Ireland Abroad: Politics and Professions in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Ireland Abroad collects fifteen papers delivered at a conference at the University of Aberdeen under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland. As with most publications of this genre, the intention is to show a variety of disciplinary approaches to a common theme: in this case, the Irish diaspora during the nineteenth century. The collection is a flawed and, at times, frustrating contribution to this overarching theme. Channelling the energies of scholars from disparate backgrounds (history, sociology, literary studies) into a coherent narrative is always difficult. Unfortunately the editorial policy here has been to construct a general rubric by stretching key concepts such as "nineteenth century," "abroad," and "professions" beyond their historical contexts to the extent that the volume appears as a loose collection of essays in search of a general theme. The collection kicks off, for example, with a meditation on the notebook of Wolfe Tone (a reprint of a chapter from Declan Kiberd's well-known Irish Classics [2001]), a man who did not live to see the dawn of the nineteenth century, and ends with a study of asylum seekers in modern Ireland. The editor claims that the collection breaks new ground by focusing on professionals, defined as "relatively privileged, literate, [and] educated" (10). But this category is stretched to include policemen and domestic servants. Also rather worrisome is the editor's decision to focus "on the state of being abroad, rather than engage with the minutiae of cohort depletion, passenger lists, or patterns of settlement" (10). Yet it is on these categories that much of the most interesting work on the Irish migrant experience has been founded. Finally, given that Ireland, from 1801, was subsumed into the greater political entity of the United Kingdom, there is debate as to whether "abroad" could mean overseas without necessarily meaning over the Irish Sea. This thorny historiographical issue is essential to any study of the professions, as London exerted a considerable influence over the conduct of doctors (General Medical Council) and scientists (the Department of Science & Art). But this collection scarcely notes an awareness of the importance of these interesting and emotive historiographical issues.

Ireland Abroad is divided into three sections. The first, "Imaginings," delineates how an (often delusional) image of Ireland was created by emigrants. This section includes a study by Cliona Ó Gallchoir of the French writer Madame de Genlis's bizarre story "The Great Earl of Cork; or the Artless Seduction" (1808), a romance based on the life of the seventeenth-century landlord Richard Boyle. De Genlis never visited Ireland, nor does she seem to have been overly sensitive to the dictates of historical accuracy. At one point her romance has Boyle falling madly in love with Lady Ranelagh, Boyle's real-life daughter. To use such an obviously trivial piece of fictional ephemera as the foundation for an investigation of how Ireland was reimagined abroad is to confuse ignorance with insight. Furthermore, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan's decision to use Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) for a study of the ambiguous role of the Irish in the Empire is so mired in the exhausted jargon of postcolonial theory that it lacks any sense of political or historical specificity.This is especially disappointing when the careers of crucial Irish figures abroad such as William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (electromagnetics), Sir Anthony MacDonnell (Indian Civil Service), and William Crooke and George Grierson (both linguistics) remain comparatively underexplored.

The second section, "Professions," is more satisfying but also suffers from this lack of a coherent editorial policy. The term "profession" is stretched beyond its conventional Victorian meaning to include Irish domestic servants in the USA. Two biographical studies of Irish middle-class emigrants such as Richard Robert Madden and Alexander Robert Crawford are excellent. Elizabeth Malcolm's preliminary exploration of Irish policemen in Britain and Australia whets the appetite nicely for what promises to be an interesting and much-needed research project. While...