NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Earrach/Spring 2000

Karen A. Holland
Form over Function: Irish Quilting, 1850–2000
Bruce Stewart
On the Necessity of De-Hydifying Irish Cultural Criticism
Gregory O’Donoghue
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
David G. Holmes
The Eucharistic Congress of 1932 and Irish Identity
Richard Harp
No Other Place But Ireland:
Alice Milligan’s Diary and Letters
J. C. M. Nolan
Edward Martyn and the Founding of Dublin’s Palestrina Choir
Thomas E. Jordan
The Quality of Life in Victorian Ireland, 1831–1901
Nicole Pepinster Greene
Dialect and Social Identity in The Real Charlotte
R. J. Clougherty, jr.
Voiceless Outsiders: Count Dracula as Bram Stoker
Léirmheasanna: Reviews
Nuacht faoi Údair: News of Authors

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
From the 1983 Breacadh show through the 1991 Celebrations and the 1996 Women of Annaghmakerrig exhbitions, Irish quilters have turned a nineteenth-century domestic craft into twenty-first century art. Prof. Karen A. Holland outlines here the social history of that housewifely craft in Ireland and its transformation into a transatlantic art form. Domestic pedagogy of the Victorian era emphasized the practical and moral side of quilting, a craft that helped often isolated rural Irishwomen create and maintain a supportive community. As Dr. Holland shows, the art of patchwork has created similar communities for Irishwomen wishing to reinvigorate a craft that had almost died out just after World War II. Reinvented in Ireland by such mentors Helen Hardesty and Alison Erridge, patchwork is now the chosen medium of social and artist expression of artists like Ann Fahy, Hazel Bruce, and Kitty Whelan. Likewise, such institutions as the National Museum of Ireland and the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum now maintain collections of quilts and patchwork art.

From 1935 to 1947, the scholar Douglas Hyde served as the first president of Ireland. In 1892 he delivered his famous lecture “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.” Like the Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879) and The Field Day Anthology (1991), Hyde’s lecture and his presidency bracket the revivalist formation of Ireland’s culture that Prof. Bruce Stewart contends with here. That formation has for long occluded the fundamental cultural terms of civic rapprochement with and in the North. Attending again to the critical writings of Charles Gavan Duffy, Stopford Brooke, and John Eglinton, Dr. Stewart parses those forgotten points in the debate that might have tempered Free State Gaelocentrism and, later, the terms of the 1937 Constitution. An energetic researcher and generous correspondent, Dr. Stewart has been long at work on an electronic archive called Eirdata 2000. He has published lately articles on Bram Stoker in The Irish Review and Irish University Review.

Out of University College, Cork, came in the 1970s a remarkable generation of poets tutored by John Montague, Sean Lucy, or Seán Ó Tuama. Among them one can count Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Louis de Paor, Tom McCarthy and Seán Dunne. Gregory O’Donoghue, one of that generation, made an early start with Kicking in 1975, published after he became a wandering scholar and had emigrated to Canada. O’Donoghue recently returned to Cork after spending a decade in Lincolnshire working for the British rail system. And that distinctive émigré experience—one shared by many Irish since the days of Carlyle—lies at the heart of O’Donoghue’s finely crafted sequence “Roads.” Our readers will find in O’Donoghue’s lines not simply craft, but an intelligence that peers gracefully around the edges of “Paddy-works” themes and labor clichés. John F. Deane’s Dedalus Press will publish O’Donoghue’s Making Tracks early in 2001.

Following the election of the Free State’s first Fianna Fáil government, the Eucharistic Congress of June, 1932, welded together the two terms “Irish” and “Catholic.” As David G. Holmes suggests here, the success of the Dublin congress laid the foundation for de Valéra’s 1937 Constitution. Indeed, from Sligo in the north to Cork in the south, Irish papers treated the Eucharistic Congress as the cynosure, both public and spiritual, of Irish nationality in terms treated far too skeptically today. The congress marked, as Holmes well documents, the formation of the uniquely Catholic culture of the South that endured through the 1960s. Like the Tailteann Games (1924) or the Saorstát Éireann Official Handbook (1932), the success of Eucharistic Congress underscored Ireland’s newly achieved stature as a stable, constititionally democratic European nation in a decade that proved fatal to many Euopean democracies. An active historian of twentieth-century Ireland, David G. Holmes has recently written on “Moving Statues and Modern Ireland.”

In 1941 Eamon de Valéra awarded an honorary doctorate to Alice Milligan (1866–1953), a figure long forgotten by both political and literary historians. A stalwart nationalist in a large Northern Unionist family, Milligan participated directly in the Literary Revival and published two nationalist papers The Northern Patriot and Shan Van Vocht in the 1890s. As Prof. Richard Harp reveals here, Milligan’s diaries and letters offer living views of Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Davitt, and W. B. Yeats. She corresponded with Sinéad de Valéra and wrote out for her, as she had for others. a mystical vision she had in 1894 foreseeing the Easter Rising, the Irish civil war, and the reunion with Ulster. Dr. Harp has lately published, with Robert Evans, Frank O’Connor: New Perspectives (1998) and is at work on a Companion to Brian Friel.

Edward Martyn (1859–1924) has been unkindly remembered by historians of the Literary Revival as a querlous patron and inept dramatist. Here J. C. M. Nolan documents one of Martyn’s enduring contributions to his Catholicism and his Ireland—the Palestrina Choir. At the turn of the century Martyn led off a debate about the sad condition of Irish church music and musicianship in D. P. Moran’s The Leader. That debate capped Martyn’s championing of the choirmaster Vincent O’Brien and Martyn’s endowment of the Palestrina Choir for Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral. A thorough Victorian, Martyn can be counted as one of the founders of Ireland’s twentieth-century Catholic culture. Now at work on a critical biography of Martyn, J. C. M. Nolan has lately published articles on Martyn in Irish Arts Review, Irish Studies Review, and the Proceedings of The Princess Grace Library Conference.

Queen Victoria’s visits to Ireland in 1849, just after the Famine, and in 1900, a year before her death, bracket Victorian Ireland, a society and culture largely created by the trauma of the Famine. The eight decennial censuses of Ireland taken between 1831 and 1901 record the formation of Victorian Ireland in ways that confirm, as Prof. Thomas E. Jordan suggests, the observations of such nineteenth-century journalists as Harriet Martineau or such novelists as Trollope and Somerville and Ross. The Gradgrindian statistics reveal a two-fold increase in agrarian wages during those decades. School enrollments increased three-fold, while female illiteracy decreased by half. Tellingly, during these same decades Ireland acquired the recognizably modern, Anglophone political culture whose predominance was only amended, not overthrown, by the ideologies of Irish-Ireland. Prof. Jordan’s latest publication is Ireland’s Children: Quality of Life, Stress, and Child Development (1999).

The fictional County Cork town of Lismoyle is the backdrop for the provincial life of Victorian Ireland portrayed in The Real Charlotte (1894) by Somerville and Ross. Less forgiving than Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899) or The Big House of Inver (1925), this novel derives much of its social commentary from the ways in which it deploys social language: standard English and the dialects and idiolects of Hiberno-English. In particular, as Dr. Nicole Pepinster Greene shows here, Somerville and Ross employ dialect so as to register degrees of ambition and condescension, of provincial caste and class, and their title character—Charlotte Mullen—provides the chief example. Director of the Writing Center of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Dr. Greene has written previously on the fiction of the late Francis Stuart.

Three years after Somerville and Ross published The Real Charlotte, Bram Stoker published his now ubiquitous horror novel Dracula (1897), which might be retitled “The Real Bram.” Increasingly treated as diagnosing Ireland under the Union, late Victorian Irish fiction is also perceived as cloaked autobiography, and that is how Dr. R. J. Cloughtery, Jr., proposes to read the unreliable narrative of Dracula, its language, and its talked-about title character. In this frame, Dracula in London becomes a version of Stoker in London and Transylvania simply Ireland imagined superstitiously by the English. A former Fulbright-Hays scholar at the University of Uppsala, Dr. Clougherty has written on Ireland’s literature for The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Études Irlandaises, and the Yeats-Eliot Review.

Clúdach: Cover
In 1961 the Irish government of Seán Lemass published Design in Ireland, and from that report the covers for this fourth volume of New Hibernia Review all descend. That report led to the creation of the Kilkenny Design Workshops which assembled a collection of antique Irish quilts that was exhbited at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, and to the foundation of The Northern Ireland Patchwork Guild in 1979 and then The Irish Patchwork Society in 1981. Karen Holland’s article “Form over Function: Irish Quilting, 1850–2000” in this issue traces the utilitarian and now aesthetic history of patchwork and quilting in Ireland.

A prominent figure in this movement is the County Galway artist Ann Fahy who completed Mullaghmore Reflection, a four-panel patchwork piece (48 x 48 inches), in 1996 for a QuiltArt exhibition. Overlooking a shallow loch in the Burren of County Clare, the “Great Summit” of Mullaghmore appears just on the left of the innermost selvages of the center two panels. This forms the vertical axis of the piece. The reflection of the summit starts at the water’s edge, which extends across the four panels, forming the horizontal axis. Likewise, the relaxed “v” of the bluest lake waters echoes the inverted “v” of the sky over the summit. Mounted together, Fahy’s four panels form a symmetrical mandala. Mullaghmore is also the subject of Fahy’s three-panel piece titled Mullaghmore Formation, Maturation, and Interpretation (1994). The last word of Fahy’s title alludes directly to the ongoing controversy about the proposed siting of the interpretive center for the Burren National Park at Mullaghmore. We thank both Karen Holland and the artist Ann Fahy for permission to reproduce Mullaghmore Reflection, which is now in the collection of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.

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