ABSTRACT
The ‘battle of two civilizations’ was fought, not only between England and Ireland, but, and perhaps more fiercely, within Ireland; and it acquired a special intensity in the last decade of the nineteenth century with the fall of that most celebrated representative of the Anglo-Irish nationalists, Charles Stewart Parnell. Once the political battle was won, then the ‘day of the gay uniforms and glittering banners returns for the soldiers’; but until then the ‘occasional poetic revel’ notwithstanding, the ‘harsher summons of some evicting landlord or crimes act constable’ were the realities of the Irish condition. The Brookes stood between, and also within, two civilizations; but if these two civilizations were embattled, as they now appeared to be, then it was necessary to take one side or the other. English was the medium through which nationalist Ireland became a political reality.
