The ‘Alien’ European: British Accounts of Portugal and the Portuguese, 1780–1850

  • Maria Clara Paulino
Chapter
Part of the Britain and the World book series (BAW)

Abstract

In A journal of a few months’ residence in Portugal and glimpses of the South of Spain (1847), Dorothy (Wordsworth) Quillinan wrote:

If I had set out from home with the project of writing a book, I might as well perhaps have gone to Portugal as to any remoter quarter; for […] there is, I believe, no country in Europe that is less thoroughly familiar to us […].1

In several other passages of this journal, written during the author’s residence in Portugal between 1845 and 1846, she expresses surprise at how ‘new’ most of the country was to the British though a mere ‘three days’ voyage from the Isle of Wight.2 The reader may well share in her perplexity, for how could Britain’s oldest ally, the subject of travel narratives by wellrespected authors such as James Murphy,3 Robert Southey,4 William Morgan Kinsey5 and William Beckford,6 be so unfamiliar to the British? What did Quillinan mean by new?

Keywords

Eighteenth Century Port Wine Political Upheaval Monthly Magazine Lisbon Earthquake 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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© Maria Clara Paulino 2013

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