Chapter 6 - ‘A Scene of Terror, Tumult, and Confusion’

Summary

6. Jim Kelly’s chapter ‘“A Scene of Terror, Tumult, and Confusion”: Irish Gothic Tourism’ addresses early-nineteenth-century tourism in Ireland, acknowledging both the foreignness of Ireland to most Britons and the distinctive valence of ruin in a context where it was harder to consign confessional conflicts to the past. Kelly’s discussion of travellers’ encounters with ruined abbeys emphasizes the cross-fertilization of travel writing and fiction in this period. It considers the visits of tourists such as Anne Plumptre and Richard Colt Hoare to Muckross Abbey in Killarney (where the presence of human remains compromised aesthetic appreciation), and then explores the representation of the ruins of Bonamargy Abbey, Antrim in Lady Morgan’s O’Donnell (1814) and of Kilmallock Abbey near Limerick in Alicia Le Fanu’s Tales of a Tourist (1823). Morgan and Le Fanu sometimes associated Irish ruin with a proud national heritage and satirized the ignorance of English travellers, although as Kelly concludes, contemporary efforts (such as those of Dublin artist Thomas Bell) to understand Irish Gothic architecture in the terms of a wider revivalism would remain shadowed by sectarian division.