Oh, for a proper cup of tea!
Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves
Lucy Lethbridge
(Bloomsbury, £20)
IN the summer of 1815, ‘excursionists’ flocked to Waterloo in search of souvenirs. Charlotte Eaton, arriving two days after the battle, observed how the ground was ‘literally whitened’ by scattered packs of cards, books and papers. Walter Scott picked up a bullet-pierced French breastplate to display at his Borders home, Abbotsford; others scavenged skulls and letters, a lost shoe, cap or scabbard as momentos, indulging in the frisson of horror elicited by the corpse-strewn scene.
Travel was all about “the desire to be different and the reassurance of being the same”
This novel form of tourism encompasses several of the themes in, from the quest for exciting new experiences and the pleasure of collecting—some might say looting—‘relics’ and, to the romance of ruins and the ‘contemplation of death,’
