It would, of course, be illusory to think that the granting of Catholic Emancipation brough all the political and sectarian controversy in Ireland to a harmonious close; conservative Protestant opinion hardened, as can be seen from the defiant stance of the Dublin University Magazine which was founded after the first Reform Bill so [101] as to voice the attitudes of Protestant Ireland. Even so, the measure may have helped to defuse the tense legacy of post-1798 feelings. Thomas Moore attempted to express this in his Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of Religion (1833), which, though it remained stubbornly Catholic in its exegesis and its view on Church history, famously began by stating that after Emancipation, the Irishman’s loyalty to Catholicism was no longer an a priori matter of political loyally to a down-trodden religion, in dogged defiance of unjust oppression, but that the two creeds could now be judged fairly and even-handedly on their tenets and merits. But the great importance of Emancipation was that the terms of political debate were slowly being redefined, and that sectarian difference between Orange and Green, Protestant and Catholic, exacerbated by the memories of 1798, was transmuted into a polarity of Ireland versus England, nationalist versus unionist. It is indicative that O’Connell’s campaign, having once won the religious, intra-Irish matter of the rights of Catholics, went on to the national issue of Home Rule and Repeal of the Union. It is no less indicative that Anglo-Irish literature gradually abandons the mode of explaining Ireland to an English audience and instead begins to explain native Ireland lo an Irish audience: the post-Union climate changes, in the period 1830-1845, to a programme of uniting native and settler into a common Irish national awareness. 1829 did prepare for a minor intellectual and cultural renaissance in the 1830s. After Emancipation, the Protestant elite can no longer consider itself an English colony on the Irish shores and must try to establish its own identity: Irish and unionist. That, as we shall see, is the main issue in the writings of Samuel Ferguson, who resented the idea that Catholics with their nativism could claim an exclusive monopoly on Irish nationality, leaving Protestant unionists implicitly to the outer margins of non-Irishness.

The immediate impact of Emancipation was to highlight the religious differences between Protestant and Catholic Ireland; it would be simplistic, therefore, to see Emancipation in itself as the catharsis or catalyst for a national cultural revival. On the other hand, Emancipation came at a time (long overdue, and conceded by the government with grudging ill grace) when the stagnation of post-Union sectarianism was beginning to crumble and a non-contentious, non-partisan interest for Irish culture and Irish antiquities was spreading once again. A cardinal figure in this development was, without doubt, the landscape painter, music collector and archaeologist George Petrie, with his involvement in the rejuvenated Royal Irish Academy and in the Ordnance Survey.

In the mid-1820s, the Ordnance Survey of Ireland had, after initial triangulation adjustments, been entrusted (under the command of one Colonel Colby) to a young officer named Thomas Larcom; he was to become one of the most commendable examples of British officialdom in Ireland (he was later to organize famine relief as Commissioner of Public Works, was involved in the reform of the Poor Laws, and became Permanent Undersecretary for Ireland in 1853). Larcom, from 1828 onwards, expanded the Ordnance Survey project from a straightforward map-making and gazetteering project into a huge synopsis of the Irish physical and cultural landscape, where each historical landmark was [102] to be described in its physical appearance and antiquarian importance in major archaeological descriptions accompanying each map.

The Ordnance Survey had accordingly started to employ a native scholar to ascertain the proper nomenclature of the Gaelic toponymy. Until 1830, the official employed for those purposes (on very scant wages) had been Edward O’Reilly; upon O’Reilly’s death in 1830, he was replaced in that capacity by John O’Donovan. However, whereas O’Reilly had been a poorly paid drudge working in isolation, O’Donovan’s activities were placed under the co-ordination of a Historical Department which Larcom had set up around 1828 in order to prepare a ‘Historical Memoir’, and which had been placed under the care of George Petrie.

The story of the Historical Department, which met at Petrie’s house and included, not only John O’Donovan, but also Eugene O’Curry (as yet plain Curry without the restored O) and, briefly, James Clarence Mangan, is well known. The troika of Petrie, O’Donovan and O’Curry has often been celebrated as the rescue team of Irish antiquarianism, the men who set the investigation of Gaelic antiquity on a new, scientific and critical footing, and whose enormous labours laid the groundwork for all subsequent work in the field. At the same time it is important to realize that this work was undertaken for, and for more than ten years largely funded by, the Ordnance Survey project as it was expanding under Larcom’s inspired direction. It is all the more important to stress this, since the Ordnance Survey has been heavily distorted in Brian Friel’s widely successful play Translations [1980]. Friel presents the Ordnance Survey as a blunt colonial instrument in the hands of the imperial forces, inflicting cultural self-estrangement on native Ireland by means of billeting English soldiers in rural villages, and imposing uncomprehending and ugly anglicizations of native placenames under threat of eviction. In fact, the very opposite was the case. Although triangulation and measurements may have been undertaken by soldiers, the fieldworkers sent out to inventorize placenames, architectural remains and other cultural artefacts were men like O’Donovan and O’Curry, with a good knowledge of, and a sympathetic interest in, local antiquities and native lore, foreshadowing later folklore commissioners, salvaging the original placenames from neglect or corruption by painstaking inventorization of manuscripts, giving them English transliterations rather than translations, and capturing a great deal of local lore and learning from communities which would fifteen years later be swept away by the Famine. If, today, the Gaelic substratum of Irish culture is most prominently visible in the placenames and the landscape, then that presence is owing to a large degree to the work of the Ordnance Survey of 1824-1841. We may go even further and say that the Ordnance Survey was a major contribution to the cultural nationalism of later decades, in that it equated the very land itself with a Gaelic past and a Gaelic-speaking peasantry, thus canonizing the Gaelic tradition as the very bedrock, the cultural ground under the feet of modem Ireland, making Gaelic culture literally aboriginal and autochthonous to Ireland, a native fruit of its very soil. The Ordnance Survey turned the entire countryside of Ireland into one vast lieu de mémoire: topography became replete with historical and mythological overtones, [103] while history and myth became specific and graspable in their topographical locale. As William Stokes put it:

[...] the most ancient history, itself quoting from the most dim traditions, indicated the name, locality, and purpose of a certain monument; its remains are found corresponding in name, place, and obvious purpose with the old account, itself borrowed from sources older still, while its architecture is that of the most remote Pagan period, and so the monument verifies the history and the history identifies the monument, and both become mutually illustrative. (Life and Labours [...] of George Petrie, 1868, p.95.)

This effect of rendering the historical and mythical past present by describing it in its territoriality, while at the same time historicizing the territory by tracing its records and earlier mentions, is aptly illustrated by the time-warped fancy of a field worker in the Ordnance Survey Historical Section, one Mr Wakeman, who felt that as they became engrossed in the work,

I felt as if I had a personal acquaintance with Niall of the Nine Hostages, or Con of the Hundred Battles (or bottles, as poor Mangan humorously misstyled the hero), or with Leogaire [...] (Quoted in Stokes, op. cit.)

One particularly important result of the Ordnance Survey at the ideological level was, then, that sense of place and sense of past became mutually linked and almost interchangeable, and that Ireland itself, as a geographical space, became inescapably also a vessel laden with the placenames, monuments, memories and cultural cargo of a Gaelic past. In that respect, the Ordnance Survey, although its results were to codify Ireland’s national separateness as a primordially Celtic country, closely resembles the antiquarians and regional historians of England who at the same time were engaged on their County Histories. Philippa Levine’s description of these English counterparts has remarkable applicability to the enterprise of Petrie, O’Donovan and O’Curry:

The reconstitution of the past was a means of consolidating and realising place and identity in a landscape increasingly unfamiliar. A historical landscape peopled with events, buildings and figures from the past and verified by historical fact was a triumph of possession. Nostalgia provides an insufficient explanation for the popularity of organised antiquarian pursuits. It was rather an alternative cultural force of amazing vigour, an attachment to local identity [...] It asserted a sense of provincial dignity and of distinctiveness and provided a crucial link between past glories and present triumphs. (Levine, The Amateur and the Professional [...&c.], 1986)

Levine accordingly characterizes Victorian County Histories in terms that fit the Historical Memoir of the Ordnance Survey precisely: they ‘acknowledged the significance of both material remains and of municipal manuscripts. The ideal county history was one which embraced accounts of local superstitions and customs alongside discussions of medieval land holdings, of monasteries dissolved under Henry VIII and transcripts of epitaphs on old tombs.’ However, the Ordnance Survey seems also in one fatal flaw to have borne the [104] mark of antiquarian localism as characterized by Levine: ‘They revelled in the sheer weight of detail, in “a fanatical obsession with the historical significance of the individual object”.’ [Levine, op. cit.; her quotation not sep. identified here.] Indeed, the Historical Memoir of the Ordnance Survey badly overshot the mark; and indeed it seems to have taken on Casaubonish proportions. Sixty thousand names of parishes and townlands were surveyed, inch-by-inch in their full cultural and historical dimension, with a tender loving care which found no detail too small or to obscure to warrant full and painstaking investigation. This almost obsessive precision and love of minutiae eventually backfired. In 1835, after ten years of work, the Historical Department of the Ordnance Survey proudly presented its first published instalment: a topographical and historical description of the parish of Templemore (of which the city of Derry formed part). The British government was impressed and horrified by the ‘excessive zeal’ displayed in what ‘from a tactical viewpoint [...] was an unmitigated disaster’ with its ‘enormous sprawling bulk’. (John Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteeth-Century Ireland, Clarendon Press 1975.] The Prime Minister, Peel, inquired later on:

As the account of that single parish constitutes a work of nearly 400 pages, it is manifest that the labour and expense of continuing a publication for the whole of Ireland would be very great; and, independently of the consideration of labour and expense, it may well be doubted whether the value of the memoir is increased by the great extent and variety of the detail into which it enters on many points of merely local and temporary interest. [Quoted by ?Samuel Ferguson, in Dublin Univ. Mag., 1844.]

Obviously the archaeological tail had begun to wag the cartographical dog; and as a result, the government brusquely stopped funding for the historical project. As the government official in charge formulated it:

That the ordnance officers should collect and be encouraged to collect much valuable information which cannot be given to the world in the shape of a map is quite true. That this should be published in the shape of a memoir or of piéces justicatives I admit. That we should pay for this I agree. But that we should undertake to compile regular county and city histories of all Ireland I cannot assent to. (Quoted in Andrews, op. cit., 1975.)

In the course of 1838, the scheme of the grandiose Historical Memoirs as they had expanded under Petrie and Larcom was drastically cut down. By mid-1840 the project had foundered. The matter was certainly not improved when an anonymous letter in 1842 accused Petrie and his staff of Catholic bigotry and nationalist predisposition; it is not clear though, whether this sectarian venom was instrumental in prompting the government’s decision to cut the Ordnance Survey down to financial size.

The suspension of the Historical Memoir was widely felt to be a great pity, as work on other parts of Ireland had progressed a good deal since then, and the work of many scholars and fieldworkers over a ten-year period was condemned to remain unfinished and unpublished even as it was nearing completion. The words of J T. Gilbert, twenty years after the fact, still echo the frustration:

Government in i842 unexpectedly stopped the grant for the Historic Department of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, the specially educated and disciplined labourers in which were thus dispersed and left to seek other employments just at the time when they had attained to the high state of efficiency qualifying them to methodize and give to the world in a satisfactory form the results of years of combined study and investigation. (Life and Labours of John O’Donovan, p.11.]

There was a good deal of commotion on both sides of the Irish Sea about this insensitive government measure. The government acted against the recommendations of a Parliamentary Commission; both the British Academy and the Royal Irish Academy had strongly commended the scholarly importance of the Ordnance Survey and did not take kindly to its abrupt termination, and there was widespread agitation (led in Ireland by Petrie’s friend Lord Adare - the future Lord Dunraven - and including William Smith O’Brien) to salvage the project. It was not to be. The materials collected and sorted principally by John O’Donovan remain accessible in manuscript only,* and the volume on Templemore remains solus. One shining piece of salvage was George Petrie’s great essay on the antiquities of Tara Hill, which incorporated the fieldwork of the Ordnance Survey and was read to the Royal Irish Academy with the permission of Larcom and Colby. This great specimen of modern, critical archaeology, collating manuscript tradition and topographical information with a precise description of the site and its artefacts, was an outstanding example of the light that modem scholarship could throw on the Irish past; it received the Royal Irish Academy’s Cunningham Medal and was published in its Transactions for 1839.

Petrie’s Tara essay apart, the failure of the Ordnance Survey was a bitter disappointment to those who had hoped to see a new type of critical scholarship illuminate the dark recesses of Irish antiquity, a non-partisan, factual basis for future historical investigation. There were, however, consolations. The reputations of O’Donovan and O’Curry as philologists had been firmly established; the new methodology of combining physical evidence with native manuscript sources was now widely accepted as the proper procedure for antiquarian investigation; the movement to dissuade the government from its insensitive budget cuts had been truly trans-partisan and had united all Irish men of learning into a common front; and the materials that were gathered, if not published, by the Ordnance Survey were just in time to salvage the historical folklore and popular learning of rural Ireland on the very eve of the Famine, with its devastating effect on rural society and culture.

The cultural and social fabric of Gaelic Ireland was to vanish in 1845-1848 with a suddenness that can only be compared to the disappearance of Jewish life in Central Europe. This cataclysm added another instance of the notion that history, in Ireland, was a series of disruptions and divorces from the past, rather than a traditionary accumulation growing out of it. The materials collected by the Ordnance Survey helped to save something at least from that cultural guillotine, the Famine. J. H. Todd, then President of the Royal Irish Academy, stated later that

this information has been of singular interest [...] In many places it will be found that the descriptions and drawings presented in the collection are now the only remaining records of monuments which connect themselves with our earliest history, and of the folk-lore which the famine swept away with the aged sennachies, who were its sole repositories.

J. T. Gilbert echoed these sentiments in 1849: ‘Thus very many ancient remains were identified, which otherwise would have been lost to history; much valuable ancillary information was also derived from the traditions and legends of the natives, since obliterated by famine, eviction and emigration [. . J.’109 Indeed, the feeling in post-Famine Ireland was that Carleton’s peasantry, with its lore and pastimes, had been swept out of existence. Sir William Wilde wrote in the Dublin University magazine in 1849:

The old forms and customs, too, are becoming obliterated; the festivals are unobserved, and the rustic festivities neglected or forgotten; the bowlings, the cakes and the prinkums (the peasants’ balls and routs), do not often take place when starvation and pestilence stalk over a country, many parts of which appear as if a destroying army had but recently passed through it. The hare has made its form on the hearth, and the lapwing wheels over the ruined cabin. The faction-fights, the hurlings, and the mains of cocks that used to be fought at Shrovetide and Easter, with such other innocent amusements, are past and gone these twenty years, and the mummers and May-boys left off when we were a gossoon no bigger than a pitcher. It was only, however, within those three years that the waits ceased to go their rounds upon the cold frosty mornings in our native village at Christmas; and although the ‘wran boys’ still gather a few half-pence on St. Stephen’s Day, wc understand there wasn’t a candle blessed in the chapel, nor a breedogue seen in the barony where Kilmucafauden stands, last Candlemas Day; no, nor even a cock killed in every fifth house, in honour of St. Martin; and you’d step over the brosnach of a bonfire that the childer lighted last St. John’s Eve. (W. Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions, in Dublin University Magazine, May 1849.)

This helped to give folklore studies - which burgeoned after the Famine - a sense of combined urgency and nostalgia. [... T]he collection of folk culture, which had begun with Crofton Croker in the 1820s, intensified strongly after 1845 to become one of the main feeding grounds of the Yeatsian revival by 1890. The Ordnance Survey, which had worked under the very shadow of the imminent Famine, marked an important step in the development of anthropological interest in Ireland’s living native culture.

Even while Petrie was preparing the Historical Memoir for the Ordnance Survey, he was also elected to become a member of the Royal Irish Academy. That august body was just then beginning to wake up from its post-Union stupor, and gamed much prestige under the presidency of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, renowned astronomer and mathematician. With Hamilton adding to the Academy lustre in the sphere of the exact sciences, Petrie was to become the Academy’s chief luminary in the field of the humanities. It was Petrie who procured some of the outstanding manuscripts for the Academy’s library, chief among which was tne holograph copy of the Annals of the Four Masters acquired in 1831; it was Petrie who from 1837 onwards laid the foundation for a collection of Irish antiquities which would eventually become the core collection of the National Museum of Ireland. The Academy’s Council minutes the period 1830-1845 illustrate a pronounced trend to acquire manuscripts and artefacts previously held in private hands; this retrieval process from the private domain into a place of well-ordered public accessibility (and the need was soon felt for analytical catalogues) marks one of the more important preconditions of the gradual redemption of philological and text-historical studies from amateurish speculation. The same process led to a growing desire to have the more important manuscript materials published in print; indeed, in 1840 the Irish Archaeological Society was founded by Academy members Petrie and Todd precisely for this purpose. Petrie was a driving force in this process; and it was Petrie more than anyone else, who introduced, into the Academy of learned and ingenious gentlemen (amateurs and dilettanti for the most part, and not a few of them Freemasons) the precise, critical spirit of new scientific scholarship.

The Royal Irish Academy to which Petrie was elected in 1828 was still dominated by the Phoenician model; this was to change, though not without great friction, as a result of Petrie’s achievement, his institutional influence and his critical factualism. The entrenched rearguard held the Academy’s key positions: important members on the Council representing ‘polite letters’ were men like the Ulster King of Arms, Sir William Betham, and the barrister John D’Alton, both of whom had espoused the Phoenician model of Irish antiquity - Betham in the ludicrously speculative way that we have seen, D’Alton in a more sober, conventional vein. D'Alton, his Phoenicianism notwithstanding, was an important figure in the development of Irish historiography. Following the archival work of O’Conor of Stowe and O’Reilly, he was among the first to rely strongly on native annals and chronicles as a source, and on that basis wrote a number of interesting local histories. One work deserving of mention is his History of Ireland from the annals of Boyle (1845). D’Alton’s work is all the more interesting because it exemplifies a dual tendency, which is often found to work in tandem. On the one hand, there is the reliance on ancient manuscript sources, often accompanied by the desire to see such sources (re-)printed, on the other, a penchant for local history. Another outstanding example of this dual trend is found in the work of James Hardiman, whose History of Galway of 1821 was based on extensive use of manuscripts and had been preceded by his ‘Catalogue of maps, charts, and plans relating to Ireland’, (Transactions, RIA, 14). The prevailing English fashion for reprints and publications of ancient sources is matched in Ireland by the activities of the Irish Archaeological Society, founded in 1840 in order to bring important MS sources into print (a move designed to combat fanciful speculations), and its counterpart in the Ossianic Society. Indeed, the entire work of John O’Donovan, grounded as it was m the fieldwork undertaken for the Ordnance Survey, shows that it was through the pursuit of local history that the use and (re-)publication of MS source material gained a foothold in Irish antiquarian and historiographical practice.

In the very year that Petrie joined the Academy, D'Alton hd read, on 24 Nov. 1828, an essay which in its published form was to take u9p no less lthat 380 page of the Academy’s Proceedings. [...] (p.108.)

[...]

We may presume that Petrie, who had become a member of the Academy’s Committee of Antiquities in 1829, wanted to overhaul [the] entrenched Phoenicianist attitude in the Academy when he proposed that the “Origin and Uses of the Round Towers” be made the topic for a prize essay in 1830. In November 1830, the Council endorsed Petrie’s proposal for a prize essay -on the round towers of Ireland, in which it is expected that the characteristic[113] architectural peculiarities belonging to all these ancient buildings shall be noticed and the uncertainty in which their origin and uses are involved satisfactorily explained’. The Round Towers had been cited in a variety of interpretations by generations of scholars and antiquaries, and it was obvious that no progress was being made to reconcile, or advance beyond, the various positions. The prize essay was obviously intended to break through this stagnated status quaestionis (indeed in the next decades it was to become a commonplace to refer to the Round Towers as the vexata quaestio or "vexed question").

The result was that matters were brought to a head. Different opinions concerning Irish antiquity, which for decades had coexisted in relative mutual disregard, were now forced into a confrontation. The Academy’s advertisement of the prize essay, published in December 1830 and reiterated, for lack of satisfactory submissions, in March 1832, elicited either three or five entries (accounts differ); when the submission deadline expired in mid-1832, the Council found that it not only had to judge authors of varying ability and thoroughness, but that it also had to choose between mutually incompatible
scholarly

The two contending protagonists were Petrie himself and an unknown young enthusiast by the name of Henry O’Brien, born in County Kerry in 1808, recently graduated from Trinity College, and now based in London. Petrie, in later eyes, stands for painstaking, critical investigation, while O’Brien has come to stand for wild speculation untrammelled by considerations of common sense; but that may have been less glaringly obvious in 1832. Both essays were later reworked by their respective authors: Petrie’s Ecclesiastical architecture of Ireland appeared in massive form, lavishly illustrated, in 1845, and O’Brien’s The Round Towers of Ireland appeared in book form in 1834. The differences between the two books is manifest; but it may be argued that Petrie’s essay had profited a great deal from being reworked into book form, while O’Brien’s essay was greatly disimproved in the reworking by the author’s growing frustration and increasingly overwrought paranoia. The differences between the two essays may have been less pronounced than would appear from the published versions. But the main, irreconcilable difference between the two, apparent even in June 1832, was the fact that O’Brien works on the basic assumption of a great Oriental presence in Irish antiquity, whereas Petrie refuses to countenance speculations predating the introduction of Christianity.

In adjudicating the prize, the Council appears to have split along lines of persuasion. The sole partisan in favour of O’Brien’s essay was John D’Alton, whose Phoenicianist persuasion obviously predisposed him against Petrie’s medieval theory. Remarkably, Sir William Betham seems to have gone Petrie’s way, but that need not have been a matter of serious scholarly persuasion; a concept that does not easily fit Betham. Rather, Petrie’s standing in the Academy was very high indeed at the time, Petrie having just managed to obtain an original MS copy of the Annals of the Four Masters. Betham seems to have judged according [114] to personal sympathy rather than from considerations of scholarly agreement, and become Petrie’s declared enemy only in subsequent years.

In the event, a final decision was reached - with a fatal does of compromise. Petrie’s essay did, indeed, receive the prize medal and money but a consolation prize was afforded to O’Brien as a runner-up in recompense for the young man’s frenetic labour to meet the dealdine after having been belated informed of the competition.

Matters might have ended there. D'Alton and Beaufort had earlier received medals for their versions of Irish antiquities, now Petrie had put the more factualist interpretation back on the Academy’s agenda by having his version acclaimed. But alal this failed to take the personality of young Henry O’Brien into account and the awkward timing of the adjudication. (p.115.)

[...]

The situation was indeed odd. The Council had, no doubt owing to the internal divisions and a sense of embarrassment at the muddled procedure, hedged its bets and give a consolation prize to O’Brien, but meanwhile a prestigious public accolade was given to an essay and a theory which as yet were unknown in their contents and conclusions to the general public. The public was told that Petrie had come and solved the riddle to the Academy’s satisfaction, but not details of Petrie’s solution were divulged.

This failure to go public was to take on ridiculous proportions. Petrie could not be 'induced to submit' anything to the public for twelve years, for it took that long for him to rework the prize-winning essay into what he considered publishable form, to have illustrations engraved, &c. The Petrie essay reached the public only my means of indirect reference. On person who did go public, meanwhile, was the disappointed rival, Henry O’Brien.

In retrospect, O’Brien can be seen as pathologically obsessive, suffering from paranoid delusions. His wild speculations on the origin and use of the Round Towers are matched by his frenzied controversialism over the alleged conspiracies in the Academy’s inner circle. It appears that the controversy he stirred up, and the public humiliation and ridicule he had endured, hastened his [116] death in 1835 at the age of twenty-seven. But while O’Brien’s essay on the Round Towers was still idle speculation taken to extremes, his criticism of the Academy’s procedure is not entirely groundless. The aim of the prize essay was undoubtedly to reconcile the conflicting versions and schools concerning Irish antiquity once and for all; in the event, O’Brien was given a bonus prize of £20, Petrie’s essay was allowed to share the honours with O’Brien’s incompatible counter-version, and initially it was even decided that both essays would be published in the Transactions - the Academy thus seeming to have it both ways, endorsing two conflicting versions of Irish antiquity. Although there were precedents for the awarding of bonus or consolation prizes (the Academy had given one in 1828 to Thomas Wood), ’Brien construed it as a sign of bad faith and as an attempt to save the established authority’s reputation in the face of his, O’Brien’s, incontrovertible and superior essay. And this is the tale that he told before the public.

Even while the issue was still pending, O’Brien grasped an opportunity to present his case independently of the Academy’s control. An amiable and slightly eccentric clergyman-scholar in exile from Spain, Joaquin Villanueva, had in the preceding year (1831) published, in Latin, a theory on Ireland’s Phoenician origins, deeply indebted to Vallancey (Ibemia Phoenicia, seu Phoenician in Ibernia incolatus, ex ejus priscarum coloniarum nominibus, et earum idolatrico cultu demonstratio, Dublin 1831). It was in part an old man’s hobby-horse, subscribed to for charitable purposes by various worthies of the Dublin intellectual scene and endorsing a view of Irish history which at that point no-one took the trouble of contradicting (there are no reviews of Villanuevas book, nor references to him in subsequent antiquarian writings). O’Brien decided to bring out an English translation of this book; and no author was ever more strangely served by his translator. O’Brien translated and edited Villanueva’s original much as Charles Kinbote, in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, edited John Shade’s poem. The result appeared under the promising title Phoenician Ireland. Translated and illustrated with notes, plates, and Ptolomey’s map of Erin made modern, by Henry O’Brien, Esq., B.A., author of the ‘prize essay upon the “Round Towers” of Ireland (Dublin, 1833). Villanueva’s name is absent from the title page, mercifully so, because O’Brien is highly selective in what he chooses to translate, and interpolates lengthy passages from his own hand. The result is a farrago of footnotes and digressions with only the most tenuous connection with Villanueva’s book (of which it has the effrontery to reproduce excerpts in an appendix as proof of fidelity). To complete the Nabokovian uncanniness, it is couched throughout in O’Brien’s insane prose style; a sample from his dedication to the Marquis of Thomond may give an idea:

And yet, my Lord, will you not commiserate with me the degeneracy? and say ‘how are the mighty fallen?’ when informed that the individual who has revived so many truths, immersed between the rubbish of three thousand years accumulation - and that when his researches did not apply alone to Ireland,* but took in the scope of [117] the whole ancient world - has been defrauded of that prize for which his zeal had been enlisted, and his young energies invoked? while - from that system of "jobbing" with which our country has been long accursed - he has seen the badge of his victory transferred to another, merely because that other was a member of the council of the deciding tribunal who disregarded the crying fact, that the whole texture of their friend’s essay must, inevitably, be untenable!† However, my Lord, in the consciousness of your countenance I find my consolation; and, soon as my ‘Towers’ appear, I doubt not, this wise (?) ‘tribunal’ will reap the fruits, together, of their own discomfiture and of my revenge. (x-xi)

[O’Brien’s note:] ‘The formation as well as the date of this, the present name of our islandd, I account for in a forthcoming note.)

[O’Brien’s note:] ‘Of this I give, by anticipation, the most startling and over-whelming proof, even in a note appended towards the end of the 33rd chapter of the present work.’ [No such note is appended ‘towards the end of the 33rd chapter’, J.L.]

Villanueva’s Phoenician book is the merest pretext, in short, for a full frontal attack on the Royal Irish Academy. The entire vituperative correspondence between O’Brien and the Academy is reproduced in the Introduction (‘To the Public’, xiii-xxxii), and the ‘Translator’s Preface’ (i-xxxii) is one long anticipation of the startling, overwhelming and incontrovertible proofs that O’Brien will offer to the astounded world once his Round Tower essay will see the light of day.

The reviewer of the Gentleman’s Magazine already poked fun both at the ‘Spanish antiquary’ (‘an etymon hunter on a full scent’) and at the frenetic, italics-ridden prose of the translator. (GM, Oct. 1833) Doubtless, the etymological conjectures of Villanueva deserved to be criticized: any place-name beginning with ‘Bally-’ he construed as indicating a primordial worship of the god Baal, and he even went so far as to suppose an ancient worship of Astarte from the fact that that goddess’s name was still daily on the lips of the Irish populace in the old song ‘Molly Astore’. O’Brien himself may have been warned by this patronizing and ironic review that he could not expect to be taken seriously merely because he was so very vehement in insisting on his achievement; but he was to receive worse treatment at the hands of the critics when his book on the Round Towers finally appeared in 1834. Before looking at contemporary reactions to O’Brien’s book, however, it may first be in order to look at the theory advanced there and to place it in context.

[Round Towers and phallic worship]

The appearance of The Round Towers of Ireland (or the mysterious freemasonory, of sabaism, and of budhism, now for the first time unveiled, in 1834, was slightly delayed: O’Brien had initially placed his essay with the printer P. Dixon Hardy, who was a member of the Royal Irish Academy and one of the more prominent Dublin publishers in the field of Irish history and antiquity at the time (he took over the Dublin Penny Journal when that magazine became too burdensome for Petrie and Otway, and was later to publish the works of Sir William Betham). However, Hardy, upon becoming acquainted with the scandalous nature of the work, declined publishing it, and the book appeared under a [118] joint London and Dublin imprint. It caused an immense sensation, though not in the author’s favour. The book opened with a ludicrous dedication and was preceded by a lengthy introduction which recapitulated (in more extensive form than in Phoenician Ireland) the contentious origin of the text, often in highly derogatory terms, evidently written with much anger, much frustration and little self-control. The main body of the book was no less intemperate. Previous theories were set aside with scorn, exclamation marks and italics, and to the extent that an argument could be detected in the author’s ravings, that argument was both far-fetched and shocking.

O’Brien started out from four clues. One was that Round Towers look like erect penises; the second (pointed out by Miss Beaufort also) was that the word ‘Erin’ looks like the word ‘Iran’; the third was that Iran lies in the east, the cradle of Irish civilization, and that in the east there are pagodas, which, to the extent that they look like Round Towers, also look like erect penises; and the fourth one (clinching the matter) was that the Gaelic word for penis, bod, looks like the first syllable in the word ‘Buddhism’, denoting an eastern religion. The rest follows as a matter of course. There was once a Persian civilization, where the creative fertility principle was worshipped under the shape of the phallus, and in phallic-shaped pagodas. This religion, originally taught by Zoroaster, was known as Buddhism or, alternatively, as Sabaism. These Buddhist-cum-Zoroastrian Sabaists were expelled from Persia, settled in Ireland under the name of Tuath-De-Danaans and built pagodas there (the Round Towers) to continue their phallic worship. The hypothesis is given extra clout by the illustrations, which deliberately appear to emphasize the penis-shaped aspect of Round Towers by turning sharp angles into curves and rounding off their conical roofs to give a hint of the glans penis.

This hypothesis by itself forms an archimedian fulcrum with which O’Brien unhinges all of ancient and middle-eastern history and re-interprets the entire religious history of the world as a cover-up exercise in effacing the heritage of the noble Sabaists. The serpent and the apple in the Garden of Eden are interpreted as genital symbols; serpent-worship is seen as a derivation of phallus worship; the Hinduist veneration of sexual polarity in the shape of lingam and yoni is adduced in evidence; and if there are carvings of crucifixes to be seen on Round Towers, then O’Brien immediately explains this by the fact that there was in fact a pre-Christian, Buddhist worship of the crucifix. In other words, this is madness surpassing even Roger O’Connor’s Chronicles of Eri.

But whereas the Chronicles of Eri never gained much serious attention, Henry O’Brien’s book became a cause celebre. Nobody endorsed O’Brien’s theory, but there were always some who refused to reject it wholly and utterly. For better or for worse, O’Brien’s name was made famous by becoming the subject of scandal and ridicule; his theory was given exemplary status by being so memorably unmentionable in polite society; and he remained, if only at the symbolic level, a locus for all those who had misgivings about Petrie’s factualism.

To begin with, it must be said that O’Brien’s theory was flawed but not wholly without substance. To be sure, it would be ludicrous and plain wrong, a distortion [119] of historical relativism or epistemological scepticism should tempt us, merely because we cannot know for certain what is truth, to countenance what we know for certain to be an error. Historians and critics in the last decades have become perhaps too lenient in endorsing, or empathizing with, historical errors and mistakes, merely because they made sense at the time or because they lifted the paradigm within which they were conceived, or because there was some sort of edifying poiesis in them, a poetic justice if not a factual correctness. Those who refuse the benefit of hindsight and merely immerse themselves sympathetically in the past or in unfalsifiable conjecture are tourists or dreamers, not historians; for although historians may not claim knowledge of absolute truth with which to measure the endeavours of the past, or a positive knowledge of what things were like, they do have a positive knowledge of what has been falsified in history, what has been proved wrong, what was certainly not the case. We know, positively, what falsification has taught us: that the earth is not flat; that combustion does not proceed by the emission of phlogiston; that the Gaelic language has not evolved from Hebrew, that the Round Towers were not built by phallus-worshippers. To waive such positive knowledge-quod-non is to descend into silliness and make-believe.

That being said, O’Brien’s thesis is far from insignificant, even though it is factually wrong. He worked, it should be remembered, before the definitive establishment of the Indo-European frame of reference, which he anticipated to some extent. His extensive survey of phallic worship and fertility worship in antiquity, though it is misguided in its application to Gaelic historical myths and Round Towers, invokes material concerning the religious eroticism of Hinduism made available by men like Sir William Jones; such material, along with the surviving traces of phallic superstition in the Mediterranean area, was leading to a new interest in the link between sex and religious ritual, foreshadowing, and paving the way for, important later insights in anthropology and psychology. Although O’Brien never mentions it, the work of Richard Payne Knight (A discourse on the worship of Priapus and its connexion with the mystic theology of the ancients, 1786) was certainly an important source, directly or indirectly, for his theories. The embryonic anthropological interest in the link between sex and religious ritual was kept alive by a number of books and tracts which followed in O’Brien’s footsteps and helped to pave the way for Freudian thought.

This process was partly fed by the gradual discovery of the cultic religions and mysteries of classical antiquity: those of Orpheus, Bacchus, Demeter or Mithras. Some of these cults and mysteries involved the glorification of sexual energy, and there were syncretic tendencies which brought in Oriental elements or deities. Such factors help to make clear that the religious fringe activities of classical antiquity (of which phallic icons survived) should be conflated with analogous remains of Oriental religions, from Egypt to India, and hence be interpreted collectively as the substratum of a vanished primordial cult spanning the entire pre-classical world. Indeed, that view of primitive religion was to [120] remain operative enven in the thought of Sir James Frazer and Sigmund Freud. all tis means that O’Brien’s views, though intemperately expressed, were not quite as grotesque as might be supposed. [...; p.120]

Another faithful support groups for O’Brien’s theories was found among freemasons. There were strong masonic hints in the title, dedication and introduction of the book’s first edition, and subsequent reprints seem to have been sponsored by masonic and otherwise hermetic-speculative associations. (p.120.)

[...; O’Brien, Moore and Father Prout]

The Dublin Penny Journal vented part of its irritating in animadverting on the fact that O’Brien, who referred to his opponent as plain Mr Petrie, fatuously styled himself Esq. and B.A. - or “Big Ass” as the reviewer (Dixon Hardy) glossed it. O’Brien threatened legal action over Hardy’s exceedingly harsh review, which was however stoutly maintained, with the exception of an apologetic retraction of the “B.A.” taunt (DUM, April 1834). The result [121] was to drive O’Brien into insanity; he died within weeks of the altercation with the Dubin Penny Journal, on 28 June 1835.

[...]

The paradox is, then, that while the critical and factualist methodology of Petrie was vindicated by the absurdities of his opponent, O’Brien himself gained a curious underdog claim to sympathy. This became apparent in an interesting spin-off controversy around 1835, when Thomas Moore entered the fray. (p.122.)

[...] Moore was quite pleased with [his] review [Edinburgh Review, 1834] and the humorous stir it caused. The Times carried an extract of Moore’s article, O’Brien was vowing revenge, and letters and journal entries testify to Moore’s delight in the scene. Later, in 1842, Moore was to recall with mixed feelings that his review probably hastened O’Brien’s death.

But the matter did not end there. In early 1835, Moore brought out the first volume of his History of Ireland, which dealt with the nation’s origins and antiquity; and he managed to fall foul of almost everybody. The Dublin University Magazine savaged him for daring to presume that Christianity had been introduced into Ireland under papal authority; generally, Moore’s mixture of Orientalism and factualism (the book is closest to D’Alton’s 1830 historical essay) pleased no-one. Although Moore steered an even-handed or even equivocal course between the two opposing schools of Irish antiquarianism, the Oriential and the Nordic, he failed to take the scientific innovations of someone like Petrie into account - largely because Petrie, slow-working investigator of massive data, found it difficult to see his studies into a definitive, printable form.

Ail in all, then, Moore’s History, though undertaken by the most famous Irish man of letters at a time when there was growing demand for a work like this, left the questions of the Irish past much as it found them. It did elicit, however, a scathing and brilliant satire in Fraser’s Magazine (a conservative quarterly), by the pen of a certain Father Prout.

Father Prout, parish priest of Watergrasshill, County Cork, was the satirical persona of Francis Mahony, himself a Corkman. The persona was an amiable Catholic priest, halfway between Mr Pickwick and Mr Shandy, full of nugatory erudition and with many contacts among the literary world, all of whom he met when they undertook their pilgrimages to his parish so as to kiss the Blarney stone. Mahony himself had given up the priesthood; he had originally been educated by Jesuits in France and in the Irish College at Rome, and had taught at Clongowes Wood College before settling down to the secular career of journalism. A staunch conservative, he had a great dislike for nationalist leaders of Catholic opinion, such as Daniel O’Connell (‘the bogtrotter from Derrynane’) and Thomas Moore, author of Captain Rock and The Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of Religion. The death of Henry O’Brien and the appearance of the first volume of Moore’s History coincided nearly enough to mark the joint occasion of Mahony/Prout’s most felicitous satire, amusing and scathing at the same time: The rogueries of Tom Moore’ (1835).

[124] Prout attacks Moore by satirically vindicating O ’Brien. The satire is close-knit and may mislead the inattentive reader: the vindication of O ’Brien is, fundamentally, a vindication of O ’Brien’s utter originality - whereas Moore, in the Edinburgh review, had accused him of echoing received speculations. Prout twists this criticism of Moore’s around into an accusation of plagiarism, and then turns it against Moore whom he accuses of being a plagiarist himself.

The vindication of O ’Brien, is, then, backhanded and highly ironic, part of a multiple satiric inversion:

[...] over Henry O ’Brien, as he is young and artless, I must throw the shield of my fostering protection. It is now some time since he called at Walergrasshill; it was in the summer after 1 had a visit from Sir Walter Scott. The young man was then well versed in the Oriental languages and the Celtic: he had read the ‘Coran ’ and the ‘Psalter of Cashil, the ‘Zendavesta ’ and the ‘Ogygia ’, ‘Lalla Rookh ’ and ‘Rock’s Memoirs ’, besides other books that treat of Phoenician antiquities.

The mention of Lalla Rookh and Captain Rock is a first hint of barbs to come. Moore’s Oriental poem Lalla Rookh had been a runaway success, and by alluding to this Prout cunningly places Moore himself in the vicinity of Orientalist minds. Throughout the rest of the piece, Moore is to be described as ‘the veiled prophet of Khorasan ’ and similar references to Lalla Rookh; in other words, Moore of all people is not one to mock O ’Brien’s Orientalism. The point is rammed home with much political innuendo when Prout alludes to the national-political, Irish meaning that was often read into Lalla Rookh’s episode of the ‘Fire-Worshippers ’:

From these authentic sources of Irish and Hindoo mythology, he [O ’Brien] [...] had picked up a rude (and perhaps a crude) notion that the Persians and the boys of Tipperary were first cousins after all. This might seem a startling theory at first sight; but then the story of the fire-worshippers in Arabia [as told in Lalla Rookh, JL] so corresponded with the exploits of Captain Decimus Rock in Mononia [Munster, JL], and the camel-driver of Mecca was so forcibly associated in his mind with the bog- trotter of Derrynane, both having deluded an untutored tribe of savages [&c.] ’ (Reliques of Father Prout, 1859, pp.141-41.)

Thus the ironic vindication of O ’Brien and the sarcastic-satirical attack on Moore kicks off. A multitude of references are marshalled to unflattering effect: that Moore himself used the Round Towers in legendary fashion in his poem ‘Let Erin remember ’; the sham duel that Moore and Sidney Smith fought with pistols which upon inspection proved to be loaded with blanks. The attack culminates, however, with a splendid controversion of the Irish Melodies (which ‘made emancipation palatable to the thinking and generous portion of Britain’s free-born sons ’, 153): Prout accuses Moore (who had been an assiduous pilgrim to the Blarney Stone, and a frequent visitor) of having pilfered his Melodies from manifold unacknowledged originals in foreign languages, mainly in French and Latin, having passed off the English, Hibernifised [125] translations as his own work. And this from the one who imputed plagiarism to poor O ’Brien!

The substance of the satire, and the chief point around which the fun turns, is Prout providing us with the ‘originals ’ from which Moore ‘plagiarized ’ his Melodies (‘Go where the glory waits thee ’ is shown to correspond line-by-line to a sixteenth-century French song; ‘Oh ’twas all but a dream ’ is juxtaposed with its seventeenth century French original; ‘To a beautiful milkmaid ’ is pilfered from Prout’s own Latin original, In pulchram lactiferam ’, which is duly quoted; ‘The shamrock ’ is denounced by having it placed side-by-side with a French song of the Wild Geese, ‘Le Trefle d ’lrlande ’. ‘Wreathe the bowl ’, to top it all, is derived from the ancient Greek poet Stakkos Morphides. Finally, Prout’s own immortal ‘The Bells of Shandon ’ is given to the reader as the Ur-version of Moore’s ‘Peterburg air ’.

All these translation games are so many clever jeux d ’esprit, which at the time were a fashion with the men of letters around Fraser’s. There is, then, a double aim in ‘The rogueries of Tom Moore ’: one, as a setting to show off Mahony’s clever reworkings of Moore’s Melodies; and passing them off, satirically inverted, as the originals taken by Moore rather than as the translations taken from Moore. The other purpose is to castigate the nationalist, Catholic giant of Irish literature, who, after his specious successes in poetry and controversial satire, was now claiming the laurels of historiography and who had seen fit to exercise his wit on the case of a poor, deluded, young and defenceless visionary.

There is, of course, a natural solidarity between the satirist and the antiquary: both meet near Blarney, both deal in nonsense and absurdities, one deliberately, the other unconsciously so. But ‘The rogueries of Tom Moore ’ was more than that. For the modem reader, it illustrates much the same point as did the case of the ungraspable Rock-O ’Connor (who is at the same time an invented persona, a real person, and that person’s fantastical self-mythologization): to what complexities and contradictions the historicist cult of authenticity and true identity can lead. By so cleverly inverting the notions of what is original and what is derived, Prout’s skit strips the Irish melodies of the thing they aimed to celebrate most: Irishness. The Melodies turn out to be, in Prout’s satiric inversion, Latin, Greek or French - anything but Irish. Their celebration of Irish national values is a sham imposition, much as Moore’s Catholic-nationalist vision of the Irish past, as his opponents in the Dublin University magazine tirelessly pointed out, is a distortion of the historical record.

For contemporaries, the attack against the canonized national poet went beyond mere fun. It was the first and cleverest rebuttal of Moore’s claim to be a historian. It voiced some justified strictures at Moore’s fly-swatting exercise against the unfortunate O ’Brien, and it may have marked the first indication that Moore’s literary career was now past its peak. In doing so, it perpetuated the memory of O ’Brien as a pathetic, Chattertonesque visionary, mercilessly crushed by the learned establishment. (p.125.)

[...]