Introduction: Irish Poetic Networks, 1790–1815

Abstract

The role of religious and political dissent has recently become central to our understanding of the revolutionary period in Britain and Ireland (1780–1820), and there were few places where Dissenters were more geographically concentrated or socially powerful than in the north of Ireland:

In 1787 the fourth Duke of Rutland making his Viceregal tour of Ireland observed that ‘the province of Ulster is filled with Dissenters, who are in general very factious — great levellers and republicans […]. They are greatly under the influence of their clergy, and are taught from their cradles to be republicans […]. (Stewart, 2000, p. 32)

Rutland’s observations on Ulster point to a densely concentrated religious minority whose religious and political non-conformism was making itself conspicuous but, more generally, they offer a retrospective sense of Ulster’s transnational position in the early Romantic period. This minority was almost exclusively Scottish-descended after centuries of Scots-Irish migration across borders, particularly in what L. M. Cullen described as the ‘pan-Scottish world … on both sides of the North Channel with Glasgow as its intellectual centre’ (Cullen, 1989, p. 230). This fact, combined with the fiercely independent, anti-authoritarian (and therefore tending towards anti-monarchical) theology of the congregations, effectively rendered the Presbyterian Church in Ireland ‘a state within a state’, causing the ruling Episcopal party considerable alarm (Hempton and Hill, 1992, p. 16).