Travel literature has been described by Jonathan Raban as "literature's red-light district". It defies peoples' beliefs, confuses expectations, crosses disciplinary boundaries and is linked to ethnography, journalism and biography. Yet for all that has managed to remain not only a visible but also an increasingly popular literary genre. This anthology makes an entertaining and insightful contribution to this engaging field. It includes extracts from well known writers, such as Thackeray, Boll and Chesterton, but also presents less familiar figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The seventy pieces collected here both offer sharp observations of the country and are equally revealing about the travelers themselves. Each extract, where possible, is prefaced by a brief biography of its author. For readers interested in the origins and historical role of travel writing in general, and how they relate to Ireland, the editor offers an illuminating introduction. This anthology presents illuminating snapshots of Ireland over two hundred years. It also provides insights into the varied perspectives of the travelers themselves, a perspective often influenced by contemporary political events such as the Great Famine, Home Rule, the Civil War and the Troubles. This anthology leaves the reader with an enduring image of Ireland's ability to fascinate and stimulate visitors through two centuries.

From the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth, tourism became established as a leisure industry and travel writing as a popular genre. In this collection of essays, leading international historians and travel writing experts examine the role of home tourism in the UK and Ireland in the development of national identities and commercial culture.

Urban spaces in nineteenth-century Ireland offers new insights on the Irish urban experience by exploring the ways in which urban spaces, from individual buildings to streets and districts, were constructed and experienced during the nineteenth century.

For the majority of us the opportunity to travel has never been greater, yet differences in mobility highlight inequalities that have wider social implications. Exploring how and why attitudes towards movement have evolved across generations, the case studies in this essay collection range from medieval to modern times and cover several continents.

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.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.