class tourism

Definitions

1. 1

   The practice by members of the middle class of visiting working class areas or slums out…

   The practice by members of the middle class of visiting working class areas or slums out of curiosity or for entertainment.

   • As working-class neighborhoods drew curious tourists, so too did the factories where immigrants labored. The novelist and journalist Howard Vincent O’Brien turned the experience of class tourism into reformist literature.
2. 2

   Tourism catering to a wealthy elite (contrasted with mass tourism).

   • The matter of whether Hawaii is to be given over to “mass” or “class” tourism will obviously have been settled by then, and in favor of the former, for the early 1970s will see the 500-passenger “Jumbo” jets come winging in.
   • 1971, Mary McCarthy, Birds of America, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, “A Sibylline Interlude,” p. 284, I feared you might be one of those snobs who distinguish between class tourism and mass tourism.

The neighborhood