Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (review)

On May 21, 1747, following the arrest for debt of one of their number, rioting Trinity College students made their way to the Black Dog, or Newgate prison, where shots were fired by the constabulary, killing two. The authoritative Burke editor JT Boulton is of the opinion that a celebrated passage in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) may refer to the Black Dog riots, which occurred while Burke was himself a student at Trinity. The passage in question describes the manner in which identification is produced amidst the racket of the protesting crowd: "The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect; and by the sole strength of the sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forbear being bor[n]e down, and joining in the common cry, and common resolution of the croud." Burke's "best established tempers" are not, for some, well enough established stoically to ignore the pull of protest; Adam Smith, for instance writes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that "we do not fly" towards the "hoarse, boisterous, and discordant voice of anger."

The difference between the Burkean response to the protesting voice, and that of such mainstream Enlightenment figures as Smith are central to Luke Gibbons's holistic study of Burke's career, which reveals a conflicted political character whose feelings for the oppressed jostled with the constrictions of party politics. A simplistic emphasis on conservatism which ignores "the unresolved counter currents in his thought," most particularly the unsettling concept of the sublime in his aesthetic theory, has obscured that capacious political sympathy produced, for Gibbons, out of Burke's Irish background.

The Irish Burke has long been a neglected figure. His adoption as a seer by conservatives usually requires a playing-down of his Irishness, and his fidelity to the cause of the Irish Catholics is generally no more than a footnote to a traditionalist treatment of his corpus. Burke's entire career, however, was indelibly and primarily influenced by his Irish experience. Born in Dublin, Burke was educated initially at a hedge school, then at the Quaker School at Ballitore in County Kildare, and finally at Trinity College, Dublin. Burke's father was a Protestant just converted from Catholicism. His mother was a Nagle, and thus a member of one of the most substantial Catholic families to escape the confiscations of property that took place after the Battle of the Boyne. The family's influence in early eighteenth-century Ireland was strong, particularly in so-called "Nagle Country"—the Blackwater Valley of North Cork. His maternal background, and the instrumental nature of his father's conversion, would lead to Burke's characterization in England as a crypto-Catholic. Additionally, Burke's family history and background is infused with the residual Jacobitism that characterized the politics of the Gaelic and Catholic Irish generally through the mid-century, and bled into the Whiteboy disturbances in Munster in the 1760s.

Burke's father was the defense attorney for the Jacobite James Cotter, a victim of judicial murder in 1720. In 1766 the similarly judicial murder of Fr. Nicholas Sheehy—related to Burke through marriage—provided another instance of colonial malfeasance to which Burke would react with grief and indignation. Gibbons situates the Philosophical Enquiry so that its aesthetics of sublimity encapsulates a solidarity with, and witness to, the colonial abuses of the disenfranchised majority population in Ireland in the eighteenth century. Preempting the dry charge of anachronism, Gibbons places Burke's aesthetic treatise in Janus-facing context, making the Enquiry poignantly relevant to events after its publication. As such, Burke's sympathetic response to cultures in distress later in the century is continuous with his delineation of the sublime.

The social positioning of Burke's family meant that the harsh realities of a misgoverned Ireland were painfully close to home. Having...