By-Gone Tourist Days: Letters of Travel

In 1899, Laura G. Case Collins gathered her private letters from a journey across Europe and offered them to the world as something rarer than a guidebook: a window into one woman's rapturous encounter with a continent still untouched by modern tourism. The book opens aboard the steamer Adriatic, where Collins, despite weeks of seasickness, notices something in the turbulent Atlantic that no other passenger observed - a small mystery that sets the tone for her entire enterprise. Her voice is delightfully unsophisticated, prone to exclamation and wonder, and entirely without the ironic distance we might expect from a contemporary traveler. She walks Shakespeare's rooms in Stratford-upon-Avon, marvels at Chester's medieval walls, falls silent before Heidelberg's ruined castle. What makes these letters endure is not their sophistication but their sincerity - the pleasure of encountering Europe through eyes that find genuine wonder in everything from cathedral spires to hotel breakfasts. For readers who crave the intimacy of private correspondence and the vanished thrill of seeing the old world for the first time, this collection offers both time capsule and time machine.