Abstract
The national question increasingly dominated Irish public discourse in the decades that preceded independence: this was also bound to affect discussions of foreign travel, which sometimes played down the exotic nature of the experience as a result. If, on one level, continental trips obviously afforded a holiday from home, the travel writing that sought to shape the European experience of Irish tourists was conflicted. On the one hand, Irish subjects were exposed to texts that portrayed foreign journeys in escapist terms, as in much of metropolitan travel writing—and in several cases, what they consumed was precisely metropolitan travel writing that also circulated in Ireland. On the other hand, a home-grown version of travel writing would regularly revisit the themes developed by the pioneering texts of the 1830s and 1840s surveyed in Chap. 2. Among these, Thomas Davis’s 1844 essay on ‘Foreign Travel’ set the tone for a distinctly Irish culture of travel that had clear patriotic, and even nationalist overtones. Irish nationalism, however, underwent many changes and took on many forms in the period that stretched from the emergence of Davis’s Young Ireland movement to the War of Independence. This chapter will show how the transformations of Irish nationalism affected the ways in which Irish travel writing revisited Davis’s advice to ‘brethren and sisters going abroad’ in the Victorian and Edwardian period; at the same time, it will remain alert to the tension that existed between such nationalist writing and a more metropolitan Irish culture of travel that was often informed by a Unionist outlook.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Davis, ‘Foreign Travel’, The Nation, 17 August 1844.
- 2.
James Buzard, The Beaten Track. European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 181.
- 3.
Arthur Brooke Faulkner, Visit to Germany and the Low Countries in the Years 1829, 30, and 31 (London: Bentley, 1833), vol. 1, p. vi.
- 4.
J. Emerson Tennent, Belgium (London: Bentley, 1841), vol. 1, p. vi.
- 5.
Freeman’s Journal, 13 February 1840.
- 6.
Thomas Davis, ‘Foreign Travel’, The Nation, 17 August 1844.
- 7.
Freeman’s Journal, 22 August 1854. The article was reprinted from the Dundalk Democrat.
- 8.
The Nation, 18 September 1852.
- 9.
Cork Examiner, 9 September 1864. The article was also reprinted in the Freeman’s Journal, 12 September 1864 and in the Tuam Herald, 12 September 1864.
- 10.
The Nation, 17 July 1875.
- 11.
Irish Independent, 22 July 1912.
- 12.
Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 32.
- 13.
Irish Independent, 22 July 1912.
- 14.
Freeman’s Journal, 21 October 1909.
- 15.
Freeman’s Journal, 21 October 1909.
- 16.
See Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution. Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1912 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 96.
- 17.
On the ideological shifts of Irish nationalism, see Richard English, Irish Freedom: the History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: Macmillan, 2006), and, for turn-of-the-century nationalism more specifically, Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (London: Gill and Macmillan, 1999). On Thomas Davis’s use of improvement discourse, see Helen O’Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 157–9, 203. On Revivalist nostalgia and hostility to Victorian discourses of progress, see e.g. Eve Patten, ‘Ireland’s “Two Cultures” Debate: Victorian Science and the Literary Revival’, Irish University Review 33.1 (2003), pp. 1–13. As the main proponent of Irish agricultural economic improvement in early-twentieth-century Ireland was the Unionist Horace Plunkett, it has become customary to emphasize nationalist hostility to his modernizing ‘co-operative’ movement. This antithesis has recently been qualified; see e.g. Patrick Mary Doyle, ‘Reframing the “Irish Question”: the Role of the Irish Co-operative Movement in the Formation of Irish Nationalism, 1900–22’, Irish Studies Review 22.3 (2014), pp. 267–84.
- 18.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, Evening Telegraph Reprints (Dublin: The Freeman’s Journal, s.d. [1889]), p. 3.
- 19.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, p. 44.
- 20.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, pp. 42–3.
- 21.
Thomas Davis, ‘Foreign Travel’, The Nation, 17 August 1844.
- 22.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, p. 42. The phrase ‘comely maidens dancing at the crossroads’ is often misattributed to Eamon de Valera—see Helena Wulff, Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), p. 12.
- 23.
Thomas Davis, ‘Foreign Travel’, The Nation, 17 August 1844.
- 24.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, p. 1.
- 25.
Pašeta, Before the Revolution, pp. 31, 96.
- 26.
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 455.
- 27.
Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 181.
- 28.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, p. 43.
- 29.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, p. 26.
- 30.
The Nation, 22 August 1846.
- 31.
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2002).
- 32.
Elizabeth A. Bohls and Ian Duncan, ‘Introduction’, in Travel Writing 1700–1830. An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. xxii.
- 33.
The 2006 reissue of parts of the text in a ‘Classics of Irish History’ series only confirms this; see Owen McGee’s edition of Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints Over Europe (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006).
- 34.
See Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representations of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame: Field Day, 1997).
- 35.
William Reeves, ‘The Antiphonary of Bangor’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology 1 (1853), pp. 170–1. Emphases mine.
- 36.
Thomas Davis, ‘Foreign Travel’, The Nation, 17 August 1844.
- 37.
Reeves, ‘The Antiphonary of Bangor’, p. 171.
- 38.
See Owen McGee, ‘Davis, Eugene’, and Andrew O’Brien and Linde Lunney, ‘Reeves, William’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). http://dib.cambridge.org/
- 39.
Anon., ‘Relics of the Wild Geese’, Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine 1.5 (1860), p. 227.
- 40.
Westmeath Examiner, 24 June 1905.
- 41.
Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, pp. 148–9.
- 42.
Westmeath Examiner, 7 October 1905.
- 43.
Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 190.
- 44.
See also Stuart Semmel, ‘Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo’, Representations 69 (2000), pp. 9–37.
- 45.
O’Flanagan, Impressions at Home and Abroad, vol. 1, p. 236. O’Flanagan’s interest in such sites is discussed in Chap. 1.
- 46.
Rupert Hart-Davis, The Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 169.
- 47.
The Irish Times, 26 July 1895.
- 48.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, pp. 24–6.
- 49.
The Irish Times, 30 July 1867.
- 50.
Kerry Sentinel, 16 September 1893.
- 51.
Irish Independent, 3 October 1906.
- 52.
Irish Independent, 16 November 1906.
- 53.
Ulster Herald, 29 December 1906, emphasis mine.
- 54.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, pp. 71, 73, emphasis mine.
- 55.
Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 32.
- 56.
Anon., ‘A Pilgrim’s Notes of the Irish National Pilgrimage to Rome: October, 1908’, Irish Monthly 37.429 (1909), p. 128.
- 57.
See e.g. Anon., ‘Etchings of Italy’, Dublin University Magazine 30.175 (July 1847), pp. 81–90; Anon., ‘Continental Notes in July and August. Savoy and Piedmont’, Dublin University Magazine 54.322 (1859), pp. 413–26. For a discussion of anti-Catholicism, see Chap. 5.
- 58.
Irish Times, 22 December 1869.
- 59.
See Manfred Pfister, The Fatal Gift of Beauty: the Italy of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 1996). Pfister notes that this ‘aestheticization of Catholicism only became possible when Catholicism had ceased to be regarded as a political threat’ in Britain (p. 437). The fact that travelogues published in the Unionist Irish Times could resort to such aestheticization suggests that the newspaper distinguished between Catholicism (to which it stood fairly open) and the threat of political nationalism.
- 60.
Weekly Irish Times, 10 January 1903.
- 61.
Freeman’s Journal, 2 June 1840.
- 62.
Mangan’s poem appeared in the Irish Penny Journal 1.16 (1840), pp. 123–5.
- 63.
Julia Kavanagh, A Summer and Winter in the Two Sicilies, vol. 2 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858), pp. 51–2.
- 64.
The Nation, 1 April 1871.
- 65.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, p. 125.
- 66.
Irish Times, 15 November 1902. Emphases mine.
- 67.
Martin Haverty, ‘Rome; A Glance at its Present State, with a Few National Reminiscences’, Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine 2.9 (1861) pp. 138–9. The plagiarism in the Irish Times article also extends to various sentences in which Haverty describes the O’Connell monument.
- 68.
Irish Times, 15 November 1902.
- 69.
Anon., ‘Continental Notes in July and August. Savoy and Piedmont’.
- 70.
Nathanael Colgan, ‘Pisa’, Irish Monthly 6 (1878), pp. 253–4.
- 71.
Freeman’s Journal, 10 August 1875.
- 72.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, p. 115.
- 73.
M. A. C., ‘The Superb City’, Irish Monthly 27.309 (1899), pp. 120 (my emphasis), 121.
- 74.
M. A. C., ‘The Superb City’, p. 124.
- 75.
Alfred Webb, ‘The Battlefield of Fontenoy’, Irish Monthly 15.172 (1887), p. 578. For Webb’s background, see Marie-Louise Legg, ‘Webb, Alfred John’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). http://dib.cambridge.org/
- 76.
Alfred Webb, ‘The Battlefield of Fontenoy’, pp. 579, 581.
- 77.
T.A.W. ‘Namur la Belle’, The Irish Monthly 27.314 (1899), pp. 419, 420–1.
- 78.
Weekly Irish Times, 22 July 1911.
- 79.
Freeman’s Journal, 18 August 1904.
- 80.
Freeman’s Journal, 19 August 1904.
- 81.
An ad for the Fontenoy trip can be found in the Freeman’s Journal, 3 March 1905. For the prices of Thomas Cook’s trips to Lourdes in those years, see e.g. the Irish Independent, 28 July 1910.
- 82.
Freeman’s Journal, 15 June 1905.
- 83.
Irish Independent, 10 June 1905.
- 84.
Donegal News, 17 June 1905.
- 85.
Freeman’s Journal, 10 June 1905, 15 June 1905.
- 86.
Irish Independent, 14 June 1905.
- 87.
Donegal News, 17 June 1905.
- 88.
Irish Independent, 14 June 1905, Donegal News, 17 June 1905.
- 89.
Freeman’s Journal, 15 June 1905.
- 90.
Irish Independent, 14 June 1905.
- 91.
Freeman’s Journal, 27 October 1905, 16 November 1906.
- 92.
Skibbereen Eagle, 31 August 1907.
- 93.
Irish Times, 26 August 1907.
- 94.
Freeman’s Journal, 27 August 1908.
- 95.
Butte Independent, 17 September 1910.
- 96.
Donegal News, 17 June 1905.
- 97.
Matthew O’Conor, Military History of the Irish Nation (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1845), p. 369.
- 98.
See e.g. the Fermanagh Herald, 29 December 1906.
- 99.
Margaret Stokes, Six Months in the Apennines. A Pilgrimage in Search of Vestiges of the Irish Saints in Italy (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892), p. x.
- 100.
Stokes, Six Months in the Apennines, p. 220.
- 101.
Stokes, Six Months in the Apennines, p. 1
- 102.
In her youth, Stokes did field work with some of the most distinguished figures of Irish antiquarianism like George Petrie. See Andrew O’Brien and Linde Lunney, ‘Stokes, Margaret’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). http://dib.cambridge.org/. On Petrie as a major antiquarian figure within Irish cultural nationalism, see Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, pp. 126–43.
- 103.
Margaret Stokes, Three Months in the Forests of France. A Pilgrimage in Search of Vestiges of the Irish Saints in France (London: George Bell and Sons, 1895), pp. l–li.
- 104.
Freeman’s Journal, 24 October 1895 and 25 December 1895, Irish Times, 27 February 1893.
- 105.
Freeman’s Journal, 1 October 1898.
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Ingelbien, R. (2016). Utilitarians, Nationalist Pilgrims and Time Travellers: Carrying and Seeing Ireland Abroad. In: Irish Cultures of Travel. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56784-0_4
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