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Dickens, Ireland and the Irish
Leon Litvack
Background reading: Litvack, Leon. ‘Dickens, Ireland and the Irish, Parts I and II’. Dickensian 99.1 (2003): 34-59, 99.2 (2003): 6-22.
1. Letters of Charles Dickens, voi. 8, pp. 637-9; dated 25 August 1858.
In this letter to his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, Dickens says, ‘I have become a wonderful Irishman—must play an Irish part some day’. In the same letter he includes a dialogue with a young boy, which embodies a theatricality that informs the wish he expresses:
INIMITABLE. Holloa old chap.
YOUNG IRELAND. Hal-loo!
INIMITABLE (in his delightful way). What a nice old fellow you are. I am very fond of little boys.
YOUNG IRELAND. Air yes? Ye’r right.
......
INIMITABLE. I say, old boy! Wasn’t it you I saw on Sunday morning in the hall, in a soldier’s cap? You know!—In a soldier’s cap?
YOUNG IRELAND (cogitating deeply). Was it a very good cap?
INIMITABLE. Yes.
YOUNG IRELAND. Did it fit ankommon?
INIMITABLE. Yes.
YOUNG IRELAND. Dat was me!
2. Charles Dickens, American Notes, chap. 6
In his survey of New York, he espies ‘two labourers in holiday clothes’, of whom he says:
Irishmen both! You might know them, if they were masked, by their long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons, and their drab trousers, which they wear like men well used to working dresses, who are easy in no others. It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen and countrywomen of those two labourers. For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement!
3. Charles Dickens, American Notes, chap. 11
An encounter with the Irish on a journey from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati on a steamboat, and then describes a temperance parade in Cincinnati in which the Irish were prominent:
I was particularly pleased to see the Irishmen, who formed a distinct society among themselves, and mustered very strong with their green scarves; carrying their national Harp and their Portrait of Father Mathew, high above the people’s heads. They looked as jolly and good-humoured as ever; and, working (here) the hardest for their living and doing any kind of sturdy labour that came in their way, were the most independent fellows there, I thought.
4. Leslie Williams, ‘Irish Identity and the Illustrated London News, 1846-51: Famine to Depopulation’, in Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality, ed. Susan Shaw Sailer (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), p.91:
In a deeper reading of the text and graphic material, there appears a very strong recurrent theme of the otherness of the Irish. Even while reporting current events on the neighboring island, most of the writers and illustrators view the Irish experience by contrast with the happy homes and fair fields recorded more often in illustrations of the English countryside. The editorial viewpoint regarding the Irish is comparable to the proto-anthropological view of the imperial or colonial reportage in the paper. The Irish experience is seen by the ILN as foreign and is reported in that context. The effect of distancing, of course, reduces involvement or any sense of political or social responsibility. Whatever passed for social contract in London or England was not expected to be applied to the colonies, nor to the sister island. While the ILN is at first sympathetic and positive towards the Irish, the very tragedy of the famine and emigration makes their experience “other.”
5. [Charles Dickens], ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, Household Words 3 (14 June 1851): 266-7
Dickens presents a tramps’ lodging-house, featuring various Irish occupants:
Ten, twenty, thirty — who can count them! Men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese! Ho! In that dark corner yonder! Does anybody lie there? Me sir, Irish me, a widder, with six children. And yonder? Me sir, Irish me, with me wife and eight poor babes. And to the left there? Me sir, Irish me, along with two more Irish boys as is me friends. And to the right there? Me sir and the Murphy fam’ly, numbering five blessed souls. And what’s this, coiling, now, about my foot? Another Irish me, pitifully in want of shaving, whom I have awakened from sleep — and across my other foot lies his wife — and by the shoes of Inspector Field lie their three eldest — and their three youngest are at present squeezed between the open door and the wall.
6. [Charles Dickens], ‘New Uncommercial Samples: A Small Star in the East’, All the Year Round new series 1 (19 Dec 1868): 61-2.
Dickens provides a vivid portrait of a woman who has suffered from working in the dust-laden, poisonous atmosphere of a white-lead factory; she is described by her companion thus:
It was a dark street with a dead wall on one side. Nearly all the outer doors of the houses stood open. I took the first entry and knocked at a parlour door. Might I come in? I might, if I plased, Sur.
The woman of the room (Irish) had picked up some long strips of wood, about some wharf or barge, and they had just now been thrust into the otherwise empty grate, to make two iron pots boil. There was some fish in one, and there were some potatoes in the other. The flare of the burning wood enabled me to see a table and a broken chair or so, and some old cheap crockery ornaments about the chimneypiece. It was not until I had spoken with the woman a few minutes that I saw a horrible brown heap on the floor in a corner, which, but for previous experience in this dismal wise, I might not have suspected to be "the bed." There was something thrown upon it, and I asked what that was?
"'Tis the poor craythur that stays here, Sur, and 'tis very bad she is, and 'tis very bad she's been this long time, and 'tis better she'll never be, and 'tis slape she doos all day, and 'tis wake she doos all night, and 'tis the lead, Sur."
"The what?"
"The lead, Sur. Sure 'tis the lead-mills, where the women gets took on at eighteen-pence a day, Sur, when they makes applicaytion early enough and is lucky and wanted, and 'tis lead-pisoned she is, Sur, and some of them gits lead-pisoned soon and some of them gets lead-pisoned later, and some but not many niver, and 'tis all according to the constitooshun, Sur, and some constitooshuns is strong and some is weak, and her constitooshun is lead-pisoned bad as can be, Sur, and her brain is coming out at her ear, and it hurts her dreadful, and that's what it is and niver no more and niver no less, Sur."
The sick young woman moaning here, the speaker bent over her, took a bandage from her head, and threw open a back door to let in the daylight upon it, from the smallest and most miserable backyard I ever saw.
"That's what cooms from her, Sur, being lead-pisoned, and it cooms from her night and day the poor sick craythur, and the pain of it is dreadful, and God he knows that my husband has walked the sthreets these four days being a labourer and is walking them now and is ready to work and no work for him and no fire and no food but the bit in the pot, and no more than ten shillings in a fortnight, God be good to us, and it is poor we are and dark it is and could it is indeed!"
Knowing that I could compensate myself thereafter for my self-denial, if I saw fit, I had resolved that I would give nothing in the course of these visits. I did this to try the people. I may state at once that my closest observation could not detect any indication whatever of an expectation that I would give money; they were grateful to be talked to, about their miserable affairs, and sympathy was plainly a comfort to them; but they neither asked for money in any case, nor showed the least trace of surprise or disappointment or resentment at my giving none.
6. Letters of Charles Dickens, voi. 8, p. 647; dated 2 Sept 1858
Of Limerick Dickens said ‘there is not much to be done’; he remarked on the town’s peculiarity in a letter top his sub-editor:
This is the oddest place―of which nobody in any other part of Ireland seems to know anything. Nobody could answer a single question we asked about it. . . Arthur [Smith] says that when he opened the doors last night, there was a rush of―three Ducks! We expect a Pig to-night. We had only £40; but they seemed to think that, amazing! If the two nights bring £100, it will be as much as we expected. I am bound to say that they are an admirable audience. As hearty and demonstrative as it is possible to be. It is a very odd place in its lower-order aspects, and I am very glad we came―though we could have made heaps of money by going to Dublin instead.
7. [George Walter Thornbury], ‘Her Majesty’s Irish Mail’, All the Year Round 1 (16 July 1859): 285.
The article (by the lead writer of the ‘Irish department’ of Dickens’s journal) drew adverse comment from Irish readers. The narrator, an English traveller, riding on a jaunting-car in County Wicklow, describes his situation thus:
A scene more intensely Irish and more intensely un-English could scarcely be conceived. Here was a mail-cart reckless of delays; a consequential, drunken, sporting farrier passing for a real doctor, and a driver quite indifferent to punctuality, parcels, passengers, or nightfall, stopping at the bidding of a half-drunken cow-doctor at a roadside whiskey-shop.
The Freeman’s Journal carried a letter from ‘An Irish Male’, whose reaction to the piece was filled with fury and indignation. He described the author as ‘totally unacquainted with this country, and only distinguished by his buffoonery and vulgarity’. The letter ends by observing that Dickens’s acceptance of this piece for publication constitutes an ‘ungrateful and ungracious return’ to the Irish people who, when the novelist toured the previous year, ‘poured their money into the coffers of a peripatetic story teller’ (‘Mr Charles Dickens on the Irish Mail System’, Freeman’s Journal, 23 July 1859)
The Freeman’s Journal published a reply from Thornbury (a contributor to both Household Words and All the Year Round), who, in the guise of ‘The Writer of the Article’, expressed surprise at the response to his ‘innocent and playful’ piece. He asserted that he loved Ireland and admired its inhabitants; he also defended Dickens, who, he says, has ‘so grateful a sense of Irish hospitality’ and feels ‘nothing but good will’ towards the country. ([G.W. Thornbury], ‘“Her Majesty’s Irish Mail”: To the Editor of the Freeman’, Freeman’s Journal, 29 July 1859)
Dickens knew of the exchange, and discussed it with a friend; he wrote:
Of the extraordinarily coarse and unreasonable attacks I have seen on myself personally―so easily elicited by an innocently-meant article, in which I saw no harm when I read it in proof, and the desperate offence of which I do not even now understand―I will only remark that they have amazed me for my life. (Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 9, p. 101; dated 2 Aug 1859)
8. Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 11, pp. 333-4; dated 15 March 1867)
Before his first Dublin reading Dickens wrote to his sister-in-law, to confirm that his fears about the Fenians were well founded:
Our business here is very bad, though at Belfast it is enormous. There is no doubt that great alarm prevails here. This hotel is constantly filling and emptying, as families leave the country, and set in a current to the Steamers. There is apprehension of some disturbance between tomorrow night and Monday night (both inclusive); and I learn this morning that all the drinking shops are to be closed from tonight until Tuesday. Of course you will not be in the least uneasy about me. If any commotion occurs, I shall instantly stop the Dublin Readings, and of course I shall not put myself in harm’s way. . . There is no doubt whatever that alarm prevails.
9. George Dolby, Charles Dickens As I Knew Him, pp. 75-6
Dickens goes off for a nocturnal excursion in Dublin, in search of Fenian riots:
We sallied forth in the dead of the night on outside cars, and under police care, to make a tour of the city; and so effectual were the precautions taken by the Government, that in a drive from midnight until about two o’clock in the morning, we did not see more than about half a dozen persons in the streets, with the exception of the ordinary policemen on their beats. Several arrests of suspected persons had been made in the night, and some of these became our fellow-travellers in the Irish mail on our return to England.
10. Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 11, p. 475; memo dated early November 1867.
Dickens composed a memo to his sub-editor W.H. Wills, which contained restrictions on the material which could be published in All the Year Round during his absence:
Remember that no reference, however slight is to be made to America in any article whatever, unless by myself.
Remember that the same remark applies to the subject of the Fenians.
11. ‘The Spirit of Chivalry in Westminster Hall’, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine for August 1845; reprinted in Dickens’ Journalism, Volume 2, pp. 73-80.
Dickens called the design for a fresco in the palace of Westminster an ‘extraordinary work’, executed with ‘beauty, strength, and power’. He calls Maclise an ‘English artist who has set his genius on this English stake’. He addresses Prince Albert in a passage that appeared in proof, but not in the published article:
Oh, your royal Highness, look upon this work again! Have some regard for its originality: its execution, it design, its combination of high qualities so rare, that any One of them has often furnished forth a Painter! I do not question the ability of the artist whom you raise above the lofty head: I have ever done it justice, and I do so now. Nor do I venture to dispute that it is natural and amiable in you to love the German school of art, even at second-hand. But there is Justice to be done! The object of this competition was encouragement and exaltation of English art; and in this work, albeit done on paper which soon rots, the Art of England will survive, assert itself, and triumph, when the stronger seeming bones and sinews of your royal Highness and the rest, shall be so much Dust.