Shelley's Irish LinksShelley &Revolutionary Ireland by Paul O'BrienReview by: Moyra HaslettThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 32, Thinking in Public (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 121-123Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736256 .

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sharp, can ever recapture contemporaries' experience of reading Tristram Shandy as

it first appeared, in nine volumes published in five irregular instalments across an

eight-year span.

The third part of Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel is the most specialized.

Opening with a close discussion of Sterne's connections to the Nonsense Club of

the late 1750s and early 1760s, it continues with an illuminating chapter on the

Ossianic vogue, in which Keymer argues convincingly for a much closer

connection between the 'ardent primitivism' of Macpherson's Fingal and the

'playful modernity' of Tristram Shandy than is immediately apparent. The final

chapter links Tristram Shandy with Whig politics and contemporary readings of

Marvell's poetry (like some of the earlier material, Keymer here draws on and

develops work first published elsewhere).

By its title and organization, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel may most easily

find readers among those with a particular interest in Sterne and Sterne

scholarship. It deserves a much wider readership.

IAN CAMPBELL ROSS

Shelley's Irish Links

Paul O'Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland. London and Dublin: Redwords, 2002. ISBN 1-872208-12-6. ?11.00 pbk.

John Keats came to Ireland in 1818, to see the Giant's Causeway, but turned back

at Belfast, lacking money, having underestimated the distances involved in his

journey, and repelled by what he saw. He writes to his brother of one encounter:

'On our return from Bellfast we met a Sadan ?

the Duchess of Dunghill ?

It is no

laughing matter tho ?

Imagine the worst dog kennel you ever saw placed upon

two poles from a mouldy fencing.

? In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old

Woman squat like an ape half starved from a scarcity of Buiscuit in its passage from

Madagascar to the cape, ?

with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round

eyed skinny lidded, inanity - with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her

head ?

squab and lean she sat and puff'd out the smoke while two ragged tattered

Girls carried her along. - What a thing would be a history of her Life and

sensations.' Byron never visited Ireland but drew on the experiences of his friend

Hobhouse in arguing for Catholic Emancipation in the House of Lords in 1812:

'Should it be objected that I never was in Ireland, I beg leave to observe, that it is

as easy to know something of Ireland, without having been there, as it appears

with some to have been born, bred, and cherished there, and yet remain ignorant

of its best interests.' More famously, Shelley came to Dublin to organize and

petition for reform, to distribute pamphlets and political fervour in equal measure.

The relationship between the writing and ideals of high Romanticism and the

politics of late-eighteenth-century Ireland has scarcely been mapped, and Paul

HASLETT, 'Shelley's Irish Links', Irish Review 32 (2004) 121

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O'Brien's study certainly explores and throws up new aspects of Shelley's

involvement with Ireland: that his manuscripts were published in Dublin by John Stockdale, publisher for the United Irishmen's Press, for example,

or the

significance of Shelley's speech on Catholic Emancipation at a meeting of the

Catholic Committee in Fishamble Street, as reported by six contemporary

newspaper accounts. Appendices of Shelley's poems, personal letters and prose

pamphlets concerning Ireland provide a welcome anthology of texts to anyone

interested in Romanticism and Ireland. These are full of interesting details and

images: Shelley writing of his novel method of distributing his political pamphlets for example ('I stand at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man who

looks likely. I throw a book to him') and Harriet laughing secretly at its absurdity

('Yesterday he put one into a woman's hood of a cloak. She knew nothing of it and

we passed her. I could hardly get on my muscles were so irritated').

At times, however, the material seems to be stretched to breaking point, as if any

link with Ireland is relevant in itself. O'Brien notes that Queen Mab was written in

Ireland and that it was substantially and approvingly printed in 1815 in the Theo?

logical Inquirer. The significance of the first of these links is largely taken for

granted: Queen Mab is a political poem, Shelley's activities in Ireland radical too.

The second detail is included only because, it seems, the paper's editor was George

Cannon, 'an Irish radical'. By such means is the larger narrative of Shelley's life,

when it appears to leave Ireland behind, refixed there by the slightest of links (thus

Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the poem 'written seven years after his departure

from Ireland'). One of the informing arguments of the book is the importance of

Shelley's early life and writings to the entirety of his career (an argument which

Shelley himself makes in a curious, rather portentously, expressed letter to God?

win: 'my publications will present to the moralist and metaphysician a

picture of a

mind however uncultured and unpruned which had at the dawn of its knowledge taken a singular turn, and to leave out the early lineaments of its appearance would

be to efface those which the attrition of the world had not deprived of right

angled originality'). But ultimately O'Brien's argument tends to assert where it

ought to convince. Most tellingly, the story of Shelley's later life seems to tail off

quietly: Chapter Seven ends with the Shelleys -

Percy and Mary -

enjoying the

company of Lady Mount Cashel, Anglo-Irish aristocrat and female radical, in Pisa;

Chapter Eight discusses the relationship between later Irish writers and Shelley (by far the weakest chapter in the book); and Chapter Nine returns, inexplicably, to the

last years of Shelley's life. (Perhaps the chapters here have been incorrectly placed, or

overlooked by poor copy-editing - a possibility, given the huge numbers of typing

errors throughout the book.) O'Brien is engaged in tracing the life of Shelley, to

which the Irish dimension can often seem tangential or incidental, while arguing

that such a dimension informs the entire life. A different, more unconventional,

narrative shape or way of writing biography might have resolved the tension here,

because a linear account only collapses under the pressure of the assertion.

This problem is compounded by the book's seeming uncertainty about its

audience. On the one hand, the book assumes a reader unfamiliar with

122 HASLETT, 'Shelley's Irish Links', Irish Review 32 (2004)

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Romanticism in general and Shelley in particular.Yet the book's appeal is surely to

readers already familiar with both and interested in pursuing the more idiosyncratic,

oblique approach offered by a focus on Ireland, and to such readers the narrative of

Shelley's life is a familiar one and one to which the Irish angle, disappointingly, seems only incidental. A shorter, more academic study could have taken the

biographical narrative more for granted and pursued its analysis more incisively. Or

it might have been more persuasive about Shelley's literary and political presence in later Irish writers. That Joyce's visit to Shelley's grave in Rome, for example,

'leads directly to his short story The Dead' or that Leopold Bloom is 'cast in the

role of Prometheus from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound' are both potentially

interesting readings, but completely unexplained. Or the book might have been

more troubled by Shelley's ambivalence towards the Irish he comes to enlighten,

for although Shelley acknowledges that the Irish 'mob' are oppressed and beaten

down by labour, he can also describe them, in a letter to Godwin, as 'the oyster

that is washed and driven at the mercy of the tides ... an animal of almost equal

elevation in the scale of intellectual being', and asks: 'Is it impossible to awaken a

moral sense in the breasts of those who appear so unfitted for the high destination

of their nature?'

In its favour, the book captures the optimism and idealism of Shelley and

Harriet in their hopes for Ireland and encourages us to read such works as An

Address to the Irish People and Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists, works

which many will know of, but few actually read. This is a worthy book then, but

not quite what it might have been.

MOYRA HASLETT

Absorption Fears

James Muldoon, Identity on the Medieval Irish Frontier: Degenerate Englishmen, Wild

Irishmen, Middle Nations. Gainesville, Fia. University Press of Florida, 2003. ISBN

0-8130-2624-5. $59.95 hbk.

This book examines the transformations that occurred when expansionist

medieval and early modern European societies, which viewed themselves as

civilized, encountered peoples with different religious, cultural, socio-economic

and political values and institutions. The author focuses on frontier regions,'zones

of cultural contact between European Christian societies and those they defined as

Others'. Ireland is his chief example of a frontier, and he analyses the consequences

of interaction there between the native Irish, English colonists and the English Crown from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. He argues that 'The experience

of the English in Ireland . . . provided a body of information about the frontier

and a vocabulary for identifying the fundamental types of identities that appeared on the frontiers of Europe'. Muldoon also considers

- and parallels

or contrasts

SCULLY, 'Absorption Fears', Irish Review 32 (2004) 123

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