Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760-1860: Culture, History, Politics

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Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860 Culture, History, Politics

Glenn Hooper

Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860

Also by Glenn Hooper IRELAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Regional Identity (co-editor) HARRIET MARTINEAU’S LETTERS FROM IRELAND (editor) THE TOURIST’S GAZE: Travellers to Ireland, 1800–2000 (editor) IRISH AND POSTCOLONIAL WRITING: History, Theory, Practice (co-editor) PERSPECTIVES ON TRAVEL WRITING (co-editor) LANDSCAPE AND EMPIRE (editor)

Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860 Culture, History, Politics Glenn Hooper

© Glenn Hooper 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4286–9 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4286–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hooper, Glenn, 1959– Travel writing and Ireland, 1760–1860 : culture, history, politics / Glenn Hooper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4286–2 1. Travelers—Ireland—History—18th century. 2. Travelers’ writings, English—History and criticism. 3. Ireland—Politics and government— Historiography. 4. Ireland—Description and travel—Historiography. 5. Travelers—Ireland—History—19th century. 6. British—Ireland— History—18th century. 7. British—Ireland—History—19th century. 8. Ireland—Civilization—Historiography. I. Title. DA969.H66 2005 914.1504′7—dc22 2005047739 10 14

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Oonagh, Dearbhla and Glenn Philip

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 From Grand Tour to Home Tour, 1760–1800

11

2 The Post-Union Traveller, 1800–1820

59

3 Trekking to Downfall, 1820–1850

100

4 Travelling to Write, 1850–1860

144

Notes

190

Select Bibliography

212

Index

219

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List of Illustrations 1 Wicklow. From Lough Dan looking North towards Luggelaw. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 2 Tone’s Interview with Napoleon. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 3 Ireland, by Chapman, John (1812). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 4 Travelling in Connemara. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 5 Protestant Missionary Settlement, Isle of Achill. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 6 Friends’ Soup Kitchen. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 7 Geological Map. W. B. Webster, Ireland Considered as a Field for Investment or Residence (Dublin: Hodges & Smith, 1852) 8 Map of Ireland, Shewing the Distribution of the Constabulary Force. F. B. Head, A Fortnight in Ireland (London: Murray, 1852) 9 Map Shewing the Residences of Scotchmen and Englishmen who have settled agriculturally in Ireland. T. Miller, The Agricultural and Social State of Ireland in 1858 (Dublin: Thom, 1858)

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26 56 71 85 106 134

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Acknowledgements

Although very distant from it now this book has something of its origins in a PhD degree I undertook at University College Dublin, under Declan Kiberd’s supervision. Declan’s generosity and patience, his tactful way of encouraging me towards completion of the project is something I came to heavily depend upon, so much so that if it wasn’t for his presence I very much doubt it would have been finished at all. I am extremely grateful to him for his guidance then, but also for the many favours and advice kindly dispensed over subsequent years. My thanks, also, to Kevin Whelan, whose one-to-one ‘tutorials’, conducted in the Kilkenny Design coffee shop, I remember with almost as much embarrassment at my own ignorance as gratitude for the patience demonstrated by Kevin; I appreciate now, as I did then, the many references and thoughts he freely shared. Several others have also helped or contributed to this book, although they might not always have been aware of their involvement, or of the extent to which their own work and example was useful to me; my thanks to Seamus Deane, Peter Hulme and Lyn Innes. Sometimes it was only coffee we shared, or some reference, or a general whine about our job prospects and how insurmountable it all seemed. But I owe a great debt to other colleagues and friends, some recent, some going back several years, many of them researchers in entirely different fields, others working generally within Irish studies, or travel, comparative and related topics. My thanks to Margaret Kelleher, James Murphy, Brian Hanratty, Conor McCarthy, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Padmini Mongia, Pauric Dempsey, Catherine Cox, Colin Graham, Sharon O’Brien, Beth Kiberd, C. J. Woods, Loredana Polezzi, Jane Mc Dermid, Elio Di Piazza, Mary Condé, Tim Youngs, Betty Hagglund, David Johnson, Mike Cronin, Maggie Miller and Sean Ryder. More recently I’d like to thank the staff at Mary Immaculate College, particularly colleagues within the Department of English, for polite and tactful encouragement. I’d also like to thank my parents, Frances and Dennis, for all their help. My mother’s questions concerning the project’s development was always a boost, despite the sometimes edgy and evasive responses I gave. I also sincerely hope that for my father – an Englishman in ix

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Acknowledgements

Ireland – there is something here for him too. Thanks also to my parents-in-law, Niall and (the late) Phil Walsh, and to the extended Emmet family of county Wicklow, especially Clemency and Amanda, Philip and Vicky, all of whom helped in their own way, at a much earlier stage. I would also like to acknowledge two awards – from the AHRB, while at the University of Aberdeen, and the CRD at Mary Immaculate College – both of which helped finance several research trips to libraries, and therefore ensured that the book was brought to completion. A warm thanks, too, for the efficiency and guidance of several colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Paula Kennedy and Helen Craine. My greatest debt, though, is to Oonagh, who read, and persevered, and advised right from the beginning. I’ve used the facilities of several institutions over the past few years, and I wish to acknowledge the very great debt I owe to all of them. My thanks to the libraries of Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen, St Mary’s University College, the University of Southampton, the Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Limerick, Magee College Derry, as well as to the Linenhall Library, the National Library of Ireland, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, and the Royal Irish Academy. However, several staff members deserve my especial thanks: Gerry Healey at the Linenhall, Anne Walsh at Trinity College, Siobhan Fitzpatrick at the Royal Irish Academy, Gilian Dawson at the University of Aberdeen, Jim O’Shea, Colette O’Flaherty, Joanna Finegan, Sandra McDermott and Francis Carroll at the National Library of Ireland, Ken Bergin and Jean Turner at the University of Limerick, and John Power at Mary Immaculate College. During the closing stages of this book, when it seemed like I’d never get to the end, my daughter Dearbhla always seemed to be asking if we could go to the back garden to play football. Sometimes my answer would be ‘in a little while’, and at other times ‘not just now’. We did get to play football, though not nearly as often as we’d have both liked, and of course even when liberated I was still distracted with my Quakers, or some illustration I was thinking of including. But Dearbhla’s persistence was inspired and true: ‘Dad, kick it up to the sky’. Here goes.

Introduction

By the end of the eighteenth century, it would appear, anyone with even a modicum of literary and intellectual aspiration had undertaken foreign travel. From Britain, young men in particular fanned out all over the globe, exploring, explaining, cataloguing and returning to write up their accounts of lands visited, and cultures assessed and assimilated. In the eighteenth century, Europe was the principal destination for these travellers, who found all that they required to complete their educations on the continental mainland. Throughout the nineteenth century, tourist opportunities and experiences altered drastically, as communications improved, and more distant lands came increasingly into reach. A growing number of travel narratives emerged as a result, many relating to exotic locales such as Africa and Asia, and all of which fed a growing appetite at home for tales of valour and excitement. Yet there was one less likely destination that nevertheless attracted large numbers of visitors from 1760 onwards: Ireland. There were no obvious aesthetic, cultural, or antiquarian attractions comparable to Italy or France, both of which attracted numerous travellers in this period, hungry for intellectual stimulation. In the nineteenth century, in particular the latter half, other non-European destinations came into focus, with North America emerging as a new traveller destination that offered aesthetic and indeed athletic challenges unavailable in Ireland. The rugged terrain of Canada or the American West, where men could pit themselves against the wilderness, or accompany trappers and miners for a brief experience of elemental life, was not part of the Irish itinerary. Yet still visitors came in increasing numbers throughout the century, to a country with less obvious attractions. Although the Irish had frequently been portrayed as unsophisticated, they could not compete for sheer ‘exoticism’ with the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, or 1

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China and Japan. Nevertheless, travellers, especially British travellers, flocked to Irish shores in increasing numbers from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, and the fact that the majority of these visitors successfully published their accounts suggests a growing appetite for books on Ireland and the Irish in this period. So what drew these travellers to Ireland, given the lack of obvious touristic attractions? There are many factors, the most important of which, as will be seen in subsequent chapters, was a perceived lack of information on the country and its inhabitants amongst the British. This epistemological vacuum became a matter of grave concern, reiterated by writer after writer, although the root of their anxieties altered over time. From 1760 to 1860, travel accounts focus on the necessity to know Ireland, and bemoan the fact that she is so little comprehended. Yet this articulation is itself only a partial truth: many travellers saw Ireland as a potentially corrupt, and corrupting, element within the body politic, whose control demanded total knowledge. The integration of the country within the United Kingdom after 1800 required that she be as well known, and as tractable, as the Home Counties. For some writers, there was also a sense of shame that Ireland, as an integral part of the new political structure, should be so impoverished and economically underdeveloped. They travelled with an almost evangelical desire to improve the country and its inhabitants, and raise it, as they hoped, to a comparable level of civilisation with England, Scotland, and Wales. By the mid-nineteenth century, these early optimistic texts had largely given way to more sombre assessments, and a sense of despair that Ireland should apparently be so resistant to improvement. But still they came, searching for an answer to the ‘Irish question’ that was to prove elusive to the end of the nineteenth century. There were other factors that made Ireland a more attractive tourist destination in this period. The country’s infrastructure had improved significantly, with a comprehensive road, rail, and canal system developing steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Travellers could move about with relative ease and, despite periodic political unrest, with relative safety compared to other foreign destinations. The country was largely English speaking, with an excellent postal system that made communication with Britain easy. Indeed, as the century progressed, the mail boat carried not just post but more travellers across the Irish sea, bearing letters of introduction to individuals in Ireland who would, it was hoped, give them hospitality and insights to the country and its inhabitants. Women travellers featured prominently throughout the century, liberated from many of the restrictions facing them in other countries,

Introduction

3

specifically because of these comforting factors. Ireland offered them a chance to be active agents, undertaking independent forays in the manner of men, but without attracting the criticism or anxiety about appropriate gender roles that inevitably arose in other countries. In Ireland, no less than in other countries, the definition of a ‘travelogue’ is a fluid and slippery one. I have chosen a variety of texts for examination, out of a huge field. Although all are linked by a common set of criteria – most were written by British-based authors who visited the country with the specific intention of writing up their experience – the motivation and intent behind each was often quite different. For example, some writers such as John Hervey Ashworth composed his narrative with the intention of attracting settlers and investors to the country. As such, his encounters with the inhabitants are relentlessly upbeat, and the only conversations to be recorded are those with individuals who testify to the economic potential of the country. Others, such as the Reverend James Hall, are concerned with comprehending the peculiar customs and habits of the Irish, and he prioritises those meetings when, often in disguise, he manages to extract information on religion, superstition, and folk-practice. In some cases, the thrust of the travelogue was defined by some extraordinary event. Those individuals who toured Ireland between 1845 and 1850 were drawn by the Great Famine, and they recorded the dreadful suffering and the many attempts to alleviate it throughout the country. Post-Famine travellers shared a common desire to assess the potential of the country for re-settlement, now that a significant proportion of the population had been lost to starvation and emigration. In other words, each travel narrative was a response to, or attempt to understand, quite specific political or economic circumstances, rather than a mere record of wanderings by various routes across the country. This book is divided into four chapters. The first consists largely of an engagement with the writings of two pre-Union authors, John Bush and Arthur Young, whose texts give an indication of the variety of forms the travelogue may take. Both writers are reflective of a new development in travel writing: the Home Tour. For a variety of reasons discussed in the chapter, travel in continental Europe became more difficult and less popular in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Partly as a consequence of this, travellers began to focus upon hitherto neglected regions at home, and upon Scotland and Ireland in particular, and a new body of literature emerged that documented explorations of the English Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, and of parts of Ireland. Bush is a curious writer, in both senses of the word. He travels across the country, applying Edmund Burke’s recently published theories of the sublime to

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what initially appears to be rather unpromising terrain. Bush sees wonder everywhere in Ireland, and is a rare example of a commentator on the country who is relatively unencumbered by preconceptions of the Irish. His text mixes a highly developed aesthetic sensibility with a dispassionate political perspective, allowing him to move seamlessly from an appreciation of the lakes at Killarney, to a critique of neglectful landlords. Indeed, his openness to experience, be it an encounter with the inhabitants of a hovel in Co. Wicklow, or a meditation on the immensity of Irish bogs, marks him out from other travellers, whose reactions to the country are rather more guarded. One may see how swiftly the travelogue adapted to changing Irish circumstances when one reads Arthur Young’s accounts of his visits. Although he travelled a little over a decade after Bush, his account is a much more focussed and detailed affair, and one that presents a good deal of specific information upon the country and its inhabitants. A writer with an established reputation as an agricultural economist, Young conducted a detailed survey of Ireland’s resources, and his travelogue is a sustained effort to encourage higher standards of agricultural practice in Ireland. He is a committed moderniser, a champion of progressive farming methods, and as such an individual who sought to improve the country. But one also sees in Young the start of a process that was to be continued by successive generations of travel writers to the country: the ceaseless drive to acquire information on Ireland and the Irish. Before the Act of Union, writers are concerned largely with the fact that a lack of specific information has allowed for the proliferation of secret societies, and illicit political movements. In this case, knowledge is power, and if Ireland is to cease to be a potential threat, an uneasy presence at Britain’s back, she must be comprehended. Young presents an at times reassuring picture of Ireland’s potential, but his oft-reiterated point about the need to improve the country suggests a continued anxiety regarding security, and Ireland’s long-term relationship to Britain. The Anglo-Irish relationship, in one form or another, lies at the heart of the travel narratives discussed in this book. In Chapter 2, I discuss texts written in the aftermath of the Act of Union of 1800, texts that are, on the surface at least, optimistic about the future of the country as a potential constitutional equal. The drive for information exhibited by Young continues, but it now represents an attempt to understand Ireland so that she may be brought fully into equal union with the remainder of the United Kingdom, as the ‘Sister Isle’. The early post-Union travelogues are therefore largely optimistic accounts, emphasising Ireland’s economic potential, and downplaying political resistance. Yet despite

Introduction

5

the integrationist rhetoric, there remains an underlying unease about the country that acts as a counter-melody to the dominant tune of Union. Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s travelogue, published in 1806, ironically evokes much earlier commentators on Ireland to shore up statements regarding the urgency for comprehensive information on the country. Although he praises the work of individuals such as the twelfth-century cleric Giraldus Cambrensis for his chronicling of Irish habits and customs, he implicitly suggests that 700 years later Ireland remains as unknown now as she was then. But this is not really Hoare’s point: rather he is concerned to establish a continual British engagement with Ireland, and the presentation of a history, as well as a particular frame of reference, within which to interpret the country. What was lacking in the past was the means through which Ireland could be tied to Britain: the Act of Union now confers a constitutional framework, and all that remains is a thorough assessment of the region that will finally provide the authorities with the information they need to govern. As Hoare penned his manuscript, he must have felt assured that the required information would soon be available. From the turn of the century, the Dublin Society’s comprehensive county survey of Ireland became available, modelled on the Statistical Account of Scotland that had been published in single-county volumes between 1791 and 1799. The authors of the Irish works were instructed to gather information on all aspects of life, from animal husbandry, through details of wages, to the dress and appearance of the local populations. The interesting element common to several of these surveys, however, is their sense of excitement, as they detail greedily the extent of natural resources, ready for exploitation. For some of these visitors Ireland represented a cornucopia, one rendered available as a consequence of Union. And other writers also reflect a sense of post-Union optimism and opportunity. The Rev. James Hall, for example, while couching his visit to Ireland in explorative and breathless terms – ‘Tour through . . . the Interior and least known Parts’ – traverses the country, and seeks to methodically gather information on history, religion, folk medicine, and politics. For Hall, this exhaustive survey is necessary to ensure Britain’s security, for he sees in a lack of information on Ireland the potential for subversive political activity. Little escapes his invasive eye, even if a reader may wonder at the usefulness of some of the data he secures. Another writer who reads a lack of information as inherently dangerous to the commonweal is Anne Plumptre, a progressive and forceful woman who sees in post-Union Ireland significant economic opportunity, but only if the country is analysed and understood. To this end, she trains her

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scientific mind upon phenomena as diverse as the origins of the Giant’s Causeway, the nature of Irish poverty, and the obscure (as she sees them) causes of Irish rebellion, and confidently concludes that Ireland is capable of being integrated into a pacific, prosperous, United Kingdom. However, her text is permeated with a sense of anxiety regarding the Irish themselves, and her itinerary, as well as the narrative it produces, is tailored to exclude the political reality of anti-union activity. Despite her quest for knowledge, Plumptre steadfastly refuses to engage with facts that may threaten her vision of Ireland as a ‘sister’, preferring a partial reality to one that might undermine the whole ideology of Union. In a certain sense, Plumptre’s blinkered perspective was a necessary response for English unionists. In the years following the 1800 Act, many travellers were engaged in a constitutionally constructive exercise, one that required a seamless narrative of progression towards harmony. By the early 1830s, the realities of Anglo-Irish affairs were such that travellers were forced to admit that the Union had not provided the desired integration and harmony between the two isles. Those individuals who visited in the years between the granting of Catholic Emancipation and the Great Famine were a good deal more subdued than their predecessors, while still holding true to their particular vision of a peaceful United Kingdom. In these years, the desire to gather information and understand the country has an added urgency: now knowledge is necessary if the union is to merely survive, not even to prosper. To this end, Chapter 3 focusses initially upon writers including Kitson Cromwell, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, and John Barrow, all of whom travelled throughout the country in the late 1820s and 1830s, and all of whom struggled to find a means through which to comprehend Ireland. However, their difficulties with understanding the country are of a different order from the post-Union writers; although these later narratives also begin with statements as to how little known Ireland is, the sense of goodwill and excitement that (often self-consciously) pervaded the earlier works is entirely lacking. In its place is despair, and often shame, at the fact that Ireland is still in the same impoverished, neglected, and indeed fractious state as she was thirty years ago. Union has not brought the expected benefits to Ireland, and these writers meditate on the possible reasons: are the Irish incapable of being raised to the level of the British? Is it impossible to free the population from their dependence upon priests? Will they ever come to realise the wonders that await them, if they turn from rebellion to unionist quiescence? A word that occurs continually in these accounts is ‘anomalous’, as the travellers seek to find an explanation for the state of the country. Some come

Introduction

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to tentative conclusions, presenting the increase in population, the deteriorating estates, or the antiquated agricultural systems as reasons why Ireland has failed to prosper. All, however, retain firm faith in Union, and their Irish expeditions are exercises in information gathering to ensure that, even now, Ireland may be brought to her rightful place within the United Kingdom. This chapter also deals with travellers’ accounts of the Great Famine. In many ways, this subject was so overwhelming, and so vastly distressing for writers and readers alike, that commentators found it difficult to say anything at all about the country. The disaster was of such proportions that large numbers of writers visited Ireland throughout its course, and included journalists sending copy on a daily and weekly basis, scientists attempting to find a cause and cure for blight, philanthropists distributing food, clothing, and money to individuals and institutions, and, perhaps most notoriously, missionaries who saw in the Famine an opportunity to save Ireland from Roman Catholicism. There were also Quakers who travelled during the Famine years, seeking to alleviate misery where they could, but also fulfilling a Quaker imperative to bear unprejudiced witness to human suffering, and bring it to public notice. The Famine years produced a new variation on the travel narrative, one that was defined by misery, and marked by a sense that Ireland was politically and economically irredeemable. Ironically, the horrors of this period gave way, as far as travel accounts were concerned, to one of the most optimistic phases in writings on Ireland. The post-Famine years saw an influx of travellers who, rather in the spirit of the post-Unionists some fifty years earlier, saw in Ireland a place of great economic potential. Although obviously reluctant to celebrate the reasons behind the massive reduction in the Irish population, these writers were nevertheless excited by the opportunity they saw in a land now ready for resettlement. As early as 1852, William Bulloch Webster published a travelogue that was nothing less than a manual for venture capitalists. Writing warmly of continuing migration, Webster drew attention to the cheap and conveniently empty tracts of land, vast mineral resources, and low-cost labour that awaited the shrewd British investor. Ireland may have proved a disappointment since 1800, Webster suggested, but she was now finally an asset ripe for exploitation. While Webster offered advice on how best to draw wealth out of Ireland, other post-Famine writers saw the country as an integral part of the British Empire, and argued that the most effective means of modernising the country was through the literal transplantation of sturdy English yeomen and thrifty Scots farmers to Irish soil. Francis Bond Head, who

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also published his travelogue in 1852, argued that now was the time to finally deal comprehensively with Ireland. Her intractability has been linked with a perennial lack of knowledge, but this could be rectified by gathering information (Head advocates using the local constabulary as conduits for this purpose, thereby linking knowledge specifically with power), and making that the basis upon which to control and regulate wayward Irish behaviour. Head’s narrative takes the form, for considerable portions, of questions and answers on subjects as diverse as population size, Catholic Church fees for sacraments, literacy levels, sectarianism, climate, crop rotation: in short, all the information that a potential settler could possibly require. For Head’s text is nothing less than a promotional piece, in which the themes of ‘order’, ‘regulation’, and ‘control’ are constantly reiterated. The Irish now represent little more than a cheap source of labour, and he cheerfully opens his book with a map showing the number and distribution of constabulary stations. New settlers will be supported by the full force of the law, he implies, and one is never far away from such support. He visits the estates of English settlers at Clifden, and notes approvingly how they have imposed order and civilisation on the Irish bogland. What marks the post-Famine travelogues out from earlier works is a sneaking sense that although the Famine caused untold misery for millions, it has created an opportunity to finally subdue, modernise, and integrate Ireland and its inhabitants. The promise of Union might now be fulfilled, some 50 years late, but all the more welcome for that. Of course, most post-Famine travellers couched this theory in terms of the advantages it offered to the Irish, as well as new settlers. However, their benefits would come only if they rejected their former modes of life, and adapted themselves to a new regime of thrift, good husbandry, hard work, and restraint: in other words, the Irish must re-make themselves not merely as English, but as the new Saxons. The Rev. John Hervey Ashworth was one of the first new settlers to hurry to Ireland in the immediate aftermath of Famine. He published The Saxon in Ireland in 1851, and it was so enthusiastically received that it was republished the following year. Although the sub-title of his work suggested a leisurely tour around the country – Rambles of an Englishman in Search of a Settlement – there was little ease taken on his trip. Rather he rushed breathlessly around Connaught, enumerating the many advantages to be found for settlers: absurdly cheap land and labour, close proximity to England and to English markets, temperate climate, and, most importantly, massive depopulation that resulted in vast swathes of uninhabited land. However, so as to avoid charges of complete insensitivity to the

Introduction

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suffering that has just preceded his visit, Ashworth added some ‘native’ voices to his text. He claims that he has been told by the Irish that ‘All we want is English capital and English spirit, and . . . English justice’, thereby neatly avoiding possible charges of exploitation, while simultaneously implying that the Irish were indeed the architects of their own misfortune. The sense that Ireland had deserved her fate, but could now be safely brought back into the fold, was reiterated by another post-Famine author, Harriet Martineau. In 1852, she travelled to Ireland at the request of the editor of the Daily News, charged with the task of sending a series of letters on the state of the country for publication in the paper. Their favourable reception ensured that they were published as a volume in 1852, under the title Letters From Ireland. Like Ashworth, Martineau saw in Ireland great opportunities for settlement and development, but her text is unusual for the deep impatience she exhibits at the perceived deficiencies of Irish government. She lauds the new settlers, but points out that they must gain the support of the Irish if they are to succeed. Once this has been secured, it seems that Ireland will face an unparalleled period of prosperity, brought safely to the standards of the remainder of the United Kingdom. Already, in the civilised environs of new settlements, and in particular at the agricultural training college at Templemoyle, Co. Londonderry, she sees evidence of a new Ireland, populated not by landless, impoverished cottiers, but by scientific agriculturalists who will save the land from the depredations of ragwort, poor management, and mindless dependence upon their priests. For post-Famine travellers, then, Ireland was a tabula rasa upon which, with the assistance of suitably loyal farmers and labourers, a new narrative of prosperity and peace could be inscribed. Travel writing on Ireland changed in form and emphasis over the one hundred years covered in this book. The general mood shifted from a relatively open attitude in the 1760s, to a cautious pessimism in the turbulent years of the 1790s, through to an unbounded sense of renewal immediately following the Act of Union. Although hopes of rapid economic and political development were dashed, the catastrophe of the Great Famine was not total, as far as many travellers were concerned. The 1850s proved another decade of optimism, and although most authors scrupulously avoided describing the Famine as an act of God, they nevertheless saw in it a natural reversion to an appropriate order. Ireland had moved from site of curiosity, to potentially subversive element in Union, and then on to land of boundless possibility. One might well ask if the country and its inhabitants were ever seen as they actually

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were. One might further ask if travel writers, then or now, ever see what really exists, or see merely what they expect and hope to find. This examination of a selection of the many travel narratives written on Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hopes to illuminate at least some of the complex issues that drove commentators to Ireland, and to suggest that while a travelogue may tell us a good deal about the country being visited, it may tell us as much again about the country from which the journey began.

1 From Grand Tour to Home Tour, 1760–1800

A Grand Tour For much of the eighteenth century, young Britons of a certain class regarded continental travel as a way of completing their education.1 A visit to Europe, especially with the exotic pleasures and greater cultural appreciation it was presumed to bestow, gave a gloss of sophistication and maturity to their lives.2 Indeed, many focussed almost exclusively on this view of travel, believing themselves engaged in a self-fashioning exercise, an effort intended to bring the references and allusions gleaned from a classical education to life. Some learned languages, engaged meaningfully with different cultures, and improved their appreciation of the arts, although much of what they absorbed was predetermined, stemming as it did from a very definite set of geographical coordinates. Nevertheless, to partake in the Grand Tour of Europe was esteemed one of the most worthy of pursuits, and many wellknown figures – Adam Smith, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence Sterne, for example – made trips to the centres of continental culture. They visited the Italian cities of Siena, Florence, Venice and Rome, but also southern venues such as Puglia, and for the hardier tourist, Sicily.3 France, too, as well as parts of middle and northern Europe drew an enthusiastic response, with Paris and Versailles, Amsterdam and Vienna, becoming increasingly popular. The one surprising omission, despite the fact that the majority of travellers would have been steeped in the history and literature of Greece and Rome, was Greece itself, and it appears that a tour of Italy satisfied most classical tastes and ambitions: As well as book work and art appreciation, there were such accomplishments as fencing, dancing, equitation, music and drawing to be 11

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learnt. There were also snuff boxes, tapestries, clocks, watches, and clothes to be bought in Paris; scagliola table-tops or pietra dura panels in Florence; coins, cameos, intaglios and prints in Rome.4 By the middle of the eighteenth century, as the Grand Tour was reaching its zenith, an alternative itinerary began at approximately the same time to a venue that was potentially less exotic, but arguably just as rewarding and challenging: the Home Tour. From about 1750, journeys to the Lake District, North Wales, the Highlands of Scotland, and of course the more picturesque regions of Ireland, became increasingly popular. William Pennant’s Tour of the Scottish Highlands (1769), Samuel Johnson’s Tour of Scotland (1776) and William Gilpin’s Tour of Scotland (1777), for example, conveyed the attractions of the more rugged parts of Scotland to many. But Gilpin’s Tour of the Wye Valley (1775), as well as a surge of interest in the Lake District and parts of southern England generally, brought the advantages of touring within many parts of Britain and Ireland to a new prominence. Barbara Korte suggests that travel within Britain and Ireland may be traced as far back as the sixteenth century, and of course there are texts and travellers that constitute something of an earlier tradition.5 However, the development of the eighteenth-century Home Tour was a much more focussed affair, not just because of the greater number of people who undertook it with marked enthusiasm, but because of the peculiar alliance of political and aesthetic considerations that shaped its development. Travellers began to concentrate on Britain and Ireland because it was increasingly difficult to travel in safety throughout continental Europe due to the Napoleonic wars, but also because of a reaction against the more classical standards associated with the Grand Tour. Indeed, the beginnings ‘of picturesque tourism in Britain’, argues Malcolm Andrews, ‘in the middle decades of the eighteenth century coincided with strong challenges to the cultural authority of Greek and Roman literature, with attempts to give an English vernacular flavour to classical genres of poetry, and with experiments in alternative, native traditions, such as those exemplified in Gothic and Celtic revivalism’.6 Laura Doyle more directly argues that: It may seem odd that at the moment when England became an empire following the Seven Year’s War and the defeat of France in various corners of the globe, the English literati apparently turned inward and became preoccupied with local races; but in fact this coincidence of events indicates that the mythology of locally-rooted races was crucial to the imagining of an imperial Englishness.7

From Grand Tour to Home Tour, 1760–1800

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This challenge to the ideology of Grand Tourism, partly explained by Andrews as a change in taste, is one of the most immediate ways of accounting for the rise in British and Irish travel in the latter eighteenth century. However, one text more than any other made that change all the more important: Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757. Burke’s description of what he termed the ‘sublime’ force of nature, and his regard generally for the terror of certain landscapes, prompted many in parts of Britain and Ireland to feel a renewed sense of pride. And although it is not easy to select from Burke’s complex and wide-ranging aesthetic the moments that encapsulate this shift, a number of critical comments make the connection between his ideas and their eventual influence upon landscape theorists, painters, travellers and writers easier to determine. Indeed, Burke’s evaluation of the sublime as ‘a non-rational and overpowering aesthetic experience’ deepens our understanding of a number of eighteenth-century travel accounts, especially of Ireland, and shows just how profound this enthusiasm for the Home Tour was to eventually become.8 Divided into five parts, Burke’s Enquiry steers the reader towards a conception of the sublime and the beautiful as meaningful aesthetic categories, but also demonstrates the effect they may have on our feelings and passions. In particular, Parts 2 and 4 – ‘of the Passion caused by the Sublime’, and ‘of the efficient cause of the Sublime and Beautiful’ – are of most interest for the present chapter, focussing, as they do, on instances of the sublime drawn in many cases from everyday life: Vastness, Magnitude in Building, Sound and Loudness, The Effects of Blackness, and so on. In Part 1 of the Enquiry Burke begins with an overarching statement, suggesting that ‘whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible . . . is a source of the sublime’.9 He then elaborates on this idea by describing various instances in which the sublime might be found, prompting us to consider its application across a range of experiences, and focussing on ‘astonishment’ as an especially powerful emotion: ‘Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect.’10 In Part 2 of the Enquiry, as Burke provides increasing examples of a sublime aesthetic, we begin to sense how these ideas might be absorbed, but also applied beyond the confines of taste and metaphysical philosophy. In his section on ‘Obscurity’, for example, Burke declares that to ‘make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary’,

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a belief elaborated with reference to a list of seemingly incongruous, though not uncharacteristic examples: Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. For this purpose too the druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks. No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton.11 As in his later comments on ‘Vastness’ or ‘Infinity’, Burke declares an appetite for the sublime that allows us to specifically connect it to the physical world, to those places that seem empty, barren or vast, that conjure up images of solitude, indeterminate light, fog and gloom; above all, the sorts of places that inspire a sense of foreboding or melancholy, as often as not a menacing, other-worldly universe (‘Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime’).12 The sublime, then, may be detected in wooded glens, near waterfalls, or on the edge of a mountain. But in case we think of it solely as a visual experience Burke also declares an interest in hearing the sublime, which can be just as intense an experience, and equally stimulating to the aesthetic mind: ‘Sad and fuscous colours, as black, or brown, or deep purple, and the like’ are perfectly suited to sublime experience, but ‘excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind.’13 It was to be the domestication of these ideas, brought about partly by a sense of growing ennui for the Grand Tour as a ‘civilizing’ exercise, but also because people could see how to adapt Burke’s ideas to their appreciation of British and Irish landscapes generally, that we see the origins of an enthusiasm for the Home Tour.14 As already suggested, the ongoing difficulties of European travel, as well as a shift in taste away from classical forms, were additional factors. But of course there were a myriad of other, sometimes more politically driven, issues involved. For example, Gold and Gold suggest that while curiosity, even scientific curiosity, was the reason some travellers visited Scotland in the mid- to late eighteenth century, a set of recently changed political circumstances – namely Culloden (1745) – significantly altered how the


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country was perceived. The Highlands, in particular, saw ‘initial disarmaments measures . . . followed by a conscious longer-term policy that sought to remove the area’s quasi-independence’. Responding to the fact that the region had seen ‘two pro-Stuart uprisings in thirty years’ the authorities adopted severe measures to impose control. Around ‘500,000 tenants in all were displaced [while others . . .] were forced to accept single passage on emigrant ships [or were . . .] allocated diminutive smallholdings on the littoral margins’, a strategy that ensured continued political resentment.15 But more important to the development of tourism than the government’s militarily inspired solutions to Scottish insurrection was the way in which the land itself became subject to reorganisation. A direct ‘response to the defeat at Culloden’, argue Gold and Gold, ‘lay in road construction’, and they suggest that improvements in Scottish infrastructure in the second half of the eighteenth century clearly relate to the perceived threat the country continued to evoke. After the 1715 uprising, they note, ‘250 miles of road and 40 new bridges [were . . .] constructed in the central Highlands between 1525 and 1736’. But after Culloden, ‘750 further miles including a road across the treacherous peat-bogs of Rannoch Moor and from Perth to Fort George (near Inverness) and to Aberdeen’ were built. This, and the fact that between 1747 and 1755 ‘a detailed military map at a scale of approximately two miles to the inch’ was also completed, provided precisely the sort of infrastructural, but also epistemological, basis upon which others would build. Knowing where to go, in other words, but knowing that reasonable roads existed to take you there, was one of the main reasons for the rapidly developing nature of Scottish tourism: Construction of roads and availability of maps and information gave travellers some basis on which to make their journeys. The stationing and constant relocations of large numbers of troops gave precedent for large numbers of visitors to move around even remote regions. Sequestration of land and use of income generated for building inns provided some accommodation for visitors from the leisured classes.16

The travelling method Although it has become commonplace to describe eighteenth-century Ireland as relatively peaceful this is a sentiment based, arguably, as much on comparing that era with the country’s much more turbulent early modern history, or even by contrasting it with the nineteenth

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century, which was marked by rising militarism and political uncertainty. Yet throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, from the 1760s onwards, there was growing rural unrest, characterised by a steady growth and consolidation of secret societies. As Michael Beames suggests: The 1760s witnessed the onset of major peasant disturbances. Three types of unrest can be distinguished: protests by Presbyterian peasants and farmers in Ulster; Whiteboy disturbances in the southern and midland counties; and sectarian clashes in parts of Ulster from the 1780s onwards leading eventually to the formation of the Catholic Defenders society and the Protestant Orange Order.17 The Whiteboys, Oakboys, Greenboys, Peep O’Day Boys, Defenders and Orange Boys provided a colourful if disruptive backdrop to what appeared to many as an era of general improvement, most notably demonstrated by the work of the Wide Streets Commission in Dublin (appointed 1757), and the later development of the cities of Limerick and Armagh. Moreover, Dublin’s Customs House was begun in 1781, the Four Courts in 1786, and Carlisle Bridge’s foundation stone laid in 1791, in addition to the construction of the great houses of Ireland, many of which were built throughout the eighteenth century, and all of which attested to an optimism in the country’s long-term political future. Yet behind this simmered a growing dissatisfaction, attributed by Beames to a combination of changes in agricultural practice and market forces. He explains: The influence of the forces of the external market are particularly apparent in the origins of the first Whiteboy disturbances. The early and middle decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a movement in Irish agriculture towards increasing pasture at the expense of tillage . . . By 1760–61, the pressure for new pasture was strong enough in the province of Munster to tempt graziers into enclosing lands previously understood to be commons. It was these enclosures which sparked off the earliest Whiteboy disturbances . . . In such circumstances, the only option left apart from quiet submission was some form of violent protest.18 The comments are apposite. In 1766 the Tumultous Risings Act was passed, specifically directed against Whiteboy activity, although it hardly seemed to matter as there was widespread rioting from June to


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August of that year over the scarcity and high price of food; in 1772 a similar Act was passed to repress Steelboy disturbances in five Ulster counties. Writing of these events David Dickson suggests that despite periodic outbursts Ireland may not in fact have been any more dangerous or unsettled than other countries: ‘Stories of highwaymen and bandits were given colourful prominence in the Dublin press – but precisely the same was the case in England, which may indeed have become by 1760 a more violent society than was Ireland.’19 So, as usual, Ireland continued to convey to many of its visitors a rather more varied repertoire of social and cultural experiences than some were prepared for. While several of the writers discussed below comment upon the disturbances of these decades, for others the focus is elsewhere, on aesthetics or on agriculture, and the Whiteboys and others appear, not inappropriately, like shadowy and fleeting movements behind the general rhythms of Irish life. The country may have been periodically unsettled, in other words, yet it continued to appeal to an increasing number of British travellers who were beginning to explore the more remote areas within Britain and Ireland. Indeed, for many eighteenthcentury British travellers seeking to expand their geo-political horizons, Ireland was a place to which they felt increasingly drawn, and whatever the bad publicity resulting from rural disturbances, several came to the country prepared to engage with its culture, and above all, hoping to compare it with Britain. In this chapter, then, I want to examine Ireland’s role within the culture and development of the Home Tour, and show the ways in which it attracted yet also confused many British travellers. I also wish to demonstrate the manner in which Ireland provided many of the thrills of continental travel, while also remaining reassuringly domestic: mainly English-speaking, geographically close, and increasingly tied to the British political system. As we will see, in many respects Ireland fitted the new Home Tour brief extremely well: sufficiently close to be spatially regarded by many a part of their ‘home’, yet because it was the least understood of all the regions, potentially exotic. This, at any rate, is part of the appeal noted by John Bush, one of the earliest Home Tour travellers to visit Ireland, who published Hibernia Curiosa in 1769, which was subsequently translated into Dutch in late 1769 as Hetmerkwaardig Ierland. Hibernia Curiosa, written in the form of letters from Bush to a friend based in Kent, focusses mainly on the manners and customs of the Irish, although it also offers observations on the country’s trade and agriculture, as well as discussing some of its natural curiosities and more celebrated places of interest. Clearly tapping into the newness of the

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event, Bush, even in his title, alludes to Ireland’s relatively unknown status among many British readers, declaring the country to be both uncharted, yet – the paradox of all adventure travel accounts – about to be discovered, certainly made more available than was previously the case. The curiosity expressed, and allegedly shared, by Bush and his readers, then, is conveniently expressed in that latinate form – Hibernia Curiosa – with the result that Ireland, a place routinely associated with savagery and incomprehension, becomes not so much associated with the classical forms of the Grand Tour, but classified in the tradition of Linné: pinned like a specimen, for the reader’s gratification. Published only twelve years after the Enquiry, Bush’s text – perhaps surprisingly for someone classified as a Gentleman Farmer from Tunbridge Wells – has clearly absorbed the sublime theories of Edmund Burke.20 Indeed, even Bush’s editor, who pens a lengthy introduction, titled ‘To the Reader’, suggests the new direction being offered by Bush, and notes how removed from the writings of more traditional ‘tour-writers’ Hibernia actually is. Hibernia, he declares, is designed to serve ‘the curious traveller’ rather than ‘the sedentary, domestic traveller’, a text far removed from the lifeless transcriptions of foreign parts that were routinely presented.21 Readers of the latter, he argues, have been content with inaccurate depictions of Ireland, with scurrilous representations of the Irish themselves, and with an altogether tedious set of preoccupations that normally involve detailed analysis of particular monuments and antiquities, whether they are interesting or not. That, he argues, is the handiwork of those ‘domestic travellers, or, rather, if you please, garretriders’, whereas Bush’s work offers a radical departure from standard practice: You gentlemen, in the paper and calf-skin trade, have a little patience, and you shall have an original natural history, or tour, to work upon, to pick out, stick in, curtail, transpose, digest, methodize, or however you please, according to the art and mystery of your profession. We assure you, Sirs, by this is not meant the following production, for though ’tis perfectly original, and therefore should be one of the best subjects in your shops to work upon, yet it is beyond your profoundest art to methodize.22 Bush’s text, then, is aimed at a particular type of traveller, one who is able to discern what is worth visiting, and why. Ian Ousby reminds us that the shift from the Grand Tour (‘the moving Academy’) towards a fuller appreciation of the attractions of Britain and Ireland, was


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something that took a grip on the minds of many, of how ‘Home ground . . . was [initially] too tame and too familiar to furnish the scholar with conclusions of much originality or provide the gentleman with an education of much weight. At least, so it seemed until the latter part of the eighteenth century.’23 And when we read someone like Bush the sense of renewed interest suggested by Ousby is certainly manifest. Not only that, but we also discover that many of the same battles waged by Grand Tourists concerning what was most interesting, or best avoided during their travels around Europe, would be now played out at home: Suppose, for once, we should have a tour historical, in order to realize it, in a manner, to the imaginations of the reader, wrote a little more conformable to the general plan of a tour itinerant. Why, for instance, must a gentleman whose taste and inclination for travelling shall carry him through the kingdom, to gratify his curiosity with a view of the general face of the country, and of what is really curious and deserving of notice, either in the artificial or natural productions of it, why must he, against all sense and taste, be confined to the dull, stupid, and unnatural method of circulating and zig-zagging through all the insignificant towns of every county he gets into, before he can leave it; or why must he waste as much time and patience in one county, as will carry him with pleasure through half a score. You, grave Sirs, that are dealers in method and margin, and imagine it is making the most of your tours and illustrations – may call this travelling methodically – but the devil’s in’t if it is travelling with pleasure, or making the most of the journey.24 Clearly, the sense that a tour of Ireland should be a pleasure is being relayed here, but how to get the most out of a country is being specifically associated with a particular kind of travelling, and a specific way of writing. For Bush’s editor, those ‘grave’ travellers who engage in lengthy digressions and detail, not only dull their own physical experiences, but the reading experiences of others. Imaginative travellers, on the other hand, convey the essence of a country more effectively to their readers through careful and selective descriptions that have been judiciously and artfully composed. Speculations on the minutiae of rural life are useless, indeed infuriating, unless supported by interesting observations, and stopping the reader: at every market town he should go thro’, to examine into the antiquities of it, for the useful acquisition of knowing who built the first

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house .. .whether the markets were kept on Wednesdays or Saturdays – if more sheep than bullocks were brought to the fair . . . and whether the town were governed by a Mayor and Alderman, or by a set of old women in long riding-hoods25 is both dull and pointless. Clearly, for Bush’s editor, then, the turn from venues associated with classical Grand tourism to places within Britain and Ireland involved much more than a shift or reorientation in geographical awareness. It meant ridding the travel narrative of those ‘pedagogical priggs’ that bogged the form down in tedious and unwarranted documentation: ‘Damn the whole fraternity of ’em. – Sir, I mean of knights of the post – from Pall-mall to Pater-noster.’26

Travelling light Bush’s journey took him from Dublin to several parts of the country, although as is clear from the editorial, not every town or village actually encountered within that radius receives a mention. He states that he ‘traversed from north to south and from west to east, the three provinces of Ulster, Leinster and Munster’. Connaught, however, ‘the most western province of Ireland, and in form and situation, not much unlike Wales in England, is the least inviting to a traveller of any part of the kingdom’, and is therefore ignored.27 This concern on the narrator’s part to principally visit the more picturesque areas of the country, especially where the ‘Englishman will find as much civility, in general, as amongst the same class in his own country’, reflects the largely eighteenth-century sense of travel as something done for one’s health (spiritual or physical), or because the place to be visited is beautiful, or interesting, or associated with irrefutable historical and antiquarian significance, and therefore to be journeyed to at all costs.28 The thought of putting one’s life in danger in pursuit of thrills, or because of some curious, proto-ethnological interest in local customs, would have been completely at odds with the conventions of eighteenth-century travel. Travellers might have been more interested in internal travel in a way previously unimaginable, but that did not mean that they were prepared to take risks with their own safety, or be inconvenienced more than was necessary. Not until the nineteenth century, when the west of Ireland would be transformed from one of the least to one of the most visited regions would things change. At this stage in the development of modern tourism, however, too great an interest in native culture or practice would have been anathema to what was regarded as the civilising


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basis of travel. The uncouth, dangerous or downright harrowing could only be investigated if displaced onto the physical place to which the traveller’s own gaze was directed: to the sublime or horrifying spectacles of nature. By contrast, the natives themselves were rarely acknowledged, and even then only within certain limits, or when absolutely crucial to the development of the narrative itself, for example as a way of introducing local colour, or to verify occasionally outrageous claims. By the mid-nineteenth century political commentary in travel narratives was quite common, and although Bush’s concerns are generally more aesthetic, and literally explorative, he considers Irish political life at several junctures and offers an analysis of the complexities of Ireland that focusses on landlordism as the likeliest source of annoyance. These ‘haughty and tyrannic landlords’, suggests Bush, oppress the people unmercifully, burdening ‘the miserable wretches [who] live in the vilest and most abject state of dependence’, and thus create scenes of ‘misery and oppression’ all around.29 A brief mention of the role of the Catholic clergy in also maintaining a stranglehold on the economic, as well as spiritual, lives of the people appears in passing (‘the rapacious, insatiable priest’), which does free Bush from too radical a position.30 Nevertheless, his excoriating attack on the excesses of landlordism, absentee as well as settled, and his belief that they are themselves directly responsible for at least some of the outrages conducted by the Whiteboys, reveals a narrator unusually willing to directly confront the realities of Irish life: I make no doubt, this has been the principal source of the many insurrections of the White-boys, as they are called, in the south, from my own observations and enquiries in the midst of them, and likewise drives them, in swarms, to the high roads, which throughout the southern and western parts, are lined with beggars; who live in huts, or cabbins as they are called, of such shocking materials and construction, that through hundreds of them you may see the smoak ascending from every inch of the roof, for scarce one in twenty of them have any chimney, and through every inch of which defenceless coverings, the rain, of course, will make its way to drip upon the half naked, shivering, and almost half starved inhabitants within . . . The consequences of this, with respect to the different classes, are obvious – the landlords, first and subordinate, get all that is made of the land, and the tenants, for their labour, get poverty and potatoes.31 The swarming multitude of disaffected Irish brought to textual presence by Bush, then, constitute a beleaguered and voiceless community

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whose economic and political status requires urgent attention, but about whom he can do, ultimately, nothing.32 His intervention on their behalf, in other words, represents an unusual but predictably redundant effort to take the focus away from high political matters and onto a more practical level (‘[the peasantry] are absolutely no better than slaves to the despicably lazy subordinate landlords’).33 True, such arguments may prevail little upon those directly responsible, yet in having advanced such notions Bush nonetheless reveals himself as prepared to counter conventional thinking. Whether the pose struck can be related to the relative newness of Ireland as a tourist destination, or to the fact that Bush is simply outspoken, or because of a growing unease in Britain about its role in Ireland, is hard to say. But that Bush displays a willingness to confront some of the less attractive features of Irish life is clear from the opening pages of his text. Duncan and Gregory suggest that travel writing: is often inherently domesticating . . . and we have noted how many critics have emphasized its complicity with the play of colonizing power. But even in its most imperial gestures, by virtue of its occupation of that ‘space in-between’ . . . travel writing can also disclose an ambivalence, a sense of its own authorities and assumptions being called into question.34 Although Bush’s narrative does not advance specifically radical solutions for Ireland, in registering a sense of unease about the state of the country he nevertheless evokes an ambivalence not dissimilar to that described by Duncan and Gregory. While Hibernia reveals a multi-faceted narrative, then, able to voice concern at current policy in Ireland, while at the same time stressing solidarity with other ‘Englishmen’, it offers an impression of the country that is permeated with a Burkean sensibility. It develops a version of Ireland that connects much of the countryside with Burke’s view of the sublime, and reflects a sense of the country as an uncultivated and raging landscape. An allied aesthetic appreciation is also deployed which situates Ireland within the ‘picturesque’ tradition, a potentially reassuring category that allows for a more serene appreciation of the grandeur of Irish nature. But the main thrust of Bush’s response is to make a direct linkage between certain aspects of the Irish landscape and the sublime force of nature, a place in which freedom from the sort of classical traditions that still dominate appreciations of the British landscape could be more easily developed. The sublime, then, is where Bush sees Ireland’s


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attractions being most successfully discussed, but there is the sense, too, that the sublime offers to British travellers a way of seeing in Ireland something fundamentally different from continental Europe. Jeremy Black concurs with the notion that domestic travel boomed in the eighteenth century, largely because of the increasing numbers of writers who actively promoted the Home Tour, but also because of the convenience with which tourists could now travel around the more remote parts of these islands. Better maps, roads and inns, as suggested above, all helped to change how potential travellers viewed their own countries. Nevertheless, Black does point to one serious drawback that proponents of the Home Tour were clearly aware of: that ‘Tourism on the Continent was more adventurous’.35 Undoubtedly, there were risks involved in travelling, and temporarily residing, in continental venues, such as the notorious heat and malaria of Rome and Naples, the physical hardships involved in winter travel through the Alpine passes, not to mention the sea journeys, which involved in the case of the Mediterranean route to Italy the possibility of an encounter with Barbary pirates. That said, the cultural, social and artistic attractions of continental Europe could be also endlessly fascinating, a medley of tongues and temptations that were hard to surpass, and almost impossible to resist. The sights and public buildings of Paris, the pleasantries of Geneva, described by Black as ‘offering the French language without the pitfalls of Catholicism’, Venitian opera, Roman antiquities, even the scholarly attractions of Leyden and Ghent, all promised greater thrills and opportunities for self-expression and pleasure.36 Moreover, for the hardier and more independent-minded, there was also the promise of the Balkans and, further afield, Russia, Turkey or the near East, although several of the cities on this itinerary, such as Buda, Constantinople and Bucharest, only received significant numbers of tourists from the 1780s onwards. In other words, it is clear that however committed proponents of the Home Tour felt about the range of options available throughout the rugged or picturesque parts of Britain and Ireland, of how worthy they were of serious attention, they were up against more than stiff opposition when the combined cultural diversity of continental Europe was considered as an alternative. Which is why the rhetorical advantages to be gained from drawing on theories of the sublime, especially in the case of Ireland, became one way of creating a diversion, of instilling excitement into a terrain and culture that was – at least within conventionally classical terms – less appealing. A sublime appreciation helped encourage touristic interest in Ireland, but for writers such as John Bush it provided them with a rich and, more importantly, distinct vocabulary

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with which to combat classical discourse. The sublime was not just different, but a potentially horrifying spectacle that could entice by the sheer waywardness of its form, its unpredictability, but also because to appreciate its charms involved divesting oneself of certain refined sensibilities and tastes. In Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Burke’s sublime is seen as a reaction to a fairly well-established discussion on aesthetics that has its origins in the German philosophical tradition, which in turn was ‘born as a discourse of the body’, a reaction or ‘long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical’.37 Such a philosophy, suggests Eagleton, took root in Britain by the mid-eighteenth century, and was conveyed most emphatically in Burke’s writing, a form of writing, he argues, that ‘is on the side of enterprise, rivalry and individuation . . . a suitably defused, aestheticized version of the values of the ancien regime’, and therefore a reactionary aesthetic that, albeit suffused with the language of intense and heightened contemplation, offers a view of the world that is at once self-aggrandizing and intimidatory. He continues: as a ‘kind of terror, the sublime crushes us into admiring submission; it thus resembles a coercive rather than a consensual power, engaging our respect but not, as with beauty, our love’. For Eagleton, the sublime has a deliberately jolting effect, rocking the complacent middle classes into a fuller realisation of their social and cultural position vis-à-vis their inferiors, a reminder that not all of what they hold will always be theirs, or theirs in quite the way they have historically enjoyed. The sublime, he reminds us, ‘is confined to the cultivated few . . . with its “delightful horror”, [it] is the rich man’s labour, [capable of] invigorating an otherwise dangerously complacent ruling class’,38 a natural development of the eighteenth century when Britain emerged ‘as the world’s leading commercial power, vanquishing its foreign rivals and extending its imperial sway across the globe’. 39 Although Eagleton usefully identifies certain conservative aspects of sublime discourse, showing how it conveyed both the anxieties and the desires of an upper middle class who periodically feared for its future, it is less applicable to Bush than might first appear. Eagleton agrees that as the eighteenth century progressed, an earlier, more liberated version of the sublime – which had had authority and visibility – went into decline. However, Tom Furniss argues that a ‘society organized around the sublime would be a meritocracy . . . [and that] Burke’s aesthetic theory seeks to throw off the trammels of custom through which political and social hegemony had been traditionally maintained; it places authority in the immediate, sensory experience of the individual rather


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than in tradition’. More particularly, Furniss sees – or rather argues that Burke sees – the sublime as ‘open to all in a way which potentially cuts across social strata’.40 This is not to suggest that we may interpret Bush as having clearly developed political intentions, or regard his view of the sublime as a way of resolving – to Ireland’s satisfaction – those historical antagonisms that exist between Britain and Ireland. But it is to say that unlike later writers alluded to by Eagleton, Bush embraces an ideologically enlightened view that helps to destabilise political structures, while at the same time situating certain aspects of the Irish landscape within a sublime discourse that appears liberated and liberating.

The rough and the smooth Since certain Irish views seem to invite a particularly nuanced interpretation it is hardly surprising that it is in county Wicklow that Bush’s sublime interests are first conveyed. Indeed, one might argue that Bush finds on parts of Lord Powerscourt’s estate elements from nature that arouse what Andrews calls ‘primary emotional drives’, an aesthetic response to the Irish countryside that was previously unexpressed, and because of that, novel.41 What is possibly more of a surprise, however, is the way in which Bush moves away from the relative safety of the Big House to wander quite freely across the Irish landscape, picking up on those aspects of it that most appeal to him, and which in turn he feels will be of most interest to his readers. Ian Ousby follows Andrews in alluding to the intensification of social disparity that accompanied the development of the eighteenth-century country house, stressing, in particular, its exclusivity and remove from the bulk of society. But Ousby also argues that these houses had a specific function, and of how they ‘became a prominent and familiar part of the landscape for the leisured, mobile middle classes – not just imposing spectacles to be glimpsed from a distance but attractions to be entered and viewed in the course of their travels’.42 Which is at least partly how Powerscourt functions within Bush’s narrative: as a place of refinement and taste, a pleasing diversion, even though within its boundaries lie teasing transgressions that seem to infatuate and enthral our narrator. However, when it comes to an exploration of those natural elements that are at a short distance from the house Bush appears even more explicit in his aesthetic appreciation of the Irish countryside, warming to its wild and rugged charms, its bold and apparently formless composition. Indeed at times Bush turns county Wicklow, a place regarded by some as a cultural extension of Dublin, and therefore with

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Illustration 1 Wicklow. From Lough Dan looking North towards Luggelaw. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland

gentility and security, into a sort of gothic retreat, a realm of terror only miles from the Irish capital.43 ‘The glyns, or dark vallies’, he remarks, are ‘remarkably beautiful’, ornamented, as they are, with trees, and sometimes laced with streams and waterfalls.44 But rather than simply comment on the appearance of such ‘natural curiosities’ themselves, Bush’s language pushes towards an acknowledgement of the effect they have on the viewer, harmonising and, to a certain extent, fusing the natural environment with an essentially human response. This, to quote Andrews, is part of the ‘sensationist aesthetic’ outlined by Burke, an instinctual, pre-rational acceptance of beauty free from the intrusions of schematised thinking. 45 That Bush is able to read such elements of the Irish countryside within the discourse of the sublime – as markers of irrepressible natural wonder – without any feelings of insecurity or anxiety, is certainly noteworthy. Of possibly even greater note, though, is his ability to relax in the sense of melancholy that the scene also provokes, detecting in it a reflection of his own higher intelligence and sensitivity. The ‘glyn’, he suggests, gives off ‘a kind of gloomy solemnity’, a comment he then elaborates on by way of demonstrating, not just his ease in the presence of such a sight, but the benefits to be gleaned from such a connection: ‘[consider] the


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gloomy retirement of the place, where the lover, the poet, or philosopher, may wander with every circumstance, every scene about him, calculated to warm his imagination, or produce the most serious reflections’.46 The relationship here envisaged by Bush between the poet-philosopher and the natural environment is hardly a new one, not even by mid-eighteenth-century standards, but that he forges a connection between a type of Irish landscape and such an imaginative response is a radical enough undertaking. As an English traveller, Bush’s attitude towards Irish nature is an interesting one; he regards it as something to be experienced, almost tested, seeing it as a potentially unknown force that can free the emotions by its sudden and unexpected pleasures. Described by his editor as a ‘curious traveller’, Bush presents himself as forthright in his criticisms and comments, but also – at least up to a point – prepared to take risks for the sake of a rewarding experience. His one failing is to have shied away from what he thought might be too uncomfortable an encounter with the Connaught Irish, and yet we are able to balance this by the remarkable innovation he shows in another, rather unexpected area of interest: his love of Irish bogs. This is the one element of the Irish landscape that has historically enjoyed, especially among English visitors, a less than favourable response. Indeed, from the early modern era onwards bogs were seen as threats or inconveniences from the natural order, places to be feared, and therefore avoided at all costs. Their purpose was unknown, and quite apart from the smells they periodically emitted, or the pools of water that unexpectedly emerged, they had been also used by the Irish militarily, particularly in battles such as Yellowford (1597), where the Irish forces led Sir Henry Bagenal, his troops and heavy carthorses, into the bog where they became, first, disorientated, then immobilised, and finally defeated. Hardly surprising, then, that a link became established between Irish ethnic and environmental intractability in many early modern English minds, and that the bogs themselves became places of dark and brooding unpredictability in the English psyche. For Bush, however, the bogs are an opportunity to see something different, and they constitute part of the exotic appeal of Ireland, while an additional attraction lies in there having been little positive discussion of them to date. Standing in, one might imagine, for the displaced Connaught Irish whom he refuses to physically encounter, the bogs are the quintessential heart of Ireland, and located, partly, at its very centre they represent a truly awesome sight: inert yet organic, with little

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discernible undulations or visible markers, they exude their own sense of terror, their own subliminal force: From these lofty and sublime curiosities of nature, you must now make a descent with me into the dreggs of Ireland, down into the very bogs, with which this island abounds, and some of them to an extent of many miles . . . However, I will carry you over them as safe, and with as much expedition as I can; staying no longer on them than just to let you know what ground you are upon, and will conduct you again to prospects more inviting and fertile of entertainment. Though the bogs have generally been classed among the natural disadvantages of this kingdom, I shall, notwithstanding, take them into the number of its natural curiosities, at least as they will appear such to an English traveller, both as to their origin and produce. But prepare yourself to travel as lightly as possible, throw off every unnecessary weight, for the surface you have now to tread on is very infirm and dangerous; and should you break through, you have but little chance of stopping, in your descent, ’till you reach the antediluvian world.47 Here is Bush, forever tempting us with the value to be gained from a ‘curiosity’, sharing his own, very personal delight in the fears associated with the bog, titillating the reader with unforeseen dangers, while at the same time ameliorating them with the sense of himself as a friend who can be relied upon to look out for their safety. At Powerscourt we know exactly what he prefers to focus on, how the parkland of the estate is largely passed over in favour of an encounter with the sublime forces of the falls, the raging cataract reduced to a tranquilized sheet, with Bush himself positioned now at their foot, then high above, the ever-moving discussant and surveyor of all. However, despite the communion he forms with the natural, at times prettified, scenery of County Wicklow, these attractions almost pall in comparison with the marshy wetlands of other parts of the country. ‘Make a descent with me into the dreggs of Ireland’, Bush temptingly proposes, for although the bog appears dangerous, and has been classed as a ‘natural disadvantage’ by earlier English visitors, it is really unknown, or known only to that ‘antediluvian world’ of prehistory.48 In Bush’s mind the bog fails as a candidate for the more obvious ecstasies of sublime discourse noted earlier, but this is not to suggest that he is unable to speculate beneficially about it, and he chooses to tease the reader with theories and possibilities concerning its construction. For


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example, he admits that any suggestions concerning what might lie at the bottom of a bog are ‘altogether conjectural’, that Irish accounts of the composition of turf are ‘erroneous’, that the idea that wood has been physically added to the marshy ground is ‘highly probable’, but that a ‘theory’, at best, can only be offered for the bog’s formation.49 The bog, quite simply, defies comprehension, retaining its secrets, yielding little but its ‘natural smell’. And yet rather than frustrate the reader, Bush’s wavering and inconclusive geology only draws the reader ever closer towards something routinely avoided by English travellers.50 In other words, the suspenseful Bush may create unease, agreeing that there is little that can be said about the bog with certainty, but he is also putting successfully on the map the very thing that has been historically shunned as featureless, alien and dangerous. Indeed, almost as though he wishes to make the latest Irish attraction even more curious to the reader (and Bush likes to describe himself as a ‘curious traveller’), he goes on to represent the bog as a living specimen, writing, for example, of the ‘plentiful growth of the heath’, of its ‘course mat’, and its ‘fluid . . . [and] infinite number of capillary fibres’. He even speaks of the ‘luxuriant growth’ that yearly develops on its surface, and of the ‘fibrous roots’, ‘annual growths . . . and internal vegetation’ that hold the ever-ranging organism together.51 This is the bog made gothic, but also human, where it is purposefully described in all its geological and vegetative alterity, yet made to also appear as a reassuring element of the natural order: I assure you, a good beef steak broiled on Irish turf, and served up with a dish of roasted potatoes, is excellent food for an English stomach, and were it possible to transpose them, I should be very glad to exchange one of my best acres of corn land in Kent, for two acres of the bog of Allen.52

Waters and ruins Within the discourse of sublime and picturesque travel, the presence of water has an interesting if unevenly developed history. Lynne Withey points out that in the early eighteenth century, for example in Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), the Lake District is described as ‘a land of unhospitable terror, barren and bleak’, and how he cherished, by way of contrast, the ‘pastoral landscape of southern and central England’. Clearly, in the decades after Defoe the usefulness, not to mention the fundamental attraction of water as

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a primary element in the landscape, became firmly established, and Withey goes on to ironically suggest that the Lake District ‘was by the 1790s the single most popular tourist destination in the British Isles’.53 It is not easy to say with any degree of certainty how exactly Bush came to regard several of the lakes of Ireland with the fondness that he does, because by the time of his writing those now-familiar discourses on the beauty of water were yet to be published. John Brown’s A Description of the Lake at Keswick, written around 1753, does predate Bush, and in it we see something of that growing infatuation with water: ‘The lake is a perfect mirror; and the landskip in all its beauty, islands, fields, woods, rocks, and mountains, are seen inverted, and floating on its surface.’54 Thomas Gray is another serious contender for the title of lakeside populariser, who travelled around the Lake District in 1767 and 1769, and went on to write enthusiastically about the natural scenery of the area in Journal in the Lakes (1769). And Thomas Whately, better known for his Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), was nothing less than emphatic in his appreciation of the practical, but also the aesthetic usefulness of water: Water is the most interesting object in a landscape, and the happiest circumstance in a retired recess; captivates the eye at a distance, invites approach, and is delightful when near; it refreshes an open exposure; it animates a shade; chears the dreariness of a waste, and enriches the most crouded view: in form, in style, and in extent, may be made equal to the greatest compositions, or adapted to the least: it may spread in a calm expanse to sooth the tranquillity of a peaceful scene; or hurrying along a devious course, add splendor to a gay, and extravagance to a romantic, situation.55 However, despite the growing interest in water, expressed by several writers from the 1760s, it is arguably not until Gilpin and Thomas West’s publications that we begin to see lake and water scenery really take hold with, firstly, Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782), described by Andrews as ‘having initiated the vogue for Picturesque tourism in Britain’.56 Gilpin’s decision to strike camp on the banks of the Wye, followed by a return trip from Wye to Monmouth, set the trend, not just for an environmentally satisfying, but a specifically picturesque appreciation of water, focussing on it as both an impressive physical and visual spectacle: ‘Every view of a river, thus circumstanced, is composed of four grand parts; the area, which is the river itself; the two side-screens, which are the opposite banks, and mark the perspective; and the front-screen, which points out the winding of the river.’57 And


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in the case of West, Scottish topographer, Jesuit priest and sometime antiquarian, the intention is even clearer: ‘The design of the following sheets, is to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes, by furnishing the traveller with a Guide; and for that purpose, the writer has here collected and laid before him, all the select stations and points of view.’ 58 Although the difference in time between Bush’s and Gilpin’s publications is relatively modest – Andrews maintains that although the latter’s Observations was not published until 1783 versions of the text had been ‘circulating in manuscript . . . for at least a decade earlier’59 – the fact that Bush includes in his text water scenery as forcefully, and with as much enthusiasm as he does, is nevertheless noteworthy: [W]e will now enter upon a survey of another and much more pleasing species of natural curiosity in this kingdom, which will particularly engage the attention, and afford scope for the highest entertainment to the English traveller, I mean the beautiful lakes that are met with in great numbers in this island . . . many of them beautifully ornamented with fertile and verdant islands, amongst which, in the summer time, are made the most agreeable parties of rural pleasure.60 That Bush’s invitation to the English traveller and reader to appreciate the various waterways of Ireland is based, at least in these opening remarks, on pleasure and entertainment, is especially interesting. Jeremy Black reminds us that it is only in the second half of the eighteenth century that enticements of this nature could be more fully acknowledged, so for Bush to openly disassociate Ireland from the more educationally inspired reasons for travel in the 1760s suggests not just an attempt to reconfigure Ireland, but to reconceptualise the very basis for travel itself. The sometimes xenophobic arguments proffered by some commentators hostile to continental touring were based on the fact that increasing levels of time were being spent on idle pleasure, rather than on self-improvement. As Black explains, many ‘critics could not accept that tourism, despite the ideology of education and improvement, was primarily a holiday’.61 For Bush to invite readers to view certain Irish attractions as a form of escape, in and of itself, then, was to reject the georgic basis of travel itself, to declare the lakes of Ireland worthy of seeing because a degree of pleasure was not something that had to be concealed, or converted into a more palatable form. ‘Such actions had always been common’, argues Black, ‘but in the second half of the [eighteenth] century tourists appear to have regarded them as appropriate activities that did not need defending.’62

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Of course, several, rather more serious issues are raised by Bush just prior to his spate of fluvial imaginings. For example, he states that some ‘of these lakes have their medicinal virtues, likewise, particularly that of Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the kingdom, and famous for curing ulcerous disorders, and for its petrifying quality’.63 His pseudo-medical concern is not identified with tourism itself, but simply alluded to as one of the benefits that might be derived from visiting this particular area. There is no further comment made, and none expected, mainly because quite apart from how unsuited a concern in restorative medicine might be to Bush’s text, an interest in water, spa or bathing tourism in the 1760s was minor enough. To be sure, visits to coastal cities or towns frequently involved taking the air, and tourists generally tried to appreciate whatever sea-view happened to be in front of them. It is also the case that notable Irish sea-side resorts, proclaimed for their ‘curing’ capacities, such as at Bray, Youghal and Kilkee, were following a tradition first established in England: [F]ashion for sea-bathing as a ‘cure’ originated early in the eighteenth century in Britain. Small fishing villages were the beneficiaries of this new restorative diversion of the leisured classes and before long the best-known of these was Brighthelmstone in Sussex, soon to figure prominently . . . under its later name of Brighton. These new resorts offered fresh air, at a time when the growing urban areas were becoming increasingly polluted, together with healthy exercise.64 But although there were eighteenth-century visitors to each of these places, it was not until the latter part of the century that they became established as touristic venues in their own right. John Heuston suggests that Irish spas, such as at Lucan, Mallow and Castleconnell, were developed in the eighteenth century, but that it is only towards ‘the end of the eighteenth century [that] . . . sea-bathing became popular among the Anglo-Irish élite’, remarking of Kilkee, in particular, that only in the 1820s was greater interest expressed.65 Cara Aitchison et al. remark on the early eighteenth-century interest in ‘medicinal springs and wells’, and how they laid the foundation for the later vogue for ‘health cures . . . spas, and later seaside resorts’, but whether an appetite, even among the Irish themselves, had been generated in such diversions was unlikely, especially in the 1760s.66 By 1845, when Thomas Cook’s fledgling business decided on a train excursion from the English midlands to the Liverpool seashore (the ‘obvious popularity of the Liverpool excursion induced Cook to run a second one two weeks later’),67 attitudes


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towards the idea had radically changed, but then so too had the direction of tourists’ interests generally, with bathing and pleasure largely replacing the earlier, more upmarket, emphasis on health and well-being. Although Bush highlights the potential available at Lough Erne, and therefore appears far ahead of his contemporaries, the most interesting part of his narrative emerges when he moves from the simple aquatic pleasures of Lough Erne to the more spectacular sights around the lakes of Killarney. Indeed, the unappealing nature of his trip from Cork to Killarney has the merit of instantly amplifying the scenery of the south-west, of making what lies ahead all the more intense. In fact when the lakes of Killarney do appear they practically take on the role of an oasis, sprung from the surrounding moor and rock, a magical kingdom of mountainous views, islets and vegetative abundance that mystify and bewitch the viewer (‘one would imagine that Nature had neglected the country round about it for many mile on purpose to be lavish of beauty and fertility on this her favourite spot’).68 And for the next thirty pages or so, despite claims from the narrator that his powers are less than adequate, and that the beauties of the place are descriptively beyond him, we are persuaded to think of the south-west in terms of natural perfection, but also of its picturesque and sublime qualities, and consider how they are to be most successfully enjoyed. River, or water scenery generally, suggests Malcolm Andrews, ‘offered the connoisseur Picturesque pleasures of a very specific kind. Unlike travel in a jolting carriage, the smooth passage of the boat relaxed the tourist and encouraged concentration on the very steady unfolding of views.’69 Moreover, unlike riding over the top of broken or heavily rutted tracks, a water tour also gave the feeling of being in harmony with the very environment one is there to appreciate. And for Bush, who clearly warmed to the soft pulse and rhythms of the water, while his oarsmen rowed him across the lakes in pursuit of ever more staggering views, the experience is not just of a sublime, but of a religious nature also. He alludes to other travellers to the lakes not as tourists or visitors, but as ‘votaries’, a term with clearly religious connotations that describe a person vowed to the service of God, an ardent follower or devotee of the spiritual life. And Roger Cardinal writes, largely of romantic travellers, that the ‘sensation of drifting in a boat seems especially conducive to fantasies of omnipresence and omnipotence’.70 Of course, to identify the experience of Ireland’s south-west with terms such as ‘votary’ is to not only associate it with an other-worldly universe, but to also make it emphatically less tangible as a geo-political reality, which is to say rather less Irish than one might be tempted to think.

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And yet rather than attribute a political import to such a development, to see in it an effort to deterritorialise the area by implicitly identifying it with a supernatural authority, the place seems to have a genuine command over Bush, and is therefore comprehensible to him only in other-worldly terms. His way of making contact with something he describes as an ‘aqueo-insular paradise’, in other words, is to talk of it in almost mystical terms (‘nothing but the thunder of Heaven itself’). Which is why, prompted by the fact that the region is ‘beyond description’, sometimes ‘beyond imagination’, Bush gives himself over to its pleasures, even though those pleasures are deeply tinged with confusion about the great curiosities with which the area abounds. For example, as he is punted gently around the many small islands that dot the lakes, Bush comments on ‘shrubs of various kinds, such as I do not remember to have seen’,71 expressing a sense of horticultural curiosity about the place in ways that neatly reflect the achievements of the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linné, who published Systema Naturae (1735), and later, Philosophia Botanica (1751), and Species Plantarum (1753). These texts, argues Mary Louise Pratt, dramatically impacted upon travel and travel writing, created unprecedented interest in the natural world, and prompted a fascination for classifications of all sorts: In the second half of the eighteenth century, whether or not an expedition was primarily scientific, or the traveller a scientist, natural history played a part in it. Specimen gathering, the building up of collections, the naming of new species, the recognition of known ones, became standard themes in travel and travel books. Alongside the frontier figures of the seafarer, the conqueror, the captive, the diplomat, there began to appear everywhere the benign, decidedly literate figure of the ‘herborizer’, armed with nothing more than a collector’s bag, a notebook, and some specimen bottles, desiring nothing more than a few peaceful hours alone with the bugs and flowers.72 Although Linné’s influence on Bush might not be immediately discernible, the editorial comments do remind us that ‘natural history’ has a role in the text, and that an interest of this kind is part of the reworking of the travel narrative form itself, which Bush is specifically committed to. With this in mind Bush’s description of how the lakes are ‘visited by the curious votaries of nature from all parts of Ireland, and many from Britain’, and of how ‘nature seems to have exerted herself for the entertainment of her curious votaries’, is not all that different from the


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somewhat solemn relationship to the natural order described by Pratt.73 Indeed, the knap-sacked and hunched figure evoked by Pratt is very like the aquatic-borne Bush, the latter simply marvelling at what he sees from the cool vantage of a flat-bottomed boat as various scenes are manoeuvred into view by his oarsmen: ‘If the present sketch should afford you entertainment enough to excite a curiosity for a farther acquaintance with it, I may, perhaps, in some future packet, enter more extensively into the natural history of Ireland.’74 But what ties both figures together is the way in which an appreciation of the natural order is seen as some sort of duty, done for the betterment of all, and almost divinely sanctioned: The romantic intermixture of horrible impending precipices with these lofty mountains, that are most beautifully covered down their sides, to the very verge of the lake, with arborage of every of the common sorts of wood, mixed with ever-greens of various kinds, all of which appear to be the spontaneous produce of the soil, and with their different and diversified shades and tints, present such a grand and beautifully variegated scenery on the immense slopes of these surrounding hills, as is beyond description: – add to this, the numberless rivulets cascading in rocky channels, skirted with trees of every kind, down the sides of these enormous mountains, some of them to the height of a hundred yards or more at one view; while in other places are seen cataracts or water-falls, over rocky precipices, near or more distant from shore; and the whole together presents such a grand and striking prospect as pleases and entertains beyond imagination.75 That there is great emphasis on the aesthetic potential of a scene such as this is obvious enough: shades and tints, greens and other variegated colours are being used here much as a palette would by an artist. Yet the interest expressed on how well co-ordinated and expressive – indeed, on how obliging nature has become – contrasts with the somewhat heavier description of a grander, possibly more menacing form of nature. The ‘immense’ slopes, the ‘numberless rivulets cascading in rocky channels’, the ‘enormous’ mountains, ‘cataracts’ and ‘rocky precipices’ that Bush is also witness to jar aesthetically, producing what he tellingly calls a ‘romantic intermixture’. Here is Ireland, so to speak, as both an aesthetically available image (‘[it] pleases and entertains’), and a threatening force that inspires much gloomier thoughts (‘horrible impending precipices’).

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Although now part of the canonical imagery of Ireland, Bush’s response to the views of Killarney and its lakes would have had a freshness, even a vitality, about them. The open, intellectually free-spirited nature of his remarks, combined with a declaration to write differently about not only travel, but also Ireland, make him a remarkably trustworthy guide, an able commentator who appears to revel in the spirit of the times. And here on the lakes, in particular, fully liberated from any sense of responsibility other than to simply yield to his passions, Bush becomes a truly animated figure: clambering up rock faces, travelling over waterways, noting the region’s horticultural excess; these things he does with a sense of himself as an explorer partly to the fore, but more often as an individual who simply takes pleasure in the place. He enjoys it all, and consistently employs a non-hierarchical attitude to Irish nature, travelling ‘to the top of some of the surrounding mountains’ one minute, then ‘land[ing] at the bottom of the bay’ the next.76 Moreover, in writing of the place in terms of outlines, views and colours, he shows how before Gilpin went anywhere near the Wye, or the Derbyshire Fells, Bush had explicitly identified a non-classical, Irish landscape as preferable to the Palladian aesthetic: ‘At a distance it has a fine effect, but as you approach nearer, and come under the precipice that fronts the water, its frightful impending height possesses the mind of the spectator, who is obliged to navigate close under it, with equal terror and admiration.’77

England into Ireland Because the lakes of Killarney are of such aesthetic gratification to Bush, and because he seems both relaxed and stimulated by all that he sees and hears, the final pages of his text become more clotted with revelations than at any other part of his narrative. As Bush is rowed from lake to lake, revelling in the majesty of the place, his narrative becomes confessional, yet also more confident about the range of influences that have impacted upon him. As he travels the waterway between one lake and another, described as the ‘streights’, for example, he refers to that ‘most serpentine and intricate passage’ that links the lakes together. Later, he writes of ‘widening through this serpentine maze’, while back on dry land he finds time to rhapsodise about the ‘beautiful serpentine walks, as well as noble and entertaining vistas’ that offer so much to the appreciative tourist on the hills above.78 How far Bush was influenced by William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753), which championed the serpentine shape as the Line of Beauty, and by the notion of the wavy, flowing curves identified with landscape and garden architects in


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the mould of Capability Brown, is not entirely clear. Hogarth described the ‘serpentine-line’ as something that gives ‘play to the imagination, and delights the eye’, and he illustrated his argument, among other things, by alluding to anatomical figures, with the female form, unsurprisingly, being most disposed towards this perfect state (‘Who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women, that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate?’).79 As for Brown, who began to work on major park and garden commissions in the 1750s, such arguments would take more tangible form: Linear planting, such as avenues or geometric vistas, was shunned. All blocks of woodland – an important feature of these designs – had curvilinear, serpentine outlines . . . Serpentine carriage drives ran through the park . . . Many parks, and the majority of the larger ones, had a lake. Ideally this was positioned in the middle distance when viewed from the windows of the house. It was invariably of irregular or serpentine form.80 Whatever the difference, like Hogarth, Brown’s ideas were to prove immensely popular, and his ‘smooth, pastoral style’ would reflect the graceful taste exemplified by those who were in reaction to a highly formalised aesthetic. In other words, the flowing graceful curves of the serpentine line was a move away from more symmetrical shapes, but more importantly, a rejection of geometrical patterns that had been thought increasingly dull, uniform and unexciting. Another possible source for Bush would have been William Shenstone’s ‘Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening’, first published in his The Works in Verse and Prose, the very year that Bush travelled around Ireland (1764). Shenstone also praised the sublime (‘[it] has generally a deeper effect than the merely beautiful’), and suggested that water ‘should ever appear, as an irregular lake, or winding stream’.81 Moreover, Shenstone discussed the function of ruins in a landscape, obelisks and waterfalls, the purpose of variety, vistas and views, much of which would find their way into the thoughts and writings of people like Gilpin only a few years later. Bush, too, alludes to serpentine paths, ruins and mountain passes. Indeed, he occasionally finds himself assaulted by the almost endless possibility of Irish nature (‘Nor is it the eye only that nature has laid herself out to please in this aqueo-insular paradise, the ear also comes in for its share of entertainment’), but he responds positively, and appears to share in the diversity that surrounds him.82 Do these

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sublime responses place him within a masculinist discourse of mastery, seeing the landscape free of tension, as a picture of harmonious British authority liberated of Irish sedition, and therefore a reassuring image of the natural, political order? In an essay by Sara Mills on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), an argument is developed which both distinguishes, yet problematises male and female responses to the sublime. Mills argues that many feminist critics have taken male responses to the sublime to be frequently characterised by a subject-controlling gaze, and that the desire for control, empowerment and possession is what is largely at work within male, sublime discourse. Many women writers of the sublime, on the other hand, have a decidedly varied repertoire of responses, including Wollstonecraft herself, who, far from ‘seeking a simple mastery over Nature, [is] rather . . . portrayed as trying to escape from worldly difficulties’.83 This is not to suggest an essentialist interpretation by Mills of Wollstonecraft’s writing, for Mills departs from conventional feminist readings that argue that women writers of the sublime avoid the appeal of wide and available landscapes in preference for ‘more confined spatial representations’, that they have less potential for the greedy, all-encompassing ambitions that mark so many male texts.84 Rather, Mills concludes, women respond differently to the sublime than men because of basic cultural and educational opportunities that are either unavailable to them, or more difficult to fully engage with: ‘What may be at issue here are other differences, for example, access to discourses of aesthetics, rather than the difference in description being due to gender. Although there may be a correlation between this access to discourse and gender, there will not be a complete fit.’85 I raise this aspect of Mills’s essay because it strikes me as having a bearing on our reading of Bush, who sometimes offers a traditional male view of the Irish sublime, but who also complicates male positions by rendering more fragmented and oblique his responses to it. For example, we have already noted how in anticipation of his arrival at Lough Neagh Bush remarked on the potential of the place, and how careful development around the Lough’s waterways could transform the local area into a vibrant economy, especially if what the narrator calls its ‘medicinal virtues’ were fully exploited. Indeed, even on the mountains around the lakes of Killarney, Bush is able to put on hold his rapture at the physical arena in favour of a very fleeting nod in the direction of the extractive opportunities allegedly available (‘Even the very bowels of this peninsula, are fraught with mines of copper, and


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silver we were told had been extracted from them’).86 An even more emphatic version of the male gaze, concentrated on the surrounding mountains, witnesses ‘the rough and shaggy Turc, a name given to a lofty, rocky mountain, that stands a little detached from the neighbouring mangerton’ being absorbed within an emphatically masculinist discourse. The Turc mountain, we are told, is so called because of its ‘white chalky top’, which appears like a Turkish turban among the hills of the region. But from this piece of relatively anecdotal information Bush places his experience within a specifically eroticised realm: the Turkish reference allowing for the hills to be seen, first, as ‘beauties’ to Bush’s gaze, but more importantly, he himself as master, indeed purveyor, of their various ‘physical’ attractions and charms: For as a Turk of the greatest sensibility would have his taste and choice confounded amidst a seraglio of surrounding beauties, and till he had separated them, could neither be so sensible of their particular charms, nor have that exquisite joy and satisfaction that each, in a more distinct and less interrupted situation, would be capable of giving [. . .].87 Of course, within a broadly Orientalist discourse, the seraglio features as both an element of Turkish lasciviousness and excess, but also as a convenient focus, or desire, for the European male. ‘By the mid-eighteenth century’, writes Felicity Nussbaum provocatively, ‘whole areas of the world were construed as sexualised, as if to suggest that the world represented a human body with its genitals in the lower southern climes.’88 But for those seeking erotic provocation, either in literature, or as part of an authenticating visit to the Ottoman Empire, the seraglio was a familiar motif, ‘usually depicted as an abhorrent form of domestic tyranny and slavery from which European women are happily exempt’, yet also remaining as an undiminished expression of male sexual power and control.89 This, at any rate, is at least how many readers perusing Bush’s text would have thought of the allusion, as a conduit to an already well-established discourse that linked the seraglio with an oppressive, politically corrupt and exhausted regime on the one hand, but also as a signifier of wanton sexual delight. Despite these moments within Bush’s text, where the narrator appears to adopt a conventional male perspective of the Irish landscape, converting it into an imaginary economic or erotic realm, he appears largely free of more traditional views for the simple reason that none of these tropes are either sustained or carried through with any conviction.

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Rather, Bush seems more keen to engage with the sublime as a spectacle capable of simply arousing the emotions, and appears less concerned that such experience may be evoked, not to mention appreciated, in a country known to Britain largely as a dependency, or as a source of periodic trouble. Bush travels around the Turc mountain, in other words, less as a territorially aggressive male, than as a confused, sexual incompetent. He is ‘enraptured’ by the ‘immense declivities and hollow bosoms’, but is also overwhelmed, and reveals an embarrassed, selfconscious self, who appears less in control than we might imagine or expect: ‘The debarkation at the shallow, above mentioned, and the ruffing through the woods that verge upon the straight, at this rapid descent, gives him time to cool . . . .’90 The image of a flushed and confused narrator, disentangling himself from the rush of an erotic encounter with the landscape, is arguably energised by these Irish experiences, but he also cuts a fairly depleted, even confused figure within eighteenth-century travel discourse. In other words, if Bush’s sexualised discourse appears, at one level, largely in keeping with conventional masculinist appreciations that eroticise landscape in order to make their mastery over it all the more gratifiying, then this represents a fairly watered-down version of that position indeed.91 As a writer of the sublime, then, Bush’s somewhat gauche response contrasts greatly with the more traditional perspective outlined by several feminist critics, his eroticising of the landscape reading more like the admissions of a bumbling adolescent than the predatory advances of the more mature male: ‘[it] affects the mind of the spectator in a manner unspeakable, and possesses the imagination with the highest conceptions of natural sublimity. You may laugh at my rhapsody, if you please . . . .’92

Learning to see If the 1750s and 1760s saw a move away from traditional Grand Touring, many of these changes were actually consolidated throughout the 1770s, at home and abroad, as shifting tastes and opportunity altered perceptions of the potential of travel. Indeed, John Towner argues that the historical and cultural forces swaying traveller’s changing interpretations of continental travel are so apparent that they may be identified with three principal stages, and he maps each of these shifts against distinctly different eras in order to illustrate the development of contemporary tourism. The first period, from 1685 to 1720, ‘represents what may be termed the “Classical Grand Tour”’, when travellers not only focus on the culture of countries such as Italy, but plan their


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itineraries as if on pilgrimage, linking numerous sites together in a weave of antiquarian excess, and ensuring that attention to places associated with imperial Rome – and Roman celebrity – are especially noted (‘Addison visits Capri because Augustus and Tiberius retired there and his sea voyage back to Ostia follows in the steps of Virgil’).93 However, to veer even slightly from this beaten path, to miss out on any of the major sites was to have somehow failed, or at any rate, to have squandered an opportunity for glorious self-improvement. In thinking how these late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travellers structured their lives one very obvious question arises: to what extent did the environments through which they passed to get from one city to another impinge upon them? Was the countryside south of Paris, for example, viewed as a relief once the heady artistic classicism of the city was finally left behind? Was the cooler air associated with the Italian or Swiss lakes soft enough to force even the slightest contemplation regarding the relative attractions of less hectic environs? Hardly at all. Urban rather than rural in their preferences, travellers of this period derived most of their pleasure from the architectural and public spaces associated with the antiquarian pleasures to be found in cities, rather than on a field or plain, or on some nondescript track that led – as they saw it – to nowhere in particular. And in those few cases where landscape appreciation did manifest itself there was only appetite for the ‘gentle landscapes . . . [of] the Low Countries, Lombardy, Campania, and parts of Tuscany’.94 In other words, nothing too taxing, or melancholy, or evocative of untidy or potentially threatening, open space could be even remotely entertained. The city was regarded as relatively safe and spatially coherent, the countryside a melange of unknowable rustic possibility. ‘Apart from differences in opinion over mountain scenery’, suggests Towner, ‘the travellers of this period reveal similar tastes for landscape. They admire modern, stone-built cities, productive and well-cared for rural landscapes, they dislike barren areas and mountains except in the distance, and they are chiefly interested in areas that have classical associations.’95 This is not to suggest that natural curiosities fail to arouse interest, but rather that the response given to them is usually marked by utilitarian concerns above all else. ‘We are told how large things are and how they work, rather than their emotional effect’, suggests Towner, who goes on to remark that although Vesuvius was on many itineraries, for example, most tourists ‘speculate upon how it “works” ’ above all else.96 In other words, practical considerations, no less than intellectually formed appreciations of particular sites, continue to take precedence over experiences stemming from emotional or instinctual drives.

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Interestingly, Towner’s periodisation of the Grand Tour can be partly read against changes that were taking place much nearer to home. As already suggested, the Home Tour was developed partly in response to the declining interest in classical sites, as well as to the fact that travel had been briefly, though effectively, halted as a result of the continental wars, and was moving into a higher gear at just the time identified as the second phase of the Grand Tour by Towner (1776–1789).97 In other words, although figures like John Bush were travelling to Ireland in the 1760s, suffused with the aesthetic rhetoric of Burke and others, the really noticeable growth in these home tours – and in their resultant publications – was throughout the 1770s. This is especially true of one of the best known ‘picturesque’ tourists of the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin, who had to wait until the 1780s to see several of his works in print, but who conducted his most significant tours throughout the 1770s: Observations on the River Wye . . . Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (1782); Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England (1786); Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1776, on Several Parts of Great Britain, Particularly the High-Lands of Scotland (1789); and Observations on Several Parts of the Counties of Cambridge . . . Also on Several Parts of North Wales . . . in 1769 [and] 1773 (1809). But Gilpin was not alone, and other travellers of note, including the miscellaneous writer Anne Grant (Letters from the Mountains . . . between the Years 1773 and 1797 [1807])98 and Thomas Pennant, regarded by many as the forerunner of much Home Tour literature – A Tour in Wales, 1770 [1778] and A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides MDCCLXXII [1774] – confirm the 1770s as a decade of increasing literary production. While the popularity of Ireland as a Home Tour destination took somewhat longer to develop, the 1770s nevertheless does set the tone for many subsequent travels, and Richard Twiss’s A Tour in Ireland in 1775 (1776), Philip Luckombe’s A Tour through Ireland in 1779 (1780) and Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland, 1776–1779 (1780) all helped to establish the country as a viable strand on the Home Tour circuit. Although radically different works, written with different agendas in mind, they were to become some of the best known eighteenthcentury writings on Ireland, frequently cited, now and then. In the remainder of this chapter, I wish to examine what has been long considered the most important of these texts – Young’s Tour – in relation to the changing face of British travel writing generally, but I also wish to examine Ireland’s very specific position within the ‘British archipelago’, and ask to what extent its role within the Celtic fringe


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facilitated, or hindered, British traveller’s perceptions of the country at this time.

Open ground In the very year in which Richard Twiss’s Tour in Ireland was rolling off the press, the author’s travels and livelier personal exploits now behind him, Arthur Young was setting sail for Dublin, determined to get to grips with a country frequently misunderstood, and misrepresented, in Britain.99 Born in 1741, Young came from an established Suffolk family where books, writing and creative effort were taken for granted, and where his father had been Rector of Bradfield, near Bury St. Edmunds. Despite the established and educationally sound home environment, however, as the second son Young was not sent to university, although within a relatively short period of time this hardly seemed to matter as ‘his career as a writer [began] at the age of seventeen’, with the young author displaying a facility for ‘precocious novels and political pamphlets’.100 Hardly surprising, then, that by the age of 20 Young had several professional options in front of him, all of which he was passionate about: he could take up a commission in the army, opt for a career in farming, or become a writer. By 1763, suggests George Mingay, his mind was made up, for it was in that year that he: turned decisively towards agriculture, taking his first farm as tenant of 80 acres of his mother’s estate at Bradfield. To this he added another farm, to a total of some 300 acres. Four years later, following a disagreement with his wife and his mother, Young moved to Sampford Hall in Essex where he had ambitions to try on his own a single farm of 300 acres.101 However varied Young’s career and early years were, and despite the disappointments in later life he would endure, especially in farming, it is his writings on agriculture that endure to this day. Indeed, despite his many other achievements, Young is mainly regarded as the author of numerous late eighteenth-century ‘farming travels’, as Mingay calls them, texts that combined a lot of raw, sometimes grindingly dull data, but enfolded within an at times buoyant, proto-ethnological narrative. Moreover, throughout the 1760s and 1770s Young’s interest in this form of writing was to see him not only achieve notable success, but to move increasingly away from his home base to explore locales and cultures further afield. His A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties

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of England and Wales (1768) was followed by A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England (1770), which was then succeeded by The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (1771). Within each of these moves we see the imprint of the Home Tour very much to the fore, as Young travels in an attempt to determine the various agricultural practices across the British regions, how they differ, and what can be learned from each of them, but to also show that there is something to be gleaned from these peripatetic exercises in themselves. Young, in other words, saw himself as a traveller as much as an agriculturalist or economic theorist working in the broad interests of society, even if the merging of these two positions and discursive modes occasionally jarred. Given the direction he moved in, it should come as no surprise that two of Young’s later texts demonstrate an even greater appetite for cultural diversity. A Tour in Ireland (1780) and Travels [through] the Kingdom of France (1792) took Young to places outside of his immediate sphere of influence, and show an ever-widening interest in comparative agricultural, as well as cultural systems. Where Richard Twiss travelled the continent before deciding to visit Ireland, an indication, perhaps, of his growing interest in domestic rather than ‘foreign’ travel, Young moved in the opposite direction. For Twiss travel became a more restricted exercise, to the point of drawing extensively on other sources as a replacement for his own thoughts and impressions; for Young travel became associated with greater personal experience, and he built steadily on previous achievements. Indeed, not only do Young’s journeys to parts of Britain, Ireland and France signal a growing awareness of other jurisdictions and regions, but the fact that he spends longer periods away shows a willingness to fully engage with those cultures, rather than merely sampling their diversity. From departing for a six months’ tour of the North of England, to organising several trips to Ireland over the course of almost four years, Young becomes a traveller in the fuller sense of the word. Young’s Tour in Ireland was first published by subscription, in 1780, with several reprints called for by the year’s end. However, the history of the text’s publication since that date has been rather uneven, though this is attributable less to doubts over the value of the narrative itself, and more to later confusion regarding how best to present it. A lengthy text, even by the standards of the day, subsequent editions of the Tour have seen numerous editorial attempt to produce abridged versions, in order to cut costs and increase sales and availability of what is generally regarded as one of the most important accounts of late eighteenth-century Ireland. But what editors have omitted from the


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original narrative has also fostered the notion, not just of an overlong text in need of pruning, but of one in which competing, or at the very least distinctive, elements are forced to converge uncomfortably. In short, the text may be read, depending on which edition one happens upon, as a straightforwardly agricultural treatise on the one hand, or a social and historical commentary on the other. It has been taken up with equal enthusiasm by economic historians, keen to draw on it as a reliable source from the period, as well as by more general readers who see in it interesting commentary that tie it directly to the Home Tour. Alert to these sundry appetites, Arthur Wollaston Hutton produced what has become the most satisfactory version of the work to date (1892), an unabridged, two-volume edition, which has the added advantage of explanatory notes and a bibliography of Young’s works.102 Interestingly, Hutton’s edition of the Tour actually enhances the text’s dual perspective, revealing it as a detailed record of farming and agricultural life, but also as a comprehensive travel account of much of the country: Part I, containing minutes of the ‘Tour’, has been broken up into twenty chapters, the headings to which, repeated in the Table of Contents, will facilitate reference to the author’s journey, while the agricultural statistics, and other less important matter, of interest only to specialists, are printed in smaller type. On the other hand, Part II is printed throughout in the larger type used in Part I; and readers will thus for the first time be able to study, without discomfort to the eye, those admirable and luminous disquisitions on the political, social, economic, and religious condition of Ireland in the years 1776–79.103 In Hutton’s estimation there is no point in attempting to smooth out the narrative and thematic shifts that occur throughout the text; better to reprint them in their entirety, but to show where differences exist by the simple, but effective, use of different type sizes to denote what is generally seen – even by the end of the nineteenth century – as the most central element of Youngs’s work: namely his cultural and social assessments of the country. That Young himself was aware of the potentially conflicted nature of his writing, and of how it could appeal to widely diverging tastes, is borne out by the preface that accompanies his later Travels in France. In it he writes of his initial discomfort over the thought of introducing a

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more subjective voice, and of his attempts to foster a clearer narrative mode: When I traced my plan, and begun to work upon it, I rejected, without mercy, a variety of little circumstances relating to myself only, and of conversations with various persons which I had thrown upon paper for the amusement of my family and intimate friends. For this I was remonstrated with by a person of whose judgement I think highly, as having absolutely spoiled my diary by expunging the very passages that would best please the mass of common readers; in a word, that I must give up the journal plan entirely or let it go as it was written [.. .].104 Here the narrator declares himself committed to removing any extraneous material from the text, especially of the sort that might detract from his grander vision, but finding that it is in the very fractured and fluid nature of his writing that greater success lies. Initially unsure of how to resolve the difficulty of using a subjective, autobiographical voice and a more detached, learned one, Young discovers that it is in the blend of both that lends his text distinction, and which most readers desire. Of Young’s discussion of this perceived difficulty, Barbara Korte suggests that his ‘justification of a subjective account still has an apologetic ring about it’, an unease about the relevance of including a personal viewpoint, all of which makes for some uncertainty of purpose.105 Although the same cannot be said about Young’s Irish account, it is not until Hutton, clearly aware of the various threads that go to make up the text, that we find a more open-ended sense of the text acknowledged. Indeed, even Young himself declares unease over the difficulties of merging different perspectives and interests within the one narrative: The details of common management are dry and unentertaining; nor is it easy to render them interesting by ornaments of style. The tillage with which the peasant prepares the ground; the manure with which he fertilizes it; the quantities of the seed of the several species of grain which he commits to it; and the products that repay his industry, necessarily in the recital, run into chains of repetition, which tire the ear, and fatigue the imagination.106 However, what more dramatically separates the writing of Young from many of his contemporaries is the fact that his work appears driven by a sense of purpose all but absent from the efforts of someone like Twiss. That said, although Young focusses on agriculture, or what Mingay calls


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‘agricultural economics’, ruthlessly assessing the minutiae of Irish farming practice, comparing various levels of productivity, and commenting on how much better things could be, his mind is always open and interested enough to allow him to periodically step back and see the wider scene. Agriculture, of course, was more than uppermost in his mind, and for good reason. As Mingay suggests, it ‘has to be remembered that in the late 1760s and early 1770s, when Young was publishing his first books, [British] agriculture employed directly something like two-fifths or perhaps rather more of the working population’.107 Committed agricultural interests aside, Young is still able to contextualise much of what appears highly localised, and to give his visit to Ireland a fuller treatment than might be supposed. Indeed, if it had not been for the misfortune of having lost a supplementary diary he kept throughout his first visit to the country we may have had an even more extensive report of his experiences, and a possibly differently constructed text.108 However, surveying the land means more than commenting on the obvious usefulness of cash-crops, or why trees should be reintroduced to a particular tract. It means comparing one farm with another one, of course, and asking why this estate seems to be working to a greater level of efficiency than one in the neighbouring county, but it also means taking note of the general culture of a particular locale, looking at improvements in the broadest sense of the term. Sometimes it simply allows the narrator to talk of the landscape in terms of its picturesque qualities, and to remind the reader that even in generally impoverished Ireland an aesthetic commitment on the part of many landowners is what also matters. In his Autobiography Young writes of the fact that he has letters of introduction – the first tour is undertaken at the request of the First Marquis of Lansdowne – from ‘the Earl of Shelburne, Mr. Burke, and other persons of eminence in England’.109 It is just these contacts which will allow Young to not only settle himself, for weeks at a time, at a particular venue, but also let his readers know the extent of estate improvement in Ireland, and how it compares with similar developments at home. Just as important for some readers as his evaluations of cottier farming, then, Young is aware of the advantages to be gained from a balanced, fully rounded picture of agricultural refinement.110 The narrator is acutely aware of the various changes then underway throughout the country, and applauds those he feels are of benefit to the wider community. Indeed, it comes as no surprise when, at Lord Lucan’s estate in county Dublin, Young enthuses about the changes then taking place: ‘the house is rebuilding, but the wood on the river, with walks through it, is exceedingly beautiful’.111 Or that upon reaching the Duke of Leinster’s

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estates at Maynooth we hear of how a ‘large but gentle vale winds through the whole, in the bottom of which a small stream has been enlarged into a fine river’.112 Later, at Lord Bective’s estate at Headfort, we are told of similarly ambitious plans: ‘The grounds fall agreeably in front of the house, to a winding narrow vale, which is filled with wood, where also is a river, which Lord Bective intends to enlarge’,113 while in Dundalk, at the seat of Mr. Fortescue, we are informed that while the position of the house is ‘very romantic’, before ‘he fixed there, it was all a wild waste’.114 Not unlike the energetic farmers whom Young congratulates for improvements made to their holdings, Young regards changes carried out by large landowners to be similarly beneficial. Indeed, all the way through Ireland, Young focusses on various improvements, or intended improvements to the Irish landscape, thereby departing significantly from the more aesthetic interpretations offered by Bush. Wheat, barley, oats, potatoes, soil types and milk quotas, sheep to acre ratios, ploughing, cross ploughing and burning, all these he comments on tirelessly; how Irish farmers and landowners approach each, and how what they currently do could be improved upon. And yet he always balances each of these discussions of Irish husbandry with comments on a different, but no less important aspect of Irish life. At Belleisle, on Lough Erne, ‘Lord Ross has made walks round the island’;115 at Woodlawn, county Galway, a ‘small stream [has been] converted into a large river’ by Frederick Trench;116 at Dunkettle, county Cork, Mr. Trent is ‘making a walk around’ the circumference of a hill on his land;117 at Lord de Montalt’s estate at Dundrum, county Tipperary, ‘[p]arterres, parapets of earth, straight walks, knots and clipt hedges’ are apparently all the rage;118 while at Mr. Bolton’s seat at Ballycanvan, county Waterford, ‘walks and a riding are tracing out’.119 Indeed, it seems that almost as fast as agricultural methods are being altered by enlightened farmers, so too are changes to the appearance of the very landscape itself being pursued with enthusiasm and vitality. To read Young, then, is at times to feel that almost everyone is digging and ditching, cutting and clearing throughout the length of the country, for the place seems literally buzzing with a sense of refinement, and the feeling that enhancement and recovery is underway. The aestheticisation of the landscape produced by Young, however, does more than simply applaud the improvements taking place within the parks and gardens of large estates. It provides something of a balm to add to the sense of agricultural efficiency he wishes for the rest of the country. Indeed, one might argue that, hand-in-hand, the aesthetic transformations he promotes with regard to the landscape suggest just


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as strong a desire for the political pacification of the country as do his more direct appeals to Irish farmers to initiate more modern farming practices, therefore damping down the sporadic bursts of unrest that British commentators usually attribute to economic uncertainties and slumps. Elizabeth Bohls argues that ‘Gardening and scenic tourism share a paradigm of imaginative appropriation and manipulation that inscribes social hierarchy on the face of the land.’120 Certainly this is true from a reading of Young, as the degree to which he supports many of the efforts then taking place on Irish estates would indicate. What possibly differentiates him from several of the writers critiqued by Bohls, however, is the fact that Young’s range and interests also include the everyday detail of agricultural life, and do not focus exclusively upon estate improvements. Nevertheless, even though Young moves in and out of focus, now appearing as an aesthetic subject, then as a practical agriculturalist, his desire for the radical transformation of the Irish landscape is rarely less than fulsome. Indeed, the ‘superficial passivity and innocence’ noted by Bohls as being common to many scenic tourist is entirely absent from his work.121 For example, after only a short time in Dublin, Young feels the need to quickly escape the city. He tells us that he spent nine weeks, ‘very busily employed in examining and transcribing public records and accounts’, all of which provide the backbone to his book on Ireland. He is introduced to the Lord Lieutenant, visits Lord Charlemont’s house, Mr. Latouche’s residence in Stephen’s Green, before striking out for Lord Charlemont’s villa at Marino, ‘near the city, where his lordship has formed a pleasing lawn, margined in the higher part by a wellplanted thriving shrubbery’.122 Although his aesthetic appropriation of each of these sites is concluded successfully, his contact with the everyday Dubliner is less than satisfactory: Before I conclude with Dublin I shall only remark, that walking in the streets there, from the narrowness and populousness of the principal thoroughfares, as well as from the dirt and wretchedness of the canaille [from the French for masses or rabble, or more tellingly, from the Italian for ‘pack of dogs’ (canaglia)] is a most uneasy and disgusting exercise.123 The elite of Irish society, and especially their homes, gardens and artefacts ([at Lord Charlemont’s residence are] some good pictures, particularly one by Rembrandt . . . [and] a portrait by Titian) certainly satisfy Young’s need to see in Ireland evidence of polite society comparable to that of England.124

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The Irish themselves, however, constitute a threatening presence, though Young’s unease never quite settles on whether it is Irish poverty or a presumed disposition to violence that he finds most alarming. But that the narrator is less than enamoured of Irish difference appears clear from his recollections of time spent in Dublin. It is true that his remarks partly derive from his appreciation of the physical site of the city itself, here made to seem restrained, overcrowded and dirty. But whatever the reasons, Young is clearly more at ease in the company of improving landowners, men of property who have taken to the task of overhauling their estates in the name of gardening aesthetics – alongside the agricultural efforts made by the small farmer – than in jostling with the Dublin crowds. One feels that fresh air, walks and gardens, sensible husbandry, and the altogether more wholesome culture of the Irish countryside are more to Young’s tastes.

The view finder Where Young parts company from other picturesque tourists is in his appreciation of the actual uses to which the land must be put: in his discussion of soil types, working practices, manufactures and so on. Indeed, it is strange to see Young so conveniently categorised alongside conventional tourists when his determination to talk of the productivity of the landscape, of enclosures, the poor, taxes and estate costs, all mark him out as straying widely from the routines of picturesque discourse. Writing of the connection between painting and the picturesque aestheticisation of the landscape, Bohls states: The picturesque substitutes imaginative for real possession as a central principle in aestheticizing land. The analogy with painting situates both discourses in a long-standing cultural nexus of vision, power, and possession. But painterly framing as a mode of conceptualising land also helps to uncouple aesthetic perception from that land’s material particularity, and especially from the use value that connects it with its working inhabitants, who dwindle to abstract, sanitized figures in the landscape.125 But Young is far from oblivious to the figures in the landscape. Indeed, if anything, for this narrator the very purpose of travelling is to give as full and up to the moment appreciation of all aspects of Irish rural life as possible. Bohls’s argument that the ‘process of framing and composing constitutes an exercise of power, a non-reciprocal mode of


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vision whose effect is to display and reinforce mastery’, does define many of the ways in which Young engages with the image of the Irish landscape.126 Indeed, it could be argued that his elaboration of just this kind of authority was very much in keeping with a British view of Ireland that saw the country as a place to be tamed and domesticated at all costs. In county Tipperary the narrator comes into contact with a tract of land that is not only impressively well cared for, but a reminder of home: From Mountrath to Gloster, Mr. Lloyd’s, [sic] I could have imagined myself in a very pleasing part of England; the country breaks into a variety of inequalities of hill and dale; it is all well inclosed, with fine hedges; there is a plenty of wood, not so monopolized as in many parts of the kingdom by here and there a solitary seat, but spread over the whole face of the prospect: look which way you will, it is cultivated and cheerful.127 At certain moments in the text Young appears almost like a bridge between Bush, who was prepared to accept Ireland on its own terms, and those nineteenth-century travellers who constantly sought to see the country as an integral part of Britain. However, like many visitors to Ireland before and after him, for Young the greatest satisfaction is to see Ireland as a potential mirror of England, a transformation that would establish it as a territory at once governable and secure. Indeed, the need to improve Ireland, of giving it not only what it lacked, but imparting to it a sense of propriety based along specifically English lines, is something that may be detected at several key moments in his text, but nowhere more emphatically than at the very close of volume one. On his return to Dublin from Cork Young decides to make a point of visiting county Laois, mainly because of the favourable reports that have reached him about this particular part of the country (‘Having heard much of the beauties of a part of the Queen’s county I had not before seen, I took that line of country in my way on a journey to Dublin.’).128 However, the manner of Young’s arrival at what is proclaimed as the finest example of a settled landscape is marked by not just a breathless, anticipatory narrative construction (‘Take the road to Urlingford . . . Then enter a low marshy bad country . . . Breakfast at Johnstown . . . Immediately on leaving these planted avenues’)129, but the way in which he draws the reader towards an ever narrowing, though increasingly detailed spectacle:

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Pass Durrow; the country for two or three miles continues all inclosed with fine quick hedges, is beautiful, and has some resemblance to the best parts of Essex. Sir Robert Staple’s improvements join this fine tract; they are completed in a most perfect manner, the hedges well-grown, cut, and in such excellent order, that I can scarcely believe myself to be in Ireland. His gates are all of iron. These sylvan scenes continue through other seats beautifully situated, amidst gentle declivities of the finest verdure, full grown woods, excellent hedges, and a pretty river winding by the house. The whole environs of several would be admired in the best parts of England.130 Almost as though he has exchanged a wide for a telescopic lens, which he still pans across the landscape, Young here declares himself fully satisfied with at least one piece of Ireland. Enclosed – and therefore tidied – by the extensive use of hedges, secured by a stout set of gates, and casually stamped with the imprimatur of the line of beauty (‘a pretty river winding’), the place is of a more than acceptable standard. And like the conventional picturesque tourist Young can sometimes be, the framing of the scene has about it all that is both consistent and balanced: the river, the scale of house to woods, the hedges and especially the orderly way in which landscape, proprietorial authority, aesthetics and a degree of agricultural competence are conveniently fused together. True, this is very much a snap-shot image, a cropped rather than wall-to-wall illustration of Irish life of the sort that would invariably demonstrate greater, but potentially more intractable variety. Nevertheless, the point, if it needed to be made, is that Ireland can be improved and, more importantly, improved in such a way so as to satisfy even the most sceptical of its English visitors: I must in general remark, that from near Urlingford to Dawson Court, near Monstereven, which is completely across the Queen’s County, is a line of above thirty English miles, and is for that extent by much the most improved of any I have seen in Ireland. It is generally well planted, has many woods, and not consisting of patches of plantation just by gentlemen’s houses, but spreading over the whole face of the country, so as to give it the richness of an English woodland scene. What a country would Ireland be had the inhabitants of the rest of it improved the whole like this!131 Rather than a form of emphatic, rigorous planting that simply reclaims a landscape from barren wilderness, Young here emphasises the natural


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beauty of a scene which has been made to appear organic, integral, gradually expanding to include all in its path. But Young is not the only visitor to Ireland prepared to comment on these various improvements, and how best to regard them. Philip Luckombe, for example, also attends to landscape appreciation – when he tears himself away from providing copious statistical detail that is, and stops still long enough to contemplate a scene. Like Bush, Luckombe is also smitten with the rougher elements of the Irish countryside, and is fulsome it his praise: ‘Without either mountain or sea, no landscape can, in my conception, be perfect; it wants the grand attribute of sublimity.’132 Yet as he travels around the country Luckombe takes with him something of that later critique of overly manicured countryside that we see articulated by Knight and Price. About five miles outside of Tipperary town, for example, at an unnamed but ‘venerable seat’ the narrator exclaims: Here are all the capabilities for a terrestrial paradise; and yet one thing is wanting that mars the whole. Every violence that she is capable of suffering, has been done to Nature . . . I own to you I felt more pain than pleasure in this demesne. I could not help wishing, that instead of torturing the place to the plan, they had accommodated the plan to the place. Indeed, all predisposed plans for laying out grounds are dangerous; for every place has within itself a plan, from which true taste can never deviate. Nature may be improved, but never changed to advantage. Levelling hills and raising mounds, at a vast expense, is like the custom of the Indians, who lavish their blood, in slitting their ears, and gashing their faces, to improve their beauty.133 Here we have something of that gathering antipathy for the designs of Brown, which were increasingly revoked as the 1770s and 1780s wore on, and with especial energy after his death in 1783. In particular, Luckombe’s reference to ‘place and plan’, what architects and planners today would call context, is what is mostly absent from the scene; instead we have a formula that has been used elsewhere, perhaps with greater flair and success, but which now appears insensitively grafted onto a landscape which is less suited to it, and without any cognisance taken, or impression formed, of the local environment.134 Opting for a more picturesque, at times even sublime experience, Luckombe openly militates against unimaginative designs that anaesthetise a landscape too often associated with intractability, but which offer fundamentally little in terms of aesthetic satisfaction.

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Does the ‘picturesque’, a term described by many as unstable, significantly improve our relationship to, or understanding of, nature?135 In an essay on the relationship between picturesque travel and the tropes of exploration, John Whale suggests that ‘the Picturesque has often been considered as a safe middle-ground, a compromise category, happily mediating the dangerous Burkean opposites of the Sublime and the Beautiful’.136 Open to something of the rough and unexpected, but not quite game enough for full-blown rapturous self-abandon, the picturesque is seen as a ‘particularly English form of landscape aesthetic to rival that of the Continent’.137 In Whale’s opinion, the picturesque seems a rather tame aesthetic response to both make, and cultivate, a way of enlivening human experience and contact, but without going so far down the road that self-control, order and authority can become in any way jeopardised or compromised. By contrast, David Punter suggests that the ‘Sublime represents the movement outward, the sudden rush of air which deflates the ego in the face of the avalanche, the pleasurable abandon of control’, a reading that interprets Burke’s classification in terms of horror-stricken excitement, but which also loads the term with the usual cargo of sexually enhanced allusion.138 Given the extent to which these various aesthetic and intellectual debates were taken up by many writers and travellers of the latter part of the eighteenth century, it is hardly a wonder that Young shares something of the burgeoning interest in these theories, and yet as we know, remains a figure more at ease with picturesque than sublime discourse. As suggested, Richard Payne Knight’s The Landscape: A Didactic Poem and Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque, of 1794 and 1795 respectively, would re-examine picturesque aesthetics two decades later, heralding a re-think on the subject, as well as infusing the topic with a brisk, political subtext.139 Knight, in particular, preferred a landscape that was less restrained, and he ‘favoured gardens which were rampant and unchecked, preferring even old formal gardens to those designed by [Capability] Brown because, although the old gardens had worked against nature, Knight argued . ..so did Brown’s, and his unnatural designs were far more extensive’.140 Clearly, though, this somewhat more developed interpretation of picturesque aesthetics was not one that would have been widely shared by Young and his contemporaries. They could hanker after deformity, decay and irregularity – such as with the ruin – and yet always within tightly controlled parameters of taste, and not as a prelude to a more ambitious reading. The ‘unimproved wild’ of later years, as Malcolm Andrews terms it, is more associated with an increasingly romantic strain that would hold sway, almost unchecked, until the 1820s or 1830s.141


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Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels suggest that of ‘all landscape tastes the Picturesque has conventionally been seen as wilfully detached from the practice of rural production, even hostile to it’. 142 Although they agree that high culture – in terms of the history of art, literature, architecture and the applied arts – should not be neglected in any study of the picturesque, they insist that the landscape should be seen in all its varied, seasonal complexity, and they suggest that critics should also take note of things such as ‘estate management . . . farming, planting, leases and rents’. 143 For a writer such as Young, a careful consideration of the relationship between these variables, a responsible attitude, in other words, towards how estate improvements, farming practice, aesthetics and the idea of a stable community might be fused together, was all-important. And the combined interests of land, landscape and nation, it might be argued, are certainly concerns that arguably drive much of Young’s desires for Ireland. It is true that his practical and empirical sympathies are always more than evident, and that his genuine commitment to progressive farming is the cornerstone to all his work. A ‘Fellow of the Royal Society, and an honorary member of countless agricultural societies in England and in Europe’, he is certainly nothing if not passionate about ‘innovation in farming and . . . the spreading of a scientific, yet strictly commercial, attitude to progress in agriculture’.144 Yet although it is the case that Young works as a committed pragmatist, he is also one who can gaze upon a landscape with a rapturous sense of wonderment, a man at ease within different discursive modes and methods. Tim Fulford argues that if landscape signified anything to the educated class of the eighteenth century, it was that power and vested authority could be expressed through, and in association, with it. He suggests that ‘the proper source of power and stability in the nation [Britain] was the possession of land, and the organization of the prospect-view was an expression of their authority over the national landscape which they owned’. Owning the land, then, but also being able to appreciate it, usually in the manner of self-conscious detachment, was paramount: Through the prospect-view, the propertied classes were able to present their political dominance as confirmed by the natural scene. The ability to distinguish and possess shared standards independent of self-interest (standards of aesthetic value or taste) in agreement about the beauty and sublimity of landscape seemed not only a mark

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of the viewer’s gentlemanliness but a criterion for the exercise of legitimate social and political power.145 Whether the writer of picturesque travel in Ireland felt simply liberated to comment on everyday politics and concerns in a way unavailable in England is not entirely clear, but that Young felt comfortable about confronting Irish difficulties head-on is nevertheless evident from these extracts. It is also true that his anxiety about continuing unrest in Ireland being detrimental not only to the stability of the country, but as having wider, possibly imperial repercussions is also declared. The Irish,

Illustration 2 Ireland

Tone’s Interview with Napoleon. Courtesy of the National Library of


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he clearly sees, need to be better treated, not just because a more enlightened culture proclaims against their continued neglect and abuse, but because a ‘better treatment of the poor in Ireland is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British Empire’.146 Focussing on what would become a common theme in much nineteenth-century travel and related literature, Young regards the development of a fairer political system in Ireland as necessary for the maintenance of British rule (‘Relative to the national welfare, it must appear extremely evident to the unprejudiced, that an aristocracy of five hundred thousand Protestants, crushing the industry of two millions of poor Catholicks, can never advance the public interest’), at ‘home’, and abroad.147 Of this he is entirely confident. However, with so many expressions of a political nature clotting the pages of Young’s book, it is clear that the lines separating Grand from Home Tourism became increasingly apparent throughout the 1770s and 1780s. This is not to suggest that writers of the Grand Tour were restricted in what they could discuss, and forced to comment only on art, architecture and fashion, for as Jeremy Black reminds us, religious, social and cultural differences were frequently the mainstay of many eighteenth-century travel accounts. What is nevertheless true, however, is that ‘domestic’ travel allowed, if it did not emphatically endorse, an altogether more open attitude towards local and regional politics that was notably different from what was expected within the conventions of Grand Tour writing. The picturesque or sublime aspects of nature, the customs of local inhabitants, the various geo-political and regional considerations that were encountered were all successfully accommodated by the Home Tour. But the Home Tour also encouraged a proactive engagement with local politics that was frequently absent from Grand Tour narratives. Travel writer Charles Topham Bowden, for example, is able to talk of Irish agricultural improvements in ways reminiscent of Young: ‘. . . their estates exhibit an appearance of opulence almost singular in this country [around Kilkenny], and strongly characteristic of an English colony’.148 But Bowden is also appalled at the situation of the peasantry who intrude painfully, and relentlessly, upon his experience: Tipperary is remarkably well situated for manufacture, in a fine country, and on one of the principal roads. I must acknowledge as I passed through this county, my mind was filled with melancholy, on contemplating the situation of those poor creatures who drag on a miserable existence under an accumulation of woes, that it is hard to

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think human nature can sustain . . . The Landholder is rioting in voluptuousness and the luxuries of distant climes, totally indifferent to all but his remittances; and in his pleasures loses every idea of the miseries he is occasioning, to those ill-fated wretches who are here toiling for him, under the weight of oppression and every discouragement.149 In travelling through Ireland, it is clear, the traveller is compelled to emphasise the country’s miseries and inequalities as much as its more picturesque attributes, which is possibly where the real difference resides in any case. At the end of the day, no matter how shocked or affronted the British traveller to continental Europe might be, it is still possible to detach oneself from its petty corruptions and insufficiencies in a way one could not when touring Scotland or Ireland. And Arthur Young, no less that Richard Twiss, Phillip Luckombe and John Bush, was very much caught within this bind: free to speculate on the attractions of Ireland, but tempted, too, into discoursing on the political uncertainties of the period, on the relationship to Britain, and of what the future might hold for the ‘Sister Isle’.

2 The Post-Union Traveller, 1800–1820

Date sensitive The late eighteenth century saw a sharp increase in contact between Ireland and France. In fact, so developed was the relationship between the two countries during this period that an attempt was made to land a fleet of 43 ships, complete with 15,000 troops, off the coast of Bantry Bay, County Cork in December 1796. Although the ultimate objectives of the mission were to be spectacularly thwarted by a combination of storms and disagreements, and the fleet forced to return to France with little engagement to report, the action constitutes not only a ‘great might-have-been in Irish history’ but a significant level of commitment and coordinated determination on the part of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the adjutant-general of the fleet, and prominent United Irishman.1 Indeed, the Bantry Bay episode boosted ‘popular disaffection in Ireland’ to such an extent that despite its failure a threat was still perceived in the country and the possibility that an, admittedly unaided, insurrection might eventually take place remained strong.2 With tensions running high, arms stockpiling and the mobilisation of troops becoming a feature of Irish life, then, it came as no surprise when rebellion was eventually precipitated on 23 May 1798. The insurgents were effectively crushed by 21 June of that year; another French expedition, which landed at Killala in County Mayo on 22 August, was also defeated. While the Act of Union of 1800 may not be attributed solely to these revolutionary events, the insurrection of 1798 as well as the relatively simple idea that political interests were best served by having Ireland tied more securely to Britain were two of the greatest incentives for its implementation. In this chapter I want to look at how the Act of Union, with the suggestion of parity and concord it generally conveyed, 59

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encouraged many British writers to investigate Ireland at a time of fluid, historical change. The various convulsions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland led not only to political change, but forced many, especially in Britain, to consider the country in a new light. Several historians, for example, saw the sense of renewal suggested by Union as offering somewhat fresher pastures, and many historical as well as statistical texts were published and republished in the immediate post-Union decades, some of which are discussed in this chapter. But as we will see, the Union also had a dramatic effect on travellers to the country, whose numbers increased greatly in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Their texts are especially useful for showing the enthusiasm, but also the confusion, that a visit to Ireland produced, and several travel writers of the immediate post-Union era, notable among them Anne Plumptre, are considered later in the chapter. It is always tempting to begin a discussion of early nineteenth-century travel writing by drawing on the broader context, testing apparently local issues against wider trends, rather than looking to Anglo-Irish relations for answers to complicated questions. Much criticism relating to travel literature for this period, for example, has pointed to fundamental differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narrative styles, with attention focussed on different forms of self-representation in particular. For example, Charles Batten argues that one of the tenets of eighteenthcentury travel writing is that highly factual and entertaining information is conveyed with as little authorial intrusion as possible. Indeed, Batten cites several travellers whose efforts to avoid ‘the charge of egotism’ led them to use ‘we’, and in some cases even ‘you’, so as to establish a level of objectivity and distance in their writing.3 Examining the ‘[e]stablished literary conventions’ of the eighteenth century, with its propriety and tightly organised generic dictates, Batten discovers a carefully structured and, at times, almost inviolable rubric.4 With the growth of a romantic sensibility at the end of the eighteenth century, however, some of these older standards were to come under review. Indeed, Mary Louise Pratt suggests a development similar to Batten’s, and argues that the nineteenth century ushered in some new and more diverse methods of writing, citing the 1799 publication of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa as exemplary in this regard, since it marked ‘the eruption of the sentimental mode into European narrative . ..at the end of the eighteenth century’.5 In Pratt’s opinion, Park’s rigorous attention to personal experience, particularly his interest in the mental processes of his companions and the various individuals whom he met, as well as the air of theatricality with which he generally enfolded his narrative, made for a substantially remodelled form.

The Post-Union Traveller, 1800–1820

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While some of the developments suggested by Batten and Pratt may be discernible in the case of travel writing on Ireland, and are certainly useful as a supplementary context, it is possible to argue that the Act of Union created its own energy, and became the principal model for change. Regarding the legislation as marking a moment of historical and ideological opportunity, several British travel writers came to regard Ireland as a site of epistemological challenge, while the Act itself offered them not just a new way of dealing with the country, but an invigorated sense of their own interpretive self-worth. Indeed, this issue of renewal is given prominence in many travelogues of the period, with the Anglo-Irish relationship often shorn of its colonial context and replaced by a narrative of inauguration and restorative compatibility. But even here there are problems, and despite the direction taken by many writers to ensure greater compliance on Ireland’s part it becomes clear that even with revised constitutional arrangements in place there is still one outstanding issue to be addressed: British ignorance of Ireland.6 Indeed, more emphatically than at any other time in Irish history, many British narrators make a specific link between Irish political instability and a lack of knowledge about the country, and argue that if Ireland had been more effectively understood then rebellion might never have happened. Resolve the epistemological lack at the heart of the Union, runs the argument in the early years of the nineteenth century, and a significant step towards ameliorating the sorts of difficulties that plague Anglo-Irish relations will be achieved. An epistemological absorption of Ireland is seen as a way of not only satisfying the newly established political order, then, and gratifying the fact of Union, but of providing much needed information about an undependable and potentially disloyal terrain. In Christine Bolt’s Victorian Attitudes to Race, the period between 1830 and 1865 is cited as institutionally important in terms of the development of what she calls the ‘scientific spirit’.7 Indeed, Bolt regards the founding of institutions, such as the Royal Geographical Society in 1831, the English Ethnological Society in 1843 and the London Anthropological Society in 1863, as instrumental in determining the move towards an epistemological discourse. More important than their contribution to scientific and pseudo-scientific endeavour, these societies also functioned as supplements of empire, their very foundation pushing the desire for information high onto the political agenda. Knowledge of geographical regions, or of ethnological groupings, or of climatic or topographical conditions, would be the new determinants in the nineteenth-century Euro-expansionist race. While Bolt’s survey of certain early to

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mid-nineteenth-century institutions places the structures of empire in a different light, a similar set of developments were underway in Ireland, but throughout the earlier, immediate post-Union era. Not surprisingly, the sorts of narratives especially prized in the post-Union period were statistical surveys, with travel and antiquarian studies favoured by the more aesthetic reader, and histories of Ireland maintaining a steady readership within more politically charged circles. Indeed, historiographical material, particularly when it involved an interpretation of recent events, proved the most lively of these, and potentially the most controversial. In Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1801), for example, the narrator declares that ‘History, which is a mirror of past times, is the best guide to the statesman; and Livy tells us, that he wrote his, that the Republick might learn lessons of wisdom and prudence from it, by avoiding such measures as had proved fatal, and by embracing such as had been found salutary for its interest.’8 Musgrave’s desire to construct a new history of Ireland, by drawing on the lessons of the past, constitutes an acceptable, if methodologically naive, approach to the political and historical difficulties of Ireland. The tone is a little sober, but the message hardly evidence of the most strident of historiographical positions. However, when in 1803 Francis Plowden, the well-respected British legal and political writer, published An Historical Review of the State of Ireland, it drew the scorn of Musgrave only the following year. ‘I mean no offence to this Gentleman’, wrote Musgrave in Strictures upon an Historical Review of the State of Ireland (1804), ‘by imputing to him any improper design by his publication; at the same time, I cannot avoid lamenting the misrepresentations, which his great ignorance of the History of Ireland, his party prejudices, the false information furnished him, and his astonishing credulity have betrayed him into.’ 9 Plowden, left with little option but to make an equally public response, published An Historical Letter from Francis Plowden to Sir Richard Musgrave (1805), in which he dismissed the charges, defended his English Catholicism and corrected Musgrave on a number of apparent errors.10 The charges and counter-charges levelled by these writers serve to remind us of how deep historiographical arguments have always run in Ireland, but they also indicate how highly regarded the ‘story’ of Ireland appeared in the post-Union period, and why the establishment of satisfactory narratives was considered an important Union-building exercise. The rush of historians, travellers and other field-workers into the vacuum created by the Union, irrespective of professional jealousies and


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methodological disagreements, was indicative of a desperation for knowledge that existed at almost every level of intellectual life. Although altercations such as those between Musgrave and Plowden added to the interest surrounding historiographical discussion, an additional element was the republication of certain texts, in which Ireland’s medieval and early modern history was used as a way of propping up the newly established narratives upon which the Union would depend. Between 1807 and 1808, for example, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland was republished, a mammoth, six-volume narrative that structured the story of British history holistically. Always highly regarded, Holinshed’s Chronicles held a particular fascination for those ideologues working to re-establish Ireland as a known entity after 1800. The Chronicles told of an earlier history between Britain and Ireland, but by telling it in terms of an integrated narrative, helped to galvanise Irish reattachment to Britain at a time of political and constitutional change. Like the republication of Ware’s 1633 edition of The Works of Spencer, Campion, Hanmer and Marleborough only the following year (1809), such texts made the absorption of Ireland within the Union easier, even if individual writers such as Spenser might have made for a less than amenable narrative.11 As with Plowden and Musgrave’s texts, reprinted history classics by Holinshed and Ware revealed the extent to which information – especially ideologically amenable information – was keenly desired in the post-Union period. Securing Ireland, by gathering as much knowledge about it as possible, then, became one of the primary themes within many texts and, perhaps unsurprisingly, found favour with several travel writers. For instance, in Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s Tour in Ireland (1806), an anxiety to address the problem of potential unrest, while at the same time attempting to draw Ireland more closely to Britain, is keenly observed. Hoare’s interest in Ireland, apparently stimulated by an affection for the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, is a curious amalgam of travel description, historiographical speculation and antiquarian research. A fellow of both the Royal Society of Antiquities and the London Society of Antiquaries, Hoare was especially committed to sending back to the metropolis images of heartening and improved cordiality. However, like many of his post-Union colleagues, he also emphasised the distinctly uninformed nature of British involvement in Ireland: To the traveller, who fond of novelty and information, seeks out those regions, which may afford reflection for his mind, or employment for

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his pencil, and especially to him who may be induced to visit the neglected shores of Hibernia, the following pages are dedicated.12 Although keen to see better relations fostered between Britain and Ireland, Hoare finds that one of the major difficulties towards greater understanding lies in the insufficient levels of knowledge about Ireland that exist in Britain. Indeed, from his opening lines he attends to those issues to which he feels principally drawn: Ireland is an unattended entity which must be better secured to Britain; information should be amassed as quickly and efficiently as possible; the Act of Union’s centralising powers at Westminster should convert Ireland into a region within the larger British unit. Interestingly, the lengths to which Hoare goes to make Ireland both an attractive venue for scholars, as well as a fully incorporated member of the United Kingdom, are comparatively based: ‘whilst Wales and Scotland, I say, have had the assistance of the Historian’s pen to record their annals’, he declares, ‘the island of Hibernia still remains unvisited and unknown’.13 Wales and Scotland, of course, are better known because they have been a part of wider political structures for that much longer, with Union bringing knowledge, and knowledge bringing increased security and co-dependence.

The present tense Although many post-Union narratives endlessly deploy tropes of renewal and reinscribed opportunity, the proximity of the Act of Union to Hoare’s Tour in Ireland is especially telling. A classicist who was introduced into the family banking house, Hoare was a figure whose natural curiosity and many talents were well recognised; in addition to his travelogue on Ireland, for example, he published A Tour through the Isle of Elbe (1814), the four-volume Recollections Abroad; Journals of Tours on the Continent between 1785 and 1791 (1817), as well as A Classical Tour through Italy and Sicily (1819). Hoare had also developed a scholarly as well as almost spiritual interest in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, the twelfth-century Bishop of St. David’s, Wales. Indeed when ‘the French revolutionary wars put a stop to continental travel’, Hoare made a tour ‘for artistic and archaeological purposes, through Wales, taking Giraldus Cambrensis as a guide, and following him through his “Iter laboriosum” ’. In addition, Hoare produced The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales, A.D. 1188, by Giraldus de Barri . . . with Views, Annotations, and a Life of Giraldus in 1806.14


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While the narrative and ethnological ruminations of a twelfth-century cleric might not seem especially notable, Cambrensis is extremely important in the context of Anglo-Irish affairs. As an aide to the medieval invasions of Ireland, he was a chronicler of high repute who brought to his manuscripts a dramatic and acute sensitivity. Remembered for his anthropophagic discourse and a telescopic ethnology of the sort which purged indigenous behaviour of anything like a legitimising context, Cambrensis’s writings present themselves as the originary encounter between England and Ireland. His experiences in Ireland, which began in 1183 and continued on an intermittent basis until 1186, as well as the publication of his two texts, Topographia Hiberniae (The History and Topography of Ireland) and Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland), were of considerable importance in the promotion of a particular view of Ireland, and he was the first traveller to present the appropriation and control of the country as a way of securing British political and military interests. Indeed, on the basis of his trips and publications Cambrensis was to become a figure of some authority and stature where Ireland was concerned; his Topographia Hiberniae was so highly regarded that he was invited to read it publicly, over a period of three days, to various audiences at Oxford in 1188. According to Cambrensis, the Irish are ‘a barbarous people, literally barbarous. Judged according to modern ideas, they are uncultivated . . . All their habits are the habits of barbarians.’15 Hoare first mentions Cambrensis in the lengthy introduction and preface to his Tour, before going on to claim Cambrensis as a spiritual inspiration (‘my friend GIRALDUS’), as well as an historico-literary figure for whom he has a deep regard.16 As an intertextual gesture the inclusion of Cambrensis is important, not just because Hoare may be interpreted as establishing genealogical contact with Cambrensis, or seeking verification from him in some citatory sort of way, or even invoking him as a means of establishing the interpretive parameters into which Ireland will be situated, but because Hoare is denarrativising and censoring the native Irish. If what ‘counts as truth’ depends more ‘on strategies of power rather than on epistemological criteria’ then Hoare may be said to have marshalled Cambrensis as a refutation of indigenously produced narratives.17 In other words Hoare cites Cambrensis for the same reason that he evokes Cox, Ware and Holinshed: because they provide him with a means of dealing with the practicalities of the Union in as coherent and referentially productive a setting as possible. Of all the texts written about Ireland, however, few suggest the drive for narrative coherence and the organisation of knowledge more effectively

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than the writing of history. Certainly, this is how it appeared to Hoare, as can be inferred from the battle for historiographical supremacy that he wages with Seathrun Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating), an Irish priest and author of Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, subsequently translated as The General History of Ireland (1629). More specifically, Céitinn’s text is of particular interest to Hoare, not just because it constitutes a refutation of the writings of ‘English historians’, but because it impedes Hoare’s desire for uninterrupted narrative purity.18 This, as we shall see later in this chapter, will become a major element within much post-Union discourse, to be discussed and laboured over: GEOFFREY KEATING, an Irish priest, composed a history of his country, from the earliest times to the period of its invasion by the English, in the reign of King Henry the Second. This manuscript was translated into English, by DERMOD O’CONNOR, and printed, first in 1723, and afterwards in a more costly manner in 1738. No great credit is allowed to this work by more modern historians. SlR RICHARD COX calls it ‘an ill-digested heap of silly fictions’ and PETER TALBOT styles it, insigne planè, sed insanum opus, and such indeed, on examination, it appears to be.19 While Hoare may be said to derive a sort of ‘hermeneutic satisfaction’ from the construction of lines such as these, they provide the reader with a direct point of entry to his text.20 By judging Céitinn to be interpretively deficient, lacking in professionalism, scholarship and more elaborate and refined methodologies, however, Hoare raises as many questions about his own text as he does about Céitinn’s; of particular note is Hoare’s charge of fictionality and incompetence. As a general statement concerning the historiographical credibility of an adversary opinions such as these are acceptable, certainly predictable, enough: Hoare has read Céitinn’s narrative of pre-conquest Ireland and judged it to be an unpalatable alignment of hagiography with historical scholarship. That said, the basis upon which Hoare comes to his own conclusions are in themselves questionable, particularly as the charge of incompetence that Hoare brings against Céitinn seems to be based more upon the aboriginal and/or clerical status of the author (‘Irish priest’) than upon the basis of impartial, academic assessment (‘modern historians’). This is an important point, not least because it suggests that what is at stake here is not so much an argument about academic or institutional membership, but one of ideology. Céitinn is denied the status of a ‘modern historian’ not just because he is a priest, but because, irrespective of his


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professional status, he is regarded as fundamentally Other, and described as such. Nevertheless, not wishing to appear too dualistic or partial, and not wanting to be seen to have dismissed Céitinn on the basis of racial difference, Hoare conceals prejudice behind the veil of historical professionalism. Seen in this way, Hoare’s reference to ‘modern historians’ may be read for the euphemism that it is and ‘modern’ glossed for ‘British’, for the organising theme of the passage lies not, as Hoare would have it, on Céitinn’s non-membership to the guild of historians but, rather, in his native and narrative presumption. Constructing a new history of Ireland, then, one that might privilege some historiographical procedures over others, is one of Hoare’s central concerns. Regarding Ireland and Britain as having entered into some sort of new alliance, Hoare clearly views his opportunity at this point as being one in which a fresh beginning has to be made. If Ireland is to have a history, he seems to imply, then that history must be written from outside the country and with an eye to policy and the transmission of certain cultural and ideological values. This might appear obvious enough, but the issue requires emphasis, particularly since Hoare – pretending on the one hand that the recording of history is an objective, scientific activity, and on the other, eliminating histories that are disruptive of a unionist ideology – illustrates perfectly the duplicity of such a scheme. ‘It is not my intention’, Hoare unproblematically, though revealingly, suggests, ‘to give a detailed account of all the different publications that tend to illustrate the History of Ireland, but to mention a few only of those which I consider the most useful and important.’21 The shaping of historiographical data to a dramatically altered political establishment, however, is only part of Hoare’s intention. In addition to constructing an historical narrative substantiated by a number of canonical authorities, he is also concerned about the continuing narrative that has been established by the legislative union of Ireland with Britain. In other words, even though Ireland’s history is something to which he feels a certain narrative and documentary responsibility, it is to the country’s unwritten potentiality that he is principally drawn. In many respects, then, Hoare’s historiographical set-to with Céitinn operates as a means of clearing the way for an evocation of the future of the country as an epistemologically available terrain awaiting the interpreting eye of the traveller. Ireland is still ‘unvisited and unknown’, suggests Hoare, and it is manifestly incumbent upon Britain that such a deficiency be addressed.22 Moreover, although the British ‘are regarded by foreigners as a rambling nation’, their motive for travelling derives

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less from domestic inadequacy than ‘from a laudable desire of research and information’.23 He continues: Whilst the opposite coasts of WALES and SCOTLAND, have for many successive years attracted the notice and admiration of the man of taste, and of the artist; whilst the press has so teemed with publications, pointing out their natural beauties, and works of military and monastick art, that little more is left to be described . . . the Island of HIBERNIA still remains unvisited and unknown. And why? Because from the want of books, and living information, we have been led to suppose its country rude, its inhabitants savage, its paths dangerous.24 While the organising theme around which many of Hoare’s ideas collect is that of knowledge, a relationship between the lack of knowledge and possible, largely unspecified, dangers is also established. As he sees it, Wales and Scotland have been examined, their various art forms discussed, and their histories and ‘curiosities’ been detailed to the point of exhaustion, whereas in Ireland knowledge remains untapped and confined, with stories and anecdotes passing for real, concrete information, and all to the detriment of Britain. Despite the strenuous attempts to set a new agenda, however, and to delineate for British readers the unfathomable mysteries of the Irish landscape, the end result very often involved an emphasis on language, where some semblance of authority and control might still be presumed. For example, Hoare illustrates his text by referring to Ireland as ‘our Island’, and to the native Irish as ‘domestic enemies’,25 thereby claiming and possessing Ireland in an emphatically linguistic manner. Ireland has been legislatively linked to Britain in fundamentally different ways, he seems to suggest, but it is nevertheless appropriate that this new-found relationship be cemented by textual, as well as physical appropriation. In exchange for a greater control over the country, of course, Hoare is prepared to supply the reader with a series of benign commentaries on the impoverished peasants whom he occasionally meets, but when pressed a little further is content to fall back on the theories of Cambrensis rather than an appraisal of the economic or social conditions of the country to explain their predicament: ‘I fear the character applied to the Irish by GIRALDUS de BARRI, in the twelfth century, may in some degree be applied with equal propriety to them in the nineteenth.’26 – another case, in other words, of ontology taking precedence over the niceties of history. If Hoare’s understanding of the realities of nineteenth-century Irish life is coloured by an inherited medievalism for which he had an


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exceptionally high regard, his relationship to a pre-historiographical Ireland is something from which he draws an even greater degree of comfort. Indeed, the topos of possession which infects his text, as well as the ancient history of Celtic Ireland in which he has an antiquarian and scholarly interest, are presented to the reader as being specifically allied. For example, when Hoare visits the Rock of Cashel he undertakes to remind the reader of how to regard the monument by suggesting that ‘Every lover of British antiquity, will be highly gratified with the first sight of this very curious chapel.’ 27 Indeed on the subject of antiquities, in general, Hoare’s appetite is voracious, appropriating not only the monuments themselves but the society which constructed them, and even the language which that society used to signify their efforts. If a stone temple, Hoare muses, existed formerly on the Curragh of Kildare, then it did so because ‘the elevated situation, and the nature of the soil of that plain, admirably suited both the inclinations and habits of the Britons’; of artifacts that he has seen in the museum in Dublin and around which a certain amount of debate has focussed, he suggests, ‘I do not hesitate to pronounce them the places of interment of the most ancient inhabitants of our island.’28 Read as statements of appropriation or, simply, as epistemological self-endorsements, such language reveals the extent to which antiquarian pursuits such as those enacted by Hoare, himself a fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, were increasingly constituted within the discourse of early nineteenth-century British travel.

Treasure island Although Hoare’s interest in creating an appetite for constitutional union may be easily deduced from his Tour, his was only one of several texts committed to a similar agenda. William Patterson’s Observations of Ireland (1804), Edward Wakefield’s An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political (1812), John Gamble’s A View of Society (1813) and William Shaw Mason’s A Statistical Account of Ireland (1814), all demonstrated a keen interest in securing information about the country above all else. Even J. C. Curwen, in his Observations on the State of Ireland (1818), was still relaying the message quite emphatically to a British readership some years after the Union: ‘I regret that I have not employed more of my leisure on the topography and locality of Ireland. I perceive I am on a voyage of discovery’, he intoned, ‘and, like a mariner without a compass, at a loss how to steer my course . . . It is really a national reproach to us to be thus generally ignorant as we are, of so important a part of the empire.’29

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In Sir John Jervis White’s A Brief View of the Past and Present State of Ireland (1813), an awareness of the potential value of Ireland is married to a graphic illustration of insecurity in the post-Union period. Although White, like Hoare, views the country as an interpretively rich field, the ‘knowledge for power’ paradigm he develops also suggests a level of palpable unease. Like so many others writing on the subject, White opens his text by specifically remarking on how poorly researched Ireland has been: ‘I conceive it advisable to pay some attention, in particular, to that part of these united realms called Ireland; a matter which has been too much neglected; and . . . to point out what may now appear for the benefit of that valuable whole portion of the great whole.’30 In White’s case, one not only finds the usual anxieties about how unknown Ireland is, but how necessary is the integration of the country with the rest of Britain: we are too prone, in considering matters of consequence to the British empire, to almost entirely occupy our attention with what more immediately appertains to that part of his Majesty’s dominions called Old England, and to lose sight of those valuable parts which may with great propriety be denominated the limbs. Of those united limbs, well known by the support which they give the body, I intend to class Ireland as the principal or right leg, and as such to view the importance of her good condition, in order thereby to effectually sustain, along with the fellow limb, Scotland, the ponderous frame.31 Apparently without any humour whatsoever, White demonstrates, in his own idiosyncratic manner, the necessity for constitutional change, and of the need for Ireland to become culturally, not just geographically, accessible to Britain. Without the benefits of Union, argues White, ‘Old England’ would be condemned to a life of political incapacitation and enfeeblement. Too many people, he claims, are prepared to view Ireland as ‘an unbecoming excrescence, [rather] than as a necessary and ornamental part of the whole’, whereas he regards the inclusion of Ireland as both a natural and a necessary development.32 Although less seriously considered than writers such as Plowden and Musgrave, White’s contribution nevertheless emphasises the historical and statistical interest taken in Ireland in the immediate post-Union period. In Stephen Barlow’s two-volume The History of Ireland, From the Earliest Period to the Present Time; Embracing Also a Statistical and Geographical Account of that Kingdom (1814), a further text is added to the post-Union corpus, but in a methodologically imaginative manner


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Illustration 3 Ireland, by Chapman, John (1812). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland

that indicates a greater interest in fact-gathering and pure information. In Volume I, Barlow offers a broad history of Ireland, with the attendant dissatisfactions that that entails, but in his second volume he locates Ireland within a discourse of statistical and geographical

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discovery. Like White, he begins by deploring the state of British scholarship on Ireland: ‘It must surely have excited surprise in the minds of many readers, that while we have histories of Greece, Rome, and England, adapted to popular use, no attempt has been made to familiarize us with the events of Irish History.’33 But he then broadens the criteria normally employed for historical research to other areas. Perhaps ‘it may be permitted to borrow something from the peculiar province of geography’, he suggests, ‘in laying the foundations upon which the fabric is to stand’.34 For Barlow the need to comprehend Ireland as fully as possible is paramount, not just because such ‘auxiliary knowledge helps to infix more strongly in our memory those facts’,35 but because ‘every man who wishes well to the general prosperity of the empire, must ardently wish to see Ireland conciliated, and find her a cordial and willing labourer in the great national vineyard’.36 Like White, Barlow’s overview of British histories of Ireland suggests a topic less than satisfactorily developed, but one that would bear considerable fruit if properly attended to. Facts and knowledge, regarded as indispensable areas of human understanding by writers such as Barlow, became one of the standard methods of understanding other cultures and territories in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the sorts of statistical institutions and societies that were established specifically linked a desire for control over other regions with information itself. The literary critic, Thomas Richards, in an astute assessment of nineteenth-century classificatory practices, describes the impulses, as well as the limitations, of such a scheme: From all over the globe the British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map. They surveyed and they mapped. They took censuses, produced statistics. They made vast lists of birds. Then they shoved the data they had collected into a shifting series of classifications. In fact they often could do little other than collect and collate information, for any exact civil control, of the kind possible in England, was out of the question. The Empire was too far away, and bureaucrats of Empire had to be content to shuffle papers. This paper shuffling, however, proved to have great influence. It required keeping track, and keeping track of keeping track. It required some kind of archive for it all.37 The usefulness of Thomas’s thesis lies in its ability to attach the collection, classification and adaptation of knowledge to particular moments and institutions, such as the British Museum, the Royal Geographical


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Society and the India Survey. However, Thomas’s appreciation of the imperial archive also reveals how facts were linked to authority, and how information was regarded as something to be utilised, rather than merely regarded as an archival source. Hence the classification of races, the development of ordnance surveys, the establishment of censuses. Flawed and limited, these developments nevertheless documented the Empire in the name of knowledge, sometimes in the name of progress, ultimately in the interests of political power. To examine nineteenth-century Ireland is to note the establishment of similar developments, particularly statistical surveys, which had a frequently regional and chorographical flavour. Indeed, one notable development, brought about as a result of similar exercises in England and Scotland, was the creation of the Dublin Society. Although the later accomplishments of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society has been well documented since their establishment in the 1840s, there has been less research on the Dublin Society, and on the background to its work.38 In brief, the establishment of the Society followed that of ‘the Board of Agriculture in England under Sir John Sinclair in 1793’, who had overseen the publication of county surveys of England between 1794 and 1815, and who had previously worked on compiling a statistical survey of Scotland between 1791 and 1799.39 In The Statistical Account of Scotland, the analytical model proposed by Sinclair was not only ambitious, but singularly effective in terms of coverage. Sinclair simply asked ministers operating within the different parishes of Scotland – obviously interpreting them as scrupulous and reliable statisticians – to provide him with as much detail about daily life as possible. Amongst the categories upon which he desired information was ‘number of the poor, climate and diseases, quantity of grain consumed, wages and price of labour’. However, he also attempted to gauge the number of orchards and woods that existed in various regions, and even went to the extent of determining the whereabouts of caves and rocks, islands and rivers, which he then collated and published from 1791 onwards. Interestingly, it was not until Sinclair’s third volume, on Roxburgh in 1792, that some sort of discussion of the author’s intentions and rationale emerged. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the volume, Sinclair declares that his object is ‘to lay the foundation of a great, methodical, and complete survey of Scotland’.40 However, in his ‘Address to the Reader’ the extent of his belief in statistics, and their relation to the political well-being of a country, become manifest: ‘The superiority, which the philosophy of modern times has attained over the ancient, is

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justly attributed to that anxious attention to facts, by which it is so peculiarly distinguished. Resting not on visionary theory, but on the sure basis of investigation, and of experiment, it has arisen to a degree of certainty and pre-eminence, of which it was supposed incapable.’41 Inquiries about the political and economic condition of countries have been attempted before, he acknowledges, but usually for selfish or political reasons – for tax-gathering purposes or for raising an army – certainly not, he insists, for anything less than the self-improvement of a few individuals or a particular social grouping. In Sinclair’s opinion, however, the true value of statistics is that they can operate like an early warning system for central and regional government alike, highlighting possible difficulties, as well as offering ways for dealing with unavoidable problems should they arise. From statistics, he believes, can be derived a better way of life, and he links statistical knowledge specifically with progress and change: No science can furnish, to any mind capable of receiving useful information, so much real entertainment; none can yield such important hints, for the improvement of agriculture, for the extension of commercial industry, for regulating the conduct of individuals, or for extending the prosperity of the state; none can tend so much to promote the general happiness of the species.42 Although we may dispute Sinclair’s singularity of purpose, it is difficult to dismiss the relatively benign intentions of the author. A similar series of published surveys for Ireland, however, would be somewhat differently devised. As with the Scottish surveys the actual scope of the Irish surveys suggested significantly greater breadth than might ordinarily be associated with such undertakings. For example, although particular emphasis, in the public notice which accompanies the surveys, is placed upon the importance of deriving accurate information about breeds of cattle, nature of soil, size of farms and so on, authors are also encouraged to assess the minutiae of wages, food, ‘clothing and habitations of the lower orders’. Clearly the statistical surveys which were being carried out in the early 1800s provided much-needed information about the country, and on a number of levels.43 In 1801 alone, five surveys were published by the Dublin Society. The third, by Robert Fraser, on County Wicklow, gives some sense of the levels of information these surveys actually generated.44 We read from Fraser’s text about drill husbandry, pasture, manufactures, soil, fisheries, nurseries and mines. Even comments on the use of the English


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language, less beneficial to the agriculturalist than we might think, are presented with some interest. However, it is in Fraser’s introduction, in which speculative capital is first appealed to, then interpreted as an issue of patriotic service, that the full potential of the survey is revealed: The account also which I have given of the singular phenomenon of gold being found in this country, of the extensive metalliferous strata with which it abounds, the numerous streams of water also, and opportunities for the erection of machinery, may attract the attention of men of extensive capital in other parts of the United Kingdom, fair and ample scope being here afforded for the employment of vast sums, in the skilful pursuit of the treasures contained under the surface of the earth; as well as in the improvement of the soil, and the establishment of manufactures. At the same time that the attentive observation of all these extensive resources, impresses the fullest conviction, that the County of Wicklow must in the natural progress of things attract enterprize and capital, to the production of additional wealth and strength to the empire.45 Like the post-Union optimist that he is, Fraser articulates a sense of Ireland as an untapped source, capable of providing considerable wealth for modest investment. Indeed, the language of pushy commercialism which the introduction presents suggests how several of these surveys really operated. ‘Account’, ‘gold’, ‘opportunities’, ‘capital’, ‘afforded’, ‘vast sums’, ‘treasures’, ‘manufactures’, ‘enterprise’, ‘capital’, ‘wealth’: these terms outline a significantly different programme from the one envisaged by Sinclair. No longer a method for dealing with particular social or regional problems, the statistical surveys of Ireland, significantly coincident with the Act of Union, display a wanton appetite for capital. Moreover, while the language of economic advancement is shamelessly exploited here, a broader sense of Ireland’s availability is being also declared. The country’s wealth, but also its geographical proximity to Britain, demands keener and closer co-operation.46 From being associated with insurrection, to being presented as a realm of easy financial gain, Ireland’s status is rewritten and repackaged in the mind of Robert Fraser. And if the promise of gold fails to excite the interests of the more wary investor, then an appeal to geography might more effectively convey the advantages to be acquired. The ‘wonderful beauty and variety of the country, [with] its immediate vicinity to the metropolis, [and] the extension of its maritime coast’, suggests Fraser, forms ‘an easy communication with the British shores’.47 It

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is true that County Wicklow might have presented the author with more obvious reasons for talking up the benefits of Union than, say, Donegal (published 1802), but the sense of spatial access suggested by these lines indicates the extent to which the country was being more effectively absorbed. Ireland might exist as a separate geographical entity, but the newly established constitutional relationship to Britain, by stressing the harmonising benefits of Union, would overcome such divisions. Like the mineral wealth that is apparently just there for the taking, Ireland appears remarkably accessible and available.48 Although Fraser’s text provides an interesting gloss on the desires of the post-Union period, it is only one of a number of statistical surveys conducted after the legislative Union of Britain and Ireland.49 Because information is of premium value throughout these years, and because there is a particular appetite for more factually based surveys, such studies noticeably increased in the early 1800s. Statistical surveys and histories are especially important because they are seen as providing one of the most dependable forms of knowledge. Picturesque views and narratives of a more imaginative cast are, of course, also popular. But from an administrative viewpoint, statistical surveys, particularly surveys in which the country is rendered in truly detailed ways, are crucial. Broken into counties, town-lands, populations, religious groupings, social classes, urban and rural locales, such surveys present a picture of Ireland which, before the advent of the census, offer about as thorough an impression of Ireland as can be achieved. In 1802 a further 10 county volumes are added to the list (Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Down, Kilkenny, Londonderry, Meath, Tyrone and Dublin), while a survey of Armagh is published in 1804, with studies of Wexford and Kildare published in 1807. By 1832, when the final county survey is eventually published – of Roscommon – by Isaac Weld, Secretary of the Society, the work had apparently run its course. Despite being literally incomplete in its aims, the Dublin Society had nevertheless produced 23 volumes in total, helped establish a statistical record of Ireland, and fuelled the interest in fact-gathering studies that was to continue for much of the century.

Pride of place If Britain felt that it had paid dearly for its epistemological disregard of Ireland – through the 1798 Rebellion – then attempts to fill the gaps in its knowledge were ongoing, and being strenuously encouraged in the early 1800s. In addition to work done by the Dublin Society, a number


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of other statistical accounts were published, testifying to the seriousness with which the demand for Irish research was being taken. Not surprisingly, some of the most interesting material produced was written by Irish writers who saw precisely the same danger in not having a sufficient knowledge of the country. One such figure, Thomas Newenham, who was explicit in his sympathy for the enfranchisement of Catholics, and well-intentioned in his attitude towards the improvement of the country, was one of the most prominent in this regard.50 In his Statistical and Historical Inquiry into the Progress and Magnitude of the Population of Ireland (1805), the narrator opens with the following lines: ‘The political condition of Ireland, from the revolution until near the close of the last century, was little calculated to keep alive those hopes or fears which alone could have operated in rendering the British public solicitous to attain a knowledge of the different circumstances of that country.’51 Although Newenham’s sense of quiet concern for the state of the Union is evident from lines such as these, the link between knowledge and power is particularly evident.52 As the narrator sees it, Ireland is ‘almost as imperfectly known in England, as those of some of the more remote parts of the British dominions’, and he encourages the British public to become as fully informed about Ireland as possible.53 If people are not familiar with the country, he declares, then ‘it is not improbable that Ireland may furnish permanent grounds of perplexity and debilitating alarm’.54 Lack of knowledge, the narrator clearly states, can do little but endanger the Union. Cementing the relationship through the development of detailed and comprehensive writing about the country is to offer at least one way of preventing future disturbances. Another way, of course, is to simply produce a fantasy of empire in which Ireland, splayed like a patient on an operating table, is seen as both fixed and available. Moving away from the more empirical realm of statistics and population figures, Newenham interprets the attractions of Ireland in truly tempting terms: ‘. . . open to the four quarters of the world. Its seas may be navigated throughout the year. Its coasts may for the most part be approached with safety in the most tempestuous weather.’55 Clearly aimed at promoting the empire, and of offering Ireland as an advantage to, rather than a beneficiary of, constitutional change, Newenham aims high in the post-Union stakes. The authors of the county surveys overseen by the Dublin Society might have been content to section the country into manageable units, rigorously replacing ignorance with knowledge in an effort to stave off potential dissatisfactions, but figures like Newenham were working to a much more ambitious brief. While having some sympathy with the work of

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the Dublin Society, Newenham sees Ireland less in terms of a series of well-defined regional studies, than an economic opportunity on a considerably larger scale: It is everywhere indented by secure harbours, there being no fewer than sixty-six in a circuit of about 750 miles. Noble rivers already navigable, or which may be rendered so, intersect it in all parts. Canals may be cut through it in all directions, without exhausting, as in other countries, that supply of water which is requisite for many other useful purposes. Smooth and durable roads may be, and indeed are made, in every district, however comparatively unfrequented, at an inconsiderable expense. In short, it presents such facilities for an importation and quick transportation of provisions throughout its whole extent, as are not to be found in any other country in Europe, Holland perhaps excepted.56 The fact that Ireland may be rendered navigable, that canals may be cut through it and that durable roads may be built, is interesting for the way in which it positions the country within a discourse of infrastructural potential and improvement. But the language also bears witness to the newly inscribed vision of the country that Newenham shares: of a proximity that can be capitalised upon, of a complexity that can be overcome by a thorough reorganisation of the landscape. In Newenham’s A View of the Natural, Political, and Commercial Circumstances of Ireland (1809) these ideas are further developed, and more explicitly expressed. Indeed, even the title of the text marries several complex issues together, and suggests the sort of robust appreciation necessary for consolidating the Union. Yet nowhere are Newenham’s desires for Ireland and, more importantly, for Ireland’s newly established relationship with Britain more clearly stated than in the opening lines of his preface: Under a well established government, exempt from popular control, an accurate and comprehensive knowledge of the various circumstances of a country, on the part of those who exercise the principal functions of the state, does not appear to be indispensably necessary, when the obedience of the people is the sole, or paramount object of concern. To insure obedience, a due proficiency in the art of government is the chief, or, perhaps, the only requisite. To promote the prosperity of a nation, a much more diversified knowledge, than that of the mere statesman, must unquestionably be attained.57


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Although a series of issues compete within these lines, the sense of increased prosperity tied to improved knowledge, and the manner in which both are regarded as necessary for political stability, is clear enough. Ireland is locked into an arrangement which surpasses any relationship Britain might have to her other possessions, suggests Newenham, and that relationship should be advanced as far as possible: ‘The eastern possessions of Great Britain are confessedly valuable, in a high degree; so also are her possessions in the western parts of the world. But considered as sources of imperial strength, they are, indisputably, upon the whole, inferior to Ireland.’58 In both of Newenham’s texts an emphasis on disclosing the benefits of empire, while arguing that a closer set of relations can only come about through increased knowledge, are consistently displayed. More importantly, Newenham’s reading of the available texts on Ireland have convinced him, among other things, that British prosperity, indeed British national security, is dependent on the political stability of Ireland. ‘The strength’, he insists, ‘indeed in times like the present, the very stability of the British empire incontrovertibly requires the permanence of tranquility in Ireland.’59 However, unlike the post-Union optimism of some of Newenham’s colleagues across the Irish sea, the view expressed of how exactly Ireland might function within the empire is more directly stated. Rather than view Ireland as a minor player in the field of international politics, Newenham argues for a much greater share of responsibility, seeing in the Union an opportunity for Ireland to become not just a member of the United Kingdom, but an equal partner in all of Britain’s overseas transactions. If that fails, if Ireland is less than equally treated, then ‘the union will surely be regarded, by all reflecting and unbiassed men, as a vain, illusive, nugatory, and even mischievous measure’.60 Yet for all the talk of empire, and of Ireland’s indispensable relation to it, the central theme of Newenham’s text is knowledge. Again and again the narrator points to this issue, and of its importance in bringing about the political satisfaction of Union. ‘To suspect a deficiency of due knowledge’, claims Newenham, ‘with regard to the circumstances of Ireland, on the part of the principal ministers of the executive power, may appear extremely presumptuous in an individual who has few opportunities of ascertaining the extent of their information. Such a suspicion, however, seems not altogether unwarrantable.’61 To have knowledge is clearly to be empowered; to be without is to be at the mercy of your enemies. Like the authors of the statistical surveys feverishly written at the same time, Newenham searches for Ireland

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amidst the wreckage of discredited, or methodologically unimpressive, texts. He describes the work of the Royal Irish Academy as very worthy, yet concludes that ‘notwithstanding the acknowledged merit of these writers, especially Smith62 and Beaufort,63 the inquirer, after perusing them all, will still have much to learn’.64 When he turns to the narratives of Ireland’s trade, a central issue for one so enamoured of the economic potential of the country, he suggests, ‘very little has, as yet, been written’.65 Even historical accounts of the trade and manufactures of the country are ‘still wanting’,66 he suggests, while the statistical surveys being carried out by the Dublin Society are ‘far from satisfactory’,67 and history writing more generally entirely unrewarding: ‘The historical accounts of Ireland have, for the most part, been written under strong inveterate prejudices and biases, perpetually operating, in some shape or other, to the preclusion of truth; and cannot, therefore, generally speaking, be, with safety, individually relied on.’68 Whether Newenham’s almost complete dismissal of a considerable cross-section of research on Ireland is a valid critique, or evidence of professional jealousy, is unclear. Certainly, the tentatively punctuated last line above, as the narrator builds to a denunciation of several predecessors, suggests a nervousness borne out of making too great a case against other writers of Ireland. That said, the sense of opportunity which Newenham expresses demands an image of Ireland as a textually renewable place, either written up but faultily, or not written up at all. Newly established political relations, he seems to suggest, require newly composed narratives. The picture of expectancy presented by the narrator in his Inquiry into the Population of 1805, when the country was read as offering the benefits of access to the British shores, is now surpassed by something much more ambitious. In the earlier text it was simply necessary to stress Ireland’s favourable position, how it needed only the importation of capital and resources to make it a lucrative investment. However, in his A View, only four years later, the importance of reading Ireland not just in commercial and trading terms but in the light of a global economy becomes paramount: Whoever will cast an eye over a chart of the world, as exhibited by a projection of the sphere, will find no difficulty in admitting, that the situation of Ireland, relatively to all other countries, capable of receiving and bestowing the reciprocal benefits of external commerce, is favourable in the extreme. Its communication is open and direct with England, France, Spain, Portugal, the coast of Africa,


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the East-Indies, South-America, the West-Indies, the United States of America, Newfoundland, Hudson’s-bay, Greenland, &c. . . . Its communication with the rest and least valuable part of the world is, upon the whole, neither more circuitous, nor more difficult than that of other European countries, with many of those places which the ordinary pursuit of extended and diversified commerce requires their traders to visit. It seems destined by nature to be the great emporium of the commodities of Europe and America; and indeed of those of almost every maritime country upon the surface of the globe.69 Newenham views Ireland no longer as a simple asset within the British archipelago, but rather as an impossibly advantaged realm within the world economy. Within this ‘chart of the world’ Ireland is read as a repository of sumptuousness and excess, its position guaranteeing it links to the Orient and Africa, as well as to the New World. By conjuring up an image of seafaring plenitude, with the country crosshatched by the traffic of international trade, Newenham presents as productive a future for Ireland as might be imagined. Ireland is central to the British Empire, then, but also to European capitalism. For a text that was written less than 10 years after the deaths of 30,000 people in the 1798 Rebellion, such writing says much about the need to emphasise the benefits of Union in the early 1800s. In examining the various writings on early nineteenth-century Ireland, one is struck, then, by how often the subject of British ignorance of the country is aired. Ireland is described as unknown and uncharted, its language appears to have a wildly preposterous lineage, its customs are as little understood as the far reaches of Christendom, its inhabitants constitute an ethnologically rich, if politically unstable, community. While high-level interest in Ireland may be linked to the broader imperial project, in which informationgathering disciplines and societies supplemented the agencies and armies of state, such developments are formed by the culture of Unionism also. Knowledge is about fact-gathering, but also about using facts, and the success and relevance of writers such as Newenham and Fraser rests chiefly on their epistemological appreciations of the country. Such data-collecting developments, in other words, find a ready role in the consolidation of empire, but for many writers such inquiries are a necessary part of promoting the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. More than that, they absorb an historically recalcitrant neighbour within a culturally accessible matrix.

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Stranger in Ireland In 1813, just as Richard Colt Hoare stepped back onto British soil after a testing sojourn in Italy, James Hall, chaplain to the Earl of Caithness and author of several late eighteenth-century religious sermons, was bracing himself for the publication of his two-volume Tour through Ireland, Particularly the Interior and Least Known Parts. Over the course of several months Hall had travelled throughout Ireland, starting with the Locknel Packet from Liverpool to Dublin, before moving westwards towards Kildare, then onto Wexford, Waterford and the south coast. Indeed, unlike many others, Hall attempted as comprehensive a tour of the country as possible. His visit to more picturesque and traditionally touristic spots, such as Killarney and Tralee, are balanced by less favoured places, such as Athlone, Edgeworthstown and Enniskillen, and although some regions excite his interest more fully than others there is a generally even quality to the writing. Throughout his journey he travelled on horseback, moving in a clockwise direction, from the south to the north-west, before swinging north-east towards Belfast, and concluding with a final ride south to Dublin. As previously mentioned, although much effort has focussed on reading the travelogue as a form of colonial discourse, earlier efforts simply concentrated on the many differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing. Charles Batten suggests that although travel books ‘were not merely treatises’, but something that provided an ‘imaginative experience’ for many readers, the eighteenthcentury travel writer ‘was first of all a researcher, “sucking” intelligence from different geographical regions’.70 And Pratt draws a similar distinction suggesting that many eighteenth-century travellers not only included a tabulative and statistical element as part of their accounts, but a less than visible sense of themselves as writers and participants.71 In particular, Pratt cites figures such as the Swede, Anders Sparrman, and the English botanist, William Paterson, as providing ‘asocial narrative[s] in which the human presence, European or African, is absolutely marginal’.72 Concerned more with the task in hand, be it cataloguing the heterogeneity of plant life, or documenting the rock formation of a particular terrain, Pratt sees much, specifically mid- to late eighteenthcentury travel writing, as exemplifying an encyclopaedic style that gives little sense of a narrative voice or self. Although the difference emphasised by Pratt in her reading of African and South American travelogues has some relevance for our present discussion, Hall’s tour of Ireland seems to encapsulate something of


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both developments, suggesting a more mediative phase of travel. On the one hand, elements of the conscientious explorer, marking out territory as well as gathering and relaying information, may be discerned in Hall’s text, tying the narrator to the sort of scientific and methodological parameters indicated by Sparrman: After the publication, in 1807, of my Travels in Scotland, which I performed by an unusual route, I felt a strong desire to visit Ireland, particularly the interior and least known parts; and having, with a view to this, made myself as well acquainted with the country as I could by reading, I determined to gratify my wish by actual observation, and so procured letters of introduction to some of the most respectable and best informed persons in that country, not forgetting that necessary companion, money, which I took with me in drafts on the Bank of Ireland. Thus provided, I directed my course to Liverpool.73 On the other hand, he seems to fit more securely within the sort of movement towards individual experience and subjectivity indicated by Mungo Park – to whom Hall, incidentally, directly refers – and to a more personal and emotionally engaged type of subject.74 Indeed, even Hall’s title, which hints at a sense of adventure and discovery, and which echoes Park’s – those ‘interior and least known parts’ – ties him to an explorative and masculinist form of travel that was to be increasingly amplified by writers fascinated by trauma and physical challenge.75 The emphasis on an undiscovered territory that is both difficult to access, and epistemologically unavailable, then, suggests a text sensitive to the political immediacies of post-Union Ireland. Hall’s narrative may be also part of the wider development of the travel narrative form, but it specifically inscribes Ireland as an unknown category, and implicitly links an epistemologically disadvantaged Britain to potential Irish unrest. In other words, hanging over much of Hall’s text, as a reminder of how politically volatile Ireland could still be, are the recent events of the 1798 Rebellion. In county Wexford, the location of some of the fiercest fighting during the rebellion, Hall suggests: ‘Many parts of Ireland have been watered with the blood of its inhabitants. The battle of New Ross which happened on the 5th June, during the rebellion in 1798, was extremely bloody. Instead of the 500 people, given out as killed on both sides, it is the opinion of many, who saw it, that more than three times that number were slain.’76 Indeed, the very fact of this most recent case causes the narrator to view the now pacific state of the country with a little apprehension. During his visit to Kildare, for

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example, he tells us that ‘the people all over this country engaged deeply in the late rebellion; and, if their minds be not enlightened, and their external circumstances somewhat bettered, notwithstanding the punishment the law inflicts on rebels, they will, it is to be feared, be ready to rebel again’.77 To read Hall’s text, then, is to encounter not a unified speaking subject, but rather a more complex narrator who struggles to bring the various experiences of Ireland together. True, such complexity is very much a feature of travel writing itself, where the varied responsibilities to be faced, the constantly changing scene, and especially the multiple topics upon which the traveller is invited to comment, result in an extremely fluid form of writing. In other words, since travel itself is a shifting, highly mobile experience, it is hardly surprising that writers often reflect this sense of transience, whatever the historical period in which their work is produced. William Sherman, in assessing early modern travel writing, for example, notes that it is: marked by complex rhetorical strategies. Its authors had to balance the known and the unknown, the traditional imperatives of persuasion and entertainment . . . Given such diverse purposes . . . travel writers were often torn between giving pleasure and providing practical guidance, between logging and narrating, between describing what happened and suggesting what could have happened.78 Echoing this, Barbara Korte argues that as ‘far as its theme and content matter are concerned, the travel account has not emerged as a genre hermetically sealed off from other kinds of writing’.79 And in Hall’s Tour, where historical record, scientific analysis and medical theory jostle against the rhetorical imprint of empire, this is especially clear. Indeed, the highly textured nature of Hall’s text suggests something more than a set of formal or aesthetic considerations and complexities. One might even suggest that the hybrid narrative that he produces specifically encapsulates that sense of unease which faced British travellers when they visited Ireland. Confronted by a range of inconsistencies and discontinuities, many were discomfited and confused about how best to react to what at times seemed like everyday situations. They were introduced to narratives of appropriation and military might on the one hand, and stories of interracial contact and assimilation on the other. Indeed, because relations between Britain and Ireland were continually bound by a set of competing and sometimes contradictory discourses, discourses that provided a sense of diffusion rather than linearity for


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Illustration 4 Travelling in Connemara. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland anyone seeking narrative reassurance and order, many travellers produced a somewhat schizophrenic interpretation of the country. Not surprisingly, this complex frame of reference – at once assimilationist and exclusivist – posed for narrators of Ireland many problems. Ireland was janus-faced, contradictory and ambivalent; its loyalty could not always be relied upon, its culture, before greater Anglicisation, was believed to be fluid and chaotic, yet it bore several, increasing resemblances to Britain that made its outright rejection a contentious and problematic issue. ‘Travelling, and the reading of travels’, suggests a reviewer for the Annual Register in 1807, ‘is one of the most agreeable amusements in the whole compass of human resource. The ever varying aspect of nature and views of fellow-creatures in a vast variety of situations, with interesting anecdotes, and curious facts, in both civil and natural history, form a species of entertainment which requires not any effort of understanding.’80 For James Hall, however, things are not so easily resolved, nor so clear-cut. Like many post-Union narrators, Hall might be said to operate within a highly politicised environment, which partly explains the rather fraught perspective frequently employed. True, there are moments in the text in which he is content to simply promote Ireland, especially when he points not just to the benefits of empire, but to Ireland’s anticipated role within it: To whatever quarter of the globe we turn, we shall find new reasons to be satisfied with that part in which we reside. The rivers of Ireland

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furnish all the plenty of the African stream, without its inundations; that have all the coolness of the Polar rivulets, with a more constant supply; they may want the terrible magnificence of huge cataracts, or extensive lakes, but they are more navigable and more transparent. Though less deep and rapid than the rivers of the Torrid zone, they are more manageable, and only wait the will of man to take their direction.81 But concerns such as these are usually less available to Hall because of the ongoing difficulty of matching a genuinely promotional discourse to the present state of the country. In other words, Hall’s desires concerning Ireland are of a more pragmatic nature because the primary motive for his trip is to make increasingly accessible, or at the very least comprehensible, the complexities of post-Union Ireland for British readers. Which is not to suggest that he refuses to engage with the challenges presented, for he explores various Irish problems, and offers solutions for their amelioration. But the manner in which his narrative increasingly incorporates instances of transgression and, increasingly, disguise as a way of dealing with them raise further questions about resistance and communion in this most complex of contact zones.

The inside track As suggested above, one of the main reasons for Hall’s travels is to become intimately informed about Ireland by, first, establishing a strong sense of the historical and cultural complexities of Anglo-Irish relations and, secondly, investigating the country at first hand, specifically the less well known areas with which a level of danger is still associated. However, to gain access to the country, at least from Hall’s perspective, requires a high level of skill and forbearance. More specifically, because the narrator is locked into a discourse from which one has to look both ways, so to speak, he is also required to develop a personal response, one that might alleviate the culture of duality and ‘double-think’ within which he finds himself. In other words, although gaining access to a country is a necessary component of any tour, that task is made all the more difficult in the case of Ireland, principally because the usual narrative and ideological parameters upon which a British traveller may depend are in a constantly shifting and uneasy state. For some writers, of course, the temptation might be to avoid the pitfalls and convolutions of Anglo-Irish politics entirely, but in the case of Hall, as a writer who has specifically set himself the task of discovery


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and elucidation, Ireland simply has to be faced. But what better method of facing that dilemma, of seeking entry then withdrawal, of operating like a discoverer of facts while maintaining some semblance of self-preservation, than through a process of disguise and pretence?: As my boy, particularly in places where the cabins seemed miserably poor, generally rode my pony more than myself, I now and then went into them, enquiring for the nearest village, whether there were any manufacture in the country, and on other pretences.82 At a later point in the text Hall tells of how he went ‘into a variety of cabins, on various pretences’ and of how the native Irish, because they thought him ‘a new tithe-procter . . . were afraid’.83 Further on, he recounts how upon ‘Hearing somebody sing as I passed an open door, on my way to New Castle I stepped in, under the pretence of asking for a little water, and found a middle-aged woman singing and working among flax.’84 Finally, while lodging in a boarding house, in Millstreet, he tells of how he came across a young girl: with something like a pin-cushion hung round her neck: which, I learned, had been given her by the priest to cure her of a decline, and defend her from all diseases whatever. After looking much at it for some time, and hearing much of its value and virtues, [I] became anxious to see what was in it; but did not know how to come at it.85 Perhaps not surprisingly, the religious plunder that Hall desires from this particular transaction is eventually made available, although without the girl’s parents’ consent and through a process of deception. However, the episode is more interesting, I believe, not just because it ends profitably enough for the narrator, but because Hall is finally taken by the family ‘for a priest’.86 Taken in isolation, incidents such as these have an unsettling quality to them; bad mannered, and in bad faith, Hall enacts a series of deceptions on people who appear sincere and well-intentioned. But what each of these passages also reveals is an obsession with impersonation and the sort of covert activities reminiscent of many travellers. As matters of interpretation these are points worth bearing in mind, and not simply because one of the many purposes of travel is that of surveillance and interpretation. Although Hall’s use of disguise is frequent and notable, the narrator’s use of the mask is tied to a broader, vacillatory view of Ireland to which he also subscribes. To take one example, because of the Union Ireland is generally

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believed to be on the road to peace, yet everywhere Hall travels he is confronted by a sense of military preparedness and unease. At Boyne Castle, for instance, he finds that a residence has been ‘converted into [a] barracks’, while at Enniskillen 2000–3000 military, with an ‘excellent barracks, and cannon to defend them’, are in a state of constant vigilance.87 And north or south of the country, whenever he attends to this issue, the picture is just the same. At the garrison in Omagh the narrator talks of how the military ‘are prepared against the worst’, while in Clonmel ‘there are generally some thousands of the military stationed’, he suggests, on account of their ‘excellent barracks. .. one for foot-soldiers, one for the horse, and one for the artillery’.88 As with some of the earlier passages, Hall seems to be caught, here, within a world of wildly discordant images and narratives. Because of its close geographical proximity to Britain, Ireland should be well known, but it continues to remain inaccessible. The Irish themselves should be culturally assimilable, yet all indications seem to suggest the opposite. The sense of further insurrection should be at end, but the country seems to be more fortified than ever. Like the information for which he seeks, but which he must gather by a process of surveillance and disguise, Hall’s perception of Ireland seems to be at once ‘there’ – unquestioned, fixed and indisputable – yet in a continual state of flux. It is a place to which the narrator can relate on a practical level, yet it is being continually transgressed by the disguised figure of James Hall: ‘Taking me for a priest, the children, as well as the teachers, were attentive, and seemed pleased with my listening to them.’89 When we see Hall seeking access under the guise of somebody else we are reminded, then, of just how unstable and piecemeal is this appropriation of the Celtic fringe. Hall’s unionist ideology may insist on coherence and certainty, yet because obstacles continually appear the narrator turns to impersonation as a means of escape. Indeed, because it can provide him with cover in the true sense of the word, disguise becomes a necessary way of travelling throughout, and engaging with, Ireland. In other words, he employs a more fluid sense of himself because self-dissolution is precisely the sort of tactic required for so narratively complex an environment as Ireland. He can, for the sake of the Union and in pursuit of a flagging epistemology, suffer these, sometimes fruitful, exchanges, but he can also avoid the threat of personal contamination by occupying another space or identity. It is only here, as a continually evolving and divided figure, that Hall can connect with Ireland: On my way from New Castle to Rathkeal, I fell in with a young man, whom, from his way of speaking, I suspected to have the yaws; a


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disorder in some parts not uncommon. Looking into his mouth, which he permitted me to do, supposing me a doctor, I found the avula and roof quite gone.90 In the course of Hall’s travels through Ireland many issues are discussed and, in some instances, the narrator reveals a genuine effort to understand problems such as rural poverty, the increasing alienation of the Catholic population, taxes and tithes, middlemen and absentee landlords. Similarly, his desire to give as complete an assessment of the country, from a variety of economic and political viewpoints, is based on a thoroughly engaged level of research. For example, he speaks of the threat from widely disparate social classes and how it could affect the country (‘How far it is in the interest of government to allow this, I leave it to others to judge’)91, while at other points he speaks cogently and persuasively about the need for tangible rather than theoretical improvement: ‘It is of no consequence for the absentees, and landed proprietors, who live in England and at a distance from their tenants, and the poor Irish, to say that they pity them. Pity of itself is but poor comfort, and, unless it produces something more substantial, is rather troublesome than agreeable.’92 However, although Ireland is a threat, certainly a periodical hindrance to Britain, it must still be safeguarded and brought successfully within the Union. Preaching at Ordequhill, Scotland, some 20 years previously, Hall almost prophetically declared: Though the desire of Liberty be natural to man, and forms a leading feature in his character; though it appears in his early infancy, and continues with him to the end of his journey, yet no sooner does he enter society, or join himself to any community of men, than he finds it necessary to give up part of his liberty into the hands of others, in order to be freed from factions at home, and sudden attacks from abroad.93 The spectre of revolutionary France, with designs on Britain, make the content of language such as this comprehensible enough, but the idea of strength in unity and, more particularly, in the political satisfaction derived from the Union of the British Isles seems to have informed much of Hall’s writing throughout. France, he went on to preach, is all ‘famine, rapine and confusion’, while Spain, ‘on account of their despotical form of government’, is no better.94 And yet the union of Britain and Ireland which Hall was to witness some few years later was

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to lead the narrator to not just intriguing, sometimes unconscious, tactics as a means of coping with Ireland, but a deep sense of confusion about just how profitable such alliances might be.

An independent traveller In 1812, just one year before Hall’s at times mysterious rumination on the state of Ireland appeared in the bookshops, Henry Lichtenstein, doctor of medicine and philosophy, and professor of natural history at the University of Berlin, produced his two-volume Travels in Southern Africa. In the preface to his work Lichtenstein considered the purpose of travel writing, wondered why accounts of similar regions differed so widely, and concluded that while many writers were keen to ‘make their works entertaining to their own countrymen, or at the utmost, to their contemporaries in general’, he had ‘avoided all attempts to embellish his descriptions, lest they might endanger the throwing [of] . . . an improper shade over the whole of the rest’.95 While Lichtenstein’s grave and self-analytical tone may strike a note of cautious piety for many a reader, it usefully serves as a means of comprehending the various changes that were being absorbed by the travel narrative form for this particular period. We will remember how Pratt suggested that where eighteenth-century travel writers worked with a more factually based model, eschewing all temptations towards self-promotion or personal drama, early nineteenth-century writers moved in the direction of making their texts more entertaining, or autobiographical, or simply more imaginative than had been previously the case. What makes Lichtenstein’s text interesting for the purpose of my discussion, however, is not just its relationship to the various threads of a specifically Euro-American discussion concerning the complexities of the travel narrative form, but the fact that his text had been translated into English from the original German by Anne Plumptre, novelist, translator and traveller. Author of a novel entitled The Rector’s Son (1798), and a travelogue, Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France (1810), Plumptre is not just an interesting narrator in her own right, but the quietly unobtrusive and, I believe, methodologically sympathetic figure behind Lichtenstein’s work. In fine, her translation of his Travels reveals an affinity for a more scientifically based model, thereby raising questions about Pratt’s thesis of an end-of-century transformation of the travel narrative form. Born in 1760 to Anne and Dr. Robert Plumptre, President of Queen’s College, Cambridge, Anne Plumptre received a good education, spoke


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several languages fluently, and developed an interest in drama and creative writing. In fact her linguistic and theatrical interests were to coalesce during the years 1799–1800 when she was given the opportunity to translate several of Augustus Von Kotzebue’s plays from German to English. Poet Laureate and director of the Imperial Theatre at Vienna, Kotzebue was a hugely popular dramatist in his day, and Plumptre seems to have revelled in her duties as translator, completing his The Count of Burgundy, The Virgin of the Sun, The Force of Calumny and The Horse and the Widow, all within this two-year period. In addition, she translated, also from German, Letters Written from Various Parts of the Continent, a series of observations published in 1799 in which several travellers offered their views on continental Europe at a time of significant change. She spent the period 1802–1810 living and conducting research in France, and making preparations for the first of her travel narratives. Then in the summer of 1814 she made a trip to Ireland, remaining there until the following year, the results of which were eventually published in 1817 under the title Narrative of a Residence in Ireland. Compared with many another travelogue, Plumptre’s Narrative is an interesting text, blending together issues as diverse as science and architecture, politics and mineralogy. In addition, the narrator not only appears well informed and interested in the subject of her inquiry, but seems genuinely drawn towards the sort of methodological procedures outlined by Lichtenstein. Divided into two parts, with many subsections and chapters, the text is concerned with two separate journeys: the first to Dublin and Wicklow, with a swing north to Antrim and Down where the author has the opportunity to indulge her passion for mineralogical inquiry, followed by a second journey, which also takes in Dublin and Wicklow, but which then fans out towards the south and south-west. Although the itinerary is interesting in itself, particularly her northern route, a region frequently ignored by many travellers, Plumptre’s responses to the country, filtered through the predominant political and ideological pressures under which she wrote, are less obviously conflicted than Hall’s. That said, as a woman traveller with literary ambitions she still faced considerable difficulties in having her work produced, and objectively reviewed. Cora Kaplan, for example, defines women as ‘segregated speakers’ for whom ‘the suppression and restriction of their speech’ is an internalised position imposed by the forces of patriarchal discourse.96 However, when we examine several of the narratives of women travellers to Ireland we are confronted by a rather more complex picture than the one evoked by Kaplan. In seeking access to cultures and landscapes quite

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alien, and certainly incompatible with anything like that sphere of the domestic with which they had familiarity, many women were challenging social proprieties and expectations to an extent previously unimagined. Not all the women who travelled, of course, were like Plumptre. Many of them had to compromise themselves and their opinions in order to comply with the rubric of femininity that was all-pervasive, while many more masked or underplayed their intelligence so as simply to have their work accepted, even though to do so carried its own problems and penalties.97 Anne Plumptre, however, was something of an exception to these gendered limitations, writing confidently and unselfconsciously on a range of topics distinctly ‘unfeminine’. Indeed, Plumptre’s feminist credentials are clearly displayed at several junctures of her text. For example, during the course of her travels she not only informs us of how she has procured a letter of introduction to Lady Morgan, whom she describes as that ‘amiable authoress’,98 but she also meets, while in Dublin, with Sir William Betham, brother of Matilda Betham, author of the Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804). In instances such as these, Plumptre takes the opportunity to emphasise not only the range of her reading and the extent of her social contacts, but also her alignment with progressive, in some instances explicitly feminist, figures. Plumptre was also a close friend of Helen Maria Williams, the well-known democrat, noted for her sympathy for the revolutionaries in France, and with connections to Fanny Burney and Wollstonecraft; what might be said to have drawn Williams and Plumptre together, then, was not just their travelling and respective residences in France, but their commitment to the kind of revolutionary politics current in Britain as well as continental Europe from the 1780s onwards. In addition, it is tempting to make a connection between Plumptre and Elizabeth lnchbald, who also worked on Kotzebue’s plays, specifically Lovers Vows, which Inchbald was asked to fit for the stage at Covent Garden in 1798. All of these women wrote about women’s issues, but perhaps just as noteworthy for our purposes is how many of them complement Plumptre’s own philosophical and literary development, and how several regarded travel and travel writing as an important, self-defining element in their lives. Indeed, when we remember that Mary Wollstonecraft published Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in 1796, a text which was well received and went into several printings, we begin to see how important the travel narrative form was for women of this period. Whether we might consider Wollstonecraft as laying the foun-


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dation for other women travellers of the time is perhaps debatable, but since Mary Williams published A Tour of Switzerland (1798), followed by Plumptre’s travelogues of, first, France, and then Ireland, a tradition of politically enlightened female travel writing would appear to have been in the making for the last decade of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries. In Sara Mills’s analysis of women’s travel writing, it is suggested that it is the various travellers who moved across landscapes as investigators and scouts who should be credited with much of the success of the colonial enterprise. Mills’s efforts to map differing responses to dominant discourses, her assessment of recent criticism which has conceptualised colonialism in masculine terms only, and her preparedness to accept that women’s writing had its own discursive and interpretive parameters makes her text an important stage in our understanding of the relationship between colonial discourse and travel writing. For example, while she acknowledges Mary Kingsley’s efforts at self-deprecation in her Travels in West Africa of 1897, Mills also points to the masculine adventuring hero position adopted by Kingsley, as well as the alignment of the narrator with colonial politics generally. Although Plumptre’s text, like Kingsley’s, evokes the occasional note of humour, relating, for example, a comical moment in which she is invited to christen an island off the west coast of Ireland by local inhabitants, the text is more interestingly read within the context of colonialist discourse and, specifically, as directly influenced by the attendant ‘double-think’ that affected many British commentators who travelled to Ireland after the Union.99 As already suggested, many writers were obsessed with comprehending Ireland, not least because they linked an understanding of the country with an opportunity for greater and more effective management. In the preface to Plumptre’s travelogue, for example, we are told that it was ‘the very flattering reception with which the Narrative of My Residence in France was favoured’ that prompted the current engagement with Ireland.100 However, a selective quotation from Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, printed on the title page, in which the country is evoked as a de-territorialised landscape, suggests that a post-Union interest in the commodification of Ireland may have had some part in that decision.101 Plumptre continues: If we are anxious to be introduced to a knowledge of the face of their country, to understand its natural advantages and disadvantages, its customs and manners, its civil and political state, that we may be

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enabled to compare them with our own, and judge between them and ourselves, – a much deeper interest will surely be excited when these injuries, these comparisons, relate to an object so near to us as a SISTER.102 Like writers such as Hoare, Plumptre reveals a desire for information about the country, not just because a Union has been effected, but because that Union’s chances of success is being specifically read in terms of epistemological gains and advantages. By writing about the political and cultural affairs of Ireland, however, Plumptre is doing more than just presenting herself as a figure of decision, but rather aligning herself with narrators as centrally placed, in canonical terms, as Edmund Spenser. Describing herself as the author of a well-received travelogue may reveal a pride and confidence in her ability to map the contours of Irish cultural and political life, but it also allows us to recognise something of the confident manner and tone of the text itself. When we remember that until 1857 women, on marriage, ‘became civil minors and were not allowed to own property’, it becomes possible to gauge the likely effect her text would have had, and the extent to which it would have been viewed as radical in its assessments and strategies.103 Indeed, it is quite possible to present Plumptre as a proto-feminist writer since her efforts at political analysis, and also her narrative style, suggest an indifference to the contemporary discourses of femininity which affected, and frequently limited, the writings of many other women. As Mills has suggested, because women travel writers sought physical as well as intellectual freedom in which to prepare, and then document, their own experiences, they very often had to compromise themselves and their opinions. For example, she suggests that because the writer Fanny Parks wished to report on Thug militancy in India, but realised that such a commentary and subject matter might be deemed ‘unfeminine’, she decided on a ‘distancing strategy’ that would help provide yet ‘mediate the information’ for her readers; in Park’s case the best vehicle proving to be the ‘letters from a friend’ format.104 With Plumptre, however, things are rather different. There is no shirking or denying her responsibilities, and no efforts at selfeffacement or denigration anywhere in the text. She confidently cites Richard Pococke and John Carr, and by so doing not only establishes familiarity with each of their texts, but manages a degree of almost institutional, certainly professional, compatibility between their work and her own. As to those aspects of women’s writing that very often remain undeveloped – like the adoption of a quasi-scientific


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voice – Plumptre has absolutely no reservations. While the level of scientific assessment performed at the Giant’s Causeway may come across as a little strained, the description is not an isolated affair and, regarded in the context of the overall work, not at all unusual: ‘The latter circumstance, in addition to the occurrence of basaltic fragments, in which a sphere appears to be enveloped by a polyhedral figure, suggested the hint for an opinion which I have been led to adopt – that a compressible laminated sphere is the primitive figure of each prismatic articulation.’105 Supported by references to a paper originally published in the Journal de Physique and to an ‘excellent paper in the Philosophical Transactions’ by Mr Gregory Watt,106 Plumptre’s enthusiastic assessments, backed up by an indefatigable belief in her own interpretive self-worth, carry a credible, and impressive, charge.107

A different view It has been suggested that many feminist analyses of women travellers tend to downplay unpalatable aspects of the women under discussion in favour of a critique that centres on their individuality or eccentricity. Meanwhile other critics have simply chosen to regard women as far too involved in their struggle against social convention to be interested in anything as alien as colonial policy or ethnicity and, no doubt, there are instances where such analyses are appropriate. But, in addition to de-legitimising women as ideologically complex figures in their own right, there are dangers with this type of assessment, problems in seeking to see them as non-political and as uncontaminated by the experiences of so ethnological an encounter. To be sure, difficulties existed for women which tended to make any political interpretations they might offer more complex, like the pressures and parameters of a restrictive feminine discourse that foregrounded the individual over the racial, or the domestic and private over the public spheres, but women who were intelligent and privileged enough to travel (sometimes unchaperoned), as well as motivated enough to have their experiences later published, cannot be seen as uniformly apolitical. In her assessment of nineteenth-century women’s travel narratives, Shirley Foster makes the point that ‘the woman writer often represents foreigners sympathetically, as individuals with whom she tries to identify’, rather than as symbols of an alien ‘otherness’. The woman traveller, she continues, ‘blurs the demarcation between “them” and “us” and may be less assertive than her male equivalent’.108 Mills, also keen to stress

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the power differential that exists between women travellers and their subjects, gives qualified support to this thesis by suggesting that because the assessment of women and colonised natives was similar (‘simple, childlike, deceitful, passive, not capable of intellectual thought, and more closely allied to nature’) the representational efforts of some women travellers were more sympathetic than that of men.109 However, while this may well be the case for the texts analysed by Foster and Mills, it is not wholly the case with Plumptre. For example, if we examine Plumptre’s experiences at the Giant’s Causeway we find her description of the native Irish to be no less explicit than those found in male texts, and no less sure in their pronouncements: But the troop of guides by which the Causeway is infested are always upon the look-out to collect every thing they can find worth seizing . . . Notwithstanding my peremptory rejection of their services, a whole flock of these cormorants would continue to follow me about the whole day, and then use their impertinent intrusion a pretence for wanting some remuneration at the conclusion.110 Dehumanising the Irish and translating them into an undifferentiated mass whose intrusive physicality is one to be painfully endured by the visitor to Ireland is a central theme here. The Irish, Plumptre seems to suggest, are a hindrance and an obstacle to leisured and intellectual activity, their presence best seen as a frightening plurality of native and ethnic difference: Scarcely can a carriage stop at a shop, or a well-dressed person enter one, but the door is immediately surrounded by a number of these miserable-looking beings, whose clamour and importunities exceed those of the English beggars in equal proportion with the wretchedness of their appearance . . . to them working and being well kept, is greater misery than their rags and wretchedness, while indulged in their beloved indolence.111 What the language also suggests is compatibility between Plumptre and her male colleagues, showing, in particular, how unconstrained is the narrator by the discourses of femininity that traditionally bound women to specific areas of assessment and interpretation. Plumptre’s evocation of the Irish in these lines is no different in sentiment from many male-authored texts that characterise poverty


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in a similar manner, while seeking to represent the Irish as uninvited and unwelcome. However, Plumptre’s choice of language also shows her to be influenced by the problematic frames of reference that unionism inspired, and which we saw especially pronounced in James Hall’s writing. For example, when, towards the close of the text, she suggests, ‘It cannot be denied but that the state of the country calls loudly for some amelioration – that the situation of the inferior classes among the Irish is lamentable, is affecting’, and adds that ‘the Irish are a kind and warm-hearted people, extremely disposed to show kindness themselves, and no less feelingly alive to receiving it from others’, she shows a level of tolerance towards the Irish and, in the latter instance, a degree of parity between herself and those she comes into contact with.112 In other words, Plumptre can appear intermittently generous towards the ‘Sister Isle’, see it as a source of great interest, and even offer a vigorous defence of it against one of its better-known critics:

The writers of his time, then, taking their cue from the court, vilified Ireland in every way; and Mr Hume, at all times too much disposed to abandon his better judgement when personal or national prejudices interposed, has, without considering the inconsistency of what he says, suffered the impartiality of the historian to be overswayed by their designed and wilful misrepresentations.113

However, her generosity towards the Irish is ambivalent throughout, and one finds them aligned with a deeply conflictual model of representation, a model that cites their basic humanity, their poverty or their congeniality one moment, and their barbarous and marginalised state the next. Ireland has been linked in union to Britain, Plumptre’s narrative would appear to suggest, but that Union looks like an extremely confused and fragile one indeed:

The heads of the rebellion were crushed, but venom still rankled in the hearts. If in later times these things have been partially corrected; if by degrees something of the jealousy and asperity with which this rival sister was regarded is abated, too much has still been retained: till that be entirely eradicated, Ireland can never be other than a diseased limb of the body poIitic.114

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Although the concept of ‘home’ is usually regarded as signalling a realm of domestic fixity and permanence, Alison Blunt suggests that for women travellers, in particular, home is ‘constructed in an arbitrary, retrospective way while the traveller is away, and, by necessity . . . changes on the traveller’s return’.115 Between Britain and Ireland, the concept of home has always had a particular relevance, although it has frequently indicated confusion and loss as much as notions of ownership and possession. But while many post-Union travellers were content to retain an older, somewhat outdated view of Ireland, others desired a state of renewal, unsullied by past memories of conflict and racial antagonism. And Anne Plumptre, trying desperately to avoid a confrontation with the past, found herself presenting Ireland’s incorporation within the Union as a naturally occurring political reality, making Ireland ‘home’ – the title of her text, Residence, suggests as much – while at the same time exoticising the country for the purpose of professional satisfaction, even if such claims occasionally rang hollow and untrue. Trying to get such a balancing act right, however, trying to make Ireland foreign enough to justify being there in the first place, but sufficiently amenable so as to complement the prevailing ideologies of the time, could make, as the following quotation suggests, for very uncomfortable writing indeed. Like some of her colleagues, Plumptre attempted to disengage from Ireland, to purify herself in the interests of ideological propriety, but occasionally the past, and past memories, would come back to trouble her: At Tipperary I first heard of the disturbances which just now commenced in these parts; only two nights before the Mail had been attacked on the other side of Cashel by a very desperate gang, and a soldier had been killed . . . the object was not so much to get money, as arms .. .I came to Cashel to see the celebrated rock and the venerable remains of antiquity with which it is crowned, but I could now see nothing except the increased sufferings which the country had prepared for itself, I became indifferent to everything else, and I thought only of quitting scenes which seemed surrounded with nothing but gloom and horror. I saw the rock and the ruins at a little distance, as I entered the town, and as I quitted it they presented but new ideas of devastation, and I passed over. Yet for one moment I felt an impulse to stop the carriage and ascend the rock. The rain had ceased in the night, the morning was fine, the sun was shining upon the mouldering towers and turrets, and they assumed an air of magnificence which methought ought not to be passed by. The next


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moment, however, the idea that though the heavens were bright and clear, all was gloom in the moral atmosphere, came too forcibly over my mind to be repelled, and I pursued my route. At present my feelings upon this occasion seem strange to me, they seemed so in a few hours after, but at the outset they were irresistible. I have often asked myself since, why I did not see the ruins of Cashel – I could never answer the question satisfactorily.116 Setting Ireland into a framework by which it may be read as a place of racially inferior inhabitants, or effete antiquarianism, then, is not particular to male narrators. Plumptre’s strategies may differ from many others because they are less ethnologically charged, or because they are born of a somewhat more liberal post-Union paradigm, and yet her text can also converge with quite conventional opinions concerning Irish culture, political loyalty, customs and living conditions.117 Quite simply, she had in common with many other writers of post-Union Ireland a certain unease about her relationship to the country, which was rendered all the more problematic in her case because of her natural sympathy with revolutionary politics. And the fact that writing seemed to her a very affirmation of self, a means of intellectual selfvalidation, only made matters worse. Aligning herself with a series of complex and frequently incompatible discourses, her writing shows a remarkably dense philosophical and literary inheritance, even if like Kotzebue, the dramatist who inspired her to a period of intense intellectual activity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, she has slipped quietly from our view.118

3 Trekking to Downfall, 1820–1850

Things fall apart Although the Act of Union created its own touristic impetus, throughout the late teens and 1820s the numbers of travellers to Ireland continued to rise, a noteworthy phenomenon as these years had seen the re-opening of continental Europe as a tourist destination and if anything one might have expected a decline in visitors to Ireland. It is true that many thousands still saw the opportunity to visit Europe as too great a temptation, and poured across the channel in increasing numbers; James Buzzard states that ‘after 1815 Britons seemed to explode across the Channel, heading abroad in greater numbers than ever before’, a feature of contemporary tourism that was noted by many observers of the day: The topical literature of the years following the Napoleonic Wars is full of hyperbole about British tourists’ deluge, invasion, or infestation of the Continent, an onslaught marked chiefly by suddenness, liquid formlessness, and deafening noise. The Westminster Review remarked in 1825 that ‘immediately after the peace’ of 1815, ‘the inundation of Britons, like a second irruption of the Goths, poured down upon Italy . . . ’ Numerous testimonies feature a spectacle of British men and women flowing furiously across the Channel, transforming in their numbers the favoured Continental routes and haunts.1 However, despite these newly available riches, Ireland managed well, and continued to act as a draw for many British travellers especially. Not quite ‘foreign travel’ in the way associated with parts of continental Europe, it nevertheless held attractions that were sufficiently close, yet 100

Trekking to Downfall, 1820–1850

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potentially challenging, or at any rate different, from what was on offer in Britain. We saw in Chapter 1 how the numbers visiting parts of Britain escalated in the 1770s and 1780s, with several travellers writing up their experiences of places such as the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands. Although these writings were infused with the rhetoric of sublime and picturesque discourse, those very same texts were soon ridiculed for their aestheticisation of the landscape, with their responses interpreted as forced, inflated or simply inappropriate. James Plumptre, for example, himself an avid traveller throughout Britain – North Wales, the Peak District, Scotland, the Lake District, the West Riding of Yorkshire – anonymously published the comic opera The Lakers, in 1798, and showed, as Ian Ousby suggests, ‘how easily the fashion for the Picturesque could degenerate into affected jargon and hollow exclamation’.2 And Norman Nicholson reminds us that the ‘very name . . . the “Lakers”, has an underlying irony, since “laking” or “laiking” is the dialect word for “playing”, and, more particularly, for playing as children play’.3 However, declared irony and impatience with what some regarded as excessive responses did little to quell enthusiasm for the Lakes. Nicholson also astutely notes that ‘in spite of the growing traffic the Lake tour still remained an adventure – to the Londoner, perhaps, it was a greater adventure than crossing the Channel, for Cumberland seemed remote in a way in which Paris and Florence were not’.4 No doubt there were other, celebrity driven reasons for it remaining so fashionable; Coleridge and Wordsworth, Southey and De Quincey, all moved to the area, for varying lengths of time, while the early years of the nineteenth century saw several publications specifically dedicated to the Lakes, as well as further afield: John Housman’s A Descriptive Tour and Guide to the Lakes (1802), Richard Warner’s A Tour through the Northern Counties of England and the Borders of Scotland (1802), James Denholm’s A Tour to the Principal Scotch and English Lakes (1804), Coleridge’s Diary of a Tour to the Lake District (1799) and Wordsworth’s A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (1822), as well as the later A Guide through the District of the Lakes (1835). Meanwhile Ireland witnessed its own upsurge in tourist numbers, but also an increase in the number of texts subsequently published, with the 1820s seeing the production of several interesting volumes, including Thomas Kitson Cromwell’s The Irish Tourist and Andrew Bigelow’s Leaves from a Journal, both of which appeared in 1820. Bigelow, an American, was in Ireland for the purpose of soliciting observations for American periodicals including the Philadelphia Gazetteer, the Analectic Magazine and The Boston Athenaeum, and though a Unitarian minister,

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was less troubled by the political disturbances of the period, including the campaign for Catholic Emancipation (granted 1829), than might have been expected. Kitson Cromwell’s text, on the other hand, did embrace a more forthright engagement with Ireland, tackling sometimes difficult issues, and focussing on religious and political tensions on several occasions. A minister, like Bigelow, Kitson Cromwell was author of several volumes entitled Excursions through Britain (1818–1822), and for his work in this area was later elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (1838). However, it is in his assessment of the particularities of Irish social life – his subtitle, ‘Historical and Descriptive Sketch’ suggests much more than an engagement with the antiquarian and picturesque – that the full import of his work resides: Everywhere in Ireland, we meet with lengthened and pale if not darkened visages, the indexes to the minds of men employed in the common agricultural labours, which, contrasted with the ruddy open countenances of English rustics, might appear to the traveller from the latter country those of banditti, of beings detached from civilized society, and ready for the perpetration of any attack upon its legal institutions, rather than of men constituting the far greater portion of a population united under an established form of lawful government.5 A capacity for physical violence on the part of Irish agricultural labourers is being presumed here, yet the proto-anthropological language – ‘darkened visages, the indexes to the minds’ – also establishes the narrator’s impressions as verifiable; that the brutality and ferocity of Irish rural life is not only there, but clearly visible, something that can be actually read in the faces of the Irish themselves. Moreover, the contrast established between an idealised notion of English rustic simplicity with one of barbarous Irish intent underscores the sense of Irish difference, despite the still relatively recent constitutional alignment that presupposed a closer relationship between Britain and Ireland, with its corollary, closer understanding and co-operation. Shocked, because seemingly unexpected, Kitson Cromwell’s response is one of affronted, then outraged British sensibility evoked by the maltreatment of the Irish lower orders. He continues: The national distinction we have just drawn between the peasantry of the two countries – to what is it to be ascribed, if not to national differences in their situation, as respects their domestic comforts,


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and the relation they stand in to their superiors? The English tourist in Ireland must have indeed shut his eyes, if the use of the faculty of vision alone has not convinced him, that, in both these points of view (notwithstanding the legal institutions are the same), the condition of the Irish labouring classes is infinitely below that of the English. But long must such a state of things have existed in a country, and grievous, during that long period, must have been its endurance, ere it could have affixed a national portraiture on a considerable body of the people: yet the history of the world teaches, that the continuance of the degradation of a majority in any country cannot be for ever; and who, that really prizes the blessings of order and civil union, but must view with alarm of population rapidly increasing under such circumstances [. . .].6 Interestingly, although under little illusion as to the realities of Irish political life, Kitson Cromwell also chooses to place a type of English tourist in an immediate relationship with the current state of Irish affairs. Looking, then, to reveal the true extent of Irish dissatisfaction to an English readership, he seems equally concerned with countering the misrepresentations of English tourists whom, it is presumed, either distort the true nature of Irish life, or choose to ignore it altogether. Unlike the work of those writing at the same time about the Peak District, or North Wales, for whom occasional forays into ethnological analysis might have spiced up otherwise tired or inflated narratives, travellers to Ireland were forced to consider their experiences and expectations in a much more immediate way. Some might, as Kitson Cromwell suggests, look to conceal their opinions in favour of more conventional appreciations of the Irish landscape, and yet to follow this line was to avoid directly engaging with the country at all. Unlike those other ‘home’ tours of Scotland, Wales and various sites within England, then, Ireland appears, even here, some 20 years after the Union, as a place incontestably different for the majority of British travellers: spatially accessible, familiar in many respects, anecdotally reminiscent of much of Britain, at least in topographical, climatic and geographical ways, yet cordoned off by a clearly defined set of historical, religious and cultural differences.7 In James Glasford’s Notes of Three Tours in Ireland, in 1824 and 1826, published in 1832, an attempt to structure understanding of Ireland with reference to British cultural and social systems is offered as a way of coming to terms with several of these Irish difficulties, despite the country’s apparent deviation from what many considered the norm.

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A Scottish legal writer, and sometime sheriff-deputy of Dumbartonshire, Glasford travelled Ireland with the express purpose of investigating its educational system, something many considered ripe for overhaul, primarily because of the way in which the different religious groupings variously regarded the true purpose of education. Balanced and fairminded (he wrote of the ‘Orange factions’ with as much distaste as he did the ‘power of the priest’), Glasford concludes that even a ‘hasty inspection of Ireland, and of Irish people, excites strong and painful interest’,8 and he goes on to argue against emigration – even then appearing as a convenient means of dealing with several, not always economically related, problems – as the most effective way of countering the country’s difficulties: ‘Much seems to be now expected for Ireland from emigration, whereas it is reasonable to expect nothing from it, or very little . . . it seems clearly an error in principle, starting with a mistake; for population, abstractly, is not the evil.’9 But more than this, Glasford senses the ways in which to travel to Ireland is to travel not only to a different part of the United Kingdom, but to a place determinedly alien in every respect; it is a country, he exasperatedly writes, ‘remaining nearly at the same point of barbarism’ as it has done ‘for more than two centuries’. More tellingly – and here the comparison might be made with writers such as Kitson Cromwell – he recognises it as ‘an integral part of a great empire, so civilized in its other portions’.10 Whatever about Ireland being part of the Home Tour, seen as a place to visit similar to the venues written up by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travellers such as Pennant, Gilpin, Johnson and others about the Scottish Highlands or the Lake District, Ireland consistently forces an altogether different sort of response from its visitors. Something of the same sort of unease over presumed similarities between Britain and Ireland is evident from J. E. Bicheno’s Ireland and Its Economy; Being the Result of Observations Made in a Tour through the Country in the Autumn of 1829 (1830), a text that explicitly mixes social observation with economic analysis. Trained in law, elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1812, sometime member of an Inquiry into the administration of the poor-law system, and later appointed Secretary to Van Dieman’s Land, Bicheno is nothing if not a well-qualified commentator on a number of topics. In his thoughtful and candid preface he states that his intentions with regard to the country are borne out of a relatively straightforward concern with its plight: ‘At the present moment no person will be considered obtrusive who can throw any fresh light on the obscure and abstruse questions relating to the condition of Ireland.’11 The sense that Ireland is something of a conundrum to


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British travellers, and their readers, is clearly conveyed here; the responsibilities placed upon the shoulders of the sensitive traveller to the place considerable. Nonetheless, the evidence – for the narrator talks of his writing being based on ‘actual observation’, and ‘facts’ – is such that the difficulties of Ireland are manifest. Moreover, Bicheno interprets Ireland by means of the same physiognomical trope we saw employed by Kitson Cromwell as a way of coming to terms with the country: Besides, national character and national institutions do lie on the surface; and a stranger is more likely than the resident to catch their peculiar features, just as a visitor discovers a common resemblance in a family long before it is recognized by themselves. I had long harboured the desire of visiting a country, which contradicts the received theory of population, and the established doctrines of political economists; where, contrary to experience, the higher and lower orders profess different religions; and whence spring, as Pliny says of Africa in his time, all the marvellous and unaccountable contradictions of nature. Ireland is, therefore, to the moral and political philosopher what Australia is to the naturalist – a land of strange anomalies; and he must be a very dull observer, who does not bring home, from either of these countries something new and interesting.12 Here is Ireland much as Kitson Cromwell saw it: as a place scarred by the sectarian divisions that loomed over much contemporary discourse, and which threatened to bring trouble from several sections of society. Curiously, where it would have been almost unthinkable to talk of Ireland in the years immediately following the Union as anything other than ‘British’, it now appears perfectly acceptable to entirely displace such labels. Part of the British archipelago it may be, tied to Britain in ways never before attempted, it nevertheless feels safer, Bicheno cheerily admits, to think of Ireland as comparable to either Africa or Australia – places about as far away from Britain, if not spatially then certainly culturally, as one is likely to get. Of course, it might be argued that the hyperbole of the extract is intended to simply hold the readers’ attention, and might be therefore read as part of the self-conscious conventions customary with prefaces, of which it is a part. Yet the rhetorical force of those lines is without question; Ireland is strange, ‘marvellous and unaccountable’, a place of contrasts, anomalies and provocations. What appears evident from several texts from the 1820s and onwards, then, is how soon the sense of post-Union optimism, when figures like Hoare travelled around the country, has been extinguished. Early

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nineteenth-century visitors concentrated on the apparent benefits of the Union, on the sense of opportunity that was opened up by the new constitutional configuration, and urged all to see in the Sister Isle a sense of worth, a brighter future and, most importantly, greater political stability. Despite the rhetoric, though, many struggled to accommodate themselves to these new ideas, for the simple reason that Ireland proved to be less cordial and amenable than they had been led to suppose. Indeed, their disquiet over having to bring frequently competing and contradictory discourses together, I have already argued, was made clear in several travel accounts, including those of Anne Plumptre and James Hall, and was a notable theme that ran throughout their works. Nevertheless, it is also clear that many continued to toil with the sense of shared optimism that the Union seemed to engender, and they worked hard with sometimes relatively thin material to produce positive images throughout those immediate post-Union years. Here at the tail end of the 1820s, however, we find a different story, a sense that the fiction of a harmonious relationship between the various parties in Ireland, not to mention between it and Britain, is all but over.

Illustration 5 Protestant Missionary Settlement, Isle of Achill. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland


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And the 1820s must, indeed, have proved disappointing to those who were favourably disposed towards what they took to be the benefits of Union, and who thought that a new century might finally put rancour to rest. That Bigelow and Kitson Cromwell were both dissenting ministers and travellers to Ireland in 1820 is no coincidence, for as Ó Tuathaigh suggests ‘it was in the decades immediately after the Union that the struggle between the priests and the missionary bible societies reached its full intensity’, and he goes on to chart the work undertaken by the various missionary agencies who, in just ten years, ‘distributed 4,400,000 tracts’.13 Add to this the growing sense of dissatisfaction articulated by many Catholics concerning emancipation, which they believed was concomitant with the Union, but which was now inexplicably delayed, the ‘widespread popular unrest’, and the ‘noticeable increase in rural disorder and . . . agrarian secret societies [who] were active over an ever-extending area of the countryside’, and we begin to have some sense of the level of discontentment that then flourished, and which was patently obvious to many of the country’s visitors.14 This was certainly clear to Bicheno who, although at times exasperated at the seemingly endless difficulties that faced all well-wishers to Ireland, still felt obliged to open his text with a sense of the country’s tantalising attractions: ‘Few countries present more curious or more anxious matter for observation than Ireland. To the politician, the political economist, the philanthropist, and the philosopher, she is alike interesting.’15 A veritable patchwork of ailing social and economic issues, then, Ireland is not yet the disaster zone she will become in the mid-1840s, but rather a curious amalgam of religious confrontation, economic mismanagement and political instability. The early optimism of the immediate post-Union years would appear to have been somehow squandered, and few are under the impression that a solution will be easily found to the country’s apparently intractable, and myriad, problems.

Time travel Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s the number of published travel writings about Ireland continued to accelerate, a growth we might generally attribute to the fact that tourism within Britain, but also abroad, was perceptibly changing; 1830 saw the first wholly steam-powered railway in operation between Manchester and Liverpool, Baedeker’s first guidebook, published in Coblenz, appeared in 1835, with John Murray’s first guidebook, published in London, available the following year. Meanwhile, the word ‘timetable’ was coined

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by the London and Birmingham railway in 1838, while Thomas Cook, to be forever associated with a form of organised, if somewhat more upmarket, mass tourism, organised his first return trip of 570 people, by train, from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual experience of travel was itself becoming increasingly methodised, with the emphasis on the individual and subjective downplayed, at least by some tour-organisers and publishers. Although John Vaughan tells us that the ‘earliest recorded use of the term “guide-book” is in Lord Byron’s poem Don Juan (1823)’, he goes on to argue that the term itself was a fluid and evolving one: It is easier to recognise a guide book than to define one, for the form has many variations. It falls between the extremes of a directory or inventory and a travel book, but shares certain features with them. The difference between a travel book and a guide has sometimes been likened to the distinction between the description of a meal and its recipe in a cookery book, but this is too neat . . . The early guides were fairly personal in their approach, and it was only after almost a century of experience of the form that the features associated later with Murray, Baedeker or Muirhead appear. These guides are impersonal, systematic, and designed for a single overriding purpose.16 It is true that an altogether more practical sense of how best to advise tourists and travellers as to what to look for, how to access it, and what is to be especially noted about a particular site, has an impact on many travel accounts from the 1830s onwards. Even Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1835) is a not entirely dispassionate interpretation of how best to conduct a tour of a place that was up until then still exclusively associated in many minds with picturesque beauty. As Barbara Korte suggests, in Wordsworth’s Guide ‘readers thus find tips on how the landscape should be approached in order to capture the best view of it. In this manner’, she argues, ‘Wordsworth’s text is a guide-book rather than the account of an individual travel experience.’17 Whatever about the literal changes taking place within British travel, or the changing cultural attitudes towards it, British traveller’s responses to Ireland could be dramatically different from those formed from other Home Tour experiences. For one thing, throughout the 1830s travel writing about Ireland continued to stress the possibility of political crises, ineradicable party antagonisms and baffling economic disparities. This is not to suggest that picturesque and romantic interpretations of


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the country did not appear, nor that many travellers journeyed to places of scenic interest, such as the Lakes of Killarney, and felt themselves less than gratified with the experience, but rather travel writing pertaining to parts of the North of England, or Wales, revealed considerably less political consideration of the places through which the traveller passed. Quite simply, other places within Britain offered occasional ethnological insights into local customs and traditions, but they failed to impact on a sense of British national identity in the way that Ireland did, and the country remained as a site of difficulty and incomprehension for many. In Sir John Fox Burgoyne’s Ireland in 1831: Letters on the State of Ireland, the sense of impending crisis facing Ireland, but also Britain, in the event of political failure, is made manifest from the opening lines: We have often considered the anomaly which Ireland presents to the world – a fine country possessed of many natural advantages, forming an integral portion of one of the most civilized empires in Europe; and yet eternally torn by faction, and a constant prey to distress and turbulence.18 Once again, Ireland is not only being incongruously situated in relation to Britain, but this in itself becomes the main reason for visiting her. Part of an imperial network of improved, and improving, social and economic systems, Ireland, even yet, remains stubbornly wedded to its own particularities, especially where class and religious differences are concerned. A victim of faction, distress and turbulence, the British traveller is confused by Ireland’s resistance to change, and to its appetite for creating ever more problems with which Britain must contend: Changes have been rung upon the existing grievances of Church property, and tithes, absentees, the Union, the yeomanry, and, till lately, the depression of the Catholics, till one is weary of the discussion; and we become more and more puzzled to ascertain how far each has a bearing on this unhappy state of affairs.19 Here, then, is an acknowledgement of more than a mere failed set of policies and proposals but, rather, a profound sense that the Union with Ireland has not worked, or certainly not so well as some might have thought. Union was supposed to have brought changes and a sense that benefits, not all of them to the advantage of Britain, might follow; yet rather than an appreciable level of improvement, relations between the partners have actually deteriorated.

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The general point about so much published material from the 1820s and 1830s, then, is that where many writers commenting on Irish affairs after the Union, until approximately 1820, chose to downplay their sense of disappointment, or simply chose to omit anything negative about the Union, writers from the decades before the Famine could no longer continue with such a fiction. Pre-Union efforts to see in Ireland a picturesque haven comparable to parts of Britain were rudely shattered by the savagery of the 1798 Rebellion. After the Union – which McDonagh rightly suggests was enacted as much from a sense of fear as anything else – many writers galvanised themselves, and turned energetically towards a re-appreciation of Ireland, looking positively upon what many hoped would be an improved situation.20 What is notable from many of the writings of the 1820s and 1830s, after the initial excitement and optimism has had time to settle, however, is the way in which rancour and disbelief has once again re-emerged. After some hopes that differences could be put aside, that Ireland would take her natural place alongside Britain in working to maintain the empire, that party and religious animosities could be finally shelved and some start made towards modernising Ireland, disappointment still reigns. It is just about possible to argue that several of the travellers who visited the country throughout the 1820s did so out of single-issue – mainly religious – interests, whereas a greater number of writers from the 1830s tended to respond to a wider sense of economic and political failure, with several seemingly operating from a clearly reformist position that took greater interest in the Irish themselves. This is why Burgoyne openly declares his sense of shock at finding things in Ireland not only as bad as ever, but possibly worse than they once were. He admits to a degree of puzzlement over Ireland, stating that although he has perused speeches from Parliament and the ‘periodical publications of different parties’, and even ‘compared notes’ with other interested parties, he has ‘never been able to attain a clear understanding of the subject’.21 Ireland, especially its perennial dissatisfactions and historical resentments, reveals itself as a place of social and political intangibility, frustrating readers with its wavering sense of loyalty, its chronic disparities, and its seemingly endless disputes and hardships: The first sound I heard, as I approached the Irish coast, was the accent of distress. As the steamer rounded the harbour of Kingstown, she passed under the stern of a convict ship moored near the shore; on the opposite rocks were seated some women miserably attired, with infants in their arms, and in a state of grief and wretchedness: one of


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them shouted in Irish to the ship, from the bars of which was heard the voice of a man in reply. The prisoners on board were rioters, who, having been recently sentenced to transportation, were thus taking their last farewell of their desolate families.22 In something of a challenge to conventional narrative introductions to Ireland that emphasise the beauty of Dublin bay, and the view to the Wicklow hills, Burgoyne here places himself within a discordant scene of distress. Moreover, the intention, in contrast to many earlier post-Union travellers, is to now write of Irish realities in such a way as to force a differing awareness of the country, and to challenge conventional scenic appreciations for the simple reason that it appears increasingly appropriate to do so. Indeed, what is especially noteworthy about travel writing from the 1830s is the way in which several of these writers visit the country more as economic and social commentators than tourists, thereby taking Irish tourism in a somewhat different direction from other, more mainstream developments within Britain. This is not to suggest that the sort of increased appetite for tourism, especially on the continent, failed to impact on Ireland, or that Ireland’s traditionally scenic areas failed to arouse interest, but rather that irrespective of the physical changes occurring within the Irish transport system – primarily in the development of its canals and railways – the greater number of travel writers who approached the place viewed it in a greatly different light than they did parts of Britain. In several recent studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing it has become usual to attach differing temporal identities to spatially diverse regions, to argue that to travel in space is to travel in time. In Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840, Nigel Leask, for example, writes of how an ‘aesthetics of distance’ became increasingly pronounced throughout these decades, of the ‘traveller’s desire for the distant’, and of how spatially inaccessible sites were frequently privileged over places that were more readily available, suggestive, as were the former, of exoticism, hardship, danger and novelty. 23 More a nineteenth- than an eighteenth-century response, travellers looked upon travel to ‘distant’ lands as signalling a greater achievement, an altogether supreme effort on their part to engage with the foreign, the new and the wondrous. To travel to places less distant was to encounter, quite simply, less danger, novelty and alterity, and was therefore seen by many to be inferior in a myriad of spatial, cultural and intellectual ways. All of which makes travel within Britain and Ireland, of course, a complex part of the development of late eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury tourism, providing, as it does, clearly much less in the way of

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spatial and cultural diversity than places ‘abroad’. This is not to suggest that travel within Britain, for instance, lacked physical challenge, certain hardships, or that there was less to see and admire. But it was clearly to the advantage of travellers to emphasise the scenic beauty of the place, the charm of its hidden, local history, and the fact that customs were relatively unchanged, unlike those of the metropolis. It was less different than ‘abroad’, but then part of its appeal lay precisely in its literal familiarity, which was indeed one of the ways in which many travellers promoted it: arguing that it could compete with the aesthetic and intellectual challenges thrown up by continental Europe, yet be more amenable, offer certain physical challenges, yet confirm one’s sense of cultural allegiance, national identity, even patriotic sensibility. Although several late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writers tried to make Ireland fit within a frame of reference similar to the one devised for Britain, Irish cultural and social realities consistently forced the country beyond those rigidly conceptualised parameters. Ireland, it was argued, could be viewed as another part of the Celtic fringe, with its own picturesque and scenic attractions; a place that could be comprehended, and evaluated, via the discourse of late eighteenthcentury taste. After the Union, indeed, many felt that Irish antiquarian riches, in addition to the beauties of the Killarney lakes or the Wicklow hills, brought the place even more within the orbit of the British Home Tour, especially given the recently forged political configuration between the islands which encouraged many to re-appreciate the charms of the Sister Isle. The political and historical detail may have changed British and Irish perceptions of one another, but many of those immediate post-Union travellers nevertheless maintained faith in the idea of a harmonious outcome. Although a number of commentators from the 1820s and 1830s found it increasingly difficult to classify Ireland, regarding it as an anomaly that simply failed to resolve itself, several travel writers found the ‘spatio-temporal codes’ referred to above as having some relevance to an Irish travelling experience.24 The country was not remote, and might therefore be associated with little that was either exotic or especially different. However, since Ireland consistently breached the organisational and cultural contours of the Home Tour experience, a way of comprehending it had still to be found. Which is why it becomes useful to orientate Ireland within the interpretive framework developed by Leask and others. As Leask sees it, just as an aesthetic of distance was developed by many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travellers abroad, so too was an aesthetic of time constructed as a way of coming to terms


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with a ‘foreign’ experience. He goes on to state that ‘when travellers moved from the centre to the periphery [. . .] they were frequently represented – or represented themselves – as moving in “deep” time as well as cartographic space’.25 This deep-time/deep-space parallel, identified solely with the travelling experiences of many who ventured over considerable distances at some personal cost, has a bearing upon the impressions formed by many British travellers to Ireland, especially throughout the 1830s. In spatial terms Ireland may have failed to convince many that a journey to its shores was anything more than what it obviously was: a packet trip away from any number of British ports. In cultural terms, however, it could not have been more different, and whereas some years earlier it may have been a little reckless to talk of the surprising sense of alterity faced on arrival, by the 1830s it made sense to talk of nothing else. Which is why many travellers continuously write of the strangeness of Ireland, some in the hope that by talking about Irish alterity it may become less alien, others because it more easily explains Irish difficulties. In other words, by emphasising differing racial characteristics and cultural customs, while simultaneously acknowledging the anomalies frequently written of with regard to the country, the burden of economic stagnation or failure can be made to rest more securely with Ireland itself. All of which, unsurprisingly, allows somewhat problematic conclusions to be drawn. If the sort of temporalisation of the Orient or Mexico that Leask identifies with many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travellers may also be seen in Ireland, it problematises further the notion of Ireland as a venue within the Home Tour circuit. Chloe Chard argues that: In acclaiming the foreign as gratifyingly dissimilar from the familiar, travel writing employs a range of concepts of otherness: ‘the marvellous’ . . . ‘the wonder’, and concepts of the strange . . . Accounts of foreign places also make use of a range of specific tropes and rhetorical strategies .. .in order to affirm that the subject of commentary has managed to grasp the topography in its full alterity, and is offering it up to the reader as an object of pleasurable instruction.26 And Ireland was, as we see in several writings from the 1830s, shockingly strange to many of its visitors. Burgoyne, as he brings to a close Letter I, announces: ‘I am about to make an excursion into the country, where I may possibly acquire some information on this most interesting subject [Ireland’s misery], of which you shall hear the results.’27 When

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he ventured into that interior he was genuinely appalled by what he saw (‘. . . with haggard looks and dishevelled hair, more like a wild beast at the mouth of his den than a human being’).28 Interestingly, despite his anxieties for the future state of Ireland he was also able to both acknowledge the desperately poor state in which the peasantry lived, while recognising that violence was the logical consequence of such poverty: ‘Can a country be expected to be prosperous, or even tranquil, in such a state? It is impossible: the body of the people must be allowed to improve.’29 But of course Ireland was not supposed to be different in ways customarily evoked by the term ‘foreign’, which meant that to employ the word in relation to Ireland was to set it apart, to somehow accept precisely the sense of difference that the Union was supposed to quell. James Glasford admits that ‘even a hasty inspection of Ireland, and of Irish people, excites strong and painful interest’,30 but rather than see a solution to lie, like Burgoyne, in a reassessment of current laws, opts for a more drastic solution: And it is certain, even now, that, in many districts, single and unprotected settlers from England or Scotland have not the necessary confidence and security – are subjected to danger as well as obstacles, their improvements regarded with jealousy, and themselves treated as intruders, if not enemies; whereas by the safe establishment of a body of industrious families, and the example of their resources, and success, communicating employment and increased comforts to the peasantry, a better contagion might be spread.31 Sensing that all is not well, that the promised resolution to Anglo-Irish difficulties has not yet borne fruit, Glasford opts for a more proactive policy of recruiting – like colonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – greater numbers to Ireland in the hope of diluting the diseased hold of the native Irish on the country. Written a little before Catholic emancipation, Glasford sees the continuing difficulties of Ireland as only surmountable with a greater infusion of British settlers, who will not only improve culture and agriculture, but offer a greater level of security than currently prevails. Burgoyne and Glasford may have differed somewhat in their respective views of Ireland, but a sense that all was not well, indeed that the ills of the Sister Isle were many and ongoing, influenced much of what both writers saw at the beginning of the 1830s.


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Remote control In a rigorous discussion of the Grand Tour Chloe Chard argues that around 1830 a once relatively fixed view of travel ‘split into two opposing attitudes’, the first coming to associate travel with ‘a form of personal adventure, holding out the promise of a discovery or realization of the self through the exploration of the other’, a view she generally terms ‘romantic’. The second approach, which ‘presents itself in more or less explicit opposition to the Romantic view of travel’, is one in which the traveller ‘recognizes that travel might constitute a form of personal adventure, and might entail danger and destabilization, but, as a result of this recognition, attempts to keep the more dangerous and destabilizing aspects of the encounter with the foreign at bay’.32 At first glance it might be thought that the reading offered by Chard has little bearing on any assessment we might make of the Home Tour, since danger – the central issue that drives these diverging strands – would appear to have relatively little relevance to Home Tour itineraries. However, what many writers of the 1830s note is the manner in which danger within Ireland becomes a constant source of pressure, dominating their view of the country, and sometimes becoming a test they must either face or avoid. Danger, malevolence, simmering discontent, a general capacity for unreliability and uncertainty: several travellers remark upon these aspects of the culture, despite Catholic emancipation, granted in 1829, which many believed would alleviate such tensions. This is not to suggest that a dramatically different way of dealing with danger was now developed, but simply that the emphasis laid on the dangerous and the criminal becomes even more visible during the 1830s. We know that it existed immediately after the Union, and that many attempted to downplay it. We are also aware that it was increasingly noted throughout the 1820s, and was frequently allied to the poisonous religious tensions of that decade. Here in the 1830s, sufficiently distant from the upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and after an improved position for Catholics, however, it is not only manifest, but ever more pronounced. Indeed, when Henry David Inglis, a Scot, and one-time businessman turned professional travel writer (Tales of the Ardennes, 1825, Narrative of a Journey through Norway, Sweden and the Islands of Denmark, 1826), attempted to write up his experiences in A Journey throughout Ireland (1834), he struggled to find a way of bringing together the various impressions left upon him (‘I was everywhere informed that Ireland is a difficult country to know: that in case of attempting to glean opinions

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on all hands, their contrariety would bewilder me’).33 Inglis’s forthright views of the country and its inhabitants (‘oppressed by some, deluded by others, and neglected by all’)34 present a picture of incredulity at the state of the country, despite his intention to focus on the ‘cities, towns, and villages . . . mountains, vales, and rivers’. Moreover, not unlike many before and after him, the preferred point of reference for comprehending Ireland is not Britain, but the continent: In walking through the streets of Dublin . . . you might easily fancy yourself in another and distant part of Europe . . . I saw the same rags, and apparent indolence . . . boys with bare heads and feet, lying on the pavement, whose potato had only to be converted into a melon or a bit of wheaten bread, to make them fit subjects for Murillo.35 That Irish poverty may evoke the poor-but-contented destitution of Murillo’s The Young Beggar, or Two Boys Eating Melon and Grapes, is less notable than the pronounced seventeenth-century version of poverty that helps to situate Ireland as an ahistorical entity, incapable of transforming or modernising itself. Like several others, Inglis is conscious of the difficulties facing travel writers to Ireland, who must decide which version of Irish experience they wish to emphasise (‘I have not studied to make this an agreeable book, so much as a useful book . . . We have been amused by fiction long enough; I aspire, in these volumes, to be the narrator of truth’).36 And like many others he also reflects the ongoing search for a way of explaining Ireland to a Britain endlessly confused by the various reports and recommendations they have so often read. Despite the at times uneasy nature of their writings, the 1830s nevertheless proved to be a busy period for both travellers and travel writers to Ireland. For example, in John Barrow’s A Tour round Ireland, through the Sea-Coast Counties, in the Autumn of 1835 (1836), the writer, like Inglis, attempts to synthesise the several images absorbed by his travels around the country. His strategies range from positioning the country within a recognisable picturesque and tourist discourse, to regarding it as the very pinnacle of human degradation and suffering. At Florence Court, for example, the seat of the Earl of Enniskillen, he writes of his view of this impressive home and the efforts that go towards its upkeep: ‘The grounds are beautiful and well wooded with beeches, oaks, sycamores, and other forest-trees . . . Everything seemed to be kept in high order’, while at Lord Sligo’s mansion, in Westport, the owner’s interest in art is noted, and clearly approved of (‘a Gainsborough . . . one of Rubens, and


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two or three of Canaletti’).37 At these points in the text Barrow relaxes into a sense of Ireland as a recognisable cultural entity that is both improving and tasteful, and he appears encouraged with these signs of Irish prosperity and contentment. Indeed, much more than many travellers, Barrow makes several references to the activities of other tourists, revealing a growing sense of an industry proper, but also implicitly associating Ireland with more marketable images than the routinely reported ones of banditry and terror. Although customarily thought of in conventionally tourist terms, Barrow’s experience at Killarney, for example, is notable for the sense of a fast-developing business catering for considerable, and expanding numbers: I had no sooner taken my seat in the coffee-room, than I found myself in the very midst of tourists. In one corner sat half-a-dozen noisy and merry-looking fellows, clustered together, with an array of maps stretched out before them, talking over the exploits of the day, and making arrangements for the morrow. In another might be seen some solitary tourist (like myself) poring over a well-thumbed ‘Guide to the Lakes’, and ever and anon seeking information or explanation from the waiter. Some were busily employed with their knives and forks, in different parts of the room; while others were amusing themselves with reading over the names of the numerous visitors contained in the book that is kept for their insertion [. . .].38 Despite the widespread scenes of poverty, the apparently spontaneous lawlessness, and the religious and political aggravation, here at Killarney, even then known for its beauty, there exists another version of Ireland. More concerned about the weather, with its likely effect on their visits to the lakes, these visitors appear unconcerned about those other ‘realities’ of Irish life. Contented, secure within their hotel, passing information and gossip – written as well as oral – between themselves, they appear remote, but also identifiable as a distinct social group. But unlike those other tourists – and Barrow sets himself tentatively apart – the narrator does more than simply engage with the traditionally scenic, but opts instead for a text that blends the various impressions of Ireland into an, at times, uncomfortable poetics of travel. At once representative of the confusion many British writers felt about country, but also a most modern way of coming to terms with a shifting and at times uncertain alterity, Barrow splices the various threads of Ireland together, while revealing himself as an at times fixed and curious object of study to the Irish themselves. At Ballyshannon, he states ‘I was told that it

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was not safe to venture even as far as the bridge at the foot of the street after dusk, without a brace of pistols in one’s pocket’, while his travels through Connemara are described as ‘a district of Connaught hitherto not very much frequented’.39 Clearly the narrator is here alert to the dangers of travelling to inhospitable regions, but also to the usefulness of enhancing his role as adventurous, risk-taking explorer. Not only that, but he consolidates this communion between himself and the native Irish at several junctures as a way of auto-ethnographically certifying his own, but also their, mutual strangeness to one another: ‘After this I found by their looks that I was no longer considered to be a Milesian, but a Saxon, and was surveyed from head to foot; and then the good simple folks seemed to wonder where I had come from, and whither I could be going in such miserable weather.’40 Not only prepared to search out the strange and uncanny, the narrator happily discloses his own sense of aberrance in the face of the Irish, turning himself from viewer to viewed, from authoritative subject to uncertain object of putative Irish ridicule: ‘Of course there was no withstanding this, and I for once consented to sit in state and be gazed at, wrapped up in my cloak.’41 The point about such shifts and moves across a wide spectrum of tastes and issues is that it reveals several writers from the 1830s as increasingly aware of the difficulty of presenting what many readers still expected from an allegedly ‘factual’ narrative form. It is true that many readers and writers would have been all too aware of the relativism of any one place, briefly glimpsed by a single narrator, subjective in every respect, and all too easily associated with the latest fashion. But many would have been nevertheless keen to extract from these writings some sense of what it was that actually made Ireland such an anomalous presence within the Union. They would have hoped, however naïve such a perspective may have appeared, that a traveller’s account provided them with a degree of information about a country, its customs and inhabitants, from which they could, in turn, form reasonably informed opinions. One of the ways in which a greater degree of realism was successfully introduced into accounts dating from this decade, however, was through an increasing emphasis on descriptions, and altogether more explicit interactions with the native Irish themselves, who in several accounts from the 1830s become increasingly visible. In Barrow’s text, for example, we find illustrations, among others, of the ‘worst sort of Mayo stone-cabin’, or later, ‘hovel near the foot of the Reek [Croagh Patrick]’, both of which include images of female figures and animals, but which are much more interesting for the way in which they dramatically


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depart from the more touristic images from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where the greater emphasis is on landscape perspectives, gentleman’s villas and a natural scenery that conveniently inhabits the same space as ruined abbeys and towers. Gentler, more refined, views still persist, but interpretations of the Irish, both as visual accessories, but also as characters within the fabric of the narrative, appear decidedly more acceptable. Indeed, a later illustration, commissioned from the Irish artist D. Maclise, reinforces the idea that texts such as Barrow’s were increasingly aware of the added value of giving greater space to the Irish, as ‘Interior of one of the better kind of Irish cottages’ provides graphic detail of a hitherto hidden aspect of Irish life. Moreover, the fact that the perspective offered is positioned from within the cottage itself, rather than from the outside looking in, generates a greater level of acceptance, perhaps even trust, between viewer and viewed, further strengthening the notion of a growing appetite for such ‘Irish’ representations on the part of British readers.42 Curiously, then, a greater awareness of, and interest in, Irish culture develops at just the time when Ireland itself was seen as politically, but also socially and economically, deteriorating. In April 1833, the Edinburgh Review wrote: It is with feelings of the deepest regret and disappointment that we find ourselves once more engaged in writing an article upon the State of Ireland . . . We had hoped that we should at length see in Ireland all that her poets and orators have told us, in describing all that she is and that she is not. We must confess, that, in many important particulars, our expectations have been grievously disappointed. In many respects the condition of Ireland has not improved, in some it has retrograded [. . .].43 Yet, many travellers nevertheless visit the country with the sole purpose of witnessing, and presumably understanding it, despite the difficulties. Baptist Wriothesley Noel, in Notes of a Short Tour through the Midland Counties of Ireland (1837), begins his account by describing Ireland as ‘a strange anomaly. United to Great Britain, its eight millions are our weakness rather than our strength . . . Although forming part of the wealthiest empire in the world, the mass of its inhabitants have scarcely the necessities of life.’44 But more than simply subscribe to the by now routine sense of Irish capriciousness in the face of repeated British efforts at reform, Noel insists on engaging with Irish complexities in a more direct manner: ‘I wished, therefore, to see for myself the real

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condition of the people.’45 His experiences, though, were not always easy to fathom, or narrate, as the author discovered at Killaloe when his desire for Irish authenticity came at all too shocking a cost: ‘But in Ireland there is an omnipresent mischief – and when you would let your thoughts repose among the sweet influences of nature, and would hush your heart into a tranquillity like that of the unruffled lake . .. then Popery looks in upon you like a spectre . . . I felt it at Killarney, I felt it at Rostrevor, and here it was again.’46 Although part of the general trend towards greater inquiry about the native Irish, Noel nonetheless struggles with the task of bringing them centre-stage. He is aware of them, and shows them to be part of the landscape, but is also affronted by the appalling level of misery and destitution they endure. Indeed, almost prophetically, he regards the Irish as ghostly visions, emaciated figures that disturb his thoughts and for much of the time hauntingly encroach on his picturesque reverie: On our return to the village [of Killaloe], the importunities of some miserable objects again interrupted our enjoyment of the gentle scenery. How can you be pleased with the tranquillity of inanimate nature, when it seems only to insult the rags and wretchedness of the starving creatures who creep amidst its shades?47 But Ireland’s relationship to ‘gentle scenery’, it seems, was differently conveyed than in other parts of Britain, and for that reason could present its visitors with something more challenging than they might have experienced in parts of Scotland or northern England, even in those places where poverty was more abundant and visible. John Barrell suggests that by ‘the late nineteenth century, it had become axiomatic that whether in literature or the visual arts the actuality of the life of the poor could be represented only by images of them at work’, yet in Ireland, some decades earlier, we find the peasantry consistently appearing as an unemployed – and unemployable – society of vagrants, rather than active participants within a viable economic system.48 And though viewing them was increasingly called upon, or at least periodically expected, it was clearly with some anxiety that writers included images of Irish peasant life in several early nineteenth-century travel accounts.

Imperfect Britons In a discussion of traveller’s impressions of Greece, Robert Shannan Peckham argues that although a much revered part of the late


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nineteenth-century Grand Tour, the place of Greece within the western European mind was one that was both fluid and uncertain. Although very much a part of the culture of Europe itself, with its arts, language and mythological fables constituting a basis for western learning, it was geographically, but also culturally, equally close to Asia, and thereby hovered uncomfortably between different social and moral systems. Visitors to Greece, sensing something of this Asiatic exoticism, then, referred to the country in a variety of ways, referring to the civilising influence it had had upon Europe, but also to its aberrant, sometimes paradoxical status: ‘Guidebooks and travel accounts of voyages to Greece focused repeatedly on the relative differences and similarities between Greeks and Europeans, or Greeks and Turks. If the Greeks were portrayed as imperfect Orientals, they were also imperfect Europeans.’49 The difficulty facing Greece, then, was clear: a part of Europe, yet also of Asia, the country consistently failed to qualify as either. As is noted above, after the Union, British travel writers such as Richard Colt Hoare attempted to smooth off the rough edges of Irish alterity by focussing attention on those aspects of Irish life that most successfully registered the country as British. Archaeological sites were British rather than Irish, the ancient Irish were themselves really Britons, the landscape and topography was very like Britain’s in appearance. However, as can be seen in the writings of several travellers from the 1820s and 1830s, despite efforts to embrace the country within a different cultural and political system, it consistently reminded travellers of its difference and, fundamentally, of its failure to fit within the terms of the British contract. Not unlike the situation that faced Greece a little later, Ireland was seen as being within, yet somehow apart from, British influence and culture. More European than British, it operated not only as a worryingly unstable category, but a politically unhelpful one at a time when forging a new British identity – allegedly, and ironically, to be strengthened by Ireland’s participation – was crucial. Marjorie Morgan rightly suggests that to use the term ‘Briton’ was to reinforce a sense of belonging, and that ‘British identity emphasized the unity rather than diversity of peoples in Britain, at times inclusive of peoples in Ireland as well.’50 In encounters with continental Europeans this may have been all too common an experience, but in the case of ‘internal’ travel, Ireland was rather different. Morgan believes that the ‘experience of travelling, particularly around Britain, worked to enhance awareness of the differences between her countries and peoples, and thus to intensify identification with England, Scotland, or Wales’, and she cites the way in which the border crossings between England and

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Scotland – at the river Tweed, near Kelso, for instance – acted to remind travellers of these differing cultures and regions.51 Morgan’s point is that despite widespread use of the term ‘British’, cultural, social and, especially, national differences were both recognised and maintained, by many travellers within Britain. And she continues, ‘Publishers of guidebooks reinforced these identities and differences by never producing a volume on Britain as a whole. They conditioned travellers to think in terms of smaller geographical frames of reference when describing cities and sites.’52 Yet the point might be made that a greater flexibility regarding national difference could be more easily registered in these instances because they failed to disturb the commonality of purpose that underlay otherwise harmonious relations between English and Scots. Which is not to deny that periodic uneasiness, scepticism or even xenophobic attitudes existed within these countries towards one another, but the fact remains that Scotland – and more emphatically, Wales – functioned, and was recognisable, as part of the United Kingdom in ways that Ireland was not. Linda Colley is correct to talk of the extent to which not only the Scots, but also the Irish took advantage of the development of empire, yet Ireland itself, as a physical entity supposedly linked to Britain, was nevertheless a cause of concern for many Britons. The much-emphasised arrival at Kingstown, or Dublin, many travellers repeatedly tell us, did more to reinforce that idea than anything else. So, what did British readers take away with them from the various readings of Ireland? Only that to travel to it was to undergo considerable discomfort, despite its proximity, and the general convenience of travelling there. Morgan tells us that in ‘the 1830s, roughly 30,000 people a year embarked from Britain’s Channel ports’; clearly there were many who viewed travel to the continent, then, despite the linguistic and gastronomic challenges frequently encountered, relatively easy, and a lot less stressful.53 Nonetheless, the 1830s – with 1837 proving a bumper year – showed that for many the difficulties of Ireland could act as their own draw. Leith Ritchie, Scots journalist, essayist and travel writer, entitled his work Ireland Picturesque and Romantic, a text that seemed to suggest a fairly routine, post-Romantic engagement with Ireland, which its lavish engravings of Lismore Castle, Glendalough, Powerscourt Waterfall and others certainly reinforced. Yet to focus on these aspects of Ireland solely, Ritchie clearly understood, was to do more than promote the more scenic aspects of the country; it was to omit discussion of some of the most desperate levels of poverty imaginable:


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after having explored a considerable portion of continental Europe in search of the picturesque, I certainly did not expect to find at home a scene of such splendid beauty on so great a scale. The state of the atmosphere was far from being Italian, but I imagined that the varieties of our northern clime were still better; and the bright green colour of the land compensated for the presence of those water-clouds which keep vegetation fresh in the Emerald Isle when even the Garden of England is an arid waste.54 That Ireland could be seen in this way is not really the issue. That it was not as ornate or lavish in architectural detail or statuary as Italy would have astounded few in 1837, nor that it could compete well with England for freshness of pasture perhaps not that surprising either (though the ‘arid wastes’ of Kent and Somerset are surely a little exaggerated). But it is in what Ireland most signified to British visitors, and especially how it governed their self-perceptions, where the real problem resides, and what proved most difficult for them to communicate in their writings: ‘For my own part, my heart smites me, that I have sat wilfully down to write a frivolous book upon a country where I have met so much to sadden and to shock me.’55 However, not all were so concerned, or so self-consciously troubled by their responsibilities as Ritchie. Sir George Head, author of Forest Scenes and Incidents in the Wilds of North America, and brother of Francis Bond Head, discussed in p. 150, enabled many readers to see in Ireland a different, perhaps more reassuring, set of experiences. For example, his A Home Tour through Various Parts of the United Kingdom opens with an advertisement to the reader – 29th June 1837, the Athenæum Club, Pall Mall – in which the narrator explains that in ‘preparing for the press, I determined, for more reasons than one, to change my original plan of introducing at the end, a brief ramble in England’.56 Not a tour, journey or even excursion, but rather a ramble throughout Britain, with all that the word connotes – disconnectedness, something done for relaxation – Head embarks on entertaining readers with trivial tales of peasant life, clearly convinced that this is what most appeals to many. Moreover, it is possible to read into his title – Home Tour .. .United Kingdom – a desire to avoid too illustrative a sense of Irish alterity, a determination to stress that whatever differences exist may be seen as local particularities, at worse regionalist eccentricities that do little to challenge national structures or institutions: The peasants, as if time were of no value, gazed listlessly on our merry career, leaning in motionless attitude on their long handled

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spades, while the boys . . . pursued us on foot, sometimes for two or three miles at a stretch, without once stopping to take wind. How little has abstract poverty to do with the energies of our nature; the rags of these urchins flapped about their bare legs and thighs as they bounded buoyantly along, vexed by no thought or earthly care.57 However much travellers like Head chose to represent this version of Ireland – perhaps valid in its own right, and therefore another interpretation for readers to consider – the overwhelming sense is of writers increasingly obliged to emphasise, rather than disguise, Irish discordances. Ritchie, for example, despite his own best intentions to follow the picturesque in all its variety, switches back and forth between discourses, citing the beauty, the sublimity and the glorious views, but interspersed with a less than detached appreciation of the social and economic state of those around him: ‘I met with feuds of names and families, such as cannot by possibility exist in any country where the laws are good and well executed. I met with agrarian disturbances, with bloody revenges, with petty pilferings of food, though few robberies of money; but, above all things, I met with hunger – hunger – hunger!’58 None of which, especially the sense of increasing lawlessness, was exaggerated. Michael Beames, for example, states that in response to increasing rural disturbances, such as described by Ritchie, Irish policing methods had to be radically revised throughout these years, and he details the energy that went into the ‘amalgamation of the Peace Preservation Force with the County Constabulary’ in the 1830s.59 More particularly Beames also emphasises the para-military nature of this revised force, as well as the rate at which it developed to deal with the perceived crisis: Four depots were established, one in each province, to which recruits were sent for a period of about four months training. Each constable was armed with a carbine and eventually assigned to a police station or barracks. In its early years, the Irish Constabulary recruited about a thousand constables a year. By 1845, it numbered 246 officers and 9,112 men.60 Despite efforts to control the countryside – widely believed to be in the hands of insurgents – the impression on passing travellers, then, was clearly less than encouraging. Jonathan Binns, Quaker traveller and author of The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland (1837), also alluded to the desperate state the country appeared to be in:


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To detail the history of Ireland from the period of its connection with Britain as a conquered country, to the present moment, at which, nominally at least, it bears the character of an integral portion of the empire, would be to enter upon a subject of mighty difficulty . . . The terms of the Union, let us remember, promised an equality of civil rights, and, until those terms are rigidly complied with, Ireland never will, and Ireland never ought to be, a contented country.61 Like Ritchie, Binns consistently alerts readers to the fact that Ireland not only fails to look like a contented partner in union, but rather a very probable source of insurrection. He is impressed by the Duke of Devonshire’s holdings around Youghal and Dungarvan, which bring in a yearly income ‘of nearly £40,000’, as well as the experimental farm run by the Duke’s agent (‘The farm buildings are excellent, and the implements and horses well adapted to successful husbandry’), all of which show that improvements can be made, productivity increased and a general sense of harmonious well-being declared, even on the very landscape itself.62 Yet no matter how much effort is expended by Binns on revealing the attractions of Ireland, another version of the country necessarily emerges, which is why the very title of his book – Miseries and Beauties – fuses the apparently awkward and incongruous elements of Irish experience together; Ireland as dysfunctional entity, jarringly blended in a patchwork of partial reform, paramilitary policing and secret societies, rather than as tourist retreat along the lines identified with the Scottish highlands or the English Lakes. Moreover, Binns is not only aware of the perilous state of the country, but of how close to calamity it has come in recent years: ‘The road [near Millstreet] passes through the rugged hills of Carrigugulla, famous alike for slate-quarries, and as the scene of dreadful encounters of the White Boys in 1822 and 1823.’63 Indeed, for Binns Ireland increasingly appears as a place of fracture and inconsistency, a land of endless contradictions that simply confuse and frustrate. Even Dublin, frequently described as a city with some claim to architectural beauty, educational standing and social pretension, nonetheless startles the narrator on arrival, contrasting poverty with ostentatious wealth in dizzying and varying degrees: Dublin is indeed a fine city; but it is a city of lamentable contrasts. If the stranger be forcibly struck by the number and magnificence of the public buildings, and the general beauty of some of the streets, he is sure to be no less forcibly moved by the very different character of

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those parts which are termed ‘the Liberties’. Here, narrow streets, houses without windows or doors, and several families crowded together beneath the same roof, present a picture of ruin, disease, poverty, filth, and wretchedness, of which they who have not witnessed it are unable to form a competent idea. Dublin, I have said, is a city of lamentable contrasts [. . .].64 The Victorian city, of course, whether British or Irish, consistently conveyed to its visitors and more concerned inhabitants a sense of wildly discordant living and moral standards, successfully summed up, even in the latter nineteenth century, by texts such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Not the first, by any means, to write of the vice and unwholesomeness of city living, Stevenson nonetheless demonstrates the city’s capacity for contamination and evil; except that where Stevenson writes of the city as comprised of different areas, each connoting different standards of social and physical hygiene, with filth and dereliction suggestive of decaying moral codes, many visitors to Dublin focus on the physicality of the city’s inhabitants. Squalor, dirt, a sense of barely contained infection, all of these appear in traveller’s accounts, too, but for many the greater emphasis is towards the actual physical state of the impoverished Irish who come to their attention. In Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, the narrator specifically identifies Charles Dickens as bringing into being ‘a new kind of novel’, mainly through his capacity to represent all aspects of city life, and through a commitment to articulating diverse social experiences that until then had been largely absent from creative writing.65 Dickens was successful, wrote Williams, because he emphasised ‘the random and the systematic, the visible and the obscured’, and he goes on to suggest that ‘Dickens’s ultimate vision of London is then not to be illustrated by topography or local instance. It lies in the form of his novels: in their kind of narrative, in their method of characterisation, in their genius for typification.’66 Although Williams shows the way in which Dickens illustrated London life by including references to wider social groupings, giving them visibility and a voice in ways previously unencountered in fiction, the emphasis is more on the profusion of activity, on the sense, ironically, of voices barely audible against a background of industrial complexity and change: ‘These are the real and inevitable relationships and connections, the necessary recognitions and avowals of any human society. But they are of a kind that are obscured, complicated, mystified, by the sheer rush and noise and miscellaneity of this new and complex social order.’67


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Although something of the confusion alluded to by Williams may be discerned in many British travel accounts of Ireland, it usually rests more emphatically on that moment of arrival at Kingstown harbour, where the Dublin brogue is much in evidence, and where there is great competition for portering duties, or simply beggary. Of course, it might be suggested that it is declared here because despite the genuine need to comment on the moment of arrival, especially the opportunity afforded the visitor to stress contact with the native Irish themselves, that this is what might be expected from a travel account anyway: a busy dock scene replete with wildly gesticulating natives and disorientated, slightly queasy passengers, barely, and perhaps rudely disgorged from the ship’s deck. However, the comparisons between these roughly comparable time-frames usually ends at this point, not only because the opportunity for situating the Irish against a world of industrial mayhem and uncertainty is rather limited in Ireland, but because the Irish are regarded as apart from, rather than as a part of social mechanisms and structures in a way that impoverished English, in London, clearly are not. In other words, after the moment of entry into Ireland has passed, the poor become more emphatically a distinct category within Irish society, viewed and commented on rather than fully integrated, by many travellers. For all the difficulties and challenges involved in bringing London’s lower class to life in Dickens’s writing, then, the English poor nevertheless still constitute an organic, if sometimes unsettling, element within British life, whereas the native Irish in many travel accounts function as an ethnologically intriguing, but frequently detached community separated from the upper classes not just on social, but on religious, cultural and sometimes linguistic grounds.68 Perhaps it is unsurprising that Binns, himself an Assistant Agricultural Commissioner of the Irish Poor Inquiry, should be as interested in differing social experiences, or that he should reveal a sense of incomprehension at the levels of destitution he routinely encounters. Yet Binns, who travels extensively, and by several methods – by horse and carriage, post-chaise, mail-car, coach and even on foot – is a nevertheless exacting and conscientious narrator very much in that tradition of direct, uncomplicated, chastening, Quaker writing. Romantically inclined in some respects, especially with regard to certain landscapes, he also brings to the reader the diversity of Irish life as fully as he can, while positioning himself as standing apart, rapt by the experience, though unable at times to be properly involved with it. 69 At certain points, for example, he

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appears tempted into ameliorating the shock of the strange and the difficult: Notwithstanding the privations which these poor creatures endured, it was delightful to see them as cheerful and as happy as if they were living in the midst of English plenty [. . .].70 At other moments, however, his determination simply fails him, and he opts for a greater empathy, even if that is one based on emphasising, ironically, his sense of Englishness in the face of Irish alterity: ‘No Englishman could fail to be grievously shocked with the wretchedness exhibited in the streets of Omagh.’71 Unprepared, it seems, for the radical departure from the basic amenities and standards of home, Binns can only wonder at the sense of it all, truly struck by the gulf separating Ireland from Britain: ‘The little snug woodbine-covered cottage, with its neat plot of garden-ground, which almost every peasant in England may possess if he pleases, is here, as I have observed before, totally unknown.’72 Imperfectly British, oddly yoked in Union, a constant source of uncertainty and undependability, however strange Ireland appears to Binns and his readers, the country nevertheless sharpens his sense of outrage and regret, inspiring laudably impassioned pleas that the place, but especially the conditions of the poorest sections of society, be improved, and soon. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the repeated warnings and advice, the reports and recommendations drawn from many sources, despite even the most graphic of descriptions and allusions – all of which point to profound and unmitigated misery for millions – such appeals went largely unheeded. No one could have predicted, of course, what would happen within only a matter of years; but few in Britain could have been under any illusions as to the true state of the peasant Irish, even here, in the 1830s: I have witnessed scenes that would awaken commiseration in the coldest and the hardest heart, and some of these I have endeavoured to describe, faithfully, without the slightest shadow of exaggeration. I have seen young and helpless children, almost naked and without food, exposed to the cruel influences of the weather, in huts which should have afforded them protection; and I have seen old people, afflicted severely by asthmas and rheumatic attacks, lying in hovels without either window or chimney, with nothing for their bed but the bare damp floor, or a thin layer of straw. Can it, I again ask, can it surprise us, when people, habituated to such appalling wretchedness, and instigated by mingled feelings of revenge and despair, commit crimes, at the bare relation of which human nature shudders?73


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Hunger, writing, and foul-weather friends It can be a rather odd experience reading through William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Irish Sketch Book of 1842 (1843), coming, as it does, so close to Irish calamity, stranger still to let the eye rest briefly on the accompanying illustrations of Irish life drawn for the late nineteenthcentury consumer that reflect a largely enjoyable travelling experience, which the images of gambling, rainy days in Killarney, and hunting, largely endorse. Yet even clear-sighted Thackeray, whose extensive itinerary takes him to many points on the Irish map, was aware of the drastic disparities within Irish society, and of the underlying tensions, even if he chose to conclude his book by declaring an unwillingness to offer much more of an opinion of the country other than to say that it ‘is steadily advancing [not . . .] nearly so wretched now as it was a score of years since’.74 The careful-not-to-give-offence pose generally adopted, then, though hardly unique among English visitors, can seem strangely quaint, as the narrator occasionally touches on issues of some importance, yet deftly sidesteps when too close an encounter with the unpleasant business of Irish political life looms large: ‘The Northern manner is far more English than that of the other provinces of Ireland – whether it is better for being English is a question of taste, of which an Englishman can scarcely be a fair judge.’75 ‘Two years before the first great European epidemic of potato blight’, Austin Bourke usefully reminds us, ‘the disease had broken out in the USA in the hinterland of the great east coast ports’, a fact all too often passed over in popular conceptions of Irish Famine history.76 However, despite the limited impact of Phytophthora infestans on parts of the American east coast, where early fungal explanations were explored, then seemingly dropped as the blight passed on, it is in Europe where it registered itself most keenly, and where it appeared with increasing virulence across a number of countries throughout 1845. The first outbreak, Bourke tell us, occurred in Belgium in the last week of June, was in the Low Countries by July, and had spread to the outskirts of Paris by mid-August. Its entry into all countries, though, was neither so effortless, nor the movement as steady, as might be thought: [. . .] the extension of the disease from Belgium to Luxembourg seems at first to have been blocked by the Ardennes; it did not appear there until it flanked the mountains from north and south. At a later stage, the entry of the disease into Switzerland appears similarly to have been made, virtually simultaneously in September, along the valleys of the Rhône and the Rhine.77

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Briefly arrested by natural obstacles, the blight nonetheless progressed across parts of northern Europe, and then across the British Channel, accompanied by a battery of theoretical possibilities offered for its existence by agriculturalists, mycologists and naturalists, many of whom published papers and gave public lectures on the subject and its likely impact.78 By ‘mid-August the disease had also extended to the lower Rhineland, to north-west France, to the Channel Islands and to southern England’ writes Bourke, the ‘southern limit of the disease did not quite reach the Mediterranean, with the possible exception of the Genoa area about which there were conflicting reports . . . In 1846, the disease made an appearance in new areas on the European mainland, in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and even in Algeria.’79 Interestingly, although it was to become an issue of great magnitude, affecting the lives of so many, the Irish press responded briefly, almost sparingly, to the initial reports of blight, only announcing its arrival ‘on 6 September’, reports Bourke, ‘in brief paragraphs in the Waterford Freeman and the Dublin Evening Post’. Within only a few weeks, however, the tone and the conditions had changed, and a different manner of responding to the problem was required: ‘. . . it was not until considerable tuber rot was noted at harvest time in October that the popular panic spread to the Irish newspapers’.80 Within only a few short years of Thackeray’s departure from Ireland, then, dramatic changes had overcome the country, changes which in turn introduced a new breed of traveller, one with different interests and abilities, capable and daring enough to travel through areas associated with fever and contagion. Visitors with a background in journalism, economic theory or agriculture and, a little later, with philanthropic or missionary interests, all of whom tried to convey their experiences to sometimes radically different constituencies in Britain and America, flowed steadily to Ireland throughout the late 1840s. Indeed, from 1845 to around 1860 more travel narratives, the greater number written by British narrators, were published about Ireland than at any time throughout the nineteenth century. And as was usually the case it was Ireland’s social and political state that drew them in, the sense that the real interest to be derived from an Irish travelling experience lay in examining the country’s internal divisions, its chronic inequalities, the economic difficulties that shadowed each generation, the idea that Ireland was, clearly and emphatically, incapable to improving itself. It is perhaps unsurprising that so many published travel accounts from the period stem from a visit to the country in 1847, as it was then that the effects of prolonged potato failure was taking its greatest toll, in


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terms of general hardship, and in a feeling that relief efforts were having little impact, but more clearly because of the greater numbers clearly suffering from Famine. Indeed, William Bennett, in Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (1847), opens his text by directly emphasising his role in Ireland as that of unobtrusive, but concerned informant: ‘The following record of a simple individual effort is from memoranda and letters written principally to my sister’, he modestly confides, it ‘is not that an additional testimony is needed to the depth and extent of the visitation which has been permitted to desolate our sister-isle’ but rather a way of ensuring as much coverage of the country as possible.81 Bennett, who travelled from ‘north to south, and twice from east to the extreme west of the island, over a distance of not less than 1,500 miles’, was one of several Quaker travellers to Ireland who came as concerned visitors rather than tourists, but who felt that unless their experiences were published and made better known the full extent of Irish hardship would go unnoticed.82 Even this, though, for the conscience of one only too aware of the stigma of self-promotion, was a difficult task: The whole journey has been a painful, but now upon the retrospect, a most deeply interesting one. He has endeavoured to confine these Letters to such details only as are characteristic of something in the state and circumstances of the people, or otherwise closely connected with his subject; and it was never his intention to have written a BOOK.83 Clearly, the need to distinguish between writing for its own sake, and writing that is required, almost insisted upon because of one’s Christian duty, is being declared here. It is not so much that literary production is of itself frivolous – though that is certainly implied – but that book production in the case of Irish distress is particularly inappropriate and unwelcome. Which is why Bennett, like several Quakers, insists on the practicalities of his trip, on the mechanics of relief, on facts and figures, on data drawn from several sources. In fact this commonsense approach is declared at the very outset, partly as a way of dismissing any notions of literary ambition, but also because of the necessity to convey a pragmatic reason for travelling to Ireland in the first place. As Bennett so emphatically reminds us, this is ‘testimony’, ‘investigation’, ‘information’ and ‘observation’, rather than creative effort, and with ‘her peasantry . . . on the constant verge of famine’ Ireland demands nothing less: ‘. . . should

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they have any effect in abating one prejudice – in awakening any fresh sympathy, or in keeping up any warmth of feeling and affection, he will be amply repaid and his object answered’.84 Indeed, Bennett writes of his need to speak of Ireland not only as a duty, but as if it is simply beyond his control, the letters written initially ‘out as a debt’, then mutating into something else, as Ireland becomes a textually proliferative and ungovernable site: ‘. . . much beyond what was at first anticipated, they have unconsciously swollen under his hands’.85 In a discussion of the impressions formed of Ireland by American, Asenath Nicholson, Maureen Murphy inclines towards the opinion that what largely distinguishes Nicolson’s writing from that of her Quaker friends is a greater emphasis on the daily hardships facing the peasantry, and on the toll taken on numerous communities along the western seaboard who had to contend with unimaginable difficulties: ‘Her Annals differ from the accounts of her Quaker male counterparts which focus on the logistical problems of famine relief’, writes Murphy, while ‘Nicholson concentrates on the nature of human suffering’.86 Although a case might be made for demonstrating the depth of feeling on Nicholson’s part towards the Famine Irish, showing the level of sacrifice she consistently made on their behalf, the Quakers were never less than fully conscious of the level of suffering endured, nor of their responsibility to publicise it, much of which they did in a number of publications throughout the late 1840s. Indeed, of Bennett himself Nicholson writes: These men, moved by high and lofty feelings, spent no time in idle commenting on the Protestant or Papist faith – the Radical, Whig or Tory politics; but looked at things as they were, and faithfully recorded what they saw. Not only did they record, but they relieved. They talked and wrote, but acted more; and such a lasting impression have their labours left . . . William Bennett, too, passed six weeks in Ireland, and a clear and concise account was recorded by himself of the state of the Famine.87 It is certainly true that the Quaker attitude is one of methodical and careful assessment, and that the overriding concern is that information be conveyed and, if possible, solutions offered to clearly identifiable problems. But although the Quaker attitude leans more towards testimonial writing – bearing witness to events, and recounting them clearly and without prejudice – they still manage to strike a balance between


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dealing with the practicalities of relief work, and responding feelingly to the difficulties that surround them: We spent the whole morning in visiting these hovels indiscriminately, or swayed by the representations and entreaties of the dense retinue of wretched creatures, continually augmenting, which gathered round, and followed us from place to place – avoiding only such as were known to be badly infected with fever, which was sometimes sufficiently perceptible from without, by the almost intolerable stench. And now language utterly fails me in attempting to depict the state of the wretched inmates. I would not willingly add another to the harrowing details that have been told; but still they are the FACTS of actual experience, for the knowledge of which we stand accountable . . . My hand trembles as I write. The scenes of human misery and degradation we witnessed still haunt my imagination, with the vividness and power of some horrid and tyrannous delusion, rather than the features of a sober reality. We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible, from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly, their little limbs – on removing a portion of the filthy covering – perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation. Crouched over the turf embers was another form, wild and all but naked, scarcely human in appearance.88 In this quote, drawn at some length from letter III, dated 16 March 1847, Bennett and friends are not only in Belmullet, the site of especial hardship, but in prolonged contact with the peasant Irish themselves. The neglect of farm buildings, the operational detail of soup-kitchens, subjects such as female industry and the school system, all of these are extremely interesting to Bennett, yet he also insists on reporting on the starving conditions of the peasantry, as well as how better run the country might be, or what could be done to appreciably alleviate suffering. Indeed, throughout Bennett’s text we find many descriptions similar to this, all of which reveal a Quaker commitment to graphic demonstrations of Irish experience as well as to the practicalities of relief work. The presumed reserve, the careful if not parsimonious use of language customarily associated with Quaker discourse, has been here set aside in favour of a more demonstrative engagement with Famine distress. He may wish to convey facts, draw our attention to the

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Illustration 6

Friends’ Soup Kitchen. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland

insufficiency of language, and remind us of the ‘sober reality’ of all he has seen, but the degraded and physically unrecognisable state of the Irish is also to be clearly understood and emphasised. Indeed, even the more factually based publications of other Quakers, diary in feel and individually composed to reflect a variety of impressions, manage to mix on-the-spot assessments of individual distress with more practical matters similar to Bennett. For example, when the eminent philanthropist and abolitionist William Forster – then 67 years of age – decided to visit Ireland at the end of 1846, his itinerary reminiscent of a military operation, the resultant publication took care to emphasise the physicality of the Irish themselves and not just the condition of poor-houses, or the challenges of distribution to the extreme west of the country. Responding to the call from English and Irish Quakers, who met in London and Dublin on 6 and 13 November 1846 respectively to discuss ways to alleviate suffering, and who had established a Central Relief Committee in Dublin, a timely proposal was made: ‘At the second meeting in London on 25 November 1846 William Forster, a Quaker from Norwich, offered to travel to Ireland to find out at first hand the extent of the distress, particularly in the remote districts.’89 Presumably


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on the basis of advanced years, however, Forster was to be accompanied throughout his tour of the country – by Joseph Crosfield, James Hack Tuke, William Dillwyn Sims and William Edward Forster, Forster’s son – as they took it in turns to safely escort him around some of the most distressed parts of the country.90 The writings themselves certainly contain many facts and financial estimates common to Quaker writing, where verification rather than well-intentioned exaggeration, however tempting, is much in evidence. We read from Crosfield, his letter dated Liverpool, 9 December 1846, that the ‘weekly cost of food in the poor-house [at Boyle] is 2s. per head, which sum includes medicine and food, but no other item’.91 James Hack Tuke’s letter, York, 4 January 1847, makes mention of diet and soil types, while Sims and Forster junior, letters dated Ipswich, 29 January, and Rawden, near Leeds, 9 February 1847 respectively, include discussion of grain types and public works. However, blended within the carefully itemised information and scrupulously attentive descriptions lie facts of another sort. Crosfield reports thus of the Carrick-on-Shannon poor-house: Some of these children were worn to skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger, and their limbs wasted almost to the bone. From a number of painful cases the following may be selected. A widow with two children, who, for a week had subsisted on one meal of cabbage a day: these were admitted into the poor-house, but in so reduced a state, that a guardian observed to the master of the house, that the youngest child would trouble them but a very short time.92 The language employed may be direct and the detail of the case bluntly stated, yet the idea of conveying emphatically to British readers the true extent of Irish suffering is manifestly clear. About as far away from conventional tourist description as one is likely to get, the emphasis here is not only on reporting, but on reporting faithfully on some of the sorriest cases. True, these are hardly normal circumstances, the travels themselves the result of a particularly vexed set of social conditions, yet the narrators are nonetheless conscious of themselves as foreigners passing through the country, and of their responsibility to afterwards publicise their experiences. Helen Hatton, in a thoughtful and persuasive account of Quaker involvement in Ireland, writes of the need among most Quakers for privacy, emphasising their linguistic restraint and modesty, their preference for an especially terse parlance that eschews over-emphasis or prolixity. And certainly from a reading of the letters of those who accompanied Forster there is little sense of wordy self-indulgence.

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Yet for figures used to understatement, where a commitment to propriety governs much public discourse, the decision to write so sensitively and acutely of Irish distress is a telling and notable departure. Here is Tuke, for example, breaking away after a brief discussion on draining and subsoiling: It is difficult for us in England to realize the effects of this visitation upon our sister country in all its varied ramifications. .. The chief, we might say only sustenance of four millions of our fellow-creatures in Ireland has entirely disappeared. Had a mighty deluge devastated the country, or fire swept across it, with awful destruction, leaving the people with their lives only, how eagerly would all classes have come forward to the help of the destitute. Who would have ventured to recommend us to wait for the operation of the poor-laws and labour acts, however desirable these provisions may be and are in themselves? Whilst these methods are discussing, the people are dying, and already in some districts ‘more than a twentieth part of the population has been swept away.’ How, then, can any one doubt that it is the imperative duty of all to endeavour to relieve those who are thus perishing.93 Not only insistent about claiming the Irish as ‘fellow-creatures’, Tuke’s language, with its rhetorical questions and italicised emphasis, also lends to his discourse a sense of edgy disquiet borne out of simple incomprehension. Facts and laws are all very well, he clearly declares, but action is better still, indeed imperative, especially when people are suffering desperately, and in such numbers. Tired of excuses, stupefied by the developing culture of inertia they see around them, Tuke is both proactive and outraged, a public position rarely approved of within Quaker tradition and therefore all the more surprising and admirable. Yet not all travellers to Ireland in 1847 were so discomfited by the ‘visitation’, as it was frequently called; indeed several took the opportunity to utilise the Famine as a way of chastising the Irish for their profligate ways, but also for their adherence to Catholicism, citing the potato blight as evidence of God’s displeasure. The Rev. John East, in Glimpses of Ireland in 1847, for example, took especial efforts to connect the role of the Priest and his ignorant parishioners with spiritual disapproval in a carefully worded text that would have appealed to many who were uncomfortable with the sight of numerous Irish arriving in British cities. A Church of England rector in Bath with several religious publications to his credit, including Sabbath Meditations in Prose and Verse (1826), from the early 1840s East was identified with the evangelical


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wing of the church, and was a frequent advocate of the cause of missions. Interestingly, he began his journey from Dublin on 14 April 1847, and was therefore travelling around the country at exactly the same time as Bennett, though evidently coming to sometimes different conclusions. The hardship endured he freely comments on: As for Cork, it might well be called ‘THE CITY OF DESTRUCTION’. The misery of its population was truly appalling. The multitudes swarmed in all the streets from morning till night, unless when a heavy storm of rain descended; and then it was astonishing to think where they could find refuge. Their state is hopeless, hopeless misery – yet, with the exception of the practised beggars, quiet, and beseeching relief rather by the eye and general aspect than by the tongue – was such as I could compare to nothing but the condition of the insect tribes at the fall of the year, when they just move to struggle and to die. Children, wan and livid, were dying or actually dead in the arms of fathers and mothers, who had scarcely strength to carry them; or, if they lived, their cries, especially at night, were terrible to hear.94 One of many instances of sympathetic reporting by East, the destitution described is both direct and sincerely felt. Moreover, like Tuke and others, East is appalled at how readily committees and meetings have taken the place of action while people are literally starving to death: ‘Its best men . . . were subscribing largely and meeting daily, and consulting anxiously about food establishments, and fever hospitals, and cordon-sanitaires, while little or nothing appeared to be done . . . to remove from their very feet the causes or the aggravations of disease.’ 95 However, at a loss as to how best balance his visit to Ireland, East occasionally wavers in his sense of purpose, evoking the image of himself as destabilised tourist, caught between incompatible worlds: Time . . . did not allow me to visit the more remote and wild regions of Crookhaven and Kilmoe, where, amid the ruin-wrecks of onceencastled chieftains and savage rocks, mountain heights and ravines, dells and bold shores, the tourist and the rambler find much to gratify their taste; but where now famine and pestilence sit on every crag, and point in terrific silence to the untenanted cabins, the untilled patches of garden ground, and the miserable hordes that are half living and half dying upon the bounty of strangers.96

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The narrator here strains to find a way of accommodating himself to Famine, tempted into approaching the country in conventionally tourist ways, but finding the reality too difficult to circumvent. Indeed, for one who travelled to Ireland as a witness to Famine, East becomes periodically unwilling, or unable, to confront what he is there to see (‘their aspect was so terrifically repulsive . . . that I tried not to fix my eyes upon any of them while I was speaking to them as they looked over the low garden wall’).97 Ironically, because the Irish are pestilent and diseased, at times appearing more like a moving bacteriological spectacle than a social network, they have the ability to disturb East’s narrative composure and must therefore be occasionally omitted, or at the very least screened from view. Indeed, the idea of contamination eventually displaces that of Famine, and becomes more prevalent in East’s work than in many others, although hunger can be assuaged, and liberty nevertheless attained, through conversion: In the midst of all this immeasurable distress, it rejoiced my heart to learn from the Lord’s servant, what his Divine Master was enabling . . . His ministry and that of his curates is being abundantly blessed, not merely in the conversion of Roman Catholics into nominal Protestants, but in their true conversion to God.98 Unlike Quaker writing, then, which focusses on fungicidal theories of blight, on the uncertainty of remedy, but most of all, on the difficulties facing many peasant Irish, East passes through a land biblical in judgemental as well as analogous ways: I seemed to have the language of the prophet Hosea sounding in my ears, only changing the name of the people. ‘Hear ye the word of the Lord, ye children of Ireland: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land . . . Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish.’99 The contrast with the impressions made on someone like Tuke, who is both ashamed and indignant at such levels of human suffering, could not be more apparent; where Tuke and his travelling companions see distress, and look to publicise it so that action to reduce it may be taken, East appears ambivalent throughout: ‘Her whole aspect was loathsome in the extreme, and her breath seemed the very breath of the famine plague.’100 Indeed, prefiguring a sentiment that will become more vocal


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and persistent throughout the early and mid-1850s, East sees Famine as an unfortunate, but necessary development for Ireland, and he closes his text with a charitable appeal to greater understanding of the Sister Isle, though one imbued not just with a sense of evangelical, but obvious political opportunity: Even will all her faults, and admitting the criminality of many of her guilty children, that country is OUR OWN. .. Let us, then, for the glory of our God, and constrained by the love of Christ, exercise an unwearied charity toward that country, as part and parcel of the British islands .. .The soil may, indeed, to a considerable degree, have resisted our moral and evangelical culture, and have hitherto disappointed earnestly-cherished hope. Still, ‘let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not’.101 Although travellers to Ireland throughout the late 1840s were conscious of their role as investigators and analysts, and of the seriousness of their task, and even though the travel narrative itself was always fluid enough to cope with myriad interests and developments, travel writing from this period was made to carry an especially heavy burden. No longer leisurely tours or vague wanderings, with entertaining or at the very least instructive advice on offer at the tour’s end, Famine travellers traversed a darkened landscape and could with only the greatest effort escape its imprint. Although narrators like Bennett and East write differently about a similar set of experiences, and while their responses reflect deep divisions in attitude towards Ireland, they were so conditioned by Famine – as well as the thought of what possible further crop failure might herald – that their writings were rarely open in the way customary to travel accounts. Their experiences were unexpected, curious and out of the ordinary, while the country itself was a constant source of amazement and incomprehension. Indeed, so odd was a visit to Ireland, constitutionally a part of the United Kingdom, that several writers, not all of them Quakers, consistently sported with the unconventional state of the place, confounding British expectations time and time again. Alexander Somerville, for example, regarded by many, including Raymond Williams, as an especially independent thinker, wrote: One of the first things which attracts the eye of a stranger to Ireland, at least such a stranger as I am, and makes him halt in his steps and turn round and look, is the police whom he meets in every part of the island, on every road, in every village, even on the farm land, and

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on the seashore, and on the little islands which lie out in the sea. These policemen wear a dark green uniform and are armed; this is what makes them remarkable, armed from the heel to the head. They have belts and pouches, ball cartridges in the pouches, short guns called carbines, and bayonets, and pistols, and swords. .. In the Phoenix Park at Dublin, a barrack of large size, with drill ground, is devoted to the training of these armed police, from which barrack they are drafted into the provinces, as soon as they are trained to prime, load, and fire, to fix bayonets and charge; to march, counter-march, and so forth; these to be distributed and shaken out upon the land in half dozens or dozens.102 Written at the same time that Forster and other Quakers were ascertaining the state of the poor-houses, many of which had inadequate provision for the hordes that hung languidly around their gates, Somerville the Presbyterian Scot could only look dubiously on at such developments. Judging from the accounts of many in 1847, it seems incredible that military preparedness of the sort described was actually necessary, so enfeebled were the majority of the peasantry, yet Somerville’s testimony describes a curiously bifurcated society in which, while some were being drilled mercilessly on behalf of the authorities in the Phoenix Park, many more were unable to sit, stand or beg, so appalling was their condition: ‘Never, in the known history of mankind, was there a country and its people so dislocated as Ireland is now; so inextricably ravelled, and its people in such imminent hazard of perishing utterly.’103 And so it continues. In Tuke’s A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847, we are reminded that one of the more practical uses of travel is a greater understanding of other regions (‘The soil and climate of Connaught are, generally, peculiarly suited to the growth of flax’),104 but he also demonstrates how the travel narrative can be used as a way of engaging with relatively difficult political issues, reminding British readers of the conditions of Ireland, and directly appealing to their conscience: While in the neighbourhood of Belmullet, I called upon several of your correspondents, who confirmed even the worst accounts I had heard, of the wretchedness of the district. They appeared completely dispirited and worn out, and regarded the coming winter with gloomy forebodings and despair. The fever, which is raging throughout this district with unabated severity, prevents their employing the poor women, or visiting their neighbours as heretofore. I hardly visited a


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family among the more respectable classes, in which I did not find that several of its members had been attacked, or were mourning the loss of their nearest friends. In Belmullet especially, it might truly be called a plague [. . .].105 Corns and Loewenstein write that among ‘the radical sects which flourished during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the early Quakers were particularly aware of the power of the written word’, and that early Quakers were ‘guided by the divine inner light “to Act, Speak, or Write” ’.106 Although the interpretation Corns and Loewenstein offer concerns a much earlier period, the emphasis placed on the ‘written word’, conveyed in what Nigel Smith calls a ‘flat style’, is nonetheless evident even from later writings.107 Clearly, the Quakers who travelled through Ireland in the 1840s were not concerned with producing a religious or missionary literature, in disputatious engagement with other sects or religions, yet they still managed to convey a powerful sense of their own experience. And an emphasis on a plain, unadorned style that avoided immoderation and an extravagant use of language was what they consistently strove for. Writing of William Penn’s prose from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, for example, N. H. Keeble emphasises the simplicity of the style, and argues that Penn ‘associated this stylistic quality of “plainness” both with the integrity of that “Plain Dealing” which becomes the character of a friend to truth, and with direct and immediate communication’.108 To waver from simplicity, then, is to not only run the risk of misinterpretation, but to dally shamefully with the very truth itself. ‘If plainness marks straightforward dealing in the truth’, continues Keeble, ‘then linguistic dexterity is the subterfuge of hypocrisy and wilful obfuscation.’109 All of which sharpens a perception of those British Quakers who traversed some of the most challenging terrain Ireland had to offer, under personally difficult circumstances, and with an increasingly despondent sense of their own participation, as especially noble participants: It was now the beginning of December and contrary to Ireland’s usual ‘soft’ winters, that of 1846–47 would be one of the worst on record, with unending gales, sleet, deep snow which drifted so heavily on the roads that transport could not get through, and temperatures that remained below freezing for weeks on end . ..Deep snow prevented their reaching some areas, and at times they had to walk behind the car because the horses could not pull it through the drifts. On occasion old Forster had to lie on his back in the snow to recover from the

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exertion of struggling through the drifts. He would not give up, but continued to buy and distribute whatever bread was available as they went along.110 Not all were so convinced of the effort made on behalf of the Irish, however, or of the necessity, even, of bringing their plight to a wider audience. For example, the reviewer of a selection of writings, titled ‘Tours in Ireland’, published in the Quarterly Review, September 1849, suggested that ‘whether this incomprehensible people can be persuaded to work for their livelihood or no, we trust that we shall hear no more of the vile cant about “hereditary bondage and the accursed tyranny of England”. The bondage was and is no other than the bondage of obstinate ignorance, and the tyranny, the tyranny of inveterate sloth.’111 But there were other Britons, and not just Quakers, who were yet concerned about Ireland, and what must be done on its behalf. For example, printer and bookseller Spencer T. Hall, who published Life and Death in Ireland, as Witnessed in 1849 (1850), drew attention not only to the state of the country, but of the obligation placed on Britain to a greater responsibility on Ireland’s behalf. He begins by recalling for readers the country’s physical proximity: ‘A member of parliament may now dine and enjoy an evening’s conversation with his family in Limerick or Clare – may have three or four hours’ rest in Dublin by the way – and give his vote in Westminster the evening following.’112 But in addition to reminding readers of the accessibility of Ireland, like several other writers Hall confronts directly the experience of Famine, and employs an extravagantly gothic discourse to fully describe particular scenes: ‘Crawling about, in some instances altogether unable to crawl, were objects much more like death than anything I had heretofore seen out of a coffin.’113 And echoing Hall, the very same year, we have Sidney Godolphin Osborne who in Gleanings in the West of Ireland (1850) appears drawn towards a similar use of language: ‘. . . the face and head, from the wasting of the flesh, and the prominence of the bones, have a skull-like appearance’, all of which confirms the infected Irish, here wasting away for want of food, but also appearing as other-worldly creatures unrecognisable to their English viewers, as simply beyond belief and understanding.114 And yet the uncertainty that surrounds British attitudes to Ireland, these narrators conclude, is unsustainable and unlawful. Political circumstances alone demand a change, and it is simply unacceptable to allow things to remain as they are: ‘Either Ireland is not united with us, and we have no right to more than a diplomatic interference in her


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affairs; or she is united with us, and her children are our fellow citizens’, writes an exasperated Hall, reminding readers of the obvious lack of solidarity.115 Ironically, where even pre-Union travellers such as Bush could write positively of the connection between Britain and Ireland, expansively engaging with the country on its own terms, there is now, on the part of British travellers and not just the Irish themselves, a feeling of incredulity at how fractured that relationship has become. Bennett, Tuke and other Quakers quickly recognised it; even East was anxious about the parlous state of Anglo-Irish affairs and the long-term effect the Famine would likely have. And so too did Hall and the philanthropic Osborne sense the growing unease as the catastrophe deepened, who toyed with the fiction of Union, and who mocked and criticised it for the travesty it was: In England one-fiftieth part of such conduct, would so rouse the indignation of the public that a speedy end would be put to the abuse, and I have no doubt pretty severe rebuke dealt on all who connived at, or promoted it. I have yet to learn that Ireland is not an integral part of Great Britain; I have yet to learn that doings so disgraceful can exist in Ireland, and not be a shame and disgrace to England.116

4 Travelling to Write, 1850–1860

Census writing Ireland in the nineteenth century experienced significant political, economic and social change. Although the Famine was in itself an event of unimaginable misery, it continued to alter Irish, and Anglo-Irish, life for the remainder of the century. Travellers and other commentators, we have seen, reported on events as they occurred between 1845 and 1850, yet the post-Famine years, when a perceptible reduction in interest might be expected, saw a surprising, and additional, development. In this chapter I wish to examine a range of writings on Ireland that were published in the years immediately following the worst effects of the Irish Famine, and I want to especially concentrate on the writings of travellers to the country, but also on several promotional texts, the alignment between the two forms being particularly close throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. Alison Blunt suggests that ‘Travel is bounded by points of departure and destination but in an arbitrary, retrospective way defined by perceptions of “home” that can themselves arise only with critical distance.’1 In the course of this chapter I want to show how the concept of ‘home’ could undergo displacement, could at times even force a dramatic sense of reinvention, as the pressures of imperial desire meshed with the realities of Famine in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. As has already been demonstrated, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland was established as a popular epistemological locale for British travellers. Clearly, a series of processes contributed to this growth, such as better infrastructure and amenities, but as travel writing continued to develop generally Ireland’s place within the discourse of British travel became increasingly secured. However, when the potato crop failed in 1845, followed almost immediately by the outbreak of 144

Travelling to Write, 1850–1860

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Famine, a deepened interest in the effects of catastrophe brought many additional visitors to Irish shores. In July 1849, for example, Thomas Carlyle made a tour of Ireland, subsequently recalled in a series of ‘fragmentary notes’, edited by James Froude, and not published until 1882.2 Although Carlyle attributes little importance to the notes, and although they are presented in what Froude calls a ‘rough and hasty’ fashion, a sense of the conditions under which people were living, and of the degradation and difficulties widely endured, still prevails. Presented as a series of incomplete sketches, Carlyle’s Reminiscences of My Irish Journey is notable not only for its vividly recalled snap-shot coverage, but for the manner of its presentation and for the rushed, almost synthetic quality of the prose in particular: ‘After lunch, street filled with beggars; people in another coach threw halfpence; the population ran at them like rabid dogs, dogs of both sexes, and whelps; one oldish fellow I saw beating a boy, to keep at least him out of the competition. Rain. “Hay-y-p!” down hill at a rapid pace, happily we get away.’3 A little like the government’s response to the Famine itself, Carlyle’s text manages to attend to the specificities of Famine, but to also keep it at arm’s length, opting for a confused, more often than not defensive, narrative whose combination of providential design, outright condemnation and despair make for uncomfortable reading, even today. However hesitant Carlyle’s travel account of Ireland may be, it is interesting to see how opinion was radically transformed within only a few years of his departure. The sense of widespread disruption, as well as the scale of Famine-related mortality and emigration seems to have been widely enough understood in Britain, but the full extent of the loss was most effectively conveyed in the form of the census figures, which were published in London in March 1852. Although the publication of the census returns were available to only a few of the narrators under discussion in this chapter, the rate at which the native Irish were believed to be emigrating, in addition to the scale of mortality documented by several writers for the period 1845–1852, suggests that the census simply verified what many people already knew to be the case: that the country had seen massive depopulation, and that the degree to which cheap land and economic opportunity was available was significant. In other words, while most people would have agreed that the Famine was terrible, and that its wasted peasantry and landscape presented a horrifying sight, the publication of figures which assured them that Ireland was open for investment, and at a reduced cost, was very appealing. In William Bulloch Webster’s Ireland Considered as a Field for Investment or Residence (1852), the various extractive and mineralogical possibilities

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Illustration 7 Geological Map. W. B. Webster, Ireland Considered as a Field for Investment or Residence (Dublin: Hodges & Smith, 1852)

afforded by Ireland are provided as an enticement to the British investor. A short narrative by comparison with most of its type, Webster’s text exemplifies precisely the sense of speculative capital so often articulated in the immediate post-Famine period. Moreover, the narrative is marked not only by a sense of interpretive authority and self-congratulation, but by the manner in which the narrator directly assesses ‘the capabilities of the soil and the character of the people’.4 Indeed, these twin themes of agricultural potential and human agency act as a focus for much of the narrative as Webster takes his promotional responsibilities to include a rigorous interpretation of the two issues most likely to win the approval of potential settlers. In other words, he situates an aggressively


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promotional image, such as his geological map, against an assessment of the results of a programme of sustained emigration, because maps create a sense of adventure and a belief in the exploratory credentials of the narrator, and also because they provide a visual account of capital potential so much more immediately than many other forms. What I wish to suggest about Webster’s text, then, is that in the determination to make settlement and incoming investment a real possibility, the narrator need only remind the reader of the extent to which land, cheap labour and newly expanding markets, brought about to a significant extent by the massive depopulation currently taking place in the country, may be attained. Webster also emphasises the ease with which resettlement to Ireland can be facilitated, as well as the potential rewards to be gained. Here, for example, is how he sums up the accumulative benefits of Irish investment: How, then, so far, does Ireland promise as a field for investment? Let us briefly recapitulate the heads of our answer: Land, of the best quality, to be had, to almost any extent, at a very moderate price; labour abundant and cheap; materials of all kinds almost always on hand, or to be procured at the most economical rates; communication to all parts certain and rapid, and markets either for the sale or purchase of goods as easily attainable as in most parts of Great Britain.5 While the language of provocative marketability is what largely governs lines such as these, none of that ‘density of meaning’ to which Mary Louise Pratt refers, seems to be required.6 Simply extolling the labour, land and material benefits of the country, in conjunction with an assurance that such benefits may be easily coordinated and harnessed to the international markets centralised at London, is all that is required. Direct and uncomplicated, like the idea of investment itself, Webster presents an uncompromisingly brisk discourse of geographical access for his many readers. Ireland is not just a politically unstable economy, runs the reasoning, but an economically backward one that is an affront to empire. Given its ‘off-shore’ location, even more so. Hardly surprising, then, that the narrator emphasises communications as a means of reassuring investors, but also as a way of drawing Ireland more comprehensively within the orbit of British political and cultural influence. In order that Ireland may be sold to a readership viewed in terms of its investment ability, however, Webster also emphasises the extent to which Irish emigration is taking place as a means of directly promoting the country. Indeed, it is largely within these terms, within the parameters

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of demographical power, that his claims appear likeliest to succeed. He suggests that in 1851, ‘there could not have been less than 279,000 persons emigrating’, a remark that not only strengthens ‘the cause of order in Ireland’, but reinforces the point about the country being a place of largely uncontested investment opportunity.7 A ‘firm and settled conviction’ takes root in Webster’s mind, we are informed, ‘that, as respects the relative value of English and Irish landed property, the latter presents the fairer prospect of a handsome return for a judicious outlay’.8 As regards sugar beet, flax cotton, coalfields and the fisheries, Ireland is either vastly superior to Britain, or else it can produce these commodities more competitively. Finally, the Irish labourer may have an, albeit exaggerated, reputation for indolence and indifference, he suggests, but given that the chief minerals after coal are ‘iron, silver, copper, lead, and even gold’, the capitalist may still find in Ireland a healthy site for investment.9 Tackling the poor image that Ireland has in Britain, Webster establishes a narrative of high profitability coupled with the promise of continuous native emigration. Many of the Irish, he reminds us, are leaving Ireland, in particular those he describes as ‘disaffected and unthriving’. Yet the result cannot be anything but beneficial, particularly for an ambitious settler elite whose investment potential can be underwritten by the full apparatus of empire: The disaffected and unthriving may be drafted from it [Ireland]; the industrious and well-intentioned, by having inducements offered them, may yet remain; while a most efficiently organised police force, combined with the numerous English and Scotch settlers, must quickly suppress any lingering system of intimidation that may yet remain. The constabulary at this time consists of an Inspector-General, two Deputy Inspectors-General, with two Assistant Inspectors-General, and a most efficient and well-distributed body of horse and foot constables, numbering in all upwards of 12,000 men.10 In the early 1850s, George Preston White, a civil engineer, also published several promotional-cum-travel narratives on Ireland. In White’s Three Suggestions for the Investment of Capital (1851), the narrator suggests that the ‘reclamation of the Waste Lands is a subject which has long occupied the anxious attention of the Government. When it is remembered that “Six Million” acres of Land in Ireland remain unreclaimed, it will be evident that great advantages would arise if practical means were devised for executing so desirable an object.’11 And in his


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A Tour in Connemara with Remarks on Its Great Physical Capabilities (1851), the narrator goes further, pointing to the broader considerations and benefits of imperial incorporation: What advantages would arise, not only to Ireland, but to Great Britain, if one of these noble Western Harbours were used as the port for the departure of the Trans-Atlantic steamers! And should the canal be completed across either the Isthmus of Panama or Tehuantepec, which is now under consideration, it would reduce the time of communicating with our Australian possessions nearly one half.12 However, despite the euphoric nature of both these texts, and the way in which they combine practical advice with promotional rhetoric as an effective resettlement package, the narrator, like Webster, is nevertheless compelled to address the subject of security, and to reassure potential investors that Ireland is a relatively safe resettlement option. White continues: As many persons in this country entertain erroneous notions as to the security of travelling in Ireland, and more especially in this district, I think it right to endeavour to disabuse their minds on that subject as much as possible. I believe there is no part of her Majesty’s possessions where persons may travel with more security.13 As with White, much of Webster’s text is taken up with security issues, although a good deal of his energy is also given over to enumerating the apparently endless possibilities of the country. Alison Blunt, in her assessment of Mary Kingsley’s travels in West Africa, suggests that the ‘most tangible relationship between travel and imperialism [lies] in exploration and discovery, with travel writing playing an important role in the naming and thus “owning” of colonial territories’.14 Like travellers cited by Blunt, Webster presents exploration as one of the surest methods of land advertisement available. Indeed, because his notes have been based on ‘four years’ experience of the country to which they refer’, the narrator feels able to ‘submit the result of his observations and experience in Ireland to the British public, from a knowledge of the vast amount of capital now vainly seeking profitable investment’.15 However, although attaining information is what largely governs Webster’s text, the suggestion that Ireland has experienced a quite considerable depopulation, and in ways unimaginable to a merchant class whose impressive investment capabilities are seen as necessary to the economic reactivation

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of the country, reveals a connection not just between knowledge and power, but between the underdevelopment of the country and the legitimation of an extended programme of imperial intervention. Having examined the recent history of Ireland, then, Webster intensifies his view of the country as a deterritorialised and depopulated terrain, while at the same time citing the country’s infrastructure as holding the key to commercial success. Able to transport goods to the metropolis but, also, the settler himself, Webster suggests that it is in the country’s canals, railways and roads that the full sense of opportunity available in Ireland may be read. Indeed the narrator’s sense of Ireland being more closely tied to Britain, becoming more available as both a market and a geo-political reality, informs much of his text. ‘The inland traffic by roads, canals, rivers, and railways, is gradually becoming as complete as could be desired’ suggests the narrator, although the roads specifically, he continues, are ‘as good as any in the world’, and the canals ‘nearly equally good’.16 With facilities such as these, he adds, ‘it is at once apparent that the produce of Ireland may commend the best market’, while at the same time allowing the potential investor/settler the comfort of easily accessed and inviolable pathways ‘home’.17 By reading the establishment of canals and railway links in premium terms, in addition to securing an image of Ireland as a place of investment capability, Webster identifies Ireland as a malleable environmental entity. In describing its produce and investors as flowing along routes and pathways of uncontested space, he levels the country to a series of permeable and unobstructed grids. Like the Irish labourer, whom the narrator recognises as being of improvable mind and spirit in addition to his potential ‘as a source of animal power’, the Irish landscape is read by Webster as having an appealing and increasingly transformative quality: occasionally troublesome and, certainly, underdeveloped by comparison with metropolitan standards, but potentially tractable nevertheless.18

Pampas and bogs To investigate the political complexities of Webster’s text, however much they may point to a wider set of circumstances and comparisons, is to become aware of the historical specificities of Ireland: of its crop failure and disease, of emigration, and of the violence and counter-violence that was to become an ongoing feature of mid-nineteenth-century life. As suggested above, however, the early 1850s was a busy time for the publication and republication of para-literary forms, and Francis Bond Head, a narrator who took his travelling responsibilities very seriously,


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appeared at a fortuitous time in Irish history. As Sydney Jackman, Head’s biographer, suggests ‘once a subject caught Head’s imagination, he would not easily dismiss it from his mind’ and would pursue it determinedly and with careful deliberation.19 However, where Head’s Rough Notes Taken during Some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas of 1826 was generally well received, and has been described by Pratt as standing ‘out among those of the business emissaries for its critical perspective on Euroexpansionism and its relativizing perspective on culture’, his subsequent Fortnight in Ireland, published in November 1852, is an altogether different affair.20 According to Pratt, Head’s ‘profound horror’ over ‘the deathly exploitation of Andean miners’, as well as his vociferous condemnation of ‘the neglect and abuse’ that he found so casually applied to the Pampas Indians, makes him a figure of some complexity and interest.21 Whether Head’s outspokenness and impatience with Ireland was due to the 25 odd years that separated his romantic from his more mature self, or to increasingly militant views concerning the best methods for tackling native unrest, is unclear. Perhaps what ultimately stimulated his attitude to Ireland, and held it in so steadily engaging and critical a light, was the fact that while there were British concerns and capital in South America, those concerns were always just that: concerns, with perhaps a degree of informal influence being exerted in specific instances. By and large, though, and with the exception of British Guiana, South America would continue to be a place in which Britain would have little chance of colonial success, a place that would remain, in terms of political actuality, language and religion, essentially Hispanic. Ireland, on the other hand, was a different matter. It was part of the United Kingdom, was geographically accessible, had seen a series of conquests and settlements by Britain that had supplied it with laws and customs with which Head could identify, and yet it remained periodically ungovernable. However, if Ireland chose to present itself in an unruly fashion, then it was the responsibility of Francis Bond Head to provide reasons for such obstinacy or, at the very least, offer suggestions as to how such difficulties might be managed. Head’s text therefore opens with a detailed map from which information about the various strengths and locations of constabulary stations for the entire country may be extracted. Like Webster, who provides a geological map upon which may be located quartz or coal deposits, Head is also drawn to the authority of the map. With Webster, however, it is imperative that promotionalism be accompanied by the sort of image that can most successfully present the attractions Ireland has for the potential settler, whereas for Head promotionalism must be tempered by other, more pragmatic concerns.

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Where one text, in other words, simply lauds the achievements of certain individuals who have taken up the challenge and travelled to Ireland in search of adventure and opportunity, the other focusses on issues of security as a means of reassurance and encouragement. But getting capital and settlers to reinvestigate the potential of Ireland, however difficult that might be, is still Head’s primary concern. Where other writers choose to simply trawl for investment in an upbeat manner, Head’s assessments are based on a more practical form of inducement. In fact, if there is a dominant tone with which Head might be identified it would have to be that of the amateur social scientist, for when he arrives in Ireland we are told that what he desires, above all else, is ‘to be enabled to observe a little without being observed’.22 With the emphasis being placed on the need for unobstructed, indeed undetected discovery, Head establishes a link between himself and a well-recognised procedure within travel writing, and evokes the image of the ever-resouceful James Hall, discussed above, whose use of the mask proved a useful way of countering the contaminative agencies of Ireland. Indeed, a letter sent by Head to John Murray, his publisher, in advance of his trip to Ireland, emphasises just this sense of interpretation on the part of the narrator: ‘I do maintain that we have not seen Ireland, and that we have no book which, veluti in speculum, reflects a picture sufficiently correct to inform us of the real state of “that undiscovered country”.’23 Head unravels the complexities of Irish culture, then, seeks to provide answers to a seemingly insurmountable set of interracial difficulties, by linking his observations of the Irish to a very basic, almost statistical, need for knowledge. Unlike Webster, whose powers of observation were governed by the simple distractions of the Irish landscape, Head focusses on the subjects at hand, on their movements, habits, recreational activities and educational prowess: I resolved, therefore, that before I concluded my trifling tour, the sole object of which had been to inform myself as correctly as possible of the real character of the Irish people, I would, instead of generalities, come to particulars on the subject in question, and I accordingly put to the constable the following questions, the answers to which I wrote as he pronounced them: – Q. ‘How long have you been on duty in Galway?’ A. ‘Above nine years.’ Q. ‘Have you much crime here?’ A. ‘Very little; it principally consists of petty larcenies.’ Q. ‘Have there been here many illegitimate children?’24


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Illustration 8 Map of Ireland, Shewing the Distribution of the Constabulary Force. F. B. Head, A Fortnight in Ireland (London: Murray, 1852)

Here we have Ireland seen as essentially a text from which one may gather information conducive, or at any rate helpful, to effective rule. If one wished the country to be pacified, made more accommodating to incoming settlement, or to succumb to the civilising discourse of imperial

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authority, one had only to present the country as comprehensible. For that reason it makes sense to speak of Head as having social–scientific pretensions. Regarding Ireland as a subject fit for evaluation and assessment, he goes about his unselfconsciously interpretive investigations with a supreme and undaunted confidence: ‘Have you lived all your life in this neighbourhood? How’s the climate here in Winter? What is the price of provisions in this country? Where do you go to church? How many people attend? What do you live on?’25 Yet despite the very obvious concern with gaining as much information as possible on Ireland, Head also manages to extol the virtues of resettlement in more immediate ways. For example, near Clifden, the narrator talks of ‘the skill and energy of new settlers’, who have taken ‘the surrounding waste of brown bog and heather’ and converted it ‘into cornfields and pasture’.26 Even here, though, there looms the figure of Head himself, who submits everything to his endless search for comprehension and knowledge. ‘What is the population of this village?’ Head asks of the constable at Moycullen barracks, and what, he continues, ‘is your principal duty here?’27 ‘Have you ever been attacked by any one’ or had ‘any differences between your men on account of religion?’ he asks a Head Stewart and Sub-Inspector respectively at Castlebar.28 ‘How long have you been in charge of the Claddagh village?’, ‘How many children are there at your school?’, ‘How many relieving officers have you in the union?’, ‘What do the poor people pay to their priest for being married?’, ‘What do they pay for christening a child?’, and so on.29 While not suggesting that Head in some way constitutes a departure from other travellers of the period, I would suggest that his approach does allow us to recognise the degree to which knowledge and, more importantly, the collection and adaptation of knowledge is incorporated in new and highly developed forms. Ten years after the publication of Head’s text, for example, Henry Coulter published his travel narrative, The West of Ireland (1862). Coulter, too, talked of the degree to which he would be relying on ‘personal observation’ and ‘inquiry’, and stressed that ‘facts’ not ‘hearsay’ would be the basis upon which he would present his assessments; yet even Coulter cannot compare with the exhaustive epistemological exertions of Head.30 Perhaps someone who more readily reflects the type of model developed by Head is Sir Digby Neave, whose Four Days in Connemara of 1852 not only stresses the institutionalisation of colonial structures, but pays particular attention to workhouses and other places of correction:


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Turning from the picturesque to the practical . . . I would visit the homesteads of the English settlers, and the field of the Late Waste Land Company’s efforts. I would allow time for taking an interest in the workhouse, in the constabulary arrangements, the schools, and the missions, four powerful and philanthropic, aye, philanthropic agents, all equally forced upon the population for its regeneration, as pioneers opening up the country.31 Like Head, Neave’s recognition of the necessity for empire to be structured around the institutionalisation of the country suggests an increasingly developed, yet more complex form of control. Picturesque description is fine as an added inducement to intending British emigrants thinking of Ireland as a resettlement option, but an emphasis on the practicalities of daily survival – the church, constabulary, workhouse and school – reinforces a greater sense of propriety, order and routine. The submission of Ireland to a process of incessant inquiry is important for a number of texts on Ireland, then, but with respect to Head’s work it has a particular resonance. While not precisely part of a developed social scientific discourse, there is a case to be made for reading several of his inquiries as part of a broad, if institutionally non-defined, ethnological project. For instance, when he informs us, just prior to his departure for Mayo and Galway, that he is anxious to observe ‘the Irish character in the various phases in which it is seen’, he reveals a desire heavily influenced by popular racial theory.32 Similarly, when he asks, ‘quite incidentally – in what part of Ireland was to be seen the greatest amount of poverty and misery’, we are aware that there exists a wish here, not just for titillatory reportage concerning, say, the inhabitants of the Claddagh, but for a body of information from which may be extrapolated even greater pronouncements on the subject of ‘native character’ and ‘behaviour’.33 In a certain sense, then, Head may be said to differ from other writers, who were unwilling to embark on a form of representation that might jeopardise the sort of settlement and investment input regarded as necessary in Ireland. In the case of others, such as Charles Richard Weld’s Vacations in Ireland (1857), the reader is simply reminded of the responsibilities of empire, and the indubitable nature of the mission civilisatrice: ‘Irish peasants, too, are beginning to understand, and what is better, duly appreciate and value, the brain-power, judgement, and, above all, indomitable perseverance and energy, of Saxon.’34 With Head, however, the desire for a narrative of pacification has to be met with something more scientific or hard-headed, in which the reader can discover, from

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such metaphysically dubious entities as ‘facts’, how Ireland fares as a place for investment. Head’s engagement with Ireland is significant on a series of levels. He seeks access to jails and workhouses because he regards such institutions as providing the basis for correction. Similarly, he sees schools as providing the best form of socialisation, and announces, rather cheerfully, how they ‘contradicted the opinion which has often so unjustly been expressed, that Irishmen instinctively rebel against discipline’.35 He sees railways specifically, but industrial development more generally, as morally as well as environmentally necessary, since they create in some vague, though doubtless, comforting way, an interpretation of Ireland that manages to equate such improvements with unimaginable order and propriety. And bound up with several of these concerns, installed at the very foundation upon which each of them is discussed, is a total and unimpeachable belief in knowledge. If Ireland, Head suggests, is to be understood, made more palatable to British tastes, or re-invoked as a site of resettlement and capital, then such comprehension can only be achieved if the country is submitted to a programme of rigorous inquiry. The natives might be, suggests Head, ‘vile, naked-legged, bare-footed Irish savages’,36 but if enough information is provided with which they might be better understood, then scenarios such as occasionally greeted him might easily exist in its place: ‘to my astonishment and delight, the whole of the 300 girls rose, and, as with one voice, commenced with great taste and melody to sing together “God Save the Queen”!’.37

The Saxon in Ireland If travel writers of the Famine years wrote with something of the journalist’s eye (and the relationship between journalism and travel writing has always been close38), then the immediate post-Famine years saw, as we know, the coalescence of travel writing with a form of promotional rhetoric, such as displayed by Webster, Head, Neave and many others. Indeed, throughout the 1850s the number of travellers interested in this view of Ireland dramatically increased. For example, in John Forbes’s Memorandums Made in Ireland (1853), the narrator remarks on ‘the English colonists’ settled around Clifden, and of the ‘fertile-seeming, English looking homesteads’ they inhabit.39 Around the same time, Harriet Martineau, described in detail in p. 172, was writing of the ‘western wilds’ as ‘the region for English settlers’, and of the new houses, the gardens and the ‘really verdant fields’ they had


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created.40 It is true that not everything discussed by Martineau or Forbes was so positive, with both acknowledging the economic and political difficulties that still faced the country.41 Nevertheless, in many postFamine accounts an emphasis on the advantages of settling in Ireland became a key feature of their writing. And as we saw, even Head, despite opening his text with a distribution map detailing the number and location of Irish constabulary stations (a gesture that must have raised as much as quelled settler anxieties), was particularly keen to emphasise the confidence of British migrants to Ireland: ‘In front of Mr. Butler’s lawn and gardens was a small rocky eminence, on which from a slight flag-staff I saw revelling in pure air the British Union Jack, beneath which several children were gambolling. The young plantations were thriving very luxuriantly.’ ‘Lawn’, ‘gardens’, ‘gambolling children’, the ‘Union Jack’, ‘pure air’; this is less a description of a moment or place, than a fantasy of empire, a reinscribed landscape that conveys the benefits of the paternal hand. And like many fantasies its impact is mainly achieved by reconfiguring and re-imagining an earlier scenario: replacing lazy beds with lawns, bogs with gardens, ophthalmic children with gambolling ones, Irish militantism with the Union flag, and the prevailing stench of pestilence with ‘pure air’. However, of the several travel writers who visited Ireland in the 1850s and 1860s, and who emphatically endorsed this notion of post-Famine resettlement, the Rev. John Hervey Ashworth was possibly one of the most trenchant. Ashworth’s The Saxon in Ireland: or, the Rambles of an Englishman in Search of a Settlement in the West of Ireland, published in 1851 and republished the following year, exudes all the ebullience of settler discourse: outgoing, positive and full of the detail of a potentially profitable landscape. Educated at Oxford, in his mid-fifties by the time of his migration to Co. Clare, Ashworth’s text marked the relatively easy alignment of a type of promotional rhetoric with the travel narrative form. Recommending Ireland to potential investors, by comparing it to less favourable destinations further afield, but also by focussing on the actual material benefits to be gained from settling in the country, is blended with a rather skewed version of the Home Tour. Ireland is not exactly ‘home’ to Ashworth, nor indeed is it to many of his readers, but the intention throughout his narrative is to convert their shared unease over the state of the country into something positive; to suggest that if one individual can overcome his fears and reservations about the place, then how much more successful would be the efforts of hundreds, or thousands, to the benefit of Ireland, but also to the benefit of British economic and national security.42

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How exactly does Ashworth convey to wary British investors, more accustomed to stories of Famine and contagion, the notion that Ireland is an ideal place to which to emigrate? And how does he overcome years of prejudice and, more interestingly, confidently convey the idea of Irish renewal to potential British emigrants? From the outset Ashworth bases his appeal on the fundamentals of geography, reminding readers that Ireland is considerably less remote than many of Britain’s ‘other’ colonies, and arguing that the proximity of Ireland to Britain is one of the least-appreciated advantages of resettlement to that country. The overall design of his work, he states simply in his preface, ‘is to direct the attention of persons looking out either for investments or for new settlements, to the vast capabilities of the Sister Island’.43 But his ability to persuade potential emigrants that Ireland is worth considering, that it is now politically as well as economically stable, involves reminding them in the first instance of where the country actually is. Indeed, almost as though the idea of uncomplicated travel between Ireland and Britain is one of his major concerns, Ashworth structures the first part of his text around a series of journeys that take the narrator from England to Ireland, from Ireland back to England, followed by a final journey to Ireland in which Ashworth appears as a resolute emigrant embarking on a voyage of discovery. The narrative opens with him sitting under an oak tree, near his home, contemplating his future in England with some anxiety.44 His options are limited. He feels he can do nothing but emigrate, possibly to the Antipodes, but is prompted into a reconsideration by the wise counsel of a friend: ‘Will nothing but New Zealand, or Australia, or icy Canada, or the burning Cape suit you?. . . what do you think of Ireland?’45 The question appears initially ludicrous, then less so, as arguments in favour of Ireland as a resettlement option – convenience to major markets, comparable climate, largely English-speaking – become increasingly convincing. Within a mere three pages Ashworth has absorbed all the descriptive, historical and statistical information on Ireland he can lay his hands on, has packed his bags, and is ensconced at the Imperial Hotel, Dublin. Ashworth’s efforts to ‘sell’ Ireland to the more sceptical British settler are both exhausting and compelling. As suggested above, one of the principal methods of enticing potential investors is to emphasise how well Ireland fares when compared to other territories. Indeed before long, he insists, ‘the English will discover how much better it is to settle in Donegal or Mayo, than to seek their fortunes beneath burning suns, or in the land of the wild Indian’. It is more attractive, he tells us, than ‘Australia or the Canadas’, while even New Zealand, the Cape, and


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Port Philip cannot hope to compete with all that Ireland has to offer.46 These strategies, designed to dispel what might otherwise have been unfavourable comparisons with Ireland, are supported by extensive agricultural data, such as the suitability of certain soil types for reclamation or drainage. In other words, Ashworth is aware of the need to discuss Ireland within a wider, imperial setting, but is at the same time alert to the practicalities of everyday life. Settlers, he rightly gauges, will need to be persuaded to think of Ireland in broad terms, as an alternative to other locations, but they will also require specific details of what exactly it is that makes it a realistic substitute. Indeed, this strategy of making Ireland not just attractive, but significantly more attractive than other resettlement venues is something that increases in popularity as the notion of Ireland as a location for emigrant and commercial possibility takes hold. For example, James Tuke, in his A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847, suggests that ‘on entering the houseless and uncultivated region of Erris, the traveller is reminded of the wilds of Canada: for some miles, hardly an acre of cultivated land or the appearance of human residence greets the eye’,47 but by December 1851, a columnist for the Quarterly Review could simply point to the: immense advantage . . . [that] would result both to Ireland and to the empire at large from colonizing that island as extensively and systematically as possible with a race differing from the natives in origin, in religion, and in character, whose enterprise might develop the rich resources of the country, and whose knowledge and activity might guide the industry and stimulate the emulation of its inhabitants.48 And as if the point had not been emphasised enough, s/he continued: ‘A rich field was calling out for capital to turn its resources to account . . . Vast tracts of land are going to waste for lack of capital and husbandmen of enterprise; in every direction farms of every size and capability are to be had on the most reasonable terms.’49 Passages such as these are interesting, among other things, not just because they stand out as so much promotional patter, but for the degree to which they engage in reductive and tendentious politics. Like Ashworth, the reviewer evokes emigration only as a means of encouraging British resettlement, stripping the process of its wider social and ideological implications, in addition to presenting capital as the solution to a largely unspecified and unnarrativised problem. This explains why Ashworth constructs a semi-confessional approach during the initial stages of his narrative, declaring himself effectively

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bankrupt, before inviting a close friend to advise him in his hour of need. The presentation of the narrator as a desperate and sceptical individual combines precisely the sort of elements necessary to overcome the doubts of those readers thinking of Ireland as a resettlement option. Ashworth clearly realises that Ireland is not the first place one might think of emigrating to, suggesting to his friend that ‘the midnight attacks of armed ruffians – the abduction of females – the lifting of cattle – [and the] forcible abstraction of crops’ would be enough to dishearten the hardiest settler.50 Yet no matter how many obstacles he puts in his – and our – way, Ashworth’s dialogue with such a well-read informant means that the country’s attributes are kept very firmly centre-stage. Indeed, even when the narrator turns the discomforts of distant colonies into comparative assets, Irish attractions still win out. ‘We could bear the solitude of the backwoods of the Western Continent, or the chill air of Canada, or the sultry winds of South Africa’, remarks an initially despondent Ashworth, ‘but the poverty, the squalidness, the degradation of the lower orders in Ireland, as described by travellers, we could not endure to witness’.51 But there are other reasons, argues Ashworth’s friend, for travelling to, and ultimately living in, Ireland: It is idle to blame individuals; the social system of the country is rotten to the core; it has grown up under misgovernment; it must and will be altered; and the day is not far distant, nay, it has already arrived, when the axe will be laid to the root of that tree, and a finer and fairer be planted in its stead. When we consider the progress of the human mind, can we doubt that Ireland will yet be righted? Do not therefore decide too hastily. I will send you a few books and sundry documents to which I have alluded; look them over carefully, and without any of your John Bull prejudices, and then we can discuss the subject with a better chance of arriving at a right decision. 52 Not only is Ireland a source of untapped wealth, then, literally hours away from Britain, and arguably cleansed of much of its recent disorder, but there is now a responsibility on potential emigrants, argues Ashworth’s friend, to consider it a serious alternative. And this moral imperative, developed within only a matter of pages, becomes a central element in Ashworth’s resettlement programme. Clearly enticing Britons to travel to Ireland because of rich pickings, especially in the West, is one thing, but suggesting to them that Ireland requires their participation in the renewal of its resources, in the building of its infrastructure, and in the establishment of a more stable political


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system, provides additional leverage of the sort necessary to inspire a particular type of Victorian reader. Not surprisingly, then, Ashworth develops a very hands-on, no-nonsense approach, stating that the ‘following pages were principally written amid the scenes which they attempt to describe’, and that they convey ‘the passing impressions of the moment’.53 Composed, we are led to believe, in the manner of a report, with situations and personalities fixed briefly within Ashworth’s gaze, the text asks us to regard everything we are being told as verifiable and truthful, not only because from truth comes trust, but because it is trust that Ashworth primarily needs to establish between himself and his reader. Promoting Ireland as a desirable and bounteous place in which to live is all very well, but unless the reader can feel a sense of the plea being based on sound empirical evidence, then that appeal might sound a lot less convincing than he would wish.

The waste land Ashworth’s arrival in Ireland is marked by a compression of sights and sounds, with the city of Dublin presented as a myriad of frenzied, sometimes unappealing activity: ‘The public buildings, the streets, the shops, the hotels, all striking and handsome [. . . I] was well pleased with everything I saw, save the crowded and filthy purlieus of this otherwise fine city.’54 But Dublin, for all its architectural or cultural interest, is despatched in less than a page, and Ashworth sets off on a number of excursions towards the west of the country, taking the train from Dublin to Mullingar, then the mail to Galway, a ‘kind of Seville’, he remarks, full of Moorish associations.55 But even Galway is only a stopping point, a place where information and advice can be gathered, and it is not until he has properly departed, ‘taking the road that skirts the western shores of Lough Corrib’, that his ‘tour of observation’ begins.56 These tours, in which the narrator casts himself as something of an explorer, rarely fail to convince Ashworth of Ireland’s limitless potential, and he rhapsodises about the country’s attributes and how accessible they seem: I have been again much gratified with my excursions today in the neighbourhood of Westport. What may be done by patient industry is here manifested on every side; and I am convinced that persons wishing to leave England may here find an asylum to suit their inclinations and their means.57

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Even when he departs for what he terms an ‘aquatic excursion’, there is more than a feeling of well-being about his experiences, a fit between his sense of place and his sense of self, and he is especially enamoured by all he sees. Indeed, everywhere Ashworth travels is full of extractive or agricultural potential, a place that requires only modest investment and a little imagination to make it truly profitable. At the beginning of his narrative he informs us that his intention is to comment upon agricultural capabilities rather than picturesque beauties, and he does his utmost to keep to this brief, praising Irish mountains, passes and gorges for their scenic beauty, while directing most of his high-energy efforts towards an evaluation of the fields and bogs that require only industry and maintenance. However, sensing that such efforts might be better supported by testimony other than his own, Ashworth produces a series of facts and figures, but chooses to have them narrated by other settlers, or ‘witnesses’, who come forward – not unlike subsidiary characters in a novel – to recite their personal experiences, and give evidence of how attractive Ireland really is. This type of witness narration, perhaps not surprisingly, had a real appeal for those ideologues looking to promote Ireland in the aftermath of Famine. One such figure, Thomas Miller, who published The Agricultural and Social State of Ireland in 1858, put together a text that was almost entirely comprised of extracts from correspondence Miller had had with various settlers throughout Ireland in the mid-1850s. Like Ashworth, Miller was keenly aware of the need to persuade potential investors in England of the necessity of considering Ireland as a settlement option, but he also knew that by ‘collecting the sentiments of [his] fellow-countrymen’ he might be able to present precisely the sort of documentary evidence to clinch such a deal.58 Moreover, to emphasise the importance of resettling Ireland, Miller made a strong case of presenting the country in comparative terms, suggesting: that if only a portion of the many millions of English money which have been, from time to time, so lavishly applied and so frequently lost in bringing out the resources and promoting the internal improvements of many foreign lands, had been judiciously laid out in Irish investments and improvements, a great benefit would have been conferred on the country, and the investors would have received back a large return.59 As we will remember, this was a constant feature of promotional literature for this period, with the conflict between Ireland’s continuing underdevelopment, yet close geographical proximity to Britain, being


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Illustration 9 Map Shewing the Residences of Scotchmen and Englishmen who have settled agriculturally in Ireland. T. Miller, The Agricultural and Social State of Ireland in 1858 (Dublin: Thom, 1858)

employed as agitants for a renewed resettlement campaign. Moreover, Miller’s own very personal campaign, the map with which he seeks to invite, first, speculation and, secondly, a participatory input from his readers, suggests an especially robust version of the form. Seeing in

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Ireland all manner of possibilities, writers such as Miller and Ashworth lauded the economic potential of Ireland, and created a sense in which the country, providentially emptied of its native inhabitants, could be renewed. ‘It becomes a self-evident fact that Ireland cannot remain as it is’, suggests Ashworth: propinquity to better things will induce imitation; and that spirit of enterprise which has already converted so many far distant deserts of the earth into smiling and prosperous colonies, cannot and will not suffer one of the loveliest and most fertile islands of the world, only a few hours’ distance from our shores, to remain a mere waste.60 His sense of regret over the ‘expatriation of so many thousands of the inhabitants’ of the country may reveal an acknowledgement of the extent of Irish emigration, but the greater emphasis lies in the availability of cheap labour as an aid to increased profitability and success.61 In addition, he presents his readers with evidence, not just of a pacific and accommodating Irish presence, but of a welcoming and enthusiastic one also: ‘All we want,’ suggests the ‘intelligent man’ he cites, ‘is English capital and English spirit, and . . . English justice.’62 And for Ashworth, whose efforts in this regard are more restrained than Miller’s, such persuasive manoeuvring is highly effective: ‘I have never . . .’ continued he, ‘repented my choice of a home, and never intend to leave it.’ Moreover, just as Ashworth is persuaded in the first instance by a friend to overcome his prejudice towards Ireland, Ashworth now in turn pressurises his reader, by gathering around him figures who corroborate his impressions of the country, and who then go on to verify the attractions of Ireland in their own right. Yet no matter how enthusiastic Ashworth becomes about Ireland, or the native Irish (especially their labouring skills), or how much he warms to the economic potential of the place, one point is emphasised time and again: the fact that not only have communications improved in Ireland, but that physical contact between Britain and Ireland has also advanced. Ireland, Ashworth is keen to stress, is no longer deficient in transport networks, but rather progressing daily: Now that internal communications are daily opening out, and the proximity to England is so marvellously increased by railways in every direction, it becomes a self-evident fact that Ireland cannot remain as it is.63


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At a certain level this might seem like a straightforward enough statement about the effects of an ‘improving’ Irish modernity, and yet the emphasis on communications that occurs throughout the text demonstrates an awareness of the necessity of such a transformation for Ireland. The Irish canal system had seen significant advance since the mid-eighteenth century, with the Grand Canal links between Dublin and the Barrow and Shannon rivers completed by 1791 and 1805 respectively.64 But the really great change – and hope – lay with the railways, which expanded throughout the 1830s, but which saw dramatic advances during the 1840s and 1850s, with track laid throughout a number of counties.65 Of course, railways and improved infrastructure meant one thing: easier access to the British markets for those settlers determined to be part of a wider economy. But improved infrastructure also suggested increased security, and provided precisely the sort of guarantee a nervous investor might need before considering Ireland as a resettlement option. Getting potential travellers, settlers and investors to re-imagine the country in the aftermath of Famine, by emphasising the sense of physical proximity between Britain and Ireland, was one way of initiating interest. But by emphasising how developed infrastructural links are, or could be, Ashworth takes this issue one stage further. The physical space of Ireland has been made better known to many British readers as a result of Ashworth’s narrative and explorative efforts, but as his text develops, the transformative power of these new colonists becomes increasingly dominant. Having relocated what many took to be an imperceptibly situated entity, Ireland, and especially its landscape, must now be brought to life. While Ashworth declares an interest in publicising Ireland’s physical capabilities above all else, his motives for doing so could not be simpler: to keep the potential settler’s mind focussed on the core issues, and to maintain a distinction between the type of tour he is conducting, and the scenic tours offered by many others. Indeed, as he journeys across parts of the west of Ireland, striking out on each occasion from Cong, his ‘headquarters’, he adopts an increasingly proprietorial air, stopping to comment on the altering profiles of hills, on the paucity of woodland, the layout of Irish villages, and the fact that much of what he sees is in need of economic rejuvenation. Indeed, the twin-track approach chosen – conveying impressions of Ireland to his readers, while deciding on a location in which to settle with his family – is aided, he tells us, by an extensive use of maps, which Ashworth constantly refers to throughout his text, and which appear to occupy an increasingly legitimising role. As a way of coming to terms with the specificities of

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the Irish landscape, of course, maps are the ideal tool, able to image the landscape in terms of scale and perspective, while showing enough of the sort of natural detail that would be of use to someone with Ashworth’s interests: determining whether land is being used for cultivation, rough-grazing or waste, for example, showing the location of towns, waterway systems and bogland. Seen in this way, maps are an indispensable aid for the more serious-minded traveller, a way of appreciating the fullness of the terrain over which he travels, while providing a more ‘scientific’ edge to his narrative. But maps have other purposes too. As J. B. Harley suggests, ‘maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false’.66 They are not unambiguous displays of technicality and admeasurement, in other words, but rather texts upon which are inscribed whole histories of possession and territoriality. However, although cartographic authority is employed by Ashworth at a number of junctures (‘The whole of Achill lay below me like a map’), one especially memorable moment sees it displaced onto an imaginary realm, allowing not just for the possible reinvention of the Irish landscape, but of the very identity of John Hervey Ashworth himself.67 As with so much of Ashworth’s writing on Ireland, the aim here is simply to convince the reader of the prospect for limitless selfadvancement that is on offer, of the transformations that can be fulfilled, and how beneficial to Ireland, and also to Britain, a settler’s efforts might be. Ashworth climbs to the top of Ballycroy mountain, near Newport, County Mayo, in the company of a local Irish guide, only to express the following sentiments: ‘I could have stood and gazed for hours’, he enthuses, ‘It was Nature’s own map, and I soon, from my geographical knowledge of the district, made my eye familiar with my position.’68 Having finally dispensed with an actual physical map, Ashworth chooses to rely on his own expertise for clarification, establishing himself as the authority he would dearly love to be, capable of comprehending the scene that lies before him without any textual aids or prompts. Indeed, so keen is he to make the transition from traveller to settler (or better still, native) that he engages his guide in a sort of duet, in which Ashworth and the guide take it in turns to name the various mountains and villages that lie beneath their gaze: ‘We are now,’ said my companion, ‘in Shrahduggane; and that lake to the left, as well as the dark one below us, are the sources of the Owenduff river, which empties itself yonder into Turlogh Bay.’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘close by Croy Lodge, where is the celebrated salmon fishery.


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That black and gloomy range to the left, in the far distance is, I suppose, Currawn Achill; and beyond are Slievemore and Croaghan, with Saddle Head to the north’. ‘Right, Sir,’ interrupted Macguire; ‘and look off to the sea as far as your eye can reach – that rock is called Deevelaun [. . .] ‘And,’ continued I, ‘yonder far bay, on which the sun is just now shining, is Blacksod Harbour, and beyond is the Mullet, and this lovely creek, that penetrates so beautifully inland, is Tulloghan Bay [. . .] What a glorious map is this!69 And not for nothing does this, increasingly tetchy, epiphany take place on the top of a mountain. Mountain views, of course, provide a feeling of mastery, and are central to many colonial narratives. Indeed, for Pratt the ‘prospect view’, among just one of many physical attributes prized by a type of nineteenth-century traveller, is given an unusual spin, recalling ‘the European subject who scans landscapes and dreams of their transformation’.70 In Pratt’s opinion, the ‘promontory description’, an especially nuanced method of landscape appreciation favoured by a number of famous Nile explorers including Speke, Burton and Grant, articulates a ‘particularly explicit interaction between aesthetics and ideology’.71 In other words, those travellers or explorers who take to gazing enviously from great heights upon what they frequently describe as virgin territory are reconfiguring that territory as much as appreciating its scenic attractions, thinking of it as a potentially lucrative investment as well as a place of beauty. And it is at this interface between aesthetics and ideology, between a view of Ireland that is appreciative, and another that exploits that view in the interests of capital, that we find Ashworth: gazing, viewing, seeing, sometimes just presiding over a largely uninhabited landscape: Take the large map of Ireland I have sent you, and draw a circle around this mountain, as far as you think the human eye can range, and you may have some idea of the glorious prospect I now enjoyed. The objects were infinite, and the view embraced one of the most interesting and picturesque tracts, I had almost said, on the world’s surface.72 Although Ashworth’s appreciation of Irish potential, then, largely involves reimagining the place for British readers, his efforts to extol the wonders of the west of the country is especially noteworthy. Noted for its romantic aspects, though conversely, also for its association with some of the worst effects of the Famine, the west of Ireland is presented

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by Ashworth as a settler’s delight, capable of generating untold wealth, prosperity and happiness. And this rapturous appraisal, directed at the very heart of the intending emigrant experience, is highly effective, largely because of the seeing, recording authority that accompanies it. For example, almost delirious with the potential that lies just outside the village of Clifden, Ashworth writes of the sumptuous views, and of how the ‘sublime scene before him’ has left him entranced.73 But on the northern shore of Lough Corrib, after he has ascended to the highest point from which to appraise its worth, Ashworth comments on the ‘magnificent view’ and, more interestingly, how ‘gazing . . . upon a vast extent of country’ prompts the mind to ‘speculate upon the rapid changes which must soon come over this fertile, but hitherto almost unknown region’. Indeed, as a specific location the Lough Corrib region appears to offer especially rich pickings, inviting ‘the eye of the improver [to see] . . . much to attract his attention’, a space of bounteous, if unexplored, potential amidst some of the worst of the Irish wastelands: ‘A more delightful location for a settler than that I can scarcely conceive; everything is made to his hand, and the future prospects of this district are certainly most encouraging.’74 For the narrator, the need to see potential, then, and also to see that potential as something other than a list of cold and abstract data, is of paramount importance: The lands around [Wesport] were manifestly in a state of transition, and I could not but admire the persevering industry that was converting one of the most impracticable slopes I ever saw into a creditable farm; removing huge boulders, paring and burning the red bog; surface-draining, scarifying, hedging, ditching, and walling, with a spirit that does infinite credit to the proprietor. As I saw all this enacting before me, I fancied that I could read my own history.75

From home to home A reviewer of Ashworth’s text, writing in Fraser’s Magazine, in August 1851, agreed with Ashworth in supposing Ireland an edenic environment for settlers. Describing Ashworth as ‘an English agriculturist’ who has presented a record that is ‘practical and careful in its statements, and remarkable for its good sense and its entire freedom from prejudice and exaggeration’, the Fraser’s reviewer suggests a climate of increasing interest in Ireland as a resettlement location, complementing and recommending Ashworth as a guide, in addition to feeding Ireland back


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into the broader discourse of British imperial politics.76 For example, the reviewer not only poses the question of whether Ireland or Australia presents the greatest possibility for intending emigrants (Ireland could ‘place the antipodes at a discount’), but concludes that ‘every practical Englishmen who has visited Ireland for the purpose of testing her resources in this way, has answered it in the affirmative’.77 Furthermore, s/he suggests that the value of Ashworth’s book ‘(which may be strongly recommended to the perusal of intending emigrants), consists mainly in the excellent view it gives of the actual resources of the soil in the districts traversed by the author’,78 a fact well supported by the manner in which Ashworth hones in on specific locations as commercially viable resettlement options: On ascending to the highest point on this farm, we enjoyed, from the area of one of the old Danish forts, a magnificent view. To the north the waters of Lough Mask extended to the far horizon; to the south, the broad expanse of Comb lay at our feet, studded with green islands, its shores broken by rocky promontories and rising into lofty hills. From hence, too, we could distinctly mark the line of communication which is to unite these two large lakes; and gazing as we did upon a vast extent of country below us, the mind could not but speculate upon the rapid changes which must soon come over this fertile, but hitherto almost unknown region.79 Interestingly, there are a number of issues raised in this particular extract that prompt comparison with Pratt’s notion of ‘incipient empire’.80 Again, Ashworth strives for legitimacy from a position of physical and spatial dominance (‘the highest point’). However, because he is able to read Ireland as a place of availability (‘lay at our feet’, ‘vast extent’), the shift from ‘gazing’ to a form of ‘industrial revery’ is made relatively easy.81 In other words, looking at ‘undeveloped’ terrain is one thing, but looking, Ashworth seems to suggest, at so much of it directs the narrator towards a series of fantasies in which a reformulated landscape becomes almost instantly apparent. In strictly linear terms, then, the passage steers the reader from simple presentation to fantasy, yet bound up within the terms of colonial endeavour and ambition. To describe the landscape as ‘almost unknown’, in other words, is to not only deterritorialise it, but to deterritorialise those for whom it is not unknown at all. Indeed, in transforming Ireland from a geo-political fact to an underpopulated landscape of great potential, Ashworth effects a remarkable reinvention of the landscape. With its inhabitants carefully

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relocated, Ireland is increasingly positioned by the narrator not so much as a place of ethnic unrest or trauma, but as a ‘delightful location’ onto which may now be projected an initially narrative, but ultimately tangible, settler class: Beautiful scenery will have its influence on the mind of an emigrant, and I do not therefore think that my frequent notices of the general aspect of the country will by any means be lost. There is a freshness, a cheerfulness, a constant variety, a union of softness and grandeur about the scenery of the West of Ireland, that, to my mind, make it one of the most desirable places of settlement in the world.82 Although Britain had no immediate competitor with which to contend for the possession of Ireland, it appears that the inducements presented by figures such as Ashworth helped to interpret the country as a place of material satisfaction. As a writer for Ainsworth’s Magazine in 1854 points out, Ireland has been poorly served by its native inhabitants and can only really develop if taken in hand by the energies of a new elite: ‘A great and wonderful change has come over the face of Ireland. Is coming. WILL COME! From 1846 to 1850, two million souls have emigrated!’.83 Almost as though the availability of Ireland can be read as a panacea for whatever social or political ills exist in Britain, Ireland is incorporated into an increasingly destined alliance with Britain: ‘A new era has dawned on Ireland; the Englishmen and Scotchmen have come over to farm; the yeomen, and the amateur, and the farmer, find no place so cheap to farm in as the “Emerald Isle”’.84 Indeed, this continually orchestrated theme of resettlement and profit is one that has a particular resonance in the 1850s and 1860s. Not only that, but many describe their travelling experiences as being of crucial, self-fashioning importance also, and establish a connection between plantation and one’s own metaphysical health. Referring to Ireland as the ‘Slough of Despond’ may make for a provocative assessment of the economic decline into which the country has fallen, but the evocation of Bunyan also helps to establish the colonist as a pilgrim-hero, and as one for whom the resettlement of Ireland is as much a spiritual as an entrepreneurial issue.85 When Ashworth, approximately half-way through his text, arrives back in England, determined to settle in Ireland, he announces to his family that the ‘delightful and convenient Mullingar railroad has lost Australia or the Canadas a right worthy and desirable emigrant. To reach Galway from London in four-and-twenty hours certainly sets a


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new face on things.’86 At certain moments throughout his tour, Ashworth made use of the exoticising qualities of the Irish, and of how the country sometimes differed from Britain, in cultural as well as geographical ways. It sometimes suited him, in other words, to tempt the potential traveller or emigrant with salacious tales of Irish life, and especially how at odds with so much British cultural practice he found the place to be. Ultimately, however, Ashworth must turn away from this potentially worrying form of presentation, and project a vision of Ireland that satisfies basic travel and emigrant criteria. He must draw Ireland, and the Irish – not surprisingly – closer to Britain. Fortunately, a number of technological advances make the presentation of such an argument that bit easier to convey: ‘the power of steam has almost annihilated distance’, reasons Ashworth, ‘and now brings the Irish proprietor within a few hours’ journey of the English metropolis’.87 And yet no matter how much Ashworth tells himself and his readers that Irish railways are a necessary development, that England can be easily reached, and communications are generally improving, these arguments seem, finally, to sound less convincing than he would wish, and he decides on an altogether different strategy. Ashworth, in other words, decides to play safe, which amounts not so much to telling readers how easily Ireland can be transformed, but to telling them how much like England Ireland really is. ‘You cannot’, he emphatically suggests of the emigrant experience, ‘call this banishment, when the same breezes blow over both islands – the same laws are observed, and the same legislature governs, and exchange of communication is the work of only a few hours?’88 Indeed, in the final pages of the book, after some time spent persuading readers about the attractions of Irish difference, he announces: [T]his is not like a new country. It is historical all over – full of the associations of olden times, yielding the same fruits, raising the same crops, inhabited by the same animals, birds, and fishes, as merry England – similar in climate, and occupied by a people intermixed with our own race, and speaking our own language. In about sixteen hours we may at any time step on English ground, and in eight hours more, pace the streets of London. The recent improvements in travelling seem almost to annihilate time and space, and ere long, people will think as little of journeying to the shores of the Atlantic, and locating themselves among the green mountains or fertile plains of Mayo, as they used to think of a tour in Devonshire, or even a trip to Margate.89

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Ireland is not just like England, so the reasoning runs, but really an extension of England, a place in which one’s neighbours, as well as the laws they observe, the food they eat and the language they speak, are as your own. Indeed it is at this point that we feel that Ashworth really has taken us on quite an Irish excursion: from presenting the place as relatively unknown, then increasingly explored and understood, as a region of almost endless economic possibility, and finally as a somewhat vandalised – though salvagable – version of England. John Hervey Ashworth sincerely believed in Irish economic potential, and felt the best way for it to be realised was by encouraging thrifty English and Scottish settlers to Ireland in the aftermath of Famine. The country was in a sorry state, he believed, but it was nevertheless possible to transform it and to take advantage of its proximity to British shores, an advantage that Ireland had over many of its competitors. However, realising that generating interest in Ireland was going to be an uphill struggle, not least because of the simmering discontent that continued to prevail in the country, he made the most of its scenic attributes, but especially of his own not inconsiderable marketing strategies. Ashworth may have been back in Britain by the late 1860s, his dream of an Irish home cut short by disappointment or homesickness. Nonetheless his enthusiasm for the country, at a time when most people thought of it in terms of extreme hardship and deprivation, constitutes one of the most engaging pieces of emigrant literature to emerge from nineteenth-century Ireland: The Owenduff and one of its most considerable tributaries watered this plain with their meanderings, the former descending from the mountains overhanging the distant valley of Shrahmore, and the latter visibly rushing down the precipitous sides of Nephin Beg, from the Lake of Scardaun. I could at the moment have fancied myself amid those lovely scenes of Asia Minor described by travellers. The eye of fancy speedily crowded this solitary plain with flocks and herds, perched on each rising knoll some quiet pastoral home, covered the rocky sides of the mountains with dark forests, or converted their sunny slopes into green pastures, or joyous fields of corn.90

A scientific edge ‘Our informants and we join in being glad’, wrote Harriet Martineau on 7 October 1852, ‘that Mr. Ashworth has bought the salmon-fishery at Galway, and that the people about Carrickfergus are associating to work


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the great salt-mine there . . . glad, in short, of every exposure to the sunshine of daylight and of hope of the great natural wealth of Ireland’.91 Not unlike John Hervey Ashworth, Harriet Martineau was yet another traveller who visited Ireland as the worst of the Famine was petering out, although unlike Ashworth she was committed to a rather more serious tour of inspection, assessing the country’s capacity for recovery and, when necessary, suggesting methods of improvement, rather than thinking of settling down in a place she was deeply conflicted about. A popular and greatly respected writer, highly regarded in political circles, Martineau travelled extensively throughout Ireland at a time of great change, tremendous hardship and considerable uncertainty, though this was not her first visit to Irish shores. Born on 12 June 1802, into a wealthy manufacturing family in Norwich, Harriet Martineau led a full life in which she travelled to Egypt and America, wrote novels and many reviews, lectured extensively, and argued with passion and conviction for improved conditions for women, and the abolition of slavery; she also managed to publish two texts on the subject of Ireland. After winning a prize from the Unitarian Society for a number of theological essays, in May 1831, she travelled to Ireland to visit her brother James and his wife, to conduct research, and to prepare for a career as a writer with serious intellectual ambitions. She remained in Dublin until September of that year, she tells us in her Autobiography: writing all the time, and pondering the scheme of my Political Economy Series . . . My own idea was that my stories should appear quarterly. My brother and the publishers urged their being monthly. The idea was overwhelming at first: and there were times when truly I was scared at other parts of the scheme than that. The whole business was the strongest act of will that I ever committed myself to; and my will was always a pretty strong one.92 Harriet Martineau’s Ireland: A Tale, published in 1832, was the ninth in a series of 32 Illustrations of Political Economy, in which she successfully blended imaginative writing with the laws of political economy. ‘Political ecomony’, suggests Robert Lee Wolff in the 1979 republication of Martineau’s Ireland, took a firm and unambiguous position: ‘on the side of laissez-faire, free trade, and the interests of the manufacturer’.93 However, despite the growing interest in popular economy – Wolf suggests that from 1830 to 1860, it was ‘much in the air’ – Martineau describes how difficult it was to secure the interest of publishers. Recalling

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her determination with a sort of evangelical intensity, Martineau, when faced with a moment of particular difficulty: thought of the multitudes who needed it – and especially of the poor . . . I thought too of my own conscious power of doing this very thing. Here was the thing wanting to be done, and I wanting to do it; and the one person who had seemed to best understand the whole affair now urged me to give up either the whole scheme, or, what was worse, its main principle!94 Not surprisingly, the Illustrations series, produced after lengthy negotiations with a variety of publishers, proved to be much less of a risk than was originally thought. Indeed, the decision of Charles Fox, her eventual publisher, proved to be a fortuitous contract for both parties: impressive and growing sales for the former, security and literary acclaim for the latter. Indeed whatever the criticisms,95 the political economy series turned Martineau into an international celebrity, and by 1834 was selling 10,000 copies per month. Exactly 20 years later, in 1852, at the behest of the editor of the Daily News, Harriet Martineau returned to Ireland, accompanied by her niece Susan. The Daily News, first edited by Charles Dickens, took a liberal line on most issues, and in the early 1850s was especially interested in receiving an informed and up-to-the-minute report on Ireland. If the 1840s had been a decade of increasing misery for Ireland, so too had it been a period of increasing interest in its potential. Reports and memoranda, schemes and provisions of one sort or another, competed with the impressions of various travellers who visited the country and carried details of the Famine away with them, as from a war-zone. In response to the increasing journalistic interest in Ireland, Martineau was contacted by the editor of the Daily News, Frederick Knight Hunt, in April 1852, and asked if she would be interested in occasional leader writing. After what Martineau in her Autobiography describes as a ‘frank and copious’ correspondence, a face-to-face meeting, sometime in the summer of 1852, took place: He came to us at Portobello; and for two half days he poured out so rich a stream of conversation that my niece could not stand the excitement. She went out upon the shore, to recover her mind’s breath, and came in to enjoy more. It was indeed an unequal treat; and when we parted, I felt that a bright new career was indeed opened to me. He had before desired that I should write him letters


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from Ireland; and he now bespoke three per week during our travels there.96 Later, in a letter to Frances Ogden, Martineau expressed similar excitement. ‘Everything prospers’, she declared, ‘We are to have a charming home at Dublin, – with capital (ci-devant) quakers, – old correspondents of mine, and hearty friends, – with the very best connections for my objects. I don’t mean to tell any of the mouldy old Unitarians there of my visit.’97 Ireland had always interested Martineau, had appeared in countless articles and letters, was the subject of two trips, and was the place she planned her successful Political Economy series. In other words, although there has been relatively little made of her relationship to the country, or how constant an issue it was for her during a long publishing career, Ireland was a topic and place to which she felt drawn. That said, her feelings about the country were undoubtedly mixed, and one can only guess that Ireland’s intractable economic and political misfortunes frustrated her enormously. In the first volume of her Autobiography she simply relates her Dublin experiences in the light of her plans for the Political Economy series. Given that she spent approximately four months in the capital, such silence is particularly disappointing. Martineau’s Dublin recollections, such as they are, constitute little other than a recital of planned or executed correspondence to London publishers. There is no detailing of her information-gathering episodes for the Ireland: A Tale volume, nor anything of the social contacts she made, or how she felt about the place or its inhabitants. This might partly explain the fact that Martineau’s writings on Ireland are still relatively under-researched. For example, Gillian Thomas views Martineau as a complex, variously focussed narrator, and reminds us that she partook of many forms of writing: fiction, journalism, travel literature, political theory. However, in a chapter that specifically discusses Martineau’s success as a travel writer, Thomas chooses to omit any mention of Martineau’s Letters.98 Indeed, in Thomas’s chronology of Martineau’s life and works, Letters is actually absent, presumably incorporated under the heading Daily News, and therefore relegated to the broader, more transient, moments of Martineau’s career. Yet in other critical texts that have dealt solely or in part with Martineau’s writing, the same amnesia, showing a similar detachment of Martineau from her Irish experiences, occurs. Deirdre David’s Intellectual Women (1987) and Shelagh Hunter’s Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism (1995), for example, contain no account of Martineau’s Letters whatever.99 Many of these authors are perhaps accounting for particular aspects of

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Martineau’s writing, are looking for specific connections and nuances, and might therefore regard Ireland as a less-than-useful category. But for a woman who wrote two texts, made several trips and published occasional journal pieces on Ireland over the course of a very long life, the result is still surprising. Even more so when we actually find Ireland, in text after text, not even making it into an author’s index, as though these experiences never really happened or, when placed alongside Martineau’s views on, say, mesmerism, were regarded as less vital. Yet her 1852 trip to Ireland was of great importance to her, and from the very outset she appears as a committed and conscientious investigator, reading much of the current literature on Irish agricultural practice, as well as parliamentary papers and works of history, and taking time to scrutinise the various obstacles she anticipates encountering. Indeed, even the journey itself becomes associated with arduous, conscientious effort, and she claims in the preface that she has travelled almost 1200 miles, so clearly determined is she to come to a better understanding of the place; from Lough Foyle to Belfast, south to Dublin, and then onwards to places such as Galway, Connemara, Achill and Valentia. Subjects touched upon include the manufactures of the North of Ireland, agricultural improvements generally, railways, and the loss of the Irish woods. Indeed Martineau is what many travellers to Ireland rarely are: adaptable and curious, but also intellectually astute, and an able, if often provocative, commentator on the variety of topics she combatively discusses. Tenant right, Irish landlords, the ‘rival’ Churches, the role of women and emigration; all are tackled by her in a lively and trenchant manner. We may not always be impressed by her efforts at balanced and objective reporting, but her more difficult moments are offset by elements of surprising honesty and intelligence. More importantly, the text brings together diverse issues in a relatively composed and coherent manner. It conveys a sense of all that is best about travel literature – opinionated, transient and impressionistic – while at the same time offering a picture of the country that is frustrating, even occasionally unpalatable to read. In her Autobiography Martineau says of Letters that their production ‘was a pure pleasure, whether they were penned in a quiet chamber at a friend’s house, or amidst a host of tourists, and to the sound of the harp, in a salon at Killarney’.100 Pleasure is not necessarily the sense that predominates when reading the text, however, and not just because the narrator occasionally challenges the reader’s patience, but because there is displayed an attitude towards Ireland that sees the country less in terms of its human complexity, than as a laboratory that requires only sociological analysis, and frequently cold


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and unfeeling sociological analysis at that. Only the following year, in a review essay for the Westminster Review, she stated: The world is weary of the subject of Ireland; and, above all the rest, the English reading world is weary of it. The mere name brings up images of men in long coats and women in long cloaks; of mud cabins and potatoes; the conacre, the middleman, and the priest; the faction fight, and the funeral howl. The sadness of the subject has of late years increased the weariness. People who could read with enjoyment Abdallatif’s descriptions of famine, or Defoe’s of plague, turn away from narratives of similar woes in Ireland, because they are too real and practical to be an intellectual exercise or pastime – to serve as knowledge or excitement. Something ought to be done for Ireland; and, to readers by the fireside, it is too bewildering to say what.101 Weariness of Ireland, of its pitiful politics and dissatisfactions, but more importantly, of the ‘realities’ of Irish life, is clearly articulated here. Plague or Famine is all very well, but only as remote sources of enjoyment or instruction, particularly if associated with exotic locations. However, when those concerns are rendered real and, more problematically, given the kind of visibility that the Irish Famine received, then they become far too painful to consider.

A gendered space Although Martineau’s travel writing – of Ireland and elsewhere – suggests much more than a form that encapsulates the many stranded interests she developed during the course of a long career, it had other attractions and benefits. It was expressive of an individual voice in a way that many other forms of writing were not, and it captured something of the adventuring spirit which many women were increasingly keen to articulate. As Alison Blunt has suggested, travel itself ‘seems independent, individualistic, and active, unlike the mass, essentially passive consumption associated with tourism’.102 Indeed, the significance of Martineau’s Letters deepens if viewed in the context of a growing body of women’s travel writing, which had begun in the late eighteenth century, and which had achieved considerable acclaim by the middle of the nineteenth. As suggested in p. 92, texts such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), Maria Williams’s A Tour in Switzerland (1798) and Anne Plumptre’s Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France

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(1810) not only contributed significantly to the form’s development, but helped to establish women’s presence in the field. Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century the number of female authored travel texts were so numerous that Lady Eastlake, writing in 1845 for the Quarterly Review, had no less than twelve to assess in the course of a single review. Travels to Egypt, New South Wales, Texas, Mexico and Madras, Eastlake’s spatially diverse texts embodied the geographical, but also literary ambitions of many well-connected and educated women. In fact, the reviewer’s gender-specific assessment praised these texts for the spirit of independence she saw as necessary for successful travel, but also because they were, quite simply, so much better written than men’s: ‘Who, for instance, has not turned from the slap-dash scrawl of your male correspondent’, she sneered, ‘with excuses at the beginning and haste at the end, and too often nothing between but sweeping generalities – to the well-filled sheets of your female friend, with plenty of time bestowed and no paper wasted, and overflowing with those close and lively details which show . . . that observing eyes have been at work?’103 Although a complex set of reasons may be offered for the proliferation of nineteenth-century female-authored travel literature, Shirley Foster attributes a political rather than generic motivation to this growth: ‘The concept of escape is of particular significance here. To a greater or less extent, the women voyagers saw their journeying as a release, an opportunity to experience solipsistic enjoyment and to enrich themselves spiritually and mentally.’104 Whether Ireland afforded such women as visited her in the course of the nineteenth-century the sort of intellectual gratification that destinations further afield could provide is difficult to say. 105 But certainly the increasing interest in Ireland as a convenient destination from which a wealth of political and social reportage could be easily extrapolated became firmly established in the minds of several British travellers. Henrietta Chatterton’s Rambles in the South of Ireland (1839), Emily Taylor’s The Irish Tourist (1843) and Henrietta Pendleton’s Gleanings from the Islands and Coast of Ireland (1856), to name just a few, displayed a keen interest in the country’s political difficulties as much as its scenic attractions, thereby testifying to the extent to which travel was also linked with personal, intellectual development. Not all of these writers produced texts of scintillating political commentary by any means, but their developing interest in the country signalled a phase in which complex images of Ireland became more available, and women travellers more visible. From her tour of Ireland in 1852, Harriet Martineau produced a series of impressions about the general welfare of its inhabitants, plus a list of


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resolutions and recommendations for their future improvement that sits comfortably within this framework. In many respects, she was no different from other travellers who regarded the country as a convenient, off-shore location in which economic and political dissatisfactions abounded. However, Martineau was also making a contribution towards the broader development of travel literature, and to associative disciplines such as anthropology and geography, disciplines that could weld an empire together. Indeed, it is interesting to note how this interest in travel developed at precisely the moment of European overseas expansion, of how the traveller was invested with a level of importance at such a politically expedient moment. Which is not to suggest that every missionary, anthropologist or minerals expert who happened to publish their travelling experiences regarded their efforts in quite this vein. However, there is little doubting that travellers who displayed consistently high levels of ethnological data did much to sustain empire politics. Harriet Martineau’s Letters from Ireland is geared more towards an appreciation of Ireland’s economy and infrastructure, on how best to get the country moving after the Famine, than on specifically graphic accounts of the native Irish or their landscape. Nevertheless, much of her text is taken up with advising, presumably future British governments, how best to deal with the country’s religious, educational and cultural complexities. In many of the critical readings of Martineau’s work, praise is usually paid to the author’s championing of certain issues: abolitionism, women’s right to work, the improving qualities of education, the position of the poor. Gaby Weiner, in the Virago republication of her Autobiography, describes Martineau’s position as ‘a response to several powerful calls on her intellect; her outrage at any social prejudice or injustice’.106 Martineau pledged her resources in the fight against all sorts of iniquities, it is clear, and she gladly engaged those she regarded as exploiting their privileges and power. Women, in particular, she believed to have considerably less authority over issues concerning their lives than men. For example, in Society in America she wrote passionately about slavery, but also reserved a chapter of her book to the role of women, particularly their political status within society: Governments in the United States have power to tax women who hold property; to divorce them from their husbands; to fine, imprison, and execute them for certain offences. Whence do these governments derive their powers? They are not ‘just’ as they are not derived from the consent of the women thus governed.107

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And in text after text, the same sentiments are articulated, with Martineau’s sense of outrage at seemingly preposterous legislation and institutions forcefully argued. In Letters Martineau reveals a similarly concerned persona, affronted by the destitute nature of many of the country’s inhabitants, at the high levels of ophthalmia recorded amongst Famine survivors, at the pitiful working conditions and wages endured by the peasantry. Letter IX, entitled ‘The Women’, opens by simply stating that it is ‘the industry of women which is in great part sustaining the country’. Martineau discusses the traditional areas of occupation for women, but goes on to claim that women dominate ‘the flax-fields . . . potato-fields . . . harvestfields . . . bog [and] . . . warehouses’.108 Although she appears encouraged by their participation in a diverse economy, she nevertheless fears for their economic futures. Martineau’s feminism welcomes advances for women in Ireland, as in America, but her economic background questions the exploitative nature of the new system of Irish female employment. As she points out, when men struck for wages, ‘their work was given to girls, at 8d per day’, retarding the economic progress of both sexes. Martineau argues therefore for a raising of standards and wages, and states that advancement for Ireland must come through the ‘due reward’ of masculine and feminine labour, on an equal basis.109 Throughout her text Martineau makes equally balanced assessments, revealing a capacity for objectivity and fairness. She speaks movingly about the plight of tenants, for example, who are forced to accept that improvements to their homes might mean significantly increased rents, and certainly no compensation for work undertaken. Similarly, there is a balanced critique of the Established Church, whose tithe-gathering powers she finds divisive and unjustifiable. One particularly notable observation, in Letter XVI, concerns the different types of settler to Ireland, and how they are perceived by the native inhabitants in the aftermath of Famine. Martineau speculates that settlers who come to the country to improve the land, hire local labour, and generally contribute to the local economy, are to be welcomed and congratulated. However, she points to a different type of resettlement that the native Irish, and implicitly she herself, finds less attractive. It appears, she remarks: that the good feeling towards settlers does not always extend to those who make the rearing of stock their object. They buy up or lease land for a sum or rent nearly nominal, when, as in the case of Lord Sligo’s lands, the depreciation in value is excessive. They graze


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their cattle for almost nothing, employing next to no labour, and make vast profits. There is nothing really unfair in this. They give what the land, in a season of adversity, will bring, and they use it in a way most profitable to themselves. Nobody has a right to complain of this as dishonest. But we cannot wonder if the suffering neighbours are quick to feel the difference between this method of settling and that of men who come to till the ground and employ labour. Men see cattle growing fat among the enclosures where their neighbour’s homes used to be. Their neighbours are gone – over the sea or into the grave – for want of work or food, and one herd of cattle succeeds another, to be sent away to England, and fill English pockets with wealth, while the Irish peasant remains as poor as ever.110 However, although Martineau displays concern for the oppressed at certain moments in the text, she also reveals a surprising degree of insensitivity, something remarked upon by critics of several of her other works. Indeed, in many of her writings, commentators have noted the complex nature of Martineau’s responses, and indicated that while she aligns herself with progressive institutions and movements one moment, she is capable of sounding not only tiresomely judgmental, but even conservative, the next. For example, Valerie Sanders argues that Martineau occupies a series of sometimes incompatible positions in her texts. Sanders’s inquiry, which covers much of Martineau’s output, suggests a figure of considerable originality, an ‘influential, if always controversial, literary figure’, whose reputation for radical and free thinking was not always consistent: ‘Her outspokenness on some issues makes her sound surprisingly modern, while her reticence, or conventionality, on others roots her firmly among the more conservative Victorian teachers. Just when she seems to be endorsing the most radical ideas, she drops back into line with the most traditional.’111 Sanders also emphasises the hybrid nature of Martineau’s writing, and how this has disqualified several of her works from serious consideration: ‘Her mode is essentially impure; she blurs the lines between fact and fiction, travelogue and theology, national history and autobiography. Whether we see this’, she continues more provocatively, ‘as a serious drawback, or an invitation to pursue other, possibly more intriguing questions, any study of such a mixed form must face tougher than usual methodological problems.’112 Not surprisingly, Letters displays the same sense of duality identified by Sanders and others, particularly at those moments where a sympathy

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for the disadvantaged clashes with her deep-seated desire to see the benefits of modernisation enacted. As a consequence, at several moments in the text particularly unsettling images arise. In Letter XVII, for example, Martineau describes the departure of an emigrant family from the quay at Castlebar. It is a peculiar passage, which attests to the trauma of parting, while denying the validity of the emotion displayed, and the economic circumstances that encouraged it: Our blood ran cold at the loud cry of a young girl who ran across the road, with a petticoat over her head, which did not conceal the tears on her convulsed face . . . The last embraces were terrible to see; but worse were the kissing and the claspings of the hands during the long minutes that remained after the woman and children had taken their seats . . . we became aware . . . of the full dignity of that civilization which induces control over the expression of the emotions. All the while that this lamentation was giving a headache to all who looked on, there could not but be a feeling that these people, thus giving vent to their instincts, were as children, and would command themselves better when they were wiser.113 Martineau’s ambivalance over this incident is both typical and alarming. Within a single paragraph, she acknowledges simultaneously the despair of the moment – ‘all eyes were fixed on the neighbours who were going away forever’ – yet attempts to minimise it: ‘the woman’s face was soon like other people’s, and the children were eating oatcake very composedly’. As an individual, Martineau responds to the emotion; as an improving economist, who sees in emigration a means of modernising the country, she displays impatience with these wilfully childish people who cling to outmoded associations and practices.

Writing Ireland Certain themes recur in Letters that demonstrate deeply held political, religious and economic concerns. In her progress throughout the country, for example, she returns again and again to questions of land ownership, the position of women, the role of the priests, and the figure of Daniel O’Connell (who died in 1847), the leader of the Irish Emancipation movement. What her treatment of each of these diverse topics display in common is a forthright criticism of the backwardness of much of Irish life, a great deal of which she attributes to the Catholic clergy. Yet there is one issue to which Martineau consistently turns: the


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belief that the future prosperity of the country lies in large-scale emigration by the Irish, and a resettlement of the country by thrifty English farmers and industrialists. The notion of emigration as a solution to Irish problems had been aired long before the Famine, but the publication of the 1851 census appeared to clarify the issue to the satisfaction of many. Faminerelated mortality and emigration had seen the population decline significantly from 1841, yet until the census was published no one was quite sure how far the figures had dropped, or whether presumptions regarding regional variations in decline would be borne out. The publication of the census, then, revealing a decrease from 1841 to 1851 of 1,659,330 persons, put an end to speculation. It gave specific details about male to female ratios, but it was the precise population figures, region by region, and town by town, that had the greatest impact. Reading the census, in other words, could be a fairly complex, though interpretively rich experience. On the one hand, it could be read as a narrative of political and economic misfortune, with widespread disease, malnutrition and death marking its climax, but it could also be viewed in terms of anticipatory capital and resettlement, which is how several writers increasingly approached the subject. These figures would excite interest in the country in ways that only five years earlier would have been unimaginable. Although the census is important to Martineau, it also functions as part of a wider discourse on Ireland, which links progress with scientific advancement generally.114 The development of railways, canals and bridges, or the work of the Belfast Social Inquiry Society – linked to the Statistical Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science – establish a model of scientific improvement for Ireland as the necessary way forward. The Chemico-Agricultural Society of Ulster, as well as the work of figures such as Alexander Drummond115 or John Frederick Hodges,116 cited by Martineau in her introduction, are not just admirable institutions or individuals, but signs of improvement on a largely bleak and wasted landscape. They exercise a particular fascination for her because they are indicative of tangible scientific improvement, but also because they emphasise the direction she feels the country must take if it is to improve. In fact as early as Letter II Martineau rhapsodises about the benefits of one particular branch of scientific improvement: the agricultural science demonstrated at the Templemoyle agricultural school in County Londonderry. Everything about this school, from the elevated site on which it stands, to the principles of discipline it instills in its pupils, is a marvel to her. Indeed, beginning with the edenic description of its location, set on a hill overlooking the

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fields below, Martineau invests the institution itself with a striking benevolence: The situation of the establishment is beautiful. The house stands near to the top of a steep hill, looking down upon a wooded glen, and abroad over the rich levels stretching to the Lough, and over the Lough to the mountains of Donegal and the grand Coleraine rocks. The path to the front door rises through garden, nursery-ground, and orchard; and behind the house and offices the land still rises till it overlooks the whole adjacent country.117 From this centre of civilisation Martineau envisages what she calls ‘the missionaries’ – young men trained at the school – issuing forth to civilise a barbarous terrain in the interests of economic improvement. Although her primary concern in this letter is with agricultural improvement, Martineau also stresses the contrast between modern English farming methods which guarantee prosperity, and outmoded Irish ones which are specifically associated with decay and decline. Thus politics and economics are conflated to stress the necessity for greater intervention on the part of the government to forcibly improve Ireland: The wretched potatoes, black, withering, and offensive, seemed to have poisoned and annihilated every growth within their boundaries; but in every enclosed pasture the weeds had their revenge. This is a proud country for the ragwort. In every pasture, as far as we could see, it grew knee-high, presenting that golden harvest which may please the eye of an infant, but which saddens the heart of a well-wisher to Ireland.118 The importance attributed by Martineau to marigolds, ragwort and weeds, the embodiment of Irish agricultural ineptitude, is typical. She deplores what she sees as the Irish refusal to improve property, but frequently ascribes it to an inherent tendency in the Irish rather than a lack of agricultural investment or estate management. The point about the Templemoyle seminary is that it functions for Martineau as a symbol of what Ireland might be, were English and Scots scientific agriculturalists to take the country in hand. Indeed, Martineau sees science as the solution to all of Ireland’s difficulties, and tirelessly promotes the benefits, as she sees them, of rational, scientific progress. In this regard she represents Ireland, and Ireland’s relationship to Britain, in a typical manner. Ireland can occasionally appear picturesque,


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bountiful and fertile, but rarely as a convincing instance of modernity. Rather, she is trapped in an undignified, pre-modern narrative of programmatic decay, a disgrace to both herself and Britain. Degenerated, if beautiful, Ireland encourages Martineau to see the assistance that the country desperately requires as a blessing, and the visitation of Famine a pitiful but necessary cleansing act. It is for this reason that she and many of her contemporaries, such as Ashworth, Webster and Miller, investigate the agricultural worth of the country in the 1850s, and with particular relish as the first instalments of the census figures become available. The picture of obstructive counter-modernism that Ireland presents, then, is handled by Martineau – for all her apparent distaste – in an opportunistic mode. The general terms of her critique focus on the poor husbandry of the Irish, their illogical and childish attachment to Church and land, and their ignorance of basic economic principles. A discernible difference appears between the north-east and the more westerly, and south-westerly parts of the country. Belfast and Antrim, for example, and especially the Londonderry Companies estates, appear as relatively competent arenas where agri-economical success is, if not flourishing, at least in better shape. However, the closer she gets to Galway, Mayo and Clare, the shriller her criticism and the deeper her despondency. The north of the country does not escape criticism entirely, being noted for its paucity of woodland, but when this is set against the horrors of the west, especially enclaves such as the Claddagh, it is positively idyllic. Barefoot children, vistas of bogland, priestly interventions in everyday affairs; the west of Ireland is less an area of calculable social interaction than a nebulous collection of names and images. Indeed, the enthusiasm she feels for the science and practice of agriculture at Templemoyle gives way to a specifically developed depression on the bogs of the west and south-west of the country. And yet it is precisely this disregard for basic principles that Martineau despairingly describes which allows her to anticipate a future based on a reorganisation of the country along British lines. If Ireland is poorly utilised, then the answer is clearly the importation of individuals who can more successfully manage the land; if the people are disgracefully mislead by their priests, then National Schools and the Queen’s Colleges will educate them out of such ignorance, and away from their influence.119 While there is something distasteful about the belief in Irish barbarism and British civility that can be found in so many British authored texts from the mid-nineteenth century, Martineau consistently viewed herself, and Ireland, in just such terms. She sailed to the city of Derry, when

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Belfast or Larne would have been more convenient, because Derry is where she could get a proper sense of the work of the Londonderry Companies. In Letter I, for example, she explicitly states that the purpose behind her decision is to see ‘some of the most prosperous parts of the country, in order to carry elsewhere the hope that the use of similar means may produce a similar prosperity’.120 The Fishmonger’s Company, she is happy to relate, is doing some excellent work: reclaiming land, replanting trees, building schools and churches. In Letter II, having travelled just 5 miles in the direction of Limavady, she notes with some satisfaction the sharp difference between the Grocer’s estates and their native Irish neighbours. On an estate ‘which lies between the lands of the two companies’ she finds ‘cottages whose thatch is sinking in or dropping off and .. . puddles of green slime’, whose inhabitants live next to ‘green ponds’.121 The influence of the Companies, ‘great though it be, is not all-powerful in improving the cultivation of the land in their neighbourhood’.122 Although Martineau’s assessment portrays the work of the Companies as less than complete, the impression of preferable systems of management and economy is prevalent. As suggested above, the work of the Templemoyle agricultural school is seen as a beacon, an institution devoted to rigorous agricultural methods based on the most modern economic principles. Its one major failing is that many of its young men emigrate after graduating from the college, so that rather than improve the lands around them they take their expertise away from the place which requires it most. Still, the impression is that these institutions, like the London companies, offer the best that Ireland can get. English and Scottish influences, it is clear, offer a lifeline to Ireland through estate management, education and investment. And all along the route from Derry to Belfast Martineau consistently evokes this vision. In Letter III, for example, we are told of abundant fowls, high-yielding milking cows and salmon-fisheries on the river Bann. The Clothworker’s estates near Coleraine come in for some criticism, but as the narrator winds her way towards Belfast the most outstanding impression is of improvement and industry. The circumstances of Martineau’s arrival in Belfast, in Letter IV, are curiously convenient. The city is covered in fog, we are told, ‘which hung over the district as we entered it [and which] was so dense as to allow nothing to be seen beyond the road’.123 Like Derry and Dublin, this is a city of industry and of evaluations of future prosperity rather than individual contact, and Martineau refuses to take us much further than within sight of the city limits. And like Derry and Dublin, Belfast remains strikingly obscured, an indication of her preference for rural


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economy above all else. Indeed, even the Belfast to Dublin road, never the most remarkable of routes, offers considerably greater comfort than might have been expected: ‘Some really good wheat-crops are seen here and there’, remarks a satisfied Martineau.124 Wheat-crops, turnips, oats and potatoes; these are the items to which Martineau’s observing eye is consistently turned. Moreover, when her attention moves from the relative prosperity of Leinster, Queen’s County in particular, towards the west of the country, this appetite for landscape appreciation will prove a deadly gift. Travelling by train through Kildare, we are told that there exists ‘the best crops that have come under our notice thus far in Ireland’.125 Good signs, the reader might think. But the spectre of the west – Famine stricken, destitute in terms of manufactures and industry, politically unstable, and synonymous with evictions and emigrations – lies ahead. ‘If we should encounter a wilder barbarism in remote places, it will, at least, not be jumbled together with an advanced civilisation’, writes Martineau on 31 August 1852.126 Letter XI, simply entitled ‘Galway’, signals a new phase in the Martineau itinerary. Where Martineau resided when she stepped from the train at Eyre Square is not revealed. How she dealt with porters, where she dined, whom she met, what personal effects she had to stock up on, or found wanting within the cobbled streets of the town, is not known either. What we do know is that part of the journey by train from Dublin was uncomfortable (acute bends which apparently shook the carriages violently), while part of the rest of it was dull (the bog of Allen, the section of railway between Lord Clancarty’s residence at Ballinasloe and Galway city). Furthermore, we know, or are swiftly informed, that here, in direct contrast to much of what has preceded it, lies mayhem and uncertainty. Around Derry there was the work of the Londonderry Companies, and in the vicinity of Lisburn and the outskirts of Belfast stood the scutching-mills and the flax mills of serious and sure-minded men. However, in Galway city, in the Claddagh and, by reputation, on the Aran islands, lies a different story. In fact, one gets the impression that here, finally, Martineau has found what she has been really looking for. On putting into port at Derry she mentioned that it was her purpose to compare, not just record, the various impressions of Ireland. Those parts of the north of the country under the sway of external influences, that show some signs of improvement and profitability, elicit approval. In the west of the country, however, even in a place such as Galway with its recently opened railway and newly built Queen’s College, there is only disdain and despair. Indeed, Galway is less a place or region,

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suggests Martineau, than ‘a spectacle never to be forgotten by an Englishman’.127 And as for the poor-houses and workhouses of Kilrush, the religious fanaticism of Achill, the emaciated and ophthalmic victims of Ennistymon, these are worse and worse; although rarely, the reader will notice, does Martineau actually write of the hardships themselves. Whenever a sense of desperation arises Martineau’s keen sense of editorial propriety quickly intervenes. Near Coleraine, for example, she tells us that there is no need ‘to describe the mournful spectacle of the people’. On entering the district of Erris, she declares, ‘Of the horrors of the famine we shall say nothing here.’ Outside Castlebar, she insists, ‘there is no need to describe again the condition of the land and the people’. And after the briefest of discussions on the problems of subletting, she concludes, ‘it is the same old story, which we may spare ourselves the pain of telling again’.128 But the question raised is this: just who exactly is being spared the pain, and why? Is Martineau concerned for the reader’s feelings to such an extent that she would disclose certain aspects of her trip, while repressing others? Certainly a sensitive narrator, unwilling to pornographise human misery, is only too welcome. Yet there is something unsettling about these discursive ellipses, about a narrator who so clearly wishes to talk about some things, like the benefits of emigration, but who so determinedly avoids others. A series of formally provocative reasons may lie behind the absence of Letters from the Martineau canon, but perhaps a simpler reason lies in her presentation of Ireland: ridiculing and criticising the country in some matters, while ignoring or excising others in the interests of ideological purity. No doubt a great deal of material from the Famine period has been similarly displaced, passed over in favour of other readings, or because the author has simply fallen from critical favour. But when we consider how difficult it might have been to square Martineau’s Letters with the broader reputation she had for many liberal agendas the notion of political selectivity becomes especially pronounced. Harriet Martineau is forced to concede the unnecessary harshness of several aspects of contemporary Irish life during the course of her 1852 trip, yet she finds much of the country’s intractability to be associated, in her own mind at least, with a lack of knowledge and with an unwillingness to adapt to different agricultural and social methods. Solve these difficulties, she seems to suggest, and the result will be greater economic success and, ultimately, greater political stability. The country has seemingly withstood the epistemological advances of Britain for long enough; it is now time to put the place in order, to bring about


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a state of relative prosperity, to break down the country’s subordinate, yet unknowable presence. Yet Martineau has overlooked one thing: that the strategy of social engineering she has in mind might not mesh so easily with the complexities of Ireland. As she sails into the city of Derry to confront these problems, at the beginning of August 1852, this most complex of narrators is on course for a challenge.

Notes 1 From Grand Tour to Home Tour, 1760–1800 1. While the age profile of travellers may have varied somewhat, the relative youthfulness of many is noted by several critics. For example, James Buzzard quotes Lady Montague, who writes of ‘the folly of British boys . . . all over Italy’, while Barbara Korte suggests that ‘The intention of the Grand Tour was to add – after the traveller’s student years – the finishing touches to his education and the process of his socialization. Originally, it had also been a part of the courtier’s professional training, preparing him for a career in a political, or more commonly, diplomatic office.’ However, such a profile was less coherent as time passed; Katherine Turner notes the increasing numbers of travellers who were accompanied by ‘wives, families and colleagues’. J. Buzzard, ‘The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840)’, in P. Hulme and T. Youngs, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 42; B. Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 42; K. Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2001), p. 25. 2. Of course, this was to be severely questioned as the persistent self-indulgence of many came to light: ‘. . . the behaviour of Grand Tourists soon attracted sufficient criticism to call into question the aims of the entire enterprise’. J. Buzzard, ‘The Grand Tour and After’, in P. Hulme and T. Youngs, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, p. 42. 3. ‘Grand tourism has its origins in the relationship of parvenu to aristocrat. Its development follows a shift in the focus of culture and of economic and political power. The wealthy and educated, of states whose position of dominance in the world is comparatively new, visit countries that have passed their peak of prestige and creativity but are still venerated for historic and cultural reasons. Thus Romans visited Greece and the eastern Mediterranean; the English, from the sixteenth century onwards, visited Italy.’ L. Turner and J. Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (London: Constable, 1975), p. 29. 4. R. Hudson, ed., The Grand Tour, 1592–1796 (London: Folio, 1993), p. 14. 5. Korte provides a number of examples, including Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617). B. Korte, English Travel Writing, pp. 66–70. 6. M. Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1989), p. 4. 7. L. Doyle, ‘The Racial Sublime’, in A. Richardson and S. Hofkosh, eds, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 16. 8. T. O. McLoughlin and J. Boulton, eds, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), vol. I, p. 186. Burke’s theories, of course, were variously adapted. See F. MacDonald, ‘St Kilda and the Sublime’, 190

Notes

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Ecumene, 8:2 (2001), who highlights the way in which Burkean aesthetics were intensified for many travellers by the publication of James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760). T. O. McLoughlin and J. Boulton, eds, Edmund Burke, vol. I, p. 216. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 231. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 250. For an investigation of the obvious political parallels, see N. Wood, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke’s Political Thought’, The Journal of British Studies, 4:1 (1964). J. R. Gold and M. M. Gold, Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism since 1750 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), p. 39. Ibid., pp. 39–40. M. Beames, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 24. Ibid., pp. 26–8. D. Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), p. 148. The tour itself, however, was conducted only seven years after Burke’s famous publication, in 1764. J. Bush, Hibernia Curiosa (London: Flexney, 1769), p. vi. Ibid., p. viii. I. Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 9. J. Bush, Hibernia, pp. ix–x. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., pp. 26–7. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 30–2. ‘Whiteboyism first appeared in the winter of 1761–2 in the counties of Tipperary, Cork, Limerick and Waterford. In spite of the repressive measures taken by the authorities, it was able to establish itself as an almost permanent feature of the Munster rural scene resurging in particular years with fresh momentum and intensity. Its peak years before 1800 were 1762, 1775 and 1786.’ M. Beames, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Sussex: Harvester, 1983), pp. 25–6. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 39. J. Duncan and D. Gregory, ‘Introduction’, in J. Duncan and D. Gregory, eds, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5. J. Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Thrupp: Sandpiper, 1992), p. 5. Ibid., p. 37. T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 12. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 31.

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Notes

40. T. Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 73. 41. M. Andrews, The Search, p. 44. 42. I. Ousby, The Englishman’s England, p. 65. 43. Although W. Nolan refers to (early nineteenth-century) Wicklow as ‘an escape, a place of seclusion where the natural world could be dramatized in a rural setting’, and as an ‘elusive entity’, he also notes how its proximity ‘to Dublin may have stunted [its . . .] urban growth’. W. Nolan, ‘Land and Landscape in County Wicklow c. 1840’, in K. Hannigan and W. Nolan, eds, Wicklow: History and Society (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1994), pp. 650, 652, 687. 44. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 72. 45. M. Andrews, The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents, vol. I (Mountfield: Helm, 1994), p. 9. 46. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 73. 47. Ibid., pp. 74–5. 48. Ibid., p. 74. 49. Ibid., pp. 75–8. 50. See K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997) for further analysis of the bog, including its contribution to early nineteenth-century nationalist fiction (where ‘even the bog undergoes a complete rehabilitaton’, p. 46), pp. 37–66. 51. J. Bush, Hibernia, pp. 78–82. 52. Ibid., p. 84. 53. L. Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (London: Aurum, 1997), p. 46. For its time, however, Defoe’s account was a nevertheless thorough undertaking: ‘The preparations for this work have been suitable to the author’s earnest concern for its usefulness; seventeen very large circuits, or journeys have been taken thro’ divers parts separately, and three general tours over almost the whole English part of the Island.’ D. Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), The Author’s Preface. 54. J. Brown, ‘A Description of the Lake at Keswick’ (c. 1753), in M. Andrews, ed., The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents, vol. I (Robertsbridge: Helm, 1994), p. 76. 55. Cited in L. Fleming and A. Gore, The English Garden (London: Michael Joseph, 1979), p. 118. 56. M. Andrews, The Search, p. 86. 57. W. Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye (1782), in M. Andrews, ed., The Picturesque, vol. I, p. 245. 58. T. West, A Guide to the Lakes (1780), in M. Andrews, ed., The Picturesque, vol. I, p. 282. 59. M. Andrews, The Search, p. 86. 60. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 85. 61. J. Black, The Grand Tour, p. 300. 62. Ibid. 63. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 85.

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64. K. M. Davies, ‘For Health and Pleasure in the British Fashion: Bray, Co. Wicklow, as a Tourist Resort, 1750–1914’, in B. O’Connor and M. Cronin, eds, Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), p. 32. 65. J. Heuston, ‘Kilkee – the Origins and Development of a West Coast Resort’, in B. O’Connor and M. Cronin, eds, Tourism in Ireland, p. 14. 66. C. Aitchison, N. E. Macleod and S. J. Shaw, eds, Leisure and Tourism Landscape: Social and Cultural Geographies (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 34. 67. L. Withey, Grand Tours, p. 136. 68. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 90. 69. M. Andrews, The Search, p. 36. 70. R. Cardinal, ‘Romantic Travel’, in R. Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 144. 71. J. Bush, Hibernia, pp. 90–2. 72. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 27. 73. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 90. 74. Ibid., pp. 129–30. 75. Ibid., pp. 91–2. 76. Ibid., pp. 93–4. 77. Ibid., p. 101. 78. Ibid., pp. 101, 118. 79. W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed., R. Paulson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 88. 80. T. Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 77. 81. M. Andrews, The Genius of the Place, pp. 290, 295. 82. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 103. 83. S. Mills, ‘Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, in A. Gilroy, ed., Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 27. 84. Ibid., p. 26. 85. Ibid. 86. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 120. 87. Ibid., pp. 93–4. 88. F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 95. 89. Ibid., p. 136. 90. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 99. 91. Chloe Chard makes the interesting observation that although seventeenthcentury European travel emphasised ‘manly self-reliance’, later travellers developed a more varied repertoire of responses: ‘Late eighteenth-century travel writing [to Continental Europe], then, both incorporates expressions of responsiveness that are defined as feminized and presents some of the feminizing effects of travel as legitimate and desirable.’ C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 36–7. 92. J. Bush, Hibernia, p. 98. These lines may be usefully read against Chard’s notion that a ‘feminized loss of restraint’ in the face of sublime nature frequently triggered a transfer from ‘the sublime to the beautiful’ on the part of the narrator.

194

93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98.

99.

100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109.

Notes Bush, however, appears less concerned about the destabilising experiences noted of several of Chard’s narrators. C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, p. 122. J. Towner, ‘The European Grand Tour’ (Birmingham: Birmingham University Centre for Urban & Regional Studies, Working Paper 79), pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid. Towner’s third, and it has to be said extremely focussed, period of Grand Tour analysis (1814–1817) brings Alpine and Romantic travel to especial prominence. See Ibid., pp. 14–19. For a useful discussion of Grant, see B. Hagglund, ‘ “Not absolutely a native, nor entirely a stranger”: The Journeys of Anne Grant’, in G. Hooper and T. Youngs, eds, Perspectives on Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Richard Twiss (1747–1821) was born in Rotterdam, the son of an English merchant. Well-known traveller and miscellaneous writer, his Tour in Ireland in 1775 (1776) was considered controversial by many, exhorting a Mr. Lewis to pen A Defence of Ireland: A Poem in Answer to the Partial and Malicious Accounts Given of It by Mr. Twiss (Dublin: Kidd, 1776): ‘With half an Eye he saw Hibernia’s Isle, / Then wrote Remarks would make a Cynic smile: / No works of Art could charm, no Objects please, / Nor Nature’s Landscapes cure his Mind’s disease’, p. 14. G. E. Mingay, ed., Arthur Young and His Times (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), p. 4. Ibid. Later editions include the abridged Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland, ed., C. Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925, reprinted Belfast: Blackstaff, 1983), and a reprint of Wollaston Hutton’s edition, with a short introductory essay by J. B. Ruane (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970). A. Young, Tour in Ireland, 1776–1779, ed., A. Wollaston Hutton, vol. I (London: Bell, 1892), p. x. Cited in B. Korte, English Travel Writing, p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. A. Young, Tour in Ireland, vol. I, p. 2. G. E. Mingay, ed., Arthur Young, p. 29. ‘I kept a private journal throughout the whole of this tour, in which I minuted many anecdotes and circumstances which occurred to me of a private nature, descriptive of the manners of the people, which, had it been preserved, would have assisted greatly in drawing up these papers; but, unfortunately, it was lost [. . .] On returning to England, I quitted my whisky [a light carriage built for rapid transport] at Bath, and got into a stage, and sent a new London servant, the only one I had, thither to bring the horse and chaise to London, and the trunk containing these things. The fellow was a rascal, stole the trunk, and pretended that he had lost it on the road.’ A. Young, The Autobiography, ed., M. Betham-Edwards (London: Smith, 1898), pp. 68–9. He also adds, ‘I had in 1775 determined on making the tour of Ireland, to which the Earl of Shelburne much instigated me, and I corresponded with several persons on the subject, who urged me much to that undertaking, but I was obliged to postpone it to the following year.’ The following is

Notes

110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135.

136.

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a note from Mr. Burke on the subject: ‘Mr. Burke sends the covers with his best compliments and wishes to Mr. Young. He would be very glad to give Mr. Young recommendations to Ireland, but his acquaintance there is almost worn out, Lord Charlemont and one or two more being all that he thinks care a farthing for him. Moreover, if letters to them would be of any service to Mr. Young, Mr. B. would with great pleasure write them.’ A. Young, The Autobiography, p. 67. ‘This was the year [1767] of the first of Arthur Young’s tours of Great Britain, which combined sober attention to crops, prices, and farming methods with rhapsody over scenery: a most unlikely combination, but obviously fashionable or the young man would not have made it.’ G. B. Parks, ‘The Turn to the Romantic in the Travel Literature of the Eighteeenth Century’, Modern Language Quarterly, 25 (1964), p. 29. A. Young, Tour in Ireland, p. 30. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., p. 392. Ibid., p. 410. E. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 68. Ibid., p. 92. A. Young, Tour in Ireland, pp. 18–19. Ibid., pp. 20–1. Ibid., p. 18. E. Bohls, Women Travel Writers, p. 92. Ibid., p. 87. A.Young, Tour in Ireland, p. 425. Ibid., p. 468. Ibid. Ibid., p. 469. Ibid., pp. 469–70. P. Luckombe, A Tour through Ireland; Wherein the Present State of that Kingdom is Considered (London: Lowndes, 1783), p. 93. Ibid., pp. 161–2. ‘As contemporary critics pointed out, the landscape park was in many ways a stereotyped product, its essential features the same from Northumberland to Surrey.’ T. Williamson, Polite Landscapes, p. 87. ‘The picturesque was established by Uvedale Price as a third term to be set beside the others [the sublime and the beautiful], but it proved to be an unstable term.’ M. Price, ‘The Picturesque Moment’, in F. W. Hillis and H. Bloom, eds, From Sensibility to Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 262. J. Whale, ‘Romantics, Explorers and Picturesque Travellers’, in S. Copley and P. Garside, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 176.

196

Notes

137. Ibid., p. 177. 138. D. Punter, ‘The Picturesque and the Sublime: Two Worldscapes’, in S. Copley and P. Garside, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque, p. 226. 139. Price’s essay constitutes a direct attack on Brown and his followers, especially Repton: ‘. . . he [Repton] is the very emblem of serpentine walks, belts, and rivers, and all of Mr. Brown’s works; like him they are smooth, flowing, even, and distinct; and like him they wear one’s soul out’. U. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, vol. I (London: Robson, 1795), p. 382. Knight’s purpose is wider than this, offering a critique of certain aspects of landscape gardening but then broadening the focus out (‘Knight divided The Landscape into three “books”, not one of which ends by drawing conclusions about landscape design. If, on the other hand, we read it as a poem about politics and religion . . . then it makes much more coherent sense.’ A. Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty, p. 191.): ‘To Cherish, not mow down, the weeds that creep / Along the shore, or overhang the steep; / To break, not level, the slow-rising ground, / And guard, not cut, the fern that shades it round’ (Book II, Lines 196–9); ‘What heart so savage, but must now deplore / The tides of blood that flow on Gallia’s shore! / What eye, but drops the unavailing tear / On the mild monarch’s melancholy bier!’ (Book III, Lines 401–4). R. P. Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem (London: Nicol, 1795). 140. A. Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty, p. 196. 141. M. Andrews, ed., The Picturesque, vol. I, p. 8. 142. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 13. 143. Ibid. 144. G. E. Mingay, ed., Arthur Young, pp. 6, 22. 145. T. Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 2–3. 146. A. Young, Tour in Ireland, p. 56. 147. Ibid., p. 67. 148. C. T. Bowden, A Tour through Ireland (Dublin: Corbet, 1791), pp. 192–3. 149. Ibid., pp. 158–60.

2 The post-Union traveller, 1800–1820 1. R. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 278. 2. M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 124. 3. C. Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 40. 4. Ibid., p. 16. 5. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 74–5. 6. ‘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

Notes

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

197

been of late, that the country itself should have been so little visited by travellers from Great Britain . . . It seems to have been blotted out of the geographical outline of European tours.’ G. Cooper, Letters on the Irish Nation: Written during a Visit to that Kingdom, in the Autumn of the Year 1799 (London: Davis, 1800), pp. ix–x. C. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: RKP, 1971), p. 1. R. Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (Dublin: Marchbank, 1801), p. v. R. Musgrave, Strictures upon an Historical Review of the State of Ireland (London: Rickaby, 1804), preface. Despite the scurrilous attack on Plowden, with the charge of bias sharpening the argument, Musgrave’s own work is described by one source as ‘so steeped in anti-Catholic prejudice as to be almost worthless historically’. Dictionary of National Biography. Although Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland is less than favourably disposed towards Ireland, its post-Union republication nevertheless suggests a desire to maximise knowledge about the country. Moreover, the version edited by Ware endured selective cutting and sanitising of the original, thereby making its inclusion a less than awkward gesture. For a fuller discussion, see A. Hadfield, ‘Another Case of Censorship: The Riddle of Edmund Spenser’s A View of The Present State of Ireland’, History Ireland (Summer, 1996). R. Colt Hoare, Journal of a Tour in Ireland (London: Miller, 1807), introduction. Ibid., pp. i–ii. Dictionary of National Biography. Giraldus Cambrensis [Gerald of Wales], The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. O’Meara (London: Penguin, 1982), pp. 101–2. R. Colt Hoare, Journal, p. xxi. P. Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 6. S. Céitinn [Geoffrey Keating], Foras Feasa ar Éirinn [The General History of Ireland] (Newry: Wilkinson, 1817), vol. I, p. ix. R. Colt Hoare, Journal, pp. ix–x. S. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 7. R. Colt Hoare, Journal, p. vi. Ibid., p. ii. Ibid., pp. iv–v. Ibid., pp. i–ii. Ibid., pp. 273, 251. Ibid., pp. 305–6. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., pp. 274, 277. J. C. Curwen, Observations on the State of Ireland (London: Baldwin, 1818), vol. I, p. 4. Sir J. Jervis White, A Brief View of the Past and Present State of Ireland (Bath: Wood, 1813), p. 1. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 33.

198

Notes

33. S. Barlow, The History of Ireland, From the Earliest Period to the Present; Embracing also a Statistical and Geographical Account of that Kingdom (London: Sherwood, 1814), vol. I, p. v. 34. Ibid., p. 16. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., vol. II, p. 313. 37. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), p. 3 38. See M. Daly, The Spirit of Earnest Inquiry: The Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 1847–1997 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1997). 39. D. Clarke, ‘Dublin Society’s Statistical Surveys’, Paper read before the Bibliographical Society of Ireland, 30th April, 1957 (Athlone: Athlone Printing, 1957), p. 3. 40. Sir J. Sinclair, The Statistical Account of Scotland, Drawn up from the Communications of the Ministers of the Different Parishes (Edinburgh: Creech, 1792), vol. III, p. xi. 41. Ibid., p. xii. 42. Ibid., p. xvi. 43. Although the Irish surveys may be seen as part of a project which predates both the Act of Union and the insurrection of 1798, the timing of their production nevertheless says much about the demand for increased knowledge about Ireland: ‘Though the Dublin Society realised the necessity for statistical surveys almost twenty years before, several considerations prevented it from carrying out its plan. In 1799 in a general petition to the Irish Parliament the Dublin Society, praying for a larger parliamentary grant, enumerated among other tasks the need for carrying out a statistical survey similar to that undertaken in Scotland and England. Parliament almost at the end of its independence and as a last gesture passed an act early in 1800 conveying to the Society a grant of £15,000 to enable it to carry out its many activities, and specifying that £1,500 “shall be applied by the Society in procuring agricultural examinations into all or any of the counties of this kingdom”.’ D. Clark, ‘Dublin Society’s Statistical Surveys’, pp. 3–4. 44. Robert Fraser (1760–1831) was born in Perthshire, the son of a local clergyman. Educated at Glasgow University he moved to London where he was employed by the Government on various statistical projects (Devon & Cornwall, 1794; Wicklow, 1801). Involved in efforts to improve Scottish fisheries and mines, especially in the western Isles and Highlands, he was also associated with the construction of the harbour at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire). 45. R. Fraser, General View of the Agriculture and Minerology, Present State and Circumstances of the County Wicklow (Dublin: Graisberry, 1801), introduction. 46. Although Fraser’s later survey of Wexford (1807) displays less enthusiasm than his survey of Wicklow, efforts to sell the region are nevertheless evident: ‘But, although metallic veins of ore have not hitherto been discovered to any great extent, it may not be unworthy to enquire, whether there is any such probability of the existence of such veins.’ R. Fraser, Statistical Survey of the County of Wexford (Dublin: Graisberry, 1807), p. 14. 47. R. Fraser, County Wicklow, introduction.

Notes

199

48. Minerological treasure is a constant theme with Fraser: ‘Even in this outline, abundant opportunities are pointed out, of the application of vast sums, in the skilful pursuit of the treasures contained under the surface of the earth.’ R. Fraser, Gleanings in Ireland; Particularly Respecting Its Agriculture, Mines, and Fisheries (London: Bulmer, 1802), pp. v–vi. 49. Even statistical accounts used for the purpose of attacking the Union still considered the development of information about Ireland a necessity: ‘No inquiry, perhaps, can be considered more important, in the present very eventful period of the British Empire, than an honest and impartial Statistical Account of Ireland.’ G. Barnes, A Statistical Account of Ireland, Founded on Historical Facts (Dublin: Gilbert, 1811), p. 3. 50. For a discussion of Newenham and his contribution to Irish political life, see H. D. Gribbon, ‘Thomas Newenham, 1762–1831’, in J. M. Goldstrom and L. A. Clarkson, eds, Irish Population, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). 51. T. Newenham, A Statistical and Historical Inquiry into the Progress and Magnitude of the Population of Ireland (London: Baldwin, 1805), p. i. 52. ‘A due consideration of the various facts which have been brought into view in the foregoing pages cannot, it is presumed, fail to impress every reader with the vast and increasing importance of Ireland in the political scale of the British empire: and to excite in every good, loyal, and patriotic man, the utmost solicitude for the continuance of internal tranquility in that country, manifestly qualified to furnish, in the greatest abundance, the means of sustaining the power of the United Kingdom amidst the momentous changes which Europe seems likely to undergo.’ T. Newenham, A Statistical and Historical Inquiry, p. 354. 53. T. Newenham, A Statistical and Historical Inquiry, p. ii. 54. Ibid., pp. iii–iv. 55. Ibid., p. 352. 56. Ibid., pp. 353–4. 57. T. Newenham, A View of the Natural, Political, and Commercial Circumstances of Ireland (London: Cadell, 1809), p. i. 58. Ibid., p. iii. 59. Ibid., p. vi. 60. Ibid., p. viii. 61. Ibid. 62. Charles Smith (1715–1762) was born in Waterford, took a medical degree at TCD, and practiced as an apothecary in Dungarvan. Smith devoted most of his time to historical and topographical research, and published histories of Waterford, Cork and Kerry in 1746, 1750 and 1756 respectively under the patronage of the Physico-Historical Society of Dublin (a forerunner of the Royal Irish Academy). 63. Daniel Augustus Beaufort (1739–1821) was educated at TCD, and ordained in 1763, succeeding his father, Daniel Cornelius, as Rector of Navan from 1765–1818. Publications include Memoir of a Map of Ireland (1792) and The Diocese of Meath (1797). One of the eighty-eight foundation members of the Royal Irish Academy, Beaufort was a reputedly lively contributor to Irish antiquarian studies. See C. C. Ellison, The Hopeful Traveller: The Life and Times of Daniel Augustus Beaufort (Kilkenny: Boethius, 1987), for a fond biography.

200 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97.

Notes T. Newenham, A View of the Natural, p. xv. Ibid., p. xvi. Ibid. Ibid., p. xv. Ibid. Ibid., p. 5. C. Batten, Pleasurable Instruction, p. 7. Although touching somewhat on Batten’s ideas, Pratt’s interest is largely in interpreting travel writing within the ‘overdetermined history of imperial meaning-making’, and not as a history of the form as such. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 4. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 51. J. Hall, Tour through Ireland; Particularly the Interior and Least Known Parts (London: Moore, 1813), vol. I, p. 1. ‘Mr Park . . . with whom I have the honour to be acqainted.’ J. Hall, Travels in Scotland, by an Unusual Route: With a Trip to the Orkneys and Hebrides. Containing Hints for Improvements in Agriculture and Commerce. With Characters and Anecdotes. Embellished with Views of Striking Objects, and a Map, Including the Caledonian Canal (London: Johnson, 1807), vol. I, p. 8. M. Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London: Bulmer, 1799). J. Hall, Tour, vol. I, p. 102. Ibid., p. 56. W. Sherman, ‘Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1720)’, in P. Hulme and T. Youngs, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 31. B. Korte, English Travel Writing, p. 8. The Annual Register (1807), p. 1015. J. Hall, Tour, vol. I, p. 132. Ibid., pp. 56–7. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 274. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 51, 107. Ibid., pp. 119, 222. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 85. J. Hall, The Blessings of Liberty and Peace; or, The Excellence of the British Constitution: A Sermon Preached at Ordeqhill on Thursday the 18th April 1793 (London: Cadell, 1793), p. 5. Ibid., p. 13. H. Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa (London: Colburn, 1812), vol., I, preface. Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London, 1988), p. 77. Mills’s assessment is worth some consideration in this regard: ‘However, as I have already noted, women writers are caught in a double-bind situation: if they tend towards the discourses of femininity in their work they are

Notes

98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118.

201

regarded as trivial, and if they draw on the more adventure hero type of narratives their work is questioned.’ S. Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 118. A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence in Ireland (London: Colburn, 1817), p. 9. S. Foster, Across New Worlds: Nineteenth-Century Women Travellers and Their Writings (London: Harvester, 1990), p. 342. A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, preface. ‘And yet it is a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any is under heaven, being stored throughout with many goodly rivers, replenished with all sorts of fish most abundantly, sprinkled with many very sweet islands and goodly lakes.’ A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, title page. A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, preface. S. Mills, Discourses of Difference, p. 95. Ibid., p. 82. A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, p. 145. Ibid., p. 146. ‘I am not aware that any theory [. . .] I have never observed [. . .] I am inclined to think [. . .] I would now take a comparative view [. . .] the most familiar examples with which I am acquainted.’ A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, pp. 146–7. S. Foster, Across New Worlds, p. 24. S. Mills, Discourses of Difference, p. 92. A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, p. 142. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 337, 338. Ibid., pp. 334–5. Ibid., p. 336. A. Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (London: Guilford, 1994), p. 114. A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, pp. 310–12. ‘Later friends included Anne Plumptre, Amelia Opie, the Wordsworths, and Lady Sydney Morgan, all known for their “Jacobinical” opinions at one time or another.’ N. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 29. The institutional amnesia concerning Plumptre is all the more unjust when we consider that the originally unpublished tour-notes by Plumptre’s brother, James, written in the 1790s as he travelled around Britain, have now been published: I. Ousby, ed., James Plumptre’s Britain: The Journals of a Tourist in the 1790s (London: Hutchinson, 1992). However, Plumptre’s writing undoubtedly provoked a varied response. Even allowing for a private animus, Dr. Barrett, a Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, whom she described as a ‘very remarkable character, in whom a passion for books and learning rises above another very prevailing feature, the love of money’ (Narrative of a Residence, p. 20) sought revenge in the most punishing, if obvious, of ways, but also raised doubts about the entirety of her project: ‘I put upon the library and witnessed in both catalogues the 4 volumes sent in by [?] last Saturday with the exception of Miss Anne Plumptre’s Narrative, which I hope the Board will order to be locked up as too silly and too

202

Notes ill-mannered for a public library. Hospitably entertained by the goodnatured blundering Irish and introduced (perhaps for the first time) into good company, she takes care to let the World know it by publishing all the little teatable talk they had indulged in to amuse her, and many of whom are now blushing at seeing it embodied in a pompous quarto illustrated with engravings. Travel in savage countries, Miss Anne, and publish their conversations if you care, but spare the feelings of those who are accustomed to the rules and decencies of civilized life.’ Extract from Dr. Barrett’s ‘Minutes of the Library’, September of 1817, attached to A. Plumptre, Narrative of a Residence, Trinity College Dublin, pp. ii, 29.

3 Trekking to downfall, 1820–1850 1. J. Buzzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), pp. 19, 83–4. 2. I. Ousby, ed., James Plumptre’s Britain: The Journals of a Tourist in the 1790s (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 13. 3. N. Nicholson, The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists (London: Hale, 1955), p. 109. Nicholson also quotes from Plumptre’s satire, mentioned above: ‘I have made the church an old abbey, the house a castle, and the battery a hermitage. I have broken the smooth surface of the water with water-lillies, flags, flowering rushes, water-docks, and other aquatics, making it more of a plashy inundation than a basin of water . . . I think . . . an orange sky, yellow water, a blue bank, a green castle, and brown trees, will give it a very fine aspect.’ Nicholson concludes, ‘It is not surprising that such heavy-handed dialogue was rejected by both Covent Garden and the Haymarket, but it is interesting, nevertheless, to find so many aspects of the fashion satirized at so early a date.’ N. Nicholson, The Lakers, p. 111. 4. N. Nicholson, The Lakers, p. 76. 5. T. Kitson Cromwell, The Irish Tourist, or Excursions through Ireland: Historical and Descriptive Sketch of the Past and Present State of Ireland (London: Longman, 1820), vol. II, p. 145. 6. Ibid., pp. 147–8. 7. Several travellers reported a sense of difference similar to the one evoked by Kitson Cromwell. See, for example, ‘An English Protestant’, Three Months in Ireland (1827), pp. 44–5. 8. J. Glasford, Notes of Three Tours in Ireland, in 1824 and 1826 (Bristol: Strong, 1832), p. 313. 9. Ibid., p. 322. 10. Ibid., p. 323. 11. J. E. Bicheno, Ireland and Its Economy; Being the Result of Observations Made in a Tour through the Country in the Autumn of 1829 (London: Murray, 1830), p. 7. 12. Ibid., pp. viii–ix. 13. G. Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine 1798–1848 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2003), pp. 58–9. 14. Ibid., p. 60. 15. J. E. Bicheno, Ireland and Its Economy, p. 1.

Notes

203

16. J. Vaughan, The English Guide Book, c1780–1870 (London: David & Charles, 1974), pp. 62–4. 17. B. Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 79. 18. Sir J. Fox Burgoyne, Ireland in 1831: Letters on the State of Ireland (London: Bain, 1831), p. 3. 19. Ibid., p. 4. 20. ‘The Act of Union was, like much other legislation, an act of miscalculations. Born of fears – of French invasion, of revolution, of social leveling, and of what a frightened peasantry or an embattled and hysterical ruling class might undertake in terror – it appeared to offer a release on every side from current pressures.’ O. MacDonagh, Ireland: The Union and Its Aftermath (London: Allen, 1977), p. 16. 21. Sir J. Fox Burgoyne, Ireland in 1831, p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 5. 23. N. Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 23. 24. Ibid., p. 44. 25. Ibid. 26. C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 4. 27. Sir J. Fox Burgoyne, Ireland in 1831, p. 9. 28. Ibid., p. 13. 29. Ibid., p. 22. 30. J. Glasford, Notes of Three Tours in Ireland, p. 313. 31. Ibid., p. 325. 32. C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, p. 11. 33. H. D. Inglis, A Journey throughout Ireland, during the Spring, Summer and Autumn of 1834 (London: Whittaker, 1834), vol. I, p. 2. 34. Ibid., dedication. 35. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 36. Ibid., p. 396. 37. J. Barrow, A Tour round Ireland, through the Sea-Coast Counties, in the Autumn of 1835 (London: Murray, 1836), pp. 135, 178. 38. Ibid., pp. 303–4. 39. Ibid., pp. 121, 248. 40. Ibid., p. 152. 41. Ibid., p. 168. 42. The perspective offered, however, may also reflect a simply less censorious attitude on the part of (the Irish) Maclise himself. 43. The Edinburgh Review (April, 1833), pp. 248–9. 44. Baptist W. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour through the Midland Counties of Ireland, in the Summer of 1836 (London: Nisbet, 1837), p. 1. 45. Ibid., p. 3. 46. Ibid., p. 247. 47. Ibid., p. 248. 48. J. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 92.

204

Notes

49. R. Shannan Peckham, ‘The Exoticism of the Familiar and the Familiarity of the Exotic: Fin-de-siècle Travellers to Greece’, in J. Duncan and D. Gregory, eds, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 173. 50. M. Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 196. 51. Ibid., pp. 208–9. 52. Ibid., p. 209. 53. Ibid., p. 14. 54. L. Ritchie, Ireland Picturesque and Romantic (London: Longman, 1837), vol. I, p. 3. 55. Ibid., p. 5. 56. Sir G. Head, A Home Tour through Various Parts of the United Kingdom (London: Murray, 1837), advertisement to the reader. 57. Ibid., p. 203. 58. L. Ritchie, Ireland Picturesque, vol. I, pp. 5–6. 59. M. Beames, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 161. 60. Ibid., p. 162. 61. J. Binns, The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland (London: Longman, 1837), vol. II, pp. 413–16. 62. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 293–4. 63. Ibid., p. 142. 64. Ibid., p. 3. 65. R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 154. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., p. 155. 68. ‘Very few of those whom I addressed could speak English; but some of the men about, seeing the disadvantages under which I laboured, very obligingly stepped forward, and offered assistance as interpreters.’ J. Binns, The Miseries and Beauties, vol. I, p. 374. 69. ‘The Bog of Allen, nearly in the centre of which I was standing, is one vast and level expanse . . . The sun was setting in a sky of cloudless and golden beauty . . . This gorgeous illumination was one of those things which are more frequently met with in the records of poetry, than in the experiences of actual life.’ J. Binns, The Miseries and Beauties, vol. II, p. 33. 70. J. Binns, The Miseries and Beauties, vol. I, p. 207. 71. Ibid., p. 261. 72. Ibid., p. 339. 73. Ibid., vol. II, p. 61. 74. W. Makepeace Thackeray, The Paris Sketch Book; the Irish Sketch Book; and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (London: Smith, 1883), p. 558. 75. Ibid., p. 547. 76. A. Bourke, The Visitation of God? The Potato and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), p. 129. 77. Ibid., p. 143. 78. ‘The epidemic broke out at an awkward time for the learned societies. Some, like the Société Royale et Centrale d’Agriculture of Paris, were summoned back by ministerial demand from their summer holidays to urgent special

Notes

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

205

sessions; the remainder made up for lost time when they reassembled in the autumn . . . But it was the pamphleteers who had the real field day. An eruption of brochures broke out all over Europe, written by physicians, surgeons, botanists, noblemen, pharmaceutical and other chemists, geologists, excisemen, gardeners and accountants.’ A. Bourke, The Visitation, pp. 140–1. A. Bourke, The Visitation, pp. 143–4, 146. Ibid., p. 144. W. Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (London: Gilpin, 1847), p. v. For very useful commentary on Bennett, see M. Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine 1845–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). W. Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey, p. vii. Ibid., pp. v–vi, vi–vii. Ibid., p. vii. A. Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, ed., M. Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput, 1998), p. 13. Ibid., pp. 54–5. W. Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey, pp. 25–7. R. B. Goodbody, Quaker Relief Work in Ireland’s Great Hunger (Kendal: Quaker Tapestry Booklets, 1995), p. 7. See also R. B. Goodbody, A Suitable Channel: Quaker Relief in the Great Famine (Bray: Pale Publishing, 1995), and Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland in 1846 and 1847 [exact facsimile reprint of the first edition, 1852] (Dublin: Burke, 1996). The order of personnel involved is as follows. The first letter, titled ‘A Letter from Joseph Crosfield, Containing a Narrative of the First Week of William Forster’s Visit to Some of the Distressed Districts in Ireland’, describes the first week of Forster’s journey. The second, by James Hack Tuke, deals with weeks two to four, Tuke meeting up with Forster at the workhouse in Carrick-on-Shannon. The third letter, by Sims, covers weeks five and six, while the fourth letter, by Forster junior, who joined the party at Westport, is dated 18–26 January 1847. J. Crosfield, Narrative of the First Week of William Forster’s Visit to Some of the Distressed Districts of Ireland (London: Newman, 1847), p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. J. Hack Tuke, Narrative of the Second, Third, and Fourth Weeks of William Forster’s Visit to Some of the Distressed Districts in Ireland (London: Newman, 1847), p. 3. Rev. J. East, Glimpses of Ireland in 1847 (London: Hamilton, 1847), pp. 17–18. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 33–4. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 124. A. Somerville, Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847, ed., K. D. M. Snell (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), pp. 28–9.

206

Notes

103. Ibid., p. 31. Although the 1848 insurrection ended in dismal failure at Widow McCormack’s garden, these were nevertheless years of growing nationalist awareness. 104. J. Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847 (London: Gilpin, 1847), p. 8. 105. Ibid., p. 28. 106. T. N. Corns and D. Loewenstein, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of Quaker Writing’, in T. N. Corns and D. Loewenstein, eds, The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Cass, 1995), p. 1. 107. N. Smith, ‘Hidden Things Brought to Light: Enthusiasm and Quaker Discourse’, in T. N. Corns and D. Loewenstein, eds, The Emergence of Quaker Writing, p. 57. 108. N. H. Keeble, ‘The Politic and the Polite in Quaker Prose: The Case of William Penn’, in T. N. Corns and D. Loewenstein, eds, The Emergence of Quaker Writing, p. 114. 109. Ibid. 110. H. E. Hatton, The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland, 1654– 1921 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), pp. 96–7. 111. The Quarterly Review (September, 1849), p. 562. 112. S. T. Hall, Life and Death in Ireland, as Witnessed in 1849 (Manchester: Parkes, 1850), p. 1. 113. Ibid., p. 120. 114. S. Godolphin Osborne, Gleanings in the West of Ireland (London: Boone, 1850), p. 16. For fuller discussion of Osborne, see M. Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997). 115. S. T. Hall, Life and Death in Ireland, p. 90. 116. S. Godolphin Osborne, Gleanings in the West of Ireland, p. 79.

4 Travelling to write, 1850–1860 1. A. Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism (London: Guilford, 1994), p. 17. 2. T. Carlyle, Reminiscences of My Irish Journey, ed., J. A. Froude (London: Sampson Low, 1882), p. vi. 3. Ibid., p. 127. 4. W. Bulloch Webster, Ireland Considered as a Field for Investment or Residence (Dublin: Hodges, 1852), preface. 5. Ibid., pp. 45–6. 6. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 208. 7. W. Bulloch Webster, Ireland Considered, p. 5. 8. Ibid., pp. iii–iv. 9. Ibid., p. 36. 10. Ibid., p. 5. 11. G. Preston White, Three Suggestions for the Investment of Capital (London: Trelawney, 1851), p. 3. 12. Ibid., A Tour in Connemara with Remarks on Its Great Physical Abilities (Dublin: McGlashan, 1851), p. xiii.

Notes 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

207

Ibid., p. xii. A. Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism, p. 32. W. Bulloch Webster, Ireland Considered, pp. i, viii. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 40. S. Jackman, Galloping Head: The Life of the Right Honourable Sir Francis Bond Head, Bart, P.C., 1793–1875 Late Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (London: Phoenix, 1958), p. 50. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 154. Ibid., p. 153. F. Bond Head, A Fortnight in Ireland (London: Murray, 1852), p. 5. S. Jackman, Galloping Head, p. 51. F. Bond Head, A Fortnight in Ireland, p. 227. Ibid., pp. 187–97. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., pp. 212–13. Ibid., pp. 142–3. Ibid., pp. 129, 134, 208, 229. H. Coulter, The West of Ireland: Its Existing Condition and Prospects (London: Hurst, 1862), notice to the reader, p. 2. Sir D. Neave, Four Days in Connemara (London: Murray, 1852), p. 51. F. Bond Head, A Fortnight in Ireland, p. 100. Ibid., p. 108. C. R. Weld, Vacations in Ireland (London: Longmans, 1857), p. 357. F. Bond Head, A Fortnight in Ireland, p. 36. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 33. Although more concerned with the modern connections between journalism and travel writing, a lively discussion is nevertheless offered by P. Holland and G. Huggan in Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), especially pp. 1–27. See, also, D. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). John Forbes, Memorandums Made in Ireland in the Autumn of 1852 (London: Smith, 1853), vol. I, pp. 259–60. H. Martineau, Letters from Ireland, ed., G. Hooper (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2001), pp. 90–1. Martineau, especially, was very clear about just how improved Ireland could be, and what potential existed, but was also never less than outspoken as to its limitations: ‘The western coast of Ireland is very beautiful . . . But a few days are enough. A few days of observation of how the people live, merely by our going to see them, are sad enough to incline one to turn away, and never come again.’ H. Martineau, Letters, p. 115. The concept of ‘home’ is, of course, a notoriously complex category, not just because our sense of what it implies is rarely shared by others, or because it can be frustrated or overridden by attachments to region or community, but because in the case of a place such as Ireland the category presents more

208

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Notes than the usual number of challenges, especially to British narrators. For a fuller, more sustained discussion, see R. Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See, also, J. Childers, ‘At Home in the Empire’, in M. Baumgarten and H. M. Daleski, eds, Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (New York: AMS, 1998), pp. 215–27. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon in Ireland; or, The Rambles of an Englishman in Search of a Settlement in the West of Ireland (London: Murray, 1852), preface. The oak tree acts as a quintessentially ‘English’ motif, and within the context of Ashworth’s text reinforces the appropriate national and gender priorities. William Shenstone, for example, refers to the oak as ‘the perfect image of the manly character: in former times I should have said, and in present times I think I am authorised to say, the British one’. T. Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 128. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon in Ireland, pp. 4–6. Ibid., p. 104. J. Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847 (London: Gilpin, 1847), p. 196. Quarterly Review (December, 1851), p. 196. Ibid. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., preface. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Dublin always featured as part of any traveller’s itinerary, not just because most people arrived at Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), a few miles away, and because it was the instinct among many to compare Dublin with London, but Dublin was also used as a cultural marker to set against the Irish countryside, which was regarded as potentially dangerous, if topographically rich. Although Ashworth’s hasty departure for the western seaboard, and his focus on a very particular region in the west is a little unusual, it does give his text an immediacy of purpose that not all travellers convey. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, p. 52 T. Miller, The Agricultural and Social State of Ireland in 1858, Being the Experience of Englishmen and Scotchmen Who Have Settled in Ireland . . . With an Appendix, Consisting of Letters from Scotch and English Proprietors and Farmers Resident in Ireland (Dublin: Thom, 1858), p. 10. T. Miller, The Agricultural and Social State, pp. 10–11. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, p. 115. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., pp. 114–15. See W. A. McCutcheon, ‘The Transport Revolution: Canals and River Navigations’, in K. B. Nowlan, ed., Travel and Transport in Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973).

Notes

209

65. ‘In 1842 there was a total of only 31 1/4 miles of railway in Ireland. By 1850 a total of 700 miles of railway was open or under construction . . . A railway map of the year 1852 shows that the basic structure of the Irish railways system had been created by then except for the routes to the north west of Connaught and to Wexford.’ K. B. Nowlan, ‘The Transport Revolution: The Coming of the Railways’, in K. B. Nowlan, ed., Travel and Transport, pp. 98, 101–2. 66. J. B. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge and Power’, in S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, eds, The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 278. 67. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, p. 155. 68. Ibid., p. 140. 69. Ibid., pp. 140–1. 70. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 104. 71. Ibid., pp. 202, 205. 72. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, p. 46. 73. Ibid., p. 39. 74. Ibid., pp. 98–102. 75. Ibid., p. 34. 76. Fraser’s Magazine (August, 1851), p. 223. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., p. 224. 79. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, pp. 71–2. 80. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 217. 81. Ibid., p. 150. 82. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, p. 97. 83. Ainsworth’s Magazine (25, 1854), p. 395. 84. Ibid., p. 409. 85. J. Hervey Ashworth, The Saxon, p. 250. 86. Ibid., p. 104. 87. Ibid., p. 106. 88. Ibid., p. 108. 89. Ibid., pp. 260–1. 90. Ibid., pp. 230–1 91. H. Martineau, Letters, p. 149. 92. Ibid., Autobiography (London: Smith, 1877), vol. I, p. 160. 93. Ibid., Ireland: A Tale, ed., R. L. Wolff (New York: Garland, 1979), pp. vi–vii. 94. Ibid., Autobiography (London: Virago, 1983), vol. I, p. 171. 95. ‘Miss Martineau has, we are most willing to acknowledge, talents which might make her a useful and an agreeable writer. But the best advice we can give her is, to burn all the little books she has as yet written, with one or two exceptions.’ Quarterly Review (49, 1833), p. 151. 96. H. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. II, p. 406. 97. Ibid., Selected Letters, ed., V. Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 125. 98. Texts discussed are Society in America (1837), Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), and Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848). 99. See D. David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), and S. Hunter, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995).

210

Notes

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

H. Martineau, Autobiography (London: Smith, 1877), vol. II, p. 407. Westminster Review (3, 1853), p. 35. A. Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism, p. 19. Quarterly Review (76, 1845), pp. 98–9. S. Foster, Across New Worlds, p. 8. See the very useful J. McAuliffe, ‘Women’s Travel Writing in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ireland’, in M. Kelleher and J. H. Murphy, eds, Gender Perspectives in 19th Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997). H. Martineau, Autobiography, ed., G. Weiner (London: Virago, 1983), vol. I, p. xv. Ibid., Society in America (London: Saunders, 1837), vol. I, p. 199. Ibid., Letters, pp. 65, 67. Ibid., pp. 67, 68. Ibid., p. 103. V. Sanders, Reason over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel (Sussex: Harvester, 1986), p. 168. Ibid., p. xiii. H. Martineau, Letters, p. 108. In an article for The Westminster Review (April, 1854), Martineau declares her admiration for the census along similar lines. However, an important aspect of the article is the manner in which she looks at census figures, indeed the accumulation of statistical information generally, as inherently beneficial, a classificatory gesture that was to be replayed throughout much of the nineteenth century. Thomas Drummond (1797–1840) was a Scots engineer who invented the limelight as well as an improved version of the heliostat. He was appointed Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle (1835), and is mainly remembered for helping to reform the Irish police, and opposing the excesses of the Orange Order. For further discussion, see M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, Thomas Drummond and the Government of Ireland 1835–41 (Dublin: National University of Ireland, 1977). John Frederick Hodges (1823–1899) was Professor of Agriculture at Queen’s College (now University), Belfast, Director of the ChemicoAgricultural Society of Ulster, and taught medical jurisprudence in a career spanning 50 years. Among his publications is What Science Can Do for the Irish Farmer: Being an Introductory Lecture on Agricultural Chemistry (Dublin: Curry, 1844). H. Martineau, Letters, pp. 33–4. Ibid., p. 30. ‘Ultimately, Martineau’s “solutions” to the situations in Ireland and India centered on education and entrepreneurial capitalism, which she thought the British had a responsibility to promote in both countries. It was the rationalist argument that science, knowledge and disciplined economic behaviour would save inhabitants in both cases from the crises and conflicts generated, she thought, by traditional culture.’ S. Hoecker-Drysdale, Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist (New York: Berg, 1992), p. 122. H. Martineau, Letters, p. 26.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115.

116.

117. 118. 119.

120.

Notes

211

121. Little psychoanalytic effort is necessary, I believe, to follow the trajectory in Martineau’s mind between the colour green, slime and an unfettered Irish peasantry. 122. H. Martineau, Letters, p. 31. 123. Ibid., p. 42. 124. Ibid., p. 56. 125. Ibid., p. 69. 126. Ibid., p. 74. 127. Ibid., p. 75. 128. Ibid., pp. 39, 100, 107.

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Index accessibilty, 142, 147, 151, 161 Achill, 166, 176, 188 Act of Union, 4, 5, 9, 59, 61, 64, 75, 100 advancement, 75, 183 economic, 75 scientific, 183 aesthetic(s), 55 of distance, 111, 112 and ideology, 167 picturesque, 54 sensationist, 26 of time, 112 Africa, 105 agriculturalists, scientific, 184 agriculture, 16, 17, 43, 47, 114, 130 Ainsworth’s Magazine, 170 Aitchison, Cara et al, 32 alienation, 89 Andrews, Malcolm, 12, 13, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33, 54 Anglo-Irish relations, 60, 61, 84, 86, 109 Anglo-Irish relationship, 4, 61, 102, 184 Annual Register, 85 antiquarian studies, 62 antiquarianism, 99 antiquities, 69 Antrim, 91, 185 appropriation, 65, 69, 84 Aran islands, 187 archaeological sites, 121 architecture, 55, 57, 91 Armagh, 16 art(s), 55, 57 Ashworth, John Hervey, 3, 8–9, 157–62, 164, 165, 166–8, 170–2, 173, 185 The Saxon in Ireland, 8, 157, 168, 169 Asia, 121

assimilation, 84 Athlone, 82 attitudes to Ireland, British, 142 Australia, 105, 169 authority, 55, 68, 73, 168 imperial, 154 interpretive, 146 of the map, 151, 166 availability of Ireland, 75, 77, 169, 170 Baedeker, 107, 108 Bagenal, Sir Henry, 27 Ballinasloe, 187 Ballycanvan, 48 Ballycroy mountain, 166 Ballyshannon, 117 Bantry Bay, 59 Barlow, Stephen, 70–2 The History of Ireland . . . , 70 Barrell, John, 120 Barrow, John, 116–19 A Tour round Ireland . . . , 116 Batten, Charles, 60, 61, 82 Beames, Michael, 16, 124 Beaufort, Daniel Augustus, 80 beauty, 53, 124, 167 Bective, Lord, 48 Belfast, 82, 176, 185, 186, 187 Belfast Social Inquiry Society, 183 Belleisle, 48 Belmullet, 133, 140–1 Bennett, William, 131–2, 133, 137, 139, 143 Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland, 131 Betham, Matilda, 92 Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country, 92 Betham, Sir William, 92 Bicheno, J. E., 104–7 Ireland and Its Economy, 104 219

220

Index

Big House, the, 25 Bigelow, Andrew, 102, 107 Leaves from a Journal, 101 Binns, Jonathan, 124–8 The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 124, 125 Black, Jeremy, 23, 31, 57 Blunt, Alison, 98, 144, 149, 177 bog(s), 27–9, 157, 162, 185 of Allen, 187 Bohls, Elizabeth, 49, 50–1 Bolt, Christine, 61 Victorian Attitudes to Race, 61 border crossings, 121 Bourke, Austin, 129, 130 Bowden, Charles Topham, 57 Boyne Castle, 88 Bray, 32 Brighton, 32 Britain, Ireland’s relationship to, 58, 76, 77, 78 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 183 British Empire, 7, 81 British Museum, 72 ‘Briton’, 121 Brown, Capability, 37, 53, 54 Brown, John, 30, 37, 53–4 A Description of the Lake at Keswick, 30 Burgoyne, Sir John Fox, 6, 109–11, 113, 114 Ireland in 1831: Letters on the State of Ireland, 109 Burke, Edmund, 3, 13, 18, 25, 26, 42, 54 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 13, 18 Burney, Fanny, 92 Bush, John, 3, 4, 17–19, 20, 21–3, 24, 25–9, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 48, 51, 53, 58, 143 Hibernia Curiosa, 17, 18 Bush’s editor, 19–20 Buzzard, James, 100 Byron, Lord Don Juan, 108

canals, 150, 165, 183 capital, 80, 149, 152, 156, 159, 167, 183 speculative, 75, 146 capitalism, European, 81 Cardinal, Roger, 33 Carlyle, Thomas, 145 Reminiscences of My Irish Journey, 145 Carr, John, 94 Carrick-on-Shannon, 135 Carrickfergus, 172 Carrigugulla, 125 Castlebar, 154, 188 Castleconnell, 32 Catholic Defenders society, 16 Catholic emancipation, 6, 102, 107, 114, 115 Catholicism, English, 62 Céitinn, Seathrun, 66–7 Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, 66 The General History of Ireland, 66 Celtic fringe, 88, 112 Celtic Ireland, 69 census figures, 145, 183, 185 Central Relief Committee, 134 Chard, Chloe, 113, 115 Charlemont, Lord, 49 Chatterton, Henrietta, 178 Rambles in the South of Ireland, 178 Chemico-Agricultural Society of Ulster, 183 Claddagh, 154, 155, 185, 187 Clancarty, Lord, 187 Clare, 142 Clifden, 8, 154, 156, 168 Clonmel, 88 Clothworker’s estates, 186 Co. Armagh, 76 Co. Clare, 157, 185 Co. Cork, 48, 59 Co. Donegal, 76, 158, 184 Co. Down, 76, 91 Co. Dublin, 47, 76 Co. Galway, 48, 155, 161, 170, 172, 176, 185, 187 Co. Kildare, 76, 82, 83, 187 Co. Kilkenny, 76 Co. Laois, 51 Co. Leitrim, 76

Index 221 Co. Londonderry, 9, 76, 183 Co. Mayo, 59, 76, 118, 155, 158, 166, 185 Co. Meath, 76 Co. Roscommon, 76 Co. Sligo, 76 Co. Tipperary, 48, 51 Co. Tyrone, 76 Co. Waterford, 48, 82 Co. Wexford, 76, 82, 83 Co. Wicklow, 4, 25, 27, 74, 76, 91, 111 Coleraine, 184, 186, 188 Coleridge, 101 Diary of a Tour to the Lake District, 101 Colley, Linda, 122 colonial endeavour, 169 colonial enterprise, 93 colonialism, 93 colonies, 158, 160, 164 commodification of Ireland, 93 communications, 147, 164, 165, 171 Cong, 165 Connaught, 8, 20, 27, 118, 140 Connemara, 118, 176 constabulary, see policing contamination, 138 context, 53 control, 8, 15, 38, 39, 40, 54, 65, 68, 72, 124, 155 Cook, Thomas, 32, 108 Cork, 33, 51, 137 Corns and Loewenstein, 141 Cosgrove, Denis, 55 cottier farming, 47 Coulter, Henry, 154 The West of Ireland, 154 country house, the, 25 county survey, 5 Cox, Richard, 65, 66 crisis, political, 108, 109, 124 Cromwell, Kitson, 6 Crookhaven, 137 Crosfield, Joseph, 135 Culloden, 14, 15 culture high, 55 Irish, 119, 152 of Europe, 121

curiosity, 18 Curragh of Kildare, 69 Curwen, J. C. Observations on the State of Ireland, 69 customs of the Irish, 17, 57 Daily News, 174, 175 danger, 86, 115 Daniels, Stephen, 55 David, Deirdre Intellectual Women, 175 Dawson Court, 52 de Montalt, Lord, 48 De Quincey, 101 Defoe, Daniel A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 29 Denholm, James A Tour to the Principal Scotch and English Lakes, 101 depopulation, 145, 147, 149 Derry, 185, 187, 189 destitution, 127, 137 development, industrial, 156 Devonshire, Duke of, 125 Dickens, Charles, 126, 127, 174 Dickson, David, 17 disappointment, 110, 172 discourse(s) colonial, 82 epistemological, 61 masculinist, of mastery, 38 of femininity, 94, 95, 96 patriarchal, 91 picturesque and tourist, 116 Quaker, 133 settler, 157 sexualised, 40 disguise, 87, 88 Doyle, Laura, 12 Drummond, Alexander, 183 Dublin, 16, 20, 25, 43, 49, 50, 51, 69, 82, 91, 92, 116, 122, 125–6, 127, 134, 137, 140, 142, 158, 161, 165, 173, 175, 186, 187 Dublin Society, 5, 73–6, 77, 78, 80 Dubliner(s), 49 Duncan and Gregory, 22 Dundalk, 48

222

Index

Dundrum, 48 Dungarvan, 125 Dunkettle, 48 Durrow, 51 Eagleton, Terry, 24, 25 The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 24 East, Rev. John, 136–9, 143 Glimpses of Ireland in 1847, 136 Eastlake, Lady, 178 economy global, 80 world, 81 Edgeworthstown, 82 Edinburgh Review, 119 education, 186 emigration, 104, 145, 147, 159, 164, 176, 182, 183, 188 empathy, 128 empire, 61, 62, 77, 79, 84, 85, 122, 147, 148, 155, 157, 179 British, 69, 70, 72, 73, 81, 104, 110, 125 employment, female, 180 enclosure(s), 16, 50 enfranchisement of Catholics, 76 England, 121 English Ethnological Society, 61 Englishness, 128 Enniskillen, 82, 88 Enniskillen, Earl of, 116 Ennistymon, 188 entertainment, 31 Erris, 159, 188 Established Church, 180 estate improvement(s), 47, 49, 53, 55 estate management, 184, 186 Europe, continental, 100, 112, 116, 123 exploitation, 7, 9 exploration, 54, 149 fact-gathering, 71, 81 fantasy, 157, 169 farmers, English, 183 farming methods, 4, 55, 184 fiction, 66, 106, 110, 116, 126, 143, 181

Fishmonger’s Company, 186 Florence Court, 116 Forbes, John, 156, 157 Memorandums Made in Ireland, 156 ‘foreign’, 114, 115 Forster, William, 134–5, 140, 141 Forster, William Edward, 135 Foster, Shirley, 95, 96, 178 Fox, Charles, 174 France, 89, 91, 92, 93 Ireland’s relationship to, 59 Fraser, Robert, 74, 76, 81 Fraser’s Magazine, 168 Froude, James, 145 Fulford, Tim, 55 Furniss, Tom, 24, 25 Gamble, John A View of Society, 69 gaze male, 39 subject-controlling, 38 German philosophical tradition, 24 Giant’s Causeway, 95, 96 Gilpin, William, 30, 31, 35, 42, 104 Observations on Several Parts of the Counties of Cambridge . . . , 42 Observations on the River Wye, 30, 31, 42 Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England, 42 Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1776, on Several Parts of Great Britain, Particularly the High-Lands of Scotland, 42 Tour of Scotland, 12 Tour of the Wye Valley, 12 Giraldus Cambrensis, 5, 63, 64, 65, 68 Expugnatio Hibernica, 65 Topographia Hiberniae, 65 Glasford, James, 104, 114 Notes of Three Tours in Ireland, in 1824 and 1826, 103 Glendalough, 122 gold, 75, 148

Index 223 Gold and Gold, 14, 15 Grand Tour, 11–12, 13, 18, 40–2, 57, 115, 121 Grant, Anne Letters from the Mountains, 42 Gray, Thomas, 30 Journal in the Lakes, 30 Great Famine, 3, 6, 7, 9, 110, 129–43, 144, 145, 162, 165, 167, 172, 177, 179, 180, 183, 185, 188 Greece, 120–1 Greenboys, 16 guidebook(s), 107–8, 122 hagiography, 66 Hall, Reverend James, 3, 5, 82–90, 91, 97, 106, 152 Tour through Ireland, Particularly the Interior and Least Known Parts, 82, 84 Travels in Scotland, 83 Hall, Spencer T., 142–3 Life and Death in Ireland, as Witnessed in 1849, 142 hardship, 131, 133 Harley, J. B., 166 Hatton, Helen, 135 Head, Francis Bond, 7, 123, 150–4, 155, 156, 157 Fortnight in Ireland, 151 Rough Notes Taken during Some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas, 151 Head, Sir George, 123–4 A Home Tour through Various Parts of the United Kingdom, 123 Forest Scenes and Incidents in the Wilds of North America, 123 Headfort, 48 Heuston, John, 32 historians, 66 history, writing of, 66, 80 history/ies of Ireland, 62, 67, 71, 72 Hoare, Sir Richard Colt, 5, 64, 65, 66, 67–9, 70, 82, 94, 105, 121 A Classical Tour through Italy and Sicily, 64 Recollections Abroad, 64 The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales . . . , 64

Tour in Ireland, 63, 64, 65 Tour through the Isle of Elbe, 64 Hodges, John Frederick, 183 Hogarth, William, 36, 37 Holinshed, Raphael, 65 Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 63 ‘home’, 98, 144, 150, 157 Home Tour, 3, 12, 14, 17, 42, 44, 57, 104, 108, 112, 113, 115, 157 Housman, John A Descriptive Tour and Guide to the Lakes, 101 hunger, 124, 138 Hunt, Frederick Knight, 174 Hunter, Shelagh Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism, 175 Hutton, Arthur Wollaston, 45, 46 identity, British, 121 ideology, unionist, 88 ignorance of Ireland, 61, 69, 77, 81 imperial incorporation, 149 imperial intervention, 150 improvement(s), Irish, 57, 77, 78, 89, 109, 156, 162, 173, 176, 179, 183, 184, 186, 187 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 92 incompetence, 66 India Survey, 73 industry, 186 information, 61, 63, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 83, 88, 118, 132, 135, 149, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 161 Inglis, Henry David, 115–16 A Journey throughout Ireland, 115 Narrative of a Journey through Norway, Sweden and the Islands of Denmark, 115 Tales of the Ardennes, 115 inns, 23 insecurity, 70 institutionalisation, 154, 155 insurgents, 124 insurrection, 59, 75, 88, 125 integration, 70 interpretation, 87, 152

224

Index

invasions, medieval, 65 investment, 145, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156, 162, 167, 184, 186 investor(s), 3, 146, 150, 157, 158, 162, 165 Irish, the, 97, 102, 110, 119, 122, 148, 152, 171, 186 ancient, 121 native, 65, 87, 96, 114, 118, 120, 127, 145, 164 peasant, 133 Irish Emancipation movement, 182 Irish Poor Inquiry, 127 Italy, 123 Jackman, Sydney, 151 jails, 156 Johnson, Samuel, 104 Tour of Scotland, 12 Johnstown, 51 journalists, 7 Kaplan, Cora, 91 Keating, Geoffrey, see Céitinn, Seathrun Keeble, N. H., 141 Kilkee, 32 Kilkenny, 57 Killala, 59 Killaloe, 120 Killarney, 4, 33, 82, 117, 120, 129, 176 Kilmoe, 137 Kilrush, 188 Kingsley, Mary, 93, 149 Travels in West Africa, 93 Kingstown, 110, 122, 127 Kitson Cromwell, Thomas, 102–3, 104, 105, 107 Excursions through Britain, 102 The Irish Tourist, 101 Knight, Richard Payne, 53 The Landscape: A Didactic Poem, 54 knowledge, 65, 68, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 81, 93, 152, 154, 156, 188 of Ireland, 63, 64 and power, 150 for power paradigm, 70 statistical, 74

Korte, Barbara, 12, 46, 84, 108 Kotzebue, Augustus von, 91, 92, 99 labour cheap, 147, 164 low-cost, 7 masculine and feminine, 180 labourer(s), the Irish, 102, 148, 150 Lake District, English, 12, 29, 30, 101, 104, 125 lakes of Ireland, 30, 31 of Killarney, 33, 36, 38, 109, 112 land available, 147 cheap, 145 owning, 55 landholder, 58 landlordism, 21 landlords, 22, 176 absentee, 21, 89 settled, 21 landowners, 48, 50 landscape, 55, 121, 157, 165 aestheticisation, 101 appreciation, 41, 53, 167, 187 English, 74 Irish, 103, 150, 152, 166 language, 68, 69, 78, 89, 96, 97, 133–4, 135 painting, 50 people as part of, 120 picturesque aestheticisation, 50 proto-anthropological, 102 reinvention, 169 Lansdowne, First Marquis, 47 Larne, 186 lawlessness, 124 Leask, Nigel, 112, 113 Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840, 111 Leinster, 20, 187 Leinster, Duke of, 47 Lichtenstein, Henry, 90 Travels in Southern Africa, 90 Limavady, 186 Limerick, 16, 142 Line of Beauty, 36 Linné, Carl, 18, 34

Index 225 Linnean Society, 104 Lisburn, 187 Lismore Castle, 122 London, 126, 127, 134, 147, 170 London Anthropological Society, 61 Londonderry Companies, 185, 186, 187 Lough Corrib, 161, 168 Lough Erne, 33, 48 Lough Foyle, 176 Lough Neagh, 31, 38 Lucan, 32 Lucan, Lord, 47 Luckombe, Philip, 53, 58 A Tour Through Ireland, 42 MacDonagh, O., 110 Maclise, D., 119 Mallow, 32 maps, 15, 23, 151, 153, 157, 163, 165–7 Marino, 49 market forces, 16 marketability, 147 markets, 158 British, 165 expanding, 147 international, 147 Martineau, Harriet, 9, 156–7, 172–89 Autobiography, 173, 174, 175, 176, 179 Illustrations of Political Economy, 173, 174, 175 Ireland: A Tale, 173, 175 Letters from Ireland, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 188; Letter I, 186; Letter II, 183, 186; Letter III, 186; Letter IV, 186; Letter IX, 180; Letter XI, 187; Letter XVI, 180 Society in America, 179 Mason, William Shaw A Statistical Account of Ireland, 69 mastery, 40, 51, 166 Maynooth, 48 melancholy, 26, 41 military might, 84 military preparedness, 88, 140

Miller, Thomas, 162–4, 185 The Agricultural and Social State of Ireland, 162 Mills, Sara, 38, 93, 94, 95, 96 mineral wealth, 76, 148 mineralogy, 91, 145 Mingay, George, 43, 46, 47 mission civilisatrice, 155 missionaries, 7, 107 Monstereven, 52 monuments, 69 Morgan, Marjorie, 121–2 mortality, Famine-related, 145, 183 mountain views, 167 Moycullen barracks, 154 Muirhead, 108 Mullingar, 161, 170 Munster, 16, 20 Murillo, 116 Murphy, Maureen, 132 Murray, John, 107, 108, 152 Musgrave, Richard, 63, 70 Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, 62 Strictures upon an Historical Review of the State of Ireland, 62 Napoleonic wars, 12 narratives, colonial, 166 natives, 21, 96, 127, 156, 159, 180 natural history, 34, 35 nature, sublime force of, 13 Neave, Sir Digby, 154–5, 156 Four Days in Connemara, 154 New Ross, battle of, 83 Newenham, Thomas, 76–81 A View of the Natural, Political, and Commercial Circumstances of Ireland, 78, 80 Statistical and Historical Inquiry into the Progress and Magnitude of the Population of Ireland, 77, 80 Newport, 166 Nicholson, Asenath, 132 Annals, 132 Nicholson, Norman, 101

226

Index

Nile explorers, 167 Noel, Baptist Wriothesley, 119–20 Notes of a Short Tour through the Midland Counties of Ireland, 119 Nussbaum, Felicity, 39 Oakboys, 16 obedience of the people, 78 observation(s) personal, 152, 154, 161 social, 104 O’Connell, Daniel, 182 O’Connor, Dermod, 66 Ogden, Frances, 175 ‘Old England’, 70 Omagh, 88, 128 ophthalmia, 180, 188 opportunity, 64, 106, 152 economic, 78, 145 political, 139 Orange Boys, 16 Orange factions, 104 order, 8, 38, 155, 156 Osborne, Sidney Godolphin, 142, 143 Gleanings in the West of Ireland, 142 Ó Tuathaigh, 107 Ousby, Ian, 18–19, 25, 101 ownership, 98 pacification, political, 49, 155 Park, Mungo, 83 Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 60 Parks, Fanny, 94 Paterson, William, 82 Patterson, William Observations of Ireland, 69 peasantry, 57, 114, 120, 131, 132, 133, 140, 180 Peckham, Robert Shannan, 120–1 Peep O’Day Boys, 16 Pendleton, Henrietta Gleanings from the Islands and Coast of Ireland, 178 Penn, William, 141

Pennant, Thomas, 42 A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 42 A Tour in Wales, 42 Pennant, William, 104 Tour of the Scottish Highlands, 12 philanthropists, 7 Phoenix Park, 140 Phytophthora infestans, 129 picturesque, 54, 55, 57, 101, 124, 155, 184 pleasure, 31, 33, 41, 176 Pliny, 105 Plowden, Francis, 63, 70 An Historical Letter from Francis Plowden to Sir Richard Musgrave, 62 An Historical Review of the State of Ireland, 62 Plumptre, Anne, 5–6, 60, 90–5, 96–7, 98, 99, 106 Narrative of a Residence in Ireland, 91, 98 Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France, 90, 93, 177 Plumptre, James, 101 The Lakers, 101 Pococke, Richard, 94 policing, 124, 125, 139–40, 148, 151, 155, 157 political change, 60 political commentary, 21 political life, Irish, 103, 129 political stability, 79, 106, 188 politics and economics, 184 Anglo-Irish, 86 colonial, 93 dominance, 55 imperial, 169 issues, 140 revolutionary, 92, 99 poor-house(s), 134, 135, 140, 188 poor, the English, 127 Irish, 127 possession, 69, 98, 166 potato blight, 129–30, 136

Index 227 potential agricultural, 146, 162 economic, 4, 7, 80, 161, 162, 168, 172, 174 extractive, 162 settler, 146 poverty, 89, 96, 114, 116, 117, 120, 122, 124, 125, 155, 160 power, 50, 55–6, 73, 77, 96, 179 Powerscourt, 25, 27 Powerscourt Waterfall, 122 Pratt, Mary Louise, 34, 35, 60, 61, 82, 90, 147, 151, 166, 169 prejudice, 67, 132, 158, 164, 168 Price, Uvedale, 53 Essay on the Picturesque, 54 priest(s), 107, 182, 185 dependence on, 6 power of, 104 role of, 21, 136, 182 promotionalism, 151 literature, 162 rhetoric, 156, 157 texts, 144 propertied classes, 55 prospect-view, 55, 166 prosperity, 78, 79 proximity, of Ireland to Britain, 158, 162, 165, 172 Punter, David, 54 Quaker writing, 127, 135, 138, 141 Quakers, 7, 131, 132–6, 139, 140, 141, 143, 175 Quarterly Review, 142, 159, 178 Queen’s College(s), 185, 187 Queen’s County, 187 ragwort, 9, 184 railways, 150, 156, 164, 165, 171, 176, 183, 187 readership, British, 69, 86, 103, 105, 122, 135, 147, 161, 167 rebellion, 59, 61 Rebellion of 1798, 76, 83, 110 regulation, 8 relief efforts, 131, 133 renewal, 60, 61, 64, 98, 158

resettlement, 7, 147, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 165, 168, 169, 180, 183 resistance, political, 4 resources, 4, 5, 80 mineral, 7, 38–9 Richards, Thomas, 72–3 rioting, 16 Ritchie, Leith, 122–3, 124, 125 Ireland Picturesque and Romantic, 122 river Bann, 186 roads, 15, 23, 150 Rock of Cashel, 69, 98–9 Roman Catholicism, 7, 136 romantic sensibility, 60 Ross, Lord, 48 Rostrevor, 120 Royal Geographical Society, 61, 72 Royal Irish Academy, 80 Royal Society, 69 ruin(s), 37, 54, 99 Sanders, Valerie, 181 Saxon(s), 8, 155 school(s), 155, 156, 186 science, 184 of agriculture, 183, 185 scientific spirit, 61 scientists, 7 Scotland, 12, 14, 58, 64, 68, 70, 73, 103, 120, 121, 122 Scottish Highlands, 12, 15, 101, 104, 125 sea-bathing, 32, 33 seaside resorts, 32 secret societies, 4, 16, 107, 125 security, 149, 152, 165 self-improvement, 41 settlement, 147, 155 settler(s), 3, 9, 150, 151, 152, 154, 158, 159, 162, 165, 180 British, 114 elite, 148, 170 English, 8, 156, 172 Scottish, 172 shame, 6 Shelburne, Earl, 47

228

Index

Shenstone, William ‘Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening’, 37 The Works in Verse and Prose, 37 Sherman, William, 84 Sims, William Dillwyn, 135 Sinclair, Sir John, 73–4, 75 ‘Sister Isle’, 4, 58, 97, 106, 112, 114, 131, 139, 158 Sligo, Lord, 116, 180 Smith, Adam, 11 Smith, Charles, 80 Smith, Nigel, 141 Smollett, Tobias, 11 social life, Irish, 102 Society of Antiquaries, 69, 102 Somerville, Alexander, 139–40 Southey, 101 Spain, 89 Sparrman, Anders, 82, 83 spas, 32 spatio-temporal codes, 112 speculation, 163 Spenser, Edmund, 63, 94 A View of the Present State of Ireland, 93 Staple, Sir Robert, 52 Statistical Account of Scotland, 5, 73 Statistical and Social Inquiry Society, 73 statistical institutions and societies, 72 statistical surveys, 62, 73, 76, 80 statistics, 73–4 Steelboy disturbances, 17 Sterne, Lawrence, 11 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 126 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 126 ‘story’ of Ireland, 62 subletting, 188 sublime, 13–14, 21, 22–3, 24, 25, 26, 27, 33, 37, 40, 53, 54, 57, 101 female responses, 38 male responses, 38 theories of, 3, 18 suffering, 132, 133, 135, 138 surveillance, 87, 88 Talbot, Peter, 66 taste, 54

Taylor, Emily The Irish Tourist, 178 Templemoyle agricultural training college, 9, 183–4, 185, 186 tenants, 180 territoriality, 166 testimonial writing, 132 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 130 The Irish Sketch Book of 1842, 129 Thomas, Gillian, 175 threat(s), 15, 27, 59, 89 Tipperary, 53, 57, 98 Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 59 tour(s) scenic, 165 water, 33 tourism, 100, 107, 111, 177 as an industry, 117 as escape, 31 as holiday, 31 development of, 15, 40 Irish, 111 mass, 108 picturesque, 12, 30 tourist(s), 131 destabilised, 137 English, 103 picturesque, 50, 52 scenic, 49 Towner, John, 40, 41, 42 trade international, 81 Ireland’s, 80 Tralee, 82 transport system, Irish, 111, 164 travel, 84, 92, 104, 115, 140, 177 and escape, 178 and imperialism, 149 British, 144 experience of, 108 picturesque, 55 romantic, 115 travel books, 82, 108 travel narrative, 34 travel writers, 111, 116 British, 121, 130 early nineteenth-century, 112 late eighteenth-century, 112 women, 94

Index 229 travel writing, 22, 42, 61, 84, 109, 130, 139, 140, 144, 149, 152, 176 British, 127 development of, 179 early modern, 84 early nineteenth-century, 90 eighteenth-century, 90, 111 forms of self-representation in, 60 from the 1830s, 111, 115 humour in, 93 and journalism, 156 ‘letters from a friend’ format, 94 male, 99 mid to late eighteenth-century, 82 narrative coherence, 65 narrative form, 45, 90, 92, 118 narrative style(s), 60, 82, 94 narrative voice, 82 nineteenth-century, 111 objectivity, 60 personal response, 86 political selectivity, 188 purpose, 90 realism, 118 subjectivity, 45, 83, 118 visibility of writer, 82 women’s, 92, 93, 95, 177–8 traveller(s) British, 17, 84, 86, 100, 103, 105, 108, 109, 113, 143, 144 curious, 27, 29 eighteenth-century, 82 Famine, 139, 174 nineteenth-century, 167 post-Famine, 3 Quaker, 131 romantic, 33 types of, 18 women, 2–3, 91–9, 178 travelogue, definition, 3 Trench, Frederick, 48 Tuke, James Hack, 135, 136, 137, 138, 143, 159 A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847, 140, 159 Tumultous Risings Act, 16 Turc mountain, 39, 40 Twiss, Richard, 44, 46, 58 A Tour in Ireland in 1775, 42, 43

Ulster, 16, 17, 20 underdevelopment, 150, 162 unease, 22, 29, 50, 70, 84, 88, 99, 143, 157 unrest, 16, 49, 55, 63, 83, 107, 151, 170 Union with Britain, 60, 87, 89, 94, 105, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 121, 125, 143 benefits of, 65, 76, 81, 107 Unionism, 81, 97 upper classes, 127 Urlingford, 51, 52 Valentia, 176 Vaughan, John, 108 violence, 114, 150 ‘visitation’, 136 votaries, 33 Wakefield, Edward An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 69 Wales, 12, 64, 68, 103, 109, 121, 122 Ware, 65 The Works of Spencer, Campion, Hanmer and Marleborough, 63 Warner, Richard A Tour through the Northern Counties of England and the Borders of Scotland, 101 water, 29–36, 37 water scenery, 31, 33 Watt, Gregory, 95 weariness of Ireland, 177 Webster, William Bulloch, 7, 145–50, 151, 152, 156, 185 geological map, 146–7, 151 Ireland Considered as a Field for Investment or Residence, 145 Weiner, Gaby, 179 Weld, Charles Richard, 155 Vacations in Ireland, 155 Weld, Isaac, 76 west of Ireland, 167–8, 185, 187 West, Thomas, 30, 31 Westminster, 64, 142 Westminster Review, 100, 177 Westport, 116, 161, 168

230

Index

Whale, John, 54 Whately, Thomas, 30 Observations on Modern Gardening, 30 White, George Preston, 148–9 A Tour in Connemara . . . , 149 Three Suggestions for the Investment of Capital, 148 White, Sir John Jervis, 72 A Brief View of the Past and Present State of Ireland, 70 Whiteboys, 16, 17, 21, 125 Wide Streets Commission, 16 Williams, Helen Maria, 92 Williams, Mary/Maria, 93 A Tour of Switzerland, 93, 177 Williams, Raymond, 126–7, 139 The Country and the City, 126 Withey, Lynne, 29, 30 witness narration, 162 Wolff, Robert Lee, 173 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 92 Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 38, 92, 177

women, 179–80 Woodlawn, 48 Wordsworth, 101 A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes, 101 A Guide through the District of the Lakes, 101, 108 workhouse(s), 154, 155, 156, 188 Yellowford, 27 Youghal, 32, 125 Young, Arthur, 3, 4, 43–58 A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England, 44 A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales, 43–4 Autobiography, 47 The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England, 44 Tour in Ireland, 42, 44 Travels [through] the Kingdom of France, 44, 45

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