This collection reveals how travellers, writers and readers discovered Britain and Ireland as sites of tourism during the heyday of the continental Grand Tour. Essays from across disciplines consider how diverse travellers deployed comparative frames of reference to understand the distinctiveness and significance of the sites they visited.
Even as members of the social elite participated in the European Grand Tour, travellers, writers, and readers increasingly recognized that Britain and Ireland might offer sights and experiences to rival the continent. This collection examines the practice and representation of tourism on 'home' ground during the period when modern Britain was invented and became a powerful and prosperous imperial nation. Interdisciplinary essays explore the diverse variety of tours and tourist agendas – artistic, industrial, leisure, scientific – and they address the ways in which travellers' 'discovery' of Britain and Ireland was an active and often self-critical process that potentially encompassed encounters with the alien and unfamiliar. Considering travellers from the wider world as well as from within Britain and Ireland, contributors discuss the function of comparative reference in contemporary travel-writing, as tourists often thought with and through others as they reflected on the distinctiveness and significance of the sites that they visited.
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An interdisciplinary collection exploring the practice and representation of tourism in Britain in the heyday of the continental Grand Tour.
Introduction Alison O'Byrne and James Watt;
1. Discovering Britain and
Ireland: Goldsmith's grand tours James Watt;
2. Frances Burney at the seaside
Harriet Guest;
3. Moving pictures: Thomas Sandby in the East Midlands and
Yorkshire John Bonehill;
4. Watercolour, extreme weather, electricity:
Cornelius varley in North Wales 1802-5 Elizabeth Edwards;
5. 'Another view of
Ireland': tourism and war on the 'Irish Road' in 1790s Wales Mary-Ann
Constantine;
6. 'A scene of Terror, Tumult, and Confusion': Irish Gothic
Tourism Jim Kelly;
7. Experimental Tourism: Aesthetics, Science, and World
History in the Highlands of Scotland Ian Duncan;
8. 'Such classic ground':
Women and the Romantic-Era Scottish Tour Pam Perkins;
9. 'Manchester is, as
it were, the heart of this vast system': Two Northern Industrial Tours of the
1790s Jon Mee;
10. 'Diffusive Opulence': Foreign Travellers' views of
Romantic London Alison O'Byrne;
11. Metropolitan Thresholds: Abu Talib,
Juliette Récamier, and Touristic Worldmaking Daniel O'Quinn; Bibliography;
Index.
James Watt is Director of the University of York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 17641832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and British Orientalisms, 17591835 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and the editor of The Citizen of the World (2024) in the Cambridge University Press edition of the Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Alison O'Byrne is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of York and has published widely on representations of the city in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She is the author of The Art of Walking in Eighteenth-Century London: Representing the City, 17001830 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
