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Responses to Gladstonian home rule and land reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Tom Dunne
Tom Dunne*
Affiliation:
Department of Irish History, University College, Cork
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Extract

As reactions to yet another initiative on Northern Ireland underlined the durability of traditional perspectives on both sides of the border, it was understandable that there should have been some nostalgic re-examination in the Irish media of the might-have-been of Gladstone’s first home rule initiative of a hundred years ago. Centenaries increasingly stimulate historians and publishers into action also, but the two major new studies of the home-rule ‘episode’ from Gill and Macmillan take a pessimistic, even jaundiced view of the 1886 scheme as unworkable, and incapable of satisfying Irish nationalists, much less unionists. Despite its precipitation of a major political realignment in British politics and its confirmation of Irish political polarisation, the crisis of 1885-6 has received relatively little attention from historians. In Britain, the only major study since Hammond’s romantic Gladstone and the Irish nation has been the decidedly anti-romantic and detailed dissection of the web of party intrigue and political calculation and infighting involved in Cooke and Vincent’s The governing passion.

Type
Articles
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 100 , November 1987 , pp. 432 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1987

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References

l Esp. Irish Times, 9–10 June 1986.

2 Hammond, J.L., Gladstone and the Irish nation (London, 1938)Google Scholar; Cooke, A.B. and Vincent, J.R., The governing passion: cabinet government and party politics in Britain, 1885–6 (Brighton, 1974).Google Scholar

3 O’Brien, C.C., Parnell and his party, 1880–90 (Oxford, 1957).Google Scholar

4 Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93. By Loughlin, James. Pp 369 Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. 1986. IR£25.Google Scholar

5 Parnell and the First Home-Rule Episode, 1884–87. By O ’Day, Alan Pp x, 308. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. 1986. IR£25.Google Scholar

6 The Plan of Campaign, 1886–1891. By Geary, Laurence M., Pp 8, 226, 2 maps, plates. Cork: University Press. 1986. IR£20.Google Scholar

7 Ireland ’S Disease: The English in Ireland, 1887. By Grousset, Paschal. Pp 342. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. 1986. £9.95.Google Scholar

8 Cf Marsh, Peter, The discipline of popular government: Lord Salisbury’s domestic statecraft, 1881–1902 (Brighton, 1978), ch. 3.Google Scholar

9 Cf. Robinson, Ronald and Gallagher, John, with Denny, Alice, Africa and the Victorians: the official mind of imperialism (London, 1961)Google Scholar; Schreuder, D.M., Gladstone and Kruger: liberal government and colonial home rule, 1880–1885 (London, 1969).Google Scholar

10 Cf. Bogdanor, Vernon, Devolution (Oxford, 1979), ch. 2Google Scholar; Dunne, Tom, ‘La trahison des clercs: British intellectuals and the first home-rule crisis’ in I.H.S., 23, no. 90 (Nov 1982), pp 134–73.Google Scholar

11 For a broader understanding of Gladstone ’s historicism and its effects on policy, cf. Dewey, Clive, ‘Celtic agrarian legislation and the Celtic revival: historicist implications of Gladstone’s Irish and Scottish land acts, 1870–1886’ in Past and Present, no. 64 (1974), pp 30–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Loughlin, , Gladstone, home rule & the Ulster question, pp 3–4, 103.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., p. 278.

14 Clark, Samuel, Social origins of the Irish land war (Princeton, 1979)Google Scholar; Bew, Paul, Land and the national question in Ireland, 1858–1882 (Dublin, 1978).Google Scholar

15 Grousset, Ireland’s disease, ch. xv.

16 Ibid., p. 295.