We would all like to know whether people in the past found their lives bearable, tolerable, or even enjoyable, but finding this out is rarely the aim of historical inquiry. As historians look at work and wages, living conditions, and health and personal relationships, people's happiness might be glimpsed or speculated on, but it is often missed completely in the course of these inquiries. It was courageous, therefore, of Mary Hatfield to assemble a conference on the theme of nineteenth-century happiness in 2018 and to publish the very interesting proceedings as Happiness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. However, a few of the articles discussed below still read like conference papers that cry out to be followed by a vigorous question-and-answer session. And one article is not about the nineteenth century at all.
The more successful contributions fix on a definition of happiness straight away and follow it through to the end. It might seem perverse to argue that a war can ever be associated with happiness, but Paul Huddie shows that there was a temporary political happiness in the unity of all Irish public opinion—Catholic, Protestant, nationalist, unionist—when faced with Russia's belligerence toward Turkey in the Crimean War (1854–1856). For early nineteenth-century theological writer Alexander Knox, happiness, David McCready explains, was attainable by “a lived experience of God” (95); in this way, Knox shared in the Enlightenment understanding of subjective happiness as something that was possible in this world. Nineteenth-century philanthropists, Simon Gallaher tells us, set out to provide regular treats—daytrips, excursions, toys, Christmas celebrations—for children in the workhouses. These fleeting joys eased the monotony of workhouse life, but then as now, there were no happy endings for children whose parents could not or would not (or were not allowed to) rear them. Kerron Ó Luain's discussion of processions and parades throughout Ireland up to 1914 demonstrates how community happiness in the past was celebrated, cemented, and threatened by public displays of cohesion. Publicly expressed happiness was often supremacist and sectarian and always triumphalist and tribal.
Shannon Devlin looks at letters between oceans-apart siblings in two distinct Irish families to show that in both families the older sister was the acknowledged custodian of sibling “happiness”; hope of reunions expressed in such letters was part of “performing happiness” (149), warding off melancholy and gloom. Ciara Thompson uses four beautiful Irish-language lullabies to apprehend both the strong, deep joy of early motherhood and the anxiety and exhaustion that is an inevitable part of such fragile happiness. (To appreciate this article fully, readers should look up the songs if they do not know them already.)
Moving from the private to the public, Andrew Tierney discusses the built urban environment in the story behind the construction of the museum in Trinity College Dublin in the 1850s. Some Irish architects were heavily influenced by Ruskinian ideals, and Ruskin believed that craftsmen should be “happy” to carry out architects’ and artists’ wishes, but the “truculent” O'Shea stone carvers, John and James, were following their own artistic happiness (104). Knowing next to nothing of architectural history, I found this an absorbing insight into one of the forms optimism took in the nineteenth century; the five pages of photographs are a welcome addition to the book.
The three articles that read very much like conference papers are all lively and absorbing in themselves. Kristina Varade suggests that both Charles Lever and Maria Edgeworth associated wealth with happiness and that both believed in the importance of health. A discussion might have explained what was novel about these points of view. Ian d'Alton argues that gentry men Henry Villiers Stuart, Norman Leslie, and Arthur Hugh Smith Barry all had “happy” lives in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but his definitions of what happiness meant for all three need more explanation than is given here. Mai Yatani's discussion of the reading habits of four Irish girls and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Katharine Tynan, Mary Colum, Sophie O'Brien, and Mary Butler) is introduced by a defense of girls’ and women's agency that is an absolute pleasure to read, but there is simply not enough material on the four writers in question, Butler in particular. Again, a question-and-answer session lurked just out of sight.
Anne Dolan's persuasive discussion presents convincing evidence of popular happiness found in all kinds of unusual places—newspaper advertisements, personal accounts, playbills, sporting fixtures, ticket sales. However, her focus is on the 1920s. The long nineteenth century finished in 1914; Dolan's article is not even presented as an epilogue (assuming that would have made sense), and its presence is not explained in Hatfield's introduction. This introduction is marred by the assertion on page 1 that nineteenth-century Ireland was characterized by large-scale “immigration.” She of course means emigration. It is impossible to understand how such a glaring error was not picked up at any stage of the editing process. Editing could have been tightened up in other ways. Frank McCourt's quip (less funny every time it is repeated) about the happy Irish childhood being “hardly worth your while” is quoted both by Hatfield (2) and Dolan (215). Both authors make similar points in defense of the history of happiness—good points, admittedly, but do we need to read them twice? The photograph from the Clonbrock collection on the book's cover—an unidentified woman, three unidentified children, and an unidentified dog—bears no relevance to any of the articles. They are all smiling and the dog looks contented, so maybe that should satisfy us. After all, if happiness is hard to define, it is even harder to illustrate.
All flaws aside, this volume is a brave attempt to bring together a variety of perspectives on happiness, and it contains much good and promising research. Having read it, I find the happiness of nineteenth-century Ireland as elusive as ever, but maybe that is the point.
