This first edition of John Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Yorkshire contains more than 600 printed pages, and the original title of the publication desrcribes it as follows: A Handbook for Travellers in Yorkshire with Map and Plans.
Travel writing as it is understood today can perhaps be traced to 1828 and Karl Baedeker's Rheinreise von Mainz bis Cöln. This was quickly followed by John Murray's Handbook for Travellers on the Continent and indeed Baedeker and Murray were to collaborate for the formers first publication in English in 1861. Murray's Handbooks for Travellers set the standard for English travellers for the rest of the nineteenth-century until Murray's was taken-over by the Muirhead brothers and their famous 'Blue Guides' in 1915.
John Murray (1809-1892) was educated at the prestigious English public school, Charterhouse from where he enrolled at Edinburgh University and following his studies he travelled extensively on the continent and this was the basis for his development of the first successful modern guidebooks, the Murray's Handbook for Travellers series. This series was begun in 1836 at a time when domestic and foreign travel was opening up, the guides came to cover all of Britain, the continent and further afield. Writers and contributors to these guides included known and unknown correspondents, including Thomas Cook correcting details about the Nile steamer, John Ruskin on Italian hotels and Felix Mendelssohn who recommended a hotel where he lived 'with a party of several ladies'. With their distinctive red covers and gold lettering - as this is one of the earlier publications it has the original brown cover - Murray's handbooks became known and famous throughout the world. By the time the business was sold Murray's had help produce 400 titles and editions in the Handbook for Travellers Series and the company was also responsible for publishing works by David Livingstone and Charles Darwing, amongst many others.
This edition of Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Yorkshire, details 46 routes throughout the the length and breadth of Yorkshire. Most of the routes detailed in the publication, as one might expect, are intended for the independent traveller using the extensive railway network then present in the county. The 46 routes begin at King's Cross Station, London via the Great Northern Railway en route to York via Doncaster entering the county of Yorkshire at Bawtry Station 148 miles from the capital. The Routes conclude with Rotherham terminating at Bawtry via Roche Abbey, Laughten-en-le Morthen and Ticknell. Each route is introduced by the overall distance to be travelled, the available modes of transport, typically by rail and provides extremely detailed topographical, geological and historical information for all of the places of note in between the starting point of the route and its final destination, making the Handbook a wonderful descriptive account of Yorkshire both for Victorian and contemporary readers alike. The original is fully-indexed and contains many hundreds of contemporary advertisements, mainly for hotels in the United Kingdom, Ireland and continental Europe.
Republished here on fully-searchable CD-ROM, is a chance to own a copy of the first edition of John Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Yorkshire, one the publications that set the standard for independent travel literature throughout the English-speaking world. High quality scanned images of the whole of the original book. This CD has been bookmarked for easy navigation, and pages can be searched, browsed, enlarged and printed out if required.
High quality scanned images of the whole of the original book. This CD has been bookmarked for easy navigation, and pages can be searched, browsed, enlarged and printed out if required.
