In this important volume, born from the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland's 2016 annual conference, Matthew Kelly guides readers through a conceptually difficult topic. ‘Nature’, he explains, is a term as polymorphous as the abstractions it has inspired. Its distinction within the environmental humanities often overlies more perceptible entities – ‘landscape’ and ‘environment’ – that affect, or have been affected by, human behaviour. While landscape and environment tend to be fixed in an era of anthropogenic development, nature requires a deeper historicisation. The environmental lens has traditionally examined the nexus of ecological, agricultural, and industrial change that human presence, absence, degradation, or improvement have influenced. Nature's agency is often refuted in this regard, instead viewed as an actant – present but perhaps powerless to assist earnestly or resist human encroachment. The studies collected here question this view to diverse ends.
While some chapters document ‘nature’ in nineteenth-century Ireland as an idea that influenced literary nostalgia, commercial opportunity and political identity, others explore it as the catalyst for the relational hybridity between biological and sociological worlds. For instance, Helen O'Connell argues that estate improvement often incorporated a desire for social, as well as material improvement. Notwithstanding its erosion of native culture, certain improvers anticipated ‘drained bogs, tidy cottages, and enclosed fields’ to similarly reform the human condition. Such cultural and environmental alignment across Britain and Ireland was anticipated to expand agricultural production (and profit) and dissolve political tension. The same desire for profit, security, and ‘moral welfare’ of his tenants inspired Lord Palmerston to improve his Sligo estates, David Brown explains. Contemporaries described this land ‘as Nature [sic] formed it’, a reservation the incongruous rundale system of land division upheld well into the nineteenth-century. While man-made obstacles frustrated improvement, the land itself presented difficulties that ensured its conservation. Uncultivated bogs, treeless landscapes that enabled wind erosion, and subsoil gravel deposits maintained an unproductive, though natural, environment.
These natural environments were increasingly politicised throughout the nineteenth-century, highlighting their platforms for both human-to-human negotiation and human-natural intersection. Colin Reid effectively argues that tenant rights and the Irish land question itself was essentially a question of environmental justice. He explains that Ireland's natural resources, principally arable land, had been legislated and controlled to such an extent as to deny economic stability for those primarily dependent on its production. This links to the question of improvement as enabling both agricultural and moral development, which the landlord system continued to deny to Ireland's struggling agrarian class throughout the later nineteenth-century.
Juliana Adelman relocates the improvement narrative to Dublin, where nineteenth-century regulations worked to combat the noisy, noxious, and unsanitary by-products typical of concentrated industrial growth. Urban animal processing, in particular, produced various unpleasant discharges that impacted public health and indicated a neighbourhood's class standing. As a result, socio-spatial gradients emerged throughout Dublin. The affluent avoided concentrated animal geographies in the form of cattle markets, slaughterhouses, and knackers’ yards – ‘the places for disposing horses’. As such, James Christopher Kenny, a Trinity College law student, journeyed from Blackrock to Tallaght insensible to ‘the Animal City’.
Socio-spatial hybridity is present in further chapters. Ronan Foley explains that natural environments induced the development of ‘therapeutic landscapes’, where select settings aided health and recovery. Ireland's spa towns and sweat houses mimicked broader European trends, but retained elements of local culture, such as holy wells. Nature's agency is again questioned. Mineral spas, which ‘literally spring up out of the ground’, formed healing spaces to treat the body's exposure to environmental toxins. Varying mineral deposits broadened the geography of healing in Ireland. In this sense, offending smells operated differently in a rural setting, where rife odour often indicated a sulphur-rich spring. Similarly, ailments set on a body worn down from a life of agricultural labour were relieved in the rural sweat-house, which treated arthritis, rheumatism, and respiratory disease.
Nature was also seen as an ideal recreational space where it was envisioned that preserved landscapes would help to develop a distinct Irish national identity. Matthew Kelly's own contribution identifies the Muckross demesne in Killarney, County Kerry, as a missed opportunity in this regard – one that amplified nationalist criticism of Britain's myopic view toward Irish governance in the late-nineteenth century, and mismanagement of its natural assets. Accounting for natural history, Mary Orr re-evaluates William Thompson's The natural history of Ireland (1849–56). Orr argues that Thompson's work not only provided important insights toward Irish ichthyology, it also revised a traditionally static terrestrial narrative in natural history writing that de-located its hydrogeology.
Nature, science and writing coalesce in Seán Hewitt's exploration of Seumas O'Sullivan's revivalist nature poetry. O'Sullivan was one of a number of revivalist writers who reconciled nineteenth-century evolutionary science with the supernatural. Grounded in a natural history education, O'Sullivan attempted to ‘de-centre the occult poem by reasserting the materiality of nature.’ This process guided the trajectory of his career, over which Hewitt notes the alignment of the spiritual to the material, the rural to the urban, and through which both the natural world transcended.
Overall, this coherent volume demonstrates how Irish environmental humanities continues to cultivate unique and complementary scholarship. While narrowed to institutions in Ireland and the United Kingdom, its authors nevertheless contribute a collectively diverse examination of nature and the environment in nineteenth-century Ireland. The key arguments explored here – the definition and meaning of ‘nature’, spaces of socio-environmental hybridity, and the extent (if any) of nature's agency – are essential comments in an ongoing discussion.
