Abstract
Several who travelled to Ireland between 1790 and 1820 have left accounts which have been published, either at the time or later. Curiosity impelled a few westwards rather than to more conventional destinations in continental Europe or further afield in the expanding British empire. A taste for antiquities and the picturesque motivated some; others hoped to make a career there, or simply visited relations and acquaintances. Protracted European warfare obliged a few who might otherwise have toured continental Europe to settle for an Irish excursion. Then, too, the attempted foreign invasions of 1796 and 1798, followed by an uprising and soon the legislative union of Britain and Ireland in 1800, directed more attention onto the island and its inhabitants.
John Fiott Lee's reasons for choosing Ireland look haphazard. He had recently graduated from Cambridge University and was undecided about a future profession. Later he showed himself to be an intrepid traveller and had wide-ranging scientific interests. His coming to Ireland had no apparent purpose other than diversion. He had no close relations there and, if he was furnished with useful introductions, including one to the new lord lieutenant, he lacked a ready-made itinerary of staging-posts where he would be certain of welcome. It is tempting to suggest that the publication in 1806 of John Carr's The Stranger in Ireland stimulated Fiott Lee, but the latter's editor, Angela Byrne, thinks this unlikely.
Apparently without any prescriptive printed guide, he was free to make impromptu detours. In addition, much of his journey was undertaken on foot. This mode gave him greater freedom to pause when he wished, to talk to others on the road and to notice what might have eluded a hastier tourist. With little baggage and halting often to sketch, it was not surprising that he was sometimes viewed with suspicion and taken to be a spy. It also made him aware of the limits to the much-vaunted Irish hospitality. Seeking accommodation at provincial inns, he was turned away on the pretext that all the beds were taken. Quickly he realised that the custom of a solitary pedestrian was not wanted, and it was feared that he might abscond without paying the bill.
Inevitably Lee often followed the same routes as his contemporaries, and commented on the sights, notably in Dublin, that others like Carr, Colt, Hoare, Gough and Plumtre noted. Similarly, he repeated familiar reactions to the contrasts, particularly in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, between the magnificence of a few public buildings and new streets and the squalor and stench of older quarters and the suburbs through which they were approached. He noted frequently the main items of the locals’ diet – customarily potatoes and milk – fondness for whiskey and prices of provisions. On occasion, he was impressed by the plenty and variety, as of fish and fowl and the seventy-three butchers’ stalls in the markets at Cork. Obliged himself to eat in commercial premises, he commented on the varying quality and costs of the fare.
Like others of an observant kind, and with his leisurely pace, he registers the crops and the modes of cultivation. He deplores uncultivated land that might be turned to profit, and links it with the oppressive tenurial systems. He inveighs against the scarcity of coins, particularly of small denominations, and the profusion and resulting confusion of paper bank notes: an inconvenience of which Carr also complained. More unusual and valuable for later historians is his enthusiasm for seeing industrial ventures, notably the mines among the Wicklow mountains, the marble works outside Kilkenny and the copper mines near Killarney. The last he criticised for their ignorance of hydrostatics. He sees a hurley match near Kilworth and attends a performance of Hamlet in Youghal. Furthermore, he is free to digress, as to a holy well at Tobernahulla in County Waterford and the remote lake of Gougane Barra in County Cork. Adventurous too is his contemplation of the Blasket Islands, the diet of which he judges the best in Kerry with an abundance of fish and rabbits. Also, on the west coast, near Ardfert, he was told of the women lowered from the cliffs on ropes to gather seaweed and of the men who also descended in order to kill seals and sometimes to grab the mahogany washed ashore from wrecks.
If he is solitary during much of the journey, latterly in the south-west, he falls in with congenial companions and enjoys the seemingly spontaneous and largely male society that smaller provincial towns such as Tralee could offer. At Blarney he dines with fourteen fox hunters, who talk ‘bawdy’ and ‘beastly’, and toast Admiral Nelson (p. 186). At Waterford, he coincided with a masked ball for the king's birthday. As well as an ‘elegant supper’ for 200, there were masquerades, a magician and clowns (pp 264–5). Elsewhere, the military stationed in provincial garrisons prove hospitable. In Cork city, he attests to its lively conviviality with a Shandy Club, an Ugly Club, and a Catch and Glee Club. The city offers not only music, but the possibility of learning to read Irish, which he is eager to take, and the impressive gallery of paintings and statuary collected by Cooper Penrose. In Penrose's print room, the work of the Cork artist James Barry is singled out.
Fiott Lee's eagerness to learn some Irish – and his frustration with the evasions of his would-be tutor, who doubles as a grocer – suggest how enthusiastically he plunged into his exploration of Ireland. Undoubtedly he had arrived with preconceptions and prejudices, some of which, about poverty, credulity and telling tales, were confirmed. At the Waterford holy well, he questioned pilgrims as to whether or not they believed in its curative power or knew of any who had been healed. Recording generally ambiguous answers, he concluded ‘the people lie confoundedly’ (p.176). He was shocked by the apparent casualness with which Irish Catholics treated Sunday, with, for example, busy markets and whiskey shops open in the environs of Dublin's St Patrick's cathedral, and dram-drinking by both women and men at Glendalough. In Killarney he approved the Catholic chapel as ‘very neat and well built’ and ‘saw’ mass there (pp. 205–6, 208). In Cork, he entered a nunnery and attended mass in the chapel, observing religious paintings beyond a screen. He enjoyed the women's voices accompanied by an organ. Elsewhere he is responsive to and sometimes critical of the harpers whom he hears, and makes comparisons between those in Ireland and Wales.
His openness to novel impressions and his willingness to admire and enjoy as well as to reprove are refreshing. In several localities, especially in Wicklow and Tipperary, he heard tales of 1798 and also of Emmett's more recent rising. The shock of these events and of the attendant violence was palpable: more so perhaps than Ireland's current engagement in Britain's struggle against Napoleon. Only occasionally does he compare what he encounters in Ireland with equivalent scenes in England. This can scarcely be avoided as he travels through England and North Wales to take ship. Slow, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous travel ensured a very different and more reflective preparation for the island than is now usually the case. With increased speed and ease of access, together with the abundant preparatory exposition and exegesis of ‘Ireland’, the sense of strangeness and excitement that Fiott Lee communicates has lessened.
This unusually illuminating account is greatly to be welcomed. Unpublished and seemingly unused until this edition (the original is in St John's College, Cambridge), it was not included in Christopher Woods's valuable guide to such sources. It is helpfully if lightly annotated by its editor, Angela Byrne, who also contributes an illuminating introduction which places the author in a wider setting. Years after the trip to Ireland, Fiott Lee inherited a substantial estate in Buckinghamshire with the means to indulge his scientific and scholarly enthusiasms. Some centred on the acquisition of Egyptian antiquities, but a passion for astronomy eventually brought him back to Ireland and linked him with Lord Rosse at Birr. It is good that the venerable Hakluyt Society should have undertaken the publishing of this handsome edition, which reproduces some of the sketches made by Lee on the tour. The one danger, which this belated review wishes to avert, is that publication under this imprint may delay use of Fiott Lee's valuable and enjoyable account by those studying Ireland, as it has done with this reviewer. Fiott Lee sometimes follows well-trodden tracks and reacts conventionally. More often, however, he takes an unexpected path and notices what others had overlooked. The result is a wonderfully fresh and vivid vista of southern Ireland early in the nineteenth century.