ABSTRACT
Although tourism history is still in its infancy, the bird’s-eye narrative of the story is relatively well established, even as it is also somewhat problematic. Most scholars agree that modern tourism started to take shape as a product of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, a coming of age ritual for English gentlemen. ese young men ventured to continental Europe for between a few months to a few years and were expected to learn languages, form relationships, and improve their aesthetic sensibilities.1 At roughly the same moment, notions of landscape attractiveness and desirability changed profoundly when Edmund Burke, a transplanted Irishmen who later made a name in British politics, published A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757. When combined with scientic advances that prompted many Enlightenment-minded tourists to seek new discoveries in the natural classroom of the outdoors,2 and the burgeoning Romantic movement which encouraged an emotional, solitary, and semi-spiritual relationship with aesthetically pleasing landscapes,3 Burke’s essay soon convinced tourists to visit places that were once deemed frightening and ugly but which now allowed visitors to experience the sublime.4 Within the next 150 years, the seaside
emerged as a leading attraction for tourists: starting with elites and gradually ltering down to the working classes.5
