Smell of the Continent

Richard Mullen & James Munson (Macmillan, £20)

Cross to the Continent today and you may take all your prejudices with you. In the Victorian era this was much more pronounced. When arriving in Calais, the traveller could actually smell it.

But then the beastlinesss of cities like Rome and Paris awaited the unwary voyager and the journey over the pre-tunnel Alps was a “jangling” challenge.

Foreign food induced a host of ribald remarks — “the painful odour of garlic frequently assails the nostrils” — and snobbery was rife among the British upper classes, with the posher travellers seeking to avoid the Cockney who “prefers Bass to burgundy”.

Mullen and Munson have seamed a rich vein of gold with this book on the emergence of tourism in Europe, detailing the fascinating mix of curiosity and crusade in the hundred years between the exile of Napoleon and the outbreak of the First World War.

It thus is an odyssey from the “grand tour” of aristocrats to those who would soon fight and die in the trenches.

The lure was both romantic and cultural, with Britons observing the beauty of lakes and glaciers as well as exploring the artistic legacies of history.

It was the Industrial Revolution, the advent of locomotives and later motor vehicles (Kipling was called an assassin as he sped by) — and, above all, peace — that sparked the rush to the Continent.

Unfortunately, one had to put up with the locals as well and if there is a theme running through this excellent book, it is that the British were superior wherever they travelled.

Bring along your guidebook and enjoy — together with Dickens, Byron, Trollope and Thackeray — the mosaic of new lands waiting to be discovered.