‘Scenes from a travel journal: “A hundred beggars gathered as usual around the carriage. What was new to me were the small wooden bowls on long sticks which they passed into the carriage like collection bags to reach the solicited pennies more comfortably.’ ”
India? No, Listowel in 1828, as seen by Hermann von Puckler-Muskau.
How about this? “People showed me the ruins of old castles; but how was I to take pleasure in the sight of them when they were surrounded by desolate and completely caved-in cabins that bore stronger witness to the misery of the present than to the splendour of the past.” Mali? No, the Limerick to Dublin road in 1835 from Friedrich von Raumer’s travel diary.
They come from a collection of German and Austrian travel accounts of Ireland: Poor Green Erin – German Travel Writers' Narratives on Ireland from Before the 1798 Rising to After the Great Famine (Peter Lang, 2011) edited by Prof Eoin Bourke of NUI Galway. It provides a rare insight into our country from a non-English perspective and shows clearly the cultural, sociological and (eventual) historical importance of travel writing. It makes one reflect, too, on what Indians will think of our blogs about their country when they read them in a hundred years.
Here is Philip Nemnich writing about Dublin’s Liberties in 1806: “The condition of the houses and streets is indescribably revolting; both assail the nostrils and the eye in the most obnoxious manner by their filth. But what exceeds all this are the people who inhabit them. More hideous creatures are hardly imaginable either in physiognomy or dress, which I do not dare to describe.”
These accounts were not meant to belittle us, but to express outrage at what the English had done to us. Yet, sometimes it’s hard for them not to blame the victim rather than the oppressor, as in Caspar Voght’s 1794 account: “There is no one more deceitful than these wretched people. They know how to join forces to plunder whatever poor traveller had fallen into their hands. Miles are doubly charged. Every six of seven miles the horses are fed, for which the drivers demand enough payment to feed them ten times more at home free of charge.”
Further proof that one should never judge a nation by its taxi-drivers.
There are plenty of positive accounts too. Had Tripadvisor been around, the top-voted attractions would be Dublin, the Lakes of Killarney and the gardens of Wicklow.
Heinrich Meidinger remarks in 1827: “In the splendour of public buildings Dublin outdoes all other cities in the Empire, Edinburgh included.”
I suppose the THM (Take Home Message) is to think before you blog. Madras folk may be reading your account of their slums 150 years from now.