Cole Porter, in his 1934 musical Anything Goes, exalts the pleasures of going abroad: “… there’s no cure like travel to help you unravel the worries of living today. When the poor brain is cracking, there’s nothing like packing a suitcase and sailing away.” Indeed, as recent historical scholarship reveals, Britons have long had the travel bug, seeking respite abroad (particularly on the European continent). Lucy Lethbridge’s Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves takes a long durée approach, tracing nearly two centuries of travel. It is an impressive and sprawling (if at times meandering) look at British tourism abroad from the eighteenth-century Grand Tour to Victorian popular tourism and onwards to the postwar era. Lethbridge shows us how travelers became tourists, coupling the rise of popular tourism with the development of modern consumer culture, and highlighting the legacies of the period which still inform how we travel today. Michael John Law’s A World Away: The British Package Holiday Boom, 1950–1974 largely picks up where Tourists leaves off, employing both a narrower chronological and thematic focus. In exploring package holidays, Law is able to adeptly speak to a wide array of topics, such as British imperial decline, consumer culture, domestic politics, demographic change, and youth culture in postwar Britain. Together, these books represent a welcome addition to a developing corpus of historical research on travel and leisure, arguing—rightly—that there is much more at stake here than merely having a good time.

Lethbridge presents readers with an extremely engaging, lucidly written narrative account of British tourists abroad. However, its thematic organization and somewhat loose chronology works perhaps to the detriment of an otherwise important addition to the canon of scholarship on travel. Tourists begins, perhaps unsurprisingly, with that exemplar of Britons abroad—the Grand Tour—showcasing how the once elite activity became democratized with the development of more sophisticated transportation technology and a boom in guidebooks put out by the likes of Baedeker, Cook, and Murray. A misplaced Baedeker famously features in E.M. Forester’s A Room With a View—as a result, Lucy Honeychurch finds much more than she bargained for at Santa Croce. If these travel guides made navigating foreign places easier, they also created a distinction between tourists and travellers. The latter would seek authenticity at any cost and bristle at what they deemed to be inauthentic, cookie-cutter itineraries. The tourist then, in Lethbridge’s description, enjoyed eating abroad when food resembled what they could find at home and often complained of an inability to find a properly made cup of tea: “there are few subjects in the annals of British tourism that inspire such exasperation” (55).

Much of what is presented in Tourists is somewhat familiar and unsurprising to anyone with a familiarity of the nineteenth century, particularly the overview of how trains changed conceptions of time and opened up potential for travel (and ensuing critiques by John Ruskin). However, the discussion of another component of industrialization—the development of cheap, mass-produced souvenirs available for purchase abroad—is particularly interesting. While eighteenth-century Grand Tourists brought back paintings and sculptures, and early Victorians picked up “[o]bjets trouvés—shells, bullets, interesting pebbles, artisanal trinkets, flowers for pressing” (134), the late-nineteenth century tourist had access to an entirely new kinds of objects. “As in all things, the choice of souvenir was a marker of class. The further removed the object was from its origins then the more vulgar it was considered by arbiters of taste: a wooden pail is one thing but a paperweight shaped like a wooden pail is another” (139). Snow globes and postcards both spoke to the Victorian preoccupation with spectacle and panorama—travel was as much about visiting a destination as it was about having something to look at.

Over the course of the book, we also see how both popular understandings and expectations of leisure have evolved. A laborer’s relationship to work fundamentally colored how they viewed rest. As Lethbridge writes, “the mid-Victorian British worker would not easily have understood the idea of ‘leisure’: it was an entitlement which the rich and aristocratic took for granted but which in anyone else was thought to be an absence of purposeful activity” (182–3). Where Tourists excels is in its ability to weave in the voices of ordinary Britons, relying heavily on source material pulled from diaries and exploring, for instance, the development of nineteenth century working-class travel clubs. Lethbridge is able to showcase the multilayered class dimensions at play, emphasizing that “class distinctions are not left behind when travelling abroad; in fact they are, for the most part, reinforced” (2). By time the Second World War had concluded, young Britons, who had spent the first half of the twentieth century barraged by constant advertisements of holidays abroad (despite economic and political realties preventing such travel for most), had finally come to expect regular foreign travel. Here, too, we see a generational divide, with older Britons opting to take their holidays at domestic resorts.

In A World Away, Michael John Law largely picks up where Lucy Lethbridge leaves off, highlighting the growth of inclusive tour charter holidays in the postwar period. By the 1960s, lower- and middle-class Britons were able to take to the skies as they flew to their holiday destinations abroad in greater numbers than ever before. Law positions this rise of package holidays within a broader historical context, highlighting the decline of Britain’s imperial power, demographic changes, rising living standards, the rise of youth culture, and tumultuous domestic politics. While he recognizes the importance of the airplane, the book seeks to avoid a “technologically deterministic approach,” attempting instead to “write the tourist back in and make her and him central to our understanding of this phenomenon” (12).

Law utilizes a variety of sources to convincingly advance his argument, namely published statistics drawn from trade press articles, data related to package tour airline crashes, oral accounts from tourists and tour organizers, and printed materials like brochures and guidebooks. Drawing on methods from sociology, cultural studies, and tourism studies, Law explores the kinds of people who booked package holidays, showcasing how lower-middle- and working-class tourists would come to dominate the industry’s market share. Law complicates the idea of the “middle-class” holidaymaker, showing the broad appeal of package holidays across class (though not necessarily racial) lines. A World Away also works to situates the British tourist abroad, highlighting popular destinations across Spain (which featured a favorable exchange rate) and the wider Mediterranean, focusing on the development of Mallorca as a bohemian British holiday enclave. It was not, however, until the 1970s that long-haul travel became a possibility for most Britons. Domestic holiday destinations, however, also remained popular—particularly the seaside—working to erode, in Law’s view, the cultural influence of travel abroad. While incomes rose during the period Law considers, Britons also sought to spend their hard-earned money on televisions and washing machines rather than holidays abroad, thereby making domestic holidays all the more attractive, too.

We also see how surplus aircraft from World War II allowed for the creation of high-occupancy and low-cost airlines, contributing to the development of an “airminded” mentality for prospective holidaymakers. Popular media encouraged the notion that Britons could join the jet set and showcased Mediterranean resorts as a “dream-like alternative to [domestic] British holidays,” with the “possibility of a carnivalesque experience” (111). As holidaymaking was fashioned into consumers, stronger consumer protections for holidaymakers also emerged. The industry had been fast-growing and unregulated, eventually reaching a crisis point with the collapse of Clarksons Travel Group in 1974, robbing hundreds of aspiring holidaymakers of their trips and their money.

A World Away is at its best when it takes an anthropological approach, focusing on the experiences of holidaymakers and industry representatives, highlighting how time was organized, the importance of the beach, a pervasive drinking culture, and the relationships between clipboard-carrying representatives and their clients. While earlier chapters at times lack some of this energetic vigor, occasionally becoming bogged down in statistical data and trade publications, thereby obscuring the very human element of holidaymaking, Law hits his stride in the back half of the book, which focuses more on the experience of traveling abroad. Echoing Lethbridge, Law describes, for instance, how “Britons were very conservative about their choice of food, and many British restaurants, beyond the excellent chip shops, were awful. Most Britons, with or without prior knowledge, disliked or feared the idea of foreign food” (139). Even as Britons at home were embracing “exotic choices such as lager, pizza, and Indian food,” holidaymakers remained wary of unfamiliar cuisine (140). Law is able to describe the experience of holidaymaking so evocatively that readers will feel transported to a destination abroad. The heat of the tarmac, the smell of Ambre Solaire, and the Mediterranean breeze practically jump off the pages of Chapter 8.

Taken together, Tourists and A World Away are important contributions to the history of travel and leisure, showing us how, in the view of Lethbridge, the “aspirations of the British tourist (and perhaps all tourists) seem to have altered very little,” with modern tourists (much like the Regency traveler) seeking “variety, climate, views, status, stories, and shopping” (243). These accounts work also to highlight the continued cultural importance of Europe in an age of the supposed Americanization of British culture. For travel-minded Britons, crossing the Channel remained a more likely possibility than crossing the Atlantic. Additionally, they work to bring together elite and mass culture, demonstrating how the two are, in fact, deeply intertwined. As travel became possible for more individuals, we see a transformation not only in physical mobility, but in social mobility. When leisure is viewed not as a privilege, but as a right, how do we find authenticity among the artifice? This question of authenticity and the contrast between tourists and travelers is explored by both Law and Lethbridge alike, in addition to discussions around access and incursion. Who gets to go abroad and how should they behave once they arrive? Finally, they both speak to the importance of visual culture and travel, of seeing and being seen, a strand also explored adroitly by Vanessa R. Schwartz in her recent book, Jet Age Aesthetic. Law and Lethbridge have reminded readers that well-trodden paths can still unexpectedly surprise and delight, while emphasizing that there remain many destinations for historians to explore afresh.