Journeys To England And Ireland

"…a tireless observer, and one of unparalleled brilliance and prescience, with a remarkable ability to draw strangers to serious talk. Here, in visits of a few months, he manages to see and describe more of the essence of English character, society, and politics—as well as that bottomless pit, the Irish problem, than most others have in a lifetime." —The New Yorker

Notebooks kept by the author during his journeys to England in 1833 and in 1835 and to Ireland in 1835, with an extract from an unpublished letter probably addressed to Gustave de Beaumont, Oct. 5, 1828.

This extraordinary series of observations on England and Ireland complements de Tocqueville's masterpieces on the United States and France in the mid-nineteenth century. These pages are perhaps the most penetrating writings on the spirit of British politics. In effect, as indicated by John Stuart Mill, de Tocqueville was the Montesquieu of the nineteenth century. This is especially the case if one thinks of the present Irish situation. His political acumen reached into the future -which is now our present.

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This volume offers a reasoned critical account of a wide range of travel writing about rural Ireland. The focus is on work by English travellers who visited Ireland for pleasure, from the ’scenic tourists’ of the post-Romantic period to Eric Newby in the 1980s. Ryle also discusses accounts by American and English anthropologists, as well as writing by Irish authors including J.M. Synge, George Moore, Sean O’Faolain and Colm Tóibín. The materials reviewed and discussed here, including many books which are now difficult to find, offer illuminating and sometimes entertaining evidence about the development of tourism. Ryle also shows how the discourses and practices of pleasurable travel have intersected with and been marked by the dimensions of power and proprietorship, hegemony, and resistance, which have characterised Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English cultural relations over the last two centuries. Journeys in Ireland will interest all those concerned with the literature and history of those relations, and will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers and students concerned with travel writing and tourism with and beyond these islands.

In "A Journey in Ireland 1921", originally published in 1922, Ewart relates memories of his journey of April and May 1921. He interviews prominent figures ranging from the Dublin Castle spin-doctor Basil Clarke, Sinn Fein activists in Cork and Limerick to Southern Unionists, former Home Rule MPs and the writer and commentator AE (George Russell). His attempt at a walking tour between Cork and Belfast led to his being interrogated both by British forces and by the IRA; his account ends with a description of Ulster Unionist public meetings addressed by James Craig and Dawson Bates as the Northern Ireland parliament and government were about to come into existence.A meticulous and intelligent observer, Ewart finds himself caught between fellow feeling for embattled British forces and dismayed at the state to which Ireland had been reduced. His account provides a striking pen-portrait of Ireland in the last stages of the War of Independence.