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William Carleton (1794-1869) is a pivotal writer in Irish literary history whose works mark the shift from the literature of the Protestant Ascendancy to that of the Irish people. As he wrote in an application for a government pension in later life, “I have risen up from a humble cottage and described a whole people.” Certainly he was the first writer in whom the character and spirit of the oppressed Gaelic majority comes to the surface again after the era of the Penal Laws, which were finally removed from the statute book when Catholic Emancipation passed through the British Parliament in 1829, driven by the political energy of Daniel O'Connell - an Irishman of a very different class from Carleton. While estimates of the literary merit of his books widely vary, he is generally accepted on his own terms as the first writer in English who ever looked at his fellow-countrymen through “Irish eyes”. The truth of this assertion reflects the fact that his predecessors and contemporaries had all been members of the English settler-community in Ireland who either ridiculed the peasantry for their apparent ignorance or saw them as material for their comic novels. Such were Samuel Lover and Charles Lever who are often mentioned as Carleton’s chief competitors, and both of these wrote primarily for the amusement of English audiences. In John and Michael Banim and Gerald Griffith, on the other hand, he had fellow-Catholic novelists, though both of these came from the emerging middle class and hence, though their sympathies were broadly with the Gaelic and Catholic population of the country, they were not in any sense “peasant writers” as he was. In this respect, Carleton enjoyed an unchallenged primacy as the only “authentic” writer who could report truly on the realities of life for the largest and lowest class of Irishmen and women and, in this sense, he is always regarded as the “true historian” of native Irish society. It has been said that no one who has not read Carleton really knows Ireland - and this is just as true of Irish people today as of those of other nations. (Whether Carleton is truly readable for non-English readers is another question!)

Born on a farm amid the “peasantry” of Co. Tyrone in the North of Ireland and excluded from significant education by the anti-Catholic Penal Laws which still operatied in his childhood, he succeeded in becoming the “historian” of his class in short stories and novels which capture the chaotic vitality of pre-Famine Ireland outside of the polite drawing-rooms and councils of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. He is the first “native” Irish writer in English and when a later generation led by W. B. Yeats set about founding a modern literature in Ireland they turned to him as the founder of the “national” tradition. Carleton was a complex man whose first entry into print took the form of sectarian narratives in which the “superstitious” practices of his fellow-Catholics and former neighbours in rural Ireland were hilariously caricatured for the amusement of the Protestants who still dominated publishing in Ireland. Critics have always been divided about the sincerity of his conversion: it was convenient and even necessary at the time, in order to reach an English-speaking audience - he addressed himself to Englishmen and Scotsmen as often as to Irishmen in his Prefaces - but it may also have been strongly felt since his rapid progress from rural peasant, failed seminarian (he “went for a priest”), then school-teacher before finally attaining the status of self-supporting writer - a rarity in those days - involved enormous changes in mental outlook and social adherence. For those who like to think of as a Catholic writer, there was the obstacle that he was Protestant. For those who liked to think of him a nationalist writer and a supported of the Repeal of the Act of Union, there was the difficulty that he said the arrival of an independent parliament in Dublin is he worst thing that could happen to Ireland.

In his own estimate he was a writer who had “risen up from a humble cottage and described a whole people.” The people he described were the ones he knew in childhood and young manhood and it is generally accepted that the rumbunctious, violent, jubilant and melancholic community of characters who populate his tales and novels are indeed a realistic cross-section of the contemporary population of Catholic Ireland in the years before the Famine of 1845-49. After the Famine, all changed: Catholic Ireland rapidly espoused the puritanical form of a Jansenist clergy and, instead of the careless proliferation of children which supplied pre-Famine Ireland with a population of 8 million living largely on the potato - a tuber which was wiped out by a rotting blight during those terrible years - two million of the country’s surviving population went into exile in Britain or American while those who remained locked themselves into a system of farm-ownership which necessitated the continued emigration of all but the eldest sons who inherited the meagre farms. In this stern modification of Irish social morals the Catholic Church played a central role by means of what is called the Confessional Revolution which made pious church-goers of the majority within a generation.

Carleton lived in a society in which the majority were still Irish speakers - or, at least, speakers of Irish with some English intermixed in a kind of croele language known as Hiberno-English. (After the Famine of 1845-49, the language-shift accelerated to the extent that Irish was near-extinct when the Language Revival Movement was promoted by the Gaelic League from 1893 onwards.) In conveying the words and deeds of his characters, he is obliged to use a form of transliteration which reproduces the vagaries of Irish pronunciation in English together with a plethora of phrases which are typically Hiberno-English as arising at the juncture between the two languages. Carleton himself strove to write in an educated form of English - the form, that is, which best displayed his own adequacy as an educated writer - and between the two dialects or planes of composition there always subsists a conflict, even a contradiction. As Barbara Hayley has pointed out in a fine analysis of his predicament, the “framing narrative” with which he began his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830-34; new edn. 1843) quickly falls down, to be replaced by the educated voice of the narrator talking directly to his readers at points when the characters are not talking to each other. The resultant space allows Carleton to express strongly held opinions independently from his characters, or even about them, but it does not constitute an artistic solution to the problem of story-telling in a colonial society.

Classroom Readings