In 1783, a man cutting turf in Co Longford found an old woollen coat deep in the bog. His landlord, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, coveted this strange survival from a distant age, but the finder prized it, “merely because another person wanted in”. In the end, he parted with it and the landlord, in turn, forwarded it to the Society of Antiquaries in London. But if the tenant farmer drove a hard bargain, then his reluctance to give up his discovery is nothing compared to the unyielding quality of the coat itself, “remarkable in nothing but its texture”.
In interpreting an old coat found in a bog for his London audience, Richard Lovell Edgeworth draws attention both to its “uncouth” ordinariness and its strange power to convey something of a culture. In time, the writings of his daughter, Maria Edgeworth, became hugely influential in documenting and explaining Irish life and helped to get an Irish romantic literature up on its feet. But that reputation for explaining things from the outside while ignoring native voices never went away.
For sure, there has long been a notion that romanticism was insufficiently Irish. The Irish literature that grew up between about 1780 and 1850 issued from a place of privilege – often from the pens of elite Protestant women – and resulted in books that sought to capture the sights and sounds of a crowded, impoverished, vital world on the flat plane of the English-language printed page.
Even the flowering of original English-language fiction and poetry – including the arrival of Catholic voices – might be seen simply as testament to the success of the anglicisation that intensified from the 17th century. But Irish romantic literature, from the end of the 18th through to the middle of the 19th century, is also intensely occupied with its own moment, whether that be a world of ballad singers, botany, fishing, naval service, cholera, the credit crisis or hunger and disease and, of course, the relationship of people of different cultural backgrounds – landlords, tenants and labourers – and, most especially, that of Ireland and Britain.
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Coats offer a way back into thinking about these extraordinary decades of literary invention. Ireland’s colonial condition gave shape to highly distinctive literary textures, seen in the unusual prominence of footnotes in Irish romantic writing, devices that make history palpable on the page. Those notes themselves often insinuate historical information via ordinary objects, as in the opening of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), a landmark achievement of Irish romanticism. There, a footnote explains how the “long great coat” worn by her peasant narrator, Thady Quirke, has been his outfit every “winter and summer” over seven years, most often attached “by a single button round my neck, cloak fashion”.
[ Maria Edgeworth was a great literary celeb. Why has she been forgotten?Opens in new window ]
Edgeworth’s note cites Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) at length, using its notorious account of the savagery of the native Irish in the time of Elizabeth I to explain the weight, size and bulk of ordinary Irish coats. Useful as “housing, bedding, and cloathing”, according to Spenser, such coats allow for disguise and escape, meaning that Irish garments such as the one worn by Thady make “a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief”. From Castle Rackrent onwards, coats appear in the mode of explanation: they not only clothe characters but come themselves dressed in footnotes, glosses and explanations.
The coat that Thady wears is doubtless made from frieze, a domestically manufactured coarse, napped woollen cloth that kept out the cold and resisted the rain, commonly used to clothe the ordinary people of the country. Frieze fabric appears in Irish romantic literature in a range of guises: as tough and impermeable stuff, as tattered rags and patches, and as coats with their own aura and near-supernatural agency. In William Carleton’s The Black Prophet (1847), the frieze coat of a dead man is seen to move of its own volition, calling up questions concerning two unsolved murders that date from 1798.
Frieze was usually spun at home before being sent to mills to be carded, thickened, teased and woven. Its characteristic dark colour came from natural materials including boiled mud, briars, bog-mould and oak branches, teased and mixed together. Forms of coarse cloth were produced across the country, with some regional variations, as part of an 18th-century Irish woollen industry that was largely rural and domestic.
[ Castle Rackrent (1800) by Maria Edgeworth: A great satirical rompOpens in new window ]
By 1770, some 10 million yards of cloth were already being produced in Ireland. From that decade though, differences began to tell as mechanisation became the norm in Britain, and Irish woollen manufacture remained a cottage-based business producing cheap, coarse cloth mostly for local use. Notwithstanding a series of challenges – the increasing integration of British and Irish markets, the arrival of steam on the Irish sea, diminishing market share – the Irish woollen industry proved remarkably robust and resilient, with new factories opened at Blarney and Dripsey in Co Cork not long after the Famine.
Described by historian Andy Bielenberg as one of the few success stories of 19th-century Irish industry, woollens give us a narrative of historic strength and strange survivals, qualities that make themselves felt within Irish romanticism. Some stories tell of the value of frieze in Irish rural life, where a piece of the fabric might serve as a token in place of coin.
Ireland in the early 19th century was a major secondary market for old clothing, sold by the ton from the cities of England and Scotland and sent across the sea, much as discarded textiles from the global North are shipped to Africa and India today
The power of frieze both to express identity and shadow violence is expressed in a Monaghan story that tells of an Orangeman who, “contrary to custom”, “happened to be wearing a frieze coat”: “The grand master of the Order noticed this and believing him to be a Catholic rode his horse over him and killed him.” Violence recurs in a Longford account which sees a red-coated soldier enter a cabin after the Battle of Ballinamuck in 1798, to ask for a glass of water while carrying over his arm a new frieze coat that the woman of the house recognises as belonging to her son. She offers the soldier the water and then, as “he raised the noggin to his head”, kills him with a blow of a shovel across the throat.
In Castle Rackrent, the age, length and cloak-like appearance of Thady’s coat might remind readers of the presence of vestigial medieval tailoring techniques and styles in ordinary 19th-century Irish clothing. With his coat fastened by a single button at his neck, Thady is both a humble family servant and a pretender to the mantle of the lost Gaelic nobility. The connection was already well established by the mid-19th century, when William Wilde’s list of historical objects found in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy notes not only the “long graceful robe or cloak” worn by ancient Irish elites but also its survival in “the heavy-caped frieze cota-mor of the modern Irish, so often worn hanging from the shoulders”, just as in Thady’s case.
The heft and weight of the cóta mór was often noticed by English travellers in Ireland and makes repeated appearances in Irish romantic writing, covering not only bodies but hanging as a strange blind over a broken window blown out by the wind, as in Maturin’s Gothic classic, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).
Dense and durable, frieze coats keep strange company with ragged and tattered fabrics. Many visitors to Ireland remarked upon the ragged clothing of the people, glimpsed on the side of the road or from the window of a coach. In John Gibson Lockhart’s account of his trip to Ireland with his father-in-law, Walter Scott, they noticed Irish rags before they saw Irish people. Travelling by steam boat from Glasgow to Belfast in 1825, Scott’s party shared space “with a cargo offensive enough to the eye and the nostrils, but still more disagreeable from the anticipations and reflections it could not fail to suggest”. Indeed they saw little else: “Hardly had our carriage been lashed on the deck before it disappeared from our view amidst mountainous packages of old clothes; the cast-off raiment of the Scotch beggars was on its way to a land where beggary is the staple of life.”
Perhaps these rags were destined for the Irish paper industry, about to play a part in the material life of literature itself. But Irish paper mills were small affairs, and it is much more likely that the malodorous bundles consisted of items for reuse and resale. Ireland in the early 19th century was a major secondary market for old clothing, sold by the ton from the cities of England and Scotland and sent across the sea, much as discarded textiles from the global North are shipped to Africa and India today. Such rags could scarcely cover impoverished Irish bodies but they also possess a power of explanation at once ordinary and abundant.
By the 1840s, the term “frieze-coat” could simply refer to a peasant, that is to the Irish men who were then coming into voice thanks to Catholic Emancipation and the efforts of Daniel O’Connell, the King of the Beggars. And in one account of O’Connell’s own first appeared in parliament, he chose to wear frieze rather than fine, black broadcloth: “I appear in frieze for it is through the frieze-coats I expect to get redress for Ireland’s wrongs.”
[ Daniel O’Connell lies in a hero’s grave, his wife Mary in an overgrown tombOpens in new window ]
These dynamics of heavy coats and ragged people, of historic endurance and present scarcity, point us towards an Irish romanticism that scripts its own terms and knows its own strength – perhaps not a body of writing that ever gets under the skin (or even inside the coats) of the culture described but not just a series of stories told from the outside either.
Irish Romanticism: a Literary History by Claire Connolly is published by Cambridge University Press. She is a professor at the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork
