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page 108
in which those novels were written. Their worth is greater than mere quaint entertainment, though God knows they are amusing in the truest and broadest sense that term will bear – and some at least of their capacity to amuse is consciously exercised. Their integrity of purpose deserves respect. It is possible – and fun, for goodness’ sake – to trot a Baedeker around a city, a cathedral or a picture gallery, noting just how much is still there and how much more the anonymous author of 1870 or 1890 manages to tell you about it than most modern guides. Their style – urbane, vivacious, sly or sardonic – is frankly better than most of us tourists deserve. They are, as I have tried to show, creative achievements, not simply an insensate battering of the consciousness with salvoes of unsorted fact. They are my comfort food, my medicine for the hard hours of sleeplessness. To drag in Jane Austen once more, they are my equivalent of Sir Walter Elliot’s copy of the peerage in Persuasion, which offered him ‘occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one’. Like Sir Walter’s, my faculties are ‘aroused into admiration and respect’, but in this case it is for the selfless energy and dedication shown by the writers, editors and translators of these books. If, like the Kellynch baronet, I feel ‘any unwelcome sensations . . . changing naturally into pity and contempt’, then these must be for those who can honestly find no species of enchantment in Baedeker’s reassuring bulk or in 102
page 109
Murray’s inimitable mixture of the vagabond, the boulevardier and the virtuoso. ven an index in one of these books can deliver its rewards. At some time during the 1890s Murray’s indexes changed their format and began absorbing the basic practical information which formerly preceded the historical and architectural accounts of the various cities, towns and villages visited along a particular route. When we take up the Asia Minor handbook for 1903 and turn to ‘S’ for Smyrna, our eyes may start to mist over a little. This is one of several places credited with the birth of Homer, founded at the same time as Troy, mentioned in Herodotus, visited or not visited by St Paul (depending on whom you believe) and home to a venerable English merchant community dating back to the days of Queen Elizabeth. From these nine columns of Murray’s index the lost civilization of a great Mediterranean emporium effortlessly reconstitutes itself. There are 62,000 Greeks here, 12,000 Armenians and 23,000 Jews, most of them Ladinospeaking descendants of those exiled from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century. Frenchmen, Italians and Germans run the hotels, Britons provide the coal for the steamers which will take us to Marseilles, Genoa, Alexandria or Trieste. There is a gasworks, an ice manufactory, a Greek hairdresser’s, an English girls’ school, there are Turkish cafés with raki and narghiles, three casinos, a sporting club, 103

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in which those novels were written. Their worth is greater than mere quaint entertainment, though God knows they are amusing in the truest and broadest sense that term will bear – and some at least of their capacity to amuse is consciously exercised. Their integrity of purpose deserves respect. It is possible – and fun, for goodness’ sake – to trot a Baedeker around a city, a cathedral or a picture gallery, noting just how much is still there and how much more the anonymous author of 1870 or 1890 manages to tell you about it than most modern guides. Their style – urbane, vivacious, sly or sardonic – is frankly better than most of us tourists deserve. They are, as I have tried to show, creative achievements, not simply an insensate battering of the consciousness with salvoes of unsorted fact. They are my comfort food, my medicine for the hard hours of sleeplessness. To drag in Jane Austen once more, they are my equivalent of Sir Walter Elliot’s copy of the peerage in Persuasion, which offered him ‘occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one’. Like Sir Walter’s, my faculties are ‘aroused into admiration and respect’, but in this case it is for the selfless energy and dedication shown by the writers, editors and translators of these books. If, like the Kellynch baronet, I feel ‘any unwelcome sensations . . . changing naturally into pity and contempt’, then these must be for those who can honestly find no species of enchantment in Baedeker’s reassuring bulk or in

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