Beggars on Horseback: the Irish cousins in Wales

Abstract

In 1893, the writers known as Somerville and Ross (Edith Œnone Somerville and Violet Martin) were struggling to finish a novel, and to subsidise their project they agreed to describe a tour of north Wales. Central to the work is the tension between the authors' assigned task to divert readers with comical situations, and their aversion to the burgeoning travel industry (and embarrassment at their own participation in it). They disapprove of the marketing of Wales as a tourist destination. For them, this land (like the remoter parts of Ireland) still lies blessedly outside the modern metropolitan sphere in which each place becomes essentially the same as every other, save for touches of “local colour”. They consistently resist the role of tourist forced upon them, and in the end write a kind of anti-travel book, intended less for the prospective traveller than for the reader who, like them, would prefer to stay at home.

Keywords:

• 1890s
• new woman
• Somerville and Ross
• tourism
• Wales

Notes

1. Although they were cousins, Somerville and Martin did not meet until they were 27 and 23 years old, respectively.

2. Though commissioned by Black and White, the articles were eventually published in Blackwood's Magazine.

3. Violet Martin took her nom de plume of “Martin Ross” by combining her surname with that of her family home, Ross Castle in County Galway. This essay will follow the convention of referring to the individuals as “Somerville and Martin” and to the literary partnership as “Somerville and Ross”.

4. For example, Moynahan (1995, 183) asserts that The Real Charlotte is a “serious contender for the best Irish novel before Joyce”.

5. Here, for the only time in their long careers, Violet Martin's pseudonym “Martin Ross” precedes Somerville's name on the title page: perhaps a publisher's error.

6. For example, in one of the “Irish R.M.” stories they describe a hotel attempting to cater to the tourist trade: “A thatched summerhouse completed the spasmodic effort of the hotel to rise to smartness. The west of Ireland cannot be smart, nor should any right-minded person desire that it should be so” (Somerville and Ross 1984, 30–31).

7. Stevens (2007, 2) recounts an argument with W.B. Yeats at Coole Park in 1901: “Yeats could not approve of ‘humour for humour's sake’. Martin Ross disagreed and defended humour as a ‘high art’.”

8. The Waldenses or Waldensians and the Albigenses or Albigensians were Christian sects originating in medieval France. Both movements were considered heretical by the Roman Catholic Church and suffered violent persecution. See Cross and Livingstone (1997, 35, 1714).

9. In a letter to her cousin, Somerville states that the money received for the Welsh travel articles will go to pay the wages owed to workers on the farm: “Again, and in shame, I must ask to have my half”; quoted in Gillies (2007, 114–115).

10. In The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit ([1844] 1861) by Charles Dickens, Mark Tapley is a servant who remains perennially cheerful in the face of adversity.

11. Somerville depicts this incident in her unpublished diary, held at Queen's University Library, Belfast.

12. Stevens (2007, 102–110) discusses the extent to which Somerville and Ross laboured under the strictures of magazine editors, not only in terms of their writing but of Somerville's illustrations as well.

13. London (1999, 113): “[T]hey themselves probably did more than any commentators to deprofessionalize their image [ … ] Somerville and Ross seem to admit to professional expertise only in private statements – in personal letters to each other.”

14. “The Tommies” were the two hired ponies, sharing the one name between them.

15. Somerville wrote: “The dear Mark gives full leave to publish and treats it as a compliment” (Lewis 2005, 79).

16. Faced with the ascent of Mount Snowdon, “Our craven hearts sank low; but we realized that, as Mark Twain has sufficingly expressed, we must ‘crowd through or bust’” (93). Huckleberry Finn utters the phrase in Chapter 35 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain 1876).

17. This is a variation on “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it” (Twain 1899, vol. 1, 89).

18. Watson (1953) notes the affinity between Twain and the cousins' travel writings.

19. On the increasing pervasiveness of “the West” in popular travel accounts of Ireland during the 1880s and 1890s, see Nash (1993).

20. See Kiberd (1996, 81) on Somerville's speeches as President of the Munster Women's Franchise League.

21. In this travelogue, however, they are not as insistent on their Irishness with those they meet as in some of their other travel journals, in part, because they reckoned they might get a warmer reception on the Continent if known as Irish rather than English:We always found it advisable in France to announce our true nationality as soon as convenient. We found ourselves at once on a different and more friendly footing, and talk had a pleasant tendency to drift into confidential calumny of our mutual neighbour, perfidious Albion, and all things ran more smoother and more gaily (Somerville and Ross [1893] 1991, 116–117).

22. However, the curtailment of the privileges of the Church of Wales, especially the paying of tithes by Nonconformists, would not become law until 1914, taking effect only after the war in 1920.

23. Somerville and Ross (1920) refers to “that wearisome effort of fancy, the Stage Irishman” (244), a figure promulgated by Irish writers such as William Carleton (1794–1869).

24. The black stovepipe hat formed part of the Welsh “traditional” national costume as invented and popularised by Lady Llanover. Though it seems to have fallen from favour in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a revival of the Welsh hat (and of traditional Welsh costume generally) from the 1890s onwards. See “Welsh Hat”, http://pilgrim.ceredigion.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=5943.

25. For example, both Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan characterised the Celts as “an essentially feminine race”. See Stevens, Brown, and Maclaran (2000, 408).

26. At the time Earl's Court was the site of many popular London exhibitions, including Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, another example of marketing an “exotic” experience for the metropolitan public.

27. Butler's Catholic family had tried to persuade her to enter a convent; see Bourke et al. (2002, 1092).