‘Ah, laddie, did ye really think I’d let a foine broth of a boy such as yerself get splattered…?’ Representations of Irish English Speech in the Marvel Universe

Abstract

Although representations of Irish people in caricatures and cartoons can be dated back to the eighteenth century, they reached their zenith in the nineteenth century, particularly in publications such as Punch in Britain and Puck, Harper’s Weekly and Yankee Notions in the United States. These magazines drew on the tradition of the Stage Irish figure which had long been perpetuated by theaters in England and which lampooned the Irish as ‘ignorant but harmless drudges, given to drink and emotional excesses, loving a fight, and not above a lie or a bit of minor thievery’ (Appel 1971: 367). In addition to presenting these supposedly Irish character traits, such cartoons also propagated stereotypes about Irish people’s appearance and speech patterns (Soper 2005). Thus, Irish characters were shown with simian features and with the costumes and props traditionally associated with Stage Irish figures, namely dudeen ‘clay pipe’ and a shillelagh ‘wooden cudgel.’ They were also provided with a repertoire of stock phrases and spoke with a brogue, which was achieved through respellings deemed to reflect their Irish accent. The effect of such portrayals on the readers of those magazines was the same as that identified by Jonathan Swift over a century earlier, namely: ‘[…] the Irish brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised; and from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders and follies’ (Swift 1728: 346).