ALTER-NATIONS ALTER-NATIONS Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland • AMY E. MARTIN THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2012 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Amy E., 1968– Alter-nations : nationalisms, terror, and the state in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland / Amy E. Martin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1202-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1202-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9304-1 (cd) 1. Irish question. 2. Nationalism—Ireland—History—19th century. 3. Nationalism—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Fenians. I. Title. DA950.M258 2012 320.54094109’034—dc23 2012015270 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Caslon Pro and ITC Century Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Nation- al Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS • LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 “The Condition of England” and the Question of Ireland: Anti-Irish Racism and Saxon Nationalism in Victorian Writings on Capitalist National Crisis 15 CHAPTER 2 Fenianism and the State: Theorizing Violence and the Modern Hegemonic State in the Writings of Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill 52 CHAPTER 3 Envisioning Terror: Anticolonial Nationalism and the Modern Discourse of Terrorism in Mid-Victorian Popular Culture 104 CHAPTER 4 “A Somewhat Irish Way of Writing”: The Genre of Fenian Recollections and Postcolonial Critique 159 BIBLIOGRAPHY 215 INDEX 224 ABBREVIATIONS • C Chartism (1839), Thomas Carlyle CA Culture and Anarchy (1867), Matthew Arnold CW The Critical Writings, James Joyce CWC The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Friedrich Engels EI England and Ireland (1868), John Stuart Mill FI Political Writings, vol. 3, The First International and After, Karl Marx IRB Irish Republican Brotherhood NLI National Library of Ireland RFF Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896), John O’Leary RU Repeal of the Union (1848), Thomas Carlyle SCL On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), Matthew Arnold SH The Secret History of the Fenian Conspiracy (1877), John Rutherford vii ILLUSTRATIONS • FIgure 2–1 “Rebellion Had Bad Luck,” Punch, 1865 53 FIgure 3–1 “Strangling the Monster,” Punch, 1881 105 FIgure 3–2 “The Irish Devil Fish,” Punch, 1881 128 FIgure 3–3 “Time’s Waxworks,” Punch, 1881 129 FIgure 3–4 “The Real Irish Court; Or, The Head Centre and the Dis-senters,” Punch, 1866 131 FIgure 3–5 “The Fenian-Pest,” Punch, 1866 133 FIgure 3–6 “Two Forces,” Punch, 1881 138 FIgure 3–7 “The Fenian Guy Fawkes,” Punch, 1867 140 FIgure 3–8 “The Irish Frankenstein,” the Tomahawk, 1869 148 FIgure 3–9 “The Irish Frankenstein,” Punch, 1882 149 FIgure 3–10 “The Irish ‘Tempest,’” Punch, 1870 151 viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • HE COMPLETION of this book was made possible by many people and the T members of several communities of which I have been a part, to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, both intellectual and personal. This project began as a dissertation at Columbia University where I was lucky to learn from many gifted faculty and from the brilliant graduate stu- dents around me. I owe an immense debt to my advisor, Gauri Viswana- than, whose wisdom and knowledge guided this project in innumerable ways. My intellectual life has been shaped and supported in important ways by Jean Howard, John Michael Archer, Rob Nixon, Anne McClintock, Debo- rah White, and David Eng. Thanks to John Waters and Luke Gibbons for participating in my defense. I have been sustained through many years by having Hiram Perez as my partner-in-crime and dear friend. Sanda Lwin, Sarita Eschavez See, Kieran Kennedy, Farhad Karim, and Laura O’Connor are among the fellow students to whom I am most grateful. I have benefited enormously from the help of my friends and colleagues in the field of Irish Studies. I have learned much from Joe Cleary, Margaret Kelleher, and Breandán MacSuibhne. David Lloyd has been an incredible source of support, inspiration, and encouragement. This book gained so much from his careful reading of it. I am grateful to have lectured twice at Notre Dame’s Irish Studies Summer Seminar. Thank you to the organizers—Sea- mus Deane, Luke Gibbons, and Kevin Whelan—for allowing me to share my work in such a generative setting. Seamus Deane provided astute and invaluable comments on my manuscript. To Luke, I owe a special thanks for his generosity and support. I am grateful for our conversations and for his encouragement and belief in my work. ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At Mount Holyoke College, I was lucky to become part of a vibrant com- munity of scholars. Thank you to the English department, in particular Nigel Alderman, Chris Benfey, Carolyn Collette, Jenny Pyke, Kate Singer, Michelle Stephens, Don Weber, and Elizabeth Young. Jenny and Nigel have helped me through the final stages of revision and writing with kindness and generosity for which I am particularly grateful. I have enjoyed the support and friend- ship of many colleagues and friends at the college and in the Pioneer Valley, in particular Nerissa Balce, Richard Chu, Joan Cocks, Fidelito Cortes, John Drabinski, Lisa Keller, Don O’Shea, and Marisa Parham. I have learned a great deal from my students, especially Tracy Miller and Poulomi Saha. I was able to complete this book with the help of a Faculty Fellowship and sev- eral generous Faculty Travel Grants from the Dean of the Faculty’s office at Mount Holyoke. Conducting research in the main collection and the archives of the National Library of Ireland is an absolute pleasure. I thank the staff, in par- ticular Tom Desmond and James Harte. Working with The Ohio State University Press on this book has been a wonderful experience. Thank you to Elaine Freedgood for suggesting that I send my manuscript to the press. Thanks to Sandy Crooms for her support, guidance, and patience and to Eugene O’Connor for his careful work on this manuscript. Any errors found in this book are of course my own. Friends and family have sustained me as I completed this project in all of its stages: Anne Coyle, Sandy Weinbaum, Shelly Weinbaum, Nancy Garrity, Pierre Chambers, Jesse Sandoval. My mother, Regina Martin, has been a con- stant source of friendship, love, and encouragement. My father, Herbert Mar- tin, did not live to see this book in print, but he shaped it and me profoundly with his love. One almost always saves the most inexpressible debts for last. For a kind of loving partnership that I never knew was possible, for reading every last page, and for walking with me through the travails and joys of life, I need to thank my partner, Daniel Weinbaum. Aidan and Jude bring me immeasurable joy every day. I would like to dedicate this book to my maternal grandparents, Peter Pat- rick McMahon and Helen Campion McMahon Walsh. My time with them when I was a child served as the start of my intellectual and political concerns. They shared with me their memories of and ideas about Irish culture and politics, and inspired my first interest in the history and literature of Ireland. They also believed in my abilities like no one else I have ever encountered. INTRODUCTION • HROUGHOUT the nineteenth century, Ireland and Britain are best T described as “alter-nations.” When British and Irish nationalisms are imagined and theorized in political writings and cultural production in this period, nationhood on each side of the Irish Sea exists, both discursively and materially, in a dialectical relation to the other. As in the case of alter- egos—inextricable and emerging from the phenomenon of colonialism, yet persistently different, even opposed—it is not possible to describe the British nation without reference to Ireland, and the same is true in reverse. Thus, in 1839, Thomas Carlyle declared that “Ireland, now for the first time, in such strange circuitous way, does find itself embarked in the same boat with Eng- land, to sail together, or to sink together.”1 Such a statement from an influen- tial intellectual and political commentator gives expression to the entangled futures of Ireland and Britain that are the subject of this book. The metaphor of the shared boat provides an allegorical representation of Union. In addi- tion, although writing about capitalist national crisis in this period, Carlyle suggests that British modernity and Irish modernity are impossibly bound and in fact must be understood in relation to one another; the national des- tinies of Britain and Ireland had become one. As Luke Gibbons reminds us, 1. “Chartism,” in vol. 29 of The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, centenary ed. (Lon- don: Chapman and Hall, 1899), 140. 1 2 INTRODUCTION by the early twentieth century, James Joyce could contend that “[i]f Ireland looked to the image of England, . it would end up seeing its own distorted reflection—as if in the ‘cracked looking glass of a servant.’”2 Joyce’s assertion uses the trope of the servant’s mirror to suggest that, over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Irish and British nationalisms and national identities not only existed in an intimate relation, but emerged as an endless, inextricable series of reflections and refractions. As we will see, these dialectical ideologies of nationhood were understood through the categories of race, class, religion, gender, and “terror” and played a foundational role in the emergence of the modern state in the United Kingdom.