Bound for Australia: Anne Trotter’s needlework specimen book, 1840

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research Timothy G. McMahon (bio) Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, edited by Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher; pp. xii + 340. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005, €25.00, $39.95. Specialist scholars and general readers alike will profit enormously from this ambitious collection, which covers aspects of the long nineteenth century in Ireland and the United Kingdom. As their subtitle implies, editors Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher have brought together "a" guide to research, rather than "the" definitive work on recent Irish scholarship—were such a creature even possible. They have, therefore, given their eleven contributors enormous leeway to prepare essays that are critical, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Much as J. J. Lee's Irish Historiography, 1970–1979 (1981) became a vital resource for students of Irish history a generation ago, Geary and Kelleher's volume promises to be a touchstone for all with an interest in the many fields of Irish studies, including history, literature in English, sociology and anthropology, historical geography, musicology, art history, and diaspora studies. That list of subjects could be extended, as the broad category of history warrants separate entries on political, social, women's, and religious history. Niall Ó Ciosáin's insightful essay on "Gaelic Culture and Language Shift" may give pause to readers who assume that the death of Gaelic, as a literary and as a spoken language, coincided with the Famine years of the late 1840s. To be sure, Ó Ciosáin emphasizes the rapidity of the shift away from the use of Irish in everyday intercourse, but he points out that few have even attempted to explain adequately the causes, the pace, or the sociocultural impacts of this dramatic transformation. Moreover, he notes that scholars prior to the 1990s largely failed to consider the ongoing production of manuscript literature in Irish because of lingering presumptions about what constituted high culture in Victorian Ireland, especially the primacy of English in the public sphere— commerce, literature, the press. In fact, Irish scribes produced more manuscripts in the nineteenth century than ever before. Similarly, because scholars have seen the Anglicization of Ireland as an essential component of the island's fitful push toward modernity, they long failed to appreciate the contested culture of "Gaelic" Ireland, where, as research in the 1990s has demonstrated, aspects of modernity competed with the pre-modern just as they did throughout the western world. Indeed, "undercutting comfortable assumptions" could be a further subtitle for this collection. Sean Ryder's discussion of literature in English, for instance, makes clear that the methodological insights gleaned from postcolonial and gender studies, along with attention to long-neglected novelists and poets, have allowed scholars to move [End Page 344] beyond the Yeatsian categories that dominated criticism for nearly a century (119). Similarly, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh's overview of political historiography embraces what he calls "the fructifying influence of cultural critics" on old debates about pre-Famine politicization, as well as on parliamentary and agrarian mobilizations later in the century (13). As the previous comments might suggest, one element that unites these disparate contributions is the growing interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into nineteenth-century Ireland. Nowhere would this be more apparent to readers than in the potentially controversial decision of the editors not to include a separate chapter on Famine studies, which practically grew into a cottage industry in the 1990s. This was, I think, the correct choice here because it allows contributors—such as Gary Owens in his chapter on social history, Maria Luddy in her overview of women's history, Marilyn Cohen and Joan Vincent in their summary of key works in anthropology and sociology, and Matthew Stout in his account of historical geography—to discuss the variety of approaches to this watershed event from perspectives that inform and challenge one another. Thus, one finds Owens lauding the collaborative Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decades (1999) as "the first comprehensive single-volume social history of the event" and Stout denouncing the same project as filled with "missed opportunities" to chart meaningfully the impact of the calamity (31, 87). It should not be surprising, of...

Reviewed by: Literacy, Language and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O'Cinneide Karen Steele (bio) Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O'Cinneide, eds., Literacy, Language and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liver-pool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), pp. xiii + 213, $92/£80 cloth. For countries that were formerly part of the British Empire, the cultural politics of language remain a persistent topic of debate, especially in contemporary English-language writing. Brian Friel notes in his dramatic masterpiece Translations (1980), which could serve as a companion to this valuable scholarly collection, that language and literacy do not merely describe the world but in fact help to create it, establishing both a set of possibilities and limits. Just as Friel's play complicates our sense of Irish literacy practices in the decades before the Irish famine, this collection up-ends [End Page 172] many assumptions about nineteenth-century Ireland as it grappled with literacies in both English and Irish during a century that witnessed tremendous change. Importantly, the authors examine languages and literacy practices within global frameworks wider than empire, such as European politics and classical and Continental language learning. Published under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Literacy, Language and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland is a cause for celebration and a strong indicator of the maturation of the field. The authors examine a diverse array of reading and writing practices, exploring "discourses surrounding literacy" including "new literacies" engendered via new technologies, print culture, orality, visuals, and trends such as palmistry (3). Organized sensibly into sections on literacy and bilingualism, periodicals and their readers, translation and transnational literacies, and visual literacies, this collection showcases some of the best theoretical and methodological approaches to Irish studies today. The lead chapter by print historian Niall Ó Ciosáin complicates the once dominant narrative of Irish language loss over the course of the nineteenth century. Ó Ciosáin examines Irish census data, which provides far more nuanced analysis of literacy and its distribution than British census data, demonstrating that literacy in English in fact stimulated rather than suppressed Irish literacy and ushered in an era of considerable bilingualism. Máire Nic an Bhaird and Liam Mac Mathúna's chapter on the linguistic development of Douglas Hyde, founding president of the Gaelic League and the first professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin, reveals additional dimensions of his multilingualism. The authors analyze Hyde's teenage diary, where he records his growing mastery of Irish using anglicized transcriptions and diacritical marks from French, to uncover how his coming-of-age narrative conveys important insight into his experiments in learning and writing Irish. For periodicals scholars, this volume offers a rich array of new work that examines both well-known and understudied publications that delineated and facilitated national and religious identity. James Quinn's careful study of the Nation, founded by radical Young Irelanders in 1842, highlights the transformative power of a nationalist newspaper to enact cultural and social changes for the populace. Quinn traces the paper's nationalist educational crusade (which included encouraging Irish readers to gain literacy in English) and notes how this early effort to promote nationalist history influenced nation-wide educational programming—from a marked growth in nationalist reading rooms to the launch of an influential book series "Library of Ireland," which sold inexpensive books of nationalist history, fiction, and poetry. Whereas Quinn sheds new light on a well-known paper, Elizabeth Tilley expertly illuminates the under-examined Dublin [End Page 173] Penny Journal, which reshaped antiquarian history along nationalist lines in the 1830s. Tilley's chapter reminds scholars of the surprising riches in miscellany publications like the penny magazine, especially when edited by a prominent member of the Royal Irish Academy like George Petri. Petri was an artist and activist who systematically worked to translate the ancient chronicles of Ireland to a general audience. Nicola Morris explores the Irish Methodist press, which charts the theological and political shifts in Irish Methodism (distinct from that being promoted in England) during the nineteenth century. Chapters in the section on translation and transnationalism explore how readers...

Ireland on a Plate: Curating the 2011 State Banquet for Queen Elizabeth II

Reviewed by: Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Georgina Laragy, Olwen Purdue and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright Richard Dennis (bio) Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Georgina Laragy, Olwen Purdue, and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright; pp. ix + 212. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, £85.00, $130.00. There have been notable works of Irish urban history in recent years, not least the impressive individual components of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, but there is still scope for more theoretically informed studies, following in the wake of the so-called spatial turn. In Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, composed of contributions written mostly by early-career scholars based in Irish history departments, the editors emphasize that they are less interested in people and activities that happened in urban spaces than [End Page 680] in “the spaces themselves,” their production and utilization, and how they shape activities and behavior (4). Latching onto another recent methodological turn, they insist on the materiality of urban space in addressing the tricky issue of what differentiates space from place: space is material, they argue, whereas place is in the mind, associated with the realms of symbolism and a sense of place. The essays range chronologically from the 1780s to 1914 and occasionally beyond, in a long nineteenth century in which high Victorianism is surprisingly elusive. There are no department stores, theaters, railway stations, or hotels among these spaces, but instead a bevy of disciplinary institutions. Most contributors pay due attention to the urban-ness of their spaces, but there is less about their Irishness. One exception is Matthew Potter’s essay about social housing in pre-World War I Ireland; he notes that nationalists favored municipal housing whereas unionists did not, resulting in few council houses in Ulster but relatively large numbers elsewhere. Notwithstanding the central government’s oft-cited policy of “killing Home Rule with kindness,” rents were unaffordable for most of the laboring poor (47). Social housing was occupied by an aspirant class whose members espoused values of domesticity and pride in their homes. In some respects, Potter’s chapter is out of step with other contributions. His “spaces” are different Irish municipalities. We learn that Belfast provided the least social housing relative to population, and Kingstown and Blackrock (among the wealthiest municipalities by ratable value) the most council-owned dwellings. But we do not get much sense of the materiality either of the dwellings or of the different towns in which they were located. Kingstown also features in Laura Johnstone’s essay, which traces the transformation of a fishing village on the periphery of Dublin, first to seaside resort and then to fashionable suburb. This is a classic lords-and-landlords study, reminiscent of work on English cities by Donald Olsen, David Cannadine, David Reeder, and others. It provides a useful addition to the literature on estate planning and suburban expansion, but could do more to question whether the development process worked any differently because of the absenteeism of the ground landlords or the particular Irish setting. Johnstone includes copies of estate maps plotting developments such as the Royal Paragon, a Bath-style crescent too grand ever to get beyond the drawing board, but also a reminder that, even if a locality appears on the map, it may never have existed outside the planner’s imagination. Mary Jane Boland’s essay, “Images of Ireland’s Urban World,” also deals with an imagined world, as local artists viewed their towns through the eyes of British and continental artists, mindful of art by painters such as William Hogarth or Aelbert Cuyp that their Irish gentry patrons aspired to own. But where Hogarth offered moral lessons warning against the evils of urbanization, Nathaniel Grogan’s and William Turner de Lond’s paintings of Cork and Ennis were uncomplicated paeans to progress and civic harmony, in which the diversity of urban types was picturesque but unthreatening. They depicted an idealization of material urban spaces rather than actuality. Like Boland, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright starts in the 1780s, invoking Peter Borsay’s ideas about an “urban renaissance” that spanned the 1660s to 1770s (qtd. in Laragy, Purdue, and Wright 62). The implication is that Irish urban...

Racialized and class specific as well as gendered heterosexuality is compulsory for young women. Substantial academic literature addressed the incidence of premarital adolescent heterosexual intercourse paying particular attention to young working-class women and (especially in the US) to young women of color. During the 1980s, journals and academic texts in the US debated the so-called black underclass disregarding the effects of Reaganomics: increasing poverty, homelessness, ill health, and unemployment, which affected young African-American women. From a traditional (hetero)patriarchal standpoint, any teenage pregnancy is a problem. Hence pregnancy avoidance and planned parenthood focus on young working-class women and young women of color presumed to constitute the problem of the (hetero)sexually active teenager. The ideology of fetal rights as used in anti-abortion and pro-life arguments represents the life of a pregnant woman as in direct opposition to that of her fetus. The ideology of adolescence constructs all young people as inherently prone to irresponsibility, especially if they are female, working-class, and black. In the Third World, young women considered as irresponsible mothers more likely face enforced sterilization than access to abortion in the guise of genetic counseling for disabilities or without explicit consent during other gynecological operations. Feminists point out that under current legislation in England and Wales, fetuses defined as seriously handicapped can be aborted up to the moment of birth. The legacy of eugenicist ideas lives on in assumptions about the inherent deficiencies of young working-class women, young women of color, and young women with disabilities as potential mothers. Yet despite the institutional, cultural, and ideological force of appropriate heterosexual and reproductive activity, young women continue to challenge common sense definitions of normality and deviance.

"A Few Good Seasons Will Restore Prosperity to the Land":Louisa Atkinson's Depictions of Drought Grace Moore (bio) drought has always been a way of life in Australia, but the importation of European farming techniques and animals exacerbated the land's aridity in the nineteenth century and continues to do so today.1 The 1860s were, as the state's official statistician, T.A. Coghlan, expressed it, a period of "distress and acute suffering" in New South Wales (448). A La Niña event between 1860 and 1864 saw the weather oscillate between periods of extreme dryness and flooding, with New South Wales hit particularly badly. As climate historian Julia Miller notes, the period from 1855 to 1870 was particularly cool and mild, and this enabled a significant agricultural expansion (23). Looking back at the end of the century, Coghlan remarked that "truly remarkable vicissitudes of climate were very great, and the destruction of property was in many instances accompanied by loss of life" (448). These climatic extremes formed a backdrop to much of Australian novelist Louisa Atkinson's writing, which captures the unsettled conditions of life in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1860s and early 1870s. A novelist, nature writer, illustrator, taxidermist, and botanist, Atkinson was the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel, Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), a work remarkable for its attentiveness to the landscape and climate. In addition to her fiction, Atkinson was renowned in her lifetime for her botanical discoveries and writing. She penned a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald from 1860 until her death in 1872, and her work offers an affective and insightful understanding of the interactions between settler land management and weather systems in her home state of New South Wales. Biographer Patricia Clarke notes that from a very early age, Atkinson was both curious and knowledgeable regarding the plant and animal life of the Australian bush (25–35). As her newspaper columns demonstrate, Atkinson held Indigenous knowledge in high regard, and she learned a great deal about her surroundings from the Indigenous men and women she knew personally.2 She would certainly have understood that the seasons in Australia do not divide neatly into four, as they do in the northern hemisphere, but rather into six. As Deborah Bird Rose observes, "the very act of mapping seasons suggests a standard or norm" to which the Australian climate was resistant (38). Rose comments that Indigenous meteorology works by making connections between weather, creatures, and environment, and she notes the "simultaneity" of seasonal events, remarking "When the march flies start biting, the crocodiles are laying their eggs. When the Jangarla tree … flowers, the barramundi are biting" (39). We can see something of this interconnectedness, or, as Rose puts it, "sequence and co-occurrence," (38) in Atkinson's accounts of drought, which are sensitive to the responses of birds [End Page 5] who relocate their nesting sites in response to extreme temperatures (see L.C. Atkinson).3 While many settler families struggled to contend with the intense heat of Australian summers and the strangeness of their new country's flora and fauna, Atkinson was much more accepting. Having been born and raised in New South Wales, she resists settler nostalgia for the green fields of England and takes delight in introducing readers to the difference of their environment. As the historian Jill Ker Conway notes, the British colonial experience "represents life in Australia as a battle with harsh elements" (52). Atkinson's fiction follows this pattern to a degree, although she emphasizes that lack of climatic understanding is all too often the root cause of settler struggles. Whether narrating the catastrophic consequences of a careless gold digger leaving a campfire in the bush to smoulder, as in her short story "The Burning Forest" (1853), or describing the "sultry season" that leads to fire on the "parched" land of Gertrude the Emigrant, Atkinson sought to educate her readers regarding the dangers of a dry landscape.4 It is in her newspaper columns that Atkinson was most outspoken about colonial culture's effect on the land. She begins an article, "Hanging Rock on the Great Southern Road" (1871), with a...

The establishment of the National Education System in 1831 provided Ireland with a non-denominational education system aimed at reducing sectarian distrust and uniting the population. The national system was one element in the wider emergence of an institutional landscape in nineteenth century Ireland. The system involved a central-local management structure with the Commissioners of National Education having tight central control of an overall system but relied on local impetus to apply for, establish, and operate individual schools. As a result of this interaction, the emergence of national education was dependent on activities of various individuals and groups in Irish society, most notably the hierarchies of the various Churches. This paper examines the geographic aspects of the emergence of national education in the landscape of pre-Famine Ireland. The emergence of the system occurred in four distinct phases, with the activities of different groups affecting the uptake of national education. The distribution of national schools across the country is examined through thematic mapping, which identifies the development of distinct areas of high national-school densities and other areas of relative non-adoption. The pattern of national education in pre-Famine Ireland can be highly generalised by a line running from Sheephaven Bay in Donegal to Waterford Harbour, with the areas east of this line exhibiting high rates of national-school establishment, and areas to the west experiencing low national-school establishment. Spatial analysis is used to detect clusters of densities and provides further evidence of the spatial nature of national education. The spatial analysis is combined with the thematic mapping and discussion to produce a general regional map of the emergence of national education in pre-Famine Ireland. The regional map illustrates the role that social interactions played in the spatial emergence of institutions of the British state in nineteenth century Ireland.

Journal Article The Influence of the Catholic Clergy on Elections in Nineteenth–Century Ireland Get access J. H. WHITE J. H. WHITE Makerere College, The University College of East Africa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LXXV, Issue 295, April 1960, Pages 239–259, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LXXV.295.239 Published: 01 April 1960

The establishment of the National Education System in 1831 provided Ireland with a non-denominational education system aimed at reducing sectarian distrust and uniting the population. The national system was one element in the wider emergence of an institutional landscape in nineteenth century Ireland. The system involved a central-local management structure with the Commissioners of National Education having tight central control of an overall system but relied on local impetus to apply for, establish, and operate individual schools. As a result of this interaction, the emergence of national education was dependent on activities of various individuals and groups in Irish society, most notably the hierarchies of the various Churches. This paper examines the geographic aspects of the emergence of national education in the landscape of pre-Famine Ireland. The emergence of the system occurred in four distinct phases, with the activities of different groups affecting the uptake of national education. The distribution of national schools across the country is examined through thematic mapping, which identifies the development of distinct areas of high national-school densities and other areas of relative non-adoption. The pattern of national education in pre-Famine Ireland can be highly generalised by a line running from Sheephaven Bay in Donegal to Waterford Harbour, with the areas east of this line exhibiting high rates of national-school establishment, and areas to the west experiencing low national-school establishment. Spatial analysis is used to detect clusters of densities and provides further evidence of the spatial nature of national education. The spatial analysis is combined with the thematic mapping and discussion to produce a general regional map of the emergence of national education in pre-Famine Ireland. The regional map illustrates the role that social interactions played in the spatial emergence of institutions of the British state in nineteenth century Ireland.

This paper draws on graduate research conducted by the authors: Colvin, C. L., ‘Religion, competition and liability: Dutch cooperative banking in crisis, 1919-1927’ (unpub. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2011); and McLaughlin, E., ‘Microfinance institutions in nineteenth century Ireland’ (unpub. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2009). They thank Ewen Cameron, Vincent Comerford, David Greasley, William Smyth, and participants at the European Historical Economics Society Conference (Dublin, 2011) and the Women’s Committee Workshop of the Economic History Society (Oxford, 2011) for commenting on an earlier version of this paper.

Reviewed by: Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891 Sara L. Maurer (bio) Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891, by James H. Murphy; pp. 224. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2003, €65.00, $65.00, €24.95 paper, $23.95 paper. Two hundred years after George IV allegedly announced that Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1801) had at last given him some real knowledge of his Irish subjects, those of us who consider our business the nineteenth-century British Isles still seem in want of a [End Page 466] reliable guide to Ireland. James H. Murphy writes to fill that need. He describes his book's purpose as twofold: on the one hand to elaborate the social context of nineteenth-century Irish literature in order to stimulate new currents of research in that field, and on the other "to report on current thinking and research on nineteenth-century Ireland from a variety of disciplines" (1). In the second endeavor, his book succeeds admirably, providing a brief but clear guide to the basic features of Irish life for those with little prior knowledge of it. Yet while Murphy presents the entire book as "based on a synthesis of current scholarship" (2), in his first stated purpose—stimulating research in nineteenth- century Irish literature—his book provides a more idiomatic view of Irish literature than he admits. This is not to say that Murphy's account of literature is not worthwhile, but rather to say that much like King George before us, we should be wary of taking any view as wholly representative when we educate ourselves on Ireland. At its best Murphy's overview reads like an animated conversation with a generous dissertation advisor, eager to point out an array of historical facts, cultural trends, and recent scholarship, as well as to suggest how these call for more in-depth investigation. Murphy offers a rapid-fire roundup of some of the most prominent features of the nineteenth-century Irish landscape; Ribbonmen, hedge schools, Daniel O'Connell's monster meetings, famine depopulation, religious factionalism, Fenians, the Home Rule movement, Paddy stereotypes, and the Gaelic Athletic Association are all concisely introduced and explained. Where scholarly opinion diverges, Murphy lists the competing theories, summarizing, for instance, schools of thought on the composition of the agrarian agitators known as Whiteboys, multiple explanations of why Tridentine Catholicism was so fervently embraced by the Irish, and debates about possible factors in the outbreak of the Land War. For scholars familiar with the British nineteenth century, but unschooled in Irish history, this book presents the basics in an easy day's read and provides a useful point of departure for further research. The volume concludes with a fifty-page bibliography of key scholarship on the Irish nineteenth century, grouped by topics such as "religion," "social life," and "land," as well as by individual literary authors. Most noteworthy about Murphy's work is the way its chronology avoids standard narratives that treat the Irish nineteenth century as either too British to count as Irish history at all, or else as one long prelude to Irish modernism and the Irish Free State. By starting his book with the first stirrings of rebellion that culminated in the 1798 uprising, Murphy crafts a historical vision of the century as begun on Irish initiative, rather than a century defined by the British imposition of the Act of Union in 1801. By ending before the Irish literary revival of the 1890s, Murphy is able to deal with the literary material in his book on terms other than whether it prefigures or fails to live up to Irish modernism. This is an Ireland that matters to a Victorian studies audience, an Ireland whose culture and history aren't simply idling in wait of their apotheosis in the twentieth century. Given this rather innovative organization, the most disappointing aspect of the book is its complete segregation of gender into the penultimate chapter, which provides a brief litany of how women's lives changed over the course of the century. Murphy knows this topic well (he coedited Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland with Margaret Kelleher [Dublin, Irish Academies Press...

Sheep introduced to southeastern Australia by settler colonists in the nineteenth century were social and ecological agents. They trampled and denuded Country and prevented murnong/yam daisy from being cultivated in the light soils. Simultaneously, they presented a new food source to the Kulin whose traditional hunting grounds were being fenced and overrun by pastoralists arriving from Van Diemen’s Land and northern New South Wales. The existing literature has not always unravelled the distinct actions and intentions of the sheep, the White settlers and the Kulin. This article argues that although the deleterious effects of sheep on Country were many, ultimately it was the human settlers and the importation of pastoralism and capitalism – not the non-humans – who should shoulder the blame in the historiography. I also point to moments of sheep objection that may be interpreted as resistance to the newcomers’ acts towards them and towards Country.

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.

In the last few decades of the twentieth century major changes occurred in work and family life in Australia. Women entered the work force at unprecedented rates. This change was particularly marked for wives and mothers, who increasingly added paid work to their family responsibilities (Baxter 2002). Men’s average employment hours and real wages declined (van Wanrooy et al. 2007). Households came to depend on women’s earnings as well as on men’s, and the dual-earner household became a normative family form. Concurrently, social attitudes became more liberal (Bittman and Pixley 1997), rates of marriage declined (de Vaus 2004), the number of couples divorcing increased (Hewitt et al. 2005), the number of couples living together before or instead of marriage rose dramatically (de Vaus 2004), young women’s educational attainment outstripped young men’s (Craig et al. 2010), women delayed childbearing and couples had smaller families (McDonald 2000). Arguably, these changes meant greater personal freedom and more financial independence for women. Concomitantly, however, there was concern that the family as an institution was being undermined. A discourse emerged in popular debate about the loss of traditional values and the breakdown of family life. There was a renewed focus on the ideals of motherhood (Manne 2005; Maddox 2005). According to some opinions, family relationships had become transitory, contingent and unreliable, and the social fabric less stable as a result.

This book examines the role of women in philanthropy in nineteenth-century Ireland. The author focuses initially on the impact of religion on the lives of women and argues that the development of convents in the nineteenth century inhibited the involvement of lay Catholic women in charity work. She goes on to claim that sectarianism dominated women's philanthropic activity, and also analyses the work of women in areas of moral concern, such as prostitution and prison work. The book concludes that the most progressive developments in the care of the poor were brought about by non-conformist women, and a number of women involved in reformist organisations were later to become pioneers in the cause of suffrage. This study makes an important contribution both to Irish history and to our knowledge of women's lives and experiences in the nineteenth century.