Caricatured as a primitive land – an undeveloped global south lying to the west of England – Ireland was accordingly positioned as a project in need of evolutionary improvement and instruction, in order to force the “savage Irish” (“irrois savages” [Lydon, Lordship 283]) to emerge one day from their barbaric cocoon into a state of enlightened civilization – an agenda, Robert Bartlett observes, that “would not be out of place in nineteenth-century anthropological thought” (Gerald 176).45
