The Irish in the Atlantic World

“The Transmigrated Soul of Some West Indian Planter”: Absenteeism, Slavery, and the Irish National Tale

“The Transmigrated Soul of Some West Indian Planter” Absenteeism, Slavery, and the Irish National Tale Susan M. Kroeg The complexities of Irish identity in the eighteenth century shaped and were shaped by Ireland’s varied roles within the British Empire. As historian Alvin Jackson argues, “Irish people were simultaneously major participants in Empire, and a significant source of subversion. For the Irish the Empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression: it provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration.”1 Ireland’s physical proximity to England rendered the people more culturally familiar than those inhabitants of the distant reaches of empire, so that within Ireland, the native Gaelic (Catholic) population could at best serve as imperfect colonial subjects, “others” against which the English colonizers could define themselves. The creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the 1800 Act of Union only amplified the ambiguities of Irish identity. The descendants of the Englishmen who, in the seventeenth century, had dispossessed the remaining Irish landowners represented Britain’s imperial power in Ireland; however, those Anglo-Irish gentry who left their Irish estates and sought a place in British society were rejected as mere colonials , neither English nor Irish. Although managing one’s colonial estates from afar was nothing new in British imperial policy, for some the practice had a particular association: Samuel Johnson said that the “phrase ‘Absentee’ . . . [is] used with regard to Irishmen living out of their country.”2 Irish colonial identity, difficult to “fix” at home, proved similarly unstable and destabilizing elsewhere in the British Empire. As Donald Akenson notes, the Irish “were imperialized quickly and became expert imperialists themselves.”3 Ireland was a major source of white migration to the New World, particularly in the seventeenth century.4 Comprising Protestant and Catholic merchants and landowners (the latter fleeing religious persecution), indentured servants, transported criminals, and others, those migrants were essential to the creation of 110 | Susan M. Kroeg what scholars now call the Atlantic World. Because they owned, managed, and worked in bondage on West Indian plantations, their various forms of Irishness came to be associated with the violence of slave societies; the Irish were at once the colonizers—brutal overseers, capable of extraordinary cruelty, and the colonized—indentured servants and slave sympathizers, perhaps ready to join with enslaved Africans to foment rebellion.5 Anglo-Irish novelists Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) were two important voices in the discussion of Ireland’s place in the British Empire in the decades surrounding the Act of Union (1800). Maria Edgeworth was born in Oxfordshire in 1767 or 1768, educated in England, and first visited her father’s Irish estate, Edgeworthstown (county Longford), in 1773; she became a permanent resident there in 1782. Her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth , Irish member of Parliament, inventor, and reformer, had a profound influence on his daughter, encouraging her to assist him in the management of his estate and writing introductions to and frequently editing her literary productions . She is perhaps best known for Castle Rackrent (1800), a satiric tale about the downfall of an Anglo-Irish family, widely considered the first regional novel. Her long and successful career as a novelist concluded with her death in 1849.6 Her contemporary, Sydney Owenson, was born in 1776 or 1783 (she liked to be vague on this particular point); she sometimes claimed she was born aboard a ship crossing the Irish Channel as her English Protestant mother, Jane Hill, traveled to join her Irish Catholic father, the actor Robert Owenson. Her identity as something in between—half Catholic, half Protestant; half English, half Irish—helped to authorize her position as a cultural go-between; however, she identified most strongly with her father and his romanticized Gaelic origins. She began her writing career in 1801 with the first of some twenty-seven published works, including novels, poetry, and travelogues. In 1812 she married physician Sir Charles Morgan. She lived most of her adult life in Dublin, making visits to England, France, and Italy. She was awarded a pension from the British government in 1837, the first woman writer to receive such an honor. She died in 1859.7 Both Edgeworth and Owenson used the medium of the national tale, an emerging and predominantly female-authored genre invested with an explicitly political agenda, variously to restore and refine a separate Irish culture in the face of political and economic...