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Irish Nationalism, Print Culture and the Spirit of the Nation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2017

Timothy M. Love
Timothy M. Love*
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent investigations into the survival and dissemination of traditional songs have elucidated the intertwining relationship between print and oral song traditions. Musical repertories once considered distinct, namely broadside ballads and traditional songs, now appear to have inhabited a shared space. Much scholarly attention has been focused on the print and oral interface that occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Less attention has been paid, however, to music in Ireland where similar economic, cultural and musical forces prevailed. Yet, Ireland’s engagement in various nationalist activities throughout the nineteenth century added a distinctly political twist to Ireland’s print–oral relationship. Songbooks, a tool for many nineteenth-century nationalist movements, often embodied the confluence of print and oral song traditions. Lacking musical notation, many songbooks were dependent on oral traditions such as communal singing to transmit their contents; success also depended on the large-scale distribution networks of booksellers and ballad hawkers. This article seeks to explore further the print–oral interface within the context of Irish nationalism. Specifically, I will examine how one particular movement, Young Ireland, manifested this interface within their songbook, Spirit of the Nation. By examining the production, contents, and ideology of this songbook, the complex connections between literature, orality and nationalism emerge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , August 2018 , pp. 189 - 208
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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4 Broadly speaking, the major nineteenth-century Irish nationalist movements were as follows: Catholic Emancipation of the 1820s, Gaelic Revival of the 1830s, the Repeal Movement and Young Ireland of the 1840s, the Fenian Movement of the 1860s, Home Rule of the 1870s and 1880s and the Gaelic League of the 1890s.

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8 Thomas Davis’s involvement with Irish traditional music can be seen in his correspondence with figures such as William Elliot Hudson, John Edward Pigot, James Hardiman and William Forde (see Thomas Davis Papers, National Library of Ireland MS 2644), as well as in his personal collection of Irish airs (see ‘Collection of Irish Airs’, National Library of Ireland MS 14,099). Davis also wrote extensively on music, particularly in his three essays – ‘Irish Music and Poetry’, ‘A Ballad History of Ireland’ and ‘Irish Songs’ – which appeared first in The Nation and were posthumously published in his collected writings, see Essays Literary and Historical, Centenary Edition, ed. D.J. O’Donoghue (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1914). In these writings, he issued prescriptive norms for the role of traditional music within Irish society, and he wrote with disdain about the influence of European art music, what he called the ‘paltry, scented things from Italy’.

9 Davis co-founded The Nation with John Blake Dillon (1814–1886) and Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903); the first issue was printed on 15 October 1842. The stated goal of the three men was to create a journal that would ‘raise up Ireland morally, socially, and politically, and put the sceptre of self-government into her hands’. See Duffy, Charles Gavan, Thomas Davis: Memoirs of an Irish Patriot, 1840–1846 (London: Kegan Paul; Trench, Trübner & Co., 1890): 72Google Scholar.

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32 Preface, Spirit of the Nation, Part II (Dublin: James Duffy, 1843), iii–iv.

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38 A staunch advocate of a union with Great Britain in his early life, Butt’s experiences with the Great Famine led him to turn to Irish nationalism and to support the establishment of a domestic legislature. In 1873 he formed the Home Rule League.

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44 The preface for the 1845 edition states that there are 22 old Irish airs arranged for voice and piano. A careful count of the songbook’s index as well as the actual printed music, however, yields a count of 20. Perhaps Davis intended to have 22 arrangements but then had to cut them out immediately before the songbook went to press.

45 The Nation, 28 June 1845, 616. In referring to Irish peasants as ‘black Helots’ and their songs as ‘nigger’ songs, Davis was drawing on a rhetorical trope of the period that linked Spartan helots, Irish peasants and African slaves of the West Indies. Irish authors even frequently used ‘Helots’ as a pseudonym for Irish peasants. See Hodkinson, Stephen and Hall, Edith, ‘Appropriations of Spartan Helotage in British Anti-Slavery Debates of the 1790s’, in Ancient Slavery and Abolition From Hobbes to Hollywood, ed. Edith Hall, Richard Alston and Justine McConnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 90Google Scholar. For example, one Irish author of the period wrote: ‘Oppression is the inevitable result of a state of things in which a marked class has the ascendancy over another; no matter whether the inferior caste be black or white, Irishmen or Helots, Catholics or Plebians, injury and insult must of necessity be its lot’. See William Sampson, Memoirs of William Sampson, an Irish Exile; Written by Himself (London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Arnot, 1832): xiv.

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49 Daniel O’Connell was Ireland’s popular leader. He rose to prominence in the 1820s for his role in campaigning for Catholic Emancipation, a role which earned him the moniker ‘The Liberator’. Through the 1830s and 1840s, O’Connell engaged in an intermittent campaign for Ireland’s release from the Act of Union with Britain. With Davis’s assistance, O’Connell’s Repeal Association became a major nationalist movement which reached its zenith in 1842–43. O’Connell’s close relationship with the Catholic clergy and his appeal for Catholic rights made him untrustworthy in the eyes of most Protestant nationalists and put him at odds with Davis’s own non-sectarian brand of nationalism.

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53 To be clear, not every song received musical notation. Seventeen original airs and 20 traditional airs were notated.

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60 John Edward Pigot (1822–1871) was an avid music collector and barrister. He met Davis while they were both attending Trinity College Dublin and he quickly became an active member of Young Ireland and a contributor to The Nation. Along with Hudson, Pigot provided valuable assistance in preparing the music for the 1845 Spirit of the Nation. Pigot’s personal collection of traditional music is now housed in the Royal Irish Academy in the Forde-Pigot Music Collection (RIA MS 24 O 20). Over 150 of Pigot’s airs were passed on to P.W. Joyce, and appeared in his Old Irish Music and Songs (1909). William Elliot Hudson (1796–1853) was a barrister and a patron of literature, art and music. He financially supported the Citizen, a monthly journal of politics and culture. William and his brother Henry were responsible for the ‘Native Music of Ireland’ portion of the journal, in which they published traditional airs from their own music collection as well as newly composed tunes modelled on traditional ones. See O’Sullivan, The Young Irelanders, 320–27.

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