Irish Emigration and the Art of Letter-Writing

Abstract

Historians of migration, though increasingly aware of the unique value of personal letters as a source for the mentality of emigrants, are still inclined to neglect the painful process by which such testaments were composed. Yet the process of composition, embedded in form and structure, was itself a vital element in the experience of migration. The letters exchanged between nineteenth century emigrants and their families at home served a variety of functions, which I have discussed in Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia.1 Apart from supplying both public and private information, they served to maintain material and emotional links between separated brethren, and helped to shape future migration. The arrival of a letter was in itself a token of solidarity, while the absence of an expected letter was an endemic source of anxiety, even a harbinger of death. Until the early twentieth century, when the new “Imperial Penny Post” quartered the charge for sending a basic letter between the United Kingdom and Australia, the cost of transoceanic postage was high enough to deter most plebeian correspondents from dashing off trivial notes. In the 1830s, such a letter had cost over half a crown, equivalent to a week’s wages for a laborer in contemporary Ireland. Most surviving letters were carefully constructed, earnest in tone, and packed to capacity with messages, advice, and information.