Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century (review)

This wide-ranging collection of twelve essays complicates the stabilities of the Victorian age in Ireland and Scotland. Its authors, many of them early career academics, consider topics as variant as tourism, agricultural technology, economics, tuberculosis, and sectarian parades. A number of chapters make significant contributions to their individual fields of study. Each investigates the "cosy roseat glow of pan-Celticism" (7), and many of the finest chapters unpack aspects of the "complicated nature of Ulster-Scottish identity" (9), an identity that, Clare M. Norcio explains, inhabits a "cultural no-man's land between Irishness and Scottishness" (31). Thus the volume's editors are at pains to emphasise that "this book is not simply about varieties of Hiberno-Scottish tension," and that "dissonance is one of the central themes to emerge from this collection" (7).

Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century is at its stongest when its contributors adopt the comparative approach that makes best sense of the project's objectives. Kevin James's essay on "Scotland and 'Tourist Development' in Late-Victorian Ireland" is a suggestive exploration of a theme that is increasingly recognised as important across disciplines. James's account demonstrates that national image was being formed in tourist discourse in comparative and often evaluative terms. Norcio's study of "Societies and Seminaries: Technological Exchange in Ulster Agriculture" provides a nice case study of the means by which farming in northeast Ireland was supposedly improved by those who were and those who merely believed themselves to be Scots. Andrew R. Holmes's discussion of "Irish Presbyterian Commemorations of their Scottish Past, c. 1830–1914" contextualises the complexities of one kind of identity formation in the largest Protestant denomination in the northeast and advances the conclusions of his important recent work in this area. Frank Ferguson's consideration of "'The Third Character': The Articulation of Scottish Identities in Two Irish Writers" similarly observes the tensions and opportunities provided by this juxtaposition, if not combination, of nations, literatures, and cultures. Peter Gray's investigation of "Thomas Chalmers and Irish Poverty," meanwhile, is a masterful discussion of an unjustifiably overlooked theme in nineteenth-century Irish-Scottish relations, and Patrick Maume's essay, "From Scotland's Storied Land: William McComb and Scots-Irish Presbyterian Identity," provides a thorough and insightful analysis of one of the period's most widely read representatives of this distinctive confessional and cultural tradition. Matthew Potter's essay, "The Urban Local State in Scotland and Ireland to 1900: Parallels and Contrasts," demonstrates a series of parallels that appear surprising in the context of the political differentiation that had, historically, marked these islands. Susan Kelly's "Tuberculosis Cures Used in Ireland, 1700–1950" strays outside the collection's chronological boundaries to extremely good effect, drawing especially richly on the older folkways, the influence of which lingered into and beyond the nineteenth century. Richard B. McCready's investigation of Dundee St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the second half of the nineteenth century offers a surprising account of a diaspora's construction of a national identity in exile, as well as a description of national difference within the boundaries of Scottish Catholicism. Finally, Amy O'Reilly's study of the Hibernian Society of Glasgow from 1792 to 1824, though oddly placed toward the end of the collection, neatly juxtaposes its conclusions with those of S. Karly Kehoe's "Irish Migrants and the Recruitment of Catholic Sisters in Glasgow, 1847–1878" to demonstrate the complexity of the often transreligious character of Irish institutions in Scotland and the frequent divisions between Irish and Scottish adherents within the institutions of Scottish Catholicism.

Despite these and other achievements, the essays in this volume do not address the breadth of topic promised in the title. A subtitle would have clarified those aspects of Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century with which the collection aimed especially to deal, and might have explained the rationale for including the final essay...