SSR 'A Happy Holiday' by Cecelia Morgan

 

Secondary Source Report ‘A Happy Holiday’ by Cecelia Morgan 

By Alana Jordan

Complete citation:

Morgan, Cecilia. A Happy Holiday. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 

Image Credit: 

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jcu/reader.action?docID=4672596, accessed 10 September 2020. 

 Key Words: 

Travel, tourism, overseas, relationships, men and women, Anglo-Canadian, transatlantic. 

Brief Overview: 

‘A Happy Holiday’ examines the travels of Canadian men and women to Britain and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book describes the tourists’ experiences and reactions to tourist sites and details the places they went, therefore drawing attention to the importance of culture and the sensory dimensions of overseas tourism. The book explores class relationships, impressions of historic landscapes, imperial spectacles and cultural sights and encounters with fellow tourists. Cecelia Morgan highlights the uncertainties between nation and empire, and how this relationship was dealt with by tourists. The book was based on personal letters, diaries, newspapers and periodicals from across Canada. Overall ‘A Happy Holiday’ argues that overseas tourism offered people the chance to explore questions of identity during this period, a time in which issues such as gender, nation and empire were the subject of much public debate and discussion. 

Summary of key points: 

• The process of chronicling the experiences gained overseas in Britain and Europe, played an important role in the development of Anglo-Canadians’ understandings of their own place within imperial and global contexts. 

• Chapter 1 provides an overview of Canadian tourists’ understandings of their interactions with people who made their livings in the tourist industry.

• The transatlantic journeys were designed to provide Anglo-Canadians with the opportunities to reflect upon their own family histories and to experience the typical tourist sites heavily invested with British imperial meaning. 

• Gender and class, together with personal political inclinations, informed how individual tourists processed and then communicated notable elements of their transatlantic journeys. 

• Chapter 9 highlights the changes within Canadian tourists and the relationship between Britain and Canada. Canadian historians believe the 1920s was the start of a new Canadian identity. It also recognizes the growth of ‘battlefield tourism’ in the immediate postwar years and the arrival of tourists whose perceptions of places were dramatically changed with the recent experiences of 1914-1918. 

Important Quotations:

• “The diaries also let me see how the daily experiences of transatlantic tourism in this period -  the scramble to get on the right train at the right time, to have the correct papers for ‘foreign’ customs inspectors, to find ones eyeglasses oneself when Thomas Cook’s agency proved incompetent – could be both amusing and provoking, well organized and maddeningly confusing.” (p. 3)

• “Yet for this group of anglophone Canadians, British cities, towns, villages and rural areas evoked a history with particular and specific meanings, ones intertwined with questions of national identity and, for some, membership in an ‘imperial’ family.” (p. 59)

• “Europe was desired for its history, religion and culture, all of which promised intellectual, sensory and moral stimulation and well as pleasure for the Canadian tourist.” (p. 236)

• “Transatlantic tourism in the 1920s was marked by both change and continuity.” (p. 318) 

Usefulness to our group topic or individual project: 

 This book provides evidence of the reasoning behind overseas travel from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. This could support the argument in my essay about why overseas travel was popular and what types of people enjoyed tourism. 

This book, however, is based on Canadian tourists in Europe. The reasons for travel and the sites that were seen, provide insightful detail into the life of a tourist during this period, however the reasons for travel cannot be globalised and stereotyped for the rest of the world.