Irish Cultures of Travel: Writing on the Continent, 1829–1914 by Raphaël Ingelbien (review)

A substantial body of work has developed over the last few decades that utilizes the study of tourism and travel writing as a lens through which to examine notions of identity. Often these works use the writings of travelers and tourists as a means of understanding both their sense of the place to which they traveled, and the way in which locals chose to present their region. Raphaël Ingelbien’s thoughtful and well-informed book, Irish Cultures of Travel: Writing on the Continent, 1829–1914, turns that methodology around, looking at the ways in which tourists envisioned not the locale to which they traveled, but instead the nation from whence they came. Irish travel writing, therefore, becomes not travel writing about Ireland, but travel writing by Irish visitors to the European continent. As such, Ingelbien addresses several historiographical topics: the modernity of pre-independence Ireland, the often multi-layered understandings of identity of the nineteenth-century Irish middle class, the role of the periodical press in shaping and reflecting that identity, and the comparative study of tourism.

Ingelbien argues that a culture of Irish visits to the continent developed in the decades after Catholic Emancipation, becoming widespread enough by the 1840s for travel to become a topic in the public discourse of the periodical press. Because the growing availability and affordability of new forms of travel coincided with intense debates about Irish identity, Irish travel became “a key site of ideological contestation” (87). In addition to the individual acculturation often associated with middle-class travel in the nineteenth century, public discourse urged tourists to see their trips to the continent as explorations of their Irish identity. Tours of Europe might serve the utilitarian purpose of bringing useful lessons back to Ireland, such as models of modernization or political development, or travel might be an opportunity for the Irish tourist to act out his or her national identity by differentiating Irish modes of touring from those of English contemporaries. Commenters on Irish travel increasingly promoted alternative tours of the continent, whereby a visitor might use a trip to Europe to demonstrate his or her social and cultural attainment, while also exploring his or her sense of Irishness through visits to sites with particular Irish associations. Daniel O’Connell’s heart, preserved in a church off the beaten track of tourist travel in Rome, is one example of a site on the cultural nationalist tour of the continent. The battlefield of Fontenoy was a popular Irish counter to tourist excursions to Waterloo.

Ingelbien also examines Irish participation in the mass religious pilgrimages that developed in the late nineteenth century to sites such as Lourdes. These journeys, he argues, often blurred the lines between religious pilgrimage and the cultural nationalism which was so much a part of Irish travel. Consequently, while pilgrimages allowed Catholics to assert their affiliation to a universal church, many Irish Protestants were concerned by the conflation of Irish and Catholic identities seen in many events, such as a 1913 National Pilgrimage to Lourdes. These various strategies for the ways in which foreign travel might assert Irish identity and/or benefit Ireland competed with the promotion of internal tourism. The “see Ireland first” rhetoric, which also dates from the 1840s, contained a variety of different strands (184). As anti-modern visions came to dominate Irish nationalism late in the century, and the heart of the nation was increasingly located in the rural west, some writers elevated Ireland at the expense of the continent. Ingelbien asserts that this conflict between the discourses of domestic and foreign tourism culminates in a much debated conversation between two characters in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914), and he concludes with a convincing re-reading of that scene within contemporary rhetoric about travel.

This is a well-researched and persuasive book. It is well placed within the historiography on travel and tourism and...