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Homespun Books: Creating an Irish National Children’s Literature

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Children's Literature Collections

Part of the book series: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature ((CRACL))

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Abstract

Belvedere House, the main building of the Catholic teacher training institution, St. Patrick’s College, lies close to the National Botanic Gardens. The Coghill family once owned the house, while the Botanic Gardens contains works by female botanical artists such as the Northern Irish Presbyterian, Sophia Rosamond Praeger. The various traditions suggested by these places might also be discerned in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s books in the College’s Cregan Library. Women artists/writers Edith Somerville (a Coghill niece) and Praeger introduced close study of Irish material culture into some of their children’s books. The contribution of these craftswomen anticipates the development of a distinctly Irish national children’s literature by Padraic Colum as shown in A Boy in Eirinn (1913) illustrated by Jack B. Yeats.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Edith Œ Somerville and Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville, Records of the Somerville family of Castlehaven and Drishane from 1174 to 1940 (Cork, 1940), p. 113. James Kelly, ‘Belvedere House: origins, development and residents, 1540–1883’ in James Kelly (ed.), St Patrick’s College Drumcondra: a history (Dublin, 2006), pp. 9–40. In October 2016, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, was incorporated into Dublin City University and its library collections transferred to DCU Library.

  2. 2.

    For further discussion, see Julie Anne Stevens, ‘The Irish land war and children’s literature’ in Heidi Hansson and James H. Murphy (eds), Fictions of the Irish land wars (Oxford, 2014).

  3. 3.

    Robert Lloyd Praeger, Weeds: simple lessons for children, S. Rosamond Praeger and R.J. Welch (illus.) (Cambridge, 1913).

  4. 4.

    Sarah Ball, Plant treasures: two hundred years of botanical illustration from the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin (Dublin, 2002). Of the 21 botanical artists listed, at least 18 are female.

  5. 5.

    See Timothy Collins, ‘A Victorian phenomenon: amateur naturalists’ field clubs in the north of Ireland’, The Linen Hall Review, 4:2 (Summer 1987): 14.

  6. 6.

    Gifford Lewis, Edith Somerville: a biography (Dublin, 2005), p. 416.

  7. 7.

    My thanks to Orla Nic Aodha and the librarians of the Cregan Library for providing me with information on the development of the college library.

  8. 8.

    The New York Times obituary emphasizes the diversity of Colum’s interests, as indicated by its title: ‘Padraic Colum, 90, Irish poet, essayist and folklorist, dead’, The New York Times, 12 January 1972, pp. 1, 47.

  9. 9.

    Elaine Sisson, Pearse’s patriots: St Enda’s and the cult of boyhood (Cork, 2004), p. 60.

  10. 10.

    See Colum’s description of the Donegal Irish children’s storyteller, Seumus MacManus, in his introduction to MacManus’s Hibernian nights (New York, 1963), p. xvi.

  11. 11.

    Toby Barnard, ‘Foreword’ in Claudia Kinmouth, Irish rural interiors in art (London, 2006), p. ix. See also Vera Kreilkamp (ed.), Rural Ireland: the inside story, exhibition publication, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 11 February–3 June 2012.

  12. 12.

    Kinmouth, ‘Spinning’, Irish rural interiors, p. 92. For a discussion of Mrs Hall’s use of illustrators, see Marian Thérèse Keyes, ‘Taken from the life’: mimetic truth and ekphrastic eloquence in the writings of Anna Maria Fielding Hall (1800–1881), PhD thesis, 2010, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra.

  13. 13.

    Edith Somerville, Diary, 1895–1896, Somerville and Ross Archive, Queen’s University Library, Belfast.

  14. 14.

    Edith Somerville, Irish memories (London, 1917); Joseph McBrinn, Sophia Rosamond Praeger 1867–1954: art, literature, science, exhibition catalogue (Belfast, 2007), p. 16; Catherine Gaynor, ‘An Ulster sculptor: Sophia Rosamond Praeger (1867–1954)’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 16 (2000): 35. According to Gaynor, Praeger remained in Ireland from 1893 onwards.

  15. 15.

    Sir J.J. Coghill, Bart, ‘On the mutual relations of photography and art’, Royal Dublin Society (25 November 1859).

  16. 16.

    William Hugh Patterson, ‘A notice of some ancient tombstones at the Abbey Church of Moville, County Down; being the substance of a paper read before the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club’, 18 March 1869.

  17. 17.

    J.R.R. Adams, ‘From “Green Gravel” to “The Way That I Went”: folklife, literature and the Patterson family of Holywood’, The Linen Hall Review, 10:3 (Winter 1993): 4–7.

  18. 18.

    Coghill to Woodlock, 20 January 1856, quoted in James Kelly, ‘Belvedere House’, pp. 38–39.

  19. 19.

    Carla King, ‘The early years of the college, 1875–1921’ in St Patrick’s College Drumcondra: a history, p. 110.

  20. 20.

    Lisa Tickner, The spectacle of women: imagery of the suffrage campaign 1907–14 (London, 1988), p. 15.

  21. 21.

    Tickner, ‘Constitution of the suffrage atelier’ in The spectacle of women, Appendix 1, p. 241.

  22. 22.

    Pat Donlon notes that Praeger became involved in children’s books for financial reasons. ‘Drawing a fine line: Irish women artists as illustrators’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 18 (2002): 81.

  23. 23.

    Exhibition of sculpture & painting by S.R. Praeger, HRHA & H Iten, Mills Hall, Dublin [1930].

  24. 24.

    Lewis, Edith Somerville, p. 142.

  25. 25.

    Sophia Rosamond Praeger, The tale of the little twin dragons (London, 1900), pp. 37; 43; 53.

  26. 26.

    Winifred Wilson (ed.), Playground and indoor games for boys and girls (London, nd), p. 34.

  27. 27.

    Sophia Rosamond Praeger, The olde Irishe rimes of Brian O’Linn (London, 1901), p. 3.

  28. 28.

    Praeger, Olde Irishe rimes, p. 22.

  29. 29.

    Praeger, Olde Irishe rimes, p. 23.

  30. 30.

    Donlon, ‘Drawing a line’, p. 87.

  31. 31.

    McBrinn, Sophia Rosamond Praeger, p. 37.

  32. 32.

    Sophia Rosamond Praeger, Old fashioned verses (Dundalk, 1947), p. 9.

  33. 33.

    E. Charles Nelson, ‘A garden of bright images: art treasures at Glasnevin’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 14 (1998), pp. 40–51.

  34. 34.

    Edith Somerville, Diary, 5 November 1881, McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast.

  35. 35.

    Henry James, Roderick Hudson (1875) (London, 1986), p. 172.

  36. 36.

    Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old mistresses: women, art and ideology (1981; New York, 2013), p. 58.

  37. 37.

    Aedín Clements, ‘Padraic Colum, the Horn Book, and the Irish in American children’s literature in the early twentieth century’ in Mary Shine Thompson (ed.), Young Irelands (Dublin, 2011), p. 154.

  38. 38.

    See Padraic Colum’s review of Yeats’s 1914 exhibition, ‘Pictures of life in the west of Ireland’, in ‘Some Irish characteristics – all racy of the soil’, Dublin Evening Mail (24 February 1914).

  39. 39.

    Joan Hardwick, The Yeats sisters: a biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats (London, 1996), pp. 124–25; 156.

  40. 40.

    Padraic Colum, A boy in Eirinn (1913), Jack B. Yeats (illus.) (London, 1916).

  41. 41.

    Ríona Nic Congáil, ‘Young Ireland and The Nation: nationalist children’s culture in the late nineteenth century’, Éire-Ireland 46:3–4 (2011): 38. For an overview of children’s literature of the period, see Pádraic Whyte, ‘Children’s literature’ in James H. Murphy (ed.), The Oxford history of the Irish book, vol. IV: the Irish book in English (Oxford, 2011), pp. 518–28.

  42. 42.

    Marnie Hay, ‘This treasured island: Irish nationalist propaganda aimed at children and youth, 1910–16’ in Mary Shine Thompson and Celia Keenan (eds), Treasure islands (Dublin, 2006), pp. 33–42.

  43. 43.

    Quoted in ‘Padraic Colum, 90, Irish poet, essayist and folklorist, dead’.

  44. 44.

    Jack B. Yeats, Letter to Padraic Colum, 27 October 1911, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

  45. 45.

    Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats (London, 1998), p. 95.

  46. 46.

    Quoted in Robin Skelton, ‘Introduction: the vision of Jack B. Yeats’ in The selected writings of Jack B. Yeats (1990) (London, 1991), p. 4.

  47. 47.

    Sanford Sternlicht, Padraic Colum (Boston, 1985), p. 130.

  48. 48.

    Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Folklore and writing for children in twentieth-century Ireland: Padraic Colum, Patricia Lynch and Eilís Dillon’ in Anne Markey and Anne O’Connor (eds), Folklore and modern Irish writing (Sallins, 2014), p. 114.

  49. 49.

    Colum omits A boy in Eirinn in his list of children’s books appended in Story telling new & old, decorations by Jay Van Everen (New York, 1961).

  50. 50.

    Padraic Colum, The big tree of Bunlahy: stories of my own countryside, Jack Yeats (illus.) (New York, 1933), p. 115.

Selected Bibliography

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, All Hallows Campus, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Julie Anne Stevens

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  1. Julie Anne Stevens
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Correspondence to Julie Anne Stevens .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Keith O'Sullivan

  2. School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Pádraic Whyte

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Stevens, J.A. (2017). Homespun Books: Creating an Irish National Children’s Literature. In: O'Sullivan, K., Whyte, P. (eds) Children's Literature Collections. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59757-1_11

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