He gained some classical knowledge at the school of Dr. A perusal of Gil Blas roused within him the desire of seeing more of the world; and throwing up his situation, he found himself in Dublin with only a few pence in his pocket. Without any definite plan, he sought everywhere for employment, even of a bird-stuffer, of whose art he was obliged to confess complete ignorance.
Driven to extremities, he contemplated enlisting, and addressed a Latin letter to the Colonel of a regiment, who dissuaded him from his intention, and gave him assistance. Chance threw him in the way of the Rev.
Caesar Otway , who, recognizing his abilities, persuaded him to try authorship. His expressed intention was to present an unsentimental picture of the Irish peasantry, not only their beliefs and customs but the cruder, vengeful.
Far from being «kaleidoscopic reflections of the reality which he has actually seen» 9 , they are skillfully crafted, complex narratives. It is certainly true, as Boue states, that Carleton boasted of his authenticity and that his characters are often drawn from life, but at his best Carleton, like the old seanachie, was very much concerned with the art as well as the moral value of storytelling.
He made use of techniques drawn from native satire and folklore, which favor the formal and the ritualized rather than the «amorphous» structure. In «The Battle of the Factions» such techniques generate the peculiar energy of both language and form. In «Wildgoose Lodge», which Boue believes comes closest to the modern short story, Carleton is experimenting with the gothic mode by fusing it with the native horror or ghostly tale.
In keeping with native satire, «The Battle of the Factions» is characterized by great verbal inventiveness, macabre humor, and a fantastic and ironic imagination. The narrator, O'Callaghan, is an itinerant hedgeschool master, whose point of view to some extent shapes this melancholy -mirthful tale of two warring families. A chest thumping eccentric, O'Callaghan speaks in the distinctive style of the Philomath, a figure who appears in The Emigrants of Ahadarra as well as in other short stories.
Clearly intended to impress his rustic audience, by mixing clots of irregular Latin «horpus corpus» or irregular, polysyllabic English into the local idiom, his speech ranges from the artful to the downright preposterous : «Several of our respective friends undertook to produce a friendly and oblivious potation between us — it was at a berrin belonging.
This is evident in the pronounced rhythms and inflections 12 of voice and in the use of dialogue, of digression, of that punctuates the narrative, and of customary formulas such as the final sentence in this passage : «for they always had the bad drop in them, from first to last, from big to little — the blackguards! But wait, it's not over with them yet» p. One is always aware of the speaking voice, so characteristic of modern Irish fiction, with its peculiar mannerisms and its sense of intimacy and collaboration.
Up to a point O'Callaghan provides a good model of the seanachie at work. He has an excellent memory — many storytellers were reputed to have a phenomenal ability to recall lengthy detail after one hearing — and like them he is also a performer, who holds an audience through sheer dramatic skill Apart from this, O'Callaghan is a purely literary construct, used to convey information about rural customs with which the ordinary «listener» would be familiar Carleton's method here is more sophisticated than in such a story as «The Station» where, as author, he simply breaks in to offer a judgment against local superstition.
In «The Battle of the Factions» even ostensibly extraneous material is shaped by the character of O'Callaghan who, for example, mocks religious practices while admiring the young girls putting on their shoes and stockings before entering the chapel to hear mass. Thus one is drawn into O'Callaghan's point of view because of his skill at storytelling and his droll, imaginative sense of the characters and creatures around him. A broken-down horse, for example, is described as jogging along «at a kind of dog's trot, like the pace of an idiot with sore feet in a shower At the same time one is invited to laugh at his pedantry, his eccentric use of language, the puns, the blunders and bulls which are not always intentional : «the only bodily injury he received was the death of a land-agent and a bailiff, who lost their lives faithfully in driving for rent» p.
Most significant, his love of fighting is always treated ironically, his narrative framed within Carleton's more humane perspective, so that the dancing rhetoric is adroitly undercut by sounds of real blows and blood spilled.
The main course of the schoolmaster's story is an exuberant account of the history, the fighting prowess, the charges and. Lawyers are called in, but they have even less success ; one is mysteriously shot when he demands his fee, another is rapidly persuaded to leave town.
Despite such goings on, the narrator insists on the superior code maintained by his own faction in all respects and, particularly, in the matter of combat : «We differed, however, materially from them ; for we were honorable, never starting out in dozens on a single man or two, and beating him into insignificance.
A couple, or maybe, when irritated, three, were the most we ever set at a single enemy In a way typical of Irish satire, humor is generated in this story by an understated, matter-of-fact account of outrageous events. Some of the details, the concern with «honor» and the rituals preceding the faction fight, for example, suggest remnants of an older aristocratic tradition, perhaps pre-Norman. As a whole, however, much of the tale has a mock epic quality, calling to mind the battle scenes in The Tain where the apparel, the weapons, the sheer physical splendor of the opposing armies are described in sumptuous detail these features obviously appear in other epics as well In Carleton's story, in place of the combat of heroes between Ferdia and Cuchulainn, we have the knock down fight between Connor O'Callaghan and Big Mucklemurray, who battle up one side of the town and down the other until O'Callaghan gives Mucklemurray «a tip above the eye with the end of an oak stick, dacently loaded with lead ; which made the poor man feel very quare entirely, for the few days he survived it» The ancient tale typically invests the hero's weapon with special significance.
The most terrible weapon in Cuchulainn 's arsenal is the gae bolga, which disembowels its victim and is invariably lethal. In «The Battle of the Factions» the weapon of choice is the cudgel which, we are told in the derisive tones of the narrator, is elaborately prepared to produce a «widow and orphan making quality, a child -bereaving touch, altogether desirable» p. The climactic battle is preceded by ceremonial performances on both sides : the trailing of the coat, the hero's leap into the air, the brandishing of the cudgels.
Carleton, who had a deep antipathy toward violence, exposes the folly of the schoolmaster through a formidable display of linguistic virtuosity. O'Callaghan 's narrative has considerable emotional range, accommodating elements that would normally seem incongruous to one another.
The fierce battle is described in terms reminiscent of a great dancing chorus as «five or six hundred men sing and. They toss their hats into the air «like so many scaldy crows» and «beat time upon the drums of each other's ears and heads» as a «prelude to neighborly fighting» p. The «whick whacks» are punctuated with shouts of excitement, cheers, groans, horrors — as one man wields a scythe and another is flung head first through a window onto a stone pavement.
Farce explodes just as suddenly in the free for all between the giant miller, Frank Farrell, and little Neal Malone, the tailor, who escapes death by leaping onto the back of the clumsy miller, jamming his feet into the miller's pockets and leathering him about the ears. He is in turn attacked by a man armed with a spitted goose — a comic variant on the figure with the scythe — who misses the tailor but punctures the unlucky miller, while the former makes off with the goose.
Carleton, at his best, is masterly at expressing the quality of human events. This story has great density and energy because of his ability to compress details and to juxtapose ironically scene after scene of vivid motion. The language is onomatopoeic, reflecting and heightening the mood of the battle, or, in a different phase, softened and lyrical. More than any other nineteenth century writer, Carleton has the Irish taste for the macabre At one point in the story, for example, the narrator sardonically informs us that «the bones of contention were numerous», and that fact is both literally and metaphorically true.
For the O'Hallaghans, driven into a graveyard, arm with bones and skulls to spread terror among their opponents. The ground is eventually strewn with the broken bones of the living and the dead. This strange medley of the bizarre, and the mirthful ends, however, on a clear note of tragedy. The young people whose marriage might have healed the breach between the two factions are both destroyed.
Their story, though very different in style, is effectively interwoven with the battle tale and serves as a commentary on it. The lovers, Rose and John, are romantic, idealized figures, far less interesting than the eccentrics whom Carleton draws so well.
Like the seanachie, Carleton varies his style to accommodate a new subject : O'Callaghan «waxes pathetic». Apart from the dialogue, however, his vocabulary here is closer to standard English, regular in its cadences and sentimental in tone ; but the role of the lovers is skillfully developed.
They are initially drawn. Because of Carleton's ability to deeply root his characters in a particular northern landscape which mirrors and intensifies emotion, this portion is not mere melodrama. The terror of the onlookers is real as is the sense of powerful natural forces set loose in their bleak mountain country and the frailty of the two caught in the rain swollen river. The irony is well drawn : John's heroic efforts are successful in preventing a natural catastrophe, but he is helpless against the willful violence of the warring factions.
In «Wildgoose Lodge» Carleton turned to the techniques of gothic fiction to create another story of murder and revenge, in this case one which is directly based on an historic event. It has been reprinted down to the present day, was made into a B. These wretched structures were hastily thrown together at the side of a road, the corner of a field or the verge of a bog. In the s a County Kildare doctor informed a parliamentary commission inquiring into the circumstances of the Irish poor, the so-called Poor Inquiry, of a fever patient he had found lying on some straw in a ditch.
This was removable and changed to whatever side the wind blew from. The Irish are particularly apprehensive of contagious maladies. The moment it had been discovered that Jemmy was infected, his school-fellows avoided him with a feeling of terror scarcely credible. Eventually, a group of agricultural labourers discovered the dazed and barely conscious Jemmy. The poor scholar, Jemmy, was placed on some straw in this structure, and food and drink were passed to him by means of a pitchfork and a long-shafted shovel, which, again, was the custom of the time.
The peasantry resorted to this stratagem in order to avoid coming into personal contact with the infected individual. The sentiments and mode of expression in this story resemble the evidence recorded in the Poor Inquiry relating to the provision of charity to beggars and vagrants—the Poor Inquiry, conducted in the mids, was almost contemporaneous with Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry.
A contributor to the inquiry, William King from Headford, Co. Book dedicated to Lord John Russell Carleton captured the vernacular, the popular voice that is often missing from the historical record—hence his importance for historians. But Carleton was more than a social chronicler; The Black Prophet: a tale of Irish famine in particular resonates with political sentiment.
The Black Prophet is a record of the passing of a peasant way of life, of a society that was utterly changed by the Great Famine. In his portrayal of famine and fever, and much else besides, Carleton was, as Yeats noted, a historian of his people. Read More: What we now know. Further reading Autobiography of William Carleton London, ; rev. Robins, The miasma.
Epidemic and panic in nineteenth-century Ireland Dublin,
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