The Delicious History of the Holiday

Fred Inglis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134786480
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Our holidays lie near the heart of our emotional life, enjoyed for a fortnight, fed on imagination for eleven months of the year. What we want from our holidays tells a lot about who we are and what we wish we were. In this charming account, Fred Inglis traces the rise of the holiday from its early roots in the Grand Tour, through the coming of Thomas Cook and his Blackpool packages, to sex tourism and the hippie trail to Kathmandu. He celebrates the bodily pleasures of generations of tourists - from Edwardian banquets in Paris to fish and chips on the beach, from the Bright Young Things on the Riviera to the chosen hardships of the sea, the desert wastes and the mountain tops. He considers the ideals and the spiritual aspirations which are part of what we look for in a holiday, but he also warns of a darker current - how we have increasingly destroyed what we take most pleasure in and how the dealings between those who have much and those who have little, can seldom, however good our intentions, avoid the taint of exploitation.

1

THE PERFECT HOLIDAY

I

This is a book about the love of vacations and of their history. It is also a book about the rise of consumerism and how the two coincide. Whether as holidays or vacations, each has a meaning. They have many meanings; are, in the jargon, polysemic. Those meanings arise in the course of historical experience and out of the vanity of human wishes. They are woven, one upon another, into so thick and heavy a rope of usage that many become overlaid and forgotten but remain embedded in the dense coil of association and significance with which we pull along our lives.

In the pursuit, as we are, of meaning, better to refuse simplification. Vacation-taking and holiday-making turn up, as the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, at more or less the same moment as the consumer, that crucial partner to the manufacturer in the modern political economy. From some time early in the second half of the eighteenth century, consumers began to take vacations.

For two centuries since, vacation-taking has expanded and the consumer has figured more and more largely in our social consciousness. So much so that as the consumer came to supersede the producer as the dominant force in economic life, so at the same time the consumer replaced the citizen as the agent of political life. By that moment, the mighty juggernaut of capitalism became synonymous with consumerism, and a modern human being became defined by the new, insatiable capacity of humans to consume commodities.

That, at least, was how the algebra worked and the economy was planned. But it seems likely that the all-powerful term ‘consumerism’ has its limits. Its enemies name and curse it for so swelling up to absorb all historical energy and leaving no room for nobler ends or ideals. They say that the ethics of consumption are not only monstrously inegalitarian, they cut out all thought of human reciprocity, loving kindness, the gods of self-denial, thrift and modesty.

Put like that who wouldn’t agree to join in the curse? But it will be the point of this book to present its protean subject as gathered within the force field of consumerism. No-one can doubt that, for a season in the wealthy countries of the world, the success of capitalism in making a sort of abundance very unequally available has released a modest orgy of self-indulgence across the globe and among the sufficiently well-off.

One manifestation of this is the multitude of tourists perpetually criss-crossing the skies above the heads of other peoples intent upon their civil wars, famines or merely the still desperate business of scraping a living and keeping out of the way of tyrants.

But the tourists in the skies are only rarely orgiasts. The jumbos come down on the ground and the visitors spill out into an unknown country. Unevenly, for sure, but as never before, the people of the world mingle with one another and the moral and political consequences of that mingling, whatever the profits shown by airlines and travel companies, cannot all be enclosed by the economic metaphor of consumption.

We may use these visits for our cognitive and emotional emancipation. Moreover, it hardly makes sense to speak of our being consumers of objects or experiences which are not consumed or used up. The paintings gazed at, the buildings sauntered through easily survive, a little erosion apart, millions of consumers. It seems likely that to characterise these economic and social exchanges as patterns of consumption fails to do justice to the love of happiness, the sense of beauty, the energy to experience new places and people, which are all apparent on the sunny piazza.

One would make many of the same points about that other unattractive agent of economic theory, Rational Economic Man, forever maximising his solid male gains. Insofar as this history offers one version of the rise of consumerism since the middle (or thereabouts) of the eighteenth century, then ‘consumer’ must remain the name of the main character of the action. Like all historical actors, however, he and she are irreducible to the single simple performance of consumption. What he and she are actually doing, let alone feeling and thinking, in the ceaseless busyness of consuming commodities can always be debited or credited to capitalism’s vast account. This is no more than to say that in order to eat and stay warm we must all be monetary actors in a capitalist economy. But unless you take a very old-fashioned and flatfootedly Marxist line about all of us being driven willy-nilly by the forces of economic production, the consumer turns out to be a vividly modern mixture of decisiveness, anxiety, irresolution, childishness, and an earnestly reasonable, loving, sometimes generous-hearted, at other times mean-minded judge and advocate of what may be afforded of life’s embarrassment of riches.

The present efflorescence of capitalism will last for a while yet, however subject to the usual slumps and revivals. Since that is where we all live, it cannot suffice to damn the whole culture as consumerist and stand aside, waiting for the end. The forces of emancipation and the quest for a self-aware self-fulfilment are still seeking and finding expression, even in our happily self-indulgent moment. That expression rises from our past, for it can only be from the past that we learn to live in the present.

Consequently, this turns into a study of how we learn to match aspiration to action in such a way as to hope to achieve certain fulfilments. It is a study of the way the social meanings of the vacation gradually accumulated and wove themselves thickly upon themselves. It offers to assemble the material bits and pieces – the geography and the history – together with the ideas and ideals which shape them – the values, the thoughts and passions – into the international and unprecedented practice of following the tour; going on holiday; taking a vacation.

This is, finally, an inquiry into the origins and forms of happiness and fulfilment. It is an essay on how we learn to feel. Forming our feelings is another way of naming how each of us assumes a place in the world. It is the contrivance of identity.

II

It all begins in the dark and cold of early January. Outside, the satisfying patter of heavy rain on the windows, the tyres of passing vehicles swishing over the drenched roads; inside, the tumbling images of summer on the screen, the endless nowhere of the blue sky, the flash of palm trees along a white promenade, brown bodies, white teeth and laughter, a glimpse of a scrubbed plank table piled with fruit and bread and green wine …

It is time to dream about the summer holidays. The seasons turn; their ancient rhythm is now marked and timed by the unquenchable liveliness of the advertisers, clearing away the used-up glitter of Christmas and all its confectionery, promptly replacing it with the irresistible medley of July and August.

The great French historian, Fernand Braudel, opened his classic history of the geography in which our holidays were born with these words:

I have loved the Mediterranean with passion, no doubt because I am a northerner like so many others in whose footsteps I have followed. I have joyfully dedicated long years of study to it – much more than all my youth. In return, I hope that a little of this joy and a great deal of Mediterranean sunlight will shine from the pages of this book … My feeling is that the sea itself, the one we see and love, is the greatest document of its past existence.¹

Braudel came from north-west Europe, from that corner of the globe which goes dark in November and stays dark until April, where the flowers and plants withdraw their juices into the cold earth for a third of the year, and the trees go bare and black as iron. Up there, the stories people used to tell while the dark, bitter weather lasted were full of trolls and troglodytes and chthonic people, of waste lands frozen ringing hard and long, starving journeys to warmth and firelight. No grapes grew there, but men made themselves blind drunk on the harsh distillation of malt and birch, and saw winter out on a diet of salty meat and saltier cod.

These folk-memories stir in us when the time comes round, and they are called up by the mesmerising powers of our contemporary storytellers on television and the effortlessness with which they magic for us pictures of all we long for in the days of night. Braudel writes movingly and from the north of the southern sea he loves and the joy which writing its history has brought him. Vacationing has its roots in that love of a loving place, and in the joy we may all feel in anticipating our return. The folk-memories, of sunshine restored and stiff, cold limbs warmed and softened, are then bound in with other, more recent memories, in which holidays represented time won for our own freedoms from the killing round of heavy industrial labour and the grim, unyielding masters who only unclenched their grip on the days which made up other people’s lives one hour at a time. One way of writing the history of the nineteenth century is as the slow process whereby labour won some time for itself from capital in order to call such time ‘free’: free from work and from producing things for the profit of others.

So a different picture of holidays is joined to the dream of sunshine. It is one in which we are freed from the unremitting demands of work and the dreary insistence of our superiors that we keep at it. It is a picture in which, as we say, we can do as we like according to a timetable, the point of which is to overturn the usual working day. The time being our own, we fill it with the pointless productivity of building sandcastles or catching fish we could buy in the shops; or we fill it with a happy recklessness of waste, spending the money it took so many days of living and dying to earn in a giddy gesture of liberality.

Over the mere two hundred years or so in which ‘taking a holiday’ has been a natural and self-explanatory thing to do, the activity has also gathered to itself a little cluster of special values, so that to be on vacation is to become conscious of these values and to cherish them in a way often excluded from everyday life. If we have been lucky enough to enjoy them during our childhoods, vacations become, especially in anticipation, a short moment in which a childish kind of rapture and ardour, an utter abandonment to the feeling of happiness may be glimpsed from the hotel balcony above the bay or leaning on a stone wall beside a meadowful of lambs. I have in mind the story of the 10-year-old sister of a dear friend who, when she arrived at the family’s country cottage on the Kimmeridge coast in Dorset, flung herself down crying out, ‘I love it here so much I want to bite the ground!’

Holidays are dreamed of as restoring the abandon and bliss of childhood. They will repair the ravages of old time. Once away from work-discipline where time is spent and time is money, away also from the industrial city, its dirt and noise and fearful, nameless crowds of people, we shall restore time’s losses, rediscover the magnificent freedoms of both familiarity and strangeness, natural beauty and civic ritual.

So the vacation cavalcades go back, back to the pretty little seaside villages in Cornwall, in Maine, in Provence, to recover the incomparable feeling of coming home after a long absence, of finding at first the delicious taste of strangeness and then, gradually, recovering familiarity, as the loved and remembered details are rediscovered and gathered into the frame of the known. People revivify these small experiences every day: pieces of furniture or corners of the garden, even stretches of a much-travelled street or a view from the train, may all speak their friendly welcome.

Figure 1.1 Forbes Stanhope, Chadding at Mounts Bay

Source: Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery

You walk down a garden path to the bench, placed crosswise at the end of the path, overhung by a tree. You sit down and look back along the path, the climbing roses on a lattice to the left, the ranks of vegetables neatly regimented at right-angles to the path on the right. It’s early evening, in July. The minutes you have to sit where you are match themselves to the homely, fragrant space and its fading colours. The fit is perfect.

Or the train stops at a station well known to you on a line you’ve travelled, off and on, for years. It’s not large, and behind the neat slate shelter with its fretted bargeboarding, you can see pleasant hills, the road going downwards out of the station car park, two or three houses on the slope. The space is shapely but not quite enclosed. You crane your neck a little and watch the tall woman with the child walk out of the gate. Small events alter the little picture. A post office van sweeps round out of sight behind the station office. A stiff breeze moves through the trees.

Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognisable as your own. The [view you are looking at] appears to have the same proportions as your own life.²

This matching of space to time, of one’s own life to the natural landscape in front of you is one of the promises held out by the dream of the vacations.

The dreams are powerful and beautiful. Of course, dedicated dreambusters in their big boots will, correctly, point out the horrors and the boredom of actually existing tightly packaged trips, the mutual exploitation of tourist and native, the drunks, the syringes, the dead babies. They will tell us, just as correctly, of that expanding third of the populations of the rich countries of the West which has absolutely no hope of affording any respite away from the dereliction and pointlessness of unemployed life on the estate.

But as Walter Benjamin once said, ‘each generation imagines the epoch which is to succeed it’,³ and to be without a television is to be very poor indeed. Television is the source of the imagery with which we do our imagining of the future, and the holiday imagery now so omnipresent on the screen – in the soaps as well as the ads and in the travel programmes of all sorts – is one best place to find our fantasies of the free and fulfilled life.

It is the first contention of this book that those dreams be cherished and are cherishable. No doubt there are awful tattiness and worse kitsch in both the desire for and actuality of holidays. Certainly, there is extortion, fraud, mendacity, brutality and abominable wickedness in the very middle of tourist life and the industrialisation of our leisure. But luxury herself has always been the realm of the imagination. The origins of art lie in the dream of luxury, where body and soul will be freed from the frightful demands of subsistence, shelter, hungry children, dying dependants and where nature, restored to comity with humankind, will provide plenty and ease. This is the Garden of Eden, and the special effects of the Club Med holiday village, Swedish log cabin settlement or Caribbean beach paradise are alike the tribute paid to that ageless work of imagination.

Each generation, you could say, in imagining the next one, takes what it believes to be the best or happiest days of its present life and, shaping them into ideal forms, bestows them upon its children as a picture of how it hopes things will be. Naturally, this generation here and now hopes for prosperity for its children, hopes on their behalf for comfort, safety, happiness. It is part of that same naturalness that the icons and images in which those great values are pictured – comfort, safety, happiness; joy, laughter, open-handedness; troops of friends, courteous strangers – that many of these are drawn from the sacred realm of luxury, as it figures in the contemporary imagination. Even when personal taste comes out badly – and we can’t ignore the fact – treat it tenderly; for this is the stuff which dreams are made of, before all these little lives are rounded out by the big sleep.

III

We shall therefore take it for the moment as read that the vast industrialisation of tours and travel may bring dire consequences in its train. This book contemplates a few. But for a value to be a value, it concentrates, in action and symbol, something of the best of life. Vacations mean what they mean because we look to them to bring out that best, in life and in us.

As any value does, this one gathers its meanings together over time and loses them also. The present English meaning of ‘the holidays’ began to accumulate sometime during the eighteenth century, taking its magical charge, as everybody knows, from the antique associations of the ‘holy days’ of the agricultural year on which heavy collective labour was replaced in brief respite by collective recreation – the dance, the race, the Christmas feast. The symbols of such moments – Maypole, Harvest Home, Yuletide – have been powerfully colonised by the inventors of tradition whatever their historical reality. Modern holidays, as we shall see, weave into their structure many such glimpses of these origins. In antique times, the palaeontologists tell us, the Lord of Misrule had his moment on the holy day, and the world was turned upside down. Excess, ecstasy, abandon, recklessness were given their usual lead in the pleasures of food and wine, sex and talking dirty, extravagant display and indecorous attire.

Plenty of ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: THE PERFECT HOLIDAY
• 2: THE INVENTION OF TOURISM
• 3: CONFECTING SEASIDE
• 4: THE MEANING OF LUXURY
• 5: MAGNETIC DANGERS
• 6: THE INDUSTRIALISATION OF MOBILITY
• 7: THE MEDITERRANEAN
• 8: FOREIGN BODIES
• 9: CITY STATES
• 10: FUTURES: VIRTUE ON VACATION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY