Industry, poverty and the language of improvement

Western regions, especially in Ireland and Scotland, offered the tourist the chance to experience remoteness from what one guidebook described as ‘the bustle and worries of business, and the murky atmospheric conditions of the crowded town’.⁸ However, at the same time, guidebooks and travel writing reported on the under-development of resources and unrealised economic potential of the west. Murray’s Ireland (1902), for instance, described the economic ‘backwardness’ of the country caused by the subdivision of smallholdings, the difficulties of the land tenure system, and ‘primitive and unscientific’ methods of cultivation.⁹ Galway was a particularly egregious example of under-development, with its fisheries ‘in a languishing condition’, according to Black’s Ireland (1885), despite the fishing grounds being ‘as good as any in the kingdom’.¹⁰ Galway also boasted natural advantages that made it the ideal location for a deep-sea port, but this was notable as another example of unfulfilled industrial and commercial potential.¹¹

For many travellers, economic development was the remedy for the poverty and desolation they saw in the west.¹² In Connemara, Frederick Verney was struck by the barrenness of the land and signs of the ‘yearly recurring struggle for existence’, including the ‘minute holdings’ and ‘hovels’ that dotted the countryside between Galway and Cashla Bay.¹³ For Stone, the ‘solitary grandeur’ of the scenery around Lough Inagh was conspicuous for its lack of life, and he lamented that there were ‘no cabins, no people, no children, no happy signs of industry, of cultivation, prosperity’.¹⁴ These were uncomfortable silences and absences evoking emigration and famine, which pervaded many descriptions of western Ireland. Some of the absences were temporary, such as the young men and women of Achill Island who, A. J. Hayes explained during his 1894 visit, migrated to England and Scotland for seasonal work.¹⁵

The subject of investment and improvement gained momentum around the turn of the twentieth century, when hopes were raised by the Agricultural Technical Instruction (Ireland) Act (1899), which established the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction in the following year.¹⁶ Moreover, travel books were an important source of information, especially for the British reading public, on the activities of the Congested Districts Board, created in 1891 to improve conditions in western Ireland by working to prevent potato disease and assist with tree cultivation, livestock breeding, poultry farming, tweed and cloth weaving, and road building. Many of the designated districts were located on the northern coast of Galway Bay,¹⁷ and the guidebooks mined the Board’s official Annual Report for information to fill their introductory pages,¹⁸ while texts such as Stephen Gwynn’s Highways and Byways in Donegal and Antrim (1899) were praised for their informative passages on the work of the Board.¹⁹ S. G. Bayne even secured an interview with W. J. D. Walker, Inspector Organiser of Industries for the Congested Districts Board.²⁰

Travel books drew readers’ attention to specific improvements that had been effected by the Board, such as the development of the fishing industry at Kilronan on Inis Mór,²¹ the replacement of traditional curraghs with larger vessels, and the establishment of a curing station at Killeany (also on Inis Mór).²² Elsewhere, the Board established a station for deep-sea fishing at Roundstone, and at Streamstown Murray’s Ireland (1906) praised the Board for its development of the mackerel fishing industry.²³ Inland, travel writers and guidebooks commented on the powers of the Board to ‘condemn and purchase at a fair valuation the fertile land’ of the great landowners, reselling it to the tenants at favourable rates.²⁴ In particular, Clare Island set an example for how this might be implemented. There, explained Black’s Ireland (1906), the division of farm work was replaced by ‘an organised tenure, by which certain lands are allotted to each tenant’, which Stephen Gwynn claimed was ‘one of the best examples of the Congested Districts Board’s beneficent work’ in the area.²⁵ Plans made by the Board were not always carried through, though, and Synge remained frustrated at the neglected kelp industry, while Stone called on the Board to construct a ‘pier or landing-stage’ at Dooagh (the most westerly village on Achill Island) which, he claimed, along with ‘an inexpensive storm-wall’, would transform the fishing from ‘spasmodic and desultory’ into ‘an important industry’.²⁶ Optimism was often tempered by the recognition that, as Murray’s Ireland (1906) put it, ‘much yet remains to be done’.²⁷

Similarly, Skye’s remoteness and solitude prompted travel writers to reflect on the poverty of the crofters and their restricted access to pastureland since the introduction of sheep farming during the Highland Clearances. This brought an end, explained MacCulloch, to the ‘shieling days’ when the township ‘migrated to the hill pasture with their sheep and cattle’, and the arable ground still available to the people was ‘subject to the ravages of game’ such as deer and grouse.²⁸ Ferguson found some hope in the successful woollen manufactory in Portree, and called for ‘some of the successful sons of Skye’ who had made fortunes abroad to return and invest, so that the island might enjoy employment, ‘welfare’, and ‘prosperity’.²⁹ However, the answer was not necessarily industrial development. Instead, Ferguson called for a resolution to the disputes between the crofters and their landlords regarding access to grazing land and fixity of tenure, without which, Ferguson acknowledged, there was no incentive for the crofters to make improvements to their ‘wretched-looking hovels’, because they could simply be ejected the following year.³⁰

As Chapter 1 discussed, some travellers followed in the footsteps of the Napier Commission (1883) to collect stories about the Crofters’ War from the inhabitants of the seldom-visited Glendale district, and to report on the effects of the Crofters Holdings Act (1886). Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell remained committed to their self-appointed responsibility to investigate the social and economic conditions of the crofters, but they were dismayed by the response of certain critics. Having set out to discover ‘the actual condition of the population’, the Pennells eschewed the beaten track of ‘civilised society’ where, they wrote, rich tourists stayed in comfortable hotels and ‘ignored’ the crofters. Instead, they described ‘the misery of the people’, but for dwelling on the subject of poverty they were labelled ‘sickly sentimentalists’ by some of their readers. Perhaps, they wondered, that instead of honest accounts, their critics preferred ‘second-hand descriptions’ of fashionable places that might have been written from home or manufactured in the British Museum.³¹ The Pennells, in seeking to write an authentic and original account of Skye, seemingly diverted too far from the well-established myths of the west that some of their readers expected. While hyperbole might entertain in accounts of dangerous mountain descents and rough sea crossings, vivid descriptions of destitution or of politically contentious issues such as the Highland Clearances could be dismissed as sentimentalism. It was in this manner that Geraldine Mitton accused MacLeod – who discussed the Clearances from the crofters’ perspective in Gloomy Memories in the Highlands (1840–41) – of painting a ‘lurid picture’ that was ‘too highly coloured to carry much conviction’.³²

In some texts, the language of deficiency and improvement perpetuated a colonial discourse that developed in Highland Scotland in the aftermath of the ’45 and was energised in the years following the Great Famine (1845–52) in Ireland.³³ Applying David Spurr’s concept of ‘negation’ to the language of improvement and deficiency in mid-nineteenth-century Connemara, William H. A. Williams explained that, as a narrative technique, negation pulled the landscapes of western Ireland and the Scottish Highlands ‘into the perceptive domain of the writer’ and claimed it as territory for the coloniser who would realise the economic potential of the land, which the natives had failed to do.³⁴ This often relied on the racial stereotype of the Celt as inherently ‘lazy’, and who therefore required the help of the naturally ‘industrious’ Saxon.³⁵ Exponents of this theory included John Pinkerton, who in 1787 described the Celts of Wales, Ireland and Scotland as ‘incapable of industry or civilization’, and John Harvey Ashworth, who encouraged the English to invest and settle in the ‘Sister Island’ in The Saxon in Ireland (1851).³⁶ The opening of Ashworth’s book is particularly revealing, and it takes the form of a conversation between the author, his wife, and their friend, the curate of the parish. It is the curate who urges Ashworth to go, because Ireland requires ‘an admixture of Saxon habits and feelings’ and ‘English capital’ to make the most of the ‘rich vales and green hills of Erin’, which had been nothing but ‘a millstone round the neck of the sister island’.³⁷ Opportunities to invest in Irish land grew with the establishment of the Encumbered Estates Court in 1849, which helped to sell the estates of landowners in financial difficulties caused by the Great Famine.³⁸ Ashworth was initially reluctant to take up the call and claimed that the ‘solitude’ of the North American forests, the ‘chill air’ of Canada, and the ‘sultry winds’ of South Africa would be far easier to endure than the ‘poverty, the squalidness, the degradation of the lower orders in Ireland’. In contrast to the ‘heartless’ Celt or Milesian landowner, who ‘may calmly view from the windows of his mansion, or the gates of his park, scenes of wretchedness’, the Saxon would ‘sacrifice his all, nay, even his life, in the endeavour to remedy such a fearful condition of society’. Far from being grounds to avoid Ireland, the curate accepted Ashworth’s summary of the country, and the differences between the Celt and the Saxon, suggesting that these were the very reasons he needed to go and settle, invest and develop.³⁹

The racial stereotypes of ‘lazy’ Celt and ‘industrious’ Saxon, and Ashworth’s colonial discourse, lived on in Harry Speight’s A Tourist’s View of Ireland (1885), in which the author perceived the land in terms of its economic potential as he travelled westwards. Speight was struck by the ‘affluence of the landscape’ and, between Westport and Leenaun, he marvelled at the ‘thousands of acres of untenanted prairie’. However, the ‘fair face’ of the land was marred by ‘irreconcilable freckles’ – the ‘squalid hovels of the peasantry’. Speight travelled through Ireland after the Land Act (1881), which provided fixity of tenure and offered a route to a reduction of rents through the Land Court. For these reasons, Speight argued, ‘there is now really no valid excuse for a continuance of this shippen mode of existence’. From Speight’s perspective, the real problem was that ‘there is still something lamentably unavailing in the Irishman’s nature’. Among the deficiencies he listed ‘sloth and natural inaptitude’, ‘ignorance’, ‘bad workmanship’ and ‘bad packing’ that ruined the potatoes for export. Land reform could only do so much, and Speight went so far as to suggest that even if the land were rent free, soon ‘the same evils of famine’ would affect the people. Those who cited the prosperity of ‘Ulster tenants’ and ‘the thrifty little farmers of France and Holland’ failed to see what Speight could – that ‘their habits and character differ as widely from these people as the sun does from the moon’. The answer was to replace the bad tenants with ‘thrifty, industrious men’, and to make sure that this ‘fertile country’ was ‘made to yield better results in the right hands’. Ireland needed ‘civilising influences’ and ‘capital to make the most of her soil’.⁴⁰

Speight was not alone in blaming Irish temperament for the dearth of industry in the west. J. L. Joynes met several landlords in Dublin who denounced the ‘idleness of the Irish’, and at Cong Captain Charles Boycott – the infamous land agent whose name became associated with the Land League’s tactic of isolating the landowners’ representatives during the Land War – insisted that ‘the peasants were all utterly idle’.⁴¹ Such accusations were not the preserve of landlords and their agents, though. The American author and photographer Clifton Johnson thought that the land in Connemara appeared ‘tilled neither energetically nor carefully’, while the French travel writer and novelist Madame de Bovet suggested that Irish peasants were ‘lacking in some quality essential to prosperity’.⁴² Examples in travel writing are numerous, and include Charles Whymper’s accusation that the Irish peasantry lacked ‘steady purpose, real perseverance, and love of labour’, and Stone’s fear that the work of the Congested Districts Board might ‘destroy the spirit of enterprise and plucky endeavour which makes nations’.⁴³ Even guidebooks such as Black’s Ireland (1906), which usually made claims to neutrality, described Ireland as the land ‘where no one is in a hurry’, especially ‘the Hibernian agriculturalist’.⁴⁴

Moreover, the laziness of the Celt was not just an Irish problem. The ‘Skyeman’, too, claimed MacCulloch, ‘is incredibly lazy’ and represented an ‘enfeebled and dying race’.⁴⁵ In a somewhat sceptical remark about the Crofters’ Holdings Act (1886), which secured fixity of tenure for the crofters, MacCulloch concluded that ‘moderate prosperity’ was now within reach of ‘all who were active enough to strive for it’.⁴⁶ Such rhetoric was more widespread around the turn of the twentieth century, but as late as 1939 travel writers such as Hugh Quigley perpetuated the notion that the crofters of Skye, being ‘used to little and not expecting much’, would ‘not labour greatly to make sour land sweet’.⁴⁷

Apparent evidence for the dichotomy of the ‘industrious’ Saxon and the ‘lazy’ Celt could be found everywhere, not just in the landscape but also in the design of everyday objects. Havelock Ellis drew attention to the different type of spade used in the Celtic west in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon east. The common Anglo-Saxon spade was ‘a short, powerful implement with a large oblong blade, and a cross-piece at the end of the handle’. This spade was ‘not an elegant instrument’, but it was ‘well adapted to obtain a maximum output of energy from arms and back and legs’. The spade represented Ellis’s Anglo-Saxon – efficient and practical, but unimaginative and inelegant. In contrast, the ‘Cornish spade – also found in Wales and Ireland – is often as long as its owner, with a slender, slightly curved handle and a small heart-shaped blade’. This was ‘a graceful instrument’ adapted to Cornwall’s shallow soil but also ‘to the lithe, slow, free movements of the Cornishmen’. As verification of this assessment, Ellis quoted Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch when concluding that the Cornish ‘possess a characteristic which has lovingly been described by a child of the land as a “divine laziness”’.⁴⁸

While travel writers pondered the deficiencies of the Celt, the guidebooks celebrated the work of enterprising Britons who invested in western Ireland in the decades after the Famine, answering the call to ‘make the backward regions of the world hum with industry and bloom with cultivation’.⁴⁹ In Letterfrack, for instance, the Quaker and Leicester manufacturer James Ellis matched his ‘philanthropic efforts’ after the Famine with a series of improvements made to what was previously ‘a waste of sparsely cultivated land’.⁵⁰ Ellis ‘built a neat village’, as well as a police-barracks and schools, ‘besides draining and planting a very large portion of moorland’.⁵¹ As a result of his perseverance, concluded Black’s Ireland (1877), ‘that which was a wilderness has become a garden’, and the ‘rude and unlettered’ people received ‘an amount of enlightenment altogether unknown before in the district’.⁵² In the 1860s, the Manchester-born merchant of Irish descent Mitchell Henry purchased around 14,000 acres of land at Kylemore, and set about building his own castle and making improvements while serving as MP for Galway between 1871 and 1885.⁵³ Speight visited Kylemore Castle, and looked upon ‘meadow and arable land of the most productive character’, which had been transformed from an ‘unproductive barrenness’ of ‘unclaimed bog and mountain land’ thanks to Henry’s ‘persevering industry and a large amount of hired labour’. Speight’s description of this ‘Protestant’, ‘amidst the crudest Catholic surroundings’, is the embodiment of Ashworth’s Saxon in Ireland. Henry had become the ‘uncrowned king of this fair domain’, the ‘avowed idol of the district’ and ‘a benefactor to the neighbourhood of no ordinary kind’.⁵⁴

The contents of guidebooks changed markedly from the 1920s. As conspicuous symbols of colonial oppression and conquest, almost 300 of Ireland’s Big Houses were occupied, burned and destroyed by republicans during the Irish Revolution.⁵⁵ Correspondingly, post-partition guidebooks were purged of celebratory passages about enterprising Britons that filled the pages of earlier texts. Much remained the same, of course, including the tone of optimism regarding the economic development of places such as Galway.⁵⁶ But information on Big House owners at Clifden, Renvyle and Leenaun was omitted from Irish Tourist Association guidebooks such as Connacht (1932), and in D. L. Kelleher’s It’s Ireland! (1932) the narrative around Mitchell Henry focused instead on the fact that he ‘married an Irishwoman and became an advocate for Home Rule’.⁵⁷

Even in earlier travel writing, not everyone looked to race or character to explain the barriers to economic prosperity in western Ireland and in Skye. Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell emphasised the crofters’ lack of incentive to make improvements without the fixity of tenure that had only been secured in 1886, and Cumming declared it ‘unjust’ to call the people of the Hebrides ‘idle’, insisting that ‘many are hard-working’.⁵⁸ Equally, in a report of his visit to Connemara, Frederick Verney held up the relief works introduced by Major Gaskell in 1880 as evidence that the people could ‘win their way from poverty by work’, should the opportunity arise. In a period of four weeks, around 3,000 men worked in gangs of 60 and constructed over 30 miles of village roads, with 100 stone-built gullets or watercourses, as well as ‘31 rough village piers for fishing-boats’, behind which ‘the boats now lie in perfect shelter’.⁵⁹ Even Speight acknowledged that Ireland’s industries had been ‘thwarted and oppressed’ by ‘English misrule’, and he could no longer deny the capabilities of Irish workers after Mitchell Henry showed him the ceilings, panelling and ‘carefully-executed mouldings’ of Kylemore Castle, which were carved from oak and ‘finished with the most perfect care and judgment’. Speight’s earlier dismissal of the Irish as ignorant turned into an admission that ‘the rude Irish peasant has a naturally sound head, but lacks the opportunities of rational advancement’.⁶⁰ Finally, in Irish Distress and Its Remedies (1880), the Quaker philanthropist James Hack Tuke took issue with the guidebooks’ triumphant narratives about English improvers, pointing out that, despite the presence of such enterprising proprietors, ‘600 out of 750 families in the district which includes Kylemore were upon the Relief lists’.⁶¹

In north Wales, by contrast, industry thrived in the heart of the mountains. Industrialisation in Wales is often associated with the coal, copper, tin-plate and steel industries of the south-east, but an image of a remote and undeveloped north-west would have been unrecognisable to travellers who encountered the slate quarries.⁶² The sights and sounds of industry spoiled A. G. Bradley’s experience of Llyn Padarn, and at Llyn Peris he looked with sadness on the ‘lacerated’ shoulder of Elidyr Fawr, where quarrying exposed ‘the entrails of this great mountain’:

one might well fancy it groaning in its agony, for all the ceaseless and horrid din, the rattle of trucks, the shout of countless men, who swarm like ants along the giddy heights, the crash of falling rocks, the creaking of machinery, the roar of blasting, and when a brief interval of silence admits it, the dull splash of some avalanche of loosened debris toppling into the lake.⁶³

Bradley’s encounter with industry was one of lamentation and horror, but it does not reflect the full range of responses in travel literature. The guidebooks celebrated the ‘extensive shipping trade’ of Porthmadog, which, the Cambrian Resorts Association noted, transported ‘thousands of tons of the famous Festiniog slates’ around the world.⁶⁴ Black’s North Wales (1883), too, expressed ‘astonishment at the commercial enterprise’ of the Penrhyn slate quarries near Bangor, which ‘transformed these mountain-wastes into sources of industrious occupation, private wealth, and national prosperity’. Bradley’s description of ‘damage’, ‘laceration’ and ‘agony’ became ‘the loud hum of busy life and industry’, which supported ‘not fewer than 11,000 individuals’, once the wives and children of the workers had been accounted for, and tourists were encouraged to visit the quarries by coach from the Railway Hotel in Bangor.⁶⁵ O. J. R. Howarth’s balanced assessment was typical of the interwar planner-preservationist mindset, acknowledging that the slate quarries in the Snowdon massif were ugly, and ‘the harnessing of water-power for the supply of electricity has required that pylons and wires should bestride the countryside’, while insisting ‘[t]he possibility of foregoing such industrial development and the use of natural power is not arguable’, and calling on proper planning for ‘mitigating their effects on natural beauty’ in the future.⁶⁶

In fact, rural landscapes and the infrastructure of industrial modernity came together in the promotion of new water supplies, as engineers and municipal leaders in Birmingham and Liverpool exploited rural, mountainous landscape imagery to suggest wild, primitive and timeless purity. Between 1880 and 1892, the Lake Vyrnwy reservoir system was constructed to supply Liverpool with water, and the Elan Valley system was built by the Birmingham Corporation from the 1890s.⁶⁷ In 1881, the Mayor of Liverpool claimed that the mountainous landscape of north Wales, ‘hidden away’ from ‘the hum of civilisation’, boasted water of ‘crystal purity’ that would bring ‘health and prosperity to our people’, and similar imagery was used in pamphlets issued by the Liverpool Corporation in 1892.⁶⁸ The associations between Welsh water, purity and health were seized on by guidebooks, which targeted urban-dwelling tourists from Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and other industrial towns in north-west England. Ward and Lock’s guidebook to North Wales (Northern Section) (1909) understood that ‘Drainage and Water Supply are matters of vital concern to intending visitors’, at a time when the threat of diseases such as cholera and typhoid haunted densely populated towns and cities.⁶⁹ Outbreaks of cholera occurred intermittently in nineteenth-century Britain, including in 1831–2, 1848–9, 1853–4, 1865, 1866, 1892, and 1893,⁷⁰ and guidebooks emphasised the purity of water supplies in tourist resorts by drawing readers’ attention to the altitude of the water source, and its endorsement by medical professionals. Llandudno, explained one guidebook, was supplied by Llyn Dulyn, ‘a precipice-girt lake near Carnedd Llewelyn, abundant and pure’,⁷¹ and another boasted that scientific and modern works costing £136,000 ensured that ‘there is probably no better drained town in the kingdom’. Furthermore, Professors Frankland and Wanklyn had pronounced the town’s water supply ‘to be purer than even that of the celebrated Loch Katrine, which supplies Glasgow’.⁷² Elsewhere, descriptions of water supplies at Penmaenmawr, Pwllheli, Nefyn, Old Colwyn and Llanfairfechan all emphasised the purity of the Welsh mountain water, drawn from ‘unpolluted streams from unfailing springs’.⁷³

At Trefriw, the water was not merely pure but fortified with iron and sulphur. This was chalybeate spring water, and it came highly recommended by guidebooks citing ‘strong medical testimony’.⁷⁴ Ward and Lock’s North Wales (Northern Section) (1912) went to great lengths to entice tourists to the waters, apparently the ‘richest sulphur-iron waters in the world’ that collected in ‘rock-hewn basins supposed to be of Roman origin’. The source of the water lay in a cave that was blocked by debris and rediscovered in 1833 with the aid of ‘an aged inhabitant, in whose memory lingered stories of cures effected by the water’. Having been fully commercialised, the tourist visiting during the 1912 season could purchase a glass for 2d. and enjoy ‘the most modern hydropathic appliances’ in the pump house and baths. If the modern conveniences and atmospheric backstory were not enough to entice the tourist, the guidebook cited a letter written in 1907 by Dr John W. Hayward, M. D., who recommended the waters for chronic stomach and liver conditions, anaemia, rheumatism ‘and such-like ailments’, while Dr Dobie of Chester claimed that ‘amongst my own patients I have witnessed very remarkable curative effects from their use’.⁷⁵ In north Wales, the landscape was both ancient and modern, where rural, mountainous landscapes met large-scale industry and infrastructure, and where the tourist could benefit from the restorative power of the west.

Degeneration at the fin-de-siècle

The restorative power of the west is explored throughout this book. Chapters 2 and 3 examined how moving westwards was a wellspring of spiritual nourishment, and stories of sunken lands and elusive islands re-enchanted the world-weary. Chapters 4 and 6 focus on the historical west, where the layers of the past and the historical imagination anchored travellers and their readers in a rapidly changing present. This chapter considers how the notion of an ‘under-developed’ west also came to signify physical and moral superiority for travellers looking back at the degenerating and enervating effects of urban-industrial modernity. Far from the language of deficiency and improvement, their descriptions of the west took the form of thinly veiled or explicit expressions of concern about the physical health and morality of the population living in large towns and cities.⁷⁶ The restorative power of the west, then, was a potential source of national revivification.

Arnold Toynbee’s lectures (1884) signalled a new consciousness of the changes brought about by what he called the Industrial Revolution. Alongside prosperity and innovation there were ‘evils’, including ‘disastrous’ changes in the living and working conditions of labourers that seemed to ‘exhaust’ the worker ‘and dull his intelligence’.⁷⁷ Toynbee remained optimistic for the future, but his recognition of the evils associated with urban-industrial modernity became part of a broader set of anxieties about degeneration at the fin-de-siècle. Max Nordau articulated the gloomy mood of ‘imminent perdition and extinction’ and its aetiology in Degeneration (1892), which was translated into English in 1895. Nordau explained:

The inhabitant of a large town, even the richest, who is surrounded by the greatest luxury, is continually exposed to unfavourable influences which diminish his vital powers far more than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere charged with organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated food; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement …⁷⁸

In the half century since 1840, Nordau claimed, the ‘little shocks’ of railway travel, ‘perpetual noises’ in large towns, the growth of newspapers, and increased communications via postal services produced a constant state of ‘suspense’ and ‘expectation’ that ‘cost our brains wear and tear’.⁷⁹ In short, the ‘vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life’ caused a state of permanent ‘fatigue and exhaustion’ and physical and moral degeneration.⁸⁰ Drawing on the work of French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel and Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, Nordau described the various physical stigmata of degeneration including asymmetry in the face and cranium, stunted growth, large ears, ‘squint-eyes, hare-lips’, irregularity in the teeth and ‘webbed or supernumerary fingers’.⁸¹ For Lombroso, the physical symptoms made it possible to identify what he called ‘born criminals’, and Nordau summarised the range of corresponding psychological symptoms, which might include stunted mental faculties, a lack of morality, ‘unbounded egoism’, impulsiveness, emotionalism, pessimism and a general ‘mental weakness’ and lack of willpower or capability to act.⁸² Crucially, Morel emphasised that degenerative adaptations were ‘transmissible’ so that the stunted mental progress of an individual ‘finds itself menaced also in his descendants’.⁸³

In late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, degeneration threatened to usher in a period of national and imperial decline, and, as they made up the pool of potential recruits for the armed forces, the fitness of the male population came under special scrutiny. Public concerns about the fitness of army volunteers were especially widespread around the time of the second Anglo–South African War (1899–1902), though within the armed forces these anxieties can be traced back to the Crimean War (1853–6).⁸⁴ In 1888, The Lancet asked: ‘Are We Degenerating Physically?’ and described the degeneration taking place ‘among town-bred populations’, pointing to ‘unwholesome occupations’, ‘improper food’, ‘over-pressure in education’ and ‘abuse of alcohol and tobacco’, which led to various ‘evils’ including ‘juvenile vice’, ‘sexual indulgence in early life’ and ‘increased tension’.⁸⁵ But there was hope. In accordance with Lamarckism, it was not just decay and decline that were transmissible but renewal and revitalisation, too. Instead of perceiving the problem of degeneration as one of fixed biological inheritance, the evidence collected by the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904), the Royal Commission on Poor Laws (1905–9), and the National Birth-Rate Commission (1912–16) suggested that decline was caused by bad environmental conditions. It followed, then, that if stunted physical and mental development were acquired traits transmissible to future generations, then beneficial adaptations worked in the same way, and sensible social policy had the potential to change the conditions of the environment, and therefore the health of future generations, for the better.⁸⁶

In this context, it was believed that the west, made up of apparently unchanged landscapes, economies and communities, as well as racial types and characters, could reinvigorate the weary and degenerating centre.⁸⁷ Echoing the language of Nordau, the Cornish novelist Joseph Hocking arrived in western Cornwall ‘with my nerves raw and shattered’ but left ‘strong and vigorous’ and refreshed by ‘the Spirit of the West’.⁸⁸ Travel writers and guidebooks drew attention to the stature of people in western regions, too, emphasising their physical fitness. Ferguson described the people of Skye as ‘a strong, healthy, hardy-looking race’, and Black’s Ireland (1906) made similar observations about the people along the Galway-Mayo border in Joyce Country, who ‘have the reputation of being the tallest and strongest race in Ireland’.⁸⁹ Baring-Gould made similar claims about the Cornish in the Cambridge County Geographies series (1910), in which he described a ‘broad-shouldered race, above average in stature’ who, when organised into regiments and drawn up on parade, could ‘cover a greater space of ground than would those of other counties’.⁹⁰

The connection between physical stature and military prowess also preoccupied the engineer and science-fiction writer John Munro in The Story of the British Race (1899). Munro cited the data collected by the Anthropometric Committee indicating that the tallest people in the United Kingdom were the Scottish, followed by the Irish in second place, and the Scottish were also the heaviest sample group in the dataset. When combined with ‘the military qualities of the Irish, not to speak of the Highlanders’, Munro was alarmed at the high levels of Irish emigration taking place, which he deemed a ‘suicidal policy’. In a passage characteristic of fin-de-siècle pessimism, Munro was concerned that the ‘British race’ owed its ‘success in war’ and ‘superiority of stature’ to the Irish and the Scots, and emigration therefore caused a ‘weakening of the nation’, sapping ‘its healthy blood’ and transferring ‘its best physique to other nations, who might become our enemies some day’.⁹¹

As well as the physical contrast, a moral contrast was drawn between the people in the rural west and the inhabitants of large towns and cities. In Cornwall, Dinah Craik claimed she had never seen ‘such an honest, independent, respectable race as the working people on this coast’, and Baring-Gould praised Welsh labourers and small farmers for choosing to gather in their thousands ‘to hear music and poetry’ instead of attending ‘races and football matches’ or engaging in ‘horse-play’ and ‘the vulgarities and riot of a collection of Anglo-Saxons out for a junketing’.⁹² In Ireland, the remoteness of the Aran Islanders was associated with ‘high moral character’,⁹³ and Frederick Verney’s report on Connemara devoted a section to the ‘Health and Morality of the People’ in which he noted that ‘there is little or no drunkenness’, ‘no thieving’, while ‘unchastity among the women is a thing almost unheard of’, and ‘honesty in this sense is almost universal’. For example, Verney went on, when the district doctor lost his purse containing £7 in gold it was returned the next day, ‘and the finder could hardly be induced to take any reward’. Verney concluded that crime, if it did occur, was due to poverty, in contrast to England where ‘crime is closely connected with vice’.⁹⁴ The situation was no different in Skye, where Ferguson could not recall ‘ever seeing a tipsy person’ and rarely heard any coarse language, which formed ‘a pleasant contrast’ to the ‘shocking scenes, and the outrageous and blasphemous swearing, often heard in some of the streets of our large cities’.⁹⁵

Havelock Ellis drew out the contrast between the morality of the west and the vices of the towns and cities on several occasions in his article ‘The Men of Cornwall’ (1897). Ellis explained that the ‘volatility’ of the Cornish ‘rarely passes into the rowdyism and horseplay which are still so painfully common among the true-born English’. According to Ellis, Cornish ‘lads’ were not known to engage in ‘creating the maximum of noisy mischief’, and if you were in the West End of London, and were awoken ‘in the early hours of Sunday morning by ugly voices howling discordantly the noisiest music-hall song to the cackling accompaniment of reckless laughter’, you could be ‘fairly’ certain that ‘these people were not born in Cornwall’. Likewise, Cornish wrestling was ‘graceful and vigorous’, and ‘there is nothing of the reckless barbarity of football so dear to the hearts of the northern English countrymen’.⁹⁶ The depiction of the west in this way was a noticeable trend in English culture, which continued to value the periphery as a site of renewal and revitalisation, finding the spirit, as Robert Colls put it, ‘richer for a little neck-stretching towards the Scottish Border, the Irish Sea, or the Welsh Marches’.⁹⁷

Escaping mass society

The anxieties about degeneration at the fin-de-siècle were connected to the fear of the crowd, in which, it was thought, people regressed into primitive disorder. Fear of the crowd intensified in a society which, through electoral reform in 1867, 1884 and 1885, was approaching mass democracy.⁹⁸ At the same time, Education Acts in 1880, 1893 and 1899 introduced universal elementary education and brought into being a mass literate public.⁹⁹ To capture the new reading public, ‘circulation-getter’ newspapers worked on commercial principles and shifted print media away from the detailed coverage of parliamentary debates, diplomatic and imperial events, and financial news that characterised the Victorian national morning press. Instead, the popular press expanded its coverage of sport, cinema and fashion.¹⁰⁰ In the interwar period, the commercialisation of culture intensified in response to falling living costs and working hours, which increased spending power and carved out more time for people to visit the cinema or nightclub, listen to jazz in the dancehall or on the radio, and take a paid holiday to a seaside resort, which was an entitlement enjoyed by four million British employees by 1937.¹⁰¹ In response, intellectuals across Europe were hostile towards the new mass culture, which was considered vulgar, trivial, and represented cultural regression.¹⁰²

These transformations in politics and culture were accompanied by an expansion of lower middle-class employment in commerce, insurance, banks and property. The clerk became a figure of ridicule, living a comfortable but dull, domesticated life in the suburbs while working in a repetitive, meaningless and sedentary job.¹⁰³ In The Condition of England (1909), C. F. G. Masterman unleashed an overblown tirade on this new class of people, who he named ‘the Suburbans’. Like many social commentators in the early decades of the twentieth century, Masterman sneered at the ‘homogenous’ life of ‘sedentary occupation’, ‘security’, and ‘respectability’ lived by the suburban man, who was ‘sucked into the City at daybreak’, spent long hours in ‘small, crowded offices, under artificial light’, while the suburban woman engaged in ‘pious sociabilities’ and visited shopping centres. In August, a short break from this ‘stifling’ routine took the suburban couple to ‘the more genteel of the southern watering-places’, where they put up with ‘cramped lodging and extortionate prices’.¹⁰⁴ Fashion, deportment and bickering about garden fences were more important than social service, ‘public duty’ and ‘great causes’ to the suburbans, and their chosen newspapers revealed a ‘cultural debasement’ and ‘frivolity’ characterised by sport, gambling, sensational divorce cases, the music hall and missing word competitions. In such a life of ‘artificial city civilisation’, Masterman concluded, lay ‘the seeds of futility and decay’.¹⁰⁵

This shift in language was reflected in guidebooks and travel writing, which increasingly presented the west as an escape from the city, the suburb, modern work, mass culture and commercialism. For Alexander Smith, Skye was an ideal destination for people who were ‘tired and jaded’ in both ‘body and soul’, ‘fagged with work’ and ‘haunted with visions of vacation’,¹⁰⁶ and MacCulloch also thought the island an especially attractive prospect for those ‘weary of the many unnatural ways of modern life’.¹⁰⁷ This was an escape from what the Scottish poet and politician Hugh MacDiarmid called ‘megalopolitan madness’ and literary critic Rolfe Arnold Scott-James called ‘the artifice of civilisation’.¹⁰⁸ MacBrayne’s steamer guidebook for 1938 advertised the Hebrides as an antidote to ‘the harassments of the hour and dull routine of the day’, and, in the Blue Guide: Wales (1922), H. J. Fleure wrote that the upland north offered refreshment away from ‘the jaded and overstrained business life of … modern England’.¹⁰⁹ Masterman’s fixation with the clerk was anticipated by W. F. Wakeman when he wrote that Ireland’s ‘magic, loveliness, and grandeur’ could ‘transfer the veriest attorney’s clerk into a poet’,¹¹⁰ and, in a printed collection of BBC radio talks about ‘The West in English History’, the historian A. L. Rowse brought together many of the themes explored in this chapter when he explained that the public were interested in places such as Cornwall because they stood for ‘character’, ‘idiosyncrasy’ and ‘diversity’ in an age when popular culture was characterised by ‘the shamelessness, the vulgar and cheap insipidity of a Hollywood civilisation’, the ‘spawning of suburbia and industrial slumdom’ and the ‘ruin of towns that had both integration and integrity’.¹¹¹

Much like the beaten track, though, escape was not always so easy in Cornwall. Modernity encroached upon the west as far as Land’s End, where Arthur Symons attempted to leave behind ‘the hotel, the tea-house, the picture post-cards, the brakes, and the motors’, and in West Country (1938) C. Henry Warren bemoaned the ‘[v]ulgarity’ that had ‘infected’ the otherwise quiet town of Truro.¹¹² The answer was perhaps to go even further, to the Scilly Isles, which the guidebooks contrasted to the ‘stereotyped holiday resorts’ and where, an article in the Manchester Evening News noted, there were ‘unspoiled charms’, ‘no cinemas’, ‘only about three motor-cars’ and not even a telephone until January 1938.¹¹³

Lamenting the encroachment of mass modernity in the west became a common feature of interwar writing about Cornwall, which suffered from what one newspaper’s ‘Nature Diary’ described as the ‘discomforts of modernity’. Some of these discomforts were easy to spot, such as crowds at Kynance Cove that were worthy of Trafalgar Square, the ‘charabanc loads of tourists’ that were dragged to the Logan Rock, and the ‘unwieldy hotel’, which ‘ruins the atmosphere’, caused a decline in wildlife, and robbed the region of ‘its power to stir the depths of the human heart’.¹¹⁴ H. V. Morton reflected on the changes that had taken place in Cornwall in a passage on the demise of the packman, who trudged around the countryside offering ‘vanity cloths and trifles from the distant town’ to the locals in the days before the railway came. In Morton’s day, however, the locals travelled on the omnibuses to do their shopping, motorcars and charabancs sped along the roads, and ‘shops now canvass the wilderness with Ford vans’.¹¹⁵ Morton’s mind turned to another iconic symbol of mass modernity and clerk culture in the Claddagh, a small fishing village just outside the walls of Galway. He watched a woman returning from work, and on her head was ‘a big round wicker-work basket in which the Galway women sell fish’. Despite her traditional occupation, Morton thought ‘she was going home to put on stockings, high-heeled shoes, and a tight little black felt hat!’ and he thought it a shame that after ‘resisting the world for so long’ the Claddagh has ‘capitulated to Mr Selfridge’.¹¹⁶

Morton’s preoccupation with Mr Selfridge and Ford infiltrating the west was part of a broader anxiety about the emasculating consequences of modernity, which focused on consumerism, the growing recruitment of women as clerks and the domesticating atmosphere of suburbia.¹¹⁷ D. H. Lawrence referred to suburban houses as ‘horrid little mantraps’, and in George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air (1939) the salesman George Bowling feels trapped by his family, employment and prison-like suburban surroundings.¹¹⁸ In response, many writers, including Lawrence, Waugh, Greene, Eliot and Auden, sought inspiration abroad.¹¹⁹ Nicola Bishop and Melanie Tebbutt have shown, however, that English landscapes also offered the male middle-class clerk the chance to reclaim his masculinity. In southern England, the rambling clerk ventured into a feminised landscape in the novels and travelogues of H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, E. M. Forster, J. B. Priestley and others, while the more challenging upland moorlands of Derbyshire required ‘stoicism, hardiness and endurance’ from ramblers who went out to realise their manliness.¹²⁰ As Chapter 4 demonstrated, the mountains and cliffs of the west offered a more extreme challenge still, where potential danger and misadventure was present in every loose tuft of grass, descending mist and changing tide. While many women faced danger and found adventure, too, the significance of western landscapes as spaces of masculine self-fashioning can be understood as an extension and an intensification of the clerk’s rambles around southern England and upland Derbyshire.

The rapid pace of suburbanisation also became symbolic of the disorientation, continuous change and sense of dislocation from the past associated with modernity. From the mid-nineteenth century, centuries-old farms, fields and woods were lost to the spread of housing, which also spoiled the older leafy middle-class suburbs with cars, litter and advertisements.¹²¹ This is another transformation that accelerated in the early twentieth century. After the Housing and Town Planning Acts of 1909 and 1919, local authorities built ‘Homes for Heroes’, replaced slums with suburban estates, and the number of new houses rose from an annual average of 150,000 in the 1920s to over 300,000 in the following decade, reaching 350,000 in 1936 and eating up 60,000 acres of countryside per year.¹²² In his book The Housing Problem in England (1907), E. R. Dewsnup was amazed at the rapidity with which ‘extensive suburbs are springing into existence’, and in 1933 the philosopher and broadcaster C. E. M. Joad wrote that ‘suburbs sprawl like a vast red rash over the fair face of the land’, destroying the ‘true country’.¹²³ By 1939 even the once quiet Llŷn Peninsula was, according to the Council for the Preservation of Rural Wales, threatened by the spread of bungalows that had marred areas of the north coast.¹²⁴ Some legislative protection against suburban sprawl followed the Restriction of Ribbon Development Act (1935) and the Green Belt, London and Home Counties Act (1938), by which time the suburb came to represent placelessness.¹²⁵ In the west, travel writers drew attention to vernacular architecture, and their romanticised descriptions of thatched cottages and crofters’ huts were often accompanied by anti-suburban rhetoric that criticised the ugly, vulgar, artificial and rootless suburbs that sprawled across the countryside surrounding the large towns and cities.

In western Ireland, the most prized and romanticised architectural form was the countryside cottage. With ‘thick whitewashed walls’ and ‘honey-coloured thatch’, as Floyd described it, the image of the countryside cottage in an otherwise empty rural landscape came to prominence in the decades after the Famine and remained an important nationalist emblem in the nascent Free State.¹²⁶ The key idea here, articulated by Floyd, was that the countryside cottage was ‘entirely in harmony with its setting’.¹²⁷ This is an idea repeated in Skye, where the organic quality of the crofters’ huts was, for MacCulloch, evident in their ‘low, lichen-covered walls’, and roofs ‘thatched with the materials of the surrounding moor’, which gave the impression that they ‘have grown’ out of the surrounding landscape (see Figure 5.1). MacCulloch suggested that the crofter’s hut ‘is a product of nature, not of art’ as it ‘rhymes with the sober landscape, and partakes of its shaggy wildness’.¹²⁸ The perception of vernacular architecture as natural and having grown out of the landscape, in contrast with the artificial suburb, shaped discussions of Cornish fishing cottages, too. In the seaside village of Bodinnick, near Fowey, Geraldine Mitton described how the village walls were ‘lined with bladder seaweed’, which ‘hangs in black masses above the incoming water’, while above it ‘rise woods and trees, and ivy and ferns, and all the paraphernalia of a country lane’. The cottages, meanwhile, were ‘covered with rose bushes’, and ‘candytuft and violets come out in their season to creep over the rough stone walls’. This was far from the isolated crofters’ huts in the moorlands or seashores of Skye, which seemed to have emerged from the landscape of their own accord.¹²⁹ But Bodinnick, too, was organic, rooted in its place, and in an approving tone, Mitton declared that ‘there is nothing conventional or suburban about Bodinnick’.¹³⁰

Whether in desolate moorland or seaside fishing villages, harmony with the surrounding landscape gave meaning to the buildings and imbued them with character befitting their setting. The rooted sense of place that writers and travellers valued in such buildings emanated from their longevity, and their connection with ‘many generations’ of the past. As MacCulloch wrote, to live in such buildings ‘is to call up a hundred phantoms of the past, to touch bygone years, to listen unawares to Time’s stolen flight’. Unlike the new, rootless suburban houses, ‘no old house is ever without these sad memories and pallid gleams of past years’.¹³¹ In Skye, the ‘larger houses’ were also appreciated in this way, for their ‘unadorned character’, built ‘for use not beauty’. For example, Dunvegan Castle ‘has the same natural appearance’ as the crofters’ huts, forming ‘no break in the landscape’, resembling ‘only a more shapely form of the rock on which it stands’. There were no ‘bird-haunted lawns’, no terraces or stairways, and instead ‘grim keep and ancient tower and worn battlements join hand-in-hand with the brown moorland, the shaggy woodland, and the lapping waves’.¹³²

The development of the Irish tourism industry was considered a threat to the vernacular architecture enjoyed by tourists, writers and painters. As early as 1897 R. A. S. Macalister feared that imitating the ‘rampant commercialism’ of England would bring the ‘boisterous cockney crowd’ across the Irish Sea, and with them ‘a stucco nightmare of lodging-house atrocities’ that would replace picturesque cottages.¹³³ The Congested Districts Board also came under criticism for replacing thatch with corrugated iron, and when Morton visited the Claddagh he was disappointed to see that ‘many of the lovely white houses have been pulled down’ and replaced by ‘the most hideous little modern houses I have seen – worse and more hateful to the eye even than the atrocious bungalows of Sussex’.¹³⁴ In Skye, too, Holmes recorded the changes taking place in the early twentieth-century crofting villages, where the traditional thatch was giving way to ‘roofing of tarred cloth or corrugated iron’ – a change ‘not loved by an artist or a devotee of the picturesque’.¹³⁵

These were, of course, romanticised descriptions of dwellings that otherwise displayed the severe poverty of crofters and tenants. Other travellers instead described ‘tumble-down, tenantless houses’, and ‘wretched dwellings’, which drew attention to the plight of the poor, and of the evicted who crowded into hovels for shelter at night.¹³⁶ Some were surprised to find that cottages with collapsed roofs were in fact occupied, and it was common for writers to remark that some cottages were ‘unfit for cattle at home’.¹³⁷ But they were writing against a widespread tendency to accept impoverished conditions as the natural abode of the peasants of the west. The author and photographer Mary Donaldson described the life of the crofter as ‘exactly suited to the Highland temperament’, and, for MacCulloch, the crofter was ‘a son of the soil’, who had ‘learned contentment apart from ease and luxury’ and whose lot was pleasant in comparison with ‘slum-dwellers in towns’.¹³⁸

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that, as well as journeying westwards, travellers also looked back towards home. Far from peripheral, the west was in fact central because it carved out a space for the articulation of a variety of responses to the transformations of industrial and urban modernity.¹³⁹ These responses were multiple and contradictory. Some areas of the west became the focus for discussions about economic development and the need for settlement, investment and improvement due to the deficiencies of the population, who failed to realise the potential of the land. At the same time, discussions of industry, degeneration, mass culture and suburbanisation in travel writing offer a valuable insight into the perceived problems of urban-industrial modernity, and how they changed over time. These passages of social commentary contained either thinly veiled or explicit criticisms of the physical health and morality in the towns and cities, as well as the spread of modern architecture which symbolised cultural decline. This chapter also suggests that western landscapes, while often understood in terms of difference, offered opportunities for masculine self-fashioning that share important connections with the rambling clerk in southern England and upland Derbyshire.

In the west, travellers’ perception of being remote from urban-industrial modernity gave them a sense of perspective when they looked back to the places they had left behind. Some of them found answers to the perceived problems of modernity in a collection of places that, it was believed, had remained largely isolated from the degenerative effects of modernity, preserving physical health, morality and culture that was reinforced by the rural environment. The final two chapters of this book explore how the geological, racial, linguistic, cultural and historical differences of the west were mobilised in an attempt to promote a version of Britishness that was multinational, pluralistic and had deep historical roots.

Notes

1. 1. Rieger and Daunton, ‘Introduction’, 4; B. Short, D. Gilbert and D. Matless, ‘Historical Geographies of British Modernity’, in Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century, ed. D. Gilbert, D. Matless and B. Short (Oxford, 2003), 1–27, at 2.

2. 2. K. Hill, ‘Narratives of Travel, Narratives That Travel’, in Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century, ed. K. Hill (London, 2016), 1–10. Also see T. Youngs, ‘Where Are We Going? Cross-Border Approaches to Travel Writing’, in Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. G. Hooper and T. Youngs (Aldershot, 2004), 167–80, at 174.

3. 3. Rieger and Daunton, ‘Introduction’, 2–3; Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 1.

4. 4. Short, Gilbert and Matless, ‘Historical Geographies of British Modernity’, 2; Rieger and Daunton, ‘Introduction’, 2–3, 5–8; J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London, 1992), 3–22; Berman, Experience of Modernity, 13–16.

5. 5. Rieger and Daunton, ‘Introduction’, 2–3; Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 3–22.

6. 6. Berman, Experience of Modernity, 13. Short, Gilbert and Matless, ‘Historical Geographies of British Modernity’, 2–3; Rieger and Daunton, ‘Introduction’, 5–8; Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 1; J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (London, 1994), 32.

7. 7. W. H. A. Williams, ‘Into the West: Landscape and Imperial Imagination in Connemara, 1820–1870’, New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 2, no. 1 (1998), 69–90.

8. 8. London and North Western Railway, Where to Spend the Holidays (1906), 100.

9. 9. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), introduction, 28.

10. 10. Black’s Ireland (1885), 220.

11. 11. For examples, see Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), 229; De Bovet, Tour in Ireland (1891), 204; Johnson, Isle of the Shamrock (1901), 143–4. For similar comments about Sligo, see W. Bulfin, Rambles in Éirinn (Dublin, 1908 [1907]), 23–4.

12. 12. For the crisis in western Ireland between 1879 and 1882, see G. Moran, ‘Near Famine: The Crisis in the West of Ireland, 1879–82’, Irish Studies Review 5, no. 18 (1997), 14–21.

13. 13. F. Verney, The People and the Country of West Galway and Connemara (printed for private circulation, 1880), 3–4.

14. 14. Stone, Connemara (1906), 133.

15. 15. Hayes, ‘Achill Island’ (1894), 638.

16. 16. Black’s Ireland (1885), 9. For the Act, see Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), xviii. For the Department see Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), Introduction, 28.

17. 17. For the aims and membership of the Board, see W. E. Curtis, One Irish Summer (New York, 1909), 460, 464; and Gwynn, Holiday in Connemara (1909), 5. For the prevalence of congested districts in Connemara, see Synge, Connemara (1911), 157.

18. 18. Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), xxix. For road building, see C. S. Ward, ed., Thorough Guide Series. Ireland (part II), 5th edn (London, 1906), xii.

19. 19. ‘New books, Stephen Gwynn, Highways and Byways in Donegal and Antrim (London, 1899)’, Scottish Geographical Magazine 15, no. 9 (1899), 492–504, at 495.

20. 20. Bayne, On an Irish Jaunting Car (1902), 94.

21. 21. Synge, Aran Islands (1907), xi.

22. 22. Murray’s Ireland (1906), 247.

23. 23. For Roundstone, see Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland, Connemara (c.1922), 10. For Streamstown, see Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), 259.

24. 24. Quotation from Stevenson, Charm of Ireland (1914), 335–6. Also see Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), introduction, 31.

25. 25. For ‘organised tenure’ quotation, see Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), 231; Gwynn, Connaught (1912), 47. This system was also explained in Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), 260.

26. 26. For Dooagh, and for plans that were not carried through, see Stone, Connemara (1906), 216, 336. For the kelp industry, see Synge, Connemara (1911), 189.

27. 27. Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), introduction, 28.

28. 28. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 213–15, 220–21; This also occurred on Clare Island which was cleared by ‘a thrifty landlord’ to ‘make room for cattle’; see H. S. Wilkinson, The Eve of Home Rule: Impressions of Ireland in 1886, 2nd edn (London, 1886), 41–2.

29. 29. Ferguson, Rambles in Skye (1885), 124–7.

30. 30. Ferguson, Rambles in Skye (1885), 8–9, 37–8.

31. 31. Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), v, xiii–xiv.

32. 32. G. E. Mitton, Black’s Guide to Scotland, North (London, 1920), 178. MacLeod’s Gloomy Memories were originally published in Edinburgh’s Weekly Chronicle, and the letters were reprinted in 1841, 1856, 1857, 1883 and 1892. In 1883, the letters were printed along with Alexander MacKenzie’s account of the ‘Social State of the Isle of Skye in 1882’, in A. MacKenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances (Inverness, 1883).

33. 33. P. Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke, 1989); J. Rak, ‘The Improving Eye: Eighteenth-Century Picturesque Travel and Agricultural Change in the Scottish Highlands’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 27, no. 1 (1998), 343–64; C. W. J. Withers, Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region (London, 2015 [1988]); James, Tourism, Land, and Landscape, 49–50; E. Meloy, ‘Touring Connemara: Learning to Read a Landscape of Ruins, 1850–1860’, New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 13, no. 3 (2009), 21–46, at 21–3.

34. 34. Williams, ‘Into the West’, 69–71. Also see E. A. Bohls, ‘Picturesque Travel: The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape’, in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. C. Thompson (Abingdon, 2016), 246–57, at 250.

35. 35. For industriousness as an ‘English’ characteristic, see P. Mandler, ‘The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English National Character, 1870–1940’, in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. M. Daunton and B. Rieger (Oxford, 2001), 119–44, at 128. The idea of the hard-working Anglo-Saxon was prevalent in travel writing, even though nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Stubbs and Carlyle described the Angles and Jutes as lazy; see J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), 143. The depiction of colonial subjects as idle has been linked to an imperial form of masculinity; see Roper and Tosh, ‘Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, 13–14.

36. 36. J. Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths (London, 1787), 69; J. H. Ashworth, The Saxon in Ireland (London, 1851).

37. 37. Ashworth, Saxon in Ireland (1851), 7.

38. 38. E. G. Lengel, The Irish through British Eyes: Perceptions of Ireland in the Famine Era (Westport, 2002), 135.

39. 39. Ashworth, Saxon in Ireland (1851), 7–8.

40. 40. Gray [Speight], View of Ireland (1885), 16–18, 20, 28–31, 33–4, 39.

41. 41. J. L. Joynes, Adventures of a Tourist in Ireland (London, 1882), 9, 76.

42. 42. Johnson, Isle of the Shamrock (1901), 140; De Bovet, Tour in Ireland (1891), 224.

43. 43. C. Whymper, ‘An Artist’s Notes. In an Irish Village’, The Leisure Hour 47 (1898), 637–41, at 638; Stone, Connemara (1906), 61–2. For the suggestion of lazy Claddagh fishermen, see Ward, Thorough Guide: Ireland (part II) (1906), 176–7.

44. 44. Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), xviii.

45. 45. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 201–2.

46. 46. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 224–5.

47. 47. Quigley, Highlands of Scotland (1939), 71.

48. 48. Ellis, ‘Men of Cornwall’ (April 1897), 329. Ellis quoted A. Quiller-Couch, The Delectable Duchy (New York, 1893), 85.

49. 49. Williams, ‘Into the West’, 69–70.

50. 50. Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland, Connemara (c.1922), 11.

51. 51. Murray’s Ireland (1878), 201.

52. 52. Black’s Ireland (1877), 282.

53. 53. Ward, Thorough Guide: Ireland (part II) (1906), 190–91; Murray’s Ireland (1878), 201; Black’s Ireland (1877), 283.

54. 54. Gray [Speight], View of Ireland (1885), 30. Religion is also the principal theme of A. M. Barbour, Connemara on the Eve of the Twentieth Century (London, 1899).

55. 55. T. Dooley, Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2023).

56. 56. For examples, see Irish Tourist Association, Connacht (Dublin, 1932), 5; T. J. Kiernan, ‘Finance and Economics of the Irish Free State’, in D. L. Kelleher, It’s Ireland! (Dublin, 1932), 122–5.

57. 57. Irish Tourist Association, Connacht (Dublin, 1932), 39–45; D. L. Kelleher, It’s Ireland! (Dublin, 1932), 69. Also see Irish Tourist Association, Ireland (Dublin, 1930), 62–3; Irish Tourist Association, Galway: The Gateway of the West (Dublin, 1932), 22–5; Irish Tourist Association, Ireland (Dublin, n.d. [1938]), 197–203.

58. 58. Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), 123; Cumming, In the Hebrides (1883), 139.

59. 59. Verney, West Galway and Connemara (1880), 9–11.

60. 60. Gray [Speight], View of Ireland (1885), 31, 34.

61. 61. Tuke, Irish Distress (1880), 74.

62. 62. Ward, Britishness since 1870, 143; Kearney, British Isles, 240.

63. 63. Bradley, Highways and Byways in North Wales (1898), 283–4. Similar comments about the northern shores of Llyn Padarn and Llyn Peris were made in Stawell, Motor Tours in Wales (1909), 105.

64. 64. Cambrian Resorts Association, The Lure of the Cambrian Coast (Oswestry, 1920), 29.

65. 65. Black’s Picturesque Guide to North Wales, 8th edn (Chester, 1883), 53–8.

66. 66. O. J. R. Howarth, The Scenic Heritage of England and Wales (London, 1937), 146.

67. 67. O. G. Roberts, ‘Developing the Untapped Wealth of Britain’s “Celtic Fringe”: Water Engineering and the Welsh Landscape, 1870–1960’, Landscape Research 31, no. 2 (2006), 121–33, at 122.

68. 68. Liverpool Daily Post, 15 July 1881, quoted in Roberts, ‘Developing the Untapped Wealth’, 125.

69. 69. A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to North Wales (Northern Section), 5th edn (London, 1909), 38; P. Fritzsche, ‘The City and Urban Life’, in The Fin-de-Siècle World, ed. M. Saler (London, 2015), 29–44, at 29–30, 41.

70. 70. E. Underwood, ‘The History of Cholera in Great Britain’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 41, no. 165 (1947), 165–73.

71. 71. Thorough Guide: North Wales I (1889), 46.

72. 72. Pictorial Guide to North Wales (Northern) (1909), 38. For the lengthy testimony of H. Falconer King, F. C. S., analyst to the city of Edinburgh, see LNWR, North Wales (1908), 83–4.

73. 73. Quotation from Pictorial Guide to North Wales (Northern) (1912), 155. For other examples, see Pictorial Guide to North Wales (Northern) (1912), 147, 155; Pictorial Guide to North Wales (Southern) (1912), 149, 160; LNWR, North Wales (1908), 51, 89; LNWR, North Wales (1909), 91.

74. 74. Jenkinson’s North Wales (1883), 168.

75. 75. North Wales (Northern) (1912), 221–2.

76. 76. J. Burchardt, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change since 1800 (London, 2002), chapter 6.

77. 77. A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution (London, 1906 [1884]), 87, 92, 227; for further discussion of Toynbee, see D. C. S. Wilson, ‘Arnold Toynbee and the Industrial Revolution: The Science of History, Political Economy and the Machine Past’, History and Memory 26, no. 2 (2014), 133–61.

78. 78. Max Nordau, Degeneration, translated from the second German edition (New York, 1895), 35–6.

79. 79. Nordau, Degeneration (1895), 38–9.

80. 80. Nordau, Degeneration (1895), 42.

81. 81. Nordau, Degeneration (1895), 16–17.

82. 82. Nordau, Degeneration (1895), 17–21.

83. 83. Morel, quoted in Nordau, Degeneration (1895), 16.

84. 84. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, 235; M. Turda, ‘Biology and Eugenics’, in The Fin-de-Siècle World, ed. M. Saler (London, 2015), 456–70, at 460–1; M. Brown, ‘Cold Steel, Weak Flesh: Mechanism, Masculinity and the Anxieties of Late Victorian Empire’, Cultural and Social History 14, no. 2 (2017), 155–81, at 158.

85. 85. ‘Are We Degenerating Physically?’, The Lancet 132, no. 3405 (1888), 1075–8, at 1076–7. Also see D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989), 201.

86. 86. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, 233–6, 239–44; Turda, ‘Biology and Eugenics’, 467.

87. 87. Colls, Identity of England, 279.

88. 88. A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Penzance and West Cornwall, 11th edn (London, n.d. [c.1926]), xxi.

89. 89. Ferguson, Rambles in Skye (1885), 74–6; Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), 227–8. Also see Black’s Ireland (1877), 285, and H. D. Inglis, A Journey Throughout Ireland, During the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834, 5th edn (London, 1838 [1834]), 226.

90. 90. Baring-Gould, Cambridge County Geographies: Cornwall (1910), 71.

91. 91. J. Munro, The Story of the British Race (London, 1899), 195.

92. 92. Craik, Unsentimental Journey (1883), 35; Baring-Gould, Book of North Wales (1903), 213.

93. 93. Lang, Black’s Ireland (1906), 209–10.

94. 94. Verney, West Galway and Connemara (1880), 7, 11.

95. 95. Ferguson, Rambles in Skye (1885), 127.

96. 96. Ellis, ‘The Men of Cornwall’, 413–14.

97. 97. Colls, Identity of England, 279.

98. 98. J. P. D. Dunbabin, ‘Electoral Reforms and Their Outcome in the United Kingdom, 1865–1900’, in Later Victorian Britain, 1867–1900, ed. T. R. Gourvish and A. O’Day (Basingstoke, 1988), 93–125.

99. 99. Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 5.

100. 100. A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004), 23, 55.

101. 101. M. Pugh, ‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars (London, 2008), 2–4, 216–18, 232–4, 239.

102. 102. Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 6–7.

103. 103. Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 58–9.

104. 104. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, 1909), 68–71, 79.

105. 105. Masterman, The Condition of England (1909), 79–81, 94.

106. 106. Smith, Summer in Skye (1885), 3.

107. 107. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 207.

108. 108. H. MacDiarmid, The Islands of Scotland: Hebrides, Orkneys, and Shetlands (London, 1939), x; Scott-James, Englishman in Ireland (1910), 1.

109. 109. MacBrayne, Royal Route (1938), 2; Fleure, ‘Land of Wales’ (1922), xi.

110. 110. Wakeman, Picturesque Ireland (c.1891), 20.

111. 111. A. L. Rowse, ‘Introduction’, in The West in English History, ed. A. L. Rowse (London, 1949), 14.

112. 112. Symons, Cities and Sea Coasts (1918), 273; C. Henry Warren, West Country (1938), quoted in ‘Peculiar Appeal of the West Country. Why It Is a “Foreign” Land’, Western Morning News, 26 January 1939, 6.

113. 113. Tonkin and Row, Lyonesse (1900), 15; G. Grafton-Green, ‘The Way of the World’, Manchester Evening News, 29 January 1938, 4.

114. 114. ‘Nature diary’, Derby Daily Telegraph, 22 September 1928, 8.

115. 115. Morton, In Search of England (1931), 97–8.

116. 116. Morton, In Search of Ireland (1932), 169. For Mr Selfridge as an icon of clerk culture, see Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 59.

117. 117. For female clerks, see Roper and Tosh, ‘Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, 19. Also see Hammerton, ‘The English Weakness?’, 164–78; J. Greenfield, S. O’Connell and C. Reid, ‘Gender, Consumer Culture and the Middle-Class Male, 1918–1939’, in Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800–1940, ed. A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (Manchester, 1999), 183–97; and R. Bowlby, Shopping with Freud.

118. 118. D. Gilbert and R. Preston, ‘ “Stop Being So English”: Suburban Modernity and National Identity in the Twentieth Century’, in Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century, ed. D. Gilbert, D. Matless and B. Short (Oxford, 2003), 187–203, at 191; G. Orwell, Coming Up for Air (London, 1939), passim, see pages 13–15 for an example.

119. 119. Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 50; Fussell, Abroad.

120. 120. N. Bishop, ‘Ruralism, Masculinity, and National Identity: The Rambling Clerk in Fiction, 1900–1940’, Journal of British Studies 54, no. 3 (2015), 654–78; M. Tebbutt, ‘Rambling and Manly Identity in Derbyshire’s Dark Peak, 1880s–1920s’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006), 1125–53.

121. 121. Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, 47–8, 66.

122. 122. J. Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London, 1994), 12–13; Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, 258–9.

123. 123. E. R. Dewsnup, The Housing Problem in England (Manchester, 1907), 273; C. E. M. Joad, ‘Pains and Pleasures of a Middle-Aged Walker’, The Bookman 84, no. 500 (May 1933), 94–5.

124. 124. P. Gruffudd, ‘The Battle of Butlin’s: Vulgarity and Virtue on the North Wales Coast, 1939–49’, Rural History 21, no. 1 (2010), 75–95, at 76–7.

125. 125. Gilbert and Preston, ‘Suburban Modernity’, 188, 192; also see Colls, Identity of England, 63–4, 236; Lowerson, ‘Battles for Countryside’, 266.

126. 126. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 7; T. Cusack, ‘A “Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads”: Irish Nationalism and the Cottage Landscape’, National Identities 3, no. 3 (2001), 221–38; quotations from 221, 223–4; James, ‘Irishness of the Irish Inn’, 28.

127. 127. Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 7.

128. 128. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 16–18.

129. 129. For crofters’ huts with walls made of ‘boulders from the seashore’, see The ‘Governor’, A Yachtsman’s Holidays; or, Cruising in the West Highlands (London, 1879), 129.

130. 130. Mitton, Cornwall (1915), 115–16.

131. 131. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 16–18.

132. 132. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 16–18.

133. 133. R. A. S. Macalister, ‘The Debit Account of the Tourist Movement’, The New Ireland Review 8, no. 2 (1897), 87–92.

134. 134. Synge criticised the Congested Districts Board in Connemara (1911), 201. Morton, In Search of Ireland (1932), 168. For other examples, see D. T. Holmes, Literary Tours in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Paisley, 1909), 29–30; Mitton, Black’s Galway, Connemara (1912), 244; Stone, Connemara (1906), 93; Floyd, Face of Ireland (1937), 7, 59–60.

135. 135. Holmes, Literary Tours (1909), 29–30.

136. 136. Quotations from Ward, Thorough Guide: Ireland (part II) (1906), 196; and Ferguson, Rambles in Skye (1885), 120. For other examples, see Verney, West Galway and Connemara (1880), 6–7; Batsford and Fry, Face of Scotland (1934), 6; Pennell and Pennell, Journey to the Hebrides (1889), 146–7; and Gray [Speight], View of Ireland (1885), 16. For a discussion of travel writers, Irish cabins and poverty in an earlier period, see W. H. A. Williams, Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland (Madison, WI, 2008), especially 89–91.

137. 137. Quotation from M. Shoemaker, Wanderings in Ireland (New York, 1908), 58. Also see Tuke, Irish Distress (1880), 54; and Johnson, Isle of the Shamrock (1901), 152.

138. 138. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 131; MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 222–4.

139. 139. Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, 14–15.