Before Departure: Travel Preparations in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century

This book is the first sustained study of an often overlooked, yet vital, part of the practice of travel in the past: the ways in which people prepared, both physically and psychologically, before a journey.Paradoxically, one of the most important stages of travel was also one of the least documented. In general people seldom wrote down their packing practices or listed in detail their anxieties about an upcoming journey, and how they expected to deal with them. To access these questions, this book is structured thematically, with each chapter focussing on a different stage of preparation. Chapter Two, for example, explores the place of travel advice literature, in providing knowledge, setting expectations, identifying dangers and suggesting what to take. The third and fourth chapters turn to emotional and practical responses to an upcoming journey. Chapter Five includes a new study of the material culture of travel and the growth of a market for travel products, drawing on an innovative study of product advertisements, before the final chapter turns to surviving evidence for the actual processes of packing. Across each chapter, in different ways, are found consistent themes of danger, comfort, and home, which, it is argued, consistently informed decisions and shaped the ways in which individuals prepared.The book is primarily aimed at an academic audience in the field of travel history, but will also appeal to scholars and students, and even a broader readership, in fields including the histories of the body, medicine, the emotions, and material culture, as well as the history of travel.