Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland

by William Williams

Overview

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England’s own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299225230
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	02/24/2012
Series:	History of Ireland & the Irish Diaspora
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	799,818
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

William H. A. Williams is professor emeritus of history at Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is author of many works including Inventing Irish Tourism, The First Century, 1750–1850 and the award-winning ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream, and editor of Daniel O’Connell, The British Press and the Irish Famine: Killing Remarks, by Leslie A. Williams. 

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1. Picturesque Tourism in Ireland

2. Historical and Religious Landscapes

3. Putting Paddy in the Picture

4. British Tourists and Irish Stereotypes

5. Tourism and the Semeiotics of Irish Poverty

6. Irish Poverty and the Irish Character

7. Misreading the Agricultural Landscape

8. Discovering the Moral Landscape

9. Landscape, Tourism, and the Imperial Imagination in Connemara

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Williams offers critical insight into the formation of what became the dominant British understanding of Irish society and poverty, a view that had a devastating influence on the popular and official response to the Great Famine.”—Michael de Nie, author of The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882

“Williams surveys dozens of guidebooks and travel narratives . . . to show how the landscape was made to yield up a host of stereotypes and a foil against which to justify the ongoing history of English domination.”—Donald Ulin, Victorian Studies

“Certainly among the most comprehensive and engaging explorations of this literature yet to appear, not only for what it says about British travelers in Ireland but also for what it indirectly reveals about life in pre-famine Ireland itself.”—Mark Doyle, Journal of British Studies

“A ‘must read’ for scholars interested in pre-famine Ireland, in the development of modern tourism, and in the development of British and Irish nationalism.”—Sean Farrell, New Hibernia Review

From the Publisher