Students are advised to read closely the short biography of William Carleton taken from the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996) and placed on the Resources pages of this website [infra].

Further quotations from the author on those pages serve to state his case for consideration as the first - if not the greatest - chronicler of the lives of the ordinary Irish people in the period he lived in.

Much of the critical debate surrounding Carleton has to do with the identification of elements of authenticity in his depiction of the peasant community in Ireland and its place in the contemporary political and social world.

Here the crucial issue is the question of Carleton's religious conversion to Protestantism. Was this a sincere gesture on his part, or was it simply a means of advancing himself in a world of journalism dominated by Protestant evangelical editors such as Caesar Otway - who published his first stories in the Christian Examiner?

The evidence of the Autobiography argues that his disaffection from Catholicism was sincere while the stories “Lough Derg Pilgrimage” and the “Denis O'Shaughnessy Going to Maynooth” suggests that he was dubious about the spiritual quality of contemporary Irish Catholicism.

It has even been rumoured that he was, in fact, the son of the local Protestant landlord who seems to have favoured his family for no apparent reason; and that, as such, he always saw himself as standing apart from other members of his social rank.

Whatever the case, it is the lively and hilarious descriptions of the self-inflated genius of the hedge-school masters and their counterparts in the world of Irish agricultural commerce such as the pig-gauger that ensures the status of these stories.

Carleton laughs with his peasant characters rather than at them and he writes of them in the recognition that their ingenuity and their vitality are hard won in conditions of dire poverty, extreme marginalisation of political disadvantage. Hence landlordism in general, and the vicious exploitation of middle-men in particular, are the ultimate targets of his animosity.

It is one of the overwhelming ironies of his career that he, the master of Irish native frolics, should also have been in effect the prophet who foresaw the darkness that would overwhelm the country with the advent of the Irish Famine, an event destined to become the chief watershed of Irish social history.

After it the Irish peasantry as he knew it all but disappeared, in its place emerging a dour, puritanical and often self-destructive type who had internalised the horror of the Irish holocaust in the form of puritanical religion and an almost religious form of land-grabbing.

Carleton thought of himself, at the end, as one of the ultima Romanorum [last of the Romans]. That is so say, he envisaged himself as a spokesman for a world passing out of existence in the recognition - and the hope - that Catholic Ireland would, in time, through up another type: the modern Irishman.

Arguably George Moore and James Joyce in their very different ways are examples of the new type: nationalist in politics and agnostic in religion; capable of sentiment but also capable of eviscerating self-reflection where any form of self-serving Irishness was concerned. And in that, they were not perhaps, after all, so very different from William Carleton.