Abstract
This handsomely produced and heavily illustrated volume is an exemplar of the ‘material turn’ that is becoming increasingly fashionable in historical writing. It brings together a number of essays on quite disparate topics – aspects of the history of consumption and collecting, publishing and the press, the domestic context of scientific inquiry, and colonial exploitation – under the capacious umbrella of activities indulged in by ‘speculative minds’ in Ireland in the age of the enlightenment. As the introduction makes clear, the prime intention is to demonstrate the extent and vitality of intellectual and cultural life in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland, in particular the craze for the new that came with rising prosperity and the opportunities presented by British imperial expansion.
There is also a subtext: to exploit evidence from material culture, and in particular the worlds of commerce and connoisseurship, in order to extend the notion of an ‘Irish enlightenment’ beyond the parameters within which historians of ideas have hitherto operated. This involves making connexions, and suggesting a symbiotic relationship, between the development of scientific knowledge and its practical applications. It also greatly enlarges the cast of characters beyond those with whom we are already familiar. The first essay in the volume, by Leonie Hannan, does this quite explicitly, describing the meteorological record-keeping of the almanac-writer Isaac Butler, the astronomical observations of the Dublin printer Robert Jackson, and communications to the Dublin Society from women interested in the breeding of silkworms. She also suggests, somewhat more speculatively, that the existence of manuscript recipe-books shows how a culture of experiment and record-keeping – key elements in the discipline of the natural scientist – were to be found in the domestic experiences of Irish housewives. Padhraig Higgins approaches the same question – the application of scientific knowledge to daily life – through an exploration of the efforts of the American ‘practical experimenter’ and self-publicist Benjamin Thompson to improve the efficiency of the Dublin ‘house of industry’ (p. 82). Thompson arrived in Ireland in the 1790s with a reputation for developing new household heating systems, which brought him the attention of those involved with running the workhouse. Soon his interest had progressed towards making economies by rationalising dietary provision for the inmates. Almost inevitably, the result was a decline in the quality of the food. Although as Higgins notes, Thompson's influence proved ‘ephemeral’, this story casts light on prevailing attitudes towards the poor as well as on the attractions of rational and efficient administration, at the expense of humanity (p. 203).
The editors themselves contribute pieces which take us into the more comfortable world of high-end consumer industries. Toby Barnard offers a richly detailed account of the case of the Dublin physician Henry Quin, an avid experimenter who was, significantly, neither a landed gentleman nor a member of the Dublin Society. Instead, professional success afforded Quin the means to indulge his appetite for collecting and to refine his taste. An early interest in the production of ‘paste’ copies of ancient gems led him to a number of other advanced manufacturing processes. Alison FitzGerald discusses the ways in which the great Josiah Wedgwood invaded the Dublin market, chiefly through the production of cameos, of which Quin was among the keenest purchasers. In a related piece, Anna Moran provides an account of the glass manufactory developed by Charles Mulvany in Dublin from the 1780s until its decline in the aftermath of the Union, and Mulvany's eventual bankruptcy. In these essays there is some discussion of experimental techniques, but as far as the themes of the book are concerned, the emphasis is on Ireland's expanding consumer society. The same applies to David Fleming's chapter on the trade in exotic plants and seeds. The enthusiasm for horticultural innovation, which gripped the prospering commercial and professional classes as well as country squires in their demesnes, was catered for by imports, especially transatlantic imports, and by the development of specialist nurseries at home. Even though, as with Wedgwood's Dublin ventures and Mulvany's glassworks, commercial success often proved elusive, the proliferation of these enterprises testifies to the fashion for greater sophistication in all forms of conspicuous consumption.
Two essays carry the reader much further afield. In an essay on colonial ‘landscapes’, Finola O’Kane explores the link between Dublin's sugar refining industry and the Caribbean plantations which provided their raw material, before elaborating on the connexions between Irish merchants and the French Atlantic trade. While the detail is interesting, it is not immediately clear how far this chapter advances the agenda set out in the introduction to the book. Jonathan Jeffrey Wright is on firmer ground in examining the West Indian career of one particular Irishman, the Belfast Presbyterian radical Robert Tennent, which is well documented in the extensive collection of Tennent family papers preserved in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Although Tennent was eventually to be a strong supporter of the abolitionist cause, as a young man newly arrived in the Caribbean he quickly turned his hand to ‘the planting line’ (p. 239). Wright closely follows Tennent's fortunes, and more often misfortunes (a running thread through the entire collection), his acceptance of the institution of slavery, and his relationship with one particular enslaved woman, with whom he fathered a child.
Finally, two essays take us back to the print culture of the eighteenth century. James Kelly presents a study of the Dublin print seller William Allen and the varying success that Allen enjoyed with different genres of print. A pioneer in selling satirical prints, Allen was eventually forced to accept that the Dublin market was indifferent to the kind of vicious political lampoons popular in the England of Gillray and Rowlandson. Not even the excitements of the closing decades of the eighteenth century could make specifically Irish political satires sell, so he turned back to more genteel subject matter. Unlike some of the other entrepreneurs in the book Allen was able to sustain a successful business model, in his case catering for collectors at ‘the more respectable end’ of the print trade (p. 180).
While prints – satirical or otherwise – may be seen as belonging to the realm of ‘material culture’, the same cannot really be said of the subject matter of Joel Herman's essay: the development of the Irish newspaper during the 1760s, which Herman rightly sees as a critical decade in the formation of a politically engaged press. Herman focuses on the appearance of sustained political commentary in the Freeman's Journal, which he attributes to the changing political context, more especially events in Britain and in the American colonies. In this respect, at least, the essay can be said to reflect one of the aims of the volume, in so far as it draws attention to the ways in which Irish society below the level of the landowning elite was becoming increasingly open to, and influenced by, events outside Ireland.
All the individual essays are well researched and offer new insights into the social and economic development of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland. But while each enlarges our understanding of the period, there remains something of a miscellaneous quality about the collection as a whole. The introduction makes a valiant attempt to draw everything together, under various related themes – ‘novelty’, ‘experiment’, ‘speculation’ and ‘curiosity’ – but this clearly works better for some contributions than for others. Where the book does succeed in becoming more than the sum of its parts is in excavating the lives a number of hitherto obscure individuals, whose histories dispel whatever may be left of a stereotype of Georgian Ireland as inward-looking and culturally underdeveloped.