Early Nineteenth-century Ireland Research Articles

Burials and bigotry in early nineteenth-century Ireland

Burials and bigotry in early nineteenth-century Ireland

The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland?s Celtic Revival

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.

Weights and Measures of the Major Food Commodities in Early Nineteenth–Century Ireland: a Regional

Weights and Measures of the Major Food Commodities in Early Nineteenth–Century Ireland: a Regional

Weights and Measures of the Major Food Commodities in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Regional Perspective

Weights and Measures of the Major Food Commodities in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Regional Perspective

Commentary on Charles Tilly's “Social movements”

In his article in this issue, Chuck Tilly has analyzed the public campaign for Catholic Emancipation in early nineteenth-century Great Britain and Ireland from two perspectives: as an early example of a modern social movement; and as a political process that illustrates similarities between social movements within states and nationalist movements within an international system of states. In both respects, he has emphasized cultural dimensions of collective action that have recently attracted considerable attention from social theorists. Leaders of social movements, like nationalist leaders, try to mobilize popular support through discursive practives and symbolic displays that foster group identities. According to Tilly, these identities necessarily involve some degree of "mystification" because they express contingent rather than essential relationships among movement participants, adversaries, spectators, and power-holders. Social movements are interactive processes of collective action, not solidary groups based on stable identities.

Women's employment and industrial organisation: commercial lace embroidery in early nineteenth-century Ireland and England

Abstract The early nineteenth century saw expanding work opportunities for women in commercial lace embroidery in Britain. This article traces the connection between the development of commercial lace embroidery in several locations – Nottingham, Essex and Limerick. Despite the fame of the Irish industry, it has received almost no academic attention. The differing structures of the Irish and English industries are examined. Aspects of lace manufacture highlight the increasing emphasis on cleanliness and the respectability of women's work in the nineteenth century. The authors suggest that to appreciate fully the impact of the Industrial Revolution on women's employment opportunities, we must look to the periphery of the national economy, as well as the centre.

Women's employment and industrial organisation: commercial lace embroidery in early nineteenth-century Ireland and England

Abstract The early nineteenth century saw expanding work opportunities for women in commercial lace embroidery in Britain. This article traces the connection between the development of commercial lace embroidery in several locations – Nottingham, Essex and Limerick. Despite the fame of the Irish industry, it has received almost no academic attention. The differing structures of the Irish and English industries are examined. Aspects of lace manufacture highlight the increasing emphasis on cleanliness and the respectability of women's work in the nineteenth century. The authors suggest that to appreciate fully the impact of the Industrial Revolution on women's employment opportunities, we must look to the periphery of the national economy, as well as the centre.

War, Gender, and Industrial Innovation: Recruiting Women Weavers in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

War, Gender, and Industrial Innovation: Recruiting Women Weavers in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

William Carleton, Demiurge of Irish Carnival: Fardorougha the Miser, 1839

WILLIAM CARLETON, DEMIURGE OF IRISH CARNIVAL: FARDOROUGHA THE MISER, 1839 DAVID KRAUSE . . . only Carleton, born and bred a peasant, was able to give us the vast multitude of grotesque, pathetic, humourous persons, misers, pig-drivers, drunkards, school-masters, labourers, priests, madmen, and to Wll them all with an abounding vitality. . . . he was what few men have even been or can ever be, the creator of a new imaginative world, the demiurge of a new tradition. —W. B. Yeats the twentieth century comic world of James Joyce and the nineteenthcentury comic world of William Carleton—I want to begin with an analogy between the way these two literary giants created an abounding and indestructible vision of Ireland in their Wction. According to Frank Budgen, Joyce explained one of the aims in writing his great novel Ulysses in the following ambitious terms: “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”1 With proper respect for Joyce’s grand scheme, it should be pointed out that the reconstructed picture of Dublin would be more faithfully accurate with the addition of some essential people and places from his Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man— as well as from the indigenous and earthy Dublin of Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan, and Flann O’Brien. And if a similar reconstruction had to be made of nineteenth-century peasant Ireland, which has indeed disappeared now, a faithful picture could be recreated from Carleton’s great folk-epic comedy Fardorougha the Miser, as well as from his Traits and Stories of the Irish WILLIAM CARLETON, DEMIURGE OF IRISH CARNIVAL 24 1 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), pp. 67–68. Peasantry, but it would not be necessary to add any material from the writings of Maria Edgeworth, the Banims, or Gerald GriYn. I have decided to stress Fardorougha because it has too seldom been recognized and celebrated as a comic masterpiece; because, though it was apparently enjoyed by readers in Carleton’s time, it has since then been ignored or misunderstood by largely indiVerent critics who to this day have not perceived it to be a Wnely constructed and artfully rendered dark comedy; and because this novel, along with the short Wction in Traits and Stories, reXects the full measure of Carleton’s remarkable genius. Therefore , I want to present Carleton through Fardorougha as a striking example of what W. B. Yeats called the Celtic Demiurge, the symbolic creator who reigned over the primal and palpable peasant world of Ireland. I want to oVer this novel also as a quintessential illustration of what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnival world of comic Wction, as a rare emblem of what, in their separate yet related ways, Yeats and Bakhtin saw as the vitality and variety of the rich folkloric imagination. From many perspectives Carleton is a complex Wgure who has been approached with too many qualiWcations in an attempt to account for his minor inconsistencies and contradictions. In his own time, as well as ours, William Carleton (1794–1869) emerges as something of an enigma, for he is a towering and elusive artist who deWes convenient classiWcation. As a man and as a writer, Carleton could be both wildly creative and conservative, rebellious and insecure, strongly profane and sometimes sympathetic to religious faith, antidoctrinaire and sometimes accommodating to secular views. He lived through some of the worst years of agrarian conXict and the disastrous Famine of early nineteenth-century Ireland, and these tragic realities of necessity appear in his Wction, particularly in his tragicomic novels , where some form of violence functions as an overriding symbol of grim Irish experience, tempered only by Carleton’s compassion and his comic vision of survival. Perhaps Sigmund Freud most eVectively accounted for this connection between the shock of a tragic experience and a comic reaction to it as a psychological impulse that creates compensatory laughter when he wrote: “Now humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing aVects that interfere...

The nature and extent of urban and village foundation and improvement in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Ireland

Conventionally, Irish historians have assumed that the widespread urban and village foundation and improvement that occurred in Ireland between circa 1700 and 1845 came about largely as the result of the direct intervention of members of the landowning minority. These people are held to have engaged in the extension or reconstruction of settlement as a means of exerting control over exchange and marketing or of asserting their social status through patterns of conspicuous consumption. This paper argues that while this sort of direct involvement by landowners was important in some cases, their involvement in urban modernization in Ireland was much more likely to be indirect. Commonly, it was limited to the construction of new markets and other public utilities and to the provision of building leases. These encouraged a wide spectrum of other social groups to participate in the process of reconstruction. The identity of these other participants is explored and a typology of urban and village foundation and ...

The development of natural history in early nineteenth century Ireland

The Ireland of the early nineteenth century is today hardly discernible. Dublin, after London, was then the major city of the British Isles and looked the part of a cultural capital. Belfast was an increasingly prosperous industrial town, throwing out an assertive challenge. The previous century had seen the American Revolution in which Presbyterian Scots-Irish had played a major role—some were signatories to the Declaration of Independence. The French Revolution had plunged Europe into war and on its periphery both revolutions added to growing Irish notions of liberality of thought and national independence. For some, then, natural history studies were a part of the development known as the 'Enlightenment'. For the less idealistic, these studies were a chance to apply business acumen to a leisure activity—the ledger-book naturalists making accounts of the natural world—and for the leisured classes they were a new means of self-expressi on in otherwise unfilled time. Whatever the driving force, the naturalists needed material to work on and there was a singular dearth of it; this was to change dramatically. In 1792 Richard Kirwan F.R.S., a renowned Irish scientist, persuaded the Dublin Society to purchase for £1,350 the natural history museum of Nathaniel Gottfried Leske, Professor of Natural History at Marburg, who had amassed considerable collections consisting mainly of minerals, a large collection of shells and insects, a herbarium and several anatomical prepar­ ations (White, 1911:8). This presaged a flood of acquisitions as assiduous collectors began to journey to all parts of Ireland. English and continental material was acquired by purchase, exchange or gift, and exotic material flooded in as a consequence of ever expanding colonial connections. As the collections grew, so momentum in growth was encouraged. Collec­ tors became more knowledgeable and increasingly specialised, and the quality of information associated with specimens correspondingly improved. These larger, better collections generated a need for storage space, curators, and finance as, indeed, did the ever-growing specialised literature based on the collections; the aims of Irish institutions and societies became directed towards satisfying these requirements. The collectors and their fund of knowledge were to provide the basis for William Thompson's four-volume Natural History of Ireland (1849-1856), which seems to have embodied various ambitions of its contributors. It is, for example, based on Irish material in Irish institutions, it is enlightening, From Linnaeus to Darwin: commentaries on the history of biology and geology. Society for the History of Natural History, London, 1985.

Mental illness and rehabilitation in early nineteenth-century Ireland: the case of Charles Stock.

The case of a sixteen-year-old youth is presented on the basis of correspondence over the years 1806 to 1813. His initial breakdown was probably due to hebephrenic schizophrenia, but clinical detail is defective and the evidence is chiefly about the difficulties of recovery and rehabilitation. The case is discussed in relation to the treatment he received and against the background of provision for insanity and psychiatric methods and ideas in Ireland during the period.

Problems in Alcoholic Production and Controls in Early Nineteenth Century Ireland

From the time of Henry Grattan's pronouncement of 1791 that ‘the drinking of spirits’ had become ‘a great national evil’ to the conclusion of the Poor Law Report of 1837 that an Irishman could get ‘dead drunk for two pence', the problems of alcoholic production, consumption and controls plagued the Irish Government. In a country whose food supplies were often as precarious as its revenues, the brewing of beer and the distilling of spirits were enterprises as controversial as they were profitable. These industries, newly adapted to the large-scale production of the late eighteenth century, underwent rapid expansion during the first years of the Union despite restrictive taxation, periodic measures of prohibition and the persistent harping of temperance leaders. During this period Ireland became an exporter rather than an importer of alcoholic beverages and witnessed the development of a considerable number of licensed breweries and distilleries throughout the country.

Burials and bigotry in early nineteenth-century Ireland

Burials and bigotry in early nineteenth-century Ireland