Defining the Irish Tourist Abroad: Souvenirs of Irish Footprints Over Europe (1888)

Most Irish Studies scholars would read the phrase “Irish travel writing” as referring to those travel accounts that take Ireland as their object. John McVeigh’s 1996 volume with precisely that title, Irish Travel Writing, offers a bibliography of texts penned by visitors to Ireland, a genre that has now been comprehensively analyzed.¹ Yet, as Michael Cronin recently observed, “commentary on travel writing by Irish writers traveling elsewhere in the modern period has been relatively sparse.”² Patterns of Irish emigration, exile, and return work to blur our distinctions, but in general, Irish Studies scholarship on migration has focused on those Irish who permanently resettled elsewhere; Cronin points out that “the emigrants’ letters home from Australia, not the visit to Berlin, become objects of critical inquiry.”³ Several studies have teased out the peculiarities of Irish writers’ engagement with foreign climes; but most of that work has focused on individual authors’ articulation of a complex stance toward colonies of the British empire, highlighting Irish writers’ various identifications with the British colonizer or with the colonized subject. Such studies certainly illuminate the ideological intricacies of Irish subjects’ “semicolonial” position, and contribute to a refinement of the Orientalist paradigm.⁴ But by emphasizing the conflicted subjectivity of Irish authors, these studies tend to ignore the readership that fed the demand for travel writing. Bernard Share’s neglected 1992 anthology surveying “fifteen hundred years of Irish travel writing” gives some idea of how Irish writers saw the wider world.⁵ However, Share selects his texts solely on the basis of the authors’ nationality. He considers neither the intended readership nor the circumstances of publication, nor does he take account of the rise of travel writing as an historically specific genre.

If the definition of travel writing is narrowed down to the textual production that accompanied the rise of mass tourism in the nineteenth century, the issue of a distinctively Irish form of travel writing aimed at Irish readers can hardly be said to have registered on the scholarly radar. Yet such writing did exist, and we might gauge its potential significance by examining Eugene Davis’s recently republished Souvenirs of Irish Footprints Over Europe (1888). Davis’s book is a text that tries to define a specifically Irish form of tourism by adapting the major tropes of nineteenth-century travel writing.⁶

In his classic study of nineteenth-century travel literature, James Buzard defines “tourism” as “a phenomenon of determinate historical origin in the modern industrializing and democratizing nations of northern Europe and, later, America” and goes on to “construe the ‘tourist’ as a mythic figure, a rhetorical instrument that is determined by and in turn helps to determine the ways such nations represent culture and acculturation to themselves.”⁷ With the notable exception of Charles Lever, no Irish authors are mentioned in Buzard’s study; the writers he discusses are usually British or American (or both, like Henry James),writing for British or American readers.⁸ In other words, they are representatives of what were then the leading “modern industrializing and democratizing nations.” Late-nineteenth-century Ireland represents an awkward case, here. Increasingly part of the English-speaking world where travel writing was in demand, Ireland was definitely democratizing in this period—though the British political framework within which that democratization took place was found wanting by nationalists. But it was not, with the exception of Northern Ireland, industrializing apace with the rest of Europe, though it did see the rise of a powerful and economically resilient middle class who could afford to travel. In view of such important nuances, can a text like Davis’s challenge traditional, Anglo-centric analyses of nineteenth-century travel writing?

The 2006 reissue of Davis’s text has prompted interest in its documentary value, both for its portrayal of Irish exiles and for the insights it affords into the colorful and politically controversial personality of its author. Born into a family of teachers and priests in West Cork in 1857, Eugene Davis was sent out to receive ecclesiastical training in Louvain and Paris, but...