The novel of the big house

Abstract

The term 'big house' - an ambivalently derisive expression in Ireland - refers to a country mansion, not always so very big, but typically owned by a Protestant Anglo-Irish family presiding over a substantial agricultural acreage leased out to Catholic tenants who worked the land. As rural centres of political power and wealth in Ireland, most big houses occupied property confiscated from native Catholic families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their presence in the landscape, unlike that of England's 'great houses', long asserted the political and economic ascendancy of a remote colonial power structure. Whereas by the nineteenth century the English country mansion could be incorporated into a triumphal concept of national heritage, for most of Ireland's population, Ascendancy houses signalled division, not community. In a colonial country, such division reflected not just the typical disparities of class and wealth between landlords and tenants, but also difference of political allegiance, ethnicity, religion and language. Thus in a speech advocating the 1800 Act of Union, Lord Clare notoriously described Irish landlords as 'hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation'.