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Life
| 1909-1988 [Robert Walter Dudley Edwards; occas. R. W. D. Edwards] historian; son of English teacher and mother from Clare; ed. Synge St. CBS and St. Enda’s; ed. UCD and King’s College, London, completing doctorate on church and state in Tudor Ireland; fnd. Journal of Irish Historical Studies with T. W. Moody to 1977; lecturer in mod. Irish history, UCD, 1939; Professor of Mod. Irish History, 1945-79; |
| he was a party to the founding of the Bureau of Military History, and a strong proponent of oral records among living participants in events surrounding 1916; issued Church and State in Tudor Ireland (1935); a key early contributor to the New History of Ireland (1972) - the flagship project of the Irish Historical Society; he issued Daniel O’Connell and His World (1975) and Ireland in the Age of the Tudors (1977); also fnd. the UCD Archive Dept. and encouraged the National Archives Act (1988); d. 5 June 1988. DIW |
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Works
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Bibliographical details
The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards & T. Desmond Williams (Dublin: [Irish Historical Studies] Browne & Nolan 1956), 517pp. [For contents, see listing in RICORSO > Library > Criticism > History > Modern - as attached.]
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Criticism
Aidan Clarke, ‘Robert Dudley Edwards’ (1909-1988), Irish Historical Studies, XXVI (1988-89), pp.121-27; Christophe Gillissen, ‘Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel and the historiography of the Great Famine’, in Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XIX:2 [Irish Famine Iss.] (2014), pp.195-212 [n.pag.); available online; see extract].
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Commentary
Sean O’Faoláin (The Irish, 1947): O’Faoláin cites Edwards’s Church and State in Tudor Ireland (1935) on the decadence of the Irish Church in the pre-Reformation period which adds in a footnote some remarks about the Normans bringing armour and stone fortresses to Ireland as well as the burning of churches, &c.; to which O’Faolain answers that the Irish had no need of instruction in this matter and that ‘It is tiresome when nations blame one another for their own faults.’ (The Irish, 1947, p.69.)
Colm Tóibín, ‘Let us lay these ghosts to rest’, in The Guardian, [Sat.] (10 July 1999): "[...] In the early 1940s Eamon de Valera, who had been brought up in County Clare, a part of Ireland deeply affected by the famine, realised that there was a need for a definitive single volume on the famine by serious historians, and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, 1,000 pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. / The government released a grant of £1,500. It finally appeared in 1956, with 436 pages of text. It was the first serious work about the famine by modern historians, and it tells us a great deal both about the famine and about the historians.’ [Cont.]
Colm Tóibín (‘Let us lay these ghosts to rest’, Guardian, 10 July 1999) - cont.: ‘In his essay on the saga of this book, which is included in Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism [ed. Ciaran Brady], Cormac O’Gráda writes: “It reads more like an administrative history of the period, with the core chapters dwelling on the tragedy mainly from the standpoint of the politician, the Poor Law administrator, those who controlled passenger movements, and the medical practitioner ... Few of the contributors relied on the wealth of manuscript sources available even then on the famine years.” / De Valera was out of office by the time the book was published. “Later,” O’Gráda writes, “he expressed unhappiness with the book, presumably because it seemed to downplay those aspects of the tragedy that had been etched in his own memory. Almost three decades later, that ‘definitive history’ remains to be written, though a great deal of work has been done in the interim.”’
[ See Tóibín’s further remarks on the Irish Famine - as supra. ]
Christophe Gillissen, ‘Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel and the historiography of the Great Famine’, in Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XIX:2 [Irish Famine Iss.] (2014): ‘In 1963, history students at University College Dublin, where Dudley Edwards was based, were famously invited to write an essay on the theme: “The Great Hunger is a great novel.” It was nonetheless based on a number of archival sources that had been neglected until then, like Trevelyan’s papers, and it turned out to be the “most widely read Irish history book of all time”. It has had a lasting influence on many scholars and it remains a useful book to this day.’ (‘Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel and the historiography of the Great Famine’, in Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XIX:2 [Irish Famine Iss.] (2014), pp.195-212 [n.pag.); available online; accessed 05.05.2024.]
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Quotations
The Great Famine (1956) - conclusion to Introduction: ‘If modern research cannot substantiate the traditional [interpretation] in all its forms, something surely more sobering emerges which is, perhaps, of greater value towards an appreciation of the problems that beset all mankind, both the governors and the governed in every generation. If man, the prisoner of time, acts in conformity with the conventions of society into which he is born, it is difficult to judge him with an irrevocable harshness. So it is with the men of the famine era. Human limitations and timidity dominate the story of the Great Famine, but of great and deliberately imposed evil in high positions of responsibility there is little evidence. The really great evil lay in the totality of that social order which made such a famine possible and which could tolerate, to the extent it did, the suffering and hardship caused by the failure of the potato crop.’ (The Great Famine, Dublin 1956, pp.xiv-xv; quoted in Gillessin, op. cit., 2014; available online; accessed 05.05.2024.]
Notes
Kith & Kin: three children, Mary, Owen (Edinburgh University), and Ruth, author of biographies of Patrick Pearse, Victor Gollancz, et al.
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