Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture, and: Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (review)

Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture, by Terry Eagleton; pp. x + 345. Cork: Cork University Press; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998, £14.95 paper, $19.95 paper.

Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, by Terry Eagleton; pp. 192. London and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999, £45.00, £13.99 paper, $59.95, $21.95 paper.

The earlier of these two fine studies by Terry Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture, is the fifth title in the series "Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs," under the general editorship of Seamus Deane. Crazy John marks the continued collaboration of Deane and Eagleton, both of whom have contributed mightily to Irish studies--and Irish culture--for more than a quarter of a century. In 1971, for example, while still in his twenties, Eagleton wrote a widely cited essay on William Butler Yeats's "Easter 1916" (1916) and has continued over the years to turn his keen materialist sensibilities to Irish culture, particularly that of the nineteenth century. As Eagleton remarks in a prefatory note to Scholars and Rebels, the two volumes considered here, along with Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (1995), constitute a trilogy of which Scholars and Rebels, focused narrowly and productively on Ascendancy intellectuals in Victorian Dublin, is the final installment.

Some readers of Victorian Studies would doubtless find more to like in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger and Scholars and Rebels than in Crazy John and the Bishop. The slimmer, final work of the trilogy makes a narrow, yet deep, excavation into the ideological paradoxes of an Anglo-Irish intellectual coterie of Victorian Dublin that found itself "doubly displaced" by both priest and politician (25). Eagleton has much to say about this group, which includes the historian W. E. H. Lecky; such editors and contributors to the Dublin University Magazine as Isaac Butt, Samuel Ferguson, and Charles Lever, as well as less-often-discussed writers such as Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde) and Emily Lawson; and such thinkers as William Stokes, William Wilde, George Sigerson, and William Rowan Hamilton. All the while, adapting the Gramscian rubric of "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals for the historical and economic realities of a colonized country, Eagleton attempts to chart the ideological striations that crossed an intellectual community "caught between a species of colonial paternalism and a more native nationalism" (46). This "formidable intellectual power-house," as Eagleton describes it, was "divided from the common people by religion and ethnicity, for which patriotism had to compensate" (46).

Heathcliff, too, has much to say about nineteenth-century Ireland. Its longest chapter, for instance, a study of "Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel," includes readings of Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, William Carleton, and others. The following chapter, "Culture and Politics from Davis to Joyce" is located squarely in the nineteenth century, from the Young Ireland movement through the cultural nationalism of Douglas Hyde's Gaelic League some fifty years later. By comparison, Crazy John is a much more sprawling project. This is neither to suggest that it offers little of interest to specialists in Victorian culture, nor to impugn Victorianists as narrow in interest or stodgy. In fact, two of the book's most intriguing chapters--"Cork and the Carnivalesque" and "Home and Away: International Émigrés in the Irish Novel"--are located either entirely or considerably in the nineteenth century.

But these come after an exhaustive, and exhausting, reading of John Toland and Bishop Berkeley and an instructive chapter entitled "The Good-Natured Gael," which moves from a meditation on stereotyping to considerations of such eighteenth-century figures as Richard Steele, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith. The book also includes single, considerably shorter chapters on the eighteenth-century poet William Dunkin, Thomas Moore, Yeats, Samuel...