Nineteenth Century Ireland

The elusive search for stability is the subject of Professor D. George Boyce's Nineteenth-Century Ireland, the fifth in the New Gill History of Ireland series. Nineteenth-century Ireland began and ended in armed revolt. The bloody insurrections of 1798 were the proximate reasons for the passing of the Act of Union two years later. The 'long nineteenth century' lasted until 1922, by which the institutions of modern Ireland were in place against a background of the Great War, the Ulster rebellion and the armed uprising of the nationalist Ireland. The hope was that, in an imperial structure, the ethnic, religious and national differences of the inhabitants of Ireland could be reconciled and eliminated. Nationalist Ireland mobilised a mass democratic movement under Daniel O'Connell to secure Catholic Emancipation before seeing its world transformed by the social cataclysm of the Great Irish Potato Famine. At the same time, the Protestant north-east of Ulster was feeling the first benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Although post-Famine Ireland modernised rapidly, only the north-east had a modern economy. The mixture of Protestantism and manufacturing industry integrated into the greater United Kingdom and gave a new twist to the traditional Irish Protestant hostility to Catholic political demands. In the home rule period from the 1880s to 1914, the prospect of partition moved from being almost unthinkable to being almost inevitable. Nineteenth-century Ireland collapsed in the various wars and rebellions of 1912–22. Like many other parts of Europe than and since, it had proved that an imperial superstructure can contain domestic ethnic rivalries, but cannot always eliminate them. Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents Introduction - The Union: Prelude and Aftermath, 1798–1808 - The Catholic Question and Protestant Answers, 1808–29 - Testing the Union, 1830–45 - The Land and its Nemesis, 1845–9 - Political Diversity, Religious Division, 1850–69 - The Shaping of Irish Politics (1): The Making of Irish Nationalism, 1870–91 - The Shaping of Irish Politics (2): The Making of Irish Unionism, 1870–93 - From Conciliation to Confrontation, 1891–1914 - Modernising Ireland, 1834–1914 - The Union Broken, 1914–23 - Stability and Strife in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Why do we send children to school? Who should take responsibility for children's health and education? Should girls and boys be educated separately or together? These questions provoke much contemporary debate, but also have a longer, often-overlooked history. Mary Hatfield explores these questions and more in this comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland. Many modern ideas about Irish childhood have their roots in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, when an emerging middle-class took a disproportionate role in shaping the definition of a 'good' childhood, with childhood seen as a fluid concept with a variety of meanings and responsibilities dependent on class, gender, and religious identity. This study deconstructs several key changes in medical care, educational provision, and ideals of parental care. It takes an innovative holistic approach to the middle-class child's social world, by synthesising a broad base of documentary, visual, and material sources, including clothes, books, medical treatises, religious tracts, photographs, illustrations, and autobiographies. It offers invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.

This book offers a new interpretation of the place of periodicals in nineteenth-century Ireland. Case studies of representative titles as well as maps and visual material (lithographs, wood engravings, title-pages) illustrate a thriving industry, encouraged, rather than defeated by the political and social upheaval of the century. Titles examined include: The Irish Magazine, and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography and The Irish Farmers’ Journal, and Weekly Intelligencer; The Dublin University Magazine; Royal Irish Academy Transactions and Proceedings and The Dublin Penny Journal; The Irish Builder (1859-1979); domestic titles from the publishing firm of James Duffy; Pat and To-Day’s Woman. The Appendix consists of excerpts from a series entitled ‘The Rise and Progress of Printing and Publishing in Ireland’ that appeared in The Irish Builder from July of 1877 to June of 1878. Written in a highly entertaining, anecdotal style, the series provides contemporary information about the Irish publishing industry.

Cowell-Meyers examines the continued sectarian conflict on the island of Ireland from a comparative and historical framework. Analyzing the process through which sectarian conflict was managed on the continent, she identifies the unique evolution of the Irish situation. Whereas European Catholics, such as those in the new Germany, developed an institutional pillar to defend themselves and protect their interests in the modern plural state, Irish Catholics developed a radical nationalist movement in the same period at the end of the 19th century. As elements of the British political system pushed the Irish Catholic mobilization toward more separatist goals and means, they thwarted the process of accommodation seen in other European settings. The shape and dynamics of Catholic mobilization in the last three decades of the 19th century set Catholics and Protestants on a path toward the management of sectarian conflict in Germany and continental Europe and toward the perpetuation of conflict in Ireland. Much like conflict resolution literature, as well as liberal and pluralist theory mischaracterizes the role of exclusive voluntary associations in the amelioration of conflict, Cowell-Meyers asserts that voluntary organizations, if they are encouraged to do so as they were in continental Europe in the late 19th century, can provide the channels through which intense conflicts are managed. Although exclusive mobilizations reinforce social cleavages, careful handling may make them constructive political formations that allow for the channeling of differences. Of particular interest to scholars, students, and other researchers involved with peace and conflict resolution, religion and politics, and the history of modern Ireland and Germany.

This is the first full-length study of Irish Ribbonism, tracing the development of the movement from its origins in the Defender movement of the 1790s to the latter part of the century when the remnants of the Ribbon tradition found solace in a new movement: the quasi-constitutional affinities of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Placing Ribbonism firmly within Ireland's long tradition of collective action and protest, this book shows that, owing to its diversity and adaptability, it shared similarities, but also stood apart from, the many rural redresser groups of the period and showed remarkable longevity not matched by its contemporaries. The book describes the wider context of Catholic struggles for improved standing, explores traditions and networks for association, and it describes external impressions. Drawing on rich archives in the form of state surveillance records, 'show trial' proceedings and press reportage, the book shows that Ribbonism was a sophisticated and durable underground network drawing together various strands of the rural and urban Catholic populace in Ireland and Britain. Ribbon Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and its Diaspora is a fascinating study that demonstrates Ribbonism operated more widely than previous studies have revealed.

The nineteenth-century history of Irish economics, politics and culture cannot be properly understood without examining Ireland's colonial condition. Recent political developments and economic success have revived interest in the study of the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland that is more nuanced than the traditional nationalist or academic revisionist view of Irish history. This new approach has arisen in several fields of historical investigation, notably culture, economics and political history.

This volume, exploring the worlds of science and technology in 19th-century Ireland and emanating from the 2009 Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland Conference, offers fascinating perspectives from science, literature, history, and archaeology.

This volume of essays explores the multiple forms and functions of reading and writing in nineteenth-century Ireland. This century saw a dramatic transition in literacy levels and in the education and language practices of the Irish population, yet the processes and full significance of these transitions remains critically under explored. This book traces how understandings of literacy and language shaped national and transnational discourses of cultural identity, and the different reading communities produced by questions of language, religion, status, education and audience. Essays are gathered under four main areas of analysis: Literacy and Bilingualism; Periodicals and their readers; Translation, transmission and transnational literacies; Visual literacies. Through these sections, the authors offer a range of understandings of the ways in which Irish readers and writers interpreted and communicated their worlds.