Continuing with our exciting guest contributions by Centre affiliates, we have invited Jordan Girardin (University of St Andrews) to tell us more about the fascinating work he has been doing on postcards and the visual history of modern tourism.
In September 2017, British postcard publisher J Salmon of Sevenoaks announced it would cease its activity by the end of the year. Founded in 1880, Salmon of Sevenoaks was one of the UK’s leading publishers of postcards and calendars. But it struggled to find a sixth generation in the family to run the family business. It claimed that social media had brought the postcard industry to a gloomy end, with annual postcard sales slumping from 20 million at the end of the last century to only 5 million in recent years. Indeed, social media offers a more personalised snapshot of our travel experience. It can reach many more recipients, does not cost anything else than access to the Internet, and of course, takes less than a second to receive as opposed to however long it will take postal services to deliver your postcard.
The demise of J Salmon reminds us that postcards are a creation of the modern tourism industry, which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. This new form of travel was characterised by the development of modern infrastructures and economic models. Railways developed in order to bring higher numbers of travellers to more destinations, and in less time. And hotels were built to minimise the burden of having to find local inns or lodgers, which was a usual challenge for eighteenth century travellers visiting smaller towns and villages.
These towns often reinvented themselves in the late nineteenth century to become resorts: Alpine villages became winter resorts, where interactions with the locals were scarce and a true Alpine experience was promised to the visitor. Seaside regions reshaped their status, by calling their strip of land a “Riviera”. The birth of advertising, alongside modern capitalism, allowed for a visual promotion of these new practices: posters that you now find in any good vintage shop were a mainstream way of promoting a certain destination, travel experience, and mode of transportation at the same time. While the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a very literary form of travel, the late nineteenth century was all about making an excellent first visual impression, in order to convince tourists to visit.
Postcards derived from that visual promotion of tourism. While many early forms of postcards exist – such as engravings attached to letters, or card-sized messages – the rise of modern postcards in continental Europe can be traced back to the 1860s. The trend followed shortly afterwards in Britain, where the tourism industry was already flourishing with resorts such as Brighton or Blackpool, and people swiftly embraced postcards as the ideal way to promote picturesque views of the English seaside.
Naturally, the postcard industry has suffered from its incapacity to modernise, or to adapt to a changing travel industry. Recently, some applications have emerged and gained popularity, allowing tourists to design their own postcard with personal photos from their smartphones. Such apps are either private initiatives (like TouchNote), or sponsored by public services, like French postal services La Poste’s MaCartaMoi. The problem is that these tools still lack temporal productivity, as the reception delay is similar to classical postcards, leaving social media and digital communications as the best ways to give an instant and personalised overview of one’s journey.
However, this situation of decline has its lot of silver linings. Postcards have become a natural part of the usual tourist hub, and it would be foolish for a souvenir shop not to display any. Postcards will remain and will keep attracting a certain public, just as letters remain a form of communication, although in severe decline.
Moreover, some of the travel practices fuelled by postcards have been transferred to the way we send digital content. By the 1930s, postcards had become a way for individuals to show off about their holiday, and for travel companies (hotels, railways, tourism boards) to promote their destinations at no cost. This attitude has precisely been transferred onto social media: people will gladly promote a holiday destination on Instagram and other social media platforms, through the use of geo-located pictures and appropriate hashtags. By embellishing our holiday photos, we send an idealised view of the places we visit. Tourism boards have understood the potential of this form and they have started to invite bloggers and ‘influencers’ to use their official social media accounts to give their own personal view on the region. These methods directly derive from the need for tourism infrastructures to promote their destination visually – a practice that rose in the late nineteenth century and was largely democratised thanks to all of us sending postcards.
Jordan Girardin is a teaching fellow in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. His main research interests gravitate around the transnational study of travel and tourism. His PhD thesis was an analysis of early tourism in the Alps, while his new project investigates networks of Esperanto speakers in Western Europe in the early 20th century. He is an affiliated staff member of the CSMCH.