Emily Lawless (1845–1913) draws increasing attention from students of nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction, and Irish cultural history more generally, but much remains to be said about the preoccupations which drive and structure her work and how these reflected tensions and uncertainties of the British and Irish societies she inhabited. This chapter develops Heidi Hansson's argument that the tension between science and art in Lawless's work shows her ‘writing in the interspace’, revealing apparently fixed identities as illusory by-products of ceaseless fluidity (a very Darwinian concept, calling into question Christian and Aristotelean views of nature as possessing underlying fixed structures accessible to reason). It discusses Lawless's quandary between the anti-teleological world view of classical Darwinism and human search for meaning through science, art, love, and religion. It suggests Lawless's stories of Ireland share deep concerns with those set elsewhere, which are comparatively neglected. (Major Lawrence, F.L.S. is usually overlooked by critics, while the numerous readings of Grania show insufficient attention to the oceanic forces which dominate the novel's Inishmaan and the life of the heroine.)

Lawless was a landlord's daughter and sister (her father, the third Baron Cloncurry, was succeeded by two of her brothers) living through agrarian unrest, suspecting she was born too late for an imagined time when tenant– landlord relations were ‘naturally’ harmonious; she was a Unionist painfully aware of the violence of conquest and colonization, but convinced nationalism provided no coherent political alternative; a troubled agnostic haunted by Christian faith lost through Darwinism and refusal to accept that suicidal relatives were damned; a woman of ambiguous sexuality. Lawless was brought up near the Atlantic coast of Galway by her mother's relatives the Kirwans of Castlehacket, but spent her later years in Surrey, remarking that she left Atlantic waves to cultivate an English garden. A Garden Diary (1909) displays the garden as miniature replica of the natural world—both need rigorous pruning to forestall chaos—and as haunted by bloody struggles to maintain British power in China and South Africa; reflecting her position among ‘the mere irresponsible camp-followers of science’ contrasted with geniuses (‘Darwin played the tune … the rest of us … danced to his piping’) as reading narratives of scientific explorers (‘with the prince of them all one starts once more upon that immortal Voyage of the Beagle’)5 palely reflects the experiences of discovery.

The Clare landowner, marine engineer, and radical ‘honest Tom Steele’, a devoted follower of O'Connell, who gave him the title ‘Head Pacificator of Ireland’, tends to be remembered as a figure of fun given to bombastic oratory and slavish loyalty to the Liberator. He is presented in this light in the writings of O'Connell's Young Ireland critics, and this view of Steele was not confined to them. Henry Grattan Junior, son of the Patriot politician, once wrote in private that the only Protestant gentlemen willing to be led by O'Connell were ‘Mad Steele and a few others’. This chapter is a think-piece, drawing on sources which have not hitherto been used in accounts of Steele, namely reports in the London Tablet (run by the journalist Frederick Lucas, a convert to Catholicism from Quakerism who was one of the few English supporters of O'Connell's Repeal movement) and a journalistic profile of Steele written in 1869 by the Cork-born journalist Denis Holland, who as a young reporter had covered the Monster Meetings and the last years of O'Connell's political career.

This chapter argues, first of all, that Steele should be seen as representing a tradition of aristocratic radicalism whose exponents positively prided themselves on taking the side of ‘the people’ without receiving anything in return, as distinct from O'Connell's more modern style of political organisation and fundraising. Where O'Connell built much of his popular image on deliberate, transgressive shamelessness—on publicly scorning the honour code binding gentlemen, by forswearing dignity in manners and language when it suited him, by engaging in public and vitriolic insults while refusing to vindicate them on the duel-ground, by openly organising popular subscriptions to sustain his personal and political activities and shrugging off the taunt that this made him ‘the Big Beggarman’—Steele's refusal of financial and political rewards, his fighting duels to vindicate his status as a gentleman, even his intense deference to O'Connell and proclamations that he was a ‘Protestant Repealer’, could be seen as expressions of noblesse oblige by reaching down to those normally outside his honour group.

The Castlebar novelist Matthew Archdeacon (1798–1853) is remembered less as an artist than as a recorder of local traditions: Connaught: A tale of 1798 (1830) draws on local traditions of the French landing, and the historical novel Shawn na soggarth, or the priest hunter (1844) is a fictionalised account of eighteenth-century events that were in turn reabsorbed into local folk memory in connection with ongoing nineteenth-century sectarian disputes in Galway/Mayo. In general, however, Archdeacon has attracted little critical attention, partly because his life is scantily documented. This chapter draws on the archives of the Royal Literary Fund and other sources to provide new biographical information, and offers a critical assessment of Archdeacon's four published novels. In particular, it argues that Archdeacon's second novel, Everard: A tale of the nineteenth century (1835), deserves attention as a portrayal of early-nineteenth-century Irish provincial life (with a glance at early-1820s literary Dublin) and as a study of a mildly Byronic young man adrift on the margins of provincial bourgeois life, whose artistic pursuits can be seen as those of a free spirit raised above the petty constraints of his neighbours, or as the folly of a dreamer who fails to realise that necessity debars him from sharing the pursuits of the leisured classes.

The first section outlines Archdeacon's career and publications, with particular reference to his ambiguous position between seeking the patronage of a leisured gentry class and appealing to a middle-class commercial readership. The second examines Everard's portrayal of reading, theatre and tourism, and argues that the novel's treatment of these leisure activities is not only interesting to the social historian but reflects its wider theme of social and cultural insecurity.

I

Matthew Archdeacon was born in Castlebar, County Mayo, on 17 March 1798. (The name Archdeacon is of Kilkenny origin.) He was probably the son of G. Archdeacon, who ran a ‘mathematical and mercantile school’ in Castlebar in 1810. George Henry Moore's reference for Archdeacon calls him ‘the son of a very estimable and distinguished man’, implying the elder Archdeacon was locally prominent.

On 15 November 1824, Archdeacon married Anne Maguire, whose father was an officer in the British army; they had three sons and three daughters.

James Whiteside (1804–76) is remembered as a leading lawyer-politician of the mid-Victorian Irish Conservative party, one of the last great exponents of the tradition of Irish classical oratory dating back to the eighteenth-century Irish parliament, and a judge who displayed more Protestant-conservative bias than legal acumen. He was born in Delgany, County Wicklow on 12 August 1804. His father, a Church of Ireland clergyman, died in 1806 and James was brought up in somewhat reduced circumstances and on Evangelical principles by his mother. He was deeply impressed by the example of his guardian, the historian and statistician Rev. James Whitelaw, who died of disease contracted while attending the sick. Whiteside’s professional and political career reveals a distinctive strand of loyalism which venerated aspects of Ireland’s eighteenth-century patriot legacy. While Whiteside’s view of the Church of Ireland as coterminous with the corporate existence of the true Irish nation occasionally led him to suggest that disestablishment would absolve Irish Protestants from loyalty to Britain, and he self-consciously drew on the oratorical legacy of the Irish Parliament in his own career, he saw contemporary loyalism not as a betrayal of the patriot legacy but as its fulfilment through participation in the providentially determined British project of disseminating Protestantism and constitutional liberty. For Whiteside, tension between the conditional loyalty associated with the ultra-Protestant view that the British government could only be trusted insofar as it upheld Protestant ascendancy, and the conservative-Burkean view that liberty was best upheld by practical administrators within a responsible government, would always ultimately be resolved in favour of the latter. This article explores Whiteside’s career in relation to the ambivalent contemporary image of the lawyer-politician, and analyses his occasional writings to show how Whiteside combined political Protestantism and Peelite administrative reformism to argue that the best interests and traditions of the Irish Protestant nation were bound up with the British constitution and fulfilled through access to Westminster, and the prospect of reviving Grattan’s Parliament was an attractive but irresponsible dream.

In late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland public-speaking – the sermon, the bar, the lecture, the hustings – was a major form of popular entertainment. High-profile lawyers became celebrities.