Alison O'Byrne – författare

Exploring a variety of perspectives on London during the long eighteenth century, this study considers how walking made possible the various surveys and tours that characterized accounts of the capital. O'Byrne examines how walking in the city's streets and promenades provided subject matter for writers and artists. Engaging with a wide range of material, the book ranges across and investigates the various early eighteenth-century works that provided influential models for representing the city, descriptions of the promenade in St. James's Park, accounts of London that imagine the needs and interests of tourists, popular surveys of the cheats and frauds of the city uncovered on a ramble through London, and comic explorations of the pleasures and pitfalls of urban living produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Convincing and engaging, O'Byrne demonstrates the fundamental role played by walking in shaping representations of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century city.

Even as members of the social elite participated in the European Grand Tour, travellers, writers, and readers increasingly recognized that Britain and Ireland might offer sights and experiences to rival the continent. This collection examines the practice and representation of tourism on 'home' ground during the period when modern Britain was invented and became a powerful and prosperous imperial nation. Interdisciplinary essays explore the diverse variety of tours and tourist agendas - artistic, industrial, leisure, scientific - and they address the ways in which travellers' 'discovery' of Britain and Ireland was an active and often self-critical process that potentially encompassed encounters with the alien and unfamiliar. Considering travellers from the wider world as well as from within Britain and Ireland, contributors discuss the function of comparative reference in contemporary travel-writing, as tourists often thought with and through others as they reflected on the distinctiveness and significance of the sites that they visited.