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

William Williams's Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character builds on the steady growth of scholarship surrounding the ideological work of tourism and travel writing. Although much of the work on Victorian tourism has focused on domestic travel (within England, Wales, and Scotland), continental tours, or voyages of exploration, Williams reminds us that "Ireland presented the British visitor with a unique experience. While not a contiguous part of Great Britain, neither was Ireland a foreign country like Italy or France. Historically a separate kingdom with a shared monarchy, after 1800 Ireland theoretically became an integral part of the United Kingdom" (4). Lacking an understanding of the world through which they traveled, tourists quite predictably misread what they saw and experienced according to their own culturally conditioned (and even economically motivated) preconceptions and desires. In this thoroughly researched and often insightful book, Williams surveys dozens of guidebooks and travel narratives, mostly from the first half of the nineteenth century, to show how the landscape was made to yield up a host of stereotypes and a foil against which to justify the ongoing history of English domination.

Picturesque tourism is Williams's starting point, but avoiding the close attention to picturesque theory characterizing the work of Alan Liu and others, Williams focuses instead on the practice of the middle-class English and Anglo-Irish tourists, for whom an aesthetics of order often compromised the theoretical separation of aesthetic from moral and practical concerns. Thus, while the early portion of Williams's book tends to rehash familiar assertions about picturesque tourism as a symbolic middle-class appropriation of a landscape to which they could claim no real ownership, the later chapters move to more interesting and original ground. In the chapter "Misreading the Agricultural Landscape," Williams points out that English tourists, noting the absence of hedges, trees, cultivated fields, familiar architecture, and other signs of English industry and good governance, failed to recognize the signs of a different but no less productive Irish social order and saw only "a disturbing sense of disorder and disorganization, even of chaos" (136).

In a chapter on "Landscape, Tourism, and the Imperial Imagination in Conne-mara" and elsewhere in the book, Williams explores the language of these tourist narratives as an instance of colonial discourse more generally. The characteristics most often admired in the "Irish character" in contrast to that of the English peasant—helpfulness, loquaciousness, and wit—"were essentially the ones that Victorian culture regarded as 'feminine.' . . . And although the travel writers often criticized Hodge's boorish masculinity, they knew perfectly well which qualities Britain's March of Progress demanded" (123). In need of masculine guidance, "the colonized become the beneficiaries of the colonizer's mission instead [of] victims of subjugation" (170). By mid-century, with the growth of English economic interests in Ireland on one hand and the depletion of the population through famine and emigration on the other hand, "British attitudes toward the Irish became increasingly racist[:] there was less concern about Paddy's character and more interest in simply exploiting his potential as a laborer" (181).

To English tourists, anxious about the social costs involved in the rapid industrialization of England, such a view of Ireland as hopelessly backward and of the Irish character as childish, feminine, or primitive served two very different purposes. On the one hand, it "glorified the ideal of an old paternalistic order" in which the fulfillment of reciprocal obligations guaranteed stability and prosperity for all classes and on which England's superiority rested (143). On the other hand, as even the trappings of such an ideal order became increasingly difficult to discern through the smoke of industrial progress, English tourists could pride themselves on the industry and ingenuity that distinguished John Bull from Paddy: "writer after writer sharply delineated Irish failings, implicitly contrasting them with the values that supposedly made Britain superior. Ireland...