Lying at the heart of this examination of representations of Ireland by travel writers over the past couple of centuries is the fundamental geographical reality of the historical interconnectedness of the islands of Britain and Ireland. Nationalist readings of the past century have often rejected this reality, opting instead for what has been called an ‘insularity of explanation’ which fails to look beyond Ireland. Within the British Isles (con)text, most of the representations of the western isle in this book are coloured by contrasts in demography and landscape. Ireland is not a great deal smaller than England, yet it contains less than one-tenth of the population. Before the nineteenth century, the respective populations were not so different, but then the demographic and economic experience of the two islands diverged sharply – with the emergence of an industrialized and crowded eastern island and a rural, peripheral, ‘unspoilt’ western isle. This basic reality underlies the processes of tourism and travel examined in this book.