Carleton was born to a family of Irish-speaking farmers in Prillisk, Clogher parish, Co. Tyrone, being the youngest of fourteen children. In the Autobiography left incomplete at his death, Carleton describes his youth as a pastoral idyll in which he claims to have accomplished almost magical feats of strength, cunning, and wit. His later recollections of this period as a 'poor scholar’, studying at a series of hedge schools, attending wakes, weddings, and dances, and listening to the anecdotes of an older generation, provided the basis for most of his written work: Mat Kavanagh in 'The Hedge School’ in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry is modelled on Pat Frayne, one of his masters. His family evicted in 1813 and Carleton joined the Ribbonmen for a while. Sometime before 1818 Carleton left Tyrone, earning a living as a teacher in various parts of the country before arriving in Dublin. He claims that one of his first nights in Dublin was spent in a basement with a group of professional beggars, and there seems to be little doubt that he was in dire financial circumstances when he met the Rev. Caesar Otway in 1828. Otway had a reputation both as a writer on Irish landscape and folklore, and as a forceful anti-Catholic proselytizer in the vicious religious debates of the period surrounding the campaign for Catholic Emancipation in 1829. In this environment, in which religious belief was radically politicized, Carleton renounced Catholicism for Protestantism and joined the Church of Ireland; moreover, the change in religious convictions was permanent, for in one of his last letters, written shortly before his death, he was to confirm that he had 'not belonged to the Roman Catholic religion for half a century or more’. Critics, notably D. J. O’Donoghue and Benedict Kiely, have gone to great pains to minimize the sincerity of Carleton’s conversion; however, he did write a letter to Sir Robert Peel in 1826 offering to demonstrate the connection between agrarian violence and Emancipation.
Carleton’s beginning as an author was the most immediate product of his association with Otway. The first version of his 'The Lough Derg Pilgrim’ appeared in Otway’s Christian Examiner in 1828, followed later that year by 'The Broken Oath’ and the serialized novella, ’Father Butler’, thus beginning the first of three phases in his career as an author. These early pieces are shaped by the context in which they appeared: 'The Lough Derg Pilgrim’ is part of a genre of tales 'exposing’ the 'errors’ and 'superstitions’ of Catholicism; 'The Broken Oath’ is a temperance tract; and 'Father Butler’ is largely a fictional framework for a series of theological debates demonstrating the errors of Catholicism. However, they also show qualities which Carleton was to develop in his later writing. 'The Lough Derg Pilgrim’ introduces the authorial persona - confiding, self-deprecating, part peasant and part man of letters - which was to become an identifiable feature of his best known works. In 'Father Butler’ we see the characteristic juxtaposition of idealized, conventional central characters with the vivid, often grotesque, minor peasant characters whose metaphorically rich Hiberno-English dialogue gives Carleton’s work much of its continuing interest. His popularity seems to have been immediate. 'Father Butler’ and 'The Lough Derg Pilgrim’ were published together in book form in 1829, and the following year the first collection of his accounts of rural life, his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry appeared, followed by a second series in 1833, consolidating Carleton’s literary reputation. The 1830s saw the launch of many Irish periodicals, to which Carleton contributed forty short prose works in ten years, including character sketches ('Tom Gressley, the Irish Sennachie’), accounts of peasant traditions ('Larry M’Farland’s Wake’), and novella length pieces, such as 'Jane Sinclair, or The Fawn of Springvale’.
In 1839, Carleton’s writing entered its second phase when he published his first novel, Fardorougha the Miser (published serially in the Dublin University Magazine, 1837-38, which combines, as do his subsequent novels, an unexceptional melodramatic narrative structure with characters, dialogue, and anecdotes. The years that followed were a remarkably prolific period. In addition to rewriting and editing his earlier works during 1840-1845, Carleton wrote a lost play, Irish Manufacture (1841), and four novels in 1845: Valentine M’Clutchy, Art Maguire, Rody the Rover, and Parra Sastha - the last three written for the 'Library of Ireland’ series promoted by The Nation . As thousands of the peasantry died during the Famine of the late 1840s, Carleton responded with three of his best known novels: The Black Prophet (1847), The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848), and The Tithe Proctor (1849). All of Carleton’s longer fiction of the 1840s shows the influence of the didactic tradition in which he first began to write in the 1820s. In his introduction to Art Maguire, Carleton writes that his object was to improve his countrymen’s 'physical and social conditions’; hence Art Maguire warns against the danger of alcohol, Parra Sastha encouraged hard work and thrift, and Rody the Rover shows the evils of the Ribbon lodges and 'bad company’ in general. As such, they can be read in the context of the Victorian genre of the cautionary tale. Indeed, the names of characters in a novel such as Valentine M’Clutchy suggest the degree to which they serve as satiric character types: Solomon M’Slime, the 'religious attorney’; Darby O’Drive, the bailiff; Lord Cumber, the absentee landlord. When the problem which Carleton addresses exceeds the bounds of the conventional didactic story, the results are more interesting. The Tithe Proctor deals with the same issue as Rody the Rover - agrarian secret societies - but unlike the earlier text it argues that tithes levied in support of the Church of Ireland are the source of discontent which leads the peasantry to join such organizations; the result is a disturbing piece of writing from which no simple reading can emerge. The same is true of the treatment of poverty in Fardorougha the Miser and religious loyalty in The Emigrants of Ahadarra. The villains of these more complex novels - Donnel Dhu in The Black Prophet, the 'tinkers’ in The Emigrants of Ahadarra and Ribbonmen in The Tithe Proctor - are often those upon whom Carleton lavishes the colloquial linguistic energies that were evident in his shorter works, suggesting a deep contradiction in his attitude to the 'wandering poor’. Carleton had established his reputation describing the wakes, weddings, and dances of rural Ireland; but he would write in Art Maguire that he hopes they will be abolished, as they lead to excessive drinking and impede Irish industrial development. Moreover, the Famine revealed the under-developed rural economy in which these picturesque traditions flourished to be dangerously unstable. By 1852, the contradiction between Carleton’s avowed desire to see the 'advance of science, civil liberty, and education’, and his success as an author dealing with the quaint eccentricities of a class he refers to as 'social antiquities’ pushed the novel form to its limits with The Squanders of Castle Squander (1852). Beginning as a narrative reminiscent of Charles Lever’s early work, the fictional form collapses in the text’s second half, degenerating into a rambling diatribe on the need for Irish modernization. It effectively marks the end of his second phase as a writer.
Continuous squabbles over money seem to have caused Carleton a great deal of worry in the early 1850s. Nonetheless, a new novel, Red Hall, or The Baronet’s Daughter appeared in 1852. In 1855 Carleton published one of the most popular Irish books of the nineteenth century, Willy Reilly and his Dear Colleen Bawn, which, although it ran to over thirty editions, was being dismissed as a 'romantic melodrama’ by the end of the century. Carleton continued to write poetry and fiction throughout the 1850s and 1860s, publishing a series of novels whose titles seem intended to remind his audience of the impact of The Black Prophet a decade earlier - The Black Baronet (1858 - a retitled printing of Red Hall ); The Evil Eye, or The Black Spectre (1860); and The Double Prophecy, or Trials of the Heart (1862). Redmond Count O’Hanlon, the Irish Rapparee, and The Silver Acre and Other Tales (a collection of short fiction from the 1850s) also appeared in 1862, followed by a diminishing trickle of short stories throughout the 1860s. The Red-Haired Man’s Wife (1889) (Carleton’s authorship of which is disputed) and a short satiric piece, Richard McRoyal, or The Dream of an Antiquarian (1890) appeared posthumously. None of these texts address complex social issues in the manner of Carleton’s novels of the 1840s; as a consequence, the conventional and sentimental plots which were a feature of his longer fiction are the most noticeable aspects of these late works. Carleton seems to have spent most of his time in the years before his death working on his unfinished Autobiography, which was published along with a ' Further Account of his Life and Writings’ by D. J. O’Donoghue as The Life of William Carleton in 1896.
Literary historians have long had difficulties in coming to terms with Carleton. The type of criticism which culminated in Daniel Corkery’s definition of Irish literature as characteristically Gaelic, Catholic, and rural needed to claim Carleton as a central writer in an Irish tradition. Yet Carleton, the only major nineteenth-century writer in English to have been an Irish-speaking peasant was an Episcopalian for all of his writing life, but one capable of attacking aspects of his own church in Valentine M’Clutchy and The Tithe Proctor. Similarly, Carleton contradicts the central thesis of traditional nationalist literary criticism - that literature written in Ireland, about Ireland, was 'national’ by definition and hence nationalist in sentiment. Carleton, who wrote only of Ireland, declared in 1852 that 'a greater curse could not be inflicted on the country than to give it a Parliament of its own making’. Living at a time when factional boundaries were clearly demarcated, Carleton wrote for the Tory, Unionist Dublin University Magazine, and the nationalist The Nation and Irish Felon ; the anti-Catholic Christian Examiner, and the pro-Catholic Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine. Many of his works are addressed to English and Scottish readers; and yet his readership in England and Scotland was insignificant. In short, Carleton offers a challenge to any reductivist literary history. The word which often appears in critical accounts of Carleton’s representations of the peasantry is 'authentic’; however, given the number of strategic uses to which Carleton put these representations, this must be questioned. Nevertheless, his bilingualism, his familiarity with and affection for the culture and outlook of rural Catholic Ireland (towards which he often adopted a condescending tone), and his community feeling, make him one the first writers in nineteenth-century Ireland to embody in his career, language, and narratives, the tensions inherent in Anglo-Irish literature. He is also a figure who exemplifies the transition from an oral culture into a print-based literary one. He died of cancer of the tongue. See Benedict Kiely, Poor Scholar (1948); Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850 (1958); Robert Lee Woolf, William Carleton: Irish Peasant Writer (1980); Barbara Hayley, Carleton’s Traits and Stories and the 19th Century Anglo-Irish Tradition (1983); Hayley, A Bibliography of the Writings of William Carleton (1985); and Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History (1990).
Works
Summary of the novels
'The Lough Derg Pilgrim’ (1828), Carleton’s first published work, was originally entitled 'A Pilgrimage to Patrick’s Purgatory’, and written with the encouragement of Caesar Otway who published it in his Christian Examiner, and whose anti-Catholic polemical bent it echoes. It soon appeared in book-form (as The Lough Dearg Pilgrim) with 'Father Butler’ in 1829. The long story in Carleton’s characteristically picaresque style of the author’s adventures as a pilgrim, initially mistaken for a priest, and finally robbed of his clothes and money by a confidence trickster, while contrasting the 'barbarous and inhuman’ religious practices with the 'sublime’ beauty of the surrounding landscape. Though removing some sectarian passages for the definitive edition of his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1843-44), Carleton retained the telling phrase 'out of hell the place is matchless’. In Station Island (1985), Seamus Heaney imagines meeting Carleton on the road to Lough Derg. See Barbara Hayley, Carleton’s 'Traits and Stories ’ and the Nineteenth Century Anglo-Irish Tradition (1983).
'Father Butler’ (1828), a polemical novella, was originally published pseudonymously Caesar Otway’s Christian Examiner between August and December 1828 and appeared in book-form with 'The Lough Derg Pilgrim’ in 1829. Written to show the moral degradation to which Catholicism has supposedly brought the Irish people, it tells of a young man who is forced into the priesthood by superstitious parents after being cured of an illness by the sinister 'Father A-’. Butler’s childhood love, a Protestant girl called Ellen Upton, dies of a broken heart, and is soon followed by her mother and finally by Butler himself, whose difficulties are aggravated by his discovery of the 'errors’ of his religion. Butler’s exposition of these errors to a Paddy Dimnick, a devout but stupid peasant, follows a pattern found elsewhere in Otway’s paper.
'Wildgoose Lodge’ (1830), a story by William Carleton, first published as 'Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman’ in the Dublin Literary Gazette, and later revised for Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (2nd ser. 1833). The narrator is summoned to a meeting of Ribbonmen [see secret societies] at a Catholic chapel in the dead of night. Whiskey is dispensed by 'Captain’ Paddy Devann, schoolteacher and parish clerk, who enforces an oath before leading the party out to wreak revenge on a Protestant neighbour branded an 'informer’ for reporting the theft of guns from his home. On a night of torrential rain his house is fired with the occupants inside. In keeping with the password chosen by Devann ('No Mercy’), an infant is thrust back into the flames when its mother tries to throw it through the window. The events described, in no sense autobiographical, occurred in Co. Louth in 1816, the victim being in fact a Catholic called Lynch, who may have refused to join the Ribbonmen. The ringleader was tried and hanged.
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830, Second Series, 1833; complete edition 1843-44); a collection of prose pieces by William Carleton. The title Traits and Stories covers a number of books containing varying permutations of Carleton’s short fiction. The 'definitive’ 1843-44 edition, which revises most of the tales, includes two novella-length works, ('Denis O’Shaughnessy’ and 'The Poor Scholar’), short tales reflecting an oral tradition ('The Three Tasks’, 'The Lianhan Shee’), and accounts of peasant traditions ('Shane Fadh’s Wedding’, 'Larry McFarland’s Wake’). The authorial voice shifts abruptly from vivid, Hiberno-English dialogue to formal commentary, and although these have been acclaimed as authentic representations of peasant life, there are curious ambivalences in Carleton’s attitude to his subject which alters from mockery of the peasantry in 'Phil Purcel the Pig-Driver’ to moral outrage at their cruelty in 'Wildgoose Lodge’.
'Denis O’Shaughnessy Going to Maynooth’ (1831), a novella by William Carleton, first serialized in The Christian Examiner and then included, greatly revised, in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (2nd Ser., 1833). Denis Senior trains his son in pedantry and bombast to prepare him for the Catholic priesthood. By bribing Dr. Finnerty, the parish priest, he ensures that he is selected by the bishop for Maynooth. On the eve of his departure he meets his beloved, Susan Connor, and offers to abandon the priesthood for her, but she declares the intention of devoting her life to the Blessed Virgin. At the conclusion of the story two years later, Denis has left Maynooth and married Susan. The story is written in Hiberno-English interspersed with comments in archly formal English on the subjection of the peasantry to their church. Carleton’s ambivalence about the subject is revealed in the linguistic vitality of his peasant characters, as well as in their communal and familial feeling and their sense of fun; he also argues that the awe in which they hold their priests helps to keep them a poor and, for that very reason, an imaginative people.
Fardorougha the Miser, or The Convicts of Lisnamona (1839), William Carleton’s first novel, originally serialized in The Dublin University Magazine (February 1837-February 1838), it preaches the redemptive power of suffering. Fardorougha’s son Connor O’Donovan and Una O’Brien are deeply in love, provoking the jealousy of Bartle Flanagan, a Ribbonman who implicates Connor in an agrarian crime [see secret societies]. To his parents’ great distress he is transported to a penal colony. Fardorougha’s struggle between 'avarice and affection’ is resolved after the trial when he sells up and follows his son to Australia. At the close of the novel Bartle is captured and hanged for attempting to kidnap Una, and Connor returns with his parents to marry her. The attack on the self-interested evil of the Ribbon Lodges had featured in 'Wildgoose Lodge’, and was renewed in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1843-44), Rody the Rover (1845), and The Tithe Proctor (1849).
Parra Sastha, or The History of Paddy Go-Easy and His Wife Nancy (1845), a didactic novel by William Carleton, written in nine days for James Duffy’s 'Library of Ireland’ series as a replacement for Thomas Davis’s projected biography of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Paddy Go-Easy, who lives on a squalid and inefficient holding, is highly critical of his improving neighbour Denny Delap, a 'shrewd’ Presbyterian. When Paddy marries, however, he becomes conscious of his own shortcomings and is swiftly transformed into a steady, industrious, and persevering farmer. The novel criticizes the peasants’ adherence to settled ways and prejudices and offers detailed suggestions for domestic and agricultural improvement. Like Art Maguire and Rody the Rover, both published by Duffy earlier in the year, it was intended 'to make Irishmen a thinking, enlightened, and independent people’, according to the author.
Art Maguire, or The Broken Pledge (1845), a temperance novel by William Carleton published as part of James Duffy’s 'Library of Ireland’, it is a greatly extended version of 'The Broken Oath’, a story which had appeared in The Christian Examiner in 1828. In common with other temperance narratives, it takes the form of a cautionary tale of alcohol and ruin. Having unsuccessfully sworn off drink three times, Art dies in the poor-house, almost killing his own son when he breaks his pledge for the third time. The novelist calls for the abolition of folk customs in regard to alcohol. Initially written as an attack on 'the consequences attendant on confession and absolution’, the revised story was dedicated to Fr. Theobald Mathew 'with a deep sense of veneration and respect’.
Valentine M’Clutchy, The Irish Agent, or The Chronicles of Castle Cumber (1845), is a melodramatic novel satirically conceived as testing 'modern Conservatism and its liberality’. M’Clutchy, a member of the Orange Order, is the dishonest agent of an absentee landlord, Lord Cumber. M’Clutchy’s son Phil wants to marry Mary M’Loughlin, the virtuous daughter of an upstanding Catholic. Mary’s refusal provokes a campaign of persecution against the family in which M’Clutchy is helped by the 'religious attorney’ Solomon M’Slime. At the end of the novel M’Clutchy is assassinated by the son of an evicted farmer, having first been dismissed from his agency when an inquisitive English tourist, Evory Easel, is revealed as the brother of Lord Cumber. Carleton writes that the Orange Lodges include some men of great courage and humanity, but his attack on the oppressive regime of the ultra-Protestants and the Established Church contrasts sharply with his earlier writings for The Christian Examiner. The novel’s best known scene, in which a family is evicted on Christmas Eve, was frequently cited by supporters of the Land League.
Tales and Sketches Illustrating the Character, Usages, Traditions, Sports and Pastimes of the Irish Peasantry (1845), is a collection of twenty one short prose pieces often confused with Carleton’s better-known Traits and Stories (1843-44). Tales and Sketches is built up around grotesquely eccentric members of peasant society, as in 'Buckram Back, the Country Dancing Master’; 'Mary Murray, the Irish Match-Maker’; 'Tom Gressley, the Irish Sennachie’; and 'Barney M’Haigney, the Irish Prophecy Man’. The standpoint of a 'moral physiologist’ studying 'the social idiosyncrasies of a past period’ adopted by the writer is rendered ambivalent by his obvious fascination with the richness of the Hiberno-English that his characters employ. Much of the material in the collection appeared in the Irish Penny Journal, edited by George Petrie, 1840-41. The book is dedicated to Charles Gavan Duffy.
The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine (1847), a novel, was written in response to the Famine of 1845 and first published serially in the Dublin University Magazine from May to December, 1846. Its melodramatic plot concerns a murder committed by Donnel Dhu, the 'prophecy man’, and the shadow of suspicion which hangs over the Daltons, a family of small farmers. Its status as the best known work of Irish Famine literature depends on the searing depiction of the effects of starvation and disease in a peasant community, based on Carleton’s own experience of the famine of 1817. The character of Donnel Dhu is a development of 'The Irish Prophecy Man’ (1841), a piece included in Carleton’s Tales and Sketches of the Irish Peasantry (1845), and based upon wandering prophets, not uncommon in pre-Famine Ireland, who were often peddlars of chapbooks and would foretell disaster or liberation at fair-days or other gatherings. Their prophecies were sometimes based on Colum Cille’s reputed divinations, or on Pastorini.
The Emigrants of Ahadarra: A Tale of Irish Life (1848), is a novel dealing with the M’Mahon family, members of 'that respectable and independent class of Irish yeomanry of which our unfortunate country stands so much in need’, according to the author. It addresses the controversy over the forty shilling freeholders who had served to provide votes for landlords after Catholic Emancipation, but who were later seen as an encumbrance. The plot concerns Bryan M’Mahon’s love for Kathleen Cavanagh, who rejects him because he is suspected of apostasy. Her pious suspicions arise from an intrigue engineered by the profligate Hycy Burke - who wants Kathleen for himself - with the help of a group of 'tinkers’ called the Hogans and a crippled poteen maker, Tim Phats, who is notable for his exaggerated Hiberno-English. At the close Hycy’s deceit is revealed to the returning absentee landlord, and he and the Hogans are sent abroad, whereas the M’Mahons had looked the more likely emigrants all along. The strength of the novel lies in its descriptions of familial love in the M’Mahon household.
The Tithe Proctor: Being a Tale of the Tithe Rebellion in Ireland (1849) is a novel arguing that the levy of Church of Ireland tithes on Catholics generates support for the Ribbonmen, 'those vile societies of a secret nature that disgrace the country and debase the character of her people’ [see secret societies]. The plot involves a love affair thwarted by a myriad of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies involving an agitator, Buck English, and his mysterious twin brother, the Cannie Soogah. It ends with an apocalyptic scene in which five thousand Ribbonmen surround and burn the home of the eponymous tithe proctor, Matthew Purcel, in an episode similar to the conclusion of 'Wildgoose Lodge’ in Traits and Stories (1843-44). The novel seems to have offended commentators of every political persuasion, parts of it striking his biographer D. J. O’Donoghue as the result of mental aberration. If so, it reflects the intensity of conflict in the Tithe War.
The Life [or Autobiography] of William Carleton (1896) is composed of an autobiographical fragment together with a biographical commentary of equal length by Frances Cashel Hoey and D. J. O’Donoghue. The autobiographical part, written towards the end of Carleton’s life, recalls his childhood in rural Co. Tyrone and narrates a series of adventures in the manner of a picaresque novel dealing with his aborted trip to Munster as a candidate for the priesthood, and his eye-witness experience of the hanging of a Ribbonman [see secret societies] near ’Wildgoose Lodge’. It reveals a strong attachment to family and especially to his mother, whose comment on the bad marriage between English words and Irish airs he related in a famous passage. Carleton stresses the obstacles he faced in becoming a man of letters and records his difficulties in accepting any single system of belief. Shorn of its commentary, the text was reprinted with an introduction by Patrick Kavanagh as The Autobiography of William Carleton (1968). |
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