Young Ireland and the Writing of Irish History E-Book

James Quinn

• Herausgeber: UCD Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 543

Beschreibung

Examines why Young Ireland attached such importance to the writing of history, how it went about writing that history, and what impact their historical writings had.

Leseprobe

YOUNG IRELAND AND THE WRITING OF IRISH HISTORY

YOUNG IRELAND ANDTHE WRITING OF IRISHHISTORY

JAMES QUINN

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN PRESS

PREAS CHOLÁISTE OLLSCOILE BHAILE ÁTHA CLIATH

Contents

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

ONE

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS

THE NATION, EDUCATION AND TEMPERANCE

TWO

READING HISTORY

CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS, ANTIQUARIANS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCES

THREE

WRITING HISTORY

FOUR

THE USES OF HISTORY

FIVE

MAKING HISTORY

SIX

THE HISTORY OF THEIR OWN TIMES

MEMOIRS, JOURNALS AND POLEMICS

SEVEN

CONTINUITIES

FROM THE CELTIC UNION TO GRIFFITH’S ‘BALLAD HISTORY’

EIGHT

THE LEGACY OF YOUNG IRELAND’S WRITINGS

Notes

Biographical Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I have incurred many debts of both a professional and personal nature in writing this book. I would like to thank the staff of all the libraries and archives that I used, with a special mention to the staff of the library of the Royal Irish Academy, especially Siobhán Fitzpatrick, Bernadette Cunningham, Petra Schnabel, Sophie Evans and Amy Hughes, who were invariably pleasant and helpful and greatly assisted my work.

I wish to thank my colleagues on the Dictionary of Irish Biography project, James McGuire, Linde Lunney, Larry White, Patrick Maume, Turlough O’Riordan and Terry Clavin for creating such a pleasant and stimulating work environment. I owe a particular debt to James, who with characteristic gen erosity took on much more than his fair share of the work of the DIB to allow me to pursue my research interests. I would also like to thank Vincent Morley for bringing my attention to some research materials that I might have otherwise missed, and Roisín Higgins, for very kindly allowing me to see a draft of her work on reading rooms before it was published.

I wish to thank Noelle Moran of UCD Press for her efficiency and unflagging enthusiasm, and for making the publishing of a book just about as painless as it can be. Noelle also suggested some useful changes to the text, which have undoubtedly improved it.

Early drafts of the book were read by friends and colleagues such as Bernadette Cunningham, Patrick Maume, James McGuire, Kate Bateman and Manuela Ceretta. All these fine scholars made valuable suggestions and corrections for which I am very grateful. Any remaining errors are of course all my own work.

I am very grateful for the support of my family, especially my father Joseph, who in his own understated way was always a supportive presence, and helped to move things along with his interest and encouragement. Special thanks are due to my brother Paul for the use of his cottage in the quiet surroundings of Achill Island, where I did the initial reading for the book. My dear friend Eimear Nic Lochlainn also provided a pleasant refuge in her Glasgow home, and much con genial company in the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere.

Finally, I owe a special debt to Louise for her kindness, patience, good humour and understanding.

JAMES QUINNMarch, 2015

INTRODUCTION

In 1842 a small group of Irish nationalists, who would later be known as Young Ireland, founded the Nation newspaper. They saw their mission as awakening the Irish people to the fact that they were an historic nation that should determine its own future. Ireland, they insisted, had a proud history, which told of sufferings bravely endured, resistance that had never faltered, and a national spirit that had never been crushed. However, since Ireland’s history had mostly been written by its conquerors, the true record of her past had been misrepresented, leading the Nation to proclaim that ‘The history of Ireland has not yet been written’.1 Rectifying this was one of their most pressing tasks, to which they devoted much of their labour. This work seeks to examine why Young Ireland attached such importance to the writing of history, how it went about writing that history, and what impact their historical writings had.

The name ‘Young Ireland’ itself was coined by Daniel Owen Madden in his Ireland and its Rulers since 1829 (1843). Madden saw strong similarities between the young men who produced the Nation and the elitist and nationalistic group of English Tories known as ‘Young England’, which included Benjamin Disraeli and Lord John Manners. For many years, most of the Nation writers refused to recognise the name, denying that they formed a separate party within the Repeal Association, but over time they came to accept it.2 Unhappy with Daniel O’Connell’s cautious leadership of the association, they believed the name Young Ireland captured the freshness and vitality they had brought to the nationalist movement, and it is the name by which they have gone down in Irish history. It was though a loose label and has been applied to many who would have undoubtedly rejected it. In his comprehensive biographical collection, The Young Irelanders (1944), T. F. O’Sullivan included all those who wrote for the Nation, regardless of their political views, with the result that the work included many marginal contributors to the paper and several who did not share the nationalist aspirations of Davis and Duffy. In this work I have generally used the term for the small group of like-minded nationalists who were regular contributors to the original Nation between the founding of the paper in 1842 and its suppression in 1848. In terms of the writing of Irish history, the most significant of these were Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Charles Patrick Meehan and Thomas MacNevin.

Young Ireland embarked on its educational campaign at a propitious time, attempting to capitalise on the success of the temperance movement of the late 1830s. Believing that a sober people was eager for improvement and instruction, they sought to provide them with accessible reading matter that would nurture and fortify their national feelings. Rising levels of popular literacy provided further opportunities. By the early 1840s the first cohorts of those educated under the new national system of primary education (founded in 1831) were coming to adulthood. Nationalists welcomed this advance in literacy, but were concerned that the government were using the schools as a means of promoting Anglicisation. The authorities too were aware that history was capable of stirring up powerful emotions and took pains to ensure that the national school curriculum contained nothing that might encourage a sense of historical grievance. The writers of the Nation therefore saw it as their patriotic duty to give the Irish people the ‘national’ education that the British government had deliberately prevented them from receiving. To this end, they encouraged the establishment of reading rooms stocked with nation alist literature to supplement or supplant official educational initiatives.

The Young Irelanders also sought to take advantage of the growing interest and advances in Irish antiquarian studies that had occurred in the previous decade. New institutions such as the Irish Archaeological Society and the Celtic Society were founded, old ones such as the Royal Dublin Society and the Royal Irish Academy reinvigorated, and opportunities for research opened up by the work of the Irish Ordnance Survey. In Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, there was a growing interest in the distant past and the Middle Ages, and a fascination with Ireland’s picturesque archaeological remains. To satisfy and encourage this interest, the Nation set about promoting and popularising the pioneering work of a new generation of antiquarian scholars such as George Petrie, John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry.

Most contemporary European nationalists had a deep interest in history, believing that a knowledge of the past gave a people the title deeds to nationality, their existence as a distinct nation validated by the trials and triumphs of previous generations. This was particularly so for subject nationalities in multi-ethnic empires, who maintained that their imperial masters had deliberately obliterated their history to deny their claims to independent statehood. History was of particular importance for those who believed themselves wronged, and was central to stoking the mixture of pride and grievance that propelled nationalist movements across Europe. For Irish nationalists, it took on an additional importance. Religion and language, two of the most powerful components of national identity elsewhere, divided in Ireland rather than united, leading the Young Irelanders to stress their country’s culture and history as powerful national unifiers.

Although they had few direct links with European nationalists, Davis and his colleagues generally identified with the Germanic romantic nationalism rooted in folk tradition that was then prevalent in much of Europe, and was explicitly acknowledged in the Nation’s motto: ‘To foster a public opinion in Ireland and make it racy of the soil.’ They were the first Irish nationalists to base their claim for self-determination primarily on cultural and historic arguments. A half century earlier the United Irishmen had formulated a nationalism that owed much to the progressive ideals of the Enlightenment and stressed the advance of humanity towards a universal future of liberty and fraternity. They usually dismissed the past as a collection of ancient and irrelevant quarrels, motivated by outmoded sectarian hatreds, and saw it as a troublesome burden to be shed rather than a heritage to be celebrated.3

Nineteenth-century nationalism was essentially historicist in character, arguing that the world was made up of distinct national communities with their own unique character and history.4 Young Ireland saw their work as challenging the taunts and misrepresentations of hostile historians who had made the Irish look on their past with shame rather than pride. Such historians regularly contrasted the purpose and grandeur of English history, in which a coherent series of events led inexorably to domestic liberty and imperial glory, with the chaotic squabbling of Irish history: ‘Our bravery they have called turbulence, our resistance rebellion, our virtue barbarity. . . . This must be undone before we can be a nation’.5 The Young Irelanders therefore sought not just to reclaim the past, but to redeem it: to impose a pattern on the various incidents, disruptions and contradictions of Irish history, showing that it had as much purpose and coherence as that of any other country, and that its disparate struggles were all part of a sustained and noble campaign to resist foreign conquest and recover Ireland’s independence. Their writings were vivid and partisan: scholarly detachment in relation to the Irish past was viewed at best as a form of academic self-indulgence and at worst as moral cowardice.6 Young Ireland wrote history to nourish collective memory and reinforce allegiances and obligations to the nation, so that the Irish would see themselves as a distinct people rooted in the struggles and sacrifices of the past and insist that they should govern their own destiny.

The Nation lamented that before its publication ‘all the world could not produce a people so ignorant of their own history’ as Ireland, and dedicated itself to creating a nation of active and informed citizens, well-versed in the knowledge of their country’s past.7 It also argued that the study of history could enlighten opponents. Orangemen were encouraged to emulate the Repeal Association and add reading rooms to their lodges, where they would learn that they had been ill-served by England’s policy of divide and rule.8 Young Ireland appealed to the Presbyterians of Ulster to remember the historic role they had played in asserting Ireland’s rights with the Volunteers and the United Irishmen. Duffy included Orange songs in his Ballad Poetry of Ireland on the basis that

they echo faithfully the sentiments of a strong, vehement and indomitable body of Irishmen, who may come to battle for their country better than they ever battled for their prejudices or their bigotries. At all events, to know what they love and believe is a precious knowledge.9

The Young Irelanders valued passion and imagination in their writings over objectivity and scholarly precision, and in most cases their knowledge of history was rather basic.10 But they knew enough to be effective propagandists, and in a clear and coherent narrative of Ireland’s past, they emphasised dramatic and picturesque events, lauding heroes and condemning villains, and aimed to enthral and inspire readers rather than just inform them.11 Regarding history primarily as a literary and rhetorical enterprise that should engage the reader’s emotions, Davis argued that

exact dates, subtle plots, minute connexions and motives . . . are not the highest ends of history. To hallow or accurse the scenes of glory and honour, or of shame and sorrow; to give the imagination the arms, and homes, and senates, and battles of other days; to rouse and soften, and strengthen and enlarge us with the passions of great periods; to lead us into love of self-denial, of justice, of beauty, of valour, of generous life and proud death; and to set up in our souls the memory of great men, who shall then be as models and judges of our actions.12

He and his colleagues drew much of their inspiration from contemporary romantic writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Jules Michelet and Augustin Thierry. They attempted to emulate their vividness and engagement and had only contempt for those such as David Hume and Henry Hallam whom they dubbed ‘philosophic historians’, claiming that they peddled a complacent and spurious objectivity that cloaked sympathy for the oppressor and condescension towards the oppressed.13

Focusing on the dramatic and the inspirational, Young Ireland paid particular attention to military history – social history was generally ignored and economic history rarely went beyond denunciations of English attempts to stifle the development of the Irish economy. Much of the history being written elsewhere in Europe also emphasised great battles and heroes, but the Young Irelanders attached a special importance to proving that the Irish were as brave as (if not braver) than other nations. The Victorian age placed a particular value on physical courage and martial prowess as an indicator of moral worth. Britain, it was argued, ruled a vast empire because its virile character and military might had enabled it to overcome inferior races. Influenced by Carlylean notions of hero worship, the Young Irelanders were intent on proving that the Irish were no less manly than their conquerors, and often focused on the deeds of charismatic warriors such as Hugh O’Neill, Owen Roe O’Neill and Patrick Sarsfield, creating semi-mythic figures who inspired later generations. When domestic history was not suitably heroic, notably during the years of Protestant oppression and Catholic quiescence that characterised the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, the Young Irelanders shifted the focus abroad, to the valiant deeds of the Wild Geese. French victories in which Irish Brigades were prominent such as Fontenoy and Cremona were lauded as victories for Ireland achieved by soldiers who remained loyal to their homeland and fought Ireland’s battles on foreign soil.

Despairing at the cost, quality and anti-national bias of history books available to the public, in 1845 Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy launched the ‘Library of Ireland’, a series of works by different authors intended to provide Ireland with a national literature in history, poetry and fiction. Written in a lively and accessible style and focusing on some of the most dramatic events in Irish history, the series was an immediate success and gained a wide readership. It was the first time since the seventeenth century that a group of like-minded Irishmen had tried to write their country’s history as a collective endeavour. Although covering a wide range of different subjects, their works were linked together by unifying themes, especially by the portrayal of Irish history as a continuous and heroic struggle against foreign domination. One of the most effective ways of doing this was with historical verse, which the Nation discovered was ‘the most powerful of all possible auxiliaries in the work of spreading a knowledge of history among a people’.14 The Library of Ireland published several collections of stirring historical ballads, most notably the best-selling Spirit of the Nation, which became Young Ireland’s most enduring contribution to nationalist literature.

In using newspapers and cheap mass-produced books to propagate Irish history, Young Ireland can be seen as a classic example of Benedict Anderson’s theory of nineteenth-century nationalism’s use of print capitalism to create a mass solidarity that formed the basis of a new nationally based ‘imagined community’.15 This was a community that stretched back into the past and forward into the future, in which a knowledge of the glories and sacrifices of previous generations was crucial in creating the bonds of obligation and solidarity that bound it together. It required the creation of a coherent narrative of struggle and resistance that pointed the way to the future and the community’s eventual realisation as an independent nation. Past failures to throw off the yoke of conquest were seen not as a matter of shame but as evidence of an undying spirit that could never be quenched. In one of his best-known essays Davis had proclaimed:

This country of ours is no sandbank, thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honoured in the archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valour and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the river of the Irish mind. Long wars, vast organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading virtues, and self-mighty men, were here. If we live influenced by wind and sun and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we are a thriftless and hopeless people.16

While the Young Irelanders liked to portray themselves as pioneers in the writing of Irish history, their writings were not particularly original.17 Lacking the time or inclination to engage in extensive primary research, they drew heavily on existing secondary works, especially those of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century historians such as MacGeoghegan, Curry, Leland, Plowden and Taaffe, filtering these accounts through the lens of their own romantic nationalism. The popularity of their writings owed much to the fact that their main themes of oppression and resistance were already deeply ingrained in popular memory. Ordinary people were not as ignorant of their history as the Nation claimed, but had often picked up a rudimentary knowledge in the home or hedge school. History books were generally scarce and expensive before the 1840s, but the deficiency was made up by a rich oral and manuscript-based vernacular culture.18 The works of Young Ireland reinforced rather than replaced this popular interpretation, confirming and supplementing folk memories of dispossession, persecution and heroic struggle, and contributed to the conservative nature of nationalist historiography for decades to come. When in the 1890s a group of nationalists attempted to renew the work of Young Ireland by publishing a ‘New Irish Library’, their works largely repeated the formulae laid down by Young Ireland half a century earlier.19

Young Ireland’s emphasis on culture and history differed from Daniel O’Connell’s more populist and pragmatic politics, and added to tensions in the Repeal Association. Although they were cautious about openly espousing republican ideology, Young Ireland’s programme to create virtuous and informed citizens who were proud of the heroism and sacrifices of their forebears owed much to the ideals of classical civic republicanism. Their belief that history was made primarily by warrior heroes and that, in the right circumstances, national independence was worth some bloodshed, put them on a collision course with O’Connell, who in July 1846 tried to bring matters to a head by forcing all members of the Repeal Association to condemn violence as a means of achieving political change. For four years the Young Irelanders had celebrated past efforts to win Ireland’s freedom by the sword and, believing they could not repudiate the tradition of armed resistance without sacrificing their integrity, they seceded from the Association.

The rupture in the Repeal Association came about at a time when most Irish people had more serious concerns. In 1846 the potato crop failed for the second consecutive year and deaths from famine and disease began to mount. The Nation continued its propagandist and educational initiatives, but by 1847 more urgent concerns such as promoting famine relief and tenant right took precedence. The writing of history was further relegated in the revolutionary year of 1848 when the prospect of achieving Irish independence through armed action seemed possible. However, while the times were not conducive to the writing of history, an awareness of history strongly influenced Young Ireland’s actions during these months. As the government cracked down on seditious protests and began arresting Young Irelanders, the movement’s leaders believed that they had to strike to preserve their honour and keep faith with the tradition of gallant resistance they had championed in the Nation. From his prison cell Duffy, who only months before had been committing the organisation to a strictly constitutional policy, wrote that

We fight, because the honour, the interest, the necessity, the very existence of this ancient nation depends upon our valour and devotion at this hour. If we cower, if we flinch, if we falter, the hopes are gone for which our fathers’ fathers gave their life’s blood. Gone in the stench of dishonour and infamy that will cling to it for ever.20

A sense of historical duty proved, however, to be an insufficient basis for an insurrection. The Young Irelanders had no military experience and few arms, were opposed by the Catholic church and reliant on a population demoralised by three years of hunger and disease. Their attempt at rebellion was ineffectual and collapsed in days. But far from damaging their reputations, the events of 1848 helped to secure them, and they were praised by later nationalists for having asserted in arms Ireland’s right to independence. Their own writings contributed to this, with accounts by Michael Doheny, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel portraying the Young Irelanders as selfless and courageous idealists who kept the spirit of Irish nationality alive. Duffy’s histories were widely read and often treated as the definitive accounts of an impartial eye-witness, his polemical intentions well cloaked by his measured judgements and moderate tone. His interpretation was supplemented by Mitchel’s more openly polemical Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). Mitchel claimed that far from being a natural disaster, the Famine was an act of genocide by the British government which had taken advantage of the social disruption caused by the potato blight to conduct a deliberate campaign of extermination. It differed from earlier attempts at extermination in its methods and rhetoric, but its results were even more destructive than the brutal campaigns of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.21

Young Ireland’s efforts to write history that served immediate political ends resulted in the creation of an interpretation that was strongly present-centred, doctrinaire and determinist, in which complexities, contradictions and discontinuities were ironed out into a grand narrative of heroic resistance. While history written with such an overtly polemical purpose inevitably invites challenge by later scholars, there is no denying its persuasive power and its importance in creating national solidarity. After 1848 growing prosperity and literacy ensured that print culture would play an ever greater role in creating an awareness of Ireland as an historic and distinct nation. Young Ireland followers founded newspapers that attempted to carry on the work of the Nation, and in exile, members of the original group – such as John Mitchel and Thomas D’Arcy McGee – continued to write lengthy national narratives which were among the most widely read Irish histories of the nineteenth century.22 Nationalist journalists such as A. M. and T. D. Sullivan, and movements such as Sinn Féin, recognised the galvanising effect of historical writings, and their publications often repeated or distilled the historical writings of Young Ireland.

There were two distinct phases in the Young Ireland history-writing project: the publications of the Nation and the Library of Ireland in the 1840s, and the accounts of their own times and narrative histories of Ireland that were published after the collapse of the movement in 1848. In the latter phase history and contemporary comment were often combined: Duffy prefaced his work on the Young Ireland movement with a concise history of Ireland from the earliest times that emphasised the continuity of Ireland’s struggle, while Mitchel concluded his History of Ireland since the Treaty of Limerick (1868) with the account of the 1840s he had first published as the Last Conquest. The Young Irelanders were well aware that writing about the past helped to shape events as well as record them, and managed to establish themselves as both chroniclers of and participants in Ireland’s history.

The term Young Ireland enjoyed a new currency in the 1880s as young idealists turned away from the political and agrarian goals pursued by constitutional politicians and towards the cultural and historic roots of Irish nationalism. Activists such as William Rooney proclaimed Davis’s writings as their gospel and formed Young Ireland societies to promote their historical legacy. Nationalists disillusioned with contemporary politics such as John O’Leary, Arthur Griffith and W. B. Yeats were drawn into these societies in which the Young Irelanders were lauded as teachers and prophets. Young Ireland history books and poetry anthologies formed the core of the collections in nationalist reading rooms and were widely read by the generation that carried out the revolution of 1916–21. As the country became more radicalised in the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a growing demand for their writings, and new editions of their work provided much of the historical inspiration for the Irish revolution. The pervasive influence of Young Ireland teachings meant that for nationalists at least no major re-writing of Irish history was required in the decades after independence. Their historical ballads remained popular, and in schoolbooks and works of popular history their historical interpretation hardened into an orthodoxy that helped consolidate the standing of the new state.

No major work has been published solely on Young Ireland’s writing of Irish history, but the topic has had some treatment. Séamas Ó Néill has examined Thomas Davis’s history-writing efforts in a short article in Irish published in an official publication to commemorate the centenary of Davis’s death in 1945, and the same work also featured an article on the Library of Ireland by P. S. O’Hegarty.23 Richard Davis’s general history of the Young Ireland movement mentions their efforts at history writing only briefly, but recent biographies of Thomas Davis and Thomas D’Arcy McGee have included detailed treatment of their historical writings.24 Other writers such as David Dwan, Malcolm Brown, Joep Leerssen, Sean Ryder, R. F. Foster and Patrick Maume have also made valuable contributions to the topic by examining the long term influence of their historical writings and their contribution to nationalist ideology.25

In Chapter one of this work I examine the part played by history in the beginnings of the Young Ireland movement and the foundation of the Nation, and the impetus given to this by developments in education and the temperance movement. Chapter two looks at their reading of history, examining the historical and antiquarian sources from which they gleaned their knowledge, and the influence of contemporary romantic historians such as Thomas Carlyle and Augustin Thierry. The early writings of Young Ireland, especially the Nation and the Library of Ireland, form the subject of Chapter three, with particular attention paid to their use of verse as a vehicle for the writing of history. Chapter four examines what the Young Irelanders hoped to achieve by writing history and the uses to which they put their writings, in particular their efforts to use history to create a unified national consciousness. The way in which their view of history caused them to act, and contributed to their differences with Daniel O’Connell and their decision to take up arms in 1848 forms the main theme of Chapter five. Chapter six deals with the efforts of leading Young Irelanders after 1848 to write the history of their own times and the extent to which their view of the struggles with O’Connell, the Famine and the insurrection of 1848 influenced subsequent nationalist historiography. In Chapter seven I examine the continuities in the Young Ireland history-writing project, and how their work was carried on by like-minded nationalists who came after them. Chapter eight looks at the legacy of their historical writings: their followers and critics, how they influenced subsequent Irish nationalists, especially the generation that carried out the revolution of 1916– 21, and how their work had an important bearing on the teaching of history in Irish schools for much of the twentieth century. Many of those who wrote or influenced the writing of nineteenth-century Irish history are now rather obscure figures, so in order to avoid weighing down the text with biographical detail I have included a separate section of biographical notes at the end.

ONE

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS

THE ‘NATION’, EDUCATION AND TEMPERANCE

On 26 June 1840 Thomas Davis, a 25-year-old Protestant graduate, delivered the presidential address to the College Historical Society in Trinity College Dublin. In a speech marked by his characteristic earnestness and idealism, he strongly criticised the college’s teaching, deploring its concentration on classical studies and its neglect of modern subjects. His address, entitled ‘The utility of debating societies in remedying the defects of a university education’, argued that Trinity’s students were so crammed with material about the ancient world that they were ignorant of the most basic modern history, especially that of their own country. To remedy this, he suggested the founding of an ‘Irish Lyceum’ to cultivate the study of the Irish language, literature and history, and stressed the importance of learning truly ‘national history’, which he defined as that written by Irishmen for Irishmen. Most histories of Ireland, he maintained, had been written by hostile strangers who had misrepresented Ireland’s past, and he exhorted the young Irishmen present to challenge their falsifications whenever possible.1

Davis argued that ignorance of Irish history was deeply damaging to Ireland’s sense of itself, since all great nations should be able to recall the deeds and honour of their heroes and martyrs. ‘The national mind,’ he claimed, ‘should be filled to overflowing with such thoughts. They are more enriching than mines of gold . . . The history of a nation is the birth-right of her sons.’ He insisted that knowledge of Ireland’s history was particularly important because her trials and misfortunes had come about not by chance, but to prepare her for a historic destiny in which she would rise ‘with a purity and brightness beyond other nations’.2 Arguing that there was much in Irish history to inspire pride – her military prowess in ancient times, the cultural achievements of her clergy and scholars and ‘her gallant and romantic struggles, against Dane, and Saxon and Norman’ – he reminded his audience that ‘gentlemen, you have a country . . . the country of our birth, our education, of our recollections, ancestral, personal, national; the country of our loves, our friendships, our hopes; our country’, and encouraged them to prove themselves worthy of it.3

Davis was supported in his views by other members of the College Historical Society such as Thomas Wallis, Torrens McCullagh, John Blake Dillon and Thomas MacNevin.4 The latter two were representative of a generation of prosperous middle-class Catholics who had reached adulthood in the 1830s and had been educated at Trinity (about 10 per cent of its students were Catholic) or in English or continental colleges. According to a contemporary, these young men ‘laughed at the pretensions of Protestant ascendancy’, and believed themselves equal in every way to their Protestant counterparts.5 Allied to liberal Protestants in Trinity, they established a small but influential nationalist grouping that challenged the dominant unionist ethos of the college. MacNevin, the son of a solicitor from Galway, had preceded Davis as auditor and president of the Historical Society and had delivered an address that encouraged his audience to study history that went beyond a superficial knowledge of dynasties and battles to examine the customs and soul of their own land to prepare them for coming days when ‘all the genius, all the patriotism, all the feeling of Ireland, will be summoned to her aid in struggles great’.6 Dillon, from a prosperous farming and shopkeeping family in Co. Roscommon, was described as a young man who ‘united a lofty enthusiasm with great lucidity of intellect and an unvarying candour’.7 The following year, he was elected president of the Historical Society and his presidential address on ‘Patriotism’ echoed that of Davis, emphasising the duty owed to one’s country after ‘long centuries of trial and affliction’ and invoking the glories of the past:

It is sweet to look back upon those times when our country was great and free. It is sweet to muse amidst moss-grown ruins, the memorials of her pride. It is sweet to read of the valour of her sons in their unequal struggles with the invader; to contrast their high-souled gallantry with the little arts and the ruffian fraud by which their ruin was effected. It is sweet to gaze upon the flag that waved above their heads in battle; it is sweet to hope that it shall wave again.8

Looking back on the origins of Young Ireland, Davis identified the College Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Study, a sister society founded by Dublin law students, as the cradle of the movement.9 His address, which was published by the College Historical Society later that year, was effectively Young Ireland’s founding manifesto. It brimmed with the kind of hortatory rhetoric that would become synonymous with the movement and introduced the main themes that would appear again and again in their historical writings: Irishmen should study their country’s history, appreciate her sufferings, learn from her mistakes, take pride in her achievements, honour her heroes, and use them as an inspiration to work for Ireland.10

The addresses to the College Historical Society of 1840–1 were delivered at a time when Ireland’s national distinctiveness had become a live political issue. In the early 1830s Daniel O’Connell had agitated for the repeal of the union with Britain and the re-establishment of an independent Irish parliament, but from 1835 had rowed back on demands for self-government in exchange for a more sympathetic administration in Dublin Castle and reforms in municipal government, poor relief and the tithe system. However, these reforms delivered less than he had hoped and, believing that his Whig allies would soon lose power, in April 1840 he founded the Loyal National Repeal Association to renew the campaign for full repeal of the act of union, a step warmly welcomed by Trinity’s cadre of nationally minded students.

Wider social and economic changes also encouraged Young Ireland to take a greater interest in the past. Britain’s dynamic capitalist economy threatened to sweep aside traditional manufacturing and agricultural practices, while Benthamite-inspired utilitarian reforms in education, policing, local govern ment and poor relief led the state to play an ever greater part in Irish life. There was a general awareness of living in a time of rapid change and of an ever greater gap opening up between past and present. The Young Irelanders were fierce critics of the anti-historical thrust of ‘Benthamism’ and industrial capital ism, claiming that the memories, customs and traditions that linked them to earlier generations were being lost in the headlong rush towards mechanisation and materialism. They saw capitalism as a new and insidious form of Anglicisation that threatened what was left of Ireland’s economic and cultural independence, and were convinced that it was more important than ever that their countrymen should know of the sacrifices and achievements of their ancestors.11

The Young Irelanders immersed themselves in Irish history. On a tour of Ulster in August 1845 they visited the little church at Dungannon where the Volunteer Convention of 1782 had adopted resolutions in favour of legislative independence and the relaxation of the penal laws, and were dismayed to see that it was not marked by a memorial to acknowledge the historic events that had occurred there. They travelled on to the estate of Lord Charlemont, founder of the Volunteer movement, and walked across the fields of Benburb, where in 1646 Owen Roe O’Neill had won his greatest victory. They visited the graves of St Patrick and the United Irishman Thomas Russell in Downpatrick, and were appalled at the shameful neglect of the grave of the national saint, which had no monument, railing or cross. All of these places fed their enthusiasm for Ireland’s past, and their determination that the achievements of Ireland’s great men should not go unnoticed.12

To this end, members of the College Historical Society regularly contributed historical articles to various Dublin magazines and newspapers. Davis wrote for a new liberal Dublin magazine, the Citizen, founded in 1839 by his Trinity friend William Torrens McCullagh, and taken over and relaunched in 1842 as the Dublin Monthly Magazine by William Elliot Hudson, a lawyer and scholar of national sympathies.13 Most of Davis’s contributions were historical, such as ‘Udalism and feudalism’, a history of land tenure in Europe with special reference to Ireland, and historical articles on India and Afghanistan. He also wrote articles on Irish historical topics such as Henry Grattan and the parliament summoned by James II in Dublin in 1689, and composed some patriotic verse that prefigured his poetic contributions to the Nation.14

In April 1841 Davis and Dillon joined O’Connell’s Repeal Association, and were immediately appointed to its general committee. From February to July 1841 Davis and Dillon worked on the Morning Register, a staunchly Catholic and hitherto rather dull newspaper published in Dublin by Michael Staunton, a moderate repealer. They enlivened it with a strong national tone, but soon tensions arose between their youthful exuberance and Staunton’s caution, and they quit after a few months.15

While working for the Register, Davis and Dillon met Charles Gavan Duffy, a 25-year-old Catholic from Co. Monaghan who worked as editor of the pro-Catholic Belfast Vindicator. They were impressed by his business-like approach and practical experience, and he in turn admired their commitment and idealism.16 Like them he too was strongly interested in Ireland’s history, but as an Ulster Catholic he admitted to being motivated by a strongly personal sense of historical grievance. He recalled his school days at a Presbyterian academy in Monaghan where he was force fed tales of papist atrocities and never allowed to forget that he belonged to a defeated race. Most of the history he learned was told to him by a local Catholic curate who told him of the oppressive effects of the penal laws, while others related the sufferings of Catholics during the 1798 Rebellion. Duffy recalled that ‘my immature judgement was naturally inflamed with rage at these crimes; a rage which did not abate when I came to read history later and found the tragic story was substantially true’.17 At the age of 18 he met Charles Teeling, a veteran of the United Irishmen, who inspired him with stories of 1798 and invited him to write for the Belfast Northern Herald. From that time on Duffy claimed

my mind was largely occupied with speculations and reveries on Ireland. I read all the books I could buy or borrow on the history or condition of the country, and gradually came to understand the epic of Irish resistance to England, often defeated, often renewed, but never wholly relinquished.

He saw this resistance as an unbroken line stretching from ‘St Lorcan to O’Connell’ and he himself ‘burned to strike a blow in that hereditary conflict’.18Duffy had not enjoyed a university education but more than made up for it with shrewdness, drive and experience: after his apprenticeship on the Northern Herald he worked for Staunton’s Morning Register as a sub-editor, before founding and editing the Vindicator in May 1839. Soon after meeting him Dillon suggested to Davis that ‘a weekly paper conducted by that fellow would be an invaluable acquisition’.19

FOUNDING THE ‘NATION’

On a visit to Dublin in the spring of 1842 Duffy, Davis and Dillon discussed setting up a new publication to invigorate the campaign for repeal. The latter pair were already intent on founding a pro-repeal newspaper, and had in mind something with the originality and vitality of London papers such as the Examiner or the Spectator.20 There were intellectually lively periodicals being published in Ireland, notably the monthly Dublin University Magazine which often featured Irish literary and historical topics, but its general tone was strongly anti-repeal and anti-Catholic.21 The Dublin Review (founded in 1836) examined topics of Irish interest from a moderate Catholic and nationalist stance, but its nationalism was rather oblique and its circulation small. The three young journalists believed that most other existing papers and periodicals, whether Tory, Whig or O’Connellite, carried little intellectual weight, and were convinced of the need for a lively and intelligent newspaper which would promote Irish nationality.22

Duffy’s work on the Belfast Vindicator had supplied him with the necessary expertise and resources and he agreed to provide finance for the new publication and to move to Dublin and become its editor.23 He also promised to bring in talented writers such as the poet James Clarence Mangan, the journalist Terence MacMahon Hughes who was already contributing to the Vindicator, and the writer and historian W. J. O’Neill Daunt, formerly private secretary to Daniel O’Connell. Davis was to enlist John Cornelius O’Callaghan, whose Green Book, a collection of nationalist poetry and historical sketches, had been published in 1841 and sold well, while Dillon would recruit John O’Hagan and John Pigot, two bright young men he knew from Trinity. The three originators met again in July for further discussions. Davis suggested that the paper should be called the Nation and be launched in the autumn.24 Thus began what T. W. Moody called ‘the most famous newspaper venture in Irish history’.25

In early October 1842 the paper’s prospectus was issued. Written by Davis, it heralded the launch of the Nation as a new departure in Irish journalism, claiming that existing publications were ‘shackled by old habits, old prejudices, and old divisions’. What was needed was a new paper

to aid and organise the new movements going on amongst us; to make their growth deeper and more ‘racy of the soil’; and above all, to direct the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of Nationality . . . a Nationality which will not only raise our people from their poverty, by securing to them the blessings of a DOMESTIC LEGISLATURE but inflame and purify them with a lofty and heroic love of country . . . a Nationality which may come to be stamped on our manners, our literature, and our deeds, a Nationality which may embrace Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter – Milesian and Cromwellian – the Irishman of a hundred generations and the stranger who is within our gates.26

The first issue of the Nation appeared on 15 October 1842. It contained an eclectic mixture of news, politics, history and poetry with articles by Davis, Dillon and Duffy, and verse by Mangan and O’Callaghan, and found a ready market. Despite the relatively expensive price of 6d., within hours it sold all 4,000 copies printed (double the amount of any other weekly Irish newspaper).27 A weekly conference of its three originators decided on the paper’s content, with Davis and Duffy writing most of the articles in the first year. Their work was complementary: Duffy’s articles concentrated on the need for education, Dillon’s dealt mainly with the land question, while Davis expounded the ideal of an historic nationality embracing all creeds and origins.28 Intellectually, Davis was the dominant figure. While he had shown promise on previous publications, it was in his writings for the Nation that he truly blossomed. Although a rather shy and solemn young man, he was widely admired for his sincerity and integrity; he also had great determination, a voracious appetite for work and an ability to inspire those around him. Bringing an evangelical zeal to his propagation of Irish history, he read widely and corresponded with a host of scholars and contributors and by the early 1840s had acquired an impressive body of knowledge, building up a library of heavily annotated history books and political pamphlets and amassing extensive notes for various historical lectures and writings. He spent much of his time visiting historic sites, collecting stories, maps and documents and sketching ancient ruins and historic monuments, and channelled all this work into the Nation.29 A colleague recalled how he used Irish history and legend ‘to mould and animate nationality. Native art, valour, virtue and glory seemed to grow under his pen. All that had a tendency to elevate and ennoble he rescued from the past to infuse into the future’.30

By the autumn of 1843 the founders were being assisted by like-minded Trinity graduates such as Michael Joseph Barry, Denny Lane, Denis Florence MacCarthy, John Pigot, John O’Hagan and Thomas MacNevin. The Nation’s contributors formed a tightly knit group of friends, holding regular weekly suppers on Saturday evenings and excursions to places of historic interest on Sundays. They thrashed out their ideas and differences in friendly discussion and argument: one later fondly recalled ‘nights, winged with genial wit and cordial friendship . . . when the reckless gaiety of Irish temperament bore fullest sway’.31

The paper’s combination of lively nationalist journalism and stirring patriotic verse proved popular with a public newly energised by O’Connell’s repeal campaign and its circulation grew rapidly. According to the quarterly returns from the Custom House which showed the quantity of each newspaper printed, the stamps issued for the Nation exceeded 10,000 for each issue: 300 copies went to newsrooms and Teetotal Societies and were read by dozens; 1,100 copies went to repeal wardens (the association’s local officers) and were read aloud at weekly meetings, reaching up to 100 persons each; 9,000 copies were sold by agents or went directly to subscribers, and many of these were handed around – each copy being read by an estimated 12 to 20 readers. Profits were considerable – around £2,000 a year – and were ploughed back into the paper and its distribution networks. The Nation’s staff were well paid, earning salaries of up to £500 a year, which gave them a financial independence matched by few others in the Repeal Association.32

According to Duffy, the weekly appearance of the Nation became an event in itself: ‘Old men still describe the fever of impatience with which they waited for its weekly issue, and the delight with which they lingered over it.’33 He claimed that in later years he met people from all walks of life: ‘Methodist missionaries, British soldiers and judges, professors in Protestant and Catholic colleges, and even Orangemen who still recall the enthusiasm with which they read the Nation.’ From his home town of Ballaghadereen in early 1843, Dillon wrote with astonishment that, despite the town’s poverty, 23 copies of the paper were delivered there weekly. A subscriber wrote that ‘My calendar for the week dates from the time the Nation arrives till the day I may hope for another Nation. I often walk three miles to the post office, to bring it home a few hours earlier than it would otherwise reach us’.34 Many nationalists who grew up in the 1840s recalled the eager anticipation of waiting for the Nation and the inspirational thrill of its editorials, essays and ballads.35 Its success was such that it firmly established the newspaper as a central pillar of all subsequent national movements.

EDUCATION AND TEMPERANCE

From the start the writers of the Nation saw their newspaper an instrument of moral reformation. They contended that centuries of subordination to England had led the Irish character to become ‘false, cowardly and provincialised’ and that it required strengthening through discipline and education.36 The bans and restrictions on Catholic schools during the era of the penal laws made education a particularly contentious subject, with nationalists claiming that its denial to the mass of the population had been one of the most powerful instruments of subjugation.37 The Young Irelanders’ philosophy was summed up in the pithy slogan ‘Educate that you may be free’ and they warned that ‘if the people do not persevere with a dogged and daily labour for knowledge and independence they will be slaves for generations’.38

The Nation’s educational crusade was assisted by the government’s decision in 1831 to establish a national system of primary education to replace the existing mosaic of hedge and parish schools. The state’s commitment to provide the building costs for new schools and the salaries of teachers encouraged a steady increase in the provision of primary education: there were 789 national schools in 1833; 1,978 in 1840; and 4,321 with 480,623 pupils in 1849.39 The Nation applauded this progress as an important step in creating a literate and self-reliant people capable of governing themselves. It also welcomed the fact that children of different religions would be educated together, observing that the spread of a uniform system of education ‘makes the peasantry and townsman share in one purpose, gives common facts and propensities to Ulster and Munster . . . and binds the native-born of every sect and blood into one family’.40

However, the Nation also found much to criticise in the new system, complaining of woeful underfunding and the poor qualifications and pay of teachers (the average basic salary of a national school teacher was £12 a year).41 It argued that the term ‘national school’ was a misnomer and that the education provided was in fact ‘anti-national’: state-funded schools ignored Irish literature, history and geography; the Irish language was not taught at all, and indeed was actively discouraged in some places.42

The exclusion of Irish history from the curriculum was deliberate. The government recognised the power of education to mould young minds, and the teaching of the national schools was intended to create loyal and orderly subjects. The Board of Commissioners appointed to supervise the system claimed that the unregulated teaching of history in hedge schools in the past had helped to stoke ancient grievances, and it took measures to ‘suppress all reading matter that did not specifically encourage piety, morality and industry’. Convinced that it was impossible to teach a version of Irish history that would be acceptable to both Protestants and Catholics, the authorities believed that it was better to avoid a subject that would only serve to open old wounds and sharpen sectarian animosity.43

The Board identified the difficulty in obtaining suitable textbooks as one of the great weaknesses of hedge and parish schools: in the past teachers had tended to use whatever reading matter was at hand and this often included almanacs, devotional literature, medieval romances and melodramatic tales of raparees and highwaymen.44 To fill this gap and avoid the propagation of any potentially subversive ideas, the Board produced a series of graded textbooks, appropriate to the age and abilities of pupils, which proved popular with teachers and became widely used throughout the British empire.45 The Nation, however, was unhappy at their assimilative and imperial character and denounced them as ‘lying compendiums . . . poisonous to the last degree’. It complained that ‘a boy leaves school filled with Greek, Roman and English facts, and most of them false facts, and profoundly ignorant of what it behoves him to know – the constitutional and general history of his own country’.46 Given the absence of Irish history, it was seen as rather sinister that the pupil learned some English history ‘as though England naturally succeeds to Greece and Rome, and takes their glory by inheritance. He is taught to link together in his mind the fame of Greece and Rome and England. He hears nothing of her crimes and oppressions – he is not taught to abhor her cruelties and perfidies’. When Ireland was mentioned, it was as ‘a semi-civilised and barbarous province – engaged almost entirely in fierce rebellion, or sunk in moody submission . . . Not a word does he there read of noble struggles for freedom – of gallant efforts, brilliant success, or defeat as glorious’.47 The result was that there were pupils and even teachers in national schools ‘who had never heard of Tara, Clontarf, Limerick or Dungannon; to whom the O’Nials and Sarsfields, the Swifts and Sternes, the Grattans and Barrys, our generals, statesmen, authors, orators and artists, were alike and utterly unknown!’48

The Nation accused the Board of adopting ‘a system of instruction devised by a master for those whom he seeks to make useful slaves’.49 It noted that of the eleven members of the Board of Commissioners only one – the veteran barrister Robert Holmes – was sympathetic to Irish nationalism.50 His colleagues were ‘dry, ungenial men, ignorant of our history, in love with English literature and character, imperialists to the core’, and were denounced ‘for turning Irish history out of doors; and . . . for the painful skill with which they have cut from every work in their schools the recognition of the literature, antiquities and state of Ireland’.51

Nationalists contrasted the national schools unfavourably with the hedge schools that preceded them. The latter, they claimed, ‘kept up something of the romance, history and music of the country’ and ‘were quite free from any assimilatory, imperial or mixed educational notions, and did aid in keeping alive a soul of nationality under the ribs of proscription and persecution’.52 The absence of a set curriculum in the hedge schools allowed for more Irish material to be taught, especially when the teacher had an interest in Irish history and folklore, and patriotic teachers could foster national sympathies by inspiring their pupils with vivid and dramatic accounts of Irish history.53

Some believed that the national spirit of the hedge schools was being carried on in a more orderly and disciplined manner by the Christian Brothers. The Brothers had been founded in Waterford in 1802 by Edmund Rice to provide education for poor boys, and gained a reputation for providing thorough instruction with a strong national flavour. By 1847 the order was growing steadily, with 93 schools in Ireland and Britain, educating 15,000 students. The strong Catholic character of the Brothers’ schools set them apart from the national schools and made their ethos incompatible with the state-supported system. The Christian Brothers used their own textbooks which, unlike those of the Board of Commissioners, emphasised Ireland’s distinctiveness, and they made a point of teaching Irish history to their pupils, stressing the courage and constancy of Ireland’s struggle against English rule.54 After a visit to the Christian Brothers’ school in North Richmond Street, Dublin, a deputation from the Nation noted that the Brothers were ‘the very reverse of the National System . . . In their class books, in their verbal teaching, in the spirit of their whole system, they infuse everything that can make their pupils proud and fond of their country, as well as attached to religion’. Their texts were highly commended for impressing on their pupils a devotion to faith and fatherland and for being culled mainly from the works of Irish and Catholic writers, including the Young Irelanders’ own Spirit of the Nation.55 The Nation commended the ‘silent patriotism’ of the Brothers and concluded that ‘a race reared up upon such intellectual food, so strong and healthy should be good men and good citizens’.56

The Young Irelanders were well aware, however, that the Christian Brothers alone could not make up the deficiencies in Irish education, and saw this as their principal mission. In private Davis was sceptical of the effect of the Repeal Association’s political agitation, regarding much of it as empty speechifying and impotent posturing, and regarded education as ‘the only moral force in which I have any faith’.57 He argued that the denial of education had been a deliberate policy adopted by the government to keep the Irish poor and ignorant: ‘first, by laws prohibiting education, then by refusing provision for it; next by perverting it into an engine of bigotry; and now by giving it in a stunted, partial, anti-national way.’ He claimed that the writings of the Nation had finally begun to change this and right the wrongs of the national system by ‘teach[ing] the people to know themselves and their history’.58

As a further stimulus to its educational mission, Young Ireland sought to capitalise on the educational initiatives already taken by the temperance movement, which had grown rapidly in Ireland during the late 1830s under the leadership of the Capuchin friar, Fr Theobald Mathew. Mathew argued that the root cause of Ireland’s poverty and backwardness was drunkenness, and that no social improvement was possible until this vice was curbed. His campaign to encourage moderation or abstention was an enormous success: from 1839 to 1842 the annual consumption of alcohol fell by half and excessive drinking became less and less socially acceptable.59 Charles Gavan Duffy was a close associate of Mathew and saw temperance as a crucial step on the road to national regeneration. He believed that the vice of drunkenness would have to be replaced with the virtues of self-help and education and encouraged Mathew to excite ‘a thirst for knowledge’, suggesting that temperance meeting rooms should be used as lecture halls and reading rooms to provide members with an alternative to socialising in public houses.60 Mathew arranged for the printing and distribution of suitable books and pamphlets, and although he insisted that works of political and religious controversy be excluded from temperance halls, this was difficult to enforce in practice, and his encouragement of reading opened the way for political instruction.61

Like Duffy, most nationalists believed that temperance had an important contribution to make to Ireland’s moral improvement, and the impressive order and discipline shown at the great repeal meetings of 1843 owed much to Mathew’s success. Although temperance facilitated the organisation of his mass political meetings, Daniel O’Connell never fully embraced the movement, harbouring reservations about its fervent evangelical character.62 In contrast the Young Irelanders took up the temperance cause with enthusiasm, valuing sobriety as the foundation of a responsible and self-reliant people. For Davis drunkenness was ‘the saturnalia of slaves’, and he maintained that ‘Irish temperance is the first fruit of deep-sown hope, the offering of incipient freedom’.63

Linking popular education to the temperance movement allowed the Young Irelanders to build on ardour and foundations that were already in place.64 When it was proposed that Fr Mathew be commemorated by a national memorial, Duffy suggested that the most suitable memorial would be to use any available funds to transform temperance societies into ‘the clubs, the adult schools, the lecture rooms, the parish parliaments of a sober people’, and nurture an informed and disciplined patriotism.65 Davis hoped that the attractions of learning would cause young men to shun ‘cards, tobacco, dissipation, and more fatal laziness’.66 To throw off such vices, it was essential that places be set aside for careful reading and sober discussion. Properly appointed reading rooms would provide a space not just for reading, but for the debate and fellowship that were central to creating an educated citizenry.67

During his incarceration in Richmond prison in 1844 with O’Connell and others convicted of conspiracy, Duffy drew up proposals to expand the Repeal Association’s educational programme.68 There were already 300 repeal reading rooms in existence, and the plan was to increase their number tenfold and make them centres of organisation and instruction.69 O’Connell’s lieutenant Thomas Ray was charged with the task, assisted by Davis and Duffy, and the Nation undertook to provide the rooms with periodicals, books and maps, while the Repeal Association would supply them with the reports of its parliamentary committee and works on Irish topography and statistics.70

Young Ireland’s educational project was largely shaped by the intention to teach subjects excluded from the national schools and, as few Young Irelanders had the ability or inclination to teach the Irish language, the teaching of Irish history dominated their educational efforts. In his efforts to make the Repeal Association the ‘schoolmaster of the people of Ireland’, Davis advised that works of history above all should be procured for its reading rooms: he recommended pro-Catholic histories such as James MacGeoghegan’s History of Ireland (1758–63), Francis Plowden’s An Historical Review of the State of Ireland (1803) and Denis Taaffe’s An Impartial History of Ireland (1809–11). In addition he advised that they should procure more recent polemical works such as