Between the Bishop’s Hall and the Hurchin: Enlightenment Legacies in Post-Union Antrim and Down

Abstract

This essay looks at post 1798 tensions in Belfast, Antrim and Down, using a survey of literary and cultural texts. It notes a range of responses to the first two decades of the nineteenth century in those associated with United Irish aspiration and those associated with maintaining establishment control. On one hand there was a maintenance of the publication of United Irish political, cultural thought and language in the first two decades after the union through continued publication of collections of poetry and other works (Samuel Thomson, James Orr, William Drennan). The essay explores how this work took shape and how it responded to the trauma of 1798, particularly in how the Scots language was deployed as a cultural tool/ weapon in the early 1800s. Alongside this, I discuss the creation and development of a range of “Enlightenment” ventures such as Academical Institution, Poor House, Literary Society and question the extent of these undertakings by looking at how far these were “enlightenment” or were generated by factional, mercantile interests operating under the guise of philanthropic endeavours (e.g. extension of cotton industry in Belfast, economic expansion built on Transatlantic slave trade, imperialist/colonialist animus of many ventures, rewriting of recent history to fit establishment view). These developments are contextualised and questioned alongside the creation of post-Union “Union-ist” Agendas and Groupings (Conservative Anglican and Presbyterian alliances in the cultural sphere in the work of Bishop Thomas Percy, Thomas Romney Robinson, Hugh Porter and Thomas Stott). The trauma and memory of the late eighteenth century left a legacy played out in Belfast’s development post Union and in its articulation, or non-articulation as an Enlightenment space.