<em>Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland</em>, edited by Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless

Abstract

Reviewed by: Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Fintan Cullen (bio) Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless; pp. 273. Dublin and Portland: Four Courts Press, 2010, £50.00, $70.00. A few years ago in the preface to a book in the Nineteenth-Century Ireland series to which this new title belongs, I hoped that "a whole conference and subsequent publication will address the role of the visual in nineteenth-century Ireland" (Land and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Úna Ní Bhroiméil and Glenn Hooper [Four Courts Press, 2008], 8). That moment has arrived. Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless have put together a most useful collection of nineteen essays, at least eleven of which, dealing with visual culture, emanated from the 2008 Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland Conference held at the University of Limerick. The collection is a mixed bag of essays consisting of many that deal with the role of images, including world-famous paintings such as Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819), on display in Dublin in 1821; Irish antiquarianism; book and journal illustrations; and anthropological photographs of Aran islanders. The final eight essays do not reference the visual but focus on print culture, be it newspapers in Ireland or Australia, the role of published translation, or official reports on the Irish poor law. Nineteen essays is a lot for one volume, and as interesting as many of them are, some fit rather uncomfortably in a volume purporting to be about the role of the visual and the material in nineteenth-century Ireland, as indicated by the edition's opening remarks. Unwittingly, some essays contribute to the decidedly mixed-bag aspect of this otherwise useful volume. The collection is also uneven in that some of the essays are highly theoretical while others are defiantly empirical; a few are chatty and untroubled by trends in the contemporary academy. The best and longest of the essays is Justin Carville's. It deals with what he calls the "visual economy" of the Irish face in 1890s Ireland as photographed by Alfred Cort Haddon and Charles R. Browne along the western seaboard [End Page 368] (159). Untroubled by the need to include descriptions of intricate scientific procedures, Carville adeptly situates the observations of Haddon and Browne in the creation of an Irish visual "type" that "continued to circulate well into the twentieth century" (168, 174). The essay is illustrated by sixteen fascinating ethnographical photographs from collections held in the National Library of Ireland and the University of Cambridge. It is only to be hoped that Carville will turn this original piece of research on Irish visual culture into a book-length study fully illustrated with these "photographic types" (168). The sixteen illustrations allotted to Carville's essay are generous in comparison to the absence of illustrations in Niamh O'Sullivan's important essay on the Dublin display of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. Although it is well known that this canvas toured Ireland and Britain, O'Sullivan focuses her attention on the clash of cultures occasioned by this display. This was a clash between high art and a popular panoramic representation of the Medusa incident which was also on show in Dublin at the same time. The fact that no illustration of the Géricault accompanies O'Sullivan's essay is a major drawback for the reader unacquainted with this seminal nineteenth-century image. An important topic among the eleven essays that deal with the visual is the range of displays available in Dublin and throughout Ireland during the century. The research carried out for these essays informs us in no uncertain terms that we ignore the visual at our peril. Valuable work is offered on a number of topics: Philip McEvansoneya, for example, carefully describes the slowness of certain cultural agencies to recognise the significance of Irish antiquarian objects, many of which are now central to a variety of definitions of early Irish culture. Essays by Emily Cullen and Elizabeth Boyle also take as their focus the nineteenth-century fascination with antiquarian objects and...