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

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland
ISBN-10
0299225232
ISBN-13
9780299225230
Category
History
Pages
280
Language
English
Published
2012-02-24
Publisher
University of Wisconsin Pres
Author
William Williams

Description

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England’s own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.

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