NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Earrach/Spring 1998




Lawrence W. McBride
Historical Imagery in Irish Political Illustrations, 1880–1910
Eileen Morgan
Ireland’s Lost Action Hero: Michael Collins,
A Secret History of Irish Masculinity
Malcolm Campbell
Immigrants on the Land: Irish Rural Settlement
in Minnesota and New South Wales, 1830–1890
Gerald Dawe
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
William H. A. Williams
Into the West: Landscape
and Imperial Imagination in Connemara, 1820–1870
Margaret Preston
The Good Nurse: Women Philanthropists
and The Evolution of Nursing in
Nineteenth-Century Dublin
John Hobbs
“My Words Are Traps”:
An Interview with Medbh McGuckian, 1995
Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt
Vermeer in Verse: Eamon Grennan’s Domestic Interiors
Sally K. Sommers Smith
Traditional Music:
Ceol Traidisíunta Landscape and Memory
in Irish Traditional Music
Reviews: Léirmheasanna

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
During the opening decades of the Literary Revival, purveyors of popular culture in Ireland—national weekly newspapers and  monthlies—took up the nationalist task of conveying present lessons drawn from a history of Ireland punctuated by agricultural crises, risings, and parliamentary frustration. Writing here of the chromolithographs published by such papers as The Shamrock, The Weekly Freeman, and United Ireland, Prof. Lawrence McBride discerns in these “cartoons” not the satire usually conveyed by English and American caricatures in Punch or Puck, but complex uses of allegorical idealization, charged depictions of the Irish landscape, and icons of the past and future of the Irish people. Like the  popular historical melodramas of Boucicault and Whitbread, the mass-produced lithograph distributed from Dublin into the far counties and into Britain kept alive the basic dogma of nationalist Irish history. An inventive and prolific scholar, Dr. McBride is the author of The Greening of Dublin Castle (1991).

Those same “cartoons” certainly informed the political imaginations of men like Pearse and Connolly, Collins and De Valéra, and of those men and women who followed them, from the Easter Rising of 1916 through the ensuing War of Independence and civil war into 1922. In film, and later television, the twentieth century found a mass-market medium for the political instruction of history, and in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) Eileen Morgan finds a visual rendition of history as complex yet as conventional as the political lithographs of the Dublin weeklies. Taking Michael Collins in the necessary context of the “Troubles” in the North, Morgan discovers that the melodramatically “revisionist” views of the film proceed more from the Hollywood conventions attendant upon casting Liam Neeson as Collins than from Jordan’s political sympathies. Eileen Morgan’s reviews have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Prose and  the Indiana Review.

Just as the imagery purveyed in the mass media—from features in the New York Times to PBS documentaries to “Irish Spring” advertisements—draws tourists back to Ireland, so in the late nineteenth century newspapers drew the Irish away into the American Midwest and into Australia’s New South Wales. Here Prof. Malcolm Campbell undertakes a comparison of the processes of Irish rural settlement in the United States and Australia to reveal that the historical commonplace—that the Irish were unequipped to settle on the land—proves untrue. Capitalized settlement schemes, such as the Irish-American Colonization Company, did not succeed in “planting” the Irish on the Great Plains, but  self-financed, gradual settlement did succeed in establishing durable rural communities of the Irish. Currently a fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, Dr. Campbell is the author of The Kingdom of the Ryans: The Irish Southwest New South Wales 1816–1890 (1997).

The premiere issue of New Hibernia Review opened with a memoir by Gerald Dawe which the poet has included in a new selection of essays titled The Rest of History: Belfast Notes (1998). This first issue of New Hibernia Review’s second volume  offers a suite of poems—including the sequence “The Visible World”—from Dawe’s forthcoming collection The Minos Hotel. The extenuated lines of that sequence mark one development of Dawe’s artistry, an art which suspends explications of the commonplace: park railings, a varnished schoolroom, the Downview bus. Gerald Dawe’s most recent collection of poetry is Heart of Hearts (1995); his most recent collection of criticism is Against Piety (1995). With Brendan Kennelly,  Dawe directs the graduate program in creative writing at Trinity College’s Oscar Wilde Centre.

While the mass media of the later nineteenth century enticed the Irish to settle the American Midwest, both before the Famine and after travel literature printed in London encouraged the Protestant English to settle in, evangelically civilize, and invest in the “Eden” of the Gaelic West—Connemara. William H. A. Williams shows here that Romantic notions made possible the dream of filling “empty” Connemara with a Saxon colony. Moreover, the extension of the railways into the Irish West helped turn travel writing into tourist writing, laying the foundation for that service industry—one that endures today—rather than for fisheries, canneries, or quarries. Ironically, as Prof. Williams suggests, the touristic taste of the English for the picturesque helped lay the foundation for the later nationalist ideal of the fíor Ghael. Prof. Williams is the author of the highly regarded ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of the Irish and Ireland in Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920 (1996).

In Dublin, as elsewhere in  Victorian Britain,  upper-class women philanthropists volunteered to provide both nursing care  hospitals and the professional education of nurses in schools attached to those hospitals. As the number of hospitals grew, the number of schools grew, and, as Margaret Preston delineates in detail here, instructional or supervisory positions came to be points of  medical and moral reform. In Roman Catholic, Protestant, and nonsectarian hospitals, nursing “sisters” were to be trained not simply in medical or technical expertise, but also to provide moral example. Joyce’s ribald portrayal of hospital life in Ulysses aside, by the turn of the century nursing had become respectable employment for working-class women, and the education and supervision of nurses had become a profession worthy of middle-class women. Margaret Preston’s studies of Dublin charities have appeared in The Historian and will appear in Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (1998).

Much anthologized, the poetry of Medbh McGuckian—from The Flower Master (1982) through Captain Lavender (1995)—is known for its inventiveness, its intimacy, its syntactic mystery, and its range of reference and referents. Reading McGuckian’s pages, her reader half-overhears her speaking self talking so straight and so intimately that one fact may go unheard: that her persona is a “real” self living in a “real” world. Working from the text of a longer 1995 interview, John Hobbs here asks McGuckian some of those leading questions—of “On Ballycastle Beach,” of “Captain Lavender”— about the real world of McGuckian’s images and lines. Formerly director of Oberlin College’s program in Dublin, Prof. Hobbs is completing a book of interviews with contemporary Irish poets.

Readers of New Hibernia Review will recall Eamon Grennan’s new poems—long-lined “approximations”—following from his accomplished collection So It Goes (1995). A poet part American, part Irish, part Renaissance scholiard, Grennan draws on rich resources in his poetry, and one of those contemplated sources is the Dutch painting of Vermeer and Van Eyck. This is an interest that, as Prof. Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt shows, Grennan shares with Derek Mahon. In particular, Dr. Fitzgerald-Hoyt emphasizes the centrality of Vermeer’s painting Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664) to Grennan’s verbal ambitions—ones resembling Eavan Boland’s in their novel pursuit of domesticity—in What Light There Is (1989) and As If It Matters (1992). Dr. Fitzgerald-Hoyt’s articles appear in such critical anthologies as Assessing the Achievement of J. M. Synge (1996) and in such journals as the Colby Quarterly and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

Currently at work on an analysis of Irish fiddling styles in America and in Ireland, Sally K. Sommers Smith has studied the art with Laurel Martin, Seamus Connolly, and Kevin Burke.  Prompted by a forthright 1996 interview with the flute player Seamus Tansey and by the historian Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory (1995), Sally K. Sommers Smith here anatomizes a long debate: whether and how the context of a particular landscape—native or not—may inform the content and practice of Irish traditional music to the degree that it creates continuity of identity, of integrity—tradition, in other words. The question is one not soon answered—and troubling one, for it also raises those spectral questions of cultural “purity” that so trouble nationalism. constructs. Dr. Sommers Smith’s other wriitings on  music have appeared in Éire-Ireland and The Recorder.

Cover
Historians of commercial culture might well characterize the later decades of the nineteenth century as the great age of popular chromolithography. In the United States, for instance, Currier and Ives published celebrations of Irish Americans serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, as well as romanticized  views of Killarney or Galway. Of course, weeklies like New York’s Puck produced sharply satirical, unsympathetic portrayals of the Irish American. Likewise, there appeared similar colorful caricatures in London weeklies, their venom varying with the severity of disturbances in Ireland and the fortunes of the Irish Parliamentary Party. In Dublin, especially after the demise of Parnell in 1891 and around the centenary of the Rising of ’98, nationalist weeklies published vivid and rousing political illustrations—rather than satiric caricatures—ennobling the political image of the Irish.

In this first issue of New Hibernia Review’s 1998 volume, Prof. Lawrence McBride provides an analytical introduction to this popular medium of political expression. And New Hibernia Review’s cover illustration presents the first of four such illustrations: “Who Fears to Speak of ’98,” the cover of The Weekly Freeman and National Press, January 8, 1898. Executed by Thomas Fitzpatrick and printed by James Walker and Co., Color Printers. The legend to this lithograph, which could not fit here, consists of the text of the “Test Oath” of the United Irishmen and a passage from the “Declaration” of the Society of United Irishmen. We thank Prof. Lawrence McBride and the Nancy Romero of the library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for providing  these examples of political lithography from Dublin.
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