Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   James Watt (University of York) ,  Alison O'Byrne (University of York)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781108842693

ISBN 10:   1108842690
Pages:   291
Publication Date:   27 March 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

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.

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Author Information

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, 1764–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (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, 1700–1830 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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