Mocking the Mob of Middle-Class Tourists: Dutch Nineteenth-Century Novels Competing with Travel Guides

Abstract

Non-fictional texts, such as travelogues and travel guides, are the privileged sources of tourism studies. Travel novels, however, offer interesting insights in travelling habits as well, when approached through discourse analysis. Two nineteenth-century Dutch novels, Reisontmoetingen van Joachim Polsbroekerwoud (1841) and Een Drenthsch gemeente-assessor met zijne twee neven op reis naar Amsterdam, in ’t voorjaar van 1843 (1845, 1853), reveal traits of mass tourist behaviour, long before the actual rise of mass tourism at the end of the century. They combine normative statements on tourist behaviour, criticizing travel guide induced tourism, with factual tourist information, as if competing with travel guides.