This article focuses on the continuing influence of Edmund Spenser’s View of
the present state of Ireland (1596) in the second half of the long eighteenth
century in Ireland. The Elizabethan author’s bleak anatomy of ‘the Irish
problem’ still had strong resonances for Protestants, particularly after the
outbreak of Whiteboy agrarian violence in Munster in the 1760s. Focusing
firstly on conservative Protestant antiquaries such as Edward Ledwich and
Thomas Campbell, it argues that their perspectives, on the present as well as the
past, were shaped by Spenserian concepts of civility and barbarism, even if
these were adapted to fit fashionable Enlightenment theories of the evolution of
human society. These perspectives were balanced by the more liberal position of
others such as Joseph Cooper Walker, whose attitude towards the View reflected
his relatively optimistic political outlook, which was characteristic of Grattanite
Whigs. The traumatic experience of the 1798 Rebellion marked the defeat of
that attitude, and the post-Union period was marked by the republication of
classic colonist texts such as the View, as well as a more ambiguous harnessing
of the latter by the key Protestant novelists after 1800, the consideration of
which forms a concluding coda to the article.