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Dr. Corry’s National Diorama of Ireland and Irish Performance in Nineteenth-century Urban Popular Culture

The history of Irish performance in nineteenth-century popular entertainment is a compelling subject. Nonetheless, the manner in which that history can speak both of and to the massive (and often traumatic) shifts in Irish and Irish diasporic life taking place during that tumultuous century remains problematic. Too often, cultural historians who examine the performance of Irishness in urban popular culture do so in a way that isolates the performance from its larger contexts. In such an approach, a particular practice—for example, a music hall performance, a tourist guide, or a lyceum lecture—emerges in a specific form and then disappears again according to contingent needs and markets. But detaching a practice from its surrounding milieu runs the risk of reducing it to quaintness and insignificance. What is left behind by this is not the “matter” of Ireland as a conceptual entity, but rather, a series of “Irish effects” of greater or lesser significance. Of course, there is much to be said for enjoying and theorizing these sporadic effects on their own terms, and in doing so, to being alive to any subversive potential as individual interventions that they might have. After all, the opposite approach—the forging of a cultural tradition out of the disparate practices of urban popular entertainment—can lead, as in the creation of the British music hall tradition, to what can seem little more than a disabling nostalgia that circles endlessly around what Gareth Stedman Jones witheringly called the “culture of consolation.” A more ambitious project of cultural history would look beyond these putative narratives and traditions. Such an approach would look, rather, at the connective nodes of the culture represented by the indi-