This post takes a look at another young gentleman on a series of ‘gap year’ tours – William Hartigan Barrington, son of Sir Matthew, who built Glenstal Castle, Co. Limerick. Barrington was interested in new experiences, meeting young women, and finding out about poverty. Has the ‘gap year’ changed all that much?
Between 1833 and 1837, aged between 18 and 23 years, Barrington visited Spain, North Africa, Russia, Scandinavia, and western and central Europe. Western Europe, and parts of central Europe, had featured on ‘Grand Tour’ itineraries since the seventeenth century, but Spain, North Africa, Russia and Scandinavia were less often visited. From c.1830, a select social group were drawn to Scandinavia’s abundant hunting and fishing grounds [1]. The difficulty of travelling outside of Western Europe continued to be emphasised, and sometimes exaggerated, to enhance the traveller’s intrepid image. The Italian traveller and naturalist, Giuseppe Acerbi (1773–1846) wrote:
“Fashion, which extends its influence over every thing, appears, in our day, to favour travels and expeditions to the North: […] However this may be, such as travel to those quarters are entitled to a degree of regard and esteem which cannot justly be claimed by those who visit the South of Europe: for the hardy North does not by any means hold out the same luxuries, the same allurements of climate, and the same temptations to pleasure that are presented by a more genial and inviting soil. Journeys in the North will be undertaken by those only who have a just and masculine taste for nature, under every aspect, and are actuated by a desire of enlarging their own information, and of instructing others.” [2]
Barrington certainly considered himself adventurous, self-consciously recording in his diary:
“there are a good many passengers on board and some of them are very curious looking fellows, there are not I think many travellers merely for pleasure, those persons generally select a shorter and more fashionable passage, preferring a long and tedious land journey to a little disarrangement of the intestines.”
Barrington had a lively interest in other cultures. In St Petersburg, he complained on one evening that they had ‘nothing Russian at dinner’. He visited a banya and attended Russian Orthodox services in an attempt to ‘try everything’. Studying languages was a good justification for extending his stay in any one place – he stayed in Dresden for an extra week because ‘a week’s practice German conversation and reading will be of great use to me going to Vienna’. In Sweden, he enjoyed learning the language from local girls, who he thought also took ‘great pleasure’ in the exercise.
He relished the freedom offered by travel, and his diary records his acquaintance with a number of young women. The first, he nicknamed ‘Miss Coquilio’ because her father was a carver of coquilla nuts. She gave him a ring made by her father. In Stockholm, a young woman named Tilda presented him with a lock of her hair, and en route from there to Gothenburg, he befriended a young English woman named Jemima. At balls, theatre visits and dinner parties, he evaluated the prettiness of the company. No doubt, these made entertaining anecdotes to share with friends, and his romantic encounters recall Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768), where ‘flirtatious encounters’ are more keenly described than the sights of Europe [3].
Perhaps the most interesting element of Barrington’s tour, is the interest he showed in provision for the poor. He proudly compared what he found elsewhere to ‘our Mont de Pieté’ in Limerick. This was a charitable pawn office that provided financial support for the hospital established by his father, Sir Matthew, in 1829. Both institutions were acclaimed as models for all charitable endeavours in Ireland.
In 1834, Barrington visited Hamburg’s hospital and institution for children who were deaf without speech. He found the patients well-fed and the hospital ‘clean and well kept’ but overcrowded and ‘very inferior to the hospital in Bordeaux.’ In rural Norway, he was astonished to discover high literacy levels despite the relatively low living standards. Prayer books and bibles were to be found in every household, and rural children benefited periodically from the visits of a travelling schoolmaster. He was amazed to find a reading room in Berlin in which ‘the public are allowed in to read and any book they ask for is given out to them […] they even bring home any book they want’.
Barrington would return to the Continent in 1859, on his honeymoon or ‘wedding journey’ with his wife, Elizabeth Olivia Darley (c.1829-1907). That will be the topic of a separate, future post.
For more on Barrington’s travels, see my article, “A Gentlemanly Tour on the Fringes of Europe: William Hartigan Barrington in Scandinavia and Russia, 1837,” Irish Economic and Social History 40 (2013), pp. 31–47. DOI: 10.7227/IESH.40.1.2
References:
All quotes from Barrington’s journals are from NLI, MSS 34,390/1-5, W. H. Barrington, Journals of tours made in 1833-7.
[1] Pia Sillanpää, ‘The Scandinavian Sporting Tour 1830–1914’, in Brent Lovelock (ed.), Tourism and the Consumption of Wildlife: Hunting, Shooting and Sport Fishing (New York, 2007), pp. 59–72.
[2] Joseph Acerbi, Travels Through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, to the North Cape, in the Years 1798 and 1799 (2 vols, London, 1802), vol. i, p. x.
[3] Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1998), p. 8.