An example of early Irish travel writing

My present study is based in OFlanagans Impressions at home and abroad or a year of real life, a two-volume travel account of his grand tour upon his coming of age through England and the Continent (France, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium) in 1836. This travelogue is symptomatic of the hybrid status of travel writing as a genre in the early nineteenth century, which was a blend of autobiography, historical recollections and pragmatic information coloured by the personality of the writer and will serve as a case study to investigate different aspects of travel writing in that period. But before I talk about some of these aspects, I will introduce the author. James Roderick OFlanagan was a lawyer and a writer on Irish subjects. Born in Fermoy in 1814 from a Catholic family, his father was a barrack master and farmer. He received his classical education in Fermoy Church of Ireland College (182432). Then, he studied law at the King's Inns, Dublin, and at Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple in London; he was called to the Irish bar in 1838, and joined the Munster circuit. Before finishing his studies in law he embarked on a grand tour through the Continent and wrote his first travel book. Later in life, he mainly worked as a journalist of several magazines such as the London Law Times, and edited the Dublin Saturday Magazine. He also wrote articles for the Dictionary of National Biography and several books. He died in 1800 at his Fermoy estate. OFlanagans work is valuable especially as it reflects the mentality of the upper-middle-class catholic Whigs of Victorian Ireland, a group that has been largely ignored. In his introduction to the tour, OFlanagan voices the rising need for more pragmatic travel guides that could give tourists some idea of the expense instead of mere impressionistic accounts. Thus, he is resolved to break the mystic tie [] that has alone prevented thousands of our intelligent countrymen, and fellow-citizens, from sharing the advantages of travel and so he provides a full account of the expenses on the Continent (hotels, coaches, steam-boats and guides fares included). It is not incidental, then, that in the same year OFlanagan was travelling in Europe, Murray published the first handbook on the Continent which was to mark, together with Baekeder, the beginning of the modern travel guidebooks corollary of the emergence of mass tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite his intentions of providing prosaic information, OFlanagans journal, as its name suggests, is a highly romantic and impressionistic narrative and therefore is in line with the socalled romantic travels. In fact, he quotes profusely Byrons verses which was the custom in those days and something that Murray was to perpetuate in his handbooks. The appropriation of Byrons Childe Harolds Pilgrimage Canto III is a key element in his descriptions of natural landscapes in Switzerland, along the Rhine in Germany and the fields of Waterloo. For instance, in the Swiss Alps, OFlanagan mingles his own romantic prose with that of Byron. Whenever he is unable to describe the magnificence of nature, he resorts to quote any of the Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In this way, Lake Geneva and the Rhine become

landscapes created by literary texts whereby the prosaic and ugly hold no place for the poetic sentiments that these locations raised. The overall image is romantic, picturesque and sublime. The theme of speechlessness and indescribability pervades when encountering the works of nature such as lakes, glaciers and mountains. In many ways OFlanagan echoes the concerns of travel writers of his time. He feels the need to explain his reasons to add his name to the vast list of authors who have written their travels before him. He uses the idea of originality and uniqueness to distinguish himself from the proliferation of travel narratives. In this sense, he expresses an increasing concern related to belatedness and authenticity. One of my major questions has to do with his national identity. How does OFlanagan describe himself in the Continent and in England? More specifically, in what contexts does he call himself an Irish, a British subject or even an English one? In order to discover whether there is a pattern for these identifications I have classified the contexts in which OFlanagan refers to his nationality. This part of my study is in line with the work of Marjorie Morgan with respect to national identities in Victorian Britain. By looking at the usage of terms such as Irish British Briton and English and their contexts, I was able to get a general, albeit preliminary, picture of OFlanagans personal national loyalties. That OFlanagan feels at home in Ireland and has strong affiliations with his land should not come as a surprise since he defines himself as an Irishman most of the time. In relation to England, he provides a simile of Ireland and England as two sisters so he views both countries as part of the same family. However, once he had crossed the Channel these terms are sometimes used loosely and inconsistently. Overall, in accordance with Morgans claim, there is a marked tendency to use the term British when referring to the collective identity of the peoples of the British Isles, thus the author highlights the unity of Britain. When emphasising a collective national identity, his visit to Waterloo is a case in point. He claims that Waterloo is, or ought to be, the chief object of interest to the British subject, on this portion of the Continent and gives a detailed account on the events using Byrons prose too. Inconsistencies of usage are reflected in his work such as when the term British and English are used as synonyms. For instance, when he describes the works that the library of St Bernard Convent holds, he comments that besides theological works, are those of Sir Walter Scott and others of our English authors. The fact that British would have been a more appropriate term in this context shows that these terms were used loosely, but these instances occur rarely. It is worth noticing too that using the phrase our English author could indicate a shared cultural identity. In terms of religious differences, most of the time OFlanagan, a devout Roman Catholic, refrains from making any remarks or generalisations about religion. All in all, he seems very

cautious to not offend Protestant sensibilities. There is just one instance where he alludes to religious groups and their intolerance. When visiting the celebrated Pre Lachaise Cemetery, he observes: Protestant, Jew, and Catholic, lie in the one common breast. Earth knows no distinction in her children. If many gave themselves the trouble to think of this in their life-time, we would have much less of animosities or religious distinctions. (IHA 283 vol. i) Given the historic context of hostilities between Protestants and Catholics within Ireland and with England which remained in the mind of the travellers even after the Catholic Emancipation of 1829 (Morgan 89), it is not far-fetched to say that this passage could be an allusion to the intolerance of Protestants. By doing this, OFlanagan encoded certain cultural attributes, namely intolerance, to Protestantism. In general, however, religious matters appear scarcely in his impressions; in fact, the terms Protestant and Protestantism were used less than ten times in his two-volume book, while Catholic and Catholicism were employed around twenty times, being majorly used as a religious label to churches. Thus, it is safe to say that there is a certain omission or evasion of religious issues in his work, unlike many Protestants who bashed on Catholics, OFlanagan does not present a derogatory discourse towards Protestants in his journal and this might have something to do with the fact that Impressions at home and abroad was published in Dublin but also in London, thus OFlanagan was aiming at a broad British readership and was well-aware that his audience could comprise many Protestants and therefore he had to avoid contention in order to sell his work. To sum all up, in many respects OFlanagan gives us a conventional travel account that exemplifies the early nineteenth century mode of travel writing. Like most romantic travellers, OFlanagans expectations were set in accordance to the romantic literary texts as he seems to emulate the distinctive mode of romantic and picturesque seeing. He also defends his writing by resorting to the theme of originality. In determining whether he called himself an Irish or British man, context plays a major role. Thus, we can preliminary conclude that OFlanagans national loyalties were not necessarily exclusive, that is, he was a self-conscious Irishman and, at the same time, a loyal British subject something that was not unusual in an Ireland post-union in the 1830s.