Fictions of the Irish Land War

246 Pages·2014·2.85 MB·English

by  Hansson, Heidi, Murphy, James H

re REIR re
imagining imagining
58
i land i land
VOLUME 58
The eruption of rural distress in Ireland and the foundation of the Land F
I Heidi Hansson and James H. Murphy (eds)
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League in 1879 sparked a number of novels, stories and plays forming an
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immediate response to what became known as the Irish land war. These O
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works form a literary genre of their own and illuminate both the historical
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events themselves and the material conditions of reading and writing O
in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Divisions into ‘us’ and ‘them’ were F
T FICTIONS OF THE
convenient for political reasons, but the fiction of the period frequently H
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modifies this alignment and draws attention to the complexity of the
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land problem.
I
S IRISH LAND WAR
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This collection includes studies of canonical land war novels, publication L
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channels, collaborations between artists and authors, literary conventions N
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and the interplay between personal experience and literary output. It also
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includes unique resources such as a reprinted letter by the author Mary
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Anne Sadlier and a reproduction of Rosa Mulholland’s little-known play R

Our Boycotting. The book concludes with a detailed bibliography of land
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war fiction between 1879 and 1916, which should inspire further reading e
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d
and research into the genre. i

H
a
n
Heidi Hansson is Professor of English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. s
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Her publications include Emily Lawless 1845–1913: Writing the Interspace (2007) o
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and the edited volume Irish Nineteenth-Century Women’s Prose: New Contexts a
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and Readings (2008). d

J
a
m
James H. Murphy is Professor of English at DePaul University, Chicago, USA. e
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He is the author of Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during H
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the Reign of Queen Victoria (2001), Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age (2011) M
and Ireland’s Czar: Gladstonian Government and the Lord Lieutenancies of the u
r
p
Red Earl Spencer, 1868–1886 (2014). He also edited The Oxford History of the h
y
Irish Book, Volume 4: The Irish Book in English, 1800–91 (2011).
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PETER LANG
www.peterlang.com
Fictions of the Irish Land War
Reimagining Ireland
Volume 58
Edited by Dr Eamon Maher
Institute of Technology, Tallaght
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Heidi Hansson and
James H. Murphy (eds)
Fictions of the
Irish Land War
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
National bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936230
ISSN 1662-9094
ISBN 978-3-0343-0999-8 (print)
ISBN 978-3-0353-0616-3 (eBook)
Cover image: ‘A League Band in the Rain’, The Graphic, 31 March 1888.
Image reproduced courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.
© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2014
Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
[email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
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This publication has been peer reviewed.
Printed in Germany
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
James H. Murphy and Heidi Hansson
The Irish Land War and its Fictions 1
Whitney Standlee
The ‘Personal Element’ and Emily Lawless’s Hurrish (1886) 19
Derek Hand
George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin: Art and the Middle-Classes 41
Faith Binckes and Kathryn Laing
‘Rival Attractions of the Season’: Land-War Fiction, Christmas
Annuals, and the Early Writing of Hannah Lynch 57
Julie Anne Stevens
The Irish Land War and Children’s Literature: Padraic Colum’s
A Boy in Eirinn (1913) illustrated by Jack B. Yeats 81
Heidi Hansson
More than an Irish Problem: Authority and Universality in
Land-War Writing 107
Anna Pilz
‘All Possessors of Property Tremble’: Constructions of
Landlord-Tenant Relations in Lady Gregory’s Writings 127
vi
Carla King
The Making of a Thoughtful Agitator: A Glimpse at
Michael Davitt’s Books 153
James H. Murphy
Mary Anne Sadlier on the Land War 179
Heidi Hansson and James H. Murphy
Introduction to Rosa Mulholland, Our Boycotting:
A Miniature Comedy 183
Rosa Mulholland
Our Boycotting: A Miniature Comedy 191
Bibliography of Land-War Fiction 1879–1916 213
Notes on Contributors 217
Index 221
Acknowledgements
Heidi Hansson expresses her gratitude to Thomas McCarthy and to the edi-
tors of the Irish Review for permission to quote from Thomas McCarthy’s
poetry sequence ‘Cataloguing Twelve Fenian Novels’. Carla King wishes
to acknowledge her debt to Michael Davitt’s grandson, Father Tom Davitt
CM, for kindly making available to her the list of books in Davitt’s library
at his death. She also wants to thank the Board of Trinity College Dublin
for permission to quote from the Davitt papers held in the Manuscripts
and Archives Research Library, Trinity College Dublin. James H. Murphy
expresses his gratitude to Shane Murphy for permission to reproduce the
letter from Mary Anne Sadlier to Rosa Carney, 28 April 1884. Anna Pilz
extends her sincere thanks to Colin Smythe on behalf of the heirs of
Lady Gregory for copyright permission. Hitherto unpublished material:
© 2014 the Estate of Lady Gregory. She also acknowledges permission from
the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American
Literature, New York Public Library to quote from the Lady Gregory
collection of papers 1873–1965 and from Emory University, Manuscript,
Archives, and Rare Book Library for permission to quote from the Gregory
family papers. Whitney Standlee extends her gratitude to the governors
and guardians of Marsh’s Library, Dublin for permission to quote from
the Emily Lawless papers held in the library. Julie Anne Stevens gratefully
acknowledges permission from A. P. Watt at United Agents (London) and
the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American
Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
to quote from Jack B. Yeats’s letters to Padraic Colum. She also wishes to
express her gratitude for permission to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg
Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations to reproduce the artworks, ‘Sketch
of Two Men’, Letter to Padraic Colum, 26 March 1913 © Jack B. Yeats/
IVARO, Dublin (2014) and ‘At night when Finn sat by the Fire’, A Boy in
Eirinn, 1913 © Jack B. Yeats/IVARO, Dublin (2014).
viii Acknowledgements
Rosa Mulholland, Our Boycotting: A Miniature Comedy is reprinted
courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. The image of Rosa Mulholland
is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.
The editors would like to express their deep gratitude to Dr. David
Gardiner for his generous help in proof reading the text of this work.
The idea for a study of the fiction of the Irish land war originated when
Heidi Hansson was a research fellow at the Centre for Irish Literature and
Bibliography, University of Ulster in 1999–2000. The study was to have
been conducted together with Dr. Anne McCartney, and although it never
progressed beyond a title and a synopsis, Heidi Hansson would like to thank
Dr. McCartney for her valuable input in the earliest stages of the project.
James H. Murphy and Heidi Hansson
The Irish Land War and its Fictions
There is little doubt that the land war began in 1879. It is arguable that
it did not end until 1984 when the Irish Land Commission ceased its
activities.1 It was a conflict that took place in phases of agitation, the last
of which ended in a campaign of land seizures and rent strikes, from 1917
to 1923. From the perspective of the subject matter of land-war fiction,
the most relevant phases are the first two, the initial land war (1879–1882)
and the ‘Plan of Campaign’ (1886–1891). Of course the land war had a
prehistory in the events of the famine of the 1840s and in the later accept-
ance, in British liberal circles at least, of an Irish nationalist analysis that
something was wrong in the relationship between landlords and tenants
in Ireland and that somehow the fault lay with the landlords. Tories, on
the contrary, believed that the problem of poverty in Ireland lay in contin-
ued over-population. W. E. Gladstone’s 1870 land act was a failed liberal
attempt to resolve the issue. Amidst debate about the ‘Ulster Custom’
and the ‘Three Fs’ (fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure), it seemed to
establish that tenants had an interest in the land and that if they were put
off it for reasons other than the non-payment of rent they had a right to
be compensated. And, in the ‘Bright Clause’, there was the harbinger of
something more, the possibility that tenants might buy their farms with
government loans.2
Although there had been some years of downturn, the quarter century
after the famine was one of agricultural prosperity in Ireland and there
1 Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland,
1891–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 313.
2 W. E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 93.