ABSTRACT
The publishing house of John Murray produced seven guidebooks covering Greece before the First World War; these guidebooks charted the series of ideological and topographic shifts to which Greece’s real and imaginary location was subjected in the British imagination. The first two editions, published in 1840 and 1845, saw sections on Greece being published in the ‘Handbooks to the East’, and by 1854, Murray published their first full edition on Greece.1 There are, of course, logistical reasons why Greece would have appeared in the early guidebooks to the ‘East’: Its geographical and cultural proximity to the Ottoman Empire meant that the traveller to the East would easily be as interested in Athens as they were in Istanbul. The ability to make this cultural elision, or comparison, however, became increasingly difficult with each successive edition of the guidebooks. From using predominantly Oriental language to describe Greece in the 1840s and 1850s, the Murray, and later the Baedeker, guidebooks would increasingly emphasize the Classical appeal of Greece, excavating it from Oriental signifiers. The significance of this emphasis cannot be understated for the women under consideration in this book: women writers were constantly playing out antagonistic battles with Murray and Baedeker in the pages of their writing. While rehearsing, or turning away from the sights on offer in the guidebook, it nonetheless formed a vital topography for women, whose freedom and access to guides was mitigated. This chapter offers an overview for the ways in which the guidebook created a kind of index to Greece for travellers and tourists – and also examines some of the key ideological assumptions and motivations of these guides – to reveal the selection and compilation of Greece from an exotic Oriental space in 1840 to a vast open-air museum by 1909.
