ABSTRACT
Asmany historians and scholars of tourism have argued, travel turned intomodern tourism on the 5 July 1841 when the teetotal preacher Thomas Cook organized a railway journey from Leicester to Loughborough so that over 500 people could attend a Temperance meeting (Inglis 2000: 14; Withey 1997: 135-6; see also Brendan 1991; Hamilton 2005; Swinglehurst 1974). The excursion was organized for Baptists and other individuals who had signed the Temperance pledge, and the destination was chosen ‘exactly because Loughborough was dry and the whole family could go on a day’s outingwithout fear ofmeeting drunks’ (Inglis 2000: 47). It seems there was no stopping the preacher after that fateful summer’s day in 1841: ‘Cook’s Tours’ rapidly expanded to the seaside, the Continent, the Middle East, Egypt, America, and eventually around the world. Indeed, Cook’s global expansion – facilitated by his development of the travellers’ cheque – became the template for modern tourism in the twentieth century. Cook’s inauguration of modern tourism offers us a stable point of origin from which we can compare our current progress: do our contemporary holidays reflect the same imperialist gaze that Cook’s Tours did? Can we continue Cook’s dream of ‘democratising’ travel bymaking itmore affordable?What lessons canwe learn from the successful ‘branding’ of ThomasCook&Sons in the nineteenth century? Forme, theseCookinspired reflections too often neglect how themoralizing tone at the heart ofCook’s enterprise continues to shape our experiences of travel. It would be easy – too easy, I think – to confine such moralizing to Cook’s involvement in the Temperance movement. Certainly, as Withey argues, Cook built his tourism business using ‘the same kind of moral fervour previously devoted to publishing Temperance tracts’ (1997: 137). But such ‘moral fervour’ was only a small part of a much more comprehensive worldview in which Cook reproduced predominant, and often contradictory, Victorian values in the world of tourism. Cook’s worldview – his ethical vision if you like – makes more sense when considered alongside other nineteenth-century philanthropists and reformers (e.g. Robert Owen) whose laudable egalitarian dreams were constrained by elitist values and Victorian morality. Initially, Cook appears to be an early class warrior because his organized excursions ran entirely counter to the elitist eighteenth-century Grand Tour that
restricted the experience of travel to privileged aristocrats (Butcher 2003: 36-7; Withey 1997: 135-66). Indeed, Cook believed that ‘everyone, rich and poor alike, had the right to travel’, and he employed his particular brand of ‘enthusiastic philanthropy’ to make that experience possible for the working classes (Withey 1997: 138; Smith 1998: v).
