Before the Baedeker

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Under the influence of Pynchon, I always thought that - among the many 
problematic things about modernity that have a German origin - modern 
travel guides, as a medium to prevent experience of the Other rather 
than to enable it, were the invention of Karl Baedeker. Imagine my 
surprise when I learned that this is not the case! In the last paragraph 
of the third chapter in the third part of Hans Christian Andersen's 
novel /Only a fiddler/ (orig. Kun en Spillemand; dt. Nur ein Spielmann) 
from 1837, I yesterday read about Naomi, the female counter-protagonist 
of Christian the fiddler, that she, sitting in the carriage on her way 
to Italy, "has a map of Italy on her lap and /Mariane/ [sic] /Starke/, 
the well known Italy travel guide, beside her".  Me I had never heard 
about Mariana Starke before, and there isn't much in the net, so I could 
imagine that she's largely forgotten. From wikipedia I learned that her 
travel literature got published long before Baedeker's, the volume on 
Italy first in the year 1800 (/Letters from Italy, between the years 
1792 and 1798 containing a view of the Revolutions in that country/, 2 
vols. London, 1800). The more general /Travels on the Continent/ 
appeared in 1820. It is also noted that Starke revolutionized travel 
literature: "Previously travel guides had concentrated on architectural 
and scenic descriptions of the places to be visited by wealthy young men 
on the Grand Tour. Starke recognised that with the enormous growth in 
the number of Britons travelling abroad after 1815 the majority of her 
readers would now be travelling in family groups and often on a budget. 
She therefore included for the first time a wealth of advice on luggage, 
obtaining passports, the precise cost of food and accommodation in each 
city and even advice on the care of invalid family members. She also 
devised a system of !!! exclamation mark ratings, a forerunner of 
today's 'stars'." This comes already pretty close to the world of 
Baedeker, no?

Andersen's novel is a gem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Starke


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