Tourist Experience & the Manufacturing Town (Published 2020)

Chapter 11 of Pen, Print and Communication in the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool University Press, 2020) is about the first illustrated guide of a town, which was the Magnificent Directory of Birmingham published in 1800 by James Bisset.

Directories were used throughout the eighteenth century to promote manufacturers, but Bisset’s Directory differed in its inclusion of poetry and expensive copperplate prints outlining Birmingham’s genuine manufactories but also an imagined town. This town was inhabited and viewed through the eyes of Classical gods both in the prints and the poetry. The chapter considers how Bisset’s Directory guided tourist experience by framing the town through a lens of wonder and thus highlighting and heightening the curiosity of visitors. It shows how Bisset created both a real and imaginary tour of industrialised Birmingham in 1800.