3 - Informing Ireland: Sources of Information and Their Cultural Impact

Summary

Despite being a summer's evening, and the counter-attractions on offer in the city, a large crowd filled Dublin's Leinster Hall to hear from the world famous Welsh-born explorer Henry Morton Stanley. For weeks, newspapers advertised his upcoming lectures in Belfast and Dublin; these were to be Stanley's first appearances in Ireland. He had only returned from a hectic lecturing tour in the United States the previous month, and he was now in the middle of a United Kingdom-wide tour. Irish admirers of Stanley were familiar with what he would speak about. But reading about his adventures in ‘Darkest Africa’ was one thing, hearing them from the man himself was quite another. A writer in the Tyrone Constitution best described the appeal:

His personality is a fascinating one, and when he appeared on the platform at the Leinster Hall on Tuesday evening he met a sea of faces upon which simple curiosity was the prevailing expression. No one expected to hear anything new, nor did anyone hear anything new, but it was a great thing to get a first view of the man who has, as one may say, created a new continent, and whose battles, sieges, fortunes, have been as varied and as eventful, and perhaps as mythically decorated, as those of Othello himself.

The Dublin audience listened attentively to one of the greatest explorers of the age, laughing and applauding at different points. Yet it seemed that Stanley failed to endear himself fully to his audience. A reviewer in the Irish Times thought that Stanley's lecture had excited ‘only a moderate amount of enthusiasm’ among attendees. Perhaps some sceptical attendees saw past his boastful tales of danger and heroics in Africa. This was not simply a renowned explorer before them, but an imperialist who for many years had earned his personalwealth by helping powerful Westerners exploit African people and resources for their own ends.

Culture, that is, everyday beliefs, practices, and traditions, in the Victorian period, helped sustain European imperial expansion and a spirit of adventure. Entertainment shows, newspapers, literature, and lectures, for example, which were all part of contemporary cultural life, popularised imperialism. Together, they conveyed to the public certain information and messages about other peoples and places and in doing so, reinforced notions of European obligation and supremacy which were central to imperialist thinking.