Imagining the Irish child: Discourses of childhood in Irish Anglican writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 9781526161987

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Imagining the Irish child

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Imagining the Irish child Discourses of childhood in Irish Anglican writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jarlath Killeen

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Jarlath Killeen 2023 The right of Jarlath Killeen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 6197 0  hardback First published 2023 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: ‘Irelands Lamentation’, in A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries (1647). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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For Eilís

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements

viii x

Introduction 1 Bad to the bone: the evil child 2 The Massacre of the Innocents: the vulnerable child 3 Instruction and delight? The believing child 4 On the road with Jack Connor: the Enlightenment child 5 Extraordinary bodies: the monstrous child

1 23 42 96 141 185

Conclusion Bibliography Index

240 245 275

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Illustrations

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642) – the Davenants forced to watch the roasting of their children. Illustration K. Courtesy of the British Museum 57 James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642) – very young children having their brains bashed out, and others being dragged by the hair. Illustration P. Courtesy of the British Museum 57 ‘Irelands Lamentation’, in A prospect of bleeding Ireland’s miseries (1647). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 59 Strange Newes of a Prodigious Monster, borne in the Township of Adlington in the Parish of Standish – testified by the Reverend William Leigh in 1612 – front page. Courtesy of the British Library 67 Frontispiece and title page of John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (Dublin: Printed by Aaron Rhames, 1724). Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin 77 A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), 11. Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin124 A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), 20. Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin127 A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), 25. Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin129 John Kay’s engraving “Three Giants, with a Group of Spectators” (1783) – Charles Byrne and the Knipe brothers. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection 203

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List of illustrations

10 William Blake, ‘Glad Day’ or ‘Albion Rose’, c.1796 (though etchings date back to 1780). Courtesy of the British Museum 11 Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), Ossian Singing his Swan Song, oil on canvas, 1787. Courtesy of Statens Museum for Kunst / National Gallery of Denmark

ix

211

215

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Acknowledgements

There were times when I thought that this book was never going to be finished. Much of it was written during the long, rolling lockdowns that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic, and the dramatic shift to distance teaching and learning, and was completed just as Ireland began to ease restrictions and move towards whatever normality will be in this new phase. That it was completed at all comes as something of a surprise. My thanks to Matthew Frost and the team at Manchester University Press for steering me through the process. Many thanks also to the anonymous readers for the Press, who read the manuscript so carefully and made some extremely helpful suggestions for revision to which I have tried my best to respond. I want to thank the Library of Trinity College Dublin; the National Library of Ireland; the British Museum; the British Library; the Wellcome Library; the National Gallery of Denmark; and the Morgan Library, New York who have been generous in granting permission to reprint images, and who supplied me with digitised copies of various texts when libraries were closed or inaccessible due to the pandemic. I am extremely grateful to the following people for helping me along the way: Clare Clarke, Paul Delaney, Aileen Douglas, Crawford Gribben, Christina Morin, Bernice Murphy, Brendan O’Connell, David O’Shaughnessy, Margaret Robson, Ian Campbell Ross, and to my colleagues in the School of English in Trinity College Dublin for their generous support. Darryl Jones is someone to whom I owe a great deal, both personally and professionally, and I want to thank him in particular for listening to my frustrations and complaints during the prolonged writing period. I would like to thank my family for their continued love and support. Mary Lawlor, as always, has had to put up with my mind being absent and distracted for long periods, and my debt to her can never receive enough acknowledgement. I have been thinking about the ideas and texts discussed in this book for years, but their significance became ever sharper for me with the arrival into the world of Eilís, who has grown up as the book was taking shape

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Acknowledgements xi first in my mind, then on the computer screen. My greatest debt in this world is to her, who is the most wonderful gift to a most undeserving father. In a letter to his daughter Alicia, Bishop Edward Synge beautifully assured her that ‘Nothing in this World is of so much consequence to me as your Welfare, not meerly because you are my Child, mine only Child.’ I dedicate this book to my daughter, with my deepest gratitude and love.

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Introduction

Following the death of his wife, Lucy, in 1691, the Irish natural philosopher (and later MP) William Molyneux was left with the responsibility of raising their only surviving child, a son, Samuel, who was then just two years old. Molyneux was acutely aware of his parental duties, and extremely anxious about the best way to bring up the boy. He was particularly concerned that young Samuel, the offspring of parents who were both prone to physical illness, and therefore not the result of ‘hardy breeding’, and having been left without a mother at a very young age, needed particular care and attention as he grew up.1 Fortunately, the congenial Molyneux was not lacking in well-connected friends, and he received some personal assistance in thinking through the demands and requirements of childcare from one of the most significant intellectual figures of the day, who also happened to have developed an interest in the education of the young. Having read the description of himself as the ‘incomparable Mr. Locke’ in the Dedicatory Epistle of Molyneux’s Dioptrica Nova (1692),2 the philosopher was flattered enough to write to thank the Dubliner for making ‘great advances of friendship’, and the two of them began a warm and affectionate correspondence that lasted until Molyneux’s sudden death at the age of only 42 in 1698.3 Locke was by the time of their first exchange of letters not just a leading philosopher, but one who, despite being a childless bachelor, had for years been working through the challenges of child-rearing, having already been asked for his advice by his friends Mary and Edward Clarke, who were hard at work trying to raise their own son. On 2 March 1693, Molyneux wrote to Locke, setting out the difficult circumstances in which his son was placed, and explaining: ‘I have but one child in the world, who is now nigh four years old … my affections (I must confess) are strongly placed on him … [and] my whole study shall be to lay up a treasure of knowledge in his mind, for his happiness in this life and the next.’ 4 In this letter he reveals that he heard, through his brother Thomas Molyneux,5 about Locke’s interest in child-rearing and asks him for guidance as to the best approach to his son’s intellectual and moral

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education, since he had ‘been often thinking of some method for his instruction, that may best obtain’ Samuel’s contentment in the future in this world and his ultimate salvation in the next. In the same letter, Molyneux urges his friend to bring his ideas about education to print for everyone’s benefit, but hopes, as a pleading ‘tender father’, that Locke will give him a preview of these ideas before they are published: ‘let me most earnestly entreat you, by no means to lay aside this infinitely useful work, ’till you have finished it, for ’twill be of vast advantage to all mankind, as well as particularly to me your entire friend’.6 Molyneux’s encouragement of Locke bore fruit. His friend sent him that ‘much desired piece, Of Education’, in August of the same year, which Molyneux immediately pored over for help and advice, ‘finding it answerable to the highest expectations I had of it’.7 While generally enthusiastic about the child-centred liberality of Locke’s educational ideas, praising them as ‘very reasonable, and’, for the most part at least, ‘very Practicable’, Molyneux’s touching concern for Samuel’s emotional wellbeing is in evidence in his heightened sensitivity to Locke’s use of the language of disciplinarian power in describing relations between parent and child. Molyneux thinks he can detect a subtle authoritarianism in some of Locke’s suggestions, complaining that ‘one particular … seems to beat hard on the tender spirits of children, and the natural affections of Parents’. That single ‘particular’ was Locke’s insistence that one of the ways to encourage the growth of maturity in children was to ensure that ‘a child should never be suffer’d to have what he craves, or so much as speaks for, much less if he cries for it’. This advice Molyneux found to be too taxing on a father’s natural desire to please and gratify his children. While it may be wise to moderate the hunger of children, so as to prevent them from becoming physically unhealthy or gluttonous, a stringent approach to their ‘wants of fancy and affection’ seemed to Molyneux ‘too strict and severe’.8 Molyneux is especially anxious that the maturing child be permitted to articulate clearly what it desires ‘in matters indifferent and innocent’, and could see no reason why ‘they may not be allowed to declare what will delight them’. Molyneux is concerned that any interference in the natural communication between a child and his parents would constitute a breach of the child’s rights as a human being, and declares it the equivalent of ‘deny[ing]’ a similar ‘liberty … between man and his Creator’.9 Just as grown-ups make petitionary prayers to God, requesting that He grant them what they most wish for, so the child ‘may be allow’d’ to make similar pleas to ‘their parents and governors’, in the hope of meeting a similar benevolent generosity.10 Molyneux also invokes a practical as well as a principled objection to Locke’s apparent severity, which indicates the first-hand nature of his own care for the young Samuel. Molyneux not only finds Locke’s

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Introduction 3 recommended restraint an unnecessary restriction of children’s freedom, but points out that it would prove a needless burden for the hapless parent tasked with denying their children even their heart’s most trivial desires. Implement this scheme, he warns, and ‘you must have the children almost moaped for want of diversion and recreation, or else you must have those about them study nothing all day but how to find employment for them; and how this would rack the invention of any man alive, I leave you to judge’.11 Molyneux is clearly speaking here from his personal struggle to try to keep a very young child entertained and distracted, and finds the childless Locke’s high-minded instructions unreasonable and impracticable in achieving harmony in the household.12 Molyneux was influential in persuading Locke to have his ideas about the instruction of children committed to print, and he was not the only member of the Irish elite to have a strong interest in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Locke’s book had two Dublin reprints in 1728, with further Irish editions in 1737, 1738 and 1778. The 1728 and 1737 editions were printed ‘at the request of several of the nobility of this kingdom’, which suggests that this was a text in demand.13 In an examination of ‘What the women of Dublin did with John Locke’, Christine Gerrard found that among the members of the ‘Triumfeminate’ group associated with Jonathan Swift, including the poet Mary Barber, and the poet and memoirist Laetitia Pilkington, Locke was considered an important authority on good childcare, and admired for his famous description of the child as a ‘White Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases’, by which metaphor he highlighted the importance and consequence of early education for the shaping of the future adult.14 Pilkington’s Memoirs (1748), where the child’s mind is described as a ‘spotless Paper’ waiting to be written upon, and Barber’s poems for her son Constantine, praising the ‘great Sage’,15 are important evidence of the impact of Locke’s views on children and childhood in the nurseries of the Dublin elite: ‘early eighteenth-century Dublin knew Locke not primarily as a political or economic writer, but as a philosopher interested in the development of human perception and understanding, and perhaps even more importantly, as an educational writer, with an interest in childhood development and how children learn, and also in parent/child relationships, maternity and childbirth’.16 Later, Richard Lovell Edgeworth would put his own happiness as a child down to the careful treatment of his mother, Jane, who, having read ‘every thing that had been written on the subject of education’, ‘preferred with sound judgement the opinions of Locke’ over that of other child-rearing experts, though she wisely modified his advice with ‘her own good sense’.17 Indeed, when RLE in collaboration with his daughter Maria came to write their own set of instructions, Practical Education (1798), they produced what is effectively a Lockean text, built

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on their empirical observation of actual children over many years, and devoted (like Locke) to the use of education as a means to shape a rational adult out of the nebulous blob nature provided to parents.18 Some Thoughts Concerning Education is both a kind of child-rearing manual, in which Locke tries to think through how a parent should respond to the demands of bringing up young children, but also a text that operates at a much more philosophical level, as Locke attempts to figure out what children are like and how childhood should be understood, and vacillates between these practical and philosophical modes. Indeed, what is impressive at the theoretical level may be (as Molyneux found) completely useless to the parent trying to look after the material child in the here and now. Unsurprisingly, Locke’s claim that the child is born a ‘blank slate’ without innate ideas is now far better known than any of his mundane advice about, for example, how loose or tight a boy’s clothes should be, or whether children should be allowed to roam around the place without any shoes.19 A tension between the metaphorical and philosophical and the material and practical, between what Richard Nash describes as ‘purely semiotic markers’ and their ‘material embodiments’, is a common one in the history and the scholarly treatment of childhood.20 Rhetorically powerful models of the child can be so influential, indeed, that according to some scholars there is no way of getting beyond the hypothetical and metaphorical to the ‘real’ child at all. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, for example, pointedly criticises the entire discipline of children’s literature studies for ‘making judgments and criticisms on behalf of a “real child” who does not exist’, concluding that ‘its writings are useless to the fulfilment of its own professed aims’.21 One of Lesnik-Oberstein’s points is that the children of intellectual analysis are creatures of the discursive rather than material world. For Erica Burman, too, given the imbrication of ideas about childhood in social, spiritual and political discussion, ‘arguably all appeals to “the child” are metaphorical’.22 Certainly, discourses of the child and childhood exist at a distance from the living, breathing human beings who supposedly embody the ideas being discussed. As Molyneux found when reading Locke’s advice, there is a considerable gap between the real child, Samuel Molyneux, and the malleable wax figure his philosophical friend had conjured up. This book is about how ideas about the ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ were enormously productive in Irish Anglican writing and thinking of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even as real children and lived childhoods often (though not always) slipped completely out of view. It takes seriously the argument that discourses about children and childhood have important material effects on living children, and it is critical that, where possible, these effects are registered and understood. However, as historian of childhood Hugh Cunningham has pointed out, the distinction between ‘children as

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Introduction 5 human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas’ is also important.23 In this study I will examine the circulation of ideas about children and concepts of childhood in Irish Anglican print culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considering the work of a variety of writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents in the period from the formulation of the Irish Articles in 1615 to the lead up to the 1798 Rebellion. This is a treatment of ideas about the child and childhood, and emphatically not a history of Irish children, who will flit in and out of the picture throughout, resistant to being completely captured by the discourses that were supposed to encapsulate their lives. The book is structured around a detailed examination of five particular ‘versions’, models or representations of the child that generated cultural interest in these two centuries: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the believing/spiritualised child, the enlightened child and the monstrous child. These versions of the child are widely recognised as important by Childhood Studies scholars, but so far have not been scrutinised in a specifically Irish context, and their significance for understanding the political and intellectual history of the period has tended to be overlooked. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the language of childhood has been applied far beyond young people to individuals, communities and collectives that have been understood as ‘childlike’ or ‘childish’.24 It traces these versions of the child across a wide range of genres and literary forms, including some directly for and about children (catechisms, children’s bibles, educational treatises, letters), and some emphatically not meant for children at all (histories, sermons, political pamphlets and fiction). The book shows how concepts of the child (like Locke’s malleable wax figure) often broke free of the young people to which they supposedly referred, and migrated into debates about communal identity, religious belief, historical understanding and political controversy. A focus on the discourses of childhood by members of just one group in Ireland across two centuries may appear narrow. However, given the political and cultural dominance of the Anglican community in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish life, understanding the ways in which its members imagined the ‘child’ is an important precursor to a more expansive treatment of the subject. A comprehensive history of ideas about childhood in Ireland has not yet been written.25 While appreciating the ways in which childhood has been inflected in different national histories has been central to the scholarly reclamation of childhood since the 1960s,26 Ireland has not featured very prominently in this work. As Maria Luddy and James M. Smith put it in what is currently the most extensive treatment, Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present (2014), while ‘in other countries considerable scholarship already exists’ in relation to Childhood Studies,

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‘the study of children and childhood, and the concepts associated with these words, is only beginning in Ireland’.27 Most of the best existing work on children in Ireland has focused on the books written for them in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Barbara Ann Young’s The Child as Emblem of the Nation in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (2006) and Pádraic Whyte’s Irish Childhoods: Children’s Fiction and Irish History (2011) do not tackle anything earlier than the twentieth century, while the collection Irish Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Valerie Coghlan and Keith O’Sullivan (2011), is explicitly focused on material from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Where Irish childhoods have been examined, most attention has also (and understandably) been on the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.28 In an incisive article on ‘Jonathan Swift’s Childhoods’, the children’s literature scholar Mary Shine Thompson complains that ‘To date historians have paid scant, incidental attention to Irish childhood during and before the Enlightenment.’ 29 One of the reasons for this scholarly gap is plain enough: the evidence of what children thought, the ways in which they saw the world, their dealings with and feelings about their parents, brothers and sisters, their peers, their possessions, the books they read, has always been and remains difficult to pin down. The historian Anna French points out that ‘the children of the early modern period have long been regarded as the socially silent’, lacking the authority to speak of their own experiences, and requiring the adults around them to define the significance of their state of being: they ‘slip through our fingers in texts … they are out of reach’.30 The best relevant work on the early modern period concentrates on the emergence of Irish children’s literature. Anne Markey’s excellent survey, ‘Irish Children’s Books, 1696–1810’ (2017), and her groundbreaking collection, Children’s Fiction, 1765–1808 (2011), opened up new avenues of investigation for scholars of children’s literature.31 While both of these publications briefly discuss ideas of childhood in eighteenth-century Ireland, Markey’s main interest is in drawing attention to the very neglected body of early literature explicitly for children by Irish writers, establishing what was actually published and the relative significance of these writers and books. Recently, there has been some welcome attention to early modern Irish childhood, both in its material and ideological manifestations. Clíona Ó Gallchoir has looked at the ways in which childhood was represented in two eighteenth-century Irish texts, William Chaigneau’s The History of Jack Connor (1752)32 and Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70), arguing that they ‘reflect both broader enlightenment ideas about childhood, and the specific socio-political conditions pertaining in Ireland in this period’ (primarily related to the education of the children of Irish Catholics).33 Anne

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Introduction 7 Markey, too, has also turned to how childhood is configured in early Irish fiction which takes education and schooling as a major subject. Looking at Jack Connor and The History of Harry Spencer; Compiled for the Amusement of Good Children, and the Instruction of such as Wish to Become Good (1794) by ‘Philanthropos’ (James Delap), in which ‘swathes of text are copied verbatim, or almost word for word’ from Brooke’s Fool of Quality, she argues that in their representation of childhood, these texts are ‘concerned with reinforcing the hegemony’ of the Protestant ascendancy, while also providing ‘verifiable insights into diverse, contemporaneous experiences of Irish childhood, albeit from a privileged adult perspective’.34 This current book builds on these important insights, though considerably widening the perspective and arguing that the models of the child that can be found in the literature of these centuries had significant implications far beyond the nursery and the schoolroom. The children imagined by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglicans in Ireland found their way into debates about the nature of the Irish political nation itself. A study of how ideas of childhood circulated in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Irish writing is important because these are the centuries recognised as crucial ones in the development of the modern understanding of childhood. Famously, the great French historian Philippe Ariès didn’t think that childhood was all that real prior to the eighteenth century.35 In the decades following his notorious claim, archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, educationalists, sociologists, children’s literature specialists, all constituting what is now termed ‘Childhood Studies’, have not only shown that Ariès was mistaken, but have brought to light the multiple and overlapping discourses in which children and childhood have been implicated back to the emergence of the human species.36 However, even though Ariès was wrong to claim that childhood was ‘invented’ in the early modern period, it did change quite significantly in this period.37 According to the historian J. H. Plumb, in a seminal essay from 1975, childhood and children both become central to the cultural life of eighteenth-century Britain. Hugh Cunningham too stresses that for the historian of modern childhood, ‘the eighteenth century holds pride of place’.38 Children became ever more increasingly obsessed over by parents, educationalists, catechists, doctors, writers, publishers, toy manufacturers, philosophers, theologians, and just about everyone else as well.39 Childhood may not have been ‘invented’ 40 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then, but it was certainly reimagined, and in an extraordinarily wide variety of genres and fields. The extent to which these changing ideas about childhood can be tracked in Irish writing of this period has not been examined extensively. The period from the early seventeenth century to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion is also a crucial one in the creation of modern Ireland. If Ireland was, as

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Declan Kiberd puts it, ‘invented’ in the late Victorian period, then it was an invention that built on ideas about the nation that had been formulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern ideas of Ireland and childhood grew up together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and what I want to examine here is some of the ways in which treatments of the child and debates about Ireland often intersected in the writing and thinking of the dominant community on the island. In their introduction to a collection of essays on the family in the nineteenth century, the historians David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli invite scholars to ‘dive’ into the ‘messy, but fascinating whirlwind of forces that together shaped and continue to shape family life’. Messiness, contradiction, confusion, discursive slipperiness are all in evidence in the circulation of ideas about childhood in Ireland (and Irish childhood) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this study will follow these ideas wherever they lead us.41 It is important to emphasise that the book does not claim either that the versions of the child and childhood explored here were the only ones important to Irish Anglican thinking, or that Irish Anglicans were the only ones to use these ideas. Indeed, as will be emphasised throughout the book, and as has been demonstrated by an enormous body of scholarship on childhood in Britain (excluding Ireland) and Europe, the models of the child attractive to Irish Anglicans were also among the most significant of those being discussed elsewhere, though I will argue that Irish writers do inflect these models in interesting and sometimes peculiar ways. John Gillis points out that the ‘language of age in pre-industrial Europe’ can now seem ‘hopelessly vague’, which means that defining what is meant by the terms ‘childhood’ and the ‘child’ in this period can be frustrating.42 Famously, in the sixteenth century, the English cleric and reformer Thomas Becon asked, ‘What is a child, or to be a child?’ 43 and the experts (whether they are benevolent philosophers dispensing childcare advice, or historians arguing over whether childhood was ‘invented’ or ‘discovered’) have been disagreeing with each other about the answers to this question ever since. Narrowing the focus to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland does not provide much more clarity, unfortunately. Age, for example, which is now considered one of the most obvious ways to distinguish the child from the adult, was not a key defining factor in the early modern period, even though historians have continued to look to life chronology as a way to set limits and indicate where childhood ends and adulthood begins.44 When Mary O’Dowd looked at the available evidence in early modern Ireland, for example, she discovered that ‘the late teens from the age of 16 or 17 to 20 was a significant time’ for young men, as it was in this period that they ‘were liable to be called up to serve in the local hosting or militia, an indication that they were deemed to be men at that stage’.45 However, even

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Introduction 9 here where some element of chronological certainty seems to be provided, the key issue is an adult perception of a child’s ability to carry out certain actions – in this case, acts of directed violence. As pointed out by Anna French, what is really at issue here is less numerical age than perceived ‘stage’ of life, a stage that could be physical but could also be understood as spiritual.46 This ambivalence and lack of chronological clarity indicates that ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ are imprecise, ambiguous and often quite murky terms. In this study, I am guided by Keith Thomas’s argument that some conceptual stability can be provided by understanding childhood in the early modern period as indicative of a relative lack of authority. In this way the term ‘child’ can be used to describe not just young individuals (or what we might call actual, or material children), but also those individuals and groups whose relative position in society was subject to the authority of others.47 William Molyneux’s slight disagreement with his friend John Locke over the limits of a child’s freedom is a useful place to start this study, as it is a good indication of how a discussion about one kind of child can be brought to bear on debates about completely different embodiments of this nebulous concept. The gap between pedagogical theory and childcare reality, between the philosophical and the actual child was pointed out by Molyneux in his otherwise generous and appreciative response to Locke’s views on education. Locke, in his reply defended his argument for limiting the independence of children, and expressed a concern that without such strictures, young children in particular would be liable to desire something simply because their elder siblings already had it: ‘does one go abroad? The other straight has a mind to it too. Has such a one new or fine cloths or play-things? They, if you once allow it them, will be impatient for the like, and think themselves ill dealt with if they have it not.’ 48 Locke’s warning is that children will always want what their elders (and those more rationally developed) already have, even though they are not ready to take on the burden of adult responsibility that the possession of even these material objects indicate. While it is ‘natural’ to want what your elder brother has, the duty of the parent is to set limits and to sternly refuse to indulge a child who is merely envious of what others have.49 Molyneux agreeably accepts Locke’s response as it pertains to the denial of the child in ‘matters of fancy and affectation’, but it is significant that in these exchanges both men frequently move beyond a discussion of how exactly one individual, Samuel Molyneux, should be instructed, and into a more general dialogue about ‘man’s liberty’ and individual freedom in which wanting what the elder brother already possesses is recognised as a potentially serious threat to the stability of the rationally organised household.50

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A few years after this exchange between friends about household management and relations, Molyneux would repurpose the discussion of fraternal tension between elder and younger brothers, in a politically explosive text that would jeopardise his relationship with Locke, and also indicate that he was well aware that Lockean limits to childhood desires were not only being applied to energetic 4-year-olds making demands on the time and attention of their harassed parents. By the 1690s, the discourses of childhood and the language of liberty and dependence were already being applied at a political level, in debates about the ‘state of Ireland’, debates in which Molyneux was about to become a central figure. The literary critic Declan Kiberd points out that British imperialism notioned the association of colonised peoples and places with children and the state of childhood very early in its imperial history. Kiberd argues that ‘Within British writing, there had long been a link between children’s fiction and the colonial enterprise, which led to an identification of the new world with the infantile state of man.’ 51 While this identification was particularly strong in the Victorian period,52 debates about the status of the Irish parliament in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries frequently employed what Mary Lowenthal Felstiner calls ‘family metaphors’,53 which represented both Ireland itself and its ruling Anglican elite as in an infantile or juvenile state, and the English parliament as maternal protector or paternal disciplinarian with (like the conscientious parent in Locke’s On Education) the responsibility to curb any precocious or insolent Irish demands. Far from accepting, however, that Ireland was the child to the English parent, in his celebrated (and very quickly notorious) Case of Ireland, Stated (1698), Molyneux tried to demonstrate that they were actually siblings with the same father, and that the Irish demand for legislative equality was simply an example of the now mature younger son wanting what his older brother had already been granted by their benevolent father. He dedicated his volume to the king, and praises him as ‘the Common Indulgent Father of all your Countries’, for having ‘an Equal Regard to the Birth-Rights of all Your Children’, expressing his certainty that the king would ‘not permit the Eldest, because the Strongest, to Encroach on the Possessions of the Younger’.54 The two countries are treated by Molyneux as equal members of ‘Your Majesty’s Glorious Family’, even if England just happens to be (by accident of ‘birth’) the older of the two brothers.55 As Patrick Kelly has pointed out, this passage draws on one in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government from 1689, which asks: ‘Is it reasonable that the eldest Brother, because he has the greatest part of his Father’s Estate, should thereby have a Right to take away any of his younger Brothers Portions?’, Locke maintaining that ‘exceeding the Bounds of Authority’ is not a ‘Right’ that can be claimed.56 Since it is not reasonable or just that an elder brother should have complete power over his younger brother, if Ireland and England are really to be

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Introduction 11 treated as sons of the same monarch, Molyneux insists, neither should have political authority over the other. Just as children (or, at least, sons, like Samuel Molyneux) will eventually outgrow their need for their father to set limits on their actions, so, too, countries eventually reach a level of political maturity that means they are less subject to the authority of their father (the king). As well as relying on Locke’s Two Treaties of Government, this configuration also depends on the assumption – articulated in Locke’s On Education – that a child properly brought up will grow into mature self-authorisation entitled to self-governance, an argument that is liberating at the level of the individual, but politically incendiary when applied to a ‘childlike’ country like Ireland. Molyneux’s key strategy here is the denial that England (rather than the sovereign) is the parent figure in Anglo-Irish relations, though his analogy accepts Ireland’s status as a child, while extending this status to cover England as well. He wrote the Case of Ireland, Stated in reaction to three different threats to Ireland’s political equality: the decision by the House of Commons in London to prohibit Irish woollen exports (as they would be in direct competition with similar products from England), disputes about the location of the power to allocate land taken from Irish Catholics in the Williamite wars, and a disagreement over the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish and English Houses of Lords. As James Woods points out, ‘In all of these cases, Molyneux’s objection was the general one that the legislative and juridical arms of the English government were acting as if Ireland were a colony entirely dependent on and subordinate to England. Against this vision of Ireland’s and England’s relationship, Molyneux appeals to the principles of equality and reciprocity.’ 57 Childhood as a descriptor of a state of being often appears under numerous negative aliases, such as ‘dependence’, and Molyneux is keen to not only establish the analogous dependence of England on the power of the king (and therefore undermine English claims to political dominance), but to represent both countries as ready to take on the mantle of adult authority. Woods is interested in the ways in which Molyneux’s treatise draws on ideals of friendship and amity in polite, civilised society (ideals which also formed the basis of his correspondence with Locke) as providing a basis for a proper consideration of the relations between ‘friendly’ countries like Ireland and England. As Woods points out, Molyneux originally appealed to ‘our Brethren of England’ in his dedication to King William in the printer’s copy, before changing that to ‘our Friends of England’ in the published version. This change suggests that Molyneux eventually came to the conclusion that an analogy based on friendship rather than fraternity would have a more persuasive rhetorical force in arguing for the equality of the two kingdoms.58 This last-minute emendation may, however, also be due to Molyneux’s realisation that any acceptance of the metaphor of Ireland’s

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child status would render his argument for the independence of its parliament more precarious. As is illustrated in Molyneux’s 1693 correspondence with Locke over the proper way to rear children, even one of the most ‘liberal’ and child-centred thinkers of the period believed that children’s ‘innocent’ desires ‘of fancy and affection’ had to be subject to the control of a potentially disapproving father figure, while in every ‘matter of moment’ their decisions were to be guided by older and therefore wiser (and wiser simply because older) family members. Molyneux’s political intervention was extraordinarily controversial and provoked a series of often intemperate responses which have, as Ian McBride contends, generally been ignored or dismissed by historians of this period.59 Importantly, as the historian Thomas Bartlett points out, parent–child analogies proliferated in the period after the publication of Molyneux’s Case, often directly responding to his attempt to politically neutralise the family metaphors by representing Ireland and England as brothers.60 For example, the English barrister William Attwood, ‘the leading English imperialist theorist’ of the period, and one who took part in ‘almost every major political debate within England, and between England and her political peripheries, during the period 1680 to 1707’, was particularly scathing in his assessment of Molyneux’s use of the metaphors of both family and friends.61 Attwood’s The History, and Reasons, of the Dependency of Ireland Upon the Imperial Crown of the Kingdom of England (1698) explicitly contradicts Molyneux’s claims that England’s political treatment of Ireland should be seen as a violation of ‘that amity which should be maintained between distinct Kingdoms, or the Children of one common Parent’, insisting that such a view of the matter is simply ‘mistaken’.62 Simon Clement’s An Answer to Mr. Molyneux (1698)63 highlighted Molyneux’s vacillation between different ‘similes’, complaining that while he speaks of the English and Irish as ‘children’ of the one parent at some points, at others ‘we are become another People and Neighbours’.64 For Clement, the Anglicans in Ireland are ‘descended from England’ and are therefore related to the English as a daughter is to her mother, and subject to the same authority.65 Clement cautions against even thinking of the relationship between the two countries in sororal or fraternal terms at all. England is a Mother to the Irish Anglican community, and ‘it would ill become them to start up and call their Mother by the Familiar Appellation of Sister’.66 Charles Davenant’s An Essay upon the Probable Methods of making the People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (1699) problematises the parent–child analogy completely, explaining that while it is true that the king is ‘Father of the People, in one place as well as in the other’, this terminology obscures the fact that, ‘in his Politick-Capacity’, he is also ‘at the Head of another Common-wealth, with whose Blood and Treasure the stranger Country was

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Introduction 13 perhaps conquer’d’. In other words, the king is simultaneously the symbolic ‘father’ of Ireland, and also its actual conqueror. So, while a father will probably forgive his son if he ‘errs’ (in opposing his father’s authority), and will not take away any of his son’s ‘natural rights’, the same cannot be said about political relations between a conqueror and those he has overcome: ‘if a Foreign People, thus subdu’d, Rebel, they may without doubt forfeit certain Priviledges, which were not any Natural Rights of their own, but Forms of living prescrib’d, and Concessions granted by the Conquerors’.67 Because of the political differences between these two cases, no one in Ireland has any justification for complaining that they are not being treated the same as other children of their political father. Indeed, Davenant argues that even if he were to grant the appropriateness of the parent–child analogy, this would still not mean that certain ‘privileges’ could not be either withheld or denied altogether from the child in certain circumstances: if Wars have been thought not only Prudent, but just, which have been made to interrupt the too sudden Growth of any Neighbour-Nation, much more justifiable may a Mother-Kingdom exercise the Civil Authority in Relation to her own Children; who from her had their Being, and still have their Protection, especially when her own Safety is so much concern’d.68

The political difficulty in accepting Davenant’s argument, however, is that it is hard to see where the limits of this kind of power rest or what kinds of actions by the parental authority would count as impermissible. Just as Molyneux was concerned with the extent of the power Locke’s theories granted parents over their children in reality, by employing parent–child analogies in describing political relationships, the natural limits of subordination become very difficult to gauge. Rejections of the arguments of Irish ‘colonial nationalists’ 69 dismissed Molyneux’s claims of fraternal equality and insisted on infantile subordination, and were emphatic also in including the Anglican community in Ireland in this subordination. Clement asserted that the Irish as a whole were a ‘People that had been subdu’d and brought into Subjection to the English Government’, claiming that ‘no Grant ever did, or could make Ireland an Absolute, Distinct, Separate Kingdom, and wholly Independent of England’.70 Ireland and all its inhabitants were, in this matter, in the same position as other colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Jack P. Greene explains, ‘precisely because wives, children, servants, and other dependents who could neither sustain nor defend themselves had to rely on husbands, fathers, masters, or patrons to support and protect them, they were not independent but, in the terminology of the age, were “at the disposal or under the sovereignty of” those upon whom they relied’.71 Clement expresses his contempt for colonial nationalist theories of ‘independence’ by reminding

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the Anglicans in Ireland that what they owed to the English state was the same as that which a son owed to his father: ‘the English of Ireland … are certainly a Colony of England, sent thither by us, bred up, cherish’d and protected by us’.72 The English in Ireland had not stopped being children, and Clement dismisses arguments such as Molyneux’s as (at best) ‘Insolent’ 73 – a common claim about unruly children in this period. Clement depends on the language of stern paternal authority in warning Anglicans in Ireland that ‘it hath been a usual Policy with some other Governments, to keep a strict Hand over their Colonys … but the Government of England hath not dealt so hardly by you, and doubtless it will always be in your Interests to prevent the giving any Occasion to distrust your Fidelity, and to think it may be needful to treat you with more Caution’.74 Sparing the rod might have been spoiling the child as far as Clement was concerned, the implication being that the Anglicans of Ireland might soon be in need of some severe discipline if they kept up an insistence on their maturity. England had a paternal right to demand ‘Obedience and Duty’ from her colonial children.75 This discourse confusingly mingled a claim to paternal rights (authority, monopoly of violence within the family, deference from the children) with a concomitant appropriation of the role of concerned mother: England was, after all, the ‘Mother Nation’ and ‘Supream Government’, a kind of parental composite.76 Clement is contemptuous of any questioning of English authority, pointing out that: When I was a Boy, I thought once that I had espy’d a fault in the performance of my Master’s, and I had the assurance to tell him on’t; he first fairly convinc’d me, that I had not taken the thing right, and then very gravely told me with a bent Brow, that ’twas more like my Boyish Confidence to find Faults where none were, than the Solidity of his stronger Judgement to commit such.77

The pamphlet returns repeatedly to the unbreakable and unquestionable authority of a father over his young children, and attacks Molyneux’s theories as examples of impudence rather than demonstrations of rational adult logic: [Molyneux argues that] because it was granted to Ireland to hold a Parliament within themselves, by their own Representatives, that therefore they ought not to be in any Subjection to the Parliament of England, wherein they have no Representatives … [However] A Father may grant his Son a great deal of Liberty, but he can never make any grant to divest himself of his paternal relation.78

Here Clement makes the case that England’s paternal authority over Ireland stretches into perpetuity and that growing up is never an option. Even if one day England were to grant some form of adult-like independence to Ireland, it could be easily revoked the next. For Clement, England will remain father and mother to Ireland forever. Any questioning of that authority should be dealt with first through an

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Introduction 15 affectionate but firm correction, and second, with a warning not to question in the future. Protests against this language were pointless, since the point of many of the pamphlets written against Molyneux was precisely that those in Ireland were children in essence. Whereas Clement had himself grown up, and was presumably no longer under the authority of his master, he gave no hint that Ireland could ever make such a break with infancy. William Attwood echoed Clement in maintaining that Ireland is ‘subjected to that Authority, which is, and must be absolute’.79 Attwood dismisses Molyneux’s claim that Irish parliamentary consent had to be given to all English legislation in order for it to operate fully, arguing that such a claim would have devastating implications in the domestic as well as the political realm since, ‘if it were [true], the Sons could not be bound by those Laws which their Fathers chose’.80 Father, and even Mother, knows best in ordering the affairs of the family, so that even if ‘a Colony be settled abroad’, the legislature of the ‘Mother Countrey’ can still issue orders, can still ‘bind’ her children: ‘the main Body of this their Mother Country must not be hindred from acting what they shall find necessary for the Common Good, because of their absence’.81 While Attwood emphasises the natural love that Father and Mother England have for their obstreperous Irish child, such a love always comes at an extreme price. Indeed, in this discourse, ‘care becomes part of a subtle ideology that possesses the moral high ground, defies opposition and exercises a continual control over the other in the name of “what is best for them”’.82 Pamphleteers highlighted the political dangers that they considered would result from any disruption of parental authority. Clement insists that it is ‘incumbent upon a Mother Nation or Supream Government, to regulate all her Colonies or Members, so as that the Tranquility of the whole Empire may be best conserv’d; and perhaps they may be subject to forget the Obedience and Duty which must be perpetually owing from them to her’.83 Chaos would result in any successful challenge to colonial authority because such success would impact on the proper orderly conduct of domestic affairs. He berates the Anglican inhabitants of Ireland for complaining about the way their parent treats them, given that without England’s protection it is likely that their Catholic neighbours would have exterminated them by now: They have frequently needed Help, and had been many times destroy’d, or driven quite away, but for the constant Protection and Support they have always had from their Mother England; and they have ever receiv’d a Governour, and Directions for all the Principal Managements of their Government from her; these Circumstances can be no way agreeable to an Original Gothick Settlement; and since there’s nothing else left, if Mr. Molyneux won’t let them be a Colony of Old England, I see no room for them to take up any where, but in his Notion of the State of Nature, and then there will be need of reducing them again to Order as Wildmen.84

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The reference Clement makes here to England providing ‘protection’ to the Anglican community in Ireland, preventing it from complete destruction, reminds readers of the events of 1641 (to which we will return in Chapter 2), and also makes a threat: if supporters of Molyneux really believe themselves to be rulers of an independent kingdom, then it may be expedient to teach them a lesson by leaving them to the mercy of their Catholic neighbours, whose violent actions would quickly force the childlike Irish Anglicans to petition their mother country for help. William Molyneux began with a concern about limiting the relative constraints on his son Samuel’s actions and desires. With his Case of Ireland, Stated, he provoked a furious response which illustrated the extent to which many commentators wanted to extend, perpetuate and reinforce restraints on ‘childlike’ political communities that presumptuously wished for things (like self-governance) to which their parent believed they were not entitled. Molyneux is sincerely interested in children (like his own 4-year-old) as real material beings, and concerned about the best way to bring them up, to treat them and to think of them, and finds the work of Locke extremely useful as a new way to think about family relationships. A few years later, however, and outside the private correspondence between good friends, Molyneux found that protesting about parental restraints and rejecting or nuancing politically inflected parent–child analogies was dangerous. Molyneux’s work comes right in the middle of the period this book will examine, and it is shaped by two ideas that compete with each other through these two centuries: Molyneux’s optimistic confidence in the agency of the child and the childlike clashes with Locke’s anxiety about the precocity of the child in wanting things it shouldn’t just because their elder sibling has these things already, and the outrage felt by Clement, Attwood and Davenant at childish presumption. This anxiety about the child, and what they might do if any power were to be granted to them, is partly generated by what is possibly the most influential and consequential idea about children in Western thought, and one which had taken a firm hold in the Anglican community in Ireland by the start of the seventeenth century: the idea that children are totally depraved.

Notes 1 William Molyneux to John Locke, 12 August 1693. Some Familiar Letters Between Mr. Locke and Several of His Friends (London: Printed for A. and J. Churchill, 1708), 52. 2 William Molyneux, A treatise of dioptricks in two parts: wherein the various effects and appearances of spherick glasses, both convex and concave, single

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Introduction 17 and combined, in telescopes and microscopes, together with their usefulness in many concerns of humane life, are explained (London: Printed for Benjamin Tooke, 1692), Dedicatory Epistle to the Illustrious Royal Society. 3 John Locke, to William Molyneux, 16 July 1692. Some Familiar Letters, 2. 4 William Molyneux to John Locke, 2 March 1692. Some Familiar Letters, 34. 5 Thomas Molyneux, doctor, natural historian and leading Dublin intellectual, had become friendly with Locke in Leiden, while he was on a tour of Europe, and Locke was in exile from England because of the accession of James II. 6 Molyneux to Locke, 2 March 1692. Some Familiar Letters, 35. 7 Molyneux to Locke, 12 August 1693. Some Familiar Letters, 49–50. 8 Ibid., 50. 9 Ibid., 51. Molyneux’s flexible attitude to very young children contrasts in a striking way with that of Maria Edgeworth, almost a century later, where she explains that in her opinion parents should enforce great ‘strictness’ in their treatment of children before the ages of 5 or 6, since ‘if there is anything refractory or rebellious in the disposition, that is the time to repress it, & to substitute good habits, obedience, attention & respect towards superiors’. Maria Edgeworth to Charlotte Sneyd, 19 October 1780. Quoted in Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 51. 10 Molyneux to Locke, 12 August 1693, Some Familiar Letters, 51. 11 Ibid., 52. 12 Not the first or the last time, when child-rearing theory meets child-rearing practice, the results are rather unsatisfactory. For a great survey of advice manuals, see Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from Locke to Gina Ford (London: Francis Lincoln, 2007). 13 For Locke’s importance to eighteenth-century Irish philosophy, see Patrick Kelly, ‘Perceptions of Locke in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 89C (1989), 17–35. Sections of Some Thoughts Concerning Education were also included in the 1734 Dublin reprint of Samuel Richardson’s The Apprentices’ Vade Mecum. See Christine Gerrard, ‘What the Women of Dublin Did with John Locke’, in Kenneth L. Pearce and Takhara Oda (eds), Irish Philosophy in the Age of Berkeley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 179–80. 14 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Dublin: Will Forrest in Hoey’s Alley, 1728), 324. 15 Quoted in Gerrard, ‘What the Women’, 186, 171–2. 16 Gerrard, ‘What the Women’, 175. 17 Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. Begun by Himself and Concluded by his Daughter Maria Edgeworth (London: Printed for R. Hunter, 1820), I, 107–8. 18 For an examination of RLE’s educational ideas, see Tony Lyons, The Education Work of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Irish Educator and Inventor, 1744–1817 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). 19 According to Locke, children should wear very loose clothing so that ‘Nature’ can ‘fashion the Body as she thinks best’, and go barefoot, so that ‘those who

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have been bred nicely, will wish, he had, with the poor People’s children, gone bare-foot; who, by that Means, come to be so reconciled by Custom, to Wet their Feet, that they take no more Cold or Harm by it, than if they were wet in their Hands’. Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 12, 6. 20 Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 3. 21 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 163. 22 Erica Burman, ‘Fanon’s other children: psychopolitical and pedagogical implications’, Race, Ethnicity and Education, 20:1 (2016), 43. 23 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (New York: Longman, 1995), 1–2. As the African American Studies scholar, Robin Bernstein, points out, Childhood Studies has ‘reached an unsatisfying détente with a model in which “imagined” childhood shapes the lived experiences of “real” juveniles, who respond by unevenly colluding in or resisting their construction as “children”’, and the tensions between ideas and realities will be taken into account in this study as well. ‘Childhood as Performance’, in Anna Mae Duane (ed.), The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 203. 24 See also Burman, ‘Fanon’s other children’. 25 In many of the best histories of the Irish eighteenth century, for example, the index has no entry on either ‘children’ or ‘childhood’. See, for example, Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2009); S. J. Connolly, Divided Kingdom, 1630–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Richard Bourke and Ian McBride (eds), Princeton History of Modern Ireland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 26 See, for example, Anthony Fletcher, Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004). 27 Maria Luddy and James M. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Maria Luddy and James M. Smith (eds), Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), 16. This admirable collection contains only one essay that deals extensively with the child prior to the nineteenth century, Mary O’Dowd’s ‘Early modern Ireland and the history of the child’, 29–45. 28 There has been a particular focus on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in twentieth-century Ireland. See Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, Suffer the Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (London: New Island Books, 2000); Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). For an analysis of the representation of twentieth-century Irish childhood poverty, see Margot Gayle Backus, ‘“The Children of the Nation?”: Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913’, Éire-Ireland, 44:2 (2009), 118–46.

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Introduction 19 29 Mary Shine Thompson, ‘Jonathan Swift’s Childhoods’, Éire-Ireland, 44:1&2 (2009), 10. 30 Anna French, Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 2. 31 Anne Markey, ‘Irish Children’s Books, 1696–1810: Importation, Exportation and the Beginnings of Irish Children’s Literature’, in Keith O’Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte (eds), Children’s Literature Collections: Approaches to Research (London: Palgrave, 2017), 33–55. 32 The main subject of Chapter 4 here. 33 Clíona Ó Gallchoir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition? Early Irish Fiction and the Construction of the Child’, in Moyra Haslett (ed.), Irish Literature in Transition, 1700–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 343. 34 Anne Markey, ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 9:2 (Spring 2016), 253, 248. 35 Or, as he famously puts it, ‘In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist.’ Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962), 128. 36 For an early critique, see Adrian Wilson, ‘The Infancy of The History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès’, History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, 19:2 (1980), 132–53. 37 There is a very useful discussion of the historiographical debate about the ‘discovery’ or ‘invention’ of childhood in Anna Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6–7. 38 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 59. 39 J. H. Plumb, ‘The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 67 (1975), 64–95. 40 Or even ‘discovered’. 41 David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, ‘Introduction’, in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789– 1913 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xxxviii. 42 John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770 to the Present (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 1. 43 Quoted in Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 48–9. 44 See also Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England: 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 21. 45 Mary O’Dowd, ‘Early modern Ireland’, 33. Ludmilla Jordanova convincingly argues that ‘definitions of the child are locally not biologically forged, and accordingly historians have no stable subjects for study’. ‘New Worlds for Children in the Eighteenth Century: Problems of Historical Interpretation’, History of the Human Sciences, 3:1 (1990), 79. 46 French, Children of Wrath, 13. 47 Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 62 (1976), 205–48. For a good survey of attempts to define early modern childhood, see Anna French, ‘Locating the early modern child’,

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in Anna French (ed.), Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2020), 3–15. 48 John Locke to William Molyneux, 23 August 1693, Some Familiar Letters, 59. 49 Ibid. 50 William Molyneux to John Locke, 16 September 1893, Some Familiar Letters, 65. 51 Kiberd argues that in the nineteenth century, in particular, the Irish were ‘treated in the English media as childlike’. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), 104. 52 Though it didn’t end then. Edith Balfour, in the early twentieth century, complained that ‘[The native Irish] are like children still listening to old fairy stories … They are like children who are afraid to walk alone, who play with fire, who are helpless; like children who will not grow up.’ Quoted in L. P. Curtis, Jr, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, CT: University of Bridgeport Press, 1968), 53. 53 Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, ‘Family Metaphors: The Language of an Independence Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25:1 (1983), 154–5. 54 William Molyneux, Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018), 91. 55 Ibid., 92. 56 [John Locke], Two Treatises of Government: In the former, The false Principles, and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, And his Followers are Detected and Overthrown. The latter is an Essay concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government (London: Printed for Awnsham Churchill, 1689, dated 1690), 423–4. See Patrick Kelly, ‘Recasting a Tradition: William Molyneux and the Sources of The Case of Ireland … Stated (1698)’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98. By invoking Locke, and ‘revealing’ him to be the author of the Two Treatises of Government, Molyneux put a strain on their relationship, made more acute by the fact that, particularly with regard to the issue of the exportation of Irish wool, Locke did not actually agree with the position adopted by his friend. As Patrick Kelly puts it in the most comprehensive analysis of the relationship: ‘Locke’s west country background and commitment to a commercial system in which the interests of the mother country would predominate at the expense of Ireland, Scotland and the colonies led him to favour the suppression of Irish competition with the English woollen industry.’ ‘Locke and Molyneux: the anatomy of a friendship’, Hermathena, 126 (1979), 45. 57 James Woods, ‘William Molyneux and the Politics of Friendship’, EighteenthCentury Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 30 (2015), 22. 58 Ibid., 24. Molyneux, Case, 94. As well as relations of family and friendship, Molyneux also uses the metaphor of neighbourliness, strategically claiming that the English parliament would never purposely do anything that ‘might seem to have the least Tendency to Hardship on their Neighbours’, 103. 59 Ian McBride, ‘The case of Ireland (1698) in context: William Molyneux and his critics’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture,

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Introduction 21 History, Literature, 118C (2018), 215. There were a number of pamphlets published in response to Molyneux, including: William Atwood, The History, and Reasons, of the Dependency of Ireland upon the Imperial Crown of the Kingdom of England (1698); John Cary, A Vindication of the Parliament of England: in answer to a book, written by William Molyneux (1698); Charles Leslie, Considerations of Importance to Ireland: In a Letter to a member of parliament there; upon occasion of Mr. Molyneaux’s late book (1698); and Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods of making the People gainers in the Balance of Trade (1699). 60 Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Protestant Nation’, Éire-Ireland 26:2 (1991), 14–15. 61 C.C. Ludington, ‘From Ancient Constitution to British Empire: William Atwood and the Imperial Crown of England’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245. 62 William Atwood, The History, and Reasons, of the Dependency of Ireland upon the Imperial Crown of the Kingdom of England. Rectifying Mr. Molineux’s State of The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England (London: Printed for Dan. Brown, 1698), 10. 63 This pamphlet was published anonymously, and different scholars attributed it to different figures, but it has now been established that Clement was the author. See Marie Léoutre, ‘Contesting and upholding the rights of the Irish Parliament in 1698: the arguments of William Molyneux and Simon Clement’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 34:1 (2014), 25–6. 64 [Simon Clement], An Answer to Mr. Molyneux, His case of Ireland’s being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated: and His Dangerous Notion of Ireland’s being under no Subordination to the Parliamentary Authority of England Refuted; by Reasoning from his own Arguments and Authorities (London: Richard Parker, 1698), 7, 13. 65 Ibid., 9. 66 Ibid. 67 Charles Davenant, An Essay Upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade. Treating of these Heads, viz. Of the People of England. Of the Land of England, and its Product. Of our Payments to the Publick, and in what manner the Ballance of Trade may be thereby affected. That a Country cannot increase in Wealth and Power but by private Men doing their Duty to the Publick, and but by a steady Course of Honesty and Wisdom, in such as are trusted with the Administration of Affairs (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1699), 110. 68 Ibid., 125. 69 The term is, of course, controversial. It was applied to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish Protestant theorists of limited national independence by J. G. Simms in Colonial Nationalism, 1698–1776: Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland – Stated (Cork: Mercier Press, for Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, 1976). 70 [Clement], An Answer to Mr. Molyneux, Dedicatory Epistle.

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71 Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Centre: Constitutional Development in the Extended Politics of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 10. 72 [Clement], An Answer to Mr. Molyneux, 157. 73 Ibid., 166. 74 Ibid., Dedicatory Epistle, n.p. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 102–3. 78 Ibid., 65–6. 79 Atwood, History, and Reasons, of the Dependency of Ireland, Dedication, n.p. 80 Ibid., 195. 81 [Clement], An Answer to Mr. Molyneux, 65. 82 Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996), 41. 83 [Clement], An Answer to Mr. Molyneux, Dedicatory Epistle, n.p. 84 Ibid., 153.

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1 Bad to the bone: the evil child

This short chapter will examine the most influential version of the child in the early modern period (and, perhaps, the version that has the most influence in Western history), in which the child is considered naturally evil, an agent of Satan and an embodiment of total depravity. As Anna French memorably puts it, ‘Early modern children were not strangers to the diabolic’,1 and were believed to be corrupted and stained with original sin from the first moment of conception, with a natural love for malevolence and chaos whose moral perversity threatened the stability of both the individual family and society at large. That the child was presumed to be a menacing interloper or emissary of evil in post-Reformation Europe has been established by many historians of both childhood and the cultural impact of theological ideas, who have set out in detail how early modern thinkers made much of analogies between children and the father of sin.2 English Puritans3 looked back at childhood, not with nostalgia or a desire to relive their youthful glories, but with horror and relief at having survived that physically and morally precarious age. The Puritan theology of the child was important for Anglican thinking about childhood in early modern Ireland as well, and the chapter will examine important treatments of the ‘evil child’ in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Theologians and ecclesiastics in Ireland were certainly involved in the theological conversation about the meaning of the child, and depended heavily on ideas of natural depravity and corruption. The degree to which a full-blown ‘theology of the child’ can be extrapolated from the writings of Irish theologians and ecclesiastics beyond a clear sense of the newborn as a degenerate creature in need of immediate remedial assistance from both his parents and society more generally is arguable, but the ‘child of wrath’ is certainly basic to much of the thinking found in sermons and pamphlets by important figures in the Irish Church in this period. While much scholarly work has been carried out on English and American Puritan discussion of childhood, the intensity of the emphasis on the malignancy and corruption of the child in seventeenth-century Ireland has not been registered

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until now. This chapter will consider the representations of childhood in the writings of leading figures in the Church of Ireland, such as James Ussher, Richard Olmstead, Stephen Jerome and Henry Leslie, as well as the Irish Articles of 1615 (the Church of Ireland’s confession of faith). I will argue that the austerity of the Puritanism that found expression in the Ireland required an emphasis on the moral corruption of the newborn infant, and an extension of the discourse of corrupt childhood to cover the entire Anglican community. It is against this deeply defective child of wrath that later changes to the discourses of childhood in Ireland can be measured. Childhood has had a great deal of good press over the last three centuries, even if the commonplace adage (usually misattributed to George Bernard Shaw) has it that youth itself is wasted on the young. Contemporary attempts to sustain or recapture youth have not only fuelled very real, and very profitable industries, but many scholars of children’s literature have argued that much of that ‘sentimental canon’ depends on adult feelings of wistful longing and nostalgia for a period of life they will (sadly!) never retrieve.4 The influential theorist Jacqueline Rose has argued that, historically speaking, ‘there is a continuity in children’s fiction which runs from [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau up to and beyond Peter Pan to Alan Garner, in which the child is constantly set up as the site of a lost truth and/or moment in history’.5 This sweeping claim covers a great deal of historical ground – from 1762, when Émile first appeared, to the 1970s, when the best work by Garner was being published. In her analysis of the ‘impossibility of children’s fiction’, Rose posits a persistent failure in literature supposedly ‘about’ or ‘for’ the child in which the lived reality of those defined as children is elided in favour of a mythology of childhood innocence which serves the needs and desires of adults. For Rose, childhood has, in the modern period, served as that period upon which the adult looks back as vanished, forsaken, both a lost state of being and a home irretrievable, no matter how many inner children the adult is convinced lies deep within them waiting to be set free. Indeed, Rose insists, since the eighteenth century, this lost moment has been increasingly configured in wistful terms as a period of innocence, of spontaneity, of a purity no longer fully accessible to the mature and jaded adult consciousness. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, then, much (though by no means all) discussion of childhood has imagined it as a kind of Eden always on the verge of the Fall. This historical argument has proved extremely persuasive in children’s literature studies, although there has been some resistance to its generalising tendencies,6 but even supposing we could take it as broadly true, it still leaves a great deal of history before the 1760s for which to account. It is important to recognise that the lost ‘moment’ or

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‘truth’ embodied by the infant has not traditionally been looked back on with the intensity of longing by those who have left it behind. After all, even when a belief in absolute childhood innocence held most sway (probably the mid-twentieth century), not everyone was persuaded that the little tykes came into this world trailing heavenly clouds of glory. Certainly, the dominant thinking about childhood ‘before Rousseau’, or before the Romantic poets, treated it as a state rather less than ideal. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that for much of Western history, far from being a repository of unspotted virtue whose state of naivety should be preserved as long as possible, the child was taken to be a dangerous miasma, a potential pollutant brim-full of natural depravity and very close to an active evil in the world. Historians of childhood in Western Europe have argued that two versions of the child have been at perpetual war with each other. If from one perspective the child possesses an ‘incapacity for evil’ and embodies wholesome if vulnerable integrity, for a much more revered and long-established tradition, the child has an ‘incapacity for good’, and is a creature of iniquity and malice.7 Rather strangely, Marina Warner argues that it is the contemporary West which fears the child the most, insisting that ‘the Child has never been seen as such a menacing enemy as today. Never before have children been so saturated with all the power of projected monstrousness to excite repulsion – and even terror.’ 8 However, even a glance at the ways in which children and childhood were described in the period prior to the mid seventeenth century would dispel any sense that fear of the child is particularly intense today. Hugh Cunningham quotes a striking German sermon of the 1520s which explains that ‘infant humans are inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness, idol worship, belief in magic, hostility, quarrelling, passion, anger, strife, dissension, factiousness, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony, and more’, a rather heady brew with which the responsible parent had to contend.9 Notoriously, rather than insisting that the child was a copy of Adam before he ate the apple, many seventeenthcentury thinkers, when they devoted any attention to childhood at all, made more of comparisons with the fallen angel against whose serpentine form Adam contended in the Garden of Eden, Satan. As Leah Sinanoglou Marcus argues, ‘Seventeenth-century Puritans, with their vehement insistence on the ravages of original sin, could not have been further from regarding childishness as any sort of idea.’ 10 Their version of the child was inherently negative, the dangerous flip-side of mature goodness. Childhood was posited in much Reformed theology as a period of sinful chaos within which the corrupt will held sway, and from which that child could be saved only through intense and intrusive interference by parents and the general community.11 The child was a creature of the will, and this will was a perverted one which

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needed to be straightened out as soon as possible – and certainly before the child could attain the physical capacity to carry into effect their depraved desires and wreak havoc. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformation thinkers inherited from both St Augustine and John Calvin an extremely unenthusiastic view of the state of the newborn child. Augustine argued that as a creature of the will, even the infant was a natural sinner. The child was blameless of direct sin, but this was only due to his physical rather than psychic helplessness and dependency: he was full of dreadful desires and was extremely eager to act on them, prevented from committing all kinds of dreadful things only by lack of physical maturity.12 His soul was as black with sin as that of the most unrepentant malefactor. Even babies were little terrors, as evidenced by their infuriating tendency to cry and fuss and disrupt the order of the household.13 Conceived through sinful ‘concupiscence’, the baby was polluted by the lust of his parents, and carried within him the most powerful sexual urges. Augustine is extremely judgemental about his own infancy, and admonishes himself for crying so much, considering it evidence of boyish narcissism: What sin did I then have? … Was it wrong that in tears I greedily opened my mouth wide to suck the breasts? … At the time of my infancy I must have acted reprehensibly; but since I could not understand the person who admonished me, neither custom nor reason allowed me to be reprehended … So the feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant’s mind.14

Augustine was writing against one of the most alluring heresies of the early Christian centuries, Pelagius’ claim that the fall of Adam and Eve did not corrupt the human race since, he reasoned, were we all infected from birth we could never be expected to keep the commandments. Augustine was rather more downbeat in his assessment of human self-sufficiency. The child emerges from his spiritual anthropology as what the sociologist Chris Jenks terms a ‘Dionysian’ creature. According to this view, ‘children … enter the world as a wilful material force, they are impish and harbour a potential evil. This primal force will be mobilised if, in any part, the adult world should allow them to stray away from the appropriate path that the blueprint of human culture has provided for them.’ 15 Jenks draws a comparison between this chaotic little goblin and the Greek god of wine, pleasure, nature and revelry, the polar opposite of the Apollonian cherub, the emissary of goodness, found in the Pelagian strain of European thinking (and to which we will return in Chapter 2).16 While thinking about the effects and implications of original sin fluctuated in the medieval period, the Reformer John Calvin re-emphasised Augustinian concerns in the sixteenth century. In his seminal (though controversial)

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treatment of the early modern family, Lawrence Stone argues that the Reformation intensified the traditional understanding of the child as a creature tainted by original sin, and that this intensification translated into a powerful drive to suppress the inherent sinfulness of even the newborn baby.17 The biological and ontological affliction of these malevolent menaces is basic and complete – theirs is a malice that is not ‘caused’ by anything other than their very existence. As Steven Bruhm emphasises, for children who are considered to be thoroughly infected by sin, ‘evil essence precedes existence’.18 Indeed, it is as demonic monsters inscribed with sinful desire that Reformers considered even their own children, configuring them as prime examples of what the culture critic Sabine Büssing describes as the ‘childas-monster’, creatures not just complicit in evil but active (and enthusiastic) agents of it.19 Reformers of all persuasions considered the child as ‘born with Original Sin, and that the only hope of holding it in check is by the most ruthless repression of the will and his total subordination to his parents, schoolmasters, and others in authority over him’.20 For Calvin, original sin is the ‘inheritably descending perverseness and corruption of our nature, poured abroad into all the parts of the soul’, a perversity that never rests, ‘never ceaseth in us, but continually bringeth forth new fruits, even the same workes of the flesh that we have before described: like as a burning furnace bloweth out flame and sparkles, or as a spring doth without ceasing cast out water’.21 Youthful exuberance and physical and intellectual incapacity were irrelevant to a true consideration of the sheer depth and culpability of the child for the sin that had its abode in his body. Although the newborn infant had not actually committed any sin himself, he was a host for an evil parasite, which acted as a virus of the soul which had the power to wipe out the unfortunate carrier: The very infants themselves, while they bring with them their own damnation from their mother’s wombe, are bound, not by another’s, but by their own fault. For though they have not as yet brought forth the fruits of their own iniquity, yet they have the seed thereof enclosed within them: yea, their whole nature is a certain seed of sin: therefore it cannot be but hateful and abominable to God.22

The extent of this childhood depravity was clearly articulated in the work of many important Puritan thinkers. For example, William Gouge’s influential Short Catechisme of 1615 described original sin as ‘that corruption of nature, wherein all are conceived and born … [B]y nature wee are dead in sinne, and so no more able to helpe ourselves than dead men.’ 23 Although parents’ attitudes to their own children in this period can be difficult to recover, there are many instances where their sense of despair

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at their child’s corruption is expressed directly. In treating of the newborn child, the English Puritan Richard Baxter did not rhapsodise on the miracle of nature but worried about the diseased creature upon which he gazed: Where did Gods Art that curious Body form? As in a Dunghil, even in Natures sink, Though Skin and Cloathing now do it Adorn; ’Twas bred between the Dung and Urins stink. What was it made of, but the Mothers Food? Curdled and quickned by the Makers pow’r, And there it lay in darkness, filth, and blood; Unmeet for sight till Births appointed hour. In pain and danger then it is brought forth, A speechless, helpless, and polluted thing; Entring the World with crying at its Birth, Foretelling greater griefs which time will bring.24

In his directions to parents, Baxter cautioned them to ‘understand and lament the corrupted and miserable state’ of their children, ‘which’ (and here is the stinger) ‘they have derived from you’.25 The newborn child did not only lie in filth but was an expression of the moral filthiness of matter. Children were considered particularly liable to the sins of pride and insubordination, the very transgressions which caused the Fall,26 and as the incarnation of the sinful (not prelapsarian) Adam rather than the virtuous Christ, and all possible attempts had to be made to transform the child into the adult as quickly as possible. Childish ‘irrationalism’ was read as the clearest signifier of this sinfulness – the child was, in fact, incapable of reason in the state of nature. Despite this tendency of early modern thinking to dwell on the image of the ‘child of wrath’, a widespread belief that children were profoundly infected with original sin did not mean that parents did not, for that reason, love their children or that they necessarily treated them badly. For example, the New England Congregationalist theologian Jonathan Edwards is now considered to be one of the most zealous and fervent defenders of the doctrine of original sin in the eighteenth century, famous for fulminating that ‘as innocent as children seem to be to us, if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God’s eyes, but are young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers’. However, he also counselled parents to treat their children carefully, and bring them up in a spirit of lovingkindness.27 Moreover, and perhaps unsurprisingly, parents could react rather unappreciatively to being told that their newly arrived and beloved babe was in fact an agent of the devil and the carrier of a sinful and deadly virus. Richard Baxter might have accepted that theological view of his own children, but his straightforward

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explanations of the implications of the puritan understanding of original sin did not win him many supporters in his ministry. In A Treatise of Conversion (1657), he recounts how ‘an Out-cry was once against me in this town, for saying, that children by nature, considered as sinful and unsanctified, were as hateful in the eyes of God, as any Toads or Serpents are in ours; so that the people railed at me as I went along the streets’.28 Believing in the natural depravity of children in the abstract and being confronted by someone who insists on telling you that your own child is a malevolent toad destined to go to Hell and despised by their Creator are two very different experiences. Indeed, the impact of ecclesiastical and theological ideas on flesh-and-blood parents and their children has been a subject of considerable controversy in early modern studies, especially in places where the empirical evidence is sparse or lacking.29 That Baxter persisted in preaching the unwelcome (and perhaps unasked for) news of the evil of the child in the face of protest and even physical threat is, however, a powerful demonstration of just how central it was in the theology to which he subscribed. In cultures influenced by Puritan theology, particularly where a commitment to double predestination is evident (a belief, that is, in the predestination of the elect and the reprobate), the Dionysian child is a source of considerable discomfort, as he has the potential to cause chaos and bring destruction wherever he is found, and it is up to parents and the state to put severe limits on the freedom allowed to him. The attention of historians of childhood has been understandably focused on experiences of and thinking about early modern childhood in the work of English and American Reformers. The Reformed treatment of the idea of the child in Ireland has been relatively neglected, and this section of the chapter will examine the ways in which theologians and ecclesiastics in the Church of Ireland were fully committed to an extremely strict and staunchly Puritan interpretation of total childhood depravity.30 While the nature of childhood is rarely contemplated at length in the extant writings of major figures in the Church of Ireland in this period, it is notable that when the child does come into view, it is explicitly as the ‘child of wrath’ whose corruption is complete, and there is no disputing the absolute commitment to this version of the child in what the historian Alan Ford calls the ‘working theology’ of the clergy.31 Whether or not the early seventeenth-century Church of Ireland could be called a ‘puritan church’ is a matter of considerable historiographical dispute, but certainly, puritan ideas, personnel and ideological commitments are in evidence throughout the institution.32 Many of its ministers had left England because they found the Church there far too tolerant of Catholic beliefs and practices, and wanted to find a more uncontaminated and authentic

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expression of the reforming spirit. Those Church of Ireland clergymen who were trained in Ireland attended the newly established, and ‘quite clearly Calvinist’, Trinity College Dublin,33 which further spread Puritan thinking through an enclave that already felt under siege, given that the majority of the population were Catholics who did not appear open to conversion, and whose opposition to the ‘Protestantising’ of the country was being shored up by the arrival of the Jesuits, helping to make Ireland a ‘bastion of Counter-Reformation Catholicism’.34 Indeed, Ford persuasively argues that, even when clergy arrived in Ireland from elsewhere who were not intensely Puritan in their thinking, this quickly changed after a short period of coming to terms with the Church’s minority position in a Catholic country, and the strength and vehemence of the opposition posed by the Catholic Church to any evangelical efforts.35 These factors helped to shape the Irish Church into a body so separate and distinct from the more traditionalist and tolerant Church of England that, in 1615, it felt confident enough to draft its own articles of faith – articles which clearly express a strict understanding of the effects of original sin on the human race. A rejection of Pelagianism and a firm and unambiguous restatement of an Augustinian understanding of original sin and its dramatic effects on the human race from childhood is certainly explicit in the Irish Articles, which historians contend is a central document in understanding the distinctly Puritan nature of Irish Anglicanism.36 The Irish Articles, probably drawn up by James Ussher, who was then working in Trinity College Dublin, and who had been among the first graduates of the university, are much more explicit and austere in their puritanism than the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), and far more dependent on Augustine’s theology of grace. As Crawford Gribben argues, the Irish Articles are ‘vigorously Calvinistic and, crucially, were the first European confession of faith to formally identify the Antichrist as the Pope’.37 The Irish Articles were drawn up in an attempt to find a set of propositions that would avoid making explicit the divisions in Irish Protestantism between the established and the dissenting churches. The need for Protestant unity was in part a response to the rise of Arminianism in the 1620s and 1630. Arminianism, derived from the sixteenth-century teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, watered down the doctrine of original sin and man’s helplessness in the face of his own sinful corruption, and stressed ‘prevenient grace’ instead, the ability of individuals to actively choose between good and evil (for the Calvinist, such a choice was impossible without God), as well as undermining belief in the division between the elect and the reprobate. As Ford explains, Arminian theology ‘rejected the cast-iron certainties of Calvinist double-predestination and sought to rescue human free will from its Augustinian cul-de-sac’,38 and

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therefore, for a Church surrounded by recalcitrant reprobates who showed few signs of being open to conversion, was a clear and present danger to the integrity of Protestantism in Ireland. The Articles themselves are profoundly anti-Catholic, explicitly identifying the Pope as the ‘man of sin’, but they also emphasise the importance of original sin and total depravity.39 According to Article Twenty-Three: Original sin standeth not in the imitation of Adam (as the Pelagians dream), but is the fault and corruption of the nature of every person that naturally is engendered and propagated from Adam: whereby it cometh to pass that man is deprived of original righteousness, and by nature is bent unto sin. And therefore, in every person born into the world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.40

Importantly, if this article is compared to the analogous treatment of original sin in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the austerity of the Irish interpretation can be highlighted. Whereas the Thirty-Nine Articles hold that ‘man is very far gone from original righteousness’, the Irish Articles aver that ‘man is deprived of original righteousness’. Article Twenty-Four changes the description of original sin as an ‘infection of nature’ in the Thirty-Nine Articles into a ‘corruption of nature’.41 In a comparison of the two confessions, Colm Lennon concludes that ‘there was a much greater emphasis, spread over seven articles, on the Calvinist tenet of predestination: God’s eternal decree of salvation for certain numbers of the just (which was the limit of the English Articles’ profession) was balanced by that of reprobation of fixed numbers of the damned, or double predestination’.42 The forcefully Calvinist inflection of the Irish Articles is echoed in the sermons of important figures in the Church of Ireland in the first half of the seventeenth century. In the most thorough examination of the extant published sermons, Alan Ford has stressed the significance of the ‘firmly predestinarian line’ that threads its way through them, despite having been delivered on different occasions, by different personalities, in many different years. Ford argues that the consistency in the theological position adopted is partly generated by the feeling of many that there was an urgent need for intellectual clarity in the Irish Church in the face of a hostile Catholic majority and internal challenges to puritan strictness. Here I will briefly examine the published work of five noteworthy figures in the Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century: Stephen Jerome, Christopher Hampton, Henry Leslie, Richard Olmstead and James Ussher. While this is a small number of churchmen, these are the figures cited by the best historians of the period as representative of the general thinking of the Church of Ireland. Alan Ford, for example, concludes that far from being

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‘untypical of the corpus of printed sources for Irish theology’, the published work of these men suggests a more general ‘Calvinist consensus on theological matters’, and therefore it is ‘justifiable’ to take their work as ‘falling within the mainstream of the Church of Ireland’.43 Stephen Jerome, the Cambridge-educated chaplain to Richard Boyle, the earl of Cork,44 emphasised in a sermon in 1624 that, although there were many differences between the Protestant denominations, they were all united against the triple threats of Papism, Pelagianism and Arminanism.45 In The threefold state of man upon earth (1620), which discusses the ‘misery of man’s fall’, Christopher Hampton, the primate of the reformed church in Ireland and archbishop of Armagh,46 stresses that Adam sinned, not as a ‘private man’, but as the ‘common root, or stocke of mankind; as a public person, and father of us all’. As the entire human race was ‘all enclosed in [Adam’s] loins when he sinned, hee branded us all with the prints and tincture of his rebellion’. Hampton emphatically confirms that ‘Whether Pelagius will or no … No one is free, not a childe of a day olde, though Anabaptists bee madde for it.’ He agrees with Augustine that even the ‘Saints children descend from their parents by carnall generation not spiritual regeneration’, and criticises the Catholic Church for de-emphasising the effects of original sin, making it ‘a light and superficial accident, easily removed’ in the false sacrament of confession.47 Earlier, in an important sermon delivered by Hampton to the second session of the parliament which passed the Irish Articles, he dwells on the division between the elect and the reprobate: The visible Church hath in it selfe, two different sorts of people: the one make an outward bare profession onely; the other by inward election, are firmely joyned unto Christ. The first are in the visible Church alone, but not of the Church invisible: They participate in the outward Sacraments of Christ, but not with the inward blessings of Christ; and so they may fall away: they may be in the Church, but not of the Church. They which are inwardly coupled to Christ by his election, and holy Spirit, cannot fall away from Christ & his church.

Hampton compares the established church, or the ‘true’ church, to a natural mother providing sustaining food for her children (the true believers, the children of grace), and describes the ‘false’ church, the Catholic Church, as a terrible, fairy-tale-like stepmother. Whereas ‘The true mother nourisheth her children healthfully with bread of life, and sincere milke of the Word: the other setteth before them quelques choses of humane inventions, and unsavory plants which our heavenly Father never planted.’ 48 Hampton is profoundly disturbed by the divisions within the true Church as he wishes it to resemble the unified ‘triumphant congregation or citie of Angels and

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Saints in heaven. Amongst whom, nothing is more peculiar and proper then …, that happy agreement and consent which admitteth no strife, no difference.’ The true Church is as harmonious as a home with a good mother at its centre. He warns against allowing heresies and bad practices to thrive because the church faithful are like children with undeveloped minds: ‘But when they which should extinguish offences, bestow their thoughts and indevors to nourish them; impressions of doubts or scruples will be wrought in soft or tender minds easily: and it is not possible to remove them againe, without much difficultie and trouble.’ 49 Here Hampton’s doubts about the efficacy of Catholic baptism for the salvation of the souls of native Irish children can be felt, but also his concern that the children of the true Church will be raised in righteousness, and not led astray by educators who inculcate suspicion rather than certainty in the malleable minds of the faithful. If the unbaptised child is a corrupt, postlapsarian Adam ready and willing to contaminate everyone around them, baptism was, at least, a partially effective vaccine providing some level of immunity to the effects of original sin. It should be emphasised, however, that the status of the sacrament of baptism was a matter of some contention in Reform theology. In the medieval church, the innocence of the post-baptismal child was basic to the economy of salvation. The historian of medieval childhood, Shulamith Shahar, points out that ‘once baptised, the child was seen [to medieval thinkers] as sweet, pure and innocent’. Though a creature of lust, a child of wrath before baptism, afterwards she was transformed and became ‘ignorant of both sexual lust and the meaning of death’.50 The child was saved through baptism, which provided a theological prophylactic against Satan’s power, and baptism translated each individual from the state of nature to that of grace. However, in a culture influenced by a commitment to a very strict understanding of predestination, ‘Victory over the Devil was no longer to be won at the font.’ 51 As Anna French details, the power of baptism had been severely reduced by the Reformation, with many theologians ‘viewing it as a “washing” or a “symbol”, rather than the moment when God, through the minister, tore the Devil out of the child. Post-Reformation, official theology told that children may be damned, if not chosen to be included amongst the elect, even if they had been baptised.’ 52 In Hampton’s sermon, the children of the true Church are indeed children of grace, being sustained with nourishing food by their ecclesiastical mother – but Catholic baptism has absolutely no positive after-effects on the children of the evil stepmother who is poisoning her adopted brood, which means they remain stuck in a state of profound sin. Most importantly, perhaps, given his enormous influence on the Irish Church for generations, Archbishop James Ussher,53 in A Body of Divinitie

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(1645), warns against being deceived by the apparently innocent faces of little children, arguing that such deception leads only to Pelagianism: Seeing our nakednesse commeth by sin, and is a fruit thereof, it may seem that little infants have no sinne, because they are not ashamed. So indeed doe the Pelagian hereticks reason; but they consider not that the want of that feeling is for the want of the use of reason; and because they doe not discerne between being naked and clothed.54

To the question of whether ‘this corruption of nature’ is present in all the children of Adam, Ussher affirms that ‘Yea, in all and every one that are meer men’: the same transgression of our first parents, by the most righteous Judgement of God, we are conceived in sin, and born in iniquity, and unto misery, Ps. 51. 5. for men are not now born as Adam was created, but death doth reign over them also that sinned not after the like manner of the transgression of Adam, Rom. 5. 14. that is, over infants, who are born in sin, & not by imitation, but by an inherent corruption of sin.55

In an earlier dispute about the ‘true intent and extent of Christ’s death, and satisfaction upon the Cross’, in 1617 Ussher limits the effects of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and argues that while ‘in one respect Christ might have been said to die for all, so in another respect [he might] truly [be] said not to have died for all’, after which he inveighs against Catholicism and Arminianism.56 The influence of Augustine and Calvin is evident throughout Ussher’s work, and he allows little or no agency to men in doing good of their own free will, and none whatsoever to children: ‘When we denie therefore that a naturall man hath any free will unto good, by a naturall man, wee understand one that is without Christ, and destitute of his renewing grace; by free-will … a thing that is in our owne power to doe; and by good, a Theologicall not a Philosophical good … a spirituall good and tending to salvation.’ 57 In the sermons of Henry Leslie, who was originally from Scotland and was trained in Aberdeen, but who from 1614 took up a variety of positions in the Irish church including being bishop of Down and Connor,58 the problem of man’s total depravity rears its ugly head repeatedly. Leslie preaches about the power of sin as an infectious disorder that has contaminated everyone since the Fall and is now running rampant, in which each individual encounter is a super-spreader event: ‘[sin] raigneth universally, like an Epidemicall disease that possesseth the whole bodie of the land’.59 Sin, he tells his congregation, was ‘conceived with thee’, and since conception ‘thou hast nourished [it] with pleasure’. The evidence of the existence of original sin can be found in childbirth itself, since ‘the Infant that hath beene layed onely nine Months, in the wombe of the Mother, is not delivered without

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paine’.60 In a later sermon, Leslie insists that while in baptism we become children of God, and are ‘born again’ into the ‘covenant of grace’, ‘wee have not this prerogative by our first birth’, and before baptism we are all ‘the children of wrath as saith the Apostle; the children of corruption saith Ish; the children of the Devill, saith our Saviour’.61 Like Augustine, Leslie emphasises the transmission of original sin down the generations since all are conceived in sexual congress, ‘by carnall generation’, which provides us with ‘our naturall being in the kingdome of this world’.62 Our spiritual being is supplied by the cleansing waters of baptism, and this helps the individual overcome his natural being – though it cannot guarantee victory in that war. So great is the corruption we inherit from our first father that Leslie considers that ‘we are not onley become rebellious children, but no children at all; for a little correction will not serve to restore us unto our former [prelapsarian] estate’.63 So corrupt is the human heart, even God Himself may not be able to break through, ‘our heart being as the scales of a Leviathan, who laughs at the shaking of the spear’.64 Stephen Jerome’s sermons circle around our ‘perfidious dispositions’, ‘our crooked natures’, our ‘rotten rebellious hearts’ and the need for constant vigilance against the rearing up of the natural man within us. Effectively, for Jerome, we remain children forever, and ‘The Lord knowes wee must as schoole-boyes bee kept at it, held to it, by discipline as well as doctrine.’ 65 For the child who continues to do wrong, even after baptism has theoretically made him a child of grace, there is always the rod of God. Leslie cautions his congregation that ‘when [God Almighty] takes a people in hand to school them … he begins with mild chastisements (but if these do not prevail) he proceeds to sharper corrections’.66 Richard Olmstead, graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and minister to a congregation in Clonenagh in Queen’s County, expands the metaphor of the Church as a perpetual child to cover the entire Irish Anglican community. He warns that like a father with recalcitrant children, ‘when the just and most almightie God begins to correct a Nation, and they stoop not nor bend under his correcting hand, hee will never desist ’til he bend or break them’.67 The language of both Jerome and Olmstead traps the Irish Anglican community into an everlasting schoolroom in which teaching, training and chastisement are all the time being meted out to a bunch of unruly schoolchildren. Jerome insists that God would deal with his children in the same way as a parent must deal with a breastfeeding infant: ‘our condition in that reference and relation wee have unto God, being significantly expressed by that reference … the weanling Child in his first footing to the hold of the Mother or the Nurse’.68 Unfortunately, because of ‘our crooked natures’, God must keep ‘oft times his dearest children … under the rod or ferula’.69 If the elect find life difficult at times, that was only to be expected since ‘God is more strict

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with his owne Children in this life, then with the reprobate.’ In phrases like this, Jerome advises his congregants to expect to find things tough and difficult in the future and not get too comfortable.70 These kinds of warnings helped to explain the tribulations Irish Anglicans had to suffer through living in Ireland, surrounded by a pulsating mass of Catholic reprobation. The majority Catholic population was not, after all, simply in political and theological disagreement with their Anglican and Dissenting neighbours: the Catholics were, like all children before baptism, enemies working as agents of the Antichrist. As Crawford Gribben points out, Irish Protestants thought of themselves ‘as a besieged remnant, a faithful elect in a nation which retained a superstitious allegiance to Rome. The reality of this situation dramatized the Irish protestant identity and was the basis for the unity of its reformed church.’ 71 ‘What think you of this island?’, Olmstead asks his listener: ‘Hath not the immortall God smitten it with warres & consumed them with famine, and may not we say with Jeremie, “sed non doluerunt” … ?’ 72 This question, it must be remembered, was posed in a period of relative calm in Ireland. These sermons regret what their speakers consider the miserable nature of the Anglican community in Ireland in the early years of the seventeenth century, convinced that God is punishing his ‘dearest’ and best in preparation for some greater glory. For Jerome, God is acting in the same way as a concerned parent acts in the best interests of their curious child: just as a ‘mother sometimes leaves a daring adventurous child, to goe without hold, till it fall and breake the nose, and cry, and bleed, that it should make more of the mother afterwards’.73 The wickedness in the heart of every child, even the child predestined to ultimate union with God, deserves complete and total punishment from a just ruler. The dearest of God’s children would have to learn to suffer the harshest of punishments so that their faith could be tested and purified. Through suffering, spiritual as well as physical adulthood could be finally achieved. Jerome had no idea, of course, that the sufferings of these children was about to increase catastrophically, when in the October of 1641 a rebellion broke out in Ulster, which quickly spread to the rest of the country, a rebellion characterised by bloody atrocity and the fear of complete extermination. The vulnerability of the Anglican community in Ireland was about to be tested to the limit.

Notes 1 French, Children of Wrath, 1. 2 See, in particular, Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 46–50; John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning, and Education,

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1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Michael Heyd, ‘Original Sin, the Struggle for Stability, and the Rise of Moral Individualism in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Philip Benedict and Myron P. Gutmann (eds), Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 197–233. James Boyce, Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western Mind (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2016). 3 This term is the subject of historiographical and theological controversy. It was originally used as a negative descriptor by opponents and detractors, but it later became commonly employed to refer to Protestants who did not consider the theological and ecclesiological reforms carried out by the Church of England to be sufficient. See J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 4–5. 4 For the idea that children’s literature is a ‘sentimental canon’, see Deborah Stevenson, ‘Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children’s Literature Canon or, the Drowning of The Water-Babies’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 21 (1997): 112–30. 5 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 43. 6 For the impact of Rose’s text on the field of Children’s Literature Studies, see the special issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 35:3 (2010). 7 David S. Grylls, Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in 19th Century Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), 24. 8 Marina Warner, Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (New York: Vintage, 1994), 56. She bases this view on the proliferation of images of the demonic child in contemporary culture. 9 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 49. 10 Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), 43. 11 Joseph E. Illick, ‘Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America’, in Lloyd De Mause (ed.), The History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988), 303–50. 12 Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 17–19. 13 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8, 9, 10. 14 Ibid., 9. 15 Jenks, Childhood, 71. 16 See also Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History (London: HarperOne, 2008). 17 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1979), 109. For a sharp response to Stone’s general analysis of the post-Reformation family, see Alan MacFarlane’s review in History & Theory, 18:1 (1979), 103–26.

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18 Steven Bruhm, ‘Nightmare on Sesame Street: or, the Self-Possessed Child’, Gothic Studies, 8:2 (2006), 102. That adults in modernity fear the otherness of children (as well as simultaneously loving children and wanting to protect them) is the argument of a number of Childhood Studies scholars. See, for example, Karen Renner, Evil Children in the Popular Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2015). For a good overview of these malevolent moppets, see Sue Walsh, ‘Gothic Children’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London-: Routledge, 2007), 183–91; Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014). 19 Sabine Büssing, Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), xvi–xvii. 20 Stone, The Family, 255. 21 John Calvin, The Institutions of the Christian Religion: In Four Books (Glasgow: Printed by John Bryce, and Archibald McLean, Junior, for Alexander Irvine, 1762), 104. See also Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 48. 22 Ibid. 23 William Gouge, A Short Catechisme, wherein are briefly laid down the fundamental Pronciples of the Christian religion (London: John Beale, 1615), 5, 6. See also Morgan, Godly Learning, 144–6. 24 Richard Baxter, Additions to the poetical fragments of Rich. Baxter written for himself and communicated to such as are more for serious verse than smooth (London: Printed for B. Simmons, 1683), 49. 25 Richard Baxter, ‘The Duties of Parents for their Children’, A Christian directory, or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience. Directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith; how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties; how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortifie every sin. In four parts (London: Printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673), Part 2, Chapter 10, 543. 26 Stone, The Family, 174. 27 Jonathan Edwards, ‘Some Thoughts concerning the Present Revival’ (1742), The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 394. Quoted by Katherine Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Marcia J. Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 303. 28 Richard Baxter, A Treatise of Conversion. Preached, and now published for the use of those that are strangers to a true conversion, especially the grossly ignorant and ungodly (London: Printed by R. White, for Nevill Simmons, 1657), 71. 29 See Diana Wood, ‘Preface’, Studies in Church History, 31, The Church and Childhood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), xi–xii. 30 For a study of ‘depravity and its limits’ see Alec Ryrie, ‘Protestants’, in Anna French (ed.), Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2020), 122–4.

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31 Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 206. 32 For recent discussion of this issue, see Colm Lennon, ‘Protestant Reformations, 1550–1641’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), vol. 2, 196–219. For an influential analysis, see Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1634’: a puritan church?’, in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), 52–68. 33 Ford, Protestant Reformation, 204. See also Ford’s ‘The Protestant Reformation in Ireland’, in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and Newcomers: The Making of Irish Colonial Society 1534–1641 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), 50–74. 34 Steven G. Ellis, ‘Economic problems of the church: why the Reformation failed in Ireland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 41 (1990), 259. 35 Ford, Protestant Reformation, 204–7. 36 See especially Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 85–103. 37 Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishmen: Theological Debate in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8. See also Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1634’. 38 Ford, James Ussher, 106–7. See also Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 92. For a description of the Arminian controversy in Europe, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 1999), 373–7. 39 Crawford Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the death of Jesus Christ’, The Seventeenth Century, 20:1 (2005), 58. 40 The Irish Articles are helpfully reprinted at https://reformed.org/historic-confessions. This same theological model is found in the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) and the Independent’s Savoy Declaration (1658). For an important discussion, see Gribben, God’s Irishmen, 91. 41 The Irish Articles of Religion (1615). https://reformed.org/historic-confessions. 42 Lennon, ‘Protestant Reformations’, 207. 43 Ford, Protestant Reformation, 204. See also Ford, ‘The Protestant Reformation in Ireland’; Marc Caball, ‘Providence and Exile in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 29:114 (1994), 182–7. 44 Alan Ford, ‘Stephen Jerome’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://dib. cambridge.org. 45 Stephen Jerome, Irelands iubilee, or ioyes Io-pæan, for Prince Charles his welcome home: With the blessings of great Brittaine, her Dangers, Deliverances, Dignities from God, and Duties to God, pressed and expressed. More particularly, Talloughs Triumphals, with the Congratulations of the adjoyning English Plantations in the province of Munster in Ireland, for the preservation of their Mother England in the powder Treason, and the reduction of their Prince from Spaine, solemnized

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(as by other festivities) by publike Sermons, on the feastes on Simon & Iude the 5. of November last, Anno Domini. 1623 (Dublin: Printed for the Societe of Stationers, 1624), 180. 46 Judy Barry, ‘Christopher Hampton’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https:// dib.cambridge.org. 47 Christopher Hampton, The threefold state of man upon earth; conteyning, The glorie of his Creation, The miserie of his Fall, And The sweete mysterie of his Reparation. Discussed in three severall sermons at the Court (Dublin: Printed by the Societie of Stationers, 1620), 33, 34, 37, 34. 48 Christopher Hampton, An inquisition of the true church, and those that revolt from it. Being a sermon pronounced at the second session of the Parliament (Dublin: Printed by the Society of Stationers, 1622), 25, A2; see, for a useful discussion of some of this material, P. Kilroy, ‘Sermon and Pamphlet Literature in the Irish Reformed Church, 1613–34’, Archivium Hibernicum, 33 (1975), 112ff. 49 Hampton, An Inquisition, A4. 50 Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990), 251. 51 French, Children of Wrath, 14. See also the discussion of early modern treatments of baptism in Anna French, ‘Infancy’, in Anna French (ed.), Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2020), 77–87. 52 French, Children of Wrath, 17. French discusses this issue in considerable detail, concluding that ‘The Protestant Reformation attempted to uproot the medieval belief system, on the grounds that one should not be able to control personal salvation … baptism and communion were no longer seen to guarantee heavenly salvation to the participant, but were, officially at least, effective and spiritually beneficial means of grace’, 25. 53 John McCaffrey, ‘James Ussher’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://dib. cambridge.org. 54 James Ussher, A Body of Divinitie, or the Summe and Substance of Christian Religion, Catechistically propounded, and explained, by way of Question and Answer: Methodically and familiarly handled (London: Printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for Thomas Downes and George Badger, 1645), 137. Ussher’s authorship of this important catechism has been disputed, but now seems reasonably secure. See Harrison Perkins, ‘Manuscript and Material Evidence for James Ussher’s Authorship of A Body of Divinite (1645)’, Evangelical Quarterly, 89:2 (2018), 133–61. 55 Ussher, A Body of Divinitie, 145, 143. 56 James Ussher, An Answer of the Archbishop of Armagh, to Some Exceptions Taken to his Aforesaid Letter, in The Judgement of the Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, and Primate of Ireland, 1. Of the extent of Christs death, and satisfaction, &c. 2. Of the Sabbath, and observation of the Lords day. 3. Of the ordination in other reformed churches. With a vindication of him from a pretended change of opinion in the first; some advertisements upon the latter; and, in prevention of further injuries, a declaration of his judgement in several other subjects, ed., N. Bernard, D.D. (London: Printed for John Crook, 1657), 30.

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57 James Ussher, An Answer to a Challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland. Wherein the Judgement of Antiquity in the points questioned is truly delivered, and the Noveltie of the now Romish doctrine plainely discovered (Dublin: Printed by the Societie of Stationers, 1625), 466. 58 Alan Ford, ‘Henry Leslie’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://dib.cambridge.org. 59 Henry Leslie, A warning for Israel, in a sermon preached at Christ-Church, in Dublin, the 30. of October, 1625 (Dublin: Societie of Stationers, 1625), 40. 60 Ibid., 16–17. 61 Henry Leslie, A sermon preached before His Maiesty at Wokin, on Tuesday the xxviij. of August. 1627 (London: H. L. for James Boler, 1627), 1. 62 Ibid., 2. 63 Ibid., 3. 64 Henry Leslie, A sermon preached before his Maiesty at Windsore, the 19. of Iuly. 1625 (Oxford: Printed by I[ohn] L[itchfield] and W[illiam] T[urner] for William Turner, 1625), 10. 65 Stephen Jerome, The haughty heart humbled: or, The penitents practice: In the regall patterne of King Ezekiah. Directory and consolatory to all the mourners in Sion, to sow in Teares, and to reape in Joy (London: Richard More, 1628), 12, 13. 66 Leslie, Warning for Israel, 5. 67 Richard Olmstead, Sions teares leading to ioy: or The waters of Marah sweetned. First preached at Clonenagh in the Queenes County in seuerall sermons, and now published for the benefite of the Church (Dublin: Printed for the Societie of Stationers, 1630), 142. 68 Jerome, Haughty heart humbled, 7. 69 Ibid., 12. 70 Ibid., 61. 71 Gribben, Puritan Millennium, 81. 72 Olmstead, Sions Teares, 141. 73 Jerome, Haughty heart humbled, 21.

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2 The Massacre of the Innocents: the vulnerable child

This chapter examines the representation of the ‘innocent’ or vulnerable child as an alternative to the ‘child of wrath’ explored in the first chapter. The helplessness and fragility, rather than the biological corruption, of the child became highlighted in the reaction of the Anglican community in Ireland to the shock of the 1641 Rebellion, one of the most significant events in modern Irish history. A belief in the ‘innocent’ child has traditionally been traced to the late eighteenth century, and associated with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who explicitly theorised the child as naturally virtuous rather than depraved. However, a duality in the understanding of childhood and children had crept into the theological discussion long before the end of the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that in Ireland, a significant development in the prehistory of the innocent child can be found in responses to the violence of 1641, particularly in Sir John Temple’s enormously influential account, The Irish Rebellion (1746), but also in the many pamphlets and instant ‘histories’ which poured from the presses during and immediately after the uprising. These texts characterise the agitating Irish Catholic rebels as evil beasts violating the sanctity of the home to kill and maim pregnant women and newborn, innocent Protestant babies. For the details of his important account of the atrocities, Temple depends on a selective reading of the Depositions, the approximately 8,000 witness testimonies provided by more than 1,500 survivors of the rising, though he focuses specifically on those in which women and children are harmed by the marauding Catholic insurgents.1 The Irish Rebellion uses the Depositions to depict the rebellion as a carefully co-ordinated, all-out Catholic assault on Protestant natality. After an opening examination of the early history of the concept of the innocent child and what has been termed the ‘spiritualisation’ of the early modern Protestant household, the bulk of the chapter will focus on Temple’s fascination with the various ways in which children were involved in the rebellion, either as evil (Catholic) aggressors or as innocent (Protestant) victims, and his insistence that the unborn children of Protestants were a major target of the rebels. In setting out the difference between the victimisers

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and the victims, Temple employs what Marina Warner has called the ‘Manichaean diptych’ of the devil and the cherub, the versions of the child as either naturally evil (explored in Chapter 1) or naturally good.2 Temple assigns Irish Catholic children to the legions of the damned, stressing their malevolence and their gleeful involvement in the atrocities, while describing ‘English Protestant’ 3 children in Ireland as innocent, sacrificial victims, and members of the company of the angels. Temple’s obsession with the irredeemable nature of the native Irish, his portrait of them as naturally debased and evil, requires that he represent Protestant children as defenceless martyrs in such a way as to elide the theology of original sin almost entirely when discussing their fate. The pamphlet accounts of the rebellion will be considered for their parallel stress on the massacre of children and the grieving mother as a representation of the Protestant community in Ireland, and Temple’s treatment of the image of the breastfeeding mother considered as part of his analysis of the rebellion as a biological as well as a theological horror. Indeed, Temple expands the significance of the rebellion far beyond Ireland, and by describing it in the apocalyptic language of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation, depicts the violence as having a cosmic as well as a national importance. This chapter connects Temple’s interest in the significance of the death of innocent children with early developments in children’s literature in which the dead child is treated as a holy martyr (and therefore an exemplum of virtue). The chapter will take the Dublin editions of James Janeway’s A Token for Children (originally published in two parts in 1671 and 1672), one of the first texts in the canon of children’s literature, and A Legacy for Children: being some of the last expressions and dying sayings of Hannah Hill (first published in 1717), a much reprinted early text of American children’s literature, as examples of the fascination with the dying and dead Protestant child in early children’s literature. These later texts depend for some of their power on the ways in which they resonated with a repository of sacrificial children found in ‘martyrologies’ like Temple’s Irish Rebellion that had been in circulation since the mid-seventeenth century. Temple’s narrative also had a direct influence on children’s literature, being a source for John Lockman’s A History of the Cruel Sufferings of the Protestants (1760), frequently used as a school textbook, which will be examined towards the end of the chapter. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the dominant figure in the eighteenth-century reassessment of the child as an innocent angel beset by the corruption of adult civilisation and under constant threat from the forces of grown-up power. Although the initial reaction to Rousseau’s views was hostile, his conceptualisation of the ‘innocent, natural child’ in Émile (1762) was

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channelled into the writings of the Romantics, particularly of William Blake and William Wordsworth, and by the end of the eighteenth century began to infiltrate general views about childhood in Britain.4 Romantic writers postulated a sacred and pure figure which appeared at odds with the child in dire need of socialisation found in the work of Puritan writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so that ‘from being the smallest and least considered of human beings, the child had become endowed with qualities which make it Godlike, fit to be worshipped, and the embodiment of hope’.5 This creation of a zone of innocence located in and around the child effectively allowed for the presentation of wider adult society as a space in which lurked monstrous threats to this guileless virtue. The full articulation of this theology of the ‘innocent’ rather than the corrupt child did indeed have to wait until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was popularised by the Romantics.6 However, as the religious historian Diane Wood has argued, the discursive relationship between theology and ideas about childhood in earlier centuries is ambiguous, and even if children were, for the most part, considered to be corrupted by sin, they could also be spoken about as innocents needing security from the brutes populating the adult world.7 Art historian Anne Higonnett traces a growth in interest in the idea of childhood innocence (rather than malevolence) back to at least the seventeenth century, and to the growth in Protestant cultures of a particular understanding of family life.8 The Puritan theology of total depravity had the effect of increasing the domestic and nuclear family focus of postReformation Protestant societies, and heightening the concern of Protestant parents for the welfare and salvation of their children. In his study of Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, Hugh Cunningham traces the emergence of the ‘middle-class ideology of childhood’, beginning with the ‘spiritualisation’ of the family and the domestic sphere during the Reformation.9 This spiritualisation was, in part, a result of a heightened sensitivity to original sin (and parents’ awareness of having passed that stain on to their children), and historians have argued that because of this heavy responsibility, parents became ever more involved in the rearing of their children in a systematic and domestically centred way. Increasingly, children were formally separated and shielded from adult society, and especially from the world of work and responsibility, as they needed to devote themselves to their moral improvement. The protectiveness of the early modern parent towards their children also manifested in a growing awareness of the corporeal and moral threats the external world posed to their health. Given their belief in the perilous state of the souls of children, and the lack of existence of a post-mortem state of purgatory or limbo, it was the responsibility of the parents of each Protestant child to ensure she fully transition from nature to grace before her possible death.

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The literary scholar Leah Sinanoglou Marcus argues that while ‘Puritan spirituality undoubtedly placed a heavy psychological burden on the young … it placed an even heavier burden on their parents’, a burden to keep them alive as long as possible so that by the time they died they would have turned their backs on natural depravity.10 After all, mothers and fathers would be reprimanded on Judgement Day for any parenting failures, and asked to account for the souls of their children and the measures they took to secure and save them. The Protestant family became increasingly childcentred, but also fearful and anxious about the spiritual and physical health of the children of the house, and the nuclear family considered the means by which an intense disciplining of the child’s soul through the love of her parents could be enacted. Indeed, ensuring that your child had not just received the sacrament of baptism, but had been convinced of the dangers of sin and the need to accept Christ before death (in a period when death in childhood was an ever-present possibility), meant that constant spiritual vigilance was required by both mother and father. While discipline was, therefore, of extraordinary soteriological importance in the early modern household, it was not because of an absence of parental love and devotion, and the pervasive myth of the ‘repressive’ and uncaring Puritan home should be dispelled.11 The fear of childhood vulnerability also created a context in which a sensitivity to childhood goodness and naivety developed, alongside the continuing awareness of the effects of original sin and total depravity. Perhaps the best-known articulation of an early modern English view of the child as ‘innocent’ comes from the Digger, Gerrard Winstanley, who in Fire in the Bush (c.1650) advised parents: ‘Looke upon a childe that is new borne, or till he growes up to some few yeares, he is innocent, harmlesse, humble, patient, gentle, easie to be entreated, not envious; And this is Adam, or mankinde in his Innocency; and this continues till outward objects intice him to pleasure’.12 Winstanley, of course, can hardly be treated as a typical Protestant thinker, but his consideration of the child as a kind of prelapsarian survival was not actually all that unusual (even if it was a minority view). As Anna French argues, ‘children in this period held a difficult and slippery spiritual status’, where they could be ‘both innocent and depraved’.13 French points out that there is a gap between theological strictness and pastoral elasticity, and that ‘Reformed Protestant views surrounding the salvation of children, and even the predestination of children’s souls, were adapted and moulded to enable parents to cope with the potential loss of their young.’ This flexibility included a willingness to indulge ideas of childish innocence and purity.14 An early modern association between the newborn child and Adamic innocence formed the basis for what became, perhaps, the dominant version of the child in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, probably most influentially articulated in William Wordsworth’s

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‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807), which characterises the world in which the child moves as an Eden always on the verge of disappearing: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight,     To me did seem   Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. (1.1–5)

‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’ (5.66), exclaims the Speaker, in his bitter-sweet remembrance of things past.15 According to Alan Richardson, Wordsworth almost ‘single-handedly’ revived the tradition of the innocent child in an English context, and then, assisted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey and others, popularised it and completely transformed adult ideas about childhood.16 However, as demonstrated above, the innocent child of Romantic fascination was not actually Romantic ‘invention’, but instead a Romantic rediscovery. Indeed, an intellectual history of the concept would have to properly begin with the Pelagian controversy of the fifth century, though traces of a belief in the uncorrupted child can be found even earlier. Pelagius famously claimed that humans are born in a morally neutral state and could, through the exercise of free will, live an honourable and good life without the intervention of God (and were therefore completely responsible at an individual level for any sins they did commit). Children, in this theory, are born without sin, a highly controversial view that was condemned by Pope Zosimus as a heresy in ad 418.17 Heretical ideas have a habit of hanging around in the intellectual and cultural ether, however, and some of them take on a life of their own. Indeed, the history of the idea of the innocent child has a consistency that earlier historians of childhood were sometimes unwilling to grant it. Robert A. Davis reminds us that ‘there existed in the Middle Ages a large corpus of Christian writings devoted to descriptions of the innocence of childhood and the uniqueness of children’s experience’.18 This prehistory of Romantic childhood is illustrated powerfully in Micro-cosmographie (1628), by John Earle, the bishop of Salisbury, which opens with a section labelled, ‘A Child’. Earle charmingly describes ‘man in a small letter’ as ‘the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the apple … nature’s fresh picture newly drawn in oil’, with a soul which ‘is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world19 … purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery’.20 This tradition of the child as an innocent abroad existed alongside of and, in dialogue with, the view of the child as an always already corrupted savage, so that early modern child had to walk ‘a sort of spiritual

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tightrope’.21 The seventeenth-century Protestant parent who paid attention to all the voices on the moral standing of their own child was charged with raising a creature who was both evil and innocent, a dangerous menace to society and one extraordinarily exposed to external dangers. Anglicans in Ireland often self-consciously described themselves as children in a loving relationship with a father God. As set out in Chapter 1, in the seventeenth century, in the sermons of influential Anglicans, God was configured as a stern teacher in charge of a schoolroom populated by the children of grace, who needed a strict disciplinarian to keep them on the path of righteousness, that, as Stephen Jerome put it, ‘wee must as schoolboyes bee kept at it, held to it, by discipline as well as doctrine’.22 These Anglican children of grace were, in Ireland at least, threatened by what appeared to be the overwhelming hordes of unregenerate children of wrath outside the relative safety of the walls of the schoolroom and the home. Irish Catholics were frequently represented as unruly children refusing to accept the legitimate authority of their king, subdued by the supposed spiritual paternity of the pope, and kept in civilised restraint only by the fear of violent state reprisal.23 For example, in 1625, Archbishop Ussher reprimanded Catholics for accepting the authority of the pope as a spiritual parent, warning that only the Lord God should be acknowledged as a father: ‘Him therefore alone doe wee acknowledge for the Father of our Faith: no other Father doe we know.’24 While all Protestants accepted the power of the real Father, Catholics had substituted a demonic simulacrum whose leadership could only lead them to damnation. Catholics were degenerate children, suffered from arrested spiritual development, and posed a grave threat to the chosen people. In a sermon preached before parliament in 1620, Ussher insisted that: there are never wanting among them some turbulent humours, so inflamed with the spirit of fornication, that they runne mad with it; and are transported so farre, that no tolerable termes can content them, untill they have attained to the utmost pitch of their unbridled desires. For compassing whereof, there is no treachery, nor rebellion, nor murther, nor desperate course whatsoever, that (without all remorse of conscience) they dare not adventure upon.25

In these circumstances, surrounded by their spiritual (and political) enemies, it is hardly surprising that Anglican children began to look to their parents like vulnerable innocents in need of shelter from the gothic threats outside the door. Direct evidence of the Irish ‘spiritualisation of the household’ is understandably sparse, but Jane Ohlmeyer points to the seventeenth-century portrait of Lady Ormond (attributed to David des Granges) and her son, Thomas Butler, who later became the Earl of Ossory, as one of the very

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few extant images we have of Irish children in this period. The portrait displays Lady Ormond holding her child’s hand in a pose clearly meant to communicate the loving and affectionate relationship between the two.26 The funerary monument for Lady Cork’s tomb (in St Patrick’s Cathedral), also celebrates the family, with images of parents and grandparents at the top and children at the bottom, stressing ‘the virtues of the family and its alliances’.27 It is not that an intellectual investment in or awareness of the corrupting effects of original sin had been surrendered, but that, given the grave physical threats enclosing the Anglican community, the little beings inside looked comparatively vulnerable and therefore ‘innocent’ and in need of safeguarding. This chapter will now consider a major moment in this discursive transformation of the Protestant child from devil to angel, the 1641 Rebellion. This rebellion was certainly the most momentous event of the period. As Ian McBride points out, ‘no historical experience’ was ‘so crucial to the formation of a distinctive Irish Protestant identity’.28 It was the result of a struggle for political power in Ireland which had been under way for a century. The struggle was between native Gaelic Catholic chieftains, the Catholic descendants of the Cambro-Normans (the ‘Old English’) who had arrived in the twelfth century and had been the most powerful political group on the island for centuries since then, and the ‘New English’ Protestants who had come to Ireland since the Reformation, and who had been taking control of the instruments of the state. The cause of the New English had been furthered by the Nine Years’ War that crown forces fought with the Ulster Gaelic chieftains, the O’Neill and the O’Donnell (1593–1603). These chieftains had appealed to the Old English for military assistance, and this appeal effectively confirmed to the New English that the Cambro-Normans were politically compromised and could not be trusted, and a thoroughgoing Protestantising of the state was necessary. When the O’Neill and the O’Donnell left Gaelic Ireland leaderless in 1603, in the famous ‘flight of the earls’, a series of plantation experiments saw large numbers of English and Scottish Protestants (both Anglican and Dissenting) transported to Munster and Ulster, and land confiscated from Catholics, in order to boost the numerical power of the Protestant population. The Old English found that any recourse to the traditional powers of the Irish parliament was blocked by the Lord Lieutenant, Thomas Wentworth, and they feared that any remaining political power they had would be further eroded in favour of the New English. Many of the Old English concluded that only an armed defence of their position could prevent them from becoming socially and politically irrelevant, and they were open to an alliance with native Catholic aristocratic forces to protect Catholic power in the country. Those native Catholic aristocrats, under the general direction of Sir Phelim O’Neill, the

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MP for Dungannon, attempted to seize control of the Irish state through a coup d’état on 22 October, and this attempt precipitated a series of often extraordinarily violent attacks by Catholics on their Protestant neighbours over the following weeks.29 Many contemporary accounts of the rising were published in the period immediately after the violent events. This chapter is primarily interested in the ways in which the image of the innocent child and the discourse of vulnerable childhood are employed repeatedly in the pamphlets about and histories of the rebellion to represent the Protestant community in Ireland, while the agitating Irish Catholic multitude is characterised as bestial and brutalising. In what became the canonical account of the rising as a series of atrocities, Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion,30 events are framed as a premeditated assault on innocent Protestant childhood and maternity as part of a plot to ‘prevent the future’ for the Protestant community in Ireland.31 Providing stark images of the death of a child has often proved a useful way of signalling fears about the future of the nation, or the future of the family. As the historian Harry Hendrick points out, the connection between the child and posterity makes it easy to employ children as shorthand representatives of collectives and their survival (or destruction), and this is particularly the case when a nation or a community is experiencing a period of upheaval or dramatic change, as the survival of children becomes even more important at these moments to ensure the endurance of the community.32 Controversialists and polemicists like Temple exploited the vulnerable child in their descriptions of the rebellion to make political points and direct Irish policy. The Master of the Rolls in the Dublin administration, Temple was involved in preparing Dublin in case of attack. As the official custodian of judicial records, he was also on hand to receive reports during the rebellion about atrocities which had either been committed on Protestants, or were being planned, and so was in a good position to give an insider’s sense of the panic felt by the state in having to confront what was an unexpected challenge to the Establishment. The Irish Rebellion was written by a man close to state power, and with good access to all the information gathered by the state, including the Depositions, the witness statements detailing the atrocities committed during the rebellion.33 Temple was also able to weave skilfully many of the most incendiary of the Depositions into a compelling and page-turning cautionary tale that proved to be irresistible to his readers. His instant history was reprinted at least ten times between 1646 and 1812, and received considerable political attention, with Richard Lawrence declaring authoritatively that it was ‘a book worth chaining to every church desk, and reading over once a year by every family’.34 As Kathleen Noonan points out, reprints of The Irish Rebellion often coincided with moments of British

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and Irish political crisis, with editions appearing, for example, at the end of the Civil War in 1679, during the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, after the battle of Culloden in 1746 and during heightened anxiety about potential Catholic Emancipation in 1812.35 While it contains a breathless (and unfinished) account of the rising itself (unfinished because Temple is called away by matters of state before he can bring the story of the rebellion to a narrative conclusion), the book’s most significant section details the massacres and brutalities carried out by Irish Catholics on their Protestant neighbours, a section that Toby Barnard describes as ‘drenched … [in] blood’ (as drenched, indeed, as Temple insisted Irish Catholics were during the rebellion [55]).36 Temple employs strategically the testimonies found in the Depositions37 to serve his own agenda to explain the rising as a coordinated and systematic attempt to completely eliminate Protestantism (and living, breathing Protestants) from Ireland. Temple is particularly fascinated by the ways in which children were involved in the rising, both as aggressors or as victims, and at times suggests that the unborn children of Protestants were actually the major targets of the rebels who were carrying out a genocidal onslaught on their Protestant neighbours and friends. Temple certainly continues the puritan tradition of seeing the child as inherently malevolent, but he ascribes all this malevolence to Irish Catholics. Temple is particularly interested in the activities of Irish Catholic children, who manifest as ‘Dionysian’ forces in his description.38 He treats Irish Catholic children as fully complicit in the brutalities committed by the adults in their community. Indeed, not only does Temple claim that Irish Catholic children are implicated in the massacres of 1641, but he suggests a close link between the adult rebel and the child rebel, with the insinuation that the adult rebel is really a degenerate child who has failed to grow up. For Temple, much of the horror of the rising is due to the fact that Irish Catholic children, as well as their parents, perpetuated many of the outrages which occurred. The Catholic children instrumental in the outrage narratives he provides become paradigmatic of the native Irish as a whole – murderous and mired in filth and sexual depravity. Temple details how ‘the very Irish children in the very beginning fell to strip and kill English children’ (40). While he believes that ‘such was the malice and most detestable hatred born to the English by the Irish [adults]’, that ‘they taught their children to kill English children’, at times he describes these evil children as acting on their own initiative (100). For example, he highlights the cases of a 14-year-old boy who alone killed fifteen men, and a 12-year-old boy who killed two women without any apparent adult direction (127). The wickedness of their transgression is compounded by the children’s disregard of the reverence due to the elderly. While ‘It was very usual, in all parts, for the Rebels children to murder the Protestants Children’, their

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blood lust was not satisfied with dispatching their chronological peers, and ‘sometimes with Lath-Swords, heavy and well-sharpened, they would venture upon people of riper Years’ (127). On occasion, these murderous children get up to even more perverted activities. In his extract from the Deposition of Robert Maxwell, Temple informs the shocked reader that the rebels sent their children ‘armed with long wattles and whips, who would therewith beat dead men’s bodies about their privy members, until they beat or rather trashed them off, and then would return in great joy to their Parents, who received them or such service as it were in triumph’ (124). Returning to their parents with the spoils of battle, the genital trophies of their enemies, these children appear more engaged in an atavistic pagan and possibly sexual ritual than in a political rebellion. Outrage is piled on outrage as Temple emphasises the extraordinary depth of the depravity reached by these monstrous Catholic minors. The intensity of the evil Temple ascribes to Catholic children in his narrative tips over from that traditionally ascribed to the child of wrath in puritan thinking, where evil is more potential than realised given the physical incapacity of the very young, and instead seems uncannily similar to that found in much later horror texts which concentrate on the iniquitous agency of cherub-featured minors. In The Irish Rebellion the Irish Catholic children involved in the rising act on their perverted desires.39 Commentators have pointed out that the horror genre has frequently vacillated between ‘twin extremes of protectiveness and paedophobia’.40 These later texts draw on a long tradition of representing children as so infected by original sin as to be capable of almost anything. The historian Toby Barnard’s description of The Irish Rebellion as a ‘horror story’ 41 gestures towards the fact that, despite Temple presenting his book as a ‘realist’ (if urgent) historical account, the text employs tropes and images that would later become central to the horror tradition, in which the actively menacing, murderous, evil child is one of the most pervasive stereotypes. As was explored in Chapter 1, intense distrust of children is rarely pushed underground in the seventeenth century, and Temple is (refreshingly) up front about what the nasty little monsters are capable of doing. The difference between Temple and the ecclesiastics examined in the previous chapter is that whereas they were most interested in discussing the evil of the Protestant child, Temple concentrates this ontological oddness in the bodies and souls of Catholic children. The miniature Catholic fiends Temple describes violate social norms with triumphant glee. The contraventions of the social proprieties that they perpetuate are symptomatic of the system of desecration the rebels as a whole operate within. Temple’s atrocity narrative concerns the ways in which the 1641 rebellion was turned into a monstrous carnival, with traditional roles being reversed, and where the actions of Irish Catholic children are characteristic of the

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behaviour of the rebels in general. Whereas English Protestants in Ireland comply with a code which keeps women and children in their proper and protected place, Irish Catholics send their wives, sons and daughters out to battle, content for them to die in their place. Attacks on the old and venerable by the young and foolish have long been used as a powerful trope in treatments of intergenerational anxiety in European literature. In a very wide-ranging and illuminating discussion of ‘the perennially perpetuated image of boys abusing a [elderly] holy man’, the religious studies scholar Eric Ziolkowski points out that this image stems ‘from an irrepressible Augustinian perception of troublesome male children as living, walking, taunting reminders of inherited Adamic sin’, epitomised by the insolent boys of the village of Bethel who insulted the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings 2.23–4.42 The conclusion of that biblical story sees the boys punished for their impertinence by being mauled by two (presumably divinely inspired) wild bears. Ziolkowski argues that this bible story lies behind very many literary and artistic instances of unruly and ill-mannered children. In texts which employ the basic trope of the young persecuting the old, the ultimate resolution of the story in Kings is often implied. Tellingly, towards the end of his narrative mining of the Depositions, Temple informs his readers of the ‘rebellious roughish Boyes’ he considers a source of much trouble (131). While Temple must break off his narrative before the child rebels have been brought to justice, to his biblically literate audience, the future punishment of these Damien Thorns43 is implicit in the scriptural pattern that is being invoked. In stark contrast to the Irish Catholic child monsters are the enormous number of Protestant children who are viciously murdered by the rebels. The rebels target newborns, toddlers and even prenatals and their parents. One of the most striking aspects of Temple’s use of the Depositions is the details he provides of the Catholic rebels attacking heavily pregnant women, forcing them to go into labour before murdering them and their babies, or ripping unborn children from the womb and slaughtering them in front of their horrified mothers. Indeed, theologically speaking, the threat the rebels represent is partly that, in tearing Protestant children from the womb they are killing them before they can be baptised.44 In these incidents, reprobate Catholic children and their parents attempt to drag their Protestant counterparts to the same post-mortem destiny that awaits them. While Temple’s history is important in part because it systematically constructs a discourse of the Irish Catholic as abject Other to the ‘new English’ Protestants, a discourse ever after available to the Anglican tradition in Ireland to plunder,45 he also uses horrific child deaths as a way to portray the rising as a Catholic assault on the Protestant future (for the achievement of which

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the destruction of prenatal children is a major strategy). For Temple, the most appalling aspect of the rebellion is that its atrocities are not random or arbitrary acts of violence carried out by Irish Catholics merely out of resentment for their subordinate status in Irish society, or out of revenge for real or perceived wrongs perpetuated against them. Complete extermination of the Protestant enemy is the aim. Temple claims that Catholic priests provided absolution to the rebels as long as all Protestants were exterminated, and assured them that ‘it was no more sinne to kill an English-man, then to kill a dogge’ (78). There is an overarching plan being put into operation by the rebels, and it is to attack the Protestant community in Ireland through its children and through a series of taboo-breaching desecrations which amount to anti-fertility rituals. Early in his history, Temple darkly refers to the continuation by Irish natives of ‘many long used rites, and still retained ceremonies, as do give us some ground to believe that they do not improbably deduce their first originall from’ pagans, and these pagan rites – continued in a sublimated way by the rituals of the Babylonish Catholic Church – are expressed in the otherwise bizarre outrages the rebels commit (2). The pagan character of the rebels’ actions is highlighted in a number of ways. They desecrate graves, disinter and then defile corpses, Temple suggesting that necrophilia has taken place in some cases. Rebels prevent Protestants from providing their loved ones with a Christian burial, and force them to leave corpses in ditches and open fields to be consumed by animals. Indeed, ‘some of the Rebels vowed, that if any digged graves wherein to bury the dead children, they should be buried therein themselves’ (43).46 Horrifically, the rebels actually perpetrate the most violence on women, ‘whose sex they neither pitied nor spared’ (96). Catholic rebels are no respecters of gender, physical impairment, pregnancy, youth, age or social, economic or religious superiority. Indeed, they care nothing for any established hierarchy whatsoever, although they are determined to institute a new one with themselves and their co-religionists at the top of it. Temple’s narrative stresses the fact that the victims were respectable married men and women who acted out of extreme concern for the safety of their spouses and children. The rebels disregarded ideals of sanctity and propriety, or delighted in desecrating them. By forcing married mothers from their homes the rebels violate the sanctity of family life. Indeed, the rebellion is an onslaught on normativity, an attempted overturning of the natural order. The rebels invert the commandment that children should ‘honour’ their father and mother by forcing Protestant sons and daughters to kill their own parents, while reversing the natural life cycle by compelling parents to kill their offspring, in one instance hanging a girl in Stapletownwood using the hair of her mother (100, 101).

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The Depositions contain a large number of accounts which describe Catholic rebels stripping and then sending their victims out into the cold of an Irish October to die of exposure. For example, the Deposition of Robert Maxwell, of County Armagh, details how the rebels took his sisterin-law, ‘being in Childbirth, the Child halfe borne and halfe vnborne’ and, ‘stript [her] starke naked, and drove her about an arrow flight to the blackwater’.47 In his Deposition, Adam Glover claims that ‘he saw upon the high way a woeman left by the Rebells stripped to her smock, sett upon [by] 3 woemen and some children being Irish whoe miserably tore and rent the said poore English woeman and stripped her of her smock in bitter frost and snow soe that she fell in labour in their hands and presence and both she and her child there miserably died’.48 While divesting these victims of their clothes would guarantee death, the extraordinary number of Depositions where a victim is stripped suggests that there was more going on than attempted murder. The historian Nicholas Canny argues that there may have been a psychosexual element in the ‘revenge’ the rebels meted out to the neighbours they believed ultimately responsible for historic crimes such as land grabbing, as well as many local and personal slights.49 This psychosexual explanation is not focused on by Temple, though. While he certainly relates many accounts of Protestants being stripped, he believes that something more sinister than even sexual perversity is at the bottom of these events. As John Gibney asserts, while the reports of the attacks on pregnant women and the castration of Protestant males had ‘stark symbolic meaning’, for Temple this meaning related to the fertility and extermination of English Protestants in Ireland rather than sexual desire.50 Wholesale extermination is best effected by preventing the next generation from being born, which is one reason why the violence of the rebels is directed at pregnant women and children. Temple’s narrative circles around the ways in which Irish Catholics specifically targeted the children (especially the unborn children) of Protestants not just because they are perverted, evil agents of Satan (though also that), but in order to effect a genocidal policy. In making the case that the rising should be read as an attempt to eradicate Protestantism (and, therefore, Protestants) in Ireland, Temple echoes the claims of other prominent commentators on the rebellion. For example, Henry Jones, the dean of Kilmore, in one of the most popular accounts of the rising, A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland (1642), insists that the rebels would not have been satisfied until they had executed ‘a generall extirpation, even to the last and least drop of English blood’.51 Temple and Jones may not have been misrepresenting the intention of some of the Catholic rebels. As Gibney rightly points out, ‘Taken as a whole, the

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winter of 1641–42 saw almost ritualized attempts to wipe out the physical, cultural, and religious presence of the Protestant colonists in Ireland.’ 52 What is different about Temple’s history is the intensity of the attention he directs towards the dangers faced by Protestant children. In his account, the rebels are at their most ingenious when devising means of killing children. They beat their brains out, trample them to death, cut them to pieces, pike them, pitchfork them, rip them up while alive, stifle them to death and starve them. They throw dead babies to the dogs and feed aborted foetuses to swine (97). The mission of the rebellion is, according to the rebels Temple quotes, to ‘devour … the seed of the English out of Ireland’ (85). Temple provides page after page of horrific description and examples of the defilement of Protestant childhood. At the most mundane level, ‘many very young Children’ are stripped and forced to wander the Irish countryside alone ‘in that miserable plight, the weather being most bitter cold and frosty’, to die of exposure (42). At an extreme level the rebels not only attack but take enormous enjoyment from the abuse and murder of pregnant women. The rebels assail John Stone’s pregnant daughter and rip her womb open (97). ‘They stab’d [a] mother, one Jane Addis by name, and left her little sucking childe, not a quarter old, by her dead corps; and then they put the breast of its dead mother into its mouth, and bid it suck, English-bastard, and so left it there to perish’ (102–3). Another account tells of a ‘Scottish woman … found in Glinwood lying dead, her belly ripped up, and a living child crawling in her womb’ (123–4). A dyer’s wife in Ross Trevor had twins torn from her womb and thrown into a ditch where a drove of pigs is found eating them (97). Another woman in Foard in Clowish had her four children killed and her unborn child torn from her womb and fed to the dogs (like an infant Jezebel) (97).53 These assaults on pregnant women and Protestant children are presented to the reader as part of a pattern rather than as discrete and singular atrocities perpetrated by individuals: Some had theur Bellies ript up, and so left with their Guts running about their Heels. But this horrid kind of cruelty was principally reserved by these inhuman Monsters for Women, whose sex they neither pity’d nor spar’d, hanging up several Women, many of them great with Child, whose Bellies they ripped up as they hung, and so let the little Infant fall out (96–7).

Taking children away from their parents, the rebels gave them ‘to Swine, some the Dogs eate; and some taken alive out of their Mothers bellies, they cast into ditches. As for suckling Children … some had their braines knockt out; others were trampled under-foot to death … some were found in the fields, sucking the breasts of their murdered Mothers’ (97–8).

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Temple was not alone in relying on such sensational stories of child murder in narrating the rebellion, and the English market was inundated with accounts which accentuated the horrific nature of events in Ireland. The abortive Bloody Newes from Ireland or the barbarous crueltie by the papists used in that kingdome (1641) quotes James Salmon, from Armagh, who tells, on the title page, of rebels raping women in the middle of the town, before ‘dragging them up and downe the Streets, and cruelly murdering them, and thrusting their Speeres through their little Infants before their eyes, and carrying them up and downe on Pike-points, in great reproach, and hanging Mens quarters on their Gates in the Street’. In this brief account, children are dashed to death by stones and then impaled on spikes. The rebels then take these spikes and run ‘with them from place to place, saying that those were the pigs of the English sows’.54 A Bloody battell, or The rebels overthrow, and Protestants victorie (1641) describes the rebels’ creation of a ‘Marian Golgotha’ in Kilkenny, followed by the brutal rape of a pregnant woman, one Mrs Atkins, after which they ‘ript open her wombe, and like so many Neroes undantedly viewed natures bed of Conception, afterward took her and her Infant and sacrifiz’d in fire their wounded bodies to appease their immaculate soules’.55 Worse and Worse Newes from Ireland (1641), describes children in Munster being boiled to death in front of their mothers, rebels standing naked around a woman in labour and then killing her newborn moments after its birth, and rebels ‘cutting off’ the ‘privie members, eares, fingers, hands’ and ‘plucking out the eyes’ of male Protestants.56 In The Happiest Newes from Ireland that Ever Came to England (1641), children are impaled on hooks and foetuses killed by trampling. 57 James Cranford, in The Teares of Ireland (1642), tells the story of John Davenant, a pilchard fisherman in Bantry, Co. Cork, who is forced to watch as his wife and children are roasted on a spit, after which his own tongue and genitals are cut off before he is roasted alive himself. The impact of these publications on the English reading public was electrifying and convinced a generation of readers of the degenerate nature of Irish Catholics. However, Temple’s account is a much more sustained and intellectually convincing history, given that it represents itself as a well-sourced, insider’s analysis, and elaborates on these individual incidences, placing them in a carefully structured political context. The atrocity accounts are positioned right in the centre of the text, and they have more impact than the pamphlets given that they follow a very detailed (at times rather dry) description of the flow of information during the rebellion, and are followed by interminable descriptions of the behind-the-scenes political negotiations and manoeuvring to bring the rebellion to an end. Ellen Moers points out that much gothic literature seeks ‘not to reach down into the depths of the soul and purge it with pity and terror … but to

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1  James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642) – the Davenants forced to watch the roasting of their children58

2  James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642) – very young children having their brains bashed out, and others being dragged by their hair59

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get to the body itself, its glands, epidermis, muscles, and circulatory system’.60 As gothic ‘histories’, Temple’s account and the rebellion pamphlets indulge in a kind of early ‘body horror’, stressing the physicality of the assaults on the bodies of English Protestant women and children in Ireland. Temple’s depictions of the killing of children and the disembowelling of pregnant women ‘drew on long-established tropes of Catholic atrocities stretching back to the Reformation’, including accounts of the Marian persecutions and the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.61 Importantly, Temple’s obsessive focus on the defiled mother and child proved so powerful that subsequent accounts of the rebellion represented Protestant Ireland itself as a mother weeping over her slaughtered infants. For example, the broadsheet, A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries (1647), which depends on Temple for its account of the rising, contains an image of ‘Irelandes Lamentation’, in which Ireland is allegorised and illustrated as a distraught woman at prayer, baring her breasts, while the slain bodies of her children lie all about her.62 As Dianne Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm point out, this image is a particularly evocative one that draws on Temple’s often hysterical account of the rebellion: ‘The picture encapsulates the long list of violent acts that accompanies it into one powerful image of Protestant Ireland as a distressed matron, stripped of her outer clothes and trappings of status, her breasts exposed signifying the loss of her children, and her hair dishevelled invoking familiar images of distressed or raped women.’ 63 Whereas the spiritualised Protestant household honours the mother and child, secularising the iconography of the Madonna and infant Christ, in accounts of the rebellion the Irish Catholic rebels desecrate both figures in acts of not just secular violence but blasphemy. Temple’s tactile and intensive focus on the physical bodies of innocent women and children, and especially his emphasis on foetuses being ripped from ‘bellies’, and starving infants vainly sucking on the breasts of their murdered mothers, invoke medieval representations of the Madonna and Child.64 The attention given to the image of the mother and breastfeeding child also resonates with the discussion of breastfeeding which had begun in Protestant Europe by the 1640s. Throughout the post-Reformation world the intense focus on the nuclear family and domesticity in the work of Protestant theologians seems to have led to an increase in the numbers of relatively well-off Protestant women taking personal responsibility for the breastfeeding of their own children. As Marcus explains, ‘because they believed that corrupt influences could be imbibed along with the milk of a pernicious nurse, writers of Puritan domestic manuals placed particular emphasis on breastfeeding by mothers—a practice which would heighten a mother’s involvement with her children’.65 However, Temple finds no evidence

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3  ‘Irelands Lamentation’, in A prospect of bleeding Ireland’s miseries (1647)

of such a transformation in the Protestant communities in Ireland, and his sense of the continuation of the long-standing practice of wet-nursing and fostering has been confirmed by Jane Ohlmeyer, who concludes that in this period ‘fostering remained reasonably widespread amongst all communities’.66 Early in The Irish Rebellion, Temple rages against the continuation of the traditional customs of ‘fostering and gossiping’, where poor Irish Catholic women were employed to breastfeed the children of Protestant households (14). In fact, he holds the preservation of wet-nursing partly to blame for the rebellion itself. Temple insists that the native Irish Catholics had been given a large degree of control over Protestant reproductive practices through fostering, since Irish peasants were employed to not only breastfeed but to

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rear Protestant children. He condemns this as a habit which had ‘in a manner consolidated [Irish natives and English newcomers] into one body’, like a grotesque baby, ‘knit and compacted together with all those bonds and ligatures of friendship, alliance and consanguinity as might make up a perpetual union betwixt them’ (14). Both sexual relationships and breastfeeding practice allowed for the bodily contact that is so dangerous to the maintenance of ethnic integrity – particularly since Temple depicts the Irish as being not just bestial in their living habits (‘the ordinary sort of People commonly bringing their Cattle into their own stinking Creates’), but prone to bestiality as well (indeed, ‘naturally delighting to lye among them’ [79]). The bodily encounter between the English Protestant child and the Irish Catholic breast in wet-nursing is treated by Temple as an epidemical horror, in which the fear of biological contamination is realised. Inter-ethnic and interdenominational marriage is the logical result of this early contamination, which dilutes the biological purity of the English Protestant community in Ireland, and because of which the Irish ‘intermixt’ with the English, a practice which has theologically radioactive results as far as Temple is concerned (2). Through this intermixing, the Irish had begun to remake the English into a version of themselves. Temple here appropriates some ideas from his predecessors, like Edmund Spenser, who in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) also claimed that intermarriage with the Irish endangered English superiority and brought about a form of degeneration: ‘For the most part of them are degenerated and grown almost mere Irish, yea, and more malicious to the English than the very Irish themselves.’ 67 The fear of fosterage is also clearly expressed in Sir John Davies’s paranoid A True Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England (1612), which warned that fosterage produced a ‘stronger alliance then Bloud; and the Foster-Children doe loue and are beloued of their foster-fathers and their Sept, more then of their owne naturall Parents and Kindred’.68 Taking in native Irish milk, the English child essentially reverts to a barbaric state, a view also articulated by Irenius in Spenser’s View: ‘the child that sucketh the milk of the nurse must of necessity learn his first speech of her’, he insists, before going on to warn that the ‘smack of the first will always abide with him, and not only of the speech but of the manners and conditions … [Infants] draw into themselves together with their suck, even the nature and disposition of their nurses, for the mind followeth much the temperature of the body; and also the words are the image of the mind, so as they proceeding from the mind, the mind must be needs effected with the words; so that the speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish.’69

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Spenser was disgusted by the ways in which the Irish nurse and the English child became one in the act of breastfeeding. For Temple, the act is infectious, and the English are contaminated with a kind of Irish Catholic virus. In the wake of such an epidemic (even as it goes unrecognised by the Protestant inhabitants of the country), social and institutional constraints become weakened and the cohesion of the English Protestant community in Ireland is compromised and breaks down. The biological analogy employed by Temple is very telling, given that he is so sensitive to ethnic impurity. His problem with close physical contact is that the native Irish are highly contagious biological pollutants. In this biological bonding with the English newcomers, through this ‘firm conglutination’ (14), native Irish biology had gained supremacy over that of their English Protestant hosts. Sexual relations and fluid exchange increasingly ‘consolidated them into one Body’, a metaphor taken from the marriage ceremony, and the English ‘degenerated into Irish affections and customs’ (14). How precisely the native Irish addition of this biological cocktail managed to keep its malignancy undiluted is unclear. However, the effect on English Protestant biology is apparent – their ethnic purity is watered down, and they are slowly taken over from within by their wet-nurses and then their native Irish wives. While the English Protestants in Ireland had been relaxing with the Irish Catholics, being good neighbours, tolerating their depravity, intermingling with them, two other forces were in process. The international Roman Catholic Church was busy planning and preparing for a rebellion to overturn the social order. God was also at work permitting the rebellion, but only so that He could use it, and the atrocities that accompany it, to deliver a warning to the Protestant elect that they need to keep their community completely separate in order to restore and then maintain purity and power. Not only are the natives virus-spreading contaminants. Temple represents Ireland itself as a toxic environment inhospitable to civilised human life, describing the country as a desolate wasteland before the arrival of the first English colonists. As Kathleen Noonan points out, unlike other commentators on Irish affairs like Spenser or Davies, ‘who spoke of Ireland as if it were an antediluvian paradise’ ruined only by the presence of so many natives, for Temple, Ireland was always a dystopia.70 Only once, in a discussion of Henry II’s invasion, does Temple suggest that the place even possesses the raw materials necessary for prosperity. The Irish were so impressed when a genuinely civilised and authoritative leader came to the country that ‘partly by his grace and favour in receiving of them in upon their feigned Submissions most humbly tendered to him, he easily subdued a barbarous, divided People’ (4).

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The backwardness of the native Irish is confirmed by Temple through his combination of different versions of inherent savagery in describing them. In an examination of Images of Savages (1999), Gustav Jahoda sets out the ways in which two particular metaphors of indigenous peoples have dominated Western depictions: the image of the savage as bestial, and the image of the savage as a child or childlike, with these two versions often cross-fertilising and reinforcing each other.71 So, for example, in describing the native Irish Catholics as uncivilised savages, barbarians and beasts in The Irish Rebellion, Temple also infantilises them. The rhetoric of colonial encounter found in Temple’s text elaborates on earlier treatments of the native Irish as primordial savages and a view of Ireland which represents it as the home of people who are stuck in an earlier, backward time. For his treatment of the indigenous Irish as atavistic, Temple draws on the representation of the native Irish as wild in the Topographica Hibernica (late 1180s) of Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). As the historian R. R. Davies explains, in the Topographica, Gerald makes a number of claims about the native Irish: they are bestial (as indicated by their characteristic cultivation of beards and long hair, which makes them literally hairy), deeply sinful, technologically unsophisticated and uncivilised.72 Indeed, so boorish are the Irish natives for Gerald, that he insists that they are bad parents too, and do not look after their children properly, preferring to abandon them to nature like savages, rather than spend the time raising them to become civilised beings. The entire culture, therefore, languishes in the historical doldrums: ‘This people is, then, a barbarous people, literally barbarous. Judged according to modern ideas, they are uncultivated, not only in the external appearance of their dress, but also in their flowing hair or beards. All their habits are the habits of barbarians.’ 73 They remain at the lowest level of human existence, ‘a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living.’ 74 Gerald considers the natives as historically closed off, in a profound state of arrested development, unable to grow up. Temple builds on this sense of the natives trapped in the civilisational as well as the biological past. Although he claims that he is not going to ‘trouble’ himself to ‘enquire’ into their origin, Temple proceeds to disabuse the reader of any false belief that the native Irish were ever a civilised race (2–3). Building on the well-established image of the Irish as uncivilised children, Temple depicts twelfth-century English colonists arriving in a kind of dystopian Tír na nÓg, and assuming the responsibility of putting manners on the unruly children who live there (a responsibility the colonialists fail to live up to, as they became increasingly infected by their native neighbours and assimilated into a childish way of life).75

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This discourse of perpetual and almost inescapable barbarism locks the native Irish into a state of prehistory, in which they live almost totally in the past.76 Here underdevelopment, which exists on a temporal scale, also operates geographically: Ireland occupies a ‘prior’ state of existence, in the same way as the child is prior to the adult. David Lloyd has persuasively argued that the language of ‘progression’, ‘development’ and ‘maturity’, when applied to entire societies, nations and cultures, works to effect a hierarchy in which supposedly more developed ‘civilisations’ can occupy a politically superior position.77 These terms and concepts rely on ideas about the growth of the individual from infancy to adulthood, and cast ‘developing’ nations and groups chronologically into an early phase of both individual and species existence.78 By utilising the language of nature to describe Ireland, colonial thinkers like Temple cast the country back in time, or as trapped in a time warp, before the advent of grown-up civilisation, and therefore in need of some adult interference to bring about colonial catch-up.79 In this way, the discourses of childhood and colonialism became thoroughly imbricated.80 The critical geographer Elizabeth A. Gagen points out that ‘The notion of “underdevelopment” … existed both on a geographical and temporal plane, relegating not simply foreign places and peoples to a premodern state, but simultaneously placing all children—American, European and Non-Western—in a universal state of primitiveness.’ 81 Infantilised adults and their cultures are suspended in time, rendered static and preserved, in need of supervision, protection and illumination by more mature, more developed and sophisticated political superiors. For Temple, the native Irish are, in terms of development, so chronologically and historically ‘behind’ the English, that they have not ‘grown up’ or reached maturity. In employing a ‘denial of coevalness’, as the anthropologist Johannes Fabian puts it, Temple defines this alien culture as behind the time, or out of time itself, as an aspect of nature rather than culture.82 This naturalisation is combined with Temple’s puritan emphasis on the ‘naturalness’ of the reprobate sinner. As Clare Carroll explains, in the early modern period, the ‘Calvinist discourse of predestined damnation is mingled with … a proto-racialist discourse’,83 and this mingling helps explain why Temple can vacillate between describing the natives as spiritually and biologically infected and rotten. Temple’s claims about the perpetual childishness of the native, Catholic Irish were influential, and reappeared in political analysis in the eighteenth century. For example, in 1749, John Flemming praised the Penal Laws, because they had been so effective in forcing Irish Catholics to grow up, ‘improving their minds, polishing their understandings, and exposing the gross errors and superstitious darkness of their deluded progenitors’.84 Flemming’s point is that whereas in previous periods Catholic priests and

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the Roman Church had control over the intellectual growth of the Irish population and kept them in perpetual infancy (superstitious, ignorant, irrational, emotional), in more recent times the Protestant state had taken over and was operating much more effectively to bring the country up to a more civilised maturity. The anonymous Inquiry into some of the Causes of the Ill Situation of the Affairs of Ireland (1731) argued that education was the solution to all Ireland’s problems, because the majority of people in the country had simply not grown up. The pamphlet advised its readers to accept the wisdom of the Ancients, who ‘seemed perfectly to have understood the Value of that wise Precept, Train up a Child in the Way he shall go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. Experience taught them, that Virtue, the Support of every State, could neither be propagated or preserved, but by a virtuous Education.’ 85 The writer complains that the Church of Rome conspires to keep its followers in perpetual infancy by a ‘Usurpation, not only over the Bodies but the Minds of Men’, thereby preventing them from developing their faculties of reason so as to penetrate behind the ‘gross Absurdities’ of her doctrines: ‘But despairing of Power to hinder all Men from Reading, and judging it impossible to destroy all valuable Books, she was content, by gradual steps, to prosecute her Designs, greatly wicked, and destructive of every manly Virtue’.86 Rome thus not only infantilises but emasculates its congregations, but these same children, should their upbringing be taken over by a wiser and genuinely mature parent figure, can still make the transition to the adult world. These later texts draw much of their rhetorical power from the traditional representation of the native Irish as childlike found in Temple’s The Irish Rebellion. He also, however, describes them as biological hybrids, a horrific mixture of different nationalities and ethnicities, ‘Scythians, Gauls, Africans, Goths, or some other more Eastern Nation that anciently inhabited Spain’, but not, significantly, Britons, and the unsurprising result of this monstrous concoction is an unruly childlike people who have to be continually ‘subdued’ by their betters – especially their adopted parents, English kings and queens (2, 4). By using the language of contamination and sin to describe the Irish, Temple’s history suggests that they are the carriers of original sin, rhetorically implying that the original English Protestant colonists were spiritually pure by comparison.87 In their native element the Irish lived ‘like beasts, biting and devouring one another, without all rules, customs, or reasonable constitutions either for regulation of Property, or against open force and violence, and all other acts of humanity and barbarism’ (5). When Christianity was brought to this place, it was by a Briton, St Patrick, but even that had few real effects on the native population, who remained essentially pagans. Holiness soon diminished and ‘decay[ed]’ because the ‘life of the people’ was ‘so beastly, their manners so depraved and barbarous’ that true Christianity could not thrive among them (5).

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Temple vividly images Ireland as a blood-crazed monster, describing it as ‘a true Aceldama, a field of blood, an unsatiated sepulchre of the English nation’ (8).88 He draws on the language of his puritan theological contemporaries in describing the native Irish passing their natural depravity down from one generation to the next by sexual congress, ‘by infusion from their ancestors, or natural generation’. Their ‘natural depravity’ had ‘irrefragably stiffned their [the natives’] necks, and hardened their hearts against all the most powerful endeavours of Reformation’ (10). This language draws on the description of the degenerate and Golden Calf-worshipping Israelites who turned away from the Lord God after he rescued them from slavery in the land of Egypt: And the LORD said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves: They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them. (Deuteronomy 9:7–10)

The phrase, ‘hardened their Hearts’, Temple takes from Exodus, which applies it to the Pharaoh, who refuses the demands from Moses that the Israelite slaves be freed (Exodus 8:32). This borrowing transforms the native Irish into enslaving Egyptians, subjugating the chosen people. So, in one sentence, Temple makes the natives into a monstrous combination of the tyrannical Pharaoh and the disloyal Israelites who were enslaved by the Egyptians, which makes the community endeavouring on behalf of the Reformation into the real chosen people.89 As well as depicting Catholic children as evil, and Catholic rebels as childlike savages, Temple employs the discourse of childhood to describe the rising itself which in his treatment also becomes a version of the ‘child-as-monster’. Early in his history, Temple despairs of the ‘first conceptions’ of what he explicitly calls a ‘monstrous birth’ (65), and insists that the ‘first authors’ of the rising should be considered ‘most odious and execrable to all Posterity’ (66). In planning the rebellion, the Catholic Church behaved like a perverted version of the God of the early chapters of the book of Genesis, who shaped Adam out of clay like a divine potter. While God moulded the first man out of malleable material into which a divine spark could be fused, the rebellion was ‘roughly drawn and hammered out on the Romish Forge, powerfully fermented by the treachery and virulent animosities of some of the Irish natives, and so by degrees, by them moulded into that ugly shape wherein it first appeared’ (66). This is a Frankenstein-monster of a creation,

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which inverts the natural order. Like a woman pregnant with a demon, ‘the power of the Rebels was suddenly swollen up to a great bulk, and likely so fast to multiply and increase’ (25). After the ‘first fruits’ of the rebellion are felt, it ‘began to dilate itself into the other Provinces’ (44). Temple’s bodily description echoes the ways in which sin itself was treated in theological writing of the period. For example, Ussher in A Body of Divinitie writes of the growth of sin as analogous to the development of an infant in the womb: How then doth sinne grow from its first conception to its full growth? Saint James in respect of the degrees of it compareth it to the conception, growth, and birth of an Infant, in, and from the wombe, James 1. 14, 15.90

The rebellion is, for Temple, covertly ‘brought to … maturity’, gestating quietly, in secret, without anyone knowing (17). The offspring of a foreign church and native Irish traitors, the growth of this child is disgusting to even contemplate. Like a committed gynaecologist, however, Temple determines to ‘observe the beginnings and first motions, as well as trace out the progress, of a rebellion so excreable in it self, so odious to God and the whole world, as no age, no kingdom, no people can parallel the horrid cruelties’ (16). In these early sections, Temple is explicit in his appropriation of the language used in describing ‘monstrous births’ when explaining how the rebellion came into being. As Julia Crawford has set out, in the early modern period, monstrous births, or the appearance of biological abominations or ‘freaks of nature’, were treated as ‘messages from God’. The ‘causes behind their creation and the forms of their monstrosity’ were pored over by intrepid interpreters eager to understand exactly what God was trying to communicate – though that message tended to be about the need to punish transgressive behaviour (usually by women).91 Since Temple is convinced that the rising was sent by God to punish the English Protestants of Ireland for allowing themselves to be biologically polluted by Irish Catholics (because, as he memorably puts it, they ‘conglutinated’ too much with the ‘beastly … depraved and barbarous’), it makes sense that he would consider it as the political equivalent of an abomination. Indeed, in understanding the rebellion in gynaecological terms, Temple’s history resonates with contemporary interpretations of the appearance of biological anomalies in the world as political events, or as having political significance. In the pamphlet Strange Newes of a Prodigious Monster, borne in the Township of Adlington in the Parish of Standish – testified by the Reverend William Leigh in 1612, the birth of a four-legged, four-armed, two-faced ‘Janus’ is described, which the author, one Reverend William Leigh, understands as a portent from God to be heeded by all pious Protestants.

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4  Strange Newes of a Prodigious Monster, borne in the Township of Adlington in the Parish of Standish – testified by the Reverend William Leigh in 1612 – front page

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Leigh connects the birth to a number of political incidents, including the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada, and the rise of the earl of Tyrone in Ireland, a man Leigh considers a monster in any case: The Island of Lecale in Ireland within the County of Downe, produced an hidious Monster, bearing the shape both of a Man and a beast, whose eyes sparkling like fyer, and his voyce sounding harsh and shrill, farre from the common strayne, gaue certaine foresignifications of those troubles that the yeere following beganne to vexe both the kingdomes of England and Ireland, in that fearefull yet memorable warre of Tyrone, that in few yeeres after prooued so fatall to both Nations, that it brought wretchednesse not onely to the people then liuing, but hath also prepared misery for the Child yet vnborne, as is too well knowne by the miserable death and slaughter, not onely of the common sort of people, but also by the lamentable ouerthrowes and slaughters of many great, and honorable Personages, famous in blood and quality.92

Since literal monstrous births could have political repercussions, then political atrocities could be, and were, compared to them. Like Temple, Leigh also invokes the sin of our first parents, because of whose fall and loss of ‘Innocencie’ the earth itself became cursed. Leigh insists that ‘The Earth it selfe innocent of his crime was accurst for his sake, for whome it was created, and brought forth thornes, bryers, and stinking weedes, where before it was full of pleasure, and delight, and so had continued, if man had continued in his first creation.’ 93 In The Irish Rebellion, ‘Innocencie’ does not protect the earth or the English Protestant child from the implications of a monstrous perversity. Temple finds evidence of the curse of the fall in Irish soil itself, which he repeatedly describes as desolate and a wasteland. From being a local series of atrocities, Temple expands the magnitude of the rising until it assumes cosmic significance, and Ireland 1641 moves from being a postlapsarian dystopia to teetering on the edge of the apocalypse.94 All the stories of forced abortions, of babies being ripped from the wombs of pregnant women, of mothers being killed in the act of childbirth, of newborns attempting to suckle the breasts of their dead mothers, of children lying in the placental detritus waiting for death, all speak of a greater, cosmic disruption in the cycle of life, and appropriately come with portentous accompaniments. The bodies of children were, as French points out, often considered battlegrounds in and on which the apocalypse would be fought, and omens of the end times could be read in the disasters of the age.95 In the Gospels, Jesus explains that the end times will begin abruptly, the Master arriving home without warning, like a thief in the night, and catching people in the middle of their daily lives (as also occurred at the time of the Deluge):

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And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all … Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed … I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. (Luke 17:26–36)

Temple reworks these words into a description of the 1641 rising, ordinary, everyday life disrupted by an unexpected, revelatory violence: ‘servants were killed as they were ploughing in the fields; Husbands cut to pieces in the presence of their Wives’ (40).96 That his narrative is unfinished is structurally useful, as it serves as an ominous indication that Temple suspects that end times may have really begun. However, he is not without hope for the future. It is, I think, significant, that Temple informs the reader that a Scottish woman who ‘was found in the Glinwood, lying dead, her belly ripped up’, had ‘a living Child, crawling in her Womb, cut out of the Cawl’ (123–4). Cauls were powerfully symbolic objects in the early modern period, and often considered to indicate a special blessing from God on the child born with one. Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), explains that Great conceits are raised of the involution or membranous covering, commonly called the Silly-how, that sometimes is found upon the heads of children upon their birth; and is therefore preserved with great care, not only as medical in diseases, but effectuall in successe, concerning the Infant and others; which is surely no more than a continued superstition.97

The caul was, traditionally, a sign of grace, and such signs held great symbolic power in cultures where predestination had theological traction.98 John Calvin insisted on the inscrutability of personal salvation: it is ultimately impossible for an individual to know whether they are one of the elect or one of the reprobate. This inscrutability is a difficult psychological burden to bear, and adherents have tended to search for signs of election to provide even temporary reassurance.99 Max Weber influentially argued that the Protestant work ethic, which encouraged material prosperity, was in part driven by the desire for assurance. Would a righteous God really permit a man to thrive economically if he was one of the damned?100 Reform cultures influenced by Puritan thinking were certainly given to reading the ‘signs of the times’, and ‘[F]or many Protestants … bodily sickness or disorder … was seen as an admonitory message from God.’ Pregnancy was an extremely anxious time for early modern Protestant women, not just because of the physical dangers it posed, although they were considerable.101 Crawford

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points out that during pregnancy, expectant Protestant mothers would pray intensely to be spared from a deformed or disabled child, because such disability could be read as a sign of God’s displeasure and a punishment for the sins of the parents, and an indication of their ultimate post-mortem destiny.102 Contrariwise, the goodness of an elect mother might ‘imprint’ itself on the body of the newborn in the form of a caul, as an outward sign of the sanctity of the mother’s soul and body. Temple’s decision to include the discovery of a caul in the midst of the apocalyptic death and destruction of 1641 Ireland suggests that there may be signs of hope, even in this desolate place, of a different kind of future. The finding of a child with a caul not only speaks of the holiness of the massacred (and the wickedness of their murderers), but is a portent for the future, and holds out hope for a regeneration of the English Protestant community in Ireland.103 The murdered children themselves are also transformed into sources of hope and inspiration for the reader, as Temple describes them not only as victims of a satanic plot, but martyrs to the Protestant cause. Temple’s narrative returns insistently to the threats faced by vulnerable Protestant children, and their helpless purity is emphasised throughout. This stress on innocent vulnerability is a powerful rhetorical tool in atrocity narratives, as it exploits the readers’ fears for the death of their own children. Given the common experience of the loss of a child for seventeenth-century families, therefore, the emotional impact of including so many accounts of horrific child murder by Temple is considerable. Indeed, the fact that many families had to experience multiple child deaths as a normal part of life provides an emotional environment in which the popularity of didactic stories of child martyrs and saintly deaths makes much sense. In contexts in which child death was actually quite a common experience, the rhetorical image of the endangered, vulnerable or dead child takes on enormous affective power, and an emotional rather than a rational response is what is being sought in Temple’s provision of so many such images in his history. The emphasis on the plight of these martyrs is also designed to provoke an adult desire to rescue the children in jeopardy. In Temple’s nightmarish scenario, the vulnerable Protestant child is surrounded by monsters of impenetrability who appear pitiless and unmoved by the tears of their helpless victims. Unlike the readers who weep at the descriptions of the horrible deaths meted out to children, the perpetrators are stone-hearted demons who appear to derive pleasure from their barbaric activities. The children cry for help and respite to their persecutors and receive no response; the reader, however, becomes appalled, an emotional response of protectiveness is provoked, and anger is directed at the victimisers.104 All these atrocity stories together, Temple informs his readers, is ‘fit for a Martyrology’ (109), and, given the relative inaccessibility of the Depositions

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themselves,105 his own history soon substituted for one. The representation of the violent death of pious children in ‘histories’ like The Irish Rebellion laid the basis for the emergence of some of the earliest children’s literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, texts in which the dying child was fetishised and presented as a subject for admiration and devotion. Most famously, perhaps, James Janeway’s A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671–2) uses a series of shocking youthful fatalities as a way to motivate the child reader through fear and terror of death into behaving better. The saintly deaths in Janeway’s collection are presented as lessons that need to be understood and then internalised by the child reader, but only if she has eyes to see and ears to hear. The child relatives of these martyrs to suffering are exemplars on whom the child reader can model their own reactions. For example, one child, the 4-year old John Sudlow (appropriately enough, an avid reader of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), is first upset into a much more pious attitude to existence when his baby brother dies: The first thing that did most affect him, and make him endeavour to escape from the wrath to come, and to enquire what he should do to be saved, was the death of a little Brother; when he saw him without breath, and not able to speak or stir, and then carried out of doors, and put into a pit-hole, he was greatly concerned, and asked surprising questions about him, but that which was most affecting of himself and others, was whether he must die too, which being answered, it made such a deep impression upon him, that from that time forward he was exceeding serious, and this was when he was about four years old.106

John converts to the way of grace because of the fright of seeing his baby brother die prematurely. Janeway’s point is that difficult events can be the means of conversion for children, and perhaps for adults too. There is no indication here that John’s little brother died in a particularly violent way, but the logic of the pattern of conversion is clear: the greater the distress, the more likely a personal spiritual alteration is to take place. The death of children is a particularly effective shock treatment for effecting personal and, potentially, communal transformation – and the more violent and shocking the death, the greater the cathartic affect could be. While the cautionary tale with the expiry or mutilation of children at its centre has been a staple of children’s literature since the seventeenth century, and encompasses the work of an enormous variety of writers for children, including Janeway, Maria Edgeworth, Hilaire Belloc and Roald Dahl,107 child death has a powerful pedagogic impact in writing for adults as well. Of course, the death of a child in real families was frequently read as a didactic

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communication from God in any case. Ohlmeyer instances a letter written by the earl of Arran to his father, the second duke of Ormond, after the death of his eldest son in 1681, in which he expressed his despair over his loss, but also his belief that this was ‘a just correction of God Almighty’, that would encourage him to improve his own life.108 Temple is very clear why he thinks the Protestant community in Ireland needs the kind of shock administered by the horrific child murders of 1641. While his analysis of the rising lays immediate blame for what has happened squarely on an international, Vatican-centred conspiracy of Catholics to eradicate the Protestant religion in Ireland (66), Temple doesn’t hold back in his criticism of English Protestants themselves. Prior to the rising, Protestants in Ireland had become far too complacent and comfortable, making friends with their Catholic neighbours and normalising their continued existence in the country. Ignoring the reality of persistent (and ineradicable) Catholic perfidy, these Protestants needed a major fright to alert them to the existential precariousness of their situation, a trauma which was delivered to them by God through the violence of the rebellion and, in particular, the grisly assaults on Protestant women and children. While Temple maintains that the conspiracy was among the most evil acts ever committed since the creation of the world, and that the Irish Catholics who carried it out were agents of Satan, he also insists that the suffering inflicted upon Protestants was ordained by God as a punishment for growing too close to their Catholic neighbours and not understanding the ‘perverse disposition of the Irish’ thoroughly (9). In a development of the theology of the good father punishing his elect children, Temple maintains that God has permitted (and even set in train) these horrific events to teach English Protestants in Ireland a lesson: ‘Thus it pleased God to humble his own people in this Land, and for their sins to give them into the power of their cruel Enemies’ (53). It is highly likely that the affective power of the deaths of children in historical accounts such as the Book of Martyrs and Temple’s Irish Rebellion had an influence on the popularity of the representations of child death in early children’s literature, such as Janeway’s Token. While there had been earlier texts in English which provided examples of child martyrs – including abridgements of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Samuel Clarke’s Mirrour (1646), and Thomas White’s A Little Book for Little Children (1646) – they had also included the deaths of adults. Janeway, however, focused only on dying child heroes. Diana Pasulka argues that ‘It is not an exaggeration to state that this text created the literary convention of child death and would be one of the most imitated texts in the Western history of children’s literature’, but it is important to emphasise that Janeway is depending on the historical ‘martyrologies’ which had already created a ready audience for his particular variety of victimology.109 Janeway opens by instructing parents to ‘take

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some time daily to speak a little to your Children, one by one, about their miserable condition by Nature’.110 After all, he muses, ‘they are not too little to dye, they are not too little to go to Hell’.111 ‘A corrupt nature’, he advises in a powerful phrase, ‘is a rugged knotty piece to hew’, especially since children appear in the world already completely corrupted.112 Janeway explains that he once ‘knew a child who was converted by one sentence from a godly schoolmistress in the country: “Every mother’s child of you is by nature a child of wrath.”’ 113 All his protagonists are deeply impressed by the knowledge of their own inherent sinfulness and of the implications of the doctrine of original sin and turn into rather annoying little evangelisers once they become fully cognisant of their responsibilities in this world. Having listened to a sermon on original sin, one child, Sarah Howley, ‘was mightily awakened, and made deeply sensible of the condition of her Soul, and her need of Christ; she wept bitterly to think what a case she was in … but got her little Brother and Sister into a Chamber with her, and told them of their condition by nature, and wept over them, and prayed with them and for them’.114 Janeway’s intention is to affect the child reader as much as the child martyrs are impacted by their experiences – he wants his readers to be emotionally transformed by encountering his text as a prelude to their religious transformation. He exhorts parents to permit their children read the book themselves, ‘over an hundred times, and observe how they are affected, and ask them what they think of those Children, and whether they would not be such’.115 Token is filled with exhortations to these young charges to confess their sins and sinful desires, to quit their disobedience of their parents (contemporary re-enactments of the disobedience of our first parents), and take heed of the eternal punishment which will be the fate of reprobates. While children fear chastisement from their earthly parents, Janeway informs them that even the strictest disciplinarian has nothing on God the Father, who can consign the disobedient child to eternal punishment: ‘Hell is a terrible place, that’s worse a thousand times than whipping; Gods anger is worse than your Fathers anger.’ 116 Janeway structures his text around the stories of a number of children whose incredibly pious sermons from their deathbed are supposed to have an improving influence on the child reader – after all, if even a 4-year-old like Mary could become ‘very solicitous of her soul’, and bless God for the ‘reproofs and corrections’ of her mother when naughty, before shuffling off this mortal coil, then surely she could serve as a fit example for everyone.117 Janeway’s children of grace should work as powerful examples that anyone could imitate (if they only tried). Janeway’s account of childhood death is interactive, with some suggested questions for parents to put to their child interlocutors, always keeping the focus on the fate of the unrepentant sinner: ‘Ask [the child readers] what

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they think of those Children, and whether they would not be such?’ 118 His style is engaging and sets up a dialogue with his readers, putting what ultimately turn out to be a series of closed questions to the inquiring child. ‘Whither, do you think, those Children go when they dye, that will not do what they are bid, but play the Truant, and Lye, and speak naughty words, and break the Sabbath? Whither do such Children go, do you think?’ If the reader suspects that Janeway knows the answer to these leading questions already, they would be right: ‘I will tell you, they which Lye, must go to their Father the Devil into everlasting burning; they which never pray, God will pour out his wrath upon them; and when they beg and pray in Hell Fire, God will not forgive them, but there they must lye for ever.’ 119 Given this depressing state of affairs, another leading question asks, ‘Are you willing to go to Hell to be burned with the Devil and his Angels?’ 120 Janeway’s advice to the child who wishes to avoid such a destiny is to read his book which should have a direct effect on the reader’s subsequent behaviour: ‘will you read this book a little, because your good mother will make you do it, and because it is a little new book[?]’ 121 A Token for Children was given a Dublin publication in 1702 by John Ware booksellers, and was, therefore, one of the first texts explicitly and exclusively concerned with childhood to be published in Ireland. That it was a success and had found a ready audience of Irish readers is suggested, perhaps, by the publisher Samuel Fairbrother’s 1719 reprinting of an example of what has been termed ‘Tokenography’:122 A Legacy for Children: being some of the last expressions and dying sayings of Hannah Hill. Hannah Hill was an 11-year-old Philadelphian Quaker whose ‘last expressions’ were recorded and published in an appeal to American children to take heed of their future state. Her early martyrdom grants her a kind of ‘pious authority’ which effectively transforms her into a prophet, and requires everyone to listen to what she has to say and pay heed to her warnings.123 While it may seem odd that a text written by a member of a relatively small Christian denomination should have proved so popular as to go into multiple editions in a few years, it is important to note that, as M. O. Grenby points out, ‘most users’ in this period, ‘did not select their children’s books on the basis of creed’, and that ‘what is striking is the promiscuity of children’s religious reading’.124 The title page contain three quotations from the Gospels often used by those of a Pelagian temperament to justify treating the child as pure and innocent: ‘Out of the mouths of Babes and Sucklings, thou hast perfected Praise’ (Matthew 21:16); ‘Whosoever shall receive one of such Children in my name, receiveth me’ (Mark 9:37); ‘But Jesus called unto him, and said, suffer little Children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God’ (Luke 18:6).125 In a response to the emphasis on the

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depravity of the child in Janeway, the dying Hannah Hill insists on the love of God for ‘Innocent Children’, of all backgrounds. Hannah exclaims her profound love for ‘both White and Black’ (motivated by the abolitionist ideology of her denomination),126 and offers her patient acceptance of death as an example to the child reader of her last words. Hannah falters on the edge of death for many days, living just long enough to sermonise eloquently to a series of visitors to her deathbed, and admonish them to live better lives in the future, keeping her own painful loss in their mind. Even the narrator is somewhat struck by ‘the admirable fluency of Pertinent Expressions suitable to the subject matter which pressed upon her Mind’.127 The author urges his child readers to experience Hannah’s death emotionally through reading witness statements proving her piety and tranquillity before her departure, and draws heavily on the didactic powers of emotion. One witness, Thomas Chakley, pleads with the ‘Youth of our Age’ to ‘follow her example’ as ‘she was a Pattern of Piety, Plainess, and Obedience to Parents’.128 The representation of the child’s deathbed scene is what the theorist Ed S. Tan calls an ‘emotion machine’,129 in that it induces in even the more hardened of readers an emotional response. The stoic acceptance of extraordinary pain by Janeway’s martyrs and Hannah Hill offered a blueprint for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists,130 when they too chose to enter into the arena of the dying child on the bed who was still capable of dispensing theological wisdom while leaving this world forever. Moreover, while such publications insist on the ‘innocence’ of the dying child, their deathbed recriminations to their peers – their admonishments that other children behave better, obey their parents, adopt a more serious attitude to life – indicate strongly that most children are simply not like the saints offered as examples. As Hannah nears death, she draws her sister and cousin closer to her to pass on the improving lessons: ‘fear God; be dutiful to thy Parents, love Truth, keep to Meetings, and be an example of Plainness’.131 A full engagement with a text like A Legacy for Children requires both an emotional and a practical response. The good child reader will first break down and cry at the heartbreaking death, and then internalise Hannah’s message and behave better in the future. Hannah herself is a powerful example of emotionality, and ‘would oft Sympathize with those that were in Affliction’.132 While Janeway essentially provides thirteen versions of the same plot, using repetition as a means of communicating the message, A Legacy for Children employs the device of the delayed climax, thus allowing Hannah to hover on the edge of death for (by the end of a short pamphlet) an increasingly unbelievable length of time. Each day Hannah thinks will be her last, so she struggles to articulate a sufficiently intense ‘deathbed’ instruction, whose effect is watered down by the fact that she doesn’t actually die and carries on living.

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Hannah grows rather tired of this postponement herself, and earnestly prays that she be allowed to die. The text opens with her being seized by ‘a violent Fever and Flux’, after which she and others around her are sure she is on the point of departure, but ‘the Lord was pleased to continue her a little longer, to testifie to his Goodness’.133 ‘I am prepared!’ she calls out to God, only for nothing to happen. Death is much desired by Hannah, who confesses that ‘I had rather die and go to God, than to continue in this World of Trouble.’ 134 God is not so accommodating, however, and has Hannah continue to linger for even longer. At one point even the narrator seems impatient with the repeated delayed termination, pointing out ‘so long was she accounted dying, or at least more than once each day had the Symptoms of Death strongly upon her’.135 If death is so desirable, however, life becomes transformed into a moral obstacle course of sin where there are too many chances open to the child to sully her soul again. Texts such as Token and Hannah Hill simultaneously present children as constantly vulnerable to sin, and make death attractive as a way out of this corrupt existence. These Dublin publications would have encountered a Protestant audience already trained by Temple to read child death as one of the most effective and blunt ways God chooses to communicate. The child deaths Temple details are instances of ‘spectacular violence’,136 rather than the dignified deaths that became traditional in children’s literature, but his dying children are as useful as those in the ‘Tokenographies’ in imparting messages from the author to the reader. While Temple’s history was not written specifically for children, it was one they encountered every 23 October in an annual sermon on the rebellion. The commemoration of 1641 was a major date in the calendar of Hibernia Anglicana, and Temple’s interpretation of it as an attempted extermination of Protestants in Ireland became the official state view, and ‘it became customary for preachers to recycle the atrocities memorialised’ in The Irish Rebellion.137 Indeed, the memorial ceremony involved a reading of the Act of 1666 which institutionalised the commemoration, and the Preface to this act contains a long quotation taken directly from Temple’s history. The text itself found its way into the homes of a great many Irish Protestants and it is likely to have had an imaginative impact on the child readers who encountered it there. Aaron Rhames’s 1724 edition of the text recognised the imaginative appeal that the atrocity stories had for the reader (in fact, they are the only reason why a general reader might be attracted to Temple’s otherwise often dry history), and in a vivid frontispiece illustrates some gruesome incidences, providing graphic images of a child being ripped from the womb of a naked woman who is tied to a tree, and one where two rebels are tearing children into pieces with what must be superhuman strength.

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5  Frontispiece and title page of John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (Dublin: Printed by Aaron Rhames, 1724)

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It is useful, as Toby Barnard has persuasively argued, to think of The Irish Rebellion as fulfilling a function for the Protestant community in Ireland similar to that of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs for English Protestant readers.138 In the mid-nineteenth century, John Milner recalled how important Foxe’s martyrology was for the average English child: Foxe’s martyrs are among our earliest recollections, and their spiritstirring incidents riveted our eyes to their pages in our earliest childhood. Here we see ‘the great things that faith can do and the great things that faith can suffer’. Here we behold, in fact, what Bunyan has so admirably described in fiction; here is Faithful again suffering and dying.139

While it might be an exaggeration to claim that Temple’s history had as great an imaginative impact in Ireland as Foxe’s martyrology had in England, its significance for the Establishment of what Diane Long Hoeveler has called the ‘Irish Protestant imaginary’ should not be underestimated.140 Moreover, the section of The Irish Rebellion containing the atrocity narratives did have direct influence on writing for children, when it became one of the sources for the section on Ireland in John Lockman’s A History of the Cruel Sufferings of the Protestants, and others, by Popish persecutions, in various countries: together with a view of the reformations from the Church of Rome, first published in 1760 by John Newbery, and given a Dublin reprinting by James Potts, at Swift’s-Head in Dame Street in 1763. This was a book, written ‘principally for Schools’, intended ‘as a preservative from Popery and arbitrary power’.141 Unsurprisingly, one of the subscribers for the Dublin reprinting was the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland, and this text was frequently used in classrooms in charity schools and then Charter schools in the eighteenth century.142 In its review, the Monthly Review noted that it was a text ‘calculated chiefly for younger minds’ who ‘may not have had an opportunity of becoming acquainted … with the many affecting relations contained therein’.143 The reviewer worried that the child reader might, when reading this volume, mistake the ‘shocking history of superstitious error and fanatical zeal’ (or, the history of Roman Catholicism) ‘for Christianity itself’,144 though given that the volume is a screed against the treatment of Protestants by Catholics, it is not clear how even the most naïve child reader could make such a elementary mistake. Lockman provides a detailed description of the ‘History of the Romish Persecutions in Ireland’, which, like the other sections, is mostly drawn from ‘authors of distinguished piety, erudition, and eminence’, and cites Temple as one such authority.145 In Lockman’s account, the 1641 rising is represented as a ‘catastrophe’ which will ‘remain in characters of blood, to last posterity’.146 As Toby Barnard stresses, when it came to 1641, Lockman only ‘repeated the most

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sanguinary interpretations’.147 According to Lockman, the rebellion was directed by the Jesuits, began on the feast of St Ignatius Loyola (31 July), and opened with a service in Multifernan Abbey in Westmeath, where a ‘horrid resolution was taken’ to ‘extirpate and destroy the whole race of Protestants in Ireland’.148 Lockman bases his accounts on the division of the world into (Protestant) angels and Catholic devils and, repeating the same claim by Temple, insists that there was nothing like 1641 in the prior history of the world: ‘a rebellion, so execrable in itself, so odious to God and to the whole world; that no age, no kingdom, no people, can parallel the horrid cruelties, and the abominable murthers, which were then, without number or without mercy, committed upon the Protestant British inhabitants’.149 Unexpectedly, Lockman does not concentrate his attention on the aspects of the 1641 Rebellion that would probably have been most appealing to the child reader: the exciting and detailed reports of the sufferings and deaths of the Irish Protestant children at the hands of the Catholic rebels that make Temple’s account so compelling. He is more interested in demonstrating that the rebellion and the attendant atrocities were approved of, and even directed by the papacy, than in providing gory details of what actually happened, and more absorbed by the fate of various Church of Ireland prelates than in the aborted children of ordinary Protestants. Lockman does, however, mention that Protestant mothers fled their homes, ‘bitterly lamenting’ the fate of their children, leaving the reader in some suspense as to what exactly happened to them.150 Leaving out the juicy bits, the child reader might have followed up by looking through the much more explicit text on which Lockman’s version draws, and which that reader would have possibly found in his parents’ library. Temple’s fetishisation of the vulnerable and innocent (rather than the corrupted and degenerate) Protestant child speaks to the changing discourses of childhood set out at the beginning of this chapter. It is not that the ‘evil child’ became less important in the later seventeenth and then eighteenth centuries, but that there was an increasing use of the language of vulnerability, preciousness and innocence, especially when people discussed their own children. While Irish Anglicanism remained theoretically committed to a belief in the active power of original sin in the minds and hearts of children, there is also some indications that by the middle of the eighteenth century, parents did not raise the subject of total depravity a great deal in their relationships with their offspring. Given the peculiar circumstances of being greatly outnumbered by a reprobate Irish Catholic population, Anglicans in Ireland had, perhaps, more cause to become intensely domestically focused than their co-religionists in England, though evidence of parental (as opposed to theological) attitudes is difficult to come by. Molyneux’s declaration of his devotion to and love for his 4-year old son is a small example of the

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kind of testimony needed to build a better sense of how Irish Anglican parents actually thought about their children. Moreover, the enthusiasm for the child-centred educational theories of John Locke by members of the Anglican elite also suggests a focus on affection and care for the child in the home. In her consideration of changing family dynamics, Jane Ohlmeyer concludes that ‘though the wider kin group remained important … early modern Irish titled families became increasingly centred on the nuclear family – and children were at the heart of this’.151 What little evidence we do possess does show that ‘parents and grandparents invested considerable emotional energy in their children and developed loving and positive relationships with them’.152 She quotes a letter from Lady Warwick, a daughter of the earl of Cork, from 1664, after the death of her son, where this love is expressed extremely clearly and touchingly: ‘I loved him at a rate, that if my heart do not deceive me, I could, with all the willingness in the world, have died either for him or with him.’ 153 Natural depravity, original sin and corruption also fail to raise their heads in the letters sent by the bishop of Elphin, Edward Synge, to his daughter Alicia, in which the bishop expresses more concern for her difficulties with spelling than her inherent capacity for doing moral wrong. On 28 July 1847, when Alicia was 14, Synge sent her a demonstrative letter explaining how much he looked forward to writing to her and delayed that gratification by dealing with other business first: ‘After dispatching a multitude of other letters, I come to my Dear Girl. Like Children with their goodys, I keep the best for last. I have more pleasure in writing to you, than to any one else, yet not so much as in reading yours.’ 154 Synge had need of such small pleasures, given the emotional difficulties of his life. He was, by this time, a widower, and had lost five of his children, Edward, Sarah, Catherine, Mary and Robert, and was deeply attached to his surviving daughter, on whom he poured out a great deal of love (and spelling advice) across the seven years of their surviving correspondence. Indeed, from the start of these letters, the mutual affection between ‘Dada’ and ‘Mrs Giddy-boots’,155 or ‘my Dear giddy brat’,156 is self-evident. In the very first extant letter, of 9 May 1746, he explains how difficult it is to be parted from her for the summer period. The Synge family had its permanent residence in Dublin, but every summer, for about six months, the bishop would take up residence in his parish in Co. Roscommon. Synge gently explained to ‘Ally’ that when she was younger it had been easier to leave her, because ‘I had then other objects of my tenderest affection. You only now remain.’ Given the number of deaths they had to endure, the ties of love between father and daughter had grown ever the deeper. When she was an infant Alicia could ‘give me pleasure only157 by looking at me’; now,

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in her adolescence, he could enter into a deeper relationship with her, and write to her about his worries, their family affairs, their neighbours, their shared interests and, crucially, her future.158 ‘My Dear Girl’s long letters are very pleasing,’ he insists, ‘and if you manage so as not to distress or embarrass your self with writing then, I care not how long they are – you may do as I do, Take a whole sheet, and fill it with Girl’s prattle, as I do mine with Old Dad’s.’ 159 She is ‘my dearest Dear child’,160 and he is lonely without her presence, feeling ‘somewhat solitary: so I must ever be when you are not with me’.161 Contemplating his return home to her the bishop warns Alicia to ‘take notice now; Mistress mine, that I won’t have you run into the street, Or Court, like a mad thing to meet me. Have a good fire in the great parlour, and there receive me. I shall run to you as fast as I can, for now the time is so near, I confess my impatience to see you.’ 162 His concern for the welfare of his surviving children is so great that, as he explains in the very first extant letter to Alicia, awareness that his son Robert is ill drives him to such distraction that he becomes ‘unhinged’, and he makes what seems to be a momentous decision: ‘I’ll tell you what I am fix’d in on this trying occasion. In the first place I have resign’d my Boy absolutely … The most prudent way is, while doubt remains, to suppose the worst.’ 163 To cope with the traumatic family losses, and the potential death of his son, Synge declares that he will essentially accept their fate as sealed, and thus remain able to cope with his other duties in life. Synge here echoes some of the claims made by historians that parents in the early modern period were emotionally distanced from the death of their children because of the high mortality rate.164 Because, given the high rates of child mortality, they expected to lose most of their children, they needed to keep an emotional distance from them to maintain psychological balance. However, despite Synge’s claim that he would no longer be moved or disturbed by news of his children’s illnesses, in fact the letters reveal that he remained obsessed by matters of Alicia’s health.165 There is hardly a letter in which Synge does not worry away at Alicia’s good health. Understandable anxiety about Alicia’s health torments Synge throughout the seven years, and every whisper of illness prompts his memory of the many members of the family he has already lost. In July 1746, he tells Alicia that she is ‘your good Mother’s daughter in understanding as well as in feature’, and he prays to God that she ‘may be like’ her mother in everything but one, ‘her bad health’.166 Synge worries that Alicia’s feminine embarrassment would prevent her speaking directly to him should anything be amiss with her menstrual cycle. In a letter of 1751 he informs her that ‘I know the State of your late disorder, which struck me at first with so much terror.’ He reassures her that she should be able to tell him about these physical problems, and cautions against ‘such a false delicacy forsooth in speaking

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to or being spoken to’ about such matters: ‘If [Women] have health, they are once a month in some Circumstances. If single Women are not, something is wrong’, and this must be attended to immediately by a doctor.167 He does not, however, insist that the feelings of a parent should overrule those of the child, and counsels that even a father’s commands should not take precedence over the guidance of her own conscience. Synge maintains that ‘the Commands of Parents ought to be lawfull and decorous. Where they are not, Children are not bound to obey, nay! they are bound not to obey.’ 168 Throughout these letters, Synge’s sincere love for his child is clear, his belief in her goodness transparent, as is his determination that she should survive him: ‘Nothing in this World is of so much consequence to me as your Welfare’, he tells her, and this ‘not meerly because you are my Child, mine only Child’.169 The Synge letters are precious evidence of the deep bond that existed between Irish Anglican parents and their children in the eighteenth century. Even if Synge is not a ‘typical’ parent, whatever such a creature may be, the casual expression of affection found throughout his letters – even as he is correcting beloved Ally’s atrocious spelling – indicates that he saw nothing unusual in the openness of their relationship. Although the over two hundred letters are often characterised by what a twenty-first-century reader might consider an excessive didacticism – at one point, Synge looks forward to ‘going over’ her letters with Alicia when they are reunited in the winter – the improving tone is mitigated by a humorous mutual regard, in which Synge can accept advice as well as dish it out, as when Alicia corrects her grammarand spelling-fixated father for an error in one of his own sentences.170 The cultural historian Willemijn Ruberg uses the Synge letters as a way to gain access to the emotional history of the eighteenth century, ‘the collective emotional standards of a society (as distinct from the emotional experiences of individuals and groups)’.171 The letters are also useful as a way into that other, connected, history, the history of Irish childhood. The letters reveal the extent to which, by the mid-eighteenth century, childhood was being treated as a time in which, while discipline, development and improvement were central considerations in the treatment of individual children, the child had become a ‘dear, dear’ object of pleasure, joy and affection. Original sin, total depravity and a belief that children are born bad had, of course, not disappeared by the mid-eighteenth century. In his catechism, Synge’s father, the bishop of Tuam, had himself emphasised the cursed condition of every human being born since the fall of Adam and Eve. Because ‘the Nature of Children must needs be like to that of their Parents’, the Corruption of the Nature of these two Persons … did communicate an universal Corruption of Nature to all their Posterity’.172 What we see in the

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relationship between the bishop and Alicia is, however, evidence that, as French argues, ‘on a pastoral level at least, Reformed Protestant views surrounding salvation of children and even the predestination of children’s souls, were adapted and moulded to enable parents to cope with the potential loss of their young’.173 Given that the terminology of childhood, childbirth and monstrosity pervade the history, Temple’s The Irish Rebellion suggests that the ways in which the Protestant community in Ireland were thinking of childhood itself was changing. While the sermons of the early seventeenth century examined in Chapter 1 explicitly described the child as a corrupted and threatening figure, the Protestant child in The Irish Rebellion is a vulnerable, threatened and, in some ways, ‘innocent’ creature, menaced by satanic childish forces outside the Protestant family circle. Temple employs a discourse of moral innocence and physical vulnerability in describing the child that carries on into the eighteenth century in the Synge letters. Fiendish children continue to stalk the land, but they are identified with the native Catholic community. The Irish Rebellion switches between horrific and horrified children, demonic monsters and innocent angels, the threatening and the threatened; these divisions emerge from a theological and ethnic division between the Irish and the English, the out-of-control and the controlled. Those who participated in the rebellion are the monstrous children of the horror stories which would appear much later in the Irish gothic: hideous progeny, racial pollutants. Their vulnerable innocent victims would be recreated as the virginal, persecuted maidens of that tradition. That emphasis on childish vulnerability continues in the Anglican writing of the eighteenth century. Temple’s The Irish Rebellion is a version of history as a kind of anthropology of childhood, and as such is a disguised ‘questing after control’ of the childlike Catholic masses.174 Irish Catholics had escaped from the routines of containment that were considered vital in the Puritan discourse of the child. Instead of socialising, educating, and training the Irish Catholics out of their inherited degeneracy, the English in Ireland had for too long tolerated this degeneracy, and found a way to live peaceably with it. This tolerance had merely opened an avenue for Irish Catholics to attempt a complete extirpation of the Protestant community, and turned Protestant Ireland into a mother weeping for her murdered babies, or a violently attacked child itself. This image of Ireland divided between vulnerable and virtuous Protestant, and an out-of-control degenerate Catholic children would have profound political consequences for the future. The shifting ideas about the child would also have a profound impact on the instruction of children in their faith, to which we now turn.

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Notes 1 The Depositions have now been digitised and can be read at a searchable website hosted by Trinity College Dublin, http://1641.tcd.ie. All quotations from the Depositions are taken from this site. 2 Marina Warner, ‘Little Angels, Little Devils: Keeping Childhood Innocent’, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time: The Reith Lectures 1994 (London: Vintage, 1994), 33–48. 3 Temple does not think of Protestants in Ireland as Irish Protestants because of his focus on the moral and spiritual implications of ethnic differences. Throughout The Irish Rebellion, Protestants who live in Ireland (even those whose families had been on the island for generations) are referred to as ‘English Protestants’, and when referring to Temple’s analysis, I will accept his designation. 4 Pia Haudrup, ‘Childhood and the Cultural Constitution of Vulnerable Bodies’, in Alan Prout (ed.), The Body, Childhood and Society (London: Palgrave, 2000), 39–59. 5 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 78. 6 See Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (London: Palgrave, 2001). 7 Wood, ‘Preface’, xii. For the dualistic interpretation of childhood, see also French, Children of Wrath, passim. 8 Though she accepts that the Romantics were most to blame for the myth of the child as preternaturally pure. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London, Thames & Hudson, 1998), 8. 9 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 47–8. Cunningham derives the term ‘spiritualisation of the household’ from Christopher Hill’s extremely influential Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Verso, 1964), 443–81. 10 Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 54. 11 For an analysis which demythologises the puritans, see Roger Cox, The Shaping of Childhood: Themes of Uncertainty in the History of Adult–Child Relationships (London: Routledge, 1996), 11–45. 12 Gerrard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush in The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), vol. 2, 220. 13 French, Children of Wrath, 17. 14 Ibid., 26. 15 William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, in The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), vol. 1, 523–4, 525. See Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 44–55, for a discussion of the ‘redemptive child’. 16 Alan Richardson, ‘Romanticism and the End of Childhood’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 21 (1999), 171.

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17 A concise survey of the Pelagian heresy can be found in John Morris, ‘Pelagian Literature’, Journal of Theological Studies, 16:1 (1965), 26–60. See also Stuart Squires, The Pelagian Controversy: An Introduction to the Enemies of Grace and the Conspiracy of Lost Souls (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019); N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin (London: Longmans, 1927); Marilyn McCord Adams, What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1999). It needs to be emphasised that Pelagius’ belief in the moral neutrality of the child (the child as innocent of sin) is matched by an uncompromising stress on the obligation of each individual to maintain moral perfection in their lives, so that human perfection is not just possible but required. For Pelagius, there is no reason why any individual should not remain free from sin for their entire life. I should say here that I find Augustine’s refutation of Pelagius to be persuasive. 18 Robert A. Davis, ‘Brilliance of a Fire: Innocence, Experience and the Theory of Childhood’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45:2 (2011), 383. 19 Anticipating Locke’s ‘blank slate’. 20 John Earle, Micro-cosmographie. Or, A Peece of the World Discovered; In Essayes and Characters (London: Printed by William Stansby, for Edward Blout, 1628), n.p. 21 French, Children of Wrath, 28. 22 Jerome, Haughty heart humbled, 13. 23 For a discussion of the debate about Catholic loyalty in this period, see Alan Ford, ‘“Firm Catholics” or “Loyal Subjects”? Religious and Political Allegiance in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury Ireland (London: Palgrave, 2001), 1–31. 24 Ussher, An Answer to a Challenge Made by a Jesuite, 10. 25 James Ussher, A sermon preached before the Commons House of Parliament in St. Margarets church at Westminster, the 18 of February 1620 (London: By I[ohn] L[egat] for Iohn Bartlet, 1631, second edition), 43–4. 26 Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 428. 27 Ibid., plate 11. 28 McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 207. 29 The work of Nicholas Canny for understanding the events of 1641 is vital. See especially Making Ireland British (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 461–550. See also, Brian MacCuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1993); Trevor Royle, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1660 (London: Abacus, 2004); Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2006), 123–51. 30 Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion: or, an history of the beginnings and first progress of the general rebellion raised within the Kingdom of Ireland, upon the three and twentieth day of October, in the Year 1641, together with the barbarous cruelties and bloody massacres which ensued there-upon (London:

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Printed by R. White for Samuel Gellibrand, 1746). All quotations will be from this edition, and placed in parentheses in the main text. The Irish Rebellion is one of the most influential books ever written in Ireland, though it was strangely omitted from Bryan Fanning and Tom Garvin’s examination of The Books that Define Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2014). 31 This is a useful term, employed by the historian Tom Garvin in the context of twentieth-century Irish conservatism and its resistance to progressive political and social change. Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so Poor for so Long? (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004). 32 Harry Hendrick, ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood, an Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the present’, in Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: Falmer Press, 1990), 34–62. 33 See Toby Barnard, Improving Ireland? Projectors, Prophets and Profiteers, 1641–1786 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 21. 34 Quoted in Kathleen M. Noonan, ‘“Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 36:2 (2004), 225. 35 Kathleen M. Noonan, ‘“The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People”: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda’, Historical Journal, 41:1 (1998), 175–6. 36 Barnard, Improving Ireland?, 21. 37 For the best account of the Depositions, see Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, in Peter Fox (ed.), Treasures of the Library, Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1986), 68–72. 38 Jenks, Childhood, 70–3. 39 The ‘evil child’ is central to a great many twentieth- and twenty-first-century films, including: Mildred Pierce (1945; d. Michael Curtiz), The Bad Seed (1956; d. Mervyn LeRoy), Rosemary’s Baby (1968; d. Roman Polanski), The Exorcist (1973; d. William Friedkin), The Omen (1976; d. Richard Donner), Carrie (1976; d. Brian de Palma), Halloween (1978; d. John Carpenter), Firestarter (1984; d. Mark Lester), The Children (2008; d. Tom Shankland), Eden Lake (2008; d. James Watkins) and The Unborn (2009; d. David S. Goyer). In many of these narratives, the child needs to be destroyed because of an intrinsic flaw in their psychological or biological make-up. For example, the problem with 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed is that she is biologically corrupted in a Darwinian updating of the Calvinist interpretation of natural depravity. In watching these films, an audience can allow itself to applaud child killers, and – by proxy – punish all the real children it resents and fears. These superficially adorable moppets turn out on closer examination to be crazed murderers, carriers of a deadly virus, possessed by Satan, or the children of the devil himself who must be exterminated before they destroy adult society. 40 Neil Sinyard, Children in the Movies (London: Palgrave, 1992), 58. 41 Barnard, Improving Ireland?, 21.

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42 Eric Ziolkowski, Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art (London: Palgrave, 2001), 11. His analysis moves from the early Church fathers right up to the work of William Golding and Doris Lessing. 43 The son of Satan in The Omen franchise. 44 Though, as explained in Chapter 1, whether the baptised child would necessarily go to heaven was a murky issue in much Protestant theology, and the importance of baptism was unclear. Anna French has provided a thorough exploration of how, in ‘Protestant culture’, ‘baptism could not impart grace or salvation’: ‘Victory over the Devil was no longer to be won at the font – children, like all members of humanity, were left at the mercy of God’s predestined plan.’ Children of Wrath, 13–14. Baptism did, however, still provide an ‘effective and spiritually beneficial means of grace’. 25. 45 See Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 28–53. 46 For a discussion of the rebels’ theology as depicted by Temple, see Noonan, ‘“Cruell Pressure”’, 161–2. 47 ‘Deposition of Robert Maxwell’, TCD MS 809, fols 005r–012v. 48 Deposition of Adam Glouer, TCD MS 833, fols 001r–001v. See also Temple, The Irish Rebellion, 43. 49 Canny, Making Ireland British, 542–3. See also, John Walter, ‘Performative Violence and the Politics of Violence in the 1641 Depositions’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 134–52. 50 John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 26. 51 Henry Jones, A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkeable Passages concerning the Church and Kingdome of Ireland, Recommended by Letters from the Right Honourable the Lords Justices, and Counsell of Ireland, and presented by Henry Jones Doctor in Divinity, and agent for the ministers of the Gospel in that kingdom, to the Honourable House of Commons in England (London: Printed for Godfrey Emerson, and William Bladen, 1642), 7. 52 Gibney, Shadow of a Year, 6. 53 2 Kings 9:10. 54 Anonymous, Bloody Newes from Ireland, or the barbarous crueltie by the papists used in that kingdome. By putting men to the sword, deflowring women, and dragging them up and downe the streets, and cruelly murdering them, and thrusting their speeres through their little infants before their eyes, and carrying them up and downe on pike-points, in great reproach, and hanging mens quarters on their gates in the street, at Armagh, Logall, at the Fort of Lease, and divers other places in Ireland. As also, the bloudy acts of Lord Mack-queere their ri[n]g-leader, and cousin to that arch-rebell Mack-queere Generall to Tyron, in the time of Queene Elizabeth of never dying memory (London: Printed for Marke Rookes, 161), title page. 55 Anonymous, A Bloody battell or The rebels overthrow, and Protestants victorie. Being a true relation of a great skirmish fought betweene Sir Thomas Moore

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of the Protestant party, and Maqueres the generall of the rebels, on the 2. day of Decemb. 1641. Also, of a cruell and detestable murther committed by 7. soldiers on the body of Mr. Atkins, his wife, and young child. In what a horrid manner they ript up his wives wombe being great with child, and afterward burnt her and her child in most lamentable manner (London: Printed for John Greensmith, 1641), n.p. 56 [Thomas Partington], Worse and Worse Newes from Ireland being the coppy of a letter read in the House of Parliament the 14 of this instant moneth of December 1641: wherein is contained such unheard-of cruelties committed by the papists against the Protestants not sparing age nor sex, that it would make a christians heart to bleede (London: Printed for Nath. Butter, 1641), 2. 57 See Gibney, Shadow of a Year, 25–6 for a good treatment of these pamphlets. 58 [James Cranford], The Teares of Ireland Wherein is lively presented as in a Map, a List of the unheard off Cruelties and perfidious Treacheries of blood-thirsty Jesuits and the Popish Faction. As a warning piece to her Sister Nations to prevent the like miseries, as are now acted on the Stage of this fresh bleeding Nation. Reported by Gentlemen of good Credit living there, but forced to flie for their lives, as Jobs Messengers, to tell us what they have heard and seene with their eyes, illustrated by pictures. Fit to be reserved by all true Protestants as a monument of their perpetuall reproach and ignominy, and to animate the spirits of Protestants against such bloudy villains (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642), 41. The British Museum has attributed the illustrations to Wenceslaus Hollar, a Bohemian printmaker and etcher. For a discussion, see Nicolás Kwiatkowski, ‘Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres: the case of Irish Rebellion, 1641–53’, in Tomas Macsotay, Cornelius Van Der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (eds), The Hurt(ful) Body: Performing and Beholding Pain, 1600–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 205–6. 59 [Cranford], The Teares of Ireland, 68. 60 Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 90. 61 Gibney, Shadow of a Year, 23. 62 Anonymous, A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries: Presented in a brief Recitement to the eyes and hearts of all her commiserating friends in England and Scotland, as one maine Motive to move their Christian courage for her assistance, when we consider there hath been at the least two hundred thousand Protestants slain and most inhumanely massacred by the barbarous and bloodthirsty Rebels, putting them to the most cruell kinds of death they could invent, as you may read by this following Relation. Diligently collected from the most certain Intelligence (London: Printed for J. H., 1647), n.p. 63 Dianne Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘“The Rebels Turkish Tyranny”: Understanding Sexual Violence in Ireland during the 1640s’, Gender and History, 22:1 (2010), 68. See also, Jennifer L. Airey, The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity,

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Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), 3–6. 64 See Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), and Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Vintage, 2000), 177–269. 65 Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 56. Valerie A. Fildes is the recognised authority on the history of wet-nursing and breastfeeding. She points out that, during the course of the seventeenth century, ‘increasingly, women were censured by the religious, moralist and medical writers of the day, who constantly reiterated that women should [breast]feed their own children’, though she also notes that these pressures actually ‘had little effect on the continuing practice of wet nursing’. Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 87. 66 Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English, 432. See also, Mary O’Dowd, ‘Men, Women, Children, and the Family, 1550–1730’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), vol. 2, 314. 67 Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 48. Renwick argues that the View was composed 1596, even though it was not published until 1633. 68 Sir John Davies, A True Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England (London: Printed by John Jaggard, Temple Bar, 1612), 179. 69 Spenser, A View, 67–8. For a detailed consideration, see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 193–241. 70 Noonan, ‘“Cruell Pressure”’, 160. 71 Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 2009). 72 See John Brannigan, ‘“A particular vice of that people”: Giraldus Cambrensis and the Discourse of English Colonialism’, Irish Studies Review, 6:2 (1998), 121–30. 73 Giraldus Cambrensis [Gerald of Wales], Topographica Hibernica [The Topography of Ireland], trans. John J. O’Meara (Portlaoise: Dolmen Press, 1982), 102. 74 Ibid., 101. 75 It is important to emphasise that in comparing the childlike Irish with beasts, Temple was not doing anything all that unusual. Keith Thomas has set out in detail the ways in which the early modern child was imaged as a kind of beast or wild animal in much writing of the period, quoting John Moore’s A Mappe of Mans Mortalitie (1617), which asks: ‘What is an infant but a brute beast in the shape of a man? And what is a young youth but (as it were) a wild untamed ass-colt unbridled?’ Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 43. See also Thomas, ‘Age and Authority’.

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76 The intense differentiation between the colonised peripheries and the centre has been anatomised in detail by Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978); see also Anne McLintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 77 See David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, in association with Field Day, 1999). 78 For Ireland and the ‘non-modern’, see David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Cork: Field Day, 2008), 73–99. 79 As Alan Richardson, commenting on British views of Africans, has argued, the language of colonialism has often been predicated on a version of childhood that renders the colonised subject and their community as not only childlike, but polluted by the degrading condition of original sin, a condition which made their subordination to the adult authority of the invader a theological as well as a biological and political necessity. ‘Slavery and Romantic Writing’, in Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 455. 80 It has been difficult to disentangle these two discourses ever since. This imbrication helped Jacqueline Rose come to the conclusion that adults look at children in the same way that colonising countries observed natives. On this basis she provocatively argues that the literature written especially for these little savages is a means of carrying the rhetoric of the coloniser from the missions abroad into the British home and nursery: ‘Literature for children is … a way of colonising … the child.’ Case of Peter Pan, 26. Rose is here specifically discussing J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird (1902), but the overall thrust of her argument expands outwards from Barrie to encompass the entire children’s literature canon. The rather slippery analogy which Rose suggests between colonisers and colonised and parents and children was later taken up by the children’s literature scholar Perry Nodleman. For Nodleman, the adult and the book dominate the child just as the colonial power dominates the colonised culture. ‘The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism and Children’s Literature’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17:1 (1992), 29. Recently, Clare Bradford has cautioned against this colonial analogy, arguing that in the first place, ‘The gulf between colonisers and colonised is of a different order [to that between adults and children], because colonial discourses are informed by the assumption that the colonised occupy quite a different ontological space from the colonisers, and that no matter how assiduously they mimic their “betters”, they will never quite measure up to them. Secondly, the comparison between child readers and colonised peoples breaks down completely when texts are produced by colonial writers for the children of colonisers, who are inscribed within these texts as young colonisers, as “us” rather than “them”.’ Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 12. Bradford also finds the child/colonised analogy itself quite problematic ethically, because she doesn’t think that there is, in reality, much of a comparison to be made between the carefully brought up middle-class children who were the subjects of the rhetoric of children’s literature and the

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discourse of the child in the West, and the indigenous peoples of places like Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, India, Algeria and Canada (she doesn’t mention Ireland), who were brutally mistreated, especially when such analogies are made by privileged children’s literature scholars in Western universities: ‘To refer to children’s literature as a site of colonisation is, then, to mute, to downplay, even to trivialise the effects of colonisation on Indigenous peoples … Established scholars are privileged because their educational achievements and their occupation endow them with prestige and authority. When they speak about marginalised others (or refer to them as emblems, metaphors or analogies) they benefit from these less-privileged people, who do not speak for themselves.’ ‘The Case of Children’s Literature: Colonial or Anti-Colonial?’, Global Studies of Childhood, 1:4 (2011), 274. 81 Elizabeth A. Gagen, ‘Reflections of Primitivism: Development, Progress and Civilization in Imperial America, 1898–1914’, Children’s Geographies, 5:1–2 (2007), 17. 82 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 83 Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, in association with Field Day, 2001), 18. 84 John Flemming, The Country Gentleman’s Letter to the Citizens of Dublin (Dublin: James Esdall, 1749), 7. 85 Anonymous, An Inquiry into some of the Causes of the Ill Situation of the Affairs of Ireland (Dublin: Printed by George Grierson, 1731), 28–9. 86 Ibid., 30. 87 This is not an unusual comparison in this period. See Stephen Jerome’s phrase, ‘English-Irish Israel’, and his comment that: ‘So to reflect upon our selves, for this our English Israell, hath not the Lord sequestrated and separated us from Pagans and Heathens, yea even from Turkes (and Jewes themselves).’ Irelands jubilee, 90, 153. For commentary on the political and ecclesiastical use of the analogy with Israel in seventeenth-century Anglican Ireland, see Caball, ‘Providence and Exile’, 186–7. 88 ‘Aceldama’ is the Arabic name for the field acquired by Judas Iscariot with the thirty pieces of silver given to him to betray Jesus. 89 For more on the relationship between ideas of ethnic and national sacredness, see Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 90 Ussher, A Body of Divinitie, 324. 91 Julia Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2. 92 Strange Newes of a Prodigious Monster, borne in the Township of Adlington in the Parish of Standish in the Countie of Lancaster, the 17 day of Aprill last, 1613. Testified by the Reverend Divine Mr. W. Leigh, Bachelor of Divinitie, and Preacher of Gods word at Standish aforesaid (London: Printed by I.P. for S.M, 1613), n.p. 93 Ibid.

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94 For more on the importance of the book of Revelation to religious and political thinking about 1641, see Alan Ford, ‘Apocalyptic Ireland: 1580–1641’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 78:2 (2013), 146–8. See also the description of the rebel attack in A Bloody battell or The rebels overthrow: ‘the Sunne did hide it’s glorious Rayes, the heavens were mantled in a dusky cloud mixt with some streaks of red’ (n.p.) 95 French, Children of Wrath, 94. 96 It is important to stress that Temple’s apocalyptic reading of the events of 1641 was not unusual, and was, in fact, less extreme than could be found in the work of his contemporaries. Henry Jones, for example, insisted that in the rebellion ‘there hath been beyond all parallel of former ages, a most bloody and Antichristian combination and plot hatched, by well-nigh the whole Romish sect … [to effect the] setting up that idol of the mass, with all the abominations of that whore of Babylon’. Jones, A Remonstrance, 1. See Ford, ‘Apocalyptic Ireland’. 97 Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), vol. 1, 431. 98 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 167–224; Christopher Carter, ‘Meteors, Prodigies, and Signs: The Interpretation of the Unusual in Sixteenth-Century England’, Parergon, 29:1 (2012), 107–33. 99 See C. J. Kinlaw, ‘Determinism and the Hiddenness of God in Calvin’s Theology’, Religious Studies, 24:4 (1988), 497–509. 100 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976 edition). 101 In her examination of the available evidence, Jane Ohlmeyer concludes that ‘noblewomen in Ireland were presumably as vulnerable [to death in childbirth] as their English counterparts’, pointing to Lawrence Stone’s calculation that 45 per cent of married women died before reaching the age of 50, with a quarter of these deaths due to childbearing. Making Ireland English, 431. 102 Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism, 16, 18. 103 For puritan interpretations of current events as portents and omens, see Jerome Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution: The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies (London: University College London Press, 1993), 41–58. See also Crawford Gribben, ‘Angels and Demons in Cromwellian and Restoration Ireland: Heresy and the Supernatural’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76:3 (2013), 377–92. 104 For more on this emotional investment in images of children, see Sharon Stephens, ‘Children and the Politics of Culture in “Late Capitalism”’, in Sharon Stephens (ed.), Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–48. 105 As John Gibney points out, until 1884, when Mary Hickson anthologised a large number of the deposition accounts, anyone wanting to read the Depositions had to use the histories of either Temple or Sir Henry Jones. Shadow of a Year, 11.

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106 James Janeway, A Token for Children: Being An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children (1671/2; London: Printed for Dorman Newman, 1676), Part II, 2–3. 107 For a good analysis of the importance of the cautionary tale, see Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 97–9, 100–2. 108 Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English, 431. 109 Diana Pasulka, ‘A Somber Pedagogy—A History of the Child Death Bed Scene in Early American Children’s Religious Literature, 1674–1840’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2:2 (2009), 178. 110 Janeway, A Token for Children, I, A5. 111 Ibid., I, A4. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid., I, A5. 114 Ibid., I, 2. 115 Ibid., I, A4v. 116 Ibid., I, Preface, n.p. 117 Ibid., I, 37. 118 Ibid., I, A5. 119 Ibid., I, Preface, n.p. 120 Ibid. Charlotte Brontë may have had Janeway’s badgering in mind when writing the early chapters of Jane Eyre (1847). There, the young heroine has a ready answer for her Janewavian theological harasser Mr. Brocklehurst, when he presses her about her ultimate fate and what she needs to do to avoid the flames of hell. Her Woody Allen-like response, that ‘she must keep in good health, and not die’, infuriates Brocklehurst. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, ed. Michael Mason (London: Penguin, 2003), 41. Even as Brontë writes against the kind of theological cross-examinations found in child-oriented martyrologies, she cannot resist the affecting child deathbed scene, and Helen Burns provides an instructive sermon to her friend before succumbing to a stoical and virtuous expiry – though her surname conjures up the fate awaiting those who don’t accept Janeway’s pious pathways to paradise. 121 Janeway, A Token for Children, I, Preface, n.p. 122 Sarah Rivett, ‘Tokenography: Narration and the Science of Dying in Puritan Deathbed Testimonies’, Early American Literature, 42:3 (2007), 471–94. 123 On child prophets, see French, Children of Wrath, 109. 124 M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 88. 125 Anonymous, A Legacy for Children: being some of the last expressions and dying sayings of Hannah Hill, Junr. Of the City of Philadelphia, in the Province of Pensylvania, in America: Aged Eleven Years and near Three Months (Dublin: Skinner Row, 1719), title page. 126 Ibid., 8. 127 Ibid., 17.

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128 Ibid., 26. 129 Ed S. Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine, trans. Barbara Fasting (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996). 130 Such as Charlotte Brontë in writing of the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. 131 Anon., Legacy for Children, 17. 132 Ibid., 28. 133 Ibid., 7. 134 Ibid., 9. 135 Ibid., 11. 136 For an examination of the political and literary uses of scenes of extraordinary violence in the eighteenth century, see Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (London: Palgrave, 2006). 137 McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 207; see also Gibney, Shadow of a Year, 21, 31–2. 138 Barnard, Improving Ireland?, 21. 139 Rev. J. Milner, ed., Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, . . . With Notes, Comments, and Illustrations (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1850), iii. Quoted in Warren W. Wooden, ‘John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Child Reader’, Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Children’s Literature Association, University of Florida, March 1982 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 147. See also William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 13–14. Ethan Howard Shagan carefully traces the rhetorical connections between the different accounts of 1641 and Foxe’s classic, and suggests that there is more than a coincidental parallel in operation. ‘Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Journal of British Studies, 36:1 (1997), 9–16. 140 Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘The Irish Protestant Imaginary: The Cultural Contexts for the Gothic Chapbooks Published by Bennett Dugdale, 1800–5’, in Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (eds), Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions, 1760–1890 (London: Palgrave, 2014), 34–57. 141 John Lockman, A History of the Cruel Sufferings of the Protestants, and others, by Popish persecutions, in various Countries: Together with a view of the Reformations from the Church of Rome. Interspersed with the Barbarities of the Inquisition, by Question and Answer (Dublin: Re-printed by J. Potts, 1763), title page. 142 I will return to these schools in Chapter 4. 143 Anonymous, ‘Review of Lockman’, Monthly Review, 22 (June 1760), 523. 144 Ibid. 145 Lockman, History of the Cruel Sufferings, 97–124, iii, 118. 146 Ibid., 110. 147 Toby Barnard, Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), 128. 148 Lockman, History of the Cruel Sufferings, 110.

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149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 117. 151 Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English, 428. 152 Ibid., 431–2. 153 Ibid., 432. 154 Edward Synge, to Alicia Synge, 28 July 1847. The Synge Letters: Bishop Edward Synge to his Daughter Alicia, Roscommon to Dublin, 1746–1752, ed. Marie-Louise Legg (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), 62. 155 Edward to Alicia Synge, 15 September 1747. Synge Letters, 87. 156 Edward to Alicia Synge, 21 July 1747. Synge Letters, 58. 157 Meaning ‘just’ in this context. 158 Edward to Alicia Synge, 9 May 1746. Synge Letters, 8–9. 159 Edward to Alicia Synge, 13 May 1747. Synge Letters, 13. 160 Edward to Alicia Synge, July 1746. Synge Letters, 6. 161 Edward to Alicia Synge, 9 May 1746. Synge Letters, 8. 162 Edward to Alicia Synge, 30 September 1747. Synge Letters, 92. 163 Synge to Alicia, July 1446. Synge Letters, 5. 164 See Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1988). 165 And, indeed, recent historians of childhood have strongly disputed claims that parents did not react emotionally to the death of a child. See, for example, Hannah Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 166 Edward to Alicia Synge, July 1746. Synge Letters, 6. 167 Edward to Alicia Synge, 31 May 1751. Synge Letters, 284. 168 Edward to Alicia Synge, 19 June 1752. Synge Letters, 419. 169 Edward to Alicia Synge, 9 May 1746. Synge Letters, 8–9. 170 Which correction he takes on the chin. Edward to Alicia Synge, 5 June 1750. Synge Letters, 188. I should say that not everyone finds the good bishop as affectionate as I do. In a review of the letters, Joseph McMinn describes Synge as a ‘sanctimonious bore’, who treated his daughter as a ‘domestic skivvy’. ‘Review: The Synge Letters’, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 29/30:1–2 (1997), 251. 171 Willemijn Ruberg, ‘Epistolary and emotional education: the letters of an Irish father to his daughter, 1747–1752’, Paedagogica Historica, 44:1–2 (2008), 208. 172 Edward Synge, An Essay Towards Making the Knowledge of Religion easy to the Meanest Capacity. Being a short and plain account of the doctrines and rules of Christianity (London: printed for R. Sare, 1722), 4. 173 French, Children of Wrath, 26. 174 Jenks, Childhood, 5.

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3 Instruction and delight? The believing child

In a letter to his daughter Alicia, in July 1747, Bishop Edward Synge advised her that ‘to lead a truly Christian virtuous life is the thing well-pleasing to God’, and expressed his approval of her reading of her grandfather’s catechetical tract, An answer to all the Excuses and pretences which men ordinarily make for their not coming to the Holy Communion (1697), in which she could find the instruction necessary to attain righteousness.1 Catechisms were among the most widely published of all texts in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were also one of the texts you were most likely to find in an average Anglican household, since, as Toby Barnard explains, ‘the way to salvation, if not to celestial bliss, lay through print’.2 This chapter examines the Anglican catechisms published or reprinted in Ireland in this period, and argues that they should be treated as important sources for understanding how central children were in the maintenance and development of an Irish Anglican community during this time. A catechism was one of the basic texts found in Anglican households, though they are also among the least examined by scholars, possibly because relatively few of them are still extant. Perhaps because of the frequency of their use within households, ‘most have perished’, having simply disintegrated because of the impact of everyday handling, and therefore are ‘in danger of being overlooked’.3 Indeed, they have been neglected, and only historians of religion and of print culture have paid much attention to those that have escaped the ravages of time.4 Moreover, because catechisms strive to communicate as effectively as possible the fundamentals of faith to individual believers, and in particular, to children, they have tended to be considered formally uninteresting to literary scholars. As Niall Ó Ciosáin points out, there is very little that is innovative in most catechisms, and standardisation rather than experimentation is basic to the genre. Moreover, for the Irish Studies scholar, the extant catechisms seem to offer very little of immediate concern. Most catechisms in use in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland were reprints of successful catechisms first published in London, and ‘catechisms printed in Ireland, even those of Irish origin … differ little

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from those printed elsewhere’.5 Beyond registering their existence and their popularity, there may seem little for the Irish Studies scholar to say about them. However, as some of the best scholarship on reprinting and republication has persuasively set out, a text’s status as a reprint is important in itself, and historians of print culture have increasingly turned to often quite tentative treatments of the motivations of publishers, printers, the print industry and indeed readers to understand how texts make meaning.6 This chapter will bring these (usually reprinted) ‘Irish’ catechisms back into focus, and suggest that while it is true that catechetical material was extremely popular in Protestant culture more generally, the available evidence suggests that, for Irish children, this material was not balanced by texts of a more ‘entertaining’ nature (including fiction) until relatively late, and therefore it is of more importance when trying to understand the cultural discourse on Irish childhood. Toby Barnard has argued that, in terms of assessing the ‘entertainment’ value of the kinds of texts given to children in Ireland, when compared to those provided for English children, ‘the chronology which can be proposed’ indicates that Irish children ‘may have been drawn into diversions more slowly than in England’.7 This claim is tentative, and it has to be, since so much material culture has been lost, but it does suggest that catechisms were of greater importance to Irish children than their English counterparts. There is a good reason why this would make sense. Having survived what was understood to be a genocidal assault in 1641, the Irish Anglican community would understandably be more interested in material that reaffirmed and secured Anglican identity than in diversions or distractions. Definitive claims are difficult to make in this area, because, as Barnard stresses, ‘private beliefs resist recovery’, but in the context of a culture recovering from the traumatic experiences of 1641 (and compounded by the renewed turmoil in 1688), generic stability and predictability rather than innovation and experimentation would have had much to offer.8 Catechisms are popular presentations of the faith, and usually aim to be as accessible as possible. An emphasis on catechising necessitated an emphasis on children, with the believing child moving into the very centre of the Irish Anglican community’s understanding of itself. Having placed the Irish catechisms in the broader history of the catechetical revolution of the postReformation period, and looked at particular features of the catechisms in circulation in eighteenth-century Ireland, the chapter will turn to ideas of ‘improvement’ and modernisation, with the Anglican child, enhanced by effective catechetical practice, reviving hopes for the Irish Anglican future, that very future that the rebels of 1641 had tried to prevent. The chapter examines the ways in which catechetical literature and discourses of improvement were mutually reinforcing, and catechesis treated as a motor of Irish

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modernisation. The chapter will also reflect on the place of catechisms in the history of children’s literature, and in particular the tension between ‘instruction and delight’ in critical treatments of the early history of writing specifically for children. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of the children’s bibles that were also published in Ireland in the eighteenth century. The Bible, in a dizzying variety of formats, was the most common book in eighteenthcentury Ireland. Here, I will focus on the much reprinted A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (first published in 1784), and ask whether such bibles can be thought of as relating to that growing interest in ‘diversion’ posited by Barnard, and analogous to eighteenth-century toys, given the way in which they are sometimes described as ‘entertaining’ by their compilers. The chapter thinks through the possibility that rather than reinforcing the authority of the believing community established by the catechisms, texts such as children’s bibles ultimately supported individual agency rather than communal identity, and moved supposedly authoritative texts like the Bible out of the sacred and into the secular world of play and pleasure. Following the assault on its very existence in 1641, the Anglican community in Ireland needed to find ways of ensuring its own survival, and protecting itself from repeating what were considered the mistakes which had left it vulnerable to attack. Sir John Temple had set out in stark detail many of these supposed errors, most of which involved physical and emotional contact with Irish Catholics. If Temple was right – and the incorporation of his history into the official annual commemoration of 1641 indicates that many (most?) affiliated with the established Church in Ireland certainly found his analysis persuasive – then steps would need to be taken to ensure that such compromising contact with the enemy was kept to a minimum. The community also needed to rebuild what the cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls ‘moral capital’, utilising the ‘resources that sustain a moral community’ to define itself against the outside world, specifically the kinds of resources that emphasise community loyalty and conformity to agreed ideals and beliefs.9 Moreover, since Irish Catholic rebels had focused so much of their anger on Anglican children and the Anglican family, efforts to safeguard the future of the community would also have to concentrate on these vulnerabilities (and in particular, the child in the family). The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a concerted effort by many in the Irish Anglican community to consolidate around a particular identity and a set of beliefs basic to that identity, and to emphasise its differences from the other communities in Ireland through reinforcing the ‘Wall of Defence’ between them. Irish Anglicans constituted a community that was, to say the least, conflicted about its own identity, and often split

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by very public disagreements. Many were deeply attached to a connection with England, and asserted an English identity very strongly. Others hesitated between Irishness and Englishness, walking an existential high-wire along a hyphen. Others adopted a different identity depending on the audience they were addressing: to one group they would adopt the tones of the English settler, to another they could speak as if they had deep roots in Ireland. Attitudes to the ‘native’ population contributed to this ‘crisis of identity’,10 as did the attitude of the ‘natives’ to the newcomers. Still others quickly adapted to being in Ireland and appropriated an Irish identity – indeed, many styled themselves the ‘Whole People of Ireland’ 11 (ignoring the substantial body of Catholics who had a rather different perspective on national identity), believing that they, in fact, constituted the Irish nation, or what Sir Richard Cox called Hibernia Anglicana (1689–90).12 However, while these differences persisted, historians have rightly emphasised a remarkable degree of homogeneity within the Anglican community in Ireland by the middle of the eighteenth century. William Molyneux articulated the sense of a unity of purpose many within this community felt very well, claiming in The Case of Ireland, Stated (1698), that ‘Your Majesty has not in all Your Dominions a People more United and Steady to your Interests, than the Protestants of Ireland.’ 13 In an earlier study, I borrowed the term ‘enclave’ from the anthropologist Mary Douglas to describe the Irish Anglican community at the turn of the eighteenth century.14 According to Douglas, an ‘enclave’ is a shared cultural space in which ideas about time and space, ethics, physical nature, metaphysical reality and human relationships are held in common. This agreed basis allows the individuals who occupy the communal space to negotiate their relationship to reality and to others outside the enclave as successfully as possible. The cultural ideas shared by the individuals and groups within the enclave have to be both flexible enough to allow genuine engagements with the external world, and adapt to changing historical circumstances, but they have also to be constant enough to ensure a robust understanding of where the borders of the enclave lie. Among the most important issues for the enclave to deal with are self-identity and the policing of boundaries with the outside world, keeping its members inside and blocking the entrance of detested outsiders. Douglas explains that enclave identity is maintained by simultaneously emphasising the ‘saved’ nature of insiders, and the damned destiny of the outsiders, which can often spill over into monstering outsiders and representing the world beyond the enclave as dark and threatening, and the inside as warm, embracing and rewarding.15 Obviously, the most basic outsider to the Irish Anglican was the Irish Catholic. The Irish Anglican enclave was immeasurably strengthened by a sense of being in a country populated by

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aggressive antagonists, and indeed so great was this sense of Catholic exclusion that in attempting to define the Irish nation, many Irish Anglicans simply disqualified the descendants of the conquered ‘savage Irish’ entirely. The Penal Laws, whatever we may think of their more practical implications (about which much scholarly ink has been spilled),16 had the psychological consequence of sealing about three-quarters of the Irish population into a non-Ireland of some kind, quarantined away to prevent contamination of the wider community.17 Nor was there much love lost between the Anglican elite and the Irish Presbyterians, whom they regarded as a little better than Catholics, and the passing of the Test Act in 1704 (which required the taking of the Anglican sacrament for every public office) effectively sent both non-Anglican groups to the political and civic wilderness. Casting some into the outer darkness needs to be balanced with a building up of a real sense of community within the enclave. This chapter is concerned with one of the major ways in which the common beliefs of the enclave were transmitted to each generation. John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury, identified a lack of catechising as the major error of previous periods, recommending ‘Catechizing and the History of the Martyrs’ as ‘the two great Pillars of the Protestant religion’,18 the means by which Protestants could define themselves in the late seventeenth century, and while he was thinking in an English context, the Irish Anglican community required ‘pillars’ of identity even more than their English codenominationalists. As discussed in Chapter 2, Temple’s The Irish Rebellion provided a martyrology for Irish Anglicans, and the ‘feast’ of the 1641 martyrs was celebrated annually on 22 October. This martyrology was balanced by a simultaneous emphasis on the importance of the catechism as a way of ensuring that insiders all believed more or less the same thing, and the catechising mission was focused on the children of Irish Anglicans. Catechisms, to be successful, need to be popular and accessible presentations of the faith, and children were expected to learn their catechisms, on whose contents they would be examined by rote. As Ian Green, the foremost historian of British catechisms points out, ‘the prime use’ of the Anglican catechisms published in Ireland was in the education of children – they were used to ensure that children understood their faith, while catechisms for Catholics were designed to help their readers to take part fully in the sacraments.19 The existing evidence demonstrates that catechisms were certainly taken very seriously in the organisation of the school day. For example, in the Hibernian Society’s School for Soldiers’ Children, catechistic education occupied two hours a day in the winter, and three in the summer. In recognition of the importance of ensuring that children were instructed in the faith, in 1748 the central committee of the Incorporated Society in Dublin ‘decreed that all pupils should be catechised’, and that appropriate catechisms should

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be printed up and sent everywhere for this purpose.20 Catechising was not just seen as a way of transmitting Christian belief, but was considered basic to the ‘improvement’ and general civilising and modernising of the country. As Barnard demonstrates, ‘improvement was in the air’, ‘and nowhere more strongly than in Ireland’, and it was an especially prevalent theme in the work of clergymen.21 Synge, in his letters to Alicia, stressed the need for improvement, and not just in her understanding of the basics of the Anglican faith. He requested that she concentrate on improving her ‘mind, body, and behaviour’, so that she would turn out ‘a Valuable Accomplish’d Woman’.22 In writing this chapter I consulted the list of ‘Irish’ catechisms compiled by Ian Green for his survey and analysis of ‘Catechisms and Catechizing in Ireland, c.1560–1800’ (1995). Green categorises as ‘Irish’ catechisms that were ‘published in Ireland; published elsewhere but from the title-page, epistle or other evidence clearly in use in Ireland’, and also takes account of those that we know from other sources ‘were deployed in or recommended for use in early modern Ireland’.23 He arrives at a number of ‘120 editions’ which were ‘destined for use in the Church of Ireland’.24 As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, most of these catechisms were reprints that had originally been published in London, and therefore their status as ‘Irish’ might be a matter of some dispute. In terms of the books to which Irish children had access, however, catechisms were no different from other texts in other genres. Anne Markey points out that ‘the majority of children’s books available in eighteenth-century Ireland’ were ‘imports and reprints rather than original productions’.25 In her analysis of Irish reprints of popular texts first published in England, Molly O’Hagan Hardy has recently argued for ‘a new understanding’ of such reprinting as kind of patriotism, ‘as an act of resistance to imperial oppression’.26 Reprinted catechisms can be read as acts of ecclesiastical patriotism designed to help rebuild the Irish Anglican community after a series of traumas, to make it stronger, more unified, theologically self-sufficient, and to secure the preservation of Irish Anglican identity for future generations. A catechism is not just an accessible restatement of the beliefs of a faith community, but, depending on how it is used, can become crucial in the creation of that community through shared experiences such as learning the answers to the catechetical questions, and going through the examination process. While catechisms did exist in the medieval period, historians of religion highlight that they not only multiplied in the age of print, but that they became particularly important to Reformed communities and churches, where teaching the faith was often devolved to the home. The popularity of Protestant catechisms has been traced to Martin Luther’s own interventions into religious education, after his dismay at finding that most Lutherans

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in Saxony did not have a grasp of very basic Christian teachings. Luther’s cumbersome ‘Greater Catechism’ of April 1529 was followed by a much more accessible and successful ‘Lesser Catechism’ in May of the same year. The ‘Lesser Catechism’ was structured around an examination of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, followed by a discussion of the two sacraments of baptism and the ‘sacrament of the altar’, or Communion, and most catechisms subsequently followed this basic outline. They were also written in the vernacular and not in Latin, to ensure that most people who could read would have access to them. The Lesser Catechism was set out in a question-and-answer format, which enabled rote learning, and this design too was copied by most subsequent writers.27 It is striking to the contemporary reader that seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury catechisms used by the Church of Ireland do not often address either theological disagreements with Catholics or those of different Protestant confessions, and in fact they tend to steer clear of theological dispute. They are, for the most part, ‘not controversial in character’.28 While some, such as The Church Catechism Explain’d and Prov’d by Apt Texts of Scripture (1699),29 affirm that the existence of only two sacraments within the Church of Ireland is a divergence from the Catholic Church, which has seven,30 even here there is no exploration of, or even insistence on the dangers of Catholicism for the naïve Anglican child.31 The Revd Pelletreau’s Abridgement of Sacred History (1760) also comments on the different number of sacraments and the Catholic belief in purgatory (declaring it ‘injurious to Christ’), but does not expand on these differences.32 The focus of these catechisms is on the Anglican self, rather than the Catholic or Presbyterian other. These texts are more about reaffirming and securing the consistency of Anglican identity than militating against others, more about self-policing than protection, though achieving internal consistency within the community would obviously have an impact on preventing possible attack from without. Although the rote learning of the answers to the questions asked would provide the Anglican child with a clear sense of the self, the catechisms do not distract by drawing attention to the enemies of the enclave. Mary Douglas points out that children are always crucial to the establishment and maintenance of community boundaries through systems of regulation such as education and family and church traditions.33 A catechism is a good example of what the sociologist Basil Bernstein calls a ‘restricted code’.34 In his studies of working-class communities, Bernstein examined the ways in which different linguistic codes operate within a group as a means by which to draw its members closer together. ‘Restricted codes’ communicate through a very narrow and tightly defined range of linguistic possibilities,

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designed to limit interpretive freedom and ensure coherence of understanding by all communicants, and therefore produce a cohesiveness of communal belief, reinforcing the ideas and structures which the community wishes to maintain. Bernstein was particularly interested in restricted codes communicated to children by their mother in the home, repeated over a long period, and therefore internalised as part of the child’s identity: As the child learns his speech or in our terms learns specific codes which regulate his verbal acts he learns the requirements of his social structure. From this point of view every time the child speaks the social structure of which he is a part is reinforced in him, and his social identity develops and is constrained. The social structure becomes for the developing child his psychological reality by the shaping of his acts of speech.35

‘Restricted codes’ are identifiable by their predictability, where those involved in the exchanges already know the correct questions and answers, where there is ‘a low level of vocabulary and syntactic selection’, and where everyone has already agreed on the required outcomes. Bernstein identifies ‘types of religious services’, alongside fairy-tale storytelling and cocktail-party exchanges as obvious examples of restricted codes in action. I would include the rote learning involved in the internalisation of catechisms through the questionand-answer format as another clear example of a restricted code.36 The repeated reading, verbalisation and examination of a particular catechism means that the text comes to occupy an authoritative relation to the child analogous to that of a teacher or parent. Bernstein associates restricted codes with the exercise of authority, and in the case of a catechism, the catechumen is required to adhere not just closely but absolutely to the form of words found in the text or suffer the consequences. Such textual authority, reinforced by the authority of the parent or teacher examining the material, emphasises the necessity for the child to submit fully to the text itself. In a culture where most children were required to go through the catechetical process, the child is encouraged to internalise and then ‘transmit the culture or local culture in such a way as to increase the similarity of the regulated with others of his group. If the child rebels he is challenging very quickly the culture of which he is a part, and it is this which tends to force the regulator into taking punitive action.’ 37 Some catechisms have more authority than others, of course. As Green points out, the distribution of a particular catechism by a benefactor or spiritual mentor transformed the catechism into ‘an icon, a semi-sacred object which would secure some kind of reward to the giver for his concern for others’ spiritual welfare’, especially when the giver was a leading member of the Church.38 So, for example, a Dublin-published catechism, The Church Catechism Explain’d

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and Prov’d by Apt Texts of Scripture, is advertised as ‘recommended … for the use of his diocess’, and may even have been written, by Narcissus Marsh.39 Marsh was not just the archbishop of Dublin, but an enormously influential figure in terms of Dublin’s development as a major cultural centre, establishing the library that is named after him, and involving himself in the preservation of manuscripts in Irish. In gaining Marsh’s imprimatur and support, the catechism’s association with the bishop is affirmed, but it also emphasises his theoretical control over theological orthodoxy wherever the catechism is supposed to find foothold. Catechisms are among the first texts that we can confidently describe as ‘children’s literature’, though they have certainly not been very popular among historians of the discipline. Indeed, they have been considered representative of the ‘negative’ side of the ‘instruction and delight’ binary in histories where the ‘development’ of children’s literature from the seventeenth century was treated as a movement from didactic training, pedagogy and sermonising to adventure, fun and delight from the publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865 onwards.40 Patricia Demers points out that ‘we take a dim view of catechisms’ because they are considered prescriptive and proscriptive rather than encouragements for free thinking, and formal or ideological innovation within the genre is limited.41 From the perspective of the traditional children’s literature scholar, catechisms seemed relatively uninteresting because their only function was instructing the passive child reader or listener in the basics of the faith. Recently, however, scholars have begun to critically examine the argument that instructional texts are by definition ‘joyless’ and overly serious, and have contended that instruction and delight have been, in fact, intertwined since the beginning of children’s literature.42 Scholars such as Katherine Wakely-Mulroney have demonstrated that actual catechisms are much more dynamic and even playful than has previously been suspected. In an article on ‘Riddling the Catechism’ (2019), which examines a range of catechetical material published in eighteenthcentury England, Wakely-Mulroney provides clear examples of catechetical creativity and diversity. She opens the article with an astute discussion of A Little Book for Little Children: Where Are Set Down, in a Plain and Pleasant Way, Directions for Spelling, And Other Remarkable Matters, published in London in 1712. This is a book which actually combines two texts, the twelfth edition of a book of sermons by Puritan divine Thomas White, dated 1702, and an often very playful ‘Youth’s Alphabet’. While White’s book of sermons is not, strictly speaking a ‘catechism’, WakelyMulroney describes it as ‘“catechistic” more broadly in its dogmatic approach to religious instruction and continual attempts to solicit the reader’s compliance and assent’.43 By combining these two books in one, putting a ‘dour’

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text in playful relation with an instructional manual full of puns and riddles, the printer created a dynamic and genre-challenging text: Each of these texts appears to typify a competing approach to childhood in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a period in which the formal and ideological characteristics of children’s books were under continual negotiation. This sense of opposition is heightened by the physical proximity between [them] .. . [They] rest side by side as their contents strain in different directions, towards the old and new worlds of children’s literature, respectively. The narrow margins, close-set type, and lack of ornamentation in White’s Little Book appear forbidding and claustrophobic when the author’s target audience of young readers is taken into consideration (as, indeed, does the text’s length, which runs to almost 100 pages). His unsparing descriptions of child death are designed to incite piety at the earliest opportunity; so too his emphasis on the importance of Bible study and catechism, vehicles for instilling Christian understanding in the very littlest among us before it may be too late … [But] This sense of moral urgency is absent from T.W.’s speller.44

Ian Green also emphasises that in England the continuity provided by the constant publication of catechisms was enlivened by improving methods of instruction and innovation.45 Paying attention to the material conditions in which catechisms and other instructional materials were produced is important, though it is also essential to note that while the combination of these two texts in this particular instance may give a sense of interpretive and readerly tension and possibly even playfulness, the book of sermons itself remains ‘claustrophobic’ and rigidly formal. Playfulness, in other words, is very much a matter of print culture context. I do not want to challenge claims that catechisms can be innovative texts. However, I want to return to two of the most important features of the catechetical form: its very predictable consistency, and its advertised designs on the child catechumen. To observe that catechisms generally adopt a very rigid structure is not in itself a criticism – stability and consistency are not flaws in either a text or a genre, and they are very considerable attractions to some kinds of reader. Certainly, in the ‘Irish’ catechisms printed in Ireland for an Irish readership, I could find no examples where children were given any interpretive freedom to provide or suggest their own answers to the questions posed, or even to seek further explanation (though presumably such explanation might be sought directly of the instructor). Catechisms printed in Ireland for Irish readers and Irish children were not, in other words, playful.46 In catechisms, as Wakely-Mulroney points out, ‘What appears to be at stake is not whether the child understands a particular question, or indeed its answer, but whether he or she is capable of repeating the correct sequence of words at the correct point in the interrogation.’ 47 Having surveyed dozens of available catechisms, Green concludes that there

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was considerable variety in the form taken by the Irish catechisms, from very short catechisms, discursive catechisms, historical catechisms, short ‘courses’ and long ‘courses’ and that ‘half a dozen new forms of Irish origin’ were published in a forty-year period.48 However, it remains the case that regularity and repetition (possibly less interesting to literary and formal scholars than formal innovation) are the most striking feature of these texts. The most innovative formal innovation in the Irish catechisms is found in The Christian’s Manual (1724), which actually does away with the interrogative mode completely, and is presented as a narrative account of the catechism in the voice of a ‘young person’ who is about to present for their first communion. Instead of the child being asked a series of questions for which the catechism supplies the correct answer, this catechism provides a ‘narrative’ account of conventional beliefs: ‘The following Account being only a Taste of the Proficiency I have made under your pious Diligence in Catechising’.49 While this is ‘innovative’ in that it contrasts with every other catechism published in Ireland, it is probably best considered a means by which to eliminate any subjective response by the individual catechumen that could potentially be generated by the interrogative mode. Here, formal innovation is in the service of ideological conformity. Plain instructions for the young and ignorant, by the bishop of Tuam, Edward Synge, first published in London in 1701, and given a Dublin publication in 1711 after his death, might also be considered ‘innovative’ in that it is more philosophically dense than others, and incudes very abstract and difficult questions for the child catechumen (and, indeed, the adult catechist!) such as ‘What is God?’ 50 It also provides some proofs of God’s existence: ‘There is so much Beauty, Order and Usefulness in the Heavens and the Earth, and in all things which I daily see, as to assure me that they could not come by chance: But that they are made and settled in their Order, by a most wise and Powerful Being’, an explanation which interestingly anticipates the natural theology of William Paley.51 In Pelletreau’s Abridgement of Sacred History, too, some of the questions require detailed probing of difficult concepts. The child is asked, ‘Why do you believe that there is a God?’, the answer being: ‘By his Works, for as nothing can be, without some one to make or provide it … It is obvious that there must be some Being, much greater than Man, who made the World.’ 52 Pelletreau is here providing a simplified version of Thomas Aquinas’s Argument from the First Cause, which would be challenging for the child reader to grasp (and the adult instructor to explain). Even in these relatively intellectually dense catechisms, however, the catechumen is warned not to inquire too deeply into difficult theological questions such as the Creed’s affirmation of Christ’s descent into Hell after his death, since ‘the Holy Scripture has not fully and plainly set forth this Matter; neither has the Christian Church declared the

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sense of it; and therefore we need not curiously enquire into it’.53 In other words, individual curiosity and inquiry is routinely cut off and discouraged even as some very tricky questions are posed. Moreover, while these three catechisms are relatively ‘dynamic’ texts, it is important to stress that they are unusual. Most catechisms in Ireland are the opposite of dynamic. For a community in crisis, such as the Irish Anglican community after 1641, formal predictability in the shape of a reprinted catechism may have been something to be welcomed, and it may have provided a sense of comfort and security. Repeating the correct answers to set questions provides a protective ring of orthodoxy around the community, a ‘wall’ many Irish Anglicans felt the need of quite intensely in the aftermath of the 1641 Rebellion. As Green points out, the rote learning and the set responses required by the catechism were part of the armoury of community that kept the ‘godly’ apart from the earthly powers of the Antichrist.54 A number of popular catechisms of the seventeenth century make the point that in the face of the power of the Catholic Church and the forces of the devil (more or less the same thing) it is important that everyone could provide roughly the same answers to certain key questions about the basics of the Protestant faith. While literary scholars have celebrated the pleasures of narrative openness and the transgression or subversion of modes of closure, in fact closure and predictability and an absence of originality are pleasurable in themselves. For communities which consider themselves in peril, interpretive openness could be viewed as a threatening and existentially dangerous luxury. In many circumstances, intellectual reassurance is more important than either entertainment or intellectual challenge, which may be why there is very little in the way of formal inventiveness in the catechisms published in Ireland in the century after 1641. It is unsurprising that, as Green points out, ‘a major increase in [catechising] activity [in Ireland] can be found only from the 1680s’ onwards – there was, after all, the serious business of simply surviving to be getting on with.55 The narratologist Gerard Prince argues that in terms of an appreciation of fiction, ‘Reading a narrative is waiting for the end and the quality of that waiting is the quality of the narrative.’ 56 The quality of a catechism resides in precisely the opposite of ‘waiting for the end’ found in fiction. Catechisms provide the answers to the questions they raise immediately, no loose ends are left untied, and they reward virtue and punish vice automatically. These texts are not interested in challenging readers’ expectations or their beliefs. In fact, they fulfil readers’ expectations and reinforce the beliefs of the household and the culture into which the Anglican child reader is born. Like many forms of popular literature, catechisms raise real-world problems and contentious issues, but they solve these problems completely, in a way which provides the kind of comfort that popular fiction is often

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considered to bring to readers. Traditionally, critics of popular literature have complained about the ways in which fantasy solutions to genuine problems are provided, as if the function of popular literature should be to undermine the status quo and suggest possible alternative realities toward which society should move.57 If literary studies, including the discipline of children’s literature, could move away from a fascination with techniques of ‘subversion’, or ‘transgression’ and resistance to closure, then we could pay more attention to the pleasures involved in and understand the existential necessity for closure in both certain periods and certain forms. With a catechism, formal closure provides the child catechumen with a sense that, once they have mastered its contents they will have also grasped ultimate reality, and therefore will be in a better position to confront and overcome the challenges that the world will throw at them. Doctrinal consistency and coherency are among the most important components of the catechising process, as they provide clear means of building up a community of genuine believers who can respond intelligently to threats to the integrity of the faith. This formal closure is evident in the most basic feature of catechisms, the way in which the answer to a question usually repeats the question verbatim. In repeating the question within the answer, the answer itself becomes self-contained and would make sense even if removed or repeated outside the context of the catechism, thus providing the child with an easily extracted set of responses to queries in the world outside the text. A good example of this practice can be seen in Marsh’s Church catechism explain’d and prov’d. This catechism opens by asking, ‘What do you mean by the word Catechism?’ The answer provided is, ‘By the word Catechism I mean: An Introduction to be learn’d of every person, before he be brought to be confirm’d by the Bishop.’ 58 The question-and-answer format here is circular and the answers are bolstered by reference to scripture rather than to argument. ‘Proof’ of the answers provided is not found in intellectual inquiry but in the Bible, and a quote or a reference to the correct scripture chapter and verse is given. This method of providing ‘proof’ has the effect of sealing the catechism from external criticism. For example, the answer to the question, ‘Where were those that believ’d the doctrine of Christ, first called Christians?’ is given as ‘Antioch’. The child is then asked, ‘How do you prove it?’, for which the correct answer is, ‘I prove it from Acts 11 Verse 26. And the Disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.’ 59 Deviation from this circular kind of popular scholarship into, for example, a reading of histories to provide support for the emergence of the term ‘Christian’ at Antioch, would be not just beside the point, but a dangerous deviation from a focus on the catechistical text itself. As Wakely-Mulroney contends, catechisms are attempts at completeness, and authors make a good effort to ‘present Christian theology as

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comprehensively as possible, whether compressing Biblical doctrine into a small compass, dividing scriptural passages into short units, or relaying information bit by bit in a graduated scheme of instruction’.60 Catechisms are difficult to write in that they need to be simultaneously clear, so as to be accessible to the child reader, but also comprehensive, taking in an enormous body of controversial theological material and debate and reducing it to a condensed and memorisable form.61 The child is not expected to even think through the questions put to them, but to repeat the exact answer contained in the catechism. Catechisms are certainly ‘inflexible and authoritarian’ as they do not offer the child any room for subjective interpretation, though, again, I am not suggesting that this is a negative quality of the form. The provision of interpretive elasticity and subjective response is not what a catechism is designed for.62 It is difficult now to appreciate how these texts could have been in any way enjoyable for the average child. Historians of children’s literature have, however, rightly warned against assuming that the kinds of reading pleasures sought by children since the mid-nineteenth century are necessarily the same as those partaken in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century children. Peter Burke, the historian of popular culture, has divided dialogues into four types, the first of which, ‘the catechetical’, he maintains is little better than a monologue disguised as a dialogue.63 The interlocutor knows (or should know, since she has it in front of her) the correct (and only) answer to provide to the question asked, so there is no sense that the questioned child can take these inquiries in a different direction to the one expected. While being presented in the form of a dialogue, catechisms are really a kind of interrogation in which the child is tested for her conformity and orthodoxy. Marsh’s catechism provides an interesting example of the supposedly dialogic mode becoming an interrogation. After the child affirms her belief in God, the questioner rounds on her: ‘But you said, that you learn’d from the Articles of the Christian Faith, to believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Are there three Gods?’ 64 The system of interrogation follows in the same way in most of the Dublin-published catechisms, and the questions are all more or less the same, though the answers do differ in complexity and sophistication. The power dynamic is also clear in catechisms directed at children, since the questioner would have been an older person, either a parent or a teacher. It is certainly difficult to imagine that the kinds of answers provided by these catechisms would have satisfied any sceptics, as most of them assume as a given the transparency of the Bible. Catechisms are closed texts, not only because they are constructed so as to prevent or limit interpretation, but closed in that they represent themselves as sufficient for the catechumen – everything they need to know

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for a righteous life is contained within the covers of the book. While frequent reference is made to the Bible, the verse being cited is usually provided, so the catechumen would not actually need to consult a bible to understand the point being made. The catechisms do not provide any support for the proposition that the Bible is the word of God. Controversy about the status of the Bible is not even raised, despite the fact that profound questions were being raised about the supposed ‘inerrancy’ of the scriptures in this period.65 Raising legitimate doubts about the propositions of these catechisms would have been a distraction from shoring up the child’s Anglican identity. It was believed that, as explained by Green, ‘Careful instruction could ensure that the right impulses reached the child’s senses, while endless, repetitive practice would not only ensure that good habits of self-discipline and thought were formed while the child was still malleable, but also keep the child so busy that he or she would not have the time to give way to his or her naturally corrupt instincts.’ 66 These are texts about preparing the catechumen to enter into a community of faith and fully participate in that community. The strategy worked to a certain extent. Certainly, as Gillian Avery argues, catechisms and primers ‘bit deep into the consciousness of many generations’.67 The catechisms maintain a businesslike tone throughout the ‘dialogue’, and a rote-learned response is all that appears to be required. Children were expected to be able to ‘say the Church Catechism by heart’.68 However, there was a genuine concern by contemporary commentators that children would simply learn the correct answers off and not understand a word of their responses. After all, as many complained, ‘you may teach a parrot to speak’, but verbatim responses do not mean that a parrot understands the sentences or even the words they are using.69 Rote learning was certainly central to the methodology recommended by the Dublin-printed catechisms. Edward Wettenhall, the bishop of Cork and Ross, emphasised in his The catechism of the Church of England with shorter marginal notes than those formerly published, which was given a Dublin publication in 1696, that the purpose of his book was to make catechising as ‘easy, plain and profitable’ as possible, to ensure that the memories of children could arrive, through repetition, at a distinct understanding of the faith.70 Catechising was ‘not merely hearing children say over that form of words … [but] that they may be sure to retain, as well as understand, each point of faith and manners’.71 Wettenhall’s anxiety, however, was relatively unusual, and most catechisms simply insisted on the value of the memorised response. Edward Synge highlights the rote-learning requirements at the start of his catechism: ‘I would have a Child taught Perfectly, Readily, and Distinctly to repeat the Church Catechism, so as not to miss or mispronounce (if possible) one single Word of it’ (thus linking catechising with literacy).72 The ABC with

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the Catechism (1795) also explicitly connected literacy to the faith. This catechism opens with the alphabet, and then plunges directly into questions and answers on the sacraments, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, indicating that a child was to learn the alphabet for the purpose of learning to read and ingest the catechism.73 Likewise, The Church Catechism, broke into short questions (1732) considers that ‘the great advantage of these Questions’ is that children can be tested to ‘try whether’ they could ‘repeat their Catechism by Rote’.74 Indeed, the text opens with the expectation that ‘Children should be able to repeat their Catechism perfectly before this is put into their Hands’ as a kind of reward for mastering the material.75 This catechism may have been written in reaction to concerns that the questions traditionally asked in catechisms were actually far too long and convoluted for young catechumens. Irish-published catechisms do not demonstrate any concern that learning answers by rote has any negative impact on the community of believers. The amount of rote learning required by catechists may lie behind the Edgeworths’ rejection of it in their chapter on ‘Memory and invention’ in Practical Education, where they contrast ‘retentive’ memory, which stupidly regurgitates things learned off by heart ‘without knowing the sense of the words’, with ‘recollective’ memory which is a helpful tool in ‘invention’, and can bring the child further along the path towards rational adulthood. They warn that ‘it is better to refer to the book itself, than to the man who has read the book’.76 Given the mandatory rote learning basic to reading and engaging with catechisms, the use of dialogue (which implies a two-way conversation) by some catechetical writers is deceptive. As M. O. Grenby insists in his consideration of eighteenth-century ‘instructive’ texts: ‘prescription and practice existed in dialogue with each other’.77 However, if catechisms can be considered relatively inflexible in formal and ideological terms, that inflexibility offers psychological and political hope to members of a community genuinely in fear of being exterminated by their neighbours. A strictly conventional catechism is useful for a community like the Irish Anglican, emerging from an assault on its coherence after the 1641 Rebellion and the Williamite wars. While catechisms do not encourage the ‘plurivocity dear to postmoderns’,78 this is because seventeenth- and eighteenth-century believers placed more emphasis on unity and coherence than in multiplicity. Mikhail Bakhtin famously complained about the catechism as a perversion of dialogue into an ‘official monologism’: When the genre of the Socratic dialogue entered the service of the established, dogmatic worldviews of various philosophical schools and religious doctrines, it lost all connection with a carnival sense of the world and was transformed into a simple form for expounding already found, ready-made irrefutable truth; ultimately, it degenerated completely into a question-and-answer form for training neophytes.79

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While the scholarship on catechisms often employs the terms ‘parroting’ and ‘rote learning’ in a disparaging way, the discomfort being articulated is mostly that of the contemporary scholar and critic, particularly given how out of fashion rote learning became in the twentieth century. In a period of children’s literature scholarship which values transgression and subversion, there is, perhaps, still a lack of appreciation of the positive qualities of homogeneity and cohesion in the reading experiences of a child. ‘Parroting’ responses, as long as this parroting is repeated across a sufficiently large number of catechumens, provides a sense of commonality, shared identity. The construction of a community is achieved through repeated performances, reiterations and recitations. As part of the maturing process, the performance of the believing community through reading and repeating aloud the catechism effectively constitutes the child as an Irish Anglican subject. Marsh’s catechism opens with the explicit confirmation of the belief, taken from Proverbs 22:6, that if parents ‘train up a Child in the way he should go … when he is old, he will not depart from it’.80 Although the catechism is directed at the child, it is in the ultimate adult outcome that the authors are really interested. A Scriptural Exposition of the Church Catechism (Dublin-published in 1738) opens with the point that it falls to parents primarily to ‘promote the honour of God, the Interest of Religion, and the Present and Future Happiness of Mankind’ by ‘laying the Foundation of a sound Faith and good Life, in the Minds of those who are Children in Age and Understanding’.81 Demers advises that critics and historians pay attention to the ‘empowering aspect of true catechesis, its potential for self-knowledge’ – though I would qualify this advice with the point that what catechisms typically aim for is the mastery by the child of the beliefs which are held by the community rather than what we might call critical inquiry.82 It is tempting to dismiss catechetical responses required by the child as evidence of ‘indoctrination’, and indeed some prominent commentators have judged catechisms very harshly. The process by which texts such as catechisms produce a particular subject, or a particular kind of child, was certainly viewed with suspicion by the Frankfurt School philosopher Louis Althusser who, in his theorising of the concept of ‘interpellation’, used Post-Reformation catechisms as an example of the ways in which particular subject identities are adopted: this ‘procedure’ to set up Christian religious subjects is dominated by a strange phenomenon: the fact that there can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e., God. God thus defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself (‘I am that I am’), and he who interpellates his subject, the individual subjected to him by his very interpellation.83

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The response of the subject to this interpellation is acceptance of the identity he is being called by, or ‘recognition’ of that identity. However, before a child can develop scepticism about a set of beliefs, it is necessary that they actually become acquainted with them in the first instance, and in getting to know what their community considers important to learn, the catechumen would also come to understand her place within the community. As recited and repeated, the catechetical text operates as a way to order and categorise knowledge and understanding, as a way to make sense of the world. The catechism transmits the community’s ‘central values and assumptions and a body of shared allusions and experiences’.84 The process of articulating belief is basic to the ability to find oneself in the world, and, as Demers insists, ‘far from being inhibiting, the catechetical preliminaries enlist learners in the ranks of those seeking, finding, and, at times, making their own answers’.85 Although Althusser looks at the catechetical process critically and suspiciously (and leaves little room for individual agency), it is important to recognise the attraction of such rigid processes in times of existential crisis. In social and national contexts where it is important that a stable identity is fostered and maintained, such as in communities suffering or recovering from historical trauma like the Irish Anglican, certain pedagogic practices and texts take on powerful therapeutic roles, assuring children of the security of their identity. In communities in crisis it is more important to ensure that children understand their place in the community, and take on the ideals of that community, than foster a sense of unique individuality. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum take a very negative view of these kinds of retellings and transmissions, and while it is true that texts like catechisms ‘have the function of maintaining conformity to socially determined and approved patterns of behaviour’, it is not necessary to consider this kind of conformity, particularly in the face of genuinely existential threat, as incontrovertibly ‘problematic’.86 These are, also, texts which do challenge the child reader in certain ways, and refuse to speak down to her, and they are structured to require a maturity of reading practice, and provide a graduated step-by-step process for the alert reader from inexperience to experience. After all, as the historian Linda Pollock points out, in this period childhood was considered a time ‘of profound importance for the formation of a sound character, the development of intellectual skills, and the acquisition of a staunch religious faith’, and these qualities were believed to complement each other.87 While conformity is expected in the engagement of the child with these catechisms, (limited) agency is simultaneously encouraged. As Green points out, typography is central to the reading experience of catechisms, as many of them employ at least two typefaces. In places where Gothic type, or ‘black letter’, is used, ‘the sort of “Gothic” type-face that one nowadays encounters only in some

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German publications and “olde worlde” signposts’, this is an indication that the author or the printer has made ‘a conscious attempt … to reach the kind of inexperienced or slow reader most familiar with that type of typeface?’ 88 Roman type is used to signify material for older (more intellectually sophisticated) catechumens. For example, in Marsh’s The Church catechism explain’d much of the text is in Gothic black letter for a relatively young reader, while the text in Roman type glosses the less demanding responses. The question ‘What is your name?’ is presented in black letter, but the more difficult, ‘What is the first privilege of your baptism?’ is presented in Roman type.89 This catechism negotiates between different readers and different levels of response, compromising between a necessary brevity in replies, desirable so that the catechumen could memorise the responses, and a suitably expansive discourse so that the propositions would make sense. Making the child catechumen sufficiently passive to receive correct instruction is also important to the success of the catechetical process. As Green explains, given that in traditional theology the child was viewed as a malignant blob of depravity, breaking their sinful will was essential to protecting that child from a debauched future and preparing it to absorb moral instruction: ‘The rote learning involved in catechizing was a means of both enforcing proper discipline on a child and providing the knowledge of God’s will which was a prerequisite of salvation.’ 90 Certainly, in most of the Dublinrepublished catechisms, the effects of original sin on the child are highlighted from the start, and there is not a focus on the vulnerable Protestant child articulated by Sir John Temple. The anonymous author of A Weeks Preparation Towards a Worthy Receiving of the Lord’s Supper (1701) reminds his reader to pray fervently, quoting Psalm 51: ‘I Confess, O Lord, That I was shapen in Wickedness, and in Sin did my Mother conceive me.’ 91 Edward Synge emphasises that ‘whereas by our corrupted Nature we are born in Sin, and perpetually addicted thereto; and therefore liable to the Wrath of God. By being Baptised into the Church of Christ, we are, as it were, born again, and made the Children of God, through His Grace’.92 The Church Catechism, broke into short questions poses an easy one: Q: In what are you, and all Persons born by Nature? A: In Sin. Q: And of what are you by Nature the Children? Or to what are you liable? A: Wrath.93

In Marsh’s The Church catechism explain’d the answer to the question of what the child is before baptism is the obvious ‘Child of Wrath’.94 This catechism stresses that while humankind was created in a state of innocence, this state did not continue, and ‘in Adam’s disobedience all fell from it’:

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‘We are born in Sin / And made Children of Wrath / By the Disobedience of our First Parents’.95 Interestingly, this formula, which highlights the inheritance of sin from our first parents, also stresses that parents and not children are the cause of sin in the world. Sin comes through parents including, presumably, the parent who is instructing the child catechumen in the principles and grounds of their religion. The process of translation from wrath to grace, however, is repeatedly affirmed as if the acquisition of moral innocence was genuinely possible. The Christian’s Manual asserts that after baptism, ‘I am no more, as I was by Nature, a Child of Wrath, but a Child of God by Adoption through Christ.’ 96 I think it is also significant that the Dublin-published catechisms sometimes explicitly foster the sense of an identity in crisis, vulnerable or under threat in order to encourage the child to rebuild that self through immersion in religious ritual and prayer. A Weeks Preparation Towards a Worthy Receiving of the Lord’s Supper, after the Warning of the Church for the Celebration of the Holy Communion was published in Dublin in 1701,97 and while it may not be strictly speaking a ‘catechism’, it is certainly ‘catechistic’ given that it adopts a hectoring attitude to the reader, and demands assent, instilling a real sense of moral urgency and an almost apocalyptic impression of the end times and the potential conclusion of the reader’s own existence at any moment.98 The text adopts a dogmatic approach to religious instruction and continually attempts to solicit the reader’s compliance and assent. This is a text which is permeated by anxieties about the dangerous state of the world, and its descent into increasing sin and disobedience. The author complains that people are no longer partaking in Holy Communion to a sufficient degree, and laments ‘the Ruins into which the Natures of Man are generally fallen by their Sins, in not coming to Holy Communion’.99 In the past ‘our Fore Fathers taught their Children what to do, and what to avoid; and then Men were better’.100 Now children are encouraged to become ‘learned’ rather than ‘good’, which leads to their ultimate destruction, since it is better ‘this earthly Tabernacle should be dissolved, than become a Theater for Sin to revel in’.101 The reader is commanded to adopt a constant penitential attitude, to pray fervently throughout the week, acknowledging not just his personal sinfulness but his complete depravity. The participant is advised to concede that, in comparison with God, he is ‘So vain, so vile, so foul’, and ‘confounded with the multitude of [sins], and the Horror of their Remembrance’.102 A later prayer confesses, ‘I am so vile that I cannot express it.’ 103 Although the text is aimed at older children preparing to take Holy Communion for the first time, and designed to instil habits of veneration and reverence for the sacrament, with the hope that these readers will then

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continue to use the book for the rest of their lives, all readers are rendered childlike dependants throughout. They are commanded to pray relentlessly to God, who is not just Father but ‘my Master, my Physician, my Redeemer, my Creator, my Benefactor, Spouse of my Soul, my God, and my All in All’,104 who, ‘by the Immortal Seed of thy word, hast begotten us to be thy Children’, and with that same Word, ‘(as with Milk) dost nourish us purely as new-born Babes’.105 Before this supremely masterful God, all are reduced to the state of the breastfeeding infant. As this hermaphrodite (but simultaneously ultra-masculine) father breastfeeds his children, he also penetrates their moral being and can see into the ‘ruins’ they have fallen through sin, and ‘adopts’ them into his ‘Family’.106 God is a punishing Father and Master who is also a spouse and lover and a mother, and who is consumed symbolically in the Holy Communion service, during which the communicant child experiences a mystical awe at taking the Master inside himself. The speaker adopts a thoroughly passive voice, weak and insignificant, infantilised in awed subservience to a superior, alpha male (yet lactating) Master. In taking into himself the body of his Mater, the infant self is sublimated and overcome by that of the Lord. The Father God that faces his child induces a response akin to that famously described by Rudolf Otto when human beings encounter the ‘Holy’. In catechetic texts such as A Weeks Preparation, God is at the same time as familiar a figure as a parent, and a transcendent ‘wholly other’: The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The ‘mystery’ is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment.107

It is difficult to know the extent to which the dominant Father and Lord of the catechisms related to the actual father the child encountered in his home. Catechisms are, in many ways, extremely idealistic texts designed to sanctify the home in which religious instruction took place, contributing to the ‘spiritualisation’ of the domestic sphere. The father at the head of the house may have been imbued with some of the charisma associated with God in the catechetical text. As Luther succinctly put it in his Lesser Catechism, catechisms in the post-Reformation period provide ‘the simple way a father should present [the Creed] to his household’.108 Catechising in the family home assists in its sanctification, and binds the family together, with the father at the head. As the same kinds of catechising were being performed

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in many homes, a community could be formed.109 Catechetical writers tend to assume that the proper home is one in which harmony is achieved through prayer, where all the members of the household attend to the father, in which children are busy reading their own ‘small godly books’ and becoming more cognisant of sin and division as threats to this harmony.110 The status of the catechetical father did not go completely unquestioned in eighteenth-century culture, however. It is striking that the protagonist of one of the best-loved novels by an Irish author, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), is, almost in direct contrast to the powerful patriarch of the catechisms, an ineffectual and thoroughly compromised figure lacking any real authority in his own home. Despite uniting in one person ‘the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family’, Dr Primrose is seemingly completely incapable of having any authoritative impact on his family’s moral life.111 He is the chief domestic catechist, the spiritual ‘instructor’ of the family, but his wife and children are ‘refractory and ungovernable’,112 and he not only loses them one by one to apparent death and moral transgression, but, as Raymond F. Hilliard points out, his very masculinity is in question given that he is the victim of an often overpowering sensibility and is overcome by repeated bouts of emotional weakness.113 In Dr Primrose’s home, he is almost a secondary character, bending to the will of his morally dubious spouse, and incapable of preventing his daughter’s defilement by Squire Thornhill. Hilliard demonstrates that Primrose fails at every level to uphold the strictures about the father’s position as the head of the house that can be found in the best-known conduct books of the period, including Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man (1658), to whose pre-eminence as a guide to life we will return in the next chapter. Primrose is also a complete failure as a catechist. Moreover, given that The Vicar of Wakefield was often treated as a kind of catechetical text by its readers, with Primrose considered a second Job, eventually justified by God having gone through enormous suffering,114 his inability to be the kind of father envisioned by A Weeks Preparation is particularly significant. In multiple confrontations with his wife, he begins well, ‘stoutly’ opposing her bad decisions, but eventually collapses in the face of her stronger will: ‘as I weakened, my antagonist gained strength’.115 At one point, in the face of his wife’s insistence on sending their daughters Olivia and Sophia to London against his wishes, the Vicar confesses, ‘I stood neuter.’ 116 That the catechetical instruction of this moral paragon should have had so little impact on the thinking and behaviour of his wife and children is startling in itself, but that it takes place in a culture in which catechisms are among the most popular books in print suggests that these texts are not being treated with appropriate domestic seriousness. That

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Primrose, a walking, talking catechism, should be so passive in his opposition to the sinful behaviour of his own family suggests that for all their theoretical and rhetorical commitment to the version of the patriarchal household upon which the catechisms depended, even morally righteous men like the Vicar are incapable of living up to such strict masculine ideals. The catechetical texts assume multiple connections between the theological and intellectual work done in the home, reinforced in the church and the school, and then grafted on to the individual identity through rites of passage such as communion and confirmation. Narcissus Marsh’s catechism, for example, explicitly envisions catechetical instruction ultimately taking place in (and being sanctified by) the home, as if that is where the authority of the catechist will be most effective. Although it recognises that this catechism was first used by churches for instruction, its reprint is ‘for the more easie dispersing of Copies in private Families: The care of Parents, Masters and Mistresses being very necessary to the fitting Children and Servants for publick Examination’.117 This sentence simultaneously asserts the importance of passing on theological knowledge from an older to a younger generation, and suggests an anxiety that the Parents, Masters and Mistresses are not in a position currently to be trusted to catechise properly, as the extent of their knowledge is limited. The goal here is the complete spiritualisation of the home, but Marsh is pragmatic enough to know that this lies some way into the future. Marsh’s Preface insists on the beneficial use of concise answers for both instructors and the instructed, suggesting that his catechism fulfils an educational purpose for adults as well as children. In the home, with a printed copy ‘belonging’ to the child for the course of their spiritual development, a parent could chart their child’s increasing theological knowledge in the preparation for examination. This home-based instruction would then bolster the child’s ability to understand the sermons which they would hear in church every week. The stress here is on continuity of message not just from one institution to another (home to church, or church to home),118 but also from one generation to the next, all of which helped in the process of forming a unified community of believers. However, if the supposedly ‘catechetical’ Vicar of Wakefield is read in this context, the contrast between expectation and reality is highlighted. While Primrose becomes ‘an inevitable satiric butt’, and the novel ‘routinely mocks his pretensions to patriarchal authority, gleefully emasculating him in the process’,119 given that he is also shown to be a man of extraordinary piety and perseverance, the problem may have been that too much trust was put in the power of catechesis in the first place. Goldsmith’s novel, then, can be read as challenge to the catechistical literature of which Primrose is supposed to be an expert. In gesturing towards the potential future in which the home and the family is completely spiritually

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transformed, catechisms are a form of utopian literature. For Ernest Bloch, even the most deeply conservative and reactionary of popular genres has a utopian element that should not be ignored, a desire for a possible future, a ‘not yet’ that might be, not realisable in the mire of contemporary reality but potentially realisable in the future. In this literature, disaffected population groups could have their social and political fears allayed and their desires satisfied. Popular literature appeals to the ‘Not Yet Become’ in which even the vaguest possibility for social change is reaffirmed in imaginative terms, as what Bloch calls this literature’s ‘cultural surplus’.120 The Vicar of Wakefield, particularly in its despairing central section, as Primrose’s life is taken to pieces, is, at times, a dystopian reminder that this future is indeed a long way away, and that anti-catechetical forces are at work in the homes and families of even the most devoted men. Given the dependence of these catechisms on biblical quotation, citation and reference, it is not surprising that there were also quite a few Dublin reprints of children’s bibles in this long period, especially given that so many of them were published across Britain. Use of an abridged Bible as an educational (rather than a catechetical) text was explicitly supported by John Locke who recommended that it could be the first full-length book provided for children who had navigated their way to functional literacy, though he also suggested that Aesop’s fables could substitute if a parent felt that the Bible was a rather difficult text to work through. The inclusion of often quite extensive quotation from the Bible within the catechisms suggests that the authors did not actually assume their young catechumens would have an extensive knowledge of the scriptures. Part of the difficulty in recommending the Bible as an appropriate children’s text is that reading it from cover to cover is probably not the best way for anyone to engage with it. Locke explicitly warned against such a reading practice, insisting that ‘so far from being of any Advantage to Children, either for the perfecting of their Reading or principling their Religion … Perhaps a worse could not be found.’ 121 Locke’s caution was later echoed by Mary Wollstonecraft, who spent a very unhappy year in Ireland in 1786–87 as a governess to the daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Co. Cork. She claimed that while the Bible should be read ‘with particular respect’, young people ‘should not be taught reading by so sacred a book’, as they might ‘consider it a task’, and not ‘a source of the most exalted satisfaction’.122 Moreover, the fear that certain sections of the Bible contained material that was inappropriate for young minds may also have discouraged parents from giving an unabridged copy to their children. Famously, in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Antonia reads a Bible with all the salacious material purged by her mother to protect her sexual innocence. While Lewis was satirising what he considered

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to be the repressive attitude of Catholics towards both sexuality and bible reading, he was sharply criticised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for appearing to suggest that there could be anything in the Bible in need of censoring for the eyes of children. There is, though, little doubt that the Bible was one of the few texts with which children were at least personally acquainted, though possibly not as reading material. Bible stories were related at the religious services children attended, so they would have encountered many of the characters and plots aurally. Instead of attempting the entire Bible itself, Locke advised that ‘some Parts of the Scripture which may be proper’ could ‘be put into the Hands of a Child’,123 including stories such as those of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, the killing of Goliath by David, and Jonah and the whale, and in 1726 the first Bible explicitly for children in English, A Compendious History of the Old and New Testament, appeared. The eighteenth century saw the publication of a substantial number of abridgements or selections for parents who wanted to avoid their children trying to trudge through the entire text, including one published by John Newbery in 1757.124 These children’s bibles have both catechetical and moral purposes. It is important to emphasise, however, that while the passing on of religious traditions and encouraging conformity to a set of beliefs and practices (including reverence towards the Bible as the most important text in the culture) is basic to why these children’s bibles were created in the first place, this does not mean that the child reader did not use the text for other reasons as well. Stephens and McCallum view children’s bibles as among the most conservative of literary genres because of the way in which the text is represented as coming from God, the ultimate authority figure, and ‘mediated by authoritative adults’.125 However, looking at the kinds of children’s bibles available to eighteenth-century Irish Anglican children, the authority of the text is actually quite complicated in these abridgements and retellings. The selections made by the compilers of these bibles are good indicators of the particular areas of morality and social organisation to which parents wanted their children to pay particular attention, and it is certainly worth examining the particularities of these abridgements in book history. As Ruth Bottigheimer has argued in her comprehensive analysis of children’s bibles, ‘social utility’ was yoked together to ‘soul-saving … in children’s Bibles in each country and every century in which they appeared’.126 Certainly, plenty of bibles were printed in eighteenth-century Ireland, with the major Dublin printers, Philip Simms, George Faulkner, Mrs Hyde and Theophilus Jones all churning them out year after year from the mid-century onwards.127 The scant available evidence indicates that many Irish children of the period enjoyed reading the Bible. In his Memoirs, for example, Richard Lovell

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Edgeworth describes his deep love of the stories of the Old Testament (how he, for example, ‘loved and admired Joseph [in Genesis] with enthusiasm’).128 How many of these children actually knew all that much about the Bible itself, however, is debatable. Pelletreau’s Abridgement of Sacred History opens with a complaint that catechumens are known to be notoriously ‘deficient’ in knowledge of sacred history, and therefore in serious need of a shortened bible for catechetical purposes – though this may be only an appeal designed to boost sales.129 This particular abridgement is very radical indeed – all of the Old Testament after Genesis is provided in one short chapter, and the New Testament is compacted into two pages. Unsurprisingly, relations between parents and children are often of major concern to the creators of bible selections and abridgements for children, and Irish children’s bibles are no exception, though the kinds of morals drawn by the texts themselves can be surprising. The Children’s Bible, printed by Henry Saunders in 1763, describes itself on its title page as designed in a way ‘never before attempted; being [the biblical text] reduced to the tender Capacities of the little Readers’, and as ‘adapted to the Minds of Children’.130 The compiler of this abridgement takes advantage of the story of the Fall of humankind to suggest a rather subversive lesson for the child reader. In identifying the sin of ‘our first parents’, the text insists that they broke a commandment that was ‘easy’ to keep, which might suggest to the child reader that parents are rather unreliable and weak-willed.131 If our first parents proved to be so useless when it comes to rule-keeping, why should the rules set by the child reader’s parents be taken seriously? This is speculative, of course – but the domestic context in which the child would have encountered an authoritative text like this is suggestive here given the stress on the frailties and mistakes of ‘our first parents’. One of the most visually arresting of the abridgements published in Ireland in the eighteenth century is A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible; or, Select Passages From the Old and New Testaments, represented with emblematical figures, for the amusement of youth: designed chiefly to familiarize tender age, in a pleasing and diverting manner, with early ideas of the Holy Scriptures, which was reprinted in Dublin by the Methodist publisher, Bennet Dugdale, in 1789.132 This was, in fact, the fourth edition of this very popular version of the Bible, having been first printed in London in 1784 by Thomas Hodgson.133 The edition had some purchase on its readers – the edition held in the library of Trinity College Dublin comes with the name John Gumly, Belturbet, Co. Cavan, on the endpaper, and is inscribed to the ‘eldest daughter’, dated 1834, over thirty years after the original publication. ‘Curious’ is the right term for this publication. Although this bible does indeed start with the creation of the world and end with some verses from Revelations, it proceeds in what seems to be a haphazard manner, with

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some apparently very random verses chosen for illustration. Each page is given over to a verse or two, with accompanying illustrations taking the place of some words (though a full iteration of the verse included at the bottom of the page in case of a reader’s confusion – which was likely to arise given the relative obscurity of some of the illustrations). The catechetical intent of the edition is clear from the start. The Preface explains that this bible is published for the ‘pious and early Instruction of Children’, through ‘lively and striking Images’, so that those who have ‘ascendancy or power over such tender Minds’, such as ‘Mothers, Governesses, and Nurses’ can use it to ‘teach and instruct even the youngest Children with proper Ideas of the most important Doctrines, and make them early acquainted with the momentous Truths in the Word of God’.134 In contrast with straightforward catechisms, then, the Hieroglyphick Bible represents itself as a tool for mothers and nurses rather than fathers and teachers. It is unlikely that a child would obtain much instruction from this text without a great deal of adult intervention, not least because many of the most ‘child-friendly’ stories in the bible are only half-told, and the text itself does not proceed in any discernible narrative or pedagogic structure. Sarah Trimmer, in her An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scriptures (Adapted to the capacities of children) (1780), had warned that mothers needed to read the biblical text along with their children, in order to guide them to the correct interpretation of the often obscure stories,135 and the sheer lack of context and absence of any progression of the ‘plot’ in the Hieroglyphick Bible means that without adult intervention, most children would be left in the dark about the ‘meaning’ of these tales. This lack of context and the obscurity of some of the illustrations makes a catechetical dialogue between the instructing mother and child a necessity. The text’s need for a parental intervention is hardly unusual. In her analysis of children’s bibles, Ruth Bottigheimer tells of a father ‘setting his threeyear-old son on his lap and telling him about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac’: As the image of a father telling Bible stories to a small child well shows, a catechetical presentation of Bible stories is a quintessential two-person exchange, and children’s Bible authors from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries adapted Bible narratives into dialogue form.136

The illustrations and images constitute the main appeal of the Hieroglyphick Bible, since it would be considered a failure judged only on its ability to introduce the child reader in any comprehensive sense to the biblical text. This version does not even include one of the verses that would have been most attractive to parents trying to pass on some useful life lessons to their children. The text does highlight the duties owed by children to their parents,

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but unlike other children’s bibles of the period, the commandment to ‘Honour thy father and they mother’ is not provided in the section given over to the story of Moses. The illustrations, then, must constitute the main reason why Dugdale elected to reprint this particular bible, rather than the dozens of other possible children’s bibles he could have chosen. Again, it is important to accept that, as Barnard argues, ‘private beliefs resist recovery’,137 and without explicit evidence it is impossible to be definitive about what the Irish readers actually took from their encounters with this text. However, suggestions can be made, and their plausibility judged carefully. Some of these images and illustrations resonate in terms of the cultural practices in favour in late eighteenth-century Ireland. For example, after the Creation, the reader is given a very brief introduction to the story of the Fall, beginning with the Lord God planting ‘a Garden in Eden’.138 The accompanying illustration of Eden is of an English country garden, with God as a supernatural version of one of the great landscape garden designers of the period such as Capability Brown (see Figure 6). It is unclear whether the figure at the top of the illustration is Adam surveying his kingdom or some kind of sculpture resembling the copies of Greek and Roman originals that aristocratic men would have encountered on their Grand Tour. There is also what seems to be a Greek temple at the bottom of the garden, which would not have been an unusual addition to the landscaped vistas of English and Irish country houses. English landscape gardens were monuments of enlightenment, and often self-conscious attempts to invoke Eden as well, and Max F. Schultz points out the ‘widespread habit of citing Eden as the locus classicus of all gardens’ in horticultural discussion in this period.139 Horace Walpole, in his History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (1771), emphasises the connection between the great gardener, the God who established Eden, and the many eighteenth-century gardeners whose aim was to emulate Him.140 The garden in the Hieroglyphick Bible looks rather like that advocated in Richard Bradley’s Survey of the Ancient Husbandry and Gardening (1725): I come to take Notice of the State-Gardens of the Ancients, how they were design’d for Grandeur … When they laid out their gardens in any Figures (for I do not find that they ever used Knots or Flourishes) those Figures were either Squares, Circles or Triangles, which they commonly encompass’d with Groves of Pines, Firrs, Cypress, Plane Trees, Beech, or such like.141

The Garden of Eden in the illustration functions as a monument to God’s creative order, and in its use of classical buildings it also incorporates Western high culture. By casting Adam and Eve out of this utopia, God banishes

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6  A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), p. 11

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them into the wilderness of the uncultivated and uncultured, which for the child of an Irish Anglican family might have suggested the dystopia outside the walls of the big house. Architecture and landscaping in Ireland, too, were undergoing neoclassical transformations in the late eighteenth century, so that the association of the landscaped garden with Eden in the Hieroglyphick Bible might well have been made by a reader, even a child reader, in an Irish Anglican family. One way of understanding the ethos of the Irish Anglican community is through their architecture, both in a deliberately imperial city and stylish Georgian houses. As Roy Foster points out, both of these innovations stand for an evident need on the Ascendancy’s part not only to claim land recently won, but also to convince themselves that they would remain … [T] hey represent a declaration by its inhabitants of the antiquity of their claim to an Irish house – in an age when their right to be ‘Irish’ was being questioned by the new wave of Irish nationalism.142

The major part of the building of these homes took place towards the end of the eighteenth century, and there is a metonymic as well as an architectural link between the operations of the Wide Streets Commission in 1757 (which transformed the townscape of Dublin) and the erection of such neoclassical monuments as the Four Courts, the Customs House, Parliament House and Leinster House, and the construction of villas with carefully landscaped gardens at Castletown House and Carton House, Co. Kildare; Summerhill House, Co. Meath; Russborough House and Powerscourt House, Co. Wicklow. For an Irish reader, the association of Eden and the landscaped Garden with a time prior to the fall into savagery might have had particular resonance, especially given the evocations of Eden often found in historical studies of Irish life. As Barnard explains, to eighteenth-century Irish Protestants, ‘underdevelopment was traced to original sin, and the consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden’.143 Beyond the walls of the garden was nature in the raw, which was associated with the unreformed man, the unruly and dangerous child of wrath, since ‘the supposed indolence of the indigenous Irish, when faced with the potential of their habitat, branded them as barbarians and blurred a vital distinction between men and beasts’.144 For Irish Anglican builders, gardens ‘provided areas where the English (or British) and Protestant could demonstrate the superiority of their concepts and techniques to the indigenes’.145 While a fashion for geometric exactness fluctuated, there were many Irish Anglicans committed to geometrical exactness as well as aesthetic pleasure in developing their gardens. Barnard discusses the layout of Kanturk Castle, Co. Cork, owned by the Perceval family, describing how octagonal design featured heavily.146 His

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love of the story of the Garden of Eden as a child also inspired Richard Lovell Edgeworth to turn part of the family garden into a kind of replica. Indeed, in his Memoirs, Edgeworth makes an explicit connection between his father’s garden and the archetypal Garden which he read about in the Old Testament: ‘A particular part of my father’s garden was paradise: my imagination represented Adam as walking in this garden.’ 147 In the Hieroglyphick Bible, when Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, he is punished by being thrown out of his comfortable English country estate and being made to work the ground in a wilderness where the ground is ‘cursed’ and is surrounded by thistles and thorns.148 Eve’s punishment is not even mentioned, and the focus is on man’s failure and his loss of that monument of civilisation, the Garden, and his new home in the wilderness, with an evocative image of the sorrowful man provided as a warning to child readers. While what Stephens and McCallum call an ‘authority paradigm’ is certainly a part of the retelling of the Fall in the Hieroglyphick Bible, the implications of this retelling for a community in which Eden has been reconstructed but is surrounded by snakes of an Irish Catholic sort need to be taken into account.149 The Hieroglyphick Bible’s inclusion of some other stories may also have been appealing for a particularly Irish audience. The dramatic story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac is one that was often included in children’s bibles in this period, for the obvious reason that it speaks to relations between fathers and their children. Indeed, Tara Hamling notes that the story was ‘ubiquitous across early modern visual culture’, which includes illustrated bibles, and, given that it explicitly addresses issues of paternal power over the child, ‘was particularly popular in a domestic context’.150 The story of a father’s willingness to sacrifice his child for the greater good is a difficult one for the child reader to negotiate – and it raises powerful questions of a child’s ability to trust their (male) elders.151 Although ‘child sacrifice’ in a very general sense has been considered by Margot Gayle Backus as basic to gothic fiction by Irish Protestant writers,152 the imagery of child sacrifice in a Christian context originates in the book of Genesis, and God’s commandment to his faithful servant Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to demonstrate his obedience to the Lord. Isaac’s near-sacrifice has always been a particularly baffling story that biblical historians and commentators believe speaks to an anthropological transition from actual child sacrifice to the gods to a system of scapegoating a symbolic animal instead.153 Interestingly, while the substitute ram caught in a nearby bush is included in the illustration of this episode in the Hieroglyphick Bible, no reference in the text is made to God actually intervening to prevent the murder of Isaac taking place. The page is self-contained, and ends with Abraham

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taking the knife ‘to slay his son’.154 This contrasts with the much more explicit description in, for example, Saunders’s Children’s Bible, where the reader is assured that God never really intended any harm to come to Isaac: ‘the angel ordered [Abraham] to make an offering of [the ram] instead of his son, whom God never designed to have hurt’.155 Moreover, Isaac is aged 30 in the Children’s Bible, and is not actually a child at all. The Hieroglyphick Bible just leaves this story stripped of theological context or New Testament foreshadowing – and may possibly have encouraged the child to look at their father’s authority in a sceptical light. In the depiction of the possible sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham in the Hieroglyphick Bible, discussed above, a child’s understanding of the scene might depend greatly on how they understood the dynamic between Isaac and Abraham. Bottigheimer has traced a tendency in eighteenth-century children’s bibles to portray ‘God as a father analog, an ultimate parental and paternal principle’.156 In this case, the Lord God and Abraham are conspiring together to kill the helpless child. For a child reading this page alone, the association between his own father and Abraham/God might have raised unnerving questions about his own disposability. The art historian Benjamin Lindquist has discussed the potential emotional and cognitive impact of scenes like this on the reading child, and argues that such scenes create in the child an awareness of her own physical existence, thus compelling her into the dangerous sensory world of Abraham and Isaac. Within this world, the child desires the comfort of a parental embrace. This need for the parent is reinforced by the child’s empathetic sensation of a bound and punished body caused by Isaac’s proximity to the sacrificial boulder and Abraham’s large, dangling knife. Frightening images entail a certain sensory interaction between parent and child.157

The Bible contains many stories where child sacrifice is part of the plot. The Hieroglyphick Bible leaves out the Passover account of the slaying of all first-born children of the Egyptians, but does include the hiding of the baby Moses in the ‘Ark made of Reeds’ in the bulrushes on the River Nile for protection (though, strangely enough, does not say from what he needed shelter).158 Infanticidal threat is invoked, and then allayed – except in the case of Isaac, where it remains as a live possibility hanging over the page. Bottigheimer argues that the inclusion of the sacrifice of Isaac in children’s bibles resonated because of the story’s ‘delineation of father–son relations’, but in Ireland it may also have resonated because it echoed the cultural fears of child sacrifice by Irish Catholics. Given that actual child sacrifice was such a strong theme in the literature of the 1641 Rebellion, as set out in Chapter 2, stories of

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children in threat would have had an historical significance for the Irish Anglican child, who would have heard stories about the massacres of the Anglican innocents in Ireland every 23 October. As Barnard points out, ‘it was left to expositors and readers to make parallels between the trials and deliverances narrated in Scripture and those endured by Irish Protestants’,159 and while there is no direct evidence of these parallels being made in the reading of the Hieroglyphick Bible, given the explicit analogies made between the Anglican remnant in Ireland and the chosen people, it does not seem improbable that similar connections would be made here. It is, of course, unlikely that this bible was reprinted by a Dublin Methodist printer like Dugdale, on the grounds that some of its images would remind its readers of the horror stories about child sacrifice that had been passed down in the commemoration of the 1641 Rebellion. However, the fact that there is such a resonance is important, as it suggests ways in which this bible might have been read by the Irish Anglican children for whom it was reprinted. Such cultural echoes might have increased the degree of seriousness with which this bible was read. However, the reverence towards the scriptures traditional within Protestantism may also have been undermined by the appearance of hieroglyphic and children’s editions. In his history of the Bible in America, Paul Gutjahr has cautioned his fellow historians to pay more attention to the materiality of different editions of the Bible and also to examine the intellectual impact the existence of different kinds of bibles has on both readers and the culture of reception more generally. For Gutjahr, it was the very existence of many different versions of the Bible which led to loss of textual authority. A home with one ‘family’ bible treats that bible with a degree of care and consideration and reverence not accorded to other books in the house. That treatment alone makes the Bible an authoritative presence within the home. However, if another bible exists within the same home, a bible that is, perhaps, more like a toy because of its ‘packaging’, then the Bible might begin to seem rather less authoritative to the members of the household, including or even especially the children.160 The Hieroglyphick Bible is very small, and therefore designed somewhat like a toy – the Dugdale edition measuring only 14.2cm; a later paperback edition, published in London by James Kendrew, only 13.5 cm. The preface stresses the size of the book as a material object and links it to the intended audience (also physically small): this is a ‘small Book published for the instruction of Youth’.161 Even if Irish children were ‘drawn into diversion’ later than English children, as Toby Barnard argues, that does not mean that they did not find diversion in what material was provided for them.162 Although, in order to fully understand the snippets of the bible stories found in the Hieroglyphick Bible, a child would need to either consult a complete bible, or their parents, nurse or teacher, the pleasure of the illustrations and the enjoyment involved

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in working out what the images are supposed to mean could also have meant an increasing integration of the Bible into the child’s play and an autonomous encounter between the child and the text, with the text becoming a toy. One copy of the Dugdale edition of the Hieroglyphick Bible was owned by a young John Prior, who would go on to become the Vice-Provost of Trinity College, and it is inscribed to him, describing him as ‘a good boy’: ‘the little bible belongs to him and he is fond of reading it’.163 The preface of the Hieroglyphick Bible promises to inculcate the basics of the faith, but to do so ‘in a pleasing and diverting manner’, and perhaps in this case the ‘pleasure’ and ‘diversion’ took over, so that the Bible becomes less sacred and more about recreation and amusement than edification.164 Texts as toys, after all, was not a new idea for Irish Anglican children in 1789. Locke, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, had recommended the use of ‘play-things’, advice that was echoed much later by Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth in Practical Education, where they suggested that toys could help in the development of a child’s senses.165 The Child’s Toy, or The New Pet’s Play-Thing. Designed for the Allurement of Tender Children, either at Home or at School, by ‘Timothy Philologos, S.M.’ had been published in 1755 by Isaac Jackson, of Meath Street. This ‘toy’ was actually an alphabet, one of the most popular kinds of books published explicitly for children in the eighteenth century. If you place a page from the Hieroglyphick Bible side by side with one from The Child’s Toy, what strikes you is their similarity, and their objective to engage the child visually rather than directing them back towards parents or teachers. Would a prior knowledge of The Child’s Toy mean that the Hieroglyphick Bible might be treated more like a toy than a sacred text? Toys are, after all, as J. H. Plumb points out, another means by which ideas about self-improvement and education could be communicated to the child supposedly amusing themselves.166 These are visually very attractive texts. The Hieroglyphick Bible makes the Bible a visual toy and a source of pleasure as well as instruction. In their visual consumption of these pleasures of the eye, the child’s autonomy would be increased as the authority of the text decreases.167 Making the Bible into a toy would, it seems to me, not just undermine its status as a uniquely ‘authoritative’ text, but perhaps encourage ‘resistant’ readings produced by ‘disruptive’ reading patterns.168 There is no doubt that the Hieroglyphick Bible is a ‘traditional’ rather than a ‘subversive’ retelling of bible stories (though these terms themselves are value-laden and misleading if taken too literally), and aims to ‘teach’ a series of lessons, as well as remind children of the bible stories they would have encountered elsewhere. However, the stripping back of these narratives to the barest information sometimes produces odd and disorienting results on the page, as in the representation of the sacrifice of Isaac. While Protestant commitment to biblical inerrancy and plenary inspiration remained intact until the

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mid-nineteenth century,169 it is an open question how the production of children’s bibles like the Hieroglyphick Bible impacted on the degree of authority the Bible continued to hold in Protestant households. There were, however, other avenues of authority for eighteenth-century parents to invoke. Formal education became something of an obsession in Ireland in this period, as different organisations sought to bring enlightenment to the ignorant masses of the native Irish Catholics. The believing child was complimented by the enlightened child, an enlightenment that would lift the native population out of its wretchedness, and also guarantee the safety of the Church of Ireland and its future.

Notes 1 Bishop Edward Synge to Alicia Synge, 4 July 1747, Synge Letters, 49. 2 T. C. Barnard, Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2017), 201. 3 Ibid., 48. See also T. C. Barnard, ‘Print and confession in eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Caroline Archer and Lisa Peters (eds), Religion and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 99–129. 4 But see Edel Lamb, Reading Children in Early Modern Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 29–70. 5 Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2010), 134. Barnard agrees, and points out: ‘Devotional reading through which understanding was to be nurtured closely resembled that of Anglicans in England.’ ‘Ireland’, in Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. 3, Establishment and Empire, 1662–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 147. 6 See, for example, Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), which has an excellent chapter on eighteenth-century Irish ‘piracies’ and reprints (145–78). 7 T. C. Barnard, ‘Children and Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in Charles Benson and Toby Barnard (eds), That Woman! Studies in Irish Bibliography: A Festschrift for Mary ‘Paul’ Pollard (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005), 215. 8 Barnard, ‘Ireland’, 147. 9 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin, 2012), 341. 10 As it is described by T. C. Barnard. ‘Crisis of Identity Among Irish Protestants, 1660–85’, Past and Present, 127 (1990), 39–83. 11 In the phrasing of Jonathan Swift in the 4th Drapier’s Letter. The Drapier’s Letters, and other works, ed. Herbert David (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 51–68. 12 Sir Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, or, The History of Ireland, from the Conquest thereof by the English, to this present time with an introductory

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discourse touching the ancient state of that kingdom and a new and exact map of the same (London: Printed by H. Clark, for Joseph Watts, 1689–90). 13 Molyneux, Case, dedication to the king, 92. 14 Mary Douglas, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1993), 12; Douglas, How Institutions Think (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 15 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 80; Mary Douglas. In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers ( Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1993), 53. 16 The historiography of the Penal Laws is extensive. See especially James A. Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1895); Richard Mant, The History of the Church of Ireland from the Reformation (to the Union of the Churches of England and Ireland) with a preliminary survey, from the papal usurpation, in the Twelfth Century, to its legal abolition in the Sixteenth Century (London: John W. Parker, 1840); W. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1892); R. H. Murray, Revolutionary Ireland and its Settlement (London: Macmillan & Co., 1911); W. K. Sullivan, Two Centuries of Irish History (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1907); William P. Burke, The Irish Priest in Penal Times (1660–1700) (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1960); R. E. Burns, ‘The Irish Penal Code and Some of its Historians’, Review of Politics, 21:1 (1959), 276–99 and ‘The Irish Popery Laws: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Legislation and Behaviour’, Review of Politics, 24:4 (1962), 485–508; Louis Cullen, ‘Catholics under the Penal Laws’, Eighteenth Century Ireland, 1 (1986), 23–36; Patrick Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin: Helicon, 1981); S. J. Connolly, ‘Religion and History’, Irish Economic and Social History, 10 (1983), 60–88 and Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 263–313; Charles Ivar McGrath, ‘Securing the Protestant interest: the origins and purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (1996–7), 25–46; Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Penal Laws against Irish Catholics: Were They too Good for Them?’, in Irish Catholic Identities, ed. Oliver J. Rafferty (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 154–68. 17 Calculating even the relative size of the different denominations in eighteenthcentury Ireland is fraught with difficulties, the only firm statistics coming from a religious census taken in 1732 by collectors of a hearth tax. They calculated that 73 per cent of households were Catholics, but most commentators believe this underestimates the correct number considerably. According to Sean Connolly, ‘the most it seems safe to say is that Catholics in the first half of the eighteenth century probably made up somewhere between three-quarters and four-fifths of the population’. Religion, Law and Power, 145. 18 John Tillotson, Six sermons…preached in the church of St Lawrence Jewry in London (London: Printed for B. Aylmer and W. Rogers, 1694, second edition), 115.

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19 Ian Green, ‘“The necessary knowledge of the Principles of religion”: Catechisms and Catechizing in Ireland, c. 1560–1800’, in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), 77, 70–1. 20 See Barnard, ‘Children and Books’, 216. 21 T. C. Barnard, ‘Improving Clergymen, 1660–1760’, in Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 306. 22 Bishop Edward Synge to Alicia Synge, 21 July 1747, Synge Letters, 59. 23 Green, ‘“The necessary knowledge”’, 69. 24 Ibid., 70. 25 Anne Markey, ‘Irish Children’s Books’, 38. 26 Molly O’Hagan Hardy, ‘Literary Pirates as Agents of Change: Jonathan Swift and the Dublin Printing Pirates of the Eighteenth Century’, LATCH 5 (2012), 138. 27 On Luther’s catechisms, see Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought, (fourth edition, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 108–9. 28 Green, ‘“The necessary knowledge”’, 80. 29 The years of publication given for the catechisms in this chapter will be of the first Dublin printing. 30 Anonymous, The Church Catechism Explain’d and Prov’d by Apt Texts of Scripture. Divided into XXVI parts (Dublin: Printed by Joseph Ray, 1699), 64. 31 Ibid., 8. 32 [The Reverend Mr. Pelletreau of the French Church of St. Patrick], An Abridgement of Sacred History, from the Creation of the World to the Establishment of Christianity. Together with A Catechetical Explanation of the Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion. Designed for the Instruction of Youth, and adapted to the meanest Capacities. By a Presbyter of the Church of Ireland (Dublin: Printed by A. James, 1760), 59. 33 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Pelican, 1973), 47–8, 53. 34 Douglas examines the ideas of Bernstein in detail in Natural Symbols, chapter 2. 35 Basil Bernstein, ‘Social Class and Psycho-therapy’, British Journal of Sociology, 15:1 (1964), 54–64, 56–7. Quoted in Douglas, Natural Symbols, 46. 36 Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 147–8. 37 Bernstein, ‘Social Class’, 59–60. Also quoted in Douglas, Natural Symbols, 26. 38 Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 5. 39 Anonymous, The Church Catechism Explain’d, title page. 40 See, for a classic example, the anthology edited by Patricia Demers and Gordon Moyles, From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); see also Mary Thwaite, From Primer to Pleasure in Reading: An Introduction to the History of Children’s

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Books in England From the Invention of Printing to 1914 With an Outline of Some Developments in Other Countries (London: Library Association, 1972). For a response to this ‘whig’ history of children’s literature, see David Rudd, ‘Theorising and Theories: How Does Children’s Literature Exist?’, in Peter Hunt (ed.), Understanding Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 2000), 15–29. 41 Patricia Demers, Heaven Upon Earth: The Form of Moral and Religious Children’s Literature to 1850 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 52. 42 Donelle Ruwe, ‘Guarding the British Bible from Rousseau: Sarah Trimmer, William Godwin, and the Pedagogical Periodical’, Children’s Literature, 29 (2001), 1–17; Matthew Grenby, ‘Delightful Instruction? Assessing Children’s Use of Educational Books in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 181–99; Grenby, Child Reader, 1, 286; Jill Shefrin, ‘Pity that any Children should be […] brought up […] without the Skill of Reading’, One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature (New York: Grolier Club, 2015), 35; Lamb, Reading Children, 76, 53–6. 43 Katherine Wakely-Mulroney, ‘Riddling the Catechism in Early Children’s Literature’, Review of English Studies, 70:294 (2019), 273. 44 Ibid., 273. 45 Green, Christian’s ABC, 230–76. 46 Which is not to say that children did not actually play with them! 47 Wakeley-Mulroney, ‘Riddling the Catechism’, 280. 48 Green, ‘“The necessary knowledge”’, 76. 49 Lancelot Addison, The Christian’s Manual. In Two Parts. I. The Catachumen: or, An Account Given by a Young Person of his Knowledge in Religion, before his Admission to the Lord’s Supper, as a Ground-work for his Right Understanding of the Sacrament. II. An Introduction to the Sacrament (Dublin: Printed by Aaron Rhames, for J. Hyde, R. Gunne, R. Owen, and E. Dobson, 1724), 1. This is the sixth edition of this text. 50 The correct answer is that ‘it is impossible for the weak and shallow mind of Man fully to understand the Nature of God’. Edward Synge, Plain instructions for the young & ignorant. Comprised in a Short and Easy Exposition of the Church Catechism. Adapted to the Understanding and Memory of those of the Meanest Capacity (London: Printed for Richard Sare, 1701), 7. This Edward Synge is the father of the Edward Synge who would go on to become Bishop of Elphin, and whose letters to his daughter Alicia were discussed in Chapter 2. 51 Synge, Plain Instructions, 8. 52 [Pelletreau], Abridgement of Sacred History, 42. 53 Synge, Plain Instructions, 12. 54 Green, Christian’s ABC, 209–10. Rote learning would be criticised in the eighteenth century as well, with Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth explicitly attacking the practice in Practical Education (London: Printed for

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J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1798), I: 726: by rote learning people ‘lay up treasures for moths to corrupt; they acquire a quantity of knowledge … and cannot produce a single fact, or a single idea in the moment when it is wanted: they collect, but they cannot combine’. 55 Green, ‘“The necessary knowledge”’, 71, 73. 56 Gerard Prince, Narratology (Berlin: Mouton, 1982), 157. 57 For a classic discussion of closure, see D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). See also Marianna Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 58 Anonymous, Church Catechism Explain’d, 1. 59 Ibid. 60 Wakely-Mulroney, ‘Riddling the Catechism’, 275. 61 ‘Catechesis is traditionally associated with formal and ideological inflexibility, a sense derived from the seeming indivisibility of its tightly coordinated question and answer sequences, and the apparently mechanical process through which children are required to navigate and repeat its premises.’ Wakely-Mulroney, ‘Riddling the Catechism’, 287. 62 Ibid., 278. It is important to acknowledge that, even if catechisms are not intended to inspire a playful response from the reader, this does not mean that readers did not engage with them playfully. 63 Peter Burke, ‘The Renaissance Dialogue’, Renaissance Studies, 3 (1989), 2. 64 Anonymous, Church Catechism Explain’d, 11. 65 See, for example, Diego Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-Century British Deists (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). 66 Green, Christian’s ABC, 234. 67 Gillian Avery, Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922 (London: Bodley Head, 1994), 29. 68 Edward Synge, Methods of Erecting, Supporting and Governing Charity Schools: With An Account of the Charity Schools in Ireland and Some Observations Thereon (Dublin: Printed by J. Hyde, 1718), 6. 69 Green, Christian’s ABC, 207–8. 70 Edward Wettenhall, The catechism of the Church of England. With shorter marginal notes then those formerly publish’d (Dublin: Printed by Andrew Crooke, 1696), n.p. 71 Ibid., opening page. 72 Synge, Plain Instructions, A3. Synge’s interest in the child getting every single word right is repeated by his son’s often minute corrections of Alicia’s letters a generation later. 73 Anonymous, The ABC with the Catechism (Dublin, 1695). 74 Anonymous, The Church Catechism Broke into Short Questions: To which is added, an Explanation of some Words, for the easier Understanding of it. Together with Prayers for the Use of the Charity-Schools (Dublin: re-printed by and for S. Hyde, 1732), 2. 75 Ibid.

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76 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, I, 553–4, 564, 555. 77 Though he doesn’t examine catechisms. Grenby, Child Reader, 197. Also quoted in Wakely-Mulroney, ‘Riddling the Catechism’, 276. 78 Demers, Heaven upon Earth, 74. 79 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 110. 80 Anonymous, Church Catechism Explain’d, title page. 81 Joseph Harrison, A Scriptural Exposition of the Church Catechism, Containing the Young Christian’s Account of the Doctrines and Duties of his Religion (Dublin: Printed for Sylvanus Pepyat, 1738, fourth edition), 1. This catechism provides a great deal of scriptural support for each question and answer of the traditional catechism. 82 Demers, Heaven Upon Earth, 53. 83 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 178–9. I am indebted for this point to the treatment of Althusser and the catechism in Norm Friesen, The Textbook and the Lecture: Education in the Age of New Media (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 99. 84 John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York: Garland, 1998), 1. 85 Demers, Heaven Upon Earth, 57. 86 Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, 1–2. 87 Linda Pollock, A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children Over Three Centuries (London: Fourth Estate, 1987), 204. 88 Green, Christian’s ABC, 7. 89 Anonymous, Church catechism Explain’d, 1–3. 90 Green, Christian’s ABC, 209. 91 Anonymous, A Weeks Preparation Towards a Worthy Receiving of the Lord’s Supper, after the Warning of the Church for the Celebration of the Holy Communion: In Two Parts. In Meditations & Prayers for Morning and Evening, for Every Day in the Week. Also some Meditations to Live Well, after the Receiving the Holy Sacrament Supper (Dublin: Printed at the back of Dick’s Coffee-House in Skinner-Row, 1701), 49. 92 Synge, Plain Instructions, 40–1. 93 Anonymous, Church Catechism, broke into short questions, 20. 94 Anonymous, Church catechism Explain’d, 3. 95 Ibid. 66. 96 Addison, Christian’s Manual, 1–2. 97 A reprint of a text originally published in 1679. 98 It is also one of the only catechisms published in Dublin to have received any critical attention at all. See the comments on the edition in the Pollard Collection in the library of Trinity College Dublin. https://nccb.tcd.ie/exhibit/ xs55mc089. 99 Anonymous, Weeks Preparation, A2.

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100 Ibid., A3. 101 Ibid., 10. 102 Ibid., 20, 34. 103 Ibid., 42. 104 Ibid., 27. 105 Ibid., 42. 106 Ibid.. 107 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Pelican, 1959), 45. 108 Luther’s Little Instruction Book: The Small Catechism of Martin Luther, trans. Robert E. Smith, Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical. Lutheran Church (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 538. For a discussion, see Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 109 Green, Christian’s ABC, 209. 110 Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen, 1981), 194, 211. 111 Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 112 Ibid., 111, 168. 113 Raymond F. Hilliard, ‘The Redemption of Fatherhood in The Vicar of Wakefield’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 23:3 (1983), 465–6. 114 James H. Lehmann, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield: Goldsmith’s Sublime, Oriental Job’, English Literary History, 46:1 (1979), 97–121. 115 Goldsmith, Vicar, 53. 116 Ibid., 58. 117 Anonymous, Church Catechism Explain’d, A. 118 Green thinks that ‘the principal location of catechizing’ remained the parish church despite the reference to the home in many of these catechisms. Green, ‘“The necessary knowledge”’, 77. 119 James Kim, ‘Goldsmith’s Manhood: Hegemonic Masculinity and Sentimental Irony in The Vicar of Wakefield’, The Eighteenth Century, 59:1 (2018), 22, 36. 120 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), vol. 1, 29, 417–18. 121 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 231. 122 Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1787), 53–4. 123 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 232. 124 For the emergence of children’s bibles in England, see Ruth B. Bottigheimer, The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 43–5.

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125 Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, 27. 126 Bottigheimer, Bible for Children, 4. 127 Barnard, ‘Children and Books’, 216. 128 Edgeworth, Memoirs, I, 23–4. 129 [Pelletreau], Abridgement of Sacred History, ‘To the Reader’, n.p. 130 The Children’s Bible, or An History of the Holy Scriptures (Dublin: Printed by Henry Saunders, 1763), title page. 131 Ibid., 4. 132 On Dugdale, see D. A. Levistone Cooney, ‘A pious Dublin printer’, Dublin Historical Record, 46 (1993), 74–100; Mary Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550–1800: Based on the records of the Guild of St Luke the Evangelist Dublin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172–3. 133 David Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 216. 134 A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible; or, Select Passages in the Old and New Testaments, Represented with Emblematical Figures, for the Amusement of Youth: designed chiefly To familiarize tender Age, in a pleasing and diverting Manner, with early Ideas of the Holy Scriptures. To which are subjoined, A short Account of the Lives of the Evangelists, and other Pieces, illustrated with Cuts (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), 4. 135 Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scriptures (Adapted to the capacities of children) (London: Printed for the Author, 1780), viii. 136 Bottigheimer, Bible for Children, 326–7. 137 Barnard, ‘Ireland’, 147 138 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, 11. 139 Max F. Schulz, Paradise Preserved: Recreations of Eden in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12. 140 Cited in ibid., 13. 141 Richard Bradley, A Survey of the Ancient Husbandry and Gardening, Collected from Cato, Varro, Columella, Virgil, and others the most eminent writers among the Greeks and Romans. Wherein many of the most difficult Passages in those Authors are explain’d, and the whole render’d familiar to our Climate; with a Variety of new Experiments, Adorn’d with Cuts (London: Printed for B. Motte, 1725), 34–5. 142 R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch: Essays in Irish History (London: Penguin, 1993), 216. 143 T. C. Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 197. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid., 205. 146 Barnard, Improving Ireland?, 138–42. 147 Edgeworth, Memoirs, I, 23. 148 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, 14.

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149 Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, 36–7. 150 Tara Hamling, ‘The Household’, in Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction, ed. Anna French (London: Routledge, 2020), 49. 151 Bottigheimer emphasises that ‘Christian interpreters of the Abraham and Isaac story have had their troubling task lightened by being able to portray Isaac kerygmatically as a proto-Christ, so that Abraham’s sacrifice of his dearly beloved son supersedes all other ethical and moral questions precisely because it is emblematic of the Christian redemptive promise.’ Bible for Children, 80. However, here, in what is from the start an ‘emblematic’ bible, where often opaque images stand in for simple words and ideas, this Christian association is never drawn by the creators of the text, which ends up highlighting the arbitrary nature of God’s fatherly care for his obedient children. 152 Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 153 See Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 154 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, 20. 155 Children’s Bible, 13. 156 Bottigheimer, Bible for Children, 69. 157 Benjamin Lindquist, ‘Mutable Materiality: Illustrations in Kenneth Taylor’s Children’s Bibles’, Material Religion, 10:3 (2014), 335. 158 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, 25. 159 Barnard, ‘Ireland’, 147. 160 Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3, 147–51, 173. For the importance of materiality to understanding children’s literature, see Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘The Playground of the Paratext’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 15 (1990), 47–9. 161 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, Preface. 162 Barnard, ‘Children and Books’, 215–16. 163 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, 1789 edition, copy in National library of Ireland. 164 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, title page. 165 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, 1–37. 166 Plumb, ‘New World of Children’, 308. On eighteenth-century toys, see O’Malley, Andrew, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 109–13; Hamling, ‘Household’, 41–3. 167 Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath, The Braid of Literature: Children’s Worlds of Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 53. 168 Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, 27. 169 John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1984), 250.

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4 On the road with Jack Connor: the Enlightenment child

‘Foolishness and bad passions are found in the heart of a child, and unless they are corrected and restrained, they grow stronger and stronger.’ 1 So, at least, insisted one Sunday school mistress, in a popular eighteenth-century chapbook ominously called The Rod. The restraint of these ‘bad passions’, generated by original sin, was the primary duty of parents, whose responsibility it was to bring enlightenment to their offspring through exposing them to different disciplinary regimes. Catechesis was one such regime, and, as we have seen, much was believed to depend on the individual child internalising the fundamentals of the faith through instruction in the home – or in the schoolroom where, inspired particularly by the epistemology of John Locke, children’s minds could be transformed, shaped and informed. While Locke is now best known for his claim that the newborn child is a tabula rasa, he held that the child’s mind was empty only of ideas, and fully acknowledged the danger of the child’s will, which was a clear and present danger to all, including the child himself. While ‘nine Parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their Education’, one part was not so malleable, and needed considerable training in reasonable thinking to get under control.2 Indeed, as W. M. Spellman has established, Locke was very influenced by his Calvinist family and accepted the inherent sinfulness of humanity and the need for redemption by Christ.3 The distinction between adult and child was, for Locke, explicable in the precarious transition from will to intellect, emotion to rationality. He warns parents that ‘the first Thing [the child] should learn to know, should be, that they were not to have any Thing because it pleased them, but because it was thought fit for them’. In that way they could understand that ‘the Principle of all Vertue and Excellency lies in a Power of denying our selves the Satisfaction of our own Desires, where Reason does not authorize them’.4 For Locke, education was a means of ending childhood, not prolonging it, and, together with paternal authority in the home, educational institutions could discipline the childish will through the force of reason. This view coincided with a Protestant understanding of the purpose of education more

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generally, which was regarded as a crucial means of taming ‘youthful rebellion’ and ‘instil[ling] ideas which would help provide godly armour against temptation and the evil which was a natural part of a human race born to sin’.5 Locke wanted to ‘adultise’ the child as quickly as possible, and argued forcefully that among the most dangerous influences in a child’s life were female presences in the home, which could overly coddle him and suppress his rational tendencies.6 This chapter will focus on the representation of the ‘enlightened’ or ‘educated child’ in eighteenth-century Irish writing, concentrating the analysis on The History of Jack Connor (1752) by William Chaigneau, which can be described (loosely) as a novel about the pitfalls and challenges of the educational process. It concerns the adventures and misadventures of the title character, the illegitimate son of a Catholic laundry maid and her landed Anglican employer, as he tries to make his fortune in Ireland, England and continental Europe in the early years of the eighteenth century. Jack’s mother represents a significant threat to her son’s future prosperity, not just because in his very early years she takes responsibility for his education and actually teaches him to read, but because, as a Catholic, her degenerate sexuality provides a terrible moral example to her son, which he is in danger of emulating. His only hope of redemption appears to be a complete immersion in Anglican educational regimes which, fortuitously, were all the rage in the Ireland in which Jack grows up. Chaigneau’s novel has been recognised as one of the most important texts in the history of early Irish fiction, and has attracted scholarly attention for its contribution to the development of the novel as a genre. More recently, the novel’s attention to Irish social and political change has been the subject of critical discussion. Of particular interest to this chapter are the protagonist’s informal and formal experiences of Irish education, as he spends much of the early part of the novel as a boy. As Toby Barnard points out, in the early modern period, ‘governments saw education as essential to good order, productivity and … Anglicization and the spread of Protestantism’.7 Jack Connor is, in part, an examination of the proposition that a rational, moral Anglican education, even of the children of Catholic parents, would turn out good, productive and (crucially) Anglican citizens, and therefore protect and secure the future of the Irish Anglican community, which the main character comes to represent. As Anna French has explained, those in Protestant communities animated by ‘reforming zeal saw children as the future of Reformed Christendom’, and education was one critical means by which to protect that future.8 The purpose of education as a means of rational control, intellectual and theological transformation and ideological surveillance was emphasised in the sermons and pamphlets written by Anglican advocates of the charity and charter-school system, and it is significant that

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Chaigneau’s novel situates the coming of age of its hero at the intersection of these different educational discourses.9 Jack Connor is treated in this chapter as a case study where the discourses of enlightenment, education, civilisation and modernisation of both individual children and Ireland (as an allegorical child) converge. The chapter will review the different educational influences on Jack, including his absorption of one of the key devotional texts in British history, Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man (1658), and his experiences in Anglican households and schools, all of which are theoretically set up to counter the negative pedagogic influence of his Catholic mother. The chapter will argue that the novel’s surface endorsement of devotionals, catechisms and schools is ultimately rather half-hearted, qualified, and even undermined, and this this lack of confidence in the rhetoric of Anglican enlightenment speaks to the wider failure of the Irish educational mission in this period. The History of Jack Connor by William Chaigneau is a picaresque novel that had a considerable degree of success when it was first published (anonymously) in 1752.10 While the novel contains many of the elements of the picaresque, a genre particularly associated with the work of Tobias Smollett, including ‘the realistic setting, the journey motif, the episodic narration, and, most importantly, the vision of a world in moral and social disorder’, Chaigneau reworks these elements by making the hero’s identity as an Irishman central to the plot.11 The story recounts the fortunes and (mostly) misfortunes of the eponymous hero as he tries to make his way through life as the Anglican son of a Irish Catholic servant. Jack is born in Limerick, the illegitimate child of a Catholic laundry maid, Dolly Bright, and her employer, Sir Roger Thornton, though he is passed off as the consequence of Dolly’s illicit relationship with Sir Roger’s Anglican servant, Jeremiah Connor, to whom she is then married off in a futile attempt to avoid scandal (futile because scandal follows Dolly wherever she goes). The novel follows poor Jack through the impoverishment of his family, the death of his (step-)father, apparent abandonment by his mother, his life with the benevolent landlord Lord Truegood in a Co. Meath estate, education in a charity school in Portarlington, Co. Laois, career as an apprentice, servant and soldier, his sad descent into criminality by way of a voracious sexual appetite, his two marriages and his eventual attainment of respectability and social status. These adventures take Jack from Ireland to England, France, Flanders and Spain, and back to Ireland again, where he reconciles with his mother, and begins a new life looking forward to the betterment of both himself and his native land. Jack Connor is often discussed for its contribution to the development of the novel as a self-conscious and self-reflexive genre. It is, for example,

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the first instance of a novel which includes mottoes for each chapter,12 and Chaigneau makes a series of comparisons between his own work and those of his better-known contemporaries. In his introduction to the most recent edition, Ian Campbell Ross sets the novel in the context of the experimental fiction of the period, and certainly it contains a striking number of references to contemporary fiction, including Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751), and Smollett’s English translation of Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas (1748).13 One of the running jokes made by the narrator is that this novel is not as tedious in its amassing of the kind of detail you would find in one authored by Richardson. The narrator pointedly refuses to provide a detailed account of a conversation, for example, insisting that ‘The Task would be too arduous even for the renown’d Author of Pamela and Clarissa, whose Patience nothing could equal, except that of his Readers.’ 14 As many critics have recently pointed out, however, this is also very much a novel about Ireland and its social, religious and political difficulties in the mid-eighteenth century, and it contains often quite detailed considerations of schemes for Ireland’s economic and political improvement.15 Jack is a useful character in an exploration of eighteenth-century Irish society, since he has a divided identity, with many different social and religious claims on him. Despite being brought up by Jeremiah Connor, Jack is really the son of a landlord who skips the country as soon as he is born at the insistence of his wife who wisely does not trust him around the amorous Catholic Dolly Bright. The most significant father figure Jack encounters is Lord Truegood, a man of impeccable moral standing who is dedicated to developing not only his own estate but the country as well, and he encourages Jack to consider the positive impact he could have on the future of Ireland. Unlike Lord Truegood, however, Jack is unsure of his Irish identity, and attempts to divest himself of it part-way through Volume One, Chapter Thirteen, changing his name to the less obviously Irish ‘John Conyers’ (which adjustment is marked by the running header becoming ‘Jack Connor, now Conyers’, another first in the history of the novel). If this is a ‘problem’ novel, as Derek Hand argues,16 one of its problems is Jack himself, and his constant insecurity about his identity. The other problem is Ireland, which is represented as a collection of clichés and stereotypes at the start of the novel, but one with the possibility of enlightened transformation given the right kind of interference by the right kind of people. Ross makes the point that, in establishing his nationality by returning to his native country at the novel’s conclusion and assuming again his original name, Jack demonstrates his newly acquired maturity, and this has positive implications for the possibility of a maturing Ireland too.17 The self-divided and multifarious Jack can,

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therefore, also be understood as (intentionally) analogous to the contemporary Irish Anglican community, ‘the whole People of Ireland’,18 and his growth from child to man a way for Chaigneau to dramatise the possible transformation of this community from childish dependence to self-determined political independence. The maturity and independence of Ireland was certainly at stake when the novel was published. Jack Connor opens, appropriately enough, in 1720, the year in which the Declaratory Act came into effect, an Act which essentially tried to make Ireland into a helpless child for perpetuity (indeed, its official title was: ‘an Act for the better securing the dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland on the Crown of Great Britain’). The Act made clear the right of the English parliament to enact tax legislation for Ireland, and therefore the permanently subordinate position of the Irish parliament. ‘Dependency’ as a term carries with it the implication of immaturity, infantilisation and childishness, and in this case applies it to the Irish political nation, in the control of the Anglican community there. As discussed in the Introduction, as far as many English political commentators were concerned, the Anglicans of Ireland had relinquished their claims to English rights and privileges by living, working and (most importantly) breeding in Ireland: by so doing they had become ethnically ‘Irish’ and childlike, and the duty of England (through the English parliament) was to act in loco parentis, for the mutual benefit of both countries.19 The Declaratory Act can be seen as a heightened expression of the parent– child metaphors in use in political commentary earlier in the century. For example, while the author of the anonymous Inquiry into some of the Causes of the Ill Situation of the Affairs of Ireland (1741) is broadly supportive of Irish Protestants and their economic and political interests, he is also clear that he wants them to realise that their proper position within Anglo-Irish relations is one of complete dependence. Since the ‘Protestant Interest of Ireland has thus grown under the Wings of England, and does now, and ever must exist by her Protection; consequently Ireland is a dependent Kingdom’.20 Because England has constantly had to intervene in Irish affairs to save the Protestants there from being completely exterminated or politically disadvantaged, ‘the present Protestant inhabitants of this Kingdom, cannot express too great a Gratitude to their Elder Brothers of England’, and should not make demands for ‘independence’ because there is nothing that they can do to end their reliance on their colonial parent.21 Even if the Irish Anglican community prospers ever the more by turning Ireland into an economic powerhouse, this will only make their childlike relation to England ever the needier: ‘Experience shows that, as the Protestant Inhabitants of Ireland have improved in Manufactures, Inclination has tied the Knot of their Dependence, and demonstrative Reason proves, that as they shall

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make further Progress in them, Interest, the Bond both of the Good and the Wicked will draw it harder.’ 22 Indeed, any political programme that involves Ireland ending its dependence on England is not even to be considered ‘serious’ (or, in other words, something adults should engage in or indulge).23 Dependence, and therefore the state of political childhood, is permanent. The anonymous pamphlet, Considerations on Several Proposals or Preventing the Exportation of Wool (1741), argues that Ireland ‘is a Sister (though a younger one)’ of England’s, so that while ‘we should not deny her a Sister’s affection’, economic self-sufficiency is not in her future.24 The relative (and everlasting) youth of the Irish Anglican nation is used here as a means of permanently denying any claims to mature independence. The passing of the Declaratory Act was a serious rebuke to those who had been arguing that Ireland was an independent sister kingdom since at least the Williamite Settlement.25 The Act, however, stimulated increased ‘colonial nationalist’ activity rather than discouraged it. For too long had Irish Anglicans depended on the rhetoric of family affection connecting them to their ‘parent’ country, England, as a reason to trust that Ireland would be treated with the loving generosity expected between sisters or brothers, only to find that with the Declaratory Act, the country was cast into a never-never land of permanent youth, as English politicians routinely acted in their own self-interest and the interest of their own country. For example, in 1738 Samuel Madden wrote of England as ‘our true Parent and Protector … who must wound herself whenever, through inadvertence she hurts us’.26 The realisation that England would indeed act in self-interest and have no difficulties in wounding Ireland came slowly, but eventually Wood’s halfpenny dropped – due to a number of factors, including (but not limited to) the Treaty of Limerick, the Woollen Act 1699, the ‘sole rights’ dispute of the 1690s, Annesley v. Sherlock 1717–19, the Declaratory Act, the Wood’s halfpence crisis, and eventually a spirit of ‘independency’ and even revolt began to motivate Irish Anglican patriotic voices. Many argued that the time was ripe to break away from parents and parent figures, grow up, leave behind childhood forever, and embrace adulthood and adult identity. The History of Jack Connor was written in the years following the contentious parliamentary campaign of one such Anglican troublemaker, Charles Lucas, the Dublin ‘patriot’ politician, in 1748–49. Lucas’s pamphlets insisting on Ireland’s national freedom, and railing against the Declaratory Act, were considered seditious within Dublin Castle, but indicated that Irish Anglican patriotism was in revival mode. In 1748, Lucas described as ‘of slavish and corrupt stamp’ Irish parliaments which allowed English MPs to ‘impose’ laws on Ireland,27 and declared: ‘I disdain the Thought of representing a People, who dare not be free.’ 28 For Lucas, ‘LIBERTY … the best Gift of

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Heaven, is your [Irish Anglican] inheritance’, but he insisted this inheritance was under threat from those within the Irish Anglican community who would simply give up this natural right.29 Lucas’s campaign ended with his having to abscond because the Irish House of Commons called on the attorney-general to imprison him as a traitor.30 However, popular fiction is often about fantasy solutions to serious political problems, and if the struggle for legislative independence could not succeed on the political front, fiction might offer an imaginative substitute. In Jack Connor, the Irish Anglican reading public were provided with a story of an enlightened and mature Irish Anglican ultimately taking control of his own estate and managing it for the future. As Hand maintains, Jack Connor can be read as a kind of ‘moral fable’ for the Anglican community in Ireland, in which its full identity as Irish can be affirmed, and its standing as civilised and grown-up can be demonstrated: ‘Ireland is presented as a dilemma: there is something wrong with it – socially, politically, economically. Corrective action can be taken, however, to make a better future for all.’ 31 To demonstrate his maturity, Jack must first cease to be embarrassed by his Irish self. Jack Connor became John Conyers, mortified by the Irish way of talking (and thinking), having been warned by his teacher, Mr Johnson, that the world does not look kindly on ‘the common Irish manner of speaking’, and advised to ‘forget the little you have, and endeavour to speak like the People you live with’.32 That Johnson knows what he is talking about is demonstrated by the story of Lady Truegood’s friend, Mrs Jordan, whose accent is the butt of her Lancashire friends’ jokes, and who is termed an ‘Irish Bog-Trotter, – a Brogue-a-neer, – a Teague, and sundry other endearing Names’.33 Jack himself also encounters English characters who find Ireland a source of stereotypical humour, such as the daughter of his first London employer who encourages him to make ‘Bulls and Blunders’ for her amusement.34 Jack keeps his nationality well hidden because he sees it as an obstacle to making a success of himself. However, by the end of the novel he casts off the English mask, and fully embraces his Irishness, finally taking up permanent residence there. As Jack progresses, Chaigneau suggests that the Anglican community in Ireland too has finally outgrown the family metaphors of contemporary political rhetoric, and can demonstrate its maturity and self-determination by making peace with its Irish identity and accepting its rightful place there. It is important as well to stress that the identity he embraces at the close of the novel is not an exclusive or sectarian one. Jack’s is an Irish Anglican identity which has absorbed Irish Catholic influences as well. After all, Jack’s mother, Dolly, is one of the worst kinds of Irish Catholic, a walking, talking stereotype, disreputable, lazy, dissolute, child-abandoning, as Jonathan Swift accused the Irish natives of being in A Modest Proposal (1729).

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However, even Dolly is transformed by the end of the novel and there is a suggestion that whatever Jack inherited from her has been sufficiently diluted by the variety of Anglican father figures who have influenced his upbringing and moral character. The novel is expansive, and ‘all aspects of Irish experience are gestured towards – Catholic, Protestant, aristocrat and lower classes people the pages of the novel’.35 This concluding maturity, though, is very hard won, and the novel is particularly interested in examining the different educational influences on Jack’s progress, influences that provide opportunities for his growth, but also those which impede his development. Jack’s mother is the greatest obstacle the young Jack must overcome. Dolly is clearly the most powerful presence in the Connor household, and one of her defining (and stereotypical) characteristics is her apparently insatiable sexual appetite. The negative influence of Catholic parents on their children was a perpetual theme of Irish Anglican theorising about the recalcitrant Catholicism of the natives in spite of many generations of missionary activity. As we have seen, Protestant culture emphasised the power of the father in the family home as a means of disciplining and controlling the childish will, and developed a theory of education thoroughly paternalist in its desire to constrain and rationalise. Steven Ozment points out that in Protestant countries ‘above all, the husband was supposed to rule. He alone was master of his house, the one on whom all domestic order and discipline finally depended.’ 36 In contrast, the Irish Catholic family suffered the imposition of the sexually ambiguous priest between a father and his children, and Catholicism was often represented as a particularly feminised and eroticised denomination in which women had far too much power. The Catholic father had been effectively de-sexed by the local priest, and Catholic loyalty to the sovereign was suspect because it could be undermined by a prior loyalty to the Pope. John Locke, in his 1689 treatment of the thorny question of toleration, argued that political liberty could legitimately be withheld from Catholics as ‘they owe a blind obedience to an infallible pope, who has the keys of their consciences tied to his girdle, and can upon occasion dispense with all their oaths, promises and the obligations they have to their prince’.37 Dolly is certainly an enormous influence on her son. It is from his mother that Jack must have inherited his own voraciousness. While Jack is still a baby she begins an affair with the local Catholic priest who is supposedly interested in her because, unlike his other parishioners, she can read, and is considered a ‘Prodigy’.38 However, the real cause of his fascination is made clear in his earliest visit to the Connor home. Fr Kelly first visits Dolly when she is feeding the infant Jack, and becomes instantly transfixed by her exposed breasts. He claims he wants to kiss Jack, who ‘looks like an

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Angel’, but leaning down to kiss the baby, ‘guiding his Head a little more on one Side, feasted his Lips (as if by Accident) on those Charms his eyes had been Witness of for Half an Hour’.39 As we have seen in Chapter 2, the breastfeeding Catholic woman had long been a problematic figure in colonial discourse. In her role as a wet-nurse to Protestant children, she was configured as a potential source of corruption and pollution, and a means to transform the child into a crypto-Catholic turncoat. Here Dolly is at least breastfeeding her own child, but Jack is an Anglican baby, and her breast threatens to absorb him into Irish Catholic culture. While Sir John Temple warned Protestant mothers to stop allowing their children to be nursed by Irish Catholics, for fear of what they would imbibe along with the sustaining milk, wet-nursing in general was being condemned by others from the start of the eighteenth century. In The Spectator, in 1711, a character created by Richard Steele worried about the communication that would take place between a mother and her child through the milk suckled through the breast, wondering whether in feeding from a nurse, the child might ‘imbibe the gross Humours and Qualities of the Nurse, like a Plant in a different Ground, or like a Graft upon a different Stock? Do we not observe, that a Lamb sucking a Goat changes very much its Nature, nay even its Skin and Wooll into the Goat Kind?’ 40 Jean Astruc, in, A General and Compleat Treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Children from Their Birth to the Age of Fifteen (1746) warns that ‘children really suck in the vicious inclinations, and depraved passions of their nurses, which honest parents perceiving in their children, are amazed at such degeneracies, not knowing after whom the child can take those propensities’.41 Just because Dolly is indeed Jack’s biological mother does not mean he won’t guzzle some ‘gross humours’ and ‘vicious inclinations’ from her. She is feeding him, after all, through a breast that is simultaneously being suckled by a Catholic priest who is deriving sexual pleasure from the experience, ‘very fervently transport[ing] his Kisses from one Side to the other’.42 Indeed, if the Bishop of Elphin is to be believed, Jack may have been negatively influenced by his mother even while he was in the womb. In A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish Church of St. Warbrough (1721), at the annual meeting of the children educated in Charity Schools, Bishop Henry Downes explained why ‘childhood and youth are vanity’. This meditation on the ephemeral nature of childhood focuses on the kinds of influences to which growing children are exposed, especially ‘the violent impressions of Fear or Desire, or such-like, which it receives from that tender Parent [the mother] before it comes into the World’, and which can be found ‘to have lasting Effects afterwards, both upon its Body and Soul’. The bishop commends the Chinese, ‘a very wise and populous Nation’, for the care and consideration they take towards the pregnant woman, ‘by reason of the

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tender Impressions which [the unborn child] receives in and thro’ the Mother’, making sure that ‘no Passion might be raised in the Mother, which might have any ill effect upon the Child’.43 In Jack Connor, the breastfeeding Catholic mother becomes a sexual predator when her uncovered breast is transformed into an erotic enticement for Fr Kelly. Ruth Perry demonstrates that ‘In eighteenth-century England, a woman who used her breasts to nurse her children’ was supposed to ‘literally suspend … other erotic bodily practices until the child was weaned. Psychologically as well as physically, motherhood cancelled a woman’s (hetero) sexuality.’ 44 Perry points out that the eighteenth century witnessed an outpouring of literature recommending – indeed, practically ordering – women to breastfeed their own children, and rhetorically enforcing a dichotomy between the sexual breast on the one hand, and the maternal breast on the other, a dichotomy not meant to be breached even by the husbands of new mothers. Motherhood was de-sexualised, and the nursing mother represented as devoid of sexual desire and out of sexual bounds.45 In one of the most influential manuals of advice of the period, An Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children, from Their Birth to Three Years of Age (1748), William Cadogan encouraged women to feed their own children despite the fact that this might damage their sexual attractiveness, insisting that a woman should be prepared to ‘give up a little of the Beauty of her Breast to feed her Offspring’,46 and put aside her erotic needs in exchange for maternal satisfaction. Famously, Mr B. does not want Pamela to breastfeed their son as it will deprive him of his sexual access to his wife’s body. As Pamela complains in a letter to Miss Darnford: ‘we have had a Debate or two on the Subject (which I maintain) of a Mother’s Duty to nurse her own Child: and, I am sorry to say it, he seem more determined that I wish he were against it’.47 Dolly, though, does not find any need to split herself in two. Indeed, it is precisely her fulfilment of her breastfeeding duty to her child that makes her sexually desirable to Fr Kelly, the beauty of Dolly’s maternal breast that drives Fr Kelly into a sexual paroxysm. When he finds her ‘in the Act of giving Suck’, she tries to cover up her body: which the holy Man prevented with his Hand, saying, ‘God speed your Work, my dear Child. – Don’t be asham’d at what God has given you. – I’m well enough us’d to such Sights!” – Perhaps he was; but Mrs. Connor had a Skin of such an wholesome Sanguineness, and Breasts so prominent and firm, as puzzled his Reverence, and made his Blood rise to his Face, and his Speech to faulter.48

Far from dampening down sexual desire, Dolly’s nursing breasts drive Fr Kelly to distraction, and he begins to kiss them, to feed on them himself, while baby Jack is still attached to the nipple.

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As Clíona Ó Gallchoir argues, Jack’s ‘Catholic origins are depicted overwhelmingly negatively in that his mother, it appears, chooses her immoral relationship with the repulsive Fr. Kelly over her own child’.49 In his treatment of Fr Kelly in this scene, Chaigneau may be alluding to Lovelace, the villain of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1747–8), who had famously indulged in a sexual fantasy in which he would see his twin offspring nursing at the breasts of the eponymous heroine: ‘Let me perish … if I would not forego the brightest diadem in the world for the pleasure of seeing a twin Lovelace at each charming breast, drawing from it his first sustenance; the pious task, for physical reasons, continued for one month and no more!’ 50 But if Fr Kelly is a kind of Lovelace, Dolly is no pious Clarissa. Dolly’s flirtation with the Catholic priest, his ‘accidental’ kissing of her breast while she feeds her child, is presented comically, but it has serious repercussions in terms of Jack’s development. For Dolly, unlike Pamela, sexuality and breastfeeding maternity go together, which indicates the extent of her perversity, and may be the source of Jack’s subsequent sexual appetite. While Jack is certainly physically robust, justifying William Cadogan’s claims that the poor were typically stronger than the rich because they had been breastfed by their own mothers,51 he is morally compromised from the very start of his life, because the breasts which fed him also fed the sexual desire of the Catholic priest. Surprisingly, however, Dolly has also provided Jack with a possible means by which he could escape the pernicious influence of her promiscuous, bodily Catholicism, because she teaches him to read, and the access to literacy opens Jack up to potentially transformative Anglican influences that have the potential to remake him as a different kind of child entirely. While catechisms made up a good proportion of the growing market for books in the eighteenth century, other kinds of learning were also ‘assisted by print’, especially as functional literacy increased, including devotional manuals and schoolbooks.52 Bishop Synge, for example, urged his daughter to read what he called ‘usefull Books’, which he recognised might not be provide much entertainment for her, but thought that even ‘two or three pages now and then’ would help in the task of ‘improving [her] mind’.53 Protestants in general had great faith in the power of the word, the power of books, to convert the individual child corrupted by original sin (the child of wrath) into a different person (a child of grace).54 This correspondence between literacy and spiritual transformation helps to explain the rhetorical (and indeed moral) investment in literacy in the eighteenth century, and the concentration of Irish Anglican parents on getting their children to read certain kinds of didactic texts. Books specifically written for children were thin on the ground in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, so when children were taught to read, parents tended to use the Bible as a first

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book before moving on to catechetical or devotional texts. The status of these educational and devotional texts as ‘children’s literature’ has been a matter of critical debate, because of the intensity and explicitness of their instructional purposes, and their pedagogic use in public and private schoolrooms. It is certainly true that the explicitly didactic dominates the ‘good godly books’ that Harvey Darton complains do not even seem to be ‘children’s books at all’, though he accepts that ‘the authors meant them to … give children pleasure and to make them happy: it was their idea of happiness which is foreign to that usually held today’.55 Recent scholarship has, as I set out in Chapter 3, nuanced the traditional division between the ‘instructive’ and ‘delightful’, and that chapter examined the potentially pleasurable elements of even the most apparently moralising of children’s texts.56 Jill Shefrin, looking at the ‘didactic’ literature of the past, emphasises the pleasurable and playful qualities to be found in this previously dismissed material.57 However, no matter how much of the potentially pleasing can be found in this early instructive literature, given its authors’ profound intellectual investment in the idea of the child as conditioned by original sin, modes of correction and restraint remain central. One of the most popular devotional texts in Britain in this period was The Practice of Christian Graces. Or The Whole Duty of Man Laid Down in a Plaine and Familiar Way for the Use of All, but especially the Meanest Reader, Divided into XVII Chapters, one whereof being read every Lords Day the Whole may be read over Thrice in the Year (1658), more popularly known simply as The Whole Duty of Man, probably written by Richard Allestree, a professor of divinity in Christ Church, Oxford, provost of Eton College, and chaplain to the king.58 Appropriately, then, Allestree’s devotional is the cherished possession of the hero of Jack Connor, despite its rather gloomy subject matter advocating the necessity of penitential humility, and the author’s warning to the reader that God’s vengeance ‘reaches even beyond Death itself, to the Eternal Misery both of Body and Soul in Hell’.59 In an analysis of the making of Jack’s masculinity, Rebecca Anne Barr argues that not only is Whole Duty ‘foundational’ to his character, but that it genuinely protects him from his mother’s Catholicism, and ‘proves his very Protestant virtues’.60 If in Émile (1762) Jean-Jacques Rousseau made Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) an entire educational library between the covers of one book, or what Gargano calls a ‘portable schoolroom’,61 then Whole Duty fulfils this role in The History of Jack Connor. Rousseau calls Crusoe not just a ‘wonderful book’, but a ‘complete treatise on natural education’.62 How natural the education of the child in Whole Duty is may be debated, but it is certainly ‘the’ book for Jack. It is given to him by his Anglican stepfather,

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who dies a couple of paragraphs later, after which it serves as a substitute father for him, especially since Jack does not know its actual author – therefore it is almost as if his father ‘authored’ it (ironically, since his father did not actually engender him). As Anne Markey points out,63 the copy Jack has in his possession is probably the Dublin reprinting of 1717 by Samuel Fairbrother, who kept a printing house in Skinner Row, and, given the relative scarcity of books published specifically for children in Ireland, in making this devotional text his hero’s cherished possession, Chaigneau is probably being quite true to the reading practices of Irish Protestant children in the eighteenth century.64 There is some extant evidence which demonstrates the degree to which Whole Duty was indeed a prized possession of young male Irish readers in this period. For example, when James O’Brien, the son of the earl of Inchiquin, was sent to Westminster School in London in the 1680s, he took with him sixty-one books, including a bible, the Book of Common Prayer and Whole Duty.65 Surveying some other booklists of young men in the period, Barnard stresses that the lists ‘spoke of duty rather than pleasure’, packed full as they are with bibles, catechisms, prayer books, sermon collections and the ‘ubiquitous’ Whole Duty.66 Jack Connor insists that he loves this book, which signals that the division between pleasure and instruction may have been extremely thin.67 Tera Pettella points out that ‘The first kind of reading that children practised [in the eighteenth century] was the discontinuous, devotional reading that permeated reading instruction and practice for almost every literate child in eighteenth-century England’, emerging first through an encounter with the Bible, and then through deep reading in the kind of devotional material which was carefully structured so that readers could consume and digest it in small portions over a rhythmically arranged period of time.68 One of the reasons for the popularity of Whole Duty is that it suits such reading practices, as it is organised so as to enable the reader to consult easily short sections which narrowly address certain aspects of life, such as ‘Pride’ or ‘Humility’. Being ‘divided into Seventeen chapters’, the book could be consumed in manageable chunks, and if one chapter was read every Sunday, it could be completed three times in a year.69 Certainly, the popularity of Whole Duty for the young is not in question. Not only was it in continuous print right up to the middle of the nineteenth century, but several notable thinkers specifically mention it by name as having had a significant influence on them as children, including Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Hume explained to his biographer, James Boswell, that he used Whole Duty as a way to examine his conscience as a child.70 Whole Duty was a book which was given to very many young children in households which could afford books as a guide to help navigate the righteous

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path to a Christian maturity, and book historians estimate that one in every ten households in England had a copy.71 It is also a devotional which plays a cameo role in a number of important novels of the early eighteenth century, not just Jack Connors. In Pamela, the heroine kindly sends three guineas’ worth of books for her father to present to Farmer Jones’s family,72 among which is Whole Duty, and the devotional is even to found in the homes of the poor. When Mrs B. and Lady Davers take a tour of nearby cottages, the latter ‘observed a Bible, a Common Prayer-book, and a Whole Duty of Man, in each Cot, in Leathern outside Cases, to keep them clean, and a Church Catechism or two for the children’.73 Joseph Andrews too finds the Whole Duty to be one of the few books he can get hold of when he is Sir Thomas Booby’s house.74 Whole Duty is not (as has been traditionally thought) a Calvinist work,75 but while it insists that salvation is open to all, and therefore rejects predestination, it nevertheless emphasises the ‘great unspeakable distance that is between God and you’.76 The book begins with a call to penitence that is designed to be both shocking and terrifying: ‘Therefore if ever you mean to obey entirely (as you must if ever you mean to be saved) get your hearts posses’d with the sense of that great unspeakable distance … Consider him, as he is a God of infinite Majesty and Glory, and we poor Worms of the Earth.’ 77 The opening sermons stipulate that salvation depends on not allowing a single sin to pass unrepented, and stress that penitence involves not only recognising our sins but also feeling humbled and humiliated by each one of them: [W]e must be heartily sorry for the Sins we confess, and from our Souls acknowledge our own great unworthiness, in having committed them, for our confession is not intended to instruct God, who knows our sins much better than our selves do, but it is to humble our selves, and therefore we must not think we have confest aright, till that be done.78

Allestree cautions the reader that human beings are deeply corrupted by their sinful, indeed bestial natures, especially when compared to the infinite perfection that is Almighty God. In section XIV, concerning ‘the duties of Parents to Children’, he warns parents to bring their offspring to baptism quickly, to wash away original sin and take the child into the covenant of grace as soon as possible,79 and admonishes them to remember that since they had actually been the ‘Instruments to convey the Stain and Pollution of Sin to the poor Infant’, so they should be the means of having it wiped away.80 Baptism must be taken care of with great haste, since ‘the life of such a Creature is but a blast, and many times gone in a Moment; and though we are not to despair of God’s mercy to those poor Children, who die without Baptism, yet surely those Parents commit a great fault, by whose neglect it

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is, that they want it’.81 For Allestree, Satan himself stands menacingly over the cradles of infants, and ‘the Devil will be diligent enough to instil into them all Wickedness and Vice’, since ‘there being also in all our Natures so much the greater aptness to Evil, than to Good’.82 At these moments, Allestree seems to be echoing the warnings of the Puritan divine, Thomas White, whose Little Book for Little Children (1660) cautioned its young readers, ‘Sleep not in Church, for … the Devil rocks the Cradle.’ 83 Indeed, those parents who fail to protect the moral sanctity of their post-baptismal child are even worse than those who take away its physical life, with Allestree lamenting, ‘God knows multitudes of such Cruel Parents there are in the World, that thus give up their Children to be possest by the Devil, for want of an early acquainting them with the Ways of God.’ 84 Whole Duty is a strenuous and unrelenting attempt to ‘acculturate’ children ‘into the ways of the Christian commonwealth’,85 and this is the volume to which Jack Connor is devoted in his youth. Indeed, he apparently masters Whole Duty at the early age of 6: As his Mother had been so good to teach him to read, he was a great Comfort to his Father, and entertain’d him out of The Whole Duty of Man, which he took particular Care of, ever since Mrs. Connor had sold his Bible. The Child read so frequently, that at last he was very expert, and began to relish the Subject. One Day, he ask’d his Father, If there was any more Books in the World, for he would read them all.86

As Ross has argued, in stressing the constancy of Jack’s reading of Whole Duty, Chaigneau highlights ‘the importance of a Protestant education, bringing both religious and secular benefits’, which ‘is one of the novel’s most frequently recurring ideas, and one to which Chaigneau remained deeply attached throughout his life’.87 Given his enthusiasm for reading, and the paucity of reading materials to which he is exposed, and especially given that the family seem to lack a bible, Dolly having sold their only copy, the love which Jack expresses for Whole Duty may, however, mislead if read literally. It is unclear, for example, whether Jack loves this book because he loves to read, or because he loves the lessons he finds within this particular text. Certainly, his early absorption in and mastery of the devotional classic appears to have little or no impact on his behaviour. Taking the majority of the novel into account, despite his thorough knowledge of Whole Duty, Jack simply fails to live up to the ideals or follow the moral guidelines laid down by Allestree, and if he has indeed been constant in his reading of the Whole Duty, he is also consistent in ignoring its many, many moral lessons. Allestree, after all, devotes a large section of the text to warning against the dangers of fornication, accentuating the virtue of chastity

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and explaining that it ‘consists in a perfect abstaining from all kinds of Uncleanness, not only that of Adultery and Fornication, but all other more unnatural sorts of it, committed either upon our selves, or with any other. In a word, all acts of that kind are utterly against Chastity, save only in lawful Marriage.’ 88 Allestree describes men who cannot restrain themselves sexually as degenerates, complaining that those who pursue sexual pleasure ‘unlawfully’ ‘do often leave themselves little, besides their Humane Shape, to difference them from Beasts’.89 In early sections of the devotional Allestree cautions against harshly judging the moral guilt of the poor and destitute, like Jack, who might find it more difficult than others to refrain from sin, and tells his reader to refrain from judging those who have had a difficult life of being greater sinners than the rest of the population. That God permits great suffering to inflict some people does not mean that they are guiltier than others: ‘it belongs not to us to judge what are the Motives to him to do so, as many do, who, upon any Affliction that befalls another, are presently concluding, that sure it is some extraordinary guilt, which puts this upon him’.90 However, in the section on chastity, Allestree reverses course, and insists that ‘Besides the Natural Fruits of this Sin, it is attended with very great and heavy Judgments from God; the most extraordinary and miraculous Judgement that ever befel any place, Fire and Brimstone from Heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah, was for this Sin of uncleanness.’ 91 It is surely significant that, despite the teachings of Whole Duty, despite having fallen in with not one but two good families who treat Jack as an adopted son and who do actually live by the principles articulated in Allestree’s devotional, from the first time Jack is sexually tempted, he cannot resist and quickly falls into bed with Johnson’s niece Nanette. Allestree instructs his reader to ‘cast away the very first fancy of lust with indignation’, since, ‘if you once fall to parley and talk with it, it gains still more upon you, and then it will be harder to resist; therefore your way in this Temptation is to fly rather than fight with it’.92 Jack neither fights with nor flies from sexual temptation, but embraces it with great enthusiasm and a high degree of moral levity. The narrator does indict Nanette as more the guilty party than Jack. When she first begins to feel sexually attracted to Jack, she consults a French novel about ‘a Lady … placed exactly in her Situation’, and uses it to lure him onto her bed, whereupon ‘Reading was become useless, [and] she clos’d the Book.’ 93 While Chaigneau is here referring directly to the closure of the French novel – there is no need to read an amorous French novel when you are actually putting its moral lessons into practice – another book is being set aside at the same time, the devotional text which has supposedly been guiding the choices Jack has had to make until that point.

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If, as Steven Moore claims, Chaigneau is ‘wittily bawdy, often conflating reading/fucking’,94 this wit is also directed at the ultimate impotence of the didacticism of texts such as Whole Duty when set against the raciness of contemporary French fiction. The scene between Jack and Nanette in bed dramatises a battle between two different kinds of conduct book, a French novel of illicit sexuality and a pedagogical Christian text, one of the most popular of the century, read and reread by the central character over many years. It is a very short battle, which the French novel wins hands down, and indeed Jack does not even call Whole Duty to mind. In a consideration of reading and meditation, Allestree warns his readers: We must not only read, but we must mark what we read, we must diligently observe, what Duties there are which God commands us to perform, what Faults there are, which God there charges us not to commit, together with the Rewards promised to the one, and the Punishments threatned to the other. When we have thus mark’d, we must lay them up in our Memory, not so loosely and carelesly that they shall presently drop out again; but we must so fasten them there by often thinking and meditating on them, that we may have them ready for our use.95

Figuring out exactly how closely Jack has even read, or ‘mark’d’ Whole Duty is quite tricky. Coming upon the recently abandoned Jack outside the gates of the Truegood estate, Mr Kindly spots the book in his pocket and asks him to show him what he has been reading. Jack explains that ‘his Father said it was a good Book, and would make every body good’,96 which is the appropriate response, and Kindly checks his literacy by having Jack recite a passage. Jack proceeds to read out the section of Whole Duty concerning the Christian duty to patiently accept the afflictions sent by God: So also for the Calamities and Miseries that befall a Man, be it Want or Sickness, or whatever else, these also come by the Providence of God, who raiseth up and putteth down, as seems good to him, and it belongs not to us to judge what are the Motives to him to do so, as many do, who, upon any Affliction that befalls another, are presently concluding, that sure it was some extraordinary Guilt, which puts this upon him, though they have no particular to lay to his Charge.97

This reading has a suspiciously immediate impact on Mr. Kindly, who left Jack ‘in an Instant, got into the Yard, and gave vent to a few Tears.—Good God, cry’d he, how infinitely is thy loving Kindness, who, out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings, teacheth us our Duty.’ 98 The suspicion is that Jack has actually manipulated the situation to ensure that the passage with the greatest emotional appeal would be the one that he would get to read aloud. Although Kindly chose the passage, Jack’s performance of it has such an

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impact that he is rescued from homelessness and for the next few years lives in the lap of luxury with Lord Truegood. So, owning Whole Duty certainly benefits Jack, but it benefits him materially rather than morally, since it has absolutely no effect on his ability to resist sexual temptation. Interestingly, the section he reads comes from quite early in the text, but Kindly notes that this is a page that is among those ‘least mark’d’, which indicates that some sections have been read rather more thoroughly than others.99 Perhaps Jack’s claim that Whole Duty has been his constant intellectual companion is rhetorically overdone for the purpose of influencing those like Mr Kindly who are in a position to help him financially. There may be a gap here between exterior appearance – Jack carries the book in a pocket that is easily seen by those he meets, and knows how to read the book aloud so as to evoke the strongest reaction in the hearers – and interior judgement. Jack is, after all, a boy who spent most of his early childhood learning how to manipulate strangers into giving alms, and enriching his family. The novel has alerted the reader to the distinction between appearance and reality in its earlier representation of the ‘impoverishment’ of the Connor family. Having been rendered blind through an assault by his wife, and subsequent incompetent medical treatment, Jerry is incapable of working for a living, and the family is reduced to begging in order to survive. They find that Jerry’s loss of sight, and the affecting presence of a young child, greatly increase the sympathies of the public towards them, so much so that their mendicancy becomes a very financially rewarding business.100 The narrator employs a great deal of irony at this point of the story, commenting on Jerry’s blindness that ‘The Loss of Sight, so dreadful to many, was to them of infinite Use. From this he drew the Pity of the Good-natur’d, and the Compassion of most Travellers.’ 101 So profitable is begging that as their ‘riches’ from it grow, the Connors contrive to greatly improve the interior of their poor cottage (the narrator refers to it as a ‘castle’ on the inside), while making sure to keep the exterior of the mansion as destitute looking as possible: ‘Business went on in a very prosperous Way; and, as Money came in, they increas’d their Conveniences and Utensils; but every Thing was added externally that gave an Idea of Misery and Wretchedness.’ 102 Perhaps young Jack has learned a very valuable lesson from his parents at this impressionable moment of his life, to seem a pious and devoted Christian on the outside in order to profit from the gullibility of others, for which deception Whole Duty would serve as a very helpful prop. If it is possible that Jack is an untrustworthy figure even in these early scenes as an apparently orphaned innocent, and also possible that he has not really absorbed Whole Duty as he claims, then a question is placed over any faith in the power of devotional texts as educational tools. When

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Allestree’s devotional is first mentioned in the novel, it is in the context of Jack’s Catholic mother, Dolly Bright, having taught him to read: ‘As his Mother had been so good to teach him to read, he was a great Comfort to his Father, and entertain’d him out of Whole Duty, which he took particular Care of, ever since Mrs. Connor had sold his Bible.’ 103 The use of the term ‘entertain’ to describe Jack’s employment of the devotional text is, perhaps, ominous. Whole Duty is, after all, intended as an instructional rather than an ‘entertaining’ text. It is also notable that, although the family has retained possession of Whole Duty, Dolly, a Catholic who places no value in the personal reading of scripture, has managed to sell the bible. The family bible has been displaced by a devotional substitute, which would have been self-evidently problematic for a sola scriptura Protestant reader.104 Dolly is disgusted when she finds out Jack has been reading Whole Duty to his father, and remonstrates energetically with him: ‘She storm’d like a Fury, and swore he was sending the Boy to the Devil, as well as himself; “But, continued she, with all my Heart, an obstinate Bastard as he is; but I’ll take Care, I warrant of your damn’d Book”.’ 105 Ian Ross argues that this episode indicates the ‘different values’ of the Catholic and Anglican in this marriage, with Jack in the middle,106 but, in fact, Jack and Jerry’s supposed dedication to the devotional is misplaced given that it means the bible is lost to the family instead. As a nominal Anglican, Jerry is supposedly committed to biblical literacy, but while he managed to keep the Whole Duty safe from his wife’s bibliophobia, he has lost control of the precious family bible out of a misplaced greater loyalty to the devotional. If a single devotional text (despite its almost sacred status in eighteenth-century Anglican culture) does not seem to be sufficient to overcome Jack’s biological inheritance from his Catholic mother, there are other possible sources of Protestant transformation. Ross argues that The History of Jack Connor should be considered one of the first novels which takes formal education as a subject matter, given the attention paid to Jack’s early life and his experiences with the charitable educational institutions of Truegood and Johnson, both deeply informed by the contemporary campaign for an expansion of education provision in Ireland.107 Much education of Irish Anglican children in this period took place in the home, of course, through private tuition. Bishop Edward Synge, for example, was essentially his daughter Alicia’s personal tutor, as ‘the necessary knowledge’ tended to be ‘transmitted [to girls] within the family, home or neighbourhood’.108 By the end of the eighteenth century, however, ‘attending school was becoming an increasingly common experience for middle-class Irish girls’.109 Boys were usually first taught at home and then sent to a respectable school to be

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turned out as respectable citizens. Raymond Williams argues cogently that educational institutions ‘are usually the main agencies of transmission of an effective dominant culture’,110 and Irish Anglicans certainly placed a great deal of trust in the schoolroom as an site of transformation and salvation. The historian J. H. Plumb points to James Forrester’s Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, and Affections, Etc., Peculiar to Children (1748), as a typical example of the way in which education was discussed in the eighteenth century.111 The book aims to ‘display’ the ‘first Dawnings of Vice and Vicious Habits’, and encourage the ‘cultivation’ of ‘Virtuous Inclinations in the tender Minds of Both Sexes’.112 The dialogues are set in a ‘Boarding-School near London’, and one of the participants, the moralist Eugenio, insists that the aim of education is ‘in the first Place, and above all … to teach [children] the Government of themselves’, the ways in which they could modulate and control their desires, and achieve their ‘internal Happiness’.113 These arguments about the transformative potential of the schoolroom draw on Locke’s theories. He insisted that a rational education was the methodology to bring childhood to a complete end and allow the adult to emerge fully formed – education, in this sense, was a means of forcing the child to internalise the norms and roles that the adult wanted him to model. The goal of maturing and enlightening the child through education is explicitly addressed in Jack Connor. Lord Truegood insists that by ‘breeding’ Jack up ‘in virtuous Principles’, he is ‘in Fact giving him a new Birth’, negating his biological inheritance completely, and allowing Truegood to become his adopted Father.114 Jack is raised with Truegood’s natural children, and given the same kind of moral instruction as them: ‘Mr. Cassock taught him his Prayers, Catechism, and other Matters, equal with my Lord’s children.’ 115 Whole Duty singles out Pride as one of the major defects into which human beings are prone to fall,116 and appropriately Lord Truegood strives to root this deadly sin out of his own brood. Pride, it is explained, ‘was to be encounter’d and conquer’d by my Lord. – As the little ones were, what is commonly call’d, fine Children, Care was taken to prevent their having too good an Opinion of their Persons.’ 117 Truegood’s servants are not permitted to praise any of the children for their appearance or their talents, which are all treated as gratuitous gifts from God rather than individual accomplishments.118 When Truegood’s daughters admire themselves in the mirror, a china doll is brought to their attention, and they are reminded that ‘this pritty Thing is made … of dirty Earth, just like you or me … [and] if I think proper, I can break it into a Thousand Pieces and make it Dirt again, just as God can do to us’.119 In discussing Lord Truegood’s rational treatment of his children, his attempts to imbue in them a desire for the ‘Things that are attainable but

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by Difficulty and Labour’, the narrator insists that ‘The same Scheme, varied in Proportion as Age open’d their Minds, was constantly pursued in their Education, and the Lessons and Customs that were sown, and had taken Root in their Childhood, grew up insensibly into Habits with their Years, and became Constitutional.’ 120 Adopted early enough, the lessons learned in childhood guarantee a godly adult life. The narrator means the reader to understand that there exists a correspondence between Truegood’s management of his children, and his treatment of the inhabitants of the country in which he lives. His school, after all, is not for the children of local Protestants, but explicitly for Catholic children he wants to transform into good Anglicans. Jenny Holt wondered whether ‘modernity itself creates a heightened consciousness of youth, engendered by a feeling that society is aiming towards maturity. Indeed … there may be a strong sense that the education of adolescents in particular helps society to reach this goal.’ 121 One of the aims of the educational establishments set up in Ireland in this period was the maturing and conversion of Catholic children by enrolling them in schools where they would be raised as Anglicans. The focus in Jack Connor on potential transformation through education is echoed by Maria Edgeworth later in the century, in her boys’ school story, ‘The Barring Out’, included in The Parent’s Assistant (1796). In this story, the rebellious and nascent revolutionary Archer organises a barricade or ‘barring out’ of the headmaster, the Lockean Mr Middleton, a man committed to the belief that adolescents need to submit to ‘the just authority which is necessary to conduct and govern’ them until they develop ‘sufficient reason to govern themselves’. Archer raises the cry of ‘victory and liberty’ and demands an end to Middleton’s ‘tyrannical law’, but finds that he has not, in fact, either the stomach or the head for rule, and eventually capitulates, accepting that others, older and with more developed rationality, may actually know better than him.122 For Edgeworth, there is a tremendous danger to social order in the child who thinks they know better than their teachers, and the struggle between them represented as one between juvenile emotion and adult rationality. Truegood paternalistically sees all Irish Catholics as children, and Ireland as a nursery, believing his duty is to provide the kind of rational education needed to lift these puerile youths out of medieval backwardness and into Enlightened modernity. Early in the novel, Truegood argues with his peers about how Ireland is to be improved, and insists that since ‘Ignorance was the Mother of Devotion [to the Catholic Church], and that, were it possible to give the poor Natives a little learning, they would be Honester, more Industrious, and in Time, find out how grosly they were deceived’, it is crucial to introduce a rigorous system of formal education into the country.123 This belief is why he, first, plants some Lancashire families in his estate so

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that they can act as enlightened adult examples to the native Irish, and secondly, sets up a charity school in the area to educate the natives into industrious and thrifty ways. As Markey argues, Truegood really believes that ‘the remedy to the country’s woes lies in education’, and his charity school is supervised by a Anglican family, and the children educated not only in catechetics, but in the skills required for practice of a trade.124 Chaigneau is echoing here schemes promoting charity schools and the extension of English Charter schools into Ireland, both proposed as solutions to Ireland’s social and economic woes, and it is significant that a later edition of the novel even contained a request to the readers for donations to the Charter schools. Ross points out that the novelist’s uncle, David Chaigneau, an MP for Gowan, was a petitioner to George II for a Royal Charter to found ‘English Protestant Schools … so the Children of the Irish Natives might be instructed in the English Tongue, and the Fundamental Principles of True Religion’.125 Chaigneau had himself written an (anonymous) article, ‘Stultus versus Sapientem’, in explicit support of the Charter-school system, an article that was included in the edition of the novel published in 1766.126 The novel, moreover, explicitly commends the establishment by Royal Charter of the ‘Incorporated Society, for promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland’ as a means to transform Ireland into a crucible of Protestant modernity.127 Markey points to the praise heaped in the narrative on Bishop Hugh Boulter, the Archbishop of Armagh and Lord Justice of Ireland from 1724 to 1742, who was a strong proponent of an evangelising brand of education.128 In 1731, the Report on the state of Popery in Ireland, written by a committee headed by Boulter and presented to the House of Lords, warned that despite the penal laws, Irish Catholicism was thriving. The report recommended launching an aggressive mission to convert the country through a school system, or otherwise just accept that Ireland was lost to the Catholic Church. It was largely down to the energy expended by Boulter in pursuing the cause of education that the Incorporated Society was established in the first instance, provided for by a royal charter in 1733, after which ‘the belief in education as the means to make Ireland English, Protestant, prosperous and secure rapidly caught hold’.129 As Karen Sonnelitter argues, the Charter-school project involved general social and economic as well as religious improvement, and the Incorporated Society formed contacts with the Linen Board as a way of growing Ireland’s economy, connecting the schools themselves to future careers for their graduates in the same way as Truegood’s establishment supplements moral discipline with vocational training. The new Charter schools often explicitly dedicated themselves to turning out potential employees for the linen industry. The Board ‘sought to turn the children into good Anglicans, but also into good citizens, reasonably well educated and trained in skills that would allow them to contribute to the Irish economy’.130

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The Irish charity and then Charter schools were considered central elements in the ‘civilising’ process of Catholic children. Christopher Lash has argued that ‘agencies of socialised reproduction’ such as educators and child-rearing ‘experts’ gained control of children only in the twentieth century by appropriating the role of parents and institutionalising and professionalising a surveillance society.131 Chris Jenks, too, insists that ‘surveillance … [of childhood] proliferates in its intensity and penetration’ only from the twentieth century.132 However, this surveillance regime has deep roots that stretches back to the growth of educational institutions in the eighteenth century. In this period, schools began to practise what Michel Foucault calls a kind of ‘moral orthopaedics’, disciplining the body of the child through a system of surveillance, examination and, ultimately, normalisation, and in Ireland the ‘normal’ was identified with the Irish Anglican community.133 The establishment of charity schools was often promoted because poor Irish Protestants needed to have a place to send their children to be educated, but also developed out of a genuine sense of philanthropic kindness towards poor Catholic families.134 However, the intense focus on charity schools in the sermons of Protestant clergymen in the first half of the eighteenth century was also part of a wider attempt to proselytise and civilise the native Catholic population into a replication of English rationality, a mission that was explicitly set out by those advocating for an expansion of the charity-school system. The main function of Irish charity and eventually Charter schools was the containment and disciplining of disorder, identified with the native Catholics. Early modern schools were required to inhibit ‘ignorance of God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny, brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always ready to stir up public disorder’.135 In Ireland, these examples of moral decrepitude were specifically and repeatedly associated with the native Catholic population, and salvation from these social and personal ills equated with conversion to Anglicanism, effected by educational establishments. Conversion, then, was identified as an essential part of the charity and the Charter-school system, and this system depended on an assumption that ‘children born within Catholic families and communities nonetheless have the potential to become enlightened and industrious Protestants’.136 In numerous sermons and policy statements, those involved in the formal provision of Irish education in the eighteenth century identify the possibility of remaking the entire island through the schoolroom evangelisation of Catholic children as the most important aspect of the system they are promoting. For Edward Synge, these schools were the means by which the ‘whole Nation might become Protestant and English and all such Rebellions as have heretofore arisen from the Difference between Us, in Religion, Language, and Interest may for the future be prevented’.137 In a sermon supporting

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the erection of more charity schools, George Stone, the Lord Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin, imagines a completely transformed country once real education has taken hold: Let them [his listeners] first reflect on the many Advantages … which the Accomplishment of this Work would bring our Country. Let them view the present State of this Island, and then compute the Difference from what it may one Day be, when this Design shall be carried to Perfection. Let them imagine those Numbers, who are now the Weakness and the Disgrace, then the Strength and Honour of their Country: Those who are now laying it waste, then employed to cultivate and adorn it; Those who are now the Burthen, then become its Support: Those who are now necessarily guarded lest they should betray, then trained and disciplined to defend it.138

Synge’s An Account of the Erection, Government and Number, of CharitySchools in Ireland (1717) opens with a succinct description of its mission. The education of the Catholic poor is important, not just ‘to the Good of Themselves both in Soul and Body’, but for ‘the Preservation of Others from those numerous Evils they might be expos’d to, from such Childrens not being instructed in the Duties of Religion and civil Life’.139 Hanging over all these schemes is the spectre of 1641: ‘It has been thought … wherein the Children of Roman Catholicks, being Instructed, Cloth’d, and taken Care of, along with our own, may be won by our affectionate Endeavours, so as the whole Nation may become Protestant and English, and all such Rebellions as have heretofore arisen from the peculiar State of this Kingdom, for future be prevented.’ 140 Synge commends schools ‘set up and Endowned by the Beneficence of single Persons … who have Built School-Houses, sent poor Children to them to be Instructed’ – in other words, individuals like Lord Truegood.141 A child like Jack Connor would have been a prime target of such education. His parents are not just poor, after all, but are manipulative beggars, made rich by their ‘profession’, and one of them is Catholic woman. As Markey points out, the novel’s representation of Jack’s parents as frauds corresponds with the suspicion of many in the Irish Anglican community that most poor Irish Catholics were just lazy impostors preying on the generosity of their Anglican neighbours.142 Interestingly, it was envisioned that the charity schools could also serve as surveillance outposts for the state, which would assist in efforts to prevent these lazy Catholics becoming dangerous rebels. Its buildings, which ‘serve in the Day for School-Houses for teaching poor Children’ would at night become ‘Watch-Houses for preserving the Peace’, particularly for those schools on county borders. The panoptic gaze of the state would, through these school rooms, correct not just the flaws of the young and the childish, but the criminal and the subversive as well.

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In 1733, the Incorporated Schools were finally extended to Ireland, and the Royal Charter for ‘erecting English Protestant Schools in the Kingdom of Ireland’ is ideologically explicit in its intentions.143 It opens with the lament that so much of Ireland, ‘great Tracts of Mountainy and Coarse Land’, are ‘almost entirely inhabited by Papists’, whose numbers do not seem to be reducing.144 It warns that, ‘if some effectual Method be not made use of to instruct these great Numbers of People in the Principles of true Religion and Loyalty, there is little Prospect, but that Superstition and Idolatry, and Disaffection to Us and our Royal Prosperity, will, from Generation to Generation, be propagated amoungst them’.145 The Charter explicitly encourages the establishment of schools to teach ‘the Children of the Popish, and the other poor Natives of Our said Kingdom of Ireland … the English Tongue’, through ‘pious’ books, by which they could come to understand the ‘fundamental Principles of true Religion’.146 The educational project was utopian, and those involved took what were considered to be radical positions on the salvific possibilities open to Irish Catholic children, including arguing against those of their own communion who insisted that Catholics were so thoroughly degenerate by nature that they could not be saved or improved.147 George Stone unambiguously rejects the claim that ‘the original Natives of this Country are incorrigible, and that Penal Laws are better suited to their Dispositions’, and contends that ‘nothing is incorrigible unless we are sure that Nature hath made it bad: And the same might formerly have been said of large uncultivated Tracts of Ground, now made fertile and profitable’.148 Here the bishop is attempting to graft a Lockean view of children onto his Calvinist theology, keeping both in a creative tension. Indeed, in sermons supporting the charity schools, Catholic children are represented as particularly amenable to such transformation. Edward Nicholson’s A Method of Charity-Schools (1712) claims that with charity schools, God can accomplish the ‘new-mould [of] the World’, a remaking of reality ‘begin[ing] at the Children’: ‘Children, as the Word of God assures us, are like soft Wax, which will receive any Impression you first put upon it.’ 149 In 1735, in A Brief Account of the Proceedings of the Incorporated Society in Dublin for Erecting and Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland, the emphasis is placed on the ways in which the education of Catholic children would secure the peace of the island. The author insists that ‘it is unnecessary to mention’ (though he goes on to do so) ‘what must be obvious to every Protestant, who is conversant in the History of Ireland; what Blood and Treasure their many Rebellions and publick Massacres have cost England; especially in the year 1641’, and points out that Irish Catholics ‘have still the same Principles, avowed by their Doctrine of Merit, to destroy all Hereticks … nor can it be expected to convert the Adult from their stubborn Bigotry’.150 As Catholics have not changed, and the adults

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are probably stuck in their ways, the solution is to ‘begin with the Youth, and to instil into their Infant Minds the Principles of Holy Religion’.151 Working from the biblical epigraph, ‘Train up a Child in the Way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it’, A Continuation of the Proceedings of the Incorporated Society in Dublin (1742), also stresses the impressionability of youth.152 In a sermon of the same year before the Incorporated Society, George Stone emphasises that the health of the adult mind and body depend on the health of the child: ‘We may, for instance, trace the Health and Vigour of our Bodies, from the Amusements, and Exercises of our Childhood: Submission to Order, Laws, and Government, from an early domestick Subordination.’ Therefore, ‘the Children of Popish Parents’ have a particular need to be introduced to the true principles of Christianity and the vigour of industry, as without it they will become the indolent degenerates that their parents already are. Since ‘the chief remaining Hope that the Church of Rome hath of recovering this Country’ is ‘by keeping Multitudes here devoted to her by the Prejudices and Terrors of Superstition’, it is the children who must be worked upon.153 The heightened optimism about the potential pedagogic transformation of both the children of Catholics and Ireland itself is echoed in Jack Connor in the optimism of Lord Truegood and his utopian Anglican schemes – though the novel goes on to demonstrate that this utopian rhetoric is all for nothing. In Jack Connor, the children Lord Truegood takes into his charity school are raised as Anglicans and taught to involve themselves in the life of the Church of Ireland.154 Whereas a Catholic education leads to material and spiritual dissipation, an Anglican education brings the child to prosperity and industry. Truegood’s philanthropic efforts to improve the state of the country through charity schools anticipates the schemes of Lord Glenthorn’s agent McLeod in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809). McLeod urges the slow but steady modernisation of the country through the introduction of English methods of agricultural organisation, education of the Catholic peasantry in non-denominational schools, and encouragement of industry. He has built a schoolhouse on his estate, and the effects of the education of the Catholic peasants is evident in the transformation of the area into a productive Eden: In an unfavourable situation, with all nature, vegetable and animal, against him, he had actually created a paradise amid the wilds. There was nothing wonderful in anything I saw around me; but there was such an air of neatness and comfort, order and activity, in the people and in their cottages, that I almost thought myself in England.155

McLeod is bringing into existence the kind of Ireland envisioned by supporters of the charity and Charter schools like Truegood.

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While Jack does not actually attend the charity school set up by Truegood, he is sent to the charity school in the Huguenot enclave of Portarlington, Co. Laois, run by Mr Johnson, whose explicit aim is the ‘inculcat[ion] into his Pupils, the Principles of True Religion, as the surest Foundation on which to build the Moral Virtues’.156 The distance between Limerick, where Jack was born, and Portarlington, guarantees that he is unlikely to come into contact with his mother, and such a distance was advised explicitly by the promoters of charity schools. When the Dublin chapter of the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland reflected on the state of the charitable education of Irish Catholics in the early 1740s, for example, it was discouraged by the fact that ‘some Children, after having been entrusted to our Care, and received the Benefit of an early instruction, have found Means to go back to their Parents, and (as it must naturally happen before Principles were confirmed by Practice) have return’d also to their native Barbarity’. The recommended solution to this backsliding was to take the children as geographically far away from their parents as possible to prevent reconciliation.157 In this way, according to Henry Downes, Irish Anglicans would be taking a lesson out of the book of Exodus, and ‘breeding’ Catholic children up ‘as Pharaoh’s Daughter did Moses for her own Son’.158 Of course, Moses himself proved rather more resistant to cultural assimilation than the bishop hints at in his sermon.159 If Catholic priests, or their Catholic parents try to get these children back, they are quickly routed by Johnson’s schemes: Some few Attempts were made to pervert the Children [in other words, to ‘convert’ them to Catholicism], and make them return to their Parents, and consequently to Sloth, Ignorance and Filth, but the Actors were soon oblig’d to quit the Country, and they were found to be Popish School Masters, who, generally speaking, are Priests in Disguise.160

However, as the novel suggests, it was not easy to restrain the Catholic determination to not just maintain but actually increase the flock. Unlike his Church of Ireland counterparts, the lecherous Fr Kelly has not relented in his mission to evangelise adults as well as children, and he becomes so fixated on bringing the reluctant Jerry Connor to ‘the Bosom of that Church, out of which there is no salvation’, that he waits until after he is dead to make ‘him a good Catholick, by performing the final Rites of the Church, before the Body was quite cold’.161 No matter what happens, priests like Fr Kelly will continue to work hard to build up the Catholic Church, and the sectarian warfare for souls will continue even after the death of potential congregants. The sectarian focus of the novel’s schools strongly echoes the calls for support for charity schools in the early eighteenth century. The materials used in these schools were chosen ‘to facilitate cultural assimilation by Irish

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“natives”’.162 Getting them out of a Catholic and into an Anglican frame of mind might be considered the raison d’être of the charity school system.163 While Jack Connor is, on the surface at least, an endorsement of these ‘pedagogical machines’ 164 to improve (Anglicanise) Jack, and by implication, improve (Anglicanise) Ireland as well, these schools, together with the catechisms Jack encounters in Truegood’s home, the moral guidance provided by Truegood and Kindly, and Whole Duty, are ultimately insufficient to keep him out of trouble. Jack is, indeed, insulated from the influence of his mother and the Catholic Church, yet still lapses repeatedly into not just licentiousness but improvidence and criminality. Jack Connor is a charityschool experiment gone wrong. The question the novel considers is whether the educational schemes can actually overcome Jack’s biological inheritance from his mother (and, by extension, whether Ireland can really overcome the fact that the majority of its inhabitants are Irish Catholics). The narrator accepts that ‘Our little Hero was not form’d without …. Passions’,165 but at these moments the narrator sounds as if he is excusing a Tom Jones, with the hope that like Tom, Jack will eventually grow out of it and become a responsible member of society. The difference is that Tom is English, and can depend on the supposedly ‘adult’ rationality of his country to correct any faults in his passionate nature. Jack, however, is Irish, and his country exhibits the same faults that he possesses. The narrator assures the reader that, ‘If, from Inexperience’ his passions ‘sometimes hurry’d him into imprudent Acts, and brought him into dangerous Situations, he was the first to censure his own Conduct, and recur instantly to the Principles imbib’d in his Youth’.166 The experience of the novel is, however, that this recurrence to the principles of his education is insufficient to prevent frequent relapse, and the novel at times seems to be simply the recounting of one immoral action by Jack after another. The rational principles of restraint and respectability to which Jack supposedly recurs come from Allestree’s volume and the education provided by Kindly, Truegood and the charity school at Portarlington. The ‘passions’ clearly come from both his fallen state as a child of wrath, but also from his lustful mother whose own youthful history is even more hot-blooded than that of her illegitimate son. While this is a novel about reform and improvement, the sections detailing Jack’s moral lapses are, in fact, far more entertaining and interesting than those which recount his rise to ‘respectability’. As Ross points out, the narrator is well aware that the episodes of sexual license and criminality threaten to overwhelm the pedagogic purpose of the text, and he tries to undermine the adventures which characterised similar novels like Tom Jones by unconvincingly dismissing narrated escapades as tedious.167 So, for example, the reader is told that, despite the fact that the reader of

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a picaresque novel might be assumed to be interested in incidences that take place when the hero is travelling, ‘The Occurrences on the Road are not worth mentioning.’ The reader is informed that ‘the Adventures of this Voyage of ten Days’ will not be described ‘as there happen’d but the Common Occurrences on such Occasions’.168 Such frustrating lines may shorten the story – we are not dealing here with a literary leviathan like Tom Jones – but they also impact on the enjoyment of the picaresque form. Moreover, they proved to be ineffective. The novel provoked diverse reactions from readers when it was first published. As Ross details, different readers found different things to admire and censure. The Monthly Review gave it a more or less positive review, concluding that ‘it may be justly considered, upon the whole, as a truly moral tale’ and ‘well deserving our recommendation’, though qualifying that praise with a warning about the licentiousness of many scenes, describing them as ‘some levities’ which Chaigneau had to ‘answer to’. Catherine Talbot enjoyed reading the novel too, not as a moral tract, but rather because it provided her with an entertaining and interesting companion while she recovered from a fever, describing the hero as the ‘profligate Jack Connor’.169 Bishop Edward Synge was at first delighted with the novel, and purchased a copy for himself and one for his daughter, describing it as a ‘pretty book, and worth not reading only, but buying’.170 He later regretted this decision, confessing that ‘Jack Connor does not answer throughout. There is a great deal indifferent.’ 171 Jack Connor is very much a novel of memorably profligate and promiscuous incident rather than moral propriety and restraint, even if (as is traditional) the hero turns respectable at the end. At one point Jack even contemplates a role as a highwayman, and makes a lucky escape from being hanged as a lawbreaker. Talbot was not the only one to think of The History of Jack Connor as an example of the genre of ‘criminal biography’, and a later printing bound the novel up with The Life and Adventures of James Freney, commonly called Captain Freney, from the Time of his first Entering on the Highway, in Ireland, to the Time of his Surrender, being a Series of Five Years remarkable Adventures. Written by Himself (1754).172 Captain Freney (along with The Life of Jack the Giant Killer, and the Tale of Robinson Crusoe) was one of the most popular books of this period, a fact with which the reader of Jack Connor would likely have been familiar. Indeed, the number of chapbooks circulating in the mideighteenth century, including among the children of poor Catholic cottagers, suggests that the narrator’s improbable claim that The Whole Duty of Man is Jack’s only reading material when a very young boy (despite his parents earning a relatively large fortune attained by begging) is to be treated with suspicion.173

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M. O. Grenby points out that ‘there is no doubt that, across the eighteenth century, many children read romances, ballads, chapbooks, fairy tales, garlands, broadsides, jest-books, tracts, almanacs, penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers, even though these forms of popular literature were usually intended primarily for adults’.174 According to Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, there was an increase of book production for the Irish poor in the eighteenth century, particularly of the chapbook variety, and Jack Connor draws on this ‘scandalous’ but much enjoyed genre.175 The sections of the novel recounting the sexual misadventures of Jack and his mother are among the most amusing and enjoyable and the narrator seems to take a considerable amount of pleasure in recounting these incidents. Chaigneau attempted to address criticisms of the novel as corrupt in the second edition by making the moral more explicit and usually more clankingly obvious. In his textual emendations ‘to defend his work and its moral tendency’ 176 Chaigneau highlights the fallenness of human nature – the fact that Jack has the ‘seeds’ of the human species in him and is therefore defective by nature. Recounting Jack’s first sexual adventure in Portarlington, the narrator reassures the reader: ‘I hope the candid reader will excuse the seeming Levity of this Chapter. – My Hero is not a perfect Hero. He is young, and without Experience. He has the Seeds of Man in him, and consequently is faulty.’ 177 However, at this stage of the story, Jack also has different kinds of ‘seeds’ in him as well, the moral seeds planted through a reading of Whole Duty, and reinforced in his educational career. Despite this education, Jack still falls at the first sexual temptation – and the ‘levity’ of the chapter suggests that the author relished writing as much as the reader enjoys reading about it. Though Jack does censure himself, and, ‘instantly’ reverts to the principles he learned as a boy, he also commits the same sins over and over again, and clearly derives a great deal of pleasure from them, even if only a ‘secret uneasy Pleasure’.178 After he first sleeps with Nanette, for example, Jack ‘began to reflect on his Conduct, and he judg’d himself greatly criminal’, and recalled ‘Mr. Kindly’s Precepts, which had for some Time been neglected’.179 However, once Nanette climbs naked into bed with him again, the narrator asks: ‘Where now were all his mighty Resolutions? – Where were all Mr. Kindly’s moral Lessons?’ The answer to these questions is straightforward: ‘Vanish’d, – Lost in the Obscurity of the Night, and in the Arms of Youth and Beauty!’ 180 Jack carries on with this affair for six weeks before being discovered, and if he checks himself and his principles after every transgression, that means he must indulge in a great deal of self-recrimination followed shortly afterwards by even more sexual indulgence.

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Later, after Jack has contracted a venereal disease while living dissolutely in France, he is described as ‘greatly mortify’d. – The Reflections of his Mind were not lighten’d by the Pains of his Body … once more, [he] began to repent, that is, to dread a sharper Punishment; for he had that Sort of uneasy Foreboding in the Soul that many feel.’ 181 However, even his renewed concerns about the state of his soul and his post-mortem fate does not constrain Jack’s sexual temper for long. Soon enough, Jack forgets ‘all the Lessons and Instructions of his Friends, and thought his own Experience and great Knowledge were sufficient to conduct him, without the Assistance of pedantick Rules, or the musty Gravity of old Philosophers’ – which must, presumably, include the principles elaborated on by Allestree and poor Mr Kindly.182 Jack’s subsequent immorality brings him to his lowest point, and it is only through reading a letter given to him as a boy by Mr Kindly, reiterating that moral instruction, that he is jolted out of his spiritual despondency and provoked into behaving well. At that point, all of Allestree’s admonitions and lessons begin to actually be heeded by the hero. It is notable, however, that his moral Anglican education has had such little practical impact on his actions up to this point. Jack now makes a good marriage with a solid middle-class woman, and seems set for life. Although his moral will is tested when she dies in childbirth, he holds up under this loss ‘like a Man’ (not a Boy), after which he joins the forces to put down the Jacobite rising of 1745, proving his masculinity and his adulthood on the battlefield.183 Late in the novel, Lord Mountworth insists that Ireland can and is being advanced, just like Jack, and that ‘no Nation ever made, in so short a Time such wonderful Improvements’.184 The reader is clearly meant to understand an analogy between Jack and his native country, particularly when Ireland’s improvement is explained by reference to the ‘English Charter Schools’, which are described as ‘in a very flourishing Condition, and will in Time make [Ireland] a Protestant Kingdom’.185 Ross argues that ‘Jack Connor looks forward to the future improvement of Ireland’, a future that involves ‘education and employment for the common people of the country, under the care of a landowning class that rejects absenteeism in favour of the responsible administration of the land, in constitutional harmony with an England that recognises the errors of its oppressive economic policies to the neighbouring island’.186 For Ross, the novel is (broadly speaking) an expression of Irish Protestant patriotism, with solid hopes for the kind of utopian possibilities in which advocates of the charter-school system indulged.187 An optimistic reading of the end of the novel, however, requires an acceptance that Jack’s education has actually (even if belatedly) worked, much as many evangelists for the completion of the Reformation in Ireland

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insisted that conversion of the Catholics would eventually happen. However, between his period at school and his eventual respectable adulthood, Jack has indulged himself in an abundance of deeply sinful activities, and these activities actually began while he was a boarder in the charity school in Portarlington, where he and Thornton’s niece consummated their sexual affair. The length of time it takes for his education to have any genuine impact on his behaviour problematises any claims that his reform is actually a result of the principles instilled in him as a child reader and student, and this time gap has implications for the educational schemes that are explicitly endorsed by the text. As we have seen, in sermon after sermon, the establishment of charity and Charter schools was believed to be the foundation of an era of peace and security on the island, and the beginnings of a new age of moral probity and rectitude in which everything would fall under the gaze of stern but benign educational surveillance officers. If Ireland is like Jack Connor, though, these schemes would need a very long time before they would have any effect. Although Nancy Armstrong argues that ‘the power of domestic surveillance’, or the moral scrutiny that occurred within the family, established ‘the need for the kind of surveillance upon which modern institutions are based’,188 in Jack Connor educational surveillance precedes the regulation of the private individual. Jack’s duty is to internalise the lessons he learns in school, and carry these lessons into his domestic affairs. The networks of surveillance move from the hypothetically narrow dimensions of the schoolroom to encompass the domestic and then the public spaces of his everyday life. If Jack can learn the right lessons at school, and internalise the sense that he is always being watched (by God), then he should be a better man for it when he grows up. If Jack’s country can follow his example, it too can make significant strides towards adult authority. What Chaigneau’s plot actually shows, however, is that such surveillance schemes fail, and fail repeatedly. Even at school, immoral temptations intrude and are not resisted. In the depths of the night, Nanette sneaks out of her own room to climb into Jack’s bed, and despite years of moral education, despite his supposed mastery of Whole Duty, despite even his expressed good intentions, he cannot refuse her. By the time Jack is discovered with Nanette, he has cultivated a habit of secrecy, and discerning the difference between Jack’s performance of adult morality and his secret heart is difficult. He may be a great deal closer the likes of Captain Freney than Chaigneau would have intended, and this novel more like a chapbook than expected. In his licentious adventurousness, Jack is reminiscent of the numerous male heroes that Maria Edgeworth later complains about in Practical Education, heroes like ‘Gil Blas, Tom Jones, Lovelace, Count Fathom’ who are in possession of ‘wit, humour’, and provide great entertainment through ‘the ingenuity of

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their contrivances’. The problem with these heroes, according to Edgeworth, is that they suggest to the child reader that ‘deceit and dishonesty are associated with superior abilities’.189 Edgeworth recommends that even Robinson Cruse should be kept away from the growing boy, as ‘the taste for adventure is absolutely incompatible with the sober perseverance necessary to success’.190 Adventure stories have been kept away from Jack, and he has had access only to Whole Duty and schoolbooks – and look at how he turned out! If the education of Jack has failed, this may be because Chaigneau’s novel recognises that the charity and Charter schools are also destined to fail, and not just in their mission to make Anglicans out of the children of Catholic parents. As Ó Gallchoir points out, ‘Far from enabling children to become enlightened and productive subjects’, the Charter schools were notorious for their bad management and mistreatment of children.191 The plot of Jack Connor undermines faith in the ultimate efficacy of such supposed engines of improvement and enlightenment as devotional manuals and schoolrooms. On the surface the novel is about Jack’s eventual fulfilment of the promise of those Anglicanising influences. However, the ‘small books and pleasant histories’, the chapbook heroes and adventurers of popular culture, offer alternative possibilities to the respectable trajectory the protagonist is supposed to be on, one much more entertaining to read about.192 Andrew O’Malley has detailed some of the ways in which the ‘plebeian culture’ of the chapbooks leached into early realist fiction, often in ways that made it difficult to tell the difference between the two genres, and has argued that many novels are ‘transitional’ or ‘hybrid’ texts which host an ‘uneasy coexistence’ of novel and chapbook morality.193 If Jack Connor is one of these hybrid texts, its child hero is also a hybrid creature, in which many different influences battle it out for mastery. Popular culture had another child figure on offer to eighteenth-century audiences, a monstrous one also closely connected to the chapbooks and unofficial culture of the carnival and the fair, and it is to this version of the child that I now turn.

Notes 1 Quoted in Plumb, ‘New World of Children,’ 70. The schoolmistress is adapting Proverbs 22:15: ‘Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the mode of correction shall drive it away from him.’ 2 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 2. 3 W. M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 4 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 42.

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5 French, Children of Wrath, 35. 6 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 5, 7, 34. 7 Barnard, Brought to Book, 74. 8 French, Children of Wrath, 2. 9 For early modern schooling more generally, see Alan Ross, ‘Schools and education’, in Anna French (ed.), Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2020), 94–118. 10 For more on Chaigneau, see Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 265–6. 11 Ian Campbell Ross, ‘An Irish Picaresque Novel: William Chaigneau’s The History of Jack Connor’, Studies, 71 (1982), 270. 12 Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–1800 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 777–9. See also, Moyra Haslett, ‘Experimentalism in the Irish Novel, 1750–1770’, Irish University Review, 41:1 (2011), 63–79. 13 Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Introduction’, in William Chaigneau, The History of Jack Connor, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 12–18. 14 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 129. 15 For the Irish issues in the novel, see especially Ross, ‘Introduction’, 24–32; Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 39–42; Markey, ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’; Catherine Skeen, ‘Projecting Fictions: Gulliver’s Travels, Jack Connor, and John Buncle’, Modern Philology, 100:3 (2003), 330–59. Clíona Ó Gallchóir also considers the novel in the context of Irish theories of improvement in ‘New Beginning or Bearers of Tradition?’, 343–53. 16 Hand, History of the Irish Novel, 41. 17 Ross, ‘An Irish Picaresque Novel’, 276–7. 18 The term ‘the whole people of Ireland’ comes, of course, from Jonathan Swift’s fourth Drapier’s Letter (1724). For a reading of aspects of Jack Connor as allegorical, see Rebecca Anne Barr, ‘“Brightest Wits and Bravest Soldiers”: Ireland, Masculinity, and the Politics of Paternity’, in Moyra Haslett (ed.), Irish Literature in Transition, 1700–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 273–4. 19 For this transition, see T. C. Barnard, ‘Protestantism, ethnicity and Irish identities, 1660–1760’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 206–35; Ian McBride, ‘“The common name of Irishman”: Protestantism and patriotism in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Protestantism and National Identity, 236–61. 20 Anonymous, An Inquiry into some of the Causes of the Ill Situation of the Affairs of Ireland (Dublin: Printed by George Grierson, 1731), 7–8. 21 Ibid., 8. 22 Ibid., 20. 23 Ibid. 24 Anonymous, Considerations on Several Proposals for Preventing the Exportation of Wool. With Heads of a Scheme for that Purpose: And Also Some Short

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Answers to Parts of the Remarks on Mr. Webber’s Scheme, and the Draper’s Pamphlet (London: Printed for A. Dodd, 1741), 5. 25 For an important examination of the passing of the Declaratory Act, see Isolde Victory, ‘The Making of the Declaratory Act’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 9–30. See also, David W. Hayton, Ruling Ireland, 1685–1742: Politics, Politicians and Parties (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004), 222–38. 26 Samuel Madden, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, as to their Conduct for the service of their Country (Dublin: R. Reilly, 1738), 109. 27 Charles Lucas, The Political Constitutions of Great-Britain and Ireland, 2 vols in 1 (London, 1751), Address X, 128. 28 Ibid., Address XI, 148. 29 Charles Lucas, Divelina Libera: An Apology for the Civil Rights and Liberties of the Commons and Citizens of Dublin (Dublin: James Esdall, 1744), 5. 30 For more on Lucas, see Jim Smyth, ‘Republicanism before the United Irishmen: The Case of Dr. Charles Lucas’, in Boyce, Eccleshall and Geoghegan (eds), Political Discourse, 240–56; Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 83–111; Sean Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin Election of 1748–1749’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), 93–111. 31 Hand, History of the Irish Novel, 40, 41. For Bernard Escarbelt, too, Jack embarks on ‘a sort of pilgrim’s progress, an onward march towards a form of salvation which allows little room for divinity except when Providence and God’s grace manifest themselves by affording social advancement’. ‘William Chaigneau’s Jack Connor. A Literary Image of the Irish Peasant’, in Jacqueline Genet (ed.), Rural Ireland, Real Ireland (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), 57. Escarbelt, though, considers Jack more a representative of an Irish peasant than an Irish Anglican. 32 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 93. 33 Ibid., 60. 34 Ibid., 99. 35 Ibid., 40. 36 Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 50. 37 John Locke, ‘An Essay on Toleration’, in Mark Goldie (ed.), Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 152. 38 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 47. For literacy rates in eighteenth-century Ireland, see Garrett Fitzgerald, Irish Primary Education in the Early Nineteenth Century: An analysis of the First and Second Reports of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry, 1825–6 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013). 39 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 48. 40 [Richard Steele], The Spectator, No. 246 (12 December 1711), in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), vol. 2, 287.

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41 Jean Astruc, A General and Compleat Treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Children, from Their Birth to the Age of Fifteen. With Particular Instructions to ender Mothers, prudent Midwives, and careful Nurses. The whole made Familiar to every Capacity (London: Printed for John Nourse, 1746), 18. 42 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 48. 43 Henry Downes, A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish Church of St. Warbrough, Dublin, May, the 7th 1721. At the Annual Meeting of the Children Educated in The Charity-Schools in Dublin (Dublin: Printed for John Hyde, 1721), 3, 4, 8. 44 Ruth Perry, ‘Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2:2, Special Issue, Part 1: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe (October 1991), 228–9. 45 Clodagh Tait points out that ‘For lower class women in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, the breastfeeding of their own children was likely to have been a fairly constant feature of their everyday lives.’ ‘Safely Delivered: Childbirth, Wet-Nursing, Gossip-Feasts and Churching in Ireland, c. 1530–1690’, Irish Economic and Social History, 30 (2003), 16. 46 William Cadogan, An Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children, from Their Birth to Three Years of Age (London: Printed for J. Roberts, 1748), 24. 47 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1741), vol. 4, 9; see Toni Bowers, ‘A Point of Conscience, Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela 2’, in Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (eds), Inventing Maternity (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 141. 48 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 47. 49 Ó Gallchoir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition?’, 350. 50 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, the history of a young lady. Comprehending the most important concerns of private life, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 706. For analysis, see Laura Fasick, ‘The Edible Woman: Eating and Breast-Feeding in the Novels of Samuel Richardson’, South Atlantic Review, 58:1 (January 1993), 17–31. 51 Cadogan, Essay upon Nursing, 7. 52 Barnard, Brought to Book, 76; T. C. Barnard, ‘Learning, the learned, and literacy in Ireland, c.1660–1760’, in Toby Barnard, D. Ó Cróinín and Katherine Simms (eds), A Miracle of Learning: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning. Essays in Honour of William O’Sullivan (London: Aldershot, 1998), 220–1; see also Mary Daly and David Dickson (eds), The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language Change and Education Development, 1700–1920 (Dublin: Department of Modern History TCD; Department of Modern Irish History, UCD, 1990). 53 Bishop Edward Synge to Alicia Synge, 28 July 1747. Synge Letters, 63. 54 Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).

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55 F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (London: Cambridge University Press, 1932)., 51. 56 Influentially, though, Jacqueline Rose has insisted that most (all?) of what had been considered the literature of ‘delight’ actually contained a great deal of instruction just beneath the surface. Case of Peter Pan, passim. 57 Jill Shefrin, Box of Delights: 600 Years of Children’s Books (Toronto: Friends of the Osborne and Lillian H. Smith Collections; Toronto Public Library, 1995). 58 The British Museum’s catalogue ascribes this book to Allestree. 59 [Richard Allestree], The Whole Duty of Man, Laid Down in a Plain and Familiar Way for the Use of All, but especially the Meanest Reader (Dublin: Printer for Samuel Fairbrother, 1717), 18. The importance of Whole Duty to the hero is also pointed out by Markey, ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’, 250; Markey, ‘Irish Children’s Books’, 36; Ross, ‘Introduction’, 19. 60 Barr, ‘“Brightest Wits and Bravest Soldiers”’, 272. 61 Elizabeth Gargano, Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 2008), 57. 62 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or, A New System of Education (Dublin: Printed for J. Potts, 1779), vol. 2, 51, 50. 63 Markey, ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’, 251. 64 This paucity should not be exaggerated, however. After all, some children had access to an entire world of books which, while not printed or marketed explicitly towards them, were still utilised for their engagement and even pleasure. See the many examples provided by Barnard, in Brought to Book, 76–8. Barnard points out that many of the contemporary texts read by children have simply disappeared over time sometimes probably from overuse, and gives as an example John Clarke’s Rational Spelling-book, which was in high demand in Dublin in the 1770s and 1780s. Only three copies survive, and because such Irish-published texts ‘are generally absent from the annual tallies of Irish-published books, impressions of the nature and impact of print in eighteenth-century Ireland may be seriously distorted’. Ibid., 81. Markey makes the point, though, that while ‘Between 1470 and 1750, over 700 children’s books were printed in England’, the available evidence currently suggests that ‘no books specifically addressed to young readers were published in Ireland before 1696 and that fewer than forty such books were published between that date and 1750’. ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’, 250–1. 65 See Barnard, ‘Children and Books’, 222. 66 Ibid. Barnard provides many examples of children in the eighteenth century in possession of a copy of Whole Duty. 67 Ibid., 223. See also Barnard, Brought to Book, 233. 68 Tera Pettella, ‘Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 24:2 (Winter 2011–12), 282. 69 [Allestree], Whole Duty, title page. 70 Alison McIntyre, ‘Fruitless Remorses: Hume’s Critique of the Penitential Project of The Whole Duty of Man’, Hume Studies, 40:2 (2014), 144; Peter

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Kail, ‘Hume’s Ethical Conclusion’, in M. Frasca-Spada and P. J. E. Kail (eds), Impressions of Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 125–40. 71 See John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 282; C.F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (New York: Seabury, 1967), 150. 72 Richardson, Pamela, vol. 2, 283. 73 Ibid., vol. 3, 318. 74 Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (Dublin: Printed by S. Powell, for G. Ewing, and W. Smith, and G. Faulkner, 1742), 23. Daniel Defoe also recommends Allestree’s devotional as one of the very few books it was safe to give to a child (along with the Bible). The Family Instructor. In Three Parts. With a Recommendatory Letter by the Reverend Mr. S. Wright (London: Published by Emanuel Matthews, 1715), 88. 75 For the claim that Whole Duty is Calvinist, see Norman Kemp Smith, ‘Introduction’, in David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), 5. 76 [Allestree], Whole Duty, 28. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 89. 79 Allestree’s theology of baptism is not as ambivalent about its salvific efficacy as that of other Anglican thinkers. See above, Chapter 1. 80 [Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, 245. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 246. 83 Quoted in Wakely-Mulroney, ‘Riddling the Catechism’, 1. 84 [Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, 246. 85 James A. Sharpe, ‘Social Control in Early Modern England: The Need for a Broad Perspective’, in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (eds), Social Control in Europe, vol. 1, 1500–1800 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 52. 86 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 49. 87 Ross, ‘Introduction’, 19. 88 [Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, 138. 89 Ibid., 140. 90 Ibid., 213–14. 91 Ibid., 140. 92 Ibid., 141. 93 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 89. 94 Moore, The Novel, 779. 95 [Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, 42. 96 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 54. 97 [Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, 213–14; Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 54.

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98 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 54. 99 Ibid., 54. 100 For a very different reading of the begging scenes in the novel, see Ó Gallchoir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition?’, 249–52. 101 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 49. 102 Ibid., 47. 103 Ibid., 49. 104 Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 27–53. 105 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 49. 106 Ross, ‘Introduction’, 19. 107 Ibid., 19–20. Ross compares the treatment of education here with that in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, Little Female Academy, being the History of Mrs. Teachum and her Nine Girls (1749), and Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70), contending that Chaigneau’s novel may have been an influence on Brooke. 108 Barnard, Brought to Book, 75. 109 Mary O’Dowd, ‘Adolescent Girlhood in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in Mary O’Dowd and June Purvis (eds), A History of the Girl: Formation, Education, and Identity (London: Palgrave, 2018), 55. 110 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 39. 111 Plumb, ‘The New World of Children’, 70–1. 112 Anonymous, Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, Appetites and Affections, Etc., Peculiar to Children (London: R. Griffith, 1748), title page. 113 Ibid., 7–8. 114 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 72. 115 Ibid., 73. 116 Allestree warns his reader that pride in the qualities we think we possess, such as ‘beauty, strength, wit and the like’, is quite often deluded, based on a completely inaccurate evaluation of our personal characteristics. We ‘are very apt to and think our selves handsome, or witty, when we are not; and then there cannot be a more ridiculous Folly, than to be proud of what we have not, and such every one esteems it in another man, though he never supposes it his own case, and so never discerns it in himself. And therefore there is nothing more despicable amongst all Men, than a proud Fool; yet no Man that entertains high opinions of his own Wit, but is in danger to be thus deceived, a Man’s own judgment of himself being of all others the least to be trusted.’ [Allestree], Whole Duty of Man, 116. 117 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 64. 118 Ibid., 64–5. 119 Ibid., 65. 120 Ibid., 64. 121 Jenny Holt, Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2008), 19.

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122 Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children, Part I (London: J. Johnson, 1796, 2nd edition), 220, 172. 123 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 61. 124 Markey, ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’, 252; Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 62. See also Ó Gallchóir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition?’, 249–52. 125 Quoted in Ross, ‘Introduction’, 19. 126 See Ó Gallichóir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition?’ for a discussion, 349. 127 Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, 303–5; Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992), 26. 128 Markey, ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’, 252. 129 T. C. Barnard, Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 130. 130 Karen Sonnelitter, Charity Movements in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Philanthropy and Improvement (Woodbridge, Sussex: Boydell Press, 2016), 53. It is important, as Sonnelitter points out, to acknowledge as well that most involved in promoting charity and Charter schools genuinely believed that ‘the Church of Ireland would improve’ the lives of Irish Catholic children ‘in innumerable ways’, as well as ‘ensuring their personal salvation’. 131 Christopher Lash, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 20. 132 Jenks, Childhood, 77. 133 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979), 135–41, 170, 10. For Foucault, education and children’s literature, see O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, 89–94. 134 The theologian Edward Nicholson, for example, emphasises in the first instance the ‘love of our Neighbours’ as the primary impetus behind the need to establish charity schools, and argues that schools could help the poor avoid the sins of idleness, idolatry, superstition and opposition to Christianity. A Method of Charity-Schools, Recommended, for giving both a Religious Education, and a way of Livelihood to the Poor Children in Ireland. With a Preparatory Discourse, about the Practice of Charity in Alms-Deeds (Dublin: Printed by Aaron Rhames, 1712), 2. 28. Edward Synge stresses that charity schools were established to educate ‘Poor Children, tending not only to the Good of Themselves both in Soul and Body, but also to the Preservation of Others from those numerous Evils they might be expos’d to, from such Childrens not being instructed in the Duties of Religion and civil Life’. An Account of the Erection, 3–4. Unless we read such sermons in an extremely cynical way, we must accept that the primary motivation for the establishment of these schools was the expression of Christian charity. The political, sectarian aims of these establishments should be understood as part of that expression. For a sympathetic examination of the charity and Charter schools, which also recognises their manifest failures, see Sonnelitter, Charity Movements, 47–75.

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135 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 210. 136 Ó Gallchoir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition?’, 344. 137 Synge, Methods, 3. 138 George Stone, A Sermon Preach’d at Christ-Church, Dublin, on the 28th Day of March, 1742. Before the Incorporated Society, for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland (Dublin: Printed for George Grierson, 1742), 18–19. 139 Edward Synge, An Account of the Erection, Government and Number, of Charity-Schools in Ireland (Dublin: J. Pepyat, 1717), 3. 140 Synge, Methods, 3. Nicholson also argues that this education will ‘save us and our Posterity from being robbed’. If charity is not extended to those in need, Nicholson cautions that the children of the poor will grow up and ‘revenge our Uncharitableness, towards their tender years’: ‘I might almost as securely venture my Children to dwell among so many Savages, as among such a Generation as this Nation is like to have in Twenty or Thirty Years more unless we give honest Christian Education.’ Indeed, unless charity schools are established, the Protestants of Ireland should expect a repeat of 1641: ‘The Rebellion of wicked People, when they grow too many for us, must end in Destruction.’ This pamphlet is apocalyptic in tone, with Nicholson warning about the possible end of a world which is ‘ripe for the last destruction by fire’ as wickedness increases, a wickedness he sees manifested in the failure to provide charity schools as well as in the behaviour of the Catholics themselves. A Method of Charity-Schools, 26, 27, 28, 29. 141 Synge, Methods, 5. 142 Markey, ‘Childhood and the Early Irish Novel’, 249–50. 143 David Hayton stresses the way in which the charity school campaign embodied the reforming principles of many Irish Protestants in this period. ‘Did Protestantism fail in Eighteenth-Century Ireland? Charity Schools and the Enterprise of Religious and Social Reformation, c. 1690–1730’, in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by law established: The Church of Ireland Since the Reformation (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), 166–86. 144 A Copy of His Majesty’s Royal Charter, for Erecting English Protestant Schools in the Kingdom on Ireland (Dublin: Printed by George Grierson, 1733), 3. 145 Ibid., 4. 146 Ibid. 147 Some sermons even concede that the solution to Irish degeneration is not mass extermination. The bishop of Rochester, Joseph Wilcocks, cautions against the pessimistic conviction of some in the established Church that the world is slowly going to the dogs, as evidenced by its ‘gradual degeneracy, and its growing worse in a moral sense’ since creation, and insists that things are actually getting better. One piece of evidence for this gradual improvement is the advance of the ‘Reformation’ of Ireland, brought about not by the violent eradication of the native population as in America, but by education through Charity Schools. A Sermon Preach’d Before the Society Corresponding with the Incorporated Society in Dublin, for Promoting English Protestant Working-schools in Ireland, at their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-church

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of St. Mary le Bow, on Saturday, March 17th. 1738–39 (London: Printed for M. Downing, 1739), 5, 14, 18–19. 148 Stone, A Sermon Preach’d at Christ-Church, 19. 149 Nicholson, A Method of Charity-Schools, 29, 30. 150 A Brief Account of the Proceedings of the Incorporated Society in Dublin, for Erecting and Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. To which is Prefix’d, an Abstract of His Majesty’s Royal Charter (Dublin: Printed by George Grierson, 1735), 7. 151 Ibid. 152 A continuation of the proceedings of the Incorporated Society in Dublin, for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland, from the 24th of March, 1737, to the 25th of March, 1738. To which is annexed, an account of the benefactions received by the Society, from Great-Britain and this Kingdom, from the opening of his Majesty’s Royal Charter, February, 1733, to this time. (Dublin: Printed for George Grierson, 1738), title page. 153 Stone, A Sermon Preach’d at Christ-Church, 7, 13, 14. 154 This aim is an accurate representation of those supported by the campaign for an increase in charity schools in Ireland. In Methods (1721), Synge argues that the Masters of these schools must ‘make it their chief Business to Instruct the Children in the Principles of the Christian Religion, as professed by the Church of Ireland, and laid down in the Church-Catechism; which they are first to teach them to pronounce distinctly, and then exactly to repeat by Heart; upon which they are to give their Names to the Minister, that he may examine them publickly in the Church’ (10). These ‘orders’ extend to the parents of the charity children, who must also (even if Catholic) ‘cause the Children to perform their private Devotions, as also to repeat the Church Catechism, and read the Holy Scriptures, and other pious Books … that so both Parents and Children may be better informed of their Duty’ (12). The sermon envisions these schools as the centre of an entire reforming and civilizing process. Thus properly educated, Catholic children will go on to become industrious members of the community, but also be able to fill the post of domestic servants in a proper and dutiful manner, whereas uneducated Catholic servants cannot be trusted. These newly converted adults, ‘who having born the Yoke [of service] in their Youth, been bred to Discipline and Order, practised Humility and Obedience, used bodily Labour, and accepted all necessary Learning; will be equally capable and willing’ to take on their duties as adults (39). Charity Schools will effect ‘a National Reformation of Manners’ (40). In this utopian scheme, Ireland itself will emerge into an age of Enlightenment: ‘May the Wise and Powerful God, who in the beginning brought Light out of Darkness, and called Order out of Confusion, so bless this Work of Faith and Labour of Love, that Ignorance, Superstition, and error, may fall before it’ (41). 155 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin, 1992), 215. 156 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 83.

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157 A Continuation of the Proceedings of Incorporated Society in Dublin, for the Promotion of English Protestant Schools in Ireland, from the 25th March, 1740, to the 25th March, 1742 (Dublin: George Grierson, 1742), 15. 158 Downes, A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish Church of St. Warbrough, 13. 159 In response to the publication of the First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry in 1825, M. J. Whitty described the Charter schools as ‘depots … for the reception of the kidnapped children of Catholic parents’, established in the hope that one day, Ireland would be ‘completely Protestant’. ‘Review of the “First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry”, 1825’, Dublin and London Magazine, 1 (1825), 231–2. 160 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 62. For more on the ‘perverted; attempts of Catholic parents to get hold of their children, see Ó Gallchoir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition?’, 350–1. 161 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 50. 162 Deirdre Raftery, ‘Colonizing the Mind: The Use of English Writers in the Education of the Irish poor, c. 1750–1850’, in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 147. The educational mission of transforming the children of Catholics into good, law-abiding (and, crucially, Protestant) citizens is stressed in Edward Synge’s analysis, which explicitly supports sending Catholic children to charity schools so as to liberate them from their ‘grossest Ignorance of Christian and moral Duties’, as well as ensuring their competency in a trade so that they can support themselves in the future. An Account of the Erection, 4. 163 W. E. H. Lecky famously accused the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland of working in ‘the guise of the most seductive of all charities, to rob [Catholic] children of the birth right of their faith’, which is more or less correct, though it was always explicit about this ambition. History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, 235. 164 The term is Michel Foucault’s, though he applies it to schools and prisons (and the school as a prison). See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 172. 165 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 87. 166 Ibid. 167 Ross, ‘Introduction’, 20–1. 168 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 82, 97. 169 Ross, ‘Introduction’, 11–16. 170 Edward Synge to Alicia Synge, 29 May 1752. Synge Letters, 402. 171 Edward Synge to Alicia Synge, 5 June 1752. Synge Letters, 408. 172 Ross, ‘Introduction’, 14; see also Ross, ‘Novels, Chapbooks, Folklore: the several lives of William Chaigneau’s Jack Connor, now Conyers; or, John Connor, alias Jack the Batchelor, the Famous Irish Bucker’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 30 (2015), 62–92. 173 For chapbooks in Ireland, see Antonio McManus, The Irish Hedge School and Its Books, 1695–1831 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 135ff., passim.

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174 Grenby, Child Reader, 103. See also, M. O. Grenby, ‘Before children’s literature: children, chapbooks, and popular culture in early modern Britain’, in Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts, and M. O. Grenby (eds), Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 25–46. 175 Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, ‘Fiction Available to and Written for Cottagers and Their Children’, in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (eds), The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives (Dublin: Rare Books Group of the Library Association of Ireland, Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1999), 124. 176 Ross, ‘Introduction’, 21. 177 Chaigneau, History of Jack Connor, 246. 178 Ibid., 88. 179 Ibid., 90. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid., 113. 182 Ibid., 160. 183 Ibid., 196. 184 Ibid., 234. 185 Ibid. 186 Ross, ‘Introduction’, 31. 187 In an alternative reading of the conclusion, Aileen Douglas argues that Ireland is more or less erased. Jack has been transformed into a happy embodiment of completely English, Protestant values, and therefore has left his ‘Irishness’ far behind: ‘the abandoned barefoot boy has so successfully taken on the characteristics of a Protestant English gentleman that he can be invited to colonise his native land’. ‘The Novel before 1800’, in John Wilson Foster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29. 188 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 19. 189 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, 216. 190 Ibid., 336. 191 Ó Gallchoir, ‘New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition?’, 347. 192 See Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories. 193 O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, 19.

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5 Extraordinary bodies: the monstrous child

If Ireland was the ‘child’ to ‘adult’ England in much political debate, a large nursery in which the natives would, if left to themselves, play forever in a kind of dreamtime, it was also treated as the home of childlike physical oddities, biological and anatomical curiosities whose very existence was a threat to the order and stability represented by the adult male subject. The term used in the early modern period to describe individuals with extraordinary physically aberrant features was ‘monster’, which Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (1755) defines as something ‘out of the common order of nature’, a creature ‘horrible for deformity’.1 Unusual physical disabilities and disfigurements marked individuals out as curiosities of interest to a number of different constituencies. For natural philosophers and scientists in organisations like the Royal Society in London and the Dublin Philosophical Society, corporeal curiosities were medical and intellectual challenges, useful in getting a sense of how a ‘proper’ or ‘whole’ or ‘normal’ body should look and be understood. In popular culture, though, such singular, spectacular bodies spoke more to the marvellous than the medical, signifying possibly divine or supernatural intervention in the everyday world. This was a ‘folk theology’ 2 sustained by the ‘Raree shows’ the public could attend at fairs and festivals, particularly in urban centres, where such ‘monsters’ were put on display and exhibited,3 and also through reading and hearing about figures like giants and dwarves in the fairy tale and sensational material found in the chapbooks, gothic bluebooks and novels that constituted popular literature in this period. The tension between the medical and the marvellous is an important one for this chapter, which examines different manifestations of the physically ‘monstrous’ through the period in both elite and popular Irish culture. My focus will be on the connections between ideas about the child/childhood and the monstrous body, and I will argue that while historians are correct to point out that ‘over time’, monsters ‘shed their religious associations’,4 as medical science overtook theology as the most culturally authoritative discourse in the analysis of the physical anomalous, those supposedly discarded

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religious and marvellous significations still circulated in popular culture, and could prove politically useful. Indeed, it was often difficult to fully separate the medical from the marvellous in the popular cultural treatment of monstrosity. As Dennis Todd has persuasively argued, in this period, monsters were ideologically slippery, ‘liminal creatures, straddling boundaries between categories’, and threatened all kinds of classificatory systems, including those between elite and popular cultures.5 The chapter opens with a brief survey of some important examples of Ireland being treated as notable as a space for physical curiosities, before turning to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and reading it as a ‘child’s book’ particularly interested in the monstrous and ‘freakish’ perspectives considered ‘natural’ to Ireland.6 Gulliver’s Travels is populated by the physical eccentrics who were on display in public houses and public museums, penny shows and fairs, coffeehouses and taverns in Britain and Ireland in this period, with a cast of characters that includes giants, dwarfs, wild children and other biological ‘abnormalities’. This section of the chapter asks whether Gulliver’s Travels privileges the so-called ‘normal’ observer, or the ‘deviant’ gaze of those who occupy strange bodies, including children, and examines the Irish political implications of Swift’s treatment of discourses of the abnormal. As many critics have pointed out, Swift is drawing on his own experiences of human exhibition, and his awareness of the tensions between the medical and marvellous interpretation of physical difference. Having established the historical associations between the monstrous child and the Irish, the chapter then turns to the extraordinary treatment of a child giant in Stephen Cullen’s The Haunted Priory (1794), a neglected example of early gothic fiction by an Irish author. The chapter treats this novel as a case study of the ways in which physically aberrant children could be remade as the embodiments of revolutionary nationalism in the late eighteenth century. The Haunted Priory resists a medical analysis of the spectacular body which reduces it to being an example of biological failure, and instead reenergises the folk theology of the monster as a divine or supernatural sign. The main character in The Haunted Priory is a child whose remarkable, gigantic body represents the revived fortunes of a dejected and defeated family crushed by powerful enemies within the state. Cullen pointedly associates this child giant with bardic nationalism, alluding to figures such as Ossian and the revered harpist Turlough O’Carolan, in ways that suggest this novel is intended to be read as an intervention into Irish political and cultural history. The novel was published during a particularly fraught period when the bard and the harp were employed by cultural nationalists as symbols of Ireland’s separatist past and possibly self-determined future. The chapter argues that in The Haunted Priory, the monstrous child is reimagined as hopeful symbol of the future of Irish nationalism, celebrating

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and making childlike otherness heroic and admirable in the cause of Irish political independence. In his seminal investigation of the limits of normality, Leslie Fielder argues for a deep relationship between ideas about what is abnormal and the books we read as we all grow up: ‘What children’s books tell us, finally, is that maturity involves the ability to believe the self normal, only the other a monster or Freak. Failing to attain such security, we are likely to end by not growing up at all.’ 7 Growing up means becoming normal, and leaving behind the monstrous zone that is childhood. The otherness of the child, even when considered representative of innocence incarnate, is unnerving, strange, weird … dangerous. As we have seen, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, children were often configured as dangerous creatures, atavistic, distorted versions of the adult. This discourse of abnormality was also useful in maintaining relations of power between political centres and peripheries where the subordinate party was considered to exist in a kind of perpetual childhood.8 If from the political perspective Ireland was a nursery, though, from an anthropological angle it was often treated as a zone specialising in bizarre bodily peculiarities, physical oddities, biological curiosities whose very existence was a threat to order and stability. For example, Gerald of Wales had, in the twelfth century, insisted that Ireland was the home of a host of such creatures. Most famously, the Topographia Hibernica describes an encounter between a wolf and a priest in Meath, in which the priest is asked to administer the Eucharist to a dying she-wolf. When the wolf’s hair is pulled down, human skin is revealed, demonstrating that this is a hybrid being. Gerald also describes other marvellous figures such as a bearded hermaphrodite in Connaught with a long mane down her back, a man who is a hybrid of a human and an ox in Wicklow, and a man-calf born from a cow near Glendalough.9 Gerald is aware that these stories will seem to ‘the reader to be either impossible or ridiculous’, but insists that they are, nonetheless, real.10 Gerald is not interested in these stories just because they connect ‘Ireland’s geographic liminality with the alleged marvellous happenings that occur there’, so that ‘Ireland and the Irish are naturally contra naturam.’ 11 As Caroline Walker Bynum has demonstrated, Gerald is focused on the possibilities of metamorphosis and hybridity because of his interest in transubstantiation, and these examples of human mutability have implications for understanding how it is that bread and wine can become the body and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration.12 However, metamorphosis and physical liminality were a major concern for Gerald, and as Amelia Sargent has pointed out, these stories in the Topographia ‘articulate a deeper

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anxiety with the concept of racial miscegenation’, especially since ‘Gerald himself was a “hybrid” Welsh and Anglo-Norman.’ 13 Despite (or because of) his own hybridity, Gerald’s text expresses an anxiety about the implications of any relationship between invading forces and the Irish natives, insisting to readers that, ‘Though the territory of Ireland may be occupied, however, its people are not to be commingled with.’ 14 Fears of ‘commingling’ with very weird people speaks to a terror of biological contamination, of a transformation of the normal body through contact with the abnormal. Travel literature is replete with examples of explorers discovering that various parts of the world are the equivalent of a tetradome, and encounters with the weird and the monstrous inhabitants of these exotic zones are basic tropes of the genre. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park demonstrate that the Liber monstrorum and the Tractatus monstrorum (both eighth-century texts), ‘the two most widely copied early medieval treatises on the eastern races’, provide many gory details about the kind of horrifying (though often still ‘human’) creatures who live ‘abroad’, especially those who are the result of ‘monstrous births’.15 Explorers sometimes brought these strange people back to the home country so that they could be displayed as exhibits of the kinds of beings that could be bumped into ‘out there’. While Ireland may not seem geographically all that far away from England, to some it had much more in common with the Tropics than it did with its nearest neighbours. In Thomas Molyneux’s ‘A Discourse Concerning the Large Horns Frequently Found under Ground in Ireland’ (1695), a paper presented to the Dublin Philosophical Society (founded in 1683), he speculates that Ireland must in the many past Ages, long before the late Discovery of that New World, had some sort of Intercourse with it … (though ’tis not easy, I acknowledge, for us at present to explain how) for otherwise I do not see, how we can conceive this Country should be supply’d with this Creature [the giant Irish deer], that for ought I can yet hear, is not to be found in all our Neighbourhood round about us, nay, perhaps in any other Parts of Europe, Asia or Africa: And then ’tis certain as Ireland is the last or most Western part of the Old World; so ’tis nearest of any Country to the most Eastern Parts of the NewCanada, New-England, Virginia, &c. the great Tract of Land, and the only one I yet know, remarkable for plenty of the Moose-Deer.16

In this passage, Ireland is sundered from Europe and from the British Isles, and goes floating off towards the West Indies, where, Molyneux thinks, it originally came from anyway: ‘For as they on the Coast of New-England and the Island Bermudas gather considerable Quantities of Amber-greese; so on the Western Coast of Ireland, along the Counties of Sligo, Mayo, Kerry and the Isles of Arran they frequently meet with large parcels of that precious Substance, so highly valued for its Perfume.’ 17 By relocating Ireland in the New World (as opposed to the Old), the Anglican community can

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be considered the equivalent of the explorers of the age of discovery, and Ireland a virgin land, whose natives are beyond the bounds of normality. The Dublin Philosophical Society itself was much interested in examining some of these native physical oddities and monstrosities, and, like the Royal Society, was particularly drawn to the direct observation and scrutiny of Irish deviations from the norm. For example, in 1686, in a letter suggesting that he had taken some of Gerald of Wales’s claims a bit too seriously, William Molyneux promised Edmond Halley that he would ‘procure … two or three wolf’s fangs, and could wish that I had all in Ireland to send you, especially from the jaws of the lycanthropes, for we are more infested with such brutes than with those of four legs’.18 Monstrous children, though, possessed a special fascination for members of the Society. In 1685 the Society examined ‘2 children with 2 heads a piece, one of them had also 3 arms’, ‘a male child with two complete heads, one something bigger than the other, and three arms’ and, most famously, a girl (who had English parents) with horns growing all over her body (a case that was also brought to the attention of the Royal Society).19 As Susan Hemmens notes, each monster was described objectively and empirically, and ‘The facts observed in each case were gathered and could be evaluated and compared by the community of peers with similar interests.’ 20 The monstrous child was an example of what the rational, whole adult was not – indeed, there was a tendency to ‘thingify’ these children, with members of the Society regretful, for example, that they could not purchase the body of the boy with two heads, so that they could dissect him, and learn even more. As these learned societies and natural scientists and philosophers were conducting empirical, supposedly objective analyses of monstrous births and individuals manifesting degrees of biological or physical disfigurement, popular culture was facilitating the public interest in the spectacular body through ‘Raree Shows’ and exhibitions in places like St Bartholomew’s in London, and Donnybrook Fair in Dublin,21 where signs of bodily deformity were still being interpreted as indications of either God’s blessing or his judgement. At these shows, as the historian Anne Wohlcke has set out, ‘limit cases’ of humanity were on display, including giants, dwarfs, wild children and other biological ‘abnormalities’,22 and, along with travel literature, these exhibitions probably served as an inspiration for Jonathan Swift when he came to write Gulliver’s Travels. Dennis Todd argues that much of the superficially strange and bizarre people encountered by Swift’s intrepid ‘hero’ Gulliver ‘could have been seen or experienced in a few days by anyone at the tourists sights, public entertainments, shows, spectacles, and exhibitions in the streets and at the fairs of London’, including the monster displays Swift attended during his time

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there.23 This monstrous interest is also manifested in the childlike perspective Swift explores through the novel’s famous transformations, as Gulliver comes to occupy a number of different versions of the physically ‘different’ body in the lands he visits.24 As Mary Shine Thompson puts it, ‘the book narrativizes alternative, marginal perspectives’,25 and such marginality applies to both monsters and children. As Gulliver stares in amazement at what he considers to be the weird bodies of the dwarves and giants, bearded ladies and talking horses he encounters, it is almost as if he has entered an early modern carnival. Interestingly, while in traditional fairs the gazed-at monster is not given a speaking role, in Gulliver’s Travels, these oddities not only look back at the ‘normal’ bodied Gulliver, but they actually put him on display as a monster himself. Indeed, although Gulliver finds that in every land he visits he encounters the population of exhibits on display throughout Britain for the amusement of the ‘normal’ spectator, in these strange lands he is the one treated as physically peculiar. In Lilliput, for example, the gigantic Gulliver is treated as an object of intense curiosity: As the News of my Arrival spread through the Kingdom, it brought prodigious Numbers of rich, idle, and curious People to see me; so that the Villages were almost emptied, and great Neglect of Tillage and Household Affairs must have ensued.26

In Brobdingnag, Gulliver is affronted by ‘the Ignominy of being carried about for a Monster’, and Todd notes that he is made to perform a variety of tricks and diversions for his audience, ‘drawn from the actual practices of showing monkeys and dwarfs in eighteenth-century England’.27 After a while, though, all this display and performance begins to make him ill: ‘the frequent Labours I underwent every Day made in a few Weeks a very considerable change in my Health’. Indeed, ‘the Life I had … led, was laborious enough to kill an Animal of ten Times my Strength’.28 Being treated as a sideshow ‘monster’ is enough to make Gulliver sick and put him in danger of death.29 Ironically, Gulliver wants to become one with these monsters by the end of the novel, and after his return home from his trip to the land of the Houyhnhnms, finds himself perpetually dissatisfied with civilised normality, preferring to hang out with the horses in his stables, alienated from his wife and children. He has gone native in the land where the monsters rule. Swift himself encountered biological oddities on different occasions. He was among the many who went to see the conjoined Hungarian sisters Ilona and Judit Gófitz, who were exhibited in London in 1708. Although Swift describes the ‘sight of two girls joined together at the back’ as raising ‘an abundance of questions in divinity, law and physic’, he was also disturbed

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by the fascination the sisters aroused in spectators, condemning it as the ‘effects of our liberty of the press’.30 The ‘wild child’, Peter of Hanover, a feral boy between the ages of 11 and 15, found in a German forest in 1724, and paraded through Europe as a fascinating specimen of the childhood of the human species, was eventually handed over to the care of Dr John Arbuthnot, one of Swift’s friends.31 Swift met Peter on 16 April 1726, while ostensibly paying a visit to Caroline, Princess of Wales, in London, writing to his friend Thomas Tickell, ‘This night I saw the wild Boy, whose arrival here hath been the subject of half our Talk this fortnight … the King and Court were so entertained with him that the Princess could not get him till now. I can hardly think him wild in the Sense they report him.’ 32 Swift is also credited with a drawing of Peter found in the pamphlet The Manifesto of Lord Peter (1720).33 Two pamphlets, It Cannot Rain But It Pours; or, A London Strewed with Rarities and The Most Wonderful Wonder that ever appeared to the Wonder of the British Nation, both published in 1726, have been attributed to Swift,34 and employ the distancing device of having normal life presented through the eyes of the supposed freak, Peter, showing how bizarre and weird such normality appears when approached from a different angle. These pamphlets employ the kind of perspective-altering that is basic to understanding a child’s view of the world, but also to the dramatic shifts in perception found in Gulliver’s Travels.35 Gulliver finds that living in a cage and being on constant display is injurious to his dignity and pride as well as deleterious to his physical health. Unsurprisingly, he realises that his essential slavery after being purchased by the queen of Brobdingnag is demeaning, and complains, ‘I was the Favourite of a great King and Queen, and the Delight of the whole Court, but it was on such a Foot as ill became the Dignity of human Kind.’ 36 There is a sharp critique here of putting supposedly monstrous human beings on show for the amusement of others, though given that the novel concludes with the visit to the Houyhnhnms, Swift may be less interested in raising the status of the monsters than skewering the pomposity of those spectators who think that they are superior to the strange bodies they visually consume. Swift was uncomfortable with the treatment of Peter of Hanover and the conjoined sisters. He was also acutely sensitive to the conflation of the Irish Anglican community with the community of monsters that was the Irish Catholics in British colonial discourse. His deconstruction of what David Hevey calls, in a discussion of the twentieth-century photographer Diane Arbus, ‘enfreakment’,37 probably had a powerful political impetus. Monstrosity, like size, shifts in the course of Gulliver’s Travels, from the native curiosities Gulliver encounters to, eventually, Gulliver himself. If the ferocity of the egg-obsessed Lilliputians is drawn from Swift’s observations of the nonsensical

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reasons children fight with each other, as some commentators have suggested,38 then there is also in this story an undercutting of the reasons why purportedly adult countries like Britain go to war. The joke here, after all, is not on children who fight with each other over trivial matters like eggs, but on the adult nations who think their quarrels are somehow more serious.39 The novel also undercuts ‘adult’ attempts to discipline children and the childlike. At one stage, like a self-respecting adult, Gulliver attempts to put manners on a freakish-looking Yahoo child, but comes out the worst of this encounter. Gulliver remembers how ‘I once caught a young Male of three Years old, and endeavoured by all Marks of Tenderness to make it quiet; but the little Imp fell a squalling, and scratching, and biting with such Violence, that I was forced to let it go.’ 40 Another Yahoo child urinates on the protagonist – ‘voided its filthy Excrements of a yellow liquid Substance’ – just punishment, perhaps, for the superior attitude Gulliver adopts towards the Yahoos more generally. Though he treats them as degenerates, it turns out that they are actually of the same species as him. This incident also works as an ironic reversal for the ‘adult’ male who put out a fire in Lilliput by urination, to the shock and disgust of the physically childlike Lilliputians.41 The frightening thing for Gulliver in Book Four is that far from being simply curiosities to be gazed at with disgust and fascination, the Yahoos are hairy, infantalised versions of ‘normal’ adult human beings. In this novel, far from the monstrous being an ‘authentic’ example of the abnormal and therefore illustrative of principles of normality, Gulliver discovers that he has more in common with the irrational savages than the rational Houyhnhnms, no matter how much he may try to deny it, or how much he resents the family resemblance. Gulliver is simply a Yahoo who has had a bath and a shave. Underneath the dirt and hair of these oddities is a community of human beings – just as under the hair of the wolf in Gerard of Wales’s story, a woman was hiding. This realisation undermines distinctions between nationalities and peoples on the basis of ‘savagery’ and ‘civility’, or childhood and maturity. Like the visitor to a carnival, Gulliver wonders if there is any affinity between himself and the exhibits, and horrifyingly discovers that indeed they are the same species, a discovery which effectively makes freaks of us all. Given that this is a novel, then, about shifting and even at times inverted perspectives, monstrous gazes, about looking at adult normality through the eyes of those generally dismissed as lacking in sophistication and mature insight, it is wholly appropriate that Gulliver’s Travels became quickly seen as ‘suitable’ for children. Soon after its publication by Motte, Swift’s friend John Gay wrote to him claiming that it ‘hath been the conversation of the whole town’, and was ‘universally read’, ‘from the highest to the lowest … from the Cabinet-council to the Nursery’.42 While it is difficult to tell when

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exactly the novel was first abridged specifically for a children’s readership, in the most recent examination of the evidence Alice Colombo has identified The Travels and Adventures of Capt. Lemuel Gulliver (printed and sold in London in around 1750) as the earliest known example, though pointing out that it is very possible that even earlier versions did exist but have so far slipped through the historical cracks.43 The suitability for a child readership of this very tricksy novel is due in part to its sceptical treatment of parental authority and its political equivalents. The novel repeatedly represents the family and the state as parallel structures, and the shifting size of the protagonist mirrors the alternative perspectives offered by maturing children on their relationship to ‘grown-ups’. As many critics and editors have pointed out, Gulliver’s Travels is particularly suited to child readers as it seems very interested in examining the world from odd perspectives, including those of size and status.44 Certainly, from the 1720s onwards, the term ‘Lilliputian’ was used, as Jeanne Welcher explains, to describe ‘any small person or thing whether naturally or abnormally so, or a young adult regardless of size, or a woman of any age’, and after 1750 the term was most often applied to children.45 The Belfast educationalist David Manson set up a ‘play-school’, based on Locke’s pedagogical principles, which he called Lilliput, and printed the Lilliput Magazine for use by the children.46 Manson’s use of Swift’s term is appropriate since, as Carole Fabricant points out, the novel is structured loosely to ‘accentuate the fragmentation of traditional hierarchic organization and institutionalized order: the collapse of tight, coherent systems and centers of unquestioned authority’.47 Far from endorsing any supposed subservience of the small to the big, Gulliver rather approvingly records that in Lilliput, ‘they will never allow, that a Child is under any Obligation to his Father for begetting him, or to his Mother for bringing him into the World … that Parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the Education of their own Children’.48 In a novel as interested in relations between countries as in relations within families, this comment has implications for any consideration of the ‘natural’ authority invested in any nation which considers itself a ‘father’ or ‘mother’ to another nation. The novel questions, in colonial nationalist fashion, the assumption of the ‘natural’ superiority of the adult over the child. The towering Brobdignagians appear threatening and dangerous to the miniscule child-sized Gulliver, while the political machinations of the childlike Lilliputians are rendered ridiculous only in their mimicking of the power games of the ‘adult’ British state back home. While he plays the benevolent parent in the scenes in Lilliput, Gulliver finds himself suddenly transported back to childland while in Brobdingnag, and surprised to find his own ‘adult’ Enlightened civilisation represented as an abomination when the Brobdingnagian king announces

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that Gulliver and the English are ‘the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth’.49 This scorn is greeted at the time with some surprise by our hero, but it is one he begins to replicate when he returns home at the end of the novel and finds that he is unable to put up with the stench of his wife and family for long periods. At the end of the novel, it is Gulliver who finds his civilised compatriots to be disgusting: ‘As soon as I entered the House, my Wife took me in her Arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the Touch of that odious Animal for so many Years, I fell into a Swoon … During the first Year I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable.’ 50 Given the rapid changes in size in Gulliver’s Travels,51 it is no wonder that children appear to enjoy the first two books so much, though the other voyages also hold some attractions for the child reader. In A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), Swift had already used the hypothetical authority associated with height to attack those who ‘look down upon this Kingdom [Ireland], as if it had been one of their Colonies of Out-Casts in America’,52 or from another perspective, as if Ireland was a child needing guidance from a wiser parent. In the third Drapier’s Letter (1724), Swift compares the dispute over Wood’s halfpence to the confrontation between the biblical boy hero David and the giant Goliath, though insisting that even if David won this particular battle he would not make Goliath into a dependant, ‘for I do not think him fit to be trusted in any honest Man’s shop’.53 It is, of course, well established that Gulliver’s Travels is, inter alia, an indictment of colonialism.54 In a famous description of how a colony is ‘founded’ Gulliver explains: A Crew of Pyrates are driven by a Storm they know not whither; at length a Boy discovers Land from the Top-mast; they go on Shore to rob and plunder; they see an harmless People, are entertained with Kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten Plank or a Stone for a Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return home, and get their Pardon. Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilise an idolatrous and barbarous People.55

This comment could be treated as the bitter ruminations of a man who had tried and failed to succeed in the world of adult politics, but there is a powerful tone of existential sympathy running through the novel for those

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who find themselves marginalised by the political discourse of the powerful, whether for reasons of size, age or anthropology. Within Gulliver’s Travels as a whole, Swift lays siege to the traditional qualities of adult authority – age, size, rationality, power, masculinity – and alternate possibilities of social, political and familial construction begin to appear. In the shifting of perspectives a relativisation of power takes place and authority begins to ‘travel’ to the margins. The book can be read as an instance of the colonies writing back from the margins to the centre.56 Editions of the novel for the child reader usually ‘cleaned up’ the text so that its frank depictions of sexuality, excrement and political sleaze would not ‘corrupt’ the child. However, the danger of the novel may also have been that some supposedly ‘childlike’ adult readers, such as those who lived in Swift’s own country, might have learned some politically subversive lessons from it. If Ireland should be treated as a child, as English politicians insisted, Gulliver’s Travels suggests that the child’s perspective could be more powerful and transformative than that of the adult. Heinz Kosok points out that many of the changes made to the original novel in abridgements for children related to the indictment of human nature scattered throughout the book. For Kosok, these changes are meant to ‘preserve a uniformly cheerful and harmonious atmosphere for the narrative’, and maintain a version of childhood as pure and innocent.57 However, given that, in fact, many of the original readers in the seventeenth century would not have believed that children were innocent angels at all, it is more likely that editors feared what would happen should such an explicit attack on human dignity and rationality fall into the hands of a readership already completely corrupted by the effects of original sin. These dangers might also apply to readers from ‘uncivilised’, strange and exotic childlike regions such as Ireland. In Gulliver’s Travels the worlds of the child and the adult interpenetrate and interpret each other, rendering absurd the absolute distinction political pamphleteers had drawn between adult England and childish Ireland. The novel also challenges the belief that age brings authority and wisdom in the absurdity of the Struldbruggs, who cannot die, but instead grow perpetually older and more senile, and are ‘not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative; but uncapable of Friendship … and whenever they see a Funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to an Harbour to Rest’.58 Age here is certainly no guarantee of insight, a significant political point to make in a period when the Irish were being urged to look to their ‘elder brother’ England for guidance. If the Struldbruggs are any example, an ‘elder’ brother may be even less trustworthy than the ‘younger’ one he is trying to guide. There are a number of powerful episodes in the novel when the pompous and increasingly superior adult Gulliver is brought down a peg or two by

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children over whom he assumes a ‘natural’ superiority, including an important episode in the fourth book when Gulliver is sexually accosted by a precocious Yahoo girl: I immediately stripped myself stark naked, and went down softly into the Stream. It happened that a young Female Yahoo standing behind a Bank, saw the whole Proceeding; and inflamed by Desire … came running with all Speed, and leaped into the Water within five Yards of the Place where I bathed. I was never in my Life so terribly frighted … She embraced me after a most fulsome Manner; I roared as loud as I could and the Nag came galloping towards me, whereupon she quitted her Grasp, with the utmost Reluctancy, and leaped upon the opposite Bank, where she stood gazing and howling all the time I was putting on my Cloaths. … she could not be above Eleven Years old.59

As Claude Rawson has pointed out, psychoanalytic critics have had great sport with this episode, pointing to the disparity in the ages of Swift and Vanessa as a potential source for Gulliver’s sexual terror, with Vanessa’s ‘chasing’ of Swift back to Ireland a real-world analogy for the young female Yahoo’s pursuance of poor frightened Gulliver.60 Reading this material through such an extremely personal and biographical lens ignores the fact that Swift was writing in a national context in which the relations between adult and child were often sexualised in discussions of the ‘union’ of Ireland with England,61 especially given the by now well-established arguments associating the Irish with Swift’s depiction of the Yahoos.62 The uncivilised child here gains advantage over the experienced adult, who has repeatedly demonstrated his untrustworthiness as an interpreter of the different cultures he has encountered throughout his travels. Extraordinary, spectacular bodies and children also frequently turn up together in one of the most popular forms of literature of this period, the chapbook.63 In an attack on Swift as the writer of ‘the most monstrous thing that ever happen’d in the bookish world’, the Dean of Clogher, Jonathan Smedley, complained about readers being ‘led away by Tom Thumbs in a Thimble, and a Fairy Giant in a Cowslip Cup’.64 Smedley was pointing out that the plot of Swift’s novel (like Chaigneau’s later) bears some resemblance to the adventures of the heroes of chapbook literature, such as Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant Killer, a resemblance that has been confirmed by the work of recent scholarship.65 The greater popularity of chapbooks with children than either catechisms or the Bible was often pointed out in the eighteenth century, with one anonymous commentator grumbling in 1708 that while ‘it is indeed a great Blessing of God, that Children in England have liberty to read the holy Scriptures … yet alas! how often do we see Parents prefer

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“Tom Thumb”, “Guy of Warwick”, or some such foolish Book, before the Book of Life’, advising his readers, ‘Let not your Children read these vain Books.’ 66 Alas, indeed, for it seems it was impossible to prevent children from consuming chapbooks, though perhaps their attraction is understandable given that the alternatives were catechisms and The Whole Duty of Man.67 In the chapbooks, the kinds of people who were being put on display in the early modern ‘monster shows’ 68 appear as characters in plots where they are frequently overcome by child heroes. The stories of the ‘Jack Cycle’, a group of English folk tales featuring a clever and quick-witted farmer’s son, Jack, emerged for the first time in the eighteenth century in chapbook form, including the now canonical ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.69 While in some fairy tales, including ‘Tom Thumb’, the child hero possesses an extraordinary physique of his own (in this instance, the body of a carnival dwarf), in the Jack Cycle, the boy hero is an agent of bodily normality, and it is the excessive physicality of the ultra-large that needs to be overcome. In the kingdom of Brobdingnag, giants are benign and wise in their penetrating exposé of the evils of colonialism, but in the Jack Cycle, idiotic and malevolent giants such as Cormilan, Blunderboar and Galigantus, all associated with Cornwall – one of the outlandish places internal to Britain – are barriers to the social transformation of the hero and they must be killed so that he can fulfil his destiny.70 By the mid-eighteenth century, the giant killer was hijacked by conservative elements of the growing institution of children’s literature to quieten rambunctious children down rather than encourage them to feats of derring-do. Rather than being interested in drawing parallels between the perspective of children and monsters as groups similarly disadvantaged by adult, cosmopolitan civilisation, or privileging the ‘freaked’ perspective of the very small and the very large, these texts put giants and children at odds with each other, and the child’s social climbing made dependent on his dispatching of threats to adult order. The Preface to John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) famously advises parents to ‘subdue’ their ‘Children’s Passions’, ‘curb’ their ‘Tempers’, and become ‘subservient to the Rules of Reason’, and the book includes two letters from ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ advising child readers to be good, to obey their parents and devote themselves to sensible activities like reading rather than seeking adventure.71 Newbery’s Pocket-Book is part of what Andrew O’Malley calls the ‘sanitization’ of Jack through the eighteenth century,72 where he transforms from a boy of remarkable mischief making, capable of challenging and undermining the views of established village authorities such as priests and aristocrats, into a clever murderer of the excessively large and grotesque, a kind of moral policeman.73 Throughout these stories children are opposed to, rather than compared with monstrous bodies, their duty being to slaughter grotesquely shaped men as evidence

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of their own skill and intelligence. This division between the child and the monster may have also been due to the increasing sense of a child’s innocence and purity as the eighteenth century went on. Hugh Cunningham argues that the growth of a belief in original innocence and a decline in the focus on original evil meant that the association between children and angels became much more powerful than that between children and demons with which we opened this study,74 and this may also have led to an increasing discursive distance of children from monstrous bodies as well. Outside children’s literature, too, giants don’t get much sympathy in eighteenth-century culture. Burke declares, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), that giants can never be loved: It is impossible to suppose a giant the object of love. When we let our imaginations loose in romance, the ideas we naturally annex to that of size are those of tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and everything horrid and abominable. We paint the giant ravaging the country, plundering the innocent traveller, and afterwards gorged with his half-living flesh: such are Polyphemus, Cacus, and others, who make so great a figure in romances and heroic poems. The event we attend to with the greatest satisfaction is their defeat and death. I do not remember, in all that multitude of deaths with which the Iliad is filled, that the fall of any man, remarkable for his great stature and strength, touches us with pity; nor does it appear that the author, so well read in human nature, ever intended it should.75

Historically, Burke was correct because the giant has tended to be the subject of suspicion and antagonism. Indeed, as Walter Stephens puts it, the giant has not only been rendered as physically and socially ‘other’ and therefore frightening and monstrous, but ‘inhuman, thus becoming a symbol of … cosmic terror’.76 Maria Edgeworth was not impressed by stories that involved giants, and in The Parent’s Assistant warned against providing children tales of ‘giants and fairies, and castles and enchantments’, as particularly damaging to their imagination. She accepted that children might like reading about these beings in fairy tales, but dismissed that as an insufficient reason for a parent to indulge their storytelling whims. Children should, instead be filled with ‘useful knowledge’ which could only be obtained by ‘labour’.77 Edgeworth was drawing on Locke’s warning against allowing children to encounter reading material that could overexcite the imagination and therefore make them afraid of the dark for the rest of their lives. For the Edgeworths, ‘the ideas of apparitions, and winding sheets, and sable shrouds, should be unknown to children’, and they recommend substituting realist material for the romance of the nursery.78 The grand narratives of Western culture, too, depict giants as monstrous beings against whom humans have had to struggle in order to become

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spiritually and morally better.79 Again and again in canonical texts, giants exist ‘only to be displaced’.80 The giant had even been a figure used explicitly to represent dominating Galigantus England to ‘Jack Good’, a representative of the Irish public, in Henry Brooke’s ballad opera Jack the Giant Queller (first published in 1749 in a now lost version). Brooke, now best remembered as the father of Charlotte, the author of Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), wrote the opera in support of the Dublin patriot politician Charles Lucas during the extraordinarily heated parliamentary campaign of 1748–9.81 In eighteenth-century popular culture, then, children and giants are natural enemies. This conflict between the child and the giant makes sense when considering the size disparity between children and adults. Size in stories about giants need not be taken literally, but merely as an indication of the kinds of odds the (much smaller) heroes of these stories must surmount in order to reach their destinies. Giants are suitable figures for men of power, like fathers, and it is not a surprise to find that they frequently appear in fairy tales, monstrous and terrifying versions of the patriarch in the home (especially given the enhanced authority of the father in the post-Reformation household), and therefore appropriate figures for children to imagine killing violently. Relations between giants and children have been usefully theorised by the child psychiatrist Percy Cohen, who has argued that giants in children’s literature frequently represent a child’s feeling of physical inferiority to others, especially parents and grown-ups who tower over them and appear to completely control their lives: ‘all men have experienced childhood; and all children have experienced adults as more powerful, more prestigious, and more experienced than they are; all children have also experienced adults as higher than they are and have come to recognise or, at least, to suppose that greater height has much to do with greater advantage’.82 This theory, if true, would help explain the sheer pervasiveness of the image of the giant in writing aimed at children, and the repetition of the plot which sees a child incapacitating these large creatures works as a fantasy of what the child reader wishes could actually happen in real life. Perry Nodleman argues that one of the main appeals that stories of defeated giants have for children is that they ‘represent a potent version of the wish-fulfillment fantasy: the very small can triumph over the dangerously large, the very powerless over the exceedingly powerful’.83 Gulliver’s Travels was a profound challenge to representations of the ‘natural’ enmity between the child and the giant. Gulliver is, after all, both a giant and a dwarf at different times, and this undermines any essential dichotomy between these two figures in the text (and perhaps between the adult and the child as well). Indeed, as has been pointed out by Declan Kavanagh, Gulliver’s experiences in the land of the Houyhnhnms challenge

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ideas of bodily normality and stability, since the Yahoo is ‘a being that is neither fully human nor fully animal’.84 While Kavanagh is interested in the ways in which eighteenth-century texts queer heteronormative bodies and desires, my focus here is on how ‘monstrous’ physical differences as they manifest in child(like) figures challenges the kinds of divisions on which adult ‘normality’ was based. Moreover, the association (rather than the contrast) between the monster and the child in the eighteenth century goes much further than Gulliver’s Travels. Those exhibited as physical ‘curiosities’ were sometimes actual children, especially the feral children (like ‘wild’ Peter, mentioned above)85 displayed around Europe as evidence of what humankind in its ‘primitive’ state looked like and how it behaved. As MajaLisa Von Sneidern points out, in places like the Royal Society and the Hans Sloane ‘museum’, early modern displays of prodigies and unusual individuals, animals and objects brought together a variety of different kinds people and things, ‘dwarfs, giants, tattooed men, bearded ladies, feral children, hermaphrodites, mummies, whales, elephants, camels, lions, tigers, leopards, polar bears, and all varieties of tropical birds and primates’.86 You were as likely to encounter strange children, giant men and tiny adults all in the same place, and it is the discursive connections between certain monstrous kinds of adults and all kinds of children that I want to consider here.87 Although children kill giants in many of the great stories of Western culture, it was not all that unusual to find real giants treated as childlike and compared to children in a very direct manner in carnival culture. The youth of exhibited giants was emphasised by advertisements and promoters as an additional attraction for the inquisitive public. The Daily Advertiser for 3 June 1745 announced that one such giant would be on display ‘for the reception of the curious’, describing the exhibited ‘freak’ as ‘a young Colossus, who, though not 16, is seven feet four inches high, has drawn more company this season than was ever known before, and must convince the world that the ancient race of Britons is not extinct, but that we may yet hope to see a race of giant-like heroes’.88 This young giant was being promoted as a surviving example of the childhood of the ancient Britons. Perhaps the most interesting real-life giant of the eighteenth century was actually a child. Thomas Hall, ‘the prodigy of Willingham’, near Cambridge, was born in 1741, reputedly grew to full size in his first year, and possessed a prodigious penis which was an object of fascination in his local village. It was, apparently, almost four inches in length while flaccid and nearly three inches in girth, surrounded by an abundance of pubic hair by the time Thomas was only 2 years old, and caused his relations ‘the Utmost uneasiness’.89 His mother was rumoured to have died because of the amount of milk he sucked from her breasts, and Thomas exacerbated the feelings of general uneasiness he provoked by going about with his penis uncovered

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all the time. Even more disturbing was the fact that his penis was ‘always … in some Degree, inflated, and made, with the Trunk of the Body, the Hypotenuse of a Right-angled Triangle’.90 The pamphlet in which his story is told, and which explicitly treats him as a ‘monstrous birth’, claims that he would chase the females of the village around waving his penis at them, and if he caught them he would urinate on them – rather like the Yahoo youth in the land of the Houyhnhnms.91 Poor Tom, his ‘uncommon Share of Strength’,92 and his phenomenal penis, were a huge attraction for the prying. One story told about him involves visiting ‘gentlemen’ who wanted to see whether Tom was capable of performing the ‘Act of Generation’. They conspired to get him erect, and ‘threw the Boy into such an Ectasie’ that he came close to ejaculation.93 Tom was also reputed to be a strong man, and could, at the age of 5, throw a 17lb blacksmith’s hammer.94 The other children of the village were frightened of him, viewing him as a being of ‘Terror, and Continual Dread’.95 This ‘young Giant’ died at the age of 6.96 The link between gigantism and sexuality in this pamphlet was not unusual for the eighteenth century. Tom is, after all, rather like a young, living, breathing version of the Giant, which, complete with a gigantic, engorged penis, is etched into a hill near the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset (probably of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century origin, though this is a matter of considerable scholarly dispute).97 The otherness represented by the young giant was made explicit by the fact that most exhibited large adolescents were inscribed with racial and colonial difference as well, many of them coming from outside the metropolitan centre, from overseas, ‘childish’ by disposition, originating in a childlike zone in the regions/colonies, and as ‘like’ a child as to make no difference. Felicity Nussbaum points out that ‘mutant forms are, like race, given geographic specificity … The defective … are easily intermingled and made synonymous with the racialized since dwarfs, giants and blacks together composed “deformed races”’.98 Indeed, very many of the touring and exhibited giants had an Irish origin.99 Displaying ‘Irish’ giants was a means of ethnographic demonstration: when people went to see an Irish giant, what they saw was not only an ethnically different monster, but one whose difference could thereby confirm at once both the spectator’s inherent normality, but also the weirdness of the ethnicity that would produce such biological abnormalities. The number of Irish giants on tour in eighteenth-century Europe is impressive (or disturbing). One of the most famous, Cornelius Magrath from Tipperary, six feet tall, went to London to launch a career in 1752. His age was a strong selling point for his promoters. The Dublin Journal of 1752 described him as ‘a boy of 15 years 11 months old, of a most gigantick stature’.100 In 1755 his age was still of interest. The Belfast News-Letter dedicated a column to his appearance in Germany as ‘the

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English Giant’, and described him as a ‘Lad of about eighteen Years’, claiming that ‘The present Height of this Youth is so extraordinary, as to admit a Man six Feet and a half high, with his Hat on, to walk under his Arm’, and insisting he ‘grows still taller daily’.101 Newspapers referred to him as childlike in manner as well as age: ‘clumsy made, talks boyish and simple’.102 Magrath was rumoured to have been ‘grown’ by Bishop Berkeley in his hothouse, and after he died tragically young at the age of only 24, his body was stolen by students of Trinity College Dublin and returned to the college where he had supposedly been created, and where it is still on display in the Museum building. The Knipe Twins, described as ‘Irish Giants … twentyfour years of age, and measur[ing] very near eight feet high … they are beyond what is set forth in ancient or modern history’, went on tour in Britain in 1785.103 Patrick Cotter O’Brien, a native of Kinsale, toured around Ireland in the 1790s, claiming to be a descendant of the medieval king Brian Boru. He measured eight feet three inches, and appears to have been quite a jovial giant, though he was terrified of his corpse being kidnapped by resurrection men and being put on post-mortem display. The best-known Irish giant was Charles Byrne (O’Brien), the ‘Irish giant’ (the Annual Register put him at eight feet four inches at his death),104 who toured London in 1782, and died aged only 23 in 1783 (probably brought on by his excessive alcohol consumption). His skeleton is now on display in the Hunterian Museum in London. Byrne was terrified at the idea of having his corpse on show and resisted the dogged attempts of the anatomist, surgeon and monster collector John Hunter to buy his body. Hunter persecuted poor Byrne, sending his assistant Howison to call on him frequently, to turn up at all his shows and badger him about selling his body, infuriating Byrne and probably exacerbating his already dangerous drinking habit. In an effort to avoid being made into a post-mortem exhibit, Byrne purchased a lead-lined coffin and hired a group of Irishmen to drop his body at sea. However, it seems they were paid off by his persecutor because they took Byrne’s naked corpse to Hunter, having deposited his clothes in the coffin. In a study of the cultural implications of Hunter’s fascination with the Irish giant, Paul Youngquist concludes that ‘Byrne’s singular anatomy … incarnates an encounter between monstrosity and medicine in liberal society, laying bare the discursive practices that produce bodies that matter.’ 105 Youngquist demonstrates how medical practitioners like Hunter built up a description of what the ‘proper body’ should look like and displayed ‘abnormal’ bodies as examples of what happens when nature goes wrong. Monstrosity, in this context, is defined as a ‘deviation from a functional norm’, and therefore illuminates the very norm from which it is supposedly diverging.

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9  John Kay’s engraving “Three Giants, with a Group of Spectators” (1783) – Charles Byrne and the Knipe brothers

Unlike the medieval period when monsters were considered signs of a message from God, in the eighteenth century such wonder and awe at the bizarre was preserved only in popular literature like ballads, chapbooks and religious pamphlets. In respectable society, monsters were considered medical rather than religious curiosities.106 As Youngquist argues, ‘Monstrosities mean nothing in themselves. Their value in medicine derives solely from their relationship to the functional norms of more perfect organisms.’ 107

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The ‘proper body’ constituted a kind of regulatory system, not unlike that of the schools examined in Chapter 4, another way in which the human subject could be surveilled and disciplined for deviation from an imagined norm or standard.108 Monsters and children were both used as a way to build up a clear sense of the proper body. The growing sense of the child as physiologically ‘different’ from the adult contributed to the ‘cultural consolidation of a proper body’,109 and Andrew O’Malley links the increase in discourse of the child to a general attempt to define the ‘normal’ by explaining the ‘deviant’ (the physically ill, mentally deficient, children, criminals).110 Youngquist details how corporeal propriety was closely linked to national propriety so that the ‘proper body’ and the ‘British body’ became one and the same thing: ‘proper bodies incorporate the Briton’.111 One of the most powerful means of articulating such national propriety was by putting on display examples of foreign monstrous bodies, and young, or adolescent Irish giants were useful for this demonstration. The proper body was white, male, rational, adult, British. In the move to define the normal, of course, the ‘abnormal’ also had to be explained and generally pathologised, and one of the most obvious physical abnormalities which facilitated display involved defects of size and shape. The giant, who once portended divinity and supernatural power, became indicative of physical deviancy and therefore body horror. Where monsters had been signs of the marvellous, now they were seen as the incapacitated, the disgusting and the pitiable. For Daston and Park, the medicalisation of abnormality stripped away much of the theological and spiritual power that was once posited of monstrous bodies. No longer were these bodies seen as awe-inspiring signifiers of divine intervention in the mundane world. They were just evidence of biological malfunctioning. Continued belief in the marvellous qualities of abnormal bodies migrated to the fairy tales, chapbooks and fairgrounds patronised by the uneducated and by children, while the sophisticated increasingly depended upon the explanations supplied by respectably learned men like John Hunter.112 For the average reader and viewer, though, and especially for children, the monstrous body remained not fully human, and existed on the ontological boundary between the human and the superhuman or the divine. Liminality permeated descriptions of giants, marvellous and medical, ethnically odd, caught between childhood and adulthood, infantilised yet also seeming to be monstrous versions of the parent. The Irish, children, giants: all were considered monstrosities of one kind or another, all threats to the normal, ontological and physical menaces to stability and normativity. In a neglected early gothic text by an Irish author, Stephen Cullen’s The Haunted Priory (1794), the child and the giant are brought together in one character, and the remainder of this chapter will

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examine the cultural and political uses to which this monstrous child giant is put in this text. The novelist uses this character to transfer the language of monstrosity from the weird other into the supposedly normal self, celebrating and making bodily eccentricity heroic and admirable in the cause of a language of a cultural nationalism becoming fashionable in 1790s Ireland. In a fascinating discussion, Leslie Fiedler describes the freak body as a potential site of resistance to the ‘tyranny of the normal’, a challenge to (rather than a confirmation of) the idea of normality.113 In The Haunted Priory, the monstrous bodies of the child and the giant (being exploited in reality by pathological normalisers like John Hunter) are placed at the very centre of national politics, and reconfigured as agents of the future rather than remnants of an outmoded past age. Stephen Cullen is a mysterious figure in the history of gothic literature, and we know almost nothing about him. He is listed in the catalogue of Trinity College Dublin as an Irish author,114 and this categorisation is probably correct given that The Haunted Priory: or, The Fortunes of the House of Rayo. A Romance, founded partly on Historical Fact was first published in March 1794 by William Jones, a Dublin publisher, and his second (and apparently last) novel, The Castle of Inchvally (1796) is set in the south-west of Ireland. The Haunted Priory is significant as it is one of the first gothic novels to be set in Spain, a location that would go on to be important for a number of major gothic novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Although The Haunted Priory has more or less been ignored in scholarship on the gothic, it was popular enough to warrant a second edition in 1795, and further editions in 1796 and 1832, and to be adapted as a play in 1833 as De Rayo; or, The Haunted Priory: A Dramatic Romance (although never apparently produced). It was also a success in America when published by the Dublinborn (and politically liberal) Matthew Carey in 1794. Carey had fled to America because his support of relief for Irish Catholics. His involvement in radical patriot politics made him a target of the government, and his interest in reprinting The Haunted Priory may have been generated by ideological as well as commercial interests (the novel continued to be popular to American audiences right up to the 1850s).115 The novel received moderately enthusiastic reviews. The Critical Review wasn’t particularly happy with it, warning that the reader ‘may be disposed to require a little more probability than he will meet with in this tale, which is frigid, though romantic, and does not make amends by the graces of fiction for quitting the plain and useful path of history and fact’.116 However, the British Critic was more impressed, and praised its language for being ‘free from vulgarity and affectation, [and] its sentiments from perversion

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and immorality’.117 After one reprint in 1833, the Monthly Magazine also commended it for ‘several forcible passages in a poetical point of view’, although regretting that ‘the sense of the author is, generally speaking, weakened by a superabundance of words’.118 This moderate praise is not, though, to be taken very seriously – it would be difficult to argue that this was anything other than a bad novel, but, as Darryl Jones noted in a different context, ‘from a critical and scholarly point of view, ambitious artistic failures can often be more rewarding than works which fully realize their aesthetic and intellectual aims’.119 Here I will make the case that The Haunted Priory is a very culturally ambitious text and should be read as an intervention into a number of debates concerning the status of the child and monster in late eighteenth-century Ireland. The plot of The Haunted Priory is not an easy one to summarise – like almost all gothic novels, it is tortuous and meandering, in spite of its relatively short length. Strangely, its only modern editor, Franz J. Potter believes that the story ‘is straight forward’,120 which it most certainly is not, and there are enough convolutions and convulsions to keep even the most adroit reader struggling. The novel begins, in conventionally gothic fashion, ‘on a cold stormy December evening’,121 and includes many of the usual eighteenthcentury gothic ingredients122 of identity switches, incest, suicide attempts, madness and ghosts, all featuring in a plot involving the political intrigues of fourteenth-century Castile. The story is set after the overthrow and murder of Peter the Cruel (Peter I of Castile)123 at the hands of Henry, Count Transtamare.124 Transtamare’s rebellion split Castile into competing pro- and anti-Petrine groups, and after his success, Transtamare reigned as Henry II.125 The Haunted Priory concerns the fate of the politically divided de Rayo family. While the Baron de Rayo and his nephew Henry Gonsalvo remained loyal to Peter (because they believe in loyalty to all legitimate rulers), the Baron’s other nephew, Don Isidor de Haro, fought alongside Transtamare. Both the baron and Isidor are widowers in mourning when the story opens, struggling to come to terms with the trauma the political upheavals have inflicted on the kingdom. They have both suffered immensely during the civil conflict. Gonsalvo and his wife Maria (de Rayo’s daughter) mysteriously disappeared during the chaos of the uprising and the baron is racked with anxiety about their fate. Moreover, in punishment for his support of Peter, the baron has suffered personally, falsely accused of and wrongly imprisoned for treachery, and his lands confiscated and given to his former friend, the Marquis of Punalada, who then evicted all the existing tenants, replacing them with occupants loyal to himself. Now released and Castile under the rule of good King John I (Transtamare’s son, who ruled from August 1358 to October 1390), de Rayo determines to discover what happened to his

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missing nephew and asks Isidor to assist him in this mission. Isidor’s son Alphonso (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the missing Gonsalvo) is an intimate of King John and hopes to obtain information about Gonsalvo, though he has to leave the court for his own safety when others become jealous of his friendship with the king. During his travels, Alphonso stumbles across the castle of Vallesanto and meets the ghost of Gonsalvo, who reveals that Punalada murdered him to get possession of Maria. Punalada then had Maria imprisoned in the subterranean depths of the castle until she would consent to marry him, ‘adopted’ Gonsalvo’s young son Fernando, and used him to blackmail Maria into marriage. The connection of Gonsalvo’s story to that of Isidor is difficult to summarise. During the rebellion, Isidor fell in love with Isabella, the niece of Peter the Cruel’s favourite nobleman, Guzman, but because he wanted Isabella to marry into a more influential noble family, Guzman conspired to prevent the wedding. Together with a loyal (but comic) servant Pierrot, Isidor and Isabella eloped and had two children, a son (Alphonso) and a daughter (Isabella Jr), before Isabella died. Isidor then sent his daughter away to be educated. To add to the complications, everyone is ignorant of the fact that the sons of Isidor and Gonsalvo (Alphonso and Fernando) were switched by their wet-nurses while their respective fathers were away fighting in the civil war.126 Into the middle of these family complications, Cullen inserts yet another story, the unhappy tale of the villain of the novel, Punalada, who was once a good man but who was irrevocably changed by the experiences of war and his own wife’s untimely death.127 Driven to malevolence by grief and the violence he witnessed, Punalada became a tyrannical master and father. The behaviour of his two children does not improve his life or his temper. His daughter falls madly in love with the portrait of a man128 prophesised to be the eventual cause of the downfall of the house of Punalada (a picture that bears an uncanny resemblance to Alphonso). Meanwhile, she is being sexually pursued by her lust-crazed brother, who dies in an attempt to rape her. Rumours of the priory attached to Punalada’s castle being haunted abound. Having conspired against the de Rayo family, murdered Gonsalvo (on the advice of his priestly confessor, Fr Pedro, later put in charge of the priory), and imprisoned Gonsalvo’s wife and (apparent) son (keep up, dear reader), Punalada is driven to the brink of insanity by guilt and his terror of the ghosts of the priory, and the exposure of his wickedness comes as something of a relief to him. Towards the end of this confusing novel, Alphonso becomes both physically and mentally ill when he discovers that a girl he rescued and fell in love with while on his journey is actually Isidor’s daughter and, therefore (it seems), his sister. Hearing the news that his children are in love with each

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other, Isidor loses his mind, as Alphonso descends into a slough of despond so deep he attempts to rip off his own skin. However, all turns out to be well, because while nursing Alphonso back to health, Maria (Gonsalvo’s wife) notices a birthmark on his back, thus proving that Alphonso is really Fernando, the son of Gonsalvo. Alphonso recovers and marries his ‘sister’cousin Isabella, and both family and national order seems to be restored. Given that the central events of the story involve a good and loyal family being dispossessed of its estate because of treacherous interlopers who have gained favour with a usurping monarch, the implication of the plot in seventeenth-century Irish history seems too obvious to miss. Their loyalty to both King Charles I and King James II had cost Irish Catholic aristocrats dearly in terms of land possession. With the Cromwellian confiscations, the Catholic share of Irish land declined from 60 per cent in 1640 to 20 per cent in 1660,129 which meant that the ‘Catholic Question’ and the land question became inextricably linked. During the reign of James II, the Catholic share of the land rose briefly to 22 per cent.130 However, following James’s defeat in the ‘wars of the Two Kings’, the penal laws facilitated the appropriation of a further one-tenth of the country’s profitable land into Protestant hands. Although objections might be raised to reading a novel set in fourteenth-century Castile ‘symbolically spreading’ into a commentary on Irish matters,131 it is significant that Cullen was almost certainly influenced in his writing of the novel by the work of the historian John Talbot Dillon in which many analogies between Ireland and medieval Spain are made. Dillon was a member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Baron of the Roman Empire, and the foremost English-speaking expert on the reign of Peter the Cruel and Spanish history and culture, and he was not averse to seeing connections between Irish and Spanish history and culture. For example, comparing ancient Irish society to that of Spain in The History of the Reign of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile and Leon (1788), Dillon complains of the injudicious way ancient Irish society has been classified as ‘barbarous’ by some historians, though the kind of practices in evidence there were common throughout Europe. He criticises the ‘ignorance’ of ‘unjust’ commentators of the ‘language and antiquities of that ancient and martial kingdom’.132 In his Letters from an English Traveller in Spain, in 1778 (1779), Dillon suggests that antiquarian speculation that the original settlers of Ireland (Milesians) came from Spain may be correct.133 His Travels through Spain, with a View to Illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom (1781) returns to comparisons between the Irish and the Spanish, speculating that so many concurring circumstances support the idea of their having been originally one people. It cannot be denied, but that the old Irish, whether from similitude

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of customs, religion and traditional notions, or whatever else may be the cause, have always been attached to the Spaniards, who on their side, perhaps from political views, have treated them with reciprocal affection, granting them many privileges.134

Most of the names of even the minor characters in The Haunted Priory Cullen would have found in Dillon’s sober history of the same period, though, despite being supposedly based on the ‘facts’, Cullen is cavalier in his treatment of actual historical reality (as already pointed out, he shifts the murder of Peter the Cruel to the start of the fourteenth century).135 Seeing connections between Ireland and Spain was not novel in the late eighteenth century, and given the success of Dillon’s work on Spain as both a traveller and a historian, it seems more than likely that Cullen would have been familiar with his books. It is also notable that Dillon was a related to another John Talbot Dillon, a political liberal and MP who, as pointed out by his obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1805, had been conferred with the title of Baron by ‘the late Emperor Joseph, accompanied by a very flattering letter, on account of his exertions in Parliament to serve his country, by granting liberty to Roman Catholicks to realize property in their native land’.136 That the plot of The Haunted Priory involves the Baron de Rayo’s recovery of property that was confiscated from him because of accusations of political disloyalty suggests that Cullen’s political sympathies lie along the same lines as those of the Talbot Dillons. The Haunted Priory takes the figures of the child, the monster and the giant and invests them all with redemptive power. The major character in the novel is Alphonso, a 14-year-old giant. As set out earlier, the gigantic body had been the subject of scientific, mythic and folkloric disgust, and popular cultural fascination and revulsion, and in this context it might have been expected that Alphonso would be represented as a possible source of biological pollution. Instead, Cullen makes him the means by which an old and ancient family, the de Rayos, are revived and rise again to prominence in a society that had written them off, confiscated their land, and banished them to the political and geographical margins. Far from possessing a mesmerising but disgusting body, Alphonso enjoys one that is aesthetically beautiful and symmetrical as well as alluring. The first time we see him he is running with a group of other children ‘with the speed of a flock of frighted deer’, but he clearly stands out from the crowd: one outstripped the rest, and, leaving them far behind, reached the stranger before he had time to form a conjecture upon the novelty of his appearance. If the old man was surprised at the swiftness of his pace, he was astonished at his personal appearance, and still more at his address. The full, muscular

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conformation of his limbs, the large size of his bones, displayed a gigantic stature for his age, and promised a proportionate share of strength; his face, in which manly fire, dignity, and sensibility, were blended, glowed with the colours of health and exercise; while an air at once majestic and insinuating, diffused a charm over the whole, that operated like a spell upon the beholder. (11–12)

Although he is literally a ‘monster’ in that his enormous size marks him as different, here he is not treated as some kind of medical example of the normal gone wrong in the way that John Hunter considered Cornelius Magrath, but as a specimen of the physically perfect. In the eighteenth century, boys were encouraged to develop their muscles as well as their morality, and in Locke’s opinion, they needed to be exposed to the elements in order to build up bodily rigour and strength, for which purpose he recommended lessons in wrestling.137 Alphonso appears to have taken Locke’s advice, and through a combination of biological inheritance and strenuous exercise he has made his body into an icon of physical superiority. Rousseau had imagined,138 in Émile, that a child raised in the ‘natural’ way would recapture some of the bodily strength that was the possession of human beings prior to their exposure to the enervating effects of civilisation. Alphonso has, completely naturally, trained his body, conditioned it to the height of physical excellence, and appears as a new Adam, who, as Leslie Fiedler points out, was often thought of as a giant himself.139 Alphonso’s masculine potency is not of the disturbing, perverted kind that drew lecherous spectators to the village of Willingham to see Tom Hall’s mighty and out-of-control penis. Alphonso is essentially a phallus magnus himself, but a beautiful and awe-inspiring one, an embodiment of Michelangelo’s David (1501–4), which combines ‘the head of an Apollo with the body of a young Hercules’, though Alphonso is even more muscularly impressive than his Renaissance counterpart.140 As Jeffrey Cohen points out, the giant’s body is a ‘violently gendered body’, as giants have often been ‘made to represent the masculine body’s lost prehistory’.141 In his embodiment of this lost potency, Alphonso, though, is beautiful rather than terrifying to look upon. Cornelius Magrath and Charles Byrne, the famous, young Irish giants of the eighteenth century, were treated as representatives of the undisciplined and dissolute body, their gigantic frames indicative not of proportionality and perfection, but imbalance and pathology. Alphonso is an antidote to such ethnic disability. His Castilian identity signifies his non-British physicality and lineage, but he physically resembles ‘Albion’, the perfect, built, revolutionary child spectacularly imaged by William Blake as a representative of revolutionary Britain in the 1790s. Although capable, like Tom Hall, of impressive displays of strength and athleticism, able to run with ‘Sancho Perez, the biggest boy you saw with

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10  William Blake, ‘Glad Day’ or ‘Albion Rose’, c.1796 (though etchings date back to 1780)

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me, on my back’ (18), Alphonso inspires love rather than revulsion or mockery. Alphonso’s connection to a kind of primal masculinity, the kind represented by mythic giants, is made clear throughout the novel. Given the image of the gigantic child as the hero, it is no surprise that The Haunted Priory was later transformed into a bluebook called The Wandering Spirit; or, Memoirs of the House of Morno (1801). The gothic bluebook is a genre which emerged out of the chapbooks of the early eighteenth century, were mostly read by children, and tended to be long synopses of gothic novels published under different names.142 While many parts of Cullen’s novel were completely changed in this bluebook adaptation, it is notable that although Alphonso becomes Don Carlos, he retains his age and his enormous stature, of ‘muscular, gigantic, and majestic appearance’.143 Felicity Nussbaum has pointed out that giants (and other ‘defective’ humans) have traditionally been ‘associated not only with a location at the edge of European geographic knowledge but also with an earlier “less civilized” period of history’.144 Alphonso is very much a biological throwback to days of primordial masculinity, and Cullen’s novel is nostalgic for a period prior to the intense political conflicts of the present. However, unlike the mythic stories, such as the tale of David and Goliath, in which primal masculinity is brutish and needs to be conquered in order for civilised masculinity to flourish, and unlike those stories where the gigantic inhabitants of the land (like the Fomorians in Irish mythology) are ejected or defeated by physically smaller but intellectually more sophisticated and civilised usurpers (the Tuatha Dé Danann), Alphonso represents a renewed flowering of a primal masculinity that will transform a decadent contemporary age. From the moment of his birth this regenerative potential was recognised in him by his grand-uncle, de Rayo, who declared him the delight of my soul – I hung in raptures over him, anticipation the opening of his manhood, and drawing to myself, in fancy’s flattering colours, the picture of his future form; the vigour and symmetry of those limbs, then in a state of shapeless, helpless inaction; the fire of that spirit then reposing in torpid apathy; and the variously expressive beauties of that face, which then exhibited no trace of sensation. (34)

Alphonso’s body is adored and admired rather than reviled. As Don Juan, one of the nobles at court, tells Alphonso, he is ‘irresistible’, not repulsive (107). By the time he is 15 – still a boy, in other words – his full flowering has taken place and ‘His stature had enlarged to a size far above his father’s; the puerile softness of his face began to harden into the firm features of manhood, the rude bulk of his limbs to form into the most perfect symmetry, and the tender treble of his voice to increase into a strong manly tenor’ (95).

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That Alphonso is a reincarnated version of the supposedly banished and lost past is emphasised a number of times, but most importantly through his literal connection to the Baron de Rayo, who is also a giant but one who has been brought low by his misfortunes. It is to the Baron that Isidor gives the care and training of Alphonso, especially the responsibility to monitor his athletic exercise (66), and Alphonso is continually impressed by the residual energy of this supposedly defeated giant. Alphonso’s biological, spiritual, moral and educational connection with the Baron is significant because it reveals the politics of this novel and its radical political sympathies. The Baron de Rayo enters the story dispossessed, alone and friendless, an itinerant giant with only his harp for comfort, playing and singing for hospitality and shelter. On first seeing him, Isidor thinks of ‘[p]ilgrims and itinerant bards he had often seen, but never one at all resembled this, in whom he imagined he could distinguish the remnants of the warrior, and the defaced ruins of the man of dignity’ (22). In other words, this dispossessed Catholic giant is also a wandering bard who plays the harp and looks like a cultural warrior. Given the interest in the figure of the Irish bard, file, whose poetry lamented a past Golden Age before the Flight of the Earls, and the fetishisation of the harp in nationalist discourse towards the end of the eighteenth century, it is difficult to believe that Cullen is not intentionally drawing on such topical imagery in his treatment of de Rayo and his revived political fortunes. Although de Rayo retains his gigantic physicality, he is a much reduced figure at the start of the novel, and Pierrot keeps comparing him to a ghost, a remnant from the past intruding into the present, and an unwelcome figure. ‘I don’t like to have any thing to do with the dead!’, Pierrot insists: ‘Well, you must know that this Baron within – I – I mean he that’s like him … The old harper in the hall is the ghost of the Baron Rayo, who died in the tower of Siguenca – it is at least his fetch!’ (85–6). The use of the term ‘fetch’ to describe an apparently phantasmatic doppelgänger is significant here. In his Provincial Glossary (1787), Francis Grose associates the term with the north of England, but it otherwise seems to have been a used mostly in Ireland.145 Like the eighteenth-century Irish bards, de Rayo is a remnant of the past, stuck in the present, mourning a time long gone. The Haunted Priory was written in a period of intense antiquarian activity where many were desperate to demonstrate the civilised as opposed to barbaric state of early Irish history, and argued that bardic poetry was evidence of the developed (rather than degraded) condition of ancient Ireland when compared to its neighbouring countries. The treatment of ancient Ireland as a place of high civilisation can be found in, for example, the work of cultural nationalists like Charlotte Brooke (daughter of Henry, the author of Jack the

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Giant Queller). In her Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) she insists that ‘The productions of our Irish Bards exhibit a glow of cultivated genius, – a spirit of elevated heroism, – sentiments of pure honour, – instances of disinterested patriotism, – and manners of a degree of refinement, totally astonishing, at a period when the rest of Europe was nearly sunk in barbarism.’ 146 Cullen’s portrayal of the elderly de Rayo alludes to several contemporary treatments of bardic poets, and he is probably best understood as a composite figure. His appearance evokes the mighty, mythic bard, Ossian. When he first arrives in the novel, de Rayo is described as ‘old, and though withered, of gigantic stature; his large snow-white beard streamed in the fleeting wind’ (1–2), resembling an image of Ossian Singing his Swan Song (1787) by the Danish artist, Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), in which he is presented as a dramatic figure in a dark and gothic landscape whose urgent declamation and spear suggests he is ready to go into battle even while he is strumming his lyre (see Figure 11). Cullen’s de Rayo is, like Ossian, an oracular figure, and everyone is supposed to listen carefully to the song he sings: he proceeded, without a word, to tune his harp, while his face exhibited marks of strong emotions, and seemed pregnant with extraordinary events … After a short prelude, he began to play, accompanying it with his voice. Melancholy had set her stamp on every note he sung … He sung of fortune and fame ruined, of friends and children lost, and of the miseries of an unconnected isolated existence here. (23–4)

Those gathered around him, and the readers as well, listen to tales of a glorious time now lost. This kind of lament was something to which Irish readers were becoming used by the time The Haunted Priory was published, and the ‘backward’ look at a lost civilisation preserved in bardic songs, the Irish language and folk tradition was a major element in the cultural revival of the late eighteenth century. Indeed, although he looks like Ossian, de Rayo’s wandering, peripatetic harp playing in the homes of the poor would also have reminded the Irish reader of the reputation of Turlough O’Carolan (1670–1738) as a ‘mediator’ between different classes and cultures in Ireland.147 In publications examining Irish music history such as Joseph Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), the famed blind harper, Carolan, was hailed as ‘a fine natural Genius’ and the ‘last’ of the bards, echoing the title awarded him in Oliver Goldsmith’s earlier essay ‘The History of Carolan, The Last Irish Bard’ (1760), where he is compared to Homer and Pindar in stature.148 In Thomas Campbell’s Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland (1777), Carolan is praised extensively as possessing ‘an ear so exquisite’ and a ‘memory so tenacious, that he has been known to play off, at first hearing, some of the most difficult pieces of Italian music’.149 Carolan had already

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11  Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), Ossian Singing his Swan Song, oil on canvas, 1787

been made into the canonical figure of Irish harp music by John and William Neal in their Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes (1724), which included twenty compositions by Carolan, half of the total collection.150 At the start of the novel, de Rayo thinks that the future looks bleak for him and his family, as if he is witnessing the last days of the great clan. Treatments of Carolan and the bards in eighteenth-century Irish culture too, were often draped in funereal black. In Matthew Pilkington’s The

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Progress of Musick in Ireland (1725), Carolan and the tradition he represents is mourned: ‘Dead – (in Esteem too dead) the Bards that sung,/The Fife neglected, and the Harp unstrung’.151 This song suggests that poetry and music have themselves died along with Carolan, that the harp has been disassembled. The question confronting cultural nationalists of the late eighteenth century was whether Carolan and the bards could be revived and brought back to life. Charlotte Brooke encouraged her fellow Irish Protestants to associate themselves with the memory of the bards as a means of rooting themselves securely in Irish history, and potentially channel the spirit of the bards and renew contemporary Ireland. The bards might be dead and gone, but perhaps there was a way they could be resuscitated. The harp de Rayo carries had become a highly important cultural icon by the 1790s in what Seamus Deane identified as the ‘first Celtic revival’, and ‘revival’ is a crucial term here.152 The historian R. V. Comerford points out that ‘the pre-eminence and longevity of the harp is one of the few apparent certainties’ of Irish cultural history, and he traces its use back to at least the eleventh century.153 The harp was used as a national symbol on Irish coinage in 1534, and was also important as a symbol for the Catholic Confederation of the 1640s, but as Comerford explains, ‘almost every’ Irish regime has employed the harp as an official symbol. However, the cultural and emotional investment in the harp increased during the eighteenth century. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, for example, employed a harpist in mid-century as a way of connecting to the Gaelic past.154 Walker’s Historical Memoirs contains a long discussion of the harp, examining and endorsing claims of its antiquity, and includes appendices by Edward Ledwich on ‘Inquiries concerning the ancient Irish Harp’, and William Beaufort on the ‘Construction and Capability of the Irish Harp’.155 The ‘cult of things antiquarian and “Celtic” … endowed the harp with a semi-sacral status’,156 and it was put to symbolic work in a period of nationalist renewal in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although there was a long tradition of the harp being used as an icon of Ireland, in the 1790s the ‘unstrung’ harp was revived and ‘re-strung’, and new tunes began to be played on it by political radicals singing of national independence.157 In her study of the 1790s cultural revival, Mary Helen Thuente demonstrates that antiquarian research and political activism went hand in hand for many political radicals of the period, and the harp became a much circulated symbol of revivalism.158 The great cultural and political moment for the harp came with the Harp Festival in Belfast in 1792. In advertisements for the festival, the harpers were described as ‘descendants of our Ancient Bards’, who were ‘at present almost exclusively possessed of all that remains of the Music, Poetry, and oral traditions of Ireland’.159 The ten harpers who attended the Festival were all old men, like de Rayo, the elderly remnants

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of an old order. But the death of the old cultural and political order was not the theme of the festival so much as rebirth. The political implications of the kinds of cultural work to which the harp was being put became clear when the final performance of the festival took place on Bastille Day, 14 July, connecting harp revivalism to radical political transformation.160 It is also significant that the Society of the United Irishmen adopted the harp as its emblem, linking this ancient instrument to the new radical politics emerging on the island, politics which would eventually culminate in the 1798 Rebellion.161 The United Irishmen was a militant republican organisation that became dedicated to breaking the political connection between Ireland and England, but it also had a cultural aspect to its programme, and used the harp as a means of articulating a version of Irish cultural inclusivity. In opposition to a conservative Protestant politics which emphasised cultural division and difference, liberal Irish Anglican opinion saw in a revival of the ancient harp a way to bring disparate elements of Irish society together. The United Irishmen adapted one of the mottoes of the earlier Irish Volunteer movement, ‘the harp restrung to the tune of liberty’, which became in the new iteration: ‘It is new strung and shall be heard.’ 162 In the Baron de Rayo’s lament, he complains about the trampling on the poor by the rich elite, protesting that ‘now at every gate savage inhospitality with stern denial rudely opposes the entrance of the poor’ (4). Readers in 1794 and again, after the second edition in 1796, may well have heard in this criticism an echo of the democratic rhetoric of the United Irishmen. De Rayo may look like a spent force, but his association with the bards and the harp suggests he actually retains his politically subversive potential. The bards were, after all, treated as genuinely threatening figures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland. The Lord President of Munster issued a death sentence against them in 1603 because of their involvement the Nine Years’ War (1593–1603), and they provided an important source of morale and support for the beleaguered Catholic majority through the eighteenth century.163 While in aisling poetry, the wandering bards mourned the loss of a Gaelic civilisation, Tom Garvin points out that most of them were perfectly capable of turning vague sentiments of unease with contemporary society into something more tangibly rebellious, for which reason they continued to be looked on with great misgiving by the ostensible rulers of the country.164 As Luke Gibbons has persuasively argued, in the late eighteenth century, the Irish bard shifted from being ‘an elegiac figure, sighing over the passing of the old order, to being a source of regeneration in a newly awakened nation’, in which process the mythical Ossian mutated into real-life Carolan.165 The lesson of both de Rayo and the supposedly dying or dead Irish bards is that appearances may be deceiving. It may seem as if the bards in general,

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and de Rayo in particular, have had their day, and are not just out of fashion but moribund. However, and as Declan Kiberd has written about the eighteenth century filí and the Irish tendency to lament and compose funeral dirges for lost cultural traditions, far from being really about to perish, revival is always just around the next historical corner.166 De Rayo is, after all, a man who still has a great deal of power and strength and will, through his relationship with the gigantic child, his great-nephew Alphonso, transform the future. The Baron laments a past age when Castilian Spain was benevolently ruled by Alphonso the Great (August 1158–5 October 1214), and contrasts it negatively with the degraded present. The past was ‘a time indeed, when the castle of a nobleman, or the arm of a knight, were the never-failing refuge of distress, in whatsoever garb distress appeared … Then reigned over this country Alphonso, the wise, the valiant and the good’ (4). However, all is far from lost, and de Rayo trains a new Alphonso, a reincarnation of the noble king, another giant who resembles him and whose impressively healthy physique augurs well for the physical and spiritual future of the country. Moreover, far from being really defeated, at times the Baron’s body too is renewed and glows with the vigour of health and power. One significant scene where this happens is when the body of his own gigantic son is being disinterred from his unmarked grave in the subterranean depths of the haunted priory: ‘The Baron worked with redoubled ardour, throwing up the rubbish that obstructed the stairs – Alphonso beheld him with astonishment; the alacrity of youth and the strength of Hercules seemed united in him’ (159). At this moment, de Rayo seems like an antiquary attempting to uncover ‘evidence’ that Ireland was once populated by a real race of giants whose bloodline can still be traced in some of those still living there, and about to channel their past energy in the present day. The political danger de Rayo represents is also suggested by his clothing. He is described as wearing ‘a great coat of black baize … buckled with a leathern belt about his loins’ (2). In his A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Edmund Spenser included a discussion of the ‘great coat’ in which Irenius warns that ‘it is a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief’.167 In treating of the political opportunism and rebellious inclinations of the bards in his Historical Memoirs, Walker includes a long quotation from Spenser, and makes the point that their political activity is facilitated by the ‘cabin’ each bard ‘slugged’ around ‘under his mantle’.168 Bards were not to be trusted as they could be hiding anything in their great coats, an anxiety that later made its appearance in the ‘editorial’ footnotes of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1801). In his narrative, Thady Quirk describes himself as wearing ‘a long great coat winter or summer, which is very handy’, and this reference triggers a long intervention by the Editor who traces the habit of wearing such cloaks back

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to ‘high antiquity’, and quotes Spenser’s dialogue – a strong indication to the alert and culturally aware Irish reader that Thady is not to be trusted.169 In Cullen’s novel, though, this ‘great coat’ is not a hint to the reader that the Baron is a deceitful figure whose revival spells doom for his political enemies. The Baron is a political figure who can bring together previously warring factions, and can guarantee the security of the new state. This reading of The Haunted Priory brings the novel ideologically close to 1790s Irish Protestant liberalism. That Cullen was a political liberal is also strongly suggested by his second novel, The Castle of Inchvally: A Tale – alas! too true (1796),170 a gothic romance in three volumes, set in the south-west of Ireland in the mid-eighteenth century. That novel revolves around the social, cultural and personal consequences of the sectarian divisions of the country, and in particular the effects of the Penal Laws preventing full Catholic participation in Irish public life on relations within communities and families. Cullen uses the interrelationships between the Catholic Howards and the Anglican Wilmots, both well-respected landed families, as a way to comment on the direction of public policy in 1790s Irish affairs. The young protagonists of the novel have to fight against the sectarian bigotry of both Catholics and Protestants to prevent their interdenominational marriage and retain control of the Inchvally estate, and within it there are long and repeated demands for what it calls ‘liberality’, the social, political and familial harmony between classes, religions, nationalities and ethnicities.171 Cullen is invested in healing political divisions in his two novels. In the use of the harp in The Haunted Priory, Cullen appropriates a powerful symbol of cultural unity rather than sectarian divisiveness. As O’Donnell points out, the harp was treated in late eighteenth-century Ireland as a ‘mediator’ between ‘the coloniser and the colonised, between the Ascendancy minority and the Catholic majority, between Protestant, Dissenter, and Catholic, always maintaining an illusion of continuity and stability in a deeply divided society’.172 The Haunted Priory is not the only Irish gothic novel of the 1790s to reference the contemporary cultural interest in the bard. In Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796),173 a Carolanian ‘blind harper’ who strolls around Wales playing for his supper stimulates in the heroine, Amanda Fitzalan, a ‘recollection of the tales of other time … sent her soul back to the ages of old, to the days of other years, when bards rehearsed the exploits of heroes and sung the praises of the dead’.174 The Fitzalans are descendants of an ancient Irish family brought low, like the bards themselves, but also like the Gaelic aristocracy, and the novel charts the progress of this fallen family back to a more secure social position. It is also a novel which lauds childhood and children, as indicated by the title. It opens with an exaggerated peon to youthful purity, as the heroine

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Amanda declares as she enters her childhood home: ‘Hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! Content and innocence reside beneath your humble roof, and charity unboastful of the good it renders. Hail, ye venerable trees! My happiest hours of childish gaiety were passed beneath your shelter … Here surely I shall be guarded from duplicity.’ 175 However, that she is chased insanely throughout the novel by the crazed and perverted father figure, Colonel Belgrave, suggests that good, morally innocent ‘children’ are safe nowhere. Indeed, rather than leave the ‘children of the abbey’ to the protection of their useless parents, Roche has her heroine’s father eschew his responsibilities and ‘commit’ his children to the care of their heavenly Father, ‘for Thou art the friend who will never forsake them’.176 Although one character, thinking Amanda has been brought to immorality, declares, ‘Happy are the parents … who, shrouded in the dust, cannot see the misfortunes of their children’,177 in fact, had her father not been such a terrible manager of money his children would not have found themselves in the moral quandary in which they end up. The heavenly father would become ever more important in eighteenth-century Ireland as the proper object towards whom parents were encouraged to direct the attention of their children. As parental authority was being pathologised in genres like the gothic, and being challenged by an Irish political nationalism which emphasised independence and selfauthorisation rather than submission and dependence, a discourse which granted authority to the revolutionary child – even the child with the monstrous body – could be extremely potent. Both The Haunted Priory and The Children of the Abbey are about respectable families who have been left behind, and whose descent is halted by the appearance of a bard. In both novels, these fallen families rise again. Cullen’s adoption of the harp, played by an old man who resembles an ancient Irish bard, who trains up a new, young gigantic version of himself, strongly suggests that The Haunted Priory is an intervention into the debates of the 1790s.178 The child giant will channel the energies of the ancient past to remake the political future of the country which will be reborn out of his powerful, masculine body. The Haunted Priory was published just two years after the Harp Festival, and when Ireland was becoming an increasingly turbulent place because of the activities of organisations like the United Irishmen which utilised the iconography of the harp and the bard as vehicles of political change. The novel contains a scene in which a version of a unifying cultural festival (like the Belfast Harp Festival?) takes place, in which landlords and tenants, aristocrats and peasants find joy and tranquillity in a mutual appreciation of Nature (171–2). These celebrations take place around de Rayo, the dispossessed and betrayed warrior whose righteous cause of land repossession and political realignment will be vindicated in the end. From

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the perspective of the 1790s, the novel can be read as a call for political and social unity around symbols and figures like the harp, the bard, the giant and the child. Together, these figures combine the past and the future, and while they look threatening from a sectarian perspective, for this novel they represent the only possible hope for a harmonious future. These kinds of political and cultural sympathies, which united Protestants and Catholics under the symbol of the bardic harp, received caustic treatment from political opponents in the press. Charles Burney reviewed Walker’s Historical Memoirs for the Monthly Review in December 1787, and disparaged what he considered to be its misplaced interest in Irish antiquities, dismissing claims that the existence of the bards demonstrate that the ancient Irish were ‘civilized’. The bard, Burney writes, is ‘little better than that of piper to the White Boys, and other savage and lawless ruffians’: On the whole, it seems as if the Irish should abate in some of their Milesian claims to the extreme high antiquity of their civilisation, refinement, literature, sciences and arts, with which Colonel Vallancey179 and others are flattering them: as our late circumnavigators to the South Seas were obliged to lower their demands on our credulity, of nine feet for the size of the Patagonians; for after their giants had been visited and measured by other voyagers, they would have been very thankful to anyone who would have allowed them six feet and a half.180

The Haunted Priory can be read as a response to the scepticism of commentators like Burney. Not only do we have an extraordinary and culturally unifying bard present, but he is a physically enormous one (though perhaps not reaching the nine feet of the Patagonians!), and he is passing the bardic tradition to another giant, who is still only an adolescent boy, one who appears to have a great future ahead of him. Burney insists that despite the rhetoric, Irish antiquity (and the bards who represent that antiquity) was not physically or culturally impressive at all, and needs to be cut down to credible size. Cullen reinvests in the figure of an actual giant and envisions the future as resting on the muscular backs of majestic children like Alphonso de Rayo. The Baron de Rayo made a serious political error in remaining loyal to a tyrant like Peter the Cruel, even though he was the ‘rightful’ ruler of Spain; Isidor (and by implication, Alphonso) was right to support the rebel Henry. Having donned the mantle of the great coat, this giant bard seems to have learned his political lesson and is prepared to switch sides to the rebels. Giants, for Burke, are sublime figures, but cannot generate affection in anyone who sees them; for Cullen, giants are simultaneously majestic and extraordinarily loveable. Cullen’s gigantic child serves as a rebuke to colonial versions of the rational adult which excluded both physical, chronological, ethnic and religious difference. If the gigantic bard de Rayo

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appears to be ‘the last’ of the race, the giant child Alphonso is a rebirth and new beginning. What nearly prevents the re-emergence of the House of Rayo is not the ineffectual scheming of the Punaladas and the Guzmans, but an incestuous sub-plot running through the whole course of the novel. The future of the de Rayo family is put under threat when the teenage giant Alphonso tries to kill himself because he thinks he has fallen in love with his own sister. Moreover, Alphonso becomes the object of incestuous desire when his mother Maria (who everyone assumes is Alphonso’s aunt) mistakes him for her dead husband Gonsalvo, and begins to behave towards him in a less than either a materteral or maternal fashion. While attending to him during his illness, Maria becomes ‘distracted, and, impelled by an unaccountable feeling, which overcame’ her and she ‘hung upon him and kissed [Alphonso’s] clay-cold lips’ (242). Caught between desire for his sister and the longing of his aunt/mother, ‘Alphonso was [driven] raving mad – that he sometimes talked of his sister, sometimes of his aunt, and sometimes called upon his cruel, cruel father’, and in his madness he attempts to disfigure himself. His family find him ‘in the most dreadful state of furious insanity, tearing himself to pieces, while the blood gushed afresh from his half-healed wounds’ (252). Incest is, of course, something of an obsession in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature. In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), the eponymous heroine finds to her horror that she has married her brother; the hero of Tom Jones (1749) thinks he has had a sexual relationship with his mother; Mansfield Park (1814) is structured around cousin marriage.181 Given that, as George Haggerty argues, ‘transgressive sexual relations are an undeniable common denominator of Gothic’, the frisson of scandal which comes with the possibility of incest has also played a major part in the plotting of gothic writing from the very start.182 In Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Manfred wants to marry his would-have-been daughter-in-law, and is already married to a woman who is his relation ‘in the fourth degree’. In Walpole’s play, The Mysterious Mother (1768), the Countess of Narbonne, in mourning for her husband, sleeps with her son, Edmund, while disguised as one of the household maids, conceives, and gives birth to Adeliza – whom Edmund marries sixteen years later, unaware that she is his daughter and sister.183 Ambrosio lusts after and rapes his sister Antonia in The Monk (1796), though at the time he is unaware of their family connection. In one of the best considerations of how incest functions in gothic fiction, Ruth Perry argues that, unlike in the conventional romance plot, in the gothic romance the threat of incest can overwhelm any movement towards a stable and happy resolution,184 and this is certainly the case in The Haunted Priory. Indeed, the central love story of the novel

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involves far too much madness, unhappiness and incestuous desire to be considered a ‘happy’ one, and it appears that the future is on the verge of unravelling because of the incest threat. Given the frequency of the ‘Irish’ symbols employed throughout the novel in association with the de Rayo family, Cullen’s use of the marriage plot to bring the novel to a conclusion suggests that there are political implications that need to be examined. The ‘fall’ of the de Rayo family, following the Baron’s disastrous decision to back the wrong political horse, led to land confiscation and social marginalisation so that, like the displaced Gaelic Irish aristocracy mourned by the harp-bearing bards of Catholic Ireland, they became ostracised within their own country. The gigantic child Alphonso, a reincarnation of his once impressive and now dying grand-uncle, represents the hopes of the family and the possibility that he could become an important figure in the political and cultural future of his community. Marriage of such a virile embodiment of youthful masculinity, with the probability of more children like him, would secure the future status of the de Rayo family and provide reasons to hope for a political revival (and the restoration of their land). The novel’s emphasis on marriage and affective bonds as resolutions of political division anticipates the so-called ‘Glorvina solution’ of the national novel. The novel’s deep investment in the politically and spiritually redemptive possibilities of the adolescent boy contrasts strikingly with Maria Edgeworth’s treatment of the child revolutionary as dangerous and easily misled in ‘The Barring Out’, in The Parent’s Assistant, which was published shortly after The Haunted Priory. There, the physically robust and charismatic Archer ferments a rebellion against the rational headmaster, Dr Middleton, for his temerity in closing down a playhouse in which Archer and his friends were planning a performance of Sheridan’s School for Scandal (1777). Appalled at what he sees as an exercise in ‘tyranny’, Archer tells his friends to refuse to accept their subordinate status and to protest against ‘slavery’ by barricading Middleton out of the playhouse until he agrees to their terms. Archer has gathered around him other boys who, while ‘not very remarkable for their mental qualifications’, are (like Alphonso) in the possession of impressive physiques, and it is their ‘bodily activity’ which ‘rendered themselves of the highest consequence’. It transpires that Middleton closed the playhouse because of an outbreak of a disease in a gypsy camp close to the building, and that Archer is singularly unfit to take on the pressures of government, particularly government of the young. In Practical Education, too, the Edgeworths sternly warn against any belief that children have any innate attachment to political ideals such as freedom, insisting that ‘a false idea of the pleasures of liberty misled Rousseau. Children have not our abstract ideas of the pleasures of liberty; they do not, until they have suffered from

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ill-judged restraints, feel any desire to exercise what we call free will.’ 185 Cullen’s political and spiritual investment in the physically impressive child contrasts starkly with the Edgeworths’ concern with what such a child would do with any power they managed to wrest from the hands of the surrounding adults. After the 1798 rebellion, and the debate about the Act of Union (1801), novelists intervened in the national conversation through the political allegorisation of the relations between Ireland and Britain as a ‘marriage’, in plots where Ireland is configured as a sensitive, sentimental, fresh-faced and innocent woman who, after a series of trials and tribulations, is happily married off to a rational man who represents Britain.186 The term, the ‘Glorvina solution’ 187 derives from Sydney Owenson’s novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806) which served as a paradigmatic example of how the national novel worked. In this novel, the young Englishman Horatio, the dissolute son of Lord M-, is punished by his father for his bad behaviour by being sent to the family’s estates in the west of Ireland, a place Horatio thinks of as a wild and foreign place full of human curiosities (repurposing the language of Gerald of Wales). There he meets the Catholic Prince of Inishmore and his daughter, the beautiful and astonishingly talented Glorvina, with whom he falls deeply in love and eventually marries. The politics of the national novel appear uncomplicated, as the implication of such marriages seems to be that Ireland’s political difficulties with England could be solved through love (between peoples) rather than violence, as long as Ireland remains the subordinate party in a union with a benevolent though still dominant male England. The ‘union of hearts’ in the national novel acts as a grand allegory of the desired for, or already completed but contested, union, marriage suggesting an apolitical solution to deeply political problems, harmony found in love and family rather than political debate. However, if the national novel proposed a happy solution to Anglo-Irish tensions, the gothic novel problematised such dreamy, utopian conclusions. In an important intervention into scholarship on the national tale, especially as treated in the fiction of Charles Robert Maturin, Christina Morin has argued that an emphasis on the harmony of the ‘Glorvina solution’ has ignored the tensions underlying the conclusions of such novels. Examining Maturin’s The Wild Irish Boy (1808), for example, she scrutinises the discourse of the Union and the utopianism of the ‘Glorvina solution’. She argues that as a novel in which the gothic mode is invoked, The Wild Irish Boy ‘showcases the ways in which the national tale’s allegorical project refuses closure and instead flirts threateningly with continued conflict’.188 According to Morin, to this quasi-pornographic version of national union-as-marriage Maturin brings an alternative language of gothic nightmare and chaos; rather than

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ending in secure marriages his novels typically gravitate towards female madness and fragmentation. Maturin’s disruption of the marriage plot by madness is anticipated in the incestuous convolutions of The Haunted Priory. Poor Maria suffers a breakdown as she finds her desire for her nephew/son Alphonso increases the more time she spends with him: ‘She instantly screamed aloud – started from the body of her son, and calling out, My husband! my husband!” flew towards Alphonso’ (224). Chaos rather than order, and a language of nightmare rather than dream, characterises Cullen’s treatment of potential marriage solutions to the problems unearthed (literally) in the text. Conjugal love is no real solution for a ‘family’ such as Ireland and Britain. Coming after a century of political debate in which Ireland had been infantilised as the younger sister, or brother, or son or daughter to England, a sexualised ‘union of hearts’ in a companionate marriage would, in any case, be inherently incestuous. The incestuous contortions involved in the relationship between Ireland and England (parent–child, sisters, husband/wife) are simply too close for comfort. The intense family intimacy involved in endogamous love is treated in The Haunted Priory as horrifying and madness-inducing rather than producing harmony and political stability. Here, first cousins marry, mothers passionately kiss their sons, brothers fall in love with their sisters, and the consanguineous relations between all the characters (two of whom are called Isabella, many of them called Alphonso), is a cause of much textual (and, I suspect, readerly) confusion. There is, as one character puts it, a ‘confusion of resemblance’ (238) here, that confounds easy resolutions. For the Marquis of Punalada too, incest is a major cause of his family’s emotional disablement and eventual collapse. His son falls ‘violently’ in love with his own sister ‘and was abandoned enough to make odious proposals to her … the young man, instigated by the devil – abandoning all sense of religion and virtue, and running counter to the course of nature, finding himself unable to prevail on his sister to indulge an incestuous passion for him, determined to enjoy her by force or stratagem’ (145–6). Isidor’s complaint that ‘incestuous love blights my family’ (250) could have been made by any inhabitant of Ireland in the late eighteenth century observing the way AngloIrish relations were described, with family metaphors and analogies being constantly redeployed in even sober political discussions. As Susan M. Kroeg argues, ‘within an Irish context, when more patriarchal metaphors of consanguinity (i.e. Ireland as “sister kingdom”) fail to give way completely to supposedly more egalitarian metaphors of affinity (Union as “marriage” or partnership), incest signals the incomplete paradigm shift’.189 At the end of the century, George Cooper encouraged the prospect of union by insisting

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that it represented the ways in which a benevolent mother loved to embrace her child in all circumstances: ‘A Legislative Union with Great Britain is being proposed. The mother country opens out her arms to embrace and relieve the child which had deserted her.’ The problem here is that if union is also understood to mean marriage, the embracing mother becomes a suffocating lover to her own child.190 In proposing a marriage with ‘sister’/’daughter’ Ireland, England makes affective bonds within the nuclear family so close that rapacious desire replaces affection. The stifling mother Maria, kissing her son/nephew in a frenzy of desire while mistaking him for her dead husband, is a hysterical representation of just how dangerous such incest inflected could become. Incestuous union is clearly a terrifying prospect in The Haunted Priory, and given the novel’s appropriation of the political tropes of the period, the political implications are also clear: a union will not work. If anything, the novel encourages a complete rethinking of the family. As opposed to the favoured nuclear family of the period, the kind of family that Margot Backus characterises as patriarchal, claustrophobic and requiring constant child-sacrifice,191 The Haunted Priory provides attractive representations of the extended, adoptive family, which brings in and absorbs disparate and displaced members. De Rayo ‘adopts’ the children of his kinsmen, and after meeting Fernando, he and Isidor generously offer to take this orphan child into their protection: ‘Let us … call you child: if affection entitles to that appellation, we claim a stronger right than the Marquis … Don Isidor … we must have this youth between us; for as of Alphonso, so of him, neither of us will give up his share’ (192, 194). This is a novel of single fathers and adopted children, where the de Rayo family welcome the abandoned, take in the elderly, protect the widow and orphan. The family model that does not cause madness in the novel is the extended rather than the patriarchal or nuclear family, which has implications for the colonial relations between two countries, one of which wishes to maintain the other in a kind of perpetual subordination whether as child, sister or mother.

Notes 1 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755), 110. 2 I am taking this term from Max Harris’s analysis of Carnival and other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 3 Richard D. Altick’s The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), is the classic account. See 36, 42, 49.

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4 Sandra Cheng, ‘The Cult of the Monstrous: Caricature, Physiognomy, and Monsters in Early Modern Italy’, Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, 1:2 (2012), 202. 5 Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 156. 6 The ‘freak’ is, as leading theorist Rosemarie Garland Thomson explains, a person who is ‘visually different’ from their fellow human beings, someone in possession of an ‘exceptional’ or ‘unexpected’ body, though the term itself was not in general use until the nineteenth century, and this chapter will retain the word ‘monster’ when referring to early modern bodies. ‘Introduction: From Wonder to Error – A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, in Rosemarie Garland Thompson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1. For important early examinations of the freak body and the history of human exhibition, see Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (London: Simon & Schuster, 1979); Altick, Shows of London; Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 7 Fielder, Freaks, 31. 8 See the discussion of the response to Molyneux’s Case, in the Introduction. 9 Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographica Hibernica, 69–72, 72, 73, 74. 10 Ibid., 57. 11 Rhonda Knight, ‘Werewolves, Monsters, and Miracles: Representing Colonial Fantasies in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica’, Studies in Iconography, 22 (2001), 60. 12 Carolyn Walker Bynum, ‘Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf’, in Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 77–109. 13 Amelia Lynn Borrego Sargent, ‘Visions and Revisions: Gerald of Wales, Authorship, and the Construction of Political, Religious, and Legal Geographies in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Britain’, D. Phil. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2011, 49. 14 Ibid., 50. 15 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 26. 16 Thomas Molyneux, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Large Horns Frequently Found under Ground in Ireland, Concluding from Them That the Great American Deer, Call’d a Moose, Was Formerly Common in That Island’, Philosophical Transactions 19 (1695), 506–7. 17 Ibid., 507. 18 William Molyneux to Edmond Halley, 19 June 1686. K. Theodore Hoppen (ed.), The Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1709 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2008), No. 340, vol. 2, 628. 19 Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society, No. 47, and No. 48, vol. 1, 49, 50; ‘A Letter from Mr. St. George Ash, Sec. of the Dublin Society, to one of the Secretaries of the Royal Society; Concerning a Girl in Ireland, Who Has Several

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Horns Growing on Her Body’, Philosophical Transactions 15 (1685), 1202–4. For the image of the ‘Girl with Horns’, see https://pictures.royalsociety.org/ image-rs-15838. 20 Susan Hemmens, ‘The Considerations of the Curious: Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Dublin’, Ph.D. Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2019, 120. 21 Paul Semonin, ‘Monsters in the Marketplace: The Exhibition of Human Oddities in Early Modern England’, in Thompson, Freakery, 70. 22 Anne Wohlcke, ‘Perpetual Fair’: Gender, Disorder, and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth-Century London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 34–5. 23 Todd, Imagining Monsters, 140. As Todd notes, ‘monster shows, particularly as practised at Bartholomew Fair, are omnipresent in Gulliver’s Travels’, 145; see also Aline Mackenzie Taylor, ‘Sights and Monsters and Gulliver’s Voyage to Brobdingnag’, Tulane Studies in English, 7 (1957), 29–82. 24 John Traugott, ‘The Yahoo in the Doll’s House: “Gulliver’s Travels” the Children’s Classic’, Yearbook of English Studies, 14 (1984), 127–50. 25 Thompson, ‘Jonathan Swift’s Childhoods’, 28. 26 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959), 32. 27 Todd, Imagining Monsters, 145. 28 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 97, 101, 102. 29 At times, the novel seems like something out of Tod Browning’s very controversial film Freaks (1932), which is set in an early twentieth-century American freak show with attractions such as the ‘Human Skeleton’, the ‘Human Torso’, and three microcephalics known as ‘pinheads’. In a powerful scene, having married the sideshow midget Hans to get hold of his inheritance, the ‘normal’-bodied trapeze artist Cleopatra is inducted into the family of freaks at the wedding feast, as they all chant ‘one of us’. See the discussion of this film in David Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber & Faber, 2001 revised edition), 145–59; see also Joan Hawkins, ‘“One of Us”: Tod Browning’s Freaks’, in Thompson, Freakery. For the American freak show more generally, see Rachael Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 30 Jonathan Swift to Dean Sterne, [10] June 1708. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), vol. 1, 82–3. For a discussion of monstrous display in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Semonin, ‘Monsters in the Marketplace’, 69–81; John H. Appleby, ‘Human Curiosities and the Royal Society, 1699–1751’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50:1 (1996), 13–27. 31 For a discussion of Peter and other feral children, see Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Picador, 2002). 32 Swift to Thomas Tickell, 16 April, 1726. Correspondence, vol. III, 128. 33 Nash makes the case for Swift’s responsibility for this drawing. Wild Enlightenment, 53. 34 Nash also examines the authorship of these pamphlets, making a good case that Swift was involved in at least one of them. Wild Enlightenment, 48–9.

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35 For a fascinating and incisive treatment of the discursive complexity of the idea of the ‘wild child’ in this period, see Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 11–69. 36 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 139. 37 David Hevey, The Creatures that Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery (New York: Routledge, 1992), 53. 38 Traugott, ‘Yahoo in the Doll’s House’, 135–6. 39 This is not to say that Swift cared a jot for actual children; his comments on them are remarkably blunt and unfeeling. One example provided by Mary Shine Thompson may suffice to demonstrate Swift’s tactlessness. On being asked to be the godfather to the child of his friends, Dorothea Walls and the Archdeacon of Achony, he gave as his answer: ‘No, surely, I will not … and I hope she’ll have no more … I hope it will die the day following the christening.’ The Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), vol. 1, 129. Quoted in Thompson, ‘Jonathan Swift’s Childhoods’, 21. 40 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 265. 41 Ibid., 266. 42 John Gay to Jonathan Swift, 17 November 1726. Correspondence, vol. III, 182. 43 Alice Colombo, ‘Reworkings in the textual history of Gulliver’s Travels: a translational approach’, D. Phil. thesis, University of Portsmouth, 2013, 173ff. For the chapbook afterlife of Gulliver’s Travels, see M. J. Preston, ‘Rethinking Folklore, Rethinking Literature: Looking at Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels as Folktales, A Chapbook-Inspired Inquiry’, in C. L. Preston and M. J. Preston (eds), The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera (London: Routledge, 1995), 19–73. 44 For some useful treatments of Gulliver’s Travels as ‘suited’ to (and adapted for) children, see Lionel Basney, ‘Gulliver and the children’, in Charlotte F. Otten and Gary D. Schmidt (eds), The Voice of the Narrator in Children’s Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), 148–58; Darton, Children’s Books in England, 107; Heinz Kosok, ‘Gulliver’s children: a classic transformed for young readers’, in Hermann J. Real and Heinz J. Vienken (eds), Proceedings of the First Munster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), 135–44; M. Sarah Smedman, ‘Like me, like me not: Gulliver’s Travels as children’s book’, in Frederik N. Smith (ed.), The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 75–100. 45 Jeanne K. Welcher, ed., Gulliveriana VIII: An Annotated List of Gulliveriana, 1721–1800 (Delmar, NY: Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints, 1988), 43. 46 Anonymous, ‘Life of David Manson’, Belfast Monthly Magazine, 6:31 (1811), 126–32. 47 Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 6. 48 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 60. 49 Ibid., 132. 50 Ibid., 289.

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51 On size changes in the novel, see Traugott, ‘Yahoo in the Doll’s House’. Lewis Carroll would later experiment with such shape shifting in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a book actually written specifically for children, though, ironically enough, more appealing to adults. 52 Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, in Cloaths and Furniture of Houses, &c. Utterly Rejecting and Renouning Every Thing wearable that comes from England, in Irish Tracts, 1720–1723, and Sermons, ed. Herbert Davis and Louis Landa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 21. 53 Swift, Drapier’s Letters, 48. 54 See, for example, Warren Montag, The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of Ireland Man (London: Verso, 1994), 130–5, though he does not consider Ireland as a possible subject of the novel. 55 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 294. 56 Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), 88. 57 Kosok, ‘Gulliver’s children’, 141. 58 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 212. 59 Ibid., 266–7. 60 Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 93. 61 Political interest in a possible union of England and Ireland stretches back well into the early years of the eighteenth century. See David Hayton, ‘Ideas of Union in Anglo-Irish Political Discourse, 1692–1720: Meaning and Use’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland (London: Palgrave, 2001), 142–68. 62 See Donald T. Torchiana, ‘Jonathan Swift, the Irish and the Yahoos’, Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975), 205; Anne Cline Kelly, ‘Swift’s Explorations of Slavery in Houyhnhnmland and Ireland’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 91:5 (1976), 846–55; Kiberd, Irish Classics, 97: Rawson, God, Gulliver and Genocide, 96. 63 For valuable examinations of the influence of the chapbook on early children’s literature, see O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, 17–38; Grenby, ‘Before Children’s Literature’. 64 Quoted in Colombo, ‘Reworkings’, 154. 65 See Welcher, Annotated List of Gulliveriana; Smedman, ‘Like Me, Like Me Not’; Preston, ‘Rethinking Folklore’. 66 Quoted in Victor E. Nueburg, Chapbooks: A Guide to Reference Material on English, Scottish and American Chapbook Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Woburn Press, 1972), 19–20. 67 Irish Catholic children were even given chapbooks in schools, if a report into Irish education in 1825 is to be believed! First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry, H.C. 1825, Appendix No. 221, 553–9. 68 Semonin, ‘Monsters in the Marketplace’, 70. 69 Mary J. Couzelis, ‘From Old World to New World: The Migration of the “Jack Tales”’, Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 3:3 (2006): 57–66. For

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the Appalachian tradition of Jack stories, see William McCarthy (ed.), Jack in Two Worlds (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 70 Ruth Bottigheimer, ‘Jack Tales’, in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 266–8. 71 John Newbery, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer (London: John Newbery, 1744), 9–10, 12, 13–20. 72 O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, 22. 73 Early children’s literature is a rich source for stories about evil giants, especially if fairy tales are taken into account. Charles Perrault’s Contes du temps passé (1697) contains the story of Bluebeard, who is depicted as an ogre, and ‘Tom Thumb’ has an ogre as well – again, one overcome by a much smaller figure. For fairy-tale giants, see Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (London: Vintage, 2000), 302–25. 74 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 43–5. See Chapter 2 of the present work. 75 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757), 162–3. 76 Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 32. For an analysis of the ways in which gigantism was understood in this period, see Douthwaite, Wild Girl, 217–22. Douthwaite is mostly interested in the Monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but she draws attention to sideshow giants and especially the possible impact of the Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath, on the late eighteenthcentury discussion of the extraordinary body. 77 Edgeworth, Parent’s Assistant, 11. 78 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, 611; see also Murphy, Maria Edgeworth, 43–70. 79 Giants make a number of spectacular appearances in the Bible. Genesis tells of the days when ‘giants walked the earth’, the children of transgressive unions between human women and angels (Genesis 6:1–4). This passage is echoed by one in the apocryphal book of Enoch (7:2), where these ‘sons of God’ are explicitly described as angels motivated by lust who desert heaven to procreate with attractive human females. These fallen angels are the Grigori, or ‘watchers’, and their offspring giants called ‘nephilim’, meaning ‘to fall’. The Great Flood is sent by God in order to kill the giants who were at war with men and had turned (literally) bloodthirsty, cannibalising humans and ‘sinning’ against birds and animals (though exactly of what this sinning is constituted is unclear) (Enoch 7:4–6). Despite being supposedly wiped out in the Flood, giants still manage to turn up in the postdiluvian world, including in perhaps the best-known story in the Bible concerning a giant, the contest between the young David and the monstrous Goliath in 1 Samuel 17:21–58. Goliath is a soldier in the Philistine army at war with Israel, and he is besting Israelite fighters due to his enormous size (‘six cubits and a span’) and strength. David, despite

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being much smaller, manages to defeat Goliath by using a slingshot, hitting his gigantic enemy between the eyes with a stone, and felling him. This scene has been enormously popular with artists through the centuries, many of them, including Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (Donatello), David (commissioned 1430), and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, David and Goliath (1606), depicting David as a young boy. In biblical tales, giants are creatures to be destroyed by the godly and the righteous; they are representatives of both monstrous inhumanity and the existence of sin and death. 80 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999), 143. 81 Kevin J. Donovan, ‘Jack the Giant Queller: Political Theater in Ascendancy Dublin’, Éire-Ireland, 30:2 (1995), 70–88; Kevin Donovan, ‘The Giant-Queller and the Poor Old Woman: Henry Brooke and the Two Cultures of EighteenthCentury Ireland’, New Hibernia Review, 7:2 (2003), 107–20. It may be also worth pointing out that the origins of the Giant’s Causeway had been the subject of considerable interest in the discussions of the Royal Society in the 1680s, where local legends which associated the unusual rock formation with the work of giants, demons and other marvellous agents, including the Fomorii, were displaced and dismissed in favour of a much more objective and scientific analysis, so that the tensions between the marvellous and the scientific were (again) resolved in favour of a complete marginalisation of tradition and local lore. See Alasdair Kennedy, ‘In Search of the “True Prospect”: Making and Knowing the Giant’s Causeway as a Field Site in the Seventeenth Century’, British Journal for the History of Science, 41:1 (2008), 19–41. 82 Percy Cohen, ‘Psychoanalysis and Cultural Symbolization’, in Mary LeCron Foster and Stanley H. Brandes (eds), Symbol as Sense: New Approaches to the Analysis of Meaning (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 59. 83 Perry Nodleman, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1992), 199. 84 Declan Kavanagh, ‘Queering Eighteenth-Century Irish Writing: Yahoo, Fribble, Freke’, in Moyra Haslett (ed.), Irish Literature in Transition, 1700–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 249. 85 It is worth noting that in later life, Peter was a neighbour of the Edgeworths when they lived in Northchurch in Hertfordshire. See the discussion in Douthwaite, Wild Girl, 25–7. 86 Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern, Savage Indignation: Colonial Discourse from Milton to Swift (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 145; see also, Todd, Imagining Monsters; Jerry White, London in the 18th Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (London: Vintage, 2013), 315–19. 87 The uncanniness of children has made them easy to consider as freaks themselves. See Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago, 1995). Their connection to the giant has also been drawn out by Marina Warner, who points out that ‘ogres not only are large adult humans but have a remarkable affinity with children. Infants are very different from giants but are at the same time represented as rather like

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them. The monsters of popular dread, with their unbridled appetite, insatiable tyranny, unappeasable desire for gratification, are just like … babies … So is it not possible that the ogre contains a concealed portrait of an infant?’ No Go the Bogeyman, 145. 88 Quoted in C. J. S. Thompson, The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (New York: University Books, 1968), 160–1. 89 Thomas Dawkes, Prodigium Willinghamense; or, Authentic Memoirs of the more Remarkable Passages in the life of a boy, born at Willingham, near Cambridge, October 31, 1741; Who, Before he was Three Years old, was Three Feet, Eight Inches high, And had the Marks of Puberty (London: C. Davies, 1747), 3. This pamphlet includes detailed, repeated measurements of Tom’s penis and testes. 90 Ibid., 33. 91 Ibid., 62. 92 Ibid., 8. 93 Ibid., 63. 94 Ibid., 54. 95 Ibid., 55. 96 Ibid., 15. 97 Timothy Darvill, Katherine Barker, Barbara Bender and Ronald Hutton, The Cerne Abbas Giant: An Antiquity on Trial (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1999). 98 Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 41–2. 99 For a stimulating treatment of eighteenth-century Irish giants, especially Charles Byrne, see Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 3–27. 100 Quoted in Douthwaite, Wild Girl, 301. 101 Anonymous, The Belfast News-Letter, and General Advertiser, No. 1602 (Tuesday 4 November 1755), 1. 102 Anonymous, ‘Cork’, Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 10 August 1752, 1; London Daily Advertiser, 4 August 1752, 381. 103 Quoted in Edward Wood, Giants and Dwarfs (London: Bentley, 1868), 172–3. 104 Cited in Youngquist, Monstrosities, 6. 105 Youngquist, Monstrosities, 9. 106 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 362. 107 Youngquist, Monstrosities, 12. 108 Youngquist examines the proper body as a disciplinary system, Monstrosities, xiv–xix. 109 Ibid., xv. 110 O’Malley, Making of the Modern Child, 15. 111 Younquist, Monstrosities, xxiii. 112 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 329–68. 113 Leslie Fiedler, The Tyranny of the Normal (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1996).

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114 See Loeber and Loeber, Guide to Irish Fiction, 338. 115 Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 95–6. 116 Anonymous, Review of The Haunted Priory, by Stephen Cullen, Critical Review, 11 (August 1794), 468. 117 Anonymous, Review of The Haunted Priory, by Stephen Cullen, British Critic, 5 (1795), 299. 118 Anonymous, Review of The Haunted Priory, by Stephen Cullen, Monthly Magazine 15:85 (1833), 125–6. 119 Darryl Jones, ‘The Lair of the White Worm; or, What Became of Bram Stoker’, in Jarlath Killeen (ed.), Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), 164. 120 Franz J. Potter, ‘Introduction’, Stephen Cullen, The Haunted Priory (Crestline, CA: Zittaw Press, 2005), 14. The Zittaw edition is based on the 1832 fourth edition, published by A. K. Newman. 121 Stephen Cullen, The Haunted Priory; or, The Fortunes of the House of Rayo. A Romance (Dublin: William Jones, Dame Street, 1794), 1. All subsequent quotations will be included in parenthesis in the main text. 122 For the gothic as a concoction based on an easy-to-follow recipe, see Anonymous, ‘The Terrorist System of Novel-Writing’ (1797), Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840, ed. Rictor Norton (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 299–303. 123 Peter I of Castile (30 August 1334–23 March 1369). Though Peter was actually murdered in 1369, the novel re-situates his death at the start of the century. Potter discusses Cullen’s very casual attitude to chronology and history in ‘Introduction’, 13–14. 124 Interestingly, Regina Maria Roche also set one of her (weakest) novels in the same period and included some of the same historical figures in the plot: The Houses of Osma and Almeria: Or, The Convent of St. Ildefonso. A Tale (1810). An historical romance with many very strong gothic elements, it is set in and around the Portuguese Interregnum in the fourteenth century. Many of the key historical figures in this period of Portuguese history, including Pedro the Cruel (Peter I of Castile), Ferdinand I, Leonor Teles (the ‘Treacherous’), João Lourenço da Cunha, Henry of Trastámara (Henry II of Castile), John I of Castile and John of Gaunt, play important secondary roles. 125 From March 1366 to April 1367. 126 Baby swaps were quite popular as plot twists in novels of this period. The best-known Irish novel with a baby swap is, of course, Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), but see also Regina Maria Roche, Nocturnal Visit, A Tale (1800); The Houses of Osma and Almeria (1810); and The Monastery of St Columb; or, The Atonement (1813). 127 It really is dangerous to be a wife in this novel. 128 Charles Robert Maturin would re-use this idea in The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio: A Romance (1807).

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129 See Bartlett, Fall and Rise, 10–11; T. W. Moody, ‘Introduction’, A New History of Ireland, vol. 3, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), xxxviii–xl; J. G. Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 (London: Faber, 1956), 193–6. 130 ‘[James] was willing to question the entire moral basis for the Cromwellian and Restoration land settlements. This put the new propriety at risk of annihilation.’ Karl S. Bottigheimer, ‘The Glorious Revolution and Ireland’, in Lois Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 240. According to Louis Cullen, Catholics ‘made good’ during the reign of James. ‘Economic Trends, 1660–1691’, A New History of Ireland, vol. 3, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 403–7. See also David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), 45. 131 Northrop Frye uses the term ‘symbolic spread’ to describe the ways in which ‘a work of literature [expands] into insights and experiences beyond itself’, including the political and national discourses operating at the time the work is produced. The Secular Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 59. It is a somewhat controversial term in Irish gothic studies. 132 John Talbot Dillon, The History of the Reign of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile and Leon (London: W. Richardson at the Royal-Exchange, 1788), vol. 1, 36, 252. 133 John Talbot Dillon, Letters from an English Traveller in Spain, in 1778 (London: Baldwin, 1781), 299. 134 John Talbot Dillon, Travels through Spain, with a View to Illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom (Dublin: S. Price & Co., 1781), 179. 135 It is worth pointing out, however, that as a text with a character called Alphonso, and a focus on the importance of the male family line, The Haunted Priory is also in dialogue with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), in which Alfonso the Good’s heirs have been usurped by Manfred, the death of whose only son Conrad precipitates the events of the plot. 136 Quoted in Otis H. Green, ‘Sir John Talbot Dillon and his Letters on Spanish Literature’, Hispanic Review, 41 (1973), 253. Green, however, thinks the obituary refers to the John Talbot Dillon who was the author of the travel books on Spain, rather than the politician (or that they are one and the same person). 137 For a brief discussion, see Fletcher, Growing up in England, 14–15. 138 ‘Imagined’ is the right word here, as Rousseau admits in Émile that he would not himself have tried to act as a tutor to a ‘real’ child, and preferred an ‘imaginary pupil’. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 50–1. 139 Fiedler, Freaks, 98. 140 Kenneth R. Dutton, The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Physical Development (London: Cassell, 1995), 67. By the time The Haunted Priory was published, Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s attempt to raise a son by adopting

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Rousseau’s methodology had proved a failure. Richard Edgeworth, born in 1764, was what his father calls a ‘bold, free, fearless, generous’ young boy, possessing a ‘ready and keen use of all his senses’, with ‘all the virtues of a child bred in the hut of a savage’, but he never integrated into society very successfully, lacking in self-control: ‘Whatever regarded the health, strength, and agility of my son, had amply justified the system of my master; but I found myself entangled in difficulties with regard to my child’s mind and temper.’ Edgeworth, Memoirs, I, 179, 178, 273. The disastrous impact of Rousseau’s theories when put into practice is behind the anti-Rousseauian Practical Education, a collaborative enterprise by both Maria Edgeworth and her father, published in 1798, and also a subplot in Belinda (1801), which involves the character Clarence Hervey’s attempt to raise an orphan girl he has adopted by preserving her as nature intended and keeping her out of society and away from rational education. For the relationship between Belinda and Practical Education, see Julia Douthwaite, ‘Experimental Child-Rearing after Rousseau: Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education and Belinda’, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies, 2:2 (1997), 35–56. 141 Cohen, Of Giants, xii, xv. 142 Diane Long Hoeveler points out that ‘Gothic bluebooks and chapbooks have been something of the stepchild of gothic scholarship, most frequently ignored because of their derivative nature, as well as their lack of artistic sophistication, depth, or significance.’ Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 198. Some bluebooks them have now been digitised and are available on Marquette’s Gothic Archive: https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_gothic. See also Angela Koch, ‘Gothic Bluebooks in the Princely Library of Corvey and Beyond’, Cardiff Corvey, Reading the Romantic Text, 9 (December 2002), 1–25. 143 Anonymous, The Wandering Spirit; or, Memoirs of the House of Morno, Appendix A, to Stephen Cullen, The Haunted Priory, ed., Franz J. Potter (Crestline, CA: Zittaw Press, 2005), 154. 144 Nussbaum, Limits of the Human, 41–2. 145 Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (London: Printed for S. Hooper, 1787), [63]. 146 Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Irish Poetry, Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies, and Songs, translated into English Verse (Dublin: Printed for George Bonham, 1789), vii. 147 Mary Louise O’Donnell, Ireland’s Harp: The Shaping of Irish Identity, c. 1770–1880 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2014), 30. 148 For an analysis of the discourse of finality and extinction that circled discussion of the bards in this period, see Fiona Stafford, ‘The Last Bards’, in The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 83–108. She argues that Carolan is the ‘climax and culmination’ of the last of the bard’ tradition, ‘rather than the decaying remains’ (87). 149 Thomas Campbell, Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, in a Series of Letters to John Watkinson, M.D. (London: Printed for W. Strahan, 1777), 8.

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150 O’Donnell, Ireland’s Harp, 32. See also Emily Cullen, ‘Carolan, bardic discourses and the Irish harping tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries’, Amhráin Chearbhalláin/The Poems of Carolan: Reassessments, ed. Liam Ó Murchú (London: Irish Texts Society, 2007), 12–29. Cullen notes that the term ‘bard’ itself is misleading and slippery when used, and is more closely associated historically with the writing of New English colonists than the native musicians themselves (13). 151 Matthew Pilkington, The Progress of Music in Ireland, reprinted in Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1730), 23. 152 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1987), 20. 153 R. V. Comerford, Ireland: Inventing the Nation (London: Hodder Arnold, 2003), 182. 154 Barra Boydell, ‘The United Irishmen, Music, Harps, and National Identity’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 13 (1998), 46. 155 Thomas Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards. Interspersed with Anecdotes of, and Occasional Observations on, the Music of Ireland. Also, an Historical and Descriptive Account of the Musical Instruments of the Ancient Irish (Dublin: Printed by Luke White, 1786), 60–2, 71–80. 156 Comerford, Ireland, 182, 183. 157 For this ‘re-stringing’, see S. C. Lanier, ‘“It is new-strung and shan’t be heard”: Nationalism and memory in the Irish harp tradition’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 8 (1999), 1–26. 158 Mary Helen Thuente, The Harp Re-strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994). In a series of booklets popularly known as Paddy’s Resource, or The Harp of Ireland, the first of which appeared in 1795, the United Irishmen preached a new Ireland where sectarian difference could be set aside. These publications came after the appearance of The Haunted Priory, so are not considered here. 159 Quoted in Boydell, ‘United Irishmen’, 47, and also in Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 10. For the growth of interest in the harp and its iconographic importance, see Barra Boydell, ‘The iconography of the Irish harp as a national symbol’, in P. F. Devine and Harry White (eds), Irish Musical Studies 5: The Maynooth International Musicological Conference, 1995: Selected Proceedings (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), vol. 2, 131–45; Tom Dunne, ‘Ireland’s “wild harp”: A Contested Symbol’, in William Laffan and Christopher Monkhouse (eds), Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1600–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 118–25 and ‘The Irish Harp: Political Symbolism and Romantic Revival, 1534–1854’, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, 17 (2014), 14–39. 160 Lanier, ‘“It is new strung and shan’t be heard”’, 8–10. 161 On the connection between radical politics and harps, see Boydell, ‘United Irishmen’, 44–51. 162 Boydell, ‘United Irishmen’, 48; Thuente, Harp Re-Strung, 15, 41.

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163 May McCann, ‘Music and Politics in Ireland: The Specificity of the Folk Revival in Belfast’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 4, Special Issue: Presented to Peter Cooke (1995), 54–5. 164 Tom Garvin, The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1981), 17. 165 Luke Gibbons, ‘From Ossian to O’Carolan: the Bard as Separatist Symbol’, in Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill (eds), From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 231. 166 Declan Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, in The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 70–1. 167 Spenser, A View, 51. 168 Walker, Historical Memoirs, 136. 169 Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, 65. 170 Or, a Tale, alas! too long. 171 Stephen Cullen, The Castle of Inchvally: A Tale – alas! too true (London: John Bell, 1796). This novel is distinguished by its long explanations of Irish social life for the benefit of an English readership, and use of footnotes to clarify historical particularities (such as the meaning of the term ‘discoverer’), or establish real-life analogies of the novel’s events in a way which anticipates Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. 172 O’Donnell, Ireland’s Harp, 9. 173 For Roche, see Loeber and Loeber, Guide to Irish Fiction, 1133–4; Christina Morin, The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 154–95. 174 Regina Maria Roche, The Children of the Abbey, a Tale (London: William Lane for the Minerva Press, 1796), vol. 1, 9, 10. 175 Ibid., vol. 1, 1–2. 176 Ibid., vol. 2, 332. 177 Ibid., vol. 4, 136. 178 For a comprehensive examination of the harp in Irish history and politics, see O’Donnell, Ireland’s Harp. 179 General Charles Vallancey, a prominent antiquarian, best known for his Vindication of the Ancient Kingdom of Ireland (1786). 180 [Charles Burney], ‘Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards’, Monthly Review (1787), 433, 438–9. Harry White discusses this review in detail in ‘Carolan and the Dislocation of Music in Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/ Iris an dá chultúr, 4 (1989), 55–64. 181 Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 182 George Haggerty, ‘Mothers and Other Lovers: Gothic Fiction and Erotic Loss’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16:2 (2004), 157. 183 Even from the brief plot summary it should be obvious that Cullen’s depiction of Maria’s insane desire for her son in The Haunted Priory probably draws on Walpole’s extreme version of the incest plot. 184 See Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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2004), 375–6. Perry is most concerned with the ‘girl singled out, against her will, in her own domestic space, for the sexual attentions of a father, an uncle, or a brother’, rather than, as is the case here, the impact of incestuous desire on a boy, Alphonso, though Cullen also depicts incest from the female perspective in the family of Punalada. 185 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, 177. 186 For the best articulation of this view, see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 137. 187 For the classic argument, see Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Versus Legitimacy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40:1 (1985), 10. 188 Christina Morin, Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 9. 189 Susan M. Kroeg, ‘“So near to us as a Sister”: Incestuous Unions in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee’, in David A. Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury (eds), Anglo-Irish Identities, 1571–1845 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 221–2. 190 George Cooper, Letters of the Irish Nation: Written during a visit to that Kingdom, in the autumn of the Year 1799 (1800), 170, quoted in Anne Markey, ‘Introduction’, in Children’s Fiction, 1765–1808, ed. Anne Markey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 28–9. 191 Backus, Gothic Family Romance.

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Conclusion

Childhood began the seventeenth century theologically defined by the farreaching effects of original sin. For the ministers of the Irish Church, children were little minions of malevolence who needed to be morally sterilised before being permitted to full membership of adult society. The guileless appearance of a child, warned James Ussher, could not be trusted. Children were the equivalent of a ‘young Serpent’ or a wolf pup, both of which look relatively harmless, but ‘are notwithstanding worthy to die, because there are principles of hurtfulnesse and poysonsomnesse in them’.1 The sheer speed of the transformation in attitude and understanding of childhood following the early decades of the seventeenth century can hardly be overstated. Catechisms continued to stress the debilitating effects of total depravity. A Scriptural Exposition of the Church Catechism, Containing the Young Christian’s Account of the Doctrines and Duties of his Religion (1738), for example, affirms that ‘in our natural state we are corrupted and defiled with Sin; and being so, are under the anger and liable to the Vengeance of God’.2 Beyond these conventional repetitions of the formula, however, a different story was emerging. By the mid-eighteenth century, this ‘child’ had become a ‘dear, dear’ object of pleasure, joy and affection. Britain had entered what the historian J. H. Plumb calls a ‘new world’ of childhood, with an ever-expanding material culture which included a variety of toys and books written with a child audience in mind, as well as a growing network of educational establishments both private- and state-funded, extending the duration and intensity of childhood itself in a novel and exciting way.3 For Irish Anglicans, the presence of a community repeatedly configured as childlike and child-ish meant that much of the maleficence ascribed to children in general could be directed more specifically at their Catholic neighbours and enemies, a projection facilitated by the horrific events of the 1641 Rebellion, during which evil Catholic children were reported to be stalking the land, committing bloody atrocities and fully living up to their demonic reputation. In contrast with these fearful devils, the Irish

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Conclusion 241 Anglican child appeared extremely vulnerable and in need of protection, eventually becoming a subject of pleasure and a source of potential happiness for the world around her. In the 1840s, Alicia Synge is being described as her father’s ‘dearest Dear child’,4 and by the time Practical Education is published in 1798, the Edgeworths are insisting that ‘Falsehood, caprice, obstinacy, revenge, and all the train of vices’ are not inherent in children, as had been traditionally understood, but instead ‘are the consequences of mistake or neglected education’.5 We have moved from inherent vice to dysfunctional parenting as the cause of childhood badness over the course of a century and a half. Genuinely troublesome children had not gone away, of course, and Ireland had the unhappy misfortune to begin and end the period covered by this book being considered as the habitation of many ferocious and childlike monsters waiting for an opportunity to exact a terrible revenge for their subordinate position in this world through violent political action. With Ireland repeatedly being represented as the younger, subordinate brother or sister to a more powerful and supposedly mature sibling, Irish political thinkers like William Molyneux would spend much time unsuccessfully attempting to reject the infantilising label and claim adult independence. By the end of the eighteenth century, some thinkers at least were interested in experimenting with what a complete embrace of a child status might achieve. Given that the discourse of Romanticism was transfiguring the child into a simultaneously innocent and politically transformative agent, cultural nationalist writing which fetishised the allegorised body of the youth into a figure of Ireland and national change were clearly on to something. Whether these were ‘children of the abbey’, or gigantically impressive specimens of virile boy masculinity, they looked to the future as well as encapsulating the past. The political excitement of the 1790s, though, translated into what was quickly read as a gothic repetition of 1641. The rebellion which eventually broke out in 1798 produced another account of the horrors of childhood in the form of Sir Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1802), a kind of fan fiction rehearsal of Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion, even to the extent of including testimony that Protestant children were butchered before their parents’ eyes.6 Images of Ireland, too, were transformed in the two centuries covered by this book. The lurid broadsheet, A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries (1647), with its provocative woodcut of ‘Ireland’s Lamentation’, provides an extraordinarily emotive representation of the beleaguered Protestant community of Ireland as a weeping mother surveying the dismembered bodies of her massacred children lying at her feet. Evocative quotations from the Book of Lamentations float around the body of the allegorised Protestant Ireland, who channels the words of the prophet Jeremiah (to

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242 Conclusion whose authorship Lamentations has traditionally been ascribed): ‘Mine eyes do fail with tears because the children and sucklings swoon on the streets.’ 7 An arresting and even incendiary image, ‘Ireland’s Lamentation’ is perhaps most powerful in communicating a sense that the Protestants in Ireland, perhaps because of the traumatic experiences of 1641, constituted not just a coherent community, but perhaps even a kind of nation, and one that could be embodied in a single figure, the bereft and weeping mother, the Mater Dolorosa, an image taken from the popular medieval Catholic representation of Mary as the Mother of Sorrows, though given a Protestant and Irish inflection.8 The image of Protestant Ireland as a mother also draws on the representation of Ireland itself as female in the tradition of the ‘sovereignty goddess’, a tradition that stretches from the pre-Christian period right up to the figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan in the nationalist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9 In this tradition, Ireland is often envisioned as fiercely maternal even as she sends her sons out to seek revenge for the wrongs that have been done to her. The depiction of Ireland as ‘wife’ to ‘husband’ England has received a great deal of attention from post-colonial thinkers,10 and generated intense discussion from feminist literary historians and critics, who have contended that the conflation of mother/woman and nation poses considerable political challenges for real women in real Ireland.11 A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries certainly domesticates the 1641 Rebellion in a radical way, suggesting that, while father and protector England was absent or distracted, Irish Catholic interlopers have breached the sanctity of the home. As an allegory of the rising, ‘Irelands Lamentation’ expands the spiritualised Protestant household of Reform theology outwards to incorporate the political relationship between Ireland and England. All the murdered Protestants in Ireland, no matter what age or rank, are depicted as the children of one mother, ‘Ireland’, who has been left mourning and weeping the loss of her family. Anglo-Irish politics are redefined by the politics of the family. Mother Ireland never went away. On the morning of Easter Monday, 1916, Patrick Pearse stood in front of the General Post Office in Dublin, and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Although it was addressed to ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’ – a putative community of adults – the Proclamation consistently configured these citizens of the nascent Republic as ‘children’ called to bear arms to free their suffering mother nation from the clutches of an oppressor. In return for their willing sacrifice in this fight against the enemy (a kind of monstrous father), the provisional government, on behalf of Mother Ireland, promised to transform existing domestic conditions from neglect and terror under paternal colonial rule to harmony and peace under the nurturing mother who would ‘cherish all of the children of the nation equally’.12

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Conclusion 243 The language of domesticity in which the Proclamation is couched was very appropriate for the independence movement which was revealing its hand in 1916. In the first place, colonial relations between Ireland and England had long been described using images pertaining to the domestic sphere, whether relating to conjugality or paternity. In Pearse’s Proclamation of 1916, the declaration of ‘independence’ from colonial rule may initially appear to signal that (like Molyneux) nationalists rejected the treatment of the Irish nation as childlike, and an assertion that the nation was ready to take on the ‘adult’ responsibilities of self-governance, no longer in need of either paternal protection or discipline. However, on the contrary, the Proclamation does not insist that Ireland has reached the maturity of adulthood, but rather embraces the notion that the Irish will remain children forever, though free from the control of an abusive parent; like children abused by their father, the Irish simply want the authoritarian father to leave the house and Mother Ireland to be granted full custody. The language of the Proclamation embraces the positive image of the child, and Ireland represented as a representative of the idealised Victorian child with which Pearse grew up, a Celtic Peter Pan. Pearse embraces the version of the child and childlikeness also found in Lady Jane Wilde’s Ancient Legends (1887), where she claimed that ‘[The mythopoetic faculty] only exists now, naturally and instinctively, in children, poets, and childlike races, like the Irish – simple, joyous, reverent, and unlettered, and who have remained unchanged for centuries, walled round … from the rest of Europe.’ 13 Pearse was infatuated with Peter Pan, but combined him with the boy-warrior Cúchulainn from the Irish myths, to imagine an eternally innocent yet militaristic boyhood under the loving care of benign Mother Ireland as the future for ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’, a vision he partly implemented in his school for boys, St Enda’s.14 The fight for Irish freedom would not, then, be the equivalent of a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood since the Irish would remain children should the rebellion be successful; instead it was to be a journey from an abusive home under a malevolent foreign paternal authority, to a cosy and nurturing Tír na nÓg domesticity under the mother. Pearse’s was the optimistic embrace of a mystical version of the child, but as the negative, demonic understanding of the child still circulated and at times took precedence over any innocent or mystical incarnation. Richard Haslam quotes The Times, from 1846, which, in the midst of a devastating Famine, described the Irish as ‘a people who in the mass are almost uncivilized. Like children they require governing with the hand of power. They require authority, and will bear it. A more enlightened community would not require it and would not bear it.’ 15 The further away from civilisation, the closer to a more ‘natural’, and therefore profoundly ambiguous state of childlike or childish existence. Future work on the image of the child in Irish discourse

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244 Conclusion will need to remain alert to the ‘Manichaean diptych’ of evil and innocence, the demonic and the angelic.16

Notes 1 Ussher, A Body of Divinitie, 145, 143. 2 Joseph Harrison, A Scriptural Exposition of the Church Catechism, Containing the young Christian’s account of the doctrines and duties of his religion (Dublin: printed for Sylvanus Pepyat, 1738), 140. 3 Plumb, ‘New World of Children’. 4 Edward to Alicia Synge, July 1746. Synge Letters, 6. 5 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, vol. I, 323. 6 Sir Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, from the Arrival of the English (2nd edition; Dublin: for John Milliken, 1802), 74, 134, 428, 492. 7 Anonymous, A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries. 8 Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 125–38. 9 For this tradition, see G. F. Dalton, ‘The Tradition of Blood-Sacrifice to the Goddess Eire’, Studies, 63 (Winter 1974), 343–52; Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Motherland’, in Ireland’s Field Day (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 59–80. 10 C. L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). 11 Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995); Edna Longley, From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands (Dublin: Attic Press, LIP, 1990); Belinda Loftus, Mirrors: William III and Mother Ireland (Belfast: Sasta, 1992). 12 ‘Proclamation of the Republic’ (1916), Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), vol. 3, 733–4. 13 Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland; with Sketches of the Irish Past, to which is appended a chapter on ‘the ancient races of Ireland’, by the late Sir William Wilde (London: Ward & Downey, 1887), 7. 14 See Elaine Sisson, ‘Masculinity and Citizenship: Boyhood and Nationhood at St. Enda’s’, in The Life and After-Life of P.H. Pearse, ed. R. Higgins and R. Ui Chollatain (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 208–19. 15 Richard Haslam, ‘“A Race Bashed in the Face”: Imagining Ireland as a Damaged Child’, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4:1 (1999), n.p., http:// english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v4i1/hasla.htm. 16 Warner, ‘Little Angels, Little Devils’, 33–48.

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246 Bibliography [Allestree, Richard Allestree], The Whole Duty of Man, Laid Down in a Plain and Familiar Way for the Use of All, but especially the Meanest Reader (Dublin: Printer for Samuel Fairbrother, 1717). Anonymous, A Bloody battell or The rebels overthrow, and Protestants victorie. Being a true relation of a great skirmish fought betweene Sir Thomas Moore of the Protestant party, and Maqueres the generall of the rebels, on the 2. day of Decemb. 1641. Also, of a cruell and detestable murther committed by 7. soldiers on the body of Mr. Atkins, his wife, and young child. In what a horrid manner they ript up his wives wombe being great with child, and afterward burnt her and her child in most lamentable manner (London: Printed for John Greensmith, 1641). Anonymous, A Legacy for Children: being some of the last expressions and dying sayings of Hannah Hill, Junr. Of the City of Philadelphia, in the Province of Pensylvania, in America: Aged Eleven Years and near Three Months (Dublin: Skinner Row, 1719). Anonymous, An Inquiry into some of the Causes of the Ill Situation of the Affairs of Ireland (Dublin: Printed by George Grierson, 1731). Anonymous, A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries: Presented in a brief Recitement to the eyes and hearts of all her commiserating friends in England and Scotland, as one maine Motive to move their Christian courage for her assistance, when we consider there hath been at the least two hundred thousand Protestants slain and most inhumanely massacred by the barbarous and blood-thirsty Rebels, putting them to the most cruell kinds of death they could invent, as you may read by this following Relation. Diligently collected from the most certain Intelligence (London: Printed for J. H., 1647). Anonymous, A Weeks Preparation Towards a Worthy Receiving of the Lord’s Supper, after the Warning of the Church for the Celebration of the Holy Communion: In Two Parts. In Meditations & Prayers for Morning and Evening, for Every Day in the Week. Also some Meditations to Live Well, after the Receiving the Holy Sacrament Supper (Dublin: Printed at the back of Dick’s Coffee-House in Skinner-Row, 1701). Anonymous, Bloody Newes from Ireland, or the barbarous Crueltie By the Papists used in that kingdome. By putting men to the sword, deflowring women, and dragging them up and downe the streets, and cruelly murdering them, and thrusting their speeres through their little infants before their eyes, and carrying them up and downe on pike-points, in great reproach, and hanging mens quarters on their gates in the street, at Armagh, Logall, at the Fort of Lease, and divers other places in Ireland. As also, the bloudy acts of Lord Mack-queere their ri[n]g-leader, and cousin to that arch-rebell Mack-queere Generall to Tyron, in the time of Queene Elizabeth of never dying memory (London: Printed for Marke Rookes, 161). Anonymous, Considerations on Several Proposals for Preventing the Exportation of Wool. With Heads of a Scheme for that Purpose: And Also Some Short Answers to Parts of the Remarks on Mr. Webber’s Scheme, and the Draper’s Pamphlet (London: Printed for A. Dodd, 1741). Anonymous, ‘Cork’, Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 10 August 1752, 1.

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Bibliography 247 Anonymous, Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, Appetites and Affections, Etc., Peculiar to Children (London: R. Griffith, 1748). Anonymous, ‘Life of David Manson’, Belfast Monthly Magazine, 6:31 (1811), 126–32. Anonymous, ‘Proclamation of the Republic’ (1916), Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), vol. 3. Anonymous, ‘Review of Lockman’, Monthly Review, 22 (June 1760), 523. Anonymous, ‘Review of The Haunted Priory’, by Stephen Cullen, British Critic, 5 (1795), 299. Anonymous, Review of The Haunted Priory, by Stephen Cullen, Monthly Magazine, 15:85 (1833), 125–6. Anonymous, Strange Newes of a Prodigious Monster, borne in the Township of Adlington in the Parish of Standish in the Countie of Lancaster, the 17 day of Aprill last, 1613. Testified by the Reverend Divine Mr. W. Leigh, Bachelor of Divinitie, and Preacher of Gods word at Standish aforesaid (London: Printed by I.P. for S.M, 1613). Anonymous, The ABC with the Catechism (Dublin, 1695). Anonymous, The Belfast News-Letter, and General Advertiser, No. 1602 (Tuesday 4 November 1755). Anonymous, The Church Catechism Broke into Short Questions: To which is added, an Explanation of some Words, for the easier Understanding of it. Together with Prayers for the Use of the Charity-Schools (Dublin: re-printed by and for S. Hyde, 1732). Anonymous, The Church Catechism Explain’d and Prov’d by Apt Texts of Scripture. Divided into XXVI parts (Dublin: Printed by Joseph Ray, 1699). Anonymous, ‘The Terrorist System of Novel-Writing’ (1797), in Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840, ed. Rictor Norton (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 299–303. Anonymous, The Wandering Spirit; or, Memoirs of the House of Morno, Appendix A, to Stephen Cullen, The Haunted Priory, ed., Franz J. Potter (Crestline, CA: Zittaw Press, 2005). Astruc, Jean, A General and Compleat Treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Children, from Their Birth to the Age of Fifteen. With Particular Instructions to ender Mothers, prudent Midwives, and careful Nurses. The whole made Familiar to every Capacity (London: Printed for John Nourse, 1746). Atwood, William, The History, and Reasons, of the Dependency of Ireland upon the Imperial Crown of the Kingdom of England. Rectifying Mr. Molineux’s State of The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England (London: Printed for Dan. Brown, 1698). Baxter, Richard, Additions to the poetical fragments of Rich. Baxter written for himself and communicated to such as are more for serious verse than smooth (London: Printed for B. Simmons, 1683). ——, A Treatise of Conversion. Preached, and now published for the use of those that are strangers to a true conversion, especially the grossly ignorant and ungodly (London: Printed by R. White, for Nevill Simmons, 1657).

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248 Bibliography ——, ‘The Duties of Parents for their Children’, A Christian directory, or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience. Directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith; how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties; how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortifie every sin. In four parts (London: Printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673). Bradley, Richard, A Survey of the Ancient Husbandry and Gardening, Collected from Cato, Varro, Columella, Virgil, and others the most eminent writers among the Greeks and Romans. Wherein many of the most difficult Passages in those Authors are explain’d, and the whole render’d familiar to our Climate; with a Variety of new Experiments, Adorn’d with Cuts (London: Printed for B. Motte, 1725). Brooke, Charlotte, Reliques of Irish Poetry, Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies, and Songs, translated into English Verse (Dublin: Printed for George Bonham, 1789). Browne, Sir Thomas, Pseudodoxia epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757). [Burney, Charles], ‘Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards’, Monthly Review, 77 (1787), 425–39. Cadogan, William, An Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children, from Their Birth to Three Years of Age (London: Printed for J. Roberts, 1748). Campbell, Thomas, Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, in a Series of Letters to John Watkinson, M.D. (London: Printed for W. Strahan, 1777). Cary, John, A Vindication of the Parliament of England: in answer to a book, written by William Molyneux (1698). Chaigneau, William, The History of Jack Connor, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013). [Clement, Simon], An Answer to Mr. Molyneux, His case of Ireland’s being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated: and His Dangerous Notion of Ireland’s being under no Subordination to the Parliamentary Authority of England Refuted; by Reasoning from his own Arguments and Authorities (London: Richard Parker, 1698). Cooper, George, Letters of the Irish Nation: Written during a visit to that Kingdom, in the autumn of the Year 1799 (London: J. Davis for J. White, 1800). Cox, Sir Richard, Hibernia Anglicana, or, The History of Ireland, from the Conquest thereof by the English, to this present time with an introductory discourse touching the ancient state of that kingdom and a new and exact map of the same (London: printed by H. Clark, for Joseph Watts, 1689–90). [Cranford, James], The Teares of Ireland Wherein is lively presented as in a Map, a List of the unheard off Cruelties and perfidious Treacheries of blood-thirsty Jesuits and the Popish Faction. As a warning piece to her Sister Nations to prevent the like miseries, as are now acted on the Stage of this fresh bleeding Nation. Reported by Gentlemen of good Credit living there, but forced to flie for their lives, as Jobs Messengers, to tell us what they have heard and seene with their eyes, illustrated by pictures. Fit to be reserved by all true Protestants

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Bibliography 249 as a monument of their perpetuall reproach and ignominy, and to the spirits of Protestants against such bloudy villains (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642). Cullen, Stephen, The Castle of Inchvally: A Tale – alas! too true (London: John Bell, 1796). Cullen, Stephen, The Haunted Priory; or, The Fortunes of the House of Rayo. A Romance (Dublin: William Jones, Dame Street, 1794). Cullen, Stephen, The Haunted Priory; or, The Fortunes of the House of Rayo. A Romance (1794; Crestline, CA: Zittaw Press, 2005). Davenant, Charles, An Essay Upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade. Treating of these Heads, viz. Of the People of England. Of the Land of England, and its Product. Of our Payments to the Publick, and in what manner the Ballance of Trade may be thereby affected. That a Country cannot increase in Wealth and Power but by private Men doing their Duty to the Publick, and but by a steady Course of Honesty and Wisdom, in such as are trusted with the Administration of Affairs (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1699). Davies, Sir John, A True Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England (London: Printed by John Jaggard, Temple Bar, 1612). Dawkes, Thomas, Prodigium Willinghamense; or, Authentic Memoirs of the more Remarkable Passages in the life of a boy, born at Willingham, near Cambridge, October 31, 1741; Who, Before he was Three Years old, was Three Feet, Eight Inches high, And had the Marks of Puberty (London: C. Davies, 1747). Defoe, Daniel, The Family Instructor. In Three Parts. With a Recommendatory Letter by the Reverend Mr. S. Wright (London: Published by Emanuel Matthews, 1715). Dillon, John Talbot, Letters from an English Traveller in Spain, in 1778 (London: Baldwin, 1781). ——, The History of the Reign of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile and Leon (London: W. Richardson at the Royal-Exchange, 1788). ——, Travels through Spain, with a View to Illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom (Dublin: S. Price & Co., 1781). Downes, Henry, A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish Church of St. Warbrough, Dublin, May, the 7th 1721. At the Annual Meeting of the Children Educated in The Charity-Schools in Dublin (Dublin: Printed for John Hyde, 1721). Earle, John, Micro-cosmographie. Or, A Peece of the World Discovered; In Essayes and Characters (London: Printed by William Stansby, for Edward Blout, 1628). Edgeworth, Maria, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin, 1992). Edgeworth, Maria, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children, Part I (2nd Edition; London: J. Johnson, 1796). Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1798). Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. Begun by Himself and Concluded by his Daughter Maria Edgeworth (London: Printed for R. Hunter, 1820).

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250 Bibliography Fielding, Henry, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (Dublin: Printed by S. Powell, for G. Ewing, and W. Smith, and G. Faulkner, 1742). First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry, H.C. 1825, Appendix No. 221, 553–9. Flemming, John, The Country Gentleman’s Letter to the Citizens of Dublin (Dublin: James Esdall, 1749). Giraldus Cambrensis [Gerald of Wales], Topographica Hibernica [The Topography of Ireland], trans. John J. O’Meara (Portlaoise: Dolmen Press, 1982). Gouge, William, A Short Catechisme, wherein are briefly laid down the fundamental Pronciples of the Christian religion (London: John Beale, 1615). Grose, Francis, A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (London: Printed for S. Hooper, 1787). Hampton, Christopher, An inquisition of the true church, and those that revolt from it. Being a sermon pronounced at the second session of the Parliament (Dublin: Printed by the Society of Stationers, 1622). ——, The threefold state of man upon earth; conteyning, The glorie of his Creation, The miserie of his Fall, And The sweete mysterie of his Reparation. Discussed in three severall sermons at the Court (Dublin: Printed by the Societie of Stationers, 1620). Harrison, Joseph, A Scriptural Exposition of the Church Catechism; Containing The young Christian’s Account of the Doctrines and Duties of his Religion, and of those Divine Authorities, upon which he builds his Faith and Practice (Dublin: Printed by Sylvanus Pepyat, 1738, fourth edition). Hoppen, K. Theodore (ed.), The Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1709 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2008), 2 vols. Janeway, James, A Token for Children: Being An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children (1671/2; London: Printed for Dorman Newman, 1676). Jerome, Stephen, Irelands iubilee, or ioyes Io-pæan, for Prince Charles his welcome home: With the blessings of great Brittaine, her Dangers, Deliverances, Dignities from God, and Duties to God, pressed and expressed. More particularly, Talloughs Triumphals, with the Congratulations of the adjoyning English Plantations in the province of Munster in Ireland, for the preservation of their Mother England in the powder Treason, and the reduction of their Prince from Spaine, solemnized (as by other festivities) by publike Sermons, on the feastes on Simon & Iude the 5. of November last, Anno Domini. 1623 (Dublin: Printed for the Societe of Stationers, 1624). ——, The haughty heart humbled: or, The penitents practice: In the regall patterne of King Ezekiah. Directory and consolatory to all the mourners in Sion, to sow in Teares, and to reape in Joy (London: Richard More, 1628). Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755). Jones, Henry, A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkeable Passages concerning the Church and Kingdome of Ireland, Recommended by Letters from the Right Honourable the Lords Justices, and Counsell of Ireland, and presented by Henry

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Bibliography 251 Jones Doctor in Divinity, and agent for the ministers of the Gospel in that kingdom, to the Honourable House of Commons in England (London: Printed for Godfrey Emerson, and William Bladen, 1642). Leslie, Charles, Considerations of Importance to Ireland: In a Letter to a member of parliament there; upon occasion of Mr. Molyneaux’s late book (1698). Leslie, Henry, A sermon preached before his Maiesty at Windsore, the 19. of Iuly. 1625 (Oxford: Printed by I[ohn] L[itchfield] and W[illiam] T[urner] for William Turner, 1625). ——, A sermon preached before His Maiesty at Wokin, on Tuesday the xxviij. of August. 1627 (London: H. L. for James Boler, 1627). ——, A warning for Israel, in a sermon preached at Christ-Church, in Dublin, the 30. of October, 1625 (Dublin: Societie of Stationers, 1625). Locke, John, ‘An Essay on Toleration’, in Mark Goldie (ed.), Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134–59. Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Dublin: Will Forrest in Hoey’s Alley, 1728). [Locke, John], Two Treatises of Government: In the former, The false Principles, and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, And his Followers are Detected and Overthrown. The latter is an Essay concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government. (London: Printed for Awnsham Churchill, 1689, dated 1690). Lockman, John, A History of the Cruel Sufferings of the Protestants, and others, by Popish persecutions, in various Countries: Together with a view of the Reformations from the Church of Rome. Interspersed with the Barbarities of the Inquisition, by Question and Answer (Dublin: Re-printed by J. Potts, 1763). Lucas, Charles, Divelina Libera: An Apology for the Civil Rights and Liberties of the Commons and Citizens of Dublin (Dublin: James Esdall, 1744). ——, The Political Constitutions of Great-Britain and Ireland, 2 vols in 1 (London, 1751). Luther’s Little Instruction Book: The Small Catechism of Martin Luther, trans. Robert E. Smith, Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical. Lutheran Church (St Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921). Madden, Samuel, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, as to their Conduct for the service of their Country (Dublin: R. Reilly, 1738). Mant, Richard, The History of the Church of Ireland from the Reformation (to the Union of the Churches of England and Ireland) with a preliminary survey, from the papal usurpation, in the Twelfth Century, to its legal abolition in the Sixteenth Century (London: John W. Parker, 1840). Molyneux, Thomas, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Large Horns Frequently Found under Ground in Ireland, Concluding from Them That the Great American Deer, Call’d a Moose, Was Formerly Common in That Island’, Philosophical Transactions 19 (1695), 506–7. Molyneux, William, A treatise of dioptricks in two parts: wherein the various effects and appearances of spherick glasses, both convex and concave, single and combined, in telescopes and microscopes, together with their usefulness in many concerns of humane life, are explained (London: Printed for Benjamin Tooke, 1692).

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252 Bibliography ——, Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018). Molyneux, William, et al., Some Familiar Letters Between Mr. Locke and Several of His Friends (London: Printed for A. and J. Churchill, 1708). Musgrave, Sir Richard, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, from the Arrival of the English (Dublin: for John Milliken, 1802, 2nd edition). Newbery, John, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer (London: John Newbery, 1744). Nicholson, Edward, A Method of Charity-Schools, Recommended, for giving both a Religious Education, and a way of Livelihood to the Poor Children in Ireland. With a Preparatory Discourse, about the Practice of Charity in Alms-Deeds (Dublin: Printed by Aaron Rhames, 1712). Olmstead, Richard, Sions teares leading to ioy: or The waters of Marah sweetned. First preached at Clonenagh in the Queenes County in seuerall sermons, and now published for the benefite of the Church (Dublin: Printed for the Societie of Stationers, 1630). [Partington, Thomas], Worse and Worse Newes from Ireland being the coppy of a letter read in the House of Parliament the 14 of this instant moneth of December 1641: wherein is contained such unheard-of cruelties committed by the papists against the Protestants not sparing age nor sex, that it would make a christians heart to bleede (London: Printed for Nath. Butter, 1641). [Pelletreau, Reverend Mr., of the French Church of St. Patrick], An Abridgement of Sacred History, from the Creation of the World to the Establishment of Christianity. Together with A Catechetical Explanation of the Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion. Designed for the Instruction of Youth, and adapted to the meanest Capacities. By a Presbyter of the Church of Ireland (Dublin: Printed by A. James, 1760). Pilkington, Matthew, The Progress of Music in Ireland, reprinted in Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1730), 23. Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa; or, the history of a young lady. Comprehending the most important concerns of private life, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985). ——, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1741). Roche, Regina Maria, The Children of the Abbey, a Tale (London: William Lane for the Minerva Press, 1796). ——, The Houses of Osma and Almeria (London: Printed at the Minerva Press, for A. K. Newman & Co., 1810). ——, Nocturnal Visit, A Tale (London: J. Johnson and H. Long, 1789). ——, The Monastery of St Columb; or, The Atonement (London: Printed at the Minerva Press, for A. K. Newman & Co., 1813). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Émile, or On Education, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Spenser, Edmund, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

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Bibliography 253 [Steele, Richard], The Spectator, No. 246 (12 December, 1711), in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: J. M. Dent, 1907). Stone, George, A Sermon Preach’d at Christ-Church, Dublin, on the 28th Day of March, 1742. Before the Incorporated Society, for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland (Dublin: Printed for George Grierson, 1742). Swift, Jonathan, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, in Cloaths and Furniture of Houses, &c. Utterly Rejecting and Renouning Every Thing wearable that comes from England, in Irish Tracts, 1720–1723, and Sermons, ed. Herbert Davis and Louis Landa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968). ——, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959). ——, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). ——, The Drapier’s Letters, and other works, ed. Herbert David (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). ——, The Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). Synge, Edward, An Account of the Erection, Government and Number, of CharitySchools in Ireland (Dublin: J. Pepyat, 1717). ——, An Essay Towards Making the Knowledge of Religion easy to the Meanest Capacity. Being a short and plain account of the doctrines and rules of Christianity (London: printed for R. Sare, 1722). ——, Methods of Erecting, Supporting and Governing Charity Schools: With An Account of the Charity Schools in Ireland and Some Observations Thereon (Dublin: Printed by J. Hyde, 1718). ——, Comprised in a Short and Easy Exposition of the Church Catechism. Adapted to the Understanding and Memory of those of the Meanest Capacity (London: Printed for Richard Sare, 1701). ——, The Synge Letters: Bishop Edward Synge to his Daughter Alicia, Roscommon to Dublin, 1746–1752, ed. Marie-Louise Legg (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996). Temple, Sir John, The Irish Rebellion: or, an history of the beginnings and first progress of the general rebellion raised within the Kingdom of Ireland, upon the three and twentieth day of October, in the Year 1641, together with the barbarous cruelties and bloody massacres which ensued there-upon (London: Printed by R. White for Samuel Gellibrand, 1746). The Children’s Bible, or An History of the Holy Scriptures (Dublin: Printed by Henry Saunders, 1763). Tillotson, John, Six sermons…preached in the church of St Lawrence Jewry in London (London: Printed for B. Aylmer and W. Rogers, 1694, 2nd edition). Trimmer, Mrs Sarah, An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scriptures (Adapted to the capacities of children) (London: Printed for the Author, 1780). Ussher, James, A Body of Divinitie, or the Summe and Substance of Christian Religion, Catechistically propounded, and explained, by way of Question and Answer: Methodically and familiarly handled (London: Printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for Thomas Downes and George Badger, 1645).

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254 Bibliography ——, An Answer of the Archbishop of Armagh, to Some Exceptions Taken to his Aforesaid Letter, in The Judgement of the Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, and Primate of Ireland, 1. Of the extent of Christs death, and satisfaction, &c. 2. Of the Sabbath, and observation of the Lords day. 3. Of the ordination in other reformed churches. With a vindication of him from a pretended change of opinion in the first; some advertisements upon the latter; and, in prevention of further injuries, a declaration of his judgement in several other subjects, ed., N. Bernard, D.D. (London: Printed for John Crook, 1657). ——, An Answer to a Challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland. Wherein the Judgement of Antiquity in the points questioned is truly delivered, and the Noveltie of the now Romish doctrine plainely discovered (Dublin: Printed by the Societie of Stationers, 1625). ——, A sermon preached before the Commons House of Parliament in St. Margarets church at Westminster, the 18 of February 1620 (London: By I[ohn] L[egat] for Iohn Bartlet, 1631, second edition). Walker, Thomas, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards. Interspersed with Anecdotes of, and Occasional Observations on, the Music of Ireland. Also, an Historical and Descriptive Account of the Musical Instruments of the Ancient Irish (Dublin: Printed by Luke White, 1786). Wettenhall, Edward, The catechism of the Church of England. With shorter marginal notes then those formerly publish’d (Dublin: Printed by Andrew Crooke, 1696). Whitty, M. J., ‘Review of the “First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry”, 1825’, Dublin and London Magazine, 1 (1825), 231–2. Wilcocks, Joseph, A Sermon Preach’d Before the Society Corresponding with the Incorporated Society in Dublin, for Promoting English Protestant Working-schools in Ireland, at their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-church of St. Mary le Bow, on Saturday, March 17th. 1738–39 (London: Printed for M. Downing, 1739). Winstanley, Gerrard, Fire in the Bush, in The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, vol. 2, eds Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 171–234. Wollstonecraft, Mary, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1787). Wordsworth, William, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, in The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 523–9. Secondary texts Adams, Rachel, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Airey, Jennifer L., The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012). Allison, C.F., The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (New York: Seabury, 1967). Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

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Bibliography 255 Altick, Richard D., The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Appleby, John H., ‘Human Curiosities and the Royal Society, 1699–1751’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50:1 (1996), 13–27. Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962). Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Avery, Gillian, Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922 (London: Bodley Head, 1994). Backus, Margot Gayle, ‘“The Children of the Nation?”: Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913’, Éire-Ireland, 44:2 (2009), 118–46. ——, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Barnard, T. C., Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017). ——, ‘Children and Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in Charles Benson and Toby Barnard (eds), That Woman! Studies in Irish Bibliography: A Festschrift for Mary ‘Paul’ Pollard (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005), 213–38. ——, ‘Crisis of Identity Among Irish Protestants, 1660–85’, Past and Present, 127 (1990), 39–83. ——, Improving Ireland? Projectors, Prophets and Profiteers, 1641–1786 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008). ——, ‘Ireland’, in Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. 3, Establishment and Empire, 1662–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 136–49. ——, Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). ——, ‘Learning, the learned, and literacy in Ireland, c.1660–1760’, in Toby Barnard, D. Ó Cróinín and Katherine Simms (eds), A Miracle of Learning: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning. Essays in Honour of William O’Sullivan (London: Aldershot, 1998), 209–35. ——, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). ——, ‘Print and confession in eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Caroline Archer and Lisa Peters (eds), Religion and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 99–129. ——, ‘Protestantism, ethnicity and Irish identities, 1660–1760’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 206–35.

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Bibliography 273 Torchiana, Donald T., ‘Jonathan Swift, the Irish and the Yahoos’, Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975), 195–212. Torgovnick, Marianna, Closure in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Tracy, Robert, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality Versus Legitimacy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40:1 (1985), 1–22. Traugott, John, ‘The Yahoo in the Doll’s House: “Gulliver’s Travels” the Children’s Classic’, Yearbook of English Studies, 14 (1984), 127–50. Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Valente, Joseph and Margot Gayle Backus, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). Victory, Isolde, ‘The Making of the Declaratory Act’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 9–30. Von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa, Savage Indignation: Colonial Discourse from Milton to Swift (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). Wakely-Mulroney, Katherine, ‘Riddling the Catechism in Early Children’s Literature’, Review of English Studies, 70:294 (2019), 270–90. Walsh, Sue, ‘Gothic Children’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), 183–91. Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Walter, John, ‘Performative Violence and the Politics of Violence in the 1641 Depositions’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 134–52. Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Vintage, 2000). ——, ‘Little Angels, Little Devils: Keeping Childhood Innocent’, in Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time: The Reith Lectures 1994 (London: Vintage, 1994), 33–48. ——, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (London: Vintage, 2000). ——, Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (New York: Vintage, 1994). Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976 edition). Welcher, Jeanne K., ed., Gulliveriana VIII: An Annotated List of Gulliveriana, 1721–1800 (Delmar, NY: Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints, 1988). White, Harry, ‘Carolan and the Dislocation of Music in Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 4 (1989), 55–64. White, Jerry, London in the 18th Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (London: Vintage, 2013). Wilde, Lady, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland; with Sketches of the Irish Past, to which is appended a chapter on ‘the ancient races of Ireland’, by the late Sir William Wilde (London: Ward & Downey, 1887).

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274 Bibliography Williams, N. P., The Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin (London: Longmans, 1927). Williams, Raymond, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). Wilson, Adrian, ‘The Infancy of The History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès’, History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, 19:2 (1980), 132–53. Wohlcke, Anne, ‘Perpetual Fair’: Gender, Disorder, and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth-Century London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Wolf, Shelby Anne and Shirley Brice Heath, The Braid of Literature: Children’s Worlds of Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Wood, Diana, ‘Preface’, Studies in Church History, 31, The Church and Childhood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), xi–xii. Wood, Edward, Giants and Dwarfs (London: Bentley, 1868). Wooden, Warren W., ‘John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Child Reader’, Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Children’s Literature Association, University of Florida, March 1982 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 147–56. Woods, James, ‘William Molyneux and the Politics of Friendship’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 30 (2015), 11–35. Youngquist, Paul, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Ziolkowski, Eric, Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art (London: Palgrave, 2001).

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Index

1641 Rebellion 16, 36, 42–79, 83, 97, 107, 111, 128, 130, 164, 165, 240, 241, 242 1798 Rebellion 5, 7, 217, 224, 241 ABC with the Catechism, The 110–11 Abildgaard, Nicolai Ossian Singing his Swan Song 214–15 Addis, Jane 55 Allestree, Richard The Whole Duty of Man 117, 143, 152–9, 168, 171, 160, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 197 Althusser, Louis 112–13 Annual Register, The 202 Aquinas, Thomas 106 Arbus, Diane 191 Arbuthnot, John (Dr) 191 Ariés, Phillipe 7 Arminius, Jacobus 30–1 Arminianism 30–1, 34 Armstrong, Nancy 172 Astruc, Jean A General and Compleat Treatise 149 Attwood, William The History, and Reasons, of the Dependency of Ireland 12–16 Augustine 26, 30, 32, 34, 35 Austen, Jane Mansfield Park 222 Avery, Gillian 110 Backus, Margot Gayle 226 Bakhtin, Mikhail 112–13 Barbagli, Marzio 8 Barber, Constantine 4

Barber, Mary 4 Barnard, T. C. (Toby) 50, 51, 78–9, 96, 97, 98, 101, 123, 125, 130, 142, 153 Barr, Rebecca Anne 152 Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan 24, 243 Bartlett, Thomas 12 Baxter, Richard 28–9 A Treatise of Conversion 29 Beaufort, William 216 Becon, Thomas 8 Belfast Harp Festival 217–18, 220 Belfast News–Letter, The 201–2 Belloc, Hilaire 71 Berkeley, George (Bishop) 202 Bernstein, Basil 103–4 Blake, William 44, 210, 211 Bloch, Ernest 119 Bloody battell, or The rebels overthrow, and Protestants victorie, A 56 Bloody Newes from Ireland or the barbarous crueltie by the papists used in that kingdome 56 Book of Common Prayer, the 153 Boswell, James 153 Bottigheimer, Ruth 121, 122, 128 Boulter, Hugh (Bishop) 162 Boyle, Richard (earl of Cork) 32 Bradley, Richard Survey of the Ancient Husbandry and Gardening 123 Brief Account of the Proceedings of the Incorporated Society in Dublin for Erecting and Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland, A 165–6

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276 Index British Critic, The 205–6 Brooke, Charlotte Reliques of Irish Poetry 199, 213–14, 216 Brooke, Henry 6, 7, 199, 213–14 The Fool of Quality 6, 7 Jack the Giant Queller 199, 213–14 Brown, Capability 213 Browne, Thomas (Sir) Pseudodoxia epidemica 69 Bruhm, Steven 27 Bunyan, John 78 Burke, Edmund A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful 198, 221 Burke, Peter 110 Burman, Erica 4 Burney, Charles 221 Büssing, Sabine 27 Butler, Elizabeth (Lady Ormond) 47–8 Butler, Thomas (Earl of Ossory) 47–8 Bynum, Caroline Walker 187 Byrne (O’Brien), Charles (The Irish Giant) 202, 210 Cadogan, William An Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children 150 Calvin, Jean 26, 27, 34, 69 Calvinism 30–2, 63, 141, 154, 165 Campbell, Thomas Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland 214 Canny, Nicholas 54 Carey, Matthew 205 Caroline, Princess of Wales 191 Carroll, Clare 63 Carroll, Lewis Alice in Wonderland 104 Carton House 125 Castletown House 125 catechisms 5, 27, 83, 96–119, 122, 143, 151, 153, 154,160, 168, 197, 240 Catholic Confederation 216 Catholic Emancipation 50 Cerne Abbas Giant 201 Chaigneau, David 162

Chaigneau, William The History of Jack Connor 6, 142–73 Chakley, Thomas 75 chapbooks 141, 169–73, 186, 196–7, 203, 204, 212 Charles I 208 Charter schools 142, 162–5, 166, 171, 172, 173 childhood believing 5, 96–132 biological 59–68, 185–226 Enlightenment 5, 6, 132, 141–73 evil 23–36, 42–3, 46–7, 48, 50–2, 65, 79, 114–15, 141–2, 154–5, 164, 198, 240–1, 244 innocent 5, 12, 24–5, 26, 28, 33, 34, 42–8, 49, 58, 68, 70, 74, 75, 79–80, 83, 114–15, 130, 187, 195, 198, 220, 241, 243–4 invented 7–8, 46 metaphorical 3, 4, 10, 11–15, 35, 62, 144–6, 147, 225–6 monstrous 27, 51, 52, 55–8, 65–8, 70, 83, 185–212, 241 political 10–16 Romantic 25, 43, 45–7 vulnerable 5, 25, 42–83, 114, 241 Childhood studies 5–7 Children’s Bible, The 121, 128 children’s bibles 5, 98, 119–32 Christian’s Manual, The 106, 115 Church Catechism, broke into short questions, The 111, 114 Clarke, Edward 1 Clarke, Mary 1 Clarke, Samuel Mirrour 72 Clement, Simon An Answer to Mr. Molyneux 12–16 Coghlan, Valerie 6 Cohen, Jeffrey 210 Cohen, Percy 199 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 46, 120 Colombo, Alice 193 Comerford, R. V. 216 Compendious History of the Old and New Testament, A 120 Considerations on Several Proposals or Preventing the Exportation of Wool 146

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Index 277 Continuation of the Proceedings of the Incorporated Society in Dublin, A 166 Cooper, George 225–6 Cox, Richard (Sir) Hibernia Anglicana 99 Cranford, James The Teares of Ireland 56–7 Crawford, Julia 66, 69–70 Critical Review, The 205 Cullen, Stephen 186–7, 204–26 The Castle of Inchvally 205 The Haunted Priory 186–7, 204–26 Culloden, battle of 50 Cunningham, Hugh 4–5, 7, 25, 44, 198 Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, A 98, 121–32 Customs House 125 Dahl, Roald 71 Daily Advertiser, The 200 Daston, Lorraine 188, 204 Davenant, Charles An Essay upon the Probable Methods of making the People Gainers in the Balance of Trade 12–16 Davenant, John 56 Davies, John (Sir) A True Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England 60, 61 Davies, R. R. 63 Davis, Robert A. 46 De Quincey, Thomas 46 Deane, Seamus 216 Declaratory Act 145–6 Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders 222 Robinson Crusoe 152 Demers, Patricia 104, 112, 113 Depositions (1641) 42, 49, 50, 52–5, 70–1 des Granges, David 47 Dillon, John Talbot (MP) 209

Dillon, John Talbot 208–9 The History of the Reign of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile and Leon 208 Letters from an English Traveller in Spain, in 1778 208 Travels through Spain, with a View to Illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom 208–9 Donnybrook Fair 189 Douglas, Mary 99 Downes, Henry (Bishop) A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish Church of St. Warbrough 150, 167 Dublin Journal, The 201 Dublin Philosophical Society 185, 188–9 Dugdale, Bennet 121, 123, 130, 131 Earle, John Micro-cosmographie 46 Edgeworth, Maria 3–4, 71, 111, 131, 161, 166, 173–4, 198, 218, 223–4, 241 Castle Rackrent 218 Ennui 166 The Parent’s Assistant 161, 198, 223 Practical Education 3–4, 111, 131, 174, 223–4, 241 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 3–4, 111, 120–1, 126, 131, 198, 216, 223–4, 241 The Parent’s Assistant 161, 198, 223 Practical Education 111, 173–4, 223–4, 241 Memoirs 120–1, 126 Edwards, Jonathan 28 English Civil War 50 Fabricant, Carole 193 Fairbrother, Samuel 74, 153 Faulkner, George 120 Fiedler, Leslie 205, 210 Fielding, Henry 144, 154 Amelia 144 Joseph Andrews 154 Tom Jones 144

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278 Index Flemming, John The Country Gentleman’s Letter to the Citizens of Dublin 63–4 Flight of the Earls 48, 213 Ford, Alan 29, 31–2 Forrester, James Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, and Affections, Etc., Peculiar to Children 160 Foster, Roy 125 fosterage 60–1 Foucault, Michel 163 Four Courts 125 Foxe, John Book of Martyrs 72, 78 French, Anna 6, 9, 23, 33, 45, 68, 83, 142 Gagen, Elizabeth A. 63 Gargano, Elizabeth 152 Garner, Alan 24 Garvin, Tom 217 Gay, John 192 George II 162 Gerald of Wales 62, 187–8, 189, 224 Topographica Hibernica 62, 187–8 Gerrard, Christine 3 giants, Irish 201–4, 210 Gibbons, Luke 217 Gibney, John 54 Gillis, John 8 Glover, Adam 54 Gófitz, Ilona and Judit 190–1 Goldsmith, Oliver 117–19, 215 ‘The History of Carolan, The Last Irish Bard’ 215 The Vicar of Wakefield 117–19 Gouge, William Short Catechisme 27 Green, Ian 100–1, 103, 105–6, 107, 110, 113, 114 Greene, Jack P. 13 Grenby, M. O. 74, 111, 170 Gribben, Crawford 30, 36 Grose, Francis Provincial Glossary 213 Gumly, John 121 Gutjahr, Paul 130

Haggerty, George 222 Haidt, Jonathan 98 Hall, Dianne 58 Hall, Thomas 200–1, 210 Halley, Edmond 189 Hampton, Christopher 31, 32–3 The threefold state of man upon earth 32 An inquisition of the true church 32–3 Hand, Derek 144, 147 Hans Sloane museum 200 Happiest Newes from Ireland that Ever Came to England, The 56 harp 186–7, 213–21, 223 Hemmens, Susan 189 Hendrick, Harry 49 Hevey, David 191 Henry II 61, 206 Hibernian Society’s School for Soldiers’ Children 100 Higonnett, Anne 44 Hill, Hannah 43, 74–6 Hilliard, Raymond F. 117 Hodgson, Thomas 121 Hoeveler, Diane Long 78 Holt, Jenny 161 Hume, David 153 Hunter, John 202, 204, 205, 210 Hunterian Museum 202 Hyde, Sarah (Mrs) 120 Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland 78, 100–1, 162, 165–7 Inquiry into some of the Causes of the Ill Situation of the Affairs of Ireland, An 64, 145 Irish Articles 1615 5, 24, 30–2 Irish Volunteers 217 Jack Cycle 197 Jahoda, Gustav 62 James II 208 Janeway, James A Token for Children 43, 71–4, 75 Jenks, Chris 26, 163 Jerome, Stephen The haughty heart humbled 24, 31, 32, 35–6, 47

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Index 279 Johnson, Samuel Dictionary 185 Jones, Darryl 206 Jones, Henry A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkable Passages concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland 55 Jones, Theophilus 210 Jones, William 205 Kanturk Castle 125 Kavanagh, Declan 199–200 Kelly, Patrick 10 Kendrew, James 130 Kertzer, David 8 Kiberd, Declan 7–8, 10, 218 Kingsborough, Robert (Viscount) 119 Knipe Twins 202, 203 Kosok, Heinz 195 Kroeg, Susan M. 225

Locke, John 1–4, 5, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 16, 80, 119–20, 131, 141–2, 148, 160, 161, 165, 193, 198, 210 ‘On Toleration’ 148 Second Treatise of Government 10–11 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 2–4, 10, 11, 80, 119–20, 131, 141–2, 160, 193, 198, 210 Lockman, John History of the Cruel Sufferings of the Protestants, A 43, 78–9 Loeber, Rolf 170 Lowenthal Felstiner, Mary 10 Loyola, Ignatius (St) 79 Lucas, Charles 146–7, 199 Luddy, Maria 5–6 Luther, Martin 101–2 Greater Catechism 102 Lesser Catechism 102, 116

Lamb, Charles 46 Lash, Christopher 163 Ledwich, Edward 216 Legacy for Children, A 43, 74–6 Leigh, William (Reverend) 66–8 Leinster House 125 Lennon, Colm 31 Lesage, Alain–René Gil Blas 144, 172 Leslie, Henry 24, 31, 34–5 A sermon preached before His Maiesty at Wokin 35 A sermon preached before his Maiesty at Windsore 35 A warning for Israel 34 Lesnik–Oberstein, Karín 4 Lewis, Matthew The Monk 119–20, 205, 222 Liber monstrorum 188 Life and Adventures of James Freney, The 169 Life of Jack the Giant Killer, The 169 Lilliput Magazine 193 Lindquist, Benjamin 128 Little Book for Little Children, A 155 Lloyd, David 63

McBride, Ian 12, 48 McCallum, Robyn 113, 120, 126 Madden, Samuel 146 Magrath, Cornelius 201–2, 210 Malcolm, Elizabeth 58 Manifesto of Lord Peter, The 191 Manson, David 193 Marcus, Leah Sinanoglou 25, 45, 58 Markey, Anne 6–7, 101, 153, 162, 164 Marsh, Narcissus The Church Catechism Explain’d and Prov’d by Apt Texts of Scripture 102–4, 108, 109, 112, 114, 118 Maturin, Charles Robert 205, 224–5 Melmoth the Wanderer 205 The Wild Irish Boy 224–5 Maxwell, Robert 51, 54 Michelangelo David 210 Milner, John 78 Moers, Ellen 56–7 Molyneux, Lucy 1 Molyneux, Samuel 1–3, 4, 9, 11, 79–80

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280 Index Molyneux, Thomas 1, 188–9 ‘A Discourse Concerning the Large Horns Frequently Found under Ground in Ireland’ 188–9 Molyneux, William 1–4, 9–16, 79–80, 99, 189, 241, 243 Dioptrica Nova 1 The Case of Ireland, Stated 10–16, 99 Monthly Magazine 206 Monthly Review 169, 221 Moore, Steven 157 Morin, Christina 224–5 Motte, Benjamin 193 Musgrave, Richard (Sir) Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland 241 Nash, Richard 4 Neal, John Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes 215 Newbery, John 78, 197 A Little Pretty Pocket–Book 197 Nicholson, Edward A Method of Charity–Schools 165 Nine Years War 48 Nodleman, Perry 199 Noonan, Kathleen 49–50, 61 Nussbaum, Felicity 201, 212 O Ciosáin, Niall 96 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona 6, 151, 173 O’Brien, James 153 O’Brien, Patrick Cotter 202 O’Carolan, Turlough 186, 214–16, 217, 219 O’Donnell, Hugh 48 O’Donnell, Mary-Louise 219 O’Dowd, Mary 8 O’Hagan Hardy, Molly 101 O’Malley, Andrew 173, 197, 204 O’Neill, Hugh 48 O’Neill, Phelim (Sir) 48–9 O’Sullivan, Keith 6 Ohlmeyer, Jane 47–8, 59, 72, 80 Olmstead, Richard 24, 31, 35, 36 Sions teares leading to ioy 35, 36 Ossian 186, 214–15, 217 Otto, Rudolf 116

Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) The Wild Irish Girl 224 Ozment, Steven 148 Paley, William 106 Park, Katharine 188, 204 Parliament House 125 Pasulka, Diana 72 Pearse, Patrick 242–3 Pelagius 26, 30, 31, 32, 34, 46, 74 Pelletreau, James Abridgement of Sacred History 102, 106, 121 Perry, Ruth 150 Peter of Hanover 191 Pettella, Tera 153 Philanthropos (James Delap) The History of Harry Spencer 7 Philologos, Timothy The Child’s Toy 131–2 Pilkington, Laetitia Memoirs 3 Pilkington, Matthew The Progress of Musick in Ireland 215–16 Plumb, J. H. 7, 131, 160, 240 Pollock, Linda 113 Potter, Franz J. 206 Potts, James 78 Powerscourt House 125 Prince, Gerard 107 Prior, John 131 prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries, A 58, 59, 241–2 Rawson, Claude 196 Report on the state of Popery in Ireland 162 Rhames, Aaron 76 Richardson, Alan 46 Richardson, Samuel 144, 150, 151, 154 Clarissa 144, 151 Pamela 144, 150, 151, 154 Roche, Regina Maria The Children of the Abbey 219–20 Rod, The 141 Rose, Jacqueline 24 Ross, Ian Campbell 144, 155, 159, 162, 168, 169, 171

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Index 281 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 24, 25, 42, 43–4, 152, 210, 223 Émile 43–4, 152, 210 Royal Society 186, 189, 200 Ruberg, Willemijn 83 Russborough House 125 Sargent, Amelia 187–8 Saunders, Henry 121, 128 Schultz, Max F. 123 Scriptural Exposition of the Church Catechism, A 112, 240 Shahar, Shulamith 33 Shaw, George Bernard 24 Shefrin, Jill 152 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley School for Scandal 223 Shine Thompson, Mary 6, 190 Simms, Philip 120 Smedley, Jonathan 196 Smith, James M. 5–6 Smollett, Tobias 143, 144, 172 Ferdinand, Count Fathom 172 Peregrine Pickle 144 Roderick Random 144 Society of the United Irishmen 217, 220 Sonnelitter, Karen 162 Spectator, The 149 Spellman, W. M. 141 Spenser, Edmund A View of the Present State of Ireland 60–1, 218–19 Steele, Richard 149 Stephens, John 113, 120, 126 Stephens, Walter 198 Stone, George (Bishop) A Sermon Preach’d at Christ– Church 163–4, 165, 166 Stone, John 55 Stone, Lawrence 26–7 Stouthamer-Loeber, Magda 170 Strange Newes of a Prodigious Monster 66–8 Summerhill House 125 Swift, Jonathan 3, 6, 147–8, 186, 189–96 A Modest Proposal 147–8 A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture 194

Drapier’s Letters 194 Gulliver’s Travels 186, 189–96 It Cannot Rain But It Pours; or, A London Strewed with Rarities (attributed) 191 The Most Wonderful Wonder that ever appeared to the Wonder of the British Nation (attributed) 191 Synge, Alicia 80–3, 96, 101, 151, 159, 169, 241 Synge, Catherine 80, 81 Synge, Edward (Bishop of Elfin) 80–3, 96, 101, 151, 159, 169, 241 Synge, Edward (Bishop of Tuam) 82, 96, 106–7, 110, 114, 163–4 An Account of the Erection, Government and Number, of Charity–Schools in Ireland 164 An answer to all the Excuses and pretences which men ordinarily make for their not coming to the Holy Communion 96 An Essay Towards Making the Knowledge of Religion easy to the Meanest Capacity 82 Methods of Erecting, Supporting and Governing Charity Schools 163–4 Plain Instructions for the young and ignorant 106–7, 110, 114 Synge, Mary 80 Synge, Robert 80 Synge, Sarah 80 Talbot, Catherine 169 Tale of Robinson Crusoe 169 Tan, Ed S. 75 Temple, Sir John 42–3, 49–70, 72, 76–9, 83, 98, 100, 114, 149, 241 The Irish Rebellion 42–3, 49–70, 72, 76–9, 83, 100, 241 Test Act 1704 100 Thirty-Nine Articles 30, 31 Thomas, Keith 9 Thuente, Mary Helen 216 Tickell, Thomas 191 Tillotson, John 100 Times, The 243 Todd, Dennis 186, 189, 190

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282 Index Tractatus monstrorum 188 Travels and Adventures of Capt. Lemuel Gulliver, The 193 Treaty of Limerick 146 Trimmer, Sarah An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scriptures 122 Trinity College Dublin 30, 121, 131, 202, 205 Ussher, James (Archbishop) 24, 30, 31, 33–4, 47, 66, 240 An Answer of the Archbishop of Armagh 34 An Answer to a Challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland 34 A Body of Divinitie 33–4, 66, 240 A sermon preached before the Commons House of Parliament 47 Vanhomrigh, Esther (Vanessa) 196 Von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa 200 Wakely-Mulroney, Katherine 104–5, 108 Walker, Joseph Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards 214, 216, 218, 221 Walpole, Horace 123, 222 History of the Modern Taste in Gardening 123 The Castle of Otranto 222 The Mysterious Mother 222 Wandering Spirit; or, Memoirs of the House of Morno, The 212 War of Spanish Succession 50 Ware, John 74 Warner, Marina 25, 43

Warwick, Lady 80 Weber, Max 69 Weeks Preparation Towards a Worthy Receiving of the Lord’s Supper, A 114–17 Welcher, Jeanne 193 Wentworth, Thomas 48 Wettenhall, Edward (bishop of Cork and Ross) The catechism of the Church of England with shorter marginal notes than those formerly published 110 White, Thomas A Little Book for Little Children 72, 104, 155 Whyte, Pádraic 6 Wide Streets Commission 125 Wilde, Jane (Lady) Ancient Legends 243 Williams, Raymond 160 Winstanley, Gerrard Fire in the Bush 45 Wohlcke, Anne 189 Wollstonecraft, Mary 119 Wood, Diane 44 Wood’s Halfpence 146, 194 Woods, James 11 Woollen Act 146 Wordsworth, William 44, 45–6 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ 45–6 Worse and Worse Newes from Ireland 56 Young, Barbara Ann 6 Youngquist, Paul 202, 203, 204 Ziolkowski, Eric 52 Zosimus (Pope) 46