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

By William Williams

University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date: February 2012

ISBN: 9780299225230

Digital Book format: PDF (Adobe DRM)

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