Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character

Download or read book Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character written by William Williams and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-02-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.