An Irishman's Diary

FOR A man given to melodrama, Charles Dickens could hardly have picked a better time to make his second trip to Ireland. It was the middle of March 1867, at the height of the Fenian scare. Or just after the height, to be exact, since the so-called Battle of Tallaght had occurred nine days before the writer’s arrival. That was to have been the centrepiece of a nationwide uprising. In the event, its popular name was an exaggeration worthy of Dickens himself.

Rather than strike at the heart of the city, the Dublin Fenians had headed for the hills to the southwest, where a force of at least 2,000 converged on the night of March 5th.

They were hampered by a lack of leadership and, no doubt, by informers within the ranks. But of course, in keeping with the First Law of Irish Uprisings, the weather was also treacherous. March 5th-6th was a night of bitter cold and heavy snow, making the choice of rendezvous even more questionable. In any case, a small force of well-trained constables was enough to scupper the doomed venture.

When Dickens arrived in Dublin on March 14th, nevertheless, both he and the city were in a state of some trepidation.

Indeed, on disembarking at Kingstown, before his identity was made known, the writer found himself approached by armed detectives whose attention was piqued by what looked like firearms in his luggage (they were actually gas fittings for the lights used during his public readings).

In the city itself, he noted, drinking shops were closed until St Patrick’s Day, amid expectations of renewed trouble then. And he was further concerned to learn that all the “men servants” in Dublin were Fenians.

Never one to understate a case, Dickens wrote home that bookings were " very bad" and that "great alarm prevails".

He also promised that, if there was any trouble, he would instantly stop the readings rather than put himself “in harm’s way”.

Inevitably, his reporter’s instincts soon got the better of him.

During a dinner on March 16th, Dickens fell into conversation with officials who were receiving reports of possible disturbances throughout the city. When they left for a tour of inspection later, between midnight and 2am, the writer went with them.

He found the streets eerily quiet, although he also learned that “several arrests of suspected persons had been made in the night, and some of these became our fellow travellers in the Irish mail on our return to England”.

In fact, contrary to his initial pessimism, the Dublin shows were a big success, commercially and otherwise. Crowds of up to several thousand attended. And praising Dickens's brilliance as a reader of his own work, The Irish Timessuggested that his ability to change voices amounted almost to "ventriloquism".

The reviewer added: “One evening communing with Dickens in the flesh is equal to months of communing with him in the spirit.”

The confidence of his performances was untroubled by any of the feared disturbances. Large numbers of arrests had followed the Tallaght skirmish, so that St Patrick’s Day came and went without major incident.

In Ireland, at least, the Fenian threat was already waning, although to some extent it followed Dickens home.

His “fellow travellers” on the return sailing to Holyhead included 12 Fenian prisoners en route to English prisons. And the fate of such prisoners would in turn spawn violence in Britain, most famously in Manchester later that year.

But by then, Dickens was planning to visit another country, the US, where the Fenians were arguably an even bigger threat.

He thought so himself. Noting that "the Irish element in New York is very dangerous", and that the many Fenians there "would be glad to damage a conspicuous Englishman", he took care that his own magazine, All The Year Round, would not offer any provocation. His orders before departure were that no reference be made to the Fenians while he was in America, unless by himself.

In fairness, he had placed a similar ban on any mentions of America, with which, because of book piracy and other issues, he had a fractious relationship.

But then again, and however unrealistically, the prospect of an Anglo-American revolt had long been a thing much wished for by the Fenian movement. So perhaps Dickens’s two-pronged self-censorship was wise.

In any case, his fears again proved groundless. Or, at least, the Fenians didn’t harm him. He survived the five-month US trip to make a third visit to Ireland, this time as part of his farewell tour of 1869. It was a calmer country now, and his shows were once more enormously successful.

Like many popular performers since, however, he was finding the demands of the road ruinous to his health.

By the end of his exhausting US tour, he had been unable to eat solid food, surviving instead on what now sounds like a rock star’s diet – champagne and eggs mixed with sherry.

But despite increasing frailty, he continued to work relentlessly. After a mild stroke in April 1869, he returned as soon as he could to writing, before another stroke in 1870 proved fatal. So if the Fenians didn’t do for him, America arguably did.