As international travel becomes cheaper and easier, many of the tourists who now swamp Venice, Barcelona, San Francisco, and Hong Kong are visiting a foreign country for the first time. Surprised, fascinated, and sometimes repulsed by what they see, they eagerly post to social media their photos and impressions. Such reports are the source of much of what we believe, consciously or unconsciously, about places we haven’t visited yet.
Centuries ago, too, travelers were eager to tell whatsapp lead their stories to people back home, and those stories helped to create the images and stereotypes that were formed about other lands and people. Many of those stories can be found in the thousands of travel books that are available in the text collections of the Internet Archive.
Here is a description, from a book published in London in 1701, of an Englishman’s first impressions of Paris:
Having enter’d this famous City, we were set down near the Louvre, and drop’d in first at a paltry House where the Fellow call’d himself in his Sign Le grand Voyageru, (or great Traveller) and pretended to Speak all Languages, but could scarce speak his own. Finding here but indifferent Accommodation, our Man provided us a Lodging in a House, where liv’d no less than two and twenty Families; thither we were carried in Sedans with Wheels, drag’d along by one Man, no Hackney-Coaches being then to be had. This was on a Sunday, and I was not a little surpriz’d to see Violins about the Streets, and People singing and dancing every where, as if they had been mad.
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