London bookseller John Dunton wrote colourfully about his visits to Ireland in the late 17th century, writes Eileen Battersby
Long before books were written there were travellers' tales, daring and often fantastic accounts of strange and exotic places populated by terrifying beasts and often equally ferocious people. The traveller was a hero, often an opportunist, at times a villain frequently a liar, but seldom boring. Above all, anyone travelling further than the next parish - or better still across the seven seas - was usually assured of an audience and possibly a meal or two.
John Dunton, 17th century London bookseller, man of opinions and begetter of a famous periodical, The Athenian Mercury, often spoke of his restless nature and love of rambling. Although he was hardly an explorer, he did set off to America to sell his books at a time when most people lived and died in the same place. He travelled widely throughout New England, chronicling his escapades in letters that were later published in the 19th century, long after his death in 1732.
But it is his writings about journeying across another, smaller body of water, the Irish Sea, that makes Dunton particularly interesting to Irish readers. These are contained in the form of two epistolary accounts, The Dublin Scuffle, a justification of his dispute with a Dublin bookseller, and a second, superior volume, Teague Land or A Merry Ramble to the Wild Irish.
Academic and writer Andrew Carpenter, an authority on Swift, has transcribed and edited the manuscript of A Merry Ramble, which is now presented in a handsome volume, complete with a useful essay on Dunton and his career by Carpenter, who has also provided valuable footnotes.
Teague Land makes colourful reading and is a lively addition to the literature of Irish travels, dominated by such classics as Robert Lloyd Praeger's The Way That I Went and Frank Mitchell's The Way That I Followed, not forgetting journalist William Bulfin's account of cycling through Ireland. The great 19th century polymath, surgeon and antiquarian, William Wilde, proved himself an able travel writer, with his first book, the record of a nine-month cruise - Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Tenerife and along the Shores of the Mediterranean. Published in two volumes in 1840, it was a bestseller and predated his Irish classics celebrating the Boyne Valley and Lough Corrib.
Huguenot artist Gabriel Beranger, in the company of Italian stage designer Angelo Maria Bigari, left an account of a field trip undertaken through Connacht in the summer of 1779.
All of these are exciting, insightful and positive, celebratory works. Richard Pococke (1704-65), an archdeacon of Dublin who in time became Bishop of Meath, explored Egypt and the Alps, before turning to Ireland. He was to prove an able if worthy writer. Dunton, writing even earlier, was a quick-minded, witty character, more drawn to the horrific and eccentric than picturesque. Even when shocked, he defers to the acceptable side of righteous. After all, as Carpenter points out, Dunton, although the son of the rector of Grafham, and coming from a family of clergymen, "John himself was clearly not an appropriate candidate for ordination and he was bound apprentice to the London bookseller, Thomas Parkhurst, in 1674" - when Jonathan Swift was seven years of age.
If Dunton's memories of Ireland as voiced here through seven reports written as letters, appear at times to owe more to Hogarth's London, it may be that standards of hygiene, or rather their lack, tended to preoccupy him. While the natives were hospitable, he often found the food unapproachable owing to methods of presentation. Such as the meal marred by the lady of the house choosing to remove her smelly head covering in order to use the said length of material as a table cloth. It should be pointed out that he appears to have been more shocked by life as lived in Connemara. Dublin was more to his liking.
Though critical he is not entirely disparaging of the Irish. All was not lost. "I take the Irish," he notes in the second of the long letters of which this volume is composed, "to be a people well humor'd and open hearted, and verie capable of good impressions if a prudent care be taken to manage them." Aside from the dirt, there is a problem. "Indeed their religion is a greate obstacle hereunto; but this is not only to be imputed to them, for we heare of the horrid barbarities dayly which the French (soe polite a people) commit among their countrymen, nay neighbours and for ought I know relations too..." By the opening of letter number 3, On the road from Connemara to Dublin, Dunton is firing on all cylinders.
"Whether religion be practised among other Roman Catholicks as it is among the Irish I am yet to learne , but surely if it be, the ignorance of their clergye and people must be the cause of it. More appearance of devotion among the layety at celebration of their mass is not everie where to be found, but yet so full of a blind zeale that the poore wretches know nothing of what they doe or say." Dunton is harder on the ministers than he is on the gormless flock, concluding, "In short, the main of their religion consists in a blind and totall adhereing to what is delivered to them by their oracles, their clergy." When not thundering on about religion, Dunton, more acidic anthropologist than sneer, is a good companion and an intelligent observer. On route to Kilkenny, he stops in what we now know as the west county Dublin village of Rathcoole, or as he spells it "Rackool" and notes the presence of two "indifferent" inns.
Luckily he chooses the more interesting of the two establishments. "In our inn some yeares since dwelt a woman who murdered her guests that had mony (sic) with them. It was not long conceald and she was burnt for the fact." Of Naas he writes: "This is a good handsom town with severall good stone houses, and two handsom taverns besides, severall inns, a large church and session house where the assizes are held, it being the shire town of the county of Kildare and a burrigh sending two members to the parliament whose names now are Nevil & Barry." Having provided the reader with such a practical piece of information, he goes on to include details of a local ritual.
"The inhabitants of this place and the neighbourhood have a custom (how begun I could not learn) on Shrove Tuesday to meet on horseback in the fields, and wherever they spye an hare in her form, they make as wide a circle as the company can and the ground will permitt, and some one is sent in to start poore puss [the hare], who cannot turn herself any way but she is repulst with loud cryes and soe frightned that she falls dead in the magicall circle, tho some times she breaks through and escapes. If a grey hound or any other dogg be found in the field, tis a thousand to one he loses his life, and thus after they have shouted two or three hares to death they disperse." The town of Kildare despite its cathedral and former glory as an ecclesiastical centre fares less well than Naas and is described as "ordinary" and "not neare so good as the Naas. He did dine well there though, "on a dish of large trouts, and with some bottles of wine made ourselves merry." 'Droghedah' as described - and spelt - in his letter 5 impressed this discerning traveller who deemed it "an handsom cleane English like town, and the best that I have seen in Ireland except the metropolis." Even the salmon of the River Boyne struck him as being "always fatt and never out of season".
In a more reflective tone, he mentions visiting the site "where the Battail of the Boyn" unfolded. "When I was on the spott where greate Schomberg fell, I could not consider it without some melancholy reflections on humanity" - Dunton's visit occurred less than eight years after the battle - "that he who was so famous a generall & had made soe much noise in the world by his conduct and successes in many greate actions should fall in a place where no trophy, no monument is erected to his name, more than what he himselfe had purchased by his greate deeds, and this last generous engagement of the enemy at the head of a few men whom he had led through the river. The country hereabouts is verie pleasant and fertile and verie well worth contending for."
Dunton who was born in 1659 and died in 1732, wed twice. His first wife according to Carpenter, was a shrewd businesswoman and died the year before Teague Land was written. Her successor appears to have been merely shrewd and abetted by her mother, appears to have as Carpenter writes, "bled Dunton of all his resources and reduced him, at times, to a state of penury." He does, however, also refer to Dunton's "own commercial ineptitude." Hard times and ill health aside, old Dunton was always nosy and had a sense of humour.
One of the best passages in this intriguing little volume vividly sketching the Ireland of some three centuries past, concerns a man he met in Drumconrah (Drumcondra) who was keen to dispose of some rats.
"I mett a fellow with a sack upon his back walking into the water of the sea. I was surprised at what I saw the man goeing to doe and called to him and enquired what he was about. He told me he was goeing to drown a sack full of ratts. I askt him how he caught them and he sayd he had a hutch of mault which he did not open of for some months and when he went to take some of it out, he found it almost empty." Having chased the rats into a sack, the man was reluctant to fling it into the sea. And so he waded out into the water, opened the sack, "and poured out all the vermin into the water where he stayd a while to see them drownd. But alas, quite other than he dreamt or expected, the ratts all made to him and crept up his shoulders to the top of his head. He was forced to come ashore with the same load entered the water being I believe neare a hundred in number".
Visions of another time, or perhaps merely yesterday, John Dunton saw things in an interesting way - and Andrew Carpenter is mining the rich confluence where folklore and history meet with entertaining results.
- Teague Land or A Merry Ramble to the Wild Irish (1698) by John Dunton, edited and introduced by Andrew Carpenter, is published by Four Courts Press