Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland

Conclusion

Conclusion k k k k k British travel narratives were, inevitably, products of, as well as contributions to, the complex history of Anglo-Irish relations. Nonetheless, they were also shaped by the very nature of tourism. Tourism creates its own contexts within which visitors discover other places and peoples . It controls the ways in which hosts and guests interact, and by establishing an itinerary (the “beaten path”), it shapes the way visitors experience a place or a country. Landscape aesthetics may also play an important role. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, picturesque tourism established the primacy of scenic landscape and romantic ruins. However, these sights meant different things in Britain than they did in Ireland. In Britain picturesque scenery was just one aspect of a powerful commercial and industrializing nation; in Ireland scenery seemed to be all there was. Indeed, surveying the island’s dramatic mountains and seascapes, British visitors sometimes felt that they had ventured beyond civilization. Moreover, the story of national progress that Britons had learned to read in their own antiquities was not easily found in the ruins of Ireland’s more contested past. Within the context of picturesque tourism, Irish poverty presented the visitors with a particular problem. In spite of their aesthetic train195 ing, most British tourists could neither ignore peasant poverty nor completely contain it within picturesque descriptions. Thus, in addition to being technicians of romantic aesthetics, the travel writers were also forced to become reporters of social conditions. The resulting combination of landscape aesthetics and social analysis created tensions, especially when travelers surveyed Ireland’s agricultural landscape. For a variety of reasons, rural scenery was of great importance to British tourists. It connected them to home in ways that the luminous lakes, misty mountains, and storm-racked sea cliffs of the Celtic fringe never could. Embowered villages and enclosed Qelds had achieved a kind of national iconic status in Britain, combining images of an idealized social order with a vision of husbandry worthy of God’s bounty. By contrast, agricultural Ireland—so often lacking the British signiQers of rural well-being—seemed to be an anomaly. In so many ways, therefore, Ireland seemed a contradiction. Not only did the dire condition of the peasantry war with the beauty nature had bestowed upon the island; apparent indifference and poor husbandry seemed in too many places to mock the land’s imagined potential. The sense that something was wrong with Ireland permeated many of the travel narratives, especially in the last two decades before the Famine. The writers were correct, of course, in calling attention to the legacies of historical injustices and religious conflict. They were right, too, in condemning absentee landlords and those proprietors who preferred subdivision and rack-renting to improving their estates. And the travel writers were justiQed in their concern about the everincreasing numbers of rural poor dependent on one source of food. The most observant and best informed of the authors often produced moving descriptions and telling critiques of Ireland’s problems. Too often, however, even these observers concluded that the Irish peasants shared the blame for their own misfortune. This led many of Ireland’s visitors to discern“moral landscapes”that evidenced the failings of the Irish character. In their imagination, bogs became undrained farmland, rich in potential, criminal in neglect. Crooked plow lines, unsightly hedgebanks, dry stone walls thrown up with no apparent thought to permanence, weedy potato patches, illConclusion 196 thatched cabins with smoke pouring out the doors—all were taken as evidence of gross carelessness and indifference. Many visitors considered the potato itself a lazy man’s crop that only encouraged Irish sloth and indigence. Put off by the chaotic appearance of the rundale villages, few travelers bothered to look beyond the jumbled cabins to understand the clachans’ vital role in land reclamation. Even when a ragged farmer turned out to be “a man of a hundred cows,” his clothing and the neglected appearance of his house suggested moral failure rather than different economic priorities. At the same time, the relative prosperity of the tourists’truncated Ulster underwrote their moral critique. If Protestant Ulstermen could look and act so much like Englishmen , what was wrong with the rest of the Irish? Britain, of course, supplied the standards by which all things Irish were judged. While this is hardly surprising, the age-old superiorinferior rhetoric of Anglo-Irish relations followed a particular logic within...