Tourist geography in Jane Austen: Bath spa destination and origin of tourism as a social phenomenon

Tourism took shape in the England of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a social phenomenon and an economic reality, with thermalism becoming an essential habit in the leisure of the upper classes. In order to confirm, through literary sources, that the origin of modern tourism as a social phenomenon is already present in Georgian England, and that Bath is a pioneering example of the creation of a tourist destination, an understudied approach of social practices around a tourist place is proposed, since there are few studies that deal with it from literature. The analysis is carried out through two novels by Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818), assumed as representative for the construction of a historical discourse of tourism in Georgian England. The incorporation of stays in Bath into its plots shows with detailed precision the already common social practice, for certain classes, of thermal tourism. The geographical tourist space is analysed with particular attention to social and leisure habits. Thus, the consolidation of tourism as a social phenomenon that transforms the areas in which it develops into tourist destinations is ascertained.