Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period

Grand Tours

James Watt, Alison O'Byrne

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108916646
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Discovering Britain and Ireland: Goldsmith’s Grand Tours
• Chapter 2 Frances Burney at the Seaside
• Chapter 3 Moving Pictures: Thomas Sandby in the East Midlands and Yorkshire
• Chapter 4 Watercolour, Extreme Weather, Electricity: Cornelius Varley in North Wales 1802–1805
• Chapter 5 ‘Another View of Ireland’: Tourism and War on the ‘Irish Road’ in 1790s Wales
• Chapter 6 ‘A Scene of Terror, Tumult, and Confusion’: Irish Gothic Tourism
• Chapter 7 Experimental Tourism: Aesthetics, Science, and World History in the Highlands of Scotland
• Chapter 8 ‘Such Classic Ground’: Women and the Romantic-Era Scottish Tour
• Chapter 9 ‘Manchester Is, as It Were, the Heart of This Vast System’: Two Northern Industrial Tours of the 1790s
• Chapter 10 ‘Diffusive Opulence’: Foreign Travellers’ Views of Romantic London
• Chapter 11 Metropolitan Thresholds: Abu Talib, Juliette Récamier, and Touristic Worldmaking
• Select Bibliography
• Index