From Ireland to Iceland: Lord Dufferin’s Letters from High Latitudes (1857)

Abstract

This essay revisits a celebrated travelogue by Lord Dufferin, a prominent Anglo-Irish aristocrat and Imperial administrator of the Victorian era. While his Letters from High Latitudes (1857) has become a classic of travel literature about Arctic regions, his descriptions of Iceland are here shown to be shot through with echoes of an earlier, lesser known account of famine-stricken Irish counties that Dufferin had co-authored at the time of the Great Hunger. In various passages, the resurgence of that Irish subtext breaks through the essentially comic surface of Dufferin’s travelogue, which then takes on Gothic overtones. Dufferin’s meditations on Icelandic history can also indirectly reveal a measure of sympathy for Irish nationalist grievances, thus adding nuance to dominant views of Dufferin as a pillar of British Imperial rule. Letters from High Latitudes can thus be profitably read as a form of travel literature that maps controversial national concerns onto an ostensibly exotic and therefore safer territory.