Historical ideas about childhood have attracted increasing attention from multiple scholarly perspectives over the past decade, including from scholars of Irish history and literature. In Imagining the Irish Child, Jarlath Killeen focuses on Irish Protestant narratives about children and tracks a profound transformation in concepts and ideas of childhood from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. In a mere hundred and fifty years or so, he argues, Irish Anglicans shifted from viewing children as born inherently depraved, and so in need of parental spiritual correction, to advocating that children should be treated affectionately and with care. In many ways, this shift was in line with their contemporaries in England. In Ireland, however, there was at the same time a profound political dimension to discourses about childhood because for these Irish Protestants, the native Catholic Irish filled the rhetorical category of uncivilized children in need of discipline and governance.

The imaginative processes whereby the native Irish retained their negative childlike characteristics, while Anglican children became objects of pleasure and joy for their parents, are outlined by Killeen in five chapters, each covering a different period and genre of writing. The shift in attitudes is underlined by the subtitles for the chapters: from chapter 1, “the evil child” for the early modern period; chapter 2, “the vulnerable child” for the seventeenth century wars; chapter 3, “the believing child” covering seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious literature for children; chapter 4, “the Enlightenment child” on eighteenth-century fairy stories; and finally chapter 5, “the monstrous child,” which focuses on eighteenth-century Gothic novels. Throughout these chapters, Killeen draws on a wide range of writing including theological texts, atrocity literature written in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion, Swift’s fiction, and minor eighteenth-century Gothic novels. This breadth of literary genres gives Imagining the Irish Child exceptional depth, as Killeen analyses these profound shifts in attitudes about children. At the same time, he also faces a challenge, in that such diverse sources can obscure arguments. Killeen mostly avoids this trap with precise analysis of his chosen texts. Only in the chapter on the Gothic novel does the analysis stretch perhaps a little too far, and this is in part because of the imprecise historical category of “child” itself. As Killeen points out in the introduction, what constituted a “child” in the period was murky and depended not so much on age but on the “child’s” function in the family and relative position of power in society. Such definitional murkiness underpins Killeen’s analysis of the minor Gothic novel, The Haunted Priory by Stephen Cullen (1794). One of the main characters of this novel is a 14-year-old giant named Alphonso, and while certainly not in a position of power or influence, much of the complex plot seems to revolve around his falling in love with a girl who is first presented as a lost sister and then discovered not to be related to him (207–8). Killeen provides interesting analyses of the relationship between the figure of Alphonso and Stephen Cullen’s ideas on Irish nationalism, but whether Alphonso should be treated as a child or as a young man capable of adult sexual attraction is not fully discussed in relation to the overall analysis of childhood. That said, the Gothic novel is a genre that Killeen has studied extensively in the past, and this section of Imagining the Irish Child benefits from his deep emersion in the material.

The chapter, “The vulnerable child,” focuses on texts about the Irish 1641 rebellion, and here Killeen demonstrates how the figure of the child, both as victim and perpetrator of violence, was used by seventeenth-century writers to argue for the inherent treachery of Irish Catholics, considered to be, citing Temple’s The Irish Rebellion, “murderous and mired in filth and sexual depravity” (50). Killeen’s analysis here reaches back to the earlier depictions of children being the seat of original sin, explored in his first chapter, as well as forward to the time when Protestants would more completely view their children as innocents in need of nurture and protection. The narratives of 1641, when innocent Protestant babies were ripped from their dead mothers’ arms or wombs and then killed, reinforced narratives of suffering innocence and childhood for generations. For Protestant settlers in Ireland, the knowledge that they and their children might be attacked by Irish Catholics who were children themselves, or as children had perpetrated such violence in the recent past, contributed to the gathering sense of living under siege in a hostile environment. Killeen’s readings here of the motif of the child and childhood in the writings generated by the 1641 rebellion are a valuable addition to the growing scholarly literature of that complex period.

While in each section Killeen offers coherent analyses based on specific texts or literary genres, the overall argument builds through the book, culminating in a persuasively argued conclusion. Killeen here builds on the well-accepted view that many Protestants saw Irish Catholics as closer to the state of nature and thus irredeemably uncivilized and in need of the English to govern them. However, Killeen has in this book established how these ideas were tightly woven around the idea of “childhood” in the imaginative world of Irish Anglicans from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. As a visual example of this, Killeen examines the broadsheet illustration, A Prospect of bleeding Ireland’s miseries (1647), which portrays Protestants, both adults and children, as distressed and dying children of Mother Ireland who had been attacked by Irish Catholics, arguably while protector Father England was distracted (242). In this book, Killeen has added depth and nuance to analyses of both the history of childhood in Ireland and to the ways in which Irish Protestants made sense of their status within Ireland itself.