Coins

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the coin’s pivotal role in the articulation of eighteenth-century Irish national identity and introduces a little-known text: The Adventures of a Bad Shilling of the Kingdom of Ireland (1805), a hybridized genre that is half it-narrative and half aisling. The Hibernian iconography on Irish coins from 1691 up through the early nineteenth century reflects Ireland’s fraught national status; coins rebranded with Hibernia encoded a Williamite, Protestant, and Anglicized Ireland associated with Jacobite defeat. Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal (1760) and Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) demonstrate that any text bearing Irish authorship and invoking a coin inevitably questions the actions of the British Empire. Most importantly, The Adventures of a Bad Shilling and The Wild Irish Girl (1806) suggest that Irish nationalist consciousness in the wake of the Union quietly endures inside Irish mind and matter, despite the forced impression of Hibernia as the weakened kingdom.