Abstract
This edited collection arose from a conference, with which it shares its title, held in Northumbria University in 2013. Consequently, the reader is treated to a wide-ranging exposition of crime and violence during the nineteenth century. At its crux, however, the volume seeks to distinguish the perceptions of these phenomena, held by contemporary observers of nineteenth-century Ireland, from reality. The various forms and meanings of crime and violence, and the consequent state responses and cultural fallout, are also explored. Its fourteen chapters are penned, in the main, by established experts in their field, with the addition of several younger scholars. These chapters are organised effectively into four sections.
The first section, ‘Secret Societies and Collective Violence’, is bound together by a common theme of attempting to assess the motivations of those who committed a crime and carried out violent acts, and, as a result, found themselves coming into contact with the British state in Ireland in some way. Huggins, in his study of the terminology applied to various networks and combinations of lower class males in pre-Famine Ireland, cautions against taking the documentary evidence available to us via the state apparatus at face value. ‘Much of what has been termed secret society activity in the first half of the nineteenth century’, he says, ‘should not be shoe-horned into a mould created by the wilder imaginings of select committee members and witnesses, local magistrates and landlords’ (p. 24). Dunne, by studying a sample of 135 letters and threatening notices from Leinster in 1832, identifies a ‘legal parallelism’ whereby ‘the law of the state and the law of the subaltern insurgency [are] in fact both types of law’ (p. 43). Likewise, Lumsden invests in Ribbonism a political legitimacy that contemporary newspapers, and especially writers of fiction, stripped from it through an ‘overemphasis of the criminality and poverty of Ribbonmen’ (p. 54). McGrath also probes this question of legitimacy, specifically in the arena of primitive trades unions in the form of the United Trades of Limerick during the years 1819–21. He finds that although the violence practised by the United Trades during this period was short-lived, their emergence represented ‘a truly seminal development’ in Limerick City through ‘the consolidation of an urban artisan fraternity’ (p. 84), which ultimately endured for a longer span than in comparable Munster cities such as Cork.
In Section 2, ‘The Law and its Responses’, the focus shifts from the theatre of rural and urban Ireland, where crime and violence were carried out, to the courthouses, court rooms and jails where the colonial state assigned and administered punishment. In a nicely illustrated chapter, Butler traces the emergence of a system of courthouses in Cork against the backdrop of the Rockite Rebellion of the 1820s. He is careful, however, not to interpret the construction of these structures as a momentary knee-jerk response to the agrarian rebellion. Instead, he argues, they should be viewed within the context of a long process and the ‘shifting balance of power between [Cork’s] elites and a newly aggressive and reforming central state’ (p. 91). Within the courtroom, Reid shines a light on the trials of the Young Irelanders as the state sought to suppress their move towards rebellion in 1848. Courtrooms were not places where the judiciary dominated entirely and those who found themselves before them were not meekly discarded of all agency. In the case of the Young Irelanders, their legal teams, such as Isaac Butt and James Whiteside, argued that the young radicals had a constitutional right to question the legitimacy of the Union; in the process, these Conservative lawyers advanced the cause of nationalism, albeit indirectly. According to Reid, the rhetoric they expounded was one of ‘conditional unionism, patriotism, and conflicting ideas of national virtue’ (p. 130). By contrast, Keogh’s chapter on the Fenian trials of 1865–66 demonstrated the power of ‘judicial ritual and performance to effectively uphold law and order’ (p. 135). It was afterwards, in the realm of historical memory – a subject under ever more scrutiny by modern scholars – that Fenianism gained its revenge. The eulogising of Fenian performances in the courtroom in texts such as Speeches from the Dock, first published in 1867 by the Sullivan brothers of Cork, as Keogh explains, ‘ultimately served to undermine the authority of the state’ (p. 135). Breathnach and Geary turn their attention to the punishment endured by the Whiteboys of south-west Ireland during the Land War period of the early 1880s. The state, in an attempt to suppress agrarian crime, was disproportionate in its punishment of these convicts when compared against common criminal sentences. The detail offered on the penal lives of the Whiteboy prisoners, by investigating their well-being through prison medical records, is innovative in its application to its subjects and warrants similar inquiry in other eras of agrarian disturbance and republican revolt. However, the authors’ characterisation of the Whiteboys as ‘atavistic enforcers of communal sanctions’ who carried out ‘petty personal and family feuds and vendettas’ (p. 171), jars somewhat with recent interpretations by scholars such as the aforementioned Huggins, advanced in his study of Roscommon cited elsewhere in the volume, which highlights the wider national, and even international, awareness and politicised mentalité behind much rural disorder.
Section three explores ‘Sectarianism and Violence’. Ian d’Alton elucidates the nature of sectarian violence in Bandon, County Cork; a town branded the ‘Derry of the South’ by the Cork Constitution (p. 178). D’Alton casts his net widely, taking in the entirety of the nineteenth century and examining instances of Orange triumphalism, electoral violence and street preaching, and the violence each elicited. Overall, sectarianism was usually a symptom, rather than a cause, of violence, whereby incidents ‘initially of a non-sectarian nature could trigger religious conflict’ (p. 191). Sectarian violence outside of Ulster during the nineteenth century is still a largely unexplored field and d’Alton has signalled avenues of future research into other towns in the south with significant Protestant populations during this period. Curran takes Ulster in the 1830s as his point of focus. The ‘conditional loyalty’ of the Ulster Protestant population, as emphasised in David Miller's seminal 1978 monograph, Queen's Rebels, is demonstrated clearly in Curran's study of the Orange Order. The Order resented the encroachment of the reforming centralised state into policing and the court system from the 1830s – arenas that up until then had been unduly influenced by prejudiced Orange police and magistrates. This resentment manifested frequently in violent outbursts and, according to Curran, ‘the period immediately post-Catholic emancipation saw the highpoint of province wide Orange disobedience towards the police’ (p. 207).
The final section, entitled ‘Manifestations of Crime and Violence’, is more of a mixed bag. Clark’s chapter on arson is fascinating and demands a similar approach be taken up by others in investigating stand-alone acts of crime and violence throughout the nineteenth century. Arson in the pre-Famine period, according to Clark, was a tool deployed to counteract the worst excesses of the land system as experienced by the poorest sections of rural society. It held ‘a particular significance in the … protest sphere because of its power as symbolic violence’ and its ability to purge the terrain of ‘the enemy’ (pp 224–5). Maume's installment is a biographical account of ‘Honest’ Tom Steele, Daniel O’Connell's right-hand man and an ‘aristocratic radical’ of the eighteenth-century variety. Steele, a Protestant, earned the admiration of middle-class Catholics like O’Connell for his role in talking would-be agrarian rebels out of collective action by opening their eyes to the ‘political counter-productiveness of crime’ (p. 235). These endeavours gained Steele the title of ‘Head Pacificator’. However, Steele’s attempts to channel agrarian discontent into constitutional politics could also be viewed, through a more cynical lens, as a means of social control. Nonetheless, his close bond with O’Connell, according to Maume, offers a cheerful juxtaposition ‘to the grim religious and social divisions of nineteenth-century Ireland’ (p. 242). There was little cheerful about the Phoenix Park assassinations of 1882, carried out by the breakaway Fenian grouping, the Invincibles. The assassins themselves gained notoriety but, at the same time, according to O’Donnell in her analysis of broadside ballads surrounding the event, were exalted as ‘self-sacrificing heroes’ (p. 258). O’Donnell's study of the ballads, as with the above-mentioned investigation of the threatening letters by Dunne, offers a useful popular corrective to analyses of crime and violence that are overly reliant on the perceptions of the administration and middle-class journalists. Indeed, in the final chapter, Crossman's focus is the subjective nature of perceptions and responses to vagrancy throughout the long nineteenth century. The result of the vagrant act, she argues, was to rubber-stamp the categorisations of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. In the process, a section of the poor was criminalised, thus ‘penalising the victim rather than addressing the larger economic and social forces that left so many Irish people without regular paid employment or a settled home’ (p. 279).
All told, this is a significant contribution to the study of crime and violence in Ireland during the nineteenth century; indeed it deploys methodologies and routes of inquiry that could easily be applied to other centuries. It is, therefore, a highly recommended compendium for those interested in the social history of modern Ireland.