Carleton was born at Prillisk, Co. Tyrone, the son of a tenant-farmer. He was the youngest of fourteen children. His father’s knowledge of both the Old and the New Testament and his fund of Gaelic lore were of obvious importance to the shaping of the future writer. His mother was renowned in the area as a sweet singer of songs both in Irish and in English. The boy was schooled by a succession of hedge-school teachers whose often idiosyncratic behaviour was to provide him with much material for his stories. At the age of fourteen, young Carleton decided that he would make his way to Munster as a ‘poor scholar’ but he got homesick along the way and had his celebrated dream of being chased by a bull, which he interpreted as an omen bidding him abandon his travels for the moment. He went back to his delighted family and stayed with them fora further five years, during which he appears to have enjoyed himself hugely, excelling at athletic contests and at dancing. In addition to pleasuring himself with sport and rural jollification, he attended a classical school at Donagh in Co. Monaghan and another in Dundalk.

When he was about nineteen he set off on a pilgrimage to Lough Derg. His father had cherished the hope that at least one of his children would become a priest but his youngest son’s journey to the famous island centre of devotion had quite the opposite effect and William’s gradual abandonment of Catholicism seems to date from about the time of his pilgrimage, an experience which was also to provide him with material for one of his most controversial early stories. He was eventually to abandon Catholicism and become a Protestant, a switch of religious allegiances which commentators have interpreted in various ways.

W. B. Yeats took the view that Carleton remained at all times a Catholic at heart. Benedict Kiely relates his Protestantism to his ambiguous contact with Caesar Otway and sees his decisions as being based on the hard facts of poverty rather than on theological conviction:

William Carleton scrambled up on the fence with the firm intention of becoming a Protestant, ended up with a long leg dangling on either side of the rickety division. The one advantage was that perched on the fence with his heels kicking the air he could work and eat.

More recently, Terence Brown has taken issue with such judgements, and has presented a case for taking Carleton’s Protestantism more seriously. Brown, however, concerns himself with Carleton’s old age and with his friendship with various sympathetic clergymen of both denominations. One feels that the Carleton who, at the end ofa long life, conversed with William Pakenham Walsh, later bishop of Ossory, was hardly the same Carleton who obliged Caesar Otway with ‘exposures’ of Catholic superstitions for The Christian Examiner.

Carleton, inspired by a reading of Gil Blas, finally left home for good in 1818 and set off for Dublin by a leisurely and roundabout route. Along the {85} way, he called on the Jesuits at Clongowes and also visited Maynooth. finally reached Dublin, almost penniless, and lived from hand to mouthm he met a Mr Fox who ran one of Erasmus Smith’s schools. Through Fox Carleton got a job as clerk in the Sunday School Office at a salary of £6 year. He married Fox’s niece, Jane Anderson, but soon found himself financial straits once more. He was dismissed from his post in the Sunday School Office and, to keep his wife and baby son, had to take a post as teacher in a Protestant school in Mullingar. In 1825 he was back in Dublin once more and there he met Caesar Otway, one of the more able and active of Protestant proselytisers of the time. Otway had just founded The Christian Examiner and he recruited Carleton to write for it. His first contributions to Otway’s paper was ‘A Pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory’ which appeared in 1828 and he continued to write for the paper until 1831. Roger McHugh has pithily characterised this phase of Carleton’s career as ‘graphic pen-pictures and sectarian bias laid on with a trowel’. When he broke with Otway, Carleton went on to write for other Dublin periodicals such as The National Magazine, The Dublin Literary Gazette and The Dublin University Magazine. The first series of his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry appeared in 1830, the second in 1833. This is the work on which his literary reputation now principally rests. In it he draws on his vivid memory of youth and pours forth a memorable series of portraits of hedge-schoolmasters, faction fighters, ‘poor scholars’. dancing-masters, country fiddlers, a whole gallery of the characters he recalled from his early days in Tyrone or had met on his travels about the country. He also recorded memorably, in stories such as the fearsome "Wildgoose Lodge", the dark and more violent aspects of the Ireland of his day.

Carleton moved on from short stories to the novel with Fardorougha Miser, which was first published in serial form in The Dublin University Magazine and went into book form in 1839. He subsequently published upwards of a dozen more novels, including Valentine McClutchy (1845) and The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848). The bewildering variety of the attitutudes and stances he adopted is summed up for us by Thomas Flanagan:

Before his career was run he had written for every shade of Irish opinion - stern Evangelical tracts for Caesar Otway; denunciations of the landlords for Thomas Davis; patronizing sketches for The Dublin University Magazine; unctuous Catholic piety for James Duffy; a few sketches for Richard Pigott, the sinister mock-Fenian who was to forge the famous Parnell correspondence. By the eighteen forties he was the most celebrated of Irish writers; ten years later he was written-out, a hack whose pen was for hire in Dublin’s ugly literary wars. He had but one subject, the days of his youth and the world in which he had lived them. This is the subject which haunted him and drove his pen; to this subject he was faithful, and to nothing else. {86}

Carleton was granted a government pension in 1848 but it was not generous enough to free him permanently from financial pressures. He went on writing to the end of his life in an effort to keep one jump ahead of his debts. He died of cancer of the tongue in Dublin in 1869, with his Autobiography still largely incomplete, and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery. (pp.85-87.)