Black Ireland's Race: Thomas Carlyle and the Young Ireland Movement

Abstract

n April 1845, Thomas and Jane Carlyle entertained three guests whose opinions dramatically clashed with their own—so much so that, as Jane Carlyle noted in her diary, “a little blood was shed involuntarily” (qtd. in Duffy 3). The guests were Charles Gavan Duffy, John O’Hagan, and John Pigot, all members of the political movement known as Young Ireland. Their immediate disagreement with their host was understandable, given Carlyle’s depiction of the Irish in Chartism, where, his visitors complained, he had characterized them all as “all liars and thieves.” 1 But Carlyle and his guests also disagreed on the fundamental political issue: the goal of Young Ireland was the repeal of the 1800 Act of Union between Britain and Ireland, a goal Carlyle opposed. In an essay published in the Examiner in 1848, Carlyle argued against repeal, comparing the efforts of Ireland against British colonialism with those of “a violent-tempered starved rat, extenuated into frenzy, [to] bar the way of a rhinoceros” (“Repeal” 43). Such inflamatory language helps to explain how the political discussion at the Carlyles’ escalated to the point of bloodshed: O’Hagan’s nose burst while the visitors “were all three at the loudest in their defence of Ireland against the foul aspersions Carlyle had cast on it” (qtd. in Duffy 3). Less easily explained, however, is the enduring relationship that developed out of this contentious first meeting. Carlyle exchanged letters with the Young Irelanders and visited and traveled with them during his two trips to Ireland. He not only received and read their weekly newspaper, the Nation (founded in 1842), but published an article in it. The friendship cultivated by Carlyle and the Irish nationalists is all the more remarkable because they had reason for disagreement not only in Young Ireland’s cause, but also in the means by which it was pursued. Writers in the Nation repeatedly encouraged their readers to overlook religious, political, and ethnic differences in order to create a united Ireland: a neutralized national identity was to overI