ABSTRACT
A tourist of 1829 was glad to find that taking an east coast route to Inverness provided many opportunities of observing ‘the customs and manners of the natives’. Interest in Gaels was as carefully ritualized as was the appreciation of landscape, making clear their roles as members of a folk culture who, through their closeness to nature and their racial heritage, offered a contrast to the rational, mechanical, and progress-obsessed world from which tourists came. To those travelers who ventured to the Highlands in the late eighteenth century, Gaels were aliens, as exotic and foreign as South Sea islanders. The definition of Highlanders as members of a folk culture positioned them as subjects to be scientifically and rationally studied, particularly as interest in both folklore and ethnography increased in the late nineteenth century. Victorians were accustomed to the display of members of other cultures, such as African tribesmen or Australian aborigines, in theatres and zoos.
