This slim volume (less than 150 pages) manages to give a really rich encounter with early 'tourists' to Wales. Liz Pitman manages to balance the extracts and snippets from the diaries with bridging narratives that give the contaxt while allowing the women's voices to come through - and the more of the women's own words you got the better the story became.
It is mostly an education in the lives of 19th Century Women but it also reveals a Wales that was more 'foreign' to these travellers than almost anywhere you would visit on holiday today - in journeys that took longer, by necessity, than my recent tour of China. There is also the clear evolution of the tourist industry, as the women often visit the same place and each finds it slightly more accommodating than the last. The story leaves off with the coming of the railway and the revolution of mass travel, a sensible breaking point.
While the Wales we hear about is interesting the real interest is the women themselves, and while one mustn't forget that they are privileged individuals they still tell a story of women in society that is very different from much of the feminist critique of the past. This may largely be due to the fact that these women for the most part lived before Victorian moralism, and particularly its expression in larbour laws, divided 'work' and 'home' or 'public' and 'private' and firmly confined women to the private home. These are gung-ho and zesty characters, who are being endlessly rain on (it is Wales they are visiting) but who hardly ever let themselves get down hearten and are ready for the next ruin to admire or mountain to climb. It makes me feel embarrassed about the amount of time we spent in Welsh tea shops whenever the sky was slightly grey!
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