History and Politics

William Hanbidge was born in the townland of Tinnahinch in County Wicklow in 1813. He died in 1909 in his ninety-fifth year. One of eleven children born to a small Protestant farmer, he grew up in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion, in one of the counties most affected by it. He witnessed the effects of the post-1815 crisis on agriculture and the domestic linen industry. In the early 1830s he went to Dublin where he trained as a schoolteacher. In 1832 he returned home to take up a position in the school he himself had attended. There he remained until around 1837 when he went to Dublin to pursue a career as a solicitor’s clerk. When this career change failed he returned to teaching, taking up positions in Carlow and Kildare. His first wife died at the beginning of 1841, leaving five young children under the age of seven. He remarried in 1847. The couple had two children before his second wife died in 1853. In 1857, he left for London where he was to spend almost forty years as an evangelical missionary in the East End. Five years after arriving there, he married for the third time. It was one of his two children from this marriage, Mary Ann (1866–1951), who encouraged William to record his memories. She became a headmistress in a London school and when she retired, more than thirty years after her father’s death, she assembled his memoirs for publication, adding her own extensive annotations, the result of considerable research in Britain and Ireland. In 1939, she published The Memories of William Hanbidge Aged 93. 1906: An Autobiography. The outbreak of the Second World War, it seems, frustrated Mary Ann Hanbidge’s ambition to circulate her father’s memoirs widely. W. J. McCormack, former professor of literary history at Goldsmiths College, University of London, has taken William Hanbidge’smemories ofwestWicklowand a sample of his daughter’s writings and reproduced them in this work, part of UCD Press’s Classics of Irish History series. McCormack’s excellent introduction on the provenance of Hanbidge’s memoirs is elucidating. It is also well informed regarding aspects of life in west Wicklow before and after independence. McCormack has a very personal reason for editing this work, whichhasundoubtedly enthusedhim for his subject. His insightful comments pre-empt much of what could be said in a critical review of the writings of the Hanbidges. He is well aware, for example, of the subjective enthusiasm of memoir writers. His introduction immediately alerts the reader to the need to be discerning in regard to the accuracy of the information presented in the text. As the memories were recorded in old age, McCormack, in noting some of the discrepancies therein, puts them down to the ‘author’s old age, his limited formal education, and indeed his deliberately plain literary style’. The point here is that memoirs such as these aremost useful to thehistorian only when evidence can be authenticated from other more reliable sources. Nevertheless, William Hanbidge’s memories have a good deal of merit. They are informative on a number of aspects of Irish social life in pre-Famine Ireland with Hanbidge’s asides, as McCormack notes, often as revealing as the substance. They tell a good deal about small farmer life, of living