Finance and Cost

Abstract

Cost was one of the principal planks of the attack on tourism, and it was the major item in the printed attack in the latter half of the century when Jacobitism had largely ceased to be an issue and the sense of threat posed by Catholicism had receded. Thus, a leading London newspaper, the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, carried the following item on 20 August 1770:

On seeing a paragraph in the public papers, relating to the French prohibiting the English from travelling in France without passports, a gentleman declared, ‘that it was too good news to be true; for he was much afraid the French would not, at their own cost, furnish a remedy to the most expensive of our national follies, which we passively suffer to run to an extravagant degree; nor hinder us from carrying them our cash, at a time when money is so scarce, and provisions so dear in their country’.