Colleen Taylor’s great-great-grandfather emigrated from west Clare in the 1870s to the booming factory town of Danbury, New Jersey. He left behind a world of hardship and scarcity and made money and a name for himself in the hat trade for which Danbury is still famous. Taylor has thought a lot about his move from a world of green fields to one of industrial production, and the story shapes her study of 18th- and early 19th-century Ireland, told through its things.
Taylor applies her academic expertise in 18th-century literature to a cutting-edge consideration of colonial culture and thought. Central to her method is the idea that matter, commodities might speak as words or people do – and an ecologically inflected postcolonialism that aims at recovering a history of ecological exploitation and environmental injustice.
Taylor uses objects and animals – coins, flax, spinning wheels, cabins and pigs, found in poems, plays, travel literature and economic treatises – to bring her readers close up to the texture of cabins, ditches, linen chests. Thinking about a mud cabin, for example, as a “biotic ecosystem” shared by people and animals, allows us to get past condescending or racist accounts of the Irish poor and enables Taylor to deliver new readings of works by Jonathan Swift, Henry Brooke, Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth and Arthur Young. We also encounter harps, shawls, buttermilk, bogs and potatoes and the writing is at its best when it tracks these agents across the page.
For all the book’s attention to material culture and its survivals, there is an undertow of loss, an insistent return to the question of how people lived and what they suffered. Daniel Corkery too wrote of “lighting up” a fading world in The Hidden Ireland, his classic study of Gaelic society in 18th-century Munster. Corkery’s sources are not Taylor’s: hers is a largely anglophone study that tries to make use of Irish-language material in translation where possible. If his name is a strange omission from her index, Taylor shares with Corkery a fierce effort to recover a world lost with the Great Famine.
