Eighteenth-century Ireland Research Articles

‘To Fame Unknown’: Familiar Verse Epistles of the Spring-Yelverton Coterie

This article identifies Thomas Spring and Barry Yelverton as the authors of three previously unattributed poems written between 1758 and 1761, around the time these two were beginning their law studies at the Middle Temple in London. Based on internal evidence from the poems themselves and clues from Samuel Whyte’s 1772 anthology The Shamrock and other sources, I argue they should be viewed as products of a short-lived literary coterie. The article first examines the poems within their original manuscript context and how Spring and his friends explore the theme of choosing poetic anonymity as they contemplate embarking on careers in the law. Next, it examines the print history of these poems, which illustrates the conflicting motives of poets and anthologists who repackage manuscript poems in printed forms. Making these poems public in printed collections obscured the authors’ identities by obscuring the existence of the literary coterie to which they belonged. Bringing this coterie to light draws attention to the complex ways poetry functioned, in manuscript and in print, in eighteenth-century Ireland and invites further scholarly examination of these poems.

Barrack-Building, Mapping, and Settlement in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

The history of residential army barracks in Ireland has in recent years become a focus for more concerted study. 1 While a number of works focused upon individual barracks have been published over the years since the 1970s, 2 the first substantive consideration as to why a permanent country-wide network of barracks was built in Ireland in the late 1690s and early eighteenth century was first published in 2012. This work assessed why these barracks were built, how they were paid for, and ultimately what purposes they served. 3 Since then, additional work has been undertaken with regard to a more comprehensive identification and inventorying of over 360 such barracks built between 1690 and 1922. 4 However, while some consideration has been given to the impact of the building of a country-wide network of barracks upon cartographic practice, 5 there has been little to no assessment of the impact that such residential army barracks had upon patterns of settlement. It is the aim of this article to assess these interlinked elements of barrack-building, mapping, and settlement patterns in relation to each other in an eighteenth-century context, with a particular focus upon barracks built in County Armagh. 6

‘Came to her dressed in mans cloaths’: transgender histories and queer approaches to the family in eighteenth-century Ireland

ABSTRACT This article engages with queer and trans scholarship to produce a methodological think-piece on how to queer the Irish family. It draws on a case study of alleged crossdressing and attempted intimacy that was recorded in the Kirk Session (church court) minute book of the Irish Presbyterian congregation of Templepatrick, County Antrim. In March 1706, a woman named Margaret McCal appeared before Templepatrick Kirk Session and lodged a complaint against a fellow church member. Margaret alleged that an individual known to her as Elizabeth McIlroy had approached her ‘Dressed in mans cloaths’, called themselves ‘David Campbell’ and ‘pretend[ed] courtship to her’. How do we understand this case? What can Margaret’s story tell us about gender, sex, and relationships in eighteenth century Ireland? Moving beyond a reading of the Templepatrick case as a simple instance of crossdressing, this article opens up new discursive pathways in histories of gender and the Irish family by situating it within a trans historical framework. In response to the calls of trans and queer scholars to ‘denaturalise the cisgender turn’, the article begins by interrogating the Presbyterian archive as a cisnormative and heteronormative construction. Next, it offers a trans reading of the case and situates David Campbell, not simply as a woman dressed in men’s clothing but as an individual who moved through the world at particular points in time as a man. Finally, the article ends by queering our understanding of female desire by unsettling the relationship between sex and gender in the pursuit of its fulfilment. Albeit based on one case-study, the story of David and Margaret captures an extraordinary – yet, as I will argue, very ordinary, intimate encounter that has important implications for our understanding of the family in Ireland.

The Irish religious censuses of the 1760s: Catholics and Protestants in eighteenth-century Ireland. Edited by Brian Gurrin, Kerby A. Miller and Liam Kennedy. Pp 496. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission. 2022. €80.

The Irish religious censuses of the 1760s: Catholics and Protestants in eighteenth-century Ireland. Edited by Brian Gurrin, Kerby A. Miller and Liam Kennedy. Pp 496. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission. 2022. €80.

Government and the Regulation of Borough Corporations in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Government and the Regulation of Borough Corporations in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland

A Calvinist Confession? Interpreting the Thirty-Nine Articles and Writing the History of the Reformation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

A Calvinist Confession? Interpreting the Thirty-Nine Articles and Writing the History of the Reformation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

House and Home in Georgian Ireland, Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life

One of the pleasures of reading House and Home in Georgian Ireland, Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life, is the richness of detail which each author of this collected volume commits to its pages. In a series of nine chapters, the book ‘introduces a broader appreciation of the diverse meanings and materialities ascribed to and associated with house and home in eighteenth-century Ireland’ (p. 28), but this might be considered an understatement, as contained within the collection is a wealth of reflections and careful consideration of lives lived in Irish houses during the period. The volume originated with the online conference ‘Species of domestic spaces: house and home in eighteenth-century Ireland’, convened at the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin in June 2021. The book’s editor, Conor Lucey, has captured the breadth of discussion from that event, and incorporated this alongside a series of powerful impressions of intimate historical interiors. Strikingly, the chapters describe lived experiences amid private and public encounters with domestic spaces, incorporating the humblest of interior furnishings in single rooms and lodgings to the most opulent decorative features of Dublin’s finest town houses. Throughout the volume, the writings of Gaston Bachelard and George Perec form an expressive metanarrative to historical accounts of many of the homes that no longer exist, as ‘bit by bit, the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out of the shadow ….’ (p. 171).

Sylvester O'Halloran's influence on medicine in eighteenth-century Ireland

AbstractSylvester O'Halloran was a prominent surgeon in late eighteenth-century Limerick. He wrote extensively on medicine, history and antiquarianism. His contribution to medicine included a series of monographs on eye disease, limb amputation and head injury. Of these many publications only his work on head injury was of clinical significance. His proposals to standardise the training and assessment of surgeons in Ireland were reflected in the procedures of the County Infirmaries Board and likely inspired the curriculum of the newly founded Royal College of Surgeons in 1784. This article reflects on O'Halloran's medical career, suggesting that his impact on practice was modest but his proposals on surgical education contributed to the professionalisation of surgery in Ireland in the eighteenth century.

The Development of the Discourse Surrounding ‘Social Improvement’ during the Anglo-Irish Trade Dispute, 1695–1800

The idea of social improvement, including the concept of ‘reciprocity’, had substantially been developed in the Anglo-Irish trade disputes since the late seventeenth century. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, commentators became more sceptical of ‘reciprocity’. The Irish reception of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations must be situated in this historical context, and the article explores the implications of the relevant discourses for John Robertson's concept of Enlightenment. Like in Scotland, ‘improvement’ was considered significant in eighteenth-century Ireland. Nevertheless, political economy played different roles in the two nations because of their different political systems and circumstances. Many, including Adam Smith, believed that political and constitutional, rather than economic, reforms would be more crucial to improving Irish society.

‘Oh, This Is More of Stretch’s Show’: Randal Stretch and Puppet Theatre in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

This article outlines the popularity - and financial success - of an eighteenth-century Dublin puppet theatre that threatened mainstream theatres of the time. Randall Stretch’s puppet theatre, in Dublin’s Capel Street, became the centrepiece for satirical and political commentary of the day. Stretch’s theatre caught the attention of Dean Swift and his circle and is commemorated in satirical verse of the period. For decades, Dubliners used the phrase ‘This is more of Stretch’s Show’ to refer to anything outlandish or incredible. The article underlines the power of the puppet theatre as a satirical device and the extent to which it can rival mainstream theatre.

Women under the Law in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Literary and Legal Campaign of Dorothea Du Bois

Dorothea Du Bois’s (1728-74) authorial career was defined by her efforts to recover what she believed was her rightful position in society both in the eyes of the public and under the law. When she was a child, her father, the 6th Earl of Anglesey, abandoned her mother and declared that their marriage had been bigamous, rendering Du Bois illegitimate. Du Bois’s contrasting representations of her fraught family history in her writings, fictional and non-fictional, reflect her dynamic response to a series of legal disputes of the 1760s and 1770s regarding the earl’s true heir. Du Bois appeals to the law as an ideal moral arbiter, yet she reveals the system in Ireland to be animated by self-interested men for whom women’s suffering was irrelevant. Thus, while Du Bois’s motivation in writing was deeply personal, her works illuminate aspects of women’s experience neither her society nor the law would acknowledge.

George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy by Stephen H. Daniel

Reviewed by: George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy by Stephen H. Daniel Peter West Stephen H. Daniel. George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 352. Hardback, $85.00. Stephen H. Daniel’s monograph offers a novel interpretation of Berkeley’s philosophy of mind while situating Berkeley’s thought within the context of early eighteenth-century epistemology and metaphysics. The text is commendable for its attempt to shed light on Berkeley’s engagement with thinkers and traditions that tend to fall outside the canon of early modern philosophy (such as Stoicism, Ramism, and “noncanonical” thinkers like Jonathan Edwards, Anthony Collins, and Peter Browne) and its attempt to place Berkeley’s lesser-known works, such as De Motu and Siris, on a par with his best-known texts. Daniel’s approach to historical interpretation is strongly contextualist and fits well with recent attempts to read the history of philosophy not as a debate among the “big seven” (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant) but as a complicated network of exchanges—often in very localized contexts (such as eighteenth-century Ireland, see chapter 17). Daniel’s aim is to show that Berkeley developed an idiosyncratic account of the mind, which relies on a notion of substance that was not accepted by, and may not have even been familiar to, the likes of Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. Berkeley scholars may already be familiar with this claim. Daniel has previously defended it in various journal publications that are included as chapters in this book (such as chapters 1 and 2, where Daniel argues that Berkeley’s philosophy of mind is more indebted to Stoic and Ramist philosophy than to Cartesian and Lockean thought). It is worth noting that since a defense of this account of Berkeley’s philosophy of mind is Daniel’s focus, and his aims are primarily interpretative rather than expository, the text would be best suited to those with some prior knowledge of Berkeley’s philosophy. In the remainder of this review, I have two aims: first, to explain Daniel’s reading of what Berkeley takes a mind to be, and second, to put forward a criticism of Daniel’s interpretation, focusing on his claim that Berkeley’s notebooks ought to be read in just the same way as his published works. As the appendices to the book indicate (including a series of “Replies to My Critics”), Daniel is aware that his interpretation of Berkeley is not always warmly received. A likely explanation for this is that it is not always easy to understand what a mind is (for Berkeley) if Daniel is right. Daniel tells us this is because we are reading Berkeley in light of the substance-mode ontology of Descartes and Locke (and Aristotle before them) that Berkeley set out to reject (13–16, 294). This is a good reason to simply try to understand how Daniel’s interpretation works. It is tempting to think of the mind as something that has thoughts and ideas, feels emotions, and performs actions like perceiving and reasoning. Our ordinary language reflects this: we say things like “I am tired” or “I am thinking.” Construed in this way, the mind is a thing—in early modern parlance, a substance—that has attributes and acts in certain ways. Similarly, I might describe a tree (another substance) in terms of its properties (tall, solid, brown, etc.) and activities (growing, photosynthesizing, etc.). However, Berkeley thinks this ordinary way of thinking is wrong. Really, he claims, the tree just is a collection of sensible properties (what he calls “ideas”). If Daniel’s interpretation of Berkeley is right, it is also a mistake to think of the mind as a thing behind its thoughts, ideas, perceptions, and emotions. The mind is, as Berkeley puts it in a notebook entry, “a congeries of perceptions” (34). Daniel claims this does not make Berkeley a Humean bundle theorist; [End Page 510] the mind may not be a thing, but it remains a “substance” (in the way the ancient Stoics construed substances [26–36]). The mind is an active principle that translates collections of properties into something meaningful. Because we are minds, we do not...

Two hostile bishops? A reexamination of the relationship between Peter Browne and George Berkeley beyond their alleged controversy

ABSTRACT For decades scholars have argued that there was a heated argumentative exchange between the bishop of Cork and Ross, Peter Browne, and the bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley. Thus, they have unduly reduced Browne to a mere adversary of Berkeley. They also thereby distorted the perception of the Irish intellectual milieu in the seventeenth / eighteenth century and the way its participants influenced one another. Contrary to this controversy-reading I establish how ill-supported the prevailing narrative of the relationship between the bishops of Cork and Cloyne is. This, in turn, allows me to demonstrate that the discussion about the problem of divine analogy in seventeenth / eighteenth century Ireland was embedded in a larger context, which has hitherto been too little appreciated. I will illustrate this point by demonstrating that the two bishops not only reacted to William King's solution to the problem of divine analogy, but that they did so by accepting his ‘resemblance-requirement'. That is, King’s notion that divine representation requires resemblance. This indicates how the discussion about the problem of divine analogy in seventeenth / eighteenth century Ireland was influenced by the way these churchmen thought about the relation of resemblance, representation, and knowledge more generally.

John Wesley, Roman Catholicism, and ‘No Popery!’

ABSTRACT This article examines John Wesley's anti-Catholicism and his hostility to ‘popery’ on theological, social, and political grounds. The subject is related to wider attitudes to the Catholic minority and its faith in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The article stresses the complexity of Wesley's thinking, thinking which ranged from his admiration for some post-Reformation Catholic figures to his abhorrence of a Church that he feared imperilled the souls of its adherents. It further investigates various germane topics, such as the response of Catholics to early Methodism and Wesley's involvement in the events that culminated in the Gordon riots of 1780.

Imperial Connections between Ireland and India in the Late Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACT This article examines the imperial connections between Ireland and India in the late eighteenth century in order to demonstrate how colonial territories engaged with one another beyond the shadow, or concerns, of the British metropole. Building on the landmark work of C. A. Bayly in comparing Ireland and India’s connected history of nationalism during the long nineteenth century, as well as other scholarly publications concerning migration and land ownership, it explores the broader issue of the circulation of people and ideas during a pivotal moment in the later 1700s. A joint consideration of the two-way traffic that operated between Ireland and India provides a more balanced view of the global opportunities provided by imperial expansion, and of the ways in which Irish and Indian travellers engaged with colonialism. Secondly, the circulation of intellectual ideas between the two countries, and the resonance of domestic Irish or Indian concerns in their corresponding locale, demonstrate how colonial subjects interacted with developments occurring elsewhere in the empire. This article weaves together the varying strands of comparison that scholars have already carried out on late eighteenth-century Ireland and India to argue for a more rounded image of continuous circulation.

‘Five pounds for a swadler’s head’: the Cork anti-Methodist riots of 1749–50*

Abstract This article constitutes the first large-scale examination of the Cork anti-Methodist riots of 1749–50. Methodist hagiographers have described the rioters as disengaged foot soldiers for Cork’s corporation and Anglican clergy. By exploring these disturbances in their religious, political and social context, this paper suggests that the predominantly Catholic rioters were fuelled by their own politico-theological grievances, thereby illuminating the persistence of religious violence in eighteenth-century Ireland. Furthermore, by exploring tensions between Cork Methodists and Baptists, it highlights both the ways in which Methodists sometimes fuelled opposition and the fact that they were not always the sole victims of anti-Methodist violence.

Poverty and Prosperity: Political Economics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

AbstractI draw attention to a group of thinkers in Ireland in the first half of the eighteenth century that made significant contributions to the philosophy of political economy. Loosely organized around the Dublin Philosophical Society founded in 1731, these individuals employed a similar set of assumptions and shared a common interest in the well-being of the Irish people. I focus on Samuel Madden (1686-1765), Arthur Dobbs (1689-1765), and Thomas Prior (1680–1751) and argue for two main theses. First, these Irish thinkers shared a number of commonalities with the English mercantilist thinkers of the eighteenth century, and to the degree that they did, their proposals to aid Ireland and reduce poverty were largely doomed to failure. Second, these Irish thinkers also importantly diverged from typical eighteenth-century mercantilist thinking in several ways. These modifications to mercantilism resulted in large part from the unusual political situation of Ireland (as a nation politically dependent on England) and helped orient their economic thinking along more institutional lines. In particular, the emphasis of the Irish on full employment and on the modification of social as well as political institutions is an early step forward in making political economy more sophisticated.

Forum Introduction: The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Forum Introduction:The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland Rebecca Anne Barr (bio) In the decade following Ian McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009), the study of what was once "Ascendancy" Ireland has been diversified, expanded, and revitalized. McBride's ambitious work was in many ways the product of two decades of historical revisionism, acting to concretize objections to the ideological restrictions of the New History of Ireland school.1 His work has helped dislodge orthodox and restrictive narratives about Ireland in the 1700s, replacing the image of Protestant hegemony with a vivid sense of the flux, tension, and incipient instability of this island of co-existing and competing cultures, creeds, and languages. As history "from the outside in" McBride's work evaded the ideological pitfalls of Irish Studies as a relatively immature field and one that had somewhat uncritically adopted the ideology of postcolonialism in the service of nationalist politics.2 As Sarah McKibben has noted, eighteenth-century Irish literature displays the pains and the profits of a "mutual transformation of socio-cultural forms," even as that transformation was marked by violence, subjugation, and resistance.3 Due to such historical complexity and complicities, eighteenth-century scholarship has been somewhat marginalized by the state apparatuses (both North and South). Both jurisdictions are currently marking their twentieth-century foundations in the so-called decade of centenaries, providing a funding bonanza for historians and academics. By contrast, both the 1798 rebellion and the rich [End Page 331] Georgian built heritage in Ireland is comparatively neglected, partly due to the ideological dissonance of Protestant republicanism and persistent ambivalence about the national status of the so-called Anglo-Irish (a term coined in the 1920s to distinguish between the supposedly "genuine" Catholic, Irish-speaking Irish, and the Protestant, sometimes-Unionist gentry).4 Academic research thrives, then, against a backdrop of relative disregard.5 Yet, in the context of Brexit's dramatic reshaping of political and intellectual boundaries, eighteenth-century Ireland offers a provocative case study for reassessing the interconnections of nations, literature, and political history. The constitutional flux of the period offers salutary analogues for our own time. As governments increasingly insist on the imperviousness of their borders and value the homogeneity of their citizenry, it behoves academics to recall the contested origins of permeable states. These conceptual and political borders are still shifting, still uneasy. This forum on the new eighteenth-century Ireland at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2018 sought to examine how recent work on eighteenth-century Ireland reshapes our understanding of the period and place and to reflect upon how new research offers to transform our sense of the cultural and political landscape of the time. Over the past decade, scholarship has re-examined Ireland's canon. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is a signal example, bringing together bibliographers, intellectual historians, and literary critics to illuminate a multifaceted Irish author attuned to both English and Irish readerships and whose Dublin editions attest to a sophisticated audience with a taste for controversy, typographic inventiveness, and wit. Such revisionary projects are not confined to the behemoths of Irish literature but extend to once-unfashionable figures such as Oliver Goldsmith. Beyond the familiar figures, however, Irish literature of the period is too often overlooked by scholars outside the island as a kind of special interest category with little perceived relevance to those interested in broader trends in eighteenth-century studies. Indeed, despite English Short Title Catalogue listings, Dublin editions are frequently overlooked by scholars, presuming them to be mere reprints, though many make substantive editorial alterations and revisions. Work is underway to change this situation. Series such as Early Irish Fiction, c. 1680–1820 and The Literature of Early Modern Ireland have made rich and innovative Irish works available to readers in outstanding critical editions. Ian Campbell Ross's edition of History of Jack Connor (1752), by Irish-Huguenot author William Chaigneau, for instance, presents this novel in a revised and accessible form.6 Jack Connor's generic playfulness, self-conscious handling of picaresque, and thoroughly engaging narrative make it an ideal text for undergraduate studies of prose fiction in [End Page 332] English, not...

Print, Manuscript, and Oral Literary Cultures: The Case of Eighteenth-Century Irish Song

Print, Manuscript, and Oral Literary Cultures:The Case of Eighteenth-Century Irish Song Moyra Haslett (bio) When the "Meeting of the Harpers" was organized in Belfast in the summer of 1792, its principal aim was to record and thus preserve Irish tunes that might otherwise disappear with the deaths of the harpers themselves. While the impetus was shaped by antiquarian interests of the late century, the context of the 1790s provided obvious political motives too. (The meeting was held in the Belfast Exchange Rooms from 11–13 July so as to coincide with commemorative celebrations of the fall of the Bastille.) The Irish language tutor who was to transcribe the lyrics of the songs did not attend (we don't know why), but the musician who transcribed the tunes, Edward Bunting, would go on to publish three volumes of what he called the "ancient music of Ireland" (1796, 1809, 1840), the product of many decades of research transcribing and notating Irish melodies from performances in rural Ireland and the first sustained attempt to document Irish-language song. Beyond the three published volumes, then, are the more extensive manuscripts, held by Special Collections in the library of Queen's University Belfast, and beyond those manuscripts the vanished performances themselves, which the print and manuscript records shadow. This essay reflects on issues arising directly from the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded "Irish Song Project" conducted at Queen's [End Page 349] University (2012–2015), which, in seeking to investigate the historical development of the different repertoires of Irish song, drew upon the evidence offered by print and manuscript cultures and supplemented these with an attempt to catch something of oral culture through performance practice as late as the emergence of audio technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 As full a survey as possible of song before 1850, with a particular focus on song-tunes, was made in order to see if there were continuities of tradition and cultural practice between songs and song traditions. Although the Bunting collection at Queen's University provided the core resource, a systematic survey of songs in manuscript and print held in many libraries was attempted. The resulting online database (www.irishsongproject.qub.ac.uk) offers an indicative sample of just over two hundred songs. Selecting songs for inclusion brought difficult issues of weighting and balance into question. How could we ensure that the vibrant culture of Irish-language song in particular would be properly represented? Stretching the parameters of the survey to 1850 allowed the project to draw upon early-nineteenth-century interest in Irish song, represented most significantly in the collections by Bunting, James Hardiman, George Petrie, William Forde, Henry Hudson, John Edward Pigot, and James Goodman. Quite a few songs got published by wending their ways into Anglophone culture, particularly in the form of ballad operas or in collections of song-tunes in the eighteenth century. The tune specification for "Eibhlin Aruin" in Charles Coffey's ballad opera The Beggar's Wedding (Dublin, 1729) indicates its existence thirty years before its first appearance in a Gaelic manuscript. The popular song "Come haste to the wedding" was included in the Dublin-performed pantomime A Trip to the Dargle or the Irish Wedding (1762).2 And the tune "Cremona" is one of many Irish airs included in the London-printed Aria di Camera (c. 1730). Since musical notation is rare in early manuscripts, certainly until Bunting's project of transcribing traditional airs, these sources are particularly significant. Engraved sheets of musical notation were often too costly for Dublin printers: while prestige publications of psalms and several notable prints of Irish tunes did include printed music, the vast majority of song-texts, including ballad opera texts, appeared without their accompanying melodies. And no Dublin printer in the early eighteenth century owned a Gaelic font, so Irish-language texts had to be anglicized unless they were published abroad. Increased attention to bilingual crossings in eighteenth-century Ireland is evident in a number of recent works.3 But while previous studies of music in eighteenth-century Ireland have noted a number of songs and airs that traverse the traditionally perceived divisions of religion and...

“This Window Is All Racked and Tattered”: Maria Edgeworth and the Architectural and Literary Legacy of the Sash Window in Ireland

“This Window Is All Racked and Tattered”: Maria Edgeworth and the Architectural and Literary Legacy of the Sash Window in Ireland Rachel Ramsey (bio) In 1809, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar was celebrated in Ireland by the construction of a 134-foot pillar and statue of Lord Nelson on Sackville Street in Dublin, the “second city” of the British Empire. In 1966, an Irish Republican splinter group blew up the pillar on the renamed O’Connell Street. In a similar but much less violent vein, in the decades after the Anglo-Irish War, sectors of the Irish government would systematically repaint red postboxes green, rename its streets, discard statues of British monarchs (including sending an imposing statue of Queen Victoria to Australia), and line its thoroughfares with statues of Irish heroes from Daniel O’Connell to Jim Larkin. As Yvonne Whelan argues, these acts were attempts to wipe out “imperial iconography” and reestablish a narrative of Irish identity on the “cultural landscape” of Dublin and beyond.1 Such attempts to remove and re-create were conflicted, however, as the newly formed Irish government decided for both economic and ideological reasons to restore war-damaged but flagship imperial buildings, mainly those built in the late eighteenth century, such as the Custom House, Four Courts, and General Post Office. Undeniably, Ireland’s colonial history demonstrates that monuments and street names and architectural elements all work together to reinforce narratives of national identity and cultural dominance while simultaneously providing a focus for the forces of resistance and change. With the 2004 erection of “the spire” in Nelson’s empty spot on O’Connell Street, it may be tempting to see Ireland as no longer struggling with its “imperial iconography,” but such thinking would ignore recent debates over development, preservation, heritage, and tourism. Ireland continues to confront what it means to live in a built environment designed to establish the political, social, and economic dominance of another culture and country. In seeking out [End Page 94] answers to what animates the conflicting desire to replace and preserve much of what speaks to centuries of British or Anglo-Irish dominance, it’s important to understand how and by whom the built environment is interpreted and to unearth the often overlooked narratives associated with inherited architectural elements. An eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse may appear simultaneously as the legacy of imperialism or as a “work of art.”2 These radically different responses to the same object are rooted in a long history of interpretation and representation, a history often obscured but still felt. In this article, I unpack the early cultural and literary narratives attached to one of Ireland’s most common architectural elements: the eighteenth-century sash window. Widely adopted by the English in the late seventeenth century and imported into Ireland in the eighteenth century, the sash window graces many of Ireland’s civic and domestic buildings, but discussions of its place in Irish literature have been confined mainly to the practical rather than the ideological. The architectural dominance of the English-imported sash window in late eighteenth-century Ireland coincides with the rise of one of its most famous Anglo-Irish chroniclers, Maria Edgeworth, whose work is instrumental in establishing a descriptive history of the sash window in Ireland. In her life and fiction, I argue the sash window acts as an architectural marker of Anglo-Irish tastes, a sign of modern conveniences and civilized life, and ultimately, because of its English origins, a symbol of English technological, political, and cultural superiority. While the sash window clearly registers as a symbol, it is perhaps more useful to read it as what Bill Brown theorizes as a “thing.” In Other Things, Brown asserts “producing a thing—effecting thingness—depends . . . on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable objectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it is what it typically is.”3 The window as an object that has been removed from its typical circuits describes the status of the English sash window in Ireland. In particular, the sash windows in Edgeworth’s writings are invariably broken, stuck, unworkable—the very condition by which Brown...