Adolescence in Modern Irish History ed. by Catherine Cox and Susannah Riordan (review)

This edited collection emanated from a 2011 workshop and represents the first volume to address the history of youth/adolescence in modern Ireland. With this is mind, the editors have wisely chosen to provide a solid and expansive introduction charting the development of the historiography in Ireland, the conceptualization of adolescence, and the trajectory of the volume from "affective revolution," to the emergence of the teenager. To date, the historiography has tended to focus on the history of education, child welfare, "juvenile delinquency" and criminality, and the emergence of youth culture in the sixties. It has been an urban history primarily, with significant gaps in the rural experience. Institutionalization has been a central trope, due in part to the scandals that emerged in the 1990s surrounding Ireland's industrial and reformatory school system. The nine chapters in this volume and the introduction go a sufficient way to address this neglect.

Many of the themes in the collection are referred to in the final chapter by Mary E. Daly, which provides a broad contextual framework for the preceding work. Daly argues that Ireland is distinctive in certain ways when looking at the history of youth/adolescence. She highlights two issues in particular—the lack of an industrial revolution (and as a result the primacy of the rural/family economy) and the impact of war and revolution from 1914–23. Ireland's demographics are also referred to—an exceptionally low rate of marriage and high birth rate, as well as the continued emigration of thousands of young men and women until the 1960s. By 1973 when Ireland became a full member of the European Economic Community (EEC), compulsory schooling, urbanization, and outside cultural influences meant "the lives of Irish adolescents were not noticeably dissimilar from those of adolescents in other EEC member states" (213).

In the introductory chapter Jonathan Jeffrey Wright explores the political ideals, literary tastes, and friendships of a group of young men from the reformist Presbyterian merchant class of early nineteenth-century Belfast. Utilizing the papers of Robert James Tennent, this highly-politicized group of educated youths represent an atypical portrayal, but a fascinating one. Naïve and idealistic in some regards, the group were corresponding at a key moment and engaging with themes like "religious Dissent, scientific innovation, French revolutionary ideals, and romantic poetry" (34). Moving to the beginning of the twentieth century, Conor Reidy and Marnie Hay provide readers with two very different narratives of youth in the period 1906–1923. Hay's depiction of nationalist youth organizations like Na Fianna Eireann provides a timely discussion of youth during the Irish revolutionary period. By looking at the philosophy, actions, and influence of this group, Hay gives the reader a sense of what it was like to be a young nationalist during this time, while also pointing to the importance of class and status to the experience. Reidy's depiction of the "borstal boys" and the efforts to reform them through educational and physical discipline (as well as aftercare) demonstrates official and psychological attitudes to juvenile delinquency at this time.

In chapters by Ann Daly, Sandra McAvoy, and Susannah Riordan—women, gender, class, and sexuality are teased out using medical records, legislation, and literature. In her chapter on female adolescence and the medical profession in post-famine Ireland, Daly weaves together the cultural constructions of femininity in Ireland from the second half of the nineteenth century. Arguing that "the cultural preoccupation with reproduction complemented the emerging 'scientification' of medicine" (57), Daly contextualizes examples from medical records within post-famine Ireland and its demographic anomalies, in particular the importance of land and marriage.

Devised for a female, young, and primarily British audience, the heroines of L. T. Meade's novels are the focus of Sandra McAvoy's piece. McAvoy argues that Meade's critics, who often claim she tamed and stereotyped the "wild Irish girl," are ignoring the instances in which Irish girls embraced masculine codes of...