1. See M.W. Daly (1998) The Cambridge History of Egypt vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); A.L.A. Marsot (2007) A History of Egypt 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The author would like to thank the Cook’s archivist, Paul Smith, for his kind assistance in making available company records, tourist journals and publicity material which have been used in the writing of this chapter.
2. W.M. Thackeray (1845) Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo quoted in V.G. Kiernan (1986) The Lords of Human Kind (New York: Columbia University Press), 118–19.
3. The historiography of ‘Victorian Egypt’ stems largely from a combination of literary accounts and travelogues, combined with the histories of tour operators such as Cook’s; see P. Brendon (1991) Thomas Cook: 150 years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg); J. Buzard (1993) The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon); J. Pemble (1987) The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon); E. Swinglehurst (1982) Cooks Tours: The Story of Popular Travel (Poole: Blandford); L. Withey (1998) Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (London: Aurum).
4. The general meaning of spectacularisation, as it is used here, is taken from Henri Lefebvre, who sees the process as stemming from the predominance of visualisation, or visual phenomena, in capitalist society: (1981) The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell).
5. J. Urry (1990) The Tourist Gaze, Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage), p. 1.