Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland

Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland, edited by Benjamin Colbert; pp. xii + 264. Basingstoke and new York: Palgrave macmillan, 2012, £60.00, $100.00.

The last few decades have seen a grow ing number of book s, art icles, and dissert ations on the subject of domestic travel and tourism in Britain, but Benjamin Colbert's Travel Wr iting and Tourism in Britain and Ireland may be the first edited collection of essays dedicated to the subject. this rich collection attests to the myr iad psychological, cultural, and political pur poses that were ser ved as grow ing numbers of British and Ir ish cit izens set out to explore their own countr y from t he late eighteent h centur y into the t went ieth.

Just a s the landed gentleman of an earlier era might have sur veyed his demesne, confirming his natural r ight of ow nership, an increa singly leisured, literate, and a ffluent middle- class t raveler in t he nineteenth centur y made new claims on the landscape. a s the essays in this collection demonstrate, that movement wa s never inno - cent, but was always motivated and/or constrained by concerns of class, gender, relig g and national identit y.

Judith adler has described tourism as a kind of "art ful per for mance" capable of defining or redefining the spaces through which the tourist moves and the relat ionship of the tourist to t hose spaces ("Origins of Sight seeing," Annals of Tourism R esearch 16 [1989], 7). these essays document and assess t hose performances a s the means by which a growing middle class confronted critical issues and events in the emergence of the modern Br it ish state (such a s t he act s of union a nd the Irish Famine). For example, tour ing Iona, the site of Br it ain's first monaster y in the sixth centur y, meant celebrating a native tradition of Chr istianit y independent of Roman Cat holicism. In the opening essay, Paul Smethurst shows how, in the decades following t he final br ut al rout of Scottish resistance at Culloden in 1749, t homa s Pennant's interest in...