Robert Dudley Edwards was a major figure in twentieth-century Irish historiography, yet remains a paradox. Proclaimed as the founder of ‘scientific’ Irish history, Dudley (as he was generally known) has been castigated for having nothing to say about the brutality and suffering of early modern Ireland. Yet, as Miriam Moffitt has shown, his first and only significant academic monograph was an example of Catholic nationalist history, detailing the persecution and violence of the English state towards the Irish, complete with pious foreword by Professor Mary Hayden and a list of Catholic martyrs at the end. Immensely influential in ensuring that the primary sources of Irish history were edited and printed, he himself published very little of permanent value, suffering throughout his life from writer’s block. Centrally placed as professor of modern Irish history in UCD and founding joint-editor of Irish Historical Studies, tirelessly organising committees, conferences and meetings, he left behind no followers, founded no school of history. Capable of great kindness, he could also be a rude, heartless bully. In conversation he could be sparkling with, as Aidan Clarke put it in his astute obituary, a ‘provocative, endlessly questioning iconoclasm’ (IHS, xxvi (1988), 125). In print, he was often dull and unoriginal. An innovative teacher, he could also bemuse classes with his wayward lectures. His outrageous behaviour inspired a fund of stories and anecdotes, but the inner demons which drove him to alcohol and excess remain unexplored. The difficulty in placing and explaining him is all the more surprising since we possess in his enormous Nachlass (deposited in the UCD Archives, which he founded) all his papers, correspondence and diaries, asking — indeed begging — for the attention of historians. These have been shrewdly used for specific projects by scholars such as Michael Bentley, Ciaran Brady, Michael Laffan and David Hayton, but they have never been mined for a comprehensive biographical treatment.
Neasa MacErlean’s book is, therefore, a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on modern Irish history writing. Readable, with a compelling and often sad story to tell, it occupies that complex space where journalism, personal knowledge, popular and academic history intersect: part primary, part secondary source. For MacErlean is the granddaughter of Dudley — indeed, she grew up for a while in his household. She is, therefore, able to use her own memories (rather awkwardly phrased in the third person), as well as a fund of family stories. In addition, she has made good use of his archive and has interviewed a range of contemporaries and historians. This combination of personal knowledge and oral history is the most important part of this book, offering insights into Dudley’s inner psyche and capturing the wide range of reactions which he inspired.
From the perspective of Irish history, two things are clear from this biography. First, for all his many failings, Dudley at his best was clearly held in considerable affection by many of those who knew and worked with him. This is the man who was open to new ideas, planning, persuading, fundraising, travelling, cajoling, always seeking to improve the position of history in Ireland and sparkling in his comments and asides — see his withering description of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid as a ‘subconsciously inferior schoolmaster who once had ambitions for academic distinction’ (UCD Archives, LA22/1034 (4)). And secondly, it is evident that his major contribution to Irish history lay in his ability to organise, edit and inspire. MacErlean traces his multifarious activities: building up UCD History; creating and supporting the Irish History Students’ Association; courting the Irish bishops in an effort to make Irish ecclesiastical records in Ireland and in Rome more accessible; founding the Irish Catholic Historical Committee; encouraging local history societies; and then, towards the end of his life, his crucial engagement with archives, personally persuading Garrett Fitzgerald to open up government records through the National Archives Act, 1986, founding the UCD Archives and developing the first archival training course in Ireland.
Where the book is less successful is in its coverage of his work as an historian. Seeking to defend Dudley against Brendan Bradshaw’s misleading caricature of him as an anti-nationalist, value-free, scientific historian is perhaps a mistake. Fortunately, Irish history has moved on from that typically Bradshavian false dichotomy and its narrow focus upon nationalism and politics into a far wider and more interdisciplinary approach. What Dudley and his papers offer is an insight into the many and various influences which helped shape mid-twentieth-century Irish historiography, in particular into the role of English (especially Cambridge) empiricism — what Michael Bentley calls modernism — with its simplistic belief that source-mining leads to objectivity, which so dominated UCD in particular and Irish universities in general, impoverishing the range and readability of much of the history that was produced. Just as the excesses of postmodernism ended the naivety of English empiricism, so too the reaction against Dudley and Bradshaw has heightened awareness of the delicate balance between the aim of objectivity and inevitable fact of subjectivity in the writing of Irish history.
This, the first biography of one of the ‘great men’ of twentieth-century Irish history, points to the need for further detailed research. Not just the interrogation of those other three giants — Moody, Quinn and Beckett — but also the investigation of a host of issues: Dudley’s ambiguous attitude to religion and the complex relationship between the UCD History Department and McQuaid; his development of the idea of the public historian, especially through his editorials for The Leader; the relationship between Cambridge and UCD History; his somewhat surprising role in the development of Irish women’s history; and above all his achievements as an organiser and the need for a detailed study of those committees and institutions which he founded and shaped. And finally, this book only confirms the impression that Dudley’s diaries (the ‘journals’), covering the period from 1951 to 1960, are a vital source for Irish historiography. An edition of them would be a worthwhile (if dangerously modern) venture for that other institution to which he devoted so much of his time, the Irish Manuscripts Commission.
