Wit & Attitude Quote by William John Wills

The line lands like a dry campfire aside, but it’s doing sharper work than mere griping about luggage. Wills is puncturing a durable Victorian fantasy: that you can pack civilization into a trunk and remain civilized no matter how far you go. In the field, the wardrobe stops being identity and starts being dead weight. The phrase “very foolish thing” carries the brisk moral judgment of the era, yet it’s aimed less at vanity than at a misplaced theory of preparedness.

Wills wrote as a scientist-explorer moving through environments that refused metropolitan assumptions. The “quantity of clothes” is a stand-in for all the imported comforts and protocols that look rational in London and turn absurd on expedition: extra shirts instead of extra water capacity, more collars instead of more knowledge of terrain. “That he never wants” is the kicker. Not “doesn’t use,” but “never wants” - desire itself is re-trained by hardship. The field edits your appetites.

The context matters: mid-19th-century exploration was equal parts data-gathering, imperial projection, and masculine performance. Clothes signaled class, propriety, and authority; bringing them was a way of carrying status into the unknown. Wills suggests the unknown doesn’t care. His observation quietly reorders values: adaptability over display, usefulness over reassurance.

Read this way, it’s an early minimalist manifesto disguised as complaint. The joke is practical, but the subtext is existential: the farther you travel, the less your old self fits, and the more you discover that “necessity” was often just habit with buttons.