Chapter 5 - The Role of the Tour in the Historiography of Early Modern Britain

Summary

The second part of the book, entitled “Time”, concerns matters that relate to specific temporal issues, linked either with the subsequent legacy of the Tour or with events that occurred close in time to its composition. Chapter 5 attempts to show how students of history have enlisted the book for a variety of purposes, especially within the last hundred years. They include eminent writers in almost every branch of the discipline, markedly different.in outlook and interests. Social, political, economic, cultural, urban and transport historians are among those who have made the most frequent raids. The work has proved invaluable to generations of writers, its text adduced by historians of the family, old age, women, religion, shopping, weather, landscape, cartography, leisure, travel and tourism, infectious disease, antiquarianism, archeology, gambling, the Navy, Civil War battlefields, dialect, folk customs, industrial archeology – the list could be greatly prolonged. The evidence collected here confirms the Tour as a truly central work for our understanding of Britain at a crucial stage of its transition into modernity.