Sending letters from the fringes of the world

Twenty years ago, there were no roads in the Island of Achill. The people were as truly savage as any South Sea Islanders . . . It was by mere accident that we discovered that, of all the population of the Catholic village of Keel, there are no adults who dare go out after nightfall, for fear of the fairies.

Are they still affeared of the fairies in Keel? Or were the locals, in time-honoured fashion, winding up gullible foreigners? Thelines were written some 150 years ago by the English writer Harriet Martineau, who travelled the country with her notebook and her niece. Martineau, who was born in Norwich in 1802, came to Ireland in 1852 for two months.

She was a prolific writer and a recorder of Victorian Britain, writing on biography, political economy, theology and colonialism, among other topics. Her many books include Illustrations Of Political Economy, Life In The Sickroom, How To Observe, Manners And Morals and Suggestions Towards The Future Government Of India.

Martineau came from a wealthy and privileged background, and saw it as her duty as a writer to focus on, and improve, the lot of the disadvantaged. It was Martineau's second trip to Ireland, but this time her sojourn was a working holiday. The Daily News, a liberal newspaper with the distinction of having Charles Dickens as its first editor, commissioned her to write a series of articles on Ireland.

Aunt and niece arrived in August 1852 and stayed until October, travelling widely by rail and carriage. Martineau's reports began in Derry and ended in Kerry, by way of Mayo, Connemara and Galway. She wrote on such topics as the linen industry, tenant rights, English settlers, priests, plans for reafforestation, landlords, emigration and, inevitably, the Famine.

Hold your breath while you read her sentences. The Victorians packed a lot between capital letter and full stop. The opening paragraph of the first account, "Lough Foyle And Its Environs", kicks off: "For some reasons, it may be well to begin by steaming into Lough Foyle, and landing at the famous old Derry, whose prefix of 'London' seems rather an impertinence when one is fairly among the Paddies." There's a lot of this sort of uppity stuff, which can become wearing as it veers between being amusing and irritating. Martineau was hugely privileged compared with most people she encountered in Ireland, and her views are in keeping with someone of her background and class.

Irish Academic Press, which is republishing the articles, is calling its collection Letters From Ireland, but this is a slightly misleading description. The material Martineau wrote in Ireland certainly went back to London by post, but a stamp alone does not a letter make. The pieces were written as commissioned articles, for a broad readership, and therefore contain few of the asides or intimate details that make rivate letters of the time so charming.

Their pages bear the watermark of Victorian morality, however. Dirt equals bad and even mad. Martineau presents the many grubby, barefooted children and adults she saw as simpleton bogtrotters who, when they could raise themselves from stupefaction, occupied themselves for hours at a time by chasing after her carriage, begging.

It's clear from her reports that the devastation wreaked by the Famine and emigration were evident throughout Ireland. Halfway through her journey, she stops writing about the misery she saw, focusing instead on related social issues, such as workhouses, and the competition between the churches, which offered bread for souls who switched religions.

It was a time when it took six hours to travel by rail from Dublin to Galway, when there were reportedly just 120 students at Queen's University Belfast and when "a peasant would never think of using a chair, or other article of furniture, till it has been blessed by the priest, which blessing costs half a crown".

When Martineau takes a rest from jumping up and down on her patch of high moral ground, she's very good at looking around and describing the landscape. While the social and economic structure of Ireland has changed beyond recognition since the 1850s, Martineau's descriptions of Connemara and Kerry could be contemporary.

Of Connemara, she writes: "The air here is like breathing cream ... there are the grand bare mountains, the Twelve Pins, caprices of sunlight playing above their solemn heads, and shining into their dark purple depths; and below are waters untraceable and incalculable. We are here at the ends of the earth, to all appearance; for the land is as a fringe, with the waters running in everywhere between its streaks."

Letters From Ireland by Harriet Martineau, edited by Glenn Hooper, will be published by Irish Academic Press next month