The title of this book comes from Fanny Trollope, mother of the more famous Anthony. On landing at Calais she overheard one Englishman exclaim, at his first encounter with France, "What a dreadful smell!" Another more experienced traveller explained to him, "It is the smell of the continent, sir!"
It's unlikely that the backstreets of Salford smelt any better, but the sort of travellers who went to Europe - first aristocratic, then increasingly the culturally inclined middle classes - weren't interested in Salford. They were heading for Paris, Florence or Lausanne. Richard Mullen and James Munson's entertaining overview considers that great window of opportunity for travel that stretched from the defeat of Napoleon to the eve of the first world war. During this long, loosely "Victorian" century, Europe teemed with English milords and ladies, simultaneously fascinated and disgusted by that unknown country called "abroad".
The 18th-century traveller, usually a wealthy young man with his tutor, went abroad principally to see Rome, read Latin epitaphs and come back with statuary and syphilis. In the 19th century his type increasingly gave way to the pushy, comical and yet admirable Victorian bourgeoisie, devoted to self-improvement. They learnt Italian while in Italy, so that they could read Dante and Petrarch in the original. They took sketching pads, pencils and watercolours everywhere they went. They sailed up the Rhine, climbed Alps to admire glaciers, bustled about the ruins of Pompeii. Their energy and appetite were indefatigable. Our laughter at their expense is always tinged with uneasiness, knowing we have neither their drive nor self-discipline.
Commanding still more admiration are those few examples of working-class travellers that Mullen and Munson have managed to dig up in their evidently extensive research and vast reading. They hint at a tradition of working-class self-education now extinct. One was Jehoida Rhodes from Sheffield, who travelled to see the Paris Exhibition in 1867, and shrewdly judged of the French way of life that "We may not have so many palace privileges, but then we enjoy more rights."
Even more impressive was Thomas Okey, born in 1852 to a family of Spitalfields basket-makers. He left school at 12, but attended lectures at Toynbee Hall, learnt Italian, travelled to Italy and finally in 1919 was made Cambridge's first professor of Italian studies. "An inspiring memorial to the Victorian ideal of self-help at its best," say the authors.
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It is fascinating to observe the differences between then and now, but also the similarities. Travel snobbery hasn't changed at all, and the declension, "I am a traveller, you are a tourist, he is a package holidaymaker", was already much in evidence. In 1819 one traveller inveighed against the use of carriages to transport twittering sightseers into the Alps. "The lover of nature can nowhere find a solitary nook to contemplate her beauties," lamented this delicate soul, by the name of William Wordsworth. He was interrupted in his reveries by the "accursed jarring, jingling and rumbling" of just such a carriage, and fled back down - in a carriage.
While Wordsworth was appalled by burgeoning mass tourism, Byron, half-Romantic and half-Augustan satirist, could relish it, delighted to overhear a fellow Englishwoman compliment Mont Blanc as pleasingly "rural" - "as if it was Highgate or Hampstead!"
Poverty tourism hasn't changed much either. The perceptive Rev Cooper observed in the 1890s that "In England, when a slum is pulled down…everyone applauds," but in Venice, when "a ghetto is pulled down to make way for better houses, there is an outcry". Similarly, the dirt-poor lazzaroni of Naples were seen as "very amusing", helping "to contribute to the gay and busy scene". Slums are so picturesque, so photogenic - as long as they are in Naples or Bombay, not Salford.
Different chapters cover subjects such as food, hygiene, luggage and guidebooks. Hippolyte Taine joked astutely that the standard guidebook was very like "the interior of an English head…many facts and few ideas". And those interminable lists of Victorian travel essentials are always fun: eau de Cologne, prayer book, laxatives, smelling salts, brandy flask, strong cotton umbrella, portable inkstand, elastic kid dress-boots, a pair of pistols and an India rubber bath. As for the effort of carrying it all, one traveller to Switzerland advised that you could always hire "a little ragamuffin to carry it all day, together with your greatcoat, for the merest trifle". In Switzerland! Those were the days.
Food inevitably caused problems. The Italians ate "a kind of Yorkshire pudding", "a cake, composed of flour, lard, eggs, garlick" and "muzzarella, a vile compound". The Victorians had encountered pizza. For all their suspicion of funny foreign food, however, the natives observed that the English still "carry a mighty stomach with them".
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In contrast to us, the Victorians never sunbathed, and, ergo, hardly ever went to Spain: far too wild and primitive. On the other hand, tens of thousands went to Germany, that great engine of European high culture. They went for the glories of Dresden, the health-giving waters of Homburg and Wiesbaden, the medieval beauties of Heidelberg, Nuremberg and Cologne cathedral, and to sail on the Rhine and gaze up in awe at the Drachenfels. All that ended in 1914, and nearly a century later, Germany remains unvisited. We still associate Dresden or Nuremberg with one thing, one brief period only. Perhaps it's time we got over it.
This is an entertaining and sometimes surprising, thought-provoking history, though those who have read this kind of book before won't find it hugely original. I never twigged before that the English founded AC Milan - hence Milan, not Milano. And for all our supposed boorishness and insularity, we still produce by far the best travel writers. An American wrote, "The Englishman is at once the most national and the most cosmopolitan of men. Wherever he goes, he takes his prejudices and his teapot…but he sees more, and tells his story of sightseeing better than the traveller of other nations." Though at our worst we are quite disgusting abroad - ask any Greek or Spanish waiter - at our best, that admiring observation might just still be true.
The Smell of the Continent: The British Discover Europe 1814-1914 by Richard Mullen and James Munson
Macmillan £20 pp400