FINTAN O'TOOLEreviews The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001By Liam Harte Palgrave Macmillan, 301pp. £55
AS EARLY AS 1605, the Privy Council in London was issuing warnings about the migration of "base people from Ireland" who were being deported from France as beggars and making their way to the English capital. In the same year, there are reports of an Irish shanty town in the East End. The figures given by Brian Lambkin and Patrick Fitzgerald in their recent and superb overview, Migration in Irish History, 1607-2007suggest that over three million Irish-born people have emigrated to Britain since 1600. Over the course of the 20th century alone, 1.6 million Irish left for Britain, more than twice as many as went to North America.
Yet, compared to the Irish in America, the Irish in Britain have an oddly low profile. Irish policy has been much more concerned with the British in Ireland than with the Irish in Britain. The diaspora itself has produced no towering literary masterpieces like Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Nightor James T Farrell's Studs Lonigan, and there have been no great historical explorations like those of Kerby Miller or Donald Akenson in North America. The overwhelming consensus in critical and historical analysis is that the Irish in Britain did not, on the whole, write their own stories. Silence, if not cunning, is assumed to have accompanied their exile.
Into this silence, Liam Harte’s superb anthology of first-person narratives by Irish writers in Britain drops like a crashing cymbal, making some wonderful noises and setting up reverberations that will hang in the air for a long time. This is a rare book, a real act of discovery that overturns inherited perceptions and opens up a rich terrain of Irish experience.
Harte's selection from 63 narratives published between 1725 and 1993 amounts, as he acknowledges in his introduction, to a corpus of writing that is collectively "fragmentary, eclectic, amorphous, uneven and obscure". Yet if that sounds like an apology, it is in fact a brave declaration of intent. Harte does include the better-known autobiographies, like the great Irish-language writings of Micí Mac Gabhann ( The Hard Road to the Klondike) and Donall MacAmhlaigh ( The Diary of an Exile), and the much-read accounts of WB Yeats, Patrick MacGill, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O'Casey, Louis MacNeice and John B Keane. But the real excitement of the book is its archaeological uncovering of the fragmentary and the obscure, of names and stories that, if they were ever remembered, have long been forgotten.
One of the narratives, by the tailor “JE”, is anonymous. Some of the other authors – Jane Jowitt, Robert Crowe, Mary Loughran – though not literally anonymous, exist in memory only through the survival of their writings. This obscurity is in fact entirely appropriate to the exercise. The thrill of Harte’s work is that he is “reading blind”, exploring an uncharted territory in which basic facts – what is the earliest Irish autobiography in England? How many autobiographies are there? Who were the authors writing for? – remain elusive. Harte’s earliest author, Mary Davys, may not even be Irish at all – in one narrative she claims English birth, in another she is quite emphatic about her Irish origins. The lawyer Michael Fagg, from whose memoirs Harte extracts an entertaining account of the fleecing of two naive Irish emigrants in Bristol, may or may not be a pseudonymous creation. The Ulster-born James Dawson Burn, whose remarkable account of his life as a vagrant beggar is one of the highlights of the book, confesses that “where or how I came into the world I have no very definite idea”.
THERE ARE ALSOsignificant gaps. Harte could not find any surviving narratives by Irish Protestant labourers in 19th-century Scotland, and the women who worked so prominently as nurses and domestic servants are largely absent from the record. (Though Harte did find one fascinating account by a Tyrone-born woman, Mary Loughran, who wrote under the pseudonym Maureen Hamish.)
Yet these absences draw attention to the remarkable range of Harte's research. His sources include St Crispin: A Magazine for the Leather Trades, whose issue for May 1869 yields the autobiography of a London-Irish shoemaker, John O'Neill. The story of the tailor JE is drawn from an 1857 edition of the Glasgow didactic magazine The Commonwealth. One grippingly unsentimental account of post-famine emigration, by Owen Peter Mangan from Co Cavan, is previously unpublished, and comes from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
This range of sources makes the anthology valuable, not just as a record of the Irish in Britain, but as a collection of voices both from the edge and from below. Prisons, for example, feature heavily in these recollections, whether for debt (Laetitia Pilkington), for ordinary crime (the pickpocket Ellen O’Neill, whose reminiscences were recorded while she was in Preston jail awaiting transportation or the extraordinary Inchicore man Jim Phelan, who spent 13 years in various English jails for various crimes), for political activities, such as those of the United Irishmen organiser John Binns or the Chartist Robert Crowe, or for journalistic purposes, as with the pioneering feminist Frances Power Cobbe, who visits a “poor, pale” battered wife in Newgate.
The texture of underclass life emerges with great immediacy, from the rawness of the vagrant’s feet (James Dawson Burn) to the blistering of fingers from climbing chimneys as a boy sweep (Walter Hampson) or picking oakum in prison (Robert Crowe), and from casual violence within families (Ellen O’Neill recalls that she went to Hull to wait for her brother to emerge from prison, whereupon he “leathered me for coming away from home”) to the dangers of disease (“I lost my little daughter,” recalls the weaver Owen Mangan blankly, “who was then near two years old. She died from whooping cough.”). If the volume bears out the notion of the Irish as natural rebels (even in the 20th century, there is a stream of agitators, from the Bolton trade unionist Alice Foley to the soapbox socialist and Hyde Park orator Bonar Thompson) it might be simply because they were over-represented at the bottom of the heap.
Yet Harte is careful to avoid any mere indulgence in misery. One of the great strengths of the anthology is its alertness to the ambiguous status of Britain in the minds of Irish migrants. If Britain is hard, Ireland is no paradise either. The Donegal-born Patrick Gallagher, living in Lanarkshire, recounts his wife’s receipt of a letter from her sister in Dungloe, reacting to the news that she is pregnant: “You both must come home . . . Your child must be Irish not Scotch.” Gallagher gives a compelling description of the anguish this causes them, drawn as they are between the knowledge that they have a better life in Scotland and the powerful pull of ethnic identity.
And within the migrant experience itself, there is a further doubleness. Britain has been a place of miserable exile. It has also been, as Harte puts it, “a longed-for escape from drudgery and obligation, a gateway to opportunity, and an invigorating test of self-sufficiency”.
This is obviously true of high-profile figures such as the Victorian journalist, novelist and politician Justin McCarthy or Bob Geldof – whose superb autobiography features here – but even the 19th-century beggar James Dawson Burn remarks that “had I remained in Ireland, I think my natural energy of mind would have been crushed”.
AS ANY IRISHemigrant knows, the carefully maintained religious and social distinctions of the Irish mean little in Britain, and it is fascinating to discover that this has been so since the 18th century. Irish otherness was often inescapable, even for émigréProtestants. Laetitia Pilkington, who grew up privileged and Protestant in early 18th-century Dublin, is assailed by the London toughs who have come to haul her off to debtors' prison as "you Irish Papist bitch". The mid-19th century tailor JE, a sober-minded Antrim man, finds himself among his colleagues in the north of England, "the butt of their ridicule and scorn". The hand-loom weaver William Hammond, another sober Ulsterman, is reminded of his origins by his Glasgow co-workers: "some of the baser sort", he writes with sublime understatement, "made me understand that it was not an advantage to have been born in Ireland".
There is, of course, the further ambivalence of the English-born child of Irish parents who is presented with alternative identities and has to work out an acceptable relationship between them. We tend to think of this struggle as a relatively new phenomenon – the poor and desperate have no time for identity crises. Yet one of the jewels of the book is the recollection of the socialist agitator Tom Barclay of growing up in a Leicester slum in the mid-19th century. His mother sings songs of Oisín and Fionn and Cuchulain but, he asks, “What had I to do with that? I was becoming English! I did not hate things Irish, but I began to feel that they must be put away; they were inferior to things English . . . My pronunciation was jeered at – mimicked, corrected . . . Presently, I began to feel ashamed of the jeers and mockery and criticism, and tried to pronounce like the English.”
Conversely, the writer Joseph Keating, born to Irish parents in 1871 in the south Wales coalfield, gives an overtly idealistic account of a respectable Irish community in which bad language and illegitimacy are virtually unknown. He declares himself Irish, not Welsh, since “nationality had nothing to do with the land of birth, but was inherited in the blood”. He is “entirely Irish in every way” and sees the Irish as “a race chosen, above all other nationalities, by the Almighty, to establish the ideals of spiritual perfection”. These two reactions to the diasporic dilemma – shame and self-loathing, or exaggerated, almost hysterical pride – are surely two sides of the same sweaty coin.
The alternative currency, of course, is the kind of hybrid identity that we again tend to think of as a postmodern phenomenon, but that Harte’s narratives help to establish as a longer tradition. The Liverpool-Irish Pat O’Mara, for example, in his 1934 autobiography, describes his “mental prejudices” as a “three-way ticket”: passionate Irish Catholic nationalist first; “ferocious sacrificial Britisher second” and thirdly “patient, wondering dreamer”.
By reflecting these ambiguities, Harte undermines the whole notion of “the Irish in Britain” as a single entity and restores the complicating factors of class, gender, religion and geography. Above all, he restores in his wonderful book the individuality of each one of the millions of painful, hopeful journeys across the Irish Sea.
The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001By Liam Harte Palgrave Macmillan, 301pp. £55
Fintan O’Toole is an
Irish Times
journalist