ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role that other aspects of the writing of Ireland played in the elaboration of a new middle-class cultural ideal in works of literature and criticism, an ideal that would come to dominate popular perceptions of British national identity. The Anglo-Irish Croker, in addition to holding an important position as editor of the Quarterly Review, was a member of Parliament, first Secretary of the Admiralty, a fellow of the Royal Society, a founder of the Athenaeum Club, a respected critic of the French Revolution, and a confidante of the great Tory leader Robert Peel. Novelists, as well as critics, were hitherto regarded as engaged in the less than dignified realm of commerce, and Croker in his critique of Lady Morgan seeks to associate her with trade. Thackeray expands his project of anti-romance in his fiction, and in his novels constructs a British national identity rooted, like Burke's, in domesticity.
