Tourism, Landscape and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland (University of Wisconsin Press, hardback 2008; paperback 2011).
Between 1750 and 1845, the eve of the Great Famine, Ireland became incorporated into modern tourism largely through the efforts of British (including Anglo-Irish) travel writers. Inevitably this meant that Ireland was seen through the distorting lens of politics and culture. This was true of all countries that the British visited. However, France, for example, was a foreign country and could be written off as such. Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom, a disturbing mixture of the familiar (language, religion, agriculture, politics and custom) and the foreign (also involving language, religion, agriculture, politics and custom). Ireland had to be understood and somehow dealt with.
Indeed, British visitors found Ireland a land of contrasts. Ostentatious wealth existed alongside appalling poverty. The Protestant faith was supposed to be dominant, but most Irish were Roman Catholics. Too much farmland seemed crowded with the mud cabins of peasants who barely survived on their small patches of potato ground. Most disturbing of all for tourists steeped in the visual culture of the sublime and the picturesque, Ireland’s striking landscapes too frequently incorporated sights of appalling poverty amid panoramas of natural splendor.
Similar contrasts could be found within Great Britain. However, a sort of tourist’s amnesia allowed British visitors to simply assume that the degree of squalor found in the smaller island was uniquely Irish, the result of defects in the national character rather than imperial economics. The visitors could even trace this “moral” failure of the the Irish in the country’s landscape, especially when travel writers contrasted “Protestant “Ulster to the rest of “Catholic” Ireland. In the resulting “moral geography” Ulster appeared to be British and prosperous while the rest of the country seemed Irish and poor.
British tourists were unconsciously looking at Ireland and thinking of England. They were using Ireland and the Irish to define their own country and culture at a time when everything was influx. Therefore, Ireland and its people became a repository for everything that was not British. It is little wonder that when the potato blight struck British sympathy could not quite surmount British ignorance and prejudice regarding Ireland.
Even before the Famine, many visitors decided that what Ireland needed was an infusion of imperial agricultural know-how. As the West of Ireland became open to tourism, it excited the imagination of writers who convinced themselves that British investors and Scottish farmers would turn Ireland’s boggy, rainy Atlantic seaboard into a garden. This myth died a slow death in the decades following the Famine
CONTENTS: 1, Picturesque Tourism in Ireland; 2, Historical and Religious Landscapes; 3, Putting Paddy in the Picture; 4, British Tourism and Irish Stereotypes; 5, Tourism and the Semiotics of Irish Poverty; 6, Irish Poverty and the Irish Character; 7, Misreading the Agricultural Landscape; 8, Discovering the Moral Landscape; 9, Landscape, Tourism and the Imperial Imagination in Connemara.