Ireland & the English Lake Poets

The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Dr Brandon Yen and Dr Amy Prendergast

Through literary treasures from the Library of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, we explore how William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and his fellow Lake Poets – Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Robert Southey (1774–1843) – engaged with Ireland.

Notes of a Journey in the North of Ireland, in the Summer of 1827 (1828)The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Context

This exhibition celebrates the rich collection of Romantic-period literary treasures from the Library of Trinity College Dublin. Here we explore the socio-political and cultural exchanges between and across Romantic Ireland and England through hand-coloured political cartoons, unique manuscripts by Wordsworth’s contemporaries and Irish friends, first or early editions of poetry and prose, and illustrations from rare nineteenth-century travel books.

Slender Billy & Hopping Harry: trying to bring a Wild Irish Bull to Westminster (1800)The Library of Trinity College Dublin

The Irish Rebellion of 1798 highlighted the question of Ireland’s relationship with Britain. The prolonged wars with France, which had begun in 1793 – and the fear of Ireland turning against Britain with French assistance – led British politicians to ponder bringing Ireland firmly into the fold.

Bribery and patronage were used to secure the passage of the Union. The Act of Union finally came into force on 1 January 1801. It achieved a legislative union in Westminster and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Dublin Castle, however, remained the seat of British colonial power in Ireland.

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This print shows the Prime Minister William Pitt and the Home Secretary Henry Dundas attempting to throw the noose of ‘UNION’ over a furious Irish bull, which is snorting from its nostrils ‘Erin go Bragh’ (Ireland Forever).

The Irish bull appeared in several pictorial satires on the Union to visualise Irish resistance to British policy. The animal alludes to a species of verbal blunders – called ‘Irish bulls’ – associated with the Irish lower classes. Maria Edgeworth and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth famously challenged this stereotypical association in their Essay on Irish Bulls (1802).

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Notes of a Journey in the North of Ireland, in the Summer of 1827 (1828)The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland was integrated into a burgeoning domestic tourism. British and Irish tourists in search of ‘the Picturesque’ availed themselves of improved or newly constructed roads and canals, benefitting from the development of steamboats, stage coaches, mail coaches, post-chaises, and, later, rail transport. Maps, guides, travelogues, prints, and local antiquarian histories were produced in large quantities. It was also the age of the Ordnance Survey (Ireland was comprehensively mapped from 1824 to 1846).

Ireland’s case was particularly intriguing. On the one hand, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808–1834) fostered a romantic view of a country whose glories were gone with ‘the light of other days’. On the other, a series of events pressingly underscored Ireland’s problematic relationship to Britain: the United Irishmen’s 1798 rebellion, Robert Emmet’s 1803 rising, and Captain Rock’s agrarian disturbances in the 1820s. The Union, and then the debates about Catholic Emancipation, not only incorporated Ireland into a British sense of nationhood but also brought its ineradicable differences to the fore.

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Itinerary for Wordsworth's tour in Ireland, 1829 by Stephanie Breen and Brandon YenThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

In 1823, Edward Quillinan (1791–1851), a Roman Catholic born to Irish parents in Portugal, published a book of entertaining verse epistles, entitled Shamrock Leaves, or, The Wicklow Excursion. One of the notes in this book mentions Wordsworth, Quillinan’s future father-in-law. Wordsworth's ‘Muse', Quillinan says,

‘never seems to have reminded him that there was in the West beauty made for song, and yet unsung; that only a narrow channel separated his own romantic coast from scenery as fine as that of Rydal, or Borrowdale, or Ulswater [places in the English Lake District] ...’

In late August 1829, Wordsworth, aged 59, did cross the ‘narrow channel’. His travelling companions were John Marshall (MP for Yorkshire) and Marshall’s son James. The friends ‘bowled away’ from the Lake District in Marshall’s carriage to Holyhead, via Chroley and Llangollen. They took the ‘Holyhead Pacquet’ and, after ‘a quiet passage’, arrived in Howth (9 miles from Dublin) on 30 August.

They then toured Ireland along a clock-wise route, finally reaching the port of Donaghadee, Co. Down, on 3 October. From there they returned to the Lakes via Portpatrick in Scotland.

Travelling in a ‘carriage and four’, they spent five weeks in Ireland, where they visited glens, rivers, loughs, abbeys, churches, castles, and demesnes, as well as Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Derry/Londonderry, and Belfast.

Along the way, Wordsworth kept up with friends and made new acquaintances. Remarkably, he also conquered Carrauntoohil with the young James Marshall.


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Sketches in Ireland (1827) by Caesar OtwayThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Caesar Otway (1780–1842), a Church of Ireland clergyman, was the author of Sketches in Ireland (1827), a travel book that Wordsworth read with ‘great pleasure’ prior to his Irish tour of 1829. In Dublin, Otway gave Wordsworth ‘a map of Ireland in two parts on Silk’. Together with William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), he accompanied the poet to Glendalough. Later in life, Otway recalled Wordsworth’s comment on the ‘ill treatment’ of horses in Ireland as the thing that had ‘most struck his observation’.

Otway’s Sketches in Ireland shows a keen interest in Irish history, landscapes, and local traditions. At times, however, his descriptions are coloured by religious prejudices.

Here we see a sharp contrast between St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg and the Protestant settlement of Enniskillen on Lough Erne. For Otway, the former was ‘the monstrous birth of a dreary and degraded [Catholic] superstition’, whilst the latter was ‘like the Island Queen of all the loyalty, and industry, and reasonable worship that ha[d] made her sons the admiration of past and present time’.

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Picturesque Sketches of some of the Finest Landscape and Coast Scenery of Ireland (1835)The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Ireland and the Writers

Was Ireland a ‘strange Country’ or a ‘sister Island’?

"View from the Top of Black Comb", in Poems, vol. 1, William Wordsworth, 1815, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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In his poem ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’ (composed in 1813), Wordsworth regards Black Combe as the seat of a ‘ministering Angel’. From this Cumbrian mountain,

‘the amplest range
Of unobstructed prospect may be seen
That British ground commands …’

This prospect view encompasses English, Scottish, and Welsh hills and rivers, as well as the Isle of Man and an ‘azure ridge’ apparently beyond the Irish sea.

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"View from the Top of Black Comb", in Poems, vol. 1, William Wordsworth, 1815, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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"View from the Top of Black Comb", in Poems, vol. 1, William Wordsworth, 1815, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Wordsworth asks whether the ‘azure ridge’ is a ‘perishable cloud’ or ‘the line of Erin’s coast’. As he notes in his Guide to the Lakes, Erin (or Ireland) can indeed be seen from Black Combe.

But in the view Black Combe affords of ‘British ground’, Ireland’s presence is ambiguous. In describing ‘Erin’s coast’ as ‘the bright confines of another world’, Wordsworth alludes to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. There, Beelzebub imagines occupying the newly created world, from which the Fallen Angels might regain heaven’s ‘bright confines’. Wordsworth’s Ireland thus recalls Milton’s heaven, but the gaze upon the ‘bright confines’ of ‘Erin’s coast’ is also underwritten by the Fallen Angels’ ambivalences towards heaven.

The allusion to Milton’s ‘bright confines’ implies a wish to achieve a unitary sense of nationhood, mixed, perhaps unconsciously, with the ambivalences of an outsider.

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Peter Dale reading Wordsworth's 'View from the Top of Black Comb'
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Black Combe is a fell in the south-west corner of the English Lake District. As Wordsworth stated, it was ‘from blackness named, / And, to far-travelled storms of sea and land, / A favourite spot of tournament and war!’

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Essays on his Own Times: Forming a Second Series of The Friend, vol. 1 (1850) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Sara ColeridgeThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

The Lake Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter Sara (1802–1852) had profound Irish sympathies. In the introduction to her 1850 edition of her father’s Essays on His Own Times, she discoursed at great length on Ireland, its condition, and its national character.

There, she employed striking metaphors of trees that had a special currency in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debates about Ireland. For Sara Coleridge, whilst the present age is like ‘a tree of rapid growth and showy bloom’, we should not be blind to ‘past oppression’.

She compares these ‘knotted thorns of past oppression’ to Dante’s ghoulish Wood of the Self-Murderers in the Inferno, where the souls of suicides are transformed into trees and are tormented there by Harpies; after the Last Judgement, the bodies that were relinquished in life will be hung from the trees.

Sara Coleridge goes on to highlight the suicidal theme: ‘Truly murderous was that oppression; nay, if Erin is, as Berkeley affirms, “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,” it might be called suicidal, and represented in spectral vision as a huge black-thorn bearing the semi-animate mangled body of “poor Ireland.”’

Here, the ‘mangled body’ is to bear perpetual witness to England’s oppression, which can only redound upon itself.

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"Ireland", in Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, vol. 1 (1829) by Robert SoutheyThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Robert Southey (1774–1843) lived in Keswick and was one of the Lake Poets. He had travelled to Ireland in 1801 – he called it ‘the dear Land of Pistols & Potatoes’ – to serve briefly as private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, Isaac Corry (1753–1813).

Southey’s letters from Ireland betray a mind steeped in prejudices and stereotypes. He said that if his scientist friend Humphry Davy could procure an Irishman ‘in his laboratory’, ‘he could analize his flesh blood & bones into nothing but potatoes & buttermilk & whiskey’.

As Poet Laureate, Southey wrote a New Year’s Ode for 1822. Entitled ‘Ireland’, this ode praises George IV, who had visited Ireland in the summer of 1821, as the harbinger of a ‘perfect union’ between Britain and its ‘Sister Isle’. George IV’s visit was satirised by many writers, including Byron in ‘The Irish Avatar’, and the fair promises he held out to the Irish Catholics were in fact delusive.

Southey, however, chose to describe the euphoria that the royal visit had occasioned, envisioning the eventual triumph of the Church of Ireland over the combined forces of ‘the Romanist’, ‘the sons of Schism’, ‘the unbelieving crew’, and ‘Faction’s wolfish pack’. He compared this Anglican victory to Arthur’s defeat of Orgoglio and Duessa (symbolic of Pride and the Roman Catholic Church respectively) in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Also included in the ode is a list of Irish (or Anglo-Irish) men Southey admired at that time: William Bedell, Jeremy Taylor, James Butler, Robert Boyle, George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, and the Duke of Wellington.

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Castle Rackrent (1800) by Maria EdgeworthThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Maria Edgeworth’s first novel, Castle Rackrent, made a profound impact on the literary landscape upon its publication in 1800, and it continues to be widely read and celebrated today. Offering its readers insight into life in Ireland and the manners of the Irish population, the novel has been awarded a plethora of accolades, including being declared the first regional novel, while Edgeworth’s contributions to Romanticism and to Irish literature were widely celebrated in 2018 on her 250th anniversary.

Castle Rackrent immediately found an extensive audience in Britain, and it is mentioned by Robert Southey in his correspondence, as well as praised by Coleridge’s only daughter Sara, an author and translator, who highlights its ‘genuine humour’.

Although feted across Europe, the author’s gender excluded her from membership of many public institutions, although Edgeworth later became one of the Royal Irish Academy’s first female honorary members when she was elected towards the end of her life, in 1842, during William Rowan Hamilton’s presidency of the RIA. Hamilton proposed his friend William Wordsworth to the academy during the same decade, and four years after Edgeworth, Wordsworth was also elected honorary member, in 1846, the achievements of both writers being officially recognised within Ireland.

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"Selections of poetry", Katharine Archer, 1794-1805, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Katharine Archer’s selections of poetry offer the reader an insight into the diverse tastes in poetry among the Irish population at the turn of the century. Written between 1794 and 1805, her manuscript selections bring together male and female writers from across Britain and Ireland.

Poems by Bluestocking women such as Hannah More and Elizabeth Carter are transcribed alongside extracts from the works of Alexander Pope and odes by Thomas Gray. Poems by Archer’s acquaintances also feature, as do works by the anthologist herself.

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"Selections of poetry", Katharine Archer, 1794-1805, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Although there are several poems by William Cowper, including his ‘The Castaway’, the Lake Poets do not feature here, nor in other similar manuscript anthologies, such as collaborative work from the Bushe, Langrish, and Connellan families, also preserved at TCD (MS 3989). We are reminded that many of the poems of the Romantic period did not find wider audiences until later in the nineteenth century, when the works were more widely anthologised in print editions. Copyright legislation meant that older poetry was much more likely to be circulated, reprinted, anthologised, and ultimately read, rather than the material generated during the Romantic period itself.

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"Trinity College, from College Green, Dublin", in Ireland Illustrated, in a Series of Views..., George N. Wright, 1829, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Wordsworth arrived in Dublin on 30 August 1829, staying for three days at Dunsink Observatory with William Rowan Hamilton. Whilst in Dublin, he visited ‘all the public buildings inside and out’, including Trinity College Dublin and its ‘Fagel Collection’.

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The Fagel Library, in The History of the University of Dublin, William Benjamin Sarsfield Taylor, 1845, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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This famous collection had belonged to the Fagel family. Hendrik Fagel the younger (Greffier to the States General of the Netherlands) had been stranded in England due to the French Revolution and the subsequent wars. His straitened circumstances forced him to sell his family library, which he had managed to ship to London. The collection of maps, pamphlets, and books – on topics such as history, law, economics, theology, geology, natural history, travel, and belles lettres – was purchased for Trinity College Dublin in 1802. Fagel’s 20,000-volume collection added substantially to Trinity’s existing collection of 50,000 volumes and greatly enhanced its diversity.

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Visiting Dublin in 1813 to see Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862) had referred to Trinity’s ‘noble library’ with its ‘many rare and valuable MSS., and a vast collection of printed books’, but he also believed ‘it was useless to visit it, for it was in the utmost disorder and confusion’.

Like many other English visitors at that time, Hogg was prejudiced against the Irish. Trinity, he wrote, was like ‘a workhouse’ compared with the ‘neatness’, ‘propriety’, and ‘elegance’ at Oxford (from which he and Shelley had been expelled in 1811). Unlike Oxford’s ‘smart, well-dressed, gentleman-like undergraduates’, Hogg thought that the ‘young hopes of Hibernia’ were ‘outwardly a buttonless, stringless, ragged lot’.

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Glendalough – with its round tower and seven churches – is steeped in local traditions related to St Kevin. Situated in Co. Wicklow, it was a major tourist attraction, close to other celebrated places such as the Vale of Avoca, the Devil’s Glen, the Dargle, and Powerscourt. Thomas Moore popularised Glendalough in one of his Irish Melodies‘By that Lake, whose gloomy shore / Sky-lark never warbles o’er’ – which tells the story of St Kevin’s Bed, a precipitous spot from which the saint was said to have flung Kathleen, his amorous pursuer, into the lake.

Sir Walter Scott bravely climbed into St Kevin’s Bed in 1825; so did William Rowan Hamilton in 1829 and Edward Lear in 1835.

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Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c. Vol.2, Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall, 1842, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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In Glendalough, Wordsworth saw an Irish woman who was going to dip her child in St Kevin’s Pool ‘to cure its lameness’. The ‘tenderness’, he wrote, with which the Catholic woman ‘spoke of the Child and its sufferings and the sad pleasure with which she detailed the progress it had made towards recovery would have moved the most insensible’.

However, the woman’s religion precluded Wordsworth’s full sympathy. He asked: ‘What would one not give to see among protestants such devout reliance on the mercy of their Creator, so much resignation, so much piety – so much simplicity and singleness of mind, purged of the accompanying Superstitions’?

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Like the Wicklow Mountains, Killarney was a favourite destination for tourists from Britain. Killarney’s beautiful lakes were often compared with the English lakes.

Before his 1829 journey, Wordsworth wrote a playful poem about fashionable tourists in the Lake District. He had seen the following words in the visitors’ book at the viewing station on Lake Windermere: ‘Lord & Lady Darlington, Lady Vane, Miss Taylor & Capn Stamp pronounce this Lake superior to Lac de Geneve, Lago de Como, Lago Maggiore, L’Eau de Zurick, Loch Lomond, Loch Ketterine or the Lakes of Killarney.’

Wordsworth ridiculed this remark as ‘Folly’s own Hyperbole’. However, whilst he had visited all the Continental and Scottish lakes dismissed by the wealthy tourists in this instance, he ‘wish’d at least to hear the blarney / Of the sly boatmen of Killarney’.

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Picturesque Sketches of some of the Finest Landscape and Coast Scenery of Ireland, 1835, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Sure enough, Killarney left an abiding impression on Wordsworth during his tour. In 1841, the poet described Killarney in relation to the English lakes in a letter to Samuel Carter Hall, co-author (with his wife Anna Maria) of Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c. (1841–1843). Wordsworth told Hall that the ‘three Lakes of Killarney considered as one, as they might naturally be, lying so close to each other, were together more important than any one of our Lakes’ (although he also emphasised that Killarney was greater than any ‘one’, as opposed to the entirety, of the English lakes).

Wordsworth also said that he had been so impressed with Co. Kerry that he had wished to ‘write a topographical description of it, in connection with some skillful Artist’.

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"The Power of Sound", in Yarrow Revisited, William Wordsworth, 1835, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Wordsworth’s poem ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1835) contains the only image that arose from his Irish tour of 1829:

‘Thou too be heard, lone Eagle! freed
From snowy peak and cloud, attune
Thy hungry barkings to the hymn
Of joy…’

Written shortly after the Irish tour, this passage was inspired by a pair of eagles Wordsworth had seen at Fair Head in Co. Antrim.

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"The Power of Sound", in Yarrow Revisited, William Wordsworth, 1835, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Wordsworth described to Francis Edgeworth how the eagles had ‘barked or yelped or clattered or screamed or whistled’. They ‘sailed towards the setting sun & were lost in a red cloud’. And then they ‘returned and spread their wings to the full width’ between the ‘sun set of corallic carmine’ and the ‘dreary’ rock.

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In response, Francis Edgeworth said that the ‘barking noise’ reminded him of the Greek writer Aeschylus’s reference to the ‘Promethean Eagle’ as the ‘winged hound of Jove’; he had always understood this as meaning the prowess of the bird of prey, but now the ‘barking’ – the sheer sound of it – added ‘new force’. The Irish eagles also appear in one of Wordsworth’s sonnets about an eagle cooped up in Dunollie Castle on the west coast of Scotland:

‘The last I saw
Was on the wing; stooping, he struck with awe
Man, bird, and beast; then, with a Consort paired,
From a bold headland, their loved aery’s guard,
Flew high above Atlantic waves, to draw
Light from the fountain of the setting sun.’

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Funeral of the Constitution (1829) by Isaac Cruikshank ?The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Catholicism

In the United Kingdom, Catholic Emancipation was essentially an Irish question. It ripped apart political parties and successive governments.

Catholic Emancipation received the royal assent on 13 April 1829. The issue had played a major political role in the United Kingdom since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It became increasingly urgent in the 1820s due to the tremendous influence of the Catholic Association, under the leadership of ‘The Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell.

Catholic Emancipation was steered through parliament by the Duke of Wellington (Prime Minister) and Robert Peel (Home Secretary), who had altered their anti-Catholic views out of pragmatic, rather than theological, concerns.

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This print alludes to the Graveyard Scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with Wellington and Peel (the latter removing his ‘Orange Peel’ to reveal a green costume) digging a grave for the British Constitution.

Lord Eldon, a staunch and influential enemy of Catholic Emancipation, is portrayed as Hamlet, contemplating the ‘fine revolution’ happening around him – the ministers’ desertion of the anti-Catholic cause, as well as the horrors in the background, with York Minster set aflame and St Paul’s Cathedral re-inscribed St Patrick’s.

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Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) by William WordsworthThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Wordsworth was against Catholic Emancipation. In March 1829, half a year before his Irish journey, he wrote to the Bishop of London, describing Catholicism as a ‘soul-degrading faith’, and Irish Catholics as ‘swarms of degraded people’. However, Wordsworth’s views of Catholicism were more complex than a simple gut reaction.

In 1822, he published Ecclesiastical Sketches, a sequence of sonnets tracing the origins and progress of the Church in England. The sonnet shown here glances critically at Henry VIII’s ‘reckless mastery’ following his break with Roman Catholicism, acknowledging that the Henrician Reformation swept away both good and evil.

But here Wordsworth also alludes to John Milton’s Paradise Lost in mocking those Catholic trappings that, in his opinion, mislead believers. Milton portrays how a ‘violent cross-wind’ blows ‘Eremites, and Friars / White, Black, and Grey, with all their trumpery’ to ‘a Limbo large, and broad, since called / The Paradise of Fools’.

Borrowing from Milton, Wordsworth says that those ‘Bulls, pardons, relics, cowls’ were not worth retaining, however much we lament the violence of the Reformation.

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Letter to William Phelan, Robert Southey, 15 March 1828, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Having earlier cherished radical ideas, Southey had by the 1820s become a vociferous supporter of Britain’s political and religious establishments. He sought to reinforce the Church of England by attacking Roman Catholicism in his contributions to The Quarterly Review, in his Book of the Church (1824), and in Sir Thomas More (1829).

On 15 March 1828, Southey wrote to William Phelan (1789–1830), a Trinity College-educated Anglican churchman. Southey gratefully acknowledged Phelan’s History of the Policy of the Church of Rome in Ireland (1827), which had ‘delighted [him] greatly’.

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Letter to William Phelan, Robert Southey, 15 March 1828, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Southey co-opted, to his own point of view, Phelan and Mortimer O’Sullivan, another Irish author whose books contain strong anti-Catholic sentiments, including Captain Rock Detected (1824), a counterblast to Thomas Moore’s pro-Catholic Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824).

Praising Phelan and O’Sullivan, and urging Phelan to carry on with his work, Southey wrote of those who were clamouring for Catholic Emancipation: ‘the assailants are always at work, & it is no time to sleep at our posts while they are battering the citadel in breach.’ He would have had in mind Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association, as well as Moore and English sympathisers such as William Cobbett.

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On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) by Samuel Taylor ColeridgeThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Coleridge’s most carefully formulated response to the Catholic Question was On the Constitution of the Church and State.

Here, he attributes the ‘evil’ of the Irish situation to imperfections in the conquest of Ireland by Britain. Whilst the Romans had effectively sought to pacify the conquered, Britain pursued the laws of ‘exclusion and disqualification’ for their own sake, without any consideration of the ultimate aim of ‘general tranquillity’.

The ‘evil’ having been introduced, the Catholic Relief Bill could at best only mitigate it. For Catholic Emancipation to work positively, Coleridge claimed that it had to rest on one single principle which possesses the character of an ‘ultimatum’: the Roman Catholic priesthood should be excluded from the National Church.

Coleridge’s definition of the National Church is broad. Whilst the object of the State is to ‘reconcile the interests of permanence with that of progression – law with liberty’, the aim of the National Church is to ‘secure and improve that civilisation, without which the nation could be neither permanent nor progressive’. For Coleridge, Roman Catholic priests could not fulfil their role in the national interest because of their ‘allegiance to a foreign power’.

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Photograph of Sir William Rowan Hamilton (Mid 19th-century)The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Romantic Sociability: The Hamiltons

Wordsworth’s major contact during his 1829 Irish tour was William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), the young Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. They had met in the Lake District in 1827.

"Coniston Lake from N. End old man" (1827) by William Rowan HamiltonThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

In June 1827, William Rowan Hamilton was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. Shortly afterwards, he made the acquaintance of the Scottish civil engineer Alexander Nimmo in Armagh. With Nimmo, he toured Limerick, Killarney, Cork, Youghal, Dungannon, Waterford, and Dunmore before taking a steamboat from Waterford to Bristol. This was a significant event for Hamilton, not least because he met Wordsworth in the Lake District during the tour.

But Hamilton also developed other interests along the way. He said to Nimmo: ‘I have long looked on nature with a poet’s eye […]; I am now beginning to look upon it with a painter’s, too. Ludicrous as my present attempts in drawing may be, they serve to make me enjoy, in a far higher and more definite manner than formerly, the visible beauties of Nature and of Art.’

In Killarney, Hamilton had met the famous painter John Glover, who let him ‘look on while he was taking several sketches’. Hamilton himself kept a sketchbook during this tour. Displayed here is his sketch of Coniston Water and the Old Man of Coniston in the Lake District.

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Letter to Eliza Hamilton, William Rowan Hamilton, 16 September 1827, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Writing to his sister Eliza on 16 September 1827, Hamilton mentioned climbing Helvellyn with Caesar Otway, Alexander Nimmo, and Nimmo’s apprentice Jones.

After descending from the peak, the friends went to Rydal Mount to visit Wordsworth, whom they had met the previous evening. Wordsworth walked back with them towards Ambleside, but he and Hamilton so much enjoyed each other’s company that Hamilton offered to walk back again with him to Rydal, whilst the others proceeded to their hotel in Ambleside.

(This is a typical ‘crossed letter’: ‘cross-hatching’, or ‘cross-writing’, was often used in the early nineteenth century to save paper and to save on postage charges.)

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Letter to Eliza Hamilton, William Rowan Hamilton, 16 September 1827, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Hamilton and Wordsworth then strolled back and forth between Rydal and Ambleside, a distance of some two miles, until ‘midnight’. Hamilton told his sister: ‘he and I were taking a midnight walk together for a long long time, without any companion, except the silent stars, and our own burning thoughts & words.’

During the 1827 tour, Hamilton also met Robert Southey, and he was to befriend Samuel Taylor Coleridge too.

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Helvellyn is a peak in the Lake District, five miles north of Grasmere. Wordsworth saw it as a ‘domestic mountain’ from which one could obtain a ‘visual sovereignty’ over ‘hills multitudinous’, over ‘wood and lake and plains / And prospect right below of deep coves shaped / By skeleton arms’.

In 1838, William Rowan Hamilton wrote a poem entitled ‘Recollections’ to commemorate his several meetings with Wordsworth, including:

‘that earliest evening, when from top,
Mist-clad, of old Helvellyn, image-fraught,
Descending, first I met that honour’d Bard;
And gazing scarcely satisfied at length
A reverential longing; nor, till night
Had wrapped us long, and morning brought her star,
Ceased I to listen, or to pour my soul
Forth in enthusiast talk, by blandest mood
Of him encouraged, while the mountains rose
Dark around our path, and gleamed the distant lake.’

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Introductory lecture on astronomy (8 December 1831) by William Rowan HamiltonThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

William Rowan Hamilton devoted himself to mathematics but never ceased to read and write poetry.

In 1829, he was engaged in an argument with the novelist Maria Edgeworth’s half-brother Francis (1809–1846) over the relative importance of science and poetry. Whilst Hamilton saw beauty in science, Francis Edgeworth insisted that the ‘intense unity’ in works of art could not be found in mathematics.

When Wordsworth visited Hamilton at Dunsink Observatory in the summer of 1829, they discussed a passage in Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) which ‘did not quite please [Hamilton] by its slight reverence for Science’. Hamilton maintained that ‘the Intellectual faculties held equal rank at least with the Imaginative’.

In the early 1830s, Hamilton again responded to Wordsworth in his introductory lectures on astronomy. These lectures were delivered at Trinity College Dublin in Michaelmas Term annually. Written poetically, they were attended not only by undergraduates but also by cultural figures, including the poet Felicia Hemans.

The 1831 lecture shown here contains two long quotations from The Excursion. Hamilton quoted these passages approvingly, but he subtly shifted their bearings in order to propound the importance of science. He wanted to invest science with an imaginative stature which Francis Edgeworth had refused to recognise, and which Wordsworth, he thought, had inadequately acknowledged in The Excursion.

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"Sonnet to Wordsworth" (1844) by William Rowan HamiltonThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

In 1830, barely a year after Wordsworth’s Irish journey, Hamilton again visited the poet at Rydal Mount. Before leaving, Hamilton and his sister Eliza wrote down two poems in an album that belonged to Wordsworth’s daughter Dora (1804–1847).

Returning again to the Lake District in 1844, Hamilton added a new poem there. This latter sonnet celebrates Hamilton’s friendship with Wordsworth, recalling the ‘unquiet transport’ when he

‘listened first to hear thy personal tongue
Utter that wisdom, which, at distance sung,
Had taught the world in many a lofty line.’

When they first met in 1827, Hamilton had felt ‘a lustre’ shining from Wordsworth’s ‘presence’. Seventeen years on, he still welcomed the ‘spirits of the past hours’, but he now felt ‘a calmer joy’: ‘A willing listener still, but now a friend.’

(BY)

Greg Sheaf reading William Rowan Hamilton's 'Sonnet to Wordsworth'
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In the transcription displayed here, Hamilton mentions that ‘Mr Wordsworth read out the whole sonnet, & gave particular effect to the 8th line’: namely, he ‘Had taught the world in many a lofty line’.

(BY)

"Sonnets to Mr Wordsworth", Eliza Hamilton, 1840, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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William Rowan Hamilton’s sister Eliza (1807–1851) was herself a poet. Early in 1829, Wordsworth commented upon her poetry positively: it was ‘well and vigorously expressed, and the feelings are such as one could wish should exist oftener than they appear to do in the bosoms of male astronomers’. He was perhaps referring to her poem ‘The Moon Seen through a Telescope’, which attributes our moongazing to a sensed affinity with ‘our kindred with that heaven / Our home to be’.

Visiting the Lake District with her brother in 1830, Eliza Hamilton spent one morning discussing poetry with Wordsworth in the summerhouse at the top of Rydal Mount’s garden.

(BY)

"Sonnets to Mr Wordsworth" (1840) by Eliza HamiltonThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Stephanie Breen reading Eliza Hamilton's 'Sonnet to Mr Wordsworth'
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In the early 1840s, Eliza Hamilton wrote two sonnets addressed to Wordsworth. In 1830, she had left a poem in Wordsworth’s daughter Dora’s album, beginning ‘It is not now that I can speak’. Ten years on, with the giddiness of joy having settled into calm reflection, Eliza Hamilton tried to ‘speak’ but was conscious of her lack of poetic power. The poem looks back on her visit in 1830, when

‘Life was one sea of glory o’er whose breast
Glided entranced thy young enthusiast guest’.

The memories of Wordsworth’s ‘melodious home’ are still vivid – all the remembered ‘smiles’ are still ‘cloudlessly sweet’ – but she is afraid of disturbing Wordsworth with too ardent feelings and is aware that she cannot convey ‘half of all that lives’ in her breast.

(BY)

The Poetical Works of Mrs. F. Hemans (1876) by Felicia HemansThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Romantic Sociability: Ireland

Mary Tighe, Felicia Hemans, Maria Edgeworth

Psyche, with Other Poems, Mary Tighe, 1812, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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One of Ireland’s foremost Romantic poets, Mary Tighe (1772-1810) of Co. Wicklow, is perhaps best known as the author of Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805).

Although initially published as a limited edition of some fifty copies intended for private distribution, Psyche reached a much larger audience than was originally envisaged, as outlined in the note ‘to the reader’ in this American edition of the work. Following Tighe’s premature death from tuberculosis in 1810, Psyche was published along with other examples of Tighe’s poetry, showcasing the breadth of her talent.

Tighe is often cited as a significant influence on the work of British Romantics, particularly John Keats, who was an early admirer of her work, as well as having informed the poetry of Felicia Hemans.

(AP)

Psyche, with Other Poems, Mary Tighe, 1812, From the collection of: The Library of Trinity College Dublin
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Correspondence with the antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker at Trinity College Dublin (MS 1461/6) also illustrates Tighe’s familiarity with the Lake Poets, particularly with the work of Robert Southey.

In one letter she recounts how ‘we have been amus’d by “letters from England by a Spaniard” – the Spaniard is however a true born Englishman and (as I hear) Southey himself, tho I cannot say it is like his style. It is however pleasantly written tho’ rather a catchpenny business.’

Her consideration of Southey’s work occurs alongside the examination of other Irish Romantic writers such as Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) and Barbarina Wilmot (later Lady Dacre), placing them all in a wider community of literature, or Republic of Letters, in dialogue with one another, being considered and assessed side by side.

(AP)

The Poetical Works of Mrs. F. Hemans (1876) by Felicia HemansThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

An immensely famous poet in her time, Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) was born in Liverpool, was brought up in Wales, and was connected to Ireland. Her paternal grandfather was from Co. Cork, and her brother George Baxter was appointed a magistrate in Kilkenny in 1830 and then Chief Commissioner of Police in Ireland in 1831.

In the summer of 1830, Hemans visited Wordsworth in the Lake District, where she also met William Rowan Hamilton and his sister Eliza. Hemans moved to Ireland permanently in April 1831. In Dublin she attended Hamilton’s introductory lectures on astronomy at Trinity College, which inspired her ‘Prayer of the Lonely Student’ (1832).

She also corresponded with Irish luminaries, including the Irish novelist Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson) and Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin.

In 1830, Wordsworth had called Hemans ‘a great Enthusiast both in Poetry and music’. In Dublin she enjoyed the organ music in St Patrick’s Cathedral – ‘All is of Heaven!’, as she described it – and she relished Niccolò Paganini’s virtuosic performances at the Musical Festival in 1831.

Hemans dedicated her Scenes and Hymns of Life to Wordsworth in 1834; many of her poems of the Dublin years have a Wordsworthian flavour and even use Wordsworth for their epigraphs. Hemans died in 1835 and was buried in St Anne’s Church in Dawson Street, Dublin.

(BY)

"Lines Written for the Album at Rosanna, in 1829" in Poetical Remains of the Late Mrs Hemans (1836) by Felicia HemansThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Janet Reid reading Hemans's 'Lines Written for the Album at Rosanna'
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In Ireland, Felicia Hemans visited many places outside of Dublin, especially the tourist attractions in Co. Wicklow, such as the Devil’s Glen, Glendalough, Powerscourt, and Lough Bray.

Whilst staying with her brother in Kilkenny in the summer of 1831, she paid a visit to Woodstock, where the poet Mary Tighe (1772–1810) had spent the last few months of her life. Hemans also went to see Mary Tighe’s mausoleum in the nearby churchyard of Inistioge.

A few years previously, Hemans had commemorated Tighe in ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ (first published in 1827). There, she derives consolation from the thought that Tighe, who has ‘left sorrow in [her] song’, is now in a place where ‘changeful hours’ hold no ‘sway’.

After her visit to Inistioge in 1831, Hemans composed ‘Written after Visiting a Tomb’. In it, she addresses a ‘bright butterfly’ whose ‘reckless and joyous’ existence sharply contrasts with the ‘burden of mortal sufferings’ that she and her sister poet have borne.

In another poem associated with Mary Tighe – ‘Lines Written for the Album at Rosanna’ – Hemans visits the ‘deep chestnut-bowers’ of Rosanna, Tighe’s former residence in Co. Wicklow. Hemans asks her fellow visitors to tread softly so that Tighe’s ‘ideal presence’ may ‘Float around and touch the woods with softer green / And o’er the streams a charm, like moonlight, shed’.

(BY)

Tap to explore

Wordsworth and the Marshalls reached Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, on 20 September 1829 and stayed two days.

There, they were joined again by William Rowan Hamilton, and they met the Edgeworths.

(BY)

Letter to Eliza Hamilton (23 September 1829) by William Rowan HamiltonThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Writing to his sister Eliza from Edgeworthstown on 23 September 1829, Hamilton described how much he and Francis Edgeworth (the novelist’s half-brother, a young man with literary and philosophical leanings) had enjoyed talking with Wordsworth.

Hamilton also mentioned that Maria Edgeworth, despite her illness, had ‘exhibited in her conversations with Mr. Wordsworth a good deal of her usual brilliancy; she also engaged Mr. Marshall in some long conversations upon Ireland; and even Mr. Marshall’s son, whose talent for silence appears to be so very profound, was thawed a little on Monday evening’ (they left on Tuesday morning).

(BY)

"The library in which Maria Edgeworth wrote", in Irish Pictures: Drawn with Pen and Pencil (1888) by Richard LovettThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

Writing to her aunt in late September 1829, however, Maria Edgeworth criticised Wordsworth for his ‘superfluity of words’, even though she also saw ‘a vein of real humour’ under ‘all this slow, slimy, circumspect tiresome lengthiness’.

She described John Marshall’s ivory-like paleness and reported his spending a colossal amount of money on a recent election, though she thought he was ‘a remarkably liberal man in all his views for Ireland’.

Regarding James Marshall, she said: ‘I charitably suspect [he had] more in him than came out’.

But she was ‘glad’ it was ‘becoming more the fashion for English travellers to visit Ireland’.

(BY)

"The house in which Maria Edgeworth lived", in Irish Pictures: Drawn with Pen and Pencil (1888) by Richard LovettThe Library of Trinity College Dublin

The travelling companions whom Edgeworth commented upon so wryly were John Marshall (1765–1845) and his son James (1802–1873). John Marshall was a wealthy flax spinner from Leeds. His wife Jane (née Pollard) was a childhood friend of Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet’s sister.

In 1815, Marshall bought Hallsteads, an estate on Ullswater which the Wordsworths often visited. The Marshall family also owned other substantial lands in the Lake District. With Wordsworth’s assistance, James Marshall was to become the owner of Tarn Hows (near Coniston Water) in 1835, which was visited by the Irish writers Aubrey de Vere and William Allingham, amongst others.

John Marshall was engaged in various social and educational enterprises in Leeds and beyond. As MP for Yorkshire from 1826 to 1830, he entertained many opinions that Wordsworth frowned upon: he promoted utilitarianism and parliamentary reform and voted for Catholic relief.

The late 1820s was a transitional period for the flax-spinning industry. Marshall & Co. were beginning to adapt to new methods of wet spinning, and one of Marshall’s purposes in Ireland was to look for new markets. Belfast – which was at that time witnessing a revival of the linen trade – was an obvious destination.

A note in The Belfast Commercial Chronicle (7 October 1829) mentions Wordsworth but focuses on Marshall’s optimistic view of ‘the forward movement’ in the Irish linen trade.

(BY)

Credits: Story

The idea for this exhibition arose from Dr Brandon C. Yen's project on Wordsworth's Ireland, funded by the Irish Research Council.

This exhibition was curated by Dr Yen (BY) (School of English, University College Cork) and Dr Amy Prendergast (AP) (School of English, Trinity College Dublin) in collaboration with Stephanie Breen (Early Printed Books & Special Collections, the Library of Trinity College Dublin) and Estelle Gittins (Manuscripts & Archives, the Library of Trinity College Dublin).

Technical assistance: Greg Sheaf, Web Services Librarian, the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

Imaging: Gillian Whelan, Senior Digital Photographer, Digital Collections, the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

Conservation: Clodagh Neligan, Preservation and Conservation Department, the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

Recitations: Stephanie Breen, Peter Dale, Janet Reid, and Greg Sheaf.

Special thanks to: Prof Graham Allen (School of English, University College Cork), Prof Claire Connolly (School of English, University College Cork), Prof Aileen Douglas (School of English, Trinity College Dublin), Catherine Morrow (Belfast Central Library), Laura Shanahan (Research Collections, Trinity College Dublin), and the staff of the reading rooms of the Department of Early Printed Books & Special Collections and Manuscripts & Archives at the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

Credits: All media
The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.
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