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A THIRD REMOVE:
THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER IN IRELAND,
1775-1845

presented by

Susan M. Kroeg

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A THIRD REMOVE:
THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER IN IRELAND,
1775-1845
By

Susan M. Kroeg

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
2000

ABSTRACT
A THIRD REMOVE: THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER IN IRELAND, 1775-1845
By

Susan M. Kroeg

English travel to and travel writing about Ireland increased dramatically in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The knowledge of Ireland acquired through
travel helped the English to delimit their own identity, to define themselves in opposition
to, or in juxtaposition with, their Irish neighbors—a crucial activity in a era of empire-
building and 1mion. When Ireland’s proximity problematized England’s ability to regard it
as Other, the rhetoric of travel, predicated on the distance between “home” and “abroad,”
provided a means to establish distance between the two islands. As records of cultural
contact, the narratives of English travellers to Ireland provide an important insight into the
cultural difl‘erences and attitudes that precipitated this desire for a sense of “remove.”
English writers of the decades surrounding the 1800 Act of Union used travel writing as a
means to (re)create a distance between the metropolitan center and the Irish periphery, a
distance the English perceived as necessary and empowering, but one that threatened to
collapse under the pressures of political union and increased contact.

The body of this dissertation is devoted to a careful examination of the texts that
produced, supported, utilized, and resisted that distancing rhetoric. Chapter 1 discusses
“home travel,” a concept that appears in many narratives of the period under consideration
here; the multiple uses of the phrase reflect the English travellers’ equivocation over

Ireland’s status as “home” or “abroad.” Chapter 2 analyzes the travellers’ responses to

the landscape of Ireland and their use of aesthetics as a means of expressing both Ireland’s
difiereme and its potential for domestication. Chapter 3 focuses on the travellers’
encounters with the Irish people, prirmrily within domestic spaces, and examines their
attempts to use the notion of “home” as a litmus test for the Irish people’s otherness.
Chapter 4 looks at tourism as a particular form of travel and analyzes the Irish people’s
attempts to mediate the English tourists’ representations of Ireland. Chapter 5 explores
the impact of travel literature about Ireland on the nineteenth-century novel and argues

that “travel to Ireland” became a metaphor for exploring other forms of cultural distance.

Copyright by
SUSAN MARIE KROEG
2000

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the process of completing this dissertation, I have incurred numerous debts, and
I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who have helped me. Financial
assistance was provided by the Department of English, the College of Arts and Letters,
and the Graduate School of Michigan State University. This project benefitted from the
library resources of Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, the Detroit
Public Library, the University of Chicago, and Knox College, as well as several libraries
who rmde their materials available through interlibrary loan; the Knox College h’brary stafl
deserves a special thank you for helping me to track down many obscure texts.

The members of my guidance committee—James Hill, William Johnsen, Ellen
Pollak, and Judith Stoddart—showed enthusiastic support of this project fiom its earliest
inception, and the final product has benefitted immeasurably from their thought-provoking
comments on various drafts. Leith Davis and Luke Gibbons also generously ofl‘ered
suggestions and feedback. The members of the nineteenth-century British literature
reading group at Michigan State helped me to refine my ideas at the start of the project.
On a more personal note, Amy Hay was a constant source of fiiendship and moral support
throughout the process, and generously and repeatedly gave of her time to help me in so
many ways; she and Dawne Curry also deserve a special thanks for providing me with a
place to stay dining various research trips. I would also like to thank Trinna Frever,

Melissa Hudson Schmidt, and Annlyn Richards McKenzie for their continued fiiendship.

No words can adequately convey my gratitude to my family. My parents, Bill and
Donna Kroeg, lnve offered me nothing but love and support, and I could never have
accomplished this goal without their help and guidance. My husband’s parents, Roger and
Jane Wood, warmly welcomed me into their family and encouraged my work at every
opportunity. I owe the greatest debt to my husband, Brad Wood. He offered scholarly
insightandasoundingboardwhenlneededthentreadandrespondedto everydraftof
my dissertation, and kept our lives running smoothly when I was overwhelmed with work;
inthesewaysandso manyothers,hehasbeenaninspirationto me, andIcannotthank

himenough

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES .................................................. viii
INTRODUCTION

THEORIZING THE DISTANCE BETWEEN ENGLAND AND IRELAND ........ 1
CHAPTER 1

THE MEANINGS OF “HOME TRAVEL” ................................. 22
CHAPTER 2

THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER AND IRELAND ............................ 49
CHAPTER 3

THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER AND THE IRISH ........................... 89
CHAPTER 4

WRITING “HOME”: ENGLISH TOURISM AND IRISH RESPONSE .......... 139
CHAPTER 5

THE GOING AND “THE NOT GOING” TO IRELAND:

TRAVEL, LITERATURE, AND TRAVEL LITERATURE ................... 189
CONCLUSION ..................................................... 230
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................... 240

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1
“Ruins of Lord Portlester’s Chapel,”
from G. N. Wright, Ireland Illustrated (1831) ............................... 73

Figure 2
“An Irish Cabin,” from Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland (1780) .................. 109

Figure 3
“Hovel near the foot of the Keck,”
fi'om John Barrow, A Tour Round Ireland (1836) ........................... 1 18

Figure 4
“A Map of Ireland l776,”fiom Richard Twiss, A Tour in Ireland (1776) .......... 231

INTRODUCTION:

THEORIZIN G THE DISTANCE BETWEEN ENGLAND AND IRELAND

In the poem “To seem the stranger lies my lot,” first published posthumously in
1893, Gerard Manley Hopkins uses three degrees of “remove” to describe his perception
of the distance that separated him from his family, a sense of alienation fostered first by his
conversion to Ronnn Catholicism, second by his decision to become a Jesuit priest, and
third by his appointment as professor of classics at University College, Dublin in 1885.
Theconcluding stanzaofthe poembeginswiththe lines: “I aminIreland now; meam
at a third / Remove.”l Ireland is a “third remove” for Hopkins not only in sequential
terms, but also in spatial and temporal terms; it represents a step toward the ultimate
remove: death (and Heaven). Hopkins’ phrase—“a third remove”—-captures the essence
of England’s ambivalent relationship to Ireland throughout much of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries: physical and cultural distance between the two countries resulted in
an insuperable feeling of estrangement. As records of cultural contact, the narratives of
English travellers to Ireland provide an important insight into the cultural differences and
attitudes that precipitated this sense of “remove.” One might expect that, when compared
to the distances between England and its colonies in North America, Afiica, and Asia, the
gap between England and Ireland would shrink in size and significance; instead, it
continued to grow, well after the 1800 Act of Union made Ireland part of the United

Kingdom. In what ways might we account for this phenomenon? As this dissertation will

 

1Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose (Penguin, 1985), p. 61-62.

demonstrate, English writers of the decades surrounding the Act of Union used travel
writing as a means to (re)create a distance between the metropolitan center and the Irish
periphery, a distance the English perceived as necessary and empowering, but one that

threatened to collapse under the pressures of political union and increased contact.

According to historian C. J. Woods, the period 1775-1850 was “the great age of

Irish travel writing”:

This was the age of travel by horse-drawn vehicle, on well-mintained

roads, navigations and canals. The coming of the railway train brought a

check to travel writing for two reasons: the traveller savoured less of the

countryside he passed through at high speed; and travel, in Europe at least,

became more common, and so other people’s accounts less interesting.

(“Review” 173)
Woods’ rationale for delimiting 1775-1850 as “the great age of Irish travel writing” is
reminiscent of Ruskin’s famed critique of tourism: “Going by railway I do not consider as
travel at all; it is merely being ‘sent’ to a place, and very little different fi'om becoming a
parcel” (qtd. in Moir xvi). In dismissing railway travel, and the narratives produced by
railway travellers, Woods follows in the anti-touristic mode popularized by Daniel J.
Boorstin, Paul Fussell, and others.2 Woods’ nostalgic (and romanticized) notion of travel
aside, he is right to point out the sharp increase in travel to Ireland, and travel writing
about Ireland, in this period. The period is bracketed, not coincidentally, by the American
Revolution and the Great Famine; near the middle of the period, 1800, the Irish parliament

dissolved itselfand formed a union with Great Britain. The years 1775-1850 were marred

 

2For more on “anti-touristic” responses to tourism, see James Buzard, The Beaten
Track, and Jonathan Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism.” This issue will be discussed in
greater depth in Chapter 4.

by fi'equent episodes of popular protest and violence in Ireland; nevertheless, countless
English people travelled to Ireland in those years and recorded their impressions of what
they consistently labeled their “sister country.”

In Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, David Cairns and
Shalm Richards profess to describe “the reality of the historic relationship of Ireland with
England; a relationship of the colonized and the colonizer” (1). While appealing in its
straightforwardness, such a formula belies the complexity of the historical relationship
between England and Ireland. Ireland has long been what Mary Louise Pratt designates a
“contact zone,” a contested physical and social space, a site of political and military
battles, a place ‘Vvhere disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (4).
With the Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169, the relationship between England and Ireland
began as one of conqueror and conquered. Henry VIH was declared “King of Ireland” in
1541, an act followed by the “plantation” of English and Scottish settlers on Irish-owned
land in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Oliver Cromwell’s devastating
campaigns in Ireland in 1649-50—in which countless Catholic landowners and priests
were murdered—were followed by land confiscation, first under Cromwell, and then again
under William III in 1691-1703. Beginning in 1694, a series ofpenal laws were enacted,
forbidding Catholics fi'om voting, owning land, or hearing arms, among other things. In
1720, the British parliament passed an act declaring their right to legislate for Ireland,

although Ireland maintained a separate parliament. Widespread famine in 1740-41 firrther

decimated the mtive Irish population. These turbulent events form the prelude to the
period under consideration here.3

Historians note a “gap in the famines” in the years 1741-1822, and this factor,
combined with increasing industrialization and urbanization, made the later eighteenth
century a period of relative prosperity for Ireland. Despite heavy tarifl’s imposed by
Britain, trade in textiles (particularly linen) and provisions (particularly beef for the British
navy) formd the backbone of the Irish economy; Roy Foster notes that “Ireland’s
industrial and commercial potential was perceived as a distinct threat by English
mercantile opinion” by the end of the eighteenth century (204). The native, largely rural,
Irish population quickly outgrew its meager resources, however, and a rising number of
landless Irishmen began forming secret societies and violent agrarian protest groups, most
notably the Whiteboys in 1761 . The American Revolution and subsequent loss of the
American colonies forced Britain to reevaluate its Irish policies; Ireland was granted a
form of free trade and the penal laws began to be relaxed. A Protestant “patriot”
movement led to Irish parliamentary independence in 1782. A struggling Irish economy
and the ideology of the French Revolution spawned another protest organization, the
United Irishmen, in 1791. Led by Wolfe Tone and aided by the French, with whom the

British were at war, the United Irishmen planned a massive uprising in 1796, which failed

 

3The following account is drawn largely fi'om R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-
1972; T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History; and Oxford’s A
New History of Ireland, voL 4: Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691-1800 (ed. T. W. Moody
and W. E. Vaughan) and vol. 5: Ireland under the Union 1, 1801-1870 (ed. W. E.
Vaughan). Readers are referred to these sources, and their excellent bibliographies, for a
more comprehensive account of Irish history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centmies
tlnn can be offered here.

when French troops could not land on the Irish coast due to storms. In 1798, another
uprising began in Duan and spread throughout the southeast and west; Foster describes it
as “probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history” (280). The
largely Catholic uprising was put down by Orange (Protestant) militia, giving further fuel
to the sectarian fire burning throughout Ireland. The British saw constitutional 1mion as a
means to moderate sectarianism and protect themselves from further French (Catholic)-
influenced and -aided attacks. The Act of Union dissolved the Irish parliament and
established proportional Irish representation in the British parliament, giving the Irish far
less sayinthegoverning ofIrelandthantheyhadhadpreviously, althoughthey nowhad
some say in English afl'airs. Catholic emancipation (the removal of the remaining penal
laws) was hoped for under the union but would not occur for almost three decades.

Henry Grattan, Irish MP and renowned orator, described the union as an “act of
absorption” that failed to recognize Ireland as a separate nation with unique concerns (qtd.
in Foster 283); nevertheless, on January 1, 1801, Ireland became part of the United
Kingdom.

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw renewed agrarian violence and
another abortive uprising in 1803. Poor potato crops in 1816 led to famine and a typhus
outbreak in 1817, followed by another, more severe crisis in 1822; despite this, the
population continued to increase at an alarming rate, particularly in poor, rural areas.
Most land was owned by English or Anglo-Irish Protestants, while the native Irish
Catholic population eked out a precarious living as tenants on land that had once been

owned by their ancestors. The people continued to agitate for Catholic emancipation; the

movement was spearheaded by Daniel O’Connell in the 18203, and in 1829, the Catholic
Emancipation Act was voted into law, which removed most of the remaining restrictions
on Catholics. Inspired by his success, O’Connell began a large-scale Repeal Movement,
characterized by a series of “monster meetings” throughout rural Ireland, and he received
support in his efforts fiom a new organization, Young Ireland, whose mouthpiece, The
Nation, was one of the widest-read newspapers in Ireland. Repeal of the Act of Union
was a popular cause, although few agreed on just what it might mean for Ireland (Foster
308). O’Connell declared 1843 the “Repeal Year,” and monster meetings that year drew
enormous crowds—tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people attended. A monster
meeting planned for October in Clontarf was prohibited by the British government, which
sent troops to enforce the edict, and when O’Connell backed down, he was arrested,
charged with conspiracy, and sentenced to prison for one year. In the fall of 1845, potato
blight was reported in several counties. The potato had become the dietary staple of the
Irish peasantry, and the loss ofthe potato crop meant death by starvation (or disease,
precipitated by malnutrition) for untold numbers of Irish people; when all was said and
done, theIrishpopulationhadbeendecreased byat leastathirdthroughdeatharrd
emigration-

These are the historical events that fiarne the “great age of Irish travel writing.”
England had its share of challenges apart fiom Ireland during those years as well: wars
with America and France, agrarian and industrial labor protests, rapid urbanization,
political and governmental controversies and crises. Why, given this context, would so

many English people choose to travel to Ireland during this time period, and subsequemly

to record their experiences in travel narratives? First, travel to Ireland was an
epistemological quest for the English; they needed to know Ireland in order to control it
effectively, to prevent another crisis like the American Revolution fiom happening in their
own backyard. Second, the knowledge of Ireland acquired through travel would help the
English to delimit their own identity, to define themselves in opposition to, or in
juxtaposition with, their Irish neighbors—a crucial activity in a era of empire-building and
union. Third, travel narratives were a popular genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and travel writers were always looking for a novel destination to discover and
describe. The Act of Union is generally considered a watershed event in Irish history;
1800 has come to represent a beginning, or an ending, and sometimes both Travel and
travel writing, and the ideologies that underlie those activities, however, provide an
important elenrent of continuity in our understanding of Ireland, and of England’s
relationship to Ireland, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 Let us tmn
now to a closer examination of the issues of epistemology, identity, and popularity that lay

behind English travel writing about Ireland.

 

‘I am aware that by choosing to limit my study to narratives written before 1845,
the year the potato blight was discovered in Ireland, I am reinforcing another sharp break
in the continuity of Irish history. However, the Great Famine changed English travel to
Ireland in a way that the Act of Union did not; although the English continued to travel to
Ireland, they generally travelled to observe the effects of the famine, or as part of some
relief effort, and they produced narratives that differed markedly in tone, purpose, and
even intended audience, fi'om those written before the famine. In addition, the English
govemment changed many of its policies toward Ireland during and after the famine,
further altering the relationship between the two countries. Finally, studies of language,
history, and race produced in the period contemporary with the famine reinforced shifis in
England’s perception and depiction of the Irish after 1845 (see Leerssen, Remembrance
and Imagination, and Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts).

In his essay “Stranger in Ireland: the Problematics of the Post-Union Travelogue,”
Glenn Hooper identifies “epistemological power” as “one of the single most important
attributes of the travel-mrrative form”; by providing culturally determined information
about unfamiliar cultures to “a specialized and lay reading public,” travel writing
“provided one of the clearest and most direct information gathering systerm available”
(26). Hooper is particularly concerned by the increase in desire for knowledge about
Ireland in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and argues that “several English
travel writers in the immediate post-Union period came to regard Ireland as a site of
epistemological challenge”: “Knowledge of Ireland . . . had to be gained, not just because
tint was the way the empire worked, but because whatever information could be made
available would give a greater and more enhanced sense of orderliness and control” (30,
32). Hooper’s insightful readings of the narratives of Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1807) and
Sir John Carr (1806) persuasively demonstrate the desire for knowledge about Ireland
among post-Union travellers, but he underestimates the epistemological quest that had
motivated Irish travel and travel writing long before the Act of Union.

Ireland’s ambiguous colonial status in an age of revolution actuated the desire of
rmny eighteenth-century travellers to “know,” and thereby control, Irehnd. Arthur
Yormg’s Tour in Ireland (1780) relies on the “dry and unentertaining . . . minutiae of the
farmer’s nnnagement” to convey the irrrportance of Ireland to “the great machine of the
[British] State” (first ed., i-ir'). “[T]hese are the circumstances upon which depend the
wealth, prosperity, and power of nations,” claims Young:

Themonarchoftheserealrnsmust know, that whenhe is sitting onhis
throne at Westminster, surrounded by nothing but state and magnificence,

that the poorest, the most oppressed, the most unhappy peasant, in the

remotest comer of Ireland, contributes his share to the support of the

gaiety that enlivens, and the splendour that adorns the scene. (ii)
In particular, Britain’s current involvement in war against France, and its pending loss of
the American colonies, indicate to Young the importance of union within Europe and
corrrrnercial cooperation (rather than competition) with the British colonies, including
Ireland; Young recognizes “the hazard we now run of losing or ruining Ireland” (v).
Young ofl‘ers copious information about the economy of Ireland, and with that
knowledge, the English reader will be better equipped to prevent the loss of a potentially
lucrative colony. Epistemology as a form of economic control drives Young’s tour and
his narrative. Other late eighteenth-century travellers are similarly motivated by the desire
to “know” Irehrnd—its resources, its people, its natural curiosities. Philip Luckombe
(1780) chooses to forgo a continental Grand Tour in favor of travelling in Ireland, “which,
on account of its laws, religions, political dependence, &c. ought to be regarded and
thoroughly known next to Great Britain” (1). Luckombe’s wonderfully ambiguous
phrase—“known next to Great Britain”—invokes a sense that Ireland’s primacy (it should
be known second only to Britain) is related to its proximity, an issue that will receive fuller
attention below. Even a traveller as dissatisfied with his experience in Ireland as Richard
Twiss (1775) acknowledges the importance of travel for improving knowledge: “The chief
pursuit of travellers ought to be, to learn the languages, the laws and customs, and to
understand the government and interest of other nations” (184). And eighteenth-century
Irish writers encouraged England’s epistemological questing, in part because they hoped

that knowledge about Ireland would improve the relationship between the two countries.

Thomas Campbell recognizes that “There is, perhaps, no country dependent on the British
Crown, whichEnglishrnenknow less ofthanIreland; andyet itmay safelybeaflirmed,
there is none which has a fairer and stronger claim to their attention” (advertisement).
John Angel writes A General History of Ireland (1781) “[t]o render . . . the present state
of Ireland more universally known, thereby contributing to advance the mutual interest of
England and Ireland” (x).

These examples do not diminish the force of Hooper’s argument; post-Union
travellers did emphasize the need for knowledge about Ireland. However, as the control
they desired failed to accompany the knowledge they acquired, they increasingly
emphasized their lack of knowledge about Ireland, despite an ever-growing number of
travel mrratives purporting to supply the requisite information. George Cooper, an
English lawyer who travelled through Ireland in 1799 and published his Letters in 1800,
begins his narrative with the following introduction:

It has often been to me a subject of some surprise, when I have heard Irish
affairs so much the topic both of public and private discussion as they have
been of late, that the country itself should have been so little visited by
travellers from Great Britain . . . But though the name of Ireland is most
familiar to our ears, yet both the kingdom and its inhabitants have been as
little described as if the Atlantic had flowed between us, instead of dividing
them fi'om the new world. . . . It seems to have been blotted out of the
geographical outline of European tours. (ix-x)
lncomparingthelrishSeato theAtlanticOceanandsuggestingthatIrelandisso far
removed that it has in efi‘ect been “blotted out of the geographical outline” of Europe,
Cooper thus participates in a trend in English travel description: knowledge cannot be
acquired—and Ireland cannot be effectively controlled—because of the distance between

England and Ireland. Sir John Carr opens his Stranger in Ireland with an anecdote about

10

travel to India, explicitly connecting the misrepresentations of and apprehensions about
travelling in the physically remote and culturally alien country of India, to Ireland (1-2).
Such a distance is perilous for the Union, claims Carr:
The union of Ireland will ever want a cordial cement, as long as political
distinctions that degrade her are permitted to exist; till then an uninformed
Irishman, looking upon the ocean from his cabin, and finding that it divides
his country from England, will insist upon it, and completely settle the
point with his conscience, that the great Creator, in parcelling out the
universe, had destined, fiom the first, that Ireland should be a separate
nation. (75)
Carr seems blissfully ignorant ofthe irony ofhis argument: Britain rmy claim that its
insular status as an island renders it ofnecessity independent, but Ireland may not. As John
McVeagh notes in All Before Them, “The sea between the countries was too wide for
union and too narrow for independence—or so England judged” (44). The Act of Union
was ostensibly intended to overcome the distance that separated England and Ireland.
Cooper insists that Union “will raise a powerful colossus” that “[rests] one foot upon the
Irish shore, and the other upon British soil,” thereby closing the gap between the two
islands (185). However, overcoming the distance was not so easy, nor so desirable. John
Gough’ claims in 1817 that “Ireland is acountry, that Englishmenirrgeneral know less
about, than they do of Russia, Siberia or the Country of the Hottentots,” lands whose
physical and imaginative distance from England were of mythic pr0portions (238). That

same year, Anne Phrmptre insists that “If curiosity be deeply awakened, if interest be

 

5According to C. J. Woods, A Tour in Ireland in 1813 & 1814, published
anonymously in 1817, may be more accurately attributed to John Alexander Staples
(“Authorship” 481 -82); however, most bibliographies continue to attribute the work to
Gough, so in order to avoid confirsion, I have chosen to refer to Gough as the author

throughout.

11

warmly excited, by inquiring into the circumstances and situation of nations not
immediately . . . among our own connexions,” then “a much deeper interest will surely be
excited when these inquiries, these comparisons, relate to an object so near to us as a
SISTER” (v), emphasizing the “familial” connectedness of England and Ireland that should
compemate for the distance between them, but never seems to. In 1818, John Christian
Cur-wen describes his anticipation at the “prospect of visiting a country, which although
almost within our view, and daily in our contemplation, is as little known to me,
comparatively speaking, as ifit were an island in the remotest part ofthe globe” (1.7).
Ireland is “almost,” but not quite, ‘Vvithin [England’s] view” and within England’s control;
Ireland’s enigmatic, insular status repeatedly renders it “remote” to English consciousness,
despite its presence in newspapers, legislation, travel narratives, and other forms of
discourse.

As we slnll see, the English traveller (and travel reader) ultimately found the
distance between England and Ireland comforting and desirable; the “knowledge” about
Ireland that travel promoted was fiequently discomfiting to English sensibilities. Henry
Inglis, writing in 1835, confesses: ‘iny ignorance ofIreland might welljustify me in
looking upon Ireland as a foreign land, and upon her people as foreigners”; be repeatedly
confionts the claim that “Ireland is a diflicult country to know,” especially for the tourist.
William Thackeray’s Irish Sketch Book (1843) is riddled with episodes that demonstrate
the difliculty of “knowing” Ireland. To be sure, English travellers continued to insist on
the importance of knowledge about Ireland, acquired through travel: “what [Ireland]

wants above every thing is, to brow, and to be knorm,” claims William Belton in 1834 (v),

12

 

and “When Englishmen learn to view Ireland as she is, the first great step will be achieved
toward rmking Ireland what she ought to be,” echoes Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna in 1839
(iv). However, distance had become the dominant paradigm for understanding the
relationship between England and Ireland; “distance” became a way for England to
rationalize its failure to assimilate Ireland into the United Kingdom.6
In The Politics of Home, Rosemary Marangoly George posits the following
framework for understanding the relationship between imperialism and distance:
Homes and nations are defined in the instances of confrontation with what
is considered “not-home,” with the foreign, with distance. Ultimately then,
distance in itself becomes difference. Thus, for instance, it is in the heyday

of British imperialism that England gets defined as “Home” in opposition to
“The Empire” which belongs to the English but which is not England. (4)

 

6It is not my intention in this discussion to diminish the real physical distance
between England and Ireland, or to suggest that travellers in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries faced no challenges in travelling to Ireland. English travellers were
forced to abandon sight of the coast of Britain in order to set foot on this island of
uncertainty. Before steam, English travellers waited in Wales for favorable weather
conditions, time that allowed their apprehensions to grow; the “Two English Gentlemen,”
writing in 1746, record waiting thirteen days “for a Wind,” while listening to the stories of
their fellow passengers, many of whom were Irish (Chetwood 28, 37). John Bush writes
of crossing the “gulph” between the two islands, noting that although it is “60 miles only”
and the Irish mountains are sometimes visrble from the Welsh coast, the rough passage
takes forty hours (6-11). Very few travellers adopted the resigned outlook of Methodist
minister John Wesley, travelling in Ireland in 1756: “I find it of great use to be in suspense;
it is an excellent means of breaking our will” (4.180). Most travellers writing before the
age of steam record spending time becalmed in the Irish channel; others tell tales of
horrifying storms or bouts with seasickness. The predictability of steam-powered travel
did not alleviate the worries of many travellers. William Wordsworth, in a letter to his
sister Dorothy in 1829, confessed: “I dread the risks as to health, the fatigue, and the
expenses . . . and the long sea sickness” (105). To a fiiend, he expressed concern for his
ability to “muster courage to cross the Channel” (101). That such apprehensions continued
to exist after the advent of steam engines only underscores the distance, both real and
inmgined, between England and Ireland.

13

 

Wewillreturnmomentarilytothe issueof“home,”particularlyasitbearsonlreland, but
letusfirstconsiderthehnporwmeofdismetomeprocessofdehmnngnglish
identity, or “Britishness.” Postcolonial criticism, particularly the work of Homi Bhabha,
has demonstrated the ways in which colonized peoples served as “Others” against which
the colonizing power defined itself. According to Linda Colley, the British “came to
define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at
home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores” (6). “The invention of
BritishnesswassocloselyboundupwithPmtestantismwithwarwithFranceandwith
the acquisition of empire, that Ireland was never able or willing to play a satisfactory part
in it,” claims Colley.7 In fact, in the early modern period, “the development of
‘Englishness’ depended on the negation of ‘Irishness,’” according to Andrew Hadfield and
Willy Maley (qtd. in Murphy 31). David Cairns and Shaun Richards concur: “writing by
Englishmen about Ireland and the Irish may not only have served to broaden English

knowledge of the neighboming island and its inhabitants, but also to define the qualities of

 

7Colley’s study, Britons, covers the period 1707-1837. According to Luke
Gibbons, Colley underestimates the importance of “Gaelicness” as an oppositional
category in the later eighteenth century", “Gaelicness” incorporates not only Ireland’s
Catholicism, but also its cultural and linguistic differences fi'om England (“United Irishmen
and Alternative Enlightenments”). In addition, Protestants in Ireland had begun to identify
themselves as “Irish” by the early eighteenth century, according to Roy Foster (178), but
despite their religious affinity with Britain, they were excluded fi'om the definition of
“Britishness.” In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the English developed another means
of delimiting “Britishness,” a complex system of anti-Irish prejudice based on
ethnography, particularly the Irish people’s perceived “racial” differences, which included
not only difl’erences in skin color and physical features, but also diflemmes in character
and belmvior (see L. P. Curtis, Jr., Anglo-Swims and Celts). The racialization of the Irish
will be discussed further in Chapter 3. For another study on the importance of
“blackness” as a defining quality of otherness for imperial Britain, see Simon Gikandi,
Maps of Englishness.

14

‘Englishness’, by simultaneously defining ‘not-Englishness’ or ‘othemess’” (2). Thus
travel as a quest for knowledge about another culture becomes a voyage of self-discovery.
In But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us, Andrew Murphy provides the reader with a

valuable concept for understanding the relationship between England and Ireland:
proximity. “Proximity” refers not only to geographic distance but also to cultural
difference. TheEnglishandtheIrishare “EuropeanClnistianslivinginneighbouring
islands with a long history of contact formalized into a series of arrangements aimed at
absorbing one island into the dominion of the other” (28). Because of this closeness, the
Irish are imperfect others—“proximate” others, rather tlmn “absolute” others (6); in Homi
Bhabha’s formulation, they are “almost the same, but not quite” (86). Thus, “Ireland is
always a problematic instance for the English writer, because the standard tropes of
colonial stereotyping are always likely to unravel in the encounter with the imperfect
Otherness of the Irish” (Murphy 7). England’s positional superiority could only be
mairfiainedbyemphasizingthedifl‘erencebetweentheEngfishandtheIfish, adifi‘erence
“founded upon maintaining the distance which separated the English fiom the Irish”
(Cairns and Richards 4). The increased nwd for knowledge ofthe Irish in the late
eighteenth century precipitated increased travel and increased cultural contact between the
two islands. Soon afterward, the Act of Union further eradicated the boundaries between
Englandandlreland. OncetheEnglishrecognizetheerasureofidentityandlossofpower
inherent in allowing the Other (“Irishness”) to become a part of the Self (“Britishness”),
tlnybeginto callattentiontothedistancebetweenEnglandandIrelandwithrenewed

vigor. In a reversal of Rosemary George’s formula, difference in itself becomes distance.

15

In the passage quoted above, George also expresses an important reformulation of
the Self-Other dichotomy: “Homes and nations are defined in the instances of
confrontation with what is considered ‘not-home,’ with the foreign, with distance.”
Honre, both in the sense of “domestic space” and “native country” (or “homeland”), is
based on “a pattern of select inclusions and exclusions” (2). Thus “home” is positioned in
opposition to “not-home,” “Home” in opposition to “The Empire.” George is not the first
scholar to note the centrality of “home” to imperial ideology. In Culture and Imperialism,
Edward Said attempts

to discern . . . a counterpoint between overt patterns in British writing
about Britain and representations of the world beyond the British Isles.

The inherent mode for this counterpoint is not temporal but spatial. How
do writers in the period before the great age of explicit, programmtic
colonial expansion—Abe “scramble for Afiica,” say—situate themselves and

their work in the larger world? We shall find them using striking but
eareful strategies, many of them derived fi'om expected sources—positive

ideas of home, of a nation and its language, of proper order, good

belmvior, moral values. (81)
By demarcating the difiereme between Home and Empire as a difference between Britain
and “the world beyond the British Isles,” Said elides the ambiguous position of Ireland—is
Ireland Home or Empire? After the Act of Union, certainly, Ireland is, in a very real
sense, Home, part of the colonial power structure. However, if British writers use
“positive ideas of home [i.e., domestic space], of a nation and its languages, of proper
order, good behavior, moral values” to define the Self (Home), then Ireland is
unquestionably Other (Empire). Within this ideological fiame Ireland is placed in an

untemble position of split subjectivity; Ireland is, in effect, both Home and Empire.

16

To complicate matters further, the concept of “home” has a particular resonance
for the traveller and the travel writer. Home, argues Georges Van Den Abbeele, is “the
veryantithesisoftravel. . . . Theconcept ofahomeisneeded (andinfact itcanonlybe
thought) only after the home has already been left behind” (Travel as Metaphor xviii).
How can Ireland retain the status of Home in the eyes of English travellers, who are away
fi'omhome? Aswe shallseeinChapter 1, travellersto Irelandat theturnofthecentury
created the term “home travel” to express the conflicted character of their voyages. Once
again, the English are confionted by Ireland’s “problematic proximity.” Typically, travel
involves a certain desirable distance between home (point of origin) and abroad
(destination), and this distance can be put to use in imperial ideology as a means of
distinguishing the colonizer from the colonized. According to Simon Gikandi, “It is
prhnarflybymwrhmgthemlonialotheralongmemesandapofiassustamedbyme
trope of travel that the imperial travelers can rmderstand themselves and their condition”
(89). However, the distance between England and Ireland is considerably less substantial
thanthedistancebetweenEnglandanditsotherimperialpossessions. Themrrative
recounting not-so-distant travels “shows us precisely what is theoretically at stake in
travelling: not discovering far countries and exotic habits, but making the slight move
which shapes the mapping of a ‘there’ to 3 ‘here’” (Ranciére 30). Travel, especially in the
form of a “slight move,” has the potential to conflate “home” and “abroad,” Self and
Other, a threatening proposition for the traveller. The Other’s very desirability lies in its
otherness—once the Other has been assimilated through colonization, or firmiliarized

through travel, it too closely resembles the Self to perform its function as an Other against

17

which the Selfmay be defined. The Self desires “a reformed, recognizable Other,” an
Other that mimics the Self, but also “continually produce[s] its slippage, its excess, its
difierence”—Blnbha calls this phenomenon of wemingly conflicting desires “ambivalence”
(86). Travel, particularly “home travel,” also produces ambivalence; that is, travel
rmdertaken to familiarize the metropolitan reader with the colonial periphery must
ultimately reinforce—or create—distance between Self/home (England) and Other/abroad
(Ireland), or risk collapsing the distinction between colonizer and colonized.

If “home” is the point of origin for the English traveller, it is also the destination
for English travel writing. Travel narratives are produced for “those who sit idle at home,
and are curious to know what is done or suffered in distant countries,” writes Samuel
Johnson in Irfler 97 (1760). Thus, “[e]very writer of travels should consider, that, like all
other authors, he undertakes either to insu'uct or please, or to mingle pleasure with
instruction.” His brief essay on travel writers and travel writing concludes:

He only is a useful traveller who brings home something by which his
country may be benefited; who procures some supply of want or some
mitigation of evil, which may enable his readers to compare their condition
with that of others, to improve it whenever it is worse, and whenever it is
better to enjoy it.
Once again, we see that travel may be used to provide some point of contrast, some means
of distinguishing “home” fiom “abroad,” Self fi'om Other. Johnson plays on two meanings
of the word “home” in his essay: “home” in the sense of “native country,” what I lnrve
been designating as Home (as in the “traveller who brings home something by which his
country rmy be benefitted”) and “home” in the sense of “domestic space” (as in the

readers “who sit idle at home”). “When is the word ‘horne’ shrunk to denote the private,

18

domestic sphere and when is the ‘domestic’ enlarged to denote ‘the afians of a nation’?”
queries Rosemary George (13). In fact, this “fluidity of meaning” is essential to the
imperialist project. The “space of domesticity” is rarely “separate from the concerns of
imperialism,” claims Susan Meyer in Imperialism at Home (7). Although the home is
itselfa form of Other—feminized, sentimentalized—the nature of its otherness, its
protected status, ensured even more fervent attempts to distinguish it from what lay
outside its boundaries. In Reaches of Empire, Suvendrini Perera argues that, like Home
or Self, “the ‘domestic’ was most otten formulated, sustained, and tested by its definition
through and in opposition to the ‘external,’ the ‘foreign,’ and the ‘other”’ (8). In a very
real way, travel writers became the eyes that produced “‘the rest of the world’ for
European readerships” (Pratt 4). Travel writing circumscribed the Other, brought it into
the home, and rendered it safe and appropriate for consumption by domestic readers.
And consume it, they did. Travel narratives ‘yvon a readership second only to
novels by the end of the [eighteenth] century” (Batten l), and their popularity continued
well into the nineteenth century, as evidenced by their proliferation. Who were these
readers? According to Charles Batten, travel narratives appealed to a wide variety of
readers, men and women of a broad range of ages and social classes. Travel narratives
made “travel for the sake of education, even into the farthest corners of the world,
available to any man who could aflord the price of a book,” and their particular blend of
“pleasurable instruction” meant that reviewers, editors, and clergymen “frequently
recommended travel accounts, especially for the youthful or inexperienced or female

reader” (119, 28). Such information supports Mary Louise Pratt’s claim that travel

19

writing was used to engage “metropolitan reading publics with (or to) expansionist
enterprises whose mterial benefits accrued rmme to the very few” (4). Travel
writing—specifically, its ability to render the Other—provided the means by which
women, children and the working classes—groups generally regarded as Other—could be
enlisted in the construction of “Britishness” and the defense of Home against foreign
invasion.

Given the travel narrative’s ideological power, and its lucrative popularity, it
comes as no surprise, then, that travel to and travel writing about Ireland—a relatively
novel and easily accessible destination—increased so dramatically in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. When Ireland’s very proximity proved problematic, the
rhetoric of travel and tourism provided a means to establish the necessary distance
between the two islands. The body of this dissertation is devoted to a careful examination
of the texts that produced, supported, utilized, and resisted that distancing rhetoric.
Chapter 1 discusses the term “home travel,” a concept that appears in many narratives of
the period under consideration here; the multiple uses of the phrase reflect the English
travellers’ equivocation over Ireland’s status as “home” or “abroad.” Chapter 2 analyzes
the travellers’ responses to the landscape ofIreland and their use ofaesthetics as a means
of expressing both Ireland’s difference and its potential for domestication. Chapter 3
focuses on the travellers’ encounters with the Irish people, prirmrily within domestic
spaces, and examines their attempts to use the notion of “home” as a liunus test for the
Irish people’s otherness. Chapter 4 looks at tourism as a particular form of travel and

analyzes the Irish people’s attempts to mdiate the English tourists’ representations of

20

 

 

 

Ireland. Chapter 5 explores the impact of travel literature about Ireland on the nineteenth-
century novel and argues that “travel to Ireland” became a metaphor for exploring other
forms of cultural distance. Together, the chapters provide a detailed reading of a body of
texts, nrany of them previously unanalyzed, that use travel and travel writing to establish
and reinforce physical and cultmal distance between England and Ireland, a distance that
allowed England to maintain an essentially colonial relationship with Ireland even after the

Act of Union

21

CHAPTER 1

THE MEANIN GS OF “HOME TRAVEL”

What is “home travel”? The ambiguous and somewhat oxynroronic term signified
at least three separate belmviors to the English reader at the turn of the century, and each
of its multiple meanings played on the gap between common understandings of the words
“home” and “travel.” Can one “travel” and still be “at home”? The answer, as we shall
see, depends to a large degree on how one interprets “home” and, to a lesser degree, on
how one “travels.” In the Irish travel narratives written between 1775 and 1845, “home
travel” or a related term is used to designate both travel within the British Isles and the
more figurative journey one undertakes when reading a travel narrative (an activity that
generallytakesplacewithinthe home). Inaddition, avariant ofthetermisused
pejoratively to describe the writers who penned their travel narratives without ever leaving
the comforts of their own home(land). Thus a “home traveller” may be a person who
physically travels to Ireland, the reader of a travel narrative, or an author who writes
without travelling. This chapter examines the multiple meanings and understandings of
“home navel” in the context of England’s desire for knowledge about Ireland and the
Irish, the Act of Union, and the attempt to incorporate Ireland into the larger British sense
of Home by using travel writing to bring Ireland into English homes. The tensions
embodied by the term “home navel” ultimately reflect the divisive outcomes engendered

by English travel to and travel writing about Ireland.

22

In Travel as Metaphor, Georges Van Den Abbeele offers an extended analysis of

the relationship between “honre” and “travel” According to Van Den Abbeele,

The economy of travel requires an oikos (the Greek for “home” fi‘om which

is derived “economy”) in relation to which any wandering can be

comprehended (enclosed as well as understood). . . . The positing of an

oikos, or domus (the Latin translation of oikos), is what domesticates the

voyagebyascribingcertainlirnitsto it. . . .Indeed, travelcanonlybe

conceptualized in terms of the points of departure and destination and of

the (spatial and temporal) distance between them. A traveler thinks of his
or her journey in terms either of the destination or of the point of

departure. (xviii)
The very notion of “travel,” then, requires a “home” that is spatially and temporally distant
fi'om the point of destination. However, “the home that one leaves is not the same as that
to which one returns”—either “home” or the traveller has changed, usually as a result of
the temporal distance between the point of origin and the point of return. For this very
reason, the naveller depends on the notion of “home” in order to place limits on travel’s
ability to alter the traveller:
The establishment of a home or oikos places conceptual limits on travel,
supplies it with a termius a quo and a terminus ad quem which allows one
to conceive of the potentially dangerous divagation of travel within assured
and comfortable bounds. The economy of travel thus domesticates the
transgressive or critical possibilities implied in the change of perspective
travel implies. (xx)
Ultimately, “home”—and its domesticating potential—become the sole point of reference
to the traveller, circumscribing the nature of travel: “Be they real or imagimry, voyages
seem as often rmdertaken to restrain movement as to engage in it, to resist change as to
produce it, to keep fiom getting anywhere as to attain a destination” (xix). When

confronted with the notion of “home travel,” one must consider the primacy of “home” in

that formulation. The English traveller is so reluctant to leave home that travel is

23

perceived as taking place within the very boundaries ofHome—in particular, the British
Isles.

.“Would not a tour round the islands ofGreat Britain and Ireland furnish a Briton
with more useful, proper and entertaining knowledge, than what is called the grand tour of
Europe?” The gradual shift in emphasis away fiom travel on the Continent and toward
“home travel,” endorsed here by the Monthly Review in 1767,1 resulted in part from the
perception that travel within the British Isles was “cheaper and less nrorally dangerous
than travel on the Continent” (Batten 148). Travel within the British Isles also provided
valuable knowledge and experience. At the conclusion of his Tour in Ireland in 1 775,
Richard Twiss ofi‘ers general remarks on travel and emphasizes that the traveller “ought to
be well acquainted with his own country, which will enable him to compare it with others:
for without a proper foundation, it will be impossible for him to reap any knowledge that
my repay his trouble, loss of time, and expence. Nothing is good or bad, beautiful or
disagreeable, but by comparison” (188). Of course, Ireland fared poorly in comparison
with Twiss’s “own country” (that is, England), but within a European context, the
traveller’s “cormtry” could be understood more broadly as Great Britain, and, after 1800,
the United Kingdom. William Thackeray’s assertion that the traveller needs “to see his

own country first (if Lord Lyndhurst2 will allow us to call this a part of it),” reveals that

 

lThe cormnent conchrdes a review of John Bush’s Hibernia Curiosa (1767), one
of the early works that initiated the boom in Irish navel narratives that occurred in the

later eighteenth century.

2Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, a Tory, staunchly opposed to all pro-Catholic
reforms in Britain’s handling of “the Irish question,” particularly repeal of the Union;
Matthew Arnold quoted him in “On the study of Celtic Literature” as having called the
Irish “aliens in speech, in religion, in blood” (see Vaughan, New History 5.170-71, 510).

24

Ireland maintamd its somewhat tenuous status as “home” into the mid-nineteenth century
(268).

Jeremy Black notes that “British domestic travel and tornism boomed in the
eighteenth centmy,” due in part to improved and regularized transportation and
accommodations (4). It becomes a point of (national) pride to have’travelled first within
the British Isles. “It was long a reflection on the national taste and judgment, that our
people of fishion knew something, from ocular demonstration, of the general appearance
of every country in Europe, except their own,” begins the preface to the first edition of
William Mavor’s The British Tourist ’s, or, Traveller ’s Pocket Companion through
England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (1800). Alter a paragraph extolling the virtues of
“the British Islands,” Mavor notes that British travellers lmve been “Roused, at last, from
the kmargyofhrdiflereme about whatwaswithintheirreach, andinspir'edwithnmre
patriotic notions than formerly, of the pleasrne and utility of Home Travels.” Mavor’s
vague reference here to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and other political
unrest on the Continent that prohibited travel there obscures one of the primary reasons
for increased travel within the British Isles: simple necessity.’ The closing off of

customary outlets produces new ones, and thus “we have of late years, seen some of our

 

3John Gamble, an Irishman, provides a similar explanation for the increase in
“home travel” in the first decade of the nineteenth century: “thanks to the ambition of the
great ones of the earth, who have kept the world in a pretty constant state of warfare for
the last twenty years, and may, perhaps, for twenty years to come, the British tomist has
now a narrower range. Spider-like, he must spin his web out of the materials of the
British empire only. . . . There is no evil, however, without its good: one advantage
attending this is, that is bring Englishmen better acquainted with their own country.”
Gamble hopes that “a similar knowledge of Ireland” will soon be “generally diflirsed”
(Sketches 2).

25

most enlightened countrymen as eager to explore the remotest parts of Britain, as they
formerly were to cross the Channel, and to pass the Alps” (viii). Mavor attributes this
eagerness not to necessity, but to the Act of Union. Travel strengthens “the social tie”
between the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland, “now happily united” (ix).
Similarly, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, writing in 1807, insists that, although the English “are
regarded by foreigners as a rambling nation,” “this vagabond spirit arises, not from any
dissatisfaction with our own home, our country, or our government; for where shall we
find their equals? . . . but fi'om a laudable desire of research and information” (iv-v). “The
spirit and even the power of foreign travel is now checked” by Napoleon, admits Hoare,
but “Our own kingdom still remains unexplored; . . . a more intimate knowledge of which
will, in the end, prove more satisfactory perhaps than the information collected dining a
foreign tour” (v-vi). The sharp distinction drawn between home and foreign travel in the
preface to a travel narrative about Ireland places Ireland firmly in the position of “home.”
Union, and the necessity of “home travel,” have rendered Ireland “Home.”

One of the earliest of the travel narratives examined in this study, A Tour through
Ireland in Several Entertaining Letters by Two English Gentlemen,‘ published in 1746,
endorses an important benefit of “home travel”—its ability to provide a sense of home for
the alienated traveller:

I never imagined any thing could compensate the Trouble of passing the

Ocean more, since we have wandered over Italy, and most Parts of the
Continent of Europe. There we were obliged to seek for English

 

‘The title and text of the letters indicate two authors, and the letters are indeed
differentiated by style and subject matter. However, the letters are generally attributed to
William Rufus Chetwood, the editor of the book. The “Advertisement by the Editor” is

signed “W.R.C.”

26

Acquaintance, and to be confined in our Conversation, while every body
round beheld us as if we were Spies, or, at least, Enemies to the Country
we travelled through. Here the Case is quite different, every one
understands you without an Interpreter, and the Gentlemen prevent yoru'
Cmiosity, by taking it as a Favour that you will give them leave to satisfy
you. . . . (Chetwood 204-5)
The pleasure of travel in Ireland excwds the pleasure of travelling on the Continent
because Ireland is decidedly less foreign; English-speakers abound, willing to provide the
traveller with informtion and assistance. Ireland is “as polite a Nation as any in Europe”
(28). As Van Den Abbeele indicates, the traveller requires a “home” and demands that
“home” exemplifies certain characteristics of familiarity and stability. Ireland’s close
physical proximity to Great Britain and the historical pattern of interaction between the
two kingdoms enabled Ireland to take on many of the characteristics of “home,” such as
the English language, long before the Act of Union made its position vis-a-vis Great
Britain oficiaL At least one writer refers to the possibility of uniting Ireland to England as
“an extension of territory at home” rather than “abroad,” merely an “enlargement of her
[England’s] boundaries,” in sharp contrast to the more distant and thus more dificult to
manage parts of the empire (Campbell 348). One reviewer of John Bush’s Hibernia
Curiosa (1767) recognizes Ireland’s unique position: “Ifwe regard Ireland as a vast
colony of Britons, as in its present state it certainly is, should we not look upon the Irish
as parts of ourselves . . . ?” (Monthly 277-78). Although a “colony” in many respects,
Ireland is also “home”; the long, close relationship between England and Ireland has
ensured that the Irish are “parts of omselves.” In particular, the descendants of the
seventeenth-century plantation settlers, whose cultural and religious behaviors make them

more like the English travellers and tourists, ensure that Ireland can safely be regarded as

27

“home,” despite the rmsettling presence of poor, Catholic, Irish-speaking peasants. As
desire for knowledge about Ireland increases, it produces a market for a body of works
that inscribe Ireland as “home,” an interesting and accessible destination, a safe place for
English travellers, and ultimately, an appropriate partner for Union.

As the label suggests, “home travel” relied on a certain domesticating impulse, a
desire to construct an Ireland tlnt might be appropriately encountered within the domestic ,
sphere. Even the narrative form could convey the suitability of Ireland for domestic
consmnption; travel narratives styled as letters and jom'nals, for example, suggest a
familial intimacy between reader and writer. John Harrington notes in the introduction to
The English Traveller in Ireland (1991) that as the more genteel “Tour” came to
dominate Irish travel in the eighteenth centmy and alter, “the literary products of these
visits took on forms suggestive of sociability and domesticity rather than adventure” (16).
Some tour writers spoke openly about the constructed “domestic” natm'e of their narrative
form. John Barrow claims that “the substance” of his letters ‘yvere, in point of fact,
written to my family fi'orn notes made daily in the progress of my tour”; however, “much
. . . hasbeenomittedfiom,andmore . . . addedto theoriginalletters,torenderthem
better suited to the public eye” (iii). John Curwen also publishes his Observations as
letters, drawing information fi'om “the daily jomnal I had transmitted for the amusement of
my own fireside” (iii). M. F. Dickson abandons her fashionable travel journal for the
pleasure of “letter writing”: “So the goodly, marble-covered blank book I had provided,
wherein to record the sayings and doings of our sojom'n on the shores of the Atlantic is to

bethrownaside...andmyramblingjournalistowingitswayacrosstheChannelinthe

28

shape of letters to you, dear old friend” (1-2). In addition, the narratives contain copious
detailsaboutthedomestic spacesofthelrishpeople,asweshallseeinChapter3,
suggesting the travel writer’s desire to use familiar notions of “home” as an interpretive
paradigm for understanding Ireland and the Irish.

However, to conceive of Ireland as “home,” the English had to be willing to ignore
cultural difference, to admit the Irish into their exclusive club, “Britishness,” an identity
heretofore constructed by its very opposition to “Irishness.” Furthermore, travel
presupposes a certain degree of novelty, something one does not necessarily expect to find
“at home.” How can “home” acconunodate this desire for novelty? “Home” must be
rendered unfanriliar in some way, and Ireland seemed particularly well-suited to this task
of defanriliarization. The English desire to position the Irish as “Other,” as distant,
contributed to their ability to conceptualize the notion of “home travel,” in which Ireland
occupied the positions of “home” (a safe and secure place) and “abroad” (an exotic and
interesting space) simultaneously. Thus a 1767 reviewer of Hibernia Curiosa can claim
tint “a British subject knows no more ofthe inland parts ofIreland than ofAfiica”
(Critical 309), a sentiment echoed by travel writers well into the nineteenth century.
William Mavor’s insistence that home travel satisfies the desire for knowledge about “the
various tribes and classes of men, who are subject to the same government, however
remotely situat ” reveals his own assumptions about the nature and purpose of travel. In
this scenario, Ireland (and parts of Scotland) can stand in for the more remote lands and
exotic peoples (“various tribes”) that might previously have been accessible to travellers;

in addition, the Gaelic and Celtic peoples—now British, alter the Scottish and Irish Acts

29

of Union—can continue to be seen as Other (x). Sir Richard Colt Hoare insists that
“Ireland can undoubtedly recommend itself to the notice of the stranger by its novelty: and
what is the object of the stranger’s tour but novelty? which carries along with it both
amusement and instruction” (314). Travel writing about Ireland, then, could
accommodate both the need to travel within the British Isles and the desire on the part of
travellers and readers for the depiction of cultural difierence: that is, “novelty.” The
popularity of travel narratives—particularly in the eighteenth century, as documented by
Charles Batten in Pleas-arable Instruction—depended in large measure on writers’ ability
to meet readers’ desire for and expectation of novelty. Narratives describing the Grand
Tour had become formulaic, much like the Grand Tour itself, but travel in the British Isles
“became a popular pastime amongst gentlemen of leisru'e” precisely because it was
“[b]ound by no tradition or convention” and “lack[ed] the established routes and rituals of
the Grand Tour” (Moir xiv). “I was advised not to begin with the Grand Tour of
Europe,” but rather to begin with Ireland, writes Philip Luckombe in his introduction to A
Tour through Ireland in 1 779(1). The advice Luckombe received and his decision to
write about Ireland was probably based as much on potential financial benefits, as on any
perceived moral or educational ones, as we shall see below. Descriptions of the relatively
uncharted territory of some of the British Isles, especially Ireland, met readers’
expectations of novelty, and provided the essential components of education and
entertainment that had already made the travel narrative so popular with the English

reading public, and thus a highly lucrative genre for writers.

30

The importance of appealing to their readers—the second classification of “home
traveller”—was not lost on travel writers. Richard Twiss acknowledges these two forms
of “home traveller,” and the need to please both audiences, when he writes that “To give a
copious catalogue of the pictures which may be seen in Dublin, would be of little service
to those who, by being on the spot, have it in their power to recur to the originals, and of
little entertainment to those who are far from them” (22). Numerous writers spoke of
their readers as fellow travellers. “One would imagine,” writes John Bush, “that the writer
. . . of a tour through his own or any other country, would be apt to consider his reader as
a traveller through the country, and himselfas his guide” (x). Edward Daniel Clarke
acknowledges the “COURTEOUS or INQUISIIIVE READER” who has “mark[ed] the progress
and termination of my rambles”: “I have considered thee as the companion of my travels,
and have given thee the him of my labours without the fatigue or expence of acquiring
them” (402). His desire to please the “home traveller” is obvious fiom the beginning of
the narrative; he writes in the preface that he “will feel hirnselfmore than satisfied ifhe
succeeds in dissipating the tedimn of a winter’s evening” (x). The trend of addressing
one’s reader as a travelling companion continues well into the nineteenth century; William
Belton concludes his introduction to The Angler in Ireland with “Reader! . . . let us lose
no more time in starting together” (viii). Even Irish writers were forced to accommodate
those “who should like to nnke a tour in Ireland by a British fireside, (and these tourists
are numerous in England)” (Atkinson, Ireland Exhibited viii).

Much like their wandering compatriots, these “home travellers” created a market

for informative texts that allowed readers to feel as if they received the benefits of

31

travelling through Ireland, without incurring the expense or difliculty. John Angel’s A
General History of Ireland (1781), for example, is directed not only to the traveller, but to
anyone who “may be interested or connected with” Ireland (vii). Similarly, William
Seward comments specifically on the gratification “the Antiquarian” will receive from his
1789 Hibernian Gazetteer, an alphabetized directory of place names and descriptions
geared primarily toward the traveller (iii). Travel writers repeatedly emphasized their
awareness of the reader, who often determined a narrative’s (financial) success or failure.
Arthur Young, whose Tour remained influential and respected among travellers and
agriculturalists well into the nineteenth century, feared that few readers would willingly
“give up the pleasure of being amused for the use of being instructed,” and confessed that
his study of agricultural management and improvement was “dry and unentertaining” and
“very firr fiom amusing” (first ed., 1.i, viii).
The flattering circumstance of a successful publication is not thus to be
expected. The present age is much too idle to buy books that will not
banish l’enuye from a single hour. Success depends on amusement. The
historical performances of this age and nation, which have proved so
honomable to their authors, would have met with a less brilliant success,
had not the charms of stile rendered them as amusive as a romance. Their
extreme popularity is perhaps built on rivalling, not only the authors that
lmd before treated the same subjects, but Sir Charles Grarrdison and Julia
(1 .viii)
No novelist, Young reassured himself that “the publick reception does not always mark
the merit of a book” (viii). Despite Young’s protests, his Tour received favorable and
lengthy reviews in both the Critical Review and the Monthly Review, and the latter
expresses particular approbation at “the inforrmtion and entertainment which his

publication has afl‘orded us” (171).

32

Of course, readers required more than an entertaining prose style to acconrpany
their “home travels.” Over the course of several decades, the number and quality of
engravings included in a travel narrative also influenced its reception. Arthur Young
expressed concern about the lack of engravings in his Tour, but could do little to rectify
the situation; the expense of engravings could not be covered by the initial subscriptions
(1.1). Bernard Scale’s Hibernian Atlas (1776) promises readers detailed maps of each
province and county, “beautifully engraved on 78 Copper Plates,” each accompanied by a
written description. The small and inaccurate maps would have been of very little use to
travellers,’ but they formed an attractive sort of eighteenth-century cofiee table book.6
Despite its primarily decorative function, the author insists on the book’s “real Utility,”
something which sets it apart in “an Age of Dissipation and Pleasure.” Like other travel
writers, Scale prides himself on producing a work “where Novelty is blended with
Instruction, which at the same Time arnuses the Imagination by mingling Entertairnnent
with Genius” (preface). Certainly Scale’s book contained instructive information, but it
had utility only for a certain kind of “home traveller.”

The home traveller’s desire to “see” Ireland began to be satisfied in earnest in the
18208 and 308. Thomas Cromwell’s Excursions through Ireland claimed on the title page

to be illustrated with six hundred engravings, which would have ensured a costly three-

 

’The map of the province of Connaught, for example, indicated no roads at all.
For more on the lack of good maps prior to the 1778 survey, see Taylor and Skinner,
pages vi-vii.

6In fact, the book continued to serve this function into the nineteenth century, as
suggested by the handwritten date of “22 Oct. 1840” on the flyleaf of the copy
nricrofihned by Research Publications for the GoldsmithS’-Kress Library of Economic
Literature (no. 11398.9).

33

volume set. Cromwell’s audience was not limited to stay—at-home travellers, however; the
book contains much useful and practical information, “forming a complete guide for the
traveller and tourist.” Some works focused attention on specific locations, such as Dublin
Delineated in 26 Views, which attempted “to afford the numerous strangers who visit
Dublin the easiest means of seeing the most interesting of its public buildings,” without
acknowledging that the easiest way to view Dublin was from London (5). Many texts
catered to both forms of “home travel,” but others, such as G. N. Wright’s Ireland
Illustrated (1834), were clearly meant to entertain the armchair tourist. The illustrations
and text follow no “systematic plan”; in fact, Wright proudly acknowledges having
“rambled over subjects without method or restraint” and “[l]ike the butterfly . . . winged
his desultory course through paths of pleasure adorned with a thousand sweets.” Each
engraving is acconrpanied by a brief text, “and the Illustrator has seized those happy
occasions, for the introduction of such legends, facts, or circumstances, as may well be
understood by the contemplator of each scene” (preface). The idea of travelling to see the
scenes in person is never introduced; instead, the reader, a member of “the world of taste,”
is provided an opportunity to see the “singular wildness and peculiar character of the Irish
Landscape,” to learn Irish folklore, and to form conclusions about the Irish people,
without ever leaving the comfort of his or her drawing room. Leitch Ritchie’s Ireland
Picturesque and Romantic, part of the Heath’s Picturesque Annual series, served a similar
function for English readers, and its title indicates an aesthetic trend in travel writing in
general, and in representations of Ireland in particular. The sense that the Irish landscape

could be elevated to the status of art, either in the form of poetic description or painting,

34

contributed to the travellers’ notion that Ireland existed to be known, circumscribed and
objectified by English pens and pencils (and the readers of the texts those instruments
produced).

On the whole, most travel writing claimed to offer “pleasurable instruction” to
both types of “home traveller.” Occasionally, however, a book’s lack of practicality as
travelling companion leaves one to conclude that its primary audience was the second type
of “home traveller.”7 For example, William Mavor’s Pocket Companion, published in six
volumes, is essentially a compendium of passages fiom others’ travel narratives. Although
some have claimed that the books “could have been quite easily acconunodated even by
those who travelled light” (Andrews 76), they still lacked the basic information found in
other, smaller guide books. Furthermore, the Pocket Companion was not organized in a
systematic fashion that would have allowed travellers to a specific country—for example,
Ireland—to take only one or two volumes of the set with them on their trip. George
Walpoole’s New British Traveller (1784), published in octavo format (21 x 37.5 cm), is a
more blatant example of a guide book created almost exclusively for the stay-at-home
traveller. The size and weight of the book make it an impractical companion for travellers;
it could be consulted the evening before an excursion, but certainly not brought along as a
guide, although it contains much of the typical guide book information. Walpoole seems
aware of his stay-at-home audience and assures the reader that the New British Traveller

will afl‘ord to each Sex a rational, irmocent, and pleasing Gratification; and

while we labour for their Instruction and Amusement, they, in Imagination,
may travel with Facility, gain Improvements at every Stage, survey three

 

7For more on the correlation between a travel book’s size and its perceived utility,
see Batten 30 and Buzard 66.

35

Kingdoms . . . without Danger, and conclude their Excursions informed but
not fatigued. . . . (iii)

In addition, he hopes the work “will prove a most entertaining Companion to Ladies and
Gentlemen, either in their Travels, or their domestic Hour of Amusement.” Walpoole
clearly anticipates a readership of “home travellers,” in particular women and,
significantly, members of a variety of socioeconomic classes, including those for whom
travel was not usually financially feasible; the book should be “of the utmost Importance
to all Ranks of Men whatever, from the Senator down to the lowest Mechanic, whose
Labour procures Riches and supports Grandeur” (iii). Although the over-five-hundred
page book contains only nine pages on Ireland, and the descriptions are vague (if generally
positive), Walpoole is one of the few eighteenth-century travel writers to acknowledge
openly the varied readership of travel writing, and the irrrportance of attracting readers
who might have very little opportunity to travel in the conventional sense.

Women and the working classes were not the only “home travellers.” After the
Act of Union, several books about travel within the British Isles, and specifically Ireland,
were written for children, indicating the extent to which information about Ireland had
begtm to permeate the English home. The earliest of these, Priscilla Wakefield’s A Family
Tour through the British Empire, was written “with a design to convey a general idea, to
the minds of children, of the variety of surface, produce, nnnufactures, and principal
places of the British Empire” (iii). The narrative has “the air of a real tour” (iii) and
recounts the journey tmdertaken by the widow Mrs. Middleton and her children, who
travel “for the sake of collecting useful knowledge,” not “for the amusement of the

moment” (2). Texts specific to Ireland, such as the anonymous New Estate (1831) or

36

Emily Taylor’s The Irish Tourist (1837), teach adolescents how to the think about Ireland
andtheIrish: “Thebookneednotnecessarily, we feel, bedismaLwhichhasthatname
[Ireland] stamped on its pages” (Taylor Vii). The works themselves will be analyzed in
greater detail in subsequent chapters, but the creation of such texts bespeaks the degree to
which Ireland had been successfully domesticated and made safe for English home
travellers, even children
Travel readers formed their opinions about Ireland with information provided by
travel writers, but some travel writers based those descriptions of Ireland on little more
information than that provided by their own imaginations. A third form of “home travel”
involved those who wrote travel narratives without ever leaving their homes:
They are domestic travellers, or rather, if you please, garret-riders,
employed, and their expences borne, by our historiographical dealers. And,

indeed, whoever shall have had opportunity of comparing the originals with
the representations given of them by our tour-writers and illustrators, will

have sufficient reason to believe, that fi'om Homer ’s-Head to the nearest

chop-house was one of the longest journeys the traveller had taken. . . .

(Bush viii)
“Fireside travels” (which include imaginative compositions as well as plagiarized accounts)
could be produced far more cheaply and quickly than legitimate travel narratives, because
they did not require the time and expense of travel (Batten 61). “Most of the time this
writer was a practical person who preferred to deal in facts, not in art, and his motive was
usually money,” according to Percy Adams (Travel Liars 143). As we shall see, fireside
travellers attracted travel readers and plagued legitimate travel writers throughout the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

37

In the “Address to the Reader” that prefaces his Hibernia Curiosa, John Bush rails
against the travel writers whose descriptions of the “natural curiosities” of Ireland “are as
much like the originals, indeed, as a sixpenny picture of KING-GEORGE & QUEEN-
SHARLOT, stuck up with a cat ’3 head in a pottage-pot against the walls of a cottage in
Lancashire,” those whose accounts “have been wrote implicitly fiom tradition or the bear-
say of other people” (vii). Bush insists that, by contrast, “he has copied immediately from
nature, without the least implicit reliance on any accounts whatever.” His work is
“perfectly original”; he would never stoop “to palm upon him [the reader] the domestic
travels of the writer” (xiv). As Percy Adams notes, “the more a writer pointed an
accusingfingeratsomeone else, themoreareaderisinclinedto suspectthatthemanwas
protesting too much and should himselfbe investigated” (Travel Liars 15). Nothing is
known of John Bush; he alludes in the text to Tunbridge Wells and styles his narrative as
“A Letter fiom a Gentleman in Dublin to his Friend at Dover in Kent,” recording the
events of a tour in 1764. There is no particular reason to suspect him of “fireside
travelling,” although some of his connnents suggest “a relatively limited actual experience
of Ireland,” according to John Harrington (155). He tours only through “the best and
most civilized parts” of Ireland, rejecting the westemmost province of Connaught as “the
least inviting to a traveller of any part of the kingdom,” due in part to the potential
presence of “wild Irish” He assures the reader that “This account, however unfavourable,
is not exaggerated . . . for it is taken from some of the more sensible people of this very
province,” indicating that he was not above relying on outside sources of information (27,

29). He garnered positive reviews in the Monthly and Critical Reviews, both of which

38

make reference to Bush’s contribution to knowledge about Ireland; neither impugn his
origimlity or honesty. Nevertheless, Bush’s narrative exemplifies the issues of accuracy
and reliability surrounding “fireside travels”—both fi'om the writer’s and the reader’s
perspective.

Because of the epidemic nature of plagiarism in travel writing (particularly in the
eighteenth century), travel readers developed a complicated system for determining the
legitimacy of a travel narrative. Eighteenth-century readers relied primarily on form to
determine the veracity of a travel writer, according to Charles Batten; although texts
recormting visits to the same places were expected to share basic similarities of order and
description, the narrative passages between them were expected to reveal the unique
experiences of the writer. The narrative was not, however, expected to form a “plot,”
which was considered a sure sign of fictionality. Well-known writers could rely on their
reputations for honesty;8 others relied on a strict adherence to generic conventions to
convince readers of their truthfirlness (Batten 19-24, 54-64). The criteria for legitimacy

were vague enough to allow countless misjudgments. As a result, legitimate travel

 

I’Charles Batten uses Arthur Young as an example of a travel writer who could
‘Tely on [his] reputation as truthful” (58), although he points out elsewhere, as part of a
critique of Percy Adams, that it is impossible to determine if Young was completely
honest or accmate in his representations of particular events (20); such a concern seems
particularly apt with respect to A Tour in Ireland, which was reconstructed from Young’s
notes and memory (see Chapter 2, note 2). In order to escape the charges leveled at his
contemporaries, Young insists in his preface that “to describe the agricultm'e of a
province, it is necessary to travel into it,” accusing “the greater number” of “writers who
have been most voluminous upon this subject” of remaining “confined to their own
farms—perinps to their fire sides” (first ed., i). Elsewhere, Young mocks his critics who
“make extremely fiee with infomnuion they never might lmve known, had my laboms been
wrought, like their own, at a fire side” (viii).

39

 
 

 

 
 
 
 

l'y'?‘?§>"7’.‘ F?!)‘..‘3l’".”.".‘f?-" (it U-"l'v' Min >!,ss",s;.-~_u-,..-. .(g. vi'v'

narratives became objects of undue suspicion, while the works of less scrupulous writers
attained the status (and popularity) of legitimate travel narratives.

Philip Luckombe’s A Tour through Ireland in 1 779 is one such example.
Published in 1780, the narrative is composed almost entirely of passages lifted verbatim
from four separate works: A Tour through Ireland in Several Entertaining Letters . . . by
Two English Gentlemen (1746; attributed to W. R. Chetwood), John Bush’s Hibernia
Curiosa (1769), Richard Twiss’s Tour in Ireland in I 775 (1776), and Thomas Canrpbell’s
A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland (1777). The Dictionary of National
Biography describes Luckombe as a “miscellaneous writer”; he worked as a printer for
several years, and his most irrrportant work is considered to be A Concise History of the
Origin and Progress of Printing (1 770). As a printer, Luckombe would have been
familiar with contenrporary debates about copyright and the status of the “author”; quite
probably he sided with other printers who wanted to be able to continue to produce
inexpensive copies of texts without fear of lawsuits.9 An audience hrmgry for travel
' writing sometimes deliberately failed to discriminate between genuine and fabricated or
plagiarized accormts, since the latter “not infiequently provided . . . more entertainment
than actual accounts”(Batten 60-61). Luckombe doubtless stood to profit from his
mrrative, following as it did on the heels of Richard Twiss’s infamous narrative, and

preceding Arthur Young’s “dry,” scientific account by only months.

 

9For more on the eighteenth-century discussion surrounding the issues of copyright
and authorship, see Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the
Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” and Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the
Copyright: Economic and legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author.’”

40

Interestingly, the reliability of each of his source texts can be called into question
to sonre degree.10 The Tour through Ireland in Several Entertaining Letters might well
have been judged fictional by its contemporaries because it violates two of the three
criteria an eighteenth-century reader might have used to determine its veracity, according
to Charles Batten: it relates “personal opinions and insignificant experiences” and “it
contains letters [purportedly] written by more than one person which reveal varying points
of view concerning the people and places visited” (24). From it, Luckombe plagiarizes his
introduction (an account of the ancient history of Ireland"), the description of a popular
attraction in Dublin (the skeleton of an ossified man), and descriptions of the cities of
Bandon-bridge and Cork, among other things, including, apparently without irony, the
following memorable line: “How ill is this noble country represented by ignorant or
ungrateful people” (Chetwood 241, Luckombe 45). From Bush, Luckombe litts accounts
of tlnee mjor tourist attractions: the waterfall at Powerscourt, the Giant’s Causeway, and
Killarney. As we have seen, Bush’s veracity is not without question, but Luckombe seems
particularly bold in borrowing Bush’s noteworthy account of Killarney, considered the
“earliest and most original” description of what would become the foremost tourist site in

Ireland (Wright, Killarney iii, 21). From Campbell, an Irish writer masquerading as

 

10For more on travel writers who “appropriated material fi'om other travelers and,
ironically, fi'om other travel liars,” see Percy G. Adams, Travellers and Travel Liars (l3).

”Luckombe took care to “correct” his source texts in order to make his plagiarism
less obvious. For example, in a brief chronicle of prechristian monarchs, Chetwood
writes, “In short, this Island, till within these fifty Years, has been a continual Field of
Blood, which must have greatly prevented its Inrprovement, as we see what a vast
Progress it has made in almost every thing for the better, in so short a Space of Time”
(67). Luckombe repeats the sentence verbatim, regularizing the capitalization, and

changing “fifty Years” to “ninety” (Luckombe viii).

41

English, ‘2 Luckombe plagiarizes descriptions of the Irish landscape and the Irish
peasanny——their quick speech, poor agriculture, and bestial living conditions, as well as
their noteworthy hospitality, as sunrrnarized in this axiomtic phrase: “If you prefer the
men of this country for their hospitality, and the women for their beauty, you are likely to
live well with them” (Campbell 44, Luckombe 18). Finally, fi'om Twiss, Luckombe
appropriates descriptions of the Whiteboys and the condition of Irish peasants, whom
Twiss designated as “these beings, who seem to form a different race fiom the rest of
mankind” (Twiss 30, Luckombe 19). English and Irish readers alike took issue with the
accuracy of Twiss’s description of Ireland and the Irish; the Irish people so despised Twiss
that they manufactured chamber pots with his face painted in the bottom, bearing the
inscription “Let ev’ry man piss / On lying Dick Twiss” (Harrington 165; for a variation see
Hadfield and McVeagh 20). Luckombe, in the midst of a description of Dublin
plagiarized primarily from Bush, brazenly makes reference to the popular opinion of
Twiss, one of his major textual resources:
During my stay here I was fiequently presented with the picture of a late
Tourist at the bottom of the chamber-pots, with his mouth and eyes Open
ready to receive the hbation, and on enquiry found, that even the utensil
now is more frequently called by the name ofa Twiss than any other, in

contempt of the flhberal reflections of that gentleman, who was so
hospitably received here. (17)

 

12Thomas Campbell, a clergyman, “was an Irish acquaintance of Boswell” and “a
sluewd student of the conventions of accounts of Ireland who adopted the persona
necessary to exploit the power of such works over the English reading public. ‘A very
entertaining book,’ reported Boswell in his life of Johnson, ‘which has, however, one
fault—that it assumes the fictitious character of an Englishman’” (Harrington 16; see also
the entry on “tourism” in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S. J. Connolly
[1998]). His Philosophical Survey was published anonymously as “a Series of Letters to
John Watkinson, M.D.” (title page).

42

Gestures such as this might have convinced some readers that Luckombe’s narrative was
genuine. The reviewer in the Critical Review (which also reviewed Bush and Twiss)
makes no accusation of plagiarism; rather, he labels Luckombe’s tour “a distinct account”
that is “sufiiciently accurate” (184). The reviewer does suggest, however, that the author
might, in fact, be Irish:

The author insinuates, in the beginning of the Tour, that he is a
native of Great Britain; whether he really be so, or a Hibemian, is of very
little consequence; but that he is the latter, may perhaps be thought
probable from the following passage, where, speaking of the cascade at
Powerscourt, he says,

‘At the very bottom of this sylvan amphitheatre, and in view from
your first entrance into it, is seen one of the most beautifirl water-falls in
Great Britain.’ (184)

Ironically, the reviewer’s insinuation that the author had made a “bull” (Ireland is of
course not in Great Britain) in fact arises from a copying error; the original text, fi'om
Bush’s Hibernia Curiosa, reads “one of the most beautiful water-falls in Great Britain, or
Irehnd, and, perhaps, in the worl ” (67). In the second edition, Luckombe Ins
“corrected” the passage to read, sinrply, “the kingdom” (23). The second edition,
published in 1783, proudly bears Luckombe’s name on the title page (the first edition did
not) and was emended so sparingly as to allow the printer to retain the same pagination as
the first edition Luckombe’s standing as a legitimate travel narrative has been retained
into the late twentieth century; several scholars include his Tour in lists of the prominent

narratives of the period. In a final irony, the entire text of Luckombe’s Tour was pirated

43

and republished anonymously in 1788 as The Compleat Irish T raveller—which, in a sense,
it was.13

Fireside travelling was not merely an eighteenth-century concern, as evidenced by
the following passage fiom William Combe’s poem, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search
of the Picturesque (1809), in which the bookseller replies to Doctor Syntax’s offer of a
travel narrative:

‘A Tour, indeedl—I’ve had enough
Of Tours, and such-like flimsy stuff.
What a fool’s errand you have trade
(I speakthe language ofthetrade),
To travel all the country o’er,
And write what has been writ before!
We can get Tours—don’t make wry faces,
From those who never saw the places.
I know a man who has the skill
To make yom' Books of Tours at will;
And fiom his garret in Moorfields
Can see what ev’ry country yields;
So, if you please, you may retire
And throw your Book into the fire:
You need not grin, my fiiend, nor vapour;
I would not buy it for waste paper!’
(qtd. in Ousby l3)

Fireside travellers (“those who never saw the places”) continued to publish, and the
superabundance of travel narratives, legitimte and otherwise, made it difiicult to offer an
original conu'ibution William Mavor’s The British Tourist ’s, or, Traveller’s Pocket
Companion is essentially a compilation of excerpts fiom various travel narratives about

the British Isles. As Mavor describes it, the work “collects, into one focus, the scattered

 

13In Strangers to that Land, Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh erroneously
describe The Compleat Irish Traveller as “a gazetteer of distances and landmarks, with
descriptions and travelling advice” and provide an inaccurate publication date of 1778
(20).

rays of information,” a necessary task because of the “plentiful crop” of such narratives
aheady published, “most consnly copied from one another, without any valuable
improvements, and fiequently with such fidelity, as not to omit a single error” (xiii-xiv).
Mavor’s sole origiml contributions to the volumes are the preface and brief introductions
to selected passages. Like Philip Luckombe, he draws from the foremost authorities on
Ireland, including Richard Twiss, Arthur Young, and George Holmes; unlike Luckombe,
Mavor provides proper attribution.

As the number of travel narratives increased, travel writers expressed growing
concern for their ability to write what had not “been writ before.” “Books of travels have
multiplied in proportion as the countries where travellers could resort to have diminished;
and have left nothing new either to see or to say,” complains John Gamble (Sketches 1).
The popularity of “borne travels” (in the sense of travel within the British Isles),
particularly among “home travellers” (readers), thus contributed to the development of
another form of “home travel”—fireside travel. In the eighteenth century, argues Martha
Woodmansee, the conception of the writer as a craftsman gave way to the conception of
the writer as “inspired”: “‘Inspiration’ came to be explicated in tern; of original genius,
with the consequence that the inspired work was made peculiarly and distinctively the
product—and the property—of the writer” (427). Generic patterns in travel writing
complicated the connection between originality, the construction of authorship, and
copyright. Travel narratives describing the same places were expected to share certain
similarities: “ifthey do not agree in their most basic descriptions of a place . . . the reader

inevitably suspects that at least one of the travelers is inaccurate, if not dishonest” (Batten

45

 

62). Tours in Ireland followed certain predictable patterns; generally, travellers began in
Dublin and travelled either clockwise or counterclockwise around the perimeter of the
ishnd, stopping at notable attractions as they passed Furthermore, travellers consulted
the works of other travellers and openly included descriptions provided by them in their
own travel narratives. In spite of these circumstances, most travel writers emphasized
their original contributions to the body of work on Ireland, frequently reassuring readers
that they had, in fact, visited the places they described, unlike so many fireside travellers.
George Cooper summarizes the position of many of his fellow travel writers:

I cannot pretend to assert, that every thing which I have said in the
following Letters is altogether new, or that many of the observations have
not even been made by other writers. I can only take to myself the merit of
having ascended to the fountain head of information . . . But it would be
absurd, under every advantage, to aim at perfect originality, considering the
very extensive discussion of Irish affairs which the Union has led to. I
cannot however, conscientiously accuse myself of the least plagiarism. In
studying a subject it is sometimes difficult to distinguish one’s own
thoughts from those which originally belonged to other people. . . . But as I
have beeninasituationto seeandnot to read, to furnishmymindwiththe
images of things, with original pictures, and not with mere copies or the
representations of other men’s ideas; I flatter myself that I do not stand
exposed even to any suspicions of that sort. (xiv-xv)

The paradox is evident: the proliferation of information about Ireland, spurred on by the
Act of Union, fueled the work of fireside travellers and made even the work of legitimate
travel writers seem to lack origimlity. To fmther complicate the situation, travel readers
had begun to seek out entertainment at the expense of instructive information (Batten 81),
paving the way for more fictionalized, but amusing, travel accounts, such as Thackeray’s
Irish Sketch Book. Avowals of authenticity, such as John Gough’s insistence in 1817 that

his narrative was based upon “an actual tour,” that had left him ‘Nvell qualified to describe

46

places, which I have not only actually visited, but in which I have at different times resided
for some months,” had begun to wear thin (3). Increasingly, Ireland (in the form of text,
picture, or tomist destination) was repackaged to suit the tastes of the metropolitan
reading public; according to John Gamble, “authors serve up the repast which suits the
public taste, and mufacture Irish bulls in their garrets, as Vintners do port in their
cellars” (Sketches 314). If fireside travellers could and did provide readers with the
Ireland they wished to see, then a legitimate travel writer’s insistence that, “There is not a
garret view in the whole work,” would not necessarily have recommended it to readers,
particularly those desirous of accounts that emphasized the differences between England
and Ireland (Atkinson, Ireland Exhibited to England v).

The multivalent concept of “home travel” reflects England’s ambivalent
relationship toward Ireland: in some ways, and at some times, Enghrnd needs Ireland to
assume the characteristics of “home”—when travel on the Continent is prohibited, say, or
when the two cormtries are brought together by an Act of Union; however, England more
often desires Ireland to occupy the position of Other, against which it my define itSelf.
Travel, even “home travel,” provides a means for othering Ireland by rendering Ireland as
“abroad”—distinct from, distant from “home.” Travel can also collapse the distance
between home and abroad, exposing the traveller to a “sudden invohmtary awareness of
the repetition of the familiar in the foreign”: the uncanny (Lawrence 3). Freud’s notion of
the uncanny seems particularly appropriate for the notion of “home travel”; unheimlich

(“uncanny”) may be more literally translated as “un-homely.”"’ According to Lawrence:

 

1"For a postcolonial reading of this term, see Bhabha, “The World and The Home.”

47

The rmcanny terrifies because it collapses the distance between the familiar
and the foreign in a way that the traveler . . . does not anticipate. In a
sense, the idea of adventure depends on this distance; the physical distance
between the poles of familiar and foreign figures the desire to separate the
two. This structure of difference between here and there by necessity
oversirnplifies the opposition between home and the foreign, until
difference is intentionally mediated by the traveler in the acts of travel and
travel writing. . . . (4)
Once again, we note the emphasis on the distance between home and abroad, the
“familiar” and the “foreign” The existence of a distance-dependent paradigm
(home/abroad) enables the maintenance of that all-important sense of cultural difference
(familiar/foreign); if travel collapses distance, then travel writing may be used to
“mediate”—in effect to construct—crucial differences. In the case of English travel
writing about Ireland, difference is primarily rendered as distance—physical distance, but
also imaginative distance, which exploits the gap between the familiar landscapes and
behaviors of “home” and the (necessarily) alien characteristics of “abroad.” However,
Ireland’s home-like characteristics—its close physical proximity and its political status
(particularly after the Act of Union)——mean that the English must strike a balance between
viewing the Irish as either home or abroad, Self or Other. As the next two chapters will
reveal, English travellers employ distinct rhetorical techniques to establish distance from
Ireland—a sublime landscape that may be domesticated through improvement or the
techniques of the picttnesque—and the Irish—a people whose domestic practices and
cultural behaviors provide numerous opporunities for travellers to distinguish between

home and not-home.

48

CHAPTER 2

THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER AND IRELAND

Edmrmd Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) begins with a discussion of novelty, a concept intimately
related to travel, as we have seen in the previous chapter. “The first and simplest emotion
which we discover in the human mind, is Curiosity,” according to Burke, and by curiosity,
he means “whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take in, novelty.”
Novelty, however, is short-lived: “those things, which engage us merely by their novelty,
cannot attach us for any length of time”; curiosity “quickly runs over the greatest part of
its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature.”
The “powers and passions” that affect the mind “should not be exerted in those things
which a daily and vulgar use have brought into a stale unafi‘ecting familiarity.” Therefore,
“some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works
upon the mind,” concludes Burke (29—30). In particular, Burke posits “the
sublime”—whatever excites “the ideas of pain and danger”——as “productive of the
strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” If Ireland—particularly its wild
and mountainous landscape—can be rendered “sublime,” then it will satisfy the traveller’s
desire for novelty. Burke recognizes the threat of danger inherent in the sublime, but his
aesthetic philosophy also provides a mechanism by which the English traveller can justify
the need to establish distance between England and Ireland: “When danger or pain press

too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain

49

 

distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we
every day experience” (36). Thus, if Ireland’s sublirnity is too close, it is “simply terrible,”
but “at certain distances, and with certain modifications,”——if Ireland can be distanced, or
domesticated in some way-—then Ireland’s sublime aspects may be “delightful.”

Burke’s essay develops the “sublime” in opposition to the “beautiful” by
establishing a series of qualities inherent in each characteristic. The sublime may be
inspired by power, magnitude, darkness, loudness, suddenness, pain, etc., while the
beautiful is found in objects that are diminutive, smooth, soft, gradual, and delicate. In her
essay “The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century,” Carole
Fabricant draws attention to the unspoken tension in Burke’s argument:

In directly opposing the sublime to the subservient, the safe, the self-
gratifying, andtheuseful, andirrremovingthe sublime fromtherealmof
mental processes to the world of external objects having an objective
reality of their own, Burke aflirrns the existence of powerful forces in
nature ungovemable by man: forces alien to his laws, resistant to his will,
and indifferent to his desires and needs. (74)
In efi‘ect, the sublime cannot be distanced or domesticated and retain any of its desirability.
However, Burke and others saw the aesthetic impulse itselfas a means of control——a
means of establishing distance between the sublime and the person being acted upon by
the sublime. Agricultural improvement, landscape architecture, and the picturesque
provided means ofcontrolling and containing the sublime in nature while retaining an
awareness of the power and novelty of the sublime. Travellers to Ireland used two modes
to attempt to control or aestheticize the sublime aspects of Irish landscape: improvement
and the picturesque. The terms will receive fuller treatment below, but it is important here

to understand that both of these attempts to control and domesticate the sublime carefully

50

negotiated the tension between similarity and difference, between the need to regard
Ireland as home (domesticated) and abroad (novel). The practitioners of improvement
and the picturesque saw their processes and intentions as distinct, but both “are
characterised, first ofall, by a desire to irrrpose an order on landscape, by laying a
str'uctme upon it, or by applying to it abstract, general rules; and, secondly, by a
willingness to manipulate a view so that it fits the order being imposed upon it” according
to John Barrel] in The Idea of landscape and the Sense of Place (58). This “way of
lookingbecamesorefined,andsoimportanttothosewhoemployedit,thatitbecame
ahnost their only way of knowing the landscapes . . . that they were contemplating” (59).
Both improvement and the picturesque constructed an objectifying distance between the
landscape and the viewer; those who saw a landscape that could be rendered picturesque
or inrproved knew only the landscape they constructed (in their minds, on paper, or
through physical reshaping and replanting), with little regard for the needs or desires of
many of the people who inhabited that hand (59). Both methods thus allow the viewer to
control and domesticate the land, and to ignore the inhabitants of that landscape if they

failed to contribute to that process of domestication.

In the rhetoric of improvement so familiar to rmny eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century readers, Irehnd is the consummte “project.” In his Tour, Arthur
Young stresses “the vast importance to England of the improvement of her irish [sic]
territory,” by which he means generally the agricultural improvement of Ireland: the

enclosure of farms, and the application of scientific methods to tillage and husbandry in

51

order to increase production and decrease waste (first ed., 2.10). Other travellers discuss
improvement in more aesthetic terms—the “improvement” of an estate to make the
landscape more visually pleasing—or in human terms—the “improvement” of the
peasantry. The conrplexities of the term were recognized by contemporaries. Henry Inglis
queries,
How often do we hear the question mooted, Is Ireland an improving
country? The reply ought to depend altogether on the meaning we afix to
the word improvement. If by improvement, be meant more extended
tillage, and improved modes of husbandry,—more commercial inrportance,
evinced in larger exports,—-better roads—better modes of
communications,—increase of buildings,—then Ireland is a highly
improving country; but, up to the point at whichI have arrived, I have
found nothing to warrant the belief, that any improvement has taken place
in the condition of the people. (45-46)
Irish travel writers Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall recognize the patronizing and paternalistic
nature of improvement: “Persons who are anxious to improve others are very often eager
to force improvements according to their own peculiar views, without considering that the
parties to be benefited have been instructed and, as it were, moulded into plans and
systems altogether differing from those they are expected at once to adopt as the most
suitable and the best” (3.299-300). Improvement often ignores the cultmal beliefs or
behaviors of the people who live on the land. Nevertheless, English travellers were eager
to see evidence of improvement in Ireland as a sign that the counuy could be successfully
domesticated. In a general sense, improvement involves the alteration of landscape from
its natural (uncultivated) state to render it more aesthetically pleasing or agriculturally
sound; nrost methods of aesthetic improvement used a great deal of artifice—moving hills,

re-routing streams, planting or removing trees, and enclosing wildlife (particularly deer) so

52

tint the combined effect of these elements enhanced the appearance of the estate when
viewed from a particular point or “prospect.” Nevertheless, improved estates were
designed to capture the essence of the sublime, rather than to exclude those elements;
formal gardens and straight lines were eschewed in fivor of wandering streams, deer
parks, and glimpses of appropriately “rustic” eabins, carefully consu'ucted and controlled
tableaus that gave the appearance of wilderness while retaining the security of
domestication Scholars have noted that English travellers in Ireland generally “[single]
out for praise a neat new town or a patch of improved landscape (which meant landscape
resembling England)” (Hadfield and McVeagh 19); such descriptions seem to reveal the
extent to which improvement was seen to domesticate Ireland and make it “home-like,”
and thus palatable to English travellers and readers. However, by repeatedly calling
attention to England as the point of comparison, the rhetoric of improvement ultimately
enrphasizes Ireland’s difference and distance fiom England.

It seems only appropriate to begin with Arthur Young, a respected agricultural
theorist dedicated to the improvement of firming systems throughout Britain.
Throughout his narrative, Yormg takes note of any improvement he sees in Ireland,

whether a snmll firm or a large estate.1 The narrative consists of two parts: Young’s

 

lSeveral scholars have noted Young’s tendency to express an attraction to the
sublime (unimproved) aspects of Irish landscape, which he undercuts by an immediate shift
in focus to an improved patch of ground (see Gibbons, “Topographies,” 28-29; Barrel] 77-
78, 82). Such an apparently contradictory move only supports my argument that both
improvement and lack of improvement are appealing in their ability to establish distance
between England and Ireland.

53

minutes,” taken as he travelled,2 followed by his “General Observations,” which analyze
and smnnmize the infornntion contained in the first part.3 He begins his General
Observations by remarking that “To judge of Ireland by the conversation one sometimes
hearsinEngland, itwouldbesupposedthatonehalfofitwascoveredwithbogs,andthe
otherwithmountaimfilledwithlrishreadyto flyatthe sightofacivilizedbeing”: inother
words, the English at home generally view Ireland as rmimproved (169). Although it
would be unfair to characterize Young as satisfied with the state of agriculture in Ireland,
he does remark fiequently on the number of improved estates and firms, and on the
potential for irrrprovement throughout the country. In particular, Yormg approves of any
attempt on the part of Irish landowners to encourage industriousness (and thus agricultural
improvement) among the Irish peasants and to improve their estates in the “modern”—-i.e.,

English—style. Young is primarily concerned with agricultural improvement, but he also

 

2Young demonstrates a remarkable consistency in the questions he asks to elicit
information about the various counties of Ireland. In 1745, Charles Smith published
Proposals for Collecting Materials, a series of fomteen “Queries recommended to the
Curious to enable them to make proper Enquiries into Natural and other Matters relating
to the several Counties of Ireland” (6). William Seward reprints the list at the end of the
introduction to the Hibernian Gazetteer (1789). Travellers were encouraged to follow a
nrethodological approach in their observations and blank travelling journals were produced
to ficilitate this process (Andrews 73-75; see also Batten 84—91). The abbreviated and
“dry” style of the “minutes” is attributed by Constant'fi Maxwell, the editor of the 1925
edition, to the theft of Young’s journal on the return trip, which forced Young to use the
notes he jotted down while travelling to reconstruct a narrative. Subsequent quotations
are from the Maxwell edition, rmless otherwise indicated.

3‘Young repeats this form in his Travels in France (1792). Charles Batten
discusses this decision in Pleasurable Instruction, concluding that Young hoped to please
the “general reader” with the more personal information in the autobiographical section
(which was lacking to some degree in Tour in Ireland; see previous note), while the
“Observations” section “aims at instructing readers with specialized interests” (Batten 32-
34).

54

reveals his pleasure in landscape architecture and similar forms of aesthetic improvement.
The following description of the Duke of Leinster’s seat at Carton is symptomatic:
The park ranks among the finest in Ireland. It is a vast lawn, which waves
over gentle hills, surrounded by plantations of great extent, and which
break and divide in places so as to give much variety. A large but gentle
vale winds through the whole, in the bottom of which a small stream has
been enlarged into a fine river, which throws a cheerfulness through most
of the scenes: over it a handsome stone bridge. . . . The park spreads on
every side in fine sheets of lawn, kept in the highest order by 1100 sheep,
scattered over with rich plantations, and bounded by a large mrgin of
wood, through which is a riding. (8-9)
Such descriptions of neat civility must have been reassuring to English readers: no bogs,
no barren landseape, no peasants; only the sheep labor on this idyllic cormtry estate. The
description is divided into “scenes” for the reader, just as the landscape itselfhad been
restructured for the viewer: hills and plantations of trees have been organized by the
planner “so as to give much variety”; similarly the stream has been “enlarged” into a river,
suggestive of increased power. The sublimity of the wood—typically a site of darkness
and uncertainty—has been at least partially domesticated into a pleasurable and safe place
forriding. Elsewhere inhis Tour, Young expresseshis approval at the ‘Varietyofhilland
dale” at General Cimninglnme’s seat in County Wicklow, and the “most noble garden, . . .
one of the completest I have seen in Ireland,” at the estate of Mr. King in County Mayo
(29, 78). Castlemartyr, the seat of the Earl of Shannon, rivals the perfection of an
engraving: “The grounds about the house are very well laid out; much wood well grown,
considerable lawns,arivermadeto windthroughtheminabeautifirlmanner, anoldcastle

so perfectly covered with ivy as to be a picturesque object” (104—5). As Young’s use of

55

the term “picturesque” suggests, aesthetically improved estates could be treated like
pictures, flawed and distanced for the pleasure of the viewer.

Agriculturally improved landscapes (inclosed fields, drained bogs, reclaimed
mountains) were more dificult to render in picturesque terms, as we shall see below, but
they involved similar forms of domestication. The necessary distance is again acquired
through comparison. Young’s highest praise is reserved for estates like Woodlawn, which
has been “improved entirely in the modern English taste” (90) or Anne’s Grove, which
“had a much nearer resemblance to an English than an Irish residence” (98), or the
Mathews estate, “so well planted that I could hardly believe myselfin Ireland” (128), or
Mr. Lloyd’s, where “I could have imagined myself in a very pleasing part of England”
(146), or of much of Queen’s County, near Dublin, which is “generally well planted so as
to give it the richness of an English woodland scene” (165). By repeatedly referencing
“home” (England) in his descriptions of Irish estates, Arthur Young calls attention to the
fiwtthatheisnotathome, butabroad,inaplacethatrmysuperficiallyresemble,butcan
never be, Britain. The Anglo-Irish (Protestant) owners of these estates had a vested
interest in establishing a connection to England, one that would justify their continued
authority over Catholic Ireland. Roy Foster uses the term “England-complex” to describe
the behavior of the Ascendancy landowners who used landscape and architectm'e to
demonstrate their afliliation to England (194). This pattern of behavior inevitably
underscored the differences between the Anglo-Irish and the English. They become, in
Homi Bhabha’s phrase, the “subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”

(86). Only much later, in the mid-nineteenth century, does an English traveller consider

56

the inherent equivocation in the desire for evidence of English-style improvement in
Ireland. William Thackeray initially feels that comparing an improved Irish property to
England is “the best compliment that can be paid” (260) but later admits, “It is hard to use
thiscompafisonsoofiemandmustnnkelrishhearersangry. Can’toneweaneathouse
and grounds, without instantly thinking that they are worthy of the sister country; and
implying, in our cool way, its superiority everywhere else? . . . Is it the fact that English
grounds are superior, or only that Englishmen are disposed to consider them so?” (277).
Nevertheless, he later admits that “a sight of neatness and comfort is exceedingly welcome
to an English traveller,” suggesting that such sights are relatively rare, and that their
implicit domestication reassures the English traveller, while reminding him that he is, in
fact, abroad—away from the comforts of home.

The temptation to domesticate Ireland and make it “home-like” sometimes
overcame the desire for distance. In Young’s eyes, the landowners who could make
Ireland look like England led the potential to make Ireland behave like England as well.
Thus the domesticating rhetoric of improvement may be extended beyond landscape to
hmn beings. Yormg is confident of the irnprovability of Ireland and the Irish, and
records one landholder as insisting that “ifgood land is let to the poor people, they are
sum to destroy it; but give them heath, or what is bad, and they will make it good” (90).
As proof of this, Young recounts the story of Sir William Osborn, who improved his
mountainous estate by letting the land to Irish peasants—many of them former Whiteboys,
according to Osbom——and supplying them with fertilizer, livestock, and materials with

which to build cottages.

57

In this manner Sir William has fixed twenty-two families, who are all upon
the improving land, the meanest growing richer, and find themselves so
well ofi‘, that no consideration will induce them to work for others, not
even in harvest. Their industry has no bounds; nor is the day long enough
for the revolution of their incessant labour. (132)
This account of Irish industriousness, so uncommon in English travel narratives, showed
English readers the potential benefits of domesticating Irish natives: revolutionary
impulses are redirected to productive activity, and laborers content to stay and work in
Ireland will not travel to England seeking employment. “Too much cannot be said in
praiseofthisundertaking. . . . It showsthatthe villainyofthe greatest miscreantsisall
situation and circumstances. Employ, don’t hang them,” concludes Young (133). YOtmg
spoke out repeatedly against the common practice of raising the rents of Irish cottiers who
improved their land,4 and praised those landowners who encouraged the peasants to apply
modern methods of agriculture, particularly enclosure and the application of lime to
increase the soil’s productivity.

Sometimes, however, the important task of improving Ireland could not be left to
the (Catholic) peasants. Young relates the story of Lord Chief Baron Foster, who “has
rmde the greatest improvements I have anywhere met with”:

The whole country twenty-two years ago was a waste sheep-walk, covered
chieflywithheath,withsomedwarffurzeandfern. Thecabinsandpeople
as miserable as can be conceived; not a Protestant in the country, nor a
road passable for a carriage. . . . In order to create a new race of tenants,

[Foster] fixed upon the most active and industrious labourers. . . . He fixed
a colony of French and English Protestants on the land, which have

 

‘Iftenants were unable to pay their rent, then the land would be released at a
higher rate. Those tenants who did nnnage to pay the increased rent ran the risk of losing
their lease to those who would pay even more. Thus, peasants had little incentive to
improve their land.

58

flomished greatly. . . . The country is now a sheet of com. A greater
improvement I have not heard of. (35-37)

The importation of French and English Protestants here enables the improvement of the
country, and as a consequence increases Ireland’s Home-like (i.e., English) qualities,
particularly the presence of Protestantism. Young offers similar praise of the Palantines,
German Protestants who emigrated to England and were brought to Ireland by various
landowners to assist with improvement. The Palantines “are very industrious, and in
consequence are much happier and better fed, clothed, and lodged, than the Irish
peasants,” according to Young (125).“ 6 Young admits that this is not entirely due to their
Protestantism; the Palantines did not work under the same lease system and suffered no
repercussions for improving the land they settled. Nevertheless, Young felt the task of
improving Ireland—mking it more like England and more profitable for England——to be
too important to be left to chance and the unpredictability of the Irish character.

Arthur Young was not the only English traveller to reflect on the importance of
improving Ireland. In the early years of the nineteenth century, John Gough and Richard
Colt Hoare remark repeatedly on the need for improvement of Ireland, or at least on the
med to incorporate the rhetoric of improvement in one’s travel narrative. Hoare admits
that after “so short a residence in Ireland, it would be deemed presumptuous in me, to

enter deeply into the actual state of agriculture” (314); nevertheless, he considers it the

 

5However, Constantia Maxwell notes, “They do not seem to have exercised any
permanent influence upon their surroundings, and when their leases fell in, they merged
into the condition of the ordinary Irish tenant” (230—3 1, n. 145).

‘Sir John Carr records a similar description of the Palantines’ positive influence on
the Irish landscape shortly after the Act of Union (352-53).

59

 

 

duty of every traveller to take note of such things: “In travelling through a new cormtry,
the eye should ever be upon the watch: its soil, produce, character, all should be
examined” (133). Such language is in keeping with popular trends in travel writing. By
the late eighteenth century, travel writers were forced to consider the type of travel
narrative they would produce: one focused on the country (landscape, agriculture, natural
curiosities) or focused on the countrymen (character, mmers, customs) (Batten 98-101).
Gough’s observatiom are reminiscent of Young’s. He writes with pleasure of a well-kept
country estate, or a landscape “much resembling some parts of England” (36, 58), and
praises landowners who encourage improvement among the peasantry: “This is the true
method of relieving the poor, and must, in a philantrophic mind, give birth to sensations,
unknown to those thoughtless landholders, possessing thousands of tmcultivated
irnprovable acres, and surrounded by an unemployed tenantry” (169). Whereas Young
notes many failures to improve, Gough, writing after the Union, focuses on the successes,
concludirrgthat “AnimpartialEnglishman. . . insteadofbeingsmprised,thatthe
appearanceofthecountryandthetowns, isnot equaltothatofEngland, mustratherbe
amazed at Ireland’s general picture, and that, with all its disadvantages, it approaches so
nw to that of the elder country” (318-19). Again, we note the equivocal and distancing
comparison: Ireland is “so near” but “not equal” to England. Ireland has the potential to
“become one of the brightest gems in the British Crown” (319), provided that the spirit of
improvement continues in its inexorable course of cultivation and domestication.
Travellers continued to find evidence of improvement well into the nineteenth century.

After his arrival in Ireland, John Barrow, “seeing the healthful state of the country,”

60

writes: “I could not forbear asking myself, ‘Can this be Ireland?’” (32). He later recounts
the story of one man, “who, having accumulated a handsome fortune in the West Indies,
spends it most liberally . . . in making improvements,” a task he accomplishes in part by
“creating among [his tenants] a rivalship, as it were, to show examples of neatrress and
cleanliness” (60-61). Elsewhere, his description of Florence Court, seat of the Earl of
Enniskillen, echoes the language of a Brown or Repton (134-35). Near mid-century,
Georgiana Chatterton describes an estate so thoroughly improved that “we could scarcely
fancy it in Ireland” (Sketches 1.300). As Barrow’s and Chatterton’s comments suggest,
improvement 1nd the power to remake Ireland, to erase the very qualities that
characterized it as Ireland. Such a change doubtless threatened some travellers, who had
grown accustomed to regarding Ireland as Other in a particular way. Nevertheless, travel
writers, especially after Union, seem determined to show how Ireland has been or can be
improved.

In fact, the Act of Union itself could be regarded as an “improving” measure.
George Cooper argues that the introduction of a “prudent legislature will tame their [the
Irish people’s] wild nature, subdue them to use, and render them the most powerful and
most tractable agents in subservience to great view and great designs” (196). Here
Cooper uses the rhetoric of irrrprovement to depict the Irish as a landscape susceptible to
refi'aming and reworking by the English imperial eye. The Irish people firnction as the
sheep or deer on an improved estate; once they have been “subdued,” and their “wil ”
natures tamed, they beconre useful for crafting the desired effect—a “great view”

reflecting “great designs.” They lend the appearance of wilderness without threatening the

61

comforts of domesticity. And, as in landscape, any obstacles to improvement my be
removed or altered without further justification. Domestication of Ireland requires more
than winding streams and spacious lawns; it requires the influence ofEnglish law, the
institution that would make Ireland not just home-like, but Home.

Not all travel writers confined their understanding of improvement to such weighty
matters as agriculture, economics, or politics. Yormg’s contenrporary, Thomas Campbell,
records with pleasure the mixture of “hill and dale” in the Irish countryside, which lacked
onlythe skillfirlhandofthe irnproverto makeittrulybeautifirl, onethatrecognizedthe
need to “accomodate the phn to the place,” instead of “torturing the place to the plan,” as
inrprovers sometimes did (166,170). John Bush concludes his description of the Lakes of
Killarney, an ever-popular destination for travellers, with the following remark:

I hardly think that nature, in any part of this habitable globe, has thrown
together a finer collection of materials for improvement, by a very little
introduction of art, into a scene the most enchantingly rural and the most
fertile of entertaimnent to her curious votaries. (157)
The potential exists to improve Ireland “by a very little introduction of art,” which will
make the country more hospitable, and entertaining, to travellers. In this vein, Philip
Luckombe singles out Lord Powerscourt for praise. According to Luckombe,
Powerscourt has taken the trouble to improve conditions for viewing the famous waterfall
on his estate by cutting steps, removing excess vegetation, and providing chairs in which
weary travellers can rest (26-27). Since we have seen evidence to indicate that
Luckombe’s account is drawn fiom other narratives, pieced together with conjecture, the

inclusion of these “improvements” (perhaps based on John Bush’s description of Lord

Kenmare’s similar accommodations at Killarney) indicates that such improvements were

62

not uncommon and tMt English travellers and readers expected and appreciated them.
Charles Bowden is pleased to find that the “noble proprietor” at another waterfall, Poll-a-
phuca, Ms “spared no expense in forming walks and palings in the most dangerous
passages” (71). RicMrd Colt Hoare recommends certain improvements at other popular
sites, in particular “the judicious application of the pruning knife” to the ivy that has, in
Hoare’s opinion, overgrown various ruins, obscuring the architecture and making them
less appealing to travellers (49; see also 51, 63). The consensus among many travel
writers, and no doubt among many travel readers as well, seems to be that Ireland could
best be seen in its improved (domesticated) state, which rendered the sublime aspects of
the Irish landscape accessible and less threatening.

The vast majority of travel writers recorded their approbation of improvement in
much more generalized terms; their fondness for “neatness,” in particular, bespeaks a
general interest in Irish domestic life that would Mve appealed to many English horrre-
travellers. George Holmes, in his Sketches of Some of the Southern Counties of Ireland
(1797) rermrks frequently upon a well-ordered environment: a village “which pleased us
exceedingly by its general neatness and cleanliness” (16) or “small, but very neat” houses
(52) or “a very neat built town” (180). However, most late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century English travellers reserved the term “neat” for towns in the north of
Ireland, and particularly for Protestant settlements there—people and places more similar
to England and the English. Methodist minister John Wesley records one such
observation in his Journal for 1756: “No sooner did we enter Ulster than we observed the

difference. The ground was cultivated just as in England, and the cottages not only neat,

63

but with doors, chimneys and windows” (4.177). Quakers, in particular, caught the
attention of my travellers. Arthur Young offers the following description of a Quaker
settlement:
I observed all the way I went, that the cabins were generally much better
than any I had seen in Ireland. Large ones, with two or three rooms, in
good order and repair, all with windows and chimneys and little sties for
their pigs and cattle. As well built as common in England. (25)
His similar comments on a Palantine settlement (see above) suggest that such orderly
domestic conditions, common among Protestants but rare among the Catholic peasants,
reassured the English traveller. Philip Luckombe remarks that the Quakers’ neatness
looks fitting in the Irish landscape, suggesting their potential to be rendered picturesque
and thus objectified (56-57). Nearly forty years later, John Gough presents a similar
picture of “this industrious people” who Mve established a village of ‘Vvell built houses,
some of them even elegant . . . [and] very neat white-washed cabins, belonging to
members of this society.” Here Gough claims to Mve “experienced true Irish hospitality
and politeness, without either form or show” (64). Thus English readers could infer that
travellers could experience Ireland without encountering the poverty and squalor they Md
come to consider as emblematic of that country. JonatMn Binns insists that the Quakers
“are greatly respected, Mving contributed in an important degree to the social and moral
improvement of their respective districts; an efiect that is manifested in the neatness of the
cottages and houses, and in the orderly and industrious habits of the people.” Binns was
flat fiom an impartial observer, although he insists that this “statement does not proceed

from an undue desire to land a society of which I am myselfa member” (1.197). Even the

travel narratives for children reinforced the desirability for improvement in the form of

 

Protestant ‘neatness’ and industry; an Anglo-Irish family fiiend tells the Grey children in
The New Estate (1831): “It Ms been observed . . . that wherever the Quakers settle, great
improvement follows in a town. Ireland is very much indebted to this class of persons, for
great advance in commerce and the introduction of neatness and order; qualities in which
the Irish are enrinently deficient” (192). Home travellers, even children, were assured tMt
the native ‘Vvild Irish” could be improved and domesticated with the proper models and
incentives.

However, improvement Md the potential to eradicate the sublirnity (and novelty)
that origimlly attracted the traveller to Ireland; similarly, improvement that depended on
Protestantism and superficial resemblance to England threatened to collapse the necessary
distance between England and Ireland by diminishing Ireland’s otherness. Thus, numerous
English travellers also noted the failures of Irish people to improve the Irish landscape.
Arthur Young encountered more than one landowner who knew “the poverty of the
common Irish residing tenantry and their characters to be such, that they could not
improve them [the lands] as they should be” (Maxwell ed. 13). In another county, Young
observedthat, “It isherethoughtthat itwouldbeverydiflicultto nurseuparaceoflittle
farmers fi'om the cottiers,” in part due to their faulty cMracter (147). Yormg was
horrified too by bad husbandry practices among the Irish (83), but he did not stop there.
His displeasure extended to the wealthier classes in Ireland, “where so many fine places
want neatness, and where, after great expense, so little is found complete” (98). Other
eighteenth—century travellers were similarly displeased by Irish influence on the landscape.

Charles Bowden writes that he feels “a spirit” of improvement to be “much wanting” in

65

Ireland (137). E. D. Clarke summarizes the connections among Irish character, Irish

landscape, and the need for improvement:
Nature Ms done but little for the country; but the repeated efforts of art, in
erecting beautiful edifices, fertilizing the soil, and encouraging the growth
of trees, Mve greatly improved it. The outlines of a poor neglected
country are often visible. The Irish are a lazy tribe, and were formerly
more indolent than they are at present. It is perMps owing to this, that the
features of a barren soil are so often to be traced. This however is very
much altered of late years. Times begin to alter. The spirit of
improvement pervades all conditions of men; and those nations, tMt
heretofore were seen buried in barbarism and savage obscurity, now teem
with increase of science and refinement. Nothing can afi‘ord a more
striking instance of this than the state of Ireland, although there is still such
vast room for alteration. (323)
The passage teems with Clarke’s ambivalence toward Ireland and the Irish: they are
“lazy,” but “were formerly more indolent than they are at present”; they were once “buried
in barbarism and savage obscurity” but “now teem with increase of science and
refinement.” This, combined with “the repeated efforts of art,” certainly demonstrates a
“spirit of irrrprovement,” since “Nature has done but little for the country.” However, “the
outlines of a poor neglected country are often visible” and “there is still such vast room for
alteration.” Clarke sees and records changes with approbation but doubts the ability of the
“lazy” Irish to improve Ireland thoroughly and completely, in effect to eradicate all signs
of its former “Irishness.” Ireland, it seems, demonstrates the limits of improvement, and
those limits were to be found in the flaws of Irish character. Such a critique of Ireland’s
failure to improve belies England’s desire to conceptualize the Irish as Other, however.
To the extent that improvement provided a means for the English traveller to domesticate

and objectify Ireland, to view the sublime without being threatened by (or overly attracted

to) it, to compare and contrast Ireland with England, then improvement reinforced the

66

desired distance between Self and Other. Failures to improve also drew attention to the

difl‘erences (and distance) between England and Ireland and could thus prove equally

useful.

In the simplest terms, “picturesque” designates something that is “like a picture.”
The description of landscape (or people) in picturesque terms functions as a framing
device, providing an objectifying distance from which the viewer may regard the thing
being examined, described, or drawn. As with irrrprovement, the methodology of the
picturesque encouraged the viewer to take an active role in imaginatively or physically
restructuring the landscape being viewed; the language of the picturesque ofl‘ers yet
another way to control or domesticate the wildness that originally attracts the viewer.
However, practitioners of the picturesque evinced a noted dislike of cultivated (improved)
land. Some years alter Burke’s essay on the sublime and the beautiful, William Gilpirr
posited the picturesque as a third category, for objects that were neither sublime nor
beautifirl, but nevertheless pleasurable “to contemplate in pictures” (Barrell 57).
Subsequent theorists of the picturesque attempted to define the characteristics of the
picturesque—cg, roughness, irregularity—but the term rennined notoriously slippery.
The term “picturesque” appears repeatedly in travel writing from the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth centuries, but it fiequently lack specificity. In a sense, its flexibility
benefitted the travel writer by providing a sort of “code word” for objectification; if
Ireland’s landscape could be rendered “picturesque,” then it could be established as

different and distant fi'om the English viewer. As with “improvement,” the modes of the

67

picturesque encouraged artists and writers to reconstruct and recreate scenes to their best

advantage, as evidenced in this passage fi'om Sir Richard Colt Hoare:
Perhaps on no one occasion do the love and knowledge of drawing and
painting, contribute so much to the amusement of those who cultivate
them, as in travelling through a dreary country, unvaried by the beautiful
irregularities and decorations of nature; for even there the eye of science
will discover some latent beauties, some Mrmonious tints, some striking
efi'ects of mture. (133)

In effect, the picturesque can establish distance between the viewer and the object being

viewed, and it can control the environment being depicted by adding to or subtracting

fi'om it at will. Thus the picturesque allows the English traveller to subdue, and even

domesticate Ireland, while still rendering it as distant and Other.

Irish landscape and ruins provided numerous opportunities for the traveller to
exercise the rhetoric of the picturesque. Occasionally even Irish travel writers participated
in the process of rendering Ireland “picturesque.” George Holmes, an Anglo-Irish
Dubliner, tomed through the south in 1797, but did not publish his work until 1801, after
the Rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union. He feels Ireland to be “less known to the
people of England, in general, than the most remote regions,” but hopes that “On the eve
of a legislative tmion between the two countries, it must, to an Englishman, become an
interesting object of inquiry” (iii-vi). His primary task is the description of Ireland’s
“picturesque scenery,” which he publishes in a series of letters (vi). He begins his account
by erquaining tMt “a knowledge of painting in the tourist gives to him an evident
advantage over the observer who is unacquainted with the executive part of the art,”
indicating that he is conversant with the modes of seeing and knowing described above

(3). Like other Anglo-Irishmen, Holmes had a vested interest in depicting Ireland in a

68

mode that the English would find both interesting and acceptable. Many of Holmes’
written descriptions follow in the tradition of the Burkean sublime, as indicated by this
passage on his travelling party’s experience in Stack’s mountains in County Kerry:
The mists began to descend fast, and spread fi'om base to base, of these
huge hills, darkening the atmosphere, and chilling us with their clamps; no
human residence was to be seen, nor any living thing except a few ravens,
which now and then heavily passed us close by, and no ways timid, flapping
their moist wings, and hoarsely croaking; sometimes they would follow us
a long way and very near, keeping up their discordant shrieks, by no means
unpleasing, as it assisted in adding to the general and horrific sublimity of
the whole; the words ‘no means unpleasing,’ may seem strange to you,
when applied to any thing horrific, but it is no less certain, that terrific
grandeur creates a sensation in our minds, (although awfirlly oppressive)
yet leaving a desire behind, of experiencing the same again, which certainly
never can be applied to any sensation that is unpleasing. (195)
The mists, darkness, and shrieking ravens intensify the image of Ireland as Gothic and
threatening. Holmes describes himselfas thrilled by the “horrific sublimity” of the scene;
his explanation of the unexpected pleasure derived fi'om the terror and grandeur
surrounding him clearly derives fiom Burke’s description of the sublime and its effect on
the body and the mind. Holmes’ language here and elsewhere very deh'berately calls to
mind landscape painting techniques of the same era. Of the province of Munster, Holmes
writes: “It is a melancholy circumstance to view such a space of country totally wild; for
the patches of tillage are so inconsiderable, when compared with the boundless wastes that
meet the eye, that they are lost in the conrparison. The traveller here may strain his eye
over many a hill, yet meet no human residence” (83). The reader must imagine the view,
in which distance is indicated by varying bands of sky and land and the only point of
perspective might be a tiny cabin or peasants laboring in a far-oft" field. The reader is thus

placed in the position of objectifying the Irish landscape, just as the viewer of a painting

69

distances himself from the subject of the painting. Travelling to Castle-Island, near
Killarney, Holmes and his travelling companion get lost: “all traces of a path were gone;
cultivation seemd to Mve fled, or rather never to Mve appeared” (104). They happen
upon a cabin, which “looked like a speck in the boundless ocean, being the only solitary
Mbitation, for many miles, through these mountains” (105). Here they find two peasant
children, ages one and seven. The elder speaks only Irish; they offer her coins, “but she
seemed unacquainted with their uses” (106). When the parents return, they show the
travellers back to the path, for which they express gratitude, Mving “conjured up . . . a
thousand dismal ideas of being benighted in these unhospitable regions” (107). This
encounter with Irish people is rendered in terms similar to those applied to the Irish
landscape: distance is magnified, and the viewer’s only perspective is provided by a
solitary cabin that “looked like a speck in the boundless ocean.” The Irish—already
obscured by this insurmountable distance——are further separated from the viewer by their
lack of civilization, their inability to understand or speak English and their unfamiliarity
with money. The peasants beconre insignificant figures in a sublime panorama, far
removed from the English viewer, who can then use the relationship suggested by the
rhetoric of the picturesque to justify removing the peasants fi'om the uncultivated
landscape and reclaiming the land to suit the needs of England.

The depiction of ruins in many travel accounts also provides the means for thinking
of the Irish peasants as at best an inconsequential part of the Irish landscape, and at worst,
as Mving a deleterious effect on that landscape. “1 never saw so many ruinous buildings

in any country as in all parts of Ireland,” recorded John Wesley in his journal for April

70

 

1748 (3.344). The presence of ruins confirmed Ireland’s antiquity and suggested a
civilized people Md ianited the country hundreds of years before the arrival of the
English. The ruins themselves contributed to the picturesque quality of Ireland’s
landscape, and they feature prominently in the engravings that accompanied many travel
narratives. Nevertheless, many English travellers described their disappointment and even
disgust at the impression of decay they left behind, responses they transferred to the Irish
themselves. Wesley, arriving in Duan in May 1748, writes: “Here likewise I observed
abundance of ruined buildings; but I observed also that some of them were never finished,
and some Md been pulled down by those who built them. Such is the amazing fickleness
of this people” (3.353). Of particular concern were the ruins of abbeys and other places of
religious significance. At Sligo, Wesley tours the remains of an abbey, “formerly one of
the largest in the kingdom,” and records his horror at what he finds:
The walls of it are standing, and three sides of the cloisters are entire; but
you can scarce tread, either within or without, unless you will step upon
skulls or human bones, which are everywhere scattered up and down as
dung upon the earth. Surely no other nation, Christian or heathen, would
endure this! (4.389)
Whether Wesley considered Ireland Christian or heathen may be debatable, but his disgust
with (and sense of alienation from) the Irish people is evident. Numerous travellers record
similar accounts of the famed Muckross Abbey, in Killarney. “Thousands of human skulls
and bones are piled in heaps among these ruins,” writes Twiss (131). For some travellers,
this circumstance only added to the ambience of the ruin: “Heaps of skulls and bones

scattered about, with nettles, briar and weeds sprouting in tufts fiom the loose stones, all

unite to raise those melancholy impressions, which are the merit of such scenes” (Young,

71

Maxwell ed. 115). RicMrd Colt Hoare calls this ill treatment of human remains “religious
indecency,” but describes the scene within the abbey as “truly impressive”: “all was in
cMracter; skulls, bones, and coffins, thick around me; the Sexton digging a fresh grave,
and a hoary old man kneeling before the altar, with his rosary and cross in his hand” (125).
For the first time, we see the “min” as an active site for religious practice being invaded by
tourists;7 Hoare feels the connection between decay and the implements of Catholic ritual
to be “in character,” that is, appropriate to the tableau, and he observes the mourner from
a distance, as if viewing a picture. The picturesque aspect of the ruin thus contributes to
the desired eflect of distance. Other travel writers were distinctly less subtle in conveying
their alienation: “I warn every one who visits Killarney, as he values life, not to enter this
abbey,” proclaims John Carr. “Contrast renders doubly horrible the ghastly contemplation
of human dissolution, tainting the surrounding air with pestilence, in a spot which nature
has enriched with a profirsion of romantic beauty” (363-64).8 The ruins, decayed human
remains, and ‘pagan’ rituals combine effortlessly to contribute to the depiction of Ireland

as other-—either picturesque or alien.

 

7Sir John Carr’s account confirms this circumstance: “The soil of the abbey is very
thin, and every efl’ort Ms been made to dissuade the lower classes fi'om bringing their dead
here,but invain. Itisafirctthatthose who Mvebeenburiedsixmonthsorayearbefore,
are raised and placed on one side to make room for those who are brought for interment
afterwards” (363). Under the penal laws, Catholics were often denied space in which to
conduct their religious practices, forcing them to worship outdoors or in wMtever space
was available; see The Course of Irish History 224—26.

8The actual state of the Abbey is diflicult to determine, and various attempts were
rrrade to render the site more acceptable to English travellers. Anne Plumptre, writing
some ten years after Carr, heatedly opposes his description of the conditions at Muckross
Abbey, indicating that descriptions were reflective of the personal tastes and character of
the writer (286).

72

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73

 

G. N. Wright’s Ireland Illustrated firrthers the association between the ruins and
the Irish peasants. Wright promises that the engravers “have endeavoured to make
intelligible” the “singular wildness and peculiar character of the Irish Landscape” by
delineating “a great variety of subjects, all of which were picturesque and sublime”
(preface). In keeping with picturesque tradition, the focus of the majority of the
illustrations are buildings or prominent landscape features (mountains, etc.); human figures
are present but inevitably small, subordinated to the main subject of the drawing (Andrews
25). Scenes in Dublin are animated with tiny figmes of well-dressed tourists and
businessmen, but the engravings of ruins are peopled by peasants or, occasionally, by
animals. In “Ruins of Lord Portlester’s CMpel, St. Audoen’s Church” (Figure 1), a
barefoot peasant woman hangs wash on a line strung around the ruins of a church. The
church itself lies within the city of Dublin and dates from the twelfth century; the chapel
lies “contiguous to the old Norman structure” and is “beautiful even in decay” (Wright
31). In the lower-center of the engraving is the Portlester cenotaph, and Wright describes
the design of the sarcongus and the inscription in great detail. The illustrator, however,
has chosen to distract the viewer from the monument, drawing the eye instead to the
billowing, white laundry. The humble, everyday occurrences of domestic life are
juxtaposed with the grandeur and religious significance ofthe ruin, and the viewer is
struck by the incongruity. According to Wright,

The Illustrator merely stands in the relation of pilot, to guide the passenger
to a desired and desirable Mven, where true taste may probably be
Mrboured. . . . [H]e fears that if public sympathy be not excited in favour

of this ancient, and yet perfect record [the monument], like the venerable
edificethatnowhangsinmelancholydecayarormd, itwillbesufi‘eredto

74

fall beneath the all-subduing scythe of Time, or compelled to yield its
prescriptive tenure to the convenience of the day. (3 2)

The picturesque mode encouraged the addition of details that may or may not Mve been
part of the actual scene viewed by the artist or writer. In Wright’s description, we see that
the artist includes evidence of the ruin “yielding” its significance to “the convenience of
the daf—larmdry strung around the ruin, which itself“hangs in melancholy decay
arotmd”—-to heighten the sense of deterioration and the threat of lost history and beauty.
The engraving suggests at once an absence of appropriate domestic space and a lack of
respect for the sacred space the ruin represents. One of several drawings that features
peasants performing domestic labor in public spaces, “Ruins of Lord Portlester’s CMpel”
provides evidence, even for “home travellers,” that the Irish were alien to English
sensibilities, incapable of appreciating—40 say nothing of preserving—the picturesque
beauty and antiquities surrormding them.9
One particular type of ruin, the round tower, captured the attention of many

English tourists. The prominence of the round tower in the illustration on RicMrd Twiss’s
map of Ireland (see Figure 4) echoes the prominence of the round tower in the narratives
(and drawings) of English travellers. Twiss’s description of the round tower at
Chmdalkin, ‘Vvill with little variation serve for all the others”:

It is eighty-four feet in height, and built of stones each about a foot square,

formingacircle offifteenfeet indiameter, thewallsareupwards ofthree

feet thick, and at about fifteen feet above the ground is a door, without any

steps to ascend to it; the base is solid; toward the t0p are four small oblong
holes which admit the light, and it is terminated by a conic covering; there

 

9John Gamble’s disapproving depiction of the Irish practice of hanging wash on
gravestones lends credence to the illustrator’s choice and confirms English fears about the
Irish people’s relationship to the monuments of antiquity (Views 171).

75

are no steps remaining in the inside, so that probably if there Mve ever
been any they were of wood, or some such perisMble material. (67)

Their origin and function were topics of heated debate among eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century travellers.l0 The towers were “always situated very near a church” (T wiss 69),
and their shape and height suggested watch towers or hell towers.” Some believed the
towers to Mve been erected by the Danes, although Twiss notes that “it is remarkable that
none of these edifices exist in Denmar ” (67). The inaccessible door troubled many
travellers; few assumed, as did Twiss, that the steps had decayed, positing instead that the
towers were used for punishment or monastic seclusion and that the high door and small
windows prohibited escape or distraction. The speculation about the round towers only
added to their mystique. Their physical prominence seemed at odds with the secrecy that
surrounded them. Anne Plumptre concludes her Narrative by insisting that the round
towers “ought to be considered as living witnesses (let me be allowed that expression) to
the great antiquity of the Irish nation” (371), a mode of viewing that seems willing to

allow Ireland its own cultural history. Other travellers were considerably more reluctant.

 

loFor an illuminating discussion of the debates over the origin of the round towers,
see Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 108-56. The Royal Irish Academy,
through a celebrated essay competition, sponsored conflicting theories of the origin of
round towers in order to avoid choosing between the two versions of Irish history: first,
that the round towers were of monastic origin, designed for defense from invaders, an
account that coincided with most theories of Ireland’s state of relative civilization at that
period; or second, that the towers were pre-Christian momnnents introduced fiom the
East for phallic worship, which posited a much older and more developed Irish civilization
than previously supposed.

”Historian Rachel Moss confirms their fimction as hell towers and explains that “a
small Mud-held hell would Mve been rung” fiom one of the small windows near the top of
the tower. The towers date fiom the tenth century and are associated “principally with
early Irish monastic settlements” (Oxford Companion to Irish History 490).

76

In The New Estate, one of the Gray children, upon contemplating a round tower, observes
that Ireland “seems hill of recollections which prove its antiquity and importance. How
much it is to be regretted that it Ms not memory for any ofthe benefits conferred by
England” (287). Simple chronology may explain such divergent attitudes. In 1817, when
Plumptre writes, Ireland seems relatively inconsequential, weakened by famine and firmly
under the thumb of the British empire; such a nation may Mve its history, its antiquities,
without threatening the English. In 1831, alter Catholic emancipation Ms been granted,
England recognizes the danger in allowing Ireland to write its own history, one that
implicates Britain in its struggles. In either case, the round towers operate as powerful
markers on the landscape, drawing the viewer’s attention to Ireland’s past, its distinctive
cultural history. Like Ireland itself, the round towers simultaneously attracted and repelled
the curiosity of English travellers.

Much of Ireland’s landscape—appropriately dotted with impressive and mysterious
ruins, and inconsequential signs of peasant life—could be easily rendered picturesque, and
thus objectified. The innumerable acres under cultivation, deforested landscapes, and bogs
were more problematic, however, but travellers found alternative means for establishing
distance. Travelling through Ireland to popular tomist sites, such as Killamey or the
Giant’s Causeway, many writers were struck by wMt they describe as the eerie barrenness
of the scenery. Headed north from Killamey to Castle-Island, Twiss must travel forty
miles “over mountains, barren heaths, and bogs, without seeing hardly a single tree, or any
verdure” (133). Sir Richard Colt Hoare records a similar impression of the Irish landscape

some thirty years later:

77

A chmch in ruins on the right, cemetery crowded with monumental
memorials; anotherinthe same lineandinthe same state;alodge placedon
the opposite side of the road to the entrance gate; a peculiarity, I am told,
very common in IRELAND: ornament and cultivation cease; a mere spirt:
dreary cormtry returns, lands rather nrore cultivated with com; a large bog;
cross the River BRUSNA flowing out of LOUGH ENNEL; several mills in a
vale on the left; and a ruined castle on the right. (32)
The journalistic style of Hoare’s narrative gives the reader the impression of travelling
withHoare inajostling carriage, noting the landscape asit passes by, first fi'omone
window, and then the other, and thus acquiring an objectifying distance from the alien
landscape. The barren style emphasizes Hoare’s description of Ireland as “dreary,”
populated with cemeteries, bogs, and ruins. Such a description contrasts sharply with so
nrany nineteenth-centmy travellers’ impressions of Ireland as hrxuriantly green. In The
Idea of Landscape, John Barrell notes that many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century travellers used “barren” to describe kind that was “merely fertile,” firmly
separating beauty fiom utility (79, empMsis in original). Climate and high annual rainfall
contribute to Ireland’s peculiarly and almost perpetually green landscape, circumstances
that confirmthat Hoare and others may Mve been responding to the utilitarian
(agricultural) aspect of Ireland’s landscape. Hoare is particularly disturbed by the lack of
trees in Ireland; when he Mppens upon “a nursery garden of firs and forest trees” at one
gemlennn’s seat, he remarks, “Would that they were more numerous, and that they found
customers! IRELAND would than [sic] regain the sylvan honours it has lost for so nmny
centmies, and no longer present so black and barren an aspect” (34). Elsewhere he notes
that the landscape is “spotted” with gentlemen’s seats: “I adopt the word spotted, because

fiom the small plantations of trees with which they are usually surrounded, they appear

78

 

like so many green spots on a surface otherwise destitute of foliage” (131). Much of
Ireland Md been aggressively deforested by English plantation settlers in the early
seventeenth century, who were anxious to profit from the timber and to enable increased
grazing of livestock. Hoare’s description of the Irish landscape thus simultaneously calls
attention to its profitable fertility and its previous domestication, while eliding England’s
responsibility for its alienating effect on the viewer. On the road to Killarney, Hoare
conducts the reader over “a long and tedious journey of one hundred and sixty-five Irish
miles, in which, few, I fear, except the lovers of momstic antiquities, will find much
amusement or gratification. . . . [T]he country is most uniformly uninteresting” (64).
Almost any English traveller to Killarney, the most celebrated tourist destination in
Ireland, would Mve to travel over this or a similar route. Sir John Carr records a response
to this landscape similar to Hoare’s (354-55). Most English travellers found the Lakes of
Killamey worth the trouble required to get to them; however, by recording their
impressions of the surrounding countryside in such alienating form, Hoare and others
efl’ectively establish difference—and thus distance—between England and Ireland, even
without the language of the picturesque.

One of the features of Irish landscape that contributed to its “black and barren
aspect” were the bogs, extensive turf (peat) deposits tMt peasants depended on for fuel.
Most eighteenth-century travellers include some description of bogs, although John
Bush’s ten-page account in Hibernia Curiosa quickly became the standard source of
information. Philip Luckombe quotes extensively from Bush on the subject and even gives

his source proper attribution, although elsewhere he plagiarizes information fiom Thomas

79

Campbell, including a list of unusual things found in bogs, “such as iron utensils, sword
blades of a kind of brass, and horns of the moose deer” (Twiss 34-35). The artifacts of
ancient Irish culture recovered fi'om bogs found their way into Dublin museums and
fmther contributed to the perception of Ireland’s past as culturally distinct, but alien.
Arthur Yotmg’s assertion that English people “supposed that one le of [Ireland] was
covered with bogs” reveals the extent to which the English associated bogs with Ireland’s
lack of civilization (Maxwell ed. 169). Although he implies that such assunrptions on the
part of English people are naive, elsewhere he confirms that the province of Connaught is
covered with bogs and other unianitable land: “Three-fourths of Sligo, bog and
uncultivated mountain”; “Mayo one-third, perMps le, hog and mountain. Galway more
than one-third bog, mountain and lakes” (76, 74). Young empMsizes that the bogs are a
valuable fuel resource in Ireland and that the rich Land could be reclaimed, improved, and
ultimately farmed, but he also points out the differences in composition and extent
between Irish bogs and English moors, thus making the bogs seem even more exotic (71).
Forty years later, Thomas Cromwell relies on Young’s account to confirm his assertion
that Irish bogs “are very difl‘erent, both in appearance and qualities, to what is generally
understood by the term in England” (21). Like Young, Cromwell finds the bogs to be an
invaluable firel resource, but deplores “the great quantity of land they cover,” which
presents “obstacles [in the form of less Mbitable land and less arable land for food
production]. . . to the extension of a population, already too redundant” (22). In
Cromwell’s description the alien Irish landscape can actually reassure English readers

because it prohibits the growth of the more alien Irish peasant population. Nevertheless,

80

the bogs threaten English travellers, many of whom fear sinking into one while crossing
the Irish countryside; Robert Slade, employed by the New Plantation Society to examine
its holdings in Ulster, found “a tract which now appears like a barren waste, hardly
accessible even in the summer months, as I found a guide necessary to avoid the Bogs
when I visited it in September” (35). Maria Edgeworth describes an episode of bog-
trotting in her Tour in Connemara, in which she and her travelling companions, a newly-
married couple relatively rmfamiliar with Ireland, sink their carriage and must be carried to
safety by a sure-footed Irish peasant. The lady confesses to Edgeworth that “she thought
it was all over with us, and that we should never be got out of this bog-hole” (31). Henry
Inglis also describes a bog-trotting adventure, empMsizing the inherent danger in the
activity (226). Bogs are a source of some tension in English travel narratives. In many
ways, the bog is the epitome ofthe sublime (dangerous) in the Irish landscape and
provides a useful emblem of alienation. However, English fears of being sunk in an Irish
bog suggest their related concern that they may be consumed by Ireland’s alien landscape,
that travel in Ireland is dangerous because it collapses distance, which provides security.12
Ultimately, however, the rhetoric of the pictures provides the means by which
Ireland’s least pictm'esque elements—including its agricultural landscape—nay be
rendered aesthetically pleasing yet culturally distant. “If you ask what is the distinctive

mark of an Irish landscape,” writes CMrlotte Elizabeth Tonna, the answer lies in the

 

12Attitudes toward the bog cMnged over the course of the period under
consideration in this study, but the bog continued to be regarded as a contested site, well-
suited for English-style improvement or adoption as an Irish nationalist emblem; for a
more complete analysis than can be offered here, see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism,
especially Chapter 1, “The Bog Itself.”

81

cultivation of land, which is “divided into portions much smaller than we usually see in
England” and “present[s] a picture altogether dissimilar from English scenery” (17). Even
in its improved state (enclosed, cultivated), Ireland is noticeably different fiom England.
Within this fiamework of distance and objectification, Toma can find something as
utilitarian as a potato field “picturesque”:
With us [ie., the English] a potato field is a very homely aflair: our
straggling ridges, the single rows of plants placed length-wise, and the flat

confirsion of the whole thing defy all idea of the ornamental. But Paddy
knows better: he separates a rising ground into parcels of about two or
three yards in width: digging between them a very deep trench, say two
feet over, running in as straight a line as the eye of mathematical precision
could desire. . . . [T]he prevailing weed, which bears a bright flower of the
deepest yellow, is carefully eradicated fi'om the beds, but allowed to grow
on either edge, which it does most thickly; and so beautiful is this belt of
rich gold exactly bordering the spacious slips of emerald green, with its
uniform tufts of pure white, or else of pure purple, that I am in doubt
whether it is not the effect of design. In short, I must take leave to repeat
the assertion which Ms more than once offended your nationality, that an
Englishman knows neither how to grow, how to boil, or how to relish a
potato. (223-24)

The Irish peasarrt’s superior ability to plant a well-ordered and attractive patch of potatoes
cMrrm, rather than threatens, the English reader. Such a description enables the reader to
imagine contented and well-fed peasants, who Mve the time and inclination to make their
potato patches picturesque. Tonm’s language reveals the power of the picturesque:
landscape can be reordered and controlled, even weeds become decorative and
domesticated Her language focuses on neatness, order, and color, drawing attention
away from the labor of the fields and the dire situation of most peasants, who relied on
potatoes as their only source of food, and thus reassm‘es English readers of the benefits of

the Union in general, and the English civilizing influence in particular. Lady Georgiana

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CMtterton offers a similarly picturesque description of agricultural “improvement,” and to
firrther domesticate the scene, she describes “a very pretty girl, sowing potatoes” and
explains tMt the “important operation is always performed by women, though it is
laborious, and requires no small skill” (Rambles 2.39). CMtterton simultaneously
feminizes and anglicizes the Irish peasant, whose subsistence firming (carried out by
women because the men were employed elsewhere to earn money to pay the rent on the
land) is likened to gardening, an activity the English reader would Mve found comfortably
fimiliar. By rendering a potato field as a picturesque landscape, the English traveller thus
calls attention to the potential for domesticating and controlling both Ireland and its
ianitants. At the same time, the English traveller (or reader) is provided with evidence
of Ireland’s difl’erence: the peasants’ division of labor, and their crude substitution of
weeds and potato patches for purely decorative domestic landscape—the flower beds and
hedges of home.13

Lady Georgiana CMtterton’s mrratives provide the most pervasive examples of
the English traveller’s aesthetic impulse. “Here I am on a lovely bank of the Lee,” begins
her Rambles in the South of Ireland (1 839). “The beautiful scenery of this fivored spot is
particularly striking after Mving so lately left the gloomy fogs of London” (1). One
inmgines Chatterton rambling through the Irish countryside, as her title suggests, but in the
third paragraph she reveals that she is merely sitting at a window, looking out at Ireland
(2); she examines the landscape and the “rustic” peasants laboring in it, even conducting a

conversation with one elderly Irishman through a window (6-7). In the chter heading,

 

I3"The relationship between the peasants, their domestic space, and the lack of
landscape architecture will be discussed further in CMpter 3.

83

 

these scenes are described, significantly, as “Home Pictures,” suggesting a variant form of
“home travel”: “travel” through Ireland acconrplished by lengthy stays at the homes of
Irish gentry and written accounts of Ireland as it appears through their windows." The
Irish landscape may be domesficated——rendered as “home”—through the rhetoric of the
picturesque, which provides the viewer and the reader with a sort of flame—in particular,
a window flame—which circumscribes the view and emphasizes the viewer’s distance
fiom Ireland.
In several instances, these windows provide a flame through which Irish poverty
can be viewed as art:
I am delighted with the interesting pictures of real life which appear before
“the window” of this room. It is, if I my use the expression, quite a rmgic
lantern of rural feeling—of the pleasures, and pains, the dull and poetic
realities of cottage life. . . .

A miserable-looking, tattered Irish boy, munching a potato, for
instance, appearsadullrealityto anotherragged boyinthesame
predicament; but to a looker on in a higher rank of life, he is a picturesque
and interesting object. (2.120-21)

CMtterton’s “rmgic lantern” illuminates what she assumes to be “real life,” but what

seems to her also to be at once “poetic” and “picturesque,” adjectives that call attention to

 

I"According to Mary Louise Pratt, “the predictable fict that domestic settings Mve
a much more prominent presence in the women’s travel accounts tMn in the men’s . . . is a
nutter not just of differing spheres of interest or expertise . . . but of modes of constituting
knowledge and subjectivity.” For women travellers, “the indoor world is the seat of the
self’ (159). Such an association between gender identity (subjectivity) and the so-called
private sphere seems unavoidable for most nineteenth-century women. However, the
women whom Pratt studied, travellers to South America in the early to mid-nineteenth
century, do not sMre the sanre concerns about domestic beMvior exhibited by women
travellers to Ireland. Pratt’s travellers use private domestic space as “refuges and sources
of well-being.” While this my be true to some degree of CMtterton, whose poor health
kept her confined to her bedroom for weeks at a time (see Rambles vol. 2), not all women
travellers seek the absence of “fimily or domestic life.” In fict, CMtterton herself uses
domestic space as a site for observing peasant life in safety and anonymity.

84

Chatterton’s romantic impulse. The starving boy may be a “dull reality” to others, but
through the flame of her window, he becomes an “interesting object,” a blank canvass on
which she can inscnhe meaning: “Thus the ragged boy excites our imagination, and
consequently our poetic feelings, more highly than a pretty girl, in our own rank of life,
would do, who was well dressed, and sitting in magnificent rooms in the midst of
refinement” (2.121). A similar instance of objectification occurs when CMtterton and her
travelling companions stop at a “solitary” inn, a “wretched-looking abode,” to wait out a
rainstorm. The parlor is cold and smoky, too dark to enable the English travellers to pass
the time by reading, “and so in despair [we] went into the kitchen, to watch the progress
of some potatoes they Md promised to boil for our luncheon”:

“WMt a beautiful picture!” exclaimed one of my companions, as he
darted out in the rain to fetch his sketch-books.

It was so, indeed. A beautiful peasant-girl sat near the fire,
apparemly much fitigued after a long walk. Her pretty head rested on her
Mnd. Her eyes were closed, and their long dark lashes overstowed a
fiir check of lovely form; but an arch smile played round her lips, and
shewed that though enjoying the luxury of repose, and the comfortable
warmthofthe fire, slreheardallthatwasgoing on.

On the opposite side of the fireplace, an old woman was seated on a
low stool, smoking a pipe in an attitude of great enjoyment. Two
cormtrymen were sitting on the ground near her, with a few potatoes and a
jug before them, laughing and talking away with great glee. The youngest,
who was very handsome, often looked up toward the reposing beauty; and
when he had uttered some witty saying, which threw his companion into
fits of laughter, he seemed not a little provoked that those long eye-lashes
were never raised. (1.236-37)

The Irish peasants become a still life, captured in a moment of repose and relaxation. In
keeping with English expectations, CMtterton’s prose depicts them laughing, eating
potatoes, and drinking whiskey; like so many exotic others, the Irish peasants are darkly

attractive. The sketch pad and pencil (or writing tablet and pen) create a distance between

85

the observer and the observed, and between the reader and the text. CMtterton records
that they “endeavoured to sketch the whole scene,” an “amusing occupation” that absorbs
their attention until the rain stops. Even when she is confionted by the Irish in their own
domestic environment, CMtterton constructs a frame, a window through which she can
safely view the Irish. She fiequently depicts herself writing, even in the Irish cabin: “I am
sitting in a little whitewashed room, writing at a ricketty table; a turf fire is burning in the
grate behind me, and a large battered kettle is singing on it to make tea for our breakfist”;
here, too, she looks through the window “upon the glorious Atlantic”: “the whole scene
without is grand and beautiful” (1.167). Windows and flames become the means by which
a frail and sickly gentlewoman can “travel” in Ireland, often without ever leaving the home
of her host. In Home Sketches and Foreign Recollections (1841), CMtterton’s account of
her travels arormd the British Isles and the European Continent, she records several
instances of such “travel” in Ireland: “what chters might be written on the lovely views
which Killakee commands! Never in any part of the world Mve I seen a prospect fi'om a
window which can rival that from the drawing-room of Colonel White’s beautiful
residence” (1.269). She also includes sketches of Ireland nrade fiom views through
windows (1.298). CMtterton’s repeated turn to the mode of the picturesque constructs
the necessary distance between the English traveller and the Irish landscape. It also
endorses the perspective of English travel readers, whose physical distance from Ireland
allows them to justify their tendency to objectify the Irish people (through stereotype and
other means), or simply to ignore them (and the British govemment’s mistreatment of

them) altogether.

86

Increasingly, travel writers applied the techniques they used to domesticate or
objectify the Irish landscape to the Irish people. In particular, nineteenth-century
travellers, intrigued by the romantic notion that landscape influenced hurrran nature, saw in
the Irish landseape the makings of Irish character. In the words of the prefice to the
London edition of Nathaniel Parker Willis’s The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland
(1 842):

It is, indeed, remarkable how closely the character and disposition of a
people will be found to assimilate to the natural features of the clime they
ianit, and how deeply the human mind is tinctured by the bright or
gloomy scenes upon which it is accustomed to dwell. Pursuing this finciful
theory, we imagine we can trace in the chequered character of the Irish
people a reflection of the varied aspect of the cormtry. Their exuberant
gaiety, their deep sadness, their warm affections, their fierce resentment,
their smiles and tears, their love and Mtred, all remind us forcibly of the
light and stows of their landscapes; where frowning precipices and quiet
glens, wild torrents and tranquil streams, lakes and woods, vales and
mountains, sea and shore, are all blended by the hand of Nature beneath a
sky, now smiling in sunshine, now saddenirrg in tears. (iii)
The passage Mrkens back to the lure of the sublime: our inexplicable desire for things
wild, dark, and terrible. The vagaries of the climate are used to codify certain Irish traits:
they are “warm,” “gay,” “sad,” “fierce”——terms that had become synonymous with
“Celtic,” a pervasive and demeaning stereotype. By nraking the Irish people mere
signifiers of a sublime landscape, the rhetoric of this passage mkes them too at once
desirable and abhorrent, but capable, like the sublime landscape, of being domesticated
and controlled, and thus rendered useful The Irish peasants were to prove fir less
susceptible to the language of aesthetics than their landscape, however. The tendency of
irnprovers and practitioners of the picturesque to eliminate or devalue the Mbitats of the

poor rendered the rhetoric of aesthetics less useful for descriptions of the peasants

87

themselves, their domestic spaces and cultural beMviors. English travellers fill back on
the Self-Other dichotomy to establish distance: the Irish are contrasted to the English, and

compared to other dehumanized subjects (slaves, animals), as we lel see in CMpter 3.

88

CHAPTER 3

THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER AND THE IRISH

PerMps not surprisingly, English “home travellers” display a particular interest in
domestic space, which they regard as revefitory of the character of the Irish people who
inhabit that space. They bring with them certain notions about the defining cMracteristics
of “home”—a safe, secure, clean, well-ordered place in which appropriate fimily
relationships are carried out. As Edward Said points out, colonizing peoples typically
used “positive ideas of home, of a nation and its language, of prOper order, good beMvior,
moral values” to distinguish themselves fiom the peoples they colonized, and to justify
their treatment of those peoples (Culture 81). Thus, fine distinctions between home and
not-home aid English travellers in demarcating the boundary between Home and not-
Home. In Georgiana Chatterton’s Horne Sketches and Foreign Recollections (1841),
Ireland is classed with the “Foreign,” rather than “Home,” in part due to its inability to
assume the characteristics CMtterton associates with home:

I never return home fiom . . . Ireland without experiencing an ecstacy of
joy at the first English village which greets my eyes; and when, on passing
through its little rural street, the clean smells of baking, brewing, (or even
soap-suds,) rise up to my expecting sense, the delight is complete.
(3.54-55)
Although CMtterton acknowledges that some readers may object to the introduction of
the “homely occmrences of domestic life,” these “occurrences” set England apart fi‘om
unclean and foreign people and places. CMtterton claims she published Sketches based on

the “fivorable reception” received by Rambles in the South of Ireland (see Sketches

89

advertisement), linking the avowed purpose of both books. Her “principal object” in
publishing Rambles, according to the Advertisement to the second edition, “is to
endeavour to remove some of the prejudices which render so many people afiaid either to
travel or reside in Ireland.” Instead, accounts of Irish domestic failings and romanticization
of Irish poverty serve rather to reinforce than to “remove” English prejudices. English
travel writers use “home”——in particular, the Irish people’s inability to replicate the
qualities of an English home—to reinforce the difference, and distance, between England

and Ireland.

Let us begin with a discussion of two issues addressed by many English travellers
to Ireland: safety and hospitality. Safety and security are typically associated with
“home,” and many “home travellers” went to great lengths to assure their readers that
Ireland was a safe place for English travellers to visit. However, even accounts that
empMsize safety draw attention to the perceived perils of travel in Ireland, ultimately
rendering the country unsafe, and therefore, not-home. Hospitality is similarly complex.
The very term conjures up images of domestic comfort, but the need for hospitality is
predicated on the fact that the recipient of the hospitality is away fiom home. Thus a
traveller’s repeated insistence on the Irish people’s hospitality only reiterates Ireland’s
status as “abroad.” The ways in which English travellers to Ireland use these key issues of
safety and hospitality to invoke distance between England and Ireland offer further insight
into their treatment of Irish domestic space, and the perceived impact of that space on the

Irish people, which will be discussed below.

90

Personal safety was and is a primary concern for most travellers; the fear of being
robbedoermedinsomewayinevitablyincreaseswhenoneisintmfimiliar
surroundings. The widespread poverty of the Irish people and the frequently agitated state
of the country meant that safety was a particular concern for travellers during the period
under consideration here. In the eighteenth century, most travellers to Ireland rmde
mention of the activities of the Whiteboys and similar agrarian protest groups. Richard
Twiss describes the Whiteboys as

peasants, who do not chuse to pay tythes or taxes, and who in the night-
time assemble sometimes to the number of many hundreds, on horse-back
and on foot, well armed, and with shirts over their clothes, fi'om whence
their denomination is derived, when they stroll about the country, firing
houses and barns, burying people alive in the ground, cutting their noses
and ears ofl‘, and committing other barbarities on their persons. (142)
Despite the threatening picture he has drawn, Twiss insists that “perfect security attends
travelling in Ireland” (54) and “the objects of their revenge and cruelty are chiefly tythe
and tax-gatherers, and landlords” and that “they never rob; neither do they molest
travellers” (142). However, his detailed descriptions of their violent actions undercut any
assurances of safety he makes; would English travellers really Mve felt safe in a country
where a band of marauders rode about, “burying people alive in the grormd, cutting their
noses and cars off, and committing other barbarities on their persons”? John Wesley and
Arthtn' Yomrg offer similarly ambivalent descriptions of the Whiteboys (4.507; Maxwell
ed. 22-25), and Young further supplements his narrative with accounts of thievery and
rape (Maxwell ed. 62, 75, 148-49, first ed. 2.78). The activities of the Whiteboys were
closely linked to the characteristics of the mythic ‘Wd Irish,” whom English travellers

feared encountering. In the words of George Cooper, the Irish “are hasty and impetuous,

91

rash and choleric, and subject to the most violent attacks of anger and passion. This
irascible temper naturally makes the English cautious of indulging too great a degree of
intimacy with them” (19). Cooper’s rhetoric makes it clear that the Irish people’s
supposed predisposition to violence was prohibitive to union.

The violence associated with the 1798 Rebellion struck new fear in the hearts of
travellers, but the Act of Union, following close on its heals, reassured many. Sir John
Carrinsiststhat “inthecornse ofmytomthroughdiflemntpansofhehnd, althoughl
was fiequently alone, and had no other weapon than a toothpick, I never met with the
slightest molestation” and that tales of murder and nrayhem in Ireland are largely the
fibrication of English newspaper editors; however, he also notes that city watchmen are
armed with muskets or “a pike Mving a curved knife”—weapons fir nrore intimidating
than a toothpick, and suggestive of a greater need for security than Carr admits (52-53).
The anonymous author of the Journal of a Tour (1804) openly expresses his repeated
concerns for his safety, and the sense ofsecurity he derives fiom an English military
presence (see 31, 40-41, 42, 49, 55, 56). Writers’ claims that travellers were safer in
Ireland than in England relies on a comparison to parts of England, particularly parts of
London, where few English people would Mve travelled (see Inglis 58, Binns 1.3 5-6).
Similarly, the English traveller’s safety depended on his or her manifest difference fiom the
native Irish people. William Wordsworth writes to his brother: “Everybody laughs at the
notion of any danger for Travellers; though the Report must Mve told you that ugly things
Mve Mppened in the County of Tipperary. But it is all among themselves—They never

trouble Strangers” (122). Hemy Inglis insists that “Irish outrages are never committed

92

upon strangers” (251), while William Belton reassures his readers that there are no perils
“for a stranger in any part of Ireland” (288, empMsis in original). Each accormt
empMsizes the continued presence of violence in Ireland, while positing the English
traveller’s safety based solely on the notion that he is a “stranger” in Ireland, easily
distinguished fi'om the Irish people who wantonly commit acts of violence on one another.
Women travellers in particular empMsize the safety of travel in Ireland. Anne
Plumptre jom'neys without incident, accompanied by a lone servant and her driver, “a
youth of thirteen,” throughout most of her journey, she occasionally even goes out alone.
Yet she writes, “I Mve not unfiequently been asked, ‘How did you dare to venture upon
travelling over a country in such a disturbed state?”’(342). CMrlotte Elizabeth Tonna
records a similar concern in the prefice to her Letters from Ireland (1 83 7):
The writer has Md many discussions with fiiends who, desirous of seeing
and judging for themselves of this most debateable land, were deterred
fiom gratifying that laudable wish by a degree of bodily fear. Their
imagination represented a succession of perilous obstacles, of which the
least formidable menaced highway robbery, or submersion in an
unfithomable bog. Not a few really pathetic remonstrances were used to
dissuade her fromso daring anundertaking asthat oftraversing from south
to north the dreaded country: exacting, at the same time, a distinct promise
that, ifperrnittedto retumwithlife, shewouldpublishafullandtrue
account of every Mir-breadth ’scape. . . . (iii-iv)
Tonna’s mocking tone is an attempt to distract her readers—and perMps herself—by
transferring a concern for her safety into a desire for novelty, entertainment, and
excitement (i.e., stories of “hair-bread ” escapes in “the dreaded country”). She
concludes, with Plumptre, “tMt it is possible to travel many and many miles over this
disturbed country in the most perfect quiet” (Plumptre 342). Similarly, Lady Georgiana

Chatterton hopes her narrative will “furnish the most decided proofs that a tour in some of

93

its [Ireland’s] wildest districts may be keenly enjoyed by an Englishwoman,” even one
“rendered fistidious by ill-health” (Rambles advertisement). Women were particularly
sensitive to the fict that misconceptions of Ireland and the traveller’s safety there could
limit them to just one form of “home travel.”1 However, Plumptre, Tonna, and CMtterton
each incorporate threatening infomration in their travel accounts, even as they attempt to
reassure their readers; Anne Plumptre reports the robbery of a mail coach and murder of
an English soldier (310), while CMrlotte Elizabeth Toma speaks of “a shocking deed
perpetrat ” in Belfist by the ‘fivild Iris ” (325). Clearly, English travellers were
uncertain about Ireland’s ability to provide a safe space—an essential cMracteristic of
“home”-for visitors.

The distancing effect of the travellers’ focus on hospitality is fir more subtle. Irish
hospitality becomes a trope in the travel nanatives of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centmies. In 1820, Thomas Cromwell remarks that “The hospitality of the
Irish Ms become proverbial; and it is confined to no rank or class, language or religion”
(9). Earlier English travellers were fir fi'om effusive in their praise of Irish hospitality,
which was often believed to involve enforced drinking (see Bush 14-18). In 1776,
Richard Twiss reassures travellers with the cautious statement that “hospitality is not so
violeme practised as heretofore” (8), but well into the nineteenth century, travellers were
still insisting that “A stranger will always find it nrore easy to get in, than to get out of the
house of an Irishnnn” (Carr 232, empMsis in original; see also Hoare 329). For example,

John Barrow discourages the recipient of his letters in A Tour Round Ireland (1835) fiom

 

'For an accormt of the limitations placed on women’s travel in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centmies, see Moskal 175.

94

sending more letters of introduction to Irish gentlemen and noblemen, ‘Vvhose kindness
and hospitath to strangers are proverbiaL” because he fears “that the consequence of
such indulgences would occasion a delay” in his tour (171). On the whole, however,
most travellers responded warmly to Irish hospitality. As Thomas Campbell concludes, “if
you prefer the men of this country for their hospitality, and the women for their beauty,
you are likely to live well with them” (44).

In many narratives, hospitality becomes the code word for the ability of Irish
domestic space to replicate “home” for the English traveller. In the eighteenth century,
wealthy travellers procured letters of introduction and took up temporary residence in the
homes of Irish gentry, to whom they were usually strangers.2 The “Two English
Gentlemen” spend several days in a gentleman’s house in Kilkenny— “home . . . (as we
term it)”: ‘yve leave this worthy Gentleman’s House every Morning; but, like Birds, come
back to roost at Night” (210, 211). Thomas Campbell expresses regret that to continue
on his tour, he must repeatedly leave the new fiiends he has made (165). George Parker

insists that “the hospitality ofthe Irish, their humanity, and uncommon kindness, cannot be

 

2According to Esther Moir, owners of “the great country houses . . . were willing
to open their doors to whoever presented themselves on the tacit understanding that the
low and common sort of people did not take such a liberty” (xv). Travelling in 1805, Sir
John Carr and his party forgo touring several country estates “merely because we Md
forgotten to furnish ourselves with letters of introduction.” In retrospect, Carr berates
himself for “forgetting that in Ireland a spirit of liberalin opens every door, and unbars
every gate to the stranger” (172; see also Croker 29-30, 144, 193). Hospitality implies a
certain permeability of the private sphere, an abdication of nrodem conceptions of privacy.
Many English travellers felt that they should and did Mve unrestricted access to Irish
domestic spaces. Several travellers recount instances of being escorted through the homes
of Irish gentry by the servants (in the absence of the landowner) or exploring the grounds,
occasionally without permission; see Campbell 103, Plumptre 84-85, Croker 126, and
Tonna 229-30.

95

 

 

spoken of in terms of suflicient praise” (38). A few travellers comment on the detrimental
effect of such expensive entertainment,3 but most seem unwilling to forego the pleasures
of Irish hospitality. Travellers who complain of being forcibly detained by their host’s
‘hospitality,’ or who seek to avoid such entanglements when possible, are few and fir
between. Most seem gratified by the attention they receive at the Mnds of their Anglo-
Irish hosts. Irishrrun Robert Bell’s accormt of “the hospitality for which the Irish gentry
Mve been so justly fimed” leaves little doubt as to the reasons for many travellers’
reluctance to leave their hosts:
The guest, even when uninvited, was not repelled by any coldness of
reception: he felt no embarrassment, no impatience to depart; and the
entertainer endeavoured to make it appear that the visit was a fivour
conferred upon him. . . . To a stranger introduced into the houses of such
men, the stories related by Homer of ancient hospitality, must no longer
Mve appeared fibulous. . . . The most amiable and unremitting attention
was always paid to visitors; and every thing was done that could nuke
them pleased with their entertainment, and prolong their stay. (35)
Bell, who travelled through Ireland in 1780-90 and published his Description . . . of the
Peasantry of Ireland in 1804, offers the careful reader a number of clues as to the Irish
people’s ambivalent relationship to their reputation of hospitality. The reference to Homer
calls to mind The Odyssey, the story of a man consmned by his desire to return home, and
his wife, whose hospitality is abused by countless parasitic suitors. Guests in an Irish
home are welcomed warmly, “even when uninvited”; these ill—mannered guests feel “no
embarrassment, no impatience to depart,” even when the host’s resources are strained by a

prolonged visit. The Ascendancy’s attempts to emulate—and even exceed—English

 

3See, for example, Bush 14-18, Cooper 21, Journal of a Tour 65-66, and Plumptre
352.

96

hospitality ultimately reinforced the difierences between England and Ireland for both
parties.

The Big House was not the only domestic space in which Irish hospitality was
extended. English travellers were often disarmed by the kindness shown them in the
humblest cottage:

Poor as the cabin is, do not, reader! think that hospitality and politeness are
not to be found in it. The power of shewing these qualities, to be sure, is
very slender; but if a stranger enters at dinner-time, the master of the fimily
selects the finest potato from his bowl, and presents it, as a flattering proof
of welcome courtesy. (Carr 155)
Once again, the Irish people’s attempts at hospitality highlight their difference, this time
through the meager resotn'ces available in their homes. George Holmes recounts a similar
instance of hospitality in his Sketches; on an excursion, his party leaves their horses at a
cottage and upon their return “were surprized at finding a small table laid, on which were
eggs, milk and potatoes. This humble fire was offered to us, with all the kindness of
genuine simplicity and good-natrne” (73). Daniel Dewar also insists tMt “the poor
labourer, who Ms only potatoes for hirnselfand his children, will give the best in his pot to
the guest, fi'om whatever quarter he may come” (1 .38-39) and indicates that he Ms often
been the recipient of such hospitality. The native greeting—céad mile fdilte (“a hundred
thousand welcomes”)—ftnther expresses the egalitarian and generous nature of Irish
hospitality:
At first I thought tMt this might be the form of salutation, on extraordinary
occasions; but, when I found that man, woman, and child, shouted ceud

mile failte duit, to every visitant, and even to every beggar, I felt rather
astonished. (1.39)

97

Dewarmaybeastonishedthathe, asanEnglishnun, receivesthe same greetingasanlrish
beggar, but he seems to regard every expression of Irish hospitality by the poor as
genuine: “the original Irish, especially in sequestered situations, are much more
distinguished for their attention to strangers tMn the same order of the Anglo—Hibernians,”
whose hospitality “becomes rather oflicious” (1.39). English travellers can afford to
express pleasure at the peasant’s hospitality, because the form that their hospitality takes
(a single potato) is but one of the myriad ways in which the English traveller can
distinguish himself fi'om the Irish peasant. Hospitality—whether in the form of “oflicious”
or “ostentatious” entertainment by the gentry, or a potato in a peasant’s cabin—allows the
traveller to reflect on his distance fiom “home.”
Charlotte Elizabeth Toma offers the following description of the nature of Irish
hospitafity in her Letters:
You Mve often smilingly asked me to define Irish hospitality—I cannot. It
would be like painting a sunbeam on a canvass for one who never felt its
influence. In an Irish house you are emthically AT HOME. . . . Here the
guest is at once installed in all the immunities of a settled resident: the good
folks Mving the tact to impress you with the conviction that you make no
other difference in their establishment tMn is occasioned by the increase of
social enjoyment. In reality, every soul is plotting for your comfort and
gratification all day long. . . . (56-57)
Toma clearly finds Irish hospitality exceptional; to someone who Md only experienced
another sort of hospitality, any attempt to describe Irish hospitality would fiil to capture
its essence. However, Tonna’s own account reveals the implied danger in such all-
encompassing hospitality—the collapsing of identities, so that the traveller, the stranger
becomes like “a settled resident” and feels hirnselfto be “at home.” Thackeray’s account

of Irish hospitality is fir more circumspect: “it is clear, that for a stranger the Irish ways

98

are the pleasantest, for here he is at once made happy and at home, or at ease rather; for
home is a strong word, and implies much more than any stranger can expect, or even
desire to claim” (34). Home is a “strong word” and carries with it many associations that
the English camot impart to the Irish. The English traveller ultimately has no “desire to
claim” that Ireland is home; if it were, then it could no longer fulfill its oppositional
ftmction in the construction of English identity. Hospitality must be used to reinforce the
English traveller’s identity as “stranger,” and Ireland’s position as “abroad.”

The places in which travellers receive hospitality—the homes of gentry, inns, and
cabins—also help to distance Ireland fi'om “home.” In each case, travellers note the
fiihnes of that space to convey the characteristics associated with home: cleanliness, for
example. The traveller’s empMsis on the ways in which Irish domestic space is not
“home-like” reiterates Ireland’s difference and reconfirms the distance between home and
abroad. Because the traveller’s descriptions are the by-product of travel, which
autonutically posits a necessary distance between home and abroad, even the
exceptions—a neat country home that resembles an English estate, or a clean, well-
appointed inn—can be used to establish distance between England and Ireland.

Particularly in the nineteenth century, as more middle-class tourists chose to travel
in Ireland, more and more travellers found accommodations at inns and hotels, especially
in popular locales. As “homes away from home,” most inns functioned poorly; countless
travellers record their disappointment and even horror at their dark and dirty
accommodations, no matter how temporary. This circumstance made it all the more

necessary for English travellers to remark on a good inn when they found one, which was

99

increasingly common as the century wore on. Even RicMrd Twiss, whose criticisms of
Ireland were notorious among English and Irish readers alike, claims that “the inns [in
Dublin] are furnished with every accommodation that a traveller, who is not over-nice, can
wish for” (54), a sentiment echoed by other travellers throughout the ensuing decades.
Nevertheless, the very need for an inn reminded the traveller that he was away from home
and encouraged attention to difference. RicMrd Colt Hoare confesses that he is “not able
as yet to rate the good or bad qualities of an Irish inn; so different an appearance do they
present in every respect to those of England” (20); similarly, Lady Georgiaru CMtterton
comments fivorably on the inns, whose “defects are more in appearance tMn reality”
(Sketches 1.287). Arriving at one inn after an uncomfortable and undignified ride on an
Irish cart through a landscape littered with poverty-stricken Irish peasants and their
cottages, she recounts her joy at finding an inn with “a large, well-firrnished, and most
comfortable sitting-room, with flash flowers on the table, and beautiful geraniums in the
windows!” Such accommodations are “doubly delightfirl, as all this was mexpected”
(Rambles 1.62). CMtterton draws attention to her distance fiom home by highlighting the
unexpectedness ofsuch a “new and clean” room, rendered all the nrore appealing by her
fatiguing journey; firrthermore, she compares the room, albeit fivorably, to the
accomnodations one might find “at an English watering-place,” again relying on travel
itself to establish distance, and difierence, from home. John Barrow records finding
domestic comforts of a more genteel sort at a hotel at Westport:

It was, in all respects, well and handsomely furnished, and the walls hung

romd with a collection of good paintings, such as would be considered an
ornament to any gentleman’s drawing-room. There was, besides, a

100

pianoforte in the room, and everything wore the appearance of a private
dwelling. (173-74)

This hotel attempts to replicate private domestic space—its furniture, paintings, even the
pianoforte—which once again calls to the traveller’s mind images of home, to which
terrrporary accommodations must inevitably (and unfivorably) be compared. Henry Inglis
uses the thoroughly domestic image of the hearth to contrast “home comfort,” as rendered
by coal, to “travelling,” symbolized by the turf fires he experiences in Ireland——the turf
“produced the desired results,—heat and cheerfulness,” but it is not like home (16).
William Thackeray’s description of a hotel in Killamey again draws attention to difi‘erence
by repeated comparisons to England:
It is a great vacant house, like the rest of them, and would fiighten people
in England; but after a few days one' grows used to the Castle Rackrent
style. I am not sure that there is not a certain sort ofcomfort to be had in
these rambling rooms, and among these bustling, bltmdering waiters, which
one does not always meet with in an orderly English house of
entertainment. (114-15)
The Want” and “frightening” hotel reminds the English traveller of the excesses and
fiilures of the Ascendancy, as described in Irish fiction; Thackeray’s heavily qualified
praise of the hotel only draws attention to its alien, and alienating, qualities. Again and
again, the traveller’s attempt to maintain some level of domestic comfort while abroad
reiterates difference by directly or indirectly calling attention to the traveller’s distance
from home.
In fict, most travellers found Irish inns to be miserable, dirty fiilures in their
attempts to replicate “home.” By depicting their experiences in these inns, English

travellers call into question the Irish people’s ability to create or maintain suitable

101

domestic spaces,thusempMsizingthedifl‘erences betweentheEnglishandtheIrish. In
the eighteenth century, Dublin inns were fiequently English travellers’ last resort and the
first target of their disappointment:

It is very extraordinary, that in this large and populous city there should be
such an almost total want of good inns for the accommodation of strangers
and travellers. There is not absolutely one good inn in the town, not one,
upon my honour, in which an Englishman of any sense of decency would
besatisfiedwithhisquarters. . . . Butthisisacircumstancethatthe
stranger from England, or elsewhere, is often unacquainted with, and
consequently frequently meets with difficulties at his first landing, that will
make it appear to him an inhospitable cormtry. (Bush 19)

Ireland’s fiilure to accommodate the English “stranger” in the fishion to which he is
accustomed renders it “an inhospitable country.” Although Bush’s disparaging comments
about Dublin inns are fiirly general, E. D. Clarke offers a detailed anecdote in his Tour
Through . . . Part of Ireland (1793) that would Mve given any reader pause:

At our hotel we conceived a very despicable opinion of Irish
cleanliness. Our waiter Md got the itch, his deputy was lousy, and the
rooms were dark and dirty. Upon this we cMnged our station, and moved
to Harris’s hotel, in Cope Street. This is esteemed the first lodging house
in Dublin, and yet we Md not mended the matter. It was only jumping out
ofthefiyingpanintothefire;foritishnpossrhleto dojusticetothe
exquisite filthiness of this place. Everything was fine and dirty. Om: bed
Md canopies and plumes, with counterpanes and sheets ofa most sable
hue. I asked them if they had applied to government? The waiters stared:
‘Do for God’s sake, and the love of your country (said I) get a patent for
Mving discovered how much filth it is possible to comprize in a given

,

compass. . . . .
At dinner the waiter had cut his thumb, and most profirsely

embroidered my plate with the sanguinary stream that issued from the
wound. I desired him to change it; upon which he pulled out a dirty rag,
tMthonceassumedtheappearanceofanMndkerchief, andwitha
nimble twirl of his Mnd began to wipe away the traces of his blood. It
would not do-—the handkerchief made Md worse; however he presented
the plate to me again with a profound bow, at the same time muttering an
apology. This was too much; I hurried away, saying, as I left the door,
‘They order this nutter better in London!’ (305-306)

102

Clarke attributesthedirtandpoor service to aflawinthelrishcharacter: “itisthe
characteristic of the nation: A popular concern to unite at once every species of
dissipation, filthiness, and extortion” (305). Clarke claims that he and his travelling
companion “found all this where they least expected it,” but his parting shot to the waiter
suggests that Clarke Md anticipated another London, where English Mbits made English
travellers comfortable. Alienated by the first two hotels, Clarke finds another, where he
“could hardly believe our landlord . . . was an Irishnun, from the accommodation he gave
us” (318). The association of dirt with “Irishness” can also be found in Arthur Young’s
account of Dublin inns: ‘Vve were well accomodated (dirt excepted). . . . All the lower
ranks in this city Mve no idea of English cleanliness, either in apartments, persons, or
cookery” (Maxwell ed. 5). He is echoed twenty years later by George Cooper: “the
accommodation which the Dublin hotels (they disdain the name ofinns, and Mve no such
thing,) offer to strangers is most execrable and intolerable. An Englishman, who Ms never
travelled out of his own country, can form no adequate idea of their dirt and
inconvenience” (71 ). Cooper, a strong supporter of the Act of Union, nevertheless
designates himself as a “stranger” and a “foreigner” (72), who, like any Englishman “who
Ms never travelled out of his own country,” is unprepared for Ireland’s inability to provide
surrogate domestic space that meets English standards. The reader of Cooper’s Letters on
the Irish Nation is frequently left to question whether Ireland will nuke a suitable
domestic partner for England, and this instance is no exception.

Dublin inns improved over time and with increased tourist demand, but

accommodations in the more remote districts of Ireland continued to offend the

103

sensibilities of English travellers. Arthur Young refers more than once to being forced to
“take refuge in a cabin, called an inn” (32, 59). Richard Twiss records the existence of
similar structures during his jorn'ney: “over the door or chimney (the same opening serving
for both) of many of the cabbins [sic], I observed a board with the words good dry
lodgings; however, as I was sme that hogs could not read, I avoided mistaking them for
styes” (73). Later travellers would explain tMt the expression dry lodgings “does not
mean that the beds to be let there are free from damp, but that lodgings only, and no
spiritous liquors, are to be had” (Carr 204; see also Hoare 19). Even with this
understanding, travellers continued to be amused by the erqrression. Ame Plumptre
writes, “It put me in mind of the noted Mr. Elwes’s room where there was just one dry
corner for the bed; though I must say that in these dry lodgings I questioned whether there
was even a corner sheltered fi'om the weather” (357). J. C. meen records his
immediate reaction to a “dry lodgings” sign: “‘God help the poor souls,’ we exclaimed,
‘can it be necessary to apprize travellers that under those roofs they would be protected
fiom the inclemency of the weather?”’ (102). Although he immediately explains the
intended meaning of the phrase, “a salutary hint against forming hasty conclusions in a
perfectly new country” (103), the inuge of a damp cabin remains associated with the
phrase in the mind of the reader. John Barrow uses the expression “dry lodgings” as an
example of a bull, indicating his belief tMt the Irish must Mve misapprehended the
meaning of the word “dry” (277). JonatMn Binns goes one step finther in his account of
rmal accommodations, fully describing the conditions that constitute “dry lodgings”:

The signs displayed by numbers of low, miserable hovels, are ludicrous
enough. ‘Entertainment,’ ‘Good Beds,’ and ‘Dry Lodgings,’ are offered to

104

the traveller by cabins which cannot certainly supply any one of the
desiderata they profess to abound in. If, however, damp green walls, roofs
of thatch, fill of holes, wet clay floors, and abundant dirt, may be
considered as sources of entertainment, these houses do no less than
properly represent the capabilities they are possessed of. ‘Dry Lodgings,’ I
should observe, merely signifies lodging without food. (2.220-21)
By juxtaposing Ireland’s promise of domestic comfort (“Good Beds,” “Dry Lodgings”)
with Ireland’s inability to fulfill that promise (“damp green walls,” “wet clay floors,”
“abundant dirt”), Binns draws attention to Ireland’s fiilings as a suitable domestic partner
for Great Britain, empMsizing the cultural differences that could be rendered as
insurmountable distance"

Far more English travellers express their horror at the domestic environment in
which nuny Irish pe0ple lived, suggesting that such appalling living conditions were both
conducive to and reflective of the perceived flaws in Irish cMracter. Such reactions were
not limited to the houses of Irish peasants, however. As indicated above and in the
previous chapter, the domestic space of the Anglo-Irish gentry attempted to capture the
essence of “home,” tMt is, England. In fict, many Anglo-Irish landowners beMved as if
England were home, and spent the greater part of their time there, leaving their property
and their tenants under the management of an agent, whose primary responsibility was to
secrne the landowner’s rent income by whatever means were necessary. The money was
then spent to support the absentee fimily abroad—in England. In 1776, “[i]n conversation
upon the subject of a union with Great Britain,” Arthur Young “was infornred that nothing

was so unpopular in Ireland as such an idea; and that the great objection to it was

 

4For additional accounts, see Plumptre 249-51; Curwen 1.312, 2. 78-79; Barrow
121, 160, 164; andBinns 1.34.

105

increasing the number of absentees,” by sending peers and commoners to England, who
would eventually stay there, along with their fimilies (Maxwell ed. 18-19). Young finds
the idea “erroneous” because “the kingdom would merely “lose . . . an idle race of country
gentlemen” in excMnge for fiee trade and an improved economy (19). Absenteeism
among the Irish gentry continued to be a serious problem for Ireland even after the Act of
Union, however, and its effects were portrayed in anti-domestic terms. George Holmes
describes the “fine old nunsion” of Lord Barrymore that is “going fist to decay, owing to
the proprietor living mostly in England” (180). John Gough reports two instances of the
effects of the union and absenteeism on Irish domestic space. The first occurs in the
north; “from wMt I Mve seen, during this my last journey in Ireland,” writes Gough, “I
should expect, that, in a very short time, most of the houses of the nobility and gentry, that
arenot alreadyturnedinto barracks, willmeetthesame fite. Thenaturalconsequence of
what is called the union” (37).5 In Dublin, Gough chronicles the effects of the “the
removal of the custom-house [which] caused the removal of the mercMnts, and the loss of
the parliament, and the consequent increase of the number of absentees”: “From what I
Mve myselfseen, I should not hesitate to say, that besides the miserable state of many of
the houses that remain, there Mve been at least two hundred houses, in this parish alone,
totally laid waste within the last thirty years” (87). Union, it seems, Md produced the

anti-domestic effects that some feared, and the decaying homes of the absentee gentry

 

sParticularly alter the 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union, additional British
troops were stationed in Ireland to keep the peace; travellers, who generally derived some
solace from their presence (see Clarke 315-17), fiequently comment on military barracks,
both in use and abandoned.

106

symbolized the decaying Irish domestic economy that Md forced so many Irish peasants
into the hovels that nearly every English traveller describes with pity and disgust.

Because the descriptions of the Irish peasants’ living conditions feature
prominently in so nuny narratives, it would be impossible to discuss each of them; instead,
in the words of one nineteenth-century traveller, “the description of one of the cabins may
serve to illustrate the state of many” (Noel 262). We will focus primarily on accounts
fiom three prominent narratives that span the time period of this study: Arthur Young’s
Tour in Ireland (1780), George Cooper’s Letters on the Irish Nation (1800), and John
Barrow’s Tour Round Ireland (1836). These accounts, combined with additional details
fiom several other travel narratives, will demonstrate important trends, as well as
continuities over time. The English believed strongly in the importance of an orderly
domestic environment and its influence on human character, as evidenced by the following

passage fiom Young:

In a country changing from licentious barbarity into civilized order,
building is an object of perMps greater consequence than may at first be
apparent. In a wild, or but lulf cultivated tract, with no better edifice than
a mud cabbin, wMt are the objects that can impress a love of order on the
mindofman? Hemustbeaswildastheroamingherds; savageashis
rocky mountains; confusion, disorder, riot, Mve nothing better than himself
to danrage or destroy: but when edifices of a difl‘erent solidity and
cMracter arise; when great sums are expended, and numbers employed to
rear more expressive monuments of industry and order, it is impossible but
new ideas must arise, even in the uncultivated mind; it must feel something,
first to respect, and afterwards to love. . . . (first ed. 1.379)

“Wild” land and a disorderly domestic environment produces Wild,” “savage,” and
riotous people in this paradigm, and these characteristics—the stereotypical essence of

Irishness, according to nuny travellers’ accounts—were some of the things the English

107

most feared and abhorred about their neighbors and soon-to-be partners. Young
expresses a hope that solid and suitable domestic space would in turn domesticate the
Irish, but most travellers saw only Ireland’s fiilures. In fict, nuny English travellers seem
to Mve wanted to see only Ireland’s fiilures-—by focusing their attention almost
exclusively on the exterior appearance of the roadside hovels erected by the poorest of the
poor,’ they deh'berately construct a fiulty understanding of Irish domestic behaviors,
reinforce cultural difference and distance, and thereby create an opportunity for an
ambivalent English response to the idea of union with the Irish.

Let us begin with Young’s “general description”:

The cottages of the irish [sic], which are all called cabbins [sic], are
the most miserable looking hovels that can well be conceived: they
generally consist ofonly one room: mud kneaded with straw is the
common material of the walls; these are rarely above seven feet high, and
not always above five or six; they are about two feet thick, and Mve only a
door, which lets in light instead of a window, and should let the srnoak out

insteadofachirmey,butthederatherkeepitin. . . ;thesmoakwarms
them, but certamly is as injurious to their eyes as it is to the complexions of

 

6In his introduction to the 1970 reprint edition of Carr’s Stranger in Ireland, Louis
M. Cullen remarks that Carr and others based their descriptions of peasant life on “fleeting
impressions” of what they saw as they travelled.
But the peasants living on the roadside were the poorest and most destitute
of Irish rural dwellers. The roadside cabins were those of cottiers, not
firmers, and should not be regarded as representative of the living
conditions of the people generally. . . . Many of the roadside cabins
moreover were those of the completely destitute, who because of the
difficulty of getting a site and for the convenience of begging inevitably
sought the roadside. Evidence of poverty was striking along the roads, but
its extent and often the degree of destitution should not lead us to
conclude, as some contemporaries did, that among the rural population at
large poverty was as unrelieved as it appeared along the roads which
travellers took in their journeys fiom one town or tourist attraction to the
next. (vii-viii)
For a similar analysis, see J. H. Andrews’ essay on “Land and people, c. 1780” in New
History of Ireland 4.245-47, 264.

108

the women, which in general in the cabbins of Ireland has a near
resemblance to that of a smoaked ham. . . .
....Thefirrnitureofthecabbinsisasbadasthearchitecture;in
very many, consisting only of a pot for boiling their potatoes, a bit of a
table, and one or two broken stools; beds are not found universally, the

fimily lying on straw, equally partook of by cows, calves and pigs. . . .
(first ed. 2.25-26)

 

Figure 2 “An Irish Cabin,” from Arthur Young,
Tour in Ireland (1780)

In Young’s drawing of an Irish cabin (Figure 2), we see the characteristics he has
delineated in his prose description: there is no chimney; instead, smoke rises from the
doorway. The walls are low, and grasses sprout from the thatch roof The ground around
appears to be barren. However, in the background we see the neat rows of a potato field,
evidemly produced by the labor of the cabin’s ianitants. Young admits tMt “Travellers,
who take a superficial view of them [the peasants and their Mbitations] are apt to think
their poverty and wretchedness . . . greater than they are,” and points out that the

“exceptions” to his “general description” “are very numerous” (Maxwell ed. 181, 188).

109

Further, he lays the blame for the existence of such conditions on the unjust tenantry
system, and not solely on the indolence of Irish peasants. However, countless other travel
writers incorporate similar images of Irish domestic space into their narratives without
Young’s caution or compassion.7
On the surfice, George Cooper’s account in Letters on the Irish Nation bears
certain resembfinces to Young’s:
The Irish peasant lives in a low narrow hut, called a cabin; which is built of
the slightest materials, cemented with clay, and thatched with straw. It is
generally without glass to its windows, or a door to shut out the wind and
rain. It seldom enjoys the convenience of a chimney, so tMt the smoke is
seen ascending through every quarter of the roof. In this cold and
comfortless Mbitation, the two sexes promiscuously herd together. These
narrow precincts must not only afford shelter to a wife and fimily, but must
also inclose within them his live stock. . . . The whole firnily are obliged to
live under the same roof. Children and pigs may indeed, and always do,
eat, drink and sleep together. (41)
Like Young, Cooper describes the poor building materials and fiulty construction of the
Irish cabins. However, Cooper goes a step finther, describing the presumed influence of
this domestic environment on its ianitants: men and women “promiscuously herd
together,” while children share their food and their beds with pigs. In Cooper’s account,
the Irish Mbitations produce immoral, even bestial beMvior among the Irish peasants.
“From the promiscuous way these people lie together, a suspicion naturally arises in a

stranger’s mind, tMt incest is unavoidable amongst them,” according to Thonus

 

7For additional eighteenth-century descriptions of Irish cabins, see Wesley 3.350,
Bush 30-31, and Twiss 75-76. Like Young, they focus on the poor building materials,
flawed construction, and smoke; unlike Young, they place the blame for these living
conditions solely on the cabin’s ianitants.

110

Campbell, who, tmlike Cooper, quickly denounces this suspicion (148); nevertheless, the
possibility lingers in the traveller’s (and reader’s) mind.

Travel writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries tended to use
descriptions of living conditions as opportunities to racialize or dehumanize the Irish
peasants, thus rendering them Other. Race is a particularly problematic term for the study
of Ireland; prior to the Victorian period, the English typically conceived of the Irish as
white, and in fict, evidence exists to suggest that the English were aware that the lack of
racial difference was ultimately detrimental to England’s ability to justify their continued
oppression of Ireland.8 Pseudo-scientific studies of racial difl°erence in the 18403 and 505
greatly enabled the construction of the Irish as racially Other; the sirnianization of the Irish
allowed for comparisons to Afiicans, who were believed to be more closely related to apes
on the chain of evolution The Irish peasants’ darker complexions—previously attributed
to their ostensibly Spanish (Milesian) origins—became the means by which the Irish could

be rendered “black.” A thorough discussion of the racialization of the Irish lies outside the

 

8CMrles Kingsley, travelling through Ireland in 1860, offered the following
description of the Irish in a letter to his wife: “But I am Munted by the human
chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are
our fiult. I believe there are not only many more of them than old, but that they are
happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But
to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much,
but their skins, except where tamed by exposure, are as white as ours” (qtd. in Curtis 84;
see also Michie, “White Chirnpanzees” 586-87 and Mmphy 11-12). Kingsley here
attempts to achieve a tenuous balance between England’s imperial oppression of Ireland,
contemporary theories of race and arrti-Irish prejudice based on their supposedly simian
characteristics, and the incontrovertible (and, for Kingsley, uncomfortable) whiteness of
the Irish people’s skin.

111

scope of this project;9 however, it is important to consider the role played by the peasants’
living conditions in this process of racial othering. Particularly in the eighteenth century,
English travellers utilized the rhetorical devices suggested by England’s colonies in North
AmericaandtheWestIndies, comparinglrishpeasantsto AmericanlndiansandAfiican
slaves. In The Present State of the British Empire, John Entick describes the “Habitation,
Furniture, and Apparel” of the “mere Irish” as “as sordid, as those of the Savages in
America” (4.197), and Charles Bowden claims that the “habitations of those poor
wretches are . . . less calculated for any of the comforts or conveniences of life, than the
huts of the savages I Mve seen in the back settlements of North America” (158-59). The
lasting irrrpact of such comparisons is evidenced by their utilization in nineteenth-century,
Irish-authored travel narratives: “the wretched appearance of several cabins . . . conspired
to revive the thoughts of an object which I Mve never seen, and perMps never shall
see—An old Indian settlement, in an uncivilized and unimproved part of the American
continent” (Atkinson, Irish Tourist 113-115). A reader would not Mve to Mve intimate
fimiliarity with American Indian settlements, as Bowden claims to Mve, to comprehend
meparaflelbemgdmwnbetweenlfishpeasantsmdtheculuuallymdmcuflydisfinct (that
is, distinct from the English settlers, and thus alien) native tribes in North America;
furthermore, such rhetorical strategies may be used to justify the removal or elimination of
a people fiom an otherwise profitable landscape, as occurred in North America. Other

travellers describe the “state of sfivery” in which the Irish peasants lived and labored

 

9The best studies of racially oriented anti-Irish prejudice remain L. P. Curtis, Jr.,
Anglo Saxons and Celts and Apes and Angels; the reader is referred to those works for a
more detailed discussion than can be offered here.

112

(Bush 29); according to George Cooper, “the condition of the West India negro is a
paradise to it [the situation of the Irish peasant]. The slave in our colonies Ms meat to eat
anddistilledspirittodrink,whilstthelifeofthelrishpeasantisthatofasavagewho feeds
upon milk and roots” (72-73).lo Although the comparison to slavery is more likely to
incite sympathy in the reader, it nevertheless afl‘ronts English sensibilities and calls into
question Ireland’s ability to form a fit partnership. Just as abolitionists did not necessarily
regard slaves as equals, the English did not regard colonized peoples—including the
Irish—as worthy of the rights and liberties accorded to English subjects, because the
English believed that such people were unable to appreciate firlly the benefits of those
rights and h’berties. F irully, travellers also compare the Irish peasants to “aborigines,”
“barbarians,” and “a horde of Hottentots” (CoOper 36-37, 40). Such groups were
considered by the English and other Western European countries to be uncivilized and
uncivilizable. In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt analyzes the narratives of numerous
eighteenth-century travellers to South Afiica, whose descriptions of the Hottentots (the
Khoikhoi) permeated the metropole and became the basis for later racial paradigms that
placed the Hottentots on the lowest rung of the hunun evolutionary ladder (see Curtis

59). Such corrrparisons paved the way for more extended descriptions of racial difference

 

10Irish writers occasionally co-opted the comparison of the Irish peasant to the
West Indian slave by comparing Irish landowners and agents to West Indian planters (see
Owenson, Wild Irish Girl 34, and Edgeworth, The Absentee 130). Slavery in the West
Indies was a notoriously brutal institution, even among slave societies, rendering the
comparison particularly cutting; for a description of West Indian slavery that empMsizes
its brutality and disruptive social consequences, see Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave
Revolts,” in Maroon Societies, ed. RicMrd Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979)
246-92.

113

later in the century. In 1843, William TMckeray concludes his description of an Irish
peasant cabin with the following statement:
I declare I believe a Hottentot kraal Ms more comforts in it: even to write
of the place makes one unMppy, and the words move slow. But in the

midstofallthismiserythereisanairofactualcheerfirlness;andgo buta
few score yards off, and these wretched hovels lying together look really

picturesque and pleasing. (104)
Once again, distance allows the English reader to regard the Irish as at once Other (in this
case, bothraciallyandculturally alien, throughthe comparisonofthepeasant cabinto the
Hottentot kraal), while manipulating the degree of Otherness, so that the Irish may be
regarded as domesticated and honre-like. From a distance—a “few score yards off,” the
pages of a book, England—the Irish cabins “look really picturesque and pleasing.”
Distance, achieved in part through the rhetoric of racial difference, minimizes the effects of
English oppression while maintaining the Irish people’s essential otherness.

“[T]he savage tribes of nunkind . . . approach nearer to the condition of animals,”
chims George Cooper, a comparison that encourages the English reader to question the
Irish people’s very humanity, based in large measure on their living conditions (37). “The
nunner in which the poor of this country live, I camot help calling beastly,” writes
ThonusCampbelanallusiontotheclose quarterssharedbyhununsandanimalsinmany
peasant cabins (144). “An Irish cabin, in general, is a like a little antedihrvian ark; for
husband, wife, and children, cow and calf, pigs, poultry, dog and fi'equently cat, repose
under the same roof in perfect amity,” according to John Carr (151-52). Carr’s
ronunticized account is one of the few to elide the unsanitary conditions produced by such

living arrangements. Most travellers express their horror at the presence of livestock,

114

typically a pig, within the domestic space. The peasants’ pragmatism about such
conditions only finther empMsizes their otherness: “Paddy says, he [the pig] Ms the best
righttobe [inthecabinratherthaninastye], ‘since it’shethatpaystherint’”(lnglis22).
Very few travellers reached Henry Inglis’ level of accommodation with the status quo:
I used to be shocked at seeing a pig’s snout at a cabin door, and looked
upon such a spectacle as a proof of wretchedness; but I now began to bless
the sight, and to pity nrore, the poor wretches who possessed no pig. It is
true, indeed, that things were still better when a pig-stye was visible; for
that gave evidence both of the existence of the pig, and of the superior
comfort ofits owner: but still, it was always to me a pleasant sight, where,
if no pig-stye was visrble, I saw him that pays the “rint” walk leisurely in
and out of the cabin door, or heard his comfortable grunt within. (45)
Some found the cabins to be unfit Mbitations even for aninuls: “I should suppose there
were not ten dwellings in the kingdom thirty years ago that were fit for an english pig to
live in” (Young, first ed. 2.77). Anne Plumptre carries the analogy a step firrther: “an
Englishfirmerwouldrefirsetoeatthefleshofahogso illlodgedandfedasanlrish
peasant” (341); the language of consumption reveals the exploitive desire behind
England’s relationship with Ireland. The comparison to pigs was further enhanced by the
peasants’ scanty and primarily vegetarian diet——potatoes, oatmeal, and buttermilk—
renriniscent of the slop generally reserved for pigs in more affluent areas: “Potatoes and
butter-milk, the food of an English hog, form the degrading repast of the Irish peasant,”
claims John Carr (291; see also 510).” English travellers also describe the peasants’

eating Mbits in aninulistic terms; lacking tables and chairs, the peasants often squatted on

 

llIrish writers confirm the comection between the peasants’ diet and the food
given to English hogs; see Bell 3.

115

the floor around a single broken bowl, and even shared their food with their pigs,
according to this account fiom Plumptre:
A gentleman told me, that once in a walk he took refuge in the cabin of a
peasant dining a heavy shower, where the fimily were at dinner; the pig

was, asusual, eating potatoesout ofthe samemesswiththerest, making
himself in other ways extremely fi‘ee and sociable. The gentleman not

thinkinghiscompanysoagreeableasitseemedto bethoughtbythefimily,

said, “I wonder, fiiend, that you keep the pig here, that you don’t nuke

him a separate house.” “Nay, plase your honour,” said the nun, “I don’t

see why you think that; I don’t see but the pig Mve every convanience here

that a pig can want.” He seemed to think that the gentleman’s anxiety

referred entirely to the pig, not to its owners. (175)
Inhumane living conditions Mve reduced the peasants to the level of animals, unable to
ofl‘er suitable domestic provisions to the traveller, thus altering the traveller’s and the
reader’s response to the Irish peasant’s great gesture of hospitality, recorded by so many
travellers—his willingness to give a stranger the last potato out of his bowl, the same bowl
from whichthe pig had eaten. ‘“I’o Englishmenthe ubiquitous pig . . . made amost
appropriate symbol,” according to L. P. Curtis. “The porcine symbol,” used with
particular relish by cartoonists, became “a shorthand method of conveying just those
brutish, primitive, and dirty qualities which were associated with the vast majority of
Irishmen” (58). By repeatedly comparing the Irish peasants to pigs, the English traveller
confirmed the status of the Irish people as Other, while justifying England’s continued
oppression ofIreland by rendering it mere animal husbandry.

By the 18305, many travellers Md become inured to the peasants’ living conditions

and assumed the Irish were as well. Thus, John Barrow can write of “the listless
indifference of the ianitarrts with regard to their dwellings” (262), and Nathaniel Parker

Willis can claim that “men and women, upright, and made in God’s image,” exercised

116

conscious “choice” to “live in styes, like swine, with swine—lying down, cooking and
eating in such filth as all brute animals” (8). Clearly the trend toward comparing the Irish
peasants to anirruls and other degraded beings Md not been corrrpletely displaced, but in
the decades before the Famine, another trend comes to dominate English travellers’
accounts. The important point of comparison now becomes something closer to home,
the living conditions of the English poor. According to L. P. Curtis, travel writers’ “stock
picture of squalor in the Irish countryside must Mve served to distract attention from the
grinding poverty and sordid conditions which prevailed in English cities and towns as well
as in many rural communities” (57). The Irish peasants’ domestic fiilings are contrasted
to the domestic bliss of the English cottage. Poverty is romanticized in these accounts; the
travel writer’s tone toward the Irish grows increasingly patronizing.

The narrative and drawings of John Barrow’s Tour Round Ireland illustrate the
ficets of this second descriptive trend. With respect to the poorest Irish cabins, Barrow
sees no need to move beyond the descriptive paradigm of his predecessors. Of the cabins
in western Ireland, Barrow writes:

. . . I should scarcely Mve supposed them to be Mbitations of human
beings,butratherasshedsforthecattle,themore certainlyso, hadIseen
the head of a cow, or some other four-footed beast, peeping out of the
doorway, which I understand is no uncommon occurrence. Many of these
cabins are built of stones, loosely heaped together, with no window; and
the only place for the light to come in at, and the smoke to go out, is
through a snull hole in the miserably-thatched and sometimes sodded roof,
at all times pervious to the rain, and through the doorway. No picture

drawn by the pencil—none by the pen—can possrhly convey an idea of the
sad reality. (179-80)

117

Despite his stated reservations, Barrow attempts to describe these Mbitations with both
the pen and the pencil, concluding the passage with a sketch ofa “Hovel near the foot of

the Ree ” one of several illustrations of cabins throughout Ireland (Figure 3).

  
   
  
   

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Ireland (1836)

For the first time since Young’s relatively sanitized drawing of a cabin (see Figure 2),
travel readers did not need to rely solely on a travel writer’s prose skill to envision the
horrors of Irish domestic life. Like Young and Cooper, Barrow notes the omnipresence of
livestock, the poor construction, and the lack of a chimney—all of which feature
prominently in his drawing. Other descriptions and drawings of cabins in the west and

south follow much the same pattern (see 151-53, 193-94, 245-46).

118

For cabins in the north, however, Barrow draws on another model: English
domestic order. While the province of Ulster pleases Barrow in general, he has
reservations about the living conditions of the poorer inhabitants; he finds the
“substitution of rude stone walls” for “trees and quickset hedges to mark the divisions of
property . . . no doubt unsightly to an English eye” (144), and observes that “the same
degree of neatness and cleanliness, either within or without, did not prevail in the cottage,
which it is the pride of our English housewives to display; nor were their gardens, where
any, kept in that neat order as with our peasantry” (143). The exterior appearance of the
cabins, especially the lack of decorative gardens, particularly concerns Barrow:

Thelittle cottages . . . are. . . built ofstone, and Mveaneatappearance;
but there is this distinctive character which makes them differ from an
English cottage—that they are all open to the road in fiont, and want that
little paled-off garden enclosure, so common to our meanest cottages, to
protect the daisies, the lilies, and the wallflowers below, and the China-
roses, the woodbines, the jasmine, or clematis, that trail up their sides, and
Mng in festoons over the door. (94-95)
Barrow’s prose makes it difficult to determine whether the flowers adorn the cabin he
sees, or whether his English imagination supplies this ‘fimsightly” omission. According to
another traveller, William Belton, “There are no roses clustering around the porch, no
jasmine climbing up the windows, nor gay borders of flowers, such as fiequently give so
cheerful and pleasing an appearance to our nual cottages”; instead, “[i]n front of the Irish
cabin is universally the nunure-heap” (6). Jonathan Binns echoes this point of
comparison: “The little snug woodbine-covered cottage, with its neat plot of garden-
ground, whichalrnost everypeasant inEngland may possess ifhe pleases, ishere, asI

Mve observed before, totally unknown” (1.339). Earlier English travellers Md been

119

alienated by the squalor and shoddy construction associated with Irish peasant cabins, but
later travellers moved beyond these signs of worker oppression and a fiiling economy to
find evidence of Irish shortcomings in their inability to reproduce not merely the basics,
but the niceties of English domestic space.

As the above quotations suggest, most travellers’ accounts of the Irish peasants’
domestic space are, at best, superficial, concerned primarily with the exteriors of cabins.
John Carr concludes his Stranger in Ireland by remarking that

it would be a desirable thing iflandlords were to insert clauses in their
leases by which they should be vacated, ifthe cabin was not kept well
white-washed within and without; and if that abominable pile of filth, which
is almost constantly to be found in the front of the dwelling, were not
removed to some other place. (522)
Similarly, Hemy Inglis confesses, “When I know that there are the means of comfort
within, I like to see a neat exterior” (82). The exteriors of cabins were easy targets for the
traveller (see note 6 above) and, because of the perceived correlation between domestic
space and cMracter, even the exteriors of cabins could be used as evidence of essential
differences between the English and the Irish. With typical cynicism, Thackeray quips, “a
traveller who in ten minutes can see not only the outsides of houses but the interiors of the
same, must Mve remarkably keen eyesight”; nevertheless, he admits that “looking at the
houses,”—which he Ms previously described as Mving a “battered, rakish look”——“one
can’t but fincy the ianitants resemble them somewMt’.’ (8). Nevertheless, travel writers
recognize the peril in rendering the Irish irredeenrably Other, particularly after the Act of
Union. English travellers and travel readers required some assurance that the Irish—near

neighbors, and now fellow members of the United Kingdom—were not a threat to the

120

safety and security of Home, but were in fict suitably domesticated. Similarly, they
desired evidence that would expiate any feelings of guilt, that would blot out any sense
that the English were somehow responsible for the conditions in which so many Irish
people lived and labored. Ultimately, travellers and readers can conclude, with TMckeray,
that the appearance of the Irish people and their homes “is only the costume, as it were,
tMt Ms fiightened the stranger, and made him fincy that people so ragged must be
unhappy” (361).

To that end, John Christian Curwen sets out to examine the peasants’ living
conditions in Observations on the State ofIreland (1818), enrphasizing in his introduction
tMt his “attention will be particularly directed to the cottiers or cabin-holders” (5).
Curwen is aware of the prejudices of his readership, but attempts to correct them:

The English traveller imbibes a most unfivorable opinion of Ireland, from
the wretched state in which he beholds the Mbitations of the lower orders;
the generality of which certainly appear unsuitable to the residence of
hunun creatures. From the dilapidations without, he draws instant
conclusions of accumulated miseries within. The Irish peasant, however,
though poor in wMt the world calls riches, possess that in his cabin which
the mines of Peru could not firmish Let the feelings be restrained——let a
dispassionate survey of the interior be taken, and the traveller will find in
the possession of its inhabitants a warnrth of heart—an overflowing of the
kindest domestic affections, and of the prnest joys of life. . . . (1.169)
Curwen’s observations are not entirely “dispassiorute,” however. Initially, the absence of
items he regards as necessary to human existence nuke him reluctant to signify their
donrestic space as a “home,” as the following passage demonstrates:
In human abodes, where the presence of a chimney is an acknowledged
luxury, the absence of all other necessary appendages to such a residence,

which according to our ideas of household conveniences are required to
make life even supportable, may be easily imagined. (1.111-12)

121

The cabin may be a “human abode,” a “residence,” or even a “household,” but it camot be
a “home.” Eventually, however, Curwen, like other picturesque travellers, acquires the
objectifying distance necessary to romanticize Irish poverty for his readers. In the Irish
cabin “the painter might catch, in native pmity, the expression of the soul, and present
virtue to the world in all her uncontamiruted loveliness” (1.167). In Wordsworthian
prose, he describes old men telling stories, while children listen and women spin (1.166),
and insists that “the erqrosed cottier on the bog, unsheltered and unpossessed of comforts
when at home, partakes more of the substantial blessings of man, tMn the well protected,
well appointed artisan in the city with treble his earnings” (1.349). In comparison to the
English poor, the Irish poor “are, in point of Mppiness, vastly their superiors” (iv).
Curwen’s observations are no doubt influenced by the trend toward valorization of rural
life (and firming) over urban life (and industrialization), and a desire to contrast the
complacent Irish poor with the revolutionary English working class. His work and others’
attempt to depict the Irish as content in their domestic space, and thus, domesticated in a
way English readers could appreciate.

Descriptions of poor living conditions in Ireland might Mve served to reinforce
English apprehensions about increased Irish presence in England, in the form of
immigrants and itinerant workers. However, travel writers who attempt to show the
positive aspects of Irish domestic life also help their English readers to understand the
peasants’ desire to rettnn “home.” In Observations of the Irish (1812), Daniel Dewar
emphasizes the domestic afl‘ections among Irish peasants:

Thelrishnun. . . must often go fi'omhome;hemust go insearchofthat
bread which his country denies him, but he can never forget the cottage of

122

hisearlyyears . . ., the lovelyvalleyinwhichhe firstbeganto live, andthe
green hills of his native isle, with all the soft and endearing associations
which they awaken. . . . The wild and simple strains which first delighted
him in the cabin, while they sooth his sorrows in a foreign clime, cherish his
fondness for home, by exciting the tenderest and most delightfirl
sympathies of the human heart. (1.32)
The passage is filled with typically English emblems of Irish identity—the cottage, green
landscapes, “wild and simple” music. They conjure the inuge of a rustic too innocent (or
naive) to desire the formation of attachments elsewhere. These romanticized assurances
of the Irish peasant’s immutable attachment to his “home”——Ireland in general, and the
cabin in particular -—reinforce the image of the domesticated, and non-threatening, Irish
peasant.

English travellers exhibit a modern concern with the activities of the private,
domestic sphere: gender roles and firnily relationships, in particular. In the eighteenth
century, travellers focused their attention on issues of sexual morality. Irish women were
accused of being uncMste (Campbell 92-93), and travellers were particularly appalled by
the custom of “bundling,” in which an unmarried couple spent the night in the same bed,
clothed, and ostensibly without indulging in intercourse, although the custom often
resulted in a Msty marriage (Twiss 103-107, Carr 11). In a similar vein, Richard Twiss’s
assertion that the “females of this island are renurkably prolific, it being not uncommon
for a wonun to Mve fifteen or twenty children,” suggests a rapacious sexual appetite on
the part of one or both partners (48). Women’s shoeless feet, Mtless heads, dirty legs,
and ragged clothes earned them the appellation “DRAGGLE-TAILED SLU'IS” fi-om one
English traveller (Clarke 328). By the nineteenth century, however, travellers Md begun

to modify their description of Irish women, in part because of cMnging notions of the

123

importance of the woman’s private sphere roles on the activities of the public sphere.
John Carr insists that “every degree of decency prevails within” the Irish cabin, and that
“instinctive delicacy which exists between the sexes, in every thing which is the subject of
it in higher life, is not banished from the poor cabin” (268). Contemporary advice books
encouraged readers to believe that women could “create a domestic Mven in the lowliest
cottage,” and so English travellers glrbly exported their notion of domestic comforts (qtd.
in Hareven 236). Irish women, in particular, were held responsible for the fiilure to create
appropriate domestic space, as indicated by John Barrow’s insistence that “the same
degree of neatness and cleanliness, either within or without, did not prevail in the cottage,
which it is the pride of our English housewives to display” (143). Other travellers fiulted
Irish peasant women for fiiling to perform necessary and appropriate domestic labor:
In the numerous cabins I Mve visited, I Mve been much concerned to see
so little attention paid to the instruction of females in domestic concerns,
not Mving on any occasion seen the mistress of a fimily occupied with her
needle. WMt good reason can be oflered for the neglect of making the
rags of which their clothes are composed somewhat more decent and tidy?
(Curwen 1.23 2)
As this passage indicates, travellers felt that women were largely to blame for their poor
appearance and that of their fimilies. William Belton describes a peasant mother and
child, “guiltless of wearing either shoe or stocking, and the latter very fi‘equently as
unencumbered with any other article of clothing. . . . Indeed, an objection to mending
appears to be a prominent cMracteristic of the Irish. The wife will neither mend her
husband’s, nor her children’s, nor her own, clothes, though a single stitch in time might
give both comfort and neatness” (1.6, 7-8; see also Inglis 24, 38). Clearly, English

expectations of gender roles and beMviors influenced their ability to conceptualize Irish

124

domestic space as “home.” Nevertheless, nineteenth-century travellers also tended to

inchrde descriptions that provided evidence of the Irish people’s concern for domestic

space and domestic comforts. Irish women are described as virtuous (Cooper 33), fiithful

(Curwen 1.171), modest (Carr 236), and appropriately concerned with the welfire of their

fimilies:
Compare the indulging, Mppy mother, existing only in her wretched cabin,
with the high-fed alluring damsel partaking the luxuries of any great town.
The exterior of the latter fir surpasses that of the former—but how do they
contrast in every quality that constitutes individual earthly Mppiness, and
contributes to command respect? (Curwen 1.349)

Although the Irish peasant woman may not approach the English cultural ideal of “the

angel in the house,” her concern for managing domestic afliairs and raising Mppy, healthy

children would Mve resoruted with many English readers, especially women.

Irish peasants tended to marry young'2 and Mve large fimilies, without what the

English considered appropriate concern for establishing adequate domestic space:
Insufficiency of provision, which operates so powerfirlly against marriage
inEngland, isnot knownor cared about inlreland;therethewant ofan
establishment never affects the brain of the enamored rustic. Love lingers
only mtil he can find out a dry bank, pick a few sticks, collect some furze
and fern, knead a little mud with straw, and raise a but about six feet high,
with a door to let in the light and let out the smoke. . . . (Carr 152)

Several travel writers express concern over this circumstance but admit that the ensuing

‘iapid race of chubby boys and girls, soon proves by wMt scanty means life can be

sustained and imparted” (152).'3 The Irish children, as depicted by travellers, tend to be

 

12Anne Plumptre reports that women of “the class of wealthy farmers” also nurried
early, as young as fourteen, in order to ensure an appropriate and beneficial match (358).

13‘Many travellers express some concern at the rapid increase of the Irish
population; early marriages, combined with relative ease of access to the bare essentials of

125

happier and healthier—if ill-clothed—than seems possible under the circumstances.

Family bonds are depicted as strong and loyal. In John Curwen’s view, “strong
attachments . . . in the Irish peasants’ finrilies” enable their survival and inspire hope: “Did
not a full share of untutored affections ensure domestic felicity to the Irish peasant, the
cabin would, indeed, be a most deplorable abode!” (1.170-71). When confi'onted with
peasantswilling to sacrifice what little thede forthe comfort ofanailing fimily
member, Anne Plunrptre exclairns, “it is amazing to wMt lengths fimily affection is carried
in an Irish cabin” (353). Their hospitality to strangers and dedication toward one another
are proof, according to Plumptre, tMt contrary to popular opinion the “extreme
wretchedness” in which the peasants live does not Mve a “pernicious efl‘ect . . . upon the
mind” of the peasant, or the reader. Curwen assrn'es his readers that “their privations [i.e.,
the peasants’], though rigorous, are not felt, or at least not in the degree which our
compassion leads us to imagine” (171). English travellers and readers can use these more
positive descriptions of domestic space and fimily life to minimize the effects of British
oppression and to assuage their own feelings of guilt. Georgiana Chatterton goes so far as
to claim that a glimpse of the Irish, “in the fill glee of their lively national temperament,”
can alleviate the viewer’s pain: “though suffering ourselves, we often feel Mppy at the
sight of Mppiness in others” (Sketches 1.285). In the fice of overwhelming evidence to
the contrary, the wealthy English traveller, not the starving Irish peasant, is depicted as the

one who is truly “suffering.”

 

life—shelter (a cabin), food (potatoes), and warmth (turf fi'om the bogs)——offered few
checks to population growth; see New History of Ireland 4.159-60, 162-65, 264, and 657.
For one interpretation of the controversial role of the potato in enabling rmal
overpopulation, see K. H. Connell, “The Potato in Ireland,” esp. 114-17.

126

English readers wanted to see proof that the Irish understood the importance of
fimilial relationships and domestic attachment; despite repeated attempts to establish
distance between England and Ireland, their close physical proximity and long-standing
relationship nude it irudvisable, if not impossible, to sever ties completely. The Irish were
Other in nuny ways, but the English Md also become accustomed to thinking ofthem in
finrilial terms. Most travel writers designate Ireland as a “sister”——“sister kingdom” or
“sister island”—a term of relative equality, although England is sometimes specified as the
“elder” (i.e., superior) sister. Travel writers use the Act of Union to reconfigure the
domestic relationships between Great Britain and Ireland, not only in the economic and
legislative senses of “domestic,” but also in the sense of “fimily.” After the Union, Ireland
will “no longer” be the “sister kingdom” (Cooper 177). Instead Ireland takes on a further-
subordinated role in the family, that of child or wife. “The mother country opens out her
arms to embrace and relieve the child which Md deserted her” (170); England eventually
stands to gain financially “fiom the Daughter” (Hoare 330). If the Union is to be regarded
as a nurriage, as Cooper also suggests (183), then Ireland takes on another feminine role,
that of Hibernia, wife of John Bull (Carr 221-28). These fimilial labels operate on two
levels. First, domestic relationships were believed to mirror the workings of the state.
George Cooper, writing on the eve of the Act of Union, descrrhes this “chain in society”
as follows: “Men form the rudiments of families; fimiliesconstitute the elements of states;
and in every system the parts will be found by their respective excellencies to promote the
perfection and Mrmony of the whole” (51-52), a Burkean sentiment echoed some years

later by Daniel Dewar (1.4-5). Government, according to Cooper, arises out of essentially

127

domestic concerns, “a natural instinctive impulse towards comfort, convenience and
secmity,” feattn'es readily identified with the space typically designated as “home” (57).
Within this paradigm, if Ireland were regarded as part of the fimily, as “Home,” it could
be expected to contribute to that sense of security, rather than threaten it. The gendered
labels travel writers and others choose, however, also contribute to the femirrization of the
Irish. Colonizing culttnes fi'equently attributed putatively “feminine” characteristics to
colonized cultures: “passivity, weakness, irrationality, wiliness, etc.” (Hogan 88—89);
Ireland was no exception to this pattern. Behind this gendered rhetoric lay “the assumed
connection between femininity and unfitness for self-govemment” (Curtis 61 ). The
designation of Ireland as a “sister,” “daughter,” or “wife” expresses the conflicting English
desires to see Ireland as both Self—a participatory member of the ‘fimily’ of the United

Kingdom—and Other—a weaker vessel in need of the guiding Mnd of the Empire.

The condition of and beMviors associated with Irish domestic space provided
many opportunities for English travellers to establish their difference and distance from the
Irish people. For the most part, the Irish people’s private-sphere beMviors provided ideal
examples of their difiemnce: they lived and acted in ways that were different from, and
thus alien to, the English, yet the differences themselves posed few tangible threats to
English safety and security. The differences could thus be used to establish distance
between the Irish and the English, while Ireland and England were drawn together by the
Act of Union. Some travellers even claimed that Union with Great Britain would

“speedily refine the national manners” (Robertson 15). However, travellers were also

128

concerned with wMt Cooper calls, in typically “domestic” rhetoric, “the firmiture of the
peasant’s mind”: belief systems and privately-held ideas that influenced beMvior in the
public sphere (43). Two particular Irish cultmal beMviors moved beyond the boundaries
of the private sphere, and thus encroached on the definitional attributes of English identity
and threatened English secmity. English travellers express their consternation over the
Irish people’s mainterunce of Catholicism as the de ficto national religion, along with its
related cultural traditions; they also object to the Irish people’s attempts to adapt English
cultmal traditions, in particular, the English language. The result is the quintessential
colonial dilemma: the colonized are at once too much and not enough like the colonizers.
England’s anxieties about the native religion of Ireland, Roman Catholicism, were
basedinpartontheir feartMtintimesofwar,Irelandmight sidewithorreceiveaidfrom
other Catholic cormtries, in particular England’s long-tinre enemy, France—a fear tMt was
nearly realized during the 1798 Rebellion, when France attempted but fiiled to send ships
to support the Irish rebels. Others perceived Ireland’s Catholicism to be an obstacle to
Union, in part because they suspected that the Irish Catholics would prioritize their
allegiance to the pope over their loyalty to the British Crown.“ The vast majority of Irish

people were Catholic, and religious distinctions reinforced class distinctions; in George

 

1"In the words of John Entick, “that most dangerous Religion of the Papists . . .
will not submit to the King’s Supremacy even in Temporals, but place the same in foreign
Jurisdiction” (4.203). Public oflice, the legal profession, and high-ranking military
positions excluded Catholics by means of an anti-Catholic oath administered to all those
who held such positions (see Moody and Martin, Course of Irish History 218-19).
George Cooper discusses the Irish people’s resistance to the oath of suprenracy, which
decfired that no foreign power, including the pope, Md any authority in Britain; by
dismissing the Irish people’s reluctance as “merely a scruple of conscience which excludes
them fiom their seats in the legislature,” the English could relieve themselves of any
responsibility for the condition of unrepresented Irish Catholics (90).

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Cooper’s observation, “almost every pitiable object in rags and misery was a Catholic; and
. . . almost every nun who enjoyed the advantages of food and cloathing obtained them by
his Protestantism” (83). This state of affairs Md been produced in part by the penal laws,
enacted in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which prohibited Irish Catholics
fi'om, among other things, buying land or acquiring a lease of more than 31 years. Most of
these restrictions were lifted by the Catholic Relief Acts of the later eighteenth century,
but not until 1829 were Irish Catholics granted the right to hold various positions in the
British government, including seats in Parliament.

Most travel writers opposed the penal laws and supported religious toleration;
nevertheless, they expressed certain fears of Catholicism. In 1758, John Wesley believed
that most “Irish Papists . . . retain the same bitterness, yea, and thirst for blood, as ever,
and would as fi'eely now out the throats of all the Protestants as they did in the last
century” (4.268). Although most travellers did not fear imminent bodily Mrm fiom the
Catholic peasants, they did express concern that the priests held “a very despotick Power”
over the people that “might be dangerous” (Chetwood 163). Such concerns continued to
be expressed in the nineteenth century; Thomas Cromwell speaks of the “abject thraldom”
in which the priests hold “the catholic fold” (20). “The Romarrists are entirely (that is the
lower orders) under the command of their priests, ready to stir in any connnotion their
spiritual leaders may be inclined to incite them to,” writes William Wordsworth in 1829,
fearing that Catholic emancipation would spell the worst for the Protestant religion in
Ireland (146). In 1834, William Belton argues that Catholicism is the biggest obstacle to

the improvement, tranquility, and true union of England and Ireland (2.277-82). The title

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of James Page’s work, Ireland: Its Evils Traced to Their Source (1836), reflects the
growing anti-Catholic sentiment: the source of Ireland’s evils was, of course, the Ronun
Catholic religion. CMrlotte Elizabeth expresses the most virulent anti-Catholicism in her
Letters (1839), describing Catholicism as “Ireland’s evil genius” and “nuster evil” (149,
187). Irish Catholic members of parliament threaten English domestic security, in her
view:
The destruction of the Protestant church and dismemberment of the
empire, is wMt these men openly, avowedly aim at: their numbers must
increasewiththe increasingboldness, decision, andactivityofthe Romish
priesthood, whose delegates they are: tMt number m the Conmrons House
is even now able, as a floating nujority, to decide any question brought
forward, where the regular parties that compose the British representation
aredivided: andthusarewealreadyprostratedbeneaththepawofthe
Apocalyptic Beast, who Mving imposed on our wise legislators by
exhibiting his lamb’s fice, was, on the strength of it, comteously admitted
among them; and now with his dragon’s voice prevails to lead captive the
British government, and to trample upon the British constitution. (292-93)
CMrlotte Elizabeth employs biblical rhetoric to convince English readers of the dangers of
toleration, and ultimately of the dangers of union with Ireland. Once Catholicism Md
ceased to be a private-sphere concern, and had entered the public arena through the
emancipation of Catholics in Ireland, it clearly threatened the English idea of “Home.”
Few travel writers, however, are so unequivocal in expressing their distrust of Irish
Catholics. Instead, they focus on what they perceive to be the detrimental cultural effects
of the Catholic religion. William Thackeray, who observes a nuss on at least two separate
occasions, clainu that “the candles, and altars, and mysteries, the priest, and his robes, and
nasal cMnting, and wonderful genuflexions, will fiighten me as long as I live,” and he

describes the “strange, wild scene” as “so entirely different . . . fiom the decent and

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comfortable Observances of 0m own ChllI'Ch” (100, 142). Catholic mysticism encouraged
paganism among the peasants, according to some; Emily Taylor writes of “the bad effect
of those superstitions which the priests so carefully cherish, and which shut out the
possrbility of nuking a wholesome impression on the minds which are fill of them” (47).
Another traveller observes that, “[i]n travelling through Ireland, one camot help being
sorry that . . . the belief of the existence of ghosts, hobgoblins, and other imaginary beings
should so much prevail” (Hall 1.260-61). Travellers’ concern with Irish superstitiousness
comes to the fore in the nineteenth centmy; according to John Harrington, “visitors begin
to attribute belief in fiiries to the Irish, who can scarcely Mve acquired that belief
suddenly” (19). Viewmg such beMvior as “harmless superstition (as distinct fi'om Papist
blasphemy)” allows English travellers to shift their conception of the Irish from
“backward” to “adolescent,” an image more in keeping with their paternal relationship to
Ireland alter the Act of Union (19), and one that makes it easier for English people to
disnriss the Irish cultural behaviors they found disturbing.

Not all Irish religious practices were so easily dismissed. Many English travellers
wacdistmbedbymepmaicesasmcutedudmfinerdsparficuhrlymem-cafled‘irish
how ” (a mourning cry) and the wake. Although these beMviors were more peculiarly
Irish than particularly Catholic, English travellers associated them with what they
perceived to be Ireland’s spiritual and moral degeneracy. Funerals were the easiest way
for English travellers to observe Irish religious practice because they could be seen from
theroad (unlikeamass). Themost alienatingofthe “rnortuarypeculiarities” ofthe Irish

was keening, a fimeral cry, often produced by hired mourners (Carr 258). Eighteenth-

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century travellers seem to Mve been unprepared for and fiightened by the “Irish howl,”
“made by the bellowing of a herd of men, women, and children” (Twiss 131). Arthm'
Young reports that “both men and women, particularly the latter, are hired to cry, that is,
to howl the corpse to the grave, which they do in a most horrid nunner” (Maxwell ed.
81 ). Even nineteenth-century travellers register their shock upon their first encomter with
the practice; Jonathan Binns describes the cry as “productive of a degree of horror which I
lel not attempt to describe” (137), and Anne Plumptre writes that although she “Md
often heard of the noise” that “it is impossible, without hearing it, to form an idea of
anything so dreadfully discordant” (248). The custom of using hired mourners also drew
criticism and seemed to provide evidence of the Irish people’s moral fiilings; Plumptre
calls it “one of the most palpable absurdities that can be imagined,” notes that “the
ceremony is confined to the Catholics,” and claims that she “could not perceive any sign of
tears, or the least symptom of real grief upon the countenance of any person attending”
the ftmeral she observed (354, 355, 248). The custom of the wake preceding the fimeral
drew similar fire from observers. Thomas Campbell calls wakes “meetings of merriment
and festivity” (210), and Arthur Young reports that the “quantity of whisky and tobacco
consumed upon these occasions is pretty considerable” (Maxwell ed. 81). Although it is
impossible to determine Campbell’s intent in including the following passage, particularly
given his Irish origins, it effectively summarizes how English travellers reacted to the Irish
cultmal and religious practices associated with death:

I Mve heard of an old woman, who, Mving gathered a few guineas, chose

to begratherthanbreakinuponthissumwhichshehadhoardedup, in
order, as she expressed it, to Mve herself buried decently. This decency

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for which she was so anxious, was, that the neighbours might be regaled,
with plenty of whiskey and tobacco. So much for the Irish cry! (211)

Far from expressions of “decency,” the wake and the Irish cry reflected Ireland’s alien
cultural beliefs and religious practices and reaflirmed England’s fear that Ireland could
never successfully be incorporated into a unified British identity.

Ultimately, the British were threatened by Ireland’s attempts to maintain its
religious heritage and distinctive religious practices. Attempts to convert the Irish
Catholics to a more traditionally “English” form of worship (i.e., the Church of Ireland)
were notoriously unsuccessful; Arthur Young claimed that it would take “FOUR
THOUSAND YEARS” to convert all of the Irish to Protestantism, “supposing that work to go
in future, as it Ms in the past time” (first ed. 2.34). One of the reasons for this fiilure may
Mve been the language gap between Protestant missionaries and Irish peasants. Priests
were believed to “possess the key to the ears and hearts of the catholic fold, by their
universal acquaintance with the rutional language” (Cromwell 20), while “the protestant
teachers are all ignorant of it, or at least do not take the trouble of nuking it the vehicle of
religious instruction” (Dewar 1.99). Although some English travellers seem to Mve been
threatened by Irish attempts to maintain their distinctive cultural identity through
continued use of their own language, they were equally ofierrded by Irish attempts to learn
and use English, and thus the struggle over language became another ambivalent issue for
many English travellers. I

According to John Wesley, the Irish language “is not only beyond all comparison
worse tMn any ancient language I know anything of; but below English, French, German,

Italian, Spanish, or any other modern language” (7.81). Any pretension to the cultrnal

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significance oftheIrishlanguage onthepart ofits supporterswasquicklyandmockingly
dismissed by the English (T wiss 41-47). Most English travellers believed Irish to be
related to the Welsh and Scots languages, and they saw no reason why it too should not
succumb to the superiority of English, since “[l]anguage is an element and part of union,”
and “on the union of two nations, the larger, and wealthier, and more populous, will ever
absorb and draw over the less” (Glassford 249). By the nineteenth century, most
travellers believed that the majority of the Irish spoke English as their primary language;
however, according to Daniel Dewar, “The truth is, a great part of Ireland is not much
explored by such gentlemen; and when they do travel, it is not through the vallies and
recesses of the mountains, but along the roads, where they must, at the inns, see those
whose interest it is to speak the language ofstrangers” (1.96). The ability ofthe Irish to
“speak the language of strangers” when it suited them, while nuintaining the language of
their ancestors at home and in the churches, implied an attempt at resistance to some
travellers. When Hemy Inglis attends a pattern (a feast day), a fiction fight breaks out,
and “The language, which, in compliment to me Md been English, suddenly cMnged to
Irish,” suggesting that the Irish maintained their own language for private dealings. From
an English perspective, elimirution of the Irish language was a natural and desirable
outconre of tmion (Hall 2.294); threatened by the differences between Enghnd and
Ireland, the English hoped the ascension of their language would unify Ireland and Great
Britain culturally and speed the demise ofCatholicism in Ireland.

However, English travellers were also troubled by the Irish people’s use of

English—the adaptation of its idioms (which the English derogatorily called “bulls”),

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cMnges in pronunciation, and addition of Irish words to the English vocabulary. Most
travel writers sought out bulls and other “Irishisms” as sources of entertainment. John
Carr hopes to Mve “many a laugh,” but later records being “woefirlly disappointed” that
he“hadbeeninlrefind sometime”andnotheardabull;he concludeshistour
“disappointed only in one instance; I quitted Ireland without hearing one bull”, (7, 123-24,
506). Few were tolerant enough to recognize the challenges ficed by non-native speakers
of English. Some, such as James HalL feel the bulls contribute to the “air of slovenliness
and irregularity” common throughout Ireland (2.304), or that the “propensity to bull-
making seems to arise from a want of thought” (Journal of a Tour 24). Others, however,
such as Daniel Dewar, insist tMt Irish bulls are evidence of the “original nrin ” of the
Irish (1.42-43), a position most likely adapted from that of Maria and RicMrd Edgeworth
in their fimed Essay on Irish Bulls (Trumpener 57-58).” The peculiar variety of English

spoken by the Irish peasants becomes a ficet of the fibled Irish rutional cMracter. The

 

lsEducation played a clear role in the Irish peasant’s use of English. Sonre
travellers believed that the Irish peasants should not be educated at all: “It might perMps
be better that the lowest class of people throughout Europe were neither taught to read
nor write . . . ; those acquisitions only creating new wants, and exciting new desires, which
they will seldom be able to gratify” (Twiss 73; see also Glassford 39—40); others promoted
instruction only in English (Hall 2.294). Daniel Dewar and others supported the
instruction of the Irish in their native language, believing that if the people were made
“intelligent and rational” they would “acquire a taste for general knowledge” and
eventually “seek for it in the general tongue of the empire” (1.97). James Glassford, who
toured through Ireland in 1824 and 1826 as part of an “Inquiry into the State of Education
in Ireland,” reports the success of those programs that employed native Irish speakers as
teachers, particularly the London Hibernian School, whose “readers” made “domestic
visits to the peasantry,” and by “speaking their own language . . . [brought] the instruction
home to their fires and bosoms” (273). Irish peasants were instructed in a variety of
ways—hedge schools, cMrter schools, and charity schools, in both English and
Irish—tmtil a national system of elementary education was established in 1831, which of
course established English as the oflicial language of instruction.

136

Irish poor, in contrast to the English poor, “are blessed with an abrupt and sudden
promptitude of reply” because they Mve “neither labour nor trade to engage their
attention” (Campbell 118), but their “national dialect” provides “a rich sauce to an
Irishman’s good things” (Scott 20). If the English traveller could respond to an Irish
peasant’s use of English with good humor, that humor did not extend to the English
spoken by the Anglo-Irish gentry. John Bush finds that the Irish poor spoke “better
Englishthanthe sameclassinEngland,”buttheclaimsof“people ofhigherrank”in
Dublin to speak better English than their counterparts in London are dismissed by Bush as
“Hibemian importance” (3 5-36). English travellers were particularly rehrctant to endorse
the beMviors of the Anglo-Irish, whose lack of status in English eyes reflect their liminal
position between “English” and “Irish” Clearly the English wanted to discomage the Irish
from maintaining their distinctive cultural identity through language; yet they were
reluctant to encourage the free use of English TMckeray captmes this sense of
equivocation when he describes his reaction to reading, in a Dublin newspaper, that the
Bishop of Aureliopolis had just been consecrated by the pope: “Such an announcement
sounds quite strange in English, and in your own country, as it were; or isn’t it your own
country?” (12). Religion and language—essential components of English (and Irish)
identity—problematized the English pe0ple’s ability to regard Ireland as home and

provided justification for nuintaining distance between England and Ireland.

As this and the preceding chter Mve shown, English travel writers in Ireland

attempted to strike a tenuous balance between thinking of Ireland and the Irish as

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“home”—which implies domestication, fimiliarity, and accessibility—and
“abroad”—which connotes distance, the foreign, the Other. Travel writing provided a
means to negotiate the lirninal space between “home” and “abroad” by describing cultural
difi‘erence while collapsing physical distance. The rhetoric of travel allows the English to
maintain a comfortable distance between England and Ireland. In the next chapter, we will
explore the effects of tourism, a particular form of travel that produced texts that
constructed Ireland as a tomist destination, 3 place patemly commodified and objectified
as “not-home.” However, English tourism also provided an opporttmity for Irish authors
to respond to English representations through their own guide books, travel narratives,
and other texts. Often, these works simultaneously attempt to construct an “Emerald Isle”
for English consumption and to argue for Irish independence and emancipation. They
reflect Ireland’s struggle to occupy two subject positions at once; ultimately, Ireland

camot be both “home” and “abroad.”

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CHAPTER 4

WRITING “HOME”: ENGLISH TOURISM AND IRISH RESPONSE

Ireland’s economic boom in the late twentieth century has occurred in part thanks
to a tourist industry that Ms managed to (re)create Ireland as a desirable vacation spot.
Television commercials encourage tourists to “Awaken to a whole new world,” a world
that featm'es green hills, smiling children, and musical accompaniment by Irish pop-rock
group The Cranberries. Potential tourists can begin their trip with a visit to the Ireland
Vacations’ website: www.shamrock.org. One could argue that economic necessity drove
the Irish to accept the cultural identities that Md been thrust upon them by others; “the
Emerald Isle” and all that it implies is, after all, a nineteenth-century English tourist
designation (Harrington 19). Did the Irish prostitute their heritage by turning Saint
Patrick’s symbol for the Trinity into a catchy Internet domain name, or did they reclaim
their cultural icons in order to tap into Irish-American (or -Canadian, or -Australian)
nostalgia (and wallets)? This chter does not propose to answer these questions, but the
questions themselves suggest om' lingering ambivalence about tourism and its effects on
cultures. In this chapter, we will ermlore the beginnings of English tourism in Ireland, and
the ways in which the Irish attempted to mediate (and nunipulate) the tourist’s experience.

The comotative distinction between the knowledge-seeking “traveller” (positive)
and the pleasure-seeking “tourist” (negative) arises in the late eighteenth century, soon
after the word “tourist” makes its appearance in the English language, as James Buzard

Ms demonstrated in the introduction to The Beaten Track (1). Daniel Boorstin traces

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“me decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist” to the mid-nineteenth century and
the democratization of travel: steam engines, railways, and the first travel agents (e.g.,
Thonus Cook and Sons) made the remoter comers of the world accessible to more and
more people, and increasingly to the growing middle classes. The consequences of this
democratization seem to Mve been, in Boorstin’s eyes, a denigration of the value of
travel: “The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure seeker.
The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of
experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.”
Ultinrately, claims Boorstin, “foreign travel ceased to be an activity—an experience, an
mdertaking——and became instead a commodity” (qtd. in Culler 156-57). Jonathan
Culler’s critique of Boorstin and others, which Buzard echoes, emphasizes the sense of
personal identity at stake in such a “[flerocious denigration of tourists”; one must
“convince oneselfthat one is not a tourist,” in part by demonstrating tMt “other travelers
are always tom'ists” (156, 157). Furthermore, when one vilifies the “rise of tourism,” one
attempts to locate “tourism” in a particular historical moment, revealing a nostalgia for the
mythic “true age of travel” which Ms “always already slipped by.” Culler claims that the
“repetition and displacement of the opposition between tourist and traveler suggests that
these are not so much two historical categories as terms of an opposition integral to
tourism” (15 7). While I find this statement essentially accruate—the opposition between
travel and tourism helps us to define the qualities and beMviors associated with tourism,
and in a sense constructs the concept of “tourism”-—I concur with Buzard that more

attention must be devoted to the ideas of “traveller” and “tourist” as “historical

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categories,” tMt is, as concepts that derive their cultural significance, and their
oppositional character, fiom cMnging attitudes toward travel and travellers within a
particular historical moment (Buzard 4). That historical moment coincides with “the
golden age of Irish travel writing”: 1775-1850 (Woods, “Review” 173), and the growing
distinction between “traveller” and “tourist” echoes the changing relationship between
England and Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

As we Mve seen in the introduction to this study, English travellers throughout
this period empMsize their desire to “know” Ireland, and to pass that knowledge on to
others through travel writing. The desire for knowledge is in keeping with Boorstin’s
distinction between traveller and tourist: the traveller, unlike the passive tourist, is actively
“working at something,” undertaking an epistemological quest. Underlying this project is
theassrnnptionthatlreland exists to beknown, and firrther,thatitwillrevealitselfto
anyone who bothers to look, even the most casual observer.‘ The desire for knowledge
Ms certain exploitative comotations, to be sure, but we cannot castigate each of the
scores of English travellers who sought to know Ireland on these grounds alone. Some, it
seenu certain, wanted to gain a clearer understanding of Irish people, culture, and history
and, by transmitting their understanding to others, hoped to better the condition ofthe
Irish people and to solidify the relationship between the two countries. Boorstin would no

doubt designate a person with such apparenfly honorable motives as a “traveller.” At

 

1As John Harrington notes, the narrative form of the “‘sketch’, with its implication
of greater accessibility, would predominate” after the Act of Union: “It is diflicult to
believe that the dissolution of political borders did not in some snull way contribute to the
notion that Ireland would surrender its true identity to the jottings and notes of the casual
English visitor” (18).

141

what point, however, do the activities required of the epistemological quest become
“tourism”? At Killarney, when one is escorted around the lakes by hired boatrnen who
relate Irish legends? At the Giant’s Causeway, when one purchases a mineral specimen
(science or souvenir?) from one of the assemblage of rag-tag guides? In the course of
jom'neying through the countryside, when one observes peasant life “at the rate of nine
miles an hour . . . fiom a coach window, starred with ice and mu ” (TMckeray 352)? In
Dublin, when one complains about the innumerable beggars and dirty hotels? Eighteenth-
century travellers express very little concern about their ability to move easily between
“knowledge-seeking” and “pleasure-seeking,” in part because the idea that there might be
anything pleasurable to be sought in Ireland was in itself a form of knowledge. They can
be both “traveller” and “tourist” (whatever the word can be supposed to mean when
applied anachronistically), and they Mve no sense of the split subjectivity implied by those
two designations. Later travellers, however, move measily between the terms “traveller”
and “tomist” and the activities implied by each. They express regret that they camot, in
the words of Robert Frost, “travel both [roads] / And be one traveler.”

In the nineteenth century, tourist-travellers begin to speak of “doing” Ireland, more
specifically, “doing” the places marked as tourist sites (primarily Killarney, the Giant’s
Causeway, and Dublin and its surrounding areas). Clearly they recognize a distinction in
their beMviors and objectives as they moved from place to place, and they tend to
distinguish in their writing between the Ireland they “did” as a tourist and the Ireland they

“knew” as a traveller. Both verbs, of course, imply a certain level of exploitation, and

142

even sexualized conquest,2 and they signify Ireland as an object to be “known” or “done.”
Daniel Boorstin’s claim that with the advent of tourism, “foreign travel ceased to be an
activity—an experience, an undertaking—and became instead a commodity” deserves
firrther exploration in this context. First, “foreign travel” is particularly subject to the
‘degradations’ of tourism precisely because of its perceived foreigrmess, its
othemess—ie., the ease with which it can be objectified and commodified. When an
English traveller sees Ireland as a tornist destination, a place to be “done,” tMt traveller
sees Ireland not as “home” (or “Home”), but as “abroad,” a foreign place, an exotic locale.
Second, both “knowing” Ireland (travel) and “doing” Ireland (tourism) incorporate
cMracteristics of travel (as “activity”) and tourism (as “commodity”). Both “to know”
and “to do” are active, transitive verbs, requiring an object. When Ireland becomes that
object (“green Erin,” “the Emerald Isle”), it simultaneously becomes a conrrnodity, a thing
available for consmnption at an agreed-upon price. WMt remains to be seen is this
process of negotiation—England’s desire for the commodity, and Ireland’s ability to
nurket that commodity and to mediate the terms of its consumption—a negotiation played
out in English- and Irish-authored travel writing.

Early nineteenth-century English travel writers recognize the changing nature of
travel to Ireland. Some travellers distinguish between their own motives and those of the

“tourists”: those travelling fi'om “mere curiosity” (Cm'wen 2.87) or those ‘Vvhose only

 

2 “To know,” of course, was used to describe sexual intercourse as far back as the
Nfiddle Ages, and gained enduring cmrency through its use in the King James version of
the Bible. We speak about sex euphemistically even today as “knowing someone in the
biblical sense.” “To do,” however, takes on its sexual denotation in the mid- to late-
nineteenth century, at around the same time the verb comes into its use as a designation
for travelling to and seeing the sights of a particular place. (OED)

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object is scenery” (Inglis 362). Henry Inglis even discriminates between his ideal,
politicized audience and “the mere tourist reader” (362). However, John Barrow, among
others, proudly admits that “the object of my visit was chiefly to see . . . the ott-
proclairned physical beauties . . . of the ‘Emerald Isle,”’ openly acknowledges that he has
“avoided—as much as it is possible in Ireland to avoid—the all-engrossing topics of
Religion and Politics,” and dismisses the exploration of trade and manufictures as “foreign
to my pursuits” (1, ii, 44). In a Killamey hotel coffee-room, Barrow finds himself “in the
very midst of tourists,” and even describes himself as a “tomist,” although he does
distinguish between himself and those less-sophisticated tourists “amusing themselves with
reading over the names of the numerous visiters [sic] contained in the book that is kept for
their insertion, and in which my be found what are intended for flashes of wit” (303,
304). By the late 18303, English travellers seem resigned to the “touristic” character of
theirjomneystoandaroundlreland. “Nowitisastonishingwhatanindispensable
necessity Ms fillen upon the bulk of our countrymen, and still more of our countrywomen,
to migrate. How our grandsires and grandames contrived to attain the robust old age that
we Mve admired to see, without an annual flitting to other climes, is a problem indeed,”
quips CMrlotte Elizabeth at the outset of her trip (2). Georgiana CMtterton remarks that
the number of “tourists” she encounters in the north is “very striking, particularly as the
scenery. . . isnotbyanymeansso fine”asinthe south, suggestingasomewhatmisguided
desire among English tourists for the comforts of “home,” or at least the comforts of a
place tMt more closely approximates it (Sketches 2. 253-54). By 1843, William

Makepeace TMckeray could mockingly describe his alter-ego, M. A. Titrnarsh, as a

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“Cockney Tomist” with the assurance that his readers would understand all the term
implied: the lower- to middle-class urbanite desirous of finding a “beautifid,” “strange,”
and “romantic” country after only “twenty-four horns of an easy journey fi'om London”
(268).3

The Irish both feared and courted these Cockney tomists. In 1809 Thomas
Newean draws a sharp distinction between the “writing of travellers” and “the accounts
of those British tomists, who hie through the land of potatoes, with a degree of celerity
extremely commendable in a King’s messenger or a Bow-street ofl‘icer, but somewhat
unfivourable to the acquisition of circumstantial and accurate information” (View x).
Travellers, such as Arthtn' Young, may be consulted for reliable infornution, but such
accounts lack the entertaining style of the narratives of “lack-leisure tomists,” whose
“elaborate descriptions of the lake and river scenery of Ireland, and its mouldering
monuments of fornrer times . . . [are] not only almost utterly barren of every species of
authentic information. . . but Mve, in some instances, a nunifest tendency to create the

most msuitable notions of the value of Ireland.” These tourists’ descriptions of “ill-fenced

 

3Of course, not all tourists were English. English tourists apparently inspired their
Irish counterparts of the middle and upper classes to spend some or all of their leisure time
in touring Ireland as well. M. F . Dickson’s Scenes on the Shores of the Atlantic (1845)
provides one account of an Irish fimily’s experiences at a bathing resort in Kilkee, near the
Shannon River, where they spent “six weeks for the benefit of sea-air, sea-water, health,
and amusement” (1.4). CMrlotte Elizabeth takes such Irish tourists to task, claiming that
“ifall her [Ireland’s] children loved her as I do, the migratory propensity would here be
little known. The rich would stay at home, and the poor would be fed” (2). However,
Dickson’s description of fishionable Irish tomists coincides with TMckeray’s
counterpoint to the Cockney Tomist, the “Dublin Cockney, who Ms all these places at his
door, [and] knows them quite well” (268). Clearly, some Irish people felt that they too
should be able to enjoy the picturesque landscapes and natural curiosities they touted to
others.

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pastures overgrown with wwds, gloomy bogs, . . . distant momtains, rocks, innumerable
mud-wallcabinsswarming withchildrenand swine, and interspersed withmiserable
whiskey shops” produce the English ambivalence discussed in the previous chters: “their
readers certainly camot find much ground for considering Ireland as a most valuable part
of the British empire” (xi). Newean feels compelled to write two substantial volumes,
A Statistical and Historical Inquiry (1805) and A View of the Natural, Political, and
Commercial Circumstances of Ireland (1809), to correct “the infornution which mere
tourists afford” (View xiv). Ultimately, Irish travel writers hoped to manipulate the
relationship between English tourists and Ireland—generally to encourage, but
occasionally to discourage, further English (and Irish) tourism.

One way to mediate the English traveller’s perception of and experiences in Ireland
was through guide books and related texts.‘ Travellers Md always relied on the accomts
of previous travellers for information, and most tour writers included some basic
information in their account: the name of a good inn, dependable modes of transportation,
the cost of meals.’ However, travellers continued to complain about the lack of reliable

and useful infornution: “A traveller, like myself, in a strange country, where accurate

 

4Numerous Irish travellers also wrote and published travel narratives designed to
provide “a correct portrait of this land, with its life and manners,” to cormterbalance the
accomrts that Md “proceeded from the pen of strangers” (Atkinson, Irish Tourist ix). See,
for example, John Lloyd, John Ferrar, Robert Bell, John Gamble, and A. Atkinson. An
extended arulysis of their works unfortunately lies outside the scope of this project.

SOver time, of course, such information required updating; one nineteenth-century
reader of Arthur Yormg’s Tour in Ireland (1780) pencilled in new numbers to reflect
fister channel crossings with the advent of steam engines (now “4 or 5 hours” rather than
the text’s original 22). (Dublin edition of 1780, microfilrned by Research Publications for
the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature, no. 11972.)

146

information can neither be procured fiom the living, or fi-om the dead, is exposed during
his rambles to nuny inconveniences” (Hoare 150). By critiquing the trustworthiness of
infornution supplied by both “the living” (the Irish people a traveller encountered) and
“the d ” (travellers of previous generations, upon whose accounts a traveller was forced
to rely), Hoare highlights the gap between the peasants’ day-to-day existence and the
motives and desires of the tourist. Numerous travellers claim to offer their writings to
contradict the anti-Irish stereotypes proliferated by previous travel writers.6 However,
such infornution did not always supply the needs of the pleasrne-seeking tomist. “I am as
unprepared with Tourists’ information as any man can he,” complained Wordsworth to a
fiiend shortly before setting out on his voyage (96); the designation “Tom'ists’
information” suggests that travellers made a distinction between generalized knowledge
about Ireland and the Irish, and the information required to travel through Ireland quickly
and economically while still taking in all the important sights. In the eighteenth century,
according to CMrles Batten, travel narratives were expected to firlfil the dual role of
entertaining and instructing readers, supplying them with both general knowledge and
some “Tourists’ information.” By the nineteenth centmy, however, travel narratives could
be devoted more exclusively to amusing, anecdotal material because another chrssification
of text, the guide book, Md begun to be developed specifically to provide practical and
necessary infonrution for travellers (29-31, 80-81). In 1844 James Grant, in Impressions
of Ireland and the Irish, included tomists’ information in a chapter entitled “Travelling to

Ireland” (91-113), but by that time, most travellers to Ireland Md come to rely on one of

 

c"See, for example, Gough 4, Dewar 2.36-37, 148-49, and Curwen 4.

147

the numerous ‘guides,’ ‘guidebooks,’ and ‘Mndbooks’ tailored specifically to the needs of
“modern tourists [who] were in neither the position nor the humour to squander their
resources” (Buzard 48). Thackeray, as part of his ostensible attempt to encourage English
tourism in Ireland, recommends particular guide books and related materials. Such works,
notes Buzard, undoubtedly “contributed to the spread of tomism” and ultimately to the
“anti-touristic attitudes” expressed both by contemporaries and later scholars, such as
Boorstin (76, 77); numerous travel writers Mve simply “filch[ed] extracts” from guide
books to augment their own descriptions, according to TMckeray, who insists that “the
best guide-book that was ever written camot set the view before the mind’s eye of the
reader” (148, 208). Nevertheless, increased interest in travel to Ireland demonstrated a
market for informative and portable works tMt could assist travellers in unfimiliar
surroundings, directing them to comfortable, clean hotels and appropriately marked tourist
sites.

Writers hurried to meet the growing denund for such works. The Post-Chaise
Companion, or, Traveller ’s Directory through Ireland, published in 1784 as a supplement
to George Taylor and Andrew Skinner’s Maps of the Roads of Ireland (1778), became
one of the first and most enduringly popular Irish guide books. The editor, William
Wilson, describes the book as “a neat convenient pocket volume” and notes that the
“utility . . . of such a publication to all orders of pe0ple, and particularly to travellers,
must be obvious” (v). As late as 1806, Sir Richard Colt Hoare describes The Post-Chaise
Companion as “the best Itinerary” (xvi) and “a most excellent and useful publication”

(61), referring to it affectionately throughout his Tour in Ireland as “the Iter.” Wilson

148

was soon followed by William Seward’s Hibernian Gazetteer in 1789 and the larger and
more detailed T opographia Hibernica in 1795.7 “To the Traveller, it must prove an
agreeable companion,” insists Seward, in the prefice to the Gazetteer; like Wilson,
Seward stresses the physical utility of the book, “a conveniemly portable volume” for “the
convenience of the traveller” (iii, vii). In keeping with the desire for portable books, The
Traveller ’s Guide through Ireland (1794), by George Tyner, contained a mere 99 pages
of closely-printed information. The Act of Union presaged another surge in the
production of guide books and related texts: James Solas Dodd’s The Traveller’s
Director through Ireland (1801), Joseph Robertson’s The Traveller ’s Guide through
Ireland (1806), Nathaniel Jefi'erys’ An Englishman ’s Descriptive Account of Dublin
(1810), and Leigh ’s New Pocket Road-Book of Ireland (1813), edited by C. C. Hamilton,
to name a few. Utility and convenience were still major selling points; the Pocket Road-
Bookmeasuredanrerethreeby six inchesandcould easilybekept inalady’s or
gentleman’s pocket.8

The books were not limited to descriptions of roads, towns, and country estates,
however. John Angel’s A General History of Ireland (1781) contains “nuny interesting
andusefulparticulars . . . aswillbefoundtobehighlynecessaryto thosewhombusiness

or pleasure may induce to nuke a tour through this kingdom” (vii). The book is neither

 

7Handwritten notes in the margins of the edition held by the British Museum,
attributed to Seward, indicate an intention to bring forth another expanded edition, but
this was apparently never published.

8The dimensions are similar to those of a Murray “lundbook”; according to
Buzard, Murray coined the term in 1836 to describe a new “genre” of portable, accessible
and standardized books for the tourist. For more on the development of the “handbook,”
see Buzard 66.

149

“too vohrminous and expensive to render the attainment” of Irish history diflicult for
travellers, nor too small to contain information beyond ancient history; with its publication
Ireland can join “all other nations of Europe” that Mve “their small but compendious
histories published, to inform their own people as well as foreigners what they were and
what they are” (ix-x). Many eighteenth-century travel narratives by English writers began
with a brief, and fiequently Anglo-centric, account of ancient Irish history. Angel, like
other Irish writers (including Wilson and Seward), saw in the growing denund for travel
infornution about Ireland, an opporttmity to profit, both financially and culturally. These
writers could not control the picture English travel writers presented to their readers, but
they seized the opportunity to manipulate the infornution resorn'ces on which such
pictures were frequently based. In a sense, these Irish authors were writing “home,”
describing their homeland for the English travellers and readers who claimed to want to
think of Ireland as “home.” However, as we shall see, the English traveller’s irubility to
conceive of Ireland as “home” was in fict supported by the distancing rhetoric of tourism,
rhetoric often constructed by the Irish in order to maintain a form of distance between
England and Ireland.

The vast majority of guide books about Ireland were written by Irish people, with
the occasiorul Scottish exception.9 Eighteenth-century guide writers were influenced by

the work of Irishnun Charles Smith (or Smyth), whose Natural Histories of various

 

9See, for example, John Thomson’s The Pleasure Tours in Ireland (1825), which
advocates British tourism in Ireland in part because of the “improving” nature of such
increased cultural contact. He bases this idea on the “remarkable change” in Scottish
manners, customs, and Mbits after the popularization of English travel to Scotland

(prefice).

150

counties were consulted avidly by travellers well into the nineteenth century. Smith’s
Proposals for Collecting Materials (1745), which outlined the questions he set out to
answer in his Histories, offered a guideline to writers who intended to describe the
country for others.lo The earliest travel writing provided very little practical information
for travellers, a situation remedied first by Wilson’s Companion, which began with a
description of the city of Dublin, followed by lists of the roads, a “Travelling Dictionary
. . . shewing the distances of all the principal cities, boroughs, nurket and sea-port towns
in Ireland from each other,” and indices both of towns and “remarkable places” (vi). Most
important, however, were its
Descriptions of cities, towns, noblemen’s and gentlemen’s seats, public
buildings, &c. improvements, churches, castles, antient ruins, and other
monuments of antiquity, mountains, Mys, harbours, lakes, rivers, springs,
waterfills, spa’s [sic], glens, natmal curiosities, &c. with their respective
distances fiom the nearest towns, or fiom the places last described. (iii)
In this respect, Wilson provided what no other Md before: an organized list of attractions
for travellers, and the infornution ensrned some degree of lasting popularity for the work.
William Seward’s Hibernian Gazetteer filfilled a similar finction, providing an
alpretical list and description of Ireland’s cotmties, cities, natural features, and historic
sites. That Seward feels the need to explain that the “nature” ofthe work “nude it more
our business to compile than invent,” indicates the relative newness of the genre,
particularly with respect to Ireland (xiir). Wilson’s Irishness is conveyed subtly, through
references to things such as the ‘yery considerable advances in improvement” made by

“our” country and his acknowledgment of intellectual debt to members of the Royal Irish

 

loSee CMpter 2, note 2.

151

Academy. Seward, incontrast, isoutspokenlylrish, but clairnsto bembiased, ifnot
apolitical:
In so interesting a subject as the description of 0m native country, a warm
attachment might be expected to lead us in some places to panegyrick and
encomium: these Mve been purposely avoided, notwithstanding the many
opportunities arising fiom a country possessed of all the excellencies of
nature and of art. But—IRELAND requires not a native pen to decorate that
cMracter which Ms been for ages known——to which the most distant
climes bear testimony—and which Ms never been with-held but by that
jealous sister, who Ms been supported by her misery, and who has fittened
on her spoils. (vii)
Seward, like many other Irish writers, clearly felt the need for “a native pen” to represent
Ireland to the world and to counter English misrepresentations, despite his protests to the
contrary. Nevertheless, his open hostility toward England, “that jealous sister,” would
Mve rendered his work less than reliable in the eyes of many English readers and
travellers.

In the nineteenth centmy, the work of representing Ireland to English tomists fell
largely to George Newean Wright and Philip Dixon Hardy, two educated Irishmen who
embraced the possibility of creating Ireland as a desirable tourist destination. Wright’s
guides to the Lakes of Killarney, the county of Wicklow, and the Giant’s Causeway
(published separately in 1822-23 and compiled as Tours in Ireland in 1823) and Hardy’s
Northern Tourist and New Picture of Dublin (both 1830), brought together in Hardy’s
Tourist Guide through Ireland in Four Tours in 1858, all attempted to focus English
attention on the most desirable and interesting sites in Ireland, and “to induce more
frequent visits from the neighbouring island of Great Britain” (Wright, Giant’s Causeway

v). Hardy’s subtitling of each of his works as a “stranger’s guide” leaves little doubt as to

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theirintended audience. Hisdesire to “performthepartofafiithfulguide indirecting [the
tourist’s] attention to every object worthy of notice” (Northern Tourist vi), echoes Wright
explanation for publishing his works:
The Author of the present Volume, then, professes to be without a rival;
for this reason, that none of his predecessors Mve been content to appear
in a less dignified cMracter than that oinstorian, Tourist, &c. while he
will rest satisfied, and consider the ends of his labour filly accomplished, if
he lel prove a useful or entertaining companion to the visiter, even in the
humble, unaspiring character of a guide. (Killamey vi)
The deliberate conflation of the functions of the guide book and the more personal, human
guide was a featm'e of much nineteenth-century tourist rhetoric designed to reassme the
uncertain traveller (Buzard 48). Here, despite Wright’s attempt at self-abasement, it also
suggests the desire of the (Irish) guide to circumscrihe or nunipulate in some we the
(English) tourist’s wanderings.

In order to understand the inrpact of these texts on their intended
audience—English tourists—let us consider their creation in light of two important
concepts, outlined by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: transculturation and
autoethnography. Transcultmation refers to cross-cultmal influence. According to
Pratt, the term is typically used “to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select
and invent fiom materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture”—in
other words, culture is generally seen as flowing fiom the metropolis to the periphery,
whereit isabsorbedto some degreehythemarginalizedpeoplewho ianittheperiphery.

However, Pratt argues, culture also flows from the periphery, and the metropolitan
representations of margirulized people Mve undoubtedly been influenced “by the

constructions of themselves and their Mbitats that they [the people on the periphery]

153

presented” to the members ofthe dominant culture (6). Our concern with the ways in
which the colonizing Self constructs its identity with reference to the colonized Other
mustthentake into account boththe ways inwhichthe Othermediatesthe identityit
presentsto the Selfandalso the ways inwhichthe Otherconstructs its identitywith
reference to the Self. Pratt uses the term “autoethnography” to descn’be “instances in
which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the
colonizer’s own terms”; autoethnographic texts “are those the others construct in response
to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (7). Irish-authored guide books
are particularly powerful examples of autoethnographic texts because of the inhereme
prescriptive nature of the genre: the guide book constructs Ireland for tourists by leading
them around the island on a designated path to sites that Mve been nurked (both by the
Irish and by earlier English travellers) as culttnally significant and worthy of being seen,
claiming to ofi‘er the tourist an “authentic” experience of Ireland, but all the while
mediating the Ireland that the tomist is allowed to see.ll The concluding remark ofthe
“Introductory Observations” to the 1860 edition of Hardy ’s Tourist ’s Guide Through
Ireland illustrates this point: “we feel confident, tMt following the track we Mve thus
marked out for him, the traveller, at the termination of his tour, will find hirnselfin no way

disappointed with his visit to the Emerald Isle.” Thus, if the tourist follows “the track . . .

 

“The concept of authenticity as it applies to tourism will be discussed in greater
depth below. See especially Culler 159-64, Buzard 172-76, and Van Den Abbeele,
“Sightseers,” 4, 7. Culler’s argument—tMt the “authentic” tourist experience is simply a
sign reution that requires mediation in the form of some type of marker—does not
preclude a gap between the day-to-day life activities of natives and the activities set apart
for tourists (what Buzard designates as “culture” and “Culture,” respectively), a gap
signified in the example given below by the comotative distance between “Ireland” and
“the Emerald Isle.”

154

nurked out for him,” he does not risk encomtering the real Ireland, which might
disappombtnrathercanreturnhome encMntedbyallheMsseenon“hisvisittothe
Emerald Isle.” Clearly, Irish travel writers recognized the power tMt ensued from
manipulating and mediating the ‘self’ one represented to others, particularly tourists.
Some Irish writers, such as T. Crofton Croker, hoped to promote knowledge
about Ireland among the English while simultaneously discomaging English tourism. As
he describes Irish history and folk culture, Croker also empMsizes the dificulties of
travelling in Ireland, the expense, the poor conditions of post-chaises and horses, the dirty
accommodations, and the reluctance of the peasantry to assist “the pictorial traveller”
(27). Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, in contrast, use every means at their disposal to convince
the English reader of the safety and comfort of travel in Ireland. Their three-volume
work, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c, initially published in monthly installments in
1841-43, Ms been written “to direct public attention to Ireland, and to induce visiters [sic]
to examine it for themselves” (Prefice viii). They emphasize repeatedly that their “design
is not to produce ‘a guide-book,’” although they Mppily recommend which guide books
the tourist should ptncMse (1.252). The Irish desire for the repeal of the Act of Union
Md reached a zenith in the Repeal Movement ofthe 1840s, but the Halls clearly oppose
repeal, feeling it to be their “duty to consider England and Ireland as one country,” hoping
“to increase intimacy between Ireland and England” (1.2, Advertisement iv). At the close
of the third volume, after some 1,500 pages, the Halls claim tMt the work “afforded space
too limited for the comideration of all topics, and descriptions of all places, that properly

come mder the notice of the Tourist,” suggesting their perception of Ireland as Mving

155

virtually limitless appeal for the traveller. A subsequent reference to the “raw material” of
Ireland indicates that the Halls see tourism itself as an exploitable resornce, one of the
“vast natmal resources of Ireland” that will soon be “rendered available for the combined
interests—interests that never can be otherwise than mutual and inseparable—of the
United Kingdom” (3.494, 496). Unlike Croker, the Halls clearly advocate first-hand
experience in Ireland to promote a better understanding of Ireland among the English;12
nevertheless, both works attempt to mediate the nature of English “Imderstanding” by
nunipulating the traveller’s (or the reader’s) experience.

Some English travellers were troubled by these attempts at manipulation and

complained bitterly about the biased Irish guide books. ‘3 An essay in the London

 

12Although Croker and the Halls are typically considered Irish, it should be noted
tMt they lived most of their lives in England. Croker, born in Cork in 1798, went to
London in 1818 and lived there until 1850, returning briefly in 1824 to conduct research
for his book on Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. Samuel Hall was
born to English parents in the Geneva barracks near Waterford in 1800; these barracks
were established for the detention of prisoners after the 1798 Rebellion, suggesting that
Hall’s fither was part of a regiment assigned to nuintain peace alter the Rebellion and
during the Union (Foster 282). Hall left Ireland in 1821, and Ireland: Its Scenery,
Character, &c. was his only major work on Ireland. Anna Maria (Fielding) Hall was born
to Irishparents in Dublin in 1800 and moved to England withher mother in 1815;
however, throughout her life, she devoted her literary efl‘orts to Irish subjects. The most
well-known of her works is Sketches of Irish Character (1829).

13Very few attempted to provide any comprehensive replacement for them,
however. The most notable exception is novelist Anthony Trollope, who in 1850 essayed
to write an Irish guidebook for John Murray, the noted publisher of tourist guides.
Trollope describes the incident in his Autobiography: apparently, Murray requested a
“certain number of pages” to ascertain Trollope’s “skill” and agreed to notify Trollope
within two weeks of his receipt of the manuscript. “1 came back to Ireland, and for some
weeks I laboured very hard,” recalls Trollope. “I ‘did’ the city of Dublin, and the county
ofKerry, in which lies the lake scenery ofKillarney; and I ‘did’ the route fiom Dublin to
Killarney, altogether completing nearly a quarter of the proposed volume.” When
Trollope fiiled to receive an answer from Murray in nine months, he “insisted on Mving
back my property,—and got it.” The fite of the manuscript is unknown, although Trollope

156

Magazine for August 1826, entitled “Irish Writers on Ireland,” points out that
socioeconomic and religious divisions in Irish society prevent any Irish writer from
providing an impartial picture of Ireland. Some travellers claim tMt the Irish themselves
are responsible for English misrepresentations: “English prejudices Mve been sometimes
strengthened even by the representations of Irishmen,” argues Sir John Carr (232), while
the anonymous author of a Journal of a Tour in Ireland . . . in August 1804, urges the
Irish “to beware of giving strangers unfivourable impressions” (28)." Other travellers
incorporated and absorbed Irish works into their own narratives, quoting from Irish
descriptions when those descriptions coincided with their own experiences, arguing with
Irish information when it did not mesh with their own interpretation. John Gough rails
against Nathaniel Jefi'erys’ Englishman ’s Descriptive Account of Dublin, claiming that
“the remarks of the writer are the most fiivolous, and least just of any I ever yet met
with,” so much so that he “begin[s] to hope that he [Jefferys] is not an Englishman” (24,
105). Gough’s attempt to spot Jefferys’ Irishness, in this case through his grammar (his
use of “will” instead of “shall”), reveals the level of quiet hostility and disdain English

travellers nuintained for their Irish guides, even after Ireland Ms oficially become part of

 

did not appear to attach much value to it and may Mve destroyed it. “In all honesty I
think that had he been less dilatory, John Murray would Mve got a very good Irish Guide
at a cheap rate,” concludes Trollope (86-87). Murray’s reluctance to relinquish Mnds-on
control of each of his guidebooks, and the ultimate demise of the publishing house, is
documented by Buzard 72-73.

l"John Harrington claims that “Irish writers fueling English stereotypes would not
become cause for contempt in Ireland until the end of the [nineteenth] century” (20).
However, both English and Irish writers critiqued Maria Edgeworth’s depiction of the
Irish, particularly in her novels (see Gough 238-39; for an opposing view, see Curwen
2. 1 79-80).

157

the United Kingdom, and even when the Irish writer does not praise Ireland. Numerous
English tomists congratulate themselves for their ability to read between the lines of
biawd Irish descriptions and uncover the “real” Ireland obscm'ed by the writer’s
patriotism. Anne Plumptre, in her Narrative of a Residence in Ireland (1817), quotes
fi'om the Post-Chaise Companion as example of a “bull,” and elsewhere critiques its
overly-descriptive prose style (360, 314). PerMps the most stinging critique comes fiom
TMckeray, who offers his guide book to an Irish peasant “and solermly [orders] him to
swear upon that to the truth of his statement,” an anecdote that invokes the stereotype of
the lying Irishman, while simultaneously fiulting English tourists for believing their guide
books as if they were Bibles (148). Nevertheless, travellers did rely on their guide books
for advice and assistance; we Mve already read Hoare’s uruMshed praise for Wilson’s
Post-Chaise Companion, and Pltmrptre herself recommends The New Traveller ’s Guide in
Ireland as an invaluable resource (113).

Ultimately, the rise of popular tourism—a rise both constructed and reflected by
Irish guide books—ensured that certain destinations would receive more attention. By the
late 1820s, so much Md been written about Ireland that travel writers were expected to
focus on specific kinds of travel (fishing and sporting erqreditions, religious missions,
Mthing excursioru and other health-related travel) and specific districts (Dublin, the north
and the Giant’s Causeway, Killarney, the Atlantic coast) in order to maintain interest

among readers.15 Three places, in particular, came to be designated as “tourist sites”:

 

15See, for example, Letters from the Irish Highlands (1825); Notes of a Journey in
the North of Ireland (1 828); W. H. Maxwell, Wild Sports of the West (1832); William
Belton, The Angler in Ireland (1834); The Sportsman in Ireland. . . by a Cosmopolite
(1840); An English Traveller, A Visit to the Wild West (1844); M. F. Dickson, Scenes on

158

Dublin, the lakes of Killarney, and the Giant’s Causeway. Let us turn now to the
expectations and experiences of tourists in these places as indicators of the effect of
“tourism” on travellers, on travel writers’ representations of Ireland, and ultimately on
Ireland itself.

“If there is one dominant and recurrent inuge in the anruls of the modern tour, it is
surely tMt of the beaten track, which succinctly designates the space of the ‘tomistic’ as a
region in which all experience is predictable and repetitive,” writes Buzard (4). As we
Mve seen, Irishtourists Md a “track . . . nurked out for them” by guide books and
previous tomists, a path so well-wom that, as early as 1791, CMrles Bowden could speak
knowingly of “the tour of Ireland” (75, empMsis mine). Bowden travelled as the
“tourists” would in coming decades—utilizing public accommodations exclusively, rather
than staying in the homes of gentry—a rather atypical circumstance for an eighteenth-
century English gentleman in Ireland. In 1793, E. D. Clarke congratulates himself and
anticipates the reader’s approMtion for “the tendency which I have shewn, throughout
these pages, to leave the beaten track”——this, despite the fict that his “tour” in Ireland
consists of a few days in Dublin (401). Tomists depended on the existence of a well-
travelled tomist route, not only to ensrne that they would see the most important places,
but also as a nutter ofpersonal secmity. The anonymous author ofaJournal ofa Tour in
Ireland . . . in August 1804 seems particularly reluctant to stray from the prescribed path:
“Having now seen the whole of Dublin; and judging it unsafe, or at least uncomfortable, to

go into the interior unaccompanied; 1 determined to cross the Channel once more, and to

 

the Shores of the Atlantic (1845), and Alexander Knox, The Irish Watering Places
(1 845).

159

remain in Wales till my servant should join me” (31). Throughout the nineteenth century,
tourists report their experiences as they jostle along this beaten track, seeing and
describing the sights that countless others Mve seen and described before them. By the
1840s, William Thackeray can write a travel narrative about Ireland that is parodic in its
repetitiveness, leading him at one point to query: “Is there anything new to be said
regarding the journey?” (251).

A “beaten track” presupposes the existence of maps, good roads, and the means
for travelling over those roads. Earlier travellers to Ireland fi'equently bemoaned the lack
of accurate infornution about travel in Ireland: “Maps of most of the counties . . . are in
general erroneous, and Mdly executed, without either longitude or latitude, and are merely
copies from old maps” (Twiss 172). George Taylor and Andrew Skinner set out to rectify
this situation with their Maps of the Roads of Ireland, published first in 1778. The 288
pages of nups, plus index, provided travellers with detailed information about cross-roads,
distances, locations of gentlemen’s seats, natural curiosities, and ruins. The authors also
supplied a fold-out maps of the country, which many travel writers adapted and included
in their own texts. Begiming in the seventeenth centmy, the responsibility for building
and upkeep of Irish roads was assigned to individual parishes; in 1765, an act of
parliament allowed grand juries “to levy money on Mronies within the county for the
repair of existing roads and bridges or the construction of new ones,” a circumstance that
led to the standardization of Irish roads (Connolly 489). The act also gave private
landholders the capacity to employ their tenants in building high-quality roads tMt suited

their particular needs, needs that often overlapped with the needs of tourists. Thackeray’s

160

claim that “they would never Mve Md these roads but for the Union, roads which are as
much at the charge of the London tax-payer as of the most ill-used Milesian in
Connaught,” is erroneous, an example of the center’s attempt to render the periphery
dependent (211); Irish road-making was in fict independent of England, and the vast
majority of travellers found Irish roads superior: “everywhere I found beautiful roads
without break or hindrance,” exclaims Young (see Comolly 489). Tourists’ comments on
the post-chaises tend to be less positive—most complain about broken-down coaches, ill-
used and tired horses, and Md drivers; nevertheless, tourists managed to get fiom place to
place with increasingly regularity and ease, a circumstance enhanced by the introduction of
mail coaches in 1790 and Bianconi passenger cars in 1815.

The interdependence of roads and tourism points again to the ability of the Irish to
nunipulate the tourist’s experience: by controlling the construction of roads, the Irish
could encourage or discourage travel to particular districts or sites. Some tourists chose
to stray ofi this beaten track; others travelled these roads in search of the Ireland their
guide books recommended. In either case, their experiences were often mediated not only
by guide books, but also by human guides—hem the peasant by the side of the road who
offered directions, to the hired boatman who rowed the tourist around the lakes of
Killarney. Many tourists expressed their perception that Irish guides somehow reflected
the site with which they were associated; in the words of the Halls, “It is curious to note
how the authorised ‘care-takers’ of celebrated places assume the tone of the scenes they
exlu'bit” (2.104). Similarly, travellers tended to assume that Irish guides believed

unquestioningly the stories and legends they told to tourists, suggesting a powerfirl desire

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on the part of the tourists to believe that the Irish were naive and thus incapable of
manipulating them (New Estate 228, Carr 390). If tourists perceived tMt they were being
manipulated by the guides, they reacted with disgust; “a parcel of legends . . . may be well
fiom the mouths of a wild simple peasant who believes in his tales,” explains Thackeray,
but they “are odious from a dullard who narrates them at the rate of Sixpence a lie” (326).
As TMckeray’s comment suggests, tourists believed strongly that the “real” Ireland,
embodied by the “wild simple peasant,” could be discovered by the persistent traveller, if
he or she were perceptive enough to distinguish between the honest (if superstitious)
peasant and the mercenary guide. As we shall see in the more detailed analyses below,
tourists needed the guides, but they also expressed resentment at the guides’ intrusiveness,
which they perceived as mediating the authenticity of their experience.

However, as Jonathan Culler has shown in his essay “The Semiotics of Tourism,”
“authentic” experience requires some form of mediation. Dean MacCamell and Culler
Mve discussed the relationship between tourists and tourist sites in terms of semiotics,
with “markers” firnctioning as signs (Van Den Abbeele 4, Culler 159). According to
Culler, a marker “is any kind of information or representation that constitutes a sight as a
sight,” including guide books, explanatory plaques, and souvenirs (Orller 159). “[T]he
touristic experience involves the production of or participation in a sign relation between
nurker and sight,” which includes activities such as writing about a sight, or comparing it
to previously written descriptions (160). However, critics of tourism, such as Boorstin,
Mve tended to assume that markers point to things that are ‘touristy,’ and thus

inauthentic; “our notion of the authentic is the unrnarked,”claims Culler. However, as

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Cullerdeftlyargues, “Tobetrulysatisfyingthesightneedstobecertifiedmarkedas
authentic” (164). Tomists tend not to be able to relate to unmarked sights: their sense
that they Mve encountered something “authentic” when they venture ofl the beaten track
requires some marker (even the presence of another tourist) to confirm the sight’s
authenticity (161-64). Tomists and travellers to Ireland relied on the markers supplied by
previous travel nanatives, guide books, and human guides to indicate to them not only to
what they should refite, but also how. As we lel see, the intertextuality ofthe many
descriptions of Dublin, Killarney, and the Giant’s Causeway confirm the importance of
markers and sign relations to the authentic tomist experience. These sign relations also
confirm the status of the tourist site as “not-honre”; as Georges Van Den Abbeele argues,
“tourism operates less to palliate than to exacethe alienation as the tomist in his
insatiable desire for immediacy and authenticity finds himself enmeshed in the very web of
mediacy and inauthenticity fi'om which he is trying so Mrd to flee” (“Sightseers” 7).
Dublin—-inpart becauseofits sizeandstatus, andinpartbecauseitistheplace
where most travellers first set foot in Ireland—occupies a unique position in a
consideration of “tourist sites.” Even a traveller as abstemious as John Wesley went to
Dublin and “saw what was accounted most worthy of observation” (4.258). By 1791,
readers could Mve been expected to be quite fimiliar with what Dublin Md to offer, and
perMps even overly fimiliar, as evidenced by this remark from CMrles Bowden: “I shall
not detain the reader with a minute description of Dublin—as several of it Mve been
aheady published. I shall, therefore, only make such general observations on it, as must

occur to every traveller. . . . ” (4). Particular attractions included the Parliament House

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(which, after the Union, became the Bank of Ireland) and other exemplars of architecture
(including the Custom House, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the cities’ numerous bridges),
Dublin University and Trinity College, and various museums and parks. Although
travellers typically expressed interest in the more anthropological aspects of Irish culture
(living conditions, religious practices, beMviors), as we Mve seen in previous chters,
tourists looked to Dublin, which Md for nuny centuries been heavily influenced by
England, for evidence of Irish culture in its more intellectual and aesthetic senses (art,
theatre, sculpture, literattne, etc.), what might be more typically designated “high culture.”
For most English travellers, the most immediate point of comparison was London;
Dublin is described variously as “the fifth city in Europe” (Bowden 5) and “the second city
in his Majesty’s dominions” (Cooper 5). The population of Dublin around 1800 was
approxinutely 200,000 people, about one-fifth the size of London, a fict noted by several
travel writers; John Gough also devotes several pages of his Tour to an extensive
comparison between the size (in acres) of London and Dublin. One traveller went so fir
asto remarkthathesaw‘hothinginourwayto suggesttheideaofadifi‘erent country
fiom that which we Md left” (Journal of a Tour 17). Most travellers were quick to
exoticize Dublin, however. In some cases, this exoticizing move was negative, and anti-
tomistic. Numerous travellers commented on what E. D. Clarke calls the “mixture of
lousiness and laziness, misery and magnificence” (325): the juxtaposition of wealth and

poverty within the city and the omnipresence of squalor and vice. ‘6 In other instances, the

 

“See Curwen 2.101-2, Glassford 12, Barrow 378, Binns 1.3-4. John Gough’s and
Philip Hardy’s counter-observation——tMt all large cities Mve poor districts—seems just
(Gough 76; Hardy, New Picture 93).

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process of exoticizing Dublin relied on the language of tomism. Henry Inglis empMsizes
Dublin’s resemblance to Spain and other locales: ‘you might easily fincy yourselfin 1
another and distant part of Europe” (6). The Bay of Dublin was fiequently and fivorably
compared to the Bay of Naples, a convention that had grown so tired by the 1840s tMt
Thackeray’s Titrnarsh, arriving in Dublin at night, mockingly regrets that “it was
impossible to institute the comparison between the Bay of Naples and tMt of Dublin,” and
pauses to reflect on the nature of the comparison itself; and, indirectly, on his fellow travel
writers: “But how could one see the Bay of Dublin in the dark? and how, supposing one
could see it, should a person beMve who Ms never seen the Bay of Naples?” (6). The
marker, in this case the Bay of Naples, must be fimiliar in order for the tourist to use that
marker to negotiate his relationship to the site; if it is not, then the site remains
mauthentic, despite its immediacy. The fict that a nurker might require its own marker in
order to be appreciated or understood by the tourist demonstrates the every-widening gap
between the sign and the signified. Hence, despite its metropolitan character and
similarities to other large European cities, Dublin could easily be othered and rendered
distant, to the extent necessary to consider it a tourist destination.

Most of the earliest travellers considered in this study were not impressed by
Dublin. John Bush views Dublin as a microcosm of the Irish cMracter and fiults the Irish
people’s excessive drinking, “ostentation,” “Hibemian importance,” and lack of high
culture; RicMrd Twiss is similarly dismissive and relies heavily on others’ accounts for his
descriptions, suggesting that his personal experience with Dublin might Mve been limited.

However, Arthur Young’s description is, as always, more even-handed. Although he

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notesthepovertyofnunyofthe inhabitants, andexpresseshisdismayattheexpensive
and dirty hotels, the city “much exceeded my expectation”:
The public buildings are magnificent, very many of the streets regularly laid
out, and exceedingly well built. The front of the Parliament House is
grand. . . . The apartments are spacious, elegant, and convenient, much
beyond that heap of confusion at Westminster, so inferior to the
magnificence to be looked for in the seat of empire. . . . From everything I
saw, I was struck with those appearances of wealth which the capital of a
thriving commmity nuy be supposed to exhibit. (Maxwell ed. 3)
As in London, the Dublin “season,” revolved around the sessions of Parliament. “There is
a very good society in Dublin in a parliament winter,” reports Young: “a great round of
dinners, andparties, andMllsandsuppers everynight intheweek, some ofwhicharevery
elegant” (5). After the Union, and the removal of parliamentary business to Westminster,
Dublin society suffered a setMck, as the upper classes went instead to London or
renuined on their country estates, a situation bemoaned by both English tourists and the
Irish people alike. Tourists were quick to point out the emergence of the “middling”
classes, however (Carr 52), and by the 18208 and 308, Dublin could once again be enjoyed
by the pleasme-minded tomist.

Dublin was generally the stepping-ofl‘ place for most Irish tours—Leigh’s Pocket
Road-Book offers a 30-page “Description of Dublin,” followed by a more than 250-page
“Itinerary of Ireland,” organized alphabetically by destination, with the point of origin
always given as Dublin. A tour of Dublin thus might only occupy a few days, or at most, a
few weeks; once a traveller “Md seen every thing which Dublin could offer to the curiosity
of a foreigner,” he was generally quick to follow the path established by the Irish elite and

head just south, to Black Rock and County Wicklow (Cooper 72, empMsis in original).

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These “fishionable” places, to use CMrles Bowden’s term (67), acquired a particularly
‘tomisty’ cMracter, as evidenced by the judgmental tone of Anne Plumptre’s description:
In the neighbourhood of Dublin, as of most large towns, there are a number
of places exceedingly frequented by the citizens on parties of pleasure,
particularly on Sundays; and which strangers, if they Mve any ambition to
be classed among curious or inquisitive travellers, must not fiil to visit.
(72)
In Plumptre’s eyes, the Dubliners are tourists, interested in mere “pleasure.” English
travellers are eager to distinguish themselves fi'om such beMviors; they are “strangers” or
“curious or inquisitive travellers,” amateur anthropologists drawn to such places to
observe the sightseers, rather than the sites themselves. The Halls are quick to point out
that County Wicklow’s attractions are not limited to the pleasure-oriented tourist,
however, in part because of its proximity to Dublin: “a visit to [Wicklow] . . . necessarily
includes one to the Irish metropolis, so abundant in nutter of the deepest interest to the
antiquary,themanofscience,thephilanthropist, andinshort, toallwhoneatheartthe
welfire of the country, and desire its moral, social, and physical advancement” (256).
Nevertheless, in 1843, Thackeray expresses concern that the tour between Dublin and
Wicklow had been “done” to death, since it “has been performed not only by myriads of
the ‘car-drivingest, tay—drinkingest, say-Mthingest people in the world,’ the inlubitants of
thecityofDublin, but also byallthe tourists who Mve cometo discoverthiscountryfor

the benefit of the English nation.”17 He abbreviates his account of Wicklow because he

 

17It is worth noting that even TMckeray—who, in the character of M. A. Titrnarsh,
created perMps the ultimate “tourist”—must still find others who are more touristy than
himself, in this case Dubliners, in order to minimize his own touristic beMviors.

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fears comparisons to Henry Inglis, John Barrow, Nathaniel Willis, Crofton Croker, and the
stories of Mrs. Hall—nothing remains for him “to discover” (251).

A lack of novelty does not appear to Mve deterred very many tomists, however.
Of particular interest was the estate of Lord Powerscourt, which included a waterfill, the
Dargle. John Bush describes the waterfill as “one of the most beautiful water-fills in
Great-Britain, or Ireland, and, perMps, in the world,” and insists “there is no heightening
or exaggeration in this description.” (67, 69). Philip Luckombe fotmd the depiction
convincing enough to plagiarize it for his Tour in 1780, but several of Bush’s
contemporaries were less convinced, and less effusive. Twiss describes it as “pleasing and
pictmesque, but not grand” (55). E. D. Clarke is disappointed to find that dry weather Ms
turned the cascade into a trickle: “One had much better visit the artificial display in tin-
work, which draws such an assemblage of virtuosos to the gardens of Vaulel” (310).
When one can enjoy the sites of Ireland at home (in England), then one need not risk
collapsing the distance betweenthe two countries through travel. Bythe time the Halls
write their book on Ireland, the Dargle Ms been reduced from “one of the most beautiful
water-fillsin. . .theworl ”to “perhaps,themostmagnificentfillinthecountyof
Wicklow” (202). Still, tourists flocked to the estate of Lord Powerscomt and wrote with
approval of the woods and the deer park; many praised Lord Powerscourt hhmelf‘Who,
withaliberalityworthyofhisrankandmind, permits everyoneto visit it [thepark], and
Ms erected seats in various parts of it for the accommodation of the public” (Carr 144).
Eventually, however, parts of the Powerscomt demesne were closed to the public. Anne

Phnnptre tells of the thrill she and her travelling companions experience when they decide

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to trespass on Lord Powerscomt’s deer park to Mve the best view of the waterfill (84-
85). Similarly, Crofton Croker reports Mving to pay gatekeepers to see the waterfill (25).
Thackeray is turned away because the park is closed, but he manages to see the waterfill
and describes it in a “grand style,” fill of hyperbole and high-flown language, “in order
that the reader, who Ms proMbly read other descriptions of the spot, might Mve at least
something new in this account of it” (254-57). Wealthy eighteenth-century travellers
canre and went as they pleased on Lord Powerscomt’s estate, but by the mid-nineteenth
century, the innumerable middle-class tourists were perceived as trespassing on private
property and eventually their presence at this renowned tourist site was
regulated—evidence that some landowners saw tourism as detrimental to their property,
and evidence that the Irish were willing and able to exercise control over the tourists’
beMviors and experiences.

AlthoughE. D. Clarke claimsthat “invisitingametropolislbeholdtheheartofa
nation;and, ifI discoveert passesintheheart, I canestimateprettynearlythetenor
and disposition of the whole body” (325), most travellers were not satisfied with limiting
their travel in Ireland to Dublin and were more likely to concur, with Henry Inglis, that
“Dublin is not Ireland—and it was Ireland I Md come to see” (9). Many travelled north
from Dublin, sometimes after a brief sojornn in Co. Wicklow, and spent time toming the
more Protestant, more industrialized, and thus more home-like province of Ulster. For
many, the journey culminated in a visit to another celebrated tomist site, the Giant’s
Causeway. The Causeway consists of geometric Msalt pillars, intricately linked, that

extend into the water off the northern coast; the name is derived fiom a legend that the

169

pillars once formed a bridge to Scotland that enabled a mythic race of giants to cross fi'om
one island to the next. This natural curiosity attracted numerous visitors, inspired
countless accounts, and eventually came to be known for its intrusive guides, and each of
these elements contributed to its touristic nature.

John Bush’s account of the Causeway is again lengthy and filled with superlatives;
he describes it as “tmexceptionably one of the greatest and most singular of natural
curiosities upon the earth” (49). Arthur Young devotes only a brief paragraph to the
Causeway, claiming that it “has been so often treated, that nothing I could say could be
new,” suggesting that a growing web of text Md begun to be associated with the site
(Maxwell ed. 54). Robert Slade also forgoes any description, in part because the touristic
nature of such an account seems ill-fitting in his formal report to the New Plantation
Society, and in part because it “has often been described” (65-66). John Barrow
recognizes that his readers “will naturally expect” tMt he will say something about the
Causeway, “though after so many accounts of it already in print, you must not expect that
my short visit will elicit anything new” (69). John Gough opts to avoid the Causeway
altogether (45). The accounts over time become linked to one another. For example,
Richard Twiss offers a dismissive account, but refers “the inquisitive reader” to Bush’s
Hibernia Curiosa (85); some years later, Charles Bowden, in his turn, critiques Twiss’
description of the Causeway.

These intertextualized descriptions are one example of what Jonathan Culler calls
“the production of or participation in a sign relation between marker and sight”: tourists

establish a relationship between a representation of the sight (a marker, such as another

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person’s account) and their experience of the sight, and then produce finther nurkers by
writing and publishing their own accounts (160). Tourists construct particularly explicit
relationships between various nurkers and the Gfint’s Causeway. They express
disappointrnenttlutthe sight isnot “giant,”asthename (atype ofnurker) implies, as in
the following account of Anne Plumptre’s first impression of the Causeway:
Juliet says, “WMt’s in a name?” and the poet who puts this sentiment in
hermouthwas deeplyreadinhumannature. YetanameMsverygreat
influence not merely upon the inugination but even upon the judgment.
We hear of the Giants’ Causeway; we know that the term Giant is applied
to a being which the imagination Ms figured, though of human form,
immensely beyond all human stature and size, and we immediately figure to
ourselves that every thing referable to these extraordinary maginary beings
must be of a vastness almost beyond all hunun conception. It is proMble
tMt at least three-fourths of the visitors to the Causeway approach it
impressed with these ideas; and to such, disappointment must ahnost
inevitably be the first sensation experienced. (131)
Phrmptre may be correct in her assessment that “three-fourths” of the tourists approached
the Causeway with this expectation and were, at least initially, disappointed.l8 She refers
the reader to Sir RicMrd Colt Hoare’s accomt for confirmation (201). John Curwen
(1.194), John Barrow (82-83), Henry Inglis (333), and William TMckeray (324) express
similar disappointment; TMckeray claims not even to Mve seen the Causeway until it was
pointed out to him. Other travellers compare the sight to the model and stone specimens

on display at the Trinity College museum (Twiss 85, Journal of a Tour 44), others to the

 

”Recognizing the potential for disappointment on this ground, G. N. Wright
acknowledges that “It is not, however, the magnitude of the Causeway which surprises”;
rather, “the wonder and admiration of the tourist are to be reserved until he steps upon the
very surfice of this great work of nature” (Giant ’s Causeway 91). This seems to Mve
been a common strategy among Irish guides. Henry Inglis’ guide “seemed to anticipate”
Inglis’ disappointment, “and although I made no observation, he said, One required to step
on the Causeway, in order to appreciate its wonders.” Inglis does so, but is “still

disappointed” (333).

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colonnades at Staffa in the Hebrides (Young, first ed. 1.140; Taylor 182; Barrow 82-83).
Many conclude that the disjuncture between the nurkers and the sight render the
Causeway less attractive; in the words of Samuel Johnson, “the Giant’s Causeway might
be worth seeing, but was not worth going to see” (Curwen 1.194; see also Twiss 157,
TMckeray 324).

The most significant markers of the Causeway were the guides, in both book and
human form. Although Henry Inglis claims he “had long ago learned to appreciate the
bomMst of a guide-book,” he and many other tourists seem unprepared for the legions of
human guides ready to mediate their experience of the Causeway. Eighteenth-century
travellers make little or no mention of guides; they are entirely absent fi'om the accounts of
John Bush, Richard Twiss, and Arthur Young. John Wesley makes reference to “three or
four poor boys [who] were ready to hold our horses and show us the way down” (195),
and Charles Bowden acknowledges Mving Md some infornution supplied by a
“gentlenun whom I met here” (231). In the nineteenth century, tomists at the Causeway
were generally accompanied by one or more guides, but their presence does not appear to
Mve been intrusive at first (Journal of a Tour 42, 44; Curwen 1.196). Anne Plumptre
provides us with the first description ofwhat became a fixture ofthe tourist’s experience
at the Causeway:

. . . I soon perceived three or four men, one after the other, rtmning
towards me, as if emulous which should Mve the start of the other. “Here
they come by dozens,” said my companion. “Who are they?” I asked.
“The guides of the Causeway,” he replied:— “I suppose they Mve seen the
car,andhearsomebodywascoming,andtheyareallrumingtotrywhich

can get hold of you first.” It was even so: these men are like a parcel of
hungry eagles, always hovering about, watching for prey, and the moment

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any is espied, the contest is commenced which can first pounce upon it.
(130)

Plumptre, Mving been warned about these carnivorous guides by a fiiend, chooses the
guide he had recommended to her, Mr. Currie. She Ms nothing but praise for Currie, but
continues throughout her account to disparage the hordes of poverty-stricken “guides”
that follow them, offering to sell them mineral specimens at inflated prices (142). John
Barrow tells a similar tale of being “beset by a crowd of people who call themselves
guides” and “assailed by men and boys offering stones to sell, which they collect into small
boxes”: “They [the guides] are of no use; but the poor fellows must live, and from their
appearance they doubtless are Mrdly put to it” (75).

But it is future novelist William TMckeray’s account that gains notoriety. He
admits that it “is not a description of the Giant’s Causeway . . . , but of a Londoner there,”
and from him we learn nothing of interlocking Msalt pillars, but everything of the tourist’s
experience. Thackeray’s raucous description of his encounter with the guides deserves to
be quoted at length:

The traveller no sooner issues fiom the inn, by a Mck door, which he is
informed will lead him straight to the Causeway, than the guides pounce
uponhirn, withadozenroughboatrnen, whoarelikewiselyinginwait;and
a crew of shrill beggar-boys, with boxes of spars, ready to tear him and
each other to pieces seemingly, yell and Mwl incessantly round him. ‘I’m
the guide Miss Henry recommends,’ shouts one; ‘I’m Mr. Macdonald’s
guide,’ pushes in another; ‘This way,’ roars a third, and drags his prey
down a precipice; the rest of them clambering and quarrelling after. I Md
no fiiends, I was perfectly helpless, I wanted to walk down to the shore by
myself, but they would not let me, and I had nothing for it but to yield
myselfinto the hands of the guide who Md seized me, who hurried me
down the steep to a little wild My, flanked on each side by rugged clifi‘s

and rocks, against which the waters came tumbling, frothing, and roaring
furiously. Upon some of these black rocks two or three boats were lying;

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fourmenseizedaboat, pusheditshouting intothewater,andravishedme
into it. . . . (322)

Forced to pay his kidnappers and promise to buy their rock specimens to procure his
release (a promise he breaks once on shore), Thackeray pauses to caution future tomists:
“Let all Cockneys take warning from this; let the solitary one caught issuing from the Mck
door of the hotel, shout at once to the boatrnen to be gone—that he will Mve none of
them. . . . For after all, it must be remembered that it is pleasure we come for. . . .” (325).
At this point, however, it seems clear that fending off the guides had become part of the
touristic experience, and Thackeray, for all his professed discomfort, takes great delight in
recounting his experiences at the Causeway. “Pleasure” was related to the perceived
authenticity of the experience, and the authentic experience at the Giant’s Causeway
required guides.

It comes as no sm'prise that almost all the Irish guide book writers recommend to
travellers that they acquire a human guide upon arriving at the Causeway. “An erqrert
guide will afiord much satisfiction to the tomist,” insists G. N. Wright (Giant ’s Causeway
95). Philip Hardy assures the tourist that although “[f]ormerly travellers were much
annoy ” by the number of guides “pressing to be hired,” “the nugistrates Mve recently
made such regulations for their payment as will prevent stranger fiom being imposed
upon” (306-7n.). The Halls claim that the guides at the Causeway, even the smallest
children, are “geologists, learned in the names of stones” (3.155n.). C. C. Hamilton, in
Leigh ’s Pocket Road-Book, is particularly explicit:

In order to visit this celebrated natural curiosity, the Tourist must engage,

as a principal, one of the many guides who will present themselves to his
notice; and he will do well not to discourage the numerous peasants who

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willbepleased to assisthirninhisprogress, andwho willconsidertheir

labours amply recompensed by the purcMse of some of the mineral

specimens which they offer. (174)
Guides, then, should be acquired in order to help the impoverished Irish peasantry, not
merely to enMnce one’s understanding of the Causeway, or to indulge fully in the touristic
experience. The Irish people, who, as Barrow noted, were fiequently “hardly put” to live,
recognized the economic benefits that could accrue to them through tourism, and they
were not afiaid to exploit that knowledge by rendering themselves as Other: superstitious,
for example. Furthermore, as in Thackeray’s account above, Irish guides used English
travellers’ representations to authorize themselves and their activities, designating
themselves as “the guide Miss Hemy recommends” or “Mr. Macdonald’s guide,”
presumably references the English traveller of Thackeray’s day would Mve recognized and
respected.

The third, and undoubtedly most popular tourist site, was Killamey—more
specifically, the chain of lakes, islands, and mountains to be found there. In his essay “The
Topographies of Terror: Killamey and the Politics of the Sublime,” Luke Gibbons argues
persuasively that “the praise lavished on Killamey’s scenic beauties was closely bound up
with the 1757 publication of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime
and Beautifid,” and that by “bringing the mollifying influence of the beautiful to bear on
the terrors of the sublime” (by which Gibbons means both “the wildness of the Killamey
countryside” and “the terra incognita of Kerry and the rest of ‘the hidden Ireland’),

“aesthetic experience enabled” the travel writer to “subdue” the savage impulse in Ireland

and nuke the landscape appear ripe for colonial exploitation (25-26, 28). Such an analysis

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fits well with the language of eighteenth-century descriptions of Killarney. The Burkean
aesthetic is exemplified in John Bush’s profession that “’Tis easier for the rural and
romantic genius to conceive than for me to express the pleasure that, in every prospect,
derives to the curious traveller fiom such a mixed and diversified scene of entertainment,”
that is,the beautyofthe lakesandthe sublimity ofthe surrounding mountains. Bush
further claims that the traveller will Mve as much difliculty choosing between the lures of
the sublime and the beautiful as “a Turk of the greatest sensibility would Mve” in selecting
fiom “a seraglio of smrounding beauties,” suggesting the orientalist (and by extension,
imperialist) impulse behind such rhetoric (113, 115-16). Gibbons also refers to “Arthur
Young’sconcern. . . to fiamehisdescriptionsofwild scenerywiththeguidingMnd of
irrrprovement always in the foreground to reassure readers ill at ease in such
surroundings,” to support his claim about the impact of the Burkean aesthetic on
England’s imperialist maneuverings toward Ireland (28). I would like to point to a
particular moment in Young’s Tour to argue tMt descriptions of Killamey were
simultaneously moving toward another kind of rhetorical strategy—4M distancing,
othering, objectifying language of tourism—to enable the English to move the Irish
imperialist project into the nineteenth century.

At the conclusion of his account of Killarney, Young mentions the need for proper
accommodations for travellers: “I am surprised somebody with a good capital does not
procure a large well-built inn, to be erected on the immediate shore of the lake, in an
agreeable situation, at a distance fiom the town; there are very few places were such an

one would answer better.” Young goes on to describe in great detail the proposed rooms,

176

dining ficilities, and activities that would provide travellers with entertainments similar to
those‘theymseetwithatanEnglishspa”; further, Young empMsizestheneedfor
reasonable, published prices for everything such an inn would offer, “fi'om a room and a
dinner, to a Mrge and a Mnd of music.” If such a plan were followed, “The resort of
strangers to Killamey would then be much increased, and their stay would be greatly
prolonged; they would not view it post Mste, and fly away the first moment to avoid dirt
and imposition” (Maxwell ed. 119). Young’s comparison of this proposed resort to “an
English spa” exemplifies Ireland’s lirninal position: improvements of the type Young
recommends will render this tourist destination more fimiliar, comfortable, and home-like,
like “an English spa”; at the same time, these improvements will confirm Killarney’s
position as a tourist site, a place patently not-home, just as an English spa was to its many
English visitors. Many English travellers confirmed the need for such “tourist”
irnprovenrents. RicMrd Twiss Md made a similar argument for “a large and elegant inn

. . . suchasthose at nunyofthe watering-placesinEngland”andassuredhisreadersthat
the builder and proprietor of such an establishment might easily acquire “a considerable
forttme” (132-33). Several enterprising businessmen must Mve taken Twiss and Young at
their word; John Curwen reports in 1818 that “the number of hotels and private lodgings
indicate the influx of strangers, and afford an incontestable proof of the attractions in its
neighborhood” (1.398), and by 1844, James Grant reports choosing to stay at Roche’s,
outside of town, rather than one of the four hotels in Killamey (228). Both Young and Sir
Richard Colt Hoare also comment on the need for improvements at one of Killarney’s

major attractions, Innisfillen Island: “Strangers who visit this charming spot, Mve cause to

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regret that its walks are not better kept” (Hoare 69); Hoare recommends that sheep should
be pastured there, instead of cattle—“the lawn would be much more nicely trimmed by the
close feeding teeth of [sheep],” he insists. This desire to see Killamey—and indeed the
rest of Ireland—“improved” for the accommodation and pleasure of “strangers” indicates
the powerful presence and influence of tourists on the Irish environment.

As the nineteenth century succeeded the eighteenth, the often subtle rhetoric of
improvement gave way to the bourgeois trappings of tourism; guidebooks assured the
English tourist that “Killamey may be perfectly viewed and admired in a tour of either
three or two days, or even of one”'9 (Wright, Killamey vi), provided that the requisite fees
were given to the guides, boatrnen, buglers, and other necessary accompanists. As with
the Giant’s Causeway, guide books for Killamey appeared in the first decades of the
nineteenth century. Before that time, travellers Md attempted to provide some tourists’
information in their travel narratives; Sir Richard Colt Hoare, for example, provides costs

and suggests an itinerary for seeing the lakes. G. N. Wright’s Guide to the Lakes of

 

I”The time spent at Killamey constituted an important element of tourism (as
distinguished from “travelling”). George Holmes insists that “to visit and admire”
Killamey firlly “would require months” (133). On a more practical note, Sir Richard Colt
Hoare recommends that “Less time certainly ought not to be allotted to Killamey that one
entire week; and another could be very pleasantly employed, in retracing the same ground”
(78). Anne Plumptre “passed five days here, a sufficient time for obtaining a general idea
of the scenery;—-to examine all its beauties in detail, five weeks would hardly more than
sufice”; because “to devote any thing like that time to it was wholly out of my power,”
and she “did not perceive that much would be gained by only an additional day or two,”
she decides to leave on the sixth day (299). In these two competing conceptions of the
amount of time required to see Killarney, we recognize important class distinctions: only
the wealthy traveller could allot suflicient time; the more money-conscious middle-class
tourist Md to be satisfied with the one, two, or three day tour recommended by C. C.
Hamilton and G. N. Wright. Mr. and Mrs. Hall specifically discriminate between their
recommendations to “the traveller” and to the “tourist, to whom time is an object”

(1 . 1 80).

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Killamey claims to be the first publication “to afl‘ord every necessary direction to the
Tourist whose object is to visit the Lakes of Killarney, and their surrounding beauties: it
points out the time required, the modes of conveyance, the inns on the road, and the
proMble expense” (v). Leigh’s Pocket Road-Book defers to Wright as the best guide to
Killarney. Although the Halls insist, once again, that their “design is not to produce ‘a
guide-book,’” they include a note that indicates where guidebooks should be purcMsed
and which they recommend (1.252). In 1834, William Belton insists there are “‘Guides’
enough, and to spare, for the Lakes of Killamey” (iv). In addition to these numerous
guide books, travellers relied on information supplied by other travellers. Twiss mentions
Mving read Bush’s narrative and John Leslie’s poem; Hoare refers to Carr; Phrmptre
renurks that prior to her visit, she “read and studied very much several different accounts
of the Lakes” and concludes that she “found every thing conformable to the ideas arranged
in my mind” by those accounts (269). G. N. Wright situates his guide book within the
context of travel narratives by Bush, Young, Curwen, and Holmes. Much like the
intertextual accounts of the Giant’s Causeway, descriptions of Killamey depended heavily
on one another. Travellers were also aware of the chlenges presented by this ever-
growing web of text; John Barrow shortens his description of Killarney, observing “If
every one of the five hundred and sixty-eight parties who, as my guide informed me,
visited Muckrosslastyear, andthethreehundredandtwentythis, were to write asmuch,
they could not expect to amuse their readers with a large share of novelty” (315).
Eventually, the “sign”—in the form of other travellers’ descriptions—may be substituted

for the site; some travellers, such as Thomas Campbell, decide to forgo a visit to Killamey

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entirely and content themselves with one of the numerous accomts provided by others
(205—6).

Those who did travel to Killarney, however, did not need to rely solely on the
printed word. Nineteenth-century tourists were often assisted by human guides, as at the
Giant’s Causeway, although most tourists do not seem to Mve reacted quite as negatively
toward the Killamey guides. Together, these guides and guide books established a
“beaten track” for tourists to follow, and the narratives of the tourists reveal the extem to
which the Irish determined the tourist’s experience at Killarney. As Sir RicMrd Colt
Hoare observed, “The usual routine adopted by the guides camot perMps be altered for
the better” (67). Killamey was owned by one of the few remaining Irish Catholic
landholders, Lord Kennure, who was the sole provider of boats for touring the lakes. He
established the rates for hiring boats and boatrnen, who expected food and whiskey in
addition to their pay. Tourists were also expected to hire horn players and gunmen to
accompanythemintheboat. Whenthe boat reachedacertainpoint onthe lakes, the
horns were blown and the guns were fired, producing a magnificent echo; the tourists, of
course, paid for the gimpowder.20 Twiss reports that the cost amounted to “about eight
guineas”(117); Carrindicatesthatthecosthrisento “aboutnineguineas” somethirty
years later. Several tourists also recount stag-hunting on the lakes, a process that involved
a deer being driven into the water by someone on shore and then hunted fiom the boats.21

Finally, most tourists mention the arbutus tree, which produced a W similar to a urge

 

20See Bush 126, Twiss 125-26, Young 117, Bowden 195-96, Holmes 118-19, 143,
Carr 388-90, Hoare 73-74, Cm'wen 1.414, Inglis 129-30, Barrow 308.

2‘See Bush, 128-31, Twiss 131, Holmes 148-51, Thackeray 125-27.

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strawberry. John Bush records sending some of the fiuit to a friend in England, with the
hopesthattheseedsmightberemovedandplanted: “ltwillgivemenosnullplmsure. . .
to see living plants from seeds that I took so much pains to procure—A tramplantation,
indeed, from the most western land of Ireland to the easternmost point of England” (155).
William Thackeray reports being urged to buy a walking stick carved from an arbutus tree
as a souvenir (137). Overall, the striking similarity oftheir accounts while towing the
lakes indicates the regimented pattern of beMvior for tourists to Killarney.

The predictable experiences of tourists and the concomitant rhetoric of tourism did
not preclude attention to aesthetics at Killarney, however. The vast nujority of tourists
were awed by the beauty of Killamey; they compared the lakes fivorably to the English
lake district, and some claimed that the beauties of Killamey surpassed the English lakes
(Journal of a Tour 52). Occasiorully, a tourist was rendered speechless by Killamey: “It
is impossible to write here—Beautiful visions crowd on the mind too rapidly for the hand
to record. . . . [A] hundred descriptions of it Mve been written—thousands of sketches
Mve been nude, but no description that I Mve read, or sketch that I Mve seen, nude me
fimiliar with Killarney,” claimed Georgiana Chatterton (Rambles 1.113). For some
tourists, however, those “hundred descriptions” and “thousands of sketches” only served
to raise filse expectations. Richard Twiss concludes that Killamey “forms one of the
greatest natural beauties of Ireland, and will amply repay the traveller of taste for his
trouble in journeying thither,” but regrets tMt his “expectations were too much raised by
reading the romantic exaggerations” of previous travellers (126). John Curwen fears that

the anticipation of Killamey engendered by others’ accounts will ensure his

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disappointment, although ultimately be is pleased by Killarney’s beauty (1.397-98).
Curwen’s skepticism is sMred by Henry Inglis, who warm the tomist not to approach
Killamey with “those exaggerated notions which are apt to be conveyed by a guide-book.”
Inglis insists that “There is nothing of the sublime about Killarney,” indicating a changing
aesthetic value both for Killamey and for the idea of the “sublime” (128). TMckeray
finds the scenery at Killamey “overpowering,” a negative sensation, as opposed to the
pleasrne one expected to derive fiom the terrors of the sublime (128). When James Grant
describes Killamey in 1844, he uses a language devoid of the rhetoric of the sublime and
the beautiful, suggesting not only that sensibilities Md changed, but also that the rhetoric
of tourism Md replaced the rhetoric of the Burkean aesthetic.

The distancing power of the rhetoric of tourism is powerfully illustrated by
tourists’ increasing awareness of a disjuncture between Killarney, the town, and Killarney,
the tomist site. Tourists became so accustomed to think of Killamey in a particular way
that they were disturbed by the presence ofanother Killamey peering in fiom the margins.
CMrles Bowden is the first to mention the poverty he observes as he comes into Killamey
(191). Sir John Carr is anuzed to find Killamey “a large town,” and not “a little romantic
place, as I Md previously penciled it in my imagination” (358-59). Again, we see the gap
between the marker and the site, as at the Giant’s Causeway, but this time in reverse.
Henry Inglis’ description is more specific:

Killamey suggests to an Englishnun, merely a spot where lakes are

situated: it isnothing butaname. But to oneresidinginthe
neighbourhood, it suggests a biggish, populous, noisy, and not very pretty
town. . . .lregret to say,thatthereisalargepauperpopulation, andavast
ntnnber of idle persons—some fi'om necessity, and some from choice: for
besides its own nattnal proportion of destitute and unemployed persons,

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Killamey has in addition, that class of the idly disposed and poor, who are
either attracted to every spot much resorted to by strangers, or who are
created, by the cMrm which precarious employment possesses in the
estimation of many, over the more certain, but more moderate wages of
labour. (125)
Tourism Ms given Killamey these disparate identities, first by “suggest[ing] to an
Englishman” that it is “merely a spot where lakes are situated,” and second, by attracting
“a class of the idly disposed and poor,” people drawn to the places where tomists
congregate and spend money. John Barrow also describes “the prodigious number of
idlers lounging at every comer of the streets” and the “set of hungry-looking fellows” who
offer their services as guides and boatrnen (300-301). TMckeray’s depiction of Killamey
is similarly grim and dovetails with his account of the fiilmes of tourism at Killarney,
typified by a rainy day that obscures the beauties of the lakes (122-27). Ultimately, the
rhetoric of tourism surrounding Killamey—carefully constructed by the Irish and
welcomed by the English for its objectifying potential—precluded any sense of Killamey
as anything other than a tourist site, even when (or perMps especially when) the realities
of day-to-day life interfered with the promulgation of that rhetoric.

When the anonymous traveller of A Journal of a Tour ascends Turk mountain at
Killarney, he suddenly realizes he is finally “at the furthest extent of my tour”: “no wonder
thatl leaped downthe sides ofthe mountainswithaspeedtMt outstrippedand surprised
the guide. Every step was now shortening my cMin, and bringing me nearer home,” i.e.,
England (54). Dublin, the Giant’s Causeway, Killamey—indeed the “Emerald Isle”
itself—were constructed and circumscripted by the rhetoric of tourism, which cast them as

irredeenubly other, as “not-honre.” In their attempts to write “home”—to manipulate the

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tornist’s perception of and experiences in Ireland——the Irish people produced the
foundational texts of the distancing rhetoric of tomism. It would be wrong to assume,
however, that the Irish necessarily regretted or resisted this distancing process. They
fiequently participated actively in this process, and their participation was not limited to
their role as guides. The Irish people were willing to other themselves, to create
themselves as the object of the tornist’s gaze, in order to maintain England’s continued
awareness of (and economic investment in) Ireland and the Irish, while retaining a separate
identity for Ireland. Witness the following account of Sir John Carr’s desire for a piece of
an Irish ruin:
As I stood at the Mse of the Round Tower, I observed tMt the cement was
very Mrd, and expressed a wish to Mve a piece of it knocked ofli upon
which my guide said, “Ab! and won’t I get you some? Oh yes! yom'
honour lel Mve a taste of it.” (180)
Shortly afterward, Carr desires a souvenir from the ruin of St. Kevin’s cathedral:
I shocked the superstitious veneration which this whimsical fellow Md for
theplace,untillhadnanqufllizeditwithmoney,byaskinghimtoassistme

in the removal of two stones into my chaise, which were elegantly
sculptured, belonging to one of the arches, the edges of which were

singularly flesh and sMrp. (187)
In each case, the peasant is willing to desecrate his cultural symbols, his history, in order
to please the English tourist and earn money. JonatMn Binns relates a similar experience
some years later:

St. Patrick’s cross, which consists of granite, is a very rude attempt at
sculpture, and, in consequence of visitors constantly taking earth from the
grave, (for the purpose either of keeping it, or selling it in the country for
the cure of diseases) has a considerable declination fiom the perpendicular.
At the request of the good woman who showed me the relics, I took a
piece of the cross for my museum, nor could I disoblige her by refising to
carry away a portion ofthe soil. (1.143)

184

We see in this example the degradation of the environment—4M cross can no longer stand
upright for lack of supporting soil—and a continued willingness to participate in that
degradation. Above all, these examples suggest a growing distinction between what the
Irish people considered essential symbols of their cultm'e, and wMt they were willing to
sacrifice to the tourists; we cannot forget that these particular excMnges occurred at
moments when the Irish were actively resisting union with Great Britain (through the
activities of the United Irishmen and the Repealers, respectively), suggesting that the Irish
people nuintained a private reserve of Gaelic culture that served as a unifying force and
remained inaccessible to English tourists.22 The tourists who cart away stones and dirt
fi'omIrishruinsdo not botherto criticize the strugglinglrishpeasantswho arewillingto
sell them because they want to believe that this is evidence of the elimination (or, at best,
archival preservation) of a distinct Irish culture; instead it represents Ireland’s ability
simultaneously to participate in and resist the effects of tourism.

As a conch example, let us consider the case of Blarney Castle and the fimed
Blarney stone. Because there are fir fewer accounts of this tourist site, it is easier to
examine the process of ‘tourification’ and to see the Irish people’s willingness and ability
to occupy the position of the other to accommodate the tourists. When Arthur Young
visits Blarney Castle in September, 1776, he makes no mention of its appeal as a tourist
site, although he applauds the owner’s intent “to give employment to the pe0ple, and to
improve the value of his estate by so doing” (Maxwell ed. 103). The usually thorough Sir

John Carr reports nearly thirty years later only that “my fair compagnon du voyage

 

22The establishment of a Gaelic alterity as a form of cultural resistance will be
discussed in more detail in CMpter 5.

185

pointedoutto meBlarney Castle, uponaturret ofwhichthere isastone whichisvery
nearly inaccessible, and possesses, it is said, the rare virtue of making those for ever
Mppy who touch it” (408). Ten years later, Anne Phnnptre includes Blarney Castle
among “the sights of Cork” and believes tMt the term “Blarney . . . is so fimiliar in
Ireland, nay even in England, that I should Mve though scarcely any one could be
unacquainted with the name at least of Blarney,” poking fun at Carr’s misunderstanding of
the stone’s power and offering the more traditiorul account of the legend: “after kissing it
[the Blarney stone], how much soever the kisser may indulge in fiction he is certain of
being believed” (23 8-39). Plumptre indulges thoroughly in the touristic experience and
concludes her description as follows: “Readers, beware! I did not find the Blarney stone
by any means inaccessible, but perfectly easy of access. It is at the highest pimacle of the
old tower, with a very good winding stone staircase up to it. I ascended and kissed it; I
Mve warned you of the consequence, and againI say, Readers, beware!” (239).
Phnnptre’s Narrative appears to Mve contributed to the promulgation of the legend. In
1835, Henry Inglis queries “Who would be at Cork without visiting Blarney, which is
situated about six miles fiom Cork? . . . . There are many things more pictrnesque than
Blarney Castle; but then, it is Blarney; and is therefore necessary to be visited. . . .” (112).
John Barrow reports being encomaged by a guide to “kneel down and kiss [the stone]
three times” for the fill effect (335), while JonatMn Binns enrphasizes that he “indulged
[his] cmiosity by ascending the tower to see the magic stone,” rather than kiss it (2.317).
The legend makes its way into narratives for children, including Emily Taylor’s The Irish

Tourist (1837), which depicts a young boy who kisses the stone “and fincies he Ms ever

186

since felt a great propensity to flatter, or blarney, all whom he approaches” (121).
Georgiana CMtterton records her impressions of Blarney in Rambles in the South of
Ireland (1839); CMtterton had first visited the castle eight years before and contrasts this
visit with her previous one:

I had neglected to kiss this stone on my previous visit, because the
important ceremony could not be performd without the risk of filling
headlong down a height above a hundred feet; but in these days of
nurching intellects, and difl'usion or confision of knowledge, even the
privilege of being able to pay extravagant compliments is made of easy
attaimnent.

The stone Md, for the accommodation of visiters, been taken out of
the wall, where it used to project over the machicolations of the old high
tower, and now lies maimed and helpless, and looking very foolish, on the
Mttlements. (2.33)

Mr. and Mrs. Hall confirm this recent “accommodation,” although they insist that “It is
certain that to no particular stone of the ancient structme is the marvellous quality
exclusively attributed” (1.48).

These accounts demonstrate a certain trajectory in the process of ‘tourification.’
While the legend Md undoubtedly existed for centuries, it comes to prominence only when
the Irish realize that it will enable them to draw English tourists to Blarney. Although the
tourists are charmed by the legend, they beMve in a patronizing fishion toward the Irish
peasants who appear to believe the superstition (note that only English children are equally
susceptible). The Irish are firther willing to move the stone to make it easier for tourists
to access it; CMtterton perceives this as Ireland’s willingness to degrade its ruins and
renurks that the stone now looks “nuirned and helpless” and “foolish.” But wMt
CMtterton considers a lessening of the stone’s power is really quite the opposite; the Irish

Mve recognized its power-—not to create flatterers, but to attract tourists and their

187

money—and are willing to position themselves as others—as superstitious peasants, as
tour guides—in order to nuximize the benefits. Ultimately, the Irish demonstrate their
flexible subjectivity, their ability and desire to occupy the position of other in order to
maintainaculturaldistance betweenEnglandandIreland, inpartbydoirrg wMt theycan
to encourage English “home travellers” to think of Ireland as a tomist site, as “not-home.”
The rhetoric of tourism, combined with aestheticized descriptions of the Irish
landscape and anthropological examinations of Irish people, contributed to the growing
sense of distance between England and Ireland. Although travel itself collapsed the
distance between England and Ireland, between home and abroad, travel writing
successfully mediated that distance, allowing the English to construct ideas ofIreland and
the Irish that negotiated a delicate balance between Self and Other, while allowing the
Irish to manipulate the ways in which they presented themselves to the “strangers” fiom
across the Channel. The language of travel——predicated on the separation of “home” and
“abroad”——provided the means by which the Irish could be considered distant, despite
their close physical proximity and long-standing ties to Great Britain. In the next chapter,
we will see the ways in which other writers—novelists, in particular——use the idea of
travel to Ireland, and the related understanding of the distance between England and
Ireland, to figure other forms of difference as distance. Travel writing about Ireland Md
so successfully permeated the domestic sphere that “travel to Ireland” could be used in
domestic fiction to discuss other pressing metropolitan issues, namely the social divisions

between men and women, and between socioeconomic classes.

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CHAPTER 5

THE GOING AND “TI-IE NOT GOING” TO IRELAND:
TRAVEL, LITERATURE, AND TRAVEL LITERATURE

As we move toward the conclusion of this study, let us consider the impact tMt
travel to Ireland Md on British culture, as evidenced by the use of travel to Ireland as a
construct in Irish and English novels of the nineteenth century. The “interdependence of
fiction and actual travel narratives,” to use Karen Lawrence’s phrase, Ms been examined
in great detail by Percy Adams in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel and by
William Spengemam in The Adventurous Muse (Lawrence 23). These influential studies
explore the ways in which travel writing informed the genre of the novel with respect to
form, style, motif, and character, among other things. The “journey motif—real or
fictional——is still the most significant, whether geographical, spiritual, psychological, or
intellectual,” according to Adams, which explains one possible reason for the repeated
incursion of “travel” (and “travel literature”) into “literature” (Evolution 283-84). On the
other Mnd, James Buzard notes “the embeddedness of many literary works in the
situations and imagery of tourism” (13). The numerous references to literary works within
travel writing, and the empMsis on travel and travel writing in literary works,
demonstrates the intercomectedness of these genres, as well as the intercomectedness of
their readers and writers. As we Mve seen in previous chapters, travel writers read and
relied upon one another for infornution about Ireland; however, some travellers also
acknowledge the influence of fiction and fiction writers on their travel narratives. Most

travellers incorporated a trip to Edgeworthtown, the home of Irish novelist Maria

189

Edgeworth, into their itinerary. Anne Plumptre, herselfa novelist, passes the time during
a long and dificult crossing of the Irish CMnnel reading 0 ’Donnel, A National Tale, by
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (Plumptre 9). Travel writing as a genre turned
increasingly toward the elements of fiction, leaving behind the more rigid eighteenth-
century conventions (Batten 80-81); the poem (e. g., Catherine Luby’s Spirit of the
Lakes), the short story (e. g. Emily Taylor’s The Irish Tourist), and the novel (e. g., W. H.
Maxwell’s Wild Sports of the West) became entertaining and popular means for conveying
at least some of the infornution about Ireland provided by the travel narrative. The
growing overlap between the travel narrative and the novel, the two most widely-read
genres in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, provides a point of
continuity between the examination of travel narratives in earlier chters and the
discussion of novels to follow. English and Irish novelists rely on their reader’s fimiliarity
with an Ireland rendered as “abroad”—distant, Other—by the rhetoric of travel; when
these novelists incorporate travel to Ireland in their fiction, they must operate within a
previously-established paradigm of distance-as-difference, as they attempt either to refute
or to reiterate the distance between England and Ireland.

Travel to Ireland became a narrative device in nineteenth-century Irish and English
novels. In Anthony Trollope’s The Macdermots of Ballycloran the narrator, in the
persona of the author, presents himselfas a traveller who learns the tale of the Macdermot
firnily fi'om the guard of the mail coach as he travels through the Irish countryside. The
implied author-as-narrator-as-traveller approach is an important deviation from previous

traveller-as-narrator accounts, which nuintained little or no apparent distance between the

190

person travelling and the person writing about those travels.l Here, the narrator of the
travels is obviously fictional, despite his self-identification with “the Author.”
Nevertheless, the narrator-as-traveller device presupposes a certain fimiliarity with travel
in Ireland, and the conventions of travel writing. Anthony Trollope travelled throughout
Ireland in his capacity as a surveyor for the Post Oflice in the 1840s; his Irish novels
displaynot onlyhis fimiliaritywiththelrishcountrysideandthelrishpeople, butalso the
Irish political environment, Irish novels, and English representations and
misrepresentations in various forms and venues, including travel writing.2

In his Autobiography, Trollope admits that he “had learned to think that Ireland
wasalandflowingwithfinandwhisky,inwhichirregularitywastheruleoflife, and
where broken heads were looked upon as honourable Mdges” (62), but he does not
explain how he had “learned” about these Irish stereotypes. The novels and tales of Irish
authors are one obvious source. As Robert Tracy argues in the introduction to the Oxford
edition of Macdermots, and elsewhere, Trollope makes reference to three Irish novelists

and their work in the course of the novel: CMrles Lever, Maria Edgeworth, and William

 

1The most significant departure fiom this pattern comes fiom another novelist, and
Trollope’s contemporary: William TMckeray. In Thackeray’s Irish Sketch Book, which
he published under his pseudonym, M. A. Titrnarsh, the traveller, in the persona of the
Cockney Tourist, finctions as a narrator of various scenes and tales. Not since the letters
of the “Two English Gentlemen” in 1746 had an English travel writer attempted to
construct such a self-conscious and self-evident separation between himself and the “I” of
his Irish travel narrative.

2Travel in Ireland, travel writing, and Irish fiction also Md an influence on
Thackeray’s work, as evidenced by his treatment of the Irish in Barry Lyndon and Vanity
Fair; however, TMckeray’s novels rely less on the device of travel to or in Ireland. This
fictor, combined with the limitations of time and Space, render an analysis of Thackeray’s
“Irish” novels outside the scope of this project.

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Carleton (xxii-iir). Tracy also notes the ways in which Trollope’s novel “echoes, responds
to, and to some extent parodies Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Gir ,” a novel we will
discuss in more detail below (xxiii). Tracy goes so fir as to claim that Macdermots
finctions as a realist rewriting of Morgan’s ronuntic tale of a dispossessed Irish fimily
whose only hope to regain their land is through marriage to an outsider of English origins
(xxiii-iv). The plot similarities are striking: The Macdermots of Ballycloran centers
around the three surviving members of the ancient Macdermot fimily—drunken and
demented Larry and his children, Thady and Feemy—who Mve built Ballycloran House as
a monument to their position but cannot afl‘ord to pay the mortgage with the meager rents
brought in by their property. Their only hope is through Feemy’s long-anticipated
nurriage to Captain Myles Ussher, an Anglo-Irishman whose position as a revenue oflicer
Msgarneredhirnfew fiiends amongthe impoverishedpeasantrywhorelyontheillegal
distillation and sale of potheen (whiskey) for their primary income. Ussher Ms no
intention ofmarrying Feemy, whom he regards as beneath him, despite her finrily name;
however,henunagesto persuadeherto runawaywithhimbypromising tomarryher
later. As Ussher leads Feemy away fi'om Ballycloran, her brother Thady, mistakenly
assumingthatUssheristakinghissisteragainstherwill, strikesUssherontheheadand
killshirn. Thadyissentencedto deathforthemmderostsher, Feemydiesinprenuture
labor brought onbythe stressostsher’s deathandTMdy’striaL andLarryloseshis
mind completely, leaving Ballycloran House to decay into the “tmnatural ruin” the

narrator-as-traveller discovers at the opening of the novel (5).

192

The novel clearly owes a great debt to Irish novels, and Lady Morgan’s Wild Irish
Girl in particular, but it also owes something to Trollope’s own travels in Ireland, and his
finriliarity with travel writing about Ireland. Ballycloran House, and the novel bearing its
name, Md been inspired by “the modern ruins of a country house” Trollope happened
upon while touring his new Irish neighborhood: Drurnsna, Co. Leitrirn (Autobiography
70). Arthur Young’s fimed Tour provides another important detail for the novel. Young
reports hearing of a “great fimily in Comacht,” the “MacDermot” fimily. The patriarch,
known as “the MacDermot,” “calls himself Prince of Coolavin. He lives at Coolavin in
Sligo, and, thoughhe Ms not above £100 a year, will not admit his children to sit down in
his presence” (Maxwell ed. 70). Much like Trollope’s fictional Larry Macdermot, this
“PrinceofCoolavin”attemptsto maintainhisstatusMsedonhisfimilyorigins, withlittle
wealth to support his position.3 Scholars of Trollope Mve assumed Trollope’s personal
fimiliaritywithlreland, withlrishfiction, andwithaccounts ofIreland provided inEnglish
newspapers, but Mve ignored the possibility of his fimiliarity with travel writing about
Ireland. Janet Egleson Dunleavy describes Trollope’s awareness of “the incidents
described in the newspapers” which “his countrymen read in their quiet English homes”
(“Trollope” 57), and claims that Trollope was sm'prised to discover that the Irish were
“not at all” wMt Irish novelists “Md led English readers to expect” (54), yet she never

mentions the possibility of other documentary sources for Trollope’s work, such as travel

 

3Robert Tracy’s introduction to Macdermots posits a comection to the Prince in
Morgan’s Wild Irish Girl, a cMracter also Msed on the real-life person of the
MacDermot, although he makes no mention of his appearance in Young’s travel narrative
(xxiv). Katie Trumpener discusses Young’s impression of the MacDermot briefly in
Bardic Nationalism (41). Neither Trumpener nor Tracy suggests that Yotmg nuy Mve
been a resource for Trollope’s creation of the Macdermot family.

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writing. Small wonder, since according to Dunleavy, “Ireland was a foreign country tMt
attracted few English tomists” (53).

Nevertheless, it seems clear that travel writing and the motif of travel in Ireland
inform Trollope’s first novel. The novel opens with the narrator/traveller’s arrival in
Drumsna for a brief stopover. After dinner, the traveller determines to take a walk,
oflermg a typical rationale for exploratory travels: “There is a kind of gratification in
seeing wMt one has never seen before, be it ever so little worth seeing; and the
gratification is the greater ifthe cMnces be that one will never see it again” (1).
Unbeknownst to the traveller, the demesne of Sir Gilbert King and other attractive sights
areeasilywithinwalkingdistance, but“Onecannotaskthemaidataninnto showone
where to find the beauties of nature,” and so the traveller sets out “along as dusty, ugly,
and disagreeable a road as is to be found in any county in Ireland” (2). Such details render
the traveller a savvy tomist, who resists the typical attractions, such as “the nuid at an
inn” might recommend, and instead sets out along a rural road, away fi'om the “beaten
track.” At the end of this road, the traveller Mppens upon a “cMracteristic specimen of
Irish life,” the ruin of Ballycloran House (5), and when he reboards the mail coach, he asks
the guard “if he knew anything of a place called Ballycloran.” The guard regales the
narrator/traveller with the story that becomes The Macdermots of Ballycloran, but the
narrator prefices his retelling with this remark:

. . . reader, if I thought it would ever be your good fortune to hear the

history of Ballycloran fi'om the guard of the Boyle coach, I would
recommend you to get it from him, and shut my book forthwith (7)

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With this nod to the touted storytelling ability of the native Irish, Trollope also recognizes
theimmed'ucy suppliedbytravel, theopportunityto experiencethe siglrtsandhearthe
stories for oneself, an immediacy not available to readers of travel narratives, or of
novels.4

Although Trollope quickly aMndons the device of the narrator-as-traveller for the
advantages offered by an omniscient narrator (see Wittig 101), he retains many other
elements of the English-authored Irish travel rurrative, including political commentary,
agricultural information, and detailed descriptions of domestic environments; his
descriptions of peasant cabins in particular rival those of English travellers (see 125-27).
Robert Tracy notes in his introduction that “Chapter XVI], ‘Sports of the West,’ pays
tribute, in title and action, to William Maxwell’s Wild Sports of the West” (xxiii), a novel
that, like Macdermots, relies on the device of the travel narrative and the narrator-as-
traveller as a flame for its action. And two of the three chapters Trollope removed fi'om
the novel in his 1860 revisions include an account of travel through Ireland, as Father
John, the parish priest, goes to Dublin to secure representation for My at his trial. In
these chapters, Trollope describes the experiences of travelling through Ireland via
coach—surrounded by the sometimes barren landscape and numerous other passengers,
one of whom is identified as “a touring Londoner” (639). The nuil coach guard is quick
to point out “to the Englishman” the residence of Maria Edgeworth and other tourist

sights along the way (642); when Father John arrives in Dublin he experiences the all-too-

 

‘In fict, Troll0pe’s novel contains an implicit critique of the use of novels as a
means of escaping the Mrsh realities of life. F eemy is fiequently depicted as alone with
“her novels and her trash” (62), and fintasizes that Myles Ussher is the dashing hero in a
gothic novel (242). Unfortunately for Feemy, Ussher more closely resembles the villain.

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fimiliar press of poverty-stricken boys offering to help him with his luggage and guide him
through the city. Trollope Md certamly experienced these elements of travelling in Ireland
fist-Mnd, but his descriptions suggest a close familiarity with the writings of other
travellers and an mderstanding of the expectations travel writing had created among the
English novel-reading public.

Trollope clearly intends an English audience, supplying information and
explanations for “those who do not know the country” (48; see also 37, 253). In a sense,
Trollope’s novel participates in what Seamus Deane has called “one of the most
cMracteristic defects of Irish fiction—its devotion to the representation of Irish life for the
purpose of educating an English audience to a proper sense of its realities” (“Fiction and
Politics” 77); like Irish novelists, Trollope “set out to display Irish fict” and found himself
“producing Irish fiction” (81). Scholars of Trollope’s work Mve noted a growing
ambivalence toward Ireland in the course ofhis Irish novels and in his representation of
Ireland and the Irish in his other novels, arguing that “Trollope’s vision ofIreland became
increasingly more distanced as time passed” (Wittig 109). “Only in The Macdermots which
rose fi'om Trollope’s first contact with Irish life and reflected his initial openness to the
impact of that life upon him, was be able to create moving and valid Irish cMracters,”
claims E. G. Wittig (118). Wittig concludes that Trollope was “essentially a foreigner [in
Ireland] despite his long residence there,” and this sense of alienation resulted in a
paternalistic attitude toward and stereotyped depiction of the Irish However, Trollope’s
irubility to write about Ireland may in fict Mve been the result of his increased fimiliarity

with Ireland. When William Thackeray began his Irish Sketch Book, he wrote a letter to

196

his mother voicing his apprehensions: “I am beginning to find that a man ought to be forty
years in [Ireland] instead of three months, and then he wouldn’t be able to write about it”
(qtd. in Brewer 267). Kenneth Brewer’s explication of Thackeray’s somewMt ambiguous
statement seems applicable to Trollope and to the numerous other travellers to Ireland
who penned narratives: “the very brevity of the visit—three months—is what allows the
English visitor to write about Ireland. A longer stay—forty years—would paralyze the
writer because he would realize tMt Ireland was too complex to be adequately
represented” (267). Trollope lived and worked in Ireland for several years and knew, or
came to know, the perils of attempting to represent Ireland. His ability to create “the
moving and valid Irish characters” of Macdermots may Mve been a result of his relatively
brief exposure to Ireland; his growmg “ambivalence” toward Ireland, noted by Wittig and
others, may in fict be the paralysis occasioned by increased firniliarity. Maria Edgeworth
expresses a similar reservation toward continuing to depict Ireland in her novels: “It is
impossible to draw Ireland as she is now in the book of fiction—realities are too strong,
party passions too violent, to bear to see, or care to look at their fices in a looking glass”
(qtd. in Deane, “Politics” 84). In short, the “Irish novel” was written in response to a
prolonged relationship and intimate firniliarity between the author and the subject matter,
circumstances that ultimately problematized representation. However, the travel
narrative—predicated on brevity and a lack of fimiliarity with the culture being
depicted——presented no such obstacles. The idea of travel and the conventions of travel

writing provided a way to talk about Ireland when other means failed.

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Two groups of novelists use this form of “Irish travel writing” to very difiermt
ends, and the remainder of this chter will be devoted to their work. The first group,
nineteenth-century Irish novelists, use the character of a travelling Englishman to urge a
reconsideration of Irish identity and of Ireland’s relationship with Great Britain. Travel to
Ireland is presented as a voyage of discovery, one that will reveal to English travellers and
readers a nation and a people that Mve been misrepresented and misunderstood. The
second group of writers, however, present and dismiss the possibility of going to Ireland;
these nineteenth-centtny English novelists use the idea of travel to Ireland to address
issues of imperialism, gender, and alterity. Just as Irish writers use ‘going to Ireland,’
English writers use the construct of ‘not going to Ireland’ to draw their readers’ attention
to important issues. In each case, “travel to Ireland” becomes a means for exploring or
exploiting cultural distance: for Irish writers, travel to Ireland can be used to demonstrate
the difference between “real” Ireland and the Ireland of British stereotype; for English
writers, travel to Ireland can be used to figure the distance between members of diverse
social classes and between men and women—in terms of power and the potential for self-
determination——in the first halfof the nineteenth century in Britain In either case,
distance registers as the dominant paradigm for understanding the relationship between
England and Ireland, and, by extension for understanding other social relationships.

Let us begin with two novels by prominent Irish writers: Sydney Owenson’s Wild
Irish Girl (1806) and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812). The two authors were
roughly contemporaries. Edgeworth was born in England in 1767 or 1768 to a prominent

Anglo-Irish Ascendancy firnily; she first went to Ireland in 1773 and subsequently spent

198

much of her adult life there. Her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), is still her most
widely known work, and it is generally considered the first regional novel. She died in
1849. Sydney Owenson is believed to Mve been born in 1776; she “liked to claim that she
was born while her English mother was crossing the Irish Channel to meet her Irish father”
(Lew, “Fate of Empire” 39). She wrote numerous novels on Irish subjects, but The Wild
Irish Girl nude her a celebrity, and it is the novel for which she is most known today. In
1812, Owenson nurried Sir Charles Morgan and thereafter published her works under the
name “Lady Morgan.” She died in 1859. Both writers negotiated and constructed their
“Irishness” very carefilly. As Sydney Owenson’s apocryphal tale of her birth suggests,
she saw herselfas a border crosser, someone who did not fit neatly into a purely “Irish” or
purely “Englis ” identity, although she was intensely patriotic about issues of Irish
nationalism. Similarly, Maria Edgeworth saw herselfas “fiiend” to Ireland, but not
necessarily “Iris ” and her work repeatedly reveals her ambivalence about the ability of
the Anglo-Irish colonizers to speak for the native Irish people. And as women, they
recognized that their social position was already precarious and peripheralized, without
the additional burden of embracing a marginalized cultural identity. Nevertheless, they
recognized the power of women’s writing in the process of constructing national identity.
“Politics can never be a wonun’s science; but patriotism must naturally be a woman’s
sentiment,” claimed Owenson (Patriotic Sketches ix). In The Wild Irish Girl and The
Absentee, Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth set out to explore the complicated issue

of cultural identity, and both use the construct of the traveller to do so.5

 

’Owenson and Edgeworth are not the only Irish novelists to use what Heinz Kosok
has labeled the “travel-book pattern”; nor are The Wild Irish Girl and The Absentee the

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A brief plot summary of the novels in question may be usefil here. The Wild Irish
Girl is an epistolary novel that relates the adventures of a yomg English nobleman,
Horatio M—, whose dissipated lifestyle in London Ms caused his fither to Mnish him to
the finrily estate in Ireland. Although initially dismissive of Irish cultm'e, Horatio soon
discovers an ancient ruin on his fither’s property, ianited by a poor Irishnun who
identifies himself as “The Prince,” his daughter Glorvina, and a priest. Captivated by
Glorvina, Horatio assumes the identity of a travelling artist, calling himself Henry
Mortimer. A minor accident enables “Henry” to stay with the fimily as he recuperates,
and as he grows closer to Glorvina, he develops a synrpathetic appreciation for Irish
culture and for the Irish people his own ancestors Md dispossessed. When he receives a
letterfi'omhisfither,informinghirnthathisfitheriscomingtolrelandandbringinga
bride forhisson, Horatio realizesthathewantsonlyto marryGlorvina,who isbetrothed
to a mysterious stranger. The clinux of the novel comes when Horatio interrupts
Glorvina’s nurriage to the stranger, only to discover tMt the stranger is his fither. When
Horatio’s fither sees his son’s genuine affection for Glorvina and her fimily, he releases
Glorvina to marry his son and turns his Irish estate over to his son’s nunagement, so that

the land will no longer suffer fiom the devastation of absenteeism.

 

only novels by Owenson and Edgeworth to use the traveller in Ireland as a central
cMracter. In his essay “Discovering an Alternative Culture: The Travel-Book Pattern in
the Nirreteenth-Century Irish Novel,” Kosok also identifies works by CMrles Lever,
Charles Robert Mann-in, and Mrs. S. C. Hall as containing elements of this pattern. Katie
Trumpener includes a similar list of authors and works in Bardic Nationalism (303, note
10). I Mve chosen to consider The Wild Irish Girl and The Absentee because these works
are relatively well known, and their Msic similarities provide fruitful ground for a
comparative analysis of the uses of the “travel plot” in Irish fiction.

200

The Absentee, as one might guess fi'om the title, also has the persistent problem of
absenteeism at its center. Lord and Lady Clonhrony, their son Lord Colambre, and Lady
Clonhrony’s niece, Grace Nugent, Mve taken up residence in London, at prodigious
expense and with devastating results for the inhabitants oftheir Irish estates, largely
because the Anglo-Irish Lady Clonhrony fears the loss of metropolitan cultmal identity
inherent in life on the periphery. Although Lord Colambre (who is secretly in love with
his cousin, but denies his afiection because his mother has a strong opposition to nurriage
between cousins) Ms not lived in Ireland since he was six year old, he believes that his
fimily will be Mppier in Ireland, so he sets out on a tour through Ireland, incognito.
Thereheobservesfirsthandthe horrors ofabsenteeismandtheirnportance ofanhonest
agent. Whenheretumsto England,he1eamsthatafinancialcrisisMsplacedhisfamilyin
unfortunate circumstances, a situation that enables him to persuade them that they are
needed on their Irish estates. Meanwhile, Colambre also discovers the real identity of
Grace’s parents and reveals that she is in fict an Englishwoman of considerable wealth,
and not his poor cousin, freeing the way for their nurriage. The novel ends on a note of
anticipation—the fimily has just returned to their Irish estate, and the proposed nurriage
betweenLord ColambreandGraceNugentMsnot yet takenplace, butthefutureappears
to be bright, both for the finrily and for Ireland.

There are clear parallels between the two novels. Both use the device of the
traveller in disguise to reveal to their Largely English audience a hidden or previously
misrepresented Ireland. Both use the marriage plot to figure and to comment on the union

between Britain and Ireland. They manage their travel plots and marriage plots in distinct

201

ways, however, as we leI see below—ways which suggest important difierences
between the two novels. Owenson’s novel can only be described as romantic: the
charactersarepresentedasyeaming foramythic GaelicpasttMtMsbeenlargely
eliminated by their colonial oppressors. This romanticized Gaelic culture provides a Msis
for the construction ofa national identity, an Irish identity retained in the face ofpolitical
union with Britain. Owenson’s pro-Irish position is made clear fi'om the start: her novel is
subtitled “A National Tale.” Edgeworth’s novel, by contrast, seems profoundly
ambivalent about the desirability of an Irish national identity; “Britishness” is figured in her
text as the ideal melding of the best of English and Irish cultmes. In his introduction to
the Oxford edition of the novel, W. J. McCornuck describes The Absentee as “an anti-
romantic novel (in tone, plot, morality, etc.) written in fivom' of romance and
ronunticism” (xlii), suggesting the comparative complexity of Edgeworth’s position vis-a-
vis Owenson. Despite these differences, however, the two novels are unified by their use
of travel (and marriage) as a means for exploring this complicated issue of national
identity. Let us now examine their use of the travel plot in more detail.

The Wild Irish Girl begins with a series of letters between Horatio and his fither,
the Earl of M—, in which the Earl amounces that he Ms decided to “banish” Horatio to
his Irish estate in the hopes that “amidst the wild seclusion ofConnaught scenery, and on
the solitary shores of the ‘steep Atlantic,’” Horatio will Mve little to do but study for his
intended profession of law (6). Horatio admits, in a letter to “J. D.” (to whom the
renuinder of the letters that make up the body of the novel are addressed), that he wishes

his fither’s ‘inercy Md flowed in any other cMmel,” that because the Irish are only “semi-

202

Mrbarous, semi-civilized,” they lack the interest of the truly savage ianitants of Siberia,
“a South-Sea Island,” or “an Esquirnaux hut” (10). As Kathryn Kirkpatrick observes in
her introduction to the novel, cultural contact between the colonizing English and the
colonized Irish Ms molded the Irish into subjects less Merous, but also less exotic than
the colonizer might desire: “Horatio reveals that the process of colonization, of
transforming the other into the inuge of the self, destroys the other’s usefilrress as an
object of tomism” (xv-xvi). And Horatio has been accustomed to think of the Irish as
“objects of tourism”; in his first letter fiom Ireland, he admits that his impression of the
Irish Md been initially Msed on the Elizabethan-era travel writings of Fynes Moryson:
I remember, when I was a boy, meeting somewhere with the quainfly
written travels of Moryson through Ireland, and being particularly struck
withhisassertion, that so lateasthedaysofElizabeth, anlrishchieftain
and his fimily were frequently seen seated round their domestic fire in a
state of perfect nudity. This singular anecdote (so illusnative of the
MerityoftheIrishat aperiod whencivilizationMdnude sucha
wonderful progress even in its sister countries), fastened so strongly on my
boyish imagination, that whenever the Irish were mentioned in my
presence, an Esquimaux group circling romd the fire which was to dress a
dinner, or broil an enemy, was the image which presented itselfto my mind;
and in this trivial source, I believe, originated that early formed opinion of
Irish ferocity, which has since been nurttned into a confirmed prejudice.
(13)
Far from a “trivial source,” travel writing Ms inspired Horatio’s prejudice, and Ms
proMbly been a fictor in the confirmation of that prejudice. The Irish of the travel
narrative are the Merous and exotic others Horatio Ms learned both to resist and to
desire—primitive, naked, even canmbalistic. Horatio, who is to travel to the “wild west”
of Ireland, the province of Connaught, feels “the strongest objection to becoming a

resident in the remote part of a country which is still sMken by the convulsions of an

203

anarchical spirit,” a region ianited, “as we are still taught to believe,” by men who are
“tm'bulent, fiithless, intemperate, and cruel” (13). Despite his previously professed regret
that the Irish are only “semi-Merous” and “semi-civilized,” Horatio exposes an
awarenessofthepossibifitythauat leastinComaught,theIrishmightstillfimctionas
appropriate, if dangerous, others. I

Horatio lands in Dublin and finds himself “pleasantly astonished” by the beauty of
the My of Dublin, which he overhears being compared to the My of Naples, a comparison
he camot vouchsafe as accurate (13-14). The Irish boatnun speaks “in English at least as
pure and correct as a TMmes boatman would use,” and Horatio is “at a loss how to
reconcile such civilization of nunner to such ferocity of appearance”; a fellow traveller
assures him that the Irish can indeed be “tmcivilized” ifpoorly treated (l4-15). Horatio
quickly learns that Irish “otherness” has largely been a construction, produced by English
misrepresentation and ill-treatment. “So much for my voyage across the Channel!”
exclaims Horatio, expressing his perception of the collapsing distance between hirnselfand
the Irish (15). He acknowledges that his “prejudices Mve received some mortal strokes,”
but insists tMt the traveller camot expect to find a “genuine” expression of ‘hational
cMracter and nunner” in Dublin and reiterates that in Comaught he “lel Mve a fiir
opportunity of beholding the Irish cMracter in all its primeval ferocity” (16, 17). In a few
short pages, Owenson Ms introduced a number of conventions of travel writing about
Ireland—the obligatory comparison between the My of Dublin and the My of Naples, the
beMvior of the Irish boatrnen, the misleading cMracter of the metropolis, as well as the

fimed excesses of Irish hospitality and the difficulties of travelling in an Irish post-chaise.

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As the novel continues, we are introduced to numerous other elements of travel through
Ireland made fimiliar by previous travel nanatives: the Catholic religion, the “Irish howl,”
inns that promise “good dry lodging”; when Horatio first sees the ruin of the Castle of
Inisnrore ianited by Glorvina and her family, Owenson provides a footnote mging
readers to inugine another Irish ruin, one made fimiliar by travel and travel writing, “the
Castle of Dunluce, near the Giants’ Causeway” (45).

Owenson’s awareness of travel writing is unquestionable; quotations fiom Bush,
Young, and other prominent travel writers pepper Owenson’s extensive footnotes to the
novel, which scholars Mve designated its ‘paratext.”‘S In his essay “How The Wild Irish
Girl Made Ireland Romantic,” Joep Leerssen considers the “travel description” to be one
of the three major textual traditions that influence Owenson’s novel (including its
paratext), acknowledging that “the way in which the story is set up [a series of letters to
an English fiiend describing Horatio’s experiences in Ireland] recalls the travel
description” (1 11-12). Although Leerssen initially rejects the epistolary form as “ill-
fitting” (100), it becomes an essential element in the process of reMbilitating Ireland in
English eyes. The letters allow for a protagonist who “begins in ignorance”; according to
Joseph Lew, the “deconstruction of Horatio’s early ignorance about and prejudices against
the Irish provides an empathetic model for a simifir deconstruction on the part of
Horatio’s intended reader, J. D., as well as for the larger audience of the published novel”

(53; see also Kosok 82). The epistolary form invokes the travel narrative and reiterates

 

“That is, “all typographical material which, while not forming part of a text,
surrounds it: title, page numbers, chter headings, blurb, illustrations, footnotes, etc.”
(Leerssen, “Ronuntic” 102, note 2).

205

the process of discovery so essential to Owenson’s attempt to reMbilitate Ireland through
her novel.

But for all its structural and thematic similarities to the travel narrative, does
Owenson’s novel take the reader to an Ireland tMt exists anywhere beyond the pages of
The Wild Irish Girl? Leerssen claims that the novel “often becomes a sort of tomist’s
guide to Ireland, the cMrms of the Irish landscape, the pleasant and pathetic cMracter of
the poor but honest Irish peasant, the impressive and fiscinating history and
antiquity—and not in the last place, the great cultural acconrplishments of Ireland” (100).
Ina Ferris argues that the national tale uses travel to relocate “the scene of cultmal
encounter, confounding the distinction between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’ in order to
move the modern metropolitan subject/reader into a potentially transformative relation of
proximity” (288). This ‘problematic proximity” places the colonizer in a lirninal position
between “foreigner” and “tourist,” a position Ferris designates as the “stranger” (294).
The stranger Ms not yet made up his mind and looks to the culture being encomtered to
determine his response, according to Ferris. Ferris’ argument might be more persuasive if
all English travellers to Ireland did not descnhe themselves as “strangers,” even as they
beMved as invasive “foreigners” and “tomists.” Owenson does not attenrpt to “confound
the distinction between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’”; rather, she attempts to reify that

distinction by reMbilitating Ireland’s Gaelic alterity.7 The Irish of The Wild Irish Girl are

 

7According to Luke Grhbons, the Scottish Enlightenment Md tried to put distance
between itself and Gaelic culture by projecting it into a distant past via the language of
romanticism; ultimately, Britishness came to be defined in opposition to Celticism and
Gaelic culture. However, the United Irishmen were not content to relegate Gaelic cultme
tothepastortheinugirury, and sotheyset aboutto reMbilitate it, endorsingtheuseof
the Irish language and other aspects oftraditionally Gaelic culture (“United Irishmen and

206

walking anachronisrns; they dress in antiquated clothes, speak Irish, and recollect with
nostalgia a time when Ireland’s cultural contributions were venerated. The letters that
comprise the novel are dated 17—, indicating that Owenson wanted to draw attention to
the moment at which Ireland’s cultural identity Md begun to be revived, albeit by groups
with rutionalist agendas. Under such circumstances, pro-Gaelic sentiment might appear
threatening to an English reader, even in a post-Union world: after all, the 1798 Rebellion
hovers at the margins of the novel just as it continued to hover at the nurgins of England’s
historical consciousness; Horatio’s fither first appears at Inismore in a time of “civil
contention” and masquerades as “some unfortmute gentleman who Md attached himself
to the rebellious fiction of the day” (214). To minimize these negative associations with
Gaelic nationalism, Owenson borrows fiom the discourse of travel to provide a “tourist’s
guide” to an Ireland that might be, an Ireland desirous of nurntammg its distinctive
cultural cMracter but willing to be bound in union with England, as signified by Horatio

and Glorvina’s marriage at the end of the novel.8

 

Alternative Enlightenments”). In 1792, the United Irishmen met at the Belfist Mrper’s
festival, an event organized “to revive and perpetuate the ancient Music and Poetry of
Ireland,” according to contemporary circulars (Trumpener 10), and the United Irishmen
subsequently adopted the harp as their symbol. Gaelic culture was thus seen as the means
for retaining a distinctive national identity in the fice of subsuming “Britishness.” For an
alternative interpretation of the uses of “Romantic Ireland” by Irish novelists, see Deane,
“Fiction and Politics” (80-81).

8An in-depth analysis of the nurriage plot of The Wild Irish Girl moves beyond the
fiamework of travel that informs this study; however, some comment on its significance to
the plot, and to critical conversations smrounding the novel, is required. Critics Mve
tended to describe the novel’s marriage plot as “unproblenutic” (Bellamy 63), although
some Mve focused on Glorvina’s “convulsive shriek” and subsequent speechlessness
(when Horatio bursts in upon Glorvina and Lord M— as they are about to be married) as
evidence of Glorviru’s reluctance to participate in a marriage described in the novel as
“prophetically typical of a national unity of interests and affections between those who

207

In The Absentee, Maria Edgeworth also uses travel as a means of rehabilitating
Irish cultural identity, but with more ambivalent results. Rather than forming the frame for
the narrative, travel to Ireland takes up only a portion of the plot of The Absentee. A third
of the way through the novel, Lord Colambre announces to his fimily that he intends to
travel to Ireland to “become acquainted with it” (73). The son of Anglo-Irish absentees,
Colambre Ms been educated in England and at the start of the novel has just arrived in
London from Cambridge. A self-described “British noblenun” (21), Colambre exemplifies
the ideal melding of English and Irish character traits:
The sobriety of English good sense mixed most advantageously with Irish
vivacity: English prudence governed, but did not extinguish, his Irish
enthusiasm. But, in fict, English and Irish had not been invidiously
contrasted in his mind: he Md been so long resident in England, and so
intimately connected with Englishmen, that he was not obvious to any of
the commonplace ridicule thrown upon I-Irbemians; and he Md lived with
men who were too well informed and hberal to misjudge or depreciate a
sister country. (6)
He claims that he does not know that prejudice against the Irish exists, at least “not among
well-informed, well-bred people” (16). His mother’s attempts to disguise or dismiss her
Irishness are nurked as “unnatural” and cause her to be the object of ridicule in London

high society. Colambre’s exposure to his mother’s acquaintances’ cruelty, and his own

 

may be fictiously severe, but who are naturally alli ” (250). Lord M—’s view of the
outcome of the marriage is even more troubling: “In this the dearest, most sacred, and
most lasting of all human ties, let the names of Inismore and M— be inseparably blended,
and the distinctions of English and Irish, of protestant and catholic, for ever buried” (250).
The equivocations tMt exist in the closing pages of the novel clearly leave the text open to
deconstruction and leave the author open to charges of ambivalence. However, I would
argue that the preponderance of the text is devoted to advocating English appreciation for
the distinctiveness of Gaelic culture, and that Owenson Md no intention of endorsing a
marriage, or any other union, premised on the inseparable blending and burying of cultural
distinctions.

208

rehrctance to be identified as an absentee, inspire him to travel to Ireland and to discover
the country and the people for himself, despite his mother’s insistence that travel in Ireland
doesn’t give “a gentleman a travelled air, or any thing of that sort” (196). Colambre
travels to Ireland essentially as an Englishman, an unknowing outsider, much like The
Wild Irish Girl’s Horatio M—, albeit without Horatio’s anti-Irish prejudice.

Colambre’s cMotic landing at the My of Dublin echoes the negative depiction
provided by countless travel narratives: “instantly be found himself surrounded and
attacked by a swarm of beggars and harpies with strange figures and stranger tones . . .”
(80).9 However, he soon nukes the acquaintance of an Englishman, Sir James Brooke,
whose knowledge of “different representations and misrepresentations of Ireland,”
inchrding travel narratives, has been accompanied by long residence in various parts of the
country. These fictors enable Brooke to “direct the attention of our young observer
[Colambre] at once to the points most worthy of his examination, and to save him fiom
the common error of travellers—the deducing general conclusions from a few particular
cases, or arguing from exceptions, as if they were rules” (81-82). Colambre’s previous
acquaintance with Ireland has been Msed prirrurily on depictions provided by his parents,
but when he arrives in Dublin he does “not find that either his fither’s or his mother’s
representations . . . resembled the reality which he now beheld” (82). Pleased with Dublin,
and cMrmed by the scenic beauties of County Wicklow (87), Colambre believes that his
further travels will only confirm his prior good opinion of Ireland and Irish society. When

Sir James is called away on business, a London acquaintance of Lady Clonhrony’s, Lady

 

9Kim Walker’s textual note to this passage directs the reader specifically to Sir
John Carr’s Stranger in Ireland for the purposes of comparison (297).

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Dashfort, steps into his place. She too offers to show Colambre “the country—not the
fice of it, but the body of it-—the people” (102). However, she secretly hopes that
Colambrewillnurryherdaughterand, becausesbedislikesthethought ofherdaughter
being “Mnished to Ireland,” she determines “to nuke the Irish and Ireland ridiculous and
contemptible to lord Colambre; to disgust him with his native country; to make him
aMndon the wish of residing on his own estate” (105). Colambre initially joins Lady
Dashfort in her mockery of Ireland, but when her nuchinations are exposed, he vows to
continue his tour, “seeing with his own eyes, and judging with his own understanding, of
the country and its ianitants” (128-29). He travels incognito, wearing sMbby clothing
and assuming the identity of a Welshman, although his voice soon reveals him as a
gentleman (129, 139). He describes himselfand is described by the Irish people variously
as English and Welsh (but never Irish)——a conflation of identities that does not bode well
for Ireland’s ability to maintain an individuated national identity under the Union.
Nevertheless, his disguise allows him to observe and contrast the Colambre estate, well-
managed by a Mr. Burke, and the Clonhrony estate, rackrented by the devilish “old Nick”
Garraghty; Colambre’s true identity is revealed when he steps in to stop the eviction of a
peasant fimily on the Clonhrony estate (172-73). Shortly thereafter, he returns to London
to persuadehisfimilyto returnto Ireland andmanage theirproperty more directlyand
fiirly.

Like Owenson, Edgeworth uses “the journey of an initially uncomprehending
stranger in Ireland to orchestrate stories of national discovery”; her audience is “distant

and differently situated,” and thus the form of the travelogue provides a special, and

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particularly appropriate, form of access to Ireland (Trumpener 61, 60). Even as
Edgeworth sets out to rehabilitate Ireland in English eyes, however, Colambre hopes to
reMbilitate Ireland in Irish eyes. His decision to travel to Ireland is primarily inspired by a
search for self-identity. As Liz Bellamy argues, “[t]he Anglo-Irish exist in a cultural no-
man’s land, rejected by the English for their Irishness, and by the Irish for their
Englishness. . . . [While] in relation to the peasantry, the Anglo-Irish might be seen to
constitute a class of colonial exploiters, in relation to the English they could be seen as the
colonised—an alien other sharing much of the culture and assumptions of their tenantry”
(61, 62). Lord Clonhrony is described by his wife’s acquaintances as “nothing, nobody,”
and Lady Clonhrony openly fears the loss of identity inherent in the ambiguity of the
Anglo-Irish position: “one gets . . . a notion, one’s nobody out of Lon’on” (Absentee 2,
202). A peasant on the Clonhrony estate explains to the disguised Lord Colambre that
Lord Clonhrony is “at home [i.e., in England]——that is, . . . not at honre [in Ireland],” a
phrase emblematic of the Anglo-Irish identity conflict. Only Lord Colambre, for all intents
and purposes an Englishman, and Grace Nugent, a self-proclaimed “fiiend to Ireland,”
who, like Colambre, combines the best of English and Irish characteristics, escape the
social abrogation that results fi'om the marginalized position occupied by most Anglo-
Irish. When Grace and Colambre are eventually freed to marry one another, their own
identities Mve been questioned and qualified to such a degree that it becomes problematic
to claim that their marriage figures the Union between England and Ireland. Grace

Nugent, whose very name marks her as Irish,” is revealed to be English, and thus not

 

”“Grace Nugent” is the title of a famous Irish ballad by the renowned Irish harper,
Carolan. As W. J. McCormack demonstrates, Maria Edgeworth could Mve learned the

211

Colambre’s cousin; whenshewasbelievedto beIrish, hernurriage to Colambrewas
proln'bited, most likely on the grounds of incest (42), suggesting that a ‘tnarriage”
betweenIrelandandEnglandmight also breakataboo bycollapsing long-standingand—
particularly to the English—necessary distinctions. The nurriage that will ultimately take
place'1 tmifies England and Anglo-Ireland; Ireland is written out of the picture entirely.
But to the degree that Colambre does represent “Ireland” in the novel, his desire
(and indeedability) to identifyhimselfwithlrelandisMsedinpartontheficttMtthe
Ireland he finds during his travels is not, for the most part, the ronunticized (and
nationalistic) Ireland owaenson and other Irish writers. Rather, it is an Ireland in need
of the guiding Mnd of Anglo-Irish landlords. Once Colambre represents this “real”
Ireland to his fimily, they begin to refer to Ireland as “home,” using the term seven times
in a few pages (200-202). Their eagerness to return “home,” however, is countered in the

text by indications that Ireland continues to figure as “absence” to their English fiiends

 

legend of Grace Nugent from any one of a variety of contemporary sources, including
Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl (see “The Tradition of Grace Nugent,” p. 276-81 in The
Absentee). In any case, the name resonates with the connotations of a romantic, Gaelic
Ireland elsewhere rejected by Edgeworth, indicating that Grace is to some extent meant to
represent this Ireland to readers.

1'The novel ends, as does The Wild Irish Girl, with a letter that anticipates the two
protagonists’ pending nuptials. This “technical departure fiom nineteenth-century
convention” highlights the significance of the omission of the marriage fiom the text
(Dunleavy, “Maria Edgeworth” 63). Seamus Deane argues that, for Edgeworth, “the
nurriage [between the aristocratic and the utilitarian spirit], however desirable, is
impossible” (“Fiction and Politics” 89-90), and the novel itself suggests that the
marriage/union between Ireland and England may not even be desirable on all sides.
Ireland Ms traditionally been figured as “an inrpoverished wonun, raped and betrayed by a
wealthy nobleman, who symbolises England” (Bellamy 64), and as Grace herself observes,
when women marry “they Mve not always the liberty of choice, and therefore they can’t
be expected to Mve always the power of refisal” (Edgeworth, Absentee 247).

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and acquaintances: Mr. Reynolds (Grace Nugent’s newly-found grandfither) intends to
visit his granddaughter but Ms trouble remembering the names of the Clonhronys’ Irish
estates—asituationmadeallthemore ironicbythefictthatthepropertiesandtheir
towns, bear the titles of their owners (253). Ultirrutely, the fimily members will lose some
aspect of their identity whether they choose to stay in England or retmn to Ireland.
Edgeworth’s novel demomtrates what the narratives of so many English travellers Md
revealed and would continue to reveal: travel ultimately cannot overcome—and in some
instances, empMsizes—thedistancebetweenEnglmdandIreland,andtheEnghshandthe
Irish

The distance between England and Ireland comes to represent other constructed
distances in English novels of the about same period. As Joseph Lew notes, “Ireland was
present largely as an absence” in English literature (44), and we will now turn to two
canonical English novels, Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) and CMrlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre
(1847), that call attention to the perils ofabsence by introducing and then rejecting the
possrbility of travel to Ireland. Travel to Ireland appears only briefly in these two novels,
but, as Georges Van Den Abbeele Ms so persuasively argued, seemingly “idle statements
on travel in a writer’s discourse allow . . . for the elaboration of a critical discomse of
considerable force” (Metaphor xxiii). Similarly, in Culture and Imperialism Edward Said
advocates careful reading of metropolitan-produced texts in order to locate those narrative
moments, those minute details tlut “enabled, encouraged, and otherwise assured the
West’s readiness to assume and enjoy the experience of empire” (80). These two

approaches reveal the importance of previously marginalized or ignored textual details. If,

213

as Said Ms so persuasively demonstrated, the mention of Antigua in Austen’s Mansfield
Park reveals the extent to which activities of the empire permeated and undergirded the
activities of English domestic space, then what might the mention of travel to Ireland in
other novels reveal? As we lel see, the distance between England and
Ireland—emphasized by travel writing and figmed in other texts by the trope of
travel—comes to stand in for the distance between men and women, particularly men and
women of different social classes.

Several scholars Mve analyzed the influence of gender on both travel and empire.
Karen Lawrence argues in Penelope Voyages that the trope of travel presupposes a nule
traveller “who crosses boundaries and penetrates spaces,” spaces typically nupped as
“female” or “feminine” (2). Similarly, the empire was fiequently coded as “feminine.”
Patrick Cohn Hogan claims that colonial cultures attributed more positive, “masculine”
qualities to themselves, while “indigenous cultures were seen as feminine or efl‘eminate”
(88). Alison mat and Gillian Rose make a related point in the introduction to their
collection of essays, Writing Women and Space: “the desire for colonial control was often
expressed in terms of sexual control” (10). Despite the persistent association of travel and
empire-building with the nusculine, women used both travel and empire to escape their
confinement within the female (domestic) sphere. Travel and travel writing provided “a
set of alternative models for women’s place in society” and “discursive space for women,”
according to Lawrence (18). Specifically, the enrpire provided an alternative to the
“circumscribing, oppressive, threatening” domestic space typically designated as the

female sphere, as the so—called redundant women of England fomd themselves needed on

214

the colonial periphery (Perera 42, 52). Gender also played a role in women’s critiques of
empire, as Susan Fraiman demonstrates in her important corrective to Said’s reading of
Jane Austen in Culture and Imperialism. Women writers’ sensitivity to the
nurginalization of women sometimes extended to the colonized (and feminized) people of
empire, as the “confluence of abolitionist and feminist discourses” suggests (Fraiman 812).
F rainun argues that Austen’s references to the slave trade in Antigua in Mansfield Park
are “fir less incidental and inadvertent than Said suggests” and that Austen uses those
references to slavery to call attention to the empire’s degradation of humanity (813). As
Austen’s and Bronté’s novels suggest, however, Ireland——nurginalized, colonized,
feminized—elicited little sympathy, and Ireland did not promise the opporttmity to
‘redress social inequalities” generally provided by the rest of the empire (Michie, Outside
the Pale 46). Instead, travel to Ireland constituted a move toward yet another, and even
less desirable, alterity than the one in which women existed at home.

Since Austen’s Mansfield Park has been the source of much scholarly discussion
about the incursion of the empire into the domestic, it seems only appropriate to begin our
consideration of Austen and Ireland with that controversial novel. Both Susan Fraiman
and Edward Said comment on the imperial implications of Fanny Price’s inability to “put
the map of Europe together” (Mansfield Park 54; Fraiman 814, Said 85). But Fraiman
reads beyond tMt particular sentence to consider the remainder of the Bertram cousins’
complaint about F amy’s lack of geographical knowledge:

“. . . Do you know, we asked her last night, which way she would go to get
to Ireland; and she said, she should cross to the Isle of Wight. She thinks

of nothing but the Isle of Wight, and she calls it the Island, as if there were
no other island in the world.” (Mansfield Park 54)

215

According to Fraiman, Fanny’s misapprehension of how to get to Ireland reveals to her
cousins “her Md sense ofdirection” (814). “On the other Mnd,” clainu Frainun,
Fanny’ s navigational mode as described in this passage is itself a rather
rmperializing one, for it begins and ends by fetishizing a single island. This
island not only Mppens to resemble Britain in its ability to eclipse others
such as Ireland and Antigua, leaving it the exclusive point of reference, but
bears a name suggesting the pseudoracial Msis for its priority. (815)
Fanny may be drawn toward the Isle of Wight, which lies in the English CMmel, in part
because it “bears a name suggesting the pseudoracial Msis for its priority”; however, as
readers we should recognize that the island for which she has mistaken it, the Isle of Man
(which lies in the Irish Channel), bears a name suggesting the gendered Msis of its priority.
Is Fanny prioritizing race over gender? mat and Rose claim that, “within colonial
contexts, constructions of racial superiority could overcome those of gender inferiority,
and thus [white] colonizing women could share in colonial discourses of power and
authority” (13). However, Frainun’s impulse to align Ireland and Antigua against the
exclusivity of Britain (and, by extension, the Isle of Wight) signifies the similarity of the
former’s marginalized, colonized positions. Fanny may be “fetishizing a single island,” but
she does so not just because ofthe desirability ofthat particular island, but because ofits
geographic positioning away from Ireland. Far fiom “bad,” Fanny’s sense of direction
leads her away fiom Ireland, toward the Continent; she Ms no intention of travelling to
Ireland, and all it represents in British consciousness, and thus she has no need to know
‘yvhich way she would go to get to Ireland.”

Austen develops this point more filly in her next novel, Emma, a text consumed by

the fine distinctions between social cusses. Just as “Antigua and the West Indies exist on

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the margins of Mansfield Park,” as Suvendrini Perera observes, Ireland exists on the
margins of Emma (49). In 183 7, Emily Taylor would acknowledge that Ireland was “but
another word for poverty, wretchedness, and destitution all the world over” (35), but
Austen anticipates this metaphoric relationship in her depiction of Jane Fairfix, the
orpMned, nurginalized, soon-to-be governess, who determines not to go to Ireland,
preferring instead to stay with her poor aunt and grandmother in Highbury. The reader is
first introduced to Jane Fairfix a third of the way through the novel. The daughter of the
late Jane Bates and Lieutenant Fairfix—who died “abroad,” presmrubly in the service of
empire—Jane Fairfax Md been taken in by a fiiend of her fither, Colonel Campbell, and
educated side-by-side with his daughter. When Miss Campbell marries a “rich and
agreeable young nun,” Mr. Dixon, who owns property in Ireland, the Campbell fimily
invites Jane to accompany them on their trip to visit their daughter and son-in-law in
Ireland (145-51). We learn that she Ms declined this proposition when Miss Bates tells
EmnutMt shehastaletter fi'omJane Fairfix, andthat Janewillsoonbejoiningher
fimily in Highbury. Miss Bates recomts the contents of the letter in her typically verbose
fishion:
“. . . The case is, you see, tMt the Canrpbells are going to Ireland. Mrs.
Dixon Ms persuaded her fither and mother to come over and see her
directly. They had not intended to go over till summer, but she is so
impatient to see them again—for till she married, last October, she was
never away from them so much as a week, which must make it very strange
to be in different kingdoms, I was going to say, but however difiermt
countries, and so she wrote a very urgent letter . . . to press their coming
over directly, and they would give them the meeting in Dublin, and take
them Mck to their country-seat, Balycraig, a beautifil place, I fincy. Jane
Ms heard a great deal of its beauty, from Mr. Dixon, I mean—I do not

know that she ever heard about it fiom any body else. . . . Jane was quite
longing to go to Ireland, fiom his account of things.” (141-42)

217

Yet, Jane chooses not to accompany the Campbells, and this “not going to Irefind”
arouses Emma’s suspicion that Jane may be attracted to her fiiend’s new husMnd (142);
as Emnu later observes to Frank ChinchilL “I am sure there must be a particular cause for
her chusing to come to Highbury instead of going with the Campbells to Ireland. Here,
shemustbeleadingalife ofprivationandpenance;there itwouldeebeenall
enjoyment” (195). While it is true that Jane’ life with her impoverished aunt and
grandmother stands in sharp contrast to the life of privilege she had enjoyed with the
Campbells, and most likely would Mve enjoyed in Ireland, Jane clearly recognizes the
potential for greater nurgirulization in Ireland. Miss Bates’ irudvertent description of
Ireland as a “different kingdom,” suggests its alien status in the eyes of the English, even
after the recent Act of Union Md rendered it merely a “difierent country.” Miss Bates
acknowledges that Jane has not heard about Ireland “fiom any body else,” revealing the
absence of Ireland from English consciousness. And finally, Miss Bates confesses that
they are glad that Jane has chosen to come and stay with them, “for we should not Mve
liked to Mve her at such a distance fiom us,” indicating that even the members ofthe
Bates fimily—others, in the eyes of Highbury—find Ireland to be too peripheral (142).
Jane, whose lot in life is to assume the socially-indeterminate role of governess, desires no
firther opportunities for nurginalization.

Jane Austen’s letters indicate that she knew people who travelled to and worked in
Ireland (Le Faye 18, 217); as well, she notes with pride that she is “read & admired in
Ireland too” (250). Nevertheless, in a letter to her niece, Anna, Austen reveals a certain

ambivalence toward Ireland. The letter, dated August 1814 (about the time Austen was

218

writing Emma), contains Austen’s response to a manuscript of her niece’s novel, a work
tentatively entitled Enthusiasm and featuring the activities of the Portrnan fimily.
Apparently, in the course of the novel (which was never published) the Portrnans
contemplate a trip to Ireland. Austen advises,
. . . we think you Md better not leave England. Let the Portrnans go to
Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Mamers there, you Md better not
go with them. You will be in danger of giving filse representations. Stick
to Bath & the Foresters [other characters in the novel]. There you will be
quite at home. (269)
Like Anna Austen, Jane doubtless knew very little of the “Manners” of Ireland and was
reluctant——imIike so nuny of her contemporaries—to give “filse representations.” Better
to stay “at home,” and descn'be what one knew intimately. Austen’s own reluctance, in
Emma, to represent Ireland and the Irish, confirms the position she emphasizes here—that,
while fictional characters might be sent to Ireland, the author should not attempt to “go
with them”—an authorial position that relegates Ireland, and the English people who
travelled there, to the nurgins of the novel. Ireland, even in English fiction, could never
be the center, could never be “home.”

Although the ironic voice of the novel’s narrator discomages readers fiom
admiring Ennru’s cruel teasing of her childhood fiiend Jane, there is nothing in the novel
to suggest tMt readers should distance themselves from the cultural distaste for Ireland
and things Irish that provides the meditnn for many ofEmma’s Mrbs. Emma is so
convinced of Jane’s infituation with Mr. Dixon, and so titillated by the scandalous
possibility that Mr. Dixon may be attracted to Jane, that she insinuates that Mrs. Dixon—a

plain, unmusical wonun, in contrast to Jane—should be grateful tMt “she is gone to settle

219

in Ireland” and is thus fir removed from the standard ofcomparison (181). Frank
Churchill even participates in Emma’s game of pairing Jane with Ireland (and thus, with
Mr. Dixon). At the dance, Frank remarks that Jane’s unusual hairstyle “must be a fincy of
her own” and determines to ask her ‘Vvhether it is an Irish fishion” (200). Jane’s
determination to collect her own mail daily at the post office, despite inclement weather,
almost drives Emma to make “an inquiry or two, as to the expedition and the expense of
the Irish mails” (269). And when the Campbells decide to stay longer in Ireland and
renew their invitation to Jane, which she again declines, Emnu is convinced that Jane
“must be under some sort of penance, inflicted either by the Campbells or herself” (256),
or else why would Jane repeatedly resist going to Ireland?

Jane’s musical abilities also link her with Ireland. When a pianoforte arrives at the
Bates house, sender unknown, it is accompanied by “a new set of Irish melodies,” perMps
Sydney Owenson’s Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, published in 1805, or some of
Thomas Moore’s lyric poetry set to traditional him music (see Leerssen, Remembrance
76-77). Jane’s first performance is Robin Adair, an Irish ballad, which Frank Chinchill
insinuates must be Mr. Dixon’s “fivourite” (219). Jane Fairfix’s one musical fiiling is her
inability to play the harp, a traditional Irish instrument whose association with a romantic
Gaelic past Ms rendered harpistry a fishionable accomplishment among the English upper
class.” The wealthy boor, Mrs. Elton, suggests tMt if Jane “knew the Mrp,” it would

improve her nurketability as a governess and “entitle [her] to name [her] own terms” and

 

”Katie Trumpener argues that Austen fiequently depicts “fishionable” harp-
playing negatively in her novels in order to critique imperialism, see Bardic Nationalism
18-19, 297 n. 44.

220

to “mix in the fimily as much as [she] chose” (271). This subtle linking ofIreland and the
socufly indeterminate role of the governess reveals the peripheralized status of both
positions. In order to move outside the sphere of the nursery and “mix in the fimily,” Jane
must learn the Mrp, but to do so is to acquiesce to, even participate in, the exoticizing of
Gaelic cultin'e. As so many contemporary travel narratives indicate, the exotic, the Other,
is easily rendered distant. As her resistance to travelling to Ireland suggests, Jane hopes to
avoid being associated with distant and culturally alien Ireland. Her reluctance to play the
harp—to inhabit, even on a figurative level, the peripheralized space of Ireland—is thus
linked to her reluctance to participate in the sale “of hunun intellect” and to assume the
marginalized role of the governess.l3

When it is revealed tlut Jane has been secretly betrothed to Frank Churchill since
their first meeting in Bath (before the start of the novel), all references to Ireland stop.
Jane’s reluctance to go to Ireland is revealed simply to be a reluctance to leave the man
she loves. Mrs. Weston, Emma’s former governess and Frank Chinchill’s step-mother,
insinuates that she Md hoped that Frank would marry Emma, on the surfice a much more
suitable nutch in terms of wealth and social standing. Jane Fairfix—who lacks Emma’s
property and fimily name——will be an interloper in the upper echelons of society. The
delay in amouncing their engagement Ms been due to Frank’s aunt, who with her husMnd
Md adopted Frank upon his mother’s death in order to sustain an heir for the Churchill

name and property, and who would Mve disinherited Frank if he Md deigned to marry

 

l3The comection between Ireland and the “governess-trade,” as Austen so
memorably designated it, will be discussed in more detail below, in order to consider both
Jane Fairfix and Jane Eyre.

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Jane. Once Mrs. Churchill dies, the way is clear for the two to marry. A case can be
made for reading this and nuny of Austen’s novels as a chlenge to the property-driven
economy of England and its adverse impact on women. Suvendrini Perera argues that the
“influx of wealth and energy” supplied by the empire provides an alternative to “the
confinement of English village life” invoked by Emma and other Austen novels: “The
spatial interrelation between country village and colonies is enacted in the texts through
the working out of new sets of social relationships” (42-43). But the new social
relationship worked out in Emma links old-money Frank Churchill to no-money Jane
Fairfax, who has been persistently (albeit reluctantly) connected not to Antigua or some
equally lucrative spot in the empire, but to Ireland—a symbol of poverty and cultural
alienation. Jane Fairfax resists travel to Ireland, just as she resists becoming a governess,
not because of her love for Frank Churchill, but because she fears being rendered as an
absence, relegated to the margins of Austen’s novel and the English empire. Ireland thus
becomes a useful means for calling attention to the perils of women’s position, particularly
middle-class women’s position, on the periphery of England’s socio-economic system.
Jane Eyre, too, calls attention to the perils of the periphery for women, and it is
the heroine’s brief contemplation of the consequences of travel to Ireland tMt first
inspired this study’s examination of how and why Ireland came to signify “distance” to the
English Shortly after Jane’s return to Thornfield, after her Aunt Reed’s death, she
encounters Edward Rochester on a moonlit walk. Rochester tells Jane that he intends to

marry Blanche Ingram, and that Adele will be sent to a boarding school, rendering Jane’s

222

services as governess no longer necessary. Because he considers Jane as his “dependent,”
however, he Ms aheady made plans to secure a new situation for her:

“. . . it is to undertake the education of the five daughters of Mrs.
Dionysius O’Gall of Bittemutt Lodge, Comaught, Ireland. You’ll like
Ireland, I think: they’re such warm-hearted people there, they say.”

“It is a long way off, sir.”

“No matter—a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage, or
the distance.”

“Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a Mrrier—”

“From what, Jane?”

“From England and from Thomfield: and—”

“Well?”

“From you, sir.”

I said this almost involtmtarily; and, with as little sanction of free
will, my tears gushed out. I did not cry so as to be heard, however; I
avoided sobbing. The thought of Mrs. O’Gall and Bittemutt Lodge struck
cold to my heart; and colder the thought of all the brine and foam, destined,
asit seemed, to rushbetweenmeandthemasterat whose sidelnow
walked; and coldest the remembrance of the wider ocean—wealth caste,
custom intervened between me and wMt I naturally and inevitably loved.
(250)

The possibility of travel to Ireland causes Jane to draw an explicit parallel between the
ocean dividing England and Ireland and the “wider ocean” of ‘Vvealth, caste, custom” that
separates her—a pemiless, orpMned young wonun—fiom her wealthy and powerful
employer, whom she loves.

The details supplied by the passage confirm Ireland’s status as alien and distant and
prepare the reader for Jane’s comparison. Although “Mrs. Dionysius O’Gall” is
presumably Rochester’s fibrication, the name carries certain comotative weight.
“Dionysius”—strikingly similar to the Greek god Dionysus, the god of wine, associated
with orgiastic excess and irrationality (comparable to the Roman god Bacchus)——calls to

mind the persistent stereotype of the drunken, wild Irish “Gall” signifies both something

223

bitter and irritating, and something influenced by France: both negative, and both
associated with Ireland in English consciousness. The name of the O’Gall estate,
“Bittemutt Lodge,” reiterates the first sense of “gall,” and suggests wMt kind of life Jane
might expect to live there.14 And finally, Bittemutt Lodge is in Comaught, the
westernmost province of Ireland—firthest from Britain, rocky and poorly cultivated, and
ianited largely by the native Irish people, circumstances which earned it the designation
“wild west” fi'om many travellers. Rochester patronizingly describes the Irish as fiat/arm-
hearted people,” invoking the caricature of the passionate, child-like Celt. Each of these
details confirms the accuracy of Jane’s irmnediate response: Ireland is “a long way off”
culturally and, to a lesser extent, physically, fiom England. Rochester agrees with Jane’s
insistence that it is “a long way” to travel to Ireland and professes to wish that he could
spare his “little fiiend” from “such weary travels” (251). He informs her that he will not
visit her there: “I never go over to Ireland, not Mving myself much of a fincy for the
country” (250); when “that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come
broad between” them, the “cord of communication” that Jane and Rochester share will be
snapped (251). Sobered by the potential consequences of such distance, Rochester insists
tMt Jane must stay with him after his marriage. When Jane subsequemly declares that she

would scorn the unequal ‘tmion” he will make with Blanche Ingram and is thus “better

 

l"Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gqu argue in Madwoman in the Attic that each of the
places Jane inhabits over the course of the novel represents a stage in her “pilgrim’s
progress,” and that the name of each place signifies the dominant character of the activities
of that stage; for example, Gateshead represents Jane’s emergence into the wider world,
while Thomfield is a place of difficulties and challenges. In this schema, then, life at
Bittemutt Lodge would likely be an embittered existence for Jane. See CMpter 10, “A
Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress,” p. 336-71.

224

than” he, Rochester kisses and embraces her. Jane struggles to get fiee, threatening to go
“to Ireland,” or anywhere where she will be “fi'ee” and “independent” (252). For a
moment, the Irish periphery seems desirable, but only in contradistinction to the
marginalized position Jane would occupy in Rochester’s household after his marriage to
another wonun. Once Jane has shown her willingness to embrace the periphery,
Rochester proposes marriage to Jane, and Ireland disappears fiom the text.

As the daughter of an Irishman, Charlotte Bronte was “particularly aware of the
issues smrounding the Irish at midcentur'y” (Michie, Outside the Pale 52). Patrick Bronte,
born in 1777 in County Down, grew up hearing that he was “the descendant of an ancient
Irish fimily,” a common claim among a people desperate to reclaim a heritage taken from
them by their colonizers. Bronte, however, never “gave [himself] the trouble to inquire”
whether this was true, since his “lot in life . . . depended, under providence, not on Family
descent, but [his] own exertions” (qtd. in Barker 2). Patrick Bronté’s emphasis on his
“exertion” serves to refute the English assumption tMt all Irishmen were lazy; he goes on
to rewrite his life in typically English ways, changing his name from the Irish “Branty” and
enrolling in Cambridge. In her Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell is carefil to
emphasize that “Mr. Bronte has now no trace of his Irish origin remaining in his speech; he
never could Mve shown his Celtic descent in the straight Greek lines and long oval of his
face” (22). Gaskell’s description of Bronté’s physical characteristics reveals the extent to
which “race” had come to play a role in stereotypes of the Irish, and as Elsie Michie
argues, “Gaskell reminds her readers of the racial difference of the Irish at the very

moment she denies the Reverend Patrick Bronte exhibits it” (“White Chirnpanzees” 589).

225

Michie uses the racialized descriptions of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre, which link him
with ‘inid-nineteenth—century caricatures of the Irish,” to argue that “stereotypes of racial
difference allow for the expression and release of colonial ambivalence” (584). Michie’s
claim is well-supported by the text of the novel, but in Jane Eyre, at least, she would not
Mve needed to look so Mrd to find a correlation between Ireland and colonial
ambivalence. Elsewhere, Michie points out that the Bronte sisters’ novels “contain few
explicit references to Ireland,” but in Jane Eyre, as we Mve seen, Ireland is not only
explicitly mentioned, but explicitly linked to difference in the guise of distance, a
spatialized form of imperial rhetoric that also enabled colonial dominance (Pale 52).
CMrlotte Bronte would later travel to Ireland, her husMnd’s native country, on her
honeymoon. Her letters record her evident surprise that all Irish people were not the wild
baerians represented by previous English travellers, and perhaps by her fither as well
(see Barker 759, Fraser 468-69). Clearly, CMrlotte Bronte Md been prinud, both by her
fither and by English society at large, to consider Ireland as culturally alien and distant,
paving the way for her use of the distance between England and Ireland to figure the
distance between Jane and Rochester.

In Jane Eyre, as in Emma, we see both Ireland and the position of the governess as
emblenutic of the margins of English society. As Mary Poovey Ms argued, the figure of
the governess in nineteenth-centiny fiction reflected society’s concerns with the economic
and domestic implications of the governess:

Because the governess was like the middle-class mother in the work she

performed, but like both a working-class woman and nun in the wages she
received, the very figure who theoretically should Mve defended the

226

naturalness of separate spheres threatened to collapse the difference
between them. (Uneven Developments 127)

A governess earned money by performing the tasks a mother might otherwise Mve done
without pay; as such, she brought the gritty economic realities of the public sphere into the
domestic environment. Govemesses inhabited a liminal zone, somewhere between
“servant” and “member of the fimily.” As Maaja Stewart argues, Austen’s Emma
“dranutizes the governess as a figure who straddles two separate categories” by “splitting
the governess image into two separate parts”: Miss Taylor (Emma’s former governess,
now Mrs. Weston), the mother substitute, and Jane F airfix, the wage earner (159). Jane
Eyre also documents the uncertainty of its heroine’s position. Jane Eyre arrives at
Thomfield and is surprised that Mrs. Fairfix treats her “like a visitor,” and although Jane
seems pleased by this departure fiom what she Md “heard of the treatment of
govemesses,” her status as ‘wishor” empMsizes the uncertainty of her position: a ‘Visitor”
is, by definition, not “at home” (103). If the governess is a marginalized figure, and
Ireland is a marginalized place, then a position as a governess in Ireland represents a dual
alterity for the middle-class Englishwoman; small wonder that the “thought of Mrs. O’Gall
and Bittemutt Lodge struck cold to [Jane’s] heart” (250).

In 1786 and 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft served as governess for the children of
Lord and Lady Kingsborough, first in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork," and later in Dublin. In

her letters, she records her apprehensions both of govemessing and of Ireland. Like her

 

15Arthur Young had managed the Kingsborough estate nine years before, another
interesting conjunction between the governess and the traveller in Ireland.

227

fictional compatriots, Wollstonecraft dislikes the govemess’s limirul position within the
fimily and expresses her opinion with a passion that anticipates Jane Eyre:
I by no means like the proposal of being a governess—I should be shut out
fiom society—and be deMrred the imperfect pleasures of fiiendship—as I
should on every side be surrounded by unequals— To live only on terms of
civility and common benevolence without any intercMnge of little acts of
kindness and tenderness would be to me extremely irksome——but I touch
on too tender a string. (Wardle 109-10)
Wollstonecraft Ms few alternatives and must take the “advantageous” position ofi‘ered by
the Kingsboroughs. She describes her position as “something betwixt and between,” and
then later descnhes herself as “a something betwixt and between,” indicating the degree to
which her peripheralized role influenced her sense of subjectivity (124, 147). Her position
in Ireland reinforces her position in the Kingsborough household. She reports to her sister
that, after landing in Dublin, “1 Mve about a hundred and seventy miles to go before I
reach my destined home—home, delightfil word—but what a different one, that will
be—how unlike the one I Mve in my ‘mind’s eye’” (119). Even after spending some time
in Ireland, she continues to feel herself to be “in a land of strangers” and refers to herself
as “an exile—and in a new world,” and “a poor solitary individual in a strange land” (120,
126, 148). Finally, Wollstonecraft is driven to state emphatically, “I do not like Ireland”
(141). Adapting the oft-quoted lines from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country
Churchyard,” Wollstonecraft bemoans the fict that she is “like a lilly dr00ping— Is it not
a sad pity that so sweet a flower should waste its sweetness on the Desart air [?]” (145).
Mrs. Elton applies the same quotation to Jane F airfix’s perilous future in Emma, but

Wollstonecraft clearly intends to apply Gray’s elegiac tone to more than her situation as

governess: above the word “Desart,” Wollstonecraft pencilled in “Dublin” (Wardle 145 n.

228

6). In itself, the role of governess might Mve been a bearable one, but when coupled with
travel to Ireland, it becomes a form of marginalization comparable to death

Precisely because so many English people travelled to Ireland in the later
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, experienced life there, and recorded their
impressions in various forms of travel writing, their depiction of Ireland as a periphery
ultimately became a sMred cultural perception. Novelists rely on this common perception
to inform their use of travel to Ireland as a way to call attention to the periphery—either
by depicting it through the eyes of a traveller, as in The Wild Irish Girl, The Absentee, and
other nineteenth-century Irish novels; or by portraying characters who refuse to travel to
Irelandandinhabit aspacetheyperceiveasmore peripheralthanthe one theyalready
ianit, as in Emma and Jane Eyre. Irish novelists sought to rehabilitate the periphery as
it Md been represented in English travel narratives and ultimately to re-center an Irish
national identity, while English novelists acceded to the travel writer’s ambivalent
depiction of Ireland and the Irish as alien and irredeemably other by confirming the
undesirability of travel to Ireland. In either case, both the going and “the not going to
Ireland” (to use Emnu’s remarkable phrase) confirmed that Ireland was, and never could
be, “Home,” even—perMps especially—when depicted in the domestic novel, a genre

devoted to, and consumed within, the English home.

229

CONCLUSION

In Mere Irish and F for Ghael, Joep Leerssen concludes that, for most English
travellers,
Ireland, the real Ireland, is only to be found in those parts (suitably ‘wild’
and mountainous) where the ‘old Merities’ are still current. These ‘old
baerities’ are, of course, ‘old’ because they Mve long been a tradition in
the English image of Ireland. The geographic entity known by the name of
‘lreland’ does not entirely correspond to its image as conjured up by a
tradition of English descriptions; but it is ‘Ireland’ which is adapted to the
image (in restricting it to a ‘reul’ Ireland of mountains and Merities)
rather than vice versa. (66)
In a series of words, pictures, and nups, English travellers adapted the “geographic entity
known by the name of ‘Ireland,”’ and the people who ianited it, to the image of Ireland
and the Irish they held in their minds: Merous, wild, Other and, consequently, distant.
By way of understanding the scope of the English traveller’s attempts to render Ireland’s
difierence as distance, I’d like to return for a moment to the early years under
consideration in this study, to RicMrd Twiss’ Tour in Ireland in I 775. The map of Ireland
preficed to his Tour (Figure 4) uses both cartographic and pictorial representation to
convey a sense of distance between England and Ireland, one firther supported by the

narrative.

230

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231

Maps, claims RicMrd Helgerson in his essay on cartography and subversion, “[can] never
be ideologically neutral . . . They inevitably [enter] into systems of relations with other
representational practices and, in doing so, [alter] the meaning and the authority of all the
others” (357). Thus nups, alone and in conjunction with “other representational
practices,” influence the perceptions of readers and enable the construction (or
nuintenance) of an ideology, in this instance, an imperialist ideology that afirmed
Ireland’s status as Other.

Let us examine Twiss’s map as an illustration of the ideological process of
encoding difference as distance. The viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the nurgins of
the map, in particular the lower right corner, which contains an iconographic depiction of
Ireland.‘ A note on the ficing page tells us the drawing “represents a view of Glandilough
mountains, and of the Skelig isle, with a round tower, a cross, part of the Giants
Causeways, &c.” Also featured are the mysterious earthen mounds known as raths, a
rainbow, a peasant riding a horse-drawn cart, an overturned Mrrel of potatoes, and bolts
of linen, one of which has been draped over the skeletal horns ofa moose-deer and bears
the legend: “A Map of Ireland 1776.” Individually, the items symbolize Ireland: its

landscape, natural curiosities, antiquities, agriculture, and manufacttues. The narrative

 

1The picture is reminiscent of “the old navigational custom of filling in the blank
spaces of nups with iconic drawing of regional cmiosities and dangers” (Pratt 30).
However, the placement of the picture over the coastline of Wales, and the rendering of
Ireland itselfas a “blank space,” allows Twiss to empMsize both the alien qualities of
Ireland and its distance fiom England.

232

incorporates an explanation or description of each object pictm'ed on the map.2 However,
the overall impression of the picture is that of Ireland’s alien (and alienating)
cMracteristics. The drawing is dominated by the skeletal head and horns of the moose-
deer, a prehistoric animal native to Ireland whose remains had been found in bogs. The
mood of the drawing is desolate; the only living creatures (the horse and peasant) are
turned away fi'om the viewer, drawing the eye to the Mrren landscape and cold stone of
two of Ireland’s cmiosities: the Giant’s Causeway, a natural but inexplicable Msalt
formation, and a round tower, equally inexplicable, yet providing evidence of Ireland’s
distinctive cultural antiquity. Ireland’s alien religious practices are symbolized by a Celtic
cross, another emblem of death. In the Mckground, the raths——fimeral mounds believed
to Mve been constructed by the Danes after their invasion in the eighth century—firther
convey a sense of Ireland’s association with conquest and death A lone tree, pushed to
the margins of the drawing, appears knotted and withered. No “Emerald Isle,” this.

The mapmakers did not rely solely on these Mimting images to convey the
distance between Ireland and England. The picture itself covers the portion of the map

where a viewer might expect to see the western coast of Wales. Other points of reference

 

2Several of Twiss’s narrative descriptions Mve been examined in greater detail in
previous chters. The close parallels between the objects he sees and describes in his
narrative, and the objects included in the picture on the map indicate that Twiss was
involved in the creation of the picture, and perMps in the creation of the entire nup. Just
as the picture diminishes any positive association with Ireland’s cultural distinctiveness and
importance, so does Twiss’s narrative: “if any person should wish to visit that island fiom
nrere curiosity, he might land in the capital, remain there a fortnight, and make excursions
twenty miles round it, in which space he might see all the pictures, statues, and handsome
buildings in the kingdom; several round-towers, crosses, raths, cams, and cromlechs, . . .
&c.” (156-57).

233

or connection for the English reader Mve also been altered or removed. Dublin Ms been
designated 0° longitude3 and no scale of distance Ms been provided; Holy Head,
Wales-—the typical point of departure for English travellers to Ireland—peeps from the fir
eastern edge ofthe map; only a fiaction ofScotland appears in the northeast. The nup
itself, drawn and engraved by J. Barber and William Watts, appears unremarkable; like
most maps of the period, proMbly derived fiom William Petty’s seventeenth-century nup
of Ireland, it features only the outlines of the provinces and counties and designates the
major cities. A double line traces Twiss’s route around the island, skirting the coastline
but avoiding Comaught. The line demarcating Twiss’s jomney reemphasizes the borders
ofthe province ofComaught and County Clare, which are set ofifiom the rest ofIreland
by the Shannon River. Because few of its cities or rutural landmarks Mve been indicated
by the mapnukers, Connaught immediately strikes the viewer as Mrren or empty,
reiterating Twiss’s fear tMt the west was “ianited (especially along the coast) by a kind
of savages, and tMt there were neither roads for carriages, nor inns” (144). Finally, in the
upper left corner of the page, the engravers Mve included another symbol of Ireland, a
Mrp with a female torso on a shield, an image whose emblematic power was confirnred by
its adoption as a “separatist icon” by the United Irishmen in the 1790s (Gibbons,
“Topographies” 27). Upon this symbol rests a British crown, an ambivalent gesture that

subordinates Ireland’s separate identity, even as the remainder of the nup separates and

 

3A note ficing the first page of Seward’s Hibernian Gazetteer (1789) informs the
reader that “The Longitude of the following places, is taken fi'om the Meridian of
London,” suggesting tMt the practice of shifting or reassigning degrees of longitude was
not uncommon at that time. Greenwich, England was not established as the Prime
Meridian until 1794.

234

alienates Ireland from Great Britain. The inclusion of the crown suggests that the Crown
may be an alternative means for controlling Ireland, should distance become
unenforceable; once again, Ireland is both Home (part of the British empire) and Abroad
(alien, foreign). As such, the nup captures on a single sheet the ambivalence expressed
throughout the narratives of Twiss and his contemporaries, ambivalence occasioned
by—and sustained through—travel, tourism, travel writing, and ultinutely through
political union.

As this study has demonstrated, the English used the travel-oriented concepts of
“home” and “abroad” to mediate their relationship with Ireland. Ireland’s physical
proximity, its historical relationship to England, and ultimately its union with Great Britain
all contributed to its status as Home, part of the British Empire. However, the English
people’s desire to retain the Irish as Others against which they could define their own
identity contrrhuted to their depiction of the Irish as cultinally alien; in the language of
travel, Ireland was “abroad”: a foreign landscape, a tourist site. This process continued
throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries, but in 1845, a blight infected
the Irish potato crop and cMnged everything. Within a few months, its effects could be
felt, and within two years, the Irish population Md been decimated through starvation,
disease, and wide-scale emigration. “In such circumstances Ireland quite understandably
lost its appeal to ordinary English tourists,” observes John Harrington, and the cMracter
of English travel to Ireland changed for decades to come (20). In nuny ways, the Famine
performed the ideological work that English travellers Md been performing for years, by

providing opportunities for descriptions of the degraded and dehumanized Irish peasants

235

 

that rendered them Other, while effectively subduing Ireland, virtually eliminating the Irish
language and with it, much of native Irish cultine, and placing Ireland once again firmly
under English control.

The rhetoric of distance becomes part of the fibric of history. In 1859, George
Eliot’s historical novel Adam Bede turns an eye toward 1799, tMt anxious year between
the Rebellion and the Act of Union. Hetty Sorrel, in love with Arthm' Domithome but
beloved by Adam Bede, goes in search of Arthur when she suspects that she is pregrunt
with his child, emMrldng on a “long, lonely journey, with sadness in the heart; away fiom
the fimiliar to the strange” (371). The trip fi'om Hayslope to Windsor, the address on
Arthtn’s last letter, exMusts Hetty, but it represents only a fiaction of the distance
between her and Arthur, who Ms been sent, with his militia regiment, “A fine sight 0’
miles away fiom here,” to Ireland (378). Others express their concern about “the danger
for Arthur in crossing that fiightfil Irish Chamel,” calling to the readers’ mind the many
eighteenth-century accounts of perilous CMmel-crossings (413). As in Emma and Jane
Eyre, the distance between England and Ireland is used to represent other forms of
cultural distance, inthiscasethe wide gapinsocial statusandwealthbetweenArthur
Domithome, a yomg squire, and Hetty Sorrel, a firm girl. However, Eliot is very careful
to contain this metaphor within a very specific moment in time; what works in 1800 nuy
not in 1859. Similarly, Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867)
associates the rhetoric of distance with the past; in his fither’s day, claims Arnold, people
spoke of an “impassable gulf” separating England and Ireland; his fither “insisted much

oftener on the separation between us and them [the Irish] than on the separation between

236

us and any other race in the world” (13-14). Arnold’s own essentializing and patronizing
attempt to “reMbilitate” Irish culture renders the Irish Other in its own way, but new
rhetorical strategies, new metaphors Mve replaced an earlier empMsis on distance.

The travel-oriented constructions of “home” and “abroad” become still less
relevant for describing the relationship between England and Ireland once Irish cries for
“Home Rule” reach English ears in the 18605. By reclaiming the term “Home” (so long a
part of English imperial identity, as evidenced in terms like Home Secretary), the Irish
force the English to reconsider the very notion of “home”—in a way they could not, when
travellers were producing shocking pictures of Irish domestic space for English
audiences—bolstering their struggle for independence with a “strong wor ” tMt “implies
much nrore” than the English were willing to accept, to adapt TMckeray’s phrase (34). In
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce expresses his recognition of
the inherent gap between the English signifier—“home”—and the Irish signified. In the
midst of a discussion with his English schoolmaster, Stephen Dedalus pauses to reflect:

The languageinwhichwearespeaking ishisbefore it ismine. How
different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine!

I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language,
so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech I Mve

not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at My. My soul
fi'ets in the stow of his language. (453)
“Home” no doubt comes first to Dedalus’ mind because of its contemporary currency in
deMtes over Irish Home Rule. In The Politics of Home, Rosemary George argues for the

importance of retaining the difference between “Home” as the exclusionary position of the

British colonizer and “Home” as the nationalist desire of the colonized: “The urge to

237

generalize on ‘home’ as represented through various global English language texts is very
strongbecausewe haveaccessto theseutterancesinalanguagethatwecanunderstand
without the acknowledgment of difl‘erence that translation would impose” (14). Because
the Irish and the English have come to share a hnguage, one might assume that a shared
term, such as “home,” has come to represent a shared ideal. Instead, the “home” in Home
Rule is far removed from the “home” in home travel. Once Ireland identifies itself as
“home,” the English can no longer pretend that it is their “home” as well.

Prior to 1775 the English relied on significant cultural diflerences to distinguish
and separate themselves fiom the Irish. In the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries,
the Irish actively attempted to separate themselves fi'om the British. But in the years in
between, that distance threatened to collapse under the pressures of political union and
increased contact rmde possible by improved modes of transportation and communication.
For a time, travel—and the spaces desigmted as “home” and “abroad”—provided a means
for establishing distance between England and Ireland, a distance the English used to
assert their difference and their superiority, which they in turn used to justify their
treatment of the Irish. Travel writers of the period 1775-1845 produced an enormous
body of texts, which have received little scholarly attention. As this study has shown,
however, these texts are important because they reveal the ways in which travel writing
was used to negotiate the distance between home and abroad, Self and Other, England and

Ireland.

238

BIBLIOGRAPHY

239

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Angel, John. A General History of Ireland, in its Antient and Modern State. 2 vols.
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Arnold, Matthew. 0n the Study of Celtic Literature; and, On Translanting Homer. New
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Atkinson, A. Ireland Exhibited to England. London, 1823.
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Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. Ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford UP-World’s Classics,
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