The Oxford Companion to Irish History ed. by S. J. Connolly (review)

105 essay by Adam Perkins outlining the subsequent career of these manuscripts.) Not least, Alan Cook describes Flamsteed’s rivalry with Halley, who went from student to enemy to successor. This is very much a work in progress. One of the afterthoughts is a brief piece by Owen Gingerich, who describesanannotated copy of Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis, which he was able to purchase for himself, and shows how it may be used to reconstruct the compilation of the astronomer’s catalog. To judge by these essays, the published letters (a third volume still to come) are already bearing much fruit. And there are obviously more manuscripts in the archives waiting to illuminate this difficult and narrow but undeniably important man and the science of his time. Joseph M. Levine Syracuse University LYNN HOLLEN LEES. The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998. Pp. xiv ⫹ 373. $64.95. ‘‘To be alive is to be at risk,’’especially if you happen to be poor. Even recipients of ‘‘redress’’ were at the mercy of ‘‘elected overseers and guardians,’’ men who judged what constituted destitution and what its victims needed. Chillingly, ‘‘the fact that paupers might have disagreed was not considered relevant.’’ As long as poverty was accepted as part of a divinely ordained social order, no laws were ever intended to eliminate destitution , still less the social inequities attendant upon it. In this thorough if rather dogged social history, Ms. Lees’s theme is that the poor laws were ‘‘residual,’’ but that they continually changed according to culturally determined attitudes toward poverty. The eighteenth-century poor were thus as despised as their Elizabethan predecessors, who were subjected to punishment as well as contempt. The laws are therefore contradictory, combining ‘‘succor andrepression , alms and forced labor,’’ even if labor in a workhouse was unprofitable and participation in it unenforceable.The underlying attitude that tried to direct the poor to the workhouse came from a mideighteenth -century legislature that ‘‘posited a downward cycle from migration into slash-and-burn agriculture and finally to crime.’’ Or: give me not poverty lest I steal. Ms. Lees’s emphasis on the low social and human status of the destitute resonates among readers of Fielding, whose indigent characters vary between vagrancy and fallen gentility. Going totheparish was something few men and women would do lightly. The documented desperation of the poor lends predictable confirmation to Defoe’s renderings of survival at the margins of society. What little legitimacy the destitute clung to in society as in literature was stripped away by the early nineteenth century, when paupers had become disreputable human beings rather than objects of compassion. Most of this survey of the poor laws covers from about 1800 to 1948, with the eighteenth century as the period when Ms. Lees’s cyclical patterns of ‘‘generosity and meanness’’ were established and authorized. Her chapters on the earlier period provide the legal realities and the social stigmata endured by those who were most at risk, and who turn up in one guise or another in picaresque fiction. The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S. J. Connolly. Oxford: Oxford, 1998. Pp. xvii ⫹ 618. $55. In the Preface, Mr. Connolly notes that the selection of entries has been significantly influenced by the existence of a separate Oxford Companion to Irish Lit- 106 erature. Coverage of individual authors is therefore limited to those, such asSwift and Yeats, whose activities extended beyond the purely literary, along with a few others, whose observations on their society are frequently turned to by historians . Despite this restriction, the present volume is of great use to teachers and students of eighteenth-century Irish writing in English. The entries, arranged alphabetically, provide basic information concisely and accessibly. The nonspecialist teacher of Swift, for example, can here clarify the difference between first fruits and twentieth parts, or check the dates of Navigation Acts. Beyond this, however, both the inclusion of much social and cultural history, under a range of imaginative headings, and a system of cross-referencing , make it likely that even readers who initially approach the volume as a reference work will stay to browse. Specialists will be stimulated by...