LITMIR.BIZ

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Isabel and Richard Burton, whose highly idiosyncratic approach to diplomatic life broke almost every other rule, travelled with prodigious quantities of luggage. On Isabel’s first journey to Santos in Brazil, where Richard was appointed consul, she took fifty-nine trunks with her, and a pair of iron bedsteads. It is hard to imagine anyone further from Major Leigh Hunt’s fanciful picture of the swooning and feather-brained female abroad than Isabel Burton. This was the woman who, when she learnt that she was to be Richard Burton’s wife, sought out a celebrated fencer in London and demanded that he teach her. ‘“What for?” he asked, bewildered by the sight of Isabel, her crinoline tucked up, lunging and riposting with savage concentration. “So that I can defend Richard when he is attacked,” was the reply.’⁸ Carrying out the order issued by her husband when he was finally dismissed from his posting in Damascus – the famous telegram bade her simply ‘PAY, PACK AND FOLLOW’ – was really a life’s work in itself. Although Richard was little short of god-like in Isabel’s eyes, when it came to the practicalities of their lives, she knew very well who was in control. ‘Husbands,’ she wrote, ‘… though they never see the petit détail going on … like to keep up the pleasant illusion that it is all done by magic.’⁹

      One wonders who was responsible for overseeing the household of Sir William and Lady Trumbull when they travelled to Paris in 1685. The vast body of correspondence describing Sir William’s embassy gives us almost no information about his wife other than that she had ‘agreeable conversation’ and once enjoyed ‘a little pot of baked meat’ sent to her by the wife of the Archbishop of York. We do know, however, the exact contents of her luggage. The Trumbull household consisted of forty people, including Lady Trumbull and her niece Deborah.

      Besides a coach, a chaise, and 20 horses, there were 2 trunks full of plate, 9 boxes full of copper and pewter vessels, 50 boxes with pictures, mirrors, beds, tapestries, linen, cloth for liveries, and kitchen utensils, 7 or 8 dozen chairs and arm chairs, 20 boxes of tea, coffee, chocolate, wine, ale and other provisions; 4 large and 3 small cabinets, 6 trunks and 6 boxes with Sir William and Lady Trumbull’s apparel, and 40 boxes, trunks, bales, valises, portmanteaux, containing belongings of Sir William’s suite.¹⁰

      Handbooks for travellers, particularly in the late nineteenth century when the empire was at its height, were often aimed at readers who were going abroad, as diplomats were, to live for some time. They enumerated at length not only what to take for a two- or three-year sojourn, but also exactly how to take it. Major Leigh Hunt, perhaps because of his military background (Madras army), was very particular on the subject.

      First there were the different types of trunk available. These include a ‘State Cabin Trunk’, made from wood with an iron bottom, for hot, dry climates; a ‘Dress Basket’, made of wicker, for damp climates; and a ‘Ladies Wicker Overland Trunk’, for overland travel (it was shallow, and could easily be stowed beneath the seat in a railway carriage). Then, of course, there was the ubiquitous travelling bath. One’s china, he advised, ‘should be packed, by a regular packer, in barrels’. Sewing machines were to go in a special wooden case; saddles in a special tin-lined case; paint brushes, he warned, should have their own properly closed boxes ‘or the hairs will be nibbled by insects’. Even a lady’s kid gloves, well-aired and then wrapped in several folds of white tissue paper, should be stored in special stoppered glass bottles.

      Useful items of personal apparel include ‘several full-sized silk gossamer veils to wear with your topee’ and ‘a most liberal supply of tulle, net, lace, ruffles, frillings, white and coloured collars and cuffs, artificial flowers and ribbons’. Furthermore ‘pretty little wool wraps to throw over the head, and an opera cloak, are requisites which should not be overlooked’. Among essential household items the major lists mosquito curtains, punkahs, umbrellas and goggles; when travelling by sea, a lounge chair; drawing materials, wool and silks for ‘fancy work’; a water filter, lamps, a knife-cleaning machine; and no fewer than half a dozen pairs of lace curtains. Other recommended sundries include:

      a refrigerator

      a mincing machine

      a coffee mill

      a few squares of linoleum

      cement for mending china and glass

      Keatings insect powder

      one or two pretty washstand wall-protectors

      a comb and brush tray

      bats, net and balls for lawn tennis

      one or two table games

      a small chest of tools including a glue pot

      a small box of garden seeds

      a small garden syringe

      chess and backgammon

      a few packs of playing cards

      a Tiffin basket

      Tropical Trials was, thankfully, by no means the only handbook of its kind to which a woman planning a life abroad could turn. Flora Annie Steel’s celebrated book The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, first printed in 1888, was so popular in its day that it ran to ten editions. Although it was dedicated ‘To the English girls to whom fate may assign the task of being house-mothers in Our Eastern Empire’, its sound good sense and truly prodigious range of recondite advice – from how to deal with snake bite (‘if the snake is known to be deadly, amputate the finger or toe at the next joint …’) to how to cure ‘bumble foot’ in chickens – made it just as useful to diplomatic women living outside the empire.

Unlike the major, Annie Steel had no time at all for fripperies.^* ‘As to clothing, a woman who wishes to live up to the climate must dress down to it,’ was her sensible advice. Frills, furbelows, ribbons and laces were quite unnecessary, she believed. None the less, the clothing which even she considered essential would have taken up an enormous amount of trunk space. ‘Never, even in the wilds, exist without one civilized evening and morning dress,’ she urged, and listed:

      6 warm nightgowns

      6 nightgowns (silk or thin wool) for hot weather

      2 winter morning dresses

      2 winter afternoon dresses

      2 winter tennis dresses

      evening dresses

6 summer tea gowns^*

      4 summer tennis gowns

      2 summer afternoon gowns

      1 riding habit, with light jacket

1 Ulster^†

      1 Handsome wrap

      1 umbrella

      2 sunshades

      1 evening wrap

      1 Mackintosh

      2 prs walking shoes

      2 prs walking boots

      2 prs tennis shoes

      evening shoes

      4 prs of house shoes

      2 prs strong house shoes¹¹

      On the actual journey, however, circumstances were often rather more frugal than these preparations suggest. When Diana Shipton travelled to Kashgar it was so cold in the mountains that she and her husband put on every garment they possessed and did not take them off again for three weeks. On one of her journeys in Brazil Isabel Burton once went for three months without changing her clothes at all. Sometimes, though, such spartan conditions were imposed more by accident than by design. When Angela

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