Indian File - On the mysterious origins of a notorious quotation

Sylvain Briollay's Ireland in Rebellion (1921), featured yesterday, is one of countless publications of the past 150 years to include a notorious quotation supposedly from the London Times during or just after the Famine.

Briollay notes that the effect of centuries of English rule in Ireland has been to drastically reduce the native population. Writing in mid-1921, he suggests Britain now has two choices: to negotiate a radical settlement or find new ways to finish the eradication of the natives, which he estimates would take another “100 years”.

Then he invokes the infamous “cry of deliverance of the Times, when famines were sweeping the country: ‘Soon the Celt will be as rare on the banks of the Liffey as the Redskin on the banks of the Manhattan’.”

Even among authors of 1921, Briollay was not alone in featuring this phrase (long before it was regarded as offensive). A version also appeared the same year, with some embellishment, in Seumas MacManus’s Story of the Irish Race, viz: “The London Times... when the exodus was most pitiful, screamed with delight: ‘They are going! They are going! The Irish are going with a vengeance. Soon a Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.”

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A few months later, yet another variant would turn up in a book destined to be vastly more famous than either of those. “We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea,” declares the fiercely nationalist Citizen in Joyce’s Ulysses: “They were driven out of their house and home in the black 47... and the Times rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered (sic) Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America.”

The Citizen goes on to echo MacManus’s version, while also reversing it, by predicting the exiles “will come again and with a vengeance”. And that last word is central to many iterations, although the phrase’s popular appeal is surely rooted in the image of the doomed “Red Indian”.

But did the Times ever actually write it, as quoted? Well, the answer seems to be yes and no. Or yes and maybe. Because, despite featuring in the 20th century’s most analysed novel and thereby attracting attention from the world’s most assiduous literary detectives, the “redskin” quotation has never been tracked down to source.

The "gone with a vengeance" has, but to a separate origin. A Joycean and former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, John Simpson, has found it in a Times editorial of December 1854. The subject was German emigration, but in an aside about immigrants generally, the writer added: "As for the Irish, troublesome at all times, they have gone... gone with a vengeance."

That created ructions in Ireland’s nationalist press, with the Freeman’s Journal leading the angry response. Ironically, later misquotations would suggest the Times had added a “Thank God” to “They are going”, whereas in fact the journal sarcastically congratulated the paper on its restraint in at least not implicating God in the work.

Simpson also found an 1849 Times piece that had some of the qualities of the “redskin” quote, but not that image. There was no reason, it argued, why “a hundred thousand natives of Ireland” should not find the life they desired “on the banks of the St Lawrence” or “the shores of the Huron”.

Waterways became a standard element of the phrase (the Irish half ranging between the Liffey and the Shannon). But they were absent in the earliest known version of the “Indian” quotation, from an 1856 issue of The Nation, which confined itself to “the Celt would soon be as rare here as the Red Indian is in New England”.

Whatever its origins, says Simpson, the phrase had gone viral by the 1880s. It featured in the Observer (1887), the York Herald (1888), and the Washington Post (1889). It was also being quoted back at the Times, in a letter to the editor (1895), among other places. No wonder James Joyce, immortalising the Dublin of 1904, saw fit to include it.

Not that the sentiment lurking behind it had died out even in 1921. Briollay quoted a recent interview with army veteran Lord French, who had "cheerfully" summarised Irish history as a series of short-lived uprisings, which had usually been solved by human export, and might be again.

French explained the War of Independence thus: “The Present disorders? That comes from having 100,000 surplus young men. For five years because of the row [the first World War], emigration has been suspended: hence all the trouble.”