‘Loss, Return, and Restitution’: Autobiography and Irish Diasporic Subjectivity

Abstract

The tradition of autobiographical writing by Irish migrants in Britain is amorphous, diverse, fragmentary and difficult to trace.1 Although distinct Irish enclaves existed in British towns and cities since Elizabethan times, first-person narratives of the migrant experience were slow to emerge, for the obvious reason that few such individuals had the means, the opportunity or the inclination to record their lives in print. Indeed, it is highly likely that the vast majority of poor, rootless seventeenth- and eighteenth-century migrants were incapable of writing their names, let alone their autobiographies, and even if they did they would not have identified them as such. It is almost impossible, therefore, to point with any confidence to a foundational text of Irish migrant autobiography in the way that, for example, the 1791 memoirs of James Lackington have been identified as the earliest manifestation of ‘the individualist self’ in English autobiography (Mascuch, 1997). Instead, we must listen for the incidental confessional voices that penetrate the fog of anonymity that envelops the mass of Irish men and women in Britain until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a greater number of individuated autobiographical voices began to assert themselves.