‘A Secret, Melodramatic Sort of Conspiracy’: The Disreputable Legacies of Fenian Violence in Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract

‘A secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy’: The disreputable legacies of Fenian violence in nineteenth-century London. This essay assesses the cultural and historical legacy of the ‘Dynamite war’, a campaign waged predominantly in London by Irish-American Republicans organised under the banners of Clan-na-Gael and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s Skirmishers from 1881 to 1885. The war was, and, to a degree, remains, a contentious event in Irish history principally because its instigators were willing to use extreme violence against civilian targets, and so demonstrated a disposition to transgress codes of martial honour which had previously been regarded as largely sacrosanct. While the history of the campaign, the degree to which it was innovative in its methods as a precursor for urban terrorism, and the manner in which the war has been represented in popular culture and literature have been the subjects of compelling recent research, the extent to which the campaign has been understood within the context of Irish London and its problematic status within narratives of nineteenth-century Irish political insurgency more broadly have been less fully considered. This paper considers these aspects in greater detail, highlighting the disreputable status of the campaign and, subsequently, the manner in which allusions to it are often deeply embedded in Irish literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes with a discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a work which uses fictionalised autobiography to locate the war in the wider history of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. In so doing Joyce acknowledges the ethical complexity of the campaign in a manner which becomes both an intervention in historiography and an experiment in literary aesthetics.