Canada to Ireland: Poetry, Politics, and the Shaping of Canadian Nationalism, 1788–1900 9780228009573

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C a n a da to I reland

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Carleton Library Series The Carleton Library Series publishes books about Canadian economics, geography, history, politics, public policy, society and culture, and related topics, in the form of leading new scholarship and reprints of classics in these fields. The series is funded by Carleton University, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and is under the guidance of the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board, which consists of faculty members of Carleton University. Suggestions and proposals for manuscripts and new editions of classic works are welcome and may be directed to the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board c/o the Library, Carleton University, Ottawa K1S 5B6, at [email protected], or on the web at www.carleton.ca/cls. board members: John Clarke, Ross Eaman, Jennifer Henderson, Paul Litt, Laura Macdonald, Jody Mason, Stanley Winer, Barry Wright

cls

242 Tug of War Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State Jocelyn Wills 243 The Hand of God Claude Ryan and the Fate of Canadian Liberalism, 1925–1971 Michael Gauvreau 244 Report on Social Security for Canada (New Edition) Leonard Marsh 245 Like Everyone Else but Different The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews, Second Edition Morton Weinfeld with Randal F. Schnoor and Michelle Shames 246 Beardmore The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History Douglas Hunter 247 Stanley’s Dream The Medical Expedition to Easter Island Jacalyn Duffin 248 Change and Continuity Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium Edited by Mark P. Thomas, Leah F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and Olena Lyubchenko 249 Home Feelings Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement Jody Mason

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250 The Art of Sharing The Richer versus the Poorer Provinces since Confederation Mary Janigan 251 Recognition and Revelation Short Nonfiction Writings Margaret Laurence Edited by Nora Foster Stovel 252 Anxious Days and Tearful Nights Canadian War Wives during the Great War Martha Hanna 253 Take a Number How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement Elisabeth Gidengil 254 Mrs Dalgairns’s Kitchen Rediscovering “The Practice of Cookery” Edited by Mary F. Williamson 255 Blacks in Canada A History, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition Robin W. Winks 256 Hall-Dennis and the Road to Utopia Education and Modernity in Ontario Josh Cole 257 University Women A History of Women and Higher Education in Canada Sara Z. MacDonald 258 Canada to Ireland Poetry, Politics, and the Shaping of Canadian Nationalism, 1788–1900 Michele Holmgren

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Canada to Ireland Poetry, Politics, and the Shaping of Canadian Nationalism, 1788–1900

M i c h e l e H olmg r en

Carleton Library Series 258 McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-2280-0837-8 (cloth) 978-0-2280-0838-5 (paper) 978-0-2280-0957-3 (eP DF ) 978-0-2280-0958-0 (eP UB)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Canada to Ireland: poetry, politics, and the shaping of Canadian nationalism, 1788-1900 / Michele Holmgren. Names: Holmgren, Michele, author. Series: Carleton library series; 258. Description: Series statement: Carleton Library series; 258 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210279834 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210279907 | IS BN 9780228008378 (cloth) | IS B N 9780228008385 (paper) | ISBN 9780228009573 (eP DF ) | IS BN 9780228009580 (eP U B ) Subjects: LC S H: Canadian literature—Irish authors—History and criticism. | LC SH: Canadian literature—19th century—History and criticism. | LC SH: Canadian literature—Irish influences. | L CS H : Nationalism in literature. | L CS H: Politics in literature. | L CS H: National characteristics, Canadian, in literature. | CS H: Canadian literature (English)—19th century— History and criticism. | CS H: Canadian literature (English)—Irish authors— History and criticism. Classification: L CC P S 8089.5.I7 H65 2021 | DDC C 810.9/89162—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction  A Canadian in Belfast  3

P art o n e   Ir is h P at r io t s i n Canada  23   1 Isaac Weld  29   2 Stephen Dickson  36

P art t wo   U n it e d Ir is h m e n i n Canada  51   3 Lord Edward Fitzgerald  55   4 Thomas Moore  78

P art t h r e e   Ir is h E m ig r a nt Wri ters an d E m a n c ipat io n   1 0 3   5 Adam Kidd  107   6 Standish O’Grady Bennett  146

P art f o u r   R e b e l l io n , R e sponsi ble G ove r n m e n t, a n d S at ir e   183   7 Charles Dawson Shanly  187   8 James McCarroll  204

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vi Contents

P art f i v e   Y o u n g Ir e l a n d and Young Can ada   2 2 5   9 Thomas D’Arcy McGee  229 10 John Reade  272

P art s i x   Ir e l a n d to t h e C anadi an Wes t  295 11 Nicholas Flood Davin  301 12 Isabella Valancy Crawford  330

Conclusion  An Irish Speaker in Canada  357

Notes 369 Bibliography 401 Index 423

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Acknowledgments

McGill-Queen’s University Press gave me invaluable support from proposal to completed work, and I would like to acknowledge the help of all the people who guided me through this project. In particular, Mark Abley offered advice and encouragement from the beginning, his kindness and good humour giving me the confidence to undertake and complete the project. Kyla Madden saw the work through its final stages after it was accepted for publication. Eleanor Gasparik brought her great insight and eye for detail to copy editing. I am also very grateful to the peer reviewers who read the lengthy manuscript and offered detailed and constructive advice. Jane McGaughey, Michael Kenneally, and Rhona Richman-Keneally of the Concordia School of Irish Studies supported this work by inviting me to present and do research in Montreal in October 2019. In addition to providing invaluable information through his extensive publications on Irish-Canadian nationalism, especially his biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, David Wilson alerted me to the Goldwin Smith snowshoe remark that became such a fitting phrase in the book’s conclusion. Marvin Luther brought a sharp eye to final proofreading and bibliographic checking. Mount Royal University has been very supportive of my research over the years, providing funding for this book, in particular, and enabling me to attend Irish studies conferences as well as host two international Irish-studies conferences in Alberta: one at Mount Royal and one at the Banff Centre. Equally important has been the encouragement and support of my colleagues, including Kit Dobson, Antoine Eche, David Hyttenrauch, Jeff Keshen, Connie Luther, Kirk Niergarth, Aida Patient, Diana Patterson, and Jennifer Pettit. Mount

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viii Acknowledgments

Royal also sponsored formal writing retreats and encouraged peerwriting groups. I gained great motivation from retreats organized by the A DC Writing Space Program as well as from the informal group of writers who met at Primal Grounds Cafe to work and create, fuelled by good strong coffee and delicious cake. Much of this work relied on sources generously and expertly made available to me by librarians in Canada and Ireland. I particularly thank Alice Swabey and the librarians at Mount Royal University; Harriet Wheelock, the Keeper of Collections at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland Heritage Centre; as well as the librarians and archivists of the National Library of Ireland, Linen Hall Library in Belfast, the Archives and Documentation Centre at the McCord Museum in Montreal, Library Archives Canada, Archives of Ontario, the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, and the Taylor Family Digital Library of the University of Calgary. This work reflects more than twenty years of studying and working within a lively Irish-Canadian scholarly community in Canada. Starting as a student and now as a professor, I have been encouraged and inspired by the work of scholars young and old, who gather each year at conferences organized in Canada and Ireland and by the Canadian Association for Irish Studies (cais), creating an invaluable international forum for multidisciplinary scholarship in Irish studies. In general, over the years my scholarship and love of the discipline has been supported and encouraged by the work of c a i s members, journal editors, and conference organizers. c a i s is also known for its support of emerging scholars and its kindness, collegiality, and friendships, often cemented through pleasant chats over pub tables in Canada and Ireland. I acknowledge fondly the memory of late members Hilarion Coughlan, Cecil Houston, and Evelyn O’Leary as  well as the ongoing friendship of Patricia Coughlan, Danine Farquarson, Sean Farrell, Liam Kennedy, Willeen Keough, Patrick Mannion, Fred McEvoy, Michael Quigley, Jean Talman, and many other c a i s members. Equally important has been the advice, guidance, friendship, and enthusiasm of early Canadian literature scholars, especially D.M.R. Bentley and Michael Peterman, along with the many early Canadian scholars who have provided essential research and/or publishing venues for early Canadian literature. Over the years, I regaled/bored my congenial coffee companion, the late Jack Macintosh of the University of Calgary, with Irish-Canadian

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Acknowledgments ix

poetry; he introduced me to William Lyons, of Trinity College Dublin, who kindly offered to hunt down Shanly references for me when he visited archives in Ireland. I was also introduced to the vibrant Irish and Irish-Canadian cultural community in Calgary, and I am grateful for the opportunities I was given to participate in Irish literary events hosted by the Irish Cultural Society of Calgary. Again, the friendship, interest, and support of many long-time members of the Calgary Irish community sustained me during this project. Finally, I am grateful to my family, without whose support and encouragement I would not have been able to complete this project. Thanks especially to my husband David, whose spouse was often away in Ireland, either physically or in imagination. Thanks also to my parents, who have always supported and encouraged me (and sometimes read my drafts). Like many Irish-Canadian poets, my grandfather Joseph Gavan loved the ballad poetry of Ireland, Canada, and Australia. He knew Banjo Patterson and Robert Service poems by heart and showed me from an early age how poetry was both a delight in itself and a way of learning who you are.

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C a n a da to I reland

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In t ro du cti on

A Canadian in Belfast go ne are the days, old Warrior of the Seas, When thine armed head, bent low to catch my voice, Caught but the plaintive sighings of my woods, And the wild roar of rock-dividing streams, And the loud bellow of my cataracts, Bridged with the seven splendours of the bow. Isabella Valancy Crawford, “Canada to England”

The expansive grounds of Belfast City Hall are a popular meeting place in central Donegal Square. Keeping company with office workers and teenagers enjoying a rare green space in an old industrial city are various stone and bronze figures, most prominently Queen Victoria, whose granting of a city charter in 1888 helped turn Belfast into an economic powerhouse.1 Other monuments commemorate the dead from various Irish regiments, the founder of the Harland and Wolff shipyards, as well as Belfast citizens lost with the Titanic – the most famous liner built there. Also prominent is a grand granite and bronze example of “the imperial pretensions of Edwardian Belfast,” the memorial statue of Frederick Hamilton-TempleBlackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Designed by F.W. Pomeroy and commemorating a “local-baron-made-good,” the bronze figure of Dufferin is sheltered within a granite temple supported by four Corinthian columns and flanked by two guardian figures who represent Dufferin’s service to the Queen at “either end of the Empire.”2 Representing India, where Dufferin served as viceroy from 1884–88, a turbaned warrior with a sabre sits on a cannon. Representing Canada, where Dufferin served as governor general from 1872–78, a toque-wearing hunter, equipped with snowshoes and armed with a rifle, sits on a dead moose.

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In addition to his distinctive headgear, the Canadian can be identified as such by his ceinture fleche, or woven arrow sash, his fringed leather leggings, moccasins, and capot, or thick wool coat. Based on French and Indigenous styles going back to the seventeenth century, this clothing would appear archaic at the beginning of the twentieth and yet, in the eyes of the monument’s architect, seemed the best way to convey an essential Canadian identity to a Belfast viewer. By the end of the nineteenth century, hardy woodsmen and hunters depicting the stereotypical Canadian had appeared in Canadian and English newspapers for decades, often dressed as a French-Canadian habitant or associated through garb or gear with farming and logging, ranching, or trapping. Even among urban Canadians, the national association with physical, outdoor labour and the garb and equipment it required was reinforced by community sports clubs like the Montreal snowshoe clubs that were prominent in the ceremonies welcoming Dufferin to Canada in 1872.3 Many of these snowshoers had their portraits taken in the Montreal studio of William Notman. In 1866, he created a popular series of photographic tableaux depicting a caribou hunt, complete with authentic clothing and equipment, along with hundreds of pounds of rock salt for snow. Continuously reprinted as postcards until the end of the century, these were widely distributed throughout the British Empire.4 (The bronze hunter in Belfast bears a striking resemblance to a model who posed for many of these studio recreations.) By the time Dufferin’s monument was completed, the image of the hardy Canadian traveller or worker was common currency throughout the world. It was due in part to earlier nationalist views in which commerce, not to mention peace, order, and good government, in the vast and inaccessible territory of British North America required strength and endurance that was almost super­ human – a strength derived from trading companies’ exploitation of Indigenous knowledge and the adaptive skills of earlier settler and explorer communities, particularly the French Canadians. However, there may be a more specific reason that Dufferin’s statue is defended by a figure whose dress associates him so closely with voyageurs. A respected and successful diplomat, Dufferin also served in Syria, Turkey, and, memorably, in Egypt, where he had been dispatched by Britain’s prime minister William Gladstone in 1882 to compile a report that assumed that the country would be absorbed into the British Empire.5 Instead, the British were drawn into a disastrous war in the Sudan against the Mahdists, who besieged British

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Introduction: A Canadian in Belfast

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forces under General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885. The mission to relieve Gordon fell to several military leaders who, like Dufferin, had seen service in Canada. Lord Joseph Garnet Wolseley, also Anglo Irish, had commanded the final British military engagement in North America: the 1870 Red River Expedition, sent to Manitoba to enforce the transfer of power from Louis Riel’s provisional government to the new Dominion of Canada.6 Wolseley, now part of the command dispatched to rescue Gordon’s troops, drew on his experience in the West of Canada where he had worked successfully with Indigenous, Métis, and French-Canadian boatmen to transport British and Canadian troops. He urged the British government to recruit voyageurs to navigate the treacherous Nile cataracts. Thus, a small group of French, Métis, and Cree Hudson’s Bay employees, joined by lumbermen and boatmen from Ontario and Quebec and the Kahnàwa:ke reserve near Montreal, became some of the 380 volunteers in the expeditionary force dispatched to Egypt. (A few adventurers from Winnipeg, young lawyers and clerks bored with their desk jobs, rounded out their numbers.) In the Canadian and international press, this contingent of civilian boatmen and lumbermen came to symbolize Canadian imperial aspirations, if not Canada itself.7 After an arduous voyage, with the deaths of some of the Canadian crew, the relief forces arrived two days after the garrison fell. In spite of their failure to save Gordon, the boatmen had performed a remarkable feat, portrayed as one of the defining national moments in Charles G.D. Roberts’s patriotic poem, “Canada,” written in 1886, a few months after the expedition: And some Canadian lips are dumb Beneath Egyptian sands. O mystic Nile! Thy secret yields Before us; thy most ancient dreams Are mixed with far Canadian fields And murmur of Canadian streams.8 Recalling Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge,” the boatmen’s graves ensure that a small bit of the Nile riverbank becomes Canadian sacred ground. More importantly, the imagery used to depict the achievement of the Canadian expeditionary force implies that only those with navigational skills acquired literally in “Canadian fields”

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and “Canadian streams” can conquer the Nile and unlock its secrets. Moreover, these images suggest that Roberts is focusing not simply on the navigation and portaging prowess that Canadians brought to their first international expedition but also on a type of Romantic spiritual insight that is acquired by working within the natural rhythms generated by the demands of a unique land. The poem implies that like other Western nations, Canada shares a cultural heritage imagined as extending back in time to the “most ancient dreams” of the Nile, which fertilized one of the earliest civilizations. Roberts goes further, however, in suggesting that the British Empire’s salvation relies on the insight acquired in the New World through communion with a natural and often sublime landscape that inspires its inhabitants to achieve greatness in the world beyond their borders. To Belfast viewers, a sculpture of an armed man in voyageur garb would seem, then, an apt symbol of not only Canadian national character but also the links binding Ireland and Canada in a complex web of cultural affiliations and imperial aspirations within the British Empire. While the concept of an organic link between land, work, and culture had been common to Romantic poetics and study of folk culture for more than a century, some of the first English-speaking writers who drew on the culture of woodsmen and boatmen to construct an image of Canada were Irish visitors or immigrants. Their significant contributions to early Canadian writing and cultural nationalism are the subject of this book. It traces common iconography and themes as they evolve from the 1780s until the early twentieth century, starting with transatlantic Enlightenment observations of North American peoples and culture, through Romanticism, to Canadian cultural nationalism in the era of Confederation and imperialism. All of the featured writers are Irish-born visitors or emigrants who were historically significant and/or who contributed substantial published amounts of writing, particularly poetry, during this period. This study begins with Irish travel writers and prominent visitors to Canada. Writing for Irish and English audiences during a time when both the future of North America and Ireland became pressing issues in European politics, they were alert to the distinctive features of landscape and culture that brought the country to life. The book examines first the travel writing of Isaac Weld (1774–1856), a long poem by Stephen Dickson (1766–1799), and the Canadian letters of the Society of United Irishmen leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763– 1798). A British major stationed in Canada from 1788–89, Fitzgerald

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is best known to nineteenth-century Canadian readers through a biography written in 1830 by the Irish patriotic poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852). Moore himself created some of the most iconic early Canadian poetry based on his own short visit in 1803. The images and concepts articulated by Irish visitors are reprised in the poetry of Irish emigrant writers in Canada through the long poems, collections, or significant single poems of Adam Kidd (1802–1831), Standish O’Grady Bennett (fl. 1776–1846), Charles Dawson Shanly (1811– 1875), James McCarroll (1814–1892), Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825– 1868), John Reade (1837–1919), Nicholas Flood Davin (1840–1901), and Isabella Valancy Crawford (c. 1846–1887). As D.M.R. Bentley has demonstrated, Irish-Canadian writers and, by extension, Canadian literary nationalism were deeply indebted to early depictions of Canada in Weld’s and Moore’s writing. These details had been popularized through the travel writing of Weld and the poetry and memoirs of Moore, both of whom enjoyed a long and international reputation through their widely published and distributed accounts. Moore brought a copy of Weld’s Travels (1799) to North America and included details from this account in several poems describing his own journey through America and Canada in 1803. Due to the success of Moore’s “The Canadian Boat Song,” voyageurs became part of both the Irish and North American literary imagination, and the primary mythical hero in a developing national narrative.9 Set to music, the poem’s evocative chorus, “Row brother, row, the stream runs fast / The rapids are near and the daylight’s past,”10 was sung around pianos throughout Europe and North America into the twentieth century. Moore’s and Weld’s work established a continuity of images, characters, and themes consciously reprised by nationalist writers as they established a literary tradition for what would become a distinctly Canadian literature. Many early Irish-Canadian writers later drew on their vivid and evocative details of Canadian landscape and life. In “Near the Rapids: Thomas Moore in Canada,” Bentley argues that the image of the voyageur appears regularly in Canadian poetry in English and French until at least 1903 (the year after Dufferin’s monument was completed). Moore’s “Canadian Boat Song” was alluded to, imitated, or parodied by Irish-Canadian writers such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee and Standish O’Grady, as well as William Wye Smith’s poem explicitly celebrating the Khartoum expeditionary force, “The Canadians on the Nile.” Details from Weld’s descriptions of Lower

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and Upper Canada also found their way into Moore’s equally influential portrait of Canadian settlement, “Ballad Stanzas,” sometimes known as “The Woodpecker Poem.” Such descriptions of solitary woods and birdlife are reprised not only in the poetry of IrishCanadian poets such as Adam Kidd but also in many emigration guides. The latter’s Romantic and inviting portrait of life in Canada influenced the decisions of other immigrants from the British Isles and so contributed to the great emigrations that began after the Napoleonic Wars and continued into the 1840s, essentially establishing the demographic character of Canada.11 Bentley demonstrates that Moore and Weld presented Canada not only as an ideal destination for immigrants from the British Isles but also as a literary model for a particular Romantic style of nationalist writing in both Ireland and Canada. In “UnCannyda,” Bentley demonstrates how the canoe becomes a symbol of transcendence and unworldliness in Canadian poetry, starting again with the poems Moore composed while traversing the extensive system of rivers and lakes for much of his journey from Lower Canada to Halifax.12 Other Irish-Canadian poets explicitly credited Moore with creating a particular form of Romantic national poetry in Canada that young writers could emulate. In “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s,” from his own collection of nationalist poetry, Thomas D’Arcy McGee offered Moore’s poems as a model for creating a distinctive poetic voice that owes its character to roots in a distinct soil or terroir. Irish-Canadian nationalists recognized that Moore’s invented Canadian traditions could be models for their cultural undertaking. However, the transmission of ideas was not simply from “Ireland to Canada”; this nationalist cultural exchange went both ways. Culturally and politically, Canada had things to teach Ireland: Moore’s Canadian experience gave him an effective formula for Irish national poetry in the nineteenth century. The songs and culture of voyageurs did not simply inspire Canadian literary nationalism: Ronan Kelly and other scholars regard Moore’s adaptation of French-Canadian traditional music in his “Canadian Boat Song” as a test run for the even more successful Irish Melodies, poems that he set to traditional Irish tunes.13 McGee’s choice of Moore’s Canadian poems as models for Canadian national poetry was itself influenced by his own involvement in an influential Irish cultural movement, Young Ireland. This movement’s ideas continued to shape Canadian poetics until the end of the nineteenth century. To McGee, Moore’s Canadian ballads and songs

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Introduction: A Canadian in Belfast

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(themselves redolent of “Canadian fields and streams”) demonstrated how Canada supplied ready materials to create a distinctive literature. Roberts and other Confederation poets’ attempt to create a literature that was free of both colonialism and provincialism was modelled on Young Ireland’s belief that national poetry conveyed the essence of a national identity drawn from the soil and fed by the waters of a specific place. Young Ireland poetics would become a significant influence for the first major poetry movement of the late nineteenth century, the Confederation school. Roberts, one of the most influential of these poets, seriously considered establishing a nationalist movement called “Young Canada” around the time that he wrote “Canada.” Furthermore, the Young Ireland notion that national poetry must necessarily be “racy of the soil” became a significant element of Roberts’s poetics as it filtered through the literary criticism of other Irish-born Canadian writers, especially the highly influential John Reade and Nicholas Flood Davin.14 While Roberts and other Confederation poets aimed for a sophisticated poetry that would be high-quality, cosmopolitan, as well as distinctively Canadian, McGee promoted the creation of popular ballads that would both educate and inspire patriotism in their readers to help them begin to imagine Canada as a sovereign nation. To McGee and Young Ireland, ballads contained the unofficial history and cultural essence of a nation. Influenced by the poetics of Young Ireland that urged nationalists to create modern ballads that were “racy of the soil,” McGee’s poem “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s” presents Moore’s invented voyageurs as the river’s human voice, both dependent on and in tune with the rhythms of the waterways and landscape that would shape Canadian history and determine the nature of its culture. This notion implied that a national poetry would be created through new poems that recalled, through subject matter, idiom, and meter, the country’s existing ballad culture, something that Moore and Young Ireland had demonstrated was possible in Ireland. In Canada, McGee and other nationalists again argued that authentic national voices would rise from the rhythms of Canadian life, particularly its physical and outdoor labour. Such a notion plays out in another extremely popular pre-Confederation ballad by an IrishCanadian, Charles Dawson Shanly’s invented Canadian legend, “The Walker of the Snow.” The harsh demands of trapping and exploration in the Canadian solitude are made endurable by a man who spins a local legend into song, keeping “measure” by “the harp-twang” of his

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snowshoes. The harp, an ostensibly ancient emblem that Moore had done so much to associate with Irish national poetry in his Irish Melodies, finds its Canadian counterpart in the indigenous method of travel taken up by settlers and explorers as they adapted to their new landscape, engendering a national music that nationalists argued was as necessary as exploration and trapping to building a distinctly Canadian nation. These views about national poetry and national character derived from Irish nationalists’ study of German Romantic philosophers, especially Johann Gottfried Herder and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. Young Ireland observed that in the eighteenth century, Germany’s intellectuals had rejected French cultural dominance and French classicism in poetry and drama, turning instead to populist movements and folk traditions to rejuvenate their culture. The writings of Herder gave birth to renewed interest in the poetry of early cultures, particularly “primitive” Celtic and Germanic poetry, as well as folk songs. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Herder was interested in the Scottish poet James Macpherson’s alleged translations of the early Irish poet Ossian as examples of primitive poetry. Herder’s vision of nationality, based on organic distinctions arising from the climate, soil, and history that shaped a language and culture, is taken up in the writings of Duffy and McGee. They, like Herder, believed that the essence of a nation, and its most authentic voice, could be discerned in its earliest poetry. Equally influential was Schlegel, who argued that poetry was also valuable “for the record of the past contained in it,” which was expressed through “the loftiest expression to which language could aspire.” In short, poetry was the “summation of the national soul.”15 Looking to Moore’s Canadian ballads and songs as a model, McGee tried to institute the Young Ireland program of creating ballads in English that would popularize Canada’s little-known history while capturing the nation’s identity, in order to educate and therefore empower its citizens. Moore and Weld can be credited with popularizing images that became Canadian national tropes. However, the image and influence of the heroic Canadian traversing the landscape and rivers by snowshoe or paddle can be extended even further back in time, to the engaging and descriptive letters of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the famous United Irish leader. While only intended for a small, intimate audience of Fitzgerald’s family and friends, his letters were selected and edited by Moore for his 1830 biography of the doomed rebel. In Moore’s

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Introduction: A Canadian in Belfast

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hands, Fitzgerald was transformed into a highly Romantic hero in the style of Byron, an aristocrat fighting for the oppressed who would die on the eve of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. A decade before the rebellion, Fitzgerald had been posted to New Brunswick as a major in the British army. His North American letters comprise a substantial portion of Moore’s successful biography, printed and reprinted in Europe and North America. (Moore’s inclusion of Fitzgerald’s lengthy description of a moose hunt in Quebec in 1789 might help to explain why the moose, rather than the caribou preferred by Canadian sportsmen, was chosen as a recognizably Canadian image for the Belfast monument.) The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald was later alluded to by William Dunlop, a Scots settler promoting emigration to Canada in the 1830s who was fascinated by the letters recalling Fitzgerald’s trail-blazing expeditions via snowshoes and canoes. Moore’s biography portrays Fitzgerald as the ideal combination of capable military officer and aristocratic Romantic who preferred a simple life among open spaces to stately homes, while showing his true democratic proclivities in his willingness to abandon a gentleman’s notion of “sport” to take part in the more collaborative and communal undertaking by Indigenous peoples for whom the moose hunt meant survival. According to Moore, Fitzgerald treasured a document from Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) Chief Karonghyontye (David Hill) announcing Fitzgerald’s ceremonial adoption into the Bear Clan before he left North America in 1789. Moore’s portrait of Fitzgerald predates Notman’s hunting portraits by nearly a century but reveals similar themes. It presents Fitzgerald as an indigenized newcomer to Canada whose essential noble and open-minded nature is revealed by his admiration of Indigenous peoples and political systems, and his ease in adapting to the land and culture’s harsh demands. Tracing what would become key images back to the 1780s introduces influential Irish cultural contexts for Canadian writing that have received less scholarly attention than Irish Romantic nationalism. In fact, the nature of Irish political and cultural expression in Canada owed as much to the earlier Enlightenment nationalist movements of the eighteenth century, in particular the Patriot movement that began in the 1740s and culminated in a brief flowering of limited Irish political autonomy in the Patriot Parliament (of which Edward Fitzgerald was an occasionally obstreperous member) of the 1780s and 1790s. Shaped by events in North America, including the American Revolution, the Patriots saw nationalism in more practical political

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Canada to Ireland

and economic terms than Romantic nationalism. As William Drennan’s famous United Irish ballad “Erin” implied, Ireland turned away from English rule and the traditions of the Old World towards those of the New World. The song shows her with “her face to the west,” associating the West with “progress and enlightenment,” open to both trade and ideas from America, as Julia Wright observes.16 That Moore could project his own desire for political reform onto America, which he claims he briefly and mistakenly imagined as “the elysian Atlantis, where persecuted patriots might find their visions realised and be welcomed by kindred spirits to liberty and repose,”17 shows his own transatlantic awareness. More importantly, while he is considered a Romantic poet, the nationalist aspirations Moore projected onto America were shaped by the Patriot cultural programs that preceded and inspired his later, more Romantic nationalism. The Patriot movement, and its more radical successor, the Society of United Irishmen were influenced and shaped by American politics; in fact, the Patriot Parliament owed its founding in part to the loyal militias that formed to protect British interests in Ireland during the American Revolution. Both the Patriot movement and the Irish Rebellion of 1798 informed the views and circumstances of many writers who visited Canada, not to mention the officials and military leaders governing the remaining British territories in North America. The latter were acutely aware of the potential threat posed by the collaboration of French, Irish, and American republicans, especially in the late 1790s. For example, Weld’s assembly of details contrasting Canada to the new American republic needs to be read in light of the fact that he considered settling in North America in 1795 to escape growing unrest, which would erupt into the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Jason King argues that Weld’s travel account, with its response to the political situation in Ireland in the 1790s, provided key details of Canadian life that later writers would shape into what becomes a “foundational narrative of Irish Canadian Romanticism.”18 Moore was also deeply scarred by his experience of the 1798 rebellion, having joined the Society of United Irishmen while a student19 and having lost close friends, including his Trinity classmate Robert Emmet, to the conflict. The United Irishmen and the nationalist political movements that followed were observed and commented upon throughout the nineteenth century by Canadian nationalists, and this historical awareness shaped their portraits of Canada. Nevertheless, while the principles of the United Irish movement were rarely openly avowed in Canada,20

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the reaction against United Irish principles was. Such political opposition was often expressed as a Romantic-influenced political and social conservatism in which Canada, according to King, was figured as a “peaceable Kingdom” contrasted to both Ireland and America, an antidote to the perceived poison of French and American revolutionary ideals in the years leading to responsible government in Canada.21 Consequently, this Romantic and conservative view of Canada is often either an outgrowth or a reaction to the earlier intellectual movements that Weld, Moore, Stephen Dickson, and, most dramatically, Fitzgerald were involved in or affected by. The Society of United Irishmen was the radical outgrowth of the Patriot movement, which sponsored the first Anglo-Irish cultural revival in Ireland, itself influenced more by Enlightenment than Romantic values. Originating with the English-speaking aristocracy and professional classes, the Patriot movement did not advocate independence from England. Instead, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, Irish Patriots argued that having a culture and interests distinct from England gave them the right to determine their own affairs through a measure of responsible government. Influenced by Enlightenment views held by a rising middle and professional class that included the Catholic merchant class, the movement began in the 1740s. In its political dimension, it gradually won concessions from both England and the Irish aristocracy, including a partial relaxation of the Penal Laws for Roman Catholics, a fair and equal application of English constitutional laws in Ireland, and more freedom in trade. In the 1770s, Irish Patriots formed a democratically organized volunteer militia in the face of a threatened French invasion. This group, the Volunteers, was able to wrest more rights from both the aristocracy and England, including gradual enfranchisement of Catholics and Dissenters, culminating in an independent parliament in 1782, idealized and eulogized by Standish O’Grady in his Canadian long poem, The Emigrant (1841). Believing that national advancement depended on the advancement of science and scholarship, the Patriots founded the Royal Irish Academy in 1785. That this intellectual organization had a reach beyond Ireland is demonstrated by the fact that so many writers featured in this book were members. Stephen Dickson, author of The Union of Taste and Science, was one of its founders (along with being one of the first chairs of the Trinity School of Medicine and its first librarian). Isaac Weld was also a member, and his own interest in

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Canada to Ireland

topographical writing did not cease with his North American explorations. His reputation established with the publication of the Travels, he participated in substantial topographical and ordinance surveys of Killarney and Roscommon after his return to Ireland. Thomas D’Arcy McGee was also a member, and John Reade tried to replicate its contributions to literary nationalism when, as one of the founders of the Royal Society of Canada, he recommended that it promote the study of folklore and history as well as literature. The fact that the Irish Parliament provided only partial freedoms for the Irish and failed to obtain full franchise for Catholics or Dissenters meant that many civic and sectarian questions remained unresolved in the 1790s. Comprised for the most part of loyal, albeit discontented, Anglo-Irish subjects, the Irish Parliament saw many of its nationalist objectives pass into the more radical hands of the United Irishmen. Less concerned with preserving their privileges than the Ascendancy Patriots, they were willing to take more radical measures in achieving religious fraternity, liberty, and economic equality for all Irish communities. The United Irishmen’s attempt to establish a republic through military force ended the more moderate Patriot dream of reconciling the interests of the Ascendancy and Catholic population of the island. As a result of the rebellion, followed by harsh reprisals from the British army and Protestant militias, “the Patriot ideal of a conciliated Ireland with citizens working disinterestedly for the public good eventually died a painful death”: Ireland was forcibly united with Great Britain in 1800, depriving the Patriots of a political forum in which to exercise civic responsibility.22 This historical event furnishes the moral example at the centre of Standish O’Grady’s long poem as he attempts to deal with the dual trauma of emigration and violent rebellion in Quebec in the 1830s. While more radical, the Society of United Irishmen also drew its rhetorical power from cultural revivals that produced idealized images of a non-sectarian, more egalitarian past. Consequently, the society supported traditional music through its famous Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 and promoted its argument of Irish cultural distinctiveness through political poems and ballads, often set to traditional tunes.23 (Edward Bunting’s collection and publication of harp tunes performed at the festival provided Moore with the melodies for his patriotic songs.) The Society of United Irishmen sought to find common interest in the political aims of non-ascendancy Protestants and Catholic middle class and peasantry. It found strong support in the North

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among Protestant Dissenters, who made up much of the professional class and trades. The society went further than the Patriots by viewing both the American and French revolutions as models for an independent republic. They began negotiations with the French in 1795 for an Irish military uprising supported by a French invasion. The impact of these negotiations, and the subsequent events of the rebellion, did more than spur Isaac Weld’s journey to North America as a possible prelude to emigration. It also shaped American and British politics in North America, which was not surprising, since so many members and participants in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 ended up there. Thomas Addis Emmet, the brother of Robert, became a successful American politician. General Peter Hunter carried out his role as military governor in Wexford with brutal and lethal efficiency in 1798, before commanding the military forces in British North America and then becoming lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. Hunter and other British officials’ anxiety about events in Ireland and America shaped early politics in Canada. Their anxieties were heightened, for instance, by the capture of the Olive Branch, an American ship attempting to smuggle thousands of muskets to Lower Canada insurgents in collusion with the French government in 1796.24 The events of 1798, and the fact that so many writers – including Thomas Moore, Adam Kidd, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, and even the conservative Standish O’Grady – were either Society of United Irishmen members, sympathizers, or descendants meant that the movement cast a long shadow in Canada. Nicholas Flood Davin saw it stretching as far west as the North-West Resistance led by Louis Riel nearly a century later. That the journalist Davin viewed Riel’s resistance through the lens of one hundred years of Irish history25 extends the continuity of preoccupations shared by Irish travel writers and emigrant poets almost to the beginning of the twentieth century. Davin’s writing also demonstrates how Canadian Romanticism influenced imperial views of Canada and the West, particularly through what could be viewed as a poetics of land possession. An issue equally pressing in both Ireland and Canada, this mutual influence was astutely recognized by Davin throughout his political career, and during his time as the founder and editor of the Regina newspaper, the Leader, set up in part to promote Canadian expansion in the West.26 Given the importance of these Irish cultural movements to IrishCanadian writers, this book argues that the role of cultural nationalism in early Canadian writing cannot be fully understood without the

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context of the literary and intellectual history of the Irish in Canada. This context restores awareness of the enormous contribution made by the Irish in Canada. As visitors, their travel accounts in Canada provided motifs for much early poetry, as Bentley and others have demonstrated. As emigrants, they often played a prominent dual role in Canada’s cultural and political history, which is not surprising when literature and politics were bound together in Irish national movements. The book also argues that a critical analysis of these writers’ major works (generally long poems and/or book-length collections) depends upon an understanding of intertwined Irish and Canadian history as well as literary biography. (With lesser-known writers such as O’Grady and Kidd, much of that biography relies on conjecture, although I have discovered documents that significantly alter our current view of some of these writers.) Equally important in understanding these writers are their works’ many paratexts (including the extensive footnotes for many poems and the surrounding articles and essays in contemporary journals and newspapers, which often remain the only way that some of these writers’ poems and other writing are currently accessible). This study emphasizes the transatlantic, transnational scope of Irish cultural nationalism and recognizes that to focus exclusively on Irish literary influence in Canada would be analogous to cutting up a Fabergé egg to study its components, as Donald Akenson has argued about studying Irish communities abroad in isolation from each other.27 As Akenson and other historians and literary scholars continue to demonstrate, viewing Canadian cultural nationalism in its proper transatlantic context reveals the debt that Irish political and cultural nationalism owes to its diasporic community. In fact, mass emigration from Ireland pointed to both crises and opportunities facing the country, beginning in the eighteenth century and intensifying at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815: economic pressures and modernization meant that the question of emigration had to be considered by every young person, regardless of class or creed.28 Moreover, Irish diasporic communities were often deeply engaged in articulating and promoting Irish interests in North America and elsewhere, and Irish nationalism at home was shaped to a vast extent by the Irish abroad in response to their own interactions with the communities among which they settled. An illustration by way of example is the mutual exchange of ideas and support between Quebec and Irish supporters of the Emancipation and Repeal movements. From the

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late-eighteenth century until the early twentieth, Canadian literary nationalism was influenced by the ideas promoted and introduced by Irish scholars and poets who visited or settled in Canada. However, their circumstances and views, and often their fates, were in turn shaped by the transatlantic web of relationships between Ireland, Britain, France, and North America. Recent histories continue to show how Ireland’s relationship with Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries influenced British strategic decisions in North America, from the American War of Independence through to 1867 and beyond. The prominent transatlantic role of Irish and Canadian-Irish visitors, emigrants, and writers is also due to their increasing numbers from the late eighteenth century onwards. Consequently, they influenced early Canadian political and literary thought. Exploring IrishCanadian writing in an accurate demographic and cultural context is essential to understanding early Canadian literary nationalism itself. While in past decades, historians have done much to reassess popular Canadian assumptions about Irish immigration, migration after the Great Famine continues to hold sway in the popular literary imagination. This is due in no small part to extraordinarily vivid and compelling portraits in modern works such as Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World, Jane Urquhart’s Away, or Peter Behrens’s Irish trilogy, and their antecedents in widely distributed serialized fiction and emigrant accounts in the nineteenth century. Along with these works, the century and a half history of monuments and commemoration – start­ ing with the Irish Commemorative Stone erected in Montreal in 1859; the work of Marianna O’Gallagher in the 1970s and 1980s to acknowledge the immigrants buried at the Grosse Île quarantine station, now a national historic site; and Toronto’s Ireland Park that opened in 2007 – perpetuate the affecting image of Irish famine victims finding either refuge or a grave in Canada.29 These migrants and their descendants made an undeniable contribution to Canada, and the circumstances of their arrival between 1845 and 1848 irrevocably changed Canadian-British relations and thus Canada’s destiny. That said, famine migration needs to be considered as part of a larger, more long-standing pattern of Irish emigration to Canada. In 1788, Fitzgerald described Halifax as already Irish in character, but that eighteenth-century Irish migration was dwarfed by the post-Napoleonic influx of Irish. For them, British North America was the second most popular destination after Great Britain itself until 1845, when

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immigrants (including many famine refugees who first landed in Canada) began to go to the United States instead. Consequently, Irish were the principal immigrant groups in Canada for the first half of the nineteenth century, forming the largest English-speaking community when the population was surveyed in 1871.30 If the diversity of Irish communities in Canada is not accurately represented by rural, possibly Irish-speaking Catholics fleeing the famine, it does not mean that a more accurate image is supplied by their antithesis, the Orange Protestants who were anti-Catholic and steadfastly loyal to the British Crown. Demographic portraits present a more diverse set of Protestant communities settling in Canada, often distinguished by region. (Some of these Protestant communities were even Irish speaking, as Peter Toner discovered.31) Moreover, rather than being the “invisible Irish,” a phrase famously denoting the Englishspeaking communities of relatively well-off and well-educated Irish undistinguished from the general migration from the British Isles, the earlier Irish communities stamped Canada with diverse and distinct characteristics that were recognizably Irish and very often nationalist, although not always conforming to the Romantic cultural nationalism that evolved into the Irish Literary Revival, the form of nineteenthcentury Irish literary and artistic expression that most readers continue to be familiar with. While literature can create dramatic but perhaps simplistic portraits of Irish identity, it can also reveal the complexity and diversity of Irish attitudes to their own country, Britain, and Canada. Once again, recognizing the influence of national movements beyond Romantic cultural nationalism can alert readers to the full range of political and cultural responses that Irish immigrants might hold, based on their class and ethnic identity. Looking at individual writers and their lives in the context of national movements can also complicate the picture: James McCarroll may have been in the Orange Order as a young man, and then became a Fenian later in life, while Thomas D’Arcy McGee, hunted out of Ireland as an Irish-Catholic rebel, befriended Orange politicians and died at the hand of a Fenian assassin. Standish O’Grady, a Protestant loyal to the Crown, was nevertheless proud of Irish ancestry that went back to the third century, while McGee’s family may have come from Scotland in the seventeenth. Irish nationalism did not automatically make writers sympathize with other oppressed or marginalized groups. Even Fitzgerald’s ostensibly revolutionary views of both Indigenous and settler societies are complicated by his role as a British officer patrolling the new border

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and surveying land for settlement (by canoe and on snowshoes). In one way, he imagines a peaceable kingdom with room for all and approves of a simple way of life best represented by the Indigenous hunting party who likely saved his expedition from starvation in 1789. They explained to Fitzgerald that “they were all one brother” as they shared their provisions with the British soldiers, Fitzgerald’s AfricanAmerican servant, and the French-Canadian guides that made up the expedition. Moreover, his friendship with Kanien’keha:ka chiefs Karonghyontye and Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) and the conversations in which Brant compared his impressions of European and North American life may have influenced, or else confirmed, his republican values. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s recognition – that Indigenous cultures might hold the key to happiness and could lead to a simpler, more egalitarian immigrant society – was made at a time when Brant and other Indigenous leaders were already being forced to cede their traditional lands to the Americans and negotiate with the Crown for a new home in British territories. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in Quebec were still waiting for the British to fulfill promises made after the American Revolution when Adam Kidd and the Irish Vindicator advocated for their land rights. In some ways, Kidd appears more radical than Fitzgerald: when his poetry is read in the context of his journalism in Upper and Lower Canada, his Romanticized portrait of Indigenous nations does not blind him to the actual plight of communities whose military and cultural contributions won them promises from both the British and the Americans that were then repeatedly broken. McGee, also sympathetic to Indigenous cultures in his poems, had argued that a tolerant, non-sectarian nationalism that respected the distinctive qualities of emigrant communities would gradually transform emigrants into Canadians. However, the poets who took up his challenge to create a national literature in Canada used what they considered the Irish people’s distinct contributions and success within the British Empire to argue for the assimilation of both the French Canadians and the Indigenous peoples of the western territories of Canada. Davin’s writing and, to a certain extent, Crawford’s unsettles the popularly held assumption that Irish cultural nationalists would be more likely than other emigrant groups to identify with Indigenous and Métis resistance to colonization (a scenario often wistfully conjured by contemporary novelists such as Urquhart). Romantic nationalist movements predicated on links to the land could instead regard Indigenous sovereignty in the west of Canada as preventing a solution

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Canada to Ireland

to the Irish question, which was based primarily on land tenure, and which continued to be a transatlantic concern from the 1860s until the first years of the twentieth century. In the views of Reade, Davin, and Crawford, Irish cultural distinctiveness was one thread in a larger Canadian culture believed to have the potential to save, or at least rejuvenate, the Empire. It was seen to occur primarily through the establishment of a simple, yeoman class that would find what Davin called “homes for Millions” in the new Canadian territories, relieving the economic and social pressures fuelling the Land War in Ireland and radical movements in England and elsewhere. Rather than recognize Indigenous and Métis rights based on ties to their ancestral lands, Crawford, Reade, and Davin instead employ the Romantic notion of connection to the land to support settlement. They argue for a program of cultural indigenization similar to the one Irish Patriots used to justify their own rights and privileges by grafting their English-based, Enlightenment culture onto ancient, Gaelic/Celtic roots. In doing so, the colonists transfer their loyalty and connection from Ireland to the New World, replacing Indigenous peoples who conveniently become ghosts, or acquiesce to their own obsolescence, in some of the poems. The Canadian imperialist movement, like its Patriot precursor, imagined a society free of linguistic, sectarian, and cultural divisions, but was constrained by its need to limit privileges and ascendancy to one group. This can explain in part why both Ireland and Canada are challenged in the present by unfinished business, often surrounding the issue of reconciliation. A look at the literary and political history of the Irish in Canada recovers a commonly held nineteenth-century vision of the future that was overwritten by subsequent events in the twentieth century. To many observers in the 1880s, the most obvious destiny for Ireland would be as a constitutional monarchy. Canadians shared with many Irish the assumption that in due time Ireland would be granted the type of responsible government enjoyed by Canada in the form of Home Rule, probably before the century’s end. Instead, in 1912, a decade after Dufferin’s statue was erected on its grounds, the Ulster Covenant was signed in Belfast City Hall, opposing the third Home Rule bill, ironically in a region that had not only supplied many dedicated United Irishmen but also contributed so much to the character of Irish communities and Irish literature in Canada. The promise of Home Rule, so strenuously resisted by the Protestant majority in the North, became continually deferred. The First World War intervened,

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and a small group of Irish nationalists recognized, once again, that England’s extremity was Ireland’s opportunity. In 1916, they organized an ill-fated attempt at establishing a republic by force that ultimately set Ireland on a very different political path than Canada had taken. With partition of Ireland in 1920, the dream of a republic first imagined by the United Irishmen more than two hundred years previously was incomplete, in the eyes of their successors. Likewise, Louis Riel and his fellow-members of the first government in Western Canada had imagined another cultural middle ground, a territory that would recognize the common interests shared by Indigenous, Métis, and white settlers in the region. They were ultimately defeated by the equally destructive forces of Victorian paternalism and armed militias. It is only at the end of the extensive Truth and Reconciliation process that people in the West of Canada are beginning to see all its inhabitants as treaty peoples and beginning the long work to recognize what Fitzgerald glimpsed in 1788: a society different than Europe, based in part on the notion of being “all one brother,” where Irish, AfricanAmerican, French-Canadian, and Indigenous peoples were interdependent on each other for survival. Consequently, this book attempts to present Irish-Canadian intellectual history as a force behind much national poetry and politics in a Canada whose evolution was interdependent with Ireland’s from its beginnings until the twentieth century. It inevitably works from an early twenty-first century, Reconciliation perspective that acknowledges the dark side of nationalism, where cultural studies and poetry were used to justify imperial expansion in the West in a way that was actively hostile to the existing peoples – often Indigenous, Métis, and French – whom imperialists often viewed as inferior. The imperialist view was promoted by some members of the British Protestant nationalist movement Canada First even as they celebrated the contributions of the Irish. However, this work also recognizes, and modestly attempts to carry on, the cultural recovery of the intellectual contributions of the Irish in Canada initiated by McGee, Reade, and even Davin. These poets saw scholarship as indivisible from affairs of state, just as they saw the Irish contribution as indivisible from the English in both Europe and Canada. At their worst, their defence of an essential, Celtic strand in the larger imperial nationalism of the late nineteenth century perpetuated stereotypes predicated on separate racial groups for which we now know there is no scientific basis. Davin in particular shared with many Victorian nationalists a view of the Irish as contributing

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to a narrative of continual cultural progress. He used this to justify the forcible assimilation of French, Métis, and Indigenous peoples in Canada, peoples whose values and outlook he considered obsolete in a modernizing world. At the same time, these poets and scholars worked to refute centuries of ignorance and prejudice regarding Irish culture, and their prodigious work uncovered centuries of Irish contributions to European and then North American culture. This was done in part to overcome the bigotry of two centuries when religious divisions and xenophobia continually threatened the political unity that Canada and Ireland both depended on to move from colony to nation. Emerging from the invasions, insurrections, riots, and turmoil of the 1830s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, Canadian Confederation was an extraordinary achievement, and McGee’s contributions prove that it depended in part on each community knowing and respecting the history and distinctive contributions of the others. In the early twenty-first century, North America, Canada, England, and Europe are again facing political and cultural changes predicated on the global inter-connectedness of politics, commerce, and culture. Fears about these changes, fuelled by exclusionary nationalist rhetoric, are often expressed through prejudice, even violence, against migrant and Indigenous communities alike. That the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland figures so prominently again in current European politics shows how Ireland’s history continues to affect the Western world. Literature and scholarship continue to challenge simplistic national narratives. From the eighteenth century until the twentieth, Irish writers in Ireland, then Canada, attempted to recover their history and express it in national poetry that asserted their right to distinctiveness and independence. However, they often made this argument by demonstrating how, for centuries, English and European culture were dependent on Irish scholarship. The intellectual activity that informs the literature in this book reminds us of this paradox.

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P art o n e Irish Patriots in Canada

Viewed from the perspective of some nineteenth-century writers in Canada, the 1780s were Ireland’s golden age. In response to the American Revolution, along with fears that France would invade England through the back door of its neighbouring island, Britain granted Ireland a limited degree of responsible government by increasing the power of the Irish Parliament in 1782. Known as Grattan’s Parliament after its most influential leader, Henry Grattan, and characterized by eloquent speakers, it made the ­elegant neighbourhoods surrounding the parliament house the site of glittering social occasions, attracting not only politicians but also members of high society. With many of its members active in the Irish nationalist movement that paved the way for it, the Parliament became a central symbol of the Irish Enlightenment, both promoting and being inspired by scientific, intellectual, and economic progress that a civic-minded elite hoped would improve society at home and Ireland’s prestige abroad. The Patriot movement illustrates the importance of intellectual societies to national movements. While Grattan’s Parliament was short-lived, the cultural revival that complemented it had significant implications for later forms of Irish nationalism. Beginning in the 1740s, Gaelic culture attracted the attention of mostly Protestant amateur historians and philologists, and the movement remained associated with an English-speaking elite. In spite of its conservative origins, the Patriots realized such research could be used to counter negative portrayals of Ireland and the Irish in English narratives. Investigations into Norman and Gaelic culture not only buttressed Patriots’ arguments that, historically, Ireland was a “distinct

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kingdom of the English Crown” deserving its own government but also presented an edifying and idealized image of past Irish society as non-sectarian, with a balance between democratic and aristocratic interests.1 The collections and translations of Irish poetry in the 1760s also fed into wider interests in ballads and oral culture in English literature as well as the European fascination with so-called primitive societies free of modern artificial constraints and corruption. Coinciding with the establishment of a more independent ­parliament, Irish historians, language scholars, and scientists obtained a royal charter for an Irish Academy in 1785, with the Earl of Charlemont, James Caulfeild, as its first president. From its beginning, the Academy society looked for a balance between science and the arts, and so the council’s twenty-one members were drawn roughly equally from the sciences and humanities.2 Early membership drew on the political, scientific, professional, and scholarly elite of Ireland, and included politicians such as Henry Flood and John Philpot Curran, well-known antiquaries Sylvester O’Halloran and the eccentric Charles Vallancey, and the chemist Richard Kirwan.3 Multidisciplinary and occasionally ecumenical, it provided “a rare platform from which religious and political controversies were excluded, and where Irishmen of all persuasion could come together in the scholarly analysis of Irish culture.”4 The Academy again fit in with wider Enlightenment interests in the promotion, collection, and rational analysis of nature and human ­societies, but also helped collect, preserve, and translate Ireland’s past historical, legal, and ­literary culture, which would be drawn upon by cultural ­nationalists for future revivals in the 1830s and 1880s. Consequently, the Royal Irish Academy’s interest in promoting respect for Ireland through its past culture was combined with ­supporting modern advances in agriculture, medicine, and technology to promote the idea of Ireland’s aristocratic, professional, and merchant classes as a cadre of “emissaries of an expansive world Empire in the van of human progress in politics, law, commerce, ­science and letters.”5 When George i i i granted the charter, its wording was influenced by the work of Irish antiquaries: “w e are willing to give encouragement to studies of that Nature in all parts of our dominions, and more especially in our said Kingdom of Ireland, which was in antient times famous for its Schools and Seminaries of Learning.”6

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The year 1785 also saw a School of Physic established at Trinity by act of Parliament. Before this, Irish physicians had to go to Edinburgh to get a medical degree, as Stephen Dickson, the first ­secretary of the Royal Irish Academy, had done before becoming one of the first professors at the new medical school in Dublin, and its first librarian. Like other professionals in Dublin, he was interested in promoting both science and literature, and gave frequent papers on both subjects at the Royal Irish Academy. The establishment in the early 1780s of a medical school and medical library, a parliament, and a learned society provided politicians and scholars alike with a stage for their talents at home, as well as a way to be participants and beneficiaries in the wider world open to an increasingly powerful Britain. However, the same European and transatlantic political upheavals that helped gain Ireland its parliament also made it a more dangerous and anxiety-provoking place for those same elites in the 1790s. While the Parliament secured modest political reforms and removed some of the most discriminatory laws affecting Catholics and Dissenters, it could not keep up with the general population’s desire for change, fuelled by ideas from France and images of a more egalitarian society that North America seemed to offer. As well, Ireland continued to be the most vulnerable point in British defence against revolutionary conspiracies within and invasions from without. Dissatisfied with the limited freedoms granted to the Irish Parliament and the slow pace of reform, many Irish politicians and activists envisioned a republic modelled on America and France. In the mid-1790s, France in particular was willing to exploit Irish discontent in order to weaken Britain in Europe, as well as regain its lost colonies in North America. In 1796, the current government, the Directoire, was happy to receive the United Irish leader, Wolfe Tone, who was looking for French military support on Irish territory for an Irish rising. They also encouraged an Irish-American named William Tate who wanted to carry out the same objective by invading England directly. The disaffected Vermont businessman Ira Allen had an equally intriguing proposal: he planned to wrest the formerly French colonies in North America from British rule and found a new democratic republic in its place: United Columbia. Making the mistake that the Hunters’ Lodges and the Fenians would repeat in the 1830s and 1860s, Allen assured the French government that the Canadien population of Quebec, smarting under both

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seigneurial rule and the British government’s conscription and road tax demands, would welcome and join an invading force sent to ­liberate them.7 In November 1796, the British Navy intercepted the American freighter Olive Branch, bound for Vermont with a less than peaceful cargo. Twenty thousand muskets and other assorted arms purchased by Allen with money from the French were to be put in the hands of an invading force of Vermont and French-Canadian soldiers. Initially assuming these weapons were bound for Ireland, the British were right to be suspicious, since that same winter, forty-three French ships carrying 14,000 French troops commanded by General Hoche and Wolfe Tone had approached the Irish coast before a ­catastrophic storm dispersed them. The Irish chancellor, already on the alert for radical activity in Ireland, suspended habeas corpus, and the additional political oppression likely provided new recruits for the United Irishmen. Many leaders and suspected conspirators were put under surveillance or jailed without trial. In 1796, Belfast librarian Thomas Russell was arrested in Dublin and held as a state prisoner. His position as adjutant general of the United Irishmen was filled by another Northern Irish intellectual, divinity doctor William Steele Dickson, also under surveillance by the government, and arrested a few days before uprisings took place in Co. Down in early June 1798. In August of that year, the French launched another invasion and succeeded in landing in Co. Mayo. By then, however, with their leadership in disarray after a government ­crackdown in May, most of the uprisings had been put down. Most of the French officers surrendered by September of that year and became prisoners of war, a far more fortunate fate than that of many ordinary soldiers and peasants who were summarily ­executed or tortured in the aftermath of the conflict. Needless to say, the 1790s were tense times for Irish people, regardless of their class or religious persuasion. Protestants loyal to the Crown feared invasion and attack, whereas Catholics and Dissenters saw the few rights the Parliament had granted them snatched away in an era of increasing government paranoia and oppression. This paranoia was as transatlantic as the conspiracies to invade Ireland, Britain, and British North America. Colonial authorities in Quebec, like their Irish counterparts, suspended habeas corpus in 1796 to put down riots at home and discourage sedition and aggression from abroad. The British colonial

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Part One: Irish Patriots in Canada

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government in Quebec established a (mostly) efficient intelligence system, but one that often exaggerated the subversive threats posed by French Canadians. Where in Ireland citizens were imprisoned unjustly, or worse, the Canadian governors and judiciary dealt ­summarily and harshly with American and French agents, most memorably in the case of David McLean in 1797. Engaged by the French to gauge support for an invasion, he was sentenced to death for high treason by the Quebec court. In July 1797, among cries for mercy (and offers of marriage) from many women present, the young, handsome American was publicly executed. Rather than listen to the appeals for clemency, Governor Robert Prescott instead rejected the common practice of commuting the ghastlier aspects of the punishment for high treason. After his body had hung for twenty-five minutes, McLean’s “head was cut off, and the executioner holding it up to public view proclaimed it ‘the head of a traitor.’ – An incision was made below the breast and a part of the bowels taken out and burnt; the four quarters were marked with a knife,” but officials decided that complete ­dismemberment was perhaps a little bordering on cruelty, as Jonathan Swift might have said.8 The effectiveness of such brutal demonstrations had already been learned by another colonial administrator, Peter Hunter, who came from a posting in Wexford directly to Quebec in 1798. As military governor in Ireland, he had displayed the heads of executed United Irish rebels on spikes.9 Consequently, Isaac Weld and Stephen Dickson arrived in a land that was geographically and culturally different, but whose administration shared the same terror of revolution and invasion, not to mention some of the same political actors, as in the case of General Hunter. Both Irish visitors, their lives significantly disrupted by United Irish activities, would find that its reach extended to the British territories in North America. Weld came from a learned family of Dublin clergymen, and his first name commemorated a family friendship with Isaac Newton. Partly in response to fears about Irish political unrest, which began to unsettle wealthy Anglo-Irish citizens as early as 1795, the young Weld considered North America as a possible refuge in case of a rebellion.10 While he eventually decided to return home, his Travels through the states of North America, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797 became a literary success, as well as a significant document

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for later historians and literary scholars. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 also cast its shadow on Stephen Dickson, a less-celebrated Irish visitor whose long poem The Union of Taste and Science (1799) is an early example of published literature in Canada. However, both writers, products of the flourishing intellectual ­society of Dublin, brought that spirit of inquiry across the ocean. As a founding member of the Royal Irish Academy, Dickson was active in promoting Patriot values. His poem provides a unique view of how his promotion of Irish Enlightenment–inspired ­societies shaped his view of early Canadian society in Quebec. The success of Isaac Weld’s Travels no doubt encouraged his later topographical surveys of Ireland that helped inform and shape the cultural revivals of the nineteenth century.

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1 Isaac Weld (1774–1856)

Isaac Weld’s Travels through the states of North America, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797 was memorable for its vivid contrasts between Canadian and American colonial life, the detailed description of the French and Indigenous communities’ distinct customs and cultures, and the picturesque and sublime depictions of North American scenery. It continued to provide images that Canadian writers would use throughout the nineteenth century, as D.M.R. Bentley has demonstrated.1 It also ensured his respect and renown in Ireland. In later life, he was elected vice-president of the Royal Dublin Society, founded in 1820 to promote arts, agriculture, and science in Ireland, and he continued his topographical work, publishing Illustrations of Killarney and the Surrounding Country in 1807.2 His early journey to North America at the age of twenty-one, along with his lifelong interest in learning about the world and using that knowledge to improve society, suggests a mind open to new experience and adventure. His travel was also shaped by the increasing colonial ambitions of Britain, whose territories in North America offered opportunities to those of Weld’s class who were some of the first to become “alert to the worsening economic conditions of pre-Famine Ireland and sufficiently affluent to take evasive action.”3 As interested in “examining with his own eyes into the truth of the various accounts which had been given of a flourishing and happy condition of the United States of America” as he was with exploration, he claims in his preface that his visit was “for the purpose … of ascertaining whether, in case of future emergency, any part of those territories might be looked forward to, as an eligible and agreeable place of abode.”4

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Weld’s journey was itself a remarkable feat, given the rudimentary transportation of the time. He travelled on horseback, by canoe, and on foot through the Great Lakes and Niagara region, as well as Detroit, New York, Pennsylvania, and New York. While unique and exciting to a young man, the rigours he endured might have also convinced him against settling, particularly in America, which he determined to “leave … without a sigh, and without the slightest wish to revisit it” (1.iii). His experience among civic-minded professionals and intellectuals in Dublin likely left him unprepared for frontier manners. His experience of political unrest in Ireland would make him less receptive to the French-inspired egalitarianism of America, particularly when it was embodied by settlers he found were obsessed with profit, and who confused emancipation with rudeness. As he observed of many of the Americans he encountered, “civility cannot be purchased from them on any terms; they seem to think it is incompatible with freedom, and that there is no other way of convincing a stranger that he really is in a land of liberty, but by being surly and ill-mannered in his presence” (1.31). He found the manners and customs of French and English settlers in British-controlled Quebec more to his liking, as did Thomas Moore a few years later, when he used Weld’s Travels as a guide when he arrived in America in 1804.5 In addition to being a literary success that gained a wide audience in England, America, and Europe, the Travels were one of the most easily accessible and influential sources of information about British North America. The book, along with a government paper on emigration that Weld wrote based on its success, became a powerful advertisement encouraging North American immigrants to choose the British territories over the United States.6 Consequently, his book helped shape the demographic makeup of Canada in the nineteenth century. In the earlier eighteenth century, Ireland had been a popular subject for travel writers, and its picturesque and sublime aspects became as appealing as the distinctiveness of the peculiarities of its rural people.7 Likewise, Weld’s delight in a picturesque North American scene or a descriptive detail made him comprehend the landscape he travelled through in terms of the relationships among people’s habits, the economies and customs that shaped them, and the buildings, plants, animals, and waterways he encountered along his way. North America provided him with an opportunity to comment on the characteristics of the different classes and nationalities that had settled the continent, and to present detailed and often sympathetic accounts of the

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Indigenous people he encountered. Most important, he was sensitive to the poetry of their place names, lamenting “that the Indian names, so grand and sonorous, should ever have been changed for others. Newark, Kingston, York, are poor substitutes for the original names of these respective places, Niagara, Cadaragui, Toronto” (2.88). It is not surprising that an Irish writer sensitive to the cultural consequences of “miscalled” landmarks (McGee’s phrase in “The Celts”) would also regret Indigenous place names being sacrificed to the imperialist drive that D.M.R. Bentley saw at work behind the “Englishing of half a continent.”8 Like British officials in Canada, Weld understood the political webs that bound together Ireland, France, America, and Canada. Cultures are portrayed most vividly through their difference from one another. In America, Weld considered encounters with “decent, civil, and reputable” people are “rare.” Instead, he characterizes Americans as “men of a morose and savage disposition … who bury themselves in the woods as if desirous to shun the face of their fellow creatures” (2.326). He also noted that “the Americans … seem to be totally dead to the beauties of nature, and only to admire a spot of ground as it appears to be more or less calculated to enrich the occupier by its produce” (2.328). In contrast, he was charmed by the picturesque farms and the French-Canadian settlers who possessed them. Interestingly, where to British administrators, “Lower Canada resembled Ireland with a French twist,”9 Weld presents its inhabitants as peaceful and content, benefitting from a relatively liberal rule. He does not explicitly compare the Canadians’ happy state under British government to the majority of Irish people back home, but nevertheless invites implicit comparisons with Ireland. For example, unlike in Ireland, Catholics were obliged to pay tithes only to their own church (1.364). In contrast to the misanthropically individualist and materialist Americans, simultaneously blind to natural beauty and to their community obligations, Weld provides a portrait of French Canadians living in harmony with nature and the British in a benevolently governed society where “the eye is entertained with a most pleasing variety of fine landscapes, whilst the mind is equally gratified with the appearance of content and happiness that reigns in the countenances of the inhabitants. Indeed, if a country as fruitful as it is picturesque, and genial and healthy climate, and a tolerable share of civil and religious liberty, can made people happy, none ought to appear more so than the [French] Canadians” (1.356–7). Weld’s more sanguine view was

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proved correct, ultimately. Unlike their Irish counterparts, the French Canadians continued to resist invitations to join republican causes and helped repel American troops in 1812. The British commitment to protecting French-Canadian language and religious rights paid off in gaining the support of the clergy and landholding seigneurs, who also knew they would not benefit from French or American republicanism, should it gain purchase on Canadian soil.10 Weld concluded that in a British territory “governed with mildness and wisdom,” “the great mass of her people were in the possession of as much happiness and liberty as those of the neighbouring country.” Lower Canada “could gain no essential or immediate advantages whatsoever by asserting her independence” (1.425–7). Weld’s detailed descriptions and commentary provided the armchair traveller with local colour through engaging sketches of French Canadians, on whom he relied for both hospitality and transportation. More fully fleshed-out character sketches would become an established genre popularized by Susanna Moodie and others in the nineteenth century. Weld’s eye for detail and natural beauty often fell on women, as suggested by the “pleasure” he took “of stopping occasionally to chat with the lively French girls, that, during this delicious season of the year, sat spinning in groups at the doors of the cottages” (2.34). His inclinations as well as his Protestant bias also showed in his portrait of a “fair Ursuline” whom he encountered at the convent in Trois Rivieres and who “seemed to be one of those unfortunate females that had at last begun to feel all the horrors of confinement, and to lament the rashness of that vow which had secluded her for ever from the world, and from the participation of those innocent pleasures, which, for the best and wisest of purposes, the beneficent Ruler of the universe meant that his creatures should enjoy. As she withdrew the curtain, she cast a momentary glance through the grating, that imparted more than could be expressed by the most eloquent words” (2.14). Weld’s description of the waterways throughout North America revealed not only their beauty but also their importance in exploration, trade, and settlement. They also reinforced the image of the hardy voyageur that would become an icon of Canadian nationality until the end of the nineteenth century in poems such as Roberts’s “Canada.” The use of local colour in connecting the distinct language, dress, and cultural attitudes of the French Canadians to the singularities of the landscape that shaped them paradoxically helps distinguish the British territories of Upper and Lower Canada from American culture. Later

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cultural nationalists would use portraits of French-Canadian culture to argue for the existence of a long history and respect for tradition within an ostensibly young country like Canada. They also supported the protection of a distinct French culture that nevertheless reinforced values of family, community, and respect for established authority cherished by conservative supporters of British culture, including Weld. For example, he notes “a wonderful difference” between the conduct of Lower Canada’s filial sons and daughters, who settle near their families, and “the young people of the United States who, as soon as they are grown up, immediately emigrate and bury themselves in the woods, where, perhaps, they are five or six hundred miles distant from every relation upon earth.” Their apparent rootedness does not preclude “a spirit of enterprise … among the Canadians; they eagerly come forward, when called upon, to traverse the immense lakes in the western regions; they laugh at the dreadful storms on those prodigious bodies of water; they work with indefatigable perseverance at the oar and the pole in stemming the rapid currents of the rivers.” While partly accounting for this intrepidity by “vanity,” Weld also notes the appeal of the stories generated by such self-regard: the French Canadian “delights” in recounting “excursions he has made to those distant regions” and “glories in the perils which he has encountered” (2.18–19). Weld anticipates later Canadian nationalist writers, who see the waterways as a proving ground for a distinct Canadian hero and a supply of nationalist narratives, most vividly illustrated in the novel of an Irish-Canadian, Rosanna Leprohon, The Manor-House of Le Villerai. For much of his own travels through Lower Canada, Weld relied on the hardiness and experience of French-Canadian boatmen and Indigenous guides, acknowledging that early Canadian culture and trade depended on their familiarity with its waterways. Unintentionally echoing the United Irish general Edward Fitzgerald, who had travelled through North America by canoe a decade earlier, Weld observes that “no one ever thinks of going thither by land … A water conveyance is by far the most eligible … it is the conveyance universally made use of in every part of the country” (2.22). Weld observes how voyageur culture, shaped by the extreme physical demands on the boatmen, led to a uniquely Canadian unit of measurement, “une pipe.” He observed that the French Canadians were “so much addicted … to smoking … that by the burning of the tobacco in their pipes they commonly ascertain the distance from one place to another. Such a place, they say, is three pipes off, that is, it is

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so far off that you may smoke three pipes full of tobacco whilst you go thither. A pipe, in the most general acceptation of the word, seemed to be about three quarters of an English mile” (2.28–9). In addition to linguistic details recorded as an element of cultural distinctiveness, Weld noted the music that French Canadians paddled and worked in time with. Such music, emerging from the natural rhythms of work and life in a particular region, coloured Canadian Romantic nationalists’ conception of national poetry in the nineteenth century, best demonstrated by Moore and McGee.11 When accompanied by a “gentle current” and the rhythms of their toil, Weld notes that “the Canadians will work at the oar for many hours without intermission; they seemed to think it no hardship to be kept employed in this instance the whole night; on the contrary, they plied as vigorously as if they had but just set out, singing merrily the whole time.” While they had no formal instruction, the French Canadians “have in general a good ear for music, and they sing duets with tolerable accuracy. They have one favourite duet amongst them called the ‘rowing duet,’ which as they sing they mark time to with each stroke of the oar; indeed, when rowing in smooth water, they mark the time of most of the airs they sing in the same manner” (2:51).12 Weld’s travels allow him to describe another craft distinct to the area, the smaller Indigenous birch canoe. Weld admires the “utmost neatness” of “the birch canoes made at Three Rivers,” noting that “on the water they appear very beautiful.” He also is in awe of “what velocity a few skilful men with paddles can take one of these canoes of a size suitable to their number” (2.18). The nautical skills shared by French Canadians and Indigenous canoeists led him to think of other shared affinities, as demonstrated by the churches that Indigenous converts build “in the Canadian style,” their veneration for the Virgin Mary, and the new culture they were building through intermarriage. Weld’s observations appear towards the end of a period of relatively harmonious cultural interaction and hybridized societies created by Indigenous and settler communities in North America that historian Richard White had called “the middle ground.” 13 Anticipating John Reade a century later, Weld presents an early image of a blended culture that will become distinct from both Britain and France due to marriage and adoptions of settlers into Indigenous communities. Each group, “attired in the same habits,” appeared indistinguishable from each other, he observed, noting that “the dispositions of the two people also accord together in a very striking

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manner; both are averse to a settled life, and to regular habits of industry; both are fond of roving about, and procuring sustenance by hunting rather than by cultivating the earth, nature seems to have implanted in their hearts a reciprocal affection for each other; they associate together, and live on the most amicable terms” (2.26). However, Weld’s detailed examination of French-Canadian and Indigenous communities does not idealize these two long-established North American cultures. (Unlike Fitzgerald, who projected his wishful thinking onto the Indigenous people he encountered, Weld notes the effects of poverty and social breakdown, often caused by alcoholism (2.26).) Nevertheless, his observations may have led the way for future Canadian-Irish nationalists who emphasized the cultural distinctiveness of the communities taking shape in Lower Canada and noted how their folk traditions could be called upon to create a style of poetry indigenous to the region that would demonstrate that Canada was a culture and a country in its own right. Overall, Weld’s descriptions of an idealized Canadian life based on secure family and community ties and a harmonious existence against a backdrop of natural beauty were taken up by subsequent Canadian writers, especially Moore. They contribute to what Jason King calls a “Romantic structure of feeling, which is based on an idealization of rural retreat and moral rehabilitation from intractable social and political conflict,” that contributed to a “normative outlook” in which Canada was a haven of moderate politics and modest success in both Irish-Canadian and Canadian writing in the nineteenth century.14 Weld offers a portrait of cultures under British rule that retained their distinctiveness and their traditions. He implies that these survived precisely because of the protection of religion and language afforded by British rule in the Canadas. This became a powerful theme in later Canadian literature.

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2 Stephen Dickson (1761–1799)

Initially, Dr Stephen Dickson seemed destined for a quiet and successful life as a physician, professor, and respected member of Dublin and Edinburgh intellectual circles. His accomplishments in medicine, chemistry, and literature make it hard to account for the obscurity into which he plunged after he “disappeared from Dublin” in 1798.1 Like Weld, Dickson seemed to view North America as a refuge from problems in Ireland. If political unrest motivated his desire to leave, his fears were reasonable. A Royal Irish Academy colleague, geologist and clergyman William Hamilton, was murdered by rebels while doing fieldwork in Donegal in 1797.2 Dickson, like Weld, obviously possessed the means to leave Ireland’s troubles behind him and start afresh, possibly with a view of practicing medicine or promoting education in science and the arts in a new country. He was born in Dublin in 1761 and received his ba from the University of Dublin (also known as Trinity College Dublin) in 1781. Since there was no medical school in Dublin at the time, he went Edinburgh, where he obtained his md in 1783. His career progressed quickly upon his return to Dublin: he became a fellow of the Irish College of Physicians in 1784 and was register (that is, registrar) of the newly established School of Physic by 1785. He received an honorary mb [Bachelor of Medicine] and md from Trinity College in 1793, and the university awarded him an ma in 1800. He resigned from the position of King’s Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, in order to take up the vacant position of King’s Professor of the Practice of Medicine in 1792. He was also “Physician to the Dublin General Dispensary” and became the first librarian to the College of Physicians in 1787, responsible for cataloguing the valuable books bequeathed

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by Sir Patrick Dun and purchasing new ones. In 1788, he accepted another prestigious appointment, State Physician, which he shared with Dr Robert Emmet, the father of Thomas Addis and ill-fated United Irish leader Robert Emmet. There seems to be no evidence, however, that Dickson had anything other than a professional connection with the Emmet family.3 Dickson was equally busy with intellectual pursuits beyond medicine, as he claimed in a published letter: “My inclinations lead me to dedicate to other occupations whatever hours I can spare from the ordinary duties of my profession.”4 These occupations included both scientific research and literature. While in Edinburgh, he was a member of the Speculative Society, where he presented essays such as “Beauties and Defects of the English Language” and “Rise and Political Effects of Oratory.”5 Responding to revolutionary scientific challenges to the received wisdom surrounding the field of chemistry, Dickson published An Essay on Chemical Nomenclature (1796) in collaboration with the noted Irish chemist Richard Kirwan, who would become the second president of the Royal Irish Academy. The work’s title page proudly announced Dickson’s numerous positions and affiliations, including Secretary to the Committee of Science of the Royal Irish Academy, and fellowships with the Royal Society of Scottish Antiquities, as well as membership in medical societies in Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. Like other founding members of the Royal Irish Academy, Dickson saw the promotion of science and literature in Ireland as a civic duty and supported the work of prominent Dublin intellectuals. His colleague Kirwan, for example, explicitly linked the study of chemistry and mineralogy to Ireland’s economic well-being.6 Dickson’s name also appears, with other known Patriots, in the subscriber lists of a number of influential Irish collections and translations, including Edward Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland and a translation of Ogygia, or A Chronological Account of Irish Events (1793), a history of Ireland by the Gaelic scholar and clan chief Roderick O’Flaherty. Patriots saw cultural recovery as inextricable from economic and scientific advancement, since “the investigation of the nation’s past was considered a philanthropic, public-spirited effort to improve the state of general knowledge and to enhance the nation’s standing by elucidating its ancient origins.”7 Dickson’s interest in science, literature, antiquities, and education also look forward to the themes of his poem The Union of Taste and

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Science (1799). While his poem rarely touches upon Irish culture, modern or ancient, the attitudes expressed in both his poetry and prose suggest that he shared the Patriot values that informed the academy. In addition to increasing Irish prestige by promoting history and culture, Patriots wished to replace the place-seeking, corruption, and sectarian discord they deplored in current politics with “a form of political philanthropy” arising from the belief that talented and learned citizens should encourage responsible politics and dedicate themselves to national progress.8 The academy’s drive to improve and modernize Ireland was seen as the most recent incarnation of ancient Irish respect for learning and education as well as evidence of Ireland’s unique contributions to the British Empire. Dickson took this philosophy with him to Canada. In spite of his prestigious appointments and accomplishments, things seem to have started going wrong for Dickson around 1794, when he and another professor were accused of neglecting their duties after the medical school failed to secure appropriate facilities and patients for a teaching hospital. He was also involved in a lawsuit to allow professors to gain a larger share in a bequest that had founded the medical school. The ruling judge pronounced their claim “a gross and shameless fraud.” His observation that Dickson and his colleagues “should be scouted from a Court of Equity with shame and disgrace” probably did not help his reputation.9 While continuing his argument for a robust and well-funded science program in Dublin, his lengthy published letter to his “medical brethren” was also an attempt to clear his name. In 1797, Dickson was again admonished by the college for neglecting his duties and this time was “deprived of his office” of King’s Professor.10 He also ceased to be the medical school librarian. Justly or unjustly, his apparent incompetence or dishonesty is what he is remembered for today by medical historians and bibliographers in Ireland. An early catalogue from the medical library at Trinity notes that many historically significant books bequeathed by Sir Patrick Dun, the medical school’s founder, were “Lost by Dr Dickson” which led at least one modern scholar to conclude that he “absconded” with them.11 The library was later the subject of a House of Lords inquiry, which observed that “considerable laxity in the care of the library was disclosed” and “bills for books were presented to the College for the delivery of which neither the bookseller nor the Librarian could vouch.”12 Dickson seemed to operate within a general environment of neglect and even corruption at the medical school. A 1799 parliamentary

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committee report revealed irregularities in the finances governing Dun’s bequest to the school, including “many thousand pounds” unaccounted for. Items “unwisely and unwarrantably expended” included “a present of claret to the President of the College of Physick annually, an immoderate purchase of books, in some instances, twice paid for; lawsuits carried on in which the said College were both plaintiffs and defendants, and actually paid from said funds the expense of both … [that] have consumed the whole surplus income of Sir Patrick Dun’s estates.”13 In 1799, Dickson suffered further public censure: he was deprived of his Fellowship of the College of Physicians for having “been absent from the meetings of the College for two years without leave.”14 Of course, it would have been difficult for him to attend these meetings, having arrived in Quebec in October 1798. Left in his wake was a medical school in disarray, for which he seems at least partly responsible. Once in Quebec, Dickson hoped his previous intellectual accomplishments would help him find a career and maybe even set up intellectual communities in Quebec as he had done in Dublin. He got to work almost immediately. Perhaps encouraged by his colleague Kirwan’s arguments for systematic and international meteorological observations, he spent his winter conducting experiments on the expansion of freezing water and published his findings.15 He also published a proposal to establish a university in Quebec, reprising arguments in favour of public education that he had made in Dublin. The pamphlet served as his introduction to Quebec society, again proudly listing all his accomplishments and titles, including “State Physician of Ireland,” on its first page. This had the desired effect: Considerations on the Establishment of a College in Quebec For the Instruction of Youth in Literature and Philosophy attracted the attention of Quebec officials. He soon gained admittance to the Chateau, the enclave of the political elite of Quebec and the residence of the governor of Lower Canada, Robert Prescott, and his wife. Dickson became a frequent visitor there and, as recounted by Chief Justice William Osgoode, “in return for Three Dinners a week at the chateau … wrote a Poem called The Union of Science and Taste [sic], and talked of Prescott’s reflecting ‘Lustre on the Throne.’”16 Not surprisingly, the poem celebrated the Prescotts’ gracious hospitality and their shared interest in promoting science in the colony. Dickson particularly admired Mrs Prescott’s careful curation of a cabinet featuring geological samples from all over the world, reflecting an interest encouraged by Irish Patriots in Dublin, especially Kirwan,

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who had brought an extensive geological collection to Dublin as part of Irish scientists’ effort to recognize, catalogue, and research Irish resources, which would foster Ireland’s economic well-being and intellectual prestige.17 Dickson was no doubt flattered and encouraged by the attention of Mrs Prescott and government officials, likely attributing it to his qualifications and willingness to work for the colony’s advancement. The attention of Osgoode and others went further than he suspected, however: while Dickson was dining with the Prescotts and admiring their cabinet, the Quebec intelligence service was opening his mail.18 On high alert since the United Columbia conspiracy of 1796, the government was anxiously reviewing intelligence about Ireland and very interested in an Irish immigrant who had arrived mere months after the rebellion and French invasion. Referring to Dickson’s pamphlet in a dispatch dated 7 January 1799, Prescott explicitly connected the former state physician’s arrival in Quebec to “circumstances that have taken place in Ireland.” Not knowing about Dickson’s professional disgrace, he thought it “extraordinary” that “a man in such eligible Situation in his own Country” would “seek his Fortune among strangers” in a colonial outpost in Canada. From Prescott’s perspective, the “retired manner in which he lives compared with what might be expected of a man in that station of Life” was highly suspicious, and he concluded that Dickson “may be actuated from motives different from any that he may be expected to avow.”19 Quebec officials were concerned about not only the timing of Dickson’s departure but also the unfortunate coincidence of his title and surname. In a 7 August 1799 letter to the undersecretary of state John King, Osgoode recounted that “Doctor Dickson, the noted Irish partisan of whom such honourable mention is made in the Report of the Secret Committee of both Houses in Ireland … came here under every Circumstance of Suspicion.”20 The “Dr Dickson” mentioned in Irish reports21 would have been the Presbyterian doctor of divinity and United Irish general William Steele Dickson, who had been taken prisoner in Ballynahinch in June 1798.22 In the summer of 1799, Dr Dickson of Co. Down was still securely under lock and key, but this case of mistaken identity might have taken a deadly turn for Dr Dickson of Quebec, given that General Hunter, notorious for his grisly treatment of United Irish prisoners, was now lieutenant-­ governor. Ominously, Osgood reported in his letter that Hunter had been looking forward to meeting Dr Dickson.23

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Quebec authorities did not need to worry about Dickson any more than about the mostly peaceful French habitants. His rejection was a lost opportunity for the colony, since in other circumstances, his civicminded promotion of science and culture in Quebec might have made him a welcome member of colonial society. The pamphlet they found so alarming actually reflected sentiments congenial to many British officials and shared by Anglo-Irish writers such as Weld.24 Where Weld saw a benign British presence in North America as a safeguard of French-Canadian culture, Dickson believed the British government guaranteed stability and order that allowed the cultivation of British art, literature, philosophy, and science to flourish. His own contribution to literature, the legacy of his brief stay in Lower Canada from October 1798 to March 1799, was a long poem, The Union of Taste and Science, “a fine specimen of early Canadian printing” by John Neilson. In terms of its lasting literary merit, the nicest thing bibliographers have said is that it was handsomely bound.25 Consequently, Dickson did not gain the level of fame enjoyed by Weld, but his poem is an informative transatlantic historical document nonetheless. It not only celebrates the science and “polite literature” promoted by the Royal Irish Academy but also praises both Irish and Canadian scientific contributions to the larger international imperial enterprise. Rather than the republican sentiments Dickson was believed to secretly “avow,” his poem shares with his university proposal the view that Britain’s monarchy, government, and military are safeguards of society and enlightened inquiry. Dickson had argued in his pamphlet that the cultivation of “literature” and “philosophy” “tend[s] to promote good order, obedience to government” and that education is the best way to “develope [sic] the native riches of a country, to render them profitable to the community, and by promoting agriculture, the arts, manufactures, and commerce, to enhance the property not only of the colony, but of the parent country.”26 The Union of Taste and Science likewise celebrates the attempts to disseminate Britain’s knowledge and expertise in its North American colonies. As Bentley observes, the poem “is a meditation on the structures of the natural and human world whose very form – decasyllabic couplets – reflects the order imparted to the universe by God, safeguarded by the British ‘love of order’ (75) that was then stemming the tide of chaos emanating from post-revolutionary France, and manifested in the uniquely human capacity to generate and systematize knowledge (‘Science’) and to discern and create beauty (‘Taste’).”27 The theme is borne out in his

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other works intended to “generate and systematize knowledge,” such as An Essay on Chemical Nomenclature. Like Kirwan, Dickson’s philosophy of science was essentially conservative, seeing providence at work in the laws of nature, chemistry, and geography, and sharing Kirwan’s tendency to resist more revolutionary discoveries, especially from France, that challenged this view.28 As Osgood cynically observed, the poem was Dickson’s attempt to ingratiate himself with the Prescotts (if not an exceedingly cunning method of carrying out his revolutionary aims under cover of fawning loyalism). Nevertheless, the librarian and scientist in Dickson would have been genuinely charmed by the Prescotts’ geological collection that he celebrates in the poem. The librarian in Dickson recognized that mineralogical and natural history collections demanded the same type of order and discipline as establishing and curating a library, and with similar aims. Barbara Benedict notes that “as antiquarianism rose,” libraries and collections “came to embody national cultural wealth. They offered the promise of completeness, and embodiment of British literary learning. This became a matter of national pride.”29 The poem reflects Dickson’s belief that such activity benefitted Great Britain and its colonies by simultaneously absorbing knowledge about the new domains and disseminating it to its colonies. It also continues his belief in increasing the knowledge and prestige of Ireland through scientific, literary, and antiquarian research, along with the collection and preservation of the nation’s scholarly work. The poem’s premise is relatively simple: Lieutenant-Governor Prescott’s official residence in Quebec becomes the site where the allegorical figure Science is reunited with his lover, Taste. Science, representing the “Genius” that has made Great Britain a leader in both scientific discovery and military might, has arrived in Quebec, having circumnavigated the globe in the pursuit of knowledge. Together, the allegorical figures inspire their human counterparts, the Prescotts, to extend the British government’s program of peace, order, and the cultivation of knowledge to the British territories in Canada. Prescott is described as a defender of British values in both war and peace, a “veteran warrior, o’er whose laurel’d brow / The olive loves to shoot its foliage now.” His governance of Canada has “rais’d the veil that hangs o’er future years / Where science fostering Public-Weal appears.” In this ideal marriage, Mrs Prescott, “his Consort[,] lent a willing hand / To honour Taste and Science through the land.”30 Mrs Prescott’s “elegant cabinet” comes to embody the “union of Taste and Science.”

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As allegory, the poem presents a blandly generic Canadian setting when compared to Weld’s more detailed observation of Canadian topography and culture. The new land is mostly a blank backdrop for Dickson’s ideas about the connections between good government and the cultivation of knowledge, and its geographic features are realized most vividly in a footnote to the poem that describes Mrs Prescott’s “elegant cabinet, which adorns, like a wreath of amaranth, the rugged brow of the gigantic rock of Quebec.”31 Dickson’s short visit would not have given him much opportunity to explore beyond the gates of Quebec, but the contrast is telling: the wildness of Canadian nature awaits the ordering and civilizing influence of science, and even the formidable cliffs of Quebec can be contained and known through the systematic forms of Enlightenment inquiry that the geological collection represents. Described in detail, the Prescotts’ collection symbolizes many of the ideas Dickson promoted through his active participation in antiquarian, academic, and scientific circles in Edinburgh and Dublin. As a room housing an extensive collection, this type of cabinet originated with Renaissance aristocrats’ collections of rare, exotic, and valuable books and objects that eventually became the foundations for many modern public museums. Not surprisingly, in his letter to his medical colleagues, Dickson had argued that the Trinity medical school should assemble its own “suitable natural history cabinet for the benefit of its medical students, a collection which, though it may be expensive, will require less expense than science to compose it.” Like Kirwan’s meticulously classified mineral collection, the Trinity cabinet should display “the spontaneous productions of nature, and the utility in the illustration of her works by their philosophical arrangement.”32 With its focus on geological samples from all over the British Empire, the Prescotts’ cabinet also resembles the more famous one in Dublin. The cabinet is also part of an older European intellectual tradition. As it lists, describes, and moralizes, the poem functions the same way as did popular catalogues and illustrations of collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the Renaissance through to the Enlightenment, people not privileged enough to be admitted into these private rooms could still appreciate them through portraits of the rooms or books that described the collections in detail. Benedict argues that these depictions allowed viewers or readers to make sense of the world, even if they did not see the actual collection. The organization of both these collections and their catalogues turned them

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“into an enactment of the educational processes of observation and reflection. By minute and value-free description, [they] prompted visitors, and indeed any readers of the catalog, to employ their own empirical prowess and make an order from what they saw.”33 Likewise, a significant portion of the Union of Taste and Science is devoted to listing the contents of the Prescotts’ cabinet, which is described as containing purely edifying objects: the cabinet is presented as a “curious” (that is, carefully wrought) “ark,” a form of poetic diction denoting a container, but with connotations that it is the repository of sacred or culturally significant objects. By the eighteenth century, such cabinets had evolved to reflect ­general Enlightenment values, “becoming identified with cutting-edge information” and demonstrating not only the owners’ interests, taste, and wealth but also their familiarity with current scientific discoveries and expeditions. Moreover, by the beginning of the eighteenth ­century, individual collectors were applying the scientific and organizational methods encouraged by the Royal Society when organizing their collections. Many collections conformed to “a Lockean system of comprehension” that reflected how objects related to each other, based on logic and scientific principles.”34 While such cabinets were sometimes satirized, by Dickson’s time they were established by scholarly societies as a legitimate way of presenting information in a manner that reflected human beings’ capacity to order and rationalize their surroundings through aesthetically pleasing arrangements that emphasized balance, order, and restraint. Consequently, Science was not complete without the talents of his partner, Taste. Between them, the characters Taste and Science are engaged in most of the activities representing eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and scientific knowledge. Taste, a “maid / [who] In early childhood with the Graces play’d” (107–8) and a muse to Michelangelo, “raptur’d Raphael,” and “Seductive Titian” (134–5), also inspires eighteenth-century landscapers, poets, and musicians, particularly as she “rehears’d the choral lays of Handel,” (perhaps on a visit to Dublin) (136–8). Meanwhile, her lover Science “through all elements adventurous goes” (17), taking advantage of the technological achievements of inventors such as “Montgolfier” and his hot air balloon. The allusion to the inventor who inspired “baloonomania” in the eighteenth century35 reflects an Enlightenment fascination with technology that would facilitate a system of knowledge encompassing all things on heaven and earth. In ascending with Montgolfier, the spirit

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of Science “dares celestial height … Sees cities dwindle, mightiest states grow small / And spies in miniature the whole terrestrial ball” (25–8). That same desire to view all elements of the natural world as a comprehensible whole inspires the cabinet created by Taste in Quebec. Equally a world in miniature, it draws on Taste’s talent for aesthetically pleasing composition, which allows thinkers to discern the order and beauty behind “labouring” Science’s filling of the “ark” with “exquisite” and “rare” specimens drawn from the four elements and the four corners of the earth. His work is then gilded with “charms” by Taste (225–31), resulting in a collection that not only demonstrates the Prescotts’ own wealth and cultivation but also the all-encompassing intellectual range of the government they represent. These national aspirations to a “completeness” of knowledge are also noted by Krzysztof Pomian, who in Collectors and Curiosities argues that from the Renaissance onwards, such exquisitely arranged cabinets and their depictions were intended as a “compendium of the universe,” encompassing “the sacred and the secular, the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate, the far and the near.”36 Cabinets were portrayed so that the viewer is “put in the place of the spectator facing natural specimens and works of art … introducing at the same time historical and religious dimensions which invite the eye to extend its gaze inwards towards thought, transcending the visible to reach the invisible, the present to reach the past and the here below to reach the beyond.”37 Dickson’s poem likewise notes how the material objects in the Prescott cabinet’s design lead the viewer to more transcendent contemplation. Eager to deflect contemporary criticism of the vogue for collections, his prose and his poem acknowledge the dangers of cupidity attendant upon such acquisitiveness. At the time, this was a common fear, as Benedict noted: “While collecting things and books was becoming a sign of the laudable British empirical thrust to learn and conquer, it was simultaneously represented as decadence, greed and deviance.”38 When he had argued for the establishment of a natural history cabinet for the Trinity medical school, Dickson hastened to clarify its purpose: “When I speak of a cabinet or museum, you will not imagine that I mean a collection of curious gew-gaws, wampum belts, south-sea necklaces, Indian idols and ogham epitaphs.”39 Consequently, the poem focuses as much on what is absent as present in Mrs Prescott’s cabinet to show that it represents no mere demonstration of conspicuous wealth:

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For though no diamond glitter from afar, Yet not excluded is the ponderous spar, Magnesian daze, calcareous stalactite, Or mild Argilla’s boasted zeolite. (258–61) In this passage, Dickson displays a rather endearing delight in scientific nomenclature and the modest poetic flourish achieved by wrestling geological terms into the strictures of pentameter. At the same time, the passage’s focus on natural objects of scientific interest within the collection curated by Mrs Prescott and “Taste” argues that the essence of nature’s beauty lies in moderation rather than ostentation. The observer, in reviewing the poem’s catalogue of stones, is encouraged to draw philosophical and religious conclusions that are in harmony with the values espoused and enforced by British rule and that reinforce the fitness of its expansion over the globe. The range of geological samples illustrates the reach of Britain’s empire. Consequently, the Prescotts’ collection included geometrical basalt columns from the north of Ireland that had also fascinated Kirwan. They are described by Dickson as a “tribute” from the “causeway fabled giants rear’d” (262–3). Local samples represent the equally important surveys and inventories that allowed a region to best utilize the natural materials available to them, so the collection also features local stalactites “from wild Niagara,” whose foam, in Dickson’s fancy, are “to stone transform’d” (264–5). While they have a utilitarian purpose, these geologic oddities also remind the viewer of the heavenly kingdom with “Its walls of jasper, and its streets of gold.” At the same time, earthly readers are cautioned: until they throw off their “nymphal coil” after death, “Let humble Prudence from Temptation run, / And even the extremes of Virtue shun,” since moderation “suits Religion best.” To the educated observer, the objects in the cabinet function as “emblem” of the moral values expressed by Taste through her choice and arrangement of objects (251–6). Representing the victory of moderation over extremism, including, perhaps, the sectarianism plaguing Ireland, the geologic samples in the cabinet at once gather Canada into the British enterprise of exploration, conquest, and good government, and offer Canadians a share in the British and Enlightenment quest for knowledge that the ­collection represents. The cabinet represents in miniature the colonizing enterprise that Dickson hopes Prescott will effect in the as-yet

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uncultivated land and peoples beyond the governor’s mansion. Dickson argues that not to arid land more vigour brings The confluent bounty of redundant springs … Than taste and sc i e nc e o’er th’untutor’d mind Shed the best benefits of human kind. (219–23) The poem concludes with a vision of a future in which both Taste and Science’s and the Prescotts’ “honour’d union” provides “the influence that refines and cheers the heart,” contributing to “the public glory, and the public weal!” In this way will both “Canada” and the Prescotts reflect “luster to the throne” (292–8). Patriot philosophy is also behind Dickson’s “humble but zealous offering of my exertions” that would help establish a university in Quebec. This task would have been considerable: he planned to donate his own books to the university’s library, set up a laboratory, create a “natural history” cabinet and a botanical garden, and give “lectures in Literature and Philosophy … according to the best of my abilities until adequate assistance can be afforded.” He hastens to deflect “the suspicion of self-sufficiency,” insisting that he offers his services only because he fears that “without this part of my proposal every thing else might end in languid speculation.”40 While this statement appears disingenuous coming from a man with few other prospects in his new community, his self-portrait as an intellectual working disinterestedly for the public good nevertheless reflects the aims of the Patriot movement. He sees those aims as no less relevant to the new British-held territories of Canada than he did to the development of an educated and responsible citizenry in Ireland when he writes in his pamphlet, “Intelligent Canadians! reflect, and ye will be convinced that ye consult your individual interests, as well as the general weal, when ye encourage learning and science to flourish in your country.”41 Unfortunately, a glorious Canadian future awaited neither Dickson nor Prescott. Ironically, the Irish Patriots’ Enlightenment ideal of a secular, progressive “English-speaking Ireland”42 did not transfer easily to a colony where the British administration needed to maintain the goodwill of the French-speaking Catholic clergy. The Canadian harmony and peace so approvingly noted by Weld depended on the Catholic clergy’s ability to discourage any revolutionary ideas that

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might develop among their congregations. A previous governor, Lord Dorchester, had also proposed a secular university in 1789. While the Roman Catholic bishop Jean-François Hubert supported “the encouragement of Science by every possible means,” he argued that Canada first needed labourers to clear the land, before there could be scholars.43 (This commonplace about Canadian culture would become the bane of future nationalists and intellectuals.) More likely, Hubert’s objections reflected his fear that the government would try to assimilate French Canadians, sensing that a secular education had its seeds in the pro-British, Protestant-influenced Enlightenment views also on display in Dickson’s poem. Prescott refused to reopen that debate. With no outlet in Quebec for his considerable talents, Dickson may have been in desperate financial straits by the spring of 1799, as suggested by an auction notice that advertised, in addition to a hogshead of Madeira, groceries, and dry goods, “a large collection of valuable books, the property of a gentleman gone to England.”44 (Irish bibliographers will no doubt deplore the fact that no surviving copies of the “Catalogue of Mr Dickson’s Books” have been found, as it might have provided a clue to the whereabouts of those priceless missing volumes from Dun’s library.) At any rate, Marie Tremaine’s listing of the catalogue in her bibliography of Dickson might involve another case of mistaken identity, given that with all his honorifics, Dickson might have resented being listed as a mere “Mr.” Moreover, he did not return to the British Isles but instead moved to the United States, or perhaps fled there: Osgoode reported that Dickson “took care to be off Scampato! alla fuga! before any intelligence respecting him could be received from home. Gen. Hunter regretted he had not stayed a little longer.”45 While avoiding, intentionally or not, the sinister attentions of General Hunter, Dickson once again demonstrated his remarkable talent for poorly timed arrivals, landing in South Carolina in the midst of a yellow fever epidemic. For a while, it looked as if he had found a home in Charleston where his talents were welcomed, giving wellreceived public lectures on chemistry.46 But at the end of September 1799, the South Carolina Register reported the deaths of “Dr Stephen Dickson, Fellow of the College of Physicians of Ireland, formerly State Physician of Ireland,” his ten-year-old son, also named Stephen, and his wife.47 Prescott’s tenure in Canada was equally brief: his inability to sort out a chaotic land grants system, coupled with his “acrimonious” relations with the governing council, led the British government to recall him around the same time as Dickson’s departure.48 The

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Charleston obituary’s final words were kinder, and perhaps fairer, than historians’ judgment of Dickson, and capture well the ambition of his poem and his life: “He informed while he seemed to enquire, and charmed, while he conveyed instruction.”49 Dickson’s legacy was not simply fulsome flattery of the Prescotts or the espousal of reassuringly conservative and pro-British politics. Nor is his poem simply a catalogue of the scientific wonders afforded by exploration of the New World within the all-encompassing values of a benevolent British government. It also reflects what Patriot cultural revivalists and the Royal Irish Academy promoted as distinctive and enduring elements of Irish character. Directed to an audience of nonspecialists, the poem, like Mrs Prescott’s cabinet, was intended to promote scientific inquiry and advancement in the new country. If, ultimately, the only reward for the poet and scientist’s effort was “the slightest thanks, … he will be amply satisfied.”50 More poignantly, the poem is a creative attempt to envision a larger providential order existing beyond the political chaos at the centre and the margins of British rule in the late eighteenth century. Its enduring faith in the power of education and science belies Dickson’s personal experience of political hostility and dashed prospects. Both Dickson’s poem and Weld’s Travels are literary products of conservative Anglo-Irish writers’ flight from personal and political instability. In recording the act of leaving Ireland, a country disturbed by the echoes of the French Revolution, for the perceived refuge of British-governed Canada, both texts sowed the seeds for a particular kind of literary portrait of Canada. Jason King argues that Irish writers in the nineteenth century were deeply influenced by conservative portraits of Canada by Weld and other writers, which “gradually crystallized into a recognizable literary motif, one that was held in explicit contrast with both the ‘Republican’ ethos of France and the United States and the agitated condition and endemic unrest of contemporary Ireland.”51 While this view indirectly supported continued British rule of its North American territories, it also had a particular rhetorical import for Patriot scholars. In their view, the collection of beneficial information, even in the farthest reaches of the empire, was a modern manifestation of Irish character that had ancient historical precedents. What is left out of collections and catalogues can be as significant as what is left in, however. Reflecting the limitations of the Patriot view of Ireland (and thus their ability to influence Ireland in an

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increasingly radical political era), Dickson was blind to the significance of two potent records and symbols of cultural history and identity when he dismissed wampum belts and ogham stones as mere trifles or “gew-gaws.” The absence of these objects from his poetic catalogue renders at least one significant prop of the colonial enterprise invisible. For Dickson’s fellow Royal Irish Academy members, the deciphering of ancient Irish ogham inscriptions provided information on ancient Ireland that Patriots could use to fashion their modern identity. Like other investigations into Irish language and culture as it existed before English conquest, such knowledge was intended to link the more recent English-speaking settlers to the land by creating, in Joep Leerssen’s words, an “aboriginally Gaelic” frame of reference.52 The ogham stones were a tangible link to that culture. However, they also – sometimes inconveniently – recorded the original inhabitants’ land titles as well as epitaphs. Wampum belts were equally tangible records of important treaties, often reflecting Indigenous political and military co-operation with the British. As such, they challenged the poem’s assertion that the lands and resources of British North America were exclusively available to the British government and their colonists. While Dickson had been establishing his medical career in Dublin, the British King’s colonial representatives were negotiating one such treaty with Britain’s Indigenous allies who had lost many of their traditional territories during the American Revolutionary War. These allies, drawn from the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, negotiated a rich reserve on the Grand River (in what is now Ontario) that they considered their own sovereign territory. In 1789, their most influential leaders befriended and then adopted another Irish visitor, a young major in the British army. It is possible that Chief Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) helped shape this visitor’s own sense of national identity and sovereignty, a vision that ultimately went much further than the Patriot’s modest ambitions for relative independence within the British constitution. His story is told in the next chapter.

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P art T wo United Irishmen in Canada

In The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831), Thomas Moore recalled encountering the aristocratic and charismatic United Irish leader in Grafton Street in 1797. Fitzgerald made such an impression on his future biographer that Moore could vividly recall him more than thirty years later: “Though I saw him but this once, his peculiar dress, the elastic lightness of his step, his fresh healthful complexion, and the soft expression given to his eyes by their long dark eyelashes are as present and familiar to my memory as if I had intimately known him.” According to Moore, Fitzgerald’s very name “had from my school days been associated in my mind with all that was noble, patriotic and chivalrous.”1 Within a year of this encounter, Fitzgerald was dead, a tragic role model for future political and literary nationalists. By the early twentieth century, most memorably in Yeats’s “September 1913,” he had come to ­represent a past “Romantic Ireland” consisting of noble martyrs that continued to haunt the modern era. A great-great grandson of Charles II, Fitzgerald was the fifth son of the Duke of Leinster, the head of an old and esteemed aristocratic family. (The Leinster ducal palace in Dublin is now the home of the Oireachtas Éireann, the Irish legislature.) On his English mother’s side, he was nephew to the equally powerful Duke of Richmond. Born into a life of privilege enjoyed by the most prominent aristocratic families in Ireland and England, Fitzgerald’s last days were spent on the run from British government agents, desperately trying to coordinate a military overthrow of the Irish government while waiting in vain for assistance from France. On 19 May 1798, a few days before the planned uprising was to go ahead, he was shot

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while resisting arrest. He died of his wounds in a Dublin prison on 4 June, aged thirty-four. In October 1830, Moore wrote to Sir John Doyle informing him that “some papers, – indeed a large mass, – relative to poor Lord Edward Fitzgerald have been lately put into my hands by different members of his family.”2 These letters became a substantial part of Moore’s two-volume biography of the United Irish leader. As with his successful life of Lord Byron, Moore relied heavily on such correspondence, using his own narrative skills to tie together vivid excerpts that he felt captured Fitzgerald’s nature and the tumultuous times of his and Moore’s own youth.3 Forming a substantial part of the biography, the letters provide an intimate perspective on the complexities of Irish political allegiances in the eighteenth century. Written as he travelled through England, France, Spain, Portugal, and North America, Fitzgerald’s letters revealed the interconnections among his family life, Irish and English politics, and world affairs As an illustration of the transatlantic range and influences on Irish republicanism, Fitzgerald first fought for the British against the Americans in the early 1780s, then commanded a garrison in New Brunswick, witnessed the early stages of the French Revolution in Paris on his return to Europe, before joining and ­ultimately leading the United Irish militia in the late 1790s. Most well-known as a United Irish general, he was also soldier, explorer, Irish mp, conspirator, and – something he was particularly proud of – adopted member of the Kanien’keha:ka Bear Clan. Once Moore published his highly successful Life, Fitzgerald’s impressions of life in the Maritimes, Quebec, and Niagara region found a wide audience in North America and Europe. Mediated through Moore’s editing and commentary in his biography, the ­letters reprised pictures of life in North America already made ­popular through Moore’s “Canadian” poems written during his own trip to North America in 1804, images that would be taken up and developed by later Canadian writers, not to mention promoters of emigration.4 Moore shared with Fitzgerald and Weld a vision of the Canadian territories as – figuratively, at least – a refuge from Ireland’s political troubles, which in 1804 were a recent and traumatic memory. He left Europe only days after the execution of his Trinity classmate, Robert Emmet, and had witnessed the imprisonment and exile of other friends implicated in the uprisings of 1798 and 1803. Writing Fitzgerald’s biography more than a quarter of a

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53

century later, Moore relived the “horror and indignation” created by the government clampdown on Irish dissent that had dogged Moore as “a youth in college,” when he watched close friends and childhood heroes alike fall “victims of that very ardour of patriotism which had been one of the sources of my affection for them, and in which, through almost every step but the last, my sympathies had gone along with them” (1.301). In one way, Moore may have gone one step further than Fitzgerald. One biography asserts that the young aristocrat was so trusted by his fellow United Irish leaders that he was not made to take the formal oath of the Society of United Irishmen,5 but compelling evidence suggests that Moore did.6 While ultimately choosing a more moderate form of Irish nationalism, Moore kept the memory of United Irish heroes alive through his biography of Fitzgerald as well as his North American poems, Lalla Rookh, his Irish Melodies, and political satires. While for the most part Moore the historian refrained from intruding his own experiences into his biography of Fitzgerald, he must have been struck by the similarities between their experiences as young, impressionable men in North America. Like Fitzgerald, Moore recorded his first impressions of North America in his letters home to family and patrons, primarily to establish and maintain contact over vast distances. Just as Canada is made to appear distinct from Ireland politically, its cultural distinctiveness is emphasized and communicated to each writer’s Irish audience. Moreover, many of Moore’s North American poems are “epistles,” more polished and literary versions of Fitzgerald’s letters to his own family and patrons addressed to specific individuals, with a wider audience essentially reading over their shoulder. Ultimately, some of the most vivid depictions of early Canadian life were created and popularized by two famous Irish visitors who embodied or reacted to the cultural and political aims of the Society of United Irishmen. In turn, both their written accounts and their presence in different regions of what would become Canada contributed to the local colour exploited by future Canadian nationalist writers.

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3 Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763–1798)

Lord Edward Fitzgerald grew up at Frescati, a modest family property near Dublin, where his tutor and stepfather William Ogilvie educated the Fitzgerald children according to the child-rearing theories of JeanJacques Rousseau. At sixteen, Fitzgerald began military training and joined the Sussex Militia commanded by his uncle, the Duke of Richmond. His first experience of war came as a British officer fighting against the Americans in the War of Independence in 1781. At the end of his life, he claimed he regretted his first visit to North America in 1781 to fight against the republican revolutionaries. However, he also made a lifelong friend after he was gravely wounded in an engagement at Eutaw Springs, when he was rescued and nursed back to health by Tony Small, an African American who had escaped slavery (1.24). Fitzgerald then engaged Small as a servant, but they became confidants and companions. The existence of many of his Canadian letters may be credited to Small and his continual admonitions that Fitzgerald write to his mother.1 Consequently, the trove of documents that Fitzgerald’s family entrusted to Moore included more than two dozen letters from British territories and the new republic of America, written to his mother, Emily Ogilvie, and other family members from 1788­–90, when he took a post as major in a garrison in New Brunswick. Generous and gentle, attracted to and attractive to women, Fitzgerald had many passionate relationships. His second posting overseas to Canada in 1788 was an attempt to recover from a broken heart after the family of his cousin Georgiana Lennox thought she could do much better than marry a junior officer with a modest inheritance. He arrived in Halifax in June 1788 before proceeding to Fredericton, where he

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joined his regiment, the 54th West Norfolk. Initially, he seemed set on the conventional path to advancement preferred by younger sons in the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, adding to a cohort of Irish-born officers and common soldiers already filling garrisons throughout North America. Many of his letters suggest how invested he was in this approach to advancement in Anglo-Irish society.2 They also reveal a young man alternately delighting in his escape from the strictures of upper-class life and suffering intense homesickness and longing for his family. The Fitzgerald family’s recollections of their beloved son and brother both confirms and undermines Moore’s portrait of the sensitive Romantic hero in his biography. Fitzgerald’s relatives often described him as “a universal delight,” an “angel” who “was the acknowledged favourite of our hearts,” but also as “that comedy, that buffoon, that dear ridiculous Eddy.”3 Both sides of his personality come out in the unexpurgated letters that were believed to have been destroyed by Fitzgerald’s relatives until rediscovered in the 1990s.4 Neither a polished travel account nor literary work, the North American letters’ intended audience was Fitzgerald’s family in Ireland and England, and their primary purpose was to reassure them that he was alive and well.5 In his preface to the biography, Moore admired them for their “simplicity and warm-heartedness, a charm which cannot but be attractive to most readers” (1.xi). That they comprised such a large part of his biography suggests their literary merit in their own right: to the practiced biographer Moore, Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Canadian life, “detailed with such natural eloquence, … affords one of those instances where a writer may be said to be a poet without knowing it; – his very unconsciousness of the effect he is producing being, in itself, a charm which no art or premeditation could expect to reach” (1.77). (Nevertheless, Moore felt it necessary to omit anything that might offend the sensibilities of his early-nineteenth-century audience.6) Even in their unvarnished, unedited state, the original letters communicate their author’s vivaciousness, affection, and charm through engaging portraits of Canadian life that would have appeared exotic to Fitzgerald’s family. While Moore’s selections often reinforce the poet’s romanticized portrait of Fitzgerald, not to mention his own impression of Canada, the original letters, in focusing on what would appear distinctive or engaging, still reflect a young aristocrat’s desire and admiration for a simpler life for both him and less-fortunate members of Irish society.

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Fitzgerald’s letters often attempt to bridge the experiential gulf between his upper-class Anglo-Irish audience and North American settler and Indigenous communities. Among the many remarkable accounts he sent his family, one event stands out: in early 1789, he and a small party of officers, servants, and woodsmen left New Brunswick and blazed a new route through northern Maine to Quebec on snowshoes, a remarkable feat of endurance and exploration in itself. They went off course, were forced to take a long detour along the river with low supplies, and, according to some accounts, nearly died. Luckily, in the words of Fitzgerald, they “fell in with some Savages and travelled with them to Quebec, they were very kind to us and said we were all one brother, all one Indian. They fed us the whole time we were with them.” This reception was in stark contrast to what they experienced when they finally entered the city, “our blanket coats and trousers all wore out and pieced,” and were refused food or lodgings at the inns they approached.7 The contrast between perceived European and Indigenous mores and between the prospects of Canadian settlers and those who stayed in Ireland are a recurring theme in Fitzgerald’s letters. While far from his family and Europe, he still could not extricate himself from the web of political and familial power relationships spanning the Atlantic. When Fitzgerald arrived at Quebec on the new and arduous trail he had blazed, his mother’s “old love,” the Irishborn General Guy Carleton, was there to greet him. Carleton, Lord Dorchester, was a veteran of the recent war against America and now governor general of the province of Quebec and governor of British North America. Lieutenant-Governor Hector Theophilus de Cramahé was also Irish, a Huguenot. (In another letter, Fitzgerald confessed that he had been “in treaty” for de Cramahé’s lieutenant-colonelcy when he inconveniently died in June 1788. Fitzgerald rebounded from this disappointment quickly. He suggested that the government position also made vacant by de Cramahé’s death, a “place of £1600 a year,” would suit his brother Charles.8) What happened in North America affected Irish politics and the Fitzgeralds equally. The recently ended American Revolutionary War had also unnerved British officials back in Ireland, and they feared, rightly, opportunistic French invasions. The Anglo-Irish Protestant militias formed to repel the French used their advantage to press for an independent parliament, in which Fitzgerald would serve as an

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elected member. Reflecting the complexity of Anglo-Irish allegiances and nationalism, the Fitzgeralds were also instrumental in English politics, supporting their cousin, the Whig opposition leader Charles Fox, a tradition his eldest brother the Duke embarrassingly departed from in briefly voting with the Pittite government. While in Canada, Fitzgerald, who took his profession and familial obligations equally seriously, reluctantly agreed to support his eldest brother, but was too conscientious to accept a much-desired promotion in the army as a reward, as he told his mother in his letters.9 In 1788, the debilitating mental illness of King George i i i raised the possibility of a Whigsupporting Regency that was favourable to Irish rights, but both Fox’s and the Fitzgerald family’s ambitions were quashed with the King’s recovery, and the humiliated Duke of Leinster retreated from Westminster politics shortly afterwards.10 It was not only romantic entanglements that Fitzgerald sailed away from, at least temporarily. On 24 June 1788, Fitzgerald wrote to let his “Dearest, dearest mother” know that he had arrived safely, after a four-week journey characterized by intense seasickness but made diverting by the ship’s captain, who “was quite a Gentleman, spoke French and played the flute.”11 Being landed for so short a time, he was unable to give a detailed “account of the Country or the people,” but noted, “by what I hear they are all Irish at least in the Town, the broge [sic] is not in higher perfection in Kilkenny,” suggesting that even in the late eighteenth century, the Irish were shaping the soundscape of Canadian settlements along with their culture. He was given the opportunity, rare for an Irish visitor of his class, to observe thriving Irish communities at the point where they were setting down roots in the Maritimes. These communities consisted primarily of Protestant freeholders from Ulster and other regions12 rather than the class of “poor tenants” back home about whom Fitzgerald was so solicitous in his letters.13 Not wanting to face another sea journey to get to his posting, he chose the longer land route around the Bay of Fundy, departing from the lodgings of a self-proclaimed relative, “a Mr Cornelius O’Brian.” (Fitzgerald claimed he “accept[ed] the relationship, and his horse.”) He planned to go a hundred and twenty miles to Saint John, New Brunswick, along a road that he heard was “very bad but by all accounts very wild and beautiful.” He told his mother that he looked forward to seeing first-hand “rivers and Lakes of which one has no idea in England” and “the finest wood and pasture but quite in a state of nature.” He added that seeing the uncultivated country that he had

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heard of only through reports would be “a journey after my own heart,”14 the appeal of the wilderness reflecting his desire for change, novelty, and forgetfulness, anticipating his later criticism of the upperclass society that had rejected him as a suitor for his cousin Georgiana. His route would take him along “one river called Shubennacadee … which they tell me is so full of fish you kill them with sticks.” The river had been named by its first inhabitants, the Sipekne’katik nation, meaning “a place abounding in groundnuts” or “place where the wapato grows.”15 Fitzgerald’s letter does not mention the Sipekne’katik settlement nearby that had welcomed an earlier French/Acadian mission, but his description likewise anticipates a land of plenty, although he primarily focuses on the ways that the newest settlers could exploit it to create a simpler but far more bountiful existence than they could enjoy back home. The communities were also diverse: recently arrived loyalists Fitzgerald describes as “refugees from the other parts of America,” along with “the Indians, the French, the old English settlers,” the latter of whom “are as wild as Indians.”16 He was witnessing the last years of “the middle ground” or “common world” of early settlement, where these three groups lived in close proximity to each other and adopted one another’s customs.17 Perhaps he saw the potential for all groups to be “one brother,” sharing resources and land equitably. At any rate, his impression of a land of plenty was further reinforced during his “long and fatiguing journey,” which he described to his mother in the 18 July letter written after he arrived in Saint John. Although he depicted the hardships as similar to a military campaign with the “one material point of having no danger” and was plagued by “millions” of mosquitos, he noted that he travelled through “a whole Tract of County peopled by Irish, who came out not worth a shilling and have all now farms worth … from 1000 to 3000 pound.”18 Fitzgerald’s 18 July letter provides a narrative that would not be out of place in Isabella Valancy Crawford’s poem, “A Hungry Day,” written a century later to celebrate Canadian territories as a haven for Irish immigrants who “own an axe and have a strong right arm.”19 He tells his mother that by subsisting on the plentiful game in the area and selling moose hides and maple sugar, a “hard working man” could clear “ground enough to raise a little grain,” and be “sure in a few years to have a comfortable supply of every necessary of life.” Work becomes the leveller that allows “every body [to be] on a footing, provided he works and wants nothing, every man is exactly what he makes himself or has made himself by Industry.” Given that he

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concluded his 24 June letter to his mother by writing, “I love Georgiana more than ever,” his sense of being shut out from fulfillment by a rigid class system seems to colour his declaration, “the Equality of every body and their manner of life I like very much.” His description of settler life offers far more reward for hard work than what could be hoped for by an Irish tenant dependent on his landlord. It also offers an implicit condemnation of the aristocratic system of primogeniture and arranged marriages that he feels has blighted his own happiness. Instead of multiple sons being shut out of a single inheritance, the simplicity of settler society ensures that all children are provided for and provide equally. Consequently, as he wryly observes in the 18 July letter, a farmer’s “wife being brought to bed is as joyful news as his Cow Calving; the Father has no uneasiness about providing for them, by the support of their work by the time they are fit to settle he can always afford them two Oxen, a Cow, a Gun, and an Ax [sic] and in a few years if they work they will thrive.” In the same letter, Fitzgerald confesses to his mother, “I own I often think how happy I could be with Georgy in any spot I see, and envy every young farmer I met, who I saw sitting down with a young wife who he was going to work to maintain.” The future of such marriages could be guessed from his description of a septuagenarian couple who ran a rustic inn where his party had stopped for the night. The settlement was “all the work of one pair” and their descendants, the five children who supplied them with produce from their own farm, leaving them just enough work to amuse them and to run an inn, mostly for the sake of the company it provided. Fitzgerald notes the patriarch and matriarch “had been there 30 years; they came there with one Cow, three children and one Servant, there not a living being within 60 mile of them, the first year they lived mostly on milk and marsh leaves.” A generation later, they were established in relative comfort and surrounded and supported by family, a detail that throughout Fitzgerald’s letters is his standard for happiness. Fitzgerald consciously sets the scene for his mother, the intimate confidante for his romantic yearnings, using the narrative to express the gulf between his dreams and the reality of a life hemmed in by class restrictions and family expectations: “Conceive, dearest mother, arriving about twelve o’clock in a hot day at a little cabin upon the side of a rapid river, the banks all covered with woods, not a house in sight – and there finding a little old clean tidy woman spinning with an old man of the same appearance, weeding salad … both talking a good deal, telling their story …

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how they had been there thirty years, and how their children were settled, and when either’s back was turned remarking how old the other had grown; at the same time all kindness, cheerfulness, and love to each other.”20 The narrative concludes with Fitzgerald, “Tony, and our guide sitting with them, all on one log.” As they all enjoy “the wild quietness of the place, not a living creature or habitation to be seen,” the humble hosts, a freed slave from America, and an aristocrat from Ireland form an early image of the “peaceable kingdom,”21 a trope that future Irish writers would employ to distinguish Canada not only from Ireland but also the United States. What would become a distinctive national narrative in Irish-Canadian literature has at its core a personal motive in this letter: Fitzgerald concludes his description by comparing the life of the old couple to “the scene I had left, the immense way I had to get from this corner of the world, to see any thing I loved, the difference of the life I should lead from that of this old pair, perhaps at their age miserable and unhappy, discontented, disappointed, wishing for power, &c. &c. my dearest mother, if it was not for you, I believe I never should go home.” That Fitzgerald makes sociological observations based on a few days’ travel suggests the scenes he paints are as much a projection of his own frustration and desires as an accurate view of settler life. They reflect his inclinations: he dreamed of hunting and gardening on his modest estate, Kilrush, away from the political demands and compromises expected of him by his older brother the Duke of Leinster or the necessities of following his chosen profession far from his family. He minimizes the hardships and privation of settler life, as suggested by his observation in the 18 July letter that the colonists “ought to be the happiest people in the world, but they do not seem to know it, they imagine themselves poor because they have no money, without considering they do not want it.” At the same time, the letters provide an early record of a society that, while allied with Britain, would ultimately develop a significantly different social structure. By 16 August, Fitzgerald tells his mother he is settled at “St Ann’s New Brunswick,” near Fredericton. In spite of his professed homesickness (Tony’s “black face is the only thing I feel yet attached to”), he describes the country as “beautiful” and says the weather is “charming,” compared to the eternal fogs of Saint John. He describes the regimental routine as “a mixture of country life and military life … that is very pleasant,” and informs her that he has “got a garden for

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the soldiers which employs me a great deal,” a project that might have been inspired as much by the idyllic routine of the elderly couple as by his own inclinations. Like the “old settlers” described in his letter to his stepfather, he is also eager to adopt the Indigenous technology that Weld would also admire, at least to the extent of learning to portage, canoe, and camp in the woods. In trying to find common ground to explain this novel form of transportation to his Irish audience, he notes that “a canoe here is like a post chaise at home and the rivers and lakes your post horses. You would laugh to see the faithful Tony and I carrying one.” Initially, he views canoeing as simply “another of [his] amusements,” noting that “it is very pleasant here sometimes to go in this way exploring ascending far up some river or creek and finding sometimes the finest lands and most beautiful spots in nature which are not at all known and quite wild.” However, in spite of his delight in the novelty of portaging and camping, he hints at these expeditions’ more serious purpose, since he is planning to “go on one of these parties, up a river, the source and course of which is yet unknown.”22 Fitzgerald hints at the strategic aims behind much of the military exploration. In planning his later, more gruelling journey to Quebec, he confided to his stepfather that “besides … being a pleasant journey, it will be instructive as I go thru the Frontiers of our provinces and see the kind of country if ever there is a war, we are likely to act in.”23 Like later Irish writers, his interest in adapting Indigenous technology comes with the recognition that it will aid in defending British sovereignty by opening up lands to loyal settlers from Ireland and the rest of Britain. In a letter from Fredericton dated 2 September, Fitzgerald tells his mother that he is contemplating another, more challenging canoe journey of two hundred and fifty miles to the “Grand Falls of St John,” again “by all accounts beautiful.” In the letter, he contemplates adopting not only Indigenous travel methods but also their way of life. After all, he claims, “savages have all the real happiness of life without any of those inconveniences or ridiculous obstacles to it which custom has introduced among us. They enjoy the love and company of their wives, relations, and Friends without any interference of interests or Ambition to separate them.” Again, the impediments created for a younger son in a rigid system of primogeniture colour his views when he notes that “if we had been Indians … instead of Lord George being violent against letting me marry Georgiana he would be glad to give her to me that I might feed her.” Just as when he encountered the settlement

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founded by the elderly couple, he imagines a life devoid of “devilish politicks … fashions, customs, duties, appearances to the world” that “interfere with ones [sic] happiness.” Instead, he prefers simple, comfortable subsistence within a society founded on “love” and “mutual obligation” in which the young are cherished and the old are supported. If his family “had been Indians,” he tells his mother, the emotional sterility of upper-class life would be replaced by Fitzgerald’s “duty to be with you to make you comfortable and to hunt and fish for you.” As with the settlers he previously described, “there would be then no cares of looking forward to the fortune for children of thinking how you are to live, you enjoy the present with looking forward, no separations in families one in Ireland one in England.” Recalling his picture of the elderly settler couple whose few needs are supplied by their loyal offspring, Fitzgerald tells his mother to imagine herself as the leisured and honoured matriarch of a generic Indigenous family group, “smoking your pipe Ogilvie and us boys after having brought in our game would be lying about the fire while our squaws were helping the ladies to cook or taking care of our papouses [sic] all this in a fine wood beside some beautiful lake.” He also notes that “instead of being served and supported by servants every thing here is done by ones [sic] relations by the people one loves and the mutual obligations you must be under increase your love for each other.” He admits that his younger sisters Ciss and Mimi would be obliged to cut a little wood and bring a little water,” while the older ones were “cooking or drying fish.” However, his own upbringing as an aristocratic male overrides his egalitarian fantasy when he imagines the women helping cook or “taking care of our papouses” while he envisages the men “spending the day hunting and fishing,” in a life not far removed from what he and his stepfather might enjoy on his small estate in Ireland.24 Fitzgerald seems to conjure this fantasy in part as a foil to the realities he is trying to escape from, and in part to tease his family, as suggested by his admission to his stepfather in his February 1799 letter that he is always happy “to lay aside the character of major commanding his majesty’s regiment to play the fool and buffoon.”25 In spite of the idyllic family romance he presents, he ends his letter to his mother by asking her to reassure Ogilvie: “don’t let him be afraid of my marrying a Yahoo.” His insistence that he would like to run away and join the “Indians” is balanced by his repeated intentions to return home. Calling himself his mother’s “petit sauvage” and insisting that “the

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more savage I am, the more I love her” indicate that his intentions to “join the savages” is mainly performance, for a select family audience, of his deep attachment to them, along with his intense romantic ­frustration. His descriptions of the vast differences between North American life and his life at home are part of a larger rhetoric in which he insists on demonstrating his connection and commitment to his family on the other side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, in attempting to communicate these distinctions and differences, he provides early, idealized depictions of Canadian life, both settler and Indigenous, that would later be reprised equally consciously by emigration proponents as well as Canadian nationalists. By October, the rustic pleasures of gardening, camping, and exploring give way to preparation for a winter that, by the end of the month, was “setting in violently.” However, he assures his mother that he is ready, having “got plenty of flannel,” and using “one of my blankets to make a Coat.”26 Again relying on others’ experience, he tells her, “by all accounts it will be very pleasant I have got my snow shoes ready with them you walk and travel easier in winter than summer; it will be quite a new scene.27 While his family audience encourages Fitzgerald to focus on the novelty and picturesque elements of the mode of travel he plans to adopt, his letters also show that he is considering their practical importance once again. In a letter to his stepfather that he composed between December 1788 and 21 February 1789, he informs him that the Canadian winter “would be the best time to move troops.” He notes that General Carleton had “succeeded so far as to get his regiment on snow shoes, but had not tried any long marches, and since the war it has fallen through.” Only the expense of supplying his own troops with snowshoes discouraged Fitzgerald from trying the same experiment. In the same letter, Fitzgerald also notes that his projected expedition from New Brunswick to Quebec, using snowshoes and hauling supplies on “tabargins,” would illustrate that “there is almost no difficulty that cannot be overcome by the perseverance and ingenuity of man.” While such strategies would “appear odd to a European officer,” Fitzgerald recognizes the ways that the British military and imperial project collects and adopts Canadian artifacts and technology in order to assert possession of Canadian land, just as Stephen Dickson would recognize the value of this knowledge when celebrating the interplay between British civilization’s “science” and its establishment in a rugged environment in his poem. Fitzgerald’s confidence in his ability to endure wintry

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conditions would also transfer well to later literary portraits of a culture made distinctive by explorers’ and traders’ heroic mastery of rivers and snowy terrain. Fitzgerald’s eager anticipation of the upcoming winter expeditions contributes to Moore’s later construction of him as a Romantic hero, when he comments that “none but a spirit and frame hardy as his own could have contrived to exact enjoyment” from such a “difficult and adventurous journey” (1.133). Such characterization allows Moore to foreshadow Fitzgerald’s unwavering resolution as an Irish republican. It also provides an early example of a trope used by the Canada First founder Robert Haliburton to assert that “men of the north” would guide Canada to its rightful place in leading the empire if they were willing to rise to the land’s challenges.28 Fitzgerald repeats similar sentiments in a letter to his mother dated 21 November 1788, where he is again enamoured with “the idea of being out of doors notwithstanding the clemency of the weather,“ which allows him to demonstrate “the ingenuity of man overcoming all the difficulties of nature.” Significantly, the expedition he recounts included General Carleton and surveyed “a fine track [sic] of land that had been mapped over the winter … it will now be soon settled.” In surviving – even thriving – in a cold climate, Fitzgerald and his fellow explorers demonstrated that settlers from the British Isles could make it their home. Tellingly, the region to be settled is land on which “there had never been but one person before,”29 which again suggests his view that it was legally and morally open to European possession. He did not deviate much from the official British hope for a distinct society made up of loyalists and new immigrants willing to adapt existing Indigenous and FrenchCanadian methods of survival to facilitate British settlement. Based on his brief experience of winter camping, he assures his mother in the 21 November letter that on “three of the coldest nights we have had yet, I slept in the woods with only one blanket and was just as comfortable as in a room.” In fact, by “clearing away the snow and banking up round and in the middle of the space making a large fire you are much warmer than in the best house. I long to teach you all how to make a good spruce bed.” The practicalities of adapting to life in the woods aside, it also provides Fitzgerald with sublime and reflective moments that later poets would also exploit to create a distinct physical and moral character for Canadians, as he describes the impressions “when one wakens perhaps in the middle of the night” in the forest with “all your companions snoring about you, the moon

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shining thro the trees.“ However, his enthusiastic embrace of Canadian outdoor life is inevitably followed by a declaration of homesickness (demonstrated in this letter by his assertion that he “would willingly give up the woods to see [Georgiana]”). While he happily returned home, he left an image of the landscape as open to settlement by the hardy, yet spiritual, rooted Canadian that would become an essential theme of nationalist literature. In wanting to uphold his own youthful vision of Fitzgerald as a heroic and sensitive figure, Moore left out details from the letters that would compromise this impression, even if they also leave out Fitzgerald’s most vivid images of Canadian winter life. Consequently, Moore’s readers were spared the fact that soldiers often relied on something other than their blanket coats to stay warm on a New Brunswick winter night: “There is a certain commodity here very cheap indeed which helps me on – not quite so good as chez la Comtesse de Milford but very tolerable. What a set of hungry dogs there will be at this shop this winter. I certainly do envy some of them.” Where he earlier declared that he would give up the woods for Georgiana, he also admits to Ogilvie that he “would give up the woods [for] at least a night’s lodging” in the brothels near the garrison, but adds, “pray don’t let Mother hear this she would be quite shocked,”30 as, no doubt, would be Moore’s polite readers. Likewise, no quotations from Fitzgerald’s December letter to his sister Sophia made it into Moore’s biography. In his December letter to his stepfather, Fitzgerald wonders if his sister “little Charlotte” has “boned [captured] Mr Strutt yet” and, if so, has consummated the marriage.31 Upon hearing of Charlotte’s marriage, he dispenses brotherly advice to Sophia on how to attract a suitor: “Ye little bitch don’t be in a hurry and your time will come … I think the Linnan handkerchief and a Castleton nosegay and the little cockers [breasts] must get something at last or the Devils in the dice. I am sure Charlotte got Mr Strutt by the swing of her bum, but don’t abandon your favorites never spare them, work them well, here is enough nonsense.”32 He then dares Sophia to show the letter to his staid eldest brother, the Duke of Leinster. Sexual frankness aside, the 2 December letter is full of other domestic details that Moore probably also felt reflected poorly on both his national hero and his valet, including Fitzgerald’s description of his neighbour, “an Officers wife an Irish woman … who quarrels often with her maid and calls her a dirty Garron [an Irish term for a small breed of horse] … the huswif is generally at the head of

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stairs and the maid at the bottom and they go on abusing one another for hours calling the most ridiculous names you ever heard but never bitch … they make more noise than Tony beating his wife.” While perhaps considered too mundane for Moore’s biography, the letter does offer interesting details of how (when away from the brothels) Fitzgerald adapted to the cold that would continue to seem so alien to Irish visitors: “We have had some very cold weather, but I do not mind much, I have dressed very comfortably against it. Plenty of flannel, every thing next ones body is flannel, and we wear a kind of shoe of soft tanned leather which covers a pair of socks. A great high fur cap with flaps that come down and tie under the chin, a short blanket coat which goes well around the body tied with a sash; large fur gloves which come almost to the elbow. In short we are dressed in that kind of way that really one bears the cold better here than in England or France … We all look like Khamskatscans.”33 The Russian analogy would help his family picture the blanket coats, sash, and moccasins he has adopted, but in his hybrid winter garb, Fitzgerald could be a plausible sitter for the bronze portrait on Dufferin’s Belfast monument. Again, in spite of inconveniences such as frozen ink or the long eyelashes so admired by Moore becoming “a cake of ice,” Fitzgerald assures his relatives that the extreme winters are more enjoyable than in Europe – and healthier, declaring that he has not had “a Bellyache or sore eye since I left England.”34 He also tells Sophia that “the cold weather puts one in very good spirits” made delightful by “another diversion … the slaying [sic] or going in Traineaus, [horse-drawn sleighs or carioles].” Fitzgerald indulged in these excursions “night and day it is absolutely flying, they are all made to hold six people at least.”35 His exhilaration brought on by outdoor activities in a salubrious climate anticipates another distinguishing characteristic that later Irish-Canadian writers, such as Nicholas Flood Davin, would use to encourage emigration to Canada. A month earlier, in a letter dated 21 November, Fitzgerald had told his mother that skating “has taken the place of canoeing. It is delightful exercise and puts one in great spirits.” While a future IrishCanadian poet, Oliver Goldsmith, would pride himself on his ability to use his skates to write his name on the ice in “large … elegant letters,”36 Fitzgerald’s original letter admits that such skill did not come easily to a newcomer, and he has knocked his “poor bones to pieces almost,” a detail Moore omits in his biography. In editing out Fitzgerald’s closing comments, Moore also reinforces the notion of

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Fitzgerald as utterly turning his back on civilization and its refinements, whereas in the original, he shows tendencies more in keeping with his family and class: “tell Ciss and Mimi I am learning Whist to play with them by the time I see you I shall be fit to play with Richardson and Lady Inchiquin.” Conscious of his audience, it would seem reasonable to Moore to include only the details that best illustrate Fitzgerald’s delight in the novelty of Canadian environment and society, but Fitzgerald’s image (possibly intended as ironic) of him docilely playing cards with the ladies and gentlemen in his mother’s neighbourhood challenges the hardy and more egalitarian portrait that is prevalent in the biography’s Canadian account. In mid-February, Fitzgerald embarked upon his long-planned 175mile overland trek to the town of Quebec, described in Moore’s biography as “an arduous and dangerous undertaking, entirely through uninhabited woods, morasses, and mountains, a route never before attempted, even by the Indians,” that would ultimately take twenty-six days, with the party camping out at night for the duration “without any covering except their blanket-coats.” In doing so, his party found a new route that would cut the normal travel distance by nearly half. To achieve it, he needed to not only admire but also adopt egalitarian habits: “On such expeditions lord and servant are alike, for each must carry his own provisions” (1.136). By some accounts, it could have ended very badly, although in his letter to his mother, Fitzgerald made light of the rumours that they were lost or starving. The party consisted of Fitzgerald, Small, some woodsmen, and a fellow officer named Brisbane. While Fitzgerald admitted to his mother that “some think we were mad to undertake it,”37 the expedition helped gain him “the esteem and admiration” (1.137) of the British officials in Quebec. Small and the other servants and guides, equally intrepid and trail-blazing, remained uncredited. Equally unknown are the identities of the generic “savages,” the Indigenous family who shared food and expertise that helped the explorers make it to Quebec alive. In his lengthy and detailed 14 March letter that, like his first, was probably intended to re-­ establish contact with his mother after an anxiety-provoking silence, Fitzgerald reveals the extent to which his group depended upon the hunting party they “fell in with.” (They might have been Abenaki speakers from whose language Quebec derives its name38 or Wendat (Huron) who had settled near Quebec.) Fitzgerald tells his mother that he ingratiated himself by carrying a pack belonging to an elderly

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woman “which was so heavy I could hardly waddle under it, however I was well paid whenever we stopt for she always gave me the best bits and most Soup and took as much care of me as if I had been her own Son in short I was quite l’Enfant cheri.” On parting, “the old Lady and Gentleman both kissed me very heartily; I gave the Old Lady one of Sophia’s Silver Spoons which pleased her very much.” In order to feed the hunting party and their unexpected guests, the group embarked on “a hard moose chase” that took place over two days, furnishing Fitzgerald with another Canadian vignette to share with his mother. The hunt was unlike the shooting parties enjoyed by Fitzgerald and Ogilvie on the family estates, since Fitzgerald assumes his mother’s unfamiliarity and explains that “the man himself runs the moose down;” or more accurately, a relay of men on snowshoes pursued the quarry, for days, if necessary, essentially relying as much on exhaustion as bullets to end its life. As Fitzgerald observed, the hunter “only gets his game by perseverance, – an Indian never gives him up.” Fitzgerald admits that he could not “help being sorry now for the poor creature.” Educated in the Age of Sensibility notwithstanding, he recognized that such sentiment was a European luxury when starving and cold, and admitted “that in a few hours the good passion wore off, and the animal one predominated … We are beasts, dearest mother, I am sorry to say it.”39 Approximately 120 years after Fitzgerald wrote this letter, an English architect chose to set a bronze moose hunter in a busy Belfast square. As guardian figure on the 1902 Dufferin monument, the snowshoe-toting woodsman helps perpetuate the image of Canadian hardiness and perseverance. If the sculptor assumed his viewers’ familiarity with Moore’s famous biography, then the Belfast statue evokes one of the United Irish originators of this particular literary and visual image. Immortalized in bronze, the Canadian moose hunter sits within sight of the venerable Linen Hall library whose first librarian was a United Irishman. Fitzgerald’s wish for an experience of “savage life” fulfilled, he initially found his re-entry into colonial life difficult. In spite of being fed and cared for by their adoptive Indigenous family, the explorers were a frightful spectacle when they entered the city, dirty and unshaven, their unwashed clothes in patches and rags. Fitzgerald delighted in telling his mother how, after several innkeepers turned them away, one woman contemptuously looked them over from head to foot before reluctantly offering them a room “without a stove or

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bed.” When they insisted that they were gentlemen, “she very quietly said, ‘I dare say you are.’” Equally gleefully, Fitzgerald describes returning the next day clean and well dressed “with one of Lord Dorchester’s aides-de-camp, to triumph over the old lady.”40 In spite of this inauspicious introduction, Fitzgerald enjoyed the charms of Quebec and Montreal society as it emerged from the icy grip of winter. Apparently even before his arrival in Canada, Irish expectations of Canadian life were being shaped by literature. Fitzgerald briefly describes the weather as “charming … every thing green,” referring his mother to the novel The History of Emily Montague (1769), which “will tell you all that better than I can.” Like future writers confronted with Canada’s dramatic seasons, he marvelled that “ten days ago, I set out from Quebec in five feet of snow.” He quickly became jaded, though, by the small British social circle in the city, complaining that “I have done nothing but feast, and I am horribly tired of it.” Where later he would prefer Paris, he found French Canadians “very like the French, and of course I like them.” Like Weld, he found French-Canadian women charming, particularly “a mother and two pretty daughters … We were very sorry to part.” Nevertheless, the charms of Montreal’s women did not dislodge the love he had left England to escape: “What would I give to hear a pleasant account of Georgiana! But I despair – so will not think of it.”41 Fortunately, Fitzgerald’s long-projected visit to Niagara Falls provided a distraction from his love- and homesickness, and he promised his mother in his 1 June letter, “I won’t let myself think of you again till I am in the Mississippi.” When Moore included excerpts from Fitzgerald’s visit to “the Falls of Niagara” in his biography, he was no doubt reminded of his own sublime experience there in 1804, where, like Fitzgerald before him, he was left speechless. “To describe them is impossible,” Fitzgerald declared. It took three days before he could manage to tear himself away. Where he had earlier found analogies that would allow his family to comprehend his experiences, the falls forced him to admit defeat, adding, “Homer would not in writing or Claude Lorraine in painting, your own imagination must do it.”42 Recounting Fitzgerald’s rapturous response to the falls, Moore concludes with Fitzgerald saying, “I will not go on, for I should never end,” but go on he does in the original letter, describing a hazardous descent to the bottom of the falls that remained accessible to more intrepid visitors into the nineteenth century. (Fitzgerald tried to stand underneath the falls, but the noise and the spray made it impossible

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to breathe.) While Moore excises Fitzgerald’s account of this descent, a Canadian novel, Agnes Maule Machar’s For King and Country: A Story of 1812 (1874), coincidentally features a jaded, sceptical British army officer who likewise fled to Canada to recover from an unhappy love affair. After making the same difficult climb to the base of the falls, his experience of the sublime leads him to recover his faith and inspires his dedication to the new country. Fitzgerald likewise records a change of perspective. With the “immense” distances he has travelled and the equally “immense” natural wonders fresh in his mind, Fitzgerald concludes his letter with the observation, tragic in hindsight, “Ireland and England will be too little for me, when I go home.”43 The 1 June letter also informs his mother of another extraordinary itinerary – southbound to New Orleans, with stops in Detroit and Michilimackinac – before returning to England. Characteristically, Fitzgerald planned to “go in canoes up and down rivers,” which he preferred to being pent up in larger lake-going vessels, where he had experienced “being as sick as at sea.” He told his mother, “I have got a canoe, with five men, – every thing is laid in,” including presents for the Indigenous villages he would pass through. This last detail suggested that, like the Quebec trek, his journey would have strategic and diplomatic ends, in this case, maintaining good relationships between the British and their Indigenous allies in their territories. The men hired to transport Fitzgerald’s party and his goods were “Canadian,” that is, French-speaking voyageurs, and, like Weld and later Moore, Fitzgerald admired their cheerful endurance: “The Canadian engagés here live on nothing but two handfuls of corn and an ounce of grease per day, and work and sing the whole day. It is very pleasant to travel with them. They sing all day, and keep time with their paddles: their lively, gay, sans souci French blood never leaves them: they are the same in America as in France.”44 To Fitzgerald, fluent in French and with many happy memories of extended tours with his family, the presence of French culture in North America allayed his homesickness. His Francophilia complemented his family’s Anglo-Irish world view held since childhood. In contrast to paranoid British governors, his sanguine view of French culture in America and Europe might have predisposed him to be optimistic about and receptive to the revolutionary changes in Paris when he visited again on his return from North America. In some ways, his views again align with those of Moore, who did not retreat to conservatism in the same way as Southey and Wordsworth did in the wake of the French

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Revolution.45 While Moore would reject French republican sentiments shortly after the rebellion of 1803, he appreciated the Romantic aura the voyageurs possessed. In reading Fitzgerald’s description nearly thirty years after composing his “Canadian Boat Song,” he would no doubt have felt his affinity with the long-dead United Irishman renewed. Having procured his canoes and his competent and cheerful FrenchCanadian guides, Fitzgerald told his mother that his tour of Indigenous communities would be “the most interesting and agreeable … yet,” since “the people I am going among live more in their own way, and have less connexion with Europeans.” However, even when being feted in remote Indigenous settlements, Fitzgerald was not out of range of Regency politics, Whig strategies, or the political complications created by his eldest brother the Duke of Leinster, his Uncle the Duke of Richmond, and his cousin Charles Fox. Fitzgerald casually mentions to his mother that his travelling companion on the trip to Detroit was “one of the Indian chiefs, Joseph Brant, he that was in England,” perhaps assuming she would know the geopolitical import of that observation. Brant (Thayendanegea), a Kanien’keha:ka war chief and statesman from the Wolf Clan as well as British officer, had already been to England twice, most recently in 1785 to request the English government pay reparations for damages to Kanien’keha:ka communities resulting from the recent war with America and to gain a pension for his military service.46 In 1789, there was no doubt whether Brant or the young British officer and junior member of an aristocratic family was the more famous or influential figure. Brant had been feted on both of his visits to England, having his portrait painted by George Romney, meeting James Boswell, and becoming friends with politicians, including Fox.47 In fact, Fitzgerald’s political connections may have been part of the reason that he and Brant ultimately had “taken very much to one another,” in Fitzgerald’s words. (Incidentally, Brant also had Irish family connections: his brother-in-law was the Irish-born Indian agent, William Johnson.48) At any rate, the reasons for their affinity are complex. Brant, emphatically a “man of two worlds” in the words of his biographer, Isabel Kelsay, prefigures Adam Kidd’s admiring descriptions of “celebrated and intelligent” chiefs who could read and write in several languages. Definitely not a “noble savage,” Brant had won his community’s respect as both war chief and sachem, but was equally respected for his European education, his facilities as a translator and diplomat,

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and his devout Christianity. While he stirred up controversy among his own people for advocating intermarriage with settlers and adopting European innovations, he continually tried to establish whatever relationships would ultimately benefit them.49 Fitzgerald likely spent three or four weeks with Brant. He promised his mother that he would entertain her “very much with Brant’s remarks on England, and the English, while he was there,” but to the regret of historians and biographers, there is no written record of their conversations.50 Fitzgerald enjoyed the songs and dances with which he was welcomed in Indigenous communities on this excursion. Brant himself was known to join in and accompany the traditional dances with a drum, but he was equally fond of a Scottish reel. If other travellers’ accounts can be relied on, the young Irish lord would have discovered that Brant was as fond of good living as Fitzgerald’s corpulent cousin Fox, feting his guests with lavish meals and tea in bone china cups served by African-American servants in livery, along with copious amounts of whisky.51 Rather than his “wildness,” Brant’s hospitality, which rivalled the Irish aristocracy’s, may have cemented the friendship. Several parallels could be drawn between Brant’s life and that of the future United Irishman. Brant first distinguished himself as a British officer, but like Fitzgerald his ultimate loyalties were to his own nation, whose sovereignty was never officially recognized by the British. He devoted much of his life to an unsuccessful attempt to regain the influence lost at the close of the American Revolutionary War, making Fitzgerald a potentially valuable ally.52 His 1785 visit to England had not resolved his most pressing questions about whether the British would defend their Kanien’keha:ka allies’ titles to lands, which were ultimately ceded to the Americans. His real dream was for Indigenous nations, led by the Haudenosaunee, to be equal players in shaping British and American policy after the American war. Unknown to them, the British had already made the decision to surrender Haudenosaunee territories to the Americans. In his biography, Moore notes that political concessions to the Irish were a cup dashed from their lips in the paranoid years leading up to the French Revolution, to which he ascribed the increasing radicalization of the Society of United Irishmen and its power to find common cause between Ascendancy members, Northern Protestants, and Catholics. Brant likewise saw his hopes of British support dashed, and in its wake dreamed of a confederacy of different Indigenous nations, imagined as “a dish with one spoon.53

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Brant may have hoped that his friendship with Fitzgerald would strengthen his strategic relationships with British politicians, and it is likely that he encouraged Kanien’keha:ka Chief Karonghyontye (David Hill) to adopt Fitzgerald into the Bear Clan. In his 20 June 1789 letter from Detroit, Fitzgerald told his mother, “I have been adopted by one of the Nations and am now a thorough Indian.” Fitzgerald cherished this “wild honour,” in Moore’s words, treasuring the paper that documented his adoption and the bestowal of his new name, since Moore found it “preserved among his papers,” and reproduced it, in Kanien’keha:ka and English, in his biography” (1.147). Fitzgerald’s informal adoption as the “Enfant cheri” of an unnamed Indigenous woman and his later official adoption by two politically astute and cosmopolitan leaders show two sides of Indigenous societies and cultures as they evolved in relation to European geopolitics. At the conclusion of his journey to New Orleans, he tells his brother that it would take too long to give a full account of his journey, but declares, “I have seen human nature under almost all its forms. Every where it is the same, but the wilder it is the more virtuous.”54 While Moore and others argue that Fitzgerald’s second North American excursion changed his views profoundly, he also begins and ends his written accounts with views derived from the precepts of Rousseau that shaped his early education. In terms of both the detailed descriptions by a curious and engaged traveller and the tantalizing omissions, Fitzgerald’s letters only hint at the complexity of British-Indigenous relationships, of settler societies on both sides of the border, and of Irish-British relationships. Because the primary audience for his letters is his family, for whom he played the favourite son as well as the buffoon, the reader needs to question how serious Fitzgerald was about remaining in North America to live a pastoral life in either a settler or Indigenous community, given that his family’s familiarity with Romantic literary conventions and travel accounts likely influenced how he described the landscapes and seasons he encountered.55 Moreover, his wish to convey the newness of his experience to his family ensured that he eagerly noted and elaborated on the habits, customs, dress, and activities that would best convey local colour to his Irish audience. In doing so, he provided pictures of Canadian life and Canadians that were taken up by later artists and would endure in literature, art, caricatures, and sculpture until the beginning of the twentieth century.

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In his biography, Moore speculated that “the romance of savage life” inspired Fitzgerald’s future activism, but was “arrived at, through all the mazes of ingenious reasoning, by Rousseau” (1.101). While recognizing the complexity of influences, including his own family’s Whig politics, that gradually led Fitzgerald to embrace the republican cause, Moore asserted that “all he had meditated and felt among the solitudes of Nova Scotia could not fail to render his mind a more ready recipient for such doctrines as he found prevalent on his return to Europe” (1.103). In depicting Fitzgerald as an Irish patriot as well as Romantic hero, Moore drew on the literary elements of his letters that would reinforce this image of Canada as a place that provided simplicity and sublimity, solitude for reflection, and an absence of what Moore considered “the pomps and luxuries of high life” that stood in the way “of all simple and real happiness” (1.98). Just as when he had emerged from the woods into the “civilized” world of Quebec innkeepers, Fitzgerald received an illustration of the stark difference between Indigenous and European mores when he returned to his mother’s house in England and was unceremoniously hustled out the door. He had arrived unannounced, and nearly walked in on the newly married Georgiana, who was paying a visit.56 Family politics would hurt him in other ways as well. An m p since 1783, he had been returned as member for Kildare in the Irish Parliament, but it necessitated an alliance with the opposition that alienated his Uncle Richmond and ultimately lost him a coveted post in the army. While the settler and Indigenous cultures and the landscapes Fitzgerald encountered may have shaped, or at least reinforced, Fitzgerald’s egalitarian principles, his return to Europe reinforced his resentments while exposing him to new political philosophies inspired by both the American and French revolutions. In Ireland, Moore notes, Whig clubs had been set up in Dublin and Belfast as a reaction to the Regency crisis, and according to him, the “new revolutionary school” had “superseded the venerable doctrines of 1688” used previously to force government reform in England (1.197). Before departing for Canada, Fitzgerald, like many Irish Patriots, had been interested in the theories of Thomas Paine, which Stella Tillyard argues he was able to observe in practice in his experience of Indigenous and settler communities’ “equality of life.”57 In 1791, Fitzgerald became part of Paine’s social circle in England, and then his roommate in Paris, after he went there to experience first-hand the

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excitement of the revolution, and began the next fateful stage of his life. Once in Paris, he began dating letters to his mother, “1st year of the Republic, 1792,” and signing himself, “le citoyen Edouard Fitzgerald.” He also met other Irish republicans and began exploring the possibilities of establishing an independent republic in Ireland. At a gathering in November of that year, he renounced his title and drank to a proposed toast, “The speedy abolition of all hereditary titles and feudal distinctions” (1. 173). His admiration for simplicity and, possibly, Canadian beauty, was confirmed when he married Pamela Sims, a woman of relatively obscure and humble background, in Paris. She was reportedly born in Newfoundland but widely assumed to be the daughter of the famous educator Madame de Genlis and the French King’s revolutionary cousin, Philippe Égalite, who later voted for the King’s execution before eventually going to the guillotine himself as the revolution devoured its originators. Fitzgerald adopted other revolutionary habits, such as walking rather than riding, simple dress and hairstyle; these “peculiar” and ostensibly republican modes of transport and fashion caught the young Moore’s eye when he spotted Fitzgerald in Dublin in 1797.58 When he returned to Ireland in 1793, Fitzgerald resumed his parliamentary seat in a government whose initial liberality towards Catholic rights had been replaced by new, repressive measures taken to quench republican fires in Dublin and Belfast, where many moderate volunteers had become increasingly and openly revolutionary. Fitzgerald publicly denounced many of the government’s repressive measures and, through his Paris acquaintances, began to be introduced to United Irish circles. By 1794, he had taken a house in Co. Kildare and begun to reach out to Catholic tenants, adopting their customs, including “turf burning, Gaelic speaking and enthusiastic Irish dancing.”59 (His willingness to identify himself with Irish republicanism through traditional music is reinforced by one legend, which attributes a set of Irish union, or uilleann, pipes to Fitzgerald.60) In 1796, while Theobald Wolfe Tone was in Paris negotiating for French aid, Fitzgerald and fellow United Irish leader Arthur O’Connor travelled to Hamburg to meet with a French minister to discuss the possibility of French military assistance. Back in Ireland, the United Irishmen became a military organization, with Fitzgerald organizing the drilling and arming of existing Irish volunteers and an untrained but enthusiastic collection of artisans, farmers, and peasants whom Fitzgerald hoped could be directed by experienced and battle-hardened

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French officers when they landed. His experiences in North America offered tangible tactical advantages: to make up for the lack of arms among his untrained recruits, Fitzgerald apparently suggested target practice without ammunition. With a degree of skepticism, Moore recounted an anecdote where Fitzgerald, “having observed while in America that the Indians who are almost all expert marksmen have attained this accuracy of aim by the use of the bow and arrow,” suggested that Irish recruits could be turned into expert marksmen “through the habit of aiming at a mark with any missile whether bow or sling … this precision of aim once acquired being with little difficulty transferable to the use of the musket or rifle” (2.211). While Fitzgerald would have liked to lead an army made up of former Patriot volunteers, Ulster Protestant radicals, Dublin tradespeople and professionals, and Irish peasants, he knew that success ultimately depended on French military support. The ferocious winter storm of 1796 ended an attempted landing that would have put French general Lazare Hoche and 14,000 soldiers on Irish soil. With no confirmation from France of another attempt in 1797, Fitzgerald, now the head of the military committee, considered the possibility that Ireland could stage a homegrown overthrow of the government. But the United Irish organization was undermined by spies, whose information allowed the government to arrest most of the senior United Irish members in March 1798. Now the most senior member remaining at large, Fitzgerald eluded capture for several more months while Ireland was plunged into martial law, which forced the organization’s hand. They scheduled the uprising for 23 May, with or without French aid. Fitzgerald was to give the signal, but on 18 May, betrayed by informers, he was shot while resisting arrest and taken to Dublin’s Newgate Prison. Sporadic and uncoordinated rebellions around Dublin and Ulster were abandoned or quickly put down. After some initial victories, the republican and French forces were soon routed with devastating casualties, including 30,000 deaths in combat or from the brutal government reprisals that followed. By the end of 1798, most of the United Irish leaders were in prison or, like Edward Fitzgerald, dead. The outrages and torture that had taken place in 1797 and 1798 remained vivid in Irish folk memory into the twentieth century.61

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4 Thomas Moore (1779–1852)

Even when they met on a Dublin street in 1797, the moderate Irish nationalist Thomas Moore and the militant United Irish leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald appeared to be worlds apart, at least at first glance, separated by class, religion, politics, and temperament. Where the aristocratic Protestant Fitzgerald shed his title with relief in revolutionary Paris, the gallophobic, middle-class Catholic Moore has never entirely shaken off his reputation as “social ambition incarnate,” in Yeats’s cutting phrase.1 Nevertheless, there were many affinities. Owing to his own hard work, talent, and a little luck, the humble grocer’s son found his way into the same Whig social circle occupied by Fitzgerald’s family, which included Francis Rawdon, the Earl of Moira, who became Moore’s patron in 1803. It was through Moira’s patronage that Moore secured an undemanding government position in Bermuda that gave him the opportunity to travel to North America. While there, he repeated many aspects of Fitzgerald’s journey: he travelled in canoes, enjoyed the songs and dances of Indigenous hosts, commented on the ladies of Quebec, complained about the mosquitos, rhapsodized about Niagara Falls and made the perilous descent to its base, and dreamed of settling down in a humble cottage with an innocent young wife – before finally admitting that he was only too delighted to return to Europe and his family. Furthermore, when they met on a Dublin street, Fitzgerald and Moore were each involved with the Society of United Irishmen in their own way. When Moore met Fitzgerald, he was not simply an admirer but a likely recruit for the United Irishmen, already active in promoting their aims at Trinity College. Writing his biography of Fitzgerald at a later time of revolutionary ferment in Ireland and England, Moore could

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have but did not disavow his United Irish associates, asserting that “through almost every step but the last my sympathies had gone with them.”2 As a Catholic student at a mainly Protestant institution, Moore had even more reason to resent government policies than his Protestant classmates. He had direct experience of the discrimination faced by Catholics and Dissenters, sitting exams for university scholarships in the full knowledge that he would be “shut out from all chance of the prize.” He argued that it was not a surprise that this institutionalized bigotry should “live bitterly in the minds and hearts of all who have, at any time, been made [its] victims.”3 Even before Moore arrived at Trinity, he had been immersed in what Leerssen calls “radical Patriot”4 views. His parents devoured United Irish newspapers such as the Press and befriended satirical writers as well as soldiers in the Irish Brigade from France. As a child, he had sat on Napper Tandy’s knee at a dinner given in the United Irish leader’s honour. His parents watched eagerly as Grattan’s Patriot Parliament argued for the relief of Catholic political disabilities, and they supported United Irish cultural activities. When the family sent Moore to Trinity in the hopes that he would become a lawyer, he and the future United Irish leader Robert Emmet became close friends, and both students joined the College Historical Society, a debating club that had honed the skills of notables as diverse as Edmund Burke, Patriot politicians Henry Grattan and Henry Flood, and the United Irish leader Wolfe Tone.5 The harsh measures taken to curb United Irish activities entrenched Moore’s radical Patriot views and helped determine the course of his literary career.6 The alarm caused by the attempted French landing in 1796 spurred repeal of some few concessions made to Catholics. The government’s Indemnity and Insurrection acts suspended habeas corpus, and government forces and Protestant yeomanry perpetuated what Moore later called a reign of “terror and torture” (1.301) characterized by summary executions of civilians and ingeniously cruel punishments such as pitch-capping (which caused victims to maim themselves as they desperately tried to remove hot tar that had been poured on their heads). While Moore later disavowed his youthful and seditious “Letter to the Students of Trinity College,” published in December 1797 in the Press, a Dublin United Irish newspaper, the letter’s accusations of government-sponsored “rapine and desolation” and “murder legalized”7 were not hyperbole. His literary apprenticeship as a Trinity student included many such inflammatory effusions, inspired equally by Patriot politics and Ossianic translations then in

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vogue. These were published in United Irish–sponsored newspapers in Belfast as well as Dublin until he was cautioned by Emmet that his writing was bringing unwanted government attention to the United Irish secret activities.8 The incident that is credited with transforming Moore from United Irish sympathizer to sworn associate occurred in April 1798 when all the members of the college from the provost down were subject to an inquisition after copies of an anonymous pamphlet were scattered throughout the campus. The pamphlet was not authored by Moore, but after a series of public protests and speeches by Trinity students (likely including Moore), it was the final straw for authorities who believed the college was a hotbed of republican sedition. Students were encouraged to sign a petition repudiating the contents of the pamphlet. (Moore’s name does not appear on this petition, but another IrishCanadian author’s does.9) They also were summoned to appear at an inquiry on pain of expulsion. The meeting was chaired by two virulently anti-Catholic government officials, John Fitzgibbon, the chancellor of Ireland and vicechancellor of the university, and Patrick Duignan. Duignan’s bigotry was known “to all who lived in those dark times” through “his eternal pamphlets sounding the tocsin of persecution against the Catholics,” in Moore’s recollection. Fitzgibbon, later the Earl of Clare, was equally feared and hated by all classes of Irish people. While his family were recent converts to Protestantism, Fitzgibbon made up for lost time by becoming, in Moore’s words, “the bitterest of all Orange politicians.” He was also both an intimate of the Fitzgerald family and their tormentor, denying them the right to visit the mortally wounded Fitzgerald until a few hours before his death and deporting his wife. Where Fitzgerald’s name was associated with all that Moore considered chivalrous, the name of the “formidable Fitzgibbon” was “never heard connected but with domineering insolence and cruelty.”10 Along with all the other students and faculty, Moore was required to take an oath before the formidable chancellor denying association with the United Irish organizers and stating what he knew about their activities at the college. He risked expulsion by initially refusing the oath, saying he feared to answer questions that would incriminate other students. Ultimately, he agreed to be sworn in, and his answers that he knew nothing of plans for a rebellion satisfied his inquisitors. Friends of Moore, including Emmet, were expelled for contumacy when they refused to attend the interrogation or answer questions. While what

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he endured was mild relative to the later violence, this experience seems to have goaded him into taking the final, dangerous step of officially joining the Society of United Irishmen shortly afterward.11 Since membership in the society was now punishable by death, the simple act of joining implies courage and conviction, but it is unlikely that the young, diminutive, and naive student was privy to the plots of the chief conspirators, including his friends Emmet and Edward Hudson. Moore’s own memoirs state that he was seriously ill during the time of the rebellion, but they capture vividly the terror and apprehension on 22 May, the eve of the rebellion. In a darkened city, the lamplighters gave the signal to rise up by extinguishing the lamps, and Moore watched from his sickbed as they went out, one by one, towards midnight.12 As spring progressed into summer, Moore would have followed the reports trickling back to Dublin of the bloody clashes on the outskirts of the city, the landing – much too late – of a French army in August, the massacres of Irish peasants who followed them at Vinegar Hill in Mayo, and the summary executions and sectarian reprisals in the revolution’s wake. He would also realize how deeply implicated some of his close friends had been in this rebellion and the fatal consequences of taking that last step with them. Three decades later, he was still traumatized by the events of 1798: “So vivid is my own recollection I could not trust myself to dwell upon them. Though but a youth in college, and so many years have since gone by, the impression of horror and indignation which the acts of the government of that city left upon my mind is, I confess, at this moment far too freshly alive, to allow me the due calmness of a historian in speaking of them” (1.300). While Moore repudiated the violence and French invasion of 1798, he carried the United Irish program of cultural nationalism into the next century. One way he did this was by keeping the rebels’ memories alive in poetry and song, tying them into the continuity of Irish literary and musical traditions that had already been revived and adopted by the Patriots. Mary Helen Thuente argues that Moore continued United Irish rhetorical and cultural aims in his early political satires, the Irish Melodies, Lalla Rookh, and his writing about prominent United Irish figures such as Emmet and Fitzgerald.13 Emmet especially recognized the power of traditional music to rally people to his cause. Moore recalls that while he was playing a tune transcribed by Edward Bunting called “Let Erin Remember the Day,” Emmet sprang up and exclaimed “passionately, “Oh that I were at the

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head of twenty thousand men marching to that air!”14 That Moore had access to these tunes was in part due to the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, which was sponsored by the United Irishmen. It gathered together many of the surviving traditional Irish harpers out of anxiety and a desire to preserve tunes that might otherwise die out with the aging players. In announcing the Belfast Harp Festival, the United Irish organizers argued that “when it is considered how intimately the spirit and character of a people are connected with their national Poetry and Music, it is presumed that the Irish patriot and politician will not deem it an object unworthy of his patronage and protection.”15 This connection between the “spirit,” or national soul, and poetry and music echoes Herder’s assertion that “the music of a nation, in its most imperfect form, and favorite tunes, displays the internal character of the people,” an idea that also informs Moore’s approach in his Irish Melodies.16 The lasting legacy of the Belfast Harp Festival was Bunting’s anthology, General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, introduced to Moore by his friend Edward Hudson, another young United Irish leader. Moore credited Hudson with sparking his lifelong love of Irish music, which became indivisible from his growing political awareness. He recalled many sessions accompanying Hudson’s flute music on the pianoforte, alternately “trying over the sweet melodies of our country” and “talking with indignant feeling of her sufferings and wrongs.”17 Later, his Irish Melodies would set Ireland’s suffering and wrongs to modified traditional harp tunes first collected by Bunting.18 Already part of the Irish coat of arms, the harp became a potent United Irish symbol, representing the voice of the nation through its motto, “It is new strung and shall be heard.” The symbol and the concepts represented by the harp sustained Hudson in jail in a graphic way while he awaited execution or exile. When Moore visited him, he found that “to amuse his solitude” Hudson had made a large drawing “on the wall of his prison representing that fancied origin of the Irish Harp,” which inspired one of Moore’s ballads in his Irish Melodies (1.302). In 1798, however, Moore resisted the “siren song” of the harp that led his fellow-students to exile or death.19 As the rebellion came to its bloody conclusion in the fall of 1798, he left for London to take up law training that his family had planned for him as early as 1795. Moore’s student translations of Anacreon’s odes, not his Ossianic effusions, initially won him fame, his early poetry borrowing more from neo-classical models than it did from Irish ones, whether

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traditional or contemporary. The Irish Melodies that would win him poetic immortality did not appear until 1808, and the Atlantic, as well as time, lay between them and his first publications. While Life and Death drew no explicit parallels between his and Fitzgerald’s journey through North America, it is highly likely that his later Irish ballads owed much to “all he had meditated and felt among the solitudes” he encountered in Canada. As Jane Moore has observed, Moore’s experiences in America sharpened his skills as a neo-classical political satirist, but Canada gave him an early taste of the sublime that may have started his transformation into a Romantic nationalist. These two sides of Moore’s character, political satirist and national bard, “can be seen in embryo” in the writing produced on his North American trip.20 Far outshining his lacklustre performance as a Temple Law student, Moore’s London social career was “remarkable,” according to his later recollection. Anacreon had many subscribers among the Irish professional, artistic, and aristocratic community in England and Ireland (including even the hated Lord Clare). He received permission to dedicate the work to the Prince of Wales, who was at that time sympathetic to the Catholic cause and to the Whigs. The poems also introduced him to an Irish expatriate community of politicians who flocked to Westminster after the dissolution of the Irish Parliament in 1800. Moore, already popular due to his natural charm and musical abilities, found himself a literary celebrity: “Anacreon” Moore.21 He also met other Irish cultural figures, including John Stevenson, the composer with whom he would collaborate in setting his Irish Melodies to music. While loyalty to his patrons may have contributed to Moore’s early reputation as a social climber, even these alliances were not in direct conflict with Moore and his family’s politics. Irish aristocrats supported many streams of cultural nationalism that were simultaneously feeding United Irish and Patriot rhetoric, along with the hopes of ambitious Catholic and Protestant tradespeople and professionals. Moore’s patron Lord Moira, for instance, was an Irish politician who had publicly denounced the government’s illegal violence in Ireland during the mid-1790s, supported Catholic Emancipation, and pursued and financially supported the study of Irish antiquities. His equally cultured and literate sister Charlotte Rawdon supported and encouraged Irish nationalist poets, and Moore would dedicate a poetic epistle to her, written from the banks of the St Lawrence.

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In 1803, Moira secured for Moore a potentially lucrative government post, registrar of the naval prize court in Bermuda. (The registrar received no salary, but got a commission based on the cash value of legally seized enemy vessels.) The post and the experiences it afforded were significant in initiating Moore’s gradual transition from wouldbe Irish revolutionary to “a cog, however tiny, in the great imperial machine” and, finally, to an eloquent spokesman, by turns darkly satiric or discreet, for the Irish cause within the empire.22 Most of his travelling companions on his first transatlantic passage, including the British consul and his wife, were avowedly anti-American, and Moore later admitted, “my mind was left open too much to the influence of the feelings and prejudices of those I chiefly consorted with.”23 On arrival in Bermuda, Moore soon discovered there was little actual work for him to do, so he left most of the day-to-day tasks in the hands of a deputy and took advantage of the opportunity to see America, Lower and Upper Canada, and Nova Scotia. Upon landing in America, Moore relied heavily on his countryman Isaac Weld’s recent account of his travels and appears to have accepted Weld’s negative views of American cities, including Norfolk, Virginia, where Moore first landed on his way to Bermuda. Like many southern ports, the city was infamous for its deadly outbreaks of yellow fever (the disease that had carried off the unfortunate Dickson family in South Carolina four years earlier).24 In spite of his poor first impression of the city, his time in Norfolk was sociable and productive. In the two months he spent there, he wrote several poems, including “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” based on a local legend that became one of the “best-loved ballads” of the nineteenth century. (Moore himself became part of folklore: American localities were graced by the presence of Moore in the same way that places and landmarks in Canada later acquired local colour for tourists and writers when Moore dashed off a poem, slept in an inn, or leaned on a specific tree, after writing an equally loved and internationally famous ballad.25) While “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” was inspired by an American legend, its most vivid motif, the white spirit-canoe, would reappear in Canadian poetry, not to mention tourism. Travel writers and missionaries repeatedly recorded similar legends of white canoes and ghostly lovers, attributing them to different Indigenous communities, but sometimes repeating phrases from Moore’s poem almost verbatim.26 One version of the legend inspired the Niagara Falls boat tours’ “Maid

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of the Mist” trademark and was recounted to passengers into the 1990s.27 Moore’s poem likely did much to help the image become an invented tradition. The ballad’s motif of the dead woman or her lover paddling a “white canoe” after death provided a means of linking a particular area to a story, creating a strong emotional association. As well, the image of the supernatural canoe’s ability to link an indigenous material object with the otherworldly looks forward to techniques Moore employs again in his Canadian poems, particularly his epistle to Lady Rawdon. Moore’s Virginia ballad features a young man driven to madness by the death of his lover. Convinced she is still alive, he seeks her in the inhospitable swamp, where the flowers and vines are as malevolent and destructive as the wolves and reptiles. When he has a vision of her out on the lake, the young man builds and launches a birchbark canoe and disappears in a storm. Ever after, the spectral lovers are glimpsed paddling their white canoe. The poem effectively elides natural and supernatural phenomena (the willow-o’-the-wisp pursued by the doomed lover could be a meteor, fireflies, or the woman’s ghostly canoe). Such ambiguity would be adopted by later Canadian ballad writers to create plausible unworldly experiences in their writing for European visitors and settlers. The white canoe, whether piloted by Indigenous or settler characters, held an enduring appeal for IrishCanadian writers in the Romantic tradition, including Adam Kidd, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, and Isabella Valancy Crawford. As with much Romantic writing, the legend is presented as having survived (as had much Irish history and folklore) through the orature of a culture living close to the land: the sightings of the reunited ghostly couple are recounted and accepted as true in “the Indian Hunter’s camp”28 at the poem’s conclusion. While Moore’s short stopover proved he was immediately sensitive and receptive to a folk culture with strong roots growing in American soil, he was more likely to present contemporary political life as uncultured, even “barbarous” in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (239). Moore’s personal circumstances, reflecting the complex nationalist culture developing in Ireland, along with his change from radical to moderate nationalist, become more comprehensible when viewed in the context of his stay in North America. His associations with the British ambassador and Lord Moira assured that American Federalist politicians gave him a hospitable reception. Such treatment reinforced the pro-British leanings acquired on his passage. It was a stark contrast

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to America’s rougher etiquette, particularly President Thomas Jefferson’s treatment of him when they were first introduced (Jefferson apparently mistook the small, slender young poet for a boy, and treated him accordingly29). Moore’s resentment towards American manners colours the preface of his New World poems collected in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806). Unlike Fitzgerald, who delighted in the equality he witnessed, Moore complained that America’s classless society “border[ed] on a state of nature.” He doubted that “the rude familiarity of the lower orders” flowed from “that simplicity of character, that honest ignorance of the gloss of refinement” admired by Fitzgerald. Influenced in his youth by United Irish praise of French and American liberty, Moore had imagined America as “the elysian Atlantis, where persecuted patriots might find their visions realised and be welcomed by kindred spirits to liberty and repose,” only later realizing that “discontent at home enhances every distant temptation, and the western world has long been looked to as a retreat from real or imaginary oppression.”30 Moore was equally hard on the poems he produced in the fourteen months that he was away from Europe. Upon his return, he struggled to arrange them in a collection that had a thematic or narrative coherence, and pre-emptively apologized for imposing on his readers “such a mass of unconnected trifles, such a world of epicurean atoms as I have here brought in conflict together” (x). That said, a number of critics have discerned a narrative structure within the North American poems. Bentley sees a Dantean progress from Inferno to a glimpse of Paradise.31 Jeffrey Vail argues that the poems are arranged to re-enact Moore’s gradual political awakening as he travels through Bermuda, America, and Canada.32 The preface and poems suggest as much. In an early poetic epistle to his sister Kate, he describes a geography tinted by youthful optimism when he presents America as a peaceful haven “far from the shocks of Europe” and far from the “chaos” into which “the system of the ancient world” is often hurled by politics (18). Given that his close friend Edward Hudson had been recently been exiled to America for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, there is poignancy in Moore’s fantasy of a land where an exile “all bereft” could find “home and friends and country here!” (19). But instead of the Elysium that welcomes the heroic martyrs of recent revolutions, whether American or Irish, Moore finds that the worst qualities of human nature, embodied by political near-anarchy,

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have followed him over the Atlantic to a land where the American people had “arrived in maturity in most of the vices, and all the pride of civilization” while retaining none of its “higher and better characteristics.” Among the vices he noted were an “illiberal zeal” that encouraged “violence of party spirit” and “an equal share of intolerance,” spectres from both sides of the political divide that had blighted his youth in Ireland.33 Throughout his life, Moore blamed government corruption and religious discrimination in Ireland for provoking the United Irishmen to solicit French revolutionary support. He wanted the existing system reformed, not replaced with French political philosophy. Initially, he had looked to America as a refuge from the unrest, faction-fighting, and sectarianism that he believed was exclusive to Ireland under its corrupt and distant government. Instead, as he writes from Washington “To the Viscount Forbes” (another Irish ascendancy member who had argued for Catholic rights), the French revolutionary notion of égalité had “pour’d her poison here” and “blighted … The opening bloom of every social grace, / And all those courtesies that love to shoot / Round virtue’s stem” (177). The narrative of the idealist’s gradual disillusionment reflects Moore’s own transition in his youth from would-be revolutionary member of the Society of United Irishmen to someone who had narrowly escaped the disaster of the French-supported invasion that left tens of thousands of his countrymen dead and his close friends either executed or exiled. The same pattern plays out in America: idealism leads to revolution, but he fears that “patriots have … bled in vain” (174). As Vail notes, Moore’s attack is not directed towards individual liberty but to the hypocrisy of American slaveowner-politicians, the violence of French republican views, and the carnage and government repression arising from the recent Irish uprising.34 While charting “the growth of the poet’s mind” occasioned by Moore’s experiences in America, Vail ends his analysis at the start of Moore’s extensive travels through the British-held territories of North America. However, Moore would spend a significant time in British territories in North America, and his experiences in Upper and Lower Canada add a further layer of complexity to the narrative pattern that Vail and others discern in the poetry collection. His travelling party left New York state in June, but not before a stop in Oneida as the guest of the Oneida nation, where Moore, like Fitzgerald and, later, Adam Kidd, admired Indigenous courtesy and culture as his hosts gave an oral account of their history. Confirming Moore’s views of

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American hypocrisy, he noted that his Oneida hosts complained of the American government driving them off their traditional lands.35 He arrived in Upper Canada in July, near Niagara Falls. As the guest of General Isaac Brock, he visited Fort George, then stopped at a Tuscarora settlement before crossing Lake Ontario to Kingston. He then travelled from Kingston to Montreal in a large freight canoe. He stopped in Quebec City, where his celebrity status earned him an invitation to a reception held by the governor, probably Robert Milnes, himself a lover of literature. After a strenuous route along the Gaspé Peninsula and across the St Lawrence River, he arrived in Halifax in September. While waiting for the ship that would take him back to England, he also visited Windsor, where he was invited to tour King’s College and witnessed the first set of exams administered there. He finally departed for England in October 1804. Comparing Canada with Ireland, France, Britain, and America helped Moore establish the new territory’s own cultural distinctiveness, something he first determined through performance. Upon ­arriving in Canada, or “British Ground,” as he put it in a letter to his mother, the first thing that he and his travelling companions did was “drink the King’s health in a bumper.” (As in Fitzgerald’s time, news of George iii’s latest bout of mental illness had travelled to North America.36) However, this gesture does not necessarily mean that Moore had abandoned his pro-Irish political views, and again, his guide on how to respond to Canada was likely Weld, who also deliberately contrasts the government, mores, and even landscape of Canada and America in the context of what it means for Irish emigrants. As in America, Moore again defines national character partly based on personal treatment. For instance, he tells his mother that in Canada, he found himself the recipient of the type of courtesies and compliments that he had enjoyed in the drawing rooms of London and Federalist Virginia: “The captain refused to take what I know is always given, and begged me to consider all my friends as included in the same compliment … Even a poor watchmaker at Niagara, who did a very necessary and difficult job for me, insisted I should not think of paying him, but accept it as the only mark of respect he could pay to one he had heard of so much, but never expected to meet with.”37 He assured his mother that the “sweetness” he felt was owing less to his vanity than to an “impulse which begins with self, spreads a circle instantaneously around it, which includes all the sociabilities and benevolences of the heart.”38 Even his initial impressions of Canada

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echo Fitzgerald’s idealistic views, suggesting a society based on mutual regard and amity, rather than the materialism and individualism that arose in America from a radical break with tradition. Sorely tried by his experiences in the American republic, his faith in human nature is restored by the sublime and pastoral scenes he found as he made his way from New York to British territories. Describing in his letters and journal the beautiful scenery, rivers, and cataracts in upper New York state, he treats them as if they are merely a prologue to the expected sublime of Niagara Falls that Weld taught him to anticipate.39 The sound of the falls lulled him to sleep on his first night in Upper Canada and he immediately visited them the next day. However, “Ballad Stanzas,” the first poem he composed in British territory, is more pastoral than sublime in its depiction of an isolated cottage in Upper Canada. The tenor of the poem might have been influenced by the way he entered Canada as he “travelled one whole day through the wilderness where you would imagine human foot had never ventured to leave its print … Such scenery as there is around me!”40 “Ballad Stanzas” is coloured by similar impressions of untouched nature that he tells his mother would refute the argument of “the atheist.” Such descriptions, along with his experience of disinterested altruism, help to create an innocent character for the region that is in stark contrast to the French-inspired republic whose “foul Philosophy … / With all her train of reasoning” had “blighted … the opening bloom of every social grace.” In “Ballad Stanzas,” even the smoke that curls from a cottage chimney does so “gracefully,” and the blooming flowers find a fresh female counterpart in a sexually innocent “maid who was lovely to soul and to eye” and whose lips “had never been sighed on” (257), echoing Fitzgerald’s only slightly more realistic fantasies of settling down in an uncorrupted world with a young wife that, significantly, he was going to “work to maintain.” Moore and Fitzgerald’s New World is not quite Eden, but still a respite, especially for a poet who in his short lifetime had already experienced two falls from innocence: the highly traumatic French invasion that followed the initial patriotic idealism of the Society of United Irishmen, and the discovery that an equally baneful French republicanism had not simply landed but taken root in America. In fact, political experience rather than innocence might account for Moore’s belief that Irish exiles, Moore’s friends among them, could hope that any “peace to be found in the world” (257) might exist in the wilds of Nova Scotia, Lower, or Upper Canada. As Weld had noted,

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the British were wary of repeating the colonial errors that marked their history with Ireland, so they granted religious and civil liberties to Catholics in the Canadian territories denied to their Irish counterparts. Again echoing Weld’s impressions, Moore’s poetry features a picturesque and fertile country whose “happy” and loyal subjects enjoyed what Weld called “a tolerable share of civil and religious liberty.”41 As an Irish Catholic, Moore would have no trouble drinking the King’s health in such a land. Decades later, in his biography of Fitzgerald, he argued that similar concessions in Ireland would have prevented Fitzgerald and Moore’s friends from taking the desperate measure of rebellion. Moore’s “Ballad Stanzas” heralded not only “a distinct new style for the poet”42 but also a political epiphany. British colonies in North America could hold a particular appeal for Irish men and women who, as Weld had contemplated doing, wished to escape the combined scourges of political corruption and religious intolerance that had transformed Ireland from Eden to an Inferno, in the rhetoric of Patriot and United Irish nationalists. The postlapsarian details of Moore’s Canadian idyll would have held particular resonance for Irish emigrants of all persuasions, since nationalist poets, and particularly United Irish balladeers, had used the image of the earth just after the Fall to portray a non-sectarian golden age in Ireland before external conquerors had introduced, in the words of Wolfe Tone, “intestine divisions.”43 One of the most famous United Irish ballads, William Drennan’s “Erin,” also presents early Ireland as blessed by God back “when Erin first rose from the dark-swelling flood.”44 Moore offers something equally poignant: Canada as inheritor of Ireland’s forfeited bliss. Like Weld’s descriptions of Upper and Lower Canada, Moore’s lyrics assure the Irish settler that he or she could feel at home among familiar institutions and civic order in the British colonies, minus the religious disabilities, tithes, and taxes imposed by the same government in Ireland. Canada, far removed from republican values and moral character deplored by both Moore and Weld and governed by Britain in a way that does not discriminate against Catholics and Dissenters, is what Ireland should have been all along. Moore distinguishes Canada from Ireland, France, and America not only by its balance of civil liberties and orderly society but also through its legends, oral history, and local culture. Relying on other writers’ travel accounts, he alludes to history, natural history, and geography to suggest both “local colour” and an emerging national

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character. For someone already steeped in both Patriot and United Irish cultural nationalism, this reliance on scholarship and folkways was not a great stretch. Irish “national character” as it was understood by late eighteenth-century cultural nationalists already owed a great deal to Irish antiquaries’ print research and translations that made ancient Gaelic culture both accessible and politically relevant to an English-speaking Irish readership. As the Patriots had demonstrated, providing evidence of the distinctiveness and antiquity of Irish character added moral weight to their demands for Irish political self-determination. Moore’s lasting and influential images of Canadian scenes and character show an equal dependence on the research of others, as suggested by the collection’s extensive paratext made up of the prefaces, footnotes, and appendices that surround the poems. Leerssen observes that in nineteenth-century Irish novels and Moore’s Irish Melodies, the paratexts can function as indirect commentary, allowing an author to become “mediator and translator, explaining a foreign, alien culture to the reader.”45 In Ireland, Leerssen argues, the material requiring explanation is often from Gaelic Ireland, presented as existing synchronously in the distant past and alongside the Anglo Irish in the present. In America and Canada, Moore makes Indigenous as well as settler history and culture appear both timeless and current. By explaining North American elements, Moore’s paratext reinforces the remoteness, the sublimity, and the exoticism of the region for Moore’s readership, emphasizing its cultural distinction. The unique aspects of geography, which shapes the history and culture of specific regions Moore encounters, become marked by these footnotes as significant details that are later taken up by Canadian nationalists looking for particular ways to represent Canada as a distinct nation. Consequently, it is likely not a coincidence that one of the most heavily footnoted poems related to Canada is the epistle addressed “To the Lady Charlotte Rawdon, from the Banks of the St Lawrence.” As with his other epistles written from North America, the primary audience is highly relevant. Lady Rawdon was the sister of Lord Moira, the patron who had given Moore the opportunity of visiting North America and Bermuda. In her own right, she was a supporter of poets, including the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Dermody, who dedicated his collection, The Harp of Erin, to her. Laced with fulsome flattery of Lady Rawdon and her brother, Moore’s epistle to his patrons is commonly viewed as the prime exhibit supporting Byron’s

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charge that “Tommy loved a lord.” However, as an opponent of Pitt and having the favour of the Whig-leaning Prince of Wales, Moira was a politically influential advocate of Catholic Emancipation. His willingness to contest Pitt’s leadership during the regency crisis had even held – briefly – the possibility of an Anglo-Irish prime minister sympathetic to Catholic rights before this, like other cups, had been dashed from the lips of the Irish. Not only the protector of Pamela Fitzgerald after her husband’s arrest and death, Moira was also godfather to the child of another major architect of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Wolfe Tone, who dubbed him “The Irish LaFayette.” (Moira’s apparent radicalism had its limits, particularly after his own estates in the North of Ireland were overrun by rebels. He also initially opposed, but ultimately voted for, the hated Act of Union.46) Moore chooses to emphasize the siblings’ joint roles as Irish patriots and antiquaries: When I have seen thee cull the fruits of lore With him, the polish’d warrior, by thy side, A sister’s idol and a nation’s pride! When thou hast read of heroes, trophied high In ancient fame, and I have seen thine eye Turn to the living hero, while it read, For pure and bright’ning comments on the dead. (318) If read in a Patriot context, the “fruits of lore” render the phrase “a nation’s pride” ambiguous, referring equally to Moira’s service to England as a decorated hero of the American Revolutionary War and his willingness to advocate for Ireland as a nation with character and interests distinct from England. In spite of his intimate connections with high-ranking United Irish leaders, Moira was an instrumental opponent of the French armies in Europe, although the forces he led were defeated. This would not be an unresolvable contradiction in Moore’s view: Moira could be a defender of liberty against both the hypocritical American slaveowners and the godless French purveyors of violence who had briefly made inroads into Ireland during the rebellion. Since the heroes “of ancient fame” researched by the Rawdons would include Ossianic warriors untainted by modern French and American notions of liberty, Moira is figured as a modern counterpart of ancient Irish defenders in the poem. This notion is reprised in Moore’s final poem about Canada,

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as he departs Nova Scotia on the Boston and tells his hospitable captain and fellow-passengers about Ireland by describing “the mind or the mien / Of some bard I had known or some chief I had seen“ (324), using archaic language to link his current cultural and political heroes to the Irish past. If Moore celebrates Moira as someone who has resisted both American and French brands of republicanism, then the presence of “an Indian spirit” in the poem might not simply be for local colour. Fitzgerald had been Moira’s aide-de-camp in 1780, and when visiting Joseph Brant nine years later, he might have seen his superior officer’s portrait, a gift to the Kanien’keha:ka leader on his 1786 visit to England. It is impossible to know whether or not Moore was aware of Brant’s meeting with Moira, but Moore’s assumption that his Whig Patriots would be interested in Indigenous culture as portrayed in the poem might also have political implications. Just as Brant hoped that Moira, like Charles Fox and Edward Fitzgerald, might be sympathetic to their Indigenous allies’ struggle to retain their lands and autonomy, Moore hoped that in supporting Irish bards past and present, his two patrons would continue to advocate for the Irish. Since the immediate audience of the epistle are patriotic antiquaries, Moore ties what he admires in current cultures to the ancient past, another way of tying together Ireland, England, and the banks of the St Lawrence. Anxious about maintaining a relationship with both of his patrons, he uses the uniqueness of the vessel in which he travels through Canada to emphasize the distance in time and space that separates them. He thinks of his patrons by the “mazy” and domesticated river Trent while his canoe “glides swiftly past those wooded shores” along the St Lawrence. The poem’s main purpose is to reinforce the poet’s attachment and loyalty to his patrons, and to express his nostalgia for the magnanimity, hospitality, and order of Lord Moira’s hall and table, presided over by a benevolent regent, the Prince of Wales. The Canadian digressions that lead to this point are couched in a Romantic language that would be recognizable to readers active in the program of Irish cultural recovery. The poem uses landscape, namely woods and waters, to establish parallels and contrasts between the placid oak groves where Lady Rawdon had sung Moore’s odes, and a wilder land that escapes conventional poetic language. Fitzgerald had noted that rivers stood in for roads back home, and Moore’s poem also shows the Canadian territories characterized by their “inland waters,” which he sees in all forms: hurled down “Niagara’s steep,”

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in still, placid “sleep” as Lake Ontario reflects the hills of “old Toronto,” or in the “lordly tide” of “grand Cadaraqui” (310). After his own apprenticeship invoking Ossianic grandeur to gain sympathy for Irish oppression, Moore, like future Canadian writers, would see a similar sublime in the landscape of Canada. The poem’s description of Niagara, where Moore has seen “all its store of inland waters hurl’d / in one vast volume down Niagara’s steep,” recalls his letter to his mother, where he struggles with poetry’s capacity to come to terms with the New World’s scale and scope: “It is impossible by pen or pencil to convey even a faint idea of their magnificence … We must have new combinations of language to describe the Falls of Niagara.”47 Once again, Moore unintentionally echoes Fitzgerald’s earlier letter to his mother fearing that the new perspective acquired in North America will make Ireland and England appear very small. In attempting to describe the Canadian landscape in the epistle, he exclaims, “Oh Lady, these are miracles which man / Cag’d in the bounds of Europe’s pigmy span / Can scarcely dream of” (310). Just as when he tells his mother that a visit to the Niagara Falls would convert the atheist, this poem continues to equate Canada with a proximity to the divine that inspires immortal poetry. First invoking the eastern exoticism of “Persia” (a tactic also used by United Irish writers for more political purposes),48 Moore compares “Donington’s old oaks” to the “sacred” groves, “Beneath whose shade the pious Persian roves / And hears the spirit voice of sire or chief / Or loved mistress sigh in every leaf.” In doing so, he ties together two cultures, Persian and Irish, whose poets are divinely inspired mediums channelling the memories and spirit of the land. As he recalls hearing his own “unpolished lays” sung by Lady Rawdon, Moore imagines himself as “some peasant boy / Who sings on Sabbath eve his strains of joy” and perceives the echoes he hears to be “some answering spirit’s tone.” This notion of the connection between sublime scenery, divinely inspired poetry, and a distinct culture carries over to his constructing an equally “visionary lay” in Canada, recalling the role of Gaelic bards popularized by Thomas Gray and later Macpherson. He takes care to ensure that the spirit of the place is figured, appropriately, as Indigenous: an “Indian Spirit” whose song is heard “in the murmur of the nightly breeze” (311). The switch to trochaic tetrameter sets the song of the Indian spirit apart from the framing address to Lady Rawdon. The distinction is reinforced with allusions to distinctive North American natural history

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and Indigenous phrases Moore had learned from travel writers Alexander Mackenzie and Jonathan Carver, Jesuit natural historian Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, and geographer Jedidiah Morse, extensively cited in footnotes to the poem. Phrases such as “WakonBird,” through the need to translate them to English in the footnotes, reinforce Moore’s sense of the distance between his patrons and the poet, while at the same time evoking a landscape alive with the genius loci that at first appears alien but whose spirit is accessible to the Romantic poet and his Irish antiquarian audience. Wherein Fitzgerald viewed the canoe as the most practical way to access otherwise unreachable territories, Moore makes it a portal to  the otherworldly, just as he had in “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp.” In his footnotes, he recounts Carver’s experience of feeling suspended in air when his canoe traversed the clear and reflective waters of Lake Huron. Travelling effortlessly with the current’s flow also gives Moore the sensation of “flying,” recalling Dante’s bark, guided this time not by a “firefly lamp” but by a pilot angel whose light illuminates “the dim shores of another world.” Presenting Canada as possessing a supernatural or spiritual presence that inspires national poets ties Moore’s poetry to other classical or ancient verse that had been identified by Romantic philosophers as having a “national voice.” Not surprisingly, future Irish-Canadian nationalist poets such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee saw Moore’s poetry as an example for Canadian writers who wished to be “the poets of the land … He nowhere found a nobler theme / Than you, ye favor’d have at hand.”49 In relating the particulars of Canada to the universal themes of enduring, even epic, poetry, Moore finds ways to make his experience accessible to a European readership, such as when he prefaces his “Canadian Boat Song” with an epigraph from Quintillus, roughly translated as “they urged their oars with song.” With its chorus of “Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast” (306), the poem is a literal performance of the epigram. Like the paratext in the epistle to Lady Rawdon, Moore’s notes to his “Canadian Boat Song” in various editions reflect the challenges of creating a “national character” derived from cultures that are at once part of the nation and alien to Englishspeaking readers of Moore’s poem. Moore’s need to contextualize the poem through extensive footnotes reflects the challenge that he and patriot writers faced in Ireland of reconstituting a colonized culture in English, an issue that Canadian cultural nationalists would also address.

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In “Near the Rapids: Thomas Moore in Canada,” Bentley has demonstrated the extent to which this particular visitor’s invented folk song influenced Canadian writing and literary tourism into the twentieth century. From the moment it was published in 1805 as music arranged for three voices, the ballad achieved international popularity as the most well-known song about Canada and established the voyageur as an archetypal national hero for future writers.50 The footnotes, in this case citing Alexander Mackenzie’s General History of the Fur Trade, inform readers that “At the Rapid of St Ann, [the boatmen] are obliged to take out part, if not the whole of their lading. It is from this spot the Canadians consider they take their departure, as it possesses the last church on the island, which is dedicated to the tutelar saint of voyageurs.” Having established for his readers that this part of Canada, like Ireland, is already populated with a Catholic-inspired genius loci and a folk history, Moore also provides the circumstances surrounding the composing of the poem, describing the boatmen singing while rowing vigorously against a strong wind for much of the journey while their passengers baked in the harsh sun and took shelter from the evening dews in any “miserable hut” that would receive them. As compensation, the “voyageurs had good voices, and sung perfectly in tune together” an air that Moore adapted for his poem, the original words being part of “a long, incoherent story, of which I could understand but little, from the barbarous pronunciation of the Canadians (306n). Later, countless travel writers and scholars searched without success for the original melody to which Moore allegedly set his most famous Canadian lyrics. The few writers who had the opportunity to compare Moore’s ballad with actual voyageur songs were inevitably disappointed with the real thing. In 1842, Richard Bonnycastle wrote that while travelling with the voyageurs on Huron and Superior, he “never heard any thing even approaching to the pathetic ballad of Moore, and am sorry to say, on the contrary, that most of the Canadian canoe songs, although they treat of love, have none of the refinement which that charming poet would have given them, had they originated with him.” (Bonnycastle also notes that the words of most of the songs are “too coarse” for polite company, and “in the north-west, these songs either begin or end with the startling and inspiring war whoop.”51) Following the tradition of Patriot and United Irish writers in setting new words to old ballads and given the vogue in both Ireland and Europe for authentic folk tunes, it is not surprising that Moore initially

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claims that he set his English words to a melody that he heard on the St Lawrence. He concluded in the preface to his collected works, “Yet, how strongly impressed I had become with the notion that this was the identical air sung by the boatmen, – how closely it linked itself in my imagination.”52 Even in the footnotes to the original poem, Moore noted how much of the lyrics’ power was derived from the emotional associations of the setting: “Without that charm, which association gives to every little memorial of scenes or feelings that are past, the melody may perhaps be thought common and trifling; but I remember when we have entered, at sunset, upon one of those beautiful lakes, into which the St Lawrence so grandly and unexpectedly opens, I have heard this simple air with a pleasure which the finest compositions of the first masters have never given me, and now, there is not a note of it, which does not recal [sic] to my memory the dip of our oars in the St Lawrence, the flight of our boat down the Rapids, and all those new and fanciful impressions to which my heart was alive during the whole of this very interesting voyage” (306n). Authentic voyageur song or not, the extreme popularity of the song may be accounted for by how well it fit many existing Romantic conventions in Irish and European literature. While Jane Moore notes that Moore is not exactly “a Wordsworthian poet,” “The Canadian Boat Song” gathers New World experience into the existing Romantic tradition that valorizes “the local, the superstitious and folkloric.”53 Given the Romantic era’s interest in Ossian and Gaelic culture, the poem’s argument and accompanying footnotes share the aims of another Romantic poem, Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper.” In keeping with the Celticism of the time, Wordsworth’s poem features an English speaker overhearing a “solitary Highland lass” accompanying her work by singing in Gaelic. Since the listener cannot understand the words, he speculates that the “plaintive numbers” describe either epic battles (as in Ossian’s poetry) or the “more humble” and “familiar matter of today / Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain / That has been, and may be again.”54 While the speaker does not identify the content, he assumes that folk ballads contain universal wisdom of lasting ­relevance. As in “The Solitary Reaper,” the “barbarous French” of the “Canadian Boat Song” is indecipherable to the listener, but Moore also identifies the recipe for successful national song: it includes both humble matters such as leave-taking and the sense that the character and the future of a nation derive from heroic voyages into the hardships and dangers of the unknown.

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Both Wordsworth’s and Moore’s poems establish that folk poetry revealing the character of a people is derived from the rhythms of work and survival within a particular natural environment that remains essentially unchanged over centuries if not millennia. Moore’s epigraph establishes both the universality and the immortality of human concerns by tying the Canadian voyageurs to the epic adventurers of ancient Rome. Rather than attempt to faithfully reproduce an authentic, but “long and incoherent,” ballad, Moore distills what he thinks is the essence of the region and people as suggested by the interaction of his recollections of the sublime scenery, primal rhythms, and emotional reaction to the experience. Like Wordsworth, who concludes that the experience of hearing the song within a remote and sublime landscape remains in his heart “long after it was heard no more,”55 Moore also reflects in tranquility on the memory of the intense emotions that the melody and scenery evoked. As in United Irish ballads, there may be political implications to Moore’s portrait of Canadians in his invented ballad, and these implications influence future Canadian cultural nationalism. That the poem draws on United Irish traditions complicates Bentley’s argument that it envisions “a trans-Atlantic Britain of lush and picturesque landscapes and contented and virtuous servants … given to singing ‘simple airs’ in ‘barbarous’ accents … [and] to paying due respect to God and Church.”56 Written as it is in the shadow of the United Irish rebellion and Emmet’s uprising, “The Canadian Boat Song” may also be an Irish writer’s attempt to vindicate Irish-Catholic character by representing the Catholic French Canadians as pious and hard-working, expressing through the primal wisdom of their music that they are loyal subjects deserving of the rights of their Protestant compatriots. Moore’s portraits of Canadian inhabitants who are innocent of the “advanced vices” of civilization could indeed make the poem appealing in terms of “qualities and characteristics that accord with the British psychological and social constitution.”57 Nevertheless, a similar argument had been made by Paine to argue that American republican society, in throwing off many of the artificial constraints of European civilization, would achieve an Eden on earth. While later biographers and scholars tended to see Moore as Whig in politics, choosing a moderate path between revolutionary anarchy and Tory hierarchy, he never entirely threw off his reputation as a seditious poet in his lifetime – nor did he want to. In his poetry and satire, he consistently argued that religious and class oppression bred rebellion. Distinct from Ireland,

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Canada appeared to prove that the British experiment in religious tolerance paid off. Weld had already suggested that such freedoms of religion granted to French Catholics made rebellion and republicanism a less tempting path in Canada. Moore argued that the 1798 rebellion might have been averted if the Irish had been better treated. While horrified by the bloody results of the United Irish risings and the consequent loss of Irish political autonomy, the poet never renounced his personal ties with his United Irish friends or ceased advocating for Irish rights. He went as far as justifying the rebels by reminding readers what they fought against and kept their memory alive in his highly successful Irish Melodies (1808) and, more than twenty years later, in his biography of Fitzgerald. He described Fitzgerald and Emmet as men “with gifts that would have made them the ornaments and supports of a well-regulated community,” but whom circumstances drove “to live the lives of conspirators and die the death of traitors by a system of government which it would be difficult even to think of with patience, did we not gather a hope from the present aspect of the whole civilized world, that such a system of bigotry and misrule can never exist again” (1.305). Writing his preface to Fitzgerald’s biography shortly after Daniel O’Connell’s emancipation movement finally guaranteed Irish Catholics freedoms similar to those Moore had witnessed on his journey through Canada, he was confident that Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had removed the motives for an Irish rebellion. Like Irish Melodies, The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald kept the United Irishmen and the memory of sectarian violence alive in the minds of its readership in the early 1830s. Moore was more sanguine than his fearful Whig colleagues about the censure it would receive. Although Moore distanced himself from the radical politics that were shaking Great Britain in the early 1830s, the biography called up ghosts of the 1798 and 1803 risings in a manner likely to embarrass his political friends. In the view of some of his friends, Moore’s life of Fitzgerald appeared at a politically ticklish time in England and Ireland.58 England was facing increased organized labour unrest; the newly elected Irish-Catholic m p, Daniel O’Connell was mobilizing Irish politicians to call for repeal of the Union; and many of Moore’s powerful patrons who advocated controversial reform measures had advised Moore against publishing the work. The first volume of Moore’s biography did more than keep Fitzgerald’s memory alive – it brought his letters to the attention of

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Canadian readers, including William “Tiger” Dunlop, a former soldier, writer, and member of the Canada Company, whose Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada: For the Use of Emigrants was intended to encourage British officers and other well-born English to come to Canada. Where Fitzgerald “fell in” with his Indigenous companions, Dunlop “fell in” with the first volume of Moore’s life of Fitzgerald with equal delight. Just after writing a passage of his own emigrant guide (not surprisingly about canoes), Dunlop alludes to Fitzgerald’s letters in the biography and “the pleasure I received from reading his vivid, spirited, and accurate description of the feelings he experienced on first taking on him the life of a hunter.” Part of this delight arose from Dunlop seeing his own vision of Canada in Fitzgerald’s earlier descriptions of an outdoor, active life that would hold a particular appeal to upper-class men. They reminded Dunlop of when he “first assumed the blanket coat and the rifle, the moccasin, and the snow shoe.” To Dunlop, the letters presented Fitzgerald as the perfect “companion in the woods.” By extension, he should have been the perfect emigrant as well: the younger son of a noble family bringing equal amounts of hardiness, sense of adventure, and sensibility to Canadian society. At the same time, Dunlop, like Moore, recognized that the “wilds” of North America could as easily inspire a republican as a loyalist vision. Dunlop recognized the seeds of rebellion in Fitzgerald’s “exstatic” [sic] experience of “Arab-like independence and the utter contempt for the advantages and restrictions of civilization.” He went on to observe that “human nature” determines that “no man who associates with and follows the pursuits of the Indian for any length of time ever voluntarily returns to civilized society.” Republicanism, in Dunlop’s view, was a “mere impulse of the passions” that Fitzgerald gave in to, “plunging his country into blood and disorder” as a result. Echoing Moore, intentionally or not, he adds, “How shocking to think that with talents which would have made him at once the idol and the ornament of his profession” and possessed of “every trait that can at once ennoble and endear” that he should become a rebel. Dunlop regretted that Fitzgerald “should have had Tom Paine for a tutor in religion and politics and Tom Moore for a biographer,” one who offered Fitzgerald’s life story as “a pattern instead of warning” that Dunlop feared would serve a contemporary “revolutionary … faction” in English politics “who like Samson are pulling down a fabric which will bury both them and their enemies under it.”59

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Dunlop’s suspicion of Moore’s biography as encouraging the work of a current “faction” intent on bringing the spirit of United Irish republicanism into the present goes against the popular image of Moore as a tame Irish bard toning down his nationalism for consumption in genteel music rooms. The poet’s ambivalence towards revolution and republicanism colours his portraits sufficiently that a contemporary like Dunlop sees Tom Paine lurking in the work of Tom Moore. Written in the immediate aftermath of United Irish tragedies, which he revisited again in the early 1830s, Moore’s complex portraits of Canadian and American territories in his poetry and biography reached a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. His own experience in the New World not only produced vivid and engaging ballads for popular consumption but also taught him techniques that he applied to his more overtly political and patriotic Irish ballads collected in Irish Melodies in 1808.60 His biography allowed Fitzgerald’s letters from Canada to be publicly read for the first time, mediated through Moore’s own experience and attitudes towards both revolutionary Ireland and British-controlled Canada. Canada could be seen simultaneously as encouraging a moderate or radical path. In the 1830s, this complex portrait became highly relevant as Canada stood at a political crossroads and could as easily choose one way as the other.

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P art t hr e e Irish Emigrant Writers and Emancipation

On 18 September 1803, the year that Adam Kidd was born, Thomas Moore’s former classmate Robert Emmet was sentenced to death in a Dublin courtroom for his part in organizing the second short-lived United Irish rebellion that took place in Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow, and parts of the North in July of that year. He had fully expected to pay the terrible penalty for high treason and turned his opportunity to respond after sentencing into a lengthy extemporized oration that, while its exact wording has been debated, ­supplied many of the key phrases that inspired Irish nationalists until 1916, including its often-quoted conclusion: “Let no man write my epitaph … When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.”1 While his calm and eloquent defence won him lasting fame, the rebellion itself, again planned with French assistance, was characterized by brutal violence. Since 1802, Emmet and his co-conspirators had been gathering and manufacturing weapons (including an ingenious folding pike that could be easily concealed). An explosion in their arms depot attracted suspicion, forcing Emmet to move the date forward, making it out of step with campaigns planned in other parts of the country. Regions that had been prominent during the 1798 rising failed to provide the hoped-for support, but Kidd’s province, Ulster, the home of many United Irish leaders, answered Emmet’s call. The rising near Loughinisland, Co. Down, ended quickly and without casualties, and its leader, United Irishman Thomas Russell, fled to Dublin, where he was eventually captured. Likewise, on the night of 23 July, the campaign in Dublin ended quickly, but not before it degenerated into mob violence in which

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Chief of Justice Lord Kilwarden was hacked to death. Skirmishes between rebels and soldiers took place throughout the night, leaving fifty rebels and twenty soldiers dead. After the trials that followed, fifteen of Emmet’s followers were hanged, and Robert Emmet went stoically to the gruesome and protracted death of a traitor the day after his trial, struggling at the end of the hangman’s rope (probably owing to his light frame). After thirty minutes, his body was taken down, beheaded by the executioner, and displayed to the witnessing crowd.2 Thomas Russell suffered a similar fate on 21 October when he was hanged and beheaded outside the Downpatrick Gaol. The contrast between Emmet, the idealistic, eloquent, and selfless martyr, and the violence of both his followers and the state they opposed made him a complex symbol for nineteenth-century nationalists in Ireland and abroad, including Moore. Moore returned from America in the wake of the Union and Emmet’s ­rebellion. He continued to be an active and influential critic of the political chaos and barely contained resentment and sectarian ­conflicts of the1820s and 1830s, a period during which his poetry and satire kept alive the radical Patriot views he grew up with and the memories of his friend Emmet and his idol Fitzgerald.3 The Ireland that afforded Moore so many satirical targets was the one that Kidd and Standish O’Grady were forced to abandon. By the 1830s, it had become increasingly insupportable for landless ­agricultural labourers and smallholders, even as it had become slightly more congenial for an enfranchised Catholic middle class after 1830. Ireland was also becoming a threatening place for any landowner who was dependent upon privilege as religious and class antagonisms increased. While the United Irish movement had offered fleeting and probably exaggerated hopes of cultural and political union among Irish and Anglo-Irish, Protestant and Catholic, class and sectarian divisions increased upon its demise. No longer a unifying source, cultural and political nationalism gradually became more associated with Irish Catholics, as the ­followers of Daniel O’Connell enlisted the colours and insignia, harps, and shamrocks of earlier trans-sectarian movements in the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Attempts to reconcile all groups in Ireland to the union were not helped by the royal visit of a “speechlessly drunk” George i v in 1821.4 Some attempts to assert Irish pride were made during the king’s visit; among the Irish ­entertainment planned for his majesty was a pipe recital by the

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blind musician Kearns Fitzpatrick, later celebrated in O’Grady’s long poem, The Emigrant. But the first visit by an English head of state since 1399 did nothing to alleviate the desperate economic state of Catholic and, increasingly, Protestant tenants. No vibrant movement arrived with the king to replace the dream of an enlightened and non-sectarian republic envisaged by the United Irishmen,5 as Ireland after the Union seemed to settle into political and cultural doldrums. Moore’s ability to draw links between the current state of affairs and the past political failures that had turned patriots into traitors meant that the ghosts of the United Irishmen–sponsored rebellions continued to animate his poetry, which in turn inspired the poetry of Irish writers driven to Canada by the failed Irish state he ­lampooned. Like Moore, O’Grady and Kidd increasingly turned to memories of the recent past. Both considered themselves exiles in Canada due to Ireland’s “hopeless and sinking situation,”6 as Kidd saw it, for all but the most powerful. Even the genteel O’Grady found himself “unable to exist at home,” and so “sailed for America, with a small competency.”7 While their experience as immigrants in Canada is the ostensible subject of their long poems, each is haunted by the United Irish martyrs Fitzgerald and Emmet, as well as the recently deceased Patriot hero Henry Grattan, even as their poetry registers the momentous change initiated by a new hero, Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell became the focus of a new transatlantic nationalist movement that would significantly shape both the Irish and the Quebec political landscape.

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5 Adam Kidd (1803–1831)

Adam Kidd dedicated his one book of poetry to Thomas Moore, “the most popular, most powerful, and most patriotic poet of the nineteenth century, whose magic numbers have vibrated to the hearts of nations.”1 Modelled on Moore’s, Kidd’s poetry is equally informed by the literary traditions of the Society of United Irishmen. Like Moore, he defended the movement’s principles until the end of his life, even as he rejected its violence and reliance on French military support. For instance, in a letter to the editor of the Kingston Chronicle published on 1 January 1831, Kidd objected that two famous United Irish songs had been attributed to George Washington and a Liverpool poet, respectively. Washington had been given credit for “The Irishman,” a song actually written by James Orr, a Ballycarry weaver who had fled to America following the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Another United Irish ballad, “The Birth of French Liberty,” appeared in the same issue as Kidd’s letter and was written by an Irish Presbyterian minister, James Porter (Kidd mistakenly calls him Robert). Based on false testimony by a paid informer, Porter was condemned to death and hanged in Co. Down within sight of his church and family home in 1798.2 Porter regularly contributed poetry and political satire to the Northern Star, established by Society of United Irishmen founder Samuel Neilson. “The Birth of French Liberty” first appeared in this paper, according to Kidd, who claimed that he had several Porter poems in his possession, perhaps as part of the much-reprinted United Irish anthology, Paddy’s Resource, which would have been readily available to Kidd in Ireland. Published in 1796, “when political feeling ran very high in Ireland,” it was “sung, by the ballad singers, through every fair and market in the North.” In crediting the poem to its rightful author, Kidd

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was able to keep the memories of United Irishmen alive in a new country. He went further: by observing, “thus, was the brave, the patriotic Porter, torn from his friends and dear connections, to embrace the horrors of the scaffold, for no crime, but that which is still considered a crime in an Irishman – the love he bears his country!” he implied that the patriotism behind the United Irish cause was still relevant. Kidd connected his own poetic mission to the nationalist tradition in his home province when he concluded his letter with the observation that “the lasting blossoms of the Shamrock, culled from the grave of the martyred Porter, shall never be allowed to garnish the pompous brow of a foreigner, while there is left but one of Erin’s humblest bards to vindicate the cause of right, and the honest fame of that genius, which has fallen the early victim of Injustice, Bigotry, and Oppression.”3 The North of Ireland furnished a regional poetry and folk tradition that inspired Kidd’s own battle with the forces of injustice, bigotry, and oppression in his poetry and autobiographical writing. In his view, these traditional grievances were reinforced rather than allayed by emigration. The Co. Derry region where Kidd grew up is indivisible from his sense of personal and political dispossession as an emigrant writer. In “The Hibernian Solitary,” collected in Kidd’s one book of poetry published in Quebec in 1830, the speaker asks, “Can I e’er forget / Th’afflictive day … I shed the big and parting tear, / And sighed to that loved spot a last farewell?” (212). The dramatic acts of remembrance in the poem are repeated throughout Kidd’s writing. The poem presents emigration as a cultural dislocation that “burst[s] asunder … The tender chain / That linked me to this earth” (211), the ambiguity of the last two words suggesting both an alienation from the homeland and from life itself, presenting emigration as a preview of death. Images from the emigrant’s last view of his locality suggest a sundering not simply from home and family but also from the history, culture, folklore, and poetry that define Irish national identity. On the last day in his home, the poem’s speaker describes a panoramic view taken after he has “sought the Tomoch’s brow” (Kidd uses Ulster Scots-Irish to describe a tummock or hill), where he sees not only the familiar landmarks of his home place such as the “tomb, where slept all life made dear to me” but also “Erin’s shore” and “the bowers of green – / The ivied turrets – / seats of classic lore.” Even his vantage point, “Slievegallin fair,” the “Mountain renowned in song,” has nationalist associations because it ties together the memories of a

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departing emigrant and the memories of Irish greatness before British domination. It is both the site of “all [his] boyish thoughts” as well as a visual reminder of “mighty days gone by, / When Erin’s bards awoke their native strain … Whilst from the harp … The soul of music, wafted on the breeze” (209). Like the visual monuments, aural reminders bring to life Ireland’s “soul” whenever its music is heard. “The Hibernian Solitary” is not the only Kidd poem that ties the national symbol of the harp to his particular region. Like United Irish nationalists who organized the Belfast Harp Festival, Kidd recognized “how intimately the spirit and character of a people are connected with their national Poetry and Music.”4 Kidd’s home region and its landmarks allowed him a physical connection with a much older culture whose traditions were retained in music and verse. Irish itinerant poets and musicians had all but died out in Ulster, but Kidd had living memory of them, recalling meeting an old woman whose beauty had been celebrated by the famous local bard, Francis Dowling, or “Rangelawe.” (A number of biographers have speculated that Kidd’s own interest in the opposite sex had interfered with his church career, but his frequent poems celebrating young women may simply mean that he is continuing the bardic tradition in his Canadian collection.5) On the edges of what has come to be known as “Seamus Heaney country,” the townlands and parishes on the border of Derry boast the remains of one of the oldest known Irish settlements, dating back 9,000 years. The Irish place names, along with ring forts, dolmens, and ogham stones scattered across the county, were themselves reminders of a long period of history stretching beyond the memory of either the Protestant ruling class or the Catholic dispossessed.6 Kidd’s birthplace, Tullynagee (Irish for “hill of the wind”), lay nestled at the foot of Slieve Gallion, a 1,700-foot-high peak at the extreme edge of the Sperrins, a mountain range that winds through Co. Tyrone and Co. Derry. “Gallion” may refer to height, the name of a buried giant, or a standing stone or pillar; Kidd would no doubt be familiar with its Stone Age cairns and chambered grave. In “The Hibernian Solitary,” Kidd notes that the mountain boasts a “Fort, called by the Irish Forth,” that he claims “is a standing monument of Danish ingenuity – and for beauty and grandeur perhaps not excelled in the British Empire” (211). In “The Hibernian Solitary,” the mountain is also “renowned in song” (211) because part of the northern Irish Fionn Cycle is set there. These sagas were most widely known through the Scottish poet James

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Macpherson’s “translations” of Ossian that had provoked antiquarian defences of the bard’s Irish origin. In the poem’s retrospective, the mountain, along with its cultural associations, shaped his “boyish thoughts” and gave him a personal, physical knowledge of places prominent in the literature that was now feeding new Romantic and nationalist movements. He wedded the mountain’s cultural associations to his poetry through his pen name “Slievegallin,” appearing as such in Canadian newspapers, particularly the pro-Emancipation paper, the Irish Vindicator. (The paper was founded in December 1828 by another Irish immigrant, Dr Daniel Tracey, and renamed the Vindicator in July 1829.) As in “The Hibernian Solitary” and other emigration poems, dramatic departure scenes feature in Kidd’s autobiographical essay, “The Reminiscent Tribute of Friendship to the Memory of a Beloved School Fellow,” published in the Philadelphia Irish Shield in 1829. In it, Kidd recalls his modest upbringing in a “straw-roofed cottage” and his studies in Moneymore, where “good old Lawrence McGuckian” taught him Latin and Greek. In this account, he abandoned his hopes of an ecclesiastical career in the Church of Ireland in 1818 (likely spawning a lifelong sense of grievance with church authorities in both Ireland and Quebec). By then, Kidd had concluded that no amount of talent or piety would allow a young man a church career in Ireland “unless he has some Croesus with a bag of gold at his back” to “enable him to wing his way to the highest pinnacle of Ecclesiastical dignity.” Once he had “dismissed, like many other of my school fellows, every hope of obtaining a profession for which I had long laboured,” Kidd states that he “remained on our little farm with my good old father and mother” for another six years, presumably until 1824.7 According to his Irish Shield essay, the possibility of emigration was  certainly on his mind when he accompanied his childhood friend Henry to Belfast before his departure to America. Henry was likely Henry Symes, the subject of an elegy Kidd composed ten years later, after his friend’s death in Quebec. Kidd used his friend’s experience to reflect on his own life in many ways: Henry was also an unsuccessful though “well qualified” candidate for the clergy, “but seeing the unhappy fate of many other talented young men … at last resolved to try his fortune in America, well knowing that in Ireland a native genius can never rise unless he barters that genius and becomes the enemy of his country” (332).

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In theory, Church of Ireland members like Kidd and Henry enjoyed political franchises denied their Catholic and Presbyterian counterparts, but “even among the privileged Episcopalians only a small number – a minority within a minority” had much power. Apart from a small coterie of aristocratic landowners, the majority of Ulster citizens had few rights or little influence, regardless of their political affiliations. Occasionally these different religious groups found common cause with each other, as was the case – briefly – with the Society of United Irishmen or when Presbyterians supported Catholic Emancipation, beginning as early as 1795.8 More often, the political ruling class benefitted from the sectarian divisions that occluded their common interests. Like Moore, Kidd saw how government corruption and systemic discrimination could channel suppressed patriotic “genius” into disloyalty and rebellion, a theme that comes up in many of his poems. Before Henry’s departure, in a scene reminiscent of “The Hibernian Solitary,” Kidd and his friend climbed the Belfast range that includes Divis Mountain and Cave Hill. This high point afforded a dramatic final glimpse of home for a would-be emigrant. From Cave Hill, they would be able to see many of the province’s landmarks, including the Mourne Mountains, as well as Wales and Scotland. The hills also had powerful historical associations: Wolfe Tone and Henry Joy McCracken had climbed these same peaks in 1795 to plan the United Irish rising, and McCracken was captured there in 1798. Kidd recalled, “From the spot where we were seated, we could easily see on one side the heaving billows of the Atlantic and on the other the smooth and peaceful waters of Loughneagh.” Reflecting themes that the poet would return to repeatedly in his own writing, Henry mused on “how much like the storms of life are those troubled surges that dash against the rocky cliffs, while the stillness of my own dear lake resembles that peace and gentle quiet which only border the shores of eternal happiness.” Catching a glimpse of “beautiful Slievegallin,” which marked both men’s birthplace, Henry “softly uttered, ‘yonder, yonder is the home of my mother and the dear scene of my childhood.’ The thoughts of his aged father, his fond mother, and an only sister together with all the endearments that bind the tender heart to kindred home and friendship rushed so powerfully upon his imagination that a tear began to steal down his cheek which by long study and disappointment had partly lost its bloom” (332).

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(Kidd’s own adulthood would also be blighted by an unprofitable “long round of study”.) Henry’s portrait, tying a lost “dear scene of … childhood” with the peace that can only be regained after death, equates Ireland with a paradisiacal world, a theme of much Irish emigrant literature9 as well as United Irish nationalist poetry. Kidd would return to these themes in North America. After taking his leave of Henry, Kidd returned home to Tullynagee on foot. This would have been a considerable trek, one that gave him long hours to consider his own bleak future as he moved spatially backward into Ireland’s happier past, “while at every step a thought glanced back accompanied with a prayer for the safety of Henry.” He continued in a melancholy state “till on heedlessly approaching the hoary walls of sha ne ’s Castle, I was aroused by the continued barking of dogs from among the ruins.” As he approaches Quilly glen, a familiar landmark, “every hazel or sloethorn bush that brushed my coat in the narrow path seemed to detain me as if querulous of Henry who had often accompanied me there when in pursuit of the nut, the sloe, or the concealed nest of the timid thrush” (333). His friend’s forced emigration turns Kidd’s return journey into a literal tour of landmarks that now mark both historic losses (represented by the ruins of the seat of the O’Neills, descendants of the High Kings of Ireland and the lords of Ulster until Plantation) and personal losses (the woods haunted by the memory of innocent childhood pleasures). Taken together, the descriptions of these ruined or empty landmarks become metonymic for “the hopeless and sinking situation of then oppressed Ireland” in the wake of rebellions and the Act of Union that eventually drove Kidd to follow his friend’s example and “seek a scanty pittance in a foreign land” (333), a phrase he will echo in another emigration poem, “Cathleen.” Written a decade after Henry’s emigration, Kidd’s “Reminiscent Tribute” to his emigrant friend is coloured by his own experience of the difficulties Irish immigrants faced in both Ireland and North America. By the time the memoir was published, Kidd had lived or at least travelled through the United States, settled in Quebec City, and tried, with varying degrees of success, teaching, theological study, poetry, and journalism. Kidd found an ecclesiastical career as unobtainable in Canada as in Ireland. On a list of prospective clergymen tutored by the Anglican Archdeacon George Jehoshaphat Mountain, Kidd appears as a “possible candidate” studying at his own expense in 1824.10 By 1830, he had abandoned his “long round of studies, the benefits of which I had

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never yet reaped.” He ascribed his failure to “an accidental fall from the cloud-capped brows of a dangerous Mountain, over which I had heedlessly wandered, with all that open carelessness which is so peculiarly the characteristic of poetic feeling” (xi), suggesting not a fall but a falling-out with Archdeacon Mountain and the church establishment, the vague and contradictory details of which have intrigued literary scholars ever since.11 Additional allusions to a “Mountain-Demon” in The Huron Chief and an epigrammatic shaft fired at “The Countess of D[alhousi]e,” who had apparently “curse[d] the humble bard” who was already “poor enough without it” (135), suggest that Kidd’s attempts to enter the professional and literary elite of Anglo Quebec were continually rebuffed. By 1825, he seems to have found some congenial community with other writers. His poem “Spencer Wood” acknowledges the hospitality of the “Hon. Michael Henry Perceval” and his “accomplished family” whose “polished and highly educated minds” clearly gave him solace and encouragement on his several visits to the estate outside the city of Quebec (159). Kidd also reunited with his school friend Henry Symes and they formed an informal literary society (170). Suggestions in his poems of rejection and mistreatment imply that Kidd felt shut out of the more prestigious and exclusive Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, founded in 1824 by Lord Dalhousie, the governor of Lower Canada, and modelled on a similar society founded while he was governor of Nova Scotia. “Composed of high officials and courtiers,” its exclusivity was enforced through high admission and subscription fees, not to mention “ballot and blackball.”12 The “Quebec Literary Society” that Kidd claims was founded in the winter of 1825 was probably a humble and informal gathering that seems to have left no records of its transactions. Kidd was learning what Stephen Dickson, in spite of his greater accomplishments and reputation, had discovered: control of much of the intellectual and literary life of Quebec remained in the hands of an exclusive coterie of government and church officials. Not surprisingly, by 1829, Kidd was citing “the immortal Kirwan” (likely Walter Blake Kirwan, a renowned preacher and philanthropist who died in poverty) in his autobiographical essay as an example of the “shameful neglect” that Irish-born genius could expect at home and abroad (332). Carl F. Klinck notes that it is possible that men named “Dermody, Kirk-White and Orr” were members of this society,13 but they would be honourary members at best, since Kidd is probably alluding to three short-lived Romantic working-class poets: the English

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Henry Kirke White, (1785–1806), the Irish-born Thomas Dermody (1775–1802), and James Orr, “The Bard of Ballycarry,” (1770–1816), whom Kidd defended in his 1831 article in the Kingston Chronicle. If he initially attempted to fit into the more conservative Irish and Canadian professional establishments, Kidd ultimately found a more congenial society among progressive nationalist Irish and Quebec organizations in Lower Canada and the United States. Based on his poetry and the North American publications with which he was aligned, Kidd appears more interested in reform than rebellion, and is highly ambivalent about violent revolution. Again, like Moore, his reaction to American republicanism was one of disillusioned idealism, having discovered that America’s “boasted charms … are merely fleeting shades of bliss” (165). Instead, like Moore, Kidd sees Canada as a happy medium between American republican values and corrupt exclusionary government at home, despite a colonial government that often seemed intent on reproducing its inequalities. Moreover, while Kidd may have felt shut out of the Quebec elite, he was welcomed by an Irish political and cultural community that opposed the type of corruption and exclusivity that Kidd had deplored in Ireland. Nevertheless, Irish Catholics settling in Lower Canada found more religious equality and freedom than at home, supported by an “ecumenical Toryism”14 not found in Ireland. As a voting bloc in the Assembly, Irish and French Canadians could challenge the Anglo-Scots Protestant commercial elites that supported the colonial executive in Lower Canada. To preserve this advantage, French-Canadian political parties opposed a Bill of Union intended to join Upper and Lower Canada, which would diminish French-Catholic representation in an amalgamated Province of Canada. Unsurprisingly, French-Canadian politicians feared that if the bill were passed, Quebec would resemble Ireland after the Act of Union. In part due to the leadership of the Irish-born Jocelyn Waller, editor of the Canadian Spectator, Irish Catholics co-operated with French Canadians who had been mobilized to protect their Assembly. The situation of “L’Irlande malheureuse,”15 describing the condition of Ireland before Catholic Emancipation, appeared frequently as a cautionary tale or analogy in newspapers that supported the Patriote party in the Quebec Assembly, and found a match in Kidd’s own descriptions of “oppressed Ireland.” Irish communities in Quebec, like others throughout North America, were also avidly following the extraordinary political situation unfolding in Ireland in 1828 as the Catholic politician Daniel O’Connell led

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the Emancipation movement to allow Catholics full participation in Irish politics. In emigrant communities throughout North America, Friends of Ireland societies were created to lend both moral and financial support in the “final heave” for Catholic relief.16 One of the early forces for diasporic nationalism, these societies were formed on both sides of the British-American borders in North America, but Montreal had the honour of being the first city to organize, founding The Society of the Friends of Ireland in Canada in September 1828. The Montreal Friends of Ireland society also crossed religious and linguistic boundaries. Unlike Quebec’s more exclusive intellectual coterie, The Friends of Ireland embraced Irish middle-class Protestants in addition to a small but rapidly growing and increasingly influential Irish-Catholic urban emigrant community and liberal French Canadians who found common cause with local and transatlantic politics.17 More Friends of Ireland societies were established early the next year in Quebec and Trois Rivieres. Irish communities in the Maritimes also supported Friends of Ireland societies, but in Lower Canada, the complementary interests in opposing the union of Lower and Upper Canada, reforming colonial government, and preserving and promoting religious rights ensured that the Irish societies in Canada were more radical and egalitarian even than O’Connell’s organization. For example, unlike O’Connell’s Catholic Association, there were not different tiers of membership for different classes in Quebec.18 By December 1828, the Montreal society had its own newspaper, the Irish Vindicator and Canada General Advertiser, edited by Tracey, an Irish Catholic sharing political views with Waller. Like Waller, Tracey used his paper to support both reform in Canada and emancipation in Ireland. The paper was cited favourably as an example of transatlantic support by the Catholic Association’s leaders, O’Connell and Richard Shiel.19 The newspaper viewed itself as the latest manifestation of a long tradition of patriotism and Irish nationalism carried across the Atlantic and into the present, as suggested by its elaborate banner featuring a woman playing a harp flanked by two warrior figures, one in classical attire and one in the regalia of an Indigenous chief. Like many United Irish writers, the Irish Vindicator editors often presented Indigenous culture as one in which principles of freedom and equality had not been corrupted by the politics of contemporary Western civilization. Not surprisingly, the paper, like Kidd, would advocate for the rights of Indigenous communities in Canada and America as well as African-American communities.

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In its first editorial on 12 December 1828, the Irish Vindicator alluded to its prospectus, in which “we have stated clearly and distinctly, the cause to which we devote ourselves, and the reasons that induce us to become the advocates of a suffering and long oppressed people.” While the paper gradually shifted its focus to the government of Lower Canada, from the beginning it emphasized the common interests shared by Irish and French Canadians. Challenging the ascendancy of Anglo-Scots merchants and leaders, the paper’s stated aim was to ensure that the “whole Canadian Community are to enjoy the blessings which they have received from Great Britain, the Constitution granted them heretofore.” The editorial claimed that past experience informed Irish politics in Lower Canada, since “no man knows better the value of a just government than an Irishman. While loyal to the government in Lower Canada, “a long series of oppression” had taught the immigrant to be “ever on the watch lest he should again fall into the miserable condition from which he escaped only by the abandonment of the land of his fathers.” Along with many FrenchCanadian politicians, the editors of the Irish Vindicator claimed that their criticism of the British government was done from patriotic motives and principles that already animated “the genius, the guardian God of the British Constitution.” Ultimately, the editors viewed their defence of Catholic Emancipation as bound up with the larger principle of “justice and the natural rights of mankind” guaranteed to all members of the British Empire, regardless of where they lived. In keeping with its primary aim of supporting O’Connell’s movement, the paper also reported the activities of Friends of Ireland societies in Lower and Upper Canada as well as in America (the American societies’ newspapers, such as the Philadelphia-based Irish Shield, returned the favour). On 23 December 1828, the Irish Vindicator reported that an 11 December meeting of the “Friends of Ireland of Quebec” was “thronged” because “each member pledged himself to bring, this evening, a ‘friend,’ willing to join their ranks and to subscribe to the ‘Catholic Rent.’” The meeting was attended by another influential Irish reformer, Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, a society member, Patriote supporter, and future editor of the Vindicator. He responded to the president’s speech by noting “that throughout the long night of bondage and mourning during which the Catholics of Ireland have patiently borne the privation of their political rights … not a voice of sympathy was heard, or a prayer offered, until now, beyond the British Isles.”

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Present also was a “Mr Kidd” who, “being called on, addressed the meeting at some length.” (If this speaker is not Adam Kidd, then he shares the poet’s volubility and fondness for classical Latin.) Mr Kidd congratulated the society on its “unsleeping assiduity” that “will prove to your enemies that the unremitting zeal … in the cause of persecuted Ireland … will not ease until it shall finally procure the accomplishment of its sacred object.” He proceeded to eulogize the recently deceased Waller, whose health had been fatally damaged after his imprisonment in 1827 for libel after criticizing a speech by Dalhousie.20 Echoing Irish Patriot philosophy, he emphasized Waller’s civic pursuit of reform and his vindication of Irish character. Waller would “ever live in our memory” as a “true patriot” as long as “the heart of a Canadian, or the pulse of an Irishmen, has one throb left to proclaim its animation.” Kidd then moved that the society would mark Waller’s “prompt and uncompromising defence of the Irish people and of the Irish character, at different periods, as a public loss.” The active presence of a “Mr Kidd” in the Friends of Ireland in Quebec suggests that by 1828 the poet had transferred his energies from theological studies to political reform in both Ireland and Quebec. His eulogy of Waller was in keeping with his desire to immortalize those who worked for Ireland’s benefit, which he viewed as a bardic role. Not surprisingly, Kidd was increasingly dedicating his time to literature, originally only a diversion from his “long round of professional studies” (xi). The Irish Vindicator provided a ready platform, supporting cultural as well as political nationalism. It contained a “poet’s corner [where] original flowers of genius have sprung up to render the Parnassian bower more fragrant,” as the Irish Shield noted approvingly in its January 1829 issue. Kidd became a favoured poet of the Friends of Ireland, and his literary career was followed with interest and encouraged by the Irish Shield, whose poets often dedicated their work to him. The Irish Vindicator and its sister-publications in the Canadas and America also regularly featured each other’s work, such as a prologue for Irish Shield editor George Pepper’s drama, “Ireland Redeemed.” Like Kidd, who often contributed as “Slievegallin,” other poets advertised their allegiances through their pen names, and the poet’s corner was filled with works authored by “Carolan” (possibly an American friend of Kidd), “Hinda” (clearly an admirer of Moore’s Lalla Rookh), “Hibernicus,” and “Harp of the Isle.” While Moore was a popular choice, the Vindicator also published verses attributed to “Dermody

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the Irish Poet” and Kirke White, suggesting Kidd’s input, since these writers also feature in Kidd’s own articles and poems. Kidd’s own debut came in the paper’s first issue on 12 December with “My Irish Home,” which appeared in the poetry section along with “Erin Ma Vourneen,” attributed to Moore. Given that Friends of Ireland papers supported the non-violent activism of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association, it is significant that poems attributed to United Irishmen appear in the paper. On 2 January 1829, “Ireland,” which the editors noted was “supposed to have been written by Lord Edward Fitzgerald on the night of his being arrested,” was published.21 The poem, and its invocation of the United Irish leader, serve as memorial and warning that inspires political action in the present. Kidd chose a similar tack in his pro-Emancipation poem, “Monody to the Memory of the Rt Hon. George Canning,” who during his brief tenure as a Conservative prime minister had advocated for Greek independence, and also put forth a measure for Catholic Emancipation in 1827. Kidd’s monody shows Erin retaining her “faith” in the government, “praying for freedom” so that “the land of Fitzgerald may flourish again.” The allusion to Fitzgerald is ambiguous: it may be that Kidd is hoping that Ireland will be restored to the Patriot and United Irish principles represented by Fitzgerald. However, in the context of his involvement in the Friends of Ireland society, the poem likely implies that as long as it suffers religious inequality, Ireland will indeed be “the land of Fitzgerald,” marked by political despair that led both Fitzgerald and Emmet to rebel. Ireland will only “flourish again” when Catholic Emancipation is finally granted, at which point Kidd echoes Emmet in envisaging Ireland taking her place “’mong the nations of earth,” as if granting full rights to Catholics is sufficient to fulfill Emmet’s prophesy. The famous United Irish poem “Erin” was likewise mistakenly attributed: it was credited to Moore when it appeared in the Vindicator on 19 December 1828, although it was one of the most famous poems written by William Drennan, who co-founded the Society of United Irishmen with Wolfe Tone and who bequeathed the phrase “the Emerald Isle” to nationalist poetry. Drennan’s poem portrays Erin with “her face to the West,” and it was from the west, in Montreal, that the Friends of Ireland found transatlantic support. Kidd’s poem complements the sentiments of O’Callaghan, who at the 11 December Friends of Ireland meeting had asserted that Irish communities in Montreal and Quebec were among the first to offer aid to “the

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Catholics of Ireland [who] have patiently borne the privation of their political rights … during this length of time.” In this context, both “Ireland” and “Erin” reinforce the editorial position of the Irish Vindicator: the founding of the first Friends of Ireland societies in Montreal and Quebec meant that Ireland could again look west for deliverance from its plagues. Other Friends of Ireland publications also employed the past to emphasize the necessity for reform in the present as well as caution against political violence. While many former United Irish activists had become prominent politicians in the United States, the Irish Shield disassociated itself from them in its announcement of a “Historical Memoir of the Insurrections of Ireland” to appear in a future issue. The article described United Irish activities as “disastrous and sanguinary tragedies got up in 1798 and 1803.” The Shield asked its readers, “Who for a moment would compare such enthusiastic insurgents as Theobald Wolfe Tone, (whose honesty and genius we admit cast a halo of splendour over the errors of his compeers) Lord Edward Fitzgerald … Thomas Addis Emmet … and the frantic Robert Emmet – with DANIEL O’Connell, the accomplished statesman, the powerful orator, and patriotic and bloodless philanthropist?”22 Kidd’s poetry in the Irish Shield and the Vindicator also consistently advocates peaceful reform through eloquence and persuasion, defending the patriotic character and rights of the Irish at home and abroad. Consequently, his poems complement the Vindicator’s arguments for equal representation in Lower Canada, thereby urging the British government to allow all its subjects to share in constitutional rights and freedoms by supporting O’Connell’s peaceful political movement in Ireland and Canadian rights to self-government in Lower Canada. The poems published in the Vindicator often support these goals by keeping Ireland’s misfortunes in the public mind until Ireland regains its rightful privileges under the British Constitution. Consequently, Edenic depictions of a lost Ireland are not simply the work of emigrants who cannot move past their nostalgia and put down roots in a new land. Instead, the past is held up to spur Irish Canadians to work for reform in Canada. For instance, while Kidd was pursuing a new professional life and actively engaged in the political and cultural activities of Lower Canada, his debut poem, “My Irish Home,” features an emigrant fixing his gaze on the fading last view of his lost Irish homeland. The speaker’s parting glance takes in mountain and ocean views that recall the

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departure scene in “The Reminiscent Tribute,” suggesting that Kidd continued to dwell on the moment of emigration as a defining point in his life. Given that for Kidd, the lost Irish landscape represents Ireland’s past glories, L’Irlande malheureuse is not simply lost to the emigrant, but to itself. However, many of his poems also reinforce the future-looking goals of the Friends of Ireland by performing various forms of restoration, both cultural and personal. As Wright notes, “Kidd’s poetry of migration tends to focus on the North American landscape as a temporary refuge for Irish subjects” and “stress[es] the moment of departure and ongoing attachment to the home landscape.”23 Nevertheless, since Catholic Emancipation would theoretically enable his exiled Irish characters to return, the poems also offer support for the Irish Vindicator’s assertion that the Irish in Canada would continue to advocate for their homeland until Emancipation was achieved. At first glance, “My Irish Home” simply and unaffectedly captures the sentiments of an emigrant, but in a political landscape, it shares overtones with Fitzgerald’s “Ireland” and Drennan’s “Erin.” In contrast to the optimistic westward view in “Erin,” the speaker’s gaze in “My Irish Home” is “backward cast” both in time and space. Like “Ireland,” the poem ends in apparent despair, with the country and the guiding stars equally “lost in evening’s gloom.” Nevertheless, “I think some happier day / May teach me not to roam” is sufficiently ambiguous to  suggest that the happier day might come for Ireland with Emancipation. This sentiment is taken up again more specifically in “Cathleen,” where the poem’s speaker assures an emigrant that she will be able to return home “when the shell of joy has once proclaimed / Loved Erin free” (174). As in “My Irish Home,” the act of emigration is initially represented as exile and thus an indicator of Ireland’s poor political health, since Cathleen is a character “easily connected both to the literary tradition of Cathleen ni Houlihan as a figure for Ireland and to the economic diaspora that drove many of the poorer Irish, women and men, to North America.”24 As such, Cathleen/Ireland tells the speaker “the story of her woes, / And hopes of other times” (172). She is implicitly compared to Ireland’s ruined monuments that hold the memory of past glory since she appears “a wreck” but “lovely still,” kindling “feelings of a finer stamp,” namely the patriotic desire to work towards her restoration (in both senses of the word) rather than mere “pity or compassion” for her degraded state (173). In the context of Emancipation, Cathleen’s restoration,

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both in terms of beauty and to her legendary “four green fields,” can be brought about through the political restoration of lost Irish rights. Variations of the notion of restoration of exile, emigrant, and Ireland’s past rights and glories occur in Kidd’s poems in the Vindicator. On 15 December 1829, the paper published “A Fugitive Garland to be Strewn on the Strange Grave of George F. Cooke, the ‘Irish Roscius.’” In the poem, the speaker removes a shamrock from the vandalized grave of a famous Irish thespian who had died in New York before he could return to Ireland. The “lonely” and “exotic” shamrock is a proxy for exiled Irish artists, including Kidd: as in “Cathleen,” the image of a present “wreck” (this time a ruined monument) is connected to an imagined future where Cooke’s “bones” are restored or at least repatriated to an emancipated Ireland that no longer neglects its national geniuses. In a footnote to the poem, Kidd links his own experience to that of his imaginary and historic migrants, claiming that he did indeed transplant a shamrock from Cooke’s grave “by conveying it to my own temporary abode, and shall finally plant it on the green summit of the flowery mantled Slievegallin, in the county of Derry – where it may once more imbibe the dew of a friendlier sky, and spread forth its little blossoms to the fairy breezes of its native mountains” (181). Recalling the antiquarian roots of both the Patriot and United Irish cultural programs, Kidd’s equating himself with the traditional Irish itinerant bard is a form of political resistance that places current nationalist activities in a longer tradition portraying an Irish identity as distinct from British. Employing the harp, which by the eighteenth century had become an established symbol of the “struggle against muteness and cultural amnesia,”25 Kidd thus imagines the “bard” as a poet-musician who could restore the cultural ruptures caused by both political oppression and emigration. Kidd keeps this role alive and relevant for his North American audience when he publishes his poems in Friends of Ireland–sponsored publications. “Apostrophe to the Harp of Dennis Hampson, the Minstrel of MacGilligan,” published in both the Irish Vindicator and the Irish Shield, portrays Hampson (more often known as Denis Hempson) as “the last of the wandering minstrels,” like Rangleawe, a living link to the Celtic past of Ulster who had survived into Kidd’s boyhood, dying “in his own little cottage, on the shores of Magilligan [a lake near Tullynagee], in 1808, at the advanced age of 115 years.” Kidd notes that the harper’s grave is marked by “a marble slab, with a suitable inscription,” (167) placed

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over it by Sidney Owenson (Lady Morgan), the novelist friend of Moore and a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, who had mentioned Hempson in her novel The Wild Irish Girl. Hempson, (c. 1692–1807) was one of the oldest and most famous musicians to attend the Belfast Harp Festival organized by the Society of United Irishmen and one of the last living performers on the ancient wire-stringed Celtic harp, whom Bunting recognized as the only harper at the gathering who played “the very old – the aboriginal – music of the country.”26 The aged harpist with his long fingernails must have been a poignant living image of the antiquity and frailty of Irish traditional culture, particularly when Hempson observed, “there’s none left who want to listen to the old style of music.” He becomes an Irish counterpart to the many Indigenous centenarian guardians of their culture featured in The Huron Chief. Hempson’s advanced age linked him with an entirely different historical epoch of nationalist aspirations; he was even reputed “to have once played in Scotland for Bonnie Prince Charlie”27 and on an instrument so symbolic of resistance that it was once banned in Scotland. With the death of Hempson, the harp, linked in Kidd’s poem to “liberty,” becomes a symbol of Ireland’s cultural crisis: the “true emblem of Erin – now hushed in the hall” (168). Kidd commemorates Hempson as the last living link to a culture “now but living in story.” While the actual practitioner of Irish music cannot be revived, his memory, and the memory of past glories of Irish culture, can be preserved in contemporary poetry, just as it is honoured by a suitable physical memorial. In figuratively re-stringing the harp – albeit only to allow Slievegallin’s “zephyrs” to play upon it – Kidd reprises the theme of Cathleen, keeping a faded image of Ireland’s glory alive until the day when “Freedom, to Erin, her anthem restore” (168). While keeping alive the tradition of the itinerant bard, the immigrant writer Kidd wandered farther than Rangleawe or Hempson ever dreamed of. Like them, he kept alive the memory of Irish cultural greatness just as he immortalized the transitory beauty of the women he celebrated, and in doing so bridged the cultural gap created by time and distance. Like Ireland, Canada has scenes “such as to attract the admiration of the lover and the poet” (159). Like the Irish bardic poetry he commemorates, Kidd’s portrait of Canadian beauty conforms to Romantic conventions established in Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” and Moore’s “Ballad Stanzas.” In “The Canadian Girl,”28 which appeared in the Vindicator on 17 November 1829, Kidd’s speaker is moved by the combined effect of sublime landscape

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and traditional song, this time in French, by a solitary woman wandering through the woods, milk pail in hand, her melody “Giving a charm to that loved spot, / Which never yet has been forgot” (155). Like Moore’s portrayal of French-Canadian folk culture and Canadian life and Fitzgerald’s praise of New World simplicity, Kidd’s Romantic representation of Canada has political implications for both Ireland and Canada. Unlike the thoroughly urban and urbane Moore, Kidd prided himself on his own rural childhood in a “Romantic” townland with its living connections to Gaelic Ulster. That may have influenced his romanticized portrait of French-Canadian life, his descriptions of the Canadian landscapes, and, in his long poem, of North American Indigenous culture, offering examples of worlds yet free from modern political corruption, exclusionary class systems, and religious conflicts. Kidd’s renunciation of “Europe’s pomp” (33) in The Huron Chief also echoed these sentiments, which were also present in the editorial rhetoric of the Vindicator when denouncing absolute power in Ireland or the colonies. While drawing parallels between Lower Canada and the landscape of his childhood home, Kidd also emphasizes the uniqueness of North American cultures in “The Canadian Girl” and “Ash-Kewa,” a ballad celebrating another woman “who dwells in pure simplicity, / Among … shady groves of pine.” In the latter poem, the speaker is entranced by the vision of a “young Indian girl’s boat,” flying “along the cascade’s daring steep,” and wishes “to share her love, her bark, her home.” Like Moore, whose sublime effects were created by linking FrenchCanadian music with the country’s historic waterways, Kidd portrays the most Romantic and uncorrupted scenery in Canada as accessible only by canoe. A footnote to “The Canadian Girl” comments that it is set on the banks of Lac Calvière, where “an evening’s sail in a canoe, across its peaceful and shaded bosom … has often been to me the source of great and uninterrupted pleasure” (155). Similarly, “AshKewa” features the Ottawa River, described as a “great stream” whose “magic beauty still bestows … on him, whose heart alone / Is fired by nature’s grandest scene.” Kidd uses the canoe to signify a distinct poetic voice connected with a unique culture in his preface to the Huron Chief, and Other Poems, where he both acknowledges his poetic models, Byron and Moore, and asserts his own identity: “The little birch canoe, in which I have safely glided through the tranquil lakes of the Canadas, could not securely venture on the boiling surge, and foaming breakers, over

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which Childe Harold and Lalla Rookh triumphantly rode in their magnificent Gondolas.” The preface also promises that Kidd will follow up his volume with a prose work on Indigenous culture, “together with local descriptions of the numerous cascades, stupendous cataracts, and majestic scenery of the country, which for beauty and grandeur remain unrivalled in the universe.” Kidd’s apology for the poem’s “defects” is related to his insistence on its distinction. Its loose, digressive structure can be accounted for in part by the fact that the episodes and reflections in the poem roughly follow the course of the North American waterways. As seen in the discussion below, the depiction of Canadian waterways also furnishes the poem with its most explosive political controversy. Being shut out by the elite of both Ireland and Quebec appears to have reinforced Kidd’s sense that Irish political corruption meant “a native genius can never rise unless he barters that genius and becomes the enemy of his country,” as he had ruefully observed in his “Reminiscent Tribute.” Like Fitzgerald, his experience of the Irish class system made him turn with relief, at least figuratively, from modern society, especially in his long poem, The Huron Chief. Again, like Fitzgerald, he was already predisposed to see Indigenous societies as unspoiled, as reflected in his bitter response to his friend Henry’s blighted hopes at the end of his short life. Kidd wishes that he “had been born a savage or something less civilized, rather than for a moment think that I am an exile from my friends and aged parents who are still dearer to me than life.” In his view, “the Canadian, or rather the American Indian, before tutored by the politeness of the bowing and jilting French or the charity of England, had more true notions of justice and integrity than he even now possesses notwithstanding all the polish he has undergone” (335). Concluding his diatribe with the observation, “My pen, I fear, is rather political and I regret it still,” Kidd continued to draw “political” parallels between his own situation and that of the Irish-Catholic and Indigenous communities in North America. His equating the natural civility of “the Canadian and American Indian” to that of the Irish is developed more explicitly in his writing in the Irish Vindicator and The Huron Chief, and Other Poems. For example, on 20 January 1829, the Irish Vindicator published a letter from Slievegallin under the headline “Great Kent Meeting” (referring to an anti-Emancipation demonstration organized by Orange Lodges in 1828). In a letter addressed to John Charlton Fisher, the editor of

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the government-approved Quebec Authority Gazette, Kidd disparaged Fisher’s attack on the more “ecumenical Tory” sentiments expressed by the Quebec Mercury, which had asserted, “We have ever considered it both unjust and impolitic to create civil disqualifications on account of religious opinions.” Kidd defended the Mercury, arguing that religious bigotry was a symptom of contemporary society’s corruption and that “man is naturally kind to his fellow creature, unless poisoned by prejudice, by bigotry and ignorance.” To prove his point, he offered the example of “the Indian who enjoys the bounties of his wild inheritance, [and] contends not for superiority over the brothers of his tribe.” In the letter, Kidd reminds Fisher that “we are all children of the same Almighty Parent, and if equally pious, have an equal claim to the spontaneous bounty of His heavenly divinity.” He further argues that denying Irish Catholics their rights would “disqualify men, whose magnanimous and noble spirits have proved, in every emergency, that they are, and ever have been, the unshaken defenders of the British Throne, and still love to rally round their King, with hearts as firm as their Island rock, that braves the fury of the ocean.”29 The parallels Kidd draws between Irish Catholics and Indigenous peoples affords him the same type of poetic distance that allowed Moore to allude to Irish history and politics in Lalla Rookh. (Kidd also draws on Moore’s more explicitly political satires “Intolerance” and “Corruption” and, as Moore did in these two poems, uses extensive footnotes in The Huron Chief to provide commentary, this time on Irish, Canadian, and American politics.) References throughout The Huron Chief, and Other Poems to characters like Hinda as well as phrases such as “flash resentment,” “Bakou’s ardent fire,” and “Chieftain of the Mountain” are direct allusions to the interconnected tales that make up Lalla Rookh. Whereas Moore’s long poem was published in 1817, Kidd’s poem, written on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, focuses as much on the hope for reconciliation as on past sectarian conflicts, but, like Moore’s poem, also demonstrates how the cynical exploitation of religious differences forces an oppressed people to rebel. Mary Helen Thuente is one of many scholars to see the stories in Lalla Rookh, particularly “The Fire Dwellers,” as “a moving commentary about the United Irishmen”30 and an attempt to rehabilitate them as patriots whose love of country was viewed as a crime by the British. Like Lalla Rookh, The Huron Chief features a number of sympathetic, doomed heroes who resist political and religious

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oppression. For example, “moranka, [is] the glory and pride of the Nation,” who “Died bravely defending the Indian’s shore” and is mourned by his widow in a ballad that, as Bentley notes, employs the meter of Moore’s “O Breathe Not his Name,” and “She is Far from the Land,” poems that commemorated Robert Emmet and his grieving fiancée, Sarah Curran.31 The Huron Chief’s allusion to Hinda, the heroine of “The Fire Dwellers” who dies with her rebel lover, “presages disaster for” Tapooka and her Sioux lover, Alkwanwaugh.32 Hinda’s lover, Hafed, makes a last stand at his religion’s final holy site and wins renown as “the Chieftain who died on that mountain.”33 Kidd’s Skenandow, the preserver of Huron traditions and religious rights in the face of white colonization, likewise introduces himself as “the Chieftain of the mountain” (22), foreshadowing his own death protecting “the remnant of his tribe” from Christian forces who outnumber the Indigenous defenders at the close of the poem. Kidd also reproduces in verse the speech of the Mingo chief and renowned orator Logan. Like Irish nationalists who in the 1820s and 1830s were ensuring Henry Grattan’s, Emmet’s and Fitzgerald’s apotheoses as eloquent spokesmen and heroes, the Hurons tell the narrator about all “the Indian’s wrongs and sorrows, / But most of logan, lately gone” (57). The versification of his historical speech in defence of his people takes up a significant portion of the poem, and he is presented as willing to accept death as the price for avenging their wrongs. Nevertheless, just as Irish nationalists of the 1820s tried to invoke past wrongs without incurring present violence, Kidd’s poem does not end with Logan’s vow to avenge his people or die trying. Despite the “long and dismal” history of white “Christian” oppression that culminates in another massacre of innocent Indigenous people at the poem’s climax, the heroes Skenandow and Tecumseh counsel peace and forgiveness, rather than revenge. They free the guilty white captives and resolve to “plant the Tree of peace,” employing what Kidd considered traditional Indigenous diplomatic figures of speech that fortuitously echo Daniel O’Connell’s famous Tipperary oration in which he asked his Irish-Catholic followers to “plant in our Native Land the Constitutional Tree of Liberty” in whose shade “the universal People of Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, and Presbyterians, and Dissenters of every Class, will sit in peace and unison and tranquillity.” The Irish Vindicator had reproduced this speech on 12 December 1828, a week before it featured Drennan’s poem asking the Irish to

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resist but also forgive their oppressors. Reflecting the Patriot tradition of using scholarship and poetry to promote Irish national interests, Kidd rehabilitates Indigenous figures who have been marginalized and maligned in the written histories of Britain and America, consciously exposing himself to charges that he is subversive in the process: “I am fully aware, that the ‘huron  c hi e f ’ will draw on me the censure of many – but this is no consideration, since I can fairly and honestly plead the correctness of my observations” (xi). Consequently, Kidd’s linking of loyal and peaceful Catholic and Indigenous communities in his letters and poem has explicit political relevance for politics in Canada. His poem is not simply “the kind of projection that can occur when a disturbed personality seeks an objective correlative for its problems in what it perceives as hostilities and injustices suffered by people of another, alien culture,” as Mary J. Edwards observes.34 Through the Irish Vindicator, The Friends of Ireland in both Montreal and Quebec advocated for and found common cause with existing Indigenous communities in the Canadas and America, just as they did with the French community. Kidd’s own interest in the Wendat (Huron) people likely arose from his proximity to the nearby and long-established community in Lorette, Quebec, which had allied with the French, accepting missionaries and establishing trade and military alliances since the early seventeenth century. While not strictly historical, the poem’s narrative alludes to the succession of epidemics and conflicts that ultimately dispersed the Wendat nation from its original territories in what is now Ontario. A community characterized by extreme resilience and adaptability35 as opposed to being a “doomed race,” the Lorette community had survived introduced diseases and war that decimated and dispersed them in the seventeenth century. Being a loosely affiliated group of clans, different communities of the Wendat experienced different fates. The Bear Clan had joined the Haudenosaunee by the 1650s, becoming part of the Kanien’keha:ka nation that later adopted Fitzgerald. Communities that resisted the Haudenosaunee settled in what would become America and fought against the French: some of these American communities, including the Wyandot of Ohio, became part of the forced removals of the 1830s deplored by Kidd, and even more strongly by the Irish Vindicator. Kidd’s footnotes frequently refer to Indigenous leaders who hosted his visits to their communities in Quebec. In contrast to what had happened in America, Kidd and

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the Vindicator editors believed that the colonial government in Lower Canada had an opportunity and obligation to create a fair and equal society for its Indigenous and Irish communities alike. As Jason King notes, the Vindicator expressed solidarity with Indigenous communities in North America by printing poignant extracts from The Huron Chief as well as American newspaper accounts such as “Removal of the Choctaws” that appeared in the Vindicator on 11 May 1830. The Choctaws were victims of American government policy that “compelled [them] to … abandon the graves of their fathers or to drag out an existence more insufferable than that of absolute slavery.” The Indigenous communities affected faced a far grimmer future than Irish emigrants, but phrases such as “abandon the graves of their fathers” (a phrase that Andrew Jackson himself used in describing the plight of American Indians in his 1829 State of the Union Address) invoked parallels that were “as indicative of the Irish as the Indian colonial experience, both cultures having endured calamitous upheavals over the course of the Romantic period.”36 In his preface to The Huron Chief, Kidd echoes Jackson’s speech, presenting the history of Indigenous peoples in America as a litany of similar injustices: “From the days of the American Revolution until this very hour, the poor Indians have been so cruelly treated, and driven from their homes and hunting-grounds, by the boasted freemen of the United States, that the mohicans, the naragansetts, the delawa re s, and others, once powerful Tribes, have now become totally extinct – while the remaining Nations are daily dwindling away, and in a few years hence will scarcely leave a memorial to perpetuate their names, as the once mighty rulers of the vast American regions” (x–xi). While Kidd adds that many of these tribes moved to Canada, where they were “happily enjoying the manly protection of the British Government” like their Irish and French counterparts, the Vindicator appeared less sanguine, implying in some editorials that the Irish and French communities were not the only ones who needed to be “ever on the watch” lest the colonial government infringe on their established rights. For instance, the paper was quick to point out incidents where the colonial government violated verbal agreements with Kanien’keha:ka communities in Quebec; on 22 January 1830, it announced having received “an interesting document relating to that portion of property to which the Indians of Caughnawaga [Kahnawake] claim inheritance and which continues in possession of the government.” In light of daily

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reports of “the gross injustice, with which other branches of that great family of the wilderness have been treated in the neighboring states,” the editors reproached the colonial government for not living up to the principles of the British constitution: “We should hope that British Subjects, if there be anything in the name, should play a more disinterested part than the selfish American offers to the unfortunate Creek.” In the eyes of the Vindicator’s editors, supporting the Kanien’keha:ka communities again reflected their general mandate to hold colonial officials to public account: “If we are properly informed, in our enquiries on this subject, the chacinery [sic] of a few individuals, who find an interest in so doing, frustrate the exercise of justice and the wisdom.” Not able to gain a fair hearing in Lower Canada, the Kanien’keha:ka had turned to the English government. As the Vindicator observed: “It certainly does not argue much for the honesty of the colonial government when, in recovery of their rights, these people are obliged to transfer their cause directly to the Throne in England.” According to reports in the Vindicator, the Kanien’keha:ka delegation to England included “two Indian Chiefs; Thomas Sonnintiowane and Thomas Sawennowane,” the latter of whom is identified by Kidd as one of the “celebrated and intelligent” chiefs who had undertaken to translate The Huron Chief into their respective languages” (xii). Aton8a (Thomas) Sawennowane was a decorated hero of the War of 1812,37 and the ancestral land in question “had been promised to them by General Carleton” at the war’s conclusion, according to the Vindicator. Where previously the Vindicator had appealed to living memory and oral culture to keep alive the traditions represented by the Irish “bards” it celebrated in its poet’s corner, it recognized that such memory held real economic and political weight in the present. While noting that Carleton’s assurance had been “but a verbal promise to the Indians not knowing then the importance of a written article,” the editors insisted on the legitimacy of the claim, arguing that “there is yet living in the village at the Ault, an old Iroquois (80 years of age) who was present – all the others are dead.” The Kanien’keha:ka also offered as support for their claim “the promise of Sir George Prevost three times repeated to the same Indians; – 1st at Montreal – 2d at Chateauguny (aux Fouchers) and 3e at Kingston that their claims should be granted on the conclusion of the war provided they continued to defend the country against the enemy.” The Vindicator does not say how it came into possession of the documents related to the Kanien’keha:ka’ appeal to the Crown, but if

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Kidd had indeed been befriended by Kanien’keha:ka leaders, including Sawennowane, then perhaps they shared them with him. At any rate, if details of the land claim informed Kidd’s poem, they would make many of his observations about Indigenous oral culture not simply a Romantic infatuation with the notion of the “noble savage,” shared with Fitzgerald, but also “political” in the sense that his concerns were highly relevant to the colonial politics of both Quebec and Ireland. The aged chiefs celebrated in Kidd’s poem possess a practical institutional memory of their political dealings with the British government. Like the Indigenous allies betrayed by the British in the poem and in real life,38 Irish Catholics who had so faithfully served in Canadian and Peninsular conflicts during the same period continued to see the promise of Emancipation deferred. The colonial government’s treatment of Kanien’keha:ka land claims certainly provides immediate and local reasons why Kidd emphasizes the value of oral culture of Indigenous peoples over often-broken promises written down on the “great paper” disparaged in a speech by a Seneca chief in a footnote to the poem (121). Oral culture also allows Kidd to assert Indigenous peoples’ “more true notions of justice and integrity” that they continue to possess “notwithstanding” their long contact with Europeans, as he observed in “The Reminiscent Tribute” (335). Whereas the Kanien’keha:ka had received Carleton’s “thrice repeated” promise regarding their land, in The Huron Chief, Indigenous people need to give their word only once: “It is the custom of an Indian never to repeat a request if once rejected” because “it would be rudeness to require them to alter their determination, or break their word” (36). Such observations make the Vindicator’s argument for the validity of Kanien’keha:ka land title, in spite of the “Indians not knowing then the importance of a written article,” a sign of their integrity in contrast to settler culture that trusts only in written contracts. Kidd’s preference for orality over written documents may even be evident in his choice of medium for his poem, which he claims was written not on paper (associated with broken treaties and illegal possession), but “on the inner rind of birch bark, during my travels through the immense forests of America” (x). Kidd also uses oral history to establish further affinity between Indigenous and Irish culture. This is not surprising, given that Irish nationalism of the early nineteenth century was, according to Leerssen, likewise characterized by an “important sense of orality” and “thus feeds into the theme (popularized most effectively by Moore) of a struggle against muteness

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and cultural amnesia, which adds an ideological sounding board to the vogue for songs and ballads as the authentically Irish genres of verse and poetry.”39 The emphasis on a history overlooked – or conveniently forgotten – by written colonial records is politicized when Kidd observes that during a visit to the “Indian Village of Lorette” in May 1829, its chief “willingly furnished me with an account of the distinguished warriors, and the traditions of different tribes, which are still fresh in his memory, and are handed from father to son, with the same precision, interest, and admiration, that the Tales and exploits of Ossian and his heroes are circulated in their original purity, to this day, among the Irish” (56). To Romantic writers, Ossian represented “the would-be natural man, simple and straightforward, sentimental and fair, not cunning or brutal, and … not religious as yet,”40 and therefore free of the “sectarian seeds” later sown by “jarring creeds-men” whom Kidd presents as encroaching on peaceful Indigenous societies governed by the natural “social ties” (95) of kinship that Fitzgerald had envied. Kidd may also have been aware of Moore’s early Ossianic “effusions,” used to indirectly support early United Irish activism. For the United Irishmen, the pre-Christian timeframe also made Ossian an appealing figure, providing imaginative possibilities for portraying an Ireland free of sectarian conflicts, as Drennan had done in “Erin.”41 Kidd’s Huron characters also share many similarities with Patriot conceptions of the ancient Irish. Like the Milesians referred to by Drennan, the Wendat are portrayed as an honourable warrior society.42 As Kidd observes in a footnote, “Nothing seems to afford the Indian so much pleasure as the relation of his noble exploits in war. The young men gather round the old warriors, and listen to their stories with all the delight of a proud enthusiasm.” Like Irish nationalists using the exploits of the warriors in Celtic sagas to fuel a revival in national pride, Kidd’s Huron also use “noble exploits” to instill a sense of pride and history among the young. More relevant to Lower Canada politics, Kidd uses Indigenous oral records to remind governments of their moral obligations to both Indigenous and Irish people. Like Skenandow, Lorette Chief Oui-ara-lih-to is “a venerable patriarch … approaching the precincts of a century,” and the oral historian of his people. His presence reminds the reader that Britain owes as much debt to the Wendat as to the Irish soldiers it depends on in its current wars. Oui-a-ra-lih-to provides Kidd with a history of Indigenous military co-operation with the

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French and English from the conquest (“the war of 1759”) to the present, including the chief’s own engagement with “the army of Burgoyne” against the Americans during the War of Independence. Consequently, the deeds kept in living memory through oral history are not simply tales of heroism, but reminders of Indigenous loyalty to the British and the political rights this loyalty entitles them to. Indigenous narratives thus belie the notion that the past is dead: the Wendat witnessed and preserve the memory of historical events that are highly relevant to their present situation. Moreover, the timeframe covered by Indigenous eyewitnesses who remember the verbal promises of the British to the people of Kahnàwa:ke might also indirectly remind readers of the broken promises to the Irish Catholics over a similar period of time, stretching from the seventeenth century and the broken Treaty of Limerick to the present. Kidd’s portrait of Indigenous military heroes indirectly calls attention to the Irish Catholics who were equally the “unshaken defenders of the British Throne,” as he had noted in his letter to the Vindicator. The fact that Kidd valorizes oral culture and tries to reproduce some of its qualities in his writing explains much of the structure of the poem. As in his poems recalling the past glory of Ireland, preservation and restoration spur his desire to commemorate both Indigenous oral historians and their histories. This urgency reflects a current political crisis facing the “remaining nations [that] are daily dwindling away, and in a few years hence will scarcely leave a memorial to perpetuate their names, as the once mighty rulers of the vast American regions” (xi). One of the chief accusations made to the Christian captives at the end of the poem is that they wish not simply to destroy “the Indian” but to “blot away his name and nation” (114). At the same time, the memories transmitted between generations become a form of cultural resistance for the poem’s Indigenous heroes, whose history of interaction with settlers has been distorted by both calumny and a lack of understanding or respect for their “monuments,” recalling Kidd’s indignation at seeing the Irish actor George Cooke’s “demon defaced” grave. In fact, the poem’s loose, almost picaresque plot becomes a tour of significant Indigenous cultural sites on both the Canadian and American sides of Lake Huron. Much as Kidd learned of his culture while exploring his region of Ireland on foot, his narrator learns the oral history of the Huron as he and his hosts traverse the woods and waterways where much of that history took place, recounting as they go the legends related to each place.

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Of course, access to the landscape and world view Kidd describes is dependent upon Indigenous technology. Like Fitzgerald, Kidd alerts his readers to how the canoe’s form arises naturally from its environment, and of its essential role in the both the culture and commerce of the new world: “The canoes of the Indians are remarkably light, and glide over the wave with as much ease as a sea-bird” (72). The landscape also invites a particular form of poetry, and Kidd becomes the first of many Canadian writers who acknowledge Moore’s early recognition of the poetic potential of North America when he writes in a footnote that “the banks of the Schuylkill … conjured up the image of my countryman, thomas moore, and presented his beautiful verses written when, perhaps, like myself, straying along its winding banks, catching the first impressions that novelty and romantic scenery generally produce to attract the admiration of the poet” (128). The poem begins with the immigrant speaker wandering “undisturbed and free,” initially believing that in America he has recovered a state akin to “my boyhood’s days” before he was forced to leave Ireland: “when over Slievegallin’s mountain-braes / ere thought or reason took command / I strayed with heart as light as feather” (44). This illusion is dispelled shortly after he stops in a peaceful spot that he imagines has never been inhabited. There he hears a lone woman sing a ballad commemorating “her hero gone.” The song’s context challenges several misconceptions that the speaker shares with the once-youthful and politically naive Moore: that America is largely uninhabited and can thus be a history-free site for a re-enactment of prelapsarian innocence, and that it is a refuge or paradise for exiled Irish patriots. Instead, the speaker learns that the picturesque “bowers” are, like Ireland, dotted with ruins and graves, signalling that the Indians’ “homes are no more.” All that is left is the ballad commemorating “Moranka” who “died bravely defending the Indian’s shore” from the “desolation” brought by “the hand of the white man” (17). Not wishing to intrude on the singer’s grief, Kidd’s protagonist continues wandering along “the windings of the lake,” where he is accosted by “a hoary Chief,” Skenandow, and their conversation is almost immediately interrupted by a Sioux youth “emerging from the wood” to sing a plaintive melody of unrequited love and mourning for the Huron beauty “Tapooka,” who has killed herself to avoid a forced marriage to “an aged Chief” (31). Tapooka is not simply beautiful but, like Cathleen ni Houlihan, “the idol of the Nation” (66). The narrative pauses briefly to tell the tale of her death, at the end of which

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Tapooka has already passed into folk legend based on sightings of the dead woman paddling a ghostly canoe (Kidd’s contribution to the supernatural-canoe sub-genre of Canadian poetry popularized by Moore and taken up by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and others). With evening drawing on, Skenandow invites the speaker to spend the night in the Huron village where they are treated to a welcoming song, followed by a dance. In the morning, the speaker resumes his “wandering,” with “Alkwanwaugh,” the lover of Tapooka, as his guide, and the party passes the time recounting the “glories of the Huron race,” containing “every name / On memry’s page,” as well as a lengthy recitation of “the Indian’s wrongs and sorrows” (56–7). This is followed by an adaptation of the famous Mingo orator Logan’s lament in ballad form. While standing on the shores of the lake, the narrator and his guide overhear yet another song set to the rhythm of the paddle by a passing “hunter, in his birch canoe,” again recalling Moore’s “Canadian Boat Song” with its themes of departure and homecoming, but ending with an invocation, not to Saint Anne but to the “Spirit of the Great and Free,” to “protect us from the White Man’s laws” (67). After several days of travel, the wanderers approach “a lovely bay” and cross Lake Erie in a birch canoe, whose quiet passage allows them to hear yet another song from the shore, that of an exiled Indigenous woman who turns out to be Alkwanwaugh’s lost lover and who had been rescued by “kind Chippewas” (78). Where the Irish emigrant Cathleen was tanned by harsh Canadian sun, the exiled and lovesick Tapooka had become pale. After she recovers and her features are restored to their “soft … brownish hue,” the marriage, celebrated with another dance, offers a short-lived picture of intercultural harmony. This vision is quickly destroyed by an ambush and massacre from a marauding party of “Christian foe-men” (105). Led by Skenandow and assisted through the miraculous appearance of the Shawnee chief and Canadian hero Tecumseh, the wedding party resists heroically until there are only three “Christian” invaders remaining. Tragically, Alkwanwaugh is mortally injured in the battle, and Tapooka dies of grief in his arms. Recalling their earlier account of Logan, the Huron warriors demand revenge. Tecumseh (famous for his mercy to prisoners of war) and Skenandow counsel peace and forgiveness in equally eloquent speeches that convince the others to release the captives. However, the surviving Hurons have barely resumed their “onward way” when they are ambushed yet again by the recently

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forgiven Christians and their reinforcements. Skenandow is slain, and the poem concludes with a description of another monument, the “holy shrine” that marks his resting place, and the assurance that his name will “ne’er be forgot” but instead commemorated “in future songs of grief.” Fittingly, distant, legendary heroism is linked with present travails through oral poetry, orations, and ballads that use the glory of the past as a spur to protest the injustices of the present. Consequently, rather than being a dead past, the history of the Indigenous societies conveyed through song and speech remains politically relevant for Irish, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee communities in Quebec. Useful political readings can also develop by acknowledging the historical context derived from the dates of both Tecumseh (d. 1813) and Skenandon (d. 1816), the likely model for Skenandow. While part of the poem appears to take place on the American shore of Lake Huron around the time of British-American conflicts of 1812, Kidd uses the setting to reflect on pressing issues of the 1830s. Like Moore (and even Emmet), the poet did not want Ireland to adopt either American republicanism or the French political philosophy it was modelled on. Instead, the poem suggests that freedom is best protected in British-held Canadian territories. Moreover, Kidd observes that “the Indians belonging to Great Britain have an utter dislike to the Yankees … for there is scarce a day but brings them some cruel accounts of the destruction and massacres of their brethren in the United States while those who are under the protection of the British Government enjoy comfort, peace, and happiness” (96). Kidd notes that Tecumseh himself “joined the Hurons” after his experience of American aggression in which the Shawnees were “all nearly annihilated by an armed body of Americans – who, in the dead hour of the night, rushed upon them … and destroyed everything that came in their way, without regard to either sex or age” (101), a historical counterpart to the indiscriminate massacre of the bridal party in the poem. Contemporary threats to Lower Canada from that same powerful enemy to the south may account for the dark ending of Kidd’s poem. Kidd’s notes to the poem and other writing reflect his and the province’s political anxieties. Even if Irish Catholics gained religious rights like the ones enjoyed by Catholics in Quebec, both communities faced a new and insidious American invasion, in Kidd’s view. He appeared to share this distrust of American politics with many Canadian editors: The Kingston Chronicle observed on 1 January 1831 that “we had

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just girded up our loins to do battle with the Philistines of the South, when Mr Kidd’s Letter arrived. To him, therefore, will we resign our pugnacious intentions, certain that his warm Irish Heart will prove a much better champion than would our own cold reasoning – though aided by Justice, and indignation.” In the wake of The Huron Chief, and Other Poem’s publication, Kidd had apparently developed a reputation for engaging with Americans. On 2 February 1830, he had written to the Vindicator warning Lower Canadians of “foul Jugglers,” itinerant American preachers who have “within this last twelve years polluted the shores of Canada, and endeavoured to destroy the manly spirit of loyalty, for which the first settlers of the country are so honourably distinguished.” Kidd regarded these preachers as an advance guard for annexationists who believed that “Upper Canada was all republican, and ready to join the United States Standard.” He expressed the hope that “some thing will soon be done, to put a stop to the poisonous system introduced by our speculating American ranters.” Consequently, the “jarring creeds-men” that Kidd excoriates in The  Huron Chief may be not simply the bigoted opponents of Emancipation in Ireland but also the American missionaries of republicanism invading both Ireland and Quebec. In a letter to the Vindicator published on 11 December 1829, Kidd attacked the American Methodist Christian Guardian, “which has just commenced its career in York, under the direction of the Rev. Messrs Ryerson and Metcalf,” and had recently “pronounced the rapid conversion of the ‘neglected poor of Ireland.’” He concludes: “If Ireland has been neglected, Upper Canada is to be pitied – not only in a religious but also in a political point of view.” Kidd cited examples of Upper and Lower Canadian families “rendered miserable” by the “religious bickerings about British and American Methodism.” Like the duplicitous missions to North American Indians described in Kidd’s poem, the Methodist preachers in his letter are portrayed as more intent on dividing, conquering, and plundering than teaching Christianity by example: Kidd sees them as “wandering mountebank(s),” and “hungry and uneducated thumpers” who “eat out of house and home” their “simple and well-disposed followers.” More seriously, Kidd presents them, and not the Irish, as seditious in importing the “political poison” of “Federalism, Adams, or Jacksonism” to otherwise loyal British communities.43 Given the concerns expressed in his letters, the actions of American Methodists likely colour Kidd’s description of the “missionary evils”

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that destroyed the “social tie of friendship,” and “in Religion’s pathway threw / sectarian seeds, which rankly grew” (95) in The Huron Chief. He claims that “the Methodists of Upper Canada, were united, comfortable, and happy” until “political preachers” slithered into their garden, introducing “the Yankee-System of Redemption” in an effort “to speculate and fatten on the industry of their innocent followers.” He also describes the fate of the victims of the Methodist schisms in language that recalls his description of Indigenous communities in America, who “adhere closely to all their old forms of devotion and find themselves happier in their ‘wild nativity’ than under the hypocritical sophism of their saddle-bag inspired preachers.” In an example that recalls the experiences of dispossessed Indigenous and Irish emigrants whose Edenic existences were destroyed by religious corruption, he describes one British Methodist preacher who was “driven, [with] his amiable wife and interesting little family, from Upper Canada, by these artful schemers, and is now living in the woods, some distance from Quebec, procuring by the sweat of his brow, an humble pittance for his affectionate wife and little children.” 44 Consistently in his letters, articles, and poetry, Kidd sees the suffering wrought by religious corruption and schisms as the unifying element that allows him to feel common cause with so many disparate groups in North America and Ireland. Kidd’s sense that in British-held North America settler and Indigenous communities alike were under threat from American incursion informed the poem’s most specific political attack. If he felt his poetry collection would draw the “censure of many,” his fear was well-grounded. In one of the more extraordinary cases of negative reviews in Canadian history, Kidd was attacked on a Montreal street shortly after the publication of his book, receiving “severe chastisement” and having “his nose pulled,” according to James Hayes in his 15 March 1830 letter to the Montreal Gazette, in response to “Violent Assault on Mr Kidd,” published 12 March 1830 in the Vindicator. The Vindicator’s anonymous account was, not surprisingly, more sympathetic to Kidd. In this version, the poet was accosted on Notre Dame street by “the sons of His Majesty’s British Consul resident at New York.” One of them asked if he was Mr Kidd, and when he affirmed this, he “immediately received a blow on the head.” Kidd seems to have been prepared for this, “having with him also a stick of no slight dimensions, which he finds necessary to carry in those dangerous times for poets who have courage to write against the omnipotence of Consular power.” Kidd, “flourishing his Herculean weapon

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over his head and advancing as if he were practising the war-dance of the Hurons … dealt it out ‘in heroic measure,’” to his assailants. At that point, according to the Vindicator article, “an irregular sort of milling commenced.”45 From the Vindicator’s and the Montreal Gazette’s conflicting reports, it can be gathered that Robert and Alexander Carlisle Buchanan, the sons of British Consul James Buchanan, carried out the attack in retaliation for a note to The Huron Chief in which Kidd criticized the consul’s “plan of giving to the United States the free navigation of the St Laurence [sic] to the ocean in exchange for the privilege of sending flax seed to Ireland by way of New York,” as recounted by a “K. Patriot” who addressed the Vindicator on 16 March 1830. The note to The Huron Chief likewise accused Buchanan of selling out Canadian colonial interests for “a bag of flax seed,” concluding, “It is a great pity he was not appointed one of the Commissioners for setting the boundary line, and then the Americans might have got all the st ­l awr e nc e to themselves” (70). Just as Kidd had contrasted the Huron’s “wild nativity” to the “speculation” of “political” American itinerant preachers, the poem associates Canadian waterways with “purity” as well as “delightful scenery and fishing places” accessible only by “birch canoe” and implies they would be sullied by American trade and industry. Reading beyond the poem, however, it appears that Kidd’s objections are not grounded simply on a Romantic aesthetic of nature but reflect political concerns that he again shares with the Vindicator, which supported the French-controlled Quebec House of Assembly’s opposition to the development of the St Lawrence. The “Remarks” by K. Patriot suggested that Buchanan’s support of the plan was motivated by selfinterest, the “misrepresentations by a British commercial functionary.” The remarks were consistent with the Vindicator’s general support of responsible government, warning that “it is well known that many of his majesty’s colonies have at various times, suffered egregious wrongs from false legislation, founded on the information of persons assuming to know the interests of the people better than themselves.” If the Vindicator was concerned that the colonial government was far too intimately connected with the commercial interests of the Anglo merchants in Lower Canada, then the Buchanan family, who “brought imperial politics and loyalist motives to bear … and helped direct emigrants into the Canadian realm,” were an obvious target. In addition to being land speculators in Canada and industrialists in Ireland,

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the family had secured key and influential government and commercial positions in America and the Canadas, and “the full extent of its influence on Canadian settlement can only be imagined.”46 Kidd’s political jabs at the Buchanan family suggest a good knowledge of their business affairs. It is highly likely that in emigrating, Kidd and his family would have dealt with Buchanan agents, sailed on Buchanan family ships, and may have even drunk Buchanan beer. The Buchanans lived in the same Derry/Tyrone region as the Kidd family, and by the early nineteenth century, Derry was a shipping and emigration hub, with the Buchanan family as chief agents in a carefully planned emigration program through which whole districts of Upper and Lower Canada became copies of loyalist Irish towns and villages.47 If Kidd left Derry only to find the loyal, Protestant, Englishspeaking community of Ulster waiting for him in the New World, much of that could be attributed to the coordinated transatlantic political and business dealings of the Buchanan family. Along with his brother, Alexander Carlyle Buchanan, and his sons Robert and Alexander Carlyle Jr, James Buchanan used his trade and political connections on both sides of the Atlantic to move people and goods, including timber, grain to supply mills and breweries (including one he owned in Derry), and flax seed to supply the bustling linen industry of Ulster. (He had set up a linen mill before emigrating.48) The Buchanans ultimately found land in Canada a more profitable venture than Irish mills and breweries, and many family members became Irish agents affiliated with the Canada Company who sold land in Upper Canada to emigrants. The family also worked with the Molson family to assist emigrants, relying on Molson steamers on the St Lawrence to transport them.49 As Kidd and the Vindicator intimated, granting American shipping the same benefits as enjoyed by British colonies under the Corn Laws50 would allow the Buchanan business venture to profit from all North American markets, not just British-controlled ones. In his notes to The Huron Chief, Kidd clearly identifies the connection between Buchanan’s diplomacy and his business activities, noting that “the impudent Buchanan” was prepared to sell navigation rights to the Americans to facilitate supplying his mills and breweries and suggesting that “he had better commence brewing, on a stream separate from the majestic St Lawrence” (70). Despite Kidd’s disgust at the Buchanans’ apparent willingness to use their political connections to enrich themselves at the cost of the public good, he and they had many political views in common. As

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Presbyterians, the Buchanans could be considered victims of the exclusionary sectarian practices that victimized Catholics, having been shut out of power and influence in Ulster until the Test Act was repealed. Moreover, while Buchanan proudly identified himself as an “Orangeman,” he also advocated for Catholic Emancipation as far back as the late eighteenth century.51 While Kidd objected to Buchanan deferring to American interests in the St Lawrence dispute, the consul considered it part of his mandate to divert loyal Irish emigrants from America, and so helped maintain the security of British territories after 1812 by stocking them with capable settlers.52 He also shared Kidd’s sympathy with the plight of Indigenous peoples in America, and Kidd drew heavily on Buchanan’s Sketches of the History, Manners and Customs of the American Indians (1824) for his footnotes and details of Indigenous traditions in his poem. Unlike Kidd, however, Buchanan had direct experience of the 1798 insurrections, arguing for the establishment of loyalist militias to defend against the rebellion, and at one point eluding rebel soldiers while disguised as a “croppy.”53 Obviously less sympathetic to the United Irishmen than Kidd, Buchanan’s association with his patron the Marquis of Londonderry (who had refused to commute the death sentence of satirical poet Porter) might have also provoked the poet’s enmity. The epistolary milling that continued in the Vindicator and the Montreal Gazette after the street brawl became increasingly vitriolic and personal, while revealing the political and cultural divisions in English and French politics in Lower Canada. After James Hayes, one of the witnesses (or combatants, depending on the account), provided his version of the altercation in the Montreal Gazette, Kidd sent a rebuttal to the paper, but the Gazette’s acting editor Andrew Harvie Armour returned the letter explaining that he refused to publish it, “disapproving as I do of much contained herein.” His reservations were, perhaps, understandable. Kidd’s letter ranged from the political, to the libelous, to the downright puerile, particularly his closing challenge to the Buchanan brothers to “let them take up the pen, & honourably, as gentlemen come forward in the defence of their father’s unfortunate political quarrels, and then Sir, they shall feel my quill as they have hitherto the potency of my magic rod.” In the letter, which the Vindicator published on 19 March along with Armour’s rejection note, Kidd writes, “It is with no small degree of reluctance that I find myself impelled to enter the arena of disputation with some person signing himself, ‘James Hayes,’ and of whom, after strict inquiry, I can

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collect no further account, than that he is a runner in the service of the Messrs Buchanans, by whom I was violently assaulted when passing along Notre Dame Street on Thursday last.” Designating Hayes as a “runner” was a nasty slur on both him and the Buchanans, who as emigration agents and government officials encouraging emigration to the Canadas tried to protect new immigrants from the predatory practices associated with this notorious class. The term encompassed petty criminals who snatched hapless immigrants’ baggage as they disembarked to force them to pay a ransom, only slightly more honest porters hired to grab baggage and deliver it and the pursuing immigrant to overpriced inns or hostels, or unscrupulous agents selling tickets to inland destinations in America,54 with the most notorious even transporting immigrants against their will to particular regions of Canada and America in order to enrich land speculators.55 The Gazette’s editors might have had more political objections to Kidd’s letter as well, since they spoke for the English merchants of Montreal and stood to benefit from James Buchanan’s support for improving navigation on the St Lawrence. A.H. Armour and his father Robert Sr, the proprietor, “were among that group of Scottish businessmen in Montreal whose commercial and political activities clashed with the nationalistic aspirations of the French Canadians” that were often supported by the Vindicator in its advocacy for responsible government. Through their publishing business, the Armours “gave eloquent voice to the tory views which sustained the British merchant class in the Canadas.”56 In addition to owning the Gazette, Robert Armour (who was accused of misappropriating public funds in 1816) was one of the founders of the Bank of Montreal and held various government positions, which included overseeing shipping on the St Lawrence as well as inland navigation. As shareholders in various steamship companies, the Armour family, like the Buchanans, stood to profit from improved navigation on the St Lawrence. Moreover, the Gazette’s editorials resented the power that French Canadians maintained in the Legislative Assembly and resisted any government measures that interfered with trade. Consequently, they were opposed to the Constitutional Act of 1791 and “even sanctioned the annexation of Montreal to Upper Canada,” measures that would reduce the powers of the French politicians who opposed the public expense needed to improve the waterways.57 The Vindicator, ever alert to collusion between the merchants and pro-British politicians, predicted on 16 March that “the Mr Buchanans will see how much they will have

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gained by drawing the attention of their mercantile fraternity in this city to a subject which, the sooner it were forgotten, the better, we fancy it would be, for the sons of His Majesty’s British Consul.” Not surprisingly, the Vindicator was happy to use the brawl and the subsequent war of letters to support the French Canadians in the Assembly. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Vindicator featured “Ode to Hope,” dedicated to Adam Kidd by “Mary” (a frequent contributor to the Irish Shield) on 13 March, the day that the account of the assault appeared in the paper. The “Buchanan Affair” spilled into the literary pages of the Montreal Gazette and the Vindicator in other ways as well, often through pseudonymous attacks, although their targets often assumed they had identified the writers. A 15 March letter to the Gazette signed by James Hayes ascribed the Vindicator’s account of the assault “to the yet excited imagination of Mr K. who seems to have seized this opportunity to apprize the public that he is a Poet!” Just before the assault, on 4 March, the Montreal Gazette had politely announced Kidd’s book, saying it greeted “with pleasure any literary production,” especially when “devoted to subjects of a local nature.” At that point, the editors were probably unaware of the precise nature of the local subjects that the constitutionally satiric and “political” author had turned his eye on. When the review by “Mr Q.” came, it was vicious. It presented a lengthy list of the book’s weaknesses and, to boot, accused Kidd of plagiarizing Moore. The Vindicator published two equally lengthy and sarcastic ripostes to this review on 15 and 18 June. The first, by “A Lover of Poetry,” remarks on Q’s bad taste, lack of erudition, and punctuation errors, then hints at the reviewer’s business interests and affiliations, suggesting that Q “take a generous glass of Consular wine. I am sure he merits some little acknowledgement for his zeal, if not for his services.” While the writer (possibly Kidd) seemed certain of Q’s identity, it is next to impossible to determine now, although the editor and proprietor of the Montreal Gazette, who had suffered financial embarrassments and promoted Buchanan’s navigation proposals, is a plausible candidate. The author of the second attack on the reviewer certainly sees Q’s review as evidence of editorial bias on the part of the Armour family, echoing Kidd’s own assault on the “Armour-y” when the Gazette rejected his earlier letter. The motives for the bad review “lie far beneath the surface, and to be fathomed require an insight into the history of this province for some years past. It cannot be forgotten what a conspicuous part Mr Kidd performed

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in the political drama which has been amusing us, until lately, for a sad length of time.” The writer observes that the book and its offending notes had “disturbed the cobwebs which so gracefully festoon their patron’s Armour-y.” On the charge that Kidd had plagiarized Moore, the editorial argued that if “Mr Kidd is under any obligations to the author of Lalla Rookh, as a writer, it must be conceded there is a strong resemblance between them as men, for they each run a most excellent chance of being damned for their politics.” The letter writer repeats Kidd’s own assertions in his preface, where he aligns himself with Moore’s form of patriotism and, like Moore, does not fear being political when condemning corruption. The “general milling” that ensued, in both the streets and the journals of Montreal in the wake of The Huron Chief, and Other Poems contributed much to Kidd’s reputation as a flamboyant Romantic idealist. Deziel has argued that this assessment draws on anti-Irish stereotypes of the nineteenth century. The focus on Kidd’s Romanticism also obscures his astute grasp of how an oligarchy could control colonial politics in a way that threatened the rights of French, Indigenous, and immigrant communities in Canada, just as it had disenfranchised many communities in Ireland. Kidd’s Romantic depictions of the mountains and waterways of Ireland and North America as idealized and Edenic serves an intentional political purpose. He ultimately uses such strategies to advocate for a fairer society in Lower Canada, one that respects the natural rights of its inhabitants to find a happiness that both he and the editors of the Vindicator recognized was continually under threat from sectarian and political corruption in both Ireland and the New World. The controversy surrounding the poem’s release aside, it is difficult to get an accurate assessment of the poem’s reception. Judging by Kidd’s claims that 1,500 people had subscribed to the volume, it may have been a financial success, or, as feared by a Kingston Chronicle reviewer, Kidd may have discovered that “poetry is its own reward.” After the book’s publication, Kidd left Montreal and travelled through Lower and Upper Canada to promote it. He also began a new project, signalling a further evolution in his politics from advocate for the Catholics of Ireland to promoter of Indigenous rights through cultural nationalism. While still advocating for Ireland, he began publishing poetry and prose focused on the history, traditions, and current plight of Indigenous communities in North America, suggesting that he continued to see their own cultural responses to dislocation and

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political repression as a form of nationalism similar to that undertaken by the Patriots and United Irish movements, an interest that he had already acknowledged in the preface to The Huron Chief. There seems to be no evidence that the poem was ever translated into the “respective tongues” of the Indigenous leaders to whom it had been communicated. However, Kidd’s narrator notes that “we … from the Sachems gathere[d] all / their deeds of war and feats of glory,” suggesting a collaborative attempt to argue for Indigenous rights by showing their history and culture in a more positive light, as the Patriots had attempted with Irish culture. These aims were recognized by the Upper Canada newspapers that reviewed the Huron Chief, and Other Poems and featured Kidd’s new works. The Kingston Chronicle and the Canadian Freeman published Kidd’s essay, “Red Jacket, The Celebrated Indian Chief,” an account of the Seneca peacemaker Sagoyewatha who tried to end “those broils … fomented and encouraged by” the “canting expounders of Christian charity.” On 9 September 1830, the Canadian Freeman reported that “Mr Kidd the Poet is now in this town on his way to the settlement on the River Ouse, to collect matter for a future work, descriptive of the habits, customs &c. of the Indians.” Described by the editors as someone who had “studied well the Indian character,” Kidd was seen as an advocate “of the cause of that interesting and distinguished, yet much injured race.” “Ash-Kewa,” which the Canadian Freeman published in the following issue on 16 September, appears to be a response to Andrew Jackson’s signing into law the Indian Removal Act. Kidd concluded the poem with the hope that “the Indian” may remain “secure and free / from tyrant hands that grasp the steel / against his brother Cherokee.”58 Any further role Kidd might have played in an Indigenous cultural nationalist movement in North America was cut short by illness. A few months after the Canadian Freeman announced Kidd’s intention to visit Indigenous communities in Upper Canada, it noted with “extreme sorrow” that “he is suffering under a severe attack of protracted illness in Kingston,” likely a lung hemorrhage as a result of the tuberculosis that would kill him the next summer.59 As Kidd had “strong claims upon his countryman and lovers of genius in Canada,” the editors hoped that “he will want no comfort that it is in their power to administer, in his present affliction.” The anticipated “Tales and Traditions” (as it was tentatively titled) would never be completed. By early 1831, Kidd was considering “a sea voyage for the recovery

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of his health”60; however, he may have already been pessimistic about his chances of recovery before that. On 4 December 1830, his poem “Farewell Lovely Erin” was published in the Kingston Chronicle. His short life had been a series of leave-takings, and in this poem, Kidd seems to be contemplating his final emigration: Must I part with thee erin! [sic] and all I have cherished, Among thy broad valleys and mountains of blue, And mark the soft blossom of hope where it perished, As the mild rays of summer begin to shine through. If this poem is indeed autobiographical, it shares with much of Kidd’s writing an awareness that he would share the fate of poets such as Kirke White, Chatterton, Dermody, and his friend Henry Symes, in whose elegy Kidd had predicted that “I shall follow shortly in the train” (171). He died on 6 July 1831, and his funeral service was held in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity in Quebec City and was attended by his father, Alexander Kidd, and a Hugh McGuire.61 In its obituary announcement on 21 July 1831, the Canadian Freeman portrayed Kidd as a tragic figure who had sacrificed his health and life, expending “zeal and activity in endeavouring to develop the true character of the North American Indian … but his frame was too delicate for the task, and it is probable that it hastened his premature end at the early age of 29.” Having aligned himself with James Porter, James Orr, Thomas Moore, and Robert Emmet, men who had committed the “crime” of defending oppressed peoples, Kidd might have been pleased with the Freeman’s assessment of him as an advocate and ultimately martyr for small nations.62 While his final poem mourned for Ireland, Kidd was not simply an emigrant poet whose gaze was always “backward cast” to his home. Like Moore, who inspired much of his verse, Kidd certainly celebrated the Romantic and sublime elements of the New World, but he also created insightful satire of his colonial society, informed by his early experiences in Ireland. As an immigrant, Kidd was profoundly shaped by the intersections of politics and economics on both sides of the Atlantic. However, even if his personal experiences and disappointments drew him, like Fitzgerald, to Indigenous subjects, it was not merely an escape into fantasy. Kidd’s poetry and political writing reflect an active engagement with his new homeland and with society in Lower Canada.

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6 Standish O’Grady Bennett (fl. 1776–1846)

By his own account, Standish O’Grady Bennett, or simply Standish O’Grady, as the author of The Emigrant (1841) styles himself,1 became “disgusted with the government, and unable to exist at home” in the years after Catholic Emancipation.2 He thus joined the Irish exodus of distressed gentry and half-pay officers who hoped their limited incomes would go further in the New World. Enfranchising Catholics did little to solve Ireland’s economic problems, nor did it bring the hoped-for peace that O’Connell and Kidd had envisaged. If Catholic Emancipation is one Irish triumph that Adam Kidd witnessed in his short life, it was merely the first of many challenges faced by Daniel O’Connell and other Irish nationalists, who directed their energies to tithe reform and repeal of the Union in the 1830s and 1840s. Like Catholic Emancipation, tithe reform addressed an egregiously unjust system where Catholic and Protestant tenants alike were forced to surrender a portion of their earnings or produce, ostensibly to support the Church of Ireland, and not necessarily in the diocese where the tithes were collected. Even more unjust was the practice of “lay impropriation,” what Brian Trehearne calls a “distasteful system whereby the revenues of a particular benefice in the Church of Ireland could be transferred to a private citizen who had nothing (at least spiritual) to do with the Church.3 Evidence strongly suggests that O’Grady derived a significant portion of his income from this practice and was forced to leave Ireland when it became impossible to collect tithes. Not surprisingly, the image of O’Grady living off tithes has made his professed sympathy with the “chill pleasant”4 he depicts in his poem appear either disingenuous or incoherent. However, a renewed look

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at O’Grady’s biography in the context of his background, his Patriot politics, and the Gordian knot that was the tithe question complicates the notion that he is purely a self-interested and hypocritical impropriator, selfishly enriched by the “plundered pittance of the poor,” to use a memorable phrase of the time.5 Like many other Irish nationalists, he viewed the seemingly intractable tithe problem as symptomatic of a larger social breakdown that affects all classes and sects in Ireland in The Emigrant. Tithe reform was a long-standing problem, having been unsuccessfully addressed by Irish politicians since the eighteenth century. With Emancipation, however, Irish citizens had learned the power of political mobilization, and by 1831, a highly organized grassroots movement employed both passive resistance and intimidation. Violent agrarian organizations such as the Whiteboys made it increasingly difficult – and dangerous – for clergy and lay impropriators6 to collect tithes, seize property to cover payment arrears, or sell seized property when they succeeded in wresting it from a tenant. Attempts to use police or army to enforce the collection of arrears often ended in highly publicized conflicts such as the Carrickshock massacre of 1831, where a dozen police officers were stoned to death by an angry crowd, or in Co. Wexford where an equal number of protestors were shot by the Irish constabulary. Clergy, tithe collectors, auctioneers of seized property, and even would-be tithe payers could expect anonymous threats, vandalism, and physical violence, as grimly revealed by government reports listing reasons for emigration: “threatened … forced to leave country … obliged to leave country … house attacked, furniture destroyed, left country … has left country … has left country.”7 As O’Grady laments in the poem, the abandoned “Land of my fathers! Green and fertile soil” is reduced to an “ill-fated spot, now rapt in endless broil,” plagued by “bigot sons” and “night assassins” whose threats and violence are carried out with a “Rockite hand!” (108) (a reference to an agrarian protest organization from O’Grady’s region that signed their threatening letters with the name of the Irish folk hero, Captain Rock). Whether O’Grady himself left Ireland at the invitation of Captain Rock or simply because he gave up hope of swift government compensation for unpaid tithes (143), he blames his departure primarily on “bad government at home.” Presumably, the reference is to the Westminster government that was dependent on a coalition of Irish m p s dominated by O’Connell and his family members who made tithe reform central to government policy in the

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wake of union and Emancipation. While focused mostly on O’Grady’s own plight and the genuine threats facing people of his class, his poem also argues that the near-total absence of any civic control in Ireland spurred mass emigration that affected all classes of Irish people. Ironically, this chaos spurs him to create a united national vision of Ireland in opposition to England that suggests he stubbornly held on to Patriot values long after the Patriot Parliament had become a wistful memory. O’Grady may have deplored the unjust and inefficient tithe system as it stood in the 1830s, even as he depended on it for his income. After all, he consistently praises Henry Grattan, who as leader of the Patriot Parliament had advocated for both tithe reform and increased Catholic rights, continuing to do so until his death in 1820. Irish Patriots considered tithes as one element of corruption and mismanagement that could be addressed by an independent Irish parliament, and the issue continued to unite Irish parliamentarians in Westminster. Given O’Grady’s arguments against wasteful and extravagant expenditure by absentees throughout the poem, he might have been in favour of addressing the type of abuses of the current system, even if they were articulated by O’Connell. Elsewhere in The Emigrant, O’Grady longs for a more equitable political system that would resolve both class and sectarian tensions and “Endear each peasant to each stately dome,” allowing the fleeing Anglo-Irish gentry to “best engage your husbandry at home.” In contrast to the chaos and corruption in Ireland that ultimately enriches England, and like other Patriots, O’Grady imagines a past, benevolent Irish system based in part on traditions established long before English domination. O’Grady’s personal investment in the tithe system complicates his position on Irish politics and culture. Like Patriots before him, he imagines a distinctly Irish gentry and government that had evolved on Irish soil, a sister-kingdom that was faithful to the Crown but the political equal of England. Reading the poem and his footnotes in the context of his biography and Irish politics reveals how his reaction to the tithe question, and his resulting Canadian exodus, allowed him to define his Irish nationalism – for an Irish nationalist he is, in spite of his suspicion of Daniel O’Connell’s movement. In fact, as a junior member of an old Irish aristocratic family, O’Grady more closely resembles two of his satiric targets in the poem, the genteel Catholic O’Connell and the seigneurial, bookish Louis-Joseph Papineau, than he does other Ascendancy members or more radical Protestant

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nationalists like Kidd. His sense of his position in Irish society colours its portrayal in The Emigrant. The sparse documentary evidence about his life as well as elements in the poem suggest that O’Grady was “descended … from a highly respectable Irish Protestant family” with semi-feudal roots that remained “Catholic and Gaelic” in nature (even if many O’Gradys changed religion in the eighteenth century prompted by conscience, marriage, political expediency, or a combination of these factors).8 Identifying himself as “Standish O’Grady” ties him to the venerable Irish O’Grady family, to whom he was almost certainly related through his mother, likely Eliza O’Grady, the niece of John, the head of the O’Grady clan who was known as “The O’Grady”9 and who occupied the family’s seat at Kilballyowen, near Bruff, Co. Limerick, since the Middle Ages. Irish chronicles trace this family’s origins to the third century, well before English conquest. By the tenth century, the O’Grady clan were members of a powerful political alliance. The common forename Standish also linked him to an older Ireland, having been introduced into the O’Grady lineage through a marriage to the Standishes in the seventeenth century. Various Standish O’Gradys had distinguished themselves in law, the government, literature, and scholarship throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably Standish O’Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore (1766–1840), who gained renown as Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer of Ireland (and notoriety as the prosecutor of Robert Emmet in 1798). A later Standish O’Grady produced translations and histories that fired the imagination of Irish Literary Revivalists at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the poem’s tributes to various illustrious O’Gradys support Patriot arguments for cultural distinctiveness – and therefore autonomy – by showing that even members of the Protestant ruling class could claim centuries-old roots in distinct cultural and political traditions. That O’Grady was expected to take his place in this class can be suggested by the few details included in the record of Trinity students, Alumni Dublinenses. It shows a Standish Bennett, enrolled in 1796 and tutored by a Mr Buckley, enjoying a relative amount of ease, status, and privilege in Irish society as the son of a gentleman permitted to display a coat of arms (his father’s occupation or station is listed as “armiger”). As a pensioner, he had more status than the humble sizar, who, in O’Grady’s words, would have “begged his learning,” performing menial tasks in exchange for tuition and support. (O’Grady

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hastens to add that there is “no disgrace” in this, chronicling in his notes the enterprise and accomplishments of many statesmen who had risen from such a humble station. That ambitious sizars were more motivated to complete their degrees than pensioners is one possible explanation for O’Grady’s own absence in the List of Graduates that recorded the names of the students who took a degree at Trinity.) While appearing as “Standish Bennett” in the Alumni Dublinenses, the author went by his full name, Standish O’Grady Bennett, for much of his adult life, according to various published announcements and documents. These documents reconcile a few incidences of the self-contradiction and ambivalence present in almost every stanza of the poem. The Toronto death of a Standish O’Grady Bennett, formerly of Tankerville, was reported in Canadian newspapers and also in the Cork Constitution on 21 March 1846, so apparently he was not unwept or forgotten in his home county as he might have feared.10 Two earlier publications11 announced the wedding of Captain R. Story to Eliza, the “second daughter of Standish O’Grady Bennett, Esq. on 11 February 1831.” (It appears that O’Grady had named his first-born daughter after his mother and then had given the same name to a daughter born shortly after he arrived in Canada.12) If Eliza Story accompanied her husband to India, or even if her attention was simply absorbed by demands of her new family, it may account for O’Grady’s reproach of his “faithless” and “ungrateful offspring,” in the poem (100). A Standish O’Grady Bennett also appears in a list of subscribers to an earlier and more intriguing document: a January 1812 Ireland-wide petition to the government “in favour of our Brethren and Fellow Subjects the Persons professing the Roman Catholic Religion … to be admitted to the Privileges and Franchises of the Constitution.” The “Protestant Brethren” addressing the government did “most heartily join the Catholics in this their loyal and reasonable Request” and felt it was a matter of “Policy as well as … Justice” to relieve Catholics “from all Civil and Political Disabilities.”13 When Standish O’Grady Bennett signed it, he was living in Bruff, near the traditional seat of the O’Gradys at Kilballyowen. (Trehearne notes that a Samuel Bennett, likely O’Grady’s nephew, also lived at Bruff.14) O’Grady was in elevated company: the list included high-ranking aristocrats and officials such as George Ponsonby, the recent Lord Chancellor of Ireland whom O’Grady praises in his poem, as well as justices of the peace, members of parliament, clergy, the successful brewer Arthur Guinness of

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St James’s Gate, an Alexander and a J. Buchanan from the North of Ireland (likely the Buchanan brothers so influential in Canada and the United States), as well as Patriot and United Irish moderates Henry Grattan, William Drennan, and Archibald Hamilton Rowan. The document demonstrates that while Catholic Emancipation was strenuously opposed by George i i i and later by George i v and his brother the Duke of Brunswick, many liberal Irish Protestants as well as Catholics had expected that upper-class Catholics, at least, would be granted the vote. O’Grady Bennett’s appearance on the list of subscribers suggests that he was considered sufficiently influential to be asked to sign such a petition, and reveals a tolerant ecumenicalism that he shared with many United Irish moderates and Patriots and apparently carried over into his poetry, where he argues, “Let each sectarian argue for the best, / Yet all agree the monitor’s the breast!” (87). The poem suggests that O’Grady’s relatively liberal views regarding religion had not diminished as he grew older and more conservative in other matters. It may also reflect his alignment with the O’Gradys, who were originally Catholic. The poet’s tributes to the O’Grady family join a selection of biographical sketches of other Irish patriots in the extensive and often overlooked paratexts that burden O’Grady’s poem. These lengthy footnotes offer the most insight into O’Grady’s complicated sense of identity and nationalism. They reveal that while O’Grady admires Irish Protestants connected to the traditional Gaelic Irish aristocracy, he has great respect for politicians who advanced by merit alone, which is consistent with Patriot philosophy. Barry Yelverton (1736– 1805), a Patriot politician who eventually became Lord Chief Baron of Ireland, is one such object lesson, illustrating how ability, virtue, and a respect and love for Ireland’s distinct culture are essential to creating a government that could advocate for Ireland’s interests. Mentioned briefly as “chief, and baron … who didst unmisticate these subtile [sic] laws” (103), Yelverton probably gets a lengthy biographical note because he was one of the chief architects of the 1782 Irish Constitution through what came to be known as “Yelverton’s Law,” granting the Irish Parliament a measure of legislative independence from England. Like Henry Grattan, Yelverton also supported more rights for Catholics, continuing Patriot attempts to reconcile the various sects and classes through Irish government. In the footnote’s rags to riches narrative, Yelverton begins as an “orphan wanderer” who was willing to endure the “degrading

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situation” of “servitude” to a “man of classical eminence” in exchange for “some instruction even of a minor consideration” (167). Yelverton was able to secure a position as schoolmaster’s assistant to a tutor named Buck15 (O’Grady calls him Buckly, perhaps confusing him with his own tutor at Trinity), who “resided near a romantic village in Ireland,” symbolically significant not only because of its proximity to the ancient seat of the O’Gradys16 but also because of its antiquarian associations beloved of Patriot scholars. The village of Kilmallock included the remains of a fortress “then known to be the seat of Government” that “in ancient days withstood the innovation of Cromwell.” In a poem that values “prescribed” tradition, the association of destructive “innovation” with English invasion and rule appears deliberate. The fortress symbolizes Irish fidelity and sacrifice, having “withstood his [Cromwell’s] most unavailing efforts.” In the wake of a more recent defeat of independent Irish politicians, O’Grady asks, “who at this day can visit the ruins of Kilmallock, divested of that national sensation which will not awaken something of reverence when he beholds the emblazoned escutcheons of those who fell to defend the fame of their then city?” Not surprisingly, the physical reminders of a former seat of independent government that resisted English “innovation” fire “the imagination” of Yelverton, who is “enabled, amidst the magnificence of its scenery, to behold nature in all its pride and art, itself so powerfully displayed even amidst the dilapidating ruins of human greatness” (168). Yelverton’s small Bildungsroman recalls the rhetoric of Patriot scholars whose antiquarianism was intended to inspire civic-minded patriots to restore Ireland’s past stature as a “distinct kingdom of the English Crown.” O’Grady’s biography of Yelverton also offers an edifying image of past Irish society whose traditions encouraged a balance between democratic and aristocratic interests that Yelverton’s success story embodies.17 The locale in which Yelverton receives his education is as important as the classical training he receives from his mentor, and the remaining biography emphasizes how the future Irish statesman applies his learning. Like Patriot scientist Stephen Dickson, who believed that a good citizen should “encourage learning and science to flourish,” Yelverton first applies his skills and knowledge to embryo public improvement projects, represented by the mill he designs for a local stream, improving the life of the poor family with whom he boards. His character

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thus established as the ideal Patriot intellectual and philanthropist, Yelverton’s future brilliant career is quickly outlined: “Modest amidst his equals, he never contended for supercilious preferment,” instead rising to the “highest degree … as Chief Baron of the exchequer” (172) without forgetting his humble roots, demonstrated when he returns to visit and reward the poor family that sheltered him. Ultimately, the story idealizes Yelverton as a person whose privilege is based on merit, and who never abandons either his old friends or the principles of mutual obligation and co-operation between Irish classes. While Adam Kidd would have also applauded the story’s moral, he would not have admired Yelverton the judge, who (reluctantly and even tearfully) condemned the United Irish supporter William Orr to death, a detail O’Grady omits from his narrative. It is also significant, in light of the poem’s bitter nostalgia, that O’Grady’s narrative ends before the Act of Union that provided Yelverton with the title Lord Avenmore after he (again reluctantly) voted for it. Reflecting on the Union in his notes, O’Grady also grudgingly concedes that the Irish Rebellion of 1798 made it necessary: “England at war as she was with half the population of the civilized world, threatened with a French invasion, and besides with her Irish subjects, for the most part in a state of heartless rebellion, – how was she to act?” (144), revealing his “typical” ambivalence when weighing Irish independence with bloody revolution.18 The events of 1798 and the consequent imposition of Union on Ireland is roughly the period in which O’Grady’s idealized Ireland dies, but its death comes at the hand of an Irish villain that O’Grady provides as a counterpart to his Patriot heroes. Since O’Grady claimed to have been a classmate of Emmet, he, like Thomas Moore, would have been present at the 1798 college visitation by the chancellor of Ireland, John Fitzgibbon, 1st Earl of Clare, the grim episode in Trinity’s history that nearly made a rebel of Moore. The inquisition took place after two students circulated “Resolutions of the Independent Scholars and Students of Trinity College,” a pamphlet protesting the expulsion of two well-liked senior scholars who had boycotted a speech by the highly unpopular Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.19 In response, the University published a document listing all students and faculty who publicly condemned the pamphlet “with the warmest indignation” after finding it “scattered through the College.” These signatories disavowed “the principles [the pamphlet] tends to inculcate, and the motives from which it was published” and stated

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their determination “to support the cause of l oya lt y a n d t h e c on stit ut i on.”20 The name “Standish O’G. Bennett” appears on the list of signatories. Thomas Moore does not. Nevertheless, O’Grady shares Moore’s antipathy towards Fitzgibbon, who unintentionally united Irish of all classes by being held in such universal contempt that people on the route of his funeral procession flung curses (and according to legend, dead cats) at the coffin.21 That Catholic students like Moore could attend Trinity in the 1790s was no thanks to Fitzgibbon, who counselled George i i i to oppose the Irish Act, passed by the Irish Parliament in 1793, and even limited reforms supported by William Pitt the Younger and Charles Fox.22 O’Grady avoided the fate of nineteen Trinity students who were expelled for contumacy, effectively blasting their hopes of a future in any learned profession.23 Among the expelled were, of course, Robert Emmet, and, intriguingly, another Bennett, a Thomas Bennett from Cork. According to the Alumni Dublinenses, the latter enrolled as a sizar the same year as Standish and had been tutored by a “Mr Bulkley.” If this is a typographic error, then in addition to a surname, Thomas may have shared a tutor and family connections with O’Grady. While the only thing that the two Bennetts indubitably shared is the year in which they enrolled, Fitzgibbon’s baleful presence in The Emigrant may have its seeds in the visitation by a politician who terrorized so many students and was so adamantly opposed to even the limited Catholic rights espoused by moderate Patriots. In a poem that is brimming with invective against attorneys and “newraised” politicians (Lord Clare was both), The Emigrant reserves its bitterest language for the chancellor. Until 1792, Trinity students could use their college regalia as entrée to the visitor’s gallery of the Irish Parliament located nearby.24 Even after that privilege was revoked, O’Grady may have managed to squeeze into the public galleries to observe the proceedings of parliament, where statesmen gathered “to hear persuasion from a Grattan’s tongue” (32). In The Emigrant, Grattan and his supporters are presented as the heroes of the Patriot Parliament and Fitzgibbon its destroyer. In keeping with his admiration of established Irish institutions, O’Grady presents the Patriot Parliament as having deep roots in Irish political tradition, implying that Fitzgibbon’s relentless opposition to religious tolerance and moderate reform overseen by the Patriots was a misguided attempt to further assimilate England’s sister

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kingdom, leading to political chaos and increased sectarian strife and ultimately forcing Ireland into an unwanted union with England. In recalling the Irish Parliament in his poem, O’Grady names the politicians who were historically most vocal in their opposition to union with Britain: “A Burke, A Bushe, a Ponsonby most dear” (32). Charles Kendal Bushe, later solicitor general of Ireland, was known for his “silver tongued” eloquence in opposing the Union, as was Ponsonby, who along with O’Grady Bennett signed the petition to grant Catholics more rights in 1812. Ultimately, these leaders too resigned themselves to the Union. Grattan bitterly withdrew from politics temporarily, and, like Yelverton, Ponsonby, and Bushe accepted benefits and positions in the British government, post-Union. O’Grady also reluctantly concluded that the Union was necessary, consistent with his larger political view, promoted by moderate Patriots, who had originally argued that their faithful defence of Britain against American and French republicanism was an argument for more political and economic autonomy. However, even if the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and supporting French invasions made the Union inevitable, O’Grady still manages to blame those events on Fitzgibbon – “ha­d the Earl of Clare and such influential characters, destroyed the canker in its origin, it never could have blighted the bud, much less the tree”(144) – echoing the accusations made by Henry Grattan’s son in his memoirs, which O’Grady may have seen when they were published in 1843.25 Later in the poem, O’Grady again bemoans the lack of disinterested leaders whom Ireland’s “prospering sons would cheerfully obey” and who, “if appeased by gentle deeds, or so / Had never planned their country’s overthrow” (112). In the poem, the “venial” and “mercenary” politicians whose corruption is most visibly represented by the “cynical fixer,” Fitzgibbon,26 are the root cause of the rebellion, the loss of the Irish Parliament, and Ireland’s current political woes. Ireland, like Fitzgibbon, regrets too late the failure of government that led to rebellion and then the dissolution of its parliament. O’Grady’s apostrophe in the wake of the Union appears to be directed primarily towards Fitzgibbon rather than the United Irish rebels: What have ye gained, a rabble council brought To plunge the state, alas! too dearly bought; Too late ye mourn, the conflict what it cost, When all your boasted suffrage is lost!” (35)

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Like Grattan and earlier patriots, O’Grady believes that the ideal relationship between the sister kingdoms would be one in which Ireland had retained its parliament and legislative suffrage, allowing the “loyalty and strength” of Ireland and England to support each other. According to O’Grady, Ireland’s independent parliament was a just reward for the support the Irish had shown England during the American Revolution, when “Ireland famed for words, and deeds of arms, / Securely stood nor feared a world’s alarms – / With allied strength” as England’s political equal rather than “vassals to a throne” (33). An independent parliament would have awarded politicians “brighter laurels” than the positions they accepted in the British Parliament after the Union. To the poet, one of the bitterest consequences of the Union is that Westminster lured away Ireland’s educated, ambitious, and talented leaders, bringing about more absentees as well as destroying a sense of autonomy that Patriots believed would have helped encourage civic-mindedness and discourage corruption. The history of the late eighteenth century that shaped the young O’Grady’s ideals explains why the poem is narrated by an eponymous emigrant. Like emigration in the poem, the dissolution of the Irish Parliament touches all aspects of society in a land not only lost to the emigrants but also to “bliss” and to “well requited toil.” The loss of the Irish house of parliament and its resulting absentee leaders is linked thematically to the emigrants’ loss of their own homes. The Ireland now treated as a vassalage by Westminster is one in which those with the means to do so, flock to the courts of London or emigrate, leaving the “chill peasant” to mark “in sad despair / The gloomy prospects he remains to share,” which include: Accruing rack-rents, agents, bailiffs’ fees, Attornies, peelers, writs and absentees; Ennobled spendthrifts, commoners each year, Who spend their produce, yet they know not where. (32) O’Grady continues to blame the ruling class’s exile and the peasants’ plagues on Fitzgibbon’s destruction of what should have been the chancellor’s own rightful home, the Irish Parliament, after he undermined it through his opposition to any progressive measures regarding tithes or Catholic Emancipation and then engineered the Act of Union as its coup de grâce.

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In an instance of poetic justice that his enemies and historians alike delighted in recounting, the newly ennobled Earl of Clare was firmly put in his place by “the noble Duke of Bedford.” O’Grady (and many others) note Bedford was “foremost to accuse him … most virulently, giving him the complete picture of himself,” shortly after Fitzgibbon arrived at Westminster planning “to speech and command that noble house as he was wont to do in his own” (144). Bedford had cuttingly and publicly condemned Fitzgibbon for addressing parliament using “language … ‘such as they wouldn’t brook from their own equals much less from the upstart pride of chance nobility.’”27 Never in full technical mastery of his chosen form, the heroic couplet, O’Grady nonetheless produces some competent satiric poetry from this irony. The bristling consonants he employs create the impression of spitting when the politician is mentioned: Clare sold his Isle for stipulated rank, And thus metamorphosed a palace to a bank His new raised pomp still met a Bedford’s sneer, An upstart Lawyer, Chancellor and Peer; A self-judged felon, penitent too late, He died the modern Nero of the State! (37) In the footnote to these lines, O’Grady provides the Canadian reader with a brief biography of Fitzgibbon that forms a neat antithesis to the Patriot Yelverton. Like other sizars who went on to higher office, Fitzgibbon “begged his learning, which was no disgrace,” but “being of a most intrepid and petulant disposition, and well versed in the dry study of the law … at length got into parliament, was made a fit tool for the purpose by the English Ministry and foremost in promoting the Union, which he afterwards regretted when he lost all his popularity” (143). In a poem where O’Grady does his best to vindicate the Irish character, he shares his compatriots’ deep resentment of the way that Fitzgibbon attempted to ingratiate himself with the English by continually denigrating the Irish. (The apocryphal cats flung on his coffin were intended as a post-mortem allusion to Fitzgibbon’s boast that he would render Ireland as tame as a “geld” cat.28) Instead, Fitzgibbon figuratively pulls down his own house, the Irish Parliament, about his ears, becoming a self-destructive outcast whose actions have the effect of

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turning other deserving Irish out of their “stately domes” as absentees or emigrants. Echoing Nero’s heedlessness at the burning of Rome and with the neo-classical Irish parliament building in figurative ruins behind him in the poem, the Earl of Clare becomes the Anti-Patriot to Grattan and Yelverton’s Patriots, motivated by lust for power, personal ambition, and pecuniary gain rather than civic duty. O’Grady’s assessment of the damage Clare wrought is illustrated metonymically by the image of the Irish parliament building representing the “Isle” (the kingdom of Ireland). Its rightful tenants, the citizens of Ireland, endure a metaphorical, sordid eviction as their “palace” becomes the Bank of Ireland. In including this historical detail, O’Grady reinforces Fitzgibbon’s mercenary motives by recalling how the British government ensured that the building could never again be home to the political representatives of an independent kingdom. (It remains the Bank of Ireland today, a few blocks away from the modern Irish Dáil in Leinster House, the former seat of the Fitzgerald family.) In another instance of poetic justice, Clare’s opposition to tithe reform and his engineering of the Union means that with the extinction of the Irish Parliament, the British Parliament has inherited the impossible task of keeping the peace in Ireland without enraging the newly influential coalition of Irish mps by coercive measures. Back home, Ireland suffers because “roam[ing]” absentee politicians have left “fell feuds and poverty at home,” and their rule from a distant centre of power has “made perpetuate, terms from year to year, / No tenures now and tithe laws more severe” (35). The problems that O’Grady believes an independent Irish Parliament could have solved if given time are now in the lap of Westminster ministers. Belatedly, they ask, “with asses’ heads, why bear O’Connell’s tail[?]” (36), a derogatory phrase current in the 1830s and 1840s that described the allied Irish mp s (including O’Connell’s family members) who were able to combine to keep Irish issues, including tithe reform and repeal of the Union, first and foremost in parliamentary affairs. In O’Grady’s analysis, Fitzgibbon is again at the root of this problem: in a note to the poem, O’Grady suggests that the moderate changes to the franchise and the tithe system proposed by the Patriots and resisted by Fitzgibbon would have averted not only the 1798 rebellion but also the equally radical changes and coercive measures that the Pitt and Peel governments were forced to introduce after union. Such measures “excited such bad feeling amongst the peasantry, few men of property, even now, wish to venture amongst them, influenced as they are, by

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the distracted feeling of religious animosity. It is deplorable to see the wealth of Ireland expended as it is, in the sister country; which unavoidably must be the case, until a mutual confidence is restored, and all sectarian differences are exploded” (145). Stylistically and thematically, O’Grady links the fall of the Irish Parliament and the enforced exile of its ministers with the reluctant exodus of Irish emigrants. Like Kidd, O’Grady portrays emigration as expulsion from a time as well as a place. In his case, the contemporary Ireland that he abandons along with the tithe question is wistfully contrasted to Ireland before 1800. Whereas Kidd associates his former home with both childhood innocence and Eden, O’Grady idealizes his early adult life before the Act of Union, but both poets use the emigrants’ final view of home to make political observations about the conditions that have resulted in expulsion from the island itself. The emigrants aboard the ship remain haunted by the country they are leaving, as suggested by the poem’s epigraph that reminds them, “though you sail to distant climes or strand, / You leave your heart upon its native land.” To illustrate this, O’Grady presents his fellow-exiles fixing “their parting gaze on land Cape Clear” (13), “the last visible” point of land “on leaving the southern coast of Ireland” (131). The poem quickly gets into difficulties in fitting syntax to a strict system of heroic couplets, with the first few lines probably suggesting that Ireland is the “land of my fathers … and their sons betrayed”; that is, O’Grady and his fellow children of Ireland have been failed by a fatherland “oft too rudely swayed” by “newraised patriots” (the upstart Clare, O’Connell’s coalition, or both) who exploit the chaos created by bad government (13).29 Like Kidd’s parting gaze in his exile poems, The Emigrant’s vision of a vanishing Ireland provides an opportunity to discuss the causes and effects of emigration. In the poem, the emigrants’ departure creates a ripple effect that expands beyond their immediate homes to encompass their kin, social connections, and finally the state itself: From peaceful homes and habitations spurned, From fond connections, aged parents mourned, From dear society, now friends no more, To cheer their wanderings on a distant shore, From all those tender ties on friendship wait, From links that bind and fortify a state Behold proud Erin’s sons promiscuous spread. (15)

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The passage implies that traditional government systems are modelled on the natural ties created by mutual obligation and love between family members, a social structure that Fitzgerald had earlier claimed was the foundation of Indigenous society in Quebec, and that O’Grady also believes characterizes Indigenous societies. Moreover, he reminds the reader of the political consequences of uprooting long-established family members such as O’Grady from their kindred and friends, effectively unravelling the web of obligations that the state depends upon as well. To reinforce this point, he calls up the memories of past uprisings, when Irish exiles plotted rebellion from France or America, warning that turning Irish citizens into an “outcast band,” who are “Denied subsistence in [their] native land” will drive them to “ill blend [their] hate” in “other climes” and “seal Britannia’s ruin with defeat” (16). O’Grady explicitly contrasts this situation with Ireland under Hanoverian rule, which Irish conservatives considered a golden age. Managing to separate the memory of the deceased king from the influence of his vile adviser, O’Grady imagines the late George iii carousing at a celestial drinking party after a newly discovered planet (Georgium Sidus, now Uranus) is named for the monarch. In the footnotes, he claims, “Never was there a more glorious reign than that of George the Third” (144), contrasting this period of relative peace in the two kingdoms to the post-Union British government. In O’Grady’s recollection, Ireland was then governed benevolently by the Ascendancy, guided in part by older Irish traditions that extended beyond the memory of English domination, traditions that recognized obligations to peers and families. These agreements and contracts were upheld by a sense of “honour bright,” considered “a sacred trust, by obligations bound.” Lawyers were mostly unnecessary because the few contracts’ “simple language bound them to the act” (14), and the moral principles behind them were “all prescribed and faithful to the fact” (14). O’Grady echoes Edmund Burke in valorizing a past society where each succeeding generation’s rights of property and responsibilities (including, presumably O’Grady’s right to tithes) was upheld as much by “prescription” as by written contract. Apart from leaving scant pickings for O’Grady’s despised attorneys or “scribes,” prescription bound different social classes in a mutual web of obligations determined by familial and community ties and enforced by an innate sense of honour rather than commercial interests, rendering unnecessary legal documents that could be rendered invalid “if wits but play or quibble on a word” (14).

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O’Grady’s portrait of Ireland’s golden age is accompanied by the first of many long and digressive footnotes. In addition to supplying Canadian and Irish cultural and historical context, the poem’s paratext provides a concrete, detailed, and intimate view of a traditional and oral-based world of personal relationships that O’Grady appeared to thrive in and that he lost when embarking for Canada. His first footnote begins by explaining Ireland’s current corrupt legal system, moves on to a story drawn from Ireland’s apparently generous supply of “anecdotes of coroners” featuring a Mr Snuffle, which inspires O’Grady to compose a humorous poem at Mr Snuffle’s expense, “The Coroner and the Ghost.” Many of the footnotes share this pattern of information illustrated by anecdote, followed by drinking song or humorous poem inspired by the anecdote, suggesting that O’Grady was most comfortable, and perhaps best known in his social circle, as a raconteur and wit. (Admittedly, many of his puns and other attempts at humour would not be out of place in the famously dire Jokes Cracked by Lord Aberdeen.) These copious notes could easily be dismissed as one of the many signs that O’Grady lost control of his poem. Nevertheless, they are sometimes more engaging than the actual poem, and appear to provide relief from the demands of heroic couplets and the neo-classical strategy of using individual cases to draw universal conclusions, which O’Grady grapples with, sometimes to comic effect. O’Grady seems more creatively at home in his notes, which preserve, imperfectly, the convivial Irish community that drew its vitality and endurance from unwritten laws of hospitality, oral tales, and ballads. This community is reassembled, briefly, on board the Ocean, where, for the most part, order reigns under a competent crew.30 On board, O’Grady and his more privileged fellow-passengers at least do not experience the privations associated with the later “coffin ships,” instead finding ways to maintain some genteel traditions from home. For example, the emigrants mark May Day: “though on the ocean we / Pursue the traceless paths of destiny” (32). In the accompanying note, this ceremony is presented as a final if imperfect simulacrum of the warm and stable Irish society O’Grady attempts to recall throughout his poem: the sea “breathed a complete calm, and well did our crowd of emigrants conceive the nature of other calms. The fife and fiddle were early resorted to; with these instruments, not according to perfect harmony, the merry dance was kept up to a late hour, a few artificial roses were strewn emblematic of the real, a few

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goblets were sipped, a few amorous glances exchanged, and thus ended the pastime” (142). However, even this sense of order is undermined by details that provide a realistic picture of shipboard life for the “landsman.” Even before the storm, the “well ranged stock” intended to sustain the travellers is destroyed by the ship’s rocking that “in one sad hour displaced … Glass jars and packages no art can save” (23). This is the first indication that the travellers’ accustomed way of life will not transfer to their new homes. Disembarking in Quebec, O’Grady’s shipboard community disperses, and O’Grady’s emigrant speaker contemplates in its place a life of solitude as a “cheerless wanderer” seeking “some peaceful spot, sequester’d from mankind, / There in secluded loneliness to dwell, / And bid the world’s gay residents farewell” (65). (O’Grady ultimately finds and celebrates a small, “private circle” in the village of Sorel, the country retreat of the governor, Sir John Colborne, and his family and associates, where he was supported both emotionally and perhaps financially by other genteel neighbours including the poet Ethelind Sawtell and her husband Luther.31) Removed from the society that nurtured him, O’Grady uses his notes to reminisce about a world of traditional music and hospitality that predates Yeats’s and even James Joyce’s nostalgically imagined worlds. It also resembles O’Connell’s own life in Derrynane, a respite from politics where he tended to his estate and tenants and enjoyed hunting parties, long walks, and evenings that extended into the night with upwards of thirty guests awash in “whisky toddy” while he “unlocked all his treasures of anecdote and historical and professional reminiscence.”32 O’Grady likewise describes Irish hospitality as “formerly proverbial” and “far different from the present” because “pageantry was then unknown and all expenditures were applied to good eating and good drinking.” Again, O’Grady links these traditions to an organic society based on mutual obligations, repeating the word “prescribed,” as his society enjoyed the simple and “particular amusements of a prescribed circle who visited within themselves, exchanging dinners, hounds and horses. If by unforeseen accident or too generous a feeling, one of the party became a dependent on the more wealthy, he was still cherished with their respect.” (Notwithstanding this mutual generosity, O’Grady also describes ways in which tenacious houseguests were tactfully “disposed of without any resort to harsh stratagems” (154).) The notes also describe a society distinct from England, where an Irish Protestant gentleman could demonstrate at least some knowledge

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of spoken Irish, not to mention a strong interest in the unique and venerable literature written in that language. He presents himself as equally at home in taverns frequented by Irish recruits in the British navy, whom he entertains with his own compositions, which they take to be authentic sea shanties. He also explains that local traditional musicians attended hunting parties arranged by genteel patrons, some of whom were themselves performers on the distinctive Irish “Union” or uilleann pipes, an instrument associated historically with his region, just as the harp was associated with Kidd’s. In his commentary on the poem, O’Grady presents himself and his class as active participants in a native Irish culture that other Patriots and Ascendancy members supported, but were more accustomed to viewing from the outside in. For O’Grady, the Irish pipes associated with his region best represent the nature of traditional Irish culture. (He boasts that the “tuneful pipe surpass[es] the trembling lyre” (60).) They also convey the essence of the lively society he was forced to leave. Not surprisingly, his notes include an anecdote featuring an abducted piper carried off to Brazil. Echoing the captive Israelites who refuse to sing in a strange land, the piper declares that “never shall other ears than those of my own dear native soil hear the melody of those organ pipes,” before “indignantly” consigning them, “along with other minor instruments equally melodious … to the deep” (153). O’Grady describes upper-class gatherings amidst the natural beauty of a Quebec pleasure spot that might tempt the spirit of Garrett “Ned” Nagle, a famous gentleman piper from Cork, to “rise from his sainted Isle … To crown the pleasures of such festive board,” but the poet quickly reminds himself that “the grace the tone the harmony” of “other times” have “fled / And Ned with all his jocund powers is dead” (58). A simpler era where “self-taught” native artists’ “natural powers” are augmented by “a taste and easy style” cultivated among the gentry cannot be revived in Canada. O’Grady suggests that the “genius” that Nagle represents is part of an unbroken line of artistic tradition that reaches back to Ossian. Relying on Patriot-sponsored antiquarianism to illustrate that the Irish had always been “a faithful people and a virtuous land” (112), O’Grady versifies an Ossianic translation that offers “an uncontroverted display of Irish talent and affection, as evinced by these original poems, even from the most remote ages of Irish history.” He reminds his readers of Ossian’s Irish origins by using the correct Irish spelling “of Derdri (not Dartula) – a name so modified” by James MacPherson (179–80). In his note, O’Grady identifies an influential Patriot scholar (and O’Grady’s fellow-alumnus), Theophilus O’Flanagan, who

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“dedicated his translation to none other than Henry Grattan,”33 the leader of the Patriot Parliament. O’Grady includes his versification of O’Flanagan’s translation as evidence of “Irish talent and affection.” In the same footnote, guided mostly by free association, he goes on to argue that such “proverbial” fidelity extends even to the “poor criminal” who, in an anecdote featuring one of O’Grady’s more laboured puns, resolutely goes to the scaffold after stoutly refusing to betray his accomplices. Certainly, in his lifetime, O’Grady could have found many examples of such ambivalent fidelity and nationalism, such as the students who had paid dearly for refusing to betray their classmates, and even among the terrifying agrarian secret societies who depended upon such oaths of silence. In his poem, Irish people from all levels of society appear as naturally loyal, unless corrupted by political machinations, a theme he returns to repeatedly in the poem and its notes. “Bad politics,” the impetus of so much Irish emigration in O’Grady’s view, was one of the few familiar things he would find waiting when he disembarked in Quebec. He was not alone in drawing parallels between British treatment of Ireland and the Canadian colonies: after Emancipation, Irish newspapers of all political affiliations continued to use Canadian events as analogies for the Irish situation. In the period between Kidd’s immigration and O’Grady’s arrival in May 1836, the relationship between Irish and French communities in Lower Canada had changed considerably, along with the patterns of Irish migration to the province. In the 1820s, the French Canadians had allied with Irish reformers to resist the union of Upper and Lower Canada. They were also united in their respect for O’Connell, whom many French Canadians had admired for defending their rights in his speeches. In the summer of 1829, as Emancipation seemed assured, the Irish Vindicator under Dr Tracey began to focus on Quebec politics, as reflected in the paper’s new name, the Vindicator, but the Irish/ French alliance that the Vindicator advocated was already unravelling. Once he took his seat in Westminster, O’Connell could do little for distant Canadian colonies, and his French-Canadian supporters became disillusioned. Increased Irish immigration in the 1830s further strained amity between the communities. As more Irish working-class immigrants began making the longer journey to Lower and Upper Canada, they competed with the French for scarce land and employment. Even as co-religionists, the new Catholic immigrants stood to outnumber French parishioners, who increasingly felt it necessary to defend their rights to be served by French-speaking clergy.34

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The British government’s policy of shipping its social and economic problems to Quebec created more deadly consequences in the summer of 1832, when ships leaving British ports brought not only competition but also cholera, which unfortunately became associated in the popular imagination with the increasingly desperate economic refugees leaving Ireland.35 Local governments bore the burden of setting up quarantine stations, most notably at Grosse Île, and helping the destitute and often ill immigrants once they arrived. One of the most immediate political consequences was that Tracey, recently elected to the Assembly in an election characterized by English-French violence, never took his seat after dying from cholera contracted from the patients he tried to help.36 Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, present at the first Quebec Friends of Ireland meeting in 1828 and a devoted ally of Papineau, replaced Tracey as editor of the Vindicator in 1833. Both men admired O’Connell, and O’Callaghan regarded Papineau as the Irish statesman’s French-Canadian counterpart in terms of defending French Canadians and resisting the union of Upper and Lower Canada. (Interestingly, Papineau’s son Amédée viewed Moore’s biography of Edward Fitzgerald as a useful political history of “la malheureuse Irlande.”37) However, Papineau and O’Callaghan’s more radical proposals and avowed anti-clericalism alienated more moderate Irish and French reformers, encouraging the Irish to find more reform-minded allies in English-speaking Quebec. The more radical political movements in Lower Canada became distinctly French: with the notable exception of O’Callaghan, few Irish supported the Patriotes during the Rebellions of 1837–38.38 Consequently, when he settled in Sorel in 1836, O’Grady entered a significantly different political and cultural community than Kidd had encountered. Also known as William-Henry and originally a fortified British army outpost, Sorel had become a picturesque town that O’Grady may have chosen for its well-to-do Anglo community that gathered around Colborne, who made it his summer home. To O’Grady, it may have appeared a pastoral retreat from Irish troubles, but he soon found armed insurrection practically on his doorstep. In 1837, barely a year after he settled, Sorel reverted to its more warlike origins, and on 22 November it became one point from which the British authorities launched a pre-emptive attack on the nearby town of Saint-Denis-sur-Richelieu, where Patriote leaders Papineau, O’Callaghan, and Wolfred Nelson had decided to make an armed declaration of independence for the province in December of that year. No doubt much to the British brigade’s surprise, it was forced to

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retreat, owing to thick walls protecting the sharpshooters assembled under the guidance of Nelson, who had been raised among the officer community of Sorel and whose skill as a military leader belied his more peaceful occupation of physician. Given the fact that Nelson had grown up comfortably within the Anglo community in Sorel in the shadow of the governor’s summer home and had represented the William-Henry/Sorel borough in the assembly, he would have moved in the very social milieu that O’Grady desired to enter. At any rate, the speaker in The Emigrant claims to have first-hand experience of some of the conflicts surrounding the 1837 rebellion in Quebec, including hearing “the midnight tocsins,” the bells that Nelson had ordered to ring in Saint-Denis after he decided to engage the Sorel force in the early hours of 23 November. However, Papineau and O’Callaghan were conspicuously absent at this first successful Patriote action, either urged to leave by Nelson, according to some accounts, or having left him and his followers “in the lurch,” in Nelson’s later recollection.39 Within days, the Patriotes were routed at Saint-Denis and other battle points. Nelson was taken prisoner while Papineau escaped, possibly taking refuge briefly in Sorel, where the poem’s narrator recalls seeing him “wan and shrinking from the storm” before “the dastard’s flight” (91). Like many Irish observers, both loyalist and nationalist, O’Grady used the events of 1837 and 1838 to draw parallels between Canadian and Irish politics. He recognized the similar aims and mutual support that followers of Papineau and O’Connell gave each other, as well as the parallels between the English government’s attempt to appease O’Connell and the conciliatory policy that the Irish-born Archibald Acheson (Lord Gosford) was instructed to carry out in Lower Canada, where he had been sent by the British as governor in 1835.40 Like the Protestant press in Dublin, Belfast, and the west of Ireland, O’Grady drew even greater parallels among the 1837, 1798, and 1803 rebellions. (Pikes seized from Whiteboys were described as “PapineauO’Connell instruments” in 1838 by a loyalist Sligo newspaper, linking the French uprising to Irish troubles through its name for the rudimentary arms that had also been employed by the 1803 and 1798 rebels.41) While more aligned with Deist and Enlightenment American philosophers than the Catholic O’Connell, Papineau was his equal in terms of popular support in Lower Canada. His renowned skills as an orator had earned him the role of speaker in the Assembly in 1815

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and helped him promote his ideas among a French-Canadian workingclass population who lacked the means and sometimes the literacy to access political journals and pamphlets.42 O’Grady is much less complimentary, of course: in his account, “glib-tongued Patriot” Papineau’s “vast orations flow” in streams of logorrhea (88). O’Grady may have witnessed, or at least read about, Papineau’s lecture tour of Saint-Denis and other towns near Sorel in the autumn of 1837, which resembled O’Connell’s monster meetings if not in scale then in enthusiasm. Like O’Connell, the Patriote leader was greeted as an uncrowned king with flags and maple boughs, processions, children’s choirs, showers of rose petals, firing of cannons, and banners portraying both Papineau and O’Connell.43 Where Protestant and Loyalist papers frequently compared O’Connell and Papineau, the French-Canadian leader’s humiliating plunge from the heights of power more closely resembles the fate of the poem’s prime villain, Fitzgibbon. Where Fitzgibbon is described as a “self-judged felon,” Papineau is described in even more unusual syntax as a “self-thought fugitive” and a “self-made” slave who likewise attempted to “raise a ruin on a well-formed state” (88–90) that had already guaranteed constitutional liberty to French Canadians, in O’Grady’s view. In some ways, the Patriotes’ NinetyTwo Resolutions aimed at ensuring an independent legislature resemble the Irish Patriots’ demand for an independent parliament, but O’Grady focuses on Papineau’s annexationist post-rebellion negotiations with the Americans, which he argues would “add each Province to enrich the States,” an even far less-acceptable union than the one Fitzgibbon had engineered. Many of the accusations of hypocrisy that O’Grady levels against Papineau reflect criticisms made by his own party and its exiled leaders, who were divided on how to proceed in the wake of the initial rebellion. Papineau experienced public humiliation similar to what Fitzgibbon endured in Westminster, when he returned to the house of assembly where he was accustomed to command and his former allies accused him of abandonment and cowardice. O’Grady likewise considers him “vile,” loving “the treason yet with traitor’s dread / When dealt the poison politic, he fled” (88). He blames Papineau almost exclusively for the rebellion’s consequences, including approximately100 supporters slain, 1,600 wounded, 29  executed, and 59 transported to Australia.44 While drawing Irish parallels, O’Grady also evokes the specific horrors of the Canadian rebellion through compelling descriptions of

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the Canadian winter in which the initial battle took place. The “bold, intrepid peasants” that “bleed” for Papineau are presented as young and idealistic, with “dimpled cheek” and “rosy smile” that revealed “the Patriot fire that warmed the valorous breast.” This introduction makes their frozen corpses on the wintry Canadian battlefields appear more pathetic and grotesque as they are “Embalmed, embedded in … Tombs of Ice” rather than “kindred clay” and subject to the indignities of “the wolf, the wild dog, or the Bear” until the spring melt “unveils … each meagre, mouldering mutilated mass” (89). Whether or not O’Grady had immediate experience of the aftermath of the battle, his note to this section of the poem, written in the present tense, suggests that he either wrote the passage shortly after witnessing the battle’s aftermath or else relives the trauma in his mind. In case his readers have missed the effect, his note asserts that his description is not based on poetic fancy but “carries with it a material force; if any thing can strike the mind with horror, it must be when spring develops the carcasses of the unfortunate slain, at that season of the year they become literally disinterred, if I may so use the expression, and scarcely can a few be identified by their respective relations” (161). The civil unrest in the Canadian provinces did not end with the winter battle, and O’Grady’s poem effectively captures the sense of paranoia and high alert that both Upper and Lower Canada were under from 1837 until 1840 as French exiles allied with American subversives. The poem describes the interception and destruction of the rebel-commandeered American steamship Caroline. Like Irish writers before him, O’Grady is not immune to the sublime potential of the Niagara Falls and imagines (inaccurately) the burning ship going over the falls to crash spectacularly and alliteratively “in frittered, fractured fragments” on the rocks below (92). He also conveys the fearful atmosphere created by a campaign of terror featuring anonymous threats, assassinations, and vandalism that continued against citizens and property until 1840: the Brock monument suffered a bomb attack “by the daring hands of the disloyal,” and British officers were murdered in their homes by “vile assassins” who “stalk their midnight round,” and leave “the bowknife glitter[ing] in the rankling wound.” (For his part in the attack on the Caroline, Allan McNab was the target of an anonymous note promising he would get “a bowie knife in the heart.”45) As in Ireland, the putting down of a rebellion did not stop secret societies from harassing local and British authorities. While Papineau advocated negotiating with America and even

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Russia, the more militant wing of the organization attempted to regroup, collaborating with both Americans and French-Canadian organizations known as Hunters’ Lodges or Freres-Chasseurs to arrange invasions from the United States. These subsequent invasions also revived memories of 1812 in British Canada46 and provide O’Grady with the opportunity to again tie together Canadian and Irish affairs by presenting the tragedy of American participants who believed they were liberating oppressed Canadians, based on Papineau’s account of “fancied ills.” To this end, he supplies the example of one particular “highminded and misled patriot” who, “unwittingly embarked in the views of Papineau,” was taken in an engagement aiding the rebels and “met his fate on the scaffold” (162). Like many Canadians at the time, O’Grady’s imagination was fired by the vainglorious sacrifice of the “high-minded Pole” (95) who closely resembles “General” Nils von Schoultz (1807–1838), a Finn reputed to have fought with Polish patriots against the Russians in the 1830s. Von Schoultz’s already colourful history became fatally entangled with that of Lower Canada when he emigrated to America and joined a Hunters’ Lodge, convinced that Canadian citizens suffered serf-like conditions similar to those of the Poles under the Russians. Von Schoultz took part in the invasion of Prescott, Upper Canada, in November 1838 and unexpectedly found himself in command of the expedition after its leaders abandoned their soldiers on Canadian soil. After a bloody siege lasting several days, he and his surviving men were captured, court-martialled, and sentenced to hang. Von Schoultz’s dark good looks, relative youth, and air of exotic aristocracy initially won him the admiration, or at least interest, of the Canadian public, the press, and even British soldiers. It also brought him to the notice of a talented but obscure young Kingston lawyer named John A. Macdonald, who agreed to defend him. His suicidal determination to plead guilty (against the advice of his counsel) so that he could defend his honour against charges that he had mutilated the corpses of the slain increased his heroic image, but of course could not save him.47 Upon being sentenced, he gave a speech announcing his desire to compensate the families of the fallen Canadian militiamen and to expiate his crime through a military execution, which the judges of the court martial obligingly furnished him. To create pathos, the poet notes that the repentant rebel left his property “to the widows and children of those who fell in action, and fought with such bravery against him” and to “a lady, to whom he

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was fondly attached and to whom he was honourably engaged in matrimony” (162). This last piece of information would have come as a surprise to von Schoultz’s wife in Sweden.48 Recalling a tragic Irish couple sundered by a heroic but misguided rebellion, “the noble Pole’s” last moments are witnessed by his fiancée, “the lonely maid, deprived of love” who goes mad with grief (95). (This was not entirely poetic fancy: the Kingston papers described a wife who, upon witnessing her rebel husband’s execution, “became a maniac.”49) Nevertheless, while von Schoultz’s execution scene is an amalgam of historical detail and fiction, its purpose is to draw more Irish parallels: the Pole’s bereft lover feels her “melancholy” fate is already “known” by Sarah Curran, “who loved that patriot Emmet of our own.” Like von Schoultz, Emmet is “the mistaken man” of “genius” who “palliate[s] the deed” of rebellion by both his execution and his patriotic vision of a future Ireland: Let no man write my epitaph, let it And me repose till other times befit; Silence best adds her tribute of esteem, Till other times my character redeem. (96) Like von Schoultz, Emmet partially redeems his bloody Dublin uprising through his eloquence in court. Sentenced to hang, he defends not himself, but the principles that motivated his rebellion, expressing sentiments shared by O’Grady and by the Patriots, in whose company Emmet is numbered in these lines. O’Grady finds it in himself to love the rebel and hate the rebellion. In contrast to his portrait of Emmet’s fall, O’Grady employs farce as well as tragedy in describing the aftershocks of the Rebellion of 1837. When members of American Hunters’ Lodges attack the Kahnawake reserve to steal arms, the tables are turned: the “assailed become assailants” as “the Indian leader takes his faithful stand” and “at length a rebel seeks an Indian’s will” (94). O’Grady relishes the irony of the supposedly “conquered” peoples remaining “conquerors still” as he commemorates Britain’s former Indigenous allies prevailing again over American invaders at Kahnawake (and also at Chateauguay, where “the sound of the Indian war whoops was heard by both insurgents and volunteers long before the reinforcements swept into the camp.”50) Such incidents allow O’Grady to contrast Indigenous loyalty to the treachery of the Patriotes.

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O’Grady has prepared the reader for this portrait of Indigenous leaders innately distinguishing good (British) government from bad and once again demonstrating virtue and loyalty. Like many Enlightenment philosophers, O’Grady sees Indigenous people as originally following “nature’s laws by wisest precepts taught” and argues that “all legislative thought” had been “deduced” from these same original precepts (67). Not surprisingly, the vision of a society that follows customs derived from natural law recalls his description of a harmonious, albeit paternalistic Irish society before the Union, linking past Irish governments to an ideal Indigenous society “where none abandoned, none that tie forsakes / Which binds that link our modern virtue breaks” (66). In describing broken ties and obligations, O’Grady may have in mind his “chill peasant,” whom he previously described as “abandoned” to grim prospects, given that he again links peasant and Indigenous ways of life in his lengthy note on the fidelity of the Irish character. Beginning with the observation, “Were an Indian divested of his forest an Irish hut might serve him as a model,” he concludes, “an Irish peasant has been steeled to such adversity there is no change or clime which he will not endure and which is not preferable to the unenviable situation he maintains amongst his most unfeeling and exalted neighbours” (186). Unlike the rebels who throw themselves on their mercy, “no orator excites” the residents of Kahnawake, who instead are ruled by “right reason” and so have no need to “plot[] protection by a bill of rights” – presumably the Ninety-Two Resolutions presented by the Patriotes to address what O’Grady considered imagined grievances (67). The status of “conquerors still” is likewise achieved by the Irish who join the Scots and English loyalists to quell Papineau’s uprising. (The 83rd, an Irish regiment from the County of Dublin, had recently joined the English and Scots regiments already stationed in Montreal and Quebec City at the time of the rebellions, giving credence to O’Grady’s vision of “The Thistle, Shamrock, Rose uniting” (162) to oppose Papineau’s rebels.) Where earlier in the poem O’Grady had praised the unsung Irish contribution to British victories over France in 1812, other images of solidarity under the British flag are revealed in the ballad that he dedicates to the volunteers and sets to his own music. His ballad, however, is dedicated to the Glengarry militia stationed near the border with Lower Canada, who publicly offered their services to Colborne in November 1837. As Olive Senior notes, while there were some Irish and English in their ranks, the majority were

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emigrant Catholic Gaelic-speaking Scots from the disbanded 1st Glengarry Fencible Regiment. They did, however, have a historical Irish connection, being “the only Catholic Regiment raised in Great Britain since the Reformation.” Along with their chaplain, Alexander MacDonnell (later a conservative Canadian bishop), they were deliberately and diplomatically posted to Ireland in 1798 because of their anti-French sentiments and because as co-religionists and speakers of Gaelic they were perceived as less likely to further inflame sectarian tensions in the regions to which they were assigned. O’Grady observes that the regiment had previously proven its loyalty in Canada fighting against the Americans when stationed in Montreal during the War of 1812. The ballad reflects the regiment’s warm relationship with Colborne, who “expressed frequently and feelingly his gratitude” for their service in 1837 and 1838.51 The two engagements are linked when O’Grady notes that “during the last war the Glengarry Volunteers, composed of Scotch, Irish, and English were the most conspicuous of all others for their bravery” and that “this character so handed down distinguishes this noble race” (161). That said, it is unclear whether he sees the primarily Gaelic-speaking regiment as a distinctive cultural/racial group or sees all the people making up the kingdoms of Britain and comprising the regiment as a “race” set apart from their French opponents, whom he figures later in the poem as irredeemably alien to British rule. O’Grady also notes that “during the last contest” against the rebels, the volunteers “were the terror of those that fought against them”; Senior notes that the Highlanders’ fierce reputation was sufficient to demoralize the Chasseurs, who dispersed when they knew that the “Scotch with the Indians were coming.” An offer of assistance to the governor published in the Montreal Transcript concluded with the Gaelic phrase, “Than a Gael a gradh gun dobhair iad an soup pheosoir as na Frangaich leis na Beanglaiden,” translated by the editor as “The Gaels’ determination to give the French rebels pease soup on the point of a bayonet.” Much of the burnings and terror that swept the countryside during and after the rebellion were suspected to be the work of the Glengarry Volunteers and other British militia under control of John Colborne, who were accused of burning the property of Patriotes in reprisal for the rebellions.49 Through his portrait of the volunteers’ willingness to work together and the terror this inspires in the rebels, O’Grady presents the reestablishment of an order he considers both natural and justified.

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O’Grady uses the 1812 and 1837 rebellions to create an edifying picture of Haudenosaunee, Scots-Catholic Gaelic speakers, Irish, and English volunteers presenting a united front against subversive notions originating from republican America and France. In doing so, he presents Colborne and the British settler communities in Canada as more attuned to the local situation than the Imperial government in England, whose absorption in the Irish crisis shaped their response to the Canadian one.52 While he previously used pathos to depict the young Patriotes who paid for Papineau’s ambition with their lives, O’Grady denies clemency to the living rebels, as suggested in his tacit support of the volunteers’ campaign of “terror” and the final lines of the poem where he notes that “suffering Britons” (in this context, most likely the loyalist communities in Quebec) “chide” British officials who argued for clemency (130). He singles out for criticism “Gosford,” that is, Governor General Acheson, who was born in Co. Armagh, in the North of Ireland, and had represented the county in Grattan’s Parliament. While he fought against the United Irishmen in 1798, Acheson was a staunch opponent of both Orangeism and the Union, which he voted against in 1799.53 In spite of shared political sympathies with Acheson, O’Grady implies that “suffering Britons” and colonists might have had reason to chide the governor’s previous behaviour in Westminster parliament. He voted with the Whigs regularly, especially regarding Irish questions, and his consistent advocacy for conciliation of the Irish won him praise from O’Connell and his allies. In Canada, Acheson “proceeded on the assumptions that there was a very close analogy between Irish and colonial conditions, and that the Whig policy known in Irish affairs as ‘conciliation’ needed only a trial to prove an absolute success beyond the sea.”54 However, O’Grady felt that an O’Connellite cure was worse than the disease of union, and believed a similar policy of appeasement had wrought havoc in Canada. Consequently, he also dismisses the “pride” of Gosford’s successor John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, whose political allegiances in Westminster had earned him the nickname “Radical Jack” and who resigned in 1838 after only a few months in Canada rather than approve an illegal British decision to deport convicted rebels to Bermuda.55 Where O’Grady did find common ground with Lambton was in their shared sentiments regarding French-Canadian society, most controversially expressed in the Durham Report submitted to the British government identifying what Lambton thought were the root

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causes of the rebellion. Not surprisingly, French Canadians rejected his Report on the Affairs of British North America, which dismissed them as “a people without a literature or history” and recommended their assimilation be facilitated through another political union: the long-resisted joining of Upper and Lower Canada into a new Province of Canada, where French Canadians would form a political minority. O’Grady’s poem echoes the report’s conclusion that the rebellions were the outcome of “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.”56 Unlike the Irish, capable of showing instances of “fidelity” from the Bronze Age onwards, or the local Indigenous communities, whose own natural sense of good government guides them to accept British constitutional principles, the French Canadians are presented in the poem as a resentful and “vanquished” people “chastened” by the conqueror’s hand (65) but ever ready to use England’s extremity, in the form of colonial incompetence, as their opportunity to rise up. Where O’Grady was quick to celebrate what he believed were the Protestant Ascendancy and the Gael’s shared literary traditions and oral culture, he sees no parallel in French-Canadian peasant or polite culture. Ignoring the example of the eloquent bibliophile Papineau, he dismisses the French as an “unlettered race,” bereft of a national culture, especially poetry (“how few the number tells”), and therefore of a national identity that would allow them to conceive of a national government. Instead of national pride, “their only pride [is] a cariole and bells” (107). O’Grady is immune to the Romantic ideals that habitant culture represented in Moore’s and Kidd’s poetry, using the details these two poets found exotic or charming to instead demonstrate its backwardness. At his most extreme, he dismisses French-Canadian peasants as “the most domesticated animals I know of” (174). Likewise, the poem depicts “lank Canadian[s]” huddling round their fire in their unendurable climate. He has them “creep,” “smoke,” “spit,” and “sleep” on the floor. Or relying on even cruder eighteenth-century anti-Gallic caricatures, he depicts them “feed[ing] on fricassees of frogs.” The habitants’ traditional ceinture fléchée is described as a “sanguine [sanguinary] sash,” itself an ominous phrase that also evokes the bloody and barbaric depictions of the French in British political cartoons during the revolution, which is reinforced by O’Grady providing “the most appalling examples of [French Canadians’] brutality” (174). They also wear “Indian’s mogs [moccassins]” and endure “Greenland winters,” recalling Fitzgerald’s own “Khamchatkan” winter garb and

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reinforcing O’Grady’s view of the French Canadians as a people made unknowable by climactic, geographical, and linguistic extremes. Lacking the ties of kinship with Britain that O’Grady and other Patriots argued made Ireland its sister-kingdom rather than “vassals to a throne” (33), the French in Canada “thus plot rebellion,” being merely “subject[s] chastened by the conqueror’s hand” (65). Again tying the political to the personal, O’Grady warns the Irish immigrant to Lower Canada that he leaves behind the social traditions of his own land to endure “adverse custom mixed with men unknown / Who add to this a language not your own,” a barrier that works to “forbid that converse social minds impart” and renders the newcomer “foreign to the alien’s heart” (76). Not content in making the French Canadians appear “revolting” in both senses of the word, O’Grady provides a rebuttal to Moore’s idyllic “Canadian Boat Song” through his “Shanty Song,” which Bentley sees as “parody.”57 The song counters Moore’s spiritual sojourners with a more down-to-earth image of “ranting boys [who] shove the canoe … with liquor and good cheer” (190) anticipating the rowdier and saltier voyageur ballads noted by Bonnycastle. Given, however, that O’Grady calls his song a “shanty” and uses similar tone and word choice in his “impromptu narrative” about a Munster sailor, his “Shanty Song, to a New and Appropriate Air” might be O’Grady’s attempt to carry out Durham’s assimilation through his strange hybrid ballad, with its incitement to “row, brothers row” and then, like the Munster sailor, to reaffirm their loyalty and “cheer” with brave Britons and “join in the yeo-heave-ho” (190–1). As opposed to Moore’s Catholic FrenchCanadian and Romantic voyageurs and Kidd’s Indigenous and Irish wanderers, O’Grady’s version of invented ballad traditions uses the distinct folk culture of Irish sailors and soldiers to reinforce Irish pride as it is channelled into the larger imperial project, again aligning him with the Patriot nationalists. Moreover, the poem’s frequent images of Irish tars, competent ships’ pilots, and steamboats navigating the St Lawrence present Irish participation in the New World as part of a modernizing force that is contrasted to the rural (and in O’Grady’s view, backward) culture of the habitants and voyageurs. The poem’s association of French Canadians with winter and uncultivated forests and the Irish with spring and open water reinforces the cultural gulf O’Grady encounters in Lower Canada. These oppositions further reinforce the cultural distance between French and Irish to make a larger point about politics. It is consequently not entirely the

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case, as Trehearne argues, that “Canada is realized most forcibly in its landscape, whereas Ireland is realized most forcibly in its abstract political tensions.” In Trehearne’s reading, O’Grady’s new home “is not the topographical embodiment of a series of indecipherable political issues.”58 Viewed in a transatlantic context, however, O’Grady’s gothic depictions of winter actually serve his political observations. Warning both emigrants and “my country” to “seek not, ask not” for refuge in Lower Canada, O’Grady uses sharp distinctions between Canada and Ireland to challenge the Imperial government’s view that Ireland and Lower Canada are similar situations requiring similar remedies of coercion admixed with conciliation. Instead, the gulf that separates the “chill peasant” from the “exalted” Ascendancy in Ireland is not as unbridgeable as the culture gap between French and “Briton.” As warning, he describes a winter storm whose “hoar tempest sweeps the icy plain,” producing “a drifted canopy of snow.” Its winds knock the “sheltered squirrel from his attic height,” dispersing “his well wrought store,” rendering his “house a ruin,” and subjecting him to “famine” (123), an echo of the earlier storm at sea that introduced the plight of the diasporic Irish, themselves propelled by political storms that robbed them of their rightful parliament and their individual homes. In contrast, in the closing lines of the poem, O’Grady celebrates the unlocking of the St Lawrence from winter’s icy grasp (again associated with the French Canadians through their affinity with the cold season) and opening it to modernizing forces of commerce: Now boatsmen cheer, the steaming engines ply, The busy hands, their various ships supply; The sliding sleigh no longer now conveys The hoarded timber o’er the ice formed ways. The toil complete, ‘tis Molson’s the control, With Tate and Torrance to conduct the whole; Wise, kind, beneficent, alike endowed, A people’s safeguard, and a public good. (128) Kidd had couched his resistance to the commercial development of the St Lawrence in Romantic aesthetics to support the Vindicator’s opposition to the “mercantile fraternity in this city”59 who wished to undermine all forms of French political influence through union with

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Upper Canada. In contrast, O’Grady’s imagery shows the traditional French-Canadian “sliding sleigh” giving way to Molson and Torrance’s steamers and other forcers of modernization represented by the AngloScottish business community. (John Molson, as previously mentioned, had interests in steamships as well as brewing; John Torrance, another leading merchant, had married into the Galt family, responsible in part for financing the early railway system; and Charles Tait – likely O’Grady’s “Tate” – was part of this same influential coterie.60) The earlier “toil” of the simple French hewers of wood, in O’Grady’s view, can only become part of an economically viable system when given into the rightful “control” of the Anglo businessmen of Montreal. Characteristic of O’Grady, this optimistic vision of a new season heralding economic and technological progress is immediately undercut by the reality of “rude spring” in Lower Canada. Where Fitzgerald marvelled at the sudden transition from winter in Quebec, O’Grady’s musical ear represents spring’s onset as cacophony that is implicitly contrasted with earlier musicians representing the Old World harmony that he reluctantly abandoned. Spring takes place in a swamp inhabited by “chattering … tuneless birds” whose “discordant notes … rend the listening ear” with “screams” and “shrill loud” swans who sound their “loud trump” while “the frog strains … his croaking throat” and predatory serpents hiss (128–9). O’Grady’s inability to partake in the economic boom he described may account for the sudden transition from depicting the “public good” presided over by Molson and others to contemplating his own failed enterprise. For him, spring represents mere survival, an opportunity to survey winter’s damage, represented by the “frozen relics” of his dead livestock and, reinforcing the dissonant soundscape he has just created, one living cow “to aid the screaming orphan at the breast” (129). (Given that his fictional immigrant Sylvia fares worse, dressed in rags and tending to seven orphans after her husband’s death, O’Grady may have considered himself lucky to escape with “one Canadian stud horse and one miserable cow” remaining (190).) After cataloguing “each gloomy object” on the speaker’s ruined farm, the poem segues into one final summary of the recent rebellion, and O’Grady rallies unconvincingly to hope for better times, “Whilst mighty Wolfe in Colborne still survives,” in the last line of the poem. Whether he feels that Colborne can oversee a thriving modern and economic society and resist malign American republican influence or

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literal invasions, or whether he simply got tired, the final line of the poem is lifted almost verbatim from the conclusion of his tribute to the Glengarry Volunteers. Upon publication by John Lowell in 1841, the poem received polite attention from English-language newspapers in both Lower and Upper Canada, and O’Grady reprinted it at his own expense again in 1842, suggesting that it had not made much money for the poet or his publisher.61 Around this time, the poet moved from Sorel to Montreal. During the 1843 Lachine Canal strike and riots, The Montreal Transcript identified O’Grady as part of a delegation instrumental in “bringing several hundreds of the Corkonians to the spot, where a reconciliation was effected,” earning the poet “the warm applause of his countrymen.”62 While his poem’s speaker presents himself as a solitary exile and “cheerless wanderer … sequester’d from mankind,” O’Grady was obviously still considered an influential member of the Irish Protestant community, just as he had been when he signed the Petition of the Protestants in 1812. Dan Horner argues that the Montreal delegation that O’Grady joined represented a formative moment in the Quebec Irish community and was made up of elite Irish Catholics and Protestants, including Benjamin Holmes, the head cashier of the Bank of Montreal, who received a large group of canal workers after they had marched in “orderly procession” from their shantytowns to the Bank of Montreal offices to state their grievances. Holmes was also president of the St Patrick’s Society of Montreal founded in 1834 by prominent Irish Protestants, so it is likely that O’Grady was participating because he was a member. The interfaith delegation included other business leaders who would benefit from resolving the bitter labour conflict triggered by a labour surplus, low wages, and intense competition that pitted Cork immigrants against those from Connaught, as much as against their supervisors. Like the improvements to the St Lawrence shipping route, the improvement of the Lachine Canal that served it was part of the government’s plan “to increase the capacity, and thus the profitability, of Montreal’s harbour … to ensure Canada’s commercial survival in the face of stiff American competition.” Not surprisingly, merchants like Molson and Tait publicly deplored the strike. While the English and French press often presented the conflict as a sectarian hereditary rivalry imported from Ireland, it was a contemporary grassroots form of labour activism, and “thus an essential component of industrial capitalism.” The Irish labourers’ actions were

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not indicative of an innate propensity to faction fighting as much as a necessary response to the harsh conditions and poverty-level wages imposed on them by private companies that had bid low to gain government contracts and would be penalized if they went over budget. Nevertheless, labourers from Cork adapted various tactics from Irish agrarian movements that O’Grady would have been familiar with: threatening notes, nighttime visits, and processions common to O’Grady’s region since the last century. Violent night visits to rival work camps and a note nailed to the gate of the canal works in January 1843 declaring that “any person or persons who works here in the Lachine Canal under 3 shillings and 6 pence per day may have their coffin and bearer” resembled the intimidating notes to Irish collaborators that were often written “in a Rockite hand.” Nevertheless, O’Grady and his peers in the St Patrick’s society, the established Irish Catholics in Montreal, and the workmen who gained a hearing through their orderly, “solemn processions” to the financial centre of Montreal all had an interest in disproving these stereotypes. The resolution of the conflict between Corkonians and Connaughtmen ultimately provided “a crucial moment in identity formation for both the striking canal workers and the city’s Irish elite … By defusing the tempers at Lachine, the Irish elite had proven themselves capable of doing the heavy lifting that came with the positions of leadership and authority to which they were seeking greater access.”63 If vindicating the Irish character had been one aim that the poet shared with his Patriot peers back home, the Lachine Riots allowed him to demonstrate this on a more public level in the few years remaining to him. The prestige finally afforded O’Grady in the Montreal Irish community does not appear to have been sufficient to sustain him financially. His final years can be traced through newspaper notices in Lower and Upper Canada, which indicate a “gradual journey westward” that terminated in Toronto, where his death was announced in an obituary published in the British Colonist in February 1846.64 This was preceded by a public request for charity on behalf of O’Grady, published in late 1845 in a short-lived Essex County paper, the British Canadian, which was quoted in the Toronto Examiner. It suggested a bleak end for O’Grady, described as “descending in sorrow to the grave” and facing the rapid advent of a “pinching winter” more severe and final than any he had described in his poem. It also demonstrated great delicacy towards how a “distressed gentleman” may have felt about being the object of charity: “We trust that he will not shrink from the

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publicity that this brief notice – wholly unknown to him – has given to his misfortunes! Our object is not to expose but to relieve them, which could hardly be hoped for by concealing his wants.”65 As much as it might have hurt O’Grady’s pride, the advertisment suggests that some of the traditions he remembered in Ireland had carried over to Canada West, at least among the British Colonist’s editors and readership. Like the “proverbial” Irish hospitality that O’Grady relates in his notes, people in Canada West seemed willing to “still cherish[] with their respect” a member of his class who had “by unforseen accident” become dependent on his wealthier peers (154). The British Canadian was published in the township of Sandwich, which boasted an “Irish Settlement,” established in the early 1800s, and a Bennett “took part in its erection.66 Perhaps O’Grady was seeking his relations. The generosity to an elderly and ailing Irish immigrant only went so far, however. The British Colonist’s notice had been mockingly brought to the attention of the Examiner by “A Subscriber,” who complained, “We should like to know if the Editor of that paper wishes the name of Poet O’Grady to be put on the pension-list of the Province or if something like the Upper Canada Gazette could not be started for the support of his declining age. We should have thought that Sir John Smith had the first claim. Really, a life of dissipation deserves something.”67 Perhaps the anonymous writer was using O’Grady’s misery as an opportunity to lampoon patronage appointments, but his pen name and his reference to “Poet O’Grady” raises the question of whether he was one of the “kind subscribers” O’Grady acknowledged in his “Dedication,” one who decided, like Kidd’s Q, to offer one final devastating review. The letter writer argues that there was a more deserving writer than O’Grady: the farmer and self-styled “Sir John Smyth, Baronet, and Royal Engineer, Canadian Poet, L.L.D., P.L. [Poet Laureate], and Moral Philosopher,” an even less-gifted (and far more dissipated) poet than O’Grady.68 While the writer’s assessment of O’Grady’s literary genius is close to the mark, the comments still suggest a much smaller-souled grasp of charity than O’Grady had articulated in his modest verses. While O’Grady’s end, after “a painful and protracted illness,”69 fulfilled his emigrant speaker’s prophecy that he would die with “Scarce … a pound to purchase death’s last need” (68), he was at least spared from witnessing the political rehabilitation of his archnemesis Papineau, who returned from exile to his book-filled estate in Quebec, receiving admirers who came to view him as a venerable

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French-Canadian nationalist statesman. The poet may have harboured similar dreams of presiding over a cultivated circle delighting in music and literature as well as “dinners, hounds and horses” like the ones he recalled in Ireland. Like many other loyalist Irish commentators, O’Grady drew no positive parallels between the new French-Canadian and Irish nationalism gathering strength in the 1830s and 1840s. Nevertheless, he resembles Papineau, a seigneur who wished to speak for the poor and unlettered peasant but was unwilling to relinquish entirely his privilege or authority, the same stumbling block for the Irish Patriots. Moderate reform in Ireland after the Union could not provide a remedy for the cataclysmic events that were developing even as O’Grady lay dying in Toronto. An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, was initially set off by repeated failures of the Irish potato crop in 1845, 1846, and 1847 but was exacerbated by incompetence, indifference, and cruelty on the part of the British government and Irish landlords. It would ultimately result in more than a million deaths in Ireland, a scale of catastrophe only exceeded in the British Isles by the Black Death. In its wake, the St Lawrence River and the port of Montreal would see a new type of Irish immigrant: desperate and often dying. The opening of the waterway each spring during those terrible years facilitated the arrival of tens of thousands of starving and ill people fleeing or driven off their land, once again tying Irish and Canadian politics together as governments and ordinary citizens attempted to assist the refugees. The inscriptions on the famine monument erected on Gross Île more than fifty years later would convey, in three different languages, the different ways communities in Canada would regard the famine. The Irish inscription told those who could read it that “Children of the Gael died in their thousands on this island, having fled from the laws of the foreign tyrants and an artificial famine in the years 1847–1848. God’s loyal blessing upon them. Let this monument be a token to their name and honour from the Gaels of America. God save Ireland.” The sentiments expressed in Irish, especially in the inscription’s last sentence, reflected a nationalism far more republican and radical than  O’Grady could ever countenance, one that would initially express itself in another Irish rebellion in 1848.70 Some of its participants would flee across the Atlantic, folding Canada yet again into Irish political ambitions through later invasions – this time directed by the Fenian Brotherhood – that would be depicted by the poets in the chapters to come.

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P art fou r Rebellion, Responsible Government, and Satire

In 1840, on the recommendation of Lord Durham, the British Parliament passed the Act of Union that merged Upper and Lower Canada into a new Province of Canada. It was proclaimed in Montreal in 1841. Each region was given equal seats, and English became the language of government, reducing French power. While unpopular, it was a first step towards a constitutional independence that Ireland could only dream of. Had he lived to see it, Standish O’Grady would not have appreciated the Rebellion Losses Bill of 1848, which created widespread anger among English Canadians in Montreal. While residents of Upper Canada had already received reparations, the government’s decision to compensate Lower Canada residents for damages suffered during the 1838 rebellions was widely resented, as it appeared to reward the rebels. Englishspeaking Tories expected Governor General Lord Elgin to oppose this bill, and after it was passed, riots broke out in Montreal. For several days in April 1849, mobs threw stones and eggs at Elgin, attacked the homes of Reform leaders, and burned down the ­parliament buildings. While O’Grady was no longer around to expend his savage indignation on such events, they were duly noted and skewered in the humorous magazine Punch in Canada. Relying on the same stock figures of unlettered French Canadians that O’Grady had indulged in, it ran a cartoon of a habitant ­delighting in the sudden windfall of apparently undeserved ­compensation with an accompanying caption in mangled English. The editor of Punch in Canada, Charles Dawson Shanly, ­contributed humorous editorials as well as many of the illustrations and cartoons that skewered French-Canadian politicians and

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populace. Although Shanly was born in Ireland, his satiric treatment of recent Irish emigrants was no kinder. However, French and Irish politicians were not the only targets for deflation by Punch’s “sharp pointed instruments.”1 The crisis had the unforeseen effect of uniting members of the English business class and anti-British politicians like Papineau who founded the Annexation Association in 1849, which argued that their interests would be better represented in a political union with the United States. Needless to say, the ­political road, with its switchbacks and necessity for alliances between groups who were not normally fellow-travellers, provided copious material for satirists. Initially, the union did not address the lack of responsible ­government that had fuelled so many grievances in the colonies. Its main aim had been to reduce the power of the French population, which had outnumbered English speakers in Lower Canada but would be a minority in the new province. In spite of this, Louis Lafontaine, who represented Canada East, agreed to co-operate with Robert Baldwin and the Irish-born Francis Hincks in Canada West, founding the Reform Party, which continued to advocate for responsible government. The Reform Party effectively gained responsible government for the Province of Canada after winning the election in 1848, with Lafontaine and Baldwin sharing the role of premier. They and the country faced a new province filled with challenges, including the effects of a worldwide depression, not to mention the enormous humanitarian crisis that unfolded in Quebec and Ontario as more than one hundred thousand Irish refugees fled famine and epidemics. The gradual and often tumultuous evolution of Canadian politics in the 1840s and 1850s was observed closely and wryly by another Irish immigrant as well: James McCarroll, who came to Canada West as a young man. While neither Shanly nor McCarroll witnessed the famine in Ireland, they would be familiar with sizable and seemingly alien Irish communities established in Toronto and Montreal by the 1850s. McCarroll and Shanly edited a number of short-lived political and satirical papers in Toronto and Montreal. Initially, both appeared to be successful members of the Irish Protestant immigrant community who had settled into Canadian life early; yet they also took advantage of their perspective as ­outsiders. Borrowing from a long-standing convention of Irish stock figures and Irish brogue in literature written in English, both writers

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employed distinctively “Irish” voices that provided them with the satiric distance necessary to record the twists and turns of Canadian politics in the decades before Confederation. Not surprisingly, the Irish-Canadian politician and poet Thomas D’Arcy McGee loathed the stage Irishman and his presence in Canadian culture. Unlike the high Patriot and Romantic rhetoric of much cultural nationalism, popular drama, fiction, and even poetry drew on an Irish comic tradition that originally perpetuated the stereotype of the brutish and ungovernable Irish villain in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Gradually, however, a more sympathetic literary portrait of Irish characters began to emerge, partly influenced by Irish dramatists.2 Early Canadian examples of this comic Irish character had already enlivened the paratexts of O’Grady’s The Emigrant, but even in his writing, this particular satiric weapon was double-edged. Originally mocked for the brogue that demonstrated their limited English skills and their simplicity, these characters began to employ a distinctive vernacular that often turned the tables on their supercilious audience, providing subversive wit and eloquence, delivered in a style that became extremely popular in Irish and North American drama, prose, poetry, and song throughout the nineteenth century. In Ireland, satirists had long exploited the possibilities offered by what seemed to them alien rural communities, mostly Catholic but sometimes Protestant. The stock character “Paddy” or “Teague” was originally characterized by “his ignorance, his whiskey drinking, his interest in pigs” and his “incorrigible ways and talent for ‘­blarney.’”3 While it could be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, the use of Irish immigrant lower-class comic figures also fit a North American interest in the use of regional and immigrant dialects in character sketches and fiction. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a wide range of poetry, drama, and prose written in “e­thnic dialect,” defined by Holger Kersten as “a form of nonstandard language that can be attributed to speakers of non-AngloSaxon background.”4 Popular writers exploited American regional slang. They believed spellings and vernacular English characterized Indigenous, immigrant, and African-American communities as well as “Cowboy” English. Dialect also was applied to more serious ­purposes, as in the French-Canadian dialect poems by the Irish-born William Henry Drummond and Duncan Campbell Scott or in poems about Irish famine refugees by Isabella Valancy Crawford.

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Often dismissed by critics for reinforcing notions of cultural i­nferiority, dialect in nineteenth-century writing provided writers with points of view that allowed critical distance and new perspectives. From the standpoint of a speaker seen as an outsider in North American culture, writers had “an opportunity for revealing things otherwise invisible to the dominant culture.”5 In Canada, this ­interest in novel perspectives arose partly from established AngloCanadian communities’ sense that their power and viewpoints were being challenged and shaped by diverse social groups. Shanly and McCarroll both exploited the use of Irish rural and workingclass dialects to reinforce a sense of difference, showing the Irish as a distinct and sometimes disruptive cultural group, who along with Anglo, French, and Scottish communities needed to negotiate complex alliances to create a cohesive government in the new Province of Canada. While primarily satirists, Shanly and McCarroll still contributed to the Romantic program of cultural nationalism through their poetry and prose. While the Irish dialect could be used to denigrate or defend Irish cultural difference, it also contributed to the notion that a distinct folk culture was an essential element of both Irish and Canadian nationalism. Shanly’s most enduring contribution to the nineteenth-century literary canon was a traditional-style ballad in English made popular by Irish nationalist groups. “The Walker of the Snow,” recited and sung even in the twenty-first century, was an adaptation of what he considered to be a uniquely Canadian legend. In his “Irish Anthology” poems, McCarroll promoted, with a mix of irony and sincerity, the “janius” of Irish culture, which he supported elsewhere in his respect for both the Irish-Catholic and Orange traditions in Canada. In his novel Ridgeway (1868), primarily an apology for the Fenian movement in North America, McCarroll demonstrates how both the “moral force” and “physical force” branches of nationalism that evolved out of Young Ireland after 1848 were influenced by Young Ireland’s program of cultural vindication. Where McGee’s Irish histories and patriotic poems celebrated Ireland and Canada’s distinct contributions to a larger cultural entity within a benevolent British government, McCarroll ultimately revisited the same subject matter to represent a seven-hundred-yearlong litany of undeserved Irish injuries and advocated for Canada and Ireland to completely separate from Britain.

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7 Charles Dawson Shanly (1811–1875)

Unlike Moore, or later, McGee, Charles Dawson Shanly never affiliated himself with a formal Irish or Canadian nationalist movement, but his view of Canadian and Irish culture alike was coloured by the North American emigrant experience. Like many other expatriate Irish writers, his education and career spans Ireland, Canada, and the United States, where he achieved the most success and acceptance, albeit in a modest circle. According to the unpublished Shanly family history written by his brother Walter, Charles Shanly was “a man of high artistic gifts and tastes; a ready and caustic writer,” one who possessed “brilliant wit and … remarkable conversational power.” Nevertheless, Walter Shanly did not see emigration as opening up a world of opportunity for his family, especially his eldest brother Charles, for whom “the coming to Canada in its then crude stage of civilization” meant “a life of great promise sacrificed … His place was, properly, in London, where his great talents would have been valued and rewarded.” Walter believed that when his elder brother “cut loose from the drudgery” of government work in a provincial colony to “seek more congenial occupation in the literary world,” it was too late.1 The habitually morose Walter did not see any of the family’s considerable contributions to Canadian society in a good light, perhaps because the shadow of an idyllic lost home in Ireland seemed to darken his view well into old age. In many ways, the Shanly children’s upbringing and family background allowed them to easily join the Englishspeaking, Protestant professional class who readily assimilated into North American society and so were not identified with the “Celtic” identity that McGee and other Canadian nationalists would construct

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and promote in Canada. Irish emigrants of Shanly’s class resembled more closely the British officer-emigrants portrayed by Susannah Moodie. Still, given their upbringing on a country estate outside of Dublin, it would be difficult to imagine Charles or Walter Shanly being unaware of the Irish-Catholic culture that surrounded their family home, and which antiquaries and philologists had promoted as providing the Irish nation with its distinctive myths, legends, history, culture, and dialect. Moreover, the Irish Ascendancy was in its own way a distinctive class whose world view would eventually contribute to the cultural nationalism promoted by Yeats. Like O’Grady, the Shanlys could trace their history back to ancient Catholic roots, their lands having been confiscated after the Battle of the Boyne in 1689. By the eighteenth century, they had converted to the Church of Ireland. In Canada, however, they were a minority within a minority, having as little in common with the poorer Irish-Catholic emigrants who arrived in great numbers in the 1830s and 1840s as with the Northern, Protestant, and often Orange community.2 Charles Dawson Shanly was born in Dublin, the eldest son of James Shanly, a lawyer from a minor aristocratic family whose fortunes had slowly declined during the eighteenth century. What lands they had regained after seventeenth-century confiscation were completely sold off by James Shanly’s time, and after a brief law career, he became an estate agent, a lucrative career for a professional that would also permit him to live the life of a country gentleman. James moved his young family to a “magnificent old house” on one of the managed estates in Queen’s County (now Laois) in 1816.3 James, his wife, and their eight surviving children emigrated to Ontario in 1836. While many of the Shanly sons embraced life in the rapidly modernizing cities of North America, they carried with them the memory of a more traditional, aristocratic, and pastoral way of life shaped by Anglo-Irish society, at least according to brother Walter Shanly. He recollected “the place of his birth [as] a bright oasis in a dull, colourless, and laborious and unsuccessful life.”4 The Shanly brothers’ biographer Richard White argues that the Canadian generation of Shanlys remained “conservative gentlemen who in many ways lived in a culture more closely tied to the old Irish rural gentry than to anything modern or technical.”5 In 1825, the family moved nearer to Dublin to provide education for the sons, and in 1830, Charles entered Trinity College (Dublin University). Whereas Thomas Moore had distinguished himself at

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Trinity by joining the Historical Society and supporting the United Irish students, there is little evidence that Shanly participated in any cultural or political activities. Family worries may have kept Shanly from becoming involved in extracurricular activities: he interrupted his studies to move to Penzance to look after his brother William, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The two spent their time fishing, reading, and painting, until William died at the age of twenty. Once Shanly returned and completed his degree at Trinity, he studied art with members of the well-respected Brocas family of painters and engravers, likely through classes supported by the Royal Dublin Society.6 He became reasonably accomplished, and some of his paintings are in collections and archives in Canada.7 As the influence of the Protestant Ascendancy waned and social unrest increased in Ireland, James Shanly, like Standish O’Grady and other families of their class, thought he could improve his fortune and find better prospects for his young sons in Canada. They stopped briefly in New York, then Oswego. Walter’s account of returning to British territory after leaving the United States recalls Moore’s earlier reaction: the Shanlys crossed Lake Ontario on a steamship, “a Canadian vessel carrying, of course, British Colours, which the youthful adventurers, born Tories all, hailed with joyful loyalty after their few weeks of first experience under an alien flag.” In November 1836, the family settled in a log house on a partially cleared farm in Concession 4, London Township, where they made friends with other genteel Irish families in the neighbourhood. Writing of settler life at the time, Catharine Parr Traill noted that it was more congenial to young men than their sisters, with the farming providing vigorous outdoor activity, supplemented by the fishing and hunting that Charles and his brothers already loved. According to Walter, “Their first two or three winters, the first especially, were sufficiently pleasant to … the younger members of the immigrants band” and “the four grown ‘boys’ … took kindly to such work as came to their hands to do and very kindly to such natural diversions as ‘bush life’ offered.” However, as both Strickland sisters noted, the drudgery of farming was uncongenial to immigrants brought up as gentlemen, and hired labour quickly drained the resources of officer families. James, the family patriarch was “impressed with the old country idea, common to the ‘gentlemen settlers of the time,’ that land and revenue were convertible terms. The father believed that his sons had only to be provided with farms to become at once independent and content.” The sons had other

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ideas. All eventually left, believing, like Walter Shanly, “that, surely, there was some better promise in the horoscope of a young country for a young fellow … than manual toil in hopeless competition with unlettered boors whose labour and sweat were certain of all the reward they aimed at – a hundred acres of clearing with the stumps out.”8 A commission in the Canadian militia during the 1837 rebellion was Charles’s ticket away from the family farm, and he never returned. He became a clerk for the Lower Canada Board of Public Works in 1840. By the time James Shanly moved the family to Nissouri Township and built an elegant house more in keeping with the ideas of a genteel Irish family, two of the eldest remaining sons had followed Charles’s example and left home for professional careers in cities. Walter and Francis Shanly made names for themselves in Canada as engineers and then politicians, surveying and overseeing construction of the Welland Canal and quite literally building the Canadian railway system, while Charles made his more modest contributions to what McGee would call the “Grand Trunk” of thought in Canada.9 While Charles Shanly had written poems before emigrating, his North American literary career began in journalism. He became editor and contributor to a new satirical magazine, Punch in Canada, which ran from January 1849 until April 1850.10 Unlike many papers of the time, Punch in Canada refused to support any Canadian political parties. It also provided savage commentary on Canada-US relations, particularly the ongoing debate about annexation.11 Shanly, along with his co-editor, another Irish emigrant named John Henry Walker, put his art training to good use in contributing cartoons to the journal. Walker was a skilled wood engraver who created the magazine’s vivid covers, modelled on Punch in England. Like the English version, the magazine featured the eponymous comic puppet, but Walker clothed him in habitant garb, with Hudson’s Bay blanket coat, snowshoes, sash, and pipe. Smaller illustrations bordering the central portrait varied from issue to issue, featuring Punch chopping wood, smoking a pipe outside a Quebec tavern under the sign “M. Ponche,” flirting with Indigenous women, steering a birchbark canoe, or hunting bison. The peoples, activities, and landscapes that had impressed Moore as distinctly Canadian provided visual tropes that Shanly also employed in his preface to the collected issues of the first volume. With the magazine’s mascot presented as an immigrant, Canada could easily become “the country of Punch’s adoption,” its vast and varied territories offering the newcomer endless opportunity – in this case, for satire:

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“From the verge of the extreme west, where the lambent lake of Huron licks the pebbles to sleep on its murmuring beach, to the granite walls of ocean-buffeted Gaspé, whose snow-white porpoises spout antiannexation to the whales of the gulf; from the trapper-trodden ravines of the Winnipeg, to the tourist-tormenting ridges of rumbling Niagara, – all is Punch’s. Every hut offers him a home; every table has a knife and fork for him, and frequently a spoon.”12 While acknowledging the mascot’s English origins, the magazine declared that “Punch is … entitled to the style and denomination of a settler” in all senses of the word: “Many knotty points have been readily and completely settled by him.”13 Wordplay aside, Shanly’s own brief experience as an Anglo-Irish backwoods settler also furnish his metaphors, suggesting that literary emigrants can shape both the physical and mental landscape to determine the country’s future. The newcomer is the type of settler “who, with sharp pointed instruments, the pen and pencil of satire, roots up the stumps of humbug from the social soil of his adoption, sowing pleasant flowers where he has put down noxious weeds.”14 In introducing the new magazine to the public, Shanly positions himself as insider and outsider: someone who has settled in the country but relies on ironic distance and independence from political parties to provide satiric commentary in a new society. The articles and drawings frequently sank to broad cultural and racial stereotypes, but Punch in Canada was an equal-opportunity offender. Indigenous people are represented as painted, semi-naked members of “toxophilic” clubs that use lost militiamen as targets. (In more serious writing, however, he describes the Wendat people he meets in Quebec as “a very civilized race of Indians”.15) Racist terms and images are occasionally used to describe African Americans (although, like Moore, the magazine aims its most bitter satire at slave owners). The French Canadians are seen as uncultivated, rebellious peasants or would-be subversives who flirt with French or American republicans. Members of the “Club National Democratique” allied with Joseph Papineau are represented as monkeys trying unsuccessfully to provoke the British lion, but colonial establishment figures are also regularly dehumanized, represented as raccoons, and in one instance, an eggplant. Nor did Irish people, particularly the recent Irish-Catholic emigrants who settled in Montreal, escape blows from Punch’s baton. Solicitor General William Hume Blake, another Irish immigrant, is referred to as “Paddy Blake,” for instance. Again, however, Shanly’s bile is primarily

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directed at the way the Irish are treated. For instance, in his attempt to cover the full range of human behaviour, Shanly has Punch claim to have “climbed to the top of the Parnassus of the Mountains of Montreal” as well as descended to “the meanest cellars of Griffintown, in order to study the characteristics of humanity in its lowest phases – converting the rags of the wretched into torches for the illumination of his readers.”16 While Shanly denotes the impoverished Irish slums of Montreal as the lowest level to which humans can sink, he also lampoons the failure of civil authorities to bring basic services to these areas, commenting on the frequent floods suffered in Griffintown. McGee deplored the use of negative Irish stereotypes perpetuated through the use of “Stage Oirish” vernacular,17 but Shanly and Punch in Canada revelled in the wordplay and the seemingly disingenuous observations it could generate. Initially, playwrights and satirists took advantage of Irish speakers’ propensity towards errors, blunders, and malapropisms as they struggled with English. “Irish Bulls,” as such errors came to be known, were “statements which, though their intended meaning is clear and straightforward, are so infelicitously expressed as to be self-contradictory.”18 They are a gold mine for the satirist, offering a “laughable confusion of thought” that could lampoon Irish national character, but could also offer useful ambiguity through a “metaphorical statement stressing apparent connections which are not real.”19 As the treatment of the stage Irishman became more sentimentalized in the eighteenth century, the brogue and the blunders in English could also be seen as a more positive trait, reflecting “an honest, eager heart thwarted by a somewhat awkward tongue.”20 At any rate, the comic Irish speaker could be used to state satiric truth about society in general, either subtly or unintentionally. For example, one unsigned cartoon in Punch in Canada, possibly by Shanly, shows a barefooted immigrant with his possessions bound up in a handkerchief on a stick, resolutely determined to return to Ireland. Peering out from a hovel window, his friend asks why he is going away, to which the immigrant replies, “bekase if I stop in Kanada, they’ll be for makin a Legistlaytive Counciller of me – and I was brought up among dacent people, sure!21 Nevertheless, Shanly’s satire subscribes to the same national and racial distinctions that Irish nationalists exploited. From the 1840s, the designations “Celt” and “Anglo Saxon” were employed to denote cultural distinctions as well as political positions, and predictably, the group a writer identified with possessed superior qualities. Shanly

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generally characterizes Anglo Saxons as resolute and loyal in their support of Canada’s continuing union with Britain when satirizing annexationist and separatist arguments. One cartoon titled “French Domination” and signed with his initials shows a small boy, designated “Juvenile Briton,” brandishing a stick and ordering French Nationalists (frequently designated in the magazine as “Snobs”) to take their hats off for “God Save the Queen” or he will “smash ‘em over your eyes!”22 While he exploited these cultural and racial distinctions for satiric purposes, it is not clear how much Shanly actually believed them. Nevertheless, he employs another frequently encountered Irish character appearing on the stage and in fiction and folklore, one identified by Maureen Waters as the “Irish rogue.” A character “who lived on the fringes of the community,” the rogue was “audacious, eloquent, clever at outwitting formidable opponents.”23 Shanly invents a resourceful and roguish Irish letter-writer in “Organ-ization,”24 an Irish barrel organ player who signs his name “Martini Sullivani.” Overlaying his brogue with poetic diction, he claims to have been “brought up in the classical shades of Maynyouth [Maynooth]” and plies his trade in the “city of Montrey Hall; where I found the hospitalities of my imerald home, amongst the green and pig-deliting ponds of Griffintown” (likely another dig at the chronic flooding the neighbourhood suffered). Exploiting Canadians’ ignorance when his “slight Irish axent” is mistaken for “an Italian die-elect,” he decides to pass himself off as “an Italian nobleman in disguise” performing itinerant music for a large wager “with an English Discount of great iminense.” In introducing “Sullivani’s” letter, Shanly notes that “our young friends of Nouvelle France have of late been ravenously bellowing” for republican tunes. But when asked by French-Canadian radicals to play the “Marsellaise,” the organ grinder quickly discovers that none of them can tell him how the tune goes and so do not notice when he substitutes the Irish ballad, “Bold Soldier Boy.” Nor do the English Canadians escape lampooning: When “a couple of young AngloSaxons, as they call ‘em here – though I think myself they were Englishmen,” request him to play “God Save the Queen,” he “immediately ground [it] up with all the Energy of a thrue subject,” the would-be republicans having escaped through a keyhole at the appearance of the Englishmen. (The fact that the Marsellaise/God Save the Queen fiasco takes place in an establishment named “Madame Laughon’s” suggests even more about Shanly’s opinion of the level of nationalist debate taking place.)

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Readers might laugh at Martini Sullivani’s pretentions and mangled English. (In fact, his previous work experience turning a mangle helped him discover his musical talent.) However, he proves to be the one character who actually profits from the nationalist debates occurring in Canada East and West at the time. The naive – or more likely disingenuous – speaker provides several layers of irony and ambiguity needed for making shrewd observations about the clash of nationalisms Shanly witnessed and gleefully participated in. As Michael Peterman observed of stage-Irish vernacular, it provided an Irish voice that “one could laugh at and with, a voice that offered plenty of amusement and a dramatic platform for Irish insight.”25 The real butt of Shanly’s ridicule are the would-be Marsellaise singers, presented as completely uninformed about the republicanism they espouse. Sullivani’s equal willingness to “grind up” the English national anthem is also ambiguous. By presenting an Irishman who masquerades as an Italian offering an Irish march as the French national anthem, Shanly departs from the arguments of earlier Irish nationalists, suggesting that using national music to perform national and political differences has its limits. Even his choice of tune is ambiguous: the “Bold Soldier Boy” could make Irish- and French-Canadian nationalists equally suspect because it calls up memories of the 1798 and 1848 Irish rebellions.26 At the same time, the song’s lyrics focus as much on the soldiers’ ability to charm and even manipulate women, including “landladies [who] adore us / And never refuse to score us / But chalk us up with joy.”27 With an Irish speaker more intent on profiting from the demand for grinding out national songs of all stripes while imposing on his landlady “Mrs Mawkins,” her daughter, and “Biddy the cook-maid” with his Italian accent, “Organ-ization” presents the Irish immigrants less as active nationalists in Canada and more as shrewd bystanders willing to profit from the current political confusion of the colonies. In employing an Irish denizen of Griffintown for his mouthpiece, Shanly is able to demonstrate his own political views and yet remind the reader that for an Irish emigrant of any class or religious profession, these views will always be couched in ambiguity, coloured by a complex and conflicting set of loyalties. In addition to recognizing how music and ballads continued to perform cultural and national differences in Canada (and perhaps subtly link more revolutionary Irish and Quebec separatism through the allusion to “Bold Soldier Boy”), Shanly used parodies of Romantic ballads and poetry to make his satirical points. He offers burlesques

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of Moore’s and Byron’s poetry as well as his own parodies of antique ballads that Percy’s Reliques and other collections had popularized during the Romantic and Victorian eras. He took great delight in punning on Old English titles for his satiric ballads. In “A Lay of Egges,” for instance, Lord Elgin is haunted by the ghosts of innumerable unhatched chickens; so many eggs were thrown at Elgin by protesters that Shanly elsewhere suggested the Queen give him the title, “Marquis of Omelette.” Nevertheless, in addition to parodying ballads, he created a convincing one of his own: “The Walker of the Snow,” published in the United States in 1859, but obviously coloured by his experience of Ontario and Quebec winters. A folksong in the tradition of Moore and later Irish nationalists, and almost as popular in North America, “The Walker of the Snow” was set to music by the Scottish composer Alexander Campbell Mackenzie in 1913. It became one of the earliest recorded country and western tunes in the 1920s, and was recorded in 1990 by Irish piper Davy Spillane and singer Seán Tyrrell on Spillane’s album, Shadow Hunter, its hybrid Irish-American origin underscored by an accompaniment of uilleann pipes, guitar, and dobro. It was recorded again by Seán Tyrrell in 2013.28 In contemporary folk music, it now has the status of literal, rather than literary, ballad. While Shanly ultimately escaped to warmer climes, he continued to write about his Canadian experiences in American journals until a few years before his death in Florida in 1875. Like other Irish writers, he recognized that “the frozen swamps of Canada” (as Charles Gavan Duffy called them) remained fascinating and mysterious to Irish emigrants and American audiences. His essay “Winter in Quebec” (1873) describes the immense December snowfalls, when “the face of the country becomes one level plain, all fences and boundary marks being completely obliterated” under “drifts of from ten to twenty feet.”29 The snow also causes the Canadian woods to “assume their most weird and mystic aspect,” he writes in “Winter in Canadian Forests” (1874), noting that “the young spruce-trees that are interspersed here and there among the more lofty timber are converted to white obelisks. Sometimes they take the form of unearthly sculptures – statues of things unknown to mortal eyes but standing up there in the silent wood radiant in the purest alabaster.” More than a decade before, McGee had noted in “Our Ladye of the Snow” how such sights could trigger a sublime, unworldly, or even hallucinatory experience. To Shanly, the effects were enhanced when the snow dampened sound:

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“It is awfully still in the forest when there is a foot or so of snow upon the ground. The very air seems to be muffled, and living things move about unheard.” This detail again echoes Moore’s earlier description of the impressive silence of Canadian woods in ways that continued to present them as a site for the sublime. The winter woods’ deathly void, belied only by the “tracks of wild creatures,”30 becomes a hauntingly significant detail in “The Walker of the Snow.” Even if Shanly was not familiar with McGee’s Canadian Ballads, published a year before “The Walker of the Snow” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, later Canadian anthologists likely saw it as an answer to McGee’s earlier New Era editorial plea. He called for writers to create poems that contain the “gorgeous coloring and the gloomy grandeur of the forest … the grave mysticism of the Red man, and the wild vivacity of the hunter of the western prairies,” images whose geographical range unintentionally recalls the picturesque language and scope of Canadian culture in Shanly’s preface to Punch in Canada.31 Written for a primarily American audience, “The Walker of the Snow” again features details that distinguish Canada from other nations. In Locusts and Wild Honey, American naturalist John Burroughs treasures the poem for what by now has become the “Canadian sound” of the narrative ballad. Burroughs also views it as one of the few works that captures the mood of expeditions into the wilderness: “there is plenty that is weird and spectral, as in Poe, but little that is woody and wild as the scene is.” In his view, “The Walker of the Snow” “fits well the distended pupil of the mind’s eye about the camp-fire at night … The intent seems to be to personify the fearful cold that overtakes and benumbs the traveler in the great Canadian forests in winter.”32 To Sherril Grace, the poem, which inspired a haunting painting by William Blair Bruce in 1888, also effectively portrays a “world seen in the mind’s eye” through its representation of the Canadian winter wilderness as a “world of legend, myth, and imagination, a world of spine-tingling mystery, of the uncanny, and of ghosts … It proves Earle Birney quite wrong when he proclaimed that Canada is haunted by its ‘lack of ghosts.’”33 Instead, the poem is a Romantic depiction of Canada’s empty wintry spaces as sites where the self-perceived alienation of strangers – explorers, traders, and immigrants – is projected onto an encounter with the uncanny and sublime, but one that is barely, if at all, survivable. Like Moore’s Canadian verse, Shanly’s poem presents the explorers, traders, and hunters of Canada as a repository of unique oral poetry,

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legend, and myth. This notion is played out literally in the poem as the speaker, a guide or servant, explains to his “Good master” the legend of the “haunted valley,” which they must get through before nightfall. Beyond the power relationship implied by the monologue addressed to the silent listener, the reader knows little about either men or their occupations. There could be some basis in reality for the speaker’s use of the term “master.” Shanly lived in Montreal as the seigneur system was slowly being dismantled, and its vestiges may have seemed reassuringly familiar to someone from a family with pretentions to the Irish gentry. If the poem is set in the more distant past, the use of “Master” would be even more historically appropriate if it alludes to the feudal system still alive in the founding days of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where employees like Henry Kelsey (fl. 1667– 1724) described themselves in their writing as servants faithful to their master back at the factory. Even in a society less egalitarian than the United States, though, the phrase “good master” sounds quaintly archaic. Canada as a Burkean paradise34 is briefly invoked by what appears to be a respectful master-servant relationship, but one that becomes more complicated as the poem progresses. Consequently, the poem seems both archaic and contemporary. Living in Montreal, Shanly was aware of the continuing influence of the fur trade in his adopted town (the Montreal-based North West Company had merged with Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821). In “Winter in Quebec,” he explained to his American audience that in early winter before the river froze reliably, modern travellers were still dependent on a mode of transport left over from that era: they needed to engage canoes, that is, “large wooden ones of the dug-out variety, each of them manned by experienced and adroit voyageurs” in order to make their connection to the Grand Trunk Railway.35 Even as the influence of the fur trade was waning in the face of rapid industrialization and the rise of small business and professional classes, anglophone immigrants were adopting the activities and garb of the explorers, voyageurs, and traders upon whose labour their city had been founded. They proudly wore their habitant garb as they participated in excursions organized by snowshoe clubs that became fashionable in the 1840s when Shanly was working in the city. According to Gillian Poulter, the majority of members were “either new immigrants from the British Isles or Canadian-born, English-speaking Montrealers who felt strong ties of loyalty to the empire while still desiring to make for themselves an identity as Canadians.”36 For English-speaking

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immigrants, such clubs also afforded a way to differentiate themselves from both American and British culture. Moreover, the act of snowshoeing was as performative as the more elaborate public festivals, marches, and banquets that Poulter sees as a demonstration of a particular “Canadian” form of loyalty. (The Irish-born governor general, Lord Dufferin, was welcomed to Montreal by snowshoers who formed an elaborate human arch upon his visit in 1878.) Poulter argues that in taking symbolic possession of the wild areas around Montreal, members of the snowshoe clubs acted out indigenizing “myths of origin [that] caused the performer to feel himself part of that history on a conscious, cognitive level, and through bodily knowledge this feeling became a matter of fundamental belief, a sensation of physical rootedness in the land.”37 Like Moore’s invented ballads that appear to be the unpolished, spontaneous production of the traders and voyageurs who urged their oars to the rhythm of song, Shanly’s ballad meter ostensibly matches the rhythms of a body attempting to make itself at home in a particular land. The speaker in Shanly’s poem cajoles his master to “speed on,” by offering to “tell you as we go” the legend of the valley, which is haunted by the “Shadow Hunter / who walks the midnight snow.” Whether sung or spoken, the common meter employed in the ballad reproduces the laborious tread of a heavily laden traveller on snowshoes. Like the poem’s steady beat, the legend it recounts offers a diversion intended to ameliorate the tedium of the long journey. The speaker recounts how on a previous voyage, he countered his loneliness and fatigue by singing and shouting, “keeping measure as I sped / to the harp-twang of the snowshoe / as it sprang beneath my tread.”38 The harp, a symbol of Irish indigenous music adapted by both Englishspeaking Catholic and Protestant nationalists as emblematic of their nation, is linked to a similar indigenous object adapted by successful explorers and settlers, and the “measures” of both poetry and rhythm of travel become essential to allowing settler Canadians to possess and move freely in their adopted land. Readers often assume the poem is set in the Arctic (although the famous Klondike Gold Rush did not begin until 1896). However, given Shanly’s experience with Quebec winter, a nineteenth-century reader could still plausibly encounter such cold and isolating conditions, along with the poem’s attendant flora and fauna, at Montreal’s city limits, or even closer, on the slopes of Mount Royal. If the poem is indeed set further north, then the particular legend,39 fitted into

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common meter, also creates an emotional connection to a remote part of Canada that might otherwise be inaccessible to the reader, as McGee would do with Canadian place names in ballads such as “The Death of Hudson” and “Our Ladye of the Snow.” Shanly’s winter scene uses elements of the sublime to create this emotional response: To the cold December heaven Came the pale moon and the stars, As the yellow sun was sinking Behind the purple bars. The snow was deeply drifted Upon the ridges drear, That lay for miles around me And the camp for which we steer. The lack of human sound reinforces the sense of the uncanny or unearthly in the poem, and the description of “the solemn wood” having “No sound of life or motion / To break the solitude” is a possible nod to Moore’s “Canadian Ballads” in describing the silence of a boreal wilderness. As in Moore’s poem, the silence is broken only by the sound of an invisible bird, in this case, “the wailing of the moose-bird / With a plaintive note and low.” Moore’s woodpecker is succeeded by an even more Canadian emblem, Perisoreus canadensis, also called the Canada Jay or whisky jack, commonly found in boreal and mountain forests throughout Canada. The eeriness is reinforced by the appearance of another Canadian emblem, a red leaf “skating … Upon the frozen snow,”40 which grimly foreshadows the poem’s ending, where the one moving thing the speaker encounters is not actually alive. That the speaker will explain how he came to suffer from the “blight of the shadow hunter” suggests that the men who live and work in that valley believe the legends that they recount, thus moving them and their activity even further from the rational, empirical, and industrialized early-Victorian world. The presumably skeptical reader – not to mention the guide’s master – might be prepared to suspend disbelief and submit to the poem’s uncanny setting, with the only sign of life being the “wailing” of an invisible bird and a dead leaf that eerily moves across the snow as if it were alive. Compounding the supernatural unease is the speaker’s natural fear of being alone, far from

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human help, late at night. Illustrating the old adage, “be careful what you wish for,” the speaker recollects that he felt his “heart it would be lightsome / If I had but company.” Almost immediately, he is joined by (or has unintentionally summoned) “a dusky figure / in a capuchon of grey.” The reader might initially assume the figure is wearing the hooded blanket coat favoured by hunters and voyageurs, but the ­wording invites associations with the Grim Reaper. Disconcertingly, in a world where survival depends on mutual kindness, the grey figure does not reply to the greeting of the speaker, but the trapper/guide becomes aware of his danger only when under glow of the “sickly moonlight,” he sees that his companion has “left no footprints in the snow.” At this moment, recalls the speaker, “the fearchill fell upon me … like a shroud,” and he sinks upon the snow. When he is discovered by “otter trappers,” his “dark hair” is as “blanched and whitened / As the snow in which I lay.” The actual nature of his ordeal remains eerily ambiguous: it is almost if the speaker has been erased,41 much as the snowdrifts in Quebec would eradicate all landmarks in town and country alike. While the trappers familiar with the legend readily accept that the hapless traveller has “withered” from the “blight” of the Shadow Hunter, it is equally plausible that the apprehension of the absent footprints brought about such shock and terror that he became an old man overnight. At this point, Shanly introduces a twist;42 in the poem’s frame narrative, the speaker and his master arrive at the “valley / of the Walker of the snow” just as the guide finishes his macabre tale and the sun begins to sink. The ambiguity of the ending encourages several complementary readings. The poem could be a simple ghost story in which the speaker not only believes in the evil spirit that haunts the valley but also has actually met him and had his vitality mysteriously drained away. Or perhaps the legend has such a hold on the guide’s imagination that he is frightened nearly to death by his own shadow. Burroughs offered a figurative reading: the shadow hunter is the embodiment of the terrifying powers of the cold itself. The more psychologically inclined might conclude that the cold and fatigue induced a hallucination, a malevolent version of the “Third Man” syndrome later described by Antarctic explorers and other people in life-and-death situations.43 Observing that the famous Blair painting depicts the spectre as the speaker’s own spirit departing, Grace offers the unsettling suggestion that the speaker “may himself be the Shadow Hunter or the hallucinatory projection of the Master’s fear. It may already be too late.”44

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The whole poem could, of course, be an Irish satirist’s joke on the reader, particularly if the speaker is imagined as a long-suffering Irish servant to an inept, inexperienced English sportsman, a newcomer to the country ripe for gulling. If the speaker-guide is an ancient, garrulous, naturally white-haired guide, a compatriot of the duplicitous Signor Sullivani, then the invented traditional ghost story might be just the thing to speed up the pace of his floundering master. Its ending recalls the narrative strategy employed by sadistic camp counsellors to this day. (Want to know how my hair got so white? … The shadow hunter is still out there, you know … Oh no! We have reached the haunted valley!) That the poem dwells more on the terrible than the sublime (or ridiculous) suggests that for Shanly, the transformation from Canadian settler to Canadian indigene is incomplete, at least in this poem. Grace believes that within the poem’s ambiguity lies its charm: “this tension, this undecidability … makes the poem interesting, even today, when it might well seem trite and aesthetically dated.” Such tensions and ambiguities might also hint at the ambivalence felt by a settler of Shanly’s class and nationality. At the very least, the relationship between the roles of master and servant is not as secure as might be suggested by wistful Romantic portraits of early Canadian life. The archaic elements of the poem, including the servant’s invocation of “Sancta Maria,” suggest adherence to a pious, feudal order, at least in the case of the servant. The master’s beliefs are even less clear, and Grace suggests that the poem’s tension derives from this uncertainty: “If there is a strong affinity between the story-teller and his ‘Master,’ then surely they will hurry and safeguard each other, but if they cannot agree about what has happened, then a struggle will occur and they may both succumb to the reality of the valley.”45 If the setting of the poem exists in the poet’s present, then the legend, while seemingly Indigenous, can never be entirely adopted by the master, except as an interesting piece of folklore, perhaps to be collected and appreciated by nationalists who are safe and warm in their own studies. At any rate, as the sun sinks, the power balance shifts to the servant, who not only knows and accepts the reality of the myth but also uses it to take control of the situation and subtly order the master to pick up the pace to ensure their safety. As Lord Edward Fitzgerald discovered, rank becomes meaningless in the Quebec woods; the guide, with his knowledge of both the terrain and its implied culture, holds the power of life and death over his employer,

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who must cede his own authority to survive. The English adoption of habitant garb and Indigenous methods of travel does not make this less the case. While the servant possesses intimate knowledge about the local lore and landscape that the master lacks, it does not make the world they travel through more welcoming. The servant’s audience, master and readers, have been “manipulated into accepting a construction of north that may or may not be true but is conveyed with the force of truth by the poem,” according to Grace.46 Coloured by the legend, the landscape, already hostile to settler life, is rendered even more terrifying by a supernatural and malevolent presence set on destroying human intruders. The wintry Canadian wilderness is presented as a place difficult to settle or even survive in. Comparing “The Walker of the Snow” to McGee’s “The Arctic Indian’s Faith” provides two vastly different Irish-Canadian views of politics and culture. Like Shanly’s ballad, McGee’s imagines a “spirit that walks unseen / Through our land of ice and snow” whose “presence and power we know.”47 “The Arctic Indian’s Faith” provides a Romantic portrait of “primitive” peoples’ intuitive grasp of the basic precepts of the poet’s own Catholic faith. In doing so, it presents the Canadian North as imbued by the benevolent presence of a God whom McGee imagines as providentially hanging moss on the trees to sustain his hardy northern creatures. To an Indigenous beholder, the spirit of the place is benign. This has a political import: McGee presents the religious values that he sees already embodied in existing cultures in Canada as evidence that Irish Catholics’ faith can be preserved in a Canadian landscape. In contrast, Shanly’s speaker is a settler who feels as if he is an intruder into a world possessing an existing cultural and spiritual “presence.” Consequently, the spirit that precedes him seems uncanny, unknowable, and therefore hostile. In the context of Shanly’s experience of rebellions in Ontario and Quebec, his wariness of Irish and French Catholics alike may colour his poem sufficiently to create a landscape and story that derives its power from its alien and unworldly qualities. Ironically, his portrait of a settler’s dissociation from the Canadian landscape and culture creates such a powerful emotional impact that over the next century and a half, the poem, along with the art and folk music it inspired in North America and Ireland, has come to be seen as quintessentially Irish Canadian. In spite of its Canadian subject matter, the poem is the product of Shanly’s new literary career in America. With the departure of the

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colonial government from Montreal after the union, Shanly was forced to move Punch in Canada to Toronto, where it folded in 1850. Shanly then contemplated a decision faced by many Canadian writers, and later satirized by Charles G.D. Roberts: “Soon you’ll leave your uplands flowery / Forsaking fresh and bowery fields, / For ‘pastures new’ – upon the Bowery!”48 While subsequent work such as “The Truant Chicken” understandably did not secure Shanly’s lasting fame in the same way as “The Walker of the Snow,” he helped found Vanity Fair and was a regular contributor to other significant intellectual and literary journals, including the New York Leader and the Atlantic Monthly.49 Shanly’s posterity seemed to rest as much on his reputation as a charming raconteur as author. His brother Walter wrote that his older brother possessed “an unconscious faculty of winning affection from all classes” and “a notable conversational gift”50 that soon won him a place among a congenial and bohemian New York literary coterie that met at the German cafe Pfaff’s, and included Walt Whitman among its members. There he developed a reputation as “a charming essayist and a graceful poet, quaint in character, sweet in temperament, modest and gentle in bearing.”51 In America, he was remembered as a scholarly Irish gentleman immortalized by one ballad that, like Moore’s “Canadian Boat Song,” ensured that the voyageur and explorer narratives would continue to represent Canadian ballad tradition at home and abroad into the twenty-first century.

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8 James McCarroll (1814–1892)

Much like earlier Irish writers, James McCarroll caught Canadian character most memorably in his reactions to the extreme Canadian climate, often conveying his amazement in dialect literature that was already popular in North America: “Ah! Mavourneen, I have been here in this cowld counthry for minny a long, long year; and this much I can say, that I niver yet saw in it what I could call a rale summer’s evenin wid the bewtiful, blue haze that the sun stained with cathedhral light as he lay on some far off goolden sand bank on the verge of the horizon. Oh! but this is the dhreadful place! Nine months winther, and three of cool weather, barrin an odd hot whiff from some ethayrial furnace or other, that’s no more like the rale thing itself than Joe Gould’s like Lord Brougham.”1 McCarroll’s fictional letters from an Irish-Canadian publican provide a fresh perspective on Canadian life. Like Shanly’s Signor Sullivani, McCarroll’s immigrant speaker burlesques the more polite literature of the time, puncturing purple passages and poetic diction with a more earthy wit couched in Irish vernacular and unconventional orthography. In doing so, the author’s alter ego, “Terry Finnegan,” uses his own amazement and bemusement to remind his readers of the unique culture and environment of Canada, sharing with Shanly and Dickson a fascination with the frigid Canadian climate. In spite of his complaints, McCarroll’s Finnegan concedes that winter offers some compensation. Where Lord Edward Fitzgerald was obsessed with learning to stay upright on skates, Terry Finnegan celebrates the romantic opportunities that come with a fall: describing the “goins on” at the local skating rinks, he claims that he can imagine no “plisanther place on the face of the whole globe,” nor any better

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pastime than “takin up fallin ladies wid a look of the deepest consarn … Surely you’ll say wid me … that a good dale of house-keepin will come of it” (32). (Just like the young men pursuing courtships under the cover of skating parties, McCarroll would find many opportunities to admire the female form in his poetry.) Like Shanly, McCarroll left Ireland with his family as a young man, settled in Canada, wrote for short-lived satirical magazines, and ­eventually found a place in the New York literary world. The son of Robert McCarroll, a shoemaker, militia sergeant, and military band member, he was born in Lanesboro, Co. Longford, in 1814, but raised in Co. Leitrim. While not as privileged as the Shanlys, the McCarroll family were also Church of Ireland and joined the professional, Protestant cohort taking up land grants in Canada when conditions worsened in Ireland in the 1830s.2 While Shanly was treated to the benefits of a full and leisurely education at Trinity, Continental travel, and art school, “Young McCarroll” gained only a basic classical education before “his schoolboy life was over,” according to the Canadian bibliographer Henry Morgan.3 In spite of his father’s more humble position in Irish Protestant society, McCarroll still enjoyed some privileges, including formal musical study with European tutors who, like the artistic Brocas family that mentored Shanly, had established schools in Ireland. Like the Shanlys, the McCarrolls also briefly enjoyed other advantages gained by living on the periphery of the Irish Ascendancy. According to Morgan, the aristocratic Cardens of Templemore “had evinced much interest in McCarroll’s family,” but Sir John Carden died before he could translate that interest into any social or material advancement for McCarroll’s father.4 Not surprisingly, the McCarrolls shared the Shanlys’ loyalist politics, and McCarroll may have joined the Orange Order in Canada at the beginning of his journalism career.5 Politically, though, he journeyed much further than Shanly from his family origins, concluding his Canadian career as a Fenian supporter. His cultural and political about-faces were as dramatic as those of the Irish-Canadian politician and poet Thomas D’Arcy McGee, whom McCarroll and Terry Finnegan closely observed in journalism and satire. As Michael Peterman observes in his biography of McCarroll, Leitrim was a remote county in the remote western province of Connaught and much less famous than other regions celebrated by Irish writers. Nevertheless, its history and culture reflected the profound changes shaping Irish society throughout the nineteenth century.

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Living in a mountainous, boggy, thin-soiled region, Leitrim’s Catholic tenants mostly relied on subsistence farming, regularly experiencing shortages and famines well before the Great Hunger of the 1840s.6 Its artisans fared no better when Leitrim’s linen industry mechanized in the 1830s. As a teenager, McCarroll would likely have witnessed suffering and poverty that would grow more intense in the mid-1840s, when the repeated potato crop failures depopulated his home county. Nonetheless, these poor and marginalized communities possessed a rich and distinct rural culture and folkways, which McCarroll warmly recreated in his humorous Terry Finnegan letters, his novels, and poetry. The Irish courtships he nostalgically recalls when in Canada are but one example of “the sheer energy and pursuit of pleasure evident in the daily life” of rural Catholic communities7 that were later extinguished by the famine, after which later marriages were encouraged. (The idealized and innocent dalliances McCarroll portrays gave way to a more repressed but pragmatic sexuality to the extent that the young rural Catholics in Ireland became viewed as “signally chaste” by visitors to Ireland.8) For the classically educated McCarroll, the rural Ireland of his childhood is instead a pastoral paradise with a titillatingly innocent enjoyment of sexual attraction. (“Kitty of Coleraine,” attributed to Shanly, takes a similar comic tack when a naive young man kisses a milkmaid to console her for spilt milk, triggering an epidemic of broken milk jugs throughout Coleraine.) Leitrim’s picturesque rural fields interspersed with lakes and rivers and antique ruins supplied the pastoral setting for this paradise. Leitrim was also Turlough O’Carolan’s home county.9 The blind harper was one bridge between traditional Irish and European classical styles, and McCarroll, a highly accomplished flautist, was adept in both. As Peterman observes, his musical contributions to the early cultural life of Ontario were as significant as his writing: in Canada, he accompanied visiting concert performers, organized concerts and recitals, financially supported other talented musicians, and in his reviews in newspapers introduced the concept of serious, critical evaluation of the arts, rather than mere promotion.10 McCarroll’s political views were also likely shaped by his youth in Ireland. Leitrim had been the site of intense political activism by the Emancipation and Repeal movements. Like Standish O’Grady, the McCarroll family could have simultaneously sympathized with the ills endured by the “chill peasant” while living in fear of the remedies

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administered by Captain Rock and other agrarian terror groups. In Leitrim as elsewhere, Daniel O’Connell held peaceful mass protests arguing for Catholic rights and then for repeal of the Union, but social injustices were just as often redressed by agrarian secret societies sending terrifying anonymous letters to landlords in the captain’s name. However, Captain Rock himself added to the rich folklore and literature of Ireland, most famously through Moore’s Memoirs of Captain Rock. Peterman speculates that Moore’s political satire may have offered McCarroll a literary model for criticizing the inequities and injustices perpetuated in Ireland.11 The style and tone of Moore’s satiric memoirs may have also inspired McCarroll’s early Canadian novel The New Gauger, an account of illicit poteen brewing that is a tribute to the resourcefulness and creative subversion of the oppressed. It may also reflect his desire that the Irish of different classes and sects be reconciled and work together.12 If his more conciliatory view of Ireland is shaped by his experience in Leitrim, the later savage indignation at the oppression of Ireland that he expresses in his novel Ridgeway (1868) can be traced to his experiences in Canada. Emigrating with his family to Peterborough in 1832, McCarroll tried a number of occupations, including shoemaker. In 1842, he became editor and then owner of the Peterborough Chronicle, which supported moderate Reform principles in Canada, including responsible government, and was patronized by one of the Reform Party’s Irish-Canadian leaders, Francis Hincks. McCarroll also supported the Durham Report’s call for more responsible government, even quoting its recommendations in the paper’s editorial section. Journalism allowed him to closely observe Reform politicians – some of them members of the Orange Order – negotiate conflicting demands of loyalty to Britain and more political independence for Canada. This likely taught McCarroll to appreciate the balancing acts required by politicians in the decade leading to Confederation. Politicians’ acrobatics, or “summersets,” and their occasional falls were relished by his ironic alter-ego Terry Finnegan.13 In 1846, a fire destroyed McCarroll’s printing office and bankrupted him, but in spite of this setback, he continued to contribute to Reform newspapers in Peterborough and Coburg, write political commentary and poetry regularly for local newspapers, and teach music wherever he lived.14 In 1849, his support of Francis Hincks was rewarded when he was granted a position in the customs office in Cobourg; such government positions became his primary means of support

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until 1863. An 1856 appointment in Toronto provided a wider arena for his musical and literary enterprises, and during this time, he completed and published The New Gauger and began another novel. Reversing the emigration narrative in Adam Kidd’s long poem, he sends a Huron chief to Ireland in his uncompleted serial, Black Hawk. Local papers regularly published his occasional poetry as well as humorous vernacular poems that he hoped to gather into an “Irish Anthology.”15 His humorous prose began appearing in the popular satirical magazine The Grumbler and in his own briefly published magazine, The Latch-Key. An early Irish supporter of McCarroll’s serious poetry also became his primary satiric target. In 1856, a New York–based Irish journalist, poet, speaker, and former revolutionary member of the nationalist organization Young Ireland arrived in Montreal. He had been invited by the city’s Irish-Catholic community to set up a liberal Catholic newspaper and represent the community’s interests as a politician. By the end of 1857, Thomas D’Arcy McGee supported Reform as a member of the Canadian legislative assembly, marking his gradual transformation from extreme republican to what David Wilson called an extreme moderate.16 McGee’s New Era argued presciently that Canada would need to foster an inspiring literature before it could become a great Northern nation. On 11 February 1858, the New Era reprinted McCarroll’s poem “Madeline,” which the editor introduced as coming from “the pen of a man of true genius.” A gentle romantic comedy, the poem demonstrated McCarroll’s talent for pleasing popular verse, but his approach to Irish poetry, like his approach to politics, was generally more earthy and pragmatic than that favoured by Romantic nationalists, as McGee would soon find out. Even so, McCarroll’s view of national identity remained closer to the views of Young Ireland than to the more adamant loyalism of Shanly. For instance, his bartender alter-ego Finnegan is familiar with Edward Hayes’s The Ballads of Ireland, a collection that, like Young Ireland anthologies, supported national revival through popular poetry (46). McCarroll’s reservations about Moore’s romantic idealism comes out in his tribute, “To Moore,” written in 1849. Like the Young Ireland movement, McCarroll admired the immense talent and the patriotic contributions of Moore, but not always his approach, at least when it avoided engagement with the realities of human nature. He satirizes Moore as “the boy that supposes / That love always lies on a shakedown of roses.” McCarroll saucily presents rural Irish lovemaking as

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taking place instead “On a wad of ould strhraw, with a dozen together, / And a different sint [scent] in the room!17 While obviously proud of his own classical education, McCarroll wished that the cosmopolitan “Anacreon” Moore would give way more often to the Irish Moore, “a voice celebrating the Irish imagination, be it in Ireland or Canada.”18 In Canada, McCarroll’s political and poetic foil McGee would continue Young Ireland’s program of nationalist historical ballads. Like Moore’s national poems, they presented a panoply of noble, aristocratic Celtic or Canadian heroes, partly as a corrective to the racist Irish stereotypes that originated on the English stage and continued in political cartoons in the nineteenth century. In contrast, McCarroll embraced many stage-Irish conventions. Shanly had readily availed himself of this stereotypical shorthand to make his political points in cartoons and essays in his satirical magazine, Punch in Canada. Likewise, McCarroll was not above employing such stereotypes when he thought that politicians were getting above themselves. Where Shanly mocked “Paddy” Blake, McCarroll took shots at McGee’s idealism, along with his tendency to identify more with the Irish middle class than the working-class Irish-Catholic constituents in his Montreal riding of Ste Anne’s.19 McGee’s alliance with the Globe editor and mp George Brown also made him an irresistible target as the two, an ultramontane Catholic and a prominent Orangeman, were forced to turn political “summerset[s]” (33) in order to present a united Reform front. In 1860, a crude caricature of McGee appeared in the Grumbler at the head of a poem lampooning McGee’s pretensions and ambitions. The poem was “almost certainly the work of James McCarroll,” according to Wilson20 and burlesqued McGee’s own poem, “God Be Praised,” which had appeared in his Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses (1858). The caricature features McGee wearing a battered Irish top hat, carrying a shillelagh, “in full dress as the General of the 300,000 Irishmen.” Where McGee’s poem asserts its speaker’s humility, the illustration (complete with Napoleonic pose) undermines it, while the parody suggests that McGee’s belief that he can maintain harmony among the diverging interests within the Reform Party and the country itself betrays delusions of grandeur: For love hath thy career been noted; Concord and peace hast thou promoted, Ever to union’s cause devoted – D’Arcy McGee.

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The poem goes on to warn against hubris, advising that McGee “take in time a warning … Quit then the ranks of an unequal war … If thou must shine be not a wayward star.”21 McCarroll was realistic about the likelihood of McGee and Brown’s alliance lasting in the face of the contentious school debate pitting Protestants against Catholics or the question of who should pay for the dismantling of the seigneurial system in Quebec.22 Generally, McCarroll targets McGee’s attitude and ideas rather than his Irish-Catholic background. In his view, McGee would need to set aside his idealism in both his poetry and politics if he were to represent Irish interests in Canada. A few years later, Terry Finnegan advised the politician to “beware of principle and consistency; for a divil a two worse brickbats a man ever carried in his hat” (37). Rather than encourage the reader to look down on rural or workingclass Irish, McCarroll’s depiction of Irish character is most often presented through “humour” of the “kind that laughs not sneers,” as Charles Lotin Hildreth later noted in his introduction to Madeline and Other Poems (1889). Stock Irish phrases such as “Arrah,” or calling Moore “the boy,” signal a colloquial, shrewd approach that McCarroll believed was more in keeping with the contemporary realities of Irish life in Ireland or Canada than were heroic depictions of patriots. Like Shanly, McCarroll employs both the Irish working-class persona and the distinctive, if contrived, brogue to provide ironic ambiguity and objective distance to the Canadian subjects treated. It may also have given him a degree of protection from retaliation, as a later American writer noted: “no one could sue … a comic Irishman.”23 As well as giving McCarroll a degree of plausible deniability for his more controversial observations, the stage-Irish brogue could accomplish in humorous prose what his contemporary Irish nationalists wished to achieve in poetry: create a literary voice that is “English in language without growing un-Irish in character,”24 a voice that would be applied to more serious purposes by Irish literary revivalists Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge. While McCarroll diverged in subject matter from Romantic nationalists, he still performed Irish uniqueness through his vernacular prose. His contention that the Irish in Canada were culturally distinct informed his view that, whether Protestant or Catholic, Irish voices must be heard in English Canada. McCarroll’s literary and political aims came together in the satirical “Letters” that he wrote to McGee in the guise of Terry Finnegan, McGee’s less respectable “lovin’ cousin” from Toronto. He may have

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drawn some of Finnegan’s character from life: in Toronto, McCarroll was good friends with Mike Murphy, a saloon keeper and later president of the Hibernian Benevolent Society, who had his own reasons for following Irish-Canadian politics closely.25 McGee’s idealism and high-flown oratory was frequently brought back to earth by his more pragmatic Irish cousin, whose sharp wit invariably cut political poseurs down to size. Terry Finnegan’s letters began to appear in various newspapers, and many were collected into a popular book, the Letters of Terry Finnegan, in 1863. After an introduction praising McGee as “a Statesman of broad and generous views, an Orator of transcendent abilities, and a Companion at once instructive, agreeable, and refined,” McCarroll stated that the letters aimed “to promote a knowledge of some of the peculiarities of the Irish Character among those who may not have had an opportunity of studying it in all its purity on the other side of the Atlantic.” He hoped they would provide “a spare half hour” of pleasure “on the part of such as are not the irrevocable victims of transcendentalism or sound common sense” (5). McCarroll valued Irish playfulness and fancy over more stolid and dull English mores, a distinction he would repeat in his later constructions of “Celtic” identity. While the “Irish Character” is mined for comedy, the letters also reinforce the notion of the Irish as being a distinct people contributing to Canadian society but always aware of their identity and their particular needs and concerns. Written from behind the bar in a fictional pub on Toronto’s notorious Stanley Street, the letters also intimate the less fortunate ways that some of the Irish in Toronto were distinguishing themselves, at least in the court sections of the popular press, where their mishaps made salacious reading. (Always protective of his community’s reputation, McGee decried court reporters’ practice of identifying plaintiffs’ nationality.) The news stories made Finnegan’s own accounts of policemen rendered unconscious with their assailants’ wooden arms appear plausible.26 The reality for the Irish-Catholic communities that crowded into Toronto – many from counties hit hardest by the famine, like Leitrim – was vastly different to McGee or McCarroll’s more privileged world. By intimating that inhabitants of Stanley Street were kin to McGee, McCarroll urged him to acknowledge the Irish community’s complexity and diversity when seeking political alliances. McGee’s relatively liberal-centrist position in the Reform movement reflected Canadian Victorian values that were challenged by what William Jenkins has identified as “the first significant and recognized

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minority – or, more accurately, ‘out group’” in Toronto’s history. In the wake of famine emigration, Stanley Street had become “synonymous with the poorest elements of the city’s working class of Catholic Irish birth,” the equivalent of America’s slum inhabitants who, to be fair, McGee had tried to assist through education and advocacy during his time there. The street became infamous during a devastating cholera epidemic in 1849, and by the 1850s, the neighbourhood’s population was at least fifty per cent Irish, with taverns such as Erin Go Bragh and the Erin’s Home Tavern attesting to the area’s cultural character.27 Finnegan would lose no money running a pub in this community, and members of his occupation also supplied the grease that kept the political wheels turning in the current capitol, Toronto, where John A. Macdonald, McGee, and McCarroll were only a few of the politicians and journalists known for their drinking capacity.28 McGee’s lovin’ cousin reminds the politician that his constituency of 300,000 Irish Canadians embraced more than just the sober and educated audiences for his public lectures. Living near Stanley Street, McCarroll was neighbour to members of the Irish famine diaspora, including those from his home county. Nevertheless, he may have hoped that through their memories of pre-famine life, they retained the lively, irreverent character that he captured in his letters. While McGee and other middle-class Irish may have winced at the popularization of the Irish brogue, it gradually came to be viewed less a symptom of Irish backwardness and destitution and more “the mark of the skillful and persuasive talker, the man whose good humour takes the sting out of his victory in any verbal duelling match.”29 In the hands of Finnegan, Hiberno-English becomes not only distinctive but also useful in cutting through the pretensions of Canadian political rhetoric. It could also be as effective as a cartoon caricature in succinctly delineating politicians of all nationalities and persuasions. For example, in commiserating with McGee’s political challenges, Finnegan describes Antoine Dorion as “that frinch thief … who was the first blue fly that lit on your mutton” (32). Moreover, Finnegan’s creator reserves the role of omadhaun or naive rustic for politicians like the Pennsylvanian-born Quaker Joe Gould, a more radical Reformer who had been briefly imprisoned for his role in the 1837 Rebellion. While McGee’s lovin’ cousin may face orthographic challenges (“This pen I have doesn’t spell well” (37)), he prides himself on classical knowledge that could have been acquired in Irish hedge schools in the early nineteenth century where even the poorest

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Irish might spare the few pennies it took to pay a schoolmaster, who would teach their children Irish history, geography, language, poetry, and even Latin and Greek. Combined with an existing oral culture, this education might mean a working-class Irish person like Finnegan could conceivably possess both limited written English along with a higher level of erudition in Irish and classical languages than more functionally literate but philistine English speakers. Finnegan, at least, has an ample store of Latin proverbs. Encountering the phrase “Ex pede Herculeum” (from his foot, we can measure Hercules), the innocent Gould hears “Ax Paddy Herculem … believin the same ‘Herculem’ to be a Kerry men [sic], whose opinions on politics were of a most unquestionable authority” (20). While McCarroll cannot resist employing the occasional Irish bull or blunder, he more often emphasizes Finnegan’s gifts for metaphor and shrewd observation. In so doing, he creates a self-deprecating and deliberately pragmatic political observer, but one who, like Synge’s Christy Mahon, is enchanted with the musicality and vivid turns of phrase that English as an acquired and modified language has given the speaker. Using the brogue as one marker of cultural distinctiveness, McCarroll also suggests that the Irish, regardless of their religious affiliations, share a unique world view and temperament. McCarroll is one of the few Irish writers who acknowledges the richness of Orange culture and its contributions to Canadian culture. As the son of a bandmaster, he appreciated its music, which for Irish loyalists provided an alternative source of patriotic lyrics, such as were collected in The Dominion Orange Harmonist (1876).30 Their common love of music aside, the Orangemen in the party are the Catholic McGee’s “natural allies,” if only because they help keep publicans like Finnegan afloat. “Sure if it was nothin else, there’s more dhrinkin min on the other side – bouchals that are able for yourself and Foley, and thats no joke,” he argues. McGee’s Orange compatriots are “often generous, whimsical, and unguarded,” less calculating than the “Clear Grit Prosbeteran” whose “opposition is clear, cool, deadly, and continuous” (15). This statement contradicts Finnegan’s previous astute observation that McGee’s alliance with the Orangeman George Brown will not work because he “can’t work John Knox and the pope wid the same string” (8). Nevertheless, McGee, who had family connections to the North of Ireland, both feared and respected the Orangemen, and he had tried to include them in his vision of Irish national character. McCarroll also believed that Irish of all persuasions shared a

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poetic and magnanimous temperament. Increasingly, though, he would distinguish the “Celts” from the colder and analytical “Anglo Saxons” as his own politics leaned more to republicanism. McCarroll’s sensitivity to the perceived differences in temperament among the groups trying to piece together a government made him also appreciate the distinct history and needs of the new country that was being created. Consequently, Finnegan dismisses McGee’s ­proposal, first articulated in 1858, that the new nation become “a Canadian sovereignty in the literal sense” by appointing one of Queen Victoria’s sons to become king of Canada.31 Finnegan argues that while Canada should maintain the British institutions that distinguish it from the United States, the country would not readily accept such a transplant. He notes, paradoxically, that Canadians “are by far and away two in depindint for anythin even approachin a monarchy altho the divil a sound day’s governmint we’ll iver have without one.” Canadians “would be all wanton to dine wid the king and shake hands wid him and would become so familiar wid royalty that it wouldn’t be worth tuppence as a sight.” Monarchies were for “ould countries,” with high populations and extreme social inequalities, “where the rich are very rich and the poor are very poor.” Getting Canadians to accept a British sovereign on their own soil, Finnegan concludes, would be as futile as milking ducks (67). Expressing his argument in an identifiable Irish idiom reinforces the connections between Canadian and Irish interests and suggests that McCarroll believes both countries should retain a skeptical and political distance from the implicit cultural assumptions behind imported forms of British government. Finnegan was able to prove this point when, apparently, he was invited to a gala in the Prince of Wales’s honour, which he describes to his cousin in a letter written in February 1863. (McCarroll was included in the delegations welcoming the prince to Toronto in 1860.) As they watch Canadian attendees trip over their swords while wearing their unfamiliar new “court dress,” Finnegan regretfully informs the prince that the tangled heap of limbs on the floor does indeed represent Canada’s government, to which the prince winks and replies in Irish, “Nabocklish” [don’t worry about it] (37). In a more serious vein, McCarroll reinforces the different political philosophies in Canada and England in a poem written for the occasion of the prince’s visit. Canada is represented as a peaceful state linked to Britain by loyalty rather than imperial conquest in “Lines Inscribed to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales on the Occasion of his visit to Canada.”

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In it, he emphasizes Irish contributions to Canada. Echoing earlier Patriot arguments that Ireland is a sister-kingdom rather than vassal, McCarroll argues that Canada possesses a similar attitude towards the British monarchy: For here are no strange people, swarthy, grim or wild. To pour their feeble homage at thy gospel feet; But the sturdy Saxon and the fiery Celtic child Hast’ning with cherished household words thine eager ear to greet. The Canadians greeting their future king consist of loyal descendants of the prince’s two kingdoms who are becoming a distinctive culture with a unique landscape characterized by “Cathedral woods / With mighty pillared aisles bannered with living green.32 As in Finnegan’s letter, Canadians consider themselves equals within an imperial system rather than subjects. (The poem’s independent spirit probably explains why it was not acknowledged when it was sent to the prince by McCarroll.33) Like other cultural nationalists, McCarroll portrays the Celts as possessing a long history of traditions and temperament that shape their identity and contribute to the character of the new country. Initially, McCarroll agreed with McGee that the distinct character of the Irish contributes to the strength of Canada and its role in the British Empire. While presenting his poem to the Prince of Wales in hopes of gaining more public recognition for his literary efforts, McCarroll continued to use his Irish dialect to depict the essential Irish contributions to both English and Canadian technological and economic advancement. As in the Finnegan letters, McCarroll’s use of dialect poems works well in emphasizing, in a humorous and pithy way, the distinctive and necessary Irish contributions to transatlantic progress. In “Impromptu On seeing the Balloon Europa Made of Irish Linen Just Ascend at Toronto, Canada to a Great Height on its Way to Boston,” McCarroll neatly sums up the transatlantic connections among Ireland, Europe, Canada, and the United States suggested by the flight that took place on 25 August 1859. Rather than portray it as populated by omadhauns and rogues, McCarroll likely recognized that Ireland, his home county of Leitrim included, was beginning to contribute to Ireland’s industrialization in the years since McCarroll had emigrated. In observing the balloon, McCarroll could see his country’s contributions from his home perch in Toronto.

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While Leitrim had been shaken by a transition to mechanized looms, McCarroll hoped that the linen industry itself could contribute to Ireland’s revival after the famine: Why! In commerce, ould Ireland, I’m glad you’re beginnin’ Just to hould up your head and to “never say die,” For, begorra, I’m sure that your beautiful linen Never went off before half so quick or so high. Oh! thin, won’t they be glad, from Coleraine up to Kerry, At its rapid and most unaccountable sale? And, machree, it’s no wonder they all should be merry, For to see that so much can be done by the Gael. (310) While Europe and the United States could be viewed as the cultural and economic leaders in the world, the Irish speaker’s brogue ironically undercuts that notion as the Irish, much lampooned for their backwardness, are the only source for the material necessary for the flight. Rather than be presented as the revenant of a dying culture, the Celts, this time characterized as “the Gael,” provide the one product needed by “Europa” for this public and literal demonstration of the rise of modern technology. At the time of ascension, no one could know that the balloon’s flight path delineated a pan-Irish geography that the Fenian network in Toronto, Boston, and New York would depend on. Less than a decade after publishing this poem, McCarroll would retrace the balloon’s flight path, becoming one of the American movement’s most eloquent Fenian apologists. As early as 1863, McCarroll was questioning McGee’s willingness to stand up for Irish rights, even as he continued to encourage him. He had Terry Finnegan congratulate McGee on his recently published magisterial history of the Irish, but reserved judgment on it. He noted that other reviewers admired the way that it winnowed out “the chaff,” the common anti-Irish biases that had “sadly be-husked our nationality and chronology,” to give “us but the plump round grain for our mintal [mental] stomachs.” However, he worries that if McGee hasn’t “given it right and left” to biased English historians or downplayed the damage of such oppressive measures as the Penal Laws, then “I’ll begin to think that the Council Chamber has made a Sassanach of you” (75). By 1863, McCarroll was beginning to see anti-Irish biases at work in the loss of his government position. His fall from fortune coincided with a dark time in McGee’s political life, as both ran afoul of the new

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reform leader, John Sandfield Macdonald. McGee also had new political rivals to contend with, since Reformers such as Francis Bernard McNamee were also influential Fenians who by 1862 were beginning to gain influence in Montreal and Toronto. Representing a very different nationalism than McGee’s, Fenianism in North America had evolved from the more revolutionary branch of Young Ireland, which McGee now saw as threatening to undo all the work that the Catholic Irish had done to prove themselves loyal subjects in Canada.34 His increasingly urgent public denunciation of the Fenians as they infiltrated Irish patriotic societies in Canada made him many enemies, and Fenian supporters in the Irish community and Canadian political circles did their best to undermine his political influence. His involvement in this and other Irish-Catholic controversies strained his relationship with Reform leader Macdonald, who began to treat McGee as a liability. By May 1863, McGee had resigned from the Reform Party and was running as an independent. He would eventually ally himself with the Liberal-Conservative John A. Macdonald.35 As a supporter of Macdonald, McCarroll too made no secret of his opinion of Sandfield Macdonald in unambiguously titled poems such as “Three Loaded Dice,” where he described him as “Shrivel’d ugly and hard – sharp, repulsive and thin, / with no body without and no spirit within.”36 While Macdonald benefitted from McCarroll’s attacks on his political enemies, it cost McCarroll dearly, given that he currently owed his government positions and patronage to Sandfield Macdonald. If McCarroll had rolled his own dice on the chance of Macdonald rewarding his political support when he came to power, then it was a bad gamble, as nothing came from the LiberalConservative leader’s repeated promises to find him a situation after he was fired from his customs position in 1863. Like Adam Kidd, whose own professional disappointments in Canada in the 1820s made him more sympathetic to the injustices visited on Ireland and the Irish in Canada, McCarroll began to view his mistreatment as analogous to the Canadian establishment’s treatment of Irish Canadians in general.37 McGee became less “wayward” a star when he became a minister in the new Liberal-Conservative government. Instead, it was McCarroll’s star that quickly set. Although McCarroll warned Macdonald that McGee’s attacks on Fenianism would lose the party Irish support, McGee continued to see the movement as a threat to

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the security of both the Irish community and Canada. The Irish revolutionary turned conservative Canadian nationalist became increasingly strident in his opposition to Fenianism in Canada and Ireland, whereas McCarroll gradually abandoned the notion of a Canada modelled on Britain to become “the poet of Canadian Fenianism.”38 It was, after all, members of this movement who supported McCarroll during his increasing financial distress in the 1860s. While Macdonald’s promises to an increasingly desperate and humiliated McCarroll came to nothing, he was helped by the pro-Fenian Hibernian Benevolent Society and the editor of the equally Fenian Irish Canadian to which McCarroll had contributed.39 When he moved to Toronto, McCarroll initially maintained cordial relationships across the Irish sectarian divide, befriending the Orangeman Ogle Gowan of the Toronto Patriot, the moderate Irish Catholic James Moylan of The Canadian Freeman, Patrick Boyle of the pro-Fenian Irish Canadian, as well as Mike Murphy, who became a leader within the Hibernian Benevolent Society.40 By 1865, Murphy was also the “head centre” of the Fenians in Canada, boasting that the organization had the support of 100,000 Irish Catholics in Canada.41 A new political home for “physical force” republicanism, the Fenians had established themselves in the United States in 1858. A veteran of the failed Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, James Stephens became the leader of the Ireland branch, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, while John O’Mahony founded the American branch, the Fenian Brotherhood. O’Mahony, an Irish-language scholar, chose the name because of its association with the legendary defenders of Ireland, the “Fiann na h-Eirenn,” as he called them.42 The organization was well funded by the Irish community in America, but also had significant support in Canadian cities and rural communities. While there were only 3,000 members in all of Canada, the organization had many “fellow travellers” through the wide circulation of papers such as the Irish Canadian. Moreover, as part of the larger American movement, these Canadian supporters had an “influence out of all proportion to their numbers.”43 Not surprisingly, McCarroll began to present the Irish-Canadian community as part of a larger international diaspora dedicated to freeing Ireland. In celebrating the balloon Europa, he had unwittingly traced the geographical range of the Irish Fenian network that he now believed would enable “the Gaels” to rise again to their proper status in the world. This sentiment was repeated more directly in McCarroll’s

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poem “Resurgam,” appearing on the first page of the first issue of Boyle’s Irish Canadian on the first day of 1863. “Resurgam” was the paper’s motto, accompanied by the image of a phoenix rising from the flames. Taking the motto as its theme, the poem alludes to Brian Boru, who repelled a Danish invasion and whose warriors propped up their wounded comrades during the battle. It invites Irish people, “no matter what … creed or clan,” to likewise come to the aid of Ireland. Reprising the image of living green banners from his poem addressed to the Prince of Wales, McCarroll now argues that support from Irish-Canadian communities would ensure that Ireland’s “drooping standard” of “emerald” will unfurl “O’er yonder sea of kindred sheen” and “mid-way meet,” an apt symbol of transatlantic co-­ operation. The speaker hopes that the Irish of North America will not forget their “pledge of countless glorious years” to help “the haughty Celt” to “stand erect / As once he stood in other days.” Where the Europa was a symbol of Ireland’s ability to “hould up your head” and to “never say die,” “Resurgam” argues more explicitly that Ireland’s resurrection requires the expulsion of a foreign invader. Many Fenians believed this new war would take place in a transatlantic theatre. McCarroll’s pairing of “Celt” and/or “Gael” with the unextinguishable essence of Irish culture is again the theme of “Bearla Feine,” a poem celebrating a culturally significant dialect of Old Irish. While the meaning of the term “Bearla Feine” was open to scholarly debate in the nineteenth century (some suggested “Feine” referred to the language of the Phoenicians), the phrase most commonly designated the dialect in which the Brehon Laws were written. McCarroll goes even further, suggesting that Irish was God’s language and that “the words that ushered in the primal dawn / Was the sublime command, ‘Biols lus awn’ [let there be light].”44 Even if many Irish knew only a few colloquial phrases in the aftermath of English conquest and ­famine, the Irish tongue is represented as an unstoppable river that fertilized Greco-Roman languages and – more significantly for McCarroll – English. He based his poem on the medieval history Lebor Gabála Érenn’s fanciful argument that the Old Irish Ogham alphabet was one of the first developed after the fall of Babel. Existing a thousand years before the “Saxons” developed their own “Furthoc” runic alphabet, the Irish language had “baptized” the Saxons’ “valleys, hills, and mountains” with “the royal impress of … Beith Lus Nuin [the first three Ogham alphabet letters].” Ancient Irish is “alone the key that opes the door / That guards the dungeons of their early lore” (97).

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Living on in both the roots of English and the living breath of actual Irish speakers, the language is portrayed as spreading along with the diaspora, a “gentle restless headlong world wide roamer,” the “priceless treasures of whose matchless lore / Like golden sands strew almost every shore” (96). Like other Irish historical poems, “Bearla Feine” is of course addressing the politics of the present. Departing from other philologists, McCarroll instead translates the phrase as “Ancient Fenian Celtic” (96). By this logic, in language and character, Ireland is essentially Fenian and separatist, supporting the argument that political separation would restore a nation that has existed almost as long as written language itself. As McCarroll’s republicanism increased, the cultural distinctions between Saxon and Celt became his rationale for Irish separation. In his pro-Fenian writing, McCarroll often pairs the long history of the Irish language and culture with a centuries-long recitation of the attempts of “ungrateful Saxon knaves and fools … to rob thee of thy ancient glory” (97). He presents the enmity between Saxon and Celt even more explicitly in the introduction to his 1868 novel Ridgeway, which views Irish-English relations as a “dark crucible of seven hundred years of famine, fire and sword.” Keeping with his resurrection motif, he argues that “notwithstanding that their altars, their literature and their flag have been trampled in the dust, beneath the iron heel45 of the invader, the pure, crimson ore of their nationality and patriotism still flashes and scintillates before the world” while the “fierce heart” of Brian Boru and his Dalglais men continue to beat in the heart of each Irish person.46 By 1865, McCarroll had openly identified himself with the Fenian movement, calling for the Irish to throw off the Saxon’s “degrading, vile fetters,” while giving Terry Finnegan “A New Song,” as well as a new name: “Terry Fenian.”47 That same year, McCarroll and Finnegan aligned themselves with McGee’s former brothers-in-arms in the Irish Confederation, made up of Young Irelanders who had rejected Daniel O’Connell’s “peaceful Agitation” in favour of the Fenian’s “vow to avenge the wrong / And swear their Isle must be a Nation.”48 Finally abandoning hope that Macdonald would assist him, McCarroll left Toronto for Buffalo in 1866 to give a concert and lecture and never returned. Instead, he became the editor of the Buffalo Globe, a pro-Fenian newspaper owned by the auctioneer Patrick O’Dea (sometimes spelled O’Day), a “fat fussy man” who was the head centre or leader of a wellfunded circle that supported John O’Mahony’s wing of the Fenians.49

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In early 1866, much to the alarm of O’Dea’s accountant Alexander McLeod, the auction house was rapidly filling with cases of guns, ammunition, and other surplus army supplies for an upcoming auction. O’Dea’s capacious cellars could also function as a drill room for two hundred men, whom McLeod noted were becoming increasingly proficient, going through military manoeuvres “as easy as if they were drinking a glass.”50 The accountant also paid close attention to a new arrival who happened to be a former acquaintance of his: a Canadian journalist and former customs officer and now “a prime Fenian” who “lectures among them on the weakness of Britain and Canada, etc.”51 The auction never took place. In June 1866, the arms, in the hands of the drilling men, crossed the Niagara River into Canada. In spite of intelligence by spies such as McLeod who had infiltrated the Buffalo Fenian centre, and in spite of the fact that the plans for the invasion were an open secret in the city, the Fenian invasion took the Canadian government by surprise. On 2 June, the Irish Republican Army, under the leadership of its general, John O’Neill, enjoyed its one victory at Ridgeway, Ontario, where it routed the poorly armed and inexperienced young recruits in the Canadian militia led by Alfred Booker and John Stoughton Dennis. However, the American government prevented subsequent reinforcements from crossing the border, and after O’Neill’s forces were compelled to retreat, they were taken prisoner by their own country’s army.52 O’Neill would be charged with violating American neutrality, and many of his followers spent an uncomfortable and humiliating three days on the deck of a barge turned prison ship, alternately baked by sun and drenched by rain. Nevertheless, the brief victory at Ridgeway was mined for symbolic purposes by the senate wing of the Fenians, becoming “a source of pride and inspiration for many Irish nationalists” in North America, as well as in Ireland, where McGee’s old journal the Nation wrote that the invasion “fills our people with tumultuous emotions impossible to describe, impossible to conceal.”53 When the American government released O’Neill in August, O’Dea organized a massive parade with bands and marchers in green caps and ribbons, along a route lined with 7,000 spectators, likely including McCarroll.54 Given the accuracy of detail in his historical novel on the battle of Ridgeway in 1868, it is possible that he had been there as well.55 Published under his Irish pen name, Scian Dubh (Black Knife), McCarroll’s Ridgeway: An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion

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of Canada combines his role as journalist and composer of romantic comedies, not entirely successfully. It shares many details with an early historical novel about the United Irishmen written by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, including a star-crossed couple, the abduction of the heroine by an English villain (this time a spy for the Canadian government), and a heroic young Irishman moved partly by romantic disappointment to join the rebels. McCarroll’s novel also features an IrishAmerican counterpart to Terry Finnegan, “Big Tom,” a Connaughtman who presides over a Buffalo pub named The Harp and offers political commentary in a pithy Irish vernacular. McCarroll also uses the novel to settle scores with the Canadian establishment, commenting on the political corruption he saw behind the loss of his customs job. He has his spy carry intelligence of the planned invasion to Macdonald, who for the duration of the crisis is too drunk to function, spilling liquor on state papers or lighting his cigar with them (100). The novel develops McCarroll’s notions of Irish cultural separateness in a political context. Taking Moore’s line, “On our side is virtue and Erin / on theirs’ is Saxon and Guilt” (i) as the epigraph to his novel, McCarroll again aligns Celticism with Fenianism, linking the current Irish-American movement to pre-conquest history and presenting the Anglo-Scots ascendancy in Canada as a continuation of England’s oppression of Ireland. In arguing for Irish separatism, he promotes American annexation for “the people of Canada, who “should long for a union with this Republic” or else remain “a frozen strip against the North pole” (144). In both North America and Ireland, the Fenians are presented as a unifying force. In expounding on the name given the organization by its founder O’Mahony, McCarroll refers to scholarship carried out by Patriot and Young Ireland cultural nationalists such as Charles O’Conor and Sylvester O’Halloran to model American and Canadian Fenians on the last unified military force Ireland possessed before having its power dispersed through “rebellious provincial kings and princes” and foreign invasion (69). To McCarroll, “Fenian” is a highly appropriate term, representing a historical period free of both sectarian division and English influence: “There seems to be nothing sectional in it. It is national in the broadest sense of the term, and primitive and forcible to intensity” (66). Like other cultural nationalists, McCarroll looks to the distant Irish “Celtic” past for a cultural symbol that could unify a nation politically and argues that the term “Fenian” places the current movement “en rapport with the great past of the nation which was the grand

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receptacle of its traditions and source of its pride” (71). Where once he had hoped that McGee’s history would promote nationalism, he now hoped the Fenian movement would encourage people to become “educated in the history and the wrongs of Ireland, as well as the extent to which England is indebted to that unfortunate country for all that she now is” (231). For McCarroll, like other nationalists, cultural scholarship that revises Irish history and restores its reputation can be the impetus for revolutionary action that begins with the “perusal of the annals of their country” (70). In a novel with few flashes of his characteristic humour, McCarroll is able to fire off one salvo of ironic satire. After the utter rout of the Canadian militia, its leader Colonel Dennis is “found in a hay-loft, shorn of his fierce moustachios, and endeavoring to imitate the Irish brogue, in the slouched caubeen and coarse, gray habiliments of some poor, plundered Son of the Sod” (242).56 In contrasting the AngloCanadian colonel-turned-stage-Irishman to the ancient warrior-hero represented by his Irish-American counterpart, the tables were duly and satisfactorily turned. McCarroll believed the brief success of the Fenian Colonel O’Neill would inspire nationalists to continue to fight for Ireland: “For the present, then, we bid him and his noble comrades adieu; hoping the next time we shall have occasion to refer to them, the power of England may be broken on this continent, and the green flag of Ireland floating over the Castle of Dublin” (249). Fenian supporters launched two final raids in 1870 and 1871, both of them failures. While considered a threat in Canada for another decade, the organization disbanded in America in 1880. McCarroll, like Shanly, eventually moved to New York and was able to make a living as writer, publisher, musician, and inventor until he died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-eight in 1892. During his time in America, he published his well-received collection, Madeline, and Other Poems (1889), as well as novels and plays, and was a director for the Robert J. Belford publishing company. He was also an inventor and, according to his obituary in the International Bookseller, possessed some “valuable patents” at the time of his death. Gliding over his more revolutionary activities, the obituary noted only that he had “a sojourn in Buffalo in 1866.”57 Like Shanly, McCarroll was a wellrespected member of the American literary community at the time of his death, but Canadians arranged to write him out of their literary history. D’Arcy McGee experienced a similar fate in Ireland, reviled and ignored there while his reputation as father of Canadian

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Confederation increased in the years following his assassination.58 The division between moral force and physical force factions in Young Ireland set its members against each other, just as Fenianism divided McGee and McCarroll. In spite of this, both were motivated by their belief that the work of cultural nationalists could unite Irish members of all faiths and classes. McCarroll had once protested to Macdonald, “I have always endeavoured to … smooth down the asperities existing between the Catholic, and the Orange body. I have done much in that direction.”59 Ironically, the Fenian invasions are popularly seen as helping unite Canada through Confederation, but McGee, not McCarroll, was one of the attending fathers at its birth.

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P art f i v e Young Ireland and Young Canada

On 1 September 1848, while Ireland was still in the grip of the Great Famine, Thomas D’Arcy McGee departed from Donegal on board the Shamrock bound for Pittsburgh. Like Adam Kidd, he fixed his parting gaze on the receding Irish mountains (this time the Derryveagh range) and composed a poem swearing ever to serve and love his homeland, or “die a dog’s death.” Unlike Kidd and other Irish-Canadian writers, he was not emigrating to escape poverty, unrest, or hunger, but literally escaping, having been on the run since July. That summer, the London Times had identified him as “one of the most dangerous men now abroad,” and there was a warrant for his arrest for high treason. Like Fitzgerald, he spent ­several weeks eluding officials (with several near-misses) before being bundled on board the Shamrock disguised – the story goes – as a priest. (The less romantic reality was that he travelled under an assumed name as a Maynooth student.1) He was fleeing the aftermath of another revolution designed to complete the work of 1798 but plagued with similar problems: bad timing and lack of coordination among its poorly armed and vastly outnumbered ­participants. As fifty years previous, the hoped-for support of an invading army from France proved a dream. Like Fitzgerald, McGee had suddenly found himself the leader of the planned revolution in the wake of a government clampdown that scooped up many of his fellow–Irish Confederates before the insurrection began in late summer. Like many United Irishmen who had begun as Patriots in the 1780s, he was originally a ­moderate, part of Young Ireland, an organization formed to support O’Connell’s Repeal movement. Their desired outcome was not

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revolution but the restoration of the Irish Parliament, a “new and improved 1782, rather than a replay of 1789 or 1798.”2 Repeating history, their politics became more radical in the face of the same type of British intransigence that had been so slow to grant ­concessions to Irish Catholics in Moore’s student years. This time, the trigger was the British response to the famine, a laissez-faire approach so callously indifferent in the face of widespread suffering that to many observers, McGee included, it appeared nothing less than genocide. At the same time, the overthrow of the king in France and revolutionary movements in England and other parts of Europe in 1848 convinced Irish activists that once again, England’s emergency was Ireland’s opportunity. Like many in the newly organized Irish Confederates, McGee pinned the success of their revolution on France’s going to war with England and ­providing Ireland with military support. But 1848 was not 1798, and in Ireland, events conspired as if to illustrate Marx’s maxim that history repeats itself as farce rather than tragedy. That the leaders were committed and deadly serious is inarguable, since McGee’s treason charge was punishable by death, and his colleague William Smith O’Brien was actually sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. (The sentence was commuted to transportation.) However, even as British indifference to the famine drove moderate Confederates into the republican camp, the organization was never able to overcome its own deep ideological rifts, let alone unite the Catholic clergy and opposing sects and classes behind the cause. Though hopes of support from France faded, the desperate situation in Ireland and their own increasingly ­revolutionary rhetoric meant the few Confederate leaders still at ­liberty felt honour-bound to carry out their plans, even with few arms or fighters. Inevitably, the revolution fizzled out during a siege at Mrs McCormack’s farmhouse in the Co. Tipperary village of Ballingarry. Subsequent reports that much of the skirmish took place in a cabbage patch made its failure particularly hard for the participants to live down.3 While not the best military strategists, McGee and many of his fellow–Young Ireland members ultimately proved to be exceptional statesmen, journalists, poets, and, most importantly, intellectuals. Their most enduring legacy was the program of cultural nationalism that had been developed and promoted by Young Ireland. As a writer and politician in Canada, McGee deliberately applied Young

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Ireland’s Romantic-inspired philosophy to the new country’s ­cultural life, coming to be seen both as Father of Confederation and Father of Canadian literature.4 His road from respected poet to revolutionary to Conservative cabinet member, back to respected poet and member of the Royal Irish Academy involved dizzying switchbacks. However, his core belief in a cultural revival that could unify different political factions, creeds, and ethnic groups remained consistent. While he quarrelled with other Young Ireland members, Orangemen, the Catholic clergy, and, ultimately, the Fenians who were blamed for his assassination in 1868, he remained friends with Young Ireland founders William Smith O’Brien and Charles Gavan Duffy and true to the memory of Thomas Davis, who best articulated the movement’s Romantic cultural principles. These principles were applied so faithfully by McGee in Canada that David Wilson argues that Davis, O’Brien, and Duffy could also be considered Fathers of Canadian Confederation.5 While McGee’s political star had been setting at the time of his assassination, the event provoked widespread outrage, mourning, and a renewed sense of national unity. The Irish writer and publisher Mary Anne Sadlier helped construct McGee as a romantic national martyr whose youthful patriotism could be transmuted into a new nationality. According to Sadlier, he “died as he had lived, loving and serving his mistress Ireland as a true knight. His last writings were for Ireland; his last words for the peace and unity of his adopted country the New Dominion of Canada.” Quoting from Henry Clarke’s biographical sketch in her prologue to McGee’s ­collected poems, she emphasized McGee’s role as public intellectual: “his life-labors stand forth as an example worthy of emulation to future millions.”6 McGee’s close friend John Reade also continued to honour McGee’s memory as a patriot-intellectual. Reade became a popular poet, scholar, and literary critic whose influence was felt in Canada into the early twentieth century. To him, the best way to redeem McGee’s violent death at the dawn of Confederation was to unify disparate communities in Canada. McGee’s death was also the impetus for a new political and ­cultural movement, Canada First, founded in 1868 by five young writers and civil servants after an earlier “accidental meeting” around the time of McGee’s assassination in 1868.7 In life and death, McGee exerted a powerful influence on these men: the writer and bibliographer Henry Morgan had published a collection of

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McGee’s speeches, and George Denison, a soldier active during the Fenian invasion of 1866, had attended McGee’s funeral in Montreal.8 The poet Charles Mair was determined to take up McGee’s challenge to the young men of the nation to create a uniquely Canadian nationalist poetry. The group also included ­lawyer William Foster and Robert Grant Haliburton. Haliburton’s speech, The Men of the North and Their Place in History elaborated on the vision McGee had of a great northern nation. Canada First members’ distaste for the divisive party politics that had characterized pre-Confederation governments was reflected in their brand of cultural nationalism. Like Young Ireland and McGee’s cultural programs, it attempted to overcome sectarian, political, and ethnic differences to create a distinctive “new nationality” by celebrating the contributions each ethnic group made to the nation as a whole. Irish writers associated with Canada First and other cultural nationalist programs negotiated cultural and political tensions in various ways. Keenly aware of the damage wrought by sectarian conflict in his home country, Reade, an Irish-born poet and scholar from the North of Ireland, took up his friend McGee’s challenge to unify religious and ethnic communities by revealing their ­common interests through scholarship, history writing, and ­patriotic poetry. Like McGee, he acknowledged the cultural ­contributions of Irish, French, and Indigenous communities, using precedents from English history to show how a nation’s people and character are formed from past migrations, invasions, and ­integrations.9 He also employed McGee’s elastic concept of “The Celt” as a way of describing the unique flavour that Irish writers had brought to English and Canadian literature. He looked to the history of French Canadians for inspiring images of heroism and patriotism for Canadian readers and encouraged interest in Canadian literature in French.10 Although a Protestant, he continued the Romantic presentation of Canadian national identity as similar to rural, Catholic Ireland, characterized by closeness to the land, simple piety, and a rich folk culture of song and legend that could already be found in Irish, Indigenous, and French-Canadian culture. Like McGee, he encouraged scholarship that would uncover and preserve the orature that already existed among French-Canadian, Indigenous, and Métis communities. Unlike McGee, however, his rhetoric ultimately fit the more imperialist and assimilationist programs promoted by Canada First in the period of westward expansion following Confederation.

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9 Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825–1868)

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s hasty departure for America in 1848 was not his first trip to the country. In 1842, at the age of seventeen, McGee and some of his siblings had emigrated to America after his father remarried, settling with an aunt in New England. As part of the great pre-famine migration to the United States, McGee’s early life illustrates the transatlantic nature of Irish nationalism: his activities within the Irish community in Boston would shape his cultural views as much as Young Ireland.1 The teenage McGee soon gained fame for his precocious and antiBritish Fourth of July oration delivered to the Boston Repeal Association and he was asked to join the Boston Pilot as a subscription agent. The job allowed him to take up speaking engagements throughout New England in support of O’Connell’s Repeal movement. By nineteen, he was the paper’s editor. His editorials continued to call for Ireland to be recognized as a nation and defended Irish Catholics against anti-immigrant movements such as the nativists. He also supported adult education, establishing associations and reading rooms that would enable Irish Americans to learn about their history and literature, instilling the pride that cultural nationalists argued was the first step towards civic engagement.2 Similar projects would be at the centre of the Young Ireland cultural movement. Since the diaspora crossed borders, he observed Canadian politics with interest, seeing parallels between reformers’ demand for responsible government and repeal in Ireland. He even met Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan at a repeal convention in New York.3 Canada would continue to provide analogies for his arguments until he moved to Quebec in 1857. By 1845, when he was barely twenty, McGee was not only the editor of an influential Irish-American paper but also a published novelist

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and poet dedicated to “national subjects.”4 That year, he moved back to Ireland to become a reporter for the Freeman’s Journal, originally founded by Patriots and supporting repeal of the Union in the 1840s. In 1846, he was assigned to London as a parliamentary reporter covering a more mundane repeal: that of the Corn Laws. Unlike Standish O’Grady, McGee was able to witness first-hand the wrangling of Robert Peel with O’Connell’s “tail” and the 100 Irish mps.5 This was an important though often dull assignment, but it gave him ready access to the British Museum, where he had the opportunity to research antiquarianism and Irish history. When in Dublin, McGee was able to meet some of the scholars whose translations and catalogues he consulted in the British Museum. He was quickly accepted into a diverse Irish scholarly, artistic, and political community that included antiquaries and their Ascendancy patrons and the more liberal Catholic and Protestant nationalists who supported repeal politically but situated their cultural activities within the wider philosophical framework of the European Romantic movement.6 During the 1830s, the first group had actively contributed to the second Irish revival that began after union. The more conservative among them saw their work as helping defend Irish political interests yet distanced themselves from the 1798 revolutionaries. Their aim was to nurture an interest in Irish history, music, and poetry in order to “attach the ascendancy firmly to the Irish soil.” Conservative revivalists such as Samuel Ferguson identified themselves as “patriotic unionists” who wished to politically engage the Ascendancy in working for Ireland’s advancement by giving them reason to identify as Irish and feel pride in this connection.7 Ferguson, incidentally, considered McGee as “foremost of the Young Ireland poets,” even more accomplished than Thomas Davis.8 The scholars, translators, and antiquarians associated with this revival profoundly influenced McGee’s recognition of the interdependence of scholarship and artistic expression in nationalist movements. George Petrie (1790–1866) helped administer the Royal Irish Academy and carried out meticulous and accurate archaeological research into Bronze Age and medieval sites. His paintings of them attempted to express the country’s character in a manner complementary to “our exquisite and strongly-marked national music.” Irish historian John O’Donovan (1809–1861) and antiquary Eugene O’Curry (1796–1862) carried out exhaustive historical surveys of Irish place names, topography, social history, and archaeological remains. When McGee did

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his research in the British library, he had benefitted from the painstaking work of O’Curry, who catalogued and translated many of the Irish manuscripts in its collection. The scholarly reconstruction of Ireland’s past, reimagined through Romantic art, was an attempt to make it a “living reality in the present.”9 Thomas Davis, one of the founders of Young Ireland, observed that the outcome was revolutionary, even if the scholars were not.10 Where O’Connell’s movement, popularly referred to as “Old Ireland,” concerned itself with economic reform and parliamentary influence and Young Ireland with reviving a sense of civic responsibility, intellectuals, in McGee’s mind, formed a “third party,” feeding the Irish pride that steeled the Irish legislators. When Petrie, Donovan, and O’Curry died in the early 1860s, since McGee had committed himself to his new country, their example continued to be relevant in Canada, just as his “love and admiration” remained fresh in his memory on hearing of their deaths. The elegies he composed in their honour reinforced the importance of intellectual work at a time when he was employing it in the service of what he hoped would be a new northern nation.11 Through his work for repeal, McGee met Young Ireland founders Thomas Davis (1814–1845) and Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903). He did not make the best first impression: Duffy found his approach too deferential and his appearance slovenly, and the upper-class Protestant Davis was put off by his American manners and wished that McGee had been less determined to “transact an acquaintance” with him.12 (That there were these subtle social tensions says something about Young Ireland’s willingness to at least attempt to bridge class as well as sectarian divides.) Nevertheless, both men shared McGee’s views on Irish culture and cultivated his obvious talents and intellect. His manners aside, McGee’s experience in America made him a useful recruit; in overcoming barriers of distance and time in order to preserve Irish cultural connections for recent emigrants, he had learned skills that would help in a nationalist revival closer to home. One place where Duffy and McGee found common ground was their respect for the unique culture of the North of Ireland. Duffy, a Catholic born in the Ulster county of Monaghan, had edited the Belfast Northern Herald, founded by United Irishman Charles Hamilton Teeling. Not surprisingly, his early patriotism “was kindled by stories of 1798.”13 Recognizing the emotional and didactic powers of poetry, he continued the United Irish practice of setting new patriotic lyrics

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to traditional tunes originally favoured by faction fighters.14 Like Kidd, both Duffy and McGee appreciated the province’s ancient Catholic and Gaelic roots while respecting and fearing the formidable influence of Orangeism and admiring the more liberal and radical northern United Irish founders. McGee never forgot his own family’s United Irish and Ulster roots. He was born in Carlingford, near the border of Co. Down and within view of the Mourne Mountains, and spent part of his childhood on the northern coast of Co. Antrim. David Wilson identifies the McGees in this region as survivors of a massacre carried out by Protestants at Islandmagee in 1641, kept alive for McGee through stories he was told “while at home by old men,” and through his sense that the blood of the survivors “flow[ed] in his veins.”15 (Even if, as Norman Vance speculates, the McGees were on the other side of the conflict through “one of the Scottish soldiers … [who] came out with General Munroe’s army in 1642,”16 it would demonstrate how invaders and settlers could gradually be transformed into the most ardent nationalists, something McGee would argue was possible in Canada.) McGee’s family history helped him understand how the seemingly distant Irish past could remain imaginatively alive in the present. Given his roots in the region, “McGee took Ulster seriously” according to Vance,17 ever aware of how it shaped his own identity as well as Irish scholarship and culture. Even when he became a politician closely identified with his Irish-Catholic constituency in Quebec, his respect for the North likely served him well in a new country significantly shaped by Ulster emigrants. In observing the alliances that McGee made with Orange politicians, James McCarroll intuited early on that the shared northern culture meant they had more in common with each other than with English-Canadian politicians. McGee’s mother’s family included United Irish supporters,18 and McGee wrote in the “long shadow of 1798,” according to Vance, who argues that he, like Moore, should be considered a “United Irishman of the nineteenth century.”19 Within the larger program of uncovering Ireland’s history, McGee often tried to introduce the rest of Ireland to Ulster and Orange culture through poems such as “Apostrophe to the Boyne,” “The Man of the North Countrie,” and “No Surrender.” The North also inspired one of McGee’s earliest sustained artistic efforts, Eva MacDonald (1844), much of it set in the Glens of Antrim, the Antrim Coast, and Belfast. It attempts to rehabilitate Wolfe Tone, Edward Fitzgerald, and Robert Emmet as figures who would “illuminate

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the path of men who would dare emerge from the darkness of slavery.”20 Its hero closely resembles Fitzgerald. A love-crossed nobleman who trades his title for the honorific “Citizen” after meeting Wolfe Tone in Paris, Sir Cahir O’Dougherty is by turns charmingly innocent and deadly: his main talent is duelling, but though he had wounded “several German Grand Dukes … [and] actually shot an Italian Count, a Spanish Count of Talavera, and a couple of French Marquises,” he had “not one particle of malice in his breast.”21 He enjoys a happier ending than Fitzgerald when he rescues and marries his beloved, leaving the radical politics of the United Irishmen behind him. The novel also features a character and plot detail so “preposterous,” that McGee admits as much in a footnote. Nanny of the Cave is a superannuated Celtic eccentric, part sybil, part sweet-shop proprietor, who, true to her name, lives in a cave on the Antrim Coast. She remembers witnessing family members ride off to fight Cromwell as a girl but is still reporting for shop duty in the early nineteenth century, far surpassing Dennis Hempson and other centenarian Ulster performers in longevity. (McGee rationalizes this by observing that “life in a limestone rock is less wracking” than life on the stage.22) As in other Irish novels attempting to project Ireland’s seemingly anachronistic yet relevant cultural past into the present, Nanny’s advanced age provides a necessary symbolic function. Like Kidd’s portrait of Hempson, Nanny represents oral and folk culture as a living force in the present, as she is seen at the end of the novel dispensing sweets and family history to the Irish-Scots and Catholic-Presbyterian children of Eva and her cousin. While admittedly an exaggerated example, Nanny still illustrates how oral history, transmitted from living generation to living generation, has the effect of compressing time, making Irish resistance to Cromwell’s invasion and the events of 1798 appear merely “a handclasp” away from the activities of repealers, to borrow a phrase from the contemporary Irish-Canadian novelist Peter Behrens. While an apprentice work, McGee’s novel looks forward to his Irish and Canadian poems that attempt to bring each country’s history and culture to life in an emotionally immediate way in order to unify dispersed immigrant groups. McGee’s mentor Duffy likewise attempted to educate Irish readers about their political responsibilities through their history and culture. In Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, he recalled how the movement relied on a growing Irish-Catholic professional class, “a generation issuing from college, and from the National schools, and

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gathered into the temperance societies,” whom Duffy hoped would be “a fit audience for lessons of more informed and generous patriotism.” This aim was made explicit in the Nation’s motto: to create and foster public opinion in Ireland and to make it racy of the soil.” The phrase “racy of the soil” appears in different forms and context throughout Young Ireland cultural theory. According to Duffy, the quotation originated as a retort to Robert Peel, who had asked how more local government could be pertinent to a country as impoverished as Ireland. It would “go far to create and foster public opinion and make it racy of the soil,” replied the Catholic-Irish exchequer, Stephen Woulfe. Duffy defined “racy” as “the peculiar flavour of the soil from which it [a work of literature] had sprung,” a notion in turn derived from a quote by Macauley.23 The phrase was a fitting epigraph for a paper following a cultural program intending to reacquaint a colonized people with both self-governance and their own distinct culture. It upheld Herder’s concept of a nation as organic, having roots in a specific place and contributing biological diversity, as it were, to the garden of nations. Duffy shared his views about literature and nationalism with Davis, a Protestant whose own intellectual work articulated Young Ireland’s cultural nationalism within the greater European Romantic tradition. Most of his biographers believe that Davis made a continental tour in the late 1830s and was widely read in contemporary French and German literature. These provided models for contemporary Irish literature, as well as offering views of Ireland from a continental, rather than English perspective. Davis and other writers contributed articles on continental philosophy, literature, and historiography to the Nation.24 Like Duffy, Davis defined literature and popular culture with a distinctive national character as “racy,” as in his praise of the French patriotic poet Beranger, who set his own patriotic lyrics to existing folk songs, expressing through “the raciest choruses, in simplest idiom, … every popular thought and passion.”25 In following other Romantic critics in arguing that the most enduring poetry derived from a simple, “authentic” folk culture, Davis was also able to imply that Ireland already possessed this rich and distinctive national resource. In this respect, it was more fortunate than England, which needed to borrow “the gay songs of Ireland and Scotland” to revitalize its own literature. Through McGee, the concept of a national literature that was “racy of the soil” would be imported to Canada. These criteria first guided his poetics and his selection of poems in

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Canadian Ballads (1858). The concept eventually found its way into both the literary criticism and the poetics of the Confederation school, as Bentley has demonstrated.26 French and German philosophy contributed two important ideas to Young Ireland cultural nationalism: the liberating power of historiography and the uses of the historical ballad. Writing in the Nation on 26 November 1842, Davis described the approach of liberal French historian Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), a supporter of the 1830 French Revolution who had written a sympathetic account of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and who argued that history must include more than just the perspective of rulers and colonial governors. To Young Ireland nationalists, his method of creating vivid and affecting narratives challenged hierarchies by illuminating events previously viewed “confusedly at the bottom of the histories of the European monarchies.” In addition to inspiring Irish historians and poets to write from a populist perspective, Thierry’s retelling of history as compelling stories became a useful model for Davis, who argued that Irish history needed to be not only accurate but also compelling enough to be “the purifier and protector of tradition, the basis of fiction, and the arsenal of the song writer.”27 German Romanticism offered a way to make literature “racy of the soil” by drawing its traditions and forms from folk culture, especially oral history, folk tales, and ballads. McGee frequently appeals to [Friedrich] Schlegel in both his Irish and Canadian writing on national literature. Writing in the New Era on 17 June 1857, he called for a Canadian literature to be established even before Confederation, and paraphrased Schlegel’s dictum, “no national literature, no national life.” The relationship among poetry, a nation’s history, and a nation’s character was made more explicit in Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern (1822). For Schlegel, literature, “the epitome of all the intellectual capabilities and progressive improvements of mankind,” preserved the defining elements of a distinct culture. A people with “a national poetry of their own” would possess “the consciousness that they have been illustrious in ages that are gone by.” Schlegel’s Lectures also defined history as a people’s “national consciousness, expressing itself in works of narrative and illustration.”28 His writing emphasized the ways in which a national poetry could bring national lessons from history to life in the present, inspiring a patriotic pride that would guide citizens’ current civic duties, a concept that was eagerly taken up by Young Ireland.

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The connections Davis, Duffy, and McGee draw between national history and poetry also have their roots in Schlegel’s assertion that poetry helps preserve the chronicles and culture of a people from “oblivion.” As Schlegel observed, a historical chronicle was not “worthy of our attention unless the spirit of the nation has been such as to communicate its interests to those undertakings.”29 Consequently, Davis, who often paraphrased Schlegel, argued that poetry and history were complementary: a culture “without a knowledge of the country’s history”30 and “without its national poetry” is condemned to “hopeless dullness or … utter provincialism. National poetry … binds us to the land by its condensed and gemlike history.”31 Their members’ reading of Schlegel likely influenced Young Ireland’s decision to call their earliest literary anthology The Spirit of the Nation. Like Herder, Schlegel felt that a nation’s oldest and most enduring poetry conveyed its essential identity. He cited Greek and Hebrew verse as examples of how an eternal “national” spirit could be conveyed through a culture’s literature into the present. Herder had seen an equally enduring national spirit evident in the writings of the Irish poet Ossian. Consequently, among the many groups that made up modern Ireland, national poetry often emphasized the traditions of the Bronze Age “Celtic” period. In his introduction to The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, Duffy argued that the Celt’s culture contained the essential Irish identity: “The Irish or Celtic identity has not changed since Caesar’s time, due to a ‘strange tenacity’ in the Celts.” Drawing on the work of Petrie, Donovan, and O’Curry, Young Ireland writers could argue that Ireland possessed a culture that, through its longevity, was the equal of Greek and Hebrew culture, the model and inspiration for so much English poetry. By arguing that Ireland possessed a Celtic culture of great sophistication and longevity, Young Ireland could rehabilitate a term often associated with savagery, backwardness, or rebelliousness. To Duffy, the Celts were not barbarians but rather “a highly sensitive and poetic people.”32 McGee’s writing and rhetoric also presented Celtic culture as a distinctive and essential strand in Irish identity. Behind McGee’s evolving notion of Celtic lies both the recovery work of antiquarian scholars and a didactic purpose. His poem “The Celts” not only reminds readers of the glory of their past but also reinforces the central role that poetry plays in a culture. Consequently, “The Celts”33 is intended to reinforce the cultural values of the present. McGee wrote this poem in America after his political exile, making

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it, like “Salutation to the Celts,” a message of cultural endurance particularly relevant in the face of Irish political failure and continued diaspora. It is not so much a history lesson as a didactic illustration of the nature, function, and necessity of cultural nationalism. The Celts and their culture are shaped by a sublime landscape characterized by “wind and waves,” two forces that convey divine messages or power in Hebrew and Greek poetry as well. Described as “Western Shepherd seers,” they are aligned with the Greeks and, more importantly, the Hebrews, another spiritual people with a long history of subjugation and dispersal but possessing a culture that not only resists eradication but also becomes a pillar of current civilization. As in much of his writing about nationalism, McGee’s poem downplays the Celts’ legendary military prowess, choosing instead to focus on their poetry. The Goddess Bride is presented in the poem as an epic muse, described as “the goddess of philosophers and poets,” “their queen of song,” to whom “they pray’d with fire-touch’d lips.” The fact that the Bride is the daughter of the sun god and fires the eloquent prayers of the faithful further links religious and poetic inspiration as central to their culture. Duffy had made a similar argument about the connection between poetry and the moral and spiritual values of a people when he had argued that poetry was the “sister of religion.”34 Consequently, Young Ireland looked to not only the ancient Celtic past but also the cultural contributions of more recent settlers, making Ireland’s literary and historic diversity easily available to Irish readers through a highly influential and widely distributed book series. Originally intended as a collection of accessible histories, the series, entitled the Library of Ireland, contained a significant part of Young Ireland’s intellectual work, made accessible to all classes of Irish by Irish publisher James Duffy. His interest in providing edifying and affordable material for a Catholic readership helped build an Irish audience for Young Ireland scholarship.35 Published between 1845 and 1847, the Library of Ireland series originated from Davis’s call for an affordable Irish popular history, but eventually came to include all the things that McGee would consider a nation’s essential “mental outfit”: collections of ballads, folklore, literary anthologies, literary criticism, essays, and novels on Irish subjects. Through reprints and distribution, Young Ireland’s literary and historical work had a wide influence in America, Australia, and Canada well into the 1870s. McGee’s contributions to this series reflect Davis’s interest in revolutionary historiography as a means of challenging stereotypes and

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recovering lost stories that provide insight into Irish identity in the present as well as the past. As McGee argues in the preface to A Memoir of the Life and Conquests of Art Mac Murrough, “History is the grand court of Posterity. To it the calumniated in life and the hunted unto death, appeal.” McGee’s first contribution to the series also reflected his own lifelong interest in recovering the intellectual contributions of the Irish. Consequently, his collection of literary biographies, The Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century (1846), reinforced the series’ ultimate aim of colonial resistance: creating Irish biographies and histories in the face of oppressive measures that had rendered them obscure or forgotten. Where McGee’s British Museum research allowed him to imagine a Celtic paradise before the “fall” of English conquest, his discovery of forgotten scholarship of the seventeenth century allowed him to find intellectual affinity in a more unstable but intellectually exciting era.36 Just as McGee had used Nanny of the Cave’s eyewitness recollection of the 1640s to establish emotional continuity between seventeenth-century resistance, the United Irish movement, and repeal, he drew on seventeenth-century scholarship to provide intellectual ancestors for the present movement.37 McGee offered his brief lives of seventeenth-century writerscholars as currently relevant examples of how to write from a “native point of view,” as a counterbalance to the many negative accounts by English historians.38 Focusing on the seventeenth century, an era full of conflict that was nevertheless a prelude to “the birth of nationalism” in the eighteenth century, McGee’s inclusive history celebrated the intellectual accomplishments of both Protestant and Catholic scholars as a reminder of the contributions that Irish intellectuals from all backgrounds made to Irish and European thought, especially in history and theology.39 More importantly, it recognized the indefatigable and essential labours of intellectuals during a time of political turmoil. Keeping with the explicit, formative aim of Young Ireland anthologies, which determined what works were suitable in guiding their readers’ nationalist views,40 McGee is not simply curator but gatekeeper, deciding which intellectuals “are fit men to be commended to the acquaintance and confidence of our descendants.”41 He chooses individual writers whose lives and activities have parallels with the Young Ireland movement. As he would later do in Canada, he presents intellectuals as heroes and patriots, inviting readers to consider “what courage is in their industry, what patience, what pains!” He uses their persistence to encourage present-day nationalists who might consider

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themselves labouring under similar conditions: “No sympathising public cheers them on. The very name of ancient Ireland and Catholic Ireland has grown hateful … Through the spring, and the summer and the harvest time they toil.”42 McGee’s biographical sketches also revived interest in writers whom he viewed as the “custodians of popular tradition” that was “preserved in the tongue of the people, sung in their songs … stored in their writing,” and without which no national identity could be achieved.43 His book provides a historical example of the necessary collaboration among classes and religions that brought together popular culture, folk tradition, and scholarship in order to keep a sense of distinct identity alive. As historian and poet, McGee encouraged such collaboration to the end of his life, reflecting Hutchinson’s definition of ­cultural nationalism as a program of research and creative work. By creating continuity between writers and artists of the past and present, cultural nationalists would uncover and reveal the character of a people for a national audience.44 Moving his study of the intellectual underpinnings of nationalist thought back into the seventeenth century allowed McGee to make the argument that contemporary cultural nationalism, and presumably the achievement of independence, depended on the centuries of intellectual work that preceded it. The presence of so many Irish historians also meant that his work was as much historiography as biography.45 McGee reprised this argument again in the introduction to his memoir of Art MacMurrough, writing that the ultimate purpose of such histories was to “teach all their readers that the Irish nation was, in its essence and intellect, different from the English.46 While Young Ireland saw history as a way to educate the common people about their rights and responsibilities, it was even more effective when used to stock the “arsenal of the song writer.” Young Ireland adopted the strategy that had worked so well for the United Irishmen – setting nationalist poems to traditional tunes – grounding its goals in the aspect of Irish culture that many believed best reflected Ireland’s unique character: its music.47 Like earlier nationalist papers, The Nation published patriotic poems, and by 1843, the editors had enough patriotic poetry to fill a book, The Spirit of the Nation, which was a popular success that went into many reprints. The writing of history and poetry are constantly bound together in the Nation’s cultural program, particularly in historical ballads. In Davis’s view these created an intimate link between Irish people and their history

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by making it “familiar to the minds, pleasant to the ears, dear to the passions, and powerful over the taste and conduct of the Irish people in times to come.”48 Young Ireland members believed the popular ballad could engage all classes politically. Even when written in English, the ballad had a long association with regional loyalties and nationalism, as Duffy had learned in his own home county. In order to provide material that inspired patriotic sentiments in young contemporary writers, Duffy advised them to look at earlier examples of ballads, conveniently collected for them in The Ballad Poetry of Ireland. He encouraged poets to contribute modern Irish ballads, a form unknown to “Celtic Ireland,”49 which he described in the preface’s collection as “chastened and elevated by modern art, but equally indigenous, and equally marked with a distinct native character.” He offered AngloIrish ballads as models with an idiom “as easily discriminated from London English as the dialect of Saxon spoken in the Lowlands of Scotland … It is a dialect fired with the restless imagination, and coloured with the strong passions of our nation … They have taught the native muse to become English in language without growing ­un-Irish in character.”50 Such ballads were published in the Nation but also gathered into anthologies published by the Library of Ireland, intended to reacquaint Irish readers with historical, literary, and popular culture. The selection and preservation of particular writers and texts in anthologies had a nationalist aim: as Duffy observed, “What poets they shall read and love, is no unimportant question; very much the contrary.”51 According to Anne MacCarthy, anthologies were a particularly important way to promote the form of Irish cultural self-awareness that Young Ireland hoped would unite Irish across classes and sects, being “a progressive step in the creation of a new, autonomous identity for the Irish, underlining their difference from the English, their dignified past and future, and their ability to be self-sufficient and resistant to divisions among themselves.”52 Texts were selected and presented to make a specific ideological argument, with the ultimate goal being to “influence readers in deciding what being Irish in a self-governing nation could mean through a reading of the texts carefully selected to teach them to appreciate Irish culture and literature, and in that way to be aware of their own worth.”53 Several of McGee’s ballads were included in the Library of Ireland’s The Book of Irish Ballads and some were reprinted in his own collection, Canadian Ballads.

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The brief but remarkably diverse and prolific artistic and intellectual flowering of Young Ireland was cut short by their political rupture with Daniel O’Connell and the increasing crises generated by the famine. The failed revolution of 1848 first divided Young Irelanders and then scattered them across the globe. Nevertheless, the 1840s were a remarkably productive and formative period for the movement’s principal members. During his collaboration with Young Ireland, McGee had written a history, a series of literary biographies, and a ballad history that was published serially in the Nation, along with many poems and shorter works. After his escape from Ireland, McGee faced starting over again in North America, in an Irish community that was as demoralized and disillusioned as he was by the failure of the recent rebellion. Back in America, McGee quickly established himself in New York, starting another Irish-American newspaper, the Nation. In the early 1850s, McGee began a slow evolution from revolutionary Irish nationalist in exile to advocate for Irish immigrants. He continued to argue that scholarly work was the foundation of national identity and selfrespect for Irish emigrants, who were marginalized and exploited to such an extent that McGee believed they were little better off than the famine victims back home.54 Herder had believed that “emigration sometimes leads to enfeeblement, lack of vital force, the flattening out of human beings, and a sad uniformity,”55 and in McGee’s eyes, the experience of Irish emigrants in America seemed to illustrate this. He also believed that the American pressure to conform elevated “AngloSaxon” values at the expense of other emigrant groups. Where, asked McGee, “are the French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Irish settlers of this continent? … Had they no posterity? Have they no identity?”56 Where McGee had helped compile Young Ireland histories and anthologies to remind Irish people of cultural accomplishments that had been overshadowed by England, he now published A History of the Irish Settlers in North America (1855) to highlight Irish contributions from America’s earliest settled period to the present. McGee also feared that emigrants freed from the close observation and moral strictures of village life and the influence of clergy could become degraded and exploited in America.57 He began to see scholarship in the New World as a literary substitute for the physical landscape and monuments that emigrants were forced to abandon. For example, in his preface to the History of the Attempts to Establish the Protestant Reformation in Ireland (1853), McGee portrayed the Irish in America

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as equally in need of poetry and history if they were not to drift, unmoored from physical reminders of their history and spiritual roots: “Here are no wayside crosses, or empty belfries, no Cromwellian breaches, no soil fruitful of traditions, to keep alive in their souls the story of their heroic and orthodox ancestors. For the monuments and memorials that abound in Erin, this little book is the only substitute I can offer them.”58 Like the Library of Ireland series, the histories McGee wrote for an Irish-American audience continued the Young Ireland program of creating a modern, English-language culture that would reconstitute Irish heritage in an accessible form. Works such as A History of the Irish Settlers in North America (1855) and The Catholic History of North America (1855) no doubt continued what the German nationalists had inspired Young Ireland to do: keep alive a sense of identity and patriotic pride in a cultural or ethnic group. Frequent invitations to speak in Canada gave McGee an opportunity to visit Irish-Canadian communities, and he was impressed with their orderliness, industry, and prosperity. An 1854 visit allowed him to contrast the treatment of Irish and French Catholics in Canada and in America, where anti-immigrant nativist candidates were sweeping the polls. Robin Burns sees these tours as a catalyst: in 1853, McGee had written of Canadians cowering “under the sinister protection of the British Flag,” but in a letter from Quebec that he published in the American Celt on 16 December 1854, he conceded that “the British flag does indeed fly here, but it casts no shadow.” In the same letter, McGee drew parallels between the traditional rural society of Ireland and the French Canadians’ leisurely, family-oriented, and pious life that had charmed both Weld and Moore more than fifty years earlier. “With us, life is a fevered and eager race, with them a slow and merry procession,” he wrote. Writing in the American Celt on 23 December and echoing Moore, McGee presented Canada in contrast to the industrialized inferno in which most Irish-American labourers were “to be found, misplaced, overworked, and often ill-content in the mines of Pennsylvania, in the mills along the Merrimack, in the ranges of the ‘long shoremen’, and upon the most slavish of public works.”59 Wilson speculates that in 1848, McGee could have easily taken a road that would have led to his becoming the Father of Fenianism rather than Canadian Confederation. However, his visit to Canada provided a dramatic political epiphany that helped return him to more moderate views. Like many other radical Romantics, McGee grew more conservative post-1848, as cultural nationalism generally became

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a more moderate, even conservative, movement, but his experience in Canada certainly shaped his changing views. His move away from republicanism, along with his failed plan to found exclusive IrishCatholic communities in the American West, alienated many of his former supporters in the United States, and in 1856, he took advantage of the Montreal Irish community’s support to move to Canada and begin another newspaper, the New Era. He also agreed to become a candidate who would represent the community in parliamentary elections. By 1857, the transformation of McGee from what Burns called an “Irish Zionist” primarily working for his homeland to an advocate for emigrant communities was complete. In Canada, McGee encountered a society with constitutional links to Britain but divided along political, religious, and linguistic lines. His new home was struggling with challenges similar to those in Ireland, and he applied his experience as both Irish nationalist and Irish emigrant to the Canadian situation. In his pre-revolutionary Young Ireland phase, he had supported fellow Young Irelander William Smith O’Brien’s view that Ireland should recognize its distinctiveness but still maintain its “golden link”60 with Britain. In Canada, he came to believe, like Weld, that a constitutional relationship with Britain had helped protect Catholic rights and keep American values that threatened such diversity at bay.61 Like Davis and Duffy, though, he also believed that the different settler groups needed to be educated about their own history as well as that of the other communities who occupied the colonies in Canada. In thinking about the ways that Canada East and Canada West could unite while continuing to respect the organic distinctions of the primarily Irish, French, Scottish, and English communities within them, McGee began to envision “a new northern nationality” through his articles in the New Era. In combining the idealism of the poet and scholar with the more practical skills of journalist and politician, McGee often demonstrated astuteness and efficiency in supporting economic programs, agricultural and technological development, language and religious education rights for French Canadians, and, ultimately, federation of the different territories in Canada.62 Nevertheless, he continued to argue that a country’s economic and political advancement was worth little without the unifying force of a national literature. A telling metaphor to describe his belief that material progress depended upon intellectual work came from his 25 July 1858 New Era editorial, “Who Reads a Canadian Book?” McGee asserted that

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a healthy Canadian publishing industry would help establish “a Grand Trunk of thought, which will be as a backbone to the system we desire to inaugurate.” While a national railway would link economic centres and thwart American competition, only a national literature could unite the hearts of disparate communities. Like Davis, McGee valued diversity within a nation and saw the Irish-Catholic community in Canada as one thread in the tapestry of a national consciousness that he had earlier described in his 24 April editorial, “Protection for Canadian Literature,” as “freely developed, borrowing energy from the American, grace from the Frenchman, and power from the Briton.”63 In his editorials, McGee also borrows the doctrines of Romantic nationalism that Davis learned from Schlegel, as when he asserted in “A National Literature for Canada” on 17 June 1857, “No literature, no national life – this is an irreversible law … Literature is the vital atmosphere of nationality. Without that all-pervading, indefinite, exquisite element, national life – public life – must perish and rot.” In “Who Reads a Canadian Book?” he repeated this assertion when arguing for a protected publishing industry: only a “national literature” could help Canada preserve a distinct individuality. Canadians needed to overcome their own sense of colonial inferiority, and so McGee vigorously attacked the notion that Canada was too young to have an independent literary tradition. Stephen Dickson’s university proposal at the end of the eighteenth century had died because of a similar argument – that Canada needed to defer intellectual development until physical labour had built a nation. In “Protection for Canadian Literature,” McGee had dismissed this as “a false idea, imported from beyond the seas … It is to be found in the mouths of cockneys who speak disdainfully of the ‘Colonies’; of persons who cannot see the importance of possessing a national ­literature.” He argued that Canadian cultural nationalism, like Irish nationalism, first needed published books in order to teach Canadians how to measure their own self-worth by appreciating their existing intellectual and cultural legacy. If Canada did not support literature, then the unrestricted sale of American publications would “Massachusett-ize the Canadian mind,” McGee argued in “Who Reads a Canadian Book?” Moreover, McGee shared with other Canadian nationalists the “strong” British North American view that “the United States, its ideas and its way of life, had long represented the antithesis of what British North America was meant to be.”64 If, as he asserted, nationality is founded upon “the distinctive characters and features

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of a people,” then one of the greatest threats to Canadian culture was the flood of American culture over the border, without any homegrown publishing industry to counter it. To support the argument that Canada was capable of creating a rich intellectual and literary heritage, McGee offered analogies to prove that great national literatures could be found in countries less prominent on the imperial stage than Great Britain. The most obvious example would be Young Ireland: in “A National Literature for Canada,” McGee declared he had already “seen an era made in Irish literature, and we speak from experience; for we were an humble pupil of the men who made it.” Countries occupying roughly the same latitude were even more pertinent: he offers “historic precedents” from the cultures of “Northern Europe” whose climates were congenial to “indoor labour of the brain.”65 In “A National Literature for Canada,” McGee noted that “Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland have their literature: rich in poetry, in history, in eloquence, and, as well becomes the North, in astronomical discovery. Cannot Newfoundland yield topics to the poet, or a new Urania to another Tycho Brahe?” As an immigrant, McGee was particularly aware of the challenge settler communities faced in establishing a distinct and independent culture. In “Canadian Literature,” which appeared in the New Era on 30 June 1857, he conceded to Judge Haliburton that settler colonies leave a rich culture behind them to move to a land where they have no long history or folklore of their own. However, he refuted Haliburton’s general argument with one drawn from Young Ireland’s belief that lessons learned from other Romantic nationalist revivals could take root: “For although we may not have much history to commemorate, although we may not be able to form a literature purely Canadian in its identity, yet we can gather from every land, and mould our gleanings into a form, racy of the new soil to which it is adapted.” Rather than simply being a link that bound Canada to Britain, the old countries’ literatures would instead provide models for new forms. Noting that “the ballads of the three kingdoms circulate among us, and our people are thought to prize them,” this existing appreciation would “by the same train of thought” eventually “tend to the creation of a thoroughly Canadian feeling.” If the New Era theorized about how literature could inspire Canadian patriotism, McGee’s Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses was a practical demonstration. Published in 1858, and including poems written for the American Celt and other publications,66 it

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was his modest attempt to apply what had worked well in the histories, anthologies, and poetry collections of the Library of Ireland. His collection most resembles Denis Florence McCarthy’s The Book of Irish Ballads, published in 1846 as a companion to Duffy’s ballad anthology. McCarthy’s collection echoed Davis’s philosophy in its assertion that ballads were effective in “making Irish History familiar to the minds, pleasant to the ears, dear to the passions, and powerful over the taste and conduct of the Irish people in times to come.”67 Widely reprinted in the United States as well, it contained some of McGee’s historical ballads. McGee’s collection featured his own work exclusively but follows the aims of the Library of Ireland. It was addressed to “the younger generation of Canadians, as an attempt to show … that by those who are blessed with the divine gift of poesy, many worthy themes may be found, without quitting their own country.”68 The preface identified the collection’s didactic purpose, and some poems were unabashed moral lectures. (For instance, “Donna Violetta” warns feckless young men that if they sleep late and then spend too much time fussing about their appearance, their intended bride will run away with the groomsman.) In Julia Wright’s view, the division implied in the book’s title, Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses, reveals the work’s “jostling nationalisms, one rooted in Young Ireland and one emerging in Canada.”69 The complexities inherent in the identity of a developing settler nation were already foreseen by McGee in his New Era editorials as he worked through the conflicting loyalties that he believed other new arrivals to Canada shared. That said, both the Canadianand Irish-inspired sections serve as a primer that adapted Young Ireland poetics to an emerging Canadian national consciousness. The poems and their paratexts are concerned with establishing the value of poetry, identifying suitable subject matter to encourage would-be writers in Canada, and offering examples of various types of historical ballads, patriotic songs, and invented traditions drawn from the existing folk culture of Canada as well as whatever valuable “gleanings” could be supplied from other nations. While he did not follow the practice of later Canadian anthologies in organizing his poems by theme and subject, the section headed “Canadian Ballads” is roughly organized by subject and purpose. The first five poems feature Canadian explorers Sebastian Cabot; Jacques Cartier; René-Robert Cavelier; Sieur de La Salle; and Henry Hudson. The next three adopt the world views of French-Canadian and

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Indigenous peoples. After a poem celebrating Moore’s visit to Canada, he supplies four national songs modelled on Moore’s Irish Melodies and the patriotic verse of Beranger. The two concluding poems return to the subject of McGee’s dedication to the volume: his friendship with Duffy and the memory of the “old times” in which they created the cultural movement that would continue to inspire them as members of a diaspora that now spanned the globe. McGee dedicated the collection to Duffy “In Memory of Old Times” because Duffy “had shown his particular concern for the younger Irish writers” when he hoped that his collection of Irish ballads would go some way towards “forming their taste” and encouraging further study of their homeland.70 After specifically identifying Duffy as a mentor to younger Irish poets in his dedication, McGee addresses the “young people of Canada” in whose hands the fate of the future Canadian nation lies. He also valorizes intellectuals just as he had in Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century where he had announced that “studious men, conquering difficulties in the acquisition of knowledge, teachers of courtiers and of kings, shall be our heroes; libraries, cabinets and schools, our fields of action; fame and truth the trophies of our bloodless contests.”71 In the preface to Canadian Ballads, he asserts, “It is, indeed, glorious to die in battle in defence of our homes or altars; but not less glorious is it to live to celebrate the virtues of our heroic countrymen, to adorn the history, or to preserve the traditions of our country” (viii). The notion that ballads would not only recount history but also “adorn” and “preserve” it suggests that McGee’s collection was intended to prove that intellectual work would help demonstrate that Canada, like “the Irish nation,” was distinct “in its essence and intellect,” which he had asserted in his preface to his memoir of Art MacMurrough.72 Since McGee’s interpretations of Canadian character depend on accounts of its history, he shares Davis’s insistence that his sources be accurate, as illustrated by the paratext surrounding “The Launch of the Griffin” and other historical poems. For instance, he supports his account of the ship’s launch with authoritative references from George Warburton’s The Conquest of Canada (1849), Bancroft’s History of the Colonization of America, and eyewitness accounts of Recollect missionaries (59–60). Like Irish nationalists who relied on antiquarians to make much of their cultural heritage accessible to readers of English, McGee discovered that much Canadian history, achievements, and traditions were inaccessible to his projected English-speaking

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middle-class readership. Where necessary, he included detailed footnotes, drawn heavily from scholars and historical documents to uncover and revive the memory of incidents that he believed could serve as founding narratives. In doing so, he showed how much of present-day Canadian society depended upon the cultural and economic activities of French Canada. In the wake of 1837 and the Durham Report, his use of popular history to vindicate FrenchCanadian culture for an English-speaking audience again found parallels with the cultural and intellectual activities of Young Ireland. Ballads associated with Canada’s history of exploration provided McGee with a vivid way of articulating Canada’s distinctiveness, along with the moral characteristics that characterized its people. As in MacCarthy’s Irish ballad collection, which sometimes presented “Irish history from the invaders’ viewpoint,”73 McGee’s ballads presented history from multiple perspectives. Consequently, his poems include the impressions of Canada as travellers and explorers might have seen it and also the imagined points of view of French-Canadian and Indigenous communities. Recalling Moore and Fitzgerald’s attempts to make their new experiences comprehensible to their families back home, McGee also uses his own perspective as a newcomer to invite native-born Canadians to take a fresh look at their own land and traditions. Given that the author is an immigrant, it seems fitting to open the collection with “Sebastian Cabot to His Lady,” which is essentially a letter to the folks at home. Advising his readers to forget their habitual associations of Cabot with stern-looking portraits “taken when he was nearly four score,” he instead presents a young, “ardent,” and homesick explorer describing his experiences in letters addressed to his wife, Mary. (Perhaps McGee channels the trauma of his own involuntary separation in 1848 from his newlywed wife, Mary, into this poem.) Assuring her that his love for her “doth never freeze,” though he writes from the “hyperborean seas,” Cabot describes the novel phenomenon of a Northern midsummer sky “obscured with light / Albeit called of mariner’s [sic] the night” (9). Like Dickson, who was equally fascinated with Quebec’s frigid winters, and like Fitzgerald and Shanly, McGee often anticipates Gilles Vigneault’s assertion that Canada is not a country, it is winter. As Sean Virgo observed, “His response to the North, to cold, to ice and to snow was direct, not conventional. They were astonishments to him.”74 Again, McGee was able to channel his own sense of wonder and novelty into poems that would remind Canadians of the unique

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landscape that had shaped them. For instance, the two ballads that follow “Sebastian Cabot,” feature Cartier’s descriptions of Canada upon his return to St Malo. In “Jacques Cartier,” he imagines the reaction of the French audience hearing about Canada for the first time when the returning explorer describes “a region, hard, ironbound and cold … Where the wind from Thulé freezes the word upon the lip … until they thrill’d with fear, / And piled fresh fuel on the hearth” (13). More importantly, McGee uses his explorer narratives to emphasize the explorers’ moral character and motives to illustrate how Canada evolved into a society different “in essence and intellect” from both England and America. Just as his historical studies generally avoided eighteenth-century Enlightenment and revolutionary Ireland, his Canadian historical poems focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century Catholic France to find values that he believes nineteenth-century Canadians should maintain. He also emphasizes the ideals that motivate the explorers. Unlike many explorers of the New World, the lovelorn, freezing Cabot denies seeking “crypts of gold within the southern zone” (9), anticipating McGee’s later claim in “Along the Line” that Canada’s history of exploration was not motivated by rapine, or enriched by “Mexic’s gold” (48). He also implies that Cartier is motivated by agape rather than conquest. In “Jacques Cartier” and “Jacques Cartier to the Child,” the explorer views the Algonquin people not as warlike but as “poor souls” longing to know “the wonders [of] … the Gospel” (14) and believes his mission is “To lead the vanguard of truth to the inmost recess / Of this lost region of souls” (16). His planting of “the cross and the crown” (14) on Mount Royal sets the stage for McGee’s ballad narratives of the missions and settlements of Old France, and the interchange of French and Indigenous culture as a foundation for Canadian society, a concept that would be further developed by John Reade and other literary nationalists. In “The Launch of the Griffin,” La Salle, the “Columbus of the inland seas” (28), presides over the first-ever sailing of a large, European-made vessel on Lake Erie, within earshot of “Niagara’s awful roar” (26). The sublime details help present this new stage of French expansion as “a high, enduring, saintly trust” overseen by dedicated Catholics as the “Knight and Priest” (the former Jesuit La Salle and the Recollect missionary Fr Hennepin) politely offer to the other the privilege of launching the vessel (26). McGee invests his

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historical narrative with a sense of wonder by presenting the scene partly from the perspective of curious Indigenous onlookers to convey both the novelty and historical weight of the moment. Employing an imagined Indigenous viewer and Romantic conventions, McGee may be playing tribute to Moore’s “Epistle to Charlotte Rawdon” by imagining the vessel as capable of transport to an otherworldly realm. Its sails become “portentous wings” able to “waft Virgil to the court of Kings.” More supernatural than artificial, the “first of Lake Erie’s winged boats” is also compared to the “wing’d steed” associated with poetic inspiration. As such, it is able to play “its wondrous part” in “old romance and fairy lays” (27). The knowledge that La Salle’s ship, Le Griffon, disappeared on its final journey adds to the sense of mystery in the poem., McGee creates a similar effect when imagining the final days of another disastrous expedition. “The Death of Hudson” departs from mere historical chronicle in depicting the last voyage of explorer Henry Hudson, who in 1611 was set adrift in Hudson’s Bay by his mutinous crew. The poem might be considered maudlin and over-dramatic by modern standards (although I have found that students enjoy it, challenging their assumption that early Canadian literature is dry and boring). McGee adds pathos through his account of Hudson’s faithful first mate and the death of his young son, and employs the sentimentality, awe, and terror inherent in the story and its setting to create intense emotional associations with a remote Canadian landscape that even his Canadian readers would be unlikely to visit. “The Death of Hudson” essentially argues that while “the slayer Death is every where,” Canada holds the dubious distinction of offering the most poetically memorable means of extinction: “But of all the sea shapes he [Death] hath worn, may mariners never know / Such fate as Henrich Hudson found, in the labyrinths of snow” (17). Historical necessity denies Hudson the miraculous rescue afforded other ballad heroes in the collection, but McGee offers his brave last moments as an example of piety and fortitude, reinforced by the terror and awe created by his experience. The poem also exploits gothic conventions to increase the uncanny sense of a landscape that would still seem as unique and unfamiliar to most of McGee’s contemporaries as it was to early explorers. Polar bears become “shaggy monsters” that “howl behind their farewells all forlorn” and “wizard Seals” circle “round th’arrested boat, like vampires round a grave”(21). McGee imagines Hudson, the last survivor in the drifting boat, stalked by a

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Greenland shark “bounding from his dread abyss.” Skilfully employing a combination of imagery, meter, and enjambment, he presents icebergs as “O’erarching piles of blue-veined ice admitted to its still, / White, fathomless waters” (22). From the perspective of the devout Catholic writer, Hudson’s earthly isolation in the far North puts him closer to the spiritual realm. His lonely death is witnessed by the God that he has put his faith in and is illuminated by the northern lights: His heart and eye were suppliant turned to the ocean’s Lord on high, The Borealis lustres bright were gathering in the sky, From South and North, from East and West, they clustered o’er the spot Where breathed his last the gallant chief whose grave man seeth not; They marked him die with steadfast gaze, as tho’ in heaven there were A passion to behold how man the direst fate may bear; They watched him through the livelong night – these couriers of the sky, Then fled to tell the listening stars how ’twas they saw him die. (23)

McGee would not be the last Canadian writer for whom the North represents the sublime and spiritual: his descriptions of the uncanniness, isolation, light, and landscape in “The Death of Hudson” anticipate Archibald Lampman’s “lightless north,” Duncan Campbell Scott’s descriptions of remote Northern lakes, and, of course, the ballads of Robert Service. As in other poems, McGee explores the interdependence among poetry, history, and posterity: “The story of his voyage to Death, amid the Arctic frosts” will continue to be “told to unborn ages on earth’s remotest coast” (24) and thus associates the remotest regions with stories that will inspire Canadians’ pride in their country. In McGee’s view, the worth of Hudson’s achievements can be left to historians to debate, but Hudson’s lonely yet spectacular death provides the type of ripping historical yarn that comes to life through the scholarship and skill of the ballad writer. Less bound by the need for historical accuracy, McGee’s supernatural ballads, like Shanly’s, supply a folklore for a new country whose streams and trees Anna Jameson and Judge Haliburton believed lacked legends and tutelary spirits. They also suggest that Canada, with its links to older cultures, has avoided the excesses of rationalism and materialism of modern American and English society. The connection

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between piety, civic virtue, and folk belief is made most explicitly in “The Arctic Indian’s Faith,” and “Our Ladye of the Snow.” Coming directly after “The Launch of the Griffin,” “The Arctic Indian’s Faith” picks up the themes of the uncanny introduced in the historical ballad. In “The Launch of the Griffin,” McGee reminded his readers of the Wendat legends already associated with landscapes that the explorers might consider a “new” world and that, alongside those living legends, are monuments attesting to an even older, unknown culture that precedes the Wendat as the Fomor preceded the Celts in Ireland. “The Arctic Indian’s Faith” also provides a corrective to Cartier’s more patronizing view of Indigenous peoples as “lost souls” and instead suggests they have a long-existing tradition of spirituality. Like McGee’s Celts, the people who inhabit the Arctic possess a poetic temperament and a philosophy that already contains the basic tenets of theology that missionaries wish to introduce. The poem reflects McGee’s respect for the distinctive cultures of Indigenous communities, even if he supported their eventual conversion to Christianity. As Wilson notes, McGee reprises the noble savage myth but is, at least for his time, “sufficiently progressive to place the ‘aboriginal tribes’ at the heart of Canadian history and to insist that they were an integral part of the country’s identity.”75 The sense of the North as a spiritual realm is also reprised in “The Arctic Indian’s Faith.” In the words and world view of the “Arctic Indians” in the poem, their “land of ice and snow” is not remote or unhospitable, but rather infused with “His presence and power,” readily apparent to a people living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world (30). As he would do in “Our Ladye of the Snow,” McGee employs distinctly Canadian words and phrases (again explained in the book’s paratext) to show how Indigenous people use the unique features of their land to create poetic analogies that allow them to make God’s nature universally comprehensible to humans, much as did Hebrew, Greek, and early Irish poetry. Like the Celtic god Cromah in “The Celts,” the Arctic Indian’s Creator communicates through natural phenomena such as a “whisper” that “we note in every breeze.” His providence is such that he hears their supplications with “the Wapiti’s eager ear” (McGee uses the Cree word for “Elk”) and makes what appears to be a barren land hospitable by hanging moss on the trees “for the food of the Caribou” (30). In drawing metaphors from

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the natural world to explain the divine, McGee shares with Duffy the view that poetry is “the sister of religion.” If, as Davis had argued, historical ballads “rouse, and soften, and strengthen, and enlarge us with the passions of great periods,” McGee believed that the history of a long-established culture like New France could supply inspiring ballad material. While not strictly historical, McGee’s second supernatural ballad, “Our Ladye of the Snow,” fits Davis’s view that ballads can “lead us into love of self-denial, of justice, of beauty, of valour, of generous life and proud death; and to set up in our souls the memory of great men, who shall then be as models and judges of our actions.”76 In the poem, McGee emphasizes the length of time that the French have been in Canada through archaicsounding phrases such as “Ladye” and by respecting original settler place names and, when possible, the original language in phrases such as “Ville Marie [Montreal]” and “Rivers three [Trois Rivieres].” He emphasizes the culture’s reach, noting that the French once controlled an area stretching from “the Balize [in Louisiana] to Hudson’s Bay.” The poem briefly alludes to historical figures such as Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy, before focusing on an unnamed, aged veteran in Tracy’s army. (As a destroyer of Kanien’keha:ka villages and crops, de Tracy himself might have proved too Cromwellian a ballad hero for McGee.77) The nameless Seigneur is also a role model for immigrant communities, especially the Irish. Where McGee had worried that America possessed “no wayside crosses” to remind the Irish of their traditions, Quebec presents a landscape dotted with visible shrines to a deeply Catholic culture, monuments that are not only old by Canadian standards but also connected to an even older culture whose landmarks and feast days were still observed in Ireland as well. In explaining the origins of a shrine, the poem begins with a refrain that describes the contemporary Quebec countryside “where, emblem of our holy creed / Canadian crosses glow” (31). “Our Ladye of the Snow” offers an image of a settlement taking root in new soil while faithfully retaining elements of regional and national French culture that came to characterize Canadian culture as well. Consequently, the poem becomes a practical demonstration of the argument in his 26 January 1858 New Era editorial, “An Exception Answered,” that pride in one’s original region and nature could be “transmuted” through a “genial and generous” new patriotism. In developing his French settler’s character in “Our Ladye of the

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Snow,” McGee observes, “Strange sight that on those fields of snow / The genial vine of Gaul should grow / Despite the frigid sky!” Recalling Fitzgerald’s observation that the French Canadians’ “lively, gay, sans souci French blood never leaves them: they are the same in America as in France,” McGee says of the Seigneur: “The Breton song, the Breton dance, / The very atmosphere of France, / Diffused a generous cheer” (32). No hothouse exotic, the Breton Seigneur possesses the qualities required to put down roots in a challenging environment. Characteristically, McGee emphasizes his piety rather than his military prowess: he is “the humblest devotee / of God and St Catherine dear” (33). St Catherine’s feast day, originally widely celebrated in Europe and France, came to be associated with Quebec culture through the religious mission of Marguerite Bourgeoys, who was credited with converting Indigenous peoples and educating settler children in New France. Consequently, the Seigneur becomes indirectly associated with a less celebrated form of heroism that contributed to the modern Montreal culture that McGee had found so welcoming to an IrishCatholic emigrant. Roughly contemporary with Shanly’s “The Walker of the Snow,” “Our Ladye of the Snow” also exploits the eeriness of a Quebec landscape erased by snow in order to present what becomes in the Canadian Ballads a characteristically national talent: piously and picturesquely freezing to death. The frozen forest inspires a distinct form of awe and terror designed to remind the traveller of powers even larger than “Man’s all-conquering will” (32), the ostensibly Enlightenment value of human perseverance and ingenuity praised by Dickson and Fitzgerald. To reinforce the notion that the reader is in a less empiricist world, the fast-falling snow transforms the landscape in such a way that fancy takes over from reality: “the hillocks looked like frozen sheep / Like giants grey the hills.” Eventually, the Seigneur finds himself in a scene as hallucinatory and otherworldly as that experienced by Hudson and his dying men: “the scene grew blank at last / As when some seaman from the mast / Looks o’er th’shoreless brine.” Like the journeys undertaken by Moore’s voyageurs and Shanly’s trapper, the Seigneur’s overland trek is initially made bearable through music, but the “Breton song” and “jingling horse bells” soon give way to an inhuman silence in “such a scene” that ensures “the death of song / Upon the bravest lips” as “Nature fronts us in her shroud” (35). The Seigneur’s faith and respect for tradition compel him to risk travelling in a snowstorm so that he can attend Christmas mass in Ville

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Marie and, of course, he gets lost. After living the archetypal ballad hero’s “generous life,” he finds himself beyond all earthly help and prepares himself for a “proud death” by asking “St Catherine and St John [the patron saint of Quebec] / And our dear Ladye” to provide him with the Christian fortitude to accept his fate (36). His faith is rewarded by a vision inspired in part by the deathly serene and ­beautiful woodland clearing where suddenly, announced by A light beneath the trees which clank their brilliants in the breeze … Our Lady’s self rose to his sight, In robes that Spirits wear. (37) Like the vision of a “moon across the moor / [that] Points the lost peasant to his door,” the Virgin “unbind[s] for him Death’s icy bands” and leads him to the safety and warmth of an “antique forge,” where he later builds a shrine to mark the miracle. A skeptic might insist that the dying and hallucinating Seigneur sees only the moon illuminating an icicle-covered tree and follows the trail of light to safety, but that would miss the point: the Quebec landscape’s deathly harshness and inhuman beauty creates the crisis that inspires both the vision and the legend, which is then marked for posterity by the shrine and the poem. While circumspect about whether the shrine exists, McGee’s footnote to the poem describes an actual monument marking the site of “the original church of Notre Dame des Neiges … on the southern slope of the Mountain of Montreal. It was originally surrounded by the habitations of the converted Indians and their instructors, of ‘the Mountain Mission’ … The present chapel of the same names stands in the Village of Cote des Neiges, behind the Mountain” (63). (Unknown to McGee, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery on the border of this Montreal neighbourhood would be his final resting place.) In associating heroic and folk narratives with monuments to enduring Catholic faith in Canada, McGee again creates emotional associations that link history and place in his new nation. McGee also supplies a more secular legend that draws on the extensive waterways of Canada. O’Grady’s Irish mariners contributed to folkways through their participation, willing or otherwise, in the English navy, which has made maritime subjects a less attractive source of folk culture for members of Young Ireland. McGee, however, finds the inland seas, rivers, and ports of Canada an equally rich source

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of legends and folktales. He gives “The Sea Captain” an air of authenticity by claiming that he personally heard it “related, many years ago, with the greatest gravity, by an ‘Old Salt,’ who laid the scene of the ghostly abduction in the Gulf of St Lawrence” (63). The legend, in which the captain of a boat is literally haunted by the woman he seduced and abandoned, may be authentic, but the vessel in which her fury-like spectre comes to claim him again borrows Moore’s invented tradition. The white canoe launched in the swamps of Virginia has apparently navigated its ghostly way through the folklore and waterways of the Niagara Falls region before finally drawing abreast the guilt-ridden captain’s ship in the middle of the Gulf of St Lawrence. The symmetry between Moore’s and McGee’s ballads manifests in other ways as well. Whereas many of McGee’s poems are only ballads by name, “The Sea Captain” follows the traditional quatrain ballad stanza form more strictly than Moore’s five-line stanzas but employs Moore’s meter. Where Moore’s lover and his maid are bound together in faithfulness, the captain and his abandoned lover are equally locked together beyond death, but in bonds of retribution: To the ship’s side she drew in her ghostly canoe For a moment has waited her prey: In vain shout the crew, to the phantom he flew – In the darkness they vanish away. (41) More characteristic of McGee than Moore, the poem ends with an explicit moral: “for the sins men imagine they leave on the shore / Do follow them often to sea.” Having the priest pronounce this again situates the by-now common trope of the supernatural canoe within not only sailors’ yarns but also French-Catholic folklore, which has its own set of morality tales surrounding voyageurs, trappers, and unworldly canoes whisking souls to damnation, as in La Chasse Galerie. In spite of the trite conclusion, the poem achieves something remarkable: it adapts tropes normally associated with early Canadian exploration, trapping, and trading to the rapidly modernizing channel of St Lawrence so that they colour and inform the progress of the new nation. If the ballad’s meter, the white canoe, and the subtle acknowledgement of French-Canadian folklore did not reveal McGee’s tribute to Moore by way of imitation, the poem that follows makes McGee’s debt explicit. “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s” is set roughly at the centre

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of the first section, functioning as a commentary on the preceding poems and introducing the themes to follow. In Moore’s “Canadian Boat Song,” the wayside shrine to the voyageurs’ patron saint provided local colour for Moore’s English and Irish audience; McGee astutely recognized that this site had become one of Canada’s much-needed monuments, a shrine for literary pilgrims.78 In his notes, McGee observes that “near the junction of the upper branch of the Ottawa with the St Lawrence, they show a particular spot as the place where Moore composed his well-known ‘Canadian Boat-song’ … It may not be amiss to remark that, to this flying visit of Moore’s which occupied him only from the 22d of July 1804, when he reached Chippewa, till the 10th of October, when he sailed from Halifax for England, we are indebted not only for the Boat-song, but “the Woodpecker,” [Ballad Stanzas] and the ballad “Written on passing Dead-man’s Island,” poems which must certainly be included in any future Canadian Anthology” (63). McGee assumed that, like Young Ireland anthologies, Canadian collections would provide texts that created an edifying self-image drawn from Canadians’ cultural heritage.79 In “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s,” McGee demonstrates how Moore’s past poetry and his own present efforts would lay the groundwork for the first generation of Canadian poets seeking to channel the spirit of the nation. “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s” not only argues that literature is instrumental in associating specific places and monuments with national pride but also demonstrates McGee’s own principles of Romantic Irish literary nationalism. He argues that while a “poet from the farther shore” wrote one of the most memorable poems celebrating existing Canadian culture, poetic inspiration was already indigenous to the country due to a landscape and climate responsive to a Romantic sensibility. Consequently, McGee has the symbol of undying poetic fame, the laurel, bear the “fruit of song” in Canada because it “loves the north,” (43) thriving in an environment of inspiring natural beauty. He argues that Moore’s song is so strongly associated with the land and with the rhythm of work in a particular place that it is not the voyageurs’ but the “the river’s song” that Moore channels. That a visitor “from the farther shore” (42) is capable of creating a song that is “racy of the soil” reflects McGee’s collection’s primary didactic point. As he reminds his readers and would-be poets: the internationally renowned Moore “nowhere found a nobler theme / Than you, ye favor’d, have at hand” (43). In fact, he argues, Moore finds greater inspiration in

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Canada than in the Greek, Arabian, and Ossianic poetry admired by Moore as well as Schlegel and Herder. Consequently, Canada already contains the inspiration for a national poetry that could in turn inspire “a great northern nation.” “Arm and Rise,” the first of McGee’s Canadian counterparts to Moore’s Irish Melodies, restates the moral of “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s” for Canadian writers. At this point in the collection, the reader has been presented with a survey of ballads revealing the history, lore, and legends of the main founding cultures in Canada, immediately followed by a reminder that one of the most enduring “Canadian” songs was written by a “Poet from the farther shore.” “Arm and Rise” is equally concerned with intellectual and cultural trail-blazing. As in the preface, such work is implicitly compared to other sacrifices demanded to establish a nation: the work of scholars and poets was as valid a form of “patriotism” as dying in the service of one’s country’s altars and homes. In addition, McGee argues that poets in Canada are pioneers, making “Arm and Rise” a versified manual of cultural nationalism for what McGee regards, ultimately, as a national identity created by immigrants. The language and images of “Arm and Rise” form another rebuttal to Haliburton’s observations in “Canadian Literature.” Haliburton had argued that there would be few significant native-born poets in Canada because its people “were plain, hard, matter of fact men” and consequently “poets were not valued among them.” He also argued that “there could be no poets where there were no memories,” owing to the fact that Canada “had … no castles … their rivers had no names, their streams had no legends.” To counter the argument, “Arm and Rise” again presents exploration and settlement as inspired, heroic endeavours. Following poems that demonstrated how Canada’s existing history, legends, and shrines represent established cultural wealth, “Arm and Rise” then illustrates how this wealth can become accessible to readers in the present. Addressed to all readers on Canadian soil (particularly young men), the poem’s opening exhortation implies that many of them are recent immigrants by offering a vision of “White ships glancing o’er the ocean / All Earth’s tides too in swift motion / Pouring onward to their goals” (44). The command that readers cease “repining” and assume the duties of manhood anticipates Charles G.D. Roberts’s address to an imagined Young Canada in his patriotic poem, “Canada.” Again, though, McGee’s address is particularly relevant to Canadians born

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elsewhere. He denies them the long backward-cast look of previous emigrant poets, allowing them “one tear” for their childhood memories, “one prayer for the ancestral dead / Then right on” (45). The relentless forward (and possibly westward) movement of the stanzas is matched by a march into the future, inspired by the past. In charting his future journey, the apprentice Romantic poet is told not to “guess” but instead legislate his and the country’s destiny: “Say I shall be / Say I am” (44). Consequently, the opening stanzas’ archaic imagery, normally associated with knightly trials, is used to draw imaginative parallels among combat, settlement, and intellectual work in the poem. Rather than encounter a castle, the Canadian hero, whether settler or poet, is tested in the “silent, gloomy” primeval forest, where neither “bell nor wassail / Echoes through its sable halls” and “Night and chaos guard its portals.” The poet’s duty is to creatively order that silence and chaos into song. Anticipating future pioneer epics such as Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, “They” (silence, night, and chaos, but also the trees) “shall bow … to us … / Strike and down their standard falls.” Those same trees, along with the enterprise of settlement and colonization that require their clearance, become the source of heroic poetry in the new land, since “On the round Canadian cedars / Legends high await but readers” (45). While conquest and labour are commonly used to legitimize land possession in settler societies, this poem focuses on the intellectual labour required to map out a cultural tradition by building on history and traditions whose long-established roots in the New World have already been celebrated in previous poems. The would-be poets are the “favor’d” identified in “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s”: Canada’s rich but barely explored history is uncharted territory, and a poet can still become the imaginative “Lord of the first land you camp on” (45). McGee’s sympathetic portrait of Indigenous cultures in his American writing and in “The Arctic Indian’s Faith” notwithstanding, he does little in Canadian Ballads to establish parallels between Indigenous and Irish peoples’ experience of colonialism and dispossession. Reproducing some of the aims of the earlier Ascendancyoriented Patriot movement, the nationalism articulated in Canadian Ballads is used by future poets to establish a poetics of land possession in which settler literature is indigenized in tandem with their possession of the land. Like Moore, who occasionally expressed dismay at slavery or the erosion of Indigenous territorial rights under Jefferson,

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McGee ultimately focused on Irish causes; Adam Kidd and the ­Vindicator editors did much more to defend Indigenous or AfricanAmerican rights. In “Along the Line” and “Freedom’s Journey,” his would-be “Canadian melodies,” McGee uses the pressing issue of American slavery primarily to distinguish British North America from the United States. “Along the Line,” which is possibly inspired by Beranger’s war anthems and presented as a marching song for the War of 1812, ignores the significant participation of Indigenous officers and soldiers, not to mention the African-American militias who defended Canada against American invasion during that war. Instead, it focuses on the contributions of “men of Norman stamp” to make its rhetorical points and allow the war to function as a historical analogy for present times. Davis had identified the Normans as one thread in Irish culture, and this notion easily transferred to Canada; the idea that disparate communities shared common roots continued to be a theme in the prose and poetry of John Reade and Nicholas Flood Davin. Reflecting his editorials in the New Era, McGee felt that the culture in the province of Canada was under intellectual – rather than military – siege from American culture. In 1858, McGee the politician was also concerned with Catholic/Protestant conflicts that would require the dispelling of “clannishness” to resolve. Where the concept of the “Celt” had provided a flexible and accommodating label based on McGee’s rhetorical needs at the moment, the “Norman” label proved useful in establishing common roots for the English, French, and Irish communities that McGee wished to reconcile after the union of Upper and Lower Canada. “Norman” could encompass Charles de Salaberry, the FrenchCanadian commanding officer of the French-Canadian Voltigeur regiment, as well as homegrown militias that included soldiers with English and Irish roots. The line defended in the poem demarcates two distinct cultures: the republican United States that permits slavery and the British-held territories that uphold and defend “the legend of the law” (47) embodied in the British constitution. Like Irish-Canadian poets before him, McGee’s poetry “pursues a distinction between a more benign British North America and a deeply troubled United States.”80 The “treasures” defended by the Canadian militias are the principles of the British constitution that had preserved French language and religious rights and made Montreal a congenial place for the Catholic McGee. McGee imagines the War of 1812 as the first historical instance in which

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identifiably Canadian communities had demonstrated that they were ready to “die in battle in defence of [their] homes and altars.” Like the preceding poems, “Along the Line” uses military patriotism to inspire the would-be poets of Canada to dedicate themselves as selflessly to celebrating “the virtues of their [heroic] countrymen” (vii–viii). While the poem is set in 1812, it imagines a future in which the “babes” currently defended by the soldiers will grow to be “sons” who are “crowned in far futurity / With the laurels of the free” (48). The image of “the laurel … that loves the north” in “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s” had suggested that poetic vision grew best in the land that would become Canada. McGee argued that religious and cultural freedom were equally racy of Canadian soil. In “Freedom’s Journey,” McGee reinforces the argument he made in “Along the Line” that Canada has remained closer to the ideals of a free society than has the United States. He personifies Freedom as “a nursling of the North, / Rock’d in the arms of stormy pines” (49) who is repelled by the hypocrisy of a country that praises liberty and yet enslaves African Americans. In spite of hearing her praises sung in the United States, she finds “no shrine to freedom there.” She concludes that it is only in “the hardy kindly North … Where stood her shrine by every hearth” that she can find her “home.” In claiming that love of freedom, like poetry, is determined by climate and landscape, McGee inspired the rhetoric of later nationalists such as R.G. Haliburton, who argued that “the descendants of Northern races” who thrived in the rugged landscapes of Canada were more likely to “preserve their vigour and cherish their institutions of liberty” than countries that had the geographic misfortune to lie south of the forty-ninth parallel.81 While criticizing America’s failure to live up to its principles, McGee still chooses to acknowledge Irish-American heroes in “An International Song,” which widens the scope beyond his Canadianthemed ballads to celebrate “the Brave Man’s Memory” regardless of nationality. To encourage the dedication that makes men “willing to die in defence of [their] homes and altars,” he argues that national poets must admit brave men to an international “Brotherhood on Earth” based on whether they stood “true to the flag they had in hand” (51). As examples of men willing to serve and die for their country, he cites several generals: the French “Gallant Ney” who opposed Wellington, the English Wolfe, the French Montcalm, and the IrishAmerican Montgomery. Winner or loser, ally or enemy, each hero’s deeds ultimately stock the arsenal of the songwriter. The Irish-born

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Richard Montgomery is a significant example: even though he besieged Quebec, he represents an emigrant’s willingness to die for the principles of his new country, the United States. The argument that patriotic dedication is itself worthy of commemoration, regardless of a hero’s alliance, is reprised in McGee’s final poem in the section, “Apostrophe to the Boyne.” After “An International Song” reminds those who aspire to be the poets of the land to look within Canada as well as abroad for inspiration, McGee offers a tribute to his mentor, Gavan Duffy. “To A Friend in Australia” is also an autobiographical account of his own labours as a cultural nationalist in two countries. McGee had previously acknowledged his debt to Duffy and Young Ireland as their “humble pupil.” In the penultimate poem of the first section, McGee returns to the roots of his nationalism in praising his Young Ireland mentor. Duffy’s Irish career certainly illustrated the patriotic self-sacrifice that McGee praised in his collection’s preface. When McGee fled Ireland in 1848, Duffy was awaiting trial for the serious charge of sedition and was released only after several mistrials and appeals. In the 1850s, he continued his political activism as an Irish mp and for a while was able to create a coordinated Irish voting block at Westminster, a tactic that Charles Stewart Parnell would adopt, with devastating effectiveness, in the 1870s and 1880s. Duffy’s coalition turned its attention to reforming land tenure. Finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the different interests among Irish mp s, and ultimately disillusioned by faction fighting within his coalition, Duffy emigrated to Australia in 1855, leaving Ireland, as he bitterly expressed it, “a corpse on the dissecting table.”82 In emigrating in 1857, McGee was again following his mentor, whose career in Australia anticipated McGee’s in Canada: he was welcomed by the Irish community in Melbourne as a journalist and politician, becoming premier of the state of Victoria in 1871. In “To A Friend in Australia,” the speaker identifies himself and his friend as part of a diaspora scattered through both hemispheres. Both share the same longing for and “fair memory” of “emerald fields” where “the Avoca sings the song of Moore” (53), another reminder to would-be poets that fields and streams can become associated with a poetic voice that expresses the nature and spirit of a place. Unlike McGee’s more optimistic Canadian patriotic songs, this poem evokes nostalgia and mourning. Echoing other immigration laments, the poem presents the time and distance that separates friends as a force nearly as insurmountable as “death,” reflecting, perhaps, both men’s belief

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that the Irish spirit of the nation has itself been left for dead by Duffy, worn out by political infighting, and by McGee, forced to run for his life after a failed rebellion. Ireland becomes a remembered heaven that both exiles can only behold again either in dreams or when “time for us both a quiet couch prepares” (54). While such sentiments might appear to undermine the optimistic nationalism of the previous ballads, the poem’s final allusion to Jacob’s ladder is borrowed from Zionist rhetoric, reinforcing the idea that Duffy and McGee are part of a larger international community created by diaspora. (Young Ireland nationalist poetry frequently compared the Irish and Hebrew peoples.) The speaker imagines that “when thus we sleep may we behold / Th’angelic ladder of the Patriarch’s dream” and hopes to follow his mentor “as of old, by hill and stream” (54). The poem thus conveys the complexity of both Irish and Canadian national cultural identity, shaped equally by the experience of exile and emigration. The visionary power that fuelled Irish political exiles’ actions continues to shape their perception of their new surroundings, an idea reinforced through McGee’s allusions in the collection to Moore’s songs celebrating Irish and Canadian streams. Like the writing of Moore and Fitzgerald (whom Moore portrayed as another outsider gifted with poetic vision), McGee’s collection of ballads repeatedly suggests that explorers, visitors, exiles, and immigrants are often the most perceptive in recognizing the spirit of a place, and he presents Canada as Romantic, spiritual, and otherworldly from their imagined perspective. In the argument made through his book’s Canadian section as well as in his New Era articles, nostalgia and an intense dedication to the land of one’s birth are not so much an impediment as a requisite for a new Canadian nationalist. In the nation that would become Canada, immigrants will not be “de-characterized by any abstract reasoning or preliminary setting forth of the mere grounds of change,” he argued in the New Era editorial “An Exception Answered” on 26 January 1858. Instead, McGee’s “Canadian Ballads” becomes a practical demonstration of the argument in “An Exception Answered” that the “new patriotism itself must perform the part of solvent, and by its genial and generous atmosphere” allow the old patriotism to be “transmuted into native forms.” McGee’s editorial echoed the sentiments of Duffy, who had hoped to instill a “generous patriotism” through his cultural work. McGee addressed his preface to the current generation of young Canadians in the hopes that they would carry out a similar visionary labour for their new country.

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Having essentially written a nationalist poetics for an intended audience of immigrants or their children willing to be transmuted into patriotic Canadians, McGee concludes his “Canadian Ballads” section with a poem dedicated to an Irish rather than Canadian river. The River Boyne was a byword for national and sectarian conflict whose iconography still appears in murals in Northern Irish communities. Present-day Canadian readers would be less likely to know that the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 was a decisive defeat of James i i by William of Orange that established the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. However, McGee seems to assume that his audience already knows the history behind what the river represents, so his substantial paratext instead provides the poem’s publication history, identifies the original Irish names of historic sites such as Drogheda, and alludes to the Irish Tenant League, the movement championed by Duffy before he regretfully abandoned Ireland to the dissecting table. The paratext also alerts the reader to another wished-for transmutation: namely, how the poem’s rhetorical function changes as it appears in different anthologies or collections. McGee’s note to the poem relates its moral to the poem’s inclusion as the final ballad in a collection concerned with blending disparate emigrant voices into a native literature on Canadian soil: “These stanzas, originally written several years ago, and included in Hayes’ collection of ‘The Ballads of Ireland,’ … are here inserted as an evidence of what the author at the time of writing then considered, and still continues to consider, the true spirit in which the events referred to in them ought alone be remembered by natives of Ireland, whether at home or abroad. In this light he would fain hope they may be acceptable to the general reader in Canada” (64). The poem’s note identifies two concerns that had shaped McGee’s Canadian nationalist poetics. First, it acknowledges that Irish nationalism has depended on the act of remembrance, carried out communally by cultural networks created by “natives of Ireland” whose understanding of their history and culture is essential, regardless of whether they are “at home or abroad.” Once again, Young Ireland’s re-envisioning of Irish history is relevant in a transnational context, something McGee would be aware of as he worked on his history of Ireland while in Canada in the 1850s. Second, the ways that Irish nationalist and loyalist movements allowed knowledge of history to guide their actions would continue to be relevant to “the general reader in Canada,” a readership that included many politically active Irish immigrants. In McGee’s view,

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the Irish faction fighting that Duffy despaired of in the 1850s was in danger of being repeated on Canadian soil. Consequently, the general population of what would become Canada depended upon IrishCanadian and other politicians rising above religious, linguistic, and ethnic differences in pre-Confederation politics. Therefore, the poem ends with a prayer that the “true spirit” guiding Canadian politics and nationalism will be “brotherhood and union, / For equal laws to class and communion” (57). “Apostrophe to the Boyne,” like Duffy’s early nationalist ballads, transforms a subject dear to faction fighters into a national anthem. As the closing poem in “Canadian Ballads,” it reiterates the New Era’s call for a “generous and genial” patriotism demonstrated in different ways by each preceding poem, a sentiment that goes back to Duffy’s and Davis’s original hope of educating a new generation of nationalists. Of course, that was easier said than done. The 1850s were a challenging time for McGee as he made controversial political alliances with Orange politicians while legislators argued over separate schools for Catholic children, tariff increases, and even the location of the new government Assembly. At one point he was simultaneously the target of Protestant politicians and the recipient of “one of the strongest ecclesiastical condemnations ever levelled against a Canadian Catholic politician” by the Catholic hierarchy in Canada. Moreover, Irish faction fighting in Canada was not going away in the 1850s and 1860s (the Peterborough Orange Order pointing a loaded cannon at an 1863 St Patrick’s Day procession being one of the less serious examples). McGee’s conciliatory poetic and historiographical experiment in his “Canadian Ballads” was no doubt influenced by his political assessment of the “manifold intricacies” that arose within a country of diverse emigrant communities, including his Irish-Catholic riding in Montreal.83 It reflected the complex political landscape he was negotiating as a recent immigrant and would-be Canadian nationalist, a landscape characterized by McCarroll as a “tightrope” where it was impossible to “work John Knox and the Pope wid the same string” and not fall off.84 Between the publication of Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses and Canadian Confederation in 1867, McGee continued to see literature, scholarship, and politics as indivisible in creating a mental framework that would allow people to move on from past differences to a future that encompassed diversity and complexity. Consequently, in addition to his political work and journalism, he continued to promote intellectual activity in Canada and Ireland in

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the 1850s and 1860s. When McGee delivered one of his most influential speeches, “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion” (1867), his audience were members of the new nation he had imagined in the New Era and worked towards as a politician, a delegate to the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences, and a government minister. While he had played a modest role in uniting the territories of British North America, he found himself a divisive figure in the Irish community. When he delivered “The Mental Outfit” to the Montreal Literary Club in November 1867, McGee’s own political career was on the wane, in part due to his public condemnations of the Fenian organization that became increasingly intense and confrontational after the invasions of Canada in 1866. His disagreements with more radical Irish Canadians led to death threats and ostracism: in January 1868, McGee would be expelled from the St Patrick’s Society of Montreal, an organization that increasingly sided with Fenians in Montreal and the United States. While his political work was condemned in Canada and Ireland, his scholarly efforts were celebrated: in 1864, he had been elected to the Royal Irish Academy, based in part on his Popular History of Ireland (1863), considered a major work of Irish scholarship that “deeply influenced subsequent Irish historical writing.” McGee’s history functioned partly as a didactic narrative that supported his view that Ireland’s best hope lay with Home Rule; like earlier moderate Irish-Canadian writers, he hoped Ireland would follow the more conciliatory path laid out by O’Connell, and behind him, such Patriot politicians and heroes as Grattan and Curran.85 On a tour of Ireland to promote Canadian industry and trade, during which he was inducted into the academy, McGee’s view of Ireland’s history and destiny informed a speech he gave in Wexford on 15 May 1865 to the Catholic Young Men’s Society. A written version was published in the Dublin Evening Mail the next day. The “infamous Wexford speech” summed up what McGee considered the lessons drawn from “Twenty Years’ Experience of Irish Life in America.” While he had often spoken about the futility of physical force nationalism and about the differences between the United States and Canada, his choice of words in the Wexford speech allowed Fenians on both sides of the Atlantic to brand him a national traitor and made things easy for his enemies in Canada: looking back at his own failed attempt at insurrection, he dismissed the revolutionary wing of Young Ireland as “a pack of fools” indulging in “the follies of one-and-twenty.” He presented Fenian organizers in America as equally deluded about

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American support for the Irish cause, and as ready to “breed informers” as “filth produces vermin.” In spite of the language that alienated many Irish nationalists, he did not stray far from the political views of earlier Irish writers in Canada or his own carefully considered views about nationalism and politics that had evolved over his political and literary career in three countries. Echoing Moore’s early observations about America, he warned would-be Irish emigrants that they would not find a revolutionary and egalitarian paradise in the United States. Ever aware of the transatlantic exchanges of nationalist and political beliefs, he then condemned the Fenian movement in North America for reviving sectarian and political strife that emigrants had sought to escape. He concluded by warning the Irish at home to reject the “siren call of Fenianism from across the Atlantic.” While the speech was praised by conservative papers in Ireland and Britain, it was widely condemned in Ireland, and McGee came home to a “hurricane of Irish Canadian nationalist hostility.”86 By the end of 1867, his health broken by the stresses of politics and controversies, he was looking forward to a retirement from public life that would allow him to return to poetry and scholarship. He continued to see both activities as essential to the establishment of an independent nation that still retained its constitutional ties with Great Britain. On 4 November 1867, McGee made one of his most extensive arguments for the necessity of an intellectual foundation for Canadian nationalism, “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion.” (Not simply oratory, it was supported by the type of thorough research into production and consumption that had characterized his work as minister of agriculture and in other roles.) In looking forward to Canada’s future, McGee drew on his past experiences and Canada’s present position in terms of its scholarly and artistic culture. His speech began with a carefully researched inventory of Canada’s “intellectual forces and appliances,” a review of “what quantity and kind of mental common stock” his fellow-Canadians possessed as they “set up for [themselves] a distinct national existence in North America.”87 Recognizing that the country had been established in “a reading and writing age,” an era of mass literacy, McGee also wished to assess not simply the quantity but also the nature and range of media the reading public consumed. He first considered the press and its influence, observing that provincial publications had yet to disengage from their “servile dependence for … opinions on foreign affairs” from New York and London publications. Mindful of what Young Ireland had achieved

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through the Nation, he believed that newspaper editors’ role was to encourage a “large and generous catholicity [inclusiveness] of spirit” in its readership (2). He then presented statistics on the quantities and kinds of books circulating among Canadian readers and their availability and cost, observing that they were primarily English books or American reprints of English books. He noted the amount of popular fiction consumed and advised young readers that wellwritten histories would provide young nationalists with sufficient “romance” to feed their “geographical and historical dreams.” In addition, the Bible provided literary examples of “high eloquence” and “lessons of patriotism,” again echoing the German-inspired Romanticism of Young Ireland (4). Having assessed the range of books read by Canadians, he posed the question: “Who Reads a Canadian Book?” To which he replied: “Frankly, very few, for Canadian books are exceedingly scarce” – a situation he had deplored a decade earlier in his New Era articles. He then enumerated the number of universities and colleges already established as well as the number of “educated men,” who he hoped could play the role of public intellectual by sharing their expertise “for the benefit of lay societies” and contributing to “the general elevation of public taste” (5). In his survey of existing libraries, he acknowledged those in universities and parliament, but regretted that the country possessed not a single public library. Finally, he turned his attention to the number of influential Canadian thinkers and writers. He identified “one humourist” (Haliburton, not McCarroll), one historian (French Canadian Fr Garneau), and several promising poets (Alexander McLachlan, Charles Heavysege, and Charles Sangster, but again not McCarroll). He concluded that Canada had not yet produced an extended poetic masterpiece and had “few resources we can call our own” in terms of intellectual or artistic work (5). In his literary, cultural, and scholarly inventory, McGee touched upon all the elements relied upon or developed in Ireland during its second cultural revival of the 1830s: universities and libraries; scholars and antiquarians; an independent press that promoted both political engagement and culture; and a published, readily accessible library of popular history, biography, and patriotic poetry. All these things had been recognized by Young Ireland as necessary to its program of creating an intellectual foundation that would “foster public opinion and make it racy of the soil.” Likewise, McGee argued that Canadian culture must express a “distinct national existence” that would

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encourage the “mental self-reliance” that was “an essential condition of our political independence” (1). As in Ireland, it required the cultivation of intellectual and literary works on Canadian soil, but this aim is expressed by McGee through a distinctly contemporary and Canadian metaphor. The English and American publications accessible to educated Canadians “do not always run on the same mental gauge, nor connect with our trains of thought” (6). Reflecting his experiences in Ireland and America, then Canada, McGee again reflects on the new nation’s need to distinguish itself from England and America and to produce literature that encouraged Canadians to reflect on their essential differences in order to guide them into the future. The country’s need to assert its mental independence from the United States had become increasingly urgent in the decade since McGee had observed in the New Era that American books would “Massachusett-ize the Canadian mind.” In the wake of the American Civil War, he was not concerned solely with the literal invasion already carried out by American Fenians, many of whom had been well-armed and battle-hardened veterans of the federal and secessionist armies. He also continued to fear the current American philosophy of Manifest Destiny that arose at the conclusion of the civil war: “It is quite clear to me, if we are to succeed with our new Dominion, it can never be by accepting a ready-made easy literature, which assumes … the American democratic system to be the manifestly destined form of government for all the civilized world, as well as the old” (6). Echoing Duffy, McGee instead asserted that “that mental culture must become more and more to many classes what religion alone once was to all our ancestors in individual and family government,” and that it would help reinforce the principles of religion that he characterized as “nature and revelation” and, “once so laid, those foundations will stand as firmly set and rooted, as any rocks in the Huronian or Laurentian range” (7). While recognizing the threat represented by American cultural dominance, McGee argued that the progress of American literature could still furnish a positive example, in keeping with his argument that Canadian poets and scholars should avoid a narrow-minded nationalism and be “ready to learn from every other people” (1). Forty years previously, the British had asked who reads an American book, and before that, “an eminent French writer raised a doubt as to whether any German could be a literary man.” Canada could learn from and be encouraged by American literature’s rapid development,

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but also from the German example that had inspired Davis. The Canadian historians, poets, and scientists McGee noted by name were “streaks on the horizon” (6) indicating a dawning literary and intellectual movement whose precedents could be discerned in the intellectual history of other new nations: “But North America is emerging; and why not our one-third of the North rise to an equal, even if an opposing altitude, with the land conterminous?” (6–7). Having inventoried the mental outfit that the new country already possessed, McGee asserted that further progress depended upon “the existence of a recognized literary class” that he believed was “a state and social necessity” (6). Repeating the appeal made in his preface to Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses, McGee again called upon “our young men” to work for the new country with the same dedication, zeal, and self-sacrifice celebrated in his historical and poetic accounts of heroic rebels, scholars, and poets. While recognizing that establishing a country required “moral power, mental power, and physical power,” he privileged intellectual labours in “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion.” Canadians, “favoured as we are,” were capable of producing the poetic and intellectual culture that material and political power depended upon. Repeating the military metaphors with which he had introduced Canadian Ballads, he concludes “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion” with an intellectual call to arms: “I would beseech of that most important class, therefore, to use their time; to exercise their powers of mind as well as body; to acquire the mental drill and discipline, which will enable them to bear the arms of a civilized state in times of peace, with honor, and advantage” (7). As a way of acknowledging his own debt to the scholars and poets of the second Irish cultural revival, he concludes by adapting Samuel Ferguson’s “Lament for Thomas Davis” to his Canadian audience: O brave young men, our hope, our pride, our promise, On you our hearts are set, – In manliness, in kindliness, in justice, To make Canada a nation yet! (7) While Davis had not lived to fight for Ireland in 1848, he had nevertheless given his short life to scholarship and poetry that he hoped would make Ireland a nation once again. With his closing verse, McGee came full circle in evaluating his own intellectual career, drawing his ideas about the future of Canada from his past experiences as

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a young immigrant in America supporting Emancipation back home, then a journalist and scholar in England and Ireland participating in Irish cultural nationalism, an advocate for Irish immigrants in America and Canada, and finally a founding father of Canadian nationalism, a national poet, and – an element overshadowed by his other colourful roles – an influential public intellectual. “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion” can be read as a summation of McGee’s intellectual, poetic, and political experience, his literary and scholarly influences, and his own contributions to a new Canadian cultural nationalism. Of course, McGee did not intend it to be the conclusion to his career but rather the prelude to its next stage, where he hoped to rededicate himself to poetry, the field in which Ferguson believed McGee surpassed Davis. After accepting a government appointment that would allow him time to focus on his writing, McGee hoped that he could do for Canada what Davis had done for Ireland, or at least “do something yet, not discreditable to my country.”88 But like Davis, his work was done too soon. At the age of forty-two, less than six months after he gave his speech in Montreal, McGee was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet while returning home from a late sitting of parliament in Ottawa on 7 April 1868. Patrick Whelan, sentenced to hang for the crime, denied being a Fenian, but based on the hundreds of threats McGee received when he began to denounce Fenianism as a threat to Canada, his opposition to the organization cost him his life. His violent death transmuted him to the type of hero he celebrated in his poems: one ready to die in defence of Canadian homes and altars. His funeral in Montreal on 13 April 1868 – his forty-third birthday – featured a public procession of 15,000 people that was attended by 80,000 more. A Montreal reporter described the public display of grief as “this unanimity, this stirring with one impulse the great heart of an immense population.”89 Other memorials were held across the country, and these mass public ceremonies provided citizens with a performative outlet for the particularly Canadian civic values that McGee had come to represent for them.90 During this early stage of post-Confederation nationalism, the decade that followed McGee’s death saw the lifelong Irish nationalist became an inspiration and example for the next generation of Canadian nationalists.

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10 John Reade (1837–1919)

The many public demonstrations of grief in the wake of Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s assassination included a poetic tribute by his close friend, John Reade. An Irish immigrant like McGee, he arrived in North America in his teens and began a precocious literary and journalistic career. Dated 7 April 1868 and published in The Prophesy of Merlin and Other Poems (1870), “In Memoriam – T.D. McGee” is an Ossianic-style lament for a writer and statesman who had first been “a prophet” then “a martyr” for the new nation. It implicitly contrasts the divisive political violence of the Fenians with communities united in their grief: O Canada, weep, ’twas for thee that he spoke the last words of his life! Weep, Erin, his blood has been shed in the healing of wounds of thy strife! Weep, Scotia, no son of thy soil held thy mountains and valleys more dear! Weep, England, thy brave honest eyes never glistened with ­worthier tear!1 In spite of Canadians’ shock and condemnation, neither Fenian activity in Canada nor invasions from America ceased with McGee’s death. While the Battle of Ridgeway in Canada West remained the most well-known and deadly engagement, Reade’s home province of Canada East had also been attacked in the summer of 1866. On 8  June, 200 Fenian soldiers crossed the American border into Huntington, 85 kilometres south of Montreal, but were turned back

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by British soldiers and Canadian volunteers on high alert since the Ridgeway invasion two days before. On the same day, Fenian forces briefly terrorized the residents of Pigeon Hill before they were defeated and captured there. (After this engagement, a Victoria Cross was awarded to an Irish private in the 1st Rifle Brigade who had averted catastrophe by single-handedly fighting a fire that had broken out in a rail car full of ammunition.2) While in part a response to these invasions, Canadian Confederation did not end them. Two years after McGee’s death, the Fenians made another foray into the same region, now the province of Quebec, at Eccles Hill near the border. They were led by the commander of the Ridgeway invasion, John O’Neill, the hero of James McCarroll’s novel. Thirteen thousand Canadian and British army and militia massed on the Quebec and Ontario borders, and on 25 May, O’Neill’s 600 recruits were defeated, with no Canadian casualties. The Fenians attempted a second invasion on 27 May 1870, this time at Trout River, west of Eccles Hill, where they again retreated before British and Canadian regiments and volunteer militia. O’Neill would make one last attempt to invade Canada at the Manitoba ­border in 1871. Now a federated nation of former British colonies, Canada still seemed vulnerable to not only American cultural incursions but also literal ones. Years before he had fully articulated his dangerous opposition to Fenian forces in North America, McGee considered American influence “the greatest long-range threat to Canada,”3 arguing that the principles of the British constitution could best preserve Canada’s distinctive character. In “Canadian National Sovereignty,” a New Era editorial that appeared 19 January 1858, he had made a proposal that was ignored or ridiculed, most memorably in McCarroll’s writing. Rather than continue with Queen Victoria as constitutional monarch, Canada should establish a British prince “in independent state on the Throne of Canada,” he suggested, “as a safeguard against assimilation, absorption and subjection to and by Americanism – and as a guarantee, focus, and standard of Canadian nationality.” If the current Prince of Wales declined the proffered kingship, one of his younger brothers “might be found capable of fulfilling all royal offices in a new kingdom upon the St Lawrence.” In May 1870, the youngest of those brothers, Prince Arthur, was in Canada, not as constitutional monarch but as a British officer on active duty helping repel the invaders at Eccles Hill, for which he received the Fenian Medal. His engagement in this battle helped him become

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a champion of his adopted country. Extremely popular among Canadians, the prince, like earlier visitors, adopted many of the roles celebrated by Canadian cultural nationalists. Like Fitzgerald, he embraced the harsh Canadian climate, cutting a dashing figure in the winter dress of the Rifle Brigade, as depicted in the Illustrated London News. On his visit to the Grand River reserve in Ontario, the chiefs of the Bear, Turtle, and Wolf clans made him an honorary chief of the Six Nations. Where Edward Fitzgerald had declared that he was now a “thorough Indian” after his adoption into the Bear Clan eighty years earlier, Pauline Johnson now observed that “were every drop of blood in [Prince Arthur’s] royal veins red, instead of blue, he could not be more fully qualified as an Indian chief than he is now.”4 Happily taking up residence in Montreal, Prince Arthur declared Canada “my home,” organizing skating parties and resolving to “lose no opportunity of becoming full acquainted” with Canadian people and institutions.5 This transformation from newcomer to Canadian nationalist took place much more quickly than the gradual evolution brought on by the “influences of climate, occupation, and surroundings by which the settlers were modified … to form a new ethnic variety” envisaged by Reade in “The Making of Canada.”6 Nevertheless, Reade used the prince’s example in his work, most comprehensively in his long poem “The Prophesy of Merlin.” As an Irish immigrant who had himself embraced the role of Canadian nationalist, Reade, like McGee, wrote out of an awareness of the complexities of national identity and patriotism in a nation formed by the interchanges between immigrant, settler, and Indigenous communities. For both poets, an “immigrant” prince would be a living symbol of the constitutional values they hoped would make their home in the new northern nation. As someone who identified as Irish, Protestant, and loyalist, Reade did not share the revolutionary views that had marked McGee’s early political career. Even so, he sympathized with McGee’s effort to reconcile his deeply felt Irish patriotism with his belief in the “golden link” to the British constitutional tradition and crown. Like McGee, Reade treasured his connection with the North of Ireland, and like Adam Kidd, his nationalism began as parochialism, in the best sense of the word. Where Kidd often published as Slievegallin, Reade adopted a Fermanagh parish, “Templecarne,” as his nom-de-plume. He was born in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, in 1837 and spent much of his childhood in his grandparents’ home in Pettigo, a border village on the Termon River. (This river would later form the

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border between the North and the Republic, at which point Pettigo found itself straddling two countries as well as two counties.) He was educated nearby at the elite Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, which had been established by royal charter in the seventeenth century as part of James i’s plantation of Ulster. It was one of the oldest and most richly endowed public schools in Ireland, intended to educate the military, ecclesiastical, political, and literary elite of Ireland. (Sir William Wilde would send Oscar and his younger brother there in the 1860s, and Samuel Beckett would attend in the 1920s.) Reade’s home region had no dearth of the “wayside crosses” and “Cromwellian breaches” that McGee considered visual reminders of the country’s history and culture. Portora’s school grounds overlook Lough Erne, its islands full of ancient stonework and carvings from pre-Christian and early Christian periods, as well as the ruins caused by the sectarian conflicts of the seventeenth century. These relics no doubt shaped Reade’s understanding of Irish nationality in a region where even the more recent Protestant settlers had been established for centuries while living among the monuments and ruins of even more ancient cultures. His childhood region of Donegal and Fermanagh formed the landscape of his nostalgic dreams of return, as described in “Devenish,” “Killynoogan,” and “Drumhariff Hill.” The poems celebrate the ancient Castle McGrath, destroyed in the rebellions of 1641 “as Cromwell’s cruel law” was imposed, as well as an ancient mill still operating in his boyhood (used in the Great Famine to grind “Indian corn” imported from America into meal to be distributed as famine relief) and the ancient “rath” or Celtic fort that he would come to see as emblematic of a multi-faceted Irish nationality even in his Canadian poems.7 After studying at Queen’s College, later Queen’s University Belfast, Reade immigrated to Canada with his family in 1856. Nineteen years old that year, he almost immediately established his first cultural journal, the Montreal Literary Magazine. While it was short-lived, he went on to a long and productive relationship with the Montreal Gazette as reviewer and columnist. He studied law and theology, briefly becoming a Church of England minister before ill health forced him to resign. He returned to literature and scholarship, becoming one of the most erudite and respected “stars” in the modest galaxy of writers and critics in late nineteenth-century Canada.8 Held in high regard as a classical scholar as well as a poet, Reade preserved many of the letters sent to him from other bright lights in the Canadian intellectual galaxy, including historians Lawrence

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J. Burpee and Sir John George Bourinot and geologist Sir John William Dawson. The letters reveal that he was ever willing to encourage and help other Canadian writers, scholars, musicians (some who set his lyrics to music), and antiquarians. They contain glimpses of the lively intellectual society cultivated in Montreal and elsewhere, as well as news (and sometimes gossip) about major and minor poets, including Archibald Lampman, Charles G.D. Roberts, Arthur Weir, and Wilfred Campbell. (One letter from Campbell conveys the general shock at Lampman’s sudden and untimely death: “The last time I saw him was the Saturday before at Madame Frechette’s, then he sportingly boasted of his immunity from Grippe. … A sweet and gentle poet has passed from among us and our loss is great.”9) Sir James MacPherson Le Moine (mentioned by McGee as one of the contributors to Canada’s “mental outfit” in 1867) was a particularly faithful correspondent for decades. A collector for Inland Revenue by profession, he was a polymath: a writer, a naturalist, and a historian most known for Quebec Past and Present, a History of Quebec, 1608–1876 (1876). In 1863, he acquired the estate Spencer Wood, where Kidd had briefly found hospitality, and continued its tradition as a haven for poets and scholars through his “dazzling” soirees at which Reade was often a guest. (At times, the letters indicate, Le Moine’s hospitality threatened to ruin him.10) The child of a seigneur and a United Empire Loyalist, Le Moine represented the harmonious intermingling of immigrant cultures and the intellectual passion and energy that Reade believed would help unify the nation. Where in the 1850s, McGee had publicly wondered who in Canada read (or wrote) a Canadian book, Reade came of age in a less barren literary period. Beginning in the 1860s, Canadian literary nationalists, following the Young Ireland example, encouraged both readers and writers through anthologies and collections. Unsurprisingly, many of the editors and contributors had Irish backgrounds. Mary Anne Sadlier, a prolific Irish-Catholic poet and novelist, had a successful transnational literary and publishing career from the 1840s to the 1890s. She edited McGee’s collected poems, published by her family’s company in 1869. The Cavan-born Methodist minister and poet Edward Hartley Dewart (1828–1903) had published the first anthology of “Canadian Verse” just before Confederation in 1864. Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets included poems by Reade as well as other Irish-born or Irish-Canadian poets, including McGee, McCarroll, Sadlier, and Rosanna (Mullins) Leprohon.

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Like earlier Irish patriot-poets, Reade joined and supported many scholarly societies within Canada, including the Royal Society of Canada and the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. He also chaired the local branch of an American folklore society.11 In addition to encouraging the study of folklore, he shared Irish cultural nationalists’ interest in local sports. An 1867 portrait of him as a young man by Montreal photographer William Notman shows him in winter gear with snowshoes.12 Like Prince Arthur and Fitzgerald before him, Reade apparently believed that to adapt to a new land and become Canadian, one must dress the part. While Montreal sports and festivals are featured in Reade’s poetry, Canada’s very recent trauma, the Fenian invasions, looms large in his only published collection, The Prophesy of Merlin and Other Poems (1870). It is one of the historical events he uses to generate a sense of national unity, a focus that tended to be overlooked by early reviewers, who praised it primarily for its professions of loyalty to the British Empire. In an 1871 review, the Dublin University Magazine considered it “a volume which in every way is worthy of the Land of the Lakes,” but also notes the main poem’s debt to an English model, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. From a conservative and loyalist Irish reviewer’s perspective, the volume’s Canadian poems are treated more as an afterthought: poems on the Fenian raids and the death of McGee are praised, rather patronizingly, as “local colouring” that “gives the book an especial interest to colonial readers.”13 However, the occasional poems touching on recent Canadian events do not simply add local colour: they complement the preoccupations of the title poem, “The Prophesy of Merlin.” The poem is generally seen as a reflection of Reade’s strong commitment to the values of the British Empire; as the Dublin University reviewer observed, Reade’s aim is to show his loyalty to Britain and “enshrine[] the memory of Albert the Good in his rhymes.”14 Percy Ghent, later celebrating Reade’s life and career in 1925, continued to view the poem as “a vehicle for the expression of Reade’s own abounding faith in the British Empire’s high destiny.”15 However, “The Prophesy of Merlin” is not simply a tribute to the centre of power from a colonial writer on the margins, and not, as his reviewers imagined, merely a “story of the mighty growth and conquest by which ‘the fair realm of Britain’ was to attain to heights of splendour.”16 Instead, it is an immediate reaction to the Canadian crises, political insecurity, and ethnic tensions that haunted the newly established nation in 1870, public traumas that McGee’s still-recent

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death embodied. McGee’s assassination in 1868 and the Fenian troubles that continued to disturb Canada cast their shadow over much of the title poem as well as the collection. While “The Prophesy of Merlin” subtly evokes the Fenian crisis, it is treated more explicitly in “The Fenian Raid: June, 1866.” This occasional poem recognizes the invasion’s role in spurring Canadian national identity into existence. After all, the invasion resulted in the first independent military engagement of the Canadian Army, which fought against a far more experienced and well-armed invasion force comprised of American Civil War veterans from former Irish battalions. Given that throughout his career Reade, like McGee, was concerned with “healing wounds” caused by Canadian and Irish political strife, his poem focuses less on military glory and more on the human cost of pursuing Irish political feuds on North American soil. Nine Canadian soldiers were killed on the first day of the invasion, including three student reservists from the University of Toronto, called away from their final exams to take up their commissions in the Queen’s Own Rifles. The conditions in which the militias fought were bad and the wounds horrific: many Canadian combatants died later of injuries or diseases contracted during rigours of the campaign. Testifying to the brutal efficiency of the Minié ball many survivors had limbs amputated.17 The poem concludes with a demand for justice for “the blood of the true, the unselfish, the brave” and “the women and children they perished to save” (85). The condemnation of needless bloodshed is repeated in “The Prophesy of Merlin,” which celebrates the chivalry of patriots inspired by the example of King Arthur but never loses sight of war’s cost, shown most vividly in the image of “lonely hearths” that “sorrow for the dead who come no more” (21). Fenian violence in Canada also creates a moral imperative for unity, given that McGee was “the champion of peace amid foes … unto death” (91). The death of a national champion, a theme introduced in “In Memoriam – T.D. McGee” is reprised in “The Prophesy of Merlin,” which also begins with the loss and hoped-for return of a national hero, again in a specifically Canadian context. In writing about contemporary Canada, Reade adapts a centuries-old genre: poems in which Merlin promises the return of Arthur and predicts the events that take place in contemporary times were part of an Arthurian literary tradition going back to the twelfth century. Reade’s poem is unique, however, in predicting that King Arthur will return, not to England, but to “a far land beneath the setting sun / Now and long

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hence undreamed of” (27). The poem concludes with the wish that the country to which Arthur returns will be made “great by noble deeds of noble men” (28). Written while Reade was still mourning a good friend and a muchloved public figure, “The Prophesy of Merlin” ponders the aftermath of one of the first national crises of Confederation, raising the question of how to keep alive the type of Romantic nationalism that McGee had championed. While the poem concludes with an apocalyptic vision of Canada’s future, it begins in despair, with Bedivere, the last surviving knight of the Round Table, mourning the slain Arthur. His speech recalls Reade’s own poetic tribute to the dead McGee, who left “the heart of a nation … bleeding and crushed” because his voice that “thrilled thousands … forever is hushed” (89). Likewise, Bedivere is bereft of “the voice that gave my arm its strength” after the loss of his nation’s hero, Arthur, who inspired patriots to go “forth to noble deeds” (4). While Merlin predicts that another Prince Arthur will demonstrate military prowess upon his arrival in Canada, McGee’s oratory powers as the prophet of a “Great Northern Nation” are transferred to Merlin in the title poem. In an 1860 speech, McGee had imagined a new nation bound within “the round of the peaks of the Western Mountains and the crests of the Eastern waves, the winding Assiniboine, the five-fold lakes,” supported by public-spirited men and “a constitution worthy of such a country.”18 Merlin likewise assures the despairing Bedivere that Arthur will return, but to a future “land of stately woods / Of swift broad rivers and of ocean lakes” (27). Generally accepted as a poem in which Canada remains connected to the history and values of the British Empire, guided by the progeny of Queen Victoria and “Albert the Blameless Prince,” “The Prophesy of Merlin” is nevertheless preoccupied with the fragility of Canada’s achievement of peace and good government. The cycle of progress and regression that Merlin sees in the history of the British Empire could also apply to political shocks facing the new nation: So after peace, Which men had thought eternal, shall come war, And chase, with rumbling horror, the sweet dreams Of gentle harmony throughout the world. (21) The phrase “And, one war over, others shall succeed” (22) could refer to the succession of civil and external conflicts endured by Britain, but

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Canadian readers might see it as an allusion to the renewed Fenian invasions of Reade’s home province the year his collection was published. However, threats of invasion also revive “the spirit of the Table Round” and inspire new acts of chivalry through patriotic “deeds that shall make the eyes / of those who come thereafter flash with pride.” At these battles “Shall fall such men as fought at Badon-hill” (21). The allusion is to a decisive sixth-century battle in which the Britons fought off the invading Anglo Saxons, but it also captures the mood of a beleaguered Canada uniting to repel repeated physical and moral incursions from south of the border. The poem reflects a national yearning for the peace and order that would finally come when, according to legend, Arthur returns to the world, fulfilling Merlin’s prediction. Bedivere asks Merlin “If, in the far-off after-time, shall come / A Prince who shall be known by Arthur’s name, / And bear it blamelessly as he did his” (26). Merlin replies that a hero named Arthur will return, not to Britain but to a country whose unique landscape, like that of Arthurian Britain and Romantic Ireland, can inspire both “noble deeds” and poetry. Merlin predicts that Arthur, son of the “Good Queen” Victoria and the “Blameless Prince” Albert, will live up to the example of his namesake or – in the context of Canadian and English history – namesakes. Prince Arthur was named after his godfather, another Arthur and national hero, the Duke of Wellington with whom he shared a birthday. Like Prince Arthur, Wellington had a role, albeit indirect, in Canada’s defence, overseeing military deployment there in the early nineteenth century, as well as the Ordinance Department that built the Rideau Canal against future American invasions.19 Through both his name and his actions, Prince Arthur becomes an appropriate symbolic embodiment of the qualities that Reade and McGee believed distinguished their great northern nation from the country to the south. While composing the poem, Reade could not have guessed that Prince Arthur would that same year be actively involved in repelling an invasion from America. However, he sent two copies of his poetry collection to Prince Arthur less than two weeks after local militia and the prince’s regiment had routed the Fenians at Eccles Hill in May. In a letter dated 6 June, Reade learned that the poems’ “spirit of loyalty and delicacy of sentiment” gave the prince “sincere pleasure” and that he would take “the earliest opportunity of having the second copy placed before” Queen Victoria.20 Reade proved exceptionally prescient in predicting the extraordinarily long and successful Canadian career of Arthur, whose title, the

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Duke of Connaught, fortuitously allows the prince to represent the union of Canadian, English, and Irish values that many of Reade’s poems and prose celebrate.21 In 1911, he was invited back to Canada to serve as governor general, becoming, in Reade’s view, the symbolic embodiment of the values that Merlin had asserted were “the real King the people serve” (10). Reade was able to make McGee a prophet in another way: Prince Arthur’s appointment indirectly fulfilled McGee’s speculation that a son of Victoria should become Canada’s constitutional representative when he became Canada’s first and only governor general who was a member of the royal family. With Irish invasions from America fresh in Reade’s mind, “The Prophesy of Merlin” uses the history of Britain as an exemplary way of unifying Canadians behind a symbol of the constitutional system that McGee had repeatedly advocated for Canada. From historical battlegrounds “rank with blood” of “Briton, and Dane, and Saxon,” Merlin predicts that “a nation shall arise” in which “as the ages pass, these foes shall join / in friendship” (9). This sentiment is reiterated again in “Hastings,” Reade’s much-anthologized paean to “The Imperial Spirit,”22 in which the mingling of cultures results from the Norman conquest, presented “as a bloody and necessary prerequisite to the creation of a new race.”23 From “that red united clay” of the battlefield, “another race did start / On the great stage of history to act a noble part.”24 Reade’s belief that the diverse settler communities of Canada have common ancestors accounts in part for his interest in French Canada. Like McGee, Reade celebrated not only British political institutions and values in Canada but also the distinctive culture and history of the nation’s French-speaking inhabitants. His historical poem “Madeleine de Verchères” features a heroine known to his contemporaries as the “Canadian Joan of Arc.” Like his poems on the Fenian invasions, “Madeleine de Verchères” presents beseiged Canadians defending their home against overwhelming odds. As in McGee’s “Along the Line,” which Reade thought was his most successful Canadian ballad, 25 Canadians “of the old Norman stamp” in “Madeleine de Verchères” are willing to sacrifice their lives in holding the line against alien values. Reade’s historical poem is one example of how a relatively littleknown event related to New France could model the type of patriotism that Reade wished to inspire in his Canadian readers. Based on a seventeenth-century historical narrative (albeit one whose details were

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contested), the poem recounts how the fourteen-year-old heroine organized and inspired her younger brothers, one elderly man, and two soldiers to resist a large Haudenosaunee war party for nearly a week until reinforcements arrived. Like McGee, Reade emphasizes the piety and patriotism of the French settlers, suggesting they embody current Canadian values, which the former Anglican minister sees as explicitly Christian values: “Never in the days to come when Canada is great and proud / Be it said a Christian maiden by a heathen’s threat was cowed.”26 Whereas McGee used French-Canadian history as a way to vindicate Irish Catholics and prove their loyalty to Canada, the Protestant Reade sees French-Catholic values as representing those held by all Canadians. It is still a relatively liberal view for the time, especially when other Canadian nationalists were retrenching their Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity in the wake of the North-West Resistance. Reade’s celebration of French Canada reflects his larger ecumenical Christianity that he hoped would transcend the sectarian divisions of his home country. While Reade often alludes to French-Canadian and British events to argue for Canadian unity, his historical poetry is deeply informed by Young Ireland’s literary criticism and historiography. Reade himself acknowledged Canadian nationalism’s debt to Young Ireland in a tribute to McGee that appeared in the February 1870 issue of the New Dominion Monthly. The article assumed a great familiarity with the cultural nationalism formulated by Young Ireland, to the extent that Reade assumed that literate Canadians knew about its goals through McGee’s poetry and criticism.27 Like many critics after him, Reade felt that McGee’s Irish ballads were stronger and more sincere than his Canadian ones. That said, he singled out “Along the Line,” written to commemorate the victory of 1812, as a superior example of patriotic poetry because it conformed with the Nation’s practice of making “popular songs and ballads a leading medium for the dissemination of national feeling.” Reade’s defence of McGee recognized that his most compelling poetry came from a strong attachment to the land of his birth. Even if such strong attachment to a native land presented challenges for cultural nationalism in a settler nation, Reade agreed with McGee that it could gradually transmute or evolve into Canadian nationalism. Like Duffy, McGee, and other Young Ireland critics, Reade emphasized the role of national poetry and ballads in conveying the essence of a distinct culture to its own members as well as to other countries, offering an international selection of national ballads as an

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example for Canada. He also considered the way that patriotic values brought to a new country by its immigrants could take root in Canada. His criticism also reiterated McGee and Young Ireland’s dictum, “No national literature, no national life.” In an annual review of literature in 1886, he repeated the by-now common nationalist belief that “a community may be distinguished in oratory, may have great historians, may produce savants of the first order and philosophers of the highest rank, but if it has no poet worthy of the name it is not considered to have reached the height of intellectual eminence.”28 Like Young Ireland members, Reade did not promote the study of history merely for its own sake but also for its ability to stock the national songwriter’s arsenal, as demonstrated by “Madeleine de Verchères.” He also followed McGee’s example in supporting the writing and popularization of Canadian history and poetry for nationalist purposes. In a paper given to the Royal Society of Canada on 21 May 1884, he credited the “archives of our parishes and seigneuries” and the accurate work of Canadian historians for creating a communal memory for Canada: “The stranger, who now and then concerns himself with us, too often neglects to consult our national library. They speak of French Canadians in the United States, in France, in England, according to the information of fancy. When they learn that we are of some importance, the works of Garneau, Ferland, and Tanguay will have an honoured place in the esteem of the learned.”29 Like McGee and other members of Young Ireland, Reade believed that a careful study of history could not only create an appreciation for the unique historical and cultural contributions of different settler communities in Canada but also act as a corrective to divisive myths, something Young Ireland intellectuals had also hoped to accomplish. In his Royal Society paper, he announced that he wished to “make it plain that the stocks from which we are derived are the best in Europe, and that the union of the qualities which have made them severally great ought, when efficaciously combined and developed, to make us still greater.”30 Reade also endorsed Young Ireland’s concept of national culture as an amalgam of the communities that had settled the country over millennia, although he privileged the Celtic element as characterizing its most evocative poetry. While reflecting on the past work of Young Ireland, he was prescient in understanding how the construction of Celtic poetry and identity would come to be viewed by future poets and critics as a way of restoring spirituality to the English-speaking

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world: “It would seem indeed Ireland were the border land between the world that is seen and the world that is unseen … It is now as it was centuries before … a chosen land of song – the only land perhaps where the sacred gifts and music are sufficient to insure their possessor a willing welcome into castle and cottage.”31 This view would form one of the tenets of the Irish Literary Revival of the 1870s and 1880s. More significantly for the transatlantic Irish community, Reade also saw Ireland as “the border-land between the old world and the new,”32 especially since its historical examples and its cultural achievements in the 1840s could help Canada navigate both nationalism and imperialism in the 1880s. In many ways, Irish cultural nationalism continued to be a conduit between Old World and New World perspectives, at least in Canada. Reade’s appreciation of Irish cultural nationalism and the Celtic contribution was essential to his understanding of Canada’s participation in the larger British imperial project, a view articulated even more explicitly by Nicholas Flood Davin during western expansion in the 1880s. Reade used the example of McGee’s career to argue how a distinct Irish identity could benefit rather than threaten a unified Canada within the British Empire. In his appreciation of McGee, Reade acknowledged how both his Celtic roots and his Catholicism fed the Irish nationalism expressed in his greatest poems. At the same time, he felt it necessary to account for the more divisive or exclusionary qualities within both the Nation’s and McGee’s earlier forms of nationalism. While conceding that “these ‘nation’ songs were the stirring prelude to a mad enterprise in which Mr McGee took part” and for which he “more than atoned – in life and death,” Reade argued that the “genuine if mistaken patriotism,” the distinct voice valued by nationalist writers, would keep the poems from being “doomed to oblivion.”33 Reade even accounts for what he considered the comparative weakness of McGee’s Canadian ballads in the context of his earlier radicalism: “But those who remember the reception that Mr McGee met with on his advent in Montreal even from those who afterwards learned to love and honor him will not wonder that he chose to keep for a time in petto the poetic emanations of which the central date was the year ’48. He therefore confined himself to such ballads as a man of any nationality might have written – at the risk, it may be, of losing admirers who might think that he was thus throwing ‘Old Ireland’ overboard.”34

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Reade nonetheless shared McGee’s later view that Canadian and Irish nationalism were threads that strengthened the warp of British imperialism, something reflected in Reade’s own poetry. Like other Canadian nationalists in the 1870s, Reade subscribed to the notion that Canada’s cultural richness, like Ireland’s, derived from the distinctiveness of its individual communities. In addition to national poetry, public narratives, rituals, and performances could be the “genial” influence or “solvent” that broke down the boundaries between different nationalities present on Canadian soil. Where Reade saw McGee’s Young Ireland poems as expressing the distinct national voice of Ireland, he noted that French Canadians had their own national poets whose concept of their nation could equally be the basis for a broader patriotism. Reade’s poem honouring Louis-Honoré Fréchette, whose strong sense of his own French-Canadian identity made him one of the first internationally recognized Canadian poets, leads to a vision of distinct identities merging into a powerful new nationality: Shamrock and thistle and sweet roses gay … These, with the later maple, take, we pray, To mingle with thy laurelled lily, long Pride of the brave and theme of poet’s song.35 In presenting emblems of distinct settler cultures in Canada as forming an aesthetically harmonious bouquet, Reade argues that “They err who deem us aliens” to each other. Like McGee, he argues that the cultures that make up the two linguistically distinctive literary communities in Canada share common roots: the English and Irish in Canada share with the French Canadians common Celtic and Gallic origins: Are not we Bretons and Normans too? North, South, and West Gave us, like you, of blood and speech their best, Here re-united, one great race to be.36 The site of a rich literary culture in two languages, Reade’s home city of Montreal offered many tangible ways to perform this cultural unity through its landscape, visible monuments, and public festivals

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that allowed the newer, seemingly “alien” English and Irish settler to establish physical and emotional connections to the more established French-Canadian and Anglo communities. Like McGee and Shanly, Reade was introduced relatively late in life to Montreal winters, which made them exotic and unique in their own right. He exploited this novelty in making the land surrounding Montreal – and by extension, its local character – the site of transcendent experiences and demonstrations of Canadian hardiness. Reade was not the only writer of this era who used the concept of a Northern nation and common Northern stock as a means of uniting diverse ethnic groups in Canada. Inspired by McGee’s death, R.G. Haliburton too had expressed this concept in The Men of the North, emphasizing that Canada’s settler cultures all had northern roots. Arguing that geography and history have ensured that the essential character “of the New Dominion must ever be that it is a Northern country inhabited by the descendants of Northern races,” he argued for a “wider range” in the view of Canadian identity that “will comprise at once the Celtic, the Teutonic, and the Scandinavian elements … and embrace the Celt, the Norman French, the Saxon and the Swede, all of which are noble sources of national life.”37 In “The Winter Carnival,” Reade answers Haliburton’s question, “Can the generous flame of national spirit be kindled and blaze in the icy bosom of the frozen north?38 He argues that winter brings out the best national qualities in Canadians, while emphasizing that the Irish, in spite of their temperate homeland, share common roots with the “hardy Northmen,” the Norse who not only invaded then populated England and Normandy, but also left “many a thrice encircled rath … on Erin’s hills” to mark “the path / By which they came and fought.”39 Arguing again that the different linguistic and religious communities in Canada shared common ancestors and traits, Reade uses the recently founded Montreal winter carnivals as an apt representation of an integrated, Northern-inspired Canadian culture. Initially established in 1883 by Montreal citizen groups as a way to encourage winter tourism from the United States and stimulate the Montreal economy, the carnivals “were a self-conscious display of civic pride and national identity.”40 In “Jacques Cartier,” Reade himself comments on these festivals’ value in promoting Montreal winter culture beyond Canadian borders by describing a more benign American invasion as “Southrons left their snowless fields / To join the merry crowd.”41 If the organizers of the carnival hoped to offer

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Montreal’s winters as a novelty that would attract foreign visitors, Reade uses the same season as a mark of cultural distinctiveness reflected in Canadian culture. Appealing mostly to those with the money and leisure to take part, the carnivals had limited success in uniting Montrealers from all classes and communities, but they did promote the image of Canadians as hardy athletes delighting in, rather than hiding from, winter. Reade reinforces this view in “The Winter Carnival.” In the spirit of invented traditions beloved of modern nationalisms, Reade links what was essentially a secular, modern, and commercial civic event to earlier French-Canadian festivals and feast days. He gives carnival activities an even more ancient ancestry by tracing them to the Norse, whose original battles with the forces of nature left them with “Health, beauty, courage, giant thews / Well braced by salutary use.”42 He argues that in Ireland and England, fierce Norse traits became “Tempered by other gentler strains” that came to Canada with these countries’ immigrants. Nevertheless, “The Winter Carnival” insists that Canadians’ Nordic ancestry, shared in common with Ireland, Scotland, England, and France, has created a particular character both adapted to and shaped by the battle with winter. As in “The Prophesy of Merlin,” Reade argues that Canadians’ close proximity to an untouched landscape that is similar to unspoiled regions in contemporary Ireland and ancient Britain gives Canadians a spiritual awareness unavailable in more urban and clement landscapes: And who that loveth Nature Feels not his heart aglow In presence of our winter woods Tinselled with ice and snow Twas just such woodland visions With moonlight glimmering down Gave pious hearts the rapt desire To raise the grand cathedral spire In many a feudal town.43 The moonlit Canadian trees had already induced supernatural “woodland visions,” both heavenly and haunting, in McGee and Shanly’s most enduring poems. Reade likewise presents the natural beauty of Canada’s winter woods as providing visionary ideals that could be carried back into urban life.

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As a young immigrant, Reade dressed for and performed the role of a hardy Canadian denizen of the woods, if only in the photographer’s studio. Likewise, the Montreal Snow Shoe Club allowed a very urban, Anglo population to reimagine itself, using elements drawn from Indigenous and French-Canadian culture and the wilds of Canada. Its members were central to the welcoming party assembled for one of the Duke of Connaught’s predecessors as governor general, the Marquis of Lorne in 1878.44 (Perhaps Reade in his blanket coat and sash formed part of the “human arch” created by club members as part of the ceremony.) In 1885, as part of the spectacle, the Winter Carnival’s centrepiece ice castle was stormed by an army comprised of members of Montreal athletic clubs who launched rockets and Roman candles at it, after which the castle’s defenders set off an elaborate fireworks display. Snowshoers then participated in a torchlight procession that vividly snaked its way up Mount Royal and lined its summit, before setting off more fireworks.45 Like the climactic carnival ceremony that physically and visually connected the urban community to the natural landscape surrounding it, Reade’s poem “Jacques Cartier” features an ice castle, “each crystal square” of which was carved from the city’s “own St Lawrence tide.” The artifact creatively ties together the river, the woods to which Montrealers had easy access, and the mountain where Cartier first planted his cross and viewed the site of the future city. Intended to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Cartier’s landing near Montreal, Reade’s poem is written from the vantage point of Mount Royal’s summit. In surveying the city, the speaker imagines Montreal’s character as having been forged over more than three centuries of exploration, settlement, and cultural mingling that the landscape evokes. Tracing Montreal’s history as it evolved into a modern Canadian city, the poem presents as heroic the labour that ultimately establishes Christian and British democratic ideals. In describing the traditional ice castle (also depicted in “The Winter Carnival”), Reade reiterates Fitzgerald’s belief that winter presented an opportunity to demonstrate the ingenuity and persistence of “Man” in making winter’s “mighty forces / Obedient to our will” as the citizens carve a “glittering mass” out of the ice that represents national qualities revealed in retelling the city’s history. The ice castle is depicted in “The Winter Carnival” as a revelatory vision of “The streets of pearl and gates of gold / Which John in Patmos saw,” evoking through its transparent walls the image of the

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new Jerusalem. It thus becomes an artistic expression of the city’s spiritual aspirations literally created from the landscapes’ elements and reflecting the varied historical contributions of Montreal’s different communities as it progresses from “little Indian town” to missionary settlement, to a multi-ethnic city graced by “prouder spires [that] point heavenward / Through purer winter air” and by stone that forms “church and home and mart.” As Montreal moves from its missionary founders’ original conception as “a city of the saints” to a “city of the world,” the “fairy turrets” of the ice castle, which are “neither wood nor stone / Nor offspring of the mine,” continue to recall the essence of the missionary founders’ original aspirations.46 While a Canadian nationalist, the Irish-born Reade continues Young Ireland’s cultural program through the promotion and popularization of the country’s history; the collection of its folklore, including Indigenous oral stories and poetry; and the writing of poetry featuring distinctly Canadian historical and cultural subjects. Like McGee, Reade celebrates the individual threads that make up Canadian society, just as Irish nationalists celebrated the different cultures contributing to their identity. However, he fits these elements into a larger narrative that celebrates the progress of Canada within the British Empire. His ultimate representation of Canadian society as essentially Christian and contributing its part to the larger British imperial project conforms to much of the loyalist and imperialist cultural movements advocated in the late nineteenth century. Even as Reade was creating vignettes featuring a harmonious intermingling of Dane, Saxon, Norman, and Celt (with sympathetic Americans joining in the fun), he would have known of the French-English rift developing after the Red River Rebellion and exacerbated by the North-West Resistance that ended with Métis leader Louis Riel’s execution in 1885. After joining the Royal Society of Canada, established in 1883, Reade registered his anxieties about conflict among Canadian ethnic groups in his scholarly explorations into cultural exchange and intermarriage. The Royal Society of Canada was modelled on the Royal Society of London, but appropriately for Canada, it emulated French scholarly societies by including literature,47 something the Royal Irish Academy had also done. Like the Patriots in Ireland, Reade hoped the Royal Society of Canada could promote collaborative scholarship that would transcend provincialism and the warring interests of different communities in order to encourage national pride and civic responsibility. In “The Making of Canada,” a paper given to the Royal Society in

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1884, he warned of the dangers of “a divided house” split by “mischief between creed and creed, between Church and State … between nativeborn and foreign-born, between mother-country and colony.” He concluded that “the constant aim” of the Royal Society of Canada should be to encourage “the spirit of unity, of helpfulness, of cooperation and goodwill” that would inspire “politics,” “science,” “art,” and “literature.”48 While Canada had “the pick of the Latin, Teutonic and Celtic races” through immigration, they still formed distinct ­communities within Canada, in his view, “but there must come a time when a Canadian will be simply a Canadian, as an Englishman is an Englishman, where of Celtic, Saxon, or Norman descent. Already there are Canadian characteristics in which natives of all origins share.” He was optimistic that disparate ethnic groups would eventually contribute to “a national spirit,” arguing that national progress “will be much greater when we are all really one. Unity is, indeed, our great desideratum, and it should be the aim of every patriotic and public-spirited man to use his influence for its attainment.”49 Like McGee, Reade argued that the work of politicians, artists, writers, and scientists would provide the common culture that would integrate existing communities into a whole. Based on his understanding of contemporary science surrounding racial/ethnic characteristics, he also assumed that the gradual shaping of a Canadian nationality was already taking place through intermarriage as much as through the sharing of art, culture, and history. He explored this issue in the context of new doctrines being advanced in the fields of history, geography, anthropology, ethnology, and philology.50 In his article “The Intermingling of Races” (1887), Reade considered the implications of Darwin’s theories, which challenged the earlier orthodoxy that “rigidly maintained that no new race had been, or could be, formed by intercrossing.”51 It appears that Reade was able to reconcile Darwin’s theories to his own Christian belief system, in which “Each twain in all the teeming earth / To one dead mother trace their birth.”52 Reade’s own views about the gradual evolution of the British people and culture expressed in poems such as “Hastings” and “The Prophesy of Merlin” made him more inclined to scholars’ arguments that human civilization, from ancient Egypt to the present, was a history of both cultural exchange and intermarriage. In keeping with this sweeping view of human history, the new communities emerging in Canada (along with the newly acquired Rupert’s Land, the Hudson’s Bay Company territories in the northwest) could be seen as part of a

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“grand ethnological experiment which has been in progress on the North American Continent for the last three centuries.”53 The outcome of this experiment, Reade observed, could be seen primarily through the history of French Canada, where young Indigenous women educated at the missions had married colonists, so that consequently, “several of the most respectable families in Canada … number among their progenitors the sons of the forest, and who should be proud to do so.”54 Looking westward in an 1885 Royal Society of Canada publication, “The Half-Breed,” Reade also argued that there was a long history of intermarriage between settlers and Indigenous communities as part of the fur trade so that by the end of the eighteenth century, “there was a considerable community … known by their own chosen designation of Bois-Brûlés, though then, as later, they often assumed the ambitious name of the ‘New Nation,’ or Métis.”55 Reade drew his conclusions from the work of writers and scientists such as Grant Allen and John William Dawson, the latter a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada. His views on cultural exchange and intermarriage could be seen as liberal for his time, since they did not privilege racial purity but instead argued that Canada’s cultural strength and rich history was founded on diversity and hybridity. Like McGee, he believed disparate communities within Canada would slowly amalgamate and become a distinct culture, or, in Reade’s words, “would rub away their roughness by mutual contact.”56 The scholars Reade cited often viewed intermarriage between communities as a way of creating harmony and solving various “problems” of racial prejudice, inequality, and ethnic, religious, or sectarian conflict.57 That said, Reade’s argument, supported by historical precedent, did not exactly make him an early prophet of multiculturalism, even though he notes that cultures marked by “diversity” (a word he uses often) were vibrant and progressive. While writers such as Haliburton were much more explicitly white supremacist, arguing that superior “northern” races would naturally dominate those of the south, Reade’s belief in British progress meant he assumed that British culture would ­predominate as Indigenous and settler communities merged. With Indigenous people “marrying freely” with “the white population,” Reade argued that “there is reason to believe that in the course of some generations the traces of red blood will disappear, not by extinction but by absorption with the dominant race.”58 Reade might have hoped for this outcome based on anxieties generated by what he refers to as the “recent unhappy rising” of 1885 in

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“the Canadian North-west, which has of late been so much before the world.”59 That Fenian sympathizers had tried to take advantage of political instability to invade Manitoba in 1871 possibly fed such anxieties. Reade notes that intermarriage among Scottish and French traders and Indigenous peoples had taken place in the West from the late eighteenth century and that mixed communities of French- and English-speaking peoples were already established by the time Lord Selkirk founded a colony of Scottish immigrants at Red River in 1812. Reade distinguished between the English- and French-speaking communities, the latter “known by their chosen designation of BoisBrûlés.” In discussing what each ethnicity contributed to the character of the growing prairie settlements, he repeated cultural commonplaces that went back to Fitzgerald’s era: “Noting the difference of character between those of French and those of British paternity,” the anthropologists and philologists Reade cites considered the French Métis “more lively and frank, but also less stable and industrious. They are large and robust, with great power of endurance and, while manifesting the reserve of the Indian, display considerable vivacity under excitement.” Another commentator quoted by Reade noted that “like all semi-savage races, the Bois-Brûlés are fickle. They must be appealed to by flattery, by threats, or by working upon their animosities or well-known dislikes, would they be led in any particular direction.” Reade accepted this testimony, concluding: “And the truth of this statement was exemplified in the recent rebellion under Riel and Dumont, no less than in the sanguinary conflict into which they were seduced in 1816.”60 The conflict into which the French Métis were “seduced” was the bloody Battle of Seven Oaks that took place June 1816 as the climax of hostilities between the North West and Hudson’s Bay trading companies over control of supplies that fuelled the fur trade, complicated by the fact that the settlers in Selkirk’s Red River colony were facing a food shortage. A party of Métis voyageurs delivering food supplies encountered a Hudson’s Bay blockade, and in the ensuing armed skirmish, twenty Hudson’s Bay employees and two young Métis were killed. (The rebellion could not be entirely traced to the “fickleness” of the French-speaking Métis, since some disaffected Scots settlers and Irish contract workers from Selkirk’s colony also joined the North West side.) While Reade considered the participation of Bois-Brûlés as evidence of their vivacious propensity to rebellion, the victory over the Hudson’s Bay forces was a defining moment for the Métis. They saw themselves as a distinct people capable of unified political action as demonstrated through their

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skilled utilization of Indigenous and European military tactics, political organization, technology, and economic opportunities. (Inspired by the battle, Pierre Falcon’s ballad “Chanson de la Grenouillere” has kept the event alive in Canadian folk memory.) Like the Irish in the 1840s, the Métis could argue that they had a distinct culture that had evolved from diverse roots and thus a moral claim for political autonomy. They were a people in the process of creating a “New Nation” in the West, but it was not necessarily the nation that the Canadian loyalist and nationalist Reade had in mind. Reade saw contemporary Montreal as an example of immigrant and established communities peacefully combining to create a new Canadian identity through literature, shared history, and public spectacles. However, as one moved westward, the political and cultural situation looked – superficially at least – more like the Ireland of Reade’s youth, a time when McGee and other Young Irelanders had hoped that the memory of French-inspired republican uprisings would spur communities demoralized by famine to unite and revolt. In 1869, Métis leader Louis Riel had briefly managed to convince disparate western communities – settler, Indigenous, and Métis – to transcend racial, linguistic, and religious differences and demand responsible government with a unified voice. Unlike the Irish Confederation, they partly succeeded, with the establishment of the province of Manitoba in 1870. However, from the 1860s until 1885, the area commonly known as the North West (now Alberta and Saskatchewan) continued to face challenges that would be familiar to the Irish: a distant, indifferent government; fears of famine; economic displacement caused by waning traditional occupations; land tenure anxieties faced especially by the French-Catholic Métis communities; and conflicts initiated by newly planted Protestant (often Orange) settlers from Ontario. Reade’s poetry implied that a newly confederated Canada had achieved a peaceful union of different peoples and religions where a certain number of colourful customs, along with racial, religious, and linguistic difference could be encouraged, but these distinctions would ultimately dissolve with the help of the dominant British-inspired political traditions. In the North West, an equally strong cultural and political nationalism had asserted itself over the century, one similar to the Irish movements of 1798 and 1848, but – from the vantage point of early 1885 – with a possibly different outcome. If Reade did not make this connection between past Irish uprisings and present resistance in the North West, Nicholas Flood Davin, another Irish immigrant turned Canadian nationalist, certainly did.

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P art S i x Ireland to the Canadian West

On 15 November 1885, while awaiting execution, Louis Riel received a visit from a priest in his Regina prison cell. Instead of his expected confessor Père André, the “priest” turned out to be a reporter from the newly founded Regina Leader, who had, in his words, “received the orders of its proprietor to see Riel before his death and have an interview with him.”1 Disguised in a beard and soutane and speaking French, he had managed to get past the prison guards where other reporters had failed. While the identity of the reporter is still debated,2 it is likely that Nicholas Flood Davin, editor and proprietor of the paper, gave himself orders to record Riel’s “Parting Message to Mankind,” published in the Leader on 19 November. The article depicts Riel preparing himself to make a good Christian death and likewise reminding his friends and enemies alike, most prominently Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, to “take every day a few moments at least, for ­devotion and prayer and prepare yourself for death.” Hearing the “spurred boot of a Mounted Policeman” approaching and noting that the agitated Riel “was about to make a speech,” the reporter cut the interview short and left Riel and the prison “with some ­sympathy and no little sadness.” Echoing the mixed tributes paid to rebel leaders such as Fitzgerald and Emmet by more moderate Irish nationalists, he concluded, “I felt that I had been in the ­presence of a man of genius manqué, of a man who, had he been gifted with judgment might have accomplished much; of one who, had he been destitute of cruelty might even command esteem.”3 Such parallels had been drawn explicitly by the Irish-born Davin when his paper asserted the historical significance of Riel’s “state

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trial; the trial of a leader in a rebellion – a trial in which his life is at stake … For a trial of such importance you have to go back to England to 1798,” declared the paper on 9 July of the same year. Riel, according to the Leader, “stands in the same category as other state prisoners,” including “William Orr, Arthur O’Connor, Theobald Woulffe [sic] Tone, Robert Emmett [sic], and coming to 1848, William Smith O’Brien, Meagher, Mitchell and others.”4 Nearly ninety years after the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and a generation after the failed Young Ireland uprising that drove McGee to North America, Irish-Canadian writers still drew ready parallels between Irish and Canadian political destiny as both countries considered whether to continue their relationship with England or break free. In the British Parliament, Irish mp s continued to work together as they had under O’Connell and so were in a position to negotiate some form of Home Rule. In Canada, nationalist writers such as Charles G.D. Roberts, Goldwin Smith, and Davin debated a more daring range of destinies, including joining the United States, becoming entirely independent, or remaining in the British Empire and – some hoped – eventually leading it. The North-West Resistance complicated these choices by exposing the fragility of a Confederation that still depended on harmony between Anglo Protestants and Irish and French Catholics. It also challenged the Canadian government’s vision of its new North West Territories’s future, a vision of mass settlement and industrialization of the region that many expected would make Canada a significant player on the imperial stage. On the eve of Riel’s execution for high treason, his interviewer meditated on the road that the West and, by extension, Canada must take. As he returned from Riel’s condemned cell, the Leader’s reporter looked “towards the Government House where happy ­people were perhaps at dinner at that hour” and reflected, “Unhappy man, there is nothing for it. You must die on Monday.” The article concludes with the speaker being called back into the present by the emblems of industry, civilization, and settlement that Davin celebrates in much of his writing: “Here as I passed near the trail going north west the well-known voice of a home returning farmer saying ‘Good night!’ woke me from my reverie. In twenty minutes, I was seated at dinner. I joined in the laugh and the joke, so passing are our most solemn impressions, so light the effect of actual tragedy.”5 The air of historical inevitability implicit in the

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reporter’s conclusion that Riel the rebel “must die” reflects Davin’s belief, echoed by many Canadian imperialists, that the “trail going north west” could lead to one destination only: a settler civilization supported by strong regional government but part of a larger, international political organization, the British Empire. Its character would be determined by prosperous yeoman farmers owning their own land and supported by new technologies and industries that necessitated the assimilation of the Métis and Indigenous peoples for whose sovereignty Riel was willing to die. Davin’s biographer C.B. Koester reflected that any sympathy Davin might have for the condemned Riel stemmed from “his youth in Ireland [which] had given him insights into the anguish of a ­people who had become strangers in their own land, and into the tensions and bitterness arising from racial, linguistic, and creedal divisions within a community.”6 Even if Davin did empathize with the Métis, his writing continually tried to exorcise the revolutionary Young Ireland and United Irish ghosts he saw haunting the NorthWest Resistance. Instead, he shared with many Irish-Canadian nationalists the belief that the Irish, both at home and in Canada, had been, and would continue to be, both beneficiaries and major architects of the British Empire. Davin’s contemporary, the Dublin-born Isabella Valancy Crawford, shared Davin’s rejection of revolutionary violence, arguing in “Erin’s Warning” that Erin could never rightfully sit on her own throne if “midnight murders placed her there.”7 Like Davin’s poetry, hers awakened Canadian readers to the pathetic plight of Irish ­peasants and poor immigrants, but neither writer supported Irish independence from England any more than they supported Métis or Indigenous sovereignty. In spite of some observations about the North-West Resistance that could be interpreted as support,8 Crawford’s poetry consistently presents a future egalitarian Canadian society predicated on white settlement. Rather than draw sympathetic parallels between the quests for Irish independence and Métis sovereignty, she used the Irish political situation to argue that the empire’s westward march through Canada would resolve social and political unrest in Ireland, thus strengthening British civilization through settlement of the West. Nevertheless, both Davin and Crawford employed a distinctly Irish perspective and, in Crawford’s case, vernacular, in their construction of Canadian national identity, while sharing what Katrin Urschel calls an “essentially Anglo-Celtic

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conception of Canada to which others had to assimilate.”9 Their view of Irish communities’ role in the settlement of the Canadian West suggests that while the Irish appear to be a less-visible ­demographic in that region than they were in Ontario, Quebec, or the Maritimes, the debate surrounding land tenure in Ireland in the 1880s was a significant shaper of the philosophy behind ­settlement of the prairies and Canadian nationalism beyond the end of the nineteenth century. The crisis of the Great Famine had abated in the early 1850s after one million deaths and mass emigration, but the social and economic problems that had spawned it had not been solved. Along with destitute tenants, the famine had bankrupted many traditional landlords, who had been replaced by land speculators, many of whom encouraged more-profitable pasturage over subsistence ­farming. Tenants were squeezed between the pressures exerted by traditional landlords desperate to remain solvent and new ­landowners keen to turn a profit. As land became increasingly ­valuable in years of prosperity, many were again facing eviction. By 1879, harvests had failed and famine stalked Ireland again, along with its attendant mass evictions. By 1880, Ireland was ­coping with widespread pauperism, along with thousands of incidents of agrarian violence that included the burning of crops, ­maiming and killing of livestock, and intimidation and murder of landlords and their agents. As in earlier decades, tenants organized to resist evictions. Scenes of siege-like standoffs between Irish ­families and landlords’ agents protected by police, “emergency men,” and military armed with battering rams were reported ­internationally. Throughout the 1880s, politicians, journalists, and social reformers in England portrayed Ireland as a failed society sliding inevitably into revolution, even savagery.10 While Irish tenants organized locally, Irish land reformers and politicians worked together through the Irish Land League, with Irish mp Charles Stewart Parnell, head of the Irish Parliamentary Party, assuming leadership. Parnell was able to unite the Fenians and the more moderate Irish parliamentarians, and together they were able to pressure the government to ensure fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale in Ireland. The excitement generated by Parnell’s successes were not limited to Ireland. Rivalling the ­rapturous winter-themed receptions given to visiting princes and governor generals, welcoming parties greeted Parnell in Toronto

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and in Montreal, where Canadian admirers drew his sleigh at the head of a 6,000-strong torchlight procession through the snowcovered streets and declared him the “uncrowned King of Ireland” in 1880. In Ireland and England, Home Rule discussions were often framed in an imperial rather than local context. Home Rule ­supporters in the United Kingdom looked to the successful example of Canada. They employed rhetorical devices similar to what Davin and Crawford used in their nationalist poetry, such as the notion that colonies under the “maternal” care of Britain eventually matured and that “Ireland, like Canada before it, had now reached political manhood.” In Canada, interest in Irish Home Rule was not limited to Irish-Canadian politicians. Liberals, Liberal Conservatives, Conservatives, and Independent m p s raised the issue frequently, delivering at least eighty-five speeches on the ­subject between 1882 and1887.11 Their speeches reflected the array of attitudes towards Canada’s place in the empire and the feasibility and nature of imperial federation as it affected both Canada and Ireland. The economic, social, and political crises embodied in the Irish Land War of the late 1870s and 1880s were of interest not simply because they posed a significant threat to Irish and English stability but also because Canada offered western emigration as a solution. Like many Canadian imperialists, Davin and Crawford suggested that Irish and British settlement in the Canadian West might not merely expand the British Empire but actually save it. Canada First member George Grant believed emigration would solve many English and Irish social problems, including alleviating Irish famine and “the condition of England’s poor,” as well as defusing agrarian and labour unrest in Ireland and England.12 In The Irishman in Canada, Davin likewise notes that “land can be no apple of discord … in a country where we open up provinces as men in the old ­country would open up a paddock.”13 Moreover, where Parnell and the Irish Land League had argued for a peasant proprietorship, Canadian reformers hoped the North West would neither be tilled by the peasant nor owned by aristocrats or speculators but would instead be purchased and brought to cultivation by families of small farmers. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli shared this hope, observing in an 1879 speech that “the Dominion of Canada is not in favour of peasant proprietors. What the Dominion of Canada

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wishes to institute is a great yeoman class”: that is, a class of ­farmers with freehold.14 In Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, the ­celebration of such a class reflects preoccupations prevalent in Irish and Canadian society at the time, especially the conviction that the rightful possession of the land and its produce belonged to those who had invested their labour in it, which had not happened in Ireland. It is not surprising that George Grant saw settlement of the prairies as an almost sacred mission that would allow Canadians to become major contributors to the expansion of the most morally and economically advanced empire the world had seen.15 Consequently, the vision of a new western settlement that would avoid the errors made in Ireland becomes central to the writings of both Davin and Crawford and the main vehicle by which both poets construct their vision of Canada’s national character and its future within the British Empire.

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11 Nicholas Flood Davin (1840–1901)

As is the case with Standish O’Grady, details about Nicholas Flood Davin’s name and his early life have been difficult to substantiate. He appears to have changed his middle name, either to associate himself with a more successful branch of his family or to acknowledge the uncle who adopted and raised him after his father died. Born in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, he gave his birthdate as 1843, but evidence suggests it was three years earlier. Like the Shanlys, Davin’s family changed their name (from Davine), and he also followed what appears to be the family tradition of converting from Catholicism to Protestantism. He seemed anxious to be identified with Ireland’s professional class, claiming that his father was a doctor (he may have been a pharmacist). His own professional aspirations were thwarted when his uncle apprenticed him to the proprietor of a hardware store at eighteen. Initially denied an advanced education, he nevertheless demonstrated great knowledge of the classics in his later writing, having educated himself outside the university, possibly through working men’s associations and libraries. However, when his uncle allowed him to attend Queen’s College, Cork in 1864, he spent only one semester there before leaving for London, becoming a law student who then turned to journalism to make ends meet. As a parliamentary reporter, he gained substantial experience in both politics and journalism. He covered the Franco-Prussian War, where he encountered “sights that seared the memory” on the battlefields. (Perhaps this experience contributed to the debilitating episodes of alcoholism that punctuated his career.) He then became editor of a new and short-lived conservative newspaper the Belfast Times, but disagreements with the proprietors, along with the report that he was occasionally “so drunk as to be

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unable to write anything for the paper,” ended that position after five months. In 1872, he left for Canada, reportedly commissioned to write articles on the question of American annexation of Canada for the Pall Mall Gazette, although biographers again have found it difficult to substantiate this claim.1 Once he arrived in Canada, Davin’s gifts quickly found him a place in political and cultural circles in Toronto, beginning with the literary criticism he wrote for George Brown’s Globe. (Ironically, Brown’s murder would later allow Davin to demonstrate both his legal skills and his eloquence when he defended the disgruntled employee who had shot him.) He was also in great demand after the St George’s Society invited him to refute the “spread-eaglism” of an annexationist public lecture by the Reverend H. Tiffany in 1873.2 (In “The Future of Canada,” he again argues against annexationism, partly because “the astute Yankee is [not] such a fool as to bring another Ireland into the bosom of the United States.”3) Davin’s rebuttal, British versus American Civilization, became the second in a series of Canada First pamphlets advertised as “subjects that will prove of national importance,” intended “to promote a more ambitious and healthy native literature.”4 Even this early document shows Davin thinking about the nature and necessity of a national literature, a subject he continually returned to, developed, and explored in the context of Canada’s relationships with America, England, and, most importantly, Ireland. While his professional energies and writing skills were often in the service of practical goals such as promoting emigration, development, and commerce in the West, these aims were often connected to his view of national literature. He shared with McGee and other writers the belief that it was as important for a nation to have a rich and diverse literature as it was to have political and economic power. However, while McGee argued that national literature must precede national life, Davin believed a Canadian national literature, built on the traditions of Europe, would come in due course. He would eventually become a respected reviewer and a promoter of the first significant school of Canadian poetry, the Confederation poets, particularly “our much-lamented friend Archibald Lampman.”5 Over the course of his career, Davin developed a philosophy of Canadian nationalism based on several principles. First, Canada was a distinct culture within North America, strong enough to resist annexation to the United States and to even form an independent country if it wished. Second, Canada should, in some manner, remain part of

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the British Empire. Third, Canada’s connection to the empire did not condemn it to a colonial or provincial mindset. Fourth, while Canada was a new country compared to England, its landscape and history would nonetheless provide inspiring material for future writers. And finally, well-educated writers and politicians should create both the literature and audience, assisted by the universities. Taken together, these principles suggested that Canadian nationalism would be carried out in great part by communities of emigrants who maintained ties with Great Britain and would carry the best of its culture westward. Davin’s writings on Canada’s character and future encouraged a Globe editor, Joseph Edmund Collins, to call attention to and promote the literary endeavours of current Canadian writers and to offer evidence of Canadian literary self-sufficiency.6 Through Collins, Davin’s views became an early and important influence for Charles G.D. Roberts, founder of the Confederation group of Canadian poets. Refuting the notion that “Canada could not maintain her independence” because it lacked “the force and colossal energy of the United States,” Davin pointed out that the country was “the fourth maritime power in the world” with “884 steamers and 6,587 sailing vessels as against 519 steamers and 5,915 sailing vessels held by the forty-nine million [Americans.]”7 These dry statistics might be behind Roberts’s rousing image of “the flag that bears the Maple Leaf” proudly borne by steamers and schooners whose “swift keels cleave the furthest seas … To stream on each remotest breeze” in his patriotic poem “Canada.”8 However, while Roberts imagined a naval power in the service of a Canadian republic, Davin, in contrast, “wished it to be distinctly understood that when I contend that Canada could, if necessary, stand alone, I am not advocating independence.”9 He concludes that Canadians are content with the imperial connection, noting that “when people are discontented they cry out, as we see in Ireland.” Instead, he argues that Canada has imported the best traditions of British culture and politics to a land free of the ancient conflicts between England and Ireland, creating a middle way between the Old World and republican America. Canadians could sit contentedly “under the tree of liberty, without inhaling the taint of American corruption or being disturbed by the death rattle of feudalism in its last gasp.”10 Davin first explored the relative merits of American, British, and Canadian society in British versus American Civilization, later arguing in “The Future of Canada” that “the Canadian type [is] just as distinct

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as the American – very much better, and more likely to make a noble nation,” based on its inherited British traditions of government and culture.11 Consequently, the country’s national identity and literature would be strengthened by maintaining a connection with Britain that was already cherished by its emigrant communities in Canada, “whose spirit and the laws of whose development are evidently British.”12 Britain in its turn had been shaped by the best traditions of earlier cultures, and so he argues that Canada, a nation of immigrants, is the latest in a series of migrations guided by “the voice of that providence which watched over the emigrants from Egypt, impelled the countrymen of Pericles to carry the Greek fire to many a smiling Mediterranean shore, raised up the Roman to civilize Europe, followed our great forefathers bearing in their little hulks the seeds of a grand liberty over every sea.”13 Canadian literature was, of course, the place to inspire nationalists, but after Confederation, writers still faced some of the obstacles that McGee had identified in the 1850s. Davin argued throughout his career that Canadian literature required public support and encouragement, which in turn depended on Canadians independently acknowledging their own worth. McGee had dismissed the notion of Canadian cultural inferiority in “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,” but a decade later, Davin complained that Canadians were still too “ready to subscribe to the statement made by a Yankee, that it is all tail in Canada – meaning thereby that it is all third class.”14 Nevertheless, in spite of few home-grown publications, he argued that Canada already had a strong sense of itself as a nation: “Canada lives for us as England for Englishmen, as France for Frenchmen, as the Fatherland for Germans … and unless the stars in their courses fight against us … we mean one day to place her among the foremost nations of the earth.”15 Davin also argued for public and government patronage of writers, dismissing a common question, “Can’t they sell their poems and make money out of them?”16 in his unpublished essay, “A National Literature,” written in the wake of Lampman’s death in 1899. Previously, in “The Future of Canada,” he argued that “the poet and artist cannot look for recognition to the worshippers of gold, some of whom are no better than public robbers.”17 Instead, he suggested a number of ways to support writing, including having Canada’s more enlightened public men and “millionaires” endow chairs at universities as well as pensions and prize poems “to encourage literary effort.”18

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He also felt that politicians, as leaders, should write literature, if only to blaze a path for greater talents to follow, a theory he put into practice in his poetry collection Eos: An Epic of the Dawn (1889). While he admitted he had no illusions about his own poetic genius, he asserted that “every step towards the creation of a Canadian literature tends to hasten the new and better era in whose advent I believe” (vi). In spite of the many obstacles that Canadian writers faced, Davin argued that Canada could already boast of internationally acclaimed poets such as French Canadian Louis-Honoré Fréchette. He was widely recognized in France, proving that Canada could furnish material that would make Canada an equal to Europe in terms of diversity and depth of culture. Davin uses Fréchette, “our first national poet,” to define the nature of that role: Fréchette’s “lyre” was inspired by “the heroes of Canadian history” as well as scenes from everyday life, and the pictures created by his poems were “all racy of this soil” as they called up “the vast solitudes, the meteoric sky, the sonorous pines.”19 The phrase “racy of the soil” again suggests that Canada’s landscape and history would shape a distinct voice, albeit one that would enrich rather than be separate from the British Empire. Davin’s allusion – likely intentional – to Young Ireland’s and the Nation’s motto brought the movement to the attention of Roberts and other Confederation poets.20 The example of Fréchette suggested that Canadian poets did not need a long history or the monuments of Europe. They had “the lakes, the mighty rivers, the snowy landscape, the bright skies of Canada, the blizzard of winter, the rapid vegetation of May”21 that had already enchanted earlier visitors and immigrants such as Stephen Dickson, Edward Fitzgerald, Adam Kidd, John Reade, and, of course, Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Canada’s lack of “monuments of antiquity, the picture galleries, the old cathedrals” could even be an advantage for a national poet. Observing that “the gulf is great which separates the historical and the antique from the land of the woodman, the snake fence, the prairie,” Davin was nevertheless confident that “imagination has only to spread her wings and it is passed,” a conceit he exploits in his epic poem Eos. Instead of ancient monuments, Canada had access to the best of the old culture through literature while being free of the “vast superincumbent mass of aristocracy” and “modern feudalism” of England.22 By 1878, Davin was already thinking of Canada’s place in this succession of cultures, as suggested in his poem “Young Canada,” first

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published in the Canadian National and Monthly Review and included in Eos: An Epic of the Dawn. The poem’s epigraph situates the “hulking young giant beyond” (that is, west of) “St Lawrence and the Lakes.” Anticipating Roberts’s personification of the country as a warrior poised on the brink of manhood, the newest region of Canada is presented as a “golden haired giant” with “a spear, which dwarfs the tallest pine,” who “with the mightiest must be placed” (133). In British versus American Civilization, Davin had distinguished between Britain and the United States by arguing that in Britain, “wealth” is not the sole “test of merit,” which was revealed instead by “long enduring toil towards glorious objects seen in boyhood, kept in view in manhood.”23 Likewise, in the poem, he argues that Young Canada’s destiny must be guided by “the high desire” for “all fair things.” In learning “to know what’s truly great,” the poem implies, Canadians will shun “wealth ill got or ill enjoyed” and be “no thrall to lust or hate” (133) in the pursuit of power. Notwithstanding its access to the British traditions and history that inspire achievement, Canada cannot climb “beaten paths to greatness.” As in Roberts’s later poem, Canada can draw on its Celtic and Saxon as well as French cultural antecedents, but must become “not Scotch, nor Irish, French, nor Saxon / But all of these, and yet your own” (134). His arguments contributed to the wider Canadian nationalist and imperialist rhetoric in the decade following Confederation as Canada expanded westward. The newly opened territories of the West allowed Davin to imagine a nation that encompasses both “Atlantic and Pacific waves” in “Young Canada,” a vision articulated earlier by many Canada First members. The notion that the young country would move beyond its British cultural roots to find its own unique greatness fit well with the sense of mission that many writers brought to their vision of the West, where the scale of the country would inspire immigrants to create a society and institutions whose spirit would reflect the generous expanses of the land.24 While not always sharing the views of Canada First or imperialists, Davin, like George Grant, saw Canada and Britain’s future linked through emigration and settlement of the West. Davin made a personal commitment to that future when he moved to Regina in 1882 to set up a newspaper, the Leader. Five years later, he became the first elected m p for the newly established riding of Assiniboia West. Reprising his earlier assertion that immigrant cultures could transcend through “imagination” the “chasm” of distance

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between the Old World cathedrals and the prairie snake fences, Davin argues in his preface to Eos: An Epic of the Dawn that establishing a distinct and enduring culture is not only feasible but also necessary to economic development. He exploited the double meaning of “cultivation” to make his point: “I am a North-West man, and I think the cultivation of taste and imagination as important as the raising of grain. The raising of grain will bring us wealth, but intellectual progress, on which again the highest development of our material sources depends, will be slow unless all the faculties of the mind are stimulated” (v). There was one significant obstacle to turning the vast spaces of the prairies into what Davin considered “Homes for Millions”: people had already made their home there for thousands of years. In what would become the political district of Assiniboia, and later Saskatchewan and Alberta, Indigenous peoples had created a fl ­ ourishing culture that had revolved around what Davin called the “axel tree” of the bison,25 the food that later supported the fur trade and the Métis settlers who fled to Assiniboia after the Red River Rebellion of 1869, unconvinced that their traditional lands and rights would be protected by the new government. However, like the Irish, the Métis found that their traditional way of living on the land was under pressure from a combination of sources, including government policy. The decline of the bison, combined with epidemics introduced by European contact, meant that by the late 1870s, the Indigenous peoples on the prairies were enduring famines and disease that the Irish were already familiar with, creating new threats of unrest and outright rebellion in both countries. In the West, as in Ireland, these famines were exacerbated by government policies. In the eyes of the Canadian government, the Plains cultures were a direct impediment to the capitalist development of mines, watercourses, and fields, and to the installation of telegraph and rail, providing Macdonald with an economic imperative to convince, and often coerce, Indigenous peoples to adapt to Western culture. The Canadian government saw western Indigenous communities’ extremity as an opportunity to clear the prairies for settlement. The reserves offered as compensation were a bargain Indigenous communities were essentially starved into accepting.26 The place Davin intended Indigenous peoples to occupy in the Canadian West’s rising civilization was informed by his notion of British cultural superiority as well as political expediency. Believing that the “axel tree” of their culture was “vanishing,” he rationalized

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the decline of Indigenous cultures as part of the inevitable rise and fall of all civilizations, which he had evoked in British versus American Civilization, where “those who have fought for and fought against them follow into the same oblivious gulf.”27 This belief, which recurs in his writing, appears at the conclusion of Eos in his portrait of a mythological Indigenous shaman acquiescing to his extinction while singing his culture’s death song: “For the doom of the hunter / there is no reprieve … Our part has been played / Let the white man play his” (62). Davin’s more abstract views about civilization’s advance were put into practice on behalf of John A. Macdonald’s government. On 28 January 1879, Macdonald assigned him to investigate the American industrial school system, part of the “aggressive assimilation” initiated by the Grant administration in 1869.28 Davin was a committee of one, but with his usual energy and diligence, he travelled to Washington to meet with government officials, including the secretary of the interior and the commissioner of Indian affairs. These officials arranged for Davin to meet leaders from what he called “the five ‘civilized’ nations,”29 including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole. He met with “some of the principal men of these nations,” including a former member of the “Supreme Court of the Cherokee Nation,” Judge Stedham, and a Colonel Porter, who Davin noted was “part Irish descent” and resembled “a Bank Director with a deep olive complexion.”30 He described the reserves these leaders represented as “five little republics within the Republic,” possessing “their own schools, a code of their own; a judiciary; a national council which enacts laws; newspapers in the native dialect and in English,” which Davin considered evidence of the industrial schools’ success in assimilating American Indians.31 He reported on the practices of various schools in Virginia and Minnesota, and when given the opportunity to tour an actual school at the White Earth Agency in Minnesota, he found much for the Canadian government to approve of and emulate. He toured plain but “comfortably furnished” dormitories and witnessed dinners where the children were “evidently well fed.” At the schools, children learned basic skills or trades, including agriculture, blacksmithing, and carpentry for the boys, and cooking and sewing for the girls. The principals and school staff that he met were often full or partial Indigenous heritage, and their spiritual guides included an “Episcopalian clergyman [who] is a full-blood Ottawa and an able preacher.” In Roman

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Catholic schools, likewise, “everything goes harmoniously.”32 He painted a portrait of people who had accepted that they must adapt and blend into the larger culture around them. What Davin did not mention in his report was that many of these nations had arrived at their “little republics” by a long and deadly march along the Trail of Tears during the forced migrations and dispossessions of the 1830s.33 While Davin had earlier asserted that the British government in Canada had “displayed more humanity than the authorities and officers of the Washington Government”34 in their treatment of Indigenous peoples, he now concluded that the American government allowed American Indians to adapt successfully to life on reserves, and he was prepared to recommend similar measures for Indigenous people in Canada. He took one key piece of advice from his meeting with the five nations’ representatives he had met in Washington: they told Davin that “the chief thing to attend to in dealing with the less civilized or wholly barbarous tribes was to separate the children from the parents.”35 In British versus American Civilization, Davin predicted that “men will look back on our boasted nineteenth century with wondering pity and amused contempt.”36 That hardly begins to describe twenty-first century recognition of the damage inflicted on generation after generation of children who, torn from their families and forced into the parsimonious care of the Canadian government, suffered physical and sexual abuse, deliberate starvation, disease, and neglect that resulted in at least 6,000 deaths and a wider legacy of trauma and despair. While Davin cannot be held solely responsible for the implementation of residential schools or what went on in them, the report he submitted not only supplied their blueprint but also offered a moral rationalization for the government’s eventual actions, one that reflected his own strongly held views on Indigenous cultural inferiority, which he made clear through his report and throughout his literary and political career. At the very least, his argument helped ensure that other possibilities, such as Indigenous and Métis self-determination, were overwritten by the narrative he proposed for them. Davin accepted American officials’ conclusions that “the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school.”37 In his view, the paternal government, like the Indian’s “infancy,” is “not a figure of speech” but a literal imperative: he believed the government must replace Indigenous parents, assuming in their stead the “sacred duty” to pass on cultural norms and advocate for their rights and

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protection. The government’s duty, in Davin’s view, included spiritual instruction: “One of the earliest things an attempt to civilize them does is to take away their simple Indian mythology … and to disturb this faith without supplying a better, would be a curious process.”38 The “simple Indian mythology,” however, was nothing of the sort. What he did not understand, or at least failed to mention, was that Indigenous belief systems informed all aspects of culture and life. In accounting for the damage done by residential schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada observed in 2014 that the preservation of cultural traditions that Davin believed essential to Western society was as essential to Indigenous peoples: “the security and survival of these societies depended on passing this cultural legacy from one generation to the next. Aboriginal peoples did this successfully through a seamless mixture of teachings, ceremonies, and daily activities … [that] described a coherent, interconnected world.”39 In bypassing the adults in the “civilization” process, the government ensured that in a generation or two, if all went according to plan, there would be no distinct culture to defend. Where earlier Irish writers and Canadian nationalists argued that Canada’s cultural distinctiveness, and even nobility, came from traditions that had evolved out of Indigenous participation in fur trade, Davin argued that “it is not enough that [the Indian] should know all the arts of the voyager and trader; not enough even that he should be able to do a little farming.” In Davin’s vision of nineteenth-century progress, the Romantic view of Canada and of a culture whose remnants still existed in the West must give way, and the Indigenous inhabitants “must be educated and become susceptible to the bracing influences of complex wants and varied ambitions”40 of the capitalist, cultivated, and industrialized pillar of the empire that Davin envisaged the West would become. Any pathos or sympathy that arises from Davin’s portraits of Métis and Indigenous peoples as “doomed” hunters comes from his view of the Canadian prairies as the latest site of inevitable Western economic and technological progress. While he argued that the Canadian government should become the literal parent to Indigenous children, he also saw their parents through the lens of a “British-Canadian tradition of Indian affairs.”41 In the minds of Canadian nationalists and expansionists, residential schools reflected British and Canadian governments’ belief that it was their moral duty to treat “the Indian as ward of the state … to protect him from the harmful effects of white culture while teaching him its benefits.”42

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Education thus became central to assimilation, which, when presented as a civilizing “mission to the Indian resolved the moral difficulty inherent in the removal of the native from his land.”43 Davin himself admitted that this paternalism was politically and economically convenient for a number of reasons. He saw the ostensibly under-used fertile prairies as the future garden of Canada and “Homes for Millions,” the title of Davin’s later emigration pamphlet. “There is now barely time to inaugurate a system of education by means of which the native populations of the North-West shall be gradually prepared to meet the necessities of the not distant future; to welcome and facilitate, it may be hoped, the settlement of the country,” he argued in his report.44 Given his belief in education’s role in absorbing Indigenous peoples into the program of Canadian nation building, he criticized the treaty provisions that allowed Indigenous leaders to determine whether their community needed a school, making him fear “that one of the results would be to make the Chiefs believe they had some right to a voice regarding the character and management of the schools.” Instead, he argued that “the needs and aptitude of the settlement are alone worthy of being weighed.”45 The voices of the chiefs who guided and were guided by their people while negotiating Treaty Six are faintly heard through Davin’s report. He identifies two by name – Plains Cree chiefs “Beardy” (KamĪyistowesit) and “Big Bear” (Mistahimuskwa) – but dismisses them as “malcontents” and “demagogues.” KamĪyistowesit signed Treaty Six but criticized its implementation. Mistahimuskwa had first refused to sign this treaty, regarding it as “a rope around our necks,” and only agreed to sign in 1882 when the people he led faced imminent starvation. After members of his band joined the Métis in the North West Resistance, Mistahimuskwa was convicted of treason in 1885.46 In keeping with the paternalism of the time and his own belief that “primitive” peoples must inevitably capitulate to a “superior” civilization, Davin dismissed the chiefs’ objections as childish rebellion rather than astute negotiation. While the chiefs’ arguments resembled those of Irish nationalists when they argued that their distinct way of life, language, and religion entitled them to a level of self-determination within the empire, Davin did not acknowledge this parallel. Since he believed that Canadian national greatness depended upon bringing the Plains peoples into the embrace of European civilization, he could not countenance the possibility of Indigenous self-determination outside the forms and conventions of the British Empire. Consequently,

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he claimed that Indigenous people, and “even some of the half-breeds of high intelligence,” were “incapable of embracing the idea of a nation.” Instead, it should be their “ambition to be merged and lost” in the larger Canadian nation.47 On the surface, Davin’s editorial position on Riel (dismissed as a failed genius) and the Indigenous communities of the West seems strange for a man who two years later criticized a London Times editorial endorsing measures to “decelticize Ireland” until “a Celtic Irishman would be as rare in Connemara as on the banks of the Manhattan.”48 Nevertheless, his view of imperial progress, assimilation, settlement, and the fate of Indigenous peoples was intertwined with his views on Irish nationalism. Part of the reason that England could not de-celticize was because Davin, like Reade, believed Irish and English national identity was already irretrievably entangled. Separating the races would be difficult in an empire in which “the races are so mixed – Saxon, Norman, Dane, and so on – that it is very hard to find a pure Celt. So there is no ethnological base for those hatreds that are sought to be fanned as between Saxon and Celt.”49 Davin also saw Ireland’s participation in the empire as part of their successful assimilation. The British Empire, he argues, was actually a “Hiberno-British Empire,” “a stately structure” with “room for genius and activity of every kind” and whose every stone bears “the mark of an Irish chisel.”50 Just as they were integral in building the edifice of the British Empire, “Irishmen are the most numerous of the English speaking races” contributing to “the formation of a great Canadian people” and would do their part “in building up a young, a free, a great, a prosperous Canadian nation.”51 In spite – or perhaps because – of his absorption in the politics of the new territory, Davin never lost sight of Ireland, publishing three speeches on Home Rule between 1885 and 1893. He conceived of Home Rule in Ireland as a “system of local government which would leave her connection with the Empire intact … a local government such as our provinces have here.” His experiences in the West clearly coloured his arguments. In parliamentary debates about Ireland, Davin spoke as the elected Conservative mp for the new riding of Assiniboia West, and he continually drew parallels between his riding and Ireland, offering the new region’s government as evidence that Ireland could also have a measure of self-determination within the empire: “Today we have in that western country – the home of the buffalo ten or twelve years ago – more control over our local affairs than the millions

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of people of Ireland.”52 Davin speculated that without such local government, “Canadians would break out in open rebellion.” Of course, in 1869, and then in 1885, the Métis and First Nations, desiring to have their existing forms of self-government recognized by the Canadian government, had done just that. Just as Davin believed Canada must carry on the modern capitalist and industrial enterprise of empire (a vision he saw threatened by the 1885 rebellion), he viewed the Fenians as “the greatest enemies to the local government of Ireland and to Ireland’s prosperity,” primarily because they were “driving capital away from the country.”53 Echoing Irish statesman Stephen Woulfe’s earlier argument that local politics would make civic responsibility and engagement “racy of the soil,” Davin argued that local government in the form of Home Rule “would give the Irish people the excitement of local politics, and would help to develop the country … In that way I believe a blow would be struck at an agitation which is educating the rising generation in Ireland to be unfit for everything like peaceful and industrial life.”54 Repeatedly in his speeches, Davin argued that “the evils between landlord and tenant” not sectarian or ethnic conflict were at the heart of Irish unrest, so he recognized that Home Rule in itself would not be an instant cure.55 Again, Canada offered a positive safety valve. With good government and access to land, Davin argued, the Irish settlers in Canada and America had become “peaceable, public spirited, exemplary citizens,” belying stereotypes perpetuated in the popular press of the Irishman “as an incorrigible monster, unmanageable, insurrectionary, rebellious.”56 Believing that the solution to unrest in Ireland lay partly in Canada, as both model and emigration destination, Davin thought that Irish stability thus depended on the suppression of another would-be land war in the West. The travails of his home country were clearly in his mind when he added three substantial references to Ireland during revision of his epic poem of the Canadian West, first published in 1884 as Eos: A Prairie Dream and republished in 1889 as Eos: An Epic of the Dawn. These additions include Eos’s long speech at the conclusion of her – and Western Civilization’s – journey west, when she chooses Davin as her “bard” and commands him to “write an epic worthy of the race.” For, she claims, “the Irish … Have play’d a great part in this work” of “the great empire which is theirs no less / than others” (63). Davin’s preoccupations with the future of the Canadian West, with Irish Home Rule, and with the North-West Resistance are reflected in

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the substantial revisions. The 1884 edition dwells briefly on European history and the growth of the British Empire as a prelude to his vision of the West’s role in continuing that narrative. In the wake of the 1885 resistance, the revised poem focuses more on the history of France and Ireland, providing context for his vision of a new Canadian civilization. The title poem synthesizes his experience in the West and his views on Ireland and the British Empire into a poetic universal vision, epic in its intent to tie together world history and geography from the godlike vantage afforded by the Dawn’s progress across the globe. Its narrative compresses the rise and fall of western civilizations into the course of one day: Eos’s fiery chariot moves from east to west, and dawn breaks successively on cities that contributed to advancing Western thought and culture through more than two millennia. It concludes with the poet waking from his “dream” near Regina in the present time, while “on the monotonous plain, / The hammers rang on shingle roofs” to build “the ‘city’ of a few weeks old” (65). Because Davin sees the poem as an epic that describes the founding of a great nation, he sets the story down in heroic blank verse (in reality, more than fourteen hundred relentlessly workmanlike lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, indifferently enjambed). The poem does, however, have its moments, as when Davin allows his genuine appreciation of the prairie landscape, its climate, scale, and subtle beauty to provide concrete and vivid images that enliven his more abstract philosophical musings. Revealing “the author’s intimate identification with his frontier environment,” 57 Davin’s detailed prairie portraits are an early example of regional poetry in Western Canada. The poet even has the temerity to correct the goddess when she dismisses the prairie as “monotonous,” countering that “Its beauty must be seen from earth.” To illustrate, he offers a catalogue of flowers indigenous to his region: Blue bells, the sun-flower small and great, the rose The crocus and anemone, the wild Convolvulus, and thousands more I love, And daily scent and see, but cannot name. (54) In listing plants that link the speaker’s new home with a pervasive but subtle sensory backdrop, the poem cultivates the affectionate knowledge and curiosity about a particular place through even its most humble forms of beauty. Like Roberts in Songs of the Common Day,

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Davin’s appreciation of the prairies reflects Roberts’s 1886 argument that national literature would develop in part through “minute and loving records of particular localities.”58 Not simply poetic colouring, Davin’s prairie imagery plays an important part in supporting the larger nationalist and political aims of the poem. As evident in “The Future of Canada,” Davin shares with McGee and Reade the belief that the nobler sentiments inspired by Canada’s ready access to pristine winter landscapes are one way that Canada surpasses European culture. He claims that the “auroaborelian tints” of the Northern Lights are “more gorgeous in their bright commingling hues / Than … colours quaint / In old cathedral windows” (58–9). Like other nationalist poets writing in the 1880s, Davin implies that Canada’s natural landscapes offer a sense of transcendence that allows Canadians to be a spiritual people: he describes how the proximity of the stars in “the wide silence of a prairie night … sweetly lures to contemplation,” creating “A feeling weird unutterably deep” (56). The distinct prairie sky with its storms and sunrises is what originally inspires the poet-speaker to dream of Eos and her vast and godlike perspective after he witnesses a prairie dawn and falls asleep on the plain. The prairie landscape, as much as his goddess-muse, inspires the Irish-Canadian bard to “write an epic worthy of the race” that would fuel “the high desire” for “all fair things” that Davin identified as a distinguishing national trait in his patriotic poem “Canada.” In giving his own answer to Haliburton’s question of whether “national spirit” can be kindled in the “frozen north,” Davin offers Canadians’ celebration of winter as evidence of cultural richness. Like Reade, Davin identifies the Celt as a northerner and affirms Haliburton’s assertion that “the peculiar characteristic of the New Dominion must ever be that it is a Northern country inhabited by the descendants of Northern races.”59 Davin would later argue in the preface to Homes for Millions (1891) that the prairie climate “is akin to that which nurtured the hordes who became the terror and ultimately the destroyers of the [Roman] Empire and whose magnificent physique has been described by pens made more eloquent by fear.” 60 Consequently, the descriptions of a salubrious northern climate are significant in a poem that ties together the future of the West with the fate of Ireland and the empire through immigration. Davin shared with many of his contemporaries the belief that “the North West was important to the role of Canada within the Empire, and possibly, the Empire within the world.”61 “Canada carried into the North West

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the whole moral weight involved in the role of guardian of the traditions of the British Empire” as it opened “this, the last fertile region within reach of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon races”62 who shared the Northern virtues extolled by Haliburton and others. Not long after revising Eos, Davin was also editing and compiling Homes for Millions, his substantial report promoting Western settlement. The report, which was published in 1891, included an essay by Charles Mair. He argued that “the most valuable feature … of the great prairie plateau” is a climate “highly conducive to health and comfort” with an atmosphere “akin to those rare vintages which quicken the circulation without impairing the system … Surrounded by this invisible influence, one lives a fuller and healthier life than in the denser atmosphere of the east. The cares of manhood press less heavily on the brain, and the severest toil or exposure finds increased capacity to endure it.”63 This eloquent description is anticipated in Eos, which likewise describes a climate whose “air / like choicest champagne, thrills your veins.” The cold that in the East “would send people shivering to their stoves,” according to Mair’s description, in the West encourages outdoor activity and, by extension, health and enterprise as the prairie settler Revels in stimulating airs, and drinks The cold pure ether, stirring high the heart Like wine. Clad in thick furs, he drives or walks, And, feeling exaltation, gathers power. (55) While the poem suggests that the prairie climate can nurture both a physical and a spiritual superiority, the poem also portrays history as an eternal battle between the best and worst impulses of humankind played out in the rise and fall that Davin had described early in his career as “system after system, style after style,” falling and rebuilding in “phases of human progress and development.”64 The latest phase of human history upon which the poem focuses is the British Empire, and the roles that both Canada and Ireland are to play within it. The poem begins with its speaker, presumably Davin, dozing in a prairie meadow before being abducted after Eos bestows upon him a kiss so explosive that “there flashed a blinding light,” provoking a prairie wildfire in which “whirlwinds of flame swept over the grass” until “the plain was one vast fire from rim to rim” (17). After spending a night in Eos’s underwater palace (and witnessing her morning bath,

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to which he dedicates twenty-five lines), the speaker is invited to join her in her chariot. Their flight begins “over the broad Aegean,” dwelling on the past glories of Athens and Rome before proceeding to modern Europe, pausing to meditate on the past and present of Paris, London, then Ireland. Crossing the Atlantic, and pointedly ignoring the United States, the poet takes in views of Halifax, then Quebec and Ottawa, followed by “all Ontario’s wealth of field and town” (53), before crossing the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, and the Fraser River. The Pacific Ocean marks the end of a global journey covering the reach of the empire that Eos says would inspire “a bard” to write “an epic worthy of the race / or races which have built it grandly up” (63). Eos exhorts Canada, at the dawn of its own nationhood, to learn from the past but not repeat its mistakes as the new nation continues the work of Empire: Then it will be seen How much of greater greatness was within Your young Dominion, by imperial works Worthy an ancient state, built up by one As yet in gristle, nobly aids the task, And gives large promise of the mightier day. (64) In the poem, each past civilization, though fallen, contains the seeds of the one that succeeds it, so that Canada, like Europe, benefits from accumulated wisdom that stretches back to ancient Greece. Significantly, the lengthy historical overview that provides context for Canada’s place within the empire is bracketed by detailed references to the recent history of Ireland. The poem’s hope for Canada’s future as the westernmost extension of Britain’s empire is complicated by the poet’s awareness of the stillprecarious state of affairs in both the Canadian West and Ireland. The Irish Land League’s ongoing organized rent strikes and opposition to rack rents, the resulting passage of a Coercion Act in 1887, and the widely publicized incidents of militia evicting Irish tenants seemed to indicate that Ireland was slipping back into the violence that had characterized the Land War of 1879–82. In that disturbance, it had been difficult to determine who was the criminal, as illustrated by rent collections that required the combined forces of sheriffs, hired bodyguards, members of the Royal Irish constabulary, and British soldiers “all armed to the teeth,” according to a witness to one eviction: “The

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tenant and his friends … looked on with the appearance of deadly hatred and would have murdered any one of us if they could. How long is such as state of things to last?”65 A similar scene blurring state-sanctioned and agrarian violence is offered by Eos to chasten Davin’s narrator when he exclaims, “How fair this world” (31). In Eos’s reply, diction and imagery draw causal links between the midnight assassinations carried out by Irish secret societies and the crimes, protected by the law, of their landlord and bailiff targets: But I could show you … The moon-light ruffian coming from his work Of savage war on civil life; and here A mountain side, a peasant’s hut, his home, Where he and his were born, but whence vile greed Ejects him now unjustly, for it made His load too heavy. He in anger scowls; The aged palsied mother weeps; the wife With apron wipes her tears away; then scolds The instruments of law, to them the dogs Of pitiless oppression; sons tall, strong, With murderous eye survey the bailiff hard; The children cry, the neighbors helpless crowd Against the cordon thrown around by power. (33) Davin’s deliberate choice to describe a mountain-side peasant home evokes the evictions contemporary observers found most morally repugnant, those of the reclamation tenantry who had made previously worthless holdings fertile by hauling manure and lime up mountainsides. In a bitter irony, they could not afford to pay increased rent on land made newly valuable from their back-breaking and unremunerated labour.66 While this scene is used to illustrate Eos’s moral that the world would be “fair … were but men’s actions fair,” the eviction scene also gives Ireland’s specific crisis a prominent place early in the poem, appearing even before its survey of European history, and thus colouring Eos and the poet’s subsequent moral observations about Europe, then Canada. The links between social injustice and political instability established in the Irish tableau are reinforced as the chariot passes over France. The history of the nineteenth century is distilled into a meditation on its most prominent landmark, the “Arch Triumphant,” a monument

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dedicated to those who died in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and that calls to mind Napoleon, whose nearby monument is “still a wonder and a power.” The poet is inspired by the “monuments / which speak of death to tyrants and of hope” and which encourage “The love of liberty, the love of man, / The love of art, of song” (36). That the revolutionary history of France strikes a kindred chord in an Irish poet is commented on by Eos, who, sensing his thoughts, responds with a caution: Amazing genius in the Kelt abides, How sweet his warm, quick, gentle, courtesy! How brave in arms! Excelling in all arts! How loyal to the leader of his heart! His very vanity a power: The price He pays for his great gifts is great: balance The steady aim and duty made supreme. (36) Implying that the Celt’s passionate and artistic temperament veers into revolution unless tempered by more steady (and presumably “Saxon” qualities), Eos looks forward to the poem’s conclusion, where Canada is enriched by the gifts of diverse cultures that complement and balance each other, especially Saxon and Celt. Given that Eos later describes the current political violence taking place in Ireland as “The worst of tyrannies in worst of forms / A reign of terror through the country side” (40), the allusions to the dark sides of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s ascendancy are also meant as cautions against the Irish overreaching for justice and liberty and toppling instead into further oppression. While Eos understands the historic sympathy between Ireland and France, the lesson for the Celt appears to be that revolutions against tyrants commemorated by the Arc de Triomphe may degrade into demagoguery under a charismatic leader. Not surprisingly, Eos’s observations are consistent with Davin’s own contemporary fears of the revolutionary chaos and violence unleashed by the Land War, as opposed to peaceful evolution into Home Rule. Moreover, given that elsewhere Davin views the British Empire as the best defender of liberties and culture, and sees the Irish as its prime builders, he implies here that the Celt’s distinct “genius,” energies, and faithfulness are best used within it. Even though Davin’s writing supports Ireland continuing as part of Britain, when the chariot next passes over “the isles of freedom,” or England, Eos comments on how “the seat of peerless empire” is also

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caught “in the fierce draw of wild democracy.” This view is likely attributable to the recent expansion of the franchise to agricultural workers, as well as Parnell’s Irish Party’s current control through the balance of power. Equally threatening is the existing urban blight and social inequality, illustrated by the view of a “blot of wretchedness” limping “to her squalid home / If home was hers in that hard populous hive” (37). On catching next a glimpse of “that small isle / whose earth-fenced fields gleam emerald from below,” the speaker asks Eos if there is any hope for Ireland, “the land of Flood and Grattan,” or if it must “forever lie a floating sorrow.” Eos reassures him that Ireland “will also have its day,” in spite of the crimes of the past and the threatened violence of the present. While portraying the country as “stained … with centuries of tears and crimes,” Eos’s appraisal focuses on the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, intimating that the Irish Parliament of “Flood and Grattan” was an opportunity squandered by those “to whom the glorious privilege of rule / Was given.” The Irish Ascendancy, lacking “sense at all of duty” instead “spent, drank, sank and soddened into swine,” and like “bloodhounds and beagles,” preyed on those “they should protect” (39). The Ascendancy “ground” those “who’ll now grind them,” the outcome being the French-inspired 1798 rebellion whose collateral damage included the lost Irish Parliament, leaving a contemporary legacy of distrust and political resentment (37–8). Public opinion in England and North America was torn between revulsion at Irish lawlessness and sympathy for the peasants’ plight, which the poem encapsulates in the image of a well-fed, well-dressed evictor, “the trim / Spruce agent gutting huts” (40). Nevertheless, Davin has Eos warn, “The danger’s now men may mistake the cry / Of blinding Vengeance for the voice of Justice” (39). Davin’s poem deplores the political pressure, violence, and intimidation that was part of the Plan of Campaign (1886–91) coordinated among Irish politicians, nationalist groups, and tenants to negotiate lower rents or to discourage tenants from paying rents to landlords or renting properties vacated by evictions. Both landlords and tenants could be subjected to tactics proven effective by earlier agrarian movements, characterized in the poem as “cruel boycott piled on travails’ pangs,” crop destruction, and, most vividly, the maiming of people and animals: “The sinless heifer hock’d by senseless hands,” and the hapless tenant who “earless drives his tailless kine to town” (40). Davin and his audience would have been familiar with newspaper accounts decrying the

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deliberate laming (known as hocking or houghing) of “dumb and helpless animals”67 reported as evidence that the campaign was “stripping Irishmen as bare of moral sense as the bushmen of South Africa.”68 Such a view fits the larger movement of Davin’s epic, in which humankind’s worst nature is pitted against its highest aspirations in the rise and fall of civilizations. Davin’s poem views unfair rents and evictions as “fruits of misused power,” but argues that agrarian violence embodies a “degradation of man” that “o’er shadows” all social inequities and will ultimately “balk the aim / Of those who’d bring in better happier days” (40). Echoing many contemporary reformers’ views that “the Irish tenantry needed to undergo a moral revolution and their landlords had to manage their properties along rational and capitalistic lines,”69 the poem argues that the tenant class needed to abandon their violent means of effecting change and in the process gain “decent self respect” where previously “pig and ass / Were hous’d on equal terms with man.” For their part, the landlords must also reform by eschewing a culture of excessive luxury in which the Irish “soil” is “drain’d to deck the Paris jade,” and “high walls / Uprear’d by pride” enclose “wide-barrenness.” The poem argues that economic and land reform is essential to ensuring “civilized” social structures and good relations between the different classes and sects in Ireland, offering “Security” where previously “dark assassins lurk’d.” Davin remains optimistic that Home Rule will prevail (even Eos is unable to foresee its failure) and that “hope’s star rises o’er that troubled land” so that as “Empire’s right hand,” “She’ll play a part her world-scatter’d sons / Can watch, nor blush” (41). Davin’s hopes and fears for Ireland were relevant to Ireland’s “world-scatter’d sons” in other parts of the empire, particularly the Canadian West. At the beginning of the poem’s journey, Eos had contemplated the extremes of virtue and vice that humans were capable of, and her image of virtue is a pastoral one, embodied in her description of The farmer faring nimbly to his fields, His bucksome [buxom] wife loud-chucking for her hens; The burly plowman turning up the earth; Small shapely fingers dressing loaded vines. (32) This hope is always attended by anxiety, since the poem also predicts the region’s exploitation by “huxters” and “Prospectors” (61). This

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echoes contemporary rhetoric surrounding expansion in the West, which commonly valued the more stable and moral farming communities over those based on the extreme wealth and materialism embodied in speculation.70 Mair, for one, envisaged Canada as facing two possible destinies: “It may be the home of a great, a comfortable and therefore a loyal and contented yeomanry … or it may become the arena of unscrupulous and vulgar monopolies, of absentee landlordism and the whole train of proletarian and socialistic agitations which follows or attends such a state of things.”71 Davin’s poem, with its overarching view of the rise and fall of civilizations linked to the best and worst of human tendencies, thematically ties together his visions for both Ireland and Canada. The worst view of Ireland’s future is a warning for Canada; the best view of Canada’s future offers hope to Ireland. As Ireland recedes and the chariot flies over the Atlantic Ocean, Eos offers the Irish bard a middle road between aristocracy and republicanism and a more peaceful way to overcome tyranny than that commemorated by French monuments: the Canadian West will be “the field of victory over kings / and tyrants” but will also quell “the passions wild / Of the impulsive throng” (43). Upon reaching Canada, Eos presents a capsule history of the nation, moving from east to west and past to present, beginning with Quebec. In spite of Davin’s appreciation for Fréchette’s poetry, he is wary of French Canada’s political legacy of revolution, aligning Quebec history and culture with both the ancien régime and revolutionary France. Where McGee celebrates French-Canadian culture, Davin echoes the Durham Report’s argument for assimilation, reflecting anti-French sentiment that increased in the wake of the North-West Resistance. Here he presents the French Canadians as a potential threat to his Anglo-Celtic concept of nationality because they are psychically divided: “while they live beneath one rule, they own / The civilization of another” and so are not “In harmony therewith” (44). McGee had seen French Canada as a positive example for IrishCatholic emigrants, but Davin, who elsewhere sees emigration freeing Europe’s underclasses from oppression under “feudal structures [that] anomalously linger in luxurious pomp or proud decay,”72 describes Quebec’s “storied citadel” as “a piece of French antique.” In the words of Eos, French Canadians “cling down there / to forms and glories and traditions old / Of other lands and of long-vanished years” (44). Like Macdonald and many English members of Canada First, Davin sees

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the westward expansion of the British Empire as the vehicle for essentially Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Celtic values. Not surprisingly, the poem explicitly links Riel, tied to the United Irishmen in Davin’s editorials in the Leader, with both Catholic French Canada and revolutionary France. In a cryptic allusion to current affairs, Davin seems to see Riel as a French-inspired demagogue who denounces oppression while inflicting it: “You see the same faults farther west in those / Blind egotists, who damn in others what they do themselves – the merest slaves of cant, / Of what has been” (44). Like Reade, Eos sees the French-Canadian “genius of a mighty race” embodied in its “peasants gentle,” “poets and thinkers, statesmen eloquent,” but considers the “Gallic stream” as merely one tributary that must be absorbed into a forward-moving “race, which gathering strength from diverse founts, / Will – a majestic river – onward flow … That makes the present great” (44). At first glance a multicultural vision similar to McGee’s, it comes with conditions: like the Irish, the French Canadians and, by extension, the Métis must accept British-based traditions in Canada before they are permitted to contribute their gifts to the new nation. Given that Davin participated in the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and was probably one of the last people to speak to Riel before his death, it is surprising that these recent events are covered in this one scant allusion. Where Davin had explicitly linked Riel’s resistance to the 1798 and 1848 rebellions in his journalism, he makes no reference to recent history when Eos’s chariot approaches the West. It is possible that Davin felt that contemporary Canadian readers were sufficiently well-versed in Irish and Canadian events to draw parallels between the political progress of the two countries, which he explicitly identifies in his speeches on Home Rule. It may be that after working so hard in his writing to present the Irish in Canada as some of the most loyal architects of the empire, he hesitates to draw explicit parallels between the revolutionary tendencies or the actions condemned as “savage” in both English and Canadian presses when discussing Irish, Métis, or Indigenous political action. Nevertheless, while the recent rebellion is not explicitly named, it colours much of Davin’s description of the prairies, presented as the site of the most recent stage of westward human progress from the godlike vantage point of Eos. Sorouja Moll believes the poem contributes to a government “­campaign that reads Canada’s North-West as Picturesque, Ready for Settlement” and whose intent is “to direct public perception away

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from any information surrounding Indigenous People’s resistance to colonization.”73 In Davin’s view, the rebellion threatened Irish settlers’ access to land that would allow them to become fulfilled members of a larger empire. While he never explicitly speaks of the rebellion, there are indirect allusions to contemporary history that reinforce the poem’s goal of presenting the West as ready for appropriation by settlers from the East. As Moll notes, the first Western Canadian place name mentioned in the poem is Qu’Appelle, a site Davin had recommended for one of the new residential schools and a stop on the recently extended Canadian Pacific rail route. The Canadian Pacific Railway was itself “a great work,” Davin argues in an 1882 RoseBelford’s article, viewing it as “the expression and emblem of nineteenth-century conditions, the tangible evidence of a new order of things.”74 The westernmost terminal of the railway, Qu’Appelle was a strategic military and settlement point and, as such, “of particular interest to John A. Macdonald,” who had appointed Davin to a royal commission on the railway and who supported Davin’s newspaper.75 “The building of a railway across the continent has evidently been one of the Prime Minister’s most cherished projects,” Davin observes in the introduction to “Literature Connected with the Canada Pacific RR.” He hoped the railway would be completed “long before Sir John Macdonald will have an opportunity of looking down on it from over the shining verge of hovering clouds.”76 In the poem, the poet is granted this very view. From their vantage point in the flying chariot, Eos says, “See where the iron horse … bears / Long trains thro’ what was wilderness a year / Ago.” The poem dismisses the contentions about ownership of the region brought up during the rebellion with the commonly used rationale that Indigenous peoples never settled the land that will be supplied and fortified from the railway’s westernmost terminal: But save the wild ox and his pursuers This land has been a solitude since it Was heaved up from the sea. For centuries? – Oh! Yes, for thousands … not a trace of man, save when the chase Brought savage hunters from the river’s marge (57) That the marge, or “The beautiful wooded vales of the Qu’Appelle,” is the home of the hunters presents a problem. However, having no word for “bison” suggests Eos sees the animal, and the way of life it

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supports, as unassimilable into Western culture. Since the “wild ox” is now the “dying axel tree” of Indigenous civilization, the goddess foresees “the Indian’s doom.” While telling the speaker that the waning of an ancient culture “should touch your heart,” Eos says simply that she has “seen / Types disappear before,” reflecting Davin’s own philosophy about the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations. Eos presents the demise of Indigenous cultures as part of a larger, eternal, and thus inevitable cycle that can be mitigated but not prevented by British civilization’s “kindness” that should attend “On dying races, as on dying men.” Such magnanimity would permit Canada to “be proud, and England, too, of that just spirit which / Has ruled her councils” (58). This part of the poem is one of the most explicit places where Davin differentiates between the situation experienced by the Irish and by the Métis and Indigenous peoples in the West: he presents the latter two communities as hunters rather than settlers. Where Davin argues in other works that possession of the land has been a point of conflict for the Irish for centuries, he views cultivation of the land as something that the settler government has recently introduced to the Plains people on the reserves as a compassionate response to the extinction of the bison. Whereas dispossession of Irish peasants is treated as a “crime” in the poem, the reality of Indigenous dispossession is ignored, displaced by a new narrative of Canadian and British benevolence that once again emphasizes the moral superiority of the British Empire. In fact, Eos and the poet do not actually see any Indigenous people until they have left the prairies behind, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and arrived in the Fraser Valley. New orchards have significantly rendered the region “white with apple trees in bloom,” another emblem of the success of settler cultivation. In the midst of this transformed world, an “Indian stood, in hand / a tom-tom rude, on which he beat” in accompaniment to his farewell song while “The children of his tribe impassive sat / and smoked their deep-bowl’d long-stemmed pipes” (60). (As in Kidd’s The Huron Chief, the Indigenous speaker’s words are set to ballad meter, distinguishing his voice from the western bard’s heroic blank verse.) Both his audience’s lack of emotion and the singer’s calm reinforce his acceptance of his people’s decline and fall as the work of a providential “good Spirit” who “knows / what for all is the best.” By way of consolation and justification, the Indigenous speaker-poet foresees that time and decline will also “prey / On the Pale Face at last,” whose “doom like our own / Is to pass and be past” (62).

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The ballad is one moment that unsettles Davin’s habitual moral justification of European civilization and progress. The Indigenous singer’s vision of environmental degradation arriving with the railway might be the only part of the poem that today’s reader would sympathize with. In contrast to the “Red Skin [who] marred not,” the singervisionary sees a time when “The pale face o’er all things / Is potent at last” and the smoke from his “steam horses” and engines will “Make[] swarthy the day,” while the waters harnessed for industry will “be black with foul refuse, / Or may be run dry” (61). The brief and destabilizing view of Western progress from the perspective of a nonWestern speaker does not undermine Davin’s ideology as much as it appears, however; instead, it is in keeping with the overall cosmic view of the poem as a constant battle between rise and fall, progress and regression, human aspiration and corruption. Like Davin, swept up by his Classical muse-goddess, the Indigenous speaker is also granted a visionary perspective through the power of poetry, enabling him to end his poem “exultantly, in contrast strange / To mien and tone with which he had begun” (63). Conveniently for white settlers, the vision he accepts happens to be the same as Davin’s: one that acknowledges the eventual rise and fall of all civilizations, but in doing so reinforces the current ascendancy of white settlers, given divine authority in the poem by Eos, and acquiesced to by the Indigenous singer. The irony of including an Indigenous poet-prophet in the poem is apparent when set in the context of the North-West Resistance led by a man who considered himself a prophet and who foresaw a very different political and spiritual destiny for the Métis. One of the most well-known quotes attributed to Riel suggests he did not see his people as dying: “My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” Unlike Davin, Riel believed that Indigenous and Métis peoples understood the concept of a national destiny very well: “We must cherish our inheritance. We must preserve our nationality for the youth of our future.”77 Echoing Davin’s belief in the connection between the Irish, their national identity, and possession of the land, Riel recognized retrospectively that, had they seen what was in store for them after Confederation, “the half-breeds of the North-West would have made conditions of a nature to preserve for our children that liberty, that possession of the soil, without which there is no happiness for anyone.”78 There was certainly much similar history and shared aspirations that would allow the Irish and the Métis to identify with each

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other and perhaps make common cause, but in Davin’s view, one he shared with the Macdonald government, Métis and Indigenous ­peoples’ insistence on their rights was in direct competition with the economic expansion and settlement of the North West. Politically, the ambitions of the Métis may have been more recognizable to Irish republicans and land reformers who wished to see Irish land in the hands of a peasant proprietorship rather than as a cog in the larger industrial and economic engine of the empire. The language that closes the poem sees only one possible destiny for Ireland and for the Irish in Canada, and significantly, Eos chooses an Irish bard to write Canada’s founding story. The chariot ride ends at the Pacific Ocean, the farthest reach of the empire that would inspire a bard to “write an epic worthy of the race / or races which have built it grandly up.” According to Davin’s muse, Eos, those races are primarily “Kelt and Saxon.” Their intertwined past and their future deeds will determine both the subjects of Canadian national poetry and the fate of the country within the empire: For Kelt and Saxon, each has done his share; By Kelt and Saxon, must it be maintained. The Irish, on a hundred battle fields, In counsel by the spoken word, by toil, Have play’d a great part in this work. (63) Eos reinforces Davin’s view of Irish identity as inextricably part of British imperial history and, as he has argued in his Home Rule speeches, indivisible from the English through culture and kinship. As Eos puts it: “those isles are linked by fate” (64). Ireland’s situation is described early in the poem and Eos’s final words also focus on the country’s immediate future. However, her warnings are also relevant to the newly confederated Canada, since it is the latest and most westward extension of an empire based, in Davin’s view, on “Anglo-Celtic” collaboration. Eos reinforces the view of cultural assimilation prevalent in post-Confederation nationalism when she warns the Irish that, loyalty to “their own green isle” notwithstanding, shipwreck will attend their aims, unless They merge them in a noble loyalty to the great empire which is theirs no less Than others. (63)

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The poem both begins and ends “on the monotonous plain” (65) where the bard wakes from his dream to hear the hammers building Regina, the empire’s latest city named after its current ruler. Consequently, the fate of the North West and all its peoples can never be separated from Davin’s extensive and lifelong preoccupation with the British Empire and the fate of Ireland within that empire. As she departs, Eos acknowledges the centuries of injustice in Ireland, but advises the Irish that “heroes do not waste / Themselves on the past – on dead things gone” (64), advice given only a few lines after the chariot has passed the Indigenous audience listening to their own death song. The field of such heroes is implicitly the North West, where a different kind of land war will be waged: a war against “the idler,” against “all injustice,” against “faction” and “gilt corruption,” and, ominously for Métis nationalists and Irish republicans alike, against “agitation.” Such war will usher in a “fruitful heaven / Spanning these lands” in “your young Dominion, by imperial works / Worthy an ancient state.” While the poem barely touches on the recently suppressed national aspirations of the Métis, Eos’s warning to Ireland implicitly reflects Davin’s political views and anxieties about the future of the North West. In Canada as in Ireland, the Irish need “to learn the cause of all is one” (64). For the Irish, the choice is to continue in the empire, trusting that both tenant reform and Home Rule will finally give them the rights and prosperity that Canadians are on the verge of enjoying. For the Métis and Indigenous people, the imagery of the poem suggests a much starker choice: assimilate or die. The example of Nicholas Flood Davin paints a complex picture of both Irish and Canadian national identity in the era of British imperialism. As someone who continued to find room for poetry in his extraordinarily active public and intellectual life, he obviously had great faith in the ability of culture to provide the long view of the ascents and downfalls of civilizations that could guide the moral growth of a new civilization. His political and literary treatment of Indigenous and Irish peoples alike seems motivated by a mixture of compassion, paternalism, cultural superiority, and political expediency. His dismissive view of Indigenous culture and his belief that it could easily be eradicated and replaced with a “superior” one contributed to a government policy that, through a combination of ignorance and arrogance, tolerated crimes so inhumane that more than a century onwards, these communities are still struggling to recover and assert their culture in the face of continued colonialism, neglect, and paternalism. The residential

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schools and other government policies contributed greatly to social inequality and despair that continues to manifest itself in poverty, health crises, and an epidemic rate of suicide. It might be simplistic to view Davin’s own sad and lonely death by suicide in a Winnipeg hotel room in 1901 in this context. The immediate causes of his despair were likely the recent loss of his parliamentary seat, compounded by his sense of betrayal when his tireless work for the Macdonald administration and the North West were neither rewarded nor recognized. His depression was exacerbated by an unhappy marriage late in life and his inability to locate a daughter given up for adoption and to publicly acknowledge his son, both from a previous relationship. A contributing factor was most certainly his increasing alcoholism, the occupational hazard for many journalists and politicians that nearly claimed McGee.79 (Like McGee and Macdonald, Davin’s behaviour when drinking was legendary – and sometimes pathetic – as illustrated in 1897 by his performing “an impromptu Blackfoot dance” on a table in the House of Commons smoking room, “kicking over everything in sight.”80) That said, it is tempting to speculate on whether he suffered from a divided psyche. Davin may have never regretted changing religions early in his life; it was possible that he was following conscience as well as family precedent. Still, in converting to Protestantism, he voluntarily assimilated himself into a larger culture that, throughout his career, he believed was not only aligned with progress and material success but also genuine intellectual and moral growth. It did not mean that he turned his back on his origins: like McGee, he continually challenged anti-Irish bigotry and celebrated the achievements of all Irish communities in Canada. However, when his speeches and poetry defended the values of the British-influenced civilization he wished to establish in Canada, it was always from the perspective of someone who was, to some extent, an outsider. When he deplored savagery and backwardness, whether it was alleged to take place in Ireland or the North West, he may have done so with the awareness that his audience saw him as part of the community accused of perpetrating it. It probably goes too far to suggest that his alcoholism and suicide were the price he paid for aligning himself with a professional and political culture that often looked down on Irish people, especially Irish Catholics. Yet it may be that in becoming a Canadian nationalist, Davin acquiesced uneasily to his own assimilation and paid a psychic price similar to that exacted upon Indigenous communities by his programs.

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12 Isabella Valancy Crawford (c. 1847–1887)

While Riel and the North-West Resistance are only indirectly alluded to in Eos, they are mentioned specifically in an unpublished fragment in which Isabella Valancy Crawford could not resist satirizing Davin (“the bald bard” in whose “polish’d crown” Eos sees her reflection). Written after the rebellion, the poem has Eos address Davin, her “bald headed daisy,” in an Irish brogue: Mywourneen, ’tis swate ’tis to leather the metis To riddle ould Riel wid bullets To chase Crowfoot and crees as if they wor flees An’ shoot down the rebels like pullets.1 Because the poem was never completed, it is impossible to determine if it was an affectionate ribbing of her Irish compatriot or a more pointed attack on his background and political views. By the time of the rebellion, Crawford regularly published her poetry in the Toronto Evening Telegram. The paper had declared itself unaligned with any government party, unlike Davin’s pro-Conservative Leader, but frequently criticized the Macdonald administration and its perceived mishandling of Indigenous affairs.2 In portraying Davin as a timeserving political functionary who abandons the “at-homes” of Lady Agnes Macdonald in his hurry to cover Riel’s trial in Regina, the poem aligns itself with the editorial policy of the Evening Telegram. If Crawford had hoped to publish her satire, it might explain her choice to write in the still-popular stage-Irish dialect, an important economic consideration for a working writer who tallied up word count and projected fees in her manuscripts.3 Crawford, like Charles

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Dawson Shanly and James McCarroll (a mentor who likely helped her access American markets),4 regularly employed dialect poetry to provide a satiric outsider perspective on Canadian affairs or, more seriously, to establish a distinct national voice that offered Irish, Scottish, and French-Canadian perspectives on national character. It was a strategy shared with the Irish-born W.H. Drummond and others, including Duncan Campbell Scott. Her long poem “Old Spookses’ Pass” was written in dialect; the fact that it features in the title of the only collection published in her lifetime suggests she considered it as important as her more conventional narrative, “Malcolm’s Katie.”5 It contributed to a national literary tradition derived from a blend of Canadian and Irish folk legends and vernacular. Hoping (vainly, it turned out) that Old Spookses’ Pass, Malcolm’s Katie, and Other Poems (1884) would sell well and establish her as a serious poet, Crawford appears to have considered dialect poetry to be as valid an art form as the traditional genres she also employed. Even in her formal poetry, Crawford tried to find ways to root English poetic tradition in a distinctively Canadian setting. Like Davin, she drew on Greco-Roman myths and legends in her poetry, but again she appears to provide a subtle riposte to his representation of Eos when personifying the dawn in her unfinished long poem, Hugh and Ion: Naked, a second, on the shore she stood With all the innocent, small feather’d things Flying to touch the scarlet, lucid bars Of her stretch’d fingers, and against her knees Rubb’d the soft sides of shadowy deer, and high The squirrels chatter’d at her from rich boughs.6 While Crawford’s personification does not directly borrow from Indigenous legend, having the dawn goddess attended by distinctively Canadian fauna makes her appearance less incongruous than Davin’s chariot and fairy attendants sweeping across the prairies. Crawford, like Moore, would people her poems with Indigenous supernatural figures mediated through the sources of non-Indigenous folklore collectors and the past examples of American poets. Crawford left few personal papers. When piecing together her life and philosophy, her biographers have had to rely on a few family anecdotes and on the context in which her poems appear. (Like

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Davin’s, her date of birth is open to question; she appears to have been born three years earlier than the 1850 Christmas birthdate she is traditionally given.7) She poses an even greater challenge for critics trying to determine her political views. Davin, at least, left an extensive public record of his thoughts in his many editorials, pamphlets, and speeches, whereas scholars can only speculate on Crawford’s views based on the leanings of the newspapers that published her poems, the subject matter, and the poems’ proximity in time and position to editorials written by others. Some of her poems were direct responses to historical events, such as the return of the Toronto volunteer militia after the Battle of Batoche that helped put down the North-West Resistance. However, many are sufficiently ambiguous to have invited diverse, even conflicting, readings of her position on Irish and Canadian politics, nationalism, and imperialism.8 In terms of family background and culture, the Crawfords resemble the Shanlys, a lost stately Irish home figuring in both family mythologies.9 The Crawford’s Irish home might have been wistfully evoked in the Frazer family’s idealized country estate on the St Lawrence in Crawford’s early novel, Winona (1877). The family initially attempted to re-create an upper-middle-class rural idyll among genteel expatriate communities in southwestern Ontario.10 Crawford was friends with the daughter of Catharine Parr Traill, and Traill’s brother Samuel Strickland gave the family a home when they ran into financial difficulties, likely brought about by her father’s incompetence as a doctor and his involvement in a financial scandal.11 The family initially settled in Paisley, then Lakefield, and finally Peterborough, where she may have been part of a literary and musical circle that included daughters of McCarroll.12 Growing up, Crawford would also have had direct experience of the hardship of early Canadian settlement life, but her cultural and political milieu would have remained Anglo-Irish, her poetic and fictional representation of rural and working-class Irish Catholics and Protestants notwithstanding. While she often lived near Indigenous communities, her portraits of Indigenous culture appear drawn primarily from American writers such as Longfellow and the missionary Granville T. Sproat.13 While Crawford employs the images and rhythms of seasonal rural and wilderness work, using Scots, Irish, Indigenous, and “Western Canadian” dialects to create a sense of national distinctiveness, Elizabeth Galvin notes that in a brief autobiographical sketch provided to the editors of the nationalist periodical, The Week, she identifies herself as of “mingld [sic] Scotch,

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French, and English descent, born in Dublin, Ireland.” Her failure to mention “Irish heritage” in her brief autobiographical sketch is “[not] so puzzling … when one realizes the Anglo-Irish considered themselves British not Irish.”14 However, as Moore, McCarroll, Davin, and Shanly have demonstrated, the choice to self-identify as Irish or “British” could change depending on time and circumstance. In mentioning her Irish birthplace in her autobiography, she adds Anglo-Irish identity to the amalgam of what had come to be seen as the four founding settler nations of Canada, and thus presents herself as a product of this culture. Unlike Robert Alan Burns, who sees Crawford as sympathetic to Riel’s resistance against Anglo-Saxon expansion, Cecily Devereux sees her conforming more to the dominant ideas of “late-nineteenth-­ century imperialist feminism in English Canada as it produced a discourse of the nature and importance of women’s work in the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British Empire.”15 Like Shanly’s and Davin’s views, Crawford’s observations regarding Canada’s place in the British Empire are often projected through an Irish lens. Echoing Young Ireland nationalists, Davin had asserted that the intermingling of Saxon and Celt had gone on for so long in both Ireland and England that it would be impossible to disengage them. Crawford depicts such a union as a marriage in “My Irish Love,” first printed in the Toronto Evening Telegram on 5 December 1883. Featuring an English “knight” who woos an Irish lady, the poem emphasizes the political alliances that aristocratic marriages between kingdoms traditionally created. More significantly, it argues that an even stronger familial and emotional connection exists between England and Ireland when the suitor offers, in addition to the dowry jewels that “were but fitting pages” to the Irish lady’s “state,” the lover’s symbol of his own willing emotional captivity: “A golden heart graved with my name alone, / And round it, twining close, small shamrocks linked.” The speaker fastens the chain holding the “English heart with Irish shamrocks bound”16 around his lover’s neck, images that contrast sharply with images of brutal shackles in another poem, “Erin’s Warning.” Instead, the bonds described in “My Irish Love” are more akin to the “light fetters” described in “Canada to England,” published a decade earlier in the Toronto Mail on 28 July 1874. In this poem set in Canada, “nature’s self / Is led, glad captive” (cp 237) and the riches yielded by a tamed nature brought willingly into cultivation lead to the material and cultural wealth that allows Canada to consider itself Britain’s equal. “Canada to England” features figurative

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as well as literal bonds, but rather than symbolizing slavery or conquest, the “bonds between” Canada and England “are no subtle links” that force together “two alien lands.” Instead, they represent “God’s own seal of kindred, which to burst / Were but to dash His benediction from our brows” (cp 238). In “Canada to England” and “My Irish Love,” the political relationships between England and Canada and Ireland and Canada are acknowledged but presented as more like the bonding of kin or lovers. Numerous critics have noted that the symbols used to represent personal, political, and economic relationships in Crawford’s poems are themselves highly ambivalent. The “silver ring” beaten out of Max’s first earned coin has the effect of moving his betrothed into the realm of commerce, an object to be earned by winning both Kate’s hand and the land she represents in a patriarchal and colonial framework.17 The silver and golden chains encircling both Canadian nature and the Irish lady’s neck can never cease being associated with the economic world and are chains no matter how “light” or symbolic they are. (That these bonds are more suggestive of mutual family obligations based on love of the type Edward Fitzgerald thought should govern society is implied by the fact that the “heart” of the English suitor is likewise “bound” by Irish shamrocks.) On the whole, Crawford’s emphasis in many of her poems on the romantic or familial links between Ireland, Canada, and England suggests that her view of imperial relations between the three countries are similar to Davin’s in spite of her parodic treatment of him.18 It may not be coincidence that “My Irish Love” is the penultimate poem in Old Spookses’ Pass, Malcolm’s Katie, and Other Poems, preceding “A Hungry Day,” which concludes the volume, giving an Irish immigrant farmer the final word. Like Davin, Crawford acknowledges the economic and political inequalities that led to widespread poverty and resulting social unrest in “A Hungry Day,” injustices that she also depicts in “Erin’s Warning,” first published in the Evening Telegram on 15 February 1881, in the midst of the Irish Land War. In contrast to the marriage of England and Ireland in “My Irish Love,” these poems respond to Ireland’s threat of imminent divorce. “A Hungry Day” also draws parallels between individual and state relationships by focusing on one Irish family that fled the potato blight in the 1840s and dramatizing their arrival in the quarantine sheds, presumably on Grosse Île. The father’s decision to leave Ireland comes in the wake of his wife’s death and the callous post-mortem of an

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attending doctor, who lacks “the face” to tell the narrator that his wife had died of “stharvation,” instead blaming the dead woman for having “let her system down.” His Irish brogue a contrast to the doctor’s obfuscation, the father answers ironically, “And that’s God’s truth,” pointing out that his children survive because the mother’s refusal of scarce food ensured they “might eat their fill” (cp 306). The father then provides a more accurate diagnosis for the malaise that afflicted both his wife and Ireland in general: No facthory chimblys shmoked agin the sky, No mines yawned on the hills so full an’ rich; A man whose praties failed had nought to do But fold his hands an’ die down in a ditch. (cp 307) The Irish peasant narrator’s diction masks a fairly sophisticated and eloquent assessment of the Irish land question that acknowledges John Stuart Mill’s analysis of the 1840s famine and the continued distress that led to a second famine in the 1870s. Mill observed in Ireland and England (1868) that “when the commercial and manufacturing development leaves a large opening for the children of the agriculturists to seek and find subsistence elsewhere than on the soil; a bad tenure of land, although always mischievous, can in some measure be borne with. But when a people have no means of sustenance but the land, the conditions on which the land can be occupied and support derived from it, are all in all.”19 Through tariffs against manufacturing and a failure to end a quasi-feudal system of land ownership, Ireland’s leaders have let her system down. While Crawford’s poems do not target the failures of the Irish Ascendancy as explicitly as Davin does in Eos, many of them, especially Hugh and Ion, still target the excesses of luxury enjoyed at the expense of survival for the poor. “A Hungry Day,” like Eos, was written during a time when newspapers were filled with cruel eviction stories. As tenants’ labour enriched their holdings, the land values went up, resulting in rent increases and the eviction of those who could not afford to pay. Crawford’s narrator recalls that “thim as lacked the rint from empty walls / of little cabins” are “wapin’ [weeping] turned away” (cp 307). Presumably because Ireland’s wealthy squandered their capital “to deck the Paris jade,” in Davin’s words, rather than invest it in improving their own economy, the Ireland of the famine is as moribund or dead to its children as the speaker’s wife.20 The speaker tells his

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children they will “leave the mother to her rest” under the “sod [that] was green” in an Ireland that itself is figured in the poem as one large graveyard where “On the sunny sides / Of hedge an’ ditch the stharvin’ craythurs lay” (307). To survive, the speaker and his children are forced to abandon their “green auld sod,” the land being a dead mother who can do no more for her children. At the poem’s end, the emigrant speaker, successfully established in Canada, looks back from a distance of more than twenty years to the Great Famine. Written in the context of the Land War, the poem nevertheless offers a harsh indictment of Ireland’s current inequitable system of land tenure through its stark contrast between the lot of immigrants to Canada and those who remained at home. The image of Ireland as helpless mother is reprised in “Erin’s Warning,” which levels the same moral reproach as “A Hungry Day” with its portrait of Irish citizens starving in the midst of a green and fertile land. The landlord may squander his wealth on jewels to deck his Parisian mistress in Davin’s Eos, but even as “Jewels” crowned her own “captive head,” Ireland laments that “I might not sell / One to buy my children bread!” (cp 81). “Erin’s Warning” directly comments on the Irish situation of the 1880s, as Ireland recovered from a less deadly, but still unconscionable famine. Just as the 1840s famine launched the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the latest crisis provides the winds that will unfurl the “sunburst” flag associated with the Fenians since the 1850s. Ireland is presented as a captive queen in chains, and her plight, apparently, is the plight of her children, the citizens of Ireland. Nevertheless, Erin commands her “sons” to “let Erin remain a slave” if they cannot free her without resorting to agrarian terrorism and ceasing to be “Fearless fronted-true and brave / Spotless as thy sires were,” presumably referring to the past Patriot generation who eschewed revolution. To reinforce her rejection of bloody solutions, Erin describes the attempt to free her by other means as “rend[ing] from my limbs / the biting chain,” an image sufficiently graphic to suggest that the attempt to free her by violence would maim her, or worse, violate her, as suggested by her additional warning that her sons must not “sell my honour in the mart” (c p 81). Given the nature of the abuse that Ireland has endured since the Union, it would seem reasonable to free her using violent means, but the poem instead shares Davin’s concerns that “midnight murders” or political change wrought by “the dark assassin’s hand” in the “lurid glare of torches” of agrarian terrorism was too high a moral price to pay for political change. In any case, the

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command that Ireland’s “sons” refrain from freeing her is only acceptable if the speaker and her audience believe that a legitimate alternative to violence is available. While Davin is more explicit in offering political solutions to the Irish question, such as a form of Home Rule similar to what Canadians were now enjoying in the West, Crawford’s poems continually focus on immigration to Canada as one answer. She shares this view with Davin and other politicians, who, as Jess observes, “were open to the idea that Ireland’s difficulty was Canada’s opportunity.” Anxiously observing the unified activism of the political groups making up the Irish Land League, Canadian politicians offered immigration and settlement as a solution to Ireland’s “intractable political history and perennial economic mismanagement.”21 Crawford uses the experiences of Irish immigrants to distinguish Canada’s evolving society and, ultimately, its national character from its Old World roots. Her portraits of settler success recall Fitzgerald’s earlier observations about Irish emigrant families who arrived with nothing but were able to live a comfortably prosperous yet simple life in a pastoral setting. The successful immigrants in “A Hungry Day” possess “a hundred acres – us as never owned / land big enough to make a lark a sod” (cp 308). In other words, the equality of life Fitzgerald admired so much in 1788 is still portrayed as available a century later through the Irish peasant’s declaration that “all men may have the same / That owns an axe and has a strong right arm!” (cp 309). Canada’s potential to be an egalitarian paradise is reprised through the aspirations of the settler Max Gordon in “Malcolm’s Katie,” who at the poem’s conclusion is poised to fulfill Fitzgerald’s frustrated fantasy of growing old with his beloved in Canada. Max’s ambition is so humble that he dares hope for no more than “four walls” and “perhaps a lowly roof” (c p 196). Like Fitzgerald, he nonetheless appreciates the enormity of the social achievement implied in his vision of his house surrounded by “modest fields” that “A man and woman standing hand in hand / In hale old age” could survey, saying, “Thank the Lord, it all is mine and thine!” (cp 196). Such economic achievements present immigration as a far better alternative to the violent revolution that Fitzgerald eventually resorted to. Unlike in Ireland, the social and political turbulence caused by imperialism and inequality is neutralized, as Davin declared it would be in Canada, by the seemingly endless capacity of the country’s unsettled spaces to absorb “panting, human waves / Upheav’d by throbs of angry poverty” that

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settle “down to peace in kindly, valley beds, / Their turbid bosoms clearing in the calm / Of sun-ey’d Plenty” (cp 204). Both Max and Katie recognize this peace as a distinctly Canadian achievement that will colour its national character and culture even as it advances beyond the settler stage. “Social-souled Max,” “the labourer and the lover” (and poet), fashions working songs designed to “speed the axe.” In doing so, he recognizes that his actions have an influence beyond the collection of shanty houses: “For ev’ry silver ringing blow, Cities and palaces shall grow.” “Bite deep and wide, O Axe, the tree, Tell wider prophecies to me.” “When rust hath gnaw’d me deep and red, A nation strong shall lift his head.” “His crown the very Heav’ns shall smite, Aeons shall build him in his might.” (cp 216) Max’s grand vision of his place in a national narrative is characterized as naive by other characters, notably his rival Alfred. However, national poetry that allows for visions of the future is again beat out in time to the rhythm of labour in Max’s song, suggesting that in Canada, the culture that is sufficiently great to build cities and palaces continues to be fed by the same Romantic stream that earlier nationalist writers valued. Like “The Canadian Boat Song,” “The Walker of the Snow,” and Young Ireland poetry, Crawford’s literary folk ballads demonstrate that a viable culture can be created from rural subjects and traditional genres to reinforce an unchanging “essence” or identity that can guide modern society. Other poems in Old Spookses’ Pass, Malcolm’s Katie, and Other Poems focus on the “cities” that probably better represent the experience of the majority of her readers. However, she concludes “Malcolm’s Katie” as she concludes the poetry collection itself, with a vision of Canada shaped physically and morally by the rhythm of axes and strong right arms. It is perhaps deliberate that the poem is not easily identified with any particular region of Canada, be it the newly opened North West Territories or the backwoods of Ontario. Instead, Katie and Max’s homestead, described as an Eden “deep in the heart of tall, green maple groves” yet featuring “mountain sides, /

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And prairies with their breasts against the skies” (cp 235), appears to be a composite of sublime Canadian landscapes. Like the Irish emigrant at the end of the poetry collection, Katie is given the last word in the poem. She finds the Eden analogy too limiting, exchanging the solitude prized by Moore in his similar depiction of an idyllic home in “Ballad Stanzas” for a more inclusive social vision: O Adam had not Max’s soul, she said And these wild woods and plains are fairer far Than Eden’s self. O bounteous mothers they, Beck’ning pale starvelings with their fresh green hands, And with their ashes mellowing the earth, That she may yield her increase willingly! I would not change these wild and rocking woods, Dotted by little homes of unbark’d trees, Where dwell the fleers from the waves of want, – For the smooth sward of selfish Eden bowers. (cp 236) The Canadian “woods” represent a new order that allows a living to anyone who is able and willing to work, making the Canadian landscape superior to Eden. It is also implicitly contrasted to Ireland, since Eden’s “smooth sward” evokes the unproductive wastes of tended lawn on wealthy estates, not to mention the leisured Ascendancy propped up by “freeborn” serfs (cp 77) trapped in what Davin decried as a modern feudalism. The poem also contrasts Canada’s woods with the dead or powerless mothers of Ireland. Whereas the figurative self-immolation of the Irish mother in “A Hungry Day” could only be meaningful if her children survive to emigrate, they thrive in Canada because the ashes of the burnt trees fertilize the maternal earth that in turn feeds “starvelings,” ensuring that these settlers will never have to endure the vision of “a famished child” (c p 309) trembling on a cottier’s floor. Crawford’s vision shares with Davin’s the belief that Canada’s vastness would inspire an equal greatness of national soul, creating a new, more just social order shaped in part by the kind of heroic labour that sets the rhythm for national poetry, which in turn influences national character. As Canada became more urban and industrialized in the late nineteenth century, the rustic vision that ends “Malcolm’s Katie” increasingly became more metaphor than reality, but Crawford still presents it as a

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founding myth whose influence might allow Canada to resist the decline that many writers and thinkers feared would overtake the British Empire. This vision of inevitable decline is voiced by Alfred in “Malcolm’s Katie” and Ion in Hugh and Ion. However, in both long poems, such fears do not necessarily undermine the hope that Canada’s civilization will eventually rival Britain’s. Significantly, Max does not labour in idealized, rustic seclusion but in the company of “smoothcoated men” who “talk’d of steamers on the cliff-bound lakes; / and iron tracks across the prairie lands; And mills.” With industry’s “busy clamour” is “mingled still / The throbbing music of the bold, bright, Axe” (cp 205). While these mechanized incursions could present a disquieting view of the ecological cost of Max’s progress22 and the less homespun “smooth-coated men” recall Davin’s “huxters” and speculators, they form the necessary economic and technological bridge between Max’s work and the “nation strong” he believes he is building. The fact that the “throbbing music” of the axe is still as much “the steel tongue of the present” as the machines that follow suggests that Crawford’s vision of Canada is based on a necessary interdependence between rural communities and industry and commerce, especially since the hoped-for “homes for millions” on the prairies would provide both supplies and market for the east, connected by the railway. These connections are made more closely in “Canada to England” and “Toronto,” two poems that again tie the cultural and economic power of urban Canada to its fields and streams. Neither poem renounces commerce or industry, arguing instead that Canada’s strength comes from its close connection with labourers like Max as well as nature itself, which will inform the culture in a way that might arrest the moral decay implicit in the era’s popular narrative of civilizations’ ascent and decline. “Canada to England” portrays the nation’s rapid progress from “primeval bowered land” to autonomous nation as its song transforms from “the wild roar of rock-dividing streams / and the loud bellow of my cataracts” to one “like to thine [Britain’s] in lusty youth” containing “all the infinity of notes” comprising “a Nation’s voice,” drawn from both rural and urban sources: the sounds of a “whispering vine,” “summer rustling thro’ the fields,” and the “lowing of the cattle in the meads” mingle with the “sound of Commerce,” and “the music-set / Flame-brightened step of Art in stately halls” (cp 237). In “Toronto,” first published in the Evening Telegram on 25 June 1884, the young city is likewise portrayed as the child of Britain,

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sharing its heritage of heroes, art, and commerce: “The pulses of past warriors bound in her; / The pulses of dead sages beat in her; / The pulses of dead merchants stir in her” (CP 239). That Canada’s culture is a rejuvenated version of British tradition is suggested by the fact that the city is still “Ankle deep in the tender buds of spring … with the perfumes of close forests thick / upon her tender flesh” while at the same time “wealthy with tall spires / All shining Godward, rare with learning’s domes / And burning with young stars that promise suns” (cp 238). While Canada possesses “learning” that presumably has its roots in British and European culture, Canadian cities’ proximity to a primal wilderness potentially allows their citizens to retain a state of innocence unavailable to older civilizations, even as it advances. The speaker reminds the city not to forget its roots as a civilization on the verge of the wilderness and that when Toronto becomes august and wealthy, with “Close domes of marble rich with gold leap[ing] up / from porphyry pillars to the eye-clear sky,” it cannot afford to forget its “first cradle on the lilies’ lap / In the dim woods” (cp 239). The multiple ways in which Canada’s “primeval” wilderness could effect a moral regeneration is explored in Hugh and Ion, Crawford’s unfinished counterpart to “Malcolm’s Katie.” At the beginning of the poem, the imagery and diction suggest that Canadian cities have already moved from the spring of hope to the winter of despair as the same “primal forest” now heaves “Its haughty heart against the City’s claws” (125–6). In an ironic counterpoint to the anthropomorphized maternal woods in Katie’s concluding vision, an urban jungle is peopled by predatory oligarchs feeding on a debased underclass. Crawford explicitly reveals the consequences of Canada forgetting the spiritual wellsprings that she portrays in “Toronto,” represented by the nativegrown and “god-like lilies … of Honour, Peace, and sweet-breathed Charity” (cp 239). In Hugh and Ion, the nameless city, simultaneously identified as “Athens” and “Babylon” in the view of the artist-figure Ion, appears as a kleptocracy ruled by Davin’s “huxters,” characterized as “Our Benedict Barabbas who can steal / With such bland gestures” that the exploited “gaze in envy and delight … even while he plucks the crust from lips / Blue with their torture for it” (51–6). The moral choice faced by Canadian society is represented by the unnamed woman who rejects the artist Ion in favour of her stockbroker suitor. That, along with the fact that Barabbas’s legal plunder helps gild the organ pipes of churches, suggests that Crawford shares with

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Davin the observation that “the poet and artist cannot look for recognition to the worshippers of gold, some of whom are no better than public robbers.”23 If the poem is a counterpart to “Malcolm’s Katie,”24 several incidents and images suggest that Canada has arrived at a point where it must choose between two paths, with one leading to the unrestrained capitalism and materialism that Davin and other imperialists believed characterized the United States. That choice is represented by a “portly” suitor who dreams only of “stocks and margins,” which are “the licens’d weapons of the world’s wild war / Against large Plenty,” who in contrast “holds to Want the wealth of weighty sheaves” (2). Katie choosing the settler-poet Max suggests that Canada’s greatness lies in its ability to offer “pale starvelings” independence and basic human dignity. Ion’s unnamed “falcon” lover instead sees everything as a commodity to be traded to the highest bidder, including her own body, which she resolves to sell before “Time rounds” and passion and beauty fade (4). (As well as being a counterpoint to Katie and the constancy she represents, the woman resembles the mercenary Cecil in Crawford’s novel Winona, who spurns her jealous cousin for the wealthy American Mr Horneyblow and goes out of the novel in dramatic, wintry style thanks to a particularly Canadian murder-suicide.) The unnamed woman’s predatory world view is reinforced when the rejected Ion is accosted by a prostitute who is as “demure” as “Barabbas” is respectable and who observes, “man finds ev’ry woman foul” while “woman weeds her dreams away, and through / Clear spaces sees the strong, smooth tiger, Man” (6). The predatory imagery is not restricted simply to personal relations coloured by commercial ones but permeates all transactions in a city where workers “raven at its flesh marts with fierce eyes” and where the “mighty maw” of factory machinery takes the “serf that serv’d it … and comb[s] his sweating flesh sheer from his bones / With glittr’ing fangs” (10). The poem opens in a city that seems established in the ethos of Barabbas and Babylon. However, this vision is challenged by a pattern of recurring dualities: idealistic Hugh and disillusioned Ion, man of action and man of contemplation, “the town with its young walls and venerable sins” that is both Babylon and Athens with “the smell of primal woods upon its air” and “the groans of Ancient Famine on its slums” (9). These dualities suggest that other possibilities coexist with Babylon, and that Canada’s artists and poets can still draw on the “primal forest” for inspiration that could keep the country from falling

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into the same errors as Britain or the United States. Hugh and Ion are presented as opposites in many ways, allowing a dialectic surrounding the notion of progress that takes up the bulk of the poem. In spite of their different backgrounds and vocations, both men are poets, and the lyrics they fashion remain the most enduring (and consequently anthologized) elements of the work. While Hugh is characterized as the more optimistic and practical speaker, he is not presented as the innocent, earthy settler-figure opposed to a more urbane cynic, as Max is to Alfred. Instead, the action of the poem concerns itself with Hugh and Ion’s common purpose: they both flee the evils of the city, seeing the wilderness much as later artists and social reformers would see it as a “mind cure”25 that rejuvenates the soul, allowing each man to return to the city where his life’s mission will take place. Ion, resembling the spurned suitor Fitzgerald, “hurri’d far into the woods from his fierce falcon love,” while Hugh’s retreat is in the wake of a nervous breakdown triggered by his empathy with the anguish of the city’s poor. While Hugh ultimately plans to build a new settlement in the wilderness, he identifies his current retreat as a purification ritual that will give him the insight and focus necessary to carry out his goal of reforming society: he vows to “plunge to drowning depth in leaf-built waves, / And let them wash me from this clanging world” (10). Hugh is portrayed as an idealistic and messianic figure intent on leading the poor out of the cities to build a more equitable society in the unsettled wilds. While Burns has argued that Hugh shares striking similarities with Riel,26 his dreamed-of colony also resembles the one that Thomas D’Arcy McGee tried to organize in the 1850s to save Irish working-class Catholic emigrants from the corruption of American cities. A similar rural haven for Irish emigrants was actually established by a Fenian organizer who happened to be a descendant of a more famous Irish Hugh: General John O’Neill, who claimed to be a descendent of the Northern Irish rebel lord Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone (1550–1616). After his final humiliation during the failed Manitoba invasion, O’Neill concluded that “absolute possession of the soil” was ultimately “the only true independence for a laboring man.”27 Taking advantage of land grants available under the American Homestead Act of 1862, he was able to lead a small colony of Irish immigrants to Nebraska in 1873.28 Crawford’s Hugh is equally fired by dreams of “a fine, full soil – free grants for every soul” (24). Since the poem is unfinished, readers will never know if his

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enterprise ends as disastrously as O’Neill’s did (although his colony became O’Neill, Nebraska, today a small city that boasts the world’s largest permanent shamrock). Whether or not it was inspired by an unrepentant Fenian, Hugh’s dream is not as radical as it appears. The rhetoric he employs to describe it would not be out of place in a nineteenth-century settlement manual. Like many imperialists, Crawford represents the West as a safety valve that would preserve both Canada and Britain from the threats of Irish republicanism and English social unrest. Unlike the contented immigrants in “A Hungry Day,” who “left the crowded city sthreets” because “th’are men galore to toil in thim an’ die” (cp 309), most Irish Catholics outside of Quebec continued to concentrate in urban centres, especially Toronto. They were only beginning to escape the low-paying jobs and squalid living conditions that McCarroll’s writing had called attention to in the 1850s. Hugh sees “gaping city sewer[s] / Beaded with haggard heads – and hungry eyes” and wonders “that what man calls ‘a man’ should choose to pave / City kennels with his juiceless bones” or suffer “the dark divorce of hunger pangs … while prairie breasts … teeming with the milk of life” offered “food and shelter” (7). As a remedy, Hugh sees the potential cure in “the ebon woods” he camps in, which would offer “Pure water – timber – hills for little towns” that would allow his colony to “touch red Plenty’s robe” (24). Like his ultimate goals, Hugh’s poetry has a more abstract moral purpose than Max’s active engagement with work and the land. The poems of both Hugh and Ion draw on images and activities associated with the Canadian wilderness. Yet even the pragmatic Hugh’s “paean” to the “canvas eaves” of his tent is more about shaping a contemplative and philosophical space than literal settlement. In spite of his wish to be a spokesman and guide for the urban poor, his tent poem reflects, in both style and content, the more genteel activities of hunting, fishing, and camping, and is more consciously literary than folk ballads. The scarred expanse of canvas tells the tent’s history through allusion and poetic diction rather than dialect: the canvas’s “long wound heal’d with a seam” was inflicted during a “Walpurgian dream / Of branches bellowing through the night” (22–3), a phrase that would not be out of place in German Romanticism. Poetic diction renders captured trout as “scaly treasures” and “speck’ld sweetmeat of the stream” (23). Rather than break free of earlier English poetic traditions, Crawford has Hugh adapt them to Canadian subject matter.

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Hugh’s investment in the Canadian wilds as rejuvenator of the existing culture is also expressed through the description of his character and heritage, though in ambiguous lines that have led to diverse interpretations. (To date, no critic has connected him with the seventeenthcentury Earl of Tyrone, who led a revolt against Elizabeth i before joining the Flight of the Earls that ended the traditional Gaelic order of government, or with his Fenian descendant.) Many readers assume that “the heritage of light” in Hugh’s eyes, which came “From Council fires that fac’d a thousand moons” (18), indicates that he has Indigenous, possibly Métis, heritage. While the combination of Hugh’s fair “Saxon” hair and eyes lit by the fire of “tribal wisdom” allows Hugh to represent an ideal union of Indigenous and European cultures lauded by Reade and Davin, the language is ambiguous enough to suggest other readings. If Hugh has Indigenous ancestry, it might feed his connection to the land, and “so [therefore] loved he prairie crests” (18). Hugh may offer the “tribal wisdom” gained from this connection as a cure for the moral malaise of the modern Canadian city and become a modern prophet, even savior.29 The syntax can suggest a different reading, however: Hugh can draw upon “tribal wisdom” because he “so loved [that is, loved so much] … prairie crests / And awful forests.” This interpretation is much more problematic because it argues that any Canadian open to the sublime of the Canadian wilderness can access the wisdom possessed by the Indigenous peoples who presumably inhabit the land Hugh wishes to settle and who are often only present in Crawford’s poems as spirits, mythological figures, or revenants such as the ghost of “Singing Leaves” in “The Camp of Souls.” A third reading suggests an affinity between Indigenous and certain European cultures. Kidd had already identified parallels between early Irish Celtic and Wendat oral traditions. Crawford’s lines could imply that a similar connection exists between Indigenous and Saxon, a label often synonymous with “English” in nationalist rhetoric, but also one of the threads of Irish national background. His Saxon heritage is emphasized over the Métis in both appearance and character: the passage asserts three times Hugh’s Saxon attributes.30 It suggests that Crawford, like Haliburton and Reade, believed that descendants of the ancient Saxons, Celts, and Normans could thrive in Canada’s remote and harsh territories because of their roots in cultures that, one thousand years ago, would have also possessed a “tribal wisdom” or a sense of identity and tradition similar to that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

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Hugh’s name has roots in all three European cultures: while it has an Irish-language equivalent, Aodh, its root is a Germanic word, describing the impulses of “heart, mind, spirit.” The name’s association with Frankish and French nobility, along with the fact that it was brought to England by the Normans,31 helps portray Hugh, in character and deed, as the idealized Northern emigrant that Reade and many members of Canada First believed best suited to guide Canadian society. Significantly, Hugh’s possible Germanic, Norman, and, more tenuously, Irish background point to the various national roots of Crawford’s own family. Like Davin’s Eos, she might value the qualities of the Celt but see the necessity for them to be tempered by Saxon qualities that Hugh possesses, described as “firm flint within his steadfast soul” from “creeds and faiths” that “Had flinty feet, and iron in their veins” (18). Hugh’s Saxon attributes contribute to his portrait as a determined and visionary leader, a fisher of men able to “cast … to draw them up / From swarming city shallows” (18). If Hugh’s portrait is based on essentialist assumptions about Saxon qualities of leadership and determination, it is possible that Crawford considers the English – and perhaps the Anglo Irish – as natural leaders and moral guides, unless the unfinished poem had a planned tragic or ironic ending in which Hugh’s flinty steadfastness is his undoing. Hugh’s sensitivity, character, and aspirations may make him receptive to an elemental wisdom identified not exclusively with any specific culture but with an ancient “tribal wisdom.” Reasserting itself “from age to age” in different “creeds and faiths,” it can be attained by living in harmony with nature within Canada’s distinctive and inspiring landscape and climate. Regardless of its origins, Hugh’s ability to commune with his own tribal inheritance takes place within a landscape peopled by Indigenous figures. Earlier English-speaking and Ascendancy Patriot scholars and poets used Celtic culture, drawn mainly from books and manuscripts or collected from native Irish speakers, to argue for Ireland’s rights as a nation distinct from Britain. Likewise, Crawford borrows generic “Indian” culture and traditional activities to weld an immigrant community to the land. In this case then, Hugh’s professed love of the land is used to demonstrate that he is morally fit to guide those who would occupy it, including the IrishCatholic children of emigrants who have not yet managed to break free of the grips of exploitative landlords and capitalists in the new Canadian (or American) cities.

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While Hugh’s Saxon traditions go back a millennium, Ion’s name points to even older cultural wellsprings that Canada can draw on, just as Young Ireland had been inspired by ancient Greek and Hebrew poetry. “Ion” may refer to the performer of Homer’s national epics in Plato’s eponymous dialogue on the subject, or to the son of Apollo, the founder of the Ionians.32 (The name is also mentioned in its Hebrew form, “Javan,” in the book of Daniel.) Like Hebrew and Greek national poets and their timeless subjects and poetry, Ion represents the long view of civilizations: his knowledge of their ascents and falls accounts for his cynicism while also fuelling the art he believes he is destined to create. Presented as more urbane than Hugh, Ion loves “the wilds, Athenian-wise” but “lov’d / his little Athens more – his canvas best,” and so has no plans to settle the wilderness. In his painting, Ion looks for what is timeless, using seasonal cycles to represent ideas in an art that he hopes will be sufficiently universal “to blaze across all ages to all men.” His approach to art would be approved of by late nineteenth-century Symbolists, being described as allowing “his spirit” to stand “at his canvas” in order to “paint[] spirit,” with the result that never burst a vine Of Spring beneath his brush, but men foresaw The vintages, and felt the soft winds move Behind its leaves, and all its juices steal Luminous from the pulses of the God. (19) Like Hugh, Ion is in the wilderness partly to escape the material distractions of the “clanging world.” The description of his art and the lyrics attributed to him within the poem suggest that his wilderness retreat will not only cure him of his unrequited love but also furnish him with symbols and images of an eternal, cyclic nature that will allow his art to transcend his place and time. As in “Malcolm’s Katie” and “The Camp of Souls,” Ion’s lyrics borrow what Crawford (and her non-Indigenous models) consider are Indigenous mythologies that express concepts of seasonal and cyclical time, often reflected by her use of “moons.” Thus, Ion’s “The Dark Stag” is a description of the dawn in which a sacrificial night stag is pursued and killed by a moccasin-clad hunter and his hounds each morning, reviving to repeat the process the next day. Ion is also the

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composer of one of the poem’s most erotic and thus most anthologized songs, “The Lily Bed.” In fleeing his “false falcon love” and retreating to the wilderness, Ion transfers his creative and erotic energy from pursuit of a material and materialist city woman to instead seeking the eternal beauty and truth that can be discerned in the images and cycles of the natural world. Lines such as “his cedar paddle, scented, red / He thrust down through the lily-bed” and “kiss’d her silver lips – hers cool / As lilies on his inmost pool” (20–1) certainly invite erotic interpretations, but Crawford also seems to be endorsing a particular aesthetic and philosophy for Canadian literature and art. As one of the latest Irish-Canadian writers to use the canoe to bridge the physical and spirit world, Crawford, like Moore, Kidd, and McGee, either draws on or invents folk legends that extend the reach of emigrant cultures back in time in their new land. In “The Lily Bed,” Indigenous figures appear as personifications such as “Stillness” sitting in a “lodge of leaves.” In this vein, the woods are “a proud and crested brave,” the lake, a “bead-bright” maiden. Their union is not simply sexual but also blends sky and earth, spirit and body so that an earthly island, suspended between the “blue and blue” of water and sky becomes “a bead of wampum from the belt, / Of Manitou” and birds are described as “wing’d and burning soul[s]” that seek “the balm / of the Great Spirit” to which “the freed soul flies.” The emphasis on “still hours,” “stillness,” a “lily-lock’d” canoe, and the poem-length pause that draws out the space between one stroke of the paddle and the next creates a moment out of time similar to that in the Confederation poet Bliss Carman’s “Low Tide on Grand Pré.” While Carman might not approve of the use of personification in the poem, it shares his interest in using Canadian nature to express something “in regard to the phenomena of the soul-life of humanity.”33 The “soul-life” in Crawford’s poems is not restricted to humans, or even living things, but infuses inanimate objects. The speaker in “Said the Canoe” narrates the poem from the repose of a good spruce-bough bed that Fitzgerald would have approved of. This is another poem in which Crawford uses the Canadian landscape and the objects within it as a portal to a greater, eternal order. Many critics have seen the canoe’s “masters twain” as Indigenous, and in nineteenth-century folklorists’ view, the sentient canoe could certainly reflect a literal animistic belief system. However, since the two hunters are not specifically identified, they could be settler or Métis trappers, Hugh and Ion, or another pair of artists or seekers. Having the canoe speak from its

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particular point of view has an effect similar to Craig Raine’s Martian poems in making the mundane world appears alien or otherworldly, or at least highly metaphoric, as when the canoe calls the fire the “camp soul” (cp 67). The feminized canoe in the poem also functions as a muse that inspires her “masters’” love songs, described as “new chains all molden / of rare gems olden” (c p 69), applying Canadian images, symbols, and figurative language to the existing traditions and subject matter of Greco-Roman and English verse. A product of the technology of an equally ancient culture and constructed from perennial materials, the canoe possesses a broader cultural and archetypal perspective than her human masters. This allows her to recognize that the art they create is both a reflection of their own time and of universal themes as they “s[i]ng songs … that wove a golden thread with a cobweb trifle” (cp 68). The hunters sing while cleaning and polishing their blades and rifles in preparation for the next day’s chase. As in other songs carried out to the elemental rhythms of work on the land, such everyday activities are fitted into a ritualized pattern of images and narratives that have ancient antecedents, creating an effect similar to Moore’s providing an epigraph from Quintilian for his “Canadian Boat Song.” From the perspective of the canoe’s highly figurative understanding, the dim firelight that attempts to illuminate the large trees beyond the clearing becomes “A shy child” wishing to “clasp a Brave’s red neck” but who fears the “rough shield on his breast, / The awful plumes shake on his crest” (cp 68). In its indirect allusion to the Iliad,34 it draws parallels between ancient national poetry and Canadian culture. Having a sentient canoe imbue animals, trees, and even flames with as much consciousness as the human beings creates an unsettling effect similar to Shanly’s “Walker of the Snow.” It asks readers to consider the nature of the spirit or spirits who inhabit this landscape and who appear as much or even more vital than the living things in the poem. Recalling Shanly’s skating red leaf in their uncanniness, the eyes of the dead stag brought down by the hunters are compared to “dead stars cold and drear,” and yet “under his lashes,” Death “peer’d through his eyes at his life’s gray ashes.” (cp 68). The notion that a force uses the deer’s eyes to behold its own corpse is only one of the disorienting concepts introduced by this scene and prepares the readers for the conclusion in which “The darkness built its wigwam walls / Close round the camp,” beyond which “Press’d shapes, thin woven and

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uncertain / As white locks of tall waterfalls” (cp 70). The reassuring solidity of the physical world extends only as far as the light allows. Its border is presented as a flimsy barrier against another vaguely understood world that again can only be described figuratively, compared to waterfalls that introduced earlier Irish travellers to a particularly Canadian form of awe or terror. Rather than use the Canadian landscape merely as a setting for a ghost story with a twist ending, as Shanly had, Crawford offers the scene as a way to create a distinctive Canadian symbolism that articulates larger eternal and spiritual truths. The barrier between the worlds is equally thin in “The Camp of Souls,” which features an Indigenous speaker who uses a “white canoe” to travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. His attachment to the land of his birth is powerful enough to keep “the rusty hunter’s knife” of Time from severing the connection between the two worlds (cp 54). As token of his visit, the Indigenous speaker “Singing Leaves” causes white flowers to bloom on the settlers’ hearths, and these flowers are symbols of both transience and eternal recurrence, in the manner of W.B. Yeats’s rose poems. The Anglo-Irish travel writer Anna Jameson had lamented that the Canadian landscape had no cultural associations for its flora and no tutelary spirits to inspire its legends. Crawford addresses this deficit by arguing that, to the settler open to a mythology being uncovered by folklorists, the flowers that bloom each spring become reminders of both the Indigenous spirits and the readers’ own loved ones “who wait in the ‘Camp of Souls’” (cp 55). As such, the flowers are also portals to an esoteric knowledge that Crawford hopes in other poems will enrich and guide settler culture. At the same time, like many of the Irish-Canadian poems in this study, “The Camp of Souls” raises “difficult questions about cultural appropriation and literary colonization.”35 Crawford, like Davin, imagines a Canadian landscape that promises material and – more importantly – spiritual resources for a great Canadian nation. But that greatness is again predicated on the death song of Indigenous mystics and poets. In this way, Crawford’s approach resembles the more conservative Patriot cultural nationalists whose recovery, revival, and vindication of Irish culture was achieved by co-operating with Irishspeaking Catholic scholars and folklorists, although it was used primarily to bolster their own ascendancy and autonomy in an Ireland that would remain part of Britain. Crawford’s poetry fits into the tradition of other published Irish-Canadian writers who infuse an

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invented tradition or folk-sensibility into their ballads, lyrics, and long poems but are rarely revolutionary. Instead, they consolidate an English-speaking ascendancy’s cultural authority by adapting it to the landscape they are settling. In light of Crawford’s larger aim of grafting older European poetic traditions to Canadian landscapes and idioms, it is worth returning to her least-appreciated long poem, “Old Spookses’ Pass” (1884). The very element that Crawford hoped would ensure its popularity – ­dialect poetry – has long been out of fashion. Thus, Crawford’s sometimes indecipherable attempts to reproduce regional working-class idiom and accents (in this case either American or Western Canadian) mean the poem has received limited attention, with a few exceptions. James Reaney sees its symbols as part of Crawford’s larger archetypal and mythopoeic vision.36 George Lyon appreciates that Crawford, who “probably never got much further west than Dufferin Street,” still manages to produce something that “could be a hit at the Pincher Creek Cowboy Poetry Gathering.”37 The North American market for dialect poetry and prose also blurred the lines between published literary poetry, popular sheet music, and folk songs during a time when Romantic lyrics migrated from middle-class libraries and music stands into the oral and folk music tradition that would feed bluegrass and country as well as Irish music. (Shanly’s “Walker of the Snow” experienced a similar career, becoming a “cowboy” song performed in the 1920s before returning to Ireland as a traditional ballad.38) The traditional working song sung by the narrator and his ghostly helper in “Old Spookses’ Pass” may even point to a possible source for the plot of “Malcolm’s Katie.” The ballad about “Betsey Lee an’ her ha[i]r of gold” is one that “cowboys allus [always] sing” in an attempt to “calm / The scare … [of] a runnin’ herd” (cp 278), but this folk song, if it exists, has eluded the few scholars like Lyons who have troubled to trace it. Certainly, a number of cowboy songs have Irish or Scottish folk origins, including what would seem the obvious source for this song, “Sweet Betsey from Pike,” which was set to a traditional Irish work song or sea shanty.39 A closer match for the title is Betsy Lee, a popular dialect poem by Manx author and Oxford scholar Thomas Edward Brown (1830–1897). Betsy Lee, A Foc’s’le Yarn was first published in the British literary periodical Macmillan’s Magazine in 1873 and republished as a book in 1881 and 1889, so it was likely accessible to Crawford and other Canadian readers. Like Crawford’s Katie, Brown’s eponymous heroine has “beautiful hair … like a shower

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of golden spray,”40 as well as a tyrannical, newly rich father and two suitors, the working-class Tom and the unscrupulous, lying lawyer’s clerk Taylor. Like Max’s rival, Taylor first convinces Betsy that Tom has fathered a child with another woman and later, after the disgraced Tom leaves to become a sailor, that he has perished in a wreck. Where Katie merely swoons, Betsy dies from the shock of hearing the news of her lover’s death. The poem ends with Tom resolving to kill, then forgiving, his rival, as Max does Alfred. If Crawford had read Brown’s poem, it may have offered her not only a model for the love triangle in “Malcolm’s Katie” but also a way to present universal love stories and other tales as working-class or rural yarns in the oral tradition, performed in a passable imitation of the dialect distinctive to the storyteller’s home region. Like her invented Indian lore, Crawford’s cowboy poetry and dialect may be indebted to contemporary American and British dialect literature and music, but it also continues a tradition first made popular in North America by Moore and McGee. Like Moore’s Canadian and American ballads, Crawford’s poem implies that settlers and workers possess linguistically distinct folk cultures evolved from the rhythms of work and the stories associated with a particular landscape. Like McGee’s writing, Crawford’s poem demonstrates how immigrant culture can be transmuted into native forms by evoking regions in Canada that gradually become haunted with spirits that allow the settlers’ presence on the land to extend beyond their immediate lifetime. Like Shanly, Crawford uses a “Third Man” story41 to create this effect, although this time the spirit is benevolent, saving the cowboy speaker and his stampeding herd from (improbably) plummeting off the edge of a pass high in the Rocky Mountains. This narrow escape furnishes the speaker with a yarn to spin that would allow the ghostly cowboy to become part of the oral tradition of his region, much as the Shadow Hunter is already a legend to Shanly’s otter trappers. As in Shanly’s poem, the supernatural figure might have been inadvertently summoned by a speaker feeling overwhelmed within the vast and remote landscape. Whereas Shanly’s guide-narrator conjures a ghostly companion who embodies the environment and solitude he fears, Crawford’s cowboy seems ready to welcome a ghostly saviour because the landscape has already turned his thoughts in that direction. The cowboy speaker’s sentiments resemble those of Moore’s itinerant boatmen, who express their nostos through their songs of departure and return. This convention is relevant to both emigrant

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and native-born poets looking back from their new country to a folk tradition that has its roots in the ballads of Ireland and Scotland, especially. In the same way that “the river’s song” inspired Moore’s nostalgic ballad, the speaker’s childhood memories and homesickness are triggered by the “singin’ tone” of a “leetle crick [little creek], / Twinklin’ and crinklin’ from stone to stone” that inevitably calls up memories of “home an’ the old home place” (cp 267). The sound of the tiny creek in a vast landscape also serves to “[dwindle] a chap in his own conceit” within sight of “them mountains an’ awful stars” (c p 266). Such sublime scenes, enhanced by the summer lightning bolts “plunging their fangs in the bare old skulls / Of the Mountains” (cp 267), lead him to think of his ultimate “home place” beyond the stars he views, creating a theology that transcends the confines of the churches gilded by sanctified robbery in Hugh and Ion or the pedantic doctors of divinity that Crawford challenges in another dialect poem, “Farmer Stebbins’ Opinions.” Inspired by the night landscape, the speaker reckons that “the hills, an’ stars, an’ creek / Are all of ’em preachers sent by God” whose message is, “Come higher, poor critter, come up tew us!” (cp 267–8). While the (presumably) Western Canadian landscape provides opportunities for solitary contemplation of the sublime and numinous, Crawford subtly reminds the reader that the speaker does not have it all to himself. Like “Malcolm’s Katie” and Davin’s Eos, the expansive vista of the prairies and mountains are the site of modernization: they ensure Canada’s economic as well as spiritual growth as the voyageur canoes and waterways are succeeded by the railroad and the speed of change it represents. However, just as McGee managed to provide the modernizing St Lawrence shipping industry with its own folklore recounted by “old salts,” Crawford allows the railway to supply her speaker with analogies that inform his particular regional folk wisdom. She pays indirect tribute to the considerable achievement of building and running a railroad through the Rocky Mountains when she compares these earthly challenges to the spiritual obstacles faced by the cowboy and other “poor sinner[s],” who have “got to labor and strain and snort” along a “’tarnal tough upgrade” presided over by an infinitely patient deity who understands that some can’t hold “Es big a head of ste[a]m as the next / An’ keep[] slippin’ and slidin’ way down hill” (cp 268). Crawford’s vision of salvation departs from conventional Christian doctrines that she challenges elsewhere in her work, in this case by

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rejecting narrow notions of sin and punishment. In trying to articulate his belief in the infinite grace God bestows on sinners, the cowboy refuses to accept that that his “Maker” has let “the devil git up a corner in souls” by “slyly” laying down logs to “hist a poor critter clar off the track” (cp 269). This theological analogy seems to be drawn from a larger North American tradition of dialect verse and music-hall culture that, as with McCarroll’s writing, fed Crawford’s work even as she contributed to it. If the recitation of “Old Spookses’ Pass” would not be out of place in a Pincher Creek community hall or riding arena, the cowboy’s religious views would be at home in a nineteenth-century camp meeting or tent revival, with its easily sung hymn tradition suitable to large outdoor gatherings. These revival hymns, drawing upon popular music traditions from both sides of the Atlantic, would evolve into country and gospel music.42 Given the prevalence of spirituals and popular hymns in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that Crawford’s analogies also appear in the popular and folk music that became associated with western and cowboy culture. Lyons speculates that Crawford might have been familiar with songs such as “The Cowboy’s Dream” (set to a Scottish song and already considered old when it was collected in 1910).43 Where “The Cowboy’s Dream” portrays the devil as a stockman or cattle dealer whose hell is full of stray dogies who wander from the narrow path, Crawford’s tempter takes the form of a shrewd stockbroker getting up “a corner” in damned souls by offering to carry the wrecked trains of sinners off to hell (CP 269). Like “Old Spookses’ Pass,” many nineteenth-century gospel tunes employed railway analogies, a trope appearing as early as 1843 in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale, “The Celestial Railroad.”44 Hawthorne’s sketch is roughly contemporaneous with a popular anonymous poem, “The Railway Spiritualized,” circulating in various forms in the United Kingdom, America, and Australia before its first recorded publication in 1854. Its view of salvation is similar to that expressed by Crawford’s cowboy, who imagines God’s envoys calling, “Come higher, poor ­critter, come up tew us!” Rather than focusing on good works or membership in the elect as a prerequisite to salvation, “The Railway Spiritualized” likewise emphasizes God’s infinite forgiveness through its inviting refrain, “Come then, poor sinner! Now’s the time … If you repent and turn from sin / The train will stop and take you in.”45 Such train-themed gospel lyrics, particularly the African-American spiritual “The Gospel Train,” inspired many popular poems with

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similar sentiments, meaning that Crawford was working within a vibrant tradition of poetry that was often later set to popular music. Some of these songs crossed over early into so-called hillbilly music, bluegrass, and eventually country and western music. For instance, much of William S. Hays’s popular poem “The Faithful Engineer” (1886) was borrowed for the lyrics of “Life’s Railway to Heaven” (1892), a country and gospel staple made famous by Patsy Cline as “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad.” That song is still recorded and sung today as part of this 170-year-old tradition.46 Phrases such as “You need never fear of sticking / On the up-grades ’long the road” and warnings about “obstructions” laid by “the cunning devil … On a hill or curve, or trestle, / Where he’ll try to ‘ditch your train’”47 are variations on Crawford’s conceits, especially her image of a sinner as an engine toiling up a steep mountainside where the devil “slyly” sets logs to derail it. Where Canadian and American fields and streams ultimately fed Moore’s “Canadian Boat Song,” the landscape of the Rockies and new transportation methods indirectly inspired an Irish immigrant writer living east of Dufferin Street to produce something approximating a country and western song. Ranging far west of Dufferin Street and Canada’s earliest territories, the poems in Crawford’s first collection are thematically organized to open with a vision of salvation in the Rockies of the West and to close with the westward migration of an Irish immigrant family. While the opening and closing poems feature individuals concerned with saving their bodies and souls, their fates reflect the destinies of the societies of which they are part. Coming of age in the early years of Confederation, Crawford was among the first generation of Canadian writers who could see Young Ireland–inspired cultural nationalism as simply Canadian. Irish dialect poems aside, her attempt to articulate a distinct nationality was often framed as a cultural and political conversation addressed from “Canada to England.” However, as this literary history has attempted to demonstrate, from the 1780s until the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every major political decision that determined the Canada-England conversation, particularly the course of Canadian responsible government, was shaped by Irish events, Irish politics, and Irish intellectual and literary life. Irish emigrants played a smaller role in the westward expansion of Canada after Confederation, but even as Irish immigration tapered off after the great and tragic famine migration of the 1840s,48 Irish debates about land tenure influenced how the Canadian West was opened up

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to settlement. Irish communities in the West appear less visible or influential than in the Maritimes, Quebec, and Ontario. However, Western settlement was seen as one solution to the Irish land problems of the 1880s and, in more grand terms, as a way to save British civilization, in the views of Canadian imperialists.

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C o n c l u s i on

An Irish Speaker in Canada How sounds my voice, my warrior kinsman, now? Sounds it not like to thine in lusty youth – A world-possessing shout of busy men, Veined with the clang of trumpets and the noise Of those who make them ready for the strife, And in the making ready bruise its head? Sounds it not like to thine – the whispering vine, The robe of summer rustling thro’ the fields, The lowing of the cattle in the meads, The sound of Commerce, and the music-set, Flame-brightened step of Art in stately halls, – All the infinity of notes which chord The diapason of a Nation’s voice? Isabella Valancy Crawford, “Canada to England”

While many Canadians in the 1890s supported giving Ireland the benefits of responsible government that they themselves enjoyed, writer and journalist Goldwin Smith (1823–1910) was not among them. According to his biographer, Smith “fought Home Rule as though his very life depended upon its defeat. ‘Statesmen might as well provide the Irish people with Canadian snowshoes,’ he declaimed sarcastically, ‘as extend to them the Canadian Constitution.’”1 Where Davin had argued that the Irish were architects and builders of the British Empire and Canada, Smith’s notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority rendered him blind to their contributions. He was also wrong about snowshoes. Some Confederation poets found encouragement and a literary community at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, thanks to the influence and encouragement of two Trinity-educated

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professors, Thomas Harrison and William F. Stockley.2 In 1889, Stockley took a year’s leave to go back to Ireland, in part to mend a broken heart after his marriage proposal had been rejected. He invited a former classmate to cover his teaching duties at the university, a Protestant clergyman’s son from Co. Roscommon, who had a degree in modern languages from Trinity but whose main interest was Irish, which he had taught himself as a boy. After graduation, he continued to pursue his love of Irish language and literature and had a collection of stories translated from Irish accepted for publication. He needed more secure employment, however, and welcomed Stockley’s invitation, seeing an opportunity to gain teaching experience as well as explore Canada and the United States. Upon arrival in Fredericton, he spent his first few weeks in an officer’s club that was originally the barracks for the British garrison in the years after Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s arrival. It provided the sociable young man with good company, not to mention the occasional glass of whisky in an otherwise dry town. While he found the local literary and intellectual community rather limited after the excitement of Dublin’s Literary Revival, the new professor appreciated the warm hospitality of Canadians, especially the friendly young women who appeared “highly emancipated” by Dublin standards. Like Fitzgerald before him, the new professor recorded his experiences in letters home and in his diary. Arriving in September 1890, he was just in time to appreciate the brief sunny Canadian autumn before winter set in, giving him the opportunity to experience one of the coldest seasons in local memory. Even so, he found the Canadian winter healthier and easier to bear than the damp cold of Ireland and told his sister that there was “capital skating” on the St John River. As a minor member of the Ascendancy, he had enjoyed shooting parties, and he now hunted grouse and woodcock with his Canadian friends as a break from his rigorous schedule teaching French and German. When invited on a Christmas caribou hunting expedition in the New Brunswick woods, he did not let the extreme cold deter him. He made the forty-mile journey by sleigh in the company of his guides, two Fredericton traders and three hunters from the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) community near Fredericton. Since Fitzgerald’s day, New Brunswick had continued to attract Irish settlers, and the hunters spent their first night in the remote cabin of one of these immigrants, who, to their surprise, greeted them at the door “stark naked without a screed on him.” As in Fitzgerald’s day, the Kilkenny accent could still

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be heard in New Brunswick, as the professor discovered. Recognizing a fellow-countryman, he addressed him in Irish. The two men launched into a spirited conversation completely incomprehensible to the Fredericton and Wolastoqiyik guides. That night was the last the party spent indoors for the next twelve days. In spite of blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, the neophyte caribou hunter boasted that “in the woods where I was camped, I never felt it cold. We pitched a beautiful tent and left about three inches of snow on the ground, then covered it thickly with spruce boughs, spread our blankets and skins, and slept as soundly and comfortably as if we were at home.” Although the frozen, crusted snow ultimately prevented them from bagging a single caribou, it was a productive outing. When the hunters gathered around the nightly fire, the scholar and folklore enthusiast listened to the stories of his Wolastoqiyik companions, including tales concerning their national hero, Glooscap. The Wolastoquiyik were part of the Wabanaki peoples, whose songs and legends had already come to the scholarly attention of John Reade. The Irish professor was intrigued to note similarities between Irish and Wolastoquiyik folk tales and wondered if they might be products of a hybrid Canadian folk tradition influenced by trade and intermarriage between Irish and Indigenous peoples. However, further scholarly investigations were hampered by his complete lack of the language. He made a rudimentary vocabulary list but was not able to progress further in such a short time. As well, the storytellers explained that much of the legends’ spirit was lost in translation. Their listener regretfully came to the same conclusion as a former literature scholar at the University of New Brunswick, Charles G.D. Roberts, who observed that poets trying to adapt Glooscap’s stories into Canadian literature found that “the Indian has left a curse in his bequest, and the prize turns worthless in our grasp.”3 What impressed him more was that the Wolastoqiyik peoples had retained their language, and thus their oral history and culture, so completely in the face of centuries of colonization. While the hunting guides and traders used English for their work, their wives and mothers who remained home spoke their own language exclusively, and thus kept the oral tradition alive, transmitting it to each new generation. Growing up in a county where Irish was still spoken among the rural communities, the professor had observed a similar phenomenon: while the men learned English and travelled to other parts of Ireland and England to work, the women kept the home fires of language and culture burning.

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Returning to the quiet comforts of the university town, the young professor continued to be popular, particularly among the young women of Fredericton, and according to the custom of the time, he exchanged small photographic portraits with them. He apparently needed quite a few, and arranged a studio sitting. Likely for the amusement of his family and friends back home, he dressed in local winter garb. Just like the Notman studios in Montreal that photographed John Reade and countless others, the Fredericton studios must have had clothing, backgrounds, and props that allowed the visitor to present himself looking suitably and adventurously Canadian in his sealskin hat, snowshoes at the ready. When his teaching term ended, he was given several warm farewell receptions, dinners, and presentations. (His speech at one “drew tears” from the young women, he was told.) Before returning to Ireland, he visited Boston and New York in June 1891, where the literary community was livelier, allowing him to meet many Irish Americans and Irish expats, including Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, editor of the Boston Pilot; folklorists; and Thomas O’Neill Russell, who promoted the Irish language in America and Ireland. He breakfasted at least twice in New York with Irish-American journalist Frederick James Gregg and Canadian poet Bliss Carman, who like his cousin Roberts had left New Brunswick for the greener literary bowers of the Bowery. (In America, Carman was considered part of the “Celtic fringe” and was included as such in the 1896 poetry anthology, Lyra Celtica.) In spite of the more varied and stimulating company he enjoyed in the United States, he had developed great affection for his temporary home in New Brunswick, bidding farewell in a poem in which he “pined for her mighty embraces / In the home of the moose and the seal.” He kept a copy of his portrait with the snowshoes in his study for the rest of his life. A second striking portrait of him in his sealskin hat was later widely reproduced throughout Ireland, owing to the fame he gained from his accomplishments upon returning to Ireland. Back in Dublin, he published well-received original Irish poetry under his pen name, An Craoibhín Aoibhinn, or the Pleasant Little Branch. He also published English translations of Irish poetry side by side with the originals to aid students wishing to learn Irish, but with their distinctively inflected English, the translations became culture-changing texts of the Revival, offering possibilities, as Young Ireland poetry had, for a distinct style

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of Irish literature written in English. However, An Craoibhín Aoibhinn, otherwise known as Douglas Hyde,4 departed from other Revival writers and scholars with regard to their views of Irish literature. He argued that it was not enough to write in English: the revival of the Irish language must be central to Irish culture if nationalists wished to decolonize and become an independent nation. In his view, colonization produced a people ashamed to speak their own language, adapting customs and belief systems as ill-fitting as the English secondhand clothes he had seen worn by impoverished peasants.5 In November 1892, he presented this argument to the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin. Like McGee’s “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,” Hyde’s speech, “The Necessity of De-Anglicizing Ireland,” became a cultural manifesto. It argued that only by casting off English cultural hand-me-downs could the Irish achieve a distinct and independent national outlook. In addition to returning to traditional Irish clothing styles manufactured by Irish craftspeople and playing Irish music and sports, Irish of all classes and creeds must take up their language. Hyde’s visit made him appreciate the transatlantic exchanges that fed Irish nationalism, just as McGee discovered that Irish migration presented both a cultural crisis and its solution, as he witnessed North American Irish communities’ struggles to preserve their customs, traditions, and stories. McGee’s experience in Canada had also suggested that its more conservative politics and culture, along with its access to sublime and pastoral landscapes, provided a world congenial to both rural economic migrants and Irish Romantic poets that in turn fostered the preservation of traditions that he hoped would inform modern Irish society. While Hyde found the polite society of Fredericton rather colonial and philistine, his experience among the woods and streams of Canada produced epiphanies similar to those experienced by Thomas Moore and Edward Fitzgerald a century earlier. He considered his time in New Brunswick important enough to include in “The Necessity of De-Anglicizing Ireland,” where he recounted his conversation with the lonely Irish speaker “in the last white man’s house in the last settlement on the brink of the primeval forest.” In spite of the gulf of time and distance, the settler, who came “from within three miles of Kilkenny,” had not forgotten “the language he had spoken as a child.” The Protestant Hyde, “although from the centre of Connacht, understood him perfectly,”6 suggesting

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that the even more profound psychic gulfs of region, class, and religion could be collapsed if Irish people regarded Irish as their common cultural legacy rather than a backward and dying language. Hyde’s Irish audience might have already been familiar with the image of an Irish settler in a cabin on the edge of civilization, thanks to Moore’s Canadian ballads. Perhaps that is why Hyde’s scene pushes his Wolastoqiyik storytellers to the side of the stage, listening to but not comprehending the fateful conversation between two Irish speakers. Nevertheless, their example of cultural resilience had likewise offered him the model of a culture on the margins of an industrialized and increasingly global British Empire, one that endured in the face of aggressive colonialism because its stories and myths had been preserved and transmitted over time in their original language. Hyde’s translations of his Irish poetry into a distinct, Hibernian idiom did more than influence major figures of the Literary Revival who wrote in English. His assertions that the Irish must assert their distinctiveness from England through language and customs also took root in the minds of more militant Irish nationalists such as the Irish language teacher and poet Pádraig Pearse, who (as Yeats reminds us) kept a school where, in addition to Irish lessons, he taught his students to march and use a rifle. Many of them fought and died alongside him during the 1916 Easter Rising. As Thomas Davis had observed of the scholars of earlier Irish cultural revivals, Hyde may not have considered his poetry and research revolutionary, but to Pearse and many signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic (written in Irish and English), the argument for a distinct language and culture inevitably led to the demand, backed by physical force, for a separate republic. “The Foggy Dew,” a popular ballad that commemorates the Easter Rising, reminds the listener that thousands of soldiers, Protestant and Catholic, fought on the British side in the First World War so “that small nations might be free.” England’s decision to again defer Irish Home Rule during the war appeared to be the latest episode in a centuries-long narrative featuring Irish soldiers who demonstrated loyalty to Britain but then faced broken promises concerning responsible government or religious freedom. In the 1820s, Adam Kidd and the Vindicator had reminded the British government of its oral promise, made after the American Revolution, to grant land to the Haudenosaunee who had supported Britain in the war, informing their readers that Haudenosaunee leaders had travelled to England to remind the king of this promise. A century later, when Ireland took its seat in

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the League of Nations (while several members of its new parliament remained in English jails), it and other small nations supported a ­petition for admission to the league made by the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario. The Six Nations was a very small nation indeed, but like the Irish and Canadians, the Six Nations’ sense of themselves as a nation originated and evolved during the long history of transnational conflicts from the 1780s until the early twentieth century. Dislocated after the American War of Independence, Brant and other loyal Indigenous officers, soldiers, and their families were granted a rich reserve by the 1784 Haldimand Proclamation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, only ten square miles remained in their possession. Nevertheless, Hy-wyi-iss (Levi General) (1873–1925), who took the name Des-ka-heh upon becoming chief and speaker of the Six Nations Hereditary Council, considered it a sovereign nation, however small, with established rights to “our home rule and self-government.”7 Like the Irish, many of the Grand River residents had once again demonstrated their loyalty by fighting on the side of Canada and Britain during the First World War. When some returning veterans requested Canadian citizenship, the Canadian government treated this as an opportunity to impose its policy of “Indian Advancement” by replacing the traditional hereditary council with an elected one and offering Canadian citizenship to all reserve members.8 Des-ka-heh and others saw this attempt to extend Canadian jurisdiction, including property and penal laws, as a threat to Six Nations autonomy and an unwarranted intrusion on the affairs of a separate state. Arguing that his people had signed their treaty with the British king, not Canada, Des-ka-heh sought an audience with George v to plead the Six Nations’ case, but the king refused to meet with him. The Six Nations council then authorized Des-ka-heh and his lawyer to seek a hearing at the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. In 1923, they petitioned the newly established League of Nations to accept “their status and position as an Independent State and of their recognition as such.”9 The petition reminded the league that “the constituent members of the State of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, that is to say the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca, and the Tuscarora, now are, and have been for many centuries, organized and self-governing peoples, respectively within domains of their own, and united in the oldest League of Nations, the League of the Iroquois.”10 Des-ka-heh hoped

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that an institution possessing a “covenant to protect little peoples and to enforce respect for treaties by its members”11 would recognize the Six Nations of the Grand River as having the same sovereign rights as others. While the Canadian and British governments worked hard to dissuade the league from hearing his case, Des-ka-heh initially gained the sympathy of other small nations, including Panama, Persia, Estonia, and Ireland. Since Britain had refused to grant the Irish Free State full independence in 1922, Irish supporters may have sympathized with the Six Nations’ plight, much as Kidd had a century earlier. Perhaps Ireland also remembered that during the 1840s, the country had received aid from another small diasporic nation, the recently displaced Choctaw, who in spite of their own trauma, the Trail of Tears, collected and sent two hundred American dollars to Ireland as famine relief. If so, the argument for Irish sovereignty continued to be informed by the kindness of Indigenous communities as well as the shared political travails that repeatedly made these disparate nations “all one brother.”12 While in Europe, Des-ka-heh lectured to packed halls, often wearing the ceremonial regalia of the chief of the Six Nations, ultimately giving the speech that the league rejected to an audience of thousands. Many, no doubt, were drawn by the romanticization of Indigenous peoples created by earlier Irish writers as well as by the new, popular Western novel.13 Like his fellow-citizen Pauline Johnson, Des-ka-heh knew that Europeans were fascinated by Indigenous culture and channelled this interest to gain support for the Six Nations. His speech brought to life not only the cultural but the human impact of the Canadian government’s program of assimilation. Politically, his perseverance, eloquence, and defiance changed nothing. Under pressure from the British government, Ireland and other nations withdrew their support for Six Nations admission to the league. Like many Irish, French-Canadian, and Métis leaders who had demanded responsible government, Des-ka-heh was forced into exile in the United States, spending his few remaining years on the Tuscarora reserve in New York state. In 1925, he gave his final speech from a radio station in Rochester, New York, aimed at American and Canadian listeners, outlining his argument for Six Nations sovereignty and decrying the Canadian government’s raid on the Six Nations in which the rc m p had confiscated wampum and other documents recording the original treaty with Britain.

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Des-ka-heh reminded his listeners that were it not for the Six Nations, their culture “would not be here.” If “one hundred and sixtysix winters ago, our warriors had not helped the British at Quebec … then it would have been a French-speaking people here, not you.”14 Like Romantic nationalists in the past, he addressed his appeal to the young – “you boys and girls who are listening and who have loved to read stories about our people” – in the hopes of educating them about the rights of nations and their own moral obligations to countries smaller and less powerful than theirs. He invited them to think “what it will mean if you grow up with a will to be unjust to other peoples, to believe that whatever your government does to other peoples is no crime, however wicked.”15 More poignantly, he saw the ways that emigrants fleeing poverty and oppression could become colonial oppressors in their turn: “I hope the Irish Americans hear that and will think about it – they used to when that shoe pinched their foot.”16 His speech evoked the experience and fears of the Irish diaspora in North America in other ways. If they were to be stripped of their traditional, independent government and become vulnerable to land grabs in a capitalist society, Des-ka-heh foresaw his people drifting away from their tight-knit communities to the cities, where “we could then be scattered and lost to each other and lost among so many of you.” He imagined his people forced to work for low wages, crammed into tenements where they would suffocate, and ultimately drowned “in the ocean of your blood” through intermarriage and assimilation. A distinct people and culture, one that had inspired so much Romantic art and literature in North America, Ireland, and Europe, would vanish forever, an extinction he hoped his audience would not countenance. His health destroyed by the stresses of his political battle, Des-ka-heh died a few months after giving his speech, many believed from a broken heart. While he failed to preserve traditional governance for the Six Nations, he became a national hero that the Irish could relate to: a defeated rebel whose final speech nonetheless became a rallying cry, describing the mental outfit that best expressed a distinct people’s distinct culture and defending their right to responsible government. Facing its own opposition from Britain and George v during the same time period, Ireland ultimately achieved complete independence, transforming itself from a dominion modelled on the Canadian constitution to a completely independent republic in 1949. In 1937, Ireland cut one of the last golden links with the crown, attempting to replace George v, still officially head of state and king of Ireland,

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with the office of president of Ireland, or in the now-official Irish language, the Uachtarán na hÉireann. Like the Canadian head of state, the position was primarily ceremonial, but an important symbol. In 1858, McGee imagined such an office embodying the long-established British traditions of parliament that Canada needed to preserve in the face of the republic to the south. This role was ultimately granted to the governor general rather than the Canadian king that McGee had proposed. (As a well-respected national poet, scholar, and public figure, McGee might have been an excellent candidate for this position, had he lived.) In Ireland, Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Eamon de Valera’s nominee for the comparable role was someone already associated with preserving the customs and mythology associated with a distinctly Irish state. Douglas Hyde became the first president of Ireland, serving from 1938 until 1945. His ceaseless activity promoting Irish culture, followed by his years as senator in the Irish Dáil, no doubt qualified him for the position. However, the constant presence in his study of his youthful portrait in fur hat and snowshoes suggests his brief sojourn in the woods of Canada also shaped his destiny and, early on, gave him the vision of a new nation consisting of diverse communities tenaciously maintaining the customs that sustained them, in their original language as well as English. In the face of increasing multiculturalism and globalization, the concept of the independent nation as imagined by Romantic intellectuals can indeed appear romantic, or even obsolete. The assumptions underpinning Canada as a nation are also being re-examined and challenged by many, especially Indigenous communities whose own struggle for decolonization continues in the face of Canadian national narratives that have too often erased or ignored their contributions as well as the moral obligations these contributions entailed. (In the twenty-first century, the Six Nations of Grand River continue to go to the United Nations to ask the settler nation that surrounds them to honour their treaties.) While not a national movement as such, decolonization shares some of nationalism’s strategies. It continues as intellectual work in communities and universities as Indigenous history is recovered, reconsidered, and reframed, and Indigenous ways of knowing and languages are increasingly taught to Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike. As artists and scholars share their experiences in diverse languages, including Wolastoqey, Cree, Ojibway, Cayuga, Innu-aimon, Siksiká, English, French, Gaelic, and Irish, and through traditional and current modes of art and writing, they provide

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new ways of expressing distinct cultural experiences within a larger network of communities, both national and international. Ireland was one of the first communities to consistently articulate nationalism as dependent on the work of scholars, historians, linguists, poets, musicians, and artists. As this study demonstrates, the intellectual and artistic work of the Patriot, United Irish, and Romantic cultural movements in Ireland inspired later nationalists in Ireland as well as Canada. Irish art and politics were likewise inspired and shaped by the experience of visitors and immigrants to a land that often appeared exotic and alien, but nevertheless offered imaginative possibilities beyond English culture. Ireland and Canada won their sovereignty gradually, through centuries-long, eloquent arguments addressed from Ireland to England, and Canada to England. However, much of these two nations’ understanding of themselves came from the ongoing exchanges, conversations, and journeys from Ireland to Canada, and Canada to Ireland.

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Notes

I nt roduct i o n   1 “History of Belfast City Hall,” Belfast City Council, accessed 30 November 2020, www.belfastcity.gov.uk/tourism-venues/cityhall/­ cityhallhistory.aspx.  2 Brett, Buildings of Belfast, 63.  3 Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land, 4.   4 Ibid., 90–1.  5 MacLaren, Canadians on the Nile, 20.   6 Cooke, “Wolseley, Garnet Joseph.”   7 Michel, “To Represent the Country in Egypt,” 51–7.  8 Roberts, Collected Poems, 86.   9 Bentley, “Near the Rapids,” 360. 10 Moore, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, 276. 11 Bentley, “Near the Rapids,” 360, 369. 12 Bentley, “UnCannyda.” 13 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 125. 14 Bentley, The Confederation Group, 60–8; see also Bentley, “Canada,” 214. 15 Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel, 24; Colum, From These Roots, 40; O’Neill, Ireland and Germany, 101; Wilson, Folklore and Nationalism, 29. 16 Wright, Representing the National Landscape, 99–101. 17 Moore, Poetical Works, 94. 18 King, “Prefiguring the Peaceable Kingdom,” 39. 19 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 62–5. 20 In “‘ … Notoriously disaffected to the Government …’ British Allegations of Irish Disloyalty in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland,” John Mannion

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Notes to pages 13–18

notes that while there is “no evidence that the ideology embraced by the United Irish leadership was introduced to Newfoundland … there is no question either that elements of the code prevalent among the rebels in ’98 reappeared in St John’s,” particularly after an aborted rebellion in 1800 (24). At any rate, British administrators in Newfoundland were as wary of events in Ireland as were officials in Quebec in the anxiety-­ provoking period of 1796 until 1803, when the United Irish and French conspirators were real threats in Ireland. 21 King, “Prefiguring the Peaceable Kingdom,” 40. 22 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 356. 23 Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 218. 24 Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 88–9. 25 “Trial of Riel,” The Regina Leader, 9 July 1885. 26 In “Charles G.D. Roberts’s Tantramar: Towards a Theory of the Literary Possession of Place and Its Implications” and elsewhere, D.M.R. Bentley demonstrates the close connection between land tenure and cultural nationalism’s encouragement of “authorial possession.” He views the poet’s evocation of a region’s distinct character as the “literary equivalent of annexation through manual labour (or through the not unrelated right of first discovery),” making the issue of cultural nationalism particularly pressing in the late nineteenth century, a time when “Canada was saturated with the intertwined discourses of British imperialism and Canadian nationalism” (5). Davin, with his consistent imperial and nationalist but also transatlantic Irish perspective, was one of the most influential contributors to these discourses through more than a quarter-century of parliamentary speeches, oratory, literary criticism, journalism, and, of course, nationalist poetry. 27 Akenson, The Irish Diaspora, 4. 28 Ibid., 5. 29 As Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth note in Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, the scope and horror of the famine ensured that the Irish in Canada acquired “a romantic and epic aura” (4) that by its nature would be attractive to Canadian nationalists but does not stand up to demographic scrutiny. 30 Akenson, The Irish Diaspora, 6. 31 In examining the 1901 censuses for Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, Peter Toner found Canadian-born Protestant Irish speakers, many of whose ancestors emigrated from northern counties such as Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh. He presented his findings at the 2006 Library Archives Canada Symposium, The Shamrock and the

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Notes to pages 24–36

371

Maple Leaf. See also Sarah McMonagle, “Langue Sans Frontières: Finding the Irish Language in Canada,” 170.

pa rt on e  1 Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 62–4.   2 “History of the Academy,” Royal Irish Academy, accessed 12 January 2021, www.ria.ie/about/history.  3 Gilbert, A History of the City of Dublin, 228–31; Charter and Statutes, 6.  4 Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 66.   5 Ibid., 54.  6 Charter and Statutes, 3.   7 Graffagnino, “Twenty Thousand Muskets!” 410–19.  8 Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 3.  9 Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 88. 10 Craig, “Weld, Isaac.”

c ha p t e r o n e   1 Bentley, “Isaac Weld and the Continuity of Canadian Poetry.”   2 Craig, “Weld, Isaac.”   3 Houston and Smith, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 8.  4 Weld, Travels, vol. 1: iii. Text references are to page in this edition.  5 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 110, 122; Bentley, “Isaac Weld and the Continuity of Canadian Poetry,” 223.   6 Seccombe, “Isaac Weld”; Sulte and Fryer, History of Quebec, 297.  7 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 67.  8 Bentley, The Gay]Grey Moose, 125.  9 Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 7. 10 Ibid., 77. 11 Bentley, “Isaac Weld and the Continuity of Canadian Poetry,” 223. 12 In “Near the Rapids: Thomas Moore in Canada,” Bentley notes that Weld’s observations again anticipate Moore’s notes on the French Canadians to his poem “Canadian Boat Song.” 13 White, The Middle Ground, xxi. 14 King, “Prefiguring the Peaceable Kingdom,” 38.

c h a p t e r t wo   1 Mills, “Dun’s Library,” 127.

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Notes to pages 36–44

  2 Golinsky, “Richard Kirwan and the Royal Irish Academy,” 267.   3 Burtchaell & Sadleir, Alumni Dublinenses, 228; A Catalogue of Graduates, 136; Kirkpatrick, “Dun’s Library,” 206; Cameron, A History of the Royal College, 105.  4 Dickson, Letter from Doctor Dickson, 2.  5 History of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh, 148.   6 Golinsky, “Richard Kirwan and the Royal Irish Academy,” 258.  7 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 71.   8 Ibid., 306.  9 Kirkpatrick, History of the Medical Teaching, 178–9. 10 Ibid. 229. 11 Mills, “Dun’s Library,” 127; Lake, “Medicine,” 577n11. 12 Kirkpatrick, “Dun’s Library,” 206. 13 Belcher, Memoir of Sir Patrick Dun, 280. 14 Kirkpatrick, History of the Medical Teaching, 162. 15 Golinsky, “Richard Kirwan and the Royal Irish Academy,” 263; Dickson, “On the Expansion of Water,” 34–5. 16 Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 551. 17 Golinsky, “Richard Kirwan and the Royal Irish Academy,” 265. 18 Wright, “The Executive Council of Lower Canada, 1791–1805.” According to Wright, “Prescott ordered aIl of Dickson’s mail opened and let him know that he was under suspicion” (235). 19 Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 550. 20 Ibid., 551. 21 See the 1798 Report from the Committee of Secrecy, of the House of Commons in Ireland as Reported by the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Castlereagh. 22 Eliot, Partners in Revolution, 205–6. 23 Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 551. 24 Bentley, Introduction to The Union of Taste and Science. 25 Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 552. 26 Dickson, Considerations, 3. 27 Bentley, Introduction to The Union of Taste and Science. 28 Golinsky, “Richard Kirwan and the Royal Irish Academy,” 274. 29 Benedict, “Reading Collections,” 188. 30 Dickson, The Union of Taste and Science, 210–15. Text references are to line in this edition. 31 Ibid., Note to l. 282. 32 Dickson, A Letter from Doctor Dickson, 53. 33 Benedict, “Reading Collections,” 172–3.

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Notes to pages 44–55

373

34 Ibid. 35 See Keen, “The Balloonomania: Science and Spectacle in 1780s England.” 36 Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, 49. 37 Ibid. 38 Benedict, “Reading Collections,” 170. 39 Dickson, A Letter from Doctor Dickson, 53. 40 Dickson, Considerations, 13–14. 41 Ibid., 4. 42 Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 54. 43 Di Mascio, “Forever Divided?” 466. 44 Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 550. 45 Ibid., 551. 46 Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston, 67. 47 Register, “Marriage and Death Notices,” 188, and “Marriage and Death Notices (Continued),” 192. 48 Burroughs, “Robert Prescott.” 49 Register, “Marriage and Death Notices,” 188. 50 Dickson, “Notes,” The Union of Taste and Science, 18. 51 King, “Prefiguring the Peaceable Kingdom,” 43. 52 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 12.

pa rt t wo  1 Moore, Life and Death, 1.306. Text references are to volume and page number in this edition.  2 Moore, Letters, 699.  3 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 485.   4 Bentley, “Thomas Moore’s Construction of Upper Canada,” 4.  5 In Citizen Lord, Tillyard claims that Fitzgerald and Arthur O’Connor did formally take the Society of United Irishmen oath in 1796.   6 Vail, “Thomas Moore in Ireland and America,” 50; Kelly, Bard of Erin, 62.

c h a p t e r t h re e   1 Fitzgerald, 24 June 1788. The quoted letters are from Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s letterbook in the Lennox, Fitzgerald, and Campbell collection at the National Library of Ireland (m s 35,011). For his biography, Moore corrected grammar and spelling, removed words or passages, and added or changed words for clarity. The original letters still contain pencil ­markings indicating which passages Moore quoted in his biography

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Notes to pages 56–68

and other emendations. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotations in this chapter are drawn from the National Library letterbook and reproduced exactly, with Fitzgerald’s emphasis and without additional punctuation or correction.   2 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 89.   3 Whelan, “New Light on Lord Edward Fitzgerald.”  4 Ibid.   5 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 88.   6 Whelan, “New Light on Lord Edward Fitzgerald.”   7 Fitzgerald, 14 March 1789.   8 Ibid.; Fitzgerald, 12 April 1789.   9 Fitzgerald, 21 November 1788. 10 Tilllyard, Citizen Lord, 94–6. 11 Fitzgerald, 24 June 1788. 12 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 89. 13 Fitzgerald, 2 February 1789. 14 Fitzgerald, 24 June 1788. 15 Sable, The Language of this Land, Mi’ma’ki, 53. 16 Fitzgerald, 18 July 1788. 17 White, The Middle Ground, 39, 315. 18 Fitzgerald, 18 July 1788. 19 Crawford, Old Spookses’ Pass, 224. 20 Fitzgerald, 18 July 1788. 21 See King, “Prefiguring the Peaceable Kingdom.” 22 Fitzgerald, 16 August 1788. 23 Fitzgerald, 2 February 1789. 24 Fitzgerald, 6 October 1788. 25 Fitzgerald, 5 August 1788. 26 Fitzgerald, 28 October 1788. 27 Fitzgerald, 6 October 1788. 28 Haliburton, Men of the North, 2. 29 Fitzgerald, 21 November 1788. 30 Fitzgerald, 2 February 1789. 31 Fitzgerald, [no date] December 1788. 32 Fitzgerald, 2 December 1788. 33 Ibid. 34 Fitzgerald, 2 February 1789. 35 Fitzgerald, 2 December 1788. 36 Qtd. In Bentley, Mimic Fires, 115. 37 Fitzgerald, 14 March 1789.

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Notes to pages 68–80

375

38 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 98. 39 Fitzgerald, 14 March 1789. 40 Ibid. 41 Fitzgerald, 4 May 1789. 42 Fitzgerald, 1 June 1789. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Vail, “Thomas Moore in Ireland and America,” 41. 46 Graymont, “Thayendanegea.” 47 Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 106. 48 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 102. 49 Graymont, “Thayendanegea.” 50 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 99. 51 Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 527. 52 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 100. 53 Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 419. 54 Fitzgerald, 26 December 1789. 55 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 89n26. 56 Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 115. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 143–54. 59 Ibid. 179. 60 Flood, “Irish Pipers in the Eighteenth Century.” 61 Elliot, Partners in Revolution, 229; Kelly, Bard of Erin 64.

c ha p t e r f o u r  1 Yeats, Letters, 4.447.  2 Moore, Life and Death, 1.301. Text references are to volume and page in this edition.  3 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 50.  4 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 80.  5 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 18, 38–40, 67.   6 Vail, “Thomas Moore In America,” 49.  7 Moore, The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore, 1: 2.  8 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 55–9; Vail, “Thomas Moore in America,” 48.   9 Vail, “Thomas Moore in Ireland and America,” 44–5; Resolutions of the Independent Scholars and Students of Trinity College. tcd ms 1203, 86–7. 10 Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 275; Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 61–4.

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Notes to pages 81–94

11 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 65–6; Kelly, 62; Vail, 49–50. 12 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 66. 13 Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 189. 14 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 26. 15 Bunting, Ancient Music of Ireland, 63. 16 Paterson, “Drawing Breath,” 128–9. 17 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 26. 18 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 50. 19 Ibid., 66 20 Moore, “Transatlantic Tom,” 77. 21 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 81. 22 Ibid., 93; Vail, “Thomas Moore in Ireland and America,” 42. 23 Moore, The Poetical Works, 23. 24 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 122; see also Bentley, “Isaac Weld and the Continuity of Canadian Poetry.” 25 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 100. See also Bentley, “Literary Sites and Cultural Properties in Canadian Poetry.” 26 Jones, Of the North American Indians, 3. 27 Sehdev, “Beyond the Brink.” 28 Moore, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, 35. Text references are to page in this edition. 29 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 113. 30 Moore, Poetical Works, 94. 31 Bentley, “Thomas Moore’s Construction,” 6. 32 See Vail, “Thomas Moore in Ireland and America.” 33 Moore, Poetical Works, 94. 34 Vail, “Thomas Moore in Ireland and America,” 55. 35 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 119–20. 36 Moore, Letters 1.94; Kelly, Bard of Erin, 122. 37 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 1.174. 38 Moore, Letters, 1.97. 39 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 122. 40 Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 171. 41 Weld, Travels, 1.356–7. 42 Moore, “Transatlantic Tom,” 85. 43 Qtd. in Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 297. 44 Ibid., 239. 45 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 7, 48. 46 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 67–83; Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 36. 47 Moore, Letters, 1.95.

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Notes to pages 94–109

377

48 Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 188. 49 McGee, Canadian Ballads, 43. 50 Bentley, “Thomas Moore’s Construction of Upper Canada,” 6–7. 51 Bonnycastle, The Canadas in 1841, 1:16. 52 Moore later admitted, “I departed in almost every respect but the time from the strain our voyageurs had sung to us, leaving the music of the glee nearly as much my own as the words.” Initially, he had transcribed the tune he heard on the fly-leaf of Priestley’s Lectures on History, which he gave to a friend and forgot about. When he was shown the book years later, he discovered that it contained both the original air and “the first verse of my Canadian Boat song, with air and words as they are at ­present” (Poetical Works, 2: 24). 53 Moore, “Transatlantic Tom,” 89. 54 Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, 1: 12. 55 Ibid., 13. 56 Bentley, “At the Rapids,” 368. 57 Ibid. 58 Kelly, Bard of Erin, 482. 59 Dunlop, Statistical Sketches, 51–2. 60 Moore, “Transatlantic Tom” 91.

pa rt t h re e  1 Geoghegan, Robert Emmet, 5, 15.   2 Ibid., 22.  3 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 79.   4 Ibid., 78.   5 Ibid., 77.   6 Kidd, “The Reminiscent Tribute of Friendship,” 33.  7 O’Grady, The Emigrant, 143.

c h a p t e r f i ve  1 Kidd, The Huron Chief, and Other Poems, 1. Text references are to page in this edition.  2 Latimer, Ulster Biographies, 71–2.  3 Kingston Chronicle, 1 January 1831.  4 Bunting, Ancient Music of Ireland, 63.   5 Dowling is commemorated in “Ranglawe, the Roving Bard,” first published in The Vindicator on 26 February 1829 and included in The Huron Chief, and Other Poems. Kidd notes in a footnote that “there are few of the Irish

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Notes to pages 109–18

people to whom the writings and character of r a ngleawe (Francis Dowling) are not well known” (201), but Kidd’s poem seems to be the only record of him: one literary dictionary says simply that Dowling is “a northern Irish poet who is referred to in Adam Kidd’s Huron Chief and other poems” (O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary of Irish Writers of English Verse).  6 Campbell, The Dissenting Voice, 8.   7 Kidd, “The Reminiscent Tribute of Friendship,” 332. Text references are to page in this edition.  8 Campbell, The Dissenting Voice, 12–13, 32, 65–6.   9 See Jess, “The Disappearing Real and the Bright Ideal.” 10 Klinck, “Adam Kidd: An Early Canadian Poet,” 497. 11 The fanciful and poetic Kidd has a history of being taken literally by scholars piecing together his biography based on the few documents ­available. In an early twentieth-century history of Canadian literature, Ray Palmer Baker took Kidd at his word and assumed he had suffered a career-ending mountaineering accident. Carl F. Klinck recognized that Kidd’s misfortune involved a man (probably Mountain) not a hill. In defending the Archdeacon from what he considers a slanderous attack, Mountain’s colleague Job Deacon accuses Kidd of “unnatural” attractions to Indigenous women, based on the poem’s speaker’s praise of various ­heroines in The Huron Chief. Speculation that Kidd had relationships with Indigenous women and that his politics were radical has gone ­relatively unchallenged until Angela Deziel’s thesis, where she notes that prejudicial assumptions about Irish immigrants in Canada in the nineteenth century have coloured even modern scholarship of Kidd. She offers a more nuanced reading of his Irish and Canadian nationalism in her PhD dissertation, “Out of Ireland: Towards a History of the Irish in PreConfederation Literature” (2009). 12 Jarrell, “The Rise and Decline of Science in Quebec,” 79–80. 13 Klinck, “Adam Kidd: An Early Canadian Poet,” 503. 14 Lynn, “Friends of Ireland,” 45. 15 Haslam, “Ireland and Quebec,” 76. 16 Lynn, “Friends of Ireland,” 44. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 50. 19 Ibid., 51. 20 Waterston, “Waller, Jocelyn.” 21 The Irish Vindicator’s cautious attribution of this poem to Fitzgerald was prudent, since he is definitely not the author. The poem had a long career

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Notes to pages 119–30

379

in newspapers and literary magazines until the end of the nineteenth ­century and was reputed, variously, to have been written by Fitzgerald on the eve of his arrest or his execution (notwithstanding that he died before he could be tried for treason). Sometimes Moore was supposed to have written it immediately after the Act of Union. It originated in Dublin in 1824 as “The Plagues of Ireland” by the Wexford-born Thomas Furlong, as “a little sketch and hasty picturing” of the evils that Emancipation might cure (Welch, “Furlong, Thomas”). Since Furlong joined O’Connell’s Catholic Association in 1825, the poem’s sentiments are appropriate to a pro-Emancipation paper, although The Irish Vindicator and other North American journals seemed to prefer the gravitas and urgency supplied by the doomed Fitzgerald’s supposed authorship of this cautionary depiction of “L’Irlande malheureuse” in a paper that was “ever on the watch” lest the Irish emigrant “again fall into the miserable condition from which he escaped only by the abandonment of the land of his fathers.” 22 “A Historical Memoir,” 390. 23 Wright, Representing the National Landscape, 114. 24 Ibid., 116. 25 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 81–2. 26 Harbison, “Bunting and the Belfast Harpers’ Festival,” 25. 27 Campbell, The Dissenting Voice, 56. 28 “The Reminiscent Tribute of Friendship” features a more cynical portrayal of French-Canadian women when the writer is introduced to the shallow and materialist mate whom Henry “had selected from the bright array of the Canadian fair” (333). 29 Slievegallin, “Great Kent Meeting,” The Vindicator, 20 January 1829. 30 Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 190. 31 Bentley, Introduction, The Huron Chief, xviii. 32 Bentley, “Explanatory Notes,” 90. 33 Moore, Poetical Works, 319. 34 Edwards, “Kidd, Adam.” 35 See Peace, Thomas, and Labelle, From Huronia to Wendakes: Adversity, Migration, and Resilience. 36 King, “A Stranger to Our Sympathy,” 88. 37 Library Archives Canada, “Military Medals, Honours, and Awards 1812– 1969,” modified 16 October 2015, accessed 12 January 2021, www.baclac.gc.ca/eng/discover/military-heritage/military-medals-1812-1969/Pages/ item.aspx?IdNumber=1102&. 38 In a note to The Huron Chief, Kidd observes that Tecumseh died at Moraviantown after General Proctor “had fled, leaving the flag of Great

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Notes to pages 131–46

Britain alone to be defended by the brave, but unsupported Indians” (102). 39 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 82. 40 Rubel, Savage and Barbarian, 52. 41 Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 56. 42 Ibid., 124. 43 Slievegallin, “The Christian Guardian!!” The Vindicator, 11 December 1829. 44 Ibid., 1 February 1830. 45 “Violent Assault on Mr Kidd,” The Vindicator, 12 March 1830. 46 Froggatt, “James Buchanan.” 47 Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 48. 48 Ibid., 87. 49 Ibid., 88. 50 Bentley, Mimic Fires, 9. 51 Froggatt, “James Buchanan.” 52 Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 48. 53 Buchanan, The Buchanan Book, 203. 54 Boucher, “Buchanan, Alexander.” 55 Kelly, The Graves Are Walking, 292. 56 Parker, “Robert Armour Sr.” 57 Ibid. 58 Kidd, “Ash-Kewa,” The Canadian Freeman, 16 September 1830. 59 MacDonald, “Adam Kidd.” 60 Edwards, “Adam Kidd.” 61 Klinck, “Adam Kidd,” 506. 62 In her reassessment of Kidd’s reputation as a poet often known more for his flamboyance and rebelliousness against social norms than his literary influence, Angela Deziel analyzes the North American Irish community’s reaction to Kidd’s death through the obituaries and tributes in IrishAmerican newspapers. She makes a strong argument for considering Kidd as a “traveller-turned-settler” (243) who saw the possibilities for Irish immigrants in Canada and who recognized the power of the Irish diaspora in advocating for Irish rights at home as well as for Canadian political reform.

c ha p t e r s i x   1 O’Grady’s claim that he was Robert Emmet’s classmate at Trinity also helped Trehearne identify him as Standish Bennett (known sometimes as

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Notes to pages 146–54

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“Standish O’Grady Bennett”). This identification is complicated by the fact that the poet claims he completed his B A , but neither the Alumni Dublinenses nor the List of Graduates that it relied on for such information shows this. It may be that O’Grady falsely claims to have completed his degree, but it may be an error, if not with the “normally reliable” Alumni Dublinenses then with the more error-prone List of Graduates its editors relied on. The introduction to the Alumni Dublinenses details the challenges of compiling an accurate record of Trinity graduates, in part because, like Bennett, many students were registered under names that they did not use in other documents or in their personal lives (their father’s forename, for instance). See Trehearne, “Preliminary Notes to a Biography of Standish O’Grady,” and Introduction, xvi–xxiii.  2 O’Grady, The Emigrant, 143.   3 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xviii.  4 O’Grady, The Emigrant, 32.   5 O’Donoghue, “Opposition to Tithe Payments,” 88.   6 The appearance of a Standish Bennett in a list of tithe holders seeking ­government relief makes Trehearne’s identification of O’Grady as a lay person almost certainly the correct one.   7 Cited in O’Donoghue, “Opposition to Tithe Payment in 1832–3.”  8 Lysaght, Surnames of Ireland, quoted in Trehearne, xiii; Trehearne, xv.   9 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xii–xiii. 10 Nick Reddan, “Nick Reddan’s Newspaper Extracts,” last modified 19 July 2016, accessed 6 January 2020, https://nickreddan.net/newspaper/np_ abst06.htm. Nick Reddan has been an assiduous genealogist of the Bennetts and other Irish families. 11 “Births, Marriages, and Deaths,” The United Service Journal and Naval Military Magazine, vol. 1, 1831, 430; “Births, Marriages, and Deaths,” The National Magazine and Dublin Literary Gazette, vol. 2, 1831, 373. 12 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, lxxi. 13 A Copy of the Protestant Petition, i. 14 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xxiv. 15 “Yelverton, Barry.” 16 Trehearne, “O’Grady’s Notes to the Emigrant,” 186. 17 Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 62–4. 18 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xliv. 19 Walsh, Sketches of Ireland Sixty Years Ago, 144–7. 20 Resolutions of the Independent Scholars and Students of Trinity College. t c d ms 1203, 86–7.

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Notes to pages 154–9

21 Webb, A Compendium of Irish Biography. 22 Fitzgibbon adamantly opposed many of the measures introduced by Grattan (and often supported by Pitt), including the commutation of tithes and a Catholic relief act that would give more political rights to Catholic men of property. (Like O’Grady, and many politicians of his time, Grattan opposed universal suffrage.) While George iii, like his son, opposed Catholic Emancipation of any form, this was partly as a result of Fitzgibbon reputedly arguing that the King would violate his coronation oath if he admitted Catholics to parliament (“John Fitzgibbon”). 23 The Book of Trinity College Dublin, 1591–1891, 88. 24 Walsh, Sketches of Ireland Sixty Years Ago, 151. 25 Kavanaugh, “Lord Clare and His Historical Reputation.” 26 Ibid. 27 O’Grady’s account of Fitzgibbon’s political humiliation in Westminster matches other (admittedly biased) popular accounts, such as the one included in The Life and Times of Daniel O’Connell (1878) by Thomas Clarke Luby, who gleefully repeats the story of the dead cats, and reports the exchange between the Earl of Clare and Bedford: “In the English House of Lords the Irish chancellor, when he tried, in his old style, to browbeat the Whig lords, and presumed to call them “Jacobins,” was soon rudely pulled up and snubbed by the Duke of Bedford … He had betrayed his country to the English Government and instead of being rewarded with vast power, he was even treated with humiliating neglect … The rage of his proud spirit wasted his frame so that he died in January 1802. He was buried with pomp in St Peter’s churchyard Dublin, but the populace threw a shower of dead cats on his grave. Thus, the elevation won by so much talent and energy, such crimes and baseness, was to Lord Clare in the end but a mockery and a snare” (199). 28 Kavanaugh, “Lord Clare and His Historical Reputation.” 29 The confusion about how to read these lines derives from the possibility that line 8 contains an incomplete zeugma, where “by” would then apply to both “new raised patriots” and “their sons,” (i.e., Ireland is “swayed” by new raised patriots and betrayed by those patriots’ sons). In that case, Ireland’s citizens may be misled by Clare or by the United Irish rebels who have succeeded Grattan and then betrayed when their own parliament is destroyed. The politicians of the present generation continue to betray Ireland rather than defend her interests. While this is a plausible alternative reading of highly ambiguous lines, given the context in which they appear, it appears that Ireland’s “sons” choose voluntary exile from a land that has betrayed them, a reading consistently supported by O’Grady’s

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Notes to pages 161–70

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­ rooding on the political corruption that led to the independent Irish b Parliament voting itself out of existence. That some of them in turn ­support Ireland’s enemies is one of the many examples of poetic justice that appears in the poem. 30 The ship endures one horrific and likely fictional storm that snaps ­mainsails, which then “sweep the busy deck,” carrying “weeping maids” and “lonely strangers” to a watery grave (28), although the actual Ocean recorded no such catastrophe when it arrived in Quebec on 22 May 1836 (Trehearne, “Explanatory Notes,” 134). Significantly, O’Grady also has the speaker, alerted by his faithful dog, seize the helm to “steer back our course” avoiding “protruding rocks” and disaster. If O’Grady as narrator of the poem intends to place himself in the role of “chance protector” of the ship, it may be his final opportunity to assert his quasi-feudal role as gentleman preserver of a traditional Irish community. 31 Trehearne, “Explanatory Notes,” 168. 32 Geoghegan, Liberator, 11–13. 33 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 425. 34 Finnegan, “Irish-French Relations,” 39–42. 35 Ibid., 43. 36 Galarneau, “Daniel Tracey.” 37 Papineau, Journal D’Un Fils de la Liberté, 29. 38 Finnegan, “Irish-French Relations,” 44–6. 39 Thompson, “Nelson, Wolfred.” 40 Blackstock, “Papineau-O’Connell Instruments,” 256. 41 Ibid, 269. 42 Noel, “A Man of Letters,” 518. 43 Ibid., 519. 44 “Rebellion in Lower Canada.” 45 Graves, Guns across the River, 57. 46 Blackstock, “Papineau-O’Connell Instruments,” 257. 47 Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician, 65–8. 48 See Holmgren, “The ‘Highminded Pole,’” and Stagg, “Schoultz, Nils Von.” Even as the trial for von Schoultz proceeded, Canadian newspapers began to obtain more detailed reports about his nationality (Swedish), his wealth (mostly speculation), and his marital status (attempted bigamist). (O’Grady seems unaware that von Schoultz had a wife, a detail that came out only gradually in newspaper accounts of his trial and death.) Unfortunately, the value of von Schoultz’s bequest depended on returns he expected from a chemical patent, and there is no evidence that his ­beneficiaries were ever enriched by his attempt at reconciliation. Stagg

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Notes to pages 170–88

asserts that “no more delightful or respectful scoundrel ever set foot in Canada or left as much of an impression there in such a short time.” Von Schoultz was certainly a figure worthy of a romantic novel, or at least a colourful interlude in a long poem. 49 Graves, Guns across the River, 183. 50 Senior, “The Glengarry Highlanders,” 155–6. 51 Ibid., 158. 52 Ibid., 146–58. 53 Blackstock, “Papineau-O’Connell Instruments,” 256. 54 Buckner, “Acheson, Archibald.” 55 Buckner, “Lord Durham.” 56 Mills, “Durham Report.” 57 Bentley, “Thomas Moore in Canada,” 359. 58 Trehearne, Introduction, xliii. 59 The Vindicator, 16 March 1830. 60 Mccallum, “Alexander Tilloch Galt”; Horner, “Solemn Processions,” 44. 61 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xiv. 62 Quoted in Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xiv.” 63 Horner, “Solemn Processions,” 37–43. 64 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xv. 65 The Toronto Examiner, 19 November 1845. 66 The Township of Sandwich, 186–7. 67 The Toronto Examiner, 19 November 1845. 68 Cline, “Smyth, John.” 69 Trehearne, Introduction to The Emigrant, xv. 70 See David Wilson, “The Fenian World of Jeremiah Gallagher.”

pa rt f ou r  1 Punch in Canada, “Preface,” 1, no. 1.  2 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 80.  3 Waters, The Comic Irishman, 1.   4 Kersten, “The Creative Potential of Dialect Writing,” 98.   5 Ibid., 95.

c h a p t e r se ve n   1 Shanly, The Canadian Shanlys, 28–9, Shanly Francis Papers, Archives of Ontario, m u 2730.  2 White, Gentleman Engineers, x, 4.

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Notes to pages 188–96

385

  3 Ibid., 6–7.   4 Shanly, “The Canadian Shanlys,” 15.  5 White, Gentlemen Engineers, x.  6 “r d s : Dublin Drawing Schools,” accessed 11 July 2016, www.rds.ie/ asharedhistory/gallery_detail.jsp?c=18&&i=1099381.   7 Walker, “Shanly, Charles Dawson;” White, Gentleman Engineers, 7–8.   8 Shanly, “The Canadian Shanlys,” 18, 24, and 27.   9 Walker, “Shanly, Charles Dawson.” 10 The copies of Punch in Canada in the D.B. Weldon Library at Western University in London, on , have the signature “N Shanly” on the first page; editorials and articles written by Charles Dawson Shanly are ­indicated with the initials cds . 11 Ethan Georges Rabidoux, “Street Gospels: Canadian Political Cartoons and Their Role in Canadian Democracy.” Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, last modified 16 June 2010, accessed 6 January 2021, www.friends.ca/blog-post/9541. 12 “Preface,” Punch in Canada, 1.1, 1–2. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Shanly, “Winter in Quebec,” 230. 16 “Preface,” Punch in Canada 1.1–2. 17 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee,” 2: 9; Peterman, “Writing ‘Irish,’” 193. 18 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 91. 19 Waters, The Comic Irishman, 11. 20 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 126. 21 “A Probable Contingency,” Punch in Canada, 1.3, 23. 22 Punch in Canada 15 August 1849, 120. 23 Waters, The Comic Irishman, 4. 24 Punch in Canada, 15 August 1849, 115. 25 Peterman, “Writing ‘Irish,’” 199. 26 For a more detailed discussion of this march and Irish nationalism in North America, see Stephen Rohs, “‘The Bold Soldier Boy.’” 27 Qtd. in Rohs, “‘The Bold Soldier Boy,’” 177. 28 The song was recorded on uilleann piper Davy Spillane’s album Shadow Hunter in 1990 with Sean Tyrell on vocals. Tyrell recorded it again on a solo album, The Walker of the Snow, in 2013. 29 Shanly, “Winter in Quebec,” 230. 30 Shanly, “Winter in a Canadian Forest,” 61. 31 “Protection for Canadian Literature,” New Era, 24 April 1858. 32 Burroughs, Locusts and Wild Honey, 181–2.

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Notes to pages 196–202

33 Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, 104. 34 Bentley, “At the Rapids,” 368. 35 Shanly, “Winter in Quebec,” 230. 36 Poulter, Becoming Native, 23–6. 37 Ibid., 51. 38 Shanly, “The Walker of the Snow,” 181–3. 39 A number of critics have speculated about whether or not Shanly’s spectre has origins in actual Canadian folklore. Sherrill Grace and others suggest it was inspired by Ojibwa/Cree legends of the Windigo. In Oliver Call’s poem “The Raconteur,” published in Poetry in 1924, a fireside storyteller terrifies his listeners with “Jean’s weird stories of the Wendigo / that haunts the woods, and of Pierre who died / Because he saw the Walker of the Snow.” The most approximate Celtic myth might be the fetch, a ghost-like figure who both resembles and appears to someone who is about to die. Grace also suggests, based on the Blair painting of the Walker of the Snow, that the ghostly figure is portrayed as either a ­doppelganger or the departing spirit of the dying trapper/guide. The ­spectre could also have a distant relationship to Sluaghs, who in Irish ­folklore were souls rejected from the afterlife and who carried off the souls of the dead. However, this particular spectre seems more intent on sapping the life force of someone still alive. 40 Shanly, “The Walker of the Snow,” 181–2. 41 Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, 118. 42 Shanly seemed fond of such grisly little twists in his narrative poems: in a later poem, “Civil War,” a captain encourages a sniper to take a “fancy shot” at the glinting object on the breast of “yon prowling” enemy scout. When the trophy is retrieved from the corpse, the captain discovers that it is a locket containing a picture of his “brother’s young bride.” What’s worse, he has no time to mourn, for the imminent danger forces him to order his sniper to immediately load again. 43 After reading John Geiger’s The Third Man Factor, I am apparently not the only one who recalled Shanly’s poem. In “The Walker of the Snow,” a blog post on the website promoting the book, the author also interprets Shanly’s poem and the painting it inspired as references to the presence of a mysterious “third man.” (Geiger, John. “The Walker of the Snow.” The Angel Effect/The Third Man Factor. Blog entry by John Geiger, 31 January 2009, accessed 11 July 2016, https://thirdmanfactor.igloo​ communities.com/forums/thirdmaninliteraryap/thewalkero.) 44 Grace, The Idea of North, 114. 45 Ibid., 114–15. 46 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 202–12

387

47 McGee, Canadian Ballads, 29. 48 Roberts, Collected Poems, 81. 49 Walker, “Shanly, Charles Dawson.” 50 Shanly, “The Canadian Shanlys,” 30–1. 51 Winter, Old Friends, 65.

chapter eight  1 McCarroll, Letters of Terry Finnegan, 16–17. Text references are to page in this edition.  2 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 17.  3 Morgan, Sketches of Celebrated Canadians, 757.  4 Ibid.  5 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 53.   6 Ibid., 26–7.   7 Ibid., 17.  8 Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 21.  9 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 24–6. 10 For detailed accounts of McCarroll’s involvement in the Ontario music scene and of his introduction of frank and critical reviews in Canadian journalism, see Peterman’s biography of McCarroll, Delicious Mirth. 11 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 22–3. 12 Ibid., 32–3. 13 Ibid., 55–6. 14 Ibid., 68. 15 Ibid., 97. 16 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 359. 17 Qtd. in Peterman, “Writing ‘Irish,’” 206. 18 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 97. 19 Ibid. 188. 20 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 73. 21 Qtd. in Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 73. 22 Ibid., 2: 75–6. 23 Kersten, “The Creative Potential of Dialect Writing,” 103. 24 Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, 2. 25 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 179. 26 Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 498; Peterman, “Writing ‘Irish,’” 202; McCarroll, The Letters of Terry Finnegan, 95. 27 Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 478, 488. 28 Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan,” 148. 29 Waters, The Comic Irishman, 52.

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Notes to pages 213–24

30 O’Leary, Message to Erin, 49. 31 Burns, “D’Arcy McGee and the New Nationality,” 316. 32 McCarroll, Madeline and Other Poems, 113–15. Text references to page in this edition. 33 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 185. 34 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 237. 35 Ibid., 2: 153–61. 36 Qtd. in Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan,” 145. 37 Ibid., 148. 38 Ibid., 149. 39 Ibid., 146. 40 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 179. Peterman notes that Boyle and Murphy were sureties for McCarroll’s customs position. 41 Wilson, “The Fenians in Canada.” 42 “The Fenians.” 43 Wilson, “The Fenians in Canada.” 44 Raymond Jess notes that the correct Irish wording should be “Biodh solas ann.” 45 The image of England’s “iron heel” might be a common trope in Irish republican rhetoric: it also appeared in “The Famine in the Land,” a poem written by McGee during his own republican phase. 46 McCarroll, Ridgeway, iii. Text references are to page in this edition. 47 Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan,” 140. 48 Ibid., 150. 49 Klein, When the Irish Invaded Canada, 88. 50 Ibid., 89. 51 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 240. 52 Vronsky, Ridgeway, 198. 53 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 279. 54 Klein, When the Irish Invaded Canada, 144. 55 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 244n33. 56 Vronsky and other historians note that Dennis was accused of cowardice, deserting his command after the first shots were fired and later evading Fenian officers by dressing in workman’s clothing and shaving off his ­mustache (Vronksy, Ridgeway, 197). 57 “James McCarroll,” 62. 58 Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan,” 159. James McCarroll would be littleknown today if not for Michael Peterman’s scholarship and recovery of his works. 59 Qtd. in Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan,” 147.

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Notes to pages 225–34

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pa rt f ive  1 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 213–20, 1: 230.   2 Ibid., 1: 194.   3 Ibid., 1: 229.   4 Ballstadt, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee as a Father of Canadian Literature,” 1.  5 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 222.   6 Sadlier, “Biographical Sketch,” 39–40.  7 Berger, The Sense of Power, 52.  8 Ibid.   9 Jess, “Rubbing Away Their Roughness,” 157–8. 10 Ibid., 161.

chapter nine   1 For a detailed discussion of McGee’s activism and journalism in North America, see Robin B. Burns’s dissertation, “D’Arcy McGee and the New Nationality.”  2 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 84.   3 Ibid., 1: 67.  4 Slattery, The Assassination of D’Arcy McGee, 6.  5 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 125.   6 O’Donnell, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Irish and Canadian Ballads,” 31.  7 Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 74, 90.  8 Skelton, The Life of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 48.  9 Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 8. 10 Davis, “The Ballad Poetry of Ireland,” 193. 11 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 109–10. 12 Ibid., 1: 14, 1: 107–9. 13 Parnaby, “Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan”; Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 194. 14 Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 200. 15 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 51–4. 16 Vance, Irish Literature, 155. 17 Ibid., 159. 18 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 54. 19 Vance, Irish Literature, 121. 20 McGee, Eva MacDonald, 31. 21 Ibid., 5. 22 Ibid., 37n. 23 Duffy, Young Ireland, 23–4.

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Notes to pages 234–43

24 O’Neill, Ireland and Germany, 97. 25 Qtd. in MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 104. 26 See Bentley, chapter one, “Young Canada” in The Confederation Poets, 24–69. 27 Qtd. in Davis, Young Ireland Movement, 240. 28 Schlegel, Lectures, 9. 29 Ibid. 30 Davis, Essays and Poems, 83. 31 Davis, “The Ballad Poetry of Ireland,” 194. 32 Duffy The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, xxv, xxxv. 33 McGee, The Poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 176–7. 34 Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, xxxiv. 35 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 60. 36 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 129. 37 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 223. 38 Ibid., 225–6. 39 McGee, The Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century,” ix. 40 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 4. 41 McGee, The Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century,” x. 42 Ibid., ix. 43 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 1: 128. 44 Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 14. 45 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 225. 46 McGee, A Memoir of the Life and Conquests, 1. 47 Thuente, The Harp Re-strung, 200. 48 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 8–9. 49 O’Donnell, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Irish and Canadian Ballads,” 83. 50 Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, i; xxii. 51 Ibid., xxix. 52 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 1. 53 Ibid., 10. 54 Burns, “D’Arcy McGee and the New Nationality,” 270–2. 55 Berlin, Vico and Herder, 177. 56 Qtd. in Burns, “D’Arcy McGee and the New Nationality,” 235. 57 Phelan, The Ardent Exile, 143–4. 58 McGee, History of the Attempts, i. 59 Qtd. in Burns, “D’Arcy McGee and the New Nationality,” 277. 60 Davis, Young Ireland Movement, 136. 61 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2:213–14. 62 Ibid., 2: 18–22.

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Notes to pages 244–74

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63 “Who Reads a Canadian Book?” New Era, 25 July 1857. 64 Snell, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee and the American Republic,” 36. 65 Ballstadt, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee as a Father of Canadian Literature,” 87. 66 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 27. 67 Qtd. in MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 189. 68 McGee, Canadian Ballads, vii. Text references are to page in this edition. 69 Wright, Representing the National, 113. 70 O’Donnell, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Canadian and Irish Ballads,” 154. 71 McGee, The Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century, viii–ix. 72 McGee, A Memoir of the Life, xii. 73 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 195. 74 Virgo, The Selected Verse of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, xix. 75 Wilson, Thomas Darcy McGee, 2:27. 76 Davis, “A Ballad History of Ireland,” 231–2. 77 Lamontaigne, “Prouville de Tracy, Alexandre, de.” 78 See Bentley, “Literary Sites and Cultural Properties.” 79 MacCarthy, Definitions of Irishness, 27. 80 Wright, Representing the National Landscape, 107. 81 Berger, The Sense of Power, 53. See also R.G. Haliburton, Men of the North. 82 Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 768. 83 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 81–4, 2: 151. 84 McCarroll, “Letters of Terry Finnegan,” 8. 85 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 195, 2: 185. 86 Ibid., 2: 233–41. 87 McGee, “The Mental Outfit,” 1. Text references are to page in this edition. 88 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 334. 89 Qtd. in Goheen, “Honouring,” 358. 90 Ibid.

c ha p t e r t e n  1 Reade, The Prophesy of Merlin and Other Poems, 90. Text references are to page in this edition.   2 Grodzinski, “Fenian Raids”; Thompson, “Timothy O’Hea.”  3 Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 23.   4 Bousefield and Toffoli, Royal Tours, 85.   5 Ibid., 83.   6 Reade, “The Making of Canada,” 1.

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Notes to pages 275–83

  7 Poems and recollections of Reade returning to visit Pettigo were ­transcribed from villagers’ memories and recorded on the webpage “Local Poets,” Ducas.ie., accessed 6 January 2021, www.duchas.ie/en/ cbes/4428264/4389672.  8 Bentley, The Confederation Group, 341n2.   9 Wilfred Campbell to John Reade, 17 February 1899. John Reade fonds, McCord Museum, Montreal. 10 Le Moine, “Le Moine, Sir James MacPherson;” John Reade fonds, McCord Museum, Montreal. 11 Monkman, “John Reade.” 12 Ibid. 13 “Poets and Poetasters,” 117. 14 Ibid. 15 Ghent, John Reade and His Friends, 21. 16 Ibid, 20. 17 Vronksy, Ridgeway, 150–4. 18 McGee, “Constitutional Difficulties,” 176. 19 Bousefield and Toffoli, Royal Tours, 82. 20 Col. Elphinstone to John Reade, Montreal, 6 June 1870. John Reade fonds, McCord Museum, Montreal. 21 Connaught (now Connacht) is one of the four kingdoms of Ireland. Located in the West, it includes the counties of Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Sligo, and Roscommon. Sons of the monarch were traditionally granted titles associated with the four kingdoms of Britain. Prince Arthur was the first prince to receive Connaught as a title, which his grandson Alistair inherited upon the first duke’s death in 1942. The second duke’s experience of Canadian winter was much grimmer than that of his grandfather. Sent to Canada as an aide to the governor general in 1942, he died in Ottawa of hypothermia during the winter of 1943 at the age of twenty-eight. With his death, the title became extinct. 22 The poem appeared in the “The Imperial Spirit” section of W.D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889). 23 Jess, “Rubbing Away Their Roughness,” 158. 24 Reade, “Hastings,” 4. 25 Reade, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee,” 20. 26 Reade, “Madeleine de Verchères,” 230. 27 Bentley, The Confederation Group, 38. 28 Reade, “Literature,” 210. 29 Reade, “The Making of Canada,” 2.

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Notes to pages 283–95

393

30 Ibid., 1. 31 Reade, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee,” 16. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 15. 34 Ibid., 20. 35 Reade, “To Louis Frechette,” 288. 36 Ibid. 37 Haliburton, Men of the North, 2. 38 Ibid. 39 Reade, “The Winter Carnival,” 200. 40 Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land, 166, 175. 41 Reade, “Jacques Cartier,” 30. 42 Reade, “The Winter Carnival,” 200. 43 Ibid., 201. 44 Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land, 21. 45 See Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land, 197–9. 46 Reade, “The Winter Carnival,” 201; “Jacques Cartier,” 30. 47 “Our History,” Royal Society of Canada, accessed 6 January 2021, https://rsc-src.ca/en/about/history. 48 Reade, “The Making of Canada,” 15. 49 Ibid., 13. 50 O’Leary, “Raciological Thought,” 24. 51 Reade, “The Intermingling of Races,” 336. 52 Ghent, John Reade and his Friends, n.p. 53 Reade, “The Intermingling of Races,” 340. 54 Ibid., 336. 55 Reade, “The Half-Breed,” 11. 56 Jess, “Rubbing Away Their Roughness,” 162. 57 Reade, “The Half-Breed,” 13. 58 Ibid., 12. 59 Reade, “The Intermingling of Races,” 339. 60 Reade, “The Half-Breed,” 11–12.

pa rt s i x   1 “Interview with Riel,” The Leader, 19 November 1885.   2 Ed Hird suggests that his ancestor Mary McLean, a journalist at The Leader, was assigned to cover the trial and carry out the interview, based on a few details, including Riel’s statement, “When I first saw you on the

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Notes to pages 295–304

trial, I loved you” (Pacholik, “For Both Good and Ill,” Regina Leader-Post, 7 March 2017). However, when Davin’s paper first announced the coverage of the trial in July, it noted that a reporter with experience in reporting on the London Parliament would be in attendance, which points more convincingly to Davin.   3 “Interview with Riel,” The Leader, 19 November 1885.   4 “Trial of Riel,” The Leader, 9 July 1885.   5 “Interview with Riel,” The Leader, 19 November 1885.  6 Koester, Mr Davin, M.P., 69.  7 Crawford, Collected Poems, 81.   8 See Burns, “Crawford, Davin, and Riel.”   9 Urschel, “From Assimilation to Diversity,” 181. 10 De Nie, The Eternal Paddy, 216, 244–6. 11 Grob-Fitzgibbon, “The Curious Case of the Vanishing Debate,” 113–16. 12 Owram, Promise of Eden, 126, 129. 13 Davin, The Irishman in Canada, 4. 14 “Speech of Lord Beaconsfield to the Royal and Central Bucks. Agricultural Society,” Toronto Telegram, 3 October 1879. 15 Owram, Promise of Eden, 126.

c h a p t e r e l e ve n   1 For Davin’s early life and English and Irish careers, see Koester, Mr Davin, M.P., 1–15, and Thompson, “Nicholas Flood Davin.”  2 Koester, Mr Davin, M.P., 24.   3 Davin, “The Future of Canada,” 493.  4 Davin, British vs. American Civilization, 56.   5 Davin, “A National Literature,” 1.   6 For a discussion of how Davin’s literary criticism influenced Collins’s and Roberts’s Canadian republicanism, see Bentley, The Confederation Group, 27–33.   7 Davin, “The Future of Canada,” 493.  8 Roberts, Collected Poems, 86.   9 Davin, “The Future of Canada,” 493. 10 Ibid., 491. 11 Ibid., 494. 12 Davin, British vs. American Civilization, 45. 13 Ibid., 10. 14 Davin, “Great Speeches,” 2. 15 Davin, “The Future of Canada,” 498.

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Notes to pages 304–13

395

16 Davin, “A National Literature,” 1. 17 Davin, “Great Speeches,” 3. 18 Davin, “A National Literature,” 3. 19 Davin, “Great Speeches,” 3. 20 For the influence of Young Ireland on Roberts’s brief movement, Young Canada, see Bentley, “Young Canada: 1880–1884” in The Confederation Group,” 24–69. 21 Davin, “Great Speeches,” 3. 22 Ibid., 1–2. 23 Davin, British vs. American Civilization, 42. 24 Owram, Promise of Eden, 135. 25 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 12. 26 Daschuk, Clearing the Plains, xix. 27 Davin, British vs. American Civilization, 9. 28 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 1. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Ibid., 9. 31 Ibid., 5. 32 Ibid., 7. 33 Moll, “The Davin Report.” 34 Davin, British vs. American Civilization, 41. 35 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 7. 36 Davin, British vs. American Civilization, 5–6. 37 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 1. 38 Ibid., 14. 39 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, They Came for the Children, 7. 40 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 12. 41 St Germain, Broken Treaties, 188. 42 Owram, Promise of Eden, 132. 43 Ibid. 44 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 10. 45 Ibid. 46 Pannekoek, “Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear).” 47 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 11. 48 Davin, “Home Rule for Ireland,” 16. 49 Ibid., 7–8. 50 Ibid., 13. 51 Ibid., 17–18. 52 Ibid., 6.

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Notes to pages 313–31

53 Ibid., 14. 54 Ibid., 17. 55 Speech of Mr N.F. Davin, 2. 56 Davin, Home Rule: A Speech, 8. 57 Koester, Mr Davin, M.P., 73. 58 Bentley, The Confederation Group, 84. 59 Haliburton, Men of the North, 2. 60 Davin, Homes for Millions, ii. 61 Owram, Promise of Eden, 126. 62 Ibid., 127–8. 63 Davin, Homes for Millions, 11. 64 Davin, British vs. American Civilization, 8–9. 65 Qtd. in Curtis, Coercion and Conciliation, 9. 66 Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 298–9. 67 De Nie, The Eternal Paddy, 213. 68 Hurlbert, Ireland under Coercion, v. 69 De Nie, The Eternal Paddy, 204. 70 Owram, Promise of Eden, 213. 71 Qtd. in Owram, Promise of Eden, 136. 72 Speech of Mr N.F. Davin, 14. 73 Moll, “The Davin Report.” 74 Davin, “Literature Connected with the Canada Pacific RR,” 583. 75 Moll, “The Davin Report.” 76 Davin, “Literature Connected with the Canada Pacific RR,” 583. 77 Manitoba Métis Federation, “Louis Riel Quotes,” accessed 9 January 2021, www.mmr.mb.ca/louis_riel_quotes.php. 78 Ibid. 79 Thompson, “Davin, Nicholas Flood.” 80 For anecdotes about parliamentarian drinking, see Waite, Canada 1874–1896.

c h a p t e r t w e lve   1 Crawford, “I wonder much what brought the bald bard back,” Lorne Pierce Collection, quoted in Robert Alan Burns, “Crawford, Davin and Riel.”   2 For the editorial position of The Toronto Telegram, see Ron Poulton, The Paper Tyrant: John Ross Robertson of the Toronto Telegram.  3 Galvin, Isabella Valancy Crawford, 65.  4 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 284–5.

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Notes to pages 331–45

397

  5 Lyons, “Round Spun the Herd,” 3.  6 Crawford, Hugh and Ion, 12. Text references are to page in this edition.   7 Crawford, Alice, “New Information about Isabella Valancy Crawford,” 87.   8 Ceilidh Hart provides a good overview of critical responses to Crawford, especially to Malcolm’s Katie, in “Exploring the Competing Narratives of Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie.”   9 Ross, “A New Biography of Isabella Valancy Crawford.” 10 Galvin, Isabella Valancy Crawford, 23–4. 11 Ross, “A New Biography of Isabella Valancy Crawford.” 12 Peterman, Delicious Mirth, 282. 13 Early, “A Source for Isabella Valancy Crawford’s ‘The Camp of Souls,’” 116. 14 Galvin, Isabella Valancy Crawford, 5. 15 Devereux, “‘And let them wash me from this clanging world,’” 101. 16 Crawford, Collected Poems, 262. Text references are to page in this ­edition (cp ). 17 See Bentley, Introduction to Malcolm’s Katie; MacDonald, “Inglorious Battles”; and Jones, “Colonial Contracts.” 18 In “Crawford, Davin, and Riel: Text and Intertext in Hugh and Ion,” Burns speculates that Crawford’s interest and sympathy towards Riel increased during his trial, even if she did not endorse his cause. 19 Mill, Ireland and England, 14–15. 20 For a discussion of Ireland figured as a dying or dead mother in IrishCanadian writing, see Jess, “The Disappearing Real and the Bright Ideal.” 21 Ibid. 22 Devereux, “‘And let them wash me from this clanging world,’” 108. 23 Davin, Great Speeches, 3. 24 Devereux notes that the poem shares stylistic approaches with “Malcolm’s Katie” (1884) and contains details of Toronto life and conditions in the late 1870s and 1880s. 25 Bentley, The Confederation Group, 178. 26 Burns, “Crawford, Davin, and Riel.” 27 Klein, When the Irish Invaded Canada, 262. 28 Ibid., 263–4. 29 In this reading, Hugh’s offering of Indigenous solutions to European ills recalls the social criticism of Joseph Brant, who was appalled at European institutions such as debtors’ prisons, or of Edward Fitzgerald, who felt that Europe could learn from the more equitable social systems practised by Indigenous peoples. 30 Devereux, “‘And let them wash me from this clanging world,’” 102.

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Notes to pages 346–55

31 “Hugh,” Behind the Name, last modified 20 November 2020, accessed 6 January 2021, www.behindthename.com/name/hugh. 32 In his introduction to the published edition of Hugh and Ion, Glen Clever connects Ion to Apollo and Ionian culture, noting an Apollonian triumph of day over night in “The Dark Stag.” Ion’s interest in Indigenous ­equivalents to classical mythology suggest that he is looking for archetypal images and symbols that can be furnished by Canadian subjects. 33 Bliss Carman, “The Modern Athenium,” Boston Evening Transcript, 24 July 1897; “A New Symbolist” Commercial Advertiser, 25 March 1899. 34 Warkentin, “The Problem of Crawford’s Style,” 22. 35 Early, “A Source for Isabella Valancy Crawford’s ‘The Camp of Souls,’” 118. 36 See Reaney, Introduction to The Collected Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford. 37 Lyon, “Round Went the Herd,” 8. 38 The early country and western singer Billy Maxwell recorded Shanly’s ­ballad as “The Haunted Hunter,” which she set to a traditional tune, in 1929. The tune is transcribed in the Canadian Folk Music Bulletin 34, no. 3 (2000): 2. 39 George Lyons notes that country and western music often has roots in work songs from naval and lumber culture in “Round Went the Herd,” 7. 40 Brown, Betsey Lee, 11. 41 Lyons, “Round Went the Herd,” 6. In discussing the “third man” legend, Lyons mentions the example of “The Walker of the Snow,” which he ­discovered was a ballad well established in the folk and country music ­tradition of Alberta. 42 Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 601. 43 Lyon, “Round Went the Herd,” 7. 44 Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 596. 45 “The Railway Spiritualized” was set to music in the twentieth century but appeared in poetry collections and broadsides throughout the nineteenth, with attributions as colourful as the song itself. According to Norm Cohen in Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, at least two collections attribute authorship to transported convicts or other repentant ­criminals; one broadside credited it to a passenger waiting for a delayed train, and an American version attributed it to “Tecumseh, the eldest son of Chief Maungwudaus, who is now a missionary among the Chippeway Indians” (606). 46 M.E. Abbey and Charles D. Tillman are credited with the words and music to “Life’s Railway to Heaven,” often recorded as “Life Is Like a Mountain Railway” or “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad,” but many phrases were

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Notes to pages 355–61

399

taken directly from William S. Hays’s poem, “The Faithful Engineer,” ­collected in his Poems and Songs (1886). Hays (1837–1907), a journalist in Louisiana, was also a prolific composer and poet in the vein of Stephen Foster. While the immense popularity of his sheet music did not return an equally immense profit, he could nevertheless console himself with seeing many of his ballads become unmoored from their author and enter the folk tradition as “anonymous,” and therefore timeless, a fate shared with lyrics by Moore, Yeats, and Patrick Kavanagh. While he drew from several immigrant and African-American traditions for much of his dialect work as well as from his own experience working on the waterways of the American south, he was proud that his Irish-themed songs “were heard from one end of Ireland to the other.” One of them, “Shamus O’Brien,” is still a popular bluegrass fiddle tune (Malone, “William S. Hays: The Bard of Kentucky,” 299). Given that much of Hays’s work was published as sheet music before the collection was issued, it is possible that Crawford knew of “The Faithful Engineer” before publishing “Old Spookses’ Pass” in 1884. Since “Old Spookses’ Pass” predates Hays’s collection, it would be intriguing to think that he took the idea from Crawford, but that is unlikely, given that she sold fewer than fifty copies of her collection in her lifetime. At the very least, the coincidence suggests that many poets and songwriters were benefitting from the cross-fertilization within a ­modernizing and increasingly multi-stranded populist North American culture built in part on traditional music and Romantic tropes from the British Isles. 47 Hays, Songs and Poems, 92. 48 Nevertheless, Irish migration to the West was significant enough to give Calgary the nickname “New Dublin” in the 1880s. One source of ­considerable numbers of Irish settlers in Western Canada was the NorthWest Mounted Police, whose recruits often took up land grants at the end of their service.

c onc l us i o n   1   2   3   4

Cook, “Smith, Goldwin.” Hodd, “The Fredericton Confederation Awakening,” 94–5. Bentley, “Charles G.D. Roberts’s Use of ‘Indian Legend,’” 20. Biographical information, diary entries, and letter excerpts describing Douglas Hyde’s time in Canada are taken from Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 137–44; Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland, 136–55; and Coffee, Douglas Hyde: President of Ireland, 21–2.

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Notes to pages 361–5

  5 Hyde, “The Necessity for the De-Anglicisation of Ireland,” 157–8.   6 Ibid., 134.   7 Des-ka-heh, “The New Story of the Iroquois,” 77.   8 Hauptman, “The Idealist and the Realist,” 126.   9 Des-ka-heh, “The Redman’s Appeal for Justice,” 2. 10 Ibid., 1. 11 Des-ka-heh, “The New Story of the Iroquois,” 76. 12 In spring 2020, nearly a century after the Six Nations and Ireland found common cause at the League of Nations, the Irish had occasion to reciprocate past Indigenous empathy and generosity. Specifically citing the example of the Choctaw Nation’s aid to the Irish during the Great Hunger (collected while the Choctaw were still dealing with the trauma from the Trail of Tears), many Irish citizens contributed to a fund supporting the Navajo and Hopi Nations, who experienced extreme hardship as a result of the c ovi d-19 epidemic. The organizers characterized the exchange between Ireland and American Indians as “acts of kindness from indigenous ancestors passed being reciprocated nearly 200 years later through blood memory and interconnectedness” (Ed O’Loughlin and Mihir Zavi, “Irish Return an Old Favor, Helping Native Americans Battling the Virus,” The New York Times, 17 July 2020). 13 Hauptman, “The Idealist and the Realist,”37. 14 Des-ka-heh, “The New Story of the Iroquois,” 79. 15 Ibid., 78. 16 Ibid.

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Index

Act of Union, 92, 153, 156, 159, 183, 379n21 Akenson, Donald, 16 Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, 214–15, 219, 273 Alistair, Duke of Connaught, Prince, 392n21 Allen, Grant, 291 Allen, Ira, 25 American Homestead Act of 1862, 343 American literature, 269–70 American War of Independence, 17, 55, 73, 363 Anglo-Egyptian war, 4 annexationist movement, 167, 184, 302 Armour, Andrew Harvie, 140 Armour, Robert, 141, 142 Arthur, Duke of Connaught, Prince: admiration of Canada, 274; Battle of Eccles Hill, 273–4; political career, 280–1, 288; title of, 392n21 Baldwin, Robert, 184 Ballad Poetry of Ireland, The, 236, 240

32497_Holmgren.indd 423

ballads: as historical narrative, 247, 248, 253; nationalism and, 240; patriotic value of, 282–3 Bancroft, George: History of the Colonization of America, 247 Batoche, Battle of, 331 Beckett, Samuel, 275 Bedford, John Russell, Duke of, 157 Behrens, Peter, 17, 233 Belfast City, 3 Belfast Harp Festival, 14, 82, 109, 122 Belford, Robert J., 223 Bennett, Samuel, 150 Bennett, Thomas, 154 Bentley, D.M.R., 7–8, 29, 31, 86, 96, 370n26 Beranger, Pierre-Jean de, 234, 247, 260 Birney, Earle, 196 “Birth of French Liberty, The” (song), 107 Blake, William Hume, 191 Bonnycastle, Richard, 96, 175 Booker, Alfred, 221 Boru, Brian, 219 Boston Repeal Association, 229 Boswell, James, 72

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424 Index

Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 254 Bourinot, John George, Sir, 276 Boyle, Patrick, 218, 219 Boyne, Battle of the, 264 British-American conflicts of 1812, 135 British Empire: foreign relations, 4–5; Ireland and, 312; westward expansion of, 299, 322–3 Brock, Isaac, 87 Brock monument: bomb attack on, 168 Brown, George, 209, 210, 213, 302 Brown, Thomas Edward: Betsy Lee, A Foc’s’le Yarn, 351–2 Bruce, William Blair, 196, 386n39 Buchanan, Alexander Carlyle, 138, 139, 151 Buchanan, James, 138, 139, 140, 141, 151 Buchanan, Robert, 138 Bunting, Edward, 81, 82 Burke, Edmund, 79, 155, 160, 197 Burns, Robert Alan, 333, 343, 397n18 Burns, Robin B., 242, 243 Burpee, Lawrence J., 275–6 Burroughs, John, 196 Bushe, Charles Kendal, 155 Byron, George Gordon, 91 cabinets of natural history, 43–4, 45 Cabot, Sebastian, 246, 248 Campbell, Wilfred, 276 Canada: Anglo-Celtic conception of, 297–8; Catholic Church in, 31; cholera epidemic, 212; civil liberties, 90–1, 99, 114; civil unrest, 167–8; comparison to Ireland, 20–1, 164, 166, 176;

32497_Holmgren.indd 424

Confederation, 296; Constitutional Act of 1791, 141; cultural distinctiveness of, 53, 88, 248, 269, 332; cultural exchange, 6, 8, 291; economic development, 340; establishment of Province of, 174, 183; exploration of, 248–9; governor general duties, 366; immigrants’ perception of, 263; imperial aspirations, 6, 20, 21; Irish immigrants, 18, 213, 216–17, 264–5, 298; as maritime power, 303; national character, 90–1; nation-building, 22; poetic depiction of, 7–8, 94; publishing industry, 244; reconciliation, 20; responsible government, 184; Romantic view of, 8, 15, 35; settler cultures, 285, 286; social conservatism of, 13; vs. United States, 251–2; unit of measurement, 33; urbanization, 340; visions of the future of, 48; westward expansion, 306; ­yeoman class of, 299–300 Canada First movement, 21, 227–8, 299, 302, 306, 322, 346 Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses (McGee): Canadian landscape in, 248–9, 254–5; dedication, 247; didactic nature of, 257; exploration narratives, 246, 248–52, 253; Indigenous cultures in, 259–60; military metaphors, 270; publication, 245–6; sense of the North, 252; structure, 234–5, 240, 246–7; targeted audience, 246, 264; title choice, 246 “Canadian Boat Song, The” (Moore): depiction of landscape,

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Index 425

355; epigraph, 95, 349; imitations of, 7; Irish context of, 98; voyageur songs and, 8, 96–7 Canadian cultural nationalism: contributors to, 98, 267, 271, 302–3; in early Canadian writing, role of, 6, 15, 244–5; Irish influence of, 16, 17, 21–2, 355 Canadian expeditionary force in Egypt, 5–6, 7 Canadian identity, 4, 228, 286, 303–4, 310 Canadian landscape, 248–9, 254–5, 287, 305, 339, 350, 351, 353 Canadian literature: American influence of, 244, 269–70, 273; development of, 9, 235, 244–5; ethnic dialects in, 185–6; Irish influence of, 15–16, 95–6, 185; nationalism and, 7, 8, 304; patriotism and, 244–5; poetry, 7–9, 305; public support of, 304; scarcity of, 268 Canadian Pacific Railway, 324 canoe: description of travels on, 62, 71, 72, 95; poetic imagery of, 8, 84–5, 95, 348–9, 350; qualities of, 34, 133 Captain Rock (Irish folk hero), 147, 207 Carden, John, 205 Carman, Bliss, 360 Cartier, Jacques, 246, 249, 288 Carver, Jonathan, 95 Catholic Association, 379n21 Celtic culture, 97, 228, 236–7, 260, 283–4 Charlemont, James Caulfeild, Earl of, 24 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de, 95

32497_Holmgren.indd 425

Choctaw Nation, 364, 400n12 Church of Ireland, 111 Clare, John Fitzgibbon, Earl of: criticism of, 157–8; political humiliation in Westminster, 382n27; reputation of, 80, 167; tithe reform and, 158, 382n22; Trinity College visitation, 153, 154 Clarke, Henry, 227 Colborne, John, 162, 172 Collins, Joseph Edmund, 303 Connaught, kingdom of, 392n21 Corn Laws, 139, 230 cowboy culture, 354 “Cowboy’s Dream, The” (song), 354 Cramahé, Hector Theophilus de, 57 Crawford, Isabella Valancy: aesthetic of, 348; background, 332; on Canadian cultural nationalism, 297–8, 300, 355–6; characteristics of poetry of, 7, 185, 330, 331, 335, 351; cowboy poetry of, 352, 354; friends of, 332; GrecoRoman mythology in poetry of, 331; identity of, 333; immigrant culture, vision of, 352; Indigenous theme in poetry of, 331, 348; Irish perspective of, 20, 297, 334–5, 337–8; literary folk ­ballads of, 338; political views, 332; rejection of violence, 297; representation of the West, 344; Riel, sympathy to, 330, 333, 397n18; “Third Man” factor in poetry of, 352; urban motif, 338, 341; use of dialects, 330, 332–3, 352; vision of Canada, 85, 334, 337, 339–41, 342, 345, 351; vision of salvation, 353–4

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426 Index

Crawford, Isabella Valancy, works of: “The Camp of Souls,” 347, 350; “Canada to England,” 3, 333–4, 340, 355, 357; “Erin’s Warning,” 297, 333, 334, 336–7; “Farmer Stebbins’ Opinions,” 353; Hugh and Ion, 331, 335, 340, 341–8, 353, 398n32; “A Hungry Day,” 59, 334–6, 337, 339, 344; “The Lily Bed,” 348; Malcolm’s Katie, 259, 300, 331, 337–40, 341, 342, 347, 351; “My Irish Love,” 333, 334; Old Spookses’ Pass, Malcolm’s Katie, and Other Poems, 331, 334, 338; “Old Spookses’ Pass,” 331, 351, 352, 354, 399n46; “Said the Canoe,” 348–9; “Toronto,” 340–2; Winona, 332, 342 cultural nationalism, 239, 370n26 Curran, John Philpot, 24 Curran, Sarah, 170 Dalhousie, James Broun-Ramsay, Lord, 113 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 7; background and education, 301; British versus American Civilization, 302, 303, 306, 308, 309; on Canadian identity, 300, 303–4, 306, 328; on Canadian Pacific railway, 324; on Celtic identity, 315, 333; on cultural development of Canada, 307, 370n26; death of, 329; drinking problem, 301–2; emigration to Canada, 302; family of, 329; on Fenians, 313; imperialist views of, 284; on Irish culture and politics, 20, 260, 312–13, 319, 327, 328;

32497_Holmgren.indd 426

journalistic career, 301–2, 306; on Métis and Indigenous peoples, 307–8, 309–10, 312–13; on national literature, 302, 315; on North-West Resistance, 15, 323; philosophy of Canadian nationalism, 293, 302–3; political career, 306–7, 308, 324, 329; promotion of emigration, 67, 311, 313, 316, 322, 337; rejection of violence, 297; religious views, 329; on residential schools, 308– 10; Riel’s trial and, 295, 296–7, 312, 394n2; support of Canadian writers, 304–5; view of progress and civilization, 308, 326 Davin, Nicholas Flood, works of: British versus American Civilization, 302, 303, 306, 308, 309; Eos: An Epic of the Dawn, 305, 306, 307, 308, 313, 316– 18; Eos: A Prairie Dream, 313– 14; “The Future of Canada,” 302, 303, 304, 315; Homes for Millions, 311, 315, 316; The Irishman in Canada, 299; “A National Literature,” 304; “Parting Message to Mankind,” 295–6; prairie imagery, 314–15, 316; “Young Canada,” 305–6 Davis, Thomas, 227, 230–1, 234, 235–6, 237–8, 244, 246 Dawson, John William, Sir, 276, 291 Deacon, Job, 378n11 Denison, George, 228 Dennis, John Stoughton, 221, 223, 388n56 Dermody, Thomas, 114; The Harp of Erin, 91

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Index 427

Des-ka-heh (Levi General), Six Nations chief, 363–4, 365 Devereux, Cecily, 333 Dewart, Edward Hartley: Selections from Canadian Poets, 276 Deziel, Angela, 143, 378n11, 380n62 Dickson, Stephen: academic career of, 13, 25, 36–7, 39, 47, 48; background and education, 36; on British presence in North America, 41; correspondence, 372n18; death of, 48–9; emigration to Canada, 27, 38, 39; An Essay on Chemical Nomenclature, 42; idea of university in Quebec, 39, 244; legacy of, 48, 49–50; literary works, 6, 41, 49; notion of good citizen, 152; political activity, 28; Prescott and, 39, 40, 42, 46–7, 49; promotion of science and ­literature, 37, 38, 41–2, 43, 46, 47; reputation of, 38–9, 41; ­scientific essays, 37; The Union of Taste and Science, 13, 28, 37–8, 41, 44–5, 46, 47; view of North America, 36 Dickson, William Steele, 26, 40 Disraeli, Benjamin, 299 Dorchester, Guy Carleton, Lord, 48, 57, 64, 65 Dorion, Antoine, 212 Dowling, Francis, 109, 377n5 Doyle, John, 52 Drennan, William, 118, 151; “Erin,” 12, 90, 119, 120 Drummond, William Henry, 185, 331

32497_Holmgren.indd 427

Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Marquis of: diplomatic career of, 3, 4; memorial statue of, 3–4, 6, 69 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 10, 195; background, 231; on ballad poetry, 240; on Celtic culture, 236, 237; criminal charges against, 262; emigration to Australia, 262; McGee’s tribute to, 231; political views, 232, 262; views of literature and nationalism, 233–4, 237; Young Ireland and, 227, 231; Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, 233 Duffy, James, 237 Duignan, Patrick, 80 Dun, Patrick, 37, 38–9 Dunlop, William “Tiger,” 11, 100–1 Durham, John George Lambton, Earl of, 173–4 Durham Report, 173–4, 207, 248, 322 Eccles Hill, Battle of, 273–4 Edwards, Mary J., 127 Elgin, James Bruce, Earl of, 183, 195 Emigrant, The (O’Grady Bennett): on Canadian civil unrest, 166, 167–70, 172–4; comic Irish ­character in, 185; dedication, 171–2, 178; footnotes and ­paratexts, 151–2, 157, 161; on French Canadians, 174–5; heroic couplets of, 157, 159, 161; on Indigenous people, 170–1, 173; on Irish culture, 149, 157–8, 162–3; on Patriot

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428 Index

Parliament, 154–6, 159; picture of shipboard life, 161–2, 383n30; political implications of, 147, 148, 151, 156, 160–1; portrayal of emigration, 159; reference to Fitzgibbon, 154, 155, 157–8; satiric targets of, 148–9, 157; on tithes problem, 148, 158 Emmet, Robert, 296; execution of, 12, 52, 103, 104, 170; expulsion from Trinity College, 154; Moore and, 79, 80; personality, 99, 232; political activism, 119, 145; on power of traditional music, 81 Emmet, Thomas Addis, 15, 119 Eos: An Epic of the Dawn (Davin): on Canada’s future, 317; Eos, ­figure of, 316–17, 318, 327; on French Canadians, 322–3; on humans’ virtue and vice, 321; on Indigenous people, 308, 324–5, 326; prairie imagery in, 314–16, 323, 328; publication of, 305–6; references to Ireland, 313–14, 317–18, 319–21, 322, 327, 328; on revolutionary France, 318–19; rhetoric of Western expansion, 322, 324–5, 326 “Erin” (Drennan), 12, 118, 119, 120 Falcon, Pierre, 293 Fenian Brotherhood: Battle of Ridgeway, 181, 221; disbandment of, 223; foundation of, 218, 266– 7; invasions of Canada, 221, 223, 224, 272–3, 278, 280, 292 Fenians: in Canada, influence of, 217–18, 220, 223; historical roots, 217, 222; leaders, 360;

32497_Holmgren.indd 428

literary representation of, 221–2; nationalism of, 217; opposition to, 217–18 Ferguson, Samuel, 230, 271; “Lament for Thomas Davis,” 270 Finnegan, Terry (McCarroll’s alter ego): fascination with Canadian climate, 204; Irish language of, 212–13, 214; “Letters” to McGee, 204, 214; literary taste of, 208; “A New Song,” 220; political views, 210, 214; prototype of, 211; on skating rinks, 204–5 Fisher, John Charlton, 124 Fitzgerald, Edward: adoption into the Bear Clan, 11, 19, 52, 74; American tour, 71, 74; background of, 51, 55; Canadian travels of, 58–9, 68–9; canoe journeys, 33, 62, 71, 72; David Hill and, 74; death of, 51–2, 77, 80; description of Canadian life, 56, 59–61, 63, 66, 337; on experience of “savage life,” 69–70; Francophilia of, 70, 71–2; Georgiana Lennox and, 55, 59–60, 62; on Halifax, 17; on Indigenous people, 18–19, 35, 57, 62–4, 73–4, 124, 274, 397n29; “Ireland,” 118, 120; Joseph Brant and, 72, 73–4; letters of, 6, 11, 52, 56, 66, 76, 100, 373n1; marriage of, 76; military career, 11, 52, 55–6; Moore’s biography of, 7, 10–11, 51, 52–3, 56, 78–9, 99–101; moose hunt description, 11, 69; in Niagara Falls, 70–1; on outdoor life, 65–6; Paine’s social circle and, 75–6; personality of, 51, 55, 56,

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Index 429

65, 67–8, 99; political career of, 11, 21, 57–8, 72, 75, 76–7, 100; in Quebec, 57, 70; on regimental life, 61–2, 64; return to England, 75; as Romantic hero, 11; settlement in New Brunswick, 61; on skating, 67; Society of United Irishmen and, 53, 373n5; Tony Small and, 55; winter camping experience, 64–5, 66, 67 Fitzgerald, Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 55, 69 Fitzgerald, Pamela, 76, 92 Fitzgibbon, John. See Clare, John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Fitzpatrick, Kearns, 105 Flood, Henry, 24, 79 “Foggy Dew, The” (ballad), 362 folk poetry and songs: Irish vs. Canadian, 359; popularity of, 195; Romantic poets and, 10, 97–8 Foster, Stephen, 399n46 Foster, William, 228 Fox, Charles, 58, 72, 73, 93, 154 France: Irish discontent and, 25–6, 76, 77, 226; North American colonies, 25–6 Fréchette, Louis-Honoré, 285, 305, 322 French Canadians: vs. Americans, 30, 31; assimilation of, 22; festivals, 287; freedoms of religion, 99; Irish communities and, 31–2, 164, 322; mentality of, 32, 33, 34; music of, 34; national identity of, 285; nautical skills, 34; O’Grady’s view of, 174–5; poetic depiction of, 285–6; political activities, 114, 141–2; satiric

32497_Holmgren.indd 429

representation of, 191, 193; smoking habit, 33–4; theory of origins of, 285, 322; treatment of, 242, 243 Friends of Ireland societies, 115, 116, 117, 127, 165 Furlong, Thomas, 379n21 fur trade, 197 Galvin, Elizabeth, 332 Geiger, John, 386n43 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité de, 76 George III, King of Great Britain, 24, 58, 88, 151, 154, 160, 382n22 George IV, King of Great Britain, 104, 151 George V, King of Great Britain, 363, 365 German Romanticism, 10, 235, 242 Ghent, Percy, 277 Gladstone, William, 4 Glengarry Volunteers, 171–2, 178 Goldsmith, Oliver, 67 Gordon, Charles George, 5 Gosford, Archibald Acheson, Earl of, 166, 173 “Gospel Train, The” (anonymous poem), 354 Gowan, Ogle, 218 Grace, Sherril, 196, 200, 201, 202, 386n39 Grant, George, 299, 300, 306, 308 Grattan, Henry: dedications to, 105, 164; Patriot Parliament and, 23, 79, 154, 173, 320; political views, 148, 151, 155, 158, 382n22

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430 Index

Great Famine, 17, 181, 206, 225, 226, 298 Gregg, Frederick James, 360 Guillamore, Standish O’Grady, Viscount, 149 Guinness, Arthur, 150 Haliburton, Robert Grant: on Canadian poets, 258; The Men of the North and Their Place in History, 228, 286; white supremacism of, 65, 261, 291, 315, 316 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 245, 251 Halifax, ns: as immigration destination, 17–18; Irish character of, 17 Hamilton, William, 36 Hardy, Thomas: “Drummer Hodge,” 5 harp: as Irish national symbol, 82, 109, 121 Harrison, Thomas, 358 Haudenosaunee: 282, land rights, 19, 73; relations with British Empire, 173, 362 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “The Celestial Railroad,” 354 Hayes, Edward: The Ballads of Ireland, 208, 264 Hayes, James, 137, 140 Hays, William S.: “The Faithful Engineer,” 355, 399n46 Heavysege, Charles, 268 Hempson, Denis, 121, 122 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 10, 234, 236, 241 Hibernian Benevolent Society, 211, 218 Hildreth, Charles Lotin, 210 Hincks, Francis, 184, 207

32497_Holmgren.indd 430

Hird, Ed, 393n2 Hoche, Lazare, 77 Hodgins, Jack: The Invention of the World, 17 Holmes, Benjamin, 178 Hopi Nation, 400n12 Horner, Dan, 178 Hubert, Jean-François, 48 Hudson, Edward, 81, 82, 86 Hudson, Henry, 246, 250 Hudson’s Bay Company, 197 Hugh and Ion (Crawford): allusion to classical mythology, 398n32; depiction of Canadian wilderness, 344–5, 347; on Indigenous and European cultures, 345–6; urban images, 341, 342–3, 344 “Hungry Day, A” (Crawford), 334–6, 337, 339–40 Hunter, Peter, 15, 27, 40 Hunters’ Lodges (Freres-Chasseurs) organization, 169, 170 Huron Chief, and Other Poems, The (Kidd): characters, 125–6, 133–4, 378n11, 379n38; dark ending of, 135; immigrant wanderings, 133; picture of intercultural harmony, 134; plot, 132, 134–5; political reading of, 135; praise of Canadian nature, 138; preface, 128; reaction to publication of, 137, 140, 143, 144; translations, 129, 144 Hutchinson, John, 239 Hyde, Douglas, 361–2, 366 “Indian Advancement” policy, 363 Indigenous peoples: advocacy of right of, 115; Americans and, 135; artists and scholars, 366–7;

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Index 431

assimilation of, 22, 307–8, 310– 11, 323; British settlers and, 34–5, 74, 291, 292; COVI D-19 epidemic and, 400n12; as example for Europe, 397n29; explorers’ perception of, 252; famines and disease, 307; government policies toward, 307, 309; Irish Catholics vs., 125; land loss, 50; military heroes of, 132; natural civility of, 124; nautical skills of, 34; oral tradition of, 131, 359; poetic depiction of, 325; preservation of cultural practices, 310; racist representation of, 191; resistance to colonization, 324, 327; social problems, 35 Ireland: agrarian organizations, 147; anti-British revolt, 25–6; Belfast range, 111; British Empire and, 14, 17, 26, 99, 155, 160; Carrickshock massacre, 147; Catholic Emancipation, 146, 151, 156; class and sectarian divisions, 104; Coercion Act, 317; comparison to Canada, 164, 166, 173, 176; cultural distinctiveness of, 14, 20, 23–4, 91, 149, 243, 362; Derry county, 108, 109; Easter Rising, 362; economic development, 335; emancipation movement, 99, 115; emigration from, 16, 164, 165, 181, 184, 313, 399n48; famines, 17–18, 181, 335; First World War and, 20–1; golden age, 23; Home Rule, 20, 299, 312, 313, 337, 357, 362; independence, 365; land tenure system, 336; Land War, 20, 317–18, 319,

32497_Holmgren.indd 431

336; Leitrim county, 205–7, 211; literature and poetry, 8, 10, 24, 239–40; national character, 91; nation-building, 22; official language, 366; oldest settlements, 109; Parliament, 14, 83, 156, 158, 159, 383n29; partition of, 21; Patriot movement, 11–12, 13, 14, 23; pauperism, 298; political development, 13, 25, 298, 319; popular history, 237; practice of “lay impropriation,” 146; Protestant Ascendancy in, 264; rebellion of 1798, 103–4; responsible government, 23; Roman Catholic Church, status of, 13; royal visit to, 104; School of Physic, 36; Six Nations and, 400n12; social problems, 298, 320–1, 335; tenants’ resistance in, 298; tithe system, 146, 147, 148, 156, 158; travel writing about, 30; Union with Britain, 158; Whig clubs, 75; “Yelverton’s Law,” 151. See also Patriot Parliament (Grattan’s Parliament) “Ireland” (Fitzgerald), 118, 119, 120, 378n21 Irish Ascendancy, 230, 335, 339, 358 Irish Canadians: ancestors of, 370n31; comparison to Indigenous people, 130; perceived backwardness of, 211–12, 216; political activism, 264–5; prosperity of, 242; satiric representations of, 184–5, 192; treatment of, 217, 242–3; writers, 6, 15–16, 17, 21 Irish Commemorative Stone, 17

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432 Index

Irish cultural nationalism, 16, 19–20, 229, 236, 260, 264, 284, 361 Irish immigrants: destinations, 17–18; diversity of, 18; French Canadians and, 116; memorials to, 17; Nebraska colony, 343; promotion of Irish interests, 16; religious affiliation, 18; support of Indigenous people, 400n12 Irish Land League, 299, 317 Irish Land War, 299 Irish language, 219–20 Irish Literary Revival, 18, 149, 284, 358, 360–1, 362 Irish Melodies (Moore): FrenchCanadian influence on, 8; harp image in, 10, 82; national ­character in, 82, 91; political implications of, 81, 82, 99, 101; popularity of, 8, 83 Irish music, 81–2 Irish Patriots: emergence of, 13; Enlightenment ideal of, 47; on Irish cultural distinctiveness, 23–4, 149; Romantic nationalism and, 11–12 Irish pipes, 163 Irish Rebellion of 1798: consequences of, 15, 81, 82, 296; French involvement in, 26; goals of, 153; motives for, 99; roots of, 11, 12; supporters of, 235 Irish rebellion of 1848, 181, 226 Irish Republican Army, 221 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 336 Irish Tenant League, 264 Irish Vindicator (newspaper): Buchanan Affair, 142; Irish poetry in, 117–18, 119, 121,

32497_Holmgren.indd 432

126; “Ode to Hope,” 142; owner of, 115; political tone of, 116, 138; on Quebec politics, 164; solidarity with Indigenous ­communities, 19, 124, 128–30; “Violent Assault on Mr Kidd,” 137–8 Iroquois. See Haudenosaunee Jackson, Andrew, 144 Jameson, Anna, 251, 350 Jefferson, Thomas, 86, 259 Jenkins, William, 211 Johnson, Pauline, 274, 364 Joyce, James, 162 KamĪyistowesit (“Beardy”), Cree Chief, 311 Kanien’keha:ka, 11, 19, 52, 72–4, 93, 127–30, 132, 170, 253 Karonghyontye (David Hill), Kanien’keha:ka Chief, 11, 19, 74 Kavanagh, Patrick, 399n46 Kelly, Ronan, 8 Kelsay, Isabel, 72 Kelsey, Henry, 197 Kersten, Holger, 185 Kidd, Adam: accusations of plagiarism, 142, 143; admiration of Moore, 107; on Americans, 135, 136–7; attack on, 137–8, 140–1, 142; autobiographical essay, 110; background, 103, 109, 110; bardic tradition and, 109; Buchanan family and, 138–9, 140–1; canoe image in poetry of, 85, 123, 133; career of, 19, 110, 112; Catholic Emancipation and, 146; correspondence of, 124–5, 140–1; death of, 145; exile of,

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Index 433

105, 107–8; friends of, 110, 112; Friends of Ireland societies and, 117; immigration to Canada, 164; on Indigenous peoples, 19, 72, 125, 126, 127–8, 131, 346, 362; Irish patriotism of, 108, 118, 217; literary status of, 121, 145; mountain climbing, 111–12; obituary, 145; pen name, 117; perception of Canada, 114, 122–4, 176; poetry of, 7, 8, 117–18, 119–21, 143, 145; political activities, 114, 119–20, 145; Quebec society and, 113; reputation of, 143, 380n62; Romanticism of, 143; scholarship on, 378n11; travels of, 112, 143; use of oral records, 130–1, 132; view of emigration, 108, 110, 159 Kidd, Adam, works of: “Apostrophe to the Harp of Dennis Hampson, the Minstrel of MacGilligan,” 121–2; “AshKewa,” 123; “The Canadian Girl,” 122, 123; “Cathleen,” 120–1; “Farewell Lovely Erin,” 145; “The Hibernian Solitary,” 108–9, 110; The Huron Chief, and Other Poems, 122, 123, 124, 125–6, 325, 378n11, 379n38; “Monody to the Memory of the Rt Hon. George Canning,” 118; “My Irish Home,” 119, 120; “Ranglawe, the Roving Bard,” 377n5; “Red Jacket, The Celebrated Indian Chief,” 144; “A Reminiscent Tribute,” 112, 120, 124; “The Reminiscent Tribute of Friendship,” 379n28; “Spencer Wood,” 113

32497_Holmgren.indd 433

Kidd, Alexander, 145 Kilmallock, village of, 152 King, Jason, 12, 13, 35, 49, 128 King, John, 40 Kirke White, Henry, 114, 118 Kirwan, Richard, 24, 37, 39, 46 Kirwan, Walter Blake, 113 Klinck, Carl F., 113, 378n11 Koester, C.B., 297 Lachine Canal strike and riots, 178–9 Lafontaine, Louis, 184 Lampman, Archibald, 251, 276 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de, 246, 250 Leader, The (newspaper), 15, 306, 330, 393n2 League of Nations, 363 Ledwich, Edward: Antiquities of Ireland, 37 Leerssen, Joep, 50, 79, 91 Leitrim, county of, 205–7, 211, 216 Le Moine, James Macpherson, 276 Lennox, Georgiana, 55, 59, 60, 66, 75 Leprohon, Rosanna, 276; The Manor-House of Le Villerai, 33 Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, The (Moore), 11, 51, 83, 99–100 “Life’s Railway to Heaven” (song), 355, 398n46 Limerick, Treaty of, 132 Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, 113, 277 Lockean system of comprehension, 44 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 332 Lorette people, 131–2

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Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, 76 Lower Canada. See Quebec Luby, Thomas Clarke, 382n27 Lyons, George, 351, 354, 398n39, 398n41 Macauley, Thomas Babington, 234 MacCarthy, Anne, 240 Macdonald, John A., 169, 211, 217, 295, 308, 324, 330 Macdonald, John Sandfield, 217 MacDonnell, Alexander, 172 Machar, Agnes Maule: For King and Country, 71 Mackenzie, Alexander, 95, 195; General History of the Fur Trade, 96 MacMurrough, Art, 239, 247 Macpherson, James, 163; translations of Ossian, 10, 109–10 Mahdist War, 4–5 Mair, Charles, 228, 316 Manifest Destiny, 269 Manitoba: establishment of the province of, 293 Mannion, John, 369n20 Maxwell, Billy, 398n38 McCarroll, James: alter ego of, 204, 206, 207; on anti-Irish biases, 216–17; background and education, 205–6; “Bearla Feine,” 219–20; Black Hawk, 208; career of, 7, 184, 207–8, 220, 223; cultural nationalism of, 186, 211; D’Arcy McGee and, 208, 209–10, 216–17; death of, 223; The Dominion Orange Harmonist, 208; emigration of Canada, 205; Fenian movement

32497_Holmgren.indd 434

and, 217–18, 220, 222–3, 224; “Impromptu On seeing the Balloon Europa,” 215, 216; inventions of, 223; Irish characters of, 206, 209, 210, 211; John A. Macdonald and, 217; Letters of Terry Finnegan, 211; literary model for, 207; “Madeline,” 208; Madeline and Other Poems, 210, 223; move to Toronto, 218; on national identity, 208; The New Gauger, 207, 208; pen name of, 221; poem addressed to the Prince of Wales, 214–15, 219; political views of, 18, 205, 206–7, 214, 217, 220, 232; portrayal of the Celts, 215, 216; relocation to Buffalo, 220–1; reputation of, 223; “Resurgam,” 219; Ridgeway, 186, 207, 220, 221–2; satirical “Letters,” 210–11; “Three Loaded Dice,” 217; “To Moore,” 208–9; vernacular language of, 186, 204–5, 208, 213, 215–16, 219–20 McCarroll, Robert, 205 McCarthy, Denis Florence: The Book of Irish Ballads, 240, 246, 248 McCracken, Henry Joy, 111 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy: on American literature, 269, 273; assassination of, 227, 271, 272; biographical sketches, 239; Canada First movement and, 227–8; on Canadian literature, 185, 244–5, 268, 270; canoe image in poems of, 85; caricature of, 209–10; celebration of heroic countrymen, 261–2; on Celtic culture, 228, 236–7, 238;

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Index 435

characteristics of poetry of, 7, 282, 343; charges against, 226; concept of national literature, 209, 234–5, 302; criticism of, 208, 216–17, 224; on cultural nationalism, 237, 239; on distinctiveness of Canadian culture, 268–9; editorials of, 243–4, 253, 263, 273; emigration to America, 225, 229; family roots, 232; Fenianism and, 217–18, 242, 266–7, 271, 273; funeral of, 228, 271; historical works of, 238; on immigrants, 263; Indigenous ­culture, view of, 19, 259–60; influence of, 227–8; interpretations of Canadian character, 247–8; Irish-Canadian communities and, 242–3; journalistic career, 196, 208, 229–30, 243, 245; legacy of, 227; Moore’s influence on, 7, 8–9; on national identity, 10, 243; in New York, 241; Orangemen and, 213; ­oration to the Boston Repeal Association, 229; political career, 208, 217, 227, 260, 265–6; political views, 18, 202, 205, 211, 225– 6, 232, 242–3; portrayal of Irish in America, 241–2; as public intellectual, 230, 270–1; reputation of, 223–4, 225; research in British Library, 230–1, 238; Royal Irish Academy and, 14; speeches, 266–8, 270, 271, 304; survey of libraries, 268; tour to Ireland, 266; tribute to Duffy, 247, 262; tribute to Moore, 256–8; on use of negative Irish stereotypes, 192; on War of 1812, 260–1;

32497_Holmgren.indd 435

wife of, 248; Young Ireland and, 8, 226–7, 230, 231, 238–9, 242, 243 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, works of: “Along the Line,” 249, 260, 261, 281, 282; “An International Song,” 261, 262; “Apostrophe to the Boyne,” 262, 265; “The Arctic Indian’s Faith,” 202, 252, 259; “Arm and Rise,” 258–9; The Book of Irish Ballads, 240; Canadian Ballads, and Occasional Verses, 196, 235, 240, 245–7, 264; “Canadian melodies,” 260; The Catholic History of North America, 242; “The Celts,” 236, 252; “The Death of Hudson,” 199, 250–1; Eva MacDonald, 232–3, 238; “The Famine in the Land,” 388n45; “Freedom’s Journey,” 260, 261; “God Be Praised,” 209; History of the Attempts to Establish the Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 241; A History of the Irish Settlers in North America, 241, 242; The Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century, 238–9, 247; “Jacques Cartier,” 249; “Jacques Cartier to the Child,” 249; “The Launch of the Griffin,” 249–50, 252; ­legends and folktales in, 255–6; A Memoir of the Life and Conquests of Art Mac Murrough, 238; “A National Literature for Canada,” 245; “Our Ladye of the Snow,” 195, 199, 252, 253–5; Popular History of Ireland, 266; “Salutation to the Celts,” 237;

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436 Index

“The Sea Captain,” 256; “Sebastian Cabot to His Lady,” 248, 249; sublime of the North in, 251; “Thomas Moore at St Anne’s,” 8, 9, 256–7, 259, 261; “To A Friend in Australia,” 262–3 McGuire, Hugh, 145 McLachlan, Alexander, 268 McLean, David, 26, 27 McLean, Mary, 393n2 McLeod, Alexander, 221 McNab, Allan, 168 McNamee, Francis Bernard, 217 Métis peoples: assimilation of, 22; identity of, 292–3; national ­aspirations of, 328; political ambitions of, 326–7; resistance to colonization, 19, 324 Mill, John Stuart: Ireland and England, 335 Milnes, Robert, 88 Mistahimuskwa (“Big Bear”), Cree Chief, 311 Mohawks. See Kanien’keha:ka Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Earl of, 78, 83, 84, 85, 91–2 Moll, Sorouja, 323, 324 Molson, John, 177, 178 Molson family: business affairs of, 139 Montgomery, Richard, 262 Montreal: festivals, 285–6, 287, 288; immigrant community, 289, 293; missionary conception of, 289; snowshoe clubs, 4, 288; winter tourism, 286–7 Montreal Friends of Ireland society, 115 Montreal Gazette, 137–8, 142, 275

32497_Holmgren.indd 436

Montreal Literary Magazine, 275 Montreal Transcript, The, 171–2, 178 Moodie, Susanna, 32, 188 Moore, Jane, 51, 97 Moore, Thomas: on American ­society, 86, 87–8; biography of Lord Fitzgerald, 7, 10–11, 51, 52–3, 56, 75, 78–9, 99–101, 373n1; canoe image in poetry of, 84–5, 93, 95; career of, 78, 83, 84, 88; critique of, 87–8; cultural nationalism and, 12, 81–2; ­depiction of Canada, 7–8, 35, 53, 90–1, 92–4, 101; education, 79, 188; Edward Hudson and, 82; Indigenous culture, view of, 91, 94–5; influence of, 95–6, 104, 107, 143, 145; Irish Rebellion and, 12; McCarroll’s tribute to, 208–9; McGee’s tribute to, 256–8; on national character, 88; patrons of, 78, 83, 84, 91, 92–3; poetry of, 10, 98–9, 105; political ­activism, 12; political views of, 73, 79–80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 99; reputation of, 78, 83; Robert Emmet and, 79, 81; satirical works of, 104, 207; Society of United Irishmen and, 79–81; Thomas Jefferson and, 86; ­translations of Anacreon’s odes, 82–3; travels of, 30, 78, 83, 84–6, 87, 88, 92–3, 104 Moore, Thomas, works of: “Ballad Stanzas” (“The Woodpecker Poem”), 8, 89, 90, 257; “O Breathe Not his Name,” 126; “Canadian Ballads,” 199; “The Canadian Boat Song,” 7, 8,

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Index 437

72, 95, 96–7, 203, 257, 352–3, 355, 377n52; Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, 85, 86; “Epistle to Charlotte Rawdon,” 250; “The Fire Dwellers,” 125; folk culture and, 85, 97–8, 399n46; Irish Melodies, 8, 10, 53, 81, 82–3, 91, 99, 101, 247; “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” 84–5; Lalla Rookh, 53, 81, 125; “Letter to the Students of Trinity College,” 79; Memoirs of Captain Rock, 207; “She is Far from the Land,” 126; “To the Lady Charlotte Rawdon, from the Banks of the St Lawrence,” 92–3 moose hunt, 11 Morgan, Henry, 205, 227 Morse, Jedidiah, 95 Mountain, George Jehoshaphat, 112, 113 Mourne Mountains, 111 Moylan, James, 218 Murphy, Mike, 211, 218 Nagle, Garrett “Ned,” 163 nation: concept of, 234, 366 Nation (journal), 221, 239, 240, 241 national identity, 9, 237, 302 national literature, 9, 10, 234, 235, 305 Navajo Nation, 400n12 Neilson, Samuel, 107 Nelson, Wolfred, 165–6 New Era (newspaper), 196, 208, 235, 243, 245, 246, 253, 263, 265–6, 268, 269 Newton, Isaac, 27

32497_Holmgren.indd 437

Niagara Falls: “Maid of the Mist” boat tour, 84–5; poetic description of, 94; sublime potential of, 168; as tourist attraction, 70–1 North American scenery: sublime depictions of, 29, 252 North-West Resistance, 5, 15, 21, 296–7, 311, 314, 332 Notman, William, 4, 11, 277 O’Brien, William Smith, 226, 227, 243, 296 O’Callaghan, Edmund Bailey, 116, 165, 166, 229 O’Carolan, Turlough, 206 O’Connell, Daniel: Catholic Association of, 115, 118, 379n21; emancipation movement of, 99, 114, 146, 148, 207, 220; followers of, 104, 166; life in Derrynane, 162; Repeal movement, 225, 229, 231; reputation of, 105, 164; Tipperary oration, 126; Young Ireland and, 241 O’Connor, Arthur, 76, 296 O’Curry, Eugene, 230, 231, 236 O’Dea, Patrick, 220 O’Donovan, John, 230, 231, 236 O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah, 360 O’Flaherty, Roderick: Ogygia, or A Chronological Account of Irish Events, 37 O’Flanagan, Theophilus, 163–4 O’Gallagher, Marianna, 17 ogham stones, 50, 109 Ogilvie, William, 55 O’Grady, Eliza, 149 O’Grady, John, 149 O’Grady Bennett, Standish: “The Coroner and the Ghost,” 161;

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death of, 150, 179–80, 181; depiction of Canada, 176; education of, 149–50, 380n1; emancipation movement and, 148; The Emigrant, 13, 104, 146, 147–8; exile of, 105; Fitzgibbon and, 154; idealization of the past, 160; immigration to Canada, 146, 147, 148, 164; on Indigenous people, 171; on Irish hospitality, 162; on Irish legal system, 161; on Irish Rebellion, 153; in Montreal, 178, 179; Moore’s influence on, 7; on Papineau, 167–8, 169; Petition of the Protestants, 150–1, 178; poems of, 7, 14, 382n30; on political corruption, 382n29; political views of, 148–9, 156, 158; religious views of, 151; Robert Emmet and, 153; self-identification of, 18, 146, 149, 151, 380n1; “Shanty Song,” 175, 176; in Sorel, 162, 165–6; on St Lawrence River, 176; on technological progress, 177–8; tithe ­system and, 146–7, 148, 158, 381n6; Trinity College inquisition and, 153–4; on upper-class gatherings, 163; view of French Canadians, 174–7, 181 O’Halloran, Sylvester, 24 O’Mahony, John, 218 O’Neill, John, 221, 273, 343–4 Orange Protestants, 18, 265 Orr, James, 114, 145; “The Irishman,” 107 Orr, William, 153, 296 Osgoode, William, 39, 40

32497_Holmgren.indd 438

Ossian: representation of, 131; Romantic era’s interest in, 97; translations of, 10, 163–4 Oui-ara-lih-to, Lorette Chief, 131 Owenson, Sidney (Lady Morgan): The Wild Irish Girl, 122 Paine, Thomas, 75, 98, 100, 101 Papineau, Amédée, 165 Papineau, Louis-Joseph: criticisms of, 167–8, 191; negotiation with Americans, 167, 168–9; NinetyTwo Resolutions, 167; political activity of, 166–7, 180, 184; rebellion of, 166, 171; supporters of, 166–7 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 298–9, 320 Patriot Parliament (Grattan’s Parliament), 23, 25, 79, 173, 320; foundation of, 12, 156; leaders of, 148, 164; poetic representation of, 154 Pearse, Pádraig, 362 Peel, Robert, 158, 230, 234 Pepper, George, 117 Peterman, Michael, 193, 194, 205, 206 Petrie, George, 230, 231, 236 Pitt, William, the Younger, 154, 158 Poland uprising of 1830, 169 Pomeroy, F.W., 3 Pomian, Krzysztof: Collectors and Curiosities, 45 Ponsonby, George, 150, 155 Porter, James, 107, 145 Portora Royal School, 275 Poulter, Gillian, 197, 198 Prescott, Robert, 27; Dickson and, 39, 40, 42, 372n18; natural history cabinet of, 42, 44, 45, 46–7, 49

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Index 439

Prevost, George, 129 primitive poetry, 10 primitive societies, 24 Prophesy of Merlin and Other Poems, The (Reade): on Fenian violence, 277, 278; idea of Canadian unity, 281; reference to King Arthur, 278–9, 280; reviews, 277; Tennyson’s influence of, 277; tribute to McGee, 272, 277–8, 279; vision of Canada, 279–80 Prouville de Tracy, Alexandre de, 253 public libraries, 268 Punch in Canada (journal): depiction of Canadian life, 190–1; editor of, 183–4, 190; French-Canadian characters in, 193; illustrations, 190; introduction to the public, 191; Irish stereotypes in, 191–2, 193–4, 209; mascot of, 190–1; move to Toronto, 203; racist terms and images, 191; on Rebellion Losses Bill, 183–4; representation of Canadian culture, 183–4, 196; targets of, 184 Quebec: colonial administration, 27; economic refugees, 165; fear of foreign invasion, 26–7, 135–6; Friend of Ireland society in, 117; intelligence system, 27; Irish communities, 40–1, 114, 163–4, 178; literary life, 113; poetic exploration of landscape, 254–5; political movements, 165; promotion of science and education, 39–40, 48; quarantine stations, 165; social unrest, 14, 166; suspension of habeas corpus, 26

32497_Holmgren.indd 439

railway: poetic imagery of, 353, 354–5, 398nn45–6 “Railway Spiritualized, The” (anonymous poem and song), 354, 398n45 Raine, Craig, 349 Rawdon, Lady Charlotte, 83, 85, 91 Reade, John, 7; background and education, 274–5; British values of, 277; Canada First movement and, 228; on Canadian nation, 281–2, 285, 287, 289, 293; on Celts, 315; concept of Northern nation, 286; correspondence of, 275–6; on cultural exchange, 291, 292; emigration to Canada, 275; interest in French Canada, 281, 283, 292–3; Irish connection, 274; on Irish culture, 20, 260, 284; journalistic career, 275; nationalism of, 274; nostalgia of, 275; patriotism of, 277, 280–1, 282; popularity, 227; promotion of study of history, 283; as public intellectual, 275, 277; on Red River Colony, 292; Royal Society of Canada and, 14, 277, 283, 289–90; scholarship of, 228; study of folklore, 277, 289; view of human history, 290–1 Reade, John, works of: “Devenish,” 275; “Drumhariff Hill,” 275; “The Fenian Raid: June, 1866,” 278; “The Half-Breed,” 291; “Hastings,” 281, 290; “In Memoriam – T.D. McGee,” 272, 278, 282; “The Intermingling of Races” article, 290; “Jacques Cartier,” 286, 288; “Killynoogan,” 275; “Madeleine de Verchères,” 281–2, 283; “The Making of

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440 Index

Canada,” 274, 289–90; “The Prophesy of Merlin,” 274; The Prophesy of Merlin and Other Poems, 272, 277–81, 290; “The Winter Carnival,” 286, 287, 288–9 Reaney, James, 351 Rebellion Losses Bill of 1848, 183–4 Red River Colony. See Selkirk Settlement Red River Expedition, 5 Red River Rebellion of 1869, 289, 293, 307 Reform Party, 184 Repeal movement, 225, 229 residential schools, 308–9, 310, 324, 328–9 Ridgeway, Battle of, 221, 272 Riel, Louis: execution of, 289, 296; on Indigenous and Métis peoples, 326; interview with, 295–6; ­public perception of, 333; ­resistance movement of, 5, 15, 21, 293, 323; trial of, 296, 393n2 Roberts, Charles G.D., 203, 276, 296, 359; “Canada,” 5, 6, 258, 303; Songs of the Common Day, 314; “Young Canada” project, 9 Romantic poetry, 6, 8, 97–8 Romney, George, 72 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 55, 74, 75 Rowan, Archibald Hamilton, 151 Royal Dublin Society, 189 Royal Irish Academy, 13, 24, 37, 49, 230–1, 289 Royal Society of Canada, 14, 277, 283, 289–90 Russell, Thomas, 26, 103, 104, 360

32497_Holmgren.indd 440

Sadlier, Mary Anne, 227, 276 Sangster, Charles, 268 Sawennowane, Thomas, 129, 130 Sawtell, Ethelind, 162 Sawtell, Luther, 162 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 10, 236, 244; Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, 235 Schoultz, Nils Gustaf von, 169–70, 383n48 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 185, 331 Selkirk Settlement, 292 Senior, Olive, 171 Service, Robert, 251 settler society, 34–5, 59–61 Seven Oaks, Battle of, 292 “Shamus O’Brien” fiddle tune, 399n46 Shanly, Charles Dawson, 7; artistic pursuits, 189; background and education, 187–9, 205; Canadian experiences of, 195–7, 198, 202; cartoons of, 209; characteristics of Anglo Saxons, 192–3; “Civil War,” 386n42; cultural nationalism of, 186; death of, 195; editorial work, 183–4, 190, 192, 193, 196, 203; emigration in Canada, 187, 188, 189; “Kitty of Coleraine,” 206; “A Lay of Egges,” 195; literary career, 183–4, 190, 191, 202–3, 385n10; in Montreal, 197; personality of, 187; poetic language of, 186, 194, 331; reputation of, 203; Romantic ballads, 194–5, 197, 198; “The Truant Chicken,” 203; use of folklore, 386n39; “The Walker of the Snow,” 9,

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Index 441

195, 196, 198, 349–50; “Winter in Canadian Forests,” 195; “Winter in Quebec,” 195, 197 Shanly, Francis, 190 Shanly, James, 188, 189, 190 Shanly, Walter, 187, 188, 189, 190, 203 Shanly, William, 189 Shiel, Richard, 115 Six Nations: fight for sovereignty, 50, 363–5, 366; Irish connections, 364, 365, 400n12; leaders of, 363; petition to the League of Nations, 363 Slieve Gallion mountain, 109 Small, Tony, 55, 61, 68 Smith, Goldwin, 296, 357 Smith, William Wye: “The Canadians on the Nile,” 7 snowshoeing, 4, 197–8 Society of the Friends of Ireland in Canada, 115 Society of United Irishmen: ­criticism of, 119; Fitzgerald and, 53, 76, 373n5; government persecution of, 77, 79, 80–1; leaders of, 6, 118; literary ­traditions of, 15, 107; Moore and, 79–81; negotiations with the French, 15; in Newfoundland, influence of, 370n20; principles of, 12–13; program of cultural nationalism, 14, 81, 82; supporters of, 14–15, 26 Sonnintiowane, Thomas, 129 Sorel, village of, 162, 165–6 Southey, Robert, 71 Spillane, Davy: Shadow Hunter album, 195

32497_Holmgren.indd 441

Spirit of the Nation, The (anthology), 236, 239 Sproat, Granville T., 332 stage-Irish vernacular, 184, 194, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, 223, 330 Stanley Street in Toronto, 211, 212 Stephens, James, 218 Stevenson, John, 83 St George’s Society, 302 Stockley, William F., 358, 359, 360, 361 Story, Eliza, 150 St Patrick’s Society of Montreal, 178, 179, 266 Strickland, Samuel, 332 “Sweet Betsey from Pike” ballad, 351 Symes, Henry, 110, 111–12, 113 Synge, John Millington, 210 Tait, Charles, 177, 178 Tandy, Napper, 79 Tate, William, 25 Tecumseh, 135, 379n38, 398n45 Teeling, Charles Hamilton, 231 Tennyson, Alfred: Idylls of the King, 277 Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), Kanien’kehá:ka Chief, 19, 50, 72, 73–4, 363, 397n29 Thierry, Augustin, 235 “third man” syndrome, 200, 352, 386n43, 398n41 Thuente, Mary Helen, 81, 125 Tiffany, H., 302 Tillman, Charles D., 398n46 Tillyard, Stella, 75 Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 79, 296; diplomacy of, 25, 76; Irish

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442 Index

uprising and, 26, 92, 111; McGee on, 232–3; United Irishmen and, 25, 79, 118, 119 Toner, Peter, 18, 370n31 Toronto: cholera epidemic, 212; Irish community, 211–12; poetic image of, 340–1; Prince of Wales’s visit to, 214 Torrance, John, 177 Tracey, Daniel, 110, 115, 164, 165 Traill, Catharine Parr, 189, 332 Trail of Tears, 364, 400n12 Treaty Six, 311 Trehearne, Brian, 146, 150, 176, 380n1, 381n6 Trinity College: expulsions from, 80–1; medical library, 38; natural history collection, 43; prominent students of, 188; “Resolutions of the Independent Scholars and Students of Trinity College” pamphlet, 154–5; students’ visits to Irish Parliament, 154 Truth and Reconciliation process, 21, 310 Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of, 343, 345 Tyrrell, Seán, 195 Ulster, 20, 103, 111, 232, 233 United Columbia conspiracy, 40 United Irish organization. See Society of United Irishmen University of New Brunswick: ­literary community at, 357 Upper Canada Rebellion, 169–70, 173–4 Urquhart, Jane, 17, 19 Urschel, Katrin, 297

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Vail, Jeffery W., 86, 87 Valera, Éamon de, 366 Vallancey, Charles, 24 Vance, Norman, 232 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 3 Vigneault, Gilles, 248 Virgo, Sean, 248 voyageurs: authentic songs of, 96, 97, 377n52; as icon of Canadian nationality, 32; in literary imagination, 7–8, 9, 96 Walker, John Henry, 190 “Walker of the Snow, The ” (Shanly): ambiguity of, 200, 201; archaic elements of, 201; Canadian wilderness in, 195, 196, 198–200, 201–2; death motif in, 349–50; painting inspired by, 386n39; popularity of, 195, 196, 203; publication of, 195; rhythm of, 198; Shadow Hunter figure, 198, 200, 386n39; source of inspiration, 196; ­targeted audience of, 196; “third man” factor in, 386n43, 398n41; traditional tune of, 398n38 Waller, Jocelyn, 114, 117 wampum belts, 50 Warburton, George: The Conquest of Canada, 239, 247 Washington, George, 107 Waters, Maureen, 193 Weir, Arthur, 276 Weld, Isaac: background of, 27; on British presence in North America, 41, 89–90; depiction of Canada, 7, 8, 32, 35, 243; description of waterways, 32, 33; emigration plans, 12, 15;

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Index 443

on freedoms of religion, 99; on French Canadians, 34; Illustrations of Killarney and the Surrounding Country, 29; on Indigenous communities, 34–5; influence of, 30, 33, 49; North American journey, 6, 12, 13–14, 15, 29–31; Royal Irish Academy and, 13, 29; on settler culture, 30; topographical surveys of Ireland, 14, 28, 29; Travels through the states of North America, 7, 14, 27–8, 29, 30, 31–2; on Ursuline convent, 32; on voyageur culture, 33 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 280 Wendat (Huron) nation, 127 Western settlement: promotion of, 316, 355–6 Whelan, Patrick, 271 Whig social circle, 78 White, Richard, 34, 188 Whiteboys (secret Irish organization), 166 Whitman, Walt, 203

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Wilde, William, 275 Wilson, David, 227, 232, 242, 252 Wolseley, Joseph Garnet, 5 Wordsworth, William, 71; “The Solitary Reaper,” 97–8 Woulfe, Stephen, 234, 313 Wright, Julia, 12, 246 Yeats, W.B., 78, 162, 188, 350, 399n46; “September 1913,” 51 Yelverton, Barry, 151–2, 153; Bildungsroman, 152 Young Ireland: achievements of, 267–8; cultural nationalism of, 226, 234, 235–6, 239, 241, 282; cultural program, 8, 209, 229, 242, 283, 289; foundation of, 227, 231; German Romantic ­philosophy and, 10; literary ­criticism and historiography of, 282; political agenda, 225–6; publications of, 208, 236, 237, 238, 239–40, 241; support of Repeal movement, 225; view of national poetry, 9, 10

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32497_Holmgren.indd 444

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