Irish Rags and Irish Lace: Famine, Fabric and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century - Melissa Fegan, University of Chester

‘Irish Rags and Irish Lace: Fabric, Famine and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century’

Melissa Fegan, University of Chester

For many writers on Ireland in the nineteenth century, raggedness was the national condition. Travellers in Ireland were amused, astonished, and often made apprehensive by, the state of Irish clothing: Samuel Foote is said to have exclaimed ‘Now I know where the cast-off clothes of English beggars go to!’, while Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal: ‘You are constantly fearful that some knot or loop will give, and place the individual before you in all the primitive simplicity of Paradise’. Yet Ireland was also associated with fine fabrics: Limerick gloves, Connemara stockings and Ulster linen were highly prized, and Irish lace and crochet were showcased at the 1851 Great Exhibition. This paper will examine the relationship between Irish rags and Irish lace, as the symptom of and potential solution to Irish poverty, in particular the encouragement of lacemaking and knitting by poor girls and women during the Great Famine, and their literary representation in texts such as Mary Anne Hoare’s ‘The Knitted Collar’, Louisa Anne Meridith’s The Lacemakers: Sketches of Irish Character, and ‘Brother James’’s Eva O’Beirne, or The Little Lacemaker.

1b: Textiles and Labour (Chair: Louisa Yates) – CWE 125