As the editors note, ‘In the Irish case, the study of leisure’ has not constituted ‘a significant element of the response to the new social history’ (pp. 3–4). Compared to the provision in England – where for the nineteenth century alone there has been a series of ground-breaking surveys such as Peter Bailey's Leisure and class in Victorian England (1978), Hugh Cunningham's Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (1980), and Richard Holt's Sport and the British (1992) – there is a distinct gap in the historiography. So this varied collection of essays, harvested from the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland in 2012, is particularly welcome.
The volume is divided into five sections. The first deals with ‘associational culture’, with essays by John Borgonovo on brass bands in Cork 1845–1918, and Brendan Power on the Boys’ Brigade and association football 1888–1914. The focus on working-class organisations is to be applauded, since they are rarely at the centre of discussions about associational culture, but the omission of any analysis of middle-class club life leaves an important gap. The second section addresses specific types of ‘leisure spaces’, with contributions from Vanessa Rutherford on children's playground culture 1836–1918, Orla Fitzpatrick on the photographic studio in mid- to late nineteenth-century Dublin, and Matthew Potter on the Limerick City Municipal Library 1889–1938. The third section on leisure and literature explores representations of recreational pursuits in the fiction of three writers: James H. Murphy discusses Charles Lever's Jack Hinton (1842), Kevan O'Rourke examines faction fighting as leisure in the writings of William Carleton, and Patrick Maume considers theatre and tourism in Matthew Archdeacon's Everard (1835). Tourism is the subject of the fourth section, with a contextualised investigation by Philip McEvansoneya of the diary of a visit to the Holy Land by Thomas Brodigan, a well-off member of the middle class, in 1845–1846; and Brian Griffin's informative study of the rise of cycling tourism in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final section explores the very distinctive leisure regimes of elite women, opening with Maeve O'Riordan's study of hosting and visiting between the late nineteenth century and the First World War, nicely complemented by Rachel Murphy's forensic examination of the diary of Lady Charlotte Stopford between 1869 and 1879.
By its very nature – and despite the editors’ attempt to give shape to the discussion through a thoughtful introduction and sectionalising the chapters – a collection of this type tends to present enticing fragments of the subject rather than a comprehensive overview. So what of the bigger picture? Perhaps the obvious question to ask is did Ireland follow a distinctive pattern of recreational development, say compared with the rest of the British Isles or Europe, during the nineteenth century? In many respects the message from these essays – consciously or unconsciously, though this question is rarely addressed directly – would seem to be no. The only sports specifically covered in the volume, association football and cycling, were a Britain-wide phenomenon. Moreover, many of the cycle tourists were from England, and it is clear that the Boys’ Brigade that promoted football drew its models from Glasgow and Scotland. Brass Band culture flourished in Wales and the north of England, and the municipal library movement, and the civic gospel that underpinned it, swept across British towns and cities as a whole in much the same period. Congruence between Ireland and England could hardly be otherwise among an Irish elite that seemed bent on cultivating its British credentials, and for whom – if Charlotte Stopford's diary is any guide – spending 57 per cent of the time in England was usual, much of it submerged in the London season, directed at finding a suitably British family to bond with through marriage.
Throughout the essays there is much reference to social class – the Boys’ Brigade and the brass bands were predominantly working class, those who sat for carte de visite photographs were lower middle class, Thomas Brodigan was a member of the well-off middle class (and his travels a sign of the widening clientele attracted to the Grand Tour), and the elite women examined were members of the Veblerian ‘leisure class’. This class-based approach is very much in line with the predominant frame within which the study of nineteenth-century English leisure developed in the 1970s and 1980s. The attempt to integrate Ireland into a wider leisure historiography – to shift the focus away from Irish exceptionalism – has many advantages, just as studies of leisure in Britain as a whole have benefited from a shift away from English exceptionalism. But it does beg the question of whether the baby is being thrown out with the bath water. Is there nothing distinctive about the Irish experience? We are told on at least two occasions that nineteenth-century Ireland did not experience an Industrial Revolution (except in Belfast). But it is industrialisation, urbansation and the emergence of a class-based society that underpins much of the analysis of English, Scottish and Welsh leisure in the period. Is this the appropriate model for a society that in 1890 still had an urban population (as defined by settlements of over 10,000 people) of only 17.6 per cent, compared with 50.3 per cent in Scotland, and 61.9 per cent in England and Wales?
A high proportion of the essays in this volume focus on cities and towns, such as Dublin, Cork and Limerick (but curiously, given its industrial status, there is nothing on Belfast). Even Brodigan's peregrinations seem to take him from city to city, and the elite ladies’ recreational life seems as much – if not more – urban focused than rural. Only in the essays on literary representations and on cycling do we get a glimpse of rural and provincial Ireland. In O'Rourke's essay an interesting distinction is made between factional and party violence, with the former treated as recreational. The validity of this distinction is difficult to assess, but it does mean that the author can largely avoid discussing politics, religion and nationalism. The problem is of course that it might be these three elements – alongside the rural context more broadly – that constitute the distinctive element in Irish leisure. However, while we still lack a comprehensive vision for Ireland of the changes in leisure history in the period, these closely researched essays make a valuable start in the right direction.
