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Excerpt from The Emigrants: A Tale of Irish Life Having written the work which follows, for the purpose of exhibiting, I trust without any offensive prejudice, the circumstances that in general occasion the unparalleled tide of emigration which has drained, and is still draining, this unhappy country of its best blood and strength, I find it very difficult to add anything further upon the subject in the shape of a preface. As there probably may be many persons, however, who will expect from this book more political details upon the subject of Emigration than I have deemed it my business as a novelis to enter into, I think it necessary in the very outset to undeceive them, and to state that, if they open its pages with such a hope or such a fear, they will most assuredly be disappointed. The work is not, therefore, a political one, nor encumbered with anything like a superabundance of mere political reflections. So far from that, I have only introduced such short and plain statements affecting the condition of our people, and pointing out the many causes which have produced it, as were in point of fact necessary to elucidate the motives of action which I have ascribed to some of my characters. I have not presumed to dictate to the legislator nor to make suggestions to the mere politician. My humble task has been to lay open, with an honest and firm hand, many of those evils which press upon the most industrious classes of my brethren the people; and, having done this in a spirit that is not calculated to exasperate but to instruct, I consider my task accomplished. It is for the legislator and the politician to read and draw the obvious inference if they think I am right - and, if they think I am wrong, to pause a little and examine closely whether the error be in their own judgment or mine - in their own prejudices or in my facts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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This is the first study of Irish improvement fiction, a neglected genre of nineteenth-century literary, social, and political history.Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement shows how the fiction of Mary Leadbeater, Charles Bardin, Martin Doyle, and William Carleton attempted to lure Irish peasants and landowners away from popular genres such as fantasy, romance, and 'radical' political tracts as well as 'high' literary and philosophical forms of enquiry. These writersattempted to cultivate a taste for the didactic tract, an assertively realist mode of representation. Accordingly, improvement fiction laboured to demonstrate the value of hard work, frugality, and sobriety in a rigorously realistic idiom, representing the contentment that inheres in a plain social order free ofexcess and embellishment. Improvement discourse defined itself in opposition to the perceived extremism of revolutionary politics and literary writing, seeking (but failing) to exemplify how both political discontent and unhappiness could be offset by a strict practicality and prosaic realism. This book demonstrates how improvement reveals itself to be a literary discourse, enmeshed in the very rhetorical abyss it sought to escape. In addition, the proudly liberal rhetoric of improvement isshown to be at one with the imperial discourse it worked to displace.Helen O'Connell argues that improvement discourse is embedded in the literary and cultural mainstream of modern Ireland and has hindered the development of intellectual and political debate throughout this period. These issues are examined in chapters exploring the career of William Carleton; peasant 'orality'; educational provision in the post-Union period; the Irish language; secret society violence; Young Ireland nationalism; and the Irish Revival.
