Abstract
“Loved, despised, celebrated, and taken for granted all in equal measure, siblings form one of the most important relationships in a person's life,” asserts Shannon Devlin on the first page of Siblinghood and Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Ulster. The familial relationship between brothers and sisters generally lasts longer in the life cycle than the connection with parents or children, making siblinghood an effective lens through which to examine family life and society. This engaging monograph is an important addition to the historiography of the family, especially as previous Irish studies have tended to concentrate more on vertical than horizontal familial relationships.
Devlin focuses on the sibling bond within middle-class families in the northern Irish province of Ulster during the nineteenth century, when the entire island of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. The Ulster-based families included in this study had links to other parts of Ireland as well as to Great Britain, Australia, and Argentina, which enables the book to offer some insight into how migration and emigration affected sibling relations. Devlin's research also complements the work of Leanne Calvert on Presbyterian families in Ulster and Mary Hatfield on middle-class childhood in Ireland in the nineteenth century.
Devlin's book is based on case studies of twenty-five sets of siblings from Ulster, some of whom were related to one another by generation or marriage. She provides full family trees in the appendix, which is helpful for any reader trying to keep track of the multiplicity of family members mentioned. In creating her sample, Devlin sought to choose an even spread of families living in rural and urban locations and those belonging to various religious denominations typically found in the north of Ireland. Due to historical settlement patterns, Ulster is the province of Ireland with the most concentrated population of protestants. Thus, it is fitting that the sample includes eleven Presbyterian, three Quaker (Society of Friends), two Anglican (Church of Ireland), two Methodist, two Unitarian, and five Catholic families. The preponderance of Presbyterians reflects their prominent position within the Ulster middle class, especially in the industrial sector. The northeast of Ireland was the most industrialised part of the island in the nineteenth century, so it is also fitting that the sample includes many families whose prosperity derived from the manufacture of linen, cotton, and muslin. Other families engaged in trade, distilling, farming, medicine, law, or ministry.
Devlin mined personal correspondence preserved in family and business collections, mainly but not exclusively from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, to develop a convincing qualitative analysis of how Ulster siblings confronted the social hierarchies and gendered power structures of middle-class society at the time. She also made effective use of extant genealogical records to piece together family trees. This task was particularly challenging because many such Irish records for the period have either been destroyed or simply do not exist.
The book is divided into six thematic chapters that cover the sibling experience in relation to households, education, the marriage market, inheritance, employment, and the public sphere. The first chapter illuminates the fluid composition of sibling households during both childhood and adulthood. Many siblings in these Ulster middle-class families “moved in and out of each other's households on a short-term, but frequent basis, whilst others chose to reside together permanently in a single building” (29) even into adulthood.
The next chapter examines the impact of siblings on education and decisions about schooling. The gendered nature of education at the time and household economics are prominent threads woven through Devlin's discussion. The education of siblings in the same family could vary greatly depending on their gender and birth order. Girls and younger boys might be educated at home by governesses or by older educated siblings who passed on their knowledge as well as language and literacy skills. The latter option could be a money-saving device in families with large numbers of children to educate. As the education of boys was deemed to have a better prospect of economic return, the formal schooling of the three Clarke brothers of Lifford, Co. Donegal was prioritized over that of their two sisters. Girls might be sent to school for a short period of time to acquire polish. Decisions on where to send a child to boarding school might be based on an elder sibling's experience or on the networking opportunities afforded by the school in question. For instance, the Richardson family found sending their children to schools in England “useful for forming networks with other well-connected Quaker families outside of Ireland” (81). Older siblings often provided more valuable advice than parents to younger siblings starting at school, or they could be a hard act to follow. Olive and Dorothy Duffin, for example, found it challenging to live up to their elder sister Ruth's academic achievements at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
Siblings could be equally influential in relation to courtship and matchmaking, as discussed in chapter three. “Close friendships and overlapping social networks allowed brothers and sisters to introduce and meet potential partners,” notes Devlin (95). For instance, Thomas Cunningham from Belfast kept an eye out for a suitable match for his older brother Samuel during a visit to friends in South Shields, England, advising, “Faith my boy, this is the place for you” (95). He quickly identified twenty-one-year-old Caroline Couper as a fine prospect for his brother. Siblings performed the rituals of courtship together at public events and visits to private homes, taking a keen interest in one another's romances because they too “had to live with the marriage decisions of their brothers and sisters, for better or worse, for the rest of their lives” (104). Personal attraction as well as religious compatibility, the capacity to satisfy gendered domestic roles, a respectable reputation, and financial factors were all important considerations when choosing a marital partner in the middle-class milieu in Ulster and elsewhere in the nineteenth century.
The next chapter traces how Ulster families redistributed property and wealth to the next generation. To research this theme, Devlin utilized surviving testamentary material, including wills, as a key primary source. More specifically, this fourth chapter “explores how siblinghood affected what testators intended to do with their wealth and the impact of inheritance on sibling relations” (130). As Devlin points out, one of the benefits of examining “inheritance horizontally across a generation” is that it “offers an insight into favouritism between brothers and sisters” (156). She deploys examples from several families to demonstrate how factors such as gender, birth order, age at the time of a parent's death, marital status, and affection could result in inequality of inheritance among siblings. The Crawford family of Belfast is indicative of such inequality but also of sibling loyalty. In 1873, when Alexander Crawford left his starch and chemical business to three of his children, two-thirds went to his son James Wright Crawford, and a lesser share of one-third to his unmarried daughters Abbey and Anne. It was unusual that the sisters were made co-partners in the business instead of only receiving an annuity or cash legacy as was often the case for female family members. In 1907, James Wright Crawford left his interest in the family business and the bulk of his estate to his youngest son, Fred, after failing to use inheritance as a bargaining chip to convince his older son, Alex, to return from Australia, where, much to his parents’ disapproval, he had become engaged to his first cousin. Alex, however, did receive an annuity and their childhood home, where their mother continued to reside. Yet Fred's more substantial inheritance did not prove a boon because he had to absorb debts on the estate and face the declining fortunes of the business. When Fred later ran into serious financial difficulties, Alex offered the house to his brother at a nominal rent and sold land to help him out. Despite a lesser inheritance, Alex had managed to thrive through his own hard work and was willing to support his brother at a difficult time.
Alex Crawford may have eschewed joining the family business, but many other Ulster siblings viewed themselves as natural business partners due to familial bonds of trust and loyalty, carrying on their family's enterprises once they reached adulthood. As Devlin observes in chapter five, “the accumulation of wealth, branching into new enterprises, and making the most of the growing Ulster capitalist economy allowed families to increase both wealth and status across generations” (159). Instability in the agricultural economy spurred some rural middle-class families to steer the next generation away from the family farm and toward trade in the case of the Cunningham brothers of Killead, Co. Antrim, or medical training for five of the seven Dunn brothers of Enniskillen, Co. Tyrone. Sisters as well as brothers could contribute to family enterprises. This might be through a marriage alliance that was advantageous to the family's business interests. Alternatively, a sister might work in the family business or establish one of her own. For instance, Matilda O’Connor (née Maguire) of Strabane, Co. Tyrone, left her family's struggling grocery business to launch her own drapery venture in 1865. Although siblings had a shared interest in improving their family's fortunes, pooling resources and maintaining the good reputation of the family name, Devlin also highlights examples in which financial mismanagement, gambling, greed, and resentment could tarnish this ideal.
The final thematic chapter considers the influential role of siblings in navigating the public sphere of middle-class society. Involvement in literary and cultural societies, such as amateur dramatics, convivial clubs and sport for men, philanthropic organisations, and political activism, heightened the public visibility of families and enabled their “performance of middle-class respectability and religious values” (220). While only brothers could run for parliament in the UK during the nineteenth century, sisters increasingly had a role to play not only in hosting and entertaining their male relatives’ political associates, but also in campaigning. In the final decades of the century, the Irish home rule question galvanized both nationalist and unionist families in Ulster. Being the sister of former Liberal MP for Armagh, James Nicholson Richardson, ensured that Cambridge-educated Anne Wakefield Richardson was taken more seriously when she spoke against home rule or in favor of temperance. However, her prominence in London as a public speaker soon surpassed that of her brother because of her energetic activism and the academic and associational connections she herself had cultivated. Although Devlin's case studies demonstrate that siblings played a significant role in facilitating an entry into school, social networks, the marriage market, employment, and the wider public sphere, it is evident that individual family members also had a vital part to play in their own personal success throughout their life cycle. Ulster may be the focus of this study, but as highlighted above, its findings are equally relevant for shedding light on siblinghood, family life, and middle-class society in Ireland and Great Britain more widely in the nineteenth century.