“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,/ It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”
So wrote WB Yeats in his well-known poem September 1913, as he mournfully reflected on contemporary Irish culture, comparing it unfavourably to an idealised past.
It’s a statement that will be familiar to many Irish readers, as Claire Connolly notes in the introduction to her new study, Irish Romanticism: A Literary History. But it’s also one that deals in an absolute born of personal disenchantment. Written in response to opposition to the establishment of a gallery to house the collections of Hugh Lane, the poem voices Yeats’s understanding of modern Ireland’s cultural depravity.
However, his assertion of the demise of Romantic Ireland was both premature and inaccurate, particularly if we consider the enduring cultural impact of literature by Irish writers of the Romantic period, which encompassed the final decades of the 18th century and the first several of the 19th. Far from dead, Irish Romantic literature had a lasting influence on 19th and early 20th century culture, not limited to the inspiration it provided to Yeats and the wider Irish literary revival.
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While Romantic figures such as Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Moore, Sydney Owenson and Lady Morgan are relatively well-recognised in Irish culture today, we still have much to learn about their works and the particular contexts in which they wrote. We must, in other words, look beyond Yeats’s familiar declaration of the death of Romantic Ireland and rediscover “from the inside” what was, in Connolly’s representation, a unique period of Irish literary production characterised by new forms and styles that we have yet to appreciate fully today.
Romanticism emerged in Europe, at least partially, in response to the Enlightenment. In literature it is characterised by a number of aesthetic and thematic focuses: a celebration of the author as independent, creative genius; an appreciation for the powers of the imagination; a glorification of nature; and a belief in the guiding light of emotion.
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In etymological terms, we might say that the concept of Romanticism has peculiarly Irish origins. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest usage of the term as a way of referring to a distinct artistic and cultural movement to Sydney Owenson: in her 1821 travelogue, Italy, Owenson wrote, “The vehemence with which the question of Romanticism has been debated, will have a favourable influence upon the Italians”.
Her comments remind us of the largely retrospective nature of the naming and defining of Romanticism: the writers we now understand as Romanticists weren’t generally referring to themselves as such. Owenson’s remark also raises the question of canonicity, asking us to think about who has traditionally been identified as a Romanticist and why.
The dominance of male English writers in the received catalogue of Romanticism says much about the politics of literary inclusion and exclusion. The names of the “big six” Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Blake and Keats – roll off the tongue with an ease reflective of more than two centuries of sexist, classist and racist practices of literary collection, preservation and praise.
New analytic approaches to Romantic-era literature from the 1960s or so on, including feminist literary studies and postcolonialism, have helped us to recognise the significant numbers of women, nonelite and nonwhite and/or colonised writers who contributed vitally to the emergence and development of Romanticism.
Among these writers are the Irish, whose engagement with Romanticism began largely through women and who, for much of the period in question, suffered from comparison to their peers elsewhere in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland formed by the Anglo-Irish union of 1801. They were “failed” writers who were seen ineffectively to imitate the exemplars of mainstream British literary culture while simultaneously producing new models and forms that couldn’t easily be contained within it.
Recent readings of Irish Romanticism have considerably opened up our study of its key authors and texts. Yet, there remains, as Julia M Wright has elsewhere observed, an Irish equivalent of the “big six”, one that centres the work of Charlotte Brooke, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Robert Maturin, Sydney Owenson, Thomas Moore and Mary Tighe. These writers feature prominently in Connolly’s book, meaning that it traces, in one sense, a fairly familiar canon of Irish Romantic literature.
However, Connolly provides fresh and illuminating accounts of much-analysed texts such as Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) while also drawing attention to less often considered works, including Edgeworth’s Helen (1834). Case studies of comparatively marginalised writers – among them, Thomas Dermody, Gerald Griffin, William Carleton and Jeremiah Joseph Callanan – focalise the wider Romantic impulse in Ireland as well as the diverse body of literature it yielded, aided by a deep and careful excavation of relevant archival materials.
[ Maria Edgeworth was a great literary celeb. Why has she been forgotten?Opens in new window ]
The book’s chronological time frame, meanwhile, expands our focus. Adopting an approach that sees the period 1780-1850 as particularly meaningful in an Irish context, the book doesn’t go quite as far as the “Romantic century” sometimes embraced by scholars. Nevertheless, it stretches back before 1798 – often seen as the starting point of British Romanticism with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, and, of course, a moment of deep political import in Ireland, with the 1798 Rebellion.
It reaches further than the first three decades of the 19th century and the fiction most commonly associated with Irish Romanticism: the national tales and regional novels of Edgeworth, Owenson and Maturin. The book encourages us to think beyond a handful of important, closely clustered texts – Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808-1834), Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) – and to view Irish Romanticism itself as dynamic and evolving, rather than static and one-dimensional. This evolution is further highlighted by the book’s division of Irish Romanticism into three main phases: 1780-1815, 1815-1830, 1830-1850.
Connolly’s introduction of six “conceptual pairings” – past/present, Irish/English (language), manuscript/print, originals/copies, women/men, people/environment – further emphasises the shifts of Irish Romanticism. These thematic combinations provide productive touchpoints throughout the book, without becoming prescriptive or heavy-handed.
In chapter one, for instance, Connolly considers the bookish quality of Irish Romanticism, addressing the ways in which publications by, among others, Dermody, Brooke, Tighe and James Orr, sat at the juncture between two cultures aligned, on the one hand, with an oral, Irish-language, manuscript tradition and, on the other, a written, English-language, print tradition. Copying out for an elite, largely anglophone readership Gaelic, oral verse, which it also seeks to translate and explain for its readers, for example Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), mediates between an elite print culture and the popular, vernacular culture from which it emerged.
In chapters two and three, attention to the dyads Connolly identifies helps us better understand Irish Romanticism’s profound interrogation of Ireland’s topography, particularly its coastal environment and the ways in which bodies of water, including rivers and oceans, allow writers such as Maturin and Griffin to conceptualise everyday Irish reality and Ireland’s imbrication in empire.
The eco-reading of Melmoth the Wanderer in chapter two is as compelling an assessment as I have read, offering fresh insight into a complex novel that has confounded fans and critics alike since its first publication. Considering the novel’s liquid co-ordinates, we can see how Maturin writes a kind of fluid-centric Gothic that shares many similarities with global gothic, but which uses the ocean, in particular, to imagine Ireland’s relationship with the imperial project.
The study’s twinned conceptual and chronological approach is an ambitious one that captures well both the gradual development of Irish Romanticism and what Connolly refers to as its “copiousness”. This is a term she uses to refer to both copies (copia) and to abundance (another meaning of “copia”). Thinking about Irish Romanticism’s copiousness means thinking about its thematic attention to questions of plenty and scarcity as they applied to the Irish population, to its linguistic cultures and to its literary production.
In less capable hands, the many thematic and temporal focal points may have proven unwieldy; the book could have very easily fallen victim to the very copiousness it seeks to describe. It is much to Connolly’s credit, however, that she is able deftly to weave the disparate threads together to produce a lucid account of a body of literature that, despite its individual variety, is coherent and intelligible as a whole.
And, here, I am purposely borrowing imagery from the book’s afterword, Frieze Coats and the Fabric of Irish Romanticism, not least because it is a real highlight of the study. In it, Connolly proposes a new cultural symbol for Irish Romanticism: the frieze coat rather than the ruin more commonly associated with Romantic culture.
Evoked repeatedly by authors across all three phases of Irish Romanticism, the coarse woollen peasant’s cloak demonstrates the fluctuating concerns and attentions of each phase. It’s there in the bookishness of early Irish Romanticism with its need to explain and mediate between disparate linguistic, confessional and class cultures, as in the glossary note on Thady’s coat in Castle Rackrent.
Later, the marine consciousness of mid-phase Romanticism finds expression through the coat, as emblematised by the contrast between John Melmoth’s ragged great coat, flapping wildly in the wind as he witnesses a fatal shipwreck off the Wicklow coast, and the unmoving clothing of the equally unflappable Wanderer. And, finally, the particular realism of late-phase Irish Romanticism is visible in Carleton’s use of the frieze coat to call attention to the commodification of domestic manufacture and the inability of external accounts fully to realise a true and faithful picture of Ireland.
Reading Irish Romanticism on Christmas Eve, I felt a kinship with Robert Rainey, who wrote about enjoying Castle Rackrent in his journal on December 24th, 1800. As he copied lines of the novel into the pages of his diary, Rainey in effect mimicked Edgeworth’s own creative process: Castle Rackrent famously began with the author’s attempt to replicate the peculiar speech of John Langan, the Edgeworth family steward.
For Connolly, Rainey’s journal helps us to understand something central about Castle Rackrent, in particular the manner in which it remediates Irish oral culture. On the one hand, Edgeworth’s collection and re-representation of popular knowledge in Castle Rackrent, especially its explanatory glossary, might be understood as a way of killing oral culture – a bit like Yeats’s discursive interment of Romantic Ireland. On the other, we can see Edgeworth’s novel as, in Connolly’s terms, “reimagin[ing] popular knowledge in a new mode”, thus giving it new life.
Given the liveliness of academic study of the Romantic period, it is perhaps debatable whether Irish Romanticism needed complete revivification. Certainly, however, Connolly’s book demonstrates that Irish Romanticism still has much to teach us.
Prof Christina Morin lectures at the University of Limerick. Her works include The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829
