Abstract
So far, this book has been concerned with the strategies that tried to guide the thoughts and behaviour of Irish tourists travelling abroad. Through the repetition of various tropes, the more nationalist discourse on Irish visitors to the continent tried to ensure that they would use their foreign travels to reassert their Irishness and/or benefit Ireland. Next to those strategies, a concurrent, seemingly rival discourse developed: the figure of the Irish tourist abroad was also used—by Unionists as well as nationalists—as a foil for the promotion of internal tourism within Ireland. Several recent studies have analysed the creation of a tourist industry in Ireland, and have occasionally discussed Irish participation in the phenomenon. However, the competition between internal and foreign travel has not been examined. This chapter proposes to explore the flipside of attempts to define Irish ways of travelling the continent, as the promotion of home tourism among the Irish travelling classes often presented an explicit alternative to continental travel. The tensions between home and foreign travel are at least as old as the development of modern Irish tourism; they arguably culminate in one of the most iconic and most debated fictional conversations in Irish literature: the confrontation between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in ‘The Dead’, during which the protagonist of Joyce’s story is denounced as a ‘West Briton’ after revealing his preference for continental holidays. While Joyce scholarship has often returned to that scene, it has never quite contextualized Miss Ivors’s challenge to Gabriel Conroy within the broader history of rebukes addressed to Irish tourists abroad. Those reproaches and the encouragement to ‘see Ireland first’ have a long and complex history; they constitute a major motif in the discourse on Irish travel that not only highlights a fundamental paradox of the nationalist approach to tourism, but also provides a new perspective from which to read the tourists who people Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, to which we return in Chap. 8.
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Notes
- 1.
See e.g. Martin Ryle, Journeys in Ireland. Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), William H. Williams, Creating Irish Tourism: the First Century, 1750–1850 (London: Anthem Press, 2010).
- 2.
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 179, Stephen Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 189–213.
- 3.
Thomas Davis, ‘Irish Scenery’, The Nation, 20 July 1844.
- 4.
Davis, ‘Irish Scenery’, The Nation, 20 July 1844.
- 5.
Nenagh Guardian, 10 October 1849.
- 6.
The Nation, 24 September 1859.
- 7.
Irish Times, 24 August 1866.
- 8.
Freeman’s Journal, 2 June 1908, Irish Independent, 2 August 1912.
- 9.
Davis, ‘Irish Scenery’, The Nation, 20 July 1844.
- 10.
Ryle quotes various reports of ‘a number of road improvements’ in travelogues by Peter Somerville-Large, John Barrow and Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, and conjectures that their ‘object may have been to encourage tourism’; see Journeys in Ireland, p. 35.
- 11.
Irish Times, 18 September 1863.
- 12.
Freeman’s Journal, 15 June 1877.
- 13.
Belfast Evening Telegraph, 24 June 1872.
- 14.
British Medical Journal, 13 August 1887, pp. 345–346.
- 15.
Freeman’s Journal, 21 October 1909.
- 16.
Tuam Herald, 20 April 1895.
- 17.
See Irene Furlong, Irish Tourism 1880–1980 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), Sturgeon Thompson, ‘“Not only Beef, but Beauty…” Tourism, Dependency and the Postcolonial Irish State, 1925–30’, in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture, and Identity, ed. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (Bristol: Channel View, 2003), pp. 263–281.
- 18.
Irish Times, 19 June 1909.
- 19.
Tuam Herald, 24 May 1873.
- 20.
Freeman’s Journal, 12 November 1834. Bish’s words were offered as an incentive to direct both Irish and British tourist traffic to Ireland, in a move that was explicitly meant to help head off calls for Repeal—the difference with Thomas Davis’s designs here highlights the fact that the promotion of internal tourism transcended political divisions.
- 21.
Southern Star, 19 August 1893, Tuam Herald, 20 April 1895.
- 22.
Nenagh Guardian, 10 October 1849.
- 23.
For nationalist critiques of the British nature of Irish middle-class habits, see Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution. Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1912 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).
- 24.
The Nation, 17 November 1855.
- 25.
See Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism. The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–92 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), p. 155.
- 26.
Cork Examiner, 27 October 1894.
- 27.
John Shovlin, ‘Pilgrimage and the Construction of Irish National Identity’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 11 (1991), pp. 59–76.
- 28.
R. F. Foster suggests that ‘by the 1840s Catholicism had been securely identified as the national experience’—see Modern Ireland, p. 317.
- 29.
Anon., ‘Scenes in Ireland’, Dublin Penny Journal 2.60 (1833), p. 59.
- 30.
Selina Martin, Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Italy, 1819–1822. With Illustrations of the Present State of Religion in that Country (London: Murray, 1828), p. 328.
- 31.
That transition was also observable in the gradual turn away from utilitarian travel charted in Chap. 4. For a detailed history of the shift, see Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representations of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame: Field Day, 1997).
- 32.
Freeman’s Journal, 12 November 1834.
- 33.
Davis, ‘Irish Scenery’, The Nation, 20 July 1844. My emphases.
- 34.
Irish Times, 18 September 1863, Irish Times, 13 May 1871.
- 35.
Belfast Newsletter, 15 June 1888.
- 36.
The Nation, 8 September 1888.
- 37.
Robert James Reilly, ‘Rostrevor as a Health Resort’, The Irish Monthly, 19.222 (1891), p. 644.
- 38.
Freeman’s Journal, 22 June 1887.
- 39.
Freeman’s Journal, 12 November 1834.
- 40.
‘Irish Scenery’, The Nation, 20 July 1844.
- 41.
One exception located in The Nation is a series of advertisements for the Hotel Brighton in Paris that ran in the first few months of 1881 (see e.g. The Nation, 5 March 1881). Although the ad, directed at ‘English and Irish visitors to Paris’ and promising rooms ‘overlooking the Tuileries’, looks innocuous enough, the context in which it appeared makes one suspect that it functioned as a coded message for radical nationalists: by early 1881, the Hotel Brighton had become the headquarters of the exiled leaders of the Land League. For policies of nationalist papers (though not The Nation) on advertising, see John Strachan and Claire Nally, Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 42.
The Nation, 17 November 1855.
- 43.
In The Wild Irish Girl (1806), the English protagonist writes on his arrival in Dublin Bay: ‘I cannot judge of the justness of the comparison, though I am told one very general and common-place’. Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14.
- 44.
The Nation, 17 November 1855.
- 45.
The Nation, 27 May 1882.
- 46.
Anon., ‘The Attractions of Ireland—No. I. Scenery’, Dublin University Magazine 8.43 (1836), pp. 112, 120.
- 47.
Weekly Irish Times, 9 May 1903.
- 48.
Quoted by Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: the Tide of a Great Popular Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 46.
- 49.
Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism, p. 55.
- 50.
Freeman’s Journal, 19 June 1909.
- 51.
Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism, p. 57.
- 52.
Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe, Evening Telegraph Reprints (Dublin: The Freeman’s Journal, s.d. [1889]), p. 15.
- 53.
Irish Independent, 8 August 1908.
- 54.
Tuam Herald, 8 January 1870.
- 55.
Freeman’s Journal, 4 June 1879.
- 56.
Robert Browning, ‘Home Thoughts, From Abroad’ in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. IV, ed. Ian Jack, Rowena Fowler and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 61. On the anthologizing of ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad’, see John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, Robert Browning (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 157.
- 57.
Benjamin Colbert, ed., Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 4.
- 58.
Davis, ‘Irish Scenery’, The Nation, 20 July 1844.
- 59.
The Nation, 27 May 1882.
- 60.
Southern Star, 19 August 1893.
- 61.
Freeman’s Journal, 12 November 1909.
- 62.
On the identification of the nation with Western landscapes in Irish tourist discourse, see e.g. Catherine Nash, ‘“Embodying the Nation”—the West of Ireland Landscape and Irish Identity’, in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture, and Identity, ed. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (Bristol: Channel View, 2003), pp. 86–112.
- 63.
The Nation, 15 November 1879.
- 64.
Tuam Herald, 24 May 1873.
- 65.
Freeman’s Journal, 4 June 1879.
- 66.
Irish Independent, 2 August 1912.
- 67.
Irish Independent, 24 August 1910.
- 68.
Irish Independent, 31 July 1908.
- 69.
Freeman’s Journal, 2 June 1908.
- 70.
Irish Independent, 2 August 1912.
- 71.
On the Unionist agenda of Irish Tourist Association founded in the 1890s by F. W. Crossley, see K. J. James, Tourism, Land and Landscape in Ireland (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 50–54. On the nationalist promotion of internal travel in the following decade, see e.g. Ryle, Journeys in Ireland, pp. 111–128.
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Ingelbien, R. (2016). Home or Abroad? ‘West Britons’ and Continental Travel. In: Irish Cultures of Travel. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56784-0_7
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