Civic Identity and Public Space: Belfast since 1780, by Dominic Bryan and S. J. Connolly, with John Nagle, Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O’Cinneide

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civic identity and public space: Belfast since 1780 by Dominic Bryan, S. J. Connolly, and John Nagle, and: Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O’Cinneide Sean O'Toole (bio) Civic identity and public space: Belfast since 1780, by Dominic Bryan and S. J. Connolly, with John Nagle; pp. ix + 238. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, $120.00, £80.00. Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O'Cinneide; pp. xiii + 213. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, $120.00, £90.00. As talk of a hard border loomed, the tragic death of journalist Lyra McKee in a Derry/Londonderry street in April 2019 served as a stark reminder of the lethal potential at the contested sites of language and public space in Northern Ireland. The presence at McKee's funeral of Prime Minister Theresa May, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and Irish president Michael D. Higgins, among thousands of mourners at St. Anne's Cathedral in Belfast, spoke equally of the desire to uphold the ideals of good relations and shared space declared under the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Two recent studies skillfully illuminate the long history of these conflicting currents in Irish civic life and political culture. Civic identity and public space: Belfast since 1780, by Dominic Bryan and [End Page 123] S. J. Connolly, with John Nagle, offers a detailed account of the development of new ideas of collective identity and public space in an urban industrial society, ideas that prevailed elsewhere in Victorian Britain but whose flawed adoption in Ulster reverberates to this day. Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O'Cinneide engages with the politics of Irish literacy, defined not simply as a set of statistics or skillsets but as a "contested and politically charged prism through which to read Ireland's history," with some of its most intriguing chapters exploring the reading communities established by Irish periodicals, the imperial mapping of Ireland and India, and the late-century vogue for palmistry (2). As Civic identity and public space shows, the public debate on parades and other expressions of identity and allegiance in Northern Ireland has been "passionate yet superficial," with both unionists and nationalists asserting long-standing "rights" and "exclusive claims to space" (2). The book adds a historical dimension to the debate by demonstrating that the modern concept of public space and the conventions for regulating its use are themselves products of specific historical developments. Belfast, the industrial metropolis of Ulster, provides a useful case study. The first six of nine chapters offer a lucid historical narrative of the origins of public space in the town's shift from eighteenth-century aristocratic proprietorship and the "polite space" of urban elites residing in the city center to the nineteenth-century commercialization of the center and rapid expansion of residential districts outward in every direction, segregated by social class, religion, and political allegiance (30). The resulting spirit of exclusiveness and discrimination, along with a corrupt one-party rule and the sectional monopoly of public space, became mutually reinforcing calcifications. In the decades leading up the 1921 partition of Ireland, Ulster looked increasingly like "a potentially separate political unit, with Belfast as its capital in waiting" (130). The book's final three chapters offer a social-scientific analysis of the renegotiation of public space in the city in the past sixty years, no less interesting but perhaps necessarily more crowded with an accumulation of acronyms. Fortunately, the book's main interest lies in its meticulous historical detail and in its cogent argument: the problems of access to and control of public space in Belfast are fundamentally rooted in the limitations of nineteenth-century liberalism within the imperial context of religious and political sectionalism. Only against this background can Belfast's more recent history be properly understood. There are several other fascinating historiographic insights as well. First, discussion of Belfast's distinctive pattern of sectarian violence has tended to focus on the armed conflicts of the early 1920s and again from 1969...