Authors, Scottish -- 19th century -- Biography; Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881; Historians -- Great Britain -- Biography
He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his
short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th,
1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or
"common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days
there passing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful
Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar,
where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years
earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George
Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to
Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on
to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after-
breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that
the remedy for Ireland was not "emancipation" or "liberty," but to "cease
following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same
afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M.
on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return
to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the
vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest
writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no
consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces.
But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that
Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose
staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only
for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional
government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of
Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and
respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme,"
he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred
hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel,
while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be
a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of
the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his
neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers
generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country
when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for
their good.
Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet
on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to
sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're
very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all
admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes,
indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well
would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty
horse-whip over that back of yours."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account