Raphaël Ingelbien: Irish Cultures of Travel. Writing on the Continent, 1829–1914 (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

As recently as 1980, Bernard Farrell, in his play Canaries (Dublin, Abbey Theatre) satirized his Irish compatriots for beginning to copy the English in their craze to travel abroad in search of leisure and amusement, the underlying idea being that this is something the Irish do not, or should not, do. Raphaël Ingelbien, in his excellent introduction to the book under review here, lists a number of reasons for this Irish autostereotype, the chief one being that foreign travel is primarily an activity of the middle classes, a social group which the Irish since de Valerian times have preferred to omit from their selfimage. Instead of the middle classes (who, according to Yeats, “fumble in a greasy till / And add the halfpence to the pence”), the core of Irish society is seen in a glorified peasant class, and peasants, for obvious reasons, do not travel. The consequence is that one finds a wealth of literature about travel to, and in, Ireland, while the experience of Irish travellers on the Continent is largely ignored.