The genius from the hedge school

Kiely's book is nearly fifty years old, and its publication did a great deal to bring Carleton back into public notice when his…

Kiely's book is nearly fifty years old, and its publication did a great deal to bring Carleton back into public notice when his books were relatively neglected. He was born in the Clogher Valley of Tyrone, near Kiely's own birthplace, of poor Catholic stock at a time when even elementary literacy was rare among that class. To an extent, Carleton was an auto-didact, with all that implies; he was close to the "people" and knew their talk, their mentality, their poverty, their narrow horizons. As he wrote himself: "If I became the historian of their habits and manners, their feelings, their prejudices, their superstitions and their crimes; if I have attempted to delineate their moral, religious and physical state, it was became I saw no person willing to undertake a task which surely must be looked upon as an important one." A dubious chapter in Carleton's life was his connection in Dublin with the Rev. Caesar Otway, an obsessive and unbalanced anti-Papist who was undoubtedly a bad influence. Carleton also clashed with the Nation writers and with young Ireland generally, yet he admired Thomas Davis personally; though his politico-social views are often baffling and contradictory, it was clear that his heart was in the right place and, as Kiely shows, he was essentially an emotional and rather illogical man. He lived through the Famine years, which shrank the population of Ireland from eight million to five, and wrote about this Black Age memorably. In Kiely's own opinion "he is among the greatest, possibly the greatest writer of fiction that Ireland has given to the English language," a highly relevant judgment now that Carleton is once again unfashionable and so little of his large, highly uneven output appears to be in print.