Adolescence in Modern Irish History

Catherine Cox, Susannah Riordan, Catherine Cox, Susannah Riordan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780230374911
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

This edited collection is the first to address the topic of adolescence in Irish history. It brings together established and emerging scholars to examine the experience of Irish young adults from the 'affective revolution' of the early nineteenth century to the emergence of the teenager in the 1960s.

1

Robert Hyndman’s Toe: Romanticism, Schoolboy Politics and the Affective Revolution in Late Georgian Belfast

Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

On 2 April 1821 an eighteen-year-old Belfast youth named Robert James Tennent received a letter from a young woman with whom he was conducting a flirtation. Little is known about the letter’s author, one Hannah McGee, but much can be said about Tennent. Born on 30 April 1803, he was a scion of one of Belfast’s most prominent Presbyterian families: his father, Robert Tennent, was a well-known philanthropist and reformer, while his uncle, William Tennent, was numbered among Belfast’s wealthiest merchants and had, in the 1790s, played a prominent role in the United Irish movement.¹ Following an early education in Belfast, Robert James Tennent had, in 1820, enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied law: he was thus a young man with prospects, and, as McGee herself quipped, a ‘fine, dashing fellow’. Given all of this, it might be supposed that McGee’s family and friends were favourably disposed towards her connection with him. But such was not the case: ‘Let me turn where I like,’ she complained in her letter, ‘I hear of nothing but of such and such a one saying what a pity it is I should have fixed my eye on that harum scarum youth as they are pleased to style you.’²

Conveying, as it does, a sense of reckless, juvenile abandon, ‘harum scarum youth’ was a fitting description, for notwithstanding his evident recommendations – his connections, education and prospects – Tennent was, in other respects, an unreliable individual. Inspired by a sequence of libertarian uprisings that had swept through southern Europe in 1819 and 1820, he was a young man flushed with revolutionary enthusiasm, who had declared his intent, the previous December, to quit his studies in Trinity College and travel to Italy to support the Neapolitans in their revolutionary struggle.³ Moreover, he was a young man whose sincerity in matters of the heart could not be depended upon. McGee’s letter conveys her awareness of these points vividly: ‘I cannot express to you my dear Robert James the restless uneasiness I endured for a few days before I received your last letter,’ she wrote; ‘a thousand disagreeable ideas crowded into my brains but the most lasting was that you had forgotten you had such a correspondent, or that that one thought of going to Naples had swallowed up all the rest … I sat with my Aunt the other night till nearly one o’clock talking of you, she told me if you went I need never expect to see you again, for my own part I think you may return but most probably not to me.’⁴

Viewed singly, McGee’s letter offers a tantalising glimpse – but a glimpse only – into the world of late Georgian Belfast’s middle-class adolescents. Fortunately, however, the letter constitutes just the tip of a substantial archival iceberg, for among the papers of Robert James Tennent – themselves merely a subset of the larger Tennent family archive – a rich cache of juvenilia and schoolboy correspondence is preserved. Offering more than a glimpse into their world, this material enables us to ‘listen in’ to a group of bright, gossipy adolescents communicating unguardedly among themselves. Utilising this revealing source base, the following discussion seeks to reconstruct the adolescent milieu inhabited by Tennent and his friends, though this is, of course, to raise questions of definition and anachronism: what, precisely, is meant by the term adolescent, and is it appropriate to apply the concept to the late Georgian period? Beginning with definition, following Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, adolescence is understood, in the current context, to refer to a distinct life-phase, between childhood and adulthood, occupying the years between ‘the early teens and the mid-twenties’. It is possible, as Ben-Amos has done, to subdivide this life-phase into two further periods: adolescence (‘the early and mid-teens’) and youth (‘mid-teens and upwards’).⁵ In what follows, however, these two phases are viewed as overlapping and adolescence is used in general terms to cover the periods of adolescence proper and youth, though the bulk of the discussion relates to the activities of individuals in their late teens and early twenties.

Definition aside, applying the concept of adolescence to the late Georgian period is to risk anachronism, for the emergence of adolescence as a distinct concept has been presented as a phenomena of the later nineteenth century. In John R. Gillis’ influential analysis, ‘[t]he discovery of adolescence belonged essentially to the middle classes’ and was closely related to changes in educational practice, whereby precocity was discouraged, children were educated for longer, and stricter demarcations were established between primary and secondary schooling.⁶ But while it is certainly true that the idea of adolescence came into sharper focus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the experience of a transitional phase between childhood and adulthood had been a reality for much longer. Ben-Amos, for instance, has suggested that adolescence and youth constituted ‘a long and dynamic phase in the life cycle’ in early modern England.⁷ Likewise, while dating the discovery of adolescence as a concept to the later nineteenth century, Gillis has acknowledged the variety of youth cultures that existed in Europe during the earlier period 1770–1870.

During these years, Europe’s middle-class youths gathered in revolutionary coteries and secret societies, organized themselves into student fraternities and, in Paris, postured as urban bohemians, experimenting with romanticism, libertinism and occultism in ‘avoidance of roles in the real (adult) world to which most knew they must ultimately turn.’⁸ This wider context is by no means irrelevant to a discussion of the milieu inhabited by Belfast’s middle-class adolescents, for Belfast was far from being a political or cultural backwater and Tennent and his associates shaped and inhabited an adolescent sub-culture which combined political engagement with literary consumption and romantic intriguing. As such, theirs was a milieu that was arguably characterized by the same ‘all-of-a-piece approach toward life’ that Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob have identified among those circles influenced by the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s. ‘The French Revolution released a kind of seismic affective energy,’ Hunt and Jacob argue, ‘not only among those who witnessed it first hand, but also further away from its epicenter … Radicals and romantics developed new kinds of intensity in their personal relationships, explored the prospects of democracy, sniffed newly discovered hallucinogenic gases, and wrote poetry, good and bad.’⁹ While there is no evidence to suggest that Tennent and his associates experimented, like Humphry Davy, with hallucinogenic gas, they certainly did debate politics and write poetry, and in what follows it will be suggested that theirs was a world touched by the ‘affective revolution’ – the broader transformation or ‘opening up’ of male sociability – ushered in by the revolutionary epoch.¹⁰ Thus, in reconstructing the world of Tennent and his associates, the ensuing discussion will not only contribute to existing knowledge of the diversity of adolescent experience that existed in early nineteenth-century Ireland, but will also reflect on the cultural and political parameters of Presbyterian Belfast in the crucial period following the 1798 Rebellion and the passage of the Act of Union. It will posit a link, albeit tentatively, between cultural consumption and adolescent behaviour.

I

To begin, some context is required. The early nineteenth century is often viewed as a period marked by two main trends in Ulster: one political, the decline of Presbyterian radicalism; and the other religious, the spread of evangelicalism. To focus solely on these developments is, however, to simplify what was, in social, political and intellectual terms, an altogether more complex period. This is not to suggest that the impact of evangelicalism should be ignored: as David W. Miller has argued, it was during the early nineteenth century that Ulster Protestantism acquired the ‘distinctly “evangelical”’ flavour it has retained to this day.¹¹ Nor is it to overlook the very real changes in Presbyterian political opinion that took place over the longer period between the 1790s and 1890s. ‘That many Presbyterians in Ulster were deeply involved in the United Irish movement in the 1790s, whose aims included “the total separation” of Ireland from Britain and which culminated in the rebellion of 1798, and that many of their children and grandchildren became ardent unionists, utterly opposed to any weakening of Ireland’s links with Britain, are,’ as Finlay Holmes put it, ‘incontrovertible facts of Irish history.’¹² Yet, as important as these developments undoubtedly were, they were also complex, protracted and contested, and the years following the Act of Union should not simply be viewed in negative terms as a period which saw opportunities for expression shut down by a creeping conservatism in matters political and religious.

This complexity is readily apparent in late Georgian Belfast. In the late eighteenth century, Belfast was known for the advanced political sympathies of many of its inhabitants. The town gave birth to the United Irish movement in 1791, and was, inevitably, viewed with suspicion by the government.¹³ In the period immediately following the 1798 Rebellion, however, Belfast appeared chastened and quiescent. When the question of Union was mooted in the autumn of 1798 it provoked little debate in Belfast, and in the early years of the nineteenth century the town appeared, like the north in general, politically stagnant.¹⁴ As William Drennan put it, in April 1807, ‘the North seems dead and rotting.’¹⁵ In that same year, however, Drennan, who had spent the previous seventeen years in Dublin, resettled in his native Belfast and the political climate began to change.¹⁶

A doctor by training, Drennan was, by inclination, a writer and political reformer. His musings on Masonic secret societies had helped shape the United Irish movement when it was first established in the autumn of 1791 and while he subsequently withdrew from the movement, having been tried for seditious libel in 1794, his return to Belfast coincided with a revival in his political enthusiasm.¹⁷ In 1806, greatly cheered by the inclusion of the pro-reform Whig grandee Charles James Fox in the so-called ‘ministry of the talents’, the coalition government established by William Grenville in the aftermath of William Pitt’s death, Drennan returned to the political fray.¹⁸ In print, he expressed his hope that a more ‘auspicious period’ had dawned, during which the cause of reform could, once more, be canvassed, and upon returning to Belfast he established links with a group of individuals who had remained wedded to the reformist cause.¹⁹

Including such individuals as the Lisburn Quaker John Hancock, John Templeton (a former friend of the United Irish leader Thomas Russell) and William and Robert Tennent, this group occupied a position in Belfast similar to that occupied in Manchester by Thomas Walker and his ass...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Catherine Cox and Susannah Riordan
• 1 Robert Hyndman’s Toe: Romanticism, Schoolboy Politics and the Affective Revolution in Late Georgian Belfast: Jonathan Jeffrey Wright
• 2 ‘A Sudden and Complete Revolution in the Female’: Female Adolescence and the Medical Profession in Post-Famine Ireland: Ann Daly
• 3 The ‘Wild Irish Girl’ in Selected Novels of L. T. Meade: Sandra McAvoy
• 4 ‘The Most Dangerous, Reckless, Passionate … Period of Their Lives’: The Irish Borstal Offender, 1906–1921: Conor Reidy
• 5 An Irish Nationalist Adolescence: Na Fianna Éireann, 1909–1923: Marnie Hay
• 6 ‘Storm and Stress’: Richard Devane, Adolescent Psychology and the Politics of Protective Legislation 1922–1935: Susannah Riordan
• 7 ‘How Will We Kill the Evening?’: ‘Degeneracy’ and ‘Second Generation’ Male Adolescence in Independent Ireland: Bryce Evans
• 8 A Powerful Antidote? Catholic Youth Clubs in the Sixties: Carole Holohan
• 9 The Emergence of an Irish Adolescence: 1920s to 1970s: Mary E. Daly
• Select Bibliography
• Index