Looking for info on sailing from London to Dublin in 1818

From the battle of Lepanto to the mid-19th century.
Leanne
Junior Member
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Nov 21, 2013 3:09 am

Looking for info on sailing from London to Dublin in 1818

Post by Leanne »

I am a writer doing research for a novel, and I am having a hard time finding out information about passenger travel by sea in the first two decades of the 19th century. I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.

I know that ships often sailed from Liverpool, but I would like to know if it was also possible to sail from the port of London, down to the Channel, up around Cornwall to the Irish sea and on to Dublin. I would imagine that considering the lack of train travel at the time, an overland journey from London to Liverpool would have been very time consuming and arduous, and people probably would have preferred to sail from London instead.

Even if there wasn't a dedicated passenger service, I would be interested to know if trade vessels did this route. My character could have managed to book passage on such a ship (fiction is great for stuff like that).

Does anyone know if this happened? Or where I might look further for more information? Also, any idea of what it might have cost?

Many thanks!

Leanne
dunmunro
Senior Member
Posts: 4394
Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2005 1:25 am
Location: Langley BC Canada

Re: Looking for info on sailing from London to Dublin in 181

Post by dunmunro »

Leanne wrote:I am a writer doing research for a novel, and I am having a hard time finding out information about passenger travel by sea in the first two decades of the 19th century. I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.

I know that ships often sailed from Liverpool, but I would like to know if it was also possible to sail from the port of London, down to the Channel, up around Cornwall to the Irish sea and on to Dublin. I would imagine that considering the lack of train travel at the time, an overland journey from London to Liverpool would have been very time consuming and arduous, and people probably would have preferred to sail from London instead.

Even if there wasn't a dedicated passenger service, I would be interested to know if trade vessels did this route. My character could have managed to book passage on such a ship (fiction is great for stuff like that).

Does anyone know if this happened? Or where I might look further for more information? Also, any idea of what it might have cost?

Many thanks!

Leanne
I'm sure that sailing ships did ply that route, but an alternative would have been a journey from London via canal to a port on the Irish sea and then a trip across to Ireland via sailing ship. For a fictional (but extremely accurate) account of travelling via canal in the 19th century read the first few chapters of CS Forester's novel Hornblower and the Atropos. I would guess that there are newspaper archives from the 18/19th century advertising such voyages and giving the cost. All of the Hornblower novels will give you lots of info about travel via sail in the 18/19th century.
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