Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13

Ireland and Romanticism

10.1057/9780230297623 - Ireland and Romanticism, Edited by Jim Kelly

Also by Jim Kelly


CHARLES MATURIN: Authorship, Authenticity, and the Nation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011)


Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production Edited by

Jim Kelly



Ireland and Romanticism

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jim Kelly 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27457–0

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Introduction Jim Kelly

1

Scenes: The Country and the City

11

1 Cín Lae Amhlaoibh: Modernization and the Irish Language Proinsias Ó Drisceoil

13

2 Jemmy O’Brien: Informer to Gothic Monster Timothy Webb

26

Influences from Abroad

43

3 Spanish Literature and Irish Romanticism, 1800–50 Anne MacCarthy 4 Robert Burns and Hibernia: Irish Romanticism and Caledonia’s Bard Stephen Dornan The Irish Writer Abroad

45

59 75

5 ‘Transatlantic Tom’: Thomas Moore in North America Jane Moore 6 A United Irishman in the Alps: William MacNevin’s A Ramble Through Swisserland (1803) Patrick Vincent 7 Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) and the Politics of Romanticism Susan Egenolf Irish Poetry in the Romantic Period 8 Drawing Breath: The Origins of Moore’s Irish Melodies Adrian Paterson 9 Malvina’s Daughters: Irish Women Poets and the Sign of the Bard Leith Davis v


77

94

109 123 125

141


Contents

Fictions of the Romantic Period

161

10 The Irish Book Trade in the Romantic Period Charles Benson

163

11 ‘Gothic’ and ‘National’? Challenging the Formal Distinctions of Irish Romantic Fiction Christina Morin

172

12 Escaping from Barrett’s Moon: Recreating the Irish Literary Landscape in the Romantic Period Jim Shanahan

188

Afterword

205

13 Placing ‘Irish’ and ‘Romanticism’ in the Same Frame: Prospects Stephen Behrendt

207

Index

221



vi Contents

My first debt of gratitude is to the contributors to this volume, many of whom contributed encouragement as well as essays. Thanks must also go to my colleagues at NUI Maynooth, particularly Prof. Margaret Kelleher, Prof. Chris Morash, Dr Moynagh Sullivan, and Dr Stephen O’Neill, all of whom provided vital advice in the preparation of this collection. I’d also like to thank Catherine Mitchell and Christabel Scaife at Palgrave Macmillan for their assistance and patience.

vii



Acknowledgements

Stephen Behrendt is George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He has published widely on Romanticperiod literature. His publications include Shelley and His Audiences (1989), Reading William Blake (1992), Royal Mourning and Regency Culture (1997), and British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (2008). He is also general editor of the Alexander Street Press electronic textbase archive, Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period (2008). Charles Benson is Keeper of Early Printed Books at the Old Library, Trinity College Dublin. He has published extensively on Irish book history and is co-editor of That Woman! Studies in Irish Bibliography: A Festschrift for Mary ‘Paul’ Pollard (2005). He is currently undertaking research on the Dublin book trade, 1801–50. Leith Davis is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She has published extensively on Irish and Scottish literature in the Romantic period. Books include Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (1998), Music, Postcolonialism, Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724–1874 (2005), and Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (edited with Ian Duncan and Janet Sorensen, 2004). Stephen Dornan is Research Fellow at the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He has published a range of articles on Scottish and Ulster poetry in the Romantic period. Susan Egenolf is Lecturer in English at Texas A&M University. She has published a wide range of articles on Irish women’s writing in the Romantic period, as well as The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (2009). Jim Kelly specialises in Romantic period literature in Ireland and Scotland. He has published articles on Irish and Scottish interactions in the period, and contributed entries on Irish Romantic writing to the forthcoming Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Romanticism. Charles Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity, and the Nation will appear in 2011. Anne MacCarthy is Lecturer in English at the University of Santiago de Compostella, Spain. She has published James Clarence Mangan, viii




Edward Walsh and Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature in English (2000) and Identities in Irish Literature (2004) as well as articles in journals such as The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, New Hibernian Review, ANQ and Notes and Queries, on Mangan, Irish history, Irene Rathbone and translations of Spanish romances. Jane Moore is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University. She is the author of Mary Wollstonecraft (1999). She has published widely on Thomas Moore, most notably The Satires of Thomas Moore (2003). She is co-editor of The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (2nd edn, 1997). Christina Morin is a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast. She has published articles on Charles Maturin and Irish Gothic fiction and entries for the online Literary Encyclopædia (http://www.litencyc. com). Proinsias Ó Drisceoil received his Ph.D. from NUI, Galway. He has published extensively on Irish-language literature, including (as editor) Culture in Ireland – Regions: Identity and Power (1993), Ar Scaradh Gabhail: An Fhéiniúlacht in Cin Lae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúilleabháin (2000), Seán Ó Dálaigh: Éigse agus Iomarbhá (2007), and (joint author) Foclóir Litríochta agus Critice (2007). Adrian Paterson is a post-doctoral fellow at NUI Galway. He has published a selection of articles on Irish literature and music in journals and edited collections. He is currently writing Words for Music Perhaps: W. B. Yeats and Musical Sense. Jim Shanahan is IRCHSS post-doctoral fellow in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He has published a range of articles on Irish fiction in the nineteenth century and is currently engaged in researching representations of 1798 in fiction, from 1798 to 1898. Patrick Vincent is Director of the English Department at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where he holds a chair in English and American literature. His main areas of research are in British, Continental and American Romantic literature, and his publications include: The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics and Gender, 1820–1840 (2004), a co-edited collection on American poetry (2006) and a range of articles on a number of Romantic-period writers including Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Rousseau, Thoreau and Cooper. He is currently finishing a book in French on British representations of the Swiss, writing another monograph on British Romanticism



Notes on Contributors ix

x


Timothy Webb is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English, University of Bristol. He has published extensively on British Romantic-period writing, including The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (1976), English Romantic Hellenism, 1700–1824 (1982), and Percy Shelley, Poems and Prose (1995), along with numerous articles and contributions to books. He is currently working on a biography of Leigh Hunt, and on various articles on archipelagic Romanticism.



and Switzerland and leading a Swiss National Research Fund project to edit three revolutionary-period travel narratives.

Introduction

I The study of Irish literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has grown exponentially in recent times, with a level of interest in the productions of writers at the margins of or outside the canon of ‘English’ literature receiving arguably more attention now than at any point in the previous two centuries. Much of the recent work on Ireland in the Romantic period is contemporaneous with a wider broadening of the canon of Romantic writing in English away from the ‘Big Six’ (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron). In particular, the role of Irish writers in developing the twin genres of the national tale and historical novel has refocused the importance of fiction in Irish literary production in this period. Thomas Flanagan published his still useful The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850 in 1959, although it was arguably the development of the study of ‘Romantic fiction’, embodied by an academic study like Gary Kelly’s English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London & New York: Longman, 1989) that gave due notice to the rich panoply of genres within the period. While authors like Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, and Charles Maturin had always been acknowledged as important writers (often to the neglect of their predecessors and contemporaries), academic study of Romantic period fiction gave a due sense of their location within a literary field until then usually confined to the ‘visionary company’ of the major Romantic poets.1 Alongside this, studies of the United Irishmen and antiquarian culture in the eighteenth century have demonstrated the rich hinterland of literary and historical work that Irish writing in the Romantic period would build on and develop.2

1



Jim Kelly

Introduction

As James Chandler notes, remembering that 1798 sees the publication of Lyrical Ballads and the United Irishmen rebellion asks us to radically reassess accepted interpretations of British Romanticism and Irish political history.3 A major spur to increased research into the Irish Romantic period has undoubtedly been the development of Irish Studies as a distinct disciplinary field, and the recovery work of projects such as the Field Day anthologies of Irish writing.4 Predating Field Day’s anthology, Tom Dunne’s 1988 essay on Irish romantic writing provided a forceful argument for Ireland as a perfect illustration of ‘the richly confused and often contradictory phenomenon’5 that was Romanticism and gave an important synoptic theorization of the field to go alongside earlier surveys like Patrick Rafroidi’s work from the 1970s.6 Recently the development of comparative studies of Irish and Scottish literature has also brought new focus on the relationship of Ireland to the Romantic period.7 The recent Cambridge History of Irish Literature devotes a chapter to ‘Irish Romanticism’, giving a sense that the term at least now has some sort of academically accepted capital.8 Developments in electronic publication have also allowed new audiences to access the works of Irish writers.9 Looking back on the twentieth century, Sean Ryder could argue in a survey of critical work on Irish literature in the nineteenth century that ‘the bulk of nineteenth-century Irish writing remained unexamined by critics, or was judged merely as historical background to the twentieth century’.10 Given the richness of Irish writing in the twentieth century this is an understandable failing, and the readiness with which W. B. Yeats co-opted the term Romantic and its cognates for his own poetic project has perhaps led to the difficulties that scholars encounter in addressing the possible connection between Ireland, Irishness, and Romanticism. For this reason this volume is entitled ‘Ireland and Romanticism’. Why not Irish Romanticism or, perhaps more traditionally, Romantic Ireland? The latter term has certainly a more illustrious history, reverberating as it does with Yeatsian echoes. Positing Ireland and Romanticism, however, allows some space for a questioning attitude to what should be thought of as propositional categories rather than fixed entities – the ‘and’ as much a separator as a conjunction. For Thomas Davis, the leading intellectual force behind the Young Ireland nationalist movement of the 1840s, the early nineteenth century had seen a decisive flowering of Irish culture that was structurally and thematically different from ‘the lower form of nationhood … before



2

Jim Kelly 3

Far healthier with all its defects, was the idea of those who saw in Scotland a perfect model – who longed for a literary and artistic nationality – who prized the oratory of Grattan and Curran, the novels of Griffin and Carleton, the pictures of Maclise and Burton, the ancient music, as much as any, and far more than most of the political nationalists, but who regarded political independence as a dangerous dream. Unknowingly they fostered it. Their writings, their patronage, their talk was of Ireland; yet it hardly occurred to them that the ideal would flow into the practical, or that they, with their dread of agitation, were forwarding a revolution.12 Davis’s sense of a shift in cultural models is important for analysing Ireland and Romanticism, although his attention to cultural nationalism exclusively risks occluding other political traditions (and Irish-language productions) in the period. His link between ‘the ideal’ and ‘the practical’, however, gets to the heart of how Irish Romantic period writings have been viewed. If the ‘grand illusion’ of Romantic poetry, as Jerome McGann famously contended, was that ‘poetry … can set one free of the ruins of history and culture’,13 then we need to acknowledge that Irish writing in the Romantic period more often than not had the political as both the origin and the terminus of the work of art. There was no distancing between affect and agency – rather, imaginative writing was deeply embroiled in political debate, and the category of the aesthetic was one that was always going to have a historical horizon of influence and determination. Even the account of as minor a historical character as the informer Jemmy O’Brien, as Tim Webb argues in his chapter, can demonstrate the imbrication of representative strategies taken from Gothic fiction with the socio-historical reality of the post-Union cityscape. It is perhaps no surprise then that the growing interest in Irish writing in the Romantic period was broadly contemporaneous with the development of new historicism in academic criticism since the 1980s. The new historicist rereading of the Romantic canon and the growth in Irish Studies did not have much of a dialogue, and that is unfortunate, as both movements were deeply concerned with similar issues. Irish writers in the Romantic period were preoccupied by the relationship between aesthetic affect and political agency, and whether there was some connection between a private cultural experience and practical



the minds of those who saw in it nothing but a parliament in College Green’11:

4

Introduction

‘Do you think that poring over an old Irish manuscript, or wandering over these wild shores, listening to an old harp with hardly a string to it will put a potatoe [sic] in your mouth, or give one stone to repair those ruins you live in, or bring you back your land to you again?’14 The novel suggests though, that such activities, if not leading to restitution, at least lead to violence, with Connal’s anachronistic citation of selected lines of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808) positing some link between celebrations of primeval Irish sentiment and modern atavistic violence. That subsequent criticism of Moore focused on his alleged commodification and emasculation of the Irish musical heritage perhaps speaks more to a blinkered view of the past than the actual qualities of his poetry itself. ‘To live in Ireland and to write for it’, wrote Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) in the preface to her novel The O’Briens & the O’Flahertys (1827), ‘is to live and write poignard sur la gorge.’15 Ireland, as many of the writers mentioned in the volume would have agreed, is to be written ‘for’, rather than ‘of’. If current Romantic-period studies are perplexed by how to go beyond some of the limitations of the new historical model and rethink the connection between affect and agency, or the private pleasure of the text and its public role, then looking again at the situation of Irish writers in the Romantic period is of vital importance to thinking through such questions. Indeed, as ‘Romanticism’ as an academic category finds itself increasingly co-opted on either side by the ‘long’ eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is perhaps in Ireland that we can re-evaluate the transitional nature of the period, and justify categorizing it as a separate conceptual category. The Act of Union may have provided a conventional turning point to neatly differentiate the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but as contributions by Christina Morin and Leith Davis in this collection demonstrate, there was a greater fluidity to literary developments than Young Ireland’s nationalist separation suggested. While Irish writers in this period may have been concerned with ideas of Irish nationality and antiquity, this did not preclude a cosmopolitan awareness of wider cultural networks and experiences. It might be surprising to realize the extent to which Irish writers and intellectuals



action in the public sphere. In Charles Maturin’s The Milesian Chief (1812), Randall O’Morven, the father of the young Romantic rebel Connal O’Morven, expresses scepticism about the political efficacy of Irish cultural nationalism:

were relentlessly comparative in their approach to literature and, as many chapters in this collection demonstrate, investigated different national cultures in order to better understand their own. Irish literature could be claimed as global in the Romantic period, traversing national borders in imaginative acts of sympathy with other cultures. The relentlessly colonial mindset that was fostered by the Union led writers to other nations that seemed to have a discrepancy between a rich cultural past and a degraded present (see MacCarthy and Vincent on Spain and Switzerland). At the same time as national cultures were being reinvigorated (or some might say invented) across Europe, an interest in the common structures and systems of differing national traditions fascinated intellectuals across the continent.16 It would be a grave error, then, to see studies on Irish literature and culture in the Romantic period as being hopelessly provincial and irrelevant to larger debates. As Prionsias O’Drisceoil’s chapter demonstrates, one can find an international scope in as ‘provincial’ a source as a hedge-school master’s Irish-language diary. Here the local and the cosmopolitan are closely intertwined, breaking down simple boundaries between a ‘here’ and ‘there’. While Thomas Davis may have seen the cultural activity of the early nineteenth century as creating a space for nationalist political activity, many of the writers in the Romantic period were themselves aware of a more problematic relationship between the written word and political action. In Lady Morgan’s Florence Macarthy (1818) the heroine, a writer of national tales, admits: ‘I do trade upon the materials [Ireland] furnishes me; and turning my patriotism into pounds, shillings, and pence, endeavour, at the same moment, to serve her, and support myself.’17 The relationship between imaginative literature and political agency was complicated by Irish writers’ acknowledgement of the commercial demands of the literary marketplace on their work. The crisis in Irish publishing brought about by the extension of copyright under the Act of Union led Irish writers to be acutely aware of the position of their work within a wider network of publishers and distributors in London, Edinburgh, and occasionally further afield. A distinctive facet of many productions of Irish Romanticism is demonstrated by Lady Morgan repeatedly in her novels: a self-reflexive awareness of the combination of imaginative effort and financial gain that were involved in the creative process. The politician and man of letters, Sir Jonah Barrington (1760–1834), began a survey of Irish literature after the Union by noting that the recent past had seen ‘the ascendancy of commerce over rank’.18 This was a familiar theme to many Irish writers in the period,



Jim Kelly 5

Introduction

with the occupation of the former Houses of Parliament on Dublin’s College Green by the Bank of Ireland a powerful symbol of the degradation of the Irish nation in the post-Union period. However, much as Yeats would argue that the political stagnation that followed the fall of Parnell gave rise to the cultural flowering of the revival period, the Act of Union and the material changes it wrought on Irish society contributed to an incredibly diverse and rich body of literature, which both built on eighteenth-century foundations and provided important directions for Irish culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A teleological view of Irish history in this period might emphasize the development of nationalist politics and a growing public Catholicism, but hopefully this collection will demonstrate that the plurality of voices in the period justifies speaking of ‘nations’ and ‘publics’ rather than a monolithic national identity and public sphere.

II Now – she leant out of her window – all was light, order, and serenity. There was a faint rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the night watchman – ‘Just twelve o’clock on a frosty morning’. No sooner had the words left his lips than the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St. Paul’s. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed … With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.19 Virginia Woolf’s wittily subversive parody of periodization in her novel Orlando (1928) should make us wary of proposing neat divides between historico-cultural periods (although that same midnight bell tolled in the Act of Union on 1 January 1801). The study of British Romanticism has become a fraught exercise, caught between differing literary theories and above all a wider existential crisis in the Anglo-American and European humanities. Romanticism itself remains an impossible category, which evades simple definition by its very plurality. This collection does not aim to provide a definitive account of Irish writing in the Romantic period – the material covered spans the decades from the 1780s to the 1840s, and comes from diverse political, linguistic, and religious sections of the population. Rather, it attempts to provide a snapshot



6

of current research, which while covering diverse topics, shares the common feature of opening up Irish cultural production to wider literary, theoretical, and geographical contexts. Timothy Webb and Prionsias O’Drisceoil open the collection with two chapters that show the complexity of rural and urban life in our period by focusing on two very different figures: the Irish-language diarist Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin and the notorious Dublin informer, Jemmy O’Brien. As scholars increasingly look at ‘popular culture’ in the Romantic period, both Webb and O’Drisceoil show the imaginative basis of representative strategies employed in two dissimilar contexts, and show how looking at marginal figures and discourses in this period provides an enriching backdrop for studies of ‘major’ writers. O’Drisceoil’s chapter shows how modernization and Irish-language culture were not mutually exclusive, and how a provincial setting does not preclude an awareness of international events. The image of Gaelic Ireland slowly ebbing away is complicated by looking at a marginal figure to canonical literature like Ó Súilleabháin, whose diary shows someone who was influenced by some of the main currents of thought in the period yet adapted them to his own habitus. Timothy Webb’s chapter similarly holds up a relatively marginal historical figure, the notorious informer Jemmy O’Brien, and shows how any analysis of Irish society and culture in this period needs to move away from an idea of a stable, univocal ‘public sphere’ and realize the volatile nature of urban life, with public space being something that was contested among various different, polyvocal groups. The intense and bitter accounts of O’Brien’s career show that the boundary between the affective language of Gothic and political calculation was porous in Irish society. The next chapters in the book show the strong international dimension of Irish Romanticism, with contributions by Anne MacCarthy and Stephen Dornan revealing how influences from abroad added to Irish self-definition, and Jane Moore, Patrick Vincent, and Susan Egenolf demonstrating how Irish writers used their experiences of foreign travel to reflect not only on their host nation’s culture, but also on the situation of Ireland. All five chapters share a common purpose in showing how Irish Romantic writing was often at its most ‘national’ when ‘international’, and vice versa. Anne MacCarthy’s chapter provides a wide survey of Irish writers who referenced Spain in their work, and used the Spanish experience to both bolster Irish moves towards self-definition and provide models for perhaps the two quintessential facets of all Romantic literatures: a body of traditional ballads (the romanceros) and a commanding example



Jim Kelly 7

Introduction

of ‘Romantic’ genius, Pedro de Calderón. Stephen Dornan’s chapter demonstrates how Irish writers found an example of both components closer to home in the work of Robert Burns, who provided an inspiration and model to Irish writers, north and south, for much of the nineteenth century. Literary influence was not unidirectional, however. Ireland may have provided a fascinating terra incognita to foreign travellers,20 but Irish travellers also both contributed and gained insight from their journeys abroad. Jane Moore’s chapter argues for the important place of North America in Thomas Moore’s development as a poet, and also the important place of Thomas Moore in the development of a Canadian poetic voice. Patrick Vincent’s chapter on William MacNevin’s account of his travels in Switzerland shows how Irish writers actively sought parallels between political developments at home with wider international contexts, thus challenging any view of Irish literature as narrowly provincial. Susan Egenolf’s chapter on Lady Morgan completes the section by showing how her travel-writing and fiction combined to create a forcefully political version of Romanticism. The international context of Irish writing continues into the section on Irish poetry. Adrian Paterson argues that Thomas Moore can be read as strikingly original, rather than sentimental and derivative, when placed within wider European debates about music and originality, and Leith Davis demonstrates how the figure of Malvina, the warrior-poetess of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry, provided a powerful image of feminine creativity and agency to a number of Irish women poets. Both chapters demonstrate how modern readings of marginal figures can expand our understanding of Romantic-period poetry in general. The final section on Irish fiction in the Romantic period takes perhaps the most studied aspect of Irish literature in this period and argues for a new approach that revises our notions of the material conditions of Irish publishing (Benson), the generic categories we use (Morin), and the manner in which a ‘canon’ of Irish novelists disfigures the actual wealth of literary production in the period (Shanahan). All three chapters contribute to revealing the rich diversity of literary production in Ireland in the Romantic period. It is perhaps fitting that a collection that asks us to re-view the past of Ireland and Romanticism finishes with a Romanticist’s view of the future. Stephen Behrendt’s afterword asks where the study of Romantic-period writing in Ireland goes from here, and provides some suggestions about how our digital age can combine with traditional archival research to revitalize not only our view of Irish literature, but of



8

Romanticism itself. His chapter argues that rather than seeking to construct a defined, separate, ‘Irish Romanticism’ we should recognize the variable, polyvocal, and heterogeneous nature of ‘Romanticism’ itself, and allow that to open up the study of Irish literature in this period to new influences and directions. Yeats may have proclaimed the death of ‘Romantic Ireland’, and Irish Romantic writing may itself have been obsessed with defeat, death, and the contrast between a rich antiquity and barren modernity, but the chapters in this collection attest to the fact that the relationship between Ireland and Romanticism remained and remains vitally productive. Rather than provide a complete account of Irish Romanticism, hopefully they will initiate more research into this diverse and rewarding body of work.

Notes 1. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961; rev. edn, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). 2. See, for instance, Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish & fíor gael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (1986; 2nd edn, Cork: Cork University Press, 1996); Helen Maria Thuente, The Harp Restrung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994); and Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004). 3. See James Chandler, ‘A Discipline in Shifting Perspective: Why We Need Irish Studies’, Field Day Review, 2 (2006), pp. 19–40. 4. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day, 1991) with The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, eds Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Geraldine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills, 2 vols (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 5. Tom Dunne, ‘Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing, 1800–1850’, in Romanticism in National Context, eds Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 68. It is noticeable that Dunne’s essay is the only one in the book that eschews the noun ‘Romanticism’ in its title in favour of the less weighted adjective. 6. Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 2 vols (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980). Originally published as L’Irlande et le Romantisme (Lille: PUL, 1972). 7. See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic, eds David Duff and Catherine Jones (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).



Jim Kelly 9

Introduction

8. Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800–1830’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, pp. 407–48. 9. See Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen Behrendt (Alexandria, VA: Alexandria Street Press, 2008), Accessed 27/10/10, http:// asp6new.alexanderstreet.com/iwrp/; The Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive (Nui Galway, forthcoming). 10. Sean Ryder, ‘Literature in English’, in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, eds Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher (Dublin: UCD Press, 2005), p. 121. 11. Thomas Davis, ‘Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ (1844), repr. in Literary and Historical Essays ((Dublin: J Duffy, 1846), p. 221. 12. Ibid., pp. 221–2. 13. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) p. 91. 14. Charles Maturin, The Milesian Chief, 4 vols (London: H Colburn, 1812), I, p. 66. 15. Lady Morgan, ‘Preface’, The O’Briens and The O’Flaherty’s: A National Tale (1827; London: Pandora Press, 1988), p. xv. 16. See Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 17. Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale, 3 vols (London, 1818), III, p. 265. 18. Sir Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches and Recollections of His Own Times (1827–34; Dublin: Blackhall Publishing, 1997), p. 251. 19. Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ed. Brenda Lyons (1928; London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 155–6. 20. See Glenn Hooper, Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860: Culture, History, Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).



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Scenes: The Country and the City




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Cín Lae Amhlaoibh: Modernization and the Irish Language Proinsias Ó Drisceoil

Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin (Humphrey O’Sullivan, c.1783–1838) owes his place in Irish-language literary history to the diary or cín lae (a word he coined) that he kept in Callan, County Kilkenny from 1827 to 1835. This is now preserved as Royal Irish Academy manuscripts 23 A 48, 23 L 23, and 23 H 26.1 A schoolmaster, storyteller, and amateur antiquarian, Ó Súilleabháin was also a local O’Connellite leader and activist, collecting the O’Connellite rent and, in 1828, making at least one speech in Irish at a Catholic Emancipation monster meeting. In that year he led the Catholic side in a vicious struggle against Protestant control of the charitable Callan dispensary.2 Ó Súilleabháin’s diary is both a highly unusual document generically within the corpus of Irish-language writing of the time, and gives a fascinating insight into how the process of modernization in Ireland was both celebrated and resisted by native speakers. Ó Súilleabháin was a fierce partisan of the Irish language, yet simultaneously was imbricated in a process of modernization that arguably led to the overall language shift visible in nineteenth-century Ireland. Ó Súilleabháin’s standing as a type of Gramscian organic intellectual3 within the Kilkenny Catholic middle class provides a fascinating insight into the various social, political, cultural, and sectarian struggles that informed the development of a politicized Catholic populace in the early nineteenth century.4 It is unrivalled in Irish as a source of information on the mentalité of the aspirant Catholic middle class, as well as being a primary source for the cultural influences of the period and the access to cultural ideas that were available in provincial Ireland in the 1820s and 1830s. Allying a fierce concern for the betterment of the native Irish Catholic class with a discernibly Romantic aesthetic response to local landscapes, the 13



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cín lae is a richly rewarding text whose hybridity highlights the extent to which Irish language culture in the period cannot be characterized simply as, at best, a mournful retreat of the incorrigibly pre-modern, or, at worst, non-existent. The cín lae derives from at least three specific geographical contexts and their accompanying political and cultural associations. Ó Súilleabháin’s Kerry background, specifically Loch Léin, Killarney, is the first of these, as it was from there that Ó Súilleabháin derived his literacy in Irish, scribal ability, and a knowledge of the Irish language literary tradition. He was only six years of age when he left Kerry in 1789, never to return. Throughout his later life he perceived himself as wrenched from an idealized edenic youth, and a sense of exile pervades his work. The second context is that of Kilkenny, specifically the intense social competition between the ambitions of a rising local Catholic middle class and the established local Protestant elite during the O’Connellite period in the town and district of Callan. The Callan Protestants, forming roughly 3 percent of the population in 1831,5 were mainly Anglican and were numerically weak and in decline. Thus, while strong in power and influence, they were vulnerable to challenge – and the rising Catholic middle class of the town was intent on offering such a challenge. Organized under the O’Connellite banner and headquartered at the parochial house, the local Catholic political faction was determined to compete economically, socially, and in cultural ideas with the class they sought to dislodge. Culturally this competition would partly take the form of emulation of the cultural mores of the dominant Anglicans. In terms of religious practice it would take the form of internalizing and adapting some of the practices that characterized the lowchurch evangelical Anglicanism with which the Catholic Church found itself in competition, particularly as evangelical missionaries of various shades challenged it for popular allegiance.6 Catholic–Protestant rivalry was to boil over in the Callan dispensary controversy of 1828. This was a contest between Abraham Cronyn – Cróinín Buí of the diaries – and Ó Súilleabháin’s friend and walking companion, Patrick Keating, ‘an t-ollamh-leá Céitinn’. This contest over the local control of public health and the many legal and other controversies that followed were reported in detail by the Tory Protestant Kilkenny Moderator in particular, but also by its Catholic rival the Kilkenny Journal. These newspaper accounts show Ó Súilleabháin as the chief organizer on the Catholic side and offer a perspective entirely at odds with the sympathetic selfimage of the diaries.



14 Cín Lae Amhlaoibh

The third, less localized, context is that of Ó Súilleabháin’s travels, particularly to Dublin, and his intense interest in ideas, publications, newspapers, current events, and intellectual trends that filtered European and British intellectual ideas into Ireland, meaning that the ideas expressed in the diary had a startling contemporaneity. While the diary is primarily concerned with giving meteorological data regarding the Callan region, there is a constant reference to European and global events. Thus his writings and political ideas exist in a dialectical play with their expression in a diary that takes its language and notation from the medievally derived tradition of Irish language manuscript production. All three contexts come together when we ask ourselves why he kept a diary in the first place, as this was a form of writing for which no real precedent existed in Irish. Ireland did have a strong tradition of diary-keeping but it was largely Protestant, part of a wider tradition of autobiography.7 The diary tradition was much obsessed with notions of spiritual growth and self-scrutiny: The journals or diaries that have survived from the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century were written almost exclusively by Protestants who were either landed gentry, clergymen, soldiers or visitors. … There is a strong tradition in Protestant denominations of keeping diaries as exercises of self-examination.8 This form of self-examination had been widespread in England since the seventeenth century, particularly among Quakers and other Puritans: [The] modern type of confessional diary emerged as a literary genre among English Puritans around 1600; these were journals intended to examine oneself for proofs of genuine election by God.9 For Seamus Deane, biographical writing in Ireland gives central place to an obsessive sense of the ‘other’, that is, ‘the person or persons, events or places that have helped to give the self definition’. For Deane the individual autobiographical subject is given definition by hostile exterior forces. As a result the autobiographer is seeking, through personal experience, self-examination, reconsideration of historical events and circumstances, to identify the other force, the hostile or liberating energy which made the self come into consciousness.10



Proinsias Ó Drisceoil 15

For Ó Súilleabháin the ‘other’ is the ‘Sasanaigh’ – the Anglicans of Callan (and Ireland generally), particularly those concerned with the operation of the law. It is against them and through competition with them that he comes to self-definition. So it is that Ó Súilleabháin is in competition with the class above him but, crucially, seeks to adapt to his own class and background characteristic aspects of Anglican culture in relation to the visual arts, romantic attitudes, science and botany, the systematic observation of nature – and the diary as a literary form. The scribal and literary legacy bestowed by his father gives these adaptations a unique twist. As a modernizing shopkeeper and O’Connellite ‘warden of charity’, in an area where Irish was becoming a subaltern language, one would have assumed that Ó Súilleabháin would have kept his diary in English, the language of modernization. O’Connell’s political nationalism was marked by a strong utilitarian attitude to the Irish language that saw it as a hindrance to Catholic advancement and, crucially, a bar to participation and engagement with an international public sphere.11 Ó Súilleabháin began the diary in English, but his paternal literary and cultural inheritance soon took over. This was a matter not only of language but also one of style and resonance: resonances from Irish literary forms such as storytelling and the caoineadh can be felt throughout the text. For Ó Súilleabháin, the condition of being a ‘Gael’ was one of expulsion, if not from Paradise, then certainly from the status of nobility: Bhí cailin cumhra ag suathadh mona: bhí [a] troigh caol teann, [a] colpa chomh geal le sioda mona, … inghin sgoloige saidhbhre i, la da raibh sé, acht tháineadh toir an tsaoghail an ‘aghaidh, briseadh e: rug an tighearna a bharr leis, rug an ministeir na ba agus na capaill leis, rug fear an sraith teampaill an bord, an pota ‘sa’ a’ súsa leis, agus do shadhadar uile le fan a tsaoghail e fein, a bhean ‘s a chlann cumhra beag og: seo na neithe cur cum bothain beag cois tsleibhe e, agus a inghin aluinn a’ suathadh mona.12 Deane refers to the ‘benign vision of the other place and time’ as ‘a necessary counterbalance to the recognition of the malign “other”’.13 Kevin Whelan regards this self-image among those who regard themselves as being of Gaelic descent as a willingness ‘to acknowledge the self-image of the displaced landowners’. This, he says, was ‘crucial, generating a residual respect’.14 Thus while autobiography might not conform to the objective historical facts, it did enjoy its own logic, a logic entirely




dependent on the sense of self defined by ‘other’. Thus the diary seeks to justify and legitimate Ó Súilleabháin’s own cultural formation in definition against the ‘Sasanach’, the Anglican, throwing up in the process, to quote Deane again, ‘those ultimately disturbing queries about the issue of identity, national or personal’.15 Ó Súilleabháin’s predicament recalls Adorno’s statement that ‘for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live’.16 Ó Súilleabháin read a great deal of contemporary printed material but never sought, as far as can be ascertained, to have anything he wrote published in printed form. Publication of the Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society did not begin until 1849, 11 years after his death. Given Ó Súilleabháin’s interest in antiquarianism and the fact that Patrick Keating was a regular contributor to its Transactions, it is reasonable to surmise that Ó Súilleabháin was likely to have contributed had he lived. No comparable Kilkenny outlet existed while he was alive. This lack of opportunity rather than an unshakeable allegiance to the manuscript form probably accounts for the absence of any printed work in his oeuvre. The surviving manuscripts contain poetry and many attempts at prose fiction,17 but Irish-language publishing in the early nineteenth century was still predominantly grounded in evangelical proselytizing, with most secular material still circulated by manuscript, creating a very different form of public sphere from one concentrated on print-media. The convergence of the public but handwritten form of the manuscript with the private and handwritten form of the diary yields up the ambiguous public/private tone of the Cín Lae. Private by virtue of being a diary, it nonetheless addresses the reader in the vocative – ‘a léitheoir’ – from time to time.18 The diary-form may have owed its emergence to the growth of a particular conception of middle-class privacy, but the idea of a private literary form sat uneasily with the largely public and often political character of Gaelic literary tradition. While Ó Súilleabháin almost certainly rated his attempts at poetry and fiction more highly than the diary, the latter was a form in which his sense of self, his background, aspirations, and influences all coincided.19 As mentioned previously, his private diary incorporates an international perspective that was an important source of self-definition. Openness to the wider world and, specifically, a knowledge of international events were important class markers, a signal that one was of the respectable ‘daoine dearshula’ and far removed from the proletarian ‘cóip na sráide’ (mob of the street). Thus Ó Súilleabháin, in 1827, refers to the ability to speak of international events as a form of cultural capital: ‘bhadar a




lan de daoinibh dearshula an baile ann, idir fear agus bean, ag cainnt go modhamhail ar seanchus agus nuadhacht, ar na Turcaigh agus na Gréagaigh’.20 For Ó Súilleabháin, Irish was a language that could incorporate an intensely local and familiar heritage with a wider knowledge of geopolitical developments. His knowledge of these events derived from his reading of the many newspapers to which he refers: the Clonmel Herald, Kilkenny Independent, Kilkenny Journal, Dublin Evening Mail, Dublin Mercantile Advertiser, Bell’s Life in London, Egan’s Life in London, and Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle. International events were covered in all of these and they allowed him access to a degree of attitudes, opinions, knowledge, and information comparable to that of his Anglican competitors.21 The Dublin–Cork road passed through Callan and it had a regular coach service so that goods and, importantly, ideas could travel there with relative ease. Of course Gaelic literary communication was also facilitated by these networks, and a letter sent from Utica by the Irish-language poet and letter-writer, Pádraig Phiarais Cundún to Cáit Graidhin, Callan and dated 1823 asks her to give his best wishes to Ó Súilleabháin.22 Ó Súilleabháin’s diary therefore problematizes any notion of a ‘hidden’ Ireland existing in parallel to an official Anglophone public sphere. This knowledge of a wider world was an appropriate attainment in a society undergoing rapid modernization. The establishment of the national school system coincided with the end of Ó Súilleabháin’s career as a schoolmaster. The national schools, Catholic Emancipation, and the development of travel and of a more mechanized agriculture – all of them developments in which the diary display an interest – left the society that sustained the Irish language in retreat. In parallel with these developments, the Catholic Church had established itself as the hegemonic force within its own population, with the parochial house leadership acting as a kind of shadow government for Callan and offering an all-embracing hegemonic Catholic identity to its inhabitants. In subscribing to this hegemony Ó Súilleabháin was necessarily though perhaps unwittingly contributing to the demise of the subaltern society in which the Irish language was still spoken. Ó Súilleabháin enthusiastically embraced the growing hegemony of the Catholic hierarchy over all aspects of social life and was, for example, one of the group of prominent local Catholics called on to defended the parish priest when the curate accused him of ‘nidhte airighthe’ (certain things)23 in 1830. His membership of the local Catholic establishment




was implicitly acknowledged at the time of his death when the Kilkenny Journal of 24 November 1838 published his death notice, a practice then confined to persons of some perceived importance.24 He accepted and internalized the disciplining and modernization of Catholic society, a process well under way in Callan during the years covered by the diaries, long before the post-Famine dates ascribed by Emmett Larkin to the ‘Devotional Revolution’.25 Thus Ó Súilleabháin came to perceive traditional practices at wakes as errores vulgares. [Ni] leigeann an easbog aosóg na daoine gan posadh ar toram san oidhce anois, agus is maith do ghnidh se sin, oir ni bhiodh do chaitheamh aimsire aca ag toramh acht ag imirt boidhicmin odharta, diuistis .i. breitheamh na breige, Sur Suipin agus an banruighean ag an Greig, agus a samhail eile d’aisthighibh; agus ag innsinn sgeulta fianuigheachta, ag abhrán &c. tres an oidhce, agus dar ndoith bhi eolas ar suirighe aca muna rabhadar pósta.26 He also accepts the Church’s ban on attendance by the widowed and unmarried at the formerly merry wakes.27 Similarly he does not question the authority of a priest who feels entitled to break up a hurling match.28 All of this dovetailed with his modernizing commitment to an effective drainage and sewage system for the town, ironically as part of a scheme of public works devised by Edward Stanley, the Chief Secretary, to undermine O’Connellism.29 Ó Súilleabháin’s acceptance of the disciplining of society is similarly evidenced by remarks such as: ‘Bhí mile ógmhná agus oganaigh ag rinnce le ceol ar mullac “an Mhóin Ruadh” … Is aoibhin saoghal doibh muna déirc é a dheire.’30 In the same vein, he admired the disciplined character of church practices (‘Fuair urmhór an poraiste se faoisidin agus caoimaoine’),31 and he frequently mentions with approval new practices such as vigils32 and Corpus Christi.33 Ó Súilleabháin’s support for modern medicine under Catholic control in the local dispensary drew all these modernizing concerns together. With some irony, then, he can therefore be seen as an unconscious agent in the destruction of Irish-speaking society and of the language in which he wrote with such proficiency and devotion.34 In helping to undermine the ‘conception of the world’ of the cultura subalterne, Ó Súilleabháin was to some extent helping to undermine the language itself. While a passionate advocate of the Irish language, and a regretful witness to its gradual association with Protestant evangelical proselytism, Ó Súilleabháin’s contradictory position gives an eloquent example




of the situation faced by many native speakers in the early nineteenth century, caught between an impulse to modernize Irish social practices and a nostalgic concern about the degradation and loss of certain folk beliefs and rituals. Although he does not appear to have had sustained contact with any established Anglo-Irish intellectual, Ó Súilleabháin’s acquaintance with what might be called contemporary ‘polite’ culture was considerable. His interest in the culture and practices of educated Anglicans was that of an outsider seeking to appropriate and internalize that culture. He had, for instance, an acquaintance with the visual arts and could share this with other discerning members of the Catholic middle class, as when he visited the parish priest of Thomastown: ‘Connarc me a lan deilbhe a ndath ola ar canabhas agus a ndath uisge ar chairt a tig an t-Athair Mic Oda, sagart a poraiste.’35 He attended a military band recital in Dublin Castle, although he did not enjoy it, contrasting the harsh notes of the orchestra with the ‘ceol caoin binn croidh-coraighteach na ngaoidhal’,36 and regularly bought books during his business trips. He appears to have been well acquainted with the latest work published by the Royal Irish Academy: Faghaim amach i leabhar trachtas ar an teanga gaodhalach le Seamus Ó Sguireadh go bhfuil (1) Annalach Dun na nGall; (2) Annalach Uladh; (3)Annalach Inisfaithlin agus (4) Annalach Buil no Connacht clodhbhuailte le h-ordughadh an taoiseach Chandon no Buckingham agus athruighthe le Cathaoir Ó Conchubhair.37 It is probable that Ó Súilleabháin spoke English as his day-to-day language – after all, many of his acquaintances were unable to speak Irish. In line with his subscription to the values of polite culture, Ó Súilleabháin was happy to deride what passed for English among those abandoning Irish, internalizing in the process certain Ascendancy attitudes towards Hiberno-English: Vuisen fare var yea now?’ ‘I was sooin praties pon Ned a Grah’s ground’: Vuel Ime gooen to Caln to sell milk38 However, despite his general acceptance of the Church’s rulings on folk practices and his own interest in modernizing certain aspects of Irish rural life, he sought on occasion to prolong the practices of the traditional world by seeking to bestow on them a rational purpose in the present, in this case the practice of the man of the house killing a





Is gnathach fuil do dhortadh, oidhche Feil Martan … Is maith an seannos e, agus ba coir a coimhead suas, ann gach aon ait nach biaidh feol buabhaisteara le faghail, agus ba ceart do gach sgolog laidir, agus do gach duine uasal caora no mart no muc, do mharbhadh, agus a roint ar lucht bothan agus ar bochtaibh De.39 Church and state were combining to obliterate the conception of the world of the cultura subalterne: ‘ni feacadh teine cnaimh air fodhnamh oir ta an dlighe na coinne’.40 As with the regulation of the social world, the physical world is often observed with more of a scientific than Romantic observation. He frequently refers to geometry41 and mentions the need for a magnifying glass – ‘gloinne iomaduigheachta’ – to examine a spider.42 He brings his competency in geometry to bear on his descriptions of the wind and frequently produces detailed scientific drawings to illustrate wind direction.43 The diary includes much regularly observed meteorological data on Callan and the surrounding areas along with disquisitions on etymology and neologisms. Breandán Ó Madagáin has argued for Englishlanguage literature on nature, particularly the amateur naturalist writings of Gilbert White and the late eighteenth-century landscape poetry of Thomas Gray, as influences on the diaries but, in the absence of specific parallels, this argument remains speculative.44 There is a discernible change of mood from the meteorological observations when Ó Súilleabháin visits the Desart Court estate, for instance, as if he is assuming, even feigning, emotions appropriate to a gentleman in the demesne of the big house. Ó Súilleabháin’s walks around Callan were an important statement of the intellectual influences at work in his life. At points he idealizes the natural landscape, showing it in tune (literally) with a musical sensibility: Do chsiublamar45 tre coillte dubha giubhaise gnathglas, tre boithrinighe breagha, anois camm, aris direach sgaite o gnuis na greine, ag eisteacht le feaduigheal na fuiseoige sna moinfhearthaibh a leathtaoibh, le minfhead an loin, an ceirsigh, an smolaigh agus gach binn-ein eile, air comhguth le Margraoidin mín binn beoghlorach De Bhar46 While his relationship to landscape may have been partially influenced by proto-Romantic attitudes, Ó Súilleabháin’s attitude to music



sheep or pig on Martinmas Eve and sprinkling its blood on the house and outbuildings:


Chaitheas cuid mhaith bhinn de Barra. Bhí sí dhom. Ní miste a radh ó thárla na Sasanaigh ‘n

de thosach oíche i bhfochair Mharaeidín ag gabháil amhráin ar fhionn Ghaelacha go bhfuil an ceathramha gné ceoil againn ar measc; ‘gultraighe’.47

The established categories of music in Gaelic tradition, as Ó Súilleabháin rightly says, were ‘golltraighe’ (melancholy), ‘geantraighe’ (joyful), and ‘suantraighe’ (lulling) but these, for Ó Súilleabháin, had been replaced, under the malign influence of Anglicanism by ‘gultraighe’, the music of tears. While Ó Súilleabháin’s pun may be distinctly idiosyncratic, it offers an intriguing counterpoint to dominant views of Irish music in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Moore had famously moulded Irish airs into popular songs in his Irish Melodies (1808–34), which were predominately characterized by emotional gratification; Ó Súilleabháin, however, believed that the dominant forms of contemporary Gaelic musical expression were now determined by the need to articulate through music a sense of what he perceived to be the catastrophic consequences of Anglican and English misrule. While the theory itself may rest on shaky foundations, what it tells us about native speakers’ perceptions of musical culture deserves to be taken into account. For Ó Súilleabháin, the melancholy that had been associated with the culture of the Celtic fringe since James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry of the mid-eighteenth century was profoundly alien. Ó Súilleabháin was both cognizant of wider cultural moods and fashions in the Anglophone world, and considered the influence and interpenetration of Irish and English musical cultures. His worldview, an apposite term given his interest in international affairs, complicates any simplistic sentimentalized characterization of Irish language culture in this period. Ó Súilleabháin’s diary draws together the author’s Gaelic learning, his competition with the local Anglicanism, and the Romantic and enlightenment attitudes of a wider world in a way that makes Cín Lae Amhlaoibh one of the great texts of nineteenth-century Irish, a text that scholars have only begun to examine. It complicates and enriches notions of an early nineteenth-century language shift, demonstrating that Irish speakers were neither insular nor ignorant of wider cultural and political developments, and that a direct alignment between



contradicts what might be considered the dominant characteristic of Irish versions of Romanticism. The entry for Thursday, 20 December 1827 gives an idiosyncratic theory of Irish music:


linguistic allegiance and traditional culture is far more complex than might at first appear.

Some of the material in this chapter has previously appeared in my Ar Scaradh Gabhail: An Fhéiniúlacht in Cín Lae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúilleabháin (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 2000). 1. The diplomatic edition of the diaries of Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin was edited with an English translation by Michael McGrath as Cinnlae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúileabháin, 4 vols (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1936, 1937). These are numbered Irish Texts Society Series volumes 30–33. Diary entries are here referred to by reference to the relevant volume. A modernized selection has been published by Tomás De Bhaldraithe, Cín Lae Amhlaoibh (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1970). Quotations and translations are as transcribed by McGrath from the extant manuscripts. Subsequent page references are to the Irish language text. 2. For background to the early dispensary system, see Laurence M. Geary, Medicine and Charity in Ireland 1718–1851 (Dublin: UCD Press, 2004). 3. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds and trans Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, repr. 1998), pp. 5–23. 4. See Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, ‘Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin as Historical Witness: An Historiographical Perspective’, in Cinnlae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúilleabháin: Reassessments, ed. Liam P. Ó Murchú (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 2004), Irish Texts Society Subsidiary Series 14, pp. 1–24. 5. J. Kennedy, ‘Callan – A Corporate Town, 1700–1800’, in Kilkenny: History and Society, eds William Nolan and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Geographical Publications, 1990), p. 293. 6. Ó Súilleabháin often makes reference to evangelical proselytisers in the cín lae: for example, 14 May 1827 (I, p. 54). For an account of the work of evangelical missionaries among speakers of Irish in the South-east, see Proinsias Ó Drisceoil, Seán Ó Dálaigh: Éigse agus Iomarbhá (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007). 7. See Diaries of Ireland: An Anthology, 1590–1987, ed. Melosina LenoxConyngham (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1998). 8. Lenox-Conyngham, Diaries, p. vii. 9. Diarmuid MacCulloch, The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 390. 10. Seamus Deane, ‘Autobiography and Memoirs, 1890–1988’, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), III, p. 380. 11. See Tony Crowley, Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland, 1537– 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 101–3. 12. 12 July 1827, I, pp. 86–8. A pretty girl was ‘kneading’ peat: her foot was slender, well-set, her calf white as bog-cotton. … She was the daughter of a farmer once rich; but the struggle of life went against him. He became bankrupt; when the landlord took away his crops, the minister his cows



Notes

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

and horses; the church rate collector took off his table, his pot, his blankets; so that, between them they pushed him down-hill in life himself, his wife and his handsome young children. These are the circumstances that drove himself to a small hovel beside a mountain and set his beautiful daughter ‘kneading’ peat. Deane, ‘Autobiography and Memoirs, 1890–1988’, p. 381. Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 7. Deane, ‘Autobiography and Memoirs, 1890–1988’, p. 380. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), p. 87. See IV, pp. 170–297 and Tóruidheacht Chalmair Mhic Mhearchuradh, ed. Mágnus Ó Domhnaill (Dublin: Oifig an tSoláthair, 1939). For example, 9 October 1827, I, p. 142. For Ó Súilleabháin’s literary work, see Neil Buttimer, ‘Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin’s Writings’, in Cinnlae, ed. Ó Murchú, pp. 79–110. 6 September 1827, I, p. 108. ‘There were many respectable people of the town, men and women, there, speaking, in well-bred fashion of matters old and new, of the Turks and of the Greeks.’ An indication of the extent of access in County Kilkenny to London newspapers is given in Kilkenny Journal, 28 April 1830, p. 1 in a notice regarding newspapers available: ‘The Observer’ … ‘Bell’s Life of London’, ‘The Englishman’ ‘Three of the most widely circulated Weekly Newspapers, published in London at Seven-pence each. Sold by all Newspaper Agents in Town and County’. ‘Bell’s Life in London … published in London every Saturday afternoon and may be received at the distance of two hundred miles from London on Sunday.’ The letter is preserved in the O’Curry manuscript collection, Russell Library, National University of Ireland, Maynooth (M C93 (e), ff. 35–6). See also B. Ó Conchúir, Scríobhaithe Chorcaí, 1700–1850 (Dublin: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1982), p. 248. 23 October 1830, II, p. 350. The notice said ‘On Wednesday last, Mr. Humphrey O’Sullivan, of Callan in this county’. Kilkenny Journal, 24 November 1838, p. 3. Emmet Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (New York: Arno Press, 1976), pp. 57–90. 24 April 1831, III, p. 38. ‘[The] bishop does not now allow young people or the unmarried [to be] at wakes at night; and in this he does well; for their only ways of whiling away the time were Bodaichín Odhardha [“Khakiclad Boor”], “True Judge and False Judge”, “Sir Suipín” and the Queen in Greece, and other similar games, the recital of romantic tales, singing &c. throughout the night; and, needless to say, if they were not married, they knew how to make love.’ 24 April 1831, III, p. 38. 6 April 1828, I, pp. 244–6; Cín Lae Amhlaoibh is a valuable source for the history of sport in Co. Kilkenny, not least that of cricket, e.g. 28 May 1835, IV, p. 90.




29. P. Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843– 1850 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), p. 27. 30. 12 July 1827, I, p. 88. ‘There were a thousand maidens and youths dancing to music on top of the “Móin Roe” … They have a fine time of it, if its end not be beggary.’ Emphasis added. 31. 19 October 1829, II, p. 202. ‘The vast majority of this parish received confession and Communion.’ 32. 20 December 1833, III, p. 266. 33. 2 June 1831, III, p. 46. 34. For details of the language shift in Co. Kilkenny, see Máirín Nic Eoin, ‘Irish Language and Literature in County Kilkenny in the Nineteenth Century’, in Kilkenny, eds Nolan and Whelan, pp. 465–80. 35. 24 February 1828, I, p. 234. ‘I saw many pictures painted in oil on canvas, and in watercolour on strong paper, in the house of Father Cody, parish priest.’ 36. 11 September 1830, II, pp. 336, 338. ‘The tender, sweet, heart-moving Irish music.’ 37. 16 July 1827, I, p. 90. ‘I learn from a book that treats of the Irish language, by James Scurry, that the Annals of Donegal or the Annals of Tighearnach, the Annals of Ulster, the Annals of Innishfallen and the Annals of Boyle, or of Connaught have been printed by order of Duke of Chandos or the Duke of Buckingham, and translated by Charles O’Connor, D.D.’ 38. 11 May 1827, I, p. 51, n. 2. 39. 10 November 1830, II, pp. 356–8. ‘It is usual to shed blood, on Martinmas Eve. … It is a good old custom, which ought to be kept up, wherever no butcher’s meat is to be had. Every strong farmer, and every country gentleman ought to kill a sheep or a beef or a porker, and share it with the hovel dwellers of the neighbourhood, and with God’s poor.’ 40. 23 June 1834, IV, p. 40. ‘I saw no respectable bonfires, for the law is against them.’ 41. For example, 24 September 1827, I, p. 132; 5 November 1828, II, p. 48. 42. 4 September 1828, II, p. 6. 43. For example, 21 December 1828, II, p. 74. 44. Breandán Ó Madagáin, An Dialann Dúlra: Cín Lae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúilleabháin agus Scríbhinní Dúlra an Bhéarla (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1978). 45. recte shiúlamar. 46. 18 April 1827, I, p. 22. ‘Walked through dark evergreen pinewoods through fine laneways, now crooked, now straight, shaded from the face of the sun, listening to the fluting of the lark in the wayside meadows, to the delicate note of the blackbird, male and female, of the thrush, and of every other sweet voiced bird in unison with soft sweet, liquid-voiced Maggie Barr.’ 47. 20 December 1827, I, p. 180. ‘I spent a good part of the beginning of the night with sweet-voiced Maggie Barry. She was singing songs to Irish airs for me. We may well say that we have a fourth kind of music since the English happened [to come] among us, namely, “melancholy or lachrymal music”.’




Jemmy O’Brien: Informer to Gothic Monster Timothy Webb

I On 2 August 1800 William Godwin wrote to his business partner in London, James Marshall, from Dublin. Godwin had set off for Dublin early in July at the invitation of the celebrated barrister John Philpot Curran who put him up during his visit. While he was away from London, Godwin’s business and financial affairs were looked after by Marshall, who also acted as surrogate father to his stepdaughter Fanny Imlay and his daughter Mary. Godwin may have felt slightly guilty about the terms of this absence; eventually, he tried to compensate a little by sending Marshall long, chatty letters, at least parts of which were to be read or glossed to the children. One of these letters reports on encounters with Henry Grattan and Lady Mountcashel, who carried unmistakeable traces of Mary Wollstonecraft’s tutorial influence, and whose surprising and unconventional appearance is unsparingly captured. The letter then moves into a darker mode, hardly suitable for childish ears: Monday, July 14, was rendered memorable here by the execution of Jemmy O’Brien, a notorious informer, for murder. He had been accustomed, I am told, to sell warrants of imprisonment on suspicion of treasonable practices for two & sixpence apiece. Persons came out of the country thirty & forty miles barefoot to enjoy the spectacle of his exit. One explained, he was the death of my husband, & another, my two brothers were brought to the gallows by his instrumentality. An individual stationed himself on the highest pinnacle of the neighbourhood, that he might give a signal six streets round, that the whole populace, however remote, might join in one shout 26



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of deafening & unbounded rapture, the moment the scaffold sunk from under him. For the rapture however you will observe they were partly indebted to the apprehension which they retained to the last moment, that the government would interfere with a pardon in behalf of their tool. When the execution was completed, his body was for a few minutes in the hands of the populace, & they tore away fingers & toes with the utmost greediness, to preserve as precious relics of their antipathy & revenge.1 On the surface, the vividness of this account suggests that it is the report of an eyewitness, but closer scrutiny reveals that the case is not so simple and that Godwin is wrong (though suggestively) about the date. O’Brien was executed on 21 July not 14 July, which, as Godwin was well aware, was the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille and the beginning of the French Revolution. Godwin’s diary entry for 21 July does not even mention the execution. His animated account certainly indicates an informed interest but it does not prove that he was present. The passage seems to indicate either that Godwin himself was an eyewitness or, at the least, that, on this occasion he was prepared to register with some force the feelings of the oppressed towards the informer. Whatever Godwin’s own status, the execution itself and the subsequent intervention of the onlookers proved to be highly significant and controversial. Reactions to these events have much to reveal not only about Godwin’s attitudes but about the dynamics of the capital city at this crucial point in history when the Act of Union had been agreed by the Irish Parliament, in spite of principled opposition, but had not yet passed into law. Much was achieved throughout the 1790s by the secret operations of spies and informers, such as Edward Newell, Thomas Reynolds, Francis Higgins and Leonard MacNally, who reported to superiors and controllers of intelligence, such as Charles Henry Sirr and Edward Cooke. As Charles Teeling recorded, feelingly but with a kind of language and imagery that often feature in accounts of Irish history: These hired monsters and traffickers in human blood, lived under the countenance and protection of power, and assumed an authority and importance which was but too often and too fatally felt [….] Those reckless ruffians […] fabricated plots, feigned conspiracies, and in the hour of Ireland’s distress, perpetrated more misery than was ever inflicted by the sword. Families were made desolate, and



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Jemmy O’Brien

In this context, O’Brien’s trial and execution were particularly significant because they brought into view a system that was widely known to exist but whose potency and secret influence were rarely acknowledged in public. Jemmy O’Brien himself was freighted with symbolic significance since, among other things, he was an informer; one of those creatures of government widely reviled in Irish society. His grotesque fate served as a catalyst in a turbulent urban space, uncovering divisions within the law, the College of Surgeons, and even the political Establishment. This case alone showed that it still would have been a serious inaccuracy to invoke a single Irish nation, since the world he inhabited was multivalent and incorrigibly plural; its politics were determined not only by courts, decrees and Lords Lieutenant but by public demonstrations and the unmanageable and threateningly ‘subversive’ behaviour of crowds. Documentary evidence, lurid newspaper reports and a variety of imaginative treatments in poetry, ballad and song also reveal that, in his own unpleasant and offensive way, O’Brien had become a formidable presence in a divided and nervous city. His hulking figure was a palpable danger to the citizens of Dublin, dominating the daily existence of many of his fellow-countrymen while ending the lives of many others through testimony that was often false. Because of his threatening ubiquity, he was regularly portrayed as a Gothic villain, both by lawyers such as John Philpot Curran and by journalists and newspaper editors such as Watty Cox, who continued to satirize him for years after his death and who characterized his villainy by printing a crude but memorable image of the informer ‘with his WORKING TOOLS as a STATESMAN’. In real life, O’Brien seems to have been a monstrous figure, a villain unsoftened by any misgivings or regrets; such raw material was ripe for the exaggerations of caricature and the Manichean simplifications of Gothic. As late as 1858, Richard Robert Madden, the indefatigable historian of the United Irishmen, contrasted the supposed wickedness revealed by O’Brien’s death-mask with the purity of that of Robert Emmet, both made by James Petrie. Such manifestations suggest that the critic Siobhán Kilfeather is justified in detecting the ubiquity of a Gothic register at work in Irish writing in the early nineteenth century.3



whole districts laid waste, while the informer and the executioner walked hand in hand; and from the infamous testimony of the most depraved and abandoned of men, virtue and innocence found no appeal.2

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Although he does not feature in recent dictionaries of Irish biography or in most histories, Jemmy O’Brien had once been a figure of wide celebrity (or, more accurately, notoriety), particularly in the city of Dublin. For some years, he was a threatening figure, to be avoided if possible. Long after O’Brien’s death, Richard Madden recorded a chilling verdict: ‘The infamy of this man’s character is without a parallel in our history. In France his depravity may have been equalled, but it could hardly have been surpassed.’4 James O’Brien, whose birth date is difficult to establish, had been born in Oldmills, in the township of Stradbally, Queen’s County (now County Laois). The relevant baptismal records seem to have disappeared, though his name suggests that he was born into a Catholic family and, at the end of his career, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, which followed a strong ‘Protestant ascendancy’ interpretation of Irish politics, was affronted by the ‘silly falsehood’ that O’Brien was a ‘noted Orangeman’ and in rebuttal pointedly recorded that he was ‘a Roman Catholic and attended in his last moments by a Popish Priest’.5 Francis Plowden, who describes him as ‘a deserter from the army’, provides a more circumstantial account than the narrative proffered by Madden: ‘they had allotted [to him] as an appendage to their own office of inquisition a subaltern apartment in the Castle yard, where he and a permanent guard were on constant duty for every emergency. They had also procured him the appointment of deputy keeper of Bedford Tower in the Castle.’6 While the Secret Service accounts are sometimes frustratingly reticent about detail, they do indicate that O’Brien was paid for ‘taking care of the Tower’. Both the duty and the location were symbolically significant since the Bedford Tower (1761) was certainly one of the most prominent and recognizable architectural features of Dublin Castle. Just as Dublin Castle might have seemed to embody the occupying presence of British power in Dublin (and in Ireland as a whole), the elevated eye of the Bedford Tower gave expression not just to Georgian architectural invention but to a threateningly superior and all-seeing administrative gaze. Whatever his previous affiliations, and however much his career was motivated by selfish aspirations, O’Brien had now allied himself and his activities with the British in Ireland, who had established the centre of their rule in the historically charged setting of Dublin Castle. He was a source of information to his employers but, even if infiltration formed one of his methods, he was essentially unlike well-educated informers such as Francis O’Higgins, the ‘Sham Squire’ (more an ‘informant’ than an



II

Jemmy O’Brien

informer, says Thomas Bartlett).7 Not only did he lack education, financial means and social flexibility, but he did not trouble to conceal his affiliations. While O’Higgins operated in secrecy, O’Brien’s brutalities were there for all to see; his crude and physical activities and his bullying tactics soon made him widely feared and hated. Publicly, O’Brien embodied the informer.

III The first seeds of O’Brien’s ultimate downfall were sown very early in his career as informer. On 25 April 1797 (by his own account), O’Brien joined the United Irishmen and became secretary of the local branch. He also began to despatch regular reports on United Irish activities. O’Brien passed the word to Sirr that, on a specified day in May 1797, a meeting of the United Irishmen was planned for a public house kept by a widow in Meath Street. In consequence of this tip-off, a raid took place during which 17 people were arrested and subsequently charged with high treason, and quantities of books, papers and identifying green ribbands were seized. When the prosecution eventually came to court on 16 January 1798, O’Brien provided evidence for the Crown; but it was his own unreliability that undermined the case against Patrick Finney and the others who had been indicted. When the charge collapsed, the authorities decided not to proceed against the other United Irishmen who had been arrested with Finney. For whatever reason, Curran chose not so much to defend his client as to attack O’Brien. The defence barrister was particularly hostile to state informers, as he had demonstrated in the trial of the United Irish intellectual William Drennan.8 In the course of a few hours, he destroyed O’Brien’s claims to credibility, and attacked his moral character with such intensity and such rhetorical and metaphorical ferocity that O’Brien never substantially recovered. More than 200 years later, the words of Curran are still barbed with a frightening edge. Read outside the intense atmosphere of the courtroom and the context of such troubled times, Curran’s speech (or the best version that could be recorded at the time) may seem extravagant, even Gothic in some passages, but its force is undeniable. For instance, Curran explained to the jury the force of O’Brien’s threat by referring to ‘the dagger [that] was in preparation to be plunged into his [the victim’s] heart’.9 As this Gothic image suggests, Curran’s rhetorical strategies did not minimize O’Brien’s sanguinary traits and presented him as a concentration of evil attributes.



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Either directly, or by association, he was identified as blood-hound, serpent, daemon, arch-fiend, swindler, perjurer, murderer, assassin, vampire and cannibal; his demonic practices were directly opposed not only to the fundamental principles of Christianity but to the primary dictates of the human heart. Even the name ‘O’Brien’ was made to acquire a sinister resonance. In the course of his lengthy address to the jury, Curran never mentions Finney by name but employs the name ‘O’Brien’ 34 times. At one stage of his speech, ‘the abominable O’Brien’10 almost seems to designate a recognized and specific category of moral turpitude. Through the force of Curran’s legal oratory and his masterful handling of the cross-examination, and through the eloquence of the defence, Patrick Finney was understandably but incorrectly acquitted. O’Brien continued to work for Dublin Castle, although his ‘murderous career’ had been terminated and his credibility had been destroyed by the effectiveness of Curran’s verbal attack. Though he could no longer appear as a witness in court, he probably was of service to his masters through looting and burglary under specious pretexts and, together with his supporters, mocked the victims of floggings in the Castle Yard. O’Brien also seems to have been included in a search-party for Lord Edward Fitzgerald who was famously, and fatally, captured by Major Sirr in a raid of 19 May 1798.11 The records note that he received at least 128 payments during this time, although it is possible that there were further monies that are not recorded in this way.12 These payments suggest that O’Brien enjoyed some sort of seniority and that, as several reports indicate, he was in the habit of operating with groups of supporters. On a number of occasions, O’Brien was paid for ‘taking care of the Tower’, presumably the Bedford Tower, though the register offers no clue as to its identity nor as to what might have been involved in taking care of it. Sometimes he received payment for parties of men who were under his control, sometimes for the hire of a coach for prisoners. Beyond all this, he seems to have carried special responsibility for the feeding of prisoners, especially in the last 11 months of his employment. This is variously recorded as ‘subsistence’ or ‘diet’, and the register sometimes refers to ‘State prisoners’, sometimes simply to ‘prisoners’. Sometimes, too, these prisoners are at ‘the Castle’, but sometimes they are located specifically in ‘the Tower’. For most of 1799 he was a regular claimant and usually received two payments a week. Such payments may not cover the full range of O’Brien’s activities but they convey some idea of his working methods, his general usefulness to the Castle, and his closeness to Sirr and to government authorities. In May 1800 O’Brien was involved in what was to prove his last excursion for Sirr and the Castle. Precisely what happened is difficult to



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Jemmy O’Brien

reconstruct with complete accuracy, but it seems to have taken approximately the following form. News was received that a football match was taking place (reports differ on the exact location), and it was feared that such a gathering might involve seditious intent. Accordingly, Major Sirr accompanied by O’Brien and others (‘armed in costume’, says Plowden)13 set off to observe or to intervene. When he climbed over the wall, he was spotted by the crowd who cried out, ‘O’Brien the informer!’ an identification which, according to Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, illustrated that ‘ferocity of the Irish mob’. Provoked into action, defensive or otherwise, by what Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, No. 9913 (12 July 1800), p. 3. described as ‘warwhoops of assassination’, O’Brien pursued the fleeing crowd, stabbing to death, apparently without provocation (although he claimed otherwise) an elderly and infirm man called John Hoey. When the case eventually came to court, O’Brien was prosecuted by Curran and MacNally, who had encountered him in very different circumstances in the Finney trial. As Curran’s son expressed it in his biography of his father: ‘by a kind of retributive justice, the two counsels who had rescued Finney were appointed to conduct the prosecution’.14 On this occasion, it seems that O’Brien was largely abandoned by those who had supported him in the past. The jury found O’Brien guilty. As one ballad triumphantly expressed it: ‘The braggart he now is pulled down, / And all the great lawyers of the Crown / Could not save poor Jemmy O’Brien!’15 O’Brien was sentenced to death, and according to standard practice his corpse was designated for dissection after the sentence had been carried out. On 20 July Sirr wrote urgently from Dawson Street to Alexander Marsden in Baggot Street: ‘For Godsake is there any chance for unfortunate O’Brien who has rendered uncommon services.’16 He asked if there could be ‘a Respite for a few days till a further enquiry be made’. The letter continues in terms that are both vivid and personal: The rejoicings at his misfortune is [sic] beyond description & I believe tomorrow will be a General Holiday for all the Rebels – Bonfires were thro’ the Liberty last night in numbers – my name made the theme & Blasphemy in their rejoicings crying Bloody Sirr’s Blood next, for heavens sake get him a Respite for he is ordered by the judges to die early on account of the Commissions [sitting].17 Sirr’s letter provides a vivid insight into the political dynamics of the city at this time, the intensity with which O’Brien was hated, and the widespread recognition that O’Brien and Sirr were intimately and



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uncomfortably connected. One fact that seems to demonstrate the closeness of this connection is an entry in the secret service accounts for 21 March 1801, which records that Sirr had been paid £21.2.6: ‘Major Sirr, maintenance, etc., of James O’Brien in gaol.’18 Whatever the force of his arguments, and however closely he was implicated in person, Sirr’s appeal failed, as had his appearance in court; O’Brien himself also submitted a petition but that, too, was rejected. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, which objected to the sentence, pointedly records O’Brien’s final protest of innocence (‘the deceased unfortunately somewhat run upon the dagger’) and summarizes his last words: ‘A short time before O’Brien was turned off, he mentioned, that there was some money due to him, which he hoped would be appropriated to the payment of what he owed, and the remainder given to his wife.’ As reported here, O’Brien’s account of the killing is substantially that which he had offered in court and which the jury had rejected. His final settling of accounts seems composed and virtuous, as does his terminal fasting; but other accounts accord a different emphasis and attribute to him final words that seem to carry a rather different import. For example, the Dublin Monthly Magazine records On the gibbet, O’Brien expressed his disappointment at the ingratitude of the state, for abandoning him in his hour of need, and died warning the concourse by which he was surrounded never to put any trust in the Castle authorities.19 Another report in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal places the emphasis somewhat differently, though it is not clear exactly when O’Brien is supposed to have made this assertion: But do not think […] that I wish to avoid death. I am rather glad to die this way; I know that if I was reprieved I should be torn to pieces by the enraged populace, and I wish rather to die quietly; but I die innocent of murder.20 The Journal does admit that the crowds were large but provides an account of their reaction that seems to conflict with other accounts: The crowds were immense that attended the execution of the above unhappy culprit. The women formed the greater part of the spectators, from whom much wailing was heard, for the loss of bonnets, shoes, &c[.]21



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Jemmy O’Brien

In a letter to his sister in Belfast, William Drennan mentions no loss of personal property and suggests a rather different context in which wailing is replaced by jubilation: ‘An informer here who had murdered a man was executed the other day at Newgate amidst the shouts and acclamations of an amazing number of people.’22 This seems much closer to Sirr’s almost apocalyptic envisaging of a general holiday with bonfires and rejoicings.

IV These reactions were immediately contemporary; later versions emphasized the jubilation but introduced other variations.23 A version provided by Faulkner’s Dublin Journal records shouts of exultation and aggressive and memorable crowd action, but in this case what is involved is not a procession with an empty cart but a parade of the corpse through ‘the principal streets of the city’. This report soon modulates into indignant comment, but the original factual basis is significantly different: [We] cannot avoid expressing our indignation, at the outrageous and disgusting scene which followed the execution; a parade, and we cannot avoid thinking an unnecessary parade, was made of the lifeless body drawn through the principal streets of this city in an open cart, and attended by a ruffian mob of upwards of twenty thousand persons, headed and marshalled by many of those who to the mercy of the present Government owe their lives, forfeited by accumulated treasons. At concerted signals, this infernal procession, with a devilish and savage malignity of which Caribs or New Zealanders would have been ashamed, [sent] into the air such shouts of brutal exultation, as were only equalled by those which accompanied the murders of Wexford bridge and the flames of Skullabogue. Such a scene, in the streets of a populous city, – in a kingdom pretending to civilization – in the British Empire – in Europe – would not meet belief in other countries, had not the horrors of 1798 prepared the world to believe of the lower Irish every thing opposite to humanity – every outrage upon common feeling – every degradation of the name of man! Had we a national character remaining, the conduct of yesterday would stain it for ever; but the cruelty of the traitors of 1798 has plunged the name of an Irish peasant below abhorrence, and we [see] that the same savage disposition still exists, and still requires the strong hand of power to restrain, though we fear no art can



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restrain its ferocity. That the last moments of an unhappy man, long persecuted for his desertion of the cause of treason, should have been insulted by the clamours of a Dublin mob, deeply tainted with that treason, was perhaps natural, as it was horrible; but that the Magistrates should have suffered or permitted the atrocious procession of which we have spoken, to occupy all the principal streets of the City, for several hours of the day, is highly disgraceful either to their spirit or their diligence.24 This disgusted reaction is highly suggestive. For the author of the article, Jemmy O’Brien was ‘a wretched man’ or ‘an unhappy man’, not only because he suffered the ignominy of a public execution but because his loyalty was uncharitably misinterpreted and he had been ‘long persecuted for his desertion of the cause of treason’. The newspaper’s indignation was pointedly and specifically antiCatholic. What rendered this behaviour credible and recognizable to the writer was ‘the horrors of 1798’, by which he intended particularly two massacres that had scarred the Protestant imagination: ‘the murders of Wexford bridge and the flames of Skullabogue’. The article shows how the purloining of O’Brien’s corpse could be used not only to demonstrate the depravities of the Irish Catholic character but also to exemplify the essentially uncivilized practices of Irish Catholicism.25 In such circumstances, it may not be an accident that Scullabogue (the location of a barn that was deliberately fired, with the subsequent loss of many lives, mostly Protestant but including some Catholics) is transformed from its usual spelling. The normal c becomes a k, embodying both the funereal character of the episode and the writer’s ill-concealed anxiety about the fundamentally lethal nature of Irish Catholics. It is worth noticing how Faulkner’s Dublin Journal fuses, or confuses, the behaviour of the Wexford peasantry and the Dublin urban mob. Perhaps, like Godwin, the anonymous writer realized how intimate could be the connections between the two. Godwin’s description allowed for the fact that on an occasion like this spectators would travel 30 or 40 miles ‘out of the country’ in bare feet to attend a city execution, or (in Godwin’s words) ‘to enjoy the spectacle’. Yet, even if the urban crowd included visitors from the country, some distinction might be expected between ‘an Irish peasant’ and the constituent elements of ‘a Dublin mob’. In both cases, the writer does not allow for special factors or local contexts, still less for any difference between rural and urban. Both the peasantry and the mob give expression to a peculiarly brutal kind of savagery from which he prefers to distance himself.



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The body of the wretched O’Brien, executed on Monday, and delivered (as the Law commanded) for dissection, has been made (we know not by whom) a source of profit, to gratify public malignity, the insatiate and ravening mob have been glutted for the three last days with the savage delight of pawing and lacerating the mangled corpse; the body has been carved into gobbets and sold to the populace, and some savages of a deeper dye than their fellows, have been indulged in the exquisite delight of tearing off the toes and fingers with their teeth.26 Anger against the crowd and the allegedly permissive College of Surgeons conveniently ignores the brutal performances of the past. Not only had there been embarrassing incidents of body-snatching but the ancient tradition of ‘hanging processions’, which had passed through the streets of the city on the way to the gallows, had often exercised an unfortunate effect on the city’s poorer inhabitants, kept them from work and excited their sympathetic and rebellious tendencies. Such demonstrations often carried a political resonance; mock funerals, which attracted followings from several hundred to 2,000, were deliberately exploited by the United Irishmen, especially in Dublin.27 It was with such considerations in mind and by command of the Lord Lieutenant that the gallows site had been transferred to the front door of Newgate Prison in Green Street from January 1783; but, as Brian Henry points out, this change of scene produced unfortunate and unexpected results: In reality, the location of the new gallows was far more accessible to the ‘common people’ as Green Street was surrounded by small shops and in close proximity to one of the biggest food markets in Dublin, the Ormond fruit and vegetable market. Tens of thousands of people took time off from their shopping or selling to descend on Green Street and observe the hangings.28 Like the journalist, most if not all of the readers of Faulkner’s Dublin Journal must have known about this unfortunate history, though the censorious leading article never mentions these contexts but prefers to concentrate on the barbarity of the Irish Catholic mob and painful memories of 1798.



Whatever its fusions or confusions, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal must have sensed in this occasion an opportunity not to be missed. The next number returns to the subject in terms that seem even more extreme:

Timothy Webb 37

The last scenes of O’Brien’s life and his execution and its aftermath were marked by a number of tragic ironies. As we have seen, the authorities had decided to move the site of execution to Newgate from the beginning of January 1783, precisely because it had become so common for the families of the executed to appropriate their bodies in order to leave them accusingly on the doorsteps of their legal prosecutors or to accord them more suitable funeral rituals and, in many cases, to allow for the extended mourning practices of the wake. Behind such apparent irregularities, or anarchies, there was a fundamental clash of cultures. The seizure of O’Brien’s body might have seemed to be in keeping with such practices; but, as many accounts make clear, the motivation was entirely different. Lurking behind some of these accounts, and sometimes acknowledged explicitly, as for example in the outraged comments in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, is the idea that such behaviour was driven by considerations that were essentially Catholic. Godwin writes of severed fingers and toes as ‘precious relics of their antipathy & revenge’. Even if O’Brien himself was, at least technically, a Catholic, such negative veneration exceeded anything for which he could have hoped. A second irony only took full force after O’Brien’s death but it was sharply pointed. During his life, the informer in the service of Government was sometimes referred to as a cannibal, most notably perhaps during the Finney trial. On that occasion, Curran had described O’Brien as a ‘cannibal informer … greedy after human gore’, with a ‘ravening maw’29 – now, at least in the eyes of the loyalist press, the Dublin mob exhibited tendencies that were recognizably cannibalistic. The descriptions in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal of the ravening crowd, its lust for flesh and its monstrous appetite greatly expand Godwin’s reference to ‘utmost greediness’. Fingers and toes, which, according to Godwin, were torn away, are now ‘torn away […] with their teeth’. In the eyes of the horrified commentator, such cannibal traits characterize not only the unrestrained Catholic crowd and their Irish supporters but also the radical English ‘prints’, or papers, which are joined with them in a cannibal league. The informer, who seems to have taken pleasure in devouring his countrymen, was himself devoured, almost eaten, by the avenging crowd. Behind these charges was the deeply rooted belief that cannibalism was a practice that enjoyed a special currency in Ireland. Both O’Brien himself and his various supporters must also have been aware of the unfortunate implications of an imprisonment and an execution in Newgate. In the public imagination, this location was



V

Jemmy O’Brien

connected with felons and criminals and perhaps with torture; although O’Brien was executed for a murder and not for his services to Dublin Castle, it was at the least bad publicity for a noted informer to end his life in such circumstances and in a setting with such degrading associations. Even more upsetting perhaps were the connections between Newgate and leading figures among the United Irishmen. Archibald Hamilton Rowan, William Jackson, John and Henry Sheares, Peter Finnerty, Oliver Bond and James Napper Tandy (nearly all defended by Curran), had all been imprisoned in Newgate for various lengths of time, and the Sheares brothers had been executed outside the prison as recently as 14 July 1798. Newgate had also held Thomas Addis Emmet (who had supported Curran in his defence of Finney against O’Brien’s accusing information) and many of Emmet’s associates (many more were imprisoned in Kilmainham) before they were transferred to a prison in Scotland in 1799. Shortly before O’Brien’s incarceration and execution at Newgate, another inmate of the prison was the barrister Robert Holmes, who was married to Emmet’s sister.

VI Jemmy O’Brien was executed on 21 July 1800 but, as these controversies demonstrate, his official and bodily death did not produce a convenient or comfortable closure. As we have seen, newspapers and observers were obsessively concerned not so much with the facts of the execution as with what happened afterwards and its implications for the health of the Irish body politic. For many years, histories or memoirs of this period tended to present Jemmy O’Brien as the quintessence of corruption and the very embodiment of evil. Characteristically, he is described as ‘notorious’, ‘celebrated’, ‘infamous’ or, with compressed force, ‘infamous Jemmy O’Brien of ’98 notoriety’; he is a figure who ‘had earned public execration’, ‘monstrous’ and even ‘a monster’. As these descriptions clearly illustrate, there were ways of earning public notice that did not involve the paths of virtue or self-sacrifice. Though Sirr continued to appear in public, his reputation was increasingly weakened as was that of the dead O’Brien who had acted as his tool. In his Irish Magazine (1808–15), for example, the journalist Walter (better known as ‘Watty’) Cox pursued a damaging campaign that was directed at both: Witty, scurrilous, anti-English, anti-establishment and utterly irreverent, his Magazine was as popular with the working people as the



38

Timothy Webb 39

One illustration of May 181031 features Jemmy O’Brien in villainous mode (‘with his Working Tools’). This unflattering picture seems to translate into the simplest currency Curran’s account of O’Brien in his defence of Patrick Finney. O’Brien’s left hand is spread possessively over a closed book, presumably the Bible, while in his right hand he clutches a large dagger. In court, Curran had described O’Brien as a wretch who would not scruple to dip the evangelists in blood. The picture in the Irish Magazine is in keeping with the Gothic simplifications of this rhetoric. On the wall behind O’Brien is a portrait, probably of Sirr, while through the open window the viewer can see the victim of a hanging, presumably the fruit of O’Brien’s readiness to swear ‘his victim to death’. For all its crudity, this illustration shows both the hostility that O’Brien continued to generate after his death and the vividness with which he could be imagined. The elderly lady Anstace O’Byrne recalled how, as a child, she had been taken to the Anatomy Hall in Trinity College Dublin to see a ‘performance’ by two skeletons activated by ropes: one was that of an Irish giant while the other was that of Jemmy O’Brien. The strange sight, she explained, was particularly satisfying to the servant who conducted her since her own husband had been ‘done to death’ by one of O’Brien’s informations.32 While the current Department of Anatomy is unable to validate from its records such a display or such a bizarre conjunction, and while this ‘memory’ might be indulging itself, the giant skeleton of Cornelius McGrath, who died in 1760, can still be inspected in Trinity and the anecdote has, at least, a certain grim appropriateness. Even at such a distance, and vicariously, Anstace O’Byrne’s description is clearly informed by a wondering pleasure in seeing the dangerously powerful and manipulative O’Brien grotesquely matched with an Irish giant and reduced to passive and mechanical compliance. Her registering of an ‘undulating kind of motion, as if dancing to slow music’,33 and the apparent grace of these involuntary revolutions, might remind one of the ‘Kilmainham minit’ [minuet], which O’Brien had performed at his execution and which is crudely but memorably described in the ballad ‘Jemmy O’Brien’s Minuet’.34 If Mrs O’Byrne’s account is to be credited, O’Brien was not only punished by public execution but also suffered a degrading afterlife as an exhibit in a museum; his ‘fame’ may



United Irishmen’s earlier publications had been. It was largely written by himself, those whom he chose to pursue (like Major Sirr and an informer called Jemmy O’Brien) becoming popular villains, its illustrations (by Brocas) informing historical accounts, even today.30

Jemmy O’Brien

have endured indefinitely but his threatening presence was tamed and deprived of any potency. Nor was he simply an exhibit to be inspected or analyzed: Anstace O’Byrne’s description makes it clear that, unwittingly, he was now party to an entertainment beyond his control. In this way, as the anecdote suggests, aggrieved citizens of Dublin had an opportunity to relieve their feelings and, at least in part, to exorcize their haunted awareness of the notorious informer and government spy; not by ignoring or forgetting him, but by putting his skeletal remains in a public display. The spectacle of the two skeletons was a calculated exercise in imbalance, a yoking together of two different varieties of monster – one moral and the other physiological. The inclusion of O’Brien in such an exhibit could hardly have produced an effect that was scientifically objective. The noticeable fact that both skeletons were ‘suspended by the necks’ is likely to have delighted observers of the one much more intensely than observers of the other. Even if Jemmy O’Brien’s presence was imagined rather than real, it answered to a genuine intensity of desire. According to the requirements of such a register, the once terrifying informer had lost all his dangerous power and was now preserved as a very unthreatening kind of monster.

Notes 1. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dep. b. 214/5, William Godwin, ‘Letter to Marshall, 2nd August 1800’. 2. Charles Teeling, Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London: n.p., 1828), pp. 74–5. 3. Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romantic Writing’, boundary 2, 31, 1 (2004), pp. 49–71. 4. R. R. Madden, The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, 4 vols (Dublin: James Duffy, 1858–60), IV, p. 467. 5. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, No. 9917 (31 July 1800), p. 3. 6. Francis Plowden, The History of Ireland, from Its Union with Great Britain, in January 1801, to October 1810, 3 vols (Dublin: J. Boyce, 1811), I, 111n. 7. Thomas Bartlett, Revolutionary Dublin, 1795–1801: The Letters of Francis Higgins to Dublin Castle (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 61. 8. See J. F. Larkin, ed., The Trial of William Drennan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1991), pp. 101–6. 9. John Philpot Curran, The Speeches of John Philpot Curran (Dublin: Stockdale, 1805), p. 147. 10. Ibid., p. 148. 11. William J. Fitzpatrick (?), The Mercenary Informers of ’98 (Dublin: n.p. 1846), p. 86.



40

12. J. T. Gilbert, Documents Relating to Ireland 1795–1804 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970 [1893]), pp. 18–37. 13. Plowden, History of Ireland, I, 112n. 14. W. H. Curran, The Life of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran, Late Master of the Rolls, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh: A Constable, 1822), I, p. 342. 15. Terry Moylan, The Age of Revolution: 1776 to 1815 in the Irish Song Tradition (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2000), p. 127. 16. National Archives, Prisoners’ Petitions, No. 551. 17. Ibid. 18. Gilbert, Documents, p. 54. 19. Quoted in Madden, The United Irishmen, p. 471. 20. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, No. 9915 (26 July 1800), p. 3. 21. Ibid., p. 3. 22. William Drennan, ‘Letter 22nd July, 1800’, The Drennan–McTier Letters, ed. Jean Agnew, 3 vols (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1999), II, p. 613. 23. Differing accounts have the body dismembered by the crowd, or dragged in procession through the city, or inspiring the triumphant parade of an empty cart around the notoriously contentious statue of King William III. 24. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, No. 9914 (24 July 1800), p. 3. 25. As such it can be seen as developing from a much longer tradition of Irish writing that focused on the violence of the Catholic population. See Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). 26. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, No. 9915 (26 July 1800), p. 3. 27. Nancy Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 241. 28. Brian Henry, Dublin Hanged: Crime, Law Enforcement and Punishment in Late Eighteenth-Century Dublin (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), p. 23. 29. Curran, Speeches, p. 155. 30. Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London: Profile Books, 2003), p. 110. 31. Reproduced in Moylan, The Age of Revolution, p. 126. 32. See W. J. Fitzpatrick, The Sham Squire: And the Informers of 1798, with Jottings about Ireland Seventy Years Ago (Dublin: W. B. Kelly, 1866), pp. 313–6. 33. Ibid., p. 315 34. Moylan, The Age of Revolution, pp. 125–7.



Timothy Webb 41





Influences from Abroad





Spanish Literature and Irish Romanticism, 1800–50 Anne MacCarthy

The first half of the nineteenth century was a difficult period in Spanish history. After years of interference in Spanish politics Napoleon invaded in 1807, prompting a nation-wide rebellion against French troops in 1808 aided by British forces. Lasting until 1812, when French forces abandoned Spain, the subsequent decades saw a period of reaction under Ferdinand VII. The Napoleonic constitution was abolished and an absolutist monarchy reinstated, beginning a ‘white terror’ that only truly ended with Ferdinand’s death in 1833 despite a notable liberal rising in 1820. Under his daughter Isabella II the Spanish parliament introduced many reforms, but at the same time there was great political instability throughout Isabella’s reign (which ended in 1868). Given the centrality of the Peninsular campaign to the British military effort, Spain and, consequently, Spanish culture came under close scrutiny in the Romantic period, providing, as Diego Saglia contends, ‘a repertory of ideological principles and descriptive materials that might be employed in order to talk about the war and its justifications, or concepts of the nation, loyalty, and liberty’.1 In Ireland there was an additional contact zone with the Iberian peninsula as many Irish priests were educated in Irish colleges in Spain prior to the founding of Maynooth in 1795. James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), for instance, learned Spanish from a Fr Graham, who had returned to Ireland from the Irish College in Salamanca.2 The Peninsular War inspired both immediate accounts of British military heroism, such as Preston Fitzgerald’s Spain Delivered, A Poem in Two Cantos (1813) and Charles Wolfe’s ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’ (1816), and later works like William Hamilton Maxwell’s The Bivouac; or, Stories of the Peninsular War (London, 1837), which partook of the 1830s’ vogue for military tales set during the Napoleonic campaigns. During the military campaign and 45



3

Spanish Literature and Irish Romanticism, 1800–50

the decades after, the reception of Spanish-themed literature reflected the domestic political situation (in both Ireland and Britain) in praising Spanish revolutionary spirit and cultural authenticity and was appropriated by intellectuals across the political spectrum. Spain was an important location for the ideological conflicts of postNapoleonic Europe between ‘legitimacy’, the restoration of European monarchies in an attempt to claw back the democratic agenda of post-Revolutionary Europe, and ‘liberty’, an often ill-defined notion connected in Ireland with the movement towards Catholic Emancipation and a general extension of the franchise in Britain.3 Percy Shelley, for instance, had written the ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1820) giving support to those who resisted Ferdinand VII’s strict regime, proving that Spain (and the wider Mediterranean world) was central to liberal debates in Britain (‘England yet sleeps: was she not called of old? / Spain calls her now’).4 Thomas Moore (1779–1852) shared this view of Spain as a post on the journey of liberty, seeing in Spain a similarity with Ireland’s abject situation in the post-Union period. Moore provided his narrative of liberty’s progress in ‘The Torch of Liberty’, published in Fables of the Holy Alliance (1823): Next, Spain, so new was light to her, Leap’d at the torch – but, ere the spark That fell upon her shine could stir, ’Twas quench’d – and all again was dark. (ll. 33–6)5 Much earlier than this in his career, however, Moore had tied together Spanish and Irish patriotism in A Melologue on National Music (1810), where, to the tune of the Spanish air ‘Ya Desperto’[sic], the poet asks ‘What harp shall sigh o’er Freedom’s grave’, to come to the answer of ‘Oh, Erin, Thine!’ (ll. 98–9).6 The Irish, in other words, accustomed to defeat in the past, will best understand Spain’s failed attempt for freedom. The sense of Irish and Spanish solidarity is perhaps clearest expressed in ‘Sublime was the Warning’ from the second series of Irish Melodies (1808) with its conjoining of ‘the shamrocks of Erin and Olives of Spain’ (l. 32).7 Spain, then, was a constant parallel to Ireland and an important focal point in the wider struggle for ‘Liberty’. The parallels between the Irish and Spanish struggles for freedom that Moore established were later assimilated by intellectuals and writers within the orbit of the Young Ireland movement, including Mangan and Denis Florence MacCarthy



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(1817–82), the latter being an important translator of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81). Other representative strategies were open to Irish writers, of course. Charles Maturin (1780–1824) presented Spain as a semi-anarchic Gothic theocracy, governed by evil priests and the Inquisition in his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a move which, while expressive of a conservative anti-Catholic agenda in Ireland, would still have been disquieting for British legitimists viewing Ferdinand VII’s Catholic autocracy.8 A concern with Spanish politics did not preclude an anachronistic, exotic perception of the country found in other writings in the period. Those who appreciated Spanish literature enough to translate it tended not to focus on contemporary literature. On the contrary, although there was an immense interest in Spanish current affairs, the chief enthusiasm in literary circles was motivated by two branches of Spanish literary history: the romanceros and the works of Calderón. Looking at both of these branches of literature separately will demonstrate the extent to which archaic Spanish literature found new resonance in Romantic-period Ireland.

Spanish romanceros The Spanish romances were originally orally transmitted ballads. They are generally considered as forming two major groups: the old, traditional romances and the romancero nuevo, or collections of romances made or composed anew from the end of the sixteenth century until the eighteenth century.9 The romances were not held in high esteem in Spain itself, but were received in Germany in particular with enthusiasm. It was there that the first critical studies of the poems and the first distinctions between the old and new romances were made.10 Herder, Jacob Grimm, and Friedrich Schlegel all translated romances, seeing in them examples of epic styles and powerful national sentiment. In Britain the collections of romances had in the eighteenth century been seen as archaic poetry belonging to a low social caste.11 Thomas Blackwell and Thomas Percy both held Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles en Granada (1595–1604) in high esteem, and the romances that this history contained were translated in 1801 by Thomas Rodd as Ancient Ballads from the Civil Wars in Granada. Percy had translated two of these romances for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and praised their ‘unadorned’ style and the ‘native simplicity of the language and sentiment’.12 In Rodd’s 1801 collection and his History of Charles the Great and Orlando (1812), the new relevance of Spanish literature to the



Anne MacCarthy 47


military effort against Napoleon was underlined. Spanish literature was increasingly seen as particularly involved in the struggle for national self-expression. Spanish literature proved of interest to major literati of the period such as Byron, Southey, and J. G. Lockhart. The latter published his Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic in 1823. It proved to be popular with the reading public and went through many editions.13 In his introduction Lockhart complains about the degeneracy of modern Spain and its subjection to the Catholic Church, contrasting Ferdinand VII’s reign with the freedom the Spanish experienced in previous ages.14 This view contrasts with the German Romantics who, as Henry W. Sullivan comments, ‘had come to set a high value on chivalry, honor, sublime and ideal love, the ballad poetry of the Spanish middle ages, and the Romantic, poetic qualities of Catholic Christianity’.15 British suspicion of Spanish Catholicism can be seen in Lockhart’s comments, and does lead to a distinction between Irish and British responses to the romances and, later, the works of Calderón. Menéndez Pidal points to an 1824 essay-review in the Edinburgh Review as representative of British (Protestant) receptions of Spanish romanceros. Written by George Moir, an Edinburgh lawyer and man of letters, the essay reviewed Jacob Grimm’s Silva de Viejos Romances (Vienna, 1815), C. B. Depping’s Sammlung der besten Alten Spanischen, Historichen, Ritter und Maurischen Romanzen (Leipzig, 1817), and D. J. Nicholas Böhl’s Floresta de Rimas Antiguas Castellanos (Hamburg, 1821). In his review of these German literary studies, Moir celebrates Spanish literature prior to Charles V: ‘it knows and needs no foreign models, but animates its minutest productions with a spirit of intense nationality’.16 The simplicity of the poetry reviewed is commended, and even its superiority ‘in point of refinement and nobleness of tone’17 to the Anglo-Scottish Border literature that Sir Walter Scott and others had popularized. Along with this, though, was Moir’s belief that some of the literary artifacts were harmed by the extent to which their Catholicism led to a confusion of the languages of devotion and physical love: ‘It seems to be the effect of Catholicism to confound as much as possible the spirit of religion with terrestrial emotions […] and to import to the language of devotion a sensual character.’18 The emotional content of the ballads and their perceived nobility and freedom of spirit were recognized in Romantic-period Britain, but this went along with a suspicion about their position in a Catholic culture. Aspects of the romance tradition appreciated by British and German Romantics were open to adaptation to the peculiar circumstances of Irish



48

Romanticism. Young Ireland nationalism had its origin in Romantic emphases on the rights of nations to express their unique cultural identity. Literature played an active, if not central, role in the formation of this identity. German scholarship in many respects determined the comprehension of Spanish poetry in both Britain and Ireland, as a glance at the books reviewed by Moir demonstrates. Mangan, for instance, claims to have used Eugenio de Ochoa’s Tesoro de los romanceros (1838), which drew on German editions of the poems, as the bibliography made clear.19 Some of the English sources considered, in particular Percy’s Ancient Reliques and Lockhart’s selection, were so easily available to Irish readers as to constitute another definite source for any opinions on the Spanish romances. Keeping in mind the significance of the ballad form, and the interpretation given to it in Irish Romantic texts, the characteristics identified in the Spanish romances adapted perfectly to the nationforming role assigned to the ballad in the early nineteenth century. Charles Gavan Duffy, in the introduction to The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845), speaks of the form’s power in shaping national character and hopes that in Ireland the ballad will have the same influence as in Spain: the romances ‘still feed that noble pride of race which lifts the Spanish people above meaner vices, and make them in spirit and conduct a nation of gentlemen’.20 He adds that [A] people without native poetry are naked to a multitude of evil influences. Not only do they want the true nursing mother of patriotism and virtue, but their first impressions of literature – the impressions that pursue us through life like our shadows – are liable to be caught from a foreign, a prejudiced, or a poisonous source. A source perilous to their public or their personal virtue.21 Spanish literature, however, is not a ‘poisonous’ source but a positive one. The ballad’s formative influence on national character makes the Spanish romance suitable for translation, and proves it is a benign foreign influence for an incipient Irish literature in English. While the Spanish romances were regarded as exotic and archaic, some Irish writers did not believe, contra Lockhart, that the culture that had produced them had entirely disappeared. Mangan, for instance, in his preface to his translations of Spanish romances that appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in 1841, claimed that ‘the legends and ballads of Spain […] are ancient, but even at the present day they constitute the national poetry’, before continuing to say that ‘the poetry of Spain remains in the nineteenth century what it was in the eleventh’.22 Mangan’s interpretation



Anne MacCarthy 49


of the romances’ continuing relevance to Spain marks a departure from British critical views, and perhaps betrays an Irish viewpoint. The emphasis on the unchanging character of the poetry echoes a contemporary feeling abut the Irish tradition – that it could survive centuries of neglect and a major linguistic shift and yet still exist as an active national poetry. The Irish writer, then, should translate from an ideal literature, one that was still the national literature of its nation, as if the literary tradition were a fixed, unchanging entity that could resist all adversity. Mangan was not the only writer to express this opinion on Spanish literature. George Croly (1780–1860), an Irish-born poet, recognized the decadence of Ferdinand VII’s Spain but felt that ‘its old Romantic character’23 had been preserved unchanged. MacCarthy, in The Book of Irish Ballads (1846), finds one of the strengths of poetry is that it is true ‘not only to the character of the age in which it is written, but in accordance with the principles of nature and truth, which are unchangeable’.24 For MacCarthy, the ballad’s potency lies in its role in helping people learn about their past and teaching them who they are and who they will be.25 Ballad poetry creates a national identity and as such it cannot be subject to change as it is replete with the noble, heroic qualities that are a constant in humans. Gavan Duffy’s Young Ireland: Or Four Years of Irish History, 1845–49 (1883) suggested the importance of MacCarthy and Spanish literature to mid-century Irish cultural nationalism: M’Carthy [sic] taught the uses of a national literature, and the noble and unselfish reward it aimed to win with a persuasiveness that recalled Davis. A great literature, he said, was either the creation or the creator of a people […] Cervantes, the maimed soldier of Lepanto, and Calderon, the secluded priest of Toledo, had given Spain a greater glory and more lasting possessions than the conquests of Cortes or the Cid.26 Spanish literature, then, was, from an Irish perspective, not an archaic curiosity of philological or literary interest; it was deeply relevant to Irish cultural self-fashioning. To refer again to MacCarthy, he explained (anachronistically) in The Book of Irish Ballads that he and Duffy were, in their ‘more limited sphere’, like Juan de Timoneda and others, sixteenth-century poets who commenced little Romanceros and Cancioneros, out of which the Romancero General, or ‘great Ballad-book of Spain’ was compiled.27 British compilers and writers such as Thomas Rodd and Percy Shelley had of course aligned Spanish literature with current ideological



50

concerns, but in some respects Irish authors went even further in aligning Spanish ballad poetry with cultural nationalism. The modern editors of Mangan’s collected works are correct when they point out that, for instance, ‘Song: The Repentant Exile’ contains lines in the refrain that are ‘rather more aggressive’ than the original ‘¡Ay Dios mi tierra!’28 The translation overtly adapts the song to the Irish state of affairs. In the original the refrain is ‘Oh! England/You are no longer to my taste’.29 In Mangan’s loose translation this becomes: Nothing, nothing e’er can make me Love this churlish England, This chill churlish England.30 The poem finally ends with ‘For I hate this England,/ Oh, I hate this England.’31 In addition to this pronounced Anglophobia, Mangan uses the adjective ‘emerald’ not found in the original (‘Spain, the emerald gem of Earth’). Spain has here metamorphosed into a southerly Ireland. Obviously, Mangan in his preface to the translations makes no mention of the pernicious influence of Catholicism, to be found in English accounts of the romance. Indeed, one of Mangan’s translations, ‘The Deliverance of Count Guarinos’, describes how the Count is offered freedom by his Moorish capturers if he will renounce his Catholic faith, a choice he emphatically rejects. MacCarthy had praised the noble sentiment of the romances, all traits similarly celebrated by British commentators, but, in contrast to a critic like Moir, he adds to this praise their ‘piety’.32 The religious affinities between the two countries could not be ignored, and the ‘medieval’ Catholicism that was unpalatable in Britain found a much more receptive audience among Catholic intellectuals in Ireland. The romanceros and ballad tradition were attractive to Irish Romanticism because of their moral, religious, and educational qualities and because they adapted easily to local circumstances in Ireland. It demonstrated the nation-forming character of literature as an important part of other national cultures, so endorsing the philosophy of cultural nationalism that became fundamental to Irish nationalist intellectual life in the nineteenth century.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca If the Spanish romanceros were celebrated for their proleptic blend of Catholicism and romantic nationalism, Calderón provided an image



Anne MacCarthy 51


of the singular Romantic genius, a Spanish Shakespeare. The publication of the English translation of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature was crucial in introducing the English Romantics not only to German aesthetics, but to Schlegel’s ideas on Spanish drama. The translation, by the journalist John Black, was first published simultaneously in 1815 in Britain with an Irish edition printed in Dublin by the publisher John Cumming. Two of the three principal nineteenth-century translators of Calderón’s work were Irish-born, Denis Florence MacCarthy and Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–86), later to become the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.33 Both MacCarthy and Trench are aware of the reception of Calderón’s work in the English periodical press, which of course, in turn, influenced Irish periodicals, such as the Dublin University Magazine. Irish Romanticism was nurtured by its contacts with Germany, English Romanticism and the English periodical press. It is, in fact, often noteworthy that the presence of German literature in Irish writing in the first half of the nineteenth century is accompanied by references to Spanish literature as the latter became known to the English and Irish thanks to the efforts of German Romantics. The Romantic view of Calderón was assimilated by MacCarthy whereas it was not totally acceptable to English critics for ideological reasons. In Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature Schlegel describes the dramatic writings of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. It was highly influential on European Romantic critical theory and with its first publication in German in 1809 ‘Schlegel launched the Romantic cult of Calderón and released the full impact of Romantic critical theory on Europe.’34 For Schelgel Calderón was the pinnacle of Spanish drama and a precursor of Romantic ideals of creativity and expression. The Spanish writer considered by the Germans as a representative of Romanticism found his most prolific nineteenth-century translator in Ireland in MacCarthy, a man of nationalist sympathies associated with Young Ireland. MacCarthy’s enthusiasm for Calderón came from his readings of Schlegel and Percy Shelley, the British poet being an admirer of the Spanish dramatist.35 MacCarthy had earlier suggested in his 1847 translation of Calderón’s The Purgatory of St Patrick that translation of Calderón’s work had helped the emergence of a German national literature, which was ‘enriched beyond expression, by the introduction and naturalization into it of two of the greatest dramatic poets of modern times – Shakespeare and Calderón’.36 The translations from Calderón for the Young Ireland project of establishing a national



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literature represent aesthetic freedom from other models in English Romanticism and greatness (even if MacCarthy’s enthusiasm was a result of his endorsement by Shelley). It would put Irish literature on a level with other world literatures just as it would be on a level with other nations if independence were to be achieved. Both MacCarthy and Archbishop Trench extract the same quotation from Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature on the subject of religion in Calderón’s drama. Trench, in the introduction to his translations from Calderón, Life’s a Dream: The Great Theatre of the World, says that Schlegel ‘characterizes the religious poetry of Calderon, as one never-ending hymn of thanksgiving, ascending continually to the throne of God’, adding Schlegel’s remark that Calderon had ‘escaped from the wild labyrinths of doubt to the stronghold of belief’.37 He discusses the reception of Calderón among English critics, pointing to those who hold the opinion that Calderón’s work is ‘morally perverse and injurious’, some even describing him as ‘the poet of the Inquisition … of Romanism in its deepest degradation, in its most extravagant divorce of religion from morality’.38 According to Ángel María García Gómez’s survey of the critical reception of Calderón in England it was common to see Calderón as ‘morally perverse’ owing to his Catholicism.39 The prejudice against the Spanish writer for his religion can explain the fact that there are very few British translations of his work in the nineteenth century and MacCarthy’s remained most prolific. John Rutter Chorley in a review of MacCarthy’s Dramas of Calderón gave a good example of a British inability to assimilate the Spanish cultural context of Calderón’s work, particularly its Catholicism. He finds the sudden repentance of characters who are expiated of their sins after a ‘career of every kind of atrocious wickedness’ immoral,40 and Trench mentioned Chorley’s review essay as outlining the reason Calderón has been met with ‘indifference’ in Anglophone culture.41 García Gómez accurately observes that Chorley contrasts the dramas with the value-system of nineteenthcentury England and not with that of other European countries of Calderón’s time.42 MacCarthy went some way to answering these anti-Catholic prejudices in his introduction to Mysteries of Corpus Christi: to explain the autos ‘definitely’ and with ‘precision’ for a ‘believing Catholic, and especially for a theologian, is comparatively easy, and entitled to little merit’.43 However, ‘for the Protestant, no matter how learned or aesthetically cultivated he may be, [it is] a matter of very great difficulty, because as long as he is a Protestant, it will be almost impossible for him to enter thoroughly into the conception of Catholic feeling and



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thought’.44 In other words, the English critics interpret Calderón’s Catholicism as superstitious and even immoral because they do not understand the theology on which his plays are built.45 Although MacCarthy was probably educated at Maynooth, his antisectarian principles generally led to some discretion on religious questions. However, in the introduction to his translation of El Purgatorio de San Patricio, and possibly having in mind the strong Catholic slant of a magazine to be read by his ‘Irish friends’, he writes that the work ‘in a religious and national point of view, must be of peculiar interest to us’,46 and that ‘in the whole of Calderón (and, indeed, in the entire Spanish drama) there is scarcely one loose or improper allusion, and certainly not one scene which the strictest censor would exclude for immorality […] on these points he is [superior] to even the purest of the old English dramatists’.47 It is interesting to note how MacCarthy interpreted the same quotation used by Trench from Schlegel’s Lecture 29: [To] translate Calderon – to clothe, in English words, his poetry – which, as Schlegel truly says, ‘whatever the subject may ostensibly be, is an unceasing hymn of joy on the splendours of creation’, seems to awaken all the glow and rapture – the enthusiasm and excitation of the most fervid original composition.48 MacCarthy gives the words an aesthetic significance in a fashion similar to the German writer. In Black’s translation, Schlegel, in Lecture 29, writes about Calderón’s religious plays ‘for religion alone he excites the most overpowering emotions, which penetrate into the inmost recesses of the soul’.49 The translation continues to the section that both MacCarthy and Trench found so important: His poetry, whatever its apparent object, is a never-ending hymn of joy on the majesty of the creation; he celebrates the productions of nature and human art with an astonishment always joyful and always new, as if he saw them for the first time in an unworn festal splendour.50 MacCarthy also quotes the same passage from Lecture 29 in his notes to the 1853 complete translation of The Purgatory of Saint Patrick, a work that combines both Catholic and Irish interest for the writer. He feels that if it were the Catholic Frederick Schlegel, and not Protestant Augustus Schlegel, who had written this, one could suspect that ‘the



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zeal of the neophyte had in this instance swallowed up the discernment of the critic’.51 So the Romantic interpretation of Calderón’s Catholicism, coming from Schlegel, is definitely not given a sectarian but an aesthetic reading in MacCarthy’s work. However, The Purgatory was the first of Calderón’s plays that MacCarthy had partially translated in an 1847 issue of Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine. Given MacCarthy’s interest in Shelley, he would have been aware of the reference to ‘a most sublime passage in El Purgatorio de San Patricio’52 in a note to The Cenci. The Shelleyean connection then, indicative as it is of political radicalism and the importance of the Spanish model to liberal rhetoric in the early decades of the nineteenth century, combined with the Irish setting and the national saint to make this play a potent import to Irish literature. MacCarthy, then, went further than Trench in accommodating Calderón’s Catholicism within an enabling aesthetic frame.

Conclusion The Irish interest in Spanish literature was a manifestation of a common European Romanticism adapted to local political and cultural circumstances. It is also points to a desire for cultural independence from England. Poets like James Clarence Mangan had little knowledge of Irish and MacCarthy did not know enough to translate from it, but they were inspired by the cultural nationalist enterprise into recognizing that, just like translations from Irish, renderings from Spanish could amplify the cultural referents in Anglophone Irish literature away from the British connection. In the above translations from Spanish we can detect a resistance to the English colonial perception of its cultural superiority to all others, including the Irish. This emerges when Irish writers come into direct contact with Spanish literature and not through the negative English reception of some of these works. Patrick Rafroidi, in his seminal study of Irish Romanticism, wrote that ‘it cannot be denied that the Romantics inaugurated a process by which the nation turned in upon itself and which the second half of the nineteenth century only emphasised’.53 The self-reliance that impelled the Young Ireland movement to look beyond England to Europe may have inadvertently become the cause of later generations eventually disregarding the work of translators like MacCarthy and Trench (and even Mangan) as irrelevant to Irish culture. However, as the case of Spain demonstrates, in the early decades of the nineteenth century Irish Romanticism was intensely open to international influences, and looked to Spain as both a source and image of literary self-expression.



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1. Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Spain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 10. For an introductory account of Irish literary works dealing with Spain, see Asier Altuna-Garcia de Salazar, ‘Spain in Irish Literature, 1789–1850: An Approach to a Minor Representation’, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America: Society for Irish Latin American Studies, http://www.irlandeses.org/0707altuna1.htm (accessed 16 October 2008). 2. Ellen Shannon-Mangan, James Clarence Mangan: A Biography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996), p. 14. 3. Ronan Kelly recounts that Moore taught his son Tom to toast ‘Success to the Spaniards … Success to the Greeks … Bad luck to the Holy Alliance.’ Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore (Dublin: Penguin, 2008), p. 380. 4. Percy Shelley, ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 181–2, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York and London: Norton, 2002), p. 312. 5. Thomas Moore, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 10 vols (London: Longman, 1840–41), VII, p. 231. 6. Ibid., V, p. 126. 7. Ibid., III, p. 277. 8. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; repr. 1992), pp. 160–1. 9. For a general introduction to the romanceros and ballad tradition in Spain, see R. Menéndez Pidal’s Romancero Hispanico (hispano-portugés, Americano y sefardi), teoría e historia, 2 vols (1953; repr. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968). 10. Pidal, Romancero, II, pp. 253–4. 11. Ibid., II, p. 260. 12. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (1765; London: Henry Washbourne, 1857), III, p. 348. 13. His selection is mostly made up of older romances. Mangan used his translation ‘The Penitence of Don Roderick’ for his own ‘The Penance of Don Rodrigo’. See Anne MacCarthy, ‘J. G. Lockhart’s “The Penance of Don Roderick” as a Source for J. C. Mangan’s “The Penance of Don Rodrigo”’, Notes & Queries, 251 (September 2006), pp. 330–2. 14. J. G. Lockhart, Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic (London: Blackwood, 1823), p. xiii. 15. Henry W. Sullivan, Calderón in the German Lands and the Low Countries: His Reception and Influence, 1654–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 180. 16. ‘Early Narrative and Lyrical Poetry of Spain’, Edinburgh Review, 40 (1824), p. 393. 17. Ibid., p. 400. 18. Ibid., p. 426. 19. Depping and Böhl are both mentioned. 20. Charles Gavan Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845, repr. Dublin: J. Duffy, 1866), p. xxxiii. 21. Ibid., p. xxxiii.



Notes

22. Quoted in The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose, 1840–1882, eds Jacques Chuto, Rudolf Patrick Holzapfel, & Ellen Shannon-Mangan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002), p. 55. In the prologue to the 1838 Paris edition of Eugenio de Ochoa’s Tresoro, the editor quotes Martinez de la Rosa as saying ‘el romance es en realidad la poesía nacional de Espan ˇ a’ [the romance is in reality the national poetry of Spain], p. I. This statement in the present tense perhaps inspired Mangan’s affirmation. 23. George Croly, The Angel of the World; An Arabian Tale; with Other Poems (London: J. Warren, 1820), p. xi. 24. Denis Florence MacCarthy, The Book of Irish Ballads (Dublin: J. Duffy, 1846), p. 17. Although MacCarthy, in his introduction, says that ‘Spain has been preeminently rich in ballad poetry’ since about the end of the twelfth century (p. 19), he later admits in his edition of Calderon that this has changed: ‘[Even] in Spain, the utter absurdity and falsity of the ancient codes of loyalty and of honour have become apparent, as in other parts of the world.’ Dramas of Calderon, Tragic, Comic, and Legendary, 2 vols (London: C. Dolman, 1853), I, p. 418. 25. MacCarthy, The Book of Irish Ballads, pp. 15, 24. 26. Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845–1849, A Sequel to “Young Ireland” (London: Cassell, 1883), p. 26. 27. MacCarthy, The Book of Irish Ballads, p. 12. 28. Jacques Chuto et al., The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems 1845–47 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 428. 29. De Ochoa, Tesoro, p. 314. Translation mine. 30. Chuto et al., Poems 1845–1847, p. 37. 31. Ibid., p. 37. 32. MacCarthy, The Book of Irish Ballads, p. 19. 33. According to MacCarthy, Gerald Griffin also began a translation from Calderón ‘in conjunction with his friend Valentine Llanos’, Dramas of Calderon, I, p. xxi. 34. Sullivan, Calderón in the German Lands and the Low Countries, p. 175. 35. MacCarthy, Dramas of Calderon, I, p. vii. 36. MacCarthy, ‘The Purgatory of St Patrick. Poetae Catholici no. 1–5’, Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine, 1 (February 1847), p. 25. 37. Richard Trench, Life’s a Dream: The Great Theatre of the World, from the Spanish of Calderon (London: J. W. Parker, 1856), pp. 2–3. 38. Ibid., p. 3. 39. See Ángel María García Gómez, ‘Contextualización de las primeras puestas en escena de La vida es sueño (1925, 1929) en Inglaterra dentro del marco de la crítica anglo-irlandesa del siglo XIX’, Archivum Calderonianum Tomo 10: Teatro Calderoniano sobre el tablado. Calderón y su puesta en escena a través de los siglos. XIII Coloquio Anglogermano sobre Calderón, Florencia, 10–14 de julio de 2002, ed. Manfred Tietz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003), pp. 163–93. 40. John Rutter Chorley, ‘Review of MacCarthy’s Dramas of Calderon’, The Athenaeum, 1360 (1853), p. 1380. 41. Trench, Life’s a Dream, p. 112. 42. García Gómez, ‘Contextualización’, p. 172. 43. Denis Florence MacCarthy, Mysteries of Corpus Christi from the Spanish (Dublin: J. Duffy, 1867), p. 35. The autos, MacCarthy had explained in his



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44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Spanish Literature and Irish Romanticism, 1800–50 1853 volumes, were ‘short allegorical entertainments for the festival of Corpus Christi’, Dramas of Calderon, II, p. 395. They were shorter than the comedias (i.e. tragedies or comedies). MacCarthy, Mysteries, p. 35. Some years before he attributed the lack of interest in Calderón in England to ‘the injudicious extremes to which his foreign admirers have gone in their idolatry’. Dramas of Calderon, I, p. xv. MacCarthy, ‘The Purgatory of St Patrick’, p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. Dramas of Calderon, I, p. xiii. August Wilhelm Schlegel. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (1815, repr. London: George Bell & Sons, 1894), p. 503. Ibid., p. 504. Dramas of Calderon, II, p. 397. Percy Shelley, ‘Preface to The Cenci’, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 143, n. 9. Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 2 vols (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980), I, p. 290.



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Robert Burns and Hibernia: Irish Romanticism and Caledonia’s Bard Stephen Dornan

In 2004 Ian Duncan wrote that ‘the term Romanticism has come under intense scrutiny and debate in literary studies in Great Britain and North America in the last couple of decades. Only very recently has that debate begun to address the term’s anglocentric underpinnings.’1 The process that Duncan alludes to has accelerated in recent years in the face of the increasing recognition of the importance of archipelagic forces in the creation of literature in these islands and in the rise and consolidation of Irish and Scottish Studies as a field of enquiry. This project had its genesis in historical scholarship, particularly in the influential ideas of J. G. A. Pocock.2 The significance of such ideas in relation to literature of the Romantic period was recognized in the ground-breaking work of Katie Trumpener, who re-evaluated the work of Irish and Scottish fiction writers of the period.3 More recently this project has expanded into poetry and begun to explore the importance of Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the imagination of English Romantics, and has also argued for the importance of these places as sites for the production of Romantic literature.4 Despite the slowly increasing visibility of Scottish and Irish writers in Romantic studies, Robert Burns remains a somewhat peripheral figure. This is despite the fact that some of most influential scholars on the work of Burns over the last half-century have been convincingly making the case for liberating his work from traditional and popular readings that see him as only narrowly relevant to a Scottish vernacular poetic tradition. Raymond Bentman, for example, argues against ‘hermetically sealing him off from the period he lived in’.5 Indeed, there are tangible connections between Burns and several of the most familiar English Romantics. His project in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, to sing ‘the sentiments and manners he felt in himself and his rustic compeers, 59



4

Robert Burns and Hibernia

in his and their native language’ pre-echoes Wordsworth’s celebrated imprecation that poets use ‘the real language of men’ in their productions. Furthermore, both Wordsworth and Keats venerated Burns with poems dedicated to his memory.6 Despite these connections Burns remains a peripheral figure in Romantic studies, although several critics, most notably Fiona Stafford, have challenged this.7 The widening of the Romantic canon and the onset of archipelagic paradigms provides a framework in which the traditionally peripheral Romanticisms of Ireland and Scotland can engage with canonical Romantic poets and with one another. This has culminated recently in a collection of essays edited by David Duff and Catherine Jones and in a monograph by Murray Pittock.8 Burns’s contribution to Romanticism has received some attention in these texts, but there is plenty more to be said. This chapter will re-evaluate the work of the most celebrated Scottish poet of the period in the light of these developments and particularly in relation to Irish writing of the Romantic period. The chapter will begin by reassessing Burns’s impact on the writing of Ulster. It will then take two of the elements that Pittock argues characterize the distinctive Irish and Scottish Romanticism and show how these apply to the work of Burns and Irish writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Pittock contends that two of the key elements in Irish and Scottish Romanticism were ‘the use of hybrid language and variable register’ and ‘the inflection of genre towards a distinctively national agenda of selfhood’.9 Both of these were central to Burns’s aesthetic and this chapter will argue that his work encouraged a number of important Irish writers to make similar aesthetic choices. Research on Burns’s impact on Ireland has focused on Ulster, which was an obvious nexus between Ireland and Scotland, and home to a numerous Presbyterian population with strong cultural and linguistic affiliations to south-west Scotland. The Scots vernacular verse of the group of Ulster poets often problematically conglomerated under the term ‘weaver poets’ has received most attention. Burns’s importance to these writers and the literary culture of this region has been appreciated since John Hewitt’s pioneering work of literary archaeology, Rhyming Weavers, and decades of neglect has been remedied by the research of Ivan Herbison, Liam McIlvanney and Carol Baranuik.10 A recent collection of essays edited by Frank Ferguson and Andrew Holmes is devoted to Burns’s considerable impact on the culture and literature of the long nineteenth century.11 Given this abundance of research it is tempting to conclude that the popularity of Burns in Ulster relates to the existence of a cultural unit that spanned the North Channel. But some of



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this recent scholarship has begun to hint at the complexity of Burns’s influence in Ireland and to suggest that it is reductive to see him simply as the champion and voice of the linguistic and cultural community to which Ulster Presbyterians felt attached. The Ulster dimension of Burns’s impact on Irish writing is crucial, but even this is complex and polysemous. For poets such as Samuel Thomson and James Orr, Burns’s deployment of vernacular idiom and use of Scots genres was inspirational, and Burns could be viewed as the vernacular, democratic and ironically barbed bard of the religious satire; however, there were other aspects to their appreciation of Burns. For example, when Thomson visited Burns in 1794 he chose to mark the occasion not with a Scots epistle or address in the rollicking style of Burns, but with a formal adulatory poem in blank verse inspired by Ben Jonson.12 Meanwhile, James Orr seems to have all but abandoned the vernacular after the publication of his first collection in 1804, though his poetry retained the sentimental humanism associated with a strand of Burns’s work, as well as his political engagement. Burns’s influence is also evident in the work of the Ulster novelist James McHenry, although Walter Scott’s novels provide a more obvious model for his work. McHenry championed Ulster Presbyterian culture and stated that, in comparison with the Scots: ‘their manners, feelings, views of propriety, habits of industry, and their religious rites and opinions, are similar, or differ in only as slight a degree as their dialects’.13 Given McHenry’s interest in dialect and cultural connections between Ulster and Scotland it might be expected that Burns’s use of dialect would have been his key inspiration. However, McHenry’s own poetry was unapologetically neoclassical, and his references to Burns in his novels suggest a conception of the Scottish poet as a man of feeling and sentiment rather than a champion of non-standard language.14 When McHenry intertextually refers to Burns he typically uses texts that deploy Scots relatively sparingly, but which depict moments of tragedy or passion and consequently evoke the sentimental and melodramatic situations described in his romantic novels. Thus in O’Halloran and The Wilderness, McHenry quotes from works such as ‘Man was Made to Mourn’, ‘Highland Mary’, ‘Sweet Fa’s the Eve’, ‘Song of Death’, ‘Winter’ and ‘Lament, occasioned by the unfortunate issue of a friend’s amour’. The collections of a number of recondite Ulster poets, such as Hugh Tynan and David Colhoun, demonstrate yet another way in which Burns’s success impinged on the literary culture of Ireland as both prefaces prominently invoke Burns, though Colhoun uses Scots forms and idiom only sparsely while Tynan does not use them at all. Tynan’s



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The present age, though not pregnant with writers of the first class, is distinguished by its number of minor poets. We have found amusement and delight, in the unlettered muse of an Ayrshire Ploughman, a farmer’s boy, a Bristol milkmaid and Chatterton.15 Burns’s company in this extract, and the condescending tone, hardly do justice to the sophistication of his verse, but he is identified as a key figure in an archipelagic literary trend within which Tynan’s volume can be situated. David Colhoun, the self-styled ‘Shepherd of Mary Grey’, from County Tyrone, is similarly presented by his editor as an Irish manifestation of a literary phenomenon already established in Scotland and England: At least the names of Falkinor [sic], Burns, and Bloomfield, which have shed a genuine lustre over their respective countries, leave no unsanctioned promise to the corresponding genius of Ireland. And surely, our Nation, once the favoured light of song, should not alone refuse a fostering ray to the spontaneous productions of the mind!16 Tynan and Colhoun are just two of a plethora of poets with purported natural genius from across the archipelago who ventured into print in the wake of Burns. In this context the Ayrshire bard was viewed as the catalyst for an outpouring of verse from writers whose social backgrounds would traditionally have excluded them from producing formal collections of verse. John Goodridge’s extensive anthology of labouring-class poets gives Burns a prominent position, and indeed the disproportionate Scottish contribution to the canon that he constructs is clear, despite the unfortunate use of ‘English’ in the anthology’s title. He does, however, underestimate the scale of Ulster’s contribution to this tradition – a contribution that was generated largely by Burns’s example.17 The different ways in which Thomson, Orr, McHenry, Tynan and Colhoun react to Burns demonstrate the complex and varied influence of Burns even within literary circles in Ulster. As Dermody and Moore’s tributes to Burns suggest, this is replicated when the whole island is considered. It perhaps should not be surprising that Burns was



editor nevertheless mentions Burns as an exemplar, along with Robert Bloomfield, Anne Yearsley and Thomas Chatterton. These ‘unlettered’ poets are set up as notable manifestations of a literary movement to which Tynan might be aligned:

invoked in such a variety of ways given the complex and fluctuating poetic voices that he creates and his engagement with pressing issues pertaining to language, class, politics, religion and nationalism. The malleability of Burns’s voice and an elusive quality to his work has been recognized for some time in a strand of Scottish literary criticism. In the mid-nineteenth century Edwin Muir was already aware of Burns’s malleability as he argued that he ‘is a myth evolved by the popular imagination, a communal poetic creation, a Protean figure; we can all shape him to our own likeness, for a myth is endlessly adaptable’.18 Kenneth Simpson repeated this metaphor by allowing Burns a prominent position in his study The Protean Scot, and while the conclusions he draws on eighteenth-century Scottish culture are perhaps problematic, Simpson is right to notice ‘the range of voices in Burns’s poems and the fluctuations of voice within individual poems’.19 Jeffrey Skoblow perhaps takes this furthest when he reflects that in the Kilmarnock edition Burns’s voices and textual strategies are so complex that he has effectively ‘disappeared many times’ during the course of the collection.20 Burns’s malleability meant that a range of Irish writers, from Ulster and other parts of island, fed on different aspects of his achievement, used him as an exemplar. Two notable examples are the poets Thomas Dermody and Thomas Moore. In 1795 Thomas Dermody, a prodigious but temperamental adolescent poet based in Killeigh, County Offaly, composed a series of poems based on models from the Scots vernacular tradition that had been popularized by Burns. In them Dermody used Scottish forms and vernacular language to evoke the energy and conviviality of the characters that frequented his local hostelry, and to describe their culture and pursuits. Twenty-four years later, in June 1819, Thomas Moore paid a very different kind of homage to Burns when he was among the stewards for a dinner designed to raise funds for the erection of a monument in memory of his Scottish predecessor. Moore’s enthusiasm in this role is evidenced by his claim that his party at the dinner contributed over a quarter of the total raised despite numbering only ten out of more than 350 attendees.21 The connections between Moore and Burns might not be immediately obvious, given that the former is often viewed as a purveyor of drawing room melodies, while the latter is usually celebrated for his racy vernacular poetry. But perhaps Dermody’s engagement with Burns is even more enigmatic. Dermody had fled from unfavourable family circumstances in County Clare and arrived in Dublin as a destitute tatterdemalion at the age of ten. The discovery of his Classical knowledge



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and poetic potential, however, caused a stir among the Dublin literati, several of whom championed and supported him before he was placed in the guardianship of Henry Boyd, a Church of Ireland clergyman, published poet and respected translator.22 Neither Dermody’s Classical background, his academic and ascendancy guardian, nor his geographical associations with south and central Ireland, well outside the most traditionally Scots influenced regions of the island, would appear to be ingredients conducive to the emergence of Scots-influenced verse. These are just two of many examples, but taken together they are emblematic of how pervasive the Scottish bard’s influence was in Ireland in the decades after his meteoric rise to fame. The attractions of Burns for Dermody were in fact manifold; on an aesthetic level Dermody seems to have admired the energy of Burns’s Scots forms and vernacular idiom and style, but he also admired Burns as a prominent example of a natural genius, and cultivated a similar persona in his own verse, while on a biographical level the young Dermody was compelled by Burns’s purported moral waywardness, pecuniary difficulties and controversial political sympathies, all of which had parallels in his own experience and caused him to see himself and his Scottish exemplar as ‘arcades ambo’.23 But the ability to fuse different traditions, and to juxtapose different registers and competing elements from high and popular culture is especially tangible in Dermody’s oeuvre and central to his Killeigh poems. In this respect Burns’s models seem perfectly equipped to articulate the competing cultural influences felt by a young poet with Classical endowments and expectations but a coexisting taste for the energetic popular culture associated with the tavern and its milieu. Murray Pittock argues that the tendency to use mixed language and variable register was a key characteristic of Irish and Scottish Romanticism. Burns is certainly an obvious example of a writer whose work displayed linguistic hybridity and is something that Dermody sought to emulate in his Killeigh poems. It has become a truism of contemporary Burns criticism that Burns’s achievement lies not simply in his use of dialect, but in the hybridity of his radically mixed language, and his ability to juxtapose and fluidly slip between competing registers. Robert Crawford, for example, argues that Burns’s ‘linguistic spectrum extends more widely than either Scots or English, taking in both’. He adds that ‘Burns often writes as if the political Union of 1707 has effected a linguistic union, giving him an enlarged territory in which to operate.’24 To this linguistic hybridity we might add a tendency to deploy elements from both the Scots and English literary traditions. The



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work of James Kinsley, Carol McGuirk, Liam McIlvanney, Fiona Stafford and others has demonstrated the range of Burns’s reading and his ability to engage with both Scots and English literary traditions through intertexuality and the literary conventions and genres that he deploys. Dermody’s ‘Farewell to Killeigh’ is a salient example of a poem that is reminiscent of Burns in its linguistic hybridity and its allusions to both the vernacular and Augustan literary traditions. The poem is written in ‘standard Habbie’, the distinctive six-line stanza form associated particularly with the Scottish vernacular revival of the eighteenth century, and at times recalls Burns’s epistles both in its tone of bantering conviviality and its thematic focus on fraternity and sociability. It is also reminiscent of Burns’s valedictory, ‘On a Scotch Bard, Gone to the West Indies’, which was composed on his planned departure to Jamaica in 1786 and in which the bard speaker bids farewell to the nurturing community that he is leaving. Dermody, as Burns often did, positions his text in a liminal space between competing literary traditions and linguistic registers. The poem opens as follows: At last, while you’ve been heedless napping, Egad, I’m ready just for hopping: There’s neither staying now nor stopping, But dash away; Perchance your bard no more may drop in, To make you gay.25 This stanza evokes a sense of energetic orality, which is exacerbated by the racy rhythm of the Habbie stanza and the feminine rhymes. Dermody uses vernacular idiom such as the light oath ‘Egad’ and an informal register represented by terms such as ‘hopping’, ‘drop in’ and ‘napping’; the latter word is derived from the foaming ale known as ‘nappy’ and, therefore, in this instance denotes drinking, and contributes to the easy informality of the opening. Examples of dialectal vocabulary also occur throughout the poem, including the Scots word ‘bairns’. On the other hand, however, Dermody includes a number of examples of Augustan poetic diction; an example is his reference to his imminent departure ‘o’er the envious main’. Indeed, in the second stanza Dermody alludes to Classical culture by imagining his friends memorializing him with a bust in the manner of Classical and neoclassical monuments as he says ‘Howe’er, I hope you’ll place my head / Upon a column white and red’. This aspiration towards Classical



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lionization is perhaps frivolously made, but Dermody, nevertheless, depicts the culture of the tavern as having a strong intellectual dimension. Despite the apparently ‘low’ debauchery and inebriation, this milieu is not characterized by philistinism or ignorance. Rather, the hostelry is the site of a vibrant and popular, if informal intellectualism where ‘Shakespeare fills each pate so fine’ and where the poet would ‘So deeply muse, / O’er pamphlet bare, or dusty news’ and ‘antiquities peruse / With craving eye.’ The speaker’s own poetic effusions are part of this literary and intellectual culture as he composed ‘love-sonnets’, ‘hudibrastics’ and ‘elegies’ for the entertainment of the community. The culture that Dermody evokes is, therefore, as hybrid as his mixed language and register, and is marked by coexisting high and low elements. In ‘Farewell to Killeigh’ he encapsulates this through a Shakespearean allusion, when he invokes the dichotomy between the ethereal Ariel and the atavistic Caliban in The Tempest; he and his circle are ‘Ready with Ariel to commune, / Or Caliban.’ Burns’s tendency to mix registers is certainly something that several Irish poets admired, and it was this that Dermody drew on in his enigmatic Killeigh poems. Such linguistic and generic hybridity is also evident in the work of James Orr and, significantly, his ‘Elegy on the Death of Mr Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Poet’ is a notable example. Orr alludes to the hybrid nature of Burns’s work at several points in this poem; his verse is described as ‘sublime, yet simple, wild yet wise’, and as appealing across class divisions, as it ‘baith amus’d / The man o’ taste, an’ taught the rude’. Given that Orr appreciated this aspect of Burns’s work, it seems fitting that his elegy on his Scottish contemporary should display such hybridity. This is encoded in the very form that Orr uses and the generic tensions evident in his tribute. In the opening stanza Orr writes: The lift begud a storm to brew, The cloudy sun was vext an’ dark; A forket flash cam sklentin thro’ Before a hawk, that chased a lark; Then, as I ran to reach a booth, I met a swain an’ ax’t ‘what news?’ When thus he mourned the far-famed youth Wha fills the dark, an’ narrow hoose.26 The language here is clearly a mixture of vernacular Scots and standard English. Interestingly, however, Orr chooses not to use the Scots vernacular elegy, a genre he used elsewhere and one that recurs time and



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again in the Scots tradition from Robert Sempill’s ‘The Life and Death of Habbie Simson’ until the nineteenth century. This form mingled humour and pathos and was often composed on eccentric or charismatic characters who occupied a specific role or profession within the community. It provided an alternative to the bombastic Classical utterances often composed on public figures and mixed genuine, though sometimes hyperbolic pathos and a humorous, anecdotal style. Orr chooses not to use this established vernacular elegiac mode, however, presumably on the grounds that Burns’s loss had a wider impact than that exerted on localities in ‘Habbie’ elegies. There are in fact elements of the Augustan elegy present in this poem, particularly in Orr’s use of pathetic fallacy, both in the sombre and atmospheric opening, and at the conclusion when ‘A noble peal convuls’d the skies’, is configured as ‘Nature’s sel respectin’ BURNS’. This echoes a poetic convention used in many Augustan and pastoral elegies including Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, ‘Whom universal nature did lament.’27 Descriptions of the natural world symbolically mourning the death of a favoured individual were also used by Burns himself in formal elegies such as ‘On the Death of Lord President Dundas’ and also in his own generically hybrid ‘Elegy, on Captain Matthew Henderson’.28 In Orr’s hybrid piece the formality and conventionality of the Augustan elegy is problematized by the use of Scots vernacular idiom in particular passages, and also by his versification as he chooses iambic tetrameter, rather than the more bombastic pentameter often used in formal elegies. The tendency to mix registers is also an important aspect of Irish fiction of the early nineteenth century, and a number of Irish prose writers, including Maria Edgeworth, James McHenry, John Banim and Gerald Griffin, allude to Burns in their polyglossic works. But of the Irish fiction writers of the period it is perhaps the work of William Carleton, the man who William Butler Yeats called ‘our great prose Burns’, that provides the most germane comparison with the work of the Scottish bard.29 Carleton was certainly aware of Burns’s work and used his poems as intertexts in several of his works of fiction. Indeed, critical reactions to Carleton’s work often echoed traditional reactions to Burns, particularly as regards the pervasive notion that the work of both writers embodied contradictions. For example, Byron famously, and fairly typically, described Burns as ‘an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay’.30 John Montague noticed similar contradictions in Carleton’s work, which



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caused him to remark that ‘parts read like genius undiluted, the rest like the intemperate ravings of a bigot’.31 These somewhat perplexed reactions to the work of the two writers were presumably a response, at least in part, to the hybrid nature of their work and the fluctuating voices and registers that characterize their aesthetic choices. Maurice Harmon argues that in Carleton’s work ‘the narrative voice … varies so much that it is impossible to identify one particular voice as distinctly his’.32 Such elusiveness was also characteristic of many of Burns’s speakers, a striking example of which occurs in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Carleton’s ‘The Battle of the Factions’, which appeared in the first series of his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, seems to borrow techniques from Burns’s masterpiece, though both are clearly influenced by the conventions of oral narration. Harmon notices the fluidity of the narrative voice in ‘The Battle of the Factions’, which seems alternatively distanced from, and vitally and emotionally involved in the action. At times the narrator, named as Pat Frayne the school teacher, aims for a dispassionate, learned tone as he explains the traditions of his subjects to his audience, but this frequently unravels in the face of his own involvement in the events, his excitement and his prejudices. He acknowledges his own role in the contentions with ‘them blackguards, the O’Hallagans’ and remembers with satisfaction a fight with one particular O’Hallagan ‘that knocked two of my grinders out, for which piece of civility I had the satisfaction of breaking a splinter or two in his carcase’.33 This tension between dispassionate reportage and emotional involvement is masterfully executed by Burns in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. At moments of emotion or arousal both narrators also betray their desires and become emotionally involved in their narrations. Pat Frayne, on contemplating the glance received by John O’Callaghan on rescuing and resuscitating his almost drowned lover, remarks that ‘I only wish, as I am a bachelor not further than my forty-fourth, that I may ever have the happiness to get such a glance from two blue eyes.’34 Similarly, though with less sentimentality, the speaker in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ forgets his moralizing when the sexually charged witches’ dance witnessed by Tam prompts him to admit that ‘had thae been queans, / A’ plump and strapping in their teens’, he would have parted with his best pair of trousers ‘For ae blink o’ the bonie burdies!’35 This fluidity also manifests itself on generic and linguistic levels in both texts. ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is advertised as ‘a tale’, and is reminiscent of oral narrations in its digressive structure and use of vernacular language, but this is combined with Burns’s highly literate allusions to the conventions



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of epic and mock-heroic poetry as well as his epigraph taken from Gavin Douglas’s sixteenth-century Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Carleton similarly makes use of the conventions of oral narration, but equally there is a humorous mock-heroic dimension to passages in ‘The Battle of the Factions’ when the fight is described in terms of a military engagement in statements such as ‘both parties now rallied, and ranged themselves along the street, exhibiting a firm compact phalanx’ and ‘sallies and charges were made on both sides’.36 Furthermore, in both texts, earthy vernacular is juxtaposed with verbose pomposity; thus the speaker in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ indulges in colourful mock-heroic apostrophes and moralizing asides, while Pat Frayne’s narration is marked by his incongruous Latinate malapropisms and a self-indulgent tendency to ‘wax poetical’.37 Burns influenced Carleton on a stylistic and aesthetic level despite their different literary mediums, but the work of both writers was also seen as a significant literary manifestation of cultural nationalism. The work of both writers was inflected towards the national and, therefore, links with the second of Pittock’s elements of Irish and Scottish Romanticism quoted above. Because of his interest in the language, culture and traditions of the Scottish peasantry, Burns was celebrated as ‘Caledonia’s bard’, and Carleton’s similar interest in the Irish lower orders rendered him an Irish equivalent in the eyes of some. His friend and collaborator, Caesar Otway, was one contemporary who noticed parallels. He wrote that ‘Carleton has been in the poetry of his prose to Ireland what Burns has been to Scotland in the poetry of his verse.’38 Both were viewed as liminal figures; they were seen as largely sympathetic chroniclers of indigenous national traditions, and both were depicted as having emerged from inside the cultures they represented, but they also had the requisite literary talents to transmit these cultures to polite and cosmopolitan audiences. Carleton, therefore, to some degree represents both dimensions of Burns’s influence on Irish writing as his work displayed linguistic hybridity and his fiction was inflected towards the national. It was Thomas Moore, however, who came closest to achieving the status of national writer that was afforded to Burns, particularly through his interest in the genre of the national song. Moore’s involvement in the Burns dinner demonstrates that he embraced the cultural practices of the early Burns cult, which were establishing and promoting Burns as a national bard. In his journal Moore records that on this occasion ‘My reception was most flattering – my name was never mentioned (and it was often by the speakers) without bringing applause and when



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I rose to speak, the people crowded from their seats towards my table – my own countrymen never received me with more enthusiasm.’39 The enthusiasm with which he was welcomed on this occasion suggests that the Burns enthusiasts, to some degree, perceived a connection between Burns’s achievements and Moore’s endeavours. This is also evident from a newspaper clipping concerning a Burns dinner in January 1843, which reported that Moore was ‘the only poet not Scotch mentioned’, a fact that gave him ‘much pleasure’.40 Moore maintained an interest in the Burns cult until late in his life, and expressed regret that he did not take up an invitation to a festival in Ayrshire in honour of Burns’s sons in 1843.41 Moore acknowledged Burns as an inspiration in the advertisement to his most celebrated work, Irish Melodies, where, commenting on the Irish music in his own collection, Moore speculates that ‘If Burns had been an Irishman (and I would willingly give up all our claims upon Ossian for him), his heart would have been proud of such music, and his genius would have made it immortal.’42 This was a sentiment extracted from Moore’s earlier letter to John Stevenson, and it demonstrates the esteem in which he held Burns’s achievement. Moore alludes to the controversy surrounding James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, and the national rivalry between Scotland and Ireland over ownership of the traditional material he mined. Moore implies that the achievement of Burns, and the virile and living national song tradition that he chronicled, was a more potent expression of cultural nationalism than the ancient, remote one represented by Ossian. This reference also suggests Moore’s interest in Burns’s creative techniques. His assertion that Burns would have recognized the value of the traditional airs, but that his ‘genius’ would have refreshed them and made the music ‘immortal’, demonstrates his similar understanding of the importance of matching suitable poetry with the traditional music. For Moore, like Burns, national song encompassed a simultaneous act of retrieval and creation, as new or amended words enriched the traditional airs. There were contrasts in terms of the two writers’ attitudes towards national song. Burns, for example, often used or amended traditional words; when collecting for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum he enthused to John Skinner that ‘I have been absolutely crazed about it, collecting old stanzas, and every information remaining, respecting their origin, authors, &c.’43 Moore, on the other hand, composed the poetry entirely. Furthermore, Burns connected national identity with Scots dialect in his songs while Moore rejected dialect as a marker of national identity. Another difference was that Moore was more candid



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regarding the political dimension to the words of many of his songs and acknowledged ‘those touches of political feeling, those tones of national complaint, in which the poetry sometimes sympathises with the music’.44 The predominant tone of Burns’s songs (if not his poetry generally), on the other hand, was pastoral naivety, which often precluded direct political commentary, although there are some celebrated exceptions, and politics could be encoded through a thematic focus on the lives, appetites and relationships of ordinary Scots.45 Burns’s own sense of the project as a culturally nationalist one is demonstrated by a letter to James Hoy written in the same month, in which Burns, having refused payment for his endeavours, remarks that his work was undertaken ‘not from mercenary views but from an honest Scotch enthusiasm’.46 Burns’s patriotic motivations, his status as national bard, and his ideas on the composition of songs all, to some degree, influenced Moore’s work. The widening of the Romantic canon and the increasing visibility of Scottish and Irish writers in Romantic Studies creates a space for the re-evaluation of the work of Burns in the context of an archipelagic Romanticism. This chapter has demonstrated that his work had a tangible influence on a range of important Irish writers. Dermody’s Killeigh poems demonstrate that the Scottish bard’s ideas on linguistic hybridity impacted on Irish writing, while Moore’s engagement with Burns represents his interest in the idea of an iconic national poet as the exponent of a national literature expressed particularly through the genre of national song. Although Burns was not the only literary figure whose work displayed these traits, and although the direct influence can be difficult to quantify, his work certainly resonates with much Irish literature of the period, and there are tangible and demonstrable links. For a number of Irish writers his aesthetic choices were to be emulated, particularly his tendency to juxtapose competing registers and to create literature that fused elements from competing literary traditions. For other writers the national inflection of his poetry and songs, and his status as Scotland’s national bard, were templates for Irish writers to emulate. The resonances of Burns’s work in Ireland, therefore, point to a series of common concerns in the Romanticisms of Scotland and Ireland.

Notes 1. Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, eds Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1.



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2. See also John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) for an extended piece of archipelagic thinking on the literature of the seventeenth century. 3. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4. See English Romanticism and the Celtic World, eds Alan Rawes and Gerard Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Wales and the Romantic Imagination, eds Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 5. Robert Bentman, Robert Burns (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1987), p. 104. 6. Wordsworth wrote a standard Habbie elegy ‘At the Grave of Burns’ when he visited Scotland in 1803. Keats wrote a sonnet ‘On visiting the Tomb of Burns’ in 1816. 7. See Fiona Stafford, ‘Scottish Poetry and Regional Literary Expression’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 340–62. 8. Scotland, Ireland and the Romantic Aesthetic, eds David Duff and Catherine Jones (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 9. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p. 7. 10. See John Hewitt, Rhyming Weavers and other Country Poets of Antrim and Down (1974; Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2004); Ivan Herbison, ‘The Rest is Silence: Some Remarks on the Disappearance of Ulster Scots Poetry’, in Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland: Varieties of Scottishness, eds John Erskine and Gordon Lucy (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997), pp. 129–45; Liam McIlvanney, ‘Across the Narrow Sea: The Language, Literature and Politics of the Ulster Scots’, in Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, eds Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004), pp. 203–26; Carol Baranuik, ‘James Orr: Ulster-Scot and Poet of the 1798 Rebellion’, Scottish Studies Review, 6, 1 (2005), pp. 22–32. 11. Revising Robert Burns and Ulster, eds Frank Ferguson and Andrew R. Holmes (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). 12. Samuel Thomson, The Country Rhymes of Samuel Thomson, The Folk Poets of Ulster Series, vol. 3 (Bangor: Pretani Press, 1992), pp. 45–6. 13. James McHenry, The Wilderness; or Braddock’s Times. A Tale of the West, 2 vols (New York: E Bliss & E White, 1823), I, p. ii. 14. For an extended analysis of Burns in the context of the age of sentiment, see Carol McGuirk, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985). 15. Hugh Tynan, Poems, by the Late Hugh Tynan of Donaghadee (Belfast: J Smith, 1803), p. ii. 16. David Colhoun, Poems, on Several Occasions, 2 vols (Strabane: n.p., 1810), II, p. iv. 17. English Labouring Class Poets, 1700–1900, ed. John Goodridge, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). 18. Edwin Muir, ‘Burns and Popular Poetry’, reproduced in Edwin Muir, Uncollected Scottish Criticism, ed. Andrew Noble (London: Vision, 1982), p. 193.



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19. Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1998), p. 185. 20. Jeffrey Skoblow, Dooble Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 191. 21. The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 6 vols (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1983–91), I, p. 183. 22. See James Grant Raymond, Life of Thomas Dermody, 2 vols (London: W Miller, 1806). 23. Thomas Dermody, ‘Tam to Rab: An Odaic Epistle’, in Poems (Dublin: J Jones, 1792), p. 53. 24. Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 102. 25. Thomas Dermody, Harp of Erin, 2 vols (London: R Phillips, 1807), I, p. 232. 26. James Orr, ‘Elegy on the Death of Robert Burns’, in Poems on Various Subjects (Belfast: Smith & Lyons, 1804), p. 29. 27. John Milton, Works, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson, 20 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), I, p. 78. 28. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), III, p. 1287. 29. William Carleton, the Authentic Voice, ed. Gordon Brand (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2006), p. 78. 30. Byron, quoted in Burns: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Low (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 258. 31. Brand, William Carleton, p. 89. 32. Ibid., p. 251. 33. William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 2 vols (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990), I, p. 117. 34. Ibid., I, p. 131. 35. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, II, p. 562. 36. Carleton, Traits and Stories, I, p. 138. 37. Ibid., I, p. 121. 38. Quoted in Brand, William Carleton, p. 18. 39. The Journal of Thomas Moore, I, p. 183. 40. Ibid., VI, p. 2317. 41. Ibid., VI, pp. 2397–8. 42. Moore, Letter to Sir John Stevenson (February 1807), The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), I, pp. 116–17. 43. Burns, Letter to John Skinner (25 October 1787), The Complete Letters of Robert Burns, ed. James A. Mackay (Ayr: Alloway Publishing, 1987), p. 363. 44. Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies (London: A & G Spottiswoode, 1856), p. 208. 45. See Liam McIlvanney, Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Phantassie Lodge, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2001) for commentary on the politics of Burns’s bawdry. 46. Burns, Letter to James Hoy (20 October 1787), Letters, p. 361.



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The Irish Writer Abroad





‘Transatlantic Tom’: Thomas Moore in North America Jane Moore

From his first published verse, which appeared in Dublin’s Sentimental and Masonic Magazine in 1795, Thomas Moore wrote lyric poetry for over 50 years. For nearly as long Moore also wrote satire: in Bermuda, England, France, Ireland and the US, in Juvenalian, Horatian and Menippean modes, in book-length satire and newspaper squib, and in novel, poem and burletta. This chapter focuses on a relatively unfamiliar aspect of the early part of Moore’s long career, the satires and lyrics written during the poet’s visit to North America of 1803–4, a body of work that has something remarkable about it, given that it is strikingly different from much of Moore’s mature verse. His satires on America have little in common with the brilliant Regency anapaests that made his satirical name and began with his succès de scandale, ‘Parody of a Celebrated Letter’ (1812), the work that established Moore’s reputation as the bête noir of the Tory government and Prince George. Similarly, his Canadian lyric poetry has more of the sublime about it than much of that which came before it – the twin books of amatory verse, the Odes of Anacreon (1800) and The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (1801) – and that which followed – the first instalment of the Irish Melodies (1808). The dual, and almost contradictory, aspects of Moore’s work, as brilliant satirist and Romantic nationalist, can be seen in embryo in his American poetry, and this early work is vital to understanding the transatlantic dimension of British and European Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Moore (Byron apart) became the satirical Whig voice of Regency Britain in 1812. The Prince of Wales, newly apprised of the fact that his father’s descent into madness had elevated him to the Regency, had a decision to make. Would he, as many politicians expected, dismiss the Tories whom his father had favoured for most of the last 77



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‘Transatlantic Tom’

40 years and bring into the ministry his friends among the Whigs, whom he had – much to King George’s disapprobation – cultivated so assiduously? We know the answer, though it is now, of course, denuded of the cataclysmic power that it possessed in its day. The Ministry stood: the Prince Regent had switched political allegiance. In his defence, George wrote to his brother, the Duke of Clarence, offering the selfrighteous justification that ‘my sense of duty to our Royal Father’ had persuaded him to keep the Tories in power. His quondam Whig friends, however, were not similarly persuaded.1 There was one form of consolation to disappointed Whigs: a witty pasquinade, ‘Parody of a Celebrated Letter’, an anonymous manuscript satire written in mid to late February 1812 and widely circulated before being published in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner newspaper. This dangerous piece of mischief ridicules the Regent’s pretensions to filial piety (his long-standing political disloyalty to the King was, of course, a matter of record). Moore parodies the text of the original letter to the Duke of Clarence, making sport with the Regent’s choicest phrase, much quoted in the newspapers of the day, ‘I have no predilection.’2 Intended as a statement of royal duty to his father, the Regent’s letter is satirically recast by Moore as an expression of his fluctuating loyalties: I am proud to declare I have no predilections; My heart is a sieve, where some scatter’d affections Are just danc’d about for a moment or two, And the finer they are, the more sure to run through3 The barely veiled reference to the Regent’s catalogue of cast-off mistresses brands the philandering heir presumptive as a man devoid of principles and unfit to govern. Before Leigh Hunt’s damning indictment of the Regent in 1812 (mocking royal toadies who had described the ‘corpulent gentleman of fifty’ as an ‘Adonis in Loveliness’),4 which landed him in gaol for two years’ imprisonment, the first to the satirical chorus was an Irish poet who had made his name with his amatory early verses. Thomas Moore was from then on – Bryon excepted – the most notable satirist of the post-Napoleonic period. The poet, at least in terms of the UK, made his satirical name with the ‘Parody of a Celebrated Letter’. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not the twin subjects of Ireland and the iniquities of British Toryism that inform his earliest satirical work. Moore had been writing intermittently in that genre for a decade and more, and whatever offence he caused by the ‘Parody’ was dwarfed by the stir he had raised in the US by his very first



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satirical writings in which he attacked a President rather than a Prince. Like Charles Dickens after him, a Whig writer found himself prompted to satire by the disappointments of the infant republic. Both men arrived with high expectations that were unmet. Both men in expressing their disillusionment – Moore in his Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806) and Dickens in American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4) – caused a degree of outrage in the US, and both subsequently recanted their earlier views. Moore, the lifelong Whig, remarkably found the men of the oppositionalist Federalist party (the ‘American Tories’ who opposed President Thomas Jefferson as a dangerous radical) rather more to his taste than the Jeffersonian Republicans. The initial object of Moore’s satirical writing in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems was what Moore saw as the hypocrisy of American politics – represented by Jefferson – and the social vulgarity of the Washington nouveau riche. Even before reaching the seat of state power, Moore had been appalled at the sights he witnessed at Norfolk, Virginia, a place with which he became unhappily acquainted at the beginning of his travels. Moore sailed to Norfolk in November 1803 en route to Bermuda, where he had been appointed to the post of Registrar of the Naval Prize Court, through the patronage of the Anglo-Irish Whig grandee and partisan of the Prince of Wales, Lord Moira, to whom Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems is dedicated. Moore found Bermuda delightful; his appreciation of the local landscape and, notably, its female inhabitants, are expressed in a series of verses included in the volume. The duties of the Prize Court, on the other hand, proved less absorbing so Moore appointed a deputy and left Bermuda at the end of April 1804, heading first for America and then Canada before returning to England in November of that year. In November 1803 the city of Norfolk had not been long released from the deadly grip of a yellow fever epidemic, and it seemed to Moore, who arrived on the tail end of the disaster, that he had landed in the wilderness, or worse. ‘This Norfolk’, he wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘is a most strange place; nothing to be seen in the streets but dogs and negroes, and the few ladies that pass for white are to be sure the most unlovely pieces of crockery I ever set my eyes upon.’5 On the other hand, he was delighted to find a harpsichord, ‘which looked like civilization’, in the drawing room of Colonel Hamilton, the British consul. Little else pleased him, however, and he lamented the absence of ‘cultured society’. Music, here, he concluded, ‘is like whistling to a wilderness’.6 The outlook was not much brighter in Washington, DC, where Moore was disappointed not only by the cultural barrenness he had



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I went to America with prepossessions by no means unfavourable, and indeed rather indulged in many of those illusive ideas, with respect to the purity of the government and the primitive happiness of the people, which I had early imbibed in my native country, where, unfortunately, discontent at home enhances every distant temptation, and the western world has long been looked to as a retreat from real or imaginary oppression; as, in short, the elysian Atlantis, where persecuted patriots might find their visions realised, and be welcomed by kindred spirits to liberty and repose.7 What he actually encountered was democracy made barbarous by political rancour, hypocrisy and licentiousness, exemplified by the (wellfounded) rumour that President Jefferson kept a slave as his mistress. Moore vented his spleen in three rancorous satiric epistles. ‘Epistle VI’, addressed from the City of Washington, to Lord Viscount Forbes, an apparently incorruptible young Irish peer whom Moore knew in London and who had been one of the 21 Irish nobles to protest publicly at the Act of Union, satirizes the vanity of youthful idealism and the collapse of the revolutionary dream. In his vituperative anti-American, anti-Jeffersonian invective, Moore wields the Federalist baton to attack the third President of the US as a disciple of ‘Gallia’s school’: —ev’n now, While yet upon Columbia’s rising brow The showy smile of young presumption plays, Her bloom is poison’d and her heart decays. Even now, in dawn of life, her sickly breath Burns with the taint of empires near their death; And, like the nymphs of her own withering clime, She’s old in youth, she’s blasted in her prime! Already has the child of Gallia’s school The foul Philosophy that sins by rule, With all her train of reasoning, damning arts, Begot by brilliant heads on worthless hearts, Like things that quicken after Nilus’ flood,



experienced in Norfolk but also, to his greater displeasure, by what struck him as rank political hypocrisy, an evil for which he was unprepared, given his high expectations of life in the infant Republic. He later wrote in the preface to the Epistles:

The venom’d birth of sunshine and of mud! Already has she pour’d her poison here O’er every charm that makes existence dear; Already blighted, with her blackening trace, The opening bloom of every social grace, And all those courtesies, that love to shoot Round virtue’s stem, the flow’rets of her fruit.8 Despite some conventional imagery, in terms of its metrical balance and tonal shrewdness, this is relatively skilled work given that Moore was still a young man at the time of its composition. Take the clever use of Popean balance and antithesis in the following lines: Who can, with patience, for a moment see The medley mass of pride and misery, Of whips and charters, manacles and rights, Of slaving blacks and democratic whites9 As satires in the neoclassical mode, Moore’s American epistles acquire meaning through their formal precision and controlled design, but there is also poignancy here, and a sense that this is a protest from the heart. As Moore saw it, President Jefferson had sunk American democracy to its lowest depths. Apart from the political faux pas of keeping a slave as his mistress, stories circulated of several minor, if socially significant, incivilities. Reportedly, Jefferson had slighted Mr Merry, the British minister in Washington, by greeting him in heel-worn slippers, ‘both pantaloons, coat, and underclothes indicative of utter slovenliness’.10 Merry (and by proxy, Moore too) was further affronted when at a formal White House banquet Jefferson ignored diplomatic procedure in favour of what he called the ‘pele-mele’ system of seating arrangements, allowing a member of the House of Representatives to step ahead of the British ambassador to sit by the wife of the Spanish Ambassador.11 When Merry actually presented Moore to Jefferson (who allegedly received him in silence), the poet, perhaps in a small act of revenge against the President’s perceived discourtesy, reported the event in a letter to his mother without the fanfare such a notable meeting might be deemed to merit: he noted merely, ‘I was presented by Mr. Merry to both the secretary of state and the president.’12 ‘Epistle VII’, also written from Washington and addressed to Thomas Hume (a fellow Dubliner who had taken Moore under his wing on



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’Tis evening now; the heats and cares of day In twilight dews are calmly wept away. The lover now, beneath the western star, Sighs through the medium of his sweet segar, And fills the ears of some consenting she With puffs and vows, with smoke and constancy!13 But this is a deliberately false note. The consoling sweetness of the opening lines leads into a depiction of the democratic president seeking succour in the arms of his slave-mistress. The weary statesman for repose hath fled From halls of council to his negro’s shed Where blest he woos some black Aspasia’s grace, And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace!14 Moore’s footnote to the last line of the quotation reads: ‘The “black Aspasia” of the present ********* of the United States, “inter Avernales haud ignotissima nymphas”, [“not the least known amongst the nymphs of Avernus”], has given rise to much pleasantry among the anti-democratic wits in America.’ (The Latin comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, V. 540 and signals, in context, a loss of innocence.) Moore found a de facto political home in Philadelphia among the politically conservative, but, as he saw it, pleasingly cultured Federalist Party and the group of wits connected with the party’s literary organ, The Port Folio. Anglophile and anti-French, the Federalists prided themselves on their superior breeding, mocking Jefferson’s perceived ill manners and hypocritical politics as two sides of the same coin, a view that Moore happily shared. The Federalists were also the party to which much of the most potent post-Popean American satire (the antidemocratic wits) had adhered, in the early work of Joel Barlow before his conversion to the Democratic Party and in that of the ‘Connecticut wits’ of Timothy and Theodore Dwight, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop and others who condemned Jefferson as a treacherous atheistical Francophile democrat.15 Moore’s preference for urbane Federalist conversation was perhaps helped by the warm acknowledgement which he received in



his arrival in London in 1799) steps up the protest. Directed again at Jefferson’s pro-slavery government, the satire opens in sentimental vein:

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My reception at Philadelphia was extremely flattering: it is the only place in America which can boast any literary society, and my name had prepossessed them more strongly than I deserve. But their affectionate attentions went far beyond this deference to reputation; I was quite caressed while there; and their anxiety to make me known, by introductory letters, to all their friends on my way, and two or three little poems of a very flattering kind, which some of their choicest men addressed to me, all went so warmly to my heart, that I felt quite a regret in leaving them; and the only place I have seen, which I had one wish to pause in, was Philadelphia.16 Moore’s revulsion at the hypocrisy over slavery by the Democrats (and his frequently expressed squeamishness as to their coarse manners) led to the poet repudiating a politics that closely mirrored his own Whiggish caste in favour of the more gentlemanly neo-Toryism of the Federalists. That said, even the respite conservative Philadelphian society provided from the degradations of Washington did little to correct Moore’s unfavourable impressions of American life, which were accompanied by a strong sense of his own cultural superiority. In later years his American sojourn was not seen as Moore’s finest hour and the poet would come to regret his youthful snobbery, his early condescending attitude to the US, and his uncharacteristic dissension from liberal politics. Indeed, in July 1818, installed in his role of chief literary satirist for the Whig opposition in England, he wholly recanted his former viewpoint: I retract every syllable injurious to the great cause of Liberty, which my hasty view of America and her society provoked me into uttering.17 The Epistles, however, remained banned from American bookstalls in the decade following their publication, and it was not until the publication of the well-received and popular Lalla Rookh in 1817 that the US reading public forgave him.18

Canada In the summer months of 1804, after leaving Philadelphia, Moore travelled through upper and lower Canada (traversing Quebec, Ontario and



Philadelphia as the author of the ‘Anacreon’ and ‘Little’ poems, on which subject he wrote to his mother:


Nova Scotia) en route back to England, moving from satire to producing a number of lyrics, ballads and songs that expressed his appreciation of the Canadian landscape and the indigenous population. Moore mythopoeticized Canada as a rural retreat, a picturesque and pleasing counterpoint to his negative assessment of the American Republic. Just as the beauties of North America go largely ignored, a notable if macabre exception being ‘The Lake of the Dismal Swamp’ (a significant title, and a poem written in the aforementioned town of Norfolk) so, conversely, Moore had no interest in the politics of early nineteenth-century Canada. Back in the ‘colonies’, Moore experienced a sense of homecoming. Paradoxically, the supporter of the United Irishmen of 1798 was so disturbed by the independent US that he celebrated his arrival in Canada as an outpost of Great Britain: ‘I am now on British ground’, he noted to his mother with wry relief, and have ‘drunk the King’s health in a bumper’.19 D. M. R. Bentley has shown that Moore’s poems were an important ‘shaping spirit’ (to borrow Coleridge’s phrase) on early Canadian literature. His ‘Ballad Stanzas’, also known as the ‘Woodpecker Song’, and ‘The Canadian Boat Song’, are staples of early Canadian poetry anthologies. A succession of early writers on Canada have recorded a debt, from Belfast-born Canadian emigrant Adam Kidd, who dedicated The Huron Chief, and Other Poems of 1830 to Moore as ‘[t]he Most Popular, Most Powerful, and Most Patriotic Poet’,20 to the Scottish novelist John Galt, who recounts in his 1831 pioneer novel Bogle Corbet the local ‘tradition’ that Moore composed ‘Ballad Stanzas’ under a ‘small tree’ on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and to the poet Charles Sangster, who made a pilgrimage in 1853, during the excursion that provided the basis for The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, to St Anne’s Rapids near Montreal because they had been ‘elevate[d] … into classic ground’ by Moore’s famous ‘Canadian Boat Song’.21 Indeed, such was the purchase of the ‘Ballad Stanzas’ on the early Canadian literary imagination that the journalist Nicholas Flood Davin breathlessly declared in his 1877 study The Irishman in Canada that ‘Yes! Moore belongs to Canada as well as Ireland in that special sense which links a poet’s name with a locality. … The spot is pointed out in Kingston where he wrote “I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled.’”22 Arriving in Canada on 22 July 1804, Moore initially spent two weeks in the area around the Niagara Falls – a sublime spectacle which, he maintained, defied the power of description: It is impossible by pen or pencil to convey even a faint idea of their magnificence. Painting is lifeless; and the most burning words of poetry



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have all been lavished upon inferior and ordinary subjects. We must have new combinations of language to describe the Falls of Niagara.23

all those who are doomed to breathe away their lives among the miniature productions of Nature, without seeing what shapes she can assume, without knowing what wonders God can produce. Of those stupendous Falls, it is impossible to attempt any description – ‘Go and see them’ is all I shall ever say to any one who inquires what they are – and it is well worth a long privation of many of our ordinary pleasures, to taste but a moment’s impression which the first glimpse of them makes on the mind.24 Such comments on the sublime poetical feelings generated by the sight of the Falls strike a familiar note to the student of the Romantic sublime. In viewing the Falls Moore’s oracular eye turns inward to his mind’s eye, producing the simultaneous self-absorption and transcendence of self that is the hallmark of the European Romantic sublime. While Moore’s response to the Falls is somewhat derivative (he explicitly acknowledges his debt to the late eighteenth-century travel writer Isaac Weld’s popular volume on Canada and North America, Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, 2 vols, London: J. Stockdale [1799]), it marks an important development in his poetic career. It should be observed that Moore had written little or nothing in this sublime vein previously, not in Ireland, not in Bermuda and, generally speaking, not in America (a possible exception is the ‘Lines written at the Cohos, or Falls of the Mohawk River’). In the United States Moore first wrote satire, but in Canada he was moved to the sublime. Up to this point in his poetical career, Moore could not have been counted a poet of the creative imagination in the Wordsworthian manner. His early poetic triumphs, the Odes of Anacreon and the Little poems, are imitative works, translations and adaptations of ancient or pre-existing poetic models. In this context, the ‘Ballad Stanzas’, written on his way from Niagara to Montreal, mark a distinctive new style for the poet, which sees him turning from the imitative mode of his previous works towards an appreciation of nature as a spur to the imagination: I knew by the smoke, that so gracefully curl’d Above the green elms, that a cottage was near,



‘I pity from my heart’, Moore wrote in another letter:

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It was noon, and on flowers that languish’d around In silence repos’d the voluptuous bee; Every leaf was at rest, and I heard not a sound But the woodpecker tapping the hollow beech-tree. And, ‘Here in this lone little wood,’ I exclaim’d, ‘With a maid who was lovely to soul and to eye, Who would blush when I prais’d her, and weep if I blam’d, How blest could I live, and how calm could I die! By the shade of yon sumach, whose red berry dips In the gush of the fountain, how sweet to recline, And to know that I sigh’d upon innocent lips, Which had never been sigh’d on by any but mine!’25 While Moore’s letters from this period do not explicitly record an acquaintance with Lyrical Ballads, ‘Ballad Stanzas’ carries echoes – the curling smoke, the green elms, the pastoral longing – of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s project. On the other hand, there are clear differences: the jaunty anapaestic tetrameter measure and the erotically charged nature imagery – the voluptuous bee and languishing flowers – is more reminiscent of the lubricious ‘Anacreon’ and ‘Little’ poems than anything written by Wordsworth. As Bentley observes, there is nothing in ‘Ballad Stanzas’ ‘of the hardships and loneliness of the pioneer experience’, nor are there any references to agricultural buildings, plants and animals.26 Moore could be accused of substituting myth for reality. This mythical element is fundamentally linked, however, to the poet’s divergent response to Canada and the US. While Canada is represented by Moore as an ‘Elysian Atlantis’ (it would be hard to find two words less rooted in material reality), America, that ‘medley mass of pride and misery’, is a country where suffering, hypocrisy and bad manners are all too real.

Ireland On returning from his North American tour in November 1804 Moore knuckled down in London to prepare for publication the diverse group



And I said, ‘If there’s peace to be found in the world, A heart that was humble might hope for it here!’

of poems, songs and satires that had been inspired by his transatlantic voyage. (This meant deferring for some months an eagerly awaited family reunion back in Dublin.) The volume resulting from his labours, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, appeared in 1806. Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, then in its infancy, was quick to pillory the collection. Keen to position his new journal at the centre of polite Scottish Whig culture, Jeffrey took a scathing moral stance on a poet whose previous volumes, the ‘Anacreon’ and ‘Little’ poems, had brought him both celebrity and a measure of notoriety. With barely a mention of the satiric epistles, his hostile review tarred the present work with much the same brush, labelling it ‘a public nuisance’27 on the strength of what Jeffrey perceived as the morally offensive amatory odes and poems collected therein. A slighted Moore swiftly challenged the Edinburgh’s editor to a duel (an attempt to salvage his honour that ended in farce: it was ultimately prevented owing to a police tip-off and Jeffrey’s pistol – on later inspection in Bow Street station – appeared not to be loaded). Mortified by the press reaction to an event that swiftly became a running joke at his expense, Moore took refuge in the promised trip home, arriving in Ireland in October 1806. In Dublin he was approached by the publishing partnership of James and William Power to write the lyrics to a collection of traditional Irish airs (arranged by Sir John Stevenson), a meeting that gave birth of course to the Irish Melodies (1808–34), which effectively transformed the reputation of the erstwhile ‘Anacreon’ Moore into his modern soubriquet, the ‘Bard of Erin’. With the Irish Melodies Moore’s place in the pantheon of nineteenth-century Irish Romanticism was secured. If the European success of ‘Transatlantic Tom’, as he teasingly styled himself in a letter to his mother sent from New York,28 rested during the second half of the nineteenth century on the powerful nostalgic sentiment of the Irish Melodies, his reputation in Canada in the same period owes rather more to the North American poems and epistles. Bentley has exhaustively traced the influence of Moore’s earliest songs and ballads written in North America on the subsequent formation and development of a Canadian literary tradition. Equally significant, however, is the shaping presence exerted by Moore’s Canadian ballads and songs on the subsequent Irish Melodies and, indeed, on the emergence of ‘Irish Romanticism’. At the forefront of Moore’s transatlantic corpus stands his renowned ‘A Canadian Boat Song’, a lyrical ballad whose words and music were composed during the five-day voyage the poet spent in the company of



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Faintly as tolls the evening chime, Our voices keep tune and oars keep time. Soon as the woods on the shore look dim, We’ll sing at St. Ann’s our parting hymn. Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The Rapids are near and the daylight’s past. Why should we yet our sail unfurl? There is not a breath the blue wave to curl; But, when the wind blows off the shore, Oh! sweetly we’ll rest our weary oar. Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast, The Rapids are near, and the daylight’s past. Utawas’ tide! this trembling moon Shall see us float over thy surges soon. Saint of this green isle! hear our prayers, Oh, grant us cool heavens and favouring airs, Blow, breezes, blow the stream runs fast, The Rapids are near and the daylight’s past.29 Moore wrote this song against the backdrop of spectacular scenery as he was being steered up the St Lawrence river by the Canadian Frenchspeaking fur-trappers (or voyageurs, legendary in local folklore for their indomitable spirits and inexhaustible energy). Although Moore gave divergent claims for the air’s authenticity throughout his career, Ronan Kelly’s research confirms that it was actually an adaptation by Moore into English of fragments of an original French lyric. In this respect, Kelly argues that ‘A Canadian Boat Song’ can be seen as an early anticipation of the Irish Melodies: its ‘mongrel origin’, as he puts it, ‘prefigures the more controversial adaptations of the Irish Melodies.… And like the Melodies too, the “Canadian Boat Song” transcended its moment, rapidly becoming the first of Moore’s songs to achieve international popularity across all social classes’.30 ‘A Canadian Boat Song’ shuns the abstract and the grandiose, concentrating instead with a sympathetic air upon the simple dignity of the voyageurs, portrayed against the backdrop of magnificent Canadian scenery, which here, as elsewhere in the poems relating to Canada,



the Quebecois oarsmen, as they rowed up the St Lawrence River towards Montreal:

furnishes fit matter for the muse. There are Wordsworthian parallels in some of Moore’s poems written from Canada as well as in the Irish Melodies, notably, in their grounding of poetic lyric and song in the communitas. The unity of voyageurs in the ‘Boat Song’ and the shared national history constructed in the Irish Melodies links Moore to Wordsworth’s fascination in Lyrical Ballads with the experience of the local rural and peasant community. It would, however, be a gross exaggeration on the basis of such resemblances to categorize Moore as a Wordsworthian poet. What is of interest here is the cross-fertilization of poetic trends across the British Romantic archipelago. Moore’s ballad emphasizes, like much contemporary Scottish and English poetry from Burns and Wordsworth onwards, the local, the superstitious and the folkloric, and in this context the poems relating to Canada (unlike the satiric epistles written in America) can be seen as part of a wider European Romantic poetic tradition that rejected the over-elaborate poeticisms of eighteenth-century neoclassicism in favour of a plainer, less adorned idiom. They are poems of the New World, certainly, but they also participate in the theoretical shifts then evident in the avant-garde poetry of the Old World. Moore’s poetry from the early 1800s onwards, not just the poems written in Canada but also the more famous Irish Melodies, has something in common with the project, if that is what one can call it, of British Romanticism (and, indeed, European Romanticism, though space precludes consideration of this aspect of the poet’s work). It has differences too, of course, and one needs to be wary of positioning ‘Irish’ and ‘English’ Romanticism in a binary relationship. It is, nonetheless, instructive to consider Moore’s work against British Romanticism, specifically the authors of the Lyrical Ballads and Burns, and against the Europe-wide enthusiasm for ‘Gaelic’ culture that had been prompted by James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry from the 1760s onwards. Ronan Kelly remarks in relation to the Irish Melodies that ‘songs are not sonnets to be read and reread. In general, they yield up their meaning readily, a process facilitated by uncomplicated expression, an easily identifiable mood and familiar imagery’.31 Setting aside the implication that a sonnet cannot be readily understood or a song opaque, the inference that Moore’s songs aspired to an ‘uncomplicated expression’ is well made. In a note in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) to his poem ‘The Thorn’, Wordsworth writes of the ‘imagination’ as ‘the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple elements’, and Moore’s Canadian verses and the Irish Melodies can be seen in similar terms. In Canada, the poet set aside the neoclassicism of the imitations



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Yet these highly poetical images, drawn in this way, as it were carelessly and from every hand, he has combined with such graphic – I had almost said geographical – truth, that the effect is great even up those who have never, with their own eyes, seen the ‘Utawa’s tide,’ nor ‘flown down the Rapids,’ nor heard the ‘bell of St. Anne’s toll its evening chime;’ while the same lines give to distant regions, previously consecrated in our imagination, a vividness of interest, when viewed on the spot, of which it is difficult to say how much is due to the magic of the poetry, and how much to the beauty of the real scene.32 Similar sentiments had been expressed by writers in relation to Wordsworth’s poetry on the Lake District, demonstrating how close the link between landscape appreciation and poetic practice was becoming in this period.33 In his cultivation of simplicity Moore’s work has parallels with that of the Lake Poets, and, indeed, Robert Burns. The Lyrical Ballads and Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect exemplify the movement of European Romanticism away from the elaborate, and Moore falls into this pattern, in his own lyrical ballads, if the Irish Melodies might be so called. Early Romanticism’s theorization of simplicity and plainness of language is captured wonderfully in a 1796 letter of Charles Lamb to Coleridge: ‘banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression’.34 Writing in Ontario, Moore attempted to fashion, for the first time, poetry with the similitude of spontaneity and simplicity. From such ballads as Burns’s ‘Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn’ Moore had learned of the efficacy of the expression of Romantic nationalism in song. In the Irish Melodies, Moore also continues developing this specifically ‘Celtic’ strand of contemporary verse in revitalizing the bardic tradition drawn from ancient Gaelic legend, which had been popularized by Macpherson in the eighteenth century. Just as the ‘Ossian’ poems provided a sophisticated Scottish eighteenth-century audience with a recreation of the Gaelic past that successfully captured the ‘noble savagery’ of the ancient Celts and their world – a world



of Anacreon and the Juvenalian satire on American society in favour of a more straightforward if discernibly literary tenor. Moore would later cite the English travel writer Captain Basil Hall as proof of his poetic accuracy:

where, as Robert Welch puts it, ‘heroism and poetry went together; and one in which sensibility and bravery did not cancel each other out’35 – so the Irish Melodies performed an act of nostalgic remembrance for Ireland. Remembrance and memory, central to poetic subjectivity and sympathy in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (‘that best portion of a good’s man life,/ His little, nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love’, ‘Lines Written a few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, ll. 34–6) are given a national resonance in Moore. To remember is the ultimate act of national kindness, a process that fuses individual memory into the national psyche. Macpherson’s association of the Gaelic past with a history of fallen heroes, doomed lovers and a national martyrdom clearly proved an invaluable example for Moore as it did, Michele Holmgren argues, for the Canadian writers who came after him: ‘Macpherson’s portrait of the ancient Celts offered a literary model for writers wishing to portray nonEuropean Canadian society, a model that promised to give the Canadian landscape a history distinct from Britain and offered indigenous heroes for the Canadian pantheon.’36 Moore and Macpherson, then, can be situated as twin sources for much Canadian literature that followed. Literary influence, however, was not unidirectional: it is important to note that Moore’s Canadian verse prefigured his groundbreaking and influential Irish Melodies. In Moore’s move from satire to ballad in his North American poetry, we can detect the kernel of two national literary traditions and the beginnings of a transatlantic Romanticism.

Notes 1. ‘Letter of the Prince Regent’ (first published in The Examiner, V, 23 February 1812), reprinted in The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, gen. eds Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Vol. 1: Periodical Essays, 1805–14, eds Greg Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), p. 208. 2. The Regent’s sentence reads in full: ‘I have no predilection to indulge, no resentments to gratify, no objects to attain, but such as are common to the whole Empire.’ Ibid., p. 208. 3. ‘Parody of a Celebrated Letter’, l1. 79–82, in British Satire, 1785–1840, gen. ed. John Strachan, Vol. 5: The Satires of Thomas Moore, ed. Jane Moore (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), p. 62. 4. Leigh Hunt, Periodical Essays, 1805–14, p. 221. Hunt dismisses the Prince as ‘a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace [and] a despiser of domestic ties’. 5. Thomas Moore, Letter to his Mother (7 November 1803), in The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), I, p. 50.



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6. Ibid., I, pp. 50–1. 7. Thomas Moore, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 10 vols (London: Longmans, 1840–1), II, pp. 202–3. 8. ‘Epistle VI’, ll. 73–92, The Satires of Thomas Moore, p. 10. 9. ‘Epistle VI’, ll. 139–42, The Satires of Thomas Moore, p. 12. 10. Howard Mumford Jones, The Harp That Once – A Chronicle of the Life of Thomas Moore (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937), p. 77. 11. Ibid., p. 78. 12. Moore, Letter to his Mother (13 June 1804), Letters, I, p. 67. 13. ‘Epistle VII’, ll. 1–6, The Satires of Thomas Moore, p. 13. 14. Ibid., ll. 7–10, pp. 13–14. 15. See Vernon Louis Parrington, The Connecticut Wits (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963). 16. Moore, Letter to his Mother (26 June 1804), Letters, I, p. 69. 17. Moore, Letter to John E. Hall (12 July 1818), Letters, I, p. 459. 18. Hoover H. Jordan, Bolt Upright: The Life of Thomas Moore (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1975), p. 118. 19. Moore, Letter to his Mother (22 July 1804), Letters, I, p. 76. The letter is addressed from Chippewa, Upper Canada. 20. D. M. R. Bentley, ‘Thomas Moore’s Construction of Upper Canada in “Ballad Stanzas”’, Mnemographia Canadensis, Vol. 1: Muse and Recall (Ontario: Canadian Poetry Press, n.d.) http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/architexts/ mnemographia_canadensis/essay_2.htm#s1 (accessed 12 February 2010). 21. D. M. R. Bentley, Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), p. 80. 22. Cited in Bentley, ‘Thomas Moore’s Construction of Upper Canada in “Ballad Stanzas”’. 23. Moore, Letter to his Mother (24 July 1804), Letters, I, p. 77. 24. Ibid., I, p. 78. 25. Moore, The Poetical Works, II, pp. 320–1. 26. Bentley, ‘Thomas Moore’s Construction of Upper Canada in “Ballad Stanzas”’. 27. Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, VIII, 16 (July 1806), p. 456. 28. Moore, Letter to his Mother (7 May 1804), Letters, I, p. 64. 29. Moore, The Poetical Works, II, pp. 323–4. 30. Ronan Kelly, Bard of Erin. The Life of Thomas Moore (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2008), p. 125. 31. Ibid., p. 163. 32. Moore, The Poetical Works, II, pp. xx–xxi. Moore cites from Basil Hall’s Fragments of Voyages and Travels, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1831). 33. This attitude is recalled in Humphry House’s remark of 1947, in his lecture ‘Wordsworth’s Time’, first broadcast for the BBC Third Programme: ‘He helped to give people new eyes, and he, more than any other man, changed their taste in landscape’, All in Due Time: The Collected Essays and Broadcast Talks of Humphry House (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1955, repr. 1972), p. 43.



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34. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jr, 2 vols (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), I, pp. 60–1. 35. Robert Welch, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish: 1789–1897 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p. 1. 36. Michele Holmgren, ‘Ossian Abroad: James Macpherson and Canadian Literary Nationalism, 1830–1994’, Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, 50 (Spring/Summer 2002), http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/cpjrn/vol 50/holmgren.htm (accessed 12 February 2010).



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A United Irishman in the Alps: William MacNevin’s A Ramble Through Swisserland (1803) Patrick Vincent

Things happened which perhaps none but an Irishman can believe to be credible1 Switzerland and the Alps play an important part in European Romanticism but also in what Quentin Skinner has called the ‘shared European heritage’ of republicanism.2 Paraphrasing Wordsworth, one can say that the Alps’ ‘mighty forms’ seized the fancy of late eighteenth-century travellers, at the same time giving ‘charter’ to their hopes of political change.3 Since the New Historicism of the 1980s, the visionary freedom figured by the Alps’ sublimity is commonly explained as an ideological displacement of the political freedom betrayed by the French Revolution.4 What is less well known is that this sense of betrayal also extended to Switzerland. Revolutionized then invaded by France in spring 1798 and again in autumn 1802, the country traditionally idealized as a mythic bastion of republican independence and freedom failed to live up to its heroic reputation. Again quoting Wordsworth, after 1798 ‘the lordly Alps themselves’ were no longer the ‘gladsome image’ they used to be, and ‘Freedom now / Stands single’ in the ‘sanctuary’ of Great Britain, closely allied here to the poet’s mind.5 Although second-generation Romantics such as Byron and Shelley rejected the senior poet’s championing of his own nation as the last sanctuary of liberty, they too tended to transform the Alps into pure consciousness, emptying them of their inhabitants and of their institutions, paving the way for modern tourism – by romanticizing Switzerland, travellers literally lost sight of its republican heritage. One of the few writers not to turn a blind eye to the republican significance of Switzerland and its Alps was a physician and Irish patriot, William James MacNevin (1763–1841).6 Born the same year as Arthur O’Connor, Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone, MacNevin joined the 94



6

United Irishmen in 1796 and was a member of the Leinster executive responsible for coordinating the Irish rebellion. MacNevin, like his friend Thomas Addis Emmet, favoured a more limited uprising with outside support as opposed to a purely domestic, more popular movement.7 As such he was sent to Hamburg in June 1797 to negotiate with the French Directory.8 On 12 March 1798 he was arrested at Oliver Bond’s in Dublin along with 11 other United Irish leaders, clearing the way for the radical faction to launch the uprising two months later. In what is controversially remembered as the Kilmainham Treaty, the State Prisoners agreed to reveal information about the organization to Castlereagh and a secret committee of the Irish House of Lords.9 Permanently banished from Ireland after five years of imprisonment at Fort George, Inverness, the State Prisoners were shipped to Hamburg where they parted ways. While the Emmets went to Amsterdam, MacNevin continued on to Switzerland. He was eager to improve his health and to visit in situ the Swiss views he had admired at Allan’s print shop in Dublin, but also, in a country in which liberty was proverbial, to reaffirm his faith in republican principles: ‘Switzerland remained a country where pastoral modes of life need not be fancied but are found; and real shepherds are not insipid personages, but warriors and statesmen, who have not lost the simplicity of manners that belongs to a sequestered people’ (18). The result of his three-month walking tour from August to October 1802 was a book published in Dublin in 1803 that has since gone largely unnoticed, which develops this vision of a pastoral, republican Switzerland. Despite a plethora of travel narratives on the Alps in the same period, MacNevin’s Rambles is in many ways a remarkable text, which deserves a place in the history of Irish travel writing alongside better-known works such as Lady Morgan’s accounts of France and Germany. Crisscrossing the country on foot, fluent in both French and German, and describing himself as a ‘tranquil observer’ (40), MacNevin combines the liberal, cosmopolitan observations of the Grand Tourist with the democratically minded ‘radical walking’ of William Wordsworth and Robert Jones in 1790.10 If he is less snobbish than the former, he is also less selfconsciously melancholy and estranged than the latter. Switzerland’s terrain, he argues, encourages a republican spirit not because of any levelling notions of equality, but because rich and poor travellers are both often obliged to foot it (3). His book is richer in detail, more multifaceted, and more sympathetic towards its subject than the two best-known English-language alpine tours of the period, William Coxe’s Travels in Switzerland (first edn. 1779) and Helen Maria Williams’s A Tour in Switzerland (1798).11 It mixes military tourism with anthropological



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A United Irishman in the Alps

field work, journalistic reporting with impassioned statements on the author’s own politics, descriptive writing on the Alps’ natural history and landscape with often acerbic commentary on the state of England and Ireland. A precursor of slow travel, MacNevin recommends good rain gear, gives advice on how to use a walking stick and celebrates the therapeutic value of bathing in cold mountain lakes, then suggests that the traveller in Switzerland ‘must enter dwellings of the peasantry; sit in the village ale-houses, as well as tables d’hôte; and converse with rustic politicians, and with rural belles’ (4). This is everything the young Wordsworth failed to do on his continental tour, resulting in very different responses to Switzerland and its inhabitants. Although Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches (1793) idealize the free, independent mountain shepherd with a sword in one hand and a book in the other, the poem focuses, like the alpine passages of Book VI of The Prelude, almost exclusively on the landscape. MacNevin, on the other hand, praises the Alps’ conventionally romantic setting, but insists in Enlightenment fashion that ‘Man and his institutions, are still the most interesting objects which Swisserland offers to our observation’ (3). His narrative does share obvious affinities with the more romantic travelogues. He sets off on a Rousseauvian pilgrimage to the Island of St. Peter, and, like Shelley and Byron, spends three days visiting the classic ground around Lake Geneva (151, 188–91). Yet he dwells less on the aesthetics of landscape than other travellers, perhaps in part because of the heat and dryness of the summer of 1802, which disallowed the kind of auditory and visual effects created by torrents, waterfalls and glaciers that had inspired Wordsworth in 1790 or the Shelley party in 1816. Except for several conventional references to picturesque beauty and a brief experience of mountain sublimity beside the ice cavern of the Arve, a favourite romantic icon, he is more often interested in the particulars of nature than in any subjective impression.12 On top of the Rigi, for example, rather than indulging in the usual imaginative solipsism prompted by mountain summits, he identifies a panoramic, clearly utilitarian desire in us ‘of taking in the world at a glance’ (126). Elsewhere he describes the Bossons Glacier descending into ‘the most genial valley […] It is not the imagination, but the eye that passes in one glance from the juvenescence to the decrepitude of the world’ (213). Although sensitive to beauty, his is the mind of a scientist rather than of a poet, of a utilitarian rather than a romantic traveller. Tellingly, his balanced description of Chamonix’s inhabitants clashes both with Wordsworth’s idealized sketch of the ‘wondrous Vale’ and with Percy Shelley’s later description of the locals as degraded.13



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These differences between Rambles and the canonical English Romantic texts on the Alps beg the question, familiar to scholars of Irish literature of this period, whether one can in fact consider MacNevin’s travel narrative as a Romantic text. If we expand the notion of Romanticism to include national or sympathetic forms of writing, as Murray Pittock has recently urged us to do, then the answer is clearly, yes. MacNevin belongs to those diasporic Irish writers who identify with far-off struggles for liberty. ‘Every friend of the independence of nations’, he writes early in the book, should be interested in ‘what can reconcile the proud spirit of a free-minded people to acts of foreign dictation’ (2). Pittock’s term for this combination of national and sympathetic feeling is ‘fratriotism’, which he defines as ‘the performance of nationality displaced into a reading of the other as the unachievable self: cultural alterity as a response to political defeat’.14 Instead of recouping the defeat of French republicanism as romantic transcendence (and political apostasy), MacNevin seeks an alternate republicanism that might be carried over to Ireland. His continuing faith in republican politics anticipates, and, in the case of Shelley, even inspires the second generation of English Romantic poets.15 More importantly, it demonstrates how his condition as an Irishman makes it impossible for him to respond to the failure of the French Revolution in the same way as English writers of his own generation, including Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. After discussing the struggle for liberty in Switzerland as seen through the eyes of MacNevin, I will then gives instances in which Switzerland and Ireland are compared and contrasted with England, before trying to outline the author’s own political thought. As I will argue, MacNevin’s Swiss narrative corresponds to, and in many places develops, the republican programme presented under duress during the State Trials of 1798, in which the author advocates an independent, secular and democratic Ireland without disowning the Real Whig tradition of liberty or the language of constitutionalism. Rather than seeing this as political accommodation on his part, as Marianne Elliott has suggested, I would argue that it testifies to a genuine attachment to the ideals of classical republicanism made manifest in Switzerland.16

A country in ferment Switzerland in 1802 was no longer the free, independent and commercially rich country, those ‘vallies [smiling] in contented ease’ that another Irishman, Lord Cloncurry, had celebrated a decade beforehand as part of the patriotic discourse on commerce and improvement, and



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that MacNevin had himself cited as an example for Ireland in an anonymously published 1799 pamphlet.17 ‘All Swisserland is in a ferment’, he exclaims upon entering the country through Constance, referring to the growing insurrection against the Helvetic Republic, the central government propped up with the help of French Revolutionary troops in 1798 (54). A quick survey of fellow passengers on a boat ride, ‘mostly pedlars, mechanics, musicians’, convinces MacNevin that popular feeling against the Helvetic Republic is general and that the French newspapers are misrepresenting the situation: ‘the more interesting to me, as I could learn from them what was the disposition of the poorer classes towards those measures, which I had seen described in the French papers, as machinations of the old oligarchy’ (15). The author agrees with the reasons given by these Swiss to oppose their government, including the fact that it is too expensive and overly centralized (31). He also acknowledges the claim that France’s interest in upholding the Helvetic Republic as a satellite state is purely strategic and interested (35, 55). This skepticism helps MacNevin to distance himself from a nation that had once been his ‘partner in Revolution’, and confirms Elliott’s point concerning MacNevin and the Emmets in 1802, that ‘there was little sign that their political views had changed, except to accommodate a greater distrust of France’.18 For his political views to remain unchanged, however, MacNevin has to paradoxically show that the popular uprising of 1802 against the French was conducted according to the same patriotic principles as the 1798 revolution conducted with the help of the French.19 Indeed, many Swiss had joined forces with the invader in 1798, particularly in Basle, Aargau and in the western, French-speaking part of the country that had been under Bernese subjection. This Swiss revolution had provoked intense questioning across Europe and especially in Britain, where many did not understand how a revolution could be conducted, in the words of the Morning Chronicle on 1 February 1798, ‘on purely theoretical principles without practical oppressions. The Swiss were not oppressed’.20 When Berne, an aristocratic republic often compared to Ancient Rome and famous for its heroic military past, fell with little resistance to the Directory troops in March of the same year, this questioning turned into disillusionment and even into moral outrage, especially among British Whigs who had believed, as Edmund Burke writes, that Berne was ‘one of the happiest, the most prosperous, and the best governed countries upon earth’.21 A Ramble goes to great lengths to debunk such a position by demonstrating that Switzerland’s ancien régime states were ‘pretended republics’ (43), conservative oligarchies that showed



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‘constant acts of partiality, frequent meanness, and occasional oppression’ (41). Much like Helen Maria Williams, MacNevin aims the brunt of his critique at Berne’s treatment of the Pays de Vaud, with its spies, excessive prison sentences and Bastille-like castle of Chillon (176–87). In seeming response to the Chronicle article, he concludes that ‘The great mass of the people was not free in Swisserland; yet they enjoyed comforts of condition that many have supposed to be the attendants of liberty […] We find that so general an effect could not have been caused by political freedom’ (220–1). Had the Swiss really been free, he continues, their government would never have fallen (209). Instead he ascribes Switzerland’s proverbial ease to economic independence, the effect of a multiplicity of farms held in perpetuity (221). As we shall see, analogies between the situation in England and Ireland are continuously present in the author’s mind, and his travel narrative reinforces the claim made during the State Trials of 1798 that forming ‘an alliance with the enemies of their oppressors’ (170) would not have been an act of treason but simply a necessary evil, as it was in Switzerland: ‘Nothing short of a foreign force could have broken the chains of the Swiss’ (184).22 Furthermore, he writes that the 1798 invasion need not have been regretted had the 1802 ‘revolution’ been successful and France not reinvaded Switzerland in the autumn of that year – the Swiss would then have attained their freedom both internally and externally, more than could be hoped for in Ireland (48).23 MacNevin is the only English-language writer to establish such a distinction between these two invasions, aligning him somewhere between the radical and conservative positions. In contrast, Wordsworth merges the two in his famous 1807 sonnet, ‘Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’, associating them both anachronistically with Bonaparte’s tyranny in order to distance himself from his earlier enthusiasm for French republicanism.24 Viewing France first as a friend, then as an enemy is necessary to MacNevin’s deliberately Irish narrative of Swiss liberty. It enables him to wed the ideals of classical republicanism, with its language of public spirit, liberty, independence, tyranny and corruption, to the more radical language of Painite republicanism, with its emphasis on natural rights and popular sovereignty. Such a move places him in a difficult position of double consciousness, praising General Massena’s conduct in the Battle of Zurich (19–24) or the French strategy of irregular warfare (which would have spared the Irish defeat at Vinegar Hill) on the one hand (49), on the other hand criticizing Rapinat, the French commissioner who ‘lorded over Swisserland with all the despotism of an Irish viceroy’ (33). The French Revolution, as Tom



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Bartlett has argued, provided the United Irishmen with a Machiavellian sense of occasione,25 but it was not the model that the more bourgeois and moderate United Irish leaders such as MacNevin wished to adopt, especially after the Terror. Although their most frequently cited models are the Glorious Revolution and the American War of Independence, MacNevin’s comparison of Ireland with the political and social situation in Switzerland is also fertile ground to help answer some key questions concerning the United Irishmen in 1798, including who they wished to include in the political nation, whether they intended the uprising as a full-blown revolution as in France or as a more limited, American-style rebellion, and what sort of republicanism they endorsed.26

Scenes of fratriotism: Switzerland, Ireland, England Recognizing Irish jaunting cars in the streets of Berne, MacNevin is suddenly filled with nostalgia and apostrophizes that ‘blessed principle of association’ (163), which reminds him everywhere of his lost homeland. An essential feature of fratriotism, according to Pittock, is ‘the creation of national associations overseas by those whose nations were abolished at home’.27 Most of these associations involve landscape description, suggesting that Ireland also has a sublime topography fit for liberty. The Rheinfalls, for example, are compared to the Falls of Powerscourt (13), the Alps viewed from Sentis to the mountains viewed from Dublin (58), and the panorama of Lake Zurich from Etzel to that of Blackrock from the top of the Hill of Howth (91). These comparisons also allow him to criticize Ireland’s lack of political freedom. While Switzerland’s meadows and pastures are ‘as green as those of Ireland’ and the small parks resemble ‘parts of the county of Armagh’, for example, MacNevin qualifies the comparison by stating that ‘an Irishman would wish to find in his own country something that approached this same air of general happiness’ (71). Elsewhere, with the United Irishmen in mind, he praises Switzerland’s heroic founders ‘who concerted the generous conspiracy which emancipated their country’, then bitterly adds, ‘they had the good fortune to succeed’ (25). This last sally points to a second feature of fratriotism, the ‘transmutation of patriotic discourses from the first to the third person’.28 Although MacNevin knew many Irishmen ‘who possessed the generosity of a Winkelried’, the Swiss fourteenth-century hero who sacrificed himself at the Battle of Sempach, the fact that the 1798 uprising was not successful forces him to consign ‘the spirit of their heroism […] to the grateful bosom of their friends’ (141) and to praise the classical heroism of the Swiss instead.



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MacNevin’s Irishness is repeatedly brought to the fore as essential to his analysis of Swiss society and history.29 Chauvinism was, of course, a wellentrenched feature of travel writing in the eighteenth century, especially among Whig travellers for whom Britain was the standard by which to compare, and often belittle, other nations. Here the author inverses the Whig model, deploying his nationalism in order to better sympathize with the indigenous population and to criticize the English. Throughout his tour MacNevin does his best to avoid English tourists and repeatedly lampoons them, as Byron would do in 1816 (11, 159, 204). His comparisons between the British and the Swiss regularly give the advantage to the latter: the British parliamentary politics are more corrupt (113), the legal system more violent (130), the people more standoffish (144). While enabling him to be more perceptive in places, MacNevin’s sympathy leads to those ideological inconsistencies already pointed out above. Writing about the Bernese repression of the Vaudois under the ancient régime, he remarks that ‘Things happened which perhaps none but an Irishman can believe to be credible’ (179). This understanding paradoxically extends to the Swiss who rise up in 1802 against the Helvetic Republic that had given the Vaudois their liberties: ‘It is difficult for any person but an Irishman to conceive how a government can be so detested’ (192). In a conversation with a retired Swiss officer in Neuchâtel, MacNevin is mistaken for an Englishman and cries out: ‘No, sir, I would be extremely sorry to be thought one.’ Asked what the Irish nation wants, he answers that all they wanted at first was ‘to be admitted to the privileges of the British constitution’, a small demand, he says, given the many imperfections of that constitution, the political corruption and the fact that all the safeguards of liberty, including civil laws, trial by jury and habeas corpus, can be swept away in five hours (155–7). Here the author takes advantage of the more neutral ground of travel writing to introduce the sensitive issue of Irish constitutionalism and separation from Britain.30 According to Stephen Small, the United Irishmen began to criticize the constitution only after it began taking away their civil liberties. In 1795, they were ‘still happy to see the constitution and themselves as part of a libertyloving British tradition’ encompassing Ireland and America, but were then pushed to reject ‘the older Whiggish approach that saw Britain as a country to be admired as a land of liberty’. MacNevin’s conversation with the Swiss officer epitomizes this shift, reluctantly attacking the present constitution that allows for corruption and arbitrary law while at the same time looking back nostalgically to 1688. As Small writes, ‘The Irish radicals often continued to use the language of the constitution for its respectability while their interpretation of the constitution’s essential elements



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continued to diverge from the government’s – even to the point of desiring separation and republicanism to renovate its basic principles.’31

In order to renovate these constitutional principles, MacNevin imagines an ideal, composite Switzerland that combines features of ancien régime republicanism with some of the modern republican elements introduced by the French Revolution. This strategy relies on a pastoral vision that privileges property ownership rather than a ‘community of goods’ (80), largely ignoring the more unsettled social organization in the Swiss cities but also the long tradition of communal grazing in the higher regions of the Alps.32 In the countryside outside St. Gallen, for example, he describes a ‘happy valley’ where ‘every one is placed in the midst of a little lawn, the demesne of the family, and is railed off by a white paling. Never was there such a division of landed property […] a site so singular, so neat, so populous; where so many of those of the lower parts of the scale of society possess the comforts of life’ (69). The vale is inhabited by weavers who hold land in perpetuity. According to Rudolf Braun, Eastern Switzerland was one of the most economically developed regions on the continent. Ironically, hand weaving was a proto-industrial activity that contributed to the uprooting of rural society by introducing capitalist work methods.33 Much like Wordsworth for the Lake District, but without the anxieties rife in poems such as The Ruined Cottage or ‘Michael’, MacNevin sees this semi-rural form of social organization as contributing to a ‘natural level’ of property ownership that increases both happiness and public security by reducing ‘the distance between the highest and the lowest’ (131–2). Marxist critics such as John Barrell and John Bull have objected to this sort of pastoral ideology, which, according to them, mythologizes social relations and class difference.34 MacNevin’s politics here indeed are not radical, and these passages simply reiterate his claim made during his secret examination in 1798 that he wished liberty to be established ‘with the least possible expence of private happiness’, in other words retaining ‘your properties, and the immense influence which attaches to property’.35 Yet his Lockean insistence on property ownership goes hand in hand with a more subversive, albeit bourgeois call (anticipating Margaret Thatcher) to democratize society by increasing the number of property owners: ‘Seeing how much the love of one’s country is a love of one’s possessions, he may deem it advantageous under every government to multiply the points of attachment by augmenting the number



Republicanism Redux

of real proprietors’ (220). This is the independent, landed classical republican ideal writ large and keyed in the Jeffersonian mode. In the tradition of seventeenth-century republicanism, MacNevin also identifies the possession of arms alongside property ownership as a source of Swiss liberty (224), a right specifically banned in Ireland. Machiavelli and English Commonwealth theorists such as Sidney, Harrington and Milton believed that Switzerland’s citizen militias played a major role in the heroic victories against Austrian ‘tyranny’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Like the many Whig travellers before him, MacNevin celebrates these battles, monumental events that belong to the shared discourse of patriotic liberty alongside Marathon or the Glorious Revolution (68). Upon visiting the battlefield of Morgarten, for example, he writes, with Ireland in mind, that ‘a republican is proud to think, that this eventful battle was gained by thirteen hundred patriots animated with the enthusiasm of liberty, against ten thousand slaves contending the authority of a despot’ (119). Independence from foreign domination was, of course, these patriots’ objective, just as it is the objective of MacNevin in 1802. Small sees the United Irishmen’s concern for national independence and liberty from foreign domination as the main difference with English republicanism.36 Harrington most influentially connected property with martial virtue, giving rise to the ideal of a public-spirited, virtuous and independent citizen but also of property-based restrictions on political participation.37 MacNevin fully endorses this patriotic ideal of civic humanism, which he sees as part of the Swiss national character, a combination of warlike spirit, love of country and heroism grounded in the domestic affections (68). On the other hand, he is closer to Paine in endorsing universal franchise: ‘the state is most powerful, which most comprehensively embraces the mass of the people in the franchises of its constitution’ (101). Again in agreement with Painite republicanism, representative government is preferred over the sort of direct or ‘unmodified’ democracy MacNevin came across in central Switzerland, and that both Rousseau and Montesquieu had maintained was only possible in the smallest states. The author claims it as a modern discovery introduced by the French Revolution that can end the strife between the rich and poor, arguing that ‘fair representation reconciles these interests’ (73). Clearly disassociating this form of representation from England’s parliamentary system, he nevertheless hangs on to the patrician ideal of the patriot hero, calling for the educated and rich to serve as representatives as a form of patriotic service, describing this as the ‘happy improvement of representation’ (74, 109).



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Religious tolerance is the third Swiss element that MacNevin thematizes as essential to renovating the traditional constitutional liberties as desired in Ireland. Time and time again he notices when a church is shared by the two faiths, as in Alstätten, for example (68, 82). Beyond this desire for an ecumenical state, he also demonstrates his own religious impartiality, making fun of Catholic institutions (95) and commending Protestants for ‘giving the revolution the readiest reception’ (60). Such an approach, again, distinguishes him from England’s Whiggish or even republican discourses, laced with references to Protestant superiority. As I hope to have shown, MacNevin’s Swiss narrative corroborates the political programme given under duress during the State Trials, indicating that this testimony was never intended as a political accommodation to English constitutionalism. His ideals were in fact grounded as much in the classical republicanism that ideologically upheld this constitutionalism as they were in Painite radicalism. The transcripts of MacNevin’s examination not only reveal his outspokenness and capacity for witty repartee, but also his indebtedness to all the central Commonwealthman themes, including 1688 as the best example of a revolution, criticism of corruption, the need for annual elections and rotation in office, religious freedom, the right to bear arms, and national independence.38 His statement that he is open to a federal union with England and to keeping the king suggests that separatism was always less of a concern for him than republicanism.39 Switzerland in 1802 allowed for the kind of synthesis between ancient and modern liberty that he was seeking as an alternative vision of liberty than that offered by the French Revolution. Because of his classical republican bias, MacNevin was unable to accept the second French intervention and Bonaparte’s imposition of the Act of Mediation in 1803 as anything but tyranny, even if historians agree that the Mediation Act gave many new liberties to Switzerland, in effect enabling its birth as a modern state.40 Former progressives in England such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, henceforth, chose to romanticize Switzerland and the Alps through a conservative lens, representing its sublime nature as a form of Divine power and chastisement in ‘Chamouny; the hour before Sunrise’ (1802), or its heroic history as an endorsement of tradition and national independence rather than of civil liberty in the 1820 Memorial Tour. As an Irishman, on the other hand, MacNevin romanticized what he saw as its agrarian and democratic republicanism, the very same features that he would seek out in the United States in 1803 after having unhappily served in the Irish Legion in France.41 Freedom could no longer be had in the Old World but, for a while at least, Switzerland served him



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as the perfect cultural other, the sympathetic object of his fratriotism and a prophetic example of what was to come in Ireland. ‘Let the rulers of nations learn, if it be possible for them to be instructed,’ MacNevin writes in the closing line of his Swiss narrative, ‘that henceforward oppressive governments will not have the support of the people’ (230).

Notes My warmest thanks go to George ‘Randy’ Ingham and to Johanna Archbold for helping me at various stages of my research on MacNevin. 1. William James MacNevin, A Ramble through Swisserland in the Summer and Autumn of 1802 (Dublin: J. Stockdale, 1803), p. 179. Subsequent references will be mentioned in parentheses in the text and notes. 2. See Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 3. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 1805, Book VI, ll. 347–8. 4. See, for example, Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), esp. chapter 1; David Miall, ‘The Alps Deferred: Wordsworth at the Simplon Pass’, European Romantic Review, 9, 1 (Winter 1998), pp. 87–102. 5. Wordsworth, Prelude, Book X, ll. 980–95. 6. Variously spelt MacNeven, McNeven, McNevin and Macnevin. See the online biography by Samuel J. Maguire, at http://www.galwaylibrary.ie/ history/chapter67.html (accessed 2 February 2010). George Ingham, an American descendant of MacNevin, is currently completing a book-length biography, tentatively titled Macneven of ’98: Rebel, Doctor, Scientist. 7. Louis Cullen writes that ‘The clash of opinion on the question of whether to await the French was in the last analysis not a strategic issue but a larger issue of the reliability of mass democracy and ultimately the desirability of a more thoroughgoing revolution.’ It indicated a larger rift in the Dublin leadership, partly derived from class difference. See Louis Cullen, ‘The Internal Politics of the United Irishmen’, in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, eds. David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998), p. 195. 8. According to Marianne Elliott, MacNevin’s instructions included more weapons but less French troops, ‘a force deemed just sufficient to liberate their country, but incompetent to subdue it’. MacNevin insisted on postponing the uprising until the French landing, something the French opposed after the Bantry Bay fiasco. Elliott writes, ‘The bitterness of the negotiations intensified MacNeven’s already mounting doubts about French invasion and injected a new caution into the Dublin movement when he returned home later that year.’ See Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 151–3. 9. Their stated reasons for agreeing to the treaty were to save Bond’s life and to halt more bloodshed. The transcripts of the examinations were published in



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10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

A United Irishman in the Alps August 1798 in Arthur O’Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet and William James MacNeven, Memoire: or, Detailed Statement of the Origin and the Progress of the Irish Union (Dublin: n.p., 1798), and developed for an American audience in William James MacNeven, Pieces of Irish History (New York: W J MacNeven, 1807). For Elliott, these documents suggest an effort on the part of prisoners to distance themselves from their earlier radicalism. ‘There is a remarkable element of self-exculpation in both the Kilmainham statement and the account of this period published by Emmet and MacNeven some years later […] One may well ask if the 1798 confession was seen as a possible way out of the republican phase of their reform activities, and if it was the government’s refusal to accept such an easy re-integration into constitutional reformism, rather than their own desire, which dictated their continuing republicanism.’ See Elliott, Partners, p. 213. Robin Jarvis, who coins the term, describes it as a mild form of social rebellion. See Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), esp. chapters 1 and 4. MacNevin was familiar with both texts: he bases himself on Williams’s portrait of Vaudois revolutionary Frederic de la Harpe (p. 176) and regrets not seeing the Mont Blanc from the Col de Balme as described by Coxe, an experience that famously disappointed the young Wordsworth (p. 216). He quotes from Ramond’s appendix on glaciers in Williams’s volume (p. 216), a text that Shelley had used when writing ‘Mont Blanc’. He also quotes Ramond’s footnote on Appenzell in the French translation of Coxe (pp.76–88) that Wordsworth had cited when writing the Descriptive Sketches. Other sources of information on Switzerland include Swiss poet Conrad Gessner (p. 18), Johann Ebel’s famous guidebook (p. 29), de la Harpe’s pamphlets on the condition of the Vaudois (p. 166), and books on Chamonix by Bourrit and De Saussure. He was also possibly familiar with Joseph Pollock’s The Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial (Dublin: n.p., 1779), who, like MacNevin, had praised Switzerland’s religious toleration and ability to throw off the foreign yoke. Interestingly, MacNevin recommends reading relations published by opposing parties of the late revolutions (30). Barbara Stafford persuasively and brilliantly argues for such a distinction between scientific, nominalist writing and the picturesque. She writes of a ‘Baconian imperative to get to the bottom of things, to trust senses when apprehending nature, not reason. This is expressed in a leitmotif of the travel account: the profoundly expressed need to penetrate the inward substance of natural particulars, to disclose the history and struggles of an active matter.’ See Barbara Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 284. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book VI, p. 456; Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (London: C & J Collier, 1817), p. 163. Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3, 236, 241. According to David Lee Clark, Shelley tried to publish an English edition of MacNevin’s Pieces of Irish History in 1812 during his visit to Ireland. It was a book he admired for showing ‘the actual state of republicanized Ireland’ and which he hoped would ‘strike the oppressors with dismay’. David Lee Clark,



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16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

‘Shelley and Pieces of Irish History’, Modern Language Notes, 53, 7 (November 1938), pp. 522–5. Elliott writes that Thomas Emmet’s and MacNevin’s delaying of violent rebellion raises questions about their republicanism. See Elliott, Partners, p. 213. Also see note 8 above. An Irish Catholic [William Macneven], An Argument for Independence, in Opposition to an Union. Addressed to all his countrymen (Dublin: J Stockdale, 1799), p. 29; Valentine Lawless Cloncurry, Personal Recollections of the Life and Times with Extracts from the Correspondence (Dublin: J McGlashan, 1849), pp. 11–13. Elliott, Partners, p. 279. According to Elliott, MacNevin’s skepticism vis-à-vis France can be traced back to his negotiations with the French. Parts of the French ‘Armée d’Angleterre’ meant to help Ireland were used in Switzerland instead. See Elliott, Partners, p. 214. ‘From the Paris Papers: Revolution in Switzerland’, The Morning Chronicle, 1 February 1798. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1955), p. 177. See O’Connor, Emmet and MacNeven, Memoire, pp. 68, 74. For a similar interpretation of the 1802 uprising against the French as a form of revolution, see Francis Clason, The Case of Switzerland, Briefly Stated (London: Debrett’s [?], 1802). Clason, however, is writing from a conservative position. Adapting ideas first introduced by Ernest de Selincourt and taken up by J. C. Maxwell in an influential 1970 article, Simon Bainbridge claims that the Subjugation sonnet is a composite response to both the 1798 and the 1802 invasions of Switzerland. Bainbridge uses the sonnet as an example of how the first-generation Romantics invented what he calls ‘the modern myth of Napoleon’s Swiss invasion’ in order to retrospectively rewrite their own complex relation to Bonaparte, a mixture of emulation and disavowal. See Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 19. See Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Burden of the Present: Wolfe Tone, Republican and Separatist’, in Dickson, Keogh and Whelan, eds, The United Irishmen, p. 8. Bartlett usefully summarizes the lack of consensus on what republicanism meant during the eighteenth century. Areas of dispute included whether the republic should be small or large, militaristic or pacific, egalitarian or patrician, commercial or agrarian, and what precise type of government it should have (king or no king, representational or direct democracy). See Bartlett, ‘Burden of the Present’, pp. 3–5. See also Stephen Small, Political Thought in Ireland 1776–1798: Republicanism, Patriotism, and Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 7. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p. 240. Ibid., p. 240. Although it would be more accurate to speak of MacNevin’s proto-nationalism given his cosmopolitan intellectual background, he was one of the instigators along with Russell and Bunting of an Irish national culture to counterbalance the United Irishmen’s cosmopolitan political ideals. MacNevin spoke Irish, and compiled a grammar for Thomas Emmet’s children during their



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30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

A United Irishman in the Alps captivity. See Kevin Whelan, Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), p. 67. See also Mary Helen Thuente, The Harp Restrung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994). This is not to say that travel writing in this period was not a political genre. For a good discussion of the politics of travel writing in the revolutionary period, see Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800, Studies in European Cultural Transition, Volume 10 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Small, Political Thought in Ireland 1776–1798, pp. 231–32, 249–52. For a discussion of the latter tradition, see Benjamin Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). Rudolf Braun, Le déclin de l’Ancien Régime en Suisse: Un tableau de l’histoire économique et sociale du 18e siècle (Lausanne: Editions d’en bas, 1988), pp. 88–91. See ‘Introduction’ in The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, eds. John Barrell and John Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Stephen Small likewise writes that ‘Their solutions to Irish social and economic problems essentially relied on a mystical faith in the ability of political reform and education to release the stifled economic energy of the country. Improvement and wealth would result from the heavy hand of aristocracy and government, not from social revolution’. Small, Political Thought in Ireland 1776–1798, p. 229. O’Connor, Emmet and MacNeven, Memoire, pp. 77, 80. Small, Political Thought in Ireland 1776–1798, p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. The best study of this tradition, with a chapter on Ireland, remains Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004). O’Connor, Emmet and MacNeven, Memoire, p. 82. See, for example, Hans Kohn, Nationalism and Liberty: The Swiss Example (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1956), pp. 25, 49. Michael Durey discusses MacNevin’s contribution to American political culture in ‘Thomas Paine’s Apostles: Radical Emigres and the Triumph of Jeffersonian Republicanism’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 44, 4 (October 1987), pp. 662–88.



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Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) and the Politics of Romanticism Susan Egenolf

Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson before her 1812 marriage to Sir Charles Morgan) contributed substantially to the development of Anglophone literature in the early nineteenth century, and scholars of Romanticism are most likely to associate her novels with the advent of the national tale. Morgan actively fostered the national tale as a genre, explicitly subtitling four of her five Irish novels as national tales: The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), O’Donnel: A National Tale (1814), Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale (1818), and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (1827).1 The national tale was one of the ‘new genres’ introduced during the Romantic period that has its ‘origins in the cultural nationalism of the peripheries’.2 For Morgan, the national tale proved to be a genre of wondrous plasticity. In The Wild Irish Girl, she casts a transcultural love story, set on the very margins of European society, amid the dialectical tension of weighty historical and cultural notes, complete with citations from antiquarian texts. In Florence Macarthy, Morgan combines the gothic tropes of ruins and disguise with a critique of property rights in Ireland and praise for revolution in South America. She demonstrates a comparable eclecticism in her final national tale, The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, incorporating mysterious sedan chairs, secret religious and political societies, and a wild Irishman of superhuman abilities rivaling Frankenstein’s Creature, alongside a lengthy embedded medieval narrative, The Annals of St. Grellan, related in the terse discourse of extant medieval annals. Morgan’s national tales display the ‘colonial character of Irish Romantic literature’, outlined by Tom Dunne, in their ‘treatment of [this literature’s] major themes – the historical past, conflict over the land or religious settlements, Irish lawlessness and alienation – and also its perception of its audience as English rather than Irish’,3 but her tales and other writings also engage 109



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Lady Morgan and the Politics of Romanticism

in a generic playfulness and global awareness that expand our notions of Irish Romanticism. In a writing career that spanned almost 50 years, Morgan penned a biographical romance, nine novels, numerous pamphlets, memoirs, a biographical romance, histories, and short commentaries; she also wrote two immensely popular and controversial travel commentaries, France (1817) and Italy (1821). She wrote about Ireland; she wrote novels set in France, Italy, Greece, India, and Belgium.4 Critics have argued that in these novels, she also continued to represent Ireland’s complicated status as British colony.5 In a recent article, Raphael Ingelbien argues compellingly that Morgan’s focus in The Princess upon ‘a sympathetic account of Belgium after its revolution against Dutch rule in 1830 – provided her with an indirect means of reflecting on some of the most pressing issues of Irish politics in the age of Daniel O’Connell’ and that the novel ‘reveals that she was far less critical of O’Connell’s objectives than previous readings of her career suggest’.6 Ingelbien’s argument is particularly significant because it demonstrates Morgan’s continued interest in the Irish cause, even though some of her personal writings indicate she had become disillusioned with Irish politics. To cast Morgan as a writer at the periphery of Romantic literary culture is to essentially ignore her successful publishing career in which she produced a major work every two to three years (and sometimes sooner) for 35 years. Almost all of Morgan’s works were first published in London, and most of them were quickly reproduced in Philadelphia or New York, and sometimes in Dublin. Florence Macarthy went through five editions in three years, and Morgan secured an agreement of £2000 for her Italy before she had penned a single page.7 Henry Colburn, publisher of ten of her works, was a particularly aggressive advertiser, provoking John Wilson Croker to complain in a Quarterly Review piece critiquing Morgan’s Italy, ‘Our readers – who are also, we presume, readers of news papers [sic] – must remember that it is at least a year since “Lady Morgan’s Italy” was formally advertised.’8 This means that Morgan’s name was virtually always before the English reading public in her novels, in reviews, and in notices for new works. The audacity of a woman willing to engage so fully and publicly with politics provoked many of her reviewers. The following critique of her 1835 novel The Princess from the American Quarterly Review is typical: Her subjects, style, and tone, are masculine. She enters the arena properly reserved for the contests of men, and challenges the opposition of the most active combatants. She abandons, to a very great



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Morgan was seemingly energized by such criticism and often responded in periodicals or in subsequent prefaces. And, according to Jacqueline Belanger, Morgan was unmatched in ‘her capacity to generate and exploit controversy’, particularly evident in her ongoing battle with Croker that played out in the public press.10 In response to another review that took issue with a woman writing Italy, Morgan published the following letter defending her right to enter the arena of politics: The accidental circumstance of being born and educated in a land stamped with the impress of six centuries of degradation – the natural tendency of a female temperament to a prompt, uncalculating sympathy – and the influence of that stirring quality called indignation (as often a constitutional as a moral affection) – gave a direction to my feelings, and a colour to my mind and writings, which from my ‘youth upwards’ have remained unchanged and indelible.11 Here Morgan turns political engagement into the natural outgrowth of feminine ‘affection’ and ‘sympathy’. She transforms the seemingly weak position of a native (a term she might not have used to describe herself but a role she assumes here through elision) of an oppressed colony into one that particularly empowers women, justifying their trespass in a conventionally masculine world. This is a tactic she would use again in her Preface to The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys in anticipation of being ‘accused of unfeminine presumption in “meddling with politics”’: [M]ay not I be permitted, under the influence of merely human sympathies, to interest myself for human wrongs; to preach in my way on the “evil that hath come upon my people,” and to “fight with gentle words, till time brings friends,” in that cause, which made Esther eloquent, and Judith brave? For love of country is of no sex.12 Murray Pittock suggests that the thorny issue of ‘What is Romanticism?’ is a question best answered by broadening space and deepening time: the principles of pluralism should embrace (as now) gender, empire, environment, and education, but they



extent, that delicate reserve which belongs to other writers of her sex, and scarcely ever presents herself in a character which can properly be denominated feminine. In the book before us, for example, she appears as a violent party politician.9

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Such broadening of our sense of Romanticism clearly makes space for the study of Morgan as both Irish writer and woman writer, and for the intersection of those two perspectives as seen above. Pittock’s definition also encourages us to explore the various dialogues that Morgan set in motion, including her public discourse in the periodicals and her ongoing discourse of sympathy and resistance that permeates her writings, where she envisions a global forum in which Romanticism plays an essential part. In France in 1829–30, a sequel to Lady Morgan’s earlier travel book, Morgan devotes a chapter to ‘Romanticists and Classicists’ and a chapter to ‘Modern Literature’. In these chapters she offers a contemporary delineation of Romanticism as a literary movement. Morgan writes: While romanticism is ascribed to the influence of a country, a sect, a party, or a person – while its nativity has been assigned to England, to Italy, to Germany, and to France – and its parentage to Shakespeare, Visconti, Schiller, Madame de Staël, and Dr. Johnson (!) – it is, in fact, the produce of no one country or apostle. Romanticism is a manifestation of intellect, a form of literature peculiar to the population which took possession of Europe on the decline of the Roman empire, and has subsisted from the earliest periods of their recorded existence.14 Morgan traces the development of Romanticism both historically and geographically: Although romanticism, as a term applied to a literary sect, is of modern date, the characteristics to which it is affixed are as old as the institutions which originated them. It came forth from the northern forests, rude and barbarous as the people to whom it belonged; and, like them, it overran the polished feebleness and elegant corruption which no longer served the interests or reflected the feelings of a new-modelled society. Wherever freedom waved her oriflamme, there, it fixed its standard. (1: 228) Morgan expresses no aesthetic pretensions for Romanticism, finding its origin among the barbaric hordes and casting this movement in opposition



should also be aware of dialogues between cultures, particularly in the context of ‘sources that fall outside the socially dominant discourses’ not just by virtue of political exclusion, but also by reason of their cultural, linguistic, and indeed national agendas.13

to the elegance and sophistication of classical aesthetics. Romanticism is enlisted by ‘new-modelled’ societies to express ‘feelings’ that older, enfeebled forms of literature no longer aptly represent. Morgan suggests that the spread of Romanticism follows the spread of liberation movements throughout Europe – thus, her Romanticism is inherently political. She posits that at the ‘first establishment of these [independent] nations, almost every trace of the ancient classical models was lost; and the first efforts of each, in literature, were guided exclusively by such lights as individual genius struck out’ (1: 231). However, for Morgan, this independent development of the arts was retarded ‘when suddenly the discovery of Greek and Roman manuscripts, and the exile of the Greek literati of Asia Minor, brought the population of Europe acquainted with a poetry, a philosophy, and a style of composition, so much more elegant, polished, and elaborated, than their own, as very naturally gave a new current to their ideas, and misled them into flat and unreflecting imitation’ (1: 231). Morgan posits that in ‘despotic states’ ‘where the mind was stagnant’, the ‘ruling authorities’ felt their ‘security strengthened by the adoption of an aristocratic literature’ and ‘soon learned to favour and encourage, as a point of policy, this particular mode of occupying and chaining the intellects of their subjects’ (1: 233–4). However, she concedes in a footnote that the popularity of the classical forms among the aristocracy of ‘Southern Europe’ was undoubtedly originally a ‘matter of pure taste’, adding ‘[t]he instincts of tyranny are, however, keen and sure’ (1: 234). In states ‘where political rights were to be defended, religious doctrines disputed, or commercial and manufacturing arts promoted and practised’, ‘preference’ was given ‘to those forms, which were most universally intelligible’, and these ‘communities’ resisted ‘an implicit adoption of classic rules of composition, and classic models of thought and writing’ (1: 233). Here Morgan develops a theory of Romanticism as a populist literature: ‘This connexion between romanticism and political liberty, fanciful as at first sight it may appear, is not difficult to explain. Literature, like all the other productions of the human species, is the creature of their wants; but its developement [sic] can only be proportionate to those wants, and accordant with the wishes and feelings of the people, where their actions and thoughts are unrestrained and free’ (1: 230). Morgan traces Romanticism’s progress on the Continent and in Ireland, Scotland, and England, remarking how Romanticism ‘took shelter’ in ‘the dark forests of the Rhine, hummed her Cronan on the banks of the Shannon, rhapsodized on the shores of the Clyde, and sent forth, from her abbey-cell at Newstead, such lights of song, as time shall never



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obscure’ (1: 236–7). For Morgan, Irish Romanticism manifests itself as a culturally specific ‘Cronan’, an old Irish form that evokes an idea of Ireland’s bardic past, what Katie Trumpener has theorized as a response of the ‘Celtic peripheries’ to ‘Enlightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral traditions’ in which ‘Irish and Scottish antiquaries reconceive[d] national history and literary history under the sign of the bard’, creating a ‘bardic performance’ that ‘binds the nation together across time and across social divides’.15 As is well known, Morgan herself was a harpist, the characters Olivia of St. Clair and Glorvina of The Wild Irish Girl echo ancient Irish culture through their harp performances, and Morgan published Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies (1805) and The Lay of an Irish Harp, or Metrical Fragments (1807), thus participating in the use of ‘[m]usic’ as ‘the intermediary between the voice of the British state, and the silence of exclusion and oppression’.16 By tracing Romanticism through the ‘shores of the Clyde’ and the ‘abbey-cell at Newstead’, Morgan pointedly brings Robert Burns and Lord Byron into the sect of Romanticism.17 Burns works particularly well in Morgan’s populist Romantic taxonomy because his poetry developed from Scottish oral tradition and community while resisting ‘an implicit adoption of classic rules of composition, and classic models of thought and writing’. Byron’s poetry, while certainly indebted to classical forms, avoids the ‘flat and unreflecting imitation’ symptomatic of oppressed peoples and reinvigorates classical forms – his work with ottava rima, for instance. Byron’s popularity, his well-known liberal politics, and his personal devotion to the cause of Greek independence coalesce firmly with the components of Morgan’s Romanticism. In her chapter, ‘Romanticists and Classicists’ in France 1829–30, Morgan employs the discourse of politics in her discussion of these literary factions. Her friend, a proclaimed classicist, comments, ‘So, I find you as I left you, surrounded by romanticists. You are still, I see, their chieftainess and guide’ (1: 200), and a young Frenchman declares, ‘You have long been deemed in France a champion of romanticism’ (1: 198). While Morgan admits that she has been categorized as both Romanticist and Classicist by the warring factions, indicating the fluidity of these literary distinctions, she clearly relishes her alignment with the republican cause: ‘and it was thus that I became the martyr of romanticism, before I was acquainted with its existence; and was ranged among the “nursing mothers” of the new doctrine, before I was qualified even for a catechumen’ (1: 250). The philosophy linking creative innovation and political resistance that Morgan outlines in ‘Modern Literature’ accords closely with that



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The Lombard League defeated the armies of the despot in open field, and until Florence was betrayed to those polished tyrants, the Medici, Freedom had one citadel wherein it could find refuge from a world which was its enemy. Florence, long balanced, divided and weakened the strength of the Empire and the Popedom. To this cause, if to anything, was due the undisputed superiority of Italy in literature and the arts over all its contemporary nations, that union of energy and of beauty which distinguishes from all other poets the writing of Dante, that restlessness of fervid power which expressed itself in painting and sculpture, and in daring architectural forms.18 Like Morgan, who specifically mentions Dante as a progenitor of Romanticism in the ‘free states of Italy’ (1: 228–9), Shelley couples artistic genius and political freedom: ‘The father of our own literature, Chaucer, wrought from the simple and powerful language of a nursling of this Republic the basis of our own literature. And thus we owe, among other causes, the exact condition belonging to intellectual existence to the generous disdain of submission which burned in the bosoms of men who filled a distant generation and inhabited other lands’ (3). While Shelley never explicitly employs the term Romanticism in his Philosophical View of Reform, the language that Morgan uses to define the movement is almost indistinguishable from Shelley’s; she writes: ‘For (to drop the image) romanticism in the nineteenth century, like protestantism in the sixteenth, is but a term invented to express the principle of mental independence, by which men claim the right to think after their own unshackled judgments, and to express their thoughts in such forms and combinations, as their own perceptions dictate, or the state of society demands’ (1: 237). In his Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley outlines a theory of poetic involvement in what appears to be a global march towards liberty, discussing the American Republic, the French Revolution, the liberation of Germany, despotism in Spain, and the readiness of South America for independence. Michael Rossington highlights Shelley’s proclamation in the Philosophical View that ‘whatever systems they [poets and philosophers] may professedly support, they actually advance the interests of Liberty’, and Rossington argues that Shelley ‘relishes not only what he wishes to believe is a Europe-wide tendency towards political liberty,



expressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his A Philosophical View of Reform, drafted around 1820 but not published until 1920. In a discussion of thirteenth-century Italian resistance, Shelley writes:


but also an opportunity to show that poetry and philosophy, including his own, may be seen, retrospectively and prospectively, to effect it’.19 Morgan demonstrates from her earliest public writings that she held such a belief as well. Before she had ever travelled abroad, she had become engaged in politics both national and international and the potential for the writer, the artist, to influence republican tendencies. Irish Romanticism as Morgan conceived it brought attention to landscape as well as politics, revealing the imbrication of the two. Especially in her Irish tales and Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, Written in Connaught (1807), she directs the readers’ eyes to picturesque scenes of the wild Irish landscape. Claire Connolly suggests, in her discussion of Irish Romanticism, that a ‘rich and intimate engagement with place’ is ‘usually associated with Romantic aesthetics’.20 Critics have attended to Morgan’s pervasive employment of picturesque aesthetics, particularly her use of the ruin, arguing that this trope becomes subversive in Irish writings. Ina Ferris argues, ‘In the nationalist appropriation of the Romantic motif, the passive site of picturesque affect becomes active and menacing’, and Robert C. Sha notes that Morgan’s ‘project’ in Patriotic Sketches is ‘to convert the Irish landscape into the ne plus ultra of the picturesque and sublime in an effort to convince her audience that these “scenes are never to be viewed with indifference”’.21 Trumpener, discussing Florence Macarthy, posits that the ‘ruins of Ireland’ are not to be read as ‘aesthetically pleasurable, but as the evidence of historical and political crimes’.22 In Florence Macarthy Morgan directs her readers’ gaze towards the landscape: ‘The surface of the country, as it appeared, contained the leading facts of its history, and those who ran might read. He who now read, studied not without comment the text whose spirit and whose letter were mis-rule and oppression.’23 We see the Irish landscape through the eyes of Morgan’s hero, the long-absent Commodore, General Fitzwalter: ‘He beheld multitudes of half-naked children, the loveliness of their age disfigured by squalid want, and the filthy drapery of extreme poverty, idle and joyless, loitering before the cabin door, or following in the train of a mendicant mother’ (1: 92–3). He also observes the ruins of the British colonial venture in Ireland: ‘Yet many stately edifices, the monuments of ancient splendor or modern taste, rose along the way; the former in ruins, the latter almost invariably unfinished. The castle of the ancient chief, and the mansion of the existing landlord, were alike desolated and deserted’ (1: 94). The Irish postillion, sensing the General’s interest in landscape and architecture, directs the traveller’s view to the jail in Naas, ‘an iligant fine building, and a croppy’s head spiked on the top of it. … I’ll engage he’ll rue the day he saw



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Vinegar-Hill, any how, wherever he is, poor lad’ (1: 88). Through the postillion’s knowing juxtaposition, Morgan makes her most explicit transition between the scene for the picturesque tourist and the political degradation to be read in the Irish landscape. The decaying croppy’s head is a grotesque reminder of the 1798 Rebellion, a fact the postillion emphasizes with his mention of Vinegar Hill, site of the Rebel camp and bloody battle outside of Wexford. Morgan takes these regional political scenes to a universal level through the Commodore’s musings: ‘Nature is the great legislator. In creating man free, she commanded him to remain so; and re-action, sooner or later, follows the violation of this her first great edict’ (1: 88). His thoughts apply directly to the Irish Rebellion, but his history as ‘Il Librador’, the ‘brave Guerilla chief, whose life and fortune have been devoted to South American independence’ (3: 48), accords his thinking international import. Later in the novel, General Fitzwalter describes himself as ‘an Irishman’ who has been ‘long an exile’ (3: 119): ‘unfettered by the distinctions of clime, country, or kindred, I have early claimed alliance with all who suffer, whatever might be the region they inhabited’ (3: 120). To underscore the transnational focus of Florence Macarthy, Morgan pointedly has one of the characters describe the novel that Lady Clancare/Florence Macarthy (a novelist in the book) is writing as ‘tales, stories, something about Ireland and Spain and South America’ (3: 109). In all of her national tales, Morgan pours her energies into an intimate representation of Ireland as a place, but she also consistently represents Ireland as part of a much larger sociopolitical network. Even in The Wild Irish Girl, where our imagination is transfixed by the ruined castle of Inismore on its isolated peninsula, the European presence is marked. In Glorvina’s ‘paradoxical boudoir’, Horatio finds a Turkish carpet, vases of ‘Etrurian elegance’, and volumes of the ‘best French, English, and Italian poets’.24 Thus, Morgan infuses her Irish national tale with incursions from the Continent in the form of objects, literary and artistic allusions (to the Italian painter Salvator Rosa, for instance), and literary form. From the outset, Morgan’s novels emphasize a cultural hybridity in Ireland and enmesh the aesthetics and politics of her seemingly isolated western island with those of the Continent. Ferris has discussed what she terms Morgan’s ‘hyper-hybridity’ in the representations of her heroines: ‘all in the first place hyphenated nationals’, but ‘also mixtures in terms of class (residual aristocrat/emergent bourgeois), secular status (half lay/half nun), and habitation (rural/urban; Ireland/Italy, etc.) … This hyper-hybridity establishes the national heroine as precisely not a



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pure whole (an integrated being) but as someone willing to live in and among parts.’25 Such hyper-hybridity extends to Morgan’s heroes as well as to her representation of Ireland more generally.26 Morgan opens Florence Macarthy with a description of the ‘Spanish vessel’, bearing the name ‘Il Librador’, a ‘now unarmed vessel’ that had ‘evidently been a sloop of war in some foreign service’, carrying her hero back to Ireland (1: 2). The hero himself she describes as a striking figure of a man of indeterminate heritage: From his accent or manner it would have been difficult to assign him to any particular country. He seemed rather to belong to the world; – one of those creatures formed out of the common mould, whom nature and circumstances combine and fit for deeds of general import and universal interest. Neither could the term gentility be appropriately applied to an appearance which had a character beyond it. He might have been above or below heraldic notices and genealogical distinctions, but he was evidently independent of them. (1: 5) Morgan includes notes to the third volume where she compares her hero General Fitzwalter to Col. Bernardo O’Higgins, ‘appointed commanderin-chief of the patriot army in 1813’ in South America, and suggests: ‘It is natural that the natives of an oppressed country should sympathize with the oppressed wherever they may exist’ (3: 289). Thus Morgan establishes Fitzwalter as a sort of Byronic freedom fighter before Byron was a freedom fighter. In accordance with this philosophy, Morgan’s writings encompass a broad geographical swath and an even broader humanitarian ideology. This philosophy of ‘sympathiz[ing] with the oppressed wherever they might exist’ developed very early for Morgan. In her second novel, The Novice of Saint Dominick, she chronicles the adventures of the orphaned novice Imogen, who escapes the convent of St Dominick before taking her vows, seeking a Provençal minstrel who has awakened her passion. She wanders the French countryside, fraught with the religious wars of the 1590s, disguised as a male troubadour, and finally encounters her minstrel, revealed to be the baron de Montargis, a famed military commander. Imogen swoons over de Montargis in military garb, ‘the finest model of youthful heroism personified’; however, Morgan gives her poet-general a speech that undercuts his own heroism: But alas! a few years military experience faded the glowing tints my imagination had shed over the picture. I saw that the laurels which



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fame flung over the path of victory did but conceal his footsteps’ bloody track, and that the heart of humanity, of reason, groaned in anguish over those deeds which gave immortality to the name of hero. I saw the ambition of a few, the scourge of millions; and I beheld the warrior in his splendid career overturning the rights, the liberties, and happiness of mankind, and obtaining a deathless name for having desolated and laid waste the fairest treasures in the moral and natural world.27 Pittock theorizes this phenomenon of sympathy for other oppressed peoples in Irish and Scottish literature more generally: Fratriotism is primarily defensive: the performance of nationality displaced into a reading of the other as the unachievable self: cultural alterity as a response to political defeat. It took a form of frequent and sometimes striking demonstrations of sympathy and cultural, political, or even military support for colonized or dispossessed nations seeking to establish a recovered or fresh autonomy for themselves, a displacement of Scottishness or Irishness (in the cases under discussion here) from the first to the third person.28 As Julie Donovan has observed, Lady Morgan ‘sought to galvanize support for Ireland as she aligned its quest for independence with nationalist causes abroad’.29 In Morgan’s final novel, we see this clearly. The Princess; or, the Béguine features the Polish–Irish–Belgian Princess Schaffenhausen who urges a dispirited Sir Frederick Mottram, ‘Look to regenerated Europe.’30 The Princess’s directive might well be the directive underlying much of Morgan’s work as she encourages her readers to understand the Irish cause as intricately linked to a global republican cause. After some time in the new republic of Belgium, Sir Frederick finds that he ‘was slowly yielding himself to a cause for which he had hitherto felt no interest, through the medium of his imagination. The arts were mixing themselves with his political opinions: Hobima, and Grétry, and the Brabançonne, presented a neutral ground, where Fancy, like Archimedes, might fix her levers, to move the world of prejudice in which he had hitherto lived. He was beginning to feel for Belgium; and feeling is a powerful step to conviction’.31 Like Shelley, Morgan believes in the power of the artist to effect revolutionary sympathy, to influence the fate of nations. Within Morgan’s theory of Romanticism the national tale is always also the tale of all nations.



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1. Only Morgan’s first Irish novel, the sentimental St. Clair; or, the Heiress of Desmond (Dublin: Wogan, Brown, Halpin, Colbert, Jon Dornin, Jackson, and Metcalf, 1803) was published without the designation of national tale. 2. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xi. 3. Tom Dunne, ‘Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing 1800–50’, in Romanticism in National Context, eds Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 70. 4. France and Italy (The Novice of Saint Dominick [1806]), Greece (Woman; or, Ida of Athens [1809]), India (The Missionary: An Indian Tale [1811]), and Belgium (The Princess; or, the Béguine [1835]). 5. Regarding The Novice, James Newcomer remarks, ‘the important aspect of the novel is its concern with warring factions and the ultimate resolution of enmities’; ‘[l]ike France of the sixteenth century, religious dissensions rent Ireland’ (p. 28); see his Lady Morgan the Novelist (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990). Julia Wright argues that in choosing her subjects for her Indian tale, Morgan was able to engage with ‘three conquered spaces – Ireland, India, and Portugal’ that ‘had all been at the forefront of public debate in the years leading up to The Missionary’s publication’ (p. 19); see her introduction to The Missionary: An Indian Tale, by Sydney Owenson, ed. Julia Wright (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002). 6. Raphael Ingelbien, ‘Paradoxes of National Liberation: Lady Morgan, O’Connellism, and the Belgian Revolution’, Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies, 42, 3–4 (2007), p. 107. 7. Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora, 1988), pp. 177, 161. 8. Quoted in Critical Receptions: Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, ed. Jacqueline Belanger (Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2007), p. 222. 9. Ibid., p. 369. 10. Ibid., p. 9. See also Claire Connolly, ‘“I accuse Miss Owenson”: The Wild Irish Girl as Media Event’, Colby Quarterly, 36 (2000), pp. 98–115. 11. Lady Morgan, Letter to the Reviewers of ‘Italy’ (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1821), pp. 4–5. 12. Lady Morgan, preface to The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (London: Pandora, 1988), p. vi. 13. Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 5. 14. Lady Morgan, France in 1829–30, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London: Saunders and Otley, 1831), I, p. 227; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 15. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, pp. xi–xii. 16. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p. 113; see also Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press and Field Day, 1996), pp. 59–60. 17. William Wordsworth visited the falls of the Clyde and composed an 1802 poem describing Corra Linn, the largest of the falls; however, because



Notes

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Morgan aligns Romanticism with cultural resistance and independence, the reference to the Clyde seems more likely to honour Burns. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, ed. T. W. Rolleston (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), pp. 2–3. Michael Rossington, ‘Theorizing a Republican Poetics: P. B. Shelley and Alfieri’, European Romantic Review, 20 (2009), p. 620. Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800–1830’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, p. 441. Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 111; Robert C. Sha, ‘Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams’, in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), p. 201. Katie Trumpener, ‘National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806–1830’, ELH, 60 (1993), p. 702. See also Susan Egenolf, The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 105–27. The pervasive depictions of ruins in Irish Romantic writing have also been connected to gothic writing; for extended studies, see Ferris’s ‘Irish Gothic and Ruin Writing’ in her The Romantic National Tale, pp. 102–26; and Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic (Galway: Arlen House, 2004). Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy, an Irish Tale, 4 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), I, p. 95. Subsequent references to this novel will be cited parenthetically in the text. Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1999), pp. 157, 156. Ferris, The Romantic National Tale, p. 84. As I have argued elsewhere, the embedded Annals of St. Grellan in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys expose the idea of Irish cultural purity as a construct (see Egenolf, The Art of Political Fiction, pp. 166–7). The Annals record arrivals, settlements, and departures over several centuries of Ireland’s history. The entry for AM 1803 reads, ‘More new comers or transplanters. Arrivaulle of the Belgians in a fleete, well rigged, led on by Slangey or Slang, prevaileth over the Bartholanians; but the Danans, a new colony, arriving, the Bartholanians forfeit their londes, and the Belgians are driven into the Fassaghs of Connact province’ (The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys [London: Pandora Press, 1988], p. 217). Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Novice of Saint Dominick, 4 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1806), II, p. 278; II, pp. 282–3. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, pp. 240–1. Julie Donovan, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan and the Politics of Style (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2009), p. 132. Lady Morgan, The Princess; or, the Béguine (Brussels: AD. Whalen, 1835), pp. 91–2. Ibid., p. 154.



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Irish Poetry in the Romantic Period





Drawing Breath: The Origins of Moore’s Irish Melodies Adrian Paterson

The reputation of Thomas Moore as a Romantic poet has foundered on notions of originality. What is most striking is that while the question of Moore and his origins is pivotal to any study of Irish Romanticism, Romanticism(s) generally considered seems to have got along quite happily without him. This is odd considering he was not a peripheral figure; no other poet save perhaps Robert Burns had such international range and influence. Moreover, as we shall see, Moore shared ideas with such figures as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, indelibly associated with the origins of Romantic aesthetics in Europe; while his embrace of music in the Irish Melodies (1808–32) drew upon the most representative of Romantic arts. What is more odd is that Romanticism as a whole might be said to concern itself profoundly with origins. So did the Melodies. No poet played with origins and originality more than Moore, although in this playing perhaps he laid a veil over his reputation only now being withdrawn. The charge laid against Moore is usually along the lines of an early review of his failed opera The Gypsy Prince (1801): the author, said the Morning Post’s correspondent, ‘had not been very studious of originality’.1 While sufficiently stung by this to abandon writing for the stage, often this was something Moore took pains not to deny, allowing claims to ‘originality’ to be taken out of his hands. And, as an author embracing anonymous and pseudonymous publication (as Thomas Little, Thomas Brown, Captain Rock), he often took pleasure in concealing (and half-revealing) his original authorship. Nevertheless, Moore was very studious of originality in the sense that he was deeply concerned with where things came from. Such studiousness reveals itself in the proliferating footnotes to so many of his texts, and not only the Melodies: documenting sources, ascribing beginnings, revealing 125



8

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and veiling origins became an obsession, even an anxiety. It was also perhaps the defining preoccupation of the period. Friedrich Schlegel’s declaration was central: ‘the real value, indeed the virtue of man [is] his originality’.2 Familiar titles to which this essay turns include Rousseau’s Essay On the Origin of Languages and Herder’s Essay on the Origin of Language. That the precise origins of James Macpherson’s eighteenthcentury Ossianic fragments took on a national cast only suggests how contentious and contemporary an issue ‘originality’ was and how intertwined it was with nationality, history, language, and aesthetics. In their concern with originality, the Irish Melodies breathe the same air as these emblematic works; examining them in this atmosphere should help us to understand their nature and fallen reputation. Origins mattered on more than aesthetic or philosophical grounds. As bookselling increasingly replaced patronage, claims to original authorship had serious economic consequences, and copyright, although often passed on to publishers as security, had real value. Legal definitions of authorship were thus increasingly important: during the preliminary rumblings of the court case between the brothers James and William Power, London and Dublin publishers of the Irish Melodies, Moore had to be established in court as ‘the author of the original songs’.3 Latterly Moore released all copyright on his songs to James Power to cancel accumulated debts; it was little wonder, with Wordsworth, that he supported the 1837 bill to extend authors’ rights to 60 years postpublication.4 Ironically, Moore had been particularly aggrieved at the Morning Post’s acid criticism of his opera’s originality, as on the stage attribution was muddier: beyond the script and scenario Moore had authored several songs, words and music, which the paper praised but donated to the singer Michael Kelly.5 Attributing originality was, for a poet who felt himself in a precarious position with regard to reputation and earnings, a sensitive business. And yet the charge was still made, enough that others were moved to defend him. Dedicating to his friend the oriental fantasy The Corsair (1814), Byron couches Moore’s originality as an oriental quality: Your imagination will create a warmer sun, and less clouded sky, but wildness, tenderness, and originality, are part of your national claim of oriental descent, to which you have already thus far proved your title more clearly than the most zealous of your country’s antiquarians.6 Originality hereby became not only a personal, but a national quality. It was evidently Byron’s regard for the Melodies that lay behind his



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reference to what Moore had ‘already’ proved: against the antiquarians Moore’s wildness, tenderness, and originality was to be demonstrated by the Melodies themselves. So where did the Irish Melodies begin? Moore considered this several times and each time deferred to the music. As he wrote in his preface to Daniel Maclise’s illustrated edition: On the poetical part of this work, it is not for me to give an opinion. Whatever may be its merits, to the music they are almost solely owing. […] The whole source and soul of the Irish Melodies lies in their matchless music.7 This was by no means a straightforward attribution. To say the Irish Melodies began in music becomes, if we look closer, a myth of origin as potent as any other. Claiming such a source appeared to align the Melodies with a German philosophical movement that claimed primacy, and originality, for music. In what M. H. Abrams has termed ‘melomania’ thinkers like Ludwig Tieck, Wackenroder and A. W. Schlegel fell over themselves to herald music a ‘language of feeling independent of all external objects’.8 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s assessment of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, roughly coinciding with Moore’s fifth volume of the Melodies, represented an apotheosis of such thinking: liberated from words music became definitively ‘the most romantic of all the arts – one might almost say, the only genuinely romantic one – for its sole subject is the infinite’.9 Moore’s A Melologue upon National Music addresses ‘Music’ directly in this spirit: There breathes the language, known and felt Far as the pure air spreads its living zone, Wherever rage can rouse or pity melt, That language of the soul is felt and known (ll. 1–4)10 Deceptively simple, these lines encapsulate many tensions we shall examine. Although in traditional vein Moore claimed for music a nearly theological originality (‘O Music! thy celestial claim/Is still resistless, still the same!’ [ll. 17–18, V, 122]), what impresses us is the range of music’s fundamental affect as the poem enumerates its power from Peru to Lapland in a kind of panglossian universality. Yet more than this played in Moore’s conception of ‘the most romantic of all the arts’.



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For one thing, not aspiring to the infinite, Moore did not seek music’s autonomy. He could not: he was composing songs. Unlike Hoffmann, therefore, he could not allow that ‘instrumental music, which scorning every aid, every admixture or another art (the art of poetry), gives pure expression to music’s specific nature’.11 Perhaps the origins of Moore’s adherence to song lay in youthful performances in a musical household. However, as we shall see, his stance also owed much to a distinct philosophical tradition. If, for example, the appeal of music to a thinker like Novalis was that it marked a work of original and individual genius (‘The musician takes the essence of his art out of himself – and not the slightest suspicion of imitation can befall him’),12 as a wordsmith Moore would therefore work under the suspicion of imitation. This he could turn to his advantage: nevertheless, by deferring to music as he did, Moore appeared to be relinquishing his own claims to originality. The natural question to ask, then, is where the music came from. William Power’s advertisement to the first number of the Irish Melodies ascribed originality to the nation: Though the Beauties of the National Music of Ireland have been very generally felt and acknowledged, yet it has happened, through the want of appropriate English words, and of the Arrangement necessary to adapt them to the voice, that many of the most excellent compositions have hitherto remained in obscurity. It is intended, therefore, to form a Collection of the best Original Irish Melodies, with characteristic Symphonies and Accompaniments. (IV, 111) Original plainly means here original to Ireland. Although Moore’s series of National Airs (1818–27) gestured like the Melologue towards universal harmonies in rather homogeneous words and tunes, the sub-headings ‘Spanish Air’, ‘Indian Air’, and so on indicate that Moore sought the flowering of independent national spirit. If this ran counter to a notion of music’s infinite nature, it did recall the writings of Herder, himself a pioneering folksong collector who in 1778–9 had published Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern (Voices of the People in Their Songs). Moore’s universalist ‘language of the soul’ was indebted to Herder, who in turn described music as ‘a magical language of the feelings’.13 But if as a philologist Herder’s researches convinced him that thought was bounded



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the music of a nation, in its most imperfect form, and favourite tunes, displays the internal character of the people […] more truly and profoundly, than the most copious description of external contingencies.14 Thus, like the National Airs, the real distinction of the Irish Melodies, according to the publisher who named them, was their national identity. After the Union this carried a definite political charge; even before, the origins of native music in Ireland were beginning to be scrutinized in the manner of Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), which claimed ‘Poetry and Music’ in whichever country ‘coeval with its original inhabitants’.15 Herder’s interest in cultural anthropology and native song had gained currency: the fruits of his own researches had been seized upon by German composers and harmonized for voice and piano. Evidently there was a huge appetite for transcriptions onto that most Romantic of instruments, the piano. In 1805 Moore had been contacted by the Scottish publisher George Thomson with a view to publishing a collection similar to his Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1793–1818), which had contained arrangements by Haydn and Pleyell, alongside Robert Burns’s songs. Moore himself was a pianist and arranger of some skill: to Thomson he had written as his enthusiasm for the Irish project, eventually overseen by Beethoven, waned: ‘I confess I could have wished you had selected some prettier melodies for me.’16 For the new project he would have to be in charge of the music too. The practical answer to the music’s origin is that Moore plundered printed books of tunes. Ten of 20 ‘airs’ from the first two numbers derived from Edward Bunting’s A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music of Ireland, published in London by William Power in 1797. Other sources he drew upon included Smollet Holden’s Collection of Old-Established Irish Slow and Quick Tunes (Dublin, 1805) and the novelist and harpist Sydney Owenson’s Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies (London, 1805). Moore did not collect airs aurally, far less transcribe them on folkloric expeditions; and, until the plea for more melodies that prefaced the fifth number, he did not cast about all that widely, beyond William Power’s own collection. These prosaic origins were hardly broadcasted. But perhaps as a consequence the nature of Moore’s



by language(s), how much more might native music provide access to local and national character:

Drawing Breath

borrowings has occasioned much debate concerning their originality. He has been accused, then and now, of plundering the native repertory and domesticating wild strains into drawing-room songs; even, anachronistically, of making something essentially Irish into something essentially English. Typically, however, it was a debate Moore himself joined. It is worth noting that there was not, and is not, a clear definition of ‘authenticity’ when it comes to such music. Bunting had already ‘adapted’ the music of his harpers at the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival by transcribing it, with all the slight regularizations of rhythm and mode this entailed, and then by variously arranging the music for piano in the printed volumes that followed (1797, 1809, 1840). It is sometimes forgotten that the harpers too were continually adapting music they knew, and tuning it to an audience’s ear, frequently preferring more up-to-date pieces Bunting disregarded. In trying to play what the audience wanted Moore was not behaving so very differently from the harpers; selection was already adaptation, something the full title of the first edition, A Selection of Irish Melodies, acknowledged. What is true to say is that musical arrangers from Bunting onwards were engaged in a more or less conscious process of restoration.17 As a restorer Bunting evidently thought of himself as painstakingly faithful to the originals. Like Moore, he followed the currents of his time in believing the music came first: a ‘strain of music’ was ‘the vehicle of many sets of words, but they are adapted to it, not it to them’. This very ‘originality’ in fact allowed Moore the licence to graft upon the music whatever words he chose. If Bunting liked to believe his harpers originally meant to add harmony and added his own,18 given the tessitura and resonance of the wire-strung harp, to separate bass notes and proto-harmonies from melody on the instrument was anyway no easy task. What he did insist upon was the essential value of his harpists’ performances. Here Moore utterly disagreed: [The] chief corruptions of which we have to complain arise from the unskilful performance of our own itinerant musicians, from whom, too frequently, the airs are noted down, encumbered by their tasteless decorations, and responsible for all their ignorant anomalies. (IV, 126) This is an astonishing statement from the advocate of the Irish harp, but it underlines how much the harp was for Moore not a real instrument but a symbol, used, as Mary Helen Thuente has shown, as in the



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patriotic verses of the United Irishmen.19 Whether instrumentalists or vocalists were more reliable sources became the ground of a fundamental opposition between harmony and melody, between instrument and the voice. Anticipating the collector George Petrie, Moore favoured the voice: Though it be sometimes impossible to trace the original strain, yet in most of them […] the pure gold of the melody shines through the ungraceful foliage which surrounds it; and the most delicate and difficult duty of a compiler is to endeavour, as much as possible, by retrenching these inelegant superfluities, and collating the various methods of playing or singing each air, to restore the regularity of its form, and the chaste simplicity of its character. (IV, 126–7) This is restoration of a robust kind, for which Moore has not always been praised. What he did, however, was to put the needs of singers before instrumentalists, and melody before harmony. All these approaches shared an assumption there was some original unsullied music that might somehow be divined. Restoration implied a replete past, and a point of origin. Moore was just an unusual antiquarian in that dismissing ‘romantic speculations’ he did not argue for the age of the melodies: [It] is certain that our finest and most popular airs are modern, and perhaps we may look no further than the last disgraceful century for the original of most of those wild and melancholy strains, which were, at once, the offspring and solace of grief. (IV, 120–1) This struck a different resonance: it derived the music from deep repositories of feeling, and from a particular period of recent history. Bunting ridiculed both Moore’s emphasis on melancholy and his political insinuations, arguing that most melodies were played by his harpers in ‘a spirited, lively, and energetic’ style in opposition to the ‘languid and tedious manner’ of ‘fashionable public performers’.20 In fact the Melodies contained plenty of brighter, livelier songs. The major-key mode of most tallied with Moore’s more subtle characterization (after he had engaged with the music) of ‘the tone of defiance, succeeded by the languor of despondency […] the sorrows of one moment lost in the levity of the next – and all that romantic mixture of mirth and sadness’ (IV, 118–19). This meant, however, that understanding the music would



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the whole task of selecting the airs and in some respects shaping them thus, in particular passages, to the general sentiment, which the melody appeared to me to express was undertaken solely by myself. Had I not ventured on these very admissible liberties many of the songs most known & popular would have been still sleeping with all their authentic dross about them in Mr Bunting’s First Volume.21 Moore justifies such ‘liberties’ by the songs finding an audience; more resonant is the claim of sensitivity to the ‘general sentiment’ of each melody. Sentiment and feeling was the domain of the artist, not the scholar, and Moore was thus claiming the poet’s natural territory. The adaptation of the music would be firmly in a poet’s hands; and those hands would be guided by feeling. What Moore was emphasizing might be summed up under the headings of several antitheses: newness as opposed to antiquity; politics as against ancient history; melody before harmony; singers before players; and feeling before scholarship. These were not abstract aesthetic distinctions. Each of them would be crucial to the Melodies’ character, and, arguably, to their success. If music came before the words, ideas about music came before the music itself. This dispute about originality was not native to Ireland. It replayed a wider discourse about music and language and their origins. For Moore at least the terms of this debate were framed by two giants of the era. Examining the origin of language persuaded Herder that the sentient being: is not alone. It stands allied with all nature! Strung with delicate chords; but nature hid sounds in these chords which, when called forth and encouraged, can arouse other beings of equally delicate build, can communicate, as though along an invisible chain, to a distant heart a spark that makes it feel for this unseen being. These sighs, these sounds are language.22 Seeking not a divine but an organic origin for language, Herder does not derive language directly from this phenomenon, believing the distinction of human language was the admixture of reason. He did, however, appear to derive music, describing its earliest form as ‘a wonder-music of all the affections’.23 In this he was looking forward to Schopenhauer and Hoffmann, but also back to Rousseau. Rousseau had seen reason as marking language’s fall: ‘the study of philosophy and the progress of 10.1057/9780230297623 - Ireland and Romanticism, Edited by Jim Kelly


be dependent on the sensibility of the interpreter of taste. As Moore confided to his journal on 15 July 1840:

reason, while having perfected grammar, deprive language of its vital, passionate quality which made it so singable’ – and found in music therefore a fundamental repository of feeling.24 That feeling began all things was an article of faith for Moore, as for the period, and he directly quotes Rousseau (‘Quand l’homme commence a raisonner, il cesse de sentire’) as epigraph to his poem ‘Love and Reason’ (I, 115). In sentences the Melodies seem designed to illustrate Rousseau insisted ‘the sounds of a melody do not affect us merely as sounds, but as signs of our affections, of our feelings’; ‘for moving a young heart’, he exclaimed, ‘or repelling an unjust aggressor, nature dictates accents, cries, lamentations’.25 As if in consequence Moore found the origin and strength of his national airs in the expression and arousal of national and personal feeling through such sounds, vocalized in music. Not just any music, either. For Rousseau music’s power could only be explained by the origin and action of melody: [By] imitating the inflections of the voice, melody expresses pity, cries of sorrow and joy, threats and groans. All the vocal signs of passion are within its domain. […] Not only does it imitate, it bespeaks. And its language, though inarticulate, is lively, ardent, passionate; and it has a hundred times the vigour of speech itself.26 Herder’s organicist metaphor of an Aeolian harp ‘strung with delicate chords’ implied the operation of harmony; Rousseau’s conception, while influencing Herder, insisted upon the primacy of melody. Seen in music as the operation of reason, harmony was rational and sensible, and thus both unaffecting and unoriginal. Worst of all it ‘separate[d] singing from speech’.27 For Rousseau, string instruments were thus a sign of degeneration: we recall Moore’s diatribes upon harpists. Melody derived from the voice: language was originally song. We might expect then these accents, cries, lamentations, together with Herder’s sighs and sounds to make up a good proportion of the Melodies, and we will not be disappointed. For Rousseau, as for Moore, defining such originality was not an abstract aesthetic question. As a practising musician, he wrote melodically driven operas like Le Devin du Village (1753) characterized by naturalistic expressive phrasing in recitative and aria. Moore too was sceptical of harmony’s pedantry, believing the ‘lawless peculiarity’ of consecutive fifths particularly suited to Irish music. Acknowledging the ‘variegating prism of Harmony’, he insisted despite ‘the improvements of moderns, our style still kept its originality sacred from their refinement’ (IV, 125). In performance he trusted to his own inspiration, ignoring the piano arrangements printed by the Powers. Following Rousseau, from singers 10.1057/9780230297623 - Ireland and Romanticism, Edited by Jim Kelly


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he demanded phrasing sensitive to the ‘expression of passion and tenderness’ and argued ‘in this style of musical recitation, […] the words ought to be as nearly spoken as is consistent with the swell and the sweetness of intonation’.28 Rousseau thus bequeathed something vital to the Melodies. Music and words were not antagonists, but breathed the same air; they derived directly from expressions of passion; and concentrating on the expressive power of vocal melody would truly manifest their origins. To put it bluntly, this was why Moore embarked on the Irish Melodies. He was channelling a philosophically authenticated source of originality. According to Moore’s own account the lyrics of the Melodies arrived together with his adapting the melody, as he tried it over at the piano or paced up and down outside: entwined just as Rousseau demanded. Moore was loath to untwine them: having, he said, ‘a strong objection to this sort of divorce’, he preferred ‘to keep them quietly and indissolubly together’ and only published the lyrics without musical notation when pirate editions made it inevitable (III, 219–20). The philosophical background to the Melodies made it imperative that once united words and music remain indissoluble. In fact Moore decided his entire poetic inspiration originated in music: It was, indeed, my strong desire to convey in words some of those feelings and fancies which music seemed to me to utter that first led me to attempt poetry.29 No wonder then we find Moore’s verse saturated with music: perhaps the chief characteristic of all his songs is this overwhelming selfconsciousness. So much so that the Melodies themselves contained and enumerated their own myth(s) of origin. So where do the Melodies tell us they begin? Well, in the most literal way, they do begin with music. Turning the pages of the first number we come upon a series of introductory pieces from Sir John Stevenson: ‘Carolan’s Concerto’, and a series of three ‘Airs’ rather elaborately arranged for fourhanded piano. The difficulty and trilling ornaments mark all this out as keyboard-led, serious instrumental music, reminding us of the piano’s dominance and the order of names on the title page, Stevenson’s before Moore’s. A similar suite opened the third and fifth volumes, although by then it was becoming clear whose voice was dominant. On reaching the opening song, ‘Go Where Glory Waits Thee’ (III, 221–3), we might indeed believe that ‘music’ is ‘stealing/All the soul of feeling’ (ll. 33–4). However, the song is insistent music’s power lies in vocal melody, recalling past singing and gesturing self-consciously ‘Oh!’ to its exclamatory manifestation.



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Arranged as it is for several voices, the song stages a community, involving the audience in its motions towards singing and remembering, and thus sets the tone of the Melodies as collaborative, harmonious, even as something (already!) reciprocally inspired or remembered. The most memorializing myth of origin in the Melodies is that of ‘Dear Harp of My Country’ (III, 354–5), which appeared as the closing lyric of the sixth number in 1815. It is Moore’s farewell to his muse, although in the event he produced another four numbers of varying quality. We know it is a myth, for Moore says he found the harp in darkness and ‘the cold chain of silence’ (l. 2, III, 354),30 but despite this aggrandizement of his role the poet attempts to retire modestly. Addressing the harp, here an Aeolian representative of Irish music, he apparently cedes to the music all power to move: If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover Have throbb’d at our lay, ’tis thy glory alone; I was but as the wind, passing heedlessly over, And all the wild sweetness I waked was thy own. (ll. 13–16, III,355) Co-opting the Aeolian harp for a national purpose, it is interesting that the poet thereby becomes the animating breeze: more usually, as in Coleridge’s poem ‘The Eolian Harp’ it is the other way round. Despite his heedless near-involuntary passing, the poet’s windy role then is more originary than might be expected. Probably we shouldn’t be surprised: the poet who expressly ‘gave all thy chords to light, freedom and song’ (l. 4) might also with the help of the piano manipulate the notes to pulse and throb at ‘the pulse of the patriot’ and then sweep along when wind was required. Words, then, might even cause music. The reversal of the expected roles is especially audible when we realize the harp but echoes a sigh: But so oft hast thou echo’d the deep sigh of sadness, That even in thy mirth it will steal from thee still. (ll. 7–8, III, 354) The harp’s originary force is, then, rather undermined by the imagery. For one thing harps don’t sigh very well, as the lyric opening the next number, ‘My Gentle Harp’, rather seems to acknowledge: But come – if yet thy frame can borrow One breath of joy, oh, breathe for me (ll. 25–36, III, 356)



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That ‘if’ hangs in the air – can a harp borrow even one breath? Breaths and sighs are effusions we associate with a human body rather than a harp. Their presence, though, might tell us something important about Moore’s conception of music. Again and again we hear, we feel breath’s presence in the Melodies, so often combined with music. That little-regarded myth of origin ‘On Music’ recalls how ‘memory lives in Music’s breath’, and once more overhearing the sighing, ‘grateful breath of song’ we might start to suspect a pun breathing through all these vocalized airs (l. 16, l. 11, III, 159). Joined in image-clusters with blushes and tears, such melting breaths and sighs were very much the stuff of Romantic fiction, notably in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. Here the heroine Glorvina (Irish ‘glór bhinn’, ‘sweet voice’) is an emotive musician after Rousseau’s own heart ‘borne away by the magic of the art […] and the natural enthusiasm of her impassioned character: she can sigh, she can weep, she can smile, over her harp’.31 Owenson even allowed her harps to breathe, as Glorvina’s father avers: ‘the tones of an Irish harp have still the power to breath a spirit over the drooping soul of an Irishman’.32 Moore himself had been concertedly using such imagery before the Melodies in his first book of poems, Odes of Anacreaon (1800); Macpherson’s Ossian was full of a grandstanding windy metonymy. Such effusions, then, were hardly new or original; the difference was their erotic charge was now delivered in music. What the Melodies might have been lacking in interior life and the imagination, the kind of thing that now stands for originality, they made up for in intimacy with physical affect. Moore was dealing not in internal reflection, nor even its external manifestation, but in the instinctive, involuntary, and primary signs of emotion. As such the Melodies were interested in the very beginnings of feeling. This was where language and music originated. As Luke Gibbons suggests, such signs of private feelings have a public face – he has examined blushes, but one might as cogently mention the sighs that follow in ‘’Tis the Last Rose of Summer’:33 To reflect back her blushes To give sigh for sigh. (ll. 7–8, III,245) As involuntary audible somatic responses the breaths and sighs that permeate the lyrics of the Melodies represent publicly authorized displays



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of emotion. At once thus intimate and performative, this was exactly the space occupied by the Melodies themselves. And, like blushes, sighs are shown here to have a reciprocal, mutually reinforcing effect; like them, they are both reactive and affective. So, one might argue, was the performance of music, especially in Moore’s hands as he played on his audience’s response. Breath can be at once somatic and transparent: a fitting metonymy for music. The more so because a breath is both controlled and compelled, as a singer like Moore knew instinctively: with each line a dramatically held breath, every lyric in concert became a performative exhibition of origins. It is obvious why breath might represent inspiration, the breath of the muse; if one followed Rousseau, it engendered the beginnings of melody. Listening to Moore’s Melodies, an audience knew intimately that breath was the very substance of song. So we can look at such clusters of imagery as derivative, repetitive, unoriginal; but this would overlook their more intimate purpose. Moore’s defence seems to cede ground: With respect to the verses which I have written for these Melodies, as they are intended rather to be sung than read, I can answer for their sound with somewhat more confidence than their sense. (IV, 128) While wrapping his words in the protective embrace of the music, Moore presumably answers also for their deliberate verbal gestures towards sound. Not only the ‘oh!’ sounds that saturate the lyrics, but, as Hazlitt expressed it, in Moore’s poetry ‘every syllable must breathe a sigh’.34 While sighs and breaths can be involuntary, their appearance in the songs is entirely considered. Writing of ‘this weary breath – half a sigh – which dies’, Herder concluded that, in context, ‘these sighs, these sounds are language’;35 Rousseau had determined such a language was intrinsically melodic: ‘All the vocal signs of passion are within [melody’s] domain.’36 It is symptomatic, then, that in ‘Echo’, sweet instrumental sounds and their echoes of ‘horn, or lute, or soft guitar’ (again no piano) are passed over for: The sigh that’s breathed for one to hear Is by that one, that only dear, Breathed back again! (ll. 13–15, IV, 420)



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By no means was this written against music. Breath united the origins of feeling and its spontaneous expression with a lover’s reciprocal sigh; it united, too, its own expression in melody with the audience’s sympathetic somatic reaction. One can just imagine the intimacy the lyric created in a breathlessly sung performance, and the audience’s exhaled response. Like so many, by dwelling on breath this melody thereby made song its subject. Filling the Melodies with the very stuff of music would not only legitimize Moore’s translations of feeling but also minimize their travel. Straying not far from sounds of passion both Rousseau and Herder had claimed as music’s origin, Moore hoped his words would achieve a kind of transparency that would join with music’s nature and in fact return song to its very origins in breath. When sung this is true of each one of Moore’s Melodies; in Rousseau’s words, not only do they imitate, they bespeak. In their concentration on the beginnings of feeling, their saturation with musical and vocal imagery, their association of breath with music in vocal performance, in all their chronic self-consciousness about origins, the Melodies achieved something not only affective and resonant, but in all senses original.

Notes 1. Quoted in Howard Mumford Jones, The Harp That Once: Tom Moore and the Regency Period (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), p. 60. 2. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgebe, ed. Ernst Behler with Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningen, 1958), vol. 2, p. 320 [for translation. see Hans Eichner, ‘The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism’, PMLA, 97, 1 (January 1982), p. 23]). 3. Quoted in Ronan Kelly, Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2008), p. 249. 4. Above his debts Moore also cleared an extra £350. Writing to Thomas Longman in November 1837 Moore’s musings on the value of his own copyrights proved prescient: ‘with respect to what you say about “Lalla Rookh” being the “cream of copyrights”, perhaps it may, in a property sense; but I am strongly inclined to think that, in a race into future times (if any thing of mine could pretend to such a run), those little ponies, the “Melodies”, will beat the mare, Lalla, hollow’, Letter to Thomas Longman (23 November 1837), The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1964), II, p. 821. 5. Kelly, Bard of Erin, p. 85. 6. Lord Byron, Selected Poems, eds Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 248–9. 7. Thomas Moore, Moore’s Irish Melodies: Illustrated by D. Maclise, R. A. (London: Longman, 1846), pp. v–vi. 8. Quoted in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 93.



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9. E. T. A Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ [1813], trans. Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, eds Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, rev. edn 1998), [1193–8] p. 1193. 10. Thomas Moore, The Poetical Works, 10 vols (London: Longman, 1840–41), V, p. 121. Unless otherwise indicated quotations are from this edition of Moore’s works and volume number and pagination are given parenthetically. 11. Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, p. 1193. 12. Quoted in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 93. 13. Quoted in ibid., p. 93. 14. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Reflections of the Philosophy of the History of Mankind [1784–91], trans. and ed. Frank E. Manuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1968), p. 40. 15. Joseph Cooper Walker, The Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (London: T. Payne & Son, 1786), pp. 1–2. 16. Moore, Letter to George Thomson (6 August 1806), Letters, I, p. 101. 17. We can observe this impulse all the way up to the very title of Charles Villiers Stanford’s Moore’s Irish Melodies: The Original Airs Restored (London: Boosey, 1895), which tried, unsuccessfully, to put back what he thought were the modal peculiarities of the ‘original airs’, often flattening sevenths and snapping rhythms at moments when Moore had in fact followed his sources pretty closely. 18. Edward Bunting, The Ancient Music of Ireland, arranged for piano forte, to which is prefixed a dissertation on the Irish harp and harpers, including an account of the old melodies of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges & Smith, 1840), p. 1. 19. See Mary Helen Thuente, The Harp Re-Strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Literary Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994). 20. Bunting, Ancient Music of Ireland, pp. 18–19. 21. Thomas Moore, The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 6 vols (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1983–91), V, p. 214. 22. Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language (1772), in Two Essays on the Origin of Language: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, trans. Alexander Gode and John H. Moran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 88. 23. Quoted in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 93. 24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Language (1781), in Two Essays, trans. Gode and Moran, p. 68. 25. Ibid., pp. 58, 12. 26. Ibid., p. 57. 27. Ibid., p. 58. 28. Thomas Moore, A Collection of the Vocal Music of Thomas Moore, Esq. (London: n.d., n.p. [c. 1814]), p. iii. 29. Moore, Moore’s Irish Melodies (1846), p. v. 30. Moore self-consciously appends a note accounting for the Irish provenance of this phrase. 31. Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 86. 32. Ibid., p. 59. 33. Luke Gibbons in conversation; see also his Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).



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34. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, eds A. R. Walker and Arnold Grove, 12 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), VIII, p. 413. 35. Herder, Essay On the Origin of Language, in Two Essays, trans. Gode and Moran, pp. 88, 90. 36. Rousseau, Essay On the Origin of Languages, in Two Essays, trans. Gode and Moran, p. 57.



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Malvina’s Daughters: Irish Women Poets and the Sign of the Bard Leith Davis

In her now classic Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997), Katie Trumpener drew scholarly attention to the importance of the figure of the bard for writers from the Celtic periphery as a symbol of a civilized and organic historic nation. At the same time, she noted the dependence of English writers on this image: ‘English literature, so-called, constitutes itself in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the systematic imitation, appropriation, and political neutralization of antiquarian and nationalist literary developments in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.’1 More recently, in his Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008), Murray Pittock credits James Macpherson’s Ossian, in particular, with both ‘confirm[ing] the role of the bard as central to Celtic culture’ and also extending its appeal to Romantic discourse in general: ‘Ossian’s is on one level the national cultural voice of 1760–90; soon its very success would enable a wider Romanticism to expound these themes of manic depression and emplace the bard as one of their predominant representatives.’2 For Pittock, the poems’ ‘tenderness and even delicacy of sentiment’, while offering a positive view of Scottish history, also work, along with other factors, to depoliticize the Scottish patriotic impulse. Pittock suggests that the poems’ combination of sympathy and heroism constitutes a subsuming of Scotland’s martial independence within British structures of feeling. But the ‘sentimental gift of compensation for the ruthless discarding of the patriot past’ that Ossian represents for Pittock can also be seen as signalling a shift in the gendered language of national identification.3 According to Harriet Guest, sentiment and sensibility were ‘central to the issue of women’s ability to imagine themselves as patriotic or public citizens’.4 Ossian’s focus on affect in fact provided new opportunities for women writers to participate in the project of national imagining.5 141



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JoEllen DeLucia has noted that the Poems of Ossian’s ‘egalitarian vision of gender’ appealed to members of the Bluestocking circle: ‘Ossian’s heroines sang alongside male bards and feasted afterwards with their male companions, all the while softening the manners of the opposite sex and inspiring a compassion and polish absent from other early societies, particularly the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome.’6 The poems also provided women writers on the Celtic periphery with a role model of a woman patriot poet who celebrates the history of her nation: the female bard, Malvina. Betrothed to the dead Oscar, Ossian’s son, she, too, is a representative of the Caledonian heroic line. She is the addressee of many of Ossian’s poems and, more importantly, a bard in her own right and Ossian’s poetic heiress until her own premature demise. In ‘The War of Caros’, for example, Ossian calls to Malvina: ‘Bring me the harp, O maid, that I may touch it when the light of my soul shall arise – Be thou near, to learn the song; and future times shall hear of Ossian.’7 In this chapter, I explore how three Irish women poets, Charlotte Brooke, Mary Balfour and the lesser-known Vincentia Rogers, capitalized on the lasting currency of the Poems of Ossian and responded to the image of the female bard to further their own national visions for Ireland. Although Irish antiquarians like Joseph Cooper Walker professed that, ‘We cannot find that the Irish had female Bards, or BARDESSES, properly so called,8 Irish women writers formulated models of female production under the sign of the bard, however fabricated. As my readings will suggest, however, this coupling of martial valour and sentiment resulted in various political positionings in the hands of these female patriots. Macpherson’s chilly reception among Irish scholars like Charles O’Conor and Sylvester O’Halloran has been well documented by Clare O’Halloran and Mícheál Mac Craith,9 although, as Lesa Ní Mhunghaile suggests, the Poems of Ossian also ‘provided a further stimulus for Anglo-Irish antiquarians to begin expressing an interest in the remote Gaelic past’.10 While the origins of the poems of Ossian were being debated by men, it was a woman, Charlotte Brooke, who undertook the project of bringing to light the Irish versions of the stories from which Macpherson had forged his highly stylized pieces. The title page of Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry indicates her interest in contributing to the discussion regarding Ossian, as it features a quotation addressed to the famous bard: ‘A Oisín, as binn linn do sgéala [O, Oisín / Your stories are sweet to me].’11 While she includes several poems that reassert the Irish origins of the Ossianic tales, however, Brooke does not directly dispute Macpherson. Moreover, she borrows from him as much



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as she corrects his perspective. In particular, she imports the language of sensibility to the cause of Ireland, presenting this language as especially connected to female articulation. Macpherson’s poems mourn the loss of Highland culture, emphasizing its rupture and difference from the present time. In his 1765 collection, the Works of Ossian, he comments on the way that Highland society has changed utterly: The genius of the highlanders has suffered a great change within these last few years. … Many have now learned to leave their mountains, and seek their fortunes in a milder climate; and though a certain amor patriae may sometimes bring them back, they have, during their absence, imbibed enough of foreign manners to despise the customs of their ancestors. (1, xxii) Brooke’s relationship to the Gaelic culture that she represents is significantly different from Macpherson’s relationship to the Highlanders in his poems, as she belonged to a group that historically had been responsible for ‘pacifying’ and ruling the native Irish.12 When Brooke came to write the Reliques, the Protestant Ascendancy had won parliamentary independence from England, and the penal laws had begun to be relaxed a little. But the years 1785–8 saw the escalation of a series of ‘Rightboy’ protests in Munster and Cork, with fears that the agitation would spread ‘to involve the whole kingdom’, as Brooke’s patron Dominick Trant wrote.13 Significantly, Brooke’s Reliques, rather than being concerned with the representation of rupture in society, focus on negotiation between the past and present. Furthermore, she suggests that women have a particularly important part to play in this negotiation. In her Preface, Brooke cites two purposes for her work, both of which involve a gendered language of sensibility. On the one hand, she seeks to convey ‘the productions of our Irish Bards’ to Irish readers in order to make them ‘gratified, at the lustre reflected on them by ancestors so very different from what modern prejudice has been studious to represent them [sic]’ (vii). This involves negotiating a place for herself among the ranks of antiquarian scholars in Ireland. Lamenting that the ‘limited circle of [her] knowledge’ does not allow her to ‘elucidate[] and enlarge[] upon’ the subject of ‘ancient Irish poetry’ in such a manner as the reader might expect, she satisfies herself by noting that even if she were able to perform such a task, ‘it would only have qualified me for an unnecessary foil to the names of [Charles] O’CONOR, [Sylvester] O’HALLORAN



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AND [Charles] VALLANCEY’ (iii). Instead, she carves out her own niche, one that on the surface limits her to a passive role more suitable to members of the female sex: ‘My comparatively feeble hand aspires only (like the ladies of ancient Rome) to strew flowers in the paths of these laurelled champions of my country’ (iii). Rather than joining in the already vociferous debate on the ancient state of the nation with yet another historical dissertation, Brooke attempts to use the poetry of the past to illustrate the manners of its people. As becomes clear, however, far from being limited by being outside the circle of antiquarian discourse, Brooke is liberated from its constraints and free to embark on an entirely new enterprise: not an antiquarian discourse, but a work of creative translation never attempted by the authorities whom she cites. Her other self-appointed task is to negotiate a more positive relationship between Britain and Ireland: to introduce ‘the British muse’ to her ‘elder sister in this isle’ in order to make Britain and Ireland ‘better acquainted’ (vii). The two muses, she suggests, are ‘sweet ambassadresses of cordial union between two countries that seem formed by nature to be joined by every bond of interest, and of amity’ (vii–viii). Not only do the muses negotiate with one another, but they are also recruited to negotiate with Britain itself: ‘Let them entreat of Britain to cultivate a nearer acquaintance with her neighbouring isle. … Let them tell her, that the portion of her blood which flows in our veins is rather ennobled than disgraced by the mingling tides that descended from our heroic ancestors’ (viii). Brooke’s representation of ‘union’ here suggests the channelling of martial history into a realm of sentiment that is associated with the female, as the sister muses ‘tell’ Britain about the Irish blood ‘that flowed from our heroic ancestors’ (viii) as they walk ‘abroad from their bowers’ (vii). Brooke’s original poem, the ‘Tale of Mäon’, represents a further channelling of an Irish history based, like that of Scotland, on a ‘taxonomy of glory’ into a female sensibility. Brooke draws her subject from a ‘Tale … found in the ancient history of Ireland, and … related by KEATING, O’HALLORAN, WARNER, &c’. (323), but she modifies it in such a way as to emphasize the female characters’ contribution. The poem begins with a dialogue between an ancient bard, Craftiné, and the female speaker of the poem. Like Ossian, Craftiné represents an era of heroism, as he describes the great spirit: Who train’d, of old, our sires to fame, And led them to the field;



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In the ‘Tale of Mäon’, however, it is the female speaker who relates the story of the fame of ‘our sires’. At first, she indicates her fear ‘of critic wrath’ (326) if she undertakes such a task. Her acceptance of the task is only secured when Craftiné frames the undertaking as a ‘gift’ (329), which she will give to a ‘Pair by Genius lov’d’ (328) (Brooke’s patron, Dominick Trant, and his wife). The process of bardic story-telling undergoes an important change here, as it shifts from a masculine line of songs ‘sung and recited’ on the battlefield or around a father’s hearth to a feminized circuit of ‘sympathy of hearts’ and ‘kindred sentiment’ (329). Through the medium of Craftiné, the female Irish ‘Muse of ancient days’ entrusts the ‘Tale of Mäon’ to the speaker so that she may in turn gift it to her friends. Craftiné suggests that the speaker’s gender makes her especially suitable for telling the tale: No more thy glorious task refuse, Nor shrink from fancy’d harms, But, to the eye of Britain’s Muse, Present a sister’s charms. The strange ventriloquism of the ‘Tale’ suggests the gender shifts that Brooke seeks to impose on the Irish material. The tale is inspired by the female muse of Ireland, told from the perspective of the male bard Craftiné, and channelled through the female speaker, Brooke’s authorial analogue. The plot of the ‘Tale’ enacts a further shift from martial heroism to a female realm of ‘sentiment’ (329). The story begins with Ireland in the midst of a civil war as the throne of Mäon’s father, Laoghaire Lork, is wrested by his brother, Cobthach. Craftiné rescues Mäon from the battle and takes him to Munster, where he is trained as a warrior and where he falls in love with Moriat. He is forced, however, to flee to France, and Moriat receives word that he is going to wed the king of France’s daughter, Aidé. Thinking of the greater good of her country, Moriat relinquishes Mäon and writes him a long poem (inspired by the ‘War Odes’ translated earlier in the Reliques), which urges him to hasten his marriage in order to secure France’s help to regain his kingdom. Here, it is Moriat rather than Mäon who is presented as the true patriot, as she is willing to sacrifice everything for her nation.14 But Aidé has heard about Moriat and refuses to come between the couple. Instead, she uses her



Taught them to glow with Freedom’s flame, And Freedom’s arms to wield.


‘persuasive charms’ (363) to convince her father to support Mäon’s bid for vengeance. The action in the conclusion of the poem is presented as a negotiation that not only takes place between women, but also serves to unite them, as Aidé suggests in the message she gives Mäon to take back to Moriat: Tell her, though oceans roll between Our shores, at distance plac’d, Yet is she by my spirit seen, And by my heart embrac’d. (364) Not only have the two women achieved a spiritual union on earth, it is a union that will continue ‘when death dissolves our frames’: Rivals no more, we then shall meet; In air’s bright chariots move; And joyful join in union sweet, And everlasting love. (365) Brooke’s final movement away from masculine to the feminine realm can be seen in her narrative decision to break with the genre of the ‘Heroic Poem’. The speaker notes that Mäon triumphs over his enemy, but she refuses to go into the details: … the soft muse, of war no more Will undelighted tell: She loves the calm, the peaceful shore, Where gentler virtues dwell. (366) Through her speaker in the ‘Tale of Mäon’, Brooke presents herself as the logical successor to the bards of Ossian, as she draws from the tales of the past to entertain those in the present. She also effects a movement away from conflicts on the battlefield to negotiation between females, from the blood ‘that flowed from our heroic ancestors’ to an international sisterhood, as Aidé and Moriat, like the British and Irish muses, serve as an image of united yet distinct nations. The speaker’s relationship to the tale she tells, however, is decidedly different from that of Ossian to his tales or even Macpherson to the fragments he collected. She is not, as she makes clear, a native speaker; 10.1057/9780230297623 - Ireland and Romanticism, Edited by Jim Kelly


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she has had to be taught the language of her originals by the ‘Irish Muse’. As Craftiné notes: ‘Thee hath the sweet enchantress taught / The accents of her tongue’ (327). If the ‘Tale of Mäon’ is a model for the kind of negotiation between past and present, Gaelic Irish and AngloIrish, and the Gaelic and English that Brooke seeks to advance, it also suggests the darker side of negotiation in an uneven power situation. For what it ultimately represents is the shifting of the aesthetic tradition from its original linguistic site to a site of translation. At the same time, however, the Reliques genuinely tries to carve out a space for the Gaelic language, as Brooke suggests a different relationship between Gaelic and English than that found in the work of her male contemporaries.15 Antiquarians like William Shaw or Charles Vallancey who considered Gaelic attempted to provide English equivalents for Gaelic words or constructions.16 Brooke, in contrast, rejects such efforts, implying that the attempt to approximate the Irish idiom in the English language is futile: ‘I do not profess to give a merely literal version of my originals, for that I should have found an impossible undertaking’ (v). She suggests that a direct translation would also be unfair – even detrimental – to the Irish language, and she refers to ‘the injustice, of such a task’, adding, ‘there are many complex words which could not be translated literally, without great injury to the original, – without being “false to its sense, and falser to its fame”’ (v–vi). What Brooke does instead is to allow the two languages to represent themselves. On the one hand, she presents the English poems to ‘cloth[e] the thoughts of our Irish muse in a language with which [the English-speaking readers] are familiar’; on the other, she provides copies of ‘the originals, as vouchers for the fidelity of my translation, as far as two idioms so widely different would allow’ (vii). In an era when editors like Percy thought nothing of inserting their own changes into a manuscript, Brooke shows remarkable fidelity to her originals, copying them exactly into printed form: These originals are copied, with the utmost exactness, from the different collections when they were taken: the Translator, therefore, is not answerable for any supposed incorrectness in orthography, &c. which may possibly be discovered in many parts of them, as it was not thought expedient to make the smallest alteration whatever, not even so much as the addition of a point, or an accent. (264) Moreover, in her concern to respect the quality of the originals, Brooke achieved an important milestone for the Gaelic. The Reliques of Irish Poetry was the first work published in Ireland using an Irish font, one 10.1057/9780230297623 - Ireland and Romanticism, Edited by Jim Kelly


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created by Stephen Parker with the help of Maurice O’Gorman. The presentation of the poems in Irish characters visually suggests their derivation from manuscripts and renders them strikingly different from the poems in the Roman font in the rest of the book. In ‘The Ode to Gaul’, Brooke quotes Joseph Cooper Walker’s remarks on the work of the bards in bringing about peace between warring factions. During the ‘celebrated contention for precedence between Finn and Gaul’, Walker notes, the bards, ‘observing the engagement to grow very sharp, were apprehensive of the consequences, and determined, if possible, to cause a cessation of hostilities’ (163). In order to effect this peace, they shook ‘The Chain of Silence’, and ‘flung themselves among the ranks, extolling the sweets of peace, and the atcheivements [sic] of the combatants’ ancestors’ (163). In the Reliques of Ancient Poetry, Brooke herself takes on this role, ‘extolling’ the feats of the ‘ancestors’ of the Irish and their language in order to ‘conciliate’ between Ireland’s various factions and between Ireland and England. While Brooke might have preferred ‘the calm, the peaceful shore, / Where gentler virtues dwell’ (366), many in her nation, inspired by the radical changes taking place in Europe and America, would opt for the battlefield, trying their hand in a bloody revolution that would tear Ireland apart and ultimately result in a union that was far from the ‘cordial’ one that Charlotte Brooke imagined. The sign of the bard continued to have currency among post-Union women writers. In Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies with English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of Ancient Irish Bards (1805), Sydney Owenson continues Brooke’s project of correcting Macpherson’s geographical location of Ossian, for, as she notes, ‘Many of the poems which compose this little selection, were orally collected in what may be deemed the classic wilds of Ireland – where Ossian sung, where Fingal fought, and Oscar fell.’17 Five years after Owenson, the Ulster poet, Mary Balfour, pays more direct tribute to Brooke by including an epigraph from the ‘Tale of Mäon’ on the title page to her Hope: A Poetical Essay with Various Other Poems (1810). Balfour was, like Brooke, both an original poet and a translator of Gaelic material, even though, as the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman, she, too, belonged to a non-native community. Her encomium, ‘To the earl of Bristol, late bishop of Derry’, a supporter of Catholic enfranchisement, included in Hope: A Poetical Essay, suggests that her political sympathies were liberal.18 In ‘Kathleen O’Neil’, the longest poem in Hope, Balfour extends Brooke’s concerns to reconceive bardic culture and to present a woman as the preserver of Gaelic Ireland’s interests and negotiator between its native and non-native populations.



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‘Kathleen O’Neil’ begins on a stormy night with the appearance of a female spirit to an English traveller. The traveller is subsequently invited by an Irish youth he meets named Cormac to join the feast at Shane’s Castle, ‘the house of great O’Neil’.19 As the two men enter the castle gates, however, they are told that O’Neil has just died. His ‘next of kin’, Owen Roe, requests the dead chieftain’s bard, Donald, to celebrate the glory of his chief and to recount tales of his ancestors. Accordingly, Donald tells the story of the generous but hot-headed Phelim O’Neil and his daughter, Kathleen. As Donald relates, Phelim had set out to Bennbraden in order to help a suppliant, O’Caghan, avenge his brother’s death and win back his lands from a neighbouring chieftain. In the process, he shows disregard for the ancient superstitious. When he finds a cow of his entangled in a whitethorn, he cuts down the plant, despite his followers’ protests that it is ‘sacred to the great Banshee’ (64). O’Caghan’s lands are peacefully restored, and Phelim returns home, only to find that Kathleen has vanished. Several nights later, she appears to Phelim, explaining that she was stolen away by the bean sidh (or banshee) as punishment for his transgressions. Donald concludes his tale with Kathleen’s promise that she would help protect the O’Neils and Ireland in the future, and the funeral celebrations for O’Neil continue. ‘Kathleen O’Neil’ raises the spectre of native Irish resistance to English colonization, as Balfour comments in a footnote that Shane’s Castle, or ‘Edinduffcarrick’, was ‘the romantic and beautiful residence of Earl O’Neill, descendant of that family from whom sprung the six branches out of which, on the demise of the great O’Nial, for the time being, a new one was elected’.20 The reference to ‘the great O’Nial’ here and Balfour’s reference to her character as ‘great O’Neil’ recall the historic Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, who had led the Nine Years’ War against England during the reign of Elizabeth I.21 The names of other characters in the poem are also linked to figures of Irish resistance. Owen Roe and Phelim (or Felim) O’Neil were both military leaders in the Catholic confederacy that tried to overthrow English governance in Ireland (1641–2). Balfour’s references to these earlier figures only a decade after the 1798 Rebellion can be seen as her acknowledgement of the continuing troubled relations between native and non-natives in Ireland. Balfour does not dwell on conflicts between the native Irish and the English in ‘Kathleen O’Neil’, however; the only conflict that is presented in the poem takes place in the tale within the tale between neighbouring Irish chieftains. But she hints at the animosity between Irish and English in Cormac’s initial suspicion of the English traveller: ‘What brings thee here, upon this land / To wander in the clouds of



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‘Through me no eye has dropped a tear; ‘Through me no native been oppress’d; ‘For truly does my soul revere ‘The virtues of an Irish breast.’ (47) His description of his own attitude to the Irish, however, reminds readers that not every Englishman has shared his perspective historically. In the national tale narrative popularized in Ireland by Sidney Owenson in The Wild Irish Girl, confederacy between native and nonnative Irish citizens is represented through the marriage of the male English outsider to the female embodiment of Gaelic Ireland. In Balfour’s poem, however, such confederacy is suggested not through heterosexual marriage, but through homosocial hospitality, as the Englishman is invited to participate in the Irish commonality by the O’Neil’s heir: ‘And thou from distant regions come, ‘Thou Sagsanach, partake our cheer, ‘Think us thy friends … this hall thy home, ‘And share an Irish welcome here.’ (50) Nevertheless, this homosocial bond is enabled through female activity, as the Englishman’s acceptability to the native Irish is ensured not by his own protestations of goodwill, but by the fact that the spirit of Kathleen has appeared to him. The sighting of the revenant leaves him ‘mute and motionless’ ‘with chill horror’ (44–5), but it also guarantees him access to the native Irish community. As Cormac explains, the Englishman is conjoined forever with the native Irish because he hears and ‘meet[s]’ the ‘eye’ of the shade of Kathleen: ‘Because her country’s friend thou art, ‘Did Lady Kathleen meet thine eye; ‘For grateful is an Irish heart, ‘Nor death itself dissolves the tie.’ (47)



night?’ (46). The Englishman assures Cormac that, although he comes from ‘o’er the dusky wave’, he has always been well-disposed toward the native Irish and attentive to the fact, ‘That Erin’s sons are just and brave’ (46):

Not only does a female figure facilitate the negotiation between native and non-native representatives, she also acts, as Balfour suggests in the ‘Argument’ to the poem, as the ‘superintending spirit of her race’ (42). Although the spirit of Kathleen enters the poem initially as a frightening shade, she is represented in the story within the story as a figure who articulates the continuity of the nation.22 When she appears to her father, she assures him that she will protect his descendants even when the castle itself has mouldered into ruin and that she will ensure that Ireland’s ‘glory’ will survive: ‘Around the heroes of O’Neil, ‘Thy Kathleen shall attendant wait, ‘Each change of fortune shall reveal, ‘And warn them of approaching fate. ‘And till this earth, now fixed secure, ‘Shall be to distant regions hurled, ‘Thy Erin’s fame shall still endure, ‘Her glory end but with the world.’ (77) Like Brooke, Balfour depicts a woman performing the function of the male bard. The actual male bard, Donald, is represented as feeble and ineffective in comparison. When Owen Roe requests that Donald proclaim O’Neil’s ‘valiant deeds’ (50), he betrays this weakness: ‘He struck the harp, his trembling hand / Wandered awhile the chords among’ (51). Rather than recounting O’Neil’s ‘ancestry and fame’ (50), he focuses in Ossianic fashion on the loss of the chieftain: ‘Oh great O’Neil how low art thou! ‘No more amidst thy faithful band, ‘With noble port and dauntless brow, ‘Shalt thou unfold thy high command.’ (51) In particular, he notes that his own hopes to have O’Neil raise the stone ‘To mark where Donald’s bones shall rest’ (53) have been dashed. Eventually, Owen asks Donald to ‘cease’ his lamentations because, ‘No heart the moving strain can bear’ (54). Instead, Donald is requested to recount ‘the tales of other times’ and subsequently delivers the story of Kathleen. In ‘Kathleen O’Neil’, then, sentimentalism is associated



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with the male bard. The work of ‘superintending’ the nation’s future and recounting the ‘taxonomy of glory’, however, is given to a woman. Just as Kathleen brings the Irish and English characters together within the narrative, Balfour’s narrator assumes that role in the poem as she mediates between the two communities in the paratext. In the Argument, Balfour’s narrator explains the origins of the story to the reader, noting that the poem is ‘founded on an ancient Irish tradition, current among the natives’, especially those anxious to ‘derive their descent from the old Milesian race’ (42). In the footnotes, she translates Gaelic words found in the poem and supplies historical information for readers unfamiliar with the history of Gaelic Ireland. The English traveller is referred to in the poem by the Gaelic word ‘Sagsanach’, for example. Balfour comments in a footnote that, ‘Sagsanach, or Sasgunach, means a Saxon or Englishman, from Sagcsan, England’ (81). Another footnote explains the reference to ‘Brian Boru, or Boroimhe, the celebrated Irish monarch, who defeated the Danes at Clontarf in 1014’ (83). Whereas the poem presents Kathleen as the ‘superintendant of her race’ who will ensure the ‘fame’ and ‘glory’ of Erin, however, Balfour’s narrator assumes a less grandiose role. The action of the poem concludes with the mourners of O’Neil raising ‘with united voice’ the ‘melancholy shriek of day’ in a solemn Caoine. But the final five stanzas of the poem represent a sudden break from this scene of communal singing, instead devolving into the lyric contemplation of the singular ‘I’ as the speaker reflects on her personal attachment to her ‘native’ land: My native Erin! … on thy smile Each future hope I fondly rest, For dearer far thy em’rald isle, Than lands with Eastern splendour blessed. (79) Like Kathleen, the narrator presents an image of Ireland as a nation from which ‘glory’ may ‘ne’er depart’, but it is a glory to which she acknowledges she has only a marginal attachment. Whereas Kathleen’s fame continues among ‘many respectable people’ (42) even in Balfour’s own day, the speaker of ‘Kathleen O’Neil’ refers to her own neglect by history. Instead, she reconciles herself to offering ‘one simple sprig of Shamrock’ to the nation: Still doomed unnoticed and unknown, In sad obscurity to pine,



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In ‘Kathleen O’Neil’, Balfour registers a more complicated relationship between the English and Irish communities than found in Brooke. Brooke’s narrator is persuaded to take on the job of singing the history of the Gaelic nation in the ‘Tale of Mäon’ by the promise of the tale being a gift to another member of the Anglo-Irish elite. Balfour’s narrator, however, is much less certain about the reception of her story. Ending as it does, however, by converting to the lyric voice, the poem does gesture to another way in which Balfour herself contributed to the communication between the Irish and English communities: by providing original English lyrics to Gaelic tunes. Balfour wrote eight songs for the second edition of Edmund Bunting’s Ancient Music of Ireland, which appeared in 1809.23 While the songs cannot be considered translations in the strict sense of the word, they do utilize Gaelic words and, like the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore, they provide evidence of the continuing presence of Gaelic oral culture.24 In addition, despite her hesitance about speaking for the native Gaelic population in Hope, A Poetical Essay, Balfour took it upon herself to adapt ‘Kathleen O’Neil’ for the stage. Kathleen O’Neil: A Grand National Melodrama, in Three Acts was performed in Belfast in 1814, complete with a comic subplot and Irish songs.25 Four years after Balfour’s death, Vincentia Rodgers, another Ulster woman poet, also turned to Irish history and the figure of the bard in her poem ‘Cluthan and Malvina’, which appeared in Cluthan and Malvina; an Ancient Legend, with Other Poems (1823).26 Unlike Brooke and Balfour, however, Rodgers suggests the inadequacy of the image of the bard, either male or female, to represent the history or future of the nation. Like ‘Kathleen O’Neil’, ‘Cluthan and Malvina’ begins in a moment of Gothic mystery with a stranger witnessing a supernatural phenomenon associated with Gaelic history: the sound of a harp in an empty hall. In this case, the stranger’s nationality remains uncertain and the mystery turns out to have a rational explanation: the wind blowing through the strings. The stranger inquires about the deserted state of the place he has come to, Carrickglas, the stronghold of Cluthan, and is answered by Rosgceach, the bard, who, undertakes to tell the stranger the ‘mournful tale’ of ‘days by-gone, / When Carrick’s hall and high towers shone / In splendour bright’ (27). Rosgceach describes the battle that occurred between the Irish and the Danes, his chieftain,



Be fame my Erin, all thy own, One simple sprig of Shamrock mine!!! (80)


Cluthan’s supposed treachery and his subsequent disappearance with his clan. After leaving Carrickglas, Cluthan and his clan sailed to one of the islands of the Hebrides ruled by Cosgrach, a pirate who had earlier fled Tara after killing his brother’s murderer. Cluthan escaped from the island with Cosgrach’s daughter, Malvina, and returned to Carrickglas, but Malvina’s brother, Macnawarah, followed the couple and killed Cluthan in a duel. Rosgceach concludes his tale with a description of Malvina’s subsequent death from grief. In ‘Cluthan and Malvina’, Rosgceach, the bard, is alone, a representative, like Ossian, of ‘the last of his race’ (23). However, unlike Ossian, Rosgceach was isolated even during the golden time of Carrickglas, largely, it would appear, because of the questionable actions of Cluthan. In the beginning of the poem, Rosgceach provides a bird’s-eye account of the battle with the Danes, but this is the last time he appears to function in such a central role in the clan. After the battle, Rosgceach loses touch with his chieftain for several days. When Cluthan does reappear, he comes with a ‘stranger knight’ (28), whom he uses to distract Rosgceach so that he can escape by sea with the rest of Clan Carrick. Instead of shedding the ‘light of the song’ (PO, 1, 144) on the actions of the clan, Rosgceach is left in the dark, uncertain about the activities of his chieftain: Methought (but wildest fancies will intrude,) That Cluthan’s sword-hilt was all stained with blood. … I then had asked, but terror sealed my tongue,–– Could Cluthan do a deed he dares disown? (29) Rosgceach appears to be further rejected by Cluthan as he leaves in the ship with the rest of the clan: I turned me then to where my chief had stood; But something worse than horror chilled my blood: The spot was vacant— (31) As Rosgceach discerns Cluthan on the stern of the ship, the chief ‘seemed to menace me to quit the shore’ (31). Unable to share his story with anyone, Rosgceach keeps his suspicions hidden ‘deep within my breast’ (32). The actions of his chief and clan, far from providing a sense



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of community and continuity, seem to him as if ‘a frightful dream’ (32). Rather than serving as a spokesperson of the ‘taxonomy of glory’ for the chieftain and clan, Rodgers’ bard is caught in the solipsism of his own subjective imagination. Cluthan’s departure also sets up a narrative discontinuity in the poem for the reader, as the entire second canto, concerning Cluthan’s adventures in the Hebrides, involves actions that Rosgceach could only know about by proxy, in effect, by becoming a reader himself. Indeed, Rosgceach recounts that Cluthan has told him of the events that occurred after their separation. Upon the return of Cluthan and Malvina, Rosgceach resumes the role of bard for the clan, but he fails to perform the traditional role of raising the warriors’ spirits with tales of heroic conflicts from the past. As Cluthan and his men stand on the heath observing the arrival of Macnawarah’s troops, Cluthan calls on Rosgceach for a song: ‘Raise the song, Rosgceach’, said Cluthan, ‘Of Connel, breaker of shields; Sing how the young chief of Belgrach Fought in the last of his fields.’ (49) Rosgceach responds with ‘The Battle of Lona’, but instead of focusing on the bravery of ‘Connel, breaker of shields’, this poem within a poem concentrates on Connel’s failure to protect his beloved, Cothune, and on the mystery of her fate. While ‘The Battle of Lona’ seems to have little effect on the men of Clan Carrick, it serves to reinforce Rosgceach’s individual subjectivity: ‘I ceased, and my heart foreboded ill’ (53). He is the only one who can hear ‘the bean-she plaintively wail’ (53) and who fears ‘that Carrick’s light would fail’ (53). He is psychically separate from the clan, even though he is physically with them. As well as depicting the bard’s failure to invigorate the community with stories of its past, Rodgers also presents the bard’s inability to sustain community in the future. At the end of the poem, Rosgceach, overwhelmed by his sense of subjective isolation, gives up on the idea of telling more tales of the heroes: But why thus lengthen tales of wo, Or sing of feuds, forgotten now? The heroes sleep, and I alone Can sing or tell of days by gone!



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When he laments the fact that soon he himself will rest ‘beneath the green sod’, and the ‘latest memory’ of Clan Carrick ‘will fade / As transient flower, or passing shade’ (57), he receives a less than reassuring response, as the stranger who has been listening to the tale all night rises and departs. The stranger does press the bard’s hand ‘kindly’ and wishes ‘his future days more blessed’, but his last action is to turn ‘his anxious eyes again / Towards Carrick’s mould’red towers, where long / He listened to the Minstrel’s song’ (58). Rosgceach’s ‘mournful tale’ has generated not a communal ‘morning with joy’ among homogeneous compatriots, but a ‘morning gray’ (58), which the stranger must negotiate, alone and anxious. Unlike Brooke and Balfour, who maintain a heroic image of ancient Ireland, even if it is a past glory, Rodgers builds alienation into the past. The hero is fallible; the bard, isolated and fearful; and the audience, an individual, leaves the tale with a sense of apprehension. Rodgers also differs from both of her Irish female predecessors in her representation of her female character. Moriat and Kathleen played important parts in articulating their nation’s history for future generations. Malvina, however, in Rodgers’ ‘Cluthan and Malvina’, is given an essentially passive role. Taken at a young age by her father, Cosgrach, to the Hebridean island, she becomes the object of Cluthan’s desire when he first sees her walking in the heath with ‘fairy step’ (41). She does petition her father for Cluthan’s release from captivity, but her pleas are rejected and she retires, weeping, until she is woken by an unseen voice who bids her go down to the shore and join the escaping Cluthan. Ultimately, she is the passive cause of her lover’s demise, as he refuses to hurt the brother who is dear to her. Malvina’s most important role comes after her death, however. She is buried ‘alone’, unlike most Ossianic lovers, who normally share the same grave: By Corrick’s stream, Malvina’s mound Is seen, alone, with gray moss crowned; And oft, when eve’s last lingering ray Gleams o’er the purple heath, The lev’ret feeds above the spot, Unconscious, that beneath, Shut up for e’er from mortal eyes, The mouldered form of beauty lies. (56) Whereas Moriat and Kathleen worked in various ways to bring Gaelic and English communities together, Malvina in death becomes a symbol 10.1057/9780230297623 - Ireland and Romanticism, Edited by Jim Kelly


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of the incommensurability between the two. It is Malvina’s mound, not Cluthan’s, that the peasants show ‘until this day’ (21). For them, Malvina’s grave (or uagh) is a validation of their history. The Englishspeaking readers of the poem, however, perceive her grave as a site of moral contemplation. With ‘eve’s last lingering ray / Gleam[ing] over the purple heath’, the mound concealing Malvina’s ‘mouldered form of beauty’ becomes a memento mori in the tradition of Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (which Rodgers cites in another poem in the collection), a warning regarding the ultimate isolation of the individual in death. Her grave serves as a marker to distinguish the superstitious Gaelic peasantry from the more educated readers of the poem. Rodgers shares Brooke and Balfour’s concerns to creatively use material from the Gaelic past. In her Introduction, she notes that she has drawn her story from local sources: ‘The subject of the following Poem, is one of the many stories of ancient times, told by the peasantry in this part of the country’ (19). Aware that she has altered her sources, however, she feels compelled to provide a sketch of the original tale: ‘I have, in the Poem, deviated from the original story: I shall, therefore, give it here, as traditionally related’ (19). Like Brooke and Balfour, Rodgers wants to represent herself as an authority on Gaelic culture by demonstrating her familiarity with its stories and language. She inserts a number of Gaelic words in her Introduction, explaining their English equivalents for the benefit of the reader. But Rodgers registers an ambivalence about Gaelic culture. She explains away what appear to be supernatural elements of the ancient stories, noting, for example, that ‘the appellation of giant, in this kingdom, in early ages, was a term of distinction for those who were celebrated for strength and prowess’ (19). Whereas Brooke was concerned to alter ‘modern prejudice’ (vii) regarding the Gaelic Irish, and where Balfour, too, attempted to present those identifying with ‘the Milesian race’ with some sympathy, Rodgers presents the Gaelic Irish as prone to exaggeration in the past and still superstitious in the present. Rodgers’ political and religious affiliations are unknown, but with its bleak representations of the Gaelic past and the condemnation of the superstitious present Gaelic population, ‘Cluthan and Malvina’ signals the increasing alienation between Catholic and Protestant communities that characterized the politics of Ulster during the time leading up to Catholic emancipation in 1828.27 In ‘The Unjust Claim’, published in her 1808 Poems, the Quaker poet from Ballitore, Mary Leadbeater, imagines Charlotte Brooke challenging Scotland’s claims to the Ossianic poems: ‘Cease, haughty Scotia, and no more Vaunt of thy Chief, thy Bard of yore. 10.1057/9780230297623 - Ireland and Romanticism, Edited by Jim Kelly


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Leadbeater fashions an invented reply to this assertion, voiced by ‘the brightest maid of Scotia’s coast’, alluding probably to Anne Grant, who included a commentary substantiating Macpherson’s claims and her own Ossianic imitations in her 1803 Poems on Various Subjects. While Leadbeater’s Grant praises Ireland’s ‘Heroes’ and ‘Bards’, she asserts Scotland’s ownership of ‘The songs which mourning Ossian sung,/ While sad Malvina’s harp was strung’ (381). Although in 1805 the Highland Commission pronounced that it had not been able ‘to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the poems published by [Macpherson]’,29 the works of Ossian continued to influence literary production in both Scotland and Ireland. And as Leadbeater’s poem suggests, the poems enjoyed a powerful afterlife not as a matter for debate between male antiquarians, but rather, as a source of inspiration for female poets interested in imagining in various ways their national communities.

Notes Earlier versions of material from this chapter appeared in ‘Negotiating Irishness: Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry’ and ‘Isolating the “Light of Song”: Vincentia Rodgers’s Cluthan and Malvina’, in Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen Behrendt (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2008), http:// asp6new.alexanderstreet.com/iwrp/, accessed 26, October 2010. 1. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xi. 2. Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 72, 80. 3. In ‘Virtue and Manners in Macpherson’s Ossian’, PMLA, 107, 1 (1992), pp. 120–30, Adam Potkay credits Ossian with reconciling ‘the emerging “feminism” of polite society’ with ‘the male “chauvinism” of both the ancient polis and its modern apologists’ (p. 121). 4. Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 16. 5. See also Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism: 1800–1830’, in The Cambridge History of Irish, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), I, pp. 407–48. 6. JoEllen DeLucia, ‘“Far Other Times are These”: The Bluestockings in the Time of Ossian’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 27, 1 (2008), pp. 39–62; 40. DeLucia suggests, ‘The lost Caledonian … history recovered by Macpherson



Fingal the brave, of noble name, And Ossian, sweetest child of fame, The Hero, and the voice of song, To Erin’s sainted isle belong.’28

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

and incorporated into the Scottish Enlightenment’s early conjectural histories offered women a seat at the table and a swig from a nautilus shell’ (p. 40). James Macpherson, Works of Ossian, Son of Fingal, 2 vols (London: T. Becket and P. A. DeHondt, 1765), 1, p. 147. Joseph Cooper Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Ancient Irish Bards (Dublin: Luke White, 1786), p. 19. Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) and Mícheál Mac Craith, ‘We Know All These Poems: The Irish Response to Ossian’, in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. Howard Gaskill (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), pp. 91–108. Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, ‘Anglo-Irish Antiquarianism and the Transformation of Irish Identity, 1750–1800’, in Anglo-Irish Identities 1600–1800, eds David Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), pp. 181–98; 188. Ní Mhunghaile also notes that the efforts to disprove Macpherson prompted a collaboration between ‘Protestant antiquarians’ and ‘native scholars and scribes’ (ibid.). Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Irish Poetry (Dublin: George Bonham, 1789). I would like to thank Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, who provided this translation and generously shared information about the original Gaelic sources. See also Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, ed., Charlotte Brooke’s ‘Reliques of Irish Poetry’ (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2009). See, on this issue, Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the 19th Century (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997) and Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1996); and Valone and Bradbury, Anglo-Irish Identities. Dominique Trant, Considerations on the Present Disturbances in the Province of Munster, Their Causes, Extent, Probable Consequences and Remedies (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1787), p. 3. See also Maurice Bric, ‘Priests, Parsons and Politics: The Rightboy Protest in County Cork 1785–1788’, Past and Present, 100 (1983), pp. 100–23. See Leith Davis, ‘The United Powers of Female Poesy and Music’, in Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724– 1874 (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005). Indeed, selections from her work would later be published in Bolg an tSolaír (1795), the Gaelic grammar and anthology published by the United Irishman, Patrick Lynch. The Reverend William Shaw produced his Galic and English Dictionary in 1780, while, in 1782, Charles Vallancey published his Grammar of the IbernoCeltic, or Irish Language. Macpherson, too, had tempted his reader with the idea of gaining a window onto the original language, as he observes in the Fragments of Ancient Poetry (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour) that he employs a ‘very literal’ translation (p. vi): ‘Even the arrangement of the words in the original has been imitated; to which must be imputed some inversions in the style, that otherwise would not have been chosen’ (pp. vi–vii).



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17. Sydney Owenson, Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies with English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of Ancient Irish Bards (London: Preston, 1805), p. 1. 18. See James Kelly, ‘The Parliamentary Reform Movement of the 1780s and the Catholic Question’, Archivium Hibernicum, 43 (1988), pp. 95–117. 19. Mary Balfour, Hope: A Poetical Essay with Other Poems (Belfast: Smyth and Lyons, 1810), p. 47. 20. Owenson’s Glorvina in the Wild Irish Girl (London: R. Phillips, 1806), while linguistically echoing Macpherson’s Malvina, also bears close resemblance to Brooke’s Moriat and the female speaker of the ‘Tale of Mäon’. 21. See Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Ireland (London: Royal Historical Society, 1999), pp. 3–7 for an account of nineteenth-century historiography of the Nine Years’ War. For information on Owen Roe and Felim O’Neil, see Patrick J. Corish, ‘The Rising of 1641 and the Catholic Confederacy, 1641–5’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, A New History of Ireland, vol. 3: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 298–316. 22. The realm of the banshee is depicted as an Ossianic paradise of heroes: ‘From harps with wreaths of shamrock twined, Celestial strains around us swell, While we on tufts of flowers reclined, Drink honey dew from cups of shell’ (p. 76). 23. Edmund Bunting, A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (London: Clementi, 1809). 24. See ‘“A Truly National Project”: Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and the Gendering of the British Cultural Marketplace’, in Davis, Music, Postcolonialism and Gender, pp. 140–63. 25. Kathleen O’Neil: A Grand National Melodrama, in Three Acts, as performed at the Belfast Theatre (Belfast: Archbold and Dugan, 1814). 26. Vincentia Rodgers, Cluthan and Malvina; an Ancient Legend, with Other Poems (Belfast: F. D. Finlay, 1823). 27. The subscription list in Cluthan and Malvina is extensive and geographically wide-ranging. It includes several professors at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, which was founded as a non-sectarian institution. Although backed by Anglican donations, the RBIA served as a college for the Presbyterian community. I thank Frank Ferguson for sharing with me his expertise on Ulster religious and political communities. 28. Mary Leadbeater, Poems (Dublin: Martin Keene and London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), p. 380. 29. Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland Appointed to Inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Constable, 1805), p. 151.



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Fictions of the Romantic Period





The Irish Book Trade in the Romantic Period Charles Benson

The six decades from 1770 to 1830, a period contemporaneous with the development of a Romantic movement in literary culture, saw the Irish book trade undergo profound change. In overall terms the demand for books and periodicals grew; there was an increase in literacy rates consequent upon greater provision of schools. At the start of the 1770s large quantities of books were being produced for home consumption, and an export trade to North America grew substantially in the 1780s. There was also a rising amount of importation of books, principally from Great Britain. By the 1830s the book trade was primarily one of distribution, heavily dependent upon imports and producing comparatively little indigenous material. The absence of any copyright legislation in the eighteenth century allowed Irish printers to print what they wished without fear of action by owners of copyright, and the reading needs of the Irish public were, to a large extent, satisfied by Irish reprints of books first produced elsewhere. There was a growing amount of original publication, much of it in the form of pamphlets on local topics of interest. It is true that the standards of production were not always elegant. In the view of the Irish author William Preston, writing in 1796, the low standard of typography was to blame: ‘Should any printer, of taste and enterprise in his art, prepare an elegant and costly edition of any work, he is liable to have the sale of it ruined, by a spurious and disgraceful republication.’1 By the late 1770s printing offices, which usually doubled up as bookshops, had been established in most county towns of any size. These were jobbing offices, which printed books, pamphlets and any ephemeral material that was commissioned. Daniel Graisberry senior printed a wide variety of orders at his works in Back Lane in Dublin in the late 1770s. An analysis of business charged in the month of April 163



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for the nine years from 1777 to 1785 showed that the number of jobbing transactions was four times those of bookwork.2 At the end of the century his son, also Daniel, was in partnership with Richard Campbell, and their work varied from printing summonses for the local militia, the Liberty Rangers, in 306 separate transactions between 1 May 1797 and 20 October 1799, to a commission for 8000 copies of a two-sheet General Catechism.3 Similar patterns could have been observed throughout the island. Dublin dominated the book trade in both production and distribution. The next two important towns were Belfast, which had strong links to the Scottish book trade, and Cork with its own connections to the London trade. The books produced in Dublin in the eighteenth century covered a wide range, with the notable exception of deluxe plate books. Standard categories of productions included political and economic pamphlets, sermons, schoolbooks, law books and drama. The printing of fiction became more frequent from the early 1770s than in previous decades. Local issues could inspire outbursts of publication, and one political issue, the proposed union with Great Britain, prompted dozens of pamphlets.4 Various measures taken by government had largely stifled the newspapers,5 resulting in a dependence on pamphlets to carry on the debate. The edition sizes varied considerably; at the upper end was an edition of 2000 copies of the Substance of the Speech of Lord Auckland in the House of Peers, April 11 1799 for J. Milliken, which was also printed in London,6 while at the lower end was an edition of 25 copies of A Short Address to the People of Ireland on the Subject of an Union printed for William Jones.7 In terms of literary publication the two major categories in this period were plays and fiction, with poetry in third place. Most plays that were published in London were reprinted in Dublin. There was a substantial demand for reading copies. Graisberry and Campbell printed editions of 750 copies of Friedrich Schiller’s The Minister and 500 of his The Robbers in 1798,8 and an edition of 3000 of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro in 1799.9 Publication of fiction grew substantially between 1770 and 1799, when a total of 1421 novels were published for the first time in Great Britain and Ireland. Production was dominated by London publishers, who produced 1339 titles. A mere 26 were original Irish publications, 19 in Dublin and 7 in Cork, while Dublin publishers produced 459 reprints of novels.10 Between 1800 and 1829 a further 2265 novels were published for the first time, of which 27 were original Irish publications.11 Although Irish writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Regina Maria Roche, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Charles Maturin



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became prominent novelists, they chose not to launch their works first in Ireland. Sometimes they were dissuaded from doing so: Sydney Owenson took her manuscript of St. Clair to a Dublin bookseller and was urged to sell it in London.12 Literature sold well in Dublin. Walter Scott’s visit to Dublin in 1825 was an immense popular success though he was also feted by the establishment, being awarded a D.Litt. by Dublin University and the freedom of the Guild of Merchants in Dublin. In 1831 the monthly volumes of his Collected Works were selling so well that John Cumming, who was distributing them, wrote to John Murray about the forthcoming edition of Byron’s works. He wanted 2500 copies of the prospectus for the Byron edition sent by return of coach so that he could insert them in the December monthly volume of Scott in order to attract subscribers. Even lesser literature could command support. A total of 659 subscribers put up money for Patrick Donnelly’s Love of Britain in 1825, almost all from a radius of 12 miles around Athboy in Co. Meath. Matthew Archdeacon, based in Castlebar, obtained 538 subscribers for his novel Everard (Dublin, 1835); of them 449 had addresses west of the Shannon, pointing in both cases to the success of individuals promoting their own works. There was good reason for an Irish writer to take a work to Great Britain before 1800 as there was no value in literary property in the absence of a copyright law. Following the Act of Union a new Copyright Act was passed and came into force on 2 July 1801. This put the book trades of the newly UK on an equal footing, that of the existing British trade, which fatally undermined the business on which much of the prosperity of the Dublin trade had been founded, namely the cheap reprint business. The effect was particularly marked in the case of imaginative literature, and the reprinting of plays and novels fell away to almost nothing. A notable feature of Dublin publication in the late eighteenth century had been the number of books jointly published by several booksellers whose names appeared in the imprint. This sharing of risk also enabled booksellers to stock their shops at a relatively modest cost. But after the introduction of the Copyright Act the Irish booksellers were very much more dependent on British publishers than before. The consequence was a much greater demand for capital for business. While this was partly related to the costs of more expensive London publications, it was made worse by the Customs administration. Until the exchequers of Great Britain and Ireland were united in 1824 a system of countervailing duties and drawbacks was in operation. The duty on



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when importing large parcels entered for drawback by Liverpool, and by long sea, that is, from London direct, we have to enter into bond, the expense of which is 1l.2s.6d. British; the cost of entry at the Custom House here is 5s.6d. British; and the expenses after we have got a certificate of landing, in getting the drawback from the broker on the other side, that is double postage both ways. The expense of forwarding the certificate to the broker, and receiving the money from him, that is 4s.6d.13 Charles Palmer Archer found the delay in getting money back could be six months or a year and that the costs were such that it was not worth entering any quantity of books of less than 160 pounds weight for drawback.14 One effect of this was to deter booksellers from sending books on approval.15 There is much evidence of financial stress in the Dublin book trade in a remarkable series of letters from members of the trade to the Galway landowner and bookseller Christopher Dillon Bellew between 1799 and 1824.16 John Archer wrote to Bellew on 25 June 1804 thanking him for drafts for £200: ‘nothing could be more timely than your recollection of me – for during the whole of my life, I never was so much in want of money’.17 Charles Palmer Archer wrote on 22 January 1816: ‘I never in all my life knew business so bad, nor have I ever known such difficulty in getting money.’18 He wrote again in the same strain in January 1820: ‘never have I known money so scarce, or difficult to be got … as to my engagements in London I cannot possibly meet them next week, unless my kind friends will assist me’.19 These complaints may, however, reflect the position of men who had overextended their businesses. The rising trend in imports of unbound books, already visible in the 1790s, was continued for the first 13 years of the nineteenth century. Imports, at a Customs’ valuation of £10 per hundredweight, twice rose above £5000 in the 1790s but slumped in 1798. Imports to Dublin were valued at £5600 in 1801, at £11,920 in 1808 and peaked at £20,210 in 1813 before declining to £13,540 in 1817. Imports to Cork twice rose above £2500, in 1807 and again in 1812, but fell away sharply after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Imports to Belfast briefly exceeded those to Cork in 1809–10 but



unbound books was 3d. per pound weight but the administration tied up substantial amounts. As William Wakeman, the Dublin agent of the London firm of Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, explained to the Parliamentary Commissioners investigating the Irish revenue in 1821:

from 1814 rose steeply and remained well above the levels in Cork from then on. Prior to the late 1820s, when publishers’ case-bindings became common, the vast majority of books were imported unbound in sheets. Wakeman gave evidence to the Commissioners of Inquiry into the revenue in 1821 about this practice and to the fact that the cost of binding was cheaper in Dublin than in London. The levels of imports of bound books fluctuated enormously in the first two decades of the century. In Cork a peak of £1499 was reached in 1807, a year in which no imports of bound books were registered in Dublin. In 1816 the figure for Dublin was £1240 but only £224 worth was recorded in Cork. Bound books from England entered ports all around Ireland, but the imports of bound books from Scotland were predominantly into Belfast and other ports in Ulster, with Dublin and Cork hardly featuring at all as destinations. Although the Customs’ regulations on duties and drawbacks inhibited the circulation of books on approval there were well-established ways in which a bookseller could identify and acquire stock. There is plenty of evidence of Irish booksellers travelling abroad. John Archer went to London and Oxford in 1786; in October 1791 he went to London and Paris and the following year he was in London, Paris and Venice. He was on the continent again in 1799 and took advantage of the Peace of Amiens in 1802 to go to France. Charles Palmer Archer visited London and Paris in 1818, and Richard Milliken went to London in 1821 and 1831. Equally British booksellers came to Ireland on a regular basis. Owen Rees, the partner of T. Longman, came to Ireland frequently, visiting Cork, Dublin and Belfast, paying attention to the creditworthiness of his customers. After his return to London from a trip in 1811 the firm wrote to William Figgis in Dublin that Rees was sorry ‘to observe that he did not find you so regularly in your shop as he had formerly the pleasure of seeing you’.20 The reports that Rees had received prompted the firm to decline to fill Figgis’s order. Adam Black, the Edinburgh publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, toured Ireland in 1830, finding few shops worth visiting outside Cork and Dublin, and thoroughly disapproving of the high style of living of his Dublin wholesale agent John Cumming. The Edinburgh firm of Oliver and Boyd had commercial travellers who visited Ireland between 1825 and 1842. William Wakeman, the Dublin agent for Baldwin, Cradock and Joy in 1821, was in contact with booksellers in Cork, Waterford, Clonmel, Belfast, Coleraine, Armagh and Newry. At the same time Thomas Parnell, a member of the Sunday School Society, could only identify 53 booksellers outside Dublin and asserted that there were 11 counties



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The common mode of getting books in Ireland, the kind of books the peasantry buy for their children, is through the means of grocers and hardwaremen; they keep a shelf for what they call Burton’s, and Spelling-books, and Almanacks, and books of that kind.21 The British publishers who were working on a large scale, like Longman, regularly produced catalogues of their productions for the benefit of booksellers and their customers. John Murray wrote to John Archer on 9 March 1809: ‘I took the liberty of inserting your name in a small catalogue of my publications of which I have sent a supply for you. … I shall feel obliged by your judicious distribution of them’.22 Such catalogues were frequently bound up with books when they were put in boards for sale. Newspapers had been extensively used for advertising books in the eighteenth century but became less popular as a medium during the 1780s owing to rises in stamp duty and advertisement tax. The tax on advertisements was raised in 1785 to 1s. for the first ten lines and 1s. for every additional ten lines. This rate was doubled in 1810, but a paltry increase in revenue indicated that the volume of advertisements had fallen away. By 1830 the Irish newspaper proprietors were able to show that the number of advertisements per issue was 16 in Ireland, 57 in Scotland and 80 in England. The tax on advertisements was reduced to 1s. for ten lines in 1833, and there was a gradual increase in the number of books promoted in newspapers. But even when the tax was at its highest some publishers still used this medium. G. B. Whitaker of London took a two and half column advertisement in the Irish Times on 11 July 1825, listing his educational wares. John Murray wrote to Wogan and Cumming on 2 December 1808 thanking them for having advertised Rundell’s Domestic Cookery in Belfast and instructing them to advertise it in all the principal towns. He also sent them 50 copies of the Eloquence of the Senate, which was not selling well in England: If you are pretty sure that an advertisement or two would carry off an hundred eloquence this may be done also. I shall send you in a parcel to Vernor and Hood some duplicates of advertisements and you will in future use those which have an extract from some Review at the bottom.23



in which there were no booksellers. Dublin apart, the major towns were Belfast with eight, Cork with six and Waterford with four, but he remarked that other shops sold books as part of a more varied stock:

Advertisements of a publisher’s other productions were routinely included in books if there was an otherwise blank page available. John Murray remarked to Gilbert and Hodges on 2 November 1804 that they should ‘omit no opportunity of advertising your own publications at the end of every book or pamphlet that you print the additional expense is a mere trifle & the advantages that continually flow from this are very great indeed’.24 Advertising in periodicals became the most effective way of informing the middle and upper ranges of the market about new publications. The covers had been used for this purpose since the middle of the eighteenth century, but by 1815 the scale of advertisements carried was far removed for the earlier four or eight pages. The circulation of the reviews was enormous. John Murray printed an edition of 3000 copies of the first number of the Quarterly Review, which sold out with great rapidity, and by April 1809 he had determined to print 4000 copies of the second number. Within a short time a separate Literary Adviser was produced to accompany each issue. By the 1840s it alone could be 56 pages long, and there were other independent inserts in each issue. The only Irish periodical that provided a sustained competition to the British publications in this field was the Dublin University Magazine, which was founded in 1833. By 1843 it required 3500 copies of any inserts that were to be sent out with it. The size of booksellers’ stocks varied greatly. The Dublin bookseller Luke White issued a catalogue in June 1784 that contained 20,000 volumes. John Archer’s catalogues in 1789 and 1791 were of a similar size. Antoine Gerna, who specialized in foreign-language books in Dublin, produced a catalogue of 2133 items in 1793. The largest stock seems to have belonged to Bennet Dugdale. This was dispersed by auction in 1828, two years after his death, and the advertisements claimed that it contained 60,000 volumes. Two reasonably prominent booksellers, Matthew Neary Mahon and A. and W. Watson, advertised stocks of 15,000 and about 13,000 volumes respectively when they retired from business in 1831 and 1832. Lending libraries, which were few in number in the mid-eighteenth century, became quite numerous after 1770. Commercial ones were in existence by 1780 in Newry, Belfast and Cork as well as in Dublin. Over the following 50 years commercial or proprietary subscription ones (of which the best known was the Linenhall Library in Belfast) were established in many of the smaller towns, particularly in Ulster. These libraries were a significant market for books. Stephen Colbert advertised in 1784 that he would make 100 copies of every new novel available.25



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John Kempston had 10,000 volumes in his Dublin circulating library by March 1817.26 On a smaller scale there were libraries attached to churches. The Roman Catholic Andrean library in Townsend Street in Dublin subscribed in 1831 to two copies of A. Rodriguez, The Practice of Christian Perfection. By the 1830s libraries catered for reading demand at all levels in society, restricted only by the level of subscription required for access. Despite the disruption to book production caused by the Copyright Act the trend for the book trade in Ireland was, broadly speaking, one of increasing demand for reading print. The anguished laments of sections of the industry, namely printers and bookbinders, whose work was partly replaced by imports, should not obscure the advances in education and literacy.

Notes 1. W. Preston, ‘Essay on the Natural Advantages of Ireland’, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, IX (1803), p. 404. 2. V. Kinane and C. Benson, ‘Some Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century Dublin Printers’ Account Books: The Graisberry Ledgers’, in Six Centuries of the Provincial Book Trade in Britian, ed. P. Isaac (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), p. 142. 3. Ibid., pp.144–5. 4. W. J. McCormack, The Pamphlet Debate on the Union between Great Britain and Ireland 1797–1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996). 5. Brian Inglis, The Freedom of the Press in Ireland 1784–1841 (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), pp. 108–13. 6. Graisberry and Campbell, Ledger 1797–1806, opening 18. 7. Ibid., opening 19. 8. Ibid., opening 21. 9. Ibid., opening 50. 10. Peter Garside, J. Raven and R. Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770–1829, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), I, p. 72. 11. Ibid., I, p. 76. 12. Ibid., I, p. 77. 13. Third Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Collection and Management of the Revenue Arising in Ireland (UK Parliamentary Papers 1822, XIII, p. 1217), p. 13. 14. Ibid. (p. 1221), p. 17. 15. Ibid. (p. 1218), p. 14. 16. Bellew Papers, National Library of Ireland Ms 27,293; 27,295–27,301; 27,304; 27,306; 27,309. 17. NLI Ms 27293(5). 18. NLI Ms 27301(7). 19. NLI Ms 27301(15). 20. Longman Archive I, 97 no.154, University of Reading.



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21. Third Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Collection and Management of the Revenue Arising in Ireland (UK Parliamentary Papers 1822, XIII, p. 1222), p. 18. 22. Outgoing letters 1795–1802, Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland Ms 41,917, p. 197. 23. Ibid., p. 227. 24. Ibid., p. 44. 25. Dublin Morning Post,11 November 1784. 26. Saunders’s Newsletter, 21 March 1817.



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‘Gothic’ and ‘National’? Challenging the Formal Distinctions of Irish Romantic Fiction Christina Morin

In 1806, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan published what critics now commonly classify as the first ‘national tale’, an allegedly pioneering form of Irish Romantic fiction motivated by a desire to reconcile Ireland and England to the Act of Union (1800). As Katie Trumpener influentially argues,1 Owenson’s text set the precedent for a body of fiction that now dominates critical understanding of Irish Romantic fiction. Trumpener contends that the ‘national tales’ published after The Wild Irish Girl, including, for example, Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812), as well as Charles Robert Maturin’s The Wild Irish Boy (1808) and The Milesian Chief (1812), generally follow the narrative pattern established by Owenson: an English or Anglo-Irish gentleman, long a hostile stranger to Ireland, journeys there, fully expecting to find it a cultural wasteland. While there, however, he falls in love with a native Irish girl, learns to love and appreciate the land and its people, and eventually decides to renounce his habitual absenteeism. He confirms his new respect and affection for Ireland and the Irish people by marrying his Irish heroine in a union that has come allegorically to represent the peaceful resolution of Anglo-Irish tension and strife.2 Compellingly, if myopically, termed ‘the Glorvina solution’ after the heroine of Owenson’s novel,3 the cross-cultural marriage that supposedly ends Owenson’s novel, but which, in fact, is only ever projected, has come to define a body of literature that many critics now assume to comprise almost single-handedly Irish Romantic fiction as a whole – the national tale. Today, in fact, the national tale ‘initiated’ by Owenson is considered the literary form par excellence used by early nineteenth-century Irish authors wishing to engage with the burgeoning sense of cultural nationalism 172



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in post-Union Ireland. As a result, the national tale has assumed a definitive place and role in the literary history of Irish fiction, despite the fact that Owenson herself seems the only writer comfortable with the term ‘national tale’ itself. Indeed, while Owenson pointed her readers to her patriotic intent of defending Ireland against the inherited ignorance of an English and Anglo-Irish audience with her subtitle, ‘A National Tale’,4 only six novels published in the following 40 years used the adjective ‘national’ to describe themselves, and three of these were by Owenson herself.5 Yet, despite the notable contemporary disdain for this term, current critical understanding of Irish Romantic fiction frequently presents the first three decades of the nineteenth century as dominated by ‘the national tale’ and the ‘national’ fictions of writers like Owenson, Edgeworth, and Maturin. The short-sighted view of Irish Romantic literary production sponsored by this critical perception not only relies on a retrospective application of the term ‘national tale’ to a body of vastly diverse fiction, it also defies contemporary understanding of and identification with the literary categorizations now used to define Romantic fiction. As a case in point, Maturin was undoubtedly aware of Owenson’s novel when he published The Wild Irish Boy, but, despite the blatant imitation traditionally ascribed to him, he pointedly neglected to describe his novel as ‘a national tale’. Similarly, his later novel, The Milesian Chief, also conventionally understood as manifestly derivative of The Wild Irish Girl, calls itself ‘A Romance’, not ‘a national tale’. Maturin’s disregard for the term ‘national tale’ points to the way in which he and his contemporaries understood formal and generic boundaries in much more fluid terms than recent notions of Irish Romantic fiction suggest. Although the idea of the ‘national tale’ now current in modern scholarship is helpful in its identification of a core group of themes, narrative strategies, and tropes tying together authors as diverse as Edgeworth, Owenson, and Maturin, it also threatens to propagate an understanding that pre-Union Irish fiction is essentially different in kind from post-Union fiction. In particular, focus on the Irish content and concern of ‘the national tale’ suggests that earlier authors remained resolutely silent about Ireland, when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. The number of novels produced by Irish authors with titles emphasizing Irish content may have increased markedly in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, as Rolf and Magda Loeber point out,6 but as Ian Campbell Ross argues, Irish authors had been writing fiction concerned with Irish social, political, and cultural realities since at least the late seventeenth century.7 The restricted nature of current critical views of Irish Romantic fiction, however, has resulted in an elision of earlier Irish



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‘Gothic’ and ‘National’?

fiction that fundamentally influences and overlaps with what we now understand as ‘the national tale’. Campbell Ross focuses particularly on the late eighteenth-century picaresque fiction produced by Irish writers William Chaigneau and Charles Johnstone to support his understanding of the continuity between forms misrepresented by our current perception of Irish Romantic fiction. The present chapter, however, will focus on two forms now commonly perceived as inherently divergent – ‘the national tale’ and what we now call ‘the Gothic novel’. Used to refer to the body of fiction popularized in Ireland, Britain, and Europe in the mid to late eighteenth century by authors such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, ‘the Gothic novel’ is a problematic term attempting to encompass a wide variety of fiction now frequently understood by way of a series of oppositional categorizations – female/male, explained/ unexplained supernatural, and terror/horror. Such antitheses suggest the troubles inherent to formal classification and, tellingly, fail to do justice to what Michael Gamer calls the ‘mixed’ nature of Gothic fiction, which, he argues, is ‘assembled, like Frankenstein’s monster, out of other discourses’.8 Frequently partaking in elements of both female and male, explained and unexplained supernatural, as well as terror and horror, individual examples of Gothic fiction are rarely justifiably or satisfactorily defined as either/or. In these texts, normative categorizations of genre and form bleed into each other, resisting criticism’s best efforts at classification. In a similar way, the forms now termed ‘the national tale’ and ‘the Gothic novel’ frequently coincide with each other in Irish Romantic literary production. Such formal intersections, however, are routinely denied in current literary criticism, largely on the basis of an understanding that the Gothic as a literary mode had died out in Ireland by the first decade of the nineteenth century. Siobhán Kilfeather notes the common critical assumption of the Gothic as ‘exhausted’ in Ireland by the 1807 publication of Maturin’s first novel, Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio.9 Yet, as W. J. McCormack argues, because of Irish novelists’ inability to distinguish clearly and decisively between ‘past history and present politics […] the gothic mode endured [in Ireland] in a fugitive and discontinuous manner throughout the nineteenth century’.10 Scholars have often noted the use of Gothic plots and settings in the works of Owenson and Maturin, but this is still seen as somehow distinct from the eighteenth-century Gothic mode. Ina Ferris, for instance, claims that with The Milesian Chief, Maturin, in essence, merged ‘the national tale’ and ‘the Gothic novel’ to create what is now labelled,



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not without controversy, ‘the Irish Gothic’,11 a form that would later be popularized by the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde.12 But, as Ferris herself admits, what Maturin’s text does is to release ‘a negativity’ already ‘inherent in the national tale from the outset’.13 In so doing, The Milesian Chief underscores the kind of formal and generic crossover with which this chapter is interested. Highlighting the continued influence of the eighteenth-century Gothic in what we now understand as ‘the national tale’, Maturin’s novel points to the ‘hybrid’ nature of Irish Romantic fiction and its deployment of both the ‘national’ and the ‘Gothic’ in its narratives. Although reliant on the terms now current in modern scholarship, including ‘the national tale’ and ‘the Gothic novel’, this chapter begins with the premise that an understanding of the essential continuity between now apparently rigid literary forms is paramount to an accurate perception of Irish Romantic fiction. Suggesting just such a formal and generic synthesis inherent to texts now understood as ‘national tales’ and ‘Gothic novels’, Miranda Burgess positions Regina Maria Roche’s 1796 novel, The Children of the Abbey, as ‘the earliest Irish national tale’.14 Like The Wild Irish Girl, The Children of the Abbey features a beleaguered native Irish heroine who effectively triumphs in her Irish identity and convinces her English hero of her intrinsic worth and purity while simultaneously drawing him to Ireland and his Irish estates. With the marriage of Amanda Fitzalan and Lord Mortimer, Burgess suggests, The Children of the Abbey anticipates The Wild Irish Girl and fundamentally predates Owenson’s alleged initiation of ‘the national tale’ almost a decade later. Conventionally, however, The Children of the Abbey has been understood as a ‘Gothic novel’ in the style of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Contemporary reviewers and readers certainly viewed it as Radcliffean in nature; the tremendous popularity of The Children of the Abbey, as well as Roche’s next novel, Clermont (1798), in fact, cemented Roche’s reputation as Radcliffe’s successor and rival while propelling her to a literary stardom rivalled only by that of Radcliffe herself. Because of these two novels, Roche became, in essence, ‘a celebrity’ in the last decade of the eighteenth century.15 In the nineteenth century, she continued to be a recognized name, and her novels widely read. The Children of the Abbey, for instance, remained in print until the end of the century, and, suggesting how widespread cultural awareness of it was, appeared in Austen’s Emma (1816) as one of Harriet Smith’s recommended reads.16 Emphasizing Roche’s early association with the Gothic mode, current literary criticism frequently divides her oeuvre into two distinct



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phases – the Gothic and the national/regional. Now, in fact, Roche’s work is seen to shift stylistically from 1820 onwards, moving from the Radcliffean Gothic style of The Children of the Abbey and Clermont into ‘a recognisably Irish mode’.17 Unlike The Children of the Abbey – understood today as engaging only sporadically with Ireland and Irish issues – texts like The Munster Cottage Boy (1820), The Tradition of the Castle (1824), and Contrast (1828) feature Irish characters and subject matter as well as settings in Roche’s contemporary Ireland. They therefore mark what Natalie Schroeder calls a ‘return to Ireland’ in Roche’s fiction.18 Against the current perception of fixed formal and historical demarcations between the ‘national’ and the ‘Gothic’ in Roche’s works and in Irish Romantic fiction as a whole, however, this chapter considers the overlap of these forms in The Children of the Abbey and The Absentee. While Burgess traces the similarities between The Children of the Abbey and The Wild Irish Girl in order to reconfigure the starting point of ‘the national tale’ as a form in Ireland, this chapter offers a comparison of The Children of the Abbey and The Absentee – two texts now considered as exemplary instances of ‘the Gothic novel’ and ‘the national tale’, respectively – as indication and proof of the transgeneric nature of the forms we now call ‘the national tale’ and ‘the Gothic novel’. Owenson’s reliance on Gothic conventions is becoming increasingly recognized today,19 but Edgeworth’s continued association with realism and didacticism seems to preclude consideration of her engagement with the Gothic mode. Yet, as Sharon Murphy has noted,20 elements of fantasy and romance as well as frequent Gothic moments regularly surface in her texts, thereby disrupting the author’s ostensible devotion to rationality and highlighting the possibility and, indeed, probability of repeated formal intersection. By considering these two novels side by side, this chapter suggests, demarcations of ‘national’ and ‘Gothic’, realism and romance, pre-Union and post-Union, as well as past and present break down, underscoring the formal continuities between two novels understood until now as having very little to do with each other. As this discussion shows, however, The Children of the Abbey is no less concerned with Ireland than The Absentee, despite its overt Gothicism. Moreover, Edgeworth’s pursuit of rational conviction in order to thwart absenteeism and promote benevolent paternalism in Ireland never prohibits pronounced Gothic overtones and, in particular, a reliance on a Gothic sense of the return of the repressed past, in The Absentee. Although The Absentee is a familiar text today, The Children of the Abbey has fallen into such disuse that a short précis is necessary to



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begin this discussion. Centred upon the hardship and adversity suffered by Amanda Fitzalan and her brother Oscar – the eponymous ‘children of the abbey’ – Roche’s novel begins with the return of its strikingly beautiful young heroine to her childhood home in Wales. Left motherless at birth and deprived of her rightful inheritance through the intrigues of her evil step-grandmother, Lady Dunreath, Amanda has been forced here in order to escape the dishonourable propositions and pursuit of Lord Belgrave, ‘a man […] of the most depraved principles’.21 Disguised as ‘Miss Dunford’, Amanda soon falls in love with the English nobleman, Henry Mortimer, but their plans to marry are undermined when Amanda’s father, the Irish soldier Fitzalan, learns of the affair. Convinced that Mortimer’s father, Lord Cherbury, to whom he is heavily indebted, has other plans for his son, Fitzalan banishes his daughter to Ireland, and soon after follows her to assume the stewardship of Lord Cherbury’s Ulster estate, Castle Carberry. In Ireland, Amanda is beset by her step-aunt, the Marchioness of Rosline, who, desiring a match between her daughter, Lady Euphrasia, and Mortimer, gleefully schemes with Lord Belgrave to ruin Amanda. Harassed by these machinations and now grieving the sudden death of her father, Amanda is forced into a position of homeless desperation, as, in an attempt to escape her enemies, she anxiously wanders through England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Release from her troubles occurs when Amanda finds herself lodged at her mother’s ancestral home – Dunreath Abbey. There she experiences a ghostly encounter with a woman she believes to be her dead mother but who is revealed to be Lady Dunreath. Although long believed dead, Lady Dunreath had actually been imprisoned in the Abbey’s ruined chapel because of her desire to confess her part in the ruination of Amanda’s mother, Malvina, and the subsequent disinheritance of Amanda and Oscar.22 Proclaiming herself ‘guilty but contrite’ (Roche, p. 423), Lady Dunreath surrenders evidence of this past treachery to Amanda, allowing her to prove her moral and sexual innocence and reclaim her birthright. Once she has done so, wreaking her revenge on Belgrave in the process, Amanda finally marries Mortimer, newly ordained Lord Cherbury after his father’s timely death, and settles with him at Castle Carberry.23 Far from registering an unconcern with Ireland, this conclusion, combined with the lengthy period during which Amanda and her father live in Ireland, highlights Roche’s concern with the disorder of her contemporary Irish society. In particular, like Edgeworth’s The Absentee, The Children of the Abbey displays a keen awareness of absenteeism as



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a primary cause of confusion and corruption in Irish society. Acting as agent of Castle Carberry, for instance, Fitzalan speaks to several tenants ‘desiring his interest with Lord Cherbury, for new leases on moderate terms’ (Roche, p. 148). Later, Fitzalan denounces absentee landlords for spending their wealth ‘in foreign lands, instead of enriching those from whence it was drawn’ (Roche, p. 156). Further, exhibiting an affinity with the Burkean paternalism later espoused by Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Fitzalan argues that by performing their duties towards their tenants, including living in Ireland for at least half a year annually, the landlords could foster ‘gratitude’ among their tenants. This, in turn, would ‘add inclination to industry, and consequently augment their profits’ (Roche, p. 156). After hearing such arguments, Amanda is inspired to improve this situation herself when once wedded to Mortimer: ‘Oh! how rapturous! […] to change such scenes; to see the clay-built hovel vanish, and a dwelling of neatness and convenience rise in its stead; to […] view the projects of benevolence realized by the hand of charity’ (Roche, p. 157). The connection Amanda feels towards her home country, and the desire to enact ‘projects of benevolence’, is one shared by Grace Nugent in The Absentee. Although resident in England for years, Grace continues to feel affection for Ireland as ‘a friend’ and ‘home’; there her ‘earliest and happiest years’ were spent, and there, she continues to hope, she may someday return.24 Along with her cousin, Lord Colambre, she earnestly wishes to resume residence in Ireland so that she may continue the munificence already undertaken there during her youth. Before she can do so, however, Grace must overcome the reluctance of her aunt and guardian, Lady Clonbrony, who resolutely insists on remaining in London. Fearing that she may be ‘betray[ed]’ by her speech or actions as ‘an Irishwoman’ (Edgeworth, p. 5), Lady Clonbrony exerts a considerable amount of energy in dissociating herself from her Irish identity. Grace, on the other hand, refuses to believe that ‘among well-informed, well-bred people’, her Irishness could have any ill effect. In this vein, Grace firmly declines Lady Clonbrony’s suggestion that she remove ‘the prejudice against the Iricism’ of her name by changing it to ‘de Nogent’ (Edgeworth, p. 16). In The Children of the Abbey, Amanda similarly rebuffs those who wish to view her Irish identity as a liability. Introduced at a social gathering in London, Amanda is belittled by her cousin, Lady Euphrasia, as ‘a far-off relation of my mother’s […] picked up in the wilds of Ireland, and […] absolutely forced […] upon our notice’ (Roche, p. 209). Lady Euphrasia and her obnoxious cohorts determine to show Amanda up as ‘an ignorant Irish country girl’



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(Roche, p. 211). Instead, however, Amanda’s wit, charm, and accomplished musical talents showcase her inherent worth and mortify her tormentors. This is, as Burgess suggests, both a personal and a national triumph for Amanda: through her witty discourse and talented singing, Amanda ‘forc[es] her metropolitan listeners to revise their orthodox notion of her national character’.25 Amanda’s national loyalty, however, is threateningly underwritten by an elemental association with the kind of violent, rebellious activity that would very soon erupt, extra-diegetically, in the 1798 Rebellion. Her ‘ancient Irish’ family is said to have fallen long ago into a state of poverty and ruin, ‘so that little more than a name, once dignified by illustrious actions, was left to its posterity’ (Roche, p. 9). Based on this description, Jarlath Killeen concludes that the family is originally of Norman descent but has converted to Protestantism for undefined reasons before Amanda’s birth.26 Burgess similarly suggests that the loss of the Fitzalan estate and wealth has occurred during the Jacobite rebellions, making dispossession a primary theme in the novel.27 Although Roche never directly states that Mortimer’s ancestors have been the cause of the Fitzalans’ primary dispossession, they certainly effect at least one bodily eviction that occurs within the narrative. Angry with Fitzalan for apparently promoting a marriage between Amanda and Mortimer, Lord Cherbury forces Fitzalan out of Castle Carberry and literally to his death. In his bitter indignation, Fitzalan declares that even if Lord Cherbury were to offer to reinstate him, ‘I should reject […] Poverty, to me, is more welcome than independence, when purchased with the loss of esteem’ (Roche, p. 309). Earlier in the text, Amanda voices a comparable, if more subtle, sense of resentment towards those who have committed such injustice to her family in the past. Viewing Castle Carberry for the first time, Amanda is struck by the hall and its various ‘coats of arms, spears, lances, and old armo[u]r’. As she contemplates these reminders of the past, Amanda finds herself ‘casting a retrospective eye to former times’ and dreaming of ‘those heroes, whose useless arms now hung upon the walls’: ‘She wished, in the romance of the moment, some gray bard near her, to tell the deeds of other times – of kings renowned in our land – of chieftains we behold no more’ (Roche, p. 138). Although Amanda’s desire for ‘former times’ apparently registers nostalgia for the ‘bards’ and ‘heroes’ of ancient times, it is also imbued with a sense of revolutionary violence. As Burgess contends, Roche simply cannot divorce ‘cultural nostalgia’ from ‘political protest’ in this scene.28 Lying just behind Amanda’s nostalgia, in fact, is a desire for ‘the return of political



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history’ – the restoration of the heroes, kings, and chieftains remembered by the antiquarian objects of Castle Carberry.29 This desire is so strong that Amanda’s initial impersonal fantasy quickly assumes a personal and quite violent intonation: Ireland has become ‘our’ land which ‘we’ no longer rule.30 The inherent danger of Amanda’s rebellious yearning for the past is further heightened by her continued association with Catholicism in the novel. Although she professes and practises the Protestant faith, Amanda is repeatedly linked with Catholicism. Frequently described as an angel and likened to the Madonna, for example, it is entirely unsurprising that Amanda should find refuge in a desolate Catholic convent in Ireland in her attempts to escape Belgrave’s evil plots. Having discovered St Catherine’s during her first few days at Castle Carberry, Amanda seems strangely drawn to the ‘relics of superstitious piety’ (Roche, p. 149) she finds in a ruined, Gothic chapel connected to the convent. More so than these relics, however, the nuns who treat Amanda with such ‘tender affection and sensibility’ seem to entrance her (Roche, p. 320). The seductive power of Catholicism is such that, while convalescing in the convent after her father’s death, listening to ‘the sweet […] strains of the sisterhood’, Amanda feels she has experienced ‘a foretaste of heaven’ (Roche, p. 320). When Mortimer finally tracks her down and persuades her to marry him, her continued reluctance to leave the nuns and the sanctuary they have provided forces Mortimer to wonder if, instead of being wed, they will ‘both become converts to the holy rites of this convent’ (Roche, p. 374). In The Absentee, Grace, too, is connected to what is presented as a dangerously seductive and atavistic Catholicism. Associated with two surnames linked to historical rebellion and religious insurrection – Nugent and St Omer31 – Grace is constructed, much like Amanda, as a threatening representative of the dispossessed Catholic population in Ireland. As is the case with Amanda, however, this political threat is symbolically projected on to the heroine’s questioned and apparently questionable sexual purity. Led to believe in Grace’s illegitimate birth, Lord Colambre rejects her as a potential wife, giving as his excuse his ‘greatest dread of marrying any woman whose mother had conducted herself ill’ (Edgeworth, p. 112). Unsurprisingly, given the novel’s conflation of private and public, it is Grace’s seeming corruption that drives Colambre from Ireland. Although he has travelled to Ireland to learn about his estates and people, the discovery of Grace’s background renders this cause meaningless to him. With ‘hope and love no longer brighten[ing] his prospects’, Colambre finds that his ‘duties […] ceased



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to appear to him easy and pleasurable’. As a result of his ‘forbid[ing] himself to think of a union with miss Nugent, his mind had lost its object and its spring; he was not sufficiently calm [to] think of the public good’ (Edgeworth, p. 129). Eventually, Colambre completes that which he set out to do, thereby discharging his ‘duties’ and guarding the ‘public good’ despite his preoccupation with Grace’s impropriety. When he returns temporarily to England, however, he determines not to accompany his family back to Ireland, but instead to accept a military commission abroad, dedication to which he believes will weaken Grace’s dangerous hold on his heart. In The Children of the Abbey, Lord Mortimer is similarly driven from Ireland and, implicitly, his duties, because of a false belief in Amanda’s sexual impurity. Convinced that ‘some fatal mystery – some improper attachment’ has irrevocably tainted Amanda, Mortimer determines not to subject himself to her enchantment any longer (Roche, p. 168). Even as he visits Castle Carberry ‘to see the state the castle was in’, Mortimer makes it clear that he intends ‘not [to] repeat his visit, or stay much longer in the kingdom’ (Roche, pp. 163, 164). He orders ‘improvements’ (Roche, p. 164), but, like Colambre, seems altogether unconcerned with the public good knowing that his intended domestic settlement with Amanda is denied. Only once the suggestion of sexual impropriety has been removed from both Amanda and Grace can they act as suitable material for wives and, implicitly, nationally unifying heroines. As dutiful women, Amanda and Grace accept their redemption with relative poise, apparently refusing to dwell on the injustice committed against them by their intended husbands. Yet, in both texts, not only do the heroines continue to be associated with an inherently threatening Irish Catholicism and the Gothic return of the past it represents, they also register their hesitation towards the project of ‘amnesia’ upon which their marriages are predicated.32 In The Children of the Abbey, for instance, Amanda appears to enjoy a triumphant homecoming to Castle Carberry. Yet, as Burgess observes, marring the joyful celebration accompanying Amanda’s return is her continued association of the castle with her father’s eviction from his post and his subsequent death:33 Amanda could not re-enter it without emotions of the most painful nature. She recollected the moment in which she had quitted it, oppressed with sorrow and sickness, and to attend the closing period of a father’s life. (Roche, p. 582)



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‘[S]ooth[ing]’ her ‘with the softest tenderness’, Amanda’s new husband helps her ‘to conquer her dejection’ so that ‘in future the remembrance of her father was only attended with a pleasing melancholy’ (Roche, p. 582). Yet, only moments later, Amanda escapes to St Catherine’s, and there, among ‘[t]he good natured nuns’, indulges in a bout of hysterical laughter and ‘violent’ tears completely at odds with her apparent resignation to her role of forgetting past dispossession and personal imputation (Roche, pp. 582–3).34 Amanda’s emotional reaction to her return to Ireland patently foreshadows the corresponding reaction recorded in The Absentee. Even after Grace’s legitimacy has been proven and her reputation restored, her sexually and politically threatening past continues to haunt the narrative. This interruption of the repressed past is most readily apparent in the establishment of her English father’s name – ‘Reynolds’. While this discovery ultimately assists in Grace’s restoration to propriety and purity, it also rearticulates her threatening Catholic Irishness in its reference to the County Leitrim poet and Irish nationalist, George Nugent Reynolds (1770?–1802).35 Linking Grace with the bitter lament over past dispossession found in many of Reynolds’ poems, this name reasserts Grace’s menacing political and religious associations even as it attempts to repress them through marriage and its accompanying change of name. In the end, the text’s refusal to suppress fully Grace’s threatening Irish Catholic identity, as symbolized by her own name and those of her mother and father, indicates a corresponding hesitancy to endorse the image of Union apparently presented by the novel’s conclusion.36 Grace’s outraged cry – ‘My mother! – my mother! – my mother’ (Edgeworth, p. 256) – comes almost at the same moment that Colambre declares his love for her, registering an intrinsic but too often ignored ambivalence about Grace’s resignation to marriage.37 Revealing the inherent instability of the allegorical union proposed between her and Colambre, Grace’s outburst voices an uncertainty that will continue to insert itself in the text even as the couple moves towards marriage. In fact, just as Grace is ‘consoled’, she jeopardizes the novel’s impending resolution by ‘recollect[ing] her new relation, Mr. Reynolds, her grandfather, whom she had never seen, who had for years disowned her – treated her mother with injustice’. Scarcely able to think of him ‘with complacency’, Grace quickly restrains her emotions in response to ‘her strong sense of duty’, but not before she has registered her ambivalence towards the necessary forgetfulness required of her (Edgeworth, p. 257). Pages later, Grace’s return to Colambre’s Irish estate only intensifies this strong sense of resistance, and the disruptive possibility of Grace’s



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inability to forget the violence of the past. In the eyes of the Irish peasantry, Grace’s homecoming represents a restoration of the dispossessed Irish nobility. Regaled by a harpist playing ‘Gracey Nugent’, a well-known tune by the famous eighteenth-century harper-composer, Turlough Carolan (1670–1738), upon her return, Grace Reynolds remains, for the native Irish, ‘miss Nugent’ – the palpable symbol of their empowerment (Edgeworth, p. 266). Paralleling The Absentee’s vision of the intrinsically threatening return of the past and its dispossessed Catholic landowners, The Children of the Abbey portrays its heroine reclaiming not only Dunreath Abbey but also Castle Carberry at the end of the text. Such a conclusion is not so much an idealized vision of Anglo-Irish Union but rather an AngloIrish nightmare. The apparent resurrection of Lady Dunreath that makes this repossession possible represents, in Killeen’s terms, ‘the chief fear in Protestant Ireland in the eighteenth century […] that a revivified Catholic corpse would reopen the Land question’.38 Nevertheless, Killeen maintains, The Children of the Abbey is intent not on continued social and religious division, but on reconciliation and the elimination of the fears and paranoias of the Irish Anglican class. Killeen therefore calls Roche’s text a ‘Gothic novel of reconciliation’.39 Instead of representing a Gothic sense of the past returning to haunt the future, The Children of the Abbey images the past as having a transformative effect on the present. Appearing to Amanda precisely as a kind of revenant or haunting – a ‘terrifying spectre’ (Roche, p. 422) – 40 Lady Dunreath represents the healing power of the past; through her, ‘the previously dead, or thought-to-be-dead, provide the intellectual and biological life-force for the next generation’.41 Certainly, Lady Dunreath’s ghostly appearance provides the means by which Amanda reclaims Dunreath Abbey and vindicates her actions to Lord Mortimer, allowing her, in the end, to marry him and return with him to Castle Carberry. To overemphasize this concluding reconciliation, however, would be short-sighted. Far from recording ‘a kind of fairy tale in modern dress’, which, after exploring ‘the harsh realities of real life’, transports its readers to ‘a never-never land of happy love’,42 The Children of the Abbey testifies to the terror of the past and the firm hold of the dead over the living.43 So, too, does The Absentee, despite current literary criticism’s belief in the allegorical, conciliatory nature of the narrative as an example of ‘the national tale’. The evident points of continuity and overlap in The Children of the Abbey and The Absentee forcefully underscore the formal intersection of the ‘national’ and the ‘Gothic’ in Irish Romantic fiction. As they do so, they demand a reconsideration of



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existing perceptions of Irish Romantic fiction and the predominance of ‘the national tale’ in the literary history of Romantic Ireland. Although The Children of the Abbey may owe more to Gothic conventions, themes, and tropes than The Absentee, it certainly does not remain silent about Ireland. Similarly, while now understood as an allegorical narrative supportive of peaceful national union, The Absentee constantly interrupts its tale with threatening reminders of the past, highlighting the Gothic return of the repressed as its central fear and feature. More similar than is allowed by modern criticism’s thinking about Irish Romantic fiction, The Children of the Abbey and The Absentee uncannily mirror each other, revealing the phantasmal presence of literary forms – past, present, and future – in their pages. In so doing, they insist on a fundamental re-evaluation of formal categorizations of Irish Romantic fiction, breaking down the divide between ‘national’ and ‘Gothic’ and highlighting instead the essential, transgeneric nature of fiction in Romantic Ireland.

Notes 1. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 141. 2. Ibid., p. 141. 3. Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Versus Legitimacy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40, 1 (1985), p. 10. 4. To the majority of Owenson’s readers, the near proximity of Ireland to England did very little to dispel the long-held understanding of Ireland as, in the words of one critic surveying several recently published Irish novels in 1826, ‘a terra incognita’ equally foreign to ‘English statesmen’ as ‘the interior of Africa’, quoted in Jacqueline Belanger, ‘“Le vrai n’est pas toujours vraisemblable”: The Evaluation of Realism in Edgeworth’s Irish Tales’, in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, eds Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), p. 106. 5. Rolf and Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), p. lxii. 6. Ibid. 7. Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Irish Fiction before the Union’, in The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Facts and Fictions, ed. Jacqueline Belanger (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), p. 35. 8. Michael Gamer, ‘Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 86. 9. Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romanticism’, boundary 2, 31, 1 (2004), p. 55. 10. W. J. McCormack, Introduction to ‘The Irish Gothic and After’, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), II, p. 831.



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11. Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 17. 12. The existence of an Irish Gothic tradition has sponsored heated debate in recent years, especially in the ways in which the term ‘tradition’ attempts to group together a vast array of distinct and individual texts and authors by way of sometimes-tenuous commonalities. As with the retrospective formal distinctions of ‘the national tale’ and ‘the Gothic novel’, the terms ‘Irish Gothic’ and ‘Irish Gothic tradition’ force a restricted view of literary production, however helpful they may be in pointing out the connections between writers as temporally, socially, and ideologically distant as Maturin, Le Fanu, Stoker, and Wilde. On this debate, see, for instance, Richard Haslam, ‘Irish Gothic: A Rhetorical Hermeneutics Approach’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1, 2 (2007), no pagination, http://irishgothichorrorjournal. homestead.com (accessed 19 November 2009); Jarlath Killeen, ‘Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1, 1 (2007), no pagination, http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com (accessed 11 February 2009), and Jarlath Killeen, ‘Irish Gothic Revisited’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1, 4 (2008), no pagination, http:// irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com (accessed 19 November 2009). 13. Ferris, The Romantic National Tale, p. 17. 14. Miranda Burgess, ‘Violent Translations: Allegory, Gender, and Cultural Nationalism in Ireland, 1796–1806’, Modern Language Quarterly, 59, 1 (1998), pp. 33–70 (40). 15. Dictionary of British Women Writers, ed. Janet Todd (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 578. 16. Similarly, Clermont is listed as one of the ‘Horrid Novels’ in Northanger Abbey (1818). 17. Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800–1830’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), II, p. 415. 18. Natalie Schroeder, ‘Regina Maria Roche and the Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel’, Eire-Ireland, 19, 2 (1984), pp. 116–30 (116). 19. See, for instance, Anne Fogarty, ‘Imperfect Concord: Spectres of History in the Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan’, in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, eds Margaret Kelleher and James M. Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), pp. 116–26; Bridget Matthews-Kane, ‘Gothic Excess and Political Anxiety: Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl’, Gothic Studies, 5, 2 (2003), pp. 7–19, and Julie Donovan, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan and the Politics of Style (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2009). 20. Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). 21. Regina Maria Roche, The Children of the Abbey (1796; New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., no date), p. 28. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 22. Roche’s choice of names, especially ‘Malvina’ and ‘Oscar’, points to the strong Ossianic influence running through her text, an influence that is also readily apparent in Roche’s description of the sublime scenery of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Roche’s marriage of the Scottish Malvina to



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23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

‘Gothic’ and ‘National’? the Irish Fitzalan further suggests her engagement with the contemporary debate over the authenticity of Macpherson’s translations and their use of tales that were, in Clare O’Halloran’s terms, of ‘recognisably Irish origin’; Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c. 1750–1800 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004), p. 101. More work certainly needs to be done on Roche’s Ossianic references as well as the ways in which they might foreshadow or at least interact with what O’Halloran calls the ‘sympathetic overview’ presented in Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl; O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations, p. 101. On the Ossianic influence in The Wild Irish Girl, see Clíona Ó Gallchoir, ‘Celtic Ireland and Celtic Scotland: Ossianism and The Wild Irish Girl’, in Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic, eds David Duff and Catherine Jones (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 114–30. This summary is heavily indebted to that of Jarlath Killeen, whose Gothic Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 182–90 offers one of the few such detailed synopses available as well as an insightful analysis of Roche’s text. Another short précis is available in the indispensable Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900: see Loeber & Loeber, pp. 1136–7. Unfortunately, analyses of The Children of the Abbey are rare and, as Burgess points out, very few scholarly articles or books have devoted much attention to it, despite what Ian Campbell Ross calls the text’s ‘amazingly durable’ quality; Burgess, ‘Violent Translations’, p. 36, Ian Campbell Ross, Introduction to ‘Fiction to 1800’, in Field Day Anthology, I, p. 687. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, eds W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (1812; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 74. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. Burgess, ‘Violent Translations’, p. 42. Killeen, Gothic Ireland, p. 185. Burgess, ‘Violent Translations’, p. 43. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid. Ibid., p. 62. The historical Nugent family was of Norman origin with connections to both Catholicism and Jacobite rebellion and, as such, was ‘synonymous with latter-day recusancy, the adherence under material pressure and legal humiliation to a defeated dispensation’, McCormack and Walker, ‘Introduction’, in The Absentee, pp. ix–xlii (xxiv). Similarly, St Omer, the name of Grace’s mother, calls to the mind the French Catholic seminary – St Omar – in which Irish priests were educated before the foundation in 1795 of Maynooth College; Thomas Tracy, ‘The Mild Irish Girl: Domesticating the National Tale’, Eire-Ireland, 39, 1/2 (2004), p. 101. Julie Anne Miller, ‘Acts of Union: Family Violence and National Courtship in Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl’, in Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2000), p. 27. Burgess, ‘Violent Translations’, p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan’, p. 14. Tracy argues that Edgeworth’s combination of the two names – Nugent and Reynolds – makes



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36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

George Nugent Reynolds a likelier reference point than Thomas Reynolds, the traitor and informer who betrayed his fellow United Irishmen in March 1798, leading to their subsequent arrest. For more extensive discussions of the significance of Grace’s names, see, for instance, Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan’, pp. 13–14; W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 141–2; McCormack and Walker, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxiii–xxiv; Miller, ‘Acts of Union’, pp. 18–23, and Thomas Tracy, ‘The Mild Irish Girl’, pp. 98–101. Miller, ‘Acts of Union’, p. 22. Killeen, Gothic Ireland, p. 184. Ibid., p. 189. Although Amanda identifies Lady Dunreath as a ghostly presence, Angela Wright argues that, in fact, it is Amanda who comes to haunt Lady Dunreath. In her brief analysis of The Children of the Abbey, Wright contends that Lady Dunreath’s conscience is ‘reanimated’ when she detects the similarities between Amanda and her long-dead mother, Malvina, resulting in her final decision to repair the familial devastation she has caused. Amanda’s appearance next to the portrait of her dead mother constructs her as ‘[t]he living embodiment’ of her ‘wronged mother’, returned to ‘haunt’ Lady Dunreath. In this way, Wright maintains, ‘[t]he past is reawakened in order to rectify [the] wrongs [committed by Lady Dunreath]’; ‘“To live the life of hopeless recollection”: Mourning and Melancholia in Female Gothic, 1780–1800’, Gothic Studies, 6, 1(2004), p. 25. Killeen, Gothic Ireland, p. 184. Natalie Schroeder, ‘The Nun’s Picture: Religion and the Sensibility Romance of the 1830s’, The South Central Bulletin, 40, 4 (1980), p. 163. Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Origins of the Irish Female Gothic’, Bullán, 1, 2 (1994), p. 44.



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Escaping from Barrett’s Moon: Recreating the Irish Literary Landscape in the Romantic Period Jim Shanahan

In an introduction to his novel The Heroine, or, Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813) – a burlesque on the Romantic conventions of novel-writing – the Irish-born writer Eaton Stannard Barrett presents the moon to his readers as a world where the characters and ideas produced by the writers of literature throughout the ages live on and interact with each other. On his moon, the very terrain, as well as the material and corporeal matter, and all that which from its ‘very nature, cannot become tangible’, are derived from those texts and ideas.1 It is not, however, a simple accretive process, and not everything can or will endure. Barrett is careful to tell us that ‘The moment […] a book becomes obsolete on earth, the personages, countries, manners, and things recorded in it, lose, by the law of sympathy their existence in the moon.’2 If we take Barrett’s moon to be a reflection of the world of the text, then Barrett’s ‘law of sympathy’ is essentially a form of organic forgetting, where all that becomes obsolete or that falls out of sympathy disappears from the literary landscape. Since up to very recently text, art, and architecture were our only resources for reconstructing versions of the past that did not depend on oral tradition, Barrett’s moon is in fact an interesting if unsophisticated metaphor for the historical process itself. His moon is in essence the remembered past – a constantly evolving perception that the historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck has termed the ‘space of experience’ – and its current composition is our present sense of the past.3 The Heroine reminds us that if we take literature, as Barrett does, to mean writing in its broadest sense, then all history is literary and all literature, by extension, historical. The Romantic period – assumed for the purposes of this chapter to be from the French Revolution to the early 1830s4 – was an age that saw 188



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notions of history, the past, and the literary canon reconceptualized, and the literature of this era was crucial to these developments. The notion of canon has always been an ambiguous term, implying as it does both a collection of authoritative and/or exemplary texts and a series of rules or laws. One meaning may well reinforce the other in this case, but the meaning of canon is further complicated by the advent in the eighteenth century of the Cartesian notion of a ‘scientific’ canon, designed to facilitate research and to expand our understanding of the world.5 So while one meaning of canon tends towards authority and restriction, the Cartesian meaning implies an impulse towards expansion and enquiry. These two different meanings remain in tension with one another to this day. To this seeming contradiction one can add a further complication. Addressing an entity called the ‘Romantic canon’ invariably brings us into a conflict between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and highlights the essential presentness of any construction of the past. Both Romantic and canon are retrospective terms in this context, and both suggest the presence of a pre-existing grand narrative. The Romantic canon, like any other canon, is essentially a deterministic entity, shaped, as it must be, by preconceived notions of both the Romantic and the canon. For anyone interested in recovering the literary past, or indeed in creating a new canon, the question of the purpose of a literary canon must be addressed. Is a Romantic canon meant to reflect our sense of what we have called the Romantic period, or should it represent that which was considered canonical at the time? If it is the latter, then as William St Clair has pointed out, we should be looking at the canonical writers of a previous era – those of what he calls the ‘old canon’ – who being out of copyright and therefore available at a reasonable cost comprised to all intents and purposes the literature that was consumed and appreciated by the vast majority of readers in the Romantic period.6 If our aim is to judge the Romantic period by what they themselves read, then the evidence of recent bibliographical scholarship suggests that in terms of popularity and output we should privilege the anti-Jacobin novel over the Jacobin; sales figures, longevity, and influence suggest we should favour Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) and James Thomson’s The Seasons over Lyrical Ballads and its preface;7 and, if we take the preferences of the Edinburgh Review as any kind of reliable guide, then the canon of contemporary novelists considered worthy of attention in the first two decades of the nineteenth century comprises an elite group consisting of Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and the then-anonymous writer of the Waverley novels. Indeed, St Clair has argued that it was not until the abolition of perpetual copyright in 1774 that formal canonizing could begin, and that the



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Escaping from Barrett’s Moon

old canon was essentially the ‘first truly national literature’. In his view, this literature continued to be culturally formative to the extent that ‘[during] the romantic period the reading nation was probably, to a very large extent, commensurate with the reach and availability of these texts.’8 Of course, the fact that certain texts were available, popular and contemporarily influential does not necessarily mean that they should be given equal status to texts seen as being exemplary, authoritative and seminal, but it does remind us that both popular and critical tastes are subject to change over time. And just as most texts will inevitably fade from popular and critical consciousness, there is also the possibility that others whose critical stock may have waned – the metaphysical poets spring to mind here – may be appreciated after a long hiatus. The impetus for canonization was not just related to the freedom to compile anthologies facilitated by the repeal of perpetual copyright laws. What Jan Gorak has termed cultural surplus, allied to an increasingly expanding and heterogeneous reading public, stimulated the need for skilled and knowledgeable intermediaries to act as arbiters on the reader’s behalf. The rise of the critic and the development of new critical approaches invariably produced new attempts to produce exemplary canons. Those who attempted to canonize fiction in the Romantic period itself included very few contemporary works. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s 50-volume series The British Novelists (1810) contained Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) as well as Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) – novels that might be considered canonical today – and works by Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and Robert Bage, but little else that could be considered from the Romantic period. John Dunlop’s History of Fiction (1814) includes William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and mentions a number of novels written by the ‘justly celebrated’ Ann Radcliffe.9 A decade later, Walter Scott’s Ballantyne’s Novelists Library (1821–4) also includes Ann Radcliffe, but no novel published or no novelist writing in the nineteenth century. Familiarity and/or copyright issues may have militated against including anything more contemporary, but this merely reinforces the fact that our canons of any period reflect our notions of the literary past, and not the assessment of contemporaries. In the light of all this, it is not unreasonable to question whether literary canons are of any use to the literary historian, or to those interested in constructing new canons. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that although canon formation and literary history can be seen to have had of necessity separate priorities and methodologies, they have always had a symbiotic relationship with each other. Canons can be



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understood as official spaces of experience upon which literary histories can be based, and literary histories can provide a context for canon formation. The original concept of the literary canon as an exclusive collection of authoritative and influential texts and authors chosen on the basis of their aesthetic and exemplary qualities has long given way to myriad different canons formed for various national, generic, temporal, pedagogical, and ideological reasons. This has resulted in a movement from the exclusive towards the inclusive, or to what John Guillory calls ‘a politics of representation’.10 Once we accept that the politics of canon formation has moved beyond what might be called in general terms the purely aesthetic and into the sphere of the representative, then the question of its relationship with literary history must be reassessed. As David Perkins has pointed out, literary history in its most sophisticated form is also a legitimate form of literary criticism, in that its aim is not merely to reconstruct and understand the past, but to illuminate literary works.11 Clearly, however, it is also a form of history, and should be subject to historical best practice. Literary history is not and cannot simply be a narrative based on our current space of experience as created by a literary canon; nor can it concentrate solely on that material that survived a process of organic forgetting like that outlined in The Heroine. A literary historian should be just as interested in what has been deemed by posterity to be obsolete – and why it has been deemed so – as in that which has survived. Canonical material – assumed here to be the established texts and authors around which the practice of literary criticism takes place – has no monopoly on historical truth. One of the dangers of the symbiotic relationship between literary history and literary canons is that the scope of the former can be limited by the latter, and that historical best practice can be sacrificed. A concentration on canonical texts to the exclusion of others may have some merit from a purely literary standpoint, but it goes against historical logic and process. This is not a new or particularly radical assumption, but is one that has generally been resisted by the architects of the discipline of literary criticism. Matthew Arnold, for example, in arguing for a timeless and exclusivist approach that he terms the ‘real estimate’, describes both personal taste and historical significance as ‘fallacious’. Even he, however, does acknowledge that the ‘investigator of “historic origins”’ can ‘enjoy the true classic all the better for his investigations’.12 At the other extreme, Franco Moretti, in attempting to write a literary history based solely on quantitative evidence, has followed this logic to a fascinating, if somewhat extreme degree,13 but there is a more fundamental implication in an Irish context. Questions arise about the



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logic and processes used to construct what must still be regarded as a fledgling Irish Romantic canon, and where we go from here. While the national model is widely acknowledged to be inherently flawed and limited, it may be, as the editors of the recent Cambridge History of Irish Literature have suggested, a necessary stage in the emergence of more sophisticated and pluralist forms of literary history.14 Sticking with novels, one can argue, for example, that those texts in the existing ‘Irish canon’ from the Romantic period have been chosen primarily for their significance in the wider British or English canon of Romantic texts or for their contribution to the development of the novel form itself. This is an entirely laudable reason for giving these texts the attention they receive, but it does tend to suggest that the Irish canon consists largely of the ‘Irish’ (a loaded and contentious term in itself) elements of the wider English canon. The underlying logic, therefore, is what they contribute in a wider sense, rather than their significance in a specifically Irish sense. Constructing an Irish literary history from a canon created in this way seems to be at best reductionist, and at worst, misleading. The history of the Irish novel should overlap with the history of the British, or ‘English’, novel, but should also be distinct from it. Returning to the wider issue may again be helpful here. In envisaging how to rethink the principles and processes of literary history Mario J. Valdés identifies the ‘historian’s dilemma’ as the incongruity inherent in having to ‘sort out the significant from the commonplace out of the array of empirical data’, while at the same time recognizing that ‘the aggregate of the commonplace often [holds] the key to the significant’.15 To discover the significant, therefore, we firstly need to interrogate the aggregate. In strictly historical terms, this aggregate corresponds to all the sources available. The implication for literary history, therefore, is that best practice means ranging beyond the traditional literary canon and into the realms of non-canonical literature. Valdés creates his own form of ‘effective literary history’ in a three-pronged approach that acknowledges a ‘dialogical idea of literary historical truth’. This comprises of an acceptance that ‘the writing of the literary past must include the authors in the conditions in which they wrote as part of our own sense of cultural reality’; that sees the ‘received heritage’ as ‘symbolic meditation between the past and present’; and that restores the ‘dialectic between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation’.16 Put crudely, effective literary history must make sense in terms of the writer’s past, our present, and the relationship between the two. The inevitable consequence of this version of effective literary history is that the practice of literary history must also incorporate an active



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process of remembering, characterized by a willingness to investigate not just the official space of experience, but also other evidence or residues of the past. Here again, the moment is especially propitious. Recent British and Irish bibliographical scholarship has identified almost every novel published in the Romantic period – an achievement that could not perhaps have been envisaged by critics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.17 Jacqueline Belanger has already argued that an ‘overview of the representations of Ireland in Romantic-era novels and tales’ can ‘provide a basis for a greater contextualisation of “Irish novels” in terms of the entirety of a fictional discourse surrounding Ireland’.18 Unlike on Barrett’s moon or in the abstract process of canonization, much of the material that has fallen out of sympathy remains available for inspection. In suggesting that we may need to reassess some of our assumptions about the Irish Romantic period, this chapter will make three main points. Firstly, and most obviously in the light of what has gone before, it argues that an investigation of the aggregate is not only good practice, but illuminating. Secondly, an investigation of this aggregate in relation to the material to which we currently accord canonical status may force us to question some of the general assumptions we make about the past and therefore influence our own space of experience. Thirdly, the process of canonization – if we assume this works in much the same way as the process outlined on Barrett’s moon – results in the loss of texts whose impact relied primarily on their relevance in their own time and who contributed to their own time’s space of experience. This last point has implications not only for our sense of the past, but more importantly for our sense of the space of experience of the reader of the Irish Romantic period. In order to demonstrate these points this chapter will briefly examine three non-canonical texts and argue that we need to construct an alternative canon of the significant for literature of historical (if not entirely ‘literary’) significance. This interaction between the ‘classic’ literature and that literature deemed merely historically significant should help to engender a more nuanced and, from a historical point of view at least, a more complete understanding of the Irish Romantic period, rather than using these texts in an Arnoldian sense merely to throw more light on the classics of the period. Returning to the first text mentioned here, Barrett’s The Heroine is a perfect example of a text that has been prey to its own ‘law of sympathy’. Widely praised and successful in its own time, it counted Jane Austen and Walter Scott among its admirers,19 but it was ultimately a victim of its own success. Primarily a burlesque on the popular novels of the day



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(and in particular the traditional heroine so prevalent in these texts), in The Heroine the novel-addicted main character, Cherry – or ‘Cherubina’, as she renames herself – believes that she has been born a heroine and subsequently lives her life as if it were the plot of a novel. Convinced that, like any true heroine, she was of noble birth, the novel recounts her increasingly bizarre (and extremely funny) adventures as she pursues an imagined inheritance. She is eventually brought back to reality, is reconciled with her father and receives a marriage proposal from a sensible man of property. In hammering a critical nail into the coffin of the Gothic and Romantic novels it parodied, Barrett’s work helped to enable a revolution in taste that ultimately rendered The Heroine itself irrelevant, as its success is largely dependent on readers recognizing the conventions of the genre and the novels being burlesqued. The year after The Heroine’s original appearance, Walter Scott published Waverley, a text that introduced a new generic category of fiction and gave an increased critical stature to the novel. Although The Heroine was never an entirely forgotten text,20 it could hardly be regarded as canonical, and, to return to the opening analogy once more, it may be hypothesized that its critical stock slipped as the novels it burlesqued faded from Barrett’s moon. As such it is itself evidence of a lost space of experience that can be glimpsed but never quite recaptured. Barrett did add notes to the 1815 edition, explaining some of the allusions, but he did not include a general glossary of the characters. The novelist and bibliographer Michael Sadleir attached a glossary to his 1927 edition of the work, and noted that a ‘[l]ack of familiarity with the books ridiculed in The Heroine is in detail as well as in general an obstacle to the novel’s continued reputation’. Sadleir concedes that without such a glossary the novel ‘cannot but puzzle the reader of a later age’.21 Barrett’s notes and Sadleir’s glossary suggest that the single most burlesqued text in The Heroine is, perhaps not surprisingly, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, which features at least tweny times. Another heavily referenced novel is the Irish writer Maria Regina Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796). However, and most interestingly from an Irish perspective, the most burlesqued writer in The Heroine appears to be Sydney Owenson. Her Woman, or Ida of Athens (1809) provides almost as many references as Radcliffe’s work, and there are others from The Wild Irish Girl (1806), The Novice of St. Dominick (1806) and St. Clair (1803), all of which results in her having by far the most traceable references. While being the most burlesqued writer might reveal little about the quality of Owenson’s writing (apart from the author’s opinion of it), it does demonstrate



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that her profile with the reading public of the time did not simply rest with her most famous work, The Wild Irish Girl. A general complicating factor, however, is that Barrett did not just choose to lampoon what he perceived to be bad writing: he also burlesques Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, de Staël’s Corinne, as well as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey. In doing so, he reinforces the sense that what he is burlesquing is not so much a discredited sub-genre as an entire space of experience. The effect on modern readers is to make them aware that readers and reading in the past operated in a different reading environment from that of today, and perhaps more importantly, in a way that was also different from that official space of experience suggested by canonical texts from that period. Moving away from the individual text, the bibliographic work of the past two decades has allowed us to reassemble a very large proportion of the novels published (a circumstance that could not have been envisaged by a critic such as Walter Raleigh)22 and thereby the potential space of experience of the reader of the Romantic period. Up to recently the mass of this material had been largely lost to us. In an Irish context, therefore, it is tempting to see the publication of Rolf and Magda Loeber’s A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900 and other bibliographical work as restoring that aggregate to us and in one fell swoop bringing back into critical sight all those texts swept away by indifference, changing literary taste, and the political and aesthetic considerations of canon-building. The work of the Loebers is a particularly useful resource for contextualizing the ‘Irish’ component of any study of Irish fiction of the Romantic period. But it is also presents a serious challenge to the literary scholar. There is, of course, a danger in making assumptions about what people did or did not read. William St Clair, in his comprehensive study of reading in the Romantic period, has clearly and concisely outlined the difficulties inherent in attempting to judge the impact of texts on readers in any period, whether that be through the ‘closed system’ of text-only analysis, or the assumptions of an ‘implied’ or ‘critical’ reader, or the existence of ‘communities of interpretation’.23 Nonetheless, an obvious example of how returning to the aggregate can force us to rethink our assumptions about the history of the novel in the Romantic period generally can be seen in the recent attention given to the antiJacobin novel of the 1790s and early 1800s. This work has revealed the existence of a considerable corpus of texts that challenge the notion that the 1790s was – in terms of the novel at least – a revolutionary decade. In fact, W. M. Verhoeven goes so far as to argue that given the



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vastly superior number of conservative novels published, the 1790s in England should be seen primarily as a counter-revolutionary decade rather than as a revolutionary one. Not only were the vast majority of novels published in this period broadly conservative in political and social terms, but over fifty novels from this period can be identified as clearly anti-Jacobin in character. The fact that so many of these books share a consistent set of values and a common structure suggests that this was both a deliberate and an influential movement. Verhoeven proposes that one of the reasons why the anti-Jacobin novel was largely forgotten was that the radical novel ultimately provided the template for the novel in the nineteenth century.24 In contrast, none of the antiJacobin novels have achieved canonical status. This suggests a clear disjuncture between a consensual or established sense of literary merit as reflected by the canon and the literary history suggested by a study of the aggregate, which manifests itself as a conflict between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The radical novel was ultimately, in the kind of historical terms represented by the canon, more influential and the canon reflects this; yet one cannot ignore the evidence that suggests the anti-Jacobin novel was a more influential and popular form in its own time, and that it certainly was more plentiful, sold more copies, and reflected more accurately the views of the vast majority of the English reading population. The literary historical component of the canon reflects the fact that ultimately the radical novel was more influential (and better written perhaps), but it does not reflect the literary reality of the 1790s. In adopting a top-down approach we run a real risk of misrepresenting the literary landscape of the past. A direct comparison can be drawn here with the attention given in Irish studies of the same period to the ‘national tale’, which one would be forgiven for assuming was the primary vehicle of ‘Irish’ novel-writing in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. An example of the narrowness of the current focus can be seen in the fact that – with the occasional exception of the Banim brothers – critical concentration has in the past two decades been focused almost exclusively on the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Charles Maturin.25 A look at the aggregate suggests that while this may be justified in purely aesthetic terms, it may also need some qualification. It is perhaps surprising to consider that of the 114 Irish-related or Irish-written fictions identified as first published during this time, only five specifically call themselves ‘national tales’.26 Three of these are by Sydney Owenson (which may explain the popularity of the term), one is James Rennie’s St. Patrick: a National Tale of the Fifth Century (1819), and the other is



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Eliza Kelly’s The Matron of Erin (1816), to which we shall return. Thus the term, ‘national tale’ as we use it today is, while useful, largely retrospective. To be sure, there are plenty of other novels around at this time that are national tales in everything but name. From a study of their titles, 25 texts would seem to fall into the national tale category in a broad sense, and in total 55 highlight some Irish element in their titles.27 Even allowing for the fact that there were other Irish novels that either prefigured or modelled themselves on Owenson’s influential national tales in terms of content, the aggregate evidence reveals that ‘Irish’ texts were just as likely to have no Irish concerns as they were to contain Irish material. An examination of those texts with Irish material reveals a body of work that demonstrates not only that there had been a consistent alternative to the generally conciliatory national tale characterized by those in the canon, but that this alternative actually predated the national tale form. This alternative strain was sometimes deeply reactionary and sometimes radical, and was sometimes an intriguing mixture of both. While these works may not have stood the test of time in a canonical sense, we cannot ignore their existence, and they should alert us to the potential dangers of drawing conclusions about the development of the Irish novel form purely from canonical texts. To take a specific example, the comfortably homogeneous nature of the national tale is directly challenged by Eliza Kelly’s novel, The Matron of Erin. A National Tale, mentioned earlier. The Matron of Erin has perhaps suffered from being difficult to categorize: although it argues for Catholic Emancipation, and might therefore be seen as similar to liberal, Whig or Enlightenment fiction, it is in many ways reactionary – even anti-Jacobin – in its sentiments. It is vehemently opposed to anything likely to encourage Jacobinism or to upset class relations. What is most immediately obvious about this text is that it clearly sets itself up as an alternative to the national tale as conceived by Sydney Owenson in The Wild Irish Girl (1806). It not only consciously calls itself a national tale (a term, as we have seen, rarely used by anyone except Owenson), but the very title itself – The Matron of Erin – presents a direct alternative to the personification of Ireland suggested in Owenson’s title. In her title Kelly substitutes maturity and dignity for Owenson’s youth and nonconformity. Indeed, the writer’s O’Connellite sympathies may have been even more representative of a popular mood than Owenson’s Protestant liberalism. Like The Wild Irish Girl, Kelly’s novel is centred on a Catholic family in Connaught. The ‘matron’ of the title, Paulina Westmond, is the daughter of a Catholic baronet, and she marries Charles Delwyn, a Protestant, whose frustrated political ambition propels him into a



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leadership role with the United Irishmen. Delwyn incites the naturally conservative Catholic population into taking part in the 1798 Rebellion by murdering Paulina’s father, with predictably disastrous results for both himself and the local population. Delwyn is eventually fatally wounded by a man whose family was destroyed by the Rebellion. The Matron of Erin does not exoticize the Catholic faith as Owenson does; instead it portrays Catholicism as an enabling, sophisticated, moral, and rational religion. Above all, Catholicism is shown to be a religion of order and the status quo. Significantly, although Kelly does not promote or seek to defend what might be seen as the more superstitious or controversial elements of Irish Roman Catholic practice to a Protestant reader, neither does she essentially disown them or present Catholicism as an historical rather than a purely religious phenomenon in the way that Owenson, through Glorvina, does in The Wild Irish Girl.28 The Catholic faith portrayed in The Matron of Erin is not one of ceremony or sacrament, but is based on quiet reflection and meditation. It is, in short, a religion virtually indistinguishable from Anglicanism and therefore, one imagines, entirely acceptable to the intended readership of the novel. The Matron of Erin is recognizably ‘national’ in that it concerns itself with national issues and attempts to create or reflect a feeling of commonality and a shared destiny between different elements in an Irish society that might otherwise be divided along religious lines. Its primary purpose is to argue for Catholic Emancipation as a bulwark against disorder and rebellion by demonstrating the desirability of absorbing educated and wealthy Catholics fully into the ruling elite: something that could be achieved by removing their last disabilities under the law. While it differs from The Wild Irish Girl in its general lack of interest in antiquarianism or the Irish past, its portrayal of Catholicism and in its general political philosophy, this conservative Catholic form shares with the liberal Protestant model propounded by Owenson a desire to create some kind of common feeling between Catholics and Protestants (of certain social classes, at least) and between the Irish people and the English reader. The Wild Irish Girl is an attempt to reach out and build bridges between the misunderstood Catholics of Ireland and a curious but sceptical British public. Eliza Kelly’s novel, on the other hand, is an altogether less certain but ultimately more pragmatic attempt to forge a coalition of mutual interest in the face of perceived threats that are both internal and external in nature. As a result, even though it is written a decade later than Owenson’s national tale, the civil horror and schism of the 1798 Rebellion is centre stage in The Matron of Erin, whereas it is only peripherally hinted at in the conciliatory Wild Irish Girl.



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However, The Matron of Erin does have a subversive side. Rather than ending with the ‘national marriage’ or the ‘union of hearts’ as The Wild Irish Girl does, it instead begins with that staple of the national tale, a marriage between a Catholic heroine and a Protestant man. There are also two incidents described where Catholic women are abducted or nearly forced into marriage by Protestants, reinforcing the notion that this is not a partnership of equals. Like many other characters in antiJacobin fiction, the Protestant Delwyn is the victim of an unsuitable and partial education heavily influenced by republicanism and atheism, which turns him into a selfish political fanatic prepared to betray and murder to get his way. Responsible for some reprehensible deeds, it is thanks to his constant and dutiful wife that he dies reconciled with God and his family. What this irregular version of the national marriage theme challenges is the overly optimistic and conciliatory plot of the national tale, where marriage is portrayed as the end rather than the beginning of the process of reconciliation. It is a reminder that in the case of Ireland political and social injustice continues to exist even after ‘marriage’ and will continue to fester and corrupt unless addressed. Acknowledging the existence of a text like The Matron of Erin and factoring it into the Irish space of experience forces us to reconsider our sense of, if not necessarily what the national tale has been retrospectively seen to be, then what the national tale was considered to be in its own time. In essence, it highlights the disconnection between our canonical construction of the literary past and the literary landscape suggested by an examination of the aggregate. Turning to another largely largely forgotten text, just as The Heroine’s significance faded as literary tastes changed, the historical significance of a novel such as Elizabeth Plunkett’s The Exile of Erin (1808) is difficult for us to appreciate unless we are capable of reconstructing the space of experience of its intended readership. For the contemporary reader, the title would have brought to mind the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell’s well-known poem of the same name, and, in an example of intertextuality across genres, Plunkett’s novel broadly treats of the same theme.29 Plunkett’s The Exile of Erin is a plea for the repatriation and rehabilitation of idealistic rebels exiled in the United States after the 1798 Rebellion. A liberal Catholic landowner, Henry Portland, is forced into exile in the United States after rashly expressing support for radical elements in Ireland, leaving behind his family, who in turn are forced into exile in Wales. While in America he meets a man named Fitzgerald, who has a ‘wife’ and child, and learns their story. In the meantime, Portland’s family are endeavouring to obtain a pardon for him through



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When a degenerate world stands by and beholds every day with indifference their privileges trampled upon, and make sport of the miseries of unfortunate women, who have been driven over the brink of perdition by the cruelty of those who ought to be their protectors, shall no man dare to take their part? Who is so insensible as to be moderate when reprobating a conduct so infamous and contemptible?30 Just in case the political point being made here is still obscure, we are told that the daughter of this abusive marriage is called ‘Erin’ and she is physically unable to survive in the extreme climate of the United States: she needs to be repatriated if she is not to die. The Irish political experience is put in domestic terms here with an eye, I would suggest, to a potentially sympathetic English female readership. The Exile of Erin is a plea, in the writer’s present, for forgiveness, religious toleration, and moderation. At the end of the novel the liberal Earl of Avenmore marries Rosanna, daughter of the exiled Portland, and as the novel concludes Avenmore is due to become lord lieutenant of Ireland. Rosanna, anticipating her new role as wife of the crown representative in Ireland, resolves to greet and treat the former oppressors of her family with fairness and magnanimity. Avenmore says that he cannot imagine ‘a greater mortification’ for her family’s enemies than in ‘beholding the daughter of the persecuted exile filling the first situation in that country from which private pique and the horrors of rebellion had driven her beloved parent’.31 The suggestion in the novel is that liberal Catholic families were opportunistically accused of disloyalty because such an accusation was likely to stick. Even more significantly perhaps, for canon-builders, Rosanna refers to herself at the end of the novel as ‘the little simple wild Irish girl’.32 Rosanna Portland is Glorvina O’Melville invested with political, rather than cultural power. The novel’s politics confirm that Plunkett’s decision to give her hero and his family the surname of Portland is clearly a deliberate one, despite her coy protestation to the contrary.33 William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, the third duke of Portland, was prime minister of the United Kingdom at the time the novel was published. He had been lord lieutenant of Ireland at the time when Grattan’s parliament was established, and had been responsible for Irish affairs for much of



their friends, the influential and aristocratic Avenmore family. Portland learns that his new friend Fitzgerald was indeed a rebel who had rescued a woman of noble birth and her daughter from an abusive and violent marriage and who justifies his actions in the following terms:

the 1790s. Perhaps just as significantly, he had moved politically from being a central figure in the Rockingham faction and a ‘whig martyr’ to becoming a Tory figurehead: something that mirrors the fictional Portland’s admittedly less spectacular transformation from radical sympathizer to moderate patriot. As if this were not evidence enough of the novel’s political intentions, the fact that the rescuer and foster-father of Erin is called Fitzgerald would invariably remind readers of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the proposed leader of the 1798 Rebellion. In addition, for Irish readers the name ‘Avenmore’ would conjure up an image of the liberal Irish peer, Barry Yelverton, Lord Avonmore (1736–1805), who had been both a liberal patriot and subsequently a supporter of the Act of Union, but who was regarded by many conservatives as having been dangerously sympathetic to the ideals of the United Irishmen. More than anything, however, the power of The Exile of Erin lies not in its literary qualities or in the pathos of its story, but in the tantalizing prospect of change in the future and the imminent reversal of fortune outlined at the story’s end. We cannot perhaps fully appreciate this power now and may fail to see its importance, but we must acknowledge that its purpose was to have an immediate effect on the contemporary reader who did not have the benefit of our hindsight, and its value to us is the insight it gives us into the anxieties and hopes of the time. As a result it can be argued that one of the elements that denies The Exile of Erin a place in the traditional canon – its topicality – is precisely what entitles it to a place in any Irish ‘significant canon’ of the period. What the texts highlighted here demonstrate is that a return to the aggregate is not just wise but necessary if we are to construct an Irish Romantic-era literary canon that is representative of a particularly Irish cultural dynamic and not just composed of those isolated Irish elements plucked from the larger canon of the Romantic period. While it would be wrong to suggest that ‘Irish novels’ can only be interpreted in an Irish context, it would be equally wrong to suggest that in attempting to construct a wider and more meaningful space of experience we cannot find new significances in the interaction between established canonical material and a developing canon of the significant drawn from an examination of this newly recovered corpus of Irish-related fiction.

Notes 1. Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine, or, Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader, 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1813), I, p. vi. 2. Ibid., I, p. vii.



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3. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘“Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 255. 4. When the Romantic period was obviously has implications in terms of formulating a canon for this period: James Chandler, for example, sees dates such as 1789, 1783, and 1776 as being on the ‘early’ side, and 1832 as on the ‘far’ side; see James Chandler, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1. In relation to an ‘Irish’ Romantic period, dating it from the French Revolution to the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 seems to make sense from a literary perspective. 5. See Jan Gorak, ‘Canons and Canon Formation’, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, eds W. H. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 575. 6. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 122–39, esp. p. 138. 7. See Marshall Brown, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 5: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4; St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 472, 525–34. 8. St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 138. 9. John Dunlop, The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age ([1814]; 4th edn, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845), p. 415. 10. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 5. 11. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 177. 12. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’, in Essays in Criticism: Second Series (1888; London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 12. 13. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). 14. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, p. 8. 15. Mario J. Valdés, ‘Rethinking the History of Literary History’, in Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory, eds Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 63. 16. Ibid., pp. 64–5. 17. See, for example, Peter Garside, James Raven and Ranier Schöwerling, eds, The English Novel 1770–1830, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, eds, A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006). More specifically for the purposes of this chapter, see the checklist of Ireland-related fiction in Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Preliminary Remarks on the Production and Reception of Fiction Relating to Ireland, 1800–1829’, Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, 4 (May 2000), http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc04_n02.html (accessed 10 February 2010).



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18. Belanger, ‘Preliminary Remarks’. 19. See Walter Raleigh, ‘Introduction’, Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine, with an Introduction by Walter Raleigh (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), pp. x, xv. 20. After the third edition was published in 1815, it was republished on at least three occasions in the nineteenth century in the US. In the twentieth century, at least two editions were published: in 1909 (see previous footnote) and 1927 (see next footnote). 21. Michael Sadleir, ‘Introduction’, Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine, with an Introduction by Michael Sadleir (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1927), p. 14. 22. See Raleigh, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. 23. St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 2–5. 24. W. M. Verhoeven, ‘General Introduction’, Anti-Jacobin Novels, gen. ed. W. M. Verhoeven, 10 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), I, pp. viii–lviii, esp. pp. viii–xiii. 25. See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 26. See the checklist in Belanger, ‘Preliminary Remarks’. 27. For example, five novels in this period subtitle themselves an ‘Irish Tale’, four as a ‘Irish Story’, two call themselves an ‘Irish Historical Tale’, and there is one ‘Irish Historical Romance’, one ‘Hibernian Tale’, an ‘Irish Romance’, an ‘Irish Novel’, a ‘Milesian Tale’, an ‘Historical Romance’, a ‘Religious Tale’, a ‘Catholic Tale’, and a ‘Roman Catholic Story’, making 25 potential national tales in total: or less than one quarter of the total number of Irish-related fictions. Thirty-five of the 114 have ‘Irish’ somewhere in the title, and another 11 have ‘Ireland’. Four have ‘Erin’; two, ‘Irishman’; two, ‘Irishwoman’; and only one, mercifully, uses ‘Emerald Isle’; see the checklist in Belanger, ‘Preliminary Remarks’. 28. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale [1806], ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 187. 29. ‘The Exile of Erin’ [1800], in Thomas Campbell, The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell. With a Memoir (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1866), pp. 110–11; see also note p. 112. 30. Elizabeth Plunkett, The Exile of Erin. A Novel, 3 vols (London: B. Crosby, 1808), II, p. 136. 31. Ibid., III, p. 46. 32. Ibid., III, p. 54. 33. ‘As a woman she [the author] has avoided any thing like political discussion, well aware how ill one of her sex must be qualified to enter on such a topic. All she has to add is that it is the man and not the politician that is here delineated.’ Ibid., ‘Dedication to the Public’, I, p. vii.



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Afterword





Placing ‘Irish’ and ‘Romanticism’ in the Same Frame: Prospects Stephen Behrendt

Many of us have spoken and written for some time about the implications for scholarship and teaching of a reconsideration of Ireland’s relationship to Romanticism, and the chapters in this collection represent a collective but nevertheless diversified approach to the subject. Their diversity mirrors the diversity of the subject itself, which extends across disciplines, genres, and theoretical and critical paradigms. Indeed, to speak of ‘Ireland and Romanticism’ (or ‘Romanticism and Ireland’, which is not quite the same) is significantly different from speaking of ‘Irish Romanticism’. The two (or three) sets of terms need to be in dialogue among themselves if we are henceforth to write what we mean by any of them now in the twenty-first century, when so much has changed historically, economically, culturally, and intellectually from the world we inhabited at the end of the previous one. Some of the chapters that appear here focus upon matters that are primarily ‘Irish’ in nature, while others lean more towards ‘Romanticism’. Because some of this imbalance is inevitable in any ‘collection’ of essays, the introductory and concluding chapters that bracket these more particularized studies need to pay heed to the more elusive – and more compelling – subject that appears when one manages to get both terms together within a single ‘frame’. Then it becomes more fully possible to consider how that compound term – ‘Irish Romanticism’ – opens new vistas when it is approached in new and less ideologically overdetermined ways. It used to be routine in literary scholarship to incorporate Irish (and Scottish) literature into a ‘British’ canon, and then to mostly ignore or marginalize the Irish (and the Scottish) works as ‘minor’ or ‘regional’ variants upon a canonical ‘British literature’. While things have begun to change, collapsing this ossified structure nevertheless remains to be 207



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Placing ‘Irish’ and ‘Romanticism’ in the Same Frame

fully accomplished, and the Romantic period offers particularly fertile ground for such recombination. As Stuart Curran noted some years ago, wherever ‘Romanticism’ evolved in Europe and North America, it was not a homogeneous phenomenon but instead one that manifested ‘the distinct exigencies of national culture’.1 More recently, Claire Connolly has pointed out that even as Irish literature of the Romantic period participated in the broad thematic and stylistic aspects of European Romanticism, its authors (and their readers) were always particularly mindful of what made their productions different from the mainstream ‘British’ literary culture: ‘Ireland emerged from this period with a renovated reputation as a naturally distinct national culture; this in turn fostered and supported new theories of nationality and nourished the cultural nationalism of the 1830s and 1840s.’2 At the same time, though, Declan Kiberd observes that, historical longings for national and cultural independence notwithstanding, the Irish ‘seem to take pleasure in the fact that identity is seldom straightforward and given, more often a matter of negotiation and exchange’.3 Scholarly writing on Irish Romanticism has historically either missed these two important points or has minimized them to the point of seeming irrelevance. But relevant they are, nevertheless. Walter Scott popularized among contemporary readers of his poetry and fiction a deliberately contrived literary and cultural Scottishness that was characterized by elements he manipulated with great care. Analogously, Thomas Moore did something comparable with ‘Irishness’ in his long-running Irish Melodies (1807–35), creating for his readers a sentimentalized and engaging portrait of a national culture that had long been unfamiliar to an English readership. Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Lay of the Irish Harp (1807), and Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (1807) likewise contributed to this idealization of a ‘romantic’ Ireland, as did numerous contributions by a variety of writers throughout the first two decades of the new century. Mixing sentiment, aesthetics, and politics, such works aimed to demystify an ostensibly alien Irish culture for English readers, while simultaneously contributing to the development of Irish nationalism that extends through to the Young Ireland writers and activists of the 1840s. But writing in this fashion almost always involved compromising both what was identifiably ‘Irish’ and what was characteristically ‘Romantic’. The unfortunate practice of defining ‘British’ Romanticism almost exclusively in terms of ‘English’ writers yields a one-dimensional portrait that misrepresents or ignores the period’s contested cultural diversity. Commenting on the objectionable composite name of the state produced



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by the Act of Union – ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ – Patrick O’Farrell notes that when it was imposed on them this title rendered the Irish ‘neither Irish nor English’.4 As William Parnell put it in 1805, the Union was nothing but ‘a name, a sound, a fiction’.5 Still suffering from the devastating effects of the bloody suppression of the 1798 Rebellion and the failure of Robert Emmet’s 1803 uprising, Irish ‘citizens’ (an ideologically freighted word in itself) from both sides of the sectarian divide were compelled to confront the problematic negotiations involved in their incomplete incorporation into ‘British’ culture generally. The widespread sense of alienation that stemmed for many from a profound sense of the loss of an Irish parliament is visible, as Ina Ferris observes, in the uncertainty and uneasiness to be found in Irish fictional narratives in the period.6 In poetry, as in fiction, loyalist (and occasionally assimilationist) gestures frequently stand in uneasy juxtaposition with decidedly nationalistic, oppositional stances that resist easy Anglicization while reminding Irish readers of what has been lost in the imperfect process of union. How this profound sense of loss of both a sentimental and political discourse of Irishness relates to social and political developments during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in particular has been widely documented, as have the efforts of state and religious institutions to extirpate ‘Irish’ cultural signifiers, from the secular to the sacred, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the linguistic. Literary histories of the period have to some extent been complicit in this linguistic ethnic cleansing, avowing an identification of ‘literature’ with printed Anglophone material. Thus, as Gearóid Denvir notes, even an esteemed modern Irish critic like Seamus Deane could claim that the Irish language was ‘well and truly dead’ by 1800.7 Even more damning, given its otherwise celebratory account of Irish literature in the global ‘republic of letters’, is the judgement of Pascale Casanova that ‘[at least since the early seventeenth century] Irish had ceased to be a language of intellectual creation and communication’.8 Such sweeping statements, Denvir objects, both assume and accept an Anglocentric perspective that aligns itself with the ‘victors’ in the historical struggle. Scholars like Denvir therefore tend to reject or dramatically modify positions like those held by Deane and Casanova that literally and figuratively ‘bury’ the native Irish literary heritage and production. That the apparent watershed moment in this language shift (and submersion) lies precisely within the Romantic period should interest us more than it historically has done, given the critical and cultural interest in the rise and flowering of all aspects of nationalism (and nativism) in the



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literature, arts, and cultures of the other nations of Europe (and North America) during these years. The primary sources, those documents composed in Irish, comprise a sort of meta-literature: many of them are oral in nature and so have been preserved and passed down often in the form of manuscript transcriptions and translations.9 Charlotte Brooke’s 1789 Reliques of Ancient Irish Poetry, for instance, while it set out to preserve and even to recover ‘native’ material (as Percy had done with indigenous English poetry some 20 years earlier), nevertheless did so through translations into English that were accompanied by commentary in English.10 Other materials are essentially paratextual in nature, comprised of descriptive accounts by (usually) culturally biased observers writing in English. The problem with such materials, as Denvir observes, is that ‘the world of the native is mediated through the mindset of outsiders who neither speak the language nor understand the culture of the people they describe’, which dramatically vitiates their value as records or as commentary. ‘In a sense, of course,’ Denvir continues significantly, the same can be said for present-day scholars of the period who neglect sources in Irish [emphases mine].11 It hardly needs saying that Denvir’s point bears particular relevance both to the project undertaken by the present collection and to the larger project of reassessing and repositioning the study of Ireland and Romanticism within wider national, international, cultural, and literary parameters. If much has been done to bring new focus to the period, much still needs to be done in representing the full spectrum of literary and cultural production across the two languages. In teaching, too, then, when it comes to Romantic-era Irish literature, it is unquestionably time for a more comprehensive and historically (and culturally) enlightened approach that regards this literature both on its own terms and in its complex interrelations with other Englishlanguage (and, indeed, continental) writing with which it is contemporary, and without simply ignoring (or worse, dismissing) what is written in Irish. Whether one is conducting courses specifically in Romantic-era literature or in broader-period surveys, texts by Irish writers can be set into productive dialogue with those by non-Irish ‘British’ authors, in terms of both subject matter generally and of national cultural issues in particular. How the French Revolution (and its implications) is viewed in those writings in the run-up to the events of 1798, for example, can show students a great deal about the dynamics of cultural difference and cultural discord, and it can help demonstrate how competing national or quasi-national interests both colour the perceptions of writers (and readers) and how they affect the reception history of the texts that



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result. At the same time, and especially when it comes to more advanced students, the locations of ‘Irish’ materials within the larger category of ‘British’ ones opens up opportunities to explore issues of cultural diversity and discord that have been the subjects of literary and cultural historians whose work is grounded in post-colonial studies. Just how – and where – one positions a discrete ‘national’ cultural production like that of Romantic-era Ireland within the larger body of English-language productions, in other words, is as important and compelling a subject for inquiry as are the more standard text-centred subjects of literary analysis. Moreover, scholarship needs to reconsider the political and cultural realities inherent in Romantic-era relations between Britain and Ireland, relations whose cultural dissonances become virtually invisible (or at least functionally indistinguishable) when viewed from within the parameters of conventionally defined ‘British’ literary studies. There can be no escaping the reality that Ireland was perceived to be an occupied country and had been for many decades. The cultural effects of this permeate the culture, arts, and discourse of Romantic-era Ireland. As a result, cultural production in Ireland necessarily reflects (even when it suppresses) the cultural dissonance involved in this deeply perceived imbalance, as post-colonial theory has illustrated in other instances of colonialist occupation and exploitation. Conditions of sociocultural imbalance like these inevitably produce an oppositional cast in the arts and other forms of public discourse, and that rhetorical and ideological shading is decidedly different from what we find, for example, in English Regency-era radical journalism, where the opposition revolves around matters of national politics, domestic policy, and class economics. How dramatically different the situation was with regard to Ireland is perhaps most clearly signalled by the British preference for talking (and writing) about the Irish ‘race’. It is a telling term, especially when one recalls that its next most frequent occurrence in mainstream British writing is in abolitionist literature, which is peppered with references to ‘the sable race’. For Romantic-era (and Victorian) British citizens, this popular preference for treating the Irish under the banner of ‘race’ rather than ‘nationality’ recalculated cultural ‘difference’ along lines that were less susceptible to flexible interpretation. Just as black Africans could never be anything else than what they were, racially, and so were perpetually bound to a social status imposed upon them from without – by those whose own ‘difference’ was a self-styled superiority – so too were the Irish locked by means of linguistic discrimination (taxonomy) into an imposed but inescapable subaltern inferiority. Writing from





within such a cultural prison, whether for one’s own ‘countrymen’ or for ‘foreigners’ (i.e. English), one cannot be expected to write either in the same language or with the same subjective descriptors with which a Wordsworth or an Austen was able to write. This means that works like The Wild Irish Girl or the Irish Melodies need to be read within broader cultural parameters that take into account the oppositional relationship that colours so much of that writing and to which Irish writers were at unusual pains in their attempts to modulate (and moderate) their language in terms of their intended or envisioned readers and the enculturated attitudes (and life experiences) they associated with those audiences. As the contributions collected here suggest at virtually every turn, scholars and teachers need to revisit the intellectual and pedagogical advantages and disadvantages of considering an ‘Irish Romanticism’ (or even an ‘Irish literature’) as a separate entity (as, for example, within a programme in ‘Irish Studies’) in literary and cultural studies. Indeed, the issue of writing in Irish is a particularly thorny one when it comes to these concerns, for it uncomfortably foregrounds the troublesome question of just what we understand by an Irish nation and an Irish nationhood, both in relation to and as distinct from the larger nineteenth-century political entity that ‘United Kingdom’ presumes to name. While there are important reasons for embracing this more narrowly national perspective, doing so also runs a danger that is not unlike that which comes with the all-subsuming ‘British’ approach. That is, it is all too easy to lose the other part of the equation, much as attempts over the past several decades to demolish the traditional literary ‘canon’ by replacing it with new, alternative ones have served so often merely to replicate (even with the best intentions) the errors and liabilities of the old and faulty paradigm rather than offering anything genuinely new. Inevitably, the most productive approach to the cultural production of Ireland and Romanticism would seem to be one that can reconcile – even if only tentatively and impermanently – the detailed and localizing specificity of an Irish Studies approach with the broader cultural scope of a ‘British’ or ‘European’ perspective, so that what is shared and what differs may be explored in the fullest and most revealing manner on both sides of the equation. And then there is the matter of the primary (contemporary) documents themselves, to which revisionist scholarship may apply a more detailed and systematic study, both on their own and – inevitably – within their complicated cultural contexts. Part of the work is necessarily archival, and even archaeological. Texts of all sorts – not just the



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literary or paraliterary – must be recovered and reassessed, as must the circumstances of their production, dissemination, and consumption. Who wrote what, and where, and why, and for what actual and envisioned audiences? The great numerical majority of Romantic-era ‘Irish’ were Roman Catholic, for example, and they made up a predominantly rural population, while much of what we usually regard as the period’s primary literature was produced by and for largely urban and/or gentry audiences on the opposite side of the sectarian divide. Who controlled the Irish presses, which after 1800 were less heavily involved in the previously lucrative trade in cheap literary reprints and were consequently driven more by emerging post-Union market factors? And what were the economic implications for this literary market? Who read – or, perhaps more importantly, who purchased – publications, and in what form? Many transplanted Anglo-Irish (and some Irish), for example, amassed libraries in their estates but opted to fill them with cheap pre-1800 Irish reprints rather than the more expensive British original editions,12 which suggests the extent to which such libraries (and the cultural suggestions they seem to make) were more for show than for ‘know’. If so, and if there were other literary consumers, especially among the less well-educated Catholic minority, these are things we need to know. Even such a short list of questions reveals the important implications that book history has for larger reconsiderations of the ideological undercurrents of Romantic period literature. There is increasing need for a study of the demographics and dynamics of the Irish publishing industry and the contemporary reading communities similar to William St Clair’s 2004 The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period,13 and for more detailed work on the Irish periodical press and regional publishing and consumption. In terms of the literary record, one extraordinary resource is the monumental descriptive annotated bibliography of Irish fiction compiled by Rolf and Magda Loeber, which includes the Romantic period in its coverage.14 Other necessary bibliographical projects will address writings on religion, law, government, medicine, economics (and, indeed, the visual arts and literature generally). Meanwhile, we need to know more about educational institutions and their practices, and about literacy in Romantic-era Ireland generally. We need to know, too, more about the dissemination of texts among the variously constituted Irish reading publics, and about the circulation records of libraries, including both institutional and commercial circulating ones. Primary information like this will help scholars more accurately to map Irish and Anglo-Irish cultural production during a period when the national culture was also significantly impacted by Ireland’s political





and economic relationships with the contending parties in the postrevolutionary and Napoleonic wars, as well as in the altered Europe that followed the Congress of Vienna. This documentary history can – and should – be inflected in other ways as well. The issue of Union dominated the discourse of the 1790s and the decade that followed its passage in 1801 (and beyond), but so did the linked subject of Catholic emancipation, which gained massive popular support in the 1820s with O’Connellite politics, and which culminated in the passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1829.15 While literary scholars have examined some of this discourse in the process of tracing Irish literary history of the period, their focus has been predictably narrow, confined typically to texts that are distinctly ‘literary’ in nature. Social and cultural historians, on the other hand, tend to approach these subjects through extra-literary documents and other cultural artifacts, while the visual arts (and the vastly suggestive body of contemporary caricature prints16) are largely left out of the equation. This is of course a natural consequence of the parochialization (or even the balkanization) of much of academic scholarship as it developed during the twentieth century, when a narrow disciplinary focus and methodology largely dictated that anything not lying directly within a discipline’s conventional purview was therefore to be excluded from consideration. Recent initiatives in interdisciplinary scholarship, methodology, and theory have begun to erase some of these traditional boundaries and barriers, and a more culturally informed variety of interdisciplinary scholarship holds great potential for the rethinking of Ireland’s relationship to Romanticism. When it comes to the debate over Union, to take but a single example, we have a great deal still to learn from the pamphlet literature on the issue and that writing’s complex interaction with other, more ‘legitimate’ or mainstream forms of public discourse. Archives as widely diverse as the National Library of Ireland and the Special Collections Department at the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library house collections of pamphlets whose texts constitute a ‘discourse history’ that sheds revealing light on the literature, history, religion, and culture of the period. Some authors temporized, arguing that in the wake of the Rising of 1798 ‘the present state of Ireland is ill calculated for the impartial discussion of a subject of such national importance’.17 Others adopted a condescending, patronizing attitude, lecturing the Irish with supposedly friendly advice about why union served Ireland’s best interests.18 Still others inveighed against the widely circulated notion that post-union Scotland provided an instructive analogy, arguing to



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the contrary that ‘from its situation, natural and political, at the time of the Union, and from its history since, … no argument whatsoever arises from it, applicable to Ireland, at least none favourable to Union’.19 Like the pamphlet war that erupted in England during the early 1790s in the wake of the French Revolution and the Paine–Burke controversy, these Irish pamphlets, together with additional texts from the fiercely partisan periodical press, document a significant cultural exchange while also laying out much of the language – figurative and otherwise – that informed Irish and Anglo-Irish writing whose ostensible subjects may not always have been the Union debate itself.20 For the purposes of both scholarship and teaching, documents of this sort furnish a rich site of interdisciplinary ‘archaeological’ excavation that holds great potential for the reassessment of Ireland and Romanticism, not the least of which has do with the dynamics of nationalism and cultural identity as modern theoretical models like post-colonialism have come to consider them. Recovery projects focused upon Irish literature, history, economics, science, and religion during the Romantic era hold real promise for this new scholarship, then, particularly in terms of making available large bodies of insufficiently known or understood material. When a few years ago I undertook a large project to recover the lives and works of Irish and Irish-affiliated women poets of the Romantic period, for example, I began my work with the then-routine understanding that there were perhaps a dozen or so such poets. In fact, there were more than fifty, and collecting and editing the majority of their works and making them accessible electronically21 proved immediately revealing (and exciting) for me, but – more importantly – it also opened up a substantial body of previously neglected poetry from which scholars and teachers can develop research projects that will without question contribute to the ongoing rewriting of Irish literary history. I mention this example because it represents a model for other projects that can – and should – be undertaken on other aspects of Irish writing, Irish discourse, Irish history, and Irish culture as part the broad reassessment that is the subject of this entire volume.22 The emergence of electronic media has in many respects revolutionized scholarship and teaching by making available in electronic form resources that have long been inaccessible for scholars because of their rarity, their geographic dispersal, and their deteriorating physical condition. While nothing really substitutes for studying ‘the real thing’, of course, and for doing so in situ, electronic versions will nevertheless permit an exponential expansion of scholarly and pedagogical possibilities.





At the same time, there remains the endless fascination of the individual artifact, as, for instance, a chapbook poem published in 1810 and called The Tears of Erin, a poem, founded upon facts,23 with which I shall conclude my remarks. Its author, who assumes the pseudonym of ‘Julius Publicola’, may be the Irish journalist Walter Cox (1770–1837), who is listed on the title page as the poem’s printer.24 The Tears of Erin links Ireland’s degraded status as an occupied land to the bloody Battle of Carlow, where some six hundred citizens and United Irishmen sympathizers were slaughtered by vengeful Orangemen following their unsuccessful attack on the town of that name during the Rebellion.25 While the verse itself is relatively standard fare in its sensational and sentimentalized description of human suffering, the supplementary notes, printed at the bottom of the pages rather than at the end, perform a remarkable if not altogether uncommon rhetorical and ideological function. The tale purports to describe the flight from Carlow, through the countryside, of an elderly shepherd, his aged wife, their recently widowed daughter and her infant son. The daughter’s husband has fallen at the hands of the Orangemen; the poem dwells in brief but gory detail on his death by torture (he is lashed to death). At the poem’s end the exhausted young woman, who can go no further despite the approach of the fearsome ‘bands of prowling Orangemen’ (p. 36) and now accepts that she is ‘doomed to certain death’, sinks down and attempts to suckle her infant but, her milk exhausted, ‘fills his guiltless mouth with streaming blood’ (original emphases), looks up to heaven and ‘on her babe expires’ (p. 37). The author makes the entire family, and the young daughter in particular (who is described in terms often associated at the time with the iconic female figure of Hibernia), signifiers of the overall national situation. As with many contemporary poetic attacks upon the prevailing political situation (e.g. Thomas Moore’s Corruption and Intolerance [1808]), the poem is accompanied by notes that on many occasions visually overwhelm the verses on the page (particularly pp. 11–14, 21–4, and 32–5). Printed in a small font, these notes burst with a fiercely resentful nationalistic rhetoric (the Union is described as ‘begun in bloodshed and cemented by corruption’ [p. 24]) that expands into a wider attack upon the present constitutional condition of the United Kingdom as a whole and the consequent urgent need for some form of pan-British reform. The sentimental family drama of the verse tale (speeches by the father and daughter comprise the larger part of the text) is clearly a vehicle conceived to provide the occasion for the political sentiment that is the poem’s real substance. Early on, the notes offer a detailed



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We are said to be unequally represented. This is one of those contradictory phrases that form the political jargon of half-enlightened periods. Unequal liberty is a contradiction in terms. It ought not to be called freedom, but the power of some and the slavery of others – the oppression of one portion of individuals by the instrumentality of another. … We find [the proofs of our unjust oppression] in that black and bloody roll of persecuting statutes that are still suffered to disgrace our code, at a time, when America and France, by wresting the sceptre from the rigid gripe of superstition, and dragging prejudice in triumph, have destroyed that arsenal to which despotism has so frequently resorted for its thunder and its chains. We find them in the ignominious exclusion of great bodies of our fellow citizens from political trusts, by tests, which, by rewarding falsehood, and encouraging apostacy from truth, profane the rights of the religion they pretend to guard and usurp the dominion of the God the profess to revere. (pp. 33–4) At this point the poem proper takes up the task of providing the reader with the gory spectacle of the blood-bearing breast, while the note develops the political argument for redrawing the constitutional relationship between Britain and Ireland, employing a transatlantic republican perspective to bolster its moral force. Given the tone and tenor of the poem’s notes, it is worth drawing attention to the unidentified author’s shrewd strategy for distancing himself from them. In a note addressed ‘To the Public’ that follows the poem’s last page, the author suggests – with a remarkable set of carefully chosen and deeply ironic words – that he plans to furnish a continuation of the tale, ‘in which, by deepening the incidents and heightening the catastrophe, he flatters himself he shall be able to render the story more generally entertaining’ (p. 38). He then continues: ‘With respect to the Notes, which accompany the Poem, he would wish the Public to observe that the note in page 12 ought to be marked as a quotation, and that he makes the same general notice of those other notes, which are most violent in sentiment and diction’ (p. 38). In other words, he both lays claim (as publishing author) to the words and insulates himself from them (by retrospectively bracketing them with [invisible] quotation



account of Protestant atrocities like the scourging of children and the salting of rebels’ wounds, but by the poem’s mid-point the enumerated atrocities are civil, religious, and institutional in nature, presented as immoral and insupportable attacks on the body politic of Ireland:


marks). Such strategies are of course the stuff of radical writing, today no less than two centuries ago. Nevertheless, their presence in The Tears of Erin suggests why scholars need to revisit works like these (and there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of them) to reconsider the complex interplay in them of literary, political, social, economic, religious, and rhetorical elements. Doing so will constitute yet another phase in the larger reassessment of Ireland and Romanticism, the latter considered not just as an artistic and aesthetic ‘movement’ but as a much more broad-ranging cultural phenomenon. The mingling of tropes of sentimental suffering with a political language of reform makes The Tears of Erin, and the countless other similar textual artifacts from the period, a fascinating resource for new interpretative strategies in approaching Romantic-period writing. What is the nature of ‘Irish Romanticism’, then, to use the term I have tried largely to resist throughout this discussion, and in what ways does it both participate in and diverge from what we tend to think of as the mainstream of both British and European Romanticism? What is most unique, most definitively and undeniably Irish, about that cultural product may, paradoxically, turn out upon careful reconsideration also to be what is most inherently ‘Romantic’ about it. Romanticism is, after all, both a product of and a producer of diversity in all areas of human experience, and as such it depends for its very life on the productive – and often violent – interaction of its constituent parts. If the chapters in this collection have begun to cast new, and perhaps complicating, light on how and why this is so, they will have taken some important first steps and begun to break some productive new pathways.

Notes 1. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 210. 2. Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800–1830’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, p. 408. 3. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 1. 4. Patrick O’Farrell, Ireland’s English Question: Anglo-Irish Relations, 1534–1970 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1971), p. 17. 5. William Parnell, Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland (1805), quoted in Claire Connolly, ‘Ugly Criticism: Union and Division in Irish Literature’, Field Day Review, 4 (2008), p. 119. 6. Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 15.



218

7. Gearóid Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish, 1800–1890: From the Act of Union to the Gaelic League’, The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, I, p. 544; Denvir quotes from Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 28. 8. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 308. 9. The early nineteenth century saw a massive increase in the number of Irishlanguage publications by Protestant evangelical societies. The confessional nature of Irish-language publishing in the Romantic period is still awaiting full study. 10. More work needs to be done on the extent to which Brooke’s translations were retranslated into Irish, thus proving the fluidity of exchange between different linguistic communities in the period. I am grateful to Prof. Margaret Kelleher for this suggestion. 11. Denvir, ‘Literature in Irish, 1800–1890’, p. 545. 12. See Richard Cargill Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers 1740–1800 (London: Mansell, 1986). 13. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 14. Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006). Other important contributions include Mary Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Niall Ó Ciosàin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1997); and the ongoing Oxford History of the Irish Book, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006–). 15. For an example of recent scholarship that deals directly with this, see Emer Nolan’s Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007). 16. These include individual broadside prints and collections like the grandiosely titled Real Life in Ireland; or, The Day and Night Scenes, Rovings, Rambles, and Sprees, Bulls, Blunders, Bodderation and Blarney, of Brian Boru, Esq. and his elegant friend Sir Shawn O’Dogerty. Exhibiting a Real Picture of Characters, Manners, &c. in High and Low Life, in Dublin and Various Parts of Ireland, ‘By a Real Paddy’ (London, 1821). Published – significantly – in London, the book is very much an Irish variant on Pierce Egan; the chapters contain satirical poems and a loose narrative of the main characters’ exploits, all supplemented by engravings, exuberantly coloured in many editions. 17. [ J. H. Cottingham] Some Observations on the Proposed Union between Great Britain and Ireland, and the Inexpediency of Agitating the Measure at this Time, By J. H. C., Esq. Barrister at Law (Dublin: W. M’Kenzie, 1798), p. 5. 18. This pro-Union propaganda is evident in the titles of many pamphlets: for example, A Letter to the People of Ireland, Which They Can All Understand, and Ought to Read, ‘By a Real Friend’ (Dublin: J Milliken, 1799). 19. Richard Jebb, A Reply to a Pamphlet, entitled, Arguments For and Against Union, 2nd edn (Dublin: W Jones, 1798), p. 29. 20. See W. J. McCormack, The Pamphlet Debate on the Union between Great Britain and Ireland, 1797–1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995). 21. See Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2008).





22. Analogous projects, such as the Thomas Moore hypermedia archive, demonstrate the extent to which electronic resources are bursting the boundaries of the canon. 23. The Tears of Erin, a Poem, Founded upon Facts, ‘By Julius Publicola’ (Dublin: W Cox, 1810). The title later appears as the title of a song ‘written on the melancholy death of Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte of Wales, [words] by the Revd. Mr. Horner’ (Dublin, [1818]). In 1832 Michael Sellors published The Irish Political Review; or, the Tears of Erin, with the Unchristian Tithe System Exposed (Dublin: n.p., 1832). In 1880 George Cooper published a song called The Tears of Erin, with music by G. Morosini, in New York. Interestingly, in 1810 there also appeared, in the London Times, a series of six ‘letters’, which were subsequently printed by J. Morton and published as Six letters of Publicola, on the Liberty of the Subject, and the Privileges of the House of Commons. Their author, identified only as ‘Publicola’ and tentatively identified by Samuel Halkett and J. Laing as Robert Harding Evans (1778–1857), challenges the powers of the House of Commons, especially the power to dispense with trial by jury; see A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain (Edinburgh: W Patterson, 1885). 24. In the National Library of Ireland’s catalogue, both copies of the pamphlet (which are not identical) are listed as ‘probably by Cox’. Cox, the son of a Westmeath blacksmith and trained as a gunsmith, founded in 1797, anonymously, a newspaper called The Union Star, seemingly supportive of the United Irishmen but in reality very slippery in its alliances, as friends and enemies alike discovered. After leaving Ireland for America in 1804 and then returning, he founded the remarkably named Irish Magazine and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography, which netted him repeated prosecutions for its anti-Union and pro-United Irishmen output. Cox carried on publishing the journal until 1815, when he was effectively bought off by the government with a substantial pension conditional on him leaving Ireland. Returning briefly to America, only to return by a long and circuitous route (involving a brief residence on the continent) to Ireland, he died in poverty in 1837 after being discovered and stripped of his pension in 1835. Cox’s biography is a remarkable instantiation in itself of the transnational nature of Irish literary culture in this period. 25. The town is mentioned in a later and well-known nineteenth-century Irish folk song, ‘Follow me up to Carlow’, that recalls the town’s siege in 1650 during Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland.



220

A Melologue upon National Music 46, 127 A Philosophical View of Reform 115–16 A Ramble Through Swisserland 95–105 nature of work 95–6 portrayal of Berne 98–9 as Romantic text 97 Abrams, M. H. 127 absenteeism 177–8 Act of Union 5, 6, 27, 209 Adorno, Theodor 17 Aeolian harp 135–6 aesthetics 116 aggregate, study of 192, 193, 195, 196 alienation 209 Alps 94, 102 Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic 48 anti-Catholicism, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal 35–6 Archer, Charles Palmer 166, 167 Archer, John 167 archipelagic paradigms 59–60, 71 archive, recovery and reassessment 212–13 archives, as historical sources 214 Arnold, Matthew 191 artistic genius, and political freedom 115 Augustan elegy 67 authenticity 130 authorship, legal definitions 126 autobiographers, sense of self 15, 17 Balfour, Mary 148–53 ‘Ballad Stanzas’ 84, 85–6, 87–9 bard female 142 symbolic importance of 141 Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire 141

Barrell, John 102 Barrett, Eaton Stannard 188–201 Barrington, Sir Jonah 5 Bartlett, Tom 99–100 Bedford Tower 29, 31 Behrendt, Stephen 8–9, 207–18 Belanger, Jacqueline 111, 193 Belfast, book trade 164 Bellew, Christopher Dillon 166 Benson, Charles 8, 163–70 Bentley, D. M. R. 84, 86, 87 Bentman, Raymond 59–60 Berne 98 bibliographies 195, 213 biographical writing 15 Black, Adam 167 Black, John 54 book trade 163–70 acquiring stock 167–8 advertising 168–9 booksellers’ stocks 169 Customs 165–6, 167 financial stress 166–7 joint publishing 165 main locations 164 sales 165 scope of production 164 Boyd, Henry 64 Braun, Rudolf 102 breath, as part of performance 136–8 British constitution 101–2 British-Irish relations 211 British Romanticism 6, 48–9, 89 anglocentrism 208–9 Brooke, Charlotte 142–8, 157, 210 conciliation 148 focus and purpose of work 143–4 and Gaelic culture 143 language 147–8 Bull, John 102 Bunting, Edward 130, 131 Burgess, Miranda 175

221



Index

Index

burlesque 194–5 Burns, Robert 59–72 impact on Ulster 60–3 influence on Carleton 67–9 influence on Dermody 63–4, 65–6, 71 influence on Moore 63, 69–71, 90 influence on Orr 66–7 Owenson’s view of 114 position in Romanticism 59–60 use of vernacular 61 Byron, Lord George 67 on Moore’s originality 126–7 Owenson’s view of 114 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 51–7 Callan dispensary controversy 14 Callan Protestants 14 Cambridge History of Irish Literature 2 Campbell, Richard 164 Campbell Ross, Ian 173, 174 Canada Moore’s reputation 87–8 Thomas Moore in 83–6 cannibalism 37 canon broadening 1, 60, 71 Irish 192 and literary history 191–2 use of term 189 see also Romantic canon canonization 190–1, 193 Carleton, William 67–9 Casanova, Pascale 209 categories, use of 8 Catholic-Protestant rivalry 14 Catholicism 180, 181, 198 British hostility to 51, 53–4 Chaigneau, William 174 Chandler, James 2 chauvinism 101 Chorley, John Rutter 53 Cín Lae Amhlaoibh context, geographical and social 14 derivation 14 evaluation 22–3 language 16 as private and public 17

travel and intellectual interests 15 see also Ó Súilleabháin, Amhlaoibh civic humanism 103 civil liberties 101 Clermont 175 ‘Cluthan and Malvina,’ 153–7 Cluthan and Malvina; an Ancient Legend, with Other Poems 153–7 Colhoun, David 61–2 colonialism 109 cultural superiority 55 comparative approach, of writers and intellectuals 4–5 confessional diary 15 Connecticut wits 82 Connolly, Claire 116, 208 conservatism 196 constitution, British 101–2 Contrast 176 Cooper Walker, Joseph 142, 148 copyright 163 Copyright Act 165 Cork, book trade 164 cosmopolitanism 4–5 Cox, Walter (Watty) 38–9, 216, 220 n. 24 Crawford, Robert 64 Croly, George 50 ‘Cronan’ 114 cultural dissonance 211 cultural independence 55 cultural nationalism 3, 71, 172–3, 208 culture, subaltern 18–21 Curran, John Philpot 32, 37, 39 attack on O’Brien 30–1 Curran, Stewart 208 Customs 165–6, 167 Davin, Nicholas Flood 84 Davis, Leith 4, 8, 141–58 Davis, Thomas 2–3, 5 Deane, Seamus 15, 16, 17, 209 DeLucia, JoEllen 142 Denvir, Gearóid 209–10 Dermody, Thomas 63–4, 65–6, 71 Descriptive Sketches 96 dialect, and national identity 70



222

diary tradition 15 Dickens, Charles 79 dissonance, cultural 211 documentary history 213–14 Donovan, Julie 119 Dornan, Stephen 7, 8, 59–72 Dublin, book trade 164 Dublin Castle 29 Dublin University Magazine 49–50 Duff, David 60 Duffy, Charles Gavan 49, 50 Duncan, Ian 59 Dunne, Tom 2, 109 Early Romanticism 90 Edgeworth, Maria 176, 178, 180–1, 182–4 Egenolf, Susan 7, 109–19 El Purgatorio de San Patricio see The Purgatory of St Patrick electronic media 215 ‘Elegy on the Death of Mr Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Poet’ 66 Elliott, Marianne 97, 98 emancipation 214 Emmet, Robert 209 English Commonwealth theorists 103 English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 1 ‘Epistle VI’ (Moore) 81 ‘Epistle VII’ (Moore) 81–2 Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems 79, 80, 87 European Romanticism 55, 89, 94, 208 export trade 163 ‘Farewell to Killeigh’ 65–6 Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio 174 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal 29 Jemmy O’Brien 33–7 Federalists 82–3 feeling 132 Ferguson, Frank 60 Ferris, Ina 116, 117, 174–5, 209 Field Day anthologies 2 Figgis, William 167

Finney, Patrick 30–1 Flanagan, Thomas 1 Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale 5, 109, 116–17, 118 foreign travel 7 Four Years of Irish History, 1845–1849, A Sequel to “Young Ireland” 50 France in 1829–30, 111–12 France, Swiss uprising against 98 ‘fratriotism’ 97, 100–2, 119 French Revolution 94, 99–100 Gaelic 16 knowledge of 55 loss of 209 relationship to English 147–8 as subaltern language 18–19 gallows (Dublin) 36 Galt, John 84 Gamer, Michael 174 García Gómez, Ángel María 53 gender, Poems of Ossian 142 German national literature 52 German Romantics 48–9 Gibbons, Luke 136 Godwin, William 26–7, 35, 37 Goodridge, John 62 Gorak, Jan 190 Gothic demarcations 176 and national tales 172–84 Gothic novels, use of term 174–5 Graisberry, Daniel Jnr 164 Graisberry, Daniel Snr 163–4 Grant, Anne 158 Guerras civiles en Granada 47 Guest, Harriet 141 Guillory, John 191 hanging processions 36 Harman, Maurice 68 harmony 133 harp, imagery of 136 harpist, symbolism 130–1 Harrington, James 103 Hazlitt, William 137 hegemonic Catholic identity 18–19 Helvetic Republic 98 Henry, Brian 36



Index 223

Index

Herder, Johann Gottfried von 128–9, 132, 133, 138 Hewitt, John 60 highland culture, mourning 143 ‘historian’s dilemma’ 192 history, documentary 213–14 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 127 Holmes, Andrew 60 Hope: A Poetical Essay with Various Other Poems 148 Houses of Parliament, occupation 6 hybrid language 60, 64–5 hybridity 175 ‘hyper-hybridity’ 117–18 idealization 208 identity, Catholic 182 identity, national, and poetry 49–50 independence, parliamentary 143 informers 27 Ingelbien, Raphael 110 innovation and political resistance 114–15 interdisciplinary approaches 214 Ireland as occupied 211 piety 51 Irish-British relations 211 Irish canon 192 Irish Gothic 174–5 Irish language see Gaelic Irish literature, growth of interest 1–4 Irish Melodies 4, 22, 70, 87, 88–9, 125–38, 208 breath 136–8 national identity 128–9 origins of 127, 134–5 Irish Romanticism locating 212 nature of work 218 Irish Studies, development of discipline 2, 3 Irishness, loss of 209 Jefferson, Thomas 80–2 Jeffrey, Francis 87 Johnstone, Charles 174

Jones, Catherine 60 Jones, Robert 95 ‘Kathleen O’Neil’ 148–53 Keating, Patrick 17 Keats, John 60 Kelly, Eliza 197–9 Kelly, Gary 1 Kelly, Ronan 88, 89 Kiberd, Declan 208 Kidd, Adam 84 Kilfeather, Siobhan 28, 174 Kilkenny 14 Killeen, Jarlath 179, 183 Killeigh poems 64, 71 Kilmainham Treaty 95 Koselleck, Reinhart 188 Lamb, Charles, letter to Coleridge 90 language derivation 132–3 Gaelic and English 147–8 hybrid 60, 64–5 loss of Gaelic 209 simplicity of 90 vernacular 61, 63, 66 law of sympathy 188 Lay of the Irish Harp 208 Le Devin du Village 133 Leadbeater, Mary 157–8 Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature 52–3 legitimacy 46 liberty 46 libraries 169–70, 213 Life’s a Dream: The Great Theatre of the World 53 literacy rates 163 literary history 190–1 approaches to 192–3 and canon 191–2 and literary merit 196 literary production 8 Lockhart, J. G. 48 Loeber, Magda 173, 195, 213 Loeber, Rolf 173, 195, 213 Longman 168 Lyrical Ballads 86, 91



224

MacCarthy, Anne 7–8, 45–55 MacCarthy, Denis Florence 46, 50, 51, 52–4, 55 MacNally, Leonard 32 MacNevin, William 8 ‘fratriotism’ 100–2 influence 97 political analogies 99 politics 102–3 religious tolerance 104 republicanism 99, 102, 103 on social organization 102 State Trials 104 in Switzerland 94–105 in United Irishmen 95 Macpherson, James 8, 22, 91, 136, 141, 143 scholarly reactions 142 Madden, Richard Robert 28, 29 Malvina 8 as role model 142 Mangan, James Clarence 45, 46, 49–50, 55 translations 51 marriage, cross-cultural 172 Marshall, James 26 Maturin, Charles 4, 47, 173, 174–5 McCormack, W. J. 174 McGann, Jerome 3 McHenry, James 61 melancholy 22 Melmoth the Wanderer 47 melody 133 melomania 127 Merry, Anthony 81 Milliken, Richard 167 mock funerals 36 ‘Modern Literature’ 114 modernization 13–14, 18 Moir, George 48–9, 51 Montague, John 67–8 moon, Barrett’s metaphor 188 Moore, Jane 7, 8, 77–91 Moore, Thomas 4, 8, 22, 63, 208 anti-Jeffersonian writings 80–1 approach to Melodies 132 attitudes to musical performance 133–4 Burns’ influence 69–71, 90

in Canada 79–83 in Canadian literature 84 Canadian poetry 87–90 career and scope of work 77 duel with Jeffrey 87 emphasis on voice 131 and Federalists 82–3 Irish Melodies 125–38 on music 127–8 music as inspiration 134 musical sources 129–30 at Niagara Falls 84–5 in Norfolk, Virginia 79 in North America 77–91 originality 125–7, 128, 130 in Philadelphia 82 reputation as Romantic poet 125 return to Ireland 86–7 satire 77–8 in United States 79–83 US satire 79–82 view of Spain 46 in Washington, DC 79–82 Moretti, Franco 191 Morgan, Lady Sydney see Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) Morin, Christina 4, 8, 172–84 Muir, Edwin 63 Murphy, Sharon 176 Murray, John 168, 169 music 22 adaptation 130 and national identity 128–9 Mysteries of Corpus Christi 53 Napoleon 45 National Airs 128–9 national cultures, reinvigoration 5 national identity 60, 128–9 and dialect 70 national tales 109, 150, 172–3 as critical focus 196–7 demarcations 176 and Gothic 172–84 use of term 173 nationalism 4, 172–3 cultural 3 nationality, and race 211–12



Index 225

Index

Newgate, associations 37–8 newspapers and periodicals, advertising 168–9 North America 8 nostalgia 179–80 Novalis 128 O’Brien, Jemmy 3, 7, 26–40 activities 31 biography 29 British allegiance 29 documentary evidence 28, 29 execution 26–7, 33–6 exhibition of skeleton 39–40 Godwin’s letter 26–7 see also Godwin, William as Gothic villain 28, 30–1 irony of execution and aftermath 37 loss of credibility 31 notoriety 29 payments to 31 prosecution 32–3 representations of 38 responsibility for prisoners 31 stabbing of John Hoey 31–2 symbolic significance 28 United Irishmen 30 O’Byrne, Anstace 39 O’Connellite period 14 ‘Ode to Liberty’ 46 Odes of Anacreon 77 O’Drisceoil, Prionsias 5, 7, 13–23 O’Farrell, Patrick 209 O’Halloran 61 O’Higgins, Francis 29 Ó Madagáin, Breandán 21 originality 125–6, 128, 130, 133 Orlando 6 Orr, James 61, 66 Ossian 70, 90, 136, 141 see also Poems of Ossian; Works of Ossian Ó Súilleabháin, Amhlaoibh 7, 13–23 attitude to music 22 biography 13–14 Callan dispensary controversy 14 cultural position 20 death notice 19

hegemonic Catholic identity 18–19 language 16, 19–20 manuscripts 17 modernizing perspective 18–19, 20 perspective 17–18 publication 17 reasons for keeping diary 15 relations to landscape 21 role in modernization 13–14 scientific interests 21 self-definition 16 traditionalism 20–1 travel 15 use of English 20 see also Cín Lae Amhlaoibh O’Sullivan, Humphrey see Ó Súilleabháin, Amhlaoibh other 15–16 Otway, Cesar 69 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 4, 5, 8, 136, 148, 150, 172–3, 176, 196–7, 208 aesthetics 116 burlesque of 194–5 career and scope of work 110 harpist 114 ‘hyper-hybridity’ 117–18 innovation and political resistance 114–15 Irish Romanticism 114, 116 national tales 109 nationalism 119 political engagement 111 politics of romanticism 109–19 seen as audacious and unfeminine 110–11 use of landscape 116–17 view of Romanticism 112–14 paradigms, archipelagic 59–60, 71 Parnell, Thomas 167–8 Parnell, William 6, 209 ‘Parody of a Celebrated Letter’ 77, 78–9 passion, as origin of music 138 past, threat of return 182–3 pastoral ideology 102



226

Paterson, Adrian 8, 125–38 pathetic fallacy 67 Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, Written in Connaught 116, 208 patriotism 71 Peninsular War 45 Percy, Thomas 47 Pérez de Hita, Ginés 47 periodicals and newspapers 168–9 Perkins, David 191 picaresque fiction 174 Pidal, Menéndez 48 piety, Spain and Ireland 51 Pittock, Murray 60, 64, 97, 100, 111, 119, 141 Plowden, Francis 29 Plunkett, Elizabeth 199–201 Pocock, J. G. A. 59 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect 59–60 Poems of Ossian gender 142 see also Ossian Poems on Various Subjects 158 poetry, and national identity 49–50 political freedom, and artistic genius 115 political resistance, and innovation 114–15 politics of representation 191 Power, James and William 87 Power, William 128 Preston, William 163 primary sources 210, 212–13 Prince Regent 77–8 printing 163–4 prisoners 31 publishing 8, 213 export trade 163 joint 165 types of 17 publishing crisis 5 race, and nationality 211–12 radical novels 196 ‘radical walking’ 95 Rafroidi, Patrick 2, 55 reading 213 during Romantic period 195–6

recovery projects 215 redemption 181, 182 Rees, Owen 167 registers mixed 67 variable 60, 64, 68 relics, of those executed 37 religion 53 religious tolerance 104 Reliques of Irish Poetry 142, 147–8, 210 republicanism, MacNevin’s 99, 102, 103 resistance 149 revolutions, as models 100 Reynolds, George Nugent 182 Rhyming Weavers 60 ‘Rightboy’ protests 143 Roche, Regina Maria 175–6 Rodd, Thomas 47, 50–1 Rodgers, Vincentia 153–7 romanceros 47–51 British Protestant reactions 48 Romantic canon use of term 189–90 see also canon Romanticism defining 111–14 diversity of 207–8 romanticism, politics of 109–19 ‘Romanticists and Classicists’ 114 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 132–4, 137, 138 Ryder, Sean 2 Sadleir, Michael 194 Saglia, Diego 45 Sangster, Charles 84 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 52–3 Schlegel, Friedrich 54, 126 Schroeder, Natalie 176 Scots Musical Museum 70 Scott, Walter 61, 165, 208 Scullabogue 35 Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice 129 self-image, Gaelic 16–17 sentiment 132 sexual impropriety 180–1



Index 227

Index

Sha, Robert C. 116 Shanahan, Jim 8, 188–201 Shelley, Percy 46, 50–1, 115–16 Simpson, Kenneth 63 Sirr, Henry 31–3, 38–9 Skinner, Quentin 94 Skoblow, Jeffrey 63 Small, Stephen 101–2, 103 solidarity, Irish and Spanish 46 ‘Song: The Repentant Exile’ 51 sources, primary 210, 212–13 Spain 7–8 ideological conflicts 46 Irish contact with 45 national self-expression 47–8 as parallel for Ireland 46–7 perceptions of 47 piety 51 representations of 46–7 romanceros 47–51 Spanish history 45 Spanish literature 45–55 cultural nationalism 51 interest in 48 and national identity 49–50 spies 27 St Clair, William 189–90, 195, 213 Stafford, Fiona 60 ‘standard Habbie’ 65 Stevenson, Sir John 134–5 subaltern culture 18–21 ‘Sublime was the Warning’ 46 Sullivan, Henry W. 48 Switzerland 8 Act of Mediation 104 as country in ferment 97–101 insurrection 98 MacNevin in 94–105 MacNevin’s republicanism 102, 103 revolution 98 romanticization 104 uprising against French 98 ‘Tale of Mäon’ 144–7 ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ 68–9 teaching 210–11 Teeling, Charles 27–8 terminology 207

texts dissemination 213 recovery and reassessment 212–13 The Absentee 178, 182–4 Catholicism 180–1 The Ballad Poetry of Ireland 49 ‘The Battle of the Factions’ 68–9 The Book of Irish Ballads 50 ‘The Canadian Boat Song’ 84, 85–6, 87–9 The Children of the Abbey 175–6, 181–2, 183–4 Catholicism 180 story 176–7 themes 177–80 The Exile of Erin 199–201 ‘the Glorvina solution’ 172 The Gypsy Prince 125 The Heroine, or, Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader 188, 193–5 The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850 1 The Matron of Erin. A National Tale 197–9 The Milesian Chief 4, 174–5 The Munster Cottage Boy 176 The Novice of Saint Dominick 118–19 The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale 4, 109 ‘The Ode to Gaul’ 148 The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little 77 The Princess; or, the Béguine 110–11, 119 The Protean Scot 63 The Purgatory of St Patrick 52, 54–5 The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period 213 The Tears of Erin 216–18 ‘The Torch of Liberty’ 46 The Tradition of the Castle 176 ‘The Unjust Claim’ 157–8 The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale 109, 117, 150, 197–9, 208 The Wilderness 61 Thomson, Samuel 61



228

‘Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’ 99 Thuente, Mary Helen 130–1 ‘To the earl of Bristol, late bishop of Derry’ 148 trade 163–70 Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society 17 translations 210 travel 7 Trench, Richard Chenevix 52, 53, 54–5 Trumpener, Katie 59, 114, 116, 141, 172 Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies with English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of Ancient Irish Bards 148 Tynan, Hugh 61–2 Ulster, impact of Burns 60–3 Ulster Presbyterianism 61 Union 214 United Irishmen 36 MacNevin’s membership 95 O’Brien’s reports and evidence 30 use of harp 130–1 United Irishmen rebellion 2 United States, Thomas Moore in 79–83 uprising, 1803 209

Valdés, Mario J. 192 variable register 60, 64, 68 Verhoeven, W. M. 195–6 vernacular Burns’ use of 61 Dermody’s use of 63 Orr’s use of 66–7 vernacular elegy 66–7 Vincent, Patrick 7, 94–105 Wakeman, William 166, 167 ‘weaver poets’ 60 Webb, Tim 3, 7, 26–40 Welch, Robert 91 Whelan, Kevin 16 Whigs 77–8 white terror 45 women poets 141–58 Charlotte Brooke 142–8, 157 Mary Balfour 148–53 Mary Leadbeater 157–8 Vincentia Rodgers 153–7 ‘Woodpecker Song’ 84, 85–6, 87–9 Woolf, Virginia 6 Wordsworth, William 60, 94, 95, 96, 99 Works of Ossian 143 Yeats, W. B. 2, 6, 9 Young Ireland nationalists 2, 46, 49, 52–3, 55



Index 229

Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production

The Media and Cultural Production

Ireland (Modern World Nations)

Ireland (Modern World Nations)

Ireland (Modern World Nations)

Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture

Media and Their Publics

The Field of Cultural Production

Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660-1850

The Field of Cultural Production

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Scenes and Other Situations

Egyptian Models and Scenes

The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic

Romanticism and human sciences

Romanticism and Form

Romanticism and Millenarianism

In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography

Satire and Romanticism

Romanticism and colonial disease

Networked Publics

Romanticism and Pleasure

Romanticism and Form

Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity

Romanticism and animal rights

Romanticism and gothic

Anger, revolution, and romanticism

Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries

Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production

The Media and Cultural Production

Ireland (Modern World Nations)

Ireland (Modern World Nations)

Ireland (Modern World Nations)

Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture

Media and Their Publics

The Field of Cultural Production

Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660-1850

The Field of Cultural Production

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Scenes and Other Situations

Egyptian Models and Scenes

The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic

Romanticism and human sciences

Romanticism and Form

Romanticism and Millenarianism

In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography

Satire and Romanticism

Romanticism and colonial disease

Networked Publics

Romanticism and Pleasure

Romanticism and Form

Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity

Romanticism and animal rights

Romanticism and gothic

Anger, revolution, and romanticism

Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries

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