Abstract
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
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
J. Buzzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), pp. 19, 83–4.
I. Ousby, ed., James Plumptre’s Britain: The Journals of a Tourist in the 1790s (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 13.
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.
G. Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine 1798–1848 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2003), pp. 58–9.
J. Vaughan, The English Guide Book, c1780–1870 (London: David & Charles, 1974), pp. 62–4.
B. Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 79.
‘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.
N. Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 23.
C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 4.
J. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 92.
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.
M. Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 196.
M. Beames, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 161.
R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 154.
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.
A. Bourke, The Visitation of God? The Potato and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), p. 129.
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).
A. Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, ed., M. Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput, 1998), p. 13.
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).
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.
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.
A. Somerville, Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847, ed., K. D. M. Snell (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), pp. 28–9.
J. Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847 (London: Gilpin, 1847), p. 8.
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.
H. E. Hatton, The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland, 1654–1921 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), pp. 96–7.
S. T. Hall, Life and Death in Ireland, as Witnessed in 1849 (Manchester: Parkes, 1850), p. 1.
S. Godolphin Osborne, Gleanings in the West of Ireland (London: Boone, 1850), p. 16.
For fuller discussion of Osborne, see M. Kelleher, The Feminiza-tion of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997).
Copyright information
© 2005 Glenn Hooper
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hooper, G. (2005). Trekking to Downfall, 1820–1850. In: Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510814_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510814_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52170-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-51081-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)