LPJIS 2017 by LPJIS

Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies

2017

Cover Photograph © SEÁN HEWITT

This journal is available online at www.lpjis.wordpress.com

Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies (2017)

Questions and queries should be directed to the General Editor, Seán Hewitt, on S.E.Hewitt2@liverpool.ac.uk

General Editor SEÁN HEWITT

Politics Editor ELIZABETH DE YOUNG

Literature Editors DARREN DUNNING JAMES GALLACHER

History Editors MICHAEL ROBINSON LUCY SIMPSON

Reviews Editor SEÁN HEWITT

Blogs Editor ANNA WALSH

Readers NICHOLAS BUBAK PAT MURPHY Prof. PETER SHIRLOW DAVY SHAW Prof. FRANK SHOVLIN Dr. DIANE URQUHART

General Editor’s Introduction This second issue of Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies builds on the strong and welcoming reception to our inaugural edition, and continues our mission to introduce some of the world’s leading postgraduate and early career researchers in the discipline to a wider audience. As always, the editorial team were highly impressed by a number of the submissions made, though of course there was not room to include them all here. In this issue, we bring to you a line-up of articles which shed important and fascinating light on Irish literature, history and social studies. This issue opens with the work of Liss Farrell, current PhD researcher at the University of Liverpool, who explores the temptation to mythologise and diagnose the mental illness of Lucia Joyce, only daughter of James Joyce. To follow, Nora Moroney of Trinity College Dublin turns to the eminent figure of W.E.H. Lecky, skilfully unpicking the historiographical concerns of his time and tradition. Lucy Simpson, University of Liverpool, who is currently researching clerical and institutional abuse in twentieth-century Ireland, completes our trio with a wide-ranging exploration of the characterisation of the ‘undeserving poor’ in an Irish context. Our reviews section brings together a host of postgraduate and early career voices to assess the latest contributions to the discipline. Here, books from the US, UK and Ireland find careful and considered readers. On behalf of the entire editorial team, I would like to say a word of thanks to our contributors, who have worked diligently over the course of the past year, and to our friends and colleagues both at the Institute of Irish Studies and in the wider Irish Studies community for their unfailing support. For my own part, I would like extend my gratitude to the editorial team for their patience, camaraderie and thoroughness. Without them, this journal would not have been possible; but with them, it has been a joy to produce.

Seán Hewitt

TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION I: ARTICLES

Lucia Joyce and the Allure of Diagnosis

LISS FARRELL

‘All News is Old News’: W.E.H. Lecky and the Writing of Irish History

NORA MORONEY

‘Drunkards and Spendthrifts’: Defining Ireland’s ‘Undeserving’ Poor LUCY SIMPSON

SECTION II: REVIEWS

The Tudor Reform of Ireland

Christopher Maginn and Stephen Ellis, eds., The Tudor Discovery of Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015) Reviewed by JOAN REDMOND

The English Poetry of Our Time

Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Reviewed by NIALL CARSON

A New Painful Excitement

Stanley van der Ziel, John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition (Cork: Cork University Press, 2015) Reviewed by SEAMUS MAY

Acting on the International Stage

Todd H. Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015) Reviewed by MICHAELA CRAWLEY

Representing the ‘Oirish’

Deirdre McFeely, Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Reviewed by ROBERT FINNIGAN

The Markieviczes and the Irish Revolution

Lauren Arrington, Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) Reviewed by ESTIBALITZ EZKERRA

Context and Chronology

Niall Carson, Rebel by Vocation: Sean O’Faolain and the Generation of the Bell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) Reviewed by JAMES GALLACHER

Inhabiting the Dream

Medbh McGuckian, The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems, selected and introduced by Borbála Faragó and Michaela Schrage-Früh (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2015) Reviewed by MARTIN McCONIGLEY

ยง Articles

Liss Farrell

Lucia Joyce and the Allure of Diagnosis Much attention has been paid to the life of Lucia Joyce, the only daughter of the author James, in recent years. Her life has become the focus of two novels, a biography, a graphic novel, and a play since 2004.1 These accounts have often prioritised an intriguing narrative over factual accuracy, while analyses of Lucia’s mental illness and how it may have affected her father’s work have often erred on the side of sensationalism. It is easy to see why authors are drawn to Lucia, who inhabited not the nineteenth-century Dublin portrayed in her father’s work, but came of age in the bohemian Paris of the 1920s. As Finn Fordham puts it: ‘Add to [her condition] rumours of incest, syphilis, lesbianism, and a litigious estate, and you have an alluring vortex of themes, crying out for mythologisation.’ 2 Alongside this mythologisation is the contextualising of Lucia as a victim of her father’s ego and literary output rather than as a woman who suffered immensely in an era which was still struggling to effectively classify and diagnose mental illnesses. Such a categorisation is misleading, and to this end this essay will examine the epistemic considerations of writing about Lucia with regards to her possible diagnosis and her surviving family members. It will then review how her ‘madness’ has been utilised in the works of both fiction and non-fiction writers. The purpose of this essay is not to provide evidence for the role that Lucia Joyce may have played in relation to the writing of Finnegans Wake; rather to suggest that the conjecture which has filled the gaps in critics’ knowledge is leading to a discernible, troubling shift in the way that Lucia is currently discussed. By contrast, the manifold ethical issues surrounding the subject of Joyce’s daughter ought to lead to a more sympathetic approach to the subject of her influence on her father’s writing, if she must be discussed at all.

Lucia Anna Joyce was born to James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Trieste on 26 July 1907. Joyce’s poetry collection Chamber Music had just been published; he finished writing ‘The Dead’ not long after her birth, and was soon to start transforming Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.3 Lucia was the Joyce’s second and last child; her older brother Giorgio was born two years earlier. When Lucia was eight the family moved to Zurich, and to Paris five years later in 1920. Stuart Gilbert, a friend of the Joyces, later described Lucia as ‘illiterate in three languages’; in reality she spoke four fluently: English, French, German, and Italian.4 While she was in Paris she took up dancing, and Richard Ellmann notes that she worked ‘six hours a day from about 1926 to 1929’.5 Details about her early twenties are difficult to confirm, for reasons that will become clear, but suffice it to say that Lucia began exhibiting irrational behaviour which gave those around her reason to think she was suffering from mental problems. On 2 February 1931, Joyce’s fiftieth birthday and the ninth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, Lucia threw a chair at Nora. Giorgio escorted her to a maison de santé. Lucia’s nerves deteriorated following her release, and after a breakdown on a train in July 1933 she was watched, cared for, or institutionalised for the rest of her life in various locations across France, Austria, Ireland, and England. 6 She was a patient at St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton from 1951 until her death on 12 December 1982. After Joyce’s death, responsibility for her care passed to his publisher and patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, and then to her goddaughter Jane Lidderdale in 1961. The problem with writing about Lucia is threefold: lawsuits follow those who attempt to publish extensively on the Joyce family; as a result, publishable information about her comes at a premium, and, as stated above, diagnostic psychiatry was in its infancy when Lucia was being treated. The problem of litigation stems directly from Stephen Joyce, the son of Giorgio Joyce. At the end of his grandfather’s family line and as the executor of his estate, Stephen has courted controversy for his desire to maintain a level of privacy around his aunt’s life. Two

scholars have encountered problems with trying to publish their works which incorporated discussions of Lucia’s personal life. They are Brenda Maddox, the author of Nora Joyce’s biography Nora (1988) and Carol Loeb Shloss, the author of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2004), which will be the focus of the second part of this essay. Maddox was instructed to excise a chapter from her book at the behest of the Joyce Estate, while in Shloss’s case, the debate with the Joyce Estate resulted in a lawsuit which she eventually won. 7 As a careful arbiter of the information available to the public, Stephen Joyce is also responsible for part of the next problem: in 1988, the New York Times reported that at the International Joyce Symposium: ‘Mr. Joyce announced that he had destroyed all his letters from his Aunt Lucia […] Mr. Joyce also announced to the stunned audience that he had destroyed correspondence to Lucia from Samuel Beckett […] at Beckett's request.’ 8 Additionally, Stephen Joyce was responsible for the removal of an unknown number of documents from the collection of Paul Léon, a Joyce family friend, after he bequeathed them to the National Library of Ireland – but before they were due to be available to the public according to his stipulations. 9 As a result, the writer who embarks on a project concerning Lucia Joyce has very few primary sources available to them, if, indeed, they are allowed to publish from them. Thirdly there is the problem of attempting to diagnose or analyse Lucia’s health at a distance. Schizophrenic was the term most regularly applied to her, and has been assumed into the canon of Joyce knowledge partially thanks to Richard Ellmann’s use of it when describing Lucia in his biography of her father. In Lucia’s lifetime, however, this diagnosis was subject to change, just as the definition of schizophrenia – and the name itself – were subject to change. 10 On the other hand, while some doctors stated that she suffered from ‘marked neuroticism’, others thought there was nothing wrong with her. Joyce himself, writing in the 1930s, observed that Lucia had ‘one of the most elusive diseases known to man and unknown to medicine.’ 11 Osamu

Muramoto, discussing the limitations in the field of retrospective diagnosis, writes the following: [One] challenge is the impossibility of verifying or falsifying the medical hypothesis of retrospective diagnosis for obvious reasons – we cannot examine and test the historical subject. […] Another important challenge pertains to the ethics and professionalism of those clinicians who render retrospective diagnoses. They publish a diagnosis of a patient with whom they never had a physician-patient relationship, and without any consent. […] Even if medical affairs of public figures in historical times are outside the boundaries of medical ethics and professionalism, the question remains what goals such retrospective diagnoses serve. 12

These ethical considerations have not dissuaded the literary scholar – already far removed from the clinician – from attempting to diagnose Lucia for the purpose of theorising about the composition, characterisation, and narrative of Finnegans Wake. As Joyce was writing much of the Wake alongside carefully arranging Lucia’s living arrangements in various institutions across continental Europe during WWII, she has been identified with the character of Izzy, the youngest child and only daughter in the Earwicker family around which the plot machinations revolve.13 To give one example, in a 1996 article Margaret McBride argues that Izzy is a ‘thinly disguised version of Lucia’ and ‘clearly suffers from schizophrenia’. 14 Joyce does appear to suggest that Izzy may have some form of split personality, as she is able to communicate with her own reflection, but this is quite a different thing from schizophrenia.15 McBride uses, in her defence, the fact that schizophrenia is Latin for ‘split mind’ and cites an article by Carl Jung dating to 1958; that is, two decades after the publication of Finnegans Wake and eighteen years before the medical community began to form a biological understanding of schizophrenia.16 However the idea of a ‘split personality’ is related to Dissociative Identity Disorder (also known as Multiple Personality Disorder) and not schizophrenia. Indeed, six years before Jung’s article, the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder clarified that ‘dissociated personality’ must be differentiated from ‘schizophrenic reaction’. This distinction has remained and current definitions of schizophrenia exclude the idea of a split personality.17 Further, there is no biographical evidence that Lucia did have a split personality, and from this it is determinable that Joyce was not under the impression that Lucia suffered from such, and neither was Izzy intended to be representative of a schizophrenic person. Adaline Glasheen’s Third Census of Finnegans Wake traces Izzy’s fractured personality rather to Joyce’s interest in a psychological study of a young woman who confronted her multiple personalities in the mirror. 18 As a definitive diagnosis of Lucia by today’s standards is impossible to formulate, there is no reason to write about her as the archetypal schizophrenic, manic depressive, neurotic, or any other label with which we may try to classify her. Yet as her actions included violence, arson, and breakdowns, and as she required medication for most of her life in order to live with minimum supervision, so too is it irresponsible to state that her actions were those of somebody who could be said to have remained mentally fit throughout her life.19 All of this is not to say that writing about Lucia is necessarily ill-advised, but the limitations presented above demonstrate that the large gaps in the critics’ knowledge leave room for speculation. Carol Loeb Shloss’s 2004 biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake was not published quietly. The Joyce Estate, under Stephen Joyce’s control, attempted to prevent her from publishing from anything that James or Lucia Joyce wrote for any purpose. A year into Shloss v. Estate of Joyce, the estate agreed to settle the case ‘on terms that [permitted] the publication of the material that was deleted [due to Stephen’s threats]’, and was required to pay $240,000 of Shloss’s legal fees. 20 For some years she maintained a website, http://www.lucia-theauthors-cut.info, which gave further quotes from Joyce’s works intended to be read in tandem with her biography.21 The book’s reviews were largely negative: an unfavourable review in the Times Literary Supplement by Brenda Maddox led to a public quarrel between the two held in

the Letters section of the publication. Maddox argues that Shloss’s tone is ‘intemperate, polemical’, and that her suggestions about the Joyce family dynamic are ‘preposterous’.22 Shloss argued that it was a ‘culture of shame’ which had ‘hidden’ the story of Lucia Joyce for so long. Shloss’s methodology, outlined in a section of the introduction titled ‘An Experiment in Biography’, explains that for lack of information, she was required to ‘construct the contexts of Lucia’s experiences and put her into them’, and that the structure of the second part of the book is based upon a collection of financial records and Richard Ellmann’s notes on a missing trunk of materials.23 From the beginning of her biography, Shloss is unconvinced that Lucia’s madness even existed: she cites people on the fringes of the Joyce’s circle of friends who did not witness anything out of the ordinary in Lucia’s behaviour, and holds that she specifically chose to adopt a method which would avoid a ‘bias towards madness’, preferring to identify these expressions of irrationality as a response to life as the daughter of a great author. 24 However, Shloss’s wish to avoid labelling Lucia, or deal directly with the possibility of her having an illness, conversely leads to the minimising of her suffering. When she refers to Lucia’s breakdown on a train as a ‘temper tantrum’, she is infantilising the then twenty-fiveyear-old.25 Additionally, that she writes ‘Lucia could not have chosen a better location’ for the breakdown gives Lucia agency where she might have had none, thus belittling the subject of her own biography. Shloss often finds opportunities to reframe Lucia’s actions as whimsical, if a little misguided: Lucia cutting the telephone wires in the family house in Paris becomes a ‘poor, rash action [with] a kind of perverse expressive meaning’. 26 Part of Shloss’s thesis is that Lucia’s inability to continue her dancing was the major source of difficulty in her life and an explanation for her unusual behaviour afterwards. As her parents’ lifestyle was the reason Lucia had to leave her dance classes, they are blamed for such behaviour. It is true that the Joyce’s ever-transitory lives – taking place in different countries

and languages, but with the constant threat of financial disaster - probably had a negative effect on Lucia’s ability and desire to dance professionally. However, Shloss’s avoidance of a ‘bias towards madness’ disallows any concessions and instead manifests as a ‘bias towards rationalisation’. While the actions listed above – breakdowns, cutting telephone wires – would be indicative of signs of illness in most adults, Shloss represents them rather as the actions of a petulant girl. This misrepresentation comes alongside conjecture which often has concerning sexual politics. In 1917 Nora wrote to Joyce about how their prepubescent children play fought naked most mornings, but that Giorgio would hide his genitals when Nora walked in the room; Shloss translates this as a ‘sexual dynamic’ between the siblings. 27 This coded language leads the reader at having to guess at Shloss’s implications, as she avoids writing straightforwardly about personal matters. This can have confusing results: By this time, Lucia must have finally talked to her father about her relationship to Alex Ponisovsky, admitting more than the fear that she had gotten syphilis. […] The first time she had brought up the matter […] Cary Baynes had despaired at the Joyces’ inability to communicate about intimate matters of the highest significance. Joyce had swerved away from his daughter’s confidence ‘as though he had a deadly terror of knowing what had actually happened to her.’ ‘Then she said her ex-fiancé deserved six years in prison for what he had done to her’.28

While Lucia’s many eccentricities are explained as the response to a disrupted childhood and adolescence, no such understanding is afforded to her older brother. By the end of the biography Giorgio Joyce is a belligerent alcoholic, ‘smarting, it would seem’ about the amount of money Joyce spent on Lucia’s care. 29 That his dependency on alcohol could have resulted from his own mental health problems or deficiencies as a result of his upbringing is not considered. Maddox remarks in her review that Shloss makes culprits of Giorgio and Nora

among others; emphasising Lucia’s victimhood rather than exploring the idea that their turbulent existence likely had a detrimental effect on all of their interpersonal lives. 30 So the question remains: with an author so dismissive of claims of Lucia’s mental illness, who is prepared to label her subject as childish rather than suffering, and willing to accuse those acting out of ignorance as malicious – or, even, abusive – it is hard to determine what purpose Shloss’s biography serves. If Lucia’s life had been hidden until its publication, much of what has been ‘revealed’ about her is clouded by spurious claims. 2012 saw the publication of Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, a collaboration between writer Mary M. Talbot and her husband, the graphic novelist Bryan Talbot. The result is a relatively short work – fewer than a hundred pages – which follows two timelines simultaneously. Mary herself is the protagonist of one, which portrays her growing up in the shadow of her father, the late Joycean scholar James S. Atherton. The second timeline is that of Lucia, with whom Mary identifies an allegorical kinship as a young girl growing up with an intelligent father obsessed with his work. The cover variously describes it as a ‘graphic novel/ memoir […] part personal history, part biography’. Talbot’s work clearly owes a debt to Shloss’s biography: not only is it cited as a source, but the front cover of the biography is depicted as Mary reads it on a train; a later scene shows the book prompting a conversation with her colleagues about Joyce. 31 Talbot also cites both Shloss’s and Maddox’s biographies in an interview as ‘helping [her] to imagine Lucia’s perspective.’ 32 Lucia’s story makes up less than half of the book; it is woven into the narrative as Mary begins to reflect upon their parallels. A certain degree of simplification is granted to non-academic texts concerning historical figures, but Dotter of her Father’s Eyes manages to erase any trace of Lucia’s possible mental illness, which is startling when contrasted with other biographical accounts of Lucia collapsing into catatonic stupors, or building turf fires on the floor.33 The pivotal act of throwing a chair at Nora is placed into the context of an argument between the

two; Nora remains relentlessly cruel throughout the book with more than half of her speech being negatively directed at Lucia. Other scenes show them arguing about dancing, or the expectations placed upon Giorgio and not Lucia, but nothing gives the sense of what Joyce’s contemporaries heard about her in 1929: ‘If I were the mother of James Joyce’s daughter and saw her staring off into space in that way, I’d be very concerned about it.’ 34 Lucia makes an appearance on just one page of the graphic novel after her initial institutionalisation, glassy eyed and staring at the reader. The captions ignore the years of therapy and various treatments she endured, and choose instead to focus on the fact that by 1935 she was ‘suicidal and addicted to Veronal.’ 35 If Shloss’s methodological aim was to avoid a bias towards madness, and emphasise her subject’s disrupted family life as a possible source of internal conflict, Talbot has reduced the Joyce family to caricature by having them abandon Lucia in an institution because they have had enough of dealing with her perpetual need to dance. Talbot has said that ‘I wasn’t at all convinced that my troubled relationship with my Joycean-scholar father would be of interest to anybody on its own. So I broadened the fatherdaughter relationship theme by bringing in James Joyce and his daughter Lucia.’ 36 Lucia’s story thus offers the reader perspective on Mary’s tale of her own upbringing: despite her overbearing father and his sexist attitudes about women’s careers, she is able to ‘escape’, an option not available to Lucia. In drawing this comparison in such a way, an important part of Lucia’s own narrative vanishes; again, an author attempting to give voice to this troubled woman instead denies her agency. Annabel Abbs, in her acknowledgements for her 2016 novel The Joyce Girl, comments that she is ‘heavily indebted to the outstanding, seminal work done by Carol Loeb Shloss in her biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake.’37 On the cover, an excerpt from Mary M. Talbot’s review tells the potential reader that ‘Here is Lucia Joyce, vibrant, passionate and alive, telling her own story.’ The novel, written in the first-person from Lucia’s point of view,

follows two timelines. One of these takes place in the autumn of 1934, while Lucia is psychoanalysed over a series of sessions with Carl Jung. Jung, finding it difficult to make progress with Lucia, has instructed her to write a memoir: ‘You said a Mr Beckett was your first lover, is that right?’ He nods encouragingly. ‘Start with him.’ 38 It is Lucia’s manuscript that makes up the second timeline; Abbs flits between short scenes of conversations in Jung’s office and Lucia’s activities in Paris and England from November 1928 to March 1932. There is also an Epilogue, Historical Note, and an Afterword. Lucia’s madness is represented as a ‘she-beast’, which rears her head in times of stress, or when Lucia is not dancing. As Shloss’s biography describes the Joyce parents forcing their daughter to abandon her dancing career, here they are blamed for her behaviour for the same reasons. Just as in Shloss’s biography, Giorgio is condemned while Lucia is vindicated. His behaviour throughout the novel is suspicious, the reason for which is revealed when Lucia has a flashback in Jung’s office to when she is around ten years old. While their parents are out, Giorgio discovers Nora’s erotic letters to Joyce, which have since been lost to history. As the correspondents to Joyce’s letters to Nora of 1909 and 1912, published in The Selected Letters of James Joyce (1975), edited by Richard Ellmann, they detail explicit scatological fantasies the couple may have shared. A pre-teen Giorgio reads these letters to Lucia, and then attempts to coerce her into re-enacting the events. Nora and James return to find Lucia and Giorgio naked; Nora accuses Lucia of encouraging her brother’s actions, and Joyce himself of passing his ‘devilish desires’ onto their daughter.39 After telling all of this to Jung, Lucia finds that the ‘she-beast’ which is the metaphor for her madness (as Abbs writes in the ‘Book Club Questions’) has been ‘routed’. 40 Much can be said about this part of the book. About Jung’s practices, the disappearance of Lucia’s illness – despite the fact that she spent the rest of her life locked away in reality – the accusation that Giorgio Joyce, whose son is still alive, attempted to rape his younger sister.

There is not the space here for such a discussion, but suffice it to say that it is unclear how this account is meant to help readers today understand Lucia’s suffering. Abbs has written elsewhere that: ‘I wanted to know more about [Lucia’s] life […] and why she spent the latter half of her life in a mental asylum. When I couldn’t find the answers in her biography, something happened that I still don’t fully understand. I felt a compulsion to uncover and fictionalise her story.’41 In other words, Shloss’s book, lacking the evidence to answer its own questions, led to Abbs’s book, which ‘fictionalised’ Lucia’s story so that evidence was not required. Both the Talbots’s and Abbs’s books owe a debt to Shloss’s biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, but it is worth questioning where Lucia can be found in the three books. Shloss writes that ‘the Lucia who is presented here [in her biography] is almost totally refracted from the eyes of others. I would have preferred to let her speak for herself and to illustrate her character with her own words from her letters, poems, and novel. But she can’t and I can’t.’42 What is left then, is implication and suggestion; hardly the material from which the character of a young woman can be recreated. Theorising about Lucia Joyce, whether that comes in the form of biography or fiction, is a necessarily moral issue, and one that still has an impact on living people. While

undeniable that Joyce himself wrote about the personal lives of others, when they make it into his novels they often have their names changed, and are generally not at the centre of scandal. And so we ought to question whether Joyce’s use of biography gives carte blanche to critics and authors who may want to write about his daughter’s sexual history or abusive family relationships. Any possible link between those subjects and the composition of Finnegans Wake – in which the word ‘character’ has very little resemblance to the ordinary usage of the word – must therefore rest upon stronger evidence than the Latin root of the word ‘schizophrenia’.

Osamu Muramoto touches on the fact that in the context of a retrospective diagnosis, the subject is unable to give his or her consent to being examined and having discussions of their private life published. With this in mind, Stephen Joyce is taking the control of such theorising out of the hands of the authors, by both erasing previous records and keeping tight control over the publication of texts which deal with his family’s private life. As Brenda Maddox puts it in her review of Lucia Joyce, Stephen Joyce’s efforts to ‘prevent written accounts of her life are attributed to a determination to expunge traces of a gifted female, rather than a wish to protect family privacy.’ 43 Shloss, on the other hand, writes that both Ezra Pound’s daughter and W. B. Yeats’s son protested Stephen’s destruction of private letters. Reviewing the biography and biographical fiction which has been written about Lucia since, it is easy to see why Stephen believed his destruction of the letters to remain a personal matter and not one which should necessarily invite the comment of literary critics and authors. The Lucia Joyce bandwagon shows no sign of slowing. Alan Moore, perhaps most famous for the comic book series Watchmen (1987) and the graphic novel V for Vendetta (1989), has written a chapter from the point of view of Lucia in his 2016 novel Jerusalem. It concerns her time in St. Andrew’s Hospital in his hometown of Northampton: ‘The Lucia Joyce chapter […] is completely incomprehensible. [...] It’s all written in a completely sub-Joycean text. I read it through again and I can actually understand most of it – well, all of it.’44 Time will tell whether this representation is sympathetic or exploitative. The line between the two has been increasingly blurred since 2004.

Liss Farrell University of Liverpool M.R.Farrell@liverpool.ac.uk

Notes

Prior to this, Alison Leslie Gold authored 1992’s Clairvoyant: The Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce. The other works are, respectively: Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl (2016), Alan Moore’s Jerusalem (2016), Carol Loeb Shloss’s Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2004), Mary M. and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (2012), and Sharon Fogarty’s Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2015). 2

Finn Fordham, ‘Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (review)’, Modernism/modernity, 12.2 (2005), p. 357.

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: University Press, 1982), p. 262-264.

Thomas F. Staley and Randolph Lewis, Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert’s Paris Journal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 48. 5

Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 612.

Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 664.

For more on this, and other controversies, see Matthew Rimmer, ‘Bloomsday: Copyright Estates and Cultural Festivals’ in SCRIPT-ed 2, 2005, p. 405. The deleted Maddox chapter is available at the Humanities Research Centre in Austin, Texas. 8

Caryn James, ‘The Fate of Joyce Family Letters Causes Angry Literary Debate’, The New York Times, 15 August 1988, p. 15. 9

Sen. David Norris, ‘Letters’, James Joyce Quarterly 30.2 (1993), p.352.

As Carl Jung was treating Lucia in 1934, schizophrenia was more commonly known as ‘dementia praecox’, and a text he wrote discussing the disorder ends with the following: ‘I do not imagine that I have offered anything conclusive in this work; this domain is too extensive and as yet too obscure for that.’ The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, trans. by Frederick Peterson and A. A. Brill (New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1936), p. 153. 11

9 June 1936, Letters of James Joyce, volume III, ed. by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966) p. 386.

‘Retrospective diagnosis of a famous historical figure: ontological, epistemic, and ethical considerations’, Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 9 (2014) 13

‘Issy’ is more commonly used to name this character without Finnegans Wake; ‘Izzy’ within it.

Margaret McBride, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Issue of Issy’s Schizophrenia’, Joyce Studies Annual 1996, ed. by Thomas F. Staley, p. 146. 15

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Penguin: Classics, 2000), pp. 526-528.

Johnstone et. al were the first to demonstrate brain abnormalities in CT scans from patients with schizophrenia. ‘Cerebral ventricular size and cognitive impairment in chronic schizophrenia’, Lancet 2 (1976). For more on the history of defining schizophrenia, see Peter F. Buckley, ‘Neuroimaging of schizophrenia: structural abnormalities and pathophysiological implications’ Journal of Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 1 (2005). 17

Marco M. Picchonio and Robin M. Murray, ‘Schizophrenia’, British Medical Journal 335 (2007) p. 92.

Adaline Glasheen, ‘Finnegans Wake and the Girls from Boston, Mass’, The Hudson Review 7 (1954), p. 91.

Jane Lidderdale, ‘Lucia at St. Andrew’s’, James Joyce Broadsheet 10 (1983), p. 3.

‘Shloss v. Estate of Joyce’; case proceedings at Stanford Law School’s Centre for Internet and Society, <http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/our-work/cases/shloss-v-estate-joyce> [accessed 14 October 2016] 21

The domain rights have since lapsed on the URL but archived versions of the website are available.

See Brenda Maddox, ‘A Mania for Insects’, Times Literary Supplement, 2nd July 2004, no. 5283. Also ‘Letters to the Editor’, nos. 5290 and 5292. 23

Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), pp. 30-32.

Shloss, Lucia Joyce, p. 30-31.

Shloss, Lucia Joyce, p. 263.

Shloss, Lucia Joyce, p. 266.

Shloss, Lucia Joyce, p. 69.

Shloss, Lucia Joyce, p. 305. Emphasis my own.

Shloss, Lucia Joyce, p. 410.

‘A Mania for Insects’, Times Literary Supplement

Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (Milwaukee: Dark Horse, 2012), pp. 4 & 13.

Peter Wild, ‘The collaboration was easy and almost continuous’ [an interview with Mary M. and Bryan Talbot, 17 February 2012], Bookmunch <https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/the-collaboration-was-easy-andalmost-continuous-peter-wild-interviews-mary-talbot-and-bryan-talbot-about-the-dotter-of-her-fathers-eyes> [accessed 10 October 2016] 33

See Brenda Maddox, Nora (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 377, and Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 676.

Cited in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 612.

Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, p. 84.

Peter Wild, interview with Mary M. and Bryan Talbot

Annabel Abbs, The Joyce Girl (Exeter: Impress, 2016), p. 358

The Joyce Girl, p. 4.

The Joyce Girl, p. 346.

Annabel Abbs, 'Ulysses and Finnegans Wake followed me round the house like hungry dogs', The Guardian, 27 September 2016, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/27/annabel-abbs-ulysses-and-finneganswake-followed-me-round-the-house-like-hungry-dogs> [accessed 10 October 2016] 42

The Joyce Girl, p. 32-33.

‘A Mania for Insects’

Helen Lewis-Hasteley, ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ in The New Statesman, 13th June 2011, p. 65.

Nora Moroney

All News is Old News: W.E.H. Lecky and the Writing of Irish History On 23 August 1898, the newspaper Freeman’s Journal carried an article on W.E.H. Lecky, stating that “[a]ll Irish men are very proud of Mr Lecky. He and Mr Ruskin are the last surviving men of genius of the great Victorian age, an age so prolific in men of genius writing in the English tongue. He is the greatest historian of our time.” The piece was just one of many articles that drew on Lecky in the year commemorating the centenary of the 1798 rebellion. In featuring the historian’s views, the paper was deliberately playing on the doubleedged reputation that characterised Lecky in Irish nationalist circles. It continued by describing ‘with great sadness … [the] astounding abuse of the English language and of historical truth’ which it saw in his assessment of the rebels. 1 An article in the Kerry Sentinel some months later similarly quoted his analysis of the uprising, while various newspapers and magazines in England reported with interest his interactions in parliament (he stood as MP for Dublin University) as well as his contributions to historical debates. These publications followed a trend that had steadily increased over Lecky’s career, in scrutinising the writings and pronouncements of a figure who, perhaps despite his inclinations, had become the figurehead for a certain elite view of British political and intellectual output by the close of the nineteenth century. There were many reasons why the late-Victorian press, from the intellectual periodicals to daily newspapers, kept close watch on this prolific historian. William Edward Hartpole Lecky was born into a landed Dublin family in 1838, and after rising through the ranks of Trinity College Dublin (which left an enduring influence on his work, as did the College Historical Society), quickly became known as an articulate and informed voice on Irish and English

history. His first major publication, the 1861 book Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, was an influential treatise on the personalities that shaped the narrative of Ireland’s recent political past. Its reception essentially confirmed Lecky’s position as a critical authority on historical representation. Bringing together sympathetic portraits of O’Connell, Swift, Grattan and Flood, it was broadly admired within Irish nationalist circles, and was consistently cited throughout the following decades of Lecky’s career. John Morley, writing as editor of the Fortnightly Review after the publication of the 1871 edition, noted the author’s ‘admiration for the Irish parliament’ but praised the even-handed judgement which came to characterise much of Lecky’s output. 2 Leaders was followed by two historiographical texts, on the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (1865), and History of European Morals (1869). Between 1878 and 1890 he released the multi-volume A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, parts of which were subsequently expanded into a separate History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. The all-encompassing reach of these works gave Lecky a prominence both within and outside the academy, and marked an important juncture in the nineteenthcentury expansion of historical thought. What this article is concerned with, however, are those essays, articles and press interventions that complemented Lecky’s published output during the span of his career. Critical attention thus far has focused largely on his books, and the influence they carried in contemporary political discussion. Donal McCartney’s thorough biography of the writer is a helpful starting point, and includes reference to most of Lecky’s important journal articles. Like other surveys by Anne Wyatt and Norman Pilling, though, it uses these mainly as illustrations of wider issues in Lecky’s writing. 3 What this ignores is the significance of certain types of press discourse, not only in Lecky’s conception of his work as an essayist, but on matters of tone and audience that move to distinguish various phases of his career. His correspondence and papers show a continued dialogue with editors, reviewers and fellow contributors on

matters of periodical publication. His friendship with the writer W.J. O’Neill Daunt, for instance, ranged from discussion on contemporary politics to urgent requests from Daunt to influence the publishers of the Fortnightly Review.4 Lecky, although his reputation today tends to place him firmly within the ranks of highbrow intellectual historians, was very much involved in the business of press publicity. In recalibrating attention towards this aspect of his work then, we can begin to chart the somewhat symbiotic relationship that existed between author and publication process, and furthermore to evaluate conceptions of public opinion and readership that became increasingly contested in the late-Victorian years. Lecky’s contributions to the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan’s, the Fortnightly Review and the Contemporary Review drew upon a range of subjects, but they all contained a strong sense of the authority that history carried. The latter decades of the nineteenth century, indeed, reflected this idea of history (and history-writing) as a major cultural resource. 5 As Gladstone wrote in 1875, “I am convinced that the thorough … study of history is a noble, invigorating, manly study, essentially political and judicial, fitted for and indispensable to a free country”. 6 In demonstrating his belief in the value of historical research, Gladstone was prefiguring his later political manoeuvres over the Irish question where the continued influence of the past on contemporary attitudes was to have a defining effect. As a practice, history too was seeing an emergent presence within British universities. Oxford and Cambridge had the longest-established departments, but Edinburgh, London and, latterly, the University of Dublin increasingly invested in professorships and specialised research journals. This drive towards professionalization during the 1880s and 1890s in particular had some interesting corollaries. What Stefan Collini has called the ‘historicisation of knowledge’ in the humanities led to more defined terms of reference, and the repositioning of certain intellectual areas as the preserve of academically qualified scholars. 7 It also largely meant the

death of antiquarianism as a serious pursuit – something that can be traced in the decline of such subject matter in the pages of prestigious periodicals. In the Irish context, this period saw a renewed interest in popular forms of history. A large variety of works in local and ecclesiastical history were published in the years before 1900, as amateur historians exploited archives collected by their mid-Victorian predecessors.8 Buoyed perhaps by the political climate, a new generation of professional historians also deployed archival knowledge in reinterpreting the country’s recent past. A.M. Sullivan, Thomas Dunbar Ingram, J.G. Swift MacNeill and G.H. Orpen all produced volumes contemporaneous with Lecky’s published works. Many of these were notable only for their marked unionist or nationalist slant, such as Sullivan’s The Story of Ireland (1867) which, though highly partisan in its nationalist viewpoint, can arguably be seen ‘to co-opt and control the more unruly and refractory narratives of vernacular history’. 9 On the opposing side, Unionists such as G. H. Orpen were active in restructuring narratives from medieval Irish history to current political debate. Orpen penned numerous pieces for the English Historical Review between 1890 and 1920, many of them attacking Irish historical works written from a nationalist perspective. 10 These fractious debates over historiography had a significant effect on constructions of Irish identity both at home and in Britain, and would not have been lost on Lecky. His monumental work on 18th-century Ireland was in part an attempt to rectify the distortions of previous portrayals, and give an objective account of the sources from the period. Writing to Charles Bowen in 1878, he describes his Irish chapters as such: The first serious attempt to analyse the political and social state of Ireland somewhat philosophically; and if they are disproportionally long and detailed, you must remember, first, that a great part of them is quite new; and, secondly, that I had to prove, often from very recondite sources, positions which are in direct opposition to the best English authorities. 11

The rigorously objective methodology espoused by Lecky here is indicative of a more general move in British historiography at the time. Allied to the university-led disciplinisation, historical knowledge in the late-Victorian years became increasingly fragmented and specialised. The development of particular techniques and methodologies was a marked feature of much history writing, especially within the so-called ‘Oxford school’ of academics. Writers such as William Stubbs and E.A. Freeman were acknowledged as authorities in constructing more standardised means of teaching and learning, and in turn regarded themselves as the ‘custodians of the new scholarly standard’. 12 The intellectual (and his perceived scientific robustness) became more visible in many areas of public life, and especially in the periodical press where he gradually displaced the high-Victorian ‘man of letters’.13 This shift – from the dominance of the polymath to reliance on the specialist – can be charted through the publication strategies of journals in the latter decades of the century. The founding prospectus of the Fortnightly Review in 1864, for instance, highlighted the open, liberal ethos of a publication that would provide ‘an organ for the unbiased expression of many and various minds on topics of general interest in Politics, Literature, Philosophy, Science and Art’.14 In contrast, by 1889 the founders of the New Review were more concerned with the professional nature of their writers; they ‘will yield to none in the eminence of … contributors. Politics, Science, and Art will be treated, in signed articles, by writers of acknowledged repute, and literature … will be associated with names that carry their own recommendation’. 15 Lecky, certainly, can be read within the purview of this new school of professional writers and historians. Although he was not officially affiliated to a university, the reputation of his early works won him an offer of the Oxford Reguis Professorship of Modern History in 1892, as well as multiple honourary degrees and the prestigious Order of Merit in 1902. His articles and essays, as well as the longer published works, stand testament to a distinct, methodical

and exacting approach towards his historical subjects. Reflecting on his own techniques, he cited the influence of Comte, Hegel and Herder, commenting that ‘what characterises these writers is that they try to look at history, not as a series of biographies, or accidents, or pictures, but as a great organic whole’. 16 The wide-lens focus of such an approach is evident in the scope of many of Lecky’s most celebrated works. A History of England in the Eighteenth Century was released in eight volumes, while the offshoot History of Ireland eventually reached four complete volumes. But even his stand-alone books display the ability to assimilate extensive material in a cohesive fashion. His view of history was that it was essentially one of morals and ideas, encapsulated in works such as The Political Value of History and Democracy and Liberty of the 1890s. As a historian of opinions, Lecky is generally regarded as unparalleled for his time. In W.J. MCormack’s reading, the historical sociology and other novel forms of intellectual history that Lecky pioneered made possible the study of mentalités and micro-communities for further generations of Irish readers. 17 He was, therefore, a historian of true European significance. And the influences that can be traced throughout his writing serve to emphasise this. Along with the German and French philosophers mentioned above, he had read Voltaire, Coleridge, Locke and J.S. Mill. But perhaps his most important influences were geographically closer to Ireland. Ann Wyatt has noted that eighteenth-century Dublin was his ‘spiritual home’, and indeed Lecky has largely been forgotten as a historian with firm intellectual roots in the capital.18 As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Lecky’s earliest forays into historical debating concerned themselves with the legacy of Grattan and the eighteenth-century patriots (as he saw them) that were to become the foundation of his later scholarship. Many of his contributions to British journals draw upon the period of Grattan’s parliament as an illustration of Ireland’s past glory and peace. His 1874 article for Macmillan’s, for instance, strongly defended the legislative independence of the parliament and the principle of

constitutional self-government in the face of another historian’s reductive analysis. 19 The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, too, exercised a major influence on Lecky’s thought throughout his career. In October 1891 the Contemporary Review featured a piece Lecky entitled ‘Carlyle’s Message to his Age’, where he details the literary and historical significance of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest writers. ‘His own special talent’, Lecky states, ‘was the gift of insight, the power of looking into the heart of things; piercing to essential facts’.20 This was a reflection of Lecky’s personal convictions about historiography. The fact that Carlyle’s ‘standard of truthfulness was extremely high’ made him a moral as well as intellectual torch-bearer – one of the last true ‘teachers of mankind’.21 The article also reveals other facets of Lecky’s quality as a historian. He was certainly aware of the importance of publication context, and the piece opens with a discussion on Carlyle’s difficulty in his early ventures into publishing on first arriving in London. The Scottish writer’s rejection from Fraser’s Magazine may well have struck a chord with Lecky, who had experienced a similar rebuff from Macmillan’s publishers in 1861. Following his submission of the first draft of Leaders, Lecky received a letter stipulating that ‘the difficulty of reading the manuscript is considerable, and must form a hindrance to any speedy decision on the part of the publisher’. 22 Concerns over writing and authenticity, moreover, were to shape and direct much of Lecky’s output. Just as Carlyle ‘took his literary vocation most seriously’, the literary affiliations that occur throughout Lecky’s essays afford an insight into his aspirations as a writer. Despite his conscientious use of manuscript sources for the establishment of facts, his anxiety that the development of scientific methods of investigation could drive a wedge between history and literature emerges very clearly. 23 As one critic has observed, his concern was ‘almost exclusively with written evidence, with literature in its broadest definition’.24 That Lecky was a generalist, who wrote for the broad, educated reading public, is an accepted fact that helped earn him a continued place within the

periodical press. Pieces such as ‘The History of the Evangelical Movement’ in an 1879 issue of the Nineteenth Century were not just intellectual but educational. As a journalist, Lecky attempted to contribute to the improvement and visibility of high culture, a kind of canon formation for the historical process. For him, ‘history is never more valuable than when it enables us, standing on a height, to look beyond the smoke and turmoil of our petty quarrels, and to detect in the slow developments of our past, the great permanent forces that are steadily bearing nations onwards to improvement or decay’. 25 Somewhat surprisingly, then, only some of Lecky’s periodical contributions concern themselves directly with history. He is featured variously as a reviewer, a political commentator and obituary writer, though a historical lens is a recurring element throughout the pieces. More interestingly, perhaps, is the authority which lends weight to his evaluations on such subjects. Editors such Archibald Grove at the New Review and James Knowles of the Nineteenth Century were shrewd commercial operators, who understood the cultural value of such prestigious names. Lecky’s articles appeared, for example, in the same issues as E.A. Freeman (writing on developments in Roman archaeology), as well as discussions on classical history by J.P. Mahaffy and the Oxford scholar Richard Cleaverhouse Jebb. 26 We can discern here the growing popularisation of history, especially within journals like the New Review that maintained a strong literary bent. Readers would have been expected to have at least some grasp on historical trends that were both of general interest and geared towards the current political climate (as Lecky’s essays on Home Rule in the 1890s exemplified). Underpinning this visibility, furthermore, was a concurrent awareness of the tensions surrounding historiography. Lecky had built his reputation as an Irish historian redressing many of the inaccuracies of earlier works, and his press interventions embodied this reflexivity. ‘Mr Froude’s English in Ireland’, appearing in two instalments in Macmillan’s between 1873 and 1874, was a scathing indictment of the xenophobia Lecky

perceived in Froude’s representation of the Irish. It became one of the best-known reactions to Froude’s controversial work, and, in its opposing stance, informed the moral ideology of much of Lecky’s later writings. But Lecky’s interactions with historians in his press articles went further than one-way commentary. The uniquely generative space of the intellectual journals encouraged sustained engagement between contributors, a technique epitomised by the Nineteenth Century’s ‘open platform’ symposia. It meant that matters were open to debate and conflicting or corrective opinions were given a platform. More than once, Lecky found himself the subject of such debate. In 1887 Gladstone dedicated an entire essay in the Nineteenth Century to Lecky’s renowned History of England. It centres on Lecky’s portrayal of William Pitt, to whom Gladstone ascribes more positive features than were allowed in Lecky’s history. The criticism extends to the type of history Lecky wrote, that of ‘gathering conspicuous persons and events around the centres of most commanding interest’. But in acknowledgement of the status of Lecky within historiography as well as journalism, the piece opens with a (somewhat qualified) admission: Mr Lecky has long ago reached so high a position in the honourable company of contemporary historians as to place him beyond the action of any fears and hopes, in connection with possible criticism, as may ruffle or perturb the minds of authors who have not yet obtained their certificate. To treat him with less than freedom would be a bad compliment to such a man. 27 The matter was not, however, his only terse exchange with Gladstone in periodical surroundings. In Lecky’s case, one of his most substantial articles – on ‘The History of the Evangelical Movement’ in the August 1879 number of the Nineteenth Century – arose as a response to criticism from Gladstone. The politician had taken issue with a passage in

Lecky’s History of England about the nature of the eighteenth-century English church, points which Lecky claims in the article ‘have much more than a mere personal or literary interest’.28 It is an example once again of the significance Lecky placed upon his own written authority. Gladstone’s critique, however technical it may have been, is taken up as a direct challenge. Lecky concludes by asserting that ‘I have endeavoured to defend the position which he has impugned’. 29 A letter to a friend around this time confirms that Lecky was ‘a good deal occupied’ with the matter, and that Gladstone had written to him personally about it. Interestingly, we are also told that it was James Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century, who persuaded Lecky to make a public response in his journal. 30 These incidences point to an aspect of Lecky’s writing that earlier commentators had picked up on – that the historian was much more suited to a journalistic, or short-form, medium than a novelistic one. The writer and public intellectual A.V. Dicey reviewed Lecky’s six-volume edition for the American journal The Nation, concluding that the writer was essentially a historical essayist rather than a historian. Lecky could, Dicey stated, ‘describe the men of the past if he saw them, but he has not the gift, granted alike to Carlyle, to Froude, and to Macaulay, of seeing the dead as they appeared when alive’. 31 This accusation – his failure of imagination (and therefore his inadequacy as a literary artist) – one can imagine struck a nerve with Lecky, who revered what he called ‘complete, elaborate, and well-digested works of enduring value’. 32 Writing to his friend Alice Stopford Green some years later he was deeply critical of the tendency to distance literature from history, complaining that ‘it seems as if a certain school of historians almost looked on beauty of language as something … unbecoming in history!’ 33 Later critics have since adhered to the dichotomy that Dicey set up, between essayist and historian, reviewer rather than litterateur. Norman Pilling, in his article on relations between the two writers, largely sides with Dicey, pointing to the success Lecky achieved with his shorter periodical pieces and political tracts. 34 Lecky’s biographer Donal

McCartney, meanwhile, is more sympathetic to the historian’s own conviction that he ‘needed the wide canvas and the free range of several volumes to exhibit his historiographical talents to the full … he was more the long distance man than the sprinter in his approach to history’.35 It is perhaps difficult to avoid the sense that, however respected Lecky may have been as an author of Victorian multi-volumed monographs, contemporary interest in his works was due largely to complementary articles, essays and reviews. Keeping to the forefront of public discourse meant retaining a presence in the periodical press, often by whatever means possible. And one overlooked side to Lecky as public intellectual was his role as literary reviewer within journals. Like Hannah Lynch, Stephen Gwynn and other Irish writers in London’s press industry, Lecky was frequently asked to provide educated opinion on new publications relating to Ireland. In August 1890, for instance, he contributed a review of Emily Lawless’s book With Essex in Ireland for the Nineteenth Century. Lawless’s work was significant for its time, examining as it did the intricacies of Ireland’s colonial past under the Earl of Essex during the Elizabethan era. The narrative emerges from a first-person perspective of Essex’s secretary during the suppression of a Tyrone uprising, and was reported to have duped Gladstone into believing it to be a true account. Lecky, however, praises this authorial dexterity in an overwhelmingly positive piece (perhaps unsurprising, as the two were good friends and correspondents), remarking on Lawless’s ability to incorporate historical ‘fidelity’ into a compelling narrative. There is a strong feeling here of empathy with Lawless’s attempts; that both writers are involved in different ways with the problems of historical representation. In a telling line near the end of the review Lecky hints that Lawless may well be the writer ‘who could do for Irish history what Scott did for the history of his own country’.36 The implicit recognition of a need for a more nuanced connection between

literature and history illustrates, once again, the more progressive elements of Lecky’s conception of culture. But as a reviewer, Lecky was no doubt best known for his early brush with James Anthony Froude in the pages of Macmillan’s. The two extended reviews that appeared in 1873 and 1874 cemented Lecky’s reputation in the public eye as the putative advocate of a modern liberal ideology. In attacking not only Froude’s representation of historical events but his broader credence regarding the ethical use of history, it sets Lecky apart as the authoritative voice of rational expertise. Lecky takes care, however, to distinguish between the character of the author and the opinions expressed within his work. The thoroughgoing style of the review directs its criticism at the factual inaccuracies, interpretative inconsistencies and various contradictions that comprised the bulk of Froude’s work. In Ciaran Brady’s view, Lecky’s main censure of the book was that it ‘amounted to little more than a polemic against liberalism and reform, and a panegyric to unyielding authority and brute force’. 37 But Froude’s work also represented an attack on Lecky’s personal historical methodology. In dissecting both the formal and ideological flaws in Froude’s thought, Lecky warns that ‘the power of a dramatic historian in this manner to falsify history without any distinct misstatement of facts can hardly be overrated’. 38 The significance of these reviews, moreover, can be measured by their resonance throughout the periodical press. Some sixteen years later the Irish MP Justin McCarthy, writing in the Contemporary Review, recalls the ‘purport and force’ of Lecky’s comments on Froude, ‘in which Lecky denounced the sort of historian who thought it his duty to stand beside the victims of tyranny as they went on their way to the scaffold and curse them as they pass’. 39 This cultural afterlife of essays and reviews was a defining aspect of the intellectual press during the later decades of the nineteenth century. For an intellectual of high standing such as Lecky, public pronouncements, even from an overtly historical perspective, flagged up

political and ideological affiliations in the eyes of readers. The historical articles and reviews that marked the early period of Lecky’s career in London were to retain an immediacy for many commentators in the more politically divisive debates of the 1880s and ‘90s. Taken together, however, these contributions reveal more about contemporary circumstances for Lecky than any future political leanings. No more than Lawless or O’Neill Daunt, the historian’s archive reveals that his periodical publications were a kind of professional scaffolding to supplement and indeed enhance his earnings as a public historian. The range of interests displayed also goes some way towards explaining how the discipline of history was perceived at the time. Lecky’s claim to posterity may have rested upon his breaking ground in a single field – in this case eighteenth-century Irish parliamentary history – but, in his press interventions at least, he clearly saw this as no hindrance to dabbling elsewhere. 40 Like E.A. Freeman and other prolific scholars, press visibility offered him a chance to demonstrate an intellectual authority on various matters of the day. Rooted in contemporary political discourse, then, Lecky created out of his historical journalism an interrogative style of writing that remains an important reflection of political, liberal and social currents of thought in the late-Victorian public sphere.

Nora Moroney Trinity College Dublin moroneyn@tcd.ie

Notes 1

‘Mr Lecky and Ninety-Eight’, Freeman’s Journal (23 Aug 1898), p. 4.

John Morley, ‘Irish Policy in the Eighteenth Century’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 11 (Feb 1872).

Ann Wyatt, ‘Froude, Lecky, and the ‘Humblest Irishman’’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 19.75 (Jan 1975), pp. 261-285; and Norman Pilling, ‘Lecky and Dicey: English and Irish Histories’, Eire-Ireland, vol. 16.3 (Autumn 1981), pp. 43-56. 4

W.J. O’Neill Daunt to Lecky (1882), TCD MS 262.

Phillippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 37. 6

W.E. Gladstone to William Stubbs, 27 December 1875, in W.H. Hutton, Letters of William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford, 1825-1901 (London: Archibald Constable, 1904), p. 147. 7

Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in Culture and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 308.

R.V. Comerford, ‘Introduction’ to W.E. Vaughan, A New History of Ireland Volume VI: Ireland under the Union II, 1870-1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), liv. 9

Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 15.

Nadia Claire Smith, A “Manly Study”? Irish Women Historians, 1868 – 1949 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 10. 11

Lecky to Bowen, January 9, 1878, as quoted in Elizabeth van Dedem Lecky, A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky: Member of the French Institute and of the British Academy, by his wife (London: Longman’s, 1909), pp. 120-122. 12

Doris S. Goldstein, ‘The Professionalization of History in Britain in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries’, Storia della Storiografia, vol. 3 (1983), p. 14. 13

See John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) for the most important survey of this term. 14

Walter Houghton, ‘Introduction’ to Fortnightly Review, Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1865-1900 http://wellesley.chadwyck.co.uk/home.do 15

As quoted in the Saturday Review, May 25 1889, p. 652.

E. Lecky, Memoir, p. 69.

W.J. McCormack, ‘Lecky, Mark Twain and Literary History’, Appendix to Donal McCartney, W. E. H. Lecky: Historian and Politician, 1838-1903 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), p. 205. 18

Wyatt, ‘Froude, Lecky, and the ‘Humblest Irishman’’, p. 273.

Lecky, ‘Mr Froude’s English in Ireland’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 30 (June 1874), pp. 166-184.

Lecky, ‘Carlyle’s Message to his Age, Contemporary Review, vol. 60 (Oct 1891), p. 526.

Ibid., p. 525.

Macmillan & Co to Lecky, 16 May, 1861, TCD MS no. 19.

Pilling, ‘Lecky and Dicey’, p. 51.

McCormack, ‘Lecky, Mark Twain and Literary History’, p. 205.

W.E.H. Lecky, Historical and Political Essays (London: Longmans, 1910), p. 41.

E.A. Freeman, ‘Recent Works on the Buildings of Rome’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 30 (June 1874), pp. 89-103; John Pentland Mahaffy, ‘Further Gleanings from the Papryri’, New Review, vol. 9 (Nov 1893), pp. 526535; Richard Cleaverhouse Jebb, ‘In Defence of Classical Study’, New Review, vol. 9 (Nov 1893), pp. 495-501. 27

W.E. Gladstone, ‘Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 124 (June 1887), p. 919. 28

W.E.H. Lecky, ‘The History of the Evangelical Movement’, Nineteenth Century vol. 6 (Aug 1879), p. 280.

Ibid., p. 285

Lecky to Mr. Booth, 13 July, 1879, as quoted in E. Lecky, Memoir, p. 154.

The Nation (Aug 3, 1882), p. 96.

E. Lecky, Memoir, p. 103.

W.E.H Lecky to Alice Stopford Green, 12 April 1894, National Library of Ireland, MS 15,085.

Pilling, ‘Lecky and Dicey’, pp. 43-56.

McCartney, W. E. H. Lecky, p. 155.

W.E.H. Lecky, ‘Noticeable Books I: With Essex in Ireland’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 28 (Aug 1890), p. 238.

Ciaran Brady, James Anthony Froude: an Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 266. 38

Lecky, ‘Mr Froude’s English in Ireland (II)’, p. 179.

Justin McCarthy, ‘Mr Lecky’s Last Volumes’, Contemporary Review, vol. 58 (Nov 1890), p. 674.

Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, p. 26.

Lucy Simpson

‘Drunkards and Spendthrifts’: Defining Ireland’s ‘Undeserving Poor’ Prior to the introduction of the Irish Poor Law and its associated workhouse system in 1838, Ireland lacked a formal welfare system. Despite widespread and sustained poverty, the poor and vulnerable relied to a considerable extent on assistance from the churches, and on the generosity of lay charities and the wider population.1 However, although this ad hoc system of unofficial outdoor relief prevailed for many years, by the mid-nineteenth century, welfare provision in Ireland had in fact become highly institutionalised.2 By 1843, 98 workhouses had opened their doors, with a further twelve under construction.3 Offering food and shelter to the destitute poor, the workhouses operated alongside various other institutions for the poor and vulnerable in Ireland. This included reformatories for wayward and criminal children, and Magdalen laundries for ‘fallen’ women; a catch-all term for supposedly ‘immoral’ women, including prostitutes, unmarried mothers, and other women held to have deviated from accepted behavioural norms.4 The Irish Poor Law remained in place in the south of Ireland until 1925, and in Northern Ireland until 1948, while Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry did not close its doors until 1996.5 Such institutions were not unique to Ireland. The workhouse system was introduced to England in 1834 with the passage of the English Poor Law, while Magdalen laundries could be found across the United Kingdom and Europe from the late-eighteenth century.6 Yet, as a physician remarked of Ireland’s workhouses in 1886, ‘in no other country in the world does this indoor system hold the place that it does with us’.7 The present study addresses the idea of the ‘undeserving’ poor, a concept that pre-dates, yet was nevertheless strongly reinforced by the

Irish Poor Laws, and discusses its role in the institutionalisation of Ireland’s poor throughout the nineteenth century. More specifically, this article will consider its gendered dimensions and assess how a desire to contain, control, and, at times, punish the country’s ‘undeserving’ or ‘fallen’ women seemingly justified the existence of the Magdalen laundries. Early use of the concept of the undeserving poor has been traced by Ó Ciosáin to the later medieval period, as the expanding towns and cities of Europe struggled with the strain placed on their relief mechanisms by increased immigration from rural areas. When administering relief, particularly in times of agricultural crisis, authorities favoured individuals local to the area over supposedly less deserving newcomers, while an effort was made to root out and deny assistance to undeserving ‘tricksters and frauds’. The separation of the undeserving from the deserving poor, Ó Ciosáin suggests, ‘remained probably the fundamental distinction in welfare policy in Europe until the twentieth century’.8 The concept was evident in the west of Ireland during the 1830s, embodied in the figure of the ‘boccough’,9 which translates to ‘lame’ in the Irish language.10 Witnesses to the 1835 poor inquiry from Mayo, Roscommon, and west Cork noted the existence of a ‘particular class of beggars’, who ‘resort to deceptive means of exciting compassion’, affecting ‘the appearance of impotence or scrofulous disease’ in order to obtain food and, more often, money.11 Irish altruists, who would occasionally open their homes to beggars, remained wary of assisting those they believed to be boccoughs, knowing ‘them to be very bad characters’.12 Although, as such, the idea that there were those more deserving of relief than others was by no means novel by 1838, in the years and decades that followed the introduction of the Poor Law and associated workhouse system, the concept of the undeserving poor became ‘deeply rooted in Irish popular culture’.13 Throughout the nineteenth century, the Irish people were urged to ‘give, and give generously’ to the ‘honest poor’, including the ill, elderly, and infirm

during charity sermons, and in appeals from philanthropic organisations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society.14 However, indiscriminate almsgiving was discouraged. Rather, there was an encouragement to ‘turn a deaf ear’ to the ‘undeserving poor’, who, it was held, had ‘the remedy in their own hands, by turning idleness and dissipation into work and sobriety’.15 Few were sympathetic to the plight of those paupers believed to be ‘ready on all occasions to eke out a subsistence at the expense of the hard-worked and industrious classes’.16 By the mid-nineteenth century, the undeserving poor had come to encompass not only ablebodied ‘tricksters’, pretending to be sick in order to gain sympathy, but also alcoholics, prostitutes, and others whose financial difficulties were believed to arise from their own bad behaviour and poor choices.17 For example, while the failure of a family’s primary breadwinner to secure regular employment was recognised as a major cause of poverty, there was a tendency to accuse the unemployed of being unwilling to find work, rather than acknowledge a lack of employment opportunities. When they did secure work, it was suggested that many paupers brought poverty upon themselves and their families by recklessly gambling or drinking away their earnings.18 These were individuals whose poverty, it was held, required correction rather than alleviation.19 Many believed that they should ‘punish as criminals all who would plainly and directly cause their own pauperism’.20 It was, however, with the introduction of outdoor relief during the Great Famine that the difference in attitudes toward, and treatment of, the deserving and undeserving poor became most pronounced. Initially, and unlike the rest of the UK, where it was possible in certain cases to receive assistance without entering an institution during the 1830s and 1840s, outdoor relief was strictly prohibited under the Irish Poor Law.21 This stemmed from a belief that the widespread provision of outdoor relief would have a demoralising effect on the Irish poor, removing any incentive for the unemployed to seek work, supporting them ‘in idleness at the expense of the

ratepayers’, and promoting dependency on financial handouts.22 Central to the new poor law was a desire to ensure that the supposedly work-shy would be reluctant, if not unable, to seek assistance, preferring to find work rather than ‘submit to the restraints by which relief is accompanied’ in the workhouse.23 Consequently, the workhouses introduced to Ireland under the 1838 law were deliberately grim and unpleasant places, as, indeed, they were across the UK, in the hope that only those truly in need of relief, and otherwise incapable of remedying their situation, would enter. Workhouse inmates were, for example, expected to keep busy, undertaking mundane domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning and chopping wood, or working in the industrial departments employed in spinning, weaving, tailoring or shoe-making, amongst other activities. It was hoped that such monotonous and often physically demanding labour would not only inculcate order and discipline in the inmates, but would also deter them from staying longer than necessary, or, in fact, entering the workhouse at all.24 Significant stigma was attached to the workhouses and those who entered them. It is unsurprising that the poor across Ireland and the UK were generally antipathetic towards these institutions and their ‘demoralising, debasing atmosphere’,25 often refusing to seek admission and choosing instead to ‘subsist partly on wages, and partly on the benevolence of charitable societies and private individuals’.26 However, as Ireland’s potato crops began to fail on an annual basis in the mid-1840s, depriving the Irish peasantry of their primary and often only means of subsistence, few could afford to adopt such an approach. For the commissioners tasked with investigating the failure of the 1845 potato crop, it was ‘a most providential circumstance’ that ‘such an extensive resource’ for the provision of relief was available in the form of the country’s workhouses.27 However, despite their optimism, the workhouse system proved ‘utterly inadequate to meet the pressure of applications’ from the

destitute poor during the famine years.28 From 1845, the numbers seeking relief in Ireland’s workhouses progressively increased, both absolutely, and as compared with corresponding weeks of the previous year.29 In the week ending 20 December 1845, for example, the country’s workhouses were collectively home to 41,118 inmates, an increase of 2,022 from the corresponding week in the preceding year. By 28 March 1846, this number had increased to 50,717, with almost 8,500 more people seeking relief in the workhouse than had done so the previous year.30 Responsible for workhouses ‘capable of holding only a few hundred inmates at one time’, Ireland’s Poor Law Guardians struggled to cope with the thousands of applications they received from ‘famishing persons’, allowing ‘applicant after applicant’ to enter ‘long after the limit of sanitary safety had been reached’.31 By the week ending 27 March 1847, the numbers receiving relief in Ireland’s workhouses had risen to 111,560, more than double the number who had sought admission in the corresponding week of the previous year.32 Despite demonstrating an obvious preference for institutional relief throughout the 1830s and early-1840s, the great strain placed on the workhouse system as a result of the 1845-52 Famine ultimately forced the state’s hand, and limited outdoor relief was introduced with the 1847 Poor Relief (Ireland) Act.33 This was not, however, to be arbitrarily distributed. Under the new legislation, those ‘permanently disabled from labour by reason of old age, infirmity, or bodily or mental defect’, and who were, as such, ‘deprived of the means of earning a subsistence for themselves and their families’, were permitted to receive outdoor relief when this was deemed ‘fitting and expedient’ by the poor law authorities.34 Crucially, as Crossman observes, this provided the poor law guardians with the opportunity to distinguish between the undeserving and deserving poor, offering the latter assistance in the relative comfort of their own homes, while requiring the former to take the degrading, and supposedly shameful, step of entering the workhouse.35

With the introduction of the 1847 law, determining precisely who should, and should not, receive outdoor relief became a major preoccupation for the poor law authorities. In 1890, John King, clerk to the Leeds board of guardians,36 argued against moral classification, proposing instead that ‘the necessities of the applicant alone ought to be the ground of the grant of relief’.37 This approach was not widely supported. Outdoor relief was, in effect, to be a reward, provided to the deserving poor who had fallen on difficult times through no fault of their own, and offered for their previous efforts to lead good, moral and productive lives.38 For the undeserving poor, who were held in one particularly hostile account to seek out relief ‘with the persistence of a wasp to the honey-pot’, more punitive measures were deemed necessary.39 In the years after the implementation of the 1847 act, the vast majority of Irish paupers continued to be granted indoor rather than outdoor support. Between May 1852 and April 1853, for example, the weekly figures for those receiving relief in Ireland’s workhouses fluctuated between 111,000 and 188,000. In contrast, the numbers listed as having received outdoor relief from September 1851 remained at the much lower weekly figure of between three and four thousand.40 These numbers clearly reflect the reluctance of the poor law authorities to offer outdoor relief on a wide scale, fearing as they did that this would encourage dependency on state handouts without affording any means of controlling the country’s pauper population. By the end of the century, it had nevertheless become a common, if largely unjust, charge against the system that Ireland’s poor law guardians were ‘careless in giving outdoor relief’, with one critic suggesting that if outdoor relief were abolished ‘not one in twenty of the recipients would enter the Workhouse’.41 As long as the system remained open to abuse by the undeserving poor, it was feared not only that those deserving of assistance would struggle to access it, but that the supposedly honest, hardworking ratepayer would be required to fund the reckless lifestyles of ‘drunkards and spendthrifts’.42 In 1897, the board of guardians for Kenmare, co. Kerry, encouraged the town’s relieving officers to post up ‘in conspicuous places

in their respective districts monthly lists of the recipients of outdoor relief’. This would afford the region’s ratepayers ‘the opportunity of judging for themselves whether those whose names appear on the lists are fit subjects for relief’.43 By publicly shaming those believed to be exploiting and abusing the system, it was hoped that the undeserving poor would ultimately be deterred from seeking assistance. By the late-nineteenth century, nowhere was the divide between those believed deserving of outdoor relief and those considered immoral and undeserving more apparent than in the case of lone mothers. Under the 1847 poor relief act, destitute widows with two or more legitimate children were entitled to receive outdoor relief.44 These were women who, by bearing children within marriage, were believed to have followed their natural and expected course, only to face destitution with the death of their husband and primary bread-winner. They were understood to have committed no moral crime and were, as such, obvious candidates for outdoor relief. In contrast, unmarried mothers were frequently held alongside prostitutes as women of ‘bad character’, having supposedly failed to maintain their modesty and purity, which were commonly viewed as the greatest virtues attributable to women during this period.45 Such women were consequently believed to have forfeited their right to outdoor relief, and were expected instead to seek assistance in the workhouse, Magdalen laundry or, later, the mother and baby home.46 First introduced to the country from the late-1760s, and flourishing by the mid-nineteenth century, Ireland’s Magdalen laundries were initially managed variously by Protestant, Catholic and lay organisations.47 However, by the early-1900s, as many of the Protestant and lay-run asylums closed their doors or modified and relaxed their regimes, the vast majority of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries were operated by orders of Catholic nuns.48 Named after the Biblical figure of the repentant prostitute, Mary Magdalene, the laundries offered a place of refuge for the

country’s prostitutes and other ‘fallen’ women.49 Upon admission to the laundry, and in an effort to discourage vanity, the women were stripped of the trappings of their former lives and were provided with plain shapeless uniforms. To pay for their keep and for the general maintenance of the institution, the women worked, without pay, and for long hours, in humid conditions hand-cleaning and drying clothes, with breaks for meals, mass, and supervised recreation.50 While the laundry trade was particularly lucrative by the second half of the nineteenth century, benefitting from the growth of the middle classes who took ever-greater pride in their clothes and general appearance, this occupation was chosen for symbolic reasons.51 As the ‘fallen’ women scrubbed the dirty laundry, they were said to be washing away the metaphorical ‘stain’ on their reputations, paying penance for their moral crimes. Throughout the nineteenth century, the country’s ‘fallen’ women were frequently represented as a ‘moral contagion’ that needed to be contained and controlled. In the female wards of Ireland’s workhouses, for example, there was an effort to separate women of ‘notoriously bad character’ from the other inmates.52 There is little evidence to suggest that similarly depraved male inmates were subjected to such classification and segregation, revealing the particularly high moral standards Irish women, rather than men, were expected to attain. Irish women were commonly held to be ‘fragile, delicate creatures’,53 whose ‘crowning glory’ was their innocence and purity.54 Significant concern was shown for younger girls in the workhouse, as the ‘lax tone’ created by ‘the presence of abandoned women, or of women of the class of unmarried mothers’ was said to spread at an ‘amazing’ rate, its effects ‘extremely deleterious to the morals of the youth brought into contact with it’.55 As such, confined to the Magdalen laundries and permitted very little contact with friends, family or the outside world, it was hoped that the undeserving female poor would no longer pose a threat to Irish society generally, or to the virtuous, yet impressionable poor more specifically. With the country’s more ‘undesirable’ elements, in effect, hidden away in such institutions, Ireland laid claim to a false

sense of moral superiority. 56 This was particularly marked in the 1920s and 1930s, as the leaders of the new Irish Free State sought to emphasise the perceived differences between the supposedly pure Irish people and their former rulers. While supportive of the laundries as a means of containing the immoral and undeserving female poor, it must not be assumed, however, that the Irish public and press were totally incapable of expressing sympathy for unmarried mothers. This was particularly evident when the mother, or expectant mother, was young and deemed a victim of male lust. In 1842, for example, the Kerry Examiner reported on a young, unmarried girl who appeared before the Dublin Commission Court after travelling from England to Belfast to procure an abortion. The article adopted language far removed from that more commonly used to describe women in her position, referring to her throughout as a ‘poor’ and ‘unfortunate’ girl, who was said to ‘weep bitterly during her interview’ in court.57 There was, furthermore, some recognition of the fact that, while unmarried mothers ultimately paid the price for their supposed transgression, fathers of illegitimate children could take little to no responsibility for the role they had played. With the introduction of the 1862 Bastardy Bill, fathers were held financially responsible for the maintenance of their illegitimate offspring.58 However, in many cases it simply proved too difficult and time consuming to identify and locate the father, leaving only the unmarried mother to endure the stigma of bearing an illegitimate child.59 When they were first established in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the primary aim of the Magdalen laundries was to reform the country’s ‘fallen’ women, before reintroducing them to society after a short stay, instilled, it was hoped, with the virtues of modesty, chastity, and sobriety. There was a general assumption that the laundries’ inmates were overwhelmingly drawn from the lower classes and that, upon their release, they would obtain low-skill, low-paid positions as domestic servants.60 However, by the turn of the

century, the aims and function of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries had, in fact, changed quite significantly. As similar institutions across Europe were reforming or closing their doors, Ireland’s laundries became increasingly inflexible and far more punitive in nature.61 By the early-twentieth century, fewer women appear to have entered the laundries voluntarily, but were instead admitted on the recommendation of family and friends, or government representatives from the health and local authorities, social services and the Gardaí.62 Smith has suggested that the Magdalen laundries began to be seen in many respects as an alternative to the state prison, offering, for example, a means of confining women on remand from court.63 Though the majority of women admitted were able to leave if they wished, many spent long periods in the laundries, and some remained in such institutions until their deaths. As one former inmate later explained, admission to a laundry was felt to be much the same as ‘being sentenced to a prison’.64 By offering outdoor relief specifically to widows with legitimate children, the 1847 relief act placed Ireland’s poor law guardians in a position to hierarchise and categorise the country’s lone mothers. Excluded from the bill and held to be responsible for their own plight, therefore requiring correction, rather than assistance, destitute unmarried mothers had little choice but to enter the workhouse or Magdalen laundry in order to obtain relief. It was the desire to separate such women as a ‘moral contagion’ from the rest of society, and ensure they paid penance for their supposed sins, that created and maintained demand for the Magdalen system in Ireland long after such institutions had ceased to operate across Europe and the UK. The concept of the undeserving poor, though not new by the nineteenth century, nor unique to Ireland, was nevertheless strongly reinforced during this period under the Irish Poor Laws. It was, indeed, widely accepted by the end of the century that there existed two distinct groups of destitute poor; the ill, elderly, or disabled ‘deserving’ poor, who fell on difficult times

through no fault of their own and were, therefore, entitled to relief, and the ‘undeserving’ poor, including prostitutes, gamblers, and alcoholics, who faced poverty as a result of their own failings. Crucially, with the introduction of limited outdoor relief in 1847, Ireland’s poor law authorities were afforded the opportunity of rewarding the deserving poor by providing them with assistance outside the workhouse, while the undeserving poor continued to endure the hardships of life in the workhouse, the punitive nature of such institutions, as well as the stigma attached to them. The persistent support of, and belief in, the concept of the undeserving poor encouraged the continued institutionalisation of Ireland’s poorest people, and ensured that the country’s Magdalen laundries operated well into the late-twentieth century. Lucy Simpson University of Liverpool L.A.Simpson@liverpool.ac.uk

Notes 1

M. Cousins, The Birth of Social Welfare in Ireland, 1922-1952 (Dublin, 2003), p. 10. Throughout the

nineteenth century, clergymen of various religious denominations solicited aid through charity sermons, and organised and distributed relief. For the role of the Catholic Church in social welfare, see T. P. O’Neill, ‘The Catholic Church and the relief of the poor’, Archivium Hibernicum, vol. 31 (1973), pp. 132-45. For the role of the Church of Ireland in relief of the poor, see R. Dudley, ‘The Dublin parishes and the poor: 1660-1740’, Archivium Hibernicum, vol. 53 (1999), pp. 80-94. 2

Outdoor relief refers to the practice of supplying the poor with food, money, clothing or other goods without

requiring them to enter an institution. 3

Ninth annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners, with appendices, [468], H.C. 1843, XXI, 1, p. 35.

J. M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame,

Indiana, 2007), p. xiii. 5

V. Crossman & P. Gray (eds), Poverty and Welfare in Ireland, 1838-1948 (Dublin, 2011), p. 1.

F. Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylums in Ireland (Oxford, 2004), p. 7.

The Nation (28 March 1886).

N. Ó Ciosáin, ‘Boccoughs and God’s poor: deserving and undeserving poor in Irish popular culture’, in T.

Foley & S. Ryder (eds), Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 1998), p. 96. 9

Ibid, p. 95.

N. Ó Ciosáin, Ireland in Official Print Culture, 1800-1850: A new reading of the Poor Inquiry (Oxford,

2014), p. 101. 11

First report from His Majesty's commissioners for inquiring into the condition of the poorer classes in Ireland

with appendix (A.) and supplement, H. C. 1835 (369), XXXII Pt.I.1, XXXII Pt.II.1, p. 510. 12

Ibid, p. 626.

V. Crossman, Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland: 1850-1914 (Liverpool, 2013), p. 3.

A charitable organisation dedicated to tackling poverty and providing practical assistance to those in need, the

St Vincent de Paul society became active in Ireland in 1844. 15

Skibbereen Eagle (17 December 1898).

Southern Star (8 September 1894).

Ó Ciosáin, ‘Boccoughs and God’s poor’, p. 95.

Crossman, Poverty and the Poor Law, pp. 14-19.

Ibid, p. 23.

20 21

The Nation (28 March 1886). Under the 1834 English Poor Law, the disabled, elderly and sick were entitled to support outside the

workhouse, while outdoor relief was also extended to those who required urgent assistance, as well as to the children of families deserted by the head of household, traditionally the father (P. Thane, ‘Women and the poor law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop Journal, no. 6 (1978), p. 30; A. McCashin, Social Security in Ireland (Dublin, 2004), pp. 6-9). 22

Irish Examiner (10 November 1893).

G. Nicholls, A History of the English Poor Law in connection with the state of the country and the condition

of the people (London, 1904), p. 236. 24

Crossman, Poverty and the Poor Law, p. 128.

Thirty-sixth report of the inspector appointed to visit the reformatory and industrial schools of Ireland

[C.9042], H.C. 1898, XLVIII, 657, p. 15. 26

Freeman’s Journal (17 September 1861).

Potato crop. Extract of a report of the commissioners of inquiry into matters connected with the failure of the

potato crop, H. C. 1846 (33) XXXVII, 35, p. 1. 28

Thirteenth annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners, with appendices, [816], H. C. 1847, XXVIII, 1, p.

24. 29

Twelfth annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners, with appendices, [704], H. C. 1846, XIX, 1, p. 26.

Appendices to the twelfth annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners, [745], H. C. 1846, XIX, 33, p. 168.

Thirteenth annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners, pp. 24-5.

Appendices to the thirteenth annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners, [873], H. C. 1847, XXVIII, 35, p.

214. 33

Cousins, Birth of Social Welfare, p. 12.

Poor relief (Ireland). A bill [as amended by the Lords] intituled, an act to make further provision for the relief

of the destitute poor in Ireland, H. C. 1847 (417) III, 213, § 1-2. 35

V. Crossman, ‘Viewing women, family and sexuality through the prism of the Irish poor laws’, Women’s

History Review, vol. 15, no. 4 (2006), p. 544. 36

Boards of guardians were elected for each poor law union to oversee the administration of relief to the poor.

Freeman’s Journal (8 September 1890).

Thane, ‘Women and the poor law’, p. 41.

Ballinrobe Chronicle (4 January 1879).

Sixth annual report of the commissioners for administering the laws for relief of the poor in Ireland: with

appendices, [1645], H.C. 1852-53, L, 159, § 2-3. 41

Irish Examiner (2 July 1895).

Irish Examiner (10 November 1893).

Kerry Weekly Report (6 March 1897).

Sixth annual report of the commissioners for administering the laws for relief of the poor in Ireland, §1-2;

widows with only one child were expected to work if they were able and were not entitled to outdoor relief (Crossman, Poverty and the Poor Law, p. 135). 45

Kerry Evening Post (5 June 1861).

Mother and baby homes were established in Ireland in the early twentieth century specifically for the

reception of unmarried mothers. These institutions are the focus of an ongoing investigation (http://www.mbhcoi.ie/MBH.nsf/page/Terms%20of%20reference-en). 47

M. Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995), p.110; D. Ferriter,

Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London, 2009), p.32. 48

Smith, Architecture of Containment, p. xiv.

Ibid, p. 25.

Other work carried out by the inmates included lace-making, needlework and making altar wafers (Finnegan,

Do Penance or Perish, p. 106). 51

M. Hearn, Thomas Edmondson and the Dublin Laundry: a Quaker businessman, 1837-1908 (Dublin, 2004),

p. 1. 52

Kerry Evening Post (5 June 1861).

T. Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2nd ed.,

1998), pp. 189-90. 54

M.G. Valiulis, ‘Neither Feminist or Flapper: The Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Woman’, in M.

O’Dowd and S. Wichert (eds), Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast, 1995), p.172. 55

The Nation (28 March 1886).

Valiulis, ‘Neither Feminist or Flapper’, p.172.

Kerry Examiner (4 November 1842).

Bastardy (Ireland). A bill to render putative fathers of bastard children in Ireland liable for their

maintenance, H. C. 1862 (49) I. 97, §2. 59

Crossman, Poverty and the Poor Law, p. 183.

Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish, p. 14 & pp. 71-2.

Smith, Architecture of Containment, p. 42.

M. McAleese, Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen

Laundries, Interim Progress Report (Dublin, October 2011), p. 152. 63

Smith, Architecture of Containment, p. 65.

Justice for Magdalenes, A Summary of JFM’s submissions to the Inter-departmental Committee to establish

the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (Crocknahattina, Bailieborough, May 2012), p. 5.

ยง Reviews

The Tudor Reform of Ireland Christopher Maginn and Steven G. Ellis, The Tudor Discovery of Ireland, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015, 207 pp., €50, hardback. The Tudor monarchs knew surprisingly little about Ireland: the lordship and subsequently kingdom of Ireland, though always encompassed within the sphere of ‘English’ realms and control, was a fundamentally unknown quantity to both the sovereigns who claimed to rule it, and to many of their councillors and administrators. In this book, Christopher Maginn and Steven Ellis set out to explore the process by which the English state gathered knowledge about Ireland – the ‘Tudor discovery of Ireland’ of the title – as well as how that knowledge was then applied (or not) to the realities of life there from the late fifteenth century. At its heart is the reproduction of the Hatfield Compendium, a very significant primary source and boon to scholars tracing the evolution of Irish-English relations in the early modern period. The Hatfield Compendium currently resides in the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House. It is composed of several treatises and informative documents dating from the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth century, all written in a single hand and placed together in a single volume. Maginn and Ellis argue that it was likely intended partially as an ‘instruction manual’ of sorts for Englishmen wishing to learn about Ireland, though they also acknowledge that while the Compendium seemingly presents itself as a series of factual accounts, it is of course a highly constructed document. Each of the treatises and accounts contained in it seek to present a particular image of Ireland and its inhabitants, and by so doing they betray as much about their English authors, their concerns and aspirations, as much as it does about the supposed subjects. The authors’ contention is that the hoped-for aim of each of the documents in the Compendium, including those that seemingly presented mere ‘facts’, was the eventual reform of Ireland. Alongside the ‘discovery’ of Ireland, the idea of ‘reform’ is the second key concept under debate in this volume. The book is divided into four principal sections. The first, the Introduction, gives the reader a general overview both of recent thinking and scholarship concerning the Tudors and Ireland, and also introduces the Hatfield Compendium. The second section is a technical discussion of each of the eight constituent parts of the Compendium, while the third is a reproduction of the text itself. The final section, composed of three chapters, offers original arguments and research concerning

the practices and applications of Tudor knowledge-gathering in late-fifteenth and sixteenth-century Ireland. The Introduction advances the core themes of discovery and reform. When the Tudors came to power under Henry VII, they and most of their councillors were largely ignorant of the country. It was in this context that written documents, such as treatises and other accounts, became critical to the monarchy in understanding the lordship of Ireland. Maginn and Ellis argue that under the earlier Tudors, ideas concerning the ‘reform’ of Ireland were not so heavily informed by notions of ‘conquest’ or ‘re-conquest’ which so heavily influenced many Elizabethan writers. Instead, thinking was directed into terms of ‘reformation’, with making Ireland a second England, a ‘reactivating and renewing’ of a pre-existing political and cultural framework that had arrived in Ireland with the twelfth-century Norman conquest, and that had fallen into a state of decay in recent times. Explaining the relationship between the Tudor ‘discovery’ of Ireland, and the desire to reform it, are then at the core of the three chapters that follow the text of the Hatfield Compendium. Maginn and Ellis locate the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII as being critical period of Tudor ‘discovery’. Henry VII’s accession to the English throne meant he also assumed responsibility for the lordship of Ireland, a place he knew even less well than his English kingdom. The authors argue that Henry preferred face-to-face contact with a person with direct knowledge and experience of Ireland in order to learn about it, and thus promoted men such as John Estrete. He also dispatched men such as Sir Richard Edgecombe to secure the loyalty of the English in Ireland in 1488; Edgecombe also documented his journey, which in turn becomes a vital source for historians in examining English views of Ireland in this period. It was also under Henry VII that the idea of the ‘reform’ of Ireland first appeared. Under him, it combined some of the ideas of military conquest of the Irish (and some renegade English), with the transformation of government and society in the ‘English’ areas of Ireland. The Irish were thought to be in a ‘state of war’ with the English, and this viewpoint was the determinant for much English policy, including a mooted expedition there to be led by Henry himself. However, Maginn and Ellis argue that by the end of Henry VII’s reign, the Tudor state’s knowledge of Ireland had not substantially improved: Henry’s preference for personal relationships meant that much of the acquired knowledge died with him. Under his son however, they argue, there would be a dramatic advance in both Tudor knowledge, and in ideas of reform. Under Henry VIII, Maginn and Ellis find a particular flurry of documents, ‘reform literature’, appearing addressed to the king and written by members of the Old English community. The

authors take issue with Brendan Bradshaw’s argument concerning the influence of humanism on prompting such writings, instead citing both the reduction in the number of meetings of Parliament – and with it the opportunity to communicate ideas and concerns via parliamentary address – together with some specific contextual information. For example, it was believed in 1514-15 that the young king may throw himself into a campaign to ‘reforming’ his Irish lordship, upon the conclusion of his French wars, with the resulting documents intending to ‘educate’ the king and his councillors in advance of any arrival in Ireland as to both its state, and what needed to be done. No such expedition ever materialised of course, but Henry VIII did support other ventures, such as the earl of Surrey’s campaign in 1520, which eventually morphed into something of a ‘fact-finding’ mission, since many of the difficulties the earl encountered were due to a lack of knowledge of the country. The gradual discovery of Ireland was proceeding. The final chapter addresses the emergence of Henry VIII’s policy of surrender and regrant in the later 1530s and 1540s. Arising from the rebellions of Kildare and the Geraldine League, it was again in the context of an intense need for knowledge of Ireland that documents such as the Hatfield Compendium were created, with the last fifteen years of Henry’s reign being an especially productive period for such accounts and treatises. Maginn and Ellis are clear, however, in saying that it is uncertain to what extent these treatises were read and acted upon, if at all – certainly Henry VIII himself was extremely unlikely to have done so. Surrender and regrant nonetheless emerged from the backdrop of increased Tudor knowledge of Ireland: Anthony St Leger’s policy of conciliation towards the Irish combined many of the ideas concerning conquest, with his ‘selective’ use of force, together with ideas of ‘reform’. It was on this basis that the Elizabethans, looking back at the end of the sixteenth century, argued that the ‘reformation of Ireland’ truly began in the 1540s, with the Kingship of Ireland Act, the granting of peerages, and the apparent promises to live by English laws, customs, and religion. All of this, Maginn and Ellis argue, was founded on the process of knowledge-gathering by the Tudor state, including through vital documents such as the Hatfield Compendium. Maginn and Ellis have produced an extremely important volume for early modern Irish scholars. The Hatfield Compendium is undoubtedly a significant source, and its publication allows for the development of a range of themes within Irish history, including the fields of record-keeping, knowledge-gathering, the nature of early modern knowledge, as well as the more ‘traditional’ fields of Irish-English relations and the evolution of the English state and policy in Ireland. The chapters tracing the outline of the ‘discovery’ of Ireland will undoubtedly prove very influential in

subsequent thinking about Tudor approaches to Ireland: a recognition of the English state’s ignorance of Ireland and how it functioned is important, as it undermines claims that any form of coherent policy concerning the ‘reform’ of Ireland emerged during the reigns of the early Tudors – if indeed it ever did. Maginn and Ellis’s account of the evolution of surrender and regrant in the context of this knowledge-gathering is highly stimulating, and the interweaving of areas of research including record-keeping, the process of knowledge acquisition and its frequent almost-accidental nature, together with the already-established questions concerning Tudor policy in Ireland, will only serve to enrich early modern Irish scholarship.

Joan Redmond University of Cambridge jer54@cam.ac.uk

The English Poetry of Our Time Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 224 pp., £60, hardcover. Louis MacNeice has long proved a difficult poet for critics; his reputation has struggled to grow in the shade of two towering figures in the shape of W.H. Auden and W.B. Yeats. MacNeice’s position within the British canon was secured through Samuel Hynes’s influential The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (1976) which placed him securely within the orbit of other English writers such as Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender and Cecil DayLewis (although he too was born Irish). Such cultural appropriation is common where the critical machinery of an imperial metropolis cannot recognise the peripheral origins of the artists whose work takes up the concerns of the city, or who demonstrate a hybrid identity that complicates any simplistic narrative around cosmopolitan sophistication. Anglo-Irish writers and artists are particularly susceptible to this type of reductive analysis, as is the case with Francis Bacon or Elizabeth Bowen, who have a place in the national cultures of both Britain and Ireland. Louis MacNeice neatly fits the definition of a sophisticated urban poet. He was Oxford educated and deeply immersed in the classics when he left to take up his post at Birmingham University; he later worked for the BBC and travelled widely in this role. If MacNeice’s work displays the erudition and complexity of one so engaged with classical literature, it also returned continuously to his Irish roots and to an examination of his own Irish identity. His critical study The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941) showed a MacNeice alive to the power of Yeats’s poetry and alerted critics to the importance of Yeats to MacNeice’s work. This is why Tom Walker’s study Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) is such a welcome addition to MacNeice scholarship. Walker is alive to the difficulty of placing MacNeice’s poetry in its proper context and in navigating the complexities of MacNeice’s own identity and loyalties, through a constant referral to the works themselves. In doing so, he sheds new light not only on MacNeice’s life, but on his writing also. Walker’s study opens with a helpful analysis of MacNeice scholarship to-date and lays out the groundwork for his own place within it. His account of the writings of critics such as Terence Brown, Edna Longley, Neil Corcoran and Jon Stallworthy show how there is a need to place MacNeice amongst his Irish contemporaries as well as his English and American. MacNeice’s work has often been misread as

having ‘no place in the intellectual history of modern Ireland’ and Walker does an excellent job of complicating this picture. He demonstrates that if MacNeice’s role in Irish intellectual history was minor, then at least the role of Irish intellectual history featured prominently in the development of MacNeice. Looming large over this work is the presence of Yeats, and Walker’s opening chapter describes MacNeice’s relationship to the early Yeats and the writings of the Revival, throwing new light on MacNeice’s reading of Yeats as consciously examining ‘the value of Yeats work in relation to the pressures of the present’, a position which Walker contrasts with Austin Clarke’s dismissive assessment of Yeats as ‘a past phase’. Walker also closes his study with a magnificent reading of MacNeice’s poetry collection The Burning Perch (1963) alongside Yeats’s late poems ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Here Walker convincingly argues for MacNeice’s place within the Irish poetic canon in his linking of the philosophical and the lyrical through the very form of poetry itself. For Walker, ‘MacNeice’s late poetry’s insistent and frequently unsettling musicality rediscovers Yeats’s legacy to Irish poetry as one of thought and song, or rather thought through song’. Outside of Yeats, Walker also does well to outline the relationship between MacNeice and the Ulster Regionalist poets W.R. Rodgers and John Hewitt, he also adds to our understanding of the importance of the BBC to Irish writers of the time by assiduous archival work. Sadly, Walker has been unable to identify the specifics of MacNiece’s brief role as poetry editor of The Bell, but this would seem to be as the archive is deficient in this regard. This being the case, Walker does an excellent job of uncovering new material on MacNeice’s relationship with its editors Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor. Walker’s Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time is worthy of its place at the foremost of MacNeice scholarship, it is lucidly written and Walker is able to guide us expertly through some difficult readings of difficult poetry. Its success is in reclaiming MacNeice for both the Irish and the British traditions by showing how the poet resisted any reductive analysis of national identity, especially in light of transnational literary movements, and of the global apocalyptic threat of nuclear war. This is an exceptional first monograph and bodes well for the scholarship to come. Niall Carson University of Manchester niall.carson@manchester.ac.uk

A New Painful Excitement Stanley Van Der Ziel, John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition, Cork: Cork University Press, 2016, 305 pp, £35, hardcover John McGahern once wrote “tradition is civilisation”, and it is within a tradition that Stanley van der Ziel attempts to place the author with a most keen eye for the state of civility. Much criticism of McGahern has turned to his life to find his artistic inspiration, yet Van der Ziel breaks new ground by turning to McGahern’s reading of other authors as a driving force behind his work. Van der Ziel’s text is broken into a series of arguments developed to demonstrate how McGahern has adopted and reworked certain key ideas, whilst relating them to their likely sources. The critic is careful, however, to avoid merely collating incidents of reference to other authors across McGahern’s oeuvre, pursuing instead a few crucial points that are indicative of greater patterns in the author’s work. These arguments focus both on authors, with chapters dedicated to McGahern’s readings of Shakespeare, Proust, Yeats and Joyce, and on larger literary movements, such as romanticism and modernism. Nevertheless, Van der Ziel notes that: “Writers such as Shakespeare, Yeats, Proust and Beckett appear in many chapters, because McGahern found in those authors versions of many areas of literary thought.” Overall, the text aims to present McGahern as a singularly self-aware author, conciously in tune with the literary traditions that have preceded him, and the tradition he will leave. Van der Ziel delineates: “In a way this book is a potted history of literary and aesthetic ideas reflected through the eyes of one particular individual ‘solitary reader’ who happens to become a writer.”

In the first chapter Van der Ziel turns his eye to McGahern’s reading and knowledge of William Shakespeare. The critic emphasises the comic elements of Shakespeare’s work in McGahern’s personal literary tradition, particularly pointing to his personality and feel for language as spoken. Particularly, he studies the phrase “all the world’s a stage” as reflective of McGahern’s self-aware “performance” as an author. Van der Ziel illustrates that often the opportunity to escape the realities of life through adopting roles, or indeed, considering life itself an act. Yet, the critic also demonstrates how McGahern turns this trope on its head in The Dark. For Mahoney, he finds his life confined to a small space: first the stage sized kitchen, whilst later his son’s life is defined by the few inches of envelope containing his exam results. Van der Ziel sharply identifies characters in McGahern’s earlier fiction as “mock-Shakespearean tragedians”, whilst King Lear is isolated as the

play of most importance to the author. Indeed, Mahoney’s feelings are shown to reflect an amalgamation of many of Shakespeare’s stages, from Lear’s “stage of fools” to The Merchant of Venice’s stage “where every man must play his part,/ And mine a sad one”.

This nuanced

understanding of McGahern’s references to Shakespeare reveal how the Irishman’s reading of the text is more than just an intertextual relationship (something Van der Ziel strains to assert is not the purpose of his text) but is alive, and in conversation with the reader’s life in rural Ireland. Furthermore, Van der Ziel argues convincingly that Mahoney’s entrapment in the kitchen is a reworking of the Revival trope-setting of the country kitchen. Thus the critic illustrates how McGahern re-imagines the tradition that had preceded him.

Van der Ziel focuses on Jane Austen and other late-Augustan writers in the second chapter, highlighting Austen as a novelist that McGahern often returned to in his adult life. In reading this second chapter, one cannot help but recall a quote that Van der Ziel has highlighted in the introduction: “tradition is civilisation”. Indeed, Van der Ziel argues that that McGahern read Austen as a “novelist of manners”, a social commentator and a keen satirist of civility (descriptions one could also attribute to the Irishman). Van der Ziel highlights McGahern’s shared practice of writing about the universal in the particular: a “localised culture”. This is placed in a wider Enlightenment tradition of finding universal morals and aesthetics in smaller communities. The critic presents McGahern’s writing of manners and customs as rooted not just in his reading of Austen, but his experiences in rural Ireland. Again, McGahern’s careful reading of predecessors and personal experience are shown to be inextricable, and crucial for his work.

Van der Ziel offers a parallel understanding of Romanticism, particularly drawing upon Wordsworth, amongst other English Romantic poets. Van der Ziel reassesses McGahern’s “feeling”, “thinking” and “seeing” of the world around him in a Romantic fashion. The critic suggests these processes to be reflective of a transcendental attitude towards the pastoral landscapes around him, in part inspired by his reading of Romantic poets. This is perhaps the most convincing of arguments contained in Van der Ziel’s work, drawing support from works across McGahern’s canon, but particularly his 1990 novel Amongst Women, in which the ageing Moran walks his land repeatedly, “like a man trying to see”. Van der Ziel argues that Moran’s sentimental relationship with the land reflects the Romantic tradition. As before, McGahern is demonstrated to be distinctly effected by his reading, and reworking tradition in new and imaginative ways.

Despite the foundation in Romanticism, Van der Ziel illustrates that McGahern is in many respects a realist writer, yet one that was in touch with the limits of this style. Van der Ziel recounts how the reading Tolstoy had a lasting impact on McGahern, with Resurrection appearing physically in The Dark, whilst some of the author’s short stories bear the structural hallmarks of the Russian. Van der Ziel alludes to readings of other realists: Chekov, Flaubert and Stendhal all feature. Semblances of Flaubert’s “Author-God” can be found in his work, though most notably in The Pornographer, where the concept is transformed from impartial creator to sadistic mocker. Van der Ziel is careful, however, to emphasise that McGahern did not subscribe to the school of realism based in forensic depiction of reality. Rather, McGahern’s work reflects only a crucial selection of reality, and the author continues to place prominence on the personal, subjective universe that we all experience.

The next two chapters are devoted to McGahern’s reading of modernism, starting off with the Proustian, European modernist tradition, and extending into the Joycean and Yeatsian Irish traditions. Van der Ziel highlights the presence of Proust in McGahern’s literary manifesto “The Image”, described also as a “cheeky literary joke” that condenses Proust’s seminal novel In Search of Lost Time to a single page in a friendly parody. Indeed, it is the Proustian themes of memory, time, the self and the external world that Van der Ziel identifies as particularly important to McGahern. Van der Ziel justifies the latter by showing how the subjects of McGahern’s literature so often compartmentalise the spaces, memories and people in their lives.

The second modernism chapter begins with an observation that perhaps summarises the entire purpose of the text: when faced with the great and looming achievements of Yeats and Joyce, McGahern escaped being overawed by separating his reading from their personhoods. That said, Van der Ziel highlights several Joycean aspects to McGahern’s work: the revival of the exile myth, paralysis and epiphany all feature. Whilst Joyce’s habit (especially in the earlier writing that McGahern valued more than the Dubliner’s latter work) of writing in the spirit of “scrupulous meanness” was a source of inspiration. With Yeats, McGahern read him as a poet of ideas. As with Austen and the Realists, McGahern admired and revived his technique of lending to the local a universality. Van der Ziel’s excellent work demonstrates how McGahern’s careful reading of the Irish poet reveals to him ancient philosophies regarding the nature of sex, procreation and the soul.

Finally, in the last chapter Van der Ziel looks at McGahern’s reading of the post-war authors and philosophers. There is a focus on his compatriot Samuel Beckett, alongside Albert Camus, and

Claude Simon. Here we see how McGahern certainly was affected by some of Camus’s ideas, with the theme of laughing in the face of futility present extensively in The Barracks. Yet, Van der Ziel is careful not to affix the author with the existentialist tag, relaying that when a French interviewer suggested this, McGahern replied “I’m not sure what that word means”. This chapter is notably shorter than others in the book, and Van der Ziel perhaps doesn’t offer as much depth in this section. Yet, the second part of this chapter does present an excellent assessment of the Beckettian elements of McGahern’s work.

Stanley van der Ziel’s text is a comprehensive and revealing. McGahern is demonstrated to be not only nuanced writer, but a nuanced reader. Indeed, the chapter titles (“An Augustan Sensibility”, “A Romantic Imagination”, “A Modernist Mind”), are suggestive of characteristics of the writer himself, suggesting a “melting pot” of an author who has read widely and absorbed much. McGahern is positioned clearly in a tradition, one that he has both refashioned and left a lasting impact upon it. By the text’s conclusion, there can be no doubt that McGahern deserves to take his place amongst the great writers of the literary tradition. Additionally, with this critical work Stanely van der Ziel has joined another literary tradition, that of great critics to accompany great authors: Yeats has Foster, Joyce has Gifford (amongst many others), and McGahern now has Van der Ziel.

Seamus May seamus.may@hotmail.co.uk

Acting on the International Stage Todd Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015, 248 pp, £26.95, hardcover Diverging from traditional notions of statecraft, Todd Hall offers new theoretical tools for scholars to understand state behaviour within international relations. That is not to say that states do not engage in traditional hard politicking, such as coercion, for example. However, it is not all they do. The conceptual core of the book then is a theory of emotional diplomacy, which is defined as ‘coordinated state-level behaviour aimed at officially and explicitly projecting the image of a particular emotional response toward other states’ (2). This is not ‘simply rhetoric, but a form of foreign policy behaviour that can incorporate very substantive gestures’ with ‘real and important consequences’ (3). Stripped of accompanying rhetoric, however, actions can take on any number of meanings and is, therefore, not so easily dismissed (51). Careful not to fall into the trap of anthropomorphising states, Hall focuses on official emotion as choreographed by state actors – including policymakers, diplomats, state and military officials etc. – and argues that emotional diplomacy is ‘by its nature intentional and collaborative’ (3). In combining rationalist and constructivist political science with contemporary history and psychological approaches Hall’s analysis has done more than one discipline a great service. This is a worthy addition to the now burgeoning literature within the field of international relations on the significance of emotion and its affect. Skillfully travelling between conceptual abstraction and empiricism, where carefully chosen case studies test political performance, Hall charts how state representatives use emotional displays strategically in order to achieve their goals on the international stage. The book concentrates on three specific strains of emotional diplomacy: anger, sympathy and guilt. Chapter 1 presents in greater depth the theoretical foundations of the book, grounding the concept of emotional diplomacy in the work of sociologists, such as Erving Goffman and Arlie Hochschild, and draws upon the writings of Robert Jervis on the role of images in international relations. Chapter 2 examines the diplomacy of anger using the example of the Taiwan Strait Crisis 1995-96. China’s military response to the visit by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to Cornell in June 1995 was coupled with a discourse of indignation. The chapter identifies the factors that escalated and deescalated the crisis and explains its long term effects. Chapter 3 investigates the diplomacy of

sympathy in the context of 9/11, reminding us that the first international leader to call the White House after 9/11 was none other than Vladimir Putin. Following 9/11, both Russia and China wanted to reboot their relations with the United States and reframe their own domestic conflicts as part of the War on Terror. Chapter 4 explores the role of the diplomacy of guilt during the initial decades of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel. During this period the Federal Republic of Germany wanted to rehabilitate its image within the international community by showing remorse. This required not only rhetoric but also costly and controversial reparations, and even came to involve secret weapons transfers which jeopardised its economic and political interests in the Middle East. The last chapter presents several mini-studies into the further potential of emotional diplomacy. For example, the Cambodian attacks on Thailand’s embassy in Phnom Penh in 2003 and Ecuador’s protest against Colombia’s attack on a FARC insurgent camp in 2008, among others. One could feasibly object to the fact that all constitute responses to significantly negative situations, and are extreme cases. Hall, however, convincingly contends that extreme cases are not necessarily easy cases for his approach. On the contrary, in high stake situations like these state actors would be less likely to ‘behave frivolously’ (11).

It appears that it is mere accident that the emotions explored posses a triangular relationship. With the exception of the unfortunate repeated error in the book: the misidentification of NATO as the “North American Treaty Organization”, this is an ambitious and important work. Strongly evidenced, the bibliography ranges across scholarship and sources published in English, German and (simplified) Chinese. In painting a truly interesting picture of emotionalism as both diplomatic theatre and rational calculation, Hall’s book will appeal to a gamut of scholars. And it bears increasing relevance to the wider public, particularly in view of the relatively recent spate of terrorist linked attacks in the West and the way in which international responses have unraveled. A path breaking study Hall encourages, even invites, further research.

Michaela Crawley University of Oxford michaela.crawley@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Representing the ‘Oirish’ Deirdre McFeely, Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015, 230 pp., illustrated, £22.99, paperback. During his life time, Dion Boucicault was among the most popular Victorian melodramatists. From the 1840s through to the latter years of the 1870s, Boucicault’s works captivated and entertained audiences in Dublin, London, Paris and New York. But what about now? In the wake of the Irish Literary Revival and their form of nationalist drama, attention on Boucicault dwindled. Although Richard Fawkes’s Dion Boucicault (1979) is the last biography of Boucicault, a number of recent critical studies examine a number of his plays with regard to partisan politics. For example, Alison O’Malley-Younger’s ‘Posing Paddy for Empire: Dion Boucicault staging the ‘Oirish’ (2013), explores Boucicault’s patriotic melodramas The Shaughraun (1874) and Robert Emmet (1884) as examples of his subversion of the Imperial gaze. As McFeely argues, ‘Boucicault criticism treated the plays as spectacular melodrama, emphasising that the success of the Irish plays was largely due to the playwright’s improved portrayal of the stage Irishman’ (2). This why this study is needed. Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage is a thoroughly welcome contribution to discussions on the reception of Boucicault, his Irish plays and melodrama.

In this detailed study, McFeely draws on a range of contemporary advertisements, reviews, literary and historical materials to illuminate the ‘social, cultural and political complexities’ (4) of Boucicault’s Irish melodramas. McFeely notes:

This work addresses some of the many lacunae in Boucicault research by undertaking a detailed examination of the reception of all of his Irish plays in the New York-LondonDublin theatre triangle which Boucicault inhabited (2). Much of the insight and pleasure of this books stems from its solid and thorough research. The numerous examples taken literature, the periodical press and contemporary materials provide a number of interesting comparisons and connections. Following a brief introduction in which McFeely outlines the aims of her study, she provides an overview of Boucicault’s life and discusses his emergence as a playwright with reference to The Poor of New York (1857), Jessie Brown; or The Relief of the Lucknow (1858) and The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana (1859).

Boucicault’s foray into Irish drama begins with The Colleen Bawn. McFeely argues ‘The Colleen Bawn is seen as an important turning point in [his] career [and his claim that it] was his first Irish drama is well documented’ (15). McFeely makes excellent used of contemporary resources in her discussion of ‘the detailed genesis of Arrah-na-Pogue (1864), and its reception’ (4). Furthermore, ‘the question of censorship and the supposed banning of ‘The Wandering of the Green’ (4) is examined in detail. Tracing the premiere of Arrah-na-Pogue at Dublin’s Theatre Royal, then, following a number of revisions, its performance at the Royal Princess’s Theatre in London, to the U.S., and its return to Dublin in 1868, McFeely provides a comprehensive narrative about the plays national and international appeal. Through her thorough research, McFeely challenges and rejects the myth ‘The Wearing of the Green’, was banned. Although the ballad did not feature in the original 1864 Dublin production, and Boucicault omitted it from the 1868 production after Fenian uprising of 1867, it was performed by the character of Shaun in the London production in 1865 to ‘rave review[s]’ (43). As McFeely argues, ‘Boucicault’s version […] was never banned. In fact, Boucicault’s rendition of the rebel song proved to be a popular highlight for English audiences’ (p. 30). McFeely’s attention to the cultural and political reception of this play and ballad are one of the highlights of this study because it illustrates Boucicault’s engagement with ‘commercial commodification’ (13).

Exploring Boucicault’s relatively neglected works, McFeely focuses on The Rapparee (1870) and Daddy O’Dowd (1873). In chapter four, the language and the reception of each play provide the central focus of McFeely’s discussion on their artistic qualities and political overtones. Concentrating on lack of critical attention that stems from the ‘problematic plot and structure’ (67), McFeely shows that ‘Overall, The Rapparee and Daddy O’Dowd both lack the winning combination of elements that contributed to the success of Boucicault’s other Irish plays’ (76). In her discussion of The O’Dowd (1880), a comparatively unknown reworking of Daddy O’Dowd, McFeely argues authoritatively that because the play proved to be controversial both on and off stage, Boucicault withdrew it shortly after its premiere at the Adelphi Theatre, London in 1880. McFeely makes a number of insightful points about the plays political nature, particularly its references to the public shaming of Charles Boycott and its support of the Land League. As McFeely argues, ‘By always portraying O’Dowd as non-violent, Boucicault was actually promoting the policies of the Land League as at the time Parnell was issuing frequent warnings against the use of physical force’ (153). Although these neglected plays are derived partly from examples of French

melodrama, notably Les Crochets du pére Martin (1858) by Eugene Grange and Eugene Corman, McFeely devotes little attention to such influences.

Similarly, McFeely’s discussion on Robert Emmet, while illuminating and insightful is all too brief. Boldly declaring in the introduction of this study that ‘Robert Emmet, a play that has been positioned as a highpoint in the playwright’s political commitment to Irish Nationalism, is first and foremost as a work by Frank Marshall, an English playwright and not Boucicault’ (4), McFeely attempts to revise the misappropriated authorship of this play. In support of this assertion, McFeely cites several lines of inquiry, including the plays genre as a heroic tragedy, its large production budget and a lack of ‘evidence to suggest that Boucicault chose to write a play about Emmet’s life’ (171). However, the scope of this discussion is limited and underdeveloped. As such, this analysis would have benefitted from larger discussion, and would have greater impact with considerable more space being devoted to this topic.

This study may have profited from being more balanced with regards to structure as McFeely devotes two lengthy chapters to her discussion of The Shaughraun. As a result, a number of chapters appear to be hurried, too brief and lack critical impact. Moreover, McFeely’s study may have benefitted from further engagement with wider discussions on melodrama and the public sphere as evident in Elaine Hadley’s Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalised Dissent in the English Marketplace 1800-85 (1998). These issues aside, readers unfamiliar with Boucicault and his works will find this an informative and useful book, it will also appeal to experienced scholars as it offers a new approach and new information about Boucicault. Students and scholars of Boucicault and Irish theatre history will find this volume insightful, thought-provoking and a valuable resource.

Robert Finnigan University of Sunderland roib.fionnagain@gmail.com

The Markieviczes and the Irish Revolution Lauren Arrington, Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016, 294pp., ₤24.95, hardcover. Lauren Arrington’s Revolutionary Lives offers a double biography of Constance (née Gore-Booth, 1868-1927) and Casimir Markievicz (1874-1932), charting their ideological evolution from their bohemian artist days in Paris in the 1890s to their direct participation in the revolutionary movements—cultural as well as political—in Ireland, and in Casimir’s case in Poland. The book also discusses their often turbulent private lives, making reference to private correspondence between them and various family members, and the pressures which led them to part ways and live separate lives without losing respect for one another. The book opens with a detailed description of Constance’s luxurious upbringing in Lissadell, the family estate in County Sligo, pointing out how insensitive she was to her extraordinary privilege in those days and how her only ambition was to become an artist. In London, while a student at Slade School of Fine Art, she was drawn to the “bourgeois, non-Marxist socialism that was fashionable among London’s artists” (3), which despite its shortcomings introduced Constance to the suffrage movement and the Land War back home. Occultism too became a source of influence for her, a passion she shared with her sister and confidant Eva, who would eventually become deeply involved in the suffragist movement. From London, Arrington takes us to Paris, where Constance met recently-widowed and fellow artist Casimir Markievicz, and from there to Dublin, where the couple settled down after getting married. By the time the Markieviczs arrived to Ireland, the Irish Revival was well underway. Arrington gives a detailed account of the political agents and debates—from anti-imperialism to the use of force for political purposes—at the time, and the political and artistic contributions of both Constance and Casimir as they became more involved in the Irish nationalist cause. Thanks to diligent research, Arrington shows the complexity both of the political situation in Ireland and of Constance’s personal and public life, and sheds light on some of the most controversial aspects of her political activism. Revolutionary Lives counteracts the bad press to which the Countess was subjected while still alive, the malicious biographies that came afterwards—based on “opinion rather than the facts of the Markievieczs’ lives and thought” (273)—and the caricatures that took a strong hold in popular imagination after independence. Amongst the latter, the author

mentions Liam O’Flaherty’s novel The Martyr (1933), a satire on the Irish Civil War, where Constance is represented through the character of Angela Fitzgibbon as a “vampiric Cathleen ni Houlihan: mystical, sexual, and above all bored” (274). More contemporary approaches to Constance’s involvement in the independence process in Ireland, especially regarding her support of violent action, do not go unnoticed either. On the one hand, Arrington convincingly argues that the connection between the armed struggle in Northern Ireland, the Easter Rising, and the Irish Civil War has led some historians to dismiss early Republicans “as enamored with violence for its own sake,” without paying proper attention to the imperial context in which the revolutionary movements were happening (273-74). Likewise, she points out the limitations of Irish Republicanism’s approach that often exaggerated Constance’s contributions. It is worth nothing that the “iconic” photograph of the Countess in soldier attire is not among the images included in the book. Rather, it is mentioned at the very end of the book, in a passage that captures American poet Louise Bogan’s impressions upon seeing the picture in the 1916 collection in the National Museum of Dublin during her visit to Ireland in April 1937. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, she would describe Ireland not as a country but as a “neurosis,” given its reverence to “those heroic but gruesome days” (276). On the one hand, this passage warns the reader of the dangers of extreme visibility—the inclusion of Constance in the pantheon of key political figures of the country does not necessarily remediate the neglect of women’s voices and experiences in historiographies of the independence process of Ireland. On the other hand, it serves as a reflection on the politics of memorialization, on the dangers of an acritical glorification of militarism for its own sake. Bogan would have been horrified—as we should be—to see school kids reenacting the 1916 uprising in the centenary of the event. Revolutionary Lives reveals among other things the misogynistic attitudes Constance faced at the time, and how a century later things have not changed that much with regards to the representation of her persona. Perhaps the Countess lacked the intellectual sophistication of some of her contemporaries. Her writings often fell into sentimental propaganda. Yet Arrington’s biography shows the complex character of someone who was born to privilege and eventually became an agent of change. The book is not a hagiography, however. Constance had many contradictions and Arrington is not shy to point them out, such as the episode when the Countess, a women’s rights advocate, demanded not to be mixed up together with common female prisoners while in prison. The space devoted in the book to Casimir’s political evolution—from being a supporter of imperial Russia to becoming an ardent advocate of Pole nationalism—is limited compared to Constance’s.

This limitation if anything illustrates the challenges the archive poses to works such as Arringtonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x201D;official archives are heavily gendered as well as biased in terms of class and ideology. In Casimirâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s case, the change of regime in Russia added difficulties to tracking his whereabouts for a considerable number of years. We can get a sense, however, of how class and Irish politics informed his attitude toward the political landscape back home. All in all, Revolutionary Lives constitutes an important source on the rich and complex lives of Constance and Casimir Markievicz and their contributions to the Irish Revolution.

Estibalitz Ezkerra University of Illinois ezkerra2@illinois.edu

Context and Chronology Niall Carson, Rebel By Vocation: Séan O’Faoláin and the Generation of The Bell, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, 192 pp, £75.00, hardcover Dr. Carson’s book begins with a retort from Seán O’Faoláin made in 1948 that describes ‘a whole generation since 1922 has gone rotten like bad fruit badly kept or evaporated like your da’s whiskey.’ (O’Faoláin, 1948, private correspondence) The quote functions as a contextual scenesetter for Carson’s meticulous excavation of O’Faoláin’s Bell magazine and the multifaceted coteries that orbited the publication from its inception in 1941 until its final demise in 1954, as well as serving as a handy summary of much of the prevailing academic opinion regarding the timeframe concerned. The book’s chronology charts what remains a critically neglected period of Irish letters, and one that is too often relegated to the generalised judgement of being a monochrome continuum of depredation and despair in which what little creative activity existed found its expression hidebound by a calcified cultural infrastructure in hock to a heavily politicised and censorious Catholic hegemony. Rebel by Vocation’s central contention reads the enduring presence and influence of The Bell throughout the 40s and into the 50s as a rebuttal to the appraisal of those years as being culturally Lilliputian. Carson is no historical apologist, but rather presents the inhibiting forces at work in mid-20th Century Irish society as the catalyst for O’Faoláin and co-founder Peadar O’Donnell’s motivation in founding the magazine. This approach requires a more analytically deft approach to the contemporary cultural context than is commonly apprehended. The strength of this nuance is particularly evident on the issue of censorship; Carson’s adroit dismantling of the commonly held maxim that the socio-cultural impulse to censor as being a specifically Irish one represents one of the book’s genuine triumphs inasmuch as it successfully roots the Irish experience amongst the wider tide of Occidental (and particularly British) cultural and artistic milieu while resisting the influence to attempt any ham-fisted revisionism relating to the comparative excesses of state censorship as practiced in Ireland. The liminal ambiguity of Ireland’s position as being both of and apart from mainstream European culture is reflected in O’Faoláin’s own episodic ambivalence towards the issue of censorship that evolves fitfully over the course of The Bell’s timespan. The question of time as a structural mode remains a significant intellectual challenge to scholarly work of this type. Attempts to define periods - be they in the form of generations, movements, coteries,

schools or any other of the plethora of labels placed on them for academic convenience - generally follow one of two critical approaches: contextual or chronological. The chronological or generational approach favoured here is one that has endured a period of relative critical neglect in recent years, and evokes echoes of Samuel Hynes’ 1976 work The Auden Generation, a book that adopts a strictly – to the point of being restrictive – chronological approach to ordering the book ‘in a straightforward year-by-year chronology.’ Hynes himself notes the underlying problems with such a strategy, admitting frankly that ‘I am aware that certain simplifications enter with such a method: it seems to assume that all imaginations work at the same rapid pace, and does not allow for a varying lag-facto between the stimulus and the work; and it seems also to assume that in all cases the stimulus is immediate history […] to write about the literary existence of a generation is to accept a necessary restriction of subject.’ (Hynes, 1976, p10) That is not to suggest Hynes’ approach is one of no merit, and it does go a significant way towards reconciling the limitations of chronology versus context while also acknowledging the inherent limitations of either such approach. Carson’s critical lense is more of the former’s hue than the latter and structures the historiography of the period accordingly, furnishing its timeline with demarcations that lie predominantly within the linear progression of events as opposed the often sprawling, inconsistent and repetitive nature of a contextual framework. However, in tandem with this, the book’s foregrounding of Sean O’Faolain in the title facilitates a parallel, character-driven assessment of the period’s key protagonists that serves to buttress the study with a contextual depth likely beyond the reach of a purely chronological approach. The value of this charactercontextualisation is articulated via the sheer weight of archival excavation undertaken in its course, over the course of a series of episodic offshoots that, while occasionally flirting on the edge, never quite career off the precipice of relevance. There are times when the convergence of these two approaches hang awkwardly together, particularly in the case of the contextual comparisons drawn between O’Faolain and O’Donnell regarding their differences over the nature and purpose of art and the chronological distinctions between their respective eras of dominance over the magazine’s editorial persuasion that are prominently referred to as points of significance to both strands of appraisal, while remaining relatively under-investigated as motivating or underpinning factors. This however is rather a trifling concern when set against the wider critical achievement of the book in wedding two seemingly oppositional approaches together in what is a predominantly coherent fashion. One other small point of criticism is Carson’s rather anachronistic tendency to use ‘English’ and ‘British’

interchangeably as terms of political reference, for as much as this convention remains common in colloquial vernacular, when discussing matters of socio-cultural history as intricately layered as 19th and 20th Century British-Irish relations, the small but pertinent distinction would have been appreciated. Beyond that, however, the book offers a new and interesting insight into an underacknowledged period of Irish literary history and will surely prove a significant point of reference for future scholarship into both 20th Century Irish culture and the nature of literary generations.

James Gallacher University of Liverpool J.O.Gallacher@liverpool.ac.uk

Inhabiting the Dream Medbh McGuckian, The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems, selected and introduced by Borbála Faragó and Michaela Schrage-Früh, Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2015, 344 pp., $18.95, paperback. Medbh McGuckian is a “difficult” poet. This phrase, the complaint of many frustrated students of Irish literature, points to the fact that her work defies standard analytic practice. In the classroom and lecture hall, what McGuckian “means”, the sought after grail of academic investigation, remains elusive. McGuckian’s verse is difficult to understand, and more difficult to write about, and, as such, her work has received comparatively little critical attention. In addition to the seeming impenetrability of her verse, McGuckian has consistently focused her poetic gaze upon themes and issues that have sometimes been described, dismissively, as “women’s concerns” or “domestic matters.” As a Northern Irish Catholic, prolific during the Troubles, subjects such as female desire and sexuality, childbirth and motherhood, were regarded as unpalatable and extraneous topics for a serious poet. A serious poet, critics intoned, would be better employed addressing, clearly and directly, the public and political world. Thankfully, due to a number of recent interventions, notably Leontia Flynn’s incisive Reading Medbh McGuckian (2013), such limiting understandings are subsiding, and, with the publication of The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems, selected by Borbála Faragó and Michaela Schrage-Früh, readers can finally possess a comprehensive and thoughtfully assembled selection of McGuckian’s work. A collection that shows the vital voice she offered and continues to offer to Irish society. It is difficult, in the few words granted here, to attempt to capture the richness of the poetic output captured in this volume, covering all of thirty years. However it is possible to reflect on The Unfixed Horizon as a volume of selected poems. A selection like this has two key functions. Firstly, it must present something comprehensive, construct a space where those encountering McGuckian for the first time can get a feel for the depth and breadth of her poetic interventions. This has certainly been achieved. The Unfixed Horizon is intelligently representative, offering an even number of poems from her collections. The selection includes poems from thirteen volumes, beginning with McGuckian’s first major volume The Flower Master and Other Poem (1982) and concluding with the recent The High Caul Cap (2012). Secondly, a selection of poems must offer the reader, new or experienced, a way to understand the importance of the poet’s work as it has developed over a number of years. Too many editors of selected poems are content to pick a number

of the “best” poems, often a by-word for most popular, offering a compilation designed, in turn, to be popular. There is logic in this decision, readers will inevitably be drawn selection of popular poems, but Faragó and Schrage-Früh endeavour to go beyond this. As is clear from their insightful introduction, The Unfixed Horizon sets out to guides the reader through the exciting evolution of a poetic career. The editors have a challenging job. In an effort to raise the selection above a compilation, they attempt to help the reader approach McGuckian’s work by commenting simply and clearly on her style and outlining the themes to which she unfailingly returns. Their knowledge is comprehensive, and, in a dense twenty-four pages, they comment and uncover many of McGuckian’s key obsessions. They name and locate the diverse themes explored in her work, such as: female sexuality, procreation, motherhood, the creative process, political violence, home, and death. However, they carefully avoid reducing their contribution to an explanation of the verse itself. Insightful comments abound in the introduction. On the first page the editors set the tone of their analysis: “Those readers willing to go with the flow of syntactical structures branching out, of images mutating and multiplying in dream-like fashion, will be gripped by an intimate, sensual, and intense reading experience.” (xiii) Comments like this empower the reader to reject the idea of “understanding” McGuckian, to give up on the tired notion of control, and to choose emersion within a fascinating world. The editors understand that McGuckian is primarily concerned with making the familiar strange, attempting always to unseat the tired rider that controls so much of our perceptive capacity. In this selection of poems we journey, guided by sure hands, along with a poet happy to inhabit a border terrain, a space in which the so-called “real” world and “dream” world exist in uncanny relation. Faragó and Schrage-Früh inform the reader that “McGuckian’s unique style, characterized by playfulness, ambiguity, and flux, has been read in terms of various theories of êcriture fêminine.” (xvii) Indeed, this is perhaps the only way to approach her work. McGuckian’s art is underpinned by viewing the world slantways. In her poems there is a clear avoidance of narrative coherence, at least in the sense of coherence understood as traditional “logical” connection. Because of this rejection of “logic”, the patient reader will inevitably discover fresh and challenging ways of looking at the world through her written word. And, perhaps most importantly, will feel like a companion rather than a follower. McGuckian, always content to forget words like control and sense, is open to the unpredictable journey, the dream wander. In a poem typical of her style, ‘The Feastday of Peace’, she opens:

Deep in time’s turnings and the overcrowded soil, too familiar to be seen, the long, long dead steer with their warmed breath my unislanded dreams. (121) There is a continuity of vision at the heart of McGuckian’s work. She is always straining to connect with the “long” dead, who “long” to be heard. And, within the dream world that the poet inhabits, she, along with the reader, becomes “unislanded”. At the heart of this selection of poems is the acceptance of not knowing, of losing the comfort of stable footing. Are there weaknesses in this publication? Yes, but they are technical and minor. For instance, the absence of an index at the back of the book is frustrating. But such trivial irritations take little away from this wonder-filled collection. Faragó and Schrage-Früh have done a noteworthy job, offering an insightful introduction, and a thoughtful selection. McGuckian’s work is founded on her ability to move seamlessly within the contradictions that make up the human life. She never turns away from the suffering, decay or death that shadows our existence, but she refuses to become overwhelmed by grief. She relentlessly reminds the reader of that which makes life joyful: the transformative power of creativity, the excitement of sexual encounter, and the mystery of love. McGuckian haunts the reader, whispering about love and death within a wonderfully disquieting dreamscape. The Unfixed Horizon will remind all readers of her poetic power. In a world frighteningly more prone to extreme ideological certainty, McGuckian lets go. She allows her imagination to wander down backroads and laneways, never seeking mastery over the written word or encountered world. McGuckian is comfortable in no woman’s land, in not questing for meaning, in settling, humbly, for epiphany. Each poem in this selection has something unique to offer the courageous reader, each is a worthwhile reflection on the “throwaway gracefulness” (234) of the human life.

Martin McConigley University College Cork

Contributors Dr Niall Carson is a lecturer in British and Irish Literature at the University of Manchester. He completed his PhD, titled ‘Beginnings and Blind Alleys: The Bell 1940-1954’, at the University of Liverpool, where he later held the Blair Chair Postdoctoral Award. He has published on the Irish literary periodical and on the author and novelist Seán O'Faoláin. His research focuses on the literary periodical and periodical cultures, and on the crossover between British and Irish literature. His monograph Rebel by Vocation: Seán O’Faoláin and the Generation of The Bell was published by Manchester University Press in January of 2016. Michaela Crawley is a DPhil Candidate at the Oxford University, and recipient of the prestigious Oxford Life-Writing and AHRC Award. In conjunction with the DPhil, Michaela works as a University Teacher and College Tutor. Previously Michaela studied at the University of Liverpool where she earned a First Class BA (Hons) in History and Irish Studies and Master of Arts with Distinction. During this time Michaela was also the recipient of the Margaret Bryce Smith Scholarship, the Institute of Irish Studies MA Studentship, and is an alumnus of the esteemed Washington Ireland Program for Service and Leadership. Estibalitz Ezkerra is a PhD candidate in Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (USA). Her dissertation focuses on the role of memory and trauma in Irish and Basque fictional accounts of rebellion. She holds an MA in English from the University of Nevada, Reno (USA), and BAs in Journalism and in Art History from the University of the Basque Country. Liss Farrell is currently in the second year of her PhD at the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, researching depictions of brotherhood in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and how they relate to Joyce’s personal life. Other interests include the works of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Both her BA and MA were also completed in Irish Studies at Liverpool University; for the former she was awarded the George Huxley and David Thistlewood prizes, while her PhD has been made possible by being awarded the Sir Joseph Rotblat Alumni Scholarship. Robert Finnigan is a PhD student at the University of Sunderland currently researching AngloIrish contributions to Aestheticism and Decadence within the fin de siècle period. His primary research interests lie in the areas of Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence and the Irish Gaelic Revival, as well as forgotten, neglected and repressed authors. For several years, he has been involved in N.E.I.C.N (North East Irish Culture Network) activities and events to promote and encourage research into the various characteristics of Irish culture and society. Sean Huddleston is currently a PhD Candidate in the School of Education at the University of the West of Scotland, researching prejudice within the Scottish Education system. Most recently, he has been the principal organiser for the 'Football, Education and Prejudice' Conference, held in October 2016 - Scotland's first ever conference held on this subject. He has presented at conferences in Scotland, the wider UK and in the United States, presenting several times at the American Conference of Irish Studies regional events. He has also made several media appearances on the subject of religious bigotry in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Seamus May is about to embark on a PhD at the University of Liverpool with a focus on Giordano Bruno’s “Gnomon” and James Joyce with a full scholarship. He has previously completed both his Undergraduate and Master’s Degrees at the University, receiving the Irish Studies Prize for highest dissertation mark in the department in the latter. This is his first time writing for LPJIS, though he edited the Liverpool Creative Writing student magazine in 2015, and contributed in 2014. Seamus’s current role is researching and writing about spirits for Danish company FineDrams.com.

Martin McConigley is a PhD research student in the School of English at University College Cork. His work analyses the significant impact of partition on Irish fiction since nineteen sixty-nine and is supported by a fellowship from the Irish Research Council. He currently lectures part-time in All Hallows College, Dublin City University. Joan Redmond recently completed a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, examining religious violence in seventeenth-century Ireland. From September 2016 she will be a Teaching Fellow at King’s College London; in 2015-2016, she was Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London. Her research interests lie in early modern Irish and British history, covering fields including violence, rebellion, religious practices, memory studies, and popular politics. She previously studied for an MPhil at the University of Cambridge, and a BA at Trinity College, Dublin.

Lucy Simpson studied History at the University of Leicester, before completing an MA in Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool in 2013. She received the Institute of Irish Studies MA Dissertation Award for her thesis, which offered a critical analysis of the 2013 McAleese Report on state involvement with the Magdalen laundries. She returned to the University of Liverpool in 2014 as a PhD candidate to continue her research on the recent investigations into clerical and institutional abuse in twentieth-century Ireland.

Submissions for LPJIS, No. 3 (2018) will open in summer 2017. All enquiries should be emailed in the first instance to the general editor, Seรกn Hewitt, on S.E.Hewitt2@liverpool.ac.uk.