William H. A. Williams's book offers a vivid portrait of Britain's ideological and aesthetic engagement with pre-famine Ireland. While not the first book to use travel narratives to illuminate British attitudes toward Ireland, it is certainly among the most comprehensive and engaging explorations of this literature yet to appear, not only for what it says about British travelers in Ireland but also for what it indirectly reveals about life in pre-famine Ireland itself. Drawing from over one hundred travel narratives by British (mostly English, mostly middle-class) tourists, Williams deftly outlines the complex cultural assumptions that British visitors brought to Ireland, showing how tourism failed to bridge the cultural gap between the two countries and instead reinforced prejudices that underlined the broader failure to integrate the two islands under the Union.

Williams begins by asking, “When British travelers turned their attention to Ireland after 1750, which category did the sister island fit into: foreign country or extension of ‘home’?” (4). Answering this question had become an urgent necessity as the two societies became more intertwined in this period, and it was often in order to teach their fellow Britons about this still relatively unknown island that British tourists went to and wrote about Ireland. The conclusion that most of them came to, Williams argues, was that Ireland was more “foreign country” than “home,” although they believed that with enough effort it could, and should, become more British. In the first two chapters Williams explores travelers’ responses to the Irish landscape, natural and historical, which were shaped by contemporary aesthetic notions of the sublime and the picturesque. He demonstrates how such notions framed tourists’ descriptions of Ireland and predisposed them to see Ireland as a “wild,” “ancient” place that was essentially different from “modern” Britain. The other chapters deal primarily with travelers’ responses to the Irish people—their poverty, their economic and religious activities, and, ultimately, their character. Like most tourists, British travelers tended to emphasize the differences between the way the locals lived and the way things were done back home, and they often made sweeping generalizations about the entire country based on their limited encounters with local people. Thus we encounter the expected stereotypes of Paddy and the Stage Irishman; horrified descriptions of “superstitious” and “undignified” religious practices (particularly those involving death and burial); the fetishization of Irish poverty through such signifiers as rags, pigs, and dung heaps; and explicit comparisons of the Irish with colonial “savages.” In all this, Williams says, travelers were revealing more about their own British identities than about the realities of life in Ireland.

The one corner of the country to escape such critiques was Ulster, where travelers perceived all the signs of agricultural productivity and civilization—orderly hedgerows, well-clad locals, Protestant churches—that were missing from the Catholic south and west. For many writers Ulster offered an example of what Ireland could become under the right political and social circumstances—how, in other words, it could become more British. In one of the book's most compelling chapters, Williams explores how British settlers and missionaries sought to expand upon the success of Ulster by regenerating and renewing the wild western lands of Connemara, which, after the famine, many saw as a sort of terra nullius in which they could freely indulge the whims of their “imperial imaginations” (163). The irony, as Williams convincingly demonstrates, was that the bucolic and orderly Britain that these travelers had in mind was itself a fantasy, a vestige of a preindustrial age that was quickly slipping away. Ireland may not have been what they wanted it to be, but neither, in fact, was Britain.

For those who study nineteenth-century Ireland, much of this will be unsurprising, and Williams, who draws heavily from the massive secondary literature on British perceptions of the Irish, doesn’t offer a radically new interpretation of these travelogues. Indeed, his central premise—that British travelers filtered their accounts of Ireland through their own cultural assumptions—seems rather self-evident, even if he does categorize and analyze these assumptions with great insight. A more serious criticism is that Williams too often succumbs to the temptation to condemn these British tourists for their failure to understand Ireland fully, frequently pointing out the “misinterpretations” and “problems” with their accounts, which he then corrects by turning to the latest historiography to show the reality behind the fantasy. While debunking myths and stereotypes is certainly within any historian's remit, one sometimes detects a whiff of condescension in Williams's attitude toward sources that, after all, one would hardly expect to be models of cultural sensitivity. This is especially true of a genre whose entire purpose is to document superficial encounters with the Other; one doubts whether even the most subtle and empathetic travel narrative could provide a “true” picture of the people whose lives it purports to depict.

These reservations aside, this is a lively, engaging study that deserves a wide audience. Written in a brisk, accessible style, it is an ideal introduction to British attitudes toward Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and will be especially useful for students who are unfamiliar with more specialized books on the topic. Also valuable for such readers is the vivid picture of pre-famine Ireland that emerges, willy-nilly and almost incidentally, through these texts, from which Williams quotes liberally. The many descriptions of mountains, farms, ruins, wakes, faction fights, cottages, bogs, and clothing that appear in these pages are inevitably refracted through the prejudices of British observers—and then refracted again, or perhaps corrected, by Williams's own analysis—but together they provide a clearer sense of how pre-famine Ireland looked, smelled, and tasted than most other economic or social histories could ever provide. British travelers might have failed to give their readers a “true” picture of Ireland in their own time, but for us they offer invaluable glimpses onto a world that has vanished entirely, even if, as Williams reminds us, their stories tell us as much about themselves as about the land they tried to understand.