Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Matthew Kelly

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Matthew Kelly Siobhan Carroll (bio) Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Matthew Kelly; pp. xii + 231. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, £75.00, $120.00. Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland brings together papers delivered at the 2016 Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland conference, the laudable goal of which was to "raise the profile of the environmental humanities in Irish studies" ("CFP Annual Conference 2016," The Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland [SSNCI, 2016]). From the quality and range of essays assembled in this collection, that goal would seem to have been accomplished. While not as comprehensive as its title implies, this collection contains a diverse set of well-researched essays that employ, with varying degrees of comfort, environmental and ecocritical approaches to traditional objects of study. Conference-derived essay collections are difficult beasts to manage. Stripped of their contextualizing discussions, individual essays can appear scattershot in their choice of topics and approaches. Thankfully, in this collection, editor Matthew Kelly has done an admirable job both in selecting high-quality essays and in assembling them into a coherent structure. His engaging introduction performs some heavy lifting, deftly summarizing ecocritical theory and Irish environmental history scholarship before erecting a useful scaffold for the diverse sets of essays that follow. For Victorianists looking for an overview of Irish environmental scholarship, Kelly's introduction will prove an invaluable read. The essays assembled in this book fall into three categories. The first section contains historical case studies on "the improvers" (8): that is, on the Irish writers and landowners [End Page 333] who contributed to the improvement of Ireland's agriculture. The second section features essays on the social construction of natural places in Ireland, while the third contains essays exploring individual authors' ecological representations. As this summary may indicate, the first section of the collection is the most coherent and the third the least, though its essays have much to offer readers interested in the authors in question. Of the "improvers" essays, the standout is David Brown's study of Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, whose improvement campaigns Brown reads as an attempt to conquer natures both human and nonhuman. A prominent British statesman and an Irish landlord, Palmerston's correspondence and actions offer a window into the philosophies informing nineteenth-century attempts to transform the physical environment of Ireland. Brown writes with admirable clarity about Palmerston's projects and, in the last part of his essay, gestures provocatively toward the implications of the Irish improvement movement for the 1840s famine. Unusually for the historicist essays in this collection, Brown is also attentive to nonhuman forms of agency, observing the ways in which geological changes affecting Sligo influenced Palmerston's projects. Drawing on environmental history, Brown's essay models a historicist method informed by ecocritical theory, one that takes seriously Paul S. Sutter and William Cronon's proposition that human history and natural history cannot be disentangled. The book's middle section features essays on the social construction of environmental place. Highlights from this section include Kelly's essay on the politics surrounding the management of Killarney, Ireland's first National Park, and Juliana Adelman's essay on the animal geographies of Dublin. Kelly's essay traces the debates about the necessity of preserving Killarney through late nineteenth-century parliamentary discussions and newspaper articles. Alternatively constructed in the history as a "transnational commons" and as a distinctly Irish landscape vulnerable to exploitation by American speculators, Killarney National Park reflects changing views on Ireland's national and environmental identities (120). Adelman's essay on the animal industries of Dublin similarly focuses on the history of a particular space, while also offering the collection's most comprehensive and methodologically suggestive essay on the nineteenth-century Irish environment. Combining digital humanities techniques with traditional historical interpretation, and drawing on sources from James Joyce's Ulysses (1920) to project-generated maps, Adelman constructs a history of Dublin's animal infrastructures that encompasses issues of environmental justice, class, and changing social mores. Given the degree to which urban space is segregated from discussions...