Ireland

Abstract

Irish Victorian literature is full of possibilities for research, and interest in it is growing continually. Long neglected, its time has apparently come at last. In the past it suffered from a number of disadvantages. First, it was largely ignored by British Victorianists. This was not only because 19th-century Ireland did not fit easily with the usual assumptions concerning Victorian literature, but also because Victorianists often work within the contours of the contemporary borders of the United Kingdom rather than their Victorian equivalents, which included Ireland. In Irish terms there has frequently been a certain nationalist suspicion of the Victorian Age as one of maximum cultural assimilation of Ireland to Britain. Though mostly for economic reasons, many Irish writers during the period lived, worked, and published in London. Then again, Irish Victorian literature has been seen to pale when compared with the intensity of the Irish literary revival, which followed it, and of Irish romanticism, which preceded it, and which has been the focus of much scholarly interest in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It was the policy of the Irish revivalists, most notably, W. B. Yeats, to denigrate what came before them, though they praised some writers, such as William Carleton, James Clarence Mangan, and Samuel Ferguson, as precursors of the revival. These writers, together with popular but often disparaged novelists, such as Samuel Lover and Charles Lever, emerged as a skeletal form of canon, whereas many hundreds of other writers were forgotten. The Irish revival also gave rise to a literary interest in the Anglo-Irish in the pursuit of such themes in fiction as the “big house” and, latterly, its dystopian equivalent, Protestant Gothic. The 1990s proved to be a particularly fertile time, with a debate about the nature of 19th-century Irish culture, fueled by postcolonial studies and other forms of literary theory and by the engagement of literary scholars with the Irish Famine, whose 150th anniversary commemoration occurred in that decade. Undoubtedly, the greatest impetus for the study of Irish Victorian literature has come from the interest in women’s literature generally. We also appear to be in the midst of a scholarly movement to recover to critical attention finally the lost legions of Irish Victorian writers, men as well as women. Although this article necessarily pays attention to authors from the traditional canon, it also gives examples of the newer scholarly attention. Interestingly, most of this work has been in the area of fiction. The division between Irish Victorian and Irish romantic literature is quite well established, and writers from the romantic period who continued into the Victorian period will, for the most part, not be dealt with here. The end point for the article’s interest is slightly more ragged. Large canonical figures with their own bibliographies, such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and also the younger Yeats, are not included. The Irish revival is traditionally thought to begin in 1891, yet the article does attend to some aspects of fin de siècle fiction, such as the New Woman and Somerville and Ross. The principal topical mode for addressing Irish Victorian writing more recently has been that of women’s experience and writing. However, this has been so successful and pervasive, as evidenced throughout this article, as to render a particular focus on it unnecessary.