* Many of Murray’s writers were already established in other fields, such as academia or literature. The writer of the 1855 guide to Portugal, for instance, one John Mason Neale, had composed the lyrics of the carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’. The most famous of his writers was Richard Ford, who wrote a magnificently eccentric handbook to Spain (1845), the information gathered largely on horseback, its idiosyncracy best defined by his useful language section which included such phrases as vengo sofocado (‘I am suffocated with rage’).

* In the US, the closest homegrown guides to Murray and Baedeker were those produced by D. Appleton & Co. in New York. Appleton was a successful general trade publisher of encyclopedias and fiction (its biggest hit was probably The Red Badge of Courage), but it wasn’t slow to realise the impact of railway and steamboat travel on its readers’ vacationing habits. Its Southern and Western Travelers Guide from 1851, for example, took in the tourist attractions Virginia Springs and the Mammoth cave in Kentucky, and included maps of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, plans of Cincinnati, Charleston and New Orleans, and three folding engraved maps of the Western, North Western and South Western States. The latter were beautifully hand-coloured, and as artifacts of the opening up of the West are now valuable items in themselves.