Focusing on horizontal relationships, Shannon Devlin has carved a reputation for herself as a leading historian of the Irish family. Siblinghood and sociability, her first book, firmly consolidates that reputation. By adopting a horizontal approach, Devlin’s book stands at the cutting edge of new scholarship on the Irish family. In a nation historically characterised by large families, most Irish people grew up with siblings (whether full-, half- or stepsiblings). The families who are the focus of Devlin’s study averaged 7.2 siblings. Yet, despite their ubiquity, siblings have been largely overlooked in the historiography of the Irish family. While a handful of studies touch on the sibling relationship or on notable siblings in Irish history, siblinghood has not yet been fully incorporated into scholarship of the Irish family. Devlin’s book does just that.
Devlin’s book is split into six chapters, each reconstructing the experiences of siblings in relation to households and living arrangements, education, the marriage market, inheritance, work and the public sphere. For this reviewer, the most fascinating aspects of the book are the insights it offers into the intimacies of family life. Historians of the Irish family have tended to approach family from the perspective of the life cycle; a lens that not only privileges the hierarchical relationships that shaped family life but can present the family as moving seamlessly from one phase to the next. As Devlin’s book shows, this was far from the case.
In chapter three on ‘Performing courtship and matchmaking’, Devlin reveals the roles played by siblings in advising, counselling, and facilitating one another’s love lives. Unlike the advice sought and elicited from parents, that received from siblings could be very different in tone and content. Freed (largely) from the constraints of deference and obedience that was owed to parents, siblings could write candidly about their experiences and expectations of the marriage market. Their letters make for surprising reading. Those exchanged between the Andrews siblings are a case in point. Two of the Andrews brothers expressed their explicit disapproval of women they had encountered in Australia. Whereas John voiced his disinclination to marry ‘colonial heifers’, his brother Hugh, following a disappointing meeting with a woman originally from Bangor, conceded that he might have to consider an Australian-born woman, remarking wryly that ‘What can’t be cured … must be endured’ (100). Such comments, we can expect, were rarely found in letters to parents.
The strength of sibling bonds meant that brothers and sisters might live together as if they were husband and wife and at different points in the life cycle. John Grubb Richardson and Sarah Malcomson are one example. Despite being born into a large family of ten siblings, John and Sarah shared a ‘special connection’ (27) on account of there being just one year between them. So much so, that following the deaths of their respective spouses, the two siblings resided together. Their shared living arrangement also included some of their children, a set-up that ‘meant that John and Sarah could provide each of their children with a mother and father figure’ (27). So cordial was this household arrangement that the two siblings remained together for eight years, breaking up their blended family only when John remarried.
The capacity of siblings to offer structure, companionship and practical support likewise factored into the decisions of some individuals not to marry and make families of their own. Falling rates of marriage and the increase in age at marriage in post-Famine Ireland have typically been associated with a changing attitude towards matrimony. Economic pressures, together with inheritance practices that favoured first-born sons, are said to have contributed to delayed marriage and to the increasing numbers of people who never married at all. Devlin’s study nuances this picture of a ‘lost marriage market’ by highlighting the role that individual choice played in decisions to delay or decline marriage. For some, the practical benefits of marriage could be gained through sibling relationships instead. In 1888, James Andrews expressed surprise that a neighbour had married, noting how he ‘should [have] thought he did not need a wife very when he had his mother + sister keeping house for him’ (98). As James’s remark suggests, sibling relationships could function as substitutes for marriage: sisters might perform the work of wives, providing and directing household labour and, very likely, offering emotional support too.
Although focused on nineteenth-century Ulster, the findings of Devlin’s groundbreaking book are not limited to that province. In this meticulously researched and innovative study of the lives of twenty-five sets of siblings, Devlin shows us how a horizontal approach not only expands our knowledge of the Irish family but thickens our understanding of Irish society too.
