Description
Book SynopsisWhat did it mean to have an ‘Irish’ dwelling in the nineteenth century? How did Irish people write about, think about, visually represent or imagine what constituted home? Showcasing research from scholars based in Ireland, the United Kingdom and further afield, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to answer these questions by exploring the physicality and symbolism of Irish dwellings, and the home as a place of repose, exercise and work. Using a range of methodological approaches including history, folklore and literature, this volume offers new perspectives on the material culture of home, fictionalized homes, social housing schemes, suburban living spaces, home and social mobility, institutional living, migration and memories of the home-house, and gender and eviction. Rather than focus on the Big House, which has already received considerable scholarly attention, this volume foregrounds dwelling spaces that were especially vulnerable to economic forces: the homes of the urban and rural poor. Additionally, the book acknowledges the importance to nineteenth-century Ireland of a class that has arguably received even less attention in Irish scholarship than the poor, a rising urban/suburban middle class, exploring their impact on housing and on cultural and leisure activities.
An Open Access version of Christopher Cusack's chapter '"Back into the old homestead": The Irish Cottage in Irish-American Fiction, 861−1910' will be made available on publication.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dwelling(s) in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Heather Laird and Jay R. Roszman
I. Modernity and the Irish Cabin
The Nonhuman and the Irish Peasant Cabin in Nineteenth-Century Culture
Maureen O’Connor
‘Hold manfully onto your farms’: Gender and Resistance During the Irish Land War
Patrick Bethel
‘Back into the old homestead’: The Irish Cottage in Irish-American Fiction, 1861−1910
Christopher Cusack
II. Class Mobility and Home
‘A partition . . . making of it a kitchen and a bedroom’: Working-Class Housing in Irish Provincial Towns in the Late Nineteenth Century
Peter Connell
Spreading Out: Suburbanization and Dwelling-Places in Middle-Class Belfast
Alice Johnson
Health from Home?: Home Gymnasiums in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Conor Heffernan
After Castle Rackrent: The Wardlaws (1896) and Literary Responses to Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent
Patrick Maume
III. Families and Intimate Spaces in Institutional Dwellings
The Policeman’s Home: The Constabulary Barracks in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland
Brian Griffin
‘No relatives or anyone … to take the slightest interest in her’: Insanity, Patients, and their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Asylum
Tríona Waters
Picturing Patients: Cork Street Fever Hospital, Photography and Childhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Dublin
Orla Fitzpatrick
IV. The Material Culture of Home
Burying Bad Luck: Material Cultures of Magic in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Irish Houses and Farmyards
Clodagh Tait
‘The tailors generally went from house to house in those days’: Travelling Tailors and the Making of Apparel in the Rural Irish Dwelling, 1850−1900
Eliza McKee
Walter Osborne and the Domestic Scene: Family and Professional Life in a Dublin Suburb
Kathryn Milligan
