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Travel-Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
In one of the twenty lines it allocates to a description of Hungary, the nearly 300-page edition in 1877 of A Satchel Guide for the Vacation Tourist in Europe summarizes the architectural and aesthetic worth of the country's capital city for sightseeing American visitors by pronouncing that, in Budapest, “the churches and the public buildings are of no particular interest” (Satchel 1877:194). Twenty years later, the 1897 edition of that same guidebook takes a more amiable but scarcely enthusiastic pitch, allowing that “some of the new public buildings are elegant in their way” (Satchel 1897:184). Twenty-seven years later—following a world war, two revolutions, and a foreign military occupation resulting in the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy—the presence of what has remained of Hungary is noted by an increase to eighty-one lines (Satchel 1924). Except for a one-sentence reference to a Danubian steamboat trip downstream from Pressburg (Bratislava, Pozsony), the entire description remains restricted to Budapest. Nearly two generations after the pronouncement of the disparaging opinion above, the 1924 text notices that Budapest's “picture at sunset is one of the most striking in Europe” (Satchel 1924:272) and that “it is not only the most considerable city of Hungary, but is probably to be numbered among the four most beautiful capitals of Europe” (1924:273).
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- The Political Economy of Leisure
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1992
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