Time for another trip to the land of Victorian evangelical literature. The Manuscript Man belongs to a subgenre of Protestant religious fiction devoted to evangelical/missionary work in Ireland. Its author, the short-lived Elizabeth Hely Walshe, was herself a native of Ireland, and she set at least four of her novels there -this one being probably the least well-known.

The Manuscript Man, as well as others of its type (e.g., Innisfail) clearly owes a debt to the Irish national tales of the early nineteenth century: in addition to its quasi-ethnographic representations of the Irish peasantry, it manifests some awareness of nationalist political unrest and spends time on the aesthetics of the Irish landscape [1]. However, as I will suggest at the end of this post, Walshe’s evangelical intentions lead her to rewrite the genre as practiced by the Banims, Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, and other Irish novelists of the period.

The novel begins with the return of a long-absent Irishman, Major Bryan, to the estate which he has inherited from his deceased brother. Although the evangelical Bryan’s arrival sets the plot in motion, he isn’t the main character; that would be Donat Clare, the “Manuscript Man”, one of the only literate peasants in the area. Bryan introduces Clare to an Irish translation of the New Testament and asks him to teach the other locals how to read. As Bryan intends, literacy quickly becomes tied to Protestant evangelization, much to the aggravation of the Nasty Young Priest, Father Devenish, and the moderate disquiet of the Nice Old Priest, Father Eusebius. Father Devenish and his parishioners harass Clare and those of his students, like the fisherman Pat Colman, who refuse to disavow their Bible-reading; the harassment quickly escalates into property destruction, stone-throwing, curses, and beatings. Meanwhile, matters are somewhat complicated by the reappearance of Clare’s long-lost brother, Redmond, one of the Ribbonmen, who may or may not have been responsible for the murder of Bryan’s father. Depending on how you look at it, Bryan’s success in spreading the Protestant Word is a trifle equivocal, since the novel’s main converts all wind up decamping to the United States.

Walshe deploys so many recognizable anti-Catholic topoi that a checklist will do:

Not surprisingly, however, the novel shares some of its strategies with Catholic fiction:

The novel’s attitude to Irish literacy and Bible-reading, however, turns out to be rather interesting, and it’s here that it engages with its roots in the national tale. Ina Ferris argues that, among other things, the national tale has “discomfort” as one of its constitutive elements (13), a discomfort that manifests itself in part in Gothic literary conversations about ruins. Unlike the “shudder” (118) analyzed by Ferris, however, this novel’s ruins provoke nothing but mild melancholy. Indeed, when Major Bryan first meets Donat Clare, Clare asks him to arrange for the return of a looted Ogham stone (12). Later, we hear that Clare’s popularity derives from his ability to narrate “lore” from the “golden age of Irish history” (45, 47). The illiterate peasant community unites itself around the twin pillars of Catholic ritual and Irish antiquarianism, both of which they experience as part of oral tradition - even though they are actually in the keeping of a literate elite.

Walshe structures Clare’s journey towards Protestantism, however, as a rejection of Irish antiquity in favor of Scriptural presence. First, public Bible reading replaces Irish legends in Clare’s repertoire, a substitution initially received by his audience as a purely literary pleasure (47). Next, as one old woman perceives, the Bible becomes not just a source of enjoyment equivalent to the Irish legends, but a superior enjoyment, and one different in kind: “‘’Tis better than hearing about kings [...] for this King is living, up in the heavens’, and she raised her skinny finger. ‘It’s a history of power. Go on, man’” (55). In moving from king to King, the Manuscript Man displaces his purely national and potentially oppositional investment in the past (the lost kings of Ireland) with a universalized and, as it turns out, quietist investment in an eternal present (Christ in Heaven). It is this new history that leads Clare’s brother to confess his wrong-doing, and, in a moment of obvious symbolism, ultimately prompts Clare to sell his manuscripts in order to finance his trip to the United States. If, as Katie Trumpener suggests, the national tale usually reveals that “[a] landscape assumed to be barren and backward reverberates with the sound of an ancient culture” (141), The Manuscript Man “reveals” that culture only to turn it into a mere curiosity. Literacy doesn’t just combat Catholicism; it combats nationalism. To belong to Christ’s kingdom means not necessarily belonging to any particular geographical space at all. While the novel ends with Clare and his wife reading Irish aloud, it is “in the pages of the Irish Bible brought to the new home beyond the sea” (190) - a home chosen for its sympathy to Protestant worship, not for its deep-rooted antiquity.

1] For this genre, see Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2002), and Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton UP 1997).