The most recent in the long-running series of edited collections emerging from the annual conferences of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Irish elites in the nineteenth century is a decidedly wide-ranging volume, addressing a multiplicity of elites and elite practices, from the political to the religious to the cultural. As such, it inevitably raises the question as to what, exactly, is meant by the term elite: can a concept that can be applied in relation to such seemingly disparate groups as archery enthusiasts, missionary supporters, solicitors and journalists be of any real analytical use? Addressing this issue in his introductory discussion, the volume’s editor, Ciaran O’Neill, concedes that ours is ‘an age when “elite” has become a multi-purpose and no-purpose word’, but nevertheless argues for its utility, building on existing literature, both sociological and historiographical (p. 17).

Engaging, in particular, with Fergus Campbell’s The Irish Establishment, 1879–1914 (2009), O’Neill proposes that the Irish elite be viewed more broadly than Campbell’s conceptualisation would allow, suggesting that ‘Irish elites may be defined much more loosely, as Trygve Gulbranssen posits in relation to Norwegian society, as “the holders of top positions in central institutions and organizations within significant sectors” of society’ (p. 19). From this, it follows that ‘power’ can be viewed ‘as something that is not doggedly maintained or monopolized by state forces, monarchies or hereditary stake-holders, but something altogether more fluid and difficult to characterize’; it can be thought of ‘as “influence”, or indeed as an enabling or “empowering” force rather than uniformly coercive or repressive’ (pp 20, 22).

The chapters that follow this introduction are arranged thematically, and address six main areas. To begin, contributions from Andrew Tierney and Susan Galavan focus on ‘Elites and the built environment’. Focusing on what he terms ‘the material equipage of “gentility” – from architecture to landscape – among the lesser gentry and rising class of rural farmers’, Tierney suggests that ‘the democratization of elite culture saw the lines between prosperous farmer, middleman and landlord increasingly blurred’, while Galavan provides a case study of ‘the firm of Michael Meade & Son, a prolific family of Dublin builders’, whose owners may be located within ‘a rising Catholic elite’ (pp 31, 50, 51). Next, in a section entitled ‘Rethinking the landed estate’, contributions from Kevin McKenna, Maeve O’Riordan and Joanne McEntee offer fresh insights through explorations of the power relations involved in the coming-of-age rituals of estate heirs (McKenna), and the role played by elite women (O’Riordan) and solicitors (McEntee) in managing big houses and country estates. Turning from landed estates, section three gathers contributions from Matthew Potter, Felix M. Larkin, Pamela Emerson and Brian Griffin, which address the theme of ‘Local elites and associational culture’. Making use of theoretical literature, Potter sheds light on what he terms the ‘Shannon Estuary group’, ‘a progressive and reforming circle’, comprising members of a number of leading families, ‘who practised noblesse oblige on a large scale, over several generations’ and who, he argues, constitute ‘an example of a classic closed elite sub-group that was unable to make the transition to a democratic open elite’ (pp 113, 124). Following this, Larkin highlights two ‘discrete but interrelated’ groupings – journalists who sat in parliament as members of the Irish party and journalists with Cork connections – suggesting that they formed ‘part of the fabric of nationalist Ireland from the 1870s until the 1918 general election’ (p. 125). By contrast, Emerson and Griffin direct our attention towards leisure, Emerson exploring the involvement in local book clubs of ‘the movers and shakers of early nineteenth-century Belfast’, and Griffin providing a well-researched overview of the rise and fall of archery, an elite pastime which ‘served as an important assertion of status and of separation from the rest of Irish society’ (pp 152, 153). Section four, ‘Writing the decline’, combines subtle studies of Canon Samuel Hayman and Lady Gregory by Patrick Maume and Anna Pilz, both of which illustrate the ways in which forms of writing could be employed in the service of defending elite status. While Maume suggests that the scholarly interests of Hayman, a churchman and antiquarian, renowned for his work on Youghal, ‘derived from a wider attempt to defend the position of the Anglican elite as civic and religious leaders’, Pilz explores the ways in which socialising, the collection of autographs and the publication of an autobiography of her late husband provided Gregory with ‘methods of upholding the social standing she and her family had previously enjoyed’ (pp 172, 196). Section five then turns from declining elites within Ireland to look further afield, with essays analysing nineteenth-century Manchester’s Irish middle class (Neil Smith and Mervyn Busteed), Irish tourists (Raphaël Ingelbien) and the Church of Ireland’s Hibernian Church Missionary Society (Timothy G. McMahon). ‘Portraying the political elites’, a sixth section, addresses politics. Fintan Cullen unpicks the ways in which the cartoonist John Doyle portrayed Daniel O’Connell, highlighting ‘Doyle’s use of parody (usually of contemporaneous art and literary references) to expose O’Connell’s political strategies’, and Nicola K. Morris provides an overview of the political career of the M.P., Jeremiah Jordan, a supporter of home rule and ‘one of the most prominent Methodists in the public sphere between his first election in 1885 and his death in 1911’ (pp 233, 248).

Although these varied contributions do not all engage with the concept of elites as directly as O’Neill does in his introduction, their variety nevertheless illustrates the potential of the ‘elastic’ approach to power and elites that he proposes (p. 19). Moreover, in a final, commissioned chapter, John Hutchinson reflects on his 1987 study The dynamics of cultural nationalism: the Gaelic Revival and the creation of the Irish nation-state, a book which sought ‘to examine how far one could explain the take-off of Irish Ireland as a significant social movement by reference to a problem of “blocked social mobility” among young Catholics’ (p. 264). Hutchinson ‘argued that the real political significance of the Irish revival was the creation of a cohesive counter-cultural community, whose values and concept of legitimacy were radically distinct from those of the state and dominant institutions of Ireland’ and here, at O’Neill’s invitation, he ‘review[s] its claims in the light of recent scholarship on Irish history’ and makes a case ‘for the neglected centrality of war for understanding crucial developments in Irish nationalist politics’ (pp 259, 265). This closing chapter, in conjunction with O’Neill’s introduction, provides the volume with conceptual ballast, and provides a stimulating close to a varied and thoughtfully edited collection.