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  • Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland
  • Sean Farrell
Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in PreFamine Ireland by William H. A. Williams, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. pp. 267, $65.00.

Historians have long used late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British travel narratives in their efforts to reconstruct portraits of prefamine Irish society and culture. In Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character, William H. A. Williams puts these traveler's accounts at the center of his analysis. The result is a wide-ranging and often insightful study that contributes substantially to our understanding of prefamine Irish society, the formation of British national identity, and the long history of Irish tourism. At the heart of the book is Williams's analysis of roughly one hundred British, mostly English, travel narratives about Ireland. While his deft use of the work of various Cultural Studies theoreticians is admirable (Williams effectively resists that subfield's tendency toward jargon-laden overreach), the book is at its best when he puts the travelogues front and center. Happily, those moments dominate the well-written narrative.

All tourists use their knowledge, both real and imagined, of familiar places to make judgments about the lands in which they travel. Not surprisingly, [End Page 150] Williams finds that British travel writers judged Ireland's largely rural society against rather selective and romanticized notions of their native England. This resulted in the emergence of a powerful discourse built around a series of dyadic contrasts that typically worked to Ireland's detriment. Given the central place held by scenery in modern tourism, it is also no surprise that commentaries on the Irish landscape featured prominently in these works. While many of the writers marveled at Ireland's beauty, they also consistently contrasted the wild, unkempt, and unproductive Irish landscape with its orderly, verdant and productive English counterpart. As Williams puts it, "British travelers found it difficult to visually organize, to literally see, much less comprehend and appreciate, much of the Irish landscape they encountered." This understanding of Ireland's physical landscape was linked to increasingly powerful notions of Irish character flaws and the dictates of political economy. The tragic confluence of these ideas with a massive subsistence crisis in the 1840s helped to produce the horrors of the Great Famine.

As Williams makes clear, when British travelers wrote about Ireland they saw more than a physical landscape; they also constructed a moral landscape that was rooted in notions of Irish improvidence and religious idolatry. This moral landscape became more powerful after 1815, and became the dominant explanation for deepening Irish poverty. None of this is new, of course, but the comprehensive way that these texts are brought together in Williams's analysis makes for powerful reading. Moreover, by detailing existing and emergent connections between tourism, landscape, and ideas of the deficiency of Irish character, this work contributes to an already vibrant famine historiography, showing a longer history to the ideas that so powerfully shaped the popular and official response to the Irish Famine.

That is not to say that there are not problems here. Many of these stem from the relative brevity of a number of chapters, which often prevents the full development of the book's ideas. One prominent example concerns the relationship between Ireland and the development of British nationalism. As Linda Colley and a generation of scholarship has shown, this is a critical era in the formation of British national identity and Williams's analysis would benefit from a more sustained engagement with that literature. The book implicitly makes a strong case that Ireland was central to this process—a point Colley famously avoided in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1937 (1992)—but the absence of amore formal and explicit argument about this fraught relationship weakens this potentially important notion. Along these lines,Williams is at his strongest when he accounts for regional variation; the closing chapters on Ulster (although frustratingly brief) and Connemara are among the most compelling in the book. While Williams often is quite careful not to over generalize, there are times [End Page 151] when his argument seems overly monolithic and...

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