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THOMAS CARLYLE, ‘YOUNG IRELAND’ AND THE ‘CONDITION OF IRELAND QUESTION’*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2008

JOHN MORROW
JOHN MORROW*
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
*
Department of Political Studies, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland Mail Centre, Auckland, New Zealand[email protected]
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Abstract

This article reconsiders Thomas Carlyle's views on the crisis facing Ireland in the 1840s and British responses to it. It argues that while Carlyle saw this crisis as being related to difficulties facing contemporary ‘English’ society, he treated it as a distinctive manifestation of a malaise that afflicted all European societies. Carlyle's views on Ireland reflected the illiberal and authoritarian attitudes which underwrote his social and political thought, but they were not, as has sometimes been suggested, premised on anti-Irish prejudices derived from racial stereotypes. An examination of Carlyle's writings on Ireland demonstrate that he attributed the parlous state of that country in the 1840s to widespread failures in leadership and social morality that were not unique to the inhabitants of Ireland and were also to be found in England. Carlyle's works were not only admired by leading members of ‘Young Ireland’, but also generated ideas that framed their response to the economic, social, and political challenges facing Ireland.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 643 - 667
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Charles Richard Sanders, K. J. Fielding, Ian Campbell et al., eds. (Edinburgh and Durham, NC, 1970–), xxi, 48; cited hereafter as CL. MS Vault Carlyle 12:4 in the Beinecke Library at Yale University is made up of a series of fragmentary drafts, most probably dating from 1848–9. Some of this material was used in Carlyle's ‘latter-day pamphlets’ of 1850. There are fragments on Sir Robert Peel's scheme for Ireland (see below) and on Daniel O'Connell. I am most grateful to Dr Kathryn James for locating this material and for supplying me with a copy of it. Quotations from this manuscript are made with the permission of the Beinecke Library.

2 CL, xxiv, p. 54, n. 2, quoting material from Carlyle's journal.

3 Cf. Martin, Amy E., ‘Blood transfusions: constructions of Irish racial difference, the English working class, and revolutionary possibility in the work of Carlyle and Engels’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 24 (2004), pp. 83–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nally, David, ‘“Eternity's commissioner”: Thomas Carlyle, the great Irish famine and the geopolitics of travel’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (2006), pp. 313–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dorothy Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English radicalism before 1850’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, eds., The Chartist experience: studies in radicalism and culture (London, 1982), pp. 126, 143–4; and Waters, Hazel, ‘The Great Famine and anti-Irish racism’, Race and Class, 37 (1995), p. 100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Roger Swift provides a more nuanced account of Chartism; see Roger Swift, ‘Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, and the Irish in early Victorian Britain’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 21 (2001), pp. 67–83. Perceptive asides on Carlyle's position are offered by David Fitzpatrick in his masterly survey, ‘ A “peculiar tramping people”: the Irish in Britain, 1801–1870’, in W. E. Vaughan, ed., Ireland under the Union, ii: 1801–1870, a new history of Ireland (Oxford, 1989), v, pp. 624–5. Aspects of Carlyle's relationship with ‘Young Ireland’ figures have been considered in two valuable essays: Keith Fielding, ‘Ireland, John Mitchel and his “sarcastic friend” Thomas Carlyle’, in J. Schwend, S. Hageman, and H. Volkel, eds., Literatur im Kontext/Literature in context: Festschrift für Horst Drescher (New York, NY, 1992), pp. 131–43; Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘“True Thomas”: Carlyle, Young Ireland, and the legacy of millenialism’, in David Sorensen and Rodger L. Tarr, eds., The Carlyles at home and abroad (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 60–76. More recently, Julie M. Dugger has written a sophisticated comparative account of the role of race thinking in the writings of Carlyle, and Ireland, Young: ‘Black Ireland's race: Thomas Carlyle and the Young Ireland movement’, Victorian Studies, 48 (2006), pp. 461–85Google Scholar.

4 Although ‘Young Ireland’ resisted being associated with ‘Young England’ (see Richard Davis, The Young Ireland movement (Dublin, 1987), pp. 1, 57), there was a commonalty of outlook among at least some members of these groups. Young England was alarmed at the economic plight of the Irish peasantry, bemoaned the absence of paternalistic leadership in the Irish countryside and was sympathetic towards what it took to be their distinctive cultural and religious interests; see John Morrow, ed., Young England: the new generation (London, 1999), pp. 11–12, 58–9, 102–5. Lord John Manners, a leading Young England figure who visited Ireland in 1847 and published reflections on his travels, met members of ‘Young Ireland’ in the course of his tour; see Lord John Manners, Notes of an Irish tour (London, 1849), p. 84.

5 Carlyle had little time for O'Brien and argued with Duffy about his merits; see Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences of my Irish journey in 1849 (London, 1882), p. 90. His views were probably inflenced by O'Brien's obstruction of Sir Robert Peel's moves to repeal the Corn Law in the early months of 1846, part of a strategy whose primary target was coercive measures directed at Irish unrest; see Richard Davis, Revolutionary imperialist: William Smith O'Brien, 1803–1864 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 198–200. Carlyle never met Davis, who died in September 1845. He was impressed with Mitchel's strength of character but was wary of his political extremism.

6 Charles Gavan Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle (London, 1892), pp. 3–5; Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 34; CL, xxiii, pp. 35–6, 137–9, 143–6. Duffy's admiration for Carlyle withstood the test of reading impatient personal judgements on him included sporadically in the Reminiscences.

7 Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle, pp. 22–3.

8 Carlyle played a leading role in establishing the London Library; Clarendon was its president from its foundation in 1841 until 1870. In 1854, when Carlyle was working on Frederick the Great, he used his connections with Clarendon, by this time foreign secretary, to gain access to archival material on eighteenth-century diplomatic history; CL, xxix, pp. 152–3

9 CL, xxiv, p. 101, n. 2. Since Carlyle had met Clarendon in England and referred to their mutual friends when he wrote in support of Mitchel and Duffy, he was in rather a delicate position; he may have been aware that Duffy saw attempts to secure his conviction over the winter of 1848–9 as episodes in a personal confrontation between him and the viceroy; see Charles Gavan Duffy, My life in two hemispheres (2 vols., London, 1898), i, p. 323.

10 CL, xxiv, pp. 58, 253–4. Nally's claim that Carlyle seemed indifferent to the physical condition of the Irish poor (Nally, ‘“Eternity's commissioner”’, p. 320) cannot be reconciled with Duffy's account of the second tour, or Carlyle's written records of it.

11 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor resartus, Works of Thomas Carlyle (20 vols., London, 1893–4), p. 198. Unless indicated otherwise all references to Carlyle's writings are to this edition.

12 Carlyle, The French Revolution, iii, p. 265.

13 Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, in Critical and miscellaneous essays, vi, pp. 125–9. Roberto Romani notes that the term ‘sanspotato’ is not derogatory of the Irish; rather, as in the formulation applied to revolutionary France, ‘sans’ signifies an absence of effective elite leadership and control; see Romani, Roberto, ‘British views on Irish national character, 1800–1846: an intellectual history’, History of European Ideas, 23 (1997), pp. 27–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Carlyle, Chartism, p. 127.

15 Carlyle, The French Revolution, i, pp. 30–1.

16 CL, xxiii, p. 162. Cf. Martin, ‘Blood transfusions’, pp. 83–4, where Ireland is treated as the ‘source’ of ‘proletarian disaffection’ in England.

17 Carlyle, Chartism, p. 132. Cf. Nally, ‘“Eternity's commissioner”’, pp. 317, 332, n. 50.

18 MS Vault Carlyle 12:4, fo. 16v.

19 CL, xx, pp. 140–2.

20 This is a key theme in Chartism and Past and Present; for a recent discussion, see John Morrow, Thomas Carlyle (London, 2006), pp. 105–19.

21 Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial myth in English history (Montreal, 1982), p. 95; Carlyle, Chartism, pp. 127–9, 134–5, 156–60.

22 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Occasional discourse on the Negro question’, first published in Fraser's Magazine in 1849 and included in Latter-day pamphlets of 1850; Dugger, ‘Black Ireland's race’, p. 469. Carlyle's engagement with arguments concerning the substantive impact of supposed racial differences between Celts and Saxons had something of the character which Dugger ascribes to Young Ireland's contributions to The spirit of the nation, an influential volume of poetry which Duffy edited in 1845: they ‘responded to the claim that Celts were inferior to Saxons with both the argument that the distinction between the races was politically meaningless and with some overt Saxon-bashing too’ (p. 477).

23 See Harnick, Phyllis, ‘Point and counterpoint: Mill and Carlyle on Ireland in 1848’, Carlyle Newsletter, 7 (1986), p. 30Google Scholar.

24 Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 63.

25 Carlyle, Chartism, p. 129. Cf. Martin, ‘Blood transfusions’.

26 Carlyle, Chartism, p. 129.

27 Thomas Carlyle, The letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with elucidations, ii, pp. 142, 203–7.

28 CL, xxi, p. 47. Owen Edwards credits Carlyle with playing an important role in encouraging Young Ireland to break with O'Connell in 1846 and in undermining its commitment to non-violence; see Edwards, ‘“True Thomas”’, pp. 68–9, 72.

29 CL, xxiii, pp. 140, 144.

30 MS Vault Carlyle 12:4, fo. 17.

31 ‘The Commissioner's’ reports were republished in Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the condition of the people of Ireland (London, 1846), with the exposé of O'Connell appearing on pp. 394–7. Some of Campbell's reports were reprinted in the Nation and subject to critical commentary there on 6 and 27 September and 4 October, 1845.

32 CL, xxi, p. 237.

33 Carlyle, Chartism, p. 126.

34 See Morrow, Thomas Carlyle, pp. 105–11.

35 CL, xxii, pp. 239–40.

36 CL, xxiv, p. 261; Duffy, Charles Gavan, ‘Conversations and correspondence with Thomas Carlyle. Part second’, Contemporary Review, 61 (1892), p. 295Google Scholar.

37 Carlyle, Latter-day pamphlets, p. 12.

38 CL, xxi, pp. 46–7, 112–13.

39 Carlyle discussed his views on Emerson with Duffy; Duffy, ‘Conversations and correspondence. Part second’, p. 290.

40 Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle, p. 120.

41 Duffy, , ‘Conversations and correspondence … part fourth’, Contemporary Review, 61 (1892), p. 455Google Scholar; MS Vault Carlyle 12:4, fo. 1: ‘Spendthrift Rakes of Mallow are not the Captains Irishmen can prosper under’; CL, xx, pp. 36, 106.

42 CL, xxi, p. 33. Carlyle did not regard drunkenness as a vice peculiar to members of the Irish working classes. In ‘The finest peasantry in the world’ it is mentioned in connection with both the Irish and the working classes of Glasgow; Martin ignores the non-Irish reference point; see ‘Blood transfusions’ p. 91, and see Chartism, p. 132. Drunkenness plays no role in Carlyle's account of extreme poverty in Ireland.

43 CL, xxi, pp. 41, 43.

44 Carlyle's views on this question were in accord with those of whig politicians in England who, in the 1830s and early 1840s, promoted a policy of justice for Ireland; see Romani, ‘British views’, p. 196. In other respects Carlyle was a sharp critic of the whig's Irish policy.

45 See Peter Gray, Famine, land and politics: British government and Irish society, 1843–1850 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 3–4.

46 CL, xxi, pp. 66, 104.

47 CL, p. 159; Gray, Famine, land and politics, pp. 271–2.

48 CL, xxi, p. 159.

49 Ibid., p. 167. Carlyle's critique was thus more closely and radically targeted than that of providentialists discussed by Boyd Hilton, The age of atonement (Oxford, 1988), pp. 108–14.

50 CL, xxiv, p. 112.

51 CL, xxi, p. 104. On this issue, at least, Carlyle's views were at one with those of the philosophical radicals, of whom he was usually so critical; see Gray, Famine, land and politics, pp. 197–204.

52 See CL, xxii, pp. 239–40. Critics of the Act included Aubrey de Vere, English misrule and Irish misdeeds: four letters from Ireland, addressed to an English member of parliament (London, 1848), pp. 8–12, and the political economist George Paulette Scrope, How to make Ireland self-supporting; or, Irish clearances, and improvements of waste lands (London, 1848), who likened it to the ‘national workshops’ set up after the revolution in France in 1848.

53 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Legislation for Ireland’, in R. H. Shepard, ed., Memoirs of the life and writings of Thomas Carlyle (2 vols., London, 1881), ii, pp. 388–9.

54 CL, xxi, p. 169.

55 See Jennifer Ridden, ‘Britishness as an imperial and diasporic identity: Irish elite perspectives, c. 1820–1870s’, in Peter Gray, ed., Victoria's Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 88–105. The figures discussed by Ridden include Duffy, de Vere, and Sir Richard Bourke, all of whom were known to Carlyle. Given Carlyle's hostility to Smith O'Brien, it is ironic that he was also an imperialist, in the sense that he promoted immigration to the colonies; see Davis, Smith O'Brien, pp. 369–70; and Davis, Young Ireland, pp. 201–14. Mitchel's hostility to British imperialism and his rejection of the view that it provided benefits for Ireland was spelled out in ‘England's colonial empire’, Nation, 26 Dec. 1845, p. 182.

56 Nally, ‘“Eternity's commissioner”’, pp. 328–9.

57 CL, xxiv, pp. 192–3. This point was repeated in material which Carlyle was drafting at about this time (MS Vault Carlyle 12:4, fo. 1). In 1855 he remarked that laissez-faire was a ‘litany to indolence’; CL, xxix, p. 260.

58 Carlyle, Latter-day pamphlets, pp. 134, 140–1.

59 Carlyle, Chartism, p. 128.

60 Carlyle described the second of these speeches as ‘perhaps the most important event even of the last revolutionary year’; CL, xxiv, pp. 7–8.

61 Charles Stuart Parker, Sir Robert Peel from his private papers (3 vols., London, 1899), iii, pp. 483, 509.

62 See Peter Ghosh, ‘Gladstone and Peel’, in Peter Ghost and Lawrence Goldman, eds., Politics and culture in Victorian Britain: essays in memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), pp. 52–5. On Carlyle's admiration for Peel see John Morrow, ‘The paradox of Peel as Carlylean hero’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 97–110. Ghosh relates Peel's penchant for strong leadership to his fears of insurrectionary dangers in modern society. While Carlyle also expressed this fear, he more often presented these dangers as a metaphor of moral collapse.

63 Parker, Sir Robert Peel, iii, pp. 513–16. See also Gray, Famine, land and politics, pp. 212–15.

64 [Thomas Carlyle], ‘Ireland and Sir Robert Peel’, Spectator, 14 Apr. 1849, p. 343.

65 Carlyle, Latter-day pamphlets, p. 77.

66 Manners, Notes, pp. 3–4.

67 Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 55; his view of the city of Cork was far more positive: ‘a beautiful bright City, wearing more an air of business than any I have yet seen in Ireland’; CL, xxiv, p. 130.

68 Carlyle, Reminiscences, pp. 177–8, 222.

69 Ibid., p. 75; Thomas Carlyle, ‘Trees of liberty’, Nation, 1 Dec. 1849, p. 217.

70 Carlyle, Reminiscences, pp. 160–1. This reaction contrasts sharply with that of Lord John Manners who regarded the quality of ritual in Church of Ireland as a litmus test of propriety; Manners, Notes, pp. 13, 72–3, 123–4.

71 Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 70.

72 Ibid., p. 223.

73 ‘Famine in the south of Ireland’, Fraser's Magazine, 35 (1847), pp. 491–504.

74 Ibid., pp. 201, 202; Carlyle, Sartor resartus, pp. 15–59; Carlyle, Chartism, p. 120.

75 Cf. Martin, ‘Blood transfusions’, p. 86; and Cora Kaplan, ‘White, black and green: racialising Irishness in Victorian England’, in Gray, ed., Victoria's Ireland? pp. 61–2; this issue aside, Kaplan offers a balanced assessment of aspects of Carlyle's responses to the condition of Ireland question, noting that Chartism pointed to a community of interest between the working classes of England and Ireland (pp. 62–3).

76 Carlyle, Past and present, p. 2.

77 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

78 CL, xxiii, p. 162. Cf. Dugger, ‘Black Ireland's race’, p. 467.

79 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Irish regiments (of the new era)’, Spectator, 13 May 1848; CL, xxiii, pp. 86–8, 112, 162–3, CL, xxiv, pp. 39–40. Carlyle returned to this theme in Latter-day pamphlets, pp. 33–40.

80 CL, xxiv, pp. 176–7; Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 249. Although Carlyle admired Hill, he did not think that his attempt to keep the peasantry on the land provided an answer to the problems facing Irish society.

81 Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 149.

82 Ibid., p. 57.

83 CL, xxiv, p. 173; CL, xxv, pp. 214–15. Cf. Nally, ‘“Eternity's commissioner”’, p. 326: ‘Ireland is unregenerate because the Irish are incorrigible.’

84 CL, xxi, p. 169. Christopher Morash sees Mitchel's views on these issues as part of a fundamental rejection of Enlightenment; see Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford, 1995), pp. 59–75.

85 Fielding, ‘Ireland, John Mitchel’, pp. 132–3.

86 Jules Seigel, ‘Carlyle's Ireland and Ireland's Carlyle’, in Steven R. McKenna, ed., Selected essays on Scottish language and literature (Lewiston, NY, 1992), pp. 198–9. Mitchel was particularly impressed with the French Revolution; see William Dillon, Life of John Mitchel (2 vols., London, 1888), i, 37. Edwards argues that Carlyle's treatment of the revolution played an important role in radicalizing members of Young Ireland; Mitchel, in particular, is seen as having been inspired by Carlyle's treatments of heroic violence in both the French and English Revolutions to adopt an attitude towards insurrection that was formulated into the myth of the ‘blood sacrifice’ by Padraig Pearse; Edwards, ‘“True Thomas”’, p. 67.

87 Nation, 8 Sept. 1849, p. 18, from Sartor resartus, p. 26.

88 Davis, Young Ireland, pp. 189–91; Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis: the memoirs of an Irish patriot (London, 1890), p. 84. Carlyle ‘Characteristics’ (1831), Critical and miscellaneous essays, iv, pp. 1–38. Davis and other Young Irelanders admired German writers (Fichte, Lessing, the Schlegels) whom Carlyle had praised in his early essays; see Oliver MacDonagh, ‘Ideas and institutions’, 1830–1845', in Vaughan, A new history, p. 198.

89 See Oliver MacDonagh, ‘O'Connell's ideology’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood, eds., A union of multiple identities: the British Isles, c. 1750–c. 1850 (Manchester, 1997), pp. 147–61; Duffy, Thomas Davis, pp. 76, 83, 99. Davis was impressed with Carlyle's critique of laissez-faire (see Davis, Young Ireland, p. 20) while Mitchel had a deep antipathy towards materialism and ideas of progress that he associated with it; see McGovern, Bryan, ‘John Mitchel: ecumenical nationalist in the old south’, New Hibernia Review, 5 (2001), pp. 102–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Carlyle and Mitchel harboured racially based anti-emancipationist views that were quite at odds with O'Connell's commitment to universal liberation. For an account of Young Ireland views on race see Dugger, ‘Black Ireland's race’.

90 Nation, 1 Sept. 1849, p. 8.

91 Nation, 8 Sept. 1849, pp. 24–5.

92 Nation, 12 July 1847, p. 568; see also Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland: a fragment of Irish history, 1840–1850 (London, 1880), p. 172.

93 Nation, 12 June 1847, p. 568. In Past and Present Carlyle had described the extension of the poor law to Scotland as a ‘temporary measure, an anodyne, not a remedy’ (p. 3).

94 Carlyle, Latter-day pamphlets, pp. 84, 108–45; Ghosh, ‘ Gladstone and Peel’, p. 52: ‘Peel, as much as Carlyle, believed in one person rule … and that was notoriously how he governed.’

95 Davis, Young Ireland, pp. 189–91; Duffy, Thomas Davis, p. 100; Charles Gavan Duffy, The creed of the ‘Nation’, a profession of confederate principles (Dublin, 1848), pp. 7–8.

96 Nation, 8 Sept. 1849, p. 25.

97 National Library of Scotland, MS 1773, fo. 235v; cited with the permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland; Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle, p. 130.

98 CL, xxiv, pp. 254–5.

99 Nation, 29 Sept. 1849, p. 72.

100 Ibid. This theme was also addressed in ‘Work not words’, Nation, 1 Dec. 1849, p. 210.

101 ‘Latter-day pamphlets’, Nation, 13 Apr. 1850, p. 522. A subsequent issue printed a long extract from the pamphlets to illustrate the necessity for ‘trusting and promoting honest men’; ‘Carlyle on the Catholic Church’, Nation, 25 May 1850, p. 620.

102 See Thomas Davis, ‘Ireland's people, lords, gentry and commonalty’, in Thomas Davis, Literary and historical essays (Dublin, 1846), pp. 198–203, reprinted from the Nation; William Smith O'Brien, Speech … on the causes of discontent in Ireland, delivered to the House of Commons on 4th July, 1843 (Dublin, 1843), p. 37.

103 Nation, 29 May 1847, p. 537.

104 See Morrow, Thomas Carlyle, pp. 157–8, and Philip Rosenberg, The seventh hero: Thomas Carlyle and the theory of radical activism (Cambridge, MA, 1974), pp. 188–93.

105 ‘Ireland not the bravest’, Nation, 29 May 1847, p. 537.

106 The phrase comes from Macdonagh, ‘O'Connell's ideology’, p. 151.

107 See Morrow, Thomas Carlyle, p. 201.

108 Macdonagh, ‘Ideas and institutions’, p. 198.