CULTURES OF RADICALISM IN
BRITAIN AND IRELAND
POETRY AND SONG IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
Series Editors: Michael Brown
John Kirk
Andrew Noble
TITLES IN THIS SERIES
1 United Islands? The Languages of Resistance
John Kirk, Andrew Noble and Michael Brown (eds)
2 Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song
Julie Henigan
CULTURES OF RADICALISM IN
BRITAIN AND IRELAND
EDITED BY
John Kirk, Michael Brown and Andrew Noble
First published 2013 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Taylor & Francis 2013
John Kirk, Michael Brown and Andrew Noble 2013
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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Cultures of radicalism in Britain and Ireland. (Poetry and song in the age of revolution)
1. Politics and literature Great Britain History. 2. Politics and literature Ireland History. 3. Radicalism in literature. 4. Radicalism in music. I. Series II. Kirk, John M. (John Monfries), 1952 editor of compilation. III. Brown, Michael, 1972 editor of compilation. IV. Noble, Andrew, 1939 editor of compilation.
820.93581-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-1-84893-344-6 (hbk)
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
CONTENTS
Michael Brown
Part I: Constituencies
Ffion Mair Jones
Martyn J. Powell
Bob Harris
Christopher A. Whatley
E. Wyn James
Part II: The Geography of Utterance
Marion Lffler
Niall Ciosin
Maura Cronin
Dan Wall
The papers in this volume were originally presented at one or other of two symposia entitled United Islands? Multi-Lingual Radical Poetry and Song in Britain and Ireland, 17701820 which were held at Queens University Belfast from 13 to 15 November 2008 and 26 to 29 August 2009 as part of an AHRC Research Networks and Grants Project under the same name. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the AHRC for these two symposia. The first symposium doubled-up as the 8th Language and Politics Symposium of the Gaeltacht and Scotstacht within the AHRC Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, to which we are indebted for further substantial funding. Additional funding came from Foras na Gaeilge.
Between the two symposia, there was a total of 120 invited participants many more participants than are represented in this volume or its companion volume: United Islands? The Languages of Resistance edited by John Kirk, Andrew Noble and Michael Brown, in the present series. We wish to acknowledge each of their contributions, especially those who chaired sessions or gave papers in response to our invitations, or acted as rapporteurs. To this last group we are especially indebted to the following at the first symposium: John Barrell, Claire Connolly, Jon Mee and Katie Trumpener; at the second symposium: Michael Scrivener, Fred Lock and Mark Philp. Each of their contributions accumulatively brought together the main inter-connecting strands of this literary and political matrix and greatly sharpened our own thinking.
At each symposium, there was a multi-lingual concert of song of the types which we are dealing with in these essays, and to which Katie Trumpener refers in her Afterword to United Islands? The Language of Resistance. There sang, at the first symposium: Ciaran Carson, Maggie MacInnes, accompanied by Brian MacAlpine, Dafydd Idris Edwards and Terry Moylan; at the second symposium Ciaran Carson, Dafydd Idris Edwards, James Flannery and Adam McNaughtan. We are deeply indebted to each of them not only for their renditions but also for sharing with us their extraordinary rich knowledge of this song material.
At each symposium, there was a reception at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, founded in 1788 as the Belfast Reading Society. In 2008, the reception coincided with the Thomas Moore 2008 Festival Travelling Exhibition My Gentle Harp: Thomas Moores Irish Melodies, 18082008, about which John Gray, the then Librarian, and Siobhan Fitzpatrick of the Royal Irish Academy, spoke. In 2009, John Killen, incoming Librarian, spoke of the Hidden Gems of Radical Poetry in the Linen Hall Library Poetry Collection ahead of a tour of the Linen Hall Library Archives. It is always a pleasure to work with the Linen Hall Library and its Librarians, and those present on each happy occasion are indebted for their hospitality as well as their erudition.
For the help of our colleagues, we are grateful especially to Ciaran Carson, Cairns Craig, Donall Baoill and John Thompson.
We are indebted to Pickering & Chatto for agreeing to publish a new series in the area: Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution, of which this volume is the third. The companion volume: United Islands? The Languages of Resistance, the first in the series, was published in 2012. See www.pickeringchatto.com/series/poetry_and_song_in_the_age_of_revolution for further details. As our blurb states: Scholars working within the disciplines of English, history, music, Celtic Studies and politics will find the series of interest, as will researchers whose wider concerns pertain to cultural history, anthropology and the history of philosophy, communications and linguistics.
John Kirk, Michael Brown and Andrew Noble
October 2012
Michael Brown is Senior Lecturer in Irish and Scottish History at the University of Aberdeen and Acting Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. As well as being a co-director of the AHRC network grant United Islands? Multi-Lingual Radical Poetry and Song in Britain and Ireland, 17701820 in 20089, he has directed an AHRC project on Irish and Scottish Diasporas since 1600 (200611). His primary research focus is on comparative Enlightenment, and he is the author of Francis Hutcheson in Dublin (Dublin; Four Courts Press, 2002) and A Political Biography of John Toland (London, Pickering & Chatto, 2011). He is currently finishing a study entitled The Irish Enlightenment.
Maura Cronin is Senior Lecturer in History and co-ordinator of the Oral History Centre at Mary Immaculate College Limerick. She was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the Irish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 20045 for her project on broadside ballads and news transmission in prefamine Ireland. Her research interests are in popular culture and politicization in nineteenth-century Ireland, Irish labour history and oral history and memory, and her more recent publications include Claiming the Landscape: Popular Balladry in Pre-famine Ireland, in U. N. Bhroimil and G. Hooper (eds),
