ABSTRACT
To say a thing was “Irish,” in a certain strand of nineteenth-century discourse, was to say that the thing in some way stood in contradiction to itself. The OED preserves this sense of the word, citing among other things an 1838 letter by George Eliot. 1 Margaret Hale, in Gaskell’s North and South , thinks to herself at one point, “If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt, if that is not Irish.” 2 The usage obviously derives from the term “Irish bull,” publicized by Maria Edgeworth and her father, Richard, in their essay of 1802: a witticism that rebounds in some self-cancelling way upon the wit, leaving us wondering whether we or the speaker are the ultimate butt of the joke. 3 When Thady Quirk, narrator of Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent , says that old Sir Condy could have been a brilliant lawyer, “if he could have borne the drudgery of that study,” he is saying a great deal. 4 You can’t be a lawyer of any kind if you can’t bear the “drudgery,” but we can never really figure out whether this is naïve and sentimental praise or knowing criticism from Thady. “Bull” existed as a term long before the Edgeworth’s essay: a bull was a piece of nonsense, a contradiction, and an Irish bull was one that contained one of these particular backflips. 5 It will be useful to keep these high-stakes linguistic maneuvers in mind as we consider Trollope’s relation to Ireland.
