• 1 Ala A. Alryyes, Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel and the Nation, Cambridge, Harvard Universi (...)
• 2 Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Pres (...)
• 3 Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, “National Orphans and a Nation’s Trauma: Experience, Emotions, and the Child (...)
• 4 Naomi McAreavey, “Children’s Experiences of Violence during the Irish Rebellion of 1641”, Parergon, (...)
• 5 Mary Helen Thuente, “Liberty, Hibernia and Mary Le More: United Irish Images of Women”, in The Wome (...)

1Stories of children’s suffering heightens the emotional register of narratives of violence and war, both in fiction and non-fiction. In doing so, images of children shape adult responses to the effects of war by provoking emotions of anger, shame or patriotism in them.1 Much scholarship about representations of children and war to date has focused on wars of the 20^th century, with some notable exceptions in recent studies of the period of the Napoleonic Wars.2 In the Irish context, most studies of childhood experiences of war have been of the 20^th century revolutionary period and the Northern Irish Troubles.3 For the earlier period, the 1641 rebellion has begun to be considered from the perspective of children.4 However there has been less attention paid to fictional portrayals of children and historic wars in Ireland. During the 19^th century, the Irish conflict which captured the attention of readers of both narrative histories and fiction was the 1798 rebellion. The 19^th century saw a huge outpouring of histories, memoirs and fiction devoted to retelling the events of this rebellion. While women and children do not feature heavily in the histories and memoirs of the rebellion, fictional images of women in ballads, poetry and novels about the 1798 rebellion were popular in the 19^th century. Such fictional images have been studied from a variety of angles arguing that women characters were depicted generally maddened by grief or violence or as bereft mothers or stoic maidens personifying Irish resolve and nationhood.5 Unlike fictional images of women, representations of children’s experiences of war and violence in this conflict have to date received little attention even though child characters do appear in novels about 1798 that were published in the latter half of the 19^th century.

• 6 Helen Berents, “Depicting Childhood: A Critical Framework for Engaging Images of Children in IR”, i (...)
• 7 Peter N. Stearns, “Defining Happy Childhoods: Assessing a Recent Change”, The Journal of the Histor (...)
• 8 Emma Butcher, “War and the Child’s Gaze in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Literature and Culture”, Cr (...)
• 9 Ala A. Alryyes, Original Subjects…, p. 210.

2Images and descriptions of children and war in both fiction and non-fiction are overlaid with heightened emotional responses because the plots contrast the innocence of children and violence that they cannot escape.6 Peter N. Stearns theorises that the advent of the concept of the “innocent child” in the early 19^th century meant that there was expectation that children should be happy and cared for precisely because of their innocence. This means that deviation from that ideal carried heightened significance in novels.7 Representations of children in novels were also often saturated with sentiment in the face of childhood experiences of violence, hunger and war. In Emma Butcher’s analysis of the “emotional investment” of child characters in European novels of war, such as Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) and the boy prisoners in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867), she argues that they transport the viewer into “the emotional and material consequences” of the moment of violence, to first evoke sympathy and then spur to action.8 As well as such emotions of loss and grief, child characters in fiction could also be associated with emotions of hope – hope for future happiness after war’s end, survival of families and by extension of the nation. Children in effect often operated both as sympathetic victims and incarnations of the future in face of political violence or decline.9

• 10 Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 100.

3This article uses these insights into the emotional work that child characters perform in historical novels about war as a basis to analyse three fictional accounts of the 1798 rebellion, all published in the latter half of the 19^th century. The three novels discussed are: Donal Dun O’Byrne: A Tale of the Rising in Wexford in 1798 (1869) by Irish journalist Denis Holland; Shilrick, the Drummer: or, Loyal and True. A Romance of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (1894) by Scottish playwright and writer Julia Agnes Fraser; and Corrageen in ’98: A Story of the Irish Rebellion (1898) by Anglo-Irish landowner Adela Elizabeth Orpen. By taking a literary historicist approach, the article argues that these novelists situated the child characters within contemporary emotional registers in order to further the action of the plot. Each of these three novels, like so many other Irish novels in the second half of the 19^th century, mirror political debates of their times.10 The child characters then provide the authors with opportunities to heighten the emotive appeal of their political agendas precisely because of the juxtaposition between the innocence of childhood and the violence of war.

• 11 Accurate counts of the dead are impossible. One of the most influential, if partisan, scholars of t (...)
• 12 The literature on the history of the 1798 rebellion is very large. For an important collection of r (...)
• 13 Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, (...)
• 14 The memory of the rebellion also survived in oral culture as demonstrated by Guy Beiner, Rememberin (...)
• 15 Farah Mendlesohn, Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars, Basingstoke, Palg (...)
• 16 Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality”, Rethin (...)

4The rebellion that broke out in the summer of 1798 was a bloody civil conflict with perhaps as many as 30,000 deaths and, like the earlier rebellion by Irish Catholics in 1641, has had a long political and social legacy.11 Although its instigators, the United Irishmen inspired by the French Revolution, had high ideals for Irish independence from Britain, vicious sectarianism erupted in many parts of the country. This violence was brutal, and the ultimately successful efforts of the British forces to put down the rebellion were equally harsh. Not only was the 1798 rebellion a byword for sectarian violence, it also was a catalyst for the 1800 Act of Union which abolished the Irish parliament and incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Throughout the 19^th century then, the 1798 rebellion was a touchstone for Irish politicians, activists and writers who either supported the Union or fought to dissolve it.12 As Kevin Whelan put it, “the rebellion never passed into history, because it never passed out of politics”.13 One sign of the 1798 rebellion’s currency in 19^th-century popular culture was the flow of writing about it in all genres, including historical fiction.14 As Farah Mendlesohn has argued with reference to fiction about the 17^th-century English Civil Wars, historical fiction is important in shaping national memory and identity.15 This is because fiction allows the exploration of a wide range of emotional and imaginative responses to historical events and a fictional space to explore possible futures.16

• 17 Jim Shanahan, “Fearing to Speak: Fear and the 1798 Rebellion in the Nineteenth Century”, in Fear: E (...)
• 18 Pauline Collombier, Imagining Ireland’s Future, 1870-1914: Home Rule, Utopia, Dystopia, Basingstoke (...)
• 19 Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 102.
• 20 Sarah Pinto, “Emotional Histories and Historical Emotions: Looking at the Past in Historical Novels (...)

5Authors of historical fiction about the 1798 rebellion, no matter what their political outlook, were able to draw on a plethora of published histories and memoirs to form immediately recognisable historical context for their fiction.17 Pauline Collombier has argued that by the 1880s, much unionist fiction, cartoons and other popular culture centred around predictions of the chaos, war and self-destruction that would result from majority Irish Catholic self-government, based on previous wars and rebellions.18 At the same time, nationalist writers were faced with the negative consequences of well-known histories of the unrestrained violence of Fenianism and Irish rebellions of the past.19 In order to present a coherent political agenda, novels about war and violence such as those about the 1798 rebellion relied on depictions of emotions such as fear, loss and grief to provide imaginative depth to historical accounts of battles, spying and military action. Sarah Pinto has argued in her analysis of contemporary Australian historical novels, that “historical interrogation […] must pay particular attention to emotions […] as a way of examining the […] implications of their historical projects […]”.20 It is the depth of the emotions evoked by characters in historical novels that differentiates this genre from narrative history and makes fiction such a crucial part of formation of cultural memory.

• 21 Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain, p. 27, 58.
• 22 John Temple, The Irish Rebellion, or, An History of the Beginnings and First Progress of the Genera (...)
• 23 Jenine Hurl-Eamon, Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain, p. 27, 59.

6Representations of children’s suffering were particularly emotive in all genres that depicted wars in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Jennine Hurl-Eamon has outlined how rumours of atrocities against children were recounted with relish by writers during wars of the late 18^th century.21 In the Irish context, John Temple’s history of the 1641 rebellion (1646), with its narratives of extreme violence, continued to be published throughout the 19^th century, often illustrated by woodcuts showing dead and damaged children.22 Stories and imagery of violated children were important emotional vectors in these narratives and were regularly used to motive men to fight to protect their own children and those of their nation or group from an enemy shown to be capable of such atrocities.23

• 24 Miles Byrne, Memoirs of Miles Byrne: Chef De Bataillon in the Service of France, Fanny Byrne (ed.), (...)
• 25 The meaning of terms such as “loyalist” and “unionist” was unstable. “Loyalist” was generally the t (...)
• 26 Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, Dublin, Robert Marchbank, 1801, p (...)
• 27 George Cruickshank, “Massacre at Scullabogue”, in William Hamilton Maxwell, History of the Irish Re (...)
• 28 The classic study of the influence of Cruikshank’s images on negative perception of Irishness is Le (...)

7In the 19^th-century, non-fictional narratives of 1798 and descriptions of deaths or injuries of babies and children were one way of emphasising the barbarity of the enemy. In United Irishman Miles Byrne’s memoir of his experiences, written in the 1850s, he describes how an Irishman was killed with his baby in his arms by an English soldier who Byrne characterised as a “monster”.24 In histories written by opponents of the United Irishmen, the cruelty of the rebels was frequently underlined by their treatment of children.25 Richard Musgrave, himself a leading figure of the recently created fiercely anti-Catholic Loyal Orange Order, wrote the influential and sensationalist book entitled Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1801) that included a description of an infant piked to death and tossed into the fire at the notorious massacre of Protestants in a barn at Scullabogue, County Wexford.26 This episode was in turn retold in most later anti-Catholic histories including William Hamilton Maxwell’s History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 (1845), which was accompanied by a full-page illustration by George Cruikshank showing the child impaled on a pike as it is about to be thrown in the fire.27 Such images were designed to provoke emotional reactions in the readers who understood this as barbaric violence perpetrated by irrational and animalistic men who lacked all connections with civilisation.28

• 29 Denis Holland, Donal Dun O’Byrne: A Tale of the Rising in Wexford in 1798, Dublin, M. H. Gill, 1869
• 30 Patrick Maume, “Holland, Denis”, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009, last revised February (...)
• 31 Julia Agnes Fraser, Shilrick, the Drummer: or, Loyal and True. A Romance of the Irish Rebellion of (...)
• 32 “Review of Shilrick”, Northern Constitution (Limavady), 16 February 1895.
• 33 See as example the review of Shilrick, the Drummer, in The Army and Navy Gazette, 2 March 1895.
• 34 Adela Elizabeth Orpen, Corrageen in ’98: A Story of the Irish Rebellion, London, Methuen & Co., 189 (...)
• 35 Philip Bull, “Orpen, Adela Elizabeth (née Richards)”, Dictionary of Irish Biography, December 2013, (...)

8It is not surprising then, that children were included in novels about 1798 in ways which focus the emotional intensity of the plots. The earliest of the three novels under consideration in this article is Donal Dun O’Byrne: A Tale of the Rising in Wexford in 1798 (1869) by Denis Holland (1826-1872).29 He was a nationalist journalist and novelist, publishing in American and Irish newspapers. Donal Dun O’Byrne was initially serialised and was subsequently published as a book, with moderate success.30 The two other novels in this study were written around the time of the 1898 centenary of the rebellion and are both pro-unionist in their outlook. Shilrick, the Drummer: or, Loyal and True. A Romance of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was published in 1894 by Scottish playwright and writer, Julia Agnes Fraser (1841-1915).31 She was a writer of popular minor plays, some with Irish subject matter, such as Dermot O’Donoghue: or The Stranger from Belfast (1872) which had success playing in regional theatres in Ireland and Scotland, and she also had relatives in Coleraine.32 Fraser drew on the experiences of her father, Major-General Simon Fraser of the Royal Marines, for the military setting of Shilrick, the Drummer. While the novel was set in Ireland, its reception was mainly in England and Scotland with encouraging reviews, especially in publications aimed at military readership.33 The third of the novels is Corrageen in ’98: A Story of the Irish Rebellion (1898), written by Anglo-Irish landowner, Adela Elizabeth Orpen (1855-1927).34 Orpen was a novelist and essayist who took over the management of the family estate, Monksgrange, Rathnure, County Wexford from her father, Edward Richards, in 1900. By that time, she had enjoyed considerable success publishing short fiction and essays for English and American journals and newspapers as well as three novels and two works of non-fiction.35

• 36 Philip Bull, “Orpen, Adela Elizabeth (née Richards)”.

9These three novels demonstrate differing political perspectives on 19^th-century Irish political aspirations. Holland was a supporter of John Mitchel’s ideals and bitterly disappointed at the failure of the revolutionary fervour of the mid-century Fenians. Orpen, like her father, was a conservative unionist and was appalled by the prospect of revolutionary violence and of what she thought would be the chaos of Irish self-government.36 Fraser’s own unionist outlook was formed by her father’s career in the Royal Marines. Analysis of all three novels shows that the emotions written into the child characters were powerful vectors that furthered the political agendas of the novels.

• 37 Eva Ó Cathaoir, Soldiers of Liberty: A Study of Fenianism, 1858-1908, Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 2 (...)
• 38 Patrick Maume, “Holland, Denis”.
• 39 Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 102.
• 40 Denis Holland, Donal Dun O’Byrne…, p. 8.
• 41 Ibid.
• 42 Ibid., p. 9.
• 43 Ibid.
• 44 The cruelty of Welsh troops known as the “Ancient Britons” was well attested in the mid-19^th centur (...)
• 45 Denis Holland, Donal Dun O’Byrne…, p. 11.
• 46 Ibid., p. 13.
• 47 Ibid., p. 21.
• 48 Ibid., p. 210.

10Donal Dun O’Byrne was published in 1869 in the shadow of the failure of planned Fenian uprisings in Ireland and North America.37 Holland, a supporter of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, though not a member, drew on the Memoirs of Miles Byrne for the historical context of his novel.38 One of the challenges for Irish nationalist writers at this time was to address the well-attested reports by loyalist historians of atrocities committed by Irish rebels and at the same time advance arguments that supported the validity of the fight for Irish self-determination.39 Holland uses the character of a young boy, Art, to provide an emotionally coherent motivation for the hero, Art’s father, to join the United Irishmen and fight for Irish freedom. At the start of the novel, Donal Dun O’Byrne is described as a peace-loving man living with his young son and father in the Wicklow Mountains. Donal is determined to keep out of the surrounding conflict, as he has no ideological commitment to the United Irishmen and wants to live peacefully with his family. His son is Art, a six-year-old with “a face of almost seraphic beauty […] skin white as newest ivory, dimpled cheeks of delicate rosy hue […]”.40 Holland heightens the emotional intensity of the novel by having Donal declaim: “[…] my heart and soul are in that child”,41 foreshadowing the crisis to come as Donal says: “[…] those who would separate us I could not forgive even on my deathbed. I think I could curse them with my dying breath”.42 That moment quickly arrives, when the child runs out on hearing a horse approaching. After hearing Art cry out, Donal rushes out to see a “brutal savage-looking fellow”, one of the “Ancient Britons”,43 the cavalry regiment renowned for their cruelty.44 Mounted on a “large and powerful horse” and holding a naked sabre, the soldier had killed the child by bringing the sword down forcibly onto his head. Art “smiled a sweet angelic smile” and died in his father’s arms while the soldier jeered, “that’s the way to check the breed of your bloody, redbelly Irish papists”.45 Donal pulls the soldier from his horse, and makes him look at the dead body of Art, then kills him with one blow to his skull.46 After burying the child in his mother’s grave, Donal joins the rebel army, equipped with the boots, money, pistols and horse of the dead soldier, vowing vengeance against every man of the same regiment as the killer.47 The novel proceeds to describe many violent actions by Donal before ending with him rescuing the “pure spotless maiden”, Grace Basset, from two soldiers who are fighting over her.48

• 49 See Jim Shanahan, “Fearing to Speak…”, p. 45.
• 50 Philip Bull, Monksgrange…, p. 147, 63.
• 51 Ibid., p. 63.
• 52 Adela Elizabeth Orpen, “Annals of an Old House”, The Christian Union, 7 October 1886, p. 9-11.

12The innocence of small children and the effect on the adults around them was a malleable plot device. While Orpen’s political agenda in Corrageen in ’98 was very different to Holland’s, she shares his use of an innocent child as an emotional anchor of the political outcome of the plot. Written thirty years after Holland’s book, and at another politically charged moment, Orpen’s novel responds to what she considers the threat of Irish Home Rule. Whereas Holland uses the violence inflicted on a child to justify righteous anger, Orpen’s unnamed child is a blank canvas on which the unknown future of both his family and Ireland will be written.49 Her tale of the rebellion is a fictionalised version of the events of her home, Grange in County Wexford (now known as Monksgrange). In the summer of 1798, Grange was spared by the rebels because the Protestant owner, John Richards, Orpen’s great-grandfather, was generally thought to be a good landlord to his Irish tenants.50 Richards’s successful negotiations with local United Irishmen when they threatened to sack the house were recorded by contemporary historians such as Musgrave.51 Unlike Orpen’s fictional Rossiter family who owned Corrageen, the Richards family escaped the fighting and fled to England. Like Corrageen in the novel, Grange also survived the rebellion although it was severely damaged.52

• 53 Adela Elizabeth Orpen, Corrageen in ’98…, p. 156, 177.
• 54 Ibid., p. 118-131.
• 55 Manuscript of Corrageen in ’98, Monksgrange Archives, II B (2a) [75/1]. Meg was based to some exten (...)

13In Corrageen in ’98, Lady Laura is the young, fashionable wife of the owner Sir Edward Rossiter. At the beginning of the novel, she admires both French fashion and ideas, and is markedly hostile to the Irish people who live on the estate. Orpen describes Laura as being sheltered and naïve – “[…] she had never really got out of her gilded cage” – and shows that she holds romantic ideas of rebellion solely because of its links with fashionable France.53 An old Irish woman, Long Meg, lives on the estate and warns Laura about an imminent rebel attack.54 In a chapter of the book that was deleted prior to publication, Meg’s character is more fully realised as a respected local midwife and matchmaker.55 By deleting this chapter, Orpen stripped Meg of her local connections and Meg is left as a vaguely drawn character whose actions throughout the novel are rather inexplicable.

• 56 Adela Elizabeth Orpen, Corrageen in ’98…, p. 149.
• 57 Ibid.
• 58 Ibid., p. 152 and see James Gordon, The History of the Irish Rebellion in the Year 1798, &c.: Conta (...)
• 59 Adela Elizabeth Orpen, Corrageen in ’98…, p. 155.
• 60 Ibid., p. 156.
• 61 Ibid., p. 192.
• 62 Ibid., p. 319.

14After Meg’s warning, Laura stays home while the rest of the household goes to church and is playing with her ten-month-old baby, when “a couple of dirty men” break into the nursery with pikes in their hands. While she is terrified, the baby is excited and “crowed and kicked his fat legs”.56 One of the rebels suggests that they should “pike ’em [Laura and the baby] and pitch ’em outer the winder”.57 However instead they decide to take them along with them to a rebel camp. In describing Laura’s journey with the rebels, Orpen draws on James Gordon’s narrative of his own escape from the rebels in Wexford in The History of the Irish Rebellion (1801) where he described seeing elite Protestant women having to carry their own babies. Laura, “in her fluttering muslin dress and thin sandals” carries the “fat, heavy” baby who she has “never even carried […] upstairs in his short life”.58 The baby seemed “heavier and heavier” in her arms and, while she was increasingly distressed, he was “soothed by the motion and open air and slept on her heaving bosom”. She eventually sleeps on the ground with the baby in her arms but when she wakes he is gone.59 The rebels laugh at her distress, telling her “her brat has gone where all heretics go”.60 Along with her own violent treatment at the hands of the rebels, she witnesses atrocities at the siege in Enniscorthy and the massacre of Scullabogue, County Wexford. She then realises that the rebels are not romantic idealists but the “living image of thieving scoundrels”.61 She is eventually rescued by a loyal servant and taken back to Corrageen, and then reunited with her husband and mother-in-law, while continuing to mourn the loss of the baby. At this point, Long Meg re-enters the narrative and reveals that she took the baby when Laura was sleeping and has been caring for him ever since. Laura initially fails to realise that the “little black sweep” in Long Meg’s arms is her lost baby. The child also does not recognise his mother, and “set up a terrible screaming and kicking, so alarmed was he” and he can only be soothed by Long Meg singing to him in Irish.62

• 63 By the time she wrote the book, Orpen was the mother of two children and no doubt was familiar with (...)
• 64 See Clíona Ó Gallchoir, “New Beginning or Bearer of Tradition? Early Irish Fiction and the Construc (...)
• 65 Timothy G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910, Syracuse, S (...)

15In Corrageen in ’98, Orpen positions the baby as an innocent who is excited by the rebels. With his “heavy” body, he is also portrayed in much less idealised terms than Holland’s description of young Art’s physical perfection.63 Fashionable Laura Rossiter had effectively left the baby’s care to her Irish servants, and even when she has to carry him herself during the forced march, finds him a heavy burden. However, one of the transformations in the novel is that Laura realises she was wrong to see him as a burden. This error is reinforced when she sees the results of her neglect after the baby was cared for by Long Meg. Here Orpen aligns her narrative with contemporary Protestant improvement literature that viewed Protestant children as needing to be separated from the taints and emotional excesses of Catholicism and Irishness.64 The baby’s happiness when he hears Meg’s Irish singing carries particular emotional resonance in the context of the contemporary revival of the Irish language by the nationalist Gaelic League.65 The baby’s understanding of and preference for Irish is an indication of the loss of his connections to the Protestant Anglo-Irish values of his parents.

• 66 Eileen Reilly gives a similar political reading of Lady Laura’s character in “Rebel, Muse, and Spou (...)

16The two very young children in Donal Dun O’Byrne and Corrageen in ’98 carry emotional weight in the novels out of proportion to the fact that they are minor characters, partly because they can both be read as personifications of the innocence of Ireland. In Art’s case, this innocence was enhanced by the idyllic countryside surrounding the family. Whereas the Rossiter baby, although a child of an elite Protestant household, is a symbol of the results of ill-considered neglect through his Protestant mother’s fantasy of fashionable republicanism.66 While he is plump and well-fed in the protective Protestant household of his parents at the beginning of the novel, he is also excited by the noise of the rebel army. Although he is outwardly happy living with Meg’s Irish language and culture, he is thin, dirty and ill-kempt, showing that for Orpen his happy emotional state is illusory, like Ireland’s would be under Home Rule, and he, like Ireland, must be rescued in order to be restored to the prosperous Protestantism.

• 67 Fraser is vague with the chronology and geography in this novel. The barracks at Glencree were not (...)
• 68 Albert Boime, “Thomas Couture’s Drummer Boy Beating a Path to Glory”, Bulletin of the Detroit Insti (...)
• 69 Jennine Hurl-Eamon, “Youth in the Devil’s Service, Manhood in the King’s: Reaching Adulthood in the (...)
• 70 Anatonia Perna, “Bara and Viala, or Virtue Rewarded: The Memorialization of Two Child Martyrs of th (...)
• 71 Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, p. 405.
• 72 George Cruickshank, “The King’s Drum Shall Never Be Beaten for Rebels”, in William Hamilton Maxwell (...)
• 73 Julia Agnes Fraser, “Dedication”, in Shilrick, the Drummer…, vol. 1.

17In contrast to the minor child characters of Art and the Rossiter baby, a child is central to the plot of Shilrick, the Drummer: or, Loyal and True. A Romance of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Julia Agnes Fraser’s novel centres on Shilrick O’Toole, a fourteen-year-old Irish drummer in a regiment of the British Royal Marines stationed at Glencree, County Wicklow in 1798.67 Images of youthful drummer boys were popular in British and European 19^th-century art and literature and were frequently used as symbols of loyalty and patriotism.68 The covers of the three volumes of Shilrick, the Drummer depict the profile of a boy in full military dress playing a drum. His youth is indicated by his diminutive size relative to the drum, showing that this was not an adult man but a child. His pristine uniform, straight back and determined gaze indicates his pride in his position. Drummers, usually aged between ten and sixteen, played their drums to call men to arms, to keep marching men in time and were also tasked with carrying messages.69 From at the least the time of the French Revolution, emotive images of the bravery of these boys when facing danger and defying enemies were useful as patriotic symbols. The legend of thirteen-year-old drummer, Joseph Bara, who was supposedly killed because he refused to cry “Vive le roi” when challenged by royalists in France in 1793, became well-known and was used by French revolutionaries to stoke revolutionary fervour through art and literature.70 In the context of the 1798 rebellion, Musgrave in his loyalist Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland recorded the death of a twelve-year-old drummer at the Battle of Tubberneering, near Gorey, County Wexford. The boy refused to play his drum for the rebels, in a flipped narrative of the death of Joseph Bara.71 This story was then retold by later Protestant historians, including Maxwell in his 1845 History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 which included a full-page illustration by Cruikshank, entitled “The King’s Drum Shall Never Be Beaten for Rebels”.72 Given the popularity of these histories, it is likely that Fraser was aware of the stories of youthful drummers during the rebellion. Certainly she would have been familiar with young boys attached to army regiments given she described herself “a daughter of the corps”.73

• 74 Ibid., frontispiece.
• 75 Pall Mall Gazette, 29 January 1895.

18For Fraser, Shilrick is a child exemplar of an ideal Irish population that maintained a distinct Irish identity while content to be a loyal part of the British Empire. The novel’s rather confused plot explicitly positions the British forces, especially the company of the Royal Marines to which Shilrick is assigned, as benevolent in their interactions with the local Irish peasants, even the Irish rebels they are tasked with suppressing. The villains of the novel are the informers, some of whom are American opportunists who have joined the Irish rebellion for personal gain. Whereas Orpen’s rebellious Irish were bloodthirsty and resistant to rationality, Fraser’s stereotyped Irish peasants are not violent, nor are they motivated by ideology. Fraser is consistently, though paternalistically, sympathetic to Irish people, a point underlined by a photograph of her at the beginning of the first volume. In the photograph she is wearing a stylised Irish peasant costume and holding a basket of flowers.74 Her Irish peasant characters are described using well-known stereotypes of both their behaviour and their speech which is voiced using typical Irishisms, a point that some of the English reviewers found “bewildering” and “depressing”.75

• 76 Julia Agnes Fraser, Shilrick, the Drummer…, vol. 1, p. viii.
• 77 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 26.

20Shilrick is described throughout the novel as a child, indeed Fraser calls him “child of my own fancy”.76 When he is first introduced he is described as “a boy of about fourteen years of age” who has a “bright, handsome face” and “sweet, generous disposition” that makes him a “pet and favourite of the corps”.77 Shilrick’s status as a child is emphasised by his small stature, his playfulness with both dogs and other young drummers, as well as by his adamant disinterest in romance. His accent textually marks him as an Irish peasant, in contrast to the non-accented speech of Annesley, Corrie and O’Neill himself who are thus coded in the text as educated elites.

• 78 Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 104.

21By making her hero a child, Fraser provides an idealised and emotionally charged portrait of the loyalty of the Irish peasantry who, like children, are untainted by revolutionary ideals. In fiction written in English, there has been a long tradition of linking the Irish and the state of childhood, particularly the sentimental vision of childhood popular among Victorians.78 So the child-like Irish need the strength of British rulers to guide them and save them from their overly emotional desires. The doomed romantic and aristocratic Irish rebel leader, Morven O’Neill, gave up a commission in the Royal Marines to become the leader of the Bold Boys of Wicklow after a stint in France where he had married a beautiful aristocratic French woman. When politics are mentioned in the novel, the discussions are led not by the Irish characters but outsiders, like Americans and Scots who have joined the rebels. To underscore Fraser’s depiction of the loyalty of childlike Irish peasants, the Irish men who join the Bold Boys of Wicklow do so only out of traditional family loyalties to O’Neill. In the key battle scene between the Bold Boys and the British Marines, the romantic O’Neill is killed, and his fragile French wife collapses and dies when she sees his body, indicating the end of both the rebellion for the Bold Boys and the end of the influence of romantic French ideas of revolution.

• 79 Julia Agnes Fraser, Shilrick the Drummer…, vol. 3, p. 349.

23By the end of the novel, ten years after the rebellion, the former Irish rebels have all emigrated to the United States and settled as comfortable farming families. Only one member of their circle, Sheymus Malloy, a prosperous tenant of the Powerscourt estate, stayed in Wicklow. He had always resisted joining the United Irishmen as, though he gave assistance to rebel friends, he did not wish to change the political structures that gave him such as comfortable living. When the Marines return to Wicklow, Shilrick is now an adult, and through an army education and a stellar military career, has shifted class position as demonstrated by the change in his accent which is now “a good pure accent; the soft, musical brogue”.79 He is also marrying the niece of Morven O’Neill’s doomed French wife, signalling that he is the functional heir of the Irish aristocrat O’Neill. Shilrick is thus emotionally and symbolically linked with the Ireland of his birth, the England that he serves and post-Napoleonic France through his marriage. Together the happy couple are the face of a new Ireland that like Shilrick’s “soft, musical brogue” embraces a non-threatening and easily legible Irishness.

• 80 Adela Elizabeth Orpen, Corrageen in ’98…, p. 321.

24Novels contributed to the cultural history of the 1798 rebellion in the 19^th century by amplifying and extending the emotional range of more constrained historical narratives. Scholars have productively analysed female characters in historical ballads, novels and poetry about the rebellion of 1798 to show the variety of roles of idealised Irish womanhood in fictional representations of the hopes and dreams of the Irish. The analysis here of historical fiction demonstrates that children, while appearing in fewer novels, poems or ballads than women, gave authors scope to explore a distinct range of emotions including anger and grief at violence against defenceless children, and then hope for an idealised future. From Donal’s son’s destroyed angelic innocence to the malleable traits of Laura’s baby and Shilrick’s triumphant transition to adulthood in the British Army, all three authors position a child as a vehicle to further their political and emotional agendas. Although young Art only appears in the first chapters of Donal Dun O’Byrne, his shining innocence in death provides the moral centre of the novel, as both motivation for the violence of rebellion and as representative of the purity and dignity of the Irish people who were destroyed by the British forces. By the end of the novel, Holland allows a ray of hope to emerge when Donal saves the beautiful Grace from rape at the hands of violent British troops. Donal now can look forward to starting a new family in an Ireland free of the British violence in keeping with Holland’s political hopes for an independent Ireland. In Shilrick, the Drummer, Fraser has her innocent young drummer boy representing all that she sees as good and pure about the Irish. He is emotionally secure in his Irish identity as part of the British Empire, which makes him resistant to foreign temptations from French and American republicanism, remaining loyal to both Britain and a peaceful Ireland free of revolution. Laura’s baby, who remains unnamed throughout Corrageen in ’98, can also be seen as representing Ireland’s future as envisaged by Orpen. The baby – and by extension Ireland – is as yet unformed but malleable and dependent on the environment in which he is nurtured. Orpen calls for a change of approach to both parenting and the landowners’ management of the Irish when she has the baby’s father saying, “there must have been something wrong in our system […] which could turn the finest peasantry in the world into such devils as they were”.80 Just as the fine fat baby was turned into a thin, shrieking and dirty toddler by living in the Irish household of Long Meg, so the Irish had been transformed into rebellious “devils” by the mismanagement of the Protestant landowning class. The experiences given to the child characters by these novelists were grounded in the available narratives in the published histories of the rebellion. As such, discussion of these novels extends our knowledge of the role of children in the varied cultural memory and identity formed by repeated retelling of the events of 1798.