The Giant-Queller and the Poor Old Woman: Henry Brooke and the Two Cultures of Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

An enduring problem for students of eighteenth-century Ireland is the extent and nature of cultural contact between the country's Gaelic- and English-speaking communities. Until recently literary historians in particular tended to emphasize the separateness of the two cultures: on the one hand the final flowering of the doomed Gaelic bardic tradition—Corkery's "hidden Ireland"—and on the other a literary culture of Irish writers in English so oriented toward England—if for no other reason than the economics of the literary marketplace—that the whole concept of a distinct Anglo-Irish literature in the eighteenth century has been called into question. 1 However, more recent scholarship tends to dispute the fixity of the boundaries between the two cultures. Thus, in discussing eighteenth-century literary culture Declan Kiberd dismisses a "schematic distinction between an Irish-speaking peasantry and an English-speaking gentry," emphasizing instead a "confluence of cultures" evident in the spread of bilingualism throughout the country, in the sizable presence of an Irish-speaking minority in the environs of Dublin, and in the increased interest in Gaelic culture displayed by the Anglo-Irish over the course of the century, as seen in such familiar examples as Carolan's patronage by Anglo-Irish gentry, Swift's versified adaptation of the Gaelic poem "Pléaráca na Ruarcach," the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, and the publication of Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry in 1789. In addition, Kiberd has argued for more far-reaching signs of confluence between the two cultures, finding "crucial affinities of form and tone, technique and theme, between Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literature in the period." 2 [End Page 107]

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