The 19th century

Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant, unionist, and cultural nationalist whose poetry and prose, as well as antiquarian work, provided foundational texts for the Gaelic Revival of the 1830s and also, crucially, for a subsequent revival, the Irish literary renaissance, which began in the last decades of the 19th century. In 1833 he wrote “A Dialogue Between the Head and Heart of an Irish Protestant.” Having published widely in Blackwood’s and The Dublin University Magazine throughout the 1830s and the famine years of the 1840s (during which he condemned British policies in Ireland), Ferguson produced in 1858 the prose burlesque Father Tom and the Pope; or, A Night in the Vatican. In 1865 he published Lays of the Western Gael, a collection of poems on Irish themes. His roiling, gutsy, and poetic version of the Ulster epic Congal appeared in 1872. Significantly, much of his work was republished or collected for the first time after his death, and his posthumous reputation coincided forcefully with the Irish literary renaissance. One of the primary figures of the renaissance, the poet William Butler Yeats, described him in 1886 as

one who, among the somewhat sybaritic singers of his day, was like some aged sea-king sitting among inland wheat and poppies—the savour of the sea about him, and its strength.

One of Moore’s best-known Irish literary contemporaries was his friend the novelist Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. She too wrote songs, and she published Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies in 1805. But it was her romantic novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) that made her a household name. This partly epistolary novel, set in Ireland, concerns the romance between Horatio, a young Englishman, and Glorvina, whose father’s Irish estate has been destroyed by Horatio’s father. Owenson was also one of the earliest exponents of the Romantic Irish national tale. Her novels present exuberant and independent heroines in rambling—but always colorful—plots, copiously footnoted with antiquarian and historical insights. She expounded a vigorous Irish nationalism and was a vocal supporter of Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, promised at the time of union in 1800 but not granted until 1829. Owenson’s politics and her perceived religious apostasy opened her to numerous attacks in the English press, and she was loathed by the English Tory establishment and especially by the politician and critic John Wilson Croker. Her travel narratives France (1817) and Italy (1821) made her a literary phenomenon on the Continent. Other novels include The Missionary (1811), Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale (1818), Absenteeism (1825), and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827).

A very different kind of novelist was the reform-minded Maria Edgeworth. Much of Edgeworth’s early work was educational in focus, completed under the supervision and influence of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Her Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), The Parent’s Assistant (1796), and Practical Education (1798) reflected the liberal educational theories of her father. These theories, ultimately derived from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argued that children’s memories should be cultivated by “well-arranged associations” rather than by rote learning. Edgeworth’s short novel Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale (1800), published anonymously the same year that the Act of Union was approved, was an immediate popular success. Narrated by the Roman Catholic family retainer Thady Quirk, who somewhat resembles contemporary stage Irishmen, Castle Rackrent is an ironic treatment of the life of an Anglo-Irish estate in times of political turbulence. The novel was innovative in its use of dialect and locale and in featuring Irish Catholics as central to the narrative. Considered the first regional novel in the British Isles, it was enormously influential, particularly on the work of Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish pioneer of the national historical novel. To Scott, Edgeworth was “the great Maria,” and he began Waverley (1814) under the influence of Castle Rackrent. Her other novels and books of stories include Belinda (1801), Leonora (1806), Tales of Fashionable Life (first series 1809; second series, including The Absentee, 1812), Harrington and Ormond (published together in 1817), and Orlandino (1848), her last novel.

Roman Catholic writers

Castle Rackrent anticipated the rise of an Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, and the first half of the 19th century witnessed the emergence of an increasingly confident Catholic voice among Irish writers. Brothers John and Michael Banim, who sometimes published jointly under the pseudonym “the O’Hara Brothers,” produced a series of novels and tales often historical and always politically pessimistic, as are John’s The Boyne Water (1826), set in Ulster during the Jacobite war of 1688–91, and Michael’s vivid The Croppy (1828), set during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. But the Banims were also intent on telling contemporary stories of the Catholic Irish peasantry that were infused with a strong element of superstition and sentimentality. These tales, including Michael’s Crohoore of the Bill-Hook (1825) and John’s The Fetches (1825) and The Nowlans (1826), were published together as Tales by the O’Hara Family (two series, 1825 and 1826). John Banim’s important last novel, published on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, was The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century (1828).

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Celtic literature: Irish

Another important Catholic novelist of the period was John Banim’s associate Gerald Griffin, who was born just after the union and died a few years before the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. His novel The Collegians (1829) is one of the best-loved Irish national tales of the early 19th century. Based on a true story, it involves a dashing young Anglo-Irish landowner, Hardress Cregan, who elopes with a beautiful young Catholic peasant girl, Eily O’Connor. With the help of his crippled servant, he later murders her in order to marry a woman of his own class. The novel gained renewed fame when the Irish-born American playwright Dion Boucicault wrote a hugely popular dramatization of it, The Colleen Bawn (1860).

The title of Boucicault’s play drew on that of a novel, Willy Reilly and His Dear Colleen Bawn (1855), in which the central plot of The Collegians is inverted: a young Catholic gentleman falls in love and elopes with an Anglo-Irish woman. Its author, William Carleton, though born among the Irish-speaking Catholic peasantry of County Tyrone, first attracted notice while writing for the strongly anti-Catholic magazine The Christian Examiner; he eventually converted to Protestantism and argued against Catholic Emancipation. His five volumes of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830–33) are vibrant descriptions of the lives and traditions of the rural Irish, and more than 50 editions were published before Carleton’s death in 1869. At the time he wrote the tales, Carleton had found his subjects “a class unknown in Irish literature, unknown by their own landlords, and unknown by those in whose hands much of their destiny was placed.” As he wrote, he therefore “became the historian of their habits and manners, their feelings, their prejudices, their superstitions and their crimes.” Carleton’s haunting novel The Black Prophet (1847) was based on the Irish famines of 1817 and 1822; its publication in the midst of the Great Potato Famine gave it obvious contemporary relevance. Though Carleton’s political positions and sympathies were inconsistent, his work retains an honesty of delineation. Yeats called him

a great Irish historian. The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battle-fields, but in what the people say to each other on fair-days and on high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage. These things has Carleton recorded.