ABSTRACT
Tactile concerns were also key in travelers’ interactions with spaces. In particular, their writings express a wish to maintain pleasant temperature and humidity levels, and to ensure ample space and cushioning for the body. The limited existing literature on tactile comfort tends to subscribe to a narrative of technology-induced growth in the need for comfort and/or in the success of achieving it, severing the traveler from the natural variation occurring in their environment. The present evidence destabilizes this narrative. It offers no signs that travelers grew more sensitive to hot, cold, wet, hard, or cramped spaces over the course of the nineteenth century. Nor do we observe the expected desensitization in those who traveled in more uncomfortable conditions across their lives because they could not afford the same (number of) newer comfort technologies. Similarly, across the nineteenth century, we do see class differences, minor gender differences, bigger regional differences, and historical modifications in the precise tools travelers used to protect themselves, but not in their fundamental methods of protection. That is, travelers turned to a stable set of technology types: clothes, umbrellas, bedding, upholstery, straw, hot and cold objects, food, and drinks, adjustments to physical exertion levels, the sheltering, heating, ventilation, and insulation options provided by buildings and vehicles, and, finally, simply moving to different spaces. Two structural changes did occur: a growing number of people could afford more comfort, and, from around 1850 onward, travelers’ mental agility to move between different types of spaces and different comfort technologies seems to have grown, too.
