John Mitchel: Commentary & Quotations

Commentary

J. S. Le Fanu (in the aftermath of 1848): ‘It is impossible to read his striking speeches and his writings, and not be impressed with the striking evidences everywhere apparent, of that impetuous abandonment of self, which characterises the genuine fanatic [...]. Mitchel wrote and spoke irrespectively of display; he gave us no pompous metaphors, no affectedness quaintness, no vapid parodies upon the style of Sartor Resartus. He seems to have been equally destitute of vanity, and of fear. Ireland republicanised and communised was his engrossing idea [...]’ (Dublin University Magazine, vol. 31, June 1848, pp.784-86; cited in W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, OUP 1980; Lilliput 1991, p.105.)

John Augustus O’Shea, Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent (London: Ward & Downey 1885) - O’Shea writes that “When he [Mitchel] heard of the death of the first son, he gave a natural sigh, but consoled himself with the expression: ‘He could have had no more enviable fate. He died in honourable company.’” According to O’Shea, Mitchel’s daughter, Henrietta, converted to Catholicism but was “cut off in the bloom of youthful beauty, and lies under a mound in a convent of the Sacred Heart in a Parisian suburb”. (Quoted on Irishmen in Paris, online; accessed 6.11.2010.)

W. B. Yeats: ‘The ... most inspired [of Irish nationalist writers] was John Mitchel, who thundered from his convict hulk ... Mitchel, by the right of his powerful nature and his penal solitude, communed indeed with the great Gods.’ (Uncoll. Prose, I, p.361.) Yeats also remarks on ‘his style [...] shaped by Carlyle’ (‘General Introduction for My Work’, in Essays and Introductions, 1961, p.513).

W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan 1955) - “Ireland After Parnell”: ‘[...] Young Ireland had sought a nation unified by political doctrine alone, a subservient art and letters aiding and abetting. [...] a method of writing that took its poetical style from Campbell, Scott, Macaulay, and Béranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, its prose style - in John Mitchel, the only Young Ireland prose-writer who had a style at all - from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as literature without much reservation or discrimination, I contended, was to be deceived or to practise deception.’ (pp.204.) See also brief comparison with J. F. Taylor who ‘had used his master’s style, as Mitchel had done before, to abase what his master loved, to exalt [214] what his master scorned.’ (Ibid., p.214.)

WBY - On Duffy’s arguing that Mitchel had behaved badly: ‘But in Ireland personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us, I think, may have gone home muttering, “How dare he [Sir Charles Gavan Duffy] be in the right if Mitchel is in the wrong?”’ (Yeats, op. cit., p.226.)

W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan 1955) - “The Death of Synge”: ‘Mitchel wrote better prose than Davis, Mangan, better poetry, D’Arcy Magee better popular verse. Fintan Lalor say deeper into a political event, O’Connell had more power and Meagher more eloquence, but Davis alone has influenced generations of young men, though Mitchel’s narrower and more faulty nature has now and again competed with him. [...] Mitchel’s influence comes mainly, though ot altogether, from style, that also a form of power, an energy of life. It is curious that Mitchel’s long martyred life, supported by style, has had less force than that of a man who died at thirty, was never in the hulks, did not write very well, and achieved no change of the law. [i.e., Thomas Davis]’ (p.516.)

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Patrick Pearse: Pearse called Jail Journal (1854) ‘the last part of the Gospel of Irish nationality as Tone’s Autobiography was the first’.

Douglas Hyde (Diary, 5 March 1881): ‘I read a good deal of The Last Conquest &c by John Mitchel (1861 &c.). I cannot sufficiently praise that author and his work. He is the best prose writer I have read for a long time; his style is forceful, and he would make a rebel out of me if I weren’t one already.’ [See Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974, p..xviii]

George Birmingham [Rev. J. O. Hannay], Introduction Recollections of Jonah Barrington (Talbot [1918]), ‘to the savage prose of John Mitchel, the strongest prose written in Ireland since the days of Swift’.

John Eglinton [William Magee], remarks of Mitchel in ‘The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature’, reprinted in Saints and Sage (1908) [and copied in FDA2, though with small variations perhaps from another source], ‘... but in Jail Journal, of Mitchel, written far away from an audience, and in order to satisfy an overmastering need of self-expression, we do at last get literature, a book so successful in giving expression to the instincts and antipathies of Irish nationality, that, in the face of it, any further talk of the inefficiency of the English language in Ireland is somewhat audacious ... M. Emile Montégut devoted to it a lengthy article in the Revue Des Deux Mondes (Tome 10, 1855), an article every Irishman who wishes “to see himself as others see him” should read. Mitchel afterwards wrote of himself as a man who “but once in his life was possessed by a great cause, whose whole life and energy converged themselves once to one focus, and were then dissipated into the general atmosphere”; but it is quite certain that so far as concerns his literary activity - for we are not here concerned with the political principles which brought him into unpleasant relations with two governments, and very nearly with a third, and which allowed him to become [40] the fierce champion of slavery - no other book of his has half the literary value of the Jail Journal, which, for may young Irish patriots, has made him the Defoe of the hulks [40-41]. ‘“[T]he cold chain of silence” will never be lifted from the soul of Ireland save by men using the homely directness of utterance, and, without doubt, the speech of John Mitchel [...] getting rid of the notion that in Ireland, a writer is to think first and foremost of interpreting the nationality of his country, and not simply the burden of what he has to deliver.’ (See also John Eglinton, q.v.) [Note: the cold chain of silence is a phrase of Moore’s.]

Louis Paul-Dubois: Paul-Dubois analysed what Mitchel called the ‘national and anti-English spirit’ in Ireland and pointed out that ‘Irishmen are never tired of anathematising the “pirate Empire”, that “Empire of Hell” to which Presbyterian Mitchel [271] dedicated the three hundred pages of hatred which go to make up his Jail Journal. Nevertheless a large portion of the British empire is administered by Irishmen, who are either members of the Indian Civil Service, or leading politicians in Canada or Australia’ (See Dubois, Contemporary Ireland, 1908, pp.166-79; quoted in D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, London: Routledge 1982; 1991, p.271-72.)

Arthur Griffith, Preface to Jail Journal (Dublin: M. H. Gill 1913), pp.ix-xvi: ‘John Mitchel met the crisis of 1848 with a policy. Practical Posterity, from its easy chair, has pronounced the policy extravagant and impossible: even, in unctuous moments, reprehensible. Let the Censor stand in the Censured’s place and declare what its wisdom would have counselled a people whose life was assailed. For two years Mitchel had trod the round of Resolution and Protest, Protest and Resolution against the drafting out from Ireland of the food of twenty millions of people to the famishing of eight millions. A third year dawned on the same programme of calculated destruction and futile remonstrance. Mitchel withdrew his name from the second part of the programme and bade his countrymen defend their lives from attack by the ultimate methods of self-preservation. [...] Thirty years later, Mitchel’s policy, interpreted and applied in a stronger generation by the man whose career Mitchel’s writings moulded - Charles Stewart Parnell - brought the stoutest bulwark of English power in Ireland to the ground. When Parnell bade the farmers of Ireland “Keep a firm grip on their holdings,” he crystallised into a phrase the policy Mitchel urged unsuccessfully in 1848. Mitchel’s generation failed him, his sacrifice seemed vain - but, sixty years after, we can look back to the Ireland of slavish resignation - the land of carcases and ruins - the Finis Hiberniae of the cheering auditors to a British Minister and the leader writers of the English press, and, seeing out of that degradation and misery and ruin new forces grow to encounter and defeat English policy in Ireland, realise that the haughty spirit of a great Irishman though baffled in its own generation may set the feet of our country in the way of triumph in the next. Fifty years passed ere the voice of Swift in the“Drapier’s Letters” spoke winningly to England through the cannon of the Volunteers. Thirty years after Mitchel was borne a shackled prisoner from a cowed country, two strong fortresses of England’s power in Ireland perished in the fires of resistance to oppression he had rekindled in an abject land. / Nature gifted Mitchel with the genius, and more than the strength of Swift. [...; &c.]’ (p.x; see full text - attached.)

Note: Griffith’s Preface contains a well-known defence of Irish independence on grounds independent of Human Rights or racial equality - as given in extract under Griffith, Quotations, supra.

Denis Ireland (An Ulster Protestant looks At his World, 1930), compares Mitchel to Swift, calling him ‘prose master’ [52], and quotes, ‘In the light of that mock throne on the hull over the Liffey there vibrate now all the dizened atomies of happy Ireland. GlitteringCaptains, silvered Lieutenants, epauletted puppyism in every grade and phase of fashion, wigged debasement fresh from a public hanging and gowned simony flock around delighted at the ‘flourishing condition’ of the state. No whisper of death, no shadow of desolation, breaks over the crowd ... and so begins the third years of uninterrupted famine.’

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Benedict Kiely, Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton [1947] (Dublin: Talbot Press Edn. 1972): ‘[...] Carleton’s denunciation of Young Ireland [as “juvenile revolution”], or at least of the romantically revolutionary aspect of Young Ireland, was not governed noticeably by any steady, set political principle. He condemned “the ferocious and brutal violence” of the language of John Mitchel who referred to Lord Clarendon as “Butcher-General of Ireland”, told Lord Clarendon that he expected no mercy from him, as, so help him God, he (Lord Clarendon) might expect none from him (Mitchel) should the revolutionary cause prosper. This, Carleton said, was not the language of common sense or common feeling, but of political insanity. But from Mitchel’s point of view it was the only language possible under the circumstances: the people were dying; the mind of the nineteenth century exhibited in economic theory was responsible; so was the British government of Ireland, and the precariousness of the potato, and the callow selfishness of the landed classes. For an honest courageous man, whose temperament and whose prose-style had come under the influence of Thomas Carlyle, but who acted where Carlyle growled in prophetic self-satisfaction, the only thing to do was stand up before all men and speak the truth. John Mitchel did that, first in the Nation, later more inflammably in the United Irishman, later in the dock when a carefully-selected jury sent him overseas for life. He thought quite sensibly that no trade regulations and no unalterable economic laws should be allowed to take food out of Ireland while the people of Ireland died of hunger. He thought quite sensibly that if men had to die at all they should die like men, not like the plants that rotted around them in the fields. They should fight for food. They should tear down the whole structure that had brought them to such misery.’ (p.105.)

Benedict Kiely, Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton [1947] (Dublin: Talbot Press Edn. 1972): ‘John Mitchel, for all his “political insanity”, had the type of mind that immediately clarified a situation by reducing it to its elements, and one page of his violent words can be infinitely more illuminating than all Carleton’s efforts to be abstract and detached, to lay the exact amount of praise and blame exactly where each belonged. Mitchel saw clearly enough that the killing of odious landlords, agents, tithe proctors and bailiffs had certainly been dreadful atrocities, but the country people of Ireland had regarded them not as murders but as executions. There was no law on either side but, as Mitchel saw it, “more substantial justice, on the whole, is done by the ‘midnight legislators’ than by the judges of Assize.” Because of his own temperament and his memories of first enthusiasm for Thomas Carlyle, Mitchel to the end of his days had no liking for the methods of secret and oath-bound societies. Ribbonism had secrecy and the swearing of oaths, and was, as well, spasmodic and unorganised both in particular action and in general outline. But for Mitchel it had the merit of being a flat negation of British law in Ireland, “a great manufactory of disaffection and rebellion, and one which the government will never be able to reach.” In other words, Ribbonism - a name that meant nothing more clearly defined than discontent expressing itself in violence - kept the fires of rebellion burning until the time and the man would come to fan them into one universal conflagration. No government could effectively smother those fires, for they burned secretly in the hearts of men resenting injustice. Although the violent expression of that resentment could be foolish and terrible, could go awry and destroy the innocent with the guilty, could be twisted to evil purposes by evil men, [118] yet it is on the survival in the human heart of that primitive anger at wrong and tyranny that the cause of freedom must ultimately depend. (pp.118-19.) [...]

See also further remarks, p.118: ‘Because of his temperament and his memories of his first enthusiasm for Thomas Carlyle, Mitchel to the end of his days had no liking for the methods of secret and oath-bound societies.’

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W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984), Mitchel was devoted reader of classical, especially Greek literature; at the climax of his trial-speech, he appealed to his audience to remember Scaevola who trust his hand into a brazier to defy the Etruscan invader, ‘The Roman, who saw his hand burning to ashes before the tyrant, promised that three hundred should follow out the enterprise. Can I not promise for one, for two, for three, aye, for hundreds?’ (J. G. Hodges, report of the trial of John Mitchel, etc., Dublin 1848, pp.97-98.)

R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: John Lane 1993), quotes Mitchel: ‘The general history of a nation may fitly preface the personal memoranda of a solitary captive, for it was strictly and logically a consequence of the dreary story here epitomised, that I came to be a prisoner.’ (Jail Journal, Dublin Edn., 1918, p.xlvi; see also remarks regarding Pearse’s debt to Mitchel (p.14; see Patrick Pearse, q.v.).

See also Foster, The Story of Ireland [Inaugural lecture ... Univ. of Oxford, 1 Dec. 1994] (Clarendon Press 1995): ‘[... John Mitchel, equally [with Samuel Ferguson] a product of those un-Irish figures Carlyle and Herder, but arguing the nationalist morality-tale with all the zeal of a Presbyterian convert. Today remembered for his Jail Journal, Mitchel’s other narratives of Irish history compel attention. His history both responded to and helped to create the irish emigrant consciousness of a national story from which England, cruel step-mother, had written them out. / By the time of Mitchel’s death in 1875, the story of Ireland had emerged from myriad retellings in its accepted narative form.’ (pp.6-7.)

Christopher Morash, The Hungry Voice (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1989), quoting Mitchel, ‘If one should narrate how the cause of his country was stricken down in open battle, and blasted to pieces with shot and shell, there might be a certain mournful pride in dwelling upon the gallant resistance ... but to describe how the spirit of a country has been broken and subdued by beggarly famine; - how her national aspirations have been not choked in her own blood, nobly shed on the field, but strangled by red tape; - how her life and soul have been ameliorated and civilised out of her; - how she dies of political economy, and was buried under tons of official stationary; - this is the dreary task, which I wish some one else had undertaken.’ Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps) (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1861), pp.138-39; Morash, p.35-6.

Christopher Morash, ‘The Rhetoric of Right in Mitchel’s Jail Journal’, in The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature [Proceedings of IASIL Leiden 1993], Vol. 1: ed. C. C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen, and Tjebbe Westendorp, ed., ‘Forging in the Smithy: National Identity and Representation in Anglo-Irish Literary History’ (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1995), pp.207-17. Morash offers extensive remarks on Carlyle’s ‘discourse of power’ and particularly Mitchel’s use of his style (‘writing Carlylese’ - Morash, p.215.) Quotes: ‘Success confers every right in the Enlightened Age; wherein, for the first time, it has come to be admitted and proclaimed in set terms, Success is Right and Defeat is Wrong. If I profess myself a disbeliever in that gospel, the Enlightened Age will only smile, and say, “The defeated always are.” Britain being in possession of the floor, any hostile comment upon her way of telling our story is an unmannerly interruption; nay, is nothing short of an Irish howl.’ (Jail Journal, p.xxxvi; Morash, 208-09.) Morash Quotes Carlyle: ‘The people [Young Irelanders] are great disciples of mine. But I think I have very little credit of them: in fact, they seem not unlikely to get themselves shot, or hanged for treason, by and by!’ (Letters of Thomas Carlyle to His Brother Alexander, Cambridge Mass. 1968, p.648; Morash, p.212.) Mitchel wrote that Carlyle is the only man in these latter days who produces what can properly be termed books. (Jail Journal, p.204; Morash, p.212.)

Christopher Morash (‘The Rhetoric of Right in Mitchel’s Jail Journal’, 1993) - cont.: ‘The Young Irishmen were greatly impressed by the philosopher and his wife. They did not accept his specific opinions on almost any question, but his constant advocacy of veracity, integrity, and valour touched the most generous of their sympathies, and his theory that under the divine government of the world right and might are identical, as right infallibly became might in the end, was very welcome teaching to men struggling against enormous odds for what they believed to be intrinsic justice.’ (Duffy, Conversations, p.4.) Quotes Carlyle, ‘If we examine we shall find that, in this world, no conquest could ever become permanent, which did not withal show itself beneficial to the conquered as to the conquerors’ (Chartism, XXXIX, pp.146-47.)

Mitchel on Thomas Carlyle: ‘Carlyle cannot write rationally about Ireland; and he believes that Carthage [England] has a mission to conquer the world. (Jail Journal, p. 204; Morash, p.214.)

On nations & national life: ‘Neither for man nor nation is happiness the end of living - least of all for those who utter new truths and lead in new paths. Let a nation act with all the energy of its national life - do with its might what its hand findeth to do - the truth it has got to speak in thunder. Therein let it find its “happiness”, or nowhere.’ (Jail Journal, p.81; quoted in Morash, op. cit., p.1993, p.214.)

Christopher Morash (‘The Rhetoric of Right in Mitchel’s Jail Journal’, 1993) - cont.: Morash quotes Carlyle: ‘Man is sent hither not to question, but to work ... For truly, if we look into it, there is not a more fruitless endeavour than this same, which the metaphysician proper toils in: to educe conviction out of negation ... The Irish saint swam the Channel, “carrying his head in his teeth”; but the feat has never been imitated.’ (Carlyle, “Characteristics, xxviii, p.27; Morash, p.215.); Cf. Mitchel: ‘But what is this? Is it the abyss of metaphysics I see yawning before me? Assuredly, I will not plunge into that bottomless pit again, after having drawn myself out of it, with pain and labour, full fifteen years ago - just so long is it since I endeavoured to walk with my own head in my teeth, like the decapitated Christian martyr celebrated by Mr. Gibbon - to rival that “Irish Saint”, known to Thomas Carlyle, who swam across the Channel with his head so secured - “a miracle”, saith Carlyle, “which has never been repeated.”’ (Jail Journal, 121-22; Morash, p.216.) [See also A Bibliography of Carlyle’s Young Ireland Connection - kindly supplied by Chris Morash - supra.

Chris Morash, Writing the Famine (1995): ‘His basic style might be defined as a disruption of the empiricism upon which Enlightenment depends. If the physical is to be displaced as the ground of truth for reasoning, the relationship between the physical world and the text is brought into question; for, if one accepts the implications of a rejection of empiricism, the truest text is the one with the least connection to the material world, leaving the writer in a universe of pure textuality. [...];we should not be led into the mistake of thinking that the separation of the text from the world is gesture of despair. Indeed it is very much much the opposite. Mitchel’s assertion of the textual basis of reality (as opposed to the real basis of texts) merely shifts the ground of battle from the physical world to the discursive world.’ (Cited by Mathew Campbell, review, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1997, p.101; note that Campbell is critical of the tendency to read the famine as textuality, comparing it in some degree with the strategy of Charles Trevelyan who attributed to divine wisdom the inclination to bring permanent good out of transient evil.)

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Tadhg Foley, ‘Praties, Professors, and Political Economy’ (Irish Reporter, Third Quarter 1995), pp.6-7, ‘That John Mitchel was an enthusiastic proponent of slavery has been an inestimable boon to liberals from the great John Elliot Cairnes to Roy Foster, enabling them to dismiss his nationalism as racism, and gleefully recognise apostolic continuity between the two ... Mitchel and his colleagues say the campaign [of 1848] as a class struggle of tenant against landlord and labour against capital. Mitchel is usually dismissed as the exponent of a theory which sees the Famine as an act of genocide against the Irish people. That this hypothesis is baseless is interesting; but much more importantly, it is unnecessary.//Frequently, Mitchel identifies political economy as the angel of death. Ireland, he claims, was ‘a nation perishing of political economy’. He frequently excoriated the discipline as ‘English’, or ‘Famine’, or ‘Whig’ political economy. He saw the subject as inherently ideological, while also claiming strict scientific neutrality and universal validity for its laws.. /It naturalised existing property relations ... [&c.]’ (p.6).

Graham Davis, ‘Making History, John Mitchel and the Great Famine’, in Irish Writing, Exile and Subversion, ed. Paul Hyland & Neil Sammells (London: Macmillan 1991), pp.98-115: ‘the theme of starvation amidst plenty, a key part of Mitchel’s nationalist propaganda, may also be seen as an oversimplification.’

Brendan Ó Cathaoir, An Irishman’s Diary (31 Dec. 1999), gives account of John Mitchel and his life with Jenny Verner, dg. of Capt. Verner whom he married in her seventeenth year; quotes, ‘‘Poor Jenny, she might as well have married a homeless Bedouin or wandering Tartar’; her own view of slavery also cited: ‘Nothing would enduce me to become the mistress of a slave household ... My objection to slavery is the injury it does to the white masters.’ She died on 31 Dec. 1899 and was buried in the Bronx.

Ciaran Brady, ‘John Mitchel’, in W. J. McCormack, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Irish Literature (Oxford 1999; 2001) : ‘For Mitchel, southern slavery represented the last vestiges of an economic system that was wholly antagonistic to the brutal international capitalism legitimated, if not celebrated, by the doctrines of political economy. It created a culture whic for all its abuses generated stability and order and did not subordinate itselt to the dictates of a nihilistic determinism. Thus whether slavery could survive or not, its defence as a means of economic production and social organisation alternative to commercial capitalism provided a fine polemical means of demonstrating the viciousness and cruelty of the modern world system, which had brought misery and ruin to Ireland. And so Mitchel, who had already consciously refashioned himself in the pages of Jail Journal as the apotheosis of the Irish patriot, now projected a further image as the unwavering apologist for slavery without any sense of contradiction. It was to prove a fool-hardy and costly commitment; but it is full measure of the degree to which Mitchel was prepared to sacrifice himself in waging war against the dominant culture that he believed was destroying his own native land.’ (p.385.)

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Quotations

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From the works ...

Life and Times of Aodh O’Neill, Prince of Ulster (Dublin: Duffy, 1846)
John Mitchel’s Jail Journal (1854)	Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)

[ See also longer extracts from Jail Journal and The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) anthologised in The Cabinet of Irish Literature [ed. T. P. O’Connor, 1880], rev. edn., Katherine Tynan (1902-03), Vol. III - as attached. ]

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Life and Times of Aodh O’Neill, Prince of Ulster (Dublin: Duffy, 1846) - Chap. 1: ‘When Con O’Neill, surnamed Baccagh, reigned in Ulster, the far greater portion of this island owed no allegiance and paid no obedience to the king or laws of England. More than two hundred years had gone by since the northern Irish, aided by Edward Bruce of Scotland, had destroyed every vestige of foreign domination in Ulster; an the few Anglo-Norman families that had got footing there, under De Courcy and De Lacy, were long since, by intermarriage, gossipred, and fostering, blended with the Irish tribes, used Irish customs, disdained to ride with stirrups, wore crommeal and coolun, submitted to brehon laws, forgot vasselage, and liege-homage, and all feudal tenure, whether by knight service, escuage, or other - nay, forgot their language and their very names. [...; 13].’

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Famine horrors: ‘A calm still horror was over the land. Go where you would, in the heart of the town or in the suburb, or the mountainside or on the level plain, there was the stillness and heavy pall-like feel of the chamber of death. You stood in the presence of a dread, silent, vast dissolution. An unseen ruin was creeping around you. You saw no war of classes, no open Janissary war of foreigners, no human agency of destruction. / You could weep but the rising curse died unspoken within your heart like a profanity. Human passion there was none but inhuman and unearthly quiet. Children met you, toiling heavily on stone heaps but their burning eyes were senseless and their faces cramped and weasened like stunted old men. Gangs worked but without a murmur or a whistle or a cough, ghostly, like voiceless shadows to the eye. / Even womanhood had ceased to be womanly. The birds of the air carolled no more and the crow and the raven dropped dead upon the wing.The very dogs, hairless with the head down and the vertebrae of the back protruding like a saw of bone, glared on you from the ditch side with a wolfish, avid eye and then slunk away, slowly and cowardly. Nay, the sky of heaven, the blue mountains, the still lake, stretching far away westward, looked not as they wont. Between them and you rose up a steaming agony, a film of suffering, impervious and dim. It seemed as if the anima mundi, the soul of the land, was faint and dying, and that the faintness and death had crept into all things of earth and heaven. You stood there too, silenced in the presence of the unseen and terrible. (United Irishman, 1848; quoted by W. Dillon in Life of John Mitchel, 2 vols (London 1888), Vol. I, p.211; quoted by Kevin Whelan in ‘The Memories of “The Dead”’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 15:1, Johns Hopkins UP 2002, p.67.

Whelan comments: ‘Such scenes developed the saeva indignatio in Mitchel, as he himself acknowledged: “I had the misfortune, I and my children, to be born in a country which suffered itself to be oppressed and humiliated by another’ (Dillon, Life of Mitchel, ii.104.) Mitchel’s savage account of 1861, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) was to provide a compelling, emotionally-charged narrative of the Famine which dominated subsequent nationalist and especially Irish-American memory of it: see James Donnelly, Great Irish Potato Famine (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing 2001, pp.184-214.)

The Famine: ‘In the depth of winter we travelled to Galway, through the very centre of that fertile island, and saw sights that will never wholly leave the eyes that beheld them: cowering wretches, almost naked in the savage weather, prowling in turnip-fields, and endeavouring to grub up roots which left, but running to hide as the mail-coach rolled by: very large fields, where small farms, had been “consolidated,” showing dark bare of fresh mould running through them, where the ditches had been levelled: - groups and families, sitting or wandering on high-road, with failing steps and dim, patient eyes, gazing hopelessly into infinite darkness; before them, around them, above them, nothing but darkness and despair: parties of tall, brawny men, once the flower of Meath and Galway, stalking by with a fierce but vacant scowl; as if they knew that all this ought not to be, but knew not whom to blame, saw none whom they could rend in their wrath; for Lord John Russell sat safe in Chesham Place; and Trevelyn, the grand commissioner and factotum of the pauper-system, wove his web of red tape around them from afar. So cunningly does civilisation work! Around these farmhouses which were still inhabited were to be seen hardly any stacks of grain; it was all gone; the poor-rate collector, the rent-agent, the county-cess collector, had carried it off: and sometimes I could see, in front of the cottages, little children leaning against a fence when the sun shone out, - for they could not stand, - their limbs fleshless, their bodies half-naked, their faces bloated yet wrinkled, and of a pale, greenish hue, - children who would never, it was too plain, grow up to be men and women. I saw Trevelyan’s claw in the vitals of those children: his red tape would draw them to death. in his government laboratory he had prepared for than, the typhus poison.’ (From The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), given in The Cabinet of Irish Literature, ed. T. P. O’Connor [1880], rev. edn. by Katherine Tynan (1902-03, Vol. 3, pp.70-78; p.76.) [For further extracts from Cabinet, see attached.]

Jail Journal [1854] (Glasgow Edn. 1876), remarks on demographic plan entailed in Lord Devon’s Digest of Evidence, which seemed to require a reduction of 326,084 occupiers or 192,368 families from Irish arable soil: ‘that is, the killing of a million of persons. Little did the Commissioners hope then that in four years, British policy, with the famine to aid, would succeed in killing fully two millions, and forcing nearly another million to flee the country.’ (Introductory, p.15). [Cont.]

Jail Journal [1854] (Glasgow Edn. 1876) - cont.: ‘The potato blight and consequent famine, placed in the hands of the British government an engine of state by which they were eventually enabled to clear off not a million, but two millions and a half of the “surplus population” - to preserve “law and order” in Ireland (what they called law and order) and to maintain the integrity of the Empire for this time (p.105). [Cont.]

Jail Journal (1854) - cont: ‘If a person of education commit the real crime of endeavouring to subvert the social order, to break down the sanction of law, and to destroy the gocernment under which he lives (supposing order, law and government to exist), how does his education entitle him to indulgence above other felons? But possibly you begin to see, gaffer John Buller, that I am no felon at all, and have committed no crime at all, not withstanding your new “Act of Parliament”, in that case made and provided; and you think it impolitic, or else you are ashamed, to proceed, to the uttermost rigour with me. Cowardly John! You ought either not to take up the vigorous policy at all, or else carry it through with a high hand. This is child’s play. Positively I am either a felon or no felon; that is to say, either I am a felon, or you John, are a felon.’ (Jail Journal, IUP rep. edn., 1982, p.12-13; quoted in Joseph Lynch, MA Dipl., UU 2003.)

Castle Catholics: ‘I do not know what they will do upon being made to learn this lesson. I only know what they ought to do. All Catholic judges, assistant-barristers, magistrates, and other functionaries, ought to resign their employments; all Cathohc policemen ought to strip off their ignominious livery; all Catholic soldiers ought to desert - in one word, what the Catholics ought to do is to tear up society from its roots, but they will be citizens in their own land. What they will do, for the present, is the reverse of all this. Some of the respectable Castle-Catholics will thank me little for bringing their degradation so prominently into public view ; they think they are emancipated enough, and will curse me by their gods, if they have any. Heaven! where is the great heart of chief and tanist? How has the rich blood of O’Conor and O’Donnell Roe grown pale! Is this, the stateliest family of the Caucasian race, indeed, starved and kicked into incurable Helotism? / But young Catholics are growing up - even, I trust, in the Castle-going rank of life - who will shame their fathers, and do honour to their ancestors.’ (Jail Journal, 1913 Edn., p.9 [Chap. I].)

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Jail Journal (1854) - cont.: [“Ego”:] ‘Nature has laws. Because the Irish have been taught peacful agitation in their slavery, therefore they have been swept by a plague of hunger worse than many years of bloody fighting. Because they would not fight, they have been made to rot off the face of the earth, that so they might learn at last how deadly a sin is patience and perseverance under a stranger’s yoke.’ (Jail Journal, IUP rep. edn., 1982, p.88; quoted in Joseph Lynch, MA Dip, UU 2003.)

Jail Journal (1854): ‘The very nation that I knew in Ireland is broken and destroyed; and the place that knew it shall know it no more.’ (Jail Journal, Dublin 1913, p.357; quoted in Declan Kiberd, Inventing ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, 1995, p.99.)

Moorings cut: ‘So my moorings are cut. I am a banished man. And this is no mere relegatio, Like Ovid's, at Tomi; it is utter - interdiction of fire and water; the loss of citizenship, if citizenship I had; the brand of whatsoever ignominy law can inflict, if law there be. Be it so; I am content. There are no citizens in Ireland; there is no citizenship - no law. I cannot lose what I never had; for no Irishman has any rights at present. As for the disgrace of “felony,” that sits very easy upon me. To make me a felon needs an act of my own. No “Act of Parliament” can do it! and what ignominy London “law” can stain an Irishman withal, I am content to underlie till my dying hour. Be that disgrace on my head and on the heads of my children. But for the thought of those children and their mother, and what temporary inconveniences they may suffer before arrangements can be made for their leaving Ireland - but for that I should absolutely feel jolly to-day. There is something independent in setting forth on a voyage of three thousand miles, with an old brown coat on my back, and a few shillings in my tricolor purse. The onus is not upon me. You Sovereign Lady, Queen Nice [i.e., Victoria compared with the Queen of Carthage], have charge of me now; look you take good care of me. I am in your majesty's hands at last; but you may find, O Queen! that I am too dear at the price you have paid, and are like to pay. I will cost you, most dread sovereign, rather more than my rations.’ (Jail Journal, 1913 Edn., p.15.)

Jail Journal (1854) - writing of Lieut. Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara (1934): ‘It is apparent that the value of any book is not in the mere thoughts it presents to you, expressed in black-and-white, but rather in those it suggests, occasions, begets in you, far outside the intentions and conceptions of the writer, and even outside the subject of his writing. If some dull rogue writes you an essay, on what he does not understand, you are not bound to follow his [208] chain of reasoning (as perhaps he calls it) - the first link of his chain may fit itself to other links of your own forging, and so you may have whole trains, whole worlds of thought, which need not run upon the dull rogue’s line, nor stop at his terminus.’ (Jail Journal, 1913 Edn., p.120; quoted in Christopher Morash, ‘The Rhetoric of Right in Mitchel’s Jail Journal’, in The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature, ed. C. C. Barfoot, et al. [Proceedings of IASIL Leiden 1993], Vol. 1, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1995, pp.207-17; pp.208-09.)

On the Irish language: ‘There is no name for modern enlightenment in Irish, no word corresponding with the “masses” or with “reproductive labour”; in short, the “nineteenth century” would not know itself, could not express itself in Irish.’ (“The Famine Year”, [reprinted as appendix toJail Journal (London: Sphere Books, 1983), p.415; quoted in Fionntán de Brun, in ‘Temporality and Revivalism’ [UU Research Series, April 2011].)

Jail Journal (1854): ‘On their passage up the Indus - when at length they were allowed to go up - they found (what the English always find in any country they have a mind to) that the people were cruelly treated by the native government, and would wish to receive the British with open arms, if the villanous Ameers would only allow them.’ (Jail Journal, IUP rep. edn., 1982, p.99; quoted in Joseph Lynch, MA Dip, UU 2003.)

History of Ireland [1868], ‘In Ireland they found themselves face to face, not two classes, but two nations; of which the one had substantially the power of life and death over the other. When we add to this that one of these two nations had despoiled [cf. supra] the other of those very lands which the plundered race was now glad to cultivate as rackrented tenants, and also that the dominant nation felt bound to hate the other, both as “rebels” who needed only the opportunity to rise and cut their masters’ throats, and as Papists who clung to the “damnable idolatry” of the Mass, we can easily understand the difficulty of the “landlord and tenant” question in Ireland. [...] All the laws were made not for, but against the great mass of the people; the courts of justice were entirely in the possession of the oppressors; the proscribed race saw only mortal enemies on the bench; enemies in the jury-box, enemies everywhere all around, and were continually made to feel that law and justice were not for them. This of course, in times of distress, threw them back upon the only resource of desperate men, conspiracy, intimidation, and vengeance.’ (p.89; quoted in Rosamund Jacob, The Rise of the United Irishmen, 1927.)

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The Last Conquest of Ireland, Perhaps (London 1861): ‘[...] Yet there are some circumstances which perplex an inquirer who derives his information from the English periodical press. That an island which is said to be an antegral part of the richest empire on the globe - and the most fertile portion of that empire; - with British Constitution, Habeas Corpus, Members of Parliament, and Trial by Jury - should in five years lose two and a half millions of its people (more than one-fourth) by hunger, and fever the consequence of hunger, and flight beyond sea to escape from hunger, - while that empire of which it is said to be a part, was all the while advancing in wealth, prosperity, and comfort, at a faster pace than ever before, - is a matter that seems to ask elucidation. / In the year 1841, Ireland, a country precisely half the size of the State of Georgia, had a population of 8,175,124. The natural rate of increase of population in Ireland, through all her former troubles, would have given upwards of nine millions in. 1851; but in 1851 the Census Commissioners find in Ireland but 6,515,794 living souls.’ (Thom’s Official Directory)’. [Cont.]

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The Last Conquest of Ireland, Perhaps (1876; 1876 Edn.) - cont: ‘Another thing, which to a spectator must appear anomalous, is that during each of those five years of “famine,” from ’46 to ’51 - that famine-struck land produced more than double the needful sustenance for all her own people; and of the best and choicest kind. Governor Wise, of Virginia, was in Brazil while the ends of the earth were resounding with the cry of Irish starvation; and was surprised to see unloaded at Rio abundance of the best quality of packed beef from Ireland. That the people who were dying of hunger did, in each year of their agony, produce upon Irish ground, of wheat and other grain, and of cattle and poultry, more than double the amount that they could all by any gluttony devour, is a fact that must be not only asserted, but proved beyond doubt.’ [Cont.]

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Sundry views
Irish history: ‘You little know the history and sore trials and humiliations of this ancient Irish race; ground and trampled first for long ages into the very earth, and then taught - expressly taught - in solemn harangues and even in sermons, that it was their duty to die, and see their children die before their faces, rather than resist their tyrants, as men ought. [...] But I tell you the light has at length come too them; the flowery spring of this year is the dawning of their day; and before the cornfields of Ireland are white for the reaper our eyes shall see the sun flash gloriously, if the heavens be kind to us, on a hundred thousand pikes.’ (United Irishman, 13 May 1848; cited in Malcolm Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature, 1972, p.110.)

1851 Census: ‘1841-1851: Those ten short years have seen more grievous and overwhelming changes in Ireland than befall to other countries in the course of centuries. Down the long files of figures on the census Table is indexed one of the most mournful histories the eye of GOD has ever rested upon. Within ten years the world has advanced greatly toward its goal - noble thoughts and actions keeping apt harmony with the music of the spheres [...]. But Ireland has struggled and starved for ten years [...]. Of all the wide world, ours is the only country we know of that, during this decade, has retrograded in the scale of national strength and liberty.’ (‘The Age we Live In’, in Irishman, I, 29; 21 July 1849, p.49; quoted in Chris Morash, ‘Mitchel’s Hunger’ [chap.], in Writing the Famine, Clarendon Press 1995, pp.52-78, p.56. Note: [D. P.] Moran quotes this passage in the context of an argument that foregrounds Macaulay’s assertion that the History of England is ‘emphatically the history of progress’; p.52.)

Cf. Séamus Ó Grianna, in Saol Corrach (Dublin 1945): “Bheadh sé creidte agam nárbh fhiú dadaidh an eagnaíocht a bhí ag fealsaimh an tseansaoil le taobh na heagnaíochta a bhí ag Bacon agus ag Macaulay. [I would have been led to believe that the wisdom of classical philosophers was worth nothing compared with the wisdom of Bacon and Macaulay.” (p.18; quoted [and trans.] by Fionntán de Brun, in ‘Temporality and Revivalism’ [UU Research Series, April 2011].)

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British prestige: ‘The British empoire as it stands, looks vast ans strong; but none know so well as the statesmen of tha tcountry how intrinsically feeble it is: and how entirely it depends for its existence on prestige.’ ‘England herseslf that begged for us, that ssent round the hat all over the globe, asking a penny for the love of God to relieve the poor Irish; - and further, that, constituting herself the almoner and agent of all that charity, she, English, took all the profits of it.’ (The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), Dublin: Glasgow: R T. Washbourne [1861]). p.38; quoted in Joseph Lynch, MA Dip., UU 2003.)

J’accuse: ‘Before the grave had yet closed on Thomas Davis [there] began to spread awful rumours of approaching famine. Within the next month from all the counties of Ireland came one cry of mortal terror. Blight had fallen on the crop of potatoes - the food on which five million of the Irish people had been reduced to depend for subsistence; three millions of them wholly and exclusively. We are at the beginning of the first year of the six years' Famine. / To Sir Robert Peel it would have seemed an impious tempting of Providence to neglect this weapon graciously placed in his hand for the consummation of the conquest on which he was bent. If the “Repeal” could not be crushed out by coercion, nor bought out by corruption, it might now be starved out by Famine. The thing was done by a process of “relieving” and “ameliorating”; - for in the nineteenth century civilised governments always proceed upon the most benevolent motives; - but it was done; and so effectually done for that time, that, a few years afterwards, the London Times (perhaps prematurely) thought it might announce “The Celts are gone - gone with a vengeance. The Lord be praised.”’ (Last Conquest of Ireland, Letter X; rep. in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed., Seamus Deane, Derry: Field Day 1991, Vol. 2, p.178. A footnote observes that concluding remark [in quotations] was later afterwards quoted by Michael Davitt and others.) [For longer extracts, see attached.]

Suicide an option?: ‘If I die by my own hand, I will be worse than forgotten - I will have confessed that England’s brute power is resistless, and therefore righteous - at any rate that I for my part am a beaten man. It will be my last speech and dying declaration, imploring my countrymen to avoid the terrible fangs of British law - my pupils will hang their heads for shame; and, insteaad of an example I shall become a warning.’ (Jail Journal, 1913 pp.48-49; quoted in Joseph Lynch, MA Dip, UU 2003 [citing IUP rep. [facs.] edn., 1982, idem.)

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