Irish History:This collection of essays is worth acquiring for Declan Kiberd's discourse on the journal of Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Prof Kiberd asserts that Tone is celebrated as the prophet of Irish independence because he "left a moving and witty chronicle of his struggle". Kiberd describes it as a "romantic artwork . . . revealing a soul in all the vulnerability of its self-making". He detects an extraordinary sense of involvement among readers of the journal: "The identity of Tone which emerges at the end is shaped as much by the attentive reader as the patriot writer, defined from day to day amidst the fluctuations of the 1790s world in Ireland, the United States and France."
Kiberd concludes that Tone was an artist as well as a revolutionary. The greatness of the journal is that it exhibits two personalities: the one known to the muses and the other to the authorities. We know him less because of military action than through the consciousness revealed in his journal. Living on the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries, the optimism of the Enlightenment tells him to trust appearances, yet all around is evidence of man's fallen nature.
With his well-stocked mind, Tone moved through the world resplendent. His use of quotation is far more subtle than that of a clubman capping famous lines, for he often unfreezes the seemingly familiar aphorism, inflecting it with unexpected meanings in its new context. At one level, the journal might be read as a parody of Swift's Journal to Stella. It is written by a man who seeks the good opinion of his wife - he had left his beloved Matilda with their children in America - referring all his thoughts, hopes and judgments to her.
Ultimately, his absence is a sign of deep love. He removes himself from his family for a great task, but is forever present to them through his written words. His journal is a solitary romantic's attempt to come to terms with his own isolation. Much of his time in France is spent - like Beckett - pondering the meaning of waiting for something that may not happen: in this case a naval expedition. Poignantly, Tone never fully re-entered the human community.
Richard Robert Madden (1798-1886) had a remarkable career, too. Nini Rodgers explains the connection between Madden's work as an anti-slavery activist and his emergence as a nationalist historian. Her essay complements an article by C.J. Woods, 'R.R. Madden, historian of the United Irishmen', in the 1798 bicentenary perspective (also published recently by Four Courts Press).
In 1820, Madden, the son of a Catholic silk manufacturer, left Dublin for Bordeaux with £30 to seek his fortune. After travelling on the Continent he went to London, where he worked as a journalist, attained a medical qualification, and acquired an ambition to become a literary figure. In 1824 he set out for the East, returning four years later with a travel book and a two-volume novel. He married, set up practice in a fashionable area and joined the Anti-Slavery Society.
Linking the abolitionist movement to growing evangelical enthusiasm in Britain facilitated the anti-slavery crusade in a counter-revolutionary age. In 1833, when the reformed parliament abolished slavery within the British Empire, Madden secured a post as a stipendiary magistrate in Jamaica, where he discovered planter relatives. Assignments in Cuba, west Africa and Western Australia followed. He returned to live in Ireland after an absence of 30 years.
Madden's seven-volume history of the United Irishmen grew out of his anti-slavery career, Rodgers affirms. Madden had appeared as a witness in the celebrated Amistad case, which re-enacted the themes of oppression, injustice and violence. While travelling in North America, he was encouraged by the United Irish exile, Dr William McNeven to become a historian of the United Irishmen. Madden was "surprised and shocked" at Irish-American antipathy towards African-Americans.
Ireland Abroad, the sixth volume in a series focusing on 19th-century Ireland, provides a variety of perspectives on diaspora studies. The multi-disciplinary essays reflect on the state of being "abroad". The quality is uneven, some of the 15 articles being reports on work in progress. The majority of the subjects were relatively privileged, and do not conform to the image of the impoverished Irish emigrant.
However, Máirtín Ó Catháin writes on dissident Irish republicans in late 19th- century Scotland, and Diane M. Hotten-Somers about the "americanisation of Irish maids". Alienated and brutalised in the fetid Irish slums of Glasgow, the Fenians turned to dynamite in collusion with Irish- American exiles. (The story of the Famine migration to Glasgow is told by John Burrowes in Irish: The Remarkable Saga of a Nation and a City, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 2003, £14.99.) Meanwhile, Irish women dominated domestic service in New England. Middle-class women gained personal freedom on the backs of Irish servants, who slaved up to 15 hours daily.
Whatever about Young Ireland gentility, Charles Gavan Duffy - the son of a Monaghan shopkeeper - would be amused at being described as an "Irish gentry migrant" in Ian McClelland's contribution, 'Worlds apart: the Anglo-Irish gentry migrant experience in Australia'.
Ireland Abroad: Politics and Professions in the 19th Century
Edited by Oonagh Walsh Four Courts Press, 224pp. €45
Brendan Ó Cathaoir is an Irish Times journalist, whose most recent book is Young Irelander Abroad: The Diary of Charles Hart