Chapter 6 traces the intellectual consequences of the unravelling of Ireland’s grain export boom at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For British political economists such as Malthus and James Ramsay McCulloch, the path towards Irish recovery could only lie through the assimilation of Ireland to what they took to be an English model of large-scale tenant farming and concentrated land ownership. For European thinkers, however, the parlous condition of the Irish countryside was proof not of Ireland’s divergence from, but its identity with, the monstrous and unsustainable condition of Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ social order. Their critiques were taken up in Britain by a new generation of liberal economists led by John Stuart Mill, and in Ireland by a group of Francophile nationalist intellectuals, Young Ireland. These thinkers re-cast the problem of Irish improvement anew, tying it not to the integration of Ireland into British or imperial markets, but on the creation of a stable class of peasant proprietors to match those that had been created in large parts of continental Europe through French, or French-inspired, land reforms.

The nature of empire is that it is always at heart contradictory, suggesting a totalising unity but not homogeneity or equality. This chapter focuses on three very different Irish men of letters, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Moore and Charles Lever, exploring the contradictions at the heart of their engagement with the British Empire and the imperial project generally, and its influence on their writing. It also suggests ways in which these contradictions are later to be found in one of the great imperial novels – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Charles Gavan Duffy was an Irish nationalist and a prime minister of a British colony, who saw Thomas Moore’s poetry as the product of an ‘imperial mind’. Moore, in his turn, can be seen as the colonised figure incarnate, beholden to imperial patronage for his livelihood and yet able to find ways to express subversive feeling in his poetry and prose. Charles Lever was perhaps the Empire’s favourite Irish novelist in this period, and yet he seldom wrote about the Empire, and when he did, it was almost always negative in tone. Although he was a moderate Tory in politics, Lever’s work suggested that the Irish could never be good Britons, or successful colonists. In contrast, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who in so many ways represents the anomalous position of the Irish in imperial terms, is presented as succeeding precisely because of his Irishness, even though he does not know what that is. The contradictions in Kim reflect the ironic relationship between the Irish and the Empire as a whole, and as such the novel can claim to be the greatest ‘Irish’ imperial novel, a term which is itself a contradiction in terms.

This chapter explores the development of a popular print culture in Ireland during the decades between 1830 and 1880, as well as the growth of an audience for such publications. It traces the history of the technological and legislative changes – such as the arrival of steam presses and the abolition of stamp and paper taxes – necessary for a popular press to emerge, as well as the social and political landscape which enabled an expanded readership to develop. In particular, the chapter examines the role of the radical political press in actively developing that readership through both its network of reading rooms across Ireland and its publishing of newspapers and juvenile story papers, including the Nation newspaper, the Irish Fireside Magazine, Young Ireland and the Shamrock magazine. These publications were intended to establish an imaginative link between popular entertainment and radical politics, especially through the use of Irish history and historical fiction in order to create a print culture which created and reinforced a national Irish audience for both the popular press and mass political movements.

The failure of the 1848 revolt scattered Young Ireland leaders across the globe. Whether transported or in exile, they carried on their campaign in the only way they could – through their writings. Taking their lead from the Nation, many founded newspapers and wrote history, memoir and ballad. Foremost among them were Michael Doheny, Thomas D’Arcy McGee and John Mitchel. Mitchel’s Jail Journal and The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) were strongly influenced by being composed in prison and in exile. The former became a seminal text for generations of Irish nationalists, who saw it as an eloquent and fervent denunciation of the cruelty and hypocrisy of the British Empire. Exile also provided the perspective to write on the Great Famine of 1845–1848, a catastrophe so great that it rendered most nationalist writers mute with shame and bewilderment. Mitchel. though, chose to deal with it not as an isolated and unprecedented disaster, but, in historical context, as the latest and most ruthless of England’s attempts to crush Irish resistance once and for all. His interpretation of the Famine as a deliberate act of genocide became the accepted view of many nationalists, in Ireland and abroad. The same period was covered in less vitriolic style by Mitchel’s erstwhile colleague Charles Gavan Duffy who put his main emphasis on the political failings and flaws of Daniel O’Connell and the idealistic self-sacrificing patriotism of the Young Irelanders. The apparent moderation of Duffy’s writings and the caution and compromises of his later political career led many younger nationalists to identify with the more rebellious Mitchel. Chief among these was John O’Leary, whose noble character and unflinching idealism made him one of the most influential of the Fenians. It was O’Leary who introduced the young W. B. Yeats to the writings of Young Ireland, and though the mature Yeats later dismissed much of their work as shallow and chauvinistic, he continued to acknowledge its enduring capacity to move and inspire.

Young Ireland emerged from a closely-knit group of young, middle-class Irishmen, initially allied to Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal movement but increasingly internally fractured by disagreements over their preferred version of Irish nationalism, and under siege from political rivals. Their newspaper, the Nation, founded in October 1842 by Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis, and John Blake Dillon, was both the organ and the crucible for their political and cultural agenda; their writings provoked attacks from both the conservative Catholic establishment, for whom the Young Irelanders were ‘Godless infidels’ promoting mixed education, and the British government, which prosecuted the editors of the Nation for sedition. Literature was, for the Young Irelanders, a powerful medium of nationalist education, and poetry and ballads particularly valuable means of teaching history. The Nation’s ‘Poet’s Corner’ hosted both well-known poets such as James Clarence Mangan, and launched the careers of Jane Francesca Elgee (the future Lady Wilde) and a number of other female poets initially accepted as curiosities and ‘auxiliaries’ by the editors, but becoming increasingly important to the paper’s readers. Through the Nation, its anthologies The Voice of the Nation and The Spirit of the Nation, and its Library of Ireland volumes of fiction and history, Young Ireland was to influence the future leaders of the Fenian movement, the Land League, and the Literary Revival.