Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 by R. F. Foster (review)

Few historians have shaped our view of the era between Parnell’s fall from leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Anglo-Irish War as deeply as has R. F. Foster. Viewed by many as an arch-revisionist, he has not shied from controversy, and he has always prodded his readers to think deeply with him about his subjects. Occasionally that has led to what passes for fireworks among scholars—one thinks of the back and forth between L. Perry Curtis and Foster over depictions of the Irish in British periodicals following the publication of Foster’s Paddy and Mr. Punch (1993), and the subsequent intervention by Michael de Nie. Such moments have pushed forward the extended conversation about modern Ireland in fruitful and exciting ways. A major reason for his ongoing relevance is that Foster, the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford, possesses three attributes necessary to good historical writing: he has an eye for anecdotes that are illustrative, memorable, and often humorous; he has a great facility for synthesizing insights from others with his own fresh material; and he has, quite simply, a way with words.

All three of these skills are on display in his latest monograph, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923, a richly detailed work that will undoubtedly provoke others to engage him yet again. The author of a two-volume biography of W. B. Yeats, Foster takes his title from the opening lines of WBY’s famous poem, “Easter 1916”: “I have met them at close of day / Coming with vivid faces / From counter or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses.” The present work revivifies many of those faces, and does so most effectively for the pre-revolutionary years. The subtitle of the work, however, clarifies his aim. Drawing inspiration from scholars of the Russian Revolution who sought its roots in biography, Foster here attempts to unearth the roots of the Irish revolution by writing the story of a “generation.” He uses that term in the same sense that Robert Wohl described those who approached World War I with excitement at the prospect of creating a new world from the listless present of their elders. “This book builds on such work,” Foster contends, “in its attempt to delineate the way a generation is ‘made’—and often made retrospectively. The Irish radicals studied here saw themselves, like their Russian contemporaries, as building and inhabiting a different world from that of their parents. The previous generation was often the perceived enemy every bit as much as the British government.” As with Wohl’s subjects, however, Foster’s would recall the early twentieth century with melancholy as their dreams of social, cultural, political, and interpersonal revolution proved illusory.

Utilizing letters, memoirs, and diaries, copious early twentieth-century newspapers and ephemera, as well as interviews collected by the Bureau of Military History, Foster chronicles several interlocking webs of families and friends that became integral players in the revolution between 1916 and 1922. (Readers will also find a useful biographical appendix that helps one keep track of these relationships.) He arranges his chapters thematically to address how specific issues and processes shaped their hopes and expectations. It is a wise choice, as it affords him scope to explore such concepts as education, playing, loving, writing, arming, fighting, reckoning, and remembering without the constraints imposed by the metronomic pressure of a narrative-driven clock.

This decision is particularly effective in the earlier chapters. Foster contends that education for this generation implied different types of schooling, both formal (including the National and Intermediate Schools, the Christian Brothers and other non-state schools, and third-level education, generally University College, Dublin) and informal (such as Gaelic League or Celtic Literary Society branches). Playing—in this case, creating theatrical productions—implied well-known professional and semi-professional companies in Dublin, Belfast, and Cork, and their less well-known, amateur contemporaries. They provided...