Irish Fiction - The 19th Century

The 19th Century

The 19th century was a golden age of fiction in English, and Irish writers were to participate fully. Although born in Oxford, Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) spent most of her life in Ireland and wrote what is generally considered the first novel on an Irish theme, Castle Rackrent (1800). This story of landlords and tenants on an Irish estate, and of the abuse of the latter by the former, was criticised at the time for its characters' apparent lack of religious feeling or scruples, but can be seen as a reasonably accurate representation of life on a great estate at the turn of the century, drawing, as it does, on the author's own experience of managing her father's estate. She wrote a number of other novels, the most interesting being Ormond (1817).

Lady Morgan (Sidney Owenson) (1776(?)-1859) was also a prolific writer but her most successful work was her third novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), which can be read as a direct response to Castle Rackrent. Morgan's novel, however, is much more explicitly political, displaying clear Jacobin feminist politics. She emphasizes the legacy of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland and uses the novel to promote an Irish view of Irish history and prehistory.

Some of the early novels of Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824) covered ground similar to that covered by Edgeworth. However, he is now best remembered for Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). This is a Faustian tale of a man, Melmoth, who sells his soul to the devil and then wanders round Europe trying to find someone to take on his satanic bargain for him. It is told through the accounts of those he approaches to help him. The book brought a whole new dimension to the Gothic novel and is considered a cult masterpiece.

William Carleton (1794–1869) came from a large family and his father was a poor tenant farmer. Carleton was educated at hedge schools and spent much of his youth surrounded by extreme poverty. His Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, which made him an extremely popular author, showed life on the other side of the social divide from the many 19th-century Irish novels written by members of the landlord class.

John Banim (1798–1842) was born in Kilkenny into a prosperous farming family. He studied art in Dublin and then returned home to work as an art teacher. In 1820, after recovering from tuberculosis, he went back to Dublin to pursue a career in writing. He wrote plays and poetry, but is best remembered for his novels, many of them written in collaboration with his brother Michael Banim (1796–1874). Their major works in fiction were the twenty-four volumes of The Tales of the O'Hara Family. One of these, The Nowlans is among the finest of all 19th-century novels. The first Catholic Irish novelists of any note, the Banims wrote the first realistic fictional portraits of the Irish peasants and their novels spare no details of the sufferings endured by their people at the time of the Penal Laws.

Gerald Griffin (1803–1840) was born in Limerick. Like his friend John Banim, Griffin wrote poetry and plays, and like so many other Irish dramatists he moved to London in search of success. However, his reputation rests on The Collegians (1989), a novel he wrote after returning to Ireland. The Collegians is based on a real life court case in which Daniel O'Connell acted for the defence.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was born in Dublin into a literary family of Huguenot origins and lived there for most of his life. He is famous for his Gothic fiction (some of which is based on Irish folklore) and mystery novels. He was the premier ghost story writer of the nineteenth century and had a seminal influence on the development of this genre in the Victorian era. Both his grandmother, Alice Sheridan Le Fanu and great uncle, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, were playwrights. His niece, Rhoda Broughton, would become a very successful novelist.

Charles Kickham (1828–1882) was born in County Tipperary. At the age of thirteen, he was involved in a gunpowder accident, permanently injuring his sight and hearing. A Young Irelander, he was arrested in 1865 for writing 'treasonous' articles and sentenced to fourteen years penal servitude. He started writing novels in prison and his Knocknagow; or The Homes of Tipperary (1879) was the most popular Irish novel of the 19th century.

Edith Anna Somerville (1858–1949) and her cousin, Violet Florence Martin (1862–1915) published their first novel, An Irish Cousin in 1889 under the names of Somerville and Ross. They went on to enjoy enormous popularity with books like The Irish R.M. and The Real Charlotte, a novel of the first rank. Following in the footsteps of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, they popularised big house novels as an Irish genre.

Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Dublin and studied Mathematics at Trinity College. Although he wrote some 18 books, he is best known as the author of Dracula. His work represents a continuation of the Irish Gothic tradition of Maturin and Le Fanu.

By the 1880s, the main outline of the Irish novel had been drawn up. Typically, the best novels of the 19th century addressed the 'national question' via the relationship between landlord and tenant and was written either by a member of the landlord class who used fiction to call for an improved relationship based on mutual respect, or by a member of the Catholic middle class who was sympathetic to the tenants. This situation may be seen as not atypical of colonial literature, the colonists attempt to absorb the colonised into a unified world picture while the colonised attempt to promote a sense of separate identity. This 19th-century novel was soon to face two challenges, one from the emergence of modernism, the other from the collapse of colonial rule and the emergence of the Irish Free State.