Visualizing '98: Irish Nationalist Cartoons Commemorate the Revolution

By the time of its centenary celebration, the Irish revolution of 1798 occupied a central place within the Irish nationalist construct of history, one that was consonant with the nationalists’ larger story of the Irish past. According to this reading of history, the formative processes in the Irish past included invasion, colonization, and confiscation; religious persecution; and emotional and physical traumas stemming from eviction, emigration, and famine. The human face of the narrative was illustrated by recalling the lives of heroic individuals who upheld the island’s Gaelic traditions and fought to restore Ireland’s national sovereignty, and by celebrating the accomplishments of those exiles who contributed to the development of Europe, the trans-Atlantic world, and points beyond.

The rebellion’s centenary provided nationalists with an opportunity to transmit both the story of 1798 and the larger interpretation of Irish history to a rising generation of enthusiasts eager to learn about their past. When the Centenary Executive Committee convened in June 1897 its members decided to sponsor activities that would both educate the country’s youth, who were not taught much Irish history in the national and intermediate schools, and revivify the public’s memory of 1798. ¹ Over the next few months, the centennial’s organizers made plans for adults and young people alike to join local ‘98 clubs, to march in memorial parades, to dedicate monuments and statues, and to make pilgrimages to hallowed battlegrounds and revered gravesites. Nationalist enthusiasts could attend plays and watch performances of tableaux vivant. They could read patriotic poetry, histories and biographies, short stories, and historical fiction, all centering on the rebellion. They could compete in drawing and writing contests like those conducted in the Weekly Freeman’s popular “Fireside Club” and by such cultural organizations as the Gaelic League. But another way that nationalists could teach was by visualizing ‘98 in colorful cartoons and illustrations that Irish periodicals included as supplements.

Irish nationalist illustrators placed graphic representations of the revolution within a construct of the event that had evolved slowly over time. As Kevin Whelan notes, the conflict was fought twice: once on bloody battlefields and then in the war of words that raged throughout the following century. ² The latter conflict, which was fought for possession of the historical record, broke out when Sir Richard Musgrave published his Memoirs of the Various Rebellions in Ireland (1801). Musgrave established the interpretation of 1798 that informed the thought of Irish unionists throughout the century and also proved to be a foil for nationalist interpretations that developed soon afterward. Musgrave eliminated the connection between the activities of the United Irishmen in the northern province from those of the United Irishmen in the south, erased signs of cooperation between Protestants and Catholics, and emphasized the sectarian violence used against Protestants by the Catholic rebels (Whelan, pp. 135–37). By the end of the nineteenth century, the potential passage of home rule legislation for Ireland seemed to many unionists and Protestants to renew the threat against them. ³ Most unionists chose, therefore, to ignore the centennial year’s events, although some took time to object to the “malevolent travesties of history that are being put in the hands of the people by the nationalist press.” ⁴ Predictably, events associated with the nationalists’ recollection of 1798 in Belfast provided an outlet for the violent expression of suppressed sectarian animosity. ⁵

The nationalists’ reconstruction of the story of 1798 also began to take shape in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, but it continued to develop over the next seventy years. Early in the century, Irish Whigs and political leaders as diverse as Henry Grattan and Daniel O’Connell distanced themselves from the violent aspects of ‘98 (Whelan, pp. 143–48, 151–53). Their interpretation of the rebellion emphasized instead misgovernment from Dublin Castle as the principal cause of the outbreak, and they centered their story on the constitutional aims of the United Irishmen. Forty years later, R. R. Madden’s seven-volume The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times (1843–46) provided the material for a second interpretive strand. Focusing on the...