Forster’s ‘Room with a View’

E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, beyond its exploration of class in Victorian Britain, also captures the tourism mania that gripped the country at the turn of the century. With the British Empire at its zenith, the continent and far-flung regions such as India, Egypt, and South Africa became accessible, exerting a powerful allure on British sensibilities. The relative peace of the period (this was before the Great War), combined with advances in transportation through railways and steamships, made travel not only possible but increasingly convenient and desirable.

The book set in Florence lampoons the tourist’s mania to ‘see’ everything that a city has to offer, often with little understanding:

If you will not think me rude, we residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little—handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get ‘done’ or ‘through’ and go on somewhere else. The result is, they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl. You know the American girl in Punch who says: ‘Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?’ And the father replies: ‘Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog.’ There’s travelling for you. Ha! ha! ha!”

The 1986 adaptation of the movie by Merchant-Ivory, powered by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script was excellent too. It was only after finishing it did I realize that the character of Cecil was played by Daniel Day Lewis! The movie is streaming on YouTube: