ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the significance of the Irish hotel in the crucial period between the Act of Union of 1800, which supposedly cemented Ireland within a sophisticated modern democracy, and the catastrophic Great Famine of 1845-52, during which approximately a million Irish people—British citizens—died. The "moral economy" of the Irish hotel was avidly monitored by travelers keen to investigate this uncanny country and its people, and by Irish commentators determined to defend the respectability of its institutions. The Irish hotel in the years following the Union was intimately tied to the rhetoric of improvement, and in particular to the progressive attitudes of Irish landlords. Travelers discovered that the Irish inn was a site of religious as well as national difference, and at times segregation. For Anthony Trollope, the unwillingly shared bed of an Irish inn is a recurring scene of the confrontation between Irish ideas of hospitality and English notions of exclusive ownership.