William H. A. Williams . Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre‐Famine Ireland.(History of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora.)Madison : University of Wisconsin Press . 2008 . Pp. xi, 267. $65.00.

Abstract

Much early modern tourism was affected by two or perhaps three Irishmen. One was Frederick Hervey, fourth earl of Bristol, bishop of Derry (1730–1803), dilettante and traveller, whose name came to be connected with the continent's classiest hotels. Another was Arthur Wellesley, duke of Wellington, whose campaigns and their commemoration generated much of the “battle tourism” made possible by the coming railway age. The third was Charles Maturin, whose Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) created the tourist from hell. The sublime as horror is never far from the eye-witness accounts discussed in William H. A. Williams's fascinating work. The marks of a growing specialism can be seen in the book's bibliography. Of eight anthologies of tourist writing on Ireland cited, all but one stem from the post-1990 period that witnessed the postmodern disaggregation of history, away from Staatsräson and toward boutique studies of varying relevance to humanist survival in the penumbra of finance capital. It is no coincidence that more print is (or in the last couple of decades was) devoted to genteel writing about the cabins and crosses of Ireland than to the far more infective socio-economic history of Liechtenstein or the Cayman Islands.