Authenticity in the tourist experience: an encounter with Louisa May Alcott

We are invited to sit in a wooden building that was built in the nineteenth century as a schoolhouse by Bronson Alcott, next to his family's home in Concord, Massachusetts. It is dark and the fierce air conditioning makes it extremely cold. There are only about six of us tourists, all wearing masks, as instructed.

On a screen a video is running. It looks like it's from an old VHS tape. An actress is playing the part of Louisa May Alcott, Bronson's most famous daughter, the author of Little Women (1868). First she is 'being interviewed', quite convincingly, with her answers presumably compiled from things she wrote.

Then she starts talking directly to the camera and clearly not using Alcott's own words, as she's saying things like "so I expect you want to see upstairs? Come on then, follow me and we'll have a look." It's a bit over-friendly and over-performed.

She tours every room in the house. My wife and I look at each other, puzzled, and I check the tickets we have been issued: yes, they do say "tour". This can't be it, can it? 

After about half an hour, the video ends. Our leaderless group stumbles out into the daylight and the warm sun, returning instinctively to the gift shop where we bought our tickets.

There, a young woman welcomes us and invites us to start our real tour of the house, which she conducts without reference to the fact that we have just been shown round on video by Louisa May herself. 

By the time we've finished, we're well-informed. The double tour was actually pretty helpful. There were a lot of Alcott sisters, all with their corresponding characters with the same or different names in Little Women, so it takes time to sort them out.

The tourist wants things to be authentic, original, real - not, paradoxically, arranged for his or her convenience. Anything that smacks of turning what we've come to see into a commercial operation is off-putting - even if obviously necessary. We want to feel as though we're discovering and noticing for ourselves, deciding what we find interesting rather than being fed the juicy titbits that every tourist always responds to.

At its most obvious, the quest for authenticity leads to questions about whether x, y or z is "the original". On that score, the Alcott house does well - with what you see today (in colour below) matching very closely what Bronson Alcott had around him in his study, as seen in a photograph from about 1875: 

As to the authenticity of the video we saw, I now know that the woman playing the part of Louisa May was Jan Turnquist, Executive Director of Orchard House, who actually introduces it as herself before slipping into costume. Well good luck to her. Nobody could say she's not leading from the front.