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page 104
till, the death-marked invalid would almost certainly get as far as Calais or Boulogne with the help of Yanatas, ‘The Remedy with the Acrostic Name’. Its letters standing for ‘You Are Now Able To Avoid Seasickness’, Yanatas carried a recommendation from the late Henry Labouchère, nowadays remembered for his unfortunate clause adding male homosexual intercourse to the list of offences punishable under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. A further testimonial came from the Neues Palais in the German city of Darmstadt, where three members of the princely family of Hesse, who happened also to be the Tsarina Alexandra and the Grand Duchess Serge of Russia (both later assassinated by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg) and their sister Princess Henry of Germany, were each of them happy to sing the praises of the miracle formula in its two-andninepenny or four-and-sixpenny bottles. – With or without Yanatas, the new Edwardian generation of tourists was growing bolder and more carefree. Baedeker still enjoyed classic status, however, its confidence as a market leader indicated by the fact that nobody in the Leipzig publishing house had seen fit to alter the series’s format for nearly seventy years. Just as it had sent the heroines of Henry James efficiently through the Louvre or the Uffizi in the 1880s, now in the 1900s it became a moral 98
page 105
touchstone for the characters of E. M. Forster. In Where Angels Fear to Tread, the novelist creates an entirely successful pastiche Baedeker entry for the fictional Tuscan town of Monteriano. Mrs Herriton’s failure of response as she reads it is meant to damn her in contrast to her son, the ineffectual but sensitive Philip. ‘She was not one,’ says Forster, ‘to detect the hidden charms of Baedeker. Some of the information seemed to her unnecessary, all of it was dull. Whereas Philip could never read the words “The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset” without a catching at the heart.’ In A Room with a View, Eleanor Lavish, the preposterous ‘lady novelist’ who nevertheless grasps accurately the kind of sexual awakening unconsciously desired by the young Lucy Honeychurch, is heard exclaiming, ‘I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy – he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation.’ She confiscates the guidebook and runs off with it, leaving Lucy symbolically defenceless in Santa Croce against an encounter with her destiny in the shape of George Emerson. dwardian girls of Lucy’s generation might have found more appeal in The Queen Newspaper Book of Travel, issued in 1906 by the periodical which later formed the hind legs, as it were, of Harpers & Queen magazine. The guide was probably the first 99

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till, the death-marked invalid would almost certainly get as far as Calais or Boulogne with the help of Yanatas, ‘The Remedy with the Acrostic Name’. Its letters standing for ‘You Are Now Able To Avoid Seasickness’, Yanatas carried a recommendation from the late Henry Labouchère, nowadays remembered for his unfortunate clause adding male homosexual intercourse to the list of offences punishable under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. A further testimonial came from the Neues Palais in the German city of Darmstadt, where three members of the princely family of Hesse, who happened also to be the Tsarina Alexandra and the Grand Duchess Serge of Russia (both later assassinated by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg) and their sister Princess Henry of Germany, were each of them happy to sing the praises of the miracle formula in its two-andninepenny or four-and-sixpenny bottles.

– With or without Yanatas, the new Edwardian generation of tourists was growing bolder and more carefree. Baedeker still enjoyed classic status, however, its confidence as a market leader indicated by the fact that nobody in the Leipzig publishing house had seen fit to alter the series’s format for nearly seventy years. Just as it had sent the heroines of Henry James efficiently through the Louvre or the Uffizi in the 1880s, now in the 1900s it became a moral

98

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