Nineteenth-century Irish poetry, particularly ballad poetry, was often performed indoors and out as recitation or song. Audiences and readers varied and publications ranged from cheap broadsheets to expensive journals, edited collections or slim volumes published by Irish, English or Scottish publishers. Following the example of Moore’s popular Irish Melodies, theme, rhythm and verse-form, celebratory or nostalgic, could be shaped by older poems in Irish or by traditional tunes, many of them collected and published, and adapted to express differing personal, political and religious sentiments. Poets responsive to classical models, European Romanticism and English poets such as Tennyson could incorporate ballad forms and traditional and popular themes into a more ambitious poetics, aiming at a wider audience. Young Ireland balladists and generous-spirited journal and anthology editors, Catholic and Protestant, sensitive to sectarian and poetic diversity and different audiences, attempted to bring their readers together in a shared national culture.

Classicism and classical allusion provided writers of the period with a time-honoured way of thinking about personal and political life. Fragments of classical story survived in popular culture and there was a tradition of gentry classicism, typified by Burke’s appropriation of the classical sublime, signifying expensive education perhaps supplemented by travel. Artists, sculptors, and architects who might have studied in Rome could supplement and stimulate textual appropriations with visual representations of classical myth, heroism, and civic or senatorial dignity. Patriotic antiquarianism, both exploited and mocked by Thomas Moore, selected possible references to the antiquity, civility, and fortitude of Ireland from classical sources. Poets of both sexes elegantly imitated classical praise of love and wine. But gentry classicism was gradually extended and democratised, sometimes sharpening into quasi-Juvenalian satire, through growing awareness and deployment of classically derived discourses of rights and liberty. Moore’s mellifluous Anacreon versions were followed by the more national Irish Melodies.

Between 1800 and 1900 the dominant literary mode of romanticism, with its various transformations, moved in the direction of modernism, accompanied and sometimes assailed along the way by different kinds of realism. More paradoxically, over the same period literature tended to become ever more international, indeed cosmopolitan, even as self-consciously national literatures developed and asserted themselves with growing confidence in Ireland and in the United States, in Russia and in Scandinavia.

Irish regionalism

'Regionalism' is a topical theme, kept before us by the regional policies of the European Union, of which Ireland is a member, and by recent discussions of regionalism in connection with the contemporary phenomenon of economic globalisation. But the concept of 'region' or 'regionalism' in Irish fiction is not straightforward, either before or after the establishment of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in 1920-2. Within the tradition of regional fiction in English, Maria Edgeworth made a pioneering contribution with her Irish novel Castle Rackrent (1800), and this was generously acknowledged by Sir Walter Scott, who helped to pass on the lessons to subsequent regional writers. But Edgeworth's example did not of itself produce strongly localised Irish fiction. The main market for Irish fiction has always been outside Ireland, and from the outset this rather discouraged a regional or sub-regional specificity which would not be appreciated at a distance. In consequence, the whole of Ireland, or at least rural Ireland, tended to be identified as a single non-metropolitan 'region', the literary province of nineteenth- and indeed twentieth-century Irish writers in English, just as a largely undifferentiated Scotland tended to be seen as a single region, the province of Scottish writers.

Introduction

The novel, the dominant narrative form in the English-speaking world for the period treated in this volume, is not an indigenous Irish form. When novels did come to be written in and about Ireland (from the late eighteenth century), English was the language of expression and the influence of Irish-language narratives on these new productions was not obvious. Nonetheless, writers in English from the time of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) have been at least intermittently and selectively responsive to Irish-language materials, particularly the largely oral story-telling tradition. When an important Irish-language tradition of prose fiction did emerge, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it drew energy from both the revival of indigenous forms and English language influences. Thus, it is no longer possible to insist with some of the older cultural nationalists that prose fiction in Irish owes nothing to Irish prose fiction in English. Much scholarly work remains to be done, however, in investigating the two bodies of writing and in establishing points of contact. This chapter treats the two traditions of novel writing in separate sections,but aims to offer readers a rich sense of the Irish novel as it developed across a range of voices, forms and languages.

Prose fiction in Irish

The history of prose literature in Irish since 1800 inevitably reflects the shifting state of the Irish language itself during that period, from its cataclysmic decline in the nineteenth century and its revival at the end of that century and on to its continuing survival today.

Despite the work of Boyd Hilton and others, it is possible, even now, to neglect the role of religion in Victorian reform movements. It is also possible to defer too much to Irish exceptionalism, the deeply ingrained sense that, whatever might be said or done about public policy in England, it was always going to be irrelevant and wrong for Ireland. As other essays in this and its companion volume, History, Religion, and Culture, demonstrate, Scotland and France play an important role in British intellectual history, but nineteenth-century Ireland should not be forgotten as testing-ground, catalyst, and sometimes source of British political and social thought. Ireland demonstrated some of the worst problems of a pre-industrial economy in the earlier nineteenth century, but parts of Great Britain were still essentially pre-industrial at the same period. Consideration of the career of Richard Whately (1787–1863) makes possible a more nuanced understanding not only of the continuing interdependence of religion and public policy but of the interaction of Great Britain and Ireland under conditions of distress, disorder and possible improvement.

Whately, Englishman, Fellow of Oriel and Archbishop of Dublin, came from a family of improvers. His uncle, Thomas Whately, MP, wrote a celebrated treatise on landscape gardening, Observations on Modern Gardening (1770; 5th edition 1793). The younger Whately improved gardens, in which he grew exotic and experimentally grafted plants, improved his Suffolk parish, renovating the school and adding 250 seats to the church, and improved Oxford's ailing St Alban Hall, which he served as Principal (1825–31).