This collection is the product of an online conference in June 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, where researchers of nineteenth-century Ireland confined to their own homes were expanding their perspective on homes in the Ireland of the 1800s. Consisting of thirteen chapters, the book is split into four thematic areas, exploring the Irish cabin, class mobility, institutional dwellings and the material cultures of home. As the editors make clear, the collection contains many new voices, with contributions from postdoctoral scholars as well as established academics, and their research delves into fresh topics and interesting new perspectives. The authors recognise that the nineteenth-century homestead of the public imagination tends toward either the ‘Big House’ or the country cabin; works included here explore these in more detail, as well as highlighting other, less well-known living environments.
The chapters are arranged into themes. The first theme, ‘Modernity and the Irish cabin’, encompasses three chapters. The first, by Maureen O’Connor, chronicles the literary trend of an othering of the Irish ‘native’, embodied by the shared living arrangements with animals. Using papers from the National Library of Ireland and contemporary newspapers, Patrick Bethel investigates how masculinity was performed during the Land War. Christopher Cusack also explores cottage literature, specifically how the Irish cottage of the imagination translates, and is reconstructed, across the Atlantic.
On the second theme, ‘Home and class mobility’, Peter Connell uses municipal meetings and newspapers to explore the housing situation in under-studied Irish provincial towns. Alice Johnson studies the unique case of middle-class urban sprawl in Belfast, while Conor Heffernan writes of the life-changing aims of the home gymnasium, linking his findings to the overarching Victorian obsession with healthism. Of particular interest is how the gymnasium was advertised differently to men and women; it made men strong, but women slim, all while remaining in the domestic sphere. Patrick Maume’s chapter analyses Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, detailing the literary response to the seminal Big House text of the period, in particular Rentoul Esler’s Castle Wardlaw.
The third theme, ‘Families and intimate spaces in institutional dwellings’, encompasses a range of settings. Brian Griffin scours the photographic archive for his chapter on police barracks, noting how many Royal Irish Constabulary barracks were either built to look like medieval turrets and castles, or were actually requisitioned original buildings, such as Grace O’Malley’s castle on Clare Island. Triona Waters uses case studies to humanise the experience of patients in the Limerick District Lunatic Asylum; similarly, Orla Fitzpatrick’s chapter on Cork Street Fever Hospital sees the children in its care detailed photographically through the archive of physician Ephraim Cosgrove. Fitzpatrick also investigates how belonging and a sense of care were embedded in the hospital through patient uniforms.
The final theme, ‘The material culture of home’, begins with Clodagh Tait’s interrogation of magic, in particular the burying of certain parts of animals in order to bring luck to the inhabitants of the house. Some animal parts were even built into the walls. Eliza McKee follows the journey of the itinerant tailor around the Irish countryside, exploring how he was treated as a valued house guest. Kathryn Milligan’s final chapter analyses how the home of artist Walter Osborne is reflected in his paintings and how objects such as prints on the wall become signatures in his art.
The real strength of this collection is in its exploration of more idiosyncratic elements of Irish housing. The National Folklore Collection is an abundant and fascinating source here: as it continues to be digitised, it provides some viewpoints of Irish peasantry of the period, most of whom did not preserve diaries or letters or other forms of archive. The thoughtful work of scholars such as Tait and McKee contribute greatly to our understanding of the Folklore Collection as an extensive primary source database and a social asset.
The breadth of scholarship that the editors include here is exhaustive. Overall, this book does diversify the dichotomy of the Big House or the vernacular cottage as sites of Irish dwelling. Even in addressing these two cultural behemoths, the use of literary analysis in particular sheds a new light on previous scholarship, providing a response to common tropes around cabin life. ‘Dwellings’ are given a broad editorial scope, so that topics may include events such as the Land War, alternative habitations such as asylums and barracks, and interiors, such as artists’ homes and gymnasia. This allows for an engaging and thorough overview of Irish nineteenth-century living spaces.
