A History of Irish Working-Class Writing 1107149681, 9781107149687

Citation preview

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A H I S TO RY O F I R I S H WO R K I N G - C L A S S W R I T I N G

This book provides a wide-ranging and authoritative chronicle of Irish working-class writing. It is a major intervention in Irish Studies – ground-breaking in scholarship and comprehensive in scope – charting representations of Irish working-class life from eighteenth-century rhymes and songs to the novels, plays and poetry of modern Ireland. The cultural world of Ireland’s labour movements, the depiction of working-class women, the experiences of the northern Irish conflict from working-class perspectives, and the marginalisation of the less well-off in Celtic Tiger Ireland are just some of the relatively neglected areas covered by this book, which provides many original insights in relatively untilled fields. Exploring working-class experience in various literary forms, from early to late capitalism, this book is an original and substantial contribution to Irish historical and literary research, which will, as Declan Kiberd puts it, ‘set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come’. Michael Pierse is Lecturer in Irish Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. His research mainly explores the writing and cultural production of Irish working-class life, though over recent years his focus has expanded into new multidisciplinary themes and international contexts, including the study of festivals, counter-cultures, diaspora experience and theatre-as-research practices. Michael has contributed to a range of national and international publications, is the author of Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey (2011) and coeditor of Rethinking the Irish Diaspora: After the Gathering (2017). He is also a recent recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research at Queen’s.

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A H I S TO RY O F I R I S H WO R K I N G - C L A S S WRITING Edi ted by MICHAEL PIERSE Queen’s University Belfast

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107149687 DOI: 10.1017/9781316570425 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-107-14968-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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This book is dedicated to the memories of Paul Devlin, Paul Cumberton and Dermot French, all, in their own ways, committed to the Irish working class, and lost to it much too soon.

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Contents

List of Contributors Foreword by Declan Kiberd Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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Michael Pierse

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Writing and Theorising the Irish Working Class

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David Convery

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Representing Labour: Notes towards a Political and Cultural Economy of Irish Working-Class Experience

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Christopher J. V. Loughlin

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Working-Class Writing in Ireland before 1800: ‘Some must be poor – we cannot all be great’

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Andrew Carpenter

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‘We wove our ain wab’: The Ulster Weaver Poets’ Working Lives, Myths and Afterlives

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Frank Ferguson

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Sub-literatures?: Folk Song, Memory and Ireland’s Working Poor

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John Moulden

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Writing Working-Class Irish Women

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Heather Laird

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‘Unwriting’ the City: Narrating Class in Early Twentieth-Century Belfast and Dublin (1900–1929) Elizabeth Mannion

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Class during the Irish Revolution: British Soldiers, 1916 and the Abject Body

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James Moran

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‘An sinne a bhí sa chónra?’: Writing Death on the Margins in Twentieth-Century Irish Working-Class Writing

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Michael Pierse

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Writing Irish Nurses in Britain

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Tony Murray

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The View from Below: Solidarity and Struggle in Irish-American Working-Class Literature

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Margaret Hallissy and John Lutz

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Irish Working-Class Writing in Australasia, 1860–1960: Contrasts and Comparisons

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Peter Kuch

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Irish Working-Class Poetry 1900–1960

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Niall Carson

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‘A system that inflicts suffering upon the many’: Early twentieth-century working-class fiction

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Paul Delaney

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Drama, 1900–1950

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Paul Murphy

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Seán O’Casey and Brendan Behan: Aesthetics, Democracy and the Voice of Labour

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John Brannigan

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Reshaping Well-Worn Genres: Novels of Progress and Precarity 1960–1998

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Mary M. McGlynn

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Locked Out: Working-Class Lives in Irish Drama 1958–1998

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Victor Merriman

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Poetry and the Working Class in Northern Ireland during the Troubles

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Adam Hanna

20 Class Politics and Performance in Troubles Drama: ‘History isn’t over yet’ Mark Phelan

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Twentieth-Century Workers’ Biography

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Claire Lynch

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Multiple Class Consciousnesses in Writings for Theatre during the Celtic Tiger Era

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Eamonn Jordan

Afterword – Overdue: The Recovery and Study of Irish Working-Class Writing, an International Perspective

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H. Gustav Klaus

Bibliography Index

407 443

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Contributors

John Brannigan is Professor in British and Irish literature at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. Andrew Carpenter is Professor Emeritus at the School of English, Drama and Film and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at University College Dublin. Niall Carson is the Academic Outreach Officer and the Blair Chair Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Irish Studies, the University of Liverpool. David Convery is an independent historian and recent Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class, the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway. Paul Delaney is Assistant Professor and Director of the MPhil in Irish Writing at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Frank Ferguson is Lecturer and Distinguished Research Fellow in English and Director of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Ulster. Margaret Hallissy is Professor of English at C. W. Post College, Long Island University, in Brookeville, New York. Adam Hanna is Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English, University College Cork. Eamonn Jordan is Associate Professor in drama studies and former Subject Head at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin.

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Declan Kiberd is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. H. Gustav Klaus is Emeritus Professor of the Literature of the British Isles at the University of Rostock, Germany. Peter Kuch is inaugural Eamon Cleary Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Heather Laird is Lecturer in English at University College Cork. Christopher J. V. Loughlin is an independent historian and researcher, and a recent PhD graduate from the School of History and Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast. John Lutz is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at C. W. Post College, Long Island University, in Brookeville, New York. Claire Lynch is Senior Lecturer in English at Brunel University London. Elizabeth Mannion earned her PhD at Trinity College, Dublin. Her teaching and research cover an interdisciplinary range of Irish Studies with a focus on city settings. Mary M.  McGlynn is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. Victor Merriman is Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Performing Arts at Edge Hill University, Lancashire. James Moran is Professor of Modern English Literature and Drama at the Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham. John Moulden is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway. Paul Murphy is Lecturer in Drama at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast. Tony Murray is Senior Lecturer in Irish Studies and English literature and Director of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University. Mark Phelan is Lecturer in Drama at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast. Michael Pierse is Lecturer in Irish literature at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast.

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Foreword Declan Kiberd

According to an old joke, the English have a class system and are so obsessed by it that most of their novels and all of their plays derive from it. The Americans have a class system but, being democrats in theory, must pretend it doesn’t exist. The Irish, however, are the worst of all, for they have a class system but will not tell anyone what it is. Novelists are forever on the lookout for subtle indicators of class: but Ireland has often proved resistant to such readings. Kate O’Brien, in writing of the Victorian Catholic middle class, found that she was compelled to invent details of their culture in the act of seeming to report them. It was as if such a middle class had yet to be fully created. The young James Joyce, in a letter to his brother Stanislaus, made the same point about the Irish proletariat  – it, also, had still to be made. In this, as in much else, he found his people the most ‘belated’ race in Europe. Yet by July 1916, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin could complain of the same people’s prematurity: ‘the misfortune of the Irish was that they rose too soon, before the revolt of the European proletariat had matured.’ One reason for this frequent undecodability is that the interests of working people have most often been defined against those of a ruling middle class – an entity which only emerged fully in Ireland in the affluence of the late twentieth century. The lack of heavy industry outside of the north-east of the island was another factor in this. Insofar as a middle class began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it missed out on the heroic phase of the international bourgeoisie, when factories were founded and heavy industries created. As a consequence of that, the native bourgeoisie tended to be consumerist and professional. Another reason was that most Irish people, apart from a privileged few, had recently experienced poverty. This meant that one’s accent was primarily rooted in locality rather than social class. A sense of this undecodability persisted even in Britain, where Irish voices were amplified in the electronic xiii

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media as user-friendly and free of associations of social class. This tradition went back to the social comedy of Sheridan, Shaw and Wilde – writers whose Irish appeal made them interestingly but not forbiddingly ‘different’ (all three were, of course, social radicals within the British scheme). But it persisted into recent decades in the figure of the nurse or schoolteacher, whose ambiguous class position seemed to come from their Irishness. Even in the Ireland of the Penal Laws, a native middle class was emerging by shrewd resort to growth industries such as distilling. The bards, once attached to aristocratic patrons, often had to find work as schoolmasters, farm labourers or hucksters. The Revivalist notion that Gaelic Ireland was somehow free of the hidden injuries of class is fanciful. Even in the 1700s, Gaelic writers were describing the narcissism of small differences experienced, say, by a spalpeen-poet as he went from Meath through Louth into Armagh. And when Tomás Ó Criomhthainn from the Great Blasket island set foot on the quayside in Dingle, he was outraged to find a managerial elite wearing gold-tipped belts, while workers on the jetty sweated in torn rags. Islands off the west coast were often portrayed by radical authors as utopian communes. J. M. Synge on the Aran Islands rediscovers many of the values of the Parisian Commune of 1871. In later decades a British communist such as George Thomson or a Dublin house-painter like Brendan Behan located a similar set of values on the Blaskets. Behan, brought up among the Dublin poor of Rutland Street, identified the islanders as an ‘out-group’ similar to inner-city proletarians, yet they were tokenised as representative of the core values of the nation. The cultural expression of socialist ideals by Irish radicals was more often a result of their reading than of the pressure of felt experience – an observation which might be made of socialist texts from other European countries too. The poor are usually too busy surviving to theorise their condition. Wilde and Shaw wrote little about the lives of the poor  – a subject left in their time to figures like Henry Mayhew. Instead, they chose in their plays and prose narratives to unmask the hypocrisies of the upper middle class. The socialism-for-superior-brains which they embraced was as much aesthetic as materialist. Yet it took the battle into enemy territory by addressing itself to potential sympathisers among the privileged groups. It is hard to imagine The Soul of Man Under Socialism, much less The Intelligent Woman’s Guide, being read by many workers, though the publication of the latter as a Pelican Book ensured a wider audience than Wilde could ever win in an elite review. There was, perhaps inevitably, a tone of condescension in the writings of Fabians and social democrats in fin-de-siècle England. This note can also

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be heard in the texts of Wilde and Shaw, as well as in the writings of the Bloomsbury Group. The depiction of an intellectually ambitious but lowly worker such as Leonard Bast in Forster’s Howards End not only describes but partakes of such condescension. It is useful, in that context, to be reminded that in the Dublin of that same period, artisans, shop-assistants and flower-sellers mingled with aristocrats like Augusta Gregory and intellectuals like W. B. Yeats in the early work of the Abbey Theatre. It was a cross-class project in ways the Schlegel sisters could never have imagined. Were the clerks and carpenters who joined in the Abbey movement seekers of higher social status by that very fact? Some were doubtless bourgeois nationalists, but Fearghal McGarry’s recent studies of Abbey rebels in 1916 and after suggests rather that many were socialist radicals, deeply disillusioned by subsequent developments in the Free State. Many died in conditions of dire impoverishment. There are few Nora Clitheroes among the Helena Moloneys and Máire Nic Shiubhlaighs treated in his analyses. The depiction of actual workers on the Abbey stage in the early years of the Free State was mainly caricatural. It isn’t true that many members from the Dublin working class came to the Abbey in order to laugh at themselves in the dramas of Seán O’Casey. Those who came were, in the main, members of the newly empowered bourgeoisie, already sentimentalising Fluther Good and his companions as urban leprechauns, cartoonish figures with little sense but gifted with high-voltage speech. The imaging of the rural peasantry in works by nineteenth-century authors was now applied to the depiction of the inner-city Dublin poor. The four or five families living in a tenement were a fairly close approximation to the population of a rural village in the earlier texts. The prevailing tropes of Irish writing proved stronger than the pressure of felt experience within the literate working class. There were few enough texts generated from within inner-city life. By comparison with, say, the many books produced by the tiny population of the Blasket islands, life among the destitute of Dublin hardly expressed itself at all. As Marx said of another out-group, these people could not represent themselves, so they had to be represented by authors from James Stephens to Paul Smith and James Plunkett. The life of Irish emigrants in Britain was also seldom written from within. A rare exception might be Dónal MacAmhlaigh’s Dialann Deoraí about the experience of navvies in the mid-twentieth century, but even it recycled a lot of old tropes (fighting Irish; drink; wounded masculinity) when compared with the audacity and freshness of the Blasket books. There was a reason for this, of course. It was difficult for anyone to become an acclaimed writer and remain a member of the working class.

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The fate of Behan is indicative – celebrity followed hard on literary success. What James Baldwin wrote wistfully about the plight of the African American author applied in this case too. Success could seem to former comrades like betrayal, lifting the writer out of the very community which he or she wished to record and to serve. The complex fate O’Casey endured in exile in Devon overtook Behan in New York but also figures such as Roddy Doyle and Conor McPherson in Dublin. W. B. Yeats, with his acute antennae, had sensed the same strain in himself, when he wrote as early as 1900 that every writer had to choose between expressing and exploiting material. History was to show that even those who sought honestly to express were often accused of exploiting. The envy directed at James Plunkett after the success of Strumpet City was not very different from that withstood by Baldwin. This is in a sense a problem which dogs all writers. Many wish to detach themselves from the constraints of a class position by the act of art; some wish to use their art to change one class for another. Yeats wished to become an aristocrat, Orwell to make an act of solidarity with tramps and dishwashers. But the sheer fact of being a writer secures for most of them, in spite of their deeper aims, a place in the middle class. The ‘aristocratic’ tradition of Anglo-Irish writing, concocted by Yeats in the 1920s and 1930s, invoked figures such as Swift, Burke, Goldsmith and Sheridan as exemplars. But the truth is that all earned their living by hard work with the pen, and each of them wrote with supreme sarcasm about the cultural nullity and idle lifestyles of hard-riding country gentlemen. If the ruined Gaelic bards ‘fell’ into the emerging Catholic middle class of the 1700s, so also did most writers of Anglo-Irish literature; hence the remarkable similarities of tone and topic in the texts produced by both groups, not least in their very middle-class attacks on the more vulgar arrivistes among that middle class. The farther a person moved from Ireland, the less likely he or she was to be caught up in these ambiguities. The Irish in Australia and the United States often discovered that they were ‘Irish’ at the same moment as they found themselves members of a working class. Hence many became key contributors to trade union activity, to suffragism and to the labour movement. Some members of their families would eventually write moving books of documentary, autobiography or fiction about the experience. It was as if tendencies towards socialism, so often hushed up or suppressed at home in Ireland, came to the fore in a commensurate act of national self-identification; and as if nationalism, often denounced as limiting by many socialists at home, could fuse with it abroad as a truly radical option.

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The same was true of members of the minority community in Northern Ireland after 1922. Many suffered poverty, in the conditions of near apartheid which were allowed to prevail even in the early years of the welfare state; but they placed their faith in that welfare system, whose educational opportunities allowed them to blend their republicanism with social-democratic values. They took Wolfe Tone’s appeal to ‘the men of no property’, repeated by Parnell, as a rallying cry. Of course, the success which many finally experienced was based ultimately on an old-fashioned Enlightenment republican notion of ‘the career open to talents’. It did not truly transform social relations or the distribution of wealth, but simply ensured that more people of ability could be recruited into the managerial and professional elites. In this it anticipated and reflected the postmodern world of market forces, in which traditions of militant trade unionism and organised labour were trumped by an economy divided between overpaid experts and underpaid service providers. This returns us to the tragedy of the working-class movement in Ireland  – it was another case of belatedness (despite Lenin’s comment). The rise of a sharpened sense of workers’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in tandem with global movements for civil rights, coincides with the decline of heavy industry in the United Kingdom, the United States and Northern Ireland itself. The apparent triumph of market forces and managerial elites caused some people to reflect ruefully on R. H. Tawney’s contention that ‘opportunities to rise are no substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization.’ The old bourgeoisie, on which socialists had heaped such ire, turned out to have had a social scruple, endowing many valuable projects from Carnegie Libraries to radium research. But the consumerist middle class which replaced it after the mid-twentieth century was far less willing to share any spoils. This shift can be observed in the ways in which the social-democratic legislation of the European Union in its early days was gradually sidetracked for a Europe of free markets. By the crash of 2008, it had created a wholly new kind of underclass  – youth. Though few of these young people did heavy labour, most of them suffered from exactly the kind of casualised conditions and hiring fairs satirised by someone like Thomas Hardy a century earlier. The difference was simply this: where once a social disadvantage might be traced to space – where a person came from, now it was increasingly traceable to time  – when they were born and when they sought to enter the labour force. Some baby boomers who had once espoused social reform and workers’ rights, spotting these changes with a mixture of selfishness and dismay, held on tenaciously to their pensions

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and state-guaranteed salaries as most of a younger generation felt history’s cutting edge. Instead of staying in their home countries to fight these degenerations of society, many young people simply voted with their feet and moved elsewhere. This raises the old question: can there be an Irish or an Italian working class? Has the notion of a proletariat or an ‘out-group’ always been international, a coalition of the dispossessed? In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and Charles Haughey unleashed new uninflected versions of two old movements – nationalism and market forces. It might have been said by radicals that the obvious counter to this was international socialism. But that was not to be – or not yet anyway. People still yearn to express a cultural identity in ways which allow for the benefits of modernity and the liquidation of its costs. Perhaps resistance to naked market forces must again, as in the nineteenth century, organise itself in the name of an outraged community, whether it calls itself a nation or a generation or a working class. It would be wise for such trade unions as remain, as well as for socialist parties, not to cede all ideas of national identity or entire generations or social classes to the radical right, which must now confront the deep contradiction between the narrow nationalism and heedless consumerism which so many of its leaders espouse. The rich diversity of essays in this book, so ably edited by Michael Pierse, has prompted these thoughts by way of an initial response. Those essays deal with an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people. They will set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come. And they could hardly be more timely.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the help, advice and encouragement of the many colleagues and friends who have made this book possible, most of all the contributors whose chapters in this book have considerably expanded my own knowledge of Irish working-class writing. Christopher J. V. Loughlin must come first in my thanks, due to his advice on this volume and sterling efforts in helping with its technical aspects. David Grant must be thanked too for his meticulousness in compiling the book’s index. I am very grateful also to David Convery, Federico Pagello, Seán Byers and Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh for reading draft sections of this book and for their advice and enthusiasm, though errors and omissions are entirely mine. Declan Kiberd and H. Gustav Klaus kindly read and commented on the volume in their respective foreword and afterword, which help set out contexts, locally and internationally. Thank you both. I am also indebted to John Brannigan for his encouragements; and to Aileen Douglas and Paul Delaney at Trinity College Dublin I owe a longer-term debt. Mark Phelan and Fabian Schuppert kindly read and advised on drafts of my own chapter, though its failures, again, are very much my own. John Thompson’s enormous energy and generous support to me in my time as a postdoctoral researcher was a tremendous spur to action, and I am very grateful for his abilities in nurturing and enthusing younger staff (though John would have me point out that he, too, is ‘young’). Cambridge University Press, and in particular my commissioning editor, Ray Ryan, have been instrumental in putting this project together, and I thank them for their vision and enthusiasm for this project. I am also grateful to our production manager, Ramesh Karunakaran, and copy editor, Ami Naramor, both at Newgen, for their precision and efficiency. Conversations with a range of colleagues, including Dónal Ó Drisceoil, Brian Kelly, Fionntán Hargey, Heather Laird, Dominic Bryan, Stevie Nolan, Eamonn Hughes, Aaron Kelly, Shaun Richards, Conor McCabe, Aidan Byrne – and those xix

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in various research groups and organisations such as the Cross-Currents in British and Irish Working-Class Life group and the Belfast Working-Class History Group – have formed part of the background to this initiative, which benefits from a growing, multi- and interdisciplinary re-examination of class in Irish Studies scholarship. Funding from bodies such as the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs Reconciliation Fund, the Ministerial Advisory Group on Ulster Scots (DCAL) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council has enabled and expanded my own research in recent years, and I am thankful for the space and time that this has given me to write and think. I must thank students too on my Representing the British and Irish Working Class module at Queen’s University Belfast: their fresh and innovative thinking is what brings the subject to life. Equally, I am grateful to doctoral students, particularly Rachael Hegarty and Scott McKendry, whose strides forward in charting the literary histories of Irish working-class experience are breaking new ground and proving why ‘A History’ cannot be ‘The History’. The staff at the National Gallery of Ireland and the Harry Kernoff Estate have very kindly given permission for the use of Kernoff’s ‘Public Meeting’ on the front cover. Lastly, and mostly, I must thank my family for their patience, encouragement and support over many years; my mother, Philomena, a formidable challenger of social inequalities, and fine singer of rebel balladry, who still manages an impressive rendition of ‘Joe Hill’, and whose politics and passion I was fortunate to grow up with; my father, Maurice, for his encouragement and for introducing me to books; and my wife, Brenda, an incredibly loving and kind partner in life, who, more than anyone else, has made this work possible.

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Introduction Michael Pierse

Irish working-class history is shrouded in silences. The histories of the poor invariably are. In ‘What Might Have Been’, a 2008 short story about a real nineteenth-century Irish emigrant family, Joseph O’Connor conjures a speculative tale of Irish workers in the New World. Charting the experiences of the Meehan-Moores, who lived in tenements on the Lower East Side of New York, his story defies the hierarchies of history, its ‘preoccupation with “great” (powerful) and “good” men’, while also raising important questions about the problematic nature of such endeavours.1 A coffee table–style publication, commissioned by New York’s Tenement Museum, ‘What Might Have Been’ is beautifully illustrated, accompanied by sketches, reproductions of artefacts, archival evidence and a wealth of historical research, including a lengthy, context-setting afterword by its editor, Arlene Kirsch. O’Connor’s collaborative short-story-cum-historical-tour presents and dwells on the possibilities inherent in fictionalising the histories of the poor – in imagining ‘what might have been’.2 The museum’s president, Ruth J. Abram, considers these possibilities in her thought-provoking foreword to the book: Many writers have pondered the line between fact and fiction. ‘Fiction,’ opined the playwright Edward Albee, ‘is fact distilled into truth.’ Francis Bacon said, ‘Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.’ [. . .] It is because of fiction’s special ability to convey ‘truth,’ that the Tenement Museum turned to the novelist Joseph O’Connor to ‘make sense’ of the narrative of the Meehan-Moore family.3

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Ann-Marie Gallagher, Cathy Lubelska and Louise Ryan, ‘Introduction’, Re-presenting the Past: Women and History, ed. by Gallagher, Lubelska and Ryan (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–20 (p. 3). Joseph O’Connor, What Might Have Been: An Irish Family at 97 Orchard Street, ed. by Arlene Kirsch (New York: Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 2008). Ruth J. Abram, ‘Foreword’, in ibid., pp. 3–5 (p. 3).

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MICHAEL PIERSE

Abram’s wish for O’Connor’s story typifies common expectations placed on (or perhaps burdening) writing of working-class life – that literary creativity will surmount historiographical selectivity, filling history’s lacunae with authentic portrayals of lives that are otherwise largely unrecorded. But notions of fiction ‘distilling’ or ‘conveying’ truth, or straightforwardly ‘making sense’ of fragments of the past, are likely to meet with scepticism from literary critics and historians, and rightly so. Assumptions of an unproblematic relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ are theoretically naïve. Indeed, one of the challenges frequently presented by working-class writing – in fiction, theatre, poetry and even memoir/ biography (for biography, as a ‘privileged place of epistemological experimentation’, must ‘for the historian’s purposes [. . .] remain somewhat uncomfortable’) – is its interrogation, often self-referential and performative, of how reality is constructed.4 Nothing can be taken for granted when encountering how ‘truth’ is narrated in particular contexts and in distinct relations of power – especially by those who are politically (and culturally) disempowered. Furthermore, a coming-of-age novel, a well-made play, a villanelle or a Hollywood blockbuster cannot be isolated from the historical contexts in which their forms inevitably carry ideologies and are always enmeshed in histories of class, gender, sexuality and race. ‘A story’ is never just so. As Terry Eagleton put it, the statement ‘Prince Charles is a thoughtful, conscientious fellow [. . .] may be true as far as it goes,’ but in failing to capture the context of its utterance, it ‘isolates the object known as Prince Charles from the whole context of the institution of royalty’.5 Stories are always palimpsests, the product of multiple ‘stories’, many of which are only dimly  – if at all  – discernible, faded into the narrative’s substance like the blurred script of another age. However, as Fredric Jameson once wrote, enigmatically, if ‘history  – Althusser’s “absent cause” Lacan’s “Real”  – is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational’, we must accept ‘the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form’.6 How does one grasp this history? Jameson’s famous injunction, ‘always historicize!’, must be taken with his own ample pinch of salt:7 in his reading, history, 4

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Pierre-Heli Monot, ‘Personal Epistemologies:  Historiography, Self-Reflexivity and Bios’, in The Politics of Contested Narratives:  Biographical Approaches to Modern European History, ed. by Ilse Josepha Lazaroms and Emily R.  Gioielli (New  York and Abingdon:  Routledge, 2015), pp.  7–16 (pp. 13, 12). Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 98–9. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 82. Ibid., p. 9.

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which we must pursue, cannot ever be fully or directly seized, can only be understood in the fog of our available range of imperfect symbolic and narrativising forms. We must attend to history while attuned to ‘its other sense, as story and storytelling’; we must ‘distinguish between our own narrative of history – whether psychoanalytical or political – and the Real itself, which our narratives can only approximate in asymptotic fashion and which “resists symbolization absolutely”.’8 In this formula, history, as Satya P. Mohanty puts it, ‘is now interpreted as the supreme horizon that is never quite visible except as pure limit’, always to be grasped at but never quite graspable.9 We can only strain ‘towards a psychic wholeness’ within ‘a vision of a world in ruins and fragments’, as Jameson has described Walter Benjamin trying to do.10 Does such an understanding necessarily diminish the creative accomplishment (and the truth claims) of a museum’s collaboration with a novelist in attempting to restore the faded patchwork of working-class lives? Must we always raise a knowing eyebrow at any text claiming to simply reflect reality? The claims made for O’Connor’s tale invite such a response. As he made ‘the facts come to life’, we are told, the Tenement Museum made its representation of the Meehan-Moores’ American apartment (the museum is based in the old tenement) as authentic as such a reconstruction might be. Yet the museum’s decision to ‘set the Moore apartment at the moment of the family’s wake for five month old Agnes’, and its tracing of the Meehan-Moores’ descendants, who turned out to be ‘serving as teachers, police officers, fire fighters and more’ – ‘contributing Americans all’ – frames the family’s ‘history’ in certain, inevitably ideological ways.11 Here, the narrative arc is perilously, even illustratively, close to the pervasive fantasy of the American Dream, its ‘crucial element of [. . .] social mobility and the “rags to riches” myth [. . .] with the message that the rugged individual can emerge from arduous economic situations through cunning initiative and hard work’.12 From the nadir of family tragedy, in a frozen moment of sorrow in 1869, a tale of ascent and tenaciousness 8

9

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Fredric Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject’, in Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. III, ed. by Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 3–43 (p. 34). Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 106. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 61. Abram, ‘Foreword’, pp. 3, 5. Doyle Greene, The American Worker on Film: A Critical History, 1909–1999 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010), p. 29.

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emerges; a lineage that climbs, out of adversity, towards the lofty heights of present-day ‘contribution’. That this narrative coheres around a progressive political project in the present  – for, as Abram enjoins, it ‘calls us to realize that when the children and grandchildren of contemporary immigrants reflect upon the experiences of their immigrant generation, they will be filled with the same pride and awe with which descendants of Bridget Meehan and Joseph Moore regard them’ – does not mitigate its dubious assumptions.13 In fact, it arguably compounds them: what of less convenient stories – of emigrants whose lives did not fit the standards for ‘pride and awe’ or ‘contribution’ – is lost in such a telling? What are the power relations of race, class and gender that underlie it?14 If supposedly veracious storytelling here serves a vatic pluralism, its construction also arguably serves a very capitalist idealism. While many may in fact greatly enjoy O’Connor’s fascinating story, immerse themselves emotionally and intellectually in its historical/imaginative space – or indeed, as visitors to the Tenement Museum, in the parallel museumisation of the Meehan-Moores’ struggle, arranged around the ‘baby’s small white coffin’  – its ‘truth’ is at least partially appropriated.15 But this is not by any means the full story: O’Connor’s awareness of the problems with realism is after all signalled in his title  – this ‘might’ (or might not) have been. His text foregrounds its struggle with historiography’s ideological complexities and relations of power. It also performs that struggle. O’Connor produces a story that, notwithstanding my reservations presented earlier, pushes back against the ways in which Irish emigrant working-class experience has been ignored or silenced. This pushing back is a common theme in representations of working-class life, even as the texts acknowledge what is lost. Both representation and reflexivity, then, are key: the representations of working-class life explored in this book repeatedly exhibit an acute awareness of the ways in which ‘reality’ is constantly framed by ideology, epistemology and historiography. Tensions between content and form – and between the middle-class gaze and the

13 14

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Abram, ‘Foreword’, p. 5. The narrative of Irish success in American society has often been utilised for regressive political purposes, for example in its association with the myth of Irish slaves that is repeatedly deployed to minimise the sufferings of African slaves. As Liam Stack notes, in recent years ‘far-right memes have taken off online and are used as racist barbs against African-Americans. “The Irish were slaves, too,” the memes often say. “We got over it, so why can’t you?” ’. Liam Stack, ‘Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too’, The New York Times, 17 March 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/us/ irish-slaves-myth.html?_r=0 [accessed 19 March 2017]. Abram, ‘Foreword’, p. 3.

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worker’s refusal to be defined or ignored by it – are at the heart of the coming discussions.

‘Revolution, both discreet and radical’: Literature and Class Recovering the experiences of those discursively othered is always a problematic endeavour, often best achieved by a triumph of imaginative cunning over the limits of the knowable. Theo D’haen has even argued that, ‘as the privileged center discourse leaves no room for a “realistic” insertion of those that history – always speaking the language of the victors and rulers – has denied a voice, such an act of recuperation can only happen by magic or fantastic or unrealistic means’.16 Wolfgang Iser argues that ‘fictionalizing begins where knowledge leaves off, and this dividing line turns out to be the fountainhead of fiction by means of which we extend ourselves beyond ourselves.’17 For writers of othered identities, literature’s capacity to perform this sort of ‘extension’ is epistemologically and politically enabling, in stretching past what the calculus of capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy delimits as the range of human knowledge. As Diana Wallace writes, for example, in her survey of women’s historical novels, the genre ‘has allowed [women] to invent or “re-imagine” [. . .] the unrecorded lives of marginalised and subordinated people, especially women, but also the working classes, Black people, slaves and colonised peoples’.18 If the truth of ‘unrecorded lives’ is a defining concern for working-class texts, it is unsurprising that those texts are mainly theorised in relation to – and, in some media more than others, proliferate within – realist traditions. Writing of British social-realist film for example, Samantha Lay observes that films produced in this genre have ‘largely concerned themselves with the portrayal of the working class’.19 As Livi Michael notes regarding novels, ‘the notion of the realist novel exists in the background of most criticisms of the working-class novel, acting in effect as a yardstick against which it is constantly being measured.’20 Facts, accuracy and utility are 16

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Theo L. D’haen, ‘Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centres’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History Community, ed. by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 191–208 (p. 197). Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Significance of Fictionalizing’, in his Stepping Forward:  Essays, Lectures and Interviews (Maidstone: Crescent Moon, 2012), pp. 13–31 (p. 25). Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 2. Samantha Lay, British Social Realism:  From Documentary to Brit Grit (London and New  York: Wallflower, 2002), p. 18. Olivia Michael, ‘Towards a Theory of Working Class  Literature:  Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair in the Context of Earlier Working Class Writing’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, The University

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central concerns in working-class writing and its critical reception. Pierre Bourdieu identified a related tendency, more generally in working-class culture, to disparage aloof forms of social and cultural artifice in favour of simplicity, honesty and utility – what he termed its ‘anti-Kantian aesthetic’.21 As John R. Hall, Mary Jo Neitz and Marshall Battani elaborate, working-class culture often emphasizes suspicion of Culture with a capital C, along with respectability, intellectuals, manners, and elitist noblesse oblige. Rejecting these badges of cultivation allows working-class people to invoke a meaningful world in which people are ‘real’, uncontrived, and straightforward in their likes and dislikes.22

An unpretentious counter-culture and emphasis on the ‘real’ go hand-inhand, it is argued. So, does it follow that literature written by the ‘organic intellectuals’ (Antonio Gramsci) of working-class life correspondingly and unproblematically embraces the apparently ‘uncontrived’ and ‘straightforward’ in art?23 Tony Davies notes that the form of working-class writing is generally anyhow thought of in this manner  – as ‘realistic in the most unpremeditated and unselfconscious fashion [. . .] it “tells it as it is” (or more often, was) in plain words valued for their sincerity and simple truth’.24 As my discussion of O’Connor’s story has sought to illustrate, the commonsensical assumption that apparently inert literary forms can simply ‘reflect’ historical truth masks complex mediatory dynamics. This is not to collapse into the ‘ultra-relativist orthodoxy that erects its own lack of critical and ethical resources into a quasi-universal “postmodern condition”, a terminal indifference with regard to truth and falsehood’, but rather to insist on the perennial historical-materialist questions of whose

21

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of Leeds, 1992), https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/5441/3/Thesis-2009-Petty. pdf [accessed 10 September 2016], p. 11. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction – A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 5. John R.  Hall, Mary Jo Neitz and Marshall Battani, Sociology on Culture (London:  Routledge, 2003), p. 52. For Antonio Gramsci, as Peter McLaren et al. put it, ‘the organic intellectuals of the working class not only resist hegemonic processes, but attempt to displace the old hegemonic order by leading their class [. . . and] serv[ing] as role models that open the horizons of their class or popular front in order to secure a more equitable system of societal organization.’ Peter McLaren, Gustavo Fischman, Silvia Serra and Estanislao Antelo, ‘The Specter of Gramsci: Revolutionary Praxis and the Committed Intellectual’, in Gramsci and Education, ed. by Carmel Borg, Joseph Buttigieg and Peter Mayo (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 147–78 (p. 165). Tony Davies, ‘Unfinished Business: Realism and Working-Class Writing’, in The British WorkingClass Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jeremy Hawthorne (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), pp. 125–36 (p. 125).

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‘truth’ and why?25 What is taken for granted in putatively transparent processes of ‘reflecting’ truth, when, as Bourdieu has argued, ‘the most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’?26 The ‘silence’ inherent in how realist cultural production is imagined conceals its relentless drive to resolve social contradictions, to remove them from a smoothened textual surface. As John Fiske explains, the ubiquitous ideology of realism ‘constructs a consensus around the point of view of the bourgeoisie and excludes the consciousness of class conflict [. . .] so the repression of contradictions in “the real” is a reactionary ideological practice for it mobilizes a consensus around the status quo and thus militates against social change’.27 Because ‘the conventions of realism have developed in order to disguise the constructedness of the “reality” it offers, and therefore of the arbitrariness of the ideology that is mapped onto it’, the danger is that this ‘reality is a way of making [the status quo] appear unchallengeable and unchangeable’.28 As I have sought to argue thus far, this does not mean that those who deploy realism are simply succumbing to a reactionary aesthetic politics, but if the traditional narrative modes of describing reality tend towards a ‘reactionary ideological practice’, many working-class writers also often challenge those modes, for example by deploying them in ironised form – adopting subversive, metafictive narratorial strategies that challenge the limits of what is normatively constituted as the real. In the working-class novel, Livi Michael identifies ‘a kind of textually subversive polemic, deconstructing the masked values of the bourgeois novel’.29 Her observation accords with the evidence Pamela Fox finds, in British working-class writing, of a ‘relatively autonomous working-class culture which always retains the capacity to resist dominant ideologies’.30 Contradicting Althusserian tendencies in Marxist theory – and more broadly, ‘the astonishingly pervasive (and omniscient) power attributed to dominant culture’ – Fox follows scholars such as Paul Willis in identifying ‘actual instances of resistance 25

26

27 28 29 30

Christopher Norris, ‘What is Enlightenment? Kant According to Foucault’, in Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the 80s, ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso and Silvia Caporale-Bizzini (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1994), pp. 53–138 (p. 138). Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (London:  Cambridge University Press, [1977] 2005), p. 188. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, [1978] 2011), p. 88. Ibid., p. 35. Michael, ‘Towards a Theory of Working Class Literature’, p. 27. Pamela Fox, Class Fictions:  Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 3.

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which manifest themselves alongside instances of accommodation’.31 Here, the working-class text is a site of struggle that might be simultaneously in some ways interruptive and in others appropriated. This too is a common theme in the analysis carried out in this volume. In such a context, definitions of what is or is not a ‘radical’ or ‘proletarian’ aesthetic strategy can lose sight of the complexities of literary orthodoxies, the ingenuity of responses to them, and the particularities of historical flux and aesthetic innovation, in which the challenges presented by this or that working-class text are always shifting and provisional. Overly prescriptive and all-too-generalised conceptualisations of the ‘subversive’ in working-class writing often tend too much in the direction of dogma. This inflexible approach is evident, for example, in Carol Snee’s essay ‘Working-Class  Literature or Proletarian Writing?’ (1979), where what is putatively ‘bourgeois’ and apparently individualistic is condemned (recalling Raymond Williams’s contention that ‘working-class culture [. . .] is primarily social [. . .] rather than individual’), though Snee does concede that some working-class writers ‘may have a different perception of the individual, and what constitutes individuality’.32 Here, in an otherwise gloomy vision, is a concession that nods to the more flexible approach adopted by other theorists of working-class writing. Jacques Rancière argues, apparently contra Bourdieu, that what is supposedly reactionary or elitist in aesthetic traditions can in fact be radicalised in its encounter with outgroups. ‘High’ culture can even be liberating for aesthetes positioned at the lower end of the social order. Rancière’s analysis approaches questions around proletarian authenticity and ‘bourgeois’ form with startling originality, positing that where working-class pathos transforms itself into an aesthetic of militant passion for reappropriation [. . .] The acquisition of this aesthetic gaze, the paradoxical philosophy of asceticism that this possessed worker draws from it, this torsion of habitus that he imposes upon himself and proposes is also the claim of a human right to happiness that exceeds the rhetoric of proletarian recruiters, the battle of cottages and castles.33

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Ibid., p 4; my emphasis. Carole Snee, ‘Working-Class Literature or Proletarian Writing?’, in Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties, ed. by Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann and David Margolies (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), pp. 165–92 (p. 169). Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 346. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, ed. by Andrew Parker, trans. by John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 199.

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Rancière refuses approaches to cultural production that either consign it to the realm of the epiphenomenal or overemphasise determining social forces. Here, the ‘acquisition of the aesthetic gaze’, and by implication the agency of the worker-writer, are vital and intrinsically radical; the excesses of sociology – the sense that in culture ‘all practices, including those purporting to be disinterested [. . . are] economic practices directed towards the maximizing of material or symbolic profit’ (Bourdieu)  – are questioned along with the excesses of post-structural concepts of ‘dissolve[d] man’ (Michel Foucault).34 Reappropriation requires and facilitates the political power of agential women and men. But the example of this ‘torsion of habitus’ that Rancière enlists – the carpenter-poet Louis-Gabriel Gauny laying a parquet floor, stealing a moment from his labours to admire a beautiful view, offering ‘the gaze of an aesthete on the décor of his servitude’  – is nonetheless somewhat unconvincing.35 Gauny can savour this view only by chance (he happens to be working on the particular property) and through stolen time, under conditions which dictate who gets to view this ‘picturesque horizon’ all of the time and who must glimpse it as an interloper.36 One might ask, for example, how much working-class women in Gauny’s France got to trespass in such a manner, let alone write about those encounters. When Rancière complains that ‘the sociologist-demystifier would like to oppose the performative efficacity of utopian or heretical discourse to the traps of allodoxia,’ his argument for ‘the radicalization of aesthetic legitimacy’ is somewhat tarnished by its unwillingness to face head-on the challenges, precisely, of sociological demystification.37 But are there lessons in both Bourdieu and Rancière that might be combined here? Is there a useful synthesis, in theorising working-class cultural production, between the sociology of cultural capital, and how it explains cultural and political marginalisation, and the philosophy of cultural ‘reappropriation’, the ‘torsion’ accomplished by the marginalised? Clearly this is a complicated business, though Rancière would argue that the complication itself – its messiness – is integral to the radical contestation of legitimacy posed by the working-class writer.

34

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Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, [1966] 2002), p. 379. Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, p. 199. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 199, 200.

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‘Poets or knights, priests or dandies’: Cultural Capital and the Working-Class Writer Deliberating on these issues, Belfast shipyard worker Thomas Carnduff dismissed his own reading in hallowed literary culture in a dramatic volteface poem entitled ‘A Worker’s Philosophy’ (n.d.): I have done with Omar Khayyám, My Chaucer lies in the dust; Sick of their words of wisdom That reek of age-long rust. What can I gain from their logic Or learn from their feathered quill – I who have lived by my labour And lean on my labour still? [. . .] Khayyám, the mystic, spoke wisdom, But little did Khayyám know Of hours of sin in the city, Of years of sweat at the docks, [. . .] I have done with my Omar Khayyám, I have laid it back in the case; I am studying life, not by culture, But meeting it face to face.38

That Carnduff uses a poem to announce his turning away from ‘culture’ of course borders on the hilarious, undermining his otherwise sober, prolier-than-thou tone. Dubliner Lar Redmond wrote, by contrast, of the delights of his ‘midnight folios’ – his secret reading of ‘Charles Lamb and his companions’ – and the need to hide such emasculating interests from his childhood friends in the Liberties; here it is the habitus of workingclass life that is stifling, high culture liberating.39 In Brendan Behan’s short story ‘After the Wake’ (1950), knowledge of suppressed queer histories, which his extensive reading yields, enables a young man growing up gay in inner-city Dublin to challenge his community’s ingrained heteronormativity. Behan’s tenement-dwelling narrator’s ‘campaign’ to seduce a local man, and to make him ‘think [homosexuality] manly’, revolves around casually introducing accounts of gay writers and thinkers into their conversations: if illustrious figures like Oscar Wilde were gay, it must be 38 39

Denis Smith, Thomas Carnduff – Poet of the People (Belfast: no publisher, 1991), pp. 3–4. Lar Redmond, A Walk in Alien Corn (Dublin: Glendale, 1990), p. 61.

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okay, the narrator implies, ‘appealing to that hope of culture – Socrates, Shakespeare, Marlow  – lies, truth and half-truth’.40 Seán O’Casey’s selfeducation in the ‘hope of culture’ (the Bible, Shakespeare, Shaw) enabled him to represent powerfully his own class. The same is the case for many other working-class writers. In Jimmy’s Hall (2014), Paul Laverty and Ken Loach illustrate how teaching Yeats and other canonical writers was part of a struggle in 1930s Ireland against a regime determined to police poor people’s access to cultural production; James Gralton’s hall, a radical cultural centre in Effrinagh, Co. Leitrim, is treated as a threat to church and state. In recent writing, Frankie Gaffney adopts the ‘Seven Ages of Man’, an explicitly Shakespearean structure, for his novel of the twenty-firstcentury urban underworld, Dublin 7 (2015), while Karl Parkinson plots his protagonist’s artistic coming of age in The Blocks (2016) with an eclectic path to acculturation in music, art and literature – epiphanies come courtesy of authorities as diverse as Oasis lead singer Liam Gallagher and Romantic poet William Blake. The emasculating shame that secret, nocturnal literary readings induced in Lar Redmond, who grew up inhibited by the abounding machismo of a 1920s Dublin neighbourhood, or the fear endured by Jim Sheridan’s painter, Shay, in Mobile Homes (1976) – his profession making him a social oddity and resulting in a beating – seems gone for Parkinson’s drug-dabbling Kenny, who successfully negotiates the macho codes of life amongst unemployed youths while simultaneously climbing further on his pilgrimage to literary endeavour. Emmet Kirwan’s recent rap-poetry similarly produces a ‘torsion of habitus’. His profoundly emotive viral rap-poem video ‘Heartbreak’ (2017) adapts to an Irish context an aesthetic through which, in America, ‘the private language of marginalized inner-city young men was transformed into a public one.’41 The video, which charts a working-class girl’s struggles in a sexist and classist modern Ireland, received hundreds of thousands of views online after its release in early 2017.42 Here the misogynistic discourse often associated with American rap is replaced by a radically feminist, class-conscious message. In Kirwan, the poetic and the profane mix in exemplary Rancièrian 40

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Brendan Behan, After the Wake, ed. by Peter Fallon (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1981), p. 48. While written in 1950 and published in the French periodical Points, ‘After the Wake’ ‘remained abandoned in the relative obscurity of Points until it was rescued in 1978’ and posthumously republished for a wider audience. Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan: A Life (Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1999), pp. 156–7. Alexs Pate, In the Heart of the Beat:  The Poetry of Rap  – African American Cultural History and Heritage (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010), p. 61. Emmet Kirwan, ‘Heartbreak’ (2017), www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv9oax2N160 [accessed 21 February 2017].

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tension: what Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling term the ‘popular misimpressions of [. . .] poetry as an elitist pastime’ are debunked in the admixture of genres and forms (rap, poetry, viral video), and the firmly working-class choice of subject matter.43 Carnduff’s ‘Worker’s Philosophy’, then, is questionable, both in its specific, paradoxical iteration, and more broadly as a proposed means of theorising the relationship between class politics and cultural capital. As Rancière has it, It is by entering into the game of bourgeois passions (and the most “legitimate” ones) that fields of symbolic relations take shape at the limit of the classes, making possible the enunciation and utterances [l’énonciation et les énoncés] of working-class speech detached from the repetitions of amor fati. The first worker-militants began by taking themselves for poets or knights, priests or dandies. An allodoxia that is the only way to heterodoxia.44

If class mobility often ‘becomes a matter of “getting it right” by learning middle-class cultural practices and knowledge in order to be able to transcend working-class signifiers’ (Beverley Skeggs), ‘entering into the game of bourgeois passions’ (Rancière) is nonetheless more than selling out.45 If, as Skeggs writes of more recent cultural developments, ‘fixing’ working-class culture is indispensable to those attempting to commodify or anathematise it – leaving working-class people ‘fixed in place so that others can express their distance from them’ – torsion, allodoxia, ambiguity and playfulness (echoing Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’) are strategies that unsettle this fixity – that assert an agile, agential subjectivity.46 Working-class writing presents challenges, however contradictory and uneven, to the canonical, to the hierarchisations of Culture, to the efforts of cognoscenti and critics to ‘fix’ all that is best and worst of ‘Culture’ and ‘Anarchy’ – to ‘taste’ itself.47 Williams would claim that ‘the simplest descriptive novel about working-class life is already, by being written, a significant and positive cultural intervention. For it is not, even yet, what a novel is supposed to be, even as one kind among others. And changing this takes time.’48 Working-class culture and experience as ‘other’ to what Culture is or ought to be is a familiar theme in criticism and in the 43

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Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 111. Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, p. 200. Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 40. Ibid., p. 52. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) is often cited as the chief ancestor of this conservative, classist and Anglocentric nationalist critical tradition. Raymond Williams, ‘Working-Class, Proletarian, Socialist: Problems in Some Welsh Novels’, in The Socialist Novel in Britain, ed. by H. Gustav Klaus (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 110–21 (p. 111).

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writing itself. As O’Casey’s soldiers put it in his First World War play, The Silver Tassie (1928), it’s ‘Shells for us and pianos for them’.49 As Forrest Reid’s aspiring working-class poet puts it in the 1915 novel At the Door of the Gate – as the poor boy glimpses wealthy Belfast girls returning ‘from a concert probably’, and, through a window nearby, a professor’s ‘book-lined walls’ – ‘these things [. . .] were symbols of a brilliant and inaccessible life from which he had permanently been shut out by the accident of birth.’50 The spaces in which Culture operates are often viewed as forbidding for working-class characters; one recalls perhaps Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and its depiction of the Edinburgh Festival as an alien place for the city’s heroin addicts. In his novel Big Fat Love (2003), Peter Sheridan depicts the anxieties that ensue when an elderly workingclass woman visits the theatre for the first time. Lionel Pilkington notes how the theatre in Ireland ‘often appears as a privileged form of cultural practice directed mainly towards middle-class audiences’, and Irish theatre practitioners have sought to challenge or demythologise the elitist associations of the stage by de-privileging its social space, some of the earliest examples being Delia Larkin and James Connolly’s theatrical endeavours of the 1910s in Dublin’s Liberty Hall, a place where, as James Moran puts it, ‘thespian excitement mingled with revolutionary zeal’.51 Heno Magee mixed kitchen-sink realism with the politics of cultural democracy in his 1981 staging of Hatchet (1972) at the Embankment pub in Tallaght, where ‘the clink of pint glasses’ and ‘plumes of cigarette smoke’ perhaps suited a play about a Dublin docker.52 Lee Dunne did likewise in his spectacularly successful staging of Goodbye to the Hill (1976) at the Regency Hotel in the 1990s: ‘Many of the audience have never been to a play before [. . .] At the Regency, we’re here to enjoy ourselves.’53 North of the border, in his work with the Derry Frontline theatre group in the 1990s, Dan BaronCohen was similarly alive to the stuffiness of traditional theatre, and the consequent need to respond imaginatively to working-class audiences. He used ‘only the most essential resources so as to reassure audiences that the performers shared their own cultural prejudices and even their poverty’.54 49 50 51

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Seán O’Casey, Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 38. Forrest Reid, At the Door of the Gate (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), pp. 43–4. Lionel Pilkington, ‘Resistance to Liberation with Derry Frontline Culture and Education’, 38:4 (winter 1994), pp. 17–47 (p. 19); James Moran, ed., ‘Introduction’, Four Irish Rebel Plays (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 1–42 (p. 21). Dick Ahlstrom, ‘ “Hatchet” at the Embankment, Tallaght’, The Irish Times, 28 July 1981, p. 8; see Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), p. 87. Mary Russell, ‘ “Goodbye to the Hill” and Hello to a “Mousetrap” ’, The Irish Times, 9 July 1992, p. 11. Pilkington, ‘Resistance to Liberation with Derry Frontline Culture and Education’, p. 25.

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By adopting a Brechtian dramaturgy, employing ‘models of representation which revealed their own means of production, so that our community audiences could see how accessible and available theatre was’, BaronCohen tried to avoid the pitfalls of clashing bourgeois theatre conventions against working-class cultural tastes.55 The People’s Theatre founded by Des Wilson and others at Springhill House in Belfast also cultivated, from the 1970s onwards, a democratised, hyper-local community theatre, and another Belfast theatre group, Charabanc, based 1980s plays on interviews with working-class women, then played community venues where those women could hear and see their stories transformed. Brenda Winter would recall, of the theatrical phenomenon that was Charabanc’s Lay Up Your Ends (1983), which depicted the 1911 Belfast mill workers’ strike, how audiences of former ‘millies’ strongly identified with the events depicted on stage. One particular audience member even ventured, ‘that’s not theatre, love! Sure anybody would enjoy that.’56 In Dublin, the Project Arts Centre (1966–) and New Theatre (2007–) attempted similar assaults on snobbishness and have been noted for their determination to put workingclass life on stage. If those active in the writing and performance of working-class life have been alive to the contradictions that arise in relation to class and cultural capital, how have scholars fared? Can academia be accused of having ignored or under-emphasised Irish working-class cultural and literary traditions? As Ian Haywood notes of one of the most noteworthy and popular of Irish working-class writers, Robert Tressell, though his The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ (1914) ‘mythic status has been preserved by generations of leftwing readers’, ‘this canonisation runs counter to the book’s absence from mainstream and academic literary tradition’.57 How much more so is that the case in Ireland, the nation of Tressell’s birth? In Brendan Behan’s household Tressell and his class politics were part of an apparently ‘national’ myth:  The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ‘was our book at home, too, and when my mother was done telling us of the children of Lir and my father about Fionn Mac Cumhaill they’d come back by way of nineteen sixteen to the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’.58 55 56

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Ibid. Brenda Winter, ‘Introduction’, in Martin Lynch and The Charabanc Theatre Company, Lay Up Your Ends:  A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, ed. by Richard Palmer (Belfast:  Lagan, 2008), pp. 17–39 (p. 29). Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction:  From Chartism to ‘Trainspotting’ (Plymouth:  Northcote House, 1997), pp. 22, 23. Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (London: Arrow, 1990), p. 293.

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Working-class writing forged identity alongside the Celtic myths of old Ireland, Behan suggests – a contention at odds with how class has mostly been thought of in Irish Studies scholarship. If Ruth Sherry could observe some thirty years ago that ‘the concept of Irish working-class writing is not a well-established one,’ the same could be said today.59 That Sherry could at least identify some of the major Irish working-class prose writers prior to the publication of her article ‘The Irish Working Class in Fiction’ in 1985 (while failing to identify others), suggests that the relative neglect of this topic since is inexcusable. Despite important book-length studies on Behan, Seán O’Casey, Sam Thompson, Christy Brown, Stewart Parker, Roddy Doyle and others, monographs that link such writers together as ‘working class’ are very rare. Mary McGlynn’s Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature (2008) and my own Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey (2011) are among the very few academic studies to do so, though these and Aaron Kelly’s recent special issue of the Irish Review on ‘Cultures of Class’ in Ireland indicate growing interest in this area.60 The late Paul Devlin’s ‘Working-Class Performance’ module at the University of Ulster and my own ‘Representing the Working Class’ at Queen’s University Belfast are amongst the few university-level courses to provide students with an opportunity to explore class in Irish writing. My own realisation that class could be applied to literature was sparked by Aileen Douglas’s module on British working-class fiction at Trinity College Dublin. Given the relatively scant scholarship and limited teaching of Irish working-class writing, it is premature to speak of an ‘Irish Working-Class Studies’, though recent institutional outcrops, such as the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class at NUI Galway, the Cross-Currents in British and Irish Working-Class Life research group and the Belfast Working-Class History Group at Queen’s, along with vibrant community history organisations such as the Stoneybatter and Smithfield People’s History Project and the East Wall History Group, join more longterm initiatives, like the Irish Labour History Society and Museum and its seminal journal Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, in providing a cradling (albeit mainly outside schools of English) for this growing area of scholarly inquiry.

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Ruth Sherry, ‘The Irish Working Class in Fiction’, in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jeremy Hawthorn (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), pp. 111–23 (p. 111). Mary M. McGlynn, Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Aaron Kelly, ed., The Irish Review (Special Issue: Culture and Class), 47 (December 2013).

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Paula Meehan explores the challenges that arise in representing workingclass life in her poem ‘Before the Pubs Close’ (1991), about a painter who, like Meehan, portrays in art a vision of urban Dublin, in this case a southinner-city flat complex: And quick. Before last orders and drunken cries steal the breath the street is holding, exhale it lovingly below each window to reclaim from night the shadowy areas. Salt your canvas with a woman quietly weeping in a tenement room until her tears become a blessing sprinkled from your fingers.61

Meehan urges the artist to accept a quasi-religious mission, a ritual of ‘exhaling’ and ‘blessing’ the canvas with tears. She enjoins him to blend with the street scene, to ‘reclaim’ it from the ‘shadowy areas’ – the silences of a history that largely excludes the poor. In ‘Woman Found Dead Behind Salvation Army Hostel’ (1991), the next poem in the same collection, Meehan further exhorts her artist  – and by implication her reader  – to venture into a bleak world: You will have to go outside for this one. The night is bitter cold But you must go out, You could not invent this.62

Fellow Dublin poet Dermot Bolger literally went outside with his Night and Day (2009) visual art and poetry project, which erected evocative ‘mural poem’ displays (posters with images and words) on city streets.63 His ‘Clondalkin Suite’, for example, a series of mural poems about the titular working-class area, returns to the motif of an unrecognised sanctity in the streets: Maybe Jesus is wandering these roads tonight, Unrecognised, unacknowledged, utterly alone, Passing half built apartment blocks investors own, 61

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Paula Meehan, ‘Before the Pubs Close’, from series, ‘Three Paintings of York Street’, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (Loughcrew, Co. Meath: Gallery, 1999), p. 55. Paula Meehan, ‘Woman Found Dead Behind Salvation Army Hostel’, from series, ‘Three Paintings of York Street’, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (Loughcrew, Co. Meath: Gallery, 1991), p. 56. See Dermot Bolger, ‘Night and Day’, www.dermotbolger.com/nightday.htm [accessed 9 November 2016].

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Passing burnt-out cars, glass shards, twisted chrome, Threading a path through Neilstown and Quarryvale, In Dunnes Stores white socks, with his jacket torn.64

Here Bolger reminds us of a feature Bakhtin identified in the carnivalesque, the ‘crowning/de-crowning’ of the ‘antipode of the real king’, a mock elevation of the lowly that accompanied medieval festivals like ‘the saturnalia, the European carnival and festival of fools’.65 Such practices unsettle, even menace, power, albeit, in carnival, under the cloak of comedy. Writers examined throughout this book, in prose, poetry and drama, enact and portray transgressions, de-crownings, infelicities – instances of the allodoxic – in the messy politics of cultural capital and class. The audacity of the worker who becomes a ‘knight’, or of the dishevelled, whitesocked wandered who becomes a ‘Jesus’, challenges the common sense of who does (or is entitled to do) what, when and where, in social and cultural terms – unsettles the fixity of what is exalted and what is abject. This impulse is both practical and poetic. Bolger’s role, for example, in setting up independent publishers such as Raven Arts Press (1977–92) and, as cofounder, New Island (1992–present), was distinctly ‘countercultural’, according to Erica Meyers; Raven Arts operated along collaborative lines, ‘dictated by the group of writers for the group of writers [. . .] maintaining a horizontal collectivist perspective’.66 The young Bolger organised poetry readings in the basement of a Ballymun council tower block. More recently, his work, like Roddy Doyle’s, has extended this politics of the Irish out-group to migrants, who flocked to Ireland in unprecedented numbers during the 1990s and 2000s as the country’s economy boomed. Bolger’s The Townlands of Brazil (2006) and Tanglewood (2015), and Doyle’s The Deportees (2007), have for instance presented the compounded exclusions suffered among new arrivals to the Irish working class. Vincent Higgins’s play Strike (2007) depicts this glaringly, when an arriviste Belfast businessman from a trade union family complains of his Polish employees’ rebelliousness. But some depictions of newcomers are in danger of being hackneyed and reductive: the Eastern European woman is exoticised and eroticised in Pearse Elliott’s (writer; director Paddy Breathnach) film Man About Dog (2004), depicted as an object of the working-class male’s gaze. 64

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Dermot Bolger, ‘Jesus of Clondalkin’, www.dermotbolger.com/nightday/17.%20Jesus.pdf [accessed 9 November 2016]. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 123, 124. Erica Meyers, ‘Characters of Class: Poverty and Historical Alienation in Dermot Bolger’s Fiction’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015), pp. 172, 176.

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The film also plays into stereotypes of Irish Travellers as comic criminals. Peter Sheridan and Mannix Flynn had challenged such depictions in their play, The Liberty Suit (1977), where a Traveller, bullied and anathematised by working-class Dubliners, takes his own life. Sheridan, Flynn, Bolger and Doyle are among the many working-class writers who have used their writing quite explicitly to support progressive political causes. As Rancière attests, ‘Order is menaced wherever a shoemaker does something else than make shoes.’67 Often those upholding that order deal with such irruptions by simply ignoring them. Terry Eagleton, writing of the ‘strongly emergent’ movement of British working-class writers in the 1970s, observed how, ‘silenced for generations, taught to regard literature as a coterie activity beyond their grasp’, these authors, then ‘actively organizing to find their own literary styles and voices’, were ‘almost unknown to academia’. If they were ‘one sign of a significant break from the dominant relations of literary production’, their novelty, unlike other forms of novelty, would not so easily break through to recognition and adulation in academe. Echoing Williams, Eagleton wrote that ‘it is because such ventures interrogate the ruling definitions of literature that they cannot so easily be incorporated by a literary institution quite happy to welcome Sons and Lovers, and even, from time to time, Robert Tressell.’68

Ireland, Writing, Radicalism and Class Colonialism and conflict over several centuries fuelled radical perspectives in Irish writing (especially in song), as the chapters in this volume by David Convery, Christopher J.  V. Loughlin, Andrew Carpenter and John Moulden show. Partition, and the moral and political torpor that followed the emergence of two states on the island of Ireland in 1922, limited the possibilities for radical left writing in the century that followed. If, in 1920s Britain, columns in publications like the Sunday Worker ventured to mercilessly mock the ‘middle- and upper-class arts scene – “The Books They Read,” “The Plays They Play,” “The Films They Screen” – ridiculing [middle-class art’s] concerns through wonderfully funny mock plot summaries’, barring O’Casey, nothing so strident and sustained in terms of class-conscious cultural critique appears in the emerging Irish Free State or in Northern Ireland.69 Some decades later it is evident in the archives 67 68 69

Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, p. 61. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 188. Qtd. in Fox, Class Fictions, p. 47.

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of the Workers’ Educational Association that worker educational initiatives in the north did have a strong artistic content.70 But there is no real sense of revolutionary purpose or class consciousness. The radical cultural outgrowths of the early ‘Troubles’, for example, some of which would find expression in the theatre of former Official IRA member Martin Lynch and the theatres of 1970s–1990s West Belfast and Derry cited previously (much of it associated with the republican movement), represent something comparable to, but relatively less extensive than the contemporaneous workerwriter and radical left theatre movements in Britain.71 In the Republic of Ireland, writers and activists such as Peadar O’Donnell, Brendan Behan, Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden, or later, Peter and Jim Sheridan, and Paula Meehan, would express revolutionary socialist ideas in their work. But this activity is, again, not on a relative par with that taking place in Britain, though it is arguably (or in Behan’s case, emphatically) a part of it. Arguably also, much of the energy that might have been expended on such writer-activism in Ireland was invested instead in the republican struggles that have ebbed and flowed since 1916. Activist writers like O’Donnell, Behan and Brenda Murphy come to mind, the impact and extent of their literary output no doubt attenuated by their commitments in the political sphere. It is probable too that such energies as might have been invested in equivalents to the British-based The Plebs’ League, the Left Review and New Left Review, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, the Working-Class  Movement Library and People’s History Museum  – and a range of other culturally democratising and left-wing educational and publishing initiatives – were partially absorbed into other forms of political activity in Ireland, or stymied by a less hospitable political environment (notwithstanding the important work of the Irish Labour History Society and others mentioned earlier in this introduction and elsewhere in this volume). Writers like O’Casey, Lee Dunne and Paul Smith all suffered greatly from the Republic’s censorship regime.72 My remarks here remain, however, somewhat provisional: a work of the order of Jonathan Rose’s magisterial The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) has yet to be written about Irish working-class intellectual history. Further research in this area is overdue. 70

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See Seán Byers and Michael Pierse, ‘Archives of Working-Class  Life:  The Labour Movement, Working-Class Cultures and Conflict in Northern Ireland since 1945’ (2016), https://michaelpierseblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/dfa-final_pdf.pdf [accessed 15 January 2017], pp. 54–5. See Bill McDonnell, Theatres of the Troubles:  Theatre, Resistance, and Liberation in Ireland (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009). See Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, pp. 66, 95, 118, for some examples.

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Working-class writing is as diverse and fluid as other social categories of cultural production. As Tokarczyk recently observed, ‘the canon of working-class writing is being defined even as it is continually revised.’73 If, as Sonali Perera argues, ‘in the global Anglophone academy, workingclass writing, even when considered in a comparative frame, has, arguably, its ideal types, its chief illustrative contexts, and its dominant narratives,’ these must be deconstructed and contextualised if we are to understand that writing in its ‘several interconnected senses: as social formation (not institution), cultural practice, and serial interrupted form’.74 The purpose of this book, then, is to broaden, rather than contract, the terrain on which writing of working-class life, in all its aspects, can be considered in an Irish context. It also seeks to move beyond a narrow fixation on labour history that is sometimes taken to encompass working-class history in Ireland. As Nicola Wilson’s recent Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015) argues, the labour history focus in Britain – for all its progressive politics – often for instance expresses an androcentric political vision.75 As David Convery argues in this volume, with regard to the Irish context, an approach to working-class history which further integrates sociological, cultural studies, literary studies and other disciplinary perspectives is enriching, not least for what has traditionally been termed labour history. The scholars who have made this book possible have no doubt come from various and conflicting political and critical schools, but the collection unites them in piecing together a heretofore largely unrecognised lineage, providing the first sustained interrogation of how working-class life in Ireland has been represented in creative writing. The chapters ahead reconfigure relationships between Irish Studies scholarship and class, confident that the paucity of discussion around how class has shaped and shapes the contours of Irish social, political and cultural life paradoxically suggests its importance. John Kirk begins his study of the British working class in film, literature and television by observing how ‘Class is always in some sense present: whether in our refusal to accept it, our inclination to acknowledge it or insist on it or, as in some cases, our being privileged enough not to have noticed it.’76 Class is at the heart of Irish society, its 73

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Michelle M.  Tokarczyk, Introduction, Critical Approaches to American Working-Class  Literature (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 1. Sonali Perera, No Country:  Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (Columbia, SC: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 4. Nicola Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction (London: Ashgate, 2015), p. 5. John Kirk, The British Working Class in the Twentieth Century:  Film, Literature and Television (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 1.

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apparatuses, privileges and anxieties, whatever the failures of academic scrutiny in this regard.

Scope and Structure of This Book A thoroughgoing history of the Irish working class has yet to be written, though much scholarship of social, political and labour history in recent decades helps contextualise the writing explored here. David Convery’s chapter in this volume interrogates the historiographical context, urging a more transnational, interdisciplinary approach to Irish working-class history and culture. While Convery acknowledges that ‘this is a potentially vast subject,’ his overview of the development of Irish labour historiography provides a comprehensive and rigorous analysis of the field. In developing his theoretical approach to the nature of class in Ireland, Convery’s discussion here is informed by sociological and anthropological perspectives that are often missing in Irish labour histories. He importantly disaggregates ‘labour’ and ‘working-class’ history; their conflation, he argues, is problematic – even as one cannot be considered without the other. This contention chimes with Joanna Bourke’s view, contra the over-focus on labour politics in working-class Britain, that ‘realization of one’s “class” position emerged from routine activities of everyday life [. . . which are] concerned as much with the symbolic expressions of power in social relationships as with material realities.’77 Convery also considers the dangers of over-extrapolating from the British working-class context, of grafting it simplistically onto a very different though related Irish experience. Here he deconstructs the questionable assumptions of modernisation theory, which has too long skewed thinking on class politics in Ireland; its sense, as Hilary Tovey and Perry Share put it, ‘that the social organisation and cultural features of a society can largely be explained by identifying the “stage of development” it has reached on the path towards modernity’.78 Christopher J. V. Loughlin charts the emergence of Irish subaltern formations in early colonialism and capitalism, mapping the incipient ‘representation’ (in various senses of the word) of working-class life. Class is understood here as a process, a relationship – always in solution. The appearance of legislation on combinations in the eighteenth century, the 77

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Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 3. Hilary Tovey and Perry Share, A Sociology of Ireland: Second Edition (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2003), p. 46.

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evolution of primitive forms of manufacture, the incitement of agrarian struggle and the drawing of the masses – the ‘armed poverty of the kingdom’ – into sporadic conflicts with the Ascendancy and the Crown lay the foundations of class consciousness in Ireland, he argues. Loughlin nonetheless observes that it still ‘remains to be proven how, exactly, “class”, “class conflict” or “modernisation” are applicable to Irish history pre-1850’, e.g. ‘was “Whiteboyism” a form of agricultural trade unionism’? As his chapter conveys, ‘in the nineteenth century Irish working-class social, economic and cultural organisation developed explicitly,’ with friendly societies and trade unions providing the spine for broader cultural and social activities, and the springboard to political consciousness. In relation to cultural consumption, Loughlin chimes with issues broached in later chapters in observing how very often texts about working-class life were not aimed at the working class.79 The tyranny of texts that attribute dysfunction, fecklessness and comic simplicity to the Irish working class is at least partly attributable to the class of reader those texts were, for the most part, aimed at. Colonial as well as class relations are vital in understanding the particular ways in which the Irish working class has been demonised over centuries, both nationally and internationally, a point George Bernard Shaw crystallises in the first act of his play John Bull’s Other Island (1904), when an English businessman, Tom Broadbent, too easily swallows the stage-Irish affectation of a canny Scottish worker who has designs on the Englishman’s money and alcohol. The stage-Irish swindle works on Broadbent because it effectively deploys ubiquitous racialising discourses of Irish imprudence and infantile charm. These are routinely performed ‘at the theatre or the music hall’, to flatter the Englishman’s ‘sense of moral superiority’.80 Here class and colonial dynamics combine, and later in the play, when Irish servant Patsy Farrell struggles up a hill ‘intolerably overburdened’ with the luggage of his social superiors, Shaw drives the point home: as Patsy inevitably collapses under his unwieldy load, and is presumed drunk and castigated, by an Irish priest and a representative member of the country’s arriviste rural middle class, as a ‘butther-fingered omadhaun’ and ‘schoopid ass’, the beleaguered worker retorts ‘howkn I carry three men’s luggage at wanst?’81 Shaw is surely 79

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As Wilson writes of Britain, ‘in working-class culture, the reading of newspapers, serial publications and penny novelettes has long been more significant than the reading of books, objects which have traditionally been expensive, difficult to obtain and demanded longer periods of leisure.’ Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction, p. 6. George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, ed. by Dan H.  Laurence (London:  Penguin, 1984), p. 78. Ibid., p. 98.

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analogising the tripartite burden of clerical, native bourgeois and imperial English contempt that disenfranchises and oppresses the Irish worker. Vilification and trivialisation in the music hall have social implications, he suggests – and deep roots in long-standing class and colonial prejudices. Andrew Carpenter’s chapter discusses, amongst other things, the roots of these prejudices in mid-seventeenth-century caricatures of the poor Irish: ‘One way of assuaging one’s fear of an opponent is by satirising or burlesquing him to make him look ridiculous,’ Carpenter observes. His analysis of mid-to-late seventeenth-century long poems that lampoon poor Irishmen’s use of English elucidates the ways in which such texts circulated in elite venues, within clubs or circles of middle-class Englishmen newly arrived in Restoration Dublin, informing discourses of colonialism and class. That few in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland could read or write Irish means that we are denied much of what Irishspeaking workers thought. That Carpenter’s chapter finds a good deal of the extant account of contemporaneous working-class life in the tales of those sent to the gallows – tales transcribed (however unreliably) and sold to onlookers as part of the spectacle of public execution – tells a story of its own. Here we are reminded of how early associations between poverty and criminality were codified through othering discourses of morality and the policing of social inequality, through epistemic and judicial violence. The plaintive tale of Sisly Burke, a domestic servant who pays dearly for a minor crime, exemplifies the wider disciplining and punishment of the lower orders. Against these realities, it is all the more impressive that – like Rancière’s audacious proletarian writers in France – aspiring poets like the Drogheda bricklayer Henry Jones or the Kilkenny housemaid Ellen Taylor rose socially with their poetry. Those other poets who tumbled downwards on the social scale, the dispossessed Irish filí who fell afoul of an alien colonial regime, clung, in their newfound poverty, to their lingering cultural capital. If colonialism and developing capitalism marginalised one class of poet, it brought yet another to the fore. Ireland’s Weaver poets are inextricably associated with the rise of machines. Frank Ferguson’s chapter expounds on these poets’ responses to profound social and economic transformations. He questions the myths of their later ‘disappearance as a group’ and examines their re-emergence as an important, if problematic cultural and political resource in twentieth-century Northern Ireland. As Ferguson conveys, technological, social, legal and political developments conspired, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, to broaden participation in print culture. Worker writers who emerged

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from this context often grappled awkwardly with their newfound literary status. Ferguson notes how, in the tentative first stirrings of this poetry, ‘safeguards’  – (perhaps falsely modest) authorial admissions of literary mediocrity – often preface poetry collections, yet ‘despite these insinuations of rustic naïveté one can see a manifesto of linguistic and class aesthetics being defined.’ In these early worker poets’ encounters with literary convention, fears of rejection and ridicule vie with a refreshing challenge to poetic orthodoxy. Song is central to Irish working-class culture, and John Moulden’s chapter explores the extensive role of folk song in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century workers’ cultural lives. The relatively democratic, collaborative, grass-roots, vernacular creativity of folk song circulation provided the paramount literary experience for communities for whom the leisure and indeed the light necessary for reading were in short supply. Among the poor, and for those who could read, ballads were the most likely object of their first reading experiences, and these ballads would ‘express the lives of the people more fully than other kinds of record’, Moulden argues. Songs could also sow the seeds of sedition, the bearers of written political broadsides and satires able to evade persecution from the authorities by concealing a song-sheet and passing its contents on orally. As with other chapters across this volume, Moulden emphasises the sharing of cultural production across national boundaries, that ‘it seems that the “poor” of all regions had songs and, presumably, experiences and aspirations, in common.’ Themes include the (anti-)heroism of the highwayman and the precarious lives of hired agricultural labourers. Moulden notes how the themes of the songs he surveys here seep into the fabric of everyday working-class culture into the twentieth century. Folk-music culture reverberates in much later writers, such as Patrick Galvin, whose curation of Irish ballads went hand in hand with his writing of poetry and plays.82 It is there too in Brendan Behan and Christy Brown; for the latter writer it typifies a generalised subaltern outlook in urban working-class life, the ballad repertoire of mid-twentieth-century Dubliners siding with ‘the ubiquitous underdog, the worm that turned, the berated beggarman roaming the streets with flapping uppers and bleeding feet’.83 82

83

See Galvin’s 1956 LP, Irish Love Songs – sung by Patrick Galvin with guitar and banjo accompaniment by Al Jeffery. Ed. by Kenneth S. Goldstein. LP 12–608. See also his collection, Irish Songs of Resistance (New York: Folklore Press, 1955). Christy Brown, Down All the Days (London: Pan Books, 1972), p. 98.

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Working-class women have received scant attention in Irish literary studies. Their representation in the literature is deeply problematic too – much of it accomplished by men. Heather Laird considers the differences between men writing women and women writing themselves. She also explores how women’s poverty is deployed as a trope in stinging social criticisms, raising important questions about discourses of public morality, gender and class. Surveying a broad field, from Fannie Gallaher’s slum writing of the 1880s to Roddy Doyle’s suburbanites of the 1990s, Laird’s chapter illuminates how, if writers of working-class women often seek to challenge oppressive gender norms, they are also often guilty of reinforcing them. Some of the texts Laird analyses mobilise an apparently leftist class politics by manipulating sexist sentiments. If there is an awareness among many writers of the particular burdens placed on working-class women by orthodox constructions of womanhood, ‘a common characteristic of fictional accounts of the Irish working class is that the women they feature are often presented as having little or no awareness of the structural basis of class and gender inequalities.’ One thinks of the women of Sam Thompson’s The Evangelist (1963), whose ignorance of the political system (much to the chagrin of their exasperated, mansplaining workingclass menfolk) appears as a perennial hindrance to working-class advancement. Women who struggle against the capitalist system, such as those in Frank McGuinness’s The Factory Girls (1982), or in Tracy Ryan’s Strike! (2010), often also struggle against patronising and sexist trade-union men. In a British context, Wilson has recently argued that ‘the two major traumas that dominate working-class life are, not the strike, not the factory accident, but early and unwanted pregnancy and hasty marriage.’84 Laird emphasises the urgency of further research on the too-often neglected world of Irish working-class women. Her chapter suggests important paths that this research will no doubt follow in years to come. Elizabeth Mannion’s chapter on the writing of early twentieth-century Dublin and Belfast demonstrates how the urban working class is depicted ‘as economic fodder for and collateral damage in the business of nation building’. Class conflict, often rendered in this period as intergenerational conflict, is central to its fiction and theatre, as one might expect in an era when radical ideas fomented revolution. But, as Mannion also notes, much of the writing in this context struggles with the challenges of class consciousness, a range of comedic stage plays, for instance, tending to simply reproduce the tradition of the stage-Irish in depictions of the urban 84

Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction, p. 89.

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working class. Writers in this period also illuminate the contradictions of trade-union consciousness:  Patrick Wilson’s sympathetic depiction of a ‘scab’ worker in his 1914 play, The Slough, could hardly have been more provocative in the post-Lockout milieu. Other plays of the Revolutionary Period (1913–23) question the revolution from within  – the burgeoning nationalism of Edwardian Ireland prompting sustained attack from working-class perspectives on the stage, Mannion notes. Here we observe a working class that is often unsure of its methods, uncertain of its place in the emerging political dispensation and frequently lampooned on stage. As Mannion conveys, the mood reflected in this writing is mostly one of disenchantment. James Moran’s chapter opens with disenchantment of a different kind: that of a British soldier involved in the execution of James Connolly. As the son of an English mining family, the youth’s allegiance to the cause of labour grates painfully against the realisation that he has just shot an iconic champion of that cause. Moran explores the common ground between such men; Connolly, himself an ex-British soldier, after all forgave his executioners for their small part in a game played by the rich. Using Georges Bataille’s thinking on abjection, Moran theorises how the bodies of the poor are depicted in O’Casey’s plays. Identifying the class divisions within the British Army of 1916, the chapter highlights deep fissures in British identity, which were forged at the very moment when imperial patriotic fervour was apparently on the rise. As writers such as O’Casey, Patrick MacGill (The Great Push, 1916), Liam O’Flaherty (Return of the Brute, 1929), Paul Smith (Esther’s Altar, 1959) and Jennifer Johnston (How Many Miles to Babylon?, 1974) have illustrated, gaping inequalities in British and Irish life were crystallised during the First World War. Moran considers the Sherwood Forresters, the tensions in their ranks, and how O’Casey depicts the people of the tenements and their status as ‘a species apart’. Just as Moran points to the ways in which working-class bodies are systemically othered, my own chapter explores texts across the twentieth century that foreground the biopolitics of class politics. Fredric Jameson argues, in The Political Unconscious (1981), that the reality of labour is frequently occluded in literature  – hidden away from view  – the literary’s assumptions of ‘some purely aesthetic level’ denying (in this instance in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900)) ‘that labour which produces and reproduces the world itself ’.85 This epistemicide is closely aligned to systemic 85

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, [1981] 2003), p. 202.

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forms of violence. Derealising labour entails derealising the labourer and the hazards, ‘accidental’ deaths and poor health workers suffer at the edge of political (and literary) consciousness. My chapter considers some of the potential ways in which biopolitical criticism can be applied to the politics of death, or ‘necropolitics’, in Irish working-class writing. It draws attention to how working-class writers repeatedly challenge and expose the operations of ideology in the politics of life and death. Perhaps the Irish workers most vulnerable to the cruelties of capitalism were those who fled to other shores. Many Irish emigrants were catapulted from impoverished rural communities into deeply unsettling experiences at the coalface of capitalist development. The late Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé captured something of this conjuncture in A Thig Ná Tit Orm (1987), his autobiographical, Irish-language account of leaving the West Kerry Gaeltacht to labour in British and American cities. In Feamainn Bhealtaine (1961), Máirtín Ó Direáin describes Aran Island women discussing American cities with the same fluency with which they might comment on the nearby town of Galway, yet these women had little or no knowledge of urban life in Ireland’s major cities.86 The shock of the new is integral to Irish diasporic experience, the huge Irish working class outside Ireland often suffering severe exploitation and prejudice far from the country of their birth. Tony Murray’s discussion, in Chapter 10, of the narratives of Irish nurses in Britain complements his ground-breaking recent contributions to the growing field of IrishBritish Studies.87 Nursing, as Murray notes, was something of a step up from factory work – the nursing profession in England more accessible than it was at home for many poor Irish women emigrating in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Such modest social mobility and elevated social status as nursing offered for Irish women in England, however, by no means came without contradiction, and the struggles of these women elucidate something of the broader struggle of Irish emigrants in Britain and, vis à vis ‘navvy narratives’, the differences between how men and women from Ireland encountered life in Britain. Racism, loneliness, poverty, hunger and misogyny are mitigated for some by a sense of heroic destiny; both nurse and navvy find succour in perceptions of their jobs’ importance (in different and very gendered ways), despite the alienation and precarity that were commonly the emigrant’s 86 87

Máirtín Ó Direáin, Feamainn Bhealtaine (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1961), pp. 27–8. See Tony Murray, London Irish Fictions:  Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (Liverpool:  Liverpool University Press, 2012).

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lot. Exploring diaries, memoirs and semi-autobiographical fiction, Murray also considers how, if Irish working-class emigrants are subject to a condescension and ‘othering’ not entirely unfamiliar to the English working class, they are also on occasion capable of evading the markers of class – their accents and backgrounds less easily categorised in acutely class-conscious England. Recent documentaries, such as Seán Ó Cualáin’s TG4 programme Lón sa Spéir (2013) and Pavel Barter’s Newstalk broadcast The Sandhogs (2015), draw attention to the often-hazardous work carried out by twentiethcentury Irish emigrants in America. Margaret Hallissy and John Lutz’s chapter considers how the Irish-American working class has been portrayed and how questions of ideology and agency are approached across a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and short stories. The writing surveyed charts the development of ethical understandings of worker dignity, unionisation and women’s labour. Some writers challenge hegemonic ideologies that effect the explaining away of complex social phenomena. Others seek to educate the middle-class reader. In their analysis of James William Sullivan’s ‘A Young Desperado: A Story for Boys’ (1895), for example, Hallissy and Lutz illustrate how a short story becomes an educational tool: here, political reform is presumed to derive, not from collective proletarian organisation, but from the informed benevolence of the better off, who, it is assumed, would do better by the poor if only they understood their deprivation. Many of these works are thus more maudlin than Marxist, but others still, such as those by Finley Peter Dunne, hold no faith in prospective philanthropists. If the experiences of the Irish diaspora worker are often relatively neglected in both labour and national histories of Ireland, the experiences of the Australasian Irish are especially so. What they wrote, furthermore, has received scant attention across Irish Studies. Peter Kuch delineates the politics of Irish-Australasian working-class writing in a range of texts. Their transcriptions of demotic and accent, innovations in form and style, challenges to narrative convention and production of social satire reveal a rich tapestry of diasporic literary politics. Kuch’s analysis points to instructive tensions in how writers depict the lives of Irish emigrants, and indeed between how writers depict working-class life in Australia and in New Zealand. Across the three chapters that focus specifically on Irish diaspora experiences, Murray, Hallissy, Lutz and Kuch illuminate myriad affinities and contradictions between representations of the Irish emigrant working class, which suggest compelling potential for further research. As Perera has insisted recently, ‘working-class writings from different parts of the

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globe share more points of connection than are acknowledged by most literary histories.’88 Fiction, biography and theatre have received a good deal more attention than poetry in the (albeit embryonic) scholarship of Irish workingclass writing. Niall Carson’s chapter considers working-class poetry from early to mid-twentieth-century Ireland, which, ‘whilst varied in scope and form’, provides important insights into the tumultuous politics of the period. Carson attends to ‘ambiguity between the representation and appropriation of the working-class voice’ – the tensions between contending visions of what the working class was and what it ought to be. In the charged atmosphere of the Revolutionary Period, so often those who would claim workers’ allegiance veer more towards national myth-making than socialist revolution; we may think of Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’ (1916), a man he sardonically admits ‘does not exist’, as the archetype here.89 In this vision, the role of the poor in an emerging Ireland is more mystical than materialist. Yet for other, lesser poets such as James Connolly, poetry and politics – bread and roses – were indisputably intertwined. And Carson’s exploration of poems from the pages of the Irish Worker conveys the extent to which others among the working class thought so too. Here, the appetite for rudimentary, propagandistic and didactic poetry was not necessarily a barrier to the appreciation of literature of a more challenging hue; the poetry of workers’ periodicals often appears alongside ‘a sophisticated body of criticism’, and Carson explores ‘a vibrant culture of resistance from working-class poets’, illustrating how class politics continually complicates ethno-national cleavages. Paul Delaney’s chapter on working-class fiction commences with Connolly’s vision of a workers’ republic, his denunciation of ‘apostate patriotism’ and a consideration of his writing about and for the working class. Connolly was joined by other writers, such as James Stephens, whose focus on class drew attention to how ‘people are cowed by the demands of capitalism and its desire to exploit and humiliate’. Both Stephens and Patrick MacGill wrote ‘witness texts’, but are there self-aggrandising fallacies in MacGill’s claim, as ‘navvy poet’, to being the ‘embodiment of a subjugated class, giving voice to a people who hitherto had not found expression beyond cliché and stereotype’? Delaney parses MacGill’s reliance on a vaguely conceived Christian socialism, leaving any pretensions 88 89

Perera, No Country, p. 5. W. B.  Yeats, ‘The Fisherman’, The Collected Poetry of W.  B. Yeats (London:  Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2000), p. 123.

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MacGill had to social radicalism in question. More broadly, Delaney argues that MacGill tarnishes with conservative and reactionary ideologies what are reputedly classics of radical proletarian literature. This is not the case in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), where ‘Tressell’s attention to the hegemonic nature of power relations’ is extensive; his desire that readers should engage is a process of critical selfawakening palpable throughout. That this classic novel was considerably sanitised by commercially driven cuts is ‘painfully ironic’, Delaney notes, yet not inconsistent with Tressell’s own excoriation of the role of the media and publishing industries in distorting reality. Delaney’s grounding of this classic of British fiction in its author’s origins in Ireland concurs with recent research on this most elusive of Dubliners.90 Jim Phelan’s work, also discussed in the chapter, further reminds us of the debt Irish workingclass writing owes to the cultural interchange with working-class Britain. In Phelan’s case, as in Behan’s, the irony of influence is the contradiction between his early role in insurrectionary left-republican politics, as an IRA Volunteer, and his later successes in the English literary marketplace – successes, for both writers, which are partly derived from writing about their experiences incarcerated in England for republican activities. As with their fellow Dubliner, O’Casey, these radical republicans discovered in Britain a more hospitable climate for their class-conscious work. Dominant social forces in pre- and post-independence Ireland turned to culture to establish or defend their privileged positions. Paul Murphy, in his chapter on Irish drama of the first half of the twentieth century, observes the curious paradox of Anglo-Irish drama’s fetishization of the peasant. Just as dramatists like Yeats and Synge sought meaning and authenticity in the figure of the peasant, their theatre was part of a movement that buttressed Anglo-Irish elites amid the storm of an emerging decolonising moment. These writers were also fiercely critical of another, emerging elite: the Catholic middle class. Synge’s Christy Mahon, the son of a homeless labourer, is anathematised by that class because of his poverty as well as his ‘dirty deed’, Murphy argues. Class and sectarian divisions are explored in other plays of the period, such as Rutherford Mayne’s The Troth (1909) and St John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911). As Murphy illustrates, the contemporaneous growth of trade unionism would lead some 90

See Marion Walls, ‘[Re]creation of Self, Text, and Audience: The Impact of Tressell’s Irish Roots on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’, in Revisiting Robert Tressell’s Mugsborough: New Perspectives on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. by Julie Cairnie and Marion Walls (New York: Cambria, 2008), pp. 103–27.

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dramatists to question the class politics of the theatre space itself – to ask not only what was welcomed on the Abbey stage and why, but also who was welcome in its audiences. Following the partition of Ireland, both the Free State and Northern Ireland were assailed on the Irish stage because of perceived betrayals of the working class. George Shiels, M. J. Molloy and Walter Macken all contribute to this critical theatre, though as Murphy notes, the balance between levity and seriousness is perennially problematic. Audiences often prefer a heavy dose of the former to the latter. Such concerns of course question the extent to which the theatre can be considered a democratic space. This is an issue of deep disquietude for many practitioners, from Delia Larkin and the other founders of the Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company at Liberty Hall in the 1910s, to practitioners of community theatre, such as DubbelJoint, Derry Frontline, Martin Lynch and Charabanc in more recent decades. In his chapter, John Brannigan argues that ‘the relationship between aesthetics and democracy, and the question about how change happens, are central concerns of working-class writing.’ O’Casey and Behan, whose commonalities and differences he explores, are writers ‘profoundly preoccupied with the disillusionments and betrayals of post-revolutionary Ireland’. Brannigan assesses the extent to which their writings, in both content and form, work against the grain of cultural and social elitism. That these worker-playwrights endured very personal struggles against this elitism is of course integral to their writing, the ‘exceptionality of the working-class writer’, as Brannigan terms it, evident in the Dublin childhoods of both:  ‘The working-class intellectual’ is ‘an extraordinary, and perhaps even oxymoronic figure’. In grappling with the personal, political and aesthetic challenges their different artistic journeys entailed, O’Casey and Behan encountered problems central to the political emancipation of their class. ‘A persistent theme in O’Casey’s drama is the attempt by working-class men and women [. . .] to become visible as thinking democratic subjects,’ Brannigan writes. In Behan, the retelling and refashioning of canonical works facilitates a process of appropriation and subversion in which a struggle for cultural democracy takes form. In considering working-class historical novels and bildungsroman, Mary McGlynn observes a ‘substantial evolution’ from the 1960s to the 1980s: ‘Earlier texts maintain preoccupations common to modernist and post-war texts: the centrality of clergy; social hypocrisy; the sprawling family with abusive alcoholic father and weary, loving mother; dreary squalor. By contrast, later texts tend to take these as clichés to be avoided if possible.’ McGlynn’s chapter examines the ways in which class and identity circulate

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in post-1950s Irish life, the challenges of second-wave feminism and the emerging conflict in the north of Ireland generating tensions and exposing contradictions that herald major political change. McGlynn considers also how the intersections that emerge from these conflicts transform the fiction; though, if identity politics brings progress in some spheres, it can also bring questionable results in others. In a British context, Sally R. Munt would note the ways in which class politics receded with the growing tide of identity-based campaigns in the latter decades of the twentieth century. She wrote in 2000 that ‘whereas there has been public debate for the last twenty years on positive images of women, people of colour, and gays and lesbians, there has been no such equivalent clamour for working-class representation.’91 In an Irish context, McGlynn discusses how writers in this period try to ‘reclaim a space’ for the working class. Maria Pramaggiore has recalled how, for one of the most memorable working-class women in Irish fiction and film  – Roddy Doyle’s Sharon Curley (The Snapper: novel 1990; film 1999) – pop music provided a means of challenging sexism, classism and social stigma. In the film version of The Snapper, Sharon, ‘pregnant and drunk, sings “Papa Don’t Preach” for her friends at a Dublin karaoke pub [. . . and] impersonates Madonna – popular music’s most egregious bad girl  – by performing a song that underscores the film’s interest in teen pregnancy, family, Catholicism, and Irish working-class culture’.92 As John Storey observes, one of the most widespread definitions of popular culture that emerged in early debates about its (often presumed negative) effects on society, was ‘the degraded “mass culture” of the new urban-industrial working class’ – ‘the culture of the “common people” has always been an object of concern for men and women with social and political power.’93 Sharon Curley finds a means of rejecting men who ‘preach’ – and more broadly, the specific ways in which working-class women, as Skeggs puts it, have been ‘coded as the sexual and deviant other against which femininity was defined’.94 That she does so by performing a richly subversive pop song is telling. Popular culture becomes an increasingly vital arena for counter-cultures and working-class assertion in the post–World War Two era in Ireland as elsewhere, and as 91

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Sally R. Munt, ‘Introduction’, in Cultural Studies and the Working Class, Subject to Change, ed. by Sally R. Munt (London: Cassell, 2000), pp. 1–16 (p. 8). Maria Pramaggiore, ‘ “Papa Don’t Preach”:  Pregnancy and Performance in Contemporary Irish Cinema’, in The Irish in Us:  Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 110–29 (p. 110). John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture:  From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2003), p. 1. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, p. 167.

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Victor Merriman’s chapter illustrates, Irish dramatists quickly discovered in Anglo-American youth culture and music a potent means of defying church and state. Merriman contrasts the significant success of James McKenna’s The Scatterin’ (1959) with the relative paucity of commentary it has secured in theatre histories. He notes also how popular culture, class politics and feminist ideas intersect in the play, and argues for a class lens, not just in relation to how the playwrights surveyed in his chapter are understood, but also in relation to their place within the canon of Irish twentieth-century theatre. In Merriman’s view, ‘dramas of these decades stage a contest between an emerging – and increasingly, normative – individualism, and a series of embattled visions of collective living.’ Reactionary politics took on a different hue in Northern Ireland, though similarities in how class inequality has rankled across the sectarian divide there provide insights into the commonalities in working-class experience north and south.95 Adam Hanna’s chapter on ‘Troubles’ poetry and the working class begins with a discussion of the cultural as well as economic gaps between rich and poor in Belfast. These gaps were very evident in an education system split between grammar and intermediate schools, yet the former, for all their faults and inequalities, often proved themselves vehicles for social mobility, propelling many bright pupils from less well-off families into university education. From the mid-twentieth century onward, these ‘fish out of water’ would provide much of the intellectual force behind calls for political change in Northern Ireland. Some were acutely aware of the class as well as sectarian divide, one of them, the Protestant playwright Stewart Parker, recalling of his grammar schooling: ‘I had two and a half years of Latin, French, History, Snobbery and Conformity to catch up on [. . .] The social stuffiness and intellectual drudgery combined to make me resentful, morose, wretched and inwardly priggish and arrogant: in short, adolescent, but with a vengeance.’96 This arriviste class would do a good deal to expose the fault-lines in a sclerotic and often despotic Northern Ireland, though class, as Hanna attests, is too often treated as a side issue in histories of the post-1960s conflict. That most ‘Troubles’ violence occurred in urban working-class neighbourhoods is not lost on the north’s most celebrated late twentieth-century poets, however, and some, like Seamus Heaney and 95

96

For an analysis of class and the Troubles, see for instance Colin Coulter’s essays, ‘The Absence of Class Politics in Northern Ireland’, Capital and Class, 69 (1999), pp. 77–100, and ‘Under Which Constitutional Arrangement Would You Still Prefer to be Unemployed? Neoliberalism, the Peace Process, and the Politics of Class in Northern Ireland’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 37 (2014), pp. 763–76. Marilynn Richtarik, Stewart Parker: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 12.

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Michael Longley, feel very personally their remove from the working class. Others, such as John Hewitt, John Campbell, Michael Brophy and Gerald Dawe, reconfigure the more recognisable conflict between orange and green as one between rich and poor. Hanna’s focus here constitutes ‘an attempt to find ways of complicating distinctions that, in their binary nature, run the risk of reductive stereotyping’. Mark Phelan makes similar arguments regarding theatre and performance in Northern Ireland during the same period, performance (in its broadest sense) being particularly crucial in the reproduction of class distinctions, he argues. ‘There is a vast amount of historiographical work still to be undertaken as regards retrieving and analysing an important, albeit occluded, tradition of plays that deal with working-class identity, politics and experience,’ Phelan writes. Commencing with the work of socialist dramatist John Boyd, his chapter explores a wide range of ‘Troubles’ playwrights and their representations of working-class life to the present day. In much of this work, efforts to bring the northern working class together often fall on deaf ears. Often too, the playwrights collapse into reductive ‘two-tribes’ depictions of the conflict, which fail to attend to both the complexity of Northern Irish sectarianism and the centrality of British imperialism. But many playwrights do indeed point to these fundamentals, or indeed to the more everyday power struggles in working-class life. The north’s vibrant vein of community theatre is also explored, and while Phelan indicates the potential for bottom-up empowerment it provides, he also suggests potential hazards. Bringing working-class experience to largely middle-class audiences produces tensions that writers have perennially struggled to square with a notionally emancipatory aesthetic politics. As Phelan conveys, recent Northern Irish plays have attempted to challenge neo-liberal notions that political progress for the working class is inextricably linked with economic ‘regeneration’. The first major strike in twentieth-century Belfast, the 1907 Dock Strike, which brought Catholic and Protestant workers together in common cause, was partially the work of Irish-Liverpudlian trade unionist James Larkin, and Claire Lynch’s chapter on worker biographies opens by focussing on the imposing statue of Larkin on Dublin’s O’Connell Street. The statue ‘zooms in, isolates, magnifies’ the great figure. But what of all those others – those Larkin’s great orations addressed? Working-class people who wrote of their own lives often faced ‘considerable obstacles of time, opportunity, and community censure’. Standing outside one’s community, and commenting on its failures and shortcomings, was also the cause of isolation, or even feelings of betrayal and anomie: ‘working-class people who

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forged opportunities to write were often viewed with suspicion, hostility even, by friends and family.’ Here the ‘class limbo’ experienced by these writers is not only evident in the tensions portrayed in their works, but also in ‘the discriminatory treatment of working-class writers by the scholars and publishers who overlook [them] in broader discussions on Irish writing’, Lynch argues. Eamonn Jordan’s chapter brings us to the near-present in its consideration of class consciousness in Celtic Tiger–era theatre. As Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux and Amanda Haynes observe, if ‘class inequality has been and remains a significant element of Irish society [. . .] the myth of a classless Ireland was perpetuated most strongly during the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom’.97 Jordan explores, then, working-class theatre in an era when the language of class inequality (let alone class war) was increasingly unfashionable, and it is therefore unsurprising that ‘rather than reinforce binaries of hegemonic and non-hegemonic, marginalised and centralised, privileged and subjugated, these plays demonstrate something more complicated.’ His chapter nonetheless shows how playwrights find reservoirs of communal feeling amidst ‘the dog-eat-dog world, the everyday of capitalism, which dominates most ways of relating’. It also probes how the academy has conceptualised class in the theatre, and how the plays Jordan surveys frequently have ‘far more interesting things to say about class than most scholarship’. While the academy has barely begun to tackle the writing that has emerged in the aftermath of Ireland’s recent, deep recession, it is certain that green shoots are emerging in class-conscious fiction, poetry, theatre and other forms of writing, including in digital forms, and that these texts are reconnecting with common themes across the writing explored in this book. Working-class writing remains an important resource and activity in the struggles of the present. As Stephen Yeo wrote in a 2009 reflection on the work of working-class writers’ movements in Britain thirty years earlier, In spite of every rumour to the contrary, class [. . .] is as powerful and necessary as ever, but more global in its actual and necessary reach than we took it to be in 1982. Writing is even more important to class practice and formation than we took it to be in the early 1980s [. . .] The opportunities for and meaning of ‘publication’, in and against its dominant modes and ideologies, have changed out of all recognition. This is not to say that it is 97

Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux and Amanda Haynes, ‘Class Invisibility and Stigmatization: Irish Media Coverage of a Public Housing Estate in Limerick’, in Social Inequality & the Politics of Representation – A Global Landscape, ed. by Celine-Marie Pascale (Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2013), pp. 2–20 (p. 3).

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any easier to use them to direct our futures. But it is, I guess, technically more possible.98

Declan Kiberd and H. Gustav Klaus, bookending this collection, remind us of the ways in which the cultural histories of the working class in Ireland traverse national and international contexts. They urge the research conducted for this project to strive further, onto fresh terrain, and the blossoms they envisage will no doubt emerge among those who add to and challenge this book. There are many studies of working-class writing internationally that provide further comparative contexts in which Irish working-class texts can be fruitfully re-examined. Scholars such as Klaus, Ian Haywood, Jeremy Hawthorn, Pamela Fox, Nicola Wilson, Janet Zandy, Nicholas Coles, John Russo, Sherry Lee Linkon, Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Paul Lauter, Kirstie Blair, Mina Gorji, Sonali Perera, Jacques Rancière, Tim Ashplant and others, present in monographs, edited collections, anthologies – and increasingly, digitised archives – a range of resources for those who wish to carry the study of Irish working-class writing onto new terrain.99 As Klaus advises, despite ‘widespread class blindness or indifference in Irish Studies, an otherwise burgeoning field in the last quarter of the twentieth century [. . .] he or she who seeketh, findeth.’ This book, and the Cambridge histories of British and American working-class writing that are published in parallel with it, suggest the significant potential for those who seek. If class is, as Lawrence Driscoll has put it, ‘a troubling subterranean and repressed element in contemporary literature, theory, and culture’, this book heralds a process of scholarly excavation and analysis that adds substantially to the mapping of an Irish ‘subterranean’ tradition.100

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Stephen Yeo, ‘The Republic of Letters, 1982–2008: A Note’, in The Republic of Letters: WorkingClass Writing and Local Publishing, ed. by Steve Parks and Nick Pollard (Philadelphia, PA, and New York: New City Community Press/Syracuse University Press, 2009), pp. 216–18 (p. 216). See for example Janet Zandy, Calling Home: An Anthology of Working-Class Women’s Writing (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Janet Zandy, ed., What we Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies (New York: The Feminist Press at the University of New York, 2001); Zandy and Nicholas Coles, eds., American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, eds., New WorkingClass Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Michelle M. Tokarczyk, ed. Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2011); Paul Lauter, ‘Working-Class Women’s Literature: An Introduction to Study’, Radical Teacher, 15 (1980), pp. 16–26. Lawrence Driscoll, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 1.

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Ch apter 1

Writing and Theorising the Irish Working Class David Convery*

In Labour in Irish History (1910), James Connolly complained that ‘Irish history has ever been written by the master class – in the interests of the master class.’1 Strong words, but at the time there was more than an element of truth about them. In 1910 Ireland was a primarily agricultural country with an underdeveloped labour movement. The Labour Party would not be founded until 1912 and the dramatic growth in membership and influence of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), formed in 1909, was still some way in the future. The Irish labour movement, for the most part, did not attract or develop an intelligentsia as did its counterparts in Germany, France and, to a lesser extent, Britain. Unlike those countries, however, Ireland had another issue that dominated radical, as well as mainstream attention: the national question. Ireland’s relationship with Britain was the central issue of the day. As such, when introducing his aforementioned work, Connolly could argue that: It is in itself a significant commentary upon the subordinate place allotted to labour in Irish politics that a writer should think it necessary to explain his purpose before setting out to detail for the benefit of his readers the position of the Irish workers in the past, and the lessons to be derived from a study of that position in guiding the movement of the working class to-day.2

* I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for its award of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, during which this piece was researched and written. Earlier drafts were presented at a seminar held at the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class, NUI Galway, in September 2015, and at a workshop in Queen’s University Belfast in March 2016. I would like to thank the audiences on both occasions for their constructive feedback. 1 James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin:  New Books edition, 1983), p.  1. This work was originally published in book form in 1910 by Maunsel & Co., Dublin. 2 Ibid. For more on this work, see Fintan Lane, ‘James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History’, in Mobilising Classics: Reading Radical Writing in Ireland, ed. by Fiona Dukelow and Orla O’Donovan (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2010), pp.  38–53, and Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh, ‘James Connolly and the Writing of Labour in Irish History (1910)’, Saothar:  Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, 27 (2002), pp. 103–8.

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Connolly’s book was a pioneering study, even though, despite its name, it dealt less with the place of labour in Irish history than with the national struggle as seen from the perspective of labour. The first real history of the labour movement came a few years later with W. P. Ryan’s The Irish Labour Movement from the ’Twenties to Our Own Day (1919). Like Connolly’s, Ryan’s work had a political as well as an educative purpose. Writing in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval, when membership of the labour movement was surging into the hundreds of thousands, he declared that ‘Irish Labour, after a shattering and inhuman history, is being called to come forth and work with mind and soul as well as body’, poetically looking to the coming time when the longed-for ‘Commonwealth’ was no longer a ‘dream of the departing night’ but ‘a fact of the rising day’, where ‘Life to those who will it can be allied with Beauty, and Work with Wonder.’3 It was not to be. The works of Connolly and Ryan heralded a false dawn, for the ‘co-operative commonwealth’ and labour history alike, the latter not finding solid footing until the 1970s, the former still a distant dream. This chapter investigates how the Irish working class has been written about and theorised. This is potentially a vast subject, so it has been limited for the most part to a consideration of academic works, rather than overtly political tracts or governmental reports, for instance. To begin with, it will provide a brief overview of the development of Irish labour historiography, which forms the bulk of academic works about the Irish working class, followed by a discussion on the nature of class in Ireland, informed primarily by works in sociology and anthropology.4 It will conclude with some thoughts on developing a theoretical framework to better conceptualise the nature of the Irish working class through history to the present day.

Irish Labour History – An Overview Most early works on Irish labour history originated outside of Ireland itself. The first academic study was arguably Labour and Nationalism in

3

4

W. P. Ryan, The Irish Labour Movement from the ’Twenties to Our Own Day (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1919), p. 265. For more detailed reflections on Irish labour historiography, see Fintan Lane, ‘Envisaging Labour History: Some Reflections on Irish Historiography and the Working Class’, in Essays in Irish Labour History: A Festschrift for Elizabeth and John W. Boyle, ed. by Francis Devine, Fintan Lane and Niamh Puirséil (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008), pp. 9–25; and Emmet O’Connor and Conor McCabe, ‘Ireland’, in Histories of Labour:  National and International Perspectives, ed. by Joan Allen, Alan Campbell and John McIlroy (Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2010), pp. 137–63. The former is particularly good on the development of labour history pre-1960, the latter post-1960.

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Ireland (1925), written by an American, J. Dunsmore Clarkson.5 Another American, Emmet Larkin, would publish the first scholarly biography of that giant of the Irish labour movement, Jim Larkin, in 1965.6 Irish labour history also attracted the interest of a number of British socialists. R. M. Fox in particular, was a prolific writer in the genre, with his Green Banners: The Story of the Irish Struggle (1938), Years of Freedom: The Story of Ireland, 1921–1948 (1948), a history of the Irish Citizen Army (1943) and biographies of three major trade union leaders, James Connolly (1946), Jim Larkin (1957) and Louie Bennett (1958), to his credit.7 These were generally outline histories, however, written in a journalistic style from a sympathetic position and lacking systematic objective research. Other examples include T. A. Jackson’s Ireland Her Own (1946) and Peter Berresford Ellis’s A History of the Irish Working Class (1972).8 It was the works of C. Desmond Greaves, however, which were to prove the most influential, as well as the most scholarly. The Life and Times of James Connolly (1961) stood well above previous biographies of Connolly and marked a new departure for studies of Irish labour history. Greaves would also later publish important texts on Liam Mellows (1971) and the ITGWU (1982).9 Overall, the Irish works of all four of these British socialists tended to shape a simplified historical narrative that married nationalism and socialism in a teleological ‘people’s struggle’ against imperialism, rather than viewing historical events, actors and ideas in their own complex and often conflicting context. This approach drew heavily on, and may even have originated with, 5

6

7

8

9

J. Dunsmore Clarkson, Labour and Nationalism in Ireland (New York: Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. 20, 1925). See also Conor McCabe, ‘Labour Classic: J. Dunsmore Clarkson, Labour and Nationalism in Ireland (1925)’, Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, 42 (2017), pp. 117–20. Emmet Larkin, James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader, 1876–1947 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). Author and subject were not related. R. M. Fox, Green Banners: The Story of the Irish Struggle (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938); Fox, Years of Freedom: The Story of Ireland, 1921–1948 (Cork: Trumpet Books, 1948); Fox, The History of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: J. Duffy & Co., 1943); Fox, James Connolly: The Forerunner (Tralee: Kerryman Ltd., 1946); Fox, Jim Larkin: The Rise of the Underman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1957); Fox, Louie Bennett: Her Life and Times (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1958). T. A. Jackson, Ireland Her Own: An Outline History of the Irish Struggle for National Freedom and Independence (London:  Cobbett Press, 1946). There have been numerous further editions and reprints of this book by the publisher Lawrence & Wishart. Peter Berresford Ellis, A History of the Irish Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1972). C. Desmond Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1961); Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (London:  Lawrence & Wishart, 1971); Greaves, The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, The Formative Years:  1909–1923 (Dublin:  Gill & Macmillan, 1982). See also Adrian Grant, ‘Labour Classic: C. Desmond Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1961; London, New York & Berlin, 1972, 1976, 1986), pp. 448’, Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, 41 (2016), pp. 139–44.

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the aforementioned works by Connolly and Ryan. Despite their drawbacks, however, they offered a distinct and important corrective to the elitist ‘great men’ approach to Irish history. Within Ireland, publications had appeared intermittently since the 1920s, but these mostly took the form of agitational and/or commemorative pamphlets and short books produced by left-wing political groups or trade unions. The 1970s brought a significant change to Irish labour historiography. That decade saw the first serious scholarly studies of labour politics and trade unions in Ireland in the form of Labour in Irish Politics, 1890–1930 (1974) by Arthur Mitchell, who, like Clarkson and Larkin before him, was an academic from the United States; and Charles McCarthy’s Trade Unions in Ireland, 1894–1960 (1977).10 The most significant development, however, was the creation of the Irish Labour History Society in 1973 and its journal, Saothar, in 1975. Since its first issue, Saothar’s annual release has been a boon to the study of working-class history in Ireland.11 Its mere existence has acted as a pole of attraction and has encouraged and provided support to generations of scholars, publishing hundreds of articles, many of which, as one of its former editors Fintan Lane convincingly argues, may otherwise have remained unpublished.12 Aside from Saothar, the study of Irish labour history has advanced considerably in recent decades. There is a small-scale industry in Connolly studies and there is now a well-developed literature on the glory days of Larkinism and the ITGWU from 1907–23.13 In the latter category can be counted, alongside Greaves’s 1982 work cited earlier, John Gray’s City in Revolt (1985); John Newsinger’s Rebel City (2004); Pádraig Yeates’s Lockout:  Dublin 1913 (2000); and Emmet O’Connor’s Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917–1923 (1988), James Larkin (2002) and Big Jim Larkin: Hero or Wrecker? (2015).14 O’Connor has also written the standard general history 10

11

12 13

14

Arthur Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, 1890–1930:  The Irish Labour Movement in an Age of Revolution (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974); Charles McCarthy, Trade Unions in Ireland, 1894– 1960 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1977). Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society has appeared each year, bar 1985, since its first issue in 1975. Lane, ‘Envisaging Labour History’, p. 19. Examples of work on Connolly include Samuel Levenson, James Connolly:  A Biography (London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1973); Ruth Dudley Edwards, James Connolly (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1981); Austen Morgan, James Connolly: A Political Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Kieran Allen, The Politics of James Connolly (London: Pluto Press, 1990); Donal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘A Full Life’ (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005); and Lorcan Collins, James Connolly (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2012). John Gray, City in Revolt:  James Larkin and the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907 (Belfast:  Blackstaff Press, 1985); John Newsinger, Rebel City:  Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement

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of the Irish labour movement, A Labour History of Ireland 1824–2000 (2011), although John W.  Boyle’s The Irish Labor Movement in the Nineteenth Century (1988) is equally indispensable for the pre-Larkin years.15 The experience of the labour movement in Ulster has received attention in studies such as Henry Patterson’s Class  Conflict and Sectarianism (1980); Austen Morgan’s Labour and Partition (1991); Graham Walker’s The Politics of Frustration (1985); and Aaron Edwards’ A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (2009).16 The history of working-class women is a developing field, although, as with women’s history in general, much scope for expansion remains. In regard to the position of women within the workforce and the wider working class, important book-length studies include Marilyn Cohen’s Linen, Family, and Community in Tullylish, County Down (1997); Joanna Bourke’s Husbandry to Housewifery (1993); Maria Luddy’s Prostitution and Irish Society (2007); and a significant oral history by Elizabeth Kiely and Máire Leane, Irish Women at Work, 1930–1960 (2012). Works on women in the labour movement include Mary Jones’s These Obstreperous Lassies:  A History of the Irish Women Workers’ Union (1988); and Rosemary Cullen Owens’s biography of trade union leader Louie Bennett (2001).17 It should be noted too that the study of many other areas of women’s history contains a strong working-class element, even if it is not an explicit study of working-class women per se. In this latter category can be counted works on the Magdalen asylums, sexuality, unmarried motherhood, and emigration, for instance.

15

16

17

(London:  Merlin, 2004); Pádraig Yeates, Lockout:  Dublin 1913 (Dublin:  Gill & Macmillan, 2000); Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917–1923 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1988); O’Connor, James Larkin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002); O’Connor, Big Jim Larkin: Hero or Wrecker? (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2015). Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland 1824–2000, rev. edn (Dublin:  University College Dublin Press, 2011); John W.  Boyle, The Irish Labor Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988). Henry Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism: The Protestant Working Class and the Belfast Labour Movement, 1868–1920 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1980); Austen Morgan, Labour and Partition: The Belfast Working Class, 1905–1923 (London:  Pluto Press, 1991); Graham Walker, The Politics of Frustration: Harry Midgley and the Failure of Labour in Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); Aaron Edwards, A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism and Sectarianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Marilyn Cohen, Linen, Family, and Community in Tullylish, County Down, 1690–1914 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997); Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery:  Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Kiely and Máire Leane, Irish Women at Work, 1930–1960:  An Oral History (Dublin:  Irish Academic Press, 2012); Mary Jones, These Obstreperous Lassies: A History of the Irish Women Workers’ Union (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1988); Rosemary Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001).

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Radical working-class politics in the form of socialist republicanism and communism before the Second World War has been of considerable interest to historians, as seen in works such as Henry Patterson’s The Politics of Illusion (1989); Richard English’s Radicals and the Republic (1994); Adrian Grant’s Irish Socialist Republicanism (2012); Emmet O’Connor’s Reds and the Green (2004); Seán Byers’ Seán Murray (2015); plus numerous biographies of Peadar O’Donnell and Frank Ryan.18 Postwar radicalism has yet to receive the same objective treatment, although The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (2009), by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, shows the potential for outstanding work in this area.19 Most curious, however, is the absence of a developed historiography on the Irish Labour Party, Michael Gallagher’s The Irish Labour Party in Transition, 1957–82 (1982) and Niamh Puirséil’s The Irish Labour Party, 1922–73 (2007) being the substantial exceptions.20 Thus far, it seems that attempts at radical change as opposed to measured reform have caused the most excitement for historians. As the study of working-class politics develops, however, it must also consider and attempt to explain what may be the more mundane  – but also more mainstream  – working-class support for the aforementioned Labour Party, and also, perhaps more importantly, Fianna Fáil. In this respect, Kieran Allen’s Fianna Fáil and Irish Labour (1997), but also Richard Dunphy’s The Making of Fianna Fáil Power in Ireland 1923–1948 (1995), are the works to follow.21

18

19

20

21

Henry Patterson, The Politics of Illusion: Republicanism and Socialism in Modern Ireland (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989); Richard English, Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State, 1925–1937 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Adrian Grant, Irish Socialist Republicanism, 1909–36 (Dublin:  Four Courts Press, 2012); Emmet O’Connor, Reds and the Green:  Ireland, Russia and the Communist Internationals, 1919–43 (Dublin:  University College Dublin Press, 2004); Seán Byers, Seán Murray:  Marxist-Leninist and Irish Socialist Republican (Sallins: Irish Academic Press, 2015). There have been four book-length studies of O’Donnell, the best of which is Donal Ó Drisceoil’s Peadar O’Donnell (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001). The three book-length studies of Frank Ryan all offer something valuable, but the best is still arguably Seán Cronin’s original study Frank Ryan: The Search for the Republic (Dublin: Repsol, 1980). Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2009). Michael Gallagher, The Irish Labour Party in Transition, 1957–82 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982); Niamh Puirséil, The Irish Labour Party, 1922–73 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007). Kieran Allen, Fianna Fáil and Irish Labour:  1926 to the Present (London:  Pluto Press, 1997); Richard Dunphy, The Making of Fianna Fáil Power in Ireland, 1923–1948 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1995).

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Conceptualising Class The term ‘labour history’ can itself be a bit of a misnomer. What has traditionally been classified internationally as the study of the history of the labour movement – trade unions, trades councils, co-operatives, strikes, political parties, etc. – has in recent decades expanded to study the working class as a whole. Issues such as working-class culture, religion, identity, mentalities, the family, gender, entertainment, discourse, and everyday life are now topics of serious consideration in Western European and North American labour historiography.22 A number of suggestions have been forwarded to overcome the arising misconceptions. For instance, Fintan Lane, a former editor of Saothar, has suggested that ‘a strong argument could be made for dispensing altogether with the term “labour history”, which seems to exclude rather than include, and referring instead to the “history of the working class” or “working-class history”.’23 In the absence of any agreement, however, it is convenient to refer to the schema adopted by Marcel van der Linden and Lex Heerma van Voss of ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ labour history; ‘narrow’ referring to the study of the labour movement, and ‘broad’ to the wider study of the working class.24 The study of labour history in Ireland has, with some notable exceptions, been overwhelmingly of the ‘narrow’ type, focussing on labour organisation, strikes and politics. There are numerous reasons why this has been the case, which are beyond the scope of this current study, but the small numbers involved in labour history, its historically limited support from institutes of higher education and the weakness of labour in the realm of politics are noteworthy. This is not to detract from the quality of the work that has been done, however, which is often exceptional. It is largely due to the consistent publication of Saothar that even a general outline of the key events, individuals and institutions in the field of ‘narrow’ labour history has been made possible, arguably a necessary requirement before more in-depth analysis can be attempted of the areas concerning ‘broad’ labour history. However, an unintentional consequence of this focus on ‘narrow’ labour history is the general lack of theorisation concerning class from Irish historians, even Marxists, who have tended to focus instead on

22 23 24

This may also be the case elsewhere, though it is beyond the scope of the author’s expertise. Lane, ‘Envisaging Labour History’, pp. 22–3. Marcel van der Linden and Lex Heerma van Voss, ‘Introduction’, in Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History, ed. by Marcel van der Linden and Lex Heerma van Voss (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), pp. 1–39.

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the national question and its intersection with labour organisation and socialism. In a recent historiographical overview written by Emmet O’Connor and Conor McCabe, it is argued that much Irish labour historiography over the past few decades has modelled itself on a ‘value-free’ approach to the past which steers away from ideology. The authors argue that, in practice, however, it is ‘strongly shaped by liberal idealism and modernization theory.’ This leads to an emphasis on the influence of ideas and people, ‘rather than material forces, in determining labour behaviour.’ In line with modernisation theory, it sees the slow progress of labour as a result of late industrialisation and the ‘enduring power of those three villains of socialist demonology, the priest, the peasant and the patriot.’25 This trend is evident, but the criticisms can go even further. The existence of the working class is, for the most part, taken for granted by labour historians. It is not explained what is meant by the working class, how it formed and re-forms, how it relates to other classes and if and how it thinks for itself. To take a well-known example, there is, for instance, no Irish equivalent of E. P. Thompson’s famous preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1963), where he theorises the working class not as ‘a descriptive term’, but as ‘a historical phenomenon’, an ‘active process’ with the working class being ‘present at its own making’.26 If labour historians take class for granted, the flip side of this is for others to downplay class or even to deny its existence. In a chapter titled ‘Inequality, poverty, and class’, the authors of the third edition of A Sociology of Ireland (2007), observe that: Irish society is often thought of as a classless society. Irish people tend to treat one another fairly informally, preferring, for example, to use first names even with relative strangers rather than titles and surnames. Holding a certain job or speaking with a particular accent is not widely regarded as entitling a person to special respect. Irish social life is characterised by an egalitarian ethic that rejects attempts by some groups to claim social honour from others. There is also a widespread belief that opportunities for social betterment have increased and that anyone can study hard, get good educational qualifications and move into a better position in society if they want to. This does not mean that people have no sense of inequality as a part of Irish society; rather, inequality tends to be understood in terms of a gross differentiation between the majority – the ‘more or less middle classes’ – and 25 26

O’Connor and McCabe, ‘Ireland’, p. 142. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Pelican edition, 1968), p. 9.

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an ‘underclass’ made up of the poor, the long-term unemployed, substance abusers and marginalised groups such as Travellers.27

This book was published just before the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and perhaps might read differently today. The chapter was cut, however, from the subsequent shorter edition published in 2012.28 This denial of class or smoothing out of class divisions is not just a recent phenomenon that can be put down to the Celtic Tiger boom. As Liam Cullinane notes, in 1955, the opinion of a French writer that Ireland was ‘financially stable and practically classless’ was described by the Irish Times as ‘well-informed’, and, in 1964, the idea that education in Ireland was ‘class-ridden’ was condemned by the president of University College Dublin as ‘the intervention of pseudo-problems’; instead he argued that Ireland was ‘extremely classless’.29 Cullinane also notes an example provided by Diarmaid Ferriter of a district court judge in Limerick in 1963 refusing to accept the counsel’s argument that farmers and farm labourers were representative of different social classes.30 The body of work published by labour historians clearly demonstrates the existence of an Irish working class. Empirical studies on issues such as social mobility also show the continuing existence of an Irish working class to the present day.31 Why then this denial? Could the issue be one of self-identification? Peter Mair investigated this question through an analysis of the 1989 European Election Study, which surveyed respondents throughout what was then the European Community.32 As Mair remarked, ‘The results are

27

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29

30

31

32

Perry Share, Hilary Tovey and Mary P. Corcoran, A Sociology of Ireland, 3rd edn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2007), pp. 170–98. The quote is taken from p. 170. Perry Share, Hilary Tovey and Mary P. Corcoran, A Sociology of Ireland, 4th edn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012). Class is discussed in this edition of the book, although as part of wider issues. See, for instance, chapter 5, ‘Who Rules Ireland?’, pp. 91–115, and chapter 6, ‘Work and Livelihood’, pp. 116–44. Irish Times, 16 July 1955 and Irish Independent, 29 June 1964, cited in Liam Cullinane, ‘ “As If You Were Something Under Their Shoe”: Class, Gender and Status among Cork Textile Workers, 1930– 70’, in Locked Out:  A Century of Irish Working-Class  Life, ed. by David Convery (Dublin:  Irish Academic Press, 2013), pp. 175–91. The citations are from p. 175. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland: 1900–2000 (London: Profile, 2005), p. 7, cited in Cullinane, ‘Class, Gender and Status’, pp. 175–6. See, for instance, Richard Breen and Christopher T. Whelan, Social Mobility and Social Class in Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996). Peter Mair, ‘Explaining the Absence of Class Politics in Ireland’, in The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland: The Third Joint Meeting of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy, Oxford, 1990, Proceedings of the British Academy, 79, ed. by J. H. Goldthorpe and C. T. Whelan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 383–410. The book can be viewed online here: www.britac.ac.uk/ pubs/proc/volumes/pba79.html [accessed 25 April 2016]. Material on the 1989 and other European Election Studies can be found at http://eeshomepage.net/home/ [accessed 25 April 2016].

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striking and, in some senses, surprising.’33 He found that although almost 9 per cent of the Irish respondents ‘refused or were unable to assign themselves to a social class’, 41.9 per cent assigned themselves to the working class. This figure was second only to Britain’s (45.9 per cent), and far ahead of countries such as Denmark (21.9 per cent), Germany (21 per cent), Italy (22.9 per cent) and Spain (12.1 per cent). As Mair argued, ‘In sum, these figures not only suggest that class categories mean something to the vast majority of Irish voters, but also that Ireland is characterised by a relatively high level of working-class self awareness [sic].’34 Recent surveys tend to show that working-class self-identification has endured for the most part since then, despite the dramatic social and economic changes in the intervening years. For instance, in a 2005 survey conducted by Amárach Research, 35 per cent of respondents assigned themselves as working class, while in 2011, a few years into the economic crisis, this figure had gone up to 41 per cent.35 In these surveys, when asked explicitly whether people thought of themselves as working class, the result was clear. In this regard, it is instructive to look at those who do the denying. All three examples cited by Cullinane concern people in positions of authority and influence, unlikely in any circumstance to describe themselves as working class. Part of the problem may also lie in the differences between the academic and the vernacular language used to conceptualise class. As Cullinane also noted, ‘Terms like working class and middle class are, to some extent, British importations and may not necessarily be a natural part of the Irish lexicon.’36 Discussing his oral histories of female textile workers in Cork, he observed that ‘more insular terms like “grandies”, “big people”, “cottage people”, “money people”, etc. appear as indicators of social class. Similarly, geographical representations of class are often employed’.37 Wealthier areas in Cork such as Montenotte were contrasted with working-class Gurranabraher, for instance.38 An equivalent in Dublin might be the images conjured in the mind when one hears references to D4 or to Tallaght. Historians of Ireland have been relatively slow to deal with the issue of language. However, studies conducted by a number of anthropologists over the years have echoed Cullinane’s findings, and demonstrate 33 34 35

36 37 38

Mair, ‘Explaining the Absence of Class Politics in Ireland’, p. 389. Ibid. The surveys had a sample size of 1,000. A graph of the results can be viewed here: www.turbulenceahead.com/2011/02/comrades-in-debt.html [accessed 25 April 2016]. Unfortunately, the survey is no longer available on Amárach Research’s own page. Cullinane, ‘Class, Gender and Status’, p. 188. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 180–2, 188–9.

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that close observation of the vernacular language used in varying contexts is central to an understanding of class in Ireland. Take, for instance, Graham McFarlane’s ethnographic study of Protestant identity in the village of Ballycuan in Northern Ireland.39 McFarlane observed that: all residents see class as being tied up in different ways with occupation, power, wealth and education. For the people of the village the number of classes in Northern Ireland ranges between 1 and 6, but for everyone in the village, only two classes are relevant for the village population. A class variously called ‘middle class’, ‘upper class’, ‘non-manual workers’, ‘professionals’ are distinguished from the majority of the population, the ‘workers’, ‘manual workers’, ‘ordinary folk’ or the ‘locals’ (the latter drawing attention to the middle class background of many non-locals). A third, almost residual, class is also identified as relevant for the village by some people: they are the ‘roughs’ who are mostly the last remnants of the agricultural labourers in the village, and who, it seems, go in for ‘mixed’ [i.e. Protestant with Catholic] marriages in a big way[.]40

Despite these differences, however, ‘for most residents’, McFarlane noted, ‘they are still all Ballycuan Protestants’.41 Chris Curtin and Colm Ryan revealed similar findings in their study of the social life situated around clubs, pubs and private houses in Ennis, County Clare, in the 1930s and the 1980s.42 They found that in the 1930s, ‘a rigid class hierarchy was well reflected in the operation of exclusive social clubs’ but they also found that in ‘the 1980s when class structure appears much more open [. . .] close ethnographic examination reveals that class and class culture continues to be of crucial importance for understanding patterns of social life.’43 They argued that in the 1930s, as a previous study by Arensberg and Kimball also concluded: The people of Ennis [. . .] were keenly aware of class differences. On the streets, one could judge with some accuracy a person’s occupation by his style of dress and from his occupation determine the type of house he lived in and in which quarter of the town it stood. In this way, the town’s great 39

40 41 42

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Graham McFarlane, ‘Dimensions of Protestantism:  The Working of Protestant Identity in a Northern Irish Village’, in Ireland from Below: Social Change and Local Communities, ed. by Chris Curtin and Thomas M.  Wilson (Galway:  Officina Typographica/Galway University Press, n.d. [1990?]), pp. 23–45. Ibid., pp. 31–2. Ibid., p. 32. Chris Curtin and Colm Ryan, ‘Clubs, Pubs and Private Houses in a Clare Town’, in Ireland from Below, pp. 128–43. Ibid., pp. 128–9.

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classes – the professionals, the merchants (or ‘big fellows’), the shopkeepers, the tradesmen and the labourers – were identified. However, no single attribute could adequately express the social divisions in the town. In addition to such factors as occupation, housing and wealth, regard had to be given to values, attitudes and customs. Subtle gradations existed within the town’s hierarchy, lines crossed and recrossed, each man knew his station and the station of his neighbour.44

By the 1980s, the nature of the workforce had changed considerably, with a greater population, higher levels of education, better housing and, most importantly, the introduction of numerous factories and a more outwardly fluid class structure. Although exclusive clubs ‘had all but disappeared’,45 class was articulated in different ways in the social landscape, various pubs and forms of entertainment being, unofficially, the semi-exclusive terrain of one class or another.46 Perhaps the most interesting example of the benefits of this approach can be found in Marilyn Silverman’s study of workers in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, which she describes as ‘an analytical and historical ethnography of labourers: their experiences, ongoing social, economic, and political lives, and the reproduction of their understandings, common sense, and ideologies.’47 The term ‘labourers’ or ‘labouring people’ referred locally to the men, women, and sometimes children who, without access to land or capital, were employed as unskilled or semi-skilled workers in local mills, tanneries, landed estates, farms, shops, and public works. Sometimes, in colloquial usage, they referred to themselves and were described by others as ‘the working class.’ Always, however, they formed the majority of the population in the town and hinterland.48

As with the examples of Ballycuan and Ennis cited previously, Silverman observed that ‘labourers’ was a term used along with other occupational categories of ‘landlords’, ‘farmers’, ‘shopkeepers’ and ‘tradesmen’, based on 44

45 46 47

48

Ibid., p. 129. The work they refer to is Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Curtin and Ryan, ‘Clubs, Pubs and Private Houses’, p. 137. Ibid., pp. 136–41. Marilyn Silverman, An Irish Working Class:  Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800–1950 (Toronto, Buffalo, London:  University of Toronto Press, 2001), p.  xii. Another noteworthy example of anthropological investigation into Irish class relations can be found in Chris Eipper’s study of Bantry, County Cork, published in his books The Ruling Trinity: A Community Study of Church, State and Business in Ireland (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1986) and Hostage to Fortune: Bantry Bay and the Encounter with Gulf Oil (St John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1989). Silverman, An Irish Working Class, pp. xi–xii.

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a local ‘culturally defined notion of “class” ’ which ‘formed an all-pervasive socio-cultural map.’ This ‘map’ fixed the categories into a hierarchy, ‘or status-class system, which expressed the separation of some and the unity of others: in access to the means of production, the labour process, lifestyle, social relations, and expectation [. . .] guiding interaction in the locality and linking people into wide-ranging networks.’49 Elaborating, Silverman argued that: This status-class map, however, only partly corresponded to an objective delineation of class as based on access to the means of production and whether labour was exploited. The status categories of labourer and landed proprietor were the only clear ones in these respects. Farmers, in contrast, had a changing relation to the land. They were tenants until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; afterwards, they became owners. They also had varied relations to labour. Some hired workers (seasonally and/or permanently); others used only family labour. Retailers, too, were tenants until the late twentieth century and only some hired labour. Artisans in their turn might be waged, domestic commodity producers or capitalists.50

Borrowing a term used by Gareth Stedman Jones, Silverman concluded that there were ‘different languages of class’ in use in Thomastown.51 Not only were there ‘status-class’ categories such as ‘farmers’ or ‘crafts’, but also ‘class’ ones such as ‘labour’ and ‘industry’. However, she rejected his notion that ‘class is a discursive rather than ontological reality’, arguing instead ‘that different world views operated simultaneously’.52 Accordingly, ‘to write the history of Thomastown’s workers requires an understanding of the continuing interplay between the two systems of categorization and of the ways in which the indeterminacies and redundancies created by their juxtaposition articulated with the needs, interests, and agency of individuals and groups.’53 As all of these examples make clear, class is real. It is real in relation to wealth, it is real in terms of power, control and freedom, and it is real in the arena of social life and entertainment. It is the subjective articulation of class that is at issue. Part of the problem in understanding class in Ireland is the inheritance of a British model of interpretation, wherein commonly 49 50 51

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Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class:  Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.  7, cited in Silverman, An Irish Working Class, p. 8. Silverman, An Irish Working Class, p. 8. Silverman does not give a citation for Stedman Jones here, but it is paraphrased from his Languages of Class, p. 8. Silverman, An Irish Working Class, p. 8.

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understood ideas about status are clearly linked to economic categories of class. The Irish case is more fluid. When economic categories of class do not adhere to the language regarding status and class as articulated in vernacular settings, confusion and potential denial of class can ensue. People in Ireland may sometimes self-identify and identify others as working class, but depending on context, they may be more likely to identify as a particular type of worker, such as labourer, carpenter or accountant, or to identify class divisions by place or by colloquial terms such as ‘grandee’, and the division in everyday social life. Each of these terms is loaded with meaning that is immediately understood by others in their proper context, suggesting types of work, outlook, education, politics and status that do not require further elaboration, or to be articulated in a formalised structure of class stratification.

Theorising the Irish Working Class Although an explicit conceptualisation of the working class is lacking in Irish labour historiography, arguably most works implicitly fit within a Marxist or a Weberian interpretation of class relations, which both place an emphasis on the working class as, at base, an economic phenomenon related to a person’s position in regard to production. To put it simply, this means people who work for a wage, who have to sell their labour to survive and who do not own independent means of subsistence in the form of monetary capital or land to farm or extract rent from. There is room for some tweaking, but overall, this definition forms a good bedrock from which to begin to conceptualise the nature of the Irish working class.54 Allying this with ideas regarding the subjective articulation of class discussed previously, and the corpus of studies conducted by historians, provides a useful framework to develop a detailed historical overview of 54

There is no room for elaboration of complex theoretical models of class here, or to discuss the merits of one model over another. Both the Marxist and Weberian approaches see class in relation to production; they differ on what this means. A key component of the Marxist interpretation is the idea of exploitation and control over surplus value. The Weberian approach tends to focus on life chances – quality of life and access to opportunity being subject to the weight of the resources one brings to the market, with a large differential operating between those who own property and those who do not. Overall, taking the relationship to production is a sound base on which to begin the task of ‘mapping’ class, and allows room for subsequent debate on issues such as gradations of income, social capital, class conflict, and the importance of class in relation to gender and race, for instance. A good overview of recent debates on class analysis can be found in Approaches to Class Analysis, ed. by Erik Olin Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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what the Irish working class is, how it has changed through time, and how it has been articulated at individual and collective levels in everything from space – housing, for instance – to sports and literature. Taking the relationship to production as a base, it is clear that the Irish working class greatly differs from the typical or even dominant image, largely imported from Britain, of the working class as primarily industrial and urban. Although in the late eighteenth century industry began to develop in Ireland on a reasonable scale relative to contemporary England, this dramatically changed by the mid-1820s. By then, British industry had begun to move from water-based to more efficient steam-based production, an ability hindered in Ireland due to the lack of coal deposits. The removal of tariff barriers between the islands coupled with a general economic depression had a disastrous impact on Irish industry, particularly textiles, as the glut of British-made goods flooded the Irish market. Cheaper transport costs with the coming of the railways mid-century further impacted regional towns which had hitherto produced much of their goods locally. Other Irish industries, particularly agriculture-based industries such as butter, milling and tanning, declined due to an inability to keep up with more efficient production methods elsewhere, coupled with changes in the structure of Irish farming. The success of large companies in brewing and distilling belies the overall decline of the numbers employed. Investment in new technology and improved transport allowed for the capture of the market by a small number of companies such as Guinness and Beamish & Crawford, to the detriment of hundreds of small-scale locally based breweries. The north-east of the island proved the exception to this general trend. The mechanised linen industry grew, benefitting particularly in the 1860s from the shortage of cotton owing to the American Civil War, but it was investment in new technologies of shipbuilding which led to the most dramatic changes, with spin-off industries also growing in marine engineering and associated trades. This economic success acted as a magnet and Belfast’s population surged in the second half of the nineteenth century, by the end of which it outstripped Dublin as the largest city in Ireland, its elite vying with their competitors to the south for political clout too. The Irish equivalent to the British large-scale industrial working class was therefore concentrated in a few industries in a limited number of towns and cities. Otherwise Ireland’s industrial workforce was scattered throughout the country in what were usually small workplaces. Taken as a whole, as Mary Daly has noted, ‘Ireland was a more agricultural country in 1900 than she had been fifty years earlier – the reverse of the typical European

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trend.’55 Ireland’s small size and proximity to Britain with its exponentially greater scale of production was a hindrance to the evolution of a large and varied native industrial sector, even after independence, with Britain on the whole providing a safer bet for work and investment. Although the independent Irish state would later build a greater industrial base – heavily dependent on foreign investment – it never developed large-scale industrial centres and a working class to match that found in Lancashire, the Ruhr or Detroit, for example.56 At the same time, if it is unhelpful to impose British images of class on Ireland, it is also unhelpful to think of the two islands as economically, socially and culturally separate, an unconscious tendency amongst many perhaps, but a tendency nonetheless. All of Ireland until 1922 was an integral part of the United Kingdom (UK) and, as such, was therefore not a ‘backward’ society any more than a primarily agricultural part of England was. By the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Ireland had a highly integrated rail and telegraph network, connecting the smallest rural towns with the cities, and its ports with the rest of the world. Transport was key to the functioning of a modern society, a point not lost on Jim Larkin, who recognised the advantages afforded by prioritising the unionisation of workers in the industry.57 The population of Ireland was also, on the whole, highly literate.58 Literacy and transport allowed for the rapid growth of the printed media, especially newspapers, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, creating a well-informed and engaged public arena. Modernisation theory, highly suspect at its best and culturally imperialist at its worst, in terms of its juxtaposition of so-called ‘traditional’ societies with modern industrial capitalist societies, is of little value in Ireland’s case except as a means of general statistical comparison with the rest of the world. It does not take account of specific internal characteristics nor its dynamic and its integration with the rest of the world, particularly with Britain. For Ireland had 55

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Mary E. Daly, Social and Economic History of Ireland since 1800 (Dublin: The Educational Company, 1981), p. 71. Much of this outline is based on a reading of Daly, Social and Economic History of Ireland; Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw, eds., An Economic History of Ulster, 1820–1940 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1985); L.  M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660, 2nd edn (London:  B. T.  Batsford, 1987); Eoin O’Malley, Industry and Economic Development: The Challenge for the Latecomer (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1989); and Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Larkin arrived in Belfast in 1907 as a representative of the British-based National Union of Dock Labourers. In 1909 he created the ITGWU, which quickly became the largest and most important trade union in Ireland. Illiteracy had been reduced from more than half the population in 1841 to 16 per cent in 1901. Daly, Social and Economic History of Ireland, p. 111.

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a role as part of the UK economy. There has been some debate about how much this role was engineered, or whether it was accidental, but nonetheless, Ireland was useful to British industry as a source of food and of cheap labour. The effects of the Famine in the 1840s saw the consolidation of smallholdings into larger plots of land due to a decline in population as well as evictions, the rearing of cattle for export to the burgeoning cities of Britain being more profitable than labour-intensive tillage.59 Small farmers and agricultural labourers, unable to support themselves in Ireland, provided a ready and almost constant supply of unskilled workers for the factories, the docks and the mines of Britain. As Friedrich Engels noted in his 1845 study The Condition of the Working Class in England, ‘The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command.’60 Marx went further in suggesting that after the Act of Union: Every time Ireland was about to develop industrially, she was crushed and reconverted into a purely agricultural land [. . .] Middlemen accumulated fortunes that they would not invest in the improvement of land, and could not, under the system which prostrated manufactures, invest in machinery, etc. All their accumulations were sent therefore to England for investment [. . .] and thus was Ireland forced to contribute cheap labour and cheap capital to building up ‘the great works of Britain’.61

By 1851, urban-dwellers outnumbered rural-dwellers in Britain (51 per cent), far ahead of the rest of the world,62 while farmers as a percentage of all workers had declined to 13.6 per cent or 34.7 per cent when their families are taken into account.63 Agriculture and related forms of industry made up 20 per cent of British national product in 1851, a figure which

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For the move from tillage to livestock, particularly cattle, and the growing market for Irish meat in Britain, see Daly, Social and Economic History of Ireland, pp. 28–33; Conor McCabe, Sins of the Father: The Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy, 2nd edn. (Dublin: The History Press, 2013), pp. 68–74. There are numerous editions of this book so I have not provided an exact page reference. To read online, see here: Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch06.htm [accessed 25 April 2016]. Karl Marx, ‘Outline of a Report on the Irish Question to the Communist Educational Association of German Workers in London’, 16 December 1867, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867/ 12/16.htm [accessed 25 April 2016]. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (London: Abacus edition, 1997), p. 205. Joyce Burnette, ‘Agriculture, 1700–1870’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume 1:  1700–1870, ed. by Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), table 3.2, p. 93.

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had declined to 6 per cent by 1901.64 For decades, a constant stream had moved off the land in Britain to seek work in the cities. The exodus of rural Irish to the industrial cities of Britain can be seen as a continuation of this trend, with the move from Mayo to Manchester echoing earlier moves from Lincolnshire to Leeds. Taking this into account, the classical image of an urban, industrial working class may also be seen as applicable to the Irish – it is just that, outside the north-east, it was mostly not in Ireland itself. Migration was not a one-way street, however. Migrants sent home remittances that kept people afloat; but they also sent home ideas and methods of organisation such as ‘new unionism’, syndicalism and socialism. Migrants were not static, but dynamic, moving back and forth between the islands, be they ‘tattie hookers’ from Donegal and Mayo travelling to Scotland each summer to pick potatoes; seamen moving from port to port throughout the Empire; or building labourers moving to and fro between Ireland and London. Irish migrants in Britain are therefore part and parcel of the Irish as well as the British working class. They cannot be otherwise. As E. P. Thompson warned, ‘the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure.’65 The economy and society of Ireland and consequently the composition of its working class was shaped by processes inextricable from its relationship with Britain. Treating Ireland independently of this relationship produces as blinkered an understanding of society as uncritically importing an idea of the working class as seen from a metropolitan perspective and applying it to a primarily rural periphery.

Rural Labour What does the Irish working class look like then? Certainly the British idea is applicable to some extent, as an urban, industrial working class has and does exist in parts of the island. Irish migrants can also be considered as part of an industrial working class, albeit based elsewhere. But what about the rest of Ireland? John Cunningham’s Labour in the West of Ireland (1995) offers some useful pointers. Cunningham outlines how in Connacht in 1891, only 6.5 per cent of the population totalling 724,774 lived in towns of 64

65

Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation:  An Economic History of Britain 1700–1914 (London: Methuen, 1969), table IV (b), p. 243. Thompson, The Making, p. 9.

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2,000 or more. Of these, more than half lived in Galway and Sligo, neither of which had much industry. Transport formed ‘the significant economic activity in both’ due to their status as ‘important regional distribution centres’.66 Cunningham’s focus on the rural labourer, however, is what is of particular note for the argument here. There has been some debate in Irish historiography about the decline of the agricultural labourer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.67 As Cunningham notes, the vast majority had no security of work in agriculture. In the warmer months they worked in the fields, but otherwise they worked at whatever they could get – roadbuilding, stone-breaking or as handymen, for instance. Cunningham therefore prefers John Boyle’s practice of referring to a rural labourer, rather than an agricultural labourer.68 The decline can thus be measured in part by a move to different forms of work. That is why basing class on the idea of a person’s relationship to production – or capital and labour – is sound. The rural labourers who moved from agriculture to roadbuilding still worked for a wage – they did not own monetary capital to employ others, nor did they own land which they could subsist on. They therefore changed the form of work but not the form of class. Some forms of rural labourer did, however, change class. Many herdsmen, who worked for a wage and should be included as working class, acquired land, for instance, and moved out of this class.69 The example of herdsmen is not one that immediately springs to mind when considering the nature of the Irish working class, and herein lies its usefulness, as it demonstrates the diversity of people to be encompassed in the term. The Irish working class had its large-scale industrial workforce, but, especially outside the few cities, it was largely composed of people such as shop assistants, general labourers, farmhands, butchers, transport workers, artisans and those working in small, local industries such as milling and brewing. The subjective articulation of class based on identification according to place of residence or type of work – ‘labourers’, ‘tradesmen’, ‘farmers’ – therefore makes sense. Each 66

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John Cunningham, Labour in the West of Ireland: Working Life and Struggle 1890–1914 (Belfast: Athol Books, 1995), p. 14. David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Disappearance of the Irish Agricultural Labourer, 1841–1912’, Irish Economic and Social History, vii (1980), pp.  66–92; John W.  Boyle, ‘A Marginal Figure:  The Irish Rural Laborer’, in Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914, ed. by Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 311–38. Cunningham, Labour in the West of Ireland, p. 30. On herdsmen, or herds as they are also known, see Cunningham, Labour in the West of Ireland, pp. 39–48, and his more recent ‘ “A Class Quite Distinct”: The Western Herds and their Defence of their Working Conditions’, in The West of Ireland: New Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Carla King and Conor McNamara (Dublin: The History Press Ireland, 2011), pp. 137–60.

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knows immediately the class relationship implied therein, and can consequently categorise themselves as ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’ when specifically asked to do so, even if these are not terms in common usage.

Conclusion After a fitful start, writing about the Irish working class has come far in the past few decades. A firm foundation has been built in the field of ‘narrow’ labour history, with detailed outlines of the evolution of the labour movement in Ireland, its key organisations, people and the events it engaged in and shaped. Combining this with methodologies and insights from across the humanities and social sciences should allow for the advance of ‘broad’ labour history in the near future, allowing for a more holistic understanding of the Irish working class, its evolution, its social relations, politics, organisations, mentalities, and everyday life. Culture, including literary output, is an essential part of this. To achieve its potential, however, it should be informed by a theoretical framework that takes account of and helps explain its diversity and its particularity based on its own subjective experience. The Irish working class was inextricably shaped by its relationship with Britain economically, culturally, socially and politically, and any attempt to understand its nature needs to take adequate account of this. However, this does not mean that the subjective understanding of class developed in and for urban, industrialised Britain can be applied without modification to Ireland. It needs to consider migrants, both seasonal and permanent, and rural labourers such as herdsmen, as much as dockers living in Dublin’s tenements, women shirt-makers in Derry or engineers in Belfast’s shipyards. All have their own unique characteristics, all have their own stories to tell, but all are equally representative of and united by their experience as members of the Irish working class.

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Representing Labour Notes towards a Political and Cultural Economy of Irish Working-Class Experience Christopher J. V. Loughlin The Whiteboy1 association may be considered as a vast trades’ union for the protection of the Irish peasantry:  the object being, not to regulate the rate of wages, or the hours of work, but to keep the actual occupant in possession of his land, and in general to regulate the relation of landlord and tenant for the benefit of the latter. George C. Lewis, On Local Disturbances in Ireland: And on the Irish Church Question (London: B. Fellows, 1836), p. 99.

They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MarxEngels Collected Works: Volume Eleven, 1851–53, 50 vols. (London, New York and Moscow: Lawrence & Wishart, International Publishers and Progress Publishers, 1975–2004), p. 187.

In so far as such a critique represents a class, it can only represent the class whose historical task is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes – the proletariat. Karl Marx, ‘Post face’, London, 24 Jan. 1873, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume One, rev. edn (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 98.

The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. James Connolly, Workers’ Republic, 8 Apr. 1916.

Representation . . . [is] a power to define reality itself. Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, revised edn (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 115. 1

‘Whiteboy’ and ‘Whiteboyism’ are the generic terms for a number of different rural protest organisations, 1760–1840. These organisations were significant precursors to trade unions and other plebeian organisations, such as the Ribbonmen and Fenianism. For an accessible introduction to this vast literature, see Maura Cronin, Agrarian Protest in Ireland, 1750–1960 (Dublin:  Economic & Social History Society of Ireland, 2012).

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Representing Labour Class is about the representation, linguistically, of a socio-economic phenomenon. In the Anglophone world the exact relationship between these terms vexed analysis of class in the last third of the twentieth century.2 Class, as the prefatory quotes which opened this chapter make clear, is also, however, about the politics of representation. This capacity of linguistic representation is, therefore, about cultural and political economy, and, according to Scott, the ‘power to define reality itself ’.3 In the following chapter I explicate some elements of the historical process by which knowledge was produced about class in Ireland. I  contend that labour, the political and cultural expression(s) of the ‘subaltern classes’, has been represented in both urban and rural forms during the past 400 years.4 The first section charts some aspects of the emergence of the representation of labour in Ireland, 1603–1824, which is, in a broad sense, the age of manufacture, as Marx described it, or ‘proto-industrialisation’.5 The second section presents some evidence for the self-representation of labour in Ireland, 1824–1998, the age of machinery. The final section of the chapter turns to the methodology underpinning the previous sections.

Labour in Irish History, 1603–1824 When we examine any history we are confronted with the issue of periodisation and all periodisation involves some arbitrary act of choice, but why 2

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It is not the intention to draw up a definitive typology of class analysis here. For an informed global introduction, see Georg G.  Iggers and Q.  Edward Wang, Marxist Historiographies:  A Global Perspective (Abingdon and New  York:  Routledge, 2016); for an important introduction to the Anglophone debate, see D.  L. Dworkin, Class  Matters (History:  Concepts, Theories and Practice) (London and New  York:  Routledge, 2006)  and Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class (London: Verso Books, 2015). Scott, Gender, p. 115. ‘Subaltern classes’ is utilised in the Gramscian sense; see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. by Quentin Hoare and G. F. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks in Three Volumes, ed. by Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1992); see also Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, ‘The Many-Headed Hydra:  Reflections on History from Below’, in Beyond Marx:  Theorising Global Labour Relations in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Marcel van der Linden and Karl-Heinz vanRuth (Leiden and Boston:  Brill, 2014), pp.  23–40 (pp.  34–5). There Linebaugh and Rediker call for expansion of ‘the working class’ from the ‘minority of mostly white, male, waged, skilled, artisanal or industrial workers’ to the majority of ‘female, unwaged, and located in other settings within a capitalist economy’, a conception that is heavily indebted to Gramsci’s notion of ‘subaltern classes’. Important research has been conducted, utilising the term ‘proto-industrialisation’, since its introduction by Franklin F.  Mendels, ‘Proto-industrialisation:  The First Phase of the Industrialisation Process’, Journal of Economic History, 32 (1972), pp. 241–61.

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1603?6 The early years of the seventeenth century witnessed the change of Ireland’s relationship to England from a ‘feudal model of imperial domination’ to a new strategy of ‘agrarian capitalism’.7 The early seventeenth century in Ireland saw the high point of plantation efforts in Ulster, the development of common law, fairs and markets, and the island was shired into thirty-two counties. This period further established the impact of print in Ireland and this is reflected in the sources available:  newspapers, popular literature, charters and the law, predominantly in English. Therefore, critically, speculatively, there is a reasonable basis to periodise Ireland’s bourgeois revolution, ‘in the epochal sense’, as beginning from at least 1603.8 It was only in the early seventeenth century that the Gaelic order in Ireland was formally submerged and defeated, and it was in this time too that socio-economic transformations of another order were set in train. The three crises in Ireland’s polity, the Nine Years War, 1593–1603, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1639–62 and the Glorious Revolution, 1688–92, witnessed the explicit political defeat of this old Gaelic social order. But it equally marked the political victory of Protestantism and the subordinate position of Ireland within the mercantilist British Empire of the long eighteenth century. These changes had cultural, economic, political and social consequences for Ireland. Raymond Gillespie, for example, has highlighted how they impacted law, literacy, language and culture: ‘documents and reading, especially following the arrival of printing and the triumph of the common law after 1603, became central to the way in which the early modern Irish world worked.’9 Gillespie has further argued that seventeenth-century Ireland established the change from a ‘redistributive’ to a ‘market economy’: ‘by the 1660s rents were almost universally paid in cash, indicating that tenants had access to markets or fairs in order to sell their produce.’10 Jane Ohlmeyer has described the process as one of ‘state-sponsored imperialism’, which in turn used military conquest, plantation and colonisation, alongside 6

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‘Too often, since every account must start somewhere, we see only the things which are new.’ Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, reissued 1980 edn (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), p. 27. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (London and New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 153–4. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register, 2 (1965), pp. 311–62 (p. 321). Raymond Gillespie, Reading Ireland:  Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 46. Raymond Gillespie, The Transformation of the Irish Economy, 1550–1700 (Dublin: Economic & Social History Society of Ireland, 1991), p. 26.

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‘more assimilationist policies’.11 It resulted in the transplantation of the hereditary peerage system to Ireland, which became a means to encourage Anglicisation.12 Sean Connolly has also noted that commercialisation in society and the land affected the poor in Ireland differently to their counterparts in Britain because there customary rights of use provided some form of protection; by contrast, Ireland saw a radical redefinition of land, 1500–1700, without such custom.13 Therefore, state and class formation in Ireland was a process of Anglicisation and commercialisation, a cultural and political economy. It is important to register that despite mercantilist restrictions Ireland had a significant stage of manufacture, or proto-industrialisation. This stage of economic development during the eighteenth century caused a rise in social differentiation on the island and the representation of labour entered Irish culture. For example, the introduction of legislation on combinations of urban labourers in 1729 appears to be the first such attempt to deal with the issue. The manufacture of linen became especially significant in Ulster and the poetry of the Ulster weavers is the first explicit self-representation of labour in Irish history so far examined.14 Subaltern organisation was not solely an urban phenomenon, as the endemic rural disorder which afflicted Ireland from the 1760s until the 1840s demonstrates.15 The crises caused by the American Revolution from 1776 also facilitated the dismantling of mercantilist restrictions against Ireland. The island was able to trade with the empire on the same terms as Britain from the 1780s. The dusk of the age of manufacture was also the moment of Ireland’s bourgeois revolution and the representation of labour became a topic of cultural and political crisis during this period. To take just one instance:  the leader of the elite Irish Whigs, Henry Grattan, denounced the Irish Volunteers in early 1785 in the Irish parliament: I would now wish to draw the attention of the House to the alarming measure of drilling the lowest classes of the populace, by which a stain had been put on the character of the Volunteers. The old, the original Volunteers had

11

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14 15

Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English:  The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 10. Ibid., p. 9. Sean J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 54–5. See Chapters 3 and 4 later in this volume. See footnote 1 of this chapter, the publications of the Economic & Social History Society of Ireland and the publications of the Irish Labour History Society.

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become respectable, because they represented the property of the nation; but attempts had been made to arm the poverty of the kingdom.16

The ‘armed poverty of the kingdom’ referred to the recruiting of Catholics and plebeian Protestants to the Volunteers. The representation of labour was tied to the political and cultural economy of the island. The decline of Irish manufacture was both consequence of and contributor to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, 1760–1830. In the mid1820s this became a formal economic integration of the islands with the equalisation of tariffs; political integration having been achieved with the Act of Union, 1801. The Act of Union, according to Ireland’s pre-eminent labour historian, resulted in an Ireland ‘governed by de-industrialisation and a continuing crisis in agriculture’.17 But revisionist economic history has critiqued the idea of general economic decline. Louis Cullen felt that historians should differentiate between general economic activity and the decline of particular sectors of the economy.18 Steam technology developed in Ulster  – such as in the cotton industry  – and this would become a good indicator of where linen factory production would later develop in the 1820s. It was in this decade that the self-representation of labour was granted legal and cultural representation:  the Combination Acts, which had criminalised combination up to this point, were repealed. In political and cultural terms, but with differing forms, the representation of labour was occurring in both Ireland and Britain.

The Self-Representation of Labour, 1824–1998 The Irish global nineteenth century was Janus-faced: trauma and demographic decline, but also the foundation of explicitly working-class social, economic and cultural organisations;19 the decimation of the poor but also the self-representation of labour. Ireland suffered its last major outbreak 16

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‘Address to the Lord-Lieutenant, 21 Jan. 1785’, The Speeches of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan: In the Irish, and in the Imperial Parliament, Volume 1, ed. by Henry Grattan Junior (Dublin: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown and R. Milliken, 1822), p. 212. Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824–2000, rev. edn (Dublin:  University College Dublin Press, 2011), p. 31. Philip Ollerenshaw, ‘Business and Industry’, in Handbook of Modern Irish History, ed. by Alvin Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 148–67 (p. 149). For the definitive history of nineteenth-century trade unionism in Ireland, see Boyd Black, ‘Reassessing Irish Industrial Relations and Labour History: The North-East of Ireland up to 1921’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 14 (2002), pp.  45–97; John W.  Boyle, The Irish Labour Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 1988); O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland.

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of famine in the early 1740s and over the next century the population expanded exponentially until, on the eve of an Gorta Mór 1845–51, there were nearly nine million people in the country. The Famine left deep cultural wounds and heralded the modern class structure in Ireland: the consolidation of farm size; the contraction of the subsistence economy; per capita income increased as a result; and, last, the relative and absolute number of the poorest was drastically reduced. The cultural memory of Britain and Ireland was further embittered by this experience. John Mitchell, for example, first propounded the Irish nationalist-associated ‘genocide thesis’ in the 1850s, but ‘revisionists’ have questioned this interpretation.20 Post-revisionists have denied the validity of a genocide thesis, but they have noted the British government’s culpability due to the Malthusian and liberal economic orthodoxy of the period. The development of Ireland afterwards, 1850–1918, saw the modernisation of Ireland.21 Yet it remains to be proven how, exactly, class, class conflict or modernisation is applicable to Irish history pre-1850. For example, was Whiteboyism a form of agricultural trade unionism? An informed contemporary, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, noted in 1836: The Whiteboy association may be considered as a vast trades’ union for the protection of the Irish peasantry: the object being, not to regulate the rate of wages, or the hours of work, but to keep the actual occupant in possession of his land, and in general to regulate the relation of landlord and tenant for the benefit of the latter.22

Perhaps class, class conflict and modernisation, as used by many analysts, are applicable,23 but it seems, to the present author, that such terms can conceal more than they illuminate. If we are to avoid ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, then we must interrogate the content of these terms, as well as their form.24 The representation of labour was contested by contemporaries and its meaning is still an issue of historical controversy.

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Palgrave Advances in Irish History, ed. by Mary McAuliffe, Katherine O’Donnell and Leeann Lane (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 88. Joseph J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918 (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 2008). Lewis, On Local Disturbances, p. 99. We may do well to follow E. P. Thompson and his description of eighteenth-century England as a society which had ‘class struggle without class’. See E. P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’, Social History, 3 (May 1978), pp. 133–65; this article was incorporated into chapter 2 of E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Penguin Books: London, 1993), pp. 16–96. A famous quote from E. P. Thompson, The Making, p. 12.

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Yet, despite such qualification, in the nineteenth century Irish workingclass social, economic and cultural organisation developed explicitly.25 In social terms, friendly societies and trade unions emerged into legality following the rescinding of the Combination Acts. These organisations offered welfare support, pastimes and recreation. The trade unions which emerged represented the entry of the respectable sections of the working class into economic life, the new model unions of mid-Victorian Britain. We even see an element of this respectability in the debates on revolutionary Irish separatism, Fenianism or ‘patriotism as pastime’.26 These organisations marked the passage from a society dominated by custom to one dominated by the modern conception of the idea of trade unionism.27 In cultural terms, working people entered Irish life through selfrepresentation. Mechanics’ Institutes, for instance, were established across the island from the 1820s, whilst the Trade Union Act of 1871 definitively legally established trade-union organisation. Despite the substantial work conducted by the Irish Labour History Society and many others, there is still much research to be conducted on the history of Irish working-class life and writing in the nineteenth century.28 Politically the nineteenth century witnessed the entry of working-class agency. In both rural and urban contexts more texts were written on, but especially by, working-class writers. Michael Davitt is an exemplar of such working-class self-representation. And where Davitt led, James Connolly and others deepened the tradition. The sources now available to the historian, due to both digitisation and publication, open new terrain for cultural class studies in Ireland.29 With the foundation of the Irish Trades’ Union Congress in April 1894 came the political and cultural emergence of labour in Ireland. Yet, not only class, but also gender has been underrepresented in Irish history. Knowledge about class and daily life, in the workplace, home and public spheres, and the related politics of masculinity and femininity, is still underdeveloped. Case studies in the rest of this book illuminate just some of these issues of intersectionality.

25

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27 28 29

See footnote 19 of this chapter, and J.  Dunsmore Clarkson, Labour and Nationalism in Ireland (New York: Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. 20, 1925). R. Vincent Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985); John Newsinger, ‘Fenianism Revisited: Pastime or Revolutionary Movement?’ Saothar 17 (1992), pp. 46–51; ibid., Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1994). ‘Trade-unionism is not a tradition, but an idea,’ O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, p. 3. The chapters that follow detail some fascinating insight into these issues. The key example here, so far, being Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

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The age of machinery in Ireland established the popular ideologies of, on the one hand, Irish conservatism and unionism, and on the other, liberalism and nationalism. Socio-economic struggle over the land, modernisation, was further entwined with the democratisation of Irish and British life. Industrial development in Ulster demarcated the region from the rest of the island.30 Three times the issue of devolved Home Rule for Ireland crippled British political culture  – 1886, 1893 and 1910–14  – but it was the Ulster Covenant of 1912 that signalled the ‘strange death’ of Liberal Ireland.31 A contributor to this morbid development was the Liberal government of 1906, which introduced a proto-welfare state with the adoption of old-age pensions and made the House of Commons sovereign.32 But it failed to deal with the Irish, labour or suffrage questions and these issues precipitated the onset of the First World War, the Irish Revolution and the foundation of rival nation states in Ireland.33 A number of crisis points, the Easter Rising and the conscription crisis of 1918, were pivots in the increasing politicisation of the Irish population. The 1920 expulsions in Ulster and the Belfast Boycott by the southern Irish government, 1920–2, cemented the construction of a physical border.34 The two Irelands which emerged were substantially shaped by social and political conflict, 1912–23. In Northern Ireland the state institutionalised and maintained division through a ‘moral economy of loyalty’.35 This ensured that the Northern Ireland state was de jure non-discriminatory, but de facto a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’.36 The regional implementation of the British welfare state by the ruling Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) offered further grounds for discriminatory activity. In December 1947, for example, the Safeguarding of Employment Act (Northern Ireland) was passed, which restricted the employment opportunities of those from outside Northern Ireland. The collapse into communal conflict at the end 30

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The continuing regional divergence of the island means it may be worthwhile to pose the Gramscian question: why did Ulster not play the role of a Piedmont in the formation of the Irish state? The Ulster Covenant was based on a Scots Presbyterian document:  the Solemn League and Covenant of 1581 and 1638. The phrase ‘strange death’ is, of course, George Dangerfield’s. W. A. Phillips – a Unionist writer in the inter-war period – utilised just such a periodisation. An authoritative introduction to this contentious historiography is Marie Coleman, The Irish Revolution, 1917–23 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). There has been much fascinating work on this period, but this material will await future publication for discussion. Northern Ireland was formed in 1920 by the Government of Ireland Act, which came into operation in 1921. The legislation provided for two Home Rule parliaments in Ireland, but the southern body was not implemented. See Christopher J. V. Loughlin, ‘The Moral Economy of Loyalty: Labour, Law and the State in Northern Ireland, 1921–39’, Labour History Review, 82(1) (2017), pp. 1–22. Ibid.

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of the 1960s was a result of the disjuncture between state form, political economy and the moral economy of loyalty. The Irish Thermidor, the regime established in the Irish Free State and then Republic of Ireland, developed a similar clientelist and exclusivist system. Special interests were represented in religion, politics and economics, for example. An orthodox liberal economic policy was followed by the Cumann na nGaedheal government in the 1920s. Culturally this was the peak of a liberal Catholic consensus, which was culturally dominant no matter the political complexion of the southern Irish government. An economic nationalist regime was introduced under Fianna Fáil in 1932, and this continued to 1957. These policies encouraged import substitution and local ownership. Richard Dunphy pioneered a Gramscian approach to the development of Fianna Fáil in southern Ireland.37 Paul Bew and others have analysed both states in Ireland from a left-wing perspective.38 Overall, however, southern Ireland was a post-colonial regime by the 1950s, both de facto and de jure. Further, the representation of labour was a greater issue for the northern state than it was for the southern: in the former there was an attempt at repression, which ultimately resulted in recognition; in the latter labour representation was merely ignored.39 The reorientation of both states occurred from the 1950s. In Northern Ireland the development of state-led British social democracy highlighted the differences caused by a moral economy of loyalty. This opened strategic opportunities for the opponents of unionism in Ulster and their cooperation subsequently shattered the political culture of Northern Ireland in the 1960s. The crisis triggered in 1969 only ended with the development of a neo-liberal peace process in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. A new, liberal political economy was adopted by the Republic of Ireland government in the 1950s. The aim was to attract international capital in order to develop the country’s economy. This policy delivered significant growth in the long term, but a number of crises occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. 37

38

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Richard Dunphy, The Making of Fianna Fáil Power in Ireland, 1923–48 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1995). See Anthony Coughlan, ‘Ireland’s Marxist Historians’, in Interpreting Irish History:  The Debate on Historical Revisionism, ed. by Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), pp. 288–305; Conor McCabe and Emmet O’Connor, ‘Ireland’, in Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives, ed. by Joan Allen, Alan Campbell and John McIlroy (Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2010), pp. 137–63. Christopher J.  V. Loughlin, ‘Pro-Hitler or Anti-Management?:  War on the Industrial Front, Belfast, October 1942’, in Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life, ed. by David Convery (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013), pp. 125–40; Marc Mulholland, ‘ “One of the most difficult hurdles”: The Struggle for Recognition of the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, 1958–1964’, Saothar, 22 (1997), pp. 81–94.

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It was the 1990s which inaugurated the convergence of the two states in Ireland. In twentieth-century Ireland tradition(s) of sectarianism in cultural memory persisted, promulgated by each respective state. In Northern Ireland, for example, 1641, 1690 and 1912 represented some aspects of this collective mentalité. Similar examples could be given about the interplay of Catholicism, cultural memory and democracy in southern Ireland. The traumas of capitalism in Ireland were delivered brutally and the cultural memory of these events has often been utilised by both dominant ideologies as a mobilising myth. This helps to contextualise the vexed issue of religious conflict and working-class politics. Sectarianism, Christianbased ethno-national political conflict, so it has been claimed, has stopped working-class unity and prevented the development of class-based political alternatives.40 Religion intersected with class in Ireland, but this is not an especially peculiar circumstance. Gender is a further area which must be considered constitutive in the formation of Irish working-class experience. The role of gender in the construction of working-class experience is still an area we know too little about.41 However, Heather Laird’s chapter in this volume presents an inter-sectional analysis of gender and workingclass experience in literature.

Approaching Irish Working-Class Writing: The Descriptivist and the Integralist Methods Here I  would like to return to questions of methodology. As David Convery’s opening chapter makes clear, much writing on the working class in Ireland has taken place within the confines of ‘narrow’ labour history,42 and the term has been utilised in a national sense, for example.43 40

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This is the consensus of Irish historiography, to take just two examples:  ‘On both sides of the Treaty divide, the reaction of conservative rural nationalism was predictably hostile to the Labour renaissance . . . Yet again, nationalist politics short-circuited class politics.’ Roy F. Foster, Modern Ireland:  1600–1972 (London:  Penguin Press, 1990), p.  515. Or, ‘Although the absence of political cleavages defined by class differentiated Ireland, north and south, from many European countries, this pattern would later be recognised as characteristic of how postcolonial states were moulded by attitudes to the former ruling power.’ Fearghal McGarry, ‘Independent Ireland’, in The Princeton History of Modern Ireland, ed. by Richard Bourke and Ian McBride (Princeton, NJ, and Woodstock, NY: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 109–40 (pp. 121–2). Maria Luddy, ‘Gender and Irish History’, in Handbook of Modern Irish History, ed. by Alvin Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 193–213 (p. 193). The reader should begin with David Convery’s chapter in this volume (Chapter  1); O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland; Boyd Black, ‘Reassessing Irish Industrial Relations’. Material by Karl Marx and James Connolly is important, specifically their marriage of the issue of Irish national identity and class. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Ireland (Moscow: Progress

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It has also been used in a religious framework, most often in relationship to a ‘Protestant’ working class.44 Further the term has been used in a geographic, urban, comparative sense, of Belfast, Dublin, Ulster/Munster/ Leinster.45 Accounts of class in Ireland, however, have been dominated by class as static, objective representation. This descriptive class analysis has also been described as ‘class analysis’, class as ‘structural location’ and class as ‘static conceptual representation’.46 This research has provided much evidence on class. The descriptivist reading of class has had much influence on Irish research.47 For example, there has been ample demonstration of the influence of class on economics, status, work, labour, diet and housing in Ireland and the Irish people.48 The Irish experience in the diaspora expresses this tendency, often in an explicitly politically radical narrative. The descriptive class analysis can be demonstrated in much Irish historical research over the past fifty years. As noted previously in this chapter, economic historians have researched ‘proto-industry’, the Industrial Revolution and the development of regional economic specialisation. There has been further work on rural labour and the endemic social disorder which began in 1760.49 Others, using myriad methodologies, have examined migratory

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Publishers, 1971); further, see the chapter on Ireland in Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Ellen Hazelkorn, Marx and Engels on Ireland: An Annotated Checklist (New York: American Institute for Irish Studies, 1981). The ‘neo-Connollyite’ work of Emmet O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, is especially important here and should be consulted with Mike Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland: The Pursuit of the Workers’ Republic since 1916 (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1984). Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, The State in Northern Ireland, 1921–72:  Political Forces and Social Classes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979) and subsequent editions. Peter Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1975); Henry Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism: The Protestant Working Class and the Belfast Labour Movement, 1868–1920 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1980). Maurice Coakley, Ireland in the World Order:  A History of Uneven Development (London:  Pluto Press, 2012); John Lynch, A Tale of Three Cities:  Comparative Studies in Working-Class  Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998); Gerard McCann, Ireland’s Economic Development: Crisis and Development North and South (London:  Pluto Press, 2011); Austen Morgan, Labour and Partition: The Belfast Working Class, 1905–23 (London: Pluto Press, 1991). Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.  5; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism:  Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 11–13. For an introduction to the historiography noted in this paragraph the reader should examine Alvin Jackson, ed., Handbook of Modern Irish History, in consultation with Ulster since 1600:  Politics, Economy and Society, ed. by Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Palgrave Advances in Irish History, ed. by Mary McAuliffe, Katherine O’Donnell and Leeann Lane. See footnotes 1 and 15 of this chapter. See Defying the Law of the Land: Agrarian Radicals in Irish History, ed. by Brian Casey (Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2013) and Cronin, Agrarian Protest.

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labour patterns and transnational emigration. Still other areas of social history and institutionalisation have recently developed, alongside more traditional conceptualisations of medical history. This is without even mentioning the efflorescence of women’s history in Ireland since the 1970s. The intersection between professional research in Ireland and class-informed perspectives is further in evidence through the post-colonial paradigm. But little of this work has examined the construction of knowledge about class. The descriptivist method of class analysis can be contrasted with the integralist method. The classical Marxist conception of class is of a social relationship represented, unproblematically, in and through language.50 As the Communist Manifesto famously proclaimed, ‘the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.’ In the Marxist perspective the working class is produced economically and sociologically: the working class will become conscious – class conscious – and politically revolutionary.51 The major contribution of Marx et al. was to provide an intellectual framework in which class was integral to modern society. In Ireland James Connolly (1868–1916) made the outstanding original contribution to the Marxist perspective.52 He explicitly based his writings on the perspective of the working class, or labour, in Ireland. The narrative of the reception of Connolly’s thought is, largely, the story of Irish Marxism.53 The usage of a Marxist-informed class methodology has been described as ‘class-struggle analysis’,54 or class as ‘process’ and ‘relationship’.55 I label Marxist-informed class analysis integralist because class in such an analysis is both descriptive and processual. Marx in Capital utilises the notion of analysis as process and this is made explicit, according to David Harvey, in footnote four of chapter 15 of volume one, Machinery and Large-Scale Machinery. In this aside Marx states, ‘technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.’56 Harvey describes this as 50 51

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Cronin, Agrarian Protest, pp. 21–2. The working class-in-itself is objective and empirically verifiable; the working class-for-itself is the revolutionary subject of history. James Connolly, Collected Works, two vols. (Dublin: New Books, 1987); James Connolly, ‘James Connolly’, www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/index.htm [accessed 6 July 2016]. Coughlan, ‘Ireland’s Marxist Historians’. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, p. 5. Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, p. 13. Marx, Capital, p. 493.

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a ‘general framework of dialectical and historical materialism’.57 We can then, according to Harvey, formulate this framework into a series of interlinked ‘conceptual elements’, or ‘moments’: one, technology; two, relation to nature; three, mode of production; four, reproduction; five, social relations; six, mental conceptions.58 This methodological framework is not one of necessary causation and explicitly rejects an essentialised or reductionist account. It is, however, an integralist methodological framework that labours to unveil historical process through a dialogue between concept and evidence.59 E.  P. Thompson made use of such a methodology with his practice of ‘historical logic’, a critical ‘dialogue between concept and evidence’.60 The significance, the political and cultural economy, of representation has been theorised impressively by E. M. Wood and Robert Brenner. Guy Bois described Wood and Brenner as a school of ‘political Marxism’ and this description applies to their conception of class as a process.61 Brenner has located the impetus for capitalist society as inhering in the different paths which class struggle took in Europe prior to the rise of the English state in the early modern period. He has also identified agrarian capitalism (profit-maximisation on the land) and further highlighted the role of the London mercantile elite during the English Civil War. Brenner, however, rejects the traditional social interpretation of the wars and sees them as a direct struggle over the nature and role of the state.62 It is in this sense that he has proffered a political account of class:  class was something which was represented by and in politics. E. M. Wood, like Brenner, has highlighted the role of class struggle, production, the economic, in the constitution of the political. Wood claims that modern society has involved the triumph of a specific division of the economic and political; a division which she sees as arbitrary and tied to the specificity of modern capitalist society.63 Wood proceeds to utilise the ‘the mode of production’

57

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David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London and New York: Verso Books, 2010), p. 189; see Marx, Capital, pp. 493–4. Harvey, Marx’s Capital, p. 192. Integralist, here, shares something with the Annaliste usage of total as transcendence. Braudel, for example, utilised the term ‘histoire globale’ as the ‘desire, when one confronts a problem, to go systematically beyond its limits’. Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989 (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 42 and 113–14. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, p. 212. Paul Blackledge, ‘Political Marxism’, in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism: A Reader, ed. by Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), pp. 267–84 (pp. 268–9). Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 270.

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as ‘a social phenomenon’.64 She explicitly rejects the base-superstructure metaphor and any reified conception of the separation of the ‘ “economic and the “political” etc.’.65 The significance of representation is to reject any reified conception of human experience. The key to an historical materialist reading of Irish history is to utilise conceptions of culture, the social, the economic, as inherently about process and representation. This reading can critique essentialised conceptions in Irish historical enquiry: for example, sectarianism in Ireland, Christian ethno-religious conflict.66 In modern Irish history this type of conflict has often been deployed as a master narrative which explains political conflict on the island, but particularly in Northern Ireland.67 Marianne Elliot, for example, has argued, of the importance of religion in twentieth-century Northern Ireland: Sectarianism operates at many different levels, and people can sustain sectarian systems and pass on sectarianism to their children without ever recognising it in themselves. It is a “distorted expression” of the very basic human needs of belonging and identity. It has also stood in for class struggle in Ireland and usually destroyed any effort at socialist alliance.68

‘Sectarianism’ is a social practice and relationship, intra-denominationally, between Christians. Yet the term should not be essentialised and to use the term in such a fashion is reductionist and equally as implausible as a solely determinist reading of Marx. Religious conflict was cause and consequence, ‘old tradition’ and ‘new context’,69 dependent on which static moment of the historical process we examine in Ireland. The increasing division of society into economic and political spheres has represented sectarianism differently, dependent on which static moment of history we study.70 This expansive notion of class as process and social relationship is related to the emergence of post-colonial perspectives on Ireland and global and transnational labour history. 64 65 66

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Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, p. 81. Blackledge, ‘Political Marxism’, p. 270. ‘Reification’:  ‘treating human relations as things’. See Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School (London and New York: Verso Books, 2014), p. 66. See footnote 40 of this chapter. Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster: A History (London: Penguin Press, 2000), p. 5. Thompson, The Making, p. 27. For the contrary view of twentieth-century Northern Ireland see Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Steve Bruce, Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Sean Brady, ‘Why Examine Men, Masculinities and Religion in Northern Ireland?’, in Masculinities and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. by Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 218–51.

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Conclusion This chapter has attempted to mark out some notes towards a political and cultural economy of Irish working-class experience, a conceptualisation of the broad context in which the working class found representation, both culturally and politically, on the island. By utilising the notion of representation and labour we can see that class is about the representation, linguistically, of a socio-economic phenomenon. This power of linguistic representation – the representation of labour in Irish history – is, therefore, about cultural and political economy. Irish working-class writing is about the representation of labour, the subaltern classes, in the historical evidence, but it is also, equally, about the self-representation of labour. We can, I would contend, adopt a subaltern approach which avoids appropriating the experience of working people. By such a method we can escape the pitfall of the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.71

71

See footnote 24 of this chapter.

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Ch apter 3

Working-Class Writing in Ireland before 1800 ‘Some must be poor – we cannot all be great’* Andrew Carpenter

Those who conquered Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to replace what they saw as the ‘barbaric’ Gaelic social structure with a ‘civil’ English one; however, post-plantation society in Ireland did not develop as a clone of that in England. The new landowners – at least those in Munster and Leinster – were often soldiers or adventurers from modest English backgrounds, in possession of estates because their armies had conquered Ireland rather than because they had inherited them. As William Mercer put it in 1675: Each private man shall, there, be a Freeholder And Gentleman to boot, is ev’ry Soldier.1

This marks the onset of what Christopher J. V. Loughlin characterises (see Chapter 2 of this volume) as the ‘change of Ireland’s relationship to England from a “feudal model of imperial domination” to a new strategy of “agrarian capitalism” ’. Those working on the farms might be from educated, but now dispossessed and landless Gaelic families. In the chaos of the times, the children of highly respected Gaelic poets became day labourers while semi-literate English adventurers took possession of large Irish holdings. Particularly after the Battle of the Boyne, the new ‘Anglo-Irish’ establishment tightened its grip on Ireland and, through the Penal Laws, outlawed any education not provided by the Established Church of Ireland. Thus the pattern of birth, education and possession that marked the reasonably static English social structure simply did not apply in Ireland. ‘The working class’ in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland is best defined as the poor, whatever the social origin of their forebears.

* Mary Byrne, The Blind Poem: Written by a Girl, Born Blind and Now in her Eighteenth Year (Dublin: Bart. Corcoran, 1789), p. 17. 1 William Mercer, The Moderate Cavalier or the Soldiers Description of Ireland (Cork:  [no pub.], 1675), p. 9.

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Any assessment of the activities of these Irish working or labouring classes before 1800 is hampered by the fact that the sources of information about most of those who lived on the lowest rungs of society are so meagre: what is clear, though, is that modern Irish working-class consciousness – its traditions, its folk-culture and its sense of its place in the world  – derives, at least in part, from perceptions of what life was like for the underdog in eighteenth-century Ireland.2 There is little printed or manuscript material to confirm these perceptions, however, since few of the poor left written records and only law-breakers and objects of charity emerge from anonymity in the archives. If children of poor parents did learn to read and write, in English or in Irish, they used these skills to raise themselves up the social and economic ladder. They ceased to follow their parents as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ but ascended towards more secure and comfortable levels of existence – perhaps as a recipient of extended patronage, a teacher, a priest, a minister or an assistant in a printing house. Thus Henry Jones the Dundalk bricklayer poet was patronised by Lord Chesterfield and ended up writing plays in London while Ellen Taylor, a housemaid near Kilkenny, received enough money from the publication of her poems to open a school. The humble origins of writers such as Patrick Delany and Constantia Grierson were forgotten as they became, respectively, Dean of Down and a renowned classical scholar. Patrick Prunty, later father of the famous Brontë sisters, was born the son of a farm worker in Co. Down. Most remarkably, John Toland, born of a poor family in Irish-speaking Donegal, became a scholar of international renown, a controversial Deist and one of the most significant intellectuals of the age. However, as visitors to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland often remarked, many people lived in abject poverty throughout the land. The conditions in the countryside were so appalling that many migrated to the towns in search of work. As a result, beggars of both sexes and all ages thronged the streets and roads. The poorest of the poor, Protestant as well as Catholic, were seldom able to avail of education or of any other services in town or countryside. There were schools in some parishes in some provinces, but these sought to turn children born as Catholics into Protestants as much as to teach them the alphabet. If they could afford the fees, Catholic parents might encourage their children to go to the illegal hedge schools in towns or in the country; but paid labour was of more use 2

Ballads such as ‘De Nite afore Larry was stretch’d’ invoke this traditional view of the colonial, capitalist structures of eighteenth-century Ireland.

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than the ability to spell and children who could earn a few pence for a day’s work were of more value than those who could read and write. Catholic boys who showed aptitude in a hedge school might be sent to study on the Continent, often for the priesthood or to join Continental armies; if a boy was a Protestant, he might progress from a parish school to a Latin or a charter school and on to Trinity College Dublin – as did Patrick Delany and Matthew Pilkington. There was no further education for girls of any social stratum. However, some boys and girls escaped from working-class life by becoming involved with the stage. Peg Woffington, for instance, the daughter of a Dublin bricklayer, started working with a troupe of acrobats and entertainers at the Smock Alley theatre in about 1730. She soon graduated to the stage and made a considerable name for herself as an actress in both Dublin and London, where David Garrick fell in love with her. Others were less successful and the number of girls begging or selling themselves for sex in the streets of Dublin, Limerick and other urban centres was often remarked on by visitors. In Presbyterian areas, girls as well as boys could attend schools organised by congregations; but again, though the brightest boys might be encouraged to go on to further study and enter the ministry, girls were expected to help earn a living at home, particularly once the linen industry, with its emphasis on home spinning and home weaving, became established in Ulster. There was virtually no leisure time for those who could work so that it is not surprising to find little writing that one can say was actually the work of members of the labouring class in seventeenth- or eighteenthcentury Ireland. However, the material that has survived – poems, songs and various kinds of miscellaneous writing – gives us an insight into the life of the Irish poor.3 In addition, there are texts which purport to represent the direct speech of the Irish working classes, in Irish-English or pidgin English and sometimes in macaronics  – that is, speech partly in pidgin English and partly in pidgin Irish. The aim of these texts is almost always satirical and the language the authors put into the mouths of their characters is exaggerated and designed to provoke unkind laughter. Though traditional Irish culture suffered many setbacks in the seventeenth century, there were always far more Catholics than Protestants on the island. Clearly, the grand imperial plan to turn Ireland into a Protestant 3

The texts considered in Deana Rankin’s Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in SeventeenthCentury Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) are the work of people of middle rather than lower rank. Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis, a bawdy satire on rural labourers in Munster, was probably written by a member of a noble Gaelic family. See the edition by N. J. A. Williams (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1981), p. xxiii.

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country controlled by English common law was not working; the native Irish remained stubbornly loyal to the Catholic Church and, despite the extensive planting of Ireland with Protestants from England and Scotland, late seventeenth-century Anglo-Irishmen and women feared their potentially rebellious Catholic neighbours. One way of assuaging one’s fear of an opponent is by satirising or burlesquing him to make him look ridiculous, and there were several texts circulating in late seventeenth-century Ireland in which the ‘non-English’ poor of Ireland were made to seem risible. The ‘stage Irishman’ – speaking with a heavy brogue and making stupid mistakes known as ‘Irish bulls’ – had been a figure on the English stage throughout the seventeenth century, but from the 1650s, scurrilously anti-Irish texts, featuring speakers of broken and absurdly exaggerated Hiberno-English (or English-Irish) circulated in manuscript and in print. Those in manuscript include the poems ‘Purgatorium Hibernicum’, ‘The Fingallian Travesty’ and ‘Iter Hibernicum’. All three long poems (written between 1660 and 1686) mock the way poor or uneducated Irishmen speak English and seem to have emerged from and been circulated within clubs or sets of (presumably middle-class) Englishmen newly arrived in Restoration Dublin. Similar printed texts include Richard Head’s Hic et Ubique or the Humors of Dublin (a play performed in about 1662), TeagueLand Jests (a popular jest book made up of scores of scenes in which unsophisticated Irishmen say or do ridiculous things) and Bog-Witticisms (London, ca. 1689). The full title of the last of these gives some idea of its tone and content: Bog-VVitticisms: or Dear Joy’s Common-Places. Being a Compleat Collection of the most Profound Punns, Learned Bulls, Elaborate Quibbles, and Wise Sayings of some of the Natives of Teague-Land. Shet fourd vor Generaul Nouddificaushion. And Coullected bee de grete Caare and Panish-Tauking of oour Laurned Countree-maun. Mac O Bonniclabbero of Drogheda Knight of the Mendicant Order. Printed For Evidansh Swear-all in Lack-Plaush Lane.

A classic example of satiric representation of the speech of the working Irish who attempted to speak English is found in a broadside circulating in the 1690s. Teague, ‘the Irish Trooper’, is telling his cousin Agra (Ir. a ghrá, my dear) of his misfortunes between the Battle of the Boyne and the surrender of Limerick. Dear Cousin Agra, and my Friends now attend To this doleful Ditty, which poor Teague has penn’d: The Irish Nation be Chreest now is lost, In [all] our Designs we are utterly crost:

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We still have been forc’d to Surrender and Yield, To K. William’s Army who Conquers the Field . . . They threaten to put then the Kill upon Teague, Therefore by my shoul we run one, two, three League, Too many for us they have been all along, Which makes me to sing this sorrowful song: As being compell’d to Surrender and Yield, To K. William’s Army which Conquers the Field . . . I put on my Shack-boots, and left Cart and Plow, And thought to have been a Commander e’er now, But I must return like a poor tatter’d Rogue, Without e’er a Shirt, Coat, Stocking, or Brogue, Since famous fair Limerick is forced to Yield, To K. William’s Army, who Conquers the Field.4

As fear of the uneducated Catholic Irish waned after the Battle of the Boyne, so did the satires directed against them. But English or Anglo-Irish readers and theatregoers still found the dramatic representations of the attempts of poor Irishmen and women to speak English riotously funny. In a not untypical example, from Hic et Ubique, the servant Patrick explains to his master, Kiltory, that he is in tears because he has come upon his wife being embraced by a ‘Peek-man’. Fuy by St. Patrick agra, he put de fuckation upon my weef. I will tell dee tale if thou wilt Glun ta mee. I came in wid my pishfork upon my back, thou know’st, and I see a greyshy guddy hang upon my weef, and I did creep in like a michear, to the wattles upon de loft abow thou know’st, and there I did see putting the great fuck upon my weef, as if thy own shelf was there Moister; and because I wu’d make haste, I fell down upon ’em, and leek to have more than half break my neck; then wid my pishfork I clap him upon de Narsum, and I did make sharge for him in the King’s name, thou know’st, to stay dere til I fetch the Cunt – stable; but before I came, this chureeh crave Ruagh make run away for himshelf.5

The mixing of Irish and English phrases, the presence of an ‘Irish bull’ (‘half break my neck’), the indecent content and the garrulousness are all typical of such writing, which is designed to provoke laughter and so make members of the Irish lower classes (and sometimes all Irishmen who could 4

5

Andrew Carpenter, ed., Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), pp. 533–5. Alan J. Bliss, Spoken English in Ireland 1600–1740: Twenty-Seven Representative Texts Assembled and Analysed (Dublin: Cadenus Press, 1979), p. 113.

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not speak standard English) objects of fun rather than of fear. In addition, this writing often – as in the ‘Purgatorium Hibernicum’ – travesties and parodies Catholic ritual or belief and allows the audience to retain its stereotypical view of poor Irishmen as uneducated, superstitious buffoons. Very little non-satirical writing by or about the working class in Ireland exists from before 1740. English-language writings from this period are the work of noble or middle-class writers. An exception is Jonathan Swift, who was fascinated by all levels of speech and recreated, in A Dialogue in Hybernian Stile, the speech of second-generation planters  – men whose fathers could have been working-class Englishmen but who, living in isolated farms surrounded by Irish speakers, had allowed elements of the Irish language to slip into their daily speech. A. What kind of man is your neighbour Squire Dolt? B. Why a meer buddogh. He sometimes coshers with me, and once a month I take a pipe with him, and we shoh it about for an hour together. A. Well, I’d give a cow in connaugh to see you together! I hear he keeps good horses. B. None but garrawns, and I have seen him often riding on a sougawn. In short, he is no better than a spawlpeen, a perfect Monaghan. When I was there last, we had nothing but a madder to drink out of.6

This text, though it is designed to highlight linguistic peculiarities, is not satirical in intent and seems intended to represent the speech of the children of the English working- or lower-middle-class individuals brought into rural Ireland in the seventeenth century as planters. In his verse, too, Swift used the voice of working-class  Irishmen and women. ‘Mary the Cook-Maid’s Letter to Dr Sheridan’, for instance, is written in the voice of the cook in the house of Swift’s friend Patrick Sheridan and ‘A Pastoral Dialogue’ purports to be a conversation between a labouring man (‘Dermot’) and his paramour (‘Sheelah’) who are weeding the courtyard at Sir Arthur Acheson’s house in Co. Armagh. Sheelah: In at the Pantry-door this Morn I slipt, And from the Shelf a charming Crust I whipt: Dennis was out, and I got hither safe And thou, my dear, shalt have the bigger half. Dermot: When you saw Tady at long-bullets play, You sat and Lows’d him all the Sun-shine Day. How could you, Sheelah, listen to his Tales, And crack such lice as his betwixt your Nails? 6

Ibid., pp. 164–5.

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Sheelah: When you with Oonah stood behind a Ditch, I peept, and saw you kiss the dirty Bitch. Dermot, how could you touch those nasty Sluts! I almost wisht this Spud were in your Guts.7

As for Irish-language material in the period 1600–1740, though Irish was the spoken language of most people in seventeenth-century Ireland, very few could read and write Irish and most of those who could have left Ireland for England or the Continent either in the flight of the earls in 1607 or in one of the waves of emigrating ‘wild geese’ that followed. A few Irish-speaking individuals, born in poverty but schooled in hedge schools by masters proficient in written Irish, were able to make a living in Ireland, either as teachers or in assisting scholars to read and interpret Irish manuscripts. Irish remained the first language of most of the inhabitants of Ireland until well after 1800; but English was the language of the administration and was widely understood in towns. Thus even the large population of landless semi-destitutes shuffling between the poorhouse and the street understood some English. Given the social structures of the day, it is not surprising that most of those who fell afoul of the law and ended up on the scaffold in early eighteenth-century Ireland were from the working class, as were most of those who came to enjoy the spectacle of a public execution. Thus though Irish was the language of many of the onlookers, the ‘Dying Words’ of the malefactor, printed on half sheets and sold to the crowd before the fatal drop, were in English. Few of these texts would have been composed by the criminals; it is more likely that they were the work of hack writers or even of those who printed them. But still, they probably reflect the attitude of working people towards each other and the law. Most contain short autobiographies (‘I was born in Lorgan Clanbrasil in the County of Ardmagh, and serv’d my time to a Black-smith’) and accounts of how the malefactor turned to crime: these are followed by either an acknowledgement of guilt or repeated protestations of innocence. Finally, the individuals commit their souls to their Redeemer. The details of their lives confirm their backgrounds, however, and the specific nature of these confessions illuminates the daily lives of the labouring poor, many of the men having been apprenticed to tradesmen, or making a precarious living running errands or driving a cart and the women having been victims of mistreatment when they were domestic servants. For example, Sisly Burke, executed near Stephen’s Green in Dublin in 1720, wrote: 7

Jonathan Swift, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. by Harold Williams (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 880–2. Long-bullets = road bowling. A ‘spud’ is a short knife used for weeding.

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I was born and bred in the County of Gollway in the Barroney of Ballymore of good Credable and Responsable Parents, who gave me sufficient Education and were very Carefull and tender of me and brought me up in the fear of God till I was Eighteen Years of age then I of my own accord (without thire consent) went to serue where I behaued myself just and honest till aboute two Years agoe . . . I got into my Lord Newtown seruis where the house Keeper and I could not agree and for that Reason was for turning me of[f ] and then one Mary Harper who was House-Maid incorraged me to take a sute of Cloths of my Lady’s sister’s . . . I am 26 Years of age, and Dies a Roman Catholick, and the Lord have Mercy on my Soul. Amen.8

These pathetic documents suggest the pressures of life on the margins, from which many young men were tempted to emigrate – perhaps to join Continental armies and fight for the Pretender. A  unique broadside in Trinity College Dublin gives a satirical version of a typical exchange as a sergeant is enlisting Irish recruits for service in a foreign army. [Sergeant]. Fat Name upon you dere? Answer. My name Byrne. [Sergeant]. Fer vash yo Born? Ans. County of Killamountains. [Sergeant]. De Tivil take you, can’t you call him Countys of Wicklows? I make English upon you, you make English upon me again, and be hang’d you Tief. Fere dere? Ans. Glanmalora. It ish a good Plashe, a bad Name, all von for dat. [Sergeant]. Fat Relishion? Ans. A Roman Catalick. [Sergeant]. Very well. To de Right, put in your Toe, put out your Heel, shit ub strait!9

An unusual and enigmatic figure from the 1720s is a poet who claimed to be a tenant farmer in Co. Kerry and called himself Murrough O’Connor. Though a landowner, he had a disagreement with his landlord, the Board of Trinity College Dublin, about the terms of his lease and wrote and published some extraordinary poems explaining his position. This position was one from which many in the working class emerged. Within one poem are remarkable details of life on a farm in Co. Kerry from the point of view of someone living on the land. Threatened with eviction, he writes: My bended shoulders with my burthen bow, And I can hardly drive this limping cow: 8

9

James Kelly, Gallows Speeches from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin:  Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 150. Bliss, Spoken English in Ireland, p. 159.

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Not long ago, which gave me cause to fret, A sea hog at the Shallogs broke my net . . . With mournful song lamenting, the Bantee Foretold the ruin of my house and me.10

Such elegiac writing is more typical of material in Irish than in English, as Daniel Corkery’s seminal The Hidden Ireland (Dublin, 1924) makes abundantly clear. That book suggests the existence of a network of repressed and poverty-stricken Irish-speaking bards throughout Ireland in the eighteenth century, many of whom descended socially during the period. Though the validity of the assumptions on which Corkery based his arguments has been effectively queried by modern scholars, there is no doubt that in Irish, and occasionally in English, elegiac poetry mourning the passing of better times, politically, economically and socially, was widespread in eighteenthcentury Ireland and that the Janus-faced, simultaneous harking back to a better past while hoping for a better future is an important part of the cultural hinterland of later radical social movements. Those who composed in Irish had to face the decline in traditional patronage and networks, and some were even forced to work as labourers in post-Cromwellian Ireland. But they were educated men and women, often from families of hereditary bards, rhymers or historians. The work of Dáibhidh Ó Bruadair, Aogán Ó Rathaille, Peadar Ó Doirnín and Seán Ó Neachtain – to name just a few of those active in eighteenth-century Ireland  – reflected the frustration and anguish of those whose way of life and hopes for a better future were being destroyed. Several poems in English, including the ‘Purgatorium Hibernicum’, satirise this aspect of Gaelic culture – though neither the poets nor those who parodied them could be said to come from the working class. The majority of the verse produced in eighteenth-century Ireland – in English as well as in Irish  – never reached print. But among the material to appear in book form are the poems of Laurence Whyte, a mathematics teacher who lived in Dublin but came from – and retained strong links with – lowly farming families in rural Co. Westmeath. Whyte wrote many poems describing the plight of working men and women, not only on farms in Westmeath but in the city of Dublin. He wrote, wittily and with verve, on the exploitation of tenant farmers, on debt-collecting and on the enjoyment of food and drink. He knew and translated from Irish 10

Carpenter, Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, p. 84. Sea hog = Ir. muc mara, porpoise. ‘The Shallogs’ (Ir. Seallóg) was ‘a fishery’. Bantee = Ir. bean sí, banshee.

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and was particularly active in the Dublin musical world. As critics have noted, Whyte came from the same area as Oliver Goldsmith, whose ‘The Deserted Village’ carries echoes of his own childhood experience of life in rural Ireland. Much of the poetry written by – or purporting to have been written by – labouring men or women in eighteenth-century Ireland is found in chapbooks. These fragile objects are printed half sheets containing three or four songs, decorated with a woodcut illustration. The words might have been dictated to the compositor or copied from another songbook. Chapbooks were produced by small printers in country towns such as Monaghan, Limerick or Newry and were sold to chapmen who hawked them round the countryside. Some chapbooks are so full of garbled misprints as to be almost unintelligible, whether the text is meant to be in English or Irish-English, or in Irish. The songs, even those in English, often use the metrical patterns of the Irish amhrán and the distinctive and eccentric vocabulary of hedge schools. Several chapbook songs adopt the persona of a woman. Many of the latter clearly reflect the experience of life on the margins of society. Songs bewail lost lovers  – sailors, weavers and journeymen  – or describe flirtatious encounters of various kinds with handsome and well-endowed but fatally untrustworthy travelling labourers. Chapbook songs recount drinking bouts or the bawdy adventures of weavers or travelling labourers with a refreshing frankness, usually in heavily Hibernicised English but sometimes in macaronics. Clearly these songs were written by those with intimate experience of rural Irish life for performance to a rural workingclass audience. As such, they are rare examples of the work of adults of the pre-1800 Irish working class. A fascinating, chance survival is a poem, in broken English, by a travelling bard. A footnote in the first printing explains how it came to be preserved. A company of ladies who were taking a walk in the Irish countryside happened to meet ‘a poor mad itinerant Ballad-maker’ called L. O’Reilly, and purchased all his compositions from him. They read the poems aloud and amused themselves by laughing at the ballad-maker’s unfamiliarity with standard English vocabulary, syntax and prosody. This is part of his ‘Elegy on Miss Bridget Burne’. Unhappy Hibernia mourn, O mourn and do not cease! Thus and only thus can you equitably appease The throbs and griefs of all that lov’d the good, The seraphic spirit that from you alas! is fled. Mourn ye widows, your comfortress is gone;

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Ye orphans mourn, thrice orphantized again; Lament ye poor: ye lost her tender-looking charity, Who pity’d your wants, distress and misery: In all your griefs, along with you she would grieve, Oppress’d with distress until yours she would relieve.11

There must have been hundreds of songs like O’Reilly’s elegy on Miss Bridget Burne, English-language versions of the traditional Irish-language elegy or genealogical poem. Several songs found in chapbooks are clearly the work of poets used to thinking and writing in Irish – for example, ‘The Irish Phœnix’. Once more kind Muses it is your duty, for to infuse me with verse sublime, My subject surely is now amusing, as you have chose me for to repine; Ye mangling poets don’t dare oppose me, for now my notions are raised on high, Kind Gods support me through these my posies, in you I glory and still rely.12

The peculiar language in this song can be partly explained by the fact that, though Irish was the language of the countryside, the hedge schoolmasters who taught English – the language of commerce and the future – might, themselves, have heard few native English speakers; thus their knowledge of English could have been derived from books and grammars and was quaintly old-fashioned and stilted. It is worth noting that the metrical and rhyming patterns in ‘The Irish Phœnix’ are those of the Irish song or amhrán. Working-class poetry did not only originate in the countryside. The urban environment produced many lively songs, of which those surrounding Larry Lambert and Luke Caffrey, executed for theft in the 1770s, are the best known – particularly ‘De nite afore Larry was stretch’d’. But ‘Lord Altham’s Bull’, an account of the release of a stolen bull in the alleyways of Dublin, is equally lively and entertaining. The fifth stanza goes: De mosey took down Plunket-street, Where de clothes on de pegs was hanging, Oh! den he laid about wid his nob, De shifts around him banging. Oh! Mrs Mulligan, jewel, take in de bits o’ duds from de wall, out o’ de way o’ de mosey’s horns – be de hokey, he’ll fly kites wid dem.13

The prose ‘patter’ at the end of each stanza of this song would be spoken in as broad a ‘Dublin’ accent as the performer could manage. 11 12 13

Ibid., p. 459. Ibid., p. 508. Ibid., p. 444. ‘De mosey’ is the bull.

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The best known of the Irish working-class poets was Henry Jones, a bricklayer from Drogheda who was patronised by Lord Chesterfield, the Lord Lieutenant, and who followed him to London. There he had some success as a poet and playwright and was even tipped to be the poet laureate. Some of Jones’s early poems celebrate Dublin events such as a series of lectures on experimental philosophy given by John Booth in Dublin in 1744. ‘Philosophy:  a poem address’d to the Ladies who attend Mr Booth’s Lectures’ described how ‘Proud Nymphs’ in the audience would be encouraged to submit themselves, one by one, to electric shocks which caused them to ‘smile’ and ‘burn’ while their eyes flashed. The poem goes on to describe how exciting this was for the ‘fond youths’ in the audience and to flatter the girls as ‘the Pride of Nature and Creation’s Boast’. Jones’s successful move up the social ranks  – until he was a frequenter of the court in London – was spoiled by a fondness for drink and dissipation; like several other male working-class poets of the age, he ended his days in poverty. A happier outcome awaited Ellen Taylor, a housemaid from Co. Kilkenny. She was of a poetic disposition and was found, by a houseguest, weeping at the beauty of an urn she was meant to be dusting. The fact that she wrote poetry soon emerged and local gentry and clergy (and their wives) banded together to print and publish her poems. The resulting fragile little book apparently gained Ellen Taylor a sufficient sum to enable her to set up a school. Much the best of her poems is an account of her feelings on being sent to wash clothes in the Barrow River. Thy banks, O Barrow, sure must be The Muses’ choicest haunt, Else why so pleasing thus to me, Else why my soul enchant? To view thy dimpled surface here, Fond fancy bids me stay; But Servitude, with brow austere, Commands me straight away.14

Another remarkable volume is The Blind Poem, Written by a Girl, Born Blind, and Now in her Eighteenth Year. Dedicated to the World by the Authoress, Mary Byrne, of Wicklow (Dublin, 1789). This long and rambling poem is prefaced with the following explanation. 14

Ibid., p. 473.

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The Authoress of this little Work is the Daughter of a labouring Man, near the Town of Wicklow, whose Genius was first discovered, at the Age of twelve Years, by a Gentleman, then Priest in that Parish . . . Offering her Compositions to the Public, was the idea of a Lady [who] thought an Arrangement of [her poems] might be productive of some pecuniary Advantages, which her situation so much needed.

The author’s own ‘Dedication’ to her book is disarmingly honest and unambiguous about her lowly situation. I am told also that to make a Book complete, a Dedication must first be address’d to some Great Friend, – first for the Purpose of Patronage, and next for pecuniary Reward; both which are generally rated according to the proportion of Flattery contained, (tho’ an Author’s Poverty and Obscurity often preclude them from either Advantage) – what a Situation am I then reduced to? – to address a great friend without having one, or to bestow Perfections on an imaginary one that I have not the least knowledge of the Party possessing – and for what? to receive in the one Instance, perhaps, a beggarly Pittance bestowed against the Will.

She is equally unromantic about the fate of her book: Curiosity will lead the Crowd to buy a Poem, written by a blind Girl at the Age of eighteen years (and here I think is an excellent Place to ask a small Favour, which is to beg for God’s sake you won’t lend my Book about from House to House, which by the by is but a mean way of cheating) . . . In full expectation therefore, of each, and every of you purchasing my Book, which will contribute much to my profit and very little to your loss. I have the Honour to subscribe myself, Your obedient (And I hope to have it in my Power to say) Your much obliged, Humble Servant, Mary Byrne. Ballyguile Hill, Wicklow, Nov 1st 1789.15

As optimistic, and as equally dependent on charitable goodwill, was John Burns of Monaghan. He was born deaf and dumb and started work as a pedlar. He subsequently owned a shop but contracted ‘an unfortunate connection’ which led to his being declared bankrupt. His wife died and he was left to bring up two children. By 1775, he was growing old and ‘unable to bustle in Business as formerly’; he therefore compiled and published an extraordinary Historical and Chronological Remembrancer of All Remarkable Occurrences: From the Creation to This Present Year of Our Lord, 1775 (Dublin, 1775). At the end of an impressive list of more than one thousand subscribers, Burns wrote that,

15

Byrne, The Blind Poem, pp. iii–v.

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With the utmost gratitude and respect, the Author begs leave to return his unfeigned thanks to those generous BENEFACTORS, whose liberality has enabled him to pass the remainder of his days as comfortably as his Situation will admit of. Gratitude and Good wishes are all the humble poor have to bestow.16

The book itself is an amazing compilation and though one would expect it to be a tissue of unacknowledged extracts from other works of this kind, Burns’s 500-page Remembrancer is full of surprising entries, some commenting on events in Britain or the wider world (particularly North America) and others peculiarly Irish. One of the most memorable is dated 20 February 1772. In the pocket of a footman to a lady of fashion (who, it seems, had purchased the chance of a ticket in the late lottery) was found the following curious memorandum, viz. when I get the ten thousand pounds I’ll marry Bett Janson, but biecause she was koy and saucy, I’ll use her lyke a servant, she shall bring me every morning a mug of strong bear, with a toast, nutmeg and sugar – then sleep till Ten, when I’ll have a sack possit – Have dinner on table precisely at won – lay in a stoe of wine and brandy – about five has tarts and gellies, and a gallon boul of punch – a hot supper of too dishes, and if in a good humour aske Bett to sit down – Go to bed at twelve.17

Following comprehensive indexes and lists of various kinds, Burns adds appendixes of curious and useful facts, listing the value of foreign currencies and many geographical, social, astrological and biblical details, even including a table of the number of bricks needed for a rod of walling. The volume ends with a poem on Ulysses’s dog, entitled: ‘A Striking example of fidelity and gratitude in a Dumb Animal’. If Burns really did compile this extraordinary book, he should be remembered as the most intellectually energetic of Ireland’s eighteenth-century working class. Energy of a slightly different kind is to be found in the work of the eccentric Patrick O’Kelly. Though most of his published works appeared after 1800, his Killarney, an Epic Poem was printed in Dublin in 1791. O’Kelly, who was born in Loughrea Co. Galway in about 1746, behaved as if he were a wandering bard in the old Gaelic tradition and seems to have lived entirely on the charity of those he visited throughout Ireland. He praised those who entertained him and lampooned those who denied him bed and

16

17

John Burns, An Historical and Chronological Remembrancer of All Remarkable Occurrences: From the Creation to This Present Year of Our Lord, 1775 . . . With an Alphabetical Index (Dublin: printed for the author, 1775) sig. A8v. Ibid., p. 293.

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board. He also wrote, one suspects, all the extravagant poems praising his poetic achievements that appear at the front of his self-published volumes. Killarney was, of course, the inspiration for many poets in eighteenthcentury Ireland, most of whom were born into the leisured middle classes. Working people did not, as a whole, have time to admire the scenery. One interesting exception is Olivia Elder, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in Aghadowey, near Coleraine, who wrote poems extolling the countryside of Ulster. This lively and inventive poet is possibly the only female voice surviving from eighteenth-century Ulster. There were, however, male poets – most of them weavers – from very poor backgrounds who, from about 1780 onwards, produced extensive amounts of verse, some of it published in local newspapers, some of it in volumes printed in Belfast. The best known of these is James Orr, but others, including Samuel Thomson, Hugh Porter and Francis Boyle, are included in a pioneering anthology Rhyming Weavers and Other Country Poets of Antrim and Down by John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1974). Though most of their work was published after 1800, a few poems by Orr and Boyle fit within our period; in one example Orr, writing in Ulster Scots, praises the potato. The weel-pair’t peasants, kempin’ set ye; The weak wee boys, sho’el, weed, an’ pat ye; The auld guid men thy apples get ay Seedlin’s to raise; An’ on sow’ns-eeves the lasses grate ye, To starch their claes.18

[The well-paired peasants, working together, plant you: the little boys shovel, weed and earth you up; the good old men always get little potatoes from which to raise seedlings; and on the eve of Samhain (i.e. 31 October) the girls grate you to starch their clothes.] There is, of course, rich material in Irish from the eighteenth century, the fullest and most significant collection of which is in Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella’s An Duanaire 1600–1900:  Poems of the Dispossessed (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1981). The Irish-language poets whose work is in that anthology lived quietly in rural communities, meeting from time to time in ‘courts of poetry’ to recite poems and exchange manuscripts. But, as Kinsella puts it: ‘Isolated within a political and social system which was both alien and repressive, [they] died in despair or abject poverty, many refusing to consider seriously any way of life but that of the poet-scholar. 18

Philip Robinson, ed., The Country Rhymes of James Orr, the Bard of Ballycarry 1770–1816 (Bangor: Pretani Press, 1992), p. 2.

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The prospect of earning a living by manual labour [was] regarded with wry humour by even a poet as accomplished as Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin.’19 [S]ince the learning won’t pay in a lifetime to drown my thirst I’ll not pause in my going till I’ve brought my spade to Galway Where daily I’ll get my pay: my keep and a sixpence. At the end of the day, if my bones be weary or weak, And the foreman consider my spadecraft less than heroic, I’ll discourse serenely upon The Adventure of Death Or the wars of the Greeks at Troy.20

It is impossible to tell whether any of the anonymous poems found in the English-language anthologies of the period, such as The Ulster Miscellany (1752), Flora’s Banquet (1782), the volumes published by John Winstanley, those edited by Joshua Edkins or, indeed, the ‘Original Poetry’ sections in Irish magazines and newspapers after about 1760, were from the pens of genuinely working-class writers. Some are written in what purports to be working-class speech and it is possible that a few of these poems were by the children of labouring parents – John Cunningham, whose father was a cooper who won the lottery; Hugh Kelly, the dramatist whose father kept a tavern in Dublin; John Taylor, the stay-maker/poet from Limerick; or even Thomas Dermody, whose spendthrift father kept a small school in Ennis. However, it is clear that the making of verses was a common pastime in eighteenth-century Ireland, as much among the working poor as among their more affluent neighbours. Some of the best descriptions of working men and women are short passages in longer poems by poets with some education: a good example is from ‘the Smock Race at Finglas’ by James Ward. A working wife is visiting a country fair near Dublin: The Butcher’s soggy Spouse amidst the throng, Rubbed clean, and tawdry dressed, puffs slow along: Her pond’rous Rings the wond’ring Mob behold, And dwell on ev’ry finger heaped with Gold. Long to St Patrick’s filthy shambles bound, Surpris’d, she views the rural scene around; The distant ocean there salutes her eyes, Here, tow’ring hills in goodly order rise; There fruitful valleys long extended lay, Here, sheaves of corn, and cocks of fragrant hay; While whatso’er she hears, she smells or sees Gives her fresh transports, and she dotes on trees, 19 20

An Duanaire, p. xxiii. Translation by Thomas Kinsella. An Duanaire, pp. 183–5.

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Yet (hapless wretch) the servile thrift of Gain Can force her to her stinking stall again.21

Because there were such different class structures in Ireland and England and because education was so rarely available for children of the Irish poor, the corpus of ‘working-class’ writing from Ireland is necessarily small. But what there is suggests that, while material in the Irish language was elegiac and full of longing for a better world, material in English reflected a surprisingly stoic cheerfulness. Even if most of the poor in Ireland lived in miserable conditions and suffered appalling hardship, those who broke free of that world and left written material behind them reflect an inventive and surprisingly optimistic attitude towards life; however, one must concede that this may have been a very small and overall unrepresentative cohort. Equally, the Act of Union and the Great Famine would in any case change how working-class people viewed their lot – as would the increasingly puritan stance of the nineteenth-century Catholic Church in Ireland. But the few working-class individuals who reflected seventeenthand eighteenth-century Ireland by writing about it have left us some unusual and enjoyable material.

21

Carpenter, Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, p. 80.

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‘We wove our ain wab’ The Ulster Weaver Poets’ Working Lives, Myths and Afterlives Frank Ferguson A literary criticism which explores the work of the poets who were termed the ‘Rhyming Weavers’ has developed over the past fifty years. In their own time, these writers were perceived as active participants in a regional and sometimes national literary community whose works were read and appreciated by a broad readership. In subsequent generations their legacy was less assured, and for a while they disappeared from the national and, indeed, even from the provincial canon. Their rediscovery has brought with it, as one might assume of any process of reawakened interest, a series of ideological underpinnings and assumptions which has offered layers of extra meaning as well as ambiguity to what might have been originally a relatively straightforward narrative of a loosely affiliated series of writers. This chapter will examine the working experiences of the school of poets designated by the poet, critic and bibliophile John Hewitt as ‘Rhyming Weavers’. Hewitt’s interest in these writers stemmed from their use of vernacular language and literary traditions to articulate the individual and communal concerns of their locale, society and nation. Many of them were handloom weavers who operated from their own homes and farms in the counties of Down, Antrim, Derry and Donegal in the nineteenth century. They published in local newspapers and in their own collections of verse, which were often self-funded through subscription.1 In Hewitt’s analysis, they flourished during the transitional phase of developing capitalism in Ulster. Despite celebrating the best work of their kind, and spending much of his adult life collecting and refining his opinion on their work and significance, Hewitt was often unsure of how to judge their literary merits, and was torn between perceiving them as pioneering transnational, Irish poets who were adept at negotiating vernacular, Augustan and Romantic registers or limiting them as mere enthusiastic 1

John Hewitt, Rhyming Weavers and Other Poets of Antrim and Down (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1974), pp. 7–14.

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imitators of Robert Burns. Hewitt was also instrumental in placing their efflorescence within the period prior to the domination of the linen industry by the factory system  – in Hewitt’s poetic rendering, the ‘Rhyming Weavers fell silent/when they flocked through the factory door’; as the use of the handloom waned, so too did this poetic class.2 Recent studies in book and linen production in the north of Ireland have contested this somewhat romanticised version of events.3 The recovery of the Ulster-Scots Rhyming Weaver tradition by a new generation of Irish and Scottish scholars has uncovered a rich seam of literary networks, authors and texts which illuminates a more sustained, various and vigorous tradition than that Hewitt imagined. Indeed, like the use of the handloom itself, the work of these writers continued well into the twentieth century. This chapter will draw on the work of the Weavers to gauge their feelings on their lives as individuals living and working through momentous economic and political change and the effect that this had on their work in biographical and aesthetic terms. It will then question the perceived extent of their disappearance as a group and will conclude by tracing the impact of the myth of a lost labouring-class tradition on northern Irish writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Working Lives Some care must be taken when assessing the authenticity of the representation of the experience of work by poets ascribed to be Rhyming Weavers. A distinction may be drawn between texts which purport to inscribe the practices of the labouring class and those which have been in actuality created by writers from a labouring-class background and embody its culture within their texts. There has long been a tradition in Irish and British writing of portraying pastoral activities and pastimes of the rural working classes, and indeed this is the case within Ulster-Scots writing. However, it must be recognised that it was only during the late eighteenth century that poetry by labouring-class Ulster-Scots writers began to be published. Prior to that, texts which demonstrate elements of the Lowland Scots literary tradition tended to be the work of middle- or higher-ranking individuals who wished to demonstrate a sense of local or regional individuality 2

3

From John Hewitt, ‘A Local Poet’, in The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. by Frank Ormsby (Belfast: BlackStaff Press, 1991), p. 219. Kevin J. James, Handloom Weavers in Ulster’s Linen Industry, 1815–1914 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), p. 85. For a revised view of Hewitt’s interpretation of the Weaver tradition, see Ivan Herbison, ‘Beyond the Rhyming Weavers’, Études Irlandaises, 38.2 (2013), pp. 41–54.

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or colour in their work. For example, the poem ‘Tit for Tat; or the Rater rated. A new Song, in Way of Dialogue, between a Laggen Farmer and his Wife’ purports to be a piece of invective against the pretensions and overlordship of an Anglican clergyman’s wife, raised by a Presbyterian farmer’s wife in the 1753 Ulster Anthology. However, this poem, featuring as it does within a section entitled ‘Scotch Songs’, is more likely to be the work of Anglican liberals ventriloquizing their thoughts on Penal-era inequalities through the mode of Ulster-Scots poetic discourse.4 IV. I rise e’er the cocks craw day; My hands I spare not a’ day, And wi’ my farmer laddie At night I take my ease: My husband plows and harrows, He sows and reaps the farrows, Shame fa’ them wad change marrows, For rector’s gown and chaise.5

While productions of verse in the mid-eighteenth century may be suspect as to their class origins, they point the way to later developments at the end of the century, in which individual voices from Ulster’s working community discovered the means to record their lives, thoughts and emotions in print. The arrival of this class into print culture can be suggested to have been occasioned by a number of factors.6 There was greater access to publication than in previous decades and the success and popularity of individuals such as Robert Burns, an iconic cultural cousin to many in Ulster, inspired many.7 The early 1800s in the north of Ireland channelled the sensitivities of many radicalised in the 1790s towards tempering their politics into cultural expression. The Union itself indirectly may have stimulated further local literary development as the inclusion of Ireland within the copyright legislation meant that, with the disappearance of the pirate trade in texts, new home-grown literary materials would be required by a print-hungry public. Alongside these local forces was the wider Romantic 4

5 6

7

Michael Griffin and Breandán Mac Suibhne, ‘Da’s Boat; Or, Can the Submarine Speak? A Voyage to O’Brazeel (1752) and Other Glimpses of the Irish Atlantis’, Field Day Review, 2 (2006), pp. 111–28 (p. 113). The Ulster Miscellany ([Belfast(?)]: James Blow, [1753(?)]), pp. 380–1. Frank Ferguson, ‘The Industrialization of Irish Book Production, 1790–1900’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book: Volume IV: The Irish Book in English, 1800–91, ed. by James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 9–26. Frank Ferguson and Andrew R. Holmes (eds.), Revising Robert Burns and Ulster: Literature, Religion and Politics, c.1770–1920 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009).

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quest for authentic voices drawn from real life rather than from the dictates of poetic diction, which provided a further impetus to gather work from lower orders who were viewed as living closer to Nature. Print enabled writers to demonstrate their flair for the vernacular and within this register they were permitted a number of freedoms that may not have existed within the standard Augustan phrasing of magazine verse. Hugh Porter’s work demonstrates the license that such verse permitted: I made my sangs to please my sel’ [,] My dearest worthy frien’s, and ithers No’ just sae dear, but rhymin’ brithers To whom, just as they are, I sent them, But never for the public meant them. And thirdly, in the style appears The accent o’ my early years, Which is nor Scotch nor English either, But part o’ baith mix’d up thegither: Yet it[s] the sort my neighbours use, Wha think shoon prettier far than shoes.8

Firstly, such poetry offers linguistic and intellectual freedom to write from and for a communal platform that is simultaneously local and supportive; but also because of the success of Robert Burns, James Hogg and Walter Scott, it is potentially international in its scope and audience. Secondly, a number of safeguards are enclosed within this text. It purports to suggest that the work is not serious literature; that it is meant for the gratification of the author and his associates rather than general consumption. Also, the use of the language is deemed a throwback to the language of childhood or the nursery and a mixture of Scots and English. Despite these insinuations of rustic naïveté, one can see a manifesto of linguistic and class aesthetics being defined, which generates alternative ways in which to communicate and enjoy literary work, and which is at odds with the prevailing authorities on writing at this time. Intriguingly, the collection in which Porter was positioning this was itself a product of Anglican patronage, and can be said to exist at the fault line where a once-radical Presbyterian United Irishman poet is determining a quasi-alliance with his Establishment supporters. While by no means the most astute or gifted of his literary generation, Porter’s work demonstrates the capability for manoeuvring that writers had within Ulster-Scots literary tradition in the early nineteenth century. 8

Hugh Porter, Poetical Attempts (Belfast: Archbold and Dugan, 1813), p. xi.

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While at times his work could descend into self-parody, or appear too selfeffacing in its desire to give his patron the type of local humour or piety thought required by local clerics, he also succeeds in keenly observing his world and milieu. For example, his ‘The Muse Dismissed’ captures the tenacious physicality of harvest, as he bends to sharpen the sickle in order to win the race to cut the last sheaf, or ‘churn’. Be hush’d my Muse, ye ken the morn Begins the shearing o’ the corn, Whar knuckles monie a risk maun run, An’ monie a trophy’s lost an’ won, Whar sturdy boys, wi’ might an’ main Shall camp, till wrists an’ thumbs they strain, While pithless, pantin’ wi’ the heat, They bathe their weazen’d pelts in sweat To gain a sprig o’ fading fame . . .9

Economic difficulty features prominently in his work and is heightened throughout the collection through a great number of verse epistles to his patron, Thomas Tighe. The texture of the poetic style allows for considerable range in Porter’s declamations. A superficial reading might see poems such as ‘The Muse Dismissed’ playing on the well-trodden sentiments of polite magazine verse as the poet-weaver must lay aside his high-flown aspirations for creating art to turn to more prosaic matters. Porter’s poem’s fascination with the work of the hand, transformed by the act of cutting the ripened grain into knuckles that risk the depredations of the sickle, and wrists and thumbs that will strain at the heavy manual labour, informs its reader of the physical toll that must be paid. A further layering of meaning is provided by the Scots vernacular in the section. The move to a register that eschews the polite world to pronounce upon bodies transformed to ‘pithless, panting’ beings whose ‘weasen’d pelts’ are bathed in sweat heightens the dual worlds that the speaker inhabits – torn between a world of searching for the muse, and one searching for the chance to win the folk custom of the local shearers. Tensions, perhaps not readily apparent to a sight reading of the poem, are more aurally attested to when one considers that ‘heat’ [hate] and ‘sweat’ conjure a full rhyme, suggesting that there is more tension and class consciousness at work within this poem that might only be recognised by those within Porter’s sociolect. His overtures to Tighe range from the grossly deferential to downright haranguing and

9

Ibid., pp. 55–6.

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evidence an individual in very harsh circumstances spurred to call on aid because of physical illness: Ye ken the wab maun be put out To pay the rent – that’s past dispute, Else Starry, inoffensive brute, Will be tane up; Then drammock, dry, (or waur) I doubt, I’d hae to sup.10

Myths of Denomination, Interests and Class Consciousness Why weaving became the overarching phenomenon to link the writers might be open to some debate. While there may be debate over if and why the linen industry is the fundamental reason for linking the writers, it has proved a powerful, cohesive force in their work and in subsequent generations of commentators. The verse of writers like Porter lent itself to the interests of critics who wished to locate the history of northern Irish vernacular culture, as part of a means to determine a left-leaning cultural past. In addition, the discovery of a caste of poets who were associated with the linen industry seemed to offer an insight into an industry that even by the mid-twentieth century appeared to be a core concern of Northern Ireland’s economy and culture.11 Hewitt’s lifelong interest in the writers reached its apogee in 1974 when he published a revised version of his 1951 MA dissertation along with a small anthology. Such an undertaking at the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles was tantamount to a mission aimed at signifying that there was a rich cultural history that all sides of the political divide in Ulster could discover, and indeed that such a history could be recovered to offer some means of recalibration of what had become a pathologically divided society. Though often apologetic about the work being presented, Hewitt’s analysis also offers a history that is not predicated upon the unionist/nationalist binary: Many of the predominant interests of the bards and their little communities are demonstrated: folk-customs and superstitions, domestic and class relationships, manual crafts, the weather and the seasons, objects seen and social practices observed, the decline of the spinning-wheel and the handloom, Tennant Right, education; we have some humour, some concern for 10 11

Ibid., p. 70. William Henry Crawford, The Impact of the Domestic Linen Industry in Ulster (Belfast:  Ulster Historical Foundation, 2005).

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the ways of words, abundant humanity, a quick eye for deceit, an enthusiasm for physical pleasure, sentiment, love, but little or no highly creative imagination. There is no Robert Burns or John Clare to be discovered here, but the reader will encounter several companionable men and a number of memorable lines of verse.12

Hewitt’s view of these writers was one of a brief flourishing accorded through the relatively stable income and financial security which handloom weaving offered to relatively well-skilled individuals. These individuals in their often unorthodox and non-conventional lives may have provided Hewitt with a sense of poetic ancestors which underscored his own sense of precarious belonging to his society. Their work, though grounded in the rhythms and idioms of northern life, often found itself at odds with the established authority of the time. For example, poems such as James Orr’s ‘Donegore Hill’, penned after the debacle of the United Irishmen’s Battle of Antrim, captures his sense of despair and bitter humour at the faithlessness and fecklessness of his fellow volunteers. Employing the Scottish traditional vernacular genre of the Christis Kirk Stanza, a form reserved in Scotland at least for discussion of the carnivalesque goings on of high days and holidays, Orr mourns and bewails the failings of the rebellion: While close-leagu’d crappies rais’d the hoards O’ pikes, pike-shafts, forks, firelocks, Some melted lead – some saw’d deal-boards – Some hade, like hens in byre-neuks: Wives baket bonnocks for their men, Wi’ tears instead o’ water; An’ lasses made cockades o’ green For chaps wha us’d to flatter Their pride ilk day.13

The satirical drive of poets like James Orr and Samuel Thomson, whom he favoured, seemed to affirm Hewitt’s own sardonic animus. Yet, for all his pioneering understanding of their work and his deep affinity with some of their political causes, his bias as a collector, historian and critic does filter into his anthological and bibliographical reclamation. In regards to the focus of this chapter, Hewitt could be forgiven for overstating the case for the disappearance of the handloom production of linen cloth. His perception is viewed as a somewhat inaccurate view now of the industrial history 12 13

Hewitt, Rhyming Weavers, pp. 126–7. James Orr, ‘Donegore Hill’, Poems, on Various Subjects, by James Orr (Belfast: Smyth and Lyons, 1804), p. 13.

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of the linen industry, as handlooms were apparently used well into the twentieth century. Despite this, Hewitt preferred to champion the work of independently minded small farmer/artisanal ‘bards’ of the early-to-midnineteenth century rather than those writers who developed out of the factory system or those who existed within the early twentieth century or indeed who were contemporary to Hewitt. It has been noted that Hewitt may have been less inclined to discuss the work of poets such as Thomas Given or Adam Lynn, as they favoured religious and political alignments to evangelicalism and Orangeism, which were at odds with Hewitt’s preferred version of the Rhyming Weaver.14 Alongside the difficulty in assessing the actual length of time the Weavers’ tradition may have lasted, there also exists a difficulty in how seriously they were taken as writers and commentators. Recent work on a number of key poets has reclaimed their reputation as being more than regional Burns imitators or local sentimentalists.15 The multiple connections to Burns have both helped and harmed the reputation of the poets, though recent discussions have done much to foment a new, if small field of scholarship around this question. In terms of class consciousness, the aspiration to connect with Burns as a ‘brither rhymer’ informs readers of Irish literary history in the twenty-first century of the determination of Irish writers to invoke a similar background to and shared experience with Robert Burns and to strive for recognition for themselves as individuals, as a class and as networks of writers. The question of the recourse to occasional sentimentalism and empty lachrymosity within the Irish Weaver tradition is a vexed one, and another of the myths that further scholarly inquiry needs to address. The tendency in the past to label such displays of emotion as mere country rhyming has harmed their reputation. The poets on occasion had a propensity to look fondly back on the generation of their childhood or to articulate their feelings in the high emotion of their age. This is not to say that such actions did not have a political agenda to them. For example, David Herbison’s lament for his hometown of Ballymena reminisces about easier times: We then had nae drapers the poor to oppress[;] We wove our ain wab and we drank our ain glass, And aye had a shilling to spend or to spare, The heart to mak’ glad that seem’d weary wi’ care; 14 15

Herbison, ‘Beyond the Rhyming Weavers’, pp. 41–54. For a recent discussion of this work, see Jennifer Orr, Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture in Romantic-Period Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015).

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Contented we were when we had in our bag A very fine score, or a six hundred rag; Our sweethearts aye met us wi’ joy in their face, Mirth reigned in their pride, and made happy ilk place; Our coats were hame spun, and our sarks were the same, And warmly we welcomed a frien’ whan he came; Our rent was aye paid when the rent day came roun’ When I was a boy in my ain native toun.16

Despite claims to somewhat prelapsarian childhood memories, such sentimentalism works to accentuate the rage felt against the industrial processes and consumerism of mid-nineteenth-century Antrim. Indeed, this proliferation of homespun memory and friendliness underscores the keenness of anguish felt in the depredations of the mill system. Oh had I the power the past to restore, The reel wad still crack, and the spinning-wheel snore, Mill-yarn wad sink doun as it never had been, Trade flourish as fair as it ever was seen; Distress and oppression flee far frae our view, Our hamlets rejoice and their beauties renew; The profligate band that brought want to our door Should labour or starve on a far foreign shore; A wab in a steamloom should never appear, Our country to steep in affliction and fear; Peace, pleasure, and plenty, and happy hearts roun’ And times wad revive in my ain native toun.17

Even poems such as ‘My Auld Candlestick’ by Thomas Given have more sophistication than might be thought on first reading. In this poem, the titular object is described in terms of being of no practical usage, and it might be seen to be a text very much as fodder for the regional newspaper. However, such poems derive from the Lowland Scots tradition and offer powerful, if at times disguised pronouncements on existence and economics. 16

17

David Herbison, ‘My Ain Native Toon’, The Select Works of David Herbison. With Life of the Author by Rev. David M’Meekin (Belfast: William Mullan & Co., 1883), p. 306. Ibid., p. 307.

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My auld candlestick, as you sit by the wa’ You mind me o’ those who are lang syne awa, O’ happy young faces wha wove late at nicht, As they put oot their wabs by the aid o’ your licht, And got them laid up for the hall the next day, Our bread tae procure and our rents for tae pay; While John thocht nae ill o’t his wab-bag tae pack, And start for the market wi’ three on his back. But noo times are changed, for the poorest of a’, When gaun tae the toon wonna travel ava’, Tae keep fashion up, though their last pence be taen, They maun hae a ticket and sail in the train; Betimes when we venture tae travel abroad, The cars o’ the poster are thick on the road, Wi’ their big lades o’ folk oot and in tae the toon, That wud pay for their seat though the charge be a croon.18

Weaver poets demonstrated their command of the sentimental mode to make political statements, and these statements were emphasised further by their use of language, rhythm and choice of verse form to stress their economic background and placement. In her ‘Epistle to Mr Richard Ramsay. On perusing his beautiful Address to the Author’, Sarah Leech employs a simple quatrain to demolish the advances of a would-be middleclass patron: Wi’ heck weel-teeth’d and spit renew’d, I sat me down to spin contented; And your address to me reviewed, Which set my head amaist demented.19

This limiting of masculine gaze and longing is heighted by the reference to the paraphernalia of the spinning wheel. It is placed literally between the speaker and the observer, its apparatus literally ready and prepared to give her honest labour to bring her content, and its parts figuratively armed and primed to repel advances both literary and physical. The language of linen production is liberally scattered throughout the verse. Samuel Thomson’s ‘To A Hedgehog’ employs the synecdoche of the flax comb to describe a hedgehog skulking through the grass:

18

19

Poems, From College and Country by Three Brothers with Biographical Sketches by Rev. George Raphael Buick (Belfast: W. & G. Baird Belfast, 1900), p. 182. Sarah Leech, Poems, on Various Subjects, by Sarah Leech, a Peasant Girl, with a Biographical Memoir (Dublin: J. Charles, 1828), p. 55.

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Thou grimest far o’ gruesome tykes, Grubbing thy food by thorny dykes, Gudefaith thou dinna want for pikes, Baith sharp an’ rauckle; Thou looks (L – d save’s) array’d in spikes, A creepin heckle!20

The high incidence of alternatively rhyming quatrains, alongside verse forms derived from the Lowland Scottish literary tradition, indicates that the poetry worked as well in terms of oral performativity as it did in terms of viewing on the page. Some of this activity may speak of how the poems themselves came into production, with the poet utilising the long hours of time spent at the loom, or, in Leech’s case, at the spinning wheel, to create verse. The metronymic beat of the process of weaving offers a strong rhythmic foundation particularly to the crafting of song or poetry, and may have helped provide a steady sonic underlay or percussive counterpoint to the development of verse writing. The fascination with the weaver as a spokesperson for their class entered into public discourse and travelled beyond the world of poetry. The figure of the weaver often found itself used in satirical works in the local press. Fictional letters and newspaper columns were a staple of mid-to-late nineteenth-century life and indeed carried on well into the twentieth century. These texts could move from playful to vitriolic and functioned as an additional commentary on the life and politics of their day. Skilful writers could add an additional element of populist exasperation through writing in Ulster-Scots dialect, and could use this to heighten their lambasting of political rivals. An instance of this occurred in the Ulster Times in 1837, when the liberal editor of the Belfast Newsletter, Thomas MacKnight, was reproached for his lack of firmness in dealing with the perceived threat from the Catholic theology of Peter Dens, which was then being taught at Maynooth. This squib takes the form of letters said to be from an Ulster correspondent, Thomas M’Ilwham, who was alleged to be a childhood friend of MacKnight, now residing in Scotland: By several good judges, both here and in Ireland, MR. M’ILWHAM’S letters have been deemed far too valuable to be allowed to pass into the irrecoverable oblivion of a newspaper. They have, accordingly, at his own request, been revised and corrected; and are now presented in a more permanent

20

Samuel Thomson, New Poems on a Variety of Different Subjects (Belfast: Doherty and Simms, 1799); Hewitt noted ‘the voluminous and rigorous attention’ writers paid to the language of linen production in their work (Rhyming Weavers, pp. 21–8).

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form to the public. Nor let any man be surprised, that the land which produced a Cowboy Astronomer, in a FERGUSON, or a Ploughman Poet in a BURNS, should also produce a Weaver Polemic in a M’ILWHAM, equally creditable to ‘bonny Rafrilan[,]’ where he was born, and the ‘banks o’ Clyde,’ where he has been domiciled.21

Other forms of this genre were less acerbic, and played to the parochial identity of readers. Many of these columnists became local celebrities, such as ‘Bab M’Keen’, who appeared in columns, almanacs and broadsheets over several decades in the Ballymena Observer and County Antrim Advertiser. Penned by generations of the Wier family who edited the paper, the column acted as a means to reinforce the editorial stance of the paper’s owners, and indeed to employ humour to say things about Ballymena’s current affairs that might have been more difficult to opine in standard English. For instance, the visit of Ulysses S. Grant to Ireland in 1879 occasioned the printing of a text in which M’Keen meets with Grant and harangues him over US foreign trade: “Bad,” quo’ I, “very bad. Am a guid fine weaver on, I  may say, constant work, an’ I can clear aboot five or six shillin’ a week, an’ oot o’ that I hae a family tae keep an’ tae pye rent. Oh, you ‘Mericans is rubbin’ us wi yer duty an this, that, an’ the ither thing, an’ then desthroyin’ the hale counthry wi’ yer roisthery that ye dinna pye us a penny on. The fermers, tae, is compleenin’ on ye that yer bringin’ doon the price o’ craps an’ bastes till they’ll pye naethin”.22

Decline and Afterlives The acceptance of the Weaver figure in Ulster literature and indeed the continuation of poets who wrote in a style similar to the Weavers well into the twentieth century begs questions as to the complete disappearance of this group of writers. The continuation of interest in the use of Ulster dialect in Ulster poetry is evident in an array of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing. It can be seen in the work of established figures, such as the late Seamus Heaney, and Tom Paulin, and also through others who emerged in the twenty-first century, such as Alan Gillis. Ulster dialect remains within the word horde of writers and poets today as a 21

22

The McIlwham Papers:  In Two Letters from Thomas McIlwham Weaver, to his Friend, Mr James M’Neight, Editor of the Belfast Newsletter, Edited, and Illustrated with Notes and a Glossary, by John Morrison, Student, Glasgow (Belfast: William McComb, 1838). The Ballymena Observer and County Antrim Advertiser, 18 January 1879.

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testament to the continued influence of the Rhyming Weavers who first found the medium so powerful an ally to declare local identity and to say things that did not have the same aesthetic or philosophical heft in more standard registers. The development of public awareness regarding UlsterScots traditions since the Good Friday Agreement, whether by individual, community or government-driven initiatives, has witnessed a continued parallel interest in the weaving tradition and a sense of inheritance on the part of Ulster-Scots writers, affirming a tradition with which they feel direct connection.23 One of the questions that might be asked is how interconnected was this group of writers? While many could be said to have direct or close contact with the linen industry, it is harder at times to see them as one single network. In addition, there appears to be a number of variables, which include social, geographical, religious and cultural differences that problematize a single, cogent cohesiveness. Furthermore, Hewitt’s bibliographical fascination with certain writers’ published collections, as opposed to work rendered in newspapers and other media, has offered a skewed understanding of the output of this group, which requires more scholarly inquiry to explore connections that exist within media beyond the published collections by individual poets. Furthermore, when this material is examined it may be then highly debatable if there was in fact a disappearance of the tradition. Indeed, the recent acknowledgement by Ulster-Scots writers such as James Fenton and Philip Robinson, who see themselves as still writing within the Weaver tradition, may suggest that a much broader and complex tradition may exist that constitutes a hidden canon of northern Irish working-class writing, which not merely speaks to groups and communities not generally associated with literary production within the province of Ulster, but through its eastern and western diasporas may also communicate far beyond its native factories and townlands.

23

See James Fenton, On Slamish (Belfast: Ullans Press, 2009).

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Ch apter 5

Sub-literatures? Folk Song, Memory and Ireland’s Working Poor John Moulden

This chapter is concerned with an important and often public aspect of how, from the poorest in society, the Irish working class created, contributed to, transformed and consumed the verbal art that impinged upon them in oral or cheap printed or, occasionally, more substantial form, and with how their life was represented in it.1 It is hoped that the discussion and the cases alluded to will allow us to reach a better understanding of the similarities and differences between what is commonly called literature and the verbal utterance that circulated in written and oral media among people of the ordinary sort and among some not so ordinary. Regrettably, no chapter heading can express its complexity – for example, ‘sub-literature’ can include large-scale works such as plays, or items as limited as aphorisms, and memory is not a matter of mere recollection but involves the form of creativity entailed in repetition from memory; relocation, truncation, extension, re-imagining – even re-creation – and where originality is less important for reception than the familiar; and where, nevertheless, the acts of memorisation, recall and performance developed towards that of creation. 1

The main source of research on cheaply printed songs in Ireland is my thesis, ‘The Printed Ballad in Ireland: A Guide to the Popular Printing of Songs in Ireland’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2005) (available online at http://hdl.handle.net/10379/5020 [accessed 24 June 2016]) – hereafter ‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’. Matters regarding the conduct of this trade are distilled in my chapter ‘Popular Songs’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book: Vol. IV, The Irish Book in English 1800–1891, ed. by James Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 602–11 – hereafter ‘Moulden, “Popular Songs” ’. For definitions, see my article ‘Ballad’, in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, ed. by Harry White and Barra Boydell (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013). For songs in oral tradition, consult Hugh Shields, Narrative Singing in Ireland:  Lays, Ballads, Come-All-Yes and Other Songs (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993). A brief summary is my ‘Traditional Singing in English’, in Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland. op. cit. The indispensable aid to vernacular song research is the Roud Folksong and Ballad Index, www.vwml.org/search/search-roud-indexes [accessed 26 April 2016]. Important web resources for printed ballad images include those of the Bodleian Library: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk [accessed 26 April 2016]; the Colm O’Lochlainn collection, http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ivrla:6022 [accessed 26 April 2016] and the Patrick Weston Joyce Ballad Scrapbooks, www.itma.ie/joyce/scrapbooks/ballad-sheet-scrapbooks [accessed 26 April 2016].

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Social and Shared: The Nature of Vernacular Verbal Art Confusingly, for those whose mentalities have been tempered by immersion in books, most of the genres within this ‘class’ are characterised by variability, especially where oral transmission is involved in their dissemination. Song is the most powerful of these genres – compact, memorable, highly expressive and at the centre of sociability; the highest form of verbal art easily accessible to the poor. Often, several, easily recognisable versions of a single ‘song’ will have been noted, over a wide geographical and temporal range, sometimes with marked differences. I have written elsewhere of two twentieth-century Ulster singers who performed highly disparate versions of a song written in about 1831 by the mid-Antrim poet Hugh McWilliams (of whom, more later in this chapter).2 Each version used around half of the original forty-eight lines – but they had only fourteen lines in common. Two lines of oral transmission had, over some hundred years and un-numbered passages of words from mouth to ear, resulted in two distinct selections from the original. However, neither selection was capricious; the process did not have an effect similar to that of ‘Chinese whispers’; critical and creative elements were involved in each of the constructions.3 Further, while Hugh McWilliams was the author, unknown editors were involved and the two singers are owed significant credit. So, to accommodate the existence of variants, we must accept communal authorship, editorship, the authority of the individual singer over the song in their own mouth (but no further) and that the same sort of dealings rule the ‘reproduction’ and transmission of songs (and other material) in popular print; the writer, the printer, the singer, all were accorded the right to make 2

3

‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter  11, part  6; John Moulden, ed., Songs of Hugh McWilliams, Schoolmaster, 1831 (Portrush: Ulstersongs, 1992) – hereafter, Moulden, Songs of Hugh McWilliams; John Moulden, ‘ “One Singer, Two Voices”:  Scots and Irish Style Song in the Work of the midAntrim Poet and Songmaker, Hugh McWilliams’, in The Local Accent:  Selected Proceedings from Blas, ed. by Thérèse Smith and Micheál O Suilleabháin (Limerick and Dublin: Irish World Music Centre and Folk Music Society of Ireland, 1997), pp. 73–99 – hereafter, ‘Moulden, “One Singer, Two Voices” ’); John Moulden, ‘Two Dimensions to Orality in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Discussion of the Functioning of Printed Ballads’, in Anáil Bhéil Bheo, Orality and Modern Irish Culture, ed. by Seán Crosson, Nessa Ní Chróinín and John Eastlake (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009) – hereafter, ‘Moulden, “Two Dimensions to Orality” ’. In general, changes in orally transmitted and printed vernacular songs seek to remedy the loss of sense that is inherent in a change of horizon, mental or physical; in America, the Irish ‘Maid of the sweet brown knowe’ became ‘The maid of the mountain brow’, and, in a song about a sea battle fought by a Belfast-funded privateer reported in Belfast Newsletter in November 1779, as it travelled across England, the ship’s name, Amazon, became ‘the bold Ambeson’ and ‘the bold Embrel’ and then ‘our bold commander’ and ‘our bold captain’; different and with different meanings, but not nonsensical.

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changes and to claim ownership; and they did; vernacular creativity was a many-handed affair, democratic and communally owned, and without any sense that it came ‘from above’. The expression was fully vernacular, often locally based and within the range of the people’s own experience – they may have known the song-maker. This was a face-to-face experience, social and shared, unlike solitary reading. Also, songs, stories, aphorisms, proverbs, jokes – all the varieties of oral communication – hopped from the oral to the written sphere and vice versa, to be altered and hop back, leaving little or no trace of the passage. They also informed one another.

The Many Lives of Printed Songs Of all the varieties of ‘literature’, that most likely to have been found in the pockets of wandering labourers, zealously preserved in the ‘keeping holes’ in the fireplaces of cottiers or tenants’ cottages, pasted to the walls of ‘shebeens’, or attached to the loom posts of weavers in the ‘Liberties’ of Dublin, were ‘ballads’, songs printed on one side of a page or in little eight-page books (but all called ‘ballads’).4 From about 1760 to 1870, they (together with popularly printed prose books) constituted the form of literature most likely to have provided the first reading experience of the poorest in society, in both educational and material terms. Especially in the case of the prose books, they were widely used in the unofficial ‘hedge’ schools of Ireland for reading practice.5 These ballads and ‘ha’penny books’ (or ‘Burtons’)6 were the product of the poorest and least skilled end of the printing trade, a trade carried on by people little above labourers, and distributed (and in some cases written) by itinerant ballad sellers, who were necessarily singers because the bulk of their potential consumers were only semi-literate and needed to be persuaded that their expenditure was worthwhile. With the possession of the words on the page, the song was available for learning and for another ‘life’ in the oral dimension – and for potentially greater and more lasting influence than the printed form could achieve. 4

5

6

The popular printing of songs in Ireland spanned two approximate periods: for songbooks, 1750– 1840 and for ballad sheets, 1825–1920. Details of the use of such books in these schools are within the First Report of the Commissioners on Education in Ireland, HC 1825 [400] xii – Appendix 221, and are discussed in Antonia McManus, The Irish Hedge School and its Books, 1695–1831 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). John Moulden, ‘ “James Cleland, his Book”: The Library of a Small Farming Family in Early 19thCentury County Down’, in Oral and Print Cultures in Ireland, 1600–1900, ed. by Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 102–18, especially pp. 103 and 117 – hereafter ‘Moulden, “James Cleland, his Book” ’.

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The themes of this form of literature cover all the experiences of workingclass life in Ireland from its own perspective. Its origin, production and reception were all carried on within a class which was seldom written about, save by travellers or court officials, and very seldom by itself.7 So – and this is the importance of these vernacular items – they express the lives of the people more fully than other kinds of record and, what is more, in a way that comes close to being that in which they, themselves, would have described it. Sometimes members of the working class themselves became the subject of the composition. Denis Hagan, a nineteen-year-old former servant to Mr Francis Obré of Clantilew House, Tartaraghan Parish, was hanged in Armagh, on 4 October 1785, ‘for ravishing a very young woman’.8 Fanny Blair is a young girl of eleven years old Although I am dying the truth should be told I never had dealings with her in my time And now I must die for another man’s crime.9 When the people they heard that young Hagan was to die They rose up against her with a murmuring cry We’ll catch her and crop her, she’s a perjuring whore Young Hagan is innocent of that we’re all sure.

The song perpetuated the strength of the feeling of outrage and injustice on Denis Hagan’s behalf. It was still being sung and sold by ballad-singers on the streets of Dublin forty-five years later.10 It also spread to north-western England, alleging a plot against Denis Hagan, and that members of the Armagh Grand Jury of the day, Meredith Workman and Thomas Dawson and the biggest landowner in the area of Tartaraghan, Thomas Verner of Churchill, were implicated.11 7

8

9

10

11

Note that the dominant themes of songs in cheap print changed over time. The early songbooks contained little that was political, but cheap ballad sheets, from their first appearance around 1825, were politically contentious. This lessened after about 1870, when love themes and sensation began to dominate (‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 8, pp. 207–8). Volunteer Evening Post [Dublin] 8 October 1785 and Belfast Mercury or Freeman’s Chronicle, 4 October 1785. This and subsequent ‘quotations’ do not represent any one text of this song, and the names (distorted in almost all versions) are given in accordance with the historical facts. Texts in vernacular print and oral tradition are not stable, particularly in the matters of personal and place names. Each singer or printer creates his own version; so too this writer. Samuel Lover, ‘National Minstrelsy:  Ballads and Ballad Singers’, The Dublin Literary Gazette and National Magazine, 1, pp.  193–203 and reprinted in Lover, Legends and Stories of Ireland (London: King, no date), pp. 147–68 – hereafter ‘Lover, “Ballads and Ballad Singers” ’. Belfast, PRONI, ‘Co. Armagh Crown Books [Indictments] General Assizes’, MIC/650/2.

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On the day of my trial, Squire Verner was there And upon the green table he lifts Miss Fanny Blair And the lies she came out with I’m afraid to tell But the judge spoke up quick saying ‘Your mother tutored you well’ You Hagans of Strandfield, Oh whither art thou flown And I a poor prisoner in Armagh alone If John O’Neill in Shane’s Castle but knew I was here In spite of Workman and Dawson he would get me clear.

It spread east and south in England, sloughing detail, for neither any of the printers nor any of the buyers of the song knew or cared about its veracity (though they believed it to be true), its location or the people concerned, but instead substituted familiar names for foreign and savoured the strength of its statements. It spread too to the United States to be found in oral tradition, printed in several manifestations of, among others, the Forget-Me-Not Songster12 and where, in 1839, some unknown seaman wrote a truncated version in the log of Java, a New Bedford whaling ship.13 Further details of the event and the extensive research entailed are contained in Printed Ballad in Ireland, chapter 11:2, where there are also details of the English printed versions of the song. Denis Hagan was a short-lived, insignificant Irish Catholic, employed in one of the most rabidly Protestant areas of Ireland (the area where, ten years later, the Orange Order would have its genesis), his death noted by a single line in two newspapers and, but for a song, totally unremembered. Whoever wrote the song probably took pains to remain obscure because his sentiments would have probably led to his persecution. The singers who sold the songs and their printer also sought obscurity with the same zeal and for the same reasons as the song-maker. And the people who bought the song sheet probably rolled it up to put in a pocket, happy not to be noticed, and carried it home where its possession, realised as a song, earned them prestige, and where it could enter oral tradition to be carried, fully portable, into a range of interconnected networks of communication, but subject to being creatively altered, or sung to pieces, just as its printed manifestation was subject to being used to destruction – ‘there’s a hole in the ballad’ – for, to their users, a piece of paper with the words of a song, in print or manuscript, was the ‘ballad’. 12

13

George Lyman Kittredge, ‘Ballads and Songs’, Journal of American Folk-Lore, 30:117 (1917), pp. 343–4. Gale Huntington, Songs the Whalemen Sang, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), p. 229.

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Literacy, Performance and the Oral World Levels of literacy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland were low in English and much lower in Irish. It is stark that all but a few of the songs printed on ballad sheets or eight-page songbooks, the cheapest of the cheap, were in English. It is suggested that the Catholic clergy discouraged literacy in Irish because they themselves had little knowledge of the language and therefore little control over the dissemination of ideas through its medium.14 In English, as would be expected, literacy levels during the period rose steadily.15 The earliest index of literacy throughout Ireland is the census of 1841. It showed substantial (more than 70 per cent) literacy in the north-east, Londonderry, Antrim and Down, while, within the Pale, the level was 50–70 per cent. The remainder, apart from Waterford, Mayo and Galway, where the level was under 30 per cent, ranged from 30–50 per cent. Understandably literacy was lesser among older people. However, and notwithstanding levels of literacy, the majority of the people of Ireland lived and functioned in an oral world. So, ‘sub-literature’, pejorative though it may seem, implies a style of linguistic function:  sub-literacy. As Ireland moved towards being bilingual and as Irish began to be subservient to English, a predominantly oral culture graduated towards a literate one but retained its essentially oral mode of function; reading practices included the communal reading of newspapers, the memorisation and subsequent oral performance, in a range of contexts, of songs, sayings, aphorisms and stories.16 Above all, note that most of the reading of Ireland’s poor was performance oriented and that subsequent usage was from memory, mostly reproduced with consequent attrition, or, rather less frequently, providing the bones for a reconstruction. It is important to realise that the ordinary people, those of ‘the poorer sort’, bought, kept and used this cheap literature in a serious way. Others, the ‘authorities’ like magistrates and the police, or the ‘educated’ like 14

15

16

Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Print and Irish, 1570–1900: An Exception among the Celtic Languages?’, Radharc, 5:7 (2004–6), pp. 73–106, especially pp. 102–3. Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland 1750–1850 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1997), chapter 2, ‘Literacy and Education’. However, towards 1870, as popular education in hedge schools, charity schools, national schools and, for adults, reading clubs, transformed mentalities, elaborated codes became acceptable to the mass of people and the songs of middle-class political writers such as Thomas Davis began to appear on ballad sheets: ‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 10:3; Moulden, ‘Two Dimensions to Orality’; see also J. R. R. Adams, The Printed Word and the Common Man: Popular Culture in Ulster 1700–1900 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1987).

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Thomas Crofton Croker, Samuel Lover and William Makepeace Thackeray did not. Instead such people treated it as seditious, morally suspicious, ridiculous or, at best, as mere curiosities.17 However, these are the kinds of people who compiled the collections of small songbooks and ballad sheets in our libraries or archives and who described their usage incompletely and with distortions, sometimes removing identifying marks such as imprints and easily compared pictorial detail. Those who actually used this literature left even less trace; what remains is all the more valuable. However, what is clear is that the remnant of the corpus that is available to us, scattered in libraries in Belfast, Derry, Cork, Dublin, Galway, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, is fractured and unrepresentative, much of it bought directly from the printers’ shelves and perhaps being merely what was left unsold, undistributed and certainly not a good sample of what was influential. Accordingly, the representation of the Irish working class in this material needs to be very carefully abstracted, and just as carefully when we consider oral material. It is by no means certain that the totality of the product of the Irish ballad trade amounted to a balanced representation, still less does what survived to be preserved in libraries, and neither comes close to allowing a total view of its influence in forming attitude or opinion or in conditioning action.

Origination: Adoption and Song Making Despite these gaping lacunae, it has been possible to identify and sometimes to follow the careers of a number of those who wrote for ballad sheets, though most songs are and remain anonymous while many of those whose names appear as authors on the sheets are otherwise unknown. Only around 250 names, pseudonyms or sets of initials grace the approximately 5,000 surviving distinct ballad sheet print editions of songs in Ireland, 5 per cent of the survival,18 and, of these, little or nothing is known of any but a scant dozen and only four (and the associates of one of them) have 17

18

Maura Murphy, ‘The Ballad Singer and the Role of the Seditious Ballad in Nineteenth-Century Ireland:  Dublin Castle’s View’, Ulster Folklife, 25 (1979), pp.  79–102; Thomas Crofton Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland, reprint of original edn (Shannon: Irish University Press, [1824] 1969); Lover, ‘Ballads and Ballad Singers’; William Makepeace Thackeray, The Irish Sketch Book of 1842 (London:  Smith, Elder & Co., 1902)  (Reprint in series ‘The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray’ in twenty-six volumes, volume XVIII; original published in 1843). Collections thus fall into three broad categories: antiquarian, official and popular. Moulden, ‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, Appendix 6, ‘Ballads with Authors’.

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been the subject of any study. The differences between them and their modi operandi may almost define the range.19 John Sheil (ca. 1784–1872) spent most of his long life in Drogheda, though he had been born further north, perhaps in the area of Lurgan, Co. Armagh. He was exceedingly prolific, publishing at least twenty-six small volumes, fourteen of Sheil’s Shamrock (political songs) and at least twelve of Sheil’s Love Songs, totalling more than 400 items; his work also appeared widely on ballad sheets. Among the characteristics that may allow anonymous items to be attributed to this writer are elaborate titles that involve the name of a person and a place – ‘Hannah Healy the Pride of Howth’ – and an enviable facility with characteristic Irish rhymes: Then the population and congregation, In exultation agreed to part, They shook hands like brothers and kissed each other, While friends smothered each Irish heart. They separated, exhilarated, And animated at what went on, And as day was breaking poor Shiel’s [sic] awaking, Cried still be true unto the Rights of Man.20

Not all John Sheil’s songbooks can now be traced and those in the National Library of Ireland are misattributed to the politician Richard Lalor Sheil. However, there is no doubt that he was hugely influential, the most prolific Irish writer of balladry; more of his oeuvre survives in print than of any other known author, and he is better represented in oral tradition than any of his fellows.21 Also, despite writing in a form that was frequently denigrated and lampooned by ‘educated’ writers, it has been argued that he, if not the best, was among the best writers of Anglo-Irish poetry before

19

20

21

The persons mentioned here are undoubtedly the authors of the songs they claim. Sometimes, however, claims to have ‘made’ songs are less well founded than we might expect. For example, a singer who merely changed some place names might claim authorship, or a substantial revision such as ‘Will you go lassie go’, made by the Belfast piper-singer Frank McPeake, from a version of ‘The braes o’ Balquidder’ (itself an adaptation by the Paisley poet Robert Tannahill of an anonymous song) could achieve copyright status. However, singers generally honour such claims for a short time and only then merely to establish local rather than individual ownership; every singer owns his/her songs. See www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/Rights_of_Man.htm [accessed 20 April  2015]; it is there (erroneously) attributed to James Connolly, one of the executed leaders of the Irish 1916 rebellion. For discussion of these prosodic forms, see Andrew Carpenter, Verse in English from 18th Century Ireland (Cork:  Cork University Press, 1998)  and Julie Henigan, Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth Century Irish Song (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). At least fourteen of his songs are current around Drogheda.

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Yeats.22 However, his concentration on politics and love songs precludes much reference to the living conditions of the poor save for a general representation that everything would be better if there were no landlords, police or Protestants. Thomas Walsh, flourishing from around 1833 until almost 1870, lived in Limerick, where several other ‘Poets and Singers’ were his associates. About forty of their songs survive in print, about half of them Walsh’s. They ranged widely around Limerick, making a living by selling song sheets, as far away as Kilkee, and in an evening able to make almost as much as a labourer’s weekly wage of three shillings. They claimed to be ‘able to sing two mobs to smash each other’s skulls’. They sang of love affairs, emigration, races and fairs, executions, mayoral elections and broader politics. There is again, little about the life of the poor.23 Hugh McWilliams, however, provides some noteworthy commentary on poverty. Born around 1783 in Glenavy, Co. Antrim, McWilliams was a pay schoolmaster, whose hedge schools were in the hills above Cultra, Co. Down; in Clough, Co. Antrim; and, after the introduction of National Schools, further into the Antrim Plateau. His two books, both called Poems and Songs on Various Subjects, were published in 1816 following the failure of his first school, and in 1831, around the time he relocated from Clough. This book reveals him to have been a consumer of ballads; almost all of the thirty-two items in the ‘Songs’ section at its back use tunes that are associated with songs in cheap print and some of his poems have a song-like form. However, his contribution to the vernacular tradition is even more significant. Ten of the thirty-two songs have made their way from his book, perhaps mediated by manuscript or by his or his family’s performance, into popular print or oral tradition. Some of these have spread throughout Ireland and Britain and the New World. His themes are largely local and homely. However, two, ‘The Cottager’s Complaint’ and ‘The Irish Shore’, give a cogent summary of the privations of the labouring and other classes in country areas: ‘Tis hard that our labour with all our endeavour, (Our wives’ and our little ones’ too,) 22

23

Sheil’s Love Songs (no place: no publisher, no date) (16 pp. 8 vo booklet), copy owned by Gerry Cullen, Drogheda, with a photocopy in the Irish Traditional Music Archive; John Moulden, ‘The Best English-Irish Poetry before Yeats’, unpublished conference paper, delivered at the Irish Song Symposium, Queen’s University Belfast, 18–19 September 2014. John Moulden, ‘Limerick Ballad Makers, Printers, Singers and Sellers, 1785–1880’, in Limerick History & Society, ed. by Gearoid Ó Tuathaigh, Liam Irwin and Matthew Potter (Dublin, Geography Publications, 2009), pp. 381–400.

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The whole of our earning with care put together, Will scarce pay the rent when ‘tis due, The coarsest of clothing, the homeliest of diet I tell you we scarce can procure, ‘Tis a sin and a shame for the rich ones to riot On the hard-earned pence of the poor. (The Cottagers’ Complaint) The landlord will look for his rent at the quarter, The Rector as ardently calls for his due, To answer all these, can be no easy matter, Our wives and our children would need something too. The produce of labour, with all our endeavour, Appears quite unequal to pay up the score, With a train of vile taxes, one after another, We’re loaded to death on the Irish shore. The Irish mechanic, the spinner, the weaver, Can bear testimony to all that I say, They loudly complain for the want of the money, The want of the money, the money’s away. Would the great condescend but a day or an hour, To thole the privations the poor must endure, They surely would use every means in their power, To grant some relief to the Irish shore. [. . .] Our commerce still flourished when Boney was reigning, We had food and clothing, and whiskey gallore; But now since he sleeps in the Isle of Saint Helen, Prosperity’s fled from our Irish shore. (The Irish Shore)24

These three writers are identifiable, and identifiably Irish, as is the other, Jimmy McCurry, from Myroe, Magilligan, though known only from oral report and the article Hugh Shields wrote.25 It is interesting that their topics are mainly politics, romance and sport (including executions). Most of the songs circulated in cheap print or orally in Ireland were also Irish. However popular song printing was first introduced into Ireland 24

25

Hugh McWilliams, Poems and Songs on Various Subjects, vol. 1 (Belfast: Finlay, 1816); McWilliams, Poems and Songs on Various Subjects, vol. 2 (Belfast: Smyth, 1831); Sheil’s Love Songs Vol. IV (NLI); Alfred Perceval Graves, The Irish Song Book (London: New Irish Library, 1894), adaptation by William Allingham; Moulden, ‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 11:6; Moulden, Songs of Hugh McWilliams; Moulden, ‘One Singer, Two Voices’. Hugh Shields, ‘A Singer of Poems: Jimmy McCurry of Myroe’, Ulster Folklife, 27 (1981), pp. 1–18.

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around 1750 and, like the craft of printing itself, was an import from Britain. It is understandable that, at that point though lessening over time, many of the songs printed were also British.26 It is also widely accepted that, in terms of the repertory of vernacular song, songs in English in Ireland, Scotland and England, and to a marked degree, in North America, Australia and New Zealand, are substantially related. In Ireland the origins of songs in small songbooks are, approximately: 49 per cent Irish; 23 per cent Scottish; 11 per cent English; and 17 per cent indeterminate; and, on ballad sheets, 55 per cent Irish; 12 per cent Scottish; 14 per cent English; 4 per cent American; and 15 per cent indeterminate, though after about 1845 the proportion of British material drops to under 10 per cent. The oral song tradition seems to have been influenced from Britain in just under a third of cases. In Britain, somewhere between 10 and 5 per cent of songs on ballad sheets had an Irish origin. Accordingly it seems that the ‘poor’ of all regions had songs and, presumably, experiences and aspirations in common.27 The means whereby these songs originated and spread are largely obscure. All we can establish is a series of reports: of a song being printed in a particular place, of it being sung by a ballad seller, being sung from memory in a particular location; the networks and vectors are largely hidden from us; what data we have must be extrapolated elastically. It is, though, indisputable that the paper was the vector for the words and the vector for the song, the singer (who, in the case of printed songs, was the seller), and that the networks of communication depended on whatever capacity for movement was available to such people and the ways in which bundles of songs could reach them or the little shops that sometimes sold them.

The People’s Way with Songs Because the songs are preserved in ephemeral media – perishable, flimsy paper  – collections of such things accumulated by ‘ordinary’ people are almost non-existent: I know of one collection of small books, one of sheets, cuttings and manuscript, and of two manuscripts both of which clearly copy or are largely derived from popular printed sources; all are northern. All were accumulated as ‘aids’ to singing, memory and transmission; the 26

27

Actually, an article on ballads by ‘Hibernicus’, in The Dublin Weekly Journal, 10 and 17 July 1725, indicates that popular English songs were being imported or locally printed much earlier, though no copies are known. ‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 10:6.

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life of a song in print or manuscript was a mere interlude in its oral existence; songs are made for singing. These collections also allow us to (very partially) sample the people’s interests. Around 1804, a family named Cleland, from the townland of Drumaughlis, near Crossgar, Co. Down, bought the first of a series of sixty small books, forty of them eight-page songbooks, the rest of them prose books of various numbers of pages; all but a few were printed in Ireland. The latest date on any of them is 1834. Annotations on the books indicate that this was a family of subsistence farmers and that the collection ended in the hands of children.28 The family clearly had great regard for printed material, for the books were carefully sewn together, if in an ungainly fashion, and are in exceptional condition for books that have clearly been used. The subjects are extraordinarily wide ranging and show that an almost certainly Presbyterian family from the Planter heartland of Co. Down would tolerate songs with near nationalistic or patently bawdy content – and give them into the hands of children; notwithstanding that accounts of religious sensation dominate among their prose books. There are many English and Scottish songs ranging from classic ballads and the staples of the British broadside trade, songs for English and Scottish patriots, songs from ballad operas, songs of love, drinking, shipwrecks, sexual trial and lovers’ partings. The Irish songs embrace all the themes of their genre:  economic affairs, political crime, emigration, drownings, race meetings; affairs of the heart abound  – unrequited, opposed, successful and unsuccessful, faithful and faithless. There are songs that praise places and beautiful maids and some that are bawdry at its best, and songs by vernacular poets, especially Burns.29 There are comic songs, songs about fashion, Masonic songs, Orange songs and ‘A divine poem’; some of these come close to Irish politics. The prose books do not fall within the range of this chapter, but indicate a similar mentality and probably similar use: they are small, mainly contain text in short sections and, thus, were suited to the use of people of limited leisure, who lived in dark houses with little money for lighting. The Clelands owned two of the books most popularly used in the hedge schools of Ireland 28

29

Belfast, Ulster Museum (UM), X166–1980 to X209–1980 and X200–1981 to X212–1981. These are boxed and located at Ulster Museum (UM Decant B022439), ‘Paper Ephemera Box 348’. Two of the books, The Young Lady of Bristol and Christ’s First Sermon, are stitched together and are designated UM X174–1980. Burns was and certainly remained until the middle twentieth century the favourite poet of the north Irish working class. The humourist Lynn Doyle, in his An Irish Childhood (Dublin:  Maunsel & Roberts 1921; Duckworth 1927), and Do. [facsimile. of 1927 edn.] (Belfast:  Blackstaff Press, 1985) wrote, in chapter 3, ‘Burns in Ulster’, of being introduced to Burns’s works by a labourer on the family farm.

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in 1824, The History of Fortunatus and an eight-page version (synopsis) of Daniel Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders.30 Both are fantasies of social mobility, though this may not fully account for their popularity. Very little of the work of the writers noted earlier had much reference to the life of the poor and only one of the songs in the Clelands’ books is relevant in this context: ‘The Downfall of Bad Money and Light Silver’.31 Dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when small silver coins were worn or clipped and much small-denomination copper coinage was not trusted, it relates the difficulties of people, poorly paid, who used coins of small value for their purchases. Poor people are greatly distressed, In country village and town, Lifnbt [Light] silver is but of small value, Any mint shillings are surely cried down. Last Monay [sic] I went to a grocer, To get half an ounce of green tea, And likewise a quartey [sic] of sugar, The water was boiling awap. [away] When sixpence I laid on the counter, The grocer unto me did say, Come lay down my tea and my sugar, And take your old half-pence away.

The role of the ballad in women’s lives is of particular interest. Margaret Henry, a young woman of Crieve, near Poyntzpass, Co. Down, spent much of her leisure between at least April 1858 and February 1859 compiling a book of songs. The book, though now damaged, contained thirty-five songs on at least ninety-eight pages; it was left behind when Margaret Henry emigrated to Canada. This young woman’s selection was very largely of love songs (30), which deal with lovers who return unrecognised from sea or the wars (‘The Mantle so Green’, William and Mary’); lovers parted by family opposition: ‘Dobbin’s Flowery Vale’, ‘The Maid of Sweet Gurteen’, ‘My Charming Mary Neil’, ‘The Sea-Apprentice’ and 30

31

Moulden, ‘James Cleland, His Book’ (op. cit. (notes 2, 46 and 47)). The Cleland collection included also three plays: Dodsley’s Toyshop, Home’s Douglas and Sheridan’s Pizzaro. It’s difficult to find them a place within the mentalities implied by the rest of the collection and they may not really have been used by the Clelands; even though there were folk plays, some of which were printed, these were short enough to be passed on orally and be adapted to local conditions. The Bold Lieutenant. To Which Are Added The Downfall of Bad Money, and Beatty’s Whiskey (Belfast: printed at the Public Printing-Office, 71, High-Street, 1807) (UM X169–1980).

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‘The Constant Farmer’s Son’ (who was killed by his lover’s brothers). These, and how ‘Johnny Hart’, a mere private soldier, was enabled to marry ‘a rich farmer’s daughter from the town of Ross’, reflect the deep divisions between master and man, rich and poor. There are lovers parted by emigration (‘Mullinabrone’), and ‘The Lover’s Discussion’ where a Protestant young man ‘turns’ in order to secure the hand of his Catholic lady love.32 About seventy years later, Mrs Elizabeth Kane née Henry, who had been born in a sod house at the Leck, near Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, began accumulating song texts – ballad sheets, newspaper cuttings and in her own hand. Towards the end of her life she maintained this treasure in a biscuit tin: scraps of writing, each of great significance to her, a mixture of old traditional items, sensational murders, songs about seasonal events and the pop songs of the day. Mrs Kane’s manuscripts, though they record popular songs of their day – her interest was, at least in part, in sensation and the latest hit – also note songs of emigration; of a love match conducted on the way to a hiring fair; yet another returning lover; an amiable piece satirising a local bachelor and two of slightly different stamp: ‘Shane Crossagh’ was a highwayman, an outlaw hero in the hills of Derry, who defied the authorities and supported the poor; and ‘Song on the Rocks of Bawan’, in my own experience the one song known to almost every countryman in the Ireland of fifty years ago, which tells of the impossibility of the work expected of hired farm labourers.33 O, Come all you loyal heroes where ever, you may be, Don’t hire with your master, to you see what your work will be, For he will rise you early, from the clear daylight till dawn, So I’m afraid I won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawan.34

Edward Higgins, owner of a shoe shop in Newcastle, County Down, and an avid collector of material of local interest, attended auctions in the area. Among his effects at his death was a song manuscript. Despite the manuscript having no better provenance, the choice of songs indicates that the scribe had strong connections with south Down and was male, probably a seaman, perhaps naval, had spent some time in Scotland, and was a Catholic nationalist. He had little formal education; the spelling was notably inconsistent – and clearly writing was a labour. It appears the imperative was to pass on these songs, plausibly those he thought the most 32 33 34

‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 11:4. ‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 8, p. 210. From a photocopy of Mrs Kane’s collection in John Moulden’s possession.

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significant of his repertory. As before, we have a mixture of songs from oral tradition, some unique, from ballad sheets and books, from middle-class authors like Fred Weatherly, Stephen Foster (who was Irish-American) and Lady Dufferin, from the music hall pen of J. B. Geoghegan and others. These thirty-six songs and fragments reflect some of the life experience of the man who compiled it, around 1910, from songs learned in about 1870. His choice of themes is unequivocally male, about boxers, sailors and the hero Willie Brennan who robs the rich and ‘helps the widow in distress’, but also includes parted lovers, departing emigrants, lovers returning in disguise. Of the sea songs, two are located in south Down, ‘John Cowan of Dysert’ and ‘Patrick Cunningham’. He is extra-rated a seaman so bold By those whom that knows him I’m certainly told For shape frame and features his comrade and he Round the fair English harbour they bear the degree. [Patrick Cunningham, regularised]

One final song of this collection tells of a poor, pathetic apprentice grocer, James Donnelly, who, also an apprentice in crime, was sentenced, first to death and then to transportation for life – at the age of seventeen – a true story that made nine days’ news in Belfast and inspired at least one other song.35 A few other singers, like John McKeown of the Skerry Inn, Newtowncrommelin, Co. Antrim, maintained books36 containing parts of their repertory; in McKeown’s case, local songs dominated, many of them locally written, by the poet Alex McKay of Carnlough or by the Cushendall butcher, Daniel McGonnell, who may have achieved publication in local newspapers but not otherwise. The first song in his book, attributed to ‘J. McK’, is ‘The Poaching Affray at Loughgiel’ wherein, on 21 January 1891, John McGowan was shot dead by ‘three cowardly gamekeepers’. Poaching, though officially a crime, was an economic necessity for many families and other songs have similar themes. 35

36

‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 8, p. 210. Originally there were at least seventy-six pages; Belfast Newsletter, 20 March, 23 March, 2 April, 29 June 1824; The Paddy Trick to Which Are Added Bonny Newton Lasses or the Merry Wench and James Donnelly’s Farewell Belfast (Belfast:  printed for the Flying Stationers, 1825)  (Linenhall Library, Belfast  – in an uncatalogued pamphlet book); James Donnelly’s Farewell (no place, no date [but 1824]) (Royal Irish Academy ms 3c37); John Moulden, James Donnelly’s Downfall (no place [Portrush]: privately published, 1993). The writer has a copy but does not know whether the original survives. Many of the songs were recorded from John McKeown and issued on LP and cassette by the Outlet Company of Belfast in its Archive Series – The Sporting Sailor Boy OAS3012 (1981)

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Songs and Irish Class Structure A major difficulty in the treatment of this material lies in the definition of the Irish working class. It existed within a colonial class structure, which was vertically divided and internally fractured, on the ‘native’ side by the inclusion of middle men and gombeens (who helped to control their fellows) and by the use of the Protestant working and tenant class by the nobility and gentry as defences against the natives. Social divisions were not as simple as peasant or labourer; instead there were day or itinerant labourers (spalpeens); farm or house servants, hired for a half year; cottiers, paid for their labour by being allowed to use land rather than cash; tenants; and, in the cities, servants and industrial workers. Irish politics tended to concentrate on nationalism and on countering it rather than on who owned the means of production.37 Vertical class structure is very strikingly shown in the tranche of songs about ‘Dolly’s Brae’. On 12 July 1849, a party of Orangemen, accompanied by wives and children, returning from meeting at Lord Roden’s estate at Tollymore, between Newcastle and Castlewellan in Co. Down, via a frequently disputed pass at ‘Dolly’s Brae’, was fired on from either side of the road. The Orangemen then took vengeance, destroying property and livestock and taking lives: a seventy-year-old woman, a nine-year-old boy, an ‘idiot’ and one able-bodied man, none of whom had offered any violence. Four Orangemen were injured, one of whom later died. A commission of inquiry resulted in Lord Roden and two local Orange leaders being dismissed from the magistracy. They were and are still conceived to have been made scapegoats. A ban on marches was put in force and was largely opposed until it was withdrawn in the 1870s. Dolly’s Brae and the subsequent ban are seminal events – the Orange Order maintains in print a booklet, The Battle of Dolly’s Brae, that may be summarised in one sentence: If you wish to defend your right to march, this is not the way to do it. However, the fifteen songs that tell the events from an Orange perspective, most of them locally written, have one feature in common – they do not mention the discomfiture of the gentlemen magistrates, rather they claim a kind of equality, calling the members of the local lodges ‘noblemen’, saying that ‘the gentlemen did bow to us as we were marching by’, that Lady Annesley ‘saluted’ them. This indicates that, in this context, and on this day of the year, these tenants and labourers saw the gentry as fellow 37

‘Class’, in Oxford Companion to Irish History, rev. edn by Sean J.  Connolly (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 104–5; ‘social structure’, ibid., p. 650.

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travellers in the common cause of maintaining control over the area where they worked and the ground upon which they walked.38 In showing this, the songs reinforce rather than reduce a sense of the inequality and exploitation that existed between landlord and tenant.

Working-Class Life in Vernacular Song The examples given previously, from the work of real working-class song makers and from the repertory of ordinary working-class and poor people, give only a partial representation of the range. It seems that the major interests of those who used vernacular song was in politics, romance, sensation and comical stories; certainly ballad sellers attested that, in the midnineteenth century, politics sold best.39 Specifically working-class themes are much less well represented. We have seen social and religious division represented in some love songs, poverty mentioned in two or three songs, the hiring of labourers in several, migration commonly, the life of soldiers and sailors and popular sports, such as hare hunting and boxing; this latter evokes the possibility of social mobility, as do, perversely, songs about outlaw heroes; which introduces the topic of crime and punishment, sometimes summary, as in the case of the young poacher. Other themes are evident in collections of popularly printed songs and collections from oral tradition. Also, we can note nuances of the themes already seen. Extreme punishment for loving above one’s station is seen in ‘Henry Connors of Castledawson’ and ‘The Lamentation of Hugh Reynolds’, and for other crimes in the many songs about executions and transportation.40 The everyday cruelties and poor diet inherent in army service, as well as the virtual abandonment of the incapacitated, are outlined in ‘The Hungry Army’, ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew You’ and ‘The Kerry Recruit’ and similarly for naval seamen in ‘Patrick O’Neill’ (or O’Neal). The curse of working-class life, excessive drinking, is featured in ‘Johnny my Man’, ‘The Drunken Act’ and ‘The Drunkard’s Looking Glass’. There are many songs on ‘the taxes’. Poverty has been touched on previously, but several songs illustrate the careful housewifery entailed in sustaining a family on 18/= a week (later inflated to £1–5/=) while complaints, such as ‘Lament for the 38 39 40

‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, chapter 14. ‘Printed Ballad in Ireland’, p. 258. Texts of named songs may be traced by an Internet search or more reliably and comprehensively in the Roud Indexes. Examples of songs about (say) executions or poverty may be found by a subject search of the Bodleian Ballads website – see note 1.

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Bad Times, ‘The State of the Times’ or ‘The Downfall of Trade’, are exacerbated by ‘A Chapter of Cheats’. Finally, and this topic might be linked with The Heroic Outlaw, we have the scores of songs that represent deep alienation from government and upper classes, those that see Napoleon and the principles of republicanism as a cure for all Ireland’s ills – we have already noted this in a seemingly innocuous manner in the reference, in Hugh McWilliams’s ‘Irish Shore’, to the trading difficulties attendant on the fall of Napoleon.

Songs in the Diaspora and Appropriations ‘Folk’ song has often been considered a rural phenomenon but, as songs in English were carried from Britain, copied on ballad sheets, as songs in English were made and distributed by performance and print in the countryside and towns, changes took place; songs (if not many) were made that reflected industrial experience  – in factories, textile mills and shipyards. Some of these songs, such as ‘The Factory Girl’, hinted at the feeling of disempowerment inherent in a move from seasonal time to factory-bell time. As I was a walking, one fine summer’s morning, The birds in the branches did whistle and sing; Gay laddies and lasses, in couples were sporting, Going down to yon factory, their work to begin.

With children forced to work in mills, their play songs were transformed to illustrate the new experience.41 Also with unemployment, shortage and, at an extreme, famine providing the impulse, people moved to Britain, America and South Africa, taking songs with them. Alexander Crawford, from the Leck, near Ballymoney Co. Antrim, went to Scotland around 1900 and became a tram driver. This and his war experience caused him, on returning home, to become one of the most prominent leaders of local labour; some of his song choices and especially his annotations of a copy of Burns’s poems, indicate his thoughts and feelings.42 Far be’t frae me that I aspire To blame your Legislation Or say, ye wisdom want, or fire, To rule this mighty nation; 41

42

Maurice Leyden, Belfast, City of Song (Dingle:  Brandon, 1989); Betty Messenger, Picking up the Linen Threads (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1979). John Moulden, ‘ “Clodhopper”:  Alexander Crawford, Leck, Ballymoney, County Antrim, His Philosophy, Life and Songs’, Béaloideas, 77 (2009), pp. 37–57.

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But faith! I muckle doubt my SIRE, Ye’ve trusted ‘Ministration, To chaps wha in a barn or byre, Wad better fill their station Than courts yon day. (From: ‘A Dream’ stanza 5.)43

Many songs reflect diasporas to Britain, America and Australia.44 They represent the who, why, how and where of migrations and they involve attitudes that changed with movement. There are songs in Irish form by migrants and transported convicts, though few express workers’ feelings – songs and song style were transmitted as cultural baggage and tended to be nationalistic or transformed into nationalistic expression, rejecting the disempowerment inherent in colonial subservience, praising outlaws and bushrangers. They also transformed into expressions that, rather than migrants of necessity, they were forced ‘exiles’. This factor has been misunderstood by some writers, especially Kerby Miller in Emigrants and Exiles.45 Sometimes songs were made abroad in an Irish form and returned. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, for example, was created for the American vaudeville stage and migrated to be naturalised; also songs migrated and returned in a new form. The movement of songs was never lineal or unidirectional; they were connected in networks and flowed in two or more directions using the movement of goods or people as their carriers. In this we should include army service abroad. Songs created for or by the people or transformed by them were appropriated for use in ballad operas or plays and sometimes songs of the elite were appropriated by the people, or even re-appropriated. Working-class writers of novels or plays – James Connolly, Robert Tressell, Patrick MacGill, Seán O’Casey, Christy Browne and Brendan Behan  – imitated the forms, themes and linguistic tricks of Irish song; some of these are, today, sung as though traditional.46 Similarly, today, there are numbers of writers of songs who use these patterns.47

43

44

45

46 47

The poem is addressed to the king in 1786, the year of its writing; Burns: Poems and Songs, ed. by James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 212. Songs of migration deserve an essay of their own. Some guidance is given in John Moulden, Thousands Are Sailing: A Brief Song History of Irish Emigration (Portrush: Ulstersongs, 1994). Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles:  Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Chapter 13 of my thesis is an incomplete critique of the argument in his final chapter. As are songs written by the English-Scot Ewan MacColl and other ‘folk’ singers. Fintan Vallely, ed., Sing Up!: Irish Comic Songs & Satires for Every Occasion (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2008) contains many such.

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Conclusion: The ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ I began this discussion with an outline of the fluid, cooperative, multiauthored, democratic nature of vernacular song. I conclude by alluding to the fluid, cooperative, multi-authored and democratic nature of writing on the Internet. Some eminent scholars of the vernacular verbal arts have begun to designate this the end of the ‘Gutenberg parenthesis’, regarding the dominance of the individual, authoritative voice of the book as a mere interlude, an interval during which Virginia Woolf ’s stricture of 1928, that ‘masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice’, has not been accorded the importance it deserved.48 Nor have these songs been given their true importance. They are representative of the masses in more than their composition, being passed on, perhaps for generations, and, therefore loaded with more meaning than at face value. They have not been properly used and considered as important representations of working-class experience and feelings. It is hoped that the present chapter will encourage researchers in their judicious use.

48

Rod Stradling and Tom Pettit, ‘The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Its Closing, and What it May Mean for Folklore and for Us’, Musical Traditions, http://mustrad.org.uk/articles/gut_par1.htm [accessed 18 December 2015]. Thomas Pettit has written widely on this subject; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929); also at www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791.txt [accessed 18 December 2015].

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Writing Working-Class Irish Women Heather Laird

This chapter offers an overview and an analysis of the representation of working-class women in Irish urban writing. It makes reference to depictions of working-class Dublin women, as provided by such well-known literary figures as Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and, more recently, Roddy Doyle. However, challenging the oft-rehearsed equation of Ireland’s working class with the country’s capital city, it also mentions works set in Cork, Limerick, Galway, Kilkenny and Donegal. Moreover, taking an islandwide focus, it discusses some Derry- and Belfast-based writings. In Writing Ireland’s Working Class, Michael Pierse notes the ‘plethora of male-authored texts about working-class women’s lives’ in Ireland.1 Ruth Sherry, comparing these writings favourably on gender grounds with fictional accounts of the English working class, asserts that ‘Irish men write with considerable understanding of working women.’2 While acknowledging the importance of male-authored texts in constructing, reinforcing and sometimes challenging key tropes in the representation of working-class  Irish women, this chapter draws attention to the many female-authored texts that feature disadvantaged women living in Irish urban centres, from the late nineteenth-century ‘slum fiction’ of Fannie Gallaher to more recent works by Paula Meehan, Rita Ann Higgins, Christina Reid and Mary Morrissy. This chapter addresses the following questions. What aesthetic and ideological functions do working-class women serve in Irish literary texts? How do these texts treat the issue of working-class motherhood? How do they depict women’s work, whether unpaid household work or waged labour? Is working-class life contextualised, in these writings, within existing power

1

2

Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), p. 110. Ruth Sherry, ‘The Irish Working Class in Fiction’, in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jeremy Hawthorn (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), pp. 111–24 (p. 120).

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structures? How do the women that they feature respond to class and gender inequalities? The figure of the overburdened and under-resourced mother valiantly struggling to look after and provide for her children dominated twentiethcentury depictions of working-class  Irish women, particularly in maleauthored texts. Terence MacSwiney’s The Holocaust (1910), James Stephens’s Hunger: A Dublin Story (1918), Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (1954), Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child (1961), Paul Smith’s The Countrywoman (1961) and James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969) all feature a harried yet dutiful mother/nurturer. This familiar figure has served a number of useful functions. In some narratives, details provided of the day-to-day reality of maintaining a dwelling and family on a working-class wage offer a strong critique of the economic and political status quo. As Caitriona Clear states, ‘the tenement-dwelling mother struggling to keep her family alive was the strongest indictment of the greed of property and the indifference of legislators.’3 Thus in Plunkett’s leftist-aligned novel, Strumpet City, Mary Fitzpatrick’s attempts during the 1913 labour dispute to keep her home intact and her children safe and healthy are to the fore. The novel also tells of an unnamed mother whose children are presumed dead after the collapse of a Dublin tenement building: the ‘young woman whose dark hair was matted with blood’ was ‘barely conscious and kept saying over and over again: “The children . . . the children”.’4 The cosy collusion of capitalism and the state against the interests of the working class is revealed when one character tells another that the owner of the tenement had pulled political strings to ensure that the unstable building passed its last safety check (447). MacSwiney’s short play, The Holocaust, which like Strumpet City is set against the backdrop of a bitter strike and lockout, features a Cork-based slum-dweller, Polly Mahony, who faces the loss of the last of her children to tuberculosis. The painstaking strategies Polly employs on behalf of her remaining family are disclosed in the account given of her attempts to eke out a priest’s charity: by buying two half-quarters of butter rather than one pat: ‘we get the turn of the scales with each half-quarter  – and that’s as much as would butter a piece of bread.’5 3

4

5

Catriona Clear, Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland, 1926–1961 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), pp. 2–3. James Plunkett, Strumpet City (London: Arrow, [original edn 1969] 1990), p. 447; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. Terence MacSwiney, The Holocaust:  A Tragedy in One Act (1910), Terence MacSwiney Papers, University College Dublin Archives, P48b/296, p. 3; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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In Smith’s The Countrywoman, set predominantly during the Irish Civil War, the figure of the impoverished mother doing her utmost to care for her children serves a different purpose. The Countrywoman tells the story of Molly Baines, a woman originally from rural County Wicklow who has spent the past eighteen years in Dublin, living in ‘two rooms in Kelly’s Lane’.6 Always behaving honourably towards others, Mrs Baines is liked and respected by Dublin-born neighbours who still view her as an exotic outsider. A  Protestant benefactor, pleased to note ‘the beautifully neat darns in [Mrs Baines’s son’s] navy-blue gansey and the threadbare wellpatched breeches that were obviously homemade but done with much care and attention’, concludes that the child’s mother is a worthy candidate for charity (105). But Mrs Baines’s conscientious efforts to keep her children fed and clothed are impeded by a drunken and abusive husband who is not beyond maliciously ripping their children’s clothes to shreds and slashing their shoes with a razor (179–80). Through a heart-breaking account of Mrs Baines’s repeated attempts to build a home for her children after each of her husband’s destructive visits, the novel offers a damning appraisal of a church whose representatives have instructed this woman to not only ‘stay with her husband’, but to ‘forgive’ him for his violent treatment of her and their children (176). That Pat Baines is aware of the complicity of the Catholic Church in the physical and psychological abuse that he inflicts on his wife and children is suggested by his insistence that they get down on their knees and pray after a particularly savage beating: ‘Mrs Baines began to pray, the words issuing in gasps through the new gap where teeth had been’ (168). The diligent yet struggling working-class mother has also functioned in Irish writing to underpin a critique of ‘abstract’ politics. O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock is a case in point. Pierse asserts that ‘women’s plight in working-class life is a key, abiding theme of [O’Casey’s] oeuvre.’7 Nicholas Grene summarises the oft-rehearsed gender aspect of the ‘Dublin trilogy’ as follows: ‘The men boast and blow, but it is the women who show the real courage of suffering and endurance.’8 As Grene states, the supposed ‘cult of the woman’ that can be found in the three plays  – The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) – has facilitated a commonplace acceptance of O’Casey as a 6

7 8

Paul Smith, The Countrywoman (London: Penguin, [original edn 1961] 1989), p. 1; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, p. 57. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 125.

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playwright with feminist leanings.9 It is certainly true that in these plays women, and in particular mothers, tend to be depicted in a positive light. The most fully central and most fully heroic of O’Casey’s women is Juno Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, a play that like The Countrywoman is set during the Civil War. Juno is hard-working, resilient and caring. As she herself acknowledges, she is crucial to the survival of the dwelling-space and the family: ‘Who has kep’ th’ home together for the past few years – only me?’; ‘I don’t know what any o’ yous ud do without your ma.’10 Her workingclass pragmatics, so essential to the preservation of home and family, are pitted in the play against the principled political stances adopted by her children. She is grounded in the day-to-day struggle to keep her family sheltered and fed. Her children, in contrast, are in thrall to a high-flown rhetoric that is revealed in the play to have very little bearing on the life choices that they make. Through the figure of Juno, Juno and the Paycock forms an opposition between the ‘real’ instincts of maternal love and the illusory nature of political commitment, whether that commitment is to anti-treaty republicanism or to the labour movement. All three sets of narratives  – those which employ the figure of the impoverished yet diligent working-class mother to expose the injustices of the economic and political status quo, those in which this figure offers a strong indictment of the Catholic Church, and those in which it provides a critique of ‘abstract’ politics − rely on an idealised and essentialised concept of motherhood. The more fervently the reader believes that Mary Fitzpatrick in Strumpet City and Polly Mahony in The Holocaust are ‘good’ mothers who are doing everything in their power to care for their children, the more successful are the condemnations offered in these texts of the prevailing economic and political forces. Moreover, the extent of the reader’s outrage at the collapse of the tenement building in Plunkett’s novel is largely reliant on her/his emotional response to the predicament of the unnamed mother whose children are missing. This emotional response is in turn dependent on that reader’s internalisation of an ideology of maternity which suggests that the connection between mother and child is both precious and unique. In The Countrywoman, Mrs Baines’s tireless efforts 9

10

Ibid., p. 125. See, for example, Marianne Peyronnet’s claim that in these early plays O’Casey preempted the poststructuralist feminism that emerged in France in the 1970s. Marianne Peyronnet, ‘Was O’Casey a Feminist Playwright?’, Times Change: Quarterly Political and Cultural Review, 12 (1997/8), pp. 23–6. Seán O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays: The Shadow of a Gunman [1923], Juno and the Paycock [1924], The Plough and the Stars [1926] (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), pp. 138, 71–2; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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on behalf of her children are contrasted to the church’s careless treatment of its flock, including Mrs Baines herself, whom it condemns to a life of deprivation and abuse. Mrs Baines’s innate maternal nature is, therefore, key to the narrative’s critique of the Catholic Church. Thus, we are told that her decision to have yet another child that she cannot afford is based not only on her knowledge of the church’s rigid stance on abortion, but on her own ‘inordinate love of life, and children in particular’ (186). She later convinces Queenie Mullen to get married and have the baby she is carrying, notwithstanding Queenie’s assertion that she would rather remain single and abort the child (200–6). Therefore, although The Countrywoman’s harsh portrayal of the Catholic Church contributed to the novel being banned upon publication, the story of the ‘good’ mother, Molly Baines, is underpinned by the same ideology of maternity that the church drew on in its celebration of idealised motherhood. The opposition established in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock between illusory politics and pragmatic realism is equally reliant on essentialist constructions of maternity. As Susan Cannon Harris states in Gender and Modern Irish Drama, ‘Juno’s connection to what is “real” is established and sold through O’Casey’s appeal to the purported universality of maternal instinct.’11 By offering his audience the one thing that he knows they will unquestionably accept as ‘authentic’, a mother’s love, O’Casey seeks to ‘break the connection between authenticity and the body of the slain political martyr’ who dies for an abstraction.12 In short, in this play O’Casey employs an ideology of maternity to undo the power of political ideology. While the careworn but diligent mother/nurturer is the dominant female figure in narratives that draw on Irish working-class life, some texts offer alternative or opposing versions of working-class motherhood. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996) features a ‘defeated’ mother who sometimes opts to remain in bed rather than face yet another day of deprivation and drudgery.13 Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper (1990) is focalised predominantly through Sharon and her father, but Sharon’s mother, who veers between looking ‘tired’ and looking ‘very tired’, is a shadowy reminder of the toll that working-class motherhood can take.14 Permanent exhaustion ensures that neither Angela McCourt nor Veronica Rabbitte is capable of playing 11

12 13 14

Susan Cannon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 198. Ibid. Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (London: Flamingo, [1996] 1997), p. 1. Roddy Doyle, The Snapper, in The Barrytown Trilogy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1992), pp. 141–340 (pp. 145, 146).

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a significant role in their children’s lives. By contrast, Mary Makebelieve’s mother in James Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter (1912) seeks to maintain an influence in her daughter’s life that is far more suited to the relationship between a mother and a much younger child. The ardent version of mothering that she employs infantilises Mary, leaving her vulnerable to the policeman who seeks to control her. Paula Spencer, in Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), admits to having sometimes bought alcohol with money that should have been spent on food for her children.15 The portrayal of Marie Damian in Lee Dunne’s Does your Mother? (1970) echoes that of the ‘good’ working-class mother found in texts like Strumpet City, but it is soon revealed that she is an occasional prostitute, only one of whose six children was fathered by her husband, now deceased. Fannie Gallaher’s Katty the Flash: A Mould of Dublin Mud (1880), one of the earliest examples of Irish urban fiction, is centred on an impoverished woman who, notwithstanding the recent death of her daughter, continues to divide her time between ‘the streets, the whiskeyshop, the police-court, and the prison’.16 Paula Meehan’s Cell (2000) and Heno Magee’s Hatchet (1972) explore the concept of perverse or monstrous mothering. Dolores Roche (Delo), the self-proclaimed matriarch of Meehan’s prison drama, adopts a motherly tone while sexually abusing Lila Byrne in exchange for heroin: ‘Mammy loves Lila. Mammy loves her little titties.’17 In the play Hatchet, Mrs Bailey is depicted as having socialised her son into committing acts of violence: ‘The Digger would fight anyone, and so would Hatchet, I never reared a gibber [. . .] Hadn’t he to face the animal gang with a hatchet when he was only fourteen, didn’t ye son?’18 In Christine Dwyer Hickey’s short story ‘The Absence’ (2013), the adult narrator, seeing his mother’s hand for the first time in nearly twenty years, vividly remembers ‘the sound of it slapping a leg, or a face or folding into a fist to punch the back of a head’.19 The first section of Dermot Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter (1987) is the story of a mother who imprisons and regularly beats a child born of an incestuous relationship. Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City (1982) foregrounds a woman’s complicity in the sexual abuse 15

16

17 18 19

Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 88; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. Fannie Gallaher, extract from Katty the Flash: A Mould of Dublin Mud (1880), in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. V, ed. by Angela Bourke and others (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 2002), pp. 939–44 (p. 939). Paula Meehan, Cell (Dublin: New Island, 2000), p. 19. Heno Magee, Hatchet (Dublin: Gallery, [original edn 1972] 1978), p. 33. Christine Dwyer Hickey, ‘Absence’, in The House on Parkgate Street and Other Dublin Stories (Dublin: New Island, 2013), pp. 13–33 (p. 30).

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of her daughter. Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl (1996) features a mother who finds it hard to accept the ‘stick-like being’ that she has given birth to as human, while her short story ‘Rosa’ (1993) tells of a young woman who arranges for her newborn baby to be left to die in an empty department store.20 All of the working-class mothers featured in these texts can be contrasted to Plunkett’s Mary Fitzpatrick, MacSwiney’s Polly Mahony, Smith’s Molly Baines and O’Casey’s Juno Boyle, but the extent to which they challenge essentialist constructions of maternity varies. The grotesque mother that is the focus of Katty the Flash is key to that narrative’s highly moralistic treatment of ‘illegitimacy’ and single motherhood. Katty Sr’s ‘unnatural’ maternal behaviour is the ultimate indicator of her divergence from bourgeois societal norms. In The Woman Who Walked into Doors, written more than a hundred years later, Paula’s limitations as a mother are linked to the socio-economic critique provided by the novel. Like the female characters that Pierse discusses in Writing Ireland’s Working Class, Paula has experienced ‘multiple social and economic impediments: as part of a disadvantaged economic class, as [a woman] in a male-dominated society, but also as [a woman] living in an especially androcentric working-class culture’.21 The novel points to the double standard in sexual matters that Paula has encountered throughout her life: ‘You were a slut if you let fellas put their tongues in your mouth and you were a tight bitch if you didn’t  – but you could also be a slut if you didn’t. One or the other, sometimes both. There was no escape’ (47). Paula’s entrapment takes multiple forms, but is ultimately shown to stem from the simple fact that she is a woman from a working-class background. Her maternal instincts are revealed to be intact − Paula’s eventual expulsion of her violent husband from the family home is triggered not by his many brutal attacks on her, but by the threat that he begins to pose to their eldest daughter – but sometimes these instincts are eclipsed by a dependency on alcohol that is at least partially attributable to the difficult circumstances of Paula’s life. While Katty Sr in Katty the Flash is held personally accountable for her failings as a mother and Paula’s failings are contextualised, both of these texts assume the reader’s awareness of the maternal ideal from which these mothers deviate. Mary Morrissy’s writings on working-class Irish women, in contrast to these two very different texts, are notable for their sustained interrogation 20

21

Mary Morrissy, Mother of Pearl (London: Vintage, [original edn 1996] 1997), p. 115; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, p. 113.

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of patriarchal ideologies of maternity. These writings include works that challenge the idea of motherhood as ‘natural’ and foreground issues relating to the ‘dark’ side of maternity, including ‘illegitimacy’, abortion and infanticide. In a number of her publications, Morrissy broaches women’s sometimes troubled responses to pregnancy, parturition and new motherhood. In the aforementioned short story ‘Rosa’, the narrator’s pregnant sister describes fellow expectant mothers as ‘[d]romedaries, one-humped camels, beasts of burden’.22 Following ‘hours of hard labour’ that culminate with the doctor ‘tear[ing] away the afterbirth with his fingers’, Bella, in The Rising of Bella Casey (2013), would be more than happy to follow the doctor’s advice that she have no more children.23 When Rita, in Mother of Pearl, watches other new mothers breast-feeding their babies, she cannot understand the women’s calm response to an act that she perceives as akin to a physical assault (120). Her own daughter, Pearl/Mary, ends her pregnancy by dispelling the ‘mollusc of flesh’ with a knitting needle (215). The pregnant girl in ‘Rosa’ gives birth having previously failed to induce a miscarriage and asks her sister to abandon the newborn baby in a department store’s Christmas crib, ‘the ultimate picture of maternity’ (28). The crib, which had replaced a plastic Santa Claus following the Pope’s declaration of a holy year, points to the Catholic Church’s role in reinforcing an essentialised concept of motherhood. Its location, in Dublin’s commercial centre, suggests an alignment between that church and the Irish middle classes. This story of infanticide set against the backdrop of a bourgeois society that wishes to be seen to obey religious dictates contains covert references to a medical procedure that the pregnant working-class girl clearly wants but has limited access to: ‘her arms encompassing the bump in a gesture of aborted protection’ (31). When Mary in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock laments that her baby will have no father, Juno reassures her that she will be a second mother to the child (145–6). Like Juno’s imminent grandchild in Juno and the Paycock, Pearl/Mary in Mother of Pearl has two mothers. While in the O’Casey play the double mothering referred to towards the end of its closing act functions as a final endorsement of the exemplary mothering role provided by Juno, Morrissy includes two mothers in her Belfast-based novel so that she can ask difficult questions about the nature and reality 22

23

Mary Morrissy, ‘Rosa’, in A Lazy Eye (London: Vintage, [original edn 1993] 1996), pp. 25–38 (p. 32); further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. Mary Morrissy, The Rising of Bella Casey (Dublin: Brandon, 2013), p. 219; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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of motherhood. One of these working-class mothers, Rita Golden/Spain, is the biological mother who views her baby as ‘something not quite human’, and the other, Irene Rivers/Godwin, is the nurturing mother who feels ‘as one’ with the child that she images into being and then kidnaps (117, 70). As Anne Fogarty states, in the complex story that is produced by Morrissy’s tripartite narrative, ‘it is only the non-biological mother who is capable of experiencing a positive connection with the daughter that she has forcefully to create for herself.’24 Indeed, Rita views the kidnapping of her child as divine punishment for her ‘unnatural’ response to a pregnancy that she experienced as a ‘violent struggle’ (98). Notwithstanding allusions to the biblical tale of two mothers wrangling over one child (31, 49, 89), this novel is less interested in determining the ‘true’ mother of Pearl/Mary than in ‘open[ing] to investigation the notion that maternal love is a natural and instinctive aspect of the female psychic economy’.25 Both mothers are relevant to this investigation. Rita’s negative response to pregnancy and motherhood challenges a belief in the essential maternal nature of all women, while Irene’s intense longing for a child is shown to be exacerbated by the expectations of female neighbours who will not accept her into their midst until she produces a baby: ‘The first thing they asked if they met her at the dairy or in the church porch was “Any news?” By that, they meant one thing, the one thing Irene knew she could not deliver’ (40). When anticipating losing Pearl/Mary, Irene remembers the ‘pride’ that she ‘had felt pushing the baby carriage out into the sun by the front door’, her maternal prowess visible to all (86). Her only request, when the police come to arrest her is that she herself be taken away ‘under cover of darkness’, her de-mothering unwitnessed by the same women to whom she had previously displayed Pearl/Mary (89). Moreover, as Fogarty notes, Irene’s allconsuming desire for a child is revealed in the novel to at least partially stem from the invasive physical procedures and loss of identity that she experienced while being treated for tuberculosis as a young woman:26 ‘No man had ever entered her; how could a baby come out? It would have to be torn from her, yanked out like her shattered ribs had been’ (54). Mother of Pearl closes with Irene, newly released from prison for the kidnap of Pearl/Mary, returning to the institution in which she had been 24

25 26

Anne Fogarty, ‘Uncanny Families:  Neo-Gothic Motifs and the Theme of Social Change in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction’, Irish University Review, 30.1 (2000), pp. 59–81 (p. 68). Ibid. Ibid.

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placed as a young woman with tuberculosis and resuming her former kitchen work in what is now a home for the elderly. Some of the working-class women that we encounter in Irish literature are engaged full-time in unpaid household work. In the texts in which much depends, aesthetically and ideologically, on the figure of the ‘good’ mother, significant emphasis is placed on the dedication with which women perform household and life-maintaining tasks, notwithstanding the many obstacles that they face. Thus, Mary Fitzpatrick in Strumpet City strives to keep the family’s living space clean and homely, even if she can no longer afford to furnish it properly − ‘The room was still bare of any real furniture. But there was a fire in the grate’ – and ensures that nothing goes to waste: ‘She took the jug from the table and returned what remained of the milk to the child’s bottle’ (564, 238). Other working-class female characters, such as Irene in the closing pages of Mother of Pearl, are engaged in paid work. Women have been assigned a distinctly marginal role in such celebrated accounts of Irish labour history as Peter Berresford Ellis’s A History of the Irish Working Class (1972). However, in the context of an only partially industrialised Irish society, in which men were often employed in irregular work, working-class women’s waged labour was of considerable financial importance to the family unit. Though generally poorly paid, such work could provide a much-needed steady income. Some of the workingclass women featured in Irish literature work in production. Catherine Byron’s poem ‘Sheers’ (1993) points to the significance of women to the linen industry, so crucial to the economic strength of the north of Ireland, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The speaker of the poem is one of forty young women working on looms in a factory setting. Central female figures in Daniel Corkery’s ‘The Lady of the Glassy Palace’ from A Munster Twilight (1916), Frank McGuinness’s The Factory Girls (1982), Dermot Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter, Frances Molloy’s No Mate for Magpie (1985) and Mary Costello’s ‘The China Factory’ (2012) work in factories based respectively in Cork, Donegal, Dublin, Derry and Galway. Miss Neligan in Corkery’s short story, the women featured in McGuinness’s play and Ann Elizabeth McClone in Molloy’s novel work in the clothing industry. Sandra O’Connor, in The Woman’s Daughter, removes ‘indented cans from the incessant silver stream’ that flows down a seemingly endless conveyor belt.27 Costello’s short story tells of the narrator’s brief stint as a sponger in a factory that makes pseudo-Celtic china for American tourists.

27

Dermot Bolger, The Woman’s Daughter (London: Penguin, [original edn 1987] 1992), p. 4.

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In contrast to Britain, service rather than production occupations provided the greater proportion of Irish working-class jobs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.28 Mary E. Daly states that ‘by 1911 one working woman in three (as defined by the census) was in service.’29 Moreover, as Maria Luddy points out, in the south of Ireland domestic service remained ‘the largest single source of female employment until the 1950s’.30 At the time of the 1911 census, 93 per cent of Irish indoor servants were women.31 Given the centrality of women to the service industry, it is hardly surprising that the vast number of employed working-class women featured in Irish texts are engaged in service jobs and, in particular, in paid household labour. The life-writings, Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child and Mary Healy’s For the Poor and the Gentry (1989), provide examples of such women. While For the Poor and the Gentry recounts the author’s experiences  – first as a housemaid and then as a parlour-maid  – in two Big Houses in Ireland, O’Connor’s autobiography contains a humorous account of his mother’s time as a domestic servant in relatively modest Irish households.32 Included amongst the fictional writings set in Ireland that make reference to women engaged in paid household labour are George Egerton’s (Mary Chavelita Dunne) ‘A Cross Line’ (1893), James Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter, James Joyce’s Dubliners stories ‘Two Gallants’, ‘Clay’ and ‘The Dead’ (1914), Paul Smith’s The Countrywoman, James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, Roddy Doyle’s The Woman who Walked into Doors and Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey. Mary Hoult’s ‘Bridget Kiernan’ (1928) features an Irish domestic servant working in London, while one of the most daring depictions of an English woman engaged in paid domestic work, Esther Waters (1894), was provided by an Irish writer, George Moore. Many of these writings point to the vulnerability of women employed in domestic service, particularly when either young or old. Both Plunkett’s Strumpet City and stories contained in Joyce’s Dubliners make reference to 28

29

30

31 32

Mona Hearn, Below Stairs: Domestic Service Remembered in Dublin and Beyond, 1880–1922 (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), p. 1. Mary E. Daly, ‘The Economy from 1850’, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. V, pp. 530–1 (p. 530). Maria Luddy, ‘Working Women, Trade Unionism and Politics in Ireland, 1830–1945’, in Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–1945, ed. by Fintan Lane and Donal Ó Drisceoil (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 44–61 (p. 46). Hearn, Below Stairs, p. 11. Contrary to popular perception, most women engaged in paid household labour in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century were working in relatively modest households that employed one or two servants.

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the dangers encountered by women engaged in paid household labour at the beginning and end of their working lives. Strumpet City opens with two women, Mary and Miss Gilchrist, both of whom work in the Bradshaw household. Mary, as a servant in training, is ‘practically the property of the Bradshaws, dependent on their kindness for every occasional release from duty’ (62).33 As a member of a ‘class without privilege’, she must lie to her employers ‘to filch a little freedom from time to time’ (62). Her lies, revealed to the reader to be the inevitable outcome of her working conditions, are used by Mr Bradshaw to reinforce the distinction that he seeks to make between his wife and the working-class women, ‘breed[ing] like rabbits’ (64), who inhabit the ‘five infirm shells of tottering brick’ which help sustain his wealthy lifestyle (17). However, there is no great reward for being the kind of ‘strong, willing and reliable’ servant that Mr Bradshaw seeks to employ (64). Miss Gilchrist, who has worked for the Bradshaws for thirty years, naïvely believes that the loyalty she has shown to the family will save her from penury in her old age. Mr Bradshaw acknowledges that ‘she is quite devoted’ (68), but ultimately views her in economic terms – as the provider of a service for which he pays. Hence, he abandons her to die in a workhouse when she is no longer capable of performing her duties.34 In response to Father O’Connor’s timid observation that Miss Gilchrist ‘has been a very long time in service with you’, Mr Bradshaw acidly states ‘she’s been paid for her trouble, every penny’ (67). The damning account provided in Strumpet City of Mr Bradshaw’s heartless treatment of the elderly Miss Gilchrist is a key component of the novel’s critique of an economic system that places monetary gain above all else. Like the families that occupy one room each in Mr Bradshaw’s tenement buildings, she is the victim of a mind-set that views the prioritisation of people over profit as impractical sentimentality. Maria, the central character in Joyce’s short story ‘Clay’, is an elderly scullery maid employed in a Protestant charitable institution for ‘fallen’ women. Similar to Miss Gilchrist, Maria had considered herself part of the family for whom she had previously worked. However, when her services were no longer required, this family procured a job for her in a 33

34

Significantly, a bill to regulate the conditions of domestic servants, including their hours of work, was presented to parliament in 1911, but never became law. Hearn, Below Stairs, pp. 1–2. Peter Berresford Ellis points out that in 1911, two years before the Lockout, 41.9 per cent of all Dublin deaths occurred in workhouses. Peter Berresford Ellis, A History of the Irish Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), p. 184. Moreover, ‘census returns from 1881 to 1911 show that a quarter to a fifth of the people in workhouses, the largest occupational grouping listed, were servants.’ Hearn, Below Stairs, p. 91.

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Magdalene laundry. Though ‘Clay’ points to the economic vulnerability of elderly working-class women, its focus is quite different to Strumpet City’s. While both Miss Gilchrist and Maria are shown to be naïve in their understanding of their circumstances, in Plunkett’s novel Miss Gilchrist’s lack of awareness functions primarily to increase the reader’s ire at the injustice being perpetrated against her; not only has this elderly woman been condemned to die in a workhouse, but she herself had no expectation of this eventuality. By contrast, in ‘Clay’ the story’s interest lies largely in exploring the gap between Maria’s unsophisticated view of the world, as revealed through Joyce’s use of free-indirect style, and the reality of her situation. Indeed, the weight placed in the story on the relationship between perception and reality is signalled in the story’s opening paragraph: ‘[The] barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices.’35 Both Dubliners stories, ‘The Dead’ and ‘Two Gallants’, draw attention to the sexual exploitation of young female domestic servants. In ‘The Dead’, the housemaid Lily’s refusal to respond to Gabriel’s patronising overtures in the expected coy yet flirtatious manner, combined with her bitter assertion that ‘[t]he men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you,’ suggests that she may have reason to empathise with the lyrics of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, the song of seduction and betrayal that Bartell D’Arcy sings at the closing of the Misses Morkan’s annual dance (178). In ‘Two Gallants’, the ‘slavey’ (44),36 who – unlike Lily – is given neither a voice nor a name, has embarked on a sexual relationship with the deeply unpleasant Corley. The treatment meted out to this young woman is used in the story to demonstrate the lengths to which Corley and his companion, Lenehan, are prepared to go in their exploitation of others. In keeping with the theme of Dubliners as a whole, these men are shown to be trapped in a paralysed society, their lack of meaningful opportunity signalled by Lenehan’s aimless wanderings through the streets of Dublin. Their growth restricted, they have become parasites who betray and take advantage of those around them. That a woman in the position of the ‘slavey’ would also be trapped in this society, facing additional strictures relating to her socio-economic standing and gender, is not acknowledged in the story. Her underdevelopment as a character can be further linked to 35

36

James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin, [original edn 1914] 1992), p. 95; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. The ‘slavey’ featured in ‘Two Gallants’ is most likely a maid-of-all-work, perceived as one of the lowest classes of domestic servants.

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her oft-cited symbolic role in the story as the personification of an Ireland that is ‘betrayed, not only by Corley, an unscrupulous conqueror who preys on her means and her body, but also by Lenehan, his complaisant companion, too spineless to act in her behalf ’.37 A common characteristic of fictional accounts of the Irish working class is that the women they feature are often presented as having little or no awareness of the structural basis of class and gender inequalities. There are some exceptions to this. Marie, in Dunne’s Does your Mother?, assigns blame for the ‘stinking hole’ that she and her children inhabit to an official mind-set that views slums ‘not fit for rats’ as appropriate living quarters for working-class people.38 Moreover, she demonstrates an awareness of both the social reproduction of poverty and the role of the state in reinforcing class boundaries when she accuses her policeman lover of going out ‘hunting kids because they were stupid enough to be born in Hell’s Kitchen’ (33). More recently, Rita Ann Higgins has published poems that feature female speakers with a strong grasp of the part state institutions play in consolidating the power dynamics that underpin the prevailing socioeconomic and gender status quo.39 However, such female characters are in the minority and can be contrasted to the women found in Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter, O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and Plunkett’s Strumpet City. In The Charwoman’s Daughter, Mrs Cafferty, pondering on why her husband has no regular work and her children are hungry, concludes that ‘there was something wrong somewhere, but whether the blame was to be allocated to the weather, the employer, the Government, or the Deity, she did not know.’40 In Juno and the Paycock, Mary’s tradeunion principles are exposed as ‘no more than a trite slogan’,41 while her mother, Juno, suggests that the solution to the country’s ‘state o’ chassis’ is for ‘the people [to] folloy up their religion betther’ (104). The story of the prostitute Lily Maxwell in Strumpet City reinforces Plunkett’s critique of the prevailing socio-economic system,42 but when Pat Bannister accuses 37

38 39

40 41

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Florence L. Walzl, ‘Symbolism in Joyce’s “Two Gallants” ’, James Joyce Quarterly, 2.2 (1965), pp. 73– 81 (p. 75). Lee Dunne, Does your Mother? (London: Arrow Books, 1970), p. 7. See, for example, Higgins’s poems, ‘God-of-the-Hatch Man’, ‘Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman’ and ‘Some People’, in Rita Ann Higgins, Throw in the Vowels (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2005), pp. 29, 53–4, 58. James Stephens, The Charwoman’s Daughter (Dublin: Scepter, [original edn 1912] 1966), p. 97. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and State in Twentieth-Century Ireland:  Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 94. Lily sells her body to avoid the economic exploitation associated with the other forms of labour available to her:  ‘Making biscuits or something for five bob a week? I  had enough of that.’ Plunkett, Strumpet City, p. 127. As Pierse points out, the figure of the prostitute often functions

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Lily of never asking herself ‘why the poor are poor’, she tells him that she doesn’t question the way God made the world (129). When informed that James Connolly is campaigning for votes for women, she dismissively responds: ‘What would I do with a vote?’ (130). In some works, including Juno and the Paycock and Strumpet City, this lack of awareness is simply taken for granted, with women associated with a humanity that is largely absent from their more politically engaged male counterparts. As Seamus Deane states in relation to Juno, ‘the ignorance of the women would appear to be a safeguard against [the] unfeelingness’ associated with the play’s male characters.43 Thus these writings conform to a tendency that Anna McMullan and Caroline Williams have noted in male-authored texts ‘to see women or the feminine as embodying values and areas of experience lacking in a male-defined society or in traditional concepts of masculinity’.44 Other works provide a context for failure on the part of female characters to comprehend the structural underpinnings of their impoverished circumstances. In The Charwoman’s Daughter, this incomprehension is linked to the women’s desire for wealth and its consumerist rewards. Notwithstanding the fact that Mrs Makebelieve and her daughter are given the improbable fairy-tale ending that they had longed for, this novel offers a strong critique of prevailing socio-economic forces. Capitalism is revealed in The Charwoman’s Daughter to be a highly seductive economic system that diverts the women’s attention from the power structures at work on their lives by encouraging them to divide their time between either wanting the things that they do not have or enjoying the voyeuristic pleasures that a consumerist society has to offer. As Liam Lanigan notes, ‘Mary frequently alleviates her hunger pangs by indulging in the phantasmagoric escapism provided by the Grafton Street shop windows.’45 By contrast, Smith’s The Countrywoman and McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes depict the Catholic Church as playing a key role in maintaining

43

44

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in working-class writing to ‘highlight the narrowness of opportunity that working-class women are afforded’. Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, p. 159. In such writings, prostitution is generally accompanied by a ‘moral descent’. By placing emphasis on the erosion of innocence, the texts’ indictment of the socio-economic status quo simultaneously re-inscribes the place of woman as upholder of ‘virtue’. In Strumpet City, however, while prostitution is portrayed as a source of ‘anguish’ and ‘suffering’ for Lily, it has no negative impact on her character. Plunkett, Strumpet City, pp. 159, 251. Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, [original edn 1986] 1994), p. 163. Anna McMullan and Caroline Williams, ‘Contemporary Women Playwrights’, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. V, pp. 1234–46 (p. 1237). Liam Lanigan, ‘Revival and the City in James Stephen’s Dublin Fiction’, UCDscholarcast, 12 (2015), pp. 2–25 (p. 10).

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the socio-economic status quo by stringently policing class boundaries and encouraging working-class women to accept their fate. Some texts draw attention to the often solitary nature of working-class women’s paid labour, quite rightly suggesting that such work conditions provide little opportunity for solidarity on the grounds of either class or gender. Paula Spencer, in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, enjoys the camaraderie she shares with the other women who travel into the centre of Dublin in the evening to clean office buildings, but once the women reach their various destinations, they have little contact. Moreover, Paula has no idea who owns the company whose offices she cleans, what the company does or who else works there: ‘There’s me, a vital cog in the machine, and none of the other cogs have ever seen me’ (107). In other texts, such as Stephens’s Hunger, poverty itself is shown to render ‘its victims voiceless, politically impotent’.46 Though offering a less explicit critique of the existing socioeconomic order than The Charwoman’s Daughter, this story uses the observations of its central female character to draw the reader’s attention to the unequal distribution of wealth that results from that order: ‘She followed people with her eyes, sometimes a little way with her feet, saying to herself:  “The pockets of that man are full of money; he would rattle if he fell.” ’47 However, the starving woman at the centre of this story can voice neither these observations nor any other when seeking assistance at a relief kitchen: ‘[S]he did not argue about the matter, for now that she accepted food, she accepted anything that came with it, whether it was opinions or advice; she was an acceptor, and she did not claim to possess even an opinion’ (24). While writings such as Maura Lafferty’s Liffey Lane (1947) point to a communal kinship facilitated by working-class urban life that goes beyond the bourgeois limits of home and family, a number of texts quite rightly indicate that working-class  Irish women are not a homogenous grouping. Subtle social gradations amongst working-class women, as signified by the distinction between ‘hattie’ and ‘shawlie’, for example, are referenced in O’Connor’s An Only Child, Daniel Corkery’s ‘The Return’ in A Munster Twilight and Mary Becket’s ‘A Belfast Woman’ (1980). Recalling the ‘long black shawl’ that his mother always wore when economic necessity impelled her to take a trip to the pawnshop, O’Connor notes that 46

47

Ruth Sherry, ‘The Irish Working Class in Fiction’, in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jeremy Hawthorn (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), pp. 111–24 (p. 119). James Stephens, Hunger: A Dublin Story (Dublin: The Candle Press, 1918), p. 23; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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her exchange of a hat for a shawl marked ‘an immediate descent in the social scale’ from poor to ‘the poorest of the poor’.48 Internal status divisions in domestic service are revealed in Healy’s For the Poor and for the Gentry,49 while other hierarchies in working-class women’s paid labour are indicated in the distinction that Queenie Mullins forms in Smith’s The Countrywoman between her work as a charwoman and a factory or restaurant job (135). Differences within the working class are shown in some texts to preclude class and gender solidarity. In a number of female-authored writings, religious/ethno-religious division inhibits working-class women’s understanding of the power structures that shape their lives, preventing them from joining forces against class and gender inequalities. Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey and Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup (1983) both feature impoverished Protestant women whose sense of superiority over their Catholic neighbours facilitates their acceptance of the status quo. Though Bella Casey/Beaver’s circumstances are similar to those of the Dublin ‘Romanists’ she lives amongst, she insists on ‘her own singularity’, refusing to ‘hang Beaver smalls out on their communal [washing] lines’ (Morrissy, 283, 275). Tea in a China Cup is a Belfast-based play centred on women across three generations of a working-class Protestant family. When the youngest of these women, Beth, points out that her family, like the Catholics her older relatives are so critical of, are poor, her grandmother responds: ‘No matter how poor we are, child, we work hard and keep ourselves and our homes clean and respectable, and we always have a bit of fine bone china and a good table linen by us.’50 The sometimes tenuous nature of the distinctions that the women of this family seek to establish between themselves and their Catholic neighbours is revealed when Beth tells her aunt and grandmother that her mother, in order to pay the rent, had to sell a china cabinet, one of the women’s chosen markers of difference, to a Catholic woman. Mary Costello’s Titanic Town (1992) suggests that sectarian politics in Northern Ireland has functioned to keep both Catholic and Protestant women in their place. In this semi-autobiographical novel, the women who do attempt to enter the political arena are manipulated by male politicians of all political persuasions. That said, some writings, such as Beckett’s ‘The Belfast Woman’ and Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie 48 49

50

Frank O’Connor, An Only Child (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 32–3. Mary Healy, For the Poor and the Gentry:  Mary Healy Remembers her Life (Dublin:  Geography Publications, 1989), p. 48. Christina Reid, Tea in a China Cup, in Christina Reid:  Plays One (London:  Methuen, [original edn 1983] 1997), pp. 1–65 (p. 25).

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(1985), quite rightly suggest that Protestant working-class women living north of the border may not be completely deluded in thinking that historically their position has been better than that of their Catholic equivalents. In Beckett’s short story, both Catholic and Protestant women face being burnt out of their houses but, according to the story’s Catholic narrator, the Protestant women ‘can always get newer better houses when they ask for them’.51 Commenting on responses to the civil rights movement in the north, the female protagonist of No Mate for the Magpie wryly states that a lot of ordinary Catholic people had been ‘surprised to learn that they had been citizens all their lives, an’ not only citizens, but secondclass citizens too at that’.52 As these two texts reveal, Catholics in Northern Ireland have been discriminated against on every rung of the social and economic ladder: jobs, housing, education and voting rights. In the colonial context of Northern Ireland, Catholic women, as Sarah Edge states, ‘were situated as the double Other, both the Other to patriarchal male power and the Other to dominant British national identity’.53 Protestant working-class women in Northern Ireland, like their Catholic equivalents, were the Other to both patriarchal male power and class privilege, but, as Reid’s Tea in a China Cup indicates, they were essential to the perpetuation of the dominant national identity and the guarding of its ethnic and cultural boundaries. In this chapter, I have gathered together an array of Irish urban writings that feature working-class women, and mapped out, with reference to a number of key questions, some connections between their depictions of female characters. That said, this is not an exhaustive study. There are other relevant writings that, due to space restrictions, I have not discussed. Moreover, this chapter’s focus on a relatively large number of works is sometimes at the expense of textual exposition, formal analysis and historical contextualisation. However, by demonstrating the often vital role working-class female characters play in well-known texts and by bringing some less familiar urban writings into the critical frame, this chapter lays the foundations for much-needed further scholarly work on the representation of working-class Irish women.

51

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Mary Beckett, ‘A Belfast Woman’, in A Belfast Woman and Other Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1980), pp. 84–99 (p. 98). Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie (London: Virago, 1985), p. 127. Sarah Edge, ‘Representing Gender and National Identity’, in Rethinking Northern Ireland: Culture, Ideology, Colonialism, ed. by D. Miller (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 211–28 (pp. 215–16).

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Ch apter 7

‘Unwriting’ the City Narrating Class in Early Twentieth-Century Belfast and Dublin (1900–1929) Elizabeth Mannion The real estate between creativity and setting is only as fixed as a writer needs or believes it to be. James Joyce, Seán O’Casey and Liam O’Flaherty – three writers George Russell praised in 1926 as ‘winning for Ireland the repute of a realism more intimate, intense and daring than any other realism in contemporary literature’1  – did not believe Ireland necessarily anchored them, but it certainly anchored their work. Joyce left Ireland because he believed it would limit his creative output. He went to the Continent with Nora in 1904 and flourished, finding what Seamus Heaney called an ‘enabling ground’2 in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. From these cities, Joyce wrote a Dublin largely void of sentimentality or narrative irony, qualities shared by the best social realists. O’Casey, one of the few early twentieth-century writers as intrinsically associated with Dublin as Joyce, produced many plays after moving to London. But these works, for all of their dramaturgical inventiveness, received neither the critical nor the popular acclaim of his Dublin Trilogy.3 O’Casey did not need to be physically present in Dublin to write any more than Joyce did, but, like Joyce, ‘his material [remained] fundamentally in Ireland.’4 His is the quintessential working-class drama of the period, but it was in good company. St John Ervine, Patrick Wilson, Edward McNulty and Arthur Power all penned social realism set in Belfast workers’ houses or Dublin tenements, and had plots centred on the ramifications of living in poverty. They also favoured the compression of time and colloquial language introduced by Joyce and employed by O’Flaherty. Ireland was the fabric of O’Flaherty’s tales, no matter where he produced them. His first short story, ‘The Sniper’ (1923) – set in Dublin, written in 1 2

3 4

George Russell, ‘Notes and Comments’, The Irish Statesman 6:4 (3 April 1926), p. 89. Seamus Heaney, ‘The Place of Writing:  W.B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee’, in The Place of Writing (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta Scholars Press, 1989), p. 20. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Christopher Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work (Montreal, Kingston and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), p. 210.

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Liverpool and published in London – takes place at the start of the civil war, and his first novel, The Informer (1925), is set in its wake. O’Flaherty grew inclined to use rural Ireland as a setting for much of his long career, but he looked to the city first and would continue to do so as an ‘analyst of post-revolutionary disillusion’.5 Part of the daringness of the Dublin- and Belfast-set realism of the period is crafting unsentimental narratives against contemporary events. These authors largely avoid the allegorical form that was often used to address anything remotely political, and the issue of class was (and remains) nothing if not political. As Russell also noted, there was an ‘idealistic’6 quality to much of the literature of the period, and these writers stripped that out: a bold move in the volatile, politically charged decades of the early twentieth century.7 There is a directness in both the prose and the drama that brings character and setting to the fore. These writers are overt in their depiction of the working classes of these cities as economic fodder for and collateral damage in the business of nation building. Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922) all draw attention to ordinary life in turn-of-the-century Dublin, and it is a life measured by and often in contemplation of work. F.  S. L.  Lyons recounted Joyce once proudly telling a friend that there was not ‘ “a single gentleman in my books” [. . .] “nor a single workingman either”, was the tart reply’.8 But work is ever present. Bloom’s day is mapped in part by the ads he must collect and deliver, Molly’s opportunity to take Blazes Boylan as a lover is due to their shared professional pursuits, and even young Milly’s relocation to Westmeath is anchored by employment. Joyce ‘captured [. . .] the expressive dignity of ordinary men and women in working conditions – in “Wandering Rocks” the camera pans back and away from Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, with the implication that any one of the thousands of other citizens passing might be enjoying interior monologues of similar poetry and complication’.9 The inhabitants of Ulysses are characterised by how (or if ) they earn a living. Work is so top-of-mind for Bloom that his observation of something as innocuous as a stalled tram  – ‘couldn’t they invent something automatic?’10 – is interrupted by concern for those who run it: ‘but that fellow 5 6 7

8 9 10

Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 491. Russell, ‘Notes and Comments’, p. 89. And Ireland stripped them back: all three share the distinction of having their work banned in their own country. F. S. L. Lyons, ‘James Joyce’s Dublin’, 20th Century Studies, 4 (November 1970), pp. 6–25 (p. 12). Declan Kiberd, ‘The City in Irish Culture’, City, 6 (2002), pp. 219–28 (p. 222). James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Bodley Head, [1922] 1967), p. 76.

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would lose his job then? Well, but then another fellow would get a job making the new invention.’11 The constant activity of the novel’s characters is mirrored in its stream-of-consciousness, perfectly synchronistic narration for the ever-multi-tasking Bloom and second-guessing Stephen. The downward spiral of the Dedalus family in Portrait is the result of Simon’s inability to keep a job, which is largely the result of his incessantly clinging to the illusion that he is middle class. Once Stephen pierces the patriarchal bubble, he leaves behind any notions about his own social standing. He is soon measuring himself against ‘the real world about him’12 and finding it ‘a new and complex sensation’.13 Lyons has argued that when Joyce left Dublin in 1904 ‘to escape the snares it laid for his artistic soul’,14 he was also looking to leave the ‘bourgeois decline into abject poverty’15 that was his family’s fate, suggesting a pragmatism worthy of Mrs Mooney but not imbued upon Mr Dedalus. Simon’s illusions turn to delusion, much to the detriment of his family. Dubliners is an instrument through which to view a trajectory of the inevitability of work. Children receive an early education in the penalties of not being in service to one’s position; adolescents are confronted by the trappings of roles prescribed by their socio-economic status or gender (sometimes both, as in ‘Eveline’), and adulthood brings limitations based on those trappings. Some workers are middle class, but they cling to that rank at the mercy of the city’s social codes, employment and employers. Maturity and public life in Dubliners is working life, and Joyce’s characters are afforded little more agency than those who live in O’Casey’s tenements. ‘Counterparts’ finds Farrington undone by the same office routine that Little Chandler slowly, drunkenly sees as restrictive in ‘A Little Cloud’. In ‘A Painful Case’, Duffy’s life ‘roll[s] out evenly’,16 like transactions at the bank where he works. When faced with anything that requires taking a position – or confronted by people who do, such as the socialist workmen and their ‘timorous’17 debates about wages or Mrs Sinico’s touch – he balks. He responds to the disruptive with dismissiveness. The socialists he once admired are transformed into naïve, ‘hardfeatured realists’18 and 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18

Ibid. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by John Paul Riquelme (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 54. Ibid., p. 57. Lyons, ‘James Joyce’s Dublin’, p. 12. Ibid. James Joyce, ‘A Painful Case’, in Dubliners, ed. by Margot Norris (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 2006), p. 91. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid.

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Mrs Sinico into a woman who ‘degraded herself ’,19 and, worse, ‘degraded him’.20 Duffy has no more use for the ‘obtuse middle class’21 than he does for the socialist workers, smugly concluding that ‘No social revolution [. . .] would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.’22 Duffy’s self-imposed exile from both ranks might be read as further evidence of what Anne Fogarty and others have noted in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’: that James Connolly and his labour movement are very much on display and in conflict with ‘the political self-interest of middle-class  Catholics [. . .] to preserve the status quo’.23 Such class conflict is central to the dramatic social realism of the period, which first found its way to the stage with Frederick Ryan’s The Laying of the Foundations. Foundations, staged by the Irish National Dramatic Company in October 1902, is ‘the first treatment of a distinctly Irish class conflict’,24 which it frames generationally, and a generational divide becomes a staple for working-class drama of the period. The play features a young architect who is awakened to his father’s complicity in tenement landlordship and unsafe building practices by a reporter for a socialist newspaper. Having a socialist influence, and urging a young generation towards helping improve the tenements of day labourers, locates this first play to open a dialogue on the Dublin working-class experience as firmly pro-labour. It would prove to be the start of ‘a wiry thread of theatre practice running through the fabric of the Revival’.25 Differing positions on the labour movement is the first generational conflict on display, but it is quickly joined by other events of the early twentieth century that would shape the island for decades to come: from Home Rule to the Civil War. If an anthology on revivalist drama addressing the Dublin and Belfast working classes were compiled, it would include, in addition to Ryan’s play, St John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911); Patrick Wilson’s Victims (1912); Ervine’s The Orangeman (1914); Wilson’s The Slough (1914); Edward McNulty’s The Lord Mayor (1914); Oliver St John Gogarty’s Blight (1917); M. M. Brennan’s The Young Man from Rathmines (1922), A Leprechaun in 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

Ibid., p. 97. Ibid. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid. Anne Fogarty, ‘Parnellism and the Politics of Memory:  Revisiting “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” ’, in Joyce, Ireland, Britain, ed. by Andrew Gibson and Len Platt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), pp. 104–21 (p. 116). Ben Levitas, ‘Plumbing the Depths: Irish Realism and the Working Class from Shaw to O’Casey’, Irish University Review, 33 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 133–49 (p. 134). Ibid., p. 133.

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the Tenement (1922) and The Big Sweep (1923); Seán O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Kathleen Listens In (1923), Nannie’s Night Out (1924), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926); and Arthur Power’s The Drapier Letters (1927). An honourable mention would be due to James Connolly’s Under Which Flag? (1916), which, although not set in either city, depicted working conditions that were informed by ‘the exploitative and dehumanised industrial workplace in which Connolly had seen women working in Dublin and Belfast’.26 Collectively, these plays offer as diverse a position on the urban working-class condition as the genres they comprise. The tragedies (Mixed Marriage, Victims, The Orangeman, The Slough, Blight, The Drapier Letters) contain glimmers of hope, but all end in the dire circumstances of a working class trapped by a status quo and circumstances beyond its control. Two comedies (The Lord Mayor and The Big Sweep) offer an optimistic glimpse at younger people circumventing the old narratives of class, but the satires – The Young Man from Rathmines, A Leprechaun in the Tenement, Kathleen Listens In, Nannie’s Night Out – struggle to find comedic ground and mostly lampoon the marginalised. Kathleen Listens In, although it never found an audience, comes closest to making a statement, which is that everybody in the Free State is marginalised. The tragicomedies of O’Casey (The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars) make the most profound commentary on the folly and divisiveness of a militarised city and its impact on the working poor. Mixed Marriage is the first example of social realism where labour is central to the plot. The play is set midway between the Falls and Shankill roads, a metaphorical dividing line between traditionally Catholic and Protestant areas, the two communities to be mixed if the marriage goes forward. The play suggests the politics of labour have the potential to heal, but ‘the problem of class unity in the face of religious sectarianism’27 proves insurmountable. The young Protestant Hugh and the Catholic Michael are united by their union activism and embody the possibility of transcending the sectarianism that engulfs their communities. Their solidarity is no match, however, for the bigotry of Hugh’s father, who personifies the ‘Protestant fears of Home Rule which rends the possibility of class unity asunder’.28 That bigotry wins out in the end, with the 26

27

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James Moran, ed., Four Irish Rebel Plays (Dublin and Portland, OR:  Irish Academic Press, 2007), p. 18. Paul Murphy, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 64. Ibid., p. 65.

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father reneging on his plan to speak to the workers, and Michael’s fiancée dead as a result of the sectarian conflicts that permeate the neighbourhood. A similar sectarian and generational divide is seen in Ervine’s The Orangeman. The play opens with an arthritic John McClurg lamenting that he will miss his first Orange parade, breaking a family tradition. John’s disappointment is tempered by his expectation that his son, Tom, will carry it on. The opening stage direction, describing John as ‘what the Belfast people call “a fine man” – that is to say, he is a sober, industrious, decent bigot, with a mind like concrete’,29 indicates a satirical component, but this is incongruent to the action. John’s pride in banging the drum on 12 July is not treated with condescension, nor is Tom’s disinterest presented as a political statement. When his son puts his foot through the family heirloom, it is more the act of a petulant son than an act of defiance against sectarianism. Generational disenfranchisement carried over into Ervine’s fiction too. His novel The Wayward Man (1927), a prodigal son adventure tale, features the East Belfast so familiar in his drama. Like Michael in Mixed Marriage, the novel’s protagonist is disgusted with the state of his city and the limitations forced on him by markers of class. But he ultimately gets out, leaving others compromised, but himself free of the community. The consequences of defiance prove more severe in the Dublin plays of Patrick Wilson.30 Both Victims and The Slough deal with organised labour’s failure to protect families. As its staging at Liberty Hall (home of the ITGWU) would mandate, Victims is every inch a union play. More specifically, this agit-prop drama is advocating for syndicalism. In a tenement room that ‘gives the impression of the most abject poverty’,31 the father, once a member of a small union that went on strike, is locked out from employment; the wife, Annie, loses her home-sewing income because she cannot work fast enough (lacking money for candles, she can work only in daylight hours); and their baby dies waiting for a doctor who will not come to the tenements unless he is paid in advance. Annie is incredulous that neither employers nor doctor – all ‘Christian men’32 – are willing to help. As Nelson Ritschel observes, the play’s ‘brutal attack on the Christianity of the employers echoed the 29 30

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St John G. Ervine, The Orangeman in Four Irish Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 101. For more on Wilson, see James Curry, ‘Andrew Patrick Wilson and the Irish Worker, 1912–13’, in Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life, ed. by David Convery (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013), pp. 39–55. Patrick Wilson, Victims in Victims and Poached:  Liberty Hall Plays No. 1 [Dublin:  Trade Union Printer, 1916], p. 3. Ibid., p. 12.

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socialist assault on the respectable class that rallied around the employers’33 who were opposing syndicalism at the time of the play’s premiere.34 The Slough is also shouting back to the contemporary sociopolitical climate, but, unlike Victims, The Slough suggests that not even one big union can save workers. It simultaneously denounces union leaders for being interested more in their own power than the plight of the workers they feign to represent, and offers a sympathetic characterisation of a strike-breaker who simply wants to do right by his family. The union is as cold-hearted as the employers and doctor of Victims, and, like that play’s Nolan family, the Hanlons here are ‘victims of their class and their class’s struggle against capitalism’.35 Tragedies that reject a victimisation narrative, such as Blight and The Drapier Letters, operate on the fringe of the realism that pervades those that embrace it. As a result, they come close to subverting the genre. The flights of fancy that anchor these plays are transformative for the central characters, but the cynicism is palpable. Blight’s Tully becomes wealthy enough to purchase his tenement, but he remains very much of that place – becoming a sort of double-agent – when his newfound landlordship earns him a place in the Corporation. The Drapier Letters’ Mary-Bridget rises above her working-class status only in death. With its invocation of ancient myth, fantasy sequence and honouring self-sacrifice, this is the one play that comes closest to the ‘idealistic literature’36 that Russell found passé. All of the comedies are set in Dublin and convey a capital in earnest transition, with hopes resting on a younger generation to assure the city does not go back to its old ways. The most successful of them, The Lord Mayor, suggests the Mansion House is a hotbed of hypocrisy. The new lord mayor, an ironmonger named O’Brien, is put in office by a backroom dealmaker, Gaffney, who is hedging his bets against the burgeoning labour movement. He achieves this, in part, by keeping the focus on Englandas-enemy to obfuscate the possibility that the ‘enemy’ is within. Gaffney uses a working man to prevent any actual reform of working conditions. This meets with general satisfaction, but the younger voices go offscript by questioning ‘the true intentions of many nationalist activities’.37 33

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Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2011), p. 122. The play never states its setting as Dublin (using instead the allegorical ‘a city’), but the parallels are many. Reviewers of the day locate it there. Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation, p. 164. Russell, ‘Notes and Comments’, p. 89. Michael Pierse, ‘Labour and Literature One Hundred Years after the Lockout: Towards an Archive of Irish Working-Class Experience’, Irish Review, 47 (2013), pp. 43–62 (p. 51).

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The Big Sweep surprises too, both generically and politically. It is unique for portraying a successful romance; and, through the character of Gerald O’Grady, depicting a working-class figure whose privileged background affords him the possibility of social mobility should his circumstances change. Set in a boarding house, where the owner wields her economic dominance over her stepdaughter, Kitty, and other lodgers, the play seeks to nullify voices of financial power and temper a young, retributive republican narrative. Its characterisation is largely archetypal: the landlady is a cliché of an evil stepmother; Kitty, a Cinderella; and O’Grady, a young prince in disguise. The play portrays a city dominated by economic control and civil servants (in the figure of the young republican, Dermot Sullivan) who are as focussed on suppressing opportunity for others as they are on maintaining control over the less fortunate. In direct contradiction to Mixed Marriage, it achieves a positive conclusion – O’Grady and Kitty marry on a fortune won in a sweepstakes – by uniting two factions that a generation spouting ageing narratives has tried to keep apart. The other two Brennan plays, The Young Man from Rathmines and A Leprechaun in the Tenement, are parodies of working-class Dublin. Both are set in north-side tenements and feature families intent on scheming (Young Man) or dreaming (Leprechaun) their way to better lives. Young Man is no less racist a play than American vaudevillian varieties played in blackface; and the intended humour of Leprechaun is mostly at the expense of an intellectually challenged son. Both plays ridicule the working class as much as The Big Sweep championed it. There is a similar lampooning in the O’Casey satires Kathleen Listens In and Nannie’s Night Out. Set in post–Civil War Dublin, Kathleen Listens In suggests the young nation is closing off all factions that contributed to its independence, including the workers, whose voices are drowned out along with all other groups that contributed to revivalist Ireland, all of whom are reduced to clichés with a measured detachment. Likewise, Nannie’s Night Out is a one-act of stereotypes. These Dubliners, all living on the margins, scrape out their livings in an Ireland focussed on rules of order that appear intended to keep the Nannies of the state penned in their tenements. O’Casey’s Trilogy, on the other hand, embraces every iconic trope of the period. John Fordham has argued that working-class fiction ‘sees beyond the limited horizon of bourgeois knowledge to articulate the actual experience and the felt consequences of industrialization. Shaped and determined by the processes of production itself, working-class writing is a product of a

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distinct form of consciousness’.38 But the Trilogy contains a cynicism that can only be born of experience, making it difficult to ignore O’Casey’s origins. O’Casey famously resigned from the Irish Citizen Army in 1914 when his ‘class-based ideology’39 proved too strident. He wore the poverty he had known up until his Trilogy success like a badge of honour, and, following a credo for novice writers the world over, he wrote what he knew. But he did this without falling into a trap of sentimentality that, as John Kirk and others have observed, is not uncommon among authors who have written their way out of a working class that privileges the physical into a life of the arts that privileges the intellectual and is relatively leisurely by comparison. ‘Writing about class,’ Kirk finds, ‘can be emotional; it can be a painful and difficult process in which feelings of belonging and un-belonging often pull in deeply ambivalent and hurtful ways. The prejudices and privileges which go along with class leave marks’.40 It may have left many marks on O’Casey, but the Trilogy suggests they were nicks of the same disillusionment that contributed to his leaving the Irish Citizen Army: the belief that he was witnessing an expendability of the working class. Any notion of a nobility of war, even when the goal is independence, is thoroughly eviscerated by O’Casey. The Trilogy ‘debunks the mythology of Mother Ireland [. . .] replacing it with images of real suffering mothers, of families torn apart by men drunk on ineffable dreams of political utopia and doggedly sober on a doctrine of arid, inflexible political principals’.41 This path of demythologising leaves no events of the period unscathed. The Shadow of a Gunman is set in 1920, amidst the War of Independence; Juno and the Paycock in 1922, during the Civil War; and The Plough and the Stars in the months leading up to and during the start of the 1916 Easter Rising. Although bystanders and cynics of these events seldom escape unharmed, the characters who are most susceptible to the rhetoric of nation invariably pay for that gullibility with their lives. Juxtaposing ‘conflict between nationalism and socialism is common in Irish working-class writing’,42 and it starts here. But it brings that internal conflict in one extra step, and, in 38

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John Fordham, ‘Working-Class Fiction across the Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel, ed. by Robert L. Caserio (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 131–45 (p. 131). Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 89. John Kirk, Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), p. 7. Ronan McDonald, ‘Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: Disillusionment to Delusion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. by Shaun Richards (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 136–49 (p. 137). Pierse, ‘Labour and Literature One Hundred Years after the Lockout’, p. 49.

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doing so, presents the most complex community of any social realism of the period. In this regard, O’Casey’s plays share a similarity with those that began at the Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT) in Belfast. ULT plays were, generally speaking, more multidimensional than Abbey plays of the period. As Karen Vandevelde notes, the ULT tended to navigate between a range of conflicting identities: Ulster unionism and Irish nationalism, Catholicism and Protestantism, a northern versus southern identity [. . . they] explored Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism not as political concepts but as defining parameters of social and cultural identity.43

The founding philosophies of each company made it inevitable that such differences would be seen in their repertories, with the Belfast company making ‘a case for an Ulster identity that was pluralist rather than dogmatic’.44 The pluralism is more pronounced in O’Casey’s Trilogy as it moves forward, with Juno acknowledging the patriarchal (though a blustering man, Juno’s husband has all the agency until the end of the play) and the ‘emerging middle class [with its] deeply puritanical’45 code. The Plough and the Stars offers the most multidimensional attack against the rhetoricians who lead the poor to slaughter. The legacy of The Plough’s Figure in the Window occurs off-stage, but the protests against the play, which often focussed on its being nationalistically blasphemous in part because of that character, occurred in the theatre as well as in the press. Ironically, the protests ‘were led not by narrow-gauge nationalists but by socialist republicans like Liam O’Flaherty and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington’,46 on whom it would appear the Covey’s sarcasm was lost.47 Having the Figure speak Pearse’s own words to stir up the tenement men who will go out and die was a bit too much realism for republicans on both sides of the labour question, and the staging (the Figure appears only in silhouette) was particularly revealing of O’Casey’s disdain for the movement. As Declan Kiberd points out, there is some irony at play: ‘[O’Casey’s] failure was similar to that of 43

44 45 46

47

Karen Vandevelde, ‘An Open National Identity: Rutherford Mayne, Gerald MacNamara, and the Plays of the Ulster Literary Theatre’, Éire-Ireland, 39:1–2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 36–58 (p. 37). Ibid., p. 39. Kiberd, Irish Classics, p. 490. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Random House, 1996), p. 234. O’Flaherty would take his turn fictionalising the Easter Rising three decades later, in the novel Insurrection (1950).

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the middle-class nationalists whom he despised: in decades to come they would ban republicans from their airwaves and demonize them in public debates, for much the same reasons that he kept them on the edge of his stage.’48 One exception is the Lady from Rathmines, who is lost and confused as the Rising begins. In what might be a form of poetic justice, she is often cut from modern productions, strategically emphasising O’Casey’s dismissal of middle-class mores and their ‘disruption in his proletarians’ lives’.49 ‘Socialist republican’ O’Flaherty may have had issues with The Plough, but his early work bore some similarities to it. Like O’Casey, he took militarised 1920s Dublin and populated it with people whose very humanity is compromised. His early Dublin stories – particularly ‘The Sniper’ (1923), ‘A Dublin Eviction’ (1924), ‘Wolf Lanigan’s Death’ (1924), The Informer (1925), ‘The Terrorist’ (1926), Mr Gilhooley (1926), ‘Civil War’ (1925) and The Assassin (1928)  – are difficult to read outside of his political biography, just as was the situation with O’Casey. Like O’Casey, he was active in socialist circles; he would also become a founding member of the first incarnation of the Communist Party of Ireland. His father was a staunch republican and O’Flaherty was active in the movement too, particularly while living in Dublin; the extent of his participation is, however, unclear. He interrupted his study at University College Dublin to serve in the British Army during the First World War, and one can surmise that his experiences in the trenches contributed to his work’s unromantic view of violence of any kind. Although often intrigue-filled stories set against warfare, his urban works suppress the thriller genre as much as they do war literature. ‘The Sniper’ is set in Dublin at the start of the Civil War and was published, while that conflict was still under way, in the 12 January 1923 London edition of The New Leader, the newspaper of the Independent Labour Party. That venue is not surprising; O’Flaherty had been supportive of workers’ rights at least as early as his return to Dublin following his army discharge. ‘The Sniper’ presents a night-time Dublin where ‘machine guns and rifles broke the silence of the night, spasmodically, like dogs barking on lone farms.’50 This analogy evokes an urban-versus-rural class conflict more common in fiction of later decades, and indicative of the rurally set prose for which O’Flaherty is best known. The only point of view afforded 48 49 50

Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 234. Kiberd, Irish Classics, p. 490. Liam O’Flaherty, ‘The Sniper’, www.classicshorts.com/stories/sniper.html [accessed 4 June 2015].

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is that of a pragmatic IRA sniper positioned on a rooftop near O’Connell Bridge. He kills methodically, and is shot by a Free Stater before returning fire and killing that man too. The limited third-person narration affords insight into the sniper’s physical pain, but  – in contrast to the republican snipers of ‘Civil War’ – his psychological trauma is withheld from the reader. The story’s abrupt, surprise ending – when ‘the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face’  – acknowledges with just a surface description that the sniper’s life has ended too, another dupe doing the bidding for those competing for power in the new Free State. ‘Civil War,’ published less than one year later, but after the conflict had ended, considers the psychological ramifications of urban warfare. Soldiers on both sides are seen to have lost their humanity, but this is particularly so of the republican Murphy, ‘an enormous low-sized workman [. . .] a resolute fanatical gunman, senseless, indomitable’.51 Whatever he was before the war is unclear, but his soldiering brutality is on constant display. He is hungry to kill, be it the enemy or, if necessary, his fellow soldier, a young clerk who finds no glory in the hellish street fighting. The Informer  – like ‘Wolf Lanigan’s Death,’ to which it is sometimes compared – maintains a ‘reliance on sheerly external depiction’,52 but that is enough to convey the hardship and expendability of Dublin’s poor. In associating poverty with criminality, the novel makes clear that a class conflict between bourgeois sensibilities and the working poor has been waged, with the middle class victorious. The Dunboy Lodging House, where Gypo has been staying, is known ‘among criminal and pauperized circles’53 alike. Surrounded by slums, the boarding house ‘was furnished with long tables and wooden forms, like a café for the working class. There were newspapers on some tables [. . .] some read [. . .] the majority, however, sat in silence, their eyes staring vacantly in front of them, contemplating the horror of their lives’.54 For Gypo and these ‘casual workers, casual criminals and broken old men, their connection with the ordered scheme of civilized life, with its moral laws and its horror of crime, was so thin and weak that they were unable to feel the interest that murder arouses in the tender breasts of our wives and sisters’.55 The limited interiority is perfectly aligned to characterisation; like the sniper, they are all in the void that is the new 51

52 53 54 55

Liam O’Flaherty, ‘Civil War’, in Liam O’Flaherty: The Collected Stories Volume 1, ed. by A. A. Kelly (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 183–8 (p. 183). Kiberd, Irish Classics, p. 493. Liam O’Flaherty, The Informer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 5. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12.

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Free State. As time moves away from the historical moment, fiction set amidst the volatile early twentieth century affords working-class characters an opportunity to fill that void. This often occurs in a heroic fashion, be it writ small, as in the Belfast of Michael McLaverty’s Call My Brother Back (1938) or epic, as recalled by Roddy Doyle’s larger-than-life Henry Smart in A Star Called Henry (1999). Heroic maybe, but still poor, and they get by with a healthy dose of cynicism. Distance does not appear to have made the literary heart any fonder, and of this Mr Russell would no doubt nod approvingly. Distance also seems to have made the cities in which these characters toil simultaneously more and less central to the unrest and revolution that played out in the workers’ cottages and tenements, and on the streets. Belfast and Dublin become more malleable as the decades progress, but they still permeate every page, just as they did in real time.

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Ch apter 8

Class during the Irish Revolution British Soldiers, 1916 and the Abject Body James Moran

They sent me to the gallery or round the music-’alls, But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! They’ll shove me in the stalls! - Rudyard Kipling, ‘Tommy’.1

Introduction At the age of eighty-eight, James Connolly’s daughter, Nora, wrote about her father’s death. She recalled that, after the execution, there came a knock at the family’s door, and on the doorstep a young British soldier presented himself. He appeared perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, and Connolly’s widow thought he might be trying to desert. However, when she asked what he wanted, the young man replied: ‘I want you to forgive me.’ He continued: I was one of the squad that killed James Connolly. It was only afterwards that I heard how he had worked for the working people. I am a miner. My father is a miner, and my grandfather was a miner – they were both very busy in the trade union. How can I go back home? They would know about James Connolly even if I didn’t. I haven’t been home on leave. I can’t go home. I’d let something slip and they’d know I killed James Connolly. Oh, why was I chosen to kill a man like that?

In response, Connolly’s widow gave the reassurance that her dead husband had offered his forgiveness at the time of the execution, because he ‘realised you were being forced, he realised you were only a working-class boy’.2 Of course, it is difficult to verify the story at this distance or to identify the soldier: there are no full lists of the men who made up the 1916 1

2

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Tommy’, in The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry, ed. by Carl Woodring and James Shapiro (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 721. Nora Connolly O’Brien, We Shall Rise Again (London: Mosquito Press, 1981), pp. 37–8.

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firing squads, with the individuals simply having been plucked from their morning’s parade and then ordered to perform the executions.3 Yet certain details of Nora Connolly’s story do ring true. Those who shot her father belonged to a group of English soldiers who were young and inexperienced and were recruited from the mining districts of the East Midlands. They were members of the 2/6th and 2/7th Sherwood Foresters, the second-line units from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire that had been set up in 1914 in order to supply the first line when it began haemorraging men at the Western Front.4 One of their commanders later reflected that ‘Most of our “men” were merely boys, Derby Recruits, who had been in uniform about 6 or 8 weeks. They had not fired their musketry course and many had never fired a rifle.’5 As Enda Duffy has noted, James Connolly’s executed corpse has since taken its place in Irish history alongside the other degraded bodies that bear ‘either the marks of colonial oppression or the scars of having fought against it, or both’.6 Such bodies range from the Illustrated London News’s famine illustrations of 1846–50, to the bodies of the Maze hunger strikers of 1981. Certainly, in 1916, the British establishment demonstrated a distinct enthusiasm for envisioning Connolly as a corpse rather than a living person. Twelve days before he was actually executed, a communiqué from the British army declared ‘James Connolly, the chief rebel leader, is reported killed,’ and the Manchester Guardian reported this (mis)information under the headline ‘Better News from Ireland’.7 Yet during 1916, Connolly’s was not the only body to preoccupy the British authorities. The general staff remained convinced that, within the army’s own ranks, a public ritual of bodily punishment was necessary in 3

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7

We do know that the twenty-year-old sergeant from Chesterfield, William Hand, of the 2/6th Sherwood Foresters, was a member of the firing squad that killed Joseph Mary Plunkett, because Hand gave Plunkett some rosary beads. Hand subsequently passed the beads to his cousin Dora, before going to France where he died in 1918 (see Dublin, National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, HE:EW.5368 and www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/785125/HAND,%20WILLIAM [accessed 27 June  2016]). We also know that Arthur Dickson of the 2/7th Sherwood Foresters commanded a firing squad, and the arrangements were made by Arthur Neal Lee, who found the task ‘beastly’; see London, Imperial War Museum, Lt. Col. A. N. Lee 66/121/1; and Captain A. A. Dickson 01/49/1; and also Cliff Housley, The Sherwood Foresters in the Easter Rising Dublin 1916 (Sawley: Miliquest Publications, 2014), p. 97. The Sherwood Foresters (Nottingham and Derbyshire Regiment): A Brief History (Derby: English Life, 1980), pp. 4, 11. The Imperial War Museum, London, The World War I Diary of Lt. Col. A. N. Lee, 66/121/1, f.33. Enda Duffy, ‘Molly’s Throat’, in Joyce:  Feminism/Post/Colonialism, ed. by Ellen Carol Jones (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 213–44 (p. 231). ‘Quelling the Rising’, The Times, 1 May 1916, p. 9. ‘Better News from Ireland’, Manchester Guardian, 1 May 1916, p. 5.

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order to maintain military discipline. In some cases (for ‘crimes’ including desertion), a court martial might condemn an offender to execution by firing squad, and from 1914 to 1918 the British army executed 322 individuals in France and Belgium in this way.8 In Discipline and Punish Foucault frequently draws on military terms, and describes civil society as an occupied zone, in order to emphasise the possibility that, as Judith Butler glosses it, ‘contemporary power-relations are, at least implicitly, war relations.’9 Hence, we might be unsurprised to find that, during the spring of 1916, the Crown authorities so readily drew on the methodologies of the attritional Western Front when facing a militarily small-scale insurgency in Dublin, and sought to treat Connolly and his colleagues like British army deserters at the Somme. This chapter explores that affinity between how the early twentiethcentury British state treated the bodies of its own working-class soldiers, and the way it treated Irish bodies in revolutionary Dublin:  as objects that could be commandeered, displayed for instruction and reduced to bloody debasement. In order to investigate this connection, I  rely on Georges Bataille’s ideas of the social operation of ‘abjection’, particularly as expressed in his short essay of 1934, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’. Here, Bataille argues that sovereignty depends on an integral exclusion by which certain members of the population are instructively ‘represented from the outside with disgust as the dregs of the people, populace and gutter’.10 As this chapter will emphasise, Irish writing explored this terrain in the work of Seán O’Casey, with O’Casey realising, like Bataille, that the operation of the modern state relied on the public display of certain bodies in abject condition. Indeed, an examination of O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy – as well as his play The Silver Tassie and the early volumes of his autobiography – reveals an interrelation between Irish tenement dwellers and working-class British soldiers that comes close to Bataille’s idea that ‘Miserable exploitation is abandoned to the organizers of production [. . .] that is to say, to a section of the population which is itself miserable; the profound internal divisions of the misérables end up thus in an infinite subjugation.’11

8

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11

Ross Wilson, Landscapes of the Western Front: Materiality during the Great War (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 65. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire:  Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 226. Georges Bataille, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, in More & Less, ed. by Sylvere Lotringer, trans. by Yvonne Shafir (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Pasadena, CA: Art Center College of Design, 1999), pp. 8–13 (p. 9). Ibid.

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The Sherwood Foresters The British army units that suffered the heaviest losses at Easter 1916 were members of the Sherwood Foresters, and a surviving postcard offers a glimpse of the world from which these soldiers were recruited. This card was published by the Clay Cross Colliery in Derbyshire, in order to promote the mine, and shows a man from one of the battalions that ended up in Dublin during the Rising. On the left-hand side of the card is an image of the man at work in the mine, accompanied by the caption ‘winning his bread:  getting the celebrated “CXC [Clay Cross Colliery] Gold Medal” coal’, and on the right-hand side is an image of the man in uniform, apparently ‘serving his country. The same individual as a “Territorial” ’.12 As this postcard reveals, the Sherwood Foresters recruited in the industrial communities of the English East Midlands, a landscape that inspired art, as Katherine Mansfield disapprovingly put it, that ‘looks black with miners’.13 However, if recruits to the Sherwood Foresters could be associated with the realm of industry and manufacture, the officers who commanded these men came from a quite different social background. For example, one of the most high-profile deaths amongst the Sherwood Foresters during the Rising was that of officer Frederick Dietrichsen, a lawyer who had graduated from Cambridge University, came from a wealthy family and lived in Nottingham’s exclusive Park district at the outset of the war.14 The way in which the Sherwood Foresters prepared for battle was designed to buttress such class difference. For example, when the 2/8th Sherwoods trained in Billericay before Easter Week, the majority of the men had suffered an assortment of ailments from their time in poor billets, whilst the Commanding Officer and Adjutant ‘were most kindly and hospitably entertained at Ramsden Hall by Mr and Mrs Bacon, and lived in the lap of luxury’.15 On arrival in Dublin, a similar divison took place: the officers dined at the Royal St George Yacht Club, whilst the rest waited in a large empty hotel and town hall.16 Even in death, a strict hierarchy was observed, with the wounded and killed officers usually being reported separately from 12 13

14

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Paul North, Regiments of Nottingham (Keyworth: Reflections of a Bygone Age, 1991), p. 59. Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield:  Volume II:  1918–1919, ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 287. See James Moran, ‘1916: A British Soldier’s Family Reunion and Death in Dublin’, Irish Times, 6 April 2015, p. 11. W. Coape Oates, The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914–1918: The 2/8th Battalion (Nottingham: J&H Bell, 1920), p. 20. Officers of the Battalions, ‘The Robin Hoods’: 1/7th, 2/7th & 3/7th Battns. Sherwood Foresters: 1914– 1918 (Nottingham: J&H Bell, 1921), p. 281.

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and in precedence to the other soldiers (and, of course, the civilian casualties). Hence, when Prime Minister Asquith described the Easter Rising to the House of Commons, he told of the Sherwood Foresters by saying, ‘six officers were killed and 15 wounded, and of other ranks 24 were killed and 142 wounded.’17 Such an attitude perhaps explains the conduct of the Rising itself, where at Mount Street Bridge the commanders in charge of the British army showed a strikingly cavalier attitude towards the lives of their own underlings: when Brigadier General Lowe was told at 4.40 PM on 26 April that the 2/7th Sherwood Foresters had suffered terrible losses, and so could not now be expected to storm the schoolhouse, he responded by telling his soldiers to ‘go on with the job’, and informed Colonel Oates of the 2/8th Foresters that ‘Your Battalion will storm the Mount Street Schools at all costs, at all costs mind, penetrate further if you can.’18 Here, in microcosm, was the philosophy of the Western Front.

Abjection The fate of the Sherwood Foresters makes manifest Georges Bataille’s idea of the abject. His theorising on this idea is primarily sociopolitical, and is informed by his witnessing the marginalising of particular groups during Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s. During this era, Bataille identified a cycle of exploitation, by which the working classes were kept in subjugation by those groups whose status depended on demonstrating their own removal from such a position. He wrote: The masters, who act as if they were the expression of society itself, are preoccupied – more seriously than with any other concern – with showing that they do not in any way share the abjection of the men they employ. The end of the workers’ activity is to produce in order to live, but the bosses’ activity is to produce in order to condemn the working producers to a hideous degradation – for there is no disjunction possible between, on the one hand, the characterization the bosses seek through their modes of expenditure, which tend to elevate them high above human baseness, and on the other hand this baseness itself, of which this characterization is a function.19

Bataille’s socially inflected ideas about the abject are not particularly well known in Anglophone scholarship, as they form a minor part of 17 18 19

‘House of Commons and the Rebellion’, Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1916, p. 5. Coape Oates, The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914–1918, p. 39. Emphasis in source. Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess:  Selected Writings 1927– 1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl, trans by Allan Stoekl with Carl R.  Lovitt and Donald M.  Leslie Jr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 116–29 (pp. 125–6).

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Bataille’s overall thinking and have been thoroughly overshadowed by Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic development of abjection in her well-known volume Powers of Horror (published in 1980 and widely available in English translation since 1982:  by contrast, Bataille’s far shorter ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’ appeared in English translation only in 1999 and is now out of print). Nonetheless, in twenty-first-century analysis of Irish theatre, ideas of abjection have become increasingly prominent.20 In particular, scholars have sought to understand the dramaturgy of Marina Carr by using Kristeva’s terminology, as shown in sensitive scholarship by Clare Wallace, Anne F. O’Reilly and Rhona Trench.21 Kristeva herself connected her thinking about the abject with the playhouse when she wrote about how disrupting the border between the bodily and the non-bodily can result in a state of abjection, and how the sight of a wound or corpse can affect the onlooker’s own sense of self: [As] in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.22

For Kristeva, then, this notion of the abject as a borderline condition is closely connected to the scopic operation of the playhouse, as well as with a fundamental breakdown in the sense of division, established in childhood, between an individual’s own bodily integrity and the body of the mother. More recently, Sara Ahmed has drawn on Foucault and J.  L. Austin to highlight how the disgust we might associate with abjection is something that, of necessity, requires an audience: [S]hared witnessing is required for speech acts to be generative, that is, for the attribution of disgust to an object or other to stick to others. In addition, the demand for a witness shows us that the speech act, ‘That’s disgusting’ generates more than simply a subject and an object; it also generates a

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See, for example, Rina Kim, Women and Ireland as Beckett’s Lost Others (Houndmills:  Palgrave, 2010); Martin Middeke, ‘Martin McDonagh’, in The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights, ed. by Martin Middeke and Peter Paul Schnierer (London: Methuen, 2010), pp. 213–33 (p. 222). See Claire Wallace, ‘Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats . . .’, Irish University Review, 31 (2001), pp. 431–49; Anne F. O’Reilly, Sacred Play: SoulJourneys in Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort, 2004); Rhona Trench, Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 3.

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community of those who are bound together through the shared condemnation of a disgusting object or event.23

Furthermore, abjection may also be connected with the performance of class. When talking about abjection, scholars of Irish theatre have taken their cue from Kristeva, but Kristeva herself repeatedly points back to the way that her notions of abjection owe much to Bataille’s thought, which has a primarily sociopolitical rather than psychoanalytic basis. Indeed, Kristeva describes Bataille as ‘the only one, to my knowledge, who has linked the production of the abject to the weakness of that prohibition, which, in other respects, necessarily constitutes each social order’.24 Hence Kristeva draws attention to the way that Bataille had, half a century earlier, used the idea of abjection in order to explain the situation of disenfranchised groups. As Kristeva points out, Bataille saw that such groups are excremental, and are repelled by others, but remain unable to do any such rejection themselves. As Bataille himself observes, ‘Filth, snot and vermin are enough to render an infant vile; his personal nature is not responsible for it, only the negligence or helplessness of those raising it. General abjection is of the same nature as the child; wreaked by impotence under given social conditions.’25 Bataille thus argues that the oppressed class must exist on the edges of society, as excremental and abject, and seemingly beyond the possibility of taking any affirmative action: yet this representation of the abject group as outsiders becomes, paradoxically, central to the operation of the social order itself. Such an idea finds its echo in Judith Butler’s later thinking about abjection, when she describes such a process as ‘the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit’.26 The Plough and the Stars Seán O’Casey’s best-known writings provide an extended discussion of the abject condition of such socially marginalised groups. In his three Dublin plays it is the tenement-dwelling class – with all of its drinking and dying, bleeding and breeding, tuberculosis and cursing – that takes centre stage. 23 24 25 26

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 94. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 207. Emphasis in source. Bataille, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, pp. 11–12. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edn (New  York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 182.

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Indeed, directors such as Garry Hynes have emphasised that, at the heart of O’Casey’s theatrical vision, are characters who are suffering terribly from the illness and ill fortune of poverty.27 Fintan O’Toole, for instance, has praised John Kavanagh’s 1986 version of Joxer Daly for revealing ‘the ratlike hunger of a half-starved man’.28 Such abjection makes the tenement dwellers a species apart from figures such as the middle-class ‘Woman from Rathmines’ and even, provocatively, from a figure like Captain Brennan (of James Connolly’s socialist militia the Irish Citizen Army), who condemns his fellow Dubliners as ‘slum lice’.29 Indeed, one of the things that made the portrayal of Pádraig Pearse in The Plough and the Stars so incendiary was his literal separation from the tenement dwellers onstage. In fact, a sign of O’Casey’s nervousness about this treatment of Pearse is demonstrated by the playwright writing a last-minute revision to the Pearse character (which never survived into performance) in which that onstage figure, who otherwise exclusively speaks words penned by the real-life Pearse, would deliver some additional dialogue invented by O’Casey, including the line ‘in every age will be found Irishmen willing and eager to fight for the sovereign freedom of their counthry’.30 That word ‘counthry’ is deeply revealing about the way that O’Casey, at the eleventh hour, attempted to bring Pearse into closer affinity with the tenement residents of the play: the Pearsean figure speaks only in standard English in the rest of the script, and ‘counthry’ is usually associated with the phrasing of O’Casey’s working-class Dublin characters (Joxer Boyle, for example, observing that ‘the whole counthry’s in a state o’ chassis’).31 By putting ‘counthry’ into the mouth of the Pearse figure, O’Casey anxiously attempted to bridge the chasm he had suggested between the middle-class revolutionary and the suffering tenement dwellers. However, it is the fourth act of The Plough and the Stars that proves most concerned with the blood, corpses and wounds which in Kristeva’s terms threaten so traumatically to remind us of our own materiality, but that, according to Bataille, reveal that ‘the majority of workers do not have the capability to react strongly against the filth and decay which is

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31

Such was the emphasis of the version of The Plough and the Stars that Hynes directed at the Abbey Theatre in 1991. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Course of True Theatre Never Should Run Smooth’, Irish Times, 8 October 2011, www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/1008/1224305440357.html [accessed 27 June 2016]. Seán O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber, 1998), p. 220. Seán O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, Typescript with MS Annotations, Dublin, NLI, MS 29,407, fol.II-2, 3. O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, p. 104.

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overtaking them.’32 The act begins with the corpse of the consumptive Mollser onstage, and then provides a description of Jack Clitheroe’s death (with ‘a tiny sthream o’ blood thricklin’ out of his mouth’).33 Then Bessie Burgess is shot and yells, ‘I’m bleedin’ to death, an’ no one’s here to stop th’ flowin’ blood.’34 Mrs Gogan spreads a sheet over the corpse and describes ‘th’ poor woman, she’s stiffenin’ out as hard as she can! Her face has written on it th’ shock o’ sudden agony, an’ her hands is whitenin’ into th’ smooth shininess of wax.’ However, although Bessie’s corpse is left on the stage, her presence scarcely affects the British soldiers. They sit next to the destroyed body, and Stoddard starts hungrily drinking tea: ‘Pour it aht, pour it aht, Stoddart – I could scoff anything just now’ (my italics).35 The soldiers, horribly, show how social abjection may work within the British imperial state, making the Irish tenement dweller into a dehumanised form of waste that, to use Bataille’s analysis, has been ‘disinherited [from] the possibility of being human’.36 Moreover, in killing this woman, the soldiers have committed a symbolic matricide. Bessie may appear to them as simply ‘one of the women of the ‘ouse’, but she is actually a Protestant unionist who has proudly declared that her only son is currently serving in the British army.37 The Mockney accent that O’Casey gives these soldiers is designed to denote a working-class English identity, and by the end of the play these soldiers are revealed to have murdered a Dublin street-fruit vendor who is delighted to be the mother of their comrade-in-arms. Thus, O’Casey’s play describes an exploitative system in which working-class men are positioned to kill the family members of fellow working-class men. The Silver Tassie In his 1928 play The Silver Tassie, O’Casey spent more time thinking about how the British soldiers of this era were themselves subject to abjection according to social rank. In that play’s famous second act, O’Casey presents Barney Bagnal, who is, much like Bessie Burgess’s son, a former denizen of Dublin’s tenements now suffering amidst the shell holes, barbed wire and ruined buildings of the Western Front. But the text specifies that 32 33 34 35 36 37

Bataille, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, p. 11. O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, p. 230. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 246. Bataille, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, p. 11. O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, p. 245.

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although Barney is a member of the British army he is not fighting: he is being punished by his superiors, and so is tied to a gun wheel throughout the act.38 The reason for this punishment is that Barney was caught stealing a chicken from one of the small cafés and bars near the Front. Like the characters of the Dublin Trilogy, he was presumably experiencing desperate hunger. But, unfortunately for Barney, he was caught red-handed by one of the top-ranking military officials who was, at the time, fucking one of the women of the area. When this incident is recounted, Barney is admonished by a plummy-voiced visitor to the trench, who declares, in public-school tones: ‘The uniform, the cause, boy, the corps. Infra dignitatem, boy, infra dignitatem [Beneath (one’s) dignity]’.39 This visitor, of course, does none of the fighting, and makes no comment about the sexual incontinence of the ‘brass hat’ who caught Barney:  Barney simply finds himself fighting for such people and subject to their disciplinary regime. As Bataille puts it: ‘The rich man consumes the poor man’s losses, creating for him a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery [. . .] the modern world has received slavery, and has reserved it for the proletariat.’40 For Bataille, as Imogen Tyler succinctly puts it, ‘the waste populations created by sovereign power at the same time intrude at the centre of public life as objects of disgust.’41 O’Casey also saw this perfectly well: and thus in the second act of the Tassie Barney Bagnal on his gun wheel is degraded, yet is also central to the scene’s staging, with the display of his abjection giving a theatrical lesson to the other soldiers about the structure of power within the army. Furthermore, although W. B. Yeats declared that O’Casey knew nothing of the Great War’s battlefields, this scene also reveals that O’Casey actually did know about the disciplinary regime of the British army during that conflict (as well as knowing about the sexual shenanigans of the wartime estaminets). As Ross Wilson explains, in real life: For more serious offences, such as theft or looting from military stores or the surrounding farms, soldiers were sentenced to ‘Field Punishment Number One’. This form of retribution consisted of tying the offending soldier to a gun-wheel by the wrists and the ankles for an hour at a time, once in the morning and again in the evening. These punishments were to 38 39 40 41

Seán O’Casey, The Silver Tassie (London: Faber, 2014), p. 32. Ibid., p. 38. Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, p. 125. Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013), p. 19.

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be carried out whilst the soldier’s unit was out of line, so all the soldiers in the battalion could see the results of disobeying the rules laid out by the military authorities.42

O’Casey had learned about such structures of power from his two older brothers, who enlisted in the British army in the 1890s. His brother Tom fought in the Boer War with the Dublin Fusiliers, while another brother, Mick, served with the Royal Engineers (and later re-enlisted in 1916).43 In the first two volumes of his autobiography (1939 and 1942), O’Casey wrote about his brothers’ military service. His brother Tom is contrasted with ‘Captain Bacon’, a figure with a ‘bristling’ moustache, who attempts to co-opt Tom into being a ‘spying bully’ for the higher ranks and thus precipitates Tom’s exit from the army.44 Meanwhile, O’Casey’s other brother, Mick, is described as ‘doing twelve calendar months, cells, for up-ending a company sergeant-major who had called him a good-for-nothing Irish bastard’.45 Thus, as O’Casey depicts it, his brothers’ experience revealed the noxious hierarchies of the army, and showed how working-class men – particularly working-class Irish men – might develop a more productive sense of affinity elsewhere. Ultimately, in what Christopher Murray is surely correct to describe as a scene of ‘pure fantasy’, O’Casey’s autobiographies depict the two brothers, whilst wearing their army uniforms, fighting alongside the Irish nationalist members of a hurling team against members of the Royal Irish Constabulary.46

James Connolly and Jack White Like O’Casey, James Connolly also developed an intimate knowledge of the British army’s hierarchical structures. Indeed, Connolly knew those structures even better than O’Casey, as Connolly had personally served seven years in the British army between 1882 and 1888–9.47 Connolly, having been born into the severe poverty of Edinburgh’s Cowgate, probably viewed becoming a British soldier as less of a career choice and more of an essential escape route. His older brother had taken the same path out of 42 43 44

45 46 47

Wilson, Landscapes of the Western Front, pp. 64–5. Christopher Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004), pp. 34, 52. Seán O’Casey, Autobiographies I: I Knock at the Door and Pictures in the Hallway (London: Faber, 2011), pp. 217 and 309–10. Ibid., p. 310. Murray, Seán O’Casey, p. 22. Donal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘A Full Life’ (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005), p. 15.

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the slums by the time that Connolly, as a fourteen-year-old, came to enlist in the King’s Liverpool Regiment, probably under a false name and giving an incorrect date of birth.48 During the seven ensuing years that he spent in the army, Connolly quite probably served in the Cork area, in Castlebar, at the Curragh, in Belfast, and in Dublin.49 He then deserted in 1888 or 1889, perhaps realising that he was part of what Bataille labels the ‘infinite subjugation’ of the social order, whereby ‘Miserable exploitation’ of the Irish was being undertaken by those from backgrounds such as Connolly’s, ‘a section of the population which is itself miserable’.50 Certainly, when world war came in 1914, Connolly perceived little of the glory that Pearse identified in the conflict, and saw here only the latest manifestation of exploitation carried out by those who squatted at the top of an unjust socio-economic system. In November 1915 he wrote the address for an anti-conscription meeting in Glasgow, speaking to ‘all the Comrades who refuse to be led astray to fight the battles of the ruling capitalist class’ and insisting that, whilst dying for freedom at home remained a possibility, ‘we have no intention of shedding our blood abroad for our masters.’51 It is notable that, when Connolly founded the Irish Citizen Army in 1913, he was assisted by Seán O’Casey – who also knew the British army so well from family experience – as well as by Jack White, another former British soldier. Indeed, it was White who founded the Irish Citizen Army by first proposing the formation of a militia ‘as a means by which to bring discipline into the distracted ranks of labour’, and at one stage he argued about the use of ‘his’ army.52 White was an Antrim-born man from a distinguished British army background, being the son of Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White VC, the defender of Ladysmith; and White himself served in the Boer War with such distinction that he received the Distinguished Service Order.53 Yet during that time as a soldier, White also had some discomforting experience of the British army’s hierarchical operation of power. In his autobiography, Misfit, he describes his reaction to seeing a fellow officer threatening to kill an unarmed Boer prisoner:

48 49 50 51

52 53

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Bataille, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, p. 9. In James Connolly, Between Comrades: James Connolly: Letters and Correspondence 1889–1916, ed. by Donal Nevin (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2007), p. 532. Ibid., pp. 552–3. See Leo Keohane, Captain Jack White: Imperialism, Anarchism & the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: Merrion, 2014), p. 30.

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I saw an extremely frightened youth of about seventeen years of age [. . .] Then arrived an officer, my superior in rank, and by this time there were ten or a dozen men around. ‘Shoot him, shoot him’, yelled the officer. A wave of disgust swamped my sense of discipline. ‘If you shoot him’, said I, pointing my carbine at him, “I’ll shoot you”. And he passed on. He is now a General.54

Little surprise that, with White holding such feelings, he found himself drawn into Connolly’s circle by 1913, and even though White clashed with others in the Irish Citizen Army and missed the Easter Rising, he did later reflect that ‘I should have stuck with the Citizen Army, where I had the clear guidance of international revolutionary principle undercutting and outlasting the conflict of national interests that caused the Great War.’55 However, by the time of the rebellion in 1916, there had been a parting of ways between Connolly, O’Casey and White. Only Connolly remained in the Citizen Army during the Rising, and O’Casey would become one of Connolly’s sternest critics, publishing The Story of the Irish Citizen Army to argue that in the build-up to Easter Week, for Connolly, ‘The high creed of Irish Nationalism became his daily rosary, while the higher creed of International humanity that had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips was silent for ever.’56 Yet, although Jack White did not fight in the Rising, he remained loyal to Connolly, and wrote what he called ‘Conolly’s [sic] defence against O’Cathasaigh’, emphasising that Connolly remained an internationalist to the end and simply ‘realized that the National Movement was the reservoir of the nation’s subconscious power, that amalgamating with it he could tap mines of energy which would ultimately produce the true revolutionary ore in Ireland’.57 That imagery of ‘mines of energy’ and ‘revolutionary ore’ is particularly telling, because when White heard about the Rising he attempted to help his former comrades by travelling to Wales, where he intended to organise a miners’ strike that would prevent the British from executing Connolly. White later reflected, ‘Had I  succeeded I  would have crippled the coal 54 55 56

57

Jack White, Misfit: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), p. 45. Ibid., p. 249. P. Ó Cathasaigh [Seán O’Casey], The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919), p. 52. I have pointed out elsewhere that, later in the twentieth century, O’Casey did eventually come to a view about the relationship between nationalism and socialism that was strikingly similar to that Connolly held in 1916: see James Moran, ‘Conflicting Counter-Hegemonies?: The Dramaturgy of James Connolly and Seán O’Casey’, Kritika Kultura, 21/22 (2013/2014), 516–32. White, Misfit, p. 249.

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supply for the British Fleet.’58 Of course, unfortunately for him, he ended up in prison instead. Nonetheless, he did have time to gain a sympathetic hearing for Connolly’s cause amongst the miners of South Wales, inspiring a future founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the collier Arthur Horner, to travel to Dublin and join the Irish Citizen Army. Horner felt that, when viewed from the valleys of South Wales, the Irish struggle took on a class-inflected colouring: ‘we, who had seen the viciousness of the coal owners, regarded what was happening in Ireland as the real struggle for the rights of small nations in a war-torn world.’59 If Nora Connolly was correct in her recollection with which this chapter began, then we can see that other members of British mining communities may also have identified with James Connolly’s cause. Of course, Britain’s miners, visibly marked by their daily work in dirty and dangerous conditions, were accustomed to seeing the male body displayed in abjection. Such miners may have felt a particular affinity with Connolly: as Arthur Horner points out, in an era of strikes and violent labour disputes, the miners could compare Connolly’s anticolonial and anti-capitalist struggle with their own awareness of the ‘viciousness of the coal owners’.60 Although the 1916 rebellion was a failure in military terms, Connolly and his colleagues showed at least the possibility of resistance to the hegemonic order. Later, in 1934, when Seán O’Casey read about the mining communities of the English East Midlands, he sought to reverse conventional societal ordering by valuing this life more highly than that of the middle-class existence which was more usually portrayed on the commercial stage. O’Casey read D. H. Lawrence’s play A Collier’s Friday Night (written 1909, published 1934), in which a miner emerges from work and is criticised for trailing black dirt with him, and when O’Casey reviewed the script he indicated – as Mary Douglas would do more explicitly later in the century – that ‘dirt’ is a culturally determined construct.61 Seán O’Casey praised the drama precisely because of its bodily accretions: ‘there is the sweat of life in it’ wrote O’Casey, contrasting that welcome sweat with the lamentable ‘sound of silken garments moving’ in the dominant middle-class British theatre.62 For him, then, the filth of the colliery signified

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62

Ibid., p. 345. Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1960), p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger:  An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Seán O’Casey, ‘A Miner’s Dream of Home’, New Statesman, 28 July 1934, p. 124.

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an existence that was of greater value than the life described by figures like Noël Coward. Ultimately, Connolly’s struggle may have been inspiring to British miners because it offered the possibility of a similar subversion of social order: the battle of Easter Week potentially showed how, as Bataille put it, ‘In the collective expression, the misérables, the conscience of affliction already veers from its purely negative direction and begins to pose itself as a threat.’63

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Ch apter 9

‘An sinne a bhí sa chónra?’* Writing Death on the Margins in Twentieth-Century Irish Working-Class Writing Michael Pierse This chapter will explore one aspect of the biopolitics of Irish workingclass writing: its representation of death at the country’s margins pre- and post-Partition. Part of the management of life, of course, is its obverse, the management of death, and the coming discussion’s focus on ‘biopolitical production’, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define it – ‘the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’ in both human bodies and ‘the whole social body’ – focusses on the structural (economic, political, cultural) production of death.1 This question, I will argue, situating it here mainly in theatrical and fictional representations of Ireland before and after Partition, provides a means of exploring responses to the shifting ‘high politics’ of the island and its effects (or lack thereof ) on the poor. Focussing on the liminal figures that recur in these depictions, the following considers Ireland’s ‘thanatopolitics’ – the power over life and death – and how the struggles of the marginal in this regard in fact define the politics of the centre. Working-class struggle here is broadly conceived: struggles in workplaces, but also in homes, with authorities, in doctors’ dispensaries, against poverty and various forms of class oppression. Such conflicts are central to twentieth-century Irish working-class writing; from A. P. Wilson to Paula Meehan, class struggle and its multivalent political manifestations inspire much of the writing explored throughout this book. But this chapter’s attention to extreme cases, or to borrow a phrase of Giorgio Agamben’s – which he applies to refugees – the ‘limit concept’, will probe for systemic forms of violence in what often seems anomalous. Here we will trace the contours of a violence that is rarely recognised as * Translated from the Gaelic: ‘Was it us in the coffin?’ From Brendan Behan, ‘Jim Larkin’, reprinted in Theo Dorgan, ‘Larkin through the Eyes of Writers’, in James Larkin – Lion of the Fold, ed. by Donal Nevin (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2006), pp. 102–9 (p. 106). 1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. xiii, 24.

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violence, yet whose victims recur with telling frequency throughout Irish working-class writing, continually drawing attention to the hegemonic construction of the power over life and death.2 A note on possible objections to my conflation of the ‘marginal’ and the working class in the foregoing commentary: this focus on representations of those most affected by poverty is not to ignore the protests of ‘povertyclass scholar[s]’, such as Vivyan C. Adair, against the ‘cooptation’ of ‘the poor’ into ‘working-class studies’, which, she argues, results, at worst, in ‘poverty-class erasure’. My argument here is, rather, to extend Adair’s view that ‘members of the working and poverty class also share many similarities and opportunities for solidarity,’ beyond the logical limitations of the ‘poverty-class’ argument.3 As Michael Zweig notes, one cannot put poverty here and the working class there, for poverty is never far from working-class life: [P]overty is something that happens to the working class. Attacks on the poor are attacks on the working class. The poor are not some marginal ‘other’; the poor are typically working class people who don’t make much money.4

The framing of public policy debates around the concept of an ‘underclass’, Zweig continues, often befogs the reality of precarity more broadly in working-class experience, and conveniently (for the political right) often vilifies – as requiring correction or censure – those who slip downwards or hover for much of their lives on the brink of hunger or ill health (not to 2

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Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:  Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 134. Vivyan C. Adair, ‘Class Absences: Cutting Class in Feminist Studies’, Feminist Studies, 31:3 (Fall 2005), pp. 575–603 (pp. 575 and 596). I am grateful to Michelle M. Tokarczyk’s fascinating introduction to her Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2011) for drawing my attention to this discussion. Michael Zweig, The Working-Class  Majority:  America’s Best Kept Secret (Ithaca, NY, and London:  Cornell University Press, 2000), p.  78. Although this argument is of course taken here from an American context, the focus on the demonization of the working class, and the separating off of sections (real or imagined) of it, has attracted scholarly and media attention in recent years closer to home, for example in Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso, 2011) and Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn’s Class and Contemporary British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). A thoroughgoing analysis of the cultural reproduction of class dynamics and class myths in Irish society has yet to written, notwithstanding some sociological works that have signalled the urgency of further research in this area (see my introduction to Writing Ireland’s Working Class:  Dublin After O’Casey (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2011)  for some discussion of this), including Fergal Finnegan and Barbara Merill’s recent essay ‘ “We’re as Good as Anybody Else’: A Comparative Study of Working-Class University Student Experiences in England and Ireland’, British Journal of Sociology in Education (5 October 2015). www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/ 01425692.2015.1081054 [accessed 12 May 2016].

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mention crudely individualising a profoundly social concern). The spectre of such poverty often lingers in the consciousness of even more affluent working-class people, even in times of boom, and affects ‘a sizable part of the working class’ at any given time.5 As Jack Metzger contends, ‘the poor are, in fact, part of the working class, and poverty, near-poverty, and the fear of poverty are an endemic part of working-class life.’6 In Irish writing, a leitmotif of the liminal, of the poverty that pushes working-class people to the threshold of death, recurrently calls attention to structural oppression and to the ‘necro-political’: the politics, for Achille Mbembe, of differentiating between valued and devalued bodies, of excluding some from life itself.7 Mbembe’s theorisations rest on the assumption that ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’;8 indeed, the shifting tyrannies of the modern state coagulate in the spectacle of human expiration at its margins, even as such expiration may seem ‘normal’, or, if lamentable, inevitable. Above all, it must not be questioned, Patrick Galvin suggests, in his deeply sardonic poem ‘Prisoners of the Tower’ (1979), where the declarative language of ‘rights’ in the modern state jars with the modicum of ‘freedom’ the state offers: ‘Under our system of Government / A man has these rights: / You may walk freely from wall to wall / And contemplate the absence of bread.’9 In this regard, it is noteworthy that representations of poverty-related death in Irish workingclass writing are often accentuated, as we shall see, by their juxtaposition with the frivolous or comedic, where the poor expire amid ghastly cheer; here dramatic contrasts collide hegemonic ‘normality’ with its horrid abnormality, estranging the ideologies that maintain the status quo. Often it is the beggar, the prostitute or the petty thief – those whom Marx would have deemed ‘lumpen’  – who represent the more general plight of the poor, occupying in these depictions a doubly threshold space: where devalued lives expire at the edge of human society, and where those ostensibly 5 6

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Ibid. Jack Metzger, ‘Are “the Poor” Part of the Working Class or in a Class by Themselves’, Labor Studies Journal Online (13 May 2009), pp.  1–19 (p.  4). Accessed online, http://lsj.sagepub.com/content/ early/ 2009/ 05/ 13/ 0160449X09335472.full.pdf+html?hwshib2=authn%3A1463563172%3A2016051 7%253A4e3d3efa-eecb-4c18-af7b-57af7b2dcb75%3A0%3A0%3A0%3ApFaKsvYqAmAUJLgoAvp7nw %3D%3D [accessed 17 May 2016]. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15 (Winter 2003), pp. 11–40. Ibid., p. 11. Patrick Galvin, ‘Prisoners of the Tower’, in New and Selected Poems of Patrick Galvin, ed. by Greg Delanty and Robert Welch (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), pp. 46–9 (p. 48).

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beneath or beyond the ‘respectable’ working class come to typify its perennial plight and deepest fears. Accordingly, characters in the writing explored here have often slipped into such precarity through workplace accidents, poverty-related diseases or the commission of an abomination; their ‘slipping’ illustrating the very conditions of precarity that constitute working-class life, the categorical fluidity of ‘working-’ and ‘under-class’, the impossibility of disentangling lumpen and proletariat. Moreover, in highlighting the ideological distortion that normalises the necropolitics of deaths caused by poverty, these representations challenge the silencing on which such distortion relies; the silencing that anomalises or individualises structural oppression, that denies ‘class’ its experiential veracity or explicatory power, is continually stressed. As Simon J. Charlesworth indicates in his Rotherham-based study, A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience (2000), the challenge that such silencing processes represent in the current neoliberal hegemony is immense: A disturbing feature of the world I am trying to capture is that it is being enveloped by silence. A silence that is not merely metaphorical, one that does not simply reflect these people’s relationship to the political institutions of England, but one which describes the form of their intimate lives. It is in the most personal dimensions of intimate life, that the cultural conditions of working class life are most pronounced and most disturbing [. . .] the condition of being-in-the-world must be more problematic for those whose lives are most devoid of social consecration.10

These narratives, then, which highlight silencing processes, provide a resource by which they might be challenged. In Irish working-class writing, necropolitics is repeatedly the site of a radical contestation that refuses silence, epistemically and in ‘intimate lives’, that urges the ‘social consecration’ of the poor.

Necro-economics and ‘Less Spectacular’ Death Economic systems must always make sense of their management of death. In his exploration of ‘necro-economics’, Warren Montag interrogates Adam Smith’s rationalisations of capitalism – Smith’s classical proffering of the market as a by-no-means perfect but nonetheless best-means-available for human social organisation.11 In capitalism, even in our selfish drives, we 10

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Simon J.  Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3, 5. Warren Montag, ‘Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal’, Radical Philosophy, 134 (November/December 2005), pp. 7–17.

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are led, through the market, as ‘by an invisible hand’, to produce a sort of socio-economic equilibrium, Smith maintained – an imperfect but bestpossible outcome that ultimately benefits the population as a whole. Even the most rapacious and solipsistic of ‘masters’, through his (for it is always his) narrow determination and productivity, inevitably, if surprisingly, effects the most judicious sharing of necessities; the busy bee, unwittingly, makes possible the survival of the hive. In this formulation, an unfettered market will ever ‘advance the interests of the society and afford means to the multiplication of the species’ (Smith).12 This apparently providential result at the level of the population is, however, undercut by how the market is – with the same appeal to nature and utilitarianism – reliant in times of dearth on expedient deaths. If, on the one hand, Smith can aver that ‘when Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seem to be left out in the partition’ – for ‘these last too enjoy their share of all that it produces’ – on the other, Montag argues, Smith’s ‘rather pronounced necropolitics’ implies that ‘the production of life both requires and induces the exercise of the right to kill.’ In Smith’s thinking, as Montag puts it, ‘the market, understood as the very form of human universality as life, must necessarily, at certain precise moments, “let die.” ’13 Expedient deaths of surplus humans are perennial and apparently inevitable, the sad but unavoidable collateral damage of a Benthamite social pact – and a seemingly providential one too. Thus, in certain apparently anomalous circumstances, for example where the market’s supposed equilibrium is unbalanced by governmental interference, ‘a decaying wage fund lowers the demand for labour so far that the subsistence of the individual workman is no longer necessary’ (Montag); this surplus worker then starves, begs or perpetrates ‘the greatest enormities’, as Smith observes.14 As Montag extrapolates, ‘the subsistence of a population may [. . . therefore] require the death of a significant number of individuals:  to be precise it requires that they be allowed to die so that others may live.’15 Those hungry who live are disciplined by dearth; those who die return the market to its adequate equilibrium; everything levels itself out. ‘Truth be told, [the market] rations not simply food, but life itself,’ Montag infers.16 Of special importance in our coming 12 13

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Qtd. in ibid., p. 9. Smith qtd. in ibid., p. 12; ibid., pp. 12, 13; my emphasis. Montag quotes from Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Smith qtd. in Montag, ‘Necro-economics’, p. 14. Ibid. Ibid., p. 15.

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discussion, Montag also questions Smith’s implicit ‘distinction between dearth and famine’, the difference here between the significant shocks of starvation, famine or recession, which, Smith argues, are occasioned by injudicious governmental meddling, and the habitual privations the poor experience in all market economies – apparently inexorable malnutrition, starvation and contraction of disease.17 The market corrects, and in Smith’s paternalistic logic, the reduction of the ‘number of inhabitants to what can easily be maintained by the revenue and stock’ of the economy is seemingly as natural as the tide that leaves the detritus of the sea in its wake.18 The important point here, as Montag discerns, is that ‘death establishes the conditions of life; death as by an invisible hand restores the market to what it must be to support life.’19 ‘Harmony’ therefore arises from the ‘power of the negative’: The allowing of death is necessary to the production of the life of the universal. Smith’s economics is a necro-economics. The market reduces and rations life; it not only allows death, it demands that death be allowed by the sovereign power, as well as by those who suffer. In other words it demands and requires that the latter allow themselves to die. From this we must conclude that underneath the appearance of a system whose intricate harmony might be appreciated as a kind of austere and awful beauty, a selfregulating system, not the ideal perhaps, but the best of all possible systems, is the demand that some must allow themselves to die.20

Here, biopolitics, the politics of reproducing life, meets thanatopolitics, the politics of taking it; here we observe, as Michel Foucault put it, the power to ‘disallow [life] to the point of death’.21 Montag thus gestures beyond Agamben’s social outcast, homo sacer – ‘the one who may be killed with impunity’ – to ‘another figure’, a figure we encounter repeatedly in working-class writing: One whose death is no doubt less spectacular than [homo sacer’s] and is the object of no memorial or commemoration; he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market.22

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Ibid., p. 14. Smith, from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), qtd. in Montag, ‘Necro-economics’, p. 16. Ibid. Ibid., my emphasis. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality:  An Introduction, Vol. 1, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 138. Montag, ‘Necro-economics’, p. 17. See also Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

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This thanatopolitics produces a rationalisation of ‘slow’ or ‘unspectacular’ death, ‘death [that] can spread out in a piecemeal fashion through the normal working of the economy’, as Guillermina Seri puts it.23 What we are exploring here, then, is the discursive processes that result in being so ‘called’ – how these deaths, through ‘slow’, creeping starvation and sickness, or ‘quick’ accidents and apparently isolated tragedies, come to seem, like Smith’s ‘power of the negative’, providential, unavoidable and thus largely unremarkable; in the normalised, unquestioning logic encapsulated by James Plunkett’s phrase, from his historical novel Strumpet City (1969), ‘These Things Were.’24 In this discussion of the ‘invisible [violent] hand’, one is reminded of Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ violence – and the discursive devices that employ that distinction in the service of global inequalities. If subjective violence has a clearly identifiable perpetrator, objective violence – the violence caused by the ‘smooth functioning’ of our capitalist economies, a violence without a clear agent – may be less spectacular, but all the more pernicious.25

Desperate Men Pierre Bourdieu has argued that ‘the most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.’26 As indicated previously, this chapter will trace the coercive force that ‘makes possible the very systemacity of the market system’ (Montag), yet that manages so often to shimmer indistinctly on the margins of social conscience, to produce ‘complicitous silence’.27 The working-class writers explored here continually probe for tears in the cloak of ideology, where a tyranny always present, but rarely graspable, concretises in the apprehension of less-spectacular death. Those writers born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were very aware of the necropolitical avant la lettre; Robert Tressell, Seán O’Casey, Patrick MacGill, Frank O’Connor, Thomas Carnduff, James Plunkett and Brendan Behan all observed, in their families or immediate communities, the dispensability of workingclass lives. Unlike many of their peers, however, they also identified its 23

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Guillermina Seri, Seguridad: Crime, Police Power, and Democracy in Argentina (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 71. James Plunkett, Strumpet City (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 73. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2009), p. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 188. Montag, ‘Necro-economics’, p. 15.

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systemacity  – a revelation that to a great extent impelled their writing and their (variously inflected) socialism. Highlighting ‘a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death’ (Mbembe)28 under capitalism, in each apparently aberrant instance of less spectacular death, this systemacity reveals what one of Thomas Carnduff’s shipyard labourers glimpses, in Workers (1932), as he considers a giant gantry in Belfast’s shipyards and is struck by the tension it embodies between human agency and systematic tyranny, which ‘terrifies me sometimes . . . It seems to live, to be human, ye[t] we puny mortals are its masters. We, who cannot shape our own lives or destuinies [sic]’.29 It is less-spectacular deaths on these gantries, during the building of the very spectacular Titanic, which animate Stewart Parker’s later radio play, Iceberg (1975). Here the spectre of industrial accidents suggests how such seeming anomalies as the deaths of the play’s ghostly protagonists while building the great ship are part of something more organised than might be readily apparent, even to them. As David Lloyd writes, ‘in a profound sense, modern Irish literature has always been highly attuned to the workings of the biopolitical state.’30 Robert Tressell (also Noonan), one of the most iconic if curiously unrecognised Irish writers of workers’ struggle, was so attuned, though writing mainly of the life of the English working class and his own observations as a migrant within the British Empire. The central character of Tressell’s epic novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), represents not only the alienation of a Marxist proselytiser within the English working class, but as recent research has stressed, Tressell’s own alienation as an Irishman critical of, but moving widely within the Empire.31 The large house that Tressell terms the ‘Cave’ in the novel, in which a group of ragged workers relentlessly toils, invokes Plato’s allegory of human philosophical blindness; here, like Plato’s chained shadow watchers, the workers can see only ‘shadows’ of their reality. They are oblivious, as Tressell shows, to the devaluation of their lives, to the systemacity of letting die all about them. When the labourers are accused of stealing tools or materials from the Cave, Tressell suggests their broader regulation under capitalism – their ‘subjective 28 29

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Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 18. Thomas Carnduff, Workers (1932), incomplete mss. in Belfast, McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast, Carnduff Collection, MS21, p. 52. David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000:  The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 14. See Marion Walls, ‘[Re]Creation of Self, Text and Audience: The Impact of Tressell’s Irish Roots on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’, in Revisiting Tressell’s Mugsborough:  New Perspectives on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. by Julie Cairnie and Marion Walls (New York: Cambria Press, 2008), pp. 103–28.

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individualization with procedures of objective totalization’ (Agamben, glossing Foucault) – in the symbolic means used to curb workplace thievery.32 A rule is introduced whereby ‘everybody was to be weighed upon arrival at the job in the morning and again at leaving-off time: any man found to have increased in weight was to be discharged.’33 At a level which relates to more general contemporaneous working-class experience, we are also presently informed that ‘none of the men were ever caught stealing anything,’ but five or six were ‘captured by the police and sent to jail – for not being able to pay their poor rates’.34 Here Tressell hints that the workers are subjected to a double-power: on the one hand, the necro-economics of the market, whereby their poverty and near starvation is criminalised; and more symbolically, the ‘the calculated management of life’ at the level of the body, by which they are ‘weighed’.35 These emaciated wraiths, who explicitly resent this obscenity of being weighed by corpulent masters, live in a country where ‘about thirteen millions of our people are always on the verge of starvation’.36 Thus their rebellion against the new regime, effected by shitting on an anonymous letter sent to management, is more than coarsely scatological; it is a retort from debased bodies to ‘the disciplinary technology of labour’, a somatic and symbolic reminder of how little social (or textual – it is a ‘letter’) power they hold.37 This necro-economic theme is emphasised once more when one of the labourers, Philpot, dies from an avoidable accident at the Cave: in the sham inquest that ensues company owners have ‘contrived to have several friends of their own put on the jury’.38 Tressell shows how men like Philpot are systematically let die; indeed, when his corpse is effectively stolen by a local undertaker ‘anxious for the job’, the system reappears as farce, appropriating for profit what had little value before his life expired.39 Man’s bestialisation under capitalism is repeatedly emphasised in how little Tressell’s workers’ lives matter to the system that they maintain. Their depressing acceptance of this plight is fittingly symbolised soon after Philpot’s death, when poor workers congratulate their newly elected Liberal MP by unyoking horses from his carriage ‘and amid frantic cheers harness[ing] themselves to it instead and 32 33 34 35 36 37

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Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 11. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2012), p. 443. Ibid., p. 443. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 140. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 497. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 242. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, p. 535. Ibid., p. 538.

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dragg[ing] it through the mud’ – ‘most of them were accustomed to acting as beasts of burden’ (Tressell, ever the didact, needlessly adds).40 This act of willing bestialisation is shortly followed by the revelation of a destitute mother’s suicide-infanticide attempt with her newborn child. The ‘philanthropists’ practise a perverse charity: the philanthropic giving of (their own) bodies to a system that seeks to harness them to the profit motive. The vulgar humour of their missive to management therefore performs a re-inscription of living, wayward bodies that refuse this control. But it is also a reminder of their debasement, and that of their class: their incapability, as shadow watchers, of anything approaching effective organisation in labour struggle. Interestingly, the failures of labour organisation, both as a means of gaining rights and as an expression of workers’ unity, tend to outweigh, or at the very least compromise, the instances of its success in twentieth-century Irish working-class writing. Notwithstanding works like O’Casey’s Red Roses for Me (1942), where trade-union activities are almost entirely cast in a positive light, various complications emerge in a range of other works, across the century, following encounters with difficult intersectional struggles within the working class, the red flag a little tattered, but still flying (in most cases) all the same, notably in: St John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911), A. P. Wilson’s The Slough (1914), James Hanley’s (Liverpudlian-Irish) The Furys (1935), Robert Collis’s Marrowbone Lane (1943), Sam Thompson’s Tommy Baxter – Shop Steward (radio play, 1957) and Over the Bridge (1960), Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden’s The Non-stop Connolly Show (1975), Martin Lynch’s Dockers (1981) and 1932: The People of Gallagher Street (2016), Frank McGuinness’s Factory Girls (1982), Martin Lynch and Charabanc’s Lay Up Your Ends (1983), Dermot Bolger’s Night Shift (1985), Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (1987), Aidan Parkinson’s Going Places (1991), Jimmy Murphy’s Brothers of the Brush (1995), Owen McCafferty’s Scenes from the Big Picture (2003), Vincent Higgins’s Strike (2007) and Tracy Ryan’s Strike! (2010). In the earliest of these examples, Mixed Marriage, trade-union solidarity collapses amid sectarian struggles; in the most recent, Lynch’s 1932: The People of Gallagher Street (2016), the labour struggle is undercut by the sexual and gender inequalities many of its adherents struggle against. In 1932’s climax, a lesbian communist fends off the threatened violence of her agitator husband, walking out on him and her family, and, by implication, throwing off the oppressive expectations to which working-class women are subjected in 1930s Belfast. Similarly, Owen McCafferty’s Scenes from the Big Picture depicts a shop 40

Ibid., p. 571.

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steward, Joe Hynes, whose espousal of worker solidarity and common humanity rings hollow in his poor treatment of his wife. McCafferty’s play revolves around an abattoir, which, like Tressell’s Cave, comes to symbolise a system in which workers are reduced to the status of beasts: ‘i think we have as much control over what happens as the lumps a dead meat we carry about the place,’ Joe says.41 In all of these works, trade unions battle not only bosses, but their own internecine conflicts. Some of these works, such as those by McCafferty, Parker, Bolger and Murphy, even contain largely negative depictions of working-class political activity (though Parker deals with a strike rooted more firmly in sectarian than class conflict: the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike). The plight of the ‘scab’ figure in both Wilson and Bolger further suggests the limitations of solidarity. In these instances, the rhetoric of class unity is continually confronted with contradictory realities. One of the charges made against trade unionism in post-Partition Ireland is that it failed to exercise its powers effectively, or to challenge the meaning of national ‘liberation’ for workers.42 This failure is recognised both north and south, the writing of Thompson, Parker and Lynch expressing the arguments for anti-sectarian working-class solidarity whilst exposing the failure to achieve precisely that. In the newly founded Northern Ireland state, Tressell’s cheerful ‘beasts of burden’ return in Carnduff’s Workers, where Belfast shipyard labourers even entertain a certain bravado in their exposure to death. One, Bradshaw, nearly loses his hand in an accident, but it is ‘nothing to speak of ’; another, Hagan, once ‘fell down the after hould’ and ‘was stretched out in a dead faint [. . . but] tould us not to spoil our meal hour’ by helping him out.43 Beneath their loud machismo is a muted acceptance of their constant exposure to death through workplace hazard that also interpellates capitalist constructions of gender. They also display a macabre pleasure in retelling stories of near misses and grotesque 41

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Owen McCafferty, Scenes from the Big Picture (London: Nick Hern, 2013), p. 93. The lack of capitalisation/rendering of vernacular is as per McCafferty’s script. As Eileen M.  Doherty argues, for instance, during the Revolutionary Period, 1913–23, ‘the goals of nationalism explicitly overshadowed those of labour [. . .] In short, trade unions deferred to the broader goal of national independence’; ‘By 1921, the year in which the Irish Free State was created by treaty with Great Britain, the radical syndicalist elements within the labor movement had taken a back seat to more mainstream collective bargaining strategies,’ yet ‘the newly independent Ireland did not provide a conducive environment even for unions who were interested’ in pursuing these strategies. Eileen M. Doherty, ‘Globalization, Social Partnership, and Industrial Relations in Ireland’, in The Politics of Labor in a Global Age: Continuity and Change in Late-Industrializing and Post-socialist Economies, ed. by Christopher Candland and Rudra Sil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 132–55 (p. 138). Carnduff, Workers, p. 66.

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deaths: ‘Aye . . . and there was the time Billy Paterson was killed [. . .] his guts was squashed in . . . about fifteen ton of metal lying on him . . . When we was carrying him up the ladder the blood was dripping out of his boots on our shoulders.’44 Here mainly Protestant shipyard workers are victims of a simultaneously macho and deferential culture, whose dynamics might be partially traced back to the unionist fervour of the Ulster Covenant of 1912, when blood was marked on paper (‘blood sacrifice’ being a common theme in contemporaneous nationalism too), and which can be discerned much later in Seamus Heaney’s 1966 image of the Protestant shipyard worker with ‘Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw’, whose ‘fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic’.45 In Workers, Carnduff juxtaposes the acceptance attendant on shipyard deaths and the fanfare attendant on the shipyard’s ships, contrasting Ulster pride with Ulster’s silences. This theme returns in Stewart Parker’s The Iceberg, in which a comic duo of ghosts, Danny and Hugh, who died together in an accident while building the Titanic, articulate a workers’ retort to the prevalent nostalgia that surrounds the famed ship’s accretion of myth.46 Haunting the Titanic’s maiden voyage in 1912, the pair consider the letters that relayed news of their deaths to their families, drawing attention to the wider necro-economic context: HUGH: Killed outright. DANNY: The company regrets to inform you . . . due to an unavoidable accident . . . HUGH: . . . so please dispose of your husband’s corpse at your earliest convenience and close the door on your way out.47

Beneath Harland and Woolf ’s moderately sympathetic tones is a pragmatic, clinical efficiency; their expression of regret is really motivated by their desire to get rid of nuisance corpses. The shipyard’s calculating productivity and inhumanity is personified by shipbuilder Thomas Andrews’s industriousness, ‘the sort that sits on the lavatory and does sums on the wall’, as Hugh puts it.48 The market makes no time for the body; as Foucault argued, the ‘power over life’ is partly ‘centred on the body as machine [. . .] an anatomo-politics of the human body’.49 In the play, Andrews’s bossing 44 45 46

47 48 49

Ibid., p. 67. Seamus Heaney, ‘Docker’, in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber, 1966), p. 41. See for example John Hill, ‘The Relaunching of Ulster Pride: The Titanic, Belfast and Film’, in The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture, ed. by Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 15–24. Stewart Parker, The Iceberg, in Honest Ulsterman 50 (Winter 1975), pp. 4–64 (p. 17). Ibid., p. 9. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 139. Emphasis in source.

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about two dead men is analogous to Marx’s concept of ‘dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks’.50 Dead labour consumes living labour, here paradoxically represented by the dead. Parker’s ghostly workers find an eerie parallel in O’Casey’s Dublin of Red Roses for Me, the city ‘a graveyard where th’ dead are all above th’ ground’, and in Seamus Heaney’s dead diggers in ‘The Digging Skeleton’ (1975) and its nightmarish vision of eternal labour, ‘by the sweat of our stripped brows / We earn our deaths,’ both mocking the consolations of Christian faith whilst reflecting the lives of many for whom death is the only hope of ‘sleep[ing] in peace’.51 The question is equally made of the modern northern state, which, invoking the site of a massacre by British soldiers, Heaney condemns for its echoes of the ‘Stalag’, its differential treatment of some lives: ‘Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up / In Ballymurphy’.52 The working dead in Parker and Heaney remind us of the toils of the many in life, the ghosts of past suffering, and a necro-economics tinged with sectarianism. Parker’s workers also recall those of Patrick MacGill’s Children of the Dead End (1914), where Donegal boy Dermod and his fellow navvies provide the physical power for large-scale industrial projects in Scotland, yet are repeatedly othered and anathematised by the society around them, ‘as lepers are shunned [. . .] and despised by all men, and foul in the eyes of all women’.53 For Dermod, this subalternity is determined not just by a racial but by a class identity and experience that the Irish navvy migrants share with their fellows in the lower reaches of the British working class, for ‘men like Moleskin’ – a Scot – ‘and myself are trodden underfoot, that others may enjoy the fruit of centuries of enlightenment’.54 It is interesting that MacGill should invoke the Enlightenment, which furnishes both Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), while condemning his own state of exception; his musings here on his and his fellows’ outcast status tellingly precedes the death of a worker in Kinlochleven:

50

51

52 53

54

Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed. by Frederick Engels, trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), p. 257. Seán O’Casey, Red Roses for Me: A Play in Four Acts (London: Macmillan & Co., 1942); Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 18. Heaney, ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, in North, p. 55. Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End:  The Autobiography of a Navvy (Dublin:  New Island, 2001), pp. 153, 154. Ibid., p. 174.

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Where we were working a new town would spring up some day; it was already springing up, and then, if one of us walked there, “a man with no fixed address,” he would be taken up and tried as a loiterer and vagrant. Even as I thought of these things a shoulder of jagged rock fell into a cutting far below. There was the sound of a scream in the distance, and a song died away in the throat of some rude singer. Another of the pioneers of civilisation had given up his life for the sake of society.55

‘Giving up’ life in this way recalls Smith’s implicit demand of the poor. Dermod’s refusal of regimes of biopolitical norms, however, signals his own rejection of society’s demands. He and his fellow navvies’ antiimprovement counter-culture centres on bodily gratification and drunken recklessness:  ‘I’ll drink and drink whene’er I  can, the drouth is sure to come /And I will love till lusty life runs out its mortal span.’56 Dermod revels in apparent dysfunction, as the somewhat subversive (though as Paul Delaney argues in Chapter 14 in this volume, problematic, in terms of its reproduction of gender norms) culmination of his ‘education’ as künstlerroman hero sees him refuse a journalist job in the metropole in order to return to his prostitute love and criminal friends in Scotland, providing a retort to the characteristically bourgeois ideology of the genre. Dermod’s return to his lover, Nora, and his painful witness of her slow death at society’s margins is an indictment of its centre, as is his refusal to write the propagandistic reports about the alleged profligacy of striking Welsh miners that his London editor requests. Oliver St John Gogarty and Joseph O’Connor’s 1917 play, Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin, also engages with this theme of less-spectacular death in its exploration of the relationship between the state, charitable organisations and death in Dublin’s slums. From his own work as a doctor at the Meath Hospital, Gogarty was particularly preoccupied with how the city’s tenements produced slow death. More broadly and strikingly in this play, he expresses exasperation with medical dispositifs (apparatuses) – their ‘said as much as the unsaid’, as Foucault puts it – and their production of destitution.57 Gogarty’s response to Dublin’s Church Street tenement collapse of 1913 tellingly takes issue with the sensationalist media focus on the disaster. He suggests that it is in the continual, though largely unremarked,

55 56 57

Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 236. Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ (1977), a conversation, in Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. and trans. by Colin Gordon (London:  Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), pp. 194–228 (p. 194).

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daily struggles with death in the tenements that the greater part of this ‘tragedy’ can be discerned: Does a tenement only cease to be a tenement, when it becomes a tomb? [. . .] [W]hat of the houses of Church Street, the houses of six and seven feet high, that cannot fall, but can only go on reeking forever. The houses in Kean’s Court – what of those? And what of those structures in Thunder’s Court, where one common privy bemerded beyond use, stands beside one common water supply which a corporation notice guards from waste.58

If the focus of the media and politicians turned to the more spectacular collapse, it ought to have been focussed on the less spectacular but no less awful deaths caused by the everyday experience of letting die. Gogarty and O’Connor’s protagonist in Blight, the Dublin labourer Stanislaus Tully, delivers similarly powerful criticisms of hypocritical charity, pauperism and state indifference to the poor, highlighting the systemacity of objective violence they facilitate. When a wealthy and religious charity volunteer, Miss Maxwell-Knox, opines that ‘the poor will always be with us,’ Tully responds: ‘As things are going, you’d think it was planned so that the poor would always be here.’59 The absurdly inhuman necro-economics of letting die all about them are discussed more explicitly at the start of the final act, as two young doctors, Medical Davy and Medical Dick, try to unravel the mysteries of a medical system that they work to maintain, with the former wondering why medical advances are not deployed to save more lives: Medical Davy: [. . .] But why isn’t it done? Medical Dick. Because of our imported hypocrisy and because we haven’t the courage to face facts; because we won’t realise that prevention is better than cure, because charity must prey on suffering; because we mix morals even in our medicine.60

As we soon discover, the Townsend Thanatorion Board, which meets in the final act, is nearly insensible to the slow deaths of Dublin’s poor. ‘The poor sees little of it anyway,’ a charwoman, Mrs Larissey, opines.61 Doctor Tumulty’s radical proposal to close the hospital and spend money instead on eliminating the slums is an extraordinary rejection of the apparatuses of medicine and charity; the state will eventually have ‘to build slums to 58

59

60 61

Reprinted in James Francis Carens, Surpassing Wit: Oliver St. John Gogarty, his Poetry and his Prose (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979), p. 41. Alpha and Omega (pseudonyms of Oliver St John Gogarty and Joseph K. O’Connor), Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin: An Exposition in Three Acts (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917), p. 10. Ibid., pp. 43–4; my emphasis. Ibid., p. 46.

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keep up the supply of patients’, he suggests, such is its focus on cures rather than causes.62

The ‘Fully Medicamented’ Free State In the emaciated body of Sitric Ó Sánasa from Flann O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht, ‘hovering on the line between human and animal’, Maebh Long suggests that ‘the bare life of the famine victims is most clearly portrayed.’63 When Sitric moves to a sea-cave to live as a cannibalistic seal, his ‘only escape from being consumed by a system to which he does and does not belong is to place himself at the head of an equally cannibalistic economy’. O’Brien thus symbolises how, ‘while the famine saw a people dehumanized by hunger and the control of an external power, in post-independence Ireland we see a country anthropophagously preying on itself.’64 If hypocrisy is ‘imported’ in Gogarty and O’Connor, in O’Casey it is very much indigenous as well, and the sacrifices made by the Irish working class in achieving independence for the twenty-six counties in fact seem entirely unrewarded by the new dispensation that preys on itself. In Juno and the Paycock (1924), Johnny Boyle’s crippled body bears the marks of a sacrifice that produces little more than vainglory, and the prospects, as his mother hints, of starvation, for ‘to be sure, to be sure – no bread’s a lot betther than half a loaf ’.65 In The Plough and the Stars (1926), the rebels’ insensibility to looters, whom they term ‘slum lice’, presages a new society that won’t be that new after all. The burial of Nora’s baby alongside the consumptive Mollser emphasises the jettisoning of working-class hopes that things might change. And if Mollser’s part in the play is apparently minor, like Paddy Maguire’s consumptive brother Larry in Lee Dunne’s later Dublin novel and play Goodbye to the Hill (1965; 1976), her wheezing sickness nonetheless provides an undercutting, choric critique of the grandstanding and demagoguery of ‘high’ politics throughout, a reminder of the letting die that will continue after Partition. As Mollser puts it: ‘Is there anybody goin’ [. . .] with a titther o’ sense?’66 Larry Maguire, as Dunne admits, represented ‘all the kids that died, who were eaten up by tuberculosis in those slums in the ’50s. The kid would get diagnosed and be dead in 10 days, cough his lungs out of his own mouth, and I was so 62 63 64 65 66

Ibid., p. 62. Maebh Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 119. Ibid., p. 120. Seán O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 93. Ibid., p. 180.

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f****** angry’.67 As Claire Gleitman argues, ‘Mollser and the multitudes of Dublin children for whom she stands suffer from a disease of poverty that remains unaltered by the feuds that so mesmerize their elders.’68 Like the maimed Harry of The Silver Tassie (1928), the Down and Outs of Within the Gates (1934) or the ‘flotsam and jetsam’ beggars of Red Roses for Me, Mollser’s spectral liminality, her hovering on the edge of death, calls for a more penetrating analysis and challenges us to drill beneath the surface of apparently seismic political change to the necropolitics that trundles on regardless, governing such figures’ everyday lives. Larry will die like Mollser, but after three decades of native rule. The Free State, then Republic, O’Casey suggests, is wilfully oblivious, or hostile to, those on its fringes. In two of his one-act plays, Nannie’s Night Out (1924) and Hall of Healing (1951) – staged almost three decades apart – he stresses the necro-economics of independent Ireland. A ballad singer’s imagining of an eternally optimistic and essentialised Irishness at the start of Nannie’s Night Out – ‘for Ireland is Ireland thro’ joy an throu’ tears. / Hope never dies throu’ the long weary years’ – is immediately ironised in its clash with the more material and mundane of the context that presently transpires on stage.69 The ‘small dairy and provision shop in a working-class district’ in which the play is based is the scene of the symbolic courting of its owner, the Widow Pender, by three bumbling, ageing, would-be suitors: Johnny, Jimmy and Joe. Their courting of course allegorises the process of state formation – of men clambering for control of the Irish economy – here represented by a tawdry corner shop. The trio spend much of the play alternately boasting about their own or belittling their rivals’ manliness, but when a gun-wielding robber arrives on the scene they nervously surrender, and it is Irish Nannie, a ‘spunker’  – a methylatedspirits addict  – recently released from jail, who challenges and thwarts the intruder. In one version of the play, Nannie dies of a heart attack; in another, she is arrested for vandalism by the police. In both, she, and by extension the lower classes, though they have defended Ireland’s ‘shop’, are now unwanted and even endangered despite their heroism. Nannie’s oppression is intersectional, O’Casey stresses; her care for her father and her husband – her domestic work – yields no social or financial support 67 68

69

Patricia Deevy, ‘Goodbye to the Anger’, Sunday Independent, section People, 16 August 1992, p. 6. Claire Gleitman, ‘Sean O’Casey (1880–1964)’, in Modern Irish Writers:  A Bio-critical Sourcebook, ed. by Alexander G. Gonzalez (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 300–8 (p. 304). Seán O’Casey, Nannie’s Night Out (1924), reprinted in Best Short Plays of the World Theatre 1958–1967, ed. by Stanley Richards (New York: Crown Publishers, 1968), pp. 241–56 (p. 244).

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and leads, one surmises, to her present state. The illiterate Nannie, fresh from ‘the Joy’, is now homeless and rootless; her plight hasn’t changed with the arrival of independence: ‘Wan place is as good as another to Nannie.’70 Nannie’s addiction, criminality and cruelty to her disabled child all point to the cyclical and intergenerational persistence of poverty. She too, it emerges, was beaten and neglected in her youth, and O’Casey’s sociological bent here is repeated throughout the century by a range of writers: Hugh Quinn, in his depiction of welfare dependency and the desperation of the poor in Mrs. McConaghy’s Money (1931); Sam Thompson, in his interviews with homeless Belfast men and depiction of labour struggle; Peter Sheridan and Mannix Flynn’s representations of sexual abuse and prison; Paula Meehan, in her writing workshops with drug addicts; Des Wilson’s 1970s and 1980s People’s Theatre and its playlets about welfare, health, poverty and the state, such as The Merry-Go-Round (Tony McCabe), If I  Was Private (Theresa Donnelly) and The Money-Lender (Wilson); and Tom Magill in his work in film and theatre with prisoners.71 In another indictment of the necro-economy behind such dysfunction in Nannie’s Night Out – which harks forward also to Plunkett’s Strumpet City, and its depiction of the hazardous workplace – we learn of the origins of Nannie’s social and psychological descent:  in a workplace accident that caused the slow death of her incapacitated docker husband: a jib of a crane fell on his back workin’ on th’ docks, an’ smashed his spine; two weeks’ half pay he got from th’ stevedore, an’ then th’ bastard went bankrupt . . . an Nannie kep’ him for two years an’ he lyin’ on his back.72

Here the 1913 Lockout hovers in the hinterland, as does the failure of the labour movement to secure a foothold in the politics of the new state, with the Labour Party condemned in the play as ‘thryin to do as little as they could’.73 The damaged docker, and indeed his wife, die slowly and 70 71

72 73

Ibid., p. 246. See Box 7, section C (i), Sam Thompson Archive (1916-1965), Belfast Central Library, Belfast, files entitled Bed for the Night, which include twelve transcripts of interviews with elderly people in lodging houses, conducted from September to December 1962; Peter Sheridan and Mannix Flynn, The Liberty Suit (Dublin: Co-op Books, 1978); Meehan’s creative writing workshops with women prisoners and drug addicts have had strong thematic influences on her poetry, and on plays such as Mrs Sweeney (1997) and Cell (1999); all People’s Theatre plays are n.d. but 1970s/1980s, published in The People’s Theatre Volume 1, ed. by Joseph Sheehy (Belfast: Glandore Publishing, 1999); Tom Magill’s Belfast-based Educational Shakespeare company has worked on dramatic and filmic collaborations with prisoners since the 1990s, such as the award-winning Mickey B (1997): see http://esc-film.com/ filmography [accessed 5 May 2016]. O’Casey, Nannie’s Night Out, p. 248. Ibid., p. 244.

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unremarkably, observed with little sympathy by those a rung above them on the social ladder, for as Jimmy puts it, ‘it’s very hard to have any sympathy for that class o’ people,’ They are doubtless, for O’Casey, casualties of the Empire and of the state that seceded from it. As the Ballad Singer, who ironically ekes a living peddling maudlin nationalist songs, puts it in his withering commentary on the Free State: Yous gang o’ hypocrites! What was it made Nannie what she was? Was it havin’ too much money? Who gave a damn about her? It was only when she was dhrunk an’ mad that anywan took any notice of her! What can th’ like o’ them do, only live any way they can? Th’ poorhouse, th’ prison an’ th’ morgue – them is our palaces! I suppose yous want us to sing “Home Sweet Home,” about our tenements? D’ye think th’ blasted kips o’ tenement houses we live in ‘ll breed saints an’ scholars?74

As Joe remarks of Nannie’s crippled son: ‘we’ve bigger things than that to settle first; we have to put th’ Army on a solid basis, an’ then, th’ Boundary Question [. . .] a few cripples o’ chiselurs is neither here nor there.’75 Ronald Ayling noted how Nannie’s ‘symbolic importance as part of the “soul of Ireland” ’ can be traced to an article of the same year in which O’Casey contrasted the new state’s emphasis on teaching Irish with its lack of emphasis on the material conditions of the poor. In the article, two men discuss the state of affairs as they queue for their dole:76 ‘Ah, the soul of Ireland,’ interrupted Jack, irritably, ‘is as apparent here [in the Labour Exchange] as it is at a meeting of the Fainne. It speaks just as truly in the wild words of a drunken spunker as it does in the jubilant eooings of President Cosgrave at a banquet in the Metropole; or the innocent babblings of President de Valera on a platform in Ennis.’77

Mrs Pender, an ersatz Mother Ireland – a mockery of Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan – has three suitors to choose from, all old, conservative and enfeebled. The shabby corner shop of a ‘new’ Ireland is their prize; the excluded and malnourished poor are their class enemies, their ‘neither here nor there’. Agamben’s identification of the ‘limit concept’ that ‘radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state’, comes once more into focus here as O’Casey’s depiction of a woman who hovers at the edges of the Free State challenges the limitations of a ‘new’ 74 75 76 77

Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 251. Ronald Ayling, ‘Nannie’s Night Out’, Modern Drama, 5 (Summer 1962), pp. 154–63 (p. 159). Qtd. in ibid.; Ayling’s emphasis. Seán O’Casey, ‘Irish in the Schools’, in The Irish Statesman, 29 November 1924, p. 362.

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dispensation that already seems (like Johnny, Jimmy and Joe) quite old and tired.78 Her added precarity as a working-class woman whose fortunes spiral downwards after the men in her life become ill, recalls James Stephens’s novel of 1912, The Charwoman’s Daughter, and echoes in later works too, such as Carnduff’s Workers, Paul Smith’s The Countrywoman (1961) and Summer Sang in Me (1975). But O’Casey’s criticism of the Republic’s necro-economics is perhaps most apparent in his condemnation of the health system’s treatment of the poor, almost three decades later, in Hall of Healing (1951). Set in the waiting room of the Dublin Parish Dispensary, this one-act play depicts ‘a place where the poor, sick or diseased are looked at and, usually, rewarded with a bottle’; a place where death’s closeness is signalled by large abounding posters – ‘DIPHTHERIA: BEWARE!’, ‘CANCER: BEWARE!’ and ‘TUBERCULOSIS:  BEWARE’  – and by patients all ‘immersed in the same uncertainty and want’.79 A young man, Red Muffler, worries about his sick daughter, repeating his fear that she will be ‘silently seen no more’.80 These ‘silently seen’ people are evidently of little importance to the dispensary  – which treats its universally impoverished patients carelessly – and to the doctor, who like that of Frank O’Connor’s short story ‘The Man of the House’ (1949), is a heavy drinker; a certain class of doctor, it is suggested, is let loose on a certain class of people. The faces of those who wait, on slow death in various forms, ‘all carry [. . .] lines of conscious, or semi-conscious, uncertainty and resignation’.81 Here, life is always liminal: either ‘starkly pale’, ‘purplish-white’ or jaundiced ‘lemon-yellow’, as O’Casey deploys the hieroglyphic total theatre techniques that are more pronounced in works such as Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949). Patients lack a sense of agency, are indeed barely there: an old woman feels that ‘th’ wind must ha’ blew me in. Without me noticin’ either’. She is shoved about by the dispenser as ‘a drover might a cow’. Another patient’s feet are ‘numb’ – he stamps heavily ‘in an effort to give them the feel of life’ – and all the patients ‘fall in with the rhythm’ of a sombre tune played on an organ,82 death encroaching everywhere, in the imagery and music of O’Casey’s stylised dramaturgy, on these semi-alive wraiths caught in a system fixated on ‘regulations’ and opening hours, but never human beings.83 Here the state’s 78 79

80 81 82 83

Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 134. Seán O’Casey, Sean O’Casey: Plays 2 – The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars, The Silver Tassie, Purple Dust, Halle of Healing (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 395–6. Ibid., pp. 402, 428. Ibid., p. 396. Ibid., pp. 396, 403, 404, 402, 408. Ibid., p. 404.

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management of poverty produces a passive and demoralised population, the kind described in John Campbell’s poem ‘Casual Curses’ (1982), where life ‘on the bloody buroo’ (social welfare) leaves poor people vulnerable to the whims of bureaucrats, with little comfort besides grim, repetitive imaginings of a better afterlife: ‘They starve yer kids on the word of a jerk, word of a jerk, word of a jerk [. . .] I hope to God when my life is through, life is through, life is through, / where I go they won’t have any bloody buroo’.84 O’Casey points to inhumane absurdity amid rationalised normality. As with Gogarty and O’Connor’s earlier work, the discursive medicalisation of poverty is again emphasised as a cover for, and indeed integral to, objective violence. Again, the role of ideology and silencing are emphasised; such were the curious ideas of the last doctor at O’Casey’s dispensary that Black Muffler suggests he might not have been ‘fit to be a docthor at all’:85 Th’ last time he saw me, he said what I needed was betther food, a finer house to live in, an’ a lot more enjoyment. An’ when I said couldn’t you give me a bottle, Docthor, he laughed at me, so that I felt ashamed of me life. An’ afther what he had said, d’ye know what he said then? [. . .] My good young man, he said, you can’t expect to dhrink health into you out of a bottle. Nobody knows how frightened I felt!86

A medicine that questions the operations of the market, its necropolitics, is not recognisable as medicine at all. So habituated is another of the patients, Jemtree, to the biopolitical management of poverty that he opines:  ‘I dunno how life could be lived without some kinda bottles.’87 These palliative bottles symbolise a wider system of regulation at the level of the population, the ‘massifying’ of the power invested in the body into one directed at ‘man-as-species’, here directed at those who are slowly dying.88 The bottles, as Foucault might put it, nod to the ‘invest[ing] of life through and through’ with this power reaching into bodies and minds.89 For O’Casey’s poor, medicine’s regulatory function produces living death so that when caretaker Alleluia draws a chalk line and circle on the floor to regulate the dispensary queue, with patients ‘toeing the line’ according to the stage directions, his makeshift regulatory technology resembles a 84

85 86 87 88 89

John Campbell, The Rose and the Blade: New and Selected Poems 1957–1997 (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1997), pp. 52–3; originally published in Saturday Night in York Street (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1982), p. 49. O’Casey, Sean O’Casey: Plays 2, p. 409. Ibid., p. 411. Ibid., p. 410. Foucault, ‘17 March 1976’, in “Society Must Be Defended”, pp. 239–64 (p. 243). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1:  An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 139.

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noose: a grim reminder of how the consequences of ‘toeing [of ] the line’ lead to painful deaths.90 O’Casey symbolises the management of slow death, and a blurring of categories between life and death, which positions the Republic’s working class at the fringes of the human. Their medication is thoroughly ideological, has the normative force of scripture, for ‘bottles there was, bottles there is, bottles there must be!’91 Indeed, as Frank McCourt shows in his memoir of 1930s and 1940s working-class Limerick, Angela’s Ashes (1996), religion is thoroughly imbricated in the ideologies that produce poverty. When the teenage Frank discovers that his consumptive lover, Theresa Carmody, has died, he ironically pledges himself to ‘a life of faith [. . .] poverty, chastity’, thinking their illicit premarital sex has sent her to hell. Poverty has produced her death, but religion moves the focus onto what happens after, rather than before, that death, which can apparently be ameliorated by more ‘poverty’.92 Those who attempt to explain the systemacity of death, to explain its material basis, are often ironically subject themselves to superstitious demonization, notably, the tenement-dwelling ‘red communist’ of Maura Laverty’s Liffey Lane (1947). He becomes something of a bad omen because of what ‘he was always saying about the priests’: ‘no one in the house would have luck so long as he lived in it.’93 In Hall of Healing, a ‘fully medicamented’ precariat is largely docile, mystified, entranced in a ‘dance of death’, managed by ‘docthors [who] wouldn’t blink an eyelid if a man passed into oblivion!’94 And they have ‘been patient for too long’, Red Muffler opines; ‘patience is only th’ holy name for suicide!’95 Ireland’s ‘medicamented’ poor is the subject of a regulation that, as Gogarty and O’Connor had also suggested, does not direct itself to the elimination of disease – something that might entail, in truth, a radical redistribution of wealth  – but rather to the maintenance of a Smithian harmony; to docile bodies and the equilibrium of the market. As Foucault argued, the direction of biopolitics towards illnesses that ‘sapped the population’s strength, shortened the working week, wasted energy, and cost money’ demanded that ‘regulatory mechanisms must be established to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis [. . .] so as to optimize a state of life.’96 Here, the point is not to 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

O’Casey, Sean O’Casey: Plays 2, p. 422. Ibid., p. 413. Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 325. Maura Laverty, Liffey Lane (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947), p. 41. O’Casey, Sean O’Casey: Plays 2, p. 421. Ibid., p. 423. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, pp. 244, 246.

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prevent illness, but to ‘optimize’ how bodies, however enfeebled, are managed, under capitalism. When Red Muffler implores the doctor to attend to his dying nine-year-old child, the doctor reminds him that ‘there are thousands of kids like yours gasping for life in the city today [. . .] No living doctor can give them what they need.’97 When the girl subsequently dies, Red Muffler curses the ‘blasted fermenter of medicine’ who can ‘go home, an’ snore away some other buddin’ life’.98 Alleluia’s tasteless if unthinking singing of ‘The Rose of Tralee’ as the scene closes is contrasted with what O’Casey terms in his stage directions the ‘counterpoint’ of the organ’s ‘old tune’.99 The odd juxtaposition of blithe cheerfulness (with a hint of nationalist Paddywhackery that reminds us of the Ballad Singer of O’Casey’s earlier play) with funereal solemnity recalls also Tressell and Carnduff, and has a similarly contrapuntal effect to a parallel exchange in O’Connor’s ‘The Man of the House’. Here O’Connor’s boy narrator discusses the same revered ‘bottles’ with a young girl at a dispensary in Cork: ‘And who’s the bottle for?’ she asked. ‘My mother.’ ‘What’s wrong with her?’ ‘She have a bad cough.’ ‘She might have consumption,’ the little girl said cheerfully. ‘That’s what my sister that died last year had. My other sister have to have tonics. That’s what I’m waiting for. ‘Tis a queer old world.’100

For both writers, the point is how ‘queer’ it ought to seem that poor lives in post-independence Ireland are so cheerfully ‘snore[d] away’. The very meaning of Irish ‘freedom’ is implicitly questioned here. James Plunkett’s writing of pre- and post-Partition Ireland chimes with this message. His panoptic depiction of working-class struggle in Strumpet City (1969) repeatedly challenges the Empire’s letting die amongst Dublin’s poor before the onset of decolonisation.101 Beggar, organ-grinder and sometimes boiler-man Rashers Tierney’s death in isolation, for example, is of the most putrid and pitiable kind. It emphasises his final reduction to the grotesque body, to bare life:

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O’Casey, Sean O’Casey: Plays 2, p. 429. Ibid., pp. 430, 431. Ibid., p. 432. Frank O’Connor, ‘The Man of the House’, in Frank O’Connor’s Collected Stories (New York: Vintage, 1982), pp. 183–90 (p. 188). See Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 143–66.

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Then the pains became worse. He felt his bowels melting and loosening in spite of his will. A burning hot liquid trickled incontinently. He made an agonising effort to stop it but failed. With a sudden rush his bowels voided their contents of foulness and gas. He felt his buttocks sticky and saturated. But he could not move.102

The slow death of a starved beggar confronts us in all its undignified, corporeal horror: man reduced entirely to the ailing body, the animal state. But when Rashers’ corpse is discovered, his pet dog now also lying dead beside him with its organs exposed by feasting rats, a priest loftily declares that ‘it isn’t fitting to lay the brute beast and the baptised body together.’103 Once more, in death, the human body becomes sacred – in a way it was not in life. That Plunkett makes similar criticisms in his 1955 short story ‘Janey Mary’ indicates how such letting die continues in the Republic and how decolonisation has failed to change the lot of the poor in the way envisaged, for instance, by the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil (1919). In ‘Janey Mary’, the eponymous heroine is an impoverished child who searches frantically for bread to feed her near-starved family. Like too many others, she hopes to avail of free food at the festival of the Blessed Bread ceremonies in a local church, but finds herself caught in a crush as the crowds heave forward. The shoes of a man in front of her, which are decorated with ‘diamond-shaped nails in double rings about the heels’, crush into her bare feet, at which point she faints, only to awaken some time later on a sofa in the parish visitors’ parlour.104 Janey Mary is left with ‘the print of the nails’ in her feet: an allegorical symbol of Christ’s pain that signals Plunkett’s indictment of the strain of Christianity that prevails, which fails to recognise Christ; the Mariolatry that fails to recognise this particular Mary.105 Those most exposed to death through poverty and neglect are the bearers of a sacred message. Brendan Behan’s depiction of prisoners in The Quare Fellow (1954) and prostitutes and gay men in The Hostage (1958) again returned Irish writing to the Republic’s margins, his ‘dance for all the outcasts’ in the latter work an act of defiance against orthodoxy and social shame, against what Foucault has termed ‘state racisms’.106 It is indeed interesting how race, 102 103 104

105 106

Plunkett, Strumpet City, p. 556. Ibid., p. 571. James Plunkett, ‘Janey Mary’, in James Plunkett: Collected Short Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg, 2000), pp. 200–7 (p. 205). Ibid., p. 207. Brendan Behan, Behan: Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 226; Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, p. 62.

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sexuality and class intersect where Behan choreographs this dance of the excluded. As Ronit Lentin argues, glossing Foucault: Rather than serving one group against another, racism becomes a tool of social conservatism, a racism that society practices against itself, an internal racism – that of constant purification and social normalisation.107

Here, racism is ‘the break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault).108 It can function as a purification mechanism within the ‘race’ – ‘a way of regenerating one’s own race’, as Foucault elaborates: ‘as more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer.’109 This ‘racism’ can be applied to criminality, madness, ‘various anomalies’.110 Its processes of purification and normalisation, which remind us of O’Casey’s commentary on state formation, occur, for Behan, at the intersection of heterodox othered identities. In one exchange from The Hostage, British soldier Leslie, who will later die, makes the class element of Behan’s message clear in his exchange with the upper-class English IRA man Monsewer: MONSEWER. Are you a cricketer, my boy? SOLDIER. Yes, sir [. . .] Mind you, I couldn’t get on with it at the Boys’ Home. They gave us two sets of stumps, you see, and I’d always been used to one, chalked up on the old wall at home. MONSEWER. That’s not cricket, my boy. SOLDIER. Now there you are, then. You’re what I call a cricket person and I’m what I call a soccer person. That’s where your race lark comes in.111

Monswer’s essentialist Irishness is fake, but his class antagonism is very real, Behan posits. Leslie’s death will have as much to do with his class as it does with his Englishness; it may be part of a post-colonial conflict, but the rich men who sent him to Ireland will not be ‘sitting around in the West End clubs with handkerchiefs over their eyes, dropping tears into their double whiskies’ when he dies.112 In Behan’s less-remarked last play, Richard’s Cork Leg (1961), which finds a somewhat limited airing in Alan Simpson’s posthumous reconstruction of 1973, the figure of the outlier-letdie returns in more elliptical form. Crystal Clear, a dead prostitute whose 107

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Ronit Lentin, ‘Illegal in Ireland, Irish Illegals:  Diaspora Nation as Racial State’, in Recognition, Equality and Democracy:  Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Politics, ed. by Jurgen De Wispelaere, Cillian McBride and Shane O’Neill (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 39–60 (pp. 45–6). Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, p. 254. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 258. Behan, Behan: The Complete Plays, pp. 190–1. Ibid., p. 217.

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demise predates the action of the play, represents those whose deaths are, to return to Montag’s terms, ‘the object of no memorial or commemoration’. The ironically named ‘Clear’ is an unpure element of Irish life whose death matters little to the Free State; her murder, carried out by pillars of the establishment, symbolises the same processes of ‘purification and social normalisation’ that Lentin outlines.113 Behan indeed adds a charge of fascism to his criticisms of the Free State, as an ageing Spanish Civil War veteran, the Hero Hogan, enlists a mercenary young helper, the ‘Leper’ Cronin, to sabotage a graveyard meeting of the fascist Blueshirts. The graveyard setting, and the fascists’ arrival there, of course conjures the conditio inhumana of recent horrors in Europe, while also representing the site of a caesura between ‘those who must live and those who must die’ (Mbembe).114 In this symbolic site, Crystal Clear’s death, which references the real-life murder of prostitute Lizzy O’Neill in Dublin in 1925, suggests the tyranny of this ‘dead’ republic;115 the crime, one suspects, was dealt with less than rigorously by the Free State’s legal system, and is therefore for Behan an indictment of the state’s treatment of its outgroups – its decision that some lives will not matter, that all of its children will not be cherished equally.116 This chapter has explored what Agamben terms ‘the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics’.117 Across various writers, pre- and post-Partition, liminal figures in working-class life continually estrange the hegemonic normality of necro-economics, contesting the ideologies undergirding objective violence and class war in Ireland, and suggesting, in the post-Partition work, a depressing vista, in which the working class is largely defeated by and interpellated within these ideologies. On the one hand, these contestations perform a resistance that harks back to the Revolutionary Period, to its espousal of other, radical ideals. At socialist leader Jim Larkin’s funeral, when Behan asks ‘an sinne a bhí sa chónra?’ – was it us in the coffin? – he responds, resoundingly, ‘Níorbh ea: bhíomar sa tsráid ag máirseáil / Beo buíoch don mharbh’ (No, we were not: we were on the street marching / Alive and grateful for the dead).118 Here, as Pádraig Pearse had argued, ‘life

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Lentin, ‘Illegal in Ireland, Irish Illegals’, p. 46. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 17. Roddy Doyle incidentally uses this term to describe the Free State, then Republic of Ireland, in his novel The Dead Republic (2010). For an account of O’Neill’s death, see Tim Pat Coogan, Ireland in the Twentieth Century (London: Arrow, 2003), p. 708. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 122. Behan, ‘Jim Larkin’, reprinted in Dorgan, ‘Larkin through the Eyes of Writers’, p. 106.

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springs from death’.119 On the other hand, the sense of a failed revolution abounds. But in unearthing the suppressed histories of the marginal, exposing the systemacity of the necropolitical, and challenging the normalcy of objective violence, Behan and these other writers perhaps locate something emphatically alive in depictions of death, that glimmer of desire Ernst Bloch characterised as the inchoate prefiguration of a post-capitalist future, an implicit (if not often here explicit) ‘dreaming ahead’; in rejecting hypocrisies of the present, and in de-familiarising them, these writers suggest that things might be different.120 As Mary M.  McGlynn argues, a ‘working-class reinterpretation of national identity’ repeatedly emerges in British and Irish working-class literature.121 The necropolitical is a key terrain on which that reinterpretation can be made, in questioning who is included within the nation and who merits life.

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Pádraig Pearse, Pearse and Rossa, ed. by Kevin T. McEneany (New York: At-Swim Press, 1982), p. 10. Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), p. 30. Mary M. McGlynn, Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee (London: Palgrave, 2008), p. 8.

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Ch apter 10

Writing Irish Nurses in Britain Tony Murray

This Mass is mostly attended by nurses and navvies, the nurses nice and neat in their white uniforms and blue cloaks and the navvies with their Sunday overcoats on them, trying to conceal the dried mud on their working clothes.1

In April 2014, during the first state visit by an Irish president to the UK, Michael D. Higgins visited University College Hospital in London to pay tribute to the contribution of Irish nurses to the National Health Service. Whilst the presidential visit was an important recognition of the historical role played by Irish people in Britain, it was criticized in some quarters for not acknowledging the equally significant contribution made by construction workers.2 Regardless of the merits or otherwise of this complaint, it remains the case that nurses still have a less conspicuous presence than navvies in popular notions about Irish workers in Britain. Published research into Irish nurses’ experiences in Britain, in contrast to that about their male compatriots, is also less common. Studies based on oral history interviews by Bronwen Walter and others have, in recent years, begun to redress this imbalance.3 But, published first-hand accounts by Irish nurses in Britain are still rare.4 This is all the more surprising given the fact that in

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Donall Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy:  The Diary of an Exile, trans. by Valentine Iremonger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 102. Ultan Cowley, ‘Honouring the Irish Men Who Helped to Build Britain’, Irish Times, 7 April 2014:  www.irishtimes.com/blogs/generationemigration/2014/04/07/honouring-the-irish-menwho-helped-to-build-britain/ [accessed 7 August 2015]. Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside:  Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (London:  Routledge, 2001); Louise Ryan, ‘ “I Had a Sister in England”:  Family-Led Migration, Social Networks and Irish Nurses’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 3 (2008), pp. 453–70. Liam Harte, The Literature of the Irish in Britain:  Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. xvi. For other studies of Irish working-class literature in Britain, see Bernard Canavan, ‘Story-Tellers and Writers: Irish Identity in Emigrant Labourers’ Autobiographies, 1870–1970’, in The Irish Worldwide:  History, Heritage, Identity:  The Creative Migrant, ed. by Patrick O’Sullivan (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), pp. 154–69; Patrick

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the middle decades of the twentieth-century nursing was one of the most popular career choices for young female Irish migrants crossing the Irish Sea.5 There were a number of reasons why so many Irish women chose Britain to pursue a career in nursing. Places on training courses in Ireland were limited and required the payment of a fee, thus restricting it to largely middle-class entrants.6 Nursing also necessitated higher qualifications than it did in Britain. However, while it was less professionalized than in Ireland, nursing still carried a higher status than many other jobs with which Irish women were associated. Margaret Collins, who was interviewed about her experience of coming to London after the Second World War, states, ‘You were always told to behave like a lady, they were always comparing what it was to be a nurse to what it was to work in a factory or to work in a shop – you were above that.’7 For young Irish women who were serious about pursuing such a career, migration was, according to Louise Ryan, ‘the only realistic pathway to achieving their goal of becoming a registered nurse’.8 When British nurses were in short supply during and after the Second World War, staff were recruited in large numbers from overseas and Irish nurses, in particular, became a sought-after commodity.9 Interviews conducted by Bronwen Walter with such nurses record them saying that they had ‘always been highly respected’ and ‘greatly appreciated’ for ‘their natural empathy’.10 In her study of class and gender and, in particular, the notion of the ‘the caring self ’, Bev Skeggs identifies nursing as one of the occupations where ‘to speak from a caring subject position confers occupational/moral status and authority’.11 Walter also argues

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Duffy, ‘Literary Reflections on Irish Migration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Writing across Worlds: Literature and Migration, ed. by Russell King, John Connell and Paul White (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 20–38; Tony Murray, London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (Liverpool:  Liverpool University Press, 2012); Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘Patrick MacGill:  The Making of a Writer’, in Ireland’s Histories: Aspects of State, Society and Ideology, ed. by Sean Hutton and Paul Stewart (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 203–22. Anne Lynch, The Irish in Exile: Stories of Emigration (London: Community History Press, 1988), p.  13. Anita Guidera, ‘How Irish Nurses Helped Make the NHS the Envy of the World’, Irish Independent, 7 February 2013. www.independent.ie/lifestyle/health/how-irish-nurses-helped-makethe-nhs-the-envy-of-the-world-29051707.html [accessed 3 August 2015]. Enda Delaney, The Irish in Post-war Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 203. Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O’Brien, Across the Water: Irish Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1988), p. 106. Ryan, ‘ “I Had a Sister in England” ’, p. 459. Clair Wills, The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-war Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 81. Bronwen Walter, Irish Women in London:  The Ealing Dimension (London:  London Borough of Ealing Women’s Unit, 1989), p. 87. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997), p. 69.

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that nursing was ‘related to dominant images of women in Ireland, to notions of caring and self-sacrifice directly reflecting Catholic values’.12 In the predominantly Catholic communities from which most Irish nurses came, such values were embodied by the Virgin Mary. In the context of the British health system, one can see how such a figure would have mapped relatively seamlessly onto the iconic image of Florence Nightingale.13 This ‘positive stereotype’ of Irish nurses stood in sharp contrast to the rather more negative one of the Irish navvy in Britain.14 This may have been one of the reasons why this particular representation of Irish workers in Britain was favoured during the presidential visit. Apart from its favourable status in public perceptions, there were more practical reasons why nursing was an attractive option for young Irish women. One was that it was an occupation which, unlike navvying, came with secure accommodation. As Henrietta Ewart points out, this was recognized by British hospitals as an asset when it came to recruiting badly needed staff in Ireland and glossy brochures were produced for this precise purpose.15 Nancy Lyons, who joined Paddington Hospital as a trainee nurse in 1943, records how thrilled she was to get her own room in a nursing home. Work was hard and the hours long, but, she points out, ‘there was such a lot of staff looking after you.’16 Such an environment also had the advantage of providing the often lonely young recruit with a readymade social circle of fellow workers and compatriots.17 Kathleen Henry, for instance, who joined the National Hospital in Queen Square, London, in the early 1950s, enjoyed going out to concerts and the theatre with her peers.18 By far the most popular entertainment, however, was dancing, not least because it provided the best means by which young nurses met potential partners. The generally positive picture of nursing presented in oral history interviews, however, is not universal. Maira Curran, for instance, who took up a position at the Royal Northern Hospital in Holloway in 1948, recalls being so unhappy that she attempted to commit suicide.19 12 13

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Walter, Outsiders Inside, p. 179. For the role played by an Irish nurse in Nightingale’s mission, see Therese Meehan, ‘The Irish Connection’, World of Irish Nursing, 19 (2010), pp. 28–9. Walter, Outsiders Inside, p. 180. Henrietta Ewart, ‘Perfecting the Honour of the Daughters of Eire: Welfare Policy for Irish Female Migrants to England, 1940–70’, Irish Studies Review, 1 (2013), pp. 71–84 (p. 79). Lennon et al., Across the Water, p. 173. Louise Ryan, ‘Migrant Women, Social Networks and Motherhood: The Experiences of Irish Nurses in Britain’, Sociology, 2 (2007), pp. 295–312 (pp. 300–1). Pam Schweitzer, ed., Across the Irish Sea (London: Age Exchange Trust, 1989), p. 91. Schweitzer, ed., Across the Irish Sea, p. 60.

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Between them, the three texts I examine in this chapter recount experiences of Irish nurses in Britain between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. Whilst they celebrate many of the positive features of nursing life referred to already, they are also highly critical of certain aspects of the institutions and regimes under which they trained and served. As such, they provide somewhat fuller and more discursive accounts of the occupation than oral history testimonies are usually able to do. Given the juxtaposition of nurses and navvies in debates about the presidential visit of 2014, I also compare these accounts to those of Irish construction workers during the period in order to explore similarities and differences, particularly across gender. The three accounts I have chosen to analyse consist of a diary, a memoir and a semi-autobiographical novel and offer the opportunity to compare a key set of experiences within a focussed historical time frame across different prose genres. Popular memoir is sometimes criticized as shallow and manufactured, but a recent study argues that it has enhanced perceptions of the relationship between personal testimony and historical understanding by offering ‘the potential to change the imagined relations their readers have with the lives of others’.20 The three texts I examine here make an important contribution to this process. Having attracted little or no attention while lodged in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum’s archives, Mary Morris’s diary of her nursing experiences during the Second World War was published in 2014. By ensuring its publication, its editor, Carol Acton, opened a window onto a hitherto obscured aspect of working women’s lives in wartime Britain. Very few diaries, she informs us, survived the war and Morris’s is ‘unusually complete and sustained’.21 Furthermore, she points out in an earlier essay that the absence of any reference to Morris’s nationality in the archive catalogue resulted in the occlusion of an important contribution by Irish workers to the British war effort.22 Morris left her family home near Caltra in County Galway at eighteen years of age to begin her nurses’ training at Guy’s Hospital on the eve of the Second World War. Although she was well-educated, there was little prospect of employment in the rural west of 20

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Julie Rak, Boom!:  Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Waterloo:  Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013), p. 4. Mary Morris, A Very Private Diary: A Nurse in Wartime (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014), p. xv. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses in the text. For earlier examples of memoirs about Irish nursing in Britain, see Annie M. P. Smithson, Myself – and Others: An Autobiography (London:  Talbot Press, 1945); Emily E.  P. MacManus, Matron of Guy’s (London:  Andrew Melrose, 1956). Carol Acton, ‘ “Stepping into History”:  Reading the Second World War through Irish Women’s Diaries’, Irish Studies Review, 1 (2010), pp. 39–56 (p. 40).

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Ireland in 1939 and so, like so many of her peers, she took the mail-boat to England. Whilst relatives and friends back home took some persuading that she was not living in ‘a hornets’ nest of evil, danger and Godlessness’ (18), Morris seems, on the whole, to have had support from those who knew her. In her research on Irish women workers in Britain during the Second World War, Mary Muldowney discovered that war conditions in Britain created opportunities for Irish women and ‘enabled some of them to fulfill ambitions or to develop personally in ways that would not have been possible before the war started’.23 Mary Morris was clearly a beneficiary of this. One year after Morris’s diary appeared, Sixty Years a Nurse (2015) by Mary Hazard was published by HarperElement, an imprint which specializes in popular memoir. While there has been a surfeit of such books about British nurses, there are (despite their numerical significance) remarkably few references to the Irish as a distinct cohort of the workforce.24 Hazard left Clonmel in south-west Ireland in September 1952 to begin her three years of nurses’ training at Putney Hospital in London. Her sense of adventure at travelling to the metropolis is palpable. ‘It was so exciting,’ she exclaims. ‘My first plane journey, ever . . . I felt very grown-up, all on my own, with my little bag neatly stowed overhead and my new shiny black Clarks shoes on my feet . . . I was finally on my way to fulfil a life-long ambition.’25 The fact that Hazard was still only seventeen years of age provides a possibly unintended ironic counterpoint to what she describes as her ‘life-long ambition’, but, as she goes on to explain, she had ‘wanted to be a nurse for as long as [she] could remember’ (5). As is apparent from her mode of transport to England, Hazard came from quite a well-off background (5). She encountered considerably more resistance from her family than Morris, but she makes very clear how determined she was to escape their ‘rigid, cruel control’ and to succeed at her chosen profession (3). The third text, Florrie’s Girls (1989) by Maeve Kelly, remains the only novel wholly dedicated to portraying an Irish nurse’s experience of working in Britain. Kelly, who was born in Ennis, Co. Clare, trained as a nurse at St Andrew’s Hospital in east London in the 1950s, and the fictionalized diary of which the novel consists is clearly based on these experiences.26 23

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Mary Muldowney, ‘New Opportunities for Irish Women? Employment in Britain during the Second World War’, University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 10 (2006), p. 2 [individual papers published separately online – no page range]. See, for instance, Maggie Holt, A Nurse at War (London: Random House, 2013), p. 68. Mary Hazard, Sixty Years a Nurse (London: HarperElement, 2015), p. 1. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses in the text. Patricia Feehily, ‘Proving Comedy Is Undeveloped Tragedy’, Limerick Leader, 28 October 1989, p. 6.

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As such, it is comparable to the other texts but also provides a creative counterpoint to their more formally historical accounts. Caitlin Cosgrave (Cos), the heroine of the novel, has entirely different emotions to her peers about leaving Ireland. On the day she takes the train to Dublin doubts about her decision to leave abound. So overwhelming is her desire to turn back that she even admits, in retrospect, that she ‘should have pulled the communication cord and leaped out of the carriage window’.27 But, she philosophically adds, ‘we get on the train and we keep moving because the train is on its tracks and it’s easier to go with it than to get off’ (1). The initial introduction to their training in Britain was often a disillusioning one for young nurses. The sheer amount of cleaning they were expected to do was not something for which student nurses were necessarily prepared.28 Cos lists the numerous domestic chores she is expected to perform before she even begins to think about attending to the sick: ‘scrubbing the cupboards, the bedpans, the soiled sheets, the walls, the doors, the sinks, the floors, the windows, the ceilings.’ ‘I stank of carbolic,’ she protests.29 Her greatest disapproval, however, is reserved for the repulsive duties of the sluice room, where trainee nurses are required to hand-wash dirty bed linen. This tests the resolve of even the most committed trainees, in much the same way as digging ditches does for novice navvies. On his first day at work, Pat Moore, the hero of Walter Macken’s novel I Am Alone (1949), complains of a succession of blisters breaking out on his hands. Likewise, Donall Mac Amhlaigh records how he was ‘hardly able to straighten [his] back next morning when [he] was getting up’.30 After a morning in the sluice room, Cos writes in her diary, ‘My arms ached at the end of it. They still ache and my shoulder muscles are strained’ (5). Meanwhile, Mary Hazard’s hands ‘became raw from washing and scrubbing all the time, immersed in carbolic and disinfectant’.31 In what is 27

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Maeve Kelly, Florrie’s Girls (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), p. 1. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses in the text. For earlier examples of fictional portrayals of Irish nurses in Britain, see Mrs Samuel Carter Hall, ‘Hospitality’, in her own Sketches of Irish Character (London:  M.A Nattali, 1844), pp. 135–54; John McGahern, The Barracks (London: Faber & Faber, 1963). For evidence of this in oral history accounts, see for instance, Kathleen Ruth, Audio Collection, Archive of the Irish in Britain, London Metropolitan University. Kelly, Florrie’s Girls, p.  31. For an even more damning condemnation of the hospital regime in London, see Maeve Kelly, ‘Morning at my Window’, in Orange Horses (London: Michael Joseph, 1990), pp. 20–8. Walter Macken, I Am Alone (London: Pan Books, 1977), p. 35; Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy, p. 31. For other examples of fictional portrayals of Irish navvies in Britain, see Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1914); Richard Power, Apple on a Tree Top (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1980); Padraic Breathnach, As Na Culacha (Galway: Clo Iar-Chonnachta, 1998); Philip Casey, The Water Star (London: Picador, 1999); Peter Woods, Hard Shoulder (Dublin: New Island, 2003). Hazard, Sixty Years a Nurse, p. 36.

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otherwise a much more optimistic take on the experience of an Irish nurse in Britain at this time, Bridget Dunne is just as emphatic in her memoir about how much she hated this aspect of her training.32 Whether sluice or ditch, such tasks appear to constitute a ‘rite of initiation’ which nurse or navvy must endure in pursuit of their chosen occupation. All three nurses are unanimous in their criticism of poor pay and conditions. On £10 a month, Hazard was required to save up for luxuries such as fashion items, and learn to ‘make-do-and-mend’ (26). She recalls how she and her fellow trainees were often hungry because, although meals were ample, they were infrequent. This meant that they regularly worked long shifts without sufficient sustenance. Morris describes the diet provided as ‘totally inadequate’. ‘I feel so faint from hunger’, she declares, ‘that it is almost impossible to carry out my innumerable duties’ (34). This is exacerbated by being required to serve food to patients while hungry herself. She explains that even on her day off, her meagre wages don’t allow her ‘to go out for a meal’ (18). The lack of adequate sustenance is apparent also in Florrie’s Girls. Such are Cos’s pangs of hunger, she is driven to smoking as a means of coping with them. The irony of this does not escape her. ‘I don’t suppose it’s very healthy’, she reflects, ‘But then, who said hospitals were healthy? As Aunt Maggie always said, you’d want to be in the full of your health before you’d go into one of those places’ (27). Despite such jocular reflections, it is surprising, however, the degree to which the nurses’ own health is compromised by the conditions in which they work, especially given the nature of their occupation.33 The harshness of the managerial system under which nurses trained also comes in for some robust criticism. This is starkly evident in one of Morris’s first entries (31 May 1940) when she records how Staff Nurse Jones ‘reduced [her] to tears twice before the 9 a.m. break’ (3). By September, she is openly critical of the inflexible hierarchy that operates in the hospital. After informing a consultant about an urgent telephone call for him, Morris is reprimanded by the ward sister. ‘I slunk off’, she writes, ‘wondering what I had done wrong this time, but was soon to learn that junior nurses must never presume to talk to a consultant – messages must always be conveyed via Sister or Staff Nurse’ (33). For Hazard, escaping the strictures of her upbringing and the emotions associated with it prove difficult 32

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Bridget Dunne, Journey into the Unknown (London:  Temple Publishing, 1995), p.  15. N.B. Limitations on space preclude me examining this text in depth. For an alternative view of nurses’ nutrition, see Mollie Kissane, ‘An Irish Nurse in East Sussex, Part 1’ www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/96/a5610296.shtml [accessed 3 August 2015].

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within the equally autocratic system she is subject to in Putney. ‘Matron and Sister Margaret’ are, she reflects, ‘my mother and God all merged into one all-seeing, omnipresent eye’. ‘I was always its beady focus’, she protests, ‘I was always in the wrong and needing to do penance as a sinner’ (72). She also records how ‘racism abounded, unchecked’ (33). In a revealing insight into the racial pecking order that applied in regards to employment, Hazard quotes one particular matron saying to her trainees, ‘I’ll take the Irish, because I need you, but I don’t have to take the coloureds’ (33). Irish nurses, however, did not always find themselves in such a favourable position. As the record of an Irish parliamentary debate reveals, the precise obverse of this view was expressed by the matron of a large London hospital in 1967.34 As Hazard’s memoir develops, she is increasingly critical of the hospital system. ‘There was a constant tension’, she writes, ‘between meeting the needs of the regime, so that rules were followed and things were done perfectly, and meeting the needs of the patients, who needed time, nursing and care’ (78). When she begins to question some of the procedures, however, she is quickly and firmly put in her place. ‘We lesser mortals’, she writes, ‘had to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of duty’ (105). After an incident in which Hazard was forced by the ward sister to substitute for the hospital cook, she learns the importance of not being coerced by her superiors into duties beyond her job description.35 As the memoir progresses, she gradually begins to appreciate the importance of collective bargaining and is persuaded by a colleague to join the Royal College of Nursing. Eventually, she transcends the powerlessness of her position by finding herself a role as a union representative.36 The hospital regime also comes in for direct criticism in Florrie’s Girls. ‘The hierarchy is unbelievably rigid’, writes Cos, ‘Worse than school’ (7). ‘After all’, she muses, ‘perhaps it is we, the little worms, who hold the hospital edifice up. Perhaps it would all come tumbling down if we were not here’ (114). Predictably, the ogre of the ward sister (represented here by the character of Maguire) makes an early appearance. Cos tells us she is ‘the most terrible person I  have ever met’ and even confesses to having nightmares about her. Like Hazard, Cos appears to be singled out for special attention. ‘It seems that I am her crucifixion, her crown of thorns, 34

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Dáil Éireann Debates, Volume 226, Number 6 at: http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20 authoring/debateswebpack.nsf/takes/dail1967020800014?opendocument [accessed 28 August 2015]. Hazard, Sixty Years a Nurse, pp. 169–70. An anonymous personal account in the Irish Democrat in January 1951 reveals the prominence of Irish nurses in a campaign for better working conditions in a British hospital. ‘They Treat us Like Dirt’, Irish Democrat (January 1951), p. 4.

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the sword in her side, and she lets me know it as often as she can’ (3). Given her surname, it is likely that Maguire (like Cos) is an Irish Catholic, something which may account for the way this description is dressed in biblical imagery. A parallel with the Irish nurses’ compatriots on the building sites is apparent here. Complaints made about ward sisters echo those made by navvies about gangers (site supervisors), many of whom were also Irish.37 The only time when the authority of the ward sisters was overruled was when the matron appeared, or when it came to ward rounds. In the following passage, Hazard fashions this moment into a graphically memorable image: We trailed behind the doctors and consultants in their crisp white coats and pin-striped suits, stethoscopes slung round their necks, as they pronounced on the patients and snapped their orders with military precision. We were like well-behaved little goslings following behind giant ganders. (40–1)

The gendered nature of the hospital regime is clearly apparent here. In Florrie’s Girls, Cos’s overt criticism of male authority figures and the inherent sexism and misogyny encountered by nurses belies Maeve Kelly’s distinctly feminist agenda. When a young woman is operated on after contracting an infection from a back-street abortionist, Cos confronts the surgeon about prejudicial comments he makes about her lifestyle. But she is dismissed by him as ‘the little fire-eater intent on demolishing the hospital system’ (212). Her most vitriolic criticism is reserved for a certain Mr McCrann, a consultant in a women’s clinic whose ward-round leaves Cos seething with anger at the manner in which he openly discusses the patients’ sex lives in front of the nurses. ‘It was all wrong, wrong, wrong,’ she protests (152). Despite the obvious deficiencies of their chosen career, all three authors were, as the texts demonstrate, nevertheless able to appreciate the more humorous side to their predicament. In keeping with the generally upbeat tone of her memoir, Hazard compares her experiences as a trainee to the comic feature film Carry On Nurse (1959) (31). She admits to having been a somewhat clumsy student nurse, whose analogue in the film is Stella Dawson (played by Joan Sims), whilst Maguire is mirrored in the character played by Joan Hickson. The near farcical nature of hospital life is never far from Cos’s thoughts either. She describes how, on one occasion, a male patient finds himself in hospital as a result of a violent dispute over 37

Ultan Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2001), pp. 198–201.

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a woman. The ward sister, who removes his stitches with a certain gusto, believes that the patient deserves no sympathy. ‘What can men do?’, she asks. ‘Fight. Build things up so that they can tear them down. That’s what men do’ (73). For a moment, this casual comment appears to promise further insights into the way some nurses viewed their compatriots on the building sites.38 However, the scene quickly descends into slapstick humour after one of the consultants intervenes unbidden. When the ward sister attacks him with a scissors, she loses her balance and falls (in arch Carry On style) on top of the patient in the bed. Like Morris and Hazard, therefore, Kelly demonstrates, through her alter-ego, Cos, that she can appreciate the comic as well as the serious side to gender relations within the hospital system. As noted previously, one of the perceived advantages for young Irish women of training to be nurses in Britain was the fact that accommodation usually came with the job, guaranteeing a safer and more secure environment than would have been the case had they been obliged to find ‘digs’ in the private rental sector. However, this came with its drawbacks. The supervision of nurses in their lodgings fell to the home sister, who, amongst other things, was responsible for ensuring that all nurses were in their beds at a suitable hour, typically by 10.30 at night.39 The rule about ‘lights out’ was particularly problematical when the nurses had an evening off and were obliged to leave early to ensure they were not locked out of the home. Coming back late from an evening’s dancing, Hazard and her fellow student nurses are forced to find an alternative means of gaining entry to the building. It was common practice in nursing homes for at least one nurse to leave her bedroom window discreetly open before going out for the evening. In Hazard’s case, the task falls to a nurse called Kathleen so that her fellow trainees can all ‘clamber in late’. Carry On Nurse springs to mind again as Hazard and her colleagues, all ‘a bit tipsy and high on the adventure’ land ‘in a heap in Kathleen’s room’ (138). The motif of ‘the open window’ also appears in Morris’s text. After a night out for dinner in Tunbridge Wells with her French boyfriend, she describes how he helped to push her through one such window after dark. She writes, ‘It was a real cloak-and-dagger effort to get to my room without being spotted by the eagle-eyed Home Sister’ (8). On this particular occasion, however, Morris 38

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The ward sister’s choice of words closely resembles the title of a popular ballad about Irish navvies in Britain. See Dominic Behan, ‘Building Up and Tearing England Down’ (1965). Not all nurses necessarily criticized such restrictions, emphasizing instead the benefits for young and sometimes naïve young women of clear boundaries. See Dunne, Journey Into the Unknown, p. 14.

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is evidently unsuccessful in her mission and the following day she is summoned to the Matron’s office: I waited to be admitted to the presence. She is such a terrifying figure as she sits behind her large desk in full regalia – severe navy dress with stiff starched collar, starched cap with frilly edges and a large bow tied under the medley of chins, all of them voicing disapproval. (9)

Similarities with Hazard’s description of this infamous symbol of hospital authority are evident here but so too is Morris’s skill at exacting a ruthless comic effect. If uniforms symbolized the constraints of the hospital regime, the following passage in Hazard’s memoir reveals how they also indicated how such young women had devoted themselves to a potentially valiant vocation: We had waist-length navy-blue woolen capes with a fabulous crimson lining, which we wore over our uniforms. It was a real Florence Nightingale touch and I felt wonderful in mine. They had red cross-over tapes to keep them in place – oh, I did feel like a proper nurse as I flounced along, my cape swishing in the wind. (27–8)

The figure of Florence Nightingale is mediated here (as it is in the title of Kelly’s novel) into a symbol of mid-twentieth-century Irish migrant experience in much the same way as the mythical figure of Cuchulain is invoked in contemporaneous ‘navvy narratives’ where feats of physical prowess by Irish construction workers are described.40 Such heroic notions are apparent in Cos’s earliest entry in her diary. ‘My heart was down in my boots to be leaving’, she declares, ‘but I consoled myself with the thought that at long last I was doing something noble’ (1). Six months into her training at St Monica’s, however, she is having second thoughts. ‘So far I don’t feel the least bit noble’, she writes, ‘I feel frazzled’ (2). In time, she fantasizes about putting an advertisement in the local paper, reading, ‘Ennobling experience for sale. Bargain offer. Low reserve. Going cheap. Very cheap’ (72). Despite the mischievous tone of this entry, Cos’s frustration and disappointment are unmistakable. Like her peers, it is only when the relatively rare opportunity arises to offer one-to-one care for individual patients that she is able to affirm her raison d’etre and her determination to continue nursing. ‘It is truly amazing’, she says, ‘how much pleasure is to be had in caring for people and making them feel better’ (38). In contrast to the 40

Tony Murray, ‘Navvy Narratives:  Interactions between Fictional and Autobiographical Accounts of Irish Construction Workers in Britain’, in Ireland: Space, Text, Time, ed. by Liam Harte, Yvonne Whelan and Patrick Crotty (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2005), pp. 209–17.

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accounts by their male counterparts referred to earlier, the heroic associations of a nursing career soon give way to a more personal and meaningful sense of job satisfaction. Cultural differences between the Irish and the English come under scrutiny, to a lesser or greater extent, in all three texts. Morris does this by highlighting the role of social class and accent in her diary. She discovers that ‘the type of colonel’s lady who looks down her nose at my soft Irish brogue will be charm itself if I teasingly adopt an Oxford drawl’ (7). Morris’s use of the word ‘teasingly’ suggests that, despite such an intimidating working environment, she has the self-confidence and linguistic facility to exploit circumstances for her own advantage when she needs to. Cos’s awareness of class is refracted through even stronger references to national or nationalist identity. When she observes how ‘The English place a lot of importance on uniforms’, she supposes this ‘is because they are so class-aware’. ‘The Irish are not neat and tidy,’ she declares. ‘The day we get neat and tidy with lawns and garden gnomes is the day we will have forgotten how to live . . . Things should fall into place and should be allowed to happen without too much pushing. It’s the pushy people who create disorder. The takeovers and colonizers and conquerors’ (78–9). When her Irish colleague Hanly begins courting an English doctor, Cos is not convinced that she will be able to adapt to English customs, prompting a strong patriotic declaration. ‘It would wear me out,’ she announces. ‘And it would wear me out having to forget all that I am, all that I am rooted in and the thousands of years that went into making me what I am’ (162). Awareness of a cultural clash between Englishness and Irishness, therefore, is more pronounced in Cos’s case than in that of her peers. As Cos nears the conclusion of her training, she resorts to increasingly lengthy and contemplative entries in her diary that explore deeper feelings about her chosen profession. Writing, in effect, becomes a way by which she confronts her ambivalence about this but also increasingly asks complex questions about her sense of identity. In the following passage she sets up a rhetorical opposition between her rural Irish background and the urban English culture to which she is becoming accustomed, while simultaneously exposing the extent to which the hospital’s institutional hierarchies are acutely gendered: I often think of the winds of home, the way they whine and wail outside our house and make the trees crooked and strip them bare. We are out of touch with winds and stormy weather here because we don’t have to work in them. We are wound up like clockwork dolls and do the bidding of people who have no sense and not much intelligence. We clean and

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tend and administer to people who come and go with their ailments big and small. We prepare them for their masters the surgeons. We prepare the sacrificial table and clean the knives and hand everything over to men who cover themselves in green cloths and hide their expressions behind masks as they pretend to be gods and we pretend to be their handmaidens. (200)

Cos begins to realize, therefore, how she and her colleagues have become mere cogs in the hospital machine. As a consequence, they are reduced to performing empty institutional rituals rather than caring for their patients in a meaningful way. On a personal level the sense of loss for Cos here is palpable. By powerfully evoking elemental imagery of the Irish countryside, she portrays a younger more innocent self being sacrificed to a work ethic which demands total commitment, if not capitulation. Even for Morris, who is generally less emotionally forthcoming, her occasional trips back to Ireland excite unambiguous declarations of belonging. In June 1940, she records her delight at ‘hearing familiar Irish voices’ on the mail boat from Holyhead to Dublin, and ‘the happy laughter of people going home to their families, glad to get away from the black-out of London’. The ‘smell of the boat to Ireland always excites me,’ she writes, and after a hearty Irish breakfast in Dublin, she declares, ‘It was bliss. I was home’ (11-13). Writing for Morris, however, does not entail quite the same degree of cathartic release as it does for her two peers. This is, perhaps, because hers is a more clandestine and proscribed text. If the least mediated of the three narratives, it nevertheless belies the skills of an experienced prose stylist, as evidenced by her evocative descriptions of the London Blitz (38). By the end of her diary she has a developed literary sense of a reader (albeit an imagined one) and is clearly concerned to maintain high standards in regards to the quality of her writing. This is evident, for instance, in her withering critique of a suitor’s attempts at poetry.41 It is apparent that writing has also played a formative role in Cos’s personal development over the period of her training. She prophetically observes near the beginning of the diary that ‘talking about things sometimes makes them worse’ and ‘writing about them makes them worse too’, but ‘at least it makes them clearer’ (21). The sense of immediacy and contemporaneity in Morris and Cos’s diaries is not so evident in Hazard’s memoir, which by definition is more retrospective. But Hazard’s backward glance has the virtue of greater objectivity. This enables Hazard to situate her nursing experiences in the 41

Morris, A Very Private Diary, 61.

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wider context of her national and family inheritance, in mid-twentiethcentury labour relations and in women’s migration more generally. Memoirs and diaries (fictional or otherwise) provide scope for their subjects to write at length about the day-to-day routine of their working lives in a way that is not so true of oral testimony. That routine, in the case of Irish nurses, was often tedious and repetitive. The pay was poor and the conditions were tough. That is abundantly clear from all three of the accounts explored here. But as Hazard declares, ‘the camaraderie was fantastic’ (127). Having chosen her path and followed it, she concludes. ‘I was happy in my choices’ (264). Even in the case of Cos, who decides by the completion of her training that she is temperamentally ill-suited to nursing, her honesty and bravery in the face of ultimately insurmountable obstacles is admirable. Narrative, in one form or another, therefore, enables the three authors to come to terms with the challenges they face as student nurses. In the case of A Very Private Nurse, this takes place contemporaneously, whilst in Sixty Year a Nurse it is retrospective. In Florrie’s Girls, it is a mixture of the two processes, contemporaneous if read through the character of Cos, but retrospective if read through from the semi-autobiographical perspective of its author. In all three texts, narrative provides a sense of time passing, conditions changing and characters evolving. This enables us as readers to share, empathize and begin to understand the lives and environments of three representative Irish female workers in mid-twentieth-century Britain. What is ultimately most striking about these texts is the way all three authors employ prose narrative to not simply record events about their lives, but also to manage and mediate their feelings about those events and adjust to migration and their working environment. In this regard, the books clearly have a cathartic and self-affirming function for their authors as well as providing a historically informative resource for their readers.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ethel Corduff for her invaluable assistance with information about Irish nurses in Britain.

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Ch apter 11

The View from Below Solidarity and Struggle in Irish-American Working-Class Literature Margaret Hallissy and John Lutz Ideology can be defined as ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.1 This chapter explores how workingclass characters in Irish-American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imagine their socio-economic world and live out their assumptions in ways that are either consistent with or contrary to the real conditions of their lives. Some writers directly address class oppression; others implicitly endorse the status quo. Some present the characters’ problems as structural features of their society; others place the full weight of responsibility on individuals, ignoring economic circumstances entirely. In each case, the way characters imagine their world is shown to have a crucial impact on their physical and psychological well-being, either reinforcing their class position or challenging it. The term ‘Irish-American fiction’ will be defined here primarily by the identity of the characters and only secondarily by that of the authors, although the two usually coincide. The time span extends from the midnineteenth century, when the great wave of Irish emigration to America in the wake of the Great Famine began, to the present. The writers discussed include three nineteenth-century writers, James William Sullivan (1848–1938), Mary Anne Madden Sadlier (1820–1903) and Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1901); Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936), whose work spans the two centuries; and twentieth-century works by James T. Farrell (1904–79), Maeve Brennan (1917–93), Betty Smith (1896–1972), William Kennedy (b. 1928) and Colum McCann (b. 1965). The organisation of the chapter is a combination of thematic and chronological. Four recurring themes emerge: the dignity of the worker as contrasted with the venality of the upper classes, the problems specific to women’s work, unionisation of the labour force and alternatives to capitalism. 1

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 162.

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Beginning with the late nineteenth century, writers in the IrishAmerican tradition stress the dignity of the worker and depict the upper classes negatively. As Lawrence B.  Glickman observes, ‘workers understood the American standard as the just reward for their labor,’2 and consequently deplored the obverse: the unjust reward gleaned by the rich from the labour of the workers. Portrayal of the poor is related to the question of personal responsibility. In the nineteenth century, American poverty was often attributed to personal faults rather than social conditions, ‘a fault of the individual more than the social system’.3 This theme emerges in James William Sullivan’s fiction. In two stories in Tenement Tales of New  York (1895), ‘Slob Murphy’ and ‘A Young Desperado:  A Story for Boys’, the labour organiser and writer locates deviant behaviour in the young, not in their own innate characters, nor in the natural inferiority of their class, but in the social and economic conditions that surround them. For one child, change arrives too late; for the other, infinite possibilities await. For each, circumstances prevail. Pat ‘Slob’ Murphy’s life is nasty, brutish and short. Would it have been different had he lived under better circumstances? Sullivan suggests so. Pat is eight years old and – his mother dead, his father a drunk – earns money via petty theft. Circumstances require him to be out on the street, where he is mortally injured in a horse carriage accident. On his deathbed, finally free from the obligation to make his way in a harsh environment, ‘Slob’ achieves the dignity that eluded him in his brief life. Once this child is off the streets and in the protected, enclosed, womblike space of a basement room off the kitchen, he develops charitable and gentle attitudes appropriate to the nurturing setting, suggesting that his social and economic environment has a determining influence on his life. His moniker, ‘Slob’, is thus revealed as a cruel misnomer, as are the discourses of personal responsibility attendant on poverty. Pat’s father, Mick, is an alcoholic, but his condition is also revealed as a product of his environment. Mick, a hod-carrier, is injured in a ‘calamitous fall’ from the beams on a construction site, making him ‘a cripple fur life’.4 The absence of workers’ compensation dooms him and his son to poverty. Such unsafe working conditions could have been rectified even given the 2

3

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Lawrence B. Glickman, ‘American Standard of Living’, in Encyclopedia of U. S. Labor and WorkingClass History, Vol. 1, ed. by Eric Arnesen (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 99. Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 62. James William Sullivan, Tenement Tales of New York (New York: Holt, 1895; repr. [Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2012]), pp. 30–1.

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technology of the nineteenth century, were it not for the mentality that the workers, especially the less skilled and easily replaced, were human fodder for the industry; indeed – to invoke again the discourse of personal failure – and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, ‘many businesses considered an on-the-job injury to be due to carelessness by the employee.’5 Even Mick’s failure to keep his promise to his dead son not to drink again dramatises the imprisoning limitations of his impoverished circumstances. Mick’s promise is no doubt sincere, but isolated individuals, infantilised by the system, have little control over the social and economic circumstances that shape their prospects and behaviour. Mick does not challenge his position within the class system, but he drinks to escape it. Sullivan’s ‘A Young Desperado: A Story for Boys’ provides an alternative fate for the child hero. Raymond Hastings, who is rich and Anglo, runs away from his home in upper-class Manhattan to a seedy lower-class neighbourhood where he meets Skinny Maguire, who is poor and Irish. The coddled rich boy, in his journey to the other side of the poverty line, has his clothes stolen by poor boys. In rags, Raymond appears to be a street urchin. Skinny, a genuine street urchin, has the usual array of problems consequent upon his impoverished environment. But he possesses selfconfidence and nascent entrepreneurial skills. Skinny educates Raymond in the finer points of begging and trickery, so necessary to ‘git on in business’.6 This detail furnishes an ironic reflection on the so-called legitimate businesses that have created the social and economic conditions that generate poverty for children like Skinny. Again Sullivan challenges how poverty is framed. Raymond’s new class identity transforms him so much that when his father eventually finds him, he does not recognise his own son. Grateful for Skinny’s protection of his son, Mr. Hastings rewards Skinny by offering to finance his education. Skinny immediately chooses Yale University, graduation from which would catapult him up the social hierarchy. As children, the boys are interchangeable, Sullivan conveys; only their clothing, that most superficial of class attributes, differentiates them. As adults, given the infusion of cash from Mr. Hastings, they would become indistinguishable, illustrating Sullivan’s belief that class is unconnected to innate characteristics, but is rather constructed by conditions imposed from without. The ability of each of the boys to adapt readily to the economic 5

6

Carol Berkin, Christopher L. Miller, Robert W. Cherny and James L. Gormly, Making America: A History of the United States, 7th edn (Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2015), p. 457. Ibid., p. 220.

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conditions that surround them points to a fundamental human equality that undercuts any ideology endorsing the innate superiority of the upper classes. Problematically, though, the story’s resolution places responsibility for social change on individual generosity rather than structural transformation. But the focus on a child protagonist also directs responsibility for poverty away from the poor themselves, towards the system that shapes them. Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional spokesperson is the Roscommon-born bartender Mr. Dooley, who observes the world from his Chicago saloon. For him, such private charity as Mr. Hastings’ is little more than pious hope, since the affluent seem incapable of understanding how their behaviour appears to the have-nots. A prime example of this is in Dooley’s discussion with his sidekick, Mr. Hennessy, of a ball given in 1897 by a wealthy family, the Bradley-Martins of Troy, New York. Hennessy defends them, asserting that money spent by the wealthy trickles down into the pockets of the poor. This provokes Dooley to tell a story set in Famine-era Ireland. The Bradley-Martins’ counterpart is a ‘rich landlord’ named Dorsey, who, when times were good, was generous and fair. But then came the Famine, when Dorsey resorted to the typical strategies of his class: ‘th’ writs an’ th’ evictions’.7 When clergymen call him to account, Dorsey congratulates himself for providing minimal relief, feeling he has done enough. And so Dorsey sees nothing inappropriate about having nightly parties in his big house as all around him people starve. Dorsey is consequently murdered by a Galway man. Dooley’s point about Dorsey’s conspicuous consumption ties his situation to that of the Bradley-Martins: ‘’Twas th’ music iv th’ band an’ th’ dancin’8 that destroyed any pretense to human fellowship. So, Dooley suggests, have the Bradley-Martins. In a later piece on the same event, Dunne makes his point even more explicit, comparing the rich of the United States and their ostentatious lifestyle to the excesses of the nobility preceding the French Revolution, and both to a ‘kag iv dinnymite’ about to explode.9 In each of these examples, the lavish and ostentatious lifestyles of the rich are an affront to the dignity of poor, struggling and suffering 7

8 9

Finley Peter Dunne, ‘The Necessity of Modesty among the Rich:  A Tale of the Famine’, in The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction, 2nd edn, ed. by Charles Fanning (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1997), pp. 266–8 (p. 267). Ibid., p. 268. Finley Peter Dunne, ‘After the Bradley-Martin Ball’, in Mr. Dooley and the Chicago Irish:  The Autobiography of a Nineteenth-Century Ethnic Group, ed. and intro. by Charles Fanning (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1987), pp. 201–4 (p. 204).

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workers, and therefore an incitement to revolution. In these and in many other Mr. Dooley pieces, Dunne launches serious criticism by mocking the foibles of the upper classes, underscoring the inhumanity of the captains of industry and exposing industrial progress as the ruthless avarice of morally bankrupt ruling classes. Dooley charges that the main source of the private charity, which some allege will right the wrongs of capitalism, is ironically the poor themselves. Dooley and his saloon patrons live within an economic system that has clearly been created for the benefit of others, but they take care of their own. Through representations of the poor acting to help one another in distress, Dooley presents the working class as a vehicle for the democratic ideals of equality and human dignity, placing them in contrast to the ruling class, their lavish consumption of wealth and indifference to human suffering. In ‘Jim O’Neill’ (1934), James T. Farrell, like Sullivan and Dunne, depicts the worker sympathetically, yet his Jim O’Neill finds meaning more in personal resilience than in political rebellion. A teamster recovering from a stroke, he reminisces about his life. His investment in his individual struggle as a worker and his ideology of honesty provide the framework for his understanding of his past. Although he has challenged the system by participating in collective labour action, he has also worked within it, moving up in the company to a management position, which finances a better apartment boasting an indoor toilet and electricity. However, his psychological well-being has suffered. He is demoralised by ‘the kind of a life that he had known, the drinking, poverty, fighting, strikes, like that teamsters’ strike back around 1904, when the company sluggers and thugs had tried to get him’.10 Jim’s physical deterioration is presented as a consequence of his difficult life of labour and points to his dehumanisation. His inability to work after his stroke contributes to a loss of self-worth. His one remaining goal is that his ten surviving children will not have to work as he has done; but an epiphany at the close of the story brings him to a realisation that their lives will be no better. Jim’s insight emphasises the cycle of poverty in which he and his children are imprisoned and denied dignified work or lives. Jim’s own dignity lies in his stoic acceptance of a situation he is powerless to change. Farrell suggests little hope of political change. 10

James T. Farrell, ‘Jim O’Neill’, in Calico Shoes, and Other Stories (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934), repr. in Chicago Stories, ed. by Charles Fanning (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 57–63 (p. 61).

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In Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness (1998), about the ‘sandhogs’ who in 1916 dug the subway tunnel under the East River, a key element of the narrative is the death of worker Con O’Leary. Building a tunnel is dangerous and unhealthy work; sandhogs routinely suffer ‘the bends’ from decompression and, over time, develop ‘blackening lungs’.11 The risk of accidents is high. When a blowout occurs, and air pressure shoots three sandhogs into the air, they are ‘blown upward like gods’ (21). Three workers survive. The fourth worker experiences no such resurrection: ‘Con O’Leary, 34, from Roscommon, Ireland, is still missing, presumed dead’ (23), leaving a pregnant wife, Maura. Again, calculated cruelty belies the upper classes’ supposed charity. William Randall, ‘the boss’ of the company, whose ‘polished shoes’ (47, 24) indicate his status as well as his far safer working conditions, visits Maura with what passes for ‘compensation’: ‘There was no time to look for Con’s body,’ he says ‘. . . Will a hundred dollars suffice?’ (25). The paltriness of Randall’s offer indicates the low value placed by management on low-skilled, thus easily replaceable workers, again, as in Sullivan’s ‘Slob Murphy’, treated as industrial fuel. Maura’s refusal to accept the money follows Randall’s claim that he takes care of his workers, thus upbraiding his hypocrisy. She does, however, accept money collected from Con’s fellow sandhogs, another example of Mr. Dooley’s insight that it is the poor who help the poor. Con O’Leary, whose body lies for all eternity beneath the East River, is a reminder that all the great construction projects of Manhattan and other American cities came at the cost of the lives of working-class men, many of whom were, like Con, Irish. The benefit, however, goes not to Con or his family, but to the owners of the company and to the citizenry who use the subways. His grandson Clarence Nathan, the product of a marriage between Con’s daughter and his co-worker Nathan Walker, will undertake an equally risky but opposite role when he joins the ironworkers, who ‘rise, aristocratic, in the air’ to ‘pierce the virginity of space where the steel hits the sky’ (229). Clarence Nathan is especially daring: he ‘will go higher than any other walking man in Manhattan’ (229). His daring and sense of balance is comparable only to that of the legendary Mohawk steelworkers and earns him his nickname, Treefrog. Although collective solutions to the oppression of workers appear to be absent, the novel affirms a common human dignity in Treefrog’s symbolic emergence from his buried life in the tunnels. Through Treefrog’s decision to find his own form of 11

Colum McCann, This Side of Brightness (New York: Holt, 1998), pp. 13, 9; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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resurrection, the novel affirms the sacrifices of the sandhogs who built the tunnels beneath Manhattan and the ironworkers who raised the skyscrapers above it. The courage of Irish working women in homes and factories is demonstrated in fictions of the mid-nineteenth century as moral rather than physical in nature: men risk their lives, but women risk their virtue.12 The plots are only tangentially concerned with such mundane matters as wages and working conditions; however, the strict codes of sexual behaviour that they reinforce suggest a method of ideological control designed to keep women workers in a subordinate role. In particular, romantic entanglements that might serve as vehicles for aspirations beyond one’s station in life as a maid or factory worker are discouraged by standards of virtue designed to control sexual behaviour. Bessie Conway; or, The Irish Girl in America (1861), by ‘Mrs. J. Sadlier’, Mary Anne Madden Sadlier, is a work of marginal literary merit but important in that it furnishes a typical example of how strict moral codes operated to suppress working-class female desire. Preservation of virginity is assumed to be more difficult in the urban environment where domestic work was available to Irish girls. Sadlier sets up a contrast between Bessie Conway, the ideal household employee, and Sally, another maid, who misbehaves. The virtuous path for Bessie entails sacrificing the possibility of pleasure and emotional fulfilment to become an exemplar of all the servile virtues. Not contented with practising humility herself, she also acculturates other female servants into the habit of subordination. Thus Bessie unwittingly preserves the status quo, shoring up the position of the rich against the interests of her own social class. Sally’s fate is a cautionary tale of the consequences of bucking the system. The negative consequences of Sally’s desire for free time and personal fulfilment in a romantic relationship counsel against such assertions of basic rights that apparently exemplify a poor moral character and lead to disaster. Sally is fired for an unspecified offense presumably connected to this relationship, and the loss of her position begins a downward spiral; she winds up begging to support an alcoholic husband and starving children, and finally dies in misery. Such is the fate of women workers who would assert their right to personal fulfilment, sexual choice and autonomy. 12

This theme is examined with regard to nineteenth-century British working-class writing in H. Gustav Klaus’s The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), and it appears also in Irish works such as Oliver St John Gogarty’s Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917); Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (first performed in 1926); and Patrick MacGill’s The Rat-Pit (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1999).

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Economic advancement is presented as a result of subservience, a strategy that ensures continued exploitation. By contrast, ‘Minnie Kelsey’s Wedding’, another of Sullivan’s Tenement Tales, which stresses the dehumanising conditions in factories, places blame on factory owners rather than workers. Minnie’s job is described in provocative imagery that emphasises its monotonous, dehumanising characteristics, comparing it to a prison, to a treadmill. Factory workers become reified, resembling the machines they operate. Their labour earns them ‘bread’, bare survival, but no ‘roses’ in their cheeks, stealing their health as it drains their spirits.13 Sullivan’s description of the grim reality of factory work emphasises its physical and emotional cost in a way that foregrounds the brutal exploitation of female workers, rather than concealing it behind the ideological platitudes about virtuous behaviour and faithful service in fiction praising domestic labour. Minnie lives with her aunt, the aunt’s drunken husband and their three children, and is made to do ‘half a night’s drudgery in her new home . . . after shop hours’.14 Factory girls’ ‘free’ time was often highly restricted due to confining social mores and family expectations, and when Minnie is tricked into attending a party in expensive garments, she violates an oftrepeated prohibition against out-dressing her station, arousing the wrath of her uncle. Minnie impulsively accepts an offer of marriage as the only refuge from this miserable life, but it is not clear whether she has saved herself from a life of repression or continued it with a different persecutor. Nonetheless, the story forms a marked contrast to Bessie Conway both to the degree that it withholds any moral condemnation of Minnie for violating any codes of moral virtue and for the way it condemns the psychological and emotional deprivation endemic to factory labour. Minnie’s dissatisfaction with mere bread and her desire for personal fulfilment and autonomy are presented sympathetically. By the twentieth century, the situation of at least fictional domestics has improved considerably, as reflected in the short stories of Maeve Brennan. ‘The View from the Kitchen’ (1953), set in a fictional suburb north of New York City, features maids whose primary relationship is not with their employer, but with each other. From their vantage point, the American upper classes deserve moral condemnation, not because they are evil, but because they are trivial. For these socially ambitious homeowners, a view of the Hudson River is a crucial status symbol. But while 13 14

Sullivan, Tenement Tales of New York, p. 50. Ibid., pp. 48–9.

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they view the river, the maids view them, and it is clear that the ‘view from the kitchen’ is the valid one. The story’s title ironically juxtaposes the superficial values of the affluent, whose main concern is to flaunt wealth and status, with the perspective of the maids, who see their employers’ moral bankruptcy. As the more experienced Bridie explains to her new counterpart Agnes, their employer has just married the owner of a cottage that obstructs her view, for the sole purpose of having the cottage demolished for the sake of the view. This ruthless act hints at the inhumane economic calculations of capitalist society at large, Bridie’s attitude towards her employer’s actions providing a stark contrast with that of Sadlier’s Bessie Conway. If Bessie’s instruction is conformist, Bridie’s is subversive, implicitly encouraging Agnes to privilege ‘the view from the kitchen’. Imagery of the optical and secret observation abounds: ‘ “Don’t let them see you looking,” she [Bridie] said, and the two of them crowded together at the side of the window, behind the curtain, and stared out.’15 Given their opportunities for spying, the maids know more about their employers’ ‘antics’16 than the employers suspect, their satirical commentary baring their employers’ pretensions. More importantly, the two maids, peering together from a window, establish solidarity with each other as against the moneyed class. Different in tone, Brennan’s ‘The Bride’ (1953) centres on a maid, Margaret Casey, who is preparing to leave her employment to marry. However, she is not actually in love with her fiancé, Carl, but only wants to quit her job, and feels that she needs the excuse of marriage to do so. Margaret had planned to return to her mother in Ireland, but when her mother dies, and with no alternate plans, she accepts Carl’s proposal. Carl has a skilled trade as a plumber, which suggests that the marriage is financially viable, but he is also a drinker and a tyrant, which suggests a life of misery. The story raises the question of whether Margaret would be better off as a poorly paid servant than as Carl’s poorly treated wife. The title becomes ironic in that the happiness any bride would hope for is clearly not in Margaret’s future; she will be bridled by Carl forever. In its depiction of Margaret’s entrapment, ‘The Bride’ suggests that while the physical conditions may have improved for domestic workers, their economic oppression and emotional deprivation has not improved all that much from the nineteenth century. Margaret’s plight as a domestic parallels 15

16

Maeve Brennan, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, The New Yorker, November 14, 1953; repr. in The Rose Garden: Short Stories (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000), pp. 3–15 (p. 6). Ibid., p. 5.

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Minnie’s dilemma as a factory worker in James W. Sullivan’s tale set more than a half a century earlier. While domestic labour could be dull, poorly paid and infantilising, and factory work monotonous and unhealthy, married women could fare even worse. Further, the unmarried woman, whether in a home or in a factory, was under constant threat of sexual harassment. In Sullivan’s ‘Cohen’s Figure’ (1895), the main character, a young and virtuous girl named Ernestine Beulefoy, is tormented by the sexual advances of the factory owner, Cohen. Ernestine, who supports her family following her father’s death, is forced into work as a ‘figure’, a dressmaking model, and has little choice but to submit to Cohen’s dehumanising advances. The situation becomes so intolerable that Ernestine commits suicide. But instead of decrying the factory owner’s depravity, the unnamed narrator valorises Ernestine’s suicide as a courageous act that upholds her humanity and dignity and provides the ultimate defence against sexual exploitation. In its emphasis on the insults that follow Ernestine wherever she looks for work, ‘Cohen’s Figure’ presents the sexual exploitation of women in the workplace as commonplace. Furthermore, the story provides a contrasting perspective to the cautionary tales for domestic servants that place the full weight of moral responsibility and condemnation on women. Working-class women, who had to rely on their labour for survival, were not only among those most vulnerable to economic exploitation but also to sexual predation. Such sexual exploitation in the workplace is also apparent in the early experiences of Helen in William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983). Like Ernestine in ‘Cohen’s Figure’, Helen is compelled by financial need to abandon her professional training in music and go to work in a piano store. Although Helen’s memory of the relationship is dominated by romantic delusions, the narrative makes clear that the store’s proprietor, Arthur, has been sexually exploiting her. After Arthur abandons Helen for a younger woman, he offers to let her continue to work in the store because ‘there has never been a saleswoman as good’ as she is.17 Helen does not see this as a professional compliment so much as a condescending form of payment for her sexual services. Her inability to develop her musical talent because of her class, combined with Arthur’s sexual exploitation, contributes to her low selfesteem and reinforces the overarching theme of unrealised potential due to economic status. On the last day of her life, homeless and dying, Helen arrives at some insight into her lost potential. She sees herself as ‘spoiled

17

William Kennedy, Ironweed: A Novel (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 127.

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seed’, as ‘barren . . . of no value’.18 Her fate underscores the vulnerability of female workers and capitalism’s waste of poor women’s talent. Like their real-life counterparts, characters in fiction seek a remedy to their powerlessness via collective action, and union-related issues often play an essential role in character and plot development. In James T. Farrell’s ‘The Buddies’ (1934), organised labour takes on some of the characteristics of organised management. Joey Murtry, the story’s villain, a union leader and former teamster, profits by collaboration with management against his members, yet remains in power. All the union members know well that they ‘had to pay their union dues because they wanted their jobs, and they knew that if they squawked or tried to oust Joey from his control, they would be terrorized by his hired sluggers’.19 Two of the younger union members form an alternative organisation, mainly intended to plan employee social events. This club, ‘The Buddies’, begins to mimic the function of the union, sometimes performing more effectively for members than the union itself. Threatened, Murtry sends his ‘sluggers’ to beat up the leaders and force them to disband their group. However, ‘The Buddies’ delivers even more: the genuine personal fulfilment and solidarity it provides threatens the company’s power over its workers more than the union does. In its examination of the way the union functions as a violent and repressive arm of the company, serving the company’s interests, ‘The Buddies’ explores how labour unions can be co-opted by capitalist interests to blunt more radical forms of association. The brutal beating of Jack and Smitty dramatises the violent repression of labour even as it explores the limitations of unions in the pursuit of workers’ interests. The new Lincoln that Joe Murtry purchases at the end of the story ironically registers how capitalists and their henchmen benefit materially from suppressing genuine solidarity among workers and preserving the status quo. Membership in a union initially appears to be the foundation of success in James T.  Farrell’s Young Lonigan (1943). During the summer of 1916, the title character’s father, Patrick J. Lonigan, sits on his back porch after dinner, ‘exuding burgher comfort’.20 Patrick is a working-class man with right-wing values, and his endorsement of hard work as the foundation 18 19

20

Ibid., pp. 126–7. James T. Farrell, ‘The Buddies’, in Calico Shoes and Other Stories (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934), repr. in Chicago Stories, ed. by Charles Fanning (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 34–9 (p. 36). James T.  Farrell, Young Lonigan (New  York:  Vanguard Press, 1932; rpt. New  York:  Penguin, 2001), p. 14.

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of his success, along with his moral condemnation of the poor, dramatises how ideology blinds workers to their own class positions. Although Pat views himself as successful, his identification with a class to which he does not belong ironically underscores his inability to recognise his own disempowerment. Thinking of his children triggers nostalgic memories of his own childhood, which recall conditions for the Irish one generation earlier. He was ‘ragged’, his father ‘a pauperized greenhorn’,21 but now, as an adult, Patrick has come to regard the Irish as the gold standard of civilisation, and he laments their social decline and the ascendency of other groups. His racist views separate him from those who occupy largely the same economic position and share the same class interests. Pat’s nostalgia for the past is yet another ideology blinding him to the real conditions of his existence. He attributes some of his own relative prosperity to the painters’ union, which won significant benefits: life insurance, disability protection for workplace injuries, better pay and the eight-hour day. But Lonigan seems to attribute his success more to personal qualities than collective effort. Eventually he owns his own business and becomes somewhat successful. Now his goal is to maintain and even improve his children’s class status. This is the American dream: by dint of hard work and good planning, to raise oneself higher than one’s parents, and to propel one’s children even higher. However, Pat’s projections about his family’s future prosperity are perhaps delusional given his inability to recognise his own class position. In Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), the central character, Francie Nolan, grows up in an impoverished family of four:  her father, Johnny Nolan, her mother, Katie, and her brother, Neely. The family lives on the edge of starvation. Unionisation has been accomplished in many lines of work, but is not universally supported by all working-class families. As a non-union janitor, Katie Nolan begrudges the cost of Johnny’s dues to the Waiters’ Union, but Johnny is proud of his membership and regards his Union button as ‘an ornament . . . like a rose’.22 Working conditions improved under the union, and so, despite Katie’s disapproval, Johnny is a firm supporter whose union job bodes well for the family’s finances. But Johnny fails to lift the Nolan family out of poverty. Born into a poor and uneducated family, he marries young and has two children immediately, which makes it impossible for him to acquire any more 21 22

Ibid., p. 15. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York: Everybody’s Vacation, 1943; repr. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), p. 38.

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education or training than he had at nineteen. Returning to the theme of wasted creative talent, Johnny’s longing for emotional fulfilment in his work is expressed in his career goal to be a ‘real singer’.23 This causes him to make a disastrous choice. Instead of being a career waiter with bookings as a singer on the side, Johnny chooses to specialise in the ‘singingwaiter business’.24 Charming but feckless, he drinks, gambles, makes excuses for his drinking, promises to reform, pities himself and drinks again. Eventually he is dismissed from his union, the consequent disappointment triggering his final drinking binge. The union appears hypocritical when it sends a floral arrangement to the funeral of a man it had only recently ejected. Union membership does not help Francis Phelan, in William Kennedy’s Ironweed, any more than it has helped Johnny Nolan, but for different reasons. In this novel, the trolley workers’ strike of 1901 contributes to Francis’ downward spiral of alcoholism, marital failure and joblessness. A ‘trolley full of scabs’ attempts to break the strike, and Francis, a failed baseball player who was still a skilled pitcher, ‘brained the scab working as the trolley conductor’ with a stone, and killed him.25 Here a wasted talent (for sport) is subverted by social conditions (into violence). The dead strikebreaker, Harold Allen, reappears to Francis at various points in the novel, a ghost of the past that Francis cannot escape. Interestingly, Francis defends his strike-related violence and justifies Allen’s killing by connecting it to roots in the Irish past and American labour history. Irish anti-colonial radicalism is exported to an American context, as Francis remembers ‘Emmett Daugherty, the wild Fenian . . . with his stories of how moneymen used workers to get rich and treated the Irish like pigdog paddyniggers’ (176). The backstory involving Daugherty draws an equation between American capitalists and Anglo-Irish landholders in Ireland, and therefore equates American socialism with Irish nationalism. As with Irish-American labour figures such as ‘Rebel Girl’ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the two causes unite in the person of Emmett Daugherty. A ‘death ship’ emigrant from Cork, Daugherty, through a confluence of random events, arrives in Albany, ‘inspiring Francis to identify the enemy and target him with a stone’ (205). Edward Daugherty, Emmett’s son and a playwright, casts Francis as the hero of his play, ‘liberator of the strikers from the capitalist beggars who 23 24 25

Ibid., p. 40. Ibid. Kennedy, Ironweed:  A Novel, p.  25; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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owned the trolleys’ (206), comparable in every way to the Irishmen who fought for Ireland’s independence. However, Francis is unable to see himself in this way; his act only initiates the first of many flights that dramatise the degree to which he remains subject to inchoate forces beyond his control. Francis’s negative assessment of class struggle springs from his guilt over killing Harold Allen, a guilt that turns him away from the pursuit of any collective solutions to his pervasive experience of powerlessness. Eventually, Francis comes to see that the strike was simply an example of the ‘insanity of the Irish, poor against poor, a class divided against itself ’ (207). He understands now that, rather than relinquish one iota of their own power, the upper classes pit the lower classes against each other, allowing them to kill each other off. He now sees self-help rather than collective action as the solution to the workingman’s problem. No ‘socialistic god’ will save him, but his own determination ‘to live, to beat the bastards . . . and show them all what a man can do to set things right’ (207). This solipsistic analysis rejects political explication in favour of individualist action, yet ironically Francis is unable to set anything right; his turning away from solidarity with others leaves him alone and at the mercy of the dehumanising forces that have defined his life and his possibilities. Although Francis is unable to find solidarity in political activism, he does find it briefly in his association with Rudy, as they work together digging graves in a cemetery marked by class distinctions between the ‘privileged dead’ and those lying beneath ‘simple headstones and simpler crosses’ (1). Francis becomes aware of a ‘bond’ with Rudy in that they ‘were both questing for the behaviour that was proper to their station and their unutterable dreams’ (23). In its evocation of the connection between manual labour and hopelessness, as well as the shared inarticulate dreams for something better, the passage emphasises their common need for forms of fulfilment suppressed by capitalism. Although Francis ultimately turns away from socialism, his feeling of brotherhood with Rudy suggests their common need for autonomy over their lives. In a parallel with Farrell’s ‘The Buddies’, union involvement or activism is unable to provide a satisfactory alternative to capitalism; this must be sought for elsewhere. If unionisation represents only a partial solution to the problems of the working class in a capitalist society, other approaches, such as private charity, are also considered. But according to Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley, the greatest flaw of reliance on charity is that it leaves untouched an economic system that is fundamentally unjust. Dooley tells the tale of a man called Casey, who is one of a group of ‘arnychists . . . inimies iv governmint’,

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which is Dooley’s opinion of socialists. Casey inveighs against ‘ “th’ governmint . . . [which] is in th’ hands iv th’ monno-polists . . . an’ they’re crushin’ th’ life out iv the prolotoorios . . . Look at th’ Willum Haitch Vanderbilts,” says he, “an’ th’ Gools an’ the Astors,” says he, “an’ thin look at us,” he says, “groun’ down,” he says, “till we cries f ’r bread on th’ sthreet,” he says, “an’ they give us a stone”.’26 Casey’s are the nascent insights of a developing class consciousness, regardless of the O’Caseyesque linguistic mirth. Part of the humour of the piece is, however, that Dooley relays what Casey says to the listening ‘Jawn’ while repeatedly stressing that these are Casey’s ideas, not his (‘he says . . . says he’). Dooley hastens to aver that neither an American nor an Irishman could possibly be an ‘arnychist’. However, this statement can easily be viewed as a mischievously ironic strategy by which Dunne distances himself from radical ideas while indirectly suggesting them: from a class-conscious perspective, there are plenty of reasons why working-class Americans and Irish-Americans might be drawn to anarchism. The radical transformation of the American economic system is an idea with weak, but not non-existent, support in the fiction of Irish-American experience. In ‘Not Yet:  The Day-Dreams of Ivan Grigorovich’. James William Sullivan describes a socialist utopia which solves the problems that Sullivan clearly perceives in the social order of his day. Unlike his Irish counterparts in the tenements, who are hoping to make the capitalist system work for them, Ivan Grigorovich espouses socialist principles. Via the narrative strategy of a third-person omniscient narrator who describes the ideas of a Russian reading a German socialist newspaper, Sullivan, like Dunne, presents then-radical theories at a safe distance from the recently arrived Irish. Ivan is a tailor, and like most factory workers he endures harsh working conditions. But he creates in his mind an ideal community, every positive attribute of which is an implied criticism of American capitalism. All time-consuming and monotonous tasks are mechanised, freeing humans for creative work. Arbitrary management power is curtailed. Assignments are fairly allocated and work hours regulated. Communitarian living arrangements, in which agriculture supplements industrial income, give workers a sense of closeness to nature and unity with each other. Income is distributed more evenly. Essentially, Ivan imagines a fully realised socialist society in which workers own the means of production. But alas for him this ‘day-dream’ cannot come true, at least ‘not yet’, as Sullivan’s narrator 26

Finley Peter Dunne, ‘The Ruling Class’, in Mr. Dooley in the Hearts of His Countrymen (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899), pp. 165–9 (pp. 165 and 167).

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observes how the American poor ‘are the only class that does not vote in its own interest’.27 While not so programmatic about her ideas for a solution, Sarah Orne Jewett also shows ambivalence about the capitalist system. ‘The Gray Mills of Farley’ (1898) centres on a labour-management conflict, in which management, predictably, prioritises shareholder profits over not only the wellbeing, but the very lives of employees. There is no social safety net for the poor; capitalistic institutions are heartless; the helpless suffer. One small light in the grey atmosphere is the moral conflict engendered by all of these conditions in at least one of the more affluent – the unnamed agent, who is the point of connection between the corporation and its employees. His private charity keeps some workers afloat during a time when the mill is closed. However, overall the story shows the futility of fighting back against the corporation and the pointlessness of rebellion. When the mill reopens at the end of the story, it once again provides a means of survival to those who have remained; however, the reopening is overshadowed by the sense that the cycle will repeat itself endlessly with no real hope for an improvement in workers’ lives. In ‘Where’s Nora?’ (1899), Jewett finds hope, not in systemic reform, but in the personal qualities of individuals. Nora, a young emigrant, sets herself up as a baker, and her entrepreneurship is rewarded with success and a happy marriage. Like Sadlier’s Bessie Conway and unlike Brennan’s Margaret Casey, she returns to Ireland triumphant – the other side of the coin of ‘The Gray Mills of Farley’. Nora owns the bakery  – the means of production – and is therefore able to chart her own course, and this, to Jewett, seems to be the ideal way in which capitalism should work. Opportunities exist for even those with minimal skills. Her husband can support the family, so her earnings are used to build a business, and to build wealth for the next generation. But Jewett juxtaposes this story with ‘The Gray Mills of Farley’ without comment as to which of the two scenarios is the more likely, though the latter, the story of Nora’s success, is presented as distinctly possible. The fiction discussed in this chapter explores social hierarchies from working-class perspectives, each work’s treatment of problems related to social status, human dignity and individual responsibility providing an insight into ideological perspectives on American capitalism. Stories that challenge the idea that everyone begins with the same advantages, that social status is somehow commensurate with innate qualities, or 27

Sullivan, Tenement Tales of New York, p. 185.

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that individual responsibility is the primary factor in a person’s prospects or success are almost always aligned with a progressive or revolutionary stance that emphasises systemic dehumanisation, while the contrary perspective most frequently provides a set of justifications designed to reproduce it. All provide a view from below that endeavours to depict the perspective and struggle of the Irish-American working class.

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Irish Working-Class Writing in Australasia, 1860–1960 Contrasts and Comparisons Peter Kuch Definitions The term ‘working class’ first appeared in print in England the year after Australia was settled as a penal colony. The colony’s first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, began using the word ‘class’ as early as 1803 to distinguish emancipated convicts from those still under sentence; but the term ‘working class’ did not appear until 1817, when the Gazette reprinted an article from the Times attacking the Poor Laws currently being debated in the Commons.1 The association between the term ‘working class’ and trade unionism dates from the end of convictism in the eastern colonies, but unions such as the Friendly Operative Society of Carpenters and Joiners (1841)2 and the Operative Masons’ Society (1850)3 were British-style craft unions instituted to protect skills rather than negotiate wages and conditions. The term ‘Irish working class’ did not appear in newsprint in the Australian colonies until 1856, although a locution commonly associated with it, ‘Catholic working class’, subsequently made its appearance as early as 11 January 1861.4 It is therefore a major contention of this chapter that the Irish working class in Australia (Colonial, Dominion and Federated) was obliged

1

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Many thanks to Emeritus Professor Lawrence Jones, Vanessa Manhire and Dr Rose Ellis for helpful suggestions. ‘British Intelligence’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 23 August 1817, p. 3: http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article2177410 [accessed 27 June 2016]. The 1823 Masters and Servants Act played a significant role in legislation affecting the working class in Australia. See, for example: ‘Advertising’, Australasian Chronicle (Sydney), 18 February 1841, p. 3: http://nla.gov. au/nla.news-article31730891 [accessed 27 June 2016]. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘trades’ unionists’ dates from 1834. See, for example, ‘Advertising’, Argus (Melbourne), 8 November 1850, p.  3:  http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article4767086 [accessed 27 June 2016]. However, as John Rickard has argued, ‘Before 1890 there are “working classes” rather than a working class.’ Class and Politics:  New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890–1910 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), p. 288.

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to express itself in reaction to two dominant discourses. The first was an imperial Anglo-Celtic Protestant hegemony that still influences the apparatuses of the state. As Thomas Keneally observed of his World War Two childhood:  ‘Britishness prevailed and even the Irish working class were part of that Britishness. We stood for God save the Queen.’5 The second was strictures against Chartism, Utilitarianism, Marxism, socialism and communism that gained momentum under the pontificates of Leo XIII and Pius IX, despite Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). In Australia, these strictures reached fever pitch in 1955 with the formation of the Democratic Labor Party (1955–78), the Church arguably exercising far more influence in Australia than in New Zealand. The politics of Australian working-class writing by and about the Irish between 1860 and 1960 thus tends to be socially realist and tribal rather than polemical and ideological. The situation in New Zealand, which was not formally acquired by the Crown until 1840, differs from the situation in colonial Australia in other ways. The term ‘working class’ appears in the first newspaper printed there, The New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator of 27 June 1840, but in a comparatively benign context. ‘Catholic working class’ and ‘Irish working class’, however, do not appear until 1912 and 1913 respectively, both with respect to Home Rule. This grouping of religion, class and politics reflects a sectarianism that was more robust in New Zealand during the first three decades of the twentieth century because, compared with Australia, New Zealand attracted proportionately more people from the northern counties of Ireland and because there were proportionally fewer Irish per head of population.6 In the North Island of New Zealand the Irish working class was obliged to negotiate a social imaginary that progressively sought to accommodate Anglo-Celts, Māori and Pacific Islanders, while it is contended that in the South Island, with the exception of settlements such as Westport, Timaru, Gore and parts of Southland, the Irish diaspora assumed a Scottish identity as protection against a dominant Anglicanism in Christchurch and a dominant Presbyterianism in Dunedin.

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Thomas Keneally, Homebush Boy (Sydney: Minerva, 1995), p. 25. D. H.  Akenson, Half the World from Home:  Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand 1860–1950 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1990); Brad Patterson, ed., The Irish in New Zealand: Historical Contexts and Perspectives (Wellington: University of Victoria Press, 2002); Brad Patterson, ed., Ulster– New Zealand Migration and Cultural Transfers (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006). For sectarianism, see Jeff Kildea, Tearing the Fabric: Sectarianism in Australia 1910–1925 (Sydney: Citadel Books, 2002); R. P. Davis, Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics 1868–1922 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1974); P. S. O’Connor, ‘Sectarian Conflict in New Zealand, 1911–1920’, Political Science 19 (1967), pp. 3–16.

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During the century dealt with in this chapter, the meanings ascribed to ‘Irishness’, ‘working class’ and ‘class’ underwent several transformations, arguably the most significant occurring after World War Two, when, for nearly two decades, the baby boomers enjoyed relatively freewheeling childhoods that weakened, were insouciant towards or ignored attitudes inherited by their elders. Coming-of-age narratives published in the 1960s and 1970s by the post-war children of aspirational working-class  Irish parents ensured that by the 1960s, Irish-Australasians had begun transforming themselves into successful Australian Irish and New Zealand Irish.7 Nevertheless, as revealed in Vincent O’Sullivan’s ‘Dandy Edison for Lunch’,8 a scarifying study of residual class-consciousness, upward mobility has a backward look. The more the middle-aged Irish Catholic narrator, an advertising executive, asserts his success, the more he is outfaced by the poise of the elderly Englishman who was once his working-class neighbour.

Irish-Australian Working-Class Prose There are at least two reasons why any analysis of Irish-Australian workingclass prose should begin with Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life (1903). First, there is E. P. Thompson’s canonical statement in his Preface to The Making of the English Working Class: ‘I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships . . . Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.’9 Such is Life, as with much Irish-Australian working-class writing, defines itself in terms of a politics of lived experience rather than an ideological struggle between inherited class structures. As The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1930) so vividly demonstrates, class, for all the ‘varieties of Irishness’ in colonial society, could prove tragically kaleidoscopic  – one twist of the hand of fate and everything changed.10 Second, as Stuart Macintyre has pointed out in a seminal article: ‘The pastoral basis of nineteenth century 7

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Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (1986; Kensington: UNSW Press, 2000) uses the terms ‘Irish Australian’ and ‘Australian Irish’ to distinguish between whether a settler is considered/considers themselves more Irish than Australian or vice versa. Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Dandy Edison for Lunch’, in Dandy Edison for Lunch and Other Stories (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1981), pp. 135–54. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), pp. 9, 11. Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (3 vols. London: Heinemann, 1930); the definitive edition is Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele’s 3 vols., published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, in 2007.

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Australian capitalism, and the general dependence of the secondary and tertiary sectors on markets created by pastoral capitalism and protected by distance, determined the character of the working class.’11 While the itinerant labourers and station hands in Such is Life are obviously working class, the protagonists of the book, the self-employed bullock drivers, are less clearly so. But what unites them as a class is their reliance on contract work; their bush craft and campfire etiquette; and their shared knowledge of tracks, water and pasture. What defines them as working class is their periodic confrontations with station foremen and pastoralists over right of way, grazing and water; their distinctive role in the chain of supply and demand; and the intense manual labour of hitching and unhitching bullocks and loading and unloading wagons. Set in the 1880s, Furphy’s Such is Life is a humorous, sprawling, self-reflexive work that draws extensively from its author’s attempts at farming, labouring, mechanical harvesting and bullock-driving in the Wimmera and Mallee, regions that furnish the landscape of the book. It is not an autobiography, but a closely observed social history of rural ways that were about to disappear with the advent of motorised vehicles and mechanical cultivation and harvesting. Furphy described his original 1,125-page manuscript as a ‘federation’ of seven ‘yarns’, each ‘yarn’ purportedly about a day randomly selected from diaries kept by a man called Tom Collins. After significant excisions, it was eventually published in the Bulletin in 1903.12 Although slow to be acknowledged, it has been republished thirty-two times and is still in print.13 What characterises Such is Life as working-class writing is its style, form and politics. Furphy was self-educated. He was also a logodædalus. Both aspects are evident in Tom Collins’s language, which reflects an eighteenth-century concern with precision and common sense mixed with a nineteenth-century preoccupation with the scientific and the demotic. The characters in Such is Life are distinguished from one another by a variety of registers that include mild profanity (mischievously elided for the sake of decorum), slang, jargon, regionalisms, colloquialisms, local and foreign dialects, argot, archaisms and a sprinkling of Latin tags.14 As Chris 11

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Stuart Macintyre, ‘The Making of the Australian Working Class:  An Historiographical Survey’, Historical Studies, 18 (1978), pp. 233–53 (p. 249). Note also William Empson’s statement in Some Versions of the Pastoral (1938): ‘I think good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral’ (p. 6). Joseph Furphy, The Annotated Such is Life:  Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins. With an introduction and notes by Frances Devlin-Glass, Robin Eaden, Lois Hoffmann and G. W. Turner (1903; Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 300. Annotated Such is Life gives a list of the reprintings, pp. 300–1. It is noteworthy that the publication of Such is Life is concurrent with the publication of the English Dialect Dictionary (6 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898–1905).

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Wallace-Crabbe has observed, ‘power relations and cultural differences keep disclosing themselves in idiolect and accent.’15 For Furphy to unmask these is to draw attention to the politics that has brought such class markers into being. Such is Life also challenges the extent to which conventional narrative and traditional genres preserve the status quo. It offers itself as a collection of ‘ripping yarns’, a tale, a story, a compilation, an annual, an anthology and a novel.16 As the amplification of a selection of diary entries, it gestures towards the epistolary tradition. As a ‘federation’ of ‘ripping yarns’, it implies the short story and the anthology. Its detailed descriptions of landscape and custom suggest a regional study, or a variation of the travelogue, but its title, Such is Life, offers a broader canvas. While there are elements of the picaresque, the accurate rendition of dialogue and the detailed accounts of political and social conditions imply a debt to nineteenth-century social realism. Yet what sexuality there is, is derivative of nineteenth-century popular romance and writers such as Ouida (1839–1908). Underpinning Such is Life’s juxtaposition of realist and anti-realist modes, its recourse to discontinuous narration, its indebtedness to orality and its fidelity to the provenance and nuance of dialogue is a shared awareness – whether conscious or not – that as the cash nexus defines the relationship between capital and labour so causality defines the relationship between capitalism and narrative. That said, the book nevertheless suffers from significant political lacunae. While large consignments of wool roll across the novel’s landscape, shearers and shearing remain invisible, despite the fact that the shearers’ strikes of the 1880s and 1890s, though eventually crushed, remain central to Australian working-class history. As Michael Wilding has persuasively argued, ‘by setting the book in the 1880s Furphy could avoid the organised politics, the sense of co-operation and mateship, that was to form the militant unions. He presents the demoralized, pre-unionised, pre-socialist state of affairs of the 1880s:  a state of affairs that had become the situation again in the days of defeat of the late 1890s.’17 To secure publication, Furphy removed chapters 2 and 5, which contained a long discussion 15 16

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Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Falling into Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 33–4. Annotated Such is Life, p. 52. For the significance of the ‘ripping yarn’, see Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Michael Wilding, The Radical Tradition:  Lawson, Furphy, Stead:  The Colin Roderick Lectures (Townsville, QLD:  James Cook University; Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 1993), pp. 38–9.

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about socialism, and substituted two new chapters.18 The effect was to shift the focus of the representation of Irishness in Such is Life from ideology to religion, a shift that chimes with Patrick O’Farrell’s contention that the Australian Irish typically sought to represent themselves through religion and party politics rather than ideology and culture.19 Arguably, this is most evident in the second tale of the book and in a portion of the fifth where the narrator recounts significant episodes from the life of Rory O’Halloran, the main Irish character. A  young middleclass Catholic from rural Armagh, Rory, in characteristic outback style, is nicknamed ‘Daniel O’Connell’. Though initially innocent of bush lore, he eventually acquires a reputation as ‘a boundary man who knows his own paddock’. Yet he remains at odds with himself in a way reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s definition of the Celt. ‘There was’, claims the narrator of Such is Life, ‘a dreamy, idealistic Rory, born of a legend-loving race; and there was a painfully parsimonious Rory, trained down to the standard of a model wealth-producer’. Neither equips him for life in outback Australia; the combination makes for tragedy. He impulsively contracts an exogamous marriage, and while he is generally tolerant towards his wife, his choice enables the narrator to rail against the ‘virus’ of sectarianism, which he suggests has yet to infect the Antipodes. Such a suggestion not only discounts the tension evident in his own account of the O’Halloran marriage, but also patently ignores the Orange Lodge riots over Home Rule that periodically erupted at the time of the book’s publication and subsequently in both Australia and New Zealand.20 But it is Rory as heir to a political tradition derived from Armagh historian W. E. H. Lecky’s History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century which the narrator sees as highly problematic. Believing himself fated by a history of persecution and dispossession as a northern Catholic, Rory is unable to see the consequences of his own actions, particularly the way he worships his only daughter with a type of Mariolatry that renders him oblivious to her 18

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Annotated Such is Life, pp. 298–9. Chapter 2 became Buln Buln and the Brolga (1948) and chapter 5 became Rigby’s Romance (1946). A serialised version of Rigby’s Romance was published in 1905–6, and an abridged version in 1921. O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, pp. 108ff, 159ff, 311–18. However, the excised section was subsequently rewritten and published as Rigby’s Romance (1946; Sydney: Rigby, 1971), which gives a brief account of a ‘row’ between Orangemen and Home Rulers, pp. 189–94. As noted in Annotated Such is Life, p. 382, Furphy’s uncle was treasurer of the Shepparton Loyal Orange Institution, Londonderry Standard. There were Orange riots in Melbourne in 1846 and 1867, and Orange protests following the attempted assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh by a Fenian sympathiser in Sydney in 1868. For Orange riots in New Zealand, see Seán G. Brosnahan, ‘The “Battle of the Borough” and the “Saige o Timaru”: Sectarian Riot in Colonial Canterbury’, The New Zealand Journal of History 28 (1994), pp. 41–59.

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childish anxieties. Within the narrative, framed by two of the major tropes of Australian realist fiction – the lonely death in the outback and the child lost in the bush – Rory is shown to be unaware that his seven-year-old Mary will set out in search of him, because she has overheard the adults talking about an itinerant worker dying close to the house. Her search proves fatal. The implication seems to be that – regardless of whether Rory’s decision to emigrate can be attributed to free will or determinism – death, sectarianism and a mistaken belief that knowledge can be acquired from books rather than learned from experience follow him from the north of Ireland to the southern regions of Australia with tragic consequences. But the speaker who makes the implication is not Joseph Furphy, but Tom Collins; as both names in vernacular Australian are suspect (a ‘furphy’ is a lie; a ‘tom collins’ is a tall story), meaning is deferred, summaries are suspect and conclusions remain provisional. Even the title of the book is derived. ‘Such is life’ is the phrase purportedly uttered by Ned Kelly on the gallows. It is the archetypal Antipodean Gallic shrug that voices the failure of reason.

Australian-Irish Working-Class Prose A novel set in the same period that contrasts Furphy’s representation of the Irish rural working class is H. J. Summers’s Ashes of the Angry Years (1966).21 Prior to becoming an author, Summers was a career journalist who had been a war correspondent, travel writer and radio and television presenter. The novel, which was published by the Australasian Book Society, a cooperative with links to the Communist Party and the trade unions, charts the rise, defeat and aftermath of the shearers’ strike from 1891 to 1893. Its protagonist is a second-generation Irishman, Lancey McCall,22 a shearer who becomes increasingly involved in the conflict between capital, union and non-union labour as the pastoral industry unites to force down wages, fearing reduced profits in the face of an imminent collapse of the banking system. A blend of history and fiction, the novel dramatises the conflict in terms of sibling rivalry (Lancey’s elder brother is a policeman, his younger an innocent) and vivid, detailed accounts of picketing, illegal assembly, arson, fistfights, armed conflict, speeches from the dock and imprisonment. Lancey is jailed for his activism. Once released, he falls in love, marries, is reconciled with his elder brother, and is eventually elected to 21 22

H. J. Summers, Ashes of the Angry Years (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1966). The name McCall originated in Scotland.

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the Queensland State Parliament after a campaign for workers’ rights that owes more to union ‘mateship’ than to the accounts of socialism, communism or William Lane’s utopian idealism briefly canvassed in the novel. (Lane’s The Workingman’s Paradise was written to raise money for the 1891 Strike Fund.) Though a labour history mainly derived from journalism drives and organises the episodic narrative of Ashes of the Angry Years, both Summers’s and Furphy’s novels vividly depict the baleful effects of itinerant work on families, of pioneer mythology on rural life and of coded masculinity on society. It is not surprising that Jack Thompson’s character was given an Irish name, Foley,23 in the 1975 New Wave classic about the 1956 shearers’ strike, Sunday too Far Away,24 which reprised several of the themes of Such is Life and Ashes of the Angry Years; it is also not surprising that Foley’s Irishness was largely subsumed into the trope of the ‘Aussie bloke’. It could be argued that by the time the film was released, an earlier sense of the Irish working class had been diluted by Whitlam’s social, cultural and political reforms (1972–5) and by the Americanisation of Australian culture.25 Yet both pre- and post-Whitlam stereotypical working-class Irish continued to people novels about rural life in Australia, from the ‘celtic’ Macca in Eve Langley’s The Pea-Pickers (1942) to the rambunctious O’Dowds in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955); the Doolans in Elizabeth O’Conner’s The Irishman (1960); the fateful Clearys of ‘Drogheda’ in Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds (1977); the warring Duffys in Peter Watts’s ‘frontier quartet’:  Cry of the Curlew (1999), Shadow of the Osprey (2000), Flight of the Eagle (2002) and To Chase the Storm (2003); and the convict servant girls, Honora, Julia, Bridget and Anne, in Eve Conlon’s Not the Same Sky (2013). Of the several novels that depict the urban Irish working class, Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and Nadia Wheatley’s The House That Was Eureka (1985) are the best known, largely because both were set texts for secondary schools and universities. Park was a New Zealand-born writer who settled in Sydney. The Harp in the South was adapted for a TV miniseries in 1986,26 as was her second novel about the Darcy family, Poor Man’s Orange (1949), in the following year. Hughie Darcy has been a 23 24

25

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The name Foley is derived from the old Irish Ó Foghladha, meaning ‘plunderer’. The title is reputedly the lament of an Australian shearer’s wife:  ‘Friday night [he’s] too tired; Saturday night too drunk; Sunday, too far away.’ The film was released in March 1975; Whitlam was removed from office on 11 November 1975. Roger Bell and Philip Bell, eds., Americanization and Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998). Six episodes of forty-five minutes, produced by Anthony Buckley Films.

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shearer’s cook, but alcohol has cost him his job, so he has brought his wife and two daughters to the inner Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, a housing commission enclave notorious at that time for poverty and crime. Though he manages to hold down a job, the Darcys are obliged to take in boarders in a desperate attempt to remain solvent. The Harp in the South exploits, and with varying degrees of success explores, those stereotypical depictions of the Irish working class that flourished in Australia in the aftermath of World War Two as a consequence of sectarianism, republicanism and prejudice associated with the reaction of the Empire to the 1916 Rising and de Valera’s wartime neutrality. In a similar way, the novel’s popularity in the 1990s and beyond was partly due to the extent to which its depiction of the Irish chimed with Australian and British reporting of the Troubles. In this context it is worth recalling that Australia did not officially recognise the southern government until 1946. What restricts The Harp in the South and its sequel, The Poor Man’s Orange, to period and stereotype are their conventional structures, their naïve depiction of Catholicism and their apolitical representation of poverty.27 In terms of traditional ‘orthodox’ Marxism, Park’s novels too readily effect the transformation of an Irish working class ‘in itself ’ into an Irish working class ‘for itself ’.28 However, what does set them apart from the ‘dun-coloured realism’29 of many post–World War Two Australasian working-class novels is the energy of the writing, the authenticity of their dialogue and settings and their quasi-socialist celebration of the human spirit. Nadia Wheatley’s The House That Was Eureka (1985; rev. 1987), by contrast, is overtly political in a historical sense:  it interweaves the lives of a 1981 working-class family facing eviction with the lives of a workingclass family whose violent resistance to eviction from the same Newtown house fifty years before has been almost lost to local and national history.30 As the parallel stories unfold, 1931 begins to intrude more and more on 1981, arousing political awareness and reviving memories of the 1854 Ballarat miners’ rebellion,31 the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1917 Russian Revolution – all of which, in turn, had inspired the fiercely resisted evictions that had taken place in Newtown, Redfern and Bankstown in 1931 27 28

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Park’s style is perhaps best characterised as a form of Grub Street ‘faux realism’. Edward Andrew, ‘Class in Itself and Class Against Capital: Karl Marx and his Classifiers, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 16 (1983), pp. 577–84. Patrick White, ‘The Prodigal Son’, Australian Letters: A Quarterly Review of Writing and Criticism, 1:3 (1958), pp. 37–40 (p. 39). Nadia Wheatley, The House That Was Eureka (Ringwood, VIC: Viking, 1985). ‘Apart from Eureka it had never come to guns in Australia. Or not as far as Lizzie knew.’ Wheatley, The House That Was Eureka, p. 51.

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when one of the protesters, Richard Eatock, was shot by the police.32 As Wheatley explains in the Preface: ‘The violence done to the [1931] pickets has not been exaggerated, and the account of the storming of the house is based on the actual pickets’ statements to their solicitor.’ What has been changed, however, is that Wheatley has made the 1931 Newtown family Irish. The Newtown ‘house’ is thus a place where ‘the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ [Marx], and where ‘the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ [Kundera]’.33 These struggles are dramatised in a collage of realist prose, journalistic reportage, letters, handwritten annotations and stream-of-consciousness passages, all of which complement or critique one another. On the one hand the novel seems to endorse the Marxian contention that ‘history repeats itself:  occurring the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’34 Ted’s credit card debt is paid off by a fortuitous win at the pokies; a mock eviction of the house that was Eureka, staged by unemployed youth to save the local CYSS, unexpectedly turns into a major media event that brings about political change. On the other hand, The House That Was Eureka shows how inequality engenders disengagement and generates violence; illustrates the ease with which capitalism erases sites of conflict and rewrites histories of protest; and reveals the ways community can reconcile people to one another and to their recovered personal histories. Whether or not this is necessarily the case is interrogated by Betty Collins in The Copper Crucible (1966),35 one of the few Australian working-class novels about the lives of migrant workers contracted to a multinational company – in this case, the Omaha Company, which is in turn contracted to the Mount Isa Mine and Smelter. Using the tactic of divide and conquer, the mine ruthlessly exploits its workers, with the result that family ties, ‘mateship’, love and even sociability prove vulnerable given the additional pressures of the harsh environment, the tyranny of distance and the ethnic rivalry and entrenched sexism that characterise the multinational male workforce. Apart from his name and his conversation, there is little that is distinctive about Paddy, the sole Irish character. He is obliged to live alone, his wife having ‘gone on holiday’ to Ireland; his politics are not markedly 32

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See, for example, Newcastle Sun, 18 June 1931, p. 7; Sydney Morning Herald, 22 June 1931, p. 22; 10 July 1931, p. 7 ff.; ‘Sequel to Bankstown Battle’, Newcastle Sun, 18 June 1931, p. 7: http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article164318160 [accessed 27 June 2016]. Wheatley, The House That Was Eureka, p. x. Ibid., p. 145. Betty Collins, The Copper Crucible (Milton, QLD: Jacaranda Press, 1966).

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different from his union mates’; in the end he accepts contract work, knowing that at any time his pay can be reduced or he can be fired.36 From early in the twentieth century, the escape for many working-class Australian Irish was education – if not for themselves then for their children, and preferably within a triumphalist Roman Catholicism that was determined to rival, if not surpass, a declining though still formidable Anglo-centric Protestantism. Though James Joyce proved a pervasive influence and the Bildungsroman and roman à clef were preferred genres, the Irish working-class coming-of-age novel in post–World War Two Australia takes a variety of forms. Vincent Buckley’s Cutting Green Hay (1983)37 and Thomas Keneally’s Homebush Boy (1995) for the most part adhere to the plot of the traditional Bildungsroman: trial by family, education, religion, sexuality and sociability, with the sensitive male protagonist eventually achieving material and career success. Desmond O’Grady’s The Deschooling of Kevin Carew (1974),38 however, as the title suggests, works satirically in reverse. The higher Kevin attempts to fly, the more he becomes enmeshed in the nets of ‘nationality, language, religion’ until he finally settles for a government job and married life in the suburbs. Equally convinced of his own brilliance, Paul O’Donahue, the hero and narrator of Laurie Clancy’s A Collapsible Man (1975),39 suffers a worse fate. His sexual, alcohol-fuelled revolt against his brutal father, over-nurturing mother and the right-wing Catholicism he encounters at Melbourne University leads him inevitably to a sanatorium. D’Arcy Niland’s Dead Men Running (1969)40 and Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row (1974)41 and A Life-time on Clouds (1976)42 are even more innovative. Dead Men Running is bookended by the defining event of Joey Emmett’s maturation, the accidental shooting one Tuesday evening in 1916 of the town’s ‘hard man’ who had become his friend and protector. In this Antipodean Great Expectations, the life experiences that shape the orphan Joey involve a small-town cast featuring a Jansenist priest, a trio of old maids, a kindly draper and a deformed one-eyed drunk 36

37

38 39 40 41 42

For research on strikes in the mining industry that substantiates such a conclusion, see S. Deery and D.  Plowman, Australian Industrial Relations (1981; Sydney:  McGraw Hill, 1985), pp.  37– 56, and Richard C.  S. Trahair, ‘The Men on the Mine’, in Allan Bordow, ed., The Worker in Australia: Contributions from Research (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977), pp. 25–66. Vincent Buckley, Cutting Green Hay:  Friendships, Movements and Cultural Conflicts in Australia’s Great Decades (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1983). Desmond O’Grady, The Deschooling of Kevin Carew (Melbourne: Wren, 1974). Laurie Clancy, A Collapsible Man (1975; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975). D’Arcy Niland, Dead Men Running (Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969). Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974). Gerald Murnane, A Life-Time on Clouds (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1976).

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who trades town secrets for pints. For its part, Tamarisk Row consists of a collage of episodes in the life of Clement Killeaton, whose working-class father’s addiction to horse racing reduces the family to penury. Though Clement, a Jamesian centre of consciousness, undergoes many of the trials of the coming-of-age novel, he only partially understands the ironic, fragmented world he imaginatively reconstructs in his attempts to understand his father. Finally, A Life-Time on Clouds is a richly comic satire on 1950s Australian Irish Catholic education. Adrian Sherd’s life is split between masturbatory fantasies of Hollywood sex and a pious reverence for an idealised Catholic marriage. In the event each shadows the other to such an extent that they become inextricably mixed. However, what most of these coming-of-age novels have in common is the call to the priesthood, an invitation to sublimate guilt, conflict and anxiety by becoming a priest of the church. It is also a feature of Australian Irish working-class fiction that distinguishes it from its trans-Tasman counterpart. Because the Catholic Church in New Zealand was neither as wealthy nor as formidable nor as closely aligned with Rome, New Zealand working-class Irish Catholics tended to seek security in small self-sufficient communities, and ameliorate rather than assert difference.

Irish New Zealand Working-Class Prose The twentieth-century New Zealand working-class novel about the Irish that provides the most instructive comparison with Furphy’s Such is Life (1903) is Helen Wilson’s Moonshine (1944).43 Both novels are set in the 1880s. Both provide vividly realistic accounts of communal rural life. Both depict the ways that harsh landscapes shape the lives of colonists. Both, with different degrees of success, reproduce dialect and idiolect. Both have to do with the shifts and exigencies of rural poverty. Both characterise the Irish in terms of a penchant for illegality. Both employ a similar narrative technique – a migratory narrator, somewhat of an ‘outsider’, whose encounters with and experience of the fictional world guides the implied reader through the book – though the narrator of Such is Life is far more knowing than the innocent junior schoolteacher narrator of Moonshine. However, some of the contrasts between Moonshine and Such is Life provide the most effective means of distinguishing aspects of New Zealand Irish working-class fiction from its trans-Tasman neighbour’s. In Moonshine, the tight-knit Irish community living in the isolated rural district of Tangi Flat 43

Helen Wilson, Moonshine (1944; London: Phoenix House, 1956).

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(near Timaru in the South Island) are ‘cabin Irish’. They are practically all caricatures reminiscent of racist cartoons in Punch, and from the writings of Disraeli (‘this wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race’), Kingsley (‘human chimpanzees’) and Froude (‘the most superstitious, the most imaginative and inflammable people in Europe’).44 Their sod cabins, in varying states of disorder, filth and decay, are contrasted with the Scots’ neat stone cottages and tended gardens that the narrator encounters on his way. In Tangi Flat, pigs and fowl wander in and out; swarms of children seem little better than savages; and superstition and secrecy abound, with the result that truth gets lost in a melee of gossip, supposition and prejudice. Acceptance proves hard won and readily lost, while lurking beneath an ebullient hospitality is a violence that is liable to erupt at any time. In short, the Irish of Moonshine are little different from Irish of Brian O’Nolan’s humorously satirical An Béal Bocht – also, coincidentally, first published in 1941.45 It is not as if such Irish do not people Australian fiction – the O’Dowds of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955) offer a case in point – but the recourse to stereotype in Moonshine seems less self-conscious than in comparable Australian novels. One explanation appears to reside in different conceptions of class. Though both Such is Life and Moonshine attempt to depict a working class in terms of its prestrike, pre-industrial configuration, the classconsciousness of Such is Life is mediated by a myth of egalitarian secular ‘mateship’ that, for all its ambiguities, blurs the distinctions and mutes the tensions inherent in class conflict. In Moonshine, the narrator images the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat as ‘iron barriers’, and speaks of the working class as ‘just [holding] up the stage on which we acted. Not that we were callous or hostile towards them’, he opines. ‘We were delighted when they “got on” and distressed and tried to help when they fell on hard times. But they were “of all His tribe who take”, so naturally excluded respect and deference.’46 It is not that such patronising attitudes do not occur in Australian fiction; it is just that they are not stated as forcefully. Where Moonshine again differs is in its representation of criminality. Dan Freel, who owns and controls the worm used to distil Tangi Flat’s 44

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Quoted in Jeffrey Richards, ‘Ireland, the Empire and Film’, in An Irish Empire?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, ed. by Keith Jeffrey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 26. The English translation, The Poor Mouth, was not published until 1973, though perhaps the common publication year for Moonshine and An Béal Bocht says something either for O’Nolan’s prescience or the zeitgeist or both. Wilson, Moonshine, pp. 37–8.

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staple export, illicit whiskey, is as secretive, mysterious and murderous as any rapparee or Whiteboy. A Gothic figure, he appears from and disappears into the marginal communities of the west coast of the South Island subsequently depicted with such vividness by Eleanor Catton in The Luminaries (2013).47 Again this is a caricature, for whether it was whiskey produced by the Delaneys of Nirranda in Victoria in 1881 or whisky produced by Clan McRae in Southland from 1872, illicit distilling was customarily excused by many of the Irish and Scots of both countries as a justifiable protest against English law. Irish New Zealand working-class coming-of-age novels also differ from their Australian counterparts in that their protagonists grow up in small towns rather than working-class suburbs; their crises of faith take place within the family and parish rather than the family and powerful institutional establishments; and the sectarian conflicts, while perhaps involving just as much name-calling and stone-throwing on the way home from school, are sublimated rather than acculturated. The last reflects the more modest profile of the Catholic Church in New Zealand. In literary terms, the difference is the same as the difference between Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the coming-of-age stories in Frank O’Connor’s Traveller’s Samples (1951)48 or for that matter Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio (1919).49 And yet, war-damaged, absent and/or alcoholic fathers figure in both; and there is a surprisingly similar sense of space and freedom despite vastly different topographies. Vincent Buckley’s description of his boyhood – as ‘impoverished and lonely, but with horses and fowls, dogs and cows and bikes, full of physical action and mental life’50  – could just as easily be used for the dust jacket of David Ballantyne’s working-class classic, The Cunninghams (1948),51 or Dan Davin’s elegantly crafted vignettes of growing up Irish Catholic in Gore and Invercargill in the far south of the South Island in The Gorse Blooms Pale (1947)52 and Breathing Spaces (1975).53 As Davin himself explains, each story ‘is basically an objet trouvé, eroded and 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (New York: Little, Brown, 2013). Frank O’Connor’s Traveller’s Samples (New York: Knopf, 1951). Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life (1919; New York: Viking, 1960); Lawrence Jones, ‘ “Colonial Like Ourselves”: The American Influence on New Zealand Fiction, 1934–65’, Deep South, 2.1 (Autumn 1996) www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth/vol2no1/ ljones.html [accessed 27 June 2016]. Buckley, Cutting Green Hay, p. xi. David Ballantyne, The Cunninghams (1948; Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1986). Dan Davin, The Gorse Blooms Pale (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1947). Dan Davin, Breathing Spaces (London: Robert Hale Limited; Christchurch: Whitcoulls, 1975).

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worn by tides of experience, soothed by long pondering and the affections of memory’.54 Arranged in terms of life experience, each preserves a key moment of maturation: ‘The Apostate’ childhood guilt at catching a young thrush; ‘The Vigil’ a neglected orphan fantasy; ‘Milk Round’ the dawning of class consciousness; ‘Presents’ patriarchy and poverty; and so on. In all of Davin’s stories and in his novels about the working-class Irish of Southland, Roads from Home (1949)55 and Not Here, Not Now (1970),56 alcohol, whether licit or illicit, unites people across sectarian divides, especially in Mataura and Invercargill where prohibition was in force, in the former between 1902 and 1954 and in the latter between 1905 and 1943. Many Irish New Zealand working-class childhoods, however, were not as privileged. Jimmy Sullivan, the narrator of Ian Cross’s The God Boy (1957),57 unsuccessfully invents various ‘protection tricks’ to shield himself from his father’s brutality and drunkenness, but when the violence becomes so intense that Jimmy’s father’s wife kills his father, Jimmy himself turns violent, smashing windows, throwing rocks and abusing people. Jimmy, now thirteen years old and in a Catholic boys’ home, tells his own story in a way that reveals more than what he realises he is disclosing. His self-protective recall, where awareness and denial jostle one another as memory struggles to fend off fantasy, subtly anticipates Roddy Doyle’s depiction of a similarly disturbed childhood in Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha (1993).58

New Zealand-Irish Working-Class Prose The complex plot of Bill Pearson’s Coal Flat (1963),59 set in one of the predominantly Irish Catholic mining towns of the west coast of the South Island,60 also turns on a deeply disturbed young boy, Peter Herlihy. A love child of a Catholic working-class father and a Presbyterian middle-class mother, Peter becomes obsessed with sex and violence in reaction to his 54

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Dan Davin, Selected Stories (London: Robert Hale Limited; Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1981), p. 14. Dan Davin, Roads from Home, ed. and intro. by Lawrence Jones (1949; Auckland:  Auckland University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Dan Davin, Not Here, Not Now (London: Robert Hale Limited; Whitcombe and Tombs, 1970). Ian Cross, The God Boy (1957; Christchurch: Whitcoulls, 1972). Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993). Bill Pearson, Coal Flat (Auckland: Paul’s Book Arcade, 1963). Other novels about New Zealand mining are Eric Beardsley, Blackball ’08 (Auckland:  Collins, 1984) and Jenny Pattrick, The Denniston Rose (Auckland: Random House, 2003). See also Melanie Nolan, ‘ “The View from Over the Hill”: Developing a Balanced View of Blackball ’08 from a Wider Range of Perspectives’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, NS8 (2009), pp. 1–27.

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parents’ self-loathing, brutality, religiosity and alcoholism. Fearing what might happen, his teacher, Paul Rogers, resorts to some elementary psychology only to find that Peter accuses him of molesting him. It is an accusation concocted from the boy’s chance view of another teacher having sex and his rage at Rogers for not protecting him from the headmaster, who is a martinet, and his mother, who is a termagant. Complicating the sexual and class conflicts are familial, sectarian, ideological and political conflicts that pit families against one another, Presbyterians against Catholics, the miners’ union against the Labour government, and the town’s publicans against the breweries, all of which test Paul Rogers’s idealist vision of a socialist society to its breaking point. Where Coal Flat differs from both Moonshine and Copper Crucible is the range and complexity of political debate about socialism, Marxist-Leninism, communism, the IWW, local unionism and the Labour right. Where it parallels Moonshine and Copper Crucible, however, is the evident failure of individual ideological commitment in the face of communal solidarity, whether this reflects class-consciousness, union solidarity, religious affiliation or the myth of ‘mateship’.

Conclusion Australasian-Irish and Irish-Australasian working-class fiction share a communal sense of poverty – predominantly rural, country town or outer suburb – whose causes are not wholly economic; a commitment to the nuclear and extended family, as dysfunctional as it generally proves to be; and an aspirational, class-conscious respect for education. There is also a palpable sense in which religion and inherited traditions – whether oral, historical, political, literary or folkloristic – invariably constructed the Irish as ‘other’. What seems to have been shared by both countries, too, is the way many post–World War Two childhoods reconfigured received notions of class, although this is more prominent in Australia61 than in New Zealand given the more even distribution of the Irish among the general population and the extent to which the Freudian complexities of ‘mateship’ were mitigated by a long-held tradition of egalitarianism. As Tim Winton has explained, the Australia ‘of my childhood was not classless . . . social distinctions were palpable and the subject of constant discussion . . . They told us kids we 61

Rickard, Class and Politics, p. 288, argues that the development of class consciousness in Australia takes place between 1890 and 1910 when the ‘improvisations of colonial politics’ are replaced by ‘a two party structure based on class lines’.

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were free, and we thought they were telling us something we already knew. As a boy, I believed that Jack was as good as his master. But I understood that Jacks like me always had masters’.62 This sense of always having a master, of being triply disenfranchised in terms of religion, ethnicity and class, bonded the Irish with the Aboriginal peoples and the Māori, with the result that mutual understanding between the Irish and the indigenous is a minor but significant theme in the working-class writing of both countries, though there is not the same acculturated celebration of this understanding in contemporary Australian Irish working-class fiction as there is in, for example, Michael O’Leary’s/Te Arawa’s, Ki ngā kaitiaki o / Unlevel Crossings (2002).63 New Zealand Irish working-class writing also differs from Australian Irish in its treatment of ideology and politics, although the working-class writing of both countries is neither as trenchant on revelatory that is to be found in novels such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906),64 Robert Tressall’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914)65 or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939).66

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Tim Winton, ‘Some Thoughts about Class in Australia:  The C Word’, The Monthly (December 2013–January 2014) www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/december/1385816400/tim-winton/c-word [accessed 27 June 2016]. Michael O’Leary (Te Arawa), Ki ngā kaitiaki o / Unlevel Crossings (Wellington: Huia, 2002). Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1906). Robert Tressall, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (London: The Richards Press, 1914). John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking, 1939).

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Ch apter 13

Irish Working-Class Poetry 1900–1960 Niall Carson

In 1936, writing in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, W. B. Yeats felt the need to stake a claim for the distance of art from popular political concerns; poets’ loyalty was to their art and not to the common man: Occasionally at some evening party some young woman asked a poet what he thought of strikes, or declared that to paint pictures or write poetry at such a moment was to resemble the fiddler Nero [. . .] We poets continued to write verse and read it out at the ‘Cheshire Cheese’, convinced that to take part in such movements would be only less disgraceful than to write for the newspapers.1

Yeats was, of course, striking a controversial pose here. Despite he famously refusing to sign a public letter of support for Carl von Ossietzky on similar apolitical grounds, Yeats was a decidedly political poet, as his flirtation with the Blueshirt movement will attest.2 The political engagement Yeats mocked is present in the Irish working-class writers who produced a range of poetry from the popular ballads of the socialist left, best embodied by James Connolly, to the urban bucolic that is Patrick Kavanagh’s late canalbank poetry. Their work, whilst varied in scope and form, was engaged with the politics of its time. In it, the nature of the term ‘working class’ itself is contested. This conflicted identity politics has been a long-standing feature of Irish poetry, with a whole range of writers seeking to appropriate the voice of ‘The Plain People of Ireland’ for their own political and artistic ends.3 1 2

3

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, ed. by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. x. For more on this, see W. J. McCormack, Blood Kindred: The Politics of W. B. Yeats and his Death (London: Pimlico, 2005). For more on Yeats and the Blueshirts, see R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life: II The Arch-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 475–7. Brian O’Nolan is perhaps the most overt example of this in his column for the Irish Times ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’. For examples of this humorous appropriation of the working-class man and woman, see Flann O’Brien:  The Best of Myles:  A Selection from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, ed. by Kevin O’Nolan (London: Flamingo, 1993), pp. 79–111.

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Changes in secondary education during the late nineteenth century in Ireland were to have a remarkable effect on the cultural and poetic life of the country. Between 1861 and 1901, the number of children receiving a secondary education rose from 22,000 to 35,000, with ‘the increase being almost exclusively the result of increasing numbers of Catholics entering the system’.4 During this time we see the rise of the poets of revolutionary Ireland, writers such as Pádraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Mary Plunkett, James Stephens, Terence MacSwiney and James Connolly. Common to their work was the appropriation of the voice of the oppressed and downtrodden. For example, Thomas MacDonagh’s poem ‘The Man Upright’ contrasts the indifferent struggles of the working-class people of an Irish village with his own revolutionary worldview. MacDonagh, the lower middle-class son of two teachers, was part of this educated generation that would come to liberate the sleeping masses from their slumber: There came a man of a different gait – A man who neither slouched nor pattered, But planted his steps as if each step mattered; Yet walked down the middle of the street Not like a policeman on his beat, But like a man with nothing to do Except walk straight upright like me and you.5

Perhaps most seductively, and with a nod to the assumed middle-class readership of poetry in Ireland, MacDonagh colludes with the reader by suggesting that they both have an upright gait and can walk facing the world. The leaders of 1916 were not the only commentators on the working classes in their poetry. Other writers and critics engaged with nationalist fervour at the turn of the century, and attempted to claim the voice of the working classes for their own; of their poetry Alice Milligan’s ‘A Country Girl’ is a striking example. Milligan (1865–1953) was born into a Methodist family in Omagh, County Tyrone. Her father, Seaton Milligan, was a writer and an established member of the Royal Irish Academy. Despite her strong Unionist and Protestant background, Milligan, like James Stephens, would be swayed by the rising tide of the Irish Revival and became an early convert 4

5

Ciaran O’Neill, Catholics of Consequence:  Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish Catholic Elite 1850–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 9. Thomas MacDonagh, ‘The Man Upright’, in The Collected Poems of Thomas MacDonagh (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1916), pp. 125–6.

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to nationalism after the death of Parnell in 1891. Along with her fellow nationalist and writer Ethna Carbery (Anna Johnston), she founded and contributed many poems and articles to the controversial journal Shan Van Vocht (1896–9).6 Milligan’s ‘A Country Girl’ is revealing about class attitudes between Protestant and Catholic and also between the established upper class and their working-class counterpoints.7 The poem describes a working-class girl who serves a table on All Souls’ Night in the home of her Ascendency employers. It finishes on something of a corrective, a corrective that again replicates this ambiguity between the representation and appropriation of the working-class voice: They think “she would not understand,” But she is wiser than the wise, A simple Southern country girl Whose faith is that her dead will rise.8

There is a skilful positioning of a duality of meaning in Milligan’s last line. On the one hand, the girl has faith that her lost relatives, ancestors and lovers will rise on All Souls’ Night and her prayers will intercede on their behalf on their journey towards heaven. On the other hand, when read in light of Milligan’s overt nationalism, there is the threat to the Ascendency order from the rural Catholic working classes who have traditionally risen in agrarian violence throughout the bloody history of Ireland. As a portent of the Easter 1916 Rebellion, Milligan’s poem is prescient, as many of these same simple working-class country girls would join the ranks of Cumann na mBan in support of Easter Week. If the Rising was a site of contested class politics, so too was the First World War, where working-class soldiers fought and died alongside their upper-class officers. One of these soldiers was the Donegal-born poet and novelist Patrick MacGill, whose books Red Horizon and The Great Push give a direct insight into the experience of the working-class men who made up the bulk of the British forces.9 MacGill produced three complete collections of poetry, Songs of the Dead End (1912), Soldier Songs (1917) and 6

7

8

9

For more on Alice Milligan, see Sheila Turner Johnson, Alice:  A Life of Alice Milligan (Omagh: Colourpoint Press, 1994); Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012). Milligan’s ‘A Country Girl’ was first published in a collected edition in 1908; see Alice Milligan, ‘A Country Girl’, in Hero Lays (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., 1908), p. 33. Alice Milligan, ‘A Country Girl’, in Poems by Alice Milligan (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1954), p. 123. Patrick MacGill, The Red Horizon (London:  Herbert Jenkins, 1916); Patrick MacGill, The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916).

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Songs of Donegal (1921). As with his prose, MacGill’s poetry is filled with the concerns of the working classes and their plight as wage-slaves under oppressive conditions. MacGill was born in 1890 and worked as a navvy before he enlisted with the London Irish Rifles, so he had seen first-hand the difficulties these labourers faced, as his poem ‘Played Out’ reveals: As a bullock falls in the crooked ruts, he fell when the day was o’er, The hunger gripping his stinted guts, his body shaken and sore. They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark, as a brute is pulled from its lair, The corpse of the navvy, stiff and stark, with the clay on its face and hair.10

MacGill’s work offers a direct challenge to the more effete and mystical poetry of many of his contemporaries, and instead places emphasis on the ‘physical strength, endurance, the ability to face danger but also stoicism’ of the Irish navvy.11 MacGill’s poetry is an eclectic mix of socialist propaganda, war memorials and Revival-inspired romanticism. His Songs of the Dead End collection is devoted to the difficulty of working-class life, and, in particular, the life of the navvy, as his Walt Whitman–inspired poem ‘Dedication’ makes clear: I sing of them, The underworld, the great oppressed, Befooled of parson, priest, and king, Who mutely plod earth’s pregnant breast, Who weary of their sorrowing, – The Great Unwashed – of them I sing.12

MacGill was joined in the trenches of the First World War by his compatriot and fellow poet Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917). Ledwidge was born the son of a manual farm labourer in Slane in Co. Meath. He too spent time working as a navvy on the roads before taking work at a copper mine near his home. Ledwidge did not last long at the mine before he was dismissed for agitating for better conditions

10

11

12

Patrick MacGill, ‘Played Out’, in The Navvy Poet: the Collected Poems of Patrick MacGill (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1984), p. 51. David Taylor, Memory, Narrative and the Great War: Rifleman Patrick MacGill and the Construction of Wartime Experience (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 94. Patrick MacGill, ‘Dedication’, in The Navvy Poet:  The Collected Poems of Patrick MacGill (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1984), p. ix.

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for the workers.13 Although a more sophisticated poet than MacGill, Ledwidge’s poetry shares some of his concerns with the working classes. Ledwidge wrote for his fellow working-class comrades in arms in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. His poem ‘Soliloquy’ captures some of the tensions he felt as a soldier-poet in France and for the faceless thousands who will be remembered only by their collective deeds of war: To thank the gods for what is great; A keen-edged sword, a soldier’s heart, Is greater than a poet’s art. And greater than a poet’s fame A little grave that has no name, Whence honour turns away in shame.14

Perhaps the most celebrated Irish poem of the First World War is Thomas Kettle’s ‘To my Daughter Betty, the Gift of God’, whose touching lines articulate a vision of why he chose to fight with the National Volunteers in support of John Redmond. Interestingly Kettle, who was born into a prosperous Catholic farming family, also claims to fight for the working-class poor of Ireland: Know that we fools, now with foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, And for the secret Scripture of the poor.15

Kettle’s lines resonate with some of the poetry of the 1916 leaders in that they portray the poor as a symbol of Ireland and replace their voices with that of a singular national identity. He was a committed propagandist on behalf of the National Volunteers and their role in World War One, collecting marching songs for them and even going as far as seeing a Nietzschean ideology as underpinning the German rise to war.16 13

14

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16

For more on the life of Francis Ledwidge, see Liam O’Meara, A Lantern On The Wave: A Study of the Life of the Poet, Francis Ledwidge (Dublin: Repost Books, 1999); Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet 1887–1917 (London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1972). Francis Ledwidge, ‘Soliloquy’, in The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge, ed. & intr. by Lord Dunsany (London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, 1919), p. 98. Thomas Kettle, ‘To my Daughter Betty, the Gift of God’, quoted in Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 1914–1945, ed. by Gerald Dawe (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2008), p. 55; W. B. Yeats makes similar claims to speak for the working-class poor where Robert Gregory’s countrymen are ‘Kiltartan’s poor’, thus eliding their tenant–landlord relationship. See W. B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 111. See Battle Songs for the Brigades, ed. by Stephen Gwynn and Thomas Kettle (Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1915). For more on Nietzsche and the war, see Thomas Kettle, The Ways of War (London: Constable, 1917), pp. 214–23.

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However, Kettle’s views were contested by a number of Irishmen and women who saw the war, and Ireland’s role in it, as part of a wider imperialist and economic system to keep the working classes oppressed. Amongst their number was James Connolly, who was involved with the Irish Trade and General Workers Union (ITGWU) and co-founded the Irish Citizen Army in order to protect workers’ rights in 1913. Connolly edited the socialist newspaper the Irish Worker and was also an author of plays, ballads and poetry. Much of the material written by Connolly was designed for entertaining the working-class men and women involved in the Irish Citizen Army, and he produced socialist realist plays such as Under Which Flag (1916) to promote union values.17 For Connolly, ‘no revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression.’ Without such poetical expression, the revolutionary movement fails its working-class supporters and becomes ‘the dogma of the few, and not the faith of the multitude’.18 Connolly wrote many ballads to be sung to the tune of popular airs, such as ‘Freedom’s Sun’, which was sung to the air of ‘Love’s Young Dream’, the Thomas Moore poem from Irish Melodies (1820). However, he also left behind a number of didactic poems such as ‘The Legacy of a Dying Socialist to his Son’, which marks the injustices felt by the working classes in Ireland, being oppressed by the rich who controlled their capital: “My Legacy.” Ah, son of mine! Wort thou a rich man’s pride, He’d crown thee with his property, possessions far and wide, And golden store to purchase slaves, whose aching brain and limb Would toil to bring you luxury as such had toiled for him.19

Connolly was joined by other political poets in support of working-class people in the pages of publications such as the Irish Citizen and the Irish Worker. The Irish Worker began life under the editorship of Jim Larkin before Connolly took over; from the outset it contained poetry submissions from those who wished to see the working classes unite and agitate for a more equitable society. Poems such as ‘The People’s Claim’ wonder, ‘must we be 17

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James Connolly, ‘Under Which Flag’, in Four Irish Rebel Plays, ed. by James Moran (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 104–32. James Connolly, introduction to his ‘Songs of Freedom’, in The James Connolly Songbook, ed. by the Cork Workers’ Club (Cork: Cork Workers’ Club, 1972), p. 1. Connolly, ‘The Legacy of a Dying Socialist to his Son’, in The James Connolly Songbook, p. 32.

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ever the slaves of a class, / That laugh at the labourer’s plea for life’. Or the poem ‘From the Earth a Cry’ bemoans that the ‘earth was made for Lords and the / makers of law’ and encourages workers, again associated with the earth and soil, to rise up: Insects and vermin, ye, the starving and dangerous myriads, List to the murmur that grows and growls! Come from the mines and mills [. . .] Pour from your dens of toil and filth, out To the air of heaven.20

Patrick MacGill also contributed to the Irish Worker regularly, with poems such as ‘He Rose a Man’ being an homage to the tradition of Irish political martyrdom where the anonymous hero of the poem ‘spoke of the struggle that was to come / To end the times of woe, / He asked for help, and a few said “aye,” / Whilst hundreds answered “no.” ’21 MacGill’s poem appears next to one titled ‘The Striker’, a prophetic reminder of the employment conditions of the working classes in a city that would be rocked a year later by the 1913 Dublin Lockout. ‘The Striker’ calls on the employers to ‘Pray God that mammon’s brood may yet / Lears [sic] reason, / Nor seek to mould humanity through / Slaves’.22 Such working-class political poetry was commonplace in the Irish Worker, and the paper also printed poems by regular contributors such as ‘Mac’ and ‘Oscar’. They wrote poems of the day and humorous little verses to satirise public figures, such as Mac’s ‘A Topical Alphabet’, which claims: K is for Kelly – John Saturnus [sic], don’t you know? L is the place where he will surely go. M stands for Murphy, sometimes known as William Martin. N is his ugly nob, a twisted one, for sartin.23

John Saturninus Kelly was an anti-Larkinite labour counsellor and William Martin Murphy was a press baron who led the employers during the 1913 20

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Anon., ‘The People’s Claim’, Irish Worker, 27 May 1911; John Boyle O’Reilly, ‘From the Earth – A Cry’, Irish Worker, 16 March 1912, this latter poem was a reprint from the poetry of the Irish Fenian poet John Boyle O’Reilly, thus wedding socialism to the older physical-force tradition of Irish nationalism. For more on John Boyle O’Reilly, see Ian Kenneally, From the Earth, a Cry: The Story of John Boyle O’Reilly (Cork: Collins Press, 2011). Patrick MacGill, ‘He Rose a Man’, Irish Worker, 23 March 1912. J. M. P., ‘The Striker’, Irish Worker, 23 March 1912. Mac, ‘A Topical Alphabet’, Irish Worker, 11 January 1913.

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Lockout.24 Such political poetry was common in the working-class newspapers of the time and played an important role in keeping morale lifted during the difficult times of strike and in conveying the ideology of the papers themselves. However, the working-class readership of these papers also had an appreciation of more sophisticated poetry, and, crucially, the critical means to interpret it. When the social worker, poet and suffragist Eva Gore-Booth released her collection The Agate Lamp in 1912, it was reviewed by A. P. W. (Andrew Patrick Wilson) for the Irish Worker.25 He found Gore-Booth’s poetry to be a cut above the ‘verse-making’ poets such as Mac or Oscar, writing that it contained something ‘worth preserving’. Although a long-time admirer of Eva Gore-Booth’s poetry, A. P. W. saw her more effete and esoteric themes in this collection as somewhat unpalatable, particularly the theme of reincarnation. For A. P. W., the idea of reincarnation was something he disliked, and he shared this dislike ‘with the whole of the working class’, before adding dryly that some people ‘get sufficient of the world in one pilgrimage without anticipating another one’. Because of the hardships of working-class life, the idea of reincarnation would ‘probably be the most dreadful hell some people could anticipate’. Despite such criticism, A. P. W. found room to approve of Gore-Booth’s poetry, in particular her poem ‘The Fishermen’, a poem that sentimentalises the lives of ordinary fishermen in Ireland who ‘watch for a silver fin / In a sea of gold’. This poem anticipates W.  B. Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’, which was first published in Poetry in 1916, in its idealisation of the Irish working class, and shares its central subject. However, as A. P. W. was keen to point out, the romance of the sea may have a harsh reality for those who depend on it for a living and it may ‘call the breadwinner far, far away and leave those dependent on him without shelter’.26 Political poetry of the working classes then was commonplace at the beginning of the twentieth century, and there was also a sophisticated body of criticism in the organs of publication. Nowhere is this more evident than in the poetry of the suffragist movement, and, in particular, that which appeared in its newspaper, the Irish Citizen. Poems such as ‘Suffrage 24

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For more on John Saturninus Kelly and William Martin Murphy and their role in the 1913 Lockout, see Padraig Yeates, Lockout Dublin 1913: The Most Famous Labour Dispute in Irish History (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Eva Gore-Booth, The Agate Lamp (London: Longmans and Co., 1912). Andrew Patrick Wilson was a Scottish poet and dramatist who was producing Larkinite plays for the Abbey Theatre; for more on this, see Ben Levitas, ‘Plumbing the Depths: Irish Realism and the Working Class from Shaw to O’Casey’, Irish University Review, 33.1 (Spring–Summer 2003), pp. 133–49. A. P. W. ‘The Agate Lamp’, Irish Worker, 18 January 1913.

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Sonnets’ by the poet and dramatist James H. Cousins mark out a space for direct criticism of the political system that denied women the right to vote. Its opening lines highlight the injustice heaped on those who would seek the vote for women: ‘Who sets her shoulder to the Cross of Christ, / Lo! Shall she wear sharp scorn upon her brow’.27 It is interesting to note that Cousins would also deploy the Christ imagery so common to the muscular Christianity of the age in order to make his political point. James Cousins was married to the formidable organiser and Honorary Secretary of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), Margaret E.  Cousins, who, along with many others in the IWFL, had been imprisoned for her politics.28 Many women poets also wrote for the Irish Citizen, of which the established poet and major Irish Revival figure Dora Sigerson Shorter was one. Her poem ‘A Vagrant Heart’ outlines the passion and adventure that she longed for, whilst suffering under unjust social restrictions that limited her freedom: ‘Ochone! to be a woman, only sighing on the / shore – / [. . .] Must join in empty chatter, and calculate with / straws – / For the weighing of our neighbour – for the sake / of social laws’.29 Although Sigerson Shorter was an establishment figure, her poem contributed to the emancipation of women of all classes, just as the Irish Citizen would publish anti-war poems once the horror of World War One and the damage to the working-class men fighting in it became apparent.30 Working-class poetry in Ireland was influenced by the Irish Literary Revival in its use of recurring tropes such as the idealisation of the working-class figure as part of or in tune with nature, the deployment of the Christ figure as shorthand for the universal man and its concerns with the spiritual world. However, as we have seen, there was a vibrant culture of resistance from working-class poets themselves, either in the production of topical political poems or in a genuine attempt to capture the workingclass experience in art. Nowhere was this resistance more evident than in the industrialised heartlands of what in 1920 became Northern Ireland. One such northern light was the shipyard poet and dramatist Thomas Carnduff (1886–1956). Carnduff was from an impoverished working-class background in Belfast. He played an active role in the Larne gun-running of 1914 with the Ulster Volunteer Force before signing up to fight in the First World War. He eventually rose to become the Worshipful Master 27 28 29 30

James H. Cousins, ‘Suffrage Sonnets’, Irish Citizen, 21 September 1912. For more on Margaret E. Cousins, see Irish Citizen, 8 February 1913. Dora Sigerson Shorter, ‘A Vagrant Heart’, Irish Citizen, 29 June 1912. For an example of this type of anti-war poem, see AE, ‘Gods of War’, Irish Citizen, 10 October 1914.

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of Sandy Row Independent Loyal Orange Lodge. However, Carnduff’s politics evolved to become more communist in outlook and he believed in the emancipation of the working class above his Orange political views.31 Carnduff’s Songs from the Shipyards and Other Poems, published after his return from the war in France, eulogises the working-class man of Belfast and the pride he felt in her shipyards: We are the men of Belfast, Her sinew, marrow, and bone, By the graft of our brain and muscle We fashioned for her a throne; And the people, or Lord, or parson, Class, or creed, or clan, Its little we care for the title, If they play the part of a man.32

This collection also makes a substantial contribution to Irish war poetry, containing many poems directly relating to his time on the front. Carnduff would go on to publish another collection of poems titled Songs of an Outof-Work in 1932 that built on his concerns with working-class men and women. At this stage, the collection is notable for its more communistinformed politics, losing some of the nationalism that informed Songs from the Shipyards and replacing it with a more specific internationalist vision.33 Working-class writing in Ireland has a strong tradition in the large urban centres of Dublin and Belfast. This is also true of England, which still celebrates the proletarian poetry of the ‘Auden Generation’ of Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. Although two of these four poets were Irish, they have been subsumed into the British canon of communist poets.34 They were a generation who fretted over their position in society. Despite their ideological commitment to the working classes, they were Oxford educated, middle class and worried about a literature of commitment and the role of the poet in light of the rise of fascism.35 Their poetry 31

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For more on Carnduff’s life and works, see Thomas Carnduff: Life and Writings, ed. by John Gray (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1994). Thomas Carnduff, ‘Men of Belfast’, in Songs from the Shipyards and Other Poems (Belfast: Thornton, 1918?), p. 11. Thomas Carnduff, Songs of an Out-of-Work (Belfast: Quota Press, 1932). See Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England of the 1930s (London: Viking Press, 1977). For an account of these poets that complicates this easy picture of them, see Adrian Caesar, Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Tom Walker has most recently argued for MacNeice’s place in the Irish canon; see Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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is of the metropolis, its industrialised factories debasing human experience for worker and artist alike.36 This is one of the fissures that divides Irish working-class poetry in southern Ireland from its northern and English counterparts – it is largely rural in its outlook, it reflects the growing number of young writers who were moving to Dublin, but retained their rural worldview, and this is mirrored in the works produced at that time. Urban working-class writing in Ireland is particularly strong in the field of drama, best represented by writers such as Seán O’Casey and Brendan Behan. But these writers also produced work in a variety of other forms from memoir to poetry. Behan began his fledgling literary career by publishing nationalist poetry in the Wolfe Tone Weekly and he maintained an interest in poetry throughout his writing life in both English and Irish. His poem ‘The Prayer of the Rannaire’ acutely recalls the pain he felt at the hijacking of the Irish language by an aspirant middle class using it as a tool for personal advancement. Behan also displays in this poem the resentment of the urban working class as their city swells with the ranks of ambitious and conservative rural poor in search of employment: But Jesus wept! What’s to be seen? Civil servants come up from Dun Chaoin, More gobdaws down from Donegal And from Galway bogs – the worst of all, The Dublin Gaels with their golden fáinnes, Tea [sic] -totalling toddlers, turgid and torpid, Maudlin maidens, morbid and mortal, Each one of them careful, catholic, cautious.37

If some of this nationalist ideology made for bad poetry, then Marxist/ socialist ideology also pervaded working-class writing with equally questionable results. The ubiquity of such weak poetry amongst Dublin’s urban working class is memorably satirised by Flann O’Brien in his novel At Swim-Two-Birds when the characters Paul Shanahan and Antony Lamont are discussing the value of Gaelic poetry but seem concerned that the working-class voice is entirely absent from it. Shanahan asks his other fictional friends: ‘But the man in the street. Where does he come in? By God he doesn’t come in at all as far as I can see.’38 He then proposes Jem Casey 36

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For an example of this, see Louis MacNeice’s account of industrialised Birmingham:  Louis MacNeice, ‘Our Sister Water’, in The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. by E.  R. Dodds (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 299. Brendan Behan, ‘The Prayer of the Rannaire’, quoted in Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan: A Life (Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1999), p. 158. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 74.

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as the great poet of the labouring classes and as an exemplar of the type of writer whose work exhibits something of ‘what you call permanence’ for his oft-quoted great work ‘The Workingman’s Friend’: When money’s tight and hard to get, And your horse has also ran, When all you have is a heap of debt – A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.39

Incidentally, the urban working-class poets of the Irish Citizen and the Irish Worker are not the only targets here for O’Brien’s jaundiced view of Irish society, but also the didactic Temperance crusader and poet-priest Reverend James Casey, whose forgettable poems on the dangers of drink were wildly popular towards the end of the nineteenth century.40 If the working-class poetry of the urban centres of Belfast and Dublin sought to challenge and overcome the long shadow of W. B. Yeats and the Revival, then perhaps the most successful writer in rising to this challenge came from beyond the poetic pale of the city. Patrick Kavanagh was the most original voice to develop in Irish working-class poetry, but his origins and subject matter were distinctly rural. Although he was a nature poet of some considerable talent, his best poetry is in an anti-pastoral mode, and his real genius would come in his ability to synthesise both the rural and the urban in poems such as his late canal bank sonnets, where a city lock ‘Niagarously roars’ by a quiet Dublin bench.41 Kavanagh’s poetry was deeply infused with Catholicism and with the ‘ordinary plenty’ of working-class life, and this turn of the poetic gaze from Yeats’s vision of celestial towers towards the ‘clay-minted’ earth offered the surest roadmap for the direction of Irish poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.42 Kavanagh offered a working-class poetry that was distinctive in being rural, Catholic and poor; his work contrasts with that of the ‘Auden generation’, who were urban, atheist and middle class. Crucially, Kavanagh’s poetry is workingclass writing by a member of that class and his work demonstrates a sincerity that is often missing from other writing. His importance to those who followed him was captured by Seamus Heaney when he recalled that there ‘came this revelation and confirmation 39 40

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Ibid., p. 77. For more on the Reverend James Casey, see John Foley, ‘The Historical Origins of Flann O’Brien’s Jem Casey’, Notes and Queries, 52.1 (March 2005), 97–9. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’, in Collected Poems (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), p. 227. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Advent’, in Collected Poems, p. 110.

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of reading Kavanagh. When I found “Spraying the Potatoes” in the old Oxford Book of Irish Verse, I was excited to find details of a life which I knew intimately  – but which I  had always considered to be below or beyond books’.43 Born the son of a cobbler and subsistence farmer in Monaghan in 1904, Kavanagh most successfully bridges the divide between workingclass life and its expression. He manages this by writing with an authority that can be savage in its criticism of provincial Catholic Ireland, as with ‘The Great Hunger’, but also capable of showing its consolations, as with a poem such as ‘Advent’. Of all the poets to follow in Yeats’s footsteps, then, Kavanagh’s rural working-class spirituality offered a more holistic view of Irish life than that posited by those urban poets who were writing from an overtly ideological perspective: With all reasonable Poems in particular We want no secular Wisdom plodded together By concerned fools.44

Certainly, Yeats too was dismissive of those proletarian poets whose subject matter debased the sanctity of art by promoting the ‘man on the tube’ as their subject: The young English poets reject dream and personal emotion; they have thought out opinions that join them to this or that political party; they employ an intricate psychology, action in character [. . .] When I stand on O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises.45

For all of Yeats’s eloquence in fighting against the ‘filthy modern tide’ of this new world, his battle was fundamentally lost.46 As the hopes of the working-class poets for a more equitable Ireland began to fade, the time of the aspirant shopkeeper had come into its own with the rise of a debased 43

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Seamus Heaney, ‘The Placeless Heaven:  Another Look at Patrick Kavanagh’, in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 138. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘To Hell with Commonsense’, in Patrick Kavanagh: Collected Poems (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964), p. 155. W. B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, in Essays and Introductions (London: MacMillan, 1961), p. 525. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Statues’, in Collected Poems (London: MacMillan, 1950), p. 376.

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middle class that ‘fumble in a greasy till/And add the halfpence to the pence’.47 However, despite Yeats’s concerns that ‘every rank above the lowest must degenerate, and, as inferior men push up into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly,’ poetry in Ireland survived.48 That it also thrived is down, in no small part, to Patrick Kavanagh and his rural working-class vision of an embryonic society in growth.

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W. B. Yeats, ‘September 1913’, in Collected Poems (London: MacMillan, 1950), p. 120. W. B. Yeats, ‘From “On the Boiler” ’, in Explorations (London: MacMillan, 1962), p. 423.

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‘A system that inflicts suffering upon the many’ Early twentieth-century working-class fiction Paul Delaney

‘The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.’ So James Connolly remarked in his radical critique of colonialism and bourgeois historiography, Labour in Irish History (1910). Such servility was a product of the imperialist imagination, Connolly noted, and was indicative of the desire to debase and control. In essence, it sought to shape the ways a subject people perceived themselves as well as how they were seen by the outside world. Reflecting on the evolution of this image, Connolly contended that it was not the sole creation of English or Anglo-Irish writers; rather, in a move calculated to disturb mainstream nationalists, he argued that Irish people had contributed to the resuscitation of this hackneyed figure, giving a veneer of credence to the very worst clichés about Irish society and, consequently, providing justification for ongoing programmes of exploitation and misrule. ‘Be it understood we are not talking now of the English slanderers of the Irishman’, Connolly warned, ‘but of his Irish apologists. The English slanderer never did as much harm as did these self-constituted delineators of Irish characteristics’.1 Labour in Irish History calls for an acknowledgement of this truth and a corrective to the established narrative, drawing attention away from received biases and sectarian differences towards a realisation of the economic basis of oppression in Ireland. Such recognition was necessary in the drive for genuine independence, Connolly argued, since without this awareness any future state would remain caught within the grip of advanced capitalism, controlled by neocolonialist interests and a self-interested, native bourgeoisie. It is for this reason that Connolly’s venom was directed, in particular, against ‘the apostate patriotism of the Irish capitalist class’, as well as ‘the hireling scribes of the propertied classes [who] have written history’.2 As Fintan Lane has observed, however, this was interlinked with a broader 1 2

James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1910), pp. viii, ix. Ibid., pp. xi, 24.

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understanding of the need for new forms of self-representation if change was to be effected by the working class.3 Connolly’s point was shared by a number of his contemporaries who, despite real differences of politics and affiliation, also engaged with questions of self-expression, class identity, subjugation and liberation. In some cases writers concentrated their energies on class relations in a local context, and engaged with the rapacious demands of capitalism and its connections with imperialism in Ireland. James Stephens, for instance, in his early romance, The Charwoman’s Daughter (1912), wrote of the hardships endured by a young woman, Mary Makebelieve, and her mother in Dublin’s inner-city slums, imagining their abuse by a suitor who  – as a policeman – is also represented as the embodiment of a patriarchal, alien law. The point was repeated in several of Stephens’s other prose works: in The Crock of Gold (1912), a sombre set of prison stories complicates a Revivalist tale of growth and new beginnings, as two men describe their experiences of unemployment in a society that is indifferent to economic justice; and in the comic fantasy The Demi-Gods (1914), an idiosyncratic vagrant recalls an earlier phase of his life when, as a rich farmer, he inflicted intolerable cruelties on the people who worked for him. ‘If you had been one of my men’, he warns a fellow nomad: you’d have been as tame as a little kitten; you’d have crawled round me with your hat in your hand and your eyes turned up like a dying duck’s, and you’d have said, ‘Yes, sir’, and ‘No, sir’ like the other men that I welted the stuffing out of with my two fists, and broke the spirits of with labour and hunger.4

Over and again in Stephens’s œuvre, people are cowed by the demands of capitalism and its desire to exploit and humiliate. His short story ‘Hunger’ is an exemplary instance of this. First published separately as the booklet Hunger: A Dublin Story (1918), a slightly revised version of ‘Hunger’ was included in Stephens’s second short story collection, Etched in Moonlight (also 1918). It is a story which is relentless in its articulation of poverty and injustice. Little is known of the woman who is at the heart of this remorseless tale, and the syntax that is deployed is stringent and bare. Unnamed and barely delineated, the few details that are presented suggest that the woman is typical of her class 3

4

Fintan Lane, ‘James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History’, in Mobilising Classics:  Reading Radical Writing in Ireland, ed. by Fiona Dukelow and Orla O’Donovan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 38–53 (p. 49). James Stephens, The Demi-Gods (London: Macmillan, 1914), 144.

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and her time – she lives with her family in a tenement, they suffer terribly through the Dublin Lockout and the early years of the First World War, and the family is so poor that the husband is forced to travel to Britain to find work. ‘Nothing could be done’ to alter their situation, the narrator mentions more than once, and this fatalistic refrain reinforces the sense that Stephens is writing of a world where there is little sense of agency or hope for change. It is almost inevitable that two of her children should die ‘of an ill which, whatever it was at the top, was hunger at the bottom’, and that her husband perishes alone on the streets of Glasgow.5 Neither the woman nor her remaining son escape the despairing logic of the story, as both are presented in the closing stages traumatised and slowly starving. Indeed, the charity that is finally offered proves inadequate to the woman’s plight, since the promise of aid is belated and cannot negate the horrors that she has experienced. ‘The story is a true one’, Stephens is purported to have said, ‘and would have killed me but that I got it out of my system this way’.6 By suggesting as much, Stephens ascribed ‘Hunger’ the status of a witness text, and laid claim to the veracity of the events depicted in this fictional story. ‘Most of my story is autobiographical,’ Patrick MacGill similarly asserted in the foreword to one of the most influential working-class novels of the period, Children of the Dead End (1914). ‘While asking a little allowance for the pen of the novelist it must be said that nearly all the incidents of the book have come under the observation of the writer.’7 From what is known of MacGill’s early life, it seems that this is not an empty rhetorical formula. Born to an impoverished family in Donegal in 1890, MacGill was hired out as a farmhand at a young age before joining a gang of ‘tatie hokers’ (potato diggers) at fifteen and migrating to Scotland; there he earned a pittance as a seasonal labourer, living in cramped, squalid conditions in bothies, byres and barely converted sties. He subsequently worked on the railways and roads, spending considerable periods of time destitute and homeless. MacGill began writing in the early 1900s and his first collection of poems, Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrap Book, was published privately in 5

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James Stephens (as James Esse), Hunger: A Dublin Story (Dublin: The Candle Press, 1918), pp. 11, 19–20; rprt. James Stephens, ‘Hunger’, in Etched in Moonlight (London: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 27 and 40. Quoted by Augustine Martin, ‘Introduction’ to James Stephens, Desire and other Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1980), p. 10; also paraphrased by Patricia McFate, The Writings of James Stephens: Variations on a Theme of Love (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 134. Neither critic supplies the relevant details for this quotation. Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1914), n.p. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses in the text.

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1911; this led to a short-lived career as a journalist and helped to establish contacts that proved instrumental for his emergence as a novelist. By the time Children of the Dead End was published, MacGill had already begun to fashion for himself the role of ‘navvy poet’, presenting himself, and being marketed in turn, as the embodiment of a subjugated class, giving voice to a people who hitherto had not found expression beyond cliché and stereotype. Children of the Dead End takes the form of a first-person narrative, told by its central character, Dermod Flynn. Many aspects of Flynn’s life are based on MacGill’s experiences, and the blurring of distinctions between MacGill and his narrator-protagonist means that it is often difficult to determine the precise boundaries of this text. If this is implicit in the formal ambiguities invested in the subtitle, The Autobiography of a Navvy (whose autobiography, the author MacGill or the fictional Flynn?), it is also manifest in MacGill’s use of techniques which are traditionally associated with discrete genres, including realist fiction, social documentary, melodrama, life writing, popular romance and the quest narrative. Weaving these forms together, MacGill produced a partially fictionalised autobiography which seeks to expose the inequities of the class system in rural Ireland and industrial Scotland. ‘I merely tell the truth’, Flynn states, ‘speak of things as I have seen them, of people as I have known them, and of incidents as one who has taken part in them. Truth needs no apologies, frankness does not deserve reproof ’ (112). In such instances, it is hard to interpret Flynn as anything other than a thinly disguised mouthpiece for MacGill, an association which is extended when Flynn asserts his belief in the interventionist capacities of writing and the diagnostic value of this particular text: I write of the ills which society inflicts on individuals like myself, and when possible I lay every wound open to the eyes of the world. I believe that there is an Influence of Good working through the ages, and it is only by laying the wounds open that we can hope to benefit by the Influence. (112)

The idea that writing can pierce the skin of dominant ideologies, and that it can lay bare the ways in which a society represents itself to itself and its subjects, is fundamental to MacGill’s œuvre. Equally important is the conviction that the form and the conventions of prose fiction provide a suitable medium with which to imagine alternative ways of living and thinking in – and to – a capitalist society. While MacGill holds these principles firm, any possibility of change is predetermined by the strictures of the dominant order that he and his characters inhabit. Jack Mitchell hinted at this thirty years ago, in a withering

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assessment of ‘the broad (but not complete) rejection of bourgeois values’ which are identifiable in MacGill’s work, as well as its ‘militant (if immature) class standpoint’.8 Foremost amongst these values are the codes of the Catholic Church, with MacGill repeatedly drawing on the language of Christianity to describe the conditions that prevail for the poor. Flynn’s early degradations at the Hiring Fair, and his subsequent ill treatment as an indentured child labourer, are poignantly portrayed as ‘the Calvary of midTyrone’, for instance, while his later experiences travelling across Scotland in search of work lead him to self-identify as ‘an Ishmaelite’ (30, 173). The belief in a vaguely conceived ‘Influence of Good’, which serves as a wishful guarantor of historical change (at best), has serious implications for radicalism and agency in the novel, while MacGill’s recourse to the language of religion severely curtails Flynn’s knowledge of left-wing politics. Recalling how he listened to street-corner socialists ‘who preached the true Christian Gospel to the people’, for example, the narrator presents his initial encounter with progressive politics as a quasi-Damascene moment: ‘from the first I looked upon the socialist speakers as men . . . who toiled bravely in the struggle for the regeneration of humanity’ (139). If this experience exemplifies Flynn’s commitment to the need for reform and social justice, it nonetheless couches that commitment in an idiom which derives from the Church, an idiom which is used by authority figures throughout Children of the Dead End to justify the unequal distribution of wealth, and which is implicated in the maintenance of the status quo. The frequency of allusions to the Catholic Church should be compared with the dearth of references to working-class literature or political activism. Aside from a fleeting section in the chapter ‘Books’, which all-toobriefly mentions Flynn’s attendance at a few socialist meetings and the influence of a couple of writers, notably Victor Hugo and the American political economist Henry George, MacGill includes hardly any details which attest to Flynn’s politicisation. Inevitably, this has consequences for the narrator’s ability to represent the situation within which he finds himself. When Flynn begins to recognise his potential as a writer late in the novel, outlining what he perceives to be the responsibilities of the socially committed artist, the aesthetic that he advances is one of simplicity. According to Peter Miles, Flynn’s declaration that ‘true art, the only true art, is that which appeals to the simple people’ (271) signals an awareness 8

Jack Mitchell, ‘Early Harvest: Three Anti-capitalist Novels Published in 1914’, in The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, ed. by H. Gustav Klaus (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 75.

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on the part of the narrator of ‘the necessity of maintaining a connection with his roots’.9 This speaks to the importance of ballads and songs in Flynn’s life story, which evolve out of the experiences of work, and which are rich in associations of solidarity and lived history. Songs are often linked to the narrator’s roguish comrade, Moleskin Joe (a link which is extended in the derivative novel, Moleskin Joe [1923]), and provide labourers with a form with which to express themselves and their experiences. If songs carry this significance, however, they are not without problems as MacGill utilises them. A roaring rendition of ‘The Bold Navvy Man’ provides a suggestive case in point, as its lusty celebration of workingclass bravado is set alongside a mawkish portrayal of ‘the life of stress and strife as suits the navvy man’ (235–6). This tendency towards sentimentality can be traced through Flynn’s artistic credo (‘true art’, ‘the simple people’), and can be interpreted as evidence of the difficulties of self-expression in the novel. It is significant, therefore, that any chance of education is cut short by the necessities of work, and that the limited schooling that Flynn receives as a child reinforces the patterns of thinking which dominate his home parish. It is also telling that the work that the narrator undertakes is intensive and demanding, and that it offers little opportunity for contemplation or study. From this perspective, the use of the language of religion can be seen less as a simple failing on Flynn’s – or MacGill’s – part, and more as an illustration of the power of dominant forces to constitute and interpellate its subjects. Not only does this impact Flynn’s ability to make sense of the society that he inhabits, it also prescribes limits to his conceptualisation of the possibilities for change in that world. ‘To-day I assert that no man is good enough to be another man’s master’, Flynn boldly proclaims (46). The narrator-protagonist is resolute in his articulation of this basic principle; nonetheless, the implications are tested whenever MacGill applies the discourse of equality to questions of gender. Although hypocrisies and double standards are incisively critiqued in the novel, with sexual abuse identified as a form of ‘white slavery’ institutionalised in the very design of capitalist society, sexist attitudes continue to determine Flynn’s representation of the women he meets on his travels (264). His childhood sweetheart, Norah Ryan, never escapes the classic binary of virgin or whore, and remains subject to the weakest of clichés. ‘To me Norah represented a poetical ideal,’ Flynn pontificates late in his 9

Peter Miles, ‘The Squalor and the Glory: Patrick MacGill, Navigator of Authorship and WorkingClass  Identity’, in John Quinn:  Selected Irish Writers from His Library, ed. by Janis and Richard Londraville (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001), p. 219.

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story, long after his beloved has been abandoned to prostitution and an early death. ‘She was a saint, the angel of my dreams’ (268). Puffed up with self-conceit, Flynn embarks on his so-called holier mission to save Norah from the streets of Glasgow, blind to the fact that he has already played a part in the determination of her fate, and focussing instead on the significance of what he perceives as ‘her shame of all shames’ (285, 265). This mode of representation is replayed elsewhere in Children of the Dead End, with Gourock Ellen offering an especially striking example of the circumscribed roles available to women in the novel. Strategically central to the novel, but barely figured by the narrator, this evocatively named prostitute continues to elicit Flynn’s ‘fugitive disgust’ to the very end of his story (297). Much of Flynn’s disgust stems from a fear of the female body which can be traced back to his early socialisation, and which is articulated through a religious idiom long after he has lost faith in the doctrines of a corrupt Church. As a result, Norah is only ever imagined as a cipher or an ideal, with Flynn avoiding any response to her as a rational agent or a sexually active subject. If women are represented in this restricted way, men, by contrast, are described at length and in detail by the narrator. This points towards a defining feature of Children of the Dead End, with the novel charting homosocial bonds in a male-centred world (the world of the navvy), and describing a machismo culture which invests particular worth in expressions of virility and masculinity. Repeatedly, Flynn equates the idea of ‘man’ with strength and size. Thinking back to his experiences as a child labourer, for instance, Flynn records his shock on learning ‘that I was not worthy of the name of man at all’; he also recalls how he was forced to recognise his perceived value in the rural economies of the Scottish Highlands and mid-Ulster, when he was considered no more than ‘an article of exchange’ to be set  alongside ‘the implements and beasts of the farm’, as well as a boy who was ‘only fit for a child’s work’ (36, 37). The latter insult causes particular offence and impacts the ways in which Flynn sees himself. It also helps to determine the characteristics that he finds attractive in others, especially older men; ‘at once I guessed that he was very strong, so I liked the man even before I spoke to him,’ Flynn remarks of his first encounter with Moleskin Joe (100). Strength is all, it seems, in configurations of masculinity, and this accounts for the respect that is given to might – and the consequent diminution of interest in intellect or articulacy – in Children of the Dead End. ‘The opinions of a man who argues with his fist are always respected’ is one of Joe’s many aphorisms, and is a comment with which Flynn seems

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to be in agreement (105). The conflation of speech with force – indeed, the supersedence of speech by force – is one of the most troubling aspects of Joe’s statement; equally worrisome is the respect which greets such a remark in Children of the Dead End, and the consequences this has for the fashioning of male working-class identity. ‘There were three sayings in Kinlochleven’, amongst the labourers working on the historic hydroelectric scheme at Lochaber, the narrator informs the reader, one of which was that ‘Flynn would fight his own shadow and get the best of it’ (217). The apparent pride with which Flynn notes this is disconcerting, as is his naivety in overlooking the inference, as the comment points towards a culture which valorises violence and wasted energy. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that so little attention is given to political education in the novel, with MacGill eschewing serious engagement with contemporaneous progressive movements in Scotland or in Ireland. Flynn’s early flirtation with socialism is soon forgotten, as is his half-hearted attempt to initiate a strike, and any chance of resistance or collective agency dissipates as the narrator-protagonist sways between expressions of anger and resignation, nihilism and ‘an almost stoical outlook on the things that are’ (251). It is equally fitting that Flynn should experience such anxiety when he takes up a brief career as a journalist, and that he should admit to feeling as if ‘I was committing some sin against my mates’ by seeking to represent their lives in print (228). Flynn’s recourse to the language of the Catholic Church is revealing, as he seeks to make sense of his work as a writer. For the Church remains a pervasive force in MacGill’s œuvre – structurally, as a powerful component in capitalist society (links are invariably forged between priests, hucksters and gombeen men), but also discursively, as it determines the ways in which people behave and think about the world. In addition, Flynn’s fears are indicative of ethical and ideological difficulties which arise out of the attempt to write about and for one’s class. These difficulties are implicit in the very act of representation, which simultaneously means to portray (to represent) but also to speak on behalf of or to stand in for by proxy (to re-present); and the difficulties are heightened in situations where a writer generates the mistrust of those whom he or she knows by seeking to describe the world that they are a part of. ‘My success as a writer discomfited me a little,’ Flynn confides to the reader. ‘I was working on a shift which [my friends] did not understand; and men look with suspicion on things beyond their comprehension . . . The man who made money with a dirty pencil and a piece of dirty paper was an individual who had no place in my mates’ scheme of things’ (228). The tensions arising out

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of this dilemma provide an interesting subtext to Children of the Dead End, hinted at in the loaded repetition of ‘dirty’, and pithily summed up by an elderly navvy who marvels: ‘A man to earn his living by writing for the papers! Whoever heard of such a thing?’ (229). If the resultant stresses remain underexplored by MacGill, the inferences are there to be teased out, with lines of association apparent between masculinity and labour, writing and class, prostitution and capital. Rather than following through with an exploration of the politics of representation, or an interrogation of the precarious position of the working-class writer in a market-driven economy, MacGill retains his belief in the diagnostic value of literature and the adequacy of the written word to engage with the conditions that prevail. The introduction to MacGill’s second novel, The Rat-Pit (1915), makes this clear, as it promises to follow the life story of Norah Ryan, and thus provide a companion piece to Children of the Dead End: Whilst my former book, “Children of the Dead End”, was on the whole accepted as giving a picture of the life of the navvy, there were some who refused to believe that scenes such as I  strove to depict could exist in a country like ours. To them I venture the assurance that “The Rat-Pit” is a transcript from life and that most of the characters are real people, and the scenes only too poignantly true.10

A claim for verisimilitude was also made by the Dublin-born emigrant writer Robert Tressell in the preface to his iconic novel of British working-class life, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914/1955). ‘The work possesses at least one merit, that of being true. I have invented nothing. There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of.’11 Tressell’s disclaimer is intentionally misleading and makes light of his own status as a creative artist. In addition to concealing the many influences which inform this work of fiction – from the socialist commentaries of Robert Blatchford to the eviscerating satire of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, the panoptic sweep of Dickens, and the cautionary parables of the New Testament, to say nothing of contemporary reports, songs, treatises and popular tales (‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ is a significant intertext, for instance) – Tressell’s comments also play down his use of an established tradition of naming characters in accordance with moral qualities and physical characteristics. 10 11

Patrick MacGill, The Rat-Pit (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1915), pp. v–vi. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), p. 12. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses in the text.

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It is a tradition stretching back beyond John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress to medieval times, and is revisited by Tressell through the naming of such characters as Crass, Slyme, Starvem, Botchit, Sweater, Grinder, Rushton, Rev. Belcher and Sir Graball D’Encloseland. To underline the point (if it were needed), these parodic monikers are set against the dignified names of some of the working-class characters, such as Frank and Nora Owen, the Easton and the Linden families, the ill-treated apprentice Bert and the mysterious but increasingly prominent figure of Barrington. Tressell’s decision not to mention this rich and diverse inheritance serves a purpose, and supports his assertion in the preface that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists should be considered an act of witness. This might be partly attributable to generic ‘nervousness’, as Raymond Williams once suggested, as Tressell drew on an idea of the novel which was linked to middle-class culture, but adapted it to incorporate elements of the pamphlet, working-class autobiography, the political tract and prose satire.12 The difficulties which ensued help to explain the aesthetic uncertainties which underlie The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as the book aims to function both as a work of art and as a piece of propaganda, with the narrative frequently compromised by acts of repetition, interjection, coincidence and expedience (consider the deus ex machina revelation of Barrington’s true identity, for example). At the same time, Tressell’s use of the novel form provided him with a medium with which to entertain his readers while exploring the core belief that it is the duty of progressive writers to unmask the truth behind conventions and orthodoxies, advancing the conviction that change can be effected through literary practice, as readers are confronted with the reality of their lives and the ways in which things might be altered. The pedagogic qualities of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists provide clear evidence of this, with speeches, debates, diagrams and expositions directly folded into the narrative. Owen’s extended discussion of ‘the Great Money Trick’ is a case in point, as is Barrington’s disquisition on the miseries of ‘a system that inflicts suffering upon the many and allows true happiness to none’ (483). It also explains the repetitions embedded within the text, as ideas are repeated (by Owen, Barrington and the narrator) to ensure that readers grasp the points that are being made. Evidently, Tressell intended to force his readers to engage self-reflexively with the novel, and 12

Raymond Williams, ‘The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists’, in Writing in Society (London:  Verso, 1984), pp. 239–56 (p. 241).

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to acknowledge their part in the continuation of a system that is exposed and held up for critique. The fact that so many of Mugsborough’s workers resist this realisation is crucial, as they refuse to think that things can be organised differently. ‘It is to the interest of all to try and find a better way’, Barrington enjoins his comrades at the annual beano (483). If few of his fellow workers appreciate the importance of this command, the invitation is nonetheless extended to Tressell’s readers to act on the argument that is advanced. This gains additional significance in light of Tressell’s attention to the hegemonic nature of power relations. Frustrated at his inability to explain the reasons for poverty to his co-workers, Owen contends that this is because his fellow labourers have been encouraged not to think for themselves: In their infancy they had been taught to distrust their own intelligence and to leave ‘thinking’ to their ‘pastors’ and masters and to their ‘betters’ generally. All their lives they had been true to this teaching, they had always had blind, unreasoning faith in the wisdom and humanity of their pastors and masters. This was the reason why they and their children had been all their lives on the verge of starvation and nakedness, whilst their ‘betters’ – who did nothing but the thinking – went clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day (299–300).

This is one of Tressell’s key observations, and is linked to a broader understanding of the ways that thought is produced and shaped by the authorities in Mugsborough. The so-called Brigands’ control of the popular newspapers, The Ananias, The Weekly Chloroform and The Daily Obscurer, ensures the dissemination of certain modes of thinking, as do invidious programmes of teaching sponsored by employers and local politicians and practised at schools and in churches. Tressell is clear that this leads to a culture of dependency, with ‘taught self-contempt’ internalised by people who have become ‘stultified, degraded and brutalized by ignorance and poverty’ (223, 358). Owen is one of the few characters who recognise this problem, and his ability to do this (unlike Flynn in Children of the Dead End) is linked to the fact that he reads and engages with left-wing literature. Most inhabitants of Mugsborough, by contrast, are unable to see beyond the status quo, and are resigned to the belief that social relations have attained the form that they have because it is somehow natural or inevitable that their world should be organised in this way. ‘They did not know the causes of the poverty that perpetually held them and their children in its cruel grip’, Owen understands, as he considers the extent to

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which the majority of his townsfolk had become ‘convinced of their own intellectual inferiority’: and – they did now want to know! And if one explained those causes to them in such language and in such a manner that they were almost compelled to understand, and afterwards pointed out to them the obvious remedy, they were neither glad nor responsive, but remained silent and angry because they found themselves unable to answer and disprove (582).

Owen labours to deconstruct this mind-set. That he does so tirelessly, notwithstanding setbacks and struggles with his own health, speaks to the heroic stature he is afforded by Tressell. It is painfully ironic, therefore, that early editions of the novel should have presented him otherwise, with considerable sections of the text removed so that the narrative ended with an image of Owen in despair, depressed for the future of his son and contemplating suicide. Dave Harker has catalogued the many excisions which were made to the typescript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in advance of its posthumous publication in 1914, changes which were commissioned by the publisher Grant Richards and undertaken by the poet Jessie Pope.13 A further abridged edition was prepared for publication in 1918. The cuts were extensive (more than three-fifths of the original 250,000 words were omitted), and commercially driven (the plot was tightened, repetition was cut, commentary was pruned), and the text was consequently shorn of its radical impulse, appearing more pessimistic than Tressell could have ever imagined. It was not until 1955 that history was finally ‘redeemed’, as Peter Miles has eloquently stated, with a full text produced following the painstaking research of Fred Ball, who pieced the excisions together and reorganised the text into a more faithful shape.14 One of the most important things to emerge from Ball’s revisions was the reorganisation of the closing pages of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. If previous versions ended in desolation, with Owen close to infanticide and self-harm, the restored conclusion shows the protagonist undefeated, looking to the return of a travelling socialist van and a future social justice. In the revised ending, Owen figuratively chooses life, as he wraps his hands around the infant child that he and Nora have adopted (Ruth’s child, born of rape by the appropriately named Slyme), and realises ‘with a kind of thankfulness that he would never have had the heart to carry 13

14

Dave Harker, Tressell: The Real Story of ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ (London: Zed Books, 2003), pp. 69–86. Peter Miles, ‘Introduction’ to Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. xi.

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out the dreadful project he had sometimes entertained in hours of despondency’ (627). This lifts him beyond the encroaching shadows of dusk to visualise a future society, where the ‘glorious fabric of the Co-operative Commonwealth’ will be attained and wealth and opportunity equally divided (630). In this imagined society, ‘Golden Light . . . will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism’ (630). It is imperative that Tressell’s narrative should end at this point (with the weighted, capitalised S-word), and that Owen’s prophecy should stretch beyond the townscape of Mugsborough to include the citizens of the world, all of whom are subject to structures which legitimise ‘abundant riches, luxury, vice, hypocrisy, poverty, starvation, and crime’ (629). For a consequence of this expansive, outward look is, paradoxically, a return to Ireland, as the problems identified by a Dublin-born housepainter named Robert Noonan (Tressell is a pseudonym, drawn from the portable stepladder which is an emblem of the painter’s trade), in a text which carries no obvious national resonance (none of the characters is Irish, there are no references to contemporary politics in Ireland and the setting is a fictionalised Hastings on the south coast of England), nonetheless speak to abuses and injustices which were – and which still are – systemic in Irish society. Not only does this broaden our understanding of what constitutes Irish writing, it serves as a salutary reminder that progressive literature is invariably comparative and internationalist. It is a point with which several canonical writers of the post-independence period would have concurred, as they decried the reining in of scope and the consolidation of interests in the decades after independence. Peadar O’Donnell, Liam O’Flaherty and Seán O’Casey, for instance, each adopted an international left-wing perspective (albeit to different ends), and each examined the rise to power of a Catholic middle-class nexus in the newly independent state. Less familiar names provided additional correctives, including the once-acclaimed but now largely forgotten writer Jim Phelan. Phelan’s œuvre, which turns on the interconnected themes of ‘imprisonment and vagrancy’, includes the partly autobiographical novel Lifer (1938), the prison memoir Jail Journey (1940), the autobiographical volume The Name’s Phelan (1948) and the political thriller Green Volcano (1938).15 At first glance, the latter text is a fast-paced ‘whodunit’ set against 15

Liam Harte, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 143. For further information on Phelan’s life, see Paul Lester, Tales of a Lifer: The Writings of Jim Phelan (Birmingham: Protean Pamphlet, 2011); see also Andrew Lees, ‘The Rolling English Road’, Dublin Review of Books, 67 (May 2015) www.drb.ie/essays/the-rollingenglish-road [accessed 27 June 2016].

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the backdrop of the revolutionary period of 1916–23, inhabited by a cast of spies, informers and double agents. However, beneath the surface, Green Volcano offers a bleak assessment of the value of freedom and the economic incarceration of working-class communities in the Irish Free State. In the course of the novel, the protagonist, Ben Robinson, witnesses the rise to power of a class of ‘new Imperialists’ (wealthy farmers and a native bourgeoisie) who hijack the impulses behind the revolution for their own benefit, and who establish a deeply hierarchical and profoundly undemocratic ‘green empire’. As Ben slowly realises this, he is forced to acknowledge that very little has changed with independence, and that he and his like will have no place in the newly emergent Free State. Ben is consequently pushed towards the inevitable path of exile. In the closing pages, he travels through Dublin on his way to the boat, and looks out across a city which is depressingly familiar, where ‘the post-boxes in the street were painted green instead of red’, and where although ‘a flag with green on it floated from a Government building’, the superficiality of change indicated that ‘otherwise it might have been 1920’.16 In the process, his fate  – like the fate of many of his working-class fictional contemporaries – exemplifies the cautionary words of James Connolly. ‘One of the slave birth-marks is a belief in the capitalist system of society,’ Connolly counselled in Labour in Irish History, as he warned of the dangers of movements and struggles which are not born of progressive economic politics. ‘The Irishman frees himself from such a mark of slavery when he realises the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in Ireland.’17

16 17

Jim Phelan, Green Volcano (London: Peter Davies, 1938), pp. 263, 265 and 267. Connolly, Labour in Irish History, p. x.

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Ch apter 15

Drama, 1900–1950 Paul Murphy

Frantz Fanon, in his path-breaking book The Wretched of the Earth, contends that in ‘the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.’1 Fanon’s statement bears upon the European colonisation of Africa, Asia and practically the rest of the world from the sixteenth century onwards and was written in the context of the period of decolonisation during the mid-twentieth century. The statement is especially poignant in terms of Ireland’s fraught status as a colony under British dominion for centuries until the War of Independence of 1919–21 and the emergence of the Irish Free State in 1922. The issue of class hierarchy was linked to colonial hierarchy, but with key differences to the relationship that Fanon outlines. Since at least the Williamite conquests of the late seventeenth century, the conflict was between what F. S. L. Lyons has called ‘Anglo-Irish Ireland’ composed of the Protestant Ascendancy2 colonial class who owned the land, and ‘Irish Ireland’3 composed of the Catholic, colonised class who worked the land. The post-independence dispensation witnessed the rise of Catholic bourgeois nationalism to become the dominant structure in the Irish Free State, with Protestant loyalism the dominant structure in Northern Ireland. The predominance of these two religiopolitical structures in the respective states resulted in the development of particular class hierarchies and conservative identities, often at the expense of progressive approaches to class disparity and social justice. The focus in this chapter 1

2

3

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 31. First published as Les damnés de la terre by François Masperio éditeur in 1961. See W. J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) for a sustained analysis of the Protestant Ascendancy. See ‘Irish Ireland versus Anglo-Irish Ireland’, in F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1880– 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), chapter 3, pp. 57–83.

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then is on how these issues of class and colonial hierarchy were variously represented and contested on stage during the period from the twilight of the Victorian era in 1900 to the consolidation of the Republic of Ireland in the late 1940s. The decades following the Great Famine of the 1840s witnessed the inexorable decline of the Protestant Ascendancy as the predominant class in Ireland. Increasing violence by Catholic peasant insurgents4 and subsequent legislation passed at Westminster, culminating in the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 and the Encumbered Estates Act of 1904, allowed tenants to purchase property from their Ascendancy landlords with government-assured loans. The Catholic rural population underwent a gradual process of enfranchisement as new hierarchies emerged, dividing more prosperous strong farmers, graziers and shopkeepers5 from small farmers and landless agricultural labourers.6 These hierarchies enabled ‘a new, relatively wealthy, largely Catholic elite to displace the old Protestant ascendancy in land and government’.7 The ‘legitimacy of this emergent class, linked as it often was socially and politically with the new Catholic middle class elite in the cities, lay at the heart of the convergence of the land reform movement and the nationalist movement’.8 The essentially feudal aristocrat-peasant arrangement of the early nineteenth century had been transformed by the rise of the Catholic middle class in the country and the city by the turn of the twentieth century. The changes in property rights and agribusiness consigned small farmers, landless workers and itinerant labourers to the lower rungs of the new social ladder. In spite of the class disparity inherent to the material reality, these disenfranchised social groups were nonetheless central to the dramatic and political imaginations of both Irish and Anglo-Irish Ireland. Alf MacLochlaínn noted the contradiction by observing that such ‘intellectual movements somehow ignore the eight million peasants and their real, vivid, and concrete way of life [. . .] which owed nothing

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8

See Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914, ed. by Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983). See Liam Kennedy, ‘Farmers, Traders and Agricultural Politics in Pre-Independence Ireland’, in Irish Peasants, pp. 339–73. See John W. Boyle, ‘A Marginal Figure: The Irish Rural Laborer’, in Irish Peasants, pp. 311–38. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism:  A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin:  Gill & Macmillan, 1996), p. 140. Ibid., p. 140. For an analysis of the rise of Catholic bourgeois nationalism see Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Élite, 1879–1922 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).

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at all to the chieftains of the Gaelic order who were dead and gone two hundred years and more’.9 The Anglo-Irish intellectual movement was typified in the work of scholars such as Standish O’Grady, whose mythopoeic vision of Irish history inspired the Ascendancy dramatists of the Irish Literary Revival, so much so that W. B. Yeats wrote, ‘I think it was his History of Ireland, Heroic Period, that started us all.’10 Yeats and his associates, including the formidable Lady Augusta Gregory, founded the Irish Literary Theatre (ILT) in 1899, initially to stage plays based on legend and folk tales that would stand ‘outside all the political questions that divide us’.11 The unstated aim was to incorporate the fading Ascendancy into an imagined history that would side-step the colonial conflict between Irish Ireland and Anglo-Irish Ireland. F. S. L. Lyons suggests that when their Irish theatre had become an established fact, Yeats and Lady Gregory would have to withstand the ironic criticism of Dubliners who rated each new play by PQ – peasant quality. But peasant quality, for good or ill, was embedded from the very beginning at the centre of the Anglo-Irish literary movement. The attitude of these early explorers towards the peasant was essentially romantic, for they saw in him [sic] a primal innocence miraculously preserved from the contaminating influences of civilisation.12

Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902),13 co-written largely by Lady Gregory, represents Yeats’s most successful attempt to incorporate his aristocratic vision in a play that is ostensibly anti-colonial agitprop. The Poor Old Woman Cathleen ni Houlihan, symbolising Mother Ireland, calls upon her sons, typified in the young peasant farmer Michael Gillane, to sacrifice themselves on the altar of national liberation so that she may be reborn as a ‘young girl’ with the ‘walk of a queen’.14 The setting for the play in ‘a 9

10

11

12 13

14

Alf MacLochlaínn, ‘Gael and Peasant – A Case of Mistaken Identity?’, in Views of the Irish Peasantry 1800–1916, ed. by Daniel J. Casey and Robert E. Rhodes (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977), p. 31. Samhain: An Occasional Review Edited by W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Sealy Bryers & Walker; London: T. Fisher Unwin), 1902, p.  12, cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 1: The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899–1901 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1975), p. 9. Lady Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre:  A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross:  Colin Smythe, 1972), p. 20. F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1971), p. 235. W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan; first produced 2 April 1902 for the Daughters of Erin by W. G. Fay’s National Dramatic Society, at St Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street, Dublin; first published in Samhain (October 1902); first separate publication, London: A.H. Bullen, 1902; reprinted in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), in Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 88.

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cottage close to Killala, in 1798’15 would resonate with a nationalist audience insofar as the 1798 rising ‘was probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history’.16 Kevin Whelan suggests that ‘the [1898] centenary was pivotal in knitting together the strands of nationalist opinion which had unravelled in the acrimonious aftermath of the Parnell split. Indeed, it could be interpreted as a necessary precursor to the nationalist resurgence and the cultural revival of the early 1900s. Yeats collaborated with Maud Gonne in commemorative committees and became fired by her enthusiasms.’17 Yeats was so inspired by Gonne that he persuaded her to play the title role in the play that, for a short period of time, endeared him to nationalists, to the extent that Arthur Griffith, one of the leading Irish Ireland intellectuals of his time, gave Yeats and the ILT his unwavering support. Cathleen ni Houlihan constitutes the high point in Yeats and Gregory’s attempt to dramatise an ideological rapprochement between the two conflicting visions of Ireland, by playing on the symbolic equivocality in the relationship between Cathleen and Michael. An Irish Ireland interpretation would see Cathleen ni Houlihan as one of many personifications of Ireland as a supernatural figure.18 Michael’s blood sacrifice will help future generations when Ireland as a beleaguered colony will be reborn as an independent republic. An Anglo-Irish Ireland interpretation would see Cathleen ni Houlihan as an Ascendancy figure, who calls upon her brave tenant farmers to unite with her against a common enemy and consolidate their relationship after independence had been realised. Poor ‘Old’ Mother Ireland would be reborn as a ‘young girl’ with the ‘walk of a queen’, implying the reinvention of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy. In both interpretations of the play, the revolutionary figure is the peasant farmer Michael Gillane. In the Irish Ireland perspective, the subordination of individual aspiration is essential to the achievement of an independent nation state. In answering Cathleen’s call to arms, Michael is transformed from a classed subject with a specific social and economic location as the son of a small farmer into a national figure that represents the Irish people. The AngloIrish view depends on the elision of the class inequality and colonial legacy of the landlord-tenant hierarchy. The evolution of the ILT from 1899 into 15 16 17

18

Ibid., p. 75. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 280. Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty:  Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 172. See Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens: Irish Goddesses from the Morrígan to Cathleen Ní Houlihan (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991).

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the Irish National Dramatic Society (INDS) in 1902, the Irish National Theatre Society (INTS) in 1904 and its permanent residence at the Abbey Theatre the same year were steps in a strategy that would consolidate cultural supremacy for Yeats and his class as the precursor to the final goal of political supremacy. Adrian Frazier argues that in this sequence of events ‘Yeats acted decisively and successfully to repeat and restore the colonial ascendancy of the Anglo-Irish.’19 The brief honeymoon period between the intellectual movements of Irish and Anglo-Irish Ireland came to an abrupt end following the production of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907).20 Although Yeats and Synge emerged from an Ascendancy background, there were key differences between them, as Foster notes: Both, obviously, were Irish; both middle class Protestants, from clerical families. But Yeats’s background was an important notch or two down that carefully defined ladder. Synge’s ancestors were bishops, while Yeats’s were rectors; Synge’s had established huge estates and mock castles, while Yeats’s drew the rent from small farms and lived in the Dublin suburbs.21

In spite of the differences in their provenance they shared an interest in a ‘discovery of the “folk” and explorations of “the people” in their “unspoiled” mode went with a contempt for the new middle classes: expressed early on by Yeats in his antipathy to the plays of [William] Boyle and [James] Cousins, and articulated by Synge in his much quoted letter to Stephen MacKenna after his western tour with Jack Yeats’.22 Synge’s letter to MacKenna, concerning his commission from the Manchester Guardian in 1905 to write a series of articles on the western Congested Districts, is key to understanding his dramatic representation of the peasantry and landless labourers: Unluckily my commission was to write on the “Distress” so I couldn’t do anything like what I would have wished as an interpretation of the whole life [. . .] There are sides of all that western life the groggy-patriot-publicangeneral shop-man who is married to the priest’s half sister and his second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor, that are horrible and awful [. . .] I sometimes wish to God I hadn’t a soul and then I could give myself 19

20

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22

Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes:  Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990), p. 135. J. M.  Synge, The Playboy of the Western World; first produced 26 January 1907 by the National Theatre Society, Ltd., Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1907. R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), pp. 198–9. Ibid., p. 205.

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up to putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn’t they hop! In a way it is all heartrending, in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming and in another place where things are going well one has a rampant double-chinned vulgarity I haven’t seen the like of.23

Synge’s wish came true when some members of the audience hopped, kicked and punched during the ‘riots’ that occurred on the opening night of The Playboy.24 The protagonist Christy Mahon, the son of a ‘squatter’25 or wandering tramp, comes from the margins of rural life on ‘a windy corner of high, distant hills’ (184) into the ‘public house’ in the midst of the settled community. Initially he is mistaken by Pegeen, the publican’s daughter, for ‘one of the tinkers [. . .] camped in the glen’ and accused by her father, Michael, of ‘robbing and stealing’, to which he falsely retorts ‘with a flash of family pride: And I the son of a strong farmer (with a sudden qualm), God rest his soul, could have bought up the whole of your old house a while since’ (181–2). Christy quickly learns that the villagers are eager to believe his tall tales and he builds up a fantastic reputation as the man who killed his father with the edge of a ‘loy’. His sporting achievements earn him the title of ‘the champion Playboy of the Western World’ (213) from the women of the locality. Christy attracts the attention of Pegeen, much to the annoyance of her fiancé, Shawn Keogh, the actual son of a strong farmer. In the final act, Christy’s illusion is dispelled by the appearance of Old Mahon, his father. The villagers respond ferociously when they accept Shawn Keogh’s view that Christy is actually ‘a dirty tramp from the highways of the world’ (221). As a homeless itinerant labourer his situation is the inevitable outcome of rural embourgeoisement where strong farmers and traders became enfranchised at the expense of smallholders and property-less workers. Though his banishment is ostensibly the result of his big lie – the gap between a ‘gallous story and a dirty deed’ – it is also

23

24

25

Cited in The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, ed. by Ann Saddlemyer, vol. 1. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 116–17. See Robert Kilroy, The Playboy Riots (Dublin:  Dolmen, 1971); Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama:  A Documentary History:  vol. 3:  The Abbey Theatre:  The Years of Synge, 1905–1909 (Dublin:  Dolmen Press; New Jersey:  Humanities Press, 1978); and David Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘Reading a Riot: The “Reading Formation” of Synge’s Abbey Audience’, Literature and History, 13 (1987), 219–37. Of the many articles and book chapters devoted to The Playboy, Christopher Morash offers one of the best recreations of the riotous response to the play in Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 130–8. J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (1907), in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992), p. 173; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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true that this coincides with the revelation of the brute facts of his class status, and he is quickly banished from the community. Synge’s contempt for the upwardly mobile Catholic nationalist community was reciprocated in the response to the play by journalists and audience members alike. The western peasant and especially the female western peasant were totemic figures for nationalist ideologues and viewed with a mixture of affection and embarrassment by the middle-class audience, insofar as such figures were awkward reminders of their own families’ humble provenance only a few generations earlier. The Freeman’s Journal typified much of the Irish Ireland response in its description of The Playboy as an ‘unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood’, and added, ‘It is quite plain that there is need for a censor at the Abbey Theatre.’26 Lady Gregory sent a telegram to Yeats stating: ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.’27 The term ‘shift’ is a colloquialism for female undergarments and its use in the play, as Lady Gregory’s telegram indicates, has traditionally been taken as the primary cause for the riots that broke out on the opening night. However, it is more likely that this is part but not all of the explanation for the protests, insofar as conservative Catholic mores about sexuality and female propriety combined with the insecurity of the newly risen bourgeoisie regarding their class status apropos of their peasant ancestry. The visceral response to The Playboy was as much about the social and economic consolidation of the Irish bourgeoisie as it was about challenging stereotypes of national identity. In the same year that Synge’s peasant fantasy offended the sensibilities of Dublin’s middle classes, Belfast dock workers went on strike, an event St John Ervine used as the backdrop for his 1911 play Mixed Marriage,28 in which class solidarity between Catholic and Protestant workers is rent asunder by sectarian hatred. Where Yeats and Gregory were mocked for staging plays depending on the level of Peasant Quality, they nonetheless produced a parallel stream of plays such as Mixed Marriage that represented workingclass concerns where the PQ equated, in Ben Levitas’s pithy phrase, to ‘proletarian quotient’.29 The 1902 production of Fred Ryan’s The Laying of

26 27 28

29

Cited in Hogan and Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History: vol. 3, p. 125. Ibid., pp. 125–6. St John Ervine, Mixed Marriage; first produced 30 March 1911 by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1911. See Benjamin Levitas, ‘Plumbing the Depths: Irish Realism and the Working Class from Shaw to O’Casey’, Irish University Review, 33:1 (2003), 133–49.

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the Foundations30 by the INDS predates Seán O’Casey’s representation of Dublin’s poor on the Abbey stage by nearly two decades. In Ryan’s play Michael O’Loskin rebels against his ruthless father, who is ‘the greatest slum owner in the city’,31 and rails against Alderman Farrelly, the corrupt chairman of the New Building Syndicate: ‘It is so serious, Mr. Farrelly. We are building a new city and we must build square and sure. In the city of the future, there must be none of the rottenness which you and your class made in the city of old; in the new city you will have no place.’32 Michael’s idealism and commitment to social justice were shared by real-world activists such as Jim Larkin, labour leader and founder of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) and his sister Delia, who founded the Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company (IWDC) in 1912. Delia liked Mixed Marriage but took exception to the middle-class contempt towards working people that was apparently endemic at the Abbey: the good coat and nice blouse disdain to sit side by side with the collarless, shoddy coated son of toil, or the drab bloused factory girl [. . .] the working class as a rule, either out of sheer sensitiveness, or out of utter contempt for these persons and their snobbishness, shun the Abbey. Not because they do not admire ‘Art’, not because the bigger ideals portrayed by the newer drama does not appeal to them, but because of the rank snobbishness that is the rotten core of the middle class, and which has spread into the Abbey like an infectious disease.33

In response Delia commissioned fellow ITGWU member Andrew Patrick Wilson, an actor in the Abbey’s second company as well as a columnist for the Irish Worker, as manager and director of the new workers’ theatre at Liberty Hall. In December 1912 the IWDC had its inaugural production comprised of four one-act plays:  Norman McKinnel’s The Bishops Candlesticks (1901), Seamas O’Kelly’s The Matchmakers (1901), Rutherford Mayne’s The Troth (1909) and the premiere of Wilson’s Victims:  A New Labour Play. Of the four pieces The Troth and Victims offer particularly incisive engagements with class disparity in the colonial context. The Troth is a solemn piece in which the Catholic Francis Moore joins forces with the Protestant Ebenezer McKie to enact their own brand of natural justice against the rack-renting landlord Colonel Fotheringham, 30

31 32 33

Fred Ryan, The Laying of the Foundations (ca. 1902) was lost for several years and a discovered fragment was published in Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, ed. by Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (Dixon, CA: Proscenium Press, 1970), pp. 23–37. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 36. D. L., ‘The Newer Drama: Reply to “Mac” ’, Irish Worker, 17 November 1921, p. 1.

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who is protected by colonial law and whose exorbitance led to the death of Moore’s wife and children. McKie invokes the spirit of his ancestors who fought in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the United Irishmen, a cross-sectarian alliance including Catholics and Protestants of various denominations. The setting in the mid-nineteenth century and reference to rotten crops evokes the horror and privations of the Great Famine and the concomitant mismanagement of the crisis by the British government. Although McKie shoots and kills Fotheringham, Moore takes the blame and, as the horrified Mrs McKie observes, will ‘swing for it now’.34 Moore’s self-sacrifice is not for an abstract concept of nationhood, but is borne out of solidarity for a comrade in spite of sectarian differences. Victims conforms in certain ways to agitprop structure, but is distinguished from agitprop plays with an overtly nationalist focus, such as Padraic Colum’s The Saxon Shillin’ (1902)35 and Maud Gonne MacBride’s Dawn (1904),36 in the foregrounding of a concern with class politics over the anti-colonial argument. Where Mayne set The Troth in the middle of the previous century, Wilson was inspired by events in the contemporary moment, specifically two strikes organised by Delia Larkin in 1912 in Dublin against the Pembroke Laundry and Keogh’s Sack Factory in response to poor conditions for working women. Wilson’s play focusses on Anne Nolan, a seamstress who works for clothing company Scott and Scott but is forced to work at home because of her child’s illness, and her husband, Jack, who is an unemployed mechanic. The company is represented by a clerk who upbraids Anne for not working quickly enough and has no sympathy for her plight: ‘Scott and Scott don’t take no notice of dying kids; they’ve heard all that yarn before.’37 When the rent collector arrives to evict the family, Jack’s ebullient response provokes a haughty retort from the bureaucrat: ‘I think it is the height of insolence and ingratitude.’38 The unwitting irony of the response lends a light touch of comic relief that enhances John’s leaden entreaty for class solidarity that goes to the polemical heart of the play: ‘If you get the sack my friend [,] You will 34

35

36

37

38

Rutherford Mayne, The Troth (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1909), p. 14. ‘Rutherford Mayne’ was the nom de plume of Samuel Waddell, who wrote plays for the Ulster Literary Theatre, some of which are contained in The Drone and Other Plays (Dublin: Maunsel, 1912). Padraic Colum, The Saxon Shillin’, first published in The United Irishman, 15 November 1902, reprinted in Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, Hogan and Kilroy, pp. 65–72. Maud Gonne MacBride, Dawn, first published in The United Irishman, 29 October 1904, reprinted in Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, Hogan and Kilroy, pp. 73–84. Andrew Patrick Wilson, Victims, in Irish Worker, Christmas Number (21 December 1912), I–III. The pagination for the play is different from the rest of the issue given that it is an insert. Ibid., I.

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be a victim as well as me then. We are all victims[.] [A]s we cannot fight profit mongers we fight one another. One victim and all done in the sacred name of profit.’39 The rent collector has no interest in joining in common cause with John and is ejected from the room. Anne and John discuss their plight not in the intimate dialogue associated with realistic plays fashioned by Henrik Ibsen or Anton Chekhov, but in direct speech often shared with the audience, a technique associated more with Epic Theatre and the work of Bertolt Brecht, which Wilson’s play anticipates in certain respects. John breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience about his tradeunion activism: ‘The Union was smashed, and then the masters, not content with their victory, sought to teach the men a lesson by proclaiming a lock-out.’40 The fraught emotional tone of the play is ramped up to a level redolent of high melodrama as John is so perturbed that he says he would rather kill his son by ‘dashing his brains’ out than leave him to a ‘system’ that would ‘chain and grind him as chattel all the days of his life’.41 When the rent collector returns Jack repeats his call for class solidary and the play closes with Anne revealing to Jack that their child has died. The emotive tone is used here specifically to heighten the impact of unjust working conditions on the urban poor rather than to rouse nationalist sentiment in a manner typical of many contemporaneous political melodramas.42 Seán O’Casey engaged in a vigorous debate with Wilson in the Irish Worker on the issue of social justice in relation to the swirling cauldron of Irish politics at the time.43 O’Casey’s cultural nationalist argument was trumped by Wilson’s detailed understanding of socialist politics. The experience chastened O’Casey in a difficult period of personal development that saw him estranged from both the Labour and nationalist movements during the build-up to the 1916 Easter Rising, following disputes with leading figures such as James Connolly and Pádraig Pearse.44 Shortly after the debate with Wilson, O’Casey resurrected his earlier enthusiasm for theatre into which he channelled his frustrations. O’Casey’s initial efforts 39 40 41 42

43

44

Ibid., III. Ibid., II. Ibid., III. See Cheryl Herr, For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890–1925 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991). See Feathers from the Green Crow: Sean O’Casey, 1905–1925, ed. by Robert Hogan (Columbus: University of Missouri Press, 1962; London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 88–100. See chapter  5, ‘Under Which Flag’, in Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey:  Writer at Work (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004), pp. 80–97.

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to represent in dramatic form the matters that preoccupied him include the agitprop play The Harvest Festival (ca. 1919), set broadly against the 1913 Lockout with the representation of a strike that is cruelly repressed and the death of a working-class hero. The play became archetypal for O’Casey in terms of dramatising contemporaneous events and would reappear in 1943 as Red Roses for Me. The innate contrarianism45 that alienated O’Casey from the defining political movements of his time also shaped his treatment of class and nationalism in the three Dublin plays that immortalised him as a chronicler of the Irish precariat:  The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). In spite of the fact that each play is subtitled as a ‘tragedy’, the structure relies more on comedy and melodrama, to the extent that the social critique is attenuated rather than enhanced as it is in Wilson’s play. The problem with O’Casey’s plays lies in the comic mediation of the effects of poverty on characters that are often caricatures of the urban poor rather than a sustained analysis or critique of the conditions represented in the plays. As Declan Kiberd argues: ‘The poor people on O’Casey’s stage may for the most part be unable to provide an analysis of their own exploitation, but they can feel its effects on their pulses.’46 R. F. Foster notes that the labour problem ‘reflected the nature of Irish urbanization and Irish industry. The latter was largely a question of servicing, processing and transporting agricultural commodities; industrial development as normally conceived remained in an arrested state, as the urban population more or less stabilized in the late Nineteenth Century’.47 Moreover the ‘non-industrial base of Dublin was one of the main reasons for the precarious and extremely impoverished condition of its proletariat by the late nineteenth century. Their dependence on casual labour was reflected by the very high proportion of so-called “general labourers”; appalled contemporaries record a bizarre and essentially pre-industrial profile of life in the lower depths’.48 J. J. Lee notes that Ireland’s first independent government under W. T. Cosgrave ‘waged a coherent campaign against the weaker elements in the community. The poor, the aged, and the unemployed must all feel the

45

46 47 48

For an examination of O’Casey’s contrarianism apropos the key political matters of his time, see Paul Murphy, ‘O’Casey and Class’, in James Moran, The Theatre of Sean O’Casey (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013), pp. 227–38. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), p. 490. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 436. Ibid.

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lash of the liberators’.49 O’Casey was exasperated by the lack of social progress and complained in 1925 that ‘Grenville Street is here to-day, a little older, but as ugly and horrible as ever.’50 In spite of O’Casey’s indignance at the plight of the poor under an Irish government, the emphasis on comedy in his three Dublin plays serves to mollify the impact of urban poverty on the audience. The comedy was amplified in the first productions of the plays, featuring Barry Fitzgerald and F.  J. McCormick, ‘the two finest comic actors in Abbey history’.51 Fitzgerald played Captain Boyle in Juno and Fluther Good in Plough, and McCormick played Seumas Shields in Shadow and Joxer Daly in Juno. F. R. Higgins, poet and protégé of W. B. Yeats, provided an incisive analysis of the premiere of the Plough: One is eager to have the opinions of our dramatic critics on a technique largely based upon the revue structure, in the quintessence of an all-Abbey burlesque, intensified by “divarsions” and Handy Andy incidents, with the more original settings offered by Sean O’Casey. That aspect of comedy so gushly over-portrayed from Dublin artisan life, as seen only by this playwright, merely affords laborious bowing on one-string fiddle – and “Fluther” Good’s is just the successor of Captain Boyle’s more lively ragtime. [. . .] If, as a sincere artist, Mr. O’Casey interpreted the raw life he is supposed to know, the sure strokes of a great dramatist would have painted such a picture of the Dublin underworld that instead of driving some to demolish the theatre, they would be driven out in horror to abolish the slum.52

Higgins refers obliquely to the riots that occurred during the opening of the Plough, where audience members took offence at various aspects of the play including the prostitute Rosie Redmond and the depiction of the Easter Rebels as delusional ideologues. Regardless of the cause of the riots the Plough, along with the two other Dublin plays, became known more for the dramatisation of the ‘birth of a nation’53 than the indictment of urban poverty under British rule or the critique of continuing poverty under Irish rule. O’Casey left Ireland in 1926, alienated from most of his former allies and frustrated with the lack of social progress in the Irish Free State. Following 49

50 51 52

53

J. J.  Lee, Ireland 1912–1985:  Politics and Society (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 124. The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–1941, ed. by David Krause (London: Cassell, 1975), p. 131. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy (London: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 138. F. R.  Higgins, ‘The Plough and the Stars’, Irish Statesman, 6 March 1926, pp.  797–8, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 5, p. 325. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 88.

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the acrimony over Yeats’s refusal to stage his expressionist play The Silver Tassie at the Abbey Theatre in 1928, O’Casey’s relationship with drama produced on the island of Ireland was effectively at an end. The years in the quarter century or so after O’Casey’s departure ‘are usually considered barren ones for the Abbey; a favourite amusement of the Dublin literati has been to revile the poverty of the company’s repertoire’.54 The international success of O’Casey’s plays led to his canonisation by the Irish literati in spite of the inherent populism of the melodrama and comedy that led to the success of his Dublin plays. The same could not be said for George Shiels, a playwright from Ballymoney in the recently created state of Northern Ireland, who employed similar techniques throughout a career that ranged from farce to increasingly indignant critiques of social inequality. The key difference between the dramaturgy of O’Casey and Shiels is that the latter used comedy and melodrama to enhance rather than diminish the critique of social inequality. Robert Hogan observes that Shiels ‘wrote the typical Abbey play of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Almost totally realistic, his plays ranged from asinine farce to adroit and wryly thoughtful dramas. He rivalled O’Casey in popularity; his The Rugged Path of 1940 was the Abbey’s first long run, packing the theatre for twelve weeks’.55 The Rugged Path proved so popular with audiences that Shiels was pressed to write a sequel, The Summit, staged at the Abbey the following year. In both plays Shiels achieved that rare combination of turning the critique of social inequality into a form of theatre that proved very popular with audiences. The plays are set during the onset of World War II at a geographically indeterminate location somewhere on the border of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. The legacy of the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Civil War is set against the class conflict between the affluent Tansey family, who own fertile land in the valley, and the impoverished Dolis family, who eke out a living on the barren mountain. The plot centres on the politics of informing on a neighbour’s illegal behaviour, building to the point where the Tanseys are asked by the Sergeant to demonstrate their ‘good citizenship’ by testifying in court that young Peter Dolis murdered the pensioner John Perrie. Shiels portrays the transition from that of colonial subjection to citizenry in a post-colonial democratic state. The Sergeant bemoans the fact that the ‘national kink’ of ignoring colonial law 54

55

Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since The Plough and the Stars (London and Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968), p. 21. Ibid., p. 33.

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and despising ‘the very name of an informer’56 continues in the Irish Free State, insofar as ‘many a decent Irishman is a damned bad citizen’ (22) when their silence ultimately serves to condone illegality. Michael Tansey and Mrs Tansey prefer to remain silent, but their son Sean refuses to be cowed by the Dolises and advocates brute force: ‘Smash them. And they’d soon learn to respect me’ (103). During a heated discussion between the two families, the Schoolmaster offers an articulate critique of the social hierarchies, both colonial and post-colonial, that failed to provide opportunities for the Dolises to lift themselves out of penury: Michael: I’ve often told Sean about the hard old times . . . Dolis: For us they’re still as hard as ever. The Dolises are as poor today as they were at the dawn of history. Master [butts in]: Excuse me, that’s what makes me what I am – a rank Socialist!

[Even Dolis looks at him with amazement.] What I keep asking myself, has twenty years of home government given the Dolises that they didn’t enjoy under alien rule? Dolis: Damn all! that’s the answer. Master: It makes my blood boil. The poor Dolises used to live in hope, fed on rosy promises. But all they ever saw of the promised land was the vision. Dolis: Reply to that, Sir Sean, if you can. Sean: I can’t. Master: ’Twas a lifelong swindle. I remember as a boy hearing an old Irish Party candidate addressing them. ‘Men of the mountain,’ says he, ‘your deliverance is at hand. The oldest man in this immense throng will live to see the green flag tossing proudly in the breeze over an Irish Parliament. And you will be the first to enjoy the fruits of victory.’ (110)

In spite of the Schoolmaster’s intervention, Sean remains implacably opposed to the Dolises and opts to ignore his parents’ advice by taking the proverbial rugged path of good citizenship and testifying against Peter Dolis. The closing scene involves a radio announcement that Peter was found not guilty and ends with the window shattered by a gunshot, presumably courtesy of one of the Dolises. The play has elements of melodrama, but they are more than compensated for by the Shavian debate on the matter of social inequality in the Irish Free State. The Rugged Path foregrounds the contradiction of national unity with class disparity and 56

George Shiels, The Rugged Path (1940), in The Rugged Path and The Summit (London: Macmillan and Co., 1942) p. 23; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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questions the problematic relationship between national sovereignty of the land and private ownership of the land. The criticism offered by Shiels and fellow playwrights contradicts the idealised view of Ireland presented by Taoiseach Eamon de Valera in his landmark St Patrick’s Day speech of 1943. The dream Ireland that de Valera evoked would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.57

Later in the same speech de Valera states that: For many the pursuit of the material is a necessity. Man, to express himself fully and to make the best use of the talents God has given him, needs a certain minimum of comfort and leisure. A section of our people have not yet this minimum. They rightly strive to secure it, and it must be our aim and the aim of all who are just and wise to assist in the effort. But many have got more than is required and are free, if they choose, to devote themselves more completely to cultivating the things of the mind, and in particular those which mark us out as a distinct nation.58

De Valera’s speech glosses over class disparity by conjuring an idealised vision of national identity, a rhetorical tactic used by politicians of the two right-wing parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil (de Valera’s own party), which had dominated the Irish political scene since the Irish Civil War of 1922–3. The year that de Valera broadcast his St Patrick’s Day speech also witnessed the Abbey Theatre production of Old Road, by Galway dramatist M.  J. Molloy, which set de Valera’s idealisation of rural life against the desolate reality of life in the western seaboard. Where Shiels rendered an uncompromising account of life on the border counties of Ireland and Northern Ireland, Molloy was the ‘great chronicler of the West of Ireland, its poverty, depopulation and decline in the 1940s and 1950s’.59 57

58 59

Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917–73, ed. by Maurice Moynihan (Dublin:  Gill & Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980), p. 466. Ibid., p. 467. Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, p. 146.

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The setting for Old Road60 is the ‘usual old-fashioned farm-house kitchen’ in rural Galway at the onset of World War II in 1939, ‘and the general impression is one of inefficient housekeeping to an extreme degree’.61 Old Road is subtitled a ‘A Comedy in Three Acts’, but there are few moments of lightness insofar as the play focusses on landless labourer Myles and domestic servant Brigid McDonagh, who face economic migration as the only way out of poverty. Myles works primarily for ‘The Lord’ Patrick Walsh, a ‘grizzled choleric looking, loud voiced old farmer of sixty-six or so; [. . .] his innate wilfulness, developed to the full by a long life-time of wayward bachelorhood’.62 Brigid has just escaped from despotic ‘oul’ Miss Darcy’ and is desperate to provide for her ‘bitter poor’ family. The couple struggle to survive in a pitiless milieu, wherein their employers ‘The Lord’ and his competitor ‘Bodagh’ Merrigan scheme to outdo each other in their ruthless drive for land and profit at the expense of the poor and vulnerable. The play ends with the young couple planning a romantic escape that is nonetheless marked with an awareness that their future will be an arduous one: Brigid (Running to him): Myles! I couldn’t live and see you that way suffering. We’ll go. We’ll take our chance. (She clings to him.) Myles (Passionately): Brigie, I’ll be thankful to you evermore. And never fear: we’ll mind ourselves greatly; and you’ll see no harm’ll come to us. We’ll get on greatly every way. Sixteen hours pick and shovel work’ll be nothing in my way when I’ll think of all the overtime money I’ll be bringing home to you . . . (Softly.) Brigie, bring together all you have quick before Paak is gone on us.63

Where Molloy uses romance to soften the harshness in Old Road, his fellow Galwegian Walter Macken uses comedy to mollify the destitution he witnessed in Galway in his 1946 play Mungo’s Mansion.64 The play deals ostensibly with the problem of inadequate housing for the urban poor in Galway. However, a review in the Irish Independent noted that the play is first and foremost a comedy, and if he plunges into stark tragedy in the third act after two acts of particularly robust fun, the tragedy comes suddenly and violently like a blow on the face – even if there is a faint suggestion of its coming. There is no purposeful build-up to tragedy. It comes like a summer 60

61 62 63 64

M. J. Molloy, Old Road; first produced, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 24 April 1943; first published as Old Road: A Comedy in Three Acts (Dublin: Progress House, 1961). Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 6. Molloy, Old Road, pp. 63–4. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion: A Play of Galway Life in Three Acts (1946) (London: Macmillan, 1957).

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shower; it passes and the fun and games go on again, maybe a bit damp and a little more subdued.65

The same cannot be said, however, for Molloy’s 1948 play Vacant Possession which was un-staged, most likely because it did not employ comic relief in its unsparingly bleak representation of Galway’s precariat. Gunner Delaney is the protagonist who has been crippled by a workrelated injury that sees him demoted from a gainfully employed coal deliveryman to rag-and-bone man. The decline has led to depression, alcoholism and poverty, leading in turn to his family’s eviction, finally leaving them little choice but to squat in a dilapidated hovel known locally as The Gantry. Gunner’s friend Fixit, an odd-job man and veteran of World War I, does his best to help Gunner and his family by fending off bailiffs in the form of local thug James ‘Revenge’ Horgan. Ultimately Fixit’s valiant efforts end in vain as Gunner’s descent into addiction leads to his death and the family are evicted once more as The Gantry is demolished. Unlike the happy ending provided by the clever tramps in the plays of Dion Boucicault and J. M. Synge, Fixit’s address to the audience at the end of the play is not an invitation to join him in celebration of adventures to come but is a denunciation of corruption: Don’t lave a stone on a stone oo it, because yeer pullin’ down the freedom a man on top a yeer own dirty heads. Let ye sing at yeer work a pullin’ down the oul’ Ganthry, because the Ganthry is ended and so is the rights a the common people. Let ye wave yeer green flags over its grave and sing a Hallelujah whin yeer blinded in its dust. Let ye give great shouts outa ye because yeer knocking the props under democracy, and it’ll fall like a corpse under the foundations a the Galway Ganthry. Democracy? How are yeh!66

In the same year that Vacant Possession was published, Ireland completed the transformation from British colony to sovereign state with the ratification of the 1948 Republic of Ireland Act that came into operation in April 1949. Macken continued his denunciation of social hierarchies in his 1952 play Home Is the Hero, which was made into a film in 1959. Such dramatic interventions had little impact on the cronyism and incompetence of the political class until the protectionism and gerontocracy that marked successive administrations led to the economic disaster of the mid-1950s. As Tom Garvin suggests, in the 1950s, ‘the facts of economic life and electoral 65 66

Irish Independent, 12 February 1946, p. 2. Walter Macken, Vacant Possession (London: Macmillan, 1948) p. 106.

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pressure began gradually to nullify the special interests of older business, ecclesiastical, cultural and labour elites, the people who had, essentially, carved up the entire country into a set of fiefdoms after 1920 and 1932’.67 British colonial dominance had been replaced by the hegemony of Catholic bourgeois nationalism that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth century until the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in the financial crisis of the late 2000s. The response to poverty and lack of opportunity for generations of Irish people would be immigration to Britain, America and other countries in the Anglophone world.

67

Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland so Poor for so Long? (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004), p. 27.

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Ch apter 16

Seán O’Casey and Brendan Behan Aesthetics, Democracy and the Voice of Labour John Brannigan

In Aesthetic Democracy, Thomas Docherty argues that aesthetics and democracy are essentially concerned with the same fundamental question:  ‘how does change happen, and how do we get from one state of affairs to another?’1 They are linked not just in their preoccupation with this question, but also because, by inaugurating change, aesthetics and democracy are themselves transformed by such change. Every act of art, as every act of democracy, in Docherty’s words, ‘discovers or reveals a foundation that is extraordinary, and whose extraordinariness makes possible a different manner of living’.2 Art is potentially changed by every work of art; democracy is potentially changed by every democratic action. Yet such acts of transformation are ‘episodic and rare’, and are ‘grounded in hope and expectation rather than in principle’,3 and hence the significance of the question, how does change happen? How does newness come into the world? This chapter argues that the relationship between aesthetics and democracy, and the question about how change happens, are central concerns of working-class writing, and, in very particular cultural and historical forms, of the work of Seán O’Casey (1880–1964) and Brendan Behan (1923–64). As playwrights born and reared in working-class Dublin, and who were drawn towards the political and intellectual ideas and actions of socialism and republicanism, O’Casey and Behan have much in common.4 Despite the considerable age gap between them, and the fact that O’Casey participated in and wrote about the revolutionary war, the literary careers of both men were profoundly preoccupied with the 1 2 3 4

Thomas Docherty, Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 158. Ibid., p. xiii. Ibid., pp. xiii, 158. See Christopher Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004); Ulick O’Connor, Brendan Behan (London: Abacus, 1993); and Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan: A Life (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1997).

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disillusionments and betrayals of post-revolutionary Ireland, with what Declan Kiberd has called ‘That nationalism [which] had promised workers reconquest of Ireland but delivered no more than green flags and green postboxes’.5 O’Casey’s most celebrated work remains his Dublin Trilogy of plays – The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) – which were produced in the Abbey Theatre. The Abbey’s rejection of his next play, The Silver Tassie (1928), came as a bitter blow to O’Casey, and triggered his decision to move to England. In England, he wrote a series of plays which explored socialist themes and working-class settings, including The Star Turns Red (1940), Red Roses for Me (1942) and The Purple Dust (1945). O’Casey also experimented with non-realist dramatic forms and utopian visionary themes, especially in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955) and The Drums of Father Ned (1959), although these were generally less successful than his Dublin Trilogy. He was also a prolific autobiographer, albeit often unreliable, and published six volumes of autobiography between 1939 and 1954. The exceptionality of the working-class writer perhaps accounts for the significance of the autobiographical form in the oeuvre of O’Casey and Behan. Behan’s literary career really began with a short story which he published in Sean O’Faolain’s The Bell magazine, entitled ‘I Become a Borstal Boy’ (1942), an early draft of the autobiographical novel, Borstal Boy (1958), which is widely regarded as his best work. Almost all of Behan’s writings have an autobiographical basis, drawing on or explicitly about his childhood in working-class Dublin, or his experiences of Republican militarism and imprisonment. Behan was acutely conscious of writing in the shadow of O’Casey. In 1943, for example, when he was working in prison on a draft of his first play, The Landlady, he declared his characters to be ‘as genuine as any of O’Casey’s battalion’.6 Later, in 1951, despairing at the literary and cultural landscape in Dublin, he summed up his frustration, but also his literary inheritance, with the phrase: ‘Joyce is dead and O’Casey is in Devon.’7 The influence of O’Casey, both politically and aesthetically, can be traced in Behan’s most successful and accomplished plays, The Quare Fellow (1954) and The Hostage (1958). Indeed, when The Quare Fellow first achieved success in Dublin at the Pike Theatre, Samuel Beckett wrote to 5 6

7

Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), p. 483. ‘To Bob Bradshaw’, in The Letters of Brendan Behan, ed. by E.  H. Mikhail (Montreal:  McGill/ Queen’s University Press, 1992), p. 27. ‘To Sindbad Vail’, in The Letters of Brendan Behan, p. 45.

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the director, Alan Simpson, and asked him to ‘Remember me to the new O’Casey’.8 Although both Behan and O’Casey were very aware of other workingclass writers, and themselves grew up in households familiar with books of all kinds, they were also acutely conscious that literary reading and writing were not common or prized practices among many working-class people. The working-class intellectual was an extraordinary and perhaps even oxymoronic figure. In a short essay on ‘Life and Literature’ published in The Irish Statesman in 1923, O’Casey understood that the political problem of class and socialism in Ireland was at root a cultural and an aesthetic problem: To realise what they are, and what they may become, the workers must look into the mirrors of the poem, the novel and the play. In these they can see themselves, search their hearts and examine their consciences, for these are they that testify of themselves. Here, and here only, can they develop the power to see themselves as others see them; to gaze at, and meditate upon their own splendour and their own poverty; their own beauty, and their own deformity. And, yet they couldn’t understand a poem, even, if by some miracle, they could be persuaded to listen to one; they refuse to read any book worthy of the name of novel, and they hear a play with the same pleasure as they hear the Gospel.9

For O’Casey, the potential for the transformation of the working class comes from ‘the power to see themselves as others see them’, an artistic or literary experience, and yet to accomplish this, the working-class intellectual must appeal to workers to share in cultural values and pleasures which seem alien to them. The cultural values of poetry, plays or novels ‘worthy of the name’, far from being equal and accessible to all, are already laden with social distinctions and discriminations. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, ‘art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.’10 In a chapter entitled ‘The Aristocracy of Culture’, Bourdieu proceeds to remind us that ‘the working-class “aesthetic” is a dominated “aesthetic” which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics.’11 The 8

9

10 11

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956, ed. by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 521. Seán O’Casey, ‘Life and Literature’, in Feathers from the Green Crow: Seán O’Casey, 1905–1925, ed. by Robert Hogan (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 10–15 (p. 13). Originally published in The Irish Statesman, 22 December 1923. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. xxx. Ibid., p. 33.

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relationship to ‘culture’ is thus fraught with contradictions and anxieties about legitimacy and propriety. Brendan Behan exemplifies the fraught situation of the working-class playwright in his articulation of social alienation from the ‘theatre-going public’ in Ireland: The Irish that I  know, and the Irish that I  like, who are ordinary blokes (taxi-drivers, house-painters, bookies’ runners) . . . they’re the people I care about, and in any country, they don’t buy books very much, they don’t live by books or by literature . . . The people that I don’t like here are the theatregoing public, what passes for society here I don’t like. They don’t like me, so there’s no love lost.12

For Behan this represented a constitutive paradox of working-class writing, which might be by and about working-class people, but which would largely be ‘consumed’ by bourgeois audiences and readers. Behan’s contemporary, Alan Sillitoe, perceived the same disparity in England between the emergence of the ‘proletarian novel’ into a serious literary art, and the fact that it was ‘read mostly by a middle-class audience’.13 As Alan Sinfield suggests, however, in a point which resonates with Bourdieu, the middle-class audience is not merely coincidental, but to some extent at least explains that recognition and value are conferred upon working-class writing in the mid-twentieth century.14 This is certainly evident in the literary careers of O’Casey and Behan, which can be charted for their conspicuous patterns of conferral and rejection, fame and disavowal, and which were marked by subjection to the aesthetic judgements and patronage of institutions. The relationship between cultural production and social class is also a significant theme in their work, however, the importance of which demonstrates not just their awareness of the social conditions explaining their exceptional status as working-class intellectuals, but also their concern with the means to transform those conditions. In O’Casey’s plays, books cause trouble. From the romanticising delusions of the poet Donal Davoren, in The Shadow of a Gunman, who fatally misleads Minnie Powell to believe that he is a revolutionary, to the thunderous condemnation of books by Father Domineer in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (‘How often have I to warn you against books!’),15 the act of reading or writing literature is repeatedly figured as socially disruptive and transgressive. 12

13 14

15

Brendan Behan, Meet the Quare Fella:  Brendan Behan Interviewed by Eamonn Andrews (Dublin: Emmet Dalton Productions, 1960). Alan Sillitoe, ‘Proletarian Novelists’, Books and Bookmen, August 1959, p. 13. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 259. Seán O’Casey, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, in Plays One (London: Faber, 1998), p. 396.

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In the first part of his autobiography, I Knock at the Door, O’Casey dwells on the ‘improving’ volumes of his father’s bookcase, with its ‘regiment of theological controversial books’, its ‘inspection officers, the English Bible, the Latin Vulgate, and the Douai Testament’, and the ‘neatly uniformed company of Dickens’, Scott’s, George Eliot’s, Meredith’s, and Thackeray’s novels; Shakespeare’s Works; Burns’, Keats’, Milton’s, Gray’s, and Pope’s poetry’.16 Yet the bookcase is no more than a comfort to his dying father, and O’Casey asks, partly through the eyes of his mother, ‘what use was it all when the time came for you to hand in your gun?’17 The euphemism for death is telling, as Minnie Powell also conceives of poetry as useful only if it can be traded for the gun.18 For O’Casey, the pleasure and value of literature jar incongruously against the working-class economy of necessity. Donal Davoren rails against ‘The People’ for this reason, that poetry has no place in working-class aesthetics: to the people there is no mystery of colour: it is simply the scarlet coat of the soldier; the purple vestments of a priest; the green banner of a party; the brown or blue overalls of industry. To them the might of design is a threeroomed house or a capacious bed. To them beauty is for sale in a butcher’s shop. To the people the end of life is the life created for them; to the poet the end of life is the life that he creates for himself; life has a stifling grip upon the people’s throat – it is the poet’s musician.19

The aesthetics of the working class, according to Davoren, is an aesthetics of utility, defined by necessity. It is a compelling critique of the cultural poverty of working-class life, perhaps, except that Davoren fails to comprehend the connection between his own fantasy of self-authorising transcendence (‘the life that he creates for himself ’) and the economic determinants of cultural alienation. It takes Minnie’s tragic death for Davoren to come to the painful realisation that his life and his poetry are inseparable from this social and aesthetic economy, that the fantasy of his own self-making is dependent on the fated subjection of the Minnies of this world. Minnie is a tragic figure before her death, of course, for O’Casey tells us that ‘like all her class, Minnie is not able to converse very long on the one subject, and her thoughts spring from one thing to another.’20 She is one of a series of women in O’Casey’s plays who must bear the intellectual 16

17 18 19 20

Seán O’Casey, Autobiographies I: I Knock at the Door and Pictures in the Hallway (London: Faber, 2011), pp. 27–8. Ibid., p. 28. Seán O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, in Plays Two (London: Faber, 1998), p. 16. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 16.

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and educational price of social inequality, either confined to thoughtless drudgery and conformity, or compelled to strive anxiously to transcend their surroundings. The anxious relationship of such characters to culture is a recurrent trope, as for example in the case of Mary in Juno and the Paycock: Two forces are working in her mind – one, through the circumstances of her life, pulling her back; the other, through the influence of books she has read, pushing her forward. The opposing forces are apparent in her speech and her manners, both of which are degraded by her environment, and improved by her acquaintance – slight though it be – with literature.21

The Young Woman in Within the Gates is another such figure:  ‘She has read a little, but not enough; she has thought a little, but not enough.’22 In Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, O’Casey shows us Loreleen, a woman who in the eyes of her father and the priest has read too much, and who is compelled into exile at the end of the play.23 Too much or not enough, books which improve and those which corrupt, the reading sufficient to enable social mobility but short of provoking social exclusion: O’Casey demonstrates through such nervous measures of aesthetic competence the torturous relationship between social aspiration and cultural acquisition. The acquisition of cultural competence is not, however, simply a means for O’Casey’s characters to escape the tyranny of economic necessity. There is a more fundamental question at stake about social awareness and about social change, and it is the same question which Jacques Rancière asks in The Philosopher and His Poor: ‘how can those whose business is not thinking assume the authority to think and thereby constitute themselves as thinking subjects?’24 The business of the working class is work, not thought or culture; as such, working-class people are objects of knowledge, objects of art and objects of political discourse. A persistent theme in O’Casey’s drama is the attempt by working-class men and women to challenge authority, and to become visible as thinking, democratic subjects. Ayamonn in Red Roses for Me exemplifies most fully O’Casey’s depiction of the relationship between culture and politics. He is O’Casey’s most confident intellectual, and the play opens to find Ayamonn surrounded by books and reciting Shakespeare’s Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), preparing for a performance 21 22 23 24

Seán O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, in Plays One, pp. 5–6. Seán O’Casey, Within the Gates, in Plays One, p. 95. O’Casey, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, p. 396. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor, ed. by Andrew Parker, trans. by John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. xxvi.

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in the local Temperance Hall. An exchange with his mother highlights their understanding of the political potential of aesthetic representation: MRS BREYDON Th’ killin’ o’ th’ king be th’ Duke o’ Gloster should go down well, an’ th’ whole thing should look sumptuous. AYAMONN So it will. It’s only that they’re afraid of Shakespeare out of all that’s been said of him. They think he’s beyond them, while all the time he’s part of the kingdom of heaven in the nature of everyman. Before I’m done, I’ll have him drinking in th’ pubs with them!25

The sensuous and sensationalist theatre of Mrs Breydon’s imagination is not necessarily at odds with Ayamonn’s determination to show his neighbours that Shakespeare is their cultural inheritance, and is part of a common culture beyond social barriers. Similarly, Ayamonn reads aloud from Ruskin’s lecture on a proposed stock exchange in Bradford, which critiques the bourgeois vision of beautiful mansions built on the labour of hundreds of workers ‘who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language’, a vision which is ‘very pretty indeed, seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below’.26 Ayamonn is not permitted to read Ruskin’s point to this conclusion, however, as Roory interrupts him to indict this bourgeois vision for its ignorance of national differences between Ireland and England. When Roory goes further to denounce another book which Ayamonn intends to read, Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (an evolutionary study of the relationship between physical science and social organisation), Ayamonn rails against Roory’s limited imagination of national freedom: AYAMONN Roory, Roory, is that th’ sort o’ freedom you’d bring to Ireland with a crowd of green branches an’ th’ joy of shouting? If we give no room to men of our time to question many things, all things, ay, life itself, then freedom’s but a paper flower, a star of tinsel, a dead lass with gay ribbons at her breast an’ a gold comb in her hair. Let us bring freedom here, not with sounding brass an’ tinklin’ cymbal, but with silver trumpets blowing, with a song all men can sing, with a palm branch in our hand, rather than with a whip at our belt, and a headsman’s axe on our shoulders.27

Yet this vision of ‘a song all men can sing’ is concluded when Ayamonn’s girlfriend, Sheila, arrives and chastises him for wasting time on such foolish things as ‘trying to paint, going mad about Shakespeare, and consorting 25 26

27

Seán O’Casey, Red Roses for Me, in Plays One, p. 219. John Ruskin, Crown of Wild Olive: Four Lectures on Industry and War (London: George Allen, 1895), p. 106. O’Casey, Red Roses for Me, pp. 255–6.

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with a kind of people that can only do you harm’.28 It is a debatable point whether the play endorses Ayamonn’s vision of what Bourdieu critiques as ‘the illusion of cultural communism’, or endorses Sheila’s understanding of the relation to art and culture as one which is always one of social relation and distinction.29 Ayamonn dies at the end of the play when soldiers brutally repress the strike he helps to rally. The Inspector considers him a fool, dying for the sake of a ‘single shilling’, while Sheila speaks for him now, that ‘Maybe he saw the shilling in th’ shape of a new world’.30 To see a new world glimpsed in the struggle for better pay or working conditions is both a political and aesthetic experience. Yet for O’Casey the problem is how to translate this aesthetic vision to others. If Ayamonn is exceptional in his facility for aesthetic understanding, there is little point to his attempts to persuade others to read Shakespeare, or Ruskin, or to see a new world. So, how did he become competent in turning shillings into new worlds? This is the question which lies at the heart of working-class writings about the relationship between aesthetics and democracy, and it requires critical reflection on the process of how the working-class intellectual comes to be. Red Roses for Me is O’Casey’s most autobiographical play, in the sense that Ayamonn comes closest to O’Casey’s depiction of his own childhood and youthful idealism in his autobiographies. In the play, Ayamonn understands his mother to be responsible for his aesthetic disposition: ‘you gave me life to play with as a richer child is given a coloured ball.’31 In his autobiographical writings, however, O’Casey draws a more complex picture of working-class literacy, from his father’s regimented bookcase of worthy volumes, to the newspapers and school primers through which he learns to read, and on to the three volumes of Shakespeare which his sister wins as a prize. It is Shakespeare and Boucicault which most encapsulate the disparity between O’Casey’s social position and the unexpected pleasures and freedoms he derives from cultural representation: Johnny fingered fondly the lovely things in the basket. It was filled with the costumes for Macbeth, King Henry the Sixth, Richard the Third, The Shaughraun, The Colleen Bawn, The Octoroon, and other plays; with swords, shields, daggers, cutlasses, halberds, lances, armour, kepis, shakos, pistols, clergymen’s robes and soldiers’ uniforms, and silk, satin, sateen, dimity, and damask costumes in great an’ wonderful variety.

28 29 30 31

Ibid., p. 258. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 224. O’Casey, Red Roses for Me, p. 309. Ibid., p. 223.

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Today he was a King, tomorrow he could be a Bishop, and the next day a Colonel. What other boy in the whole vicinity could come near him in all the glorious things that he possessed?32

Through the imitative arts of the theatre, the young O’Casey ‘possesses’ the world and feigns authority in ways which he has no means to expect from his social environment. In the chapter entitled ‘Shakespeare Taps at the Window’, culture comes calling, and although Johnny would have to wait for his debut stage performance, he has already envisaged the power of theatre to transform him and to give him the authority otherwise denied him as a thinking subject. In such imitative appropriations of cultural power lies Jacques Rancière’s principal objection to Bourdieu’s rigid hierarchy of cultural distinction, that it allows no room for working-class subjects to arrogate to themselves the entitlement to culture: The struggle for the right to speak freely is first and foremost a struggle for euphemization. It is by entering into the game of bourgeois passions (and the most “legitimate” ones) that fields of symbolic relations take shape at the limit of the classes, making possible the enunciation and utterances [l’énonciation et les énoncés] of working-class speech detached from the repetitions of amor fati. The first worker-militants began by taking themselves for poets or knights, priests or dandies. An allodoxia that is the only way to heterodoxia.33

This is precisely the process which O’Casey maps in his autobiographies, and dramatises as a struggle in his plays, of the cultural euphemisms through which working-class people ‘constitute themselves as thinking subjects’, in Rancière’s words, or ‘develop the power to see themselves as others see them’, in O’Casey’s. Shakespeare is the extraordinary foundation for O’Casey’s own narrative of aesthetic self-fashioning, but did Shakespeare tap at Brendan Behan’s window too? When Behan was imprisoned in Walton Jail in Liverpool in December 1939, he wrote to his brother Sean to request a ‘Penguin anthology of English poetry and a copy of Shakespeare’s plays’.34 The letter was suppressed, however, and there is no record of either the anthology or of Shakespeare’s works coming into Behan’s possession in prison. The request is notable in itself: even at the age of sixteen, and within days of his arrest for IRA activities, Behan focussed on an opportunity to develop 32 33 34

O’Casey, Autobiographies I, pp. 194–5. Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor, p. 200. O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan, p. 50.

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his literary education. Whereas O’Casey recalled a formal education which at least extended to ‘Grammar . . . the art of speaking, reading, and writing the English language correctly’,35 Behan’s literary education took place almost entirely outside the classroom. His precocious interest in literature and theatre was certainly unusual in the tenements of Russell Street in Northside Dublin, but it was hardly surprising given his own family. His father, Stephen, was well educated, having trained for the priesthood in his youth, and delighted in reading to his children from the work of Dickens especially, but also Thackeray, Henry Fielding, Samuel Pepys, Charles Kickham, Charles Lever, Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Shaw, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Zola and even Boccaccio and Marcus Aurelius (which he translated from the Latin).36 Behan’s mother, Kathleen, took particular pride in the literary and political history of Dublin, pointing out to her children the houses of Swift, Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw, and as a domestic servant to Maud Gonne McBride she had met W. B. Yeats and other writers, artists and political activists.37 More importantly, Kathleen’s brother, Peadar, was a renowned songwriter, most famous for writing the Irish national anthem, while her brother-in-law was P. J. Bourke, the playwright and actor-manager of the Queen’s Theatre, ‘the poor man’s Abbey’.38 As a child, Behan frequented his uncle’s theatre to enjoy the staple entertainment forms of working-class Dublin, the music hall and the melodrama, which would profoundly influence the shape of his most successful plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. Ulick O’Connor has argued on the basis of this cultural inheritance that Behan was not ‘in the true sense of the word a slum-boy’,39 but Colbert Kearney is right to point out that the intellectual capital which distinguished the Behans from their neighbours did not differentiate them economically.40 The logical flaw in O’Connor is to deduce social class from cultural taste; to return to Rancière’s dispute with Bourdieu, this is to fail to take cognisance of the ways in which cultural capital might be borrowed, performed or ventriloquised, that is the ways in which allodoxia may be strategically deployed within workingclass culture. Michael Pierse has argued that such strategies are common in working-class writing in Ireland, which evinces ‘a continuing tendency 35 36

37 38 39 40

O’Casey, Autobiographies I, p. 173. O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan, p.  18. See also Colbert Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1977), p. 6. Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan, p. 19. Ted E. Boyle, Brendan Behan (New York: Twayne, 1969), p. 18. O’Connor, Brendan Behan, p. 13. Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan, p. 2.

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towards subversive literary forms, which often invoke bourgeois logic in order to refute it’.41 Brendan Behan’s writings abound with such strategic and subversive performances of cultural capital. In Borstal Boy, for example, Behan shows us his autobiographical subject appropriating and adapting books to meet his needs as a young prisoner. The young Behan first understands reading as a vital means of passing the time. As the books are on loan from the prison library and have to be changed each week, he measures out his ‘ration’ of pages for each night, thinks of the day when he gets new books from the library as ‘pay day’, and uses the words ‘save’ and ‘spend’ to describe his progress through each book.42 The first books Behan receives are Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree and a biography of General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Hardy’s novel is distinguished as a cultural treasure to be enjoyed, but even the Booth biography can be useful: ‘I could save a bit of Under the Greenwood Tree on it.’43 Reading books is thus brought within the working-class economy of subsistence, defined by necessity and utility. Yet reading is also a process of appropriation. This process begins for Behan with Hardy’s novel when he recognises the cultural habits of his own family in Hardy’s West of England characters: ‘even their speech when they said “carrel” and “traypsing and rambling about” was like Dublin speech.’44 Behan proceeds to retell parts of Hardy’s novel, adapting the speech patterns to match his own, and juxtaposing the setting of the novel with his own: they are all at the wedding and poor Thomas Leaf, an amádan, comes up and asks to be let in to the hooley. ‘I washed and put on a clane shirt,’ says Leaf, pleading like, not to be kept out of the diversion. ‘Let the poor bastard in,’ says the Tranter, ‘he’s a bit silly-looking but I never heard he was in jail.’ Sure, if he was itself, there was as good as ever he was in it.45

Such ‘tellings’ of Hardy’s novel fit comfortably within the culture of ‘telling films’ which Behan describes in Borstal Boy as one of the ways the prisoners amuse each other. Borstal Boy frequently undertakes a collective narrative of working-class culture, despite the apparent loneliness of Behan’s situation as an IRA prisoner in English jails: 41

42 43 44 45

Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), p. 247. Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (London: Corgi, 1961), pp. 79–100. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 99.

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I had the same rearing as most of them, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London. All our mothers had all done the pawn – pledging on Monday, releasing on Saturday. We all knew the chip shop and the picture house and the fourpenny rush of a Saturday afternoon, and the summer swimming in the canal and being chased down the railway by the cops.46

‘Telling’ Hardy’s novel appropriates the private act of reading literature from its middle-class connotations, and brings reading closer to the shared working-class culture which he identifies in such moments of collective narrative. Although for much of Borstal Boy Behan is the only reader of literary books, and might thus be distinguished from his fellow inmates who read only newspapers, towards the end of the narrative Behan is able to converse with other working-class inmates about Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, about Oscar Wilde, about Dostoyevsky, Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole.47 The list of what Behan reads constitutes in its eclecticism the mark of the autodidact, but with a strong orientation towards Dickens, Hardy, Mrs Gaskell, Galsworthy and Tressell, it might also be said, in Bourdieu’s terms, that his literary predilections correspond to the dispositions of his class to see themselves in relation to their own social spaces.48 Literature is understood to be about identification and recognition (books by Shaw and O’Casey, for example, ‘were like a visit from home’).49 However, literature is also about imitation and performance, of imagining lives other than one’s own, and this plays a crucial part in Behan’s narrative, as he learns to identify with boys from other social and cultural backgrounds partly by impersonating the characters he finds in Cranford, Under the Greenwood Tree and other literary works. Borstal Boy is, in part, the narrative of a working-class boy taking possession of cultural capital and performing cultural authority. There are many other examples of cultural appropriation in Behan’s work  – in the poems he wrote in Gaelic about James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, in a short story entitled ‘After the Wake’ in which the narrator seduces another man by drawing on stories of Socrates, Shakespeare and Marlowe, and in numerous sketches for the Irish Press newspaper about the relationship between working-class Dubliners and Irish literature, such as ‘Overheard in a Bookshop’ and ‘Dialogue on Literature’.50 However, 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., pp. 241–2. Ibid., pp. 253–6, 286, 301–2. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. xxix. Behan, Borstal Boy, p. 261. See Brendan Behan, Poems and a Play in Irish (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1981), pp. 18, 20; After the Wake (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1981), pp. 46–52; Hold Your Hour and Have Another (London: Corgi, 1965), pp. 13–17, 43–6.

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given the significance of reading literature in Borstal Boy, it is perhaps remarkable that there are no such performances of cultural competency in The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, his most successful plays. There are no such characters as we find in O’Casey’s Ayamonn or Donal Davoren, no working-class intellectuals or readers, no one as literate and well-read as Behan himself. The cultural habits of the working-class characters in his plays involve songs, banter, betting, drinking and dancing. There are few literary references, and none that indicate recognition or familiarity on the part of the working-class characters. Shakespeare is mentioned twice in The Hostage, but merely as a symbol, first by Monsewer who identifies the playwright with Englishness, and then by Rio Rita, Mulleady and Princess Grace when they sing the song ‘We’re here because we’re queer’, in which Shakespeare, Wilde and Socrates are cited as queer icons.51 In The Quare Fellow, the only reader is ‘The Other Fellow’, who quotes Carlyle, but he is distanced from the other prisoners by his pious sense of morality, and dismissed as ‘a bit of an intellectual’.52 If Behan’s depiction in his plays of a working-class culture in which there are no books and disdain for intellectuals risks placing him outside of his own social class, it is a risk Behan undertakes in order to show that intellectual and moral deprivation are effects of economic deprivation. What alienates many working-class people from ‘culture’, Behan understands, is precisely the mechanisms of social differentiation by which culture is produced. Behan’s prisoners in The Quare Fellow lack the edifying graces of morality and culture because they have been persistently denied the means to acquire them. In The Hostage, Behan’s prostitutes, political dissidents and Leslie the English soldier constitute a vibrant counter-culture, yet for all its vibrancy, it does not enable any of the characters to alter or transcend the social forces which determine their fates. In both plays, Behan draws extensively on the popular theatrical devices of melodrama and music hall, aligning political drama with the theatrical forms most familiar to working-class audiences, as O’Casey had done before him. Yet, like O’Casey too, the illusion of escape from social inequality is brought to its necessary tragic end, with the Quare Fellow on the end of a rope, and the English soldier killed in a police raid. Behan was attempting to present his own social class with the image of their containment and repression, an image which contrasts sharply with the promises and ideals of the Republic.

51 52

Brendan Behan, The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 190, 224–5. Ibid., p. 53.

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Theodor Adorno once wrote that ‘all culture shares the guilt of society. It ekes out its existence only by virtue of injustice already perpetrated in the sphere of production.’53 In the work of Seán O’Casey and Brendan Behan, the implications of this understanding of the relationship between culture and social division for working-class people in Ireland are explored and dramatised. For both writers, the persistence of capitalist forms of social inequality in the Irish Free State was a cultural as well as a political problem, and presented a challenge to the possibility of social and cultural democracy. If, as Christopher Hilliard suggests, a key test of democracy in a society is the degree to which it enables ‘a shared sense of entitlement to participate in cultural activities’,54 it is clear that O’Casey and Behan were preoccupied with the cultural markers of a failing Republic. In their exceptionalism as working-class intellectuals, however, they found both the symptoms of democratic failure and the hopes of democratic change.

53

54

Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1983), p. 26. Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 6.

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Ch apter 17

Reshaping Well-Worn Genres Novels of Progress and Precarity 1960–1998 Mary M. McGlynn

A comparison of James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969) and Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1988) offers an overview of the changes during the era of their publication. The novels have common elements, as both are set in Dublin, focusing not on the story of an individual, but on a group placing its faith in the power of collective action, and ending with the failure of the central effort to improve the status of their working-class characters. Strumpet City is a historical novel – of the sort that Georg Lukács says resists bourgeois archaeologisation – set in Dublin’s turbulent labour struggles of the years leading up to the First World War. Its characters consist of the families of unionised workers in furnaces and docks, the landlord class that controls their lives and the clergy that mediate between the two groups, as well as one figure of utter destitution. By contrast, the eponymous soul band whose formation occupies The Commitments is composed mainly of youth not much junior to Plunkett’s workers, but few are employed; all save one have left school, yet none has left home. The lone priest who speaks in the novel merely lends the band space for its debut performance; the novel is set in a period roughly contemporaneous to its publication. In further contrast, Plunkett’s novel is a sprawling historical portrait, with descriptive details and a standard realist narrator whose perspective is evident, while Doyle’s much shorter novel eliminates description, pares down the role of the narrator and concentrates its realist efforts on representing local slang, pronunciation and profanity on its pages. These changes, from a devout collective of working poor to an irreverent class who cannot find gainful work, from a realist historical novel to a less conventional contemporary one, sit alongside major dissimilarities in setting. While both novels take place in Dublin, Strumpet City shows readers of the 1960s and beyond a bygone world of tenements and close, unsanitary lanes, while The Commitments locates its action in Dublin’s periphery, in the more remote areas into which those displaced by slum clearances 303

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mid-century had been moved. The physical displacement of the working class, one narrated explicitly in novels like Mary Costello’s Titanic Town (1992), about Belfast in the 1960s and 1970s, parallels its displacement from a central role in the Irish national story. The novels of the period 1960–98 work to reclaim a space in that story. Although the image of the peasant or rural labourer has historically been more associated with Irish national identity than has the urban worker, the urban proletariat features in early twentieth-century Irish literature, as in works by James Joyce and Seán O’Casey, and it is to these modernist antecedents that authors in the period under consideration tend to make reference when evoking an Irish context. They also make connections to other texts about working-class characters in England, particularly those of Britain’s so-called Angry Young Men. Like those authors, Irish working-class writers can draw, early in the era, on relatively clearly delineated classes. With the decline of industrial employment in Belfast and Dublin, as well as major shifts in the housing of the poor, however, defining a working class becomes harder. Indeed, we can track a loss of fixity in working-class identity through the period of 1960–98. Novels early in this time use the tenement neighbourhood as their focal point; subsequently, slum clearances in Dublin, as well as forced resettlements in Belfast, change the relationship of the class to its environment. Across a variety of genres, working-class homes and neighbourhoods evolve from safe spaces into threatening ones, suggesting that even with an increase in some material comforts, most writers represent an increasing sense of precarity that comes with the disappearance of a sense of belonging. This chapter will look first at historical novels, noting the ways in which they locate some of their more pointed class critiques in the past (a move which muffles overt critique and serves as historical explanation of the current state), as well as attending to how the form is modified via its representations of working-class characters. Next, I turn to the Bildungsroman, which by definition takes as its subject the (successful or failed) socialisation of its protagonist. Again arguing that the bourgeois form is necessarily reworked for working-class characters, I will trace the alienation from place that increasingly unsettles working-class texts and serves as a trace of the discussion of class often repressed in Ireland. We see substantial evolution from the 1960s to the 1980s. Earlier texts maintain preoccupations common to modernist and post-war texts: the centrality of clergy; social hypocrisy; the sprawling family with abusive alcoholic father and weary, loving mother; dreary squalor. By contrast, later texts tend to take these as

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clichés to be avoided if possible. The cost of disregarding the conventional themes is a sense of precariousness and placelessness, evident in the disappearance of a stable narrative voice. This chapter will then look at two overlapping subsets of narrative voices – those of women and those of writers engaging with the Troubles in Northern Ireland – to examine the way in which such intersectionalities shape working-class fiction. As a period that sees massive liberalisation of collective sexual mores, a rise in women working outside the home and, in 1990, the election of Mary Robinson as president, this era is also a significant one in the story of women in Ireland. As we shall see in works by Edna O’Brien, Frances Molloy, Mary Costello and others, however, the change in situation for working-class women was not always as pronounced. Similarly, the sectarian turmoil depicted in works by Molloy and Costello, as well as by Bernard MacLaverty, Glenn Patterson and Eoin McNamee, reveals how class status can reinforce a sense of political intractability. In all the texts analysed here, we can see that authors from 1960–98 have struggled not just to represent Ireland’s working class, but to move beyond the burden of representation.

Historical Background Historian J. H. Whyte explicitly compares 1916–21 and 1957–63 as ‘watershed’ moments in Irish history, arguing that ‘in all spheres except the strictly political, [1957–63] were of more critical importance in the development of the twenty-six counties,’ citing as factors the economic revival, increasing contact with foreign influences, an evolving relationship to a Catholic Church itself in transition and growing openness in media and the arts.1 Throughout early works of the period, we can see these aspects, especially an increasing willingness to be critical of the clergy and a growing resistance to censorship. As had happened in Northern Ireland in the previous decade, the arrival of television and the economic strength of the post-war era heralded openness and growth. Thus, despite some differences in setting or outlook, novels produced before 1968 in both the north and the south share similar attitudes, similar relations to the literary traditions that precede them and similar resemblances to working-class works produced contemporaneously in England. As Derek Hand notes, ‘while wealth did come to the country, it existed side by side with “squalor and 1

J. H. Whyte, ‘Chapter XI: Economic Progress and Political Pragmatism, 1957–63’, in A New History of Ireland: Volume VII: Ireland, 1921–84, ed. by J. R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 294–308 (p. 294).

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neglect”, making even more palpable the class divisions within Ireland’;2 as we shall see, the working-class texts of the 1960s engage with this increasing sense of inequality. The remainder of the era shows a dramatic bifurcation in the political climate of the two states, though arguably the representation of class dynamics retains significant overlaps. In the Republic, the move in 1972 to join the EEC was followed by an economic recession that generated new waves of emigration and made the optimism of the 1960s seem misplaced. In Northern Ireland, the Troubles generated an even more pronounced pessimism; as Hand sees it, ‘In many ways, the 1980s in Ireland were much like the 1970s, only worse . . . because there was no hope in any public or private discourse:  the same problems persisted, amplified, as if nothing had changed or developed.’3 As the end of the period approaches, economic recovery again sidesteps the poorest, and literary production by and about the working class redoubles its attention to the contradictions of an increasingly globalised, cosmopolitan outlook. Given the long-standing critical disregard of most working-class fiction, it is not surprising that John Wilson Foster’s Field Day Anthology essay about ‘Irish Fiction 1965–1990’ does not mention any working-class writers or, indeed, refer to the working class at all.4 Directing the bulk of his entry (curiously) to Joyce, George Moore and Sean Ó Faoláin, Foster asserts that writers from the 1960s onwards share more with modernism than with the intervening years. Foster cites Maurice Harmon, who ‘announced the demise of what he called “the era of inhibitions”, which he dated from 1920 to 1960’, a time when the sensuality of the modernist era – evidenced in writers as diverse in subject matter and form as Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Seán O’Casey, John Millington Synge and Katherine Cecil Thurston – lay dormant.5 Certainly novels of the 1960s through the 1990s draw on modernist themes. Urban, and increasingly willing to experiment with voice, these texts engage with class more openly than did the fiction of the 1930s–1950s. At the same time, as Foster’s lacuna suggests, the canon privileges texts engaging with questions of national identity and the role of religion. The language of class is seldom overt. Even in the texts analysed here, class is seldom treated directly. Poverty is easily inferred, and the absence of cultural capital is indicated by a variety 2 3 4

5

Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 226. Ibid., p. 235. John Wilson Foster, ‘Irish Fiction 1965–1990’, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. III, ed. by Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), pp. 937–43. Ibid., p. 941.

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of textual features, many with long traditions in depictions of the lower classes. For instance, the transliteration of accents perceived as lower class is a feature of nearly all the texts I discuss; only in later novels, like Frances Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie (1985) or Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy (1992), do we see this form of speech given narrative authority on the page. More often, even in texts sympathetic to working-class characters, their distance from a presumed middle-class, more educated audience is played for comic effect, evoking memories of stage-Irish caricatures of the nineteenth century. Indeed, even if some novels work subversively against the images they evoke, many novels in this chapter draw on long-standing stereotypes of long-suffering maternal figures and drunk, abusive, distant and/or ne’er-do-well husbands. Certainly, the frank sexuality, for instance, while conforming to long-standing associations of the lower class with ribaldry, functions as well as a critique of a perceived arid, mid-century censoriousness. The increasing openness about sexuality and gender extends to depictions of both men and women, both straight, and, in a small but increasing space, queer. The interaction of a character’s class and marginalised gender identity exponentially increases both the difficulties faced and the culture of silence suppressing such voices, a dynamic addressed with more openness in the 1990s. The working-class texts of this era also reassert for urban environments a central role ceded since the publication of Ulysses. As Ferdia Mac Anna complains about his 1960s education, ‘There was no trace of Dublin in our schoolbooks. Most of the Irish literature we were taught dealt with life on the land or the struggle against the British or the horrors of the famine. It was about as relevant to modern city life as Tarzan of the Apes.’6 Mac Anna’s lament about the absence of modern city life might more accurately be directed to the absence of class in the Irish national discussion. In his effort to construct its straw man – Dublin’s ‘literary coma’ – Mac Anna overlooks the significance of many vibrant novels of the 1960s and 1970s that take Dublin’s working class as their subject.7 His formulation of ‘dirty realism’ does indeed account for the poetry and novels his framework privileges, but I propose here a counter-narrative that connects late mid-century texts and those that came before them, laying groundwork for the Dublin Renaissance that stands as Ireland’s most explicit discussion of class to date. 6

7

Ferdia Mac Anna, ‘The Dublin Renaissance: An Essay on Modern Dublin and Dublin Writers’, The Irish Review, 10 (Spring 1991), pp. 14–30 (p. 15). Ibid., p. 29.

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Throughout the four decades under examination, working-class literature both reflects contemporary social preoccupations and affirmatively shapes the conversation about them. With the awarding of the 1993 Booker Prize to Roddy Doyle for Paddy Clarke, Ha ha ha, a literature that had been sidelined – in some senses since its inception – finally attained a central role in Irish culture.

Historical Novels The chronotope of the lane – a cramped byway filled with overcrowded, crumbling housing – structures much working-class fiction of the 1960s, from historical novels like Paul Smith’s The Countrywoman (1961) to the coming-of-age stories of Lee Dunne, Christy Brown and Maurice Leitch. The slums provide an ongoing backdrop dramatising the slow pace of modernisation.8 The lanes will come in later works like Dermot Bolger’s The Journey Home (1990) to represent an authentic Dublin in contrast to the redbrick corporation houses where Hano and Shay grow up, a ‘limbo’ where the country and city jostle uneasily.9 In contrast to this later, growing sense of placelessness, we see a relative stability of working-class identity with respect to place. For Smith’s Baines family, the lanes embody entrapment:  ‘night fog from the Canal lay sodden and trapped in the well of the Lane, stuffing the yawms of the open doorways and the black stairs with a swirling swell of vapor, and leaving the naked laths of the ceilings and the red-raddled walls wringing wet.’10 The stuffing and swelling evoke enclosure, while the reference to open doorways and naked laths underscores the vulnerability and lack of protection or privacy. Throughout the novel, characters in the two-room tenement home can hear noises in the lane, including fights in other rooms and drunken footsteps. When Pat Baines is away, the home is depicted as a cosy bulwark against these indignities; when he returns, he brings them inside with him. The Countrywoman received accolades and critiques upon its publication for this portrait of life in the lanes, but little attention has been paid to its focus on the space of the home itself. The novel devotes scant time to the workplaces of its characters, in part because it rejects the more 8

9 10

The majority of these novels are conceived (if not published) before the dangerous buildings crisis of 1963–4, their tenement settings depicted as derelict and overcrowded rather than overtly dangerous (only Strumpet City features a collapsing building). Dermot Bolger, The Journey Home (London: Viking Press, 1990), p. 7. Paul Smith, The Countrywoman (New York: Penguin, [1961] 1989), p. 20.

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bourgeois notion that self-definition arises from occupation, but also in part in recognition of the fact that the majority of the characters have little work and few have stable employment. We see less of the causes of poverty than its effects in the home – work, like the church and the tyranny of the oft-absent father, structures life from the outside. The novel opens with a flashback to the arrival of Mrs Baines to Kelly Lane, still in love with her husband and hopeful of his finding a situation in his chosen trade, wheelmaking (a craft already in decline and emblematic of Pat Baines’s irrelevance in the modern world). The Countrywoman pays its respect to its eponymous main character via the decision to maintain distance and privacy by not using her Christian name. This formality also underscores how entirely Mrs Baines is defined by and stuck in her marriage. The reader’s distance from the character serves also as a reminder of the historical distance from the era of the novel’s composition, making clear how different material conditions are, how determined by such conditions the subject is. A similar distance from the era of its composition structures James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, which depicts squalor with clinical precision, showing readers the degradations of the body created by poverty, filthy living conditions and exploitative work environments. While the wealthy and prosperous in the novel move easily throughout Dublin and beyond, the poor are literally and metaphorically impeded. Fr O’Connor leaves the poor parish easily and frequently, by tram and even car; Yearling, an affluent businessman, has a car of his own and is frequently shown offering rides to others. Bradshaw, a landlord, flees the law once his tenements collapse, crushing bodies. Those with less freedom to move suffer: Mulhall is literally deprived of mobility when his feet are amputated and Rashers also struggles to escape the bounds of his neighbourhood. Fr O’Sullivan wears painful shoes, a self-inflicted inhibition that suggests that the Church hobbles itself. While not challenging the gender roles of the time, Strumpet City offers a portrait of working-class women. Mary Fitzpatrick, as a farm girl who has come to Dublin to enter service, represents a time when the vast majority of working women laboured in domestic rather than industrial situations. Another historical treatment of the same era, Christine Dwyer Hickey’s The Dancer (1995), similarly shows many female characters whose class shapes their interactions with Dublin. Using a title reminiscent of The Countrywoman, Hickey’s novel takes an individual for her title but tells the story of a larger community. Unlike the Bildungsromane that so often narrate stories of working-class characters distinct from their surroundings, Hickey’s novels decline to assimilate characters into a modern

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mind-set and instead retain a sense of the effect of their historical context and material situation. The Dancer and its two sequels track the declining fortunes of a family, using the homes where they live, not just as indicators of socio-economic status, but also as a means of interrogating bourgeois norms of privacy. In giving us access to spaces and their re-appropriation – for instance by Greta, who uses a drawing room for sexual encounters and a scullery as an entryway – Hickey shows us how spaces restrict possibility and how resistance to such conventions expands narrative possibility.

Bildungsromane The Bildungsroman is a primary means by which Irish working-class writers represent working-class subjectivity. Most in the 1960s and 1970s spend little time on the nation that has ignored them, creating texts that have more in common with contemporaneous English and Scottish novels than with Irish ones. Dunne’s Goodbye to the Hill (1965), for instance, shares a long list of themes and plot twists with Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958); its self-loathing narrator, with his overlapping affairs with older women, also shares traits with Room at the Top’s (1957) Joe Lampton. Similarly, Leitch’s The Liberty Lad (1965) shares some themes with Lucky Jim (1954), with class again a more salient construction than is nation. (With the rise of the Troubles in the late 1960s, nation becomes a more prominent theme, as discussed later in this chapter.) Unlike the British authors, however, who foreground class so prominently as to be grouped together under the label of Angry Young Men, in the Irish Bildungsroman, the discourse of class is frequently submerged. Indeed, one could argue that the Bildungsroman is well suited to midcentury Irish culture precisely because its focus on the individual downplays class membership: in contrast to the historical novels discussed earlier in this chapter, few protagonists in these novels act as representatives or symbols of their class. Rather, in keeping with what Franco Moretti (1987) has termed the late Bildungsroman, these protagonists are outliers in their communities, a visible distance in the case of Christy Brown’s unnamed ‘cripple’ in Down All the Days (1970), an educational distance for Frank Glass in Liberty Lad and a physical distance, ever increasing, for Paddy Maguire in Goodbye to the Hill, a novel whose very title is expressive of what he moves away from. Each of these characters embodies an alienation from his origins that makes him unrepresentative of the working class at large. At the same time, the genre is inescapably about class dynamics:  Irish working-class writers attempt compromise between this form

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resolutely and relentlessly identified with the middle classes and their own frequent invisibility or caricature in fiction. Writing a Bildungsroman with a working-class protagonist both asserts the right of the story to be told and capitulates to a form that privileges the development of the individual – works, that is, explicitly against the sort of collectivism that remains one of the few weapons of the dispossessed. In its Irish, working-class iteration, the novel of development repeatedly shows the failure of such narratives to account for working-class lives. Novelists who surpass the limits of the conventional Bildungsroman include Christy Brown, who increasingly displaces his artist protagonist in favour of a modernist collectivism; Paul Smith, who places women at the centre of his narratives, revealing the limits of progress for them; Lee Dunne, who focusses on the self-loathing generated by successful Bildung; and Edna O’Brien, who shows how social forces repeatedly and violently truncate a woman’s development. Later in the period, we see more novels with children as protagonists, suggesting an incomplete progress, and in fiction about and in the wake of the Troubles, the very notion of development itself is called into question. Goodbye to the Hill compresses the novel of development into very few years. Aside from the first chapter, which details life between ages six and thirteen in the impoverished neighbourhood of the Hill in Ranelagh on Dublin’s Southside – reminiscences that convey the harsh life and sparse joys  – the novel covers Paddy Maguire’s life from age thirteen to about seventeen, during which time he completes several rites of passage often taking place later. The compression of Paddy’s sexual, educational and vocational development into a short timespan indicates that the Bildung model is not an easy fit with a working-class life story. Where a bourgeois character would have a prolonged period of coming of age, including education and introduction to society, Paddy lies about his age so he can begin working sooner, an act which truncates the period of development. In a challenge to the conventional Catholic morality of the day, the novel spends very little time on religion and a great deal of time on Paddy’s sexual exploits. With a frankness not seen in the Angry Young Men novels, Dunne details Paddy’s seduction by a middle-aged widow. Yet the novel does not shun tradition entirely: ‘Paddy’ is arguably the most stereotypical evocation of an Irish working-class man possible, and ‘Paddy Maguire’ is Patrick Kavanagh’s protagonist in ‘The Great Hunger’. Nevertheless, the novel’s end shows Paddy flying past entangling nets just as other artists have done:  Paddy chooses a life onstage in the UK rather than a stable office job in Dublin, a decision which causes his beloved, long-suffering

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mother to disown him. Neither church nor nation actively impedes him; instead, Dunne depicts conventional morality and bourgeois ambitions as the forces that oppress and constrain. In rejecting a reliable career trajectory, Paddy also evades the constraints of the many women who could be said to embody a feminised Ireland: he does not marry his sweet girlfriend, avoids responsibility for his mother and forsakes the lure of being kept by the older women he beds. Goodbye’s conclusion shows Paddy gazing at Ireland’s receding shore, feeling nothing. Unlike Mrs Baines’s son, who closes The Countrywoman with a visit to her grave, Paddy abandons all traditional allegiances, endorsing an extreme individualism. How Many Miles to Babylon?, a 1974 novella by Jennifer Johnston about a cross-class friendship established at a Big House in County Dublin and tested in the trenches of World War I, also demonstrates the limits of the Bildungsroman to account for the experiences of the working class and those sympathetic to them. The antagonists in the novel, namely the mother and the commanding officer, Major Glendinning, discourage the association Alec has with Jerry Crowe, a labourer with whom he has built a close friendship since their adolescence. The novel’s interest in demolishing the borders that Glendinning and Mother erect comes up against the intractability of a social system with so many means of maintaining separation. Frequently read as a depiction of the death of the Ascendancy, the novel of course shows the death of a member of the working class as well, at the hands of his upper-class friend. While Alec kills Jerry as an act of mercy, shooting him the night before he is to be executed by firing squad, his own death sentence is not carried out in the novel, elevating him to a position of privilege akin to the one he experiences socially, as does his narrative authority and centrality. Jerry’s life and death act as satellites in the plot of another’s story, an ancillary status replicating his social marginalisation. The novel’s final sentence reveals how imbricated Alec’s privileged status is in his ability to fit his and Jerry’s narratives into a Bildung format. ‘Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have not taken away my bootlaces or my pen, so I  sit and wait and write.’11 The mention of the bootlaces indicates the possibility of a gentleman’s suicide has been left open to him, though he here chooses to create rather than destroy. The sentence contains an excess of conjunctions – first, the presence of ‘because’ and then ‘and’ creates a cascade of cause-and-effect conditions in which the ability to write is the outcome of being an ‘officer and a gentleman’. Moreover, the polysyndeton of the repeated ‘and’ serves to equate sitting, 11

Jennifer Johnston, How Many Miles to Babylon? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974), p. 156.

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waiting and writing. The passivity of the first two makes their conjunction understandable; including ‘write’ in the list suggests the futility of creativity to affect the rigid systems of class and rank responsible for the novel’s central tragedy. Babylon’s depiction of truncated development inaugurates a period in which the Bildung format is reworked by novelists invested in depicting the way class and sectarian conflict distort maturity and progress. Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own (1988) tells the story of Mal, whose own development is scarred by his parents’ marital conflict as well as the cruelty and hate that result in the self-immolation of Francy, a Catholic boy on a largely Protestant estate. Paddy Clarke also traces the impact of marital discord on a child on a new estate. In both novels, boys are depicted as atavistic, their violence asserting a counterweight to discourses of Irish modernisation. The image of the Irish working classes put forth by the late-century Bildungsroman is one tinged by pessimism about advancement or change.

Gender Issues The image of the Irish woman enshrined in the constitution and embodied in the national imagination left little space for expressions of physical presence or desire. Trailing in the wake of an increasing openness about sexuality that spreads throughout Anglo-American culture, Irish writers begin to treat female sexuality with a directness that led to state censorship for many of them. In fiction about working-class women from 1960– 98, we see two impulses in tension with one another. On the one hand, texts explore new freedom from the mid-century ‘era of repression’, and on the other hand, they maintain a characterisation of the maternal head of household as the resilient physical body bearing up against attacks by poverty on the working classes. Both of these representations have literary antecedents in modernist literature – the sexually uninhibited Molly Bloom embodies the sort of ribald humour that accompanies most of the mid-century depictions (by men) of working-class female sexuality (Edna O’Brien offers a less jocular but still candid depiction), while Synge and O’Casey provide antecedent examples of enduring women subjected to tragedy that are updated by Smith, Doyle (with The Woman Who Walked into Doors, 1996) and O’Brien (in A Pagan Place, 1970). Paul Smith’s novels The Countrywoman and Summer Sang in Me (1975) both present a bawdy carnality as an accepted aspect of working-class womanhood. At the same time, Smith’s heroine in The Countrywoman, Mrs Baines, is not part of the

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risqué conversations and outré behaviours we see from her neighbours. Rather, she represents a parallel strain of female strength in the Irish novel, one that does risk its own reification. Christy Brown also suffuses his novel with open sexuality, but again, his depiction of the female body as sexualised repeatedly spills into caricature. As in The Countrywoman, the women seen being most frank about their sexuality are those past their prime, displayed for comic relief: the night after the funeral of her husband of thirty years, a character known as Red Magso swigs from a whiskey bottle and flaunts her large breasts: ‘ “Amn’t I  in me prime, woman?” she said, slapping herself on the chest, thrusting out her large bosom that swelled out in the blouse like the full-blown sails of a schooner. “Take a look at them!” she cried proudly; “you won’t buy the likes of them in Woolworth’s!” ’12 She then removes her false teeth, alternately lamenting her husband’s death and expressing relief that she no longer has to satisfy his sexual appetite. The scene climaxes with her search in her blouse for the whiskey bottle, which was not firmly lodged somewhere in her corset; . . . the widow started to shake and waddle as if doing a somewhat frenzied tango, but all her gyrations were to no avail, so there was nothing to do but peel off the black mourning dress and unstring her bone stays. As she stood in the middle of the room in her slip, her heavy breasts overhanging the bony ridges of her corset, the bottle fell to the floor. (83)

The recurrent references here, as throughout the novel, to the size of Red Magso’s bosom figure her as a creature of excess. The false teeth and hyperbolic description of her movements depict her body and her comfort with it as comical. Most other female bodies throughout the novel are also hypersexualised. The opening chapter orients the text towards such a vision of eroticised women. The narrator’s brother hoists him up to watch a ‘whatchamacallit’ of a woman preparing for bed, which conjures in him memories of seeing his sister in a similar situation. The text emphasises that the boy ‘did not know why’ (8) he was embarrassed around his sister after being aroused by her nudity, which both characterises his sexual ignorance and exonerates him of any responsibility for his arousal at women as objects of a male gaze. We see him aroused by the sight of a young girl twice, scenes linked by the phrase ‘flame-tip of her tongue’ (59, 136); in both cases, the girls are the aggressors, forcing themselves on him. Only his mother is not depicted primarily as a sexual being. 12

Christy Brown, Down All the Days (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970 [Mandarin, 1990]), p. 80; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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Such a construction of sensual working-class women is recurrent, but it is at its least caricatured and most critical when deployed by Edna O’Brien. Famous for her Country Girls trilogy, which depicts the sexual consciousness of its heroines as a stand against the constraints of nationalism and Catholicism, O’Brien continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s to explore the desires of women of all classes. In ‘Irish Revel’, a reworking of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ set in a country hotel, her protagonist is clearly lower class. Mary rides her bicycle into town, filled with anticipation of a fancy dinner, only to realise with humiliation that she’s been asked to work as a servant at the meal. Like Lilly, Joyce’s maid, literally run off her feet, Mary is embittered, and the story parallels her class-based insights on this night with the sexual disappointment she had suffered the summer before in an unconsummated affair with a foreign man. The story ends with her curtailed mobility on a battered bicycle with a flat tire. She takes her place alongside other working women in the literary tradition, the slights of class equated to the slights of gender and desire.

Troubles Fiction Clearly the fiction of the north shares many traits with the other texts I am considering here. At the same time, the socio-economic situation in the north of Ireland is different than in the Republic, and a number of its novels develop conversations about working-class representations that must be considered as a distinct category of experiences. With the onset of major sectarian strife in 1968, the Hunger Strikes of 1980 and 1981, the Anglo–Irish Agreement of 1985 and, finally, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland in these three decades moved from simmering conflict to outright conflict back to simmering tensions again, and then, perhaps, to growing peace. Many novels about the Troubles era in the north work to show how the experience of sectarian strife is in many ways akin to the experience of working-class alienation. MacLaverty’s Cal, for instance, opens with its protagonist a victim of the sort of alienated space discussed previously in this chapter, though for Cal’s family, this alienation from place is a direct consequence of the fact that they live in a Protestant housing estate. The burning of their home makes clear the precarity of working-class homes. The entire novel can be read as a meditation on the supposed safety of the home. Cal feels forced into violence, an accessory to a murder committed on the threshold of the victim’s home. Later – his role in that death unknown to the victim’s widowed wife – he accepts employment from her and moves into a cottage on her farm, another home that

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appears safe but is not. MacLaverty’s analysis downplays the importance of class or nation, privileging a notion of the individual as existing outside such classifications. Patterson’s Burning Your Own similarly explores the boundaries between safety and danger, home and alienation and insider and outsider, using an estate’s dump as an image of the detritus of history shunted aside but not truly gone. His next novel, Fat Lad (1992), structures its analysis of the Troubles through various homes, most of them constricted. One governing metaphor is of a goldfish freed from its tiny bowl that swims in endless miniscule circles until it drowns, an image of a national body with a short memory, unable to move beyond its own limited, limiting past. Here working-class experience is marked by a sense of limits and futility, in which sectarianism is seen to reshape the past and to control the present. Fiction by working-class women in Belfast is even more critical of the notion of domestic security. Mary Beckett’s Give Them Stones (1987), like Costello’s Titanic Town a few years later, features homes invaded by British soldiers, making them political spaces and denying privacy. While stereotypically it is the job of women to restore domesticity, Titanic Town subverts this expectation of the maternal nurturer via the reliance of Annie’s mother on Valium to maintain her calm. More politically active than the novel’s patriarch, she challenges the containment of women in the home, a space not sacred but itself under assault, whether by the mould in the opening pages of the novel or the smashing of windows by estate enemies later on. Throughout the period, fiction implicates the overlap of class and the Troubles in the maintenance of a culture of violence, at times faulting the working class for its resilience. Escapist visions in the 1990s, whether via the lurid violence of Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (1994) or the optimism of Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996), keep the spatial politics of class central via their engagement with Belfast’s geography.

Conclusion One reason Lukács privileged the historical novel was its ability to pull readers away from an inordinate focus on the individual and private life. Certainly the working-class Irish historical novels of 1960–98 work in this vein.13 As I hope I have demonstrated here, even historical novels about the 13

Ironically, Doyle’s A Star Called Henry, published as the Celtic Tiger roars, stands as a counterexample, reducing Irish revolutionary history to the backdrop of a tall-tale Bildungsroman that mocks expectations placed on working-class exemplars of both genres.

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collective move beyond the burden of representation and answerability, while Bildungsromane of the same era redefine their own genre so that they contest the centrality of the individual even in this most personal of narrative forms. In working with these well-worn genres, working-class novelists redefine and reshape them.

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Ch apter 18

Locked Out Working-Class Lives in Irish Drama 1958–1998 Victor Merriman

The critical record on class in Irish literature, culture and history is shockingly thin.1 Thinking of the historical drama as ‘the imitation of men’ [. . .] disavows how one might plot historical action otherwise.2

The Ireland of 1998 was a vastly different social space than that of 1958, partly because of exceptional local conditions, and partly because of the country’s relationship to international events. During the four decades which elapsed between Eamon De Valera’s retirement from active politics (1958) and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (1998), life on the island of Ireland was transformed; all was changed – again. After De Valera’s departure, Independent Ireland opened itself to transnational market forces, and people in artisan or working-class employment experienced significant social upheaval as economic tides ebbed and flowed. Returning to Ireland in the mid-1980s, Dermot Bolger’s Arthur Cleary was an anomaly, a revenant, From the final generation To have always known a start In factory or in timber-yard Who moved as work grew slack.3

For exposed persons, who might in this century be described as members of Ireland’s precariat, economic fluctuations always played out as social dislocation; as Bolger’s verse suggests, the default response to economic contraction was emigration. Overwhelmingly, those outside of the monied 1

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John Brannigan, ‘Foreword’, in Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. vii. Kathleen M.  Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic:  Haptic Allegories (Abingdon, Oxon., and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 13. Dermot Bolger, ‘The Lament for Arthur Cleary’, in Internal Exiles: Poems (Mountrath, Portlaoise: The Dolmen Press, 1986), p. 71.

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and propertied classes, who traded their labour for wages in the free market, were the most likely to have to leave. The place, meaning and visibility of intellectual labour in Irish life mutated also during the period. Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney founded The Crane Bag (1977–85), a journal explicitly concerned with enabling critical responses to Ireland’s pressing predicaments. The 1980s saw the publication of seminal works of sociocultural analysis by Terence Brown (1981, 1985)4 and Seamus Deane (1985, 1987).5 Joseph Lee’s monumental work6 was published in 1990, and Declan Kiberd’s7 in 1996. Deane and Kiberd dealt specifically with cultural matters – including cultural production. Lee’s, and in most respects, Brown’s canvas was more expansive and included culture, both as the labour of cultural workers and the broader concatenation of forces invoked in Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘structure of feeling’. Critical engagement with the local and global implications of Ireland’s relationship to colonialism and imperialism emerged as an important intellectual project. Works by Patricia Coughlan, Deane, David Lloyd, Luke Gibbons, Peadar Kirby and others generated telling insights – not least regarding the nature of Irish neocolonialism as the legatee of colonial political economy. They also provoked anxieties at the imagined consequences of such work for the dominant ‘security problem’ analysis of conflict in Northern Ireland (1969–98).8 By 1998, the structure and character of independent Ireland’s cultural space had undergone deep and lasting transformation. The state’s first cabinet minister for arts and culture, Michael D. Higgins, had completed a full term of office (1993–7), having integrated cultural policy into state economic planning, and leaving a legacy of institutional, organisational and infrastructural development. Theatre itself provides a precise example of how change played out in one sector of cultural work and cultural politics. The late-1950s Dublin-centred theatre ecology, augmented by vibrant amateur activity, and professional ‘fit-up’ companies touring outside the capital, had, forty years on, diversified to an extraordinary extent. A  cultural counterweight to Dublin was established in Galway (Druid Theatre Company, 1975), and, in Derry, Field Day Productions 4 5

6 7 8

Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2002 (London: Harper Perennial, 2010). Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals:  Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London:  Faber and Faber, 1987). J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996). See Colin Graham, ‘Liminal Spaces:  Postcolonialism and Post-nationalism’, in his Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 81–101.

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launched its critical project with Brian Friel’s Translations (1980). By 1992, Thomas Kilroy argued for ‘A Generation of Playwrights’, engaged, for most of the period considered in this chapter, with ‘a world which has already passed away or is in the process of doing so’; that of the ‘rural town or small town ethos [. . . encompassing even] Joyce’s Dublin [which] has all the intimacy and shared codes of a small, provincial town’.9 Kilroy’s schema is both insightful and contestable, to the extent that it represents that world-in-transit either as homogeneous, premodern or exempt from mid-twentieth-century urbanisation, the latter a feature of Independent Ireland’s national reconstruction project.10 However, his contention that ‘the Anglo-Irish playwrights, with the possible exception of Denis Johnston, never really created a significant drama out of their own social material’ strikingly excludes Seán O’Casey from the category ‘Anglo-Irish playwright’.11 Culturally, as a Dublin Protestant, O’Casey is Anglo-Irish. Yet, given the association of ‘Anglo-Irish’ and ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, it may well be that his social class is the disqualifying factor here. Narratives of working-class lives provide testimonies radically incommensurate with the social dramas of those who govern, and those who benefit from the political economy of Independent Ireland. The problem is structural, shaping assumptions in all areas of lived experience, from education to matters of taste and propriety, limiting public discourse and influencing public policy. Kilroy’s slip matters, then, because it points to the often casual ways in which class positions are obscured, dislocated, avoided and even denied in Ireland. This chapter will consider this problem in relation to four plays, one from each of four decades, in which working-class experiences are staged:  Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel (1990), A Handful of Stars by Billy Roche (1988), The Non-stop Connolly Show by John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy (1975) and The Scatterin’ by James McKenna (1960). Each play thematises working-class lives, and, in setting the works alongside each other, certain persistent problems and strategies for resolving them come into focus. If each play made a significant impact in its own time, the same cannot be argued in relation either to its endurance in the repertoire or its visibility in scholarly work. Brian Friel is the exception, standing out as one of two leading late twentieth-century playwrights; the 9

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Thomas Kilroy, ‘A Generation of Playwrights’, in Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, ed. by Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), pp. 1–7 (p. 3). The first sugar-processing factory was established in Carlow in 1926, with other small towns, Mallow, Tuam and Thurles, acquiring plants during the 1930s. Kilroy, ‘A Generation of Playwrights’, p. 3.

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other being the laureate of the working class, Tom Murphy. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s work applies a revolutionary socialist perspective to Irish society, adapting to their purposes radical performance aesthetics developed in Britain from the late 1920s. The perceived idiosyncrasy of their formal and thematic choices12 has consigned these playwrights to the periphery of Irish theatre history. The lack of critical attention to Roche’s work is harder to fathom, as A Handful of Stars is the first play of the Wexford Trilogy, a phenomenal success of the London theatre scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, Roche and his work are positively notorious by comparison to McKenna, who has been all but struck from the record. Neither Roche nor McKenna, both of whom came from working-class backgrounds, enjoyed the kinds of connections that might have smoothed their paths, not only through the theatre world, but in and out of the academy. It may also be that Friel’s stage world, thoroughly mediated by nostalgia, was a better fit with what was accepted as Irish theatre. To adapt Nicholas Grene, neither Arden and D’Arcy, Roche nor McKenna wrote ‘the “Irish” plays that an Irish playwright should. Brian Friel did’.13 Dancing at Lughnasa enjoyed huge success when it premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1990. It staged a narrative remembered in the 1960s by a man recalling details of his aunts’ lives in the 1930s, and was dedicated to the playwright’s own aunts, ‘those five brave Glenties women’. Dancing at Lughnasa is a truly powerful piece of theatre, attracting critical attention for its gender politics, and the extraordinary centrepiece of the dramatic action, the eponymous dance. Joe Cleary’s account of the play centres it in his critique of the limitations of naturalistic form in Irish cultural production. I drew attention to problems of narrative voice in Friel’s work, and argued (2011) that Michael’s depoliticised and nostalgic framing of his aunts’ world was indicative of the gap between his bourgeois perspective and their poverty. Because the play’s narrative content is a function of memory forged in childhood, the bleakness of the social world to which the dramatic world refers does not shape the dramatic action. This is most striking in the play’s refusal to stage Agnes and Rose’s degradation on the streets of London. Their exile and decline is simply reported, in passing (Act II), by Michael: 12

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Amply demonstrated in Andy O’Mahony’s approach to Margaretta D’Arcy, www.rte.ie/archives/ 2015/0324/689284-the-non-stop-connolly-show/ [accessed 29 June 2016]. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama:  Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 218. The original reads, ‘Tom Murphy did not write the “Irish” plays that an Irish playwright should. Brian Friel did.’

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MICHAEL And by the time I tracked them down, in London, twenty-five years later, Agnes was dead, and Rose was dying in a hospice for the destitute, in London.14

And yet their fate seems to have inspired the writing of the play: ‘I was at a play at the National Theatre with the playwright Thomas Kilroy,’ [Friel] said. ‘We walked across the Waterloo Bridge and up the Strand. It was about 11.30 at night and there were homeless people sleeping in the doorways. Tom said, “If you talked to those people, I’m sure many of them are Irish.” And I said, “I had two aunts who, I think, ended up something like that.” He said, “Why don’t you write about that?” So that’s how it began: backward.’ According to Kilroy, Friel ‘told the story of himself as a young man setting off for London in search of the two aunts who had left Donegal years before. What he found was destitution.’15

Finola Meredith included this anecdote in her article on a revival of Dancing at Lughnasa at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast (director:  Annabelle Comyn, choreographer: Liz Roche, 2015). Co-producer Patricia McBride (Director, An Grianán Theatre, Letterkenny) commented, ‘These women were living a life of subsistence, trying to break out of the confines of parochial society. Too often, [Lughnasa] is portrayed as nostalgic or sentimental. While it’s true that there is tenderness there, there is a dark heart too.’16 However, Comyn located ‘the tragedy of the play [in the fact that] the women are trying to maintain a family, a way of life, and yet this ends up becoming the very thing that they are reacting against’.17 Viewing Friel’s dramatic narrative through this kind of existential lens further dislocates the women from the class realities of their situation. Although the pressures exerted on them are played out, in part, in clashes between Agnes and Kate, they are not ‘reacting against’ family. Decisions and choices made in the Ballybeg homestead are explicitly shaped by harsh economic facts: the frugal household is sustained by Kate’s teacher’s salary, augmented by piecework from Rose and Agnes, who knit gloves as part of a local cottage industry. Catastrophe strikes when both sources of income are threatened. The Catholic management of Kate’s school dismisses her because of their brother Fr Jack Mundy’s lapse from doctrinal orthodoxy following service in Uganda. A glove-making factory is to open, placing Agnes and Rose’s 14 15

16 17

Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 60. Finola Meredith, ‘The Dark Heart of Dancing at Lughnasa’, The Irish Times, 1 September 2015, www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/the-dark-heart-of-dancing-at-lughnasa-1.2332117 [accessed 29 June 2016]. Ibid. Ibid.

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pittance at risk. The root cause of the breakup of the household is the spectre of slippage from subsistence into poverty, but Friel’s dramaturgical choices avert the gaze from this. Thus, the stage loses the capacity to position the sisters as representative of the abjection of poor women in rural Ireland. Surplus to the confessional state’s preferred model of cultural and political economy, modernisation Irish-style meant disaster. The submergence of their class experience within the dramaturgy is a clear example of the structuring effect of silence around working-class lives as workingclass lives in Irish theatre, compounding and colluding with the silence in public life. The Dublin Lockout of 1913 constitutes, not least in its performative iconicity, one undeniable moment of Irish class struggle. Forever identified with the towering presence and incendiary rhetoric of James Larkin, it led to the foundation of the Irish Citizen Army, commanded by James Connolly during the Easter Rising (1916). The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union strategy during that momentous event was undoubtedly informed by experiences in Wexford, in 1911, where local foundry owners locked out their workforce for six months. The outcomes of the Wexford lockout included employer recognition of the Irish Foundry Workers’ Union (IFWU),18 and the entry into public life of IFWU organiser Richard Corish. As mayor, Corish led a majority Labour Party (founded Clonmel, 1912) borough corporation in Wexford for twenty-five consecutive years. He served as TD for Wexford until his untimely death, and his son, Brendan, succeeded him, leading the Labour Party, and serving in government in the 1970s. Given this history, Billy Roche’s A Handful of Stars dramatises life in a town with a social history quite at odds with the rest of Ireland; throughout most of the twentieth century, Wexford had a socialist ethos. Factor in Colm Tóibín’s observation that ‘the Wexford Billy Roche was brought up in had all the characteristics of a metropolis and some of its energy,’ and Wexford simply cannot be approached, in Kilroy’s terms, as a ‘rural small town’. It follows that social relations in Roche’s work cannot be accurately read without acknowledging the traces of Wexford’s actual social life from the 1950s to the 1990s, in the dynamics of his dramatic worlds. His first play, A Handful of Stars (Bush Theatre, London, 1988) won the John Whiting Award, the Plays and Players Award and the Thames Television Award. Poor Beast in the Rain (1990) won the George Devine Award, and Belfry (1992) won the Charrington Fringe and 18

This face-saving measure obscured employer capitulation to the demand for the right to organise and bargain collectively. The IFWU merged quietly with the IT&GWU (1913).

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Time Out awards. Serious critical work on Billy Roche’s plays is in short supply, however, possibly because, as Tóibín and Christopher Murray suggest, his fictional Wexford is as much a function of Hollywood film tropes as it is of the received conventions of Irish theatre. Murray positions Roche as a playwright ‘not overtly political’,19 and, he argues, Roche, is in tune with contemporary Irish dramatists [. . .] mining material which avoids directly topical or political issues. What interests them is the confusion in which they find themselves emotionally and culturally. They shy away from politics as from a pit that has ensnared the past generation of writers.20

The dynamics of Roche’s dramatic worlds make this position difficult to sustain, but where Murray acknowledges the plays’ working-class milieu, it is usually as a limiting factor: ‘Jimmy perceives the inner room as for “the élite”. Such is the mimicry of this working class construction.’21 He concedes the play contains ‘criticism of the bourgeois social order’, yet asserts that ‘as social comment A Handful of Stars could probably be called naïve.’22 Naïve or not, Roche’s understanding of the interplay between social class and personal horizons is nothing if not directly stated at the key moment of the play. Jimmy Brady is on a rampage with a shotgun, and the sneering Conway, habitué of the pool hall’s inner sanctum, confronts Stapler. The fading boxer has joined the search for Jimmy, to prevent further harm to himself or anyone else. CONWAY: Do yeh know what I’d do with that lad if I had him? STAPLER: But sure what can yeh do Conway? The chap is wild. That’s all’s wrong with him. CONWAY: Wild! I’d wild him. STAPLER: I mean yeh can’t blame young fellas for goin’ off the rails either can yeh? CONWAY: How do yeh mean Stapler? STAPLER: Well let’s face it, if a young lad takes a good look around him what do he see? He sees a crowd of big shots and hob-nobbers grabbin’ and takin’ all before them. But as soon as a young lad knocks off a few bob out of a poor box or somewhere they’re all down on him like a ton of bricks.23

19

20 21 22 23

Christopher Murray, ‘Billy Roche’s Wexford Trilogy: Setting, Place, Critique’, in Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, ed. by Jordan, pp. 209–23 (p. 221). Ibid. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid. Billy Roche, ‘A Handful of Stars’, in The Wexford Trilogy (London:  Nick Hern Books, 2000), pp. 51–2.

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Under duress, and in vitriolic terms, Roche’s dramatis personae name their class affiliation and its consequences, as in Eileen’s confrontation with Molly in Poor Beast in the Rain: EILEEN: Yeh talk about me Mammy as if she was just another little workin’ class bitch in heat. Well you’d want to take a good look at your own poxy life Molly before yeh go tearin’ strips off of other people’s.24

Similarly, in Murphy and O’Donoghue’s On the Outside (1959), Frank’s depiction of his place in the socio-economic system of his small town is graphic: FRANK: The whole town is like a tank. At home is like a tank. A huge tank with walls running up, straight up. And we’re at the bottom, splashing around all week in their Friday night vomit, clawing at the sides all around. And the bosses – and the big-shots – are up around the top, looking in, looking down. You know the look? Spitting. On top of us. And for fear we might climb out someway – Do you know what they’re doing? – They smear grease around the walls.25

In Murphy’s The Wake (1998), Finbar states that ‘The reason why I say fuck [the authorities in this town] is because I’m frightened of every single one of them.’26 The recurrence of such sentiments, from 1959 to 1998, suggests that a powerful sense of exclusion among working-class people subtends the entire period under review. In spite of this, Murray’s criticism and Friel’s dramaturgical choices in Dancing at Lughnasa recruit depoliticised proxies to frame representations of class as other than they are, denying the contradictions they embody. By contrast, Colm Tóibín sees class conflict as part of the fabric of Roche’s Wexford; even if it ‘is not in these plays to be resolved or even dramatised, it is simply part of the prison in which people are locked’.27 Roche dramatises Wexford ‘as a Trojan horse with no Troy in sight, no opening available’.28 Tellingly, Tóibín reads Roche’s artistic vision as bifurcated: both ‘political’ and ‘existential’ at all times. Tóibín’s treatment of the word ‘political’ is not pejorative – as in Murray – and it includes rather than obfuscates class as a political category both in small-town life and in 24 25

26 27

28

Roche, ‘Poor Beast in the Rain’, in The Wexford Trilogy, p. 110. Tom Murphy and Noel O’Donoghue, On the Outside, in Tom Murphy: Plays 4 (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 180. Tom Murphy, The Wake (London: Methuen, 1998), p. 17. Colm Tóibín, ‘The Talk of the Town: The Plays of Billy Roche’, in Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens, ed. by Dermot Bolger (Dublin: New Island, 2000), pp. 18–29 (p. 25). Ibid., p. 25.

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the dramas which arise from it. This critical option liberates existential and political features of the dramaturgical fabric from binary opposition, recognising them as co-existent aspects of working-class lives. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s magnum opus, The Non-stop Connolly Show (1975), was a unique and possibly unrepeatable intervention into a public realm seemingly incapable of achieving anything other than the reproduction of a native capitalist order. As Tim Prentki points out, Arden and D’Arcy took a programmatic, avowedly didactic view of this piece of theatre, the world from which it emerged and into which it played. Their James Connolly is a vehicle for his political writings, locked in lethal combat with avatars of imperialist capitalism, Grabitall (the personification of aggressive capitalist accumulation), and (the historical William Martin) Murphy, organised labour’s most implacable opponent in the early twentieth century. This is theatre made at one pole of the political–existential continuum proposed by Tóibín. The sequence of six plays is manifestly indebted to mystery cycles and morality plays, vernacular English theatrical forms. Throughout the cycle, signature dramaturgical devices are those of agitprop: choral speaking and singing, the use of puppets and grotesque masks and direct declamation of political analysis. The Non-stop Connolly Show was both an occasion and a sustained act of defiance – a political analysis of the condition of the working class, staged in a society openly hostile to such views. Prentki argues that pressures in the social environment of the time influenced the decision to privilege the logical argument of Connolly’s developing activist consciousness, at the expense of the dramatic potential of the contradictions lived through by Connolly himself: The writers work from a defensive position, picturing themselves fending off the sectarian axe-grinding of that spectrum of groups broadly defined as reformist. The verbal tonnage of The Non-Stop Connolly Show is devoted to ensuring that all arguments get an airing, rather than exposing Connolly himself to the demons of contradiction, self-doubt or ambiguity.29

All politics and no existential dimension, as it were. Nonetheless, Prentki concludes that The Non-stop Connolly Show is a defining moment in Arden and D’Arcy’s ‘search for a radical discourse which is embedded in both the soil of the land and in the lives of those who work in its fields and factories’.30 If, with notable exceptions,31 little effort has gone into such a 29

30 31

Tim Prentki, ‘Socialist Shenanigans and Emerald Epiphanies: The Case of Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden’, Kritika Kultura, 14 (2010), pp. 75–96 (p. 95). Available online at http://journals.ateneo. edu/ojs/kk/article/view/1464 [accessed 29 June 2016]. Ibid., p. 95. Tom Murphy, Dermot Bolger, Jim Sheridan, Peter Sheridan and Mannix Flynn, for example.

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project since 1975, it may not be unrelated to the disappearance from Irish theatre history of a play which, in 1960, manifestly succeeded in achieving this, while entertaining large popular audiences:  The Scatterin’ by James McKenna. From the early 1960s, the state’s gradual move away from nationalist goals around territorial integrity and language revival, towards economic modernisation, was perceived as a conceptual shift from a national imaginary privileging ‘sinn féin (ourselves) [to] mé féin (myself )’.32 Aspiration begat policy, and Joe Lee (1999) concluded that Ireland was ‘an economy, not a society’.33 What was it, then, to be Irish and working class in the mid- to late twentieth century? For all too many people, it was to be living where ‘half-educated young Irishmen built Britain’s roads in the ranks of McAlpine’s Fusiliers, while half-educated young women worked as chamber-maids and nurses’34 in England. This was the socio-economic reality out of which, in 1959, James McKenna, sculptor, poet, writer and theatre-maker, created The Scatterin’, a drama with music, about the lives and options of young working-class men on Dublin’s Northside. Alan Simpson’s Dublin Theatre Festival (1960) production of McKenna’s play was an extraordinary success, transferring to London’s West End for a five-week run. ‘The Scatterin’, wrote Fergus Linehan, ‘is not just the play of festival or of the year, but of the decade’ (Sunday Review).35 Reflecting on McKenna’s work, after his death in 2000, the sculptor John Behan described The Scatterin’ as one of ‘the two most significant plays of the period’; the other was Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark.36 Despite its reception, and a short revival at the Abbey Theatre (1973)37 notwithstanding, McKenna and his extraordinary play are absent from most accounts of twentieth-century Irish theatre. Michael Pierse reclaimed The Scatterin’ for his critical project, arguing that McKenna sought ‘to compel [. . .] audiences to question social conditioning and its limitations, to question how hospitable a place the Republic was for its urban working class and to what extent social exclusion contributed to delinquent and dysfunctional behaviour’.38 McKenna was clear 32

33

34 35 36

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Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland so Poor for so Long? (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005), p. 9. Cited in Peadar Kirby, The Celtic Tiger in Distress:  Growth with Inequality in Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 145. Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 133. Cited in James McKenna, The Scatterin’ (Kildare: The Goldsmith Press, 1977), back cover. John Behan, in James McKenna:  A Celebration, ed. by Desmond Egan (Kildare:  The Goldsmith Press, 2002), p. 77. The Goldsmith Press, James McKenna Sculptor 1933–2000, lists a 1962 production at ‘Stratford East Theatre, London’ (2005), p. 31. Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, p. 109.

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about his play’s political significance:  ‘People whom you wouldn’t have won over in argument about the same issues [. . .] somehow The Scatterin’ won them over anyway. And they weren’t concerned about the smaller details – they were just won over.’39 The Scatterin’ was a counterblast to the state’s vigorous espousal of an optimistic national narrative from 1959, as T. K. Whitaker’s Has Ireland a Future? (1957) and Programme for Economic Expansion (1958) translated into state policy and announced the 1960s as the decade of modernisation. Emigration and urban unrest spelt failure; Independent Ireland was not about to dwell on its shortcomings when opening for business, and the state actively recruited key persons to arouse ‘enthusiasm for economic growth as a prerequisite to the achievement of more fundamental national goals’.40 The fate of McKenna’s work, and the subsequent marginalisation of his social and aesthetic concerns, is an egregious casualty of the advent of an Irish economic technocracy. According to Pierse, The Scatterin’ develops O’Casey’s schematic approach to gender politics, and ‘a re-assessment of working-class manhood is central to McKenna’s play.’ The dramatic action offers an exemplary critique of the marginalisation of working-class experience, but McKenna went further; in critiquing their appropriation of the trope of the outlaw group, he problematised the strategies young men deployed to counter this. At first sight, the play’s dramatic world is that of the young men, its look and moral tone theirs alone. They are the very embodiments of ‘Anglo-American or mid-Atlantic’ popular culture, ‘wholly alien to the traditional values inculcated by church and state in independent Ireland’.41 Clad in ‘your narrow trousers and your star-spangled shirts’,42 their classconsciousness is expressed through and always mediated by their collective identification as an urban gang. Theirs is a multiple alienation – bearers both of a culture of street violence traceable to Dublin’s Animal Gangs of the 1930s and 1940s and of the accumulated woes of the 1950s, during which ‘a flood of emigration, an increasing sense of being “left behind”, increasing support for Sinn Féin, popular sympathy with the resurgent IRA and a general electoral volatility alarmed even the most complacent and stasis-minded of political and social leaders.’43 39

40 41 42 43

‘The Scatterin’ at the Abbey, 1973’, www.rte.ie/archives/2013/1203/490588-the-scatterin/ [accessed 29 June 2016]. Kennedy and Dowling, cited in Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 10. Ronan Fanning, Independent Ireland (Dublin: Helicon Press, 1983), p. 200. McKenna, The Scatterin’, p. 21. Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 137.

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Over and above such temporal concerns, the working-class male affronts property, in whose interests liberal democratic political systems function, but the system secures his acquiescence by aligning him with its rigged political economy through the ideological veneration of social mobility through hard work. In reality, his exclusion from property ownership confines him within a degraded parody of the liberal humanist subject in whom ideas of democracy, citizenship and liberty are located. McKenna’s dramatic narrative foregrounds the vicissitudes of the young men. Their treatment by police at war with their perceived recalcitrance to nationalism’s ruralist ideologies is brutal: Sergeant Bejayzus, I’ll trample on ye. There’s a low dirty streak in your breed, but by God, we’ll knock it out of ye.44

Their experiences encompass the indignities of unemployment, underemployment, casual snobbery and frustration with women. The latter plays out in fierce misogynistic ranting, compounded by narrative conventions that stage women as property, in both social and representational terms. Jemmo He stands up, raising a clenched fist. Out into the sunlight steps our new model Irish woman, in cellophane wrapper with blue ribbon, an’ the price marked in dollars. They’ve took our women an’ given us a new speechis: the abstract virgin that can’t even bloody well kiss.45

Viewed as possessions by young men, women appear as little more than stage properties in a dramatic world structured around a male perspective. The Jemmo-and-Maeve subplot runs along melodramatic conventions of bad boy-meets-good girl, and once she has become Jemmo’s girl, Maeve’s function is that of a fearful foil to the gang’s most violent man. ‘Buried within the dramaturgical structure’46 of a conventional tragic or melodramatic design, her fate reprises that of Mary Boyle (Juno and the Paycock, 1924) at an even more abject level of abandonment. When Jemmo is brought ashore before the emigrant ship sails (III.2), Maeve remains on board, her history suspended, its future direction surplus to narrative requirements. Thus, in ways that anticipate problems seen again in Dancing at Lughnasa, The Scatterin’ appears unable to stage ‘women’s objective reality as separate from their allegorical images and metaphorical constructions’.47 44 45 46 47

McKenna, The Scatterin’, p. 27. Ibid., p. 13. Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic, p. 162. Ibid., p. 7.

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If tragic or melodramatic dramaturgies produce ‘drama as “the imitation of men” [. . .] disavow[ing] how one might plot historical action otherwise’,48 McKenna delivers a formal response, in the person of Sue Raftery, whose two appearances have a devastating effect. Like the down-at-heel Ould Rock, whose verses introduce and conclude the action, Sue has a choric function, but her relationship to emplotted action is wholly perfunctory. She excoriates the gang members’ lack of sexual precocity, countering Jemmo’s misogynist rage: Sue mothers’ sucks, who haven’t the courage to love a woman.

Subverting nationalist tropes of purity and masculinity, she shakes the very foundations of the young men’s rhetorical refusal of the national narrative. Her radical perception of her own person as a location of history, possibility and desire exposes the bankruptcy of their investment in social performances derivative of Hollywood ‘outsiders’. Unlike Gregory and Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), who, once she ‘found men willing to fight for her, she swiftly closed the door and turned her back on the women left to endure deprivation’,49 Sue Raftery turns her back on misogyny. She chides the young men’s collusion with a patriarchal order by which all are oppressed, leaving them speechless: Jemmo (just wakening) You know, she came an’ went so quickly, I  can hardly imagine she was here at all. Such an uproar, though. She was like a female machine gun. I’m all full of holes.

Sue’s uncontainable presence exposes the inadequacy of available Irish narratives, historical or familial, to the representation of the class experiences and gendered desires which she embodies. The plotted fictional world cannot acknowledge the lived realities of which she is the bearer, but McKenna ensures she will be present to the audience as that world unfolds, asserting herself as a ‘ “pole of differentiation in Irish society” [. . .] radically averse to the norms of the Irish state’.50 At the end of the play, Ould Rock’s quietism reveals by omission what is at stake in Sue’s interventions: Ould Rock Up an’ down the world people are movin’. Movin’ from this country into the next one. One country loses them, another country receives

48 49 50

Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, p. 26.

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them: the earth still has them and an’ the earth is happy [. . .] I’m an oul’ drunk an’ disorderly orderly [. . .] drunk to death an’ me grave approaches.51

Ould Rock’s valediction fuses the self-inflicted incapacity of O’Casey’s Captain Boyle with the existential desolation of Synge’s Maurya, and anticipates the elegiac tone of Brian Friel’s Michael: a theatrical genealogy of poverty and abjection. Agnes and Rose Mundy and the histories they bear are rendered obscene, leaving a void in which their fate, represented, would have ruptured the critical limits of a carefully crafted stage world and made ‘palpably clear the destruction of humanity’.52 Sue articulates to an incredulous onstage audience desires as unruly as those of female plaintiffs at Brian Merriman’s Midnight Court, or the medieval figure of the sheela-na-gig. Hers is a powerful refusal to accept the terms of ‘women’s dramaturgical emplotment [which] provides meaning with a place to occur, without becoming meaningful itself ’.53 In this way, McKenna radicalises an already powerful drama of young men refusing social subordination in independent Ireland, by disrupting his own narrative with extra-dramaturgical acts of cultural insurgency. Narratives of working-class lives testify to experiences radically incommensurate with the social dramas of those who govern, and those who benefit from the political economy of Independent Ireland. The problem is structural, shaping assumptions in all areas of lived experience, from education, to matters of taste and propriety, to the limits of public discourse and the formation of public policy. Structural and thematic problems presented by the representation of working-class females, present ‘in multiple forms in O’Casey’s writing’54 and in literature thereafter, are sharply focussed in The Scatterin’. Repository, predictor and critic of social and aesthetic trends in the positioning and interpretation of class experience, The Scatterin’ provides an unused, but available lens through which to reread Irish working-class struggles, and, in performance, gestures towards radical possibilities in staging – and restaging – lives long marginalised in the interests of other priorities or the priorities of others.

51 52 53 54

McKenna, The Scatterin’, pp. 68–9. Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic, p. 48. Ibid., p. 26. Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, p. 60.

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Poetry and the Working Class in Northern Ireland during the Troubles Adam Hanna

In Tuppenny Stung:  Autobiographical Chapters (1994), Michael Longley records that the part of the Lisburn Road area of Belfast where he grew up was the interface between two of the city’s communities. His house was not at a religious interface, but was, rather, on one of the city’s fault lines between its working and its middle classes. He remarks on how unusual this ‘mixed’ area was: ‘Belfast’s more prosperous citizens have usually been careful to separate themselves safely from the ghettoes of the bellicose working classes.’ He then goes on to recollect vividly how a visit to his house by a working-class school friend literally brought home to him the gulf between his life and the lives of his friends and neighbours: For the first time I  felt ashamed of our relative affluence. Our separate drawing and dining-rooms, the hall with its wooden panelling, the lavatory upstairs were all novelties to Herbie. Every corner of the home I had taken for granted was illuminated by his gaze as by wintry sunlight.1

It was not the last time that Longley would feel haunted by the differences between the lives of the city’s working class and his own more comfortable circumstances. The onset of the Troubles, like the ‘wintry sunlight’ of his friend’s gaze many years earlier, threw the different living standards of Belfast’s inhabitants into particularly sharp relief. Longley’s discomfort was far from unique among his generation of poets from Northern Ireland – particularly, as their work shows, in the 1960s and 1970s. Critics have traditionally taken inherited religious affiliations (and the political attitudes with which they are often enmeshed) as the backgrounds against which to view the works of poets from Northern Ireland. As Gail McConnell observes, typically ‘critics of contemporary Northern Irish poetry read poets – and even poetic forms – according to the sectarian paradigm by which the Troubles has commonly been understood: Catholic 1

Michael Longley, Tuppenny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1994), pp. 25–6.

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and nationalist versus Protestant and unionist.’2 The critical landscape of Northern Irish poetry was, for a long time, one on which social class and matters related to it were only dimly visible.3 However, in the past five years there has been growing interest in looking at modern Ireland’s literature through the lens of social class.4 Michael Pierse raised a rallying cry for the study of the class contexts of Irish literature in his book Writing Ireland’s Working Classes:  Dublin after O’Casey (2011), condemning the ‘legacy of neglect and snobbery [. . .] in the realm of literature and its appreciation, which resonates more broadly in the fabric of Irish cultural and social life to this day’.5 Though social class is more visible in Irish literary criticism than it was a decade ago, its use in studies of the work of modern poets from Northern Ireland has to date been limited. Perhaps the comparative lack of attention paid to social class in Northern Irish poetry is, in part, related to the terms in which class is usually discussed. These terms are often not ones that are straightforwardly applicable to the circumstances of Northern Ireland. Neil Roberts, in an article on social class in late twentieth-century poetry from England, writes of how analyses of class in poetry often pit manual occupations against nonmanual ones; typically look at urban rather than rural settings; and usually examine class in relation to the North rather than the South.6 These are all problematic terms when considered in relation to Northern Ireland. Historically, the province has been more urbanised than the rest of Ireland, but less so than northern England. Because of its more agricultural profile, manual labour and working-class status are not so closely associated in 2

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Gail McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), p. 3. Edna Longley makes a similar point in the introduction of Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, ed. by Peter Mackay, Edna Longley and Fran Brearton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 1–19 (p. 6). This did not go unremarked. See Michael McAteer, ‘Critical Contexts for the Irish Left’, Irish Review, 32 (autumn–winter 2004), pp. 53–68. Patrick Clancy wrote about the lack of interest in class in Irish Studies more generally in Irish Society: Sociological Perspectives (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2001), p. 149. Willy Maley called class difference ‘an often invisible form of difference in Ireland’ in ‘Bend It Like Beckett: Class Rules in Irish Literature’, Irish Review, 47 (winter 2013), pp. 63–85 (p. 63). See, for example, Connal Parr’s ‘The Pens of the Defeated: John Hewitt, Sam Thompson and the Northern Ireland Labour Party’, Irish Studies Review, 22.2 (May 2014), 147–66. Aaron Kelly, who has focussed in his work on the class contexts of Northern Irish literature, has edited a special edition of the Irish Review on class and Irish culture (47, winter 2013). Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class:  Dublin after O’Casey (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2011), p. 1. Neil Roberts, ‘Poetry and Class: Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean O’Brien’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 215–29. Roberts covers similar ground in his chapter ‘Poetic Subjects: Tony Harrison and Peter Reading’, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, ed. by Gary Day and Brian Docherty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 48–62.

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Northern Ireland. Finally, the points of the compass ‘North’ and ‘South’ conjure very different associations in Ireland and in England. Though the existence of prominent sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland is one reason why class has been overlooked in criticism of the work of its poets, another possible reason lies in the language in which class is typically discussed. Put simply, it has been developed with places other than Northern Ireland in mind.

The Educational Context of Modern Northern Irish Poetry The tied and twisted issues of nationality and religion have, of course, been important to Longley and his contemporaries Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. All three have credited religious ideas as the source of an imaginative basso continuo that outlasted orthodox belief itself.7 They have all also spoken about how their respective religious backgrounds were significant in the creation of exclusionary sectarian and national identities during their childhoods.8 However, a shared cultural context for the work of all three is a secondary education that, in class terms, shaped their lives and the lives of several subsequent generations in Northern Ireland.9 All three poets benefitted from the Education Act (Northern Ireland) 1947, a piece of legislation that introduced free secondary education for all and a competitive secondary school entrance examination. This ‘Eleven Plus’ system, as it became known, separated those who took it between academically oriented grammar schools and less academic technical and secondary modern schools (known in Northern Ireland as intermediate schools).10 The effects of this separation were and are felt across entire

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See Seamus Heaney to Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones:  Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London:  Faber and Faber, 2007), pp.  233–4; Derek Mahon to Eamonn Grennan, in ‘Derek Mahon:  The Art of Poetry, No. 82’, Paris Review, 154 (spring 2000), www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/732/the-art-of-poetry-no-82-derek-mahon [accessed 29 November  2016]; and Michael Longley, quoted in McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, p. 133. See, for example, Longley, Tuppenny Stung, p. 27; Derek Mahon, interviewed by James J. Murphy, Lucy McDiarmid and Michael J. Durkan, ‘Derek Mahon’, in Writing Irish: Selected Interviews with Irish Writers from the Irish Literary Supplement, ed. by James P. Myers Jr (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 185–99 (p. 189); Seamus Heaney, ‘Mossbawn’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), pp. 17–27 (p. 25). Although the ‘Eleven Plus’ examination was discontinued in 2008, its successor, the ‘Transfer Test’, continues to operate in much the same way. Caitlin Donnelly et al., Devolution and Pluralism in Education in Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 143. A detailed analysis of the provisions of the ‘Butler’ Act on which the Northern Irish legislation was based is contained in The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland, ed. by Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 333 ff.

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lifetimes. Heaney, Longley and Mahon all emerged on the ‘winning’ side of this system, and went to grammar schools in the 1950s. These schools, perhaps to a greater extent than anything else, traced out the lines of divisions that would cut across existing bonds of community and family, as each poet became the university-educated child of non-university-educated parents. Although these grammar schools were not in general sites of religious mixing, being either Roman Catholic or Protestant in character, they acted as springboards into universities that were, even in the 1950s, to a greater or lesser extent pluralistic in ethos.11 Michael Longley recollects his 1960s political attitudes (and those of his university contemporaries) in his early 1990s poem ‘River & Fountain’. This poem, with its jumbled references to the civil service, the Rubrics (a building in Trinity College Dublin), class war, the red flag and the civil rights movement, bears witness to the political confusions that class politics gave rise to in the 1960s: Would-be class warriors We raised, for a moment, the Red Flag at the Rubrics, Then joined the Civil Service and talked of Civil Rights.12

Although there are marked differences between the early religious and sectarian ideas through which their later experiences were refracted, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, too, were sympathetic to the civil rights movement that was founded a few years after they were undergraduate students.13 The Northern Irish Civil Rights Association, though not trusted by many in the Protestant working class, nevertheless represented a leftwing political movement that could draw support from people of different religious backgrounds, as the experiences of Heaney, Longley and Mahon show. These poets’ educations at once separated their lives from those of Northern Ireland’s working class, and made them highly aware of that separation.

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The religious mixes of 1950s Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin respectively are discussed by Rupert Taylor in ‘The Queen’s University, Belfast:  The Liberal University in a Divided Society’, Higher Education Review, 20.2 (1988), pp. 27–45, and Kurt Bowen in Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983), p. 154. Michael Longley, ‘River & Fountain’, Hermathena: A Literary Celebration 1592–1992: Quatercentenary Issue (1992), pp. 1–4. Derek Mahon talks of this to Nicholas Wroe in ‘A Sense of Place’, www.theguardian.com/books/ 2006/jul/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview11 [accessed 29 November 2016]; Seamus Heaney speaks of it to O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones, p. 109. Michael Parker has usefully summarised the origins and trajectory of the Northern Irish civil rights movement in Northern Irish Literature, 1956–1975: The Imprint of History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 72 ff.

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Poetry and Social Class at the Outset of the Troubles The civil rights movement collapsed as violence escalated in the early 1970s. The outset of the Troubles in the summer of 1969 brought the religious and national divisions of Belfast and Derry to the attention of the world, but it also made Northern Ireland’s existing class divisions sharply apparent to observers. The events that marked the beginning of Northern Ireland’s descent into the status of ‘the most continuously disturbed part of Europe since the ending of the Second World War’ – the Battle of the Bogside, the burning of Bombay Street and the deployment of the British Army – all occurred in urban, working-class neighbourhoods.14 The class profile of the conflict did not change as it progressed: as Fran Brearton has pointed out, Northern Ireland’s ‘war zones, its most troubled areas, whose names now reverberate internationally – the Falls, the Shankill, Divis flats, Free Derry corner – were and are urban and working class’ and ‘a world apart from the leafy suburbs of south Belfast’.15 The fact that the Northern Irish combatants and victims of the Troubles were disproportionately working class, though it has been less focussed on by literary critics, was not ignored by the poets who were writing at the time. The frequency with which issues of social class are raised in poetry from Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s suggests that the nature and consequences of class identities were felt to be acutely relevant in the period around the onset of widespread violence. A 1969 review by Seamus Heaney of a book about the Irish rebellion of 1798 signals the ways in which he was dwelling on education and professional status as potential causes of separation from nationalist beliefs and communal solidarities: At confrontation the moderate retreats from politics, affirming the need for co-operation between all men of good will and rejecting the destructiveness of civil war as a means to however desirable an end. Perhaps this explains the number of informers among the professional classes, men who as liberals had the confidence of the conspirators but as ‘moderates’ inclined to law and order.16 14

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Jonathan Bardon, quoted in Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 58. Fran Brearton, ‘Poetry and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” ’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, ed. by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 222–30 (p. 222). Seamus Heaney, ‘ “Delirium of the Brave”: Review of Thomas Pakenham, Year of Liberty’, quoted in Kevin Whelan, ‘Heaney and the “Living Language” of 1798’, unpublished book chapter, quoted here by kind permission of the author.

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In Heaney’s meditations on the different forces between which the ‘professional classes’ of previous centuries were caught, anxieties over the right location for his own loyalties at the outset of the Troubles are perhaps also audible. The preoccupations of his review suggest that, during a conflict in which the majority of the combatants and victims were working class, his own class status was at the very least an element of his thinking. Heaney’s position in class terms is not straightforward. His upbringing in a thatched cottage in which he, three adults and eventually eight brothers and sisters were divided between three rooms could hardly be termed typically middle class. However, his father’s status as a cattle dealer and small farmer who owned his own land put his family in a more secure position than many of their poorer neighbours.17 The class trajectory of Heaney’s life was determined by his time as a boarder at grammar school in Derry, which initially gave him ‘the notion that [he] was going to be a secondary school teacher, living the generic life of the newly upwardly mobile eleven-plus Catholic’.18 Heaney’s ascent of the social ladder via the education system, and his membership of a religious minority whose urban working class was increasingly beleaguered, put him in a complex position when he achieved prominence. This complexity is reflected in ‘Casualty’ (Field Work, 1979), a poem in which the speaker recalls the difficulty of finding a register in which to talk to a working-class man who later became one of the victims of violence. Heaney’s poet-speaker can enter into the fisherman’s world of eels, horses and carts; the fisherman cannot enter into the poet’s world: Incomprehensible To him, my other life. Sometimes, on the high stool, Too busy with his knife At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye, In the pause after a slug He mentioned poetry. We would be on our own And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels 17 18

Heaney to O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 18. Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney:  The Making of the Poet (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 1993), p. 26.

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Or lore of the horse and cart Or the Provisionals.19

The speaker’s affiliation with an unnamed Roman Catholic victim of the Troubles is complicated by his sense of inhabiting cultural and intellectual worlds that are inaccessible to him. For all that the second part of the poem records how the funerals of the victims of Bloody Sunday in 1972 created a sense of solidarity among the Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland, making them like ‘brothers in a ring’, the first part of the poem dwells on the differences between the highly educated speaker and the ‘dole-kept breadwinner’ who became the casualty of the poem’s title. The working-class protagonist of this poem occasions a meditation that dwells as much on difference, disjunction and incomprehension as it does on fellow-feeling and solidarity. In this way, the poem reflects on the kinds of class differences that Heaney took as his theme in the book review that he published a decade earlier. If the class position of Heaney is ambiguous, that of Bobby Sands is much less so. Sands, whose parents moved to the west Belfast nationalist Twinbrook estate when he was a teenager, left school at fifteen and worked as an apprentice coach-builder before being arrested in his late teens for activities relating to his membership of the IRA.20 After his death on hunger strike in 1981, the Sinn Féin Publicity Department published an eighty-one-page volume of his poetry, Prison Poems (1981). The majority of Sands’s poems, because of the ballad forms on which he draws, seem designed to be sung or recited aloud, read as communal possessions for the promotion of solidarity. The full chimes within and at the ends of his lines and the regular swing of their rhythms operate as analogies to the certainties of their stances. The volume shows both that Sands valued poetry for its capacity as a political vehicle, and that he disdained poets who did not share these views. It may have been Heaney whom Sands was thinking of when he wrote that: The Men of Art have lost their heart, They dream within their dreams. Their magic sold for price of gold Amidst a people’s screams.21 19 20

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Heaney, for his part, had also been imagining a more politically committed kind of art. To take one example, in ‘Exposure’ (North, 1975) he pictures someone who looks like a poet in a Northern Irish prison: ‘a hero / On some muddy compound / His gift like a slingstone / Whirled for the desperate.’22 The class divide that Sands and those like him represented shadows Heaney’s work. Heaney repeatedly stressed that the antagonisms of working-class urban areas like the one in which Bobby Sands lived took on a different, perhaps softer colouring in the countryside in which he grew up. In an interview he spoke of the differences between his countryside and the ‘urban ghetto life’ of Belfast.23 Imagining himself in dialogue with the shade of the novelist William Carleton in Station Island (1984), Heaney explained (or perhaps explained himself ) as follows: ‘The angry role was never my vocation,’ I said. ‘I come from County Derry, where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen on Patrick’s Day still played their “Hymn to Mary”. Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first and not that harp of unforgiving iron the Fenians strung[’].24

It is possible to think that this is not just how Heaney might have explained himself to a nineteenth-century novelist, but also how he might have put his position to the shades of the Catholic urban, working-class dead that by the time of the publication of Station Island included Sands. Heaney’s position in relation to the loyalist working class was similarly difficult to characterise. His early work ‘Docker’ (Death of a Naturalist, 1966) has a sectarian, working-class, pub-haunting loyalist Belfastman at its centre: ‘That fist could drop a hammer on a Catholic – / Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again.’25 However, this vivid portrait itself ended up being dropped: it does not make an appearance in either Heaney’s 1980 nor his 1990 Faber and Faber selections, nor does it feature in his more comprehensive Opened Ground:  Poems 1966–1996 (1998). Heaney intimated one possible reason for this disappearance to Karl Miller: ‘I called 22 23 24 25

Heaney, ‘Exposure’, in Opened Ground, pp. 143–4. Heaney to O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 245. Heaney, ‘Station Island’, in Opened Ground, p. 246. Heaney, ‘Docker’, in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 41.

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the poem “Docker”; it should have been called “Shipyard Worker”. I confused the Protestant, East Belfast culture of the shipyards with what I was told afterwards was the Catholic culture of the dock-workers.’26 The shelving of ‘Docker’ indicates the hazards inherent in attempts to reach across not only sectarian but also class and geographical lines. Heaney spent his formative years in the countryside, but lived in Belfast as a student, a teacher and a lecturer  – walks of life that did not necessarily involve awareness of the subtleties of the divisions between the occupations of East Belfast’s working class. Michael Longley shared Heaney’s awareness of invisible dividing lines between him and the working-class people around him. The long question that opens Longley’s famous verse-letter account of his and Mahon’s visit to the Falls Road centres on who constitutes ‘our own’. As well as invoking Mahon’s earlier poem ‘Spring in Belfast’ (‘Walking among my own this windy morning’), it raises the issue of the extension of imaginative sympathy across class lines: And did we come into our own When, minus muse and lexicon, We traced in August sixty-nine Our imaginary Peace Line Around the burnt-out houses of The Catholics we’d scarcely loved, Two Sisyphuses come to budge The sticks and stones of an old grudge[.]27

There are two distinct ways of life that are juxtaposed and perhaps even reconciled here. One, as the word ‘Sisyphuses’ suggests, is learned and classical in nature, with its props of ‘muse and lexicon’; the other is characterised by the ‘sticks and stones’ and, later, the ‘guns and long knives’ of ‘the Shankill and the Falls’. Whether these streets could be encompassed by any idea of ‘our own’ is a sensitive topic, and Longley’s echo of Mahon’s line about ‘Walking among my own’ might be an ironic one. Longley’s poem’s reference to ‘sticks and stones’, too, raises memories of another of Mahon’s poems – ‘Glengormley’, written several years before (‘The sticks / And stones that once broke bones will not now harm / A generation of such sense and charm’). By 1969 the hollowness of this hope is apparent. 26

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Longley’s references to Mahon’s work in this poem might help to explain Mahon’s slightly prickly response to it.28 They also suggest that a new and more class-conscious outlook came into Longley’s poetry at the outset of the Troubles. Class differences are present in Heaney’s, Longley’s and Mahon’s poems, but John Hewitt’s ‘The Coasters’ pursues the theme of social inequality more directly and in a more denunciatory vein, excoriating the somnolent inaction of Northern Ireland’s prosperous middle class in relation to the turmoil of its working-class areas.29 The title of the poem, which joins a reference to the inhabitants of Co. Down’s so-called ‘Gold Coast’ with effortless propulsion, sets the tone: You coasted along to larger houses, gadgets, more machines, to golf and weekend bungalows, caravans when the children were small, the Mediterranean, later with the wife.

The finger-pointing potential of the second-person voice is fully exploited in the final stanza, which is written from a post-1969 perspective:  ‘The cloud of infection hangs over the city, / a quick change of wind and it / might spill over the leafy suburbs, / You coasted too long.’ The poem’s indictment is mainly directed at Protestants, but the fact that the addressees of the poem have Roman Catholic friends, ‘coasting too’, whose ‘ways ran parallel’ with theirs, makes it cover the entire middle class of Northern Ireland’s religiously divided populace. The threatened comeuppance with which the poem ends is not imagined as retribution on Protestants for their treatment of Roman Catholics: it is envisaged as the violence of the inner city visiting itself on the ‘leafy suburbs’. To the poet John Campbell, a trade unionist and native of the workingclass Belfast district Sailortown, the middle class was not just implicated by its inaction during the Troubles. Rather, his poems show his suspicion that Northern Irish politicians were sowing political discord in the knowledge that they would not have to reap its consequences: I sigh as slick-tongued speakers weave a curtain thick with hate to blind with words the working-class, 28

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Mahon’s response is recorded by Fran Brearton in Reading Michael Longley (Tarset:  Bloodaxe, 2006), p. 90. John Hewitt, ‘The Coasters’, in The Wearing of the Black: An Anthology of Contemporary Ulster Poetry, ed. by Padraic Fiacc (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1974), pp. 154–5.

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who listen while they state that civil disobedience must be the people’s cry Yet he’ll deny all knowledge, when the bullets start to fly.30

This poem, with its suspicion that the members of the working class were the victims of political strife from which others somehow benefitted, visits similar territory to Gerald Dawe’s ‘Speedboats, 1972’ (Sunday School, 1991), a poem in which the boats occupied by ‘the burghers and their wives’ are (in a telling verb) ‘carving up the bay between them’. This image of affluence is contrasted with the speaker’s lookout in a block of flats where a boy ‘goes daft waving an Ulster flag / and points his imaginary gun / at the invisible foe’. In this poem, Dawe points out the contrast between Northern Ireland’s carefree boaters and the militarised, fanatical generation growing up in ‘grey-faced block[s] of flats’. Dawe’s lines communicate a brooding sense that the ‘invisible foe’ that the boy sights down his imaginary gun is merely a distraction from the visible foe  – the one in speedboats in the bay.31 Padraic Fiacc’s 1974 The Wearing of the Black:  An Anthology of Contemporary Ulster Poetry contains several poems whose theme is derived from an uncomfortable sense of comparative privilege.32 One of these is Michael Brophy’s poem ‘Where Are My People Now?’, narrated by a Falls Road–born but newly middle-class Roman Catholic. This narrator describes himself as: State educated Carefully creamed off, Cultivated by Stormont Until now in the suburbs, With my Methodist neighbours My mortgage and Oath of Allegiance job; I sit in my neat new Government subsidy, semi detached And watch the riot squad Baton charge down the Falls[.]33 30

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John Campbell, ‘When the Bullets Start to Fly’, in The Rose and the Blade: New & Selected Poems 1957–1997 (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1997), p. 124. Gerald Dawe, ‘Speedboats, 1972’, in Sunday School (Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath:  Gallery Press, 1991), p. 21. Richard Kirkland has pointed out the strong class-consciousness of Fiacc’s editorial style in Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), p. 66, n. 11. Brophy, ‘Where Are My People Now?’, in The Wearing of the Black, pp. 24–5.

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‘State educated’ contains a careful pun: the speaker’s privileged education has been paid for by the state, but has also led to his adoption of the state’s values and priorities at the expense of his loyalty to his first community on the Falls Road. ‘Semi detached’, too, throws a punning yoke around ideas of suburban housing and an ambiguous feeling of involvement. Brophy’s poem concludes:  ‘Where is my life / Who are my people, Now?’. The speaker’s distress is not just based on his sense of religious or national fellow-feeling. Rather, it arises in part from an uneasy sense of internal division caused by his experience of class change.

Class Change across the Generations In benefitting from opportunities that were out of the reach of previous generations of their families, Heaney, Longley and Mahon were in step with the generation across Europe and the Western world that came to maturity in the decades after the Second World War. Anthony Giddens’s study of identity-formation in the late twentieth century, Modernity and SelfIdentity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991), gives an international context for the dual-faceted experience of progress and separation that was a part of their lives. The conditions of late modernity, according to Giddens, include a weakening of the traditional structures that govern life-trajectory in favour of systems that privilege individual choice. Almost needless to say, this mobile state is much more available to an upper middle class than to less-privileged sections of society.34 The fluidity and mobility that Giddens identifies came at a cost in the form of a pervasive sense of deracination from former familial and communal bonds. Opportunities that were not available to previous generations were experienced as separations from parents, and educational and professional achievements that were out of the reach of peers resulted in a sense of distance from brothers, sisters, neighbours and friends.35 In an essay on Seamus Heaney, Terence Brown has pointed out that a strong undercurrent in his work is his guilt at his sense of separation from his male forbears. Heaney has recorded absorbing the proverb that ‘the pen’s lighter than the spade’ as a child, and his education was meant

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Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity:  Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Seamus Heaney told James Campbell that ‘I still have these brothers who didn’t get the 11-plus’; interview published in The Guardian, 27 May 2006, www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/27/ poetry.hayfestival2006 [accessed 29 November 2016].

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to prepare him for an office-based administrative role.36 Heaney’s work, Brown notes, repeatedly points out the differences between his own pursuit of poetry and the manual occupations for which his education has unsuited him.37 ‘Digging’, which Heaney wrote at the outset of his career, half-ruefully acknowledges the distance between a spade-working father and his school-teaching son: By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. [. . .] Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.38

There is a search for continuity here that is prompted by the poet’s estrangement from the activities that defined the lives of his ancestors. The circular trajectory of the poem, which opens and closes with the formulation ‘Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests,’ makes a loop that at once contains and makes a return to the working practices of the past. Heaney’s evident sense of generational separation in ‘Digging’ did not just apply to his male forbears. The speaker in ‘Clearances’ (The Haw Lantern, 1987), a sequence of sonnets in memory of Heaney’s mother, attempts to linguistically re-cross the divisions between him and his family which his education had erected: ‘I’d naw and aye / And decently relapse into the wrong / Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.’39 Here the speaker makes a choice in favour of the grammar of home rather than the one learned at the grammar school in order to cement, or perhaps feign the existence of, an intergenerational alliance. The reference to the speaker’s mother and he being ‘at bay’, however, is more mysterious. Perhaps, by heading off an acknowledgement of their differences, the speaker prevented a conflict between them. Perhaps, too, there is just a hint here that the ‘wrong grammar’ kept its users ‘at bay’ in the sense that it kept them from advancement of other kinds. ‘Spring in Belfast’ (Night-Crossing, 1968, as ‘In Belfast’), a poem that occupies the same prime position in Derek Mahon’s collected works 36

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Heaney, ‘Feeling Into Words’, Preoccupations, pp. 41–60 (p. 42). I am grateful to Tom Bartlett for his insights into how Catholic grammar schools in mid-century Northern Ireland envisaged their task as preparing their pupils for civil service roles. Terence Brown, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Witnessing Eye and the Speaking Tongue’, in Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 190–8. Heaney, ‘Digging’, in Opened Ground, p. 3. Heaney, ‘Clearances’, in Opened Ground, p. 310.

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that ‘Digging’ does in Heaney’s, displays a strong awareness of the poet’s separation from the city’s working class. It ends with the poet reminding himself that he and they, for all their differences, share the same grid of hill-surrounded streets: One part of my mind must learn to know its place. The things that happen in the kitchen houses And echoing back streets of this desperate city Should engage more than my casual interest, Exact more interest than my casual pity.40

The ‘kitchen houses’ that the speaker of this poem commits himself to devoting at least ‘one part of [his] mind’ to were the smallest type of council-provided accommodation. They were primarily built in the 1930s and cost only £250 each to build. (The next grade of council housing, the parlour house, cost £400.) Their floor-space was, according to C. E. B. Brett, a member of the Northern Irish Housing Executive, ‘the derisory size of 500 square feet’.41 Working-class people from both of Northern Ireland’s main religious groups occupied these houses. In other words, the people whom the speaker of this poem admonishes himself to remember with at least ‘one part of [his] mind’ were those who, regardless of their religion, were members of Belfast’s working class. Mahon’s interest in working-class life is unsurprising when considered in the light of the political education he received in his formative years. He has spoken in interviews about his political consciousness first being formed by socialist ideas in the 1950s.42 Mahon, like Heaney, became conscious that his university education in the arts had created a distance between his life and the lives of his ancestors. An early draft of ‘Spring in Belfast’ contains a self-admonitory stanza which divides poetry from the industrial apparatus that was known to his shipyard-working father and grandfather:  ‘Poetry and fluent drivel, know your place  – / Take shape in some more glib environment / Away from shipyard, gantry, bolt and rivet.’43 The half-rhyme that links ‘drivel’ with ‘rivet’ hammers home the contrast between a knowledge of the arts, with its ambivalent benefits, and the certain and countable materials of industrial production. There are 40

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Mahon, ‘Spring in Belfast’, in New Collected Poems (Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath:  Gallery Press, 2011), p. 15. C. E.  B. Brett, Housing a Divided Community (Dublin:  Institute of Public Administration, 1985), p. 24. See, for example, Mahon in conversation with Eamonn Grennan, in ‘Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry, No. 82’, 154. This draft of the poem is quoted in Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, p. 35.

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ways in which Mahon’s and Heaney’s worldviews are allied rather than in opposition to each other: both poets are separated from but haunted by the manual occupations of their fathers into which they could not follow. Mahon’s repeated flagging-up of the ways that his political inheritance was more left-wing than unionist in character throws light on the abrasive tone of ‘Afterlives’ (The Snow Party, 1975). This was dedicated to James Simmons and its final stanza is  – unfortunately for Simmons  – a good example of how Mahon’s dedications are double-edged entities, ones that often work as much in riposte as in reverence: What middle-class shits we are To imagine for one second That our privileged ideals Are divine wisdom, and the dim Forms that kneel at noon In the city not ourselves.44

The angry rejection of ‘privileged ideals’ at the end of the poem can be linked to a disagreement between the two poets about class politics. The political position of Simmons’s The Honest Ulsterman magazine was that religious differences could be transcended through class-based socialism, and Simmons’s own poetry often versified this viewpoint. The final stanza of Mahon’s poem is his response to what he saw as Simmons’s panglossian tendencies: it savagely turns on the optimistic narrative of enlightened progress that the poem, up to that point, appears to endorse. In ‘Glengormley’, written in 1965, Mahon was willing to give the idea of generational progress a kind of sidelong assent (‘The sticks / And stones that once broke bones will not now harm / A generation of such sense and charm’).45 However, Mahon rejected this optimistic idea at the outset of the Troubles: ‘I really thought all this was the nightmare of history from which I was one of the lucky generation that had finally recovered.’46 By the time of ‘Afterlives’, he recognised that the escape from history that he had thought might be possible for his generation was the preserve of the comparatively small section of the population who could afford to see the expanded horizons with which the poem, which opens in a flat high above London, begins. Mahon’s more pessimistic worldview can also be seen in a poem from the early 1970s, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ (Lives, 1972). In the 44 45 46

Mahon, ‘Afterlives’, in New Collected Poems, p. 57. Mahon, ‘Glengormley’, in New Collected Poems, p. 16. Mahon, quoted in Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, p. 58.

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‘grim / Dominion’ of the shed (a place that can be and has been associated with Northern Ireland), writes Mahon: Those nearest the door grow strong – ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’ – The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling Utensils [. . .] [.]47

The mushrooms demanding room, rather than being a grimly humorous touch in an otherwise forbidding and comfortless poem, could be seen as the strong and sharp-elbowed few pushing aside ‘the rest’.

Conclusion I have attempted to show here that looking at the works of Northern Irish poets with social class in mind can supply novel angles on some well-known works. The primacy of ethno-sectarian differences in the study of Northern Irish literature was acknowledged thirty years ago by Gerald Dawe, who wrote in a 1987 article that ‘the difference between a “Protestant” or “Catholic”, “Nationalist” or “Unionist” experience is only one, if presently dominant, distinction.’48 My focus on the role of social class in the literature of Northern Ireland constitutes, finally, an attempt to find ways of complicating distinctions that, in their binary nature, run the risk of reductive stereotyping. In focussing on social class in this chapter, I have not sought to ignore the unique set of historic circumstances to which Ireland has been subject in modern times, nor to underplay the national or ethno-sectarian aspects of the conflict that conditioned so much of the Northern Irish twentieth century. What I would argue, however, is that class has had a palpable impact on modern Northern Irish poetry, but has been less studied and commented on than it merits. Poets from Northern Ireland, with their preoccupations with social class, social mobility, the impact of education, generational changes and the consequences of poverty and disadvantage, have been as alive to social concerns that they share with writers from across the globe as they have to the particular circumstances of their place of origin. Examining the role of social class in Northern Irish poetry, therefore, makes all the more evident its status as a contribution to the literature of the modern world. 47 48

Mahon, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, in New Collected Poems, p. 81. Gerald Dawe, ‘Beyond Across a Roaring Hill’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 13.2 (December 1987), pp. 55–62 (p. 60).

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Class Politics and Performance in Troubles Drama ‘History isn’t over yet’ Mark Phelan Lodged in the north-east corner of Ulster, ‘Linenopolis’, as Belfast came to be known, looms large in studies of socialist politics and history in Ireland. And yet, as many scholars have highlighted, the city that was such a crucible for labour protests and politics from the early 1900s remained an industrialised centre where class politics was repeatedly supplanted and subverted by sectarian divisions that endure today, ultimately enervating socialism and ensuring it never emerged as a powerful political force. This seemingly contradictory dynamic David Howell christens ‘Connolly’s paradox’.1 Moreover, the advent of the Troubles with its deepening of sectarian cleavages, alongside a dominant critical analysis of the Troubles that emphasises the ethnonational over class dynamics of the conflict – combined with the prevailing doxa of neo-liberal economics over recent decades – have collectively compounded this paradox, leaving some to lament the contemporary ‘absence of class politics’ in the North.2 In sharp contrast with this absence, however, is the relative plenitude of historiographical studies exploring the politics of working-class identity and experience. Nevertheless, a dire paucity remains of scholarship investigating class in relation to cultural history and popular culture in the North: an area that is massively under-theorised and marginalised.3 This is especially the case as regards the history of theatre and performance. This failure is a critical one, but is not confined to the North. Indeed, Paul Murphy argues that this is true for the wider field of theatre and 1

2 3

‘Connolly’s paradox – a developed capitalism with a working class little interested in Independent Labour, let  alone Socialist, politics . . . willing to accept landed or capitalist leadership and to absorb and employ sectarian arguments’. David Howell, A Lost Left: Three Studies in Socialism and Nationalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 98. Colin Coulter, ‘The Absence of Class Politics in Northern Ireland’, Capital & Class, 22 (1999), pp. 77–100. Gillian McIntosh’s Force of Culture is an honourable exception and of seminal importance. However, it does not engage with theatre and the arts or with popular culture; Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture – Unionist Identities in Twentieth Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).

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performance studies and he indicts these disciplines’ ‘absence of classbased analysis’: a political and critical failure Murphy maintains is especially evident in Ireland. To counter this, he contends that theatre scholars should instead reconceptualise ‘class as performance rather than as it is traditionally conceived as an identity predicated solely on economic stratification’.4 It is a compelling argument, one that prises open all sorts of interesting issues related to the performative dimensions of class as opposed to reductively classifying or categorising class identity according to exclusively economic terms. Such emergent critical and conceptual paradigms, however, should not simply supplant extant approaches, especially in relation to the theatrical past, because a vast amount of historiographical work is still to be undertaken as regards retrieving and analysing an important, albeit occluded, tradition of plays that deal with workingclass identity, politics and experience. This is especially true in the North where, ironically, class cleavages have been most obvious and egregious, but all the more easily obviated as labour struggles and the potential for political mobilisation have been repeatedly undermined by confessional divisions and sectarian suspicions. The critical recognition (and reclamation) of the North’s theatrical tradition of representing working-class experience – discontinuous and diffuse as it may be – is one which can provide a vital interpretive framework for re-examining contemporary class politics in the North, and for challenging some of the prevailing myths in circulation today.

Troubles Drama It is impossible to appraise the broad range of working-class playwrights from the Troubles era in a single chapter and so the coming discussion offers only an extended coda. The first ‘Troubles playwright’ to come to the fore was John Boyd, who hailed himself as a ‘class-conscious playwright’5 and whose life and work – like that of his poet friend John Hewitt – reflects his socialist politics. Boyd adapted for the stage a number of St John Ervine’s novels whilst The Street (1977) was set in the year of the Outdoor Relief Riots: ‘a period when the economic conditions in Belfast brought unemployed Catholics and Protestants together in their common interest’ 4

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Paul Murphy, ‘Class and Performance in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Theatre Research International, 37 (2012), pp. 49–62. John Boyd, Collected Plays 2: The Street; Facing North (Dundonald: Blackstaff Press, 1982), p. viii; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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(viii). His play, however, deliberately eschews an idealised depiction of utopian solidarity to reveal the limited efficacy of labour politics appealing across sectarian divisions, much in the same vein as Lewis Purcell’s The Enthusiast (1905) and St John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911). Drawing substantially on his own family history, The Street is set in an increasingly dilapidated working-class house in east Belfast, where the sounds of ships’ horns punctuate the domestic setting and signal the decline of the industry and disintegration of the family. A picture hung on the wall of an ‘Irish landscape of a cottage with blue mountains’ portrays an ‘idealised Ireland’ (3) violently incongruent with the impoverished urban end-house, as The Street deals with alcoholism, poverty, domestic abuse and ‘what’s called the class struggle’ (47). In the course of the play, ever-affable Willie Downie – an ardent trade union official – fails to convince anyone to share his socialist convictions and is met with a mixture of indifference, hostility and mockery. ‘You should be proud to call yourself a worker, a class-conscious worker. As a social status to be proud of not to be ashamed of. The future of the world lies with the workin’ class,’ he proclaims, but even his brother dismisses this as ‘propaganda’ (10). Willie’s idealism recalls that of Michael in Mixed Marriage as well as his bourgeois namesake in Bill Morrison’s Flying Blind (1977), a sociology lecturer whose efforts to convince a loyalist workman, Smyth, that ‘both sides, I mean the working-class, must get together [. . . as] any solution must come from them’ falls on deaf ears: ‘The working-class is all on the dole.’6 In The Street, Willie’s wife, Elsie, is also running as a labour candidate in the local council elections and is defeated as her rhetoric is disconnected from the concerns of this ‘true Blue’ loyalist district. Willie and Elsie are themselves modelled on the playwright’s uncle Willy and aunt Ida; the latter stood as a Labour candidate in the 1930 council elections, whilst Willie Downie, like Willy Boyd, is the secretary of the National Union of Vehicle Builders. Downie’s conviction that ‘What counts in the long run? The social and economic interest of the working class, an’ that means you an’ me  – an’ everybody in this street an’ in the whole district. Ordinary people have nothing to lose but their chains!’7 is a direct quotation from the playwright’s uncle, as recorded by Boyd in Out of My Class (1985). As with Thomas Carnduff’s important play of Belfast working-class life, Workers (1932), Boyd’s play addresses, albeit less explicitly, domestic abuse, as Bob Downie is accused of beating his 6 7

Bill Morrison, Flying Blind (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 14. John Boyd, Out of My Class, cited in Hugh Odling-Smee, A Guide to the John Boyd Collection at the Linen Hall Library (no publication details), p. 14.

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alcoholic wife, Jane, who winds up drinking herself to death. Bob excuses his actions as a response to her drunken neglect of the household, but as with Martin Lynch’s Pictures of Tomorrow (1994), the male protagonist is confronted and challenged as to how his actions have contributed to his wife’s alcoholism.8 It is Boyd’s The Flats (1971), however, that is regarded as the first ‘Troubles play’ and is set in the Catholic working-class district of Unity Flats, which is besieged by loyalists whose sectarian assault is explained by the pirate Radio Free Belfast in the following terms:  ‘The protestant workers are the poor dupes of the junta of effete aristocrats and hard-faced capitalists that have for fifty years divided our country and have divided the working class on a sectarian basis.’9 Similar rhetoric is also broadcast by the young Gerard Donellan, who recalls O’Casey’s young Covey as he speechifies ‘like an oul’ professor’ to his Protestant neighbours about ‘the ruling capitalist class’,10 whilst his father – a fitter at the shipyards – recalls how a visiting lecturer from London declared in one of his evening classes, ‘History is on our side . . . In the end, the workers will win . . . They’ll lose every battle except the last.’11 However, Boyd’s play – both politically and formally – is far from radical in its sentimental and simplistic portrayal of two tribes at each other’s throats. Like Stewart Love and Joseph Tomelty before them, playwrights like Boyd and Wilson John Haire proudly declared their working-class identity and politics and were active socialists and communists,12 but this did not protect them from criticism from some of their working-class artistic peers. Marilynn Richtarik records how another working-class playwright from a shipyard family, Stewart Parker, railed against Boyd and Haire’s work and was appalled by The Flats.13 In contrast, Parker’s playfully sophisticated work teases out the complexities of working-class Protestant culture – an identity in crisis that he described as a ‘verbal cripple’14 – though one he helped articulate, in both senses of the word. Parker describes how 8

9 10 11 12

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‘Just ask yourself the question: why does your wife drink? Are you to blame? Or is it hereditary?’ Boyd, The Street, p. 12. John Boyd, The Flats (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1974), pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 40. Though he worked for many years in the conservative environment of the BBC, Boyd was an active socialist and once visited the USSR with a delegation of like-minded Irish artists, whilst Haire was an active member of both the Connolly Association and the Communist Party of Great Britain. Marilynn Richtarik, Stewart Parker: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 143, 146 and 358. Stewart Parker, ‘Buntus Belfast’, in Dramatis Personae and Other Writings, ed. by Gerald Dawe, Maria Johnston and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2008), p. 32.

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his life and work were shaped by a ‘mind framed by an urban neighbourhood, a working-class family struggle towards petit-bourgeois values’.15 His admiration of Sam Thompson’s drama is often highlighted as informing his own work, but as Richtarik records, his art was also influenced by his activism. This was especially evident in his successful political opposition, along with his friend John Gilbert, to the Belfast Urban Motorway project, operating under the asinine acronym BUM, which both men felt threatened working-class districts of the inner city. Parker wrote a satirical sketch of how BUM would deleteriously affect ‘an average Belfast working-class couple, Bertie and Bridget Polarity’,16 and his activism over this issue informed his first stage play, Spokesong (1975). Parker’s work has been the subject of much recent scholarship, but there has been little consideration of the fascinating class politics of his drama. Pentecost (1987) reverses clichéd representations of the conflict; its Protestant characters are working class whilst its Catholic characters are from professional backgrounds. Marion’s lacerating exchanges with her estranged husband are laced with references to his wealthy family with his monied psychiatrist and solicitor uncles in their ‘underground bunker [. . .] somewhere up Fortwilliam way’,17 whilst Lenny’s languishing musical career is financed by his landlord’s income from the rent of the deceased Lilly Matthews, whose ghost appears like a Free Presbyterian Cathleen Ni Houlihan striving to drive the Papish strangers out of ‘her’ house. As an antiques dealer and equipped with a keen sense of history, Marion becomes possessed – literally and figuratively – with Lilly’s parlour house, which is ‘eloquent with the history of this city’.18 Her efforts to have the National Trust preserve the property as a ‘museum of Belfast working-class life’19 are mocked by Lenny and Peter, who see ‘nothing special’ in this modest terraced home that seems so far removed from the rarefied manors that the National Trust looks after. Marion’s response is splenetic: So why should Lily Mathews’ home and hearth be less special than Lord Castlereagh’s or the Earl of Enniskillen’s? A whole way of life, a whole culture, the only difference being, that this home speaks for a far greater community of experience in this country than some transplanted feeble-minded aristocrat’s ever could.20 15 16

17 18 19 20

Parker, ‘Me and Jim’, Dramatis Personae, p. 98. Stewart Parker, ‘We Present: Safe as Houses: The Great Belfast Urban Motorway Show’, Fortnight, 72 (19 Nov. 1973), pp. 11–14 (p. 11). Stewart Parker, Pentecost, Plays 2 (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 224. Ibid., p. 192. Richtarik, Stewart Parker, p. 313. Pentecost, pp. 207–8.

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Marion articulates Parker’s own egalitarianism as well as his concern for local history, popular culture and working-class identity, which radiate throughout the rest of his work. His play Northern Star (1984) about the 1798 leader Henry John McCracken, also reminds audiences that class issues were central to the United Irishmen’s revolutionary ideas as they sought to unite their countrymen along class rather than confessional lines: It is not the Peep O’Day Boys or the Orange Boys who threaten your livelihood and life. They themselves are your fellow prisoners, in this vast cage that we call a country. It is the landlords and magistrates [. . .] who deliberately foment this kind of rancour between you and your neighbours [. . .] They are the cruel jailers we must unite to oppose!21

Parker’s own politics is also closely aligned with those of the proto-socialist weaver James Hope, whom McCracken hails as ‘the steadfast light, the real Northern Star’, and who insists ‘the condition of the labouring class was the fundamental question.’22 It was this condition of the labouring classes that Parker elegiacally addressed in Iceberg (1975) in his depiction of the purgatorial plight of two shipyard workers, Danny and Hugh, a Catholic and Protestant killed in the construction of the Titanic who now find themselves trapped on board its maiden voyage. In Parker’s play, the history of the Titanic is mediated not by those who built her, nor by those who savoured the ship’s extraordinary opulence, nor by those who survived its sensational sinking. It is narrated from the position and perspective of those lowly Vulcanites who forged the most famous ship in history. Iceberg – as is eponymously appropriate – is literally ‘history from below’:  articulated from the lower decks; from those travelling steerage rather than those ‘feeble-minded’ aristocrats luxuriating in first class; from the artisans, not the aristocrats. As such, the ghostly passengers of Danny and Hugh suggest ‘a generalized Northern Irish working-class dispossession stemming from a shared poverty, a deprivation both fueling sectarianism and existing as a potential bond to unite two often-divided factions’.23 Parker’s politics were significantly shaped by his mentor, John Malone, an inspired educationalist convinced of the emancipatory power of theatre and education, although other working-class playwrights, like Graham Reid, staged the blindside of education. Hailed as ‘a social historian of the Protestant working-class,’ Reid’s Hidden Curriculum (1982) concerns 21 22 23

Parker, Northern Star, Plays 2, p. 25. Ibid., pp. 60 and 54. Richard Rankin Russell, ‘Exorcising the Ghosts of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Stewart Parker’s The Iceberg and Pentecost’, Éire-Ireland, 41:3&4 (2006), pp. 42–58 (p. 44).

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Tony Cairns,24 a middle-class teacher whose encounter with two ex-pupils makes him confront his ignorance of how the conflict has affected – and involved – his students. Though he works in a war zone of west Belfast, Cairns has been cosseted from the conflict by his middle-class status; but his blindness is wilful and his ex-pupils are unsurprised: ‘If you’d stop reading them fancy English papers, you’d maybe know what was going on. They don’t know about us in The Guardian or The Sunday Times. They don’t want to know.’ One former student, Tom Allen, further challenges Cairns’s – and by extension, the audiences’ – bourgeois assumptions about loyalist paramilitaries: Look at me, do I  look like a rich, influential member of the Protestant ascendancy? I’ve got nothing . . . I live in a slum . . . I can’t get a job . . . I’ve no fancy car . . . my ma ran off with her fancyman . . . my sister got knocked up the shoot by a Brit . . . my brother’s in jail . . . and my da’s dying in agony. (Pause.) Now you go out on the Falls Road and see how many of the poor underprivileged minority want to change places with me.25

Allen’s speech is reminiscent of many of those heard in Gary Mitchell’s drama, though the veracity of these claims might be contested in the work of Belfast Community Theatre or by Dan Baron Cohen’s work with Derry Frontline, which used community-based theatre as education to empower working-class republican areas of Derry for whom theatre ordinarily represented a ‘privileged form of cultural practice directed towards middle-class audiences’.26 Cohen argues that ‘Working-class audiences are still unsure how to respond to such a culturally alien medium [. . .] but that cultural insecurity and alienation [. . .] quickly vanishes as soon as an audience sees its own people, hears its own language, and sees its own experience up on the stage’:27 a view validated by the success of Martin Lynch, whose long career has applied the popular theatre models espoused by John McGrath. Indeed, no individual or institution has done more to place working-class culture and communities centre-stage than Martin Lynch, whose body of work deserves greater critical attention than can be delivered here. A prolific, politically active playwright, performer and more recently producer, 24

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Lynda Henderson, ‘ “The Green Shoot”:  Transcendence and the Imagination in Contemporary Ulster Drama’, in Across a Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland, ed. by Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985), pp. 196–217 (p. 212). Graham Reid, The Plays of Graham Reid: Too Late to Talk to Billy, Dorothy, The Hidden Curriculum (Dublin, Co-op Books, 1982), p. 134. Lionel Pilkington, ‘Dan Baron Cohen: Resistance to Liberation with Derry Frontline Culture and Education’, TDR, 38:4 (Winter 1994), pp. 17–47 (p. 19). Cohen, in Pilkington, ‘Dan Baron Cohen’, p. 26.

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Lynch is a passionate, sometimes pugnacious figure, who has contributed some of the most popular plays to be performed in the past three decades. A former docker himself, it was Lynch who was asked to adapt Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge (1960) for its fiftieth anniversary in 2010 and he’s been centrally involved in myriad initiatives to make theatre more accessible to working-class communities, such as the Turf Lodge Fellowship Community Theatre in the 1970s and the Community Arts Forum in the 1990s, whilst playing key roles in the establishment of both Charabanc and Etc Etc. theatre companies. His The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty (1982) was the first play to critique the coercive powers of the state and the police since Tomelty’s The End House (1944), whilst the Stone Chair (1989) and The Wedding Community Play (2000) were landmark community theatre events, and more recent productions of the History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to my Da) (2002) and Chronicles of Long Kesh (2009) record the impact of the conflict on the lives of working-class communities who have been actively and collaterally caught up in the Troubles. Throughout his career, Lynch maintains he has ‘tried to build up working class values and to make working class people conscious and proud of them’.28 One of Lynch’s most interesting engagements with class politics appears in a play set in London, not Belfast, dealing with the Spanish Civil War and not the Troubles, as Irish, English and Welsh veterans of the International Brigades gather for a reunion. In Pictures of Tomorrow, Belfast communist Hugo unyieldingly clings to his political convictions; Len, a committed extrade union official, reflects on how he has spent ‘my life saving the workers’29 whilst losing his family; and Ray, whose communist beliefs crumbled with the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, nonetheless admits ‘sometimes I’d give anything . . . to get all the old certainties back’ (180). Ray fights off the attempts of his daughter – ‘one of Thatcher’s children’ (198) – to move him into a home as he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, before eventually yielding to the inevitable. The three men recall their youthful experiences in Spain and the sense of solidarity and identity they shared, but rifts soon surface when Hugo discovers Ray’s loss of political faith. ‘You can’t continue with exactly the same set of politics after such monumental changes have taken place’ (218–19). Pictures of Tomorrow is suffused

28

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Martin Lynch, cited in Maguire, ‘Martin Lynch’, in The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights. ed. by Martin Middeke and Peter Paul Schnierer (Methuen:  London, 2010), p. 184. Lynch, Pictures of Tomorrow, in Three Plays (Lagan Press: Belfast, 1996), p. 205; further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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with a sense of lost radicalism; it’s a political threnody of a period in which working-class consciousness was mobilised for an internationalist cause, but its enfeebled presence and power in the present day is embodied in the decrepit bodies of these elderly revolutionaries. The political poignancy of this contrast is enhanced by Lynch’s decision to have the flashback scenes of the Spanish Civil War played by younger actors who share the stage with the reminiscing revolutionaries. In connecting radical workingclass politics across Ireland, England and Wales, Lynch re-treaded arguments made by artists and activists elsewhere: that working-class culture and politics can appeal across the sectarian divide, and rather appositely the play was eponymously prescient, as in 2015 a stained-glass window to commemorate those Belfastmen who fought in the Spanish Civil War was installed at Belfast City Hall. In a city where commemorations more often divide than unite, this was a significant gesture, as was the fact that almost fifty Catholics and Protestants served in the Brigades in what Connal Parr acclaims as ‘a sublime moment of working-class unity in the city’s turbulent history’.30 One fascinating, though fraught issue with the vast number of plays which engage with working-class communities and culture is the extent to which they replicate sectarian divisions by staging only one community. Many of Lynch’s plays deal with working-class  Catholic communities, as is the case with Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985) and the autobiographical plays of Geraldine Hughes and Brenda Murphy, Belfast Blues (2003) and Two Sore Legs (2015), which chronicle working-class Catholic experiences growing up through the Troubles. Pearse Elliott’s Man in the Moon’s (2013) moving engagement with the aftermath of the conflict is set in Catholic west Belfast, though the issue of suicide with which it deals has equally devastated working-class communities across the sectarian divide as more people have killed themselves in the North since 1998 than were killed during the Troubles. Equally, Graham Reid’s series of Billy plays, which were widely acclaimed when broadcast on the BBC (1982–4) for (re)presenting an authentic working-class Belfast family on British television for the first time, are all firmly located in a Protestant community, whilst all of Gary Mitchell’s plays and many of Marie Jones’s are set in exclusively working-class loyalist areas, as is Rosemary Jenkinson’s problematic comedy, Bonefire (2006), which depicts working-class loyalists of Annandale Flats as little more than violent drug-taking ‘chavs’, 30

Connal Parr, ‘Honouring Belfast Men Who Died for Democracy of Spain’, Belfast Telegraph, 10 November 2015.

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though this is countered by a more nuanced treatment of working-class east Belfast bandsmen in her Basra Boy (2012), in which one joins the British army and is sent to Iraq with fateful consequences. In 2003, a new theatre company, Etc Etc., was founded with its artistic policy pledging to exclusively stage plays and stories of ‘working-class Protestants’, and though Carnduff, Thompson and Parker might be rolling in their graves, the issue of whether theatre merely reflects or helps reproduce the sectarian divide is a complex one. Indeed, when dramatists do portray ‘both sides’, it is often in the form of amorous encounters ‘across the barricades’ in the sentimental form of the ‘Romeo & Juliet typos.’31 Christina Reid’s work, however, is distinctive in that it is acclaimed for examining ‘the condition of the Protestant working class’,32 but her work complicates sectarian and class identities by exploring how they intersect with the politics of gender and race. Her female characters constantly challenge patriarchal norms and male authority, whilst The Belle of Belfast City’s (1989) prescient introduction of race is used to expose how the sectarian politics of hardline loyalism are hardwired with the far-right National Front. Perhaps the most successful ‘cross-community’ treatment of class that manages to avoid sentimental cliché, however, is the work of Charabanc Theatre company. In just over a decade, this all-female company produced twenty-four shows commingling popular culture and political engagement which toured throughout Ireland, with visits further afield to Russia, America and Britain. Its plays are pastiches of music, history and storytelling, informed by a strong underlying sense of class and gender politics. They attacked a hidebound identitarian politics that helped sustained sexist and sectarian barriers in the North. Charabanc’s inaugural production of Lay up Your Ends (1983) was ground-breaking, not only in terms of the collective dramaturgical process that underpinned it, but for the way it merged public and private worlds and linked sexual and social suppression. It depicted the 1911 mill strike, when female workers protested against their horrific work conditions in an episode largely erased from or underplayed in official histories of Belfast. Significantly, the play emerged from an innovative process of collective research conducted by all five actresses, which sought to restore the silenced voices of the mill girls, as a 31

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Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 192. Christina Reid Obituary, www.artscouncil-ni.org/news/christina-reid-1942–2015 [accessed August 2015].

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direct challenge to the patriarchal historiography that had sidelined them on the basis of their class and gender. As with many of Charabanc’s later works, Lay up Your Ends’s cogent feminist and class politics connects the personal with the political and poses profound challenges to audiences’ assumptions and prejudices. Charabanc’s process of researching and rehearsing its material so that a script was gradually fashioned in a collective, cumulative process was unique and represented a new approach to theatre that had repercussions on the later development of a dynamic sector of community theatre in Ireland. The company’s trenchant engagement with both gender and class is all the more important given that politics in the North continues to be overdetermined by allegiances to different nationalities; a polarising process in which class plays a powerful role in reproducing this dynamic rather than enabling the emergence of any form of radical politics.

Voyeurism and the Stage: Ghettoising Ghettoes? Charabanc’s Somewhere over the Balcony (1987) and Boyd’s The Flats are set respectively in the republican working-class areas of Divis and Unity Flats that were wracked by socio-economic deprivation and political violence. Both plays are jarringly different in their form, style and politics: Boyd’s play is replete with suffering, sacrificial female characters, whilst his simplistic treatment of the conflict depicts a turf war between prods and taigs with a good-hearted Tommy soldier caught in the middle as the fair-minded arbiter. Balcony made no effort to present ‘both sides’ or balance, but the perspective of working-class women from a republican area on the eve of internment and under constant surveillance. Generated through a process of interviews and using many of the same techniques practised by John McGrath and 7:84, the play’s anarchic energy, black humour and surreal action captured something of the absurdly ludic nature of ‘normal’ life in a war zone as experienced by vital female characters that made Boyd’s women appear two-dimensional ciphers. Nevertheless, some criticism was levelled against Charabanc for concentrating on a single community whilst others suggested the play provided middle-class audiences with a voyeuristic spectacle of ghettoised communities. Certainly, Balcony opened in London before touring America, and then played in the Belfast Festival in 1987, but it did not tour leisure centres, community clubs and halls throughout the North as Charabanc had its previous work, prompting Tom Maguire to query if Balcony provides

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‘audiences with the pleasures of bourgeois voyeurism’.33 This is a fraught topic that deserves a fuller discussion than can be delivered here, but which has been raised in relation to Gary Mitchell’s work, much of which was commissioned and consumed by metropolitan London theatres. Sitespecific performances are also freighted by this ethical aesthetic issue, as was the case with other seminal productions. Marie Jones and Martin Lynch’s extraordinary Wedding Community Play (1999) transported audiences to terraced homes in an interface area in an immersive theatre experience whereby audiences eavesdropped on conversations between family members of the bride and groom of a mixed marriage as they prepared for their wedding day, before being bussed to the church and a club for the wedding and reception. The unique theatre event engendered audiences with a sense of intimacy as they were privy to personal struggles emblematic of a wider divided society, which played out against the political backdrop of the peace process with the Good Friday Agreement signed months earlier, all of which effectively combined the personal with the political. And yet, the issue of metropolitan, mainly middle-class audiences entering the mean streets of east Belfast for a festival show was also unsettling, anticipating much of the ‘dark tourism’ that boomed in the post-1998 period. As with the extraordinary work of ANU Productions’s series of site-specific performances in the Monto area of north Dublin for the Dublin Theatre Festival, The Monto Cycle (2010–14), it depends if the auratic authenticity of place is used for exploitative or ethical purposes, and certainly the latter was the case for Jones and Lynch’s play, one of the most complex and ingenious productions staged in recent years. Similarly, Convictions (2000), staged in the old Crumlin Road Courthouse, drew much of its power from its sense of place, as seven plays, by seven different authors,34 were performed in seven locations within the now dilapidated building before audiences, most of whom had never darkened the door of the building. It was perhaps this sense of trespass that made the play a festival hit with audiences, who were directly challenged by Lynch’s playlet, 33

34

Tom Maguire, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006), p. 116. This dilemma perennially troubles theatre makers and is difficult to remedy, short of repeating the experience of the premiere of Lynch’s Dockers, whereby many real dockers, including some who inspired characters in the play, attended the Lyric Theatre in large numbers; an experience, which Marie Jones recalls, helped inspire the formation of Charabanc; see Marie Jones, Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, ed. by Lilian Chambers (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001), p. 213. Male Toilets by Daragh Carville, Judge’s Room by Damian Gorman, Court No. 2 by Marie Jones, Main Hall by Martin Lynch, Court No. 1 by Owen McCafferty, Jury Room by Nicola McCartney and Holding Cell by Gary Mitchell.

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Main Hall, in which an unquiet ghost, a prisoner executed many years earlier, excoriated the gathered audiences for their prurient voyeurism: It was good of you to come. Y’wait until the place closes down and all the pain and heartbreak has come and gone, before you set foot in the place. Yes. Then you turn up, then you turn up, y’shower a bastards. And behave like a pile of voyeuristic, theatre-goin’, fun-seeking, hedonistic, facile assholes.35

Gary Mitchell also contributed a playlet to Convictions, Holding Cell, in which a convicted young prisoner waits in the holding cells below the courthouse before making the long subterranean walk through the underground tunnel to the Crum’: the gaol opposite the courthouse. As his sentence sinks in and he slowly realises what awaits him, his aggressively macho posturing slips to reveal a scared young man. Much of Mitchell’s drama depicts similar young men from working class-communities who end up trapped by the pervasive control of loyalist paramilitarism and hyper-masculine models of identity. Set in the world of loyalist paramilitaries in a period coterminous with the peace process that’s perceived by many of his protagonists as a ‘sell-out’, Mitchell’s drama depicts how the force of change – the title for one of his plays – precipitates a crisis in masculinity in the traditionally macho world of paramilitary hard men who now find themselves no longer in control, redundant, left behind. In As the Beast Sleeps (1998), In a Little World of Our Own (1997), Force of Change (2000) and Loyal Women (2003) opposition to political change is vividly, often violently expressed. Mitchell’s work provides an important counterweight to positive official narratives of the peace process which emphasise its ‘progress’, whilst revealing how those in working-class loyalist areas who feel alienated from the process, and for whom there is precious little ‘peace dividend’. This motif of change is also registered in the drama of Owen McCafferty, another playwright whose dramatis personae are equally working class. Unlike Mitchell or Lynch, McCafferty rarely identifies his characters as Protestant or Catholic, in order to show how little difference political affiliation and identity means to the everyday lives of ordinary people: the tilers of Shoot the Crow (1998); the destitute labourers of The Absence of Women (2010); the dinner ladies, office workers, labourers, street kids, bar staff, plumbers, handymen and unemployed workers of I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me (1998), No Place Like Home (2001), Closing Time (2002), Scenes from the Big Picture (2003) and Unfaithful (2014). Like Mitchell, 35

Martin Lynch, Main Hall, in Convictions (Belfast: Tinderbox, 2000), p. 15.

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however, McCafferty adroitly records the deeply ambivalent responses of those who’ve experienced no palpable ‘peace dividend’ in the past decade; those for whom the material conditions of their lives have changed little, in spite of all the corporate rhetoric of urban regeneration and rehabilitation that has accompanied so much of the peace process. In Closing Time, set in a hotel bombed several years earlier, the news plays on a silenced television set relaying the ongoing peace process and political ‘progress’, all of which is of little consequence to the traumatised punters of this public house: Robbie belfast’s changin isn’t it – the keep sayin it’s changin – so it must be fuckin changin – this place is changin – places down the road are fuckin kips – this place be like the way it was before.36

Robbie refers to the radical changes taking place in their city through its physical regeneration, which cruelly contrasts with the spiritual and material paralysis of their own lives, as McCafferty exposes the neo-liberal fallacy of the peace process and ‘the classic liberal assumption – that the sectarian divide would slowly close up with rising prosperities and ongoing peace, [which] has turned out to be false.’37 Indeed, Closing Time, like Stacey Gregg’s Lagan (2011) and Shibbeloth (2015) in many ways echoes Frank Stock’s quip in Spokesong about Belfast’s built environment, that ‘if the bombers don’t get it, the planners will,’38 as these plays expose how the corporate regeneration of Belfast has bypassed working-class communities. McCafferty’s docudrama Titanic (2012) also makes an interesting case in point. Based on the 1912 British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry into the sinking of the iconic Belfast ship, McCafferty’s play was commissioned to open the signature new MAC arts centre in the revamped Cathedral Quarter as part of the wider centenary events throughout the city. Though as a piece of verbatim theatre the work itself is limited to what was actually recorded in the Inquiry, McCafferty nonetheless approached this work ‘not as a historian . . . but as playwright’ and added a fictional clerk character, who opens and closes the show with two speeches that bookend the play. The first offers a brief inventory of the ship’s opulence: ‘eight hundred bundles of fresh asparagus – five grand pianos [. . .] a Turkish bath – one hundred pairs of grape scissors [. . .] one thousand five hundred bottles 36 37

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Owen McCafferty, Closing Time, in Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), p. 179. Johann Hari, ‘Blair May Have Finally Seduced Paisley – But That Still Leaves an Ulster as Divided as Ever’, The Independent, 26 March 2007. Parker, Spokesong, Plays 2, p. 57.

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of wine [. . .] one thousand oyster forks [. . .] four cases of opium’;39 the second details the numbers drowned from first, second and third classes respectively, with few from the lower class surviving the sinking. The cruel contrast of these lists of human luxury and loss reflect McCafferty’s concern with class politics and provide a most moving coda.

Conclusion The prominence of working-class writers, settings and themes in Northern drama is important as it stands in stark contrast to the relative absence of working-class experience in critical and historical studies. The lack of awareness of this lost tradition reflects the weak tradition of labour politics in the North, as well as the fact that Belfast, in the words of poet Gerry Dawe, is ‘a city not greatly given to civic understanding of its literary cultural legacy’.40 The reclamation – or recognition – of this tradition is important not only from an historiographical perspective but because it can help dispel damaging myths, like those disseminated by the Democratic Unionist Party’s William Humphrey in 2013 regarding working-class Protestants and the Belfast stage. In a controversy played out with much fanfare in the local media, Humphrey inveighed against the new Lyric and MAC theatres for offering no ‘tangible benefit for the Protestant working-class community.’41 Significant coverage was accorded to Humphrey's vacuous claims though they seemed scotched by his own admission that he had never darkened the door of the Lyric or the MAC, or indeed any other infernal temple of Thespis in the city. Indeed, if he had visited the Lyric in the preceding six months alone, he would have encountered plays by St John Ervine, Graham Reid, Gary Mitchell, David Ireland and Marie Jones: an unbroken succession of working-class Protestants who were writing about working-class Protestants, and whose work was almost all set in working-class Protestant areas.42 Moreover, Humphrey’s spurious declaration that ‘the concept of 39

40 41

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Owen McCafferty, Titanic: Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 9. Gerald Dawe, ‘The Prow of Ship on Ridgeway Street’, Architecture Ireland 258 (2011), 69. Although Humphrey’s comments were unanimously criticised by the arts sector, and notably by Gary Mitchell and Etc. Etc., a theatre company specifically established to express working-class Protestants, an elaborate inquiry was set up to investigate the issue, the report of which can be read here: http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/globalassets/documents/cal/inquiry/arts-of-working-classcommunities/report/inclusion-in-the-arts-of-working-class-communities-report.pdf. St John Ervine, Mixed Marriage; Graham Reid, Love Billy; Gary Mitchell, Re-Energise; Marie Jones, Weddin’s We’ens, Wakes; David Ireland, Can’t Forget About You.

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“the arts” is not something which the Protestant working-class community in this city buys into’ was belied by the performance only a stone’s throw from his own constituency office of Crimea Square: a massive production dramatising a century of life in the loyalist working-class heartland of the Shankill Road that was playing as part of the Belfast Festival. Comprising a huge cast of professional and community amateur actors, the product of several months’ work with local writers and residents groups, Crimea Square stoutly declared its pride in telling ‘real stories, written by local people, acted by local people’ and was sold-out. As this chapter has sought to convey, working-class writers have often sought to transcend the tribal politics that Humphrey seemed to reaffirm, illustrating on stage how much the less-well-off across the divide share in common. Indeed, the very week in which Humphry pontificated about the arts’ failure to engage with working-class Protestant communities, a bridge in the east of the city was christened the ‘Sam Thompson Bridge’, as appositely the author of Over the Bridge became symbolically incarnate in its physical form as a result of the nationalist SDLP’s motion whereby naming rights (and rites) were delegated to the public in an online vote. It was a small but significant gesture. In a city in which public space is contested, and where streets and civic structures are christened after inventors, mathematicians, military figures, royal family members and far-flung reaches of a former empire, the ‘Sam Thompson Bridge’ is the first public space or structure beyond the ivoried campus of Queen’s University to be named after a writer. A  hopeful harbinger of change, all the more important given that Thompson, as a working-class (Protestant) artist has done so much to positively represent – with all that word connotes – working-class Protestant experience and identity.

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Ch apter 21

Twentieth-Century Workers’ Biography* Claire Lynch

Palms of the oversized hands turned skywards, bronze feet planted firmly on granite, James Larkin’s monument looms over those who pass it on Dublin’s Lower O’Connell Street.1 At its unveiling in June 1979, Irish President Patrick J. Hillery described the statue as ‘a work of art raised to the memory of a great man’.2 For Hillery, the statue was to act both as a testament to Larkin’s personal achievements and as a source of inspiration to those who similarly ‘strive on behalf of their brothers and sisters everywhere’.3 Larkin’s statue is the starting point here because it captures so neatly a central characteristic of the biographies and autobiographies of Ireland’s workers in the twentieth century. Sculptor Oisín Kelly’s design for the monument grew out of the iconic photograph of Larkin, taken by Joe Ashman in April 1923. In the photograph, Larkin stands raised above the crowd as if already on a plinth, mouth wide open, exhorting the audience to listen, to act. The foreground of the picture is a blurred sea of hats and heads, a crowd that extends to the limits of the image. It is, very clearly, a photograph not of one person, but many. Kelly’s sculpture, by contrast, draws focus only to the speaker. In doing so, the artist certainly captures the vigour and intensity of Larkin’s speeches, but he also, necessarily, erases the people he spoke to.4 This centralising * The author would like to thank the Marc Fitch Fund for generously awarding the research grant that enabled essential archival work at the National Library of Ireland. 1 For more on the history of Larkin’s monument, see Paula Murphy, ‘Let Us Rise’, Irish Arts Review, 30:4 (2013), pp. 114–17, and James Curry, ‘An Inspiration to All Who Gaze upon It’, History Ireland, 4:21 (2013), pp. 48–9. 2 Patrick J. Hillery, ‘Unveiling the Statue: June 15, 1979’, in National Library of Ireland SIPTU Tribute to James Larkin, Orator, Agitator, Revolutionary Trade Union Leader (Dublin:  National Library of Ireland, 1997), p. 30. 3 Ibid., p. 30. 4 One could argue, of course, that the crowds erased from Ashman’s photograph by Kelly’s statue have been replaced by the shoppers, tourists, city workers and homeless people most likely to pass by Larkin’s plinth in contemporary Dublin. Whether they are quite so interested or able to hear the statue ‘speak’ is another matter.

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of the ‘great man’ (and the attendant exclusion of intersecting lives) is a familiar strategy in biographical writing. As Dermot Keogh observes, for example, the multiple accounts of Larkin’s life ‘no matter how professionally constructed they might be, have by the very nature of biography tended to set [him] apart from [his] trade union colleagues and from the working class rank and file’.5 Biography zooms in, isolates, magnifies. The achievements and legacies of key figures constructed through this approach are, undoubtedly, vital in building our understanding of social and cultural history. It is equally true, however, that the uncelebrated and anonymous life is instructive and meaningful. If Kelly’s statue stands as a monument to individual greatness, Ashman’s photograph points out that we all have a life story, whether or not we have the means or motivation to tell it. The working-class men and women of the past century who were able to write their lives did so against considerable obstacles of time, opportunity and community censure. Indeed, it is because of, not in spite of these challenges that Irish autobiography is so ‘uniquely poised to capture the complex, multi-dimensional nature of historical reality’.6 Seeking to remember, reflect, retell, reimagine or even reinvent individual histories, these life stories form a cumulative account of Ireland’s recent past. As such, while Liam Harte thinks of Irish autobiography and memoir as capturing ‘historical reality’, it might be more accurate to say that this form of writing creates it. Historians, literary scholars, novelists and others invest in the curated triumphs and disappointments of Irish people in order to bring their multiple pasts into our present. What is written, how and by whom is hugely significant, therefore, in shaping wider narratives of modern Ireland. On the one hand, the types of lives narrated are too often limited by the homogeneity and distortion of traditional biography, with ‘mainstream’ lives dominating publishers’ lists. On the other, inaccessible, obscure, controversial and even simply less entertaining life stories still struggle to gain either the popular or scholarly attention needed to draw them into the debate. This chapter responds to these exclusions by remaining equally concerned with the ‘great lives’ of men like Jim Larkin as it is with the life stories 5

6

Dermot Keogh, The Rise of the Irish Working Class: The Dublin Trade Union Movement and Labour Leadership 1890–1914 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1982), pp. 1–2. For biographies of Larkin, see, for example: Emmet Larkin, James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader: 1876–1947 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965) and Richard Michael Fox, Jim Larkin: The Rise of the Underman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1957). Liam Harte, The Literature of the Irish in Britain:  Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. xix.

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of the anonymous crowds who wet their feet lining the streets on the day of his funeral.

Working Lives In Ireland and across the many sites of Irish migration, life writing, in the form of letters, diaries, biographies, autobiographies and memoir, provides us with an unparalleled account of Irish people’s attitudes and experiences during the past century.7 Importantly, both well-known and anonymous working-class  Irish writers have contributed to a long European tradition in which, ‘for at least the last three hundred years very many people have [. . .] considered that their life histories were worth recording’.8 Nevertheless, their writing remains relatively overlooked or undervalued by historians and other scholars, perhaps as a matter of self-preservation rather than prejudice. To start with, the term ‘working class’ is not easily defined, taking in ‘economic criteria (such as occupation and income)’, as well as ‘social or cultural criteria (such as behaviour, status, power, attitudes and relationships with other groups); or by some elusive combination of them all’.9 Similarly, while many scholars agree that the autobiographies of working people are immensely valuable historical sources, they also acknowledge the many ‘inherent distortions and biases’ these documents include.10 Considering where, how and why an autobiography is written is always revealing and, in an Irish context, highly politicised. Specifically, for Seamus Deane, Ireland’s colonial legacy means that autobiography, or the writing of a memoir, [. . .] is always going to reproduce, in some variation, those ultimately disturbing queries about the issue of identity, national or personal.11

The ‘disturbing queries’ Deane identifies here are bywords for the autobiographies of Ireland’s working class in the twentieth century. Questions of ‘identity, national or personal’ dominate these texts, not least of all in 7

8

9 10

11

The terms ‘autobiography’, ‘biography’ and ‘life writing’ are used somewhat interchangeably in this chapter. This should not be taken as terminological laxity, but rather as a way to indicate that the texts discussed here contain elements of all of these, often moving fluidly between them. John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, The Autobiography of the Working Class:  An Annotated, Critical Bibliography: 1790–1900, Vol. 1 (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), p. viii. John Benson, The Working Class in Britain 1850–1939 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 3–4. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 2. Seamus Deane, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. III (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), p. 380.

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the mid-century when it became all too evident that economic inequality and social injustice were just as possible under an Irish government as a British one. If questions of identity, either (and often both) ‘national or personal’ are central to Irish biographical writing, the answers offered by writers are remarkably varied. From the multivolume literary endeavours of Seán O’Casey, to the priceless fragments revealed between the lines of letters or manuscripts, a significant tradition of Irish life writing is preserved both in print and across the archives. Working-class autobiographies can be literary masterpieces and they can also be hastily scribbled notes; their value is not limited to the frames of critical acclaim or commercial success. In this chapter, texts are not excluded as a consequence of their author having been silenced by illiteracy say, or denied the mechanisms of publication and distribution. To return once more to the densely populated photograph of Larkin and the contrastingly lone figure of his statue, we might think of these texts as variously capturing both ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ Irish lives.

An Inspiration to All Who Gaze upon It Indeed, this is one of the central contradictions in Irish working-class life writing. In producing his or her own life story as one of the ‘anonymous masses’, the author becomes both exceptional and representative. Speaking as one of the community ironically forces the author outside of it; in the act of self-narration, in other words, he or she moves from the ‘background’ to the ‘foreground’. Consequently, far from being seen as inspirational, working-class people who forged opportunities to write were often viewed with suspicion, hostility even, by friends and family. Scottish writer Margaret Thomson Davis (b. 1926)  records her sense of shame around writing, but it is the experience of her friend, an Irish labourer, which captures the full extent of the taboo. ‘There’s something far wrong with a man who writes letters to himself!’ his brother exploded. ‘If you’d just been a pouf the priest could have talked to you or one of us could have battered it out of you. But what the hell can anybody do about a writer?’12

In this construct, the working-class writer is no less than an inveterate deviant. While the offensive slang and recourse to violence will be 12

Margaret Thompson Davis, The Making of a Novelist (London: Alisson & Busby, 1982), p. 6.

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distasteful to twenty-first-century readers, it remains revealing that the writer’s brother views homosexuality as a preferable idiosyncrasy in a working-class community. No doubt in response to attitudes like these, personal accounts of Irish workers’ lives are typically modest, even ‘selfeffacing testaments’.13 The fact that they are often written by ‘barely literate itinerant navvies’ makes them simply remarkable in terms of commitment and personal motivation.14 Writing against both structural inequalities and personal obstacles, these ‘rough-textured, episodic narratives’ are often particularly revelatory in their representation of the emigrant experience.15 Arguably the best known example, Patrick MacGill’s Children of the Dead End:  The Autobiography of a Navvy (1914), ‘created a sensation’ when first published.16 Shaped by the conventions of the novel, but subtitled ‘The Autobiography’, the narrative relegates, neglects and sublimates its autobiographical status while also claiming to be based on experience and reality. As MacGill prefaces the book: In the following pages I have endeavoured to tell of the navvy; the life he leads, the dangers he dares, and the death he often dies. Most of my story is autobiographical [. . .] While asking a little allowance for the pen of the novelist it must be said that nearly all the incidents of the book have come under the observation of the writer: that such incidents should take place makes the tragedy of the story.17

The fact that only ‘nearly all’ of the events described in the book have been experienced by the author is presented as wholly unproblematic. Rather, MacGill is concerned with recognition for the group in his role as de facto ‘literary laureate’ of ‘unskilled Irish migratory workers’.18 Perhaps most significantly, MacGill also requests ‘a little allowance’ from his reader as he experiments with the limits of fiction and autobiography, not least of all in his use of the named protagonist ‘Flynn’. As MacGill discovers, however, working with the brain rather than the hands places the writer in a state of class limbo, no longer restricted to the experiences of the working class, yet still too bound up in working-class concerns to be considered anything else. Effectively transformed into a person ‘of no class’, writers like MacGill are left with a ‘sense of no longer really belonging to any group’, resulting 13 14 15 16

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Harte, Irish in Britain, p. xv. Ibid. Ibid. Brian D. Osbourne, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End (Dublin: New Island, 2001), p. vii. MacGill, ‘Foreword’, in Children, n.p. Harte, Irish in Britain, p. 139.

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in a dislocation which defines the narrative.19 As in the examples cited earlier in this chapter, for MacGill’s workmates, writing is suspicious, incomprehensible work, ‘a shift which they did not understand’.20 So, as MacGill moves the ‘background’ life of the navvy (both personal and generic) into the foreground, it is at the expense of his own status among his peers. As he laments, ‘the man who made money with a dirty pencil and a piece of dirty paper [. . .] had no place in my mates’ scheme of things.’21 MacGill’s personal experience of rejection finds a parallel in the discriminatory treatment of working-class writers by the scholars and publishers who overlook their work in broader discussions on Irish writing. As Harte has noted: At best, ‘underclass’ authors are condescended to for their literary naivety and sequestered under a minor or marginal rubric; at worst, they are excluded completely from Irish critical surveys and anthologies.22

While this inequity is certainly evident in many anthologies, the opposite might also be said of working-class autobiographies that have achieved canonical status. Seán O’Casey’s six lengthy volumes of autobiography, written over a period of twenty-five years and published between 1939 and 1954, for instance, are frequently cited as the model for Irish autobiographers across the twentieth century. Both ‘a compulsive and a hesitant selfportraitist’, O’Casey challenged the conventions of the form, writing in the third person and moving through various naming conventions for his protagonist, eschewing the traditional autobiographical ‘I’.23 Perhaps most important, O’Casey’s autobiographical writing was self-consciously representative of his community, or as Michael Pierse has it, was ‘inextricable from his affection for his own people – his commitment to the working class’.24 Much has been written in both praise and condemnation of O’Casey’s life writing, considered the archetype of Irish autobiography by some and not autobiography at all by others. In the 1960s the collected volumes were reissued in paperback, eliciting hyperbolic reviews among journalists who proclaimed it:  ‘Undoubtedly, one of the greatest Irish 19 20 21 22

23 24

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 292. MacGill, Children, p. 228. Ibid. Harte, Irish in Britain, p. xv. Harte’s own work has done much to challenge patronising and myopic attitudes to working-class Irish writing. Ibid., p. 188. Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class:  Dublin after O’Casey (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 51.

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works written in English’.25 Macmillan’s 1963 paperback edition of Autobiographies I  put several significant decades between the initial publication dates of I Knock at the Door (1939), Pictures in the Hallway (1942) and Drums Under the Windows (1945). Reviews from this latter period reflect a significant moment in the history of O’Casey’s autobiographies. If the republished autobiographies presented an Ireland of the past, they also drew uncomfortable parallels with the ongoing economic and social concerns of the post-war decades. Padraic Fallon’s 1963 article in the Irish Times is indicative of reviewers’ further dramatisation of ‘the suppurating slums of North Dublin in which the child O’Casey suffered all the whips and scorpions of poverty’ in ‘that overworked and underpaid city’.26 Revealingly, Fallon’s praise for O’Casey’s material sits alongside a significant frustration with the more experimental aspects of his writing. The life of the Irish worker, as explored by O’Casey, is much admired by Fallon, yet the ‘literariness’ of his approach elicits discomfort; these autobiographies do not know their place. Ultimately, Fallon is able to forgive literary innovations such as O’Casey’s allergy to firstperson pronouns, on the grounds that these autobiographies are no less than ‘a baring of the soul’. He continues: Their business is to expose character, not create it, moving towards some vital understanding of themselves and their motivation, which finally is both the reason and justification of life and art.27

Rather less pompously, John Wain’s contemporaneous review in the Observer admired the ‘low-priced and well-printed volumes’ in which ‘this frail-bodied, tough-spirited man [. . .] has set down the story of his passage through life’.28 Only ephemera in the extensive archive of O’Casey’s life and work, these newspaper clippings sketch a clear intended readership for O’Casey’s autobiographies in the 1960s. Reviews like Fallon’s spoke to the kind of readers who might look to the Autobiographies as guidebooks for class voyeurism, not reflections of their own experience. The middleclass gaze inferred here could hardly be better captured than in Edith Shackleton’s review of the collected autobiographies in Lady. Praising the convenience of the small paperback as ‘a boon to the air traveller and the reader in bed’, she asks:

25 26 27 28

Dublin, National Library of Ireland (NLI), MS 38, 153/4; Sunday Press, Dublin, 11 August 1963. NLI, MS 38, 153/4, Padraic Fallon, Irish Times, 17 August 1963. Ibid. NLI, MS 38, 153/4, John Wain, The Observer, 11 August 1963.

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Who could go on holiday with these without being thrilled by the vivid writing which brings close contact with a brilliant mind of unshakable integrity, the story of the slum-born invalid child who grew to fame, and a close-up view of Ireland.29

If Shackleton is aware of the uncomfortable disconnect between the airtravelling holidaymaker and the ‘slum-born invalid child’ it is far from clear. Whether offered with knowing irony or naïve oversight, Shackleton’s point is important. Rather obviously, the barriers which discouraged working-class people from writing autobiography applied equally to their reading of it. It is one thing, then, to understand what Irish working-class biography was and who it was by in the twentieth century; who it was for is an altogether more difficult question.

The Mahogany Counters Self-evidently, reading the biographies of twentieth-century workingclass  Irish writers provides insight into twentieth-century workingclass Irish lives. Equally obviously, the texts need to exist and be available to readers in order for this to be possible. While the individual life cannot simply stand in for a whole community, each life story can open up our overall understanding of Irish men and women’s working conditions, experience of family life, engagement with social politics and so on. Since only a small proportion of people ever write the kind of extended prose piece most easily recognised as autobiography, fragmentary working-class lives must be sought elsewhere: in the minutes of union meetings, ships manifests, the back of photographs and so on. Self-published, local history society texts similarly preserve working-class life stories not at all dissimilar to the bestselling misery memoirs that have marketed Irish lives across the globe.30 From the mainstream to the marginal, then, autobiography might well be described as the preeminent form of literary expression for working-class people. Linda Anderson’s claim that autobiography ‘can become the “text of the oppressed” ’ is pertinent in this, positioning these texts as ‘articulating through one person’s experience, experiences which may be representative of a particular marginalised group’.31 Both Patrick MacGill and Seán O’Casey used their autobiographies in just such 29 30

31

NLI, MS 38, 153/4, Edith Shackleton, Lady, 22 August 1963. See chapter 4, ‘ “Hireland”: Marketing the Irish Life Story’, in Claire Lynch, Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 137–80. Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 104.

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a ‘representative’ way. Their narratives not only described the experiences of working-class Irish men, but also built a template for a generation to build on.32 Anderson’s model in which the ‘oppressed’ become ‘representative’ is certainly convincing. However, it does presuppose a basic level of literacy and agency. Where are the autobiographies of the Irish people who lacked these? Between 1940 and 1954 The Bell monthly magazine became a locus for Irish fiction, journalism and cultural commentary.33 Written in the documentary style designed to raise political consciousness and bring about social change, The Bell published a series of articles in 1943–4 entitled ‘Other People’s Incomes’. Presented as ‘true’ and based on ‘real life’, the articles were characteristic of the magazine’s journalistic style. Similarly, their publication in the early-mid 1940s underlines the contemporaneous concern for the economic impact of the Second World War at a household level. Via detailed household budgets and descriptions of living habits, the articles project a wider preoccupation with class. If the Irish lives recorded here are only outline sketches, by-products of social commentary even, they are no less valuable for it. The additional impact of paper rationing during this period raises the status of even the briefest published life stories. Although I am reading the profiles embedded in these articles as working-class life writing, they would not have been imagined in those terms by the journalists who compiled them. The Bell’s writers include details of individual lives and experiences here only as evidence to support their case; their value is in their typicality. As historical sources, the articles helpfully detail Irish eating and shopping habits, the organisation of family life, anxieties about work and social expectations about marriage and children. More importantly, they contain the micro-biographies of otherwise unwritten lives of Irish women. Having offered ‘half a guinea each for the three most interesting family budgets’, The Bell articles presented readers with the detailed costings, menus and habits of various ‘Other People’.34 Notably, for all the purported interest in demystifying the domestic, the compilers proved quite unable to disguise their frustration with the Irish housewives they found to 32

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34

Denis Sampson, for example, has noted echoes of O’Casey’s ‘irony and comedy’ in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996). See Sampson ‘ “Voice Itself ”: The Loss and Recovery of Boyhood in Irish Memoir’, in Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society, ed. by Liam Harte (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 197–213. For more on the significance of The Bell, see Frank Shovlin, The Irish Literary Periodical 1923–58 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ‘Other People’s Incomes’, The Bell, 6:5 (1943), p. 297. Italics in original.

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be both ‘extremely reticent’ and ‘extremely vague about their own affairs’.35 The journalists’ lack of awareness here is telling; behaviours which they interpret as reticence and vagueness might very easily be anxiety over making the true extent of private poverty publicly known. As it is, The Bell calculates precisely what might now be termed a ‘living wage’ while being ‘quite clear’ that this ‘is for a life spent without any frills whatever: a life of cheese-paring and constant humiliations’.36 According to the magazine’s investigation, in the early 1940s a working couple in Ireland, without children, could not ‘live in reasonable penury on less than £325 a year’.37 ‘Since children must be anticipated’, the article continues, men in the cities are advised to rule out the idea of marriage if earning a salary of less than ‘£400 and £425 a year’.38 Throughout the series, income benchmarks are offered as indicators of different class strata, comparisons made between the young solicitor and the respectable widow, for instance. Tellingly, it is not the income but the expenditure of the people described which designates a class identity with ‘respectability’ prioritised, even at the expense of comfort. Taking in paying guests, minor mending work and selling jams, for instance, might cover the costs of children’s schooling or just manage to disguise the lack of indoor plumbing. The whole premise of the ‘Other People’s Incomes’ articles in The Bell is to bring the private business of domestic finance into the public, to give the ‘background’ matter of life ‘foreground’ significance. One aspect of this is the unmasking of ‘respectable’ clerks and office workers as no better off than their labouring peers. In a smooth rhetorical move, the author draws the comparison between ‘the gentlemen who hand out pounds by the thousand every day over the shining mahogany’ and ‘the young chap inside the mahogany counter of the pub next door’.39 While the banker could expect to attract a £260 annual salary, a barman would draw a union wage of £234 or as much as £273 per annum if a manager. If the barman earns more than the banker, the article suggests, matters of status are destabilised. Ought Irish people, The Bell asks, to aspire to the status of a desk job over the more straightforward exchange of labour and capital associated with manual and service work? As the journalist observes knowingly:

35 36 37 38 39

Ibid. ‘Other People’s Incomes’, The Bell, 7:2 (1944), p. 150. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 155.

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If the reader is considering ‘What will we make of young Jimmy?’ we respectfully commend the comparison to his or her consideration as a wise parent.40

Mrs K Following the oblique comparison between the salary and status of the barman and banker, attention moves to ‘those very poor who have less than £100 per annum’.41 Since, as the authors point out, ‘none of this is earned we might well entitle this article “How to Live on Nothing” ’.42 The final part of this chapter focusses on the autobiography, such as it is, of an Irish woman named Mrs K. Although even her name is lost to history, Mrs K’s contribution to The Bell articles brings her life story into the public sphere. An atypical piece of biographical writing, both in form and content, the article presents Mrs K’s voice directly and also speaks on her behalf. If her experiences are revealed in the article, we also witness her ongoing disenfranchisement as her life is narrated through the editorial bias of the magazine. ‘Mrs K’ is presented to readers of The Bell as if listed in the dramatis personae of an O’Casey play. A thirty-three-year-old mother of six, married to an unemployed labourer, living in a two-roomed flat in a Dublin tenement due to be demolished under a slum-clearance scheme. She has no gas, no water and shares an outside toilet with five families. The family income is comprised of the Home Assistance and food vouchers on which ‘they manage to live from week to week’.43 Her life story is an important one in the terms outlined in this chapter since it threatens to subvert all previous efforts to define this form of Irish writing. Can a person be described as working class if they do not work? Is a text really autobiography if not written by the subject? As discussed previously in this chapter, well-known autobiographies by writers such as MacGill and O’Casey have dominated scholarly perceptions of Irish workers’ biographies. If, however, as Liam Harte argues, Irish workingclass autobiography offers a unique ‘literature of outsiderness and exclusion’, we must surely seek out the most precarious and overlooked Irish life stories.44 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid. The Bell, 7:1, p. 58. Harte, Irish in Britain, p. xv.

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Certainly by all practical measures, Mrs K’s life is that of an outsider. Unable to afford food, the family is fed at a food centre with Mrs K permitted to take home ‘dinner in cans’ for her and her husband, that they might be spared ‘the shame of eating in a public dining room’.45 When pregnant, as she regularly is, she relies on charitable assistance for extra food for herself and equipment for the baby; the Parish Clothing Guild provides the children’s First Communion clothes. As each detail of deprivation is added, Mrs K threatens to become a caricature, her own words limited to clichéd phrases and truisms. She describes her husband, for example, as a man who ‘would take the stars down out of the sky’, a man who has never said ‘a word out of place’.46 Rather than complain about her fate, Mrs K stoically tells the interviewer, ‘ “There’s people worse off than us [. . .] it would be flying in the face of God to complain.” ’47 If the banalities ‘spoken’ by Mrs K limit our access to her personality, the determination of the article’s author to paint her as ‘one of the happiest of women’ is inadvertently revealing.48 As the narrative develops, Mrs K’s unrelenting cheerfulness in the face of severe poverty slips, as we learn that her ‘constant regret is that she cannot afford more soap and hot water’.49 The indignities of Mrs K’s daily life are symptoms of the wider discontent within which she must operate. For all of his reported good nature, Mrs K’s husband does not hide the frustration at his inability to buy new clothes for his wife and sweets for the children. Here too, the few lines in the article that comprise his micro-biography reveal the apparent tragedy of his life story, the crushing refusal of a permit to travel to England for work due to poor eyesight. Unable to pay for soap, food, children’s clothes, medicine or fuel, Mrs K reports to The Bell that one payment ‘even more important than the rent’ is always paid, the ‘Society’ insurance.50 If living in poverty is seen as degrading, the prospect of a charity burial is described as the ‘ultimate and unbearable humiliation’.51 As other articles in the series had outlined 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

The Bell, 7:1, p.  60. For a contemporary reflection on food poverty in Ireland, see Stephen McCloskey, ‘Foodbanks Are an Important Barometer of Contemporary Poverty:  Development Educators Should Take Notice’, Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, 19 (Autumn 2014), 144–53. Here McCloskey argues that ‘Foodbanks represent an important element in the narrative of contemporary poverty’, describing their rise as signalling ‘an increasing derogation by government to civil society of responsibility for the welfare of the poor in both Britain and Ireland’, p. 149. The Bell, 7:1, p. 58. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 60–1. Ibid., p. 61.

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Irish households’ outgoings on meals and leisure, Mrs K’s account itemises the payments made against potential funerals; ‘sixpence on her husband, fourpence on herself, twopence on the two eldest children and a penny each on the others’.52 Each member of the family, each threatened private tragedy, is a potential cost to be anticipated, budgeted for, down to the heart-breaking penny lives of the babies. As The Bell article reinforces, this insurance payment ‘is not intended for Health. It is intended for Death’.53 Mrs K’s commitment to these payments, especially when the money might so easily be spent on more basic needs, places her within the wider culture of Ireland’s working class in the twentieth century. Throughout this period, unions manifested the dignity and status of their trades through the provision of ‘decent’ burials for members. In some cases a union’s collective respect for burial rituals was so ingrained in the organisation’s culture that members could be fined for not attending a fellow union member’s funeral. As Dermot Keogh explains: The importance attached to a decent burial by the unions can only be understood if the Dubliners’ disgust at the thought of burial in a pauper’s grave is fully appreciated.54

Mrs K operates outside of the union context but reflects the widespread anxiety in the working-class community of dying without the means to meet cultural and religious standards of decency. It is hugely telling, therefore, that her burial is described by the interlocutor as the ‘only item for which she has the satisfaction of paying’.55 The Bell’s interventions into the lives and incomes of ‘Other People’ capture an essential element of the biographical instinct. Outlining their social mission, the authors write: We hope these articles may have come to the eyes of our legislators, so that they may realise in what a struggling condition the majority of this class of people now live.56

Overall, the tone of the articles is an odd mixture of stoical nostalgia and patronising myth; Mrs K, for one, is described as ‘so poor that she has no money worries’.57 Quite. While lives like Mrs K’s are brought somewhat into the ‘foreground’ by The Bell, she remains dependent on journalists 52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid. Ibid. Keogh, Irish Working Class, p. 28. The Bell, 7:1, p. 62. The Bell, 7:2, p. 150. The Bell, 7:1, p. 58.

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and legislators to enact change. These attempts to speak on behalf of others, rather than facilitating diverse voices to be heard, is complicit in what John Brannigan observes as an ‘absence of class-based critiques in Irish Studies’.58 The implicit standards by which we judge written life stories, the expectations we hold of them to be accessible and recognisably adherent to generic conventions, continue to conceal numerous texts from ‘the eyes’ of new readers. The so-called autobiographies of ordinary people have long been described as the ‘most useful’ sources of information and insight we have into the reading and writing lives of the past.59 It is, therefore, essential that the analysis and commentary which grows out from these texts is responsive and meaningfully informed by the multiple lives which surround us and not by a biographical approach that would have us only look up to a ‘great man’ atop a plinth.

58 59

John Brannigan, ‘Foreword’, in Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class, p. vii. Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 1.

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