William Carleton
Author of The Traits and Characteristics of the Irish Peasantry, 1833
I endeavour to paint Ireland sometimes as she was but always as she is, in order that she may see many of those debasing circumstances which prevent her from being what she ought to be.
William Carleton in the preface to his novel The Tithe Proctor
William Carleton was an important part of ‘The first and lost literary revival of the 1830's'[1]: the Pre-Yeatsian revival. ‘Carleton was the first...' writes Barbara Hayley [(?) check] ‘to present specifically Irish literature to the world.' Indeed, in his earlier years, Yeats made the momentous declaration that Carleton had started modern Irish literature. Carleton's contribution to the rejuvenation of the Irish Publishing Industry after the Act of Union was invaluable. By publishing in Ireland, Carleton rebuilt the tradition, created a public, and opened the way for the likes of Banim, Griffin, and Lover, to publish at home.
Carleton was born to Irish-speaking parents in Prillisk, Co. Tyrone in 1794. The youngest of fourteen children, he was educated at hedge schools from the age of six. According to the likes of Foster, Carleton's ‘poor scholar' badge constituted a qualification for esteem of the Irish people. The ‘peasant's son' identity that he so often claimed, however, is discredited by Patrick Kavanagh; ‘he was no more a peasant than this your obedient servant.'[2]
Carleton's early years were spent in relative economic comfort, though his family experienced persecution from yeomen, suffering a violent raid in which his sister was assaulted and his family threatened. One of the yeomen turned out to be the brother of a Protestant neighbour with whom the family were close. This sense of reluctant role-playing within Irish society; of each man unsure on which side he stood or in what way; turning on his neighbour, or fawning to him, is something that informs Carleton's attitudes to Irishness, and pervades his work. At home, Carleton's older brother, Michael, who worked to support the family, was not impressed with William's habit of spending several hours a day reading the classics, and the rest going to dances.
Carleton's father wanted one of his sons to be a priest. It was an endeavour William began and then abandoned In 1813, the Carleton family were evicted from their home. Carleton joined the Ribbonmen, a violent secret agrarian society, but quickly abandoned it, leaving Tyrone to look for work. 1818, the time that Carleton walked south to find a fortune, was one of genuine hunger, famine and uprising, and work was scarce. Carleton repudiated his background in order to be taken up by Irish Protestant Society. By all accounts this conversion had little to do with religious beliefs. Carleton wanted respectability and security, and this was the best way to attain it; ‘he had only pre-Victorian Protestantism to give him a bead in the larger world'[3]. Through his conversion, Carleton built useful contacts, receiving work as a clerk and a tutor through allegiances such as the Association for Discountenancing Vice. He applied to join the army, addressing his application to the colonel in Latin.
The same William Carleton born to an Irish-speaking story-telling family, who saw his family evicted and assaulted, found his first break with sketches published in an anti-Catholic evangelical paper Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Gazette. From here, Carleton received recognition as a writer. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, where An Essay in Irish Swearing is taken from, first appeared anonymously in 1830. It was an instant success, and went on to be widely published and acknowledged. It is the work he is best known for today.
In these collections, Carleton both vindicates his people, and belittles them. Barbara Hayley insists that Carleton's intention was to show the Irish peasantry honestly to the world. In his introduction to the collection, Carleton claims to rescue the Irishman from his traditional image as ‘grotesque blunderer', yet at times the text seems to do exactly the opposite(find quote from Traits?.). He attacks the cliché of the Irish ‘Paddy', and at the same time consolidates it with images of a knavish, blundering fool.
The work by no means represents a nationalist point of view: his ‘peasants' are presented as ‘an interesting portion of the Empire'[4]. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, these volumes did not receive widespread derision from nationalists. Though Nation called it ‘envenomed caricature', the idealist Young Irelander, Thomas Davis, gave the volume a positive review, calling it an account of the peasantry from ‘a hearty peasant- not a note-taking critic'[5] To many, this was a much milder, more favourable account of Irishness than they had before seen in print; and, for a people so rarely represented as more than brutes, this was a step forward.
Insert some quote What might now be read as the patronising, colonial perception of the Irish Peasantry, was the confused voice of the Irishman speaking for his people in the language of the coloniser. Carleton is more than an example of a self-serving turncoat. Rather, his work is symptomatic of the condition of a colonised people. The famine had left the Irish with a sense of weakness and failure; the sudden mass turn from the Irish language and adoption of English in the years preceding the famine, made manifest their sense of their own tongue, and their own culture, as a symbol of shame.
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry was republished extensively and messily, with ever-changing titles, or one title belonging to completely different stories,
Irish English was not only a dialect or patios; it was one that was consistently characterized as suffering from deformity- excess, illogic, mispronunciation. It was a language that lacked rational order and was therefore incapable of providing an acceptable analysis of the condition of the people who spoke it. For to represent the speech as deformed was also to represent their account of their social and political condition as deformed, verbose, inaccurate...[6].
The disorder of Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry: the infinite permutations and combinations, the multiplication of ‘editions', fourth editions where no second or third exist, stories revised, recycled, retitled... is reflective of this notion of Hiberno-English deformity and disorder.
He became an important contributer to Dublin University Magazine, a cultural journal launched by Isaac Butt, Caesar Otway and Samuel Ferguson. In 1837-8 Dublin University Magazine published Carleton's novel Fardorough, the Miser as a serial. He wrote popular emotive novels defending the rights of tenants and lamenting the situation that gave rise to famine throughout the 1840s, including the bestselling The Black Prophet: a tale of Irish Famine (1847). His continued writing tales and novels in the 1850s and 1860s that were bestsellers not only in the isles but also in the United States of America. The most celebrated of these at the time was Willy Reilly and his dear Colleen Bawn (1855).
The Irish Publishing Industry -a trade which had flourished in the 18th century- had all but died out after the Act of Union. Due largely to Carleton's practice of publishing in Ireland, by 1840 there existed an Irish publishing trade.
Gerald Dawe, in his collection ‘Stray Dogs and Horses', considers that, as time went by, Carleton's work degenerated into something that no longer even attempted to show Ireland as ‘she' is: ‘in an artistic sense, he succumbed to stereotypical images of his own people'. Indeed, the ‘melodramatic trash' referred to by Patrick Kavanagh, was a body of work often considered to be full of derogatory racism against Irish people. In his introduction to The Tithe Proctor, Carleton declares that the Irish man carries ‘the principles of political dishonesty into the practises of private life and is consequently disingenuous and fraudulent.'
Despite his own Irish Catholic roots, Carleton associated himself more with an English culture. He offered to help Robert Peel to combat Emancipation and Catholicism in Ireland and to prove that O'Connell, the Catholic Association, and the priests were involved in agrarian crime. His comments on O'Connell are decidedly imperialist in tone, claiming that he was corrupting the Irish peasantry with notions of their own worth, transforming simple country folk to double-dealers. At this time he called the Irishman ‘a poor skulking dupe', yet in 1843 he decided to write for Nation and for the Irish Tribune, both dedicated to the cause of independence. That Carleton had no clear agenda other than his own literary fame (of which he was very proud), is clear from an unpublished letter to the Evening Mail, in which he declared that
I have not now, nor have I ever been at any time a Repealer. I am not a Young Irelander, nor, in a political sense at least, an old one. I am no Republican, no Communist, but a plain, retiring literary man who wishes to avoid politics and to devote his future life to such works as he hopes may improve his country and elevate his people.[7]
Although writing about ‘Paddy', it is clear that Carleton won prestige through behaving like a gentleman, and not an Irish Peasant. These two things- Irish Peasant and gentleman- are entirely incongruous if we are to believe Carleton's account of the peasantry. However, Carleton simultaneously won esteem and a sense of authenticity for his work by claiming a peasant background.
His unfinished Autobiography is written in an English purged of all Irish localisms. He had his portrait done in imitation of Wordsworth's, and enjoyed his title as the ‘Walter Scott of Ireland'.
In this imitation of the colonial power, Carleton is representative of a whole people for whom Irish had become, in Mathew Arnold's terms, ‘the badge of a beaten race'. Seen in more practical terms, however, this turn away from Hiberno-English was a way for a native Irishman to grasp some of the power and esteem of the British. Using standard English was the best way to present ‘the lost worlds of ambition and deprivation in its most readable form'[8] The sudden post-famine native Irish adopting of the English language, so often seen as an act of submission, can also be considered an act of subversion akin to the black slaves' adopting of education: a throwing off of the cultural version of the ‘colour bar', a reversal of the colonial policy of wiping out the native language.
In the Edinburgh review, Dr Murry called Carleton, "thoroughly Irish, intensely Irish, exclusively Irish." Foster insists that Carleton's "careerist armoury"[9] - a willingness to write with a stage Irish voice - is itself an Irish tradition. This willingness - or necessity - to play up to stereotypes or imitate the coloniser's voice in a bid for self-advancement, is a feature of all colonised people. The African slave played the minstrel, emphasised his own role as the ‘hands' to the white man's ‘head.' [the last clause needs some frame of reference maybe, what African slave did that emphasising? Footnote needed]
William Carleton features as the chief revenant in Seamus Heaney's 1984 poem, ‘Station Island';
Oh holy Jesus, does nothing change?
...
Hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and ‘Orange bigots [apostrophe before Orange?]
Made me into an old fork-tongued turncoat
His multiple self-hood, his ambiguous and ever changing attitudes to Irishness, both political and cultural, makes him either a turncoat of the worst kind, or "the aggregate of a whole people."[10]
There are those, like Declan Kiberd, or Thomas Davis of his own time, who would see Carleton as writing of the Irish peasants ‘from within.' There can be no doubt that Carleton's roots in the Irish-speaking cabins lends his work an authenticity lacking in the work of Edgeworth, but there can be no doubt either, that his authorial perspective was certainly not entirely from ‘within.' Who, for example, is the "we" of this Essay in Irish Swearing? And who is Paddy? Like his political beliefs and his very lifestyle, Carleton's writing is full of irreconcilable ambiguities: both the voice of the peasantry and of the colonial forces that stifled it.
To try to understand the tone of An Essay in Irish Swearing, we must consider that Carleton was writing in English for an English and Scottish readership; and that England who, had "the ear of the world,"[11] also had the tongue. The Irishness that Carleton was writing of was caught between two languages. Irish, incapable of communicating beyond itself, and a broken English which did not contain the terms needed to understand the colonised people.
Hayley insists that Carleton's intention was to show the Irish peasantry honestly to the world. In his introduction to the collection, Carleton claims to rescue the Irishman from his traditional image as "grotesque blunderer," yet at times the text seems to do exactly the opposite. [need example here from the text] He attacks the cliché of the Irish "Paddy," and at the same time consolidates it.
Though much of his work has been politicized and is, perhaps, of most interest today within the colonial context, Carleton himself wrote to allow "for understanding more clearly [the Irish Peasantry's] general character, habits of thought, and modes of feeling, as they exist."[12] In order to, "Exhibit Irishmen not as the blundering buffoons of the English stage, but as men capable of thinking and feeling deeply."[13]
Carleton came from a family of storytellers and, though not destitute, his family was nevertheless concerned primarily with survival. It can be easy to attack his ethics from the armchair of a different century without appreciating his struggle to succeed. It would seem he wrote to make his way in the world: he was a career writer concerned with the practicalities of survival and self-advancement before anything else.
Despite his literary success, Carleton was often in financial difficulty. Provoked by the petitions of prominent writers such as Maria Edgeworth, the Government provided Carleton with a civil list pension of £200 - something that was not uncommon for public figures at the time.It is commonly thought that this pension was a way of keeping the adaptable Carleton from writing in support of independence.
As he aged, Carleton became increasingly bitter. He felt that the Irish people had not given him the esteem he deserved. When a priest was sent to convert him back to Catholicism and administer the last rights, Carleton, lying on his deathbed, turned his face to the wall. ‘He felt that ...In spite of his success elsewhere,' writes Dawe, ‘the Irish had not voiced their appreciation of what he had laboured to do on their behalf'.
William Carleton died in 1869 at the age of 75, his writing career having spanned a variety of clashing ideals and several literary movements.
[1] Barbara Hayley's phrase
[2] Preface to Carleton's Autobiography,
Mac Gibbon & Kee Ltd, 1968
[3] Kavanagh preface
[4] P.b- antony's copy
[5] Thomas Davis, Gill & Son, 1945, p.111
[6] Seamus Deane- Strange Country
[7] O'Donoghue, The Life, Vol 2 p.133
[8] Kavanagh intro
[9] ‘The Irish Story; Telling Tales and making it up in Ireland',
[10] Quote?
[11] Mitchel
[12] Autobiographical Introduction, p. i, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry
[13] Ibid., p. iv
