Abstract
On 2 April 1821 an eighteen-year-old Belfast youth named Robert James Tennent received a letter from a young woman with whom he was conducting a flirtation. Little is known about the letter’s author, one Hannah McGee, but much can be said about Tennent. Born on 30 April 1803, he was a scion of one of Belfast’s most prominent Presbyterian families: his father, Robert Tennent, was a well-known philanthropist and reformer, while his uncle, William Tennent, was numbered among Belfast’s wealthiest merchants and had, in the 1790s, played a prominent role in the United Irish movement.1 Following an early education in Belfast, Robert James Tennent had, in 1820, enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied law: he was thus a young man with prospects, and, as McGee herself quipped, a ‘fine, dashing fellow’. Given all of this, it might be supposed that McGee’s family and friends were favourably disposed towards her connection with him. But such was not the case: ‘Let me turn where I like,’ she complained in her letter, ‘I hear of nothing but of such and such a one saying what a pity it is I should have fixed my eye on that harum scarum youth as they are pleased to style you.’2
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Notes
For more on the Tennent family, see Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, The ‘natural leaders’ and their world: Politics, culture and society in Belfast, c. 1801–1832 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), chapter one.
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth in early modern England (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1994), 9.
John R. Gillis, Youth and history: Tradition and change in European age relations, 1770–present (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 98, 102–3.
Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, ‘The affective revolution in 1790s Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34: 4 (2001), 496, 497.
David W. Miller, ‘Presbyterianism and “modernization” in Ulster’, Past and Present, 80: 1 (1978), 66.
For more on the rise of evangelicalism, see David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster society, 1740–1890 (London: Routledge, 1992);
Andrew R. Holmes, The shaping of Ulster Presbyterian belief and practice, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33–50;
David. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in modern Britain: A history from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989);
Mark A. Noll, The rise of evangelicalism: The age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2004);
John Wolffe, The expansion of evangelicalism: The age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Nottingham: Inter Varsity Press, 2006).
R. F. G. Holmes, ‘From rebels to unionists: The political transformation of Ulster’s Presbyterians’ in Ronnie Hanna (ed.), The Union: Essays on the Irish and British connection (Newtownards: Colourprint Books, 2001), 34. Established in 1791, the United Irish movement sought to secure parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation and initially operated constitutionally. However, as the 1790s progressed, government repression forced the movement underground. Links were established with revolutionary France and in the summer of 1798 a rebellion broke out, during which the United Irishmen sought, unsuccessfully, to sever the connection between Britain and Ireland. For a fuller account of the movement, see
Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular politics in Ulster and Dublin 1791–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and the essays collected in
Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), 1798: A bicentenary perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003)
Jim Smyth (ed.), Revolution, counter-revolution and union: Ireland in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, The speech of the right honourable, John, Earl of Clare, Lord High Chancellor of Ireland, the House of Lords of Ireland, Monday February 19, 1798, on a motion made by the Earl of Moira (Dublin: John Milliken, 1798), 30.
For Belfast’s response to the Union see Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, ‘“Steadfast supporters of the British connection”? Belfast Presbyterians and the Act of Union, c. 1798–1840’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 1: 2 (2008), 107–26.
William Drennan to Martha McTier, 17 Apr. 1807 in Jean Agnew (ed.), The Drennan-McTier letters (3 vols, Dublin: Irish Manuscript Commission, 1998–9), 3, 595.
A. T. Q. Stewart, ‘“A stable unseen power”: Dr William Drennan and the origins of the United Irishmen’ in John Bossy and Peter Jupp (eds), Essays presented to Michael Roberts, sometime professor of modern history in the Queen’s University of Belfast (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1976), 80–92;
John Larkin (ed.), The trial of William Drennan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1991).
For Drennan more broadly, see Adrian Rice, ‘The lonely rebellion of William Drennan’ in Gerald Dawe and John Wilson Foster (eds), The poet’s place: Ulster literature and society: Essays in honour of John Hewitt, 1907–87 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991), 77–95
I. R. McBride, ‘William Drennan and the dissenting tradition’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: Republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 49–61.
For the ministry of the talents, see Boyd Hilton, A mad, bad, and dangerous people? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107–9.
William Drennan, A letter to the right honourable Charles James Fox (Dublin: John Barlow, 1806), 3.
This paragraph is based primarily on Wright, The ‘natural leaders’, chapters two and three. For a near-contemporary account of the ‘natural leaders’, see A. H. Thornton, Memoirs of the Rea family from the period of the Irish rebellion in 1798 till the year 1857, by a Belfast man (London: np, nd [c. 1857]).
For the Roscoe circle and Thomas Walker, see S. G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A family biography, 1764–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 29;
Ian Sellars, ‘William Roscoe, the Roscoe circle and radical politics in Liverpool, 1787–1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 120 (1968), 45–62;
Frida Knight, The strange case of Thomas Walker (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957).
Elite is used here in a ‘positional’ sense, referring not necessarily to the wealthiest group in Belfast, but to a group that exercised a position of leadership and influence. See Rick Trainor, ‘Urban elites in Victorian Britain’, Urban History Yearbook, 12 (1985), 1–17.
The Duke of York affair occurred in 1809, when it was alleged that the duke’s mistress had accepted bribes from military officers who wished her to use her influence on the duke, who was commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The Queen Caroline affair was played out in 1820, when George IV attempted to divorce his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick. For more, see Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline affair: Politics as art in the reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History, 54: 3 (1982), 417–66;
Tamara L. Hunt, ‘Morality and monarchy in the Queen Caroline affair’, Albion, 23:4 (1991), 697–722;
Dror Wahrman, ‘“Middle-class” domesticity goes public: Gender, class, and politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies, 32: 4 (1993), 396–432;
Jonathan Fulcher, ‘The loyalist response to the Queen Caroline agitations’, Journal of British Studies, 34: 4 (1995), 481–502;
Philip Harling, ‘The Duke of York affair (1809) and the complexities of war-time patriotism’, Historical Journal, 39: 4 (1996), 963–84;
Anna Clark, Scandal: The sexual politics of the British constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 148–76, 177–207.
For classical republicanism, see Caroline Robbins, The eighteenth-century commonwealthman: Studies in the transmission, development and circumstance of English liberal thought from the restoration of Charles II until the war with the thirteen colonies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959)
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Patrick Kelly, ‘Perceptions of Locke in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 89C (1989), 17–35; Curtin, The United Irishmen, 13–37;
Stephen Small, Political thought in Ireland, 1776–1798: Republicanism, patriotism, and radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), offer Irish perspectives.
For the Belfast Historic Society, see W. A. Maguire, ‘The Belfast Historic Society, 1811–1835’ in John Gray and Wesley McCann (eds), An uncommon bookman: Essays in memory of J. R. R. Adams (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 1996), 100–18, and Wright, The ‘natural leaders’, 147–51.
Drennan, Fugitive pieces, in verse and prose (Belfast: F. D. Finlay, 1815), 217.
For the history of the Belfast Academical Institution, see [Royal Belfast Academical Institution], A view of the situation of education, in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution: Including outlines of the lectures; with accounts of the general business in the different classes, and the subjects for the public examinations (Belfast: Joseph Smyth, 1832);
[Royal Belfast Academical Institution], Centenary volume, 1810–1910 (Belfast: M’Caw, Stevenson and Orr, 1913);
John Jamieson, The history of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, 1810–1960 (Belfast: William Mullan and Son, 1959).
[Royal Belfast Academical Institution], The act of incorporation and bye-laws of the Belfast Academical Institution, 1810 (Belfast: Joseph Smyth, 1840); Drennan, Fugitive pieces, 217–29;
T. W. Moody and J. C. Beckett, Queen’s, Belfast, 1845–1949: The history of a university (2 vols, London: Faber, 1959), 1, xlvii.
John Tosh, A man’s place: Masculinity and the middle-class home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 105.
Belfast Magazine and Literary Journal, 1:1 (1825), 56–64 and 1:2 (1825), 176. For more on the Battle of Ballynahinch, a major encounter during which some 400 rebels were killed, see Curtin, United Irishmen, 273–5 and, A. T. Q. Stewart, The summer soldiers: The 1798 rebellion in Antrim and Down (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995), 222–9.
List of books read from May 1 to Dec. 11, 1819, exclusive of newspapers, reviews, magazines etc.’ (PRONI, Tennent Papers, D/1748/G/749/27). For Wat Tyler’s place in the radical canon see William St Clair, The reading nation in the romantic period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 307–38.
Journal of my reading from the time I entered college to reside, 19 Nov. 1822 to 3 July 1824’ (PRONI, Tennent Papers, D/1748/G/755/1), 2, 3, 4, 6, 17–17; Privately circulated in the 1790s, the Spirit of despotism was published in Philadelphia in 1795, but it was not until 1821 that English edition, albeit an anonymous one, appeared. See John Barrell, The spirit of despotism: Invasions of privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4–9.
Journal of my reading from the time I entered college to reside’, 1, 4–5, 6, 21–22, 29–30. For Holford and Porter, see St Clair, The reading nation, 213, 216; H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford dictionary of national biography (60 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 27, 637–8; 44, 958–61.
John Hewitt, ‘Ulster poets 1800–1870’ (M.A. thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1951), 23;
Terence Brown, Northern voices: Poets from Ulster (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 16.
Introduced in 1792, the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge’s rule prohibiting the acquisition of books of ‘trivial amusement’ was not formally relaxed until 1865. See John Anderson, History of the Belfast Library and Society for Promoting Knowledge, commonly known as the Linen Hall Library, chiefly taken from the minutes of the society and published in connection with the centenary celebration in 1888 (Belfast: M’Caw, Stevenson and Orr, 1888), 19, 42, 76, 82.
William Cairns, Outlines of lectures on logic and belles lettres: With a synopsis of the ancient logic (Belfast: Thomas Mairs, 1835), 103, 106–7, 110;
James Hirst, Address to the Belfast Historic Society (Belfast: Thomas Mairs, 1831), 14;
Tom Clyde, Irish literary magazines: An outline history and descriptive bibliography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002), 84.
For a classic biographical study, see Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A biography (3 vols, London: Random House, 1957).
Thomas Babington Macaulay, The works of Lord Macaulay complete, edited by his sister, Lady Trevelyan (8 vols, London: Longmans, 1866), 5, 417–18.
Henry MacCormac to RJT, 15 Feb. 1830 (PRONI, Tennent Papers, D/1748/G/326/6). One of late Georgian Belfast’s more egalitarian thinkers, MacCormac condemned the ‘unjust and barbarous’ position women were relegated to in society in his pamphlet On the best means of improving the moral and physical condition of the working classes (1830). See Thomas Duddy (ed.), Dictionary of Irish philosophers (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2004), 211.
Maurice J. Quinlan, Victorian prelude: A history of English manners, 1700–1830 (London: Cass, 1965), 140, 143; Hilton, A mad, bad, and dangerous people?, 353–71. In addition, see
Catherine Hall, White, male and middle class: Explorations in feminism and history (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 75–93 and, for a reappraisal of More’s achievement
Mitzi Myers, ‘Hannah More’s Tracts for the times: Social fiction and female ideology’ in Mary Ann Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds), Fetter’d or free? British women novelists, 1670–1815 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), 264–84.
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Wright, J.J. (2015). Robert Hyndman’s Toe: Romanticism, Schoolboy Politics and the Affective Revolution in Late Georgian Belfast. In: Cox, C., Riordan, S. (eds) Adolescence in Modern Irish History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374911_2
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