Abstract
Reviewed by: Emmet O’Connor, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
History has acquired an extraordinary topicality in Ireland at present. After the outbreak of violence in the North in 1969, state agencies shied away from it, blaming the unrest, in part, on the celebrations of the golden jubilee of the 1916 rising. Since the onset of the ‘peace process’ in 1993, the preferred approach has been to manage the past by making commemoration state-led and inclusive of what the authorities regard as acceptable versions of both nationalism and Unionism. The strategy has become very evident in addressing the centenaries of the formative events between 1912 and 1922, which saw the creation of what became Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Moreover, the public response to remembrance has been enthusiastic, partly because commemoration itself has become a contested entity in the endless rivalry between nationalists, Unionists and their critics. Arguably all public history tells us as much about the present as it does about the past, and all commemoration is more about politics than history.
Ireland and Britain, 1798–1922 is a therefore a timely and very useful teaching tool for students of modern Irish history. Dennis Dworkin offers an introduction synopsizing the history and placing it in a comparative framework, reproductions of 56 sources on Ireland, a glossary of the main dramatis personae and events, a chronology, and a guide to further reading. The range of sources is impressively imaginative and extensive, and includes extracts from political and social commentaries, speeches, letters, parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, poems, songs, and a short story by James Joyce. Most are illustrated with drawings, photographs, or maps.
The substance of the book is of course the sources, and an anthology stands or falls on the choice and organization of the selection. Dworkin manages both judiciously, grouping his reproductions in four chronological chapters, each of which is subdivided thematically. Chapter 1 is the most political in theme, and deals with the making of the union with Britain in 1800 and the emergence of nationalist demands for its undoing from the 1830s. Chapter 2 takes a more cultural perspective in examining various expressions of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. Chapter 3, ‘new departures’, is the most diverse in its range of topics and sources, which vary from Friedrich Engels on ‘The agricultural proletariat’ to Liberal Unionist Hugh de Fellenberg Montgomery on the Orange Order. The final chapter focuses on the Ulster Covenant, the Easter Rising and feminism, pillars of the current ‘decade of centenaries’. As Dworkin admits, some documents have been chosen to reflect changing historiographical fashion, and he has shown some prescience in including sections on women as the public history of events leading to the Easter Rising has become heavily feminized. One of Irish television’s flagship drama productions on the rising, Rebellion, which attracted 41 per cent of the available audience for its opening episode, is based primarily on the story of three fictional female characters. If only the women had been so central in actuality! Each chapter and each set of documents is prefaced by an introduction from Dworkin, so that the reader is given a history as well as a collection of texts.
The one disappointment is the lack of attention given to labour, industrial and social history, including issues like emigration. Only three documents, from Engels, Karl Marx and James Connolly, address these topics in part, and the last two are primarily about politics. Symptomatically, Jim Larkin’s birth year is given as 1876 (173) when scholars have accepted since the mid-1980s that he was born in 1874. Equally revealing is the inclusion of a Connolly text, when Larkin had the greater impact on the Irish Labour movement.
Undoubtedly, Dworkin succeeds in his handling of the central theme, which is essentially about the failure of the Union of 1800 and its replacement with two states dominated by nationalism and Ulster Unionism. He has an easy facility for writing clearly and concisely, and, despite a sympathy with the nationalist masses, he offers analyses which give fair consideration to all of the main political factions in Ireland. The book may appear too advanced to have much appeal to the general reader – though it presumes no prior knowledge and could be read profitably by anyone – but it certainly will commend itself to the student or academic. And no matter how well versed they are in Irish history, they are sure to find some previously unknown textual treasures accompanied by sharp, insightful commentaries.