Nineteenth-century Ireland has long been cited as an instance of a ‘literacy transition’. From an apparently predominantly illiterate populace whose lack of reading and writing competencies was quantified by the 1841 census, literacy in Ireland increased dramatically within a century: the catalyst – or product – of seismic educational, political and linguistic changes. Yet the processes, and the full cultural significance, of this transition remain somewhat unclear – as does its implications for broader questions of how nineteenth-century Irish readers engaged with text and language. This volume of essays seeks to contribute to the understanding of how literacy, in its various forms and languages, functioned in nineteenthcentury Ireland, and how reading and writing allowed an increasingly literate Irish populace to participate in print communities at home and abroad. In general, discussions of literacy in nineteenth-century Ireland have tended to position themselves in relation to developments in education and state institutions, a trend that has problematic repercussions, as we discuss below. As Mary E. Daly and Eugenio F. Biagini highlight in the introduction to The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, a focus on people rather than institutions is to be welcomed. Moreover, they argue that ‘Irish history is best understood in a wider European and indeed global context’ rather than as an insular exception. Writing of nineteenth-century Ireland, Ciarán O’Neill has stated that ‘the expansion of literacy has been read as a product of colonially-motivated mass schooling […] a colonial imposition aimed at eliminating both a “real” Irish culture and the Irish language’, and thus it ‘has become difficult to separate the literacy debate from the educational and the colonial’. These long-held assumptions have been challenged by scholars such as Nicholas Wolf, whose An Irish Speaking Island has illuminated the complex landscape of literacy in Ireland, complicating the sense of linguistic displacement and colonial dominance from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Wolf 's work attempts to extricate the languages of Ireland from an over-determined nationalist narrative in which the ‘forces for Anglicization’ attack and marginalise the indigenous language: a narrative in which ‘the primary feature’ of Irish is ‘its endangerment and political extinction’ and in which literacy features as an agent of colonisation.

Introduction

The origins of historical research into childhood are usually traced to the publication of Philippe Ariès's 1960 study, translated into English as Centuries of childhood. Here, Ariès argued that while there have always been children, the concept of ‘childhood’ – the recognition, celebration and, frequently, idealisation of an intermediate stage of life between infancy and adulthood – only developed in the seventeenth century and then primarily among the wealthier middle classes. Later scholars have dismissed Ariès's portrayal of the Middle Ages as a period in which parents had a largely unemotional relationship with their children. However, there has been a general consensus that by the middle of the eighteenth century, certainly in elite families, the child was increasingly being recognised as an individual with needs which differed from those of adults. This chapter, therefore, charts a period of enormous change beginning with the ‘discovery of childhood’ and ending with the insertion of ‘the rights of the child’ into the Irish constitution in 2012.

Ariès inspired the development of a new field of scholarship, employing age – like gender, race or class – as a tool of historical enquiry. Methodologically, this poses challenges for historians as even within a limited region and timeframe, the definition and experience of ‘childhood’ is not universal. Furthermore, children are less likely than adults to have created records that have been preserved and, where they are extant, these sources may elude analysis by the modern adult. Historians are usually dependent on sources written or recorded by adults and, in consequence, Harry Hendrick has asked ‘can the history of children/childhood ever be more than that of what adults have done to children and how they conceptualised childhood?’ This question is not merely rhetorical. Internationally, the historiography of childhood has evolved from concentration on the changing ways in which adults – whether parents, philosophers, philanthropists or politicians – represented and thought about children, to studies of the increasing intervention by states into the lives of poor, ‘criminal’, illegitimate and other vulnerable children, to attempts through the use of such sources as oral histories, memoirs, folklore collections and children's literature to discover the authentic voices, and the agency, of children in the past.