Literary Representations of the Irish Country House: Civilisation and Savagery under the Union

222 Pages·2003·2.554 MB·English

by  Malcolm Kelsall (auth.)

Literary Representations of the Irish Country House
Also by Malcolm Kelsall
BYRON’S POLITICS
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
CONGREVE: The Way of the World
THE GREAT GOOD PLACE: The Country House and English Literature
JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM: Folk, Land, Culture
and the Romantic Nation
Literary Representations
of the Irish Country House
Civilisation and Savagery under the Union
Malcolm Kelsall
Professor of English
Cardiff University
© Malcolm Kelsall 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-0-333-77936-1
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DOI 10.1057/9781403990457
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kelsall, M. M. (Malcolm Miles), 1938–
Literary representations of the Irish country house:civilisation and
savagery/Malcolm Kelsall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English fiction—Irish authors—History and criticism. 2. Country
homes in literature. 3. Literature and society—Ireland—History.
4. Social classes in literature. 5. Civilization in literature.
6. Landowners in literature. 7. Culture in literature. I. Title.
PR8807.C68 K45 2002
823.009′9417—dc21 2002026754
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
Contents
List of Plates vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Edgeworthstown ‘Rebuilding’ 29
3 Edgeworth’s Heir: Charles Lever 79
4 Trollope as Mr Kurtz 113
5 Only Connect: Violet Martin and Edith Somerville 130
6 ‘The Duchess Too is Dead’: Bowen and Gregory 166
Notes 189
Bibliography 195
Index 205
v
List of Plates
1. Ormond’s ‘brave mansion’ (from a picturesque engraving, n.d.,
author’s own collection)
2. The massacre at Scullabogue (from Maxwell’s History of the Irish
Rebellion in 1798 (1887))
3. A No-Popery dance (from Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1841))
4. Edgeworthstown (from Mrs Hall’s Ireland (1842))
5. ‘Never opened a cabin-door without a blessing’ (from Lever’s The
Martins of Cro’Martin (1856))
6. ‘Savage’ Connemara (from a painting by Peter Knuttel, author’s
own collection)
7. The demesne of ‘Ballinahinch’
8. Tyrone House: the original of ‘the big house’ of Inver
9. Marriage stones at Ross House
10. Drishane
11. Ross House
12. The lake at Ross
13. The signature tree at Coole Park
14. The bust of Maecenas in the garden at Coole
(Plates 7–14: photographs were taken by the author)
vi
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Howard Weinbrot of the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, and to the staff and postgraduates who attended my classes
there during my residence in 1996. The present book was partly written
in preparation for my seminars on ‘The Country House and the Empire
for Liberty; England, the United States, Ireland’. I had expected that
my subsequent study of Jefferson’s Monticello would close my work on
Augustan tradition that began with Addison’s Cato some forty years
ago. The fall of the Roman Republic and its rise again in the new world
formed a unifying theme. I reckoned without the generosity of the Arts
and Humanities Research Board in the UK, the British Academy and
the University of Wales in Cardiff, which supported me with time and
money to add Ireland as a coda to the classical theme.
In some ways ‘Ireland’ is as much a ‘new world’ as the nascent United
States for English writers, and in crossing that frontier I am immensely
indebted to those writers of Irish nationalism and identity who are
‘mere’ marginalia in this book. This debt is acknowledged here because
my concern with classicism and the transhistorical unity of European
culture, of necessity, ignores national issues, but without that the self-
hood of this enquiry could not be.
It is ‘self-evident’ (to use a Jeffersonism) that an approach to Ireland
that begins with the Mosaic conquest of the Promised Land and then
proceeds from the idea of Hellas to Romanitas will have a different
context for words such as colonus and imperium than that of the post-
colonialist theorist of Irish liberation and national identity. (In my view
the problems in present-day Afghanistan might appear familiar to a
Tudor statesman.) Yet, interfused with foundational European histori-
ography, I acknowledge the influence of Edward Said’s arguments on
the textuality of power in culture, Homi Bhabha’s idea of the frontiers
of‘hybridity’, and I was once introduced (to my surprise) at Charles
University, Prague, as a Foucauldian iconologist. But the foundational
historicism of all my writing, the location of my culture, is in Tacitus,
Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hume and (the neglected) Adam Ferguson. For
them irony is the essential rhetorical mode for dealing with the
complexity of history. (Without slaves there would have been no
Monticello.) I acknowledge these masters, yet this last incursion into
symbolic history (‘narrative as socially symbolic act’, in Jameson’s
vii
viii Acknowledgements
words) is a return to other sources: Auerbach on mimesis, Gombrich on
illusion and (always) Panofsky.
This study accordingly withdraws as far as it is able from consider-
ation of the historical interpellation of the literary text to a concern
with the rhetoric of fiction. Ultimately it returns to the original theory
of Platonism (albeit Plato filtered through Edmund Spenser). This
strategy is determined by the nature of the subject, for (arguably) all
nineteenth-century constructions of Ireland are mirages (images cast by
an absent subject), and in particular the Irish country house (a vanished
social phenomenon) exists only by virtue of a rhetorical memorial. One
might defend this strategy theoretically by appeal to that postmodernist
position which subverts all truth-telling claims. Some defence is neces-
sary for the essays in this book might be attacked as an apologia for
landlordism. They are not. The underlying subject (of which the
architectural form is an iconographic expression) is the same as that in
the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels (the ultimate historical text to be
acknowledged here). The ironic conjunction of civilisation and savagery
in that text is the profoundest critique I know of that state of mind
called (in English) ‘Ireland’, yet the fourth book is never concerned with
Ireland itself.
It is a pleasure to record four personal debts: to the present restorers
of Ross House (and their generous hospitality); to Anthony Mandal for
help beyond the call of duty; to Claire Connolly, ‘exiled’ in Wales; and
(again) to Joan Byrne, at home in one of the fairest of European cities.
MALCOLM KELSALL