Early Nineteenth-century Ireland Research Articles

The Sound of Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

AbstractIn the early 1800s, Jonah Barrington, an Irish judge, bemoaned that the air chosen as the march for the Irish Volunteer Movement had “no merit whatever, being neither grand, nor martial, nor animating,” contrasting it with the zeal of French revolutionary music. The emotional impact of music might be a matter of taste, but such a statement is suggestive of an aesthetics, where political music, or music used for political purposes, should have specific qualities that could be identified and judged by listeners. This article explores how people in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland identified music as political, using theories of the effects and affects of sound during the period and a corpus of Irish political music as an access point into historical experiences of musical enjoyment. While the impacts of music on the body are challenging for historians to retrieve, scholarship from the history of emotions highlights the important role of normative frameworks of emotion in accessing embodied experience. Working from this perspective, this article argues that we can begin to access the sound of politics for audiences of this period, contributing to our understanding of the role of music in political life.

Gentlemen regulators: landlord/tenant conflict and the making of moral economy in early nineteenth-century Ireland

AbstractThe central contention of this article is that early nineteenth-century Irish landlords were constrained in their ability to control their estates by the prospect of peasant resistance. The apex of that resistance took the form of what are generically known as whiteboy movements, and this article examines the impact of one particular such movement, the Whitefeet, active in the East Midlands and South-East in the early 1830s. The article argues that two forms of landlord versus tenant conflicts can be identified: an absolute form, in which landlords (or sublettingrentierscalled middlemen) behaved as if they had absolute rights over their properties and were the victims of retaliatory violence; and a negotiated form, in which landlords (or their agents) proceeded in a more restrained, and piecemeal fashion, and compromised in the face of opposition. The fact that the magistracy, at least in some instances, condemned the practitioners of absolute conflict would suggest that more measured approaches were the socially accepted norm, precisely because of the potential for retaliatory violence. The article will conclude with a discussion framing the foregoing in terms of moral economy. It will be argued that the balance between landlord power and tenant resistance created a grudging acceptance of respective rights.

Violence, space, and the political logics of territoriality: a case of peasant resistance in early-nineteenth century Ireland

ABSTRACTThis article is a theoretically motivated and empirically informed study of the space-claiming practices of a group of Irish peasant rebels, ‘the Threshers’. In the early-nineteenth century, the Threshers mobilized to contest, often violently, practices and logics that were afoot in the Irish countryside, practices which were dislocating the rural poor's mode of life and livelihood. The contribution of this article is that by invoking the theoretical work of Ernesto Laclau, amongst others, it advances practices of territoriality, that is, space-claiming practices, as political logics. Political logics are the moments in which configurations of the social are instituted, upheld, or contested. Territorial practices are then those that spatially instantiate, or contest, imaginaries of the social/space. The account of space and territoriality vis-à-vis violence developed here helps to render more intelligible the imbrications of violence, space, and ‘the Political’. Theoretically, examining the Threshers’ practices of space-claiming enables a move away from the ‘originary’ violence of radical negativity that is implicated in the articulation of antagonistically constituted imaginaries of the social to situated practices of concrete violence by interrogating moments when such frontiers are spatially inscribed. That is, the violence implicated in the spatialization of the political comes into view. The Threshers’ resistance, along with revealing concrete practices of violence entailed in the enacting of their vision of the local space, also demonstrates how in contested space the contingency of the social is continually reactivated, casting a productive light on how space in such sites of struggle may be antagonistically reproduced.

Letters of Blood and Fire: Primitive Accumulation, Peasant Resistance, and the Making of Agency in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Agrarian social conflict played a major role in shaping Irish economic development from the 1760s to the 1930s. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bands of peasants known as “whiteboys” defended customary rights to land with intimidation and violence. This article analyzes a collection of 135 so-called threatening letters from rural parts of the eastern province of Leinster in the year 1832. In the letters are found traces of the cultural practices through which peasants resisting primitive accumulation sustained their sense of collective efficacy. These traces have two main forms: expressions of pan-regional collective identity and appropriations from ruling-class status/power displays. A sense of agency was central to the exercise of actual agency—an agency that retarded processes of primitive accumulation and contributed to a situation whereby the spread of the British model of capitalist agriculture was confined and peasant production survived into the twentieth century.

From Antiquarian Text to Fiction’s Subtext: The Extended Afterlife of Spenser’sView of the Present State of Ireland

This article analyzes significant traces of the View of the Present State of Ireland in Irish novels published in the aftermath of the Act of Union of 1800. Written by Protestants, they aimed to explain the Irish problem to an English audience, and thereby foster more harmonious relations between the two islands. Spenser’s View, which had long been a resource for antiquaries, was taken up by these novelists in a variety of ways, ranging from plundering his hostile descriptions of Gaelic Irish mores to add color and an alleged authenticity to their characters and plots, to engaging with his politics and pointing to his complicity in the colonial project in Ireland. That some novelists employed both of these approaches simultaneously shows not only the continuing Protestant ambivalence toward the Gaelic Irish, and particularly the still-threatening peasantry, but also the centrality of Spenser’s View to fictive depictions of early nineteenth-century Ireland.

Narrative, Law and Emotion: Husband Killers in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

ABSTRACTScholars of emotion and the law have sought to demonstrate the significant role emotion plays in shaping the operation of courtrooms, the development of legal theory and practice, and the possibilities for justice. This paper contributes to the discussion by exploring what happens when emotion is ignored or underplayed in trial narratives, seeking to demonstrate that whose emotion is considered to be important can shed light on power dynamics, law and the cultures in which law operates. It does so through a case study of women on trial for murdering their husbands in early nineteenth-century Ireland. It argues that emotion is not simply another species of evidence that can be used in criminal processes, but itself a type of narrative – emotion is constructed and performed by actors in legal dramas and forms a competing story to others in the courtroom space.

Performing Emotion and Reading the Male Body in the Irish Court, c. 1800–1845

Justice in the early nineteenth-century Irish court was shaped by the bodies of men. Physical appearance was understood to provide information about a person's social background, character, sense of guilt, and honesty; it was available to be read by others in the court when interpreting events during trial. As well as making judgements based on clothing and the appearance of the body, how court actors performed emotion was central to discussions of how their bodies, and so their character, should be read. Such readings of emotion on the male body were heavily shaped by the science of physiognomy that provided a model for interpreting often complex, ambiguous, and individualized displays of emotion. This article uses evidence provided in newspaper reporting of criminal trials in early nineteenth-century Ireland to explore how performances of emotion were used and interpreted as a form of evidence in the courtroom. It demonstrates that emotion and emotional dispositions were central to determining a man's character, affecting how their evidence was viewed and whether they received justice. As importantly, displays of emotion in court were involved in the shaping of courtroom dynamics. In both cases, emotion became implicated in the making of justice.

The Development of Liberalistic Integration in Early Nineteenth Century Ireland:

The Development of Liberalistic Integration in Early Nineteenth Century Ireland:

Science, politics and society in early nineteenth-century Ireland: the Reverend William Richardson. By Allan Blackstock. Pp 193. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2013. €65.

Science, politics and society in early nineteenth-century Ireland: the Reverend William Richardson. By Allan Blackstock. Pp 193. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2013. €65. - Volume 39 Issue 153

Imprisonment for Debt in Early Nineteenth Century Ireland, 1810-1848

About one third of the prison population in early nineteenth century Ireland was made up of persons imprisoned by their creditors for debt. These prisoners had been arrested for defaulting on debts owing to shopkeepers. The growing size of the prison debtor population was, by the second decade of the century, threatening to cause a humanitarian crisis. The Government responded to this by, first (1821), establishing a specialist Insolvent Debtors Relief Court, second (1848), by abolishing the creditor’s power of imprisonment for debts under ten pounds, and, finally (1872), by abolishing the power to imprison genuinely insolvent debtors Each of these reforms was opposed by small business interests. This interest group -- particularly small retailers -- viewed abolition as threatening an essential and effective means of debt recovery. Abolitionists, and the Government, on the other hand, argued that the process of arrest did not work. This paper offers an account (i) of the process of imprisonment for debt in nineteenth century Ireland, (ii) of conditions in Irish marshalseas, and (iii) of the profile of those creditors who used imprisonment. It concludes with an assessment of the abolitionist claim that the remedy was ineffective.

‘A Raking Pot of Tea: Consumption and Excess in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Tea became a mainstay of many people's diets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Ireland. However, this development was controversial. In a period of heightened counter-revolutionary anxiety, tea held a range of negative associations. This was especially pronounced in the tense conditions of post-1798 and post-Union rural Ireland. Tea-drinking was understood by reformers of the period to deepen the perceived decadent and idle tendencies of the rural poor. As such, its consumption was linked to a range of domestic and social disturbances. For many reformers of the period, tea came to represent an impediment to effective modernisation. In the process, however, tea became the focus of anxiety surrounding the general effects of modernisation itself.

Society and manners in early nineteenth-century Ireland. By John Gamble. Edited by Breandán Mac Suibhne. Pp lxxxii, 716. Dublin: Field Day. 2011. €45.

Society and manners in early nineteenth-century Ireland. By John Gamble. Edited by Breandán Mac Suibhne. Pp lxxxii, 716. Dublin: Field Day. 2011. €45.

Making hay when the sun don't shine: the Rev. William Richardson, science and society in early nineteenth-century Ireland

So wrote William Hamilton Drummond in 1811 in reference to an extraordinary grass known by the old Irish name of fiorin (fiorthann), whose properties had been discovered by a fellow cleric, William Richardson (1740–1820). Richardson claimed fiorin could produce abundant winter hay and help reclaim bogland. Though Donaldson’sAgricultural biographyof 1854 dismissed Richardson’s work as ephemeral and careless, in 1806 the leading British scientist Humphry Davy visited Richardson and was impressed enough to recommend him to the Board of Agriculture and include fiorin in his famous lecture series translated into every major European language.

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison An annotated bibliography of the titles listed below is available at the Friends Historical Association website: www.haverford.edu/library/fha Quaker Writings, an Anthology, 1650–1920, edited with an introduction by Thomas D. Hamm (Penguin Classics 2010) contains Quaker writings documenting the thought and experiences of Friends from George Fox in the 1640s to 1920. Quakers first arose in a period of religious and political turmoil. Though not specifically about Quakers, David R. Adams, "The Secret Printing and Publishing Career of Richard Overton the Leveller, 1644–46," The Library, 11.1 (March 2010), 3-88, and Ariel Hessayon, "Early Modern Communism: The Diggers and Community of Goods," Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 3.2 (2010), 1-49, provide insight into the era immediately preceding the rise of Quakerism. S.L.T. Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) contains extensive references to seventeenth-century Quaker women including Joan Whitrowe, Anne Docwra and Elizabeth Bathurst. Betty Hagglund, "Changes in Roles and Relationships: Multiauthored Epistles from the Aberdeen Quaker Women's Meeting," in Woman to Woman : Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott, and Louise Duckling (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010) examines epistles written between 1675 and 1700. Amanda E. Herbert, "Companions in Preaching and Suffering: Itinerant Female Quakers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9.1 (2011), 73-113, explores the writings and tribulations of traveling women Friends, and concludes that "traveling Quaker women refigured seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constructions of the female body, femininity, and female sociability." Two recent articles examine Quakers and slavery in Barbados and the West Indies in the seventeenth century: Kristen Block, "Cultivating Inner and Outer Plantations: Property, Industry, and Slavery in Early Quaker Migration to the New World," in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8.3 (2010), 515-548, and Katharine Gerbner, "The Ultimate Sin: Christianising Slaves in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century," in Slavery & Abolition, 31.1 (2010), 57-73. Three articles examine the publishing and reading of Friends: David J. Hall, "What Should Eighteenth Century Quakers Have Read?" in The Journal of the [End Page 70] Friends Historical Society 62.2 (2010), 103-110; Richard S. Harrison, "Quaker Publishing in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Ireland," in The Journal of the Friends Historical Society 62.2 (2010), 111-130, and David J. Hall, "Spreading Friends Books for Truths Service: The Distribution of Quaker Printed Literature in the Eighteenth Century," in The Journal of the Friends Historical Society 62.1 (2010), 3-24. Clive D. Field, "Zion's People: Who Were the English Nonconformists?," Local Historian, 40.3 (2010), 208-223, compares the occupational structures of Quaker, Baptist and Congregational Nonconformists and includes data and analysis of Quaker occupations from 1650 to 1901. Local studies of English Quakers include Peter Collins, Quakers and Quakerism in Bolton, Lancashire 1650–1995: The History of a Religious Community, with a preface by Ben Pink Dandelion (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010) and Richard C. Allen, "Nantucket Quakers and the Milford Haven Whaling Industry, c. 1791–1821," in Quaker Studies, 15.1 (Sept. 2010), 6-31. Andrew R. Murphy, "Persecuting Quakers?: Liberty and Toleration in Early Pennsylvania," in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) looks at Pennsylvania's actions during the Keithian schism. Pennsylvania's actions towards and conflicts with its Native American population in the mid eighteenth century are considered in Steven C. Harper, "Making History: Documenting the 1737 Walking Purchase," Pennsylvania History, 77.2 (Spring 2010), 217-233; in Jessica Choppin Roney, "'Ready to Act in Defiance of Government': Colonial Philadelphia Voluntary Culture and the Defense Association of 1747–1748," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8.2 (2010), 358-385; and John H. Brubaker, Massacre of the Conestogas: On the Trail of the Paxton Boys in Lancaster County (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2010). The Roney and Brubaker studies include extensive references to Quakers. Joseph S. Tiedemann, "A Tumultuous People: The...

THE POOR INQUIRY AND IRISH SOCIETY – A CONSENSUS THEORY OF TRUTH

ABSTRACTThe most detailed contemporary ethnographic representation of early nineteenth-century Ireland can be found in the reports produced by the Poor Inquiry of 1833–6. Despite their richness, however, these reports remained marginal to contemporary policy discussions and public debate. This is normally, and correctly, attributed to the unpopularity and impracticability of the specific recommendations of the Inquiry. This paper argues that the marginalisation of the reports was also due to their discursive originality. It focuses on the voluminous oral evidence which was collected and published by the Inquiry. This evidence was taken in public from large groups representing all social classes, and much of it was printed verbatim. This method was unique among state reports of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, and unusual in social discourse more generally. It emerged from an equally unusual conception of truth as social consensus, a theory which the Inquiry adopted in order to overcome what it saw as the socially fragmented nature of representation in Ireland.

Reactions to the Ordnance Survey: A Window on Prefamine Ireland

Reactions to the Ordnance Survey: A Window on Prefamine Ireland Patrick S. McWilliams In 1824, the British government established the Ordnance Survey of Ireland to create new maps of the country, which would in turn serve to address inequalities in local taxation. The survey commenced in 1825 and was underway for nearly twenty years. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Colby (1784–1852) of the Royal Engineers, also director of the Survey of Great Britain, led the huge project. A small army of workers, under the direction of officers and men from the ranks of the Royal Sappers and Miners, traversed Ireland to create a series of maps at the very large scale of six inches to a mile. These maps delineated every nook and cranny of the country. A secondary scheme called the Memoir, the brainchild of Colby’s deputy in Ireland, Lieutenant Thomas Larcom (1801–79), aimed to supplement the maps, and to chart the productive worth of the country. This, too, sent numerous people, most of them civilians, into the field from 1833 to 1840.1 The early chapters of John Andrews’s definitive A Paper Landscape document the creation of a separate branch of the Ordnance Survey specifically for Ireland.2 Irish proprietors applied pressure for a new valuation of the country-side.3 A subsequent parliamentary committee recommended that a new survey go ahead on a large scale and charged Colby with its establishment. The adoption of the report of this committee—chaired by Thomas Spring Rice (1790–1866), later Lord Monteagle, a prominent Whig and the proprietor of Mount Trenchard, County Limerick—was not a foregone conclusion. Despite commending the proposed survey and valuation as a “great national work,”4 the [End Page 51] committee’s recommendations were in advance of the intentions of the government.5 The committee had not been formed merely to rubber-stamp an extension of the British system to Ireland. For the committee to propose an effective valuation at the local level, it required townland boundaries on the new map, a cartographic challenge that Colby already had indicated was possible. Moreover, a formidable shadow loomed over its proceedings in the person of the Duke of Wellington who, as master general of Ordnance, had the final decision about how the survey would proceed. The duke was chary of extending the project’s inquiry to include “dealing with divisions of a territorial nature rather than the natural geography of the country” (OSR (1846), 104). The committee’s vote of confidence in incipient military arrangements already underway for the Irish Survey may have been a gambit to make Wellington more receptive to the inclusion of townland boundaries. It was only the persistence of the dogged chancellor of the exchequer, Thomas Spring Rice, who presented individual evidence of the committee members to Wellington, which elicited an agreement that the Ordnance Survey would produce a townland map. Spring Rice considered the townland borders as adding to the Ordnance Survey, but not superseding it (OSR (1846), 104); his opinion proved a momentous decision in the history of early nineteenth-century Ireland. With Wellington’s blessing, this new venture possessed, at least in its early days, the authority of Britain’s most eminent statesman.6 Putting the Irish Survey in the hands of the Board of Ordnance inevitably meant that it would be military in character. A military approach to such projects had been the case in Great Britain since the late 1700s in India, and in Ireland [End Page 52] where Sir William Petty had employed soldiers two hundred years previous. Was there, in fact, an alternative to using military expertise? In British eyes, probably not. There was a widespread perception that the skill base in Ireland was inadequate to the task, as well as a sense that there was a need to employ servants of the state in peacetime in a manner that would use and advance their scientific training, and “keep their minds in a state of activity, ready for war.”7 This last concern is relevant in the context of the Survey of Great Britain being already well advanced at the time. In addition, the government would find a military operation much easier to control...

"Something is Being Eroded": The Agrarian Epistemology of Brian Friel's Translations

Brian Friel's conception of community finds dramatic expression in his affinity for fictionalized local settings, rooted in the recognizable geographic region of northwest Ireland. While many critics have noted Friel's affinity for local culture and community, few critics have noted the epistemological and thematic implications of his rural philosophy. His most famous drama, Translations (1980), can be reread through agrarian theories about the interrelationship between people and the land. In the twentieth century, the most renowned of these philosophies was that developed by the Agrarian writers from the American South, published in the collection of essays I'll Take My Stand in 1930. In Ireland, later in the century, Patrick Kavanagh's call for contemporary Irish authors to write in a parochial, not a provincial, manner, was likewise instructive for Friel. The playwright has developed his own well-defined agrarian theory that proposes the continued need for a viable rural farming community in Ireland as a counterweight to the rapid urbanization of the country. This conviction springs from both Friel's immersion in rural Irish culture, and from his realization that such a culture contains a premodern epistemology. Far from nostalgic, Translations articulates Friel's alarm at the loss of local community, both in early nineteenth-century Ireland and worldwide in the present. The play inveighs against the advent of the machine in rural culture, which Friel views as evicting laborers from communities, and against the concurrent Enlightenment emphasis on empiricism and the individual—all of which destroy communal identity. Much of the criticism of Translations has focused on the ways in which the play depicts the decline of the Irish language. Such a narrow reading runs the risk of relegating the discussion solely to an Irish and British context, when linguistic displacement is, in fact, part of a larger attenuation of rural culture and epistemology brought about by global modernization. Linguistically oriented criticism of Translations tends to argue that it sanctions Irish cultural nationalism and critiques English imperialism; but Friel's play actually implies that both ideologies have been complicit in ushering in pernicious aspects of modernity [End Page 106] that have, in their turn, slowly killed rural Irish farming communities and the antimodern, communal worldview these villages espouse. The universality of Friel's play becomes clear only when the linguistic, cultural, and epistemological tragedies that occur in Translations are recognized as Friel's lament for a larger, cross-cultural decline in communal ways of perceiving reality. * * * Friel's imaginative observation of Ballybeg has established it as his analog to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, his own "postage stamp" of native soil. In his artistic concern for local, rural culture and in his apprehension about the deleterious effects of modernity, Friel shares a number of concerns with the agrarian movement in the United States as espoused by a number of southern writers. His affinity with agrarianism may be surprising for those critics who view Friel as a quintessentially Irish writer, but he has always disavowed that term; he told John Boyd in a 1970 interview that he views his own work in a much broader context: "This business of seeing oneself as an Irishman writing in an Irish tradition I would find very limiting and perhaps oppressive.1 Friel emphatically proclaimed his allegiance to agrarian culture in an early interview: "I think I'm sort of a peasant at heart. I'm certainly not 'citified' and I never will be. There are certain atmospheres which I find totally alien to me and I'm much more at ease in a rural setting."2 The concern of Translations with the land, with agricultural practices, and with local crop conditions suggests a deep interest in the continued viability of local agricultural economies on Friel's part, while also displaying a related anxiety about the advent of modernity in Ballybeg and its ideological impact on an archaic culture's epistemology. The most ominous...

Symbolic violence, resistance and the vectors of improvement in early nineteenth-century Ireland

Capitalism remains an important subject for modern-world archaeologists. Symbolic violence offers an insightful avenue of inquiry into the capitalist project because it allows for a further understanding of dominant power and its effects. A case study of two early nineteenth-century Irish tenant-farmer cabins, in light of the Enlightenment theory of improvement, offers insights on the archaeological dimensions of symbolic violence and its resistance.

The social magic of correspondence: conceptions of the mails in early nineteenth century Ireland

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the post in Ireland underwent fundamental changes in terms of its methods of operation, the scope of its delivery and the actual usage of the postal service. The volume of mail sent, the changing pattern of delivery routes and the time and expense of sending a letter all changed over the course of the century. The conceptions of the post were changing from that of being a purely functional instrument of limited appeal to that of being an acknowledged tool in the growth and development of industry and trade, in the operation of the structures of government and a vital link for individuals to people and places outside their immediate social circle. This paper draws upon various sources, both those of the state and of private individuals, and uses Bourdieu's theoretical perspectives, to build a framework for analysing the differing conceptions of the mails. These changing conceptions reveal how different groups positioned themselves in order to take advantage of and shape new forms of cultural capital in the early nineteenth century.

Natural Language, Scientific Discourse and Auto-Ethnographic Representation in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Travel literature produced by rural Irish writers at the end of the nineteenth century provides an interesting contrast to previous British representations of Irish landscape and culture. Referencing the theories of Michel de Certeau, this article contrasts self-representational work produced in rural Donegal with the production of Ordnance Survey memoir materials in early nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining indigenous representations of landscape, we can see that Ireland remained not simply a landscape that was "unsettled" as noted by Thomas Colby, Head of the 1837 survey, but rather a heteroglossic linguistic landscape containing its own discourse of marginalization.