Description
Book SynopsisThis eloquent memoir provides an unrivalled insight into the life of a child reared in a working-class Irish Catholic community in late nineteenth-century Britain. No other author succeeds in depicting so vividly the texture of a life delimited by manual work, home and community ties as experienced by Irish migrants of the period. At the same time, it charts the tortuous route by which a young man struggled to free himself from a life of manual labour by using his literary talents to become a journalist and a popular novelist. Published in 1916, it reflects the world and assumptions of an emigre community between the failure of the Fenian movement and the Easter Rising, and it includes a telling vignette of the aged Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. An insightful picture of the world of those Home Rule supporters who lived outside Ireland emerges from this book.
Trade Review"The reprint of this book and similar ones is of great importance in terms of Irish historiography." Books Ireland Sept 2005 "This is a fascinating record of the son of poor Irish immigrants struggling to raise himself out of poverty and the South Wales pits to become a socialist and well-known writer. An essential piece of social history." Irish Democrat 2006 "University College Dublin Press has now published over thirty 'Classics of Irish History'. These contemporary accounts by well known personalities of historical events and attitudes have an immediacy that conventional histories do not have. Introductions by modern historians provide additional historical background and, with hindsight, objectivity." Books Ireland, Nov 2007 "Scholars of nineteenth-century Irish and Irish-American politics should reacquaint themselves with these classics, part of a long running and immensely useful series from University College Dublin Press." Irish Literary Supplement Fall 2008
Table of ContentsIntroduction by Paul O'Leary; My birth; My beginnings at school; My burning sixpence: I yearn to be a navvy; I go down a coal-pit; Danger: I hear of Dickens and Byron; My troubles begin; Real overwork; My struggle for the sun; Deadliness of an easy job; Despair makes me think of enlisting; The Post Office; Reporting; I seek refuge in Cardiff; Good-fortune comes my way; An unexpected desire: I discover my true love; My novel seeks without finding; London, the university of universities; My disapproval of London; Paddington Station; A new influence: I lecture at Cambridge; My mysterious visitor; Youth grown old; Lunch at 'The Fountain'; I am a city clerk; Index.
