Ireland's Great Famine generated Western Europe's most devastating social crisis of the nineteenth century, a crisis that created enormous and transformational upheaval. In Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853, author Catherine Nealy Judd proposes that a new literary genre emerged from the crucible of the Great Famine, that is, the Irish Famine travelogue. In her keenly argued and thoroughly researched book, Judd contends that previous scrutiny of Famine travel narratives has been overly broad, peripheral, or has tended to group Famine travelogues into an undi erentiated whole. Judd invites us to consider Famine-era travel narratives as comprising a unique subgenre within the larger discursive - eld of travel literature. Here Judd argues that the immensity of the Famine exerted great pressure on the form, topics, themes, and goals of Famine-era travelogues, and for this reason, Famine travel narratives deserve detailed and organized consideration, as well as critical recognition of their status as an unprecedented subgenre. Drawing on an extensive array of underutilized sources, Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine adumbrates the Irish Famine travelogue canon.

Sidney Godolphin Osbornes eyewitness famine narrative Gleanings in the West of Ireland is a text that is currently both neglected and misunderstood. Written and published in July of 1850, Osbornes Gleanings recounts his summer 1850 journey with an unnamed friend into the heart of late-stage famine Ireland. Most Irish Famine scholars have overlooked Gleanings, but those few who have examined Osbornes work tend to portray him as an unsympathetic, or even voyeuristic, famine tourist. This is a mischaracterisation, for in fact Osbornes aim in his 1850 Irish visit was to report on the condition of Western Irelands famine victims. Far from touring Ireland for pleasure, Osbornes primary goal was to examine eleven Poor Law Unions in counties Limerick, Clare, Galway, and Mayo, and secondarily to ascertain the amount of recent evictions in those counties and the circumstances of the newly houseless tenants. Osborne journeyed into western Ireland in both 1849 and 1850 in order to gather information with which to rebuke current governmental relief schemes and the Irish Poor Laws of 1838 and 1847, and also to attempt to stir compassion in his English readers in the hopes that their outrage would result in Parliamentary action to increase, clarify, and better administer Famine relief aid: as to the Irish peasantry being deserving of the sympathy I and very many others would seek to excite in their favour, I can only say, that I can conceive no class of human beings on this earth, whose condition, every way, can be worse. I know no one ingredient in the catalogue of those dark ingredients which enter into the composition of human suffering, which is not to be found in the cup from which they have, of late years, been compelled to drink.