The Nineteenth-century Novel
The unease generated among the aristocracy by the growth of Irish Nationalism and the Fenian Rebellion of 1848 found expression in novels showing the peasantry plotting away in their cottages against their masters up in the mansion - the "Big House" sub-genre of Anglo-Irish writing, represented by such writers as Lady Morgan (1775-1859). Typically, such a book would involve an evil-smelling Irish hoodlum inheriting the mansion and either turning it into a barn or burning it to the ground. Castle Rackrent (1800) by Maria Edgeworth (1776-1849) is one of the few good Big House novels, its craftily resourceful narrator telling the story of the great family's demise with a subtle glee. The Irish fought back, appropriating the well-made novel for themselves. Gerald Griffin (1803-40), John Banim (1798-1842), William Carleton (1794-1869) and Charles Lever (1806-72) emerged as the voice of the new middle class, protesting at the stereotyping of the Irish as savages, and demanding political and economic rights. This period also saw the entry of the Anglo-Irish into the crisis that would haunt them until their complete demise in the 1920s, as they struggled between the specifically "Anglo" and "Irish" sides of their identity. This kind of angst can be found running throughout the work of Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), Standish O'Grady (1846-1928), and Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), the founder of the Gaelic League (1893) who went on to become Ireland's first president in 1937. The writing of E.O. Sommenville (1858-1949) and ( Violet) Martin Ross (1861-1915) - cousins and increasingly improverished daughters of the Ascendancy - is typical of nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish confusion. Their work, such as Some Recollections and Further Experiences of an Irish RM (1899) and the powerful novel The Real Charlotte (1894), is imbued with a geniune love of Ireland and the ways of the Irish peasantry, yet occassionally there's a chilling sense that the status quo is in danger. The peasants, previously marginalized in the tradition, now seem to keep intruding in unwelcome ways, sneaking into the upstairs rooms, interrupting their betters or conspring behind the bushes in the estate's well-kept gardens. Meanwhile Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was busily writing his way into the history books with a novel that would enter modern popular culture in all its forms, from the movies to the comic book. Dracula is a wonderful novel, more of a psychological Gothic thriller than a schlock horror bloodbath, and its concerns - the nature of the soul versus the bestial allure of the body, for instance - are curiously Irish. Bur even this had its political implications. With its pseudo-folkloric style and its pitting of the noble peasants against the aristocratic monster debauching away in his castle, its symbolism is inescapably revoluntionary and romantic.
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