Between the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, the population of Ireland soared – growing every decade from about 1750 until 1840 – only to fall back dramatically as a result of the Great Famine. Considering the scale and intensity of the changes experienced, the historian Niall Ó Ciosáin asserts that the hundred or so years from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century can be treated as ‘a single, fairly coherent, unit’, at least from the perspective of the majority of the rural population.1 What happens if we treat those same years as a unit in literary history? Susan Wolfson and William Galperin already made a similar case for a British ‘Romantic Century’ when they proposed 1750–1850 as ‘an intellectually and historically coherent century-long category’.2 For Ireland, I argue in this book, a slightly briefer span of time, the years between about 1780 and 1850, can be understood as a meaningful period in the making of a romantic Ireland.
Nestled within that century lie folds and splits that lend a distinctive texture to Irish romantic culture. Not least of these is the relationship between the majority Catholic population and the mainly elite Protestant women writers who inaugurated an Irish romantic literature. That all began to change as middle-class Catholic writers, mostly men, came into voice from about 1800. Meanwhile, Irish romantic literature registers and responds to a palpable history of unjust colonial land settlements, revolution and war, a rural society in transition, famine and displacement. The encounter happens in the English language, on the flat plane of the printed page. A commitment to distinct cultural voices emerging from peripheral places gives force and energy to writers as varied as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore. Despite their many differences – one the offspring of a midlands landlord who made her name with prestigious publications in prose, the next a more or less self-made actor’s daughter who worked as a governess even as she made her way into publishing and the last the son of a Dublin shopkeeper who worked tirelessly to achieve income and reputation – the three writers share a self-consciously historical imagination and helped to invent a distinctly Irish literature. Although Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s fictions and Moore’s satires and melodies are partitioned in many histories, all share the same cultural ground prospected in this book.
Despite the familiarity of Edgeworth and Owenson on our pages or Moore on our ears, however, we remain literate outsiders to a culture that moved freely between oral, performed and print modes, forever on the other side of a barrier erected by colonialism, cultural privilege and recurrent catastrophes. Comprised of texts written in English by Irish writers whose class position ranges downward from elite to ordinary, Irish romantic literature partakes in particular ways of the problems outlined by Peter Burke in his classic study of popular culture. Imaging the latter as ‘elusive quarry’, Burke describes problems of access across time, language and class.3 In Ireland, the experiences of death, emigration and language loss heralded by the Great Hunger eroded cultural links still further. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century compositions discussed in this book were written in one world and increasingly came to be read or heard within another: we are the inheritors of this process.
But neither can it be right, as Vincent Morley has shown us, to consign ‘the bulk of the Irish people to the role of non-speaking extras’ in our history.4 Using popular Irish-language poetry and songs as his source, Morley finds evidence of a collective sense of identity shared by the majority of the Irish people, resting on a belief in Ireland’s status as an ancient kingdom loyal to the Stuarts and the Pope, eagerly awaiting the overthrow of the Williamite settlement. Such a worldview, Morley shows, was remarkably resilient and responsive, able to adapt to a variety of political events, including the American Revolution and the United Irish uprising, and later passing into Anglophone idioms of political democracy.5
Only traces of such popular understandings come into view in this book. Yet their marks are present and they helped to shape a modern Irish literature written in the English language that carried with it questions of history, language and identity, in their turn imprinted by issues of representation, population and demographic change. Beginning in the optimistic aftermath of the American Revolution with the performative politics of the Volunteers, the decades discussed witnessed innovations in literary genres, the flourishing of individual reputations and a brief literary renaissance. William Drennan’s poem ‘Glendalloch’ imagines an Ireland ‘stung’ into activity by ‘trans-atlantic glory’ and the ‘eloquence and virtue’ of the Irish parliament.6 The French Revolution severed older Irish ties, both commercial and religious, and prepared the grounds of modernity, while Ireland also felt the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. Toussaint Louverture lay dying in a French prison during Maria Edgeworth’s visit to Paris in 1803, where she closely followed news of Napoleon’s losses in Saint Domingue, discussed Britain’s future in Bengal and heard tell of the Louisiana Purchase. In terms of empire more broadly, Ireland over these years transitioned from a ‘colonial outpost for much of the eighteenth century to sub-imperial centre by the beginning of the nineteenth’, a change that meant much tighter ties into imperial commerce.7 But these same years tell also of disease, violence and the creeping horrors of hunger. Growing wealth for the middle and upper classes did little to counteract the effective pauperisation of most of the country as the sub-division of land proceeded apace, early efforts at industry failed, vagrancy increased and social dislocation ensued. Widening inequalities, disease, contagion, famine and recurrent agrarian violence were notable features of Irish life even as the state extended its reach during the period after the 1801 Act of Union.
Still, the case for linking the lives of Ireland’s majority rural population with the emergence of Irish literature is not an easy one to make. Rather than any clear alignment between the lives of the people and the literature of Ireland, we encounter questions, demands, doubts and entreaties that take shape in particular ways from about the 1780s onwards. These of course are quintessentially literary modes, and to track them is to begin to map a relationship between vernacular culture, learned Irish-language texts, popular classicism and new developments in imaginative literature. That latter body of work, the realm of polite letters across Britain and Ireland, is now most readily identified with romanticism but contains within itself those other, older, forces.
Defining Irish Romanticism
The broad outlines of the usual story of the emergence of Irish literature from the middle of the eighteenth century are well known, and there have been important and ongoing efforts to frame and analyse the brilliant literary achievements of the Banims, William Carleton, Maria Edgeworth, Gerald Griffin, James Clarence Mangan, Charles Robert Maturin, Thomas Moore, Lady Morgan and Mary Tighe. But it remains a challenge to bring these authors into dialogue with one another and to understand them in the context of the culture at large, the result perhaps of a tendency to conceive of Irish romanticism as an inherently broken cultural moment, of interest because of the ways in which its own fragmented state enacts a kind of prototypical romantic predicament. As it is usually told, the story of Irish romanticism comes equipped with a high-flown rhetoric of loss and defeat: a culture ‘on a collision course with Britishness and the ideology of empire’.8 But while it is possible to make such a case based on a selective reading of key scenes and images from a range of writers, the wider context is too often ignored: Irish literature of the Romantic period still needs what Marilyn Butler described as a ‘methodology which gives weight both to the collection of evidence and to analysis as opposed to synthesis’ and that is just what is offered here.9
So, what does ‘Irish romanticism’ mean and when did Ireland become romantic? How does Irish romanticism differ from the literary culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and what qualities do they share? I propose an understanding of romanticism as a temporally and aesthetically distinct period in Irish culture, during which literature flourished in new forms and styles. Books by Irish authors were written, sold, circulated and read in Ireland, Britain and America and as such were caught up in the shifting dramas of a changing print culture. Not all of these writers knew each other personally, but they shared networks that crossed the Irish Sea: with the exception of Mangan, all published in Britain or lived or spent time there. At the same time, each of these writers is aware of their distance from the larger island, and in particular from London: at once centre of colonial power and capital of an expanding culture industry. Romanticism is perhaps the period when Irish literature most needs Britain in order to chart its history and create a cultural narrative. Where Victorian literature seems to belong to Britain and its expanding empire, and where modernism sees Irish writers make their own global moment, it is striking to reflect upon the extent to which romanticism is a quintessentially archipelagic cultural formation shaped by back-and-forth movement between the two islands and across the empire. British romanticism in turn is shaped at countless points by a relationship with Ireland, from the influence of Edgeworth on Scott or Bishop Percy on Wordsworth to the role of the Catholic question in the quarrel between the Edinburgh and the Quarterly reviews or the friendship of Moore and Byron.
In 1814, Jane Austen advised her niece Anna not to locate any part of the action of a novel in progress in Ireland: ‘you had better not leave England’, she wrote, ‘Let the Portmans go to Ireland; but as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath & the Foresters. There you will be quite at home.’10 Austen herself made only brief, allusive references to Ireland, but these also express a reluctance to engage with the place, as when in Emma ‘the not going to Ireland’ becomes the motive for one of the heroine’s many misunderstandings about Jane Fairfax and her secret relationship with Frank Churchill. Mrs Bates quite trusts Jane’s preference for ‘her native air’, though she has to correct her language from that of ‘different kingdoms’ to the more nuanced post-Union term, ‘different countries’. As the Union hovers in the background of Austen’s great paean to Englishness, Frank’s clandestine gift of a piano accompanied by the sheet music for some Irish Melodies further seeks to secure Ireland within that framework, joining native airs to Irish ones. When Jane plays one song from this imagined collection – ‘Robin Adair’ – it is a popular English composition set to an old Irish air (also used by Thomas Moore and Gerald Griffin and mentioned in The Wild Irish Girl), ‘Eileen Aroon’.11 The exchange testifies not only to the pervasive place of the Melodies in wider cultural conversations but also to the ease by which they might be appropriated: in the late 1820s, Felicia Hemans, at once lamenting the loss of her mother and commencing work on her Records of Woman, wrote that she herself resembled ‘an Irish melody’, with its ‘quick and wild transitions from sadness to gaiety’.12
Austen’s best unionist efforts aside, Irish literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rings with accusations of ‘false representations’. Much of the writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries served as so many retorts to the linking of Ireland to barbarity and savagery, a common historic association still in need of address. Austen shows us she has this string to her bow too, when Emma makes a nasty joke about Jane’s ‘odd’ and ‘outrée’ curled hair resembling ‘an Irish fashion’, as if recalling the wild Irish hairstyles and glibs outlawed in the sixteenth century.13 Present since medieval times, such prejudices took on a distinctly colonial dimension in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the work of writers including Sir John Davies, Edmund Spenser and Fynes Moryson. Attacking Moryson in particular, Sydney Owenson took aim at these early modern ‘prejudiced and abject’ commentators on Ireland, ‘scribblers, who in the Elizabethian day, endeavoured to write themselves into the favour of the English government by calumniating the natural as well as the moral state of Ireland’.14 She framed her own fiction in opposition to such assumptions and wrote, she says, her landmark novel The Wild Irish Girl, ‘against a host of gigantic prejudices’.15
Following the success of The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson went on to write national tales set in Greece (Woman: or, Ida of Athens, 1809) and India (The Missionary, 1811), reminding us that Ireland requires analysis in a multiplicity of modes: variously, as comprised of specific places and internal frontiers; equivocally, as a bilingual culture where accents and voices compete and overlap; and imperially, via locations such as Greece, Peru and India. Irish romanticism not only emerges against a backdrop of political, religious, social and cultural conflict but also comes equipped with a strong sense of diverse communities, often made manifest in an awareness of layered and overlapping readerships.
In the Romantic period, the perennial question of knowing Ireland took on a new charge, informed by rebellion and union as well as increased travel between the two islands. The journeys avoided by Austen were undertaken by others, as acts of imagination as well as material movements. Speaking in the House of Lords in favour of the Catholic cause in 1812, Byron countered that objection ‘that I never was in Ireland’ with an assertion that ‘it is as easy to know something of Ireland without having been there, as it appears with some to have been born, bred, and cherished there, and yet remain ignorant of its best interests’.16 And in 1800, Thomas De Quincey accompanied his school friend Lord Sligo on a visit to Ireland, undertaking a thirty-hour journey to Dublin along the ‘high road to the Head’, as he described it in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), and finding himself in Dublin even as the Act of Union passed into law.17 That same summer of 1800 saw William Godwin in Ireland, spending time with the lawyer John Philpott Curran and the veteran politician Henry Grattan as well as meeting Margaret Mount Cashell and Joseph Cooper Walker. Writing home, Godwin made little of the challenges of the journey – the sea was but ‘a river sixty miles broad’ – though in the end his return was delayed by high winds.18 Later, among the additions to the 1856 edition of Confessions, we find De Quincey’s reckoning with the ‘massy’ infrastructure joining up the disparate parts of the United Kingdom, in which he imagines his own person, transported to London as part of a ‘huge tonnage’ that includes ‘all that weight of love and hatred which Ireland had found herself able to muster through twenty-four hours in the great depôt of Dublin, by way of donation to England’.19
Austen, De Quincey and Byron all witnessed, participated in and resisted a broader reframing of British imperialism in the aftermath of the Peninsular and Napoleonic Wars. Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson have described the 1820s and 1830s as ‘a watershed’ in British colonialism, ‘witnessing a move from a protectionist colonial system … to a free-trade empire with a political and moral agenda’.20 Changes included rights for Catholics and dissenters, the abolition of slavery in the empire and parliamentary reform. Some Irish Catholics benefited from this ‘historic settlement across nation and empire’ as the bonds of union grew closer, and these imperial affiliations are also explored in the book.21
Romanticism by the Numbers
From the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the Great Famine, Ireland was ‘an intensely bilingual and diglossic society’.22 Over 40 per cent of the population still spoke Irish at the turn of the nineteenth century, while the absolute number of Irish speakers continued to increase until the 1840s, growing as the population did. Language change was ‘a lengthy, largely silent and ad hoc process, its pace and impact varying greatly according to region, class and even individual experiences’.23 Literacy was typically acquired via English, and the idea of ‘literature’, even when prefixed with the adjective ‘Irish’, was strongly associated with imaginative Anglophone writing. Across these decades, a ‘vibrant culture of partial literacy’ took on new meaning in the rapidly changing world of Anglophone print.24
To these asymmetries of language and power, we must add population size. The question of the popular exerts a special force in my argument, and I show across the book how significant the sheer size of the population is for an Irish literature in the making. Though contemporary historians largely contradict the notion that Ireland’s impoverishment in the pre-Famine period was caused by overpopulation, it remains true that pressure on population is clearly linked to poor-quality housing, illiteracy and poverty.25 Contemporaries, including Thomas Malthus, saw such factors in stark terms not least because of differences across the islands: by 1841, the island’s population was three times that of Scotland and half that of England. The vast majority of those people, counted and charted across a series of state exercises that gathered momentum from the 1820s, were poor Catholics. A minority Presbyterian population also played a role, feared for their part in the great turnout of 1798 but later thought of as a bulwark against a Catholic threat. In the words of William Hamilton, the loyalist rector and scholar whose assassination is discussed in Chapter 2, Presbyterians might be ‘ungracious and litigious’ but nonetheless possessed a value inherent in their balancing power within the population: ‘one must estimate their worth as a miner often does his ore, rather by its weight than its splendour’.26
Remarks on the numerousness of the Irish people are so common as to be virtually invisible, and yet acts of calculation exerted particular kinds of cultural pressure. Edmund Burke’s criticism of the economists and calculators of France takes some of its force from the Irish context, while a classic statement of the chasm that divided the Anglo-Irish minority of ‘thousands’ from the millions that they governed is found in his ‘Letter to Hercules Langrishe’: ‘Sure I am’, Burke writes, ‘that there have been thousands in Ireland, who have never conversed with a Roman catholick in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardener’s workmen, or to ask their way, when they had lost it, in their sports; or, at best, who had known them only as footmen, or other domesticks, of the second and third order.’ Such ‘a state of things’, writes Burke, results in ‘alienation on the one side and pride and insolence on the other.’27 Burke’s description of an unknown and alienated Catholic majority and a proudly unknowing Anglo-Irish minority carries something of the energy and vitality of Irish romanticism itself: a drama of oppression and resistance rooted in the material facts of numbers. The liberal Protestant MP and writer William Parnell spelled the numbers out yet more clearly when he complained that ‘a Protestant of seven hundred a year is more looked up to than a Catholic of seven thousand a year’.28 In John Banim’s novel The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century (1828), an anxious Anglo-Irish group replay fears of the combination of Catholics and Presbyterians in 1798, as they worry about ‘the Popish Rockites’ and predict that they will soon be joined by ‘the discontented weavers’. The alliance is made inevitable by numbers and may well topple a system sustained only by history and faith: ‘Providence – who, since the first planting of English interests in this miserable country, has wonderfully upheld those interests, against an immense numerical odds of the Papist people – may, indeed, be pleased to avert our danger.’29 In such accounts, the presence of what Lady Morgan named ‘seven millions of Irish Catholics’ in pre-Famine Ireland is always felt.30 Still, the story could be told differently. Many saw the Union as a correction to an imbalanced set of accounts, as suggested by Richard Musgrave: ‘In a menacing tone, the papists have told us for some years “we are 3 to 1”. With the Union, we may retort “we are 11 to 3”.’31
When the census of 1821 was taken, the population of Ireland was measured at 7 million, compared to 8.6 million in England and 1.6 million in Scotland. Irish romanticism took shape in the context of a thickly populated country, subject to mass mortality and emigration. Famines and epidemics claimed thousands of lives, notably during the decade after 1815. The thirty years before 1845 were characterised by recurrent patterns of emigration; reaching new and unprecedented heights during and immediately after the Great Famine. Along with the findings of the new statistical science and the efforts of the political economists, the population of Ireland was often remarked upon in terms of wonder and awe: a miserably poor place and yet ‘the most densely peopled country in the world’, according an Edinburgh Review article published in 1825. In same article, Ireland is calculated to contain, ‘on an average, 215 persons to each square mile!’32 Reviewing Edward Newenham’s study of Ireland’s population for the Edinburgh, Malthus reported that the country might potentially come to ‘contain twenty millions’ in the course of the nineteenth century and remarked that such a people would have a ‘physical force’ that would demand political change.33
When Percy Bysshe Shelley confronts the asymmetries of population size and power in Britain in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, it was to call up an ‘unvanquishable’ popular force: ‘YE ARE MANY – THEY ARE FEW’.34 Already in 1812, Shelley had visited Ireland with his first wife, Harriet, motivated by the improbable plan of finding a publisher in post-Union Dublin for material including a book of poems, an Irish pamphlet and his Declaration of Rights. Paul O’Brien suspects that Shelley used John Stockdale as the printer, speculating that the newly arrived poet was not to know that the formerly radical publisher had already turned government informer.35 In any case, Shelley’s address to the Irish people stressed reform over revolution. ‘Temperance, sobriety, charity, and independence will give you virtue’, declared Shelley’s pamphlet Address to the Irish People (1812), ‘and reading, talking, thinking, and searching will give you wisdom; when you have those things you may defy the tyrant.’36 As with Coleridge’s praise for Irish ‘strength and vivacity’ in 1800,37 Shelley’s belief in Ireland as a place ripe for a non-violent revolution in 1812 meant thinking of a country as a moral laggard that might yet reform. His Address expresses a note of hesitant hope that mixes revolutionary language with a fine-grained gradualist theory of political change: ‘May every sun that shines on your green island see the annihilation of an abuse, and the birth of an embryon of melioration!’38 While Shelley’s philosophy of non-violence did not make a notable impression on Irish romantic literature, his later criticisms of Lord Castlereagh resounded in song and story: lines from ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ are collected as part of the ‘Stories, Songs and Ballads of ’98’ in the Irish Schools Collection, compiled in the 1930s.39
Rather than a Shelleyan cry for justice, what we find most commonly in Irish literature is a growing attention to numbers and their meanings, a process that tends towards realism as it follows the data, but does not forget its origins in injustice, war and revolution. There are however connections with Shelley’s own Philosophical View of Reform, written after Peterloo but not published until the 1920s. Arguing against the idea that ‘the evils of the poor arise from an excess of population’, Shelley protests that Malthus wishes to take away even legitimate pleasures, having ‘the hardened insolence to propose as a remedy that the poor should be compelled … to abstain from sexual intercourse’.40 Just such a shocked, dramatic and vital understanding of population numbers, as they press on culture and shape a literary legacy, continues up to W. B. Yeats, a writer who measured and enumerated his own literary inheritance in relation to romanticism.41 And within Irish romantic literature itself, the size of the Irish population was not an inert political problem but rather ‘a force for cultural change’, to borrow Breandán Mac Suibhne’s terms.42 John Gamble phrased the need to bring the full spectacle of the people into view via some dismissive remarks about ‘topography, or the natural curiosities of the country’: instead of describing views, his tour of Ireland’s northern counties in 1812 focuses on ‘human passions, human actions, and human beings’. Gamble puts his point bluntly as he delivers a slight to the famed spectacle of the Giant’s Causeway: ‘Men and women’, he writes, ‘are of more importance than pillars or columns’.43
James Orr’s poetry addresses the ethical debate about people and place via a notably sceptical account of landscape writing in his ‘A Fragment of an Epistle to Mr. W. H. D –’, a poem addressed to the Presbyterian minister and former United Irishman, William H. Drummond. The poem, written in Ulster Scots vernacular and using the Standard Habbie stanza, imagines a natural world that eludes the poet’s abilities and continually returns his vision to real scenes. A ‘purplin’ morn and pensive eve’ call for the poet’s pen, but acts of artistic representation are rebuffed by a sensuously rendered world: ‘O Nature! cud I set your stage, / Wi’ a’ its scen’ry on my page!’ – ‘My cliff sud frown, my echo rave, / My shamrock smell, / My night appear as gran’ly grave / As night hersel’. Orr’s sense of responsibility to atmosphere and environment might be understood in the context of the extractive economy of colonialism, as it moves from ‘Hill, wood, an’ grove’ and ‘rough cascades’ to people and their lives:
Focussing as it does on partial or fragmentary insights into ‘the times’, Orr’s poem links an anti-Malthusian re-peopling of an impoverished landscape (a place to be populated by ‘love’) with a quietly insistent literary force:
Orr’s defence of his rude rhymes and Gamble’s invocations of ‘men and women’ both assert the value of ordinary Irish voices. But these can be difficult to pin down, braided as they often are with forms of silence that include narrative pauses, lyrical hesitations and unfinished speculations. It may even be that the rhetoric of silence and reticence affords Irish romanticism at least part of its distinctive cultural shape: not only the silence of harps or bowers, but that of people and places. When the Donegal schoolmaster Hugh Dorian described the customs and ceremony surrounding the opening of letters from America, including the reading aloud by the local ‘scholar’, he notes that ‘In every family letter there is always something which strangers have no right to know.’45 The Cambridge academic John Lee noted not only secrecy of Irish but also their pertinacious efforts to extract information from travellers themselves. The question of secrecy moves into the mode of mystery in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Irish Sketchbook (1842), where the fictional narrator arrives at ‘a dilapidated hotel and posting-house’ near Leighlinbridge in County Carlow and, finding himself surrounded by noisy children and preying beggars, asks ‘How do all these people live?’: ‘One can’t help wondering; – these multifarious vagabonds, without work or workhouse, or means of subsistence?’ Citing the Poor Law report, Thackeray notes ‘that there are twelve hundred thousand people in Ireland, a sixth of the population, who have no means of livelihood but charity, and whom the state, or individual members of it, must maintain.’ Repeating his wonderment at how the state can ‘support such an enormous burthen’, Thackeray also tries to peer into everyday lives of the wandering poor: ‘What a strange history it would be, could one but get it true, – that of the manner in which a score of these beggars have maintained themselves for a fortnight past!’ Such questions generate some remarkable rhetoric, starting with Malthus’ ‘astonishment and curiosity’ and continuing through Thackeray’s pronouncement that ‘It is awful to think that there are eight millions of stories to be told in this island’.46 Keats’ observation about a sick and elderly woman seen as he passed through Belfast, discussed in Chapter 2 – ‘What a thing would be a history of her Life and sensations?’ – adopts the same tone of dazed dismay.
Others tried to tell at least some of the stories. Sydney Owenson’s Patriotic Sketches (1807) returns us to the silent suffering of a crowded West of Ireland place, as she vividly after the manner of Burke, evokes a scene of ‘alienation’, ‘where prerogative rests on one side, and submission on the other’.47 Owenson went to Connaught on the advice of Joseph Cooper Walker, who suggested the value of visiting a ‘primitive’ part of Ireland while ‘Your name is … up’, following the publication of The Wild Irish Girl (1806).48 Her account of the densely populated landscape of Sligo around 1807 imagines a silent peasantry in aggregate, even as her own individualised, lyric response to poverty takes on a Yeatsian solemnity: ‘I have seen the feet of the heavily-laden mother totter through winter snows beneath her tender burthen’, she wrote, ‘I have met them wandering over those heaths, which afforded no shelter to their aching brows, amidst the meridian ardours of a summer’s day; … I have met them at the door of magisterial power, and seen them spurned from its threshold … I have seen them cheerfully received into the cabin of an equally humble, but more fortunate compatriot, where their wants were a recommendation to benevolence, and their number no check to its exertion.’49
If Patriotic Sketches tries on an anaphoric rhetoric in a lyric voice whose power is achieved in the name of the people, Owenson’s novels from The Wild Irish Girl onwards occupy themselves with the deep past of that same population, their books, traditions, customs, clothing and plants. The narrative preoccupation with the material of Irish life belongs to a post-Enlightenment nationalising moment embodied in such forms as antiquarian histories, travels and collections of ballads and vernacular poetry. Also present at its birth of Irish romanticism is a vibrant popular classicism that played its part, vividly evoked by Owenson in the figure of the poor scholar, a restive type who captured the attention of William Carleton in the 1840s, Padraic Colum in the 1950s and Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel in the 1980s.
While there have been challenges to accounts of British romantic literature as moving away from classical and neoclassical imitation towards what Raymond Williams calls the ‘extraordinary flowering of the creative idea’,50 it remains vital for Irish literary history to take into account the persistence of a lively popular culture of classical learning well into the nineteenth century. Recent research on what Tarlach Ó Raifeartaigh terms ‘the legend of the Latin-speaking peasants’ lends some credence to earlier accounts of popular classical learning in eighteenth-century culture.51 In her study of The Irish Classical Self, Laurie O’Higgins finds sufficient evidence of popular classical knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘to constitute a pattern, to make a mark, and create a memory in the wider culture’.52 Irish romantic writing often locates scenes of classical learning as part of the unfolding drama of education. Owenson’s Patriotic Sketches supplies a lively and detailed account of the figure of the scholar, scribe and hedge schoolmaster Thaddeus Connellan, whose Sligo ‘lyceum’ is filled with young people reading Virgil. He explains to Owenson, ‘with the utmost gravity’, his plan to translate ‘the Eneid, and some of Terence’s plays, into Irish. “The latter (he continued) I will teach to my scholars, who may play it yet upon one of the great London stages to admiration”.53 And if Owenson sounds a mocking note, her own first foray into print, her Poems of 1801, contains a number of pieces that are clearly written in imitation and interrogation of classical models. ‘The Hawthorne Tree’, for example, praises native Irish flora over both classical and British plants, while the poem makes a familiar address to Apollo as ‘Dan Pol’.54 When she died, Lady Morgan left the ‘Greek and Latin classics from her library’ to her grandnephew, to ‘assist in his education’.55
Within Irish folklore, the poor scholar who travels the country in search of education, often in the classics, is a representative of longing, loss and hope. A complex figure located between oral and literate traditions, his migrant mobility becomes a source of unease in much early nineteenth-century commentary. Richard Lovell Edgeworth associated the Greek and Roman histories themselves with ‘restlessness and adventure’. In a letter to the Committee of the Board of Education, he cautions against ‘abridgments of these histories’, arguing that ‘they inculcate democracy, and a foolish hankering after undefined liberty: this is peculiarly dangerous in Ireland’.56 Such histories surely fell into the hands of a number of the writers discussed in the book, including Jeremiah Joseph Callanan, Thomas Dermody, John Banim and Gerald Griffin. But women’s names were not entirely forgotten among this male world of popular education: in 1825, an anonymous and impoverished tutor from County Limerick dedicated a manuscript volume listing teachers through the ages to ‘the talents and virtues of Lady Morgan, as grateful tribute for the pleasure enjoyed in the perusal of several of her volumes wherein the subject of Education has been introduced’. Listed among the ‘degraded tribe’ are educators ranging from Abelard and Immanuel Kant to Theophilus O’Flanagan – listed here as O’Flaherty – whose son, Matthew, advertised ‘A key to the classics’ in The Nation on 14 June 1843.57
Irish Romantic Phases
Modestly phrased as it is, there remains much value in Norman Vance’s suggestion that ‘“Romantic” probably describes the full range of writing in early nineteenth-century Ireland better than “national” or “nationalist”’.58 But any effort to conceptualise Irish romanticism in drily discursive terms sits uneasily with the lively literary culture described in these pages. Where Marilyn Butler once warned against the Anglo-American invention of ‘romanticism’ as the offspring of aridly formal scholarship, in Ireland we have to guard against overweening political or philosophical explanations that seek to contain the culture in the mode of summary. A critical tendency (especially among historians) to reduce the writings of Edgeworth and Owenson to the politics of the marriage plot presents one version of the problem.59 Moore too can be trapped within the outlines of his reputation as ‘fashionable song bird, fluttering from one socially rarefied early nineteenth-century Whig salon to the next, warbling nostalgic songs and sentimental hymns to Ireland’s lost glory’.60 In my account, the category of romanticism recognises literary texture and acknowledges cultural change, whether encountered as philosophical histories, domestic novels, sharp satires, rough-hewn fictions, uneasy journalistic responses or smoothly achieved lyrics.
More generally, the term ‘romanticism’ now tends towards geographical diversity, cultural particularity and historical specificity, calling up a period of writing in which ‘canonical order[s]’, in James Chandler’s description, ‘feel splintered, multiple, and localized’.61 Following Marilyn Butler’s formative work, literary scholarship on romanticism has uncovered the political realities that not only underlie but also overdetermine imaginary ideals of aesthetic unity. There is also a growing awareness of what happens when Anglophone literary modes encounter other contexts: much of the work previously gathered under the rubric of ‘late Romanticism’ might be better thought of in terms of the new models demanded by imperial and colonial cases. That broadening of geographical frame has showcased the significance of Thomas Moore for the ‘Brown Romantics’, including Henry De Rozio’s work in Kolkata, as shown by Manu Chander.62 Anna Johnston and Porscha Fermanis, meanwhile, consider the case of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, a published poet who left Ireland for Wollombi, New South Wales with her police magistrate husband in 1838, and whose work engaged with Indigenous knowledge, languages and welfare.63
My study embraces the current political, generic and geographical capaciousness of the term ‘romanticism’ but stays true to the unifying power of a concept that enables debate and discussion across periods and places. In what follows, I proceed in the spirit of Chandler’s observation that ‘Romantic and Romanticism share a grammar with a family of terms – say, classicist, renaissance, enlightenment, gothic, modern, even early modern – that together have been useful in the past and, going forward, will continue to work better as an ensemble than they do apart, especially in comparatist contexts’.64 To this ‘useful’ collection of literary concepts we can add some terms that mesh aesthetic with political forms of judgement. Irish Romanticism tracks and keeps pace with the emergence of concepts – and sometimes even the coinage of terms – that have been retroactively applied to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and which continue to do active cultural work – among them ‘romantic’, ‘ascendancy’, ‘national’, ‘wild’ and ‘racy of the soil’. It is impossible fully to disentangle the books themselves from these terms, and it may be more important to note the provenance of such language: Irish romanticism realises forms of knowledge that are already embedded within and belong to the literary and oral cultures that they represent. Sydney Owenson is the most striking case of a writer who seems to invent the terms by which she will be read. In her prose we find original or very early usages of a remarkable range of terms, including ‘national tale’, ‘wild Irish’, ‘wild Atlantic’ and even ‘romanticism’ itself, as I discuss in Chapter 2. Edgeworth too concerns herself with philology as method while Moore’s Melodies contain a repository of phrases and sounds with lasting influence.
Romanticism describes a cultural formation made up of multiple phases that played out over several decades, in part made from the materials of Ireland’s relationship with Britain and its empire, in part made by writers themselves as they appraised one another, their achievements and failures. Most of all, it took shape within particular works of verse and prose. In its effort to produce a detailed account of the contoured surface across which political meanings were made, Irish Romanticism addresses itself primarily to literature rather than performance or the visual arts. David O’Shaugnessy has noted that, after the optimism of the 1780s, Irish dramatists found it more difficult to make their way on the London stage.65 There were London successes – notably plays by James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862) and Richard Lalor Sheil (1791–1851) as well as the singular case of Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram (1816) – and significant performances in locations including Belfast, Cork, Kilkenny and Dublin, while further research will undoubtedly reveal a fuller story.66 The play that John Banim wrote about the Viking invasion of Ireland, for instance, may well be the same Irish historical drama that Byron mocked mercilessly in a letter to Moore, during the latter’s Drury Lane days. James Sheridan Knowles was drawn to the same theme, and all are likely to have based their plays on the depiction of Brian Boru (Brian Boroimhe) found in Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirea.67
A Strange Country?
Irish Romanticism depicts an Irish culture and history that is inescapably bound with other places, people and ideas, shaped by relationships that operate along a variety of different scales. To calibrate such relationships and measure Irish romanticism on its own terms is a key aim of this book. In Seamus Deane’s 1984 formulation, romanticism remains fundamentally exterior to Irish cultural life, a combined problem in aesthetics and politics: ‘to cast a romantic hue upon the matter represented is, in effect, to misrepresent it by lending it an aura or attraction not essentially its own’.68 Just a few years later, Tom Dunne mapped out the contours of an ‘Irish Romantic literature’ but suggested that there was no Irish romanticism ‘as such’; rather, he argued, Ireland saw a ‘confused and introverted’ period of cultural production where creative energies failed to break through the hard carapace of colonialism.
In Dunne’s account, the colonial dimension is inescapable: romanticism is one phase in an Irish culture that was ‘haunted by history’. It is certainly true that Irish literature is marked by violence and attuned to power, as witnessed in the prominence of plots of dispossession or in repeated references to early modern commentators including Edmund Spenser. Even the flowering of original English language fiction and poetry might be seen simply as testament to the success of the programme of anglicisation that began in the early seventeenth century. But Irish literature from the end of the eighteenth through to the middle of the nineteenth century is also intensely occupied with its own moment, whether that be a world of ballad singers, fishermen, naval service, cholera, the credit crisis or hunger and disease. Those ordinary experiences never shed their colonial markings, one aspect of which is involvement in an imperial worldview. Works by Irish writers also travelled with the empire, as evident from an exploration of the Irish titles found in Porscha Fermanis’ digital archive of book catalogues from the colonial southern hemisphere.69
Some of Dunne’s diagnosis hangs on the material facts of book production. Irish books were, at least at first, ‘published mainly in London’ and ‘written primarily for an English audience’ while a revival of Dublin publishing and a rise in English language literacy began to see changes in these patterns from around 1830. Throughout, though, ‘the English focus, like the English language and English literary genres remained predominant’.70 But Dunne’s account ignores the extent to which Irish romanticism gets out ahead of literary history in inaugurating new forms, notably the national tale. Much of the Irish fiction of the early 1800s is, as R. F. Foster puts it, ‘sui generis’, characterised by a politics with an undeniably ‘experimental’ cast.71 And the Englishness of Irish romanticism involved possibilities as well predicaments: questions of copying, derivativeness and ‘secondariness’ work their way into the texture of Irish literature as theme and metaphor, as I discuss later.72 Finally, the rhetoric of Dunne’s argument is itself worthy of close reading: to say that there was no Irish romanticism ‘as such’ is to fashion a verbal net that catches both a substantial body of writing and a slender set of claims to conceptual coherence. In Irish Romanticism, I immerse readers within a large literary archive and while also pulling those slim threads of connection in order to fashion a cohesive argument, a tension that is further explored in my Afterword via the relationship between rags and a whole coat.
In the period since Dunne’s intervention, many books and essays have revived individual Irish romantic writers and revalued genres, notably the national tale, opening up a pathway to a new understanding of romanticism in the present. Yet Julia Wright’s pointed description of the ‘barely sketched Irish romanticism of a handful of partly known authors’ remains accurate while Dunne’s vital call to scholars to attempt to grasp ‘the processes and traumas’ of Ireland’s ‘cultural revolution’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries goes unanswered.73 Irish Romanticism addresses the tumultuous experience of linguistic and cultural change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland, in order to chart the contours of a literary culture on the move. It does so by mapping out three main chronological phases that give shape to a literary history whose layers unfold in the telling. All three phases in my stratigraphy overlap and interconnect. Sometimes this happens because individual authorial lives and reputations stretch across the generations. Major literary reputations – especially those of Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore – appear across the three phases discussed though they sometimes fall back in my account to allow for a fuller picture of a wider range of writers to emerge. But mostly it happens because, as Edmund Burke wrote of all generations in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), they cannot be absolutely demarcated from one another.
In Chapter 1, the first of the phases stretches from 1780 to 1815, tracking the period between the establishment of Grattan’s parliament to the end of the French Revolutionary, Napoleonic and Peninsular Wars. Considering the cases of four Irish writers who at first glance seem to come from different worlds, I show how connecting them to one another requires taking a step in the direction of a more fully conceptualised Irish romanticism. Thomas Dermody, Charlotte Brooke, Mary Tighe and James Orr have all benefited from recent research that helps to restore their textual as well as biographical reputations but their reputations remain isolated from one another. I do not neglect the constitutive careers of Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore in this first phase, but choose to approach them in their mediatised aspect, showing how bookish acts including copying connect their work to each other and the wider world.
Writerly networks, though sometimes quite faintly traced, emerge across my chapters. The very faintness of those connections extends, in Chapter 2, into a discussion of water in Irish romanticism, bearing in mind what Joshua Calhoun calls the ‘hydrophilic’ qualities of paper as a medium.74 The second phase, explored in Chapter 2, traces a period of growing self-confidence in Irish letters that might seem surprising in the context of the post-Waterloo recession but takes some of its charge from the strength and eventual success of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Between 1815 and 1830, Irish writers felt able to look more closely at the island on their own terms, a scrutiny that meant for many a new interest in coastal locations and the shaping force of the sea. This is the period for which the diagnosis of Ireland as a ‘strange country’ seems both most apt and most contentious: writers including Gerald Griffin, Charles Robert Maturin and Jeremiah Joseph Callanan acknowledged, sought to undo and sometimes to reimagine external images of Ireland as a place that only existed in the wash of empire. The formal consequences of these varied encounters with seas and coasts include a new psychological depth in all three writers, sometimes expressed in a Gothic language, but still requiring realist modes even where introspection is the dominant note. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the cultural renaissance of the 1830s, Irish romanticism begins to imagine local places via their position on a world map.
Chapter 3 charts the final phase of Irish romanticism, from 1830 to 1850, when those explorations return to something of the medial self-consciousness of the earlier, bookish histories. If paper is the medium of Chapter 1 and water of Chapter 2, the third phase offers an abundance of detail that promises to thin out the medium and create a more complete picture of Ireland in the aggregate. The very copiousness of the data is the result of state efforts to explain and understand Ireland, an enlightened political imperative that leaves a mark on literary representation, as a reach for a fuller reality becomes increasingly darkened by the detail. A new relationship takes shape, between a densely rendered colonial information infrastructure and an Irish realism that draws energy from O’Connellite mobilisation of the mass of the Irish people. This development in turn leads to an uncertain new sociology of literature that steps away from elite perspectives and is characterised by hesitations, questions and exclamations. A brief correspondence between Gerald Griffin and John Banim – begun in literary rivalry and continuing in friendly discussions of literary and political prospects – captures a note of hesitant hope, not least in the two men’s confiding tones and offers of mutual help. Griffin, who travelled through County Clare during the by-election of 1828 that saw O’Connell elected, told Banim in London of the ‘resolute’ nature of the people: ‘no drunkenness – no riot – patience and coolness beyond anything that could have been looked for. They fill the streets more like a set of Pythagorean philosophers than a mob of Munstermen’. Banim wished that he himself had seen ‘the Clare heroes’ and confided that he was absorbed in a collection to be called ‘Songs for Irish Catholics’. Griffin meanwhile, ‘on the spot’, offered to renew Banim’s ‘acquaintance with forgotten scenes in your native country’.75
But the arrival of the Great Famine made it hard to sustain such shared cultural enterprises. Just when we arrive at romanticism as a recognisable episode in Irish culture, the methods by which Ireland is known make themselves visible. Their profusion is nowhere more evident than in the final famine-struck years. Within the final phase of Irish romanticism, literary abstractions of lived experience – tracking catastrophe and taking their bearings from absence and loss – appear in newspapers, journals and travel writings. The powerful writings of James Clarence Mangan, for instance, were only once gathered in book form in his own lifetime when a collection of his German translations, financed by Charles Gavan Duffy, was published in 1845. It remained for the exiled Young Irelander John Mitchel to publish Poems by James Clarence Mangan in New York in 1859, along with a brief but influential account of the ‘life, poetry and death’ of ‘this new old poet’.76 Irish Romanticism reflects on such gaps even as it extends into a serious and integrated consideration of the writing of the 1830s and 1840s, a period too often cast into critical darkness under the shadow of the Famine. As well as Mangan, work by Edgeworth and William Carleton is considered while Thomas Carlyle’s views are also discussed. Darkness is often the dominant note, sounded even in the relatively benign period of the 1830s, when a literary revival of sorts was underway under the very shadow of what the Gaelic scholar and Ordnance Survey employee John O’Donovan called, in 1837, ‘the era of infidelity’.77
O’Donovan’s professional investments in the retrieval and storage of both memory and history can be thought of as a stage in the creation of a ‘folkoristic-ethnological’ understanding of Ireland: a locally grounded effort ‘to renew national cultural identity’ that began with elite antiquarianism and continued into the revivalist efforts of the late nineteenth century.78 One major source of difficulty is the question of Ireland’s status as strange, a culture scarred by colonial perspectives and afflicted by assumed difference.79 In so far as Anglophone culture began with conquest and the need to subdue as well as explain a population, Ireland’s standing as a ‘strange country’ remains a dominant force in conceptualisations of Irish romanticism. Neither emerging Enlightenment values of accurate observation nor the aesthetic recalibration of wildness in romanticism ever quite undid a persistent tendency to associate Ireland with forms of cultural inferiority. From the outset, though, strangeness has a stylistic as well as a political dimension, often realised in the form of the footnote, with its distinct visual appearance and equivocal claims to truth. Meanwhile the idea of a culture constituted by ideas of estrangement is central to no less a text than Lyrical Ballads, at least in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s account of his and Wordsworth’s shared enterprise. Reviewing that collection in the pages of his Biographia Literaria (1817) – a book that borrows an Irish bull from Edgeworth and devotes a chapter to Maturin’s play Bertram – Coleridge explained that while he wrote of supernatural things as if they were ordinary, Wordsworth looked at everyday life and estranged it with a certain ‘colouring of the imagination’.80 In a different register altogether, the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky claimed the quality of estrangement or defamiliarization (ostranie) for literature itself, asking readers to break with habit and to cease seeing meaning only in silhouette or ‘as though it were enveloped in a sack’.81
For the Afterword to the book, I turn to clothing – the heavy sack-like object that is the Irish frieze coat – in order to make a case for a culture that reckons with strangeness but on its own terms. I identify a singular and resonant set of images surrounding the coarse woollen cloth worn by the native Irish and taken up and reimagined across a remarkable series of romantic descriptions. Shklovsky can support this effort too by way of his analysis of Gogol’s The Overcoat (1842), the tale of an impoverished clerk named Akaky Akakievich who is driven by the bitter St Petersburg weather to ask a tailor to mend his old coat. Assured that the item is quite beyond repair, Akakievich reluctantly assents to having a ‘marvellous’ new coat made and takes nervous steps into the complex world of ‘overcoat finance’. Once made, the new overcoat proves ‘marvellous’ indeed: almost like a lover or a spouse, it promises a lifetime of comfort but also begins to distract Akakievich from his work and take him into new and unfamiliar places. Finally, the ‘fantastic difference’ between old and new coats leads to a violent assault, the theft of the overcoat, an encounter with bullying officialdom in the shape of an ‘Important Person’, followed by illness and death. The novella’s self-declared ‘totally unexpected, fantastic ending’ involves tales of a ghostly clerk who seeks out a stolen overcoat before manifesting as Akaky Akakievich himself and taking the coat of the very same Important Person who had once traumatised him.
Gogol’s The Overcoat, with its ‘fairy-tale-like, folklore-prophetic resolution’ is read by Shklovsky as a tale whose ‘Gothic’ architecture materialises its meanings: a thinly rendered narrative framework that is all arches and no walls. Those Gothic arches can also be thought of as strained ‘power lines’ along which events in the story play out. If Gogol’s Overcoat ‘transmits Petersburg and its suburbs through the thin power lines carrying the mumblings of an impoverished clerk who has been crushed by the weight of the empire’ then so too do Irish romantic coats communicate a ragged relationship between ordinary Irish lives and the imperial British state.82 Their special power to do so comes from their being at once commonplace and remarkable, possessed of an ordinariness made strange by colonialism.
The narrative arches of Irish Romanticism are found in a series of conceptual pairings in the realms of historiography, language use, literary media, representation, gender and environment. First of these is a relationship between past and present. The book captures the process by which a moving cultural present sifts through the centuries that preceded it. Despite Irish romanticism’s reputation for history-drenched details, we find relatively few fictions of the remote past. Those that were undertaken were often unsuccessful or unremembered. Relatively recent decades, though, come into startlingly sharp focus, as when the 1798 rebellion makes its presence felt in The Wild Irish Girl in 1806, or Grattan’s Parliament of 1782 gives shape to Edgeworth’s imagination of Irish history in Castle Rackrent (1800). In the final phase, there is a growing effort to realise a distant past (perhaps previously thought to have been too tainted by colonial history), seen in Griffin’s historical novel of the Viking invasion. As the case of William Carleton would suggest, however, cultural energy remains absorbed in a living present that is scarred by the recent past.
Second, comes Irish to English, as the book reflects upon the process by which one language community collapsed under the pressure of colonial rule. During the decades described in this book, the poorest of the poor became English speaking and literate, as the Irish language itself gradually lost ground. Numbers of Irish speakers remained very high into the 1820s and 30s, though those reflect overall booming population numbers rather than real growth.83 But the ‘large-scale language shift’ from Irish to English also resulted in many moments of ‘transitional bilingualism’, as discussed in Margaret Kelleher’s account of ‘language crossings’ in nineteenth-century Ireland. Her discussion of a line taken from Lady Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827) – the question ‘Have you Irish?’ – offers an insight into that changing linguistic environment.84 The work of translation remains vital from the 1780s right through to the period of James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson and beyond.
Animated by concerns about the fading away of the practice of Irish manuscript production, the early years of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of ‘the great push towards gathering in the manuscript refugees of Gaelic culture and civilisation’, led by the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College Dublin.85 A third pairing concerns the relationship between manuscript and print. If, by ‘the early 1820s, the last traditional poet/scribes such as the Ó Longáins and Tadhg Gaelach had just laid down the quill’, it remains the case that print culture bears the marks of a manuscript culture with which it is intimately familiar and from which it freely borrows.86 And if history itself might be thought of as ‘fundamentally a literature of mediation’,87 then Irish romanticism across its phases proves to be especially alert to the potential of page space in the remaking of the deep past. A fourth paired relationship, that between originals and copies, proves a source of creative inspiration for many writers. A particular concern with copies and copying can be discerned in Irish romanticism, from the difficulties experienced by Maria Edgeworth in obtaining copies of London-published books to the artful use of metaphors drawn from print culture (including facsimile, copy, type, cliché) in the writings of the Banim brothers.88 Working from his desk in the Admiralty, his home in Fulham and holidays in Cork, the folklorist Thomas Crofton Croker pioneered the use of lithography, a method of relief printing from stone that was particularly useful for circular letters, topography, lines of musical notation and book illustration. In 1807, the Quarter Master General’s Office in Whitehall bought the secret of the process and some materials: its first production was a map of Bantry Bay, published on 7 May 1808. Croker used lithographic illustrations of Irish life in his books while his papers in the British Library contain some fragmentary material that resemble experiments in chromolithography, including new graphic versions of St Patrick and Celtic crosses.
While such practical work in the art and techniques of copying continued, Irish literature has to wait for James Joyce’s ‘Counterparts’ for Farrington, a clerk character akin to Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich or Melville’s Bartleby. But Susan Howe is sure – powered ‘by shock of poetry telepathy’ – that a figure from Irish literary history lies behind the American scrivener.89 In ‘Melville’s Marginalia’, part of The Nonconformists’ Memorial (1989), Howe finds in James Clarence Mangan a kind of impossible original of the more American fictional copyist, traced via imaginative linkages sparked by Mitchel’s US edition of Mangan’s poetry. Howe, whose mother was the Irish modernist writer Mary Manning (1905-1999), recalls hearing Mangan’s translation of ‘Roisin Dubh’ sung, during a childhood visit to Dublin. With its interest in Mangan’s job as copier and transcriber for Ordnance Survey, its curiosity about Dublin journals of the nineteenth century, and its recollection of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Address to the Irish People (1812), we can think of Howe’s book as an alternative, transatlantic, archive of Irish romanticism, made with the materials of memory, history and marginalia.
Susan Howe captures something else too: the survival of men’s names over those of women. From about 1820, the senior Protestant women who ushered in a new phase of Irish literature around 1800 were eclipsed by a coming generation of Catholic men. The figure of Thomas Moore plays a key part in this transition, and his case helps me sketch in a fifth paired set of terms, the shift of cultural authority from women to men. In 1828, a letter in the Freeman’s Journal from ‘Patricius’ disputed the claim made in a recent Athenaeum article on the appearance of ‘the Wizard of the North’, denying not his talent but his originality: ‘For that species of fictitious narrative called “the national novel” we stand indebted conjointly to the talents and patriotism of two Irish women!’90 A debate that we know from the 1990s about Owenson and Edgeworth’s influence on Scott gathered momentum early, and, despite the brave case made by ‘Patricius’, women were on the losing side. Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, with Moore, survived right through all three phases, and their lives and writings continue to give shape and definition to our understandings of Irish romanticism. All lived long enough to see the introduction of new and more favourable copyright arrangements and to shepherd new and revised editions of their works onto the market. Yet Edgeworth refused to authorise a collected edition in the 1840s, citing the difficulty of adding ‘national explanations’ to her work, and surely feeling the effects of changing times.91 In Chapter 3, I unfold this story in a reading of her last novel, Helen, showing how writers including Walter Scott and Germaine de Staël play a central role in her efforts to remake her role as woman writer.
Because change does not only belong only to political history, my sixth and final set of paired terms concerns ties between people and their environment. Irish Romanticism suggests just how much an environmentally minded approach to nineteenth-century Irish narratives might achieve, whether Maria Edgeworth’s close interest in the realities of a subsistence economy built around turf, the interest in layered anthropogenic change found in Mangan, or the weather and climate archive offered by the fictions of Carleton. Even before the Great Famine, hunger and extreme weather characterized the experience of many in the 1830s, a decade which culminated in an exceptional weather event, the ‘Night of the Big Wind’ of 5 January 1839, when, along with many other disasters at sea and on land, sixteen houses in Edgeworthstown lost their rooves.92 Improvement itself, in spite of its beginnings in dispossession, can be read for the environmental information recorded as bogs were surveyed, harbours built and lines of road laid down. When the Dublin Zoological Gardens opened in 1831, Maria Edgeworth praised their role in offering ‘innocent and rational recreation for the inhabitants of a populous city’ but asked for further education and efforts towards ‘the great scientific use’ of the collection for the advancement of ‘comparative anatomy’. She was writing to the Surgeon General Philip Crampton, first president of the Dublin Zoological Society and the man who obtained the land in Phoenix Park on which Dublin Zoo was founded, and the two shared interests in the new science of life.93 Edgeworth was already strongly interested in the work of French geologist, George Cuvier, whose theories of extinction were eclipsed by Darwinist thought in the twentieth century but have become newly relevant in our Anthropocene moment.
Continuities matter too. In contrast to a critical tendency to imagine Irish romanticism as ending in the 1820s, with its creative energies hampered by improvement and broken by violence, I have sought where possible to hint at the longer history of Irish romantic books and voices, while also understanding the resilience of the discourse of improvement right through to its deadly effects during the Famine. The influence of Banim and Griffin, for instance, was felt by a young William Ewart Gladstone, who began work on his ‘Irish Tale’ in January 1827 and later that same month attended a debate at Eton regarding the ‘conduct of England to Ireland from Revolution to 1776 justifiable? Voted, no’.94 Gladstone’s youthful views testify to the extent to which the 1820s constituted a tipping point for the discourse of improvement. In Ireland, this dissatisfaction with improvement merged with the theorisation of the romantic across Europe and led to a determination, only partly successful, to forge new forms of Irish cultural identity from native materials. It remained for the writers of the late nineteenth-century Irish Literary Revival to take up this project, and they did so in part by returning to romantic resources, even as an older Gladstone pressed ahead with a plan for Home Rule.
Most readers probably know ‘Romantic Ireland’ best via Yeats’ lament for its passing: ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave’.95 Rather than read Ireland as the very emblem of a prototypical romantic predicament, this book argues for the coherence of Irish romantic culture as a set of overlapping responses to a shifting set of circumstances, experienced by an array of writers who sought to give expression to Irish people, landscapes and histories. I have sought to read that culture from the inside and to capture the vibrant nature of the debates about literature and politics, while showing how recursive patterns of representation, adaptation and remediation made a distinctive and continuing mark. Setting the more familiar images of the romantic ruin to one side in favour of frieze fabric and its latent meanings, I end the book by arguing for an Irish romanticism that scripts its own terms and knows its own strength.
