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Neval Berber

“Interesting to be Seen and Experienced”: Some Aspects of Modern Tourist Discourse in George Walter Thornbury’s Accounts on Turkey and the Turks

Abstract This article shows how Walter Thornbury forges an image of Turkey and the Turks in accordance with modern tourist consumption in nine articles of the weekly magazine All the Year Round in 1860; drawing on typical paradigms of nineteenth-century tourism discourse.

Dieser Artikel zeigt, wie Walter Thornbury in sechs Artikeln des Wochenmagazins All the Year Round des Jahres 1860 ein von der Realität abweichendes und in Übereinstimmung mit den Konsumgewohnheiten moderner Touristen gezeichnetes Bild der Türkei und der Türken entwirft, indem er auf für das 19. Jahrhundert typische Paradigmen des touristischen Diskurses zurückgreift.

1 Introduction

The first modern tours of mass participation were organized in the mid-nineteenth-century by Thomas Cook, an English businessman known also as “Father of Modern Tourism”. As was highlighted by scholars, these tours were accessible to a lot of middle class and some working class people and, following the old tradition of the ‘Grand Tour’, they were undertaken for the purposes of education and pleasure. First mass travels resembled the ‘Grand Tour’ in the choice of travel destinations, too. In 1841, Cook’s first tour was limited to England, with an excursion from Loughborough to Leicester. In the 1850s and 1860s, his organized tours were extended to Italy, France, and Switzerland, embracing the typical...