The Exiles of Erin

Nineteenth Century Irish-American Fiction

Charles Fanning

• Publisher: Dufour Editions
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780802360601
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Of immense value to anyone interested in the Irish story in America.--The Boston Globe. This collection of three generations of Irish immigrant fiction excerpted from novels, magazines, and newspapers provides new insight into the nineteenth-century immigrant experience. It captures the spirit of those who were experiencing the traumas of adjustment and assimilation. The men and women authors of these pieces vividly render the details of immigrant life in a variety of settings, from Virginia and Nebraska to San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston, from 1820 to 1906. Fanning places each selection in its historical and cultural context by means of introductory notes. Together, they provide the most extended, continuous body of literature available to us by members of a single American ethnic group. This new edition provides some additional selections as well as new background material. Charles Fanning is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

PART I

Before the Famine: Satiric Voices

An Irish-American voice first sounds clearly in a broadside hawked on the streets of New York in 1769: “The Irishmen’s Petition, To the Honourable Commissioners of Excise, &c.”

The humble petition of Patrick O’Conner, Blany O’Bryan, and Carney Macguire, to be appointed Inspectors and Over-lookers for the port of — And whereas we your aforesaid petitioners will both by night and by day, and all night, and all day, and we will come and go, and walk, and ride, and take, and bring, and send, and fetch, and carry, and see all, and more than all, and every thing, and nothing at all, such goods, and commodities as may be, and cannot be liable to pay duty; and whereas we your aforesaid petitioners will at all times and at every time, and no time and times, we will be present and be absent, and be backward and forward, and behind, and before, and no where, and everywhere, and here, and there, and no where at all; and whereas your aforesaid petitioners will come and inform, and give information and notice duly and truly to the matter, as we know, and do not know, and by the knowledge of every one and no one; and we will not rob or cheat the king any more than is now lawfully practised; and whereas we your petitioners are gentlemen, and value him, and we will fight for him, and run for him, and from him, to serve him or any of his acquaintances, as far, and much farther than lies in our power, dead or alive, as long as we live. Witness our several and separate hands, one and all three of us both together.1

The piece is signed with four names, but it had a single author, Irish immigrant Lawrence Sweeney, who was a noted character in New York City journalism, known as “The Penny Post Boy” because he charged a penny for delivering mail, and as “Bloody Sweeney” for his habit of calling out gory headlines of the fighting during the French and Indian Wars. He also stirred up trouble by secretly distributing the seditious newspaper The Constitutional Courant during the Stamp Act agitation of 1765. Sweeney’s broadside is a parody of bureaucratic jargon which satirizes the toadying of Tory office-seekers and sets the tone for Irish-American literature before the Famine. Another early contributor to this largely humorous vein was immigrant publisher Mathew Carey, who wrote hilarious satiric pamphlets, including The Plagi-Scurriliad: A Hudibrastic Poem (1786), an attack against a fellow Philadelphia publisher, and The Porcupiniad (1799), in which he accuses essayist William Cobbett (who wrote as “Peter Porcupine”) of generating anti-Irish propaganda under orders from the British government.2

Thanks to an eighteenth-century Irish immigration of over 400,000, an Irish presence in American publishing was firmly established by the turn of the nineteenth century. Books of Irish history, folklore, antiquarianism, and popular verse were generally available, and much of the early material was reprinted from Irish or British sources. There were immediate American editions of two standard histories from Protestant Ascendancy perspectives, Thomas Leland’s History of Ireland (1774) and Francis Plowden’s Historical Review of the State of Ireland (1805-06). Shortly after the 1798 rising, revisionist, anti-British histories of Ireland, often penned by fugitive rebels, began to appear. A famous early example was Pieces of Irish History, a detailed apologia for their cause published in 1807 by exiled United Irishmen William James MacNeven and Thomas Addis Emmet.3

The early folktales and myths tended to exemplify what has persisted as the most marketable manifestation of Ireland in the American book trade: supposedly picturesque swatches of local color and legendry, replete with turf-fires, fairs, and fairies. All manner of Celtic flotsam and jetsam surfaced in the American periodical press in the later eighteenth century, and original anthologies soon followed.4 The earliest Irish-American piece may be an eight-page pamphlet, one of a number of millennial prophecies of Ireland’s deliverance from her sufferings: Old Irelands Misery at an End; or, The English Empire in the Brazils Restored (Boston: sold at the Heart and Crown, 1752).

Poems, Irish and Irish-American, appeared in virtually every newspaper and periodical with Irish or Catholic leanings throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The stock-in-trade of such verse was the immigrant’s lament for an idealized homeland and the patriot’s impassioned plea for Irish freedom from British oppression. Such materials make good songs, but bad poems — poems that hover between sentimentality and bathos and exhibit in unseemly nakedness strains of pure nostalgia and righteous indignation.5

A similar static element informs the renderings of Irish-American experience and character in the nineteenth-century American theater. The bibulous, blarneying, and belligerent “stage Irishman” is a familiar figure, early and late. He appears as the braggart soldier in plays of the Revolutionary War, the song-and-dance man popularized by Tyrone Power in the 1830s and John Brougham in the 1840s, the intrepid, brawling volunteer firefighter, “Mose, the Bowery B’hoy,” in the 1850s, and some of the Sixth-Ward New Yorkers of Edward Harrigan’s Mulligan plays in the 1870s and 1880s. Irish-American drama did evolve after the Civil War to include more realistic treatments of ethnic life in plays by Harrigan, Augustin Daly, and others. The stage Irish caricature persisted through the century, however, especially on the popular stage of vaudeville and minstrelsy. Not until the late, “Irish” plays of Eugene O’Neill, notably A Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day’s Journey into Night, was the stage-Irish mold truly broken.6

Still and all, these two extreme, opposing portraits from poetry and theater — the melancholy figure of the suffering exile and the comic figure of the stage Irishman — have been an undeniable part of Irish-American identity from the earliest to the most recent migrations. Both portraits — “Those masterful images because complete” (Yeats’s phrase) — have cast their exaggerated shadows over all the fiction collected in this book. And yet, the insistent demand on the novelist, especially the nineteenth-century practitioner, to convey a realistic world makes even the least accomplished examples of this fiction worth examining for clarification of what it has felt like to be Irish in America, all along the way.

From the earliest days Irish literature was readily available in the United States, often appearing immediately after initial publication in Dublin or London. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), which marked the beginning of serious Irish fiction, had separate American editions as far apart as 1814 and 1904, with several others in between. Very popular in America were the flamboyantly romantic “national tales” of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Her Dublin and London bestseller, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), was published the following year in New York and Philadelphia in five separate editions. Also widely available in America were the works of Ireland’s other nineteenth-century novelists, the Banim Brothers, Gerald Griffin, and William Carleton, whose masterpiece Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (published in Ireland in 1830 and 1833) had American editions as early as 1833 and 1834. The novels of the two most successful nineteenth-century perpetrators of Irish caricature, Samuel Lover and Charles Lever, were also perennially popular, at least among non-Irish readers. Both received the blessing of the American literary establishment in the form of gorgeously printed, multi-volume collectors’ editions from Boston’s prestigious Little, Brown and Company. In addition, Irish fiction appeared frequently throughout the nineteenth century in a wide range of American periodicals, from Catholic and Irish nationalist weeklies to mainstream magazines and newspapers.

Despite its ready availability, however, contemporary Irish fiction did not significantly influence Irish-American writers in the three decades before the Great Hunger. Satire, though present, was not the strongest suit of Edgeworth, the Banims, Griffin, or Carleton, and the effect in Lever and Lover is less satirical than broad-brush burlesque in the stage-Irish tradition. And yet it was toward a habit of sophisticated satire that their American cousins gravitated. Not that this tendency was wholly unexpected. Rather, pre-Famine Irish-American satire was both a natural response to American conditions and the translation to the New World of a profoundly Irish habit of mind that had merely gone underground for a generation in Ireland. Satire has been central in Irish writing in both Gaelic and English, from the early bards whose poetic ridicule was feared for its magical power to Brian Merriman’s hilarious cultural and sexual satire, Cúirt an Mheón-Oíche (The Midnight Court) of 1781, and from Jonathan Swift to James Joyce and Flann O’Brien.7

Five of the six writers in Part I of this anthology, all of them newly discovered, followed the lead of Lawrence Sweeney, Mathew Carey, and their Irish forebears by publishing fascinating books that establish satiric content and parodic form as central to the first Irish-American literary generation. The Life and Travels of Father Quipes, Otherwise Dominick O’Blarney (1820) and The Life of Paddy O’Flarrity (1834) are engaging picaresque tales which satirize the immigrant’s dream of success and the venality of political aspiration by parodying American campaign biography. Six Months in a House of Correction; or, the Narrative of Dorah Mahoney (1835) parodies the anti-Catholic fiction of “awful disclosures” about convent life and derides the nativist impulse as manifested in the burning of the Charlestown convent the previous year. Set in Ireland, The Priest’s Turf-Cutting Day (1841) by Thomas C. Mack thoroughly exposes demogoguery from the Catholic Sunday sermon, to Ascendancy bureaucracy double-speak, to the Irish nationalist stump speech. And John M. Moore’s The Adventures of Tom Stapleton (1842) pokes good-natured fun at many aspects of American and Irish-American social, political, and literary life, while parodying a range of New York dialects and the conventions of popular, sentimental fiction.

All of these books also undermine native American stereotypes of the Irish by reproducing them in exaggerated comic versions, even as they display a further dimension of comic self-satire, an acknowledgment that the Irish do, in fact, drink, fight, blarney, and backbite, perhaps to excess. As a group, this cluster of entertaining treatments of sensitive subjects (Catholicism, nativism, nationalism, political corruption, and unattractive aspects of Irish identity) suggests that this first Irish-American literary generation and its audience were sophisticated, highly literate, confident, and unthreatened by the strange, new American culture in which they found themselves. This was an immigrant generation that could laugh at itself, at its foreign background, and at native American prejudices against it.

The last piece in Part I reflects the heavy early emigration from the North of Ireland. A story of Ulster immigrants to western Pennsylvania at the time of the French and Indian War, The Wilderness (1823) is the first novel of James McHenry (1785-1845), himself an Ulster immigrant and the first Irishman to undertake a career as an American novelist. McHenry’s Irish characters in American settings (primarily in The Wilderness) and in eighteenth-century Irish historical settings (in O’Halloran; or, The Insurgent Chief, 1824, and The Hearts of Steel, 1825) are pioneering attempts to define Irishness for an American audience.8

1. “The Irishmen’s Petition, To the Honourable Commissioners of Excise, &c.” New York, 1769 (Evans 11485, American Antiquarian Society). See Michael J. O’Brien, In Old New York: The Irish Dead in Trinity and St. Paul’s Churchyards (New York: American Irish Historical Society, 1928), 64.

2. Mathew Carey, The Plagi-Scurriliad: A Hudibrastic Poem. Dedicated to Col. Eleazer Oswald (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by the author, 16 January 1786); The Porcupiniad: A Hudibrastic Poem in Four Cantos. Addressed to Mr. William Cobbett (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by the author, 2 March 1799 and 15 April 1799). Born in Dublin in 1760 and trained there as a printer, Mathew Carey came to Philadelphia in 1784 and became one of the most successful publishers and booksellers of his time, with Dickens, Scott, Irving, and Cooper on his list, as well as the Douay Bible and Moore’s Irish Melodies. See Thomas N. Brown, “The Irish Layman” in A History of Irish Catholicism: The United States of America (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1970), 57-59.

3. Thomas Leland, The History of Ireland from the Invasion of Henry II, 4 vols. (Philadelphia and New York: H. Gaine, R. Bell, and J. Dunlap, 1774). Francis P. Plowden, An Historical Review of the State of Ireland, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: William F. McLaughlin, 1805-06). William James MacNeven and Thomas Addis Emmet, Pieces of Irish History, Illustrative of the Condition of the Catholics of Ireland, or the Origin and Progress of the Political System of the United Irishmen; and of their Other Transactions with the Anglo-Irish Government (New York: Bernard Bornin, 1807).

4. Among the early anthologies are Beauties of the Shamrock, Containing Biography, Eloquence, Essays, And Poetry (Philadelphia: Bartholomew Graves, for William D. Conway, 1812), and Tales of the Emerald Isle; or, Legends of Ireland, by A Lady of Boston (New York: W.Borradaile, November 1828).

5. A representative nineteenth-century collection of Irish and Irish-American poetry, with a clarifying introduction by one of its best practitioners, is The Poetry and Song of Ireland, with Biographical Sketches of Her Poets, compiled and edited by John Boyle O’Reilly (New York: Gay Brothers & Co., 1887).

6. Edward Harrigan’s cycle of eight plays about the Mulligan family and their neighbors on New York’s lower East Side, from The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879) to Dan’s Tribulations (1884), is a rich source of information about urban, ethnic working-class life. The definitive source of bibliographic information about nineteenth-century Irish-American and other ethnic drama is Joyce Flynn, “Melting Plots: Patterns of Racial and Ethnic Amalgamation in American Drama Before Eugene O’Neill,” American Quarterly 38: 3 (1986), 417-38.

7. See Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), and David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). For clarification and extension of this tradition to include Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Sean O’Casey, and Brendan Behan, see Maureen Waters, The Comic Irishman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).

8. The Wilderness is actually the second Irish-American novel. The first is The Irish Emigrant (Winchester, Va.: John T. Sharrocks, 1817) by “An Hibernian,” the story of an Ulster patriot’s flight from the 1798 Rising in County Antrim to a comfortable life on a Potomac River estate. A turgidly written, sentimental tale of love and adventure, this novel introduces an archetypal pattern for Irish-American fiction: the sorrowing farewell to Erin, a transitional sea-change, and the dazed, wondering arrival in the New World. It is otherwise unremarkable, except that the Ulster-born hero is a Catholic. It has been attributed to one “Adam Douglass,” whose name appears on the copyright page.

The Life and Travels of Father Quipes, Otherwise Dominick O’Blarney

Written by Himself (Carlisle, Pa.: Printed for the Purchaser, 1820)

Printed anonymously, this fascinating immigrant’s picaresque tale takes its hero from County Kerry to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with stops along the way in Galway, Sligo, and (thanks to a British press gang) Ceylon. The good father’s story is told with some wit and, for its time, audacious candor about country matters, and its satiric targets include the habits of the Pennsylvania Dutch, American political electioneering, and the fad for impossibly romantic novels. Only thirty of the book’s thirty-two small pages survive, and all but five are reprinted here. A promised sequel — “for though old in vice, I am yet young in years” — seems not to have been written. The book has been ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Introduction
• PART I. BEFORE THE FAMINE: SATIRIC VOICES
• PART II. THE FAMINE GENERATION: PRACTICAL FICTION FOR IMMIGRANTS
• PART III. THE THIRD GENERATION: LITERATURE FOR A NEW MIDDLE CLASS
• Plate Section