Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791-1891 (review)

Two hundred years after George IV allegedly announced that Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1801) had at last given him some real knowledge of his Irish subjects, those of us who consider our business the nineteenth-century British Isles still seem in want of a reliable guide to Ireland. James H. Murphy writes to fill that need. He describes his book's purpose as twofold: on the one hand to elaborate the social context of nineteenth-century Irish literature in order to stimulate new currents of research in that field, and on the other "to report on current thinking and research on nineteenth-century Ireland from a variety of disciplines" (1). In the second endeavor, his book succeeds admirably, providing a brief but clear guide to the basic features of Irish life for those with little prior knowledge of it. Yet while Murphy presents the entire book as "based on a synthesis of current scholarship" (2), in his first stated purpose—stimulating research in nineteenth- century Irish literature—his book provides a more idiomatic view of Irish literature than he admits. This is not to say that Murphy's account of literature is not worthwhile, but rather to say that much like King George before us, we should be wary of taking any view as wholly representative when we educate ourselves on Ireland.

At its best Murphy's overview reads like an animated conversation with a generous dissertation advisor, eager to point out an array of historical facts, cultural trends, and recent scholarship, as well as to suggest how these call for more in-depth investigation. Murphy offers a rapid-fire roundup of some of the most prominent features of the nineteenth-century Irish landscape; Ribbonmen, hedge schools, Daniel O'Connell's monster meetings, famine depopulation, religious factionalism, Fenians, the Home Rule movement, Paddy stereotypes, and the Gaelic Athletic Association are all concisely introduced and explained. Where scholarly opinion diverges, Murphy lists the competing theories, summarizing, for instance, schools of thought on the composition of the agrarian agitators known as Whiteboys, multiple explanations of why Tridentine Catholicism was so fervently embraced by the Irish, and debates about possible factors in the outbreak of the Land War. For scholars familiar with the British nineteenth century, but unschooled in Irish history, this book presents the basics in an easy day's read and provides a useful point of departure for further research. The volume concludes with a fifty-page bibliography of key scholarship on the Irish nineteenth century, grouped by topics such as "religion," "social life," and "land," as well as by individual literary authors.

Most noteworthy about Murphy's work is the way its chronology avoids standard narratives that treat the Irish nineteenth century as either too British to count as Irish history at all, or else as one long prelude to Irish modernism and the Irish Free State. By starting his book with the first stirrings of rebellion that culminated in the 1798 uprising, Murphy crafts a historical vision of the century as begun on Irish initiative, rather than a century defined by the British imposition of the Act of Union in 1801. By ending before the Irish literary revival of the 1890s, Murphy is able to deal with the literary material in his book on terms other than whether it prefigures or fails to live up to Irish modernism. This is an Ireland that matters to a Victorian studies audience, an Ireland whose culture and history aren't simply idling in wait of their apotheosis in the twentieth century.

Given this rather innovative organization, the most disappointing aspect of the book is its complete segregation of gender into the penultimate chapter, which provides a brief litany of how women's lives changed over the course of the century. Murphy knows this topic well (he coedited Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland with Margaret Kelleher [Dublin, Irish Academies Press...