On the Specificity of Irish Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Maria Frances Dickson’s Journeys to the Continent and Kilkee

Abstract

This study explores the issue of the specificity of Irish nineteenth-century travel writing of the pre-Famine era and asks what characteristics may be identified that distinguish it from contemporary British travel writing. To this end, the work of a forgotten writer from Co. Limerick, Maria Frances Dickson (1809–1885), is studied. Her slim oeuvre, mainly produced within the short period between 1833 and 1845, comprises both the remarkable first published travel account by an Irish woman about Germany (1837) and two versions of a home travel account about the west coast of Clare, one written for an Irish readership and the other of Anglo-Irish writers is identified as the origin of a specific set of contradictions, constructions of the Other and the Self as well as exoticisms evident in Irish travel texts which impact on the images of both continental countries and the west of Ireland. The importance of the intended readership for the interpretation of such texts is also highlighted.