By ZoË Van Cauwenberg
Published in Notes and Queries, January 2026.
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Abstract

In 1825, before a House of Lords committee on Irish education, the Archbishop of Dublin William Magee, recalled a schoolbook he had encountered during his tenure as Dean of Cork:There appeared, I think in the year 1815, one book especially printed in Cork for the use of schools…. entitled A Sketch of Irish History, compiled by way of Question and Answer, for the use of Schools. That appeared to me to be so monstrous a book… The language of this, if it was circulated amongst schools… must have been the most injurious to the young mind… and in a way accessible to the meanest capacity.1The book Magee found so alarming was a fifty-page school primer, anonymously published in Cork in 1815. Its preface claims that the Sketch of Irish History aimed to remedy ‘the complete neglect of giving Children any information on the subject of the History of Ireland’ and to correct ‘the general misrepresentation in those cases where it has been touched upon’.2 Using a catechetical mode with guiding questions such as ‘was the accession of the Stewarts beneficial to the Irish nation?’ and its scathing response, ‘far from it’, it redresses historical ignorance among the Irish (Catholic) youth in a polemical way.3 While it might be a rogue schoolbook, its production within a Catholic institutional setting hints at an educational environment in which historical writing could serve a resistant political function. Published during a time of intensifying debate about Catholic emancipation in Ireland, the Sketch presents an intriguing intervention in the shaping of national history and voices a narrative rarely found in antiquarian and historical writing of the period.