Abstract
In writing from eighteenth-century Ireland there is evidence of sustained and varied reflection on the relationship between humans and the natural world. Animal life had long been a subject for both literary and artistic representation in Ireland, but at this time—due to a complex intersection of ethical and scientific enquiries—poets and artists began to re-examine the unequal relationship between man and animal, and to consider its implications for issues of religious belief and social justice. The representation of birds, in particular, prompted poets to combine moral and philosophical questions with attention to specific Irish contexts. The importance of moral sentiment—even in poems that celebrate the beauty and freedom of songbirds, and the landscapes that sustain them—reveals the complex philosophical foundation of these works and the extent to which even conventional representations are inflected by contemporary intellectual developments.
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Notes
- 1.
Erica Fudge has discussed the difficulties inherent in accessing animals in history since they are only available to us in documents written by humans. An emphasis on the purely textual can make the real animal disappear. Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals’, in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), loc. 228–41.
- 2.
Texts written in English, Irish, and Latin date from this period. These offer differing perspectives on the relationship between humans and their environment. Almost all of the poems under consideration here are the work of educated Protestants. See The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics, eds Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 1–15; 63–107.
- 3.
The poem praises the falcon, and more specifically the goshawk, the merlin, and the sparrowhawk. John Derricke, ‘From: The First Part of the Image of Irelande,’ in The Irish Poet and the Natural World, eds Carpenter and Collins. For a general discussion of the history of poetry in Ireland during this period, see Andrew Carpenter, ‘Poetry in English, 1690–1800’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vols, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, 282–319.
- 4.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 77–80.
- 5.
Sir William Temple and his sister Martha were brought up in Dublin where their father, Sir John Temple, was Master of the Rolls. Martha married Sir Thomas Giffard in Dublin in 1662, but he died a week later. As well as being the most famous diplomat of his age, William Temple was a writer of distinction. His essays on diverse subjects, from political theory to grief, reveal the range of his interests. See Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 108–11.
- 6.
Erica Fudge identifies Godfrey Goodman’s Fall of Man (1616) as one source for this conviction. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 100.
- 7.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 109.
- 8.
Ibid., 111. The question of interspecies intimacy is explored by Laura Brown in ‘Immoderate Love: The Lady and the Lapdog,’ Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 65–90.
- 9.
For further detail on the Irish print trade during the Enlightenment, see Máire Kennedy, French Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and ‘Reading the Enlightenment in Ireland,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45.3 (Spring 2012), 355–78.
- 10.
Sean Moore, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Enlightenment,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45.3 (Spring 2012), 348.
- 11.
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes to England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1983), 121
- 12.
Hutcheson is best known for two works: An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725) and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728). See Michael Brown, Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–1739 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).
- 13.
In Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832, Evan Gottlieb notes the importance of marginal groups in the construction of sympathetic Britishness in the long eighteenth century.
- 14.
Thomas Duddy contrasts Hutcheson’s willingness to see virtue in the human endeavour with what he calls the ‘unflattering moralities’ of Hobbes and Mandeville. See Duddy, ‘Against the Selfish Philosophers: Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, and James Usher’, A History of Irish Thought (London: Routledge, 2002), 170.
- 15.
Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1772), 126–27.
- 16.
Hutcheson, Inquiry, 105.
- 17.
Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 239–40.
- 18.
Collins was described thus by Iolo Williams, who collected his work. Though born in England, Collins was active in Ireland for part of his career. See Nicola Figgis in The Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. 2 (London: Yale University Press), 212.
- 19.
Toby Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 241.
- 20.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 161. Pilkington’s poems, together with those of some of her friends, are embedded in her three-volume Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington (1748–1754).
- 21.
The author of the poem, Mr B-------r, was probably Mr Belcher, holder of minor offices at Dublin Castle. The poem is dedicated to Lady Cartaret; Lord Cartaret was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1724 to 1730.
- 22.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 163.
- 23.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, analytical index by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 471.
- 24.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley, intr. Amartya Sen (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 232.
- 25.
Smith, Moral Sentiments, 7. My italics.
- 26.
Daniel Shaw, ‘Hume’s Moral Sentimentalism.’ Hume Studies 19.1 (April 1993): 34.
- 27.
James Chandler, ‘The Politics of Sentiment: Towards a New Account’, Studies in Romanticism, 14 (2010): 561.
- 28.
James Digges Latouche stood for parliament in 1749 but was deemed not duly elected as a consequence of his association with the radical Dr Charles Lucas.
- 29.
Keith Thomas notes that the popularity of caged birds was such that, in the eighteenth century ‘jays, thrushes, bullfinches, starlings, wrens, cuckoos and wild birds of every kind were captured and sold in the London bird markets’ (Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 111). A bird market reputedly took place on New Bride Street in Dublin until the 1950s.
- 30.
Samuel Whyte, Poems on Various Subjects (Dublin, 1795), 435.
- 31.
Ibid., 437.
- 32.
Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 111–12.
- 33.
Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, vol. 5 (Dublin: Printed for James Williams, 1776–1777), 163.
- 34.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 303.
- 35.
Ibid., 303.
- 36.
For an analysis of this poem within the context of blood sports in Ireland during this period, see Lucy Collins, ‘“Our Sep’rate Natures are the Same”: Reading Bloodsports in Irish Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Animals in Irish Literature and Culture, eds Borbala Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 13–25.
- 37.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 304.
- 38.
Paula R. Feldman, ‘Introduction’, in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xxviii–xxix.
- 39.
Juliana Schiesari, ‘Melancholia and Mourning Animals’, in The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern, eds Martin Middeke and Christina Wald (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 224.
- 40.
Samuel Whyte, The Shamrock: or Hibernian Cresses (Dublin, 1772), 446.
- 41.
Ibid., 447.
- 42.
For a discussion of the affection expressed towards caged birds by their owners, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 111.
- 43.
The full title of this publication—the Universal Magazine and Review or Repository of Literature containing the Literature, History, Manners, Arts and Amusements of the Age—emphasises the circulation of ideas and tropes through different forms of text during the period.
- 44.
Advertisements in the Belfast Newsletter show McCormick conducting business as a gun-maker there from 1784. In 1794 he moved the business to Dublin.
- 45.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 312.
- 46.
Ibid., 313.
- 47.
Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 186.
- 48.
My thanks to Colleen English for sharing her ideas on this subject. Her PhD thesis, ‘Writing the Dead: Epitaphs, Elegies and Communities of Sentiment in Romantic Ireland’, was completed at University College Dublin in 2015.
- 49.
Samuel Whyte’s The Shamrock: or Hibernian Cresses (1772) claimed to be the first anthology of exclusively Irish poems.
- 50.
Yi Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
- 51.
Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 56.
- 52.
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), loc. 4326.
- 53.
Jeremy Bentham, ‘An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838), 143.
- 54.
See David Perkins, ‘Animal Rights and “Auguries of Innocence”’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 33 (1999): 4–11.
- 55.
Samantha Hurd, Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 99.
- 56.
Hurd, Humans and Other Animals, 99–100.
- 57.
William M’Elroy, from Fintona in Co. Tyrone, displayed his religious zeal in his published work, which included copious biblical quotation.
- 58.
Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 356.
- 59.
‘No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathise with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to, our own’ (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 688). See also Markman Ellis, ‘Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility’, in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 92–94.
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Collins, L. (2020). Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland. In: Carey, B., Greenfield, S., Milne, A. (eds) Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_2
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