From Castle Rackrent to Castle Dracula

Paul E H Davis

• Publisher: University of Buckingham Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781789551358
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Paul E H Davis and the Irish Land Question

In his challenging new book, Paul E H Davis offers an entirely new critique of how novelists in nineteenth-century Ireland had to act -both as writers and historians - in their attempts to find a solution to what became the Irish Land Question.

Callenging the widely-held nationalist view that Irish novelists of this period had little or nothing to offer, Davis slots these castaway novelists into a new, identifiable category: the agrarian novelists.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One considers novelists writing between the Union and the Famine: Maria Edgeworth, Gerald Griffin, John and Michael Banim and William Carleton. Part Two looks at how the agrarian novel 'emigrates' with reference to the novels of Charles Kickham and to the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope. Part Three considers how some agrarian novelists - specifically Thomas Moore and Bram Stoker - felt the solution lay not in the real world but in the world of fantasy.

An exceptional book on why the agrarian novelists deserve to be valued for their unique perception of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1:

Divisions - Historical and Literary

I notice very distinctly in all Irish literature two different accents.¹

A new map is being made of the whole country.²

‘The Noble Savage’

The birth of the agrarian novel must be seen against the background of economic and political conditions in eighteenth-century Ireland – even though it has to be admitted that, in reality, contemporary writers had little to say about social or economic matters. The exception is Jonathan Swift – most famously in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729). At first sight this relative silence seems surprising, not least because there was a good deal of agrarian and institutional violence in Ireland, especially from the 1760s onwards.

Ireland may exemplify aspects of the thesis proposed by historians such as Palmer and Godechot, who have argued that there was an ‘Atlantic Revolution’ in the second half of the eighteenth century. According to Godechot, population levels stagnated throughout Europe between 1650 and 1750. Coupled with the introduction of new crops from America or Asia, this resulted in a modest improvement in living standards. Around 1750, however, numbers began to rise again and soon the temporary improvement in living standards disappeared; as things deteriorated, social and political protest became virtually inevitable.

Although relatively stable, England experienced some unrest in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Established Church was challenged by the rise of Methodism among the poor, and by the growth of a dissenting middle class. The Government’s decision to grant Catholics additional civil rights resulted in the ‘Gordon’ or ‘No-Popery’ riots (1780) – arguably the most spectacular breakdown of law and order in an English city since the Middle Ages. There was an unpopular war in America, martial law in London during the French Revolutionary Wars, opposition to Enclosures in rural areas and protest, associated with John Wilkes, in towns. These troubles seem to have reflected a universal pattern; almost invariably, when numbers grew, living standards and real wages declined. This had happened in England in the early fourteenth and in the late sixteenth centuries, and may have been occurring now in Ireland and much of the rest of Europe. Between the 1780s and 1820s, however, something unprecedented began in England. The rate of economic growth kept pace with, or even exceeded, the growth in numbers; ultimately, that meant rising living standards. But this did not happen in Ireland, where population surpassed what the economic system could sustain – although there are doubts as to precisely when this happened.

The Irish economy was not stagnant in the eighteenth century; both exports and imports increased substantially. Like other Europeans, the Irish had cause to be grateful to the potato – at least initially. The relative prosperity of England may have increased some of Ireland’s problems. Rising English demand for grain encouraged Anglo-Irish landowners to grow more corn, and to reduce the acreage under pasture. This seems to have been the immediate cause of the agrarian outrages of the 1760s. In the 1770s, Ireland was regarded as poor, but not perhaps noticeably poorer than other parts of Europe. When Arthur Young visited Ireland to collect material for A Tour of Ireland (1780), he noted that tenants ‘live upon potatoes and milk […] with some oatmeal’, they ‘are in a better situation in most respects than twenty years ago [and] are much better clad than they were’. Cormac Ó Gráda believes that the Irish economy was performing quite well at this time:

Agricultural output and rents undoubtedly rose, traditional industries such as provisioning, brewing, and distilling prospered, and the new techniques of the Industrial Revolution also made inroads. All sectors benefited from buoyant conditions in foreign, especially British, markets.³

Reliable statistical evidence for the Irish population and economy in the eighteenth century is scanty. The Palmer-Godechot analysis may not fit the situation in Ireland in the 1750s or 60s, because the widespread introduction of the potato could have been later than generally supposed. If so, the years between 1760 and 1800 would have seen the upswing of the potato-cycle, with serious problems only occurring around the turn of the century.

Why then did the first agrarian novel appear in 1800? While there is a case for thinking that the Irish economy had been performing tolerably well in the 1770s, this was certainly no longer true by 1800. The negative effects of rapid population growth – together with monoculture (crop failure and famine) and the trend to economically non-viable and smaller holdings – began to bite. The famine of 1766 was followed by some thirty-four years of relative plenty but famine returned in 1800-01. There was now virtually universal agreement that the Irish tenantry was one of the worst off in Europe. The first half of the nineteenth century was marked by recurrent famine and economic crisis: economic panic in 1810, followed by a decline in agricultural prices, famine in 1817-19, again in 1822, 1831 and, most devastatingly, between 1845 and 1849.

Political Economy first emerged as a frame of reference and a moral discipline for Government policy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The message of Adam Smith’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) was optimistic. Smith sought to discredit earlier notions, which he associated with assumptions behind ‘The System of Commerce’, that the amount of wealth in the world was finite and that one nation could only become rich if others became poorer. Smith argued that economic growth, if not infinite, was possible for the foreseeable future. He claimed that the presence of a wealthy neighbouring state was an advantage, rather than a disadvantage, and would assist economic growth. The implications for Ireland of Britain’s economic success were mainly positive but, to derive maximum advantage, other conditions were required. These included the application of the principle of the ‘Division of Labour’ and clear property rights. Since Smith’s preconditions were met more closely in Britain than in Ireland, it seemed that the way forward for Ireland was to become like Britain – and that would involve extensive changes, especially in agriculture. Significantly, Smith, a Scot, supported the Act of Union between England and Scotland (1707); perhaps Ireland could also benefit from a Union with England and Scotland. But that would involve drastic changes and might induce previously resident landowners to become absentees.

While the implications of Smith’s ideas for Ireland were mixed, those of T R Malthus were overwhelmingly negative. In his First Essay on Population (1798), Malthus argued that population had an inherent tendency to expand more rapidly than resources. Population might increase in a ‘geometrical ratio’ of 1:2:4:8:16:32, whereas resources could never increase in more than an ‘arithmetical ratio’ of 1:2:3:4:5:6:7. After a while, the gap between population and resources would become so wide that many would starve, succumb to disease or die in the inevitable social convulsion and violence that ensued. Malthus feared that England might experience such a fate, but it must have been obvious that Ireland, about to experience another famine, corresponded more closely to the Malthusian prophecy. But did Malthus mean that famine might actually be necessary and that, far from seeking to avert it, the authorities and the landowners should welcome famine as a means of restoring the natural balance between people and resources? On occasion, Anthony Trollope was to imply that they should.

Ireland’s links with England were by no means universally popular, even among the relatively privileged landowners and Protestants. The Irish as a whole had economic grievances similar to the Americans before 1776, in that existing arrangements favoured England’s industries and discriminated against those of the colonies. Some of the issues raised at the time of the American Revolution re-emerged with greater force in 1789, as the French Revolution had a distinct agrarian dimension. It began as a peasant revolt against landowners and resulted in many French tenants obtaining their own land. Perhaps Irish tenants should have followed the revolutionaries’ advice to tenants everywhere: ‘Coupez le cou aux Seigneurs, comme on avait fait en France.’ The French Revolution, however, was directed as much against the Catholic Church as against the Crown or the nobility; Bishops were some of the most notable victims of ‘The Terror’. In the past, the Papacy might have regarded Protestant England as perhaps its principle enemy but, when faced with revolution in France and the spread of revolutionary ideas in Italy, it concluded that atheistic Republicanism was worse than Protestantism or British rule. The Catholic Church and Great Britain allied against a common foe – a process much facilitated when the British took over Malta and established a remarkably harmonious relationship with the Church. Whatever the attitude of individual priests, the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, let alone the Papacy itself, would certainly never endorse movements directed against landowners or against the British Government.

For a time, it seemed just possible that the dissenting Protestant community in Ireland, especially the Presbyterians, might take the revolutionary lead. While privileged in relation to the Catholics, Presbyterians were discriminated against in relation to members of the Established Church. Some had been exposed to Enlightenment ideas and were close in spirit to the American rebels. To achieve anything against the British, however, they would have to make common cause with the Catholic majority. Some were prepared for this – the real meaning of the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 – but the rising failed because of mutual distrust between Catholics and Protestants. Most Presbyterians, though eager to escape discrimination at the hands of the Established Church, wished to retain the privileges they enjoyed in relation to Catholics.

There was a more fundamental difference between Ireland and America. From the sixteenth century onwards, comparisons had been made between American natives and those of Ireland. Yet Native Americans had been treated even more harshly than Irish natives; their numbers had been decimated by what amounted to genocide. There might still be ‘Indian Wars’ as the frontier moved westwards but, by the time of the American Revolution, there was no danger that the native population would ever take over – hence British protection was unnecessary. In Ireland, the danger was very real. Thousands of native Irish may have been killed, but they had in no sense been wiped out. They still represented the overwhelming majority of the total population, and their numbers were increasing. If the Irish Protestants cut their links with Britain, would they have sufficient strength to maintain their privileges? If not, continuing British protection was essential.

For a while, everything seemed possible in Ireland: rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants – or at least Catholics and Presbyterians – against the British, or Civil War between different classes and religions. For the British Government, the solution appeared to be an Act of Union, similar to the apparently successful Union between England and Scotland. In its original form, as devised by William Pitt the Younger, the Union project had promising features. There would no longer be any obstacles facing Irish exports into the rest of Britain and that would encourage agricultural improvements in Ireland. The Catholics demanded political equality (Emancipation) but, if they were admitted to the Dublin Parliament, they would probably gain a majority of the seats – an alarming prospect for the Protestants. If the Dublin Parliament was abolished, however, and an Irish Catholic contingent came to Westminster, it would still be a small minority among the overwhelmingly Protestant members from England, Scotland and Wales. Unfortunately, George III vetoed Catholic Emancipation, and so the Union went ahead without Emancipation; as a result Pitt resigned in 1801.

The political convulsions of the late 1700s and now the fact of the Union meant that Irish agriculture had reached a turning point and was confronted by a number of opportunities and threats. Politically, this may help to explain the appearance of novels seeking to explore the various possible outcomes. But there was also a strong cultural dimension. The implications of the cultural shift to what would shortly be defined as Romanticism were significant in that there were important links between Romanticism and nationalism. Nationalists everywhere believed that each of the peoples of Europe had distinctive ‘characters’ and an inherent right to an allotted area in which to live, a land forming and reflecting their special spirit. For some Romantics at least, the logical conclusion to be derived from this belief was that all peoples had the right to form a state of their own, and that this state should be dominated by the majority population within its borders. Romantics, however, tended to have a special interest in peasants – partly because of sympathy for their plight and partly because they were often seen as the true repository of the national character – unta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Foreword by Professor John C Clarke
• Chapter 1 Divisions: Historical and Literary
• Part One: The Edgeworth Tradition
• Part Two: Beyond Ireland
• Part Three: The Flight from Reality
• Bibliography