Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Galway 2024

Two days of papers devoted to all aspects of the Irish eighteenth century. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Galway is, of course, a delightful, friendly, elegant and cultivated city. It’s the sort of city that makes intellectual discourse seem relaxed and intuitive.

I’m in the first panel, which is ideal, because I can then relax and enjoy all that follows. I say something about a long-dead wiggy dude and his inconveniently enormous book. But then I get to hear papers about Jonathan Swift. We talk about Swift and heavy drinking – a topic that everyone seems to have an opinion about – and then we consider his notorious coercive pamphlet that advocates making beggars wear badges, giving us the chance to reflect on the meticulous, systematic, and deeply unsympathetic concept of charity that he seems to project.

I then skipped across to the adjacent room to hear about the subtleties of women’s property ownership during the Williamite confiscation period, learning about the subtle and practical ways in which women could strategically outflank the patriarchal application of property law. We were also reminded of how French protestants in Ireland tested and affirmed concepts of religious tolerance. And we were also taken to Lisbon to learn about the persistent popularity of Freemasonry among Irish as well as British mercantile communities there – despite the periodic efforts of the Inquisition to suppress and prosecute the movement.

A fiction panel them beckoned. We were introduced to Elizabeth Griffith’s 1776 fictional imagining of the Irish Gothic landscape – descriptions which seem to confound Burkean categories of the Sublime and Beautiful. Furthermore , we were introduced to the phenomenon of “dirty books” – literally – dirty – in the sense of being well thumbed, torn, scribbled on and disrespectfully annotated – the Irish Minerva series. Such volumes encouraged a relaxed interactive familiarity of reading. And we were taken back again to the children of Edgeworthstown house and introduced to the possibility that this bold experiment in holistic education may have been something of a nightmare in practice…

And then something very special – our annual Alan Harrison memorial plenary. This year Maynooth’s own Tríona Ní Shíocháin: ‘‘Elusive Utterances’ and the Invisibility of Sound: Oral Compositional Practices
in Eighteenth-century Irish-language Song and Lament’. We got to hear a great deal of song – much of it from Tríona Ní Shíocháin herself. She stressed the fact that any sheet music you see representing this material is post facto. The women in particular who crafted these songs did so in a necessary and expected spirit of improvisation. The melody swoops and swerves to suit the mood of the moment and no two performances are alike. The human voice functions not unlike a jazz clarinet and the sounds we hear live in the moment and in the memory but never on the page. Wonderful.

Day 2

We start bright and early with me chairing a panel on Very Difficult Philosophy.

I learn about some obscure works by John Toland that illustrate his wry scepticism regarding those (like Bishop Burnet) who apply the rhetoric of empiricism for speculative ends – for whom inductive trajectories are already foreclosed. We then thought about the fascinated relationship between George Berkeley and the nineteenth-century Irish rebel and vituperative contrarian John Mitchel. The affinity involves not just “slavery” but a way of thinking about immaterialism. And we were also reacquainted with Francis Hutcheson and a qualified, cautious, yet evolving theory of religious toleration.

Then for our second plenary. Jim Watt from the University of York offered an address on Oliver Goldsmith, mobility and migration – demonstrating the nuances of how peoples are “othered” within a perambulatory gaze, yet also the extent to which the colonised subject can return the stare and de-centre the assured privileges of the metropolitan commentator. Afterwards we spent some time discussing the anthropological implications of kissing barmaids.

After some more coffee, I retained my seat in the same venue to enjoy another literary panel – this one on different forms of adaptation. We learned about how Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer became adapted to various forms of creative Latin American magic realist appropriation. My favourite 18th century dramatist, George Farquhar, was considered in terms of the complex ways in which he was variously adapted and “Hibernicised” in productions after Irish Independence. And we also talked about more recent re-imaginings of Swift’s “modest proposal”, including Gregg Wallace’s mockumentary The Great British Miracle Meat – which I’ve never actually seen. I must seek it out. And consume it.

We were immediately plunged into a discussion of figures who need and deserve retrieval. To my shame, I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that the strolling Irish born player John Cunningham, who toured theatres between Durham and Edinburgh, was one of the most admired and anthologised pastoral poets of his day. I had never heard of John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth who was familiar with Byron and Shelley in Italy. Despite being a lacklustre poet and the butt of Byron’s jokes, he may have introduced a generation of Romantics to Italian rhyme schemes. And we also got to consider ‘“Mo Cheannaí Fionn”: An Aisling Poem by Éadbhard de Nógla’ – a poem which illustrates a degree of smudging and displacement of any fleeting, barely plausible, Jacobite potential.

And finally…

Professor Emerita Gillian Russell, University of York offered a closing plenary called
‘Considering a history of political printed ephemera in Ireland; or, a very long eighteenth century’. Above all this was about placards and single page publications – stretching from royal proclamations to insurrectionary exhortations. The speed with which these things could be produced was critical – and the speed of their dissemination fed into trial documents. It is a tradition of proclamation and counter-proclamation and the contest of the “authority” behind such forms of address that leads us to the most famous – indeed “immortal” example of timely ephemera – the Independence Proclamation of 1916.

We were then allowed to go home because our brains were full. I ambled back to the train station, melancholy offset by my conviction that I’ll be back soon, at some learned symposium or other…