Cecilia Morgan - 'A Happy Holiday': English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism 1870-1930

Cecilia Morgan

'A Happy Holiday': English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870-1930

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

Cased / Paper. xxiii + 461 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9758-3 / 978-0-8020-9518-3.

Cecilia Morgan's book is based on a harvesting of diaries, letters and published articles in which we follow Canadians around Britain and Ireland, across continental Europe and even to Algiers. At its best, Morgan's book brings to life the Victorian streets of London, recapturing vivid snatches of speech. However, overall, it reads like a composite travelogue, the archival equivalent of other people's holiday slides. Although Morgan links the material to concepts such as modernity and gender, we learn little about the interaction between the visitors and the places they toured. The description of a Glasgow hotel as a 'very swell place' (p. 63) points to a cultural clash, and some tourists felt they were Britishers but definitely not English. They accepted Canada's low visibility overseas in comparison with the United States but resented being subsumed as Americans. One concluded that Canadians were '[a] kind of hobbledehoy nation!' (p. 315) We learn little about ethnicity: how many Canadian visitors saw Scotland as their homeland? Even Goldwin Smith, the ultra-English expatriate, is treated as a Canadian observer. Material is sometimes quoted without discussing its accuracy. Mary Leslie saw a play in London in 1867, starring 'a Mr Henry N (a scion of the aristocracy who has been cut by his family for becoming an actor)'. (p. xxi) The thespian was Henry Neville. He had indeed defied his family to go on the stage, but his father was a theatre manager, not a lord. There are regrettable errors. We are told that two Canadians in Edinburgh in the 1890s visited the Scottish Parliament. There was no Scottish Parliament between 1707 and 1999: probably they saw Parliament House, Scotland's law courts. One observed 'the Lord Provost of Scotland' ─ in fact, the city's mayor. Another refused in 1897 to ride on Edinburgh's malodorous subway. Edinburgh has no subway, but Glasgow's opened in 1896. There is no 'Shandon Cathedral' in Cork (p. 135) nor is there a 'St Nicholas Cathedral' in York (p. 353). Seaton Delaval and Youghal are mis-spelled, Portadown acquires pat-a-cake hyphens and London's 'Mile Lane' (p. 329) makes sense as Mile End. There is no 'Lake Killarney' (p. 146) and the Phoenix Park murders were stabbings not shootings. The painter 'Rathburn' (p. 191) must be Raeburn, while the Methodist preacher 'Spungeon' (p. 232) was probably the Baptist minister C.H. Spurgeon. Morgan does not seem to know that '/' indicated shillings and pence (p. 340). But I sympathised with the bemused tourist who emerged from the Tower of London unsure whether it was Lady Jane Grey or Lady Hamilton who had lost her head, and I was glad to learn that the Vatican had a cat, although the index is so sparse that I could not subsequently trace the reference. Overall, I kept thinking of a slogan from a later decade: is your journey really necessary?