Seumas O’Sullivan and Revivalist Nature Poetry

The Irish Revival was, amongst other things, an attempt to ‘re-enchant’ the Irish natural world as both a protest against Anglicisation and Enlightenment values. Through a study of the poetry of a lesser-known Revivalist poet, Seumas O’Sullivan, who was a keen natural historian, and thus engaged with the popular discourses and practices of natural science in the period, this chapter discusses Revivalist nature poetry as a form of ‘re-enchantment’. In doing so, it also considers how engagement with natural history in the period effected a shift in the poetic relationship to materiality, considering the movement between Celtic Revival poetry and later Revivalist work in term of a closer attention to the physical world.

The Nature of Improvement in Ireland

Like its English and Scottish equivalents, improvement in nineteenth-century Ireland depicts itself as a civilising force, cultivating nature by means of a range of progressive methods. However, at this point, Irish improvement was shaped by particular events, such as the 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union. In the writings of Mary Leadbeater, Martin Doyle, and William Blacker, for example, nature is implicitly equated with history, violence, and Catholicism. I argue here that a range of improvement projects – from the dissemination of didactic fictions to the activities of agricultural societies – are directed at the socialising or conventionalising of Irish ‘nature’. Indeed, Ireland is characterised as excessively natural and in need of the middling domestication provided by modern agricultural techniques and tidy cottages. In conveying information and practical advice on soil, pigs, and seeds, improvement sought to be a progressive force, one capable of shifting public debate beyond persistent historical antagonisms towards a supposedly neutral realm of practical inquiry and activity. To that end, improvement found itself relying far more on the participation of women, labourers, and the very small farmers of the countryside than on the relatively few large landowners in residence on their estates

Introduction

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.

Therapeutic Environments in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Hybrid Spaces and Practices

There were strong traditions in nineteenth-century Ireland that associated natural environments with health and healing. As broadly described therapeutic landscapes, there were various locations where particular healing narratives shaped the production of place. Two contrasting examples, the spa town and the sweat-house, are described to show how specifically healthy environments were narrated and understood. The spa town, especially associated with mineral waters, had identifiable scientific characteristics for disease treatments. Key 19th century examples included Lucan and Lisdoonvarna, wherein the commodification of the spas tracked how hydrotherapies were accepted and contested. At the other end of the scale, the rural sweat-house, most commonly found in parts of Leitrim, Roscommon and Sligo, was a much smaller-scale, rural and epigenetic form, built from natural materials and used primarily to cure a range of colds and arthritic conditions. These two forms had variable histories across the century that reflected global/local narratives, yet differed in crucial ways around their recognition and perceived efficacy as healing spaces. Both had strongly embodied components and used different hot/cold forms of hydropathy in very different settings, within which hybrid roles for nature and the environment were experienced and played out in different ways.

On Why the UK’s First National Park Might Have Been in Ireland

This chapter examines the debate provoked by the decision to place the Muckross Estate in Co. Kerry on the market in the 1890s. Home Rule MPs, among others, insisted that the state should buy the estate on behalf of the people and manage it as a National Park. Inspiration was taken from the emergent U.S. National Park system and the campaign was framed in terms of how expanding expectations of the state might deliver justice for Ireland, particularly in the context of the over-taxation and Home Rule controversies. Attention is also paid to the National Trust’s engagement with the question. The controversy is contextualised through a discussion of the valorisation of the Lakes of the Killarney over the course of the nineteenth century and the story is taken into the twentieth century by considering independent Ireland’s struggle to maintain the site as a National Park.

‘A Voice for Ireland’: Isaac Butt, Environmental Justice, and the Dilemmas of the Irish Land Question

This chapter examines ideas of environmental justice in nineteenth-century Ireland through the prism of Isaac Butt. Butt was one of the most prominent champions of agrarian reform from the 1830s to the 1870s. His desire for change was rooted in ideas of humanist justice and political economy: the land question, for Butt, was primarily an issue concerning those excluded from legal right to their holdings. The chapter highlights Butt’s radical rhetoric concerning the land question during the 1860s, and how the failure of the British state to ‘settle’ the question contributed to his move towards Home Rule. By 1870, Butt reasoned that only an Irish parliament could legislate to produce justice on the land. The environment was, in Butt’s estimation, a constitutional issue.

The Ocean of Truth: Atlantic Imagery in Emily Lawless’s Major Lawrence, F.L.S. (1885) and Grania: The Story of an Island (1892)

This chapter relates Emily Lawless’s use of the imagery of the Atlantic Ocean and dissolution in water in her novels Major Lawrence FLS (1885) and Grania: The Story of an Island (1892) to her sense of the crisis of religious belief triggered by the Darwinian dissolution of the concept of fixed species, the Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian portrayal of the life-force embodied in sexuality as simultaneously ecstatic and entrapping, and the defeat and increasing irrelevance of the late Victorian Irish landed class.

Palmerston’s Conquest of Sligo

This chapter discusses the estates of Lord Palmerston in Sligo during the mid-nineteenth century with a view to examining the ways in which a need or desire to ‘conquer’ nature shaped plans to improve land and, by extension, the condition of tenants on that land, blending economic and political ambitions with environmental and scientific understanding. This study of estate management, by an absentee landlord, examines Palmerston’s career as an Irish landlord afresh and, borrowing the idea of a ‘conquest of nature’, reflects on the ways in which the Irish landscape was, and could be, understood or regarded by this particular Victorian politician and how this might contribute to debates about nature and its management.

Towards an Environmental History of Nineteenth-Century Dublin

This chapter argues that nonhuman factors, including features of the landscape and animals, played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century Dublin. In the first section the chapter shows that the socio-economic gradient of the city was determined partly by human factors such as estate management and railway development and partly by landscape features such as Dublin’s rivers. The second section focuses on the role of animal businesses such as markets and slaughterhouses. I argue that the direction of urban modernization reflected economic and cultural dependence on certain types of animals. Despite new ideas in public health and new technologies of transport, animals remained in the city because Dublin’s economy and society depended upon them. The final sections reflect upon how environmental history approaches might help us to frame new understandings of Dublin.

‘In The Open Country’: Nature and the Environment during the ‘Monster’ Meeting Campaign of 1843

This chapter explores the role of nature and the environment during the series of O’Connellite ‘monster’ meetings demanding the repeal of the Act of Union during the spring and summer of 1843. It considers the nature and extent of popular participation in O’Connell’s extra-parliamentary campaign amidst a charged political atmosphere and within specific environments in which place, identity, and a discourse of nationalist grievance as negotiated through a historicisation of the Irish landscape. It seeks to analyse both the processional nature of O’Connell’s rallies, the politicised culture of conviviality they engendered, and the extent to which the Repeal Association staged these rallies with a view to how they were reported in the popular press. O’Connell’s 1843 campaign is thus seen as a burst of popular participation on a scale hitherto unseen in Ireland. The O’Connellite ‘monster’ meeting is presented as a campaign to dominate public space in both small town and rural environments, based on a symbiotic relationship between the Repeal Association and Catholicism which deployed a nationalist iconography that deployed images of the natural world, and exhorted the Irish peasantry to peacefully demonstrate in favour of Repeal by invoking the natural advantages of Ireland that would be unleashed by self-government.