This edited collection, emerging from a 2011 workshop in University College Dublin, is the first volume to specifically address youth in modern Irish history. As well as seeking to determine how Irish adolescence fits within extant international scholarship, another of the key motivations of editors Catharine Cox and Susanna Riordan was to “decouple” the history of adolescence from the history of childhood (1). While the history of childhood in Ireland has received more attention to date, the liminal state of adolescence, marking a life stage between childhood and the autonomy and responsibility of adulthood, is crucial to understand particularly in the time period considered here, when ideas of adolescence were being fashioned by early psychologists. As this volume clearly demonstrates, adolescence was often constructed as a vulnerable period of “moral malleability” (3)—potentially dangerous, particularly in an increasingly urban and industrial context in which young people were deemed to require careful management. Several chapters problematize conventional definitions of adolescence; for example, Mary Daly highlights the experiences of men in rural Ireland being referred to as “boys” even into their forties because their parents had not passed over ownership of the farm, leaving their sons in a subservient position.
Cox and Riordan have assembled a volume that engages with the question of what might have been distinctive about Irish adolescence (or adolescences)—that is, particular to the religious, social, economic, and political circumstances of Ireland across this period. In doing so, their volume looks outward, seeking comparison largely with Britain and America, to inform understandings of Irish adolescence. The nine chapters in this collection span the late Georgian period to the 1970s, and variously “describe aspects of the experience of, commentary on, and efforts to mould Irish adolescents” (4). The chapters are ordered broadly chronologically, rather than by theme. Few draw on sources produced by adolescents themselves. While Jonathan Jeffrey Wright examines adolescent juvenilia and correspondence, offering a rare window into a particular set of adolescent experiences, and Marnie Hay and Bryce Evans utilize the retrospective testimony of adults considering their experiences in youth, the majority of chapters reveal more about the attitudes and actions of various officials and institutions than of adolescents themselves. While recognizing that there is a bias in extant literature toward examining youth in urban areas, Cox and Riordan note that, due largely to the types of source material available, this collection, too, is oriented more toward the urban than the rural.
While studies of adolescence have often focused on male juvenile delinquency, Ann Daly discusses medical constructions of female adolescence as a precarious state in which the potential disturbances of an emerging female sexuality needed to be monitored and controlled. While this history is contextualized in relation to similar trends among British and American practitioners, Daly is also concerned to highlight the peculiarities of the Irish post-famine context and its emphasis on land, marriage, and reproduction, which complemented the medicalizing trend. Considering a very different conception of female Irish youth, Sandra McAvoy's engaging chapter presents a reevaluation of L. T. Meade's portrayals of “wild Irish girls” in the popular novels that were read by a young, female, and primarily British audience. Addressing earlier criticisms of Meade, McAvoy argues that her presentation of Irish girls contrasted with the English school setting in a number of positive ways, ultimately challenging ideas of the conventional English “lady.”
The volume's chapters do not necessarily provide a uniform answer to the question of how far the experience of Irish adolescents can be considered distinctive, with some seeming to emphasize similarity with trends seen across Europe and America, and others divergence. Carole Holohan's chapter on Catholic youth clubs in the 1960s at first emphasizes similarity, referring to the development of an “international youth culture” and the “universality of the experience of adolescence” (177–78). However, within this broader narrative, Holohan points to long-term continuities in welfare provision for Irish youths, stretching back even to the previous century, and ultimately emphasizes the key intersections of class and gender in the treatment, attitudes, and experiences of young people. In the final chapter, Mary Daly concisely and persuasively details a number of distinct socioeconomic, political, and demographic trends marking Ireland apart for much of the twentieth century. These factors limited the degree to which many Irish youths could enjoy the distinct life phase of adolescence. Daly notes that if adolescence is seen to be characterized by “freedom” coupled with a level of protection from guardians, then only a privileged minority of young people in Ireland can be seen to have experienced it before the mid-1960s, and even thereafter “social class, geography, and gender continued to determine the lifestyle of adolescents” (199, 211).
All the chapters in this collection are well grounded in a wide range of historical and related literature, and both the goldmine of footnotes and the select bibliography that concludes the volume will be invaluable to students and to more experienced scholars looking to broaden their understanding of youth in Ireland and beyond. The focus on Ireland in an international context will be extremely useful for scholars interested in comparative work on adolescence as well as Irish historians in particular. A great strength of the volume is its emphasis on the plurality of adolescent experiences in modern Ireland, many aspects of which are still to be explored. The perspective of the adolescent in particular would benefit from future research, which this important and intriguing collection will no doubt inspire.
