'Tinkers': Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller

‘TINKERS’

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‘Tinkers’ Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller M A RY BU R K E

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Mary Burke 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Burke, Mary (Mary M.) Tinkers: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller / Mary Burke. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-956646-4 (hardback) 1. English literature–Irish authors–History and criticism. 2. Irish Travellers (Nomadic people) in literature. 3. Nomads in literature. 4. Ethnic groups in literature. 5. Marginality, Social, in literature. 6. Other (Philosophy) in literature. 7. National Characteristics, Irish, in literature. 8. Irish Travellers (Nomadic people)–Historiography. 9. Ethnic groups–Ireland– History. 10. Synge, J. M. (John Millington), 1871–1909. Tinker’s wedding. I. Title. PR8723.N66B87 2009 820.9 3529916–dc22 2009014879 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Biddles Ltd. ISBN 978–0–19–956646–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Maurice

Acknowledgements I received assistance in writing this book from a number of people, funding bodies, and institutions. My dissertation research was supported by the Department for Employment and Learning and by the Cuthbert-Fraser, Hart, and Montgomery awards at Queen’s University Belfast. The National Endowment for the Humanities Keough Fellowship I was awarded by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies (University of Notre Dame) provided me with an invaluable year in which to further my project. The University of Connecticut’s Research Foundation Junior Faculty Summer Fellowship, Faculty Small Grants and annual UCRF and University Travel Awards allowed me to present various portions of my ongoing book project at conferences and to travel to Irish and British libraries. In addition, my department’s pre-tenure research leave policy was of huge advantage to my work. I wish also to express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. The ideas presented in my final chapter benefited from discussions in the Columbia University Seminar on Irish Studies and in the Centre for Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University. I especially wish to thank Andrew McNeillie for his unstinting belief in this project and Jacqueline Baker for her support. I am grateful to have corresponded with or personally interviewed the following scholars, writers, and Traveller activists for this book: John Arden, Margaretta D’Arcy, Juanita Casey, Rosaleen McDonagh, the late Seán Ó Coisdealbha, Sean Maher, David Joyce, Mary Moriarty, Michael McDonagh, Grattan Puxton, Hasia Diner, and Anna Farmar. The many others without whom I could not have completed this task are, in order of the chronology of the project’s development: my dissertation supervisors at Queen’s University Belfast, Colin Graham and Leon Litvack, my dissertation readers, Declan Kiberd and Fran Brearton, the fellows and graduate students of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, particularly Christopher Fox, Luke Gibbons, and Kevin Whelan, Colin Clark and the members of the Traveller-net discussion list, Lucy McDiarmid, James H. Murphy, Bob Reece, Dennis Condon,

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Richard J. Waters, Sinéad Ní Shuinéar, Christopher Woods, Andrew Carpenter, Lance Wilder, José Lanters, Mary Ann Ryan, Greta Jones, Peter Bowler, Michael Kenneally, Mary McGlynn, Abby Bender, Sean Moore, Joseph Lennon, Claire Cunningham, Lochlainn Ó Tuairisg, Sunniva O’Flynn, and Richard Bleiler. Excerpts from The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge (ed. Ann Saddlemyer) and Collected Works (gen. ed. Robin Skelton) are used by kind permission of Oxford University Press; those from John Arden’s Live Like Pigs and No Room at the Inn and Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark are reproduced by kind permission of Methuen Drama, an imprint of A&C Black Publishers Ltd; excerpts from Juanita Casey’s The Horse of Selene are used by courtesy of the author; Bryan MacMahon’s work is reproduced by kind permission of A. P. Watt on behalf of Maurice MacMahon; excerpts from ‘Our Irish Gipsies—The Tinkers’ are used by courtesy of Ireland’s Own; those from Rosaleen McDonagh’s The Baby Doll Project are used by courtesy of the playwright; an excerpt from W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory is reproduced by kind permission of A. P. Watt on behalf of Gráinne Yeats; those from Frank Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold are used by permission of Mrs Jennifer WaldronLynch; excerpts from Seán Ó Coisdealbha’s An Tincéara Buí are reproduced by kind permission of Caoimhín Ó Marcaigh. My especial thanks go to the Ó Coisdealbha family for permitting me to publish these lines in my own English translation. Materials from the Irish Travelling People Resource Collection are used by courtesy of the University of Ulster, while those from the Liverpool University Library Gypsy Lore Society archive are used by courtesy of the University of Liverpool. Materials from the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin are used by courtesy of the UCD Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore. In addition, I am grateful to have been given access to films at the Irish Film Archive, to the Department of Manuscripts at both the National Library of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin, and to Belfast Central Library’s newspaper archive. A number of passages from chapters one and three have appeared in embryonic form in The Irish Revival Reappraised (ed. E. A. Taylor FitzSimon and James H. Murphy) and in New Voices in Irish Criticism 5 (ed. Ruth Connolly), and are used by courtesy of the editors and Four Courts Press. Portions of chapter one taken from Travellers and the Language (ed. John Kirk and Dónall P. Ó Baoill) and To the Other Shore (ed. Shane Murphy et al.) are used by

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courtesy of the editors and Queens University Press. Other portions of the same two chapters previously published in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 30:1 (2004) and in the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 2 (2002) are by courtesy of the journals concerned. Finally, I wish to thank my University of Connecticut colleagues Bob Tilton, Rachael Lynch, Tom Shea, Kathleen Tonry, Brendan Kane, Chris Dowd, and Rose Novak for their support. Most of all, I wish to thank the Burke and Conroy families, especially my patient and supportive husband, to whom I dedicate this study. M.B.

Contents Abbreviations

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Introduction

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1. Literary Antecedents of the Irish Revival Tinker ‘Pre-Celtic’ traces: Medieval Irish discourses of race and tinker origin theories Codifying the vagrant: The Enlightenment Gypsy and the rogue literature ‘tynker’ The tinker’s retreat to the Irish periphery: The Orientalization of the Scott(ish) tinkler 2. Synge’s Negotiation of Constructs of the Tinker (Mis)reading The Tinker’s Wedding as naturalistic representation Irishing the rover: The patriotism of rural tramping during the Revival 3. Playboys of the Eastern World: Synge’s Bohemian Tinkers and Pre-Celtic Islanders Performing the tinker: Synge and the Parisian bohémien The antithesis of the bourgeoisie: The tinker musician in Irish Revival drama ‘Eastern’ islanders and tinkers: Synge’s search for the evolutionarily exceptional 4. Reaffirming Sedentary Values: The Tinker in Post-Revival Drama and Prose The tinker’s threat to stability: Ó Coisdealbha’s An Tincéara Buí and Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold

18 20 30 44 58 60 78 96 98 106 113 134 136

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Contents ‘Re-hibernicizing’ the ‘Anglo-Irish’ tinker: Maurice Walsh’s The Road to Nowhere ‘Gypsies from Eire’: The tinker and post-Partition polarization

5. The End of the ‘Tinker’: Irish Writing after Traveller Politicization The Syngean impulse returns to the Abbey: Bryan MacMahon’s The Honey Spike Espace itinérant: The unsettled drama of Tom Murphy and John Arden Playgirls of the Western World: Synge and the Traveller woman writer’s challenge to the canon 6. Screening the Travel(l)er The Traveller in recent Irish and British cinema ‘What is an Irish Traveler?’ Travelers and the American imagination Whitening off-white trash: Colonial-era Irishness and the screening of American Travelers

152 165 173 174 184 209 234 236 249 254

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Appendix: Biographical Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

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Abbreviations CL CW

JGLS OED UCD

The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–4). John Millington Synge, Collected Works, general editor Robin Skelton (London: Oxford University Press): vol. 1, The Poetry, ed. Robin Skelton (1962); vol. 2, The Prose, ed. Alan Price (1966); vols. 3–4, The Plays, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (1968). Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society Oxford English Dictionary University College Dublin

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Introduction This study addresses the development and contexts of the representation of the historically nomadic Irish Traveller minority in literature, a construct that has generally been referred to as the ‘tinker’. It is the first full-length work to do so in a comprehensive fashion, and as such, it proposes to open a badly needed debate by offering a broad survey of the subject. A chasm exists between any marginalized minority and its depiction in dominant culture, of course, but it is arguable that in the case of traditionally non-literate Travellers, the divergence between the image and the actual lives of members of the community has been particularly entrenched and particularly unexamined. Ultimately, this study will propose that as the exotic Other against which the sedentary factions on the island of Ireland unconsciously define themselves, the ‘tinker’ is much more central to Irish, Northern Irish, and, as Chapter 6 will argue, even Irish-American identity than is currently recognized. Due to the fact that Traveller culture has been and remains somewhat elusive, symbiotic literary, media, and legislative figurations of the ‘tinker’ have created the lineaments within which the community is currently discussed as inherently ‘problematic’ or peculiar. Nevertheless, at present, and despite the fact that literary portrayals of the ‘tinker’ shape the experiences of actual Travellers, the construct is as overlooked as Jane Eyre’s madwoman before feminist theory made her comprehensible. Although the recent history of Travellers will be demonstrated to intersect with late twentieth-century literary representations of the community, this work is much less a study of the Traveller record than a critical analysis of successive fantasies of the ‘tinker’.

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Introduction TRAVELLERS: A BRIEF ANTHROPOLOGICAL DEFINITION

The Travellers, or to most Irish sedentary people before the 1960s, the ‘tinkers’, are members of a historically nomadic minority community defined by anthropologists as an ethnic group that has existed on the margins of Irish society for perhaps centuries. The 2001 Census for Northern Ireland documents a population of 1,715 Irish Travellers in the six counties, while the 2002 Republic of Ireland Census records a population of almost 24,000 Travellers in the twenty-six counties. For many generations, Travellers provided seasonal farm labour, horsetrading, hawking, entertainment, and tinsmithing services to both the urban and rural majority. These functions held a good degree of value in a predominantly agricultural early twentieth-century Ireland in which the settled relied on the nomadic to provide ‘the social cement which bound isolated communities together’ 1 and in which the uses that might be made of urban space were less codified. Moreover, a small population of Irish Traveller ancestry has lived as a distinct community in the United States since about the mid-nineteenth century, and for reasons of lifestyle and seasonal work patterns, a number of contemporary Travellers move at intervals between the urban areas of Britain and Ireland. Furthermore, Scottish traditions suggest that the ‘tinklers’ or Travellers of Scotland originated from the Irish community of that name. Contemporary Travellers in Ireland share common descent and history and possess discrete cultural practices: boundary rules against outsiders, rigid gender roles, an aspiration to be mobile, an adaptive tradition of self-employment and involvement in marginal trades, a preference for flexibility of occupation over job security, a pattern of providing short-term labour in accordance with market demands, adherence to Catholicism involving public displays of religiosity, early marriage and substantial dowry payments when the families are affluent, a unique material culture, and distinct rituals of death and cleansing. In addition, the extended family remains the key unit of social and cultural reproduction. Of most pertinence to this study is the fact that Travellers possess an oral culture and language. The latter is known as ‘Cant’ 1 Jim MacLaughlin, Travellers and Ireland: Whose Country, Whose History? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 19.

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to most Travellers and has been traditionally referred to as ‘Shelta’ by scholars, and members of the community speak it only amongst their own. Such attributes allow Travellers to be readily defined within the generally accepted criteria by which an ethnic minority is classified, and distinguishes them from other peripatetic groupings common in Ireland into the twentieth century such as beggars, itinerant traders, and roving entertainers. Finally, and in contrast to a perception within the majority population that all Travellers are indigent, the culture possesses its own class divisions, wealth variation, and regional identities. Despite apparent similarities to British Romanies, Irish Travellers do not classify themselves as Gypsies, nor are they defined as such by anthropologists. However, the two groups have been collated at various times and in assorted contexts, and the racial and cultural politics of the association of Travellers with British and European Gypsies and other marginalized Irish populations will underline much of the discussion in the following chapters. The primary focus of this study is the literary, and to a lesser extent, the cinematic representation of the Irish Traveller minority. It does not take into account Irish images of British Romanies, who have had ongoing contact with both dominant Irish culture and Travellers. Nor does it consider the depiction of ‘Celtic Tiger’ immigrants to Ireland such as the Eastern European Roma, a Gypsy grouping with which the Traveller community is sometimes popularly confused. The inherently problematic nature of any easy conflation of the experiences of Travellers and ostensibly similar minorities in Ireland is revealed when one notes that racist prejudice against non-white and non-Christian population segments in Ireland decreased between the early 1970s and late 1980s, even as such bias against Travellers actually increased. 2 Nevertheless, this analysis implies that the experiences of spatial exclusion and disadvantage experienced by recent economic refugees and asylum seekers of nomadic or ethnic minority heritage have been shaped by what Brian Fanning has termed an ‘apartheid historically experienced by Travellers’. 3 Although written records discussed in the opening chapter suggest that Travellers have practiced a distinct lifestyle since at least the 1830s, members began to publicly declare their ethnic minority status during 2 3

Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto, 2004), 60. Brian Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 172.

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the 1960s. This claim was recognized in Northern Irish law in 1997, and British law in 2000. Nevertheless, the invisibility of the Traveller in public discourse is underlined by the fact that until the influx of various immigrant groupings in the 1990s, discussions centred on Irish ethnicity and Irish ethnic conflict inevitably concerned the Catholic– Protestant divide in Northern Ireland and the Protestant landowner– Catholic tenant binary of the pre-Partition period, to the exclusion of the third most numerous indigenous segment on the island of Ireland. 4 After the division of Ireland in 1922 into the independent Irish Free State in the south and the UK constituent region of Northern Ireland, two territories in which landownership was a central tenet despite the ideological difference of unionism and nationalism, the separateness of the nomadic minority became a particularly undesirable distinctiveness. As a consequence, from about the mid-twentieth century onwards, a tendency arose to officially define Travellers not as a discrete culture, but as a problematic underclass in need of correction, housing, charity, and literacy classes. In general, and doubtlessly due to the traditionally non-literate nature of their society, Travellers are not overtly conscious of a sense of group history, and this left a vacuum that was often filled by fantasies emanating from the dominant culture. Such origin myths generally spoke more to the successive outrages committed against the sedentary population than to any history particular to Travellers themselves: their ancestors have variously been held to be the Irish dispossessed by William of Orange, those evicted during Penal times, ‘fallen’ peasants, victims of the nineteenth-century Lands Wars, and agricultural labourers driven to the road by famine.

THEORETICAL MODELS In recent decades, much attention has been given to majority representations of indigenous, historically nomadic, non-landowning and collectivist minorities in North America and Australasia. Such has not 4 Writing in 1997, Michael A. Poole refers briefly to ‘a growing, though not uncontested, opinion’ that Travellers ‘constitute a distinct ethnic group’, but otherwise deploys the term ethnicity only in relation to Catholic and Protestant identity in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Michael A. Poole, ‘In Search of Ethnicity in Ireland’, in Brian Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1997), 129.

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been the case in Ireland, a similarly First World and predominantly Anglophone former British colony, in which the figuring of Travellers is both culturally ubiquitous and critically invisible. A widespread dependence on the trope of the ‘tinker’ continues to be promulgated in texts centred on Ireland and Irishness. Nevertheless, the marginalization of the island’s only numerically significant indigenous ethnic community is clearly reflected in the general lack of interest shown in such representation by most established scholars of Irish culture. Indeed, this is the case even among commentators who explicitly claim to be concerned with neglected varieties of Irish identity and with the uncovering of dissident voices. Although the Otherness of the Traveller is sometimes referred to in passing in contemporary critical discussions of liminality, the process through which this marginalization operates remain unexamined. As a consequence, the naturalization of sedentary culture continues to be concealed. In short, although research concerning contemporary Travellers has occurred in the areas of sociology, social geography, anthropology, and the embryonic field of Irish Film Studies, the ideological and historical contexts of such data remain opaque. Moreover, and with very few exceptions, the issue remains a critical blind spot in the disciplines of Irish literature and history, the very discourses in which the image of the exotic tinker was originally cemented. Due to this lack of analysis, there is no established theoretical model that is commonly applied to Traveller–sedentary relations. As such, this study will make intermittent use of Robbie McVeigh’s concept of sedentarism and Pat Sheeran’s vocabulary of espace rayonnant/espace itinérant, which are briefly outlined below. Furthermore, in light of Tom Murphy’s subversive transformation of the Big House motif into a fulcrum of Traveller–settled conflict in a relatively recent play, this study will also attempt to detect traces that speak to the oppression of Travellers in texts and tropes that ostensibly espouse sedentary viewpoints only. The theorist of Irish racism, Robbie McVeigh, has suggested that the ‘attachment to land and locality among sedentary Irish people contrasts starkly with the absence of such [. . . ] among Travelling people. A mixture of mistrust and envy of their supposed “freedom” ensured that Travelling people came to occupy a central position within sedentary Irish culture as a symbolic “other” ’. 5 This Otherness is structured by 5

Robbie McVeigh, ‘The Specificity of Irish Racism’, Race & Class 33: 4 (1992), 41.

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the social, economic, cultural, and political exclusion of Travellers in contemporary Irish society that McVeigh theorizes as sedentarism, 6 a system of beliefs and practices that pathologizes nomadic modes of existence and normalizes settled society. Reports from statutory and voluntary agencies indicate that the individual and institutional bias against the minority leaves no psychic or physical room for the culture and ensures that even recent legislation aimed at improving Travellers’ lives encodes sedentarist assumptions. Moreover, a prominent Traveller activist has recently argued that structural prejudice results in devastating consequences for the contemporary community, including poor health performance, low educational achievement, and high rates of mortality and unemployment. 7 As a corollary of sedentarism, whereby Travellers are literally harried from the space that is owned and controlled by the settled, representations of Travellers will generally be framed within a theoretical model originally deployed by Irish critic Pat Sheeran in his consideration of the work of Traveller novelist Juanita Casey. For Sheeran, the sedentarist mindset and its cultural products exist in espace rayonnant (domicentric or radial space), which ‘lends itself easily to such thematics as land ownership, dynastic continuity, tradition and rootedness.’ By contrast, he perceives Casey’s novel as inhabiting ‘espace itinérant’, the cultural arena of ‘tinkers and navvies’, which is in contention with settled norms and expectations of lifestyle, belief, and behaviour. 8 Although the work of various theorists of race and identity in the Irish context will be referred to intermittently in this study, my analysis will typically invoke Sheeran’s model in suggesting that the Irish cultural fantasy of the Traveller has generally and narcissistically functioned as an inverted image of the domicentric rather than as a representation of the espace itinérant. 6 See McVeigh, ‘Theorising Sedentarism: The Roots of Anti-Nomadism’, in Thomas Acton (ed.), Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire, 1997), 30–52. 7 David Joyce, Irish Criminal Law Journal 4 (2003), quoted in Ivana Bacik, Kicking and Screaming: Dragging Ireland into the 21st Century (Dublin: O’Brien, 2004), 204; Paul Noonan, ‘Pathologisation and Resistance: Travellers, Nomadism, and the State’, in Paul Hainsworth (ed.), Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland (London: Pluto, 1998), 152. 8 Pat Sheeran, ‘The Road, the House, and the Grave: A Poetics of Galway Space, 1900–1970’, Galway: History and Society (Dublin: Geography, 1996), 752–3.

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In contemporary Ireland, Travellers who choose a traditional nomadic lifestyle are forcibly moved from place to place or provided with camping sites that are generally inadequately serviced with running water, toilets, and refuse collection. Due to muddled government policies that initially tried to enforce Traveller settlement in the 1960s and subsequently caved in to middle-class constituents’ protests against the provision of reasonably located sites for those still on the road, as of 2000, one-quarter of Travellers in the Republic lived in badly serviced roadside sites, mostly on the industrialized outskirts of cities. 9 In recent decades, fear of the Traveller difference has crystallized as fear of the contagion and disorder of the campsite. As such, the haphazard campsite banished to the unsavoury edges is an ideal symbol of the lack of room made for the Traveller in the Irish critical and artistic espace rayonnant and will be invoked in this capacity throughout the study. Aoife Bhreatnach’s groundbreaking study of twentieth-century government policy and the Travellers, Becoming Conspicuous, posits that increased state control over the lives of citizens after Partition forced the minority lifestyle into the literal and cultural margins. A complex set of developments narrowed the space available for camping and the practising of traditional Traveller occupations and pursuits, reduced Traveller contact with majority Ireland, and cemented the minority’s social, cultural, and economic difference: the transformation of towncentre campsites into a nuisance due to the growth of traffic zoning; the development of a rural bus service that ended the market for hawking; the disappearance of the fairs that had facilitated Traveller socializing; an improved welfare system that required a permanent address; school attendance legislation that was effectively applied to settled children alone, meaning that a subsistence family economy survived only amongst Travellers; an improvement in sedentary mortality rates due to a school medical examination policy that Travelling children with poor school attendance did not avail of. 10 Furthermore, the provision of government housing and the clearing of slums transformed the status of the sedentary urban poor in the 1940s, but forced campsites away from the rural hinterland upon which the new sprawl encroached and purged towns of the very residences that Travellers could rent cheaply 9 10

Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience, 13. Aoife Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State 1922–70 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), 20; 24; 28; 34; 45; 85.

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when not on the road. Moreover, legislation relating to planning, trading, leisure caravanning, and anti-littering gentrified wasteland that had been traditionally and uncontroversially used by Travellers for camping, horse grazing, and unregulated entrepreneurial street trading, thereby transforming such spaces into foci of minority–majority tensions. 11 In the wake of such changes in the decades immediately after Partition, the sedentary urban poor who had once begged or traded alongside Travellers gradually shifted towards petit bourgeois values, and other categories of wanderer such as the homeless insane, traders, beggars, and entertainers gradually disappeared from public view. Bhreatnach suggests that while Travellers themselves escaped direct state intervention until the 1960s, ‘the society around them was transformed by such legislation’, and that by then what public housing tenants ‘hated most about Travellers was their resemblance to their own recent past’. 12 The Traveller alone remained as an affront to ‘respectable’ sensibilities by the mid-twentieth century, rendering the community conspicuously different. Although Travellers had been perceived to be distinct enough from majority values to have come to sporadic attention as an emblem of non-conformism and exoticness throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the unconsciously sedentarist policies of the post-Partition state cemented the marginalization of the nation’s most voiceless minority. The rhetoric of the imperilment of dominant values utilized in hostile media discussions of Traveller culture by the 1950s and 1960s was out of all proportion to the minority’s numbers, but accurately reflected the community’s new role as the only visible antithesis of settled mores in the public sphere. In the Irish text, as in the Irish landscape, Travellers are often present but rarely considered. A nationalist commentator stated in 1924: ‘The Irish nation is the Gaelic nation; [. . . ] its history is the history of the Gael. All other elements have no place in Irish national life, literature and tradition.’ 13 Although such assertions are interpreted as expurgating British traditions from the post-1922 state, the unexamined sedentary consensus encoded within political and historical analyses means that 11 13

12 Ibid. 52–6; 43. Ibid. 52; 64. Catholic Bulletin 14. 4 (24 April 1924), 269, quoted in Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–1985 (London: Fontana, 1985), 63.

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the statement’s implicit exclusion of a nomadic minority of putatively non-Gaelic origin is never visible. Thus, in attending to the manner in which Traveller traces were successively written over to the point of illegibility, familiar tropes taken to refer to sedentary Irishness suddenly begin to yield different readings. For instance, Tom Murphy utilizes the Big House motif—probably the principal naturalizing symbol of sedentarism in Irish culture—as an emblem of the collision of landed and landless rather than a symbol of the clash of landlord and smallholder. Murphy’s The House, which is fully discussed in the fifth chapter, portrays the symbiotic relationship between a ‘tinkerish’ returned emigrant and the Catholic gentry family whose fine home he covets. As subversively opened up by Murphy, the Big House points up the unconsciously sedentarist traditions of the island of Ireland, be they Catholic, Protestant, nationalist, or unionist. Such narratives are imagined to be in contention when the model of reality they promulgate is in broad agreement in its exclusion of the landless. Within Murphy’s groundbreaking deployment of the trope to represent settled—nomadic tensions, the uncanny scream from the attic that inspired Jean Rhys’s writing back to Jane Eyre might be recast as the unsettling blot of an illicit Traveller campsite in the grounds of the Big House. This temporary dwelling uncovers all that has been suppressed in order for the grand home to have run so smoothly and stood so long. In short, rather than being continuously banished or forcibly dismantled, it is time for the disruption of the Traveller campsite/narrative to sedentary consensus and cultural productions to be acknowledged. WHY FOCUS ON SYNGE? The implication of the title of John Millington Synge’s most famous play is that the degenerate Western World is the antithesis of a notional Eastern realm that is never named. This investigation will suggest that the implied Orient of much of the rest of Synge’s oeuvre encompasses the virtues so lacking in the space into which Christy Mahon stumbles in The Playboy of the Western World. What is more, this East is evidently the same arena in which most of the exotic and unconventional tinkers and tramps of the Revival writer’s drama and prose operate. This study will treat of a variety of Orientalized spaces in which Irish peripatetic

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groupings were imagined to have existed, and although numerous writers will be invoked, the emphasis will be on Synge’s work in earlier chapters, particularly on the contexts of his neglected 1907 play, The Tinker’s Wedding. Primarily, this is because Synge was at the heart of the Revival’s valorization of the tinker as an embodiment of exotic indigeneity: he depicted various peoples of the road again and again in his drama and prose, and his construct is a lodestone of literature on the nomadic theme. In addition, this study’s appraisal of post-Partition writers who portrayed Irish minority culture intimates that such authors looked to Synge as an exemplar to either subvert or emulate. Despite the initial stress that will be placed on Synge, however, this study ultimately posits that his tinker construct must also be situated within a broad and long Irish and European tradition of the representation of peripatetic communities. Although the centrality of Synge’s depiction to the received Irish literary image of the tinker is commonly assumed, the discourses that informed the trope are rarely examined. The concept of tinker exoticness encompassed diverse beliefs that ranged from perceiving the community as a Western European branch of Gypsies of purported Indian ancestry, an Irish iteration of fin-de-siècle bohemianism, to figurations of them as aboriginal exotics. At its most benign in Synge’s writing, this idiom of difference portrayed the minority as being in possession of a concentrated Irishness that harked back to Ireland’s pre-Gaelic ‘Eastern’ roots. However, in the narrowed climate of post-independence Ireland, tinkers were situated as the carriers of alien values within a putatively homogeneous state. Indeed, the concept of the Irish tinker as an exotic of some variety or other has been the one constant in depictions of the minority from the early nineteenth century right into the present period. In addition, when Traveller writers themselves appropriated the ‘tinker’ trope in recent years, they transubstantiated this rhetoric into the more empowering discourse of ethnic difference. Of the many writers who tackled the ubiquitous tinker theme, Synge possessed a rare combination of deep familiarity with both the early Irish and European narratives of the exotic from which the motif had emerged. His wide reading in a variety of eras and genres ensured an awareness of the Revival figure’s medieval Irish, English Renaissance, and Continental Enlightenment contexts. Moreover, cultural nationalism’s promotion of the tinker as an authentically Irish category is

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more nuanced in Synge’s case, since he did not always fully elide the figure’s non-Irish literary accretions, even as his work insisted on tinkers’ impeccable Irishness. Indeed, it will be demonstrated that Synge’s representations of the tinker consciously carry and even subvert the traces of the preceding figurations of marginalized groupings from which they drew imaginative sustenance. Furthermore, Synge is significant to any history of the tinker trope because his principal text on that theme, The Tinker’s Wedding, correlates in an intriguing manner with twentieth-century Traveller history. The play took sixty-four years to get to the Abbey stage, only reaching it on 26 April 1971, when it was well received by audiences. The timing and reception of the first National Theatre production of The Tinker’s Wedding is significant: the early 1970s was an era of growing public awareness of Traveller political mobilization, and Synge’s hitherto disregarded drama spoke to the contemporary debate. The relative neglect of The Tinker’s Wedding, the least critically attended to of Synge’s completed dramas and the one that took decades to be produced in its natural home, epitomizes the arc of Traveller status after the Revival: the tinker had been dislodged from its literary pedestal in the post-independence era, after which the figure’s utilization as a symbol of ridicule or menace in Irish culture reflected the increasing marginalization of the actual Travelling community, and the minority only began to force its way in the Irish public sphere, both politically and culturally, during the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, in the case of the tinker depicted in the works of many of Synge’s literary peers, one receives the distinct impression that in many instances the draw of the trope owes more to its voguish nature than to any genuine interest in the people the construct purported to represent. This is never the case with Synge’s writings: the nomad was central to the writer’s imagining both of himself and of the most intriguing kind of Irishness, and was a figure that Synge always portrayed in a multifaceted but ultimately sympathetic manner, even as he probed some of the more negative beliefs surrounding peripateticism. Moreover, as one whose Irishness was repeatedly questioned during the Playboy riots, the AngloIrish Synge was personally invested in promoting the notion that the ‘non-Gael’ could be different but still Irish. Indeed, his work reveals an ability to inhabit the viewpoint of the Other that looks forward to the kind of even-handed depictions of Travellers more common after

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the community politicized in the early 1960s. Atypically, Synge’s work sought to query assumptions concerning the actual Irish Travelling people the tinker fantasy was presumed to signify, even as it celebrated the richness of the literary traditions from which the construct had emerged. Given that 2009 is the centenary of Synge’s death, it is only fitting that his overlooked achievement in this regard be finally recognized. CHAPTER BREAKDOWN The opening chapter, ‘Irish and British Literary Antecedents of the Revival Tinker,’ traces the various ‘Easts’ from which the purported preGaelic ancestors of tinkers and the Oriental antecedents of European Gypsies emerged. The Revival-era theory of Irish tinker lineage in an imagined pre-Celtic population drew upon medieval traditions of the vanquished but extant Oriental inhabitants of antediluvian Ireland. Moreover, it will likewise be suggested that widely disseminated early modern English classifications of rogues proto-racialized the formerly occupational category of ‘tinker’. Consequently, these exotic associations accompanied the term tinker when the spread of English in Ireland in the early to mid-nineteenth century allowed the word to displace unethnicized Irish-language designations for peoples of the road. At about the same time, European Enlightenment scholarship linking Gypsies to a distant Indian homeland Orientalized a British Gypsy class previously considered native. In Scotland, and particularly in the work of Walter Scott, this exoticized Gypsy usurped the indigenous Hiberno-Scottish ‘tinkler’ category, facilitating the perceived retreat of that figure from the whole of the British Isles to its Irish edge by the late Victorian period. Ultimately, this withdrawal set the stage for the elevation of the tinker to the status of quintessentially Irish exotic in the work of Synge. Chapter 2, entitled ‘Synge’s Negotiation of Constructs of the Tinker’, suggests that while that figure is doubtlessly celebrated as an aboriginal exotic in The Tinker’s Wedding, the play has yet to be properly assessed as also dialoguing with centuries of non-Irish traditions concerning the tinker, the Gypsy, and the rogue. This dearth of research has led to a great many misreadings of the drama as an unmediated portrayal of actual contemporary Traveller culture, although Synge’s mastery of diverse languages and literatures ensured that he drew deeply from both

Introduction

13

canonical and obscure Irish, British, and European sources in creating his tinkers. The chapter further considers the fact that in spite of the British and even Continental European inflections of the category of ‘tinker’, the genus had become overwhelmingly entwined with Ireland and authentic Irishness by the Revival. The significance of the stress on the nomad’s Irishness in Synge’s prose is given especial attention, and it is surmised that the dramatist’s heightened Hiberno-English dialogue was inspired by the rash of contemporaneous scholarship on the specificity of Irish tinkers’ linguistic usage. The rhetoric of the essentially Oriental nature of the Gypsy continued to be disseminated throughout the nineteenth century, but by the late Victorian period, Romanies who journeyed through the countryside, sold horses, and visited fairs were increasingly depicted as a charming remnant of vanished British rural colour. The Irish glorification of the wanderer is shown to be simultaneously rooted in this patriotic Victorian nostalgia for the ‘natural’ vagrant life, although promulgated as a nationalist alternative to the British fetishization of the Romany. The third chapter, ‘Playboys of the Eastern World: Synge’s Bohemian Tinkers and Pre-Celtic Islanders’, builds upon this contention that the Revival tinker cult involved the domestication of imported discourses of the exotic. The analysis proposes that erstwhile Paris resident Synge drew directly from two such idioms in depicting marginalized Irish groupings in his prose work: the tradition of Ireland’s ‘Eastern’ roots and the fin-de-siècle notion of bohémienisme as they both pertained to the pre-Gaelic and ‘instinctively’ artistic tinker. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, the notional exotic space of ‘Bohemia’ enfolded both free-living Gypsies and those artists who identified with what were perceived to be the inherently anti-bourgeois tendencies of nomads. In terms of the cultural politics of the Revival, the native theory of tinkers as pre-Celtic survivals was a more acceptable Orientalization than that to which British and European Gypsies had been subject during the Enlightenment. Moreover, the history of the perceived Irish affinity with France buttressed Synge’s invocation of the bohémien in reference to tinkers. Hence, even when people of the road are Orientalized by Synge, the writer invokes a native or domesticated discourse of the exotic procured from an impeccably Irish intellectual tradition and a complementary model imported from sister France. The chapter also considers the entwinement of the innocent but paradoxically bohemian

14

Introduction

islander and tinker in Synge’s prose, noting Synge’s desire to construct Aran as an Eastern, pre-Celtic space outside the capitalist and evolutionary nexus. For Synge to acknowledge that the island group was anything less than a tabula rasa was to admit his fear of the menace posed to these Orientalized ‘primitives’ by Darwinian theory and the forces of Western modernity. Chapter 4, ‘Reaffirming Sedentary Values: The Tinker in PostRevival Drama and Prose’, examines the manner in which that figure was suspected of being less than fully Irish in the isolationist postindependence era. The potential subversion of sedentarism inherent in Synge’s utilization of the tinker or tramp motif greatly lessened after Partition, when the nomad functioned only as an unsympathetic symbol of the outside forces threatening the new sedentary order in plays such as Frank Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold. Although Synge had Hibernicized peoples of the road by drawing from culturally acceptable traditions of the exotic, official discourse did not allow for the inclusion of any element of dubious or ‘foreign’ origin in the new and putatively homogenous state. Moreover, in light of Synge’s ‘Irishing’ of the nomad, it is ironic that the tinker’s alien patina appears to have been reinforced by the fact that earlier interest in the minority generally emanated from Anglo-Irish quarters. Nevertheless, in the narrowed cultural climate of post-independence Ireland, these accretions of ‘foreignness’ were sometimes exorcized in literary depictions by a compensatory stress on the tinker’s orthodox Catholicism and Irish language ability, such as will be noted in Maurice Walsh’s prose. Lastly, the close of the chapter suggests that the tinker was utilized for differing but related ideological purposes by the two sedentary territories on the divided island: liberal humanist nationalist discourse attempted to re-Hibernicize the tinker even as post-war Northern Irish unionist voices labelled the same figure a potential contaminant emanating from the hostile South. The fifth chapter, ‘The End of the “Tinker”: Irish Writing after Traveller Politicization’, traces the sea change in representations of Travellers that emerged in the 1960s as a result of the minority’s contemporaneous politicization. This mobilization made it possible for politically sensitive dramatists from majority society such as Bryan MacMahon, Tom Murphy, and John Arden to depict cultural difference in a manner that did not exoticize people of the road, facilitating the replacement of the ‘stage tinker’ by the Traveller for the first time. In terms of

Introduction

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Abbey Theatre tradition, these more nuanced portrayals of nomadic culture are considered as the homecoming of the empathetic Syngean impulse to the National Theatre after decades of exclusionary depictions of farcical and threatening ‘tinkers’. Implicitly, these more even-handed portrayals recognized that members of the Travelling community could claim a separate cultural identity without compromising their Irishness. As a result, the floodgates were opened to the emergence of Traveller writers who challenged the traditional representation of members of their community, and it may be said that the discourse of exoticness to which the minority had been subject was thereby transformed into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. The chapter concludes with a survey of the contention with normative values of Traveller oral tradition, and considers the negotiation of the ‘tinker’ figure and the response to Synge’s representations of marginalized Irishness in the works of Traveller authors Juanita Casey and Rosaleen McDonagh. The arrival of mass film and television in the twentieth century must be attended to as new visual media that reshape the long-established literary conceit of the tinker. Thus, the final chapter, ‘Screening the Travel(l)er’, departs from textual analysis to consider screen portrayals of the Irish minority and, most especially, contemporary American film and television depictions of the descendants of nineteenth-century Irish Traveller immigrants. The enquiry suggests that the image of the IrishAmerican Traveler is informed by three centuries of Irish identity in the New World, from colonial-era Ulster-Scotsness to post-Famine Catholic Irishness. Though initially perceived to be scoundrels, the eighteenthcentury Ulster Irish were eventually integrated into an unhyphenated and indisputably ‘white’ Americanness. The discourse of an ethnically unmarked ‘white trashness’, originally created in response to the incivility of the subsequently assimilated eighteenth-century Irish, inflects the ‘white’ Traveler’s contemporary image as unreformed but reformable Same. This is considered as an explicit contrast to the irrefutable Othering of the Irish Traveller in many Irish films. Ultimately, the Traveler figure’s charm in contemporary American popular culture is rooted in its possession of a combination of modish post-Famine Irish-American ‘ethnic whiteness’ and furtively appealing Scots-Irish roguishness. Altogether, the Traveler in US visual representation is informed by particularly American concerns with the inevitable ‘reformation’ of ‘flawed’ whiteness and the remaking of the uncouth past as a justification for

16

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the ‘civilized’ present. In short, due to the distinct history of race in the New World, the American Traveler construct will be demonstrated to have evolved along a separate trajectory from that of its Irish equivalent. NOTE ON APPENDIX A confusingly diverse number of commentators and writers are assessed in this study. In acknowledgement of this, an Appendix of biographical notes detailing the more obscure figures considered and the unexamined interest in the tinker of certain better-known individuals has been appended to the volume. A glossary of terms has also been included. NOTE ON L ANGUAGE AND CAPITALIZ ATION In recent centuries, tinker has been the prevalent descriptor of the majority and English-speaking population of Ireland for Travellers. Currently, Traveller designates membership of the identifiable group throughout the island of Ireland, and is a term recognized both by the population concerned and by non-Travellers. Because of the cultural practices the tradition of travelling accreted over many generations, the term is applicable even when the nomadic way of life has effectively been abandoned, as it has been in many cases today. The designation will be utilized when referring to the actual contemporary minority, to distinguish it from the construct of the community within dominant discourse, which has been labelled the ‘tinker’. The latter term was widely used within majority culture prior to the politicization of the minority in the 1960s, and though it continues to be used informally, it is currently considered to be pejorative. Therefore, I would like to stress that my utilization of this word is not intended to be derogatory, but is deployed to differentiate between the literary fantasy of the Traveller and the actual Traveller. These are, as will be demonstrated, two quite distinct categories. Traveller will be spelled with one l when the community referred to is that of the contemporary American descendants of nineteenth-century Irish Traveller emigrants, and the coinage Travel(l)er is utilized in the final chapter in instances in which the Irish and IrishAmerican minorities are referred to simultaneously.

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The terms Traveller and Gypsy are capitalized within the text, as this is the preference of the communities themselves. Indeed, many commentators have commonly utilized capital letters in referring to Gypsies since about the 1880s, probably in reflection of the fact that peripatetic population groups began to be overtly racialized at about this time. However, in Britain, Romany is currently a more acceptable term, and it will generally be alternated with Gypsy when reference is being made to the Victorian and post-Victorian British community to which both descriptors have been applied, since that was the period in which the term was first popularized. Finally, Shelta is generally used to designate the Travellers’ language as it was presented in dominant discourse, since the word was coined by the scholar who ‘discovered’ the ‘tinkers’ tongue’. As noted, the language is referred to by most Travellers as ‘Cant’, although that phrase will not be capitalized when its early modern English meaning as an underworld language is invoked.

1 Literary Antecedents of the Irish Revival Tinker John Millington Synge began the first draft of The Tinker’s Wedding in the summer of 1902, at about the time he was working on Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, and wrote six complete drafts prior to its publication in 1907. The Tinker’s Wedding was first staged in London two years later, but was not performed in Ireland until an amateur production in the 1960s. Synge’s only two-act play finally made its Abbey debut in April 1971 on the centenary of the playwright’s birth, when it was part of a double bill with Riders to the Sea. The Tinker’s Wedding is set in Wicklow and the character list consists of a tinker named Michael Byrne, his elderly mother, Mary, his commonlaw wife, Sarah Casey, and an unnamed priest. Sarah expresses a desire to legitimize her relationship with Michael, and the clergyman agrees to marry the couple on condition he is paid ten shillings and gifted a can that has been hand-tinkered by the prospective groom. The agreement is nullified when the priest later finds empty bottles in the place of the promised tin: Mary has secretly exchanged the article for alcohol. The angry priest refuses to wed Michael and Sarah, firing their money to the ground. As a consequence, the couple bind and gag the clergyman, and speak of killing him, but release him when he shouts for the police. The clergyman had promised not to inform on the trio, but utters a Latin malediction on being freed, thereby scattering his captors. The Tinker’s Wedding was based on a tale told to Synge at a Wicklow fair concerning a tinker the writer had observed earlier that day. Briefly paraphrased, the source story runs as follows: a priest agrees to marry a tinker couple for a low fee on condition they provide him with a tin can, but they arrive for the ceremony

Literary Antecedents of the Revival Tinker

19

without the offering, and the enraged clergyman refuses to perform the vows. 1 George Gmelch has written that like an ‘anthropologist does today’, Synge ‘participated in the lives and activities of the [nomadic] people he observed, recording their work, their pleasures and their outlooks on life’. 2 Although Synge patently empathized with peoples of the road, it is a critical fallacy to read his tinker characters as naturalistic portrayals of ‘real’ Travellers with whom he came into contact. Edward Stephens, Synge’s nephew and biographer, suggests that the material of The Tinker’s Wedding was derived only from ‘the lore of the country people’, 3 but this too is a reductive reading. Although The Tinker’s Wedding will ultimately be placed within its immediate Revival contexts, the following chapter situates Synge’s imaginative engagement with the tinker within a broader history of literary and historiographic discourses of peripheral populations within the British Isles. Such traditions encompass the construct of the pre-Celts in medieval Irish protoethnic histories, the codification of the vagrant in early modern rogue literature, eighteenth-century investigations of the European Gypsy’s Indian origins, and Scotland’s post-Enlightenment Orientalization of its Hiberno-Scottish tinkler population. Since the eighteenth-century Oriental Gypsy construct was cemented by a number of Irish writers and philologists, Synge’s Revival-era representation of tinkers may be said to be the culmination of over one hundred years of Irish contributions to the European fantasy of the exotic nomad. The dearth of critical analysis concerning the deep and widely spread roots of the literary construct of the tinker generally means that critics have continually underestimated Synge’s nuanced handling of longestablished stereotypes of vagrant behaviour and ‘nature’, as the second chapter will argue. Moreover, rather than recognizing that the subversive actions of Synge’s tinkers derive from centuries-old traditions of Gypsy and tinker heathenism, dishonesty, and secretiveness, commentators have generally misread The Tinker’s Wedding as a naturalistic portrayal 1 2

John Millington Synge, ‘At a Wicklow Fair’, CW 2: 228–9. George Gmelch (ed.), introductory essay, ‘J. M. Synge: Observer of Irish Peasant Life’, In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (Dublin: O’Brien, 1980), 11–12. 3 Edward Stephens, My Uncle John: Edward Stephens’s Life of J. M. Synge, ed. Andrew Carpenter (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 157.

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of an actual contemporary Traveller culture. The following discussion details the native and European sources of the nomad construct, while the opening of chapter two will outline the manner in which Synge’s ‘tinker play’ ultimately subverts the literary traditions from which it so knowingly draws. None of this is to suggest that Synge was necessarily intimately familiar with each and every early text referred to below, more than to posit that his reading in a wide variety of genres, periods, and languages exposed him to the broad current of European literature from which the tinker figure of Revival-era literature emerged. ‘PRE-CELTIC’ TRACES: MEDIEVAL IRISH DISCOURSES OF RACE AND TINKER ORIGIN THEORIES [I]t has been suggested that these tinkers and tinsmiths are the old bronze-smiths’ degenerate survivors to this day; that the Sasennach conquest, that has broken up the old Celtic world, has reduced the smith of the north to this low estate. 4

As noted, the myths concerning Irish Traveller ancestry held by majority culture tend to revolve around traumatic events in Irish history. However, a number of other beliefs centred on tinker origins are drawn from non-Irish folk traditions. Evocations of the nomadism of Jesus have been made by commentators and by peoples of the road themselves to explain their ‘innate’ urge to travel, although the motif was occasionally Hibernicized by inserting St Patrick into the role of Christ. Synge writes of a seemingly daemonic wanderer in ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’ who is of mysterious origin, preternaturally old, uncannily fertile, and associated with the Great Famine. The dramatist evokes the nationalist tradition that the ancestors of tinkers were forced onto the road during the Famine, but also echoes the legend of the Wandering Jew, condemned to roam the world eternally for the role he played in the Crucifixion. Traveller writer Sean Maher’s semi-fictionalized memoir, The Road to God Knows Where (1972), records the oral tradition of a mysterious old man who appears at a Traveller wake claiming to have 4 Frederick S. Arnold, ‘Our Old Poets and the Tinkers’, The Journal of American Folklore 11:42 (1898), 219.

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21

‘travelled for centuries’. 5 In like manner, Lady Gregory was informed that St Patrick cursed tinkers to wander both because a member of the tribe attempted to trick him out of gold and because a tinker tradesman drove the nails that pierced Jesus. In an explicit link to the Wandering Jew tradition, a folk tale collected by Gregory stated that tinkers were under a curse ‘like the Jews, to be wandering always’. 6 However, in order to trace the various traditions from which The Tinker’s Wedding derives, this chapter will explore the literary and pseudo-scholarly theories of tinker and Gypsy origin. Ultimately, it will be suggested that the Irish tinker figure is an invention cobbled together from the bric-a-brac of centuries of European writings concerning vagabonds. The Gypsy and ‘tynker’ were codified and protoethnicized by sixteenth-century English classifications of the customs of underground groupings, and the former was later Orientalized by Enlightenment-era theories of the Indian origins of Continental Gypsies. Consequently, the British Romany had progressed from differentiated but still native category in the early modern period to racialized and ‘exotic’ vagrant by the early nineteenth century. This transformation and its implications for the Revival construct of the Irish tinker will be examined through an investigation of the influence of the Orientalized Gypsy on the Hiberno-Scottish figure in Walter Scott’s writing. Although the Gypsy remained associated with the ‘Celtic’ Highlander throughout the early nineteenth-century period, the Enlightenment model of the trans-European Orientalized Gypsy gradually usurped the aboriginal ‘tinkler’. This paradigm shift is detectable within the widely divergent constructs of peoples of the road utilized within Scott’s oeuvre. Moreover, in terms of perception, it forced the tinker figure to recede to the island of Ireland alone. This withdrawal facilitated the tinker’s transformation into the quintessentially Irish exotic par excellence in the Revival period, a development that will be traced in Chapters 2 and 3. In short, this analysis will outline the rise of the Indian origin hypothesis and the consequent Orientalization of a British tinkler-Gypsy previously considered indigenous, intimating that this shift renders the Irish tinker the sole nomadic carrier of exotic but nevertheless aboriginal authenticity in the British Isles. 5 6

Sean Maher, The Road to God Knows Where (Dublin: Talbot, 1972), 30. Lady Gregory, ‘The Wandering Tribe’, Poets and Dreamers (1903; New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 96–7.

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The Revival resurrected archaic Gaelic traditions of the glorious history of the Milesian or Celtic ‘race’, and the opening of this chapter will consider the significance for theories of tinker origin of the belief in the survival of the pre-Celtic populations recorded in such annals. This concept is traceable to medieval postulations concerning the vanquished but extant ‘Eastern’ inhabitants of ancient Ireland, traditions that gained currency when translations of neglected Irish-language manuscripts were published from the late nineteenth century onwards. Of course, within the cultural politics of the Revival, the locally generated hypothesis that tinkers were pre-Celtic survivals was a more acceptable Orientalization than that to which British and European Gypsies had been subject during the Enlightenment. Thus, not only was the tinker constituted as an exemplary domestic exotic during the Revival period, but this process called upon the authority of impeccably native and archaic sources. Indeed, given the impulse towards auto-exoticism inherent in Irish cultural nationalism, the tinker’s perceived authenticity inhered in this archaic aboriginality. ‘The Tinkers are arguable lingering survivals of primitive Irish, which would perhaps explain the atavistic kinship felt for them by so many Irish scholars and writers’, wrote Robert Pohle in an article published in the journal Éire-Ireland in 1977. 7 The origin myth linking Travellers to ancient populations is traceable to the pre-Indo-European interlingual hypothesis, formulated in seventeenth-century France, which suggested that Phoenician/Carthaginian was the mother tongue of all nonRomance languages of Western Europe. 8 This Orientalization of Gaelic intrigued eighteenth-century Ascendancy (ruling class Irish Protestant) patriots, whose politically charged cultural agenda to promote Irish antiquities laid the groundwork for the ‘reclamation’ of a ‘lost’ civilization during the Revival. Patriot scholars privileged the Celto-Phoenician linguistic paradigm over the competing claim that English culture derived from Graeco-Roman civilization, and endorsed the theory of the underground survival of apparently vanquished cultures, be they Phoenician or Gaelic. In short, Gaelo-Phoenicianism had an irrefutably anti-English dimension. 9 The French theory was readily accepted by 7 8

Robert Pohle, ‘John Sampson and the Tinkers’, Éire-Ireland 12:1 (1977), 5. Joseph Leerssen, ‘On the Edge of Europe: Ireland in Search of Oriental Roots, 1650–1850’, Comparative Criticism 8 (1986), 95. 9 Leerssen, ‘On the Edge of Europe’, 95; 102.

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both the Anglo-Irish antiquary, Sir James Ware, and his Irish amanuensis, Duald MacFirbis. Indeed, versed as MacFirbis was in Gaelic mythohistory, he would have judged the hypothesis to be a mere reiteration of established native scholarship, as a brief consideration of the Irish pseudo-historiographic tradition suggests. The chronicles of the mythical prehistory of Ireland detail a series of settlements of peoples from distant lands that fashioned a unified narrative of the origins of Ireland and the Gaels that stretched from Creation to the time of writing. The following is a synopsis of the most relevant details of the annals, as outlined from the eleventh-century Book of Invasions (Lebor Gabála Érenn) to the seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters: Ireland was first settled before the Deluge, and the post-diluvian inhabitants included the Fir-Bolg, slaves of other inhabitants. The Fir-Bolg were usurped by the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the latter population were, in turn, conquered by the Milesians, also known as the Gaels, Scots, or Celts. The Milesians excepted, the different colonists came from the Eastern Empire (‘Greece’) and all were of the same race. The Milesians came from Scythia, and from thence to Egypt, from where they journeyed to Spain and on to Ireland. The Irish past was another country, and that country was usually in the east. In general, the arrival of the Milesians was constructed as the culmination of the plantations, since they were the population with which medieval chroniclers identified. In Foras Feasa air Éirinn (1634; traditionally translated as History of Ireland ), Geoffrey Keating, a priest of AngloNorman descent and the last significant pseudo-historian writing in Irish, stressed Ireland’s links to ‘the Orient’. Keating straddled the worlds of antiquarianism and Gaelic pseudo-history, and his text was amassed to counter ‘ “false” histories’ promulgated by Reformation and colonial propagandists, and to graft the Norman record onto Gaelic myth; 10 contemporary ideological requirements rather than any sincere desire to interrogate the past shaped this proto-ethnic history. The lodestar of the theory of eastern origins was General Charles Vallancey (1721–1812), an English-born military engineer who became obsessed by Gaelic antiquities when posted to Ireland in 1762. Vallancey was a prolific author on various subjects, but is remembered today 10 Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 26; Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 155.

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for his pseudo-scholarship on the ‘eastern’ origins of the ancient Irish, which he bolstered with references to mytho-history. The Revival-era opinion of Vallancey’s legacy was damning, but the general’s fostering of interest in Irish antiquities was invaluable. An essay Vallancey published in the heyday of Irish antiquarianism imaginatively fused contemporary theories of Irish–Oriental links and mytho-history in suggesting that the Phoenicians gave their letters to the Gaels and were one of the preMilesian races recorded by Keating and MacFirbis. 11 The paper also stated that the annihilation of Carthaginian culture had a relatively recent parallel within the British Isles: ‘Almost all the Carthaginian manuscripts were committed to the flames, and the History of this brave and learned People, has been written by their most bitter Enemies, the Greeks and Romans; in this too they resemble the Irish.’ 12 The shameful lack of connection to classical culture, utilized by GraecoRoman commentators and Elizabethan propagandists alike to explain Irish ‘barbarity’, is reappraised in light of the perceived link to the earlier cradle of European civilization. The rhetoric of Gaelic mytho-history was maintained by the artificial respiration of nationalism into the Revival era, with no less a person than James Joyce citing Vallancey’s theories of Irish–Phoenician links in a 1907 lecture. 13 Joseph Lennon’s definitive book on the subject suggests that by the time the Irish–Oriental nexus had been ‘disproved in modern archaeological and historical terms, the cultural myth and Oriental affinity had become part of the Irish national story, encouraging its own logic’. 14 Thus, it is not surprising that into the twentieth century, the hypothesis was promulgated in nationalist politics, mystical treatises, and Celticist literature. Moreover, Vallancey’s theories continue to attract the admiration of contemporary systematizers: the general is frequently name-checked as an expert in Irish prehistory on websites dedicated to cabbalistic arcana. Needless to say, however, orthodox scholars discounted the more obviously mythic aspects of the early chronicles after the institutionalization of the subject of history. 11 Charles Vallancey, An Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language: Being a Collation of the Irish with the Punic Language (Dublin: Powell, 1772), 2. 12 Ibid. 3. 13 James Joyce, ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110. 14 Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004), xxi.

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Nonetheless, a particularly surprising instance of myth-based conjecture occurs in the work of historian Eóin MacNeill. MacNeill was the first Professor of Early Irish History at UCD, where he collaborated on a 1916 translation of the Book of Invasions with R. A. S. Macalister, a scholar of Shelta and an archaeologist. MacNeill is also remembered as an originator of the highly influential Gaelic League, which he co-founded in 1893 with Douglas Hyde and others for the purpose of promoting the Irish language. In Phases of Irish History (1919), MacNeill’s study of the peoples inhabiting Ireland from the prehistoric to the post-Norman period, he pays particular attention to the Fir-Bolg. As noted, annalists had represented this population as former slaves in ‘Greece’, whose short-lived dominion in Ireland was overthrown by later settlers such as the Tuatha Dé Danaan and the Milesians. MacNeill employs the diction of Orientalism in suggesting evidence of ‘something like the Hindu caste system’ in the hierarchical organization of occupations ‘among the descendants of the Pre-Celtic’ peoples, calling upon the authority of Keating and the Book of Invasions to corroborate the fact that the Fir-Bolg were one of the ‘eastern’ ‘castes of ancient Ireland’. In addition, MacNeill quotes MacFirbis’s claim that ‘Fir-Bolg’ was a name by which the whole pre-Gaelic population became known, interpreting this as an indication of the ‘contempt’ with which the ‘conquered population’ was held by the ‘Celtic ascendancy’. 15 MacNeill’s use of the over-determined concept of ‘conquest’, claimed by nationalist discourse for the advent of the Normans and Planters, constructs the actions of the last ancient invaders as a prefiguration of later British incursions. In the tradition of the Phoenicianists, MacNeill critiques post-Norman historical conditions by mapping them onto conveniently distant eras: the disdainful attitude of the colonists towards the indigenous population is ‘fine old ascendancy talk, the sort of language that has served in many ages to justify the oppression of liberty’. It almost goes without saying that MacNeill’s use of ‘ascendancy’ is an anachronistic displacement of the nationalist discourse of Protestant despotism onto the ancient Irish. On the basis of such speculation, MacNeill deduces a likely genetic connection between contemporary Travellers and the pre-Milesian ‘caste’: ‘The tinker clans of recent times [. . . ] may well be survivals of 15

Eóin MacNeill, Phases of Irish History (Dublin: Gill, 1919), 76–7; 75–8.

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some of these ancient industrial communities. It is certain that ancient tribes remained in every part of Ireland after their conquest by the Gaels.’ 16 By grafting the undeniable fact that Travellers are considered the lowest stratum in contemporary Ireland onto theories of the extrinsic descent and subjugation of the pre-Celtic peoples, MacNeill constructs an essentialist colonized aborigine. He states at the outset of Phases of Irish History that he hopes to dismantle the grossly misused racial label ‘Celts’, the title given to ‘authentic’ Irish people in Romantic and nationalist discourse. However, in his attempt to subvert chauvinistic pieties, MacNeill creates a non-Celtic Other onto whom is mapped the contemporary construct of the tinker. The aristocratic origin of a tinker called Mac Swyne Na Doe was described by Ordnance Survey stalwart John O’Donovan in a letter from Donegal written in 1835. 17 The Survey’s mapping of Ireland (1824–46) was intended to create an encyclopaedic record of the culture, folklore, and historical and genealogical memory of every parish in Ireland, and the project incessantly recorded what were perceived to be the extant traces of Gaelic lineages considered long lost. Indeed, a self-styled ‘Protestant Conservative’ accused the Survey of spreading the seditious notion amongst ‘beggars and tinkers’ that they were the descendants of dispossessed gentry, thereby undermining the British plantation. 18 The hypothesis that Travellers issue from a vanquished caste that descends unbroken to this day, be it Phoenician, Fir-Bolg, or disenfranchised Gaelic gentry, has become a convention amongst those writing about the community. Sympathizers have described the minority as scions of those conquered by the Celts, while Jane Helleiner begins an analysis of anti-Traveller racism by outlining the occupations of peripatetic peoples of ancient Ireland, as does an anthropologist editor of a collection of Traveller life stories. 19 16 17

Ibid. 82. Michael Herity (ed.), Ordnance Survey Letters: Donegal (Dublin: Four Masters, 2000), 26. 18 ‘A Protestant Conservative’, to Henry Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 2 May 1842, quoted in Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 187. 19 Grattan Puxon, The Victims: Itinerants in Ireland (Dublin: Aisti Eireannacha, 1967), 8; Jane Helleiner, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 31–2; Artelia Court et al., Puck of the Droms: The Lives and Literature of the Irish Tinkers (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985), 10–13.

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Aforementioned anthropologist George Gmelch has collaborated on medical papers investigating the origins of the Travelling community, and the discourse of the exceptional nature of the Traveller gene constructed by Irish folklore and literature has seemingly shaped recent medical research on disorders prevalent within the community. 20 The indifference regarding their ancestry of many people of the road queried for the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, a 1963 governmentsponsored investigation into the ‘problem’ of Traveller culture, perplexed majority Irish cultural expectations. This ‘post-colonial dynamic’ of circling upon Traveller origins was critiqued in remarks made at a conference on Traveller ethnicity by Mairín Kenny. She indicates that it was academic delegates, rather than the Traveller participants, who demonstrated a patriarchal ‘will to permanence’ by ‘continually return[ing] to debating where [the Travellers] came from’. 21 Similarly, Gearóid Ó’Rian identifies the internalized oppression and low selfworth of Travellers as symptoms of colonization across a nomadism– sedentarism divide, labelling legislation that prevents Traveller movement as ‘colonial’. 22 The deployment of the charged discourse of colonialism in relation to contemporary Traveller-sedentary relations in Ireland has intriguing echoes: a seventeenth-century translator of Keating’s Foras Feasa described settlers from the time of the Fir-Bolg onwards as ‘colonists’. 23 To judge by certain of the texts considered above, Travellers appear to have a moral claim upon the label of ‘the colonized’ that the majority of the population—descendants of the ‘colonists’ of the last two millennia—do not. However, the seizing of such a claim as part of the contemporary Traveller struggle for recognition of separate ethnicity is questionable. The usefulness of colonialism as a model through which Traveller–sedentary tensions may be understood is extremely 20 See, for instance, Kari North et al., ‘The Origins of the Irish Travellers and the Genetic Structure of Ireland’, Annals of Human Biology 27:5 (2000), 453–65; P. Kirke and J. Barry, ‘Congenital Anomalies in the Irish Traveller Community’, Irish Medical Journal 90:6 (1997), 233–4. 21 Mairín Kenny, ‘Final Thoughts: A Case for Celebration?’ in May McCann et al. (eds.), Irish Travellers: Culture and Ethnicity (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994), 181. 22 Gearóid Ó’Rian, ‘Why Cultural Action?’ A Heritage Ahead: Cultural Action and Travellers (Dublin: Pavee Point, 1995), 15–16. 23 Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, 7.

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limited: in the Irish context, post-colonial discourse centred on a Protestant/unionist and Catholic/nationalist binary has focused almost exclusively on the historical oppression of what has been represented as one homogeneous segment of the sedentary population by another. Thus, rather than being a useful tool with which to probe the invisibility of Travellers, Irish post-colonial theory has collaborated in the elision of indigenous nomadic traditions. Furthermore, a thesis of uninterrupted subjugation potentially configures the Travelling minority as the embodiment of vanquishment or victimhood: for instance, contemporary Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill appropriates a ‘tinker’ or ‘white aborigine’ identity as a revolt against the Irish literary and class establishment, as embodied by Gregory. 24 This study seeks to dismantle the fetishization of racial ‘authenticity’, but in light of the rhetoric of Travellers’ non-‘Celticness’, it is worth stressing that the medical paper Gmelch co-authored concluded that the Traveller population ‘does not appear to have diverged significantly in all of the genetic systems’ from the majority population of the Republic of Ireland and does ‘not appear to be related to the Romany Gypsies’. 25 The championing of Vallancey’s ideas by contemporary systematizers demonstrates the tenacity of the concept of exotic and veiled racial lineage. Certain current Traveller writers and activists perpetuate the myth of archaic origin, either in response to patrilineal expectations or as a strategy of resistance: in Maher’s memoir, a mysterious old Traveller informs the narrator that ‘a lot, if not all, of the writing that has survived from early Irish history was written by travellers [. . . ] [and] St Patrick himself was a great pavvy [Irish Traveller]’. 26 Prominent Traveller spokesperson Michael McDonagh values the tradition 24 ‘If Lady Gregory came round to me I’d give her all the seanchas she wanted, but in my heart of hearts I’d be thinking [. . . ] how come she’s up there with her silk skirt, and I in my báinín, I would, and how’s she better than me? Now here you have a white aborigine who rejoices in being a white aborigine, who loves the sense I get of undermining all of us [. . . ]. In the establishment in the south of Ireland, they hate me because I remind them of their tinker ancestry.’ Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘Q. & A.: Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’, The Irish Literary Supplement 6:2 (Fall, 1987), 42. 25 Michael Crawford and George Gmelch, ‘Human Biology of the Irish Tinkers: Demography, Ethnohistory, and Genetics’, Social Biology 21:4 (1974), 330; Crawford and Gmelch, ‘Genetic Affinities and Origin of the Irish Tinkers’, in Elizabeth S. Watts, Francis E. Johnson, and Gabriel W. Lasker (eds.), Biosocial Interrelations in Population Adaption (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 100. 26 Maher, The Road to God Knows Where, 97–8.

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which links his people to pre-Milesian populations since it counters the Famine-origin belief ’s insinuation that Travellers descend from relatively recent sedentary dropouts. The attraction of binding Traveller and preCeltic cultures is that it provides, as McDonagh admits, a theory of long-standing presence in Ireland for a minority culture vulnerable to accusations of ‘merely’ recent origin. The claim that Travellers are of Famine origin is understood by McDonagh as an attempt to deny that Travellers are in possession of the kind of continuity from which separate ethnicity might be credibly claimed. 27 The hypothesis of archaic Traveller lineage is a double-edged sword, however, since soi-disant ‘Milesian’ chroniclers wrote the mythohistories from which MacNeill constructs this link. Such scribes were dismissive of what was called the ‘unfree tribe’, and a phrase favoured by bardic annalists, ‘the Sons of Míl’, meaning ‘all of the indigenous population of Ireland’, 28 excluded any ethnic groups understood to be scions of pre-Milesian groups. Part IV of the mytho-historic Book of Invasions has been summarized as ‘an explanation of how the “plebeians” [. . . ] came to Ireland; prepared for the “patricians” for whose information the history, as a whole, was compiled’. 29 MacNeill’s hypothesis frames within academic discourse the tradition that Travellers were, as nationalist William Bulfin describes, a ‘remnant of the Firbolgs’ to be ‘differentiate[d] [. . . ] from the Irish people’. 30 In short, MacNeill’s configuration of tinker origins potentially implies that Travellers are not quite Irish. The social exclusion of Travellers is naturalized when it is linked to their supposed conquest by the ancestors of the ‘real’ Irish, though the compensatory fetishization of pre-Celtic ‘authenticity’ writes out the voice of the Traveller as much as more overtly hostile discourses. Keating coined the term Éireannach (Irish person) in his History of Ireland, a word that enfolded Gael, Norman, and implicitly, the non-sedentary, while excluding the planted seventeenth-century ‘New English’. However, the limited inclusivity of Keating’s coinage receded 27 28

Michael McDonagh, personal interview, 28 April 2001. Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, 125. 29 R. A. S. Macalister, ed., trans., and introd., Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland (Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland for the Irish Texts Society, 1941), part 4, 2. 30 William Bulfin, Rambles in Eirinn, 2 vols. (1907; London: Sphere, 1981), vol. 2, 205.

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in the Revival era when ultra-nationalism seized the terms ‘Gael’ and ‘Celt’ as equivalents of ‘Irish’. This is ironic, given that the rhetoric of the tinker’s racial difference originally emerged from a benevolent nationalist desire to elevate the tinker, as will be concluded later.

CODIFYING THE VAGRANT: THE ENLIGHTENMENT GYPSY AND THE ROGUE LITERATURE ‘ T YNKER’ Cultural anthropologist Judith Okely argues that there is insufficient linguistic and cultural evidence for Gypsies’ Indian origin, surmising that Asian traditions and traces of Sanskrit may have been appropriated by wide-ranging nomads who are not necessarily the biological ancestors of contemporary Romanies. 31 Nevertheless, it is commonly held at present that Gypsies originated from northern India about one thousand years ago. However, when this popular origin theory is invoked, it is rarely noted that the hypothesis was formulated at the height of European Orientalism, and that its main proponent was institutionally enmeshed in the emergent rhetoric of race. Although the Gypsy figure was a well-established staple of sensationalist writing by the late eighteenth century, a German study of 1783 that purported to expose the Indian origins of European Gypsies, Heinrich Grellmann’s Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner consolidated the exemplar of the heathenish and asocial Gypsy, whose appetites and customs were an inverse of sedentary norms. Grellmann’s work, translated into English as Dissertation on the Gipsies four years later, was an enormous, trans-European success that was issued in seven editions and three translations. Prior to Grellmann, a historical canon of publications on Gypsies and their language already existed in Europe. These earlier writers had generally followed in each other’s footsteps, and the well-established convention of ongoing duplication of the same sources did not undergo any demonstrable disruption with the appearance of the Dissertation. However, Grellmann’s work crystallized disparate stereotypes gleaned 31 See Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8–13.

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from earlier commentaries, 32 and constructed Gypsy culture as a monolithic, mono-racial and trans-European phenomenon. The Dissertation invented the category of ‘Gypsy’ as has been understood since then, bringing various itinerant groups ‘moving through different countries together under a single name, [. . . ] and provided them with a collective history’. 33 Moreover, it is an ironic fact that actual Gypsies in a variety of European countries were being banished from the public realm just as a homogeneous transcontinental ‘Gypsy’ figure emerged in the spheres of European culture, linguistics, and ethnology. Grellmann’s preface reveals that his construct of a cohesive Gypsy presence in Europe stretching forward from the fifteenth century emanates from a wholly artificial yoking of disparate documents. The German scholar unproblematically collates accounts of Gypsies from vastly differing European regions and eras to create an unchanging, trans-European entity, and blithely admits to relying on speculation: ‘There is no record, or historical source, leading to a direct discovery of the origin of the Gipsies; those which have been thought so, are not genuine. Therefore nothing remains, but to seek the truth through wandering ways.’ 34 Grellmann’s work inflects much of the subsequent description and investigation of Gypsies by setting the narrow parameters of the cultural traits upon which they were critiqued: ‘irregular’ marriage practice, ‘obscene’ dietary practices, and ‘heathen’ religious beliefs. Grellmann begins on page one of his Dissertation by listing the word for ‘Gipsy’ in different European and ‘eastern’ languages. This inventory is repeated, often almost word for word, on the opening page of countless later commentaries on Gypsy culture in various European languages, and is invariably an indication that the work concerned is highly derivative. Heinrich Grellmann was an ethnographer and historian based for most of his career at Göttingen University, the German Enlightenment powerhouse. He was academically active in an era in which the discipline of history was being institutionalized and racial theories had begun 32 Wim Willems and Leo Lucassen, ‘The Church of Knowledge: Representation of Gypsies in Dutch Encyclopedias and their Sources (1724–1984)’, in Matt T. Salo (ed.), 100 Years of Gypsy Studies, (Cheverly, Md.: Gypsy Lore Society, 1990), 42. 33 Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy, trans. Don Bloch (London: Cass, 1997), 17. 34 Heinrich Grellmann, Introduction, Dissertation, on the Gipsies, trans. Matthew Raper (1783; London: Printed for the translator by G. Biggs, 1787), xviii.

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to emerge: Johann Blumenbach, the first scholar to employ the concept of ‘race’, was a colleague at Göttingen. Grellmann refined the previously obscure Oriental origin theory by suggesting that language proved Gypsies to be descendants of an Indian pariah group, with all the negative associations the analogy implied: Gypsies were filthy eaters, addictive, animalistic, instinctive, lazy, lustful, and dishonest. The Oriental Gypsy was self-evidently the antithesis of the European in terms of behaviour, skin colour, and appetite: ‘Let us reflect how different [Gypsies] are from Europeans; the one is white, the other black. This [one] cloaths himself, the other goes half naked. This [one] shudders at the thought of eating carrion, the other prepares it as a dainty.’ 35 Grellmann ascribes Gypsies’ purported tendency to cling to barbaric habits to ‘the place from whence they originate’, and considers the community’s criminality, nomadism, and heathenism to be unalterable and universal. For Grellmann, Gypsies seemed to epitomize all that deviated from the white, Christian, and Western norm, prompting their subsequent comparison with a dizzying array of Others made available by European settlement, colonization, and slave-trading. By the 1780s, explorations of the relationship of Indian culture and language to that of Europe were laying the foundations of the IndoEuropean interlingual paradigm, and a century later, the lowly Indian and the English Gypsy were, in certain instances, understood to be self-evidently one and the same. Prior to the rise of the Indian origin theory, the languages of the itinerant classes of the British Isles were of little scholarly interest, serving merely as amusement for readers of rogue literature. Indeed, an English document from1577 bemoans the fact that the Gypsies’ ‘Canting’ language was an artificially created aid to criminality. 36 However, by the end of the eighteenth century, the paradigm of the Gypsy language as furtive thieves’ cant was shifting amongst scholars to the new model of Romani as fascinating proof of exotic and ancient origin. Irish Orientalist William Marsden expresses wonder 35 36

Grellmann, Introduction, Dissertation, xv. Parson William Harrison, ‘Description of England’, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), quoted in Edward Viles and F. J. Furnivall (eds.), Awdeley’s Fraternitye of Vacabondes, Harman’s Caveat, Haben’s Sermon &c. (London: Early English Text Society, 1869), xii.

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that tribes wandering through [. . . ] Romania, have been conversant for centuries in a dialect precisely familiar to that spoken at this day by the obscure, despised, and wretched people in England, whose language has been considered a fabricated gibberish [. . . ] and whose persons have been (till within the period of a year) an object of the persecution, instead of the protection of our laws. 37

Marsden’s comments indicate that the relaxing of Elizabethan laws against ‘Egyptians’ coincided with the new Indian origin theory. A group previously criminalized was now racialized, and delinquency became explicable in terms of Oriental/pariah origin. The Revival-era Irish tinker emerges from a long tradition of both Gaelic and Ascendancy scholarship concerning ‘exotic’ populations, since the linking of European Gypsies to the Orient was a hypothesis with which a number of eighteenth-century Irish scholars engaged. Significantly, these commentators were all directly involved in administrating the Empire or the Crown in India or Ireland. The aforementioned Marsden, the co-founder of an East India agency business, proposed a ‘Hindostanic’ link to the Gypsy language before the Society of Antiquaries of London in February 1785, two years before the Englishlanguage translation of Grellmann’s Dissertation appeared. However, two eighteenth-century travel writers, Richard Pococke and Richard Twiss, who were associated with the Established Church in Ireland and a ruling class Anglo-Dutch family of Irish origin respectively, might have more convincingly claimed to have ‘discovered’ the exotic Gypsy. 38 Vallancey never failed to voice an opinion on the more outlandish scholarly debates of his era, and his response to Grellmann, ‘On the Origin and Language of the Gypsies’ (1804), Hibernicizes the ethnographer’s theory by grafting it onto his own hypothesis of the ‘eastern’ genesis of the Irish. 39 In an 1876 article, Henry Thomas Crofton, a British scholar of Anglo-Irish descent with a keen interest in tinkers, quotes Vallancey’s 37 William Marsden, ‘Observations on the Language of the People Commonly Called Gypsies’, Archaeologia 7 (1785), 385. 38 Richard Pococke’s much-translated A Description of the East (1743–45), suggested that the nomadic Chingani of Syria were ‘relations’ of the ‘gypsies in England’, while Richard Twiss’s Travels through Portugal and Spain, in 1772 and 1773 (1775), contains one of the earliest discussions of Spanish Gypsies in English-language travel writing, setting the template for the exotic ‘description of Gypsies’ passage common to a huge number of subsequent travel works on Spain. 39 Vallancey, ‘On the Origin and Language of the Gypsies’, Collectanea de rebus hibernicis 4.2 (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1804), 64–5; 78.

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convoluted argument linking Continental Gypsies with obscure Irishlanguage words for seers and fortune-tellers. 40 In this manner, Irish antiquarian rhetoric concerning Ireland’s archaic populations eventually nurtured the Victorian Orientalization of the Irish tinker. Moreover, the Enlightenment-era feeding frenzy for Gypsies even had a marked effect outside scholarly circles in eighteenth-century Ireland: the Belfast NewsLetter published an excerpt from William Cowper’s The Task entitled ‘The Gypsies’ in a December 1785 issue. The Task was written from late 1783 to 1784, the period when Grellmann’s study was gaining attention, and is permeated by Enlightenment assumptions about the shamming and exotic nature of the Gypsy. Although the contents are entirely consistent with its date of composition, the poem’s location in a regional publication concerned with trade, agriculture, and politics indicates how quickly the Gypsy trope percolated from major Continental centres of scholarship to provincial cities. The examination of the origins of the word tinker below highlights the difficulty of locating what are assumed to be the ancestors of contemporary Travellers within the historical record with any certainty. In light of the sudden visibility of the Irish tinker in the Victorian era, there is one extremely significant aspect to the contributions of Irish scholars to eighteenth-century debates concerning Gypsies: although the Gypsy construct they helped invent fostered the Revival Irish tinker trope, no one of them ever refers to a minority within Ireland that approximates to the European Gypsy. Despite the fact that Twiss and Pococke had considered Gypsies in their accounts of Spain and the Middle East, neither made reference to similar populations in their accounts of Ireland. In like manner, travel writer Edward Clarke gave an account of Russian Gypsies in 1800, and seemed versed in the Indian-origin theory, but his account of Dublin does not allude to Gypsies or Gypsylike communities, only to undifferentiated beggars. Neither Grellmann, Marsden, nor any other of the eighteenth-century commentators noted refer to Irish ‘Gypsies’ per se. Furthermore, a Belfast News-Letter review of the English-language translation of Grellmann’s volume makes no reference to a similar local population. 41 All of this suggests that prior 40 41

Henry Thomas Crofton, ‘Gipsies: Tinklers’, Notes and Queries 8 July 1876, 32. ‘Some Account of the Gipsies [From Raper’s ‘Dissertation’ Lately Published]’, revn. of the English-language translation of Grellmann’s Dissertation, by Matthew Raper, Belfast News-Letter 23 Nov.–27 Nov. 1787: 4.

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to the nineteenth-century textual emergence of what would come to be recognized as a Gypsy-like tinker, no Irish population group that is then perceived to approximate to the European Gypsy is visible to those with eyes for such exotica. According to Macalister, the aforementioned scholar of Shelta, premodern Irish literature indicates that the ‘earlier inhabitants of the country were dark-complexioned, contrasting, in this respect, with their tall, fair “Celtic” conquerors. [. . . ] Fair persons are held in honour; dark persons are despised.’ 42 Paradoxically, tinkers have been constructed both as carriers of supposed markers of ‘Celtic’ ethnicity (red hair and fair skin) and of a ‘foreign’ appearance denoting genetic divergence from the majority population. Prior to the late nineteenth-century inclusion of the Irish tinker within the Orientalist discourse that had racialized and differentiated the Gypsy a century previously, the tinker tended to be assigned a broadly ‘Irish’ or ‘Celtic’ rather than a specifically ‘tinker’ identity by British commentators: George Borrow’s Wild Wales (1862) describes the hair of Irish tinker children as being ‘of flaxen or red hue’, and notes that their complexions ‘rather inclin[e] to be fair’. Moreover, the tinkers address him as ‘ “your haner” ’ and throw Irish language phrases into their conversations with him. 43 Most interestingly, the tinker was constituted within the early Victorian discourse of Irish fecklessness even by British Romanies who perceived them to be ‘Irish Gypsies’. 44 The ‘Irish Tinklers’ detailed in the following account given by Scottish Gypsy expert Walter Simson in an 1865 work carry the linguistic and ethnic markers of the happy-go-lucky, violence-prone Stage Irishman, displaying no hint of the ‘Oriental’ or pre-Celtic elements notable in British and Irish accounts originating later in the nineteenth century: 42 R. A. S. Macalister, The Archaeology of Ireland (1928; London: Methuen, 1949), 14. 43 George Borrow, Wild Wales (London: Murray, 1862), 20–2; 717. 44 ‘ “[The Irish] have no law among them,” [English Gipsies] say; “they have fairly destroyed Scotland as a country to travel in; if they get a loan of anything from the [sedentary population] [. . . ] they will decamp with it [. . . ]. They have brought a disgrace upon the very name of Gipsy [. . . ]. But English and Scottish Gipsies pull well together [. . . ]. The English sympathize with the Scottish, under the wrongs they have experienced at the hands of the Irish” ’, Walter Simson, History of the Gipsies, ed. James Simson (London: Samson, Low and Marston; Edinburgh: Menzies, 1865), 357–8 fn.

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I happened, at another time, to be in the court-house of one of the burghs north of the Forth, when two Irishmen, of the names of O’Reilly and McEwan, were at the bar for having been found drunk, and fighting within the town. [. . . ] [T]heir habiliments and general appearance did not correspond exactly with the ordinary dress and manners of common Irish peasants, although their features were in all respects Hibernian. When the magistrates questioned them in respect to their conduct, the prisoners looked very grave, and said, ‘Sure, and it plase your honours, our quarrel was nothing but whiskey, and sure we are the best friends in the world;’ and seemed very penitent. But when the magistrates were not looking at them, they were smiling to each other, and keeping up a communication in pantomime. [. . . ] When the officers were completing the other part of [O’Reilly’s] punishment—‘banishing him from the town’—[McEwan having jimmied his cell-door and escaped the previous night] the regardless, light-hearted Irish Tinkler went capering along the streets, with his coat off, brandishing, and sweeping, and twirling his shillalah, in the Gipsy fashion. Meeting, in this excited state, his late judge, the Tinkler, with the utmost contempt and derision, called out to him, ‘Plase you honour! Won’t you now take a fight with me, for the sake of friendship?’ 45

By contrast, an anonymous 1887 contribution to the North British Advertiser and Ladies Journal delineates tinkers as a ‘dark haired’ and ‘swarthy’ ‘species of gipsy’: the process of enfolding the tinker within a broader and explicitly exoticized Gypsy identity has begun. 46 After the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish itinerant subculture was increasingly subject to a process of Orientalization and a concomitant racialization that drew its sustenance from the Grellmann-inspired British zeitgeist: early Victorian Cork antiquarian William Hackett found the ‘strange Oriental chaunt’ of the Irish bacach (tramp) similar to ‘the chaunting of a Fakeer’, Kerry ‘Gypsies’ caught the attention of India-based Irish Orientalist James Cousins, and Ireland-based English composer Arnold Bax observed a red-headed Irish tinker woman with the sullen ‘air of an oriental queen’. 47 45 46 47

Simson, History of the Gipsies, 326–8. ‘Irish Tinkers’, North British Advertiser and Ladies Journal 26 Feb. 1887: 34. William Hackett, ‘The Irish Bacach, or Professional Beggar, Viewed Archaeologically’, Ulster Journal of Archeology 9 (1861–62), 261; 270; James H. Cousins, ‘A Gipsy Dance in Kerry’, Collected Poems (1894–1940) (Adyar, Madras: Kalâkshetra, 1940), 66– 68; Arnold Bax, Farewell, My Youth and Other Writings, ed. Lewis Foreman (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992), 47.

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A commonplace medieval scholarly belief debunked by Grellmann held that Gypsies had penetrated Europe from Egypt (hence the word), or had entered the Continent as an aristocratic band falsely claiming to be Christian pilgrims from a forcibly Islamicized country. In contrast to the subsequent retroactive reading of the sudden visibility of the Gypsy in Renaissance Britain as evidence that Romanies had at that point arrived from Western Europe, ‘Egyptians’ in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England were perceived to be indigenous petty criminals. In the Elizabethan era, claims that the Gypsy portion of the wandering class had Oriental links were considered a ruse of native or naturalized charlatans hoping to benefit financially through alms-giving or fortune-telling by exoticizing themselves. 48 Egyptian had functioned as an Occidental signifier of ‘foreignness’ and ‘necromancy’ for centuries, and prior to Grellmann, this and other culturally available ‘Oriental’ and ‘barbarian’ signifiers were arbitrarily attached to the non-sedentary. In England, the pre-Grellmann paradigm of vagrants encompassed the similar but nevertheless differentiated categories of dishonest ‘tinkers’ (itinerant workers with tin and peripatetic peddlers of goods) and pretend (‘counterfeit’) ‘Egyptians’. The Gypsy and tinker communities were both codified as petty criminal, secretive, godless, and jargonspeaking fraternities by so-called rogue pamphlets such as John Awdeley’s The Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1561), Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warning for Commen Cursetors Vulgarly Called Vagabones (1567) and Samuel Rid’s The Art of Juggling (1612). Harman categorizes ‘Egiptians’ as ‘wily, wandering vagabonds [. . . ] depely dissembling [. . . ] [delighting] [the rude common people] with the strangenes of the attire of their heades, and practising paulmistrie’. 49 The same author’s pen picture of the ‘Dronken Tinckar’ suggests that if there are ‘thrée or foure holes in a pan, hee wyll make as many more for spedy gaine’, while Awdeley categorizes the ‘tinkard’ as one ‘leauth his [tradesman’s] bag a sweating at the Alehouse’ to ‘goeth abrode a begging’. 50 48 An Act of 1562 threatened anyone discovered ‘Counterfeiting, transforming or disguising themselves by their Apparel, Speech or other Behaviour, like unto [. . . ] Egyptians’, Fraser, Gypsies, 133. 49 Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Commen Cursetors Vulgarly Called Vagabones (1567), Awdeley’s Fraternitye of Vacabondes, Harman’s Caveat, Haben’s Sermon &c., 23. 50 Harman, A Caveat, 59; Awdeley, Fraternitye of Vacabondes, 5.

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Published between 1550 and 1620, rogue pamphlets betray a fascination with a culture they ostensibly condemn, categorizing ‘the criminal underworld as an autonomous social space with different classes’ of vagrant, beggar, and thief, each with its own distinct language, traditions, coherent barter economy, master–apprentice relations, and patrons. 51 Moreover, rogue literature directly shaped contemporaneous anti-nomadic policy aimed at those legislators codified as ‘Tynkers’ and ‘counterfeit Egyptians’. 52 In addition, their appendices of ‘thieves’ cant’ vocabulary lists cemented the image of an organized, code-speaking criminal underclass that was a kind of inverted guild. Responding to the long-standing convention amongst scholars of the early modern English period of taking such sensationalist pamphlets at face value, Linda Woodbridge stresses that ‘rogue literature creates a fanciful world’ that ‘ought to be inadmissible as historical evidence of social conditions in the real world’. Woodbridge further posits that ‘there is very little evidence that vagrants spoke thieves’ cant’, a belief she categorizes as ‘a myth fostered particularly by rogue literature’. 53 Although the rogue pamphlet authors did not refer to a Gypsy-specific canting language, the fantasy of a cant-speaking vagabond-rogue gradually narrowed to that of a specifically Gypsy cryptolect, leading Victorian commentators to retroactively read early modern references to ‘cant’ as the first instances of Romani and Shelta in print. 54 English rogue literature texts were explicitly modelled on Continental predecessors such as the Low German Liber Vagatorum (The Book of Vagabonds; c. the 1510s), a widely circulated catalogue of the different categories of rogue to which Martin Luther appended a cant vocabulary list in his role as editor of the 1528 reprint. Though later perceived as a distinctly British type, the very category of ‘tinker’, like that of ‘Gypsy’, 51 Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, Introduction, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 7–8. 52 Elizabethan legislators who codified vagabonds had almost certainly ‘read and re-read’ rogue texts by Awdeley and Harman. D. B. Thomas, Introduction, Liber Vagatorum: Der Betler Orden/The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars: With a Vocabulary of their Language Edited by Martin Luther in the Year 1528, trans. John Camden Hotten (London: Penguin, 1932), 47. 53 Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 11; 9. 54 See Henry Thomas Crofton, ‘Borde’s Egipt Speche’, JGLS 1:2 (1907), 157–68, and John Sampson, ‘Tinkers and their Talk’, JGLS 2:4 (1891), 204–21.

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was moulded from a Continental European original. Sir Thomas Overbury’s satirical early seventeenth-century definition of a tinker as one ‘that in mending one hole, [. . . ] had rather make three then want worke’ is strikingly similar to the classification provided by the Luther edition of Liber Vagatorum: tinkers ‘go about full of mischief, and if thou givest them nothing, one of them may hap will break a hole in thy kettle with a stick or a knife to give work to a multitude of others’. 55 Nevertheless, the rogue literature of each European territory constructed a localized underworld of organized, cant-speaking, deviant secret groupings in opposition to normative values. Grellmann’s text decisively Orientalizes the Gypsy, but that exoticization does not appear out of a vacuum. Rather, it is built upon the pre-existent tradition codified by European rogue literature of vagrant cultures as underground communities with their own distinctive scamming patterns, inverted codes of behaviour, and vocabularies. Grellmann’s model effaces regional difference, but builds upon this extant proto-racialized Gypsy. In effect, Grellmann’s racialized, untrustworthy heathen is sculpted from the villainous European Gypsy-rogue. The German ethnographer’s thesis, collated in a period when the Occidental Self increasingly defines its ‘civilization’ against Oriental Otherness, transforms the Gypsy from a local petty criminal to exotic barbarian. The stage upon which the Gypsy was constructed as the inversion of the Christian, law-abiding majority expanded outward from the nation-state to encompass an East–West binary. Nevertheless, the contention between an ordered, God-fearing, dominant society and its disordered, heathen, peripatetic minority carried over into the new paradigm. Grellmann’s text brought the explosive new rhetoric of racial difference to its construct of the Gypsy, but an embryonic concept of difference lay beneath the rogue literature image of the vagrant underworld as an amalgamation of linguistically distinct subcultures. The rogue literature construct of the ‘tynker’ as a grouping in possession of its own culture, internal regulations, and jargon laid the imaginative groundwork for the later exoticization of the Irish minority presumed to be their descendants. A contemporary Irish Traveller élite makes explicit links between the Travellers of today and the ‘tynkers’ 55 Sir Thomas Overbury, ‘A Tinker’, The Overburian Characters to Which is Added A Wife (1614), ed. W. J. Paylor (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 35; Hotten, trans., Liber Vagatorum, 135.

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targeted by the sixteenth-century English anti-nomadic statutes created in response to rogue literature, 56 although the problematic nature of this identification becomes apparent on close examination of the word tinker, variously identified as originating in Irish, Gaelic, Romani, or English. David MacRitchie, a founder member of the Gypsy Lore Society, notes that all over Scotland ‘ceard or caird [Irish and Gaelic for ‘artisan’] has long been a recognized equivalent of “tinker” ’. 57 Conversely, James Simson argues that ‘Tinkler [a Scots variant] is the name generally applied to the Scottish Gipsies. [. . . ] The verb tink, according to Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary, means to “rivet” [. . . ]; a Gipsy word’. 58 Most intriguingly, the OED notes that ‘Tynker’ was already a trade name in England by 1175 and a surname by 1265. Standard dictionaries of English suggest an origin in the Middle English tinglen or tinklen, ‘to tink’, a sound word associated with the trade of tinkering. However, Sinéad Ní Shuinéar, an anthropologist and a fluent Irish-speaker, has recently argued that the word tinker was almost certainly imported from Britain sometime in the nineteenth century as a cognate for Irishlanguage or Irish-language-derived descriptive terms for peoples of the road such as siúlóir, shuiler, and lucht siúil (literally, ‘walkers’ or ‘the walking people’), and that MacRitchie’s etymology is ‘spurious’. 59 Irish writings grounded in a familiarity with the two dominant languages on the island provide evidence in favour of Ní Shuinéar’s hypothesis. An article in a July 1788 number of the Belfast News-Letter refers to a local ‘strolling woman commonly called a Lough-shool’ who had been brought up on child murder and attempted child kidnapping charges. 60 This indicates that a corruption of the Irish-language term lucht siúil was in use by late eighteenth-century English speakers, and additionally suggests that less than eight months after the same news journal had published a review of Grellmann’s Dissertation, the 56 Prominent Irish Traveller activist David Joyce suggested at the May 2003 Burren Law School that current antipathy towards his community derives from ‘historical statutes which targeted Travellers, describing them as “peddlers, tinkers, counterfeit Egyptians or rogues” ’, Carol Coulter, ‘School Told Old Statutes Targeted Travellers’, Irish Times, 5 May 2003, 6. 57 MacRitchie, ‘Irish Tinkers and their Language’, JGLS 2 (1889), 355. 58 James Simson, editor’s preface, History of the Gipsies, 7 n. 59 Sinéad Ní Shuinéar, ‘Apocrypha to Canon: Inventing Irish Traveller History’, History Ireland 12:4 (2004), 18. 60 ‘Londonderry, July 1’, Belfast News-Letter, 1–4 July 1788, 4.

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Continental stereotype of the child-stealing Gypsy had already been mapped onto a native category of wanderer. Furthermore, in ‘The Lough Derg Pilgrim’, a short story written in English by William Carleton, who was born into an Irish-speaking Tyrone family at the end of the eighteenth century, a roguish ‘tinker’s widow’ is referred to as both a ‘shuler’ and a ‘gipsy’. Finally, in a stylized 1911 account of tramping in Donegal, bilingual Revivalist Joseph Campbell differentiates between the ‘tinkers’ and the ‘shuiler’ he encounters on his travels. It is likely significant that tincéir, the standard contemporary translation of the word tinker that is popularly assumed to indicate the Irish origins of the term, is not listed in the Revd. Patrick Dinneen’s definitive 1904 Irish–English dictionary. The Shuiler’s Child, Seamus O’Kelly’s 1909 play concerning the fostering of a tramp’s child by a farming family, uses the term shuiler to refer to a woman of the road. In light of the Abbey tinker construct that will be discussed in the following two chapters, the relevance of O’Kelly’s background to his utilization of this term is worth noting. Significantly, the word was not used by major dramatists from Anglicized Dublin such as Synge and Yeats in their plays centred on tinkers and tramps. O’Kelly, born in rural Galway and in possession of minimum education, was, by origin, far closer on the social and linguistic scale to the subjects of his play than any of the other early Abbey dramatists who tackled the theme of peripatetic culture. Moreover, in submissions to a February 1952 Irish Folklore Commission ‘Tinkers’ questionnaire that was distributed to a network of amateur correspondents throughout the island, a subheading referring to ‘lucht siúil’ was not evenly or exclusively understood by informants to refer to Travellers. Ní Shuinéar’s surmise suggests that the imported word tinker—with what I would argue are its rogue literature connotations of a secret subculture submerged within the nation-state—was used to describe a possibly altogether different Irish population that had previously been referred to by Irish speakers with designations denoting peripateticism rather than occupation or protoethnicity. The puzzling silence with regard to the presence of ‘Irish Gypsies’ of eighteenth-century Irish scholars and visitors to Ireland implicated in the racing of Continental Gypsies is explicable in light of such a hypothesis. A word imported sometime in the nineteenth century endowed indigenous Irish nomads with the purported attributes of the occupational fraternity known by that designation in England.

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Lest I be accused of attempting to efface Traveller ethnicity and history, let me state that this is not to deny that Travellers practised tinsmithing into the twentieth century. However, it does suggest that this fact does not necessarily prove the following: that contemporary Travellers are genetically related in any way to those known as ‘tinkers’ in sixteenth-century England or those in Ireland referred to as such by English commentators prior to the nineteenth century; that contemporary Travellers’ ancestors necessarily practised the smithing trade prior to the nineteenth century; that the occupation of smithing is the reason that these predecessors came to be referred to as ‘tinkers’. It is of pivotal importance to stress that theories of Traveller origin that attempt to prove the minority’s consistent presence by pointing to evidence of smithing castes in ancient Ireland build upon the scaffold of a word (tinker) only used of Ireland’s peripatetic population since English became the dominant language on the island in the nineteenth century. In attempting to trace the pre-nineteenth-century presence of those known in Ireland from about the early Victorian period onwards as ‘tinkers’, the word itself is a red herring. However, tinker does provide a valuable signpost in tracing the literary lineage of Irish peripatetic culture within English-language texts from both Britain and Ireland, which is the only Traveller history that this study seeks to uncover. Ní Shuinéar’s theory goes some way towards explaining why the word Cant, utilized at present as a designation for the Traveller language, was also the word deployed by rogue literature compilers for the vocabularies of ‘secret languages’ they appended to their volumes. It is a mistake to assume that tinker is a fixed, ahistorical, and culturally unspecific term, as many commentators on Travellers who read history retroactively do. 61 The transfer from shuiler to tinker that quite likely occurred with the spread of English was not the tidy swapping of an Irish-language term for its exact equivalent, but a shift from a word that merely denotes peripateticism to one with cultural baggage indicating 61 A Revival-era piece suggested that tinkers were the ‘modern descendants’ of the ‘vagrants’ who roamed Ireland in ‘the days of Queen Elizabeth’, while the anonymous 1956 article identifies victims of Edward VI’s Act against ‘tynckers’ as ancestors of the Irish minority known by that designation. Helen Weldon, ‘Tinkers, Sorners and Other Vagabonds’, New Ireland Review 26 (Sept. 1906), 46–7; ‘An Irish Tinker on the Road: A Glimpse into the Life of Ireland’s Wanderers’, The Sphere, 15 Dec. 1956, 462.

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occupation, roguishness, and proto-ethnicity. The very fact that Irish Travellers were officially recognized as members of an ethnic minority in Britain in the same year that this occurred in Ireland points to a deep-seated cultural recognition of the long-established proto-ethnic connotations of the term tinker in English culture. Incidentally, the term Traveller, which appears to have been broadly adopted as a selfdesignation by the minority in the twentieth century, is equally obscure in terms of origin. Hasia Diner suggests that it was originally utilized as a self-descriptor by nineteenth-century Jewish peddlers in Ireland, and was possibly later adopted by those then known as tinkers because of its connotations of occupational ‘respectability’. 62 More simply, however, Traveller may just be a direct translation of siúlóir / siubhlóir, the Irishlanguage word for ‘walker’ or ‘stroller’ that was corrupted to shuiler in Hiberno-English, of course. In light of Ní Shuinéar’s surmise, 1835 appears to be the moment at which an English-speaking administration first grafted the construct of a rogue literature-derived ‘tinker’ onto a hitherto uncodified Irish peripatetic population: Sharon Gmelch’s record in Tinkers and Travellers of her discovery of references to ‘tinkers’ in The Report of the Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes (1835) is generally understood to be the earliest official allusion to the category, as subsequently recognized in Ireland. It is also the moment at which a government document first presents tinkers as a proto-ethnic subculture distinguishable from majority society by mobile, extended family groupings and specific occupational activities. One submission to the commission, which had been created in response to widespread Irish indigence, stated that ‘[o]rdinary beggars do not become a separate class of the community [emphasis added], but wandering tinkers, families who always beg, do. Three generations of them have been seen begging together.’ A Mayo informant claimed that ‘wives and families accompany the tinker while he strolls about in search of work, and always beg. They intermarry with one another, and form a distinct class [emphasis added].’ 63 Significantly, O’Donovan of the Ordnance Survey made his claim for the aristocratic origins of certain tinkers in the same year as The Report of the Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes appeared. Thus, the categories 62 63

Hasia Diner, personal correspondence, 19 March 2005. Report of the Commissioners on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, vol. 32, part 1 (London, 1835), 574; 495.

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of the ‘tinker’ as both proto-ethnic minority and living link to an archaic Irish past both emerge in 1835. Moreover, the constructs are created by government classification of marginalized groupings and a governmentsponsored project to map the history of Ireland. In summation, the stage was set from about the 1830s onwards for the uneven but gradual demarcation of the people by then referred to as the ‘tinkers’. This differentiation was effected by grafting Irish discourses of preCeltic population traces and British constructs of the ‘tynker’ and ‘Gypsy’ onto a native peripatetic class. By the turn of the twentieth century, the apparent distinction between those then referred to as ‘tinkers’ and other wandering peoples whom tinkers’ ancestors may not have been decisively differentiated from was habitually acknowledged. Displaying his finely-tuned appreciation for such subtleties, Synge is careful to distinguish between ‘tinkers and ordinary tramps’ in ‘The Oppression of the Hills’, and notes in passing in ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’ that a ‘few [vagrants] have been on the road for generations; but fairly often they seem to have merely drifted out from the ordinary people of the villages, and do not differ greatly from the class they come from.’ 64 By contrast, the inherited culture by which the tinkers were distinguishable from other peoples of the road from at least the immediate pre-Famine period onwards is suggested by Mary Byrne’s speech in The Tinker’s Wedding: ‘it’s a long time we are going our own ways—father and son, and his son after him, or mother and daughter, and her own daughter again.’ 65

THE TINKER’S RETREAT TO THE IRISH PERIPHERY: THE ORIENTALIZ ATION OF THE SCOT T(ISH) TINKLER The acute sensitivity to various gradations of wanderer suggested by Synge’s comments underlines the degree of attention given to such groupings by the time of the Revival. The following investigation outlines the post-Grellmann diminishment of the Scottish tinkler-Gypsy’s ‘Celtic’ associations and the tinker figure’s subsequent withdrawal to the 64 65

Synge, ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, CW 2: 202. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 47.

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westernmost edge of the British Isles alone. This perceived retreat is examined in order to account for the manner in which a category that had only been created in Irish officialese as late as the 1830s could have become a ubiquitous trope of indigenous exoticness by that century’s close. The tinker shrank, from a figure to be found throughout the British Isles in the early modern imagination, to one found mostly on the Irish fringes after Orientalism claimed the British Gypsy for an imagined ‘East’. Moreover, the tinker also transformed from an occupational figure associated particularly with urban centres in the rogue literature text to a racialized creature of nature predominantly linked to the picturesque rural Irish setting by the Revival. The tinker was one of the many rascally vagrant types that rogue pamphleteers claimed had persistently haunted sixteenth-century London and its environs. However, the category of ‘English tinker’ had grown so obscure by the Victorian era that it is only very occasionally mentioned in passing in relation to the Irish group. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, attempts were even being made by scholars of Romany culture to retroactively racialize English tinkers of the early modern period such as John Bunyan’s father as ‘closeted’ Gypsies. 66 As the following will intimate, the tinkler of Hibernian origin and the Gypsy of Highlander association began to disappear from the Scottish literary text just as the tinker came to prominence as a domestic exotic amongst Irish cultural nationalists. The tinker is the carrier of a Celtic or pre-Celtic authenticity that is receding in early to mid nineteenthcentury Scotland just as Irish commentators begin to promote the same figure as the embodiment of a kind of concentrated archaic Irishness. The analysis will attend to the important role canonical Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott played in both official and literary discourses concerning the Scottish tinkler-Gypsy: Scott deployed Scottish Gypsies as lawless exotics in his novels even as he routed out actual members of that community in his role as Sheriff of Selkirkshire. Ultimately, this study implies that transformations in the representation of the tinker/tinkler throughout nineteenth-century Irish and Scottish literature illuminate the manner in which the Scottish claim to authentic 66 See Mary Burke, ‘ “Of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all”: Victorian Romany Studies and the Recovery of John Bunyan’s “Gypsy” Origins’, Special John Bunyan issue of the journal 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 13 (2006), 245–63.

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Celticness inaugurated by James MacPherson’s Works of Ossian in the 1760s had been indisputably relinquished to Ireland by the late Victorian era. MacRitchie stated in an 1889 Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society article that Irish tinkers ‘belong equally to the “Irish” districts of Scotland’. 67 However, the belief in the Scottish tinkler’s or Scottish Gypsy’s Irish associations had begun to be undermined in the early nineteenth century and had become much less common by the late Victorian period. Walter Scott is a pivotal figure in any examination of the gradual displacement of the Scottish tinkler-Gypsy’s overtones of aboriginality and Irishness with that of an Oriental Gypsy identity, a paradigm shift instigated by the spread of Grellmann’s theory, of course. Walter Simson’s History of the Gipsies, a collation of Scottish traditions concerning Gypsies that was originally conceived to take advantage of the fashion for the minority engendered by early nineteenth-century Scott’s writings, will be invoked throughout the following discussion. Despite the fact that it was published in 1865, Simson’s History was collated decades earlier during the lifetime of Scott, who was the lesserknown author’s correspondent and acquaintance. The eminent novelist encouraged Simson’s research on the Scottish Gypsy and even donated material left over from his own Blackwood’s Magazine articles on the subject. Most importantly, Scott considered Simson’s collation a natural successor to the efforts of Grellmann and to John Hoyland’s Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, and Present State of the Gypsies (1816), 68 an influential and explicitly Grellman-influenced volume. Hoyland’s Historical Survey was a compilation of the results of a questionnaire sent by the Quaker clergyman and author in 1815 to the Sheriffs of Scottish counties in frequent contact with Gypsies that included a contribution from Scott himself. A reply from one John Blair, Sheriff Substitute for the County of Bute, demonstrates the potential for confusion in the overlapping meanings of ‘tinker/tinkler’ and ‘Gypsy’ in early nineteenth-century Scotland: ‘I have to inform that the people generally known by the description of Gypsies, are not in use to come hither, unless abject, itinerant tinkers and braziers, generally from 67 68

MacRitchie, ‘Irish Tinkers and their Language’, 355. Scott to Walter Simson [April-May 1818], The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, gen. ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1932–37), vol. 5, 285; 282 n.

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Ireland, may be accounted such.’ 69 Another informant, William Smith, notes that the Gypsies of Yetholm were formerly called ‘the Tinkers of Yetholm’. 70 Smith’s response strongly suggests that at about the turn of the nineteenth century, the designation ‘tinker’, with its overtones of aboriginality, was replaced by that of ‘Gypsy’. Most interestingly, Scott responded in his role of Sheriff of Selkirkshire, and his testimony suggests that ‘Gypsy’ and ‘tinker’ were to be understood as equivalent and occupational terms: ‘A set of people possessing the same erratic habits, and practising the trade of tinkers, are well known in the Borders; and have often fallen under the cognisance of the law. They are often called Gypsies.’ 71 This confusion was doubtlessly due to the gradual but uneven seepage into Scottish discourse of Grellmann’s model of Gypsy culture as a monolithic and mono-racial category that subsumed all local varieties of wanderer: Smith also comments that Gypsies are ‘universally’ superstitious and that the ‘Peculiar cast’ of their features is ‘every where distinguishable’. 72 This view was concurred with by Scott, who elsewhere suggests that the Gypsy ‘exists in nearly the same primitive state, speaking the same primitive language, in almost all the kingdoms of Europe’. 73 For Simson, this trans-European Gypsy is understood to have emerged from the pages of writers such as Pococke: Simson claims that his reading of the eighteenth-century Irish traveller’s work leads him to believe that Gypsies reveal ‘an hereditary propensity to theft’ and are, ‘uniformly the same’ in disreputable livelihood, ‘manners, habits, and cast of features’, in ‘whatever country’ they are found. 74 For the most part, however, it is Grellmann’s opus that shapes British considerations of the local Gypsy: Hoyland tenders relatively little detail or quotation from the data collected from the Scottish Sheriffs, and what is offered is often interpreted through the filter of the earlier European authority, to the extent that all local difference is universalized. Moreover, Hoyland notes that his Gypsy glossary is ‘extracted’ from Grellmann’s: the 69 John Hoyland, A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, and Present State of the Gypsies: Designed to Develope the Origin of this Singular People, and to Promote the Amelioration of their Condition (York: Alexander, 1816), 93. 70 71 72 Ibid. 98–9. Ibid. 93–4. Ibid. 104; 109. 73 Scott, note on ‘Gipsies or Bohemians’, Quentin Durward (1823; Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1845), 500. 74 Simson, History of the Gipsies, 72.

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opportunity to collect a specifically Scottish Gypsy vocabulary afforded by his questionnaire is not availed of. The indigenity that Scottish peoples of the road had been understood to share with the Highlander recedes as the former accrues Oriental trappings. Nevertheless, the implicit aboriginality and rogue literature origins possessed by the tinkler-Gypsy in an era prior to the spread of Grellmann’s theory is detectable in the work of Robbie Burns. The notable Scottish Enlightenment poet composed a version of McPherson’s Rant, a ballad purportedly written by a criminal and ‘Egyptian’ of that name who was the natural son of a Highland laird by a Gypsy woman and a friend of Rob Roy MacGregor. McPherson was hanged in 1700, and the folklore surrounding this romantic composite of Gypsy and rebel Highlander constructed him as the ‘wildbut-noble’ Highlander of Scottish tradition epitomized by MacGregor: though a freebooter, no act of cruelty towards the distressed was ever perpetrated under McPherson’s command. Burns’ cantata, ‘The Jolly Beggars’ was composed in 1785, the year that Marsden suggested a theory remarkably similar to that of Grellmann. However, Burns’ work originates in a pre-Grellmann understanding of the tinkler as an occupational rather than a racial category. The tinker describes himself as follows: My bonie lass, I work in brass A tinkler is my station: I’ve travell’d round all Christian ground In this my occupation; 75

A further indication that the tinkler of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ must be situated within an indigenous and pre-Enlightenment paradigm is that he is placed amongst a motley procession of rogue literature stock types: an embeggared former soldier, his feisty ‘doxy’ (mistress), a fool, and an itinerant fiddler. As Burns’s interest in the legendary McPherson suggests, the figures of the rebellious Scottish Gypsy and the insurrectionary Highlander had been entwined in the eighteenth-century Scottish imagination. Scott’s careful description in Waverley of the facade of a Scottish manor house ‘Sixty Years since’ indicates the threat perceived to have then emanated 75 Robert Burns, ‘The Jolly Beggar—A Cantata’, The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Burns, 1759–1796, ed. James A. MacKay (Ayrshire, Scotland: Alloway, 1993), 188, lines 203–6.

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from both the ‘roving’ Gypsy and the ‘predatory’ Highlander. 76 From the early nineteenth century onwards, however, the Orientalization of the Scottish Gypsy begins to set that figure apart from the native Highlander and implicitly, from Scottishness itself. In the following account of the interaction between a Highlander and a Scottish Gypsy, Simson is careful to distinguish between the artless wildness of the indigenous Highlander and the Oriental slyness of the implicitly foreign Gypsy: A [Scottish Gipsy] exchanged [a stolen black colt] for a white horse, belonging to a Highlander wearing a green kilt. The Highlander, however, had not long put the colt into the stable, before word was brought to him that it was gone. Suspecting the Gipsy of the theft, the sturdy Gael [. . . ] pursued him, like a staunch hound on the warm foot of reynard, till he overtook him [. . . ] [T]he Gipsy was taking some refreshment in the same room with [Simson’s informant, a respectable farmer], when the Highlander, in a storm of broken English, burst into their presence. The astute and polished Gipsy instantly sprang to his feet, and, throwing his arms around the foaming Celt, embraced and hugged him in the eastern manner, overpowering him with expressions of joy at seeing him again. This quite exasperated the mountaineer: almost suffocated with rage, he shook the Gipsy from his person, with the utmost disdain, and demanded the colt he had stolen from him. Notwithstanding the deceitful embraces and forced entreaties of the Gipsy, he was, with the assistance of a messenger, at the back of the Highlander, safely lodged in the jail of Cupar. 77

The subtext of Simson’s repeated stress on the ethnic and linguistic markers of the parties involved is that such are the key to their contrasting behaviour. The post-Culloden representation of both the Highlander and the Gypsy as colourful dwellers in archaic cultural time facilitates the comparison of the two men to begin with, but the subtext of this comparison suggests that only one is an authentic HibernoScotsman. As noted, Grellmann’s work instituted a Europe-wide craze for the subject that initiated the discourse of the Gypsy’s resemblance to various Others throughout the colonized world. The German ethnographer also 76 ‘There were loop-holes for musquetry, and iron stancheons on the lower windows, probably to repel any roving band of gipsies, or resist a predatory visit from the caterans of the neighbouring Highlands’, Scott, Waverley, ed., Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 35. 77 Simson, History of the Gipsies, 173–4.

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appears to have inspired members of the Scottish intelligentsia to take notice of indigenous nomadic groups, who were subsequently stripped of their locally generated Hiberno-Scottish identity and reconstituted as wanderers of Oriental descent. The investigation of Gypsies tutored the European to perceive the minority where none had been before distinguished: whereas ‘[p]eople not interested [in the population] travel through the East, Europe, and America, and never see a single Gypsy’, 78 those versed in the craze were suddenly discovering ‘the tribe’ in every corner of the world and under cover of a multitude of identities. In a contribution on Gypsies for the first number of Blackwood’s Magazine written with the assistance of Thomas Pringle, Scott berates Scottish scholars for exploring far-flung exotica while neglecting the outlandish Gypsies camping under their very noses. 79 Scottish philosophy made a significant impression in the eighteenth century, not only on the English-speaking world but also on the Enlightenment in central Europe, and the impact was perhaps most greatly felt in Germany. Unsurprisingly, however, the Gypsy fad appears to have come to the attention of the Scottish intelligentsia through the works of German scholars and writers. Referring to Simson’s research on what he calls the ‘Oriental, probably Hindostanee’ Scottish Gypsy language in a letter written in 1818, Scott vowed: ‘When I go to Edinburgh, I shall endeavour to find a copy of Grellmann, to compare the language of the German Gipsies with that of the Scottish tribes.’ 80 Scott pursued Grellmann’s Indian origin theory in his private research and mentioned it explicitly in his correspondence, but still referred to Gypsies as ‘Egyptians’ in his published creative writing. Allusions to such an origin made in the knowledge of Grellmann’s theory were generally to be found in literary works. The associations of Egypt as a land of archaic sorcery were deeply embedded in European culture, and the label carried a poetic charm long after the Gypsy’s Indian origins had been ‘scientifically’ proven. Linguists and ethnographers pursued the Indian origin theory, but the self-consciously ‘artistic’ intentionally 78 79

Albert Thomas Sinclair, ‘The Oriental Gypsies’, JGLS 1: 3 (1908), 198. ‘Men of letters, while eagerly investigating the customs of Othaheite or Kamschatka, [. . . ] have witnessed with apathy and contempt the striking spectacle of a Gypsey camp’, [Walter Scott and Thomas Pringle], ‘Scottish Gypsies’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1 (April 1817), 43. 80 Scott to Simson [April–May 1818], The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 5, 285.

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clung to the more romantic notion of Egyptian derivation. In Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), Vanbeest Brown (a.k.a. Harry Bertram), who has of late returned from service in the East Indies, is astounded by the appearance of the Gypsy, Meg Merrilies: On his part, he was surprised to find that he could not look upon this singular figure without some emotion. ‘Have I dreamed of such a figure?’ he said to himself, ‘or does this wild and singular-looking woman recall to my recollection some of the strange figures I have seen in our Indian pagodas?’ 81

Meg’s appearance ambiguously partakes of both of the post-Grellmann trope of the authentic Oriental Gypsy and the bogus exoticness of the preceding rogue literature ‘counterfeit Egyptian’ construct: [T]here was in her general attire, or rather in her mode of adjusting it, somewhat of a foreign costume, artfully adopted perhaps for the purpose of adding to the effect of her spells and predictions [. . . ] she had a large piece of red cotton cloth rolled about her head in the form of a turban, from beneath which her dark eyes flashed with uncommon lustre. Her long and tangled black hair fell in elf-locks from the folds of this singular head-gear. Her attitude was that of a sibyl in frenzy. 82

Despite his interest in the modish Grellmann hypothesis, Scott generally gravitated towards a combination of the medieval and early modern beliefs regarding Gypsy lineage in his non-fiction writing. The 1829 Introduction to Guy Mannering states that the ‘degraded class who are called gipsies [. . . ] are in most cases a mixed race, between the ancient Egyptians who arrived in Europe about the beginning of the fifteenth century, and vagrants of European descent.’ 83 All in all, the variety of Gypsy origin theories found throughout Scott’s writing suggest that the perception of the origin and Celtic heritage of Scottish peoples of the road was undergoing rapid transformation at that time. As noted, for the Scottish authors who wrote in the wake of the Culloden, the Highlands and the Border districts, infested as they purportedly were with colourful Jacobites and their Gypsy sympathizers, constituted a space existing in earlier cultural time. However, as befits a minority increasingly believed to be of Oriental origin, Scottish Gypsies 81 83

Scott, Guy Mannering (1815; London: Dent, 1968), 154. Scott, Introduction, Guy Mannering, 11–12.

82

Ibid. 65.

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begin to be presented as the antithesis of post-Culloden Hanoverian civilization to a degree not surpassed by even the vanquished Celtic Highlander. Due to the Gypsy’s pre-agricultural nomadic mode of negotiating the landscape and an Aryan culture attesting to the distant roots of European civilization, the figure functioned as a repository of all that the sedentary West had necessarily abandoned. According to an article by Scott and Pringle, Gypsies were ‘the Parias of Scotland, living like wild Indians among European settlers’. 84 In like manner, Adam Smith held that tribal communities existed in earlier cultural time, a belief that justified the abandonment of the ‘barbaric’ elements of Scottish society. 85 Smith envisaged history as progressing through four economic periods: a hunter-gatherer stage, a nomadic and pastoral stage, a feudalist and agricultural stage, and the final stage of manufacturing and commerce, which he believed that Scotland was then entering. According to the linear Smithian model of entwined historical and economic progress, Gypsy culture lagged behind even the backward feudalism of the Highlands and of pre-Culloden Scotland in general. Indeed, Scott’s note in Guy Mannering on Gypsy superstitions intimates as much: ‘These notions are not peculiar to the gipsies; but having been once generally entertained among the Scottish common people, are now only found among those who are the most rude in their habits, and most devoid of instruction.’ 86 Scott’s fiction cemented the image of the lawless but furtively appealing Gypsy operating in earlier cultural time, even as he played a part in monitoring actual Border Gypsies in his role as Sheriff of Selkirkshire. Scott’s highly-successful Guy Mannering utilizes a great deal of what was even then the hackneyed plot device of the high-born child whisked away by a Gypsy but eventually restored to its rightful social position. In Scott’s novel, Harry Bertram, the young son of the Laird of Ellangowan, is abducted with the seeming connivance of the Gypsy, Meg Merrilies, and only resurfaces years later. The powerful Meg also instigates the eventual restoration of the heir, due to the ‘ancient attachment’ that exists between the Gypsies and the Laird. A staunch Jacobite Gypsy of the Scott family’s acquaintance named Jean Gordon was the original 84 85

[Scott and Pringle], ‘Scottish Gypsies’, 49. Kevin Whelan, ‘The Dual Tradition’, Moving On, The Irish Research Seminar, St Patricks’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin, 13 April 2002. 86 Scott, Guy Mannering, 423 n.

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of Meg Merrilies, and Scott and Pringle’s article on the woman for the very first issue of Blackwood’s Magazine paints her as the quintessentially lawless but noble Gypsy of yore. In addition, the novelist provides an admiring description of Jean’s granddaughter in the 1829 Introduction to Guy Mannering, ‘at this time accounted the Queen of the Yetholm clans’, describing her as a kind of underworld doppelgänger of Queen Anne. 87 Scott’s paralleling of Gordon’s descendant and Queen Anne is telling: with its secret self-government and inverted value-system, the Gypsy population constitutes a submerged archaic state within the modern Hanoverian nation. Scott and Pringle open the article on Jean’s granddaughter by asserting that it is a ‘singular’ phenomenon that ‘an Asiatic people should have resided four hundred years in the heart of Europe, subject to its civilized polity and commingled with its varied population, and yet have retained almost unaltered their distinct oriental character, customs and language’. 88 Simson’s construct of the Asiatic Gypsy nation immediately recalls that of Scott: This system of Gipsy polity establishes a curious fact, namely, the double division and occupation of the kingdom of Scotland; by ourselves [emphasis added] as a civilized people, and by a barbarous community existing in our midst, each subject to its own customs, laws and government; and that, while the Gipsies were preying upon the vitals of the civilized society which harboured them, and were amenable to its laws, they were, at the same time, governed by the customs of their own fraternity. 89

Simson’s use of ‘ourselves’ implies that no Gypsy could access his study, contradicting the fear expressed throughout his History that one drop of ‘Gipsy blood’ in the veins of a ‘respectable’ family ensures that all descendants are thoroughly Other. In effect, the Gypsy is the doppelgänger harboured within Scottish gentlefolk who threatens to drag the body (politic) back to its abandoned roots. 87 ‘That is, as Dr. Johnson had a shadowy recollection of Queen Anne, as a stately lady in black, adorned with diamonds, so my memory is haunted by a solemn remembrance of a woman of more than female height, dressed in a long red cloak [. . . ] whom [. . . ] I looked on with as much awe, as the future Doctor [. . . ] could look upon the Queen’, Scott, Introduction, Guy Mannering, 15. 88 [Scott and Pringle], ‘Scottish Gypsies’, 43. 89 Simson, History of the Gipsies, 150.

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Rogue literature texts were explicit in their calls for the control of Egyptians and tynkers, and certain pamphleteers were themselves professionally involved in such policing: for instance, Thomas Harman, whose work was intended to be a useful handbook for magistrates, was a Commissioner of the Peace from a landed background. The class oppression intrinsic to the surveillance of marginalized population groups by those of higher standing manifests in Simson’s accounts, where the witnesses to Gypsy affrays always appear to be, in his term, ‘gentlemen’. Simson’s grandfather, a very substantial farmer, was renting sixteen farms covering 25,000 acres of land in the Midlothian, Tweeddale, and Selkirkshire districts by 1781, and he occasionally allowed Gypsies to camp on his property. On one occasion, the author attempted to extract vocabulary from a tinkler by reminding him that his (Simson’s) grandfather had hosted the man’s ancestors. 90 Simson was a superintendent of quarantine at Inverkeithing, while Scott was appointed Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire in 1799, and was awarded a baronetcy by the Prince Regent in 1818. Despite Scott’s romanticization of Jacobite Gypsies in his fiction, the Scotts, like the Simsons, were members of a powerful class concerned with the monitoring of itinerant populations: a Gypsy who had murdered a member of his own ‘clan’ was apprehended with the assistance of Walter Scott’s father on land occupied by Simson’s grandfather in Tweeddale. Most interestingly, Scott noted in his submission to Hoyland’s survey that he had in previous years played a part in the ‘extirpat[ion]’ of the ‘last of ’ the Gypsies. 91 Extirpation is generally glossed either as ‘rooting out’ or more ominously, ‘extermination’. The fact that Scott deployed Gypsies as fascinating exotics operating outside society in his novels even as he ousted actual members of the community in his official capacity underlines the entanglement of literary and legislative constructs of the Gypsy since the early modern period. Not coincidentally, efforts to convert this ‘heathen’ populace within arose alongside Scott’s romanticized Gypsy. By the nineteenth century, a wave of British writings obsess over the definition, record, and reform of British Gypsies, represented either as an undesirable itinerant 90 Ibid. 309–10; 311. The author detailed his ancestor’s relationship with the Gypsies in ‘Anecdotes of the Fife Gypsies’, a contribution to Blackwood’s Magazine in December 1817. 91 Hoyland, Historical Survey, 94–5.

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group or as a Romany race in possession of a rich, mysterious culture intrinsically opposed to sedentary norms. 92 Although Simson credits Scott’s Waverley novels with drawing the ‘humane sentiments’ of the religious authorities to the Gypsy, historian David Mayall asserts that the English translation of Grellmann constituted ‘the most significant advance towards arousing serious interest in the Gypsy problem’ among British evangelists. The translation of the Dissertation initiated a condemnatory debate on a ‘savage race’ in need of salvation, education, and forcible settlement, 93 and Quaker interest in the minority culminated in Hoyland’s Survey. Hoyland’s subtitle—Designed to Develope the Origin of this Singular People, and to Promote the Amelioration of their Condition—sets the tone of the contrasting component of writings about Gypsies in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Gypsies were to become productive members of the emergent industrial society, and evangelists who perceived members of the community as objects of moral improvement saw little relevance in the ‘colourful’ Gypsy past that fascinated Scott. However, the contending discourses converge on the belief that Gypsies constituted a submerged heathen population within the Christian nation. Although early attempts to drag the recalcitrantly heathen Gypsy into the contemporary period were led by clergymen, late Victorian endeavours to force the anachronistic community into the industrial age were left to philanthropic bodies. By taking his crusade to ‘clean up’ the Romanies to Parliament, moral crusader George Smith of Coalville (1831–95) ‘extended the work of evangelical Christianity into more secular forms’. 94 Smith highlighted the necessity of the control of Gypsy dwellings and the separation of Romany children from their culture with lurid accounts of deprivation. In the manner of the contention between Scott’s safe Tory fantasy of the wild Gypsy and Hoyland’s anxiety over the same minority’s spiritual welfare, scholars of Gypsy culture responded to Smith’s descriptions by claiming that the activist was not looking at ‘real’ Romanies. In the end, Smith’s image of an urban Gypsy underclass contrasted sharply with the contemporaneous 92 David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71–2. 93 Simson, Introduction, History of the Gipsies, 55; Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society, 98–9. 94 Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society, 1.

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literary fantasy of the free rural Romany promulgated by such scholars, and this dissonance determined that Smith’s attempted reformation never gained widespread political support. The racialization of Gypsies in the post-Grellmann era altered the perceived numbers of ‘full-blooded’ peoples of the road in the British Isles: Simson, whose work was collated decades before its publication in 1865, had reckoned that at least 250,000 Gypsies and tinkers lived in Britain and Ireland. The core remit of the British Gypsy Lore Society and its journal (1888–) was to identify ‘true’ Gypsies and elevate them as a race apart from other peripatetics by attending to their language, history, ethnology, and folk lore. Due to their explicit racing of the term ‘Romany’, so-called Gypsylorists believed that by the late nineteenth century, the ‘pure’ dark-skinned Gypsy had almost died out, though the number of ‘half-breed’ Irish tinkers and ‘half-blooded’ Romanies was increasing. Writers associated with the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society and British Gypsies themselves split Irish and British peoples of the road into a hierarchy that located ‘dark’ Romani-speaking Gypsies on the top and Irish tinkers close to the bottom. However, Smith of Coalville had little patience for the niceties of Gypsylorist distinctions, applying the label ‘Gypsy’ to all manner of peripatetic populations. As a consequence, a British Romany who visited the House of Commons to counter the reformer’s unsympathetic views angrily shouted that he (George Smith) had never known ‘a rale Gypsy. Them folks as ’e knows is [Irish] tinkers’. 95 The following chapter will be concerned with the role that the romanticized image of the rural British Romany played in the rise of the contending Irish Revival tinker figure. The tinker’s lack of Oriental credentials and ‘impure blood’ led to a variety of responses in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods: certain Gypsylorists with an interest in Shelta attempted to enfold the Irish tinker within the remit of British Romany culture, others dismissed the tinker altogether, while Irish cultural nationalists responded by glorifying the Irish vagrant as an aboriginal exotic and a carrier of archaic Irishness to rival the ‘pure-blooded’ British Gypsy. Of course, the revival of interest in native intellectual traditions concerning pre-Milesian population traces aided 95 J. Myers, ‘Lazzy Smith in Egglestone’s Notebook’, JGLS 16:1–2 (1937), 4, quoted in Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 115.

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in the differentiation of the Irish tinker from the British Romany: in the Irish setting, the Orientalization of the tinker was often inflected by a native identification with the ‘East’ that had long preceded Grellmann. The earlier Scottish substitution of a roguish Hiberno-Scottish tinkler with the Grellmann Oriental Gypsy paradigm facilitated this new appreciation of peoples of the road in Ireland since it situated the tinker on the western edge of the Isles as the last nomad in touch with the wellspring of Celtic or even pre-Celtic culture. Just as the Revival fetishized the Irish smallholder and islander as the only remaining vestiges of a once Europe-wide peasant culture, the tinker was transformed into the last remnant of an indigenous European nomadic subculture that had receded with the perceived ‘arrival’ of Oriental Gypsies in virtually every country of the Continent but Ireland. In the following chapter, the pivotal role Synge played in the celebration and ‘Irishing’ of the tinker and tramp will be particularly attended to, though the analysis opens with an examination of the manner in which his constitution of a native exotic was informed by the non-Irish literary traditions of the nomad detailed above.

2 Synge’s Negotiation of Constructs of the Tinker The first chapter concluded that in the Scottish imagination, a Grellmann-influenced Orientalized Gypsy usurped the HibernoScottish tinkler-rogue in about the early nineteenth century. Scott’s elision of the figure’s Irish associations may be linked forward to the perceived retreat of the tinker figure from the whole of the British Isles to its westernmost edge by the Revival. This withdrawal sets the stage for the elevation of the tinker to the status of exemplary indigenous exotic in the work of Synge, since Irish cultural nationalism was, at its simplest, an attempt to promote all traditions that could be constituted as ‘not British’. Nevertheless, a W. B. Yeats letter to Gypsylorist John Sampson referred to in the chapter indicates the degree to which the Revival fashion for tinkers emerged from the contemporaneous British mania for Gypsies before situating itself as its nationalist alternative. Moreover, that glorification drew upon the native discourse of Ireland’s archaic Eastern origins rather than the broader Orientalism from which the ‘Indian Gypsy’ trope had originated. Thus, in spite of the early modern English roots of the category of ‘tinker’, the figure had become overwhelmingly associated with Ireland and authentic Irishness by the Revival. Indeed, the chapter concludes that the heightened HibernoEnglish of Synge’s dramatic dialogue may well have been inspired by contemporaneous British scholarship on the specificity of tinkers’ linguistic usage. The tinker transformed from a proto-ethnicized, urban, and occupational type found throughout the Isles in the early modern period to an ethnicized rural grouping found only on its western edge. The rhetoric of the essentially Oriental nature of the Romany continued to be promulgated throughout the nineteenth century, but by the late

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Victorian period the investigation of the Gypsy in his picturesque rural habitat had emerged as a patriotic declaration of love for a diverse British countryside and its naturalized species. The Revival valorization of the wanderer is shown to partake of this new nostalgia for ‘pre-industrial’ vagrancy, although the craze has a specifically nationalist inflection in the Irish case. The lack of recognition of the fact that Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding is in dialogue with sixteenth-century English and European and Scottish Enlightenment constructs of peripatetic peoples has resulted in the critical underestimation of the dramatist’s negotiation and subversion of a long textual tradition. It is often suggested that the play was overlooked and its Abbey production postponed for decades because of fears that Irish audiences would find the character of the priest wholly unacceptable. Although the portrayal of a grasping and heavy-drinking cleric doubtlessly contributed to the long neglect of The Tinker’s Wedding, the following analysis argues for the effect on the play’s reputation of the critical ‘under-reading’ of Synge’s tinker characters. In addition, this underestimation of the drama’s deep cultural roots has led to a great many misreadings of The Tinker’s Wedding as an unmediated portrayal of actual contemporary Traveller culture. In fact, Synge’s tinkers are literary descendants of early modern rogues and post-Grellmann heathenish Gypsies, though the play’s closing of the imagined distance between Travelling and settled people points up the fallacy of the sedentary–nomadic binary that generally informs such representations. The following chapter will begin with an analysis of the manner in which preceding literary tropes of the nomad permeate Synge’s depictions of tinkers, and concludes by placing his work at the centre of the contemporaneous exalting of the wanderer as exoticized native exemplar. Additionally, Synge’s portrayal of the tinker is demonstrated to be more nuanced than those of his Revival peers in subtly enfolding the European literary origins of the motif, even as he subverts stereotypes of peoples of the road. The complex figure Synge depicts is indisputably Irish, but possesses an Irishness that encompasses what he recognizes to be that identity’s multifarious discursive roots. In short, Synge’s tinker is cosmopolitan on two levels: it is a construct understood to be of sundry cultural origins and a reality that exemplifies Irish cultural diversity.

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Synge’s Negotiation of Constructs of the Tinker (MIS)READING THE TINKER’S WEDDING AS NATURALISTIC REPRESENTATION If it were not too much of an Irish bull, one might say that when it comes to the question of the reflection of the lives of Irish Travellers in Irish literature, particularly drama, in the first decade of this century most critics have preferred not to ask it. Paul F. Botheroyd, ‘The Years of the Travellers’

The irreverent and lawless tinkers of Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding and the shamming beggars depicted in The Well of the Saints emerge from European traditions concerning the rogue. These sources had likewise shaped Grellmann’s construct of the Gypsy, particularly in relation to that figure’s supposed disregard for religious ritual: ‘There is not, perhaps’, the German ethnographer writes, ‘any other people, among whom marriages are contracted with so little consideration, or solemnised with so little ceremony’. 1 In suggesting that their weddings were unorthodox, Grellmann grafts Gypsy marriage onto the European rogue literature tradition of beggar ritual as a carnivalesque inversion of established procedure performed by a mock clergyman. By the early eighteenth century, London-influenced Dublin drama is utilizing tropes derived from British and European rogue texts such as the inverted ceremonies of the vagrant: Charles Coffey’s The Beggar’s Wedding (1729) centres on an orthodox marriage of a ‘high-ranking’ beggar and a Dublin Alderman’s daughter. This union is mirrored by the inverted rites between the woman’s maid and a beggar, where are performed by a mock priest named Cant. During the ceremony the groom leaps over a crutch to seal his vows, in the manner of the tinker nuptials later depicted in W. B. Yeats’s Where There is Nothing (1902). The vagabond underworld served as a mirror image of the higher social order: eyewitness accounts of the crowning of Gypsy or tinker ‘kings’ patently derive from the rogue literature fantasy of the inverted rituals of the so-called ‘King of the Beggars’. Moreover, Hackett’s aforementioned concept of the Irish tramp partakes of both the established construct of an Orientalized native Other and the rogue literature trope of the proto-unionized 1 Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann, Dissertation on the Gipsies (1783), trans. Matthew Raper (London: Printed for the translator by G. Biggs, 1787), 45.

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and irreligious beggar: the bacach ‘secret society’ has its own secret ‘rules of conduct’, and its ‘members disregard marriage’, consider offspring ‘profitable appendages’, and ‘can scarcely be called Christians’. 2 The traces of preceding traditions concerning the mock weddings of the underworld colour nineteenth-century accounts of Irish tinker nuptials: Gypsylorist John Sampson informed readers that tinkers ‘intermarry among themselves, often with but slight regard for the rites of the Church’. 3 As noted, the late nineteenth-century Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society usually suggested that Irish tinkers were of treacherously ‘half-breed’ origin, and often constructed them as inferior to ‘pure’ Romanies of Indian origin. Nevertheless, as Paul Delaney notes, the journal’s contributors still pseudo-anthropologically Orientalized tinkers with accounts of sexually outlandish ‘Gypsy’ behaviour, such as wife-swapping and irregular weddings. 4 The sedentary fantasy of the enormous sexual freedom enjoyed by the male tinker or Gypsy was usually reinforced by writers, and a belief in the sexual incontinence of Travellers persisted amongst even the well-educated late twentiethcentury Irish. 5 Such descriptions immediately recall similar rogue literature accounts and presage the lore concerning tinkers’ disregard for the wedding ritual collected by Gregory: ‘[Tinkers] have not much religion; but last year Father Prendergast offered to marry a man and woman of them for nothing. But after he had them married, they made him give them a shilling for a lodging.’ The informant continues that ‘most of them have no trade [. . . ] [and] are no better than pickpockets [. . . ]. And they never go to Mass; and, as to marriage, some used to say they lepped the budget [the tinker’s toolbox], but it’s more likely they have no marriage at all.’ 6 2 William Hackett, ‘The Irish Bacach, or Professional Beggar, Viewed Archaeologically’, Ulster Journal of Archeology 9 (1861–2), 269; 262. 3 John Sampson, ‘Tinkers and their Talk’, JGLS 2:4 (1891), 204. 4 See Paul Delaney, ‘Representations of the Travellers in the 1880s and 1900s’, Irish Studies Review 9:1 (2001), 53–68. 5 Memoirist Nan Joyce notes of the Irish university students she came into contact with in the 1970s through her Traveller activism: ‘The questions they asked! “Do [Travellers] marry?” ’ Nan Joyce, My Life on the Road, ed. Anna Farmar (Dublin: Farmar, 2000), 108. Similarly, replies to the 1952 Irish Folklore Commission ‘Tinkers’ questionnaire suggested a wide variety of non-Christian tinker wedding ceremonies. ‘Tinkers.’ MS 1255 University College, Dublin. 6 Lady Augusta Gregory, ‘The Wandering Tribe’, Poets and Dreamers (1903; New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 94.

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It has been suggested by critics that Synge ‘invented’ the practice of tinker free love, but his drama plays upon centuries-old and Europewide beliefs about peripatetic peoples. The striking similarity of the anecdote collected by Gregory involving a Father Prendergast to the one upon which Synge based The Tinker’s Wedding suggests that both tales originally derive from a common folk belief concerning the tinker’s disrespectful attitude to the sacrament of marriage and the clergyman who performs it. Another informant, quoted by Synge, claimed to have witnessed fifty tinkers on the road to Rathdangan ‘match-making and marrying themselves for the year that was to come’: One man would take such a woman [. . . ] [a]nother, maybe, would swap the woman he had with one from another man, with as much talk as if you’d be selling a cow. [. . . ] Sometimes when a party would be gone a bit down over the hill, a girl would begin crying out and wanting to go back to her ma. 7

Synge transposes a portion of this account virtually unchanged into Michael’s description in The Tinker’s Wedding of how he began his relationship with Sarah: michael: I’m thinking on the day I got you above at Rathvanna, and the way you began crying out and we coming down off the hill, crying out and saying ‘I’ll go back to my ma’ [. . . ]. 8 The earliest draft of The Tinker’s Wedding more explicitly emphasizes the tinker’s seeming roguish contempt for the institution of marriage, as in the following passage in which matriarch Mary addresses the priest: mary byrne: Isn’t generations and generations we are walking round under the Heavens and what is it we ever wanted with [your like?] Let you not be talking. We have the hot suns and the cold night [. . . ]. Is it rings we want when the frost does catch on our fingers. [. . . ] I’ve had one husband and another husband and a power of children [. . . ] it’s ten generations I was saying we’ve been walking round on the roads and never a marriage in the family. 9 7 8 9

Synge, ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, CW 2: 204. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 9. Taken from the earliest draft of The Tinker’s Wedding contained in a sixteen-page notebook in use the summer of 1902. Synge, Appendix A, CW 4: 276–7.

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Moreover, Synge’s irreverent tinkers are literally early modern scoundrels: the shepherd informant whose tale formed the basis for The Tinker’s Wedding concludes his story with the angered priest calling the tinker couple ‘ “a pair of rogues” ’. 10 Synge’s tinker matriarch, Mary Byrne, describes prayer as ‘queer noise’, and in what amounts to incantation, is called a ‘heathen’ five times in Act 1 alone, while the priest assumes that Sarah was ‘never christened’. Foul-mouthed, brazen, drunken Mary is a successor to the screeching ‘molls’ of rogue literature, and her baiting of the priest may be situated within the tradition of the rogue’s disrespect for and attempted usurpation of the clergyman’s role. Moreover, the inverted sexual morality of the underworld is implied when she derides her son’s common-law wife for wishing to regularize the union. Despite the fact that Synge’s tinkers are literary descendants of preceding peripatetic figures, however, the following analysis will posit that The Tinker’s Wedding ultimately queries the binary of sedentary and nomad that structured the tropes of the early modern rogue and the Grellmann Gypsy. The opening chapter concluded that the early modern English rogue pamphlets that codified the ‘tynker’ and the Gypsy derived from Continental European predecessors. As early as his 1913 biography of Synge, Bourgeois insightfully comments that The Tinker’s Wedding ‘constitutes a notable addition to the ever-amusing literature of rascality and vagabondage’ and that it signifies the dramatist’s acquaintance with the ‘mediaeval violence of a Villon, or the picturesque boisterousness of the French or Spanish farces.’ 11 Bourgeois makes further note of Synge’s familiarity with ‘the minor Elizabethans [. . . ] still but little known at the time’, and seventeenth-century French writers. ‘Literary cosmopolitanism’, the biographer concludes, ‘enabled Synge to express Irish life [. . . ] completely’. 12 Bourgeois’s very readable biography was based on a thesis submitted to Paris University in 1912 when he was already 58 years old, and this mature and Continental European vantage point enables him to appreciate the deep cultural roots of The Tinker’s Wedding in a manner that has rarely, if ever, been matched by subsequent and predominantly Anglophone critics. Although Synge himself 10 11

Synge, ‘At a Wicklow Fair’, CW 2: 229. Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (London: Constable, 1913), 180–1. 12 Ibid. 53; 54; 63.

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continually invokes a wide variety of early Continental European writers when discussing the relationship of his work to Irish rural life, analyses of his output have generally been restricted to his immediate early twentieth-century and Irish contexts. Moreover, in addition to his understanding that The Tinker’s Wedding can only be fully appreciated through reference to centuries of Continental European literature, Bourgeois also posits that Synge’s play needs to be considered within the context of preceding British literary traditions centred on the peripatetic: he notes that the very title The Tinker’s Wedding derives from that of ‘The Tinkler’s Waddin”, a ballad composed by the eighteenth-century weaver poet William Watt. This was, the biographer stresses, ‘a vernacular Scotch song which [Synge] probably knew’. 13 Bourgeois’s suggestion implies that Synge possessed a certain degree of awareness of the Scottish folk traditions concerning tinklers that inspired Burns and informed Scott’s take on the Gypsy. Synge himself alludes to the ‘untutored’ outlaw balladry of the eighteenth-century British Isles by having Mary Byrne in The Tinker’s Wedding sing a few lines of ‘The Night That Larry Was Stretched’, and the playwright also explicitly refers to the Scottish literary tradition that celebrated brigand Highlanders and Border Gypsies: the merrymaking of Kerry islanders, he writes in ‘In West Kerry’, ‘has a quality and attractiveness that is absent altogether from the life of towns, and makes one think of the life that is shown in the ballads of Scotland.’ 14 However, despite the rich literary heritage from which The Tinker’s Wedding was drawn, the response to Synge’s most ‘difficult’ play has either been crude or non-existent. Daniel Corkery’s influential Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) suggested that ‘the play is scarcely worth considering either as a piece of stagecraft or as a piece of literature’, while David H. Greene’s mid-century take on Synge’s ‘ugly duckling’ is equally damning: ‘A fair estimate of The Tinker’s Wedding is that it contains a crude farcical element which is typical of Synge, little or no deftness of characterization, perhaps one good scene at the end where the tinkers rush off in confusion.’ 15 The important volume of essays on the dramatist, J. M. Synge: Centenary Papers 1971, contains 13 15

14 Ibid. 176 n. Synge, ‘In West Kerry’, CW 2: 256. Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin and Cork: Educational Company of Ireland and Cork University Press; London: Longmans and Green, 1931), 149; David H. Greene, ‘The Tinker’s Wedding, a Revaluation’, PMLA 62:3 (1947), 827.

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only one reference to The Tinker’s Wedding in the index, and in the typical essay collection concerning Synge’s drama, generally one out of perhaps fifteen or twenty papers considers his ‘tinker play’. As long ago as 1912 and as recently as the year 2000, The Tinker’s Wedding has been castigated as, respectively, ‘the smallest of Synge’s plays’ and a ‘marginalised experiment’. 16 Nonetheless, the fact that Synge was simultaneously working on Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen when he began writing The Tinker’s Wedding in 1902 suggests that the play was not the work of an apprentice playwright, as might be assumed by the tone of much of the criticism. Synge himself was leery of the reception that the perceived irreverence of The Tinker’s Wedding might prompt in conservative quarters in Ireland: he thought the play ‘too immoral’ for Irish audiences and readerships, worrying that the character of the priest ‘is likely to displease [. . . ] a good many of our Dublin friends and would perhaps hinder the sale of the book in Ireland—.’ 17 In the end, The Tinker’s Wedding had its first production in London on 11 November 1909 at the Afternoon Theatre Company at His Majesty’s Theatre, indicating the British recognition of a figure that derives from an English literary tradition to a very great degree. Referring to what he surmised would be the critical response to The Tinker’s Wedding, Bourgeois predicted that ‘[n]o one but a stolid, pedantic critic will ever dream of taking it as a social document’. 18 The biographer took his cue from an oft-quoted statement Synge provides in the preface to the play: The drama is made serious [. . . ] not by the degree to which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment [. . . ] on which our imaginations lives. [. . . ] The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything. 19

These words are usually interpreted as evidence of Synge’s defensiveness regarding charges that his depiction of the priest in The Tinker’s Wedding showed scant respect for traditional Irish deference towards members of the clergy. However, Synge’s words might just as easily be construed as 16 P. P. Howe, J. M. Synge: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1912), 84; W. J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 425. 17 Synge in a draft reply to publisher Elkin Mathews [c . 29 Jan. 1905], CL 1: 105. 18 Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 179. 19 Synge, Preface, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 3.

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a warning against those who would interpret the play as an instructive document that throws illumination upon actual tinkers’ lives or morals. In such a reading, the imaginative ‘nourishment’ that the dramatist refers to is the rich literary traditions from which the construct of the tinker emerges, which have little connection to any reality of the Irish peripatetic lifestyle. The dearth of research concerning the deep and long textual history of the tinker figure from which Synge’s portrayal emerges has undoubtedly contributed to the play’s critical dismissal as a drama abounding in contradictions and confusion. In light of the critical vacuum surrounding The Tinker’s Wedding, however, such puzzlement is not necessarily a reliable indication of the innate insignificance of the play, which has yet to be properly assessed as a work in dialogue with centuries of preceding texts. The general absence of critical analyses concerning the literary traditions that inform the contemporary tinker construct has resulted in a body of criticism that often throws more light upon the scholar’s unexamined beliefs regarding contemporary Travellers than upon Synge’s nuanced negotiation of long-established stereotypes. Even more problematically, critical commentary sometimes proffers ostensibly objective beliefs regarding contemporary Traveller culture that are obviously derived from the pre-twentieth-century literary construct of the tinker or the Gypsy. In short, there has been a marked tendency to read the drama as an unmediated portrayal of actual tinker paganism and indifference to the social pressure to formalize sexual relationships, often with explicit or implicit reference to contemporary Traveller culture. However, Irish Synge critics Nicholas Grene, Vivian Mercier, and Mary C. King are uneasy with the unproblematic identification of the tinker lifestyle as intrinsically chaotic, free, and unconventional, 20 and it is important to acknowledge at this juncture that established Irish scholars have more often been hesitant in reading Synge’s drama as a naturalistic representation of Travellers than certain of their North American counterparts. Incidentally, the play has also suffered from being occasionally categorized as one of Synge’s ‘peasant 20 Mary C. King, The Drama of J. M. Synge (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 88; Vivian Mercier, ‘The Tinker’s Wedding.’ Sunshine and the Moon’s Delight: A Centenary Tribute to John Millington Synge 1871–1909, ed. S. B. Bushrui (Gerrards Cross and Beirut: Colin Smythe and the American University of Beirut, 1972), 82; Nicholas Grene, Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays (London: Macmillan, 1975), 107.

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plays’, a classification that subsumes tinkers into an undifferentiated rural Irish populace. In fact, as a drama centred on the interaction of three landless tinkers and a clergyman, The Tinker’s Wedding may be one of the few plays of the Revival period that does not contain a peasant or ‘strong farmer’ character! Well-meaning but ultimately destructive liberal humanist endorsements of stereotypes of the tinker as the antithesis of ‘respectable’ sedentary values have been somewhat common in critical discussions of Synge’s play: like the Gypsies delineated by Grellmann, Hoyland, and Scott, tinkers are assumed to be promiscuous, anarchic, animalistic, and intrinsically opposed to organized religion. The artlessness of such interpretations do not do justice to what I will argue is Synge’s awareness of the literary precedents of his play or his subtle querying of the stereotypes upon which they were constructed. Bourgeois suggests that the ‘representation of a young tinkerwoman as an earnest Catholic’ in The Tinker’s Wedding is ‘ludicrous’, 21 while Jeanne Flood posits that Synge’s ‘lusty, hard-drinking, and violent’ tinkers live at ease in nature, neither having nor needing a shelter. The drunken, genial Mary Byrne, in the fullness of her experience, embodies the rich humanity of such a life. [. . . ] Placed against Mary is the Priest, the guardian and representative of the religious and social order, thus of the forces of culture which separate man from nature. 22

Rosemarie A. Battaglia stresses the ‘dialectical nature of the play’, contrasting ‘the pagan, unorthodox, folk-ritual world the tinkers represent and the orthodox, ritualized world of the Catholic priest’. It is clear, Battaglia suggests, ‘whose side’ Synge is on: ‘The marginal, “fringe” nature of the tinkers represents a freedom from the constraints and way of thinking the priest must accept as a member of a hierarchized class.’ 23 In like manner, Weldon Thornton conjectures that the supposed tinker aversion to marriage is innate: Whether [marriage] is what Sarah really wants is doubtful, for she is a tinker by nature and by choice, and she is probably largely satisfied with that life. 21

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 180. Jeanne A. Flood, ‘Thematic Variation in Synge’s Early Peasant Plays’, Éire-Ireland 7:3 (1972), 75. 23 Rosemarie A. Battaglia, ‘The Tinker’s Wedding’, in Edward A. Kopper, Jr. (ed.), A J. M. Synge Literary Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988), 64; 65–6. 22

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[. . . ] She realizes that she is a tinker, and that her only defences against life are those of the tinkers—a direct and willing acceptance of each day as it comes, in full awareness of its transiency and of the approach of old age and death. [. . . ] [Through Sarah’s] superficial aspiration to marriage, Synge explores the folly and frustration of trying to fit one’s experience into a social or intellectual frame unnatural to it. The marriage ritual is as procrustean to her experience as the marriage ring is to her finger. 24

David Kiely suggests in his popular 1994 biography of Synge that ‘there appears to be (as far as the tinkers are concerned) no good reason why Sarah should consider it necessary to approach the Priest and ask him to marry her and Michael Byrne’, since ‘it will not change her life in any practical sense’. 25 According to readings of the play that understand it as a sociological tract accurately reflecting fixed customs, tinkers could not possibly require any of the social niceties necessary to the dominant culture. Tinker customs, it seems, are inherently opposed to even temporary engagement with the institutions of sedentary life and the norms of every other human society. Michael in The Tinker’s Wedding speaks of the clergyman as ‘playing cards, or drinking a sup, or singing songs, until the dawn of day’, 26 and the priest hankers after what he obviously perceives to be the freedom of the tinker lifestyle: priest: It’s well for the like of you that do be drinking when there’s drouth on you, and lying down to sleep when your legs are stiff. [He sighs gloomily.] What would you do if it was the like of myself you were, saying Mass with your mouth dry, and running east and west for a sick call maybe, and hearing the rural people again and they saying their sins? 27 In present day Cant, Travellers refer to members of majority society as ‘country people’, and this differentiation from sedentary culture is likewise intimated when Mary refers to the local populace as ‘rural people’ at this juncture in the action. Significantly, however, the priest 24 Weldon Thornton, J. M. Synge and the Western Mind (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979), 120; 122; 156. 25 David, M. Kiely, John Millington Synge: A Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994), 108–9. 26 27 Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 13. Ibid.19.

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uses the same designation in reference to his parishioners in the quotation provided above, suggesting that he temporarily identifies with the minority culture while he and Mary drink together amicably. Nonetheless, Flood ignores the priest’s unorthodox behaviour and unstable loyalties in presenting him as the antithesis of the tinkers who attack him: ‘The Tinkers, perfectly integrated into the natural world, are thus appropriately presented in anarchic and violent act’, she notes. Man is ‘an animal’, Flood continues, and the ‘wild Tinkers’, are ‘more humane’ than the ‘domesticated variety.’ 28 However, by depicting Sarah’s desire for a more conventionally ‘respectable’ lifestyle and the hard-drinking priest’s envy of the tinkers’ peripateticism and vocabulary, Synge dissolves the boundaries between ‘civilized’ priest and ‘natural’ tinkers, a fact that is generally downplayed by critics. The supposedly unbreachable chasm between clergyman and Traveller is reinforced by Synge’s critics but queried by the playwright himself: the priest who insists on a relatively substantial fee for performing what is, after all, his duty as the community’s spiritual leader, is the very person who accuses the tinkers of ‘robbing’. In a further challenge to the settled/nomad binary, the priest’s demand of the tinkers to ‘[g]ive me the bit of gold into my hand’ recalls the clichéd opening line of the Gypsy fortune-telling ritual beloved of popular literature. Further attention is drawn to the ‘unchristian’ behaviour of those associated with the enforcement of conventional mores when it is revealed that the local parson’s daughter is Mary’s best customer when the old tinker woman reads palms. In a sense, both Mary Byrne and the priest play the swindling palm-reader in The Tinker’s Wedding: Synge’s play seems to indict as hypocritical a church that would condemn the old tinker who demands payment for her shamming words but requires its priests to charge high fees for speaking the alchemical marriage rite. If such a reading is allowed for, then perhaps The Tinker’s Wedding really did challenge the customary Irish deference towards members of the clergy that it was accused of. However, the play seems to have done so in a much subtler and more damning manner than is often recognized, given that most discussions of its irreverence concentrate on the slapstick blows exchanged between the priest and his peripatetic parishioners in the closing scene. 28

Flood, ‘Thematic Variation’, 76.

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Much critical interpretation of The Tinker’s Wedding builds upon the assumption that a moral as well as a cultural abyss lies between heathen tinker and virtuous member of sedentary society. However, in the following ambiguous exchange, the clergyman appears to suggest that Sarah should obtain the large fee that he initially wishes to charge for performing the wedding by any means at her disposal: sarah: Where would the like of us get a pound, your reverence? priest: Wouldn’t you get it easy with your selling asses, and making cans, and your stealing east and west [. . . ]? 29 The priest’s conflation of honest and dishonest enterprises as though each were of equal merit intimates that he looks at the world through the lens of the rogue literature ‘tynker’ who makes money by mending cans that he himself has secretly punctured. As if to reinforce the suggestion that the priest is just as morally suspect as the tinkers, in earlier drafts the young couple did indeed cheat the priest of his promised hand-tinkered can, but in the final version only Mary Byrne is deceitful in this manner. Moreover, every detail of the exchanges between the older pair suggests that in vying with Mary, the priest has finally met his match in roguishness and drinking capacity. Mary’s insight into the hypocritical nature of a Christian worldview in which repentant sinners inevitably prostrate themselves before goodly clergymen is suggested by the lines from ‘The Night That Larry Was Stretched’ that she is singing when she first arrives on stage: And when we asked him what way he’d die, And he hanging unrepented, ‘Begob,’ says Larry, ‘that’s all in my eye, By the clergy first invented.’

Penitence, it seems, elevates the priest and not the sinner. In light of this song, Mary’s urging of alcohol on the priest with the words ‘Aren’t we all sinners, God help us!’ query the received moral hierarchy of sinful tinker and holy priest. The elderly tinker woman’s ability to see beneath the surface of the priest’s veneer of respectability also explicates 29

Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 15.

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his otherwise somewhat puzzling wrath at the close when he discovers that the proffered sack contains empty bottles rather than the promised can. It should be recalled that during their first exchange, when the clergyman appears reluctant to admit to his fondness for alcohol, Mary urges him ‘not to be letting on you wouldn’t do the like of it, and you with a stack of pint bottles above, reaching the sky’. 30 The clatter of the three empty bottles that fall onto the stage when the sack is eventually opened is a loud reminder to priest and audience alike of Mary’s earlier reference to his hypocrisy and a challenge to the high moral tone he has adopted in the interim. Synge upends the binary of pious settled person and impious tinker and draws attention to the artificial basis of the nomadic/sedentary binary by demonstrating the manner in which value-laden words may be made to contradict their conventional meaning. The adjective ‘holy’ is deconstructed/deconsecrated very early in the play when the priest responds to Sarah’s introduction of herself and Michael with the sarcastic comment, ‘A holy pair, surely!’ The word whose meaning has thus been upended to intimate profanity rather than sanctity is afterwards used by all three tinkers to address the ‘holy father’ himself on nineteen separate occasions throughout the relatively short play. What may seem lazy editing on Synge’s behalf is in fact the dramatist’s continual reminder that the word’s earlier transformation into its antonym reinforces the ‘tinkerish’ profanity of the ‘holy’ man. In order to draw attention to the manner in which language determines perception, Synge both unmoors words from their received meanings and subliminally links tinker and settled member of society through linguistic repetition. Critics would likely be quick to note that in the heated verbal exchange of the closing scene, the priest accuses the tinkers of being ‘robb[ers]’, but might be slower to record that Mary, in turn, charges him with attempting ‘to rob poor sinners of their scraps of gold’. 31 Additionally, Sarah reveals that she wishes to marry so that no one will be able to call her a ‘dirty name’. 32 Such insults implicitly refer to Sarah’s lowly status as the mother of illegitimate children and the common-law wife of Michael. However, in an earlier draft of the play, Sarah explicitly attaches a profanity indicating such unlawfulness to sedentary women when she continues at this juncture: ‘I’ve as good a right to a decent 30

Ibid.19.

31

Ibid. 45; 47.

32

Ibid. 35.

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marriage as any speckled female bastard does be sleeping in the black hovels above.’ 33 The fallacy of the supposed distance between sedentary Christian and profane nomad is initially underlined in the opening stage directions of The Tinker’s Wedding, which place the tinkers’ temporary camping ground right beside the priest’s rooted dominion: ‘In the background, on the left, a sort of tent and ragged clothes drying on the hedge. On the right a chapel-gate.’ The jarring propinquity of structures usually understood to symbolize the sacred and the profane continually undercuts the audience’s impulse to perceive them as antithetical and separate. After Sarah has discovered Mary’s substitution of the can with empty bottles, the older woman begs the priest to protect her from the younger woman’s anger by threatening him with the shame of having the tinkers’ proximity to the church revealed to his superior: mary: What at all would the Lord Bishop say if he found me here lying with my head broken across, and the two of yous maybe digging a bloody grave for me at the door of the church? This reference to the tinkers’ grating nearness to the house of God threads the priest’s subsequent angry address to Sarah: priest: [. . . ] let you walk off I’m saying, and not be coming where you’ve no business, and screeching tumult and murder at the door of the church. [. . . ] I wouldn’t have you coming in on me and soiling my church [. . . ]. The young tinker woman’s subversive retort suggests that on the contrary, the priest himself has already ‘soiled’ the building and that only tinker skills can restore its sanctity: sarah: [. . . ] you’ll be getting all the tinkers from Wicklow and Wexford, and the County Meath, to put block tin in the place of glass to shield your windows where you do be looking out and blinking at the girls. Sarah then menaces the priest by invoking the clichéd misdemeanour that Gypsies are accused of throughout European literature: 33

Quotation from TS. ‘D’, Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 34–5.

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sarah: It’s hard set you’ll be that time, I’m telling you, to fill the depth of your belly the long days of Lent; for we wouldn’t leave a laying pullet in your yard at all. 34 It seems, however, that any transgression committed by the tinkers will simply match the clergyman’s own sins of gluttony and breaking fast. The play’s ‘tinkerish’ clergyman deconstructs the binary of rooted sedentary church and transient tinker campsite by drawing attention to the church’s own peripatetic roots. Synge’s priest, memorably described as being ‘near burst with the fat’, evokes both the roguish and well-fed itinerant friars of European comic tradition, and the rogue pamphlet category of patriarco or patrico, a strolling or ‘counterfeit’ priest who performs clerical duties while immersed in the rollicking lifestyle of his vagabond ‘parishioners’. Shades of the worldly clergymen of Irish folk tradition are also present, of course: ultimately, Synge’s roguish priest indicates the manner in which the play simultaneously negotiates both European literary tradition and the stereotypes of everyday Irish life. Moreover, it is most interesting, in light of sedentary Irish culture’s many superstitions concerning the tinker’s curse, that it is the man of God who casts a malediction at the close of the action. According to King, Mary’s blessing on her profane bonding with the priest during their drinking spree in Act I is ‘the tinker’s wedding’ in which the elderly woman is both rogue celebrant and bride. 35 (The punctuation of Synge’s title, which points to a wedding in which only one of the participants is a tinker, lends credence to King’s surmise.) Similarly, once the tinkers have released the priest from the sack in which he was tied up, he swears, as promised, not to seek vengeance against them. As he does so, Sarah performs an inverted marriage ritual by placing the ring upon his finger to remind him of his oath. On the whole, the bigamous symbolic nuptials that occur between Sarah, Mary, and the priest suggests the unacknowledged ties and shared moral weaknesses that bind Traveller and settled. The introduction to this study noted the significance of Murphy’s late twentieth-century deployment of the Big House as the controlling motif of the Irish binary of espace rayonnant and espace itinérant. Ultimately, Synge’s allusions to other literary depictions of the peripatetic gesture forwards as well as backwards: if a church is a kind of 34

Ibid. 43–5.

35

King, The Drama of J. M. Synge, 88; 94.

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Big House of the spiritual realm in the Irish imagination, then Synge’s situating of the unkempt campsite on the very boundary of the sacred grounds foreshadows the threat of Murphy’s occupying Traveller in The House. Highly aware of sedentary expectations of what a tinker should look like, Sarah purchases a red neckerchief for Michael to wear to church on what should be his wedding day. In this scene, Synge simultaneously underlines the sedentary construct that the tinker must continually negotiate or exploit and celebrates the deep cultural heritage from which literary and visual clichés of the nomad derive: the red-neckerchiefed dandy is, after all, probably the most recognizable signifier of the ‘exotic’ Gypsy. The tinker and tramp characters in Synge’s plays are not passive in the face of sedentary rejection of their lifestyle, and their ‘talking back’ to or playing with negative or exoticizing stereotypes makes Synge’s portrayal of wanderers more sophisticated than that of most who attempt the depiction. For instance, Sarah dismisses housedwelling culture when she refers to the village wives as ‘speckled females does be sleeping in the black hovels above’, and the priest’s home is scorned as a ‘shanty’ by Michael. 36 The word ‘rich’ is used in reference to the comfortable farmers ‘do be driving early to the fair’ in The Tinker’s Wedding, but it is also utilized of Jaunting Jim, Michael’s tinker rival for Sarah’s affections. The belief that Traveller culture may be unproblematically conflated with the destitute tramp lifestyle as an undifferentiated subculture of poverty lies beneath the commonplace critical assumption that Sarah, Michael, and Mary are the self-evident antithesis of the well-fed priest. However, the conjecture that tinker culture is homogeneously poor and sedentary society uniformly comfortable is undercut at the outset of Act I of the play, when Sarah threatens to run away with Jaunting Jim, described as one of ‘the rich tinkers do be travelling from Tibradden to the Tara Hill’. Notwithstanding Synge’s worrying of the boundaries that maintain tinker culture as the antipodes of majority society, the critical attention given to The Tinker’s Wedding rarely questions this binary of destitute tinker and relatively well-off settled person. Despite the occupational overtones of the very word tinker, or the fact that stage directions at the opening of the play indicate that Michael is soldering 36

Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 35; 45.

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tin, the tinker in such readings is one who exists beyond the capitalist nexus within which mainstream society operates. Even more subtly, Synge upends the standard lack of individuation of the economically and socially marginalized peripatetic figure in granting each of his tinker characters a name. By contrast, the priest of The Tinker’s Wedding, who generally garners as much critical attention as all three tinker characters together, is never given the same honour. This questioning of the assumptions of a majority culture that unconsciously defines itself against the espace itinérant is likewise generated when individual works of Synge’s oeuvre are read as a whole. In The Well of the Saints, flirtatious Molly Byrne scathingly dismisses beggar Martin Doul’s advances in a manner that indicates her belief in her innate sedentary superiority: molly: Go off now after your wife, and if she beats you again, let you go after the tinker girls is above running the hills, or down among the sluts of the town, and you’ll learn one day, maybe, the way a man should speak with a well-reared civil girl the like of me. 37 Significantly, however, Synge endows Molly with a surname also shared by the family portrayed in The Tinker’s Wedding, implying that the social distance between ‘heathen’ tinker and ‘respectable’ countrywoman continually reiterated by majority society is not as great as Molly assumes. Moreover, in light of the fact that Ireland has the longest tradition of patrilineal nomenclature in the world, Synge’s use of the same surname for both tinker and sedentary characters may also imply that the presumed genetic distance between the majority Irish and tinker ‘races’ is a fallacy. Furthermore, the comfortable sedentary heritage of The Playboy of the Western World ’s Christy Mahon, the self-proclaimed ‘son of a strong farmer’, should make him the antithesis of the transient tinker. Christy is, however, subliminally linked to nomads by Synge’s repetition of the striking word ‘gallous’ in reference to his bold hero. Intriguingly, the term is also utilized by an informant quoted in ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, who speaks of tinkers as ‘ “gallous lads for walking through the world” ’. 38 In addition, Christy’s answer when queried by Pegeen on his initial arrival at the public house as to whether he is ‘one of the 37 38

Synge, The Well of the Saints, CW 3: 123. Synge, ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, CW 2: 204.

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tinkers’—‘I am not; but I’m destroyed walking’—suggests that his new lifestyle is ‘tinkerish’, even while his identity remains resolutely sedentary. Finally, Mary Byrne’s dismissive attitude towards Sarah’s desire for marriage tends to be explicated by critics as the ‘natural’ response of a woman whose values run counter to sedentary norms. But placed within the context of the unhappy alliance of The Shadow of the Glen and the almost certain misery that awaits Playboy’s Pegeen should she eventually marry Shawn Keough, Mary’s jaded view of wedlock corresponds with that possessed by the settled women of Synge’s oeuvre. Despite the many crude critical interpretations of The Tinker’s Wedding that read it as predicated upon unquestioned ‘common knowledge’ of tinkers, Synge’s utilization of well-established beliefs are more than unthinking repetition of stereotype. In reaction to Sarah’s anger at Mary’s suggestion that the tin can be sold, the old woman threatens to exploit the folk belief in the dark powers of the female tinker: mary byrne: If I go, I’ll be telling old and young you’re a weathered heathen savage, Sarah Casey, the one [. . . ] quenched the flaming candles on the throne of God the time your shadow fell within the pillars of the chapel door. 39 Towards the conclusion of The Tinker’s Wedding, when relations between priest and tinkers have soured beyond any possibility of recovery, the clergyman threatens to blacken the family’s name with the law: priest: Gather up your gold now, and begone from my sight, for if ever I set an eye on you again you’ll hear me telling the peelers who it was stole the black ass belonging to Philly O’Cullen, and whose hay it is the grey ass does be eating. 40 In either case, it is deliberately left unclear as to whether the accused has actually perpetrated the crime or occult act referred to. It is patently obvious, however, that the accuser is certain that the charges will generally be believed. Synge depicts both sedentary bias and the momentary power reversal that the Other’s exploitation of that bias entails. Overall, The Tinker’s Wedding seems to question deeply entrenched stereotypes of tinkers in a manner that is perhaps too subtle for those who come 39

Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 33.

40

Ibid. 43, 45.

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to the play already armed with deeply held beliefs concerning nonsedentary society. The vulnerable tinker or Gypsy woman is usually the object of prurient attention when described by the sedentary male writer or critic: Kiely’s biography of Synge claims that in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the younger sons of small farmers had few alternatives ‘to a life of sexual abstinence’ but to join, ‘in some instances, a band of tinkers, whose morals do not stand in the way of a man’s taking a common law woman’. 41 There is little in the historical record to bolster such a claim, but much in the way of the kind of sensationalist and eroticized discussions of Gypsy and tinker promiscuity promulgated by early modern and Victorian writers. Kiely concludes that ‘such men were dirt-poor, but [. . . ] free’, 42 recalling the potent male sexual fantasy of a short story by Irish writer Maurice Walsh in which a wealthy businessman deserts monogamy for an ‘authentic’ life on the road with a succession of unindividuated tinker ‘wives’. 43 Ironically, twentiethcentury anthropological and sociological research indicates that the sexual activities of unmarried women in Traveller culture (the scaffold upon which Kiely’s interpretation of Synge’s play is built) are rigorously policed: sexual continence is one of the primary mores through which the minority culture defines itself against the dominant society. In short, ‘[t]he venerable Irish and British popular tradition of the sexual promiscuity of Gypsies and Tinkers flies in the face of all reliable accounts of their actual practices.’ 44 Early productions of The Shadow of the Glen enfolded an insinuation of menace at the opening as the gaunt Tramp held a lit match to his face, and Synge’s work indicates that the terror of sexual assault by an unknown, male Other is common to both sedentary and tinker women: Pegeen fears nearby tinker men in The Playboy of the Western World, a Synge piece for the Manchester Guardian (‘The Oppression of the Hills’) refers to the dread of a woman who lived near a cross roads frequented by tinkers and tramps, and Mary in The Tinker’s Wedding worries about the danger to a female walking alone in a ‘lonesome’ 41 43

42 Kiely, John Millington Synge, 97. Ibid. 97. Maurice Walsh, ‘Take Your Choice’, The Honest Fisherman (London: Chambers, 1954), 55–63. 44 Court, Puck of the Droms, 35.

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place. 45 The Tinker’s Wedding stresses the threat of sexual violence to which the female itinerant would undoubtedly have been exposed, a reality that is notably absent in Pádraic Colum’s popular poem ‘The Old Woman of the Road’ (1905). In contrast to the eroticized descriptions of female tinkers by contemporaneous and later writers, Synge displays a sensitive ability to see the world through the eyes of the tinker woman, and, in a multiplication of vision, envisages how the tinker woman imagines she is endangered by the gaze of unknown sedentary males. Thus, Synge simultaneously inhabits espace itinérant and escape feminine at this one moment in the play.

IRISHING THE ROVER: THE PATRIOTISM OF RURAL TRAMPING DURING THE REVIVAL In later years [Synge] was fond of [. . . ] tramping the country with a friend, and his amazing intimacy with the ways of Nature was a continual wonder and delight to all who knew him. Maurice Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre (1913)

In The Tinker’s Wedding, Synge reveals that the received image of the Irish tinker is composed of the bric-a-brac of centuries of European and British narratives concerning Gypsies and rogues. Although the somewhat idealized tinkers and tramps of his prose writings appear to diverge from the raucous tinkers of his most neglected play, the following analysis will indicate that the wanderers of Synge’s prose are of a continuum with The Tinker’s Wedding. The tinker of Synge’s prose works is remade to Revival specifications as a colourful feature of the Irish rural scenery whose connection to the wellspring of native culture diffuses the accretions of the European heritage acknowledged by The Tinker’s Wedding. In addition, it will be demonstrated that Synge’s cementing of the tinker as aboriginal exotic took its cue from the preceding late Victorian mania for the Gypsy: in short, Synge’s reconstitution of the tinker is also a Hibernicization of the British discourse of the wanderer as representative of an unregimented way of life. Indeed, Synge’s writings on tinkers emerged in an era in which a huge 45

Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 39.

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degree of interest converged upon that figure and related communities in Ireland and Britain. In 1907, the year in which The Tinker’s Wedding was published, at least eight full-length anthropological, cultural, and linguistic studies of Romany culture that either implicitly or explicitly enfolded the ‘Irish Gypsy’ within their sweep were readily available in Britain and Ireland. 46 The rhetoric of the essentially Oriental nature of the British Romany continued to be promulgated throughout the nineteenth century, but by the late Victorian period the investigation of the Romany in his rural habitat had emerged as a patriotic declaration of love for a quintessentially British countryside and its naturalized species. Thus, although Scott’s construct of the British Gypsy as dweller in archaic cultural time persisted, it was now imbricated by a new nostalgia for the putatively pre-industrial. A peculiar entwinement of amateur ethnology and country pursuits led to the era’s craze for ‘weekend Gypsying’, in which fashionable bohemians such as erstwhile Gypsy Lore Society President Augustus John and other middle- and upper-class scholaradventurers temporarily appropriated the Romany lifestyle and arranged encounters with rural-dwelling Gypsies. Synge’s decisive nativizing of the Irish tinker and tramp both emerges from and Hibernicizes this British celebration of the man of the road as picturesque feature of an idealized rural landscape. Indeed, the following analysis of the entwined late Victorian fashion for British Romanies and Irish tinkers will open by noting that Synge was considered by his earliest critics to have been highly indebted to the British instigator of the mania, author George Borrow (1803–81). Any analysis of the craze for ‘Gypsying’ must take Borrow’s imprecisely located and semi-autobiographical narratives of adventures with Romanies and tinkers as its starting point. By the time the influential Gypsy Lore Society is most active in the late Victorian era, the author had become both an inspiration for ‘weekend Gypsies’ and a byword with which to condemn what was dismissed as their fashionable posturing: the phrase Romany Rye, a Borrow self-designation and the title of his 1857 novel, is ambiguously glossed in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dictionaries as ‘a gentleman who affects the 46 As collated from the reviews and advertisements featured in the JGLS throughout that year.

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society of gipsies’. Borrow’s father’s occupation as a military recruiting officer involved the young George’s trekking throughout the British Isles, and though considered an expert in the Romani language during his lifetime, Borrow whetted his linguistic appetite by learning Irish when he lived in Tipperary as a child. Borrow’s Lavengro (1851) implies that in acquiring Romani, the Irish-speaking but British-born hero comes home to a variety of authentic Englishness. The author’s work is instantly recognizable in its masculinist delineation of exotic locales, sexually available Gypsy women, and the transcription of whole chunks of conversation self-consciously littered with Romani words. The narcissistic narratives often centre on the narrator’s intellectual, moral, and physical superiority to the men of the road with whom he fraternizes, and are less about Romanies and tinkers than an affirmation of the author-narrator’s manliness, facility with languages, rootlessness, and lack of conventional ambition. Borrow’s writings differ most markedly from later Gypsy Lore Society imitators in being ambivalent towards Gypsies: The Zincali (1841) investigates the myths of Gypsy cannibalism, witchcraft, heathenism, polygamy, and child-stealing without fully repudiating them. Put simply, he grafts his picaresque first person narrative onto generalizations about a fixed and trans-European Gypsy ‘nature’ first popularized by Grellmann. Borrow enjoyed something of a revival in the late nineteenth century, when Lavengro’s fantasy of temporary sedentary escape into Gypsying began to appeal to industrialized England. In addition, due to the late Victorian perception that it had captured what had become a lost rural Britain, the author’s work took on a patriotic hue that rubbed off on the Gypsies he had depicted. P. P. Howe, an early Synge critic, invokes the pugilistic Lavengro character, the Flaming Tinman, in his discussion of The Tinker’s Wedding, while Bourgeois praises Synge’s prose writings by comparing them to Borrow’s picaresques: ‘With the exception of Borrow’s romances, we know of no “books of errantry” more delightful and attractive than the four series of prose essays which embody the results of Synge’s exploration of Erin.’ 47 Synge himself refers to Borrow in a discussion of the superiority of the wandering lifestyle of a Wicklow tramp in ‘People and Places’, and Bourgeois intimates that the dramatist modelled himself on the Romany Rye: ‘An interesting parallel might be 47

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 70.

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established between Borrow and Synge: both had a wandering youth and travelled widely on the Continent; both were highly gifted linguists; and Borrow’s interest in gypsies was not unlike Synge’s partiality to tramps and tinkers. Synge was an ardent Borrovian.’ 48 In addition, Gregory and Yeats urged Borrow as a literary model for the changes they suggested to the manuscript of The Aran Islands. 49 Despite the incisive recognition of Synge’s debt to Borrow, none of the early commentary linking the writers pinpoints the most important influence of Borrow on the Irish dramatist; however, Synge’s intimation that the tramp and the tinker are treasures of the Irish countryside parallels the English author’s inauguration of the British Romany as emblem of English rural authenticity and colour. Just as an interest in Gypsy culture came to be understood as an articulation of a nostalgic love for a quintessentially British countryside by the late Victorian period, in Synge’s prose tinker culture epitomizes the threatened vigour of Irish rural life. Synge cements the tinker’s transformation from rogue literature occupational figure associated particularly with English urban centres to a creature of nature embedded within the picturesque Irish countryside, as suggested by Bourgeois’ definition of the Irish minority: ‘a tribe of irregular, ribald outlaws as typical of rural Ireland [emphasis added] as the gypsies are of rural England [emphasis added].’ 50 Prior to Synge’s singling out of wanderers as emblematic of the best of Irishness, the tinker is often considered merely one of the many varieties of Irish poor. Borrow travelled Spain distributing Bibles on behalf of the evangelical Foreign Bible Society from 1835 to 1840, and his work occasionally betrays an anti-Catholic bent. In Lavengro, that religion is identified with the Irish or the treacherous English, and the evident Catholicism of the narrator’s Irish tinker associates troubles the text: in sharp contrast to the stress on the cultural distinctiveness of the Romany, Lavengro struggles to distinguish the tinker from the general mass of the Irish destitute. A Romany who complains in Borrow’s Wild Wales (1862) that Wales had been overrun with ‘woild Irish’, by which he evidently meant Irish tinkers, utilizes the label applied to the impoverished bulk of Ireland’s inhabitants by Elizabethan chroniclers. Borrow’s undifferentiated tinker, who appears to be little more than a 48 49 50

Ibid. 12–13 n. Gregory to Synge, Greene and Stephens, J. M. Synge 1871–1909, 129. Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 181–2.

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particularly deprived variety of the broad mass of Irish, is typical of the manner in which Irish vagrants are depicted by British and European writers prior to their Revival elevation as culturally distinct envoys of archaic Irishness. In a German account of Ireland published in 1843, a miserable scene of a ragged tinker mending the utensils of a neardestitute settled woman is encountered just prior to entering strikingly prosperous Ulster. Both customer and undifferentiated tradesman are abjectly poor to an equal degree, and symbolize the gap between the productive and unproductive provinces of the island. 51 Characteristics of restlessness, beggarliness, indiscipline, and lack of productivity that were later associated with the tinker had been applied to the general Irish population by British commentators from the Elizabethan period onwards. The attention drawn to vagrants by rogue literature and antinomadic statutes shaped sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anxieties concerning Irish wandering, the population’s similarity to ‘English beggars’, and the Irish failure to make ‘provision for posterity’. 52 Rogue literature commentary claimed that continuous political unrest caused many Irish to end up begging in England, and Elizabethan chronicler John Davies’ conclusion that the ‘vulgar sort [of Irish] have chosen to be beggars in forraigne Countries [England], than to manure their own fruitfull Land at home’ parrots rogue pamphlet claims of a distinct Irish presence in the peripatetic English urban underclass. 53 After the late seventeenth-century Williamite wars, the inherent beggarliness of the general Irish population and an entwined Irish inattention to husbandry became a staple description in travel accounts. Interestingly, in a letter 51 Johann Georg Kohl, Ireland: Dublin, The Shannon, Limerick (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), 193–4. 52 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing his Ten Yeeres Travell. 4 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1908), vol. 4, 202; Robert Payne, A Brief Description of Ireland (1589), in Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh (eds.), Strangers to that Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1994), 68; John Davies, A Discovery of the True Cause Why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued (1612), ibid. 78. 53 Davies, A Discovery of the True Cause, 80; Harman records that ‘Irish men and women that wander about to begge [. . . ] saye the[y] haue béene burned and spoyled by the Earle of Desmond.’ Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Commen Cursetors Vulgarly Called Vagabones, 82; Awdeley lists a category of rogue he names ‘An Irishe Toyle’, while Harman warns of ‘Irishe men that goe about with counterfeate licenses’ and ‘Irishe men’ who pretend to be impoverished sea merchants, Awdeley, Fraternitye of Vacabondes, 5; 44; 48; Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Commen Cursetors Vulgarly Called Vagabones, 80–1.

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written from Dublin by an English journalist in the early nineteenth century, the penury of the average Irish person is seen to be worse than that of the English beggar or Gypsy. 54 Rogue literature-derived accusations of ‘inherent’ vagabondage, unwillingness to cultivate the land, and the forcible quartering upon an unwilling host were levelled at tinkers in late Victorian accounts, 55 just as the volume of such accusations directed at the general Irish population had finally almost disappeared. Of course, many of the characteristics previously attached to the great Irish unwashed that had come to be associated with the tinker alone by the late Victorian period were positive: antiquarians of the early nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey surmised that contemporaneous Irish-language agrarian culture enfolded the traces of an archaic high culture, and by the end of the century the same rhetoric was being routinely applied to the Irish tinker’s culture and language. Moreover, all Revival-era accounts in which peripatetics are described as carriers of characteristics historically associated with the broad mass of Irish share the implication that the wanderer is the inheritor of a kind of concentrated Irishness. Indeed, the auto-exoticist impulse of Irish cultural nationalism ensures that the itinerant carrier of archaic aboriginality is implicitly more ‘Irish’ than the Irish themselves. Kevin Whelan believes that the Revival was partly a post-Famine attempt to shed the entrenched discourse of the Irish as a nation of starving vagabonds; 56 in such a reading, the Revival’s valorization of the Irish tinker rehabilitates the beggary, nomadism, and lack of productivity complained of in relation to Ireland by centuries of British commentators, allowing this inheritance to be the tinker’s 54 William Cobbett to Charles Marshall, 27 Sept. 1827, quoted in William Cobbett, Cobbett in Ireland, ed. Denis Knight (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), 60. 55 According to a memoir from 19th-cent. Donegal, tinkers ‘took possession’ of firesides ‘[w]ithout asking liberty’, and anyone with straw ‘dared not refuse’. This passage echoes a rogue literature accusation that the ‘Cabins where [Gypsies] lodge in the night are the Outbarns of Farmers [. . . ], who dare not deny them for fear they should ere morning have their thatched houses burning about their ears.’ Hugh Dorian, The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal (1890), ed. Breandán MacSuibhne and David Dickson (Dublin: Lilliput in association with Donegal County Council), 2000; Dekker, Thomas, Lantern and Candle-Light. Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 244. 56 Whelan, ‘Radical Memory in the Revival Period’, The Irish Revival—Cultural Inheritance or Cultural Baggage? The Parnell Summer School, Avondale House, Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow, 16 Aug. 2002.

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burden alone. A passage of Synge’s ‘Peoples and Places’ written in 1898 about a Wicklow tramp presages the Revival’s elevation of the native vagrant as the embodiment of all that was antithetical to contemporary civilization: ‘The slave and the beggar are wiser than the man who works for recompense, for all our moments are divine and above price though their sacrifice is paid with a measure of fine gold. Every industrious worker has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.’ 57 The reconstitution of the vagabond during the Revival is, in addition, an Hibernicization of a broader nostalgia for the pre-industrial that fuelled the walking, field club, and caravanning crazes amongst Victorian Britons. Field clubs and ‘Gypsying’ were entwined enough by the 1860s that the Blackwood’s review of Simson’s History could archly note that ‘you cannot catch your Gipsy, and bring him home and study him quietly, as you would a new species of mollusc [. . . ]. You must note him in his proper habitat [. . . ] [though] he is a very shy animal’. 58 Naturalists with an interest in Gypsies tramped about collecting vagrant specimens as others might catalogue an endangered variety of wildflower: to American Gypsylorist and poet Charles Godfrey Leland, who walked the English countryside in order to encounter Romanies, the minority represented ‘the last rags of the old romance which connected man with nature. [. . . ] The day is coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild wanderers, no wild nature, and certainly no gypsies.’ 59 An Arthur Symons contribution to the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society condemned the enforced education of Gypsy children, and categorized the minority as ‘ “the houseless birds whom God feedeth” ’. Literacy would, Symons complained, cause this ‘last romance left in the world’ and the ‘wanderer whom all of us who are poets [. . . ] are summed up in’ to lose ‘contact with nature’. 60 Surprisingly, although Symons has been widely recognized as a major influence on The Aran Islands, the intriguing correlations between his and Synge’s respective writings on native vagrants has never been suggested as having any great significance. In addition, Symons also seems to have recorded the picturesque Irish tinker before his literary rival: in an article about Ireland published in 57 58

Synge, ‘People and Places’, CW 2: 196. [William Lucas Collins], ‘Gipsies’, rev. of A History of the Gipsies, by Walter Simson, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 99 (May 1866), 565. 59 Charles Godfrey Leland, The Gypsies (London: Trübner, 1882), 13; 15. 60 Arthur Symons, ‘In Praise of Gypsies’, JGLS 1:4 (1908), 294–6.

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1896, the English critic noted ‘a company of tinkers [. . . ] huddled like crouching beasts on their little, rough, open carts, driving a herd of donkeys before them’. 61 The Gypsy had been appropriated as a feature of British rural scenery available to the rambler as early as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and in later nineteenth-century accounts the figure begins to be routinely described within an idiom of rural picturesqueness: charmingly rustic Romanies who sold horses and visited fairs were recruited as a colourful patch of the quilt of bona fide English rural diversity. This was especially true when such authenticity was utilized as a telling opposition to urban-dwelling, ‘foreign’, or ‘half-breed’ itinerants such as Irish tinkers. It should be noted that Victorian English curiosity about the vagrant is also enmeshed with the sudden rash of English rogue literature reissues that appeared from the 1860s onwards. 62 The resurgence of interest in what were read as objective historical accounts of the lawless days of yore points to a Whiggish and even self-consciously Protestant nostalgia for all that had been necessarily but regrettably abandoned on the road to modernity. Moreover, what might be termed this English Cultural Revival parallels the contemporaneous Irish mania for print editions of old manuscripts such as Keating’s History, which were thought to encode native traditions and suppressed historical narratives. In an Ireland attempting to ‘recover’ a lost orality and a pre-colonial culture and in a Great Britain suffering from the perceived passing away of the physical freedoms of a preindustrial period, it is not surprising that unregimented and non-literate peripatetics began to be celebrated as living relics whose authenticity was accessible to those willing to enter the earlier cultural time zone of the rural idyll. As a boy, Synge joined the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club, founded in 1886 by some of Ireland’s most prominent scientists, and was an active member until 1888. Bourgeois depicts Synge as a Dr Doolittle figure, who ‘had a number of uncanny tricks of speaking to animals and 61 62

Symons, ‘A Causerie: From a Castle in Ireland’, The Savoy 6 (1896), 94. The Luther-edited edition of Liber Vagatorum was reissued in 1860 as The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, and the Early English Text Society reissued a rogue literature compilation that included Awdeley and Harman’s texts in 1869. A series of similar collections followed throughout the late Victorian period, and was contemporaneous with the Gypsy mania.

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calling to them. He once carried a bullfinch on his bicycle to amuse his nephews, and talked to kittens, making them purr.’ 63 In contrast to evolutionist T. H. Huxley’s celebration of advances in locomotion and communications, 64 we find the naturalist’s passion for the countryside in Synge’s work: The Aran Islands’s praise for the traditional hooker craft over the new steamers, or its celebration of Aran’s handmade implements over the hawker’s mainland goods may be situated within this pro-rural and subtly anti-evolution discourse. (The revolt against the perceived implications of evolutionary theory that inflects Synge’s championing of the tinker and islander is discussed fully in the third chapter.) Like his Gypsylorist equivalent, the Irish tinkerlorist covets the peripatetic’s perceived ability to read the landscape: Stephens writes that Synge was ‘proud of knowing’ where to find fresh water on outdoor excursions, and bicycled on the neglected eighteenthcentury Wicklow roads known only to ‘the tinkers who camped on the wide grass margins’. 65 Just as the Gypsy cult was the response of Liverpool and Manchester suburbanites countering industrialization and the emasculating luxury of rapid transportation with a vision of rural Romany wandering, Synge’s tinkerlorism may be located in his secure but restrictive suburban Dublin origins. Field clubs emerged from this self-conscious ‘return’ to rural values engendered by increased urbanization and technological advance; John Wilson Foster sees an overlap between the neo-Romantic attitude to ‘nature’ of writers such as Borrow and the scientific fieldwork of naturalists’ societies. Foster points to ignored but tantalizing overlaps between the burgeoning Revival movement of the early 1890s and the ‘heroic age’ of the Irish field club movement: Yeats lectured on fairies to the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club in November 1893, a mere ten months after an address on Aran ethnography consolidated Revival interest in the islands. 66 63 64

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 90. ‘[T]he most obvious and the most distinctive feature of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes [. . . ] accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication.’ Huxley, quoted in John Wilson Foster, Recoveries: Neglected Episodes in Irish Cultural History 1860–1912 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), 55. 65 Edward Stephens, My Uncle John: Edward Stephens’s Life of J. M. Synge, ed. Andrew Carpenter (London: Oxford University Press), 1974. 154; 32. 66 Foster, Recoveries, 92–3; 99.

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Borrow’s collecting of Romany specimens is attributed to the ‘sensibility of the English for the beauties of Nature’ and the Englishman’s ‘innate respect’ for ‘personal liberty’. 67 In the wake of the revival of interest in Borrow and in response to encroaching urbanization, immersion in vagrant culture becomes a hallmark of patriotism for late Victorian bohemians and naturalists alike. The man of the road, whether a Gypsy or a vagabond, begins to be celebrated as a national treasure and a colourful feature of the rural landscape. 68 An article published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1877 paints the wanderer as an admirable and essentially English type, and implies that the tramp’s estimable qualities are somehow linked to his Englishness: ‘[W]e must own to a certain sympathy with [the professional tramp], not altogether untempered by envy. Then the genuine tramp is an essentially English type, as England is the country of pedestrianism par excellence.’ The English tramp, a genus ‘wide enough’ to comprise ‘the gipsy, or pseudo-gipsy’, ‘seems to be guided by some rude instinct of the picturesque’, and is ‘a cheery, hearty, harum-scarum, goodish fellow’. 69 In an obvious response to such rhetoric, Synge’s description of a tinker campsite situated in the idyllic Wicklow countryside as a ‘precious possession for any country’ 70 constitutes the vagrant as a national asset. In his account of West Kerry, a tinker’s abode likewise enriches the Irish cultural economy and the beauty of the landscape: ‘One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with the magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.’ 71 In addition, the consideration of the native tramp proffered in ‘People and Places’ suggests that the Irish drifter’s physical and moral superiority over those of other nations is a trait rooted in nationality: ‘These [Irish] vagrants have no resemblance with 67 Franz Liszt, The Gipsy in Music/ Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie, trans. Edwin Evans (1859; London: Reeves, 1926), vol. 2, 237. 68 See the following articles: ‘An Old Tramp’ (pseud. of John Hill Burton), ‘Hints for an Autumnal Ramble’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 130 (Sept.1881), 393–401; John Buchan, ‘Scholar-Gipsies’, Macmillan’s Magazine 70 (July 1894), 209; F. M. F Skene, ‘The Ethics of The Tramp’, Cornhill Magazine ns 4 (May 1898), 683. 69 [Alexander Innes Shand], ‘Tramps and Pedestrians’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 122 (Sept. 1877), 325–45. 70 Synge, ‘People and Places’, CW 2: 199. 71 Synge, ‘In West Kerry’, CW 2: 246.

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the mendicants who show their sores near the churches of Italy, for [. . . ] the greater number that one sees are vigorous women and men of fine physique. When they beg for money they do not make any pretext of infirmity, but ask simply.’ 72 Furthermore, the native tramps’ concentrated Irishness and the ‘freshness of wit’ that ‘distinguishes’ the Irish variety ‘from the rural beggars of other countries of Europe’ is capable of penetrating the foibles of Irishmen deracinated by their years in the farther reaches of the British Empire: I was in Arklow a few years ago with a man who had spent most of his life in tropical countries where he had acquired a certain brusqueness in dealing with the poor and a feeling for cold that made him carry many overcoats when travelling in his own country. As we were coming out of the station an old woman begged from him, and was refused a little sharply. She said nothing till he was arranging his coats on an outside car, then she edged towards him and called out in a shrill voice that could be heard all over the station, ‘Are you sellin’ coats?’ . . . 73

Irish Travellers, in particular, have had a long tradition of dealing in rags and used clothing, so the tramp’s jibe is an attempt to suggest that Synge’s haughty companion resembles the transient peoples he treats dismissively more than he would probably admit to. The above anecdote is subtly nationalist in its implication that the real fault of this resident of the colonies lies in his having forgotten the Irishness he shares with the beggar woman. In the wake of the downfall of the Gaelic aristocracy, the once feted native file (bard) had gradually lost his status as artistic arbitrator of his society and had taken to tramping. This historical reality infused the elevation of the poetlike wanderer or wandering poet figure in Revival-era Ireland with a politicized vehemence missing from the more whimsical English celebration of the man of the road: in the Irish setting, the race of beggars had been transformed into a subset of beggar-poets. Putative traces of this vanished pre-colonial order were treated as a national treasure, as in Robert Lynd’s description of an indigent poet recovered from a workhouse by some members of the Gaelic League, whose relicdom lay in his being ‘an aged poet who knew no English’. 74 Campbell describes the party of tinkers he encounters ‘on tramp’ in scenic Donegal as 72 74

73 Synge, ‘People and Places’, CW 2: 196. Ibid. 197. Robert Lynd, Home Life in Ireland (London: Mills and Boon, 1909), 313.

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‘strolling folk [. . . ] in touch with the elemental things—the wonders and beauties and cruelties of life’, 75 and a great many similarly idealized tinkers are depicted in Revival and early Free State-era travel books by nationalist writers who have ‘tramped’ the island of Ireland. 76 The tinker craze likewise held enormous appeal for the Irish of landed and educated background, as a 1906 New Ireland Review consideration of the growing Revival taste for tramping suggests: There seems to be deep down in human nature a fascination about a wandering life which still throws its glamour over even the super-civilization which distinguishes the twentieth century. How else account for the spasmodic efforts made every now and then by luxuriously brought up individuals to go a-wandering. 77

In Britain, the so-called ‘Gentleman Gipsy’ market was catered to by the emerging leisure industry, which sold it as a modish hobby for the fashionable. 78 American artist Harold Speakman journeyed through Ireland by ass-cart for his travel book, Here’s Ireland, and the amusing spectacle of an American travelling ‘tinker’-style garnered much notice in the Irish press. Synge, by contrast, did not merely depict the wandering life, but lived it in a manner that did not involve the hiring of ostentatious conveyances that might unwittingly mock those he moved amongst. Synge’s prose accounts of his travels in Ireland suggest that he treated the peoples of the road he encountered as equals worthy of being listened to, a fact that seems to have somewhat perplexed Bourgeois. In like manner, a member of Synge’s extended family may have had her cousin in mind when she implicitly criticized Revival Ireland’s idealization of the wanderer. In a 1905 article for Dana entitled ‘The Tramp’, Laura Stephens, a minor artist and a distant cousin of Synge, endorsed the ‘scientific’ 75 Joseph Campbell, Mearing Stones: Leaves from my Note-Book on Tramp in Donegal (Dublin: Maunsel, 1911), 40. 76 Relevant travel accounts include Gwynn’s The Fair Hills of Ireland (1906), William Bulfin’s Rambles in Eirinn (1907), Michael Myers Shoemaker’s Wanderings in Ireland (1908), Campbell’s Mearing Stones (1911), Robert Lynd’s Rambles in Ireland (1912), the Harold Speakman’s Here’s Ireland (1925), Pádraic Colum’s The Road Round Ireland (1926), and Seán Ó Faoláin’s An Irish Journey (1941). 77 Helen Weldon, ‘Tinkers, Sorners and Other Vagabonds’, New Ireland Review 26 (Sept. 1903), 46–7. 78 George R Lowndes’s Gipsy Tents and How to Use Them: A Handbook for Amateur Gipsies (1890), appended a list of suppliers of the various goods associated with the ‘fashionable amusement’.

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institutional provisions made for tramps by the German and Swiss authorities and the anti-vagrant legislation then being considered by the British parliament. For Stephens, the wanderer is an unproductive parasite: So far, at least, the vagrant has proved ineradicable. [. . . ] He contributes nothing to the wealth of the country, upon the resources of which he is a constant and increasing drain. [. . . ]. He lives, in fact, the irresponsible life of a savage, and his roving habits often enable him to break the laws with impunity [. . . ]. Anyone who has lived in the country will know how the visits of well-known tramps strike terror into the hearts of farmers’ wives and cottagers living in lonely places. 79

In sharp contrast to the celebration of the good bodily health of peoples of the road in Synge’s prose, Stephens portrays the tramp as a ‘parasite, living at the cost of his host’ and a ‘disseminator of diseases’. She charges that ‘most of the recent smallpox epidemics have been ascribed to the fact that infection was carried broadcast [sic] over the country by vagrants.’ 80 As an artist Stephens was doubtlessly aware of the contemporary idealization of the Irish tinker figure in the arts, and is very careful to complain only of the ‘Highland “tinker” ’, making absolutely no reference to what Simson would have referred to as his Irish cousin. Nonetheless, she almost certainly has the native tinker in mind when she implies that Irish anti-vagrant efforts are simply not strenuous enough. Stephens’s essay is a dramatic counterpoint to her cousin John Synge’s unpublished ‘Ballad of a Pauper’, a dialogue in ballad between an old tramp on his way to the poorhouse and a sedentary speaker who suggests that the old man should instead commit an offence in order to gain access to a corrective institute, where he will learn a trade, eat for free, and be released in a few short years. The poem satirizes the hypocrisy of ‘humane’ institutional provisions for the poor as a system designed to force the destitute to crime in order to gain access. ‘Ballad of a Pauper’ further demonstrates Synge’s rare ability to inhabit espace itinérant in his depiction of a vagrant being forced to fulfil sedentary expectations in order to eat. As in his envisioning of the outlook of the Other displayed in imagining of Mary Byrne’s fear of molestation, Synge goes 79 80

Laura Stephens, ‘The Tramp’, Dana 11 (Mar. 1905), 339–40. Ibid. 340.

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beyond mere idealization of the wanderer in depicting the world from the vantage point of the margins. Nonetheless, the elevation of the tinker as native exotic was not simply a mimicking of the British appropriation of the Romany: it was also an attempt to reclaim the Irish vagrant from the grasp of Gypsylorists. As previously indicated, British commentators originally dismissed Irish tinkers as being too racially ‘impure’ to be of real significance. However, an 1880 article in which Leland claimed to have ‘discovered’ the ‘tinkers’ tongue’ 81 sparked a period of scholarly interest in the Irish tinker. Subsequent research into what Leland dubbed ‘Shelta’ revealed that a language hitherto dismissed as of little import was, in fact, thrilling evidence of arcane origin. Gypsylorist investigations of Shelta exoticized the tinker in the manner of the Gypsy ‘uncovered’ by eighteenth-century ethnography and linguistics, and the ‘tinkers’ tongue’ was soon drawn into institutionalized Orientalism: Leland read a paper before the Oriental Congress in Vienna in 1886 entitled ‘The Original Gypsies and their Language’, in which he described Shelta as a Celtic language spoken by the descendants of ancient bronze workers. The Academy reported on the paper in November 1886 under the headline ‘A Prehistoric Language Yet Surviving in Britain’, and in the following month, Crofton made a call for further research in a contribution to the same publication. Due to the rash of articles on the language that appeared in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society following Leland’s ‘discovery’, Shelta was briefly fashionable enough to be included in the 1893 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia (in an entry written by Sampson) as ‘a secret jargon of great antiquity spoken by [. . . ] descendants of the [. . . ] bards’. To an extent, the ‘tinkers’ tongue’ became a secret cultural treasure to be wrestled by British connoisseurs from its unappreciative Irish possessors; however, a Leland article on the topic subtitled ‘The Lost Language of the Bards and How it was Recovered’ describes Shelta as being ‘hidden like a religious arcanum by the Tinkers’. 82 Sampson, moreover, lamented that such ‘shady characters’ were in the possession of a rich language. 83 Little wonder then, that the colonial overtones of Gypsylorist attentions galvanized Irish writers to reclaim the Irish tinker 81 See Charles Godfrey Leland, ‘Shelta, the Tinkers’ Talk’, New Quarterly Magazine 3 (1880), 136–41. 82 Charles Godfrey Leland, ‘Shelta’, JGLS 1:2 (1907), 73. 83 Sampson, ‘Tinkers and Their Talk’, 208.

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for Ireland and to attempt to prove the vagrant’s impeccable cultural credentials and innate worth. British interest in the tinker drew at longactive Irish amateur tinkerlorists out of the woodwork, and American scholarly interest in the Gypsy languages inspired contemporaneous Irish-American curiosity about Shelta. 84 Most significantly, the influential German scholar of Irish, Kuno Meyer, turned his attention to what he surmised was a kind of Ur-Irish. Meyer’s interest in Shelta grew partly from his contact with Gypsylorist John Sampson, the Liverpool University librarian with whom he camped out on the Welsh hills on ‘weekend Gypsying’ excursions. Shelta emerged as a topic of academic interest in an era in which an argument raged between scholars of Irish over the privileging of Old Irish above the modern, and Meyer became intrigued by ‘the tinker’s tongue’ in the 1890s on the basis of its ‘antiquity’ and what he conjectured was its link to Old Irish. 85 Furthermore, in an article entitled ‘The Secret Languages of Ireland’, which was published in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1909, Meyer interprets a vocabulary list presented to the Gaelic Society of Dublin in 1807 as an example of Shelta, although the lecture concerned referred to it as ‘Berlagar na Sær’, a secret dialect spoken by Munster masons. 86 Needless to state, of course, this easy identification of Berlagar na Sær with Shelta recalls the dubious Victorian practice of reinterpreting old references to rogues’ cant as early instances of Romani in print. Meyer’s conjecture does, however, underline the degree to which a contemporaneous Irish scholarly interest in the masons’ dialect was entwined with an awareness of Gypsylorist research on Shelta: the philologist enquired of Sampson in 1890 as to whether he knew anything of ‘Berlagar na Sær’, 87 and the important Revival-era publication, Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (The Gaelic Journal), published letters in both Irish and English by Donnchadh O Luingsigh and an article by the 84 See Sherley McErgill, ‘Irish Tinkers’, TP’s Weekly 15 Oct. 1909: 495; Patrick O’Byrne of The Gaelic Society of New York wrote to Kuno Meyer on 8 December 1896 enquiring as to whether Meyer had published on the subject of Shelta. O’Byrne’s interest was aroused by the research of Prof. Prince of the University of New York on US Gypsy dialects. Liverpool University Library, Gypsy Lore Society archive (GLS C22 [66]). 85 Kuno Meyer, ‘On the Irish Origin and the Age of Shelta’, JGLS 2:5 (1891), 260. 86 P. M’Elligott, ‘Observations on the Gaelic Language’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Dublin 1 (1808), 10–11. 87 Meyer to Sampson, 13 Nov. 1890. Liverpool University Library, Gypsy Lore Society archive (GLS C22 [56]).

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Jesuit scholar of Irish, Fr. Edmund Hogan, on the subject during the late 1890s. The editorial preface to Hogan’s piece suggested that interested readers might wish to also consult Meyer and Sampson’s Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society articles on Shelta. Mary Byrne’s deployment of the phrase ‘rural people’ in The Tinker’s Wedding indicates the manner in which the peripheral vantage point of the tinker vis-à-vis majority culture is structured by language. The similarity of the phrase to the actual Cant usage ‘country people’ suggests that Synge was somewhat familiar with the Traveller vernacular, either through contact with peoples of the road or because he made use of some of the many glossaries of Shelta in circulation during the years in which he was writing The Tinker’s Wedding. Edward Stephens maintains that Synge was familiar with the dialects of road folk from a young age, ‘whether [. . . ] the wild curses of brawling tinkers fighting when he happened to pass, or [. . . ] the blessing of some tramping woman’. 88 However, another nephew, Edward Hutchinson Synge, makes an extremely thought-provoking statement in relation to the dramatist’s utilization of Cant that has received absolutely no critical attention. Hutchinson Synge explicitly suggests that the colourful Hiberno-English dialect utilized in his uncle’s drama appropriated the tone if not the vocabulary of the language of Travellers: ‘it was the annual gathering of tinkers to the Wicklow [town] regatta at the beginning of August in 1902 which brought to Synge [. . . ] a form of English in which he could really express himself.’ 89 All in all, the linguistic vibrancy of Synge’s tinker characters is endowed with a whole new significance when the contemporaneous scholarly and popular attention being given to Shelta is taken into account. Moreover, in light of the fact that Synge was writing The Tinker’s Wedding as he also worked on Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, it is arguable that the heightened HibernoEnglish dialect of his drama was suggested by the specificity of Travellers’ linguistic usage. Yeats’s fascination with the occult originally drew him to scholarship on Romany culture when he anonymously reviewed Leland’s Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (1891), but correspondence sent by the Irish writer to Sampson indicates that his interest in the tinker was directly inspired by Gypsylorist research. Yeats wrote to Sampson from Coole 88

Stephens, My Uncle John, 45.

89

McCormack, Fool of the Family, 320.

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Park in about 1901 to remind him that he had promised to forward a tinker folk story when they had met in Liverpool some years previously: Just now, Lady Gregory and I are writing a play about tinkers, Irish tinkers, and we want all we can to enlarge what little local [emphasis added] knowledge we have. Have you published anything about them that we could get? Or can you tell us of anything? I am sorry ton [sic] trouble you but you are the only authority I can turn to. 90

Yeats’s plea to Sampson regarding his research for Where There Is Nothing is the only instance of formal contact between an important British Gypsylorist and a major Irish Revival writer working on a tinker theme that I have uncovered. Moreover, and despite the ubiquity of the tinker trope in Revival era writing, I have been able to ascertain evidence of only a handful of direct or indirect acknowledgements by Irish writers of Gypsylorist scholarship on Shelta. 91 It is evident from the chronology that the British movement must have sparked Irish interest in the tinker, and it seems logical that there must have been a certain degree of awareness amongst Revivalists of the British mania for Irish minority. Nevertheless, there was resistance on the part of established Irish writers and scholars to the colonial master’s appropriation of the tinker as an object of study: the list of Gypsy Lore Society members for 1907–08, which includes addresses in France, Finland, Greece, Germany, India, New Zealand, the United States, and Britain, lists only one Irish address, that of Macalister. It may well be significant that Meyer, the one scholar of Irish who participated in the Gypsylorist interest in Shelta, was not an Irish national. Irish commentators and authors may well have been prompted to turn their attentions to the tinker by the scholarship on the minority and its language emanating from Gypsy Lore Society circles, but given the cultural politics of the period, such was not to be admitted to. 90 Yeats to Sampson, 20 July, n.d. [1901?] Liverpool University Library, Gypsy Lore Society archive (GLS C13 [50]). 91 James Joyce added Shelta vocabulary from Macalister’s Secret Languages of Ireland to Finnegans Wake, while Helen Weldon refers to or quotes Meyer, Crofton and Sampson in her article on tinkers for The New Ireland Review, and Douglas Hyde was aware of the Gypsylorist debate on Shelta, but appears to have given it little credence. Adaline Glasheen, ‘Finnegans Wake and the Secret Languages of Ireland’, in Clive Hart and Fritz Senn (eds.), A Wake Digest (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968), 48; Helen Weldon, ‘Tinkers, Sorners and Other Vagabonds’, New Ireland Review 26 (Sept.1906), 46; Henry Thomas Crofton, ‘Affairs of Egypt, 1907’, JGLS 2:2 (1908), 130.

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This fact may explain why Hutchinson Synge’s extremely suggestive comment regarding the relationship between Syngean language and Traveller Cant has received so little critical attention. If Sampson’s work informed Yeats’s depiction of the minority in Where There Is Nothing, or if The Tinker’s Wedding was inspired by contemporaneous Shelta scholarship or by Symons’s prior ‘discovery’ of the tinker, then there can be no acknowledgement of such British influence. Irish scholars, writers, and linguists followed the Gypsy Lore Society lead in turning their attentions to the tinker, but the British attempt to enfold the figure within the racialized discourse of Gypsylorism set the stage for the Irish reappropriation of the native minority. In short, the politics of culture in Revival Ireland necessitated the effacement of the role Gypsylorism had played in the rise to cultural prominence of the Irish tinker figure. The following chapter will build upon this argument that, to a certain degree, the tinker cult involved the domestication of alien discourses of the exotic: Chapter 3 will suggest that even when Synge Orientalizes the tinker or islander, his cultural nationalism ensures that he invokes a concept of the exotic drawn from an indigenous intellectual tradition and a discourse of the bohemian imported from France, a country understood to be Ireland’s sister nation and political ally.

3 Playboys of the Eastern World: Synge’s Bohemian Tinkers and Pre-Celtic Islanders Chapter 2 opened with an examination of the manner in which The Tinker’s Wedding grapples with preceding British and European literary constructs of the Gypsy and the ‘tynker’, and concluded with an analysis of the Hibernicization of the contemporaneous British mania for rural wandering in Synge’s prose. This study began by tracing the significance to tinker origin theory of the mytho-historic tradition of the preCelts, and the following chapter will examine the influence of this Irish medieval belief on Synge’s work. The tinker did not escape the Orientalization to which indigenous European peripatetic groupings had been subject during the Enlightenment. However, the cultural politics of the Revival ensured that the exoticization of Irish minorities manifested as the resurfacing of the native intellectual tradition of Ireland’s links to an imagined ‘East’. Synge, in particular, was extremely familiar with Irishlanguage mytho-historic sources, and his strong identification with an imagined pre-Gaelic Ireland inflects the delineation of islanders as well as peoples of the road in his prose. It will be suggested that due to Synge’s invocation of a native exoticizing tradition, the Orientalization of Irish peripheral groups in his prose renders such peoples more rather than less ‘authentically’ Irish: in an era in which ultra-nationalist rhetoric increasingly conflates the terms ‘Gael’ and ‘Irish’, the Anglo-Irish writer was personally invested in demonstrating that ‘non-Celts’ could be Irish too. Much of the following discussion of Synge’s utilization of indigenous Orientalism will centre on the depiction of islanders in his best known prose work, The Aran Islands. The relevance of the Syngean

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islander to the study’s overall emphasis on the tinker figure lies in the writer’s conception of the intertwined nature of marginalized Irish populations. The chapter will also examine the manner in which, for reasons of personal history, Synge’s imagining of tinkers and islanders traverses discourses of evolution and the Fall: the compensatory preCeltic and pre-Christian space in which such peoples exist is both prelapsarian and beyond the forces of evolution and Western modernity. The notional Orient in which Synge’s islanders and peoples of the road operate encompasses the intersecting Easts of the Garden of Eden and the realm from which Ireland’s pre-Celtic settlers emerged. Synge’s bohemian tinkers and islanders are situated in an archaic Irish rural or island space threatened by but still free of the degeneration invited in by economic and evolutionary progress. The chapter concludes with an examination of Synge’s attempt to present The Aran Islands as the Genesis account of his Revival Eden; for the writer to admit that Aran was anything less than a tabula rasa was to acknowledge his fears of the menace posed by modernity’s perceived debasement of the ‘innocent’. ‘[There is]’, Leland wrote in 1882, ‘a natural sympathy and intelligence between Bohemians of every grade, all the world over, and I never knew a gypsy who did not understand an artist.’ 1 The Gypsylorist’s use of the slippery noun ‘bohemian’ relies upon the nineteenth-century reader’s recognition of the overlapping meanings of the word, which could signal either an exotic Romany or a non-conformist artist who looked to Paris and to Gypsy culture for inspiration. The tinker and the islander were shaped as domestic exotics both by Synge’s invocation of Ireland’s ‘Eastern’ roots and by his contact with the fin-de-siècle cultural politics of Left Bank Paris. In terms of the Revival-era depiction of Irish minorities, the native theory of pre-Celtic survivals was a more culturally acceptable process of Orientalization than that to which British and European Gypsies had previously been subject. Similarly, the history of Irish political contacts with France and that nation’s traditional enmity towards Britain ensured that the utilization of the idiom of bohémienisme came naturally to a cosmopolitan but subtly anti-English cultural nationalist such as Synge. Moreover, the contemporaneous growth of a Breton nationalism rooted in the region’s touted Celtic 1

Charles Godfrey Leland, The Gypsies (London: Trübner, 1882), 264.

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origins, a subject upon which Synge wrote, validated the Irish identification with France. Hence, when Synge Orientalizes the tinker or islander, he invokes a native or domesticated concept of the exotic drawn from an indigenous intellectual tradition and a discourse imported from a ‘sister’ nation. Left Bank Parisian culture influenced the performance of the bohémien by the Irish writer familiar with its literature and mores, and shaped the construct of tinkers in Revival drama as the ‘naturally’ creative antithesis of the uncultured bourgeoisie. Synge spent much time in the French capital, and his work is part of a moment in which self-consciously bohemian European writers querying normative values situated themselves within an exoticized espace itinérant occupied by the Gypsy, the tinker, and the tramp. In spite of the fact that there was much apolitical aping of the peripatetic lifestyle during the period concerned, the sincerity of the engagement of radical writers with this topic should not be discounted. For the most part, the analysis of the impact of the Parisian scene on Revival writing will focus on Synge due to his deep immersion in Orientalist fin-de-siècle culture, though a number of playwrights of the Dublin and Belfast theatrical scenes who also took on the figure of the bohemianized tinker-tramp are briefly considered.

PERFORMING THE TINKER: SYNGE AND THE PA R I SI A N BOHÉMIEN Synge sporadically resided in the French capital between 1895 and 1902, though his time in Paris and Germany is often subtly dismissed: referring to the aspiring dramatist’s trips to Aran after he returned from the Continent, George Russell told Speakman that Synge ‘had done only mediocre things before he learned [Irish]’. 2 As is noted in many accounts of the writer’s development, W. B. Yeats claimed that on meeting Synge in France in 1896, he told him to give up Paris and go to the Aran Islands. On the contrary, of course, Yeats did not advise Synge to give up all things Gallic, but continued to urge his reviews of French literature. As Roy Foster comments, Synge 2

Harold Speakman, Here’s Ireland (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1927), 285.

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was the cosmopolitan Yeats wished himself to be: the dramatist wrote notebooks in French, was almost bilingual, and translated Villon. 3 In various journal and newspaper articles, Synge outlined French art, theatre, and literature to the Irish reading public, and interpreted the Irish Literary Revival for the French. For Synge, a potential British impact on his own writing or on Irish letters in general is diluted within a broad European context or bypassed altogether, with artistic and intellectual influence being understood to flow to and return from France: he stresses the importance of Keating’s studies in Bordeaux on his formation as a scholar, learnt the Breton language while studying in Paris, and wrote that both the Irish and Breton theatre revivals were products of the ‘Celtic imagination’ giving expression ‘to a limited but puissant nationality’. 4 Of course, Synge’s identification with Gallic culture squares neatly with the long intersection of Irish and French radical politics: as the long-standing enemy of England and the selfinterested ally of a smaller Catholic country, France had intermittently intervened in Irish political matters. Moreover, it is partly for such reasons that the Abbey acting style drew explicitly from the minimalist French school rather than what it dismissed as the ostentatious English style. Mark Mortimer critiques the attention paid to Yeats’s dismissal of Synge’s Paris experience, insisting that the ‘great creative period’ of 1902–5 can only be fully assessed in relation to the budding dramatist’s time in the French capital: In Paris, he read widely and retained what was appropriate to his own intellectual and aesthetic growth. In Paris, he learned much from the lectures he went to at the University [. . . ] attending the lectures of d’Arbois de Jubainville on Celtic civilization and languages, he returned to a study of the Irish language and acquired a knowledge of, and a love for, Irish mythology. In Paris, [. . . ] he saw many great plays and laid the foundations for his work as a dramatist [. . . ] and learned the trade of writing. 5 3 Roy Foster, ‘Good Behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish Etiquette’, in Nicholas Grene (ed.), Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), 45. 4 Synge, ‘An Irish Historian’, CW 2: 361; Maurice Bourgeois (ed.), Studies in AngloIrish Literature. John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (London: Constable, 1913), 36; Synge, ‘A Celtic Theatre’, CW 2: 393. 5 Mark Mortimer, ‘Synge and France’, in Joseph McMinn (ed.), The Internationalism of Irish Literature and Drama (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), 92–3.

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Moreover, at the Collège de France, where he was simply irlandais, Synge was able to recreate himself as an unhyphenated Irishman. In Paris, he was not the Anglo-Irishman who had learnt Irish from a Protestant clergyman at Trinity using only a New Testament translation in an era in which oral Irish was gaining primacy over written. There, for all most people knew, he was an ‘authentic’ Irish-speaking Gael. Bourgeois recounts an anecdote regarding what must have been a formative experience for Synge: Prof. D’Arbois made it a point of knowing whether there were any Irish students in the audience attending his lectures. One day it was whispered to him that there was un Irlandais dans la salle [an Irishman in the room]. The Irlandais was J. M. Synge. D’Arbois asked him about the pronunciation of certain words in Gaelic. [. . . ] And for several lectures Synge acted as amateur assistant in Irish at the Collège de France. 6

Synge welded the French idiom of bohemianism and the Irish mythohistoric tradition of the pre-Celts in constructing marginalized Irish groups, and this imaginative leap between two ostensibly disparate discourses of the exotic was made possible by the intellectual liberation of studying in Paris. In the French capital, he could engage with Ireland’s culture without having to deal with its contentious identity politics. Keating emphasizes Ireland’s links to ‘the Orient’ in the mytho-historyinspired History, and Synge would have been exposed to d’Arbois de Jubainville’s somewhat similar theories connecting ancient Ireland to Homer’s Greece at his time at the Collège de France. 7 Synge reviewed the English-language translation of d’Arbois de Jubainville’s 1883 study of The Book of Invasions, which pointed to manifold comparanda in classical and Oriental mythology, a thesis that he found to be ‘suggestive’. 8 Thus, France is the location in which the veracity of Irish mytho-history is intellectually confirmed to the Irishman. 6 7

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 35–6. Synge readily absorbed d’Arbois de Jubainville’s theories to judge by his review of a Gregory publication in which he suggests that the Cuchulainn narrative arose in Ireland in the manner of the Homeric epic in Greece. Synge, ‘An Epic of Ulster’, CW 2: 368. The dramatist elsewhere refers to Cuchulainn as ‘l’Achille de l’Irlande’, in Synge, ‘La vielle littérature irlandaise’, CW 2: 353. 8 Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville, The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, trans. R. I. Best (Dublin: Hodges & Figgis; London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1903). Synge’s review appeared in The Speaker, 2 April 1904.

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The Irishman who has immersed himself in bohemian Paris is transformed by the experience, as Synge described in a review of an Impressionist exhibition at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin written for the Manchester Guardian. 9 Nonetheless, Synge’s debt to the French capital ‘was deliberately underestimated by George Moore and Stephen McKenna’: Moore believed that he himself was the one Irishman capable of interpreting France, whilst the dramatist’s friend and fellow-writer McKenna played down Synge’s French ‘to defend him against the charge of being “Frenchified” [. . . ] levelled by extreme nationalists and smug pietists in Dublin’ outraged by The Shadow of a Glen and The Playboy of the Western World. 10 Ironically, despite the underlying sympathies between French and Irish culture, Synge’s engagement with the Parisian scene was a step too far for many ultranationalists. The derivative ‘foreign’ decadence of Synge’s drama led the aforementioned Bulfin to accuse him of being a kind of literary Dr. Frankenstein, ‘hunting for slimy, clammy, hideous things [. . . ] gleaning odds and ends of humanity from graveyards and dead-houses and making a monster!’ 11 Even the dramatist’s French biographer feels the need to defend his subject and himself with the assurance that Synge was ‘one of the few Irish writers who Europeanized Ireland without degaelicizing it’. 12 Synge’s depiction of peoples of the road undoubtedly draws from the subversive discourse of the bohemian that saturated the Parisian cultural scene during the period in which he resided there: ‘[T]he terms “gypsy” and “bohemian” frequently became interchangeable in nineteenth-century French literature [. . . ] [and] the gypsy began to lend his name to all those artists and other supposed cultural vagabonds who chose to lead a creative life outside the mainstream of bourgeois society.’ 13 Gypsies constituted the most fashionable element of the Great Exhibition held at Paris in June 1878: a Gypsy orchestra was mobbed, while a Russian Gypsy choir sang in the Orangerie to great applause. 14 The idiom of bohémienisme was likewise available to the 9 10 11 12 13

Synge, ‘Good Pictures in Dublin’, CW 2: 391. Mortimer, ‘Synge and France’, 87. Bulfin, quoted in Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 61. Bourgeois, ibid. 63. Marilyn R. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1985), 2. 14 Leland, Gypsies, 74–5.

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fictional Irish resident of Paris: the restless and dissident hero of Synge’s first play, When the Moon Has Set (c .1900–1), is an artistic uppermiddle-class young Irishman recently returned from Paris. Furthermore, in The Tinker’s Wedding, the overlapping definitions of ‘bohemian’ circulate in the interactions of bon vivant priest and knowing older tinker woman. When considered in the light of Synge’s immersion in Left Bank Paris, Mary Byrne’s ease in handling the worldly clergyman is suddenly revealed to be that of one bohémien with another, while her scorn for Sarah’s desire to wed is rooted in the vagabond-artist’s disdain for bourgeois values. Although much attention has been given to Synge’s encounters with the tramps of Wicklow, he also studied some of the more intriguing pariahs of Paris. Synge’s fascination with the rôdeurs de barrière (prowlers) of the Montrouge district of Paris had been aroused by reading of their fortune-telling exploits in French studies of occult science, 15 and Bourgeois suggests that the Revival drama’s glorification of the vagabond and the wandering fiddler was an importation from fin-de-siècle theatre that the Irish dramatist was likely exposed to: ‘not only in Synge, but in the whole contemporary Anglo-Irish drama, we find a romantic glorification of the tramp and the fiddler, not unlike, it seems, that in M. Jean Richepin’s Chemineau.’ Le Chemineau (the vagabond) was first produced at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, Paris, on 16 February 1897. Synge was in Paris from October 1896 to May 1897 and could rarely resist a melodrama, so he may well have seen the hugely successful work. Richepin’s play was one of the most popular of its era, and its narrative of an unhappy country girl saddled with an elderly husband who is tempted by the charms of a honey-tongued tramp immediately recalls The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World. Like Synge after him, Richepin enjoyed performing the bohemian: he journeyed with Gypsies, took a gitan as a lover, and insisted that he was of Gypsy descent. In a storm that recalls the Playboy riots of 1907, Richepin’s controversial utilization of a heightened form of naturalistic underworld language in his first book of poems led to the author’s imprisonment for its ‘immoral’ language. 16 15 16

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 26 n.; 44 n. Sisley Huddleston, Bohemian, Literary and Social Life in Paris (London: Harrap, 1928), 408–9.

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Gypsies, tramps, and tinkers were being depicted on the stages of Dublin and Paris in the years that Synge moved back and forth between both cities, and an extract from Brand, a play by Henrik Ibsen featuring a Gypsy woman who torments and kills an evangelical clergyman, was produced by the Theatre of Ireland in December 1906. Although markedly different in tone to Synge’s play centred on tinkers published some months later, Brand pits the non-sedentary and the representative of organized religion against each other in a manner analogous to The Tinker’s Wedding. Moreover, it is on record that the Dublin production of Brand did explicitly influence the depiction of a woman of the road in O’Kelly’s The Shuiler’s Child. 17 Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Synge saw the Richepin or Ibsen productions that so closely anticipated the concerns of his own oeuvre, nor is the insinuation being made that Synge was necessarily directly influenced by either playwright. In fact, if Synge did not see Richepin’s play and was not inspired by Ibsen’s treatment of a clash of clergyman and Gypsies, then such similarities underscore the fact that Synge’s work is part of a moment in which radical writers throughout Europe utilized the discourse of bohemianism to situate themselves within the espace itinérant. All in all, the Irish Independent review of The Shadow of the Glen that suggested Synge’s drama emerged from ‘the gaiety of Paris’ and Arthur Griffith’s accusation that it reeked of ‘the decadent cynicism that passes current in the Latin Quartier’ are perceptive in their way. 18 Synge first visited the Continent in 1893, staying with the von Eicken family at Koblenz, where he pursued his violin studies, and Bourgeois constructs Synge’s Continental sojourns as the wanderings of a bohemian poet: ‘He [. . . ] is said to have led a free, unconventional life in those days, listening to stories in the Harz and the Bavarian woods, making friends with servants and poor people, and more than once sleeping out under a hedge or in a farm or a hay-loft.’ 19 To Synge, the artist intuitively gravitates towards the ‘authenticity’ of the vagrant lifestyle, which involves ‘a certain wildness that gives it romance 17 Seamus O’Kelly confessed to Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, who played the shuiler in his 1909 drama, that her role as the Gypsy woman in the 1906 Dublin production of Brand was the genesis of the play. Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, as told to Edward Kenny, The Splendid Years (Dublin: Duffy, 1955), 79. 18 Quoted in David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge 1871–1909 (1959; rev. edn. New York: New York University Press, 1989), 159. 19 Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 18.

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and a peculiar value for those who look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary man’. 20 In Paris, where he resided almost exclusively on the Rive Gauche, the budding dramatist played the violin ‘to friends at night with (as someone who heard him writes) “the wild passion of a gypsy” ’, while one Aran islander recalled him simply as someone who ‘ “used to play the fiddle, and was a great conjurer” ’. 21 In like manner, Stephens situates his uncle’s vagrant persona within the finde-siècle appropriation of Gypsy identity: ‘He used the tramp or tinker as his symbol of the artist [. . . ] because he saw an analogy between the relation of the vagrant to peasant society and that of the artist to the educated, bourgeois class.’ 22 The Dublin playwright’s appearance seemed to reveal his innate bohemianism: Synge did not, according to Bourgeois, ‘look particularly Irish. There was rather something Scotch and even slightly foreign about him’. A friend went so far as to say ‘that in the Wicklow glens you often meet Synge in the person of roadside beggars’. 23 In one instance at least, Synge literally performed the bohémien: on a visit to the von Eickens in 1894, he appeared with the family in a ‘tableau of a gipsy camp’. 24 Moreover, Synge’s dress combined the codes of the shabby Parisian artist and the dandified Gypsy of Left Bank café orchestras. Stephens recalls a random encounter with his uncle at the height of his reputation: ‘He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat [. . . ]. His cape hung to his knees, and he carried one of his heavy walking sticks. He looked like a figure from a foreign city. (I remembered his saying that it was the duty of everyone to make himself as picturesque as possible.)’ 25 Whether consciously or not, Synge seems to have based his Aran persona—the skilful fiddle playing, the magic tricks, and the immersion in outdoor activities—upon the more attractive aspects of the well-established stereotype of the male Gypsy or tinker. In turn, the positive image of the bohemian Irish tinker that had solidified in popular discourse by the mid-twentieth century 20 21 22

Synge, ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, CW 2: 208. Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 47 n.; 80. Edward Stephens, My Uncle John: Edward Stephens’s Life of J. M. Synge, ed. Andrew Carpenter (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 156. 23 Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 66; 66 n. 24 25 Stephens, My Uncle John, 91. Ibid. 176.

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had gathered Syngean accretions: the tinker ‘has [. . . ] a magnificent command of the traditional tales of Irish folklore’ and ‘the soul of a poet. He plays the fiddle divinely. He has never, I am sure, stolen money or clothes or personal property. But he is an inveterate and highly skilled poacher’ and ‘knows more about the ways of the wild creatures of the countryside than any other man’. 26 Although it is predictable that Synge’s exposure to the cultural currents of fin-de-siècle Paris impinged upon his construct of the vagabond and the tinker, it should likewise be noted that his islander is equally ‘Frenchified’. The islanders described in The Aran Islands are bohemianized by the capricious nature of the islands’ erratic climate, which create an affinity between ‘the moods of these people’ and the changeable disposition of the artist. In addition, Aran’s ‘scattered cottages’ remind the author of ‘places I have sometimes passed when travelling at night in France or Bavaria’. The instinctively urbane islanders are uncannily quick to pick up the French phrases Synge teaches them, an interest reciprocated by the French philologists they observe visiting their island. The Gallic spirit hovers over every aspect of Aran: if the islanders’ innate sophistication links them to Paris, then their attractively primitive superstitions recall Brittany, one of the more ‘quaint’ districts of France. The islanders are ‘natural’ bohemians, since the surprisingly independent nature of the Aran women is compared to that of the unconventional females of Paris, and a young girl Synge seems particularly interested in is surprised by the draw she feels for the liberated lifestyle of the Rive Gauche. 27 Bohemianism primes the Irish cultural nationalist to recognize the islanders’ Oriental roots: The red dresses of the women glow with ‘Eastern richness’, while a pair of girls Synge meets speak ‘with a delicate exotic intonation’. Moreover, the Aran female is unconsciously and incongruously picturesque to the young Irish bohemian who has cultivated modish tastes in the galleries of Paris. In like manner, the backbreaking toil of Aran kiln workers, in which Synge sees the ‘colour’ of a ‘picture from the East’, is perceived through the rose-tint of Oriental quaintness. Even the hearth, the centre of the realm of the Aran housewife, is Orientalized in Synge’s account of an eviction on the 26 Brian Seymour Vesey-Fitzgerald, Gypsies of Britain: An Introduction to Their History (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles, 1973), 184–5. 27 Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 74; 127; 60; 80, 102; 143; 114.

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island, while the ‘Eastern’ nature of the sean-nós singing of an islander is implied by its comparison with a ‘chant’ Synge once heard ‘from a party of Orientals’ he travelled with on a French train. 28 If France is the location in which the veracity of Irish mytho-history is intellectually bolstered for Synge, then it is likewise the place in which he finds the pre-Celtic nature of the western islander to be emotionally confirmed.

THE ANTITHESIS OF THE BOURGEOISIE: THE TINKER MUSICIAN IN IRISH REVIVAL DRAMA Tinkers have women who go before them and sing and play. Liber Vagatorum (c .1510)

The Revival fashion for depicting tinkers as the antithesis of the expanding Irish bourgeoisie and the speakers of truth to the powers of land ownership, religiosity, and conservatism readily maps onto the fin-desiècle mania for the non-conformist bohemian. The storyline encoding maverick values and tinker or tramp characters was ubiquitous in early Abbey Theatre productions: Yeats’s Where There is Nothing features a dissident ‘Country Gentleman’ who marries a girl of ‘the tribe’, and a large number of his early plays include strolling characters who reject sedentary values; Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon (1907) centres on a ragged ballad singer, while The Travelling Man (1910) portrays Christ in the shape of a tinker; O’Kelly’s The Shuiler’s Child (first Abbey production: 1910) concerns a woman of the roads who wants her child to be reared on a farm; Douglas Hyde’s An Tincéar agus an tSídheóg (1902; translated as The Tinker and the Fairy) celebrates an ambulant fiddler. Of the Abbey productions noted, only O’Kelly’s The Shuiler’s Child could be said to be less than wholeheartedly admiring of the vagabond subculture. In discussing the ‘literariness’ of the peasant dialect utilized in Synge’s plays, Bourgeois implies that the playwright’s social origins render him somewhat irrelevant as a commentator on Irish rural culture. Indeed, Synge signed his love-letters to his fiancée, Molly Allgood, with the 28

Ibid. 58; 52; 130; 77; 89; 141.

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nickname ‘Tramp’, and this alter ego may also have been an attempt to contain the economic and social chasm between ruling-class artists and the marginalized groups their artistic gaze fell upon. Significantly, Synge notes in The Aran Islands that he brought his fiddle on later trips to Aran in order to have something with which to engage the people, with whom he found it increasingly difficult to gain common ground. This may have been a canny attempt to lessen the social distance between islander and urbanite: the fiddle was, according to nationalist writer Robert Lynd in Home Life in Ireland (1909), not only inextricably entwined with the popular image of the itinerant musician, but was also one of the most ‘patriotic’ instruments of the Revival. 29 Certainly, the wandering fiddler was one of the many implicitly authentic Irish types that Campbell records in his account of tramping in Donegal. Therefore, it is far from surprising that the trope of the fiddler’s compulsion to wander was popular in plays on the bohemian theme produced in many Irish theatres during the opening years of the twentieth century. Rutherford Mayne’s The Turn of the Road (1906) was first produced at Queen’s University Belfast and follows the contours of the contemporaneous Abbey play featuring a peripatetic musician. Mayne’s drama concerns the struggle of fiddler Robbie John Granahan, whose skill is perceived to be a folly in a farmer’s son. In order to demonstrate to Robbie ‘what fiddling brings a man [to]’, his father brings home a drunken fiddler-tramp from the fair. However, the erudite vagabond, who nonchalantly peppers his conversation with French phrases and declares himself the former leader of ‘the Blue Bohemian Wind and String Band’, fascinates Robbie. Clearly, the fiddle is associated with Bohemia, the Continent, beggary, and drunkenness, which are the antithesis of the values required for farming. Due to the domestication of the French discourse of the bohemian, however, Robbie’s ostensible desertion of native values in walking away from his farming heritage and taking to the road is in fact a patriotic gesture. Moreover, in light of the following chapter’s suggestion that the tinker figure emerged in the post-Partition period as a conduit through which the island’s political divisions were expressed, it is notable that both Belfast and ‘Southern’ drama of the Revival era were united in promoting tramping as an 29

Robert Lynd, Home Life in Ireland (London: Mills and Boon, 1909), 316.

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admirable and creative lifestyle. Aside from The Turn of the Road, two other plays utilizing the theme of the fiddler’s bohemian compulsion to wander opened near-contemporaneously: Pádraic Colum’s The Fiddler’s House, a revised version of Broken Soil (1903), was staged on 21 March 1907 by the Theatre of Ireland in the Rotunda, Dublin, and E. K. Worthington’s one-act play, The Burden, was performed by the Cork Dramatic Society on 11 May 1910. The Fiddler’s House concerns itinerant musician Conn Hourican’s irrepressible desire to return to the road after a five-year stint in a house. Conn had been accompanied by his daughters Maire and Anne on his rambles, but settled with his children when Maire inherited a farm. Anne hopes to marry the son of a neighbouring farmer, but her suitor’s father disapproves of a girl without property. Colum sets his drama in a rural Ireland in which monetary concerns determine choice of marriage partner and even possibility of union, and Conn is disgusted by the values of a people who ‘would leave the best fiddler at the fair and go and look at a bullock’. 30 Disinclined to see Anne denied happiness, Maire signs the farm over to her sister, and reluctantly returns to the road with her father in order to make room for the young couple. The Fiddler’s House suggests that vagabondage is a necessary sacrifice to be embraced by the few so that the majority may enjoy living on the land. Colum appears to privilege the romance of Conn’s favoured lifestyle over the avariciousness of small-farming Ireland. However, in contrast to Mayne’s drama, the conclusion of Colum’s play posits that the preeminence of the wandering artist is an ancient Irish privilege that the forward-thrusting modern state cannot afford. Ultimately, The Fiddler’s House is much less challenging of sedentarist assumptions than Synge’s work on similar themes: Abbey actress Máire Nic Shuibhlaigh notes that the positive response of Dublin audiences and critics to the 1903 version of Colum’s play were ‘in striking contrast to those of In the Shadow of the Glen, two months before’. 31 Synge’s tinker construct negotiates native and French traditions of the exotic, and the erstwhile music student is likewise central to the coming together of Continental and indigenous discourses of the ambulant musician in Revival drama. The fiddle’s status as a ‘patriotic’ instrument 30 31

Pádraic Colum, The Fiddler’s House (Dublin: Maunsel, 1907), 7. Máire Nic Shuibhlaigh, as told to Edward Kenny, The Splendid Years (Dublin: Duffy, 1955), 47.

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associated with the stroller drew from both the nationalist valorization of the wandering artist and a broader European Romantic tradition with which Synge would have been familiar. In its endeavour to express the ‘soul of the nation’, Romantic music tended to appropriate the ‘colourful’ and the ethnic, and the era saw an upsurge of interest in the subjects of the Gypsy and Gypsy music among formal composers. The Romantic period in music coincided with the rise of the Gypsy as a ubiquitous trope of sensuality in European letters, and the experimental composer Franz Liszt welded both trends in his study, The Gipsy in Music (1859). To Liszt, the ‘still Hindoo’ music of the non-intellectual and child-like Hungarian Gypsy expressed instinctive poetry; the ‘innate indiscipline’ of the Gypsy maligned by Grellmann becomes proof of his Romantic credentials for Liszt. The Gipsy in Music contains dozens of comparisons between the over-intellectual Jewish musician who ‘perceives in music nothing more than an industry’ 32 and the contrasting intuitiveness of the unlettered Gypsy performer. That the peculiarities of the Gypsies have ‘curious analogies with those of the Israelites’ is a truism that is repeated incessantly in ethnographic narratives of the Victorian era 33 and even inflects Irish anti-tinker sentiment and castigations made during an 1880s pogrom in Cork. 34 Although doubtlessly imbricated by the Irish trope of the wandering fiddler, Synge’s representation of the ambulant musician simultaneously emerges from the broader formal European musical tradition to which he was exposed by his music studies. Étude Morbide (c .1899), was a veiled autobiographical account of Synge’s life on the Continent, centred on a musician who has a breakdown after a failed concert. Its Romantic authorial voice was embarrassing to the older Synge, who exhorted Yeats not to publish it in a letter to the poet written prior to his operation in mid-1908. The saturation of Étude Morbide with Lisztean 32 Franz Liszt, The Gipsy in Music / Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie (1859; trans. Edwin Evans. 2 vols. London: Reeves, 1926), vol. 2, 300. 33 See [Robert Hogarth Patterson], ‘The Ethnology of Europe’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 76 (Aug. 1854), 178. 34 ‘The Jew man was shunned as were the gypsies and the [tinkers], all bringing upon themselves unvoiced odium, which was mysteriously connected with sex and [. . . ] sallow skin’, in Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland (New York: Plume, 1999), 44–5; Jews were, moreover, castigated as ‘crucifying gipsies’ during a Cork pogrom in the 1880s ‘Crucifying Gipsies’, Newcastle Chronicle 13 March 1888. Liverpool University Library, Scott Macfie archive (SM K34.85, unpaginated cutting).

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ideas indicates the degree to which the composer’s folk-musician-asnoble-savage paradigm had permeated Synge’s artistic discourse: ‘All art that is not conceived by a soul in harmony with some mood of the earth is without value [. . . ]. Music is the finest art, for it alone can express directly what is not utterable.’ The troubled hero of Étude Morbide burns his trite, insincere ‘sonnets written in Paris’, finding that the only poetry he is only able to read is ‘the songs of peasants’. 35 In a frequently reworked text entitled ‘The Duality of Literature’, Synge reveals that he shares Liszt’s Romantic concept of the purity and directness of folk melodies, which enfold ‘universal’ emotions ‘in a way complex art cannot’. 36 Synge’s immersion in Irish folk traditions and his self-conscious fostering of a Lisztean European artistic sensibility collide in the account of a dream he has on Aran in which he is made frenzied by mysterious music against his will, the result of what he terms ‘a psychic memory’ attached to the neighbourhood: It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quickness [. . . ] the sound began to move in my nerves and blood, and urge me to dance with them. [. . . ] Then the luring excitement became more powerful than my will, and my limbs moved [. . . ] I was swept away in a whirlwind of notes [. . . ] till I could not distinguish between the instruments and the rhythm and my own person or consciousness. 37

The passage invokes the folk belief that ‘the little people’ enticed humans for a brief sojourn to an irresistible realm by their beautiful playing, or could be charmed by skilled human musicians. The traditional association of fairies and tinker musicians is conjured up in Hyde’s The Tinker and the Fairy, in which the fiddler ‘king of tinkers’ saves a dying fairy with a transforming kiss, and in Gregory’s McDonough’s Wife, which depicts a piper suspected of having been taught by the fairies who is married to a woman rumoured to be ‘a tinker’s brat’. 38 The identification of skilled musicianship with a putative

35 36 37 38

Synge, ‘Étude Morbide’, CW 2: 35. Synge, ‘The Duality of Literature’, TCD MS 4382, Trinity College, Dublin. Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 99–100. Gregory, McDonough’s Wife, The Collected Plays of Lady Gregory, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, vol. 2. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 116.

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non-Gaelic caste is rooted in the mytho-historic classification of remnants of vanquished pre-Celtic peoples, as provided by MacFirbis: ‘All who are fair-haired, vengeful, large, every plunderer, all who are musical, professors of music and entertainment, those who are adepts in all druidical arts, they are descended from the Tuatha Dé Danann in Ireland.’ 39 The shared pre-Gaelic origin of tinker and fairy is the source of the commonplace association of the figures in Irish folklore and Revival writing alike, and Synge appears to have invoked this archaic connection between contemporary Other and preternatural being in The Aran Islands. Synge intimates that pre-Gaelic traces are still to be found on Aran when he refers to propping his book on ‘stones touched by the Fir-bolgs’ when he visits the islands’ prehistoric fort, Dun Aengus. 40 This pseudohistorical timeframe is even more explicitly evoked in the suggestion he makes in ‘The Last Fortress of the Celt’ that the island men ‘showed traces of the Pre-Celtic blood’. 41 By referring to the presence on Aran of Fir-Bolg, Synge implies that the islanders are their descendants, since folkloric belief suggested that, once vanquished by the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Fir-Bolg fled to Aran. Later, having been defeated by the Gaels, the Tuatha Dé Danann descended underground and became those afterwards referred to as fairies. 42 On an 1857 ethnological expedition to ‘the great Firbolg fort of Dun Aengus’, which included John O’Donovan of the Ordnance Survey, antiquarian Sir William Wilde implied that the contemporary islanders were the descendants of Aran’s pre-Celtic inhabitants: ‘I believe that I now point to the stronghold prepared as the last standing-place of the Firbolg aborigines of Ireland, here to fight their last battle if driven to the western surge.’ 43 Synge’s association of archaic populations and their putative Aran descendants with fairies allies the islanders with tinkers as a people apart 39 Duald MacFirbis, Book of Genealogies, quoted in Eóin MacNeill, Phases of Irish History (Dublin: Gill, 1919), 79. 40 Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 69. 41 Synge, ‘The Last Fortress of the Celt’, CW 2: 463. 42 Proinsias MacCana, Celtic Mythology (London: Hamlyn, 1970), 63–5. 43 Sir William Wilde, quoted in Declan Kiberd, ‘Synge’s Tristes Tropiques: The Aran Islands’, in Nicholas Grene (ed.), Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), 83.

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from the majority of ‘Gaelic’ mainlanders. The opening chapter noted that in his 1919 study, Phases of Irish History, MacNeill deduced a likely genetic connection between early twentieth-century tinkers and the preMilesian settlers of Ireland. Although the Irish historian’s intent was doubtlessly benign, his use of the language of conquest in relation to the Celtic usurpation of the imputed ancestors of tinkers configured the minority as an eternally vanquished people. By contrast, Synge’s nomads in The Tinker’s Wedding are closer in culture and aspirations to the settled Irish than the sedentary-peripatetic binary generally allows for. An analysis of the construct of tinkers and islanders as dwellers in archaic Irish cultural time in Synge’s prose suggests that he was inspired by the same mytho-historiographic sources as MacNeill. Nevertheless, the implications of Synge’s invocation of Irish founding myths are very different. MacNeill’s vanquished tinkers lack the heritage of the majority, but conversely, the non-Celtic origin of the marginalized populations of Synge’s imagination broaden the definition of ‘authentic’ Irishness. The dramatist’s linking of tinkers, tramps, and islanders to pre-Celtic peoples emerges from his desire to stress Ireland’s genetic and cultural diversity during an era in which ultra-nationalism seized the terms ‘Gael’ and ‘Celt’ as equivalents of ‘Irish’. In contrast to contemporaneous ultranationalist rhetoric that granted authentic Irishness to the Catholic, Irish-speaking Gael alone, Bourgeois suggests that it is his very hybridity that made Synge the quintessential Irishman: [The] remote English origin of the Synge family [. . . ] explains the hostility of certain Irish critics who infer a sort of a priori un-Irishness in his work [. . . ]. Synge was born in Ireland; of course he was no true-born Irishman, for the constant intermarriage of races, which has taken place in Ireland more than anywhere else, has made the aboriginal Gael in all his purity a veritable myth; nay, despite the apparent paradox, Synge’s English extraction proves him to be peculiarly Irish [. . . ]. 44

Synge’s opening up of the definition of Irishness was fuelled by the increasing narrowness of the concept in the late Revival and postPartition eras, a contraction that excluded both ‘pre-Celtic’ tinker and Protestant Anglo-Irishman alike. 44

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 4–6.

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‘EASTERN’ ISL ANDERS AND TINKERS: SYNGE’S SEARCH FOR THE EVOLUTIONARILY EXCEPTIONAL Synge’s solely artistic preoccupations led him to take an interest in the modern Irishman almost only in so far as he typifies a survival of the dateless Irishman of the sagas. Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre

For Bourgeois, the aboriginal Gael in all his purity may have seemed a patently obvious myth. However, the following assessment of the intersection of discourses of evolution and the Fall in Synge’s imagining of tinkers and islanders will suggest that for very personal reasons, the notion that descendants of the archaic Irish might be extant was an emotional truth for Synge. Due to the dramatist’s quintessentially Victorian trauma in relation to his loss of faith on discovering Darwin, the pre-Celtic cultural time in which such marginalized populations exist is a compensatory space that is also prelapsarian and beyond evolutionary change. Moreover, even after Synge lost his Protestant faith, it continued to define him socially in the contentious atmosphere of Revival Ireland to a degree that sometimes made him uncomfortable. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the archaic space in which the islander and tinker exist in Synge’s prose is implicitly pre-Christian as well as pre-Celtic. The East in which Synge’s islanders and wanderers operate encompasses the archaic Oriental worlds of the Garden of Eden and the realm from which the pre-Celtic settlers journeyed in the pseudo-historical annals. In an embryonic version of The Aran Islands originally published in 1901, Synge utilized the phrase ‘curiously Mongolian features’ in describing Aran women, and in a telling replication that suggests the shared ‘Eastern’ origins of wanderers and islanders, Synge later recycled the exact expression to describe tinkers. 45 This imagined East endows both populations with ‘Mongolian features’ and the Fir-bolg ancestors whose mythic associations place their descendants beyond change. Nationalist author and surgeon George Sigerson’s claim that the earliest Irish settlers had arrived fully evolved takes on a whole new significance 45 Synge, ‘The Last Fortress of the Celt’ (1901), A Treasury of Irish Folklore, 2nd rev. edn. (New York: Bonanza, 1983), 463; Synge, ‘People and Places’, CW 2: 198.

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in light of the nature of this alternative space in Synge’s imagining. ‘And it may be a comfort to know, in view of prevalent hypotheses,’ Dr. Sigerson noted in 1894, ‘that the stock of [the primeval colonists of our land] never went through evolutions in this country.’ 46 The pre-Christian and pre-Gaelic world of Irish pseudo-history is the Eden of the cultural nationalist wishing to ignore the sectarianism and factionalism that placed the mythicized Irish-speaking Catholic Gael and Protestant West Briton in contention during the Revival. The dramatist’s desire to efface sectarian difference and even Christianity itself is patent in his description of the Revd Keating as ‘the historian of pagan Ireland’ in a review of the priest’s poetry. 47 In addition, Synge’s detestation of the divisive nature of cultural politics in Revival Ireland is obvious when he predicts in ‘Can We Go Back into Our Mother’s Womb?’ that the England-obsessed parochialism of the Gaelic League will only be swept aside when Ireland learns ‘again that she is part of Europe’. 48 Synge’s Revival Eden is a garden in which all settlers are unproblematically Irish regardless of heritage or mother tongue, as he himself had been during those seminal days at the Collège de France. Nostalgia for the uncomplicated religiosity and social interactions of childhood permeates Synge’s imagining that tinkers and islanders somehow survived the cataclysmic fall into modernity, progress, and social and religious difference that all others endure. For the innocent dwellers in this Revival Eden, there is no organized religion or economic hierarchy to differentiate people, and Ireland has not yet fallen into factions of ‘Gael’ and ‘non-Gael’. Synge was born in 1871, the year Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, and W. J. McCormack’s biography opens by situating him in a period in which evolutionary theory was popularly understood to exemplify the disruption of traditional patterns of living by industrialization, urbanization, and advances in rapid transportation. According to Synge’s ‘Autobiography’, the initial encounter with evolutionary theory during adolescence was almost a second Fall of Man to his instinctively religious imagination: 46 George Sigerson, ‘Irish Literature: Its Origin, Environment’, in The Revival of Irish Literature: Addresses by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. George Sigerson, and Dr. Douglas Hyde (London: Fisher Unwin, 1894), 64. 47 Synge, ‘The Poems of Geoffrey Keating’, CW 2: 356. 48 Synge, ‘Can We Go Back into Our Mother’s Womb?’ CW 2: 400.

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When I was about fourteen I obtained a book of Darwin’s. It opened in my hands at a passage where he asks how can we explain the similarity between a man’s hand and a bird’s or bat’s wings except by evolution. I flung the book aside [. . . ]. Till then I had never doubted [. . . ]. I had of course heard of atheists but as vague monsters that I was unable to realize. It seemed that I was become in a moment the playfellow of Judas. Incest and parricide were but a consequence of the idea that possessed me. 49

Synge’s subsequent reading of Darwin and Herbert Spencer induced a sense of a universe ruled by randomness and existential hopelessness, as suggested by a passage in ‘Étude Morbide’: I have been reading Herbert Spencer and my creed is now very simple. Humanity has evolved from the conditions of the world, and will return to the nothing it has come from. Each separate life is but a ripple on the waves,—a blade of grass on the roadside. For those who fail, there is no hope. 50

Synge, whose brothers and brothers-in-law were conventionally successful, invokes the ubiquitous Victorian misapplication of Spencer’s phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ to explain the failure of the artist in comparison with his conformist siblings: In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside. 51

Furthermore, Synge links his loss of religious faith in the face of evolutionary theory to the passing away of naiveté in socio-political matters by recording that allegiance switched from ‘the Kingdom of God’ to the ‘kingdom of Ireland’. 52 A traumatic reaction to Darwin’s theory was generally more of a Protestant than a Catholic phenomenon in Ireland, and Yeats, like Synge, constructs the Protestant-led Revival as a compensatory response to evolutionary theory: ‘deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my 49 50 51 52

Synge, ‘Autobiography’, CW 2: 10–11. Synge, ‘Étude Morbide’, CW 2: 29. Synge, ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, CW 2: 202. Synge, ‘Autobiography’, CW 2: 13.

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childhood, I made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition.’ 53 Synge’s mother was nurtured in an evangelical north of Ireland household to hold an almost dualistic view of the world, and raised her son according to the same doctrines. As Synge retrospectively constructs it, this rearing inflected his reaction to evolutionary theory and populated his over-active imagination with visions of damnation. 54 Yeats later found comfort in mysticism: a liberal Protestant background such as his may have predisposed a resistance to the nihilism the teenage Synge succumbed to, since the evangelical view of a fallen world was closer to the evolutionist’s vision of reality. 55 Moreover, Synge’s rearing seems to have developed in him a self-consciousness concerning the troubling distance between Christian denominations in Ireland. He attempted to bridge this chasm both with a compensatory vision of an Edenic space in which social and religious differences have not yet evolved and by challenging the narrowness of his upbringing: Synge rebelled against his mother’s belief that the theatre encouraged worldliness, and steeped himself in Vatican culture during a Continental sojourn until ‘his early ideas of Catholicism seem[ed] fantastic [. . . ]. He knew that his mother, praying for “the poor dark Roman Catholic” [. . . ] could never comprehend the Church of Rome’. 56 Synge was fascinated by the Old Testament-infused mytho-history tradition, and implicitly describes his own scholarly development when he suggests that the vision of Irish history possessed by the intellectually curious pre-Revival youth was shaped by Gaelic mytho-histories, since these were one of the few readily available sources on the subject: In those days if an odd undergraduate of Trinity felt a vague longing to know more of Ireland and her past than he could learn from his teachers or companions, he had to wander on Aston’s Quay and Bachelor’s Walk, picking 53 54 55

Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 115–16. Synge, ‘Autobiography’, CW 2: 4. ‘The doctrines of predestination; of original sin; of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race; of the primacy of Satan in this world [. . . ], faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the “liberal” popular illusions that babies are all born good’, in T. H. Huxley, quoted in James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 349. 56 Stephens, My Uncle John, 162; 97.

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up ugly pamphlets with Grattan’s Speeches in them, or Davis’s Poems, or the True History of Ireland from before the Flood. 57

In Synge’s imagination, the islands of Aran are temporally both mythohistoric and antedeluvian: the description of ‘the first invasion of Ireland before the Flood’ in Keating’s History ‘harmonize[d] fantastically’ with Synge’s experiences of Aran and his mother’s early Old Testament lessons. 58 Even if he later constructed an imagined pre-Gaelic Aran as an alternative to the religion of childhood, the Old Testament narratives of his earliest days primed Synge’s subsequent interest in Irish mytho-history. Despite his stress on their pagan roots, such annals were, after all, accounts of the Irish from the time of Creation and the Deluge in which pseudo Old Testament figures occasionally appeared: for instance, the Book of Invasions details the settling of Ireland before the Flood by Cessair, a figure referred to as Noah’s kinswoman. Synge’s image of antediluvian Ireland was both a return to the Old Testamentdrenched images of childhood and a simultaneous refutation of the Judaeo-Christian nature of the Biblical narratives that had first fired the future writer’s imagination. A strikingly Irish evangelical interpenetration of Old Testament characters and Irish geography informs The Playboy of the Western World, in which Christy foresees himself ‘wandering like Esau or Cain and Abel’ on ‘the Erris plain’. In addition, in the same drama the disparate eras of the antediluvian epoch and the Viking encroachments fuse counter-chronologically: if unearthed, the skull of Christy’s presumed victim would be understood as ‘an old Dane, maybe, was drowned in the flood’. 59 In addition, the Darwinian narrative of the inevitability of change spoke to Synge’s feelings concerning the fate of his own class. Significantly, Synge name-checks Ferriter Castle in his essay ‘In West Kerry’: with his interest in Gaelic tradition, he must have been keenly aware that the Dingle district was the traditional fiefdom of Piaras Feiritéar, a seventeenth-century chieftain-poet trained in the bardic techniques. Keating and Feiritéar were some of the last representatives of dying literary traditions and a sliding Gaelo-Norman upper class, a poignancy inescapable to the author of the semi-autobiographical ‘A Landlord’s 57 58 59

Synge, ‘The Old and New in Ireland’, CW 2: 384. Stephens, My Uncle John, 137. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, CW 4: 109; 133.

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Garden in County Wicklow’, which details a charged confrontation between a thieving boy and a member of the declining Irish Protestant gentry. In the piece, Synge’s own ‘dying’ class is, in the parlance of social Darwinism, ‘degenerating’, to the point where ‘one or two delicate girls’ are left to represent the vigorous men of previous generations. 60 Synge’s consideration of such issues constitutes a distorted echo of Darwin: The theory of natural selection is grounded on the belief that each new variety [. . . ] is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent extinction of the lessfavoured forms almost inevitably follows [. . . ] a few of the sufferers may often long be preserved, from being fitted to some peculiar line of life, or from inhabiting some distant and isolated station, where they have escaped severe competition. 61

Very personally resonant visions of vanishing social orders inflect Synge’s envisioning of Irish history, and his ‘Tramp’ alter ego might also be read as a nod towards an Anglo-Irish perception of escalating crisis. Laura Stephens’s harsh Dana article on the ‘problem’ of the ‘degenerate’ tramp and his ‘crop of dirty and degenerate children’ evokes the popular misunderstanding of Darwinian theory that perceived those on the lowest socio-economic rung as destined to pass on their genetic disadvantage. In like manner, a work published by a Gypsylorist in the same year as The Tinker’s Wedding called upon evolutionist discourse to support the abhorrence the author felt with regard to the ‘mating’ of ‘purebred’ Gypsies and ‘half-breed’ tinkers. 62 By contrast, social Darwinism is selectively refuted in Synge’s prose, wherein the bodily health and longevity of the rural wanderer is repeatedly stressed. Moreover, the constitutions of tinkers and tramps are more robust than those of sedentary people, who are described by Synge in ‘The Oppression of the Hills’ as being vulnerable to madness. However, the vocabulary of social Darwinism that pervaded Victorian writing is evident in The Aran Islands, but only in relation to members of modern industrialized society: vigorous islanders are contrasted with degenerate, overweight 60 61

Synge, ‘A Landlord’s Garden in County Wicklow’, CW 2: 231. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. A Facsimile of the First Edition. Introd. Ernst Mayr. 4th edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 320–2. 62 See Andrew McCormick, The Tinkler-Gypsies (1907; East Ardley, Yorks.: E.P., 1973), 416–17.

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mainland policemen (‘newer types of humanity’), and a gentleman who cannot hunt well is a ‘fallen type’. 63 Within Synge’s oeuvre, members of the gentry and mainlanders are subject to the degeneration imagined to be inherent in the fallen outside world. By contrast, in the first two books of The Aran Islands, mainly set on the middle island of Inishmaan, islanders are depicted as being prelapsarian—which is also, of course, pre-Darwinian—and cannot be judged by post-Darwinian criteria. Synge depicts the islander as possessing ‘the agile walk of the wild animal’, and as being closer to aristocrats than the ‘citizen’, ‘as the wild horse resembles the thoroughbred rather than the [. . . ] cart-horse’. 64 Although natural aristocrats, the Aran islanders are animalistic also, a paradox that could not be encompassed by the popular interpretation of Darwinism that denigrated ‘primitives’ as graceless and degenerate. As with the Land of Eternal Youth of preChristian Irish tradition, leaving the islands leads to illness and slow, unheroic death, as opposed to the sudden, ‘clean’ death typical of Aran: an islander imprisoned on the mainland who comes home ‘feeble and emaciated’ and a young returned emigrant ‘said to be dying’, have both brought back death from the post-lapsarian outside world. Poignantly, Synge perceives himself to have fallen in some manner, evoking an Old Testament image of the serpent in paradise in a description of his presence on Blasket island: ‘I was an interloper only, a refugee in a garden between four seas.’ 65 In the manner of the perfectly evolved pre-Gaelic inhabitants of Ireland envisioned by Sigerson, Aran is a space that contains no inartistic, degenerate, or weak inhabitants, and thus does not require evolution: [T]he waves have made it impossible for clumsy, foolhardy, or timid men to live on these islands. [. . . ] It is likely that much of the intelligence and charm of these people is due to the absence of any division of labour, and to the correspondingly wide development of each individual [. . . ]. The danger of his life on the sea gives him the alertness of a primitive hunter, and the long nights he spends fishing in his curagh bring him some of the emotions that are thought peculiar to men who have lived with the arts. 66 63 64 66

Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 89; 143. 65 Ibid. 66. Synge, ‘In West Kerry’, CW 2: 258. Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 94; 132.

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Aran is a Revival Eden situated in mytho-historic cultural time, while Europe, to the detriment of its deteriorating, over-specialized population, has moved forward with history and industrial and evolutionary ‘progress’. The introduction to The Aran Islands is framed within an anthropological discourse of neutrality and anonymity: Synge describes the geography of the three islands of Aran briefly, and stresses that he has disguised the identity of those of whom he writes. However, the opening (‘we left the quay of Galway in a dense shroud of mist’) charts the movement from this objective reality to an Aran Otherworld that echoes the Celtic afterlife of Synge’s scholarly and emotional interest: 67 To rephrase Corkery’s famous declaration that the Synges were long in Ireland but never of Ireland, the Aran islanders are in contemporary Europe, but not of contemporary Europe: the south islanders are ‘strange men with receding foreheads, high cheek-bones, and ungovernable eyes [who] seem to represent some old type found on these few acres at the extreme border of Europe’. 68 Aran is a reservoir of all that the contemporary Continent has lost. Synge’s work foregrounds the evolutionarily exceptional nature of the Irish-speaking Aran islander, which is subtly validated by the Revival-era intimation that Irish was a vehicle for the preservation of racial authenticity, though the belief also likely inspired Darwinist Alfred Court Haddon to choose the islands for his fieldwork in the early 1890s. 69 A description of a tinker camp in Synge’s ‘People and Places’ equally situates the minority within prelapsarian cultural time: ‘They console us, one moment at least, for the manifold and beautiful life we have all missed who have been born in modern Europe.’ 70 Tinkers and islanders are dwellers in an archaic space Synge conjures up from personally resonant Biblical and mytho-historic traditions, the last ‘primitive child[ren]’ 71 left in a world that has lost everything of real value due to rapid change. Mercier suggests that the women of The Tinker’s Wedding likewise exist in a prelapsarian space: Mary Byrne advises Sarah that a wedding ring will not prevent her from ageing, suggesting it may even 67 69

68 Ibid. 49. Ibid. 140. See Greta Jones, ‘Contested Territories: Alfred Cort Haddon, Progressive Evolutionism and Ireland’, History of European Ideas 24:3 (1998), 195–211. 70 Synge, ‘People and Places’, CW 2: 199. 71 Synge, ‘Autobiography’, CW 2: 13.

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intensify the pain of childbirth. 72 Such pains did not exist before the Fall, and Mercier notes that ‘in this respect at least the tinker women are closer to the Garden of Eden than their bourgeois counterparts [. . . ]. [T]hey seem never to have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, for they have no sense of sin’. 73 Nevertheless, doubt regarding the unsullied nature of the earlier cultural time in which wanderers and tinkers exist creeps into Synge’s better-known drama. At the opening of The Well of the Saints, blind beggars Mary and Martin share prelapsarian contentment. The vagrants unselfconsciously exploit their physical deformity for a living, echoing the ‘sturdy beggar’ furtively celebrated in early modern rogue pamphlets. However, their fall to consciousness on being unwillingly cured of blindness reveals the brutal and degenerate nature of both themselves and those around them, and in the manner of Adam and Eve, their earlier illusions of sinlessness and happy togetherness are revealed to be lies. Realization dawns that paid labour and hunger, and what Darwin referred to as all the ills of the ‘battle for life’ replace the contentment they had been unaware of while it was theirs. 74 At the drama’s conclusion, Mary and Martin forsake their blighted Eden with a threat of Deluge hanging over them: a bystander predicts that the pair ‘will be drowned together in a short while, surely’. 75 Additionally, postDarwinian anxiety of the sort experienced by the young Synge and the Old Testament principle that existence was a fallen vale of tears coalesce in the title and tone of The Shadow of the Glen: the Edenic dream of the tramping life offered to Nora is marred by the memory of Patch Darcy’s fate, and the barriers between human and animal/nature have dissolved. 76 Furthermore, the world envisioned in Riders to the Sea, though often described as ‘pagan’, may be more accurately described as suffering from the post-lapsarian and post-Darwinian absence of the presence of God. 72 73

Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 37. Vivian Mercier, Mercier, Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders, ed. Eilís Dillon, introd. Declan Kiberd (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 234. 74 Darwin, Origin, 129; Mercier, ‘The Tinker’s Wedding’, 82. 75 Synge, The Well of the Saints, CW 4: 151. 76 The Tramp hears Darcy’s disembodied voice emerging from a mist, as nearby sheep cough ‘like an old man’, Nora boils food for her husband and for the brood sow in the same pot, while he predicts that his tramping wife will be found ‘stretched like a dead sheep with the frost on her’, Synge, The Shadow of the Glen, CW 3: 39; 49; 55.

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The Old Testament roots of the Irish pseudo-histories that made such narratives so emotionally attractive to Synge are apparent in a verse play based on Keating’s History that he projected. In Luasnad, Capa and Laine, Ireland’s first inhabitants are inundated by the Flood, and the surviving female muses to the sole male survivor: It would make A strange new life if we came through this tempest And lived like Adam and Eve building up A new mankind. 77

The pair are drowned by the rising water immediately afterwards. In Synge’s bleak pre-Gaelic colonization myth, the deluge in which all the settlers are swept away quickly follows the founding of the new world. Anxiety concerning the idealization of rurality and strolling celebrated in Synge’s prose permeates Playboy, in particular: Christy is an ignoble tramper who wanders due to existential loneliness, while, as previously noted, Pegeen fears molestation by peripatetic men. In Playboy, the earth is stalked by a Victorian freak show procession of those who do not score high on the evolutionary scale: ‘Red Linahan, has a squint in his eye, and Patcheen is lame [. . . ] the Mad Mulrannies [. . . ] lost in their wits. We’re a queer lot these times’. 78 In this fallen dramatic universe, where a professed father-slayer is almost married off to his former wet nurse, the floodgates certainly are opened to something like the ‘incest and parricide’ imagined by the adolescent Synge on first reading Darwin. This Western World of dangerous tinkers and casual outrages truly is the antithesis of the idealized Eastern realm of wanderers and islanders imagined in Synge’s prose. The accusations of amorality and nihilism that fuel Revival-era nationalist responses to Playboy conjure up the kind of bleakness attributed to post-Darwinian reality by opponents of evolutionary theory. The following rejoinder to an Irish Darwinist from an Irish Presbyterian minister might almost pass for a derogatory reading of Christy’s actions and motivations: [The human subject constructed by ‘the evolution hypothesis’] is not bound to do or to refrain from doing because of any penalty attaching to conduct; if 77 78

Synge, Luasnad, Capa and Laine, CW 3: 202. Synge, Playboy, CW 4: 59.

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there be penalty affecting the individual at all, he may judge, perhaps, that in his present environment it is as often against the right action as in favour of it: he is not bound to subordinate the lower feelings to the higher; if the lower— being for the most part more intense—yield him a greater sum of pleasure in this life, it is his duty [. . . ] to indulge in them: he is not bound to be truthful or honest; for though society is much injured by roguery and deceit, the harm wrought by his conduct would affect him little in comparison with the many advantages to be secured by his dishonestly gotten wealth. 79

Christy compares his gazing upon girls with the way ‘needy fallen spirits do be looking on the Lord’: love, it seems, has been contaminated by post-lapsarian sexual hunger. Meanwhile, paradise has been infiltrated by consumerism, as suggested by the playboy’s tribute to Pegeen: ‘It’s her like is fitted to be handling merchandise in the heavens above.’ 80 In contrast to the doubt concerning the viability of the prelapsarian or pseudo-historic setting expressed in Synge’s better-known drama, The Aran Islands constructs the island group as a pristine tabula rasa as yet unconquered by the ‘progress’ and cultural and moral degeneration that has contaminated the wider world. Nevertheless, disaster threatens, and in order to maintain the fantasy, Synge’s work necessarily ignores all previous texts on the subject, though Aran had long been of interest to scholars, scientists, and government administrators alike. Throughout the nineteenth century alone, antiquarians visited Aran in the 1820s, Ordnance Survey workers in 1839, and waves of folklorists and philologists subsequently descended on the islands. The most striking difference between Pococke’s description of Aran in his Tour in Ireland in 1752 and Revival accounts is the attention the eighteenth-century traveller pays to the islands’ rental value and agricultural productivity; he has nothing to say of the islanders. Likewise, in Martin Haverty’s report on the 1857 ethnological expedition to Aran, the islanders are merely a background chorus cheering the excursionists’ speeches. Much as the tinker is suddenly differentiated as a picturesque feature of the rural landscape during the Revival, the 79 W. Todd Martin, The Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy (Edinburgh: Gemmell, 1887), 268. Martin was responding to John Tyndall’s controversial address to the Belfast British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1874, in which he suggested that religion must acquiesce to science. 80 Synge, Playboy, CW 4: 109; 127.

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hitherto unindividuated islander abruptly emerges from the sublime and archaeologically fertile Aran scenery in the same period. Synge’s visits to Aran, which began in 1898, were the culmination of modish interest in the location and its inhabitants among his peers: Symons published ‘The Isles of Aran’ in 1896, and Yeats had been on Aran that year in his company to garner material. Bourgeois lists a large number of fictional and non-fictional Irish-, German-, and English-language accounts of Aran that were near-contemporaneous with Synge’s, including works by Somerville and Ross, Mary Banim, and Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh. Symons’ sketch catalogues previous texts on the topic of Aran, notably Emily Lawless’s sentimental novel Grania: The Story of an Island (1892), which details the life of an eighteen-year-old Inishmaan girl. Synge suggested that Lawless’s descriptions of island life lacked the ‘real Aran spirit’ in a notebook written towards the end of his first visit there, 81 though he does not acknowledge this familiarity with Grania in his own account of the island group. Due to the period’s rhetorical stress on the excavation of long-neglected Irish glory, each Revival-era visitor wishes to exclusively possess Aran as his or her own virgin territory. Synge claims the feminized and eroticized islands in a passage excised from the original published version of The Aran Islands: With this limestone Inishmaan however I am in love, and hear with galling jealousy of the various priests and scholars who have lived here before me. They have grown to me as the former lover of one’s mistress, horrible existences haunting with dreamed kisses the lips she presses to your own.

He writes in a similar vein of his possessive feelings towards Great Blasket Island in Kerry: It is curious I have a jealousy for that Island—the whole island and its people— like the jealousy of men in love. The last days I was there a stranger—a middleaged and simple-minded man from an inland district—[was staying there too,] and all the time I was making arrangements to come [away] I was urging him, I hardly know why, to come away also. 82

Prior to their formal introduction, Gregory had spied Synge on Inishmore while visiting Aran, as she told Speakman: ‘ “I saw a man in civilian 81 82

Greene and Stephens, J. M. Synge 1871–1909, 95. Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 103 n.; ‘In West Kerry’, CW 2: 258.

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clothes out there with a guide, wandering about. I was a little annoyed at that, for I thought I had found the islands from a literary point of view myself ”.’ 83 The tinker theme was equally coveted by Revival writers: Yeats’s Where There is Nothing, first published as supplement to the United Irishman in 1902, was hastily written with the aid of Hyde and Gregory to preclude Moore from utilizing the plot of a gentleman who marries a tinker girl. 84 In turn, Yeats himself was singled out for annexing the tinker theme by the aforementioned Bulfin, the author of a travel book entitled Rambles in Eirinn (1907). Bulfin was an extreme nationalist and a forceful defender of Catholic rights, whose antipathy to major Abbey playwrights, northern Protestants, and ‘West Britons’ was marked on that account. A waspish anecdote in Rambles in Eirinn concerning a tinker clan’s disapproval of Yeats’s Where There is Nothing suggests that the perceived urban upper-middle-class appropriation of the tinker was resented by the tinkers themselves or, at least, by nationalist authors intimating that they possessed a more authentic knowledge of the minority. 85 It is almost certain that Bulfin ventriloquized his irritation at Yeats through a fictionalized tinker informant, since the speaker who disparages the ‘high-up pote’ of Dublin has a ‘stage Irish’ brogue in the manner of Simson’s ‘Irish Gypsy’. As it happens, Yeats complains of the strange lack of interest in all things tramp and tinker revealed by rural audiences at the height of the tinkerlorist craze, and Gregory collects evidence of the antagonism of farming folk toward the transient population. 86 This apathy contrasts, one supposes, to the ready embrace of such figures in the urban drama scene, and the contention between writers over ownership of the tinker revealed in Bulfin’s jibe at Yeats. 83 85

84 Speakman, Here’s Ireland, 124. CL 1: 89 n. In his travel book Bulfin writes of a tinker he encounters who complains of a ‘highup pote’ in Dublin who made a play about ‘one of the girls of the Wards’ marrying ‘a quare crayther’ ‘who went about the country risin’ rucks’ and ‘couldn’t earn his bread’. Comically, the father of the Ward clan complains of the unlikelihood of this plotline to the ‘madgisthrates’, asserting, ‘Neither that pote nor anybody else who isn’t a tinker knows our saycrets . . . and never will.’ Bulfin, Rambles in Eirinn, vol. 2, 205–7. 86 ‘Some countrymen in Galway, whither we carried our plays in dialect a few weeks ago, said it was no use going to see them because they showed people that could be seen on the road every day’, in Yeats, Samhain: 1908: First Principles, Explorations (1962; New York, Macmillan, 1989), 231; [Country people] ‘speak of a visit of the tinkers as of frost in spring or blight in harvest’, in Gregory, ‘The Wandering Tribe’, 94.

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The tension between the ‘high-up potes’ of Dublin and their ultra-nationalist rivals was sometimes a sectarian divide, and the selfconscious Anglo-Irish identification with ‘nature’s own aristocrats’ may have riled Bulfin. Discussing the Revival fad for plays featuring tinker and tramp characters, Bourgeois notes the resentment that greeted the urban elite’s obvious veneration of the vagabond: Some angry-minded critics, whom this tramp-worship exasperates, allege that the outlaw or beggar who ‘goes the roads’ is thus taken as representative of the whole race by the Abbey dramatists simply because they generally belong to the upper classes, and can only get the blackguardly vagabond to tell them of ‘the wonders’ and of the quaint bits of folklore on which their plays are based, not the honest and respectable Irish peasant who, as a rule, is loath to speak to the ‘quality’. 87

For all the admiration of the wanderer in his prose writings, Synge selfdeprecatingly satirizes the foibles of certain members of his own class with regard to such idealization in the first typescript version of The Tinker’s Wedding in two acts. Michael Byrne dismisses his lover’s boasts that ‘a gentleman’ admired her and that ‘ladies’ chase about hoping to sketch her beauty: ‘Did you ever hear tell of the quality [. . . ] doing a thing, or saying a thing wouldn’t make Tom Daly, the fool of tinkers, ashamed?’ 88 Given that it is generally accepted that Symons profoundly influenced The Aran Islands, the Irish writer’s disingenuous elision of Symons’ near-contemporaneous ‘Isles of Aran’ is of particular significance. It seems that for Aran to be created as Eden come again, it was necessary for Synge’s account to be the Genesis text. Synge’s volume wilfully obscures the problematic incongruities of Aran’s long evolution, ignoring the fact, cited by Symons, that the islanders were partially descended from the soldiers of a Cromwellian garrison. This suggests, of course, that the English language was not as recent an arrival on Aran as Synge would have readers assume. The ambiguities of centuries of religious and linguistic contact trouble Synge’s vision of islands fortunately lacking in British and English-language influence, but intuitively in possession of a whiff of Gallic sophistication and an innate sympathy for all things French. Synge was hesitant to confront the modernity that has 87 88

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 150. TS. ‘B’, footnoted in Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 10.

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encroached upon his beloved islands, and his invocation of the Fir-Bolg situates the islanders within a mytho-historical frame that ignores all ‘contamination’. Throughout his Aran text, Synge subtly implies that he was taught Irish on the island, obscuring the irony that Trinity, where he first learnt the language, instituted study of the subject in order to prepare proselytizing clergymen such as his uncle, Alexander Synge, Aran’s first Protestant missionary. Synge’s belief, expressed in ‘The Old and New in Ireland’, that his tutors at Trinity were blithely unaware of the language’s rich literature, downplays near-contemporaneous attempts by members of the Protestant intelligentsia to engage with Gaelic culture. Moreover, at the outset of The Aran Islands, Synge does not make clear whether the reported speech transcribed was originally delivered in Irish or English. As the text progresses, references to islanders speaking Irish with the narrator increase, subtly implying that Synge learnt the language on Aran. For Synge, who wrote in his diary about women he was attracted to in Irish phrases, the language was utilized as a code with which to hide secrets from his family, suggesting his assumption that no one in his immediate circle would ever bother to learn the language. The paradoxes of generations of religious and linguistic contact trouble Synge’s picture of Aran’s lack of Anglo and Christian accretions. Bourgeois found the elision of religion in Synge’s prose works perplexing: ‘One would never suspect, on reading these essays, that the Irish country-folk are Christian worshippers whose religious feeling is often carried to an absurd excess of superstition and almost to fetishism.’ 89 Catholicism and its priests are portrayed as irrelevancies without influence in Synge’s plays, and in The Aran Islands, the islanders’ religion is ostensibly Catholic, but their authentic ‘voice’ is not: at a funeral Synge attends, words of Catholic belief were spoken by voices ‘still hoarse with the cries of pagan desperation’. 90 For Synge, Aran is in thrall to pagan forces alone, being a realm of witchcraft potent enough to create storms. 91 In addition, the Catholic reform movement supposedly wiped out ‘patterns’, the raucous celebration of feast days typical of pre-Famine practice that Synge mentions as still occurring on Aran, and this allusion is almost a counter-missionary effort to his uncle’s attempt to ‘amend’ 89 90

Bourgeois, Synge and the Irish Theatre, 90. Synge, The Aran Islands, 7 CW 2: 5.

91

Ibid. 88.

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the islands’ religion. As it happens, Alexander Synge’s letters constitute some of the most interesting personal documents to emerge from the tradition of Protestantism on Aran that is entirely effaced from John Synge’s account. The idealization of island life cemented by his nephew’s publication is entirely absent from the Revd Synge’s description of Aran. Indeed, the aspects that render Aran barbarian to Alexander—the barrenness of the soil, the islanders’ eccentricity, their lack of interest in organized religion, the austerity of the food and accommodation, and the difficulty of communication with the mainland 92 —are the very features that endow it with dignity in John Synge’s eyes, slightly less than fifty years later. This is a mark of the degree to which the Revival valorization of minority culture entailed merely a slight tweaking of previously derogatory vocabulary. Of course, the ironic fact of the matter is that Galway was the location of the family estate that allowed Mrs Synge a yearly income, and Aran the site of the Revd Synge’s proselytizing. By stripping the prosaic Galway and Aran of his childhood and family history of its colonial, Protestant, and familial associations, Synge refigures it as the pristine Eden from which change is entirely absent. Synge’s intentions in effacing the Christianity and hybrid heritage of the islanders in his writings are not malicious, merely a poignant attempt to breach the chasm that he obviously feels lies between him and those of whom he writes. Throughout The Aran Islands, Synge struggles not to impose a prelapsarian filter upon his account, a tension clearly seen in his disagreement with an island boy he wishes to photograph, who insists that Synge shoot him in his ‘Sunday clothes from Galway’ rather than the ‘native homespuns’ the writer obviously prefers. 93 Although Synge endeavours to be sensitive in his dealings with the islanders, in this instance he wishes to elide what the child obviously approves of as ‘progress’. The author’s description of the inhabitants as people ‘who live forgotten in these worlds of mists’ situates Aran outside the capitalist and colonial nexus within which the nearby mainland operates: it is only when Synge presents an account of an eviction that a careless reader realizes that this seemingly unmapped Eden is subject to a ruthless mainland agent. In 92 A paraphrase of Alexander Synge’s letter to Edward Synge, quoted in Greene and Stephens, J. M. Synge 1871–1909, 80. 93 Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 134.

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the Introduction to The Aran Islands, Synge notes that ‘many changes are being made, that it is not worthwhile to deal with in the text’. However, try as Synge might to ignore the evolution of Aran, the pressures of modernity are nonetheless detectable in the details of quotidian life that he provides: Synge receives newspapers while on Aran, and nutritionally useless indicators of industrialization such as tea and sugar are readily available. Moreover, he notes that the lightweight craft that had prevented easy contact with the mainland have just been replaced with a steamer facilitating frequent travel to Galway. Synge writes that two steamer expeditions carrying eviction agents from the mainland were prevented from landing when sudden storms were roused by ‘a native witch’. 94 The evils of modernity, it seems, may be momentarily routed by archaic, pagan magic. Ultimately, however, Aran is a realm in which all the traumas of the post-lapsarian progress of humanity—cash economy, proprietorship, organized religion, proselytizing, sectarian tension, class difference, industrialization, consumerism and technological advance—cannot be suppressed. The ‘sharp-edged fossils which abound’ on the island have glaringly pointed all along to the inescapability of evolution and change: recognition of Darwinian theory and development go hand-in-hand. Ironically, Synge’s own uncle might be said to have instituted some of the divisive modernity that so troubled the writer: during his time as minister on Aran in the mid-nineteenth century, the Revd Synge ‘bought a motorboat, fitted it out with fishing gear and started netting fish for the Galway market in competition with the fishermen who would certainly have assaulted him if he had not armed his captain and crew’. 95 In the final two books of The Aran Islands, Synge describes a pub with an ominous telegraph connection to the mainland and a debauched atmosphere, a series of untimely deaths, a typhus epidemic, and intimations that certain islanders resent his Protestant background. The introduction of institutions more appropriate to the mainland culture further the degeneration Synge already perceives to be creeping in on Inishere and Aranmore: ‘Some time ago, before the introduction of police, all the people of the islands were as innocent as the people here [on Inishmaan] remain to this day.’ 96 Paradoxically, too, the Aran 94 96

95 Ibid. 88. Greene and Stephens, J. M. Synge 1871–1909, 80–1. Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 95.

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presence of the Gaelic League noted by Synge ‘was made possible precisely by the elements of progress—namely improvement in communications, a postal service, national newspapers and higher education— which threatened the very survival of the language’. 97 As the end of his first visit to Aran drew nearer, Synge wrote in his notebook: The thought that this island [Inishmaan] will gradually yield to the ruthlessness of ‘progress’ is as the certainty that decaying age is moving always nearer to the cheeks it is your ecstasy to kiss. How much of Ireland was formerly like this, and how much of Ireland is today Anglicized and civilized and brutalized? 98

Inishere, the ‘more advanced’ south island (Synge generally avoided it and the northernmost island, Aranmore, in favour of Inishmaan) is already riddled with class difference and foreign peddlers selling massproduced items that contrast poignantly with the handmade implements of Inishmaan that Synge admired. On Aranmore, ‘prosperity’ and the attendant ‘indefinabl[y] modern’ desire ‘for gain’ point portentously to the inevitable fall from innocence of Inishmaan. 99 The impact of Darwinism involved a ‘crisis of belief in creation, providence, and design, of belief in the reality of the divine purposes in nature and the omnipotence and beneficence of the divine character which they reveal’. 100 Nevertheless, against all the seemingly incontrovertible evidence of his era, a lapsed evangelical Protestant found spiritual meaning on Aran and ultimately identified with the island Other, as Kiberd notes: If there is an implied ‘Western’ norm at the start of Part One, it is well and truly broken into fragments-without-commentary by the end of Part Four. [. . . ] His, therefore, was not only an Orientalist practice, but also a sort of reverse Orientalism, which accepted the capacity of the ‘Orient’ to intervene in the ‘West’. 101

Synge was incredibly drawn to the islanders, and a transformation is gradually wrought upon the empathetic narrator during his time on Aran. He absorbs the supernatural aspect earlier attributed to the islands and islanders, describing himself as an unheeded ‘waif ’ who 97 98 99 100 101

Jones, ‘Contested Territories’, 204. Greene and Stephens, J. M. Synge 1871–1909, 95. Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 140; 138; 116. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 14. Kiberd, ‘Synge’s Tristes Tropiques: The Aran Islands’, 103.

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wanders among the people. 102 The etymology of waif evokes ghosts and wandering souls, 103 as does Synge’s morbid foreboding towards the end of his narrative that young Aran fishermen he speaks and drinks with are destined to die young. 104 Once more, Synge is identifying with the island men in his sensitive way, since a prescient sense of his own mortality permeates the writer’s prose. Travelling by currach at one point in the narrative, Synge imagines that he would almost welcome death in the presence of the island men and the vast ocean. 105 The distressing closing words of The Aran Islands are ‘I left with the steamer’, and this pithy sentence is an admission that much as Synge identifies with Aran and would rather an exhilarating journey by currach than by the safer vessel, he is implicated in the ‘progress’ of the fallen outside world that is gradually colonizing the islands. Synge’s drama struggles with doubts concerning the idealization of tinkers and islanders, and The Aran Islands too eventually acknowledges that modernity threatens to overcome the pseudo-historic and prelapsarian cultural time in which the islanders exist. Synge seems to have wished to protect his beloved Aran from the contamination of both the outside world and other people’s depictions of it, and he downplayed the degree to which his volume partook of a long cultural engagement with the location. Just as significantly, I would argue, Synge has also inspired artists to depict the westerly isles. ‘With its barbaric novelties of colour, its wild red-clad women, [. . . ] Aran should be a place known to painters’, Somerville and Ross noted in Some Irish Yesterdays. 106 Gypsylorism’s artist-in-residence, Augustus John, travelled to Aran to paint the inhabitants in the years after the Revival, and Belfast artist Paul Henry moved to the Mayo island of Achill in 1912, to do ‘visually what [Synge] had done verbally only a few years earlier’. 107 Jack B. Yeats and Synge first collaborated when the Manchester Guardian commissioned a series of illustrated articles on the west of Ireland from them in 1905, and the artist’s biographer invokes 102 103

Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 113. O. Fr. waif, wef —Ice. veif, any flapping or waving thing. 104 105 Synge, The Aran Islands, CW 2: 162. Ibid. 97. 106 Edith Somerville, and Martin Ross, ‘An Outpost of Ireland’, Some Irish Yesterdays (London: Longmans and Green, 1906), 30. 107 Paul Deane, ‘Paul Henry on Achill Island: Paintings and Drawings’, Éire-Ireland 24 (1989), 61.

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the popularly conceived symbiosis between Synge’s words and Yeats’s images when he notes that the ‘wildness of Synge’s Playboy’ is ‘echoed’ in certain Yeats drawings’. 108 Yeats’s output reflected the Revival craze for the tinker: if John was Gypsylorism’s painter-in-residence, then Yeats might be said to have performed the same service to Irish tinkerlorism. All in all, the relationship of cultural nationalist artist and author created an image of ‘authentic’ Irishness that still has currency. The accretion of Henry’s and Yeats’s representations of the western isle to the Revival literary construct of Aran ensures that Synge’s vision of the idyllic Irish island has constituted the Aran and Achill of popular imagination to an enormous degree. This issue will be explored further in Chapter 5 in the examination of contemporary Irish Traveller writer Juanita Casey’s explicit response to Synge’s image of Aran. On a more concrete level, however, Synge directly participated in the creation of the familiar visual image of Aran in a manner that is not generally acknowledged. If Synge the writer could not be said to have ‘discovered’ Aran, much as he would have loved to have done so, Synge the photographer is in fact the unacknowledged originator of the current visual image of Aran. Synge took many photographs during his stays on Aran, and he had an enormous but obscured input into Yeats’s renowned representations of the islanders: the heroic Yeats image that adorned the original cover of The Aran Islands was derived from a figure in a Synge photograph entitled ‘Islanders of Inishere’. 109 Many of the other illustrations included in the book were likewise based on Synge’s photographs. In effect, Yeats’s drawings for the volume are more than representations of Aran: they are representations of Synge’s representations of Aran. Ironically, of course, the visual imagery Synge created, with its possibly unintentional memorialization of Aran difference and stoicism, contradicts the doubt with regard to Aran cultural purity and permanency that gradually permeates the text of The Aran Islands. Unlike some of the artists who took their lead from his depiction, Synge ultimately wrestles with the construct of the island group as a rooted space. Synge’s account of Aran, like his depictions of tinkers, veers between idealization and a genuine attempt to perceive his subjects through the 108

Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),

149.

109

Ibid. 146.

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clouding accretions of centuries of previous representation. His endeavours to represent the Aran and tinker Other are always sincere, though often tainted by an admirable impulse to favour peripatetic over sedentary and islander over mainlander. Moreover, for all their faults, Synge’s layered and thoughtful images of marginalized peoples contrast with the one-dimensional representations of tinkers and tramps that emerged in his wake. In the changed political climate of the decades after Partition, writers who took on the trope often unthinkingly reiterated deep-rooted stereotypes of the tinker or reinforced sedentary assumptions of the sort upended in The Tinker’s Wedding. The following chapter will trace the manner in which the pro-sedentary values of the post-Partition era stripped the tinker figure of the positive accretions endowed by Synge’s empathetic and knowing depictions and reduced it to a mere tool of dominant discourse.

4 Reaffirming Sedentary Values: The Tinker in Post-Revival Drama and Prose Chapter 3 suggested that Synge’s prose diluted the Irish tinker’s early modern and Enlightenment accretions through the invocation of the native tradition of Ireland’s ‘Eastern’ settlers and the domestication of the bohemian trope. Why then was the tinker suspected of being less than fully Irish in the isolationist post-independence era? Why did the figure’s Revival-era overtones of autonomy and dignity disappear in the decades after Partition? This chapter will argue that although Synge Hibernicized the nomad by partaking of indigenous or culturally acceptable discourses of the Oriental, the narrowed climate of the decades after the Revival ensured that the tinker was nevertheless perceived to have been contaminated by ‘foreignness’. Moreover, this alien patina lacked the positive connotations of the exoticness to which the figure had previously been subject, and it will be suggested that it was particularly endowed by Revival-era Anglo-Irish Protestant and Victorian Gypsylorist interest in the minority. In addition, as the examination of the mid-century Irish play The Righteous Are Bold will suggest, the tinker continued to be inflected by the ceaselessly circulating image of the heathenish European Gypsy. These accretions were sometimes contained by a compensatory insistence on the tinker’s orthodox Catholicism and Irish language ability, two incontestable markers of cultural patriotism that neutralized Gypsy, foreign, tribal, heathen, or pre-Gaelic associations. However, in many other instances, the tinker was depicted as an unsympathetic symbol of the forces threatening the new sedentary order, a striking departure from the figure’s complexity and allure in Synge’s work. The following analysis traces the tinker figure’s entanglement with the island’s pro-sedentary ideology after the Partition of Ireland into

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North and South in 1922. The challenge to dominant values embedded in Synge’s deployment of the tinker or tramp motif significantly diminished in the post-Revival era, during which the man of the road functions as an inverse image of the domicentric rather than a representation of the espace itinérant. Accordingly, the landless wanderer made a cameo appearance as a crude figure of colour, romance, or derision in many Abbey or Abbey-style comedies in both the Irish and English language during the period. Seán Ó Coisdealbha’s comic Irishlanguage drama An Tincéara Buí (1957; The Sallow-Skinned Tinker) will be briefly examined as an example of this tendency and as a rebuff from the Irish-speaking margins to the metropolitan Synge’s elevation of the wanderer. Additionally, in the non-comic drama of the era, the tinker figure simultaneously signified imperviousness to the values of patrilineal inheritance, stability, and conformity. Occasionally, the peripatetic figure may have been implicitly subversive, but such confrontation of sedentary mores was ultimately undermined, as will be demonstrated by a detailed analysis of Frank Carney’s tragedy, The Righteous Are Bold. Carney’s drama exemplifies the manner in which the insurrectionary potential of the nomadic figure could now be channelled to reinforce sedentary values. To a certain degree, the regressive nature of the post-Partition ‘Abbey tinker’ may also be situated within the context of the loss of Shelta’s patrician and archaic aura after the Revival: the existence of a Traveller language was almost wholly ignored in literature concerning ‘tinkers’ until the emergence of Traveller activism in the 1960s, which saw the beginning of the recognition of the community’s claims to cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. Best-selling adventure author Maurice Walsh’s 1930s construct of tinker culture as an Irish-speaking escape valve for the restless settled swashbuckler is situated within the identity politics of post-independence Ireland, which either insisted on the homogeneity of the entire populace or imaginatively expelled Others. Finally, given the emphasis on Partition as the moment at which the tinker’s depiction began to deteriorate from its Revival high point, the close of the chapter will focus on the contrasting significance the figure accreted each side of the border after 1922, even as the monolithic sedentarist discourse of both jurisdictions generally excluded actual Traveller identity. Although most of the analysis of post-Partition Ireland in chapter four refers to developments south of the border alone, the concluding section suggests

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that unease regarding the ‘foreignness’ of the tinker was also iterated in the North, albeit from a unionist establishment viewpoint mistrustful of cross-border ‘Irish Gypsy’ incursions.

THE TINKER’S THREAT TO STABILIT Y: Ó COISDEALBHA’S AN TINCÉARA BUÍ AND CARNEY ’S THE RIGHTEOUS ARE BOLD In a return to the earlier tradition of representing the nomad as all that had been necessarily abandoned by progress, the post-independence tinker figure of Irish drama carried the nineteenth-century Stage Irishman’s attributes of fecklessness, tricksterism, and linguistic slipperiness. Mathew J. O’Mahony’s Progress Guide to Anglo-Irish Plays (1960), a catalogue of drama available for performance by amateur repertoire companies, lists numerous post-Revival works that utilize a one-dimensional tinker, tramp, itinerant peddler, or fortune-teller character, the vast majority of them comedies or farces. 1 Such representations relied upon the cartoonish iconography of crystal balls and Gypsy wagons already in the possession of members of the audience, suggesting that the querying of received values inherent in the earlier deployment of the wanderer motif had greatly dissipated. Post-Revival Ireland had imaginatively, and in the alleged case of IRA procedure in the 1920s, literally, 2 extirpated actual Travellers from both the Irish landscape and the Irish stage. 1 The following are only a few of the post-Revival comedies featuring a stereotypical tinker, tramp, or peddler: Bernard Duffy’s The Coiner, produced at the Abbey in 1916; Edward McNulty’s Mrs. Mulligan’s Millions, produced at the Empire Theatre in 1918; George Shiels’s Paul Twyning, produced at the Abbey in 1922; Lennox Robinson’s Never the Time and the Place, first performed at the Abbey in 1924; Hugh Quinn’s Collecting the Rent, staged at the Gaiety Theatre in 1937; Seamus Burke’s A Tooth for a Tooth [n.d.], a farce about a tinker’s revenge; popular Abbey playwright M. M. Brennan’s Fitzgerald and the Quins (1944); Noel Marian’s Roadside (1945), in which a vagabond ‘passes’ as settled. The prolific J. Bernard McCarthy produced Old Acquaintance (1928), a farce involving a tinker, The Wheel of Fortune (1932), centred on a fortune-telling hawker, and Fair Play’s Bonnie Play (1951), a comedy featuring a travelling dealer. 2 During the War of Independence in the early 1920s, the Cork-area IRA allegedly targeted and killed Travellers and tramps alongside Protestants and former members of the British military. All were perceived to be anathema to the values of the nascent state. See Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–23 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 303–4.

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In contrast to an empathetic text such as The Tinker’s Wedding, the post-independence Abbey play featuring a peripatetic character was not primarily concerned with the wanderer per se, but with the endorsement of the new order. Not all of the plays that evoked a nomadic figure in order to reinforce sedentary norms were originally produced at the Abbey. However, many of the authors concerned were erstwhile Abbey playwrights or wrote on the Abbey model of the rural kitchen setting, indicating how comprehensively an apolitical dilution of the Revivalera rambler motif percolated from the National Theatre in Dublin to church halls throughout the island in the decades after Partition. The large number of post-Revival plays utilizing a stock tinker figure suggests that the undoubted vitality of the amateur dramatic scene in mid-century Ireland was at the expense of inclusivity. Indeed, socialist journalist Leslie Daiken complained in 1947 that in comparison to Synge’s ‘fine psychological study’, The Tinker’s Wedding, the tinker had become a one-dimensional stereotype too readily invoked by slothful playwrights: ‘And so in Ireland our Abbey peasant-play now includes a foxy tinker as a stock type, together with the land-hungry mountainy farmer, the half-witted herd, the garrulous nosey-parker, and the psychic servant-girl.’ 3 What Daiken did not note was that within the identity politics of the period, the depiction of this land-hungry farmer often necessitated the conjuring up of his nemesis and inverted image, the wily or treacherous tinker. A brief comparison of the superficially similar plotlines of Mayne’s aforementioned 1906 drama, The Turn of the Road, and William D. Hepenstall’s Two on a String reveals the reduction of the tramp character in amateur drama after independence. Two on a String was first produced at Birr Little Theatre, County Offaly in 1943, and like Mayne’s play, pivots on the effect on a family when a drunken vagrant is brought home by the man of the house. In Hepenstall’s drama, tramp Dionysius is entertained by feckless former actor Bat, who considers him ‘a fellow thespian’. Whereas the culture and sophistication of Mayne’s bohemian wanderer was admired by farmer’s son Robbie John Granahan, Dionysius’s pretensions to learning are exposed as fraudulent: in one comically effective scene, Bat casts Dionysius as his Juliet, only to discover 3 Leslie Daiken, ‘Parasites Without Power’, in Jack Lindsay (ed.), Anvil: Life and the Arts (London: Meridian, 1947), 38; 30.

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that the shamming tramp knows nothing whatsoever of Shakespeare. The dignified and cultured tramp of the Revival has been reduced to an ill-educated, dissembling fool. Dissenting critiques of depoliticized contemporary depictions of sedentary–nomadic relations did very occasionally emerge during the era, notably that of marginalized Abbey dramatist George Fitzmaurice, whose undercutting of the dominant rhetoric of rural harmony and homogeneity doubtlessly contributed to his exclusion from the canon: in the comic The Terrible Baisht (1954), villagers unite in bestowing largesse upon a homeless recluse believed to be the local priest’s nephew. Once revealed to be a ‘mere’ tinker, however, the man is hounded away. Fitzmaurice’s play has never been produced. Although this section will pay most attention to Frank Carney’s drama The Righteous Are Bold, I would like to begin by examining Seán Ó Coisdealbha’s Irish-language comedy An Tincéara Buí. Ó Coisdealbha’s drama demonstrates that in post-Partition comic writing in Irish, tinkers performed much the same function of signifying imperviousness to the values of inheritance, stability, and conformity as in comparable Anglo-Irish productions. Nevertheless, the roots of the onedimensional peripatetic figure in Irish-language drama stretch right back to the Revival period and to the Abbey Theatre itself: in the 1901 play, Eilís agus an Bhean Déirce by Peter Toner McGinley (Peadar MacFhionnghaile), which had its first Abbey performance in 1902, the woman of the road of the title is comically and cruelly used by the son of the house in order to irritate his mother. Incidentally, the title of McGinley’s work should be literally rendered as ‘Ailish and the Beggar Woman’, but was translated as Lizzie and the Tinker in 1970, which once more underlines the ethnicization that accompanies the crossing over of Irish-language designations for the peripatetic into English. McGinley’s use of the nomad as a butt of laughter set a pattern followed by many subsequent post-Revival Irish dramatists writing in English. This prompts the conjecture that in line with the post-1922 drive to reclaim all things ‘native’, depictions in English that unstitched the earlier championing of the minority by the metropolitan and AngloIrish Synge were a reclamation of the more folkloric and Irish-language trope of the trickster tinker. Indeed, traces of such oral tradition are detectable in ‘M’Asal Beag Dubh’ (‘My Little Black Ass’), the celebrated comic short story of Irish-language author, Pádraic Ó Conaire, in which

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the narrator is duped by a scheming tinker into purchasing a badtempered donkey. What can be said with some certainty is that by the time Ó Coisdealbha’s An Tincéara Buí is staged for the first time in 1957, Irish- and English-language representations of the tinker rely equally on the stereotype of the crafty or intimidating wanderer for their humour or menace. In Ó Coisdealbha’s play, Breege is the feisty daughter of a publican whose father has ‘matched’ her with unkempt farmer Red Tim in order to amalgamate the wealth of both properties. At the close of the drama, however, Breege rebels by running away with Anthony, the sallowskinned tinker of the title and a musician who occasionally frequents her father’s bar. As such, An Tincéara Buí is an exemplar of Daiken’s paradigm of the post-independence binary of the foxy tinker and the land-hungry farmer. Ó Coisdealbha’s play was first performed in Dublin at the national Oireachtas Drama Championship with the playwright in the role of Red Tim, for which he won the festival Gold Medal. Ó Coisdealbha (a.k.a. Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc Ó Coisdealbha and Sean O’Costello) was born in Indreabhán, Connemara in 1930, the son of a local blacksmith, which was a trade that the author himself engaged in sporadically throughout his writing career. Ó Coisdealbha left school at the age of 15, but subsequently studied folklore at night, and began his acting career with An Taidhbhearc, the Irish-language theatre founded in Galway in 1928. A talented actor, Ó Coisdealbha spent a brief stint at the Abbey Theatre and had parts in iconic Irish independent films such as Poitín (1979), the first Irish-language feature film, and Reefer and the Model (1987), as well as a bit-part in The Field (1990). Although he penned seven plays, Ó Coisdealbha is better known as a poet throughout the Gaeltacht, where his poems have passed into the region’s oral tradition; Gearóid Denvir assigns the writer a central role in the recent revival of the genre in Connemara. Ó Coisdealbha held court in a neighbourhood pub, and his oral poetry self-consciously created a local identity in opposition to dominant urban discourse. As Denvir notes: ‘[Such poets] speak to and for a definable audience, namely their own native community.’ 4 A member of Aosdána, the prestigious association of Irish creative artists, Ó Coisdealbha often 4 Gearóid Denvir, ‘The Living Tradition: Oral Irish Language Poetry in Connemara Today’, Éire-Ireland 24 (1989), 100.

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obtained airplay for his verses on current issues on Raidió na Gaeltachta (the government-sponsored Irish-language station), and his work has been included in French- and English-language collections of twentiethcentury Irish poetry in translation. However, the Connemara author will probably be most remembered in the wider Irish literary scene for his adaptation for radio of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s modernist classic, Cré na Cille (Graveyard Soil), which was broadcast by Raidió na Gaeltachta in 1973. Ó Coisdealbha died in October 2006, four months after I had interviewed him. McVeigh notes that in an Ireland in which Travellers are ‘indigenous and clearly as “white” as the sedentary population’, it is striking that ‘they became “coloured” ’ when depicted in cultural productions: ‘Irish folk songs are replete with references to the “Yellow Gypsy”, An Bacach Bui [the sallow-skinned tramp], the “Yellow Tinker” and so on.’ 5 The representation of Anthony in The Sallow-Skinned Tinker partakes of the fantasy of the sexually alluring and racially Other male tinker, whose charm in the eyes of the settled Breege emanates from a skilful musicianship that is inextricably entwined with his exotic aura. Ó Coisdealbha claims to have written the part of the tinker with Antaine Mac Donnchadha, his handsome, accordion-playing cousin in mind, a young man who happened also to be a talented amateur actor: ‘It was most important to me that the part of the tinker be played by a goodlooking man who could handle a musical instrument,’ he noted in our interview, both because the actor had to be able to perform live on stage and was also required to be convincingly alluring. 6 An Tincéara Buí is a folkloric and comic reworking of The Playboy of the Western World in which the heroine ultimately runs off with her beloved wanderer. The parallels between Synge’s Playboy and Ó Coisdealbha’s drama are unmistakable: Breege, like Pegeen, is a strong-willed publican’s daughter whose attention is caught by a charming drifter despite or perhaps because of the fact that she is engaged to a weak-willed young man. An Tincéara Buí opens with Anthony’s attempt to woo Breege with language that mocks the heightened eloquence of Synge’s dialogue: 5 Robbie McVeigh, The Racialisation of Irishness: Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland (Belfast: Centre for Research and Documentation, 1996), 15. 6 Seán Ó Coisdealbha, personal interview, 11 June 2006.

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Breege darling, you are the love of my heart and my earthly store. You are the most beautiful posy I ever laid eyes upon. I love you more than Ireland. For a long time I have loved your little, gentle mouth and your two black eyes, more lovely than the spring morning dew on the grass. (All translations are my own.) 7

This ‘writing back’ to Synge from the Gaeltacht suggests that the metropolitan author and his sympathetic depiction of the espace itinérant became a lightning rod for those wishing to strike a blow against the dominant English-language drama scene of Dublin in the decades after independence. All of the inarticulate settled young men of The Sallow-Skinned Tinker vie for Breege’s hand in marriage, but she rejects each of them in turn, finding their obsessions with land and money uninspiring. As Breege’s father Seamus advises the oafish Red Tim: ‘The young women of today are not looking for gold or money, house or palace, but a playful, good-hearted man. Do you understand?’ 8 In an effort to console themselves, her spurned suitors then drown their sorrows in drink. An Tincéara Buí’s depiction of the settled men’s decision to substitute porter for the woman they cannot have lampoons their view that the abuse of alcohol might serve as a viable compensation for the lack of available partners in the depopulated and impoverished West of the 1950s. Moreover, in comparison to his pragmatic and tonguetied rivals, the quixotic Anthony is effortlessly attractive to Breege. In short, the mysterious tinker, who appears briefly at the opening and returns just before the drama’s conclusion to play the music that ‘beguiles’ the publican’s daughter, appears to be Breege’s only viable romantic option. Anthony’s over-the-top declaration of love, which Ó Coisdealbha claims was inspired by his memory of the rhetorical sales pitches of the Traveller clothes-sellers who operated in post-war Galway city, 9 constitutes the tinker’s only words in the whole play. The peripatetic suitor is an almost mute symbol of the values of romance and spontaneity implicitly rejected by the other males in the play, an incongruous figure from Revival writing set down into a sceptical 7 8

Ó Coisdealbha, An Tincéara Buí (1957; Dublin: Saírséal & Dill, 1962), 11. Ibid. 21. 9 Though unwell at the time, Ó Coisdealbha dramatically recited a word-perfect performance of the Travellers’ formulaic spiel twice during our interview, and described how their eloquence enticed many frugal farmers to impulsively purchase their wares.

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post-independence comedy. Anthony’s linguistic skilfulness places him beyond the camaraderie shared by the sedentary men, who console each other for their clumsiness and inability to woo with words. The sallow-skinned tinker of the title is an unindividuated and racially Other poet, irresistible to women, but shunned and mocked by his male peers. Breege departs with Anthony and the stage is left to Red Tim and all her other former suitors, who quickly recover from their disappointment and previous competitiveness with the aid of alcohol in a final scene reminiscent of the sudden male comradeship at the close of Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen: Seamus: What’s in the bottle? The devil and the demon’s entanglement! Sean: It’s not that. But it is satisfaction and fun and friendliness. 10 The play concludes with the men mimicking Anthony’s words of love, while ‘convuls[ing] with laughter’. The play’s bleak message is that in the West of the 1950s, with its historically low rates of marriage and high rates of female emigration, in particular, romantic love is for tinker characters straight out of idealizing Revival-era writing and for Syngean women foolish enough to fall for their patter. ‘Real’ men, however, will make do with a life of celibacy if adequate amounts of alcohol are available. Ó Coisdealbha’s play lays the ghost of the media-cultivated controversy surrounding The Shadow of the Glen, during which ultranationalist commentators protested that no decent Irish woman would run away with a tramp, as Synge’s heroine had so casually done. All in all, An Tincéara Buí constitutes the West of Ireland’s refutation of the metropolitan debacle: in the Connemara writer’s reworking, respectable Irish women do flee with wanderers, but now nobody particularly cares. The subversive aura that had adhered to the tinker figure in Synge’s writing has entirely dissipated in post-independence Irish drama. The tinker may have made a brief appearance as a minor figure of colour in many Irish comedies dating from the first half of the twentieth century, but the landless wanderer was simultaneously demonized in the era’s non-comic drama. At best, the tinker character was an unindividuated device with which to move a plot forward, and at 10

Ó Coisdealbha, An Tincéara Buí, 29.

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worst, a demonized representative of the forces threatening stability. Peripatetic characters appear to have been particularly common in the most popular Abbey plays of the day, such as George Shiels’s tragedy, The Rugged Path (1940), which concerns the struggle of a law-abiding farmer to uphold the agrarian mores of the post-1922 state against a disordered neighbouring clan and its landless ally. It is an indication of the degree to which the Abbey fed the pro-sedentary zeitgeist that The Rugged Path created a record for the theatre when it was seen by 25,000 people over the course of eight weeks. Tinkers and tramps were the unconscious of the serious text of the period, erupting as harbingers of subversion or violence. They were almost always a symbolic presence, meant to contrast with the central settled character and to reinforce the values of ownership and patrilineal inheritance. Additionally, tinkers were offered as an obvious trope of difference when a post-independence writer wished to confirm native norms, underlining the assumption that peoples of the road are essentially opposed to ‘indigenous’ values. Needless to say, ‘tinkers’ are never present in order to question received ideas concerning the Traveller minority they were supposed to represent. In essence, in writing after Partition, the tinker functions as a sign of all that threatens the sedentary norm that has been completely emptied of reference to reality. In light of the valorization of tinkers in early works such as Where There is Nothing, Yeats’s drama exemplifies the post-Revival shift of the figure from elevated symbol of nonconformity to degraded Other. In his 1939 play, Purgatory, in which the thieving grandson of the ruined Protestant Irish woman is ‘A bastard that a pedlar got | Upon a tinker’s daughter in a ditch’, 11 the writer uses the mixing of nomadic and gentry blood as an almost fascist metaphor for the Protestant Irish loss of social status within the Irish Free State. Although Yeats’s depiction obviously emerges from the Irish situation, this hardening of attitude towards people of the road might be broadly contextualized within the contemporaneous monitoring of nomadic European populations by the Nazis, a policy which eventually leads to the Gypsy Holocaust, of course. For Yeats, the social distance between the Traveller and Southern Irish Protestant groupings appears to have lessened, and 11 Yeats, Purgatory, Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York: Scribner, 1996), 228.

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‘tinkers’ have consequently lost their romantic aura. Moreover, both minorities are now threatened with cultural extermination within a new regime in which smallholder values are endorsed by constitution and government policy alike: the 1937 Bunreacht na hÉireann / Constitution of Ireland, the replacement for the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State, famously guarantees that state policy would maintain ‘on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable’. 12 The bleak Purgatory foresees a future in which the rights of the Protestant population will be routinely denied, but the complaint is unintentionally ironic, given the play’s indifference to Ireland’s only other numerically notable minority. However, the following discussion of the wanderer figure in non-comic Irish drama will centre on a lesser-known mid-century play, Frank Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold. An Abbey drama produced for the first time one year after the close of a war in which untold thousands of European Roma had been exterminated, The Righteous Are Bold utilizes the theme of an Irish emigrant recently returned from England who is demonically possessed by the spirit of a Gitana (Spanish Gypsy woman). The analysis of The Righteous Are Bold suggests that the tinker/Gypsy figure was a lightning rod for post-colonial anxiety concerning the effects of the continual trafficking of emigrants between Ireland and its neighbour. Such restlessness implied that a peripatetic and ‘foreign’ element might be lurking within the homogeneous new state. Thus, in the collective unconscious of post-independence Ireland, the tinker was perceived both as the carrier of unwelcome nomadic and alien values and the symbol of that defect within the wider population. By contrast, the following chapter suggests that the emigrant’s perceived location within the espace itinérant is explored from a pro-peripatetic viewpoint in Tom Murphy’s drama. Frank Carney (1904–77) was born and educated in Galway and worked as a civil servant in the Old Age Pensions Department for most of his career. The Righteous Are Bold was the last of three Carney plays produced by the Abbey from the late 1930s onwards. Premièred at the National Theatre on 29 July 1946, and set in the previous year, The Righteous Are Bold begins by boldly challenging the pieties 12 Article 45.2.v, Bunreacht na hÉireann / Constitution of Ireland (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1964), 150.

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of the post-1922 state, but appears to end with an abrupt reaffirmation of all that has been queried. As in the case of The Rugged Path, the degree to which The Righteous Are Bold was understood to flatter post-independence sedentarism is suggested by its enormous success: Carney’s play ran for sixteen weeks, one of the longest in the history of the Abbey Theatre. After three revivals at the National Theatre, it subsequently transferred to the Holiday Theatre in New York on 22 December 1955 with a cast of mostly Abbey players, where it received mixed reviews and enjoyed a ten-week run. Given the contrast between the reactionary politics of many Abbey productions in the post-independence period and the overtly challenging work then being produced by Irish writers in exile, it is interesting to note that the New York production of The Righteous Are Bold opened in the same 1955–6 Broadway season as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Indeed, the apparent conservatism of Carney’s play made it a target of exiled Irish writer Sean O’Casey’s satire in the latter’s darkly comic Cock-ADoodle-Dandy (1949). 13 The Righteous Are Bold exemplifies the manner in which an unchallenging construct of peoples of the road could circulate from an initial Abbey production to amateur drama groups in subsequent decades: Carney’s play still enjoys non-professional revivals in Ireland and beyond, with the most recent notable production occurring in January 2005 at Seton Hall, a private Catholic university in New Jersey. Because it was extremely commercially successful in its initial run and continues to be revived, The Righteous Are Bold is chosen for analysis over the near-contemporaneous Purgatory, a more ‘highbrow’ and critically attended example of the non-comic ‘Abbey tinker’ play. The Righteous Are Bold opens with the abrupt return of emigrant Nora Geraty from wartime England to her home on the mountain of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. Nora’s parents, Michael and Mary Kate, and her brother, Patrick, are troubled that the young woman has been incommunicado for many months. Ominously, they receive notice of Nora’s homecoming from Quentin Richardson, an English priest who has harboured her and warns that she has been unwell. ‘’Tis 13 An over-the-top exorcism scene in O’Casey’s play has been interpreted by a number of O’Casey scholars as an obvious satire of the culminating scene of Carney’s work, which O’Casey apparently despised. The perceived anti-Catholicism of this response to Carney caused Cock-A-Doodle-Dandy to be suppressed in both New York and Ireland.

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a queer name for a priest,’ Nora’s illiterate mother notes of the clergyman, seemingly troubled by the ‘foreignness’ of the Anglo-Catholicism that her daughter has been in contact with. The resonance of Croagh Patrick in Irish Catholic folklore as the setting of St Patrick’s Lenten fast and a long-standing pilgrimage site situates the Geraty home upon the geographical and spiritual hub of Irish piety. The opening stage directions indicate that the ‘poor farmhouse’ of the Geratys in which the action unfolds ‘has the appearance of being swept bare and clean by the high winds of Heaven’. Moreover, this ‘clean air of the mountain’ is compared to the siren and factory smoke-filled air of urban, wartime England throughout. However, the devoutness with which the Croagh Patrick setting is associated is subsequently revealed to be under threat from both pre-Christian and post-Enlightenment belief systems. Nora’s father at first appears to be accepting of his meagre lot in the lean years of the 1940s, particularly in a response he gives to his wife’s suggestion that fishing would supply more money than farming: ‘I’d sooner the mountains any day [. . . ]. It’s poor, hungry land but it’s our home and, somehow or other, I’m content.’ 14 Michael Geraty’s economically unviable holding is actually being maintained by the remittances of his emigrant children, and at the play’s opening his farm cannot support any of his offspring, with the exception of the unmarried Patrick. Anthony, a neighbouring farmer who emerges as Nora’s suitor upon her return, equally acquiesces to post-independence rhetoric in sketching inescapable poverty as a spiritual lifestyle choice: Anthony: Sure, as long as we can manage, what have we to complain of? Some people are never done grousing. Never content until they have wireless in the kitchen, money in the bank, bigger houses, larger farms. And when they’ve got all they’re grousing about they’re not one whit the happier. If you’re not content by nature you’ll never be content—not even if you found a crock of gold under every stone on the mountain side. In response, the more questioning Patrick rails against the passivity engendered by a rigid class system and the frugality urged upon the poor by the struggling new state: ‘Who’d be content on half a dozen acres of 14

Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold (Dublin: Duffy, 1952), 7.

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rock with potatoes and salt for our dinner seven days out of seven?’ 15 On his sister’s return, Patrick’s anger is directed towards the Church and what he perceives to be its support of such policy. Furthermore, the young man suggests that it is ‘superstitious’ Catholicism which has disturbed Nora’s equilibrium to begin with. Nora’s sudden tantrum and bizarre Latin utterance when Mrs. Geraty attempts to light a lamp dedicated to the Virgin Mary is later construed as the first manifestation on Irish soil of her possession by La Cardami, the aggressive spirit of a Spanish Gypsy. However, Carney’s stage directions leave interpretation open at this point: although Nora’s expression ‘startle[s]’ her mother, the young woman’s back is to the audience, making her face visible to Mrs Geraty alone. After this episode, Nora advocates what amounts to a second Reformation in explaining her violent reaction to the lamp: Nora: You see, lately I’ve been thinking that lamps and statues and prayers don’t count for much in the long run. Even Father Richardson was saying that religion goes much deeper than that. We waste too much time on the trimmings, he said. 16 The contention of local priest Father O’Malley that Nora’s critique of Irish Catholicism proves diabolical influence is refuted for most of the action by Dr Moran, the pragmatic GP who treats the troubled young woman and believes that she merely requires psychiatric treatment. In addition, Nora suggests that Catholic doctrine is to blame for Ireland’s lack of economic achievement: Nora: And maybe people can be too much taken up with religion [. . . ] hoping against hope that it’s good to be poor [. . . ]. What has [my father] got for a lifetime of honesty and religion? A few acres of rock on the side of a mountain and his family scattered to the four corners of the earth. 17 However, Nora’s daring critique of the interplay of religion and economics in mid-century Ireland is defused when the outburst subsequently appears to have been the diabolical views of La Cardami: a moment later, Nora destroys a statue of the Virgin while shouting ‘There is no God! There is only the devil.’ Indeed, this scene and the 15

Ibid. 7.

16

Ibid. 28.

17

Ibid.

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audible reaction and walkouts it invariably provoked in devout theatregoers was notorious enough to be referred to in some of the reviews of the 1955 New York production. Furthermore, this audience conviction that demonic influence is indeed present only increases when Patrick suddenly displays shocking anger towards the priest and Michael seems indifferent to his son’s attack on the authority figure. Certainly, Father O’Malley himself interprets the actions of Nora’s father and brother as proof that they too are under La Cardami’s sway. Overt subversion of normative values is disarmed by the explanation that, for this reason, the Geraty men are not ‘responsible for what they are saying’. 18 Incidentally, certain contemporary Irish reviewers, who generally praised the play’s subject and structure but found its language too ‘peasant’, appeared to accept the reality of demonic possession. Although Borrow consolidated Spain as a significant setting for fantasies of the Gypsy, Carney might be said to partake of the Irish exploration of the Gitano trope continued into his era by the Irish Gypsylorist and Borrow scholar, Walter Starkie. A lecturer in Romance Languages at Trinity College Dublin, and a much-published commentator on Gypsies and the ‘Romany Rye’, 19 Starkie was an Abbey Theatre board member from 1927 to 1943. He was also appointed president of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1965. Significantly, Starkie’s reign on the board of the National Theatre coincided with the era of the ‘stage tinker’ for which Daiken lambasted the institution. The lecturer’s involvement with the Abbey Theatre at the point at which Carney’s dramas were being staged, his expertise on the subjects of Borrow and Spanish Gypsies, and his reputation as one of the last of the old-school Gypsylorists 20 render Starkie an important figure in considering Carney’s interrogation of complex Irish social issues through a Borrovian Spanish Gypsy construct. The Carney archive at Trinity College Dublin holds an undated notebook that includes jottings about tinkers and Gypsies taken from works by Gypsylorists such as Macalister, Samspon, and MacRitchie, 18 19

Ibid. 43. Walter Starkie provided introductions for the 1948 edition of Borrow’s Romany Rye, the 1961 reissues of the same author’s Lavengro and The Bible in Spain, and the 1963 reissue of Groome’s Gypsy Folk-tales (1899). 20 The title of Starkie’s autobiography, Scholars and Gypsies (1963), suggests that he constructed his identity as a Borrovian narrative, and his Irish childhood is presented as a series of encounters with colourful tinker fiddlers. In addition, Starkie’s Gitano picaresque, Don Gypsy (1936), is firmly in the scholar-Gypsylorist mode.

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and it seems quite likely that the playwright would have been pointed towards such material by Starkie. 21 At one point in The Righteous Are Bold, Nora suddenly declares in ‘the shrill voice’ of her demon: ‘I was a Gitana in Spain. La Cardami they called me. I was a Moor before that and before that again I was in Egypt and the tombs.’ (The Spanish commonly believed that Gypsies were descended from the Moors.) The stage direction indicates that the spirit then ‘wails in eerie Moorish melody’ a portion of a song in the Caló language of the Spanish Gypsies. Carney’s image of the Gitana was obviously influenced by the work of the ‘Romany Rye’, since the verse concerned is taken without attribution from Borrow’s The Zincali. The Irish dramatist’s playscript provides an unaccented transcript of Borrow’s Caló original, but does not offer a translation, and this opacity was presumably intended to reinforce the Otherness of La Cardami and to imply diabolical incantation, although the translation provided in The Zincali suggests that the lyrics were innocuous. 22 Given that Borrow was no longer widely read by the 1940s, Carney’s attention was almost certainly brought to this source by Starkie, who spoke Caló fluently. The context in which the song is delivered in The Zincali appears to have inspired Carney’s depiction of the vociferous La Cardami: this ‘song of Egypt’, ‘scream[ed]’ ‘in the wildest style of her people’ by an unindividuated Gitana occurs within a lurid fantasy of the eternal and treacherous Gypsy fortune-teller. Borrow’s Gitana is a ‘lying prophetess’, ‘she Thug’ and ‘witch-wife’, who sings in an animalistic frenzy before embarking on her disingenuous palm-reading. 23 In an unintentionally comic exploitation of this stereotype of the sexual and threatening Gypsy female, La Cardami/Nora at one point attempts to make love to an entranced Anthony, who only comes to his senses when he notices the priest standing next to him! The Gitana demon later taunts the priest using a highly suggestive image: ‘He’ll tie me to the bed and say his prayers over me.’ 24 In addition, there may be a further erotic subtext in the stage instruction accompanying La Cardami’s outburst, which 21 22

TCD MS 10170/538 (F55). ‘On the top of a mountain I stand, | With a crown of red gold in my hand,—| Wild Moors come trooping o’er the lea, | O how far from their fury shall I flee, flee? | O how far from their fury shall I flee?’ Borrow, The Zincali, vol. 1, 137. 23 24 Ibid.1: 136–7; 132–3. Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, 64.

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details that a nun who accompanies Father O’Malley on his exorcism mission watches Nora with ‘fascinat[ion]’. In a post-colonial Ireland in which the ‘dirty’ books and newspapers routinely condemned from the altar were generally imports from ‘godless England’, La Cardami represents Nora’s contamination by a sexually depraved English culture. This infection must be exorcized if Nora hopes to settle down as a chaste Irish wife and mother of the sort insisted upon by nativist Catholic rhetoric. Nora’s violent reaction to the lighting of the lamp and her subsequent unkempt appearance is equated with tinker misbehaviour and dishevelment: on recovering from the episode, the young woman compares herself to ‘a tinker’s wife’ who has slept under a cart. Nellie, the local ‘medical woman’, whose spell to cure Nora’s apparent possession is condemned as ‘pagan nonsense’ by Father O’Malley, links the young woman’s behaviour to a conjectured encounter with a tinker woman: Nellie: ’Twas the evil eye was put on her. She’s enchanted. It might be when she was only a child. A tinker woman she was—red-headed. Not a cow in Pat Philbin’s gave milk for years where Pat said something to her on the road, of a fairday he was drunk. 25 The disavowal of anti-peripateticism implied when this encounter proves not to be the source of Nora’s distress is negated by the presentation of a Gypsy as the actual agent of possession. A Grellmannderived construct of the heathen Gypsy is detectable in the play’s casual assumption of the impiety of the non-sedentary, and The Righteous Are Bold indicates the manner in which the tinker or Gypsy figure may be used to ventriloquize attacks on normative values by a writer wary of the conservatism of his audience. The inherent sedition of a guntoting Patrick’s attempt to halt the priest’s performance of the exorcism ritual near the climax of the action is defused by the youth’s sudden realization that his sister is indeed possessed. The final words of the previously mutinous Patrick, the drama’s voice of rage against spiritual and economic inertia are: ‘Father, I beg your forgiveness.’ Even the secular Dr Moran, who had previously denigrated Mrs Geraty’s ‘blind faith’, blesses himself upon witnessing the exorcism. Within Abbey Theatre circles, Patrick’s ultimately defused threat of violence against 25

Ibid. 58–9.

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the clergyman would have evoked the memory of the priest’s assault in The Tinker’s Wedding. However, in echoing Synge’s play, The Righteous Are Bold draws attention to the conservatism of the National Theatre in post-independence Ireland in contrast to its challenging of sedentary givens during the Revival. Carney’s play addresses the wide array of difficult issues that faced post-independence Ireland: high rates of psychiatric illness, casual prejudice towards indigenous minorities, returned emigrants, and foreigners, institutional and popular sanction of emigration, reliance on delayed marriage and remittance as a valid economic policy, and tolerance of Church dominion at individual and state levels. The Righteous Are Bold is, to a huge extent, a rather brave play in directly tackling the kinds of serious concerns that merely hover at the edges of a comedy such as An Tincéara Buí. Nevertheless, Carney’s drama appears to ultimately elide these very issues with a pat explanation of supernatural agency that relies on a stereotype of the Gypsy. Moreover, at the close, the voices given to Fr Richardson’s ‘reformed’ Catholicism, Patrick’s youthful questioning of custom and religious diktat, and both folk and post-Enlightenment medical discourses all seem to be silenced by the reiteration of a fundamentalist Catholic worldview and a nationalist insistence on the moral superiority of Ireland over England, the godless space in which Nora is first assailed by La Cardami. In short, the ironic tone of the newly returned Nora’s statement that she will be ‘all right’ because she has returned to ‘a holy place’ is entirely absent when the phrase is repeated at the conclusion. However, the concluding incident of The Righteous Are Bold, in which the priest dies, apparently exhausted from performing the successful exorcism, is highly ambiguous. Father O’Malley’s final stage instruction and line in the play is: ‘His lips mutter “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”.’ Is the clergyman a Christ-like figure of redemption or a man ultimately broken by La Cardami’s strength, despite her banishment from Nora’s soul? On a macro level, Carney disrupts any absolutely conclusive reading of the play’s conservatism by refusing to explain who or what is being referred to in the title. Is the ‘righteous’ one the quasisocialist Patrick or the doctrinally orthodox Father O’Malley? Is the use of one named Patrick as a dissenting voice a seditious nod to the ‘righteous’ Irish Protestant tradition that St Patrick’s Celtic Christianity was corrupted by Rome? Is ‘bold’ used in the sense of ‘daring’ or

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‘insubordinate’? Is the title the key to a message running counter to the play’s apparent endorsement of the status quo? It is a measure of Carney’s skill that despite the seeming disavowal of the play’s initial subversion of cultural pieties, these questions are never satisfactorily answered.

‘RE-HIBERNICIZING’ THE ‘ANGLO-IRISH’ TINKER: MAURICE WALSH’S TH E R OAD TO NOWHE R E Carney’s deployment of Spanish Gypsy Caló as a kind of gibberish demonstrates the manner in which dominant culture may exploit or misrepresent the dialect of the non-literate. For many contemporary Irish Travellers, the utilization of a discrete language constitutes one of the most palpable markers of ethnic difference, even if it can be argued that this is an appropriation of the racial rhetoric that emerged after Leland’s ‘discovery’ of ‘Shelta’ in the 1880s. As such, the misrepresentation or overlooking of Cant in texts concerning the minority is of huge import. Significantly, despite the attention the language garnered in the Victorian era, it was almost entirely absent from literary representations of the culture until the rise of Traveller claims to ethnic and cultural separateness in the 1960s and 1970s. Shelta lost its archaic mystique among British Gypsylorists after the early twentieth century, when research concluded that it lacked the antique heritage suggested by enthusiasts. Moreover, with the exception of Kuno Meyer, most reputable Irish or Ireland-based scholars shied away from the Shelta craze, or, as in the case of Yeats’s research for Where There is Nothing, elided Gypsylorism’s role in bringing their attention to tinker culture. In effect, the political nature of the resistance of Irish scholars and writers to an Irish minority language ‘discovered’ and promoted by Anglo-American Gypsylorism must not be discounted. By 1914, tinkler Cant was being constructed as a polluter of the more pure and ancient language of British Romanies. 26 In like manner, in a scene in which American Gypsies encounter Irish Travellers at a communal camping ground in a boy’s adventure narrative published in 26

Alexander Russell, ‘Scoti-Romani and Tinkers’ Cant’, JGLS 8 (1914–15), 12.

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1932, the degraded language utilized by the Irish minority isolates them from the natural camaraderie enjoyed by Romani-speaking American and Scottish Gypsies. 27 Irish linguist Sir George Abraham Grierson, a Gypsy Lore Society member and the editor of the monumental Linguistic Survey of India, was noticeably wary of the theory of the Indian origin of European Gypsies. 28 Nevertheless, the hypothesis retained favour amongst post-Victorian Gypsylorists, and Romani dialects kept their status as the rich languages of a racially pure group while Shelta fell from favour. Furthermore, the work of R. Alexander Stewart Macalister, the first Professor of Celtic Archaeology at UCD from 1909 to 1943, is pivotal in considering the dethroning of Shelta from a ‘language of the bards’ in late nineteenth-century discourse to an inconsequential pidgin. Macalister’s 1937 study of Shelta and related cryptolects, The Secret Languages of Ireland, was based on Sampson’s notes, and remains one of the cornerstones of the study of the subject, if only because it is the lone full-length scholarly publication on the subject to this day. In addition to containing archaic Irish words, Cant appears to form words from Irish using transforming or disguising devices such as the reversal of one syllable or the utilization of rhyming slang. Macalister conducted no fieldwork of his own, but damningly theorizes that the language was so cleverly ‘constructed’ that it could only have been the work of dispossessed post-Reformation monks who attached themselves to druidic bards. This was an expansion of Meyer’s undeveloped suggestion that Shelta was ‘derived from an artificial language invented by learned men’. 29 Macalister demolished any lingering romance attached to the ‘tinkers’ tongue’ in suggesting that it was the product of a scholarly clerical class, though prejudice that the language’s disdained speakers 27 ‘[The Irish travelers] [. . . ] had almost no Romany blood [. . . ]. Pete and Duko made remarks about them in Romany which the travellers could not get, as they spoke mostly cant [. . . ]. Not unlike them was the Scotch Gypsy, [. . . ] but he had some Romany blood in his veins. He and Pete soon made friends.’ Irving Brown, Romany Road: The Story of Pete Brockhaus Thought to Have Been Kidnapped by Gypsies! (New York: Smith and Haas, 1932), 85–6. 28 Sir George Abraham Grierson (gen. ed.), Linguistic Survey of India. 11 vols: vol. 11, Gipsy Languages (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1922), 1. 29 R. A. S. Macalister and J. Sampson, The Secret Languages of Ireland with Special Reference to the Origin and Nature of the Shelta Language (1937; Armagh: Craobh Rua, 1997), 233; Kuno Meyer, ‘The Secret Languages of Ireland’, JGLS 2:3 (1909), 242.

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were not worthy of the distinctiveness ascribed to them by earlier investigations may have lurked behind his theory. By 1947, Shelta had become an urban legend, its very existence doubted: ‘Like Egyptology, Ossian, or The Lost Ten Tribes, the “discovery” of a secret tinker language believed to be Gaelic in structure, caused some excitement during the [nineteenth] century.’ 30 Mid-twentiethcentury attitudes amongst the few aware of Shelta’s existence may be gleaned from Maher’s memory: ‘I remember how I used to argue with the teachers [. . . ]. I used to tell them that they were forgetting “Cant”— the travellers’ language. Often did they tell me that this was just slang, a thing that is only associated with ignorant people.’ 31 The young Maher did not reveal his Traveller origins to most of his settled schoolmates, and pragmatically evades the implications of his possession of another language when his singing of a Cant ballad mystifies the class: ‘When I was asked if I knew the meaning of the words, I said I didn’t. I knew that if so I would have to explain a lot of things besides the words of the song.’ 32 In the decades after independence, the language was rarely referred to in popular writings on Traveller culture, and most respondents to the Irish Folklore Commission’s 1952 ‘Tinkers’ questionnaire, which included a query regarding knowledge of any Traveller language, were unaware of its existence. In the wake of Macalister’s debunking, Cant lost its Victorian-era mystique, and the very little scholarly attention that it subsequently received tended to contest its status as a language. 33 After 1922, popular writing on tinker culture ignored the existence of a discrete language, and tended to trivialize the minority lifestyle as an easily unveiled subculture into which disaffected members of majority society could readily merge. A good case in point is that of best-selling author Maurice Walsh, whose apolitical depiction of 30 31 32 33

Daiken, ‘Parasites Without Power’, 40. Sean Maher, The Road to God Knows Where (Dublin: Talbot, 1918), 145. Ibid. 115. The ‘Shelta’ entry in Ethnologue states that it is a ‘cryptolect’ (secret language), based ‘largely on Irish with influence from an undocumented source’ spoken by 6,000 people in Ireland, and 86,000 in all countries, most of whom are in the United Kingdom and the USA. Raymond G. Gordon, Jr. (ed.), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. (Dallas, Tex.: SIL International, 2005). For an even-handed contemporary analysis of Cant’s origin by an Irish linguist, see Alice Binchy, ‘Travellers’ Language’, A Heritage Ahead: Cultural Action and Travellers (Dublin: Pavee Point, 1995), 87–93.

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unethnicized tinkers contrasts sharply with that of fellow Kerry writer Bryan MacMahon’s later consideration of the same subject, which is examined in the following chapter. That two authors from the same place could take such differing stances in their representation of an equivalent theme is comprehensible in light of Terence Brown’s analysis of the creative climate of post-Partition Ireland: The Irish artist, writer or poet who in the early decades of independence chose to remain in Ireland had two roles available to him. He could furnish the new order with an art, which whether in its self-conscious nativism or idyllic celebration of the rural folk tradition would nourish the dominant essentialist ideology of the state; or disgusted with the unreality of such programmatic artistic endeavours, he might seek to define his artistic identity in terms of opposition and dissent. 34

Walsh will be considered as a novelist from an agrarian background who came to public prominence in an era in which sedentarist values began to hold sway at all levels of Irish society and as an author whose work does not challenge the new cultural orthodoxy. In particular, Walsh’s solution to the ‘problem’ of the existence of Cant in portraying the ‘colour’ of Traveller culture in his work will be carefully attended to. Maurice Walsh was born into a Kerry farming family in 1879, the year the Land League was founded by Charles Stewart Parnell to promote the substitution of small proprietors for landlords. The League gained widespread support among urban- and rural-dwellers alike, and within a few decades of its founding the vast majority of Irish soil was in the possession of former tenants. Small farmers were invested with an exemplary Irishness during the struggle, when a nascent state coalesced around the ambition of landownership. Jim MacLaughlin traces the roots of the twentieth-century nomadic–sedentary clash to the reform movement’s exorcism of ‘tribalism and nomadism from nationalist history’. Tribal and clan pedigrees became ‘a political embarrassment’, ‘an obstacle to progress and a barrier to rural modernisation’, while ‘tinkerism’ became a ‘social affront to the hegemonic ideals of bourgeois society with its emphasis on hard work and property ownership’. 35 34 Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History (London: Fontana, 1981), 312–13. 35 Jim MacLaughlin, ‘The Evolution of Anti-Traveller Racism in Ireland’, Race and Class 37:3 (1996), 48–9.

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According to Philip Bull, ‘the status given to land as the symbol of liberation from oppression was such that those who had little or no land were unable to see either their individual identity or their national and social identity in terms other than as landholders and farmers’. 36 Moreover, Bull suggests that social cohesion emanated from the relationship between the small farmer and the various businesses his money supported. Problematically, this consensus excluded those Irish people who had no wish to own or cultivate the soil. The common League phrase, ‘The Land for the People’, implied a homogeneous sedentary majority and ignored those unconnected to agriculture. Problematically too, in tandem with this land reform movement, the politics of identity became inextricably bound up with the politics of language, so that those natives who did not aspire to speak Irish or, as in the case of Travellers, those in possession of a language that was not Irish, were likewise excluded from the sedentary consensus. By the early twentieth century, the Land League had succeeded in its aims, and Ireland was a society dominated by the interests and values of smallholders. Property was perceived to facilitate access to political and moral structures, and within the terms of the 1937 Constitution, was practically the foundation of citizenship itself. According to Bull, despite obvious differences, post-Partition Ireland consisted of two agriculturally based sectarian mono-cultures that had more in common with each other than with those communities excluded by their shared values. 37 The remarkable consensus concerning landownership and the codification of public space expressed by drama emanating from both sides of the border in the decades after Partition underscores this point. The fixation on the tinker as anti-hero or comic fool in the Irish writing of the period figured the nomad as a necessary Other against which the sedentary Self on both parts of the island might be constructed, albeit in different ways; in the post-Partition era, the ‘imagined community’ posited by Benedict Anderson was unquestionably a sedentary one. Walsh began writing while working as an excise officer in Scotland, and his first major success came in 1926 with The Key Above the Door, a romantic novel set in the Highlands. Most of the author’s texts rehash 36

Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996),

179. 37

Ibid. 191.

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the themes of love and manly escapades in Scottish and Irish outdoor settings replete with tinkers, tramps, rural pugilists and other ‘quaint’ types. All in all, as a writer claimed equally by Scottish and Irish literature, Walsh constitutes an interesting link between Scott’s Tory valorization of the Highland Gypsy and the utilization of the tinker motif in post-Revival Ireland. In Walsh’s The Road to Nowhere, the potential subversion of Traveller culture so central to Revival representations is defused by depicting the minority as an uncomplicated subset of majority Ireland that is ever ready to absorb settled adventurers. The exceptional nature of Travellers’ manner of living—such that it functions as a suitably picturesque subject to begin with—is contained by Walsh’s ‘Disneyization’: in The Road to Nowhere, the community is a kind of holiday camp to which those in need of a little ‘colour’ and ‘re-Gaeling’ can briefly resort. In short, the representation of Traveller culture in Walsh’s work serves in the end merely to reinforce dominant values. Unsurprisingly, Walsh’s unthreatening portraits of alternative lifestyles were embraced by the general reading public: he was the best-selling author in Ireland during the 1930s, and also enjoyed huge success in America into the 1960s. Moreover, the new Irish government acknowledged the author’s celebration of post-Partition discourse when it sanctioned Walsh’s 1932 novel Blackcock’s Feather, the story of a Scottish mercenary soldier in Elizabethan Ireland, for use as a text in Irish schools. 38 Walsh had entered the British Customs and Excise Service as an Excise Officer in 1901, and after the founding of the Free State, he seized upon the chance to transfer from the British to the Irish Customs Service. Additionally, the Kerry author vociferously defended Irish neutrality during the Second World War in The Saturday Evening Post, so his enthusiasm for the new order was never in doubt. 39 The same weekly had published his short story ‘The Quiet Man’ in 1933, and Walsh experienced a worldwide surge in popularity after John Huston’s 1952 film version transformed it into the Hollywood ‘Oirish’ yarn par excellence. Walsh’s myth of rural Irish life was sold to America, which sold it back to Ireland with the help of John Wayne. 38 39

Steven Matheson, Maurice Walsh, Storyteller (Kerry: Brandon, 1985), 71. Maurice Walsh, ‘Ireland in a Warring Europe’, Saturday Evening Post 13 Jan. 1940: 27; 38–39; 42; 44.

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Walsh’s 1934 novel The Road to Nowhere was published in the same year that the Committee on Vagrancy in Scotland stressed the need for the ‘absorption of tinkers into ordinary society’. 40 Its composition in an era antecedent to Traveller political mobilization is most evident in the absence of the concept of Traveller ethnicity that underlines MacMahon’s admittedly later celebration of the culture. Moreover, Walsh’s representation of life on the road is informed by deep-rooted sedentary beliefs concerning unorthodox tinker marriage ritual. He presents ‘jumping the budget’ as the community’s wedding ceremony, but tailors the description for his conservative mainstream Irish and Irish-American readerships by expunging the lascivious details common to such accounts. 41 Nevertheless, The Road to Nowhere was marketed as a ‘guide’ to the minority lifestyle, which provoked caustic comment from certain quarters at the time: The Times Literary Supplement reviewer was amused by ‘the unreality’ of the adventure novel’s ‘rough but noble-minded tinkers’, ‘broken-hearted hero’, and ‘dark, muttering villain’. 42 Nevertheless, Walsh’s depiction of the tinker was popularly viewed as a prism through which actual Traveller life might be understood: a 1956 newspaper article on a Munster fair described a tinker participant dressed ‘in multicoloured shirt and with a bright-hued neckerchief around his throat’ as ‘a character that might have stepped straight out of Maurice Walsh’s Road to Nowhere’. 43 The novel sold well in both Ireland and the United States, and was discussed as a potential film script at the time. Moreover, given that autumn is referred to as ‘fall’ throughout The Road to Nowhere and that even the simplest Irish-language phrases are rendered phonetically and repeated in English, it can be surmised that the novel was aimed particularly at the lucrative American market. 40 Norman A. Dodds, Gypsies, Didikois and Other Travellers (London: Johnson, 1966), 110. 41 See Walter Simson’s description of Gypsy marriage in which the bride passes urine into a ceremonial bowl and ‘the father of the bridegroom sleeps with the bride’s mother [. . . ] previous to the celebration of the marriage.’ Simson, History of the Gipsies: With Specimens of the Gypsy Language, ed. James Simson (1865), 259; 264. 42 Review of The Road to Nowhere, by Maurice Walsh, Times Literary Supplement 21 June 1934: 444. 43 Kerryman (Cork edn.), 14 July 1956, quoted in Aoife Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State 1922–70 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), 12.

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The Road to Nowhere revolves around Scottish hero Rogan Stuart and Irish-American heroine Elspeth Tandy, who join an Irish tinker camp in order to escape their respective predicaments: Stuart is fleeing personal troubles and the Anglicized Tandy is running from the intrigues of life in an Irish Big House. After being on the roads for some months, the former Big House mistress Hibernicizes her name to Ailish Conroy, while the macho Stuart has begun to sprinkle his speech with Irish and considers that at that point ‘he could talk like a tinker, drink like a tinker, think inside a tinker’s skin’. 44 In this manner, the flimsy boundary between Traveller and dominant culture is demonstrated to yield effortlessly to the penetration of the sedentary adventurers. In The Road to Nowhere, Cant does not appear to exist at all, although the year in which the novel emerged saw the publication of the third of folklorist Pádraig MacGréine’s seminal Irish-language articles on the subject. In Walsh’s text, Irish rather than Cant functions as the private language of Travellers, and is the medium through which the tribal patriarch performs a wedding ceremony. However, this appears to be literary fantasy rather than any commonly understood reality since submissions to the Irish Folklore Commission questionnaire suggest that the majority population of post-independence Ireland predominantly believed that Travellers did not speak Irish. Walsh was writing during a period in which the native tongue was being promoted as a potential replacement for English by government agencies, and in the contention between the two majority languages there was simply no ideological room for a third, much less one spoken by a powerless minority. Synge’s Revival-era imagining of tinkers’ preGaelic origins is modified to tally with the new order: in a novel published in a period in which the rhetoric of cultural homogeneity is in the ascendant, Travellers are necessarily constructed as authentic, Irishspeaking ‘Gaels’. In like manner, the tinkers depicted in the opening scene of the film No Resting Place (1951) speak fluent Irish, though the language is incomprehensible to the farmer who hounds them away from his cottage. It is significant that in the original Scottish setting of the 1948 Ian Niall novel upon which the film was based, no such linguistic divide exists between the tinklers and their sedentary persecutors. Indeed, in popular understanding, the word Cant, which was of 44

Walsh, The Road to Nowhere (London and Edinburgh: Chambers, 1949), 125.

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course the English rogue-literature derived designation for ‘the tinkers’ tongue’, began to acquire the spurious etymology of caint, the Irishlanguage word for ‘speech’ (nf ). The discourse of indigenous exoticness to which the tinker figure had been subject during the Revival is stifled and does not re-emerge until the 1960s, when it is transubstantiated into the rhetoric of Traveller ethnic difference. Shelta, an obscure tongue of dubious origin that had been academically instated by British Gypsylorists, cannot function as a feasible language of Ireland in Walsh’s fictional world. ‘Running away with the tinkers’ is a potent fantasy of the evasion of dominant values and the institutions of sedentarist control that fuelled both Synge’s wanderings in rural Wicklow and the great number of accounts of ‘tramping’ Ireland generated during the early twentieth century. However, in The Road to Nowhere, the potential subversion of such a reverie is defused when the separate Traveller minority turn out to be little more than a subset of the imagined nationalist, Catholic, and Irish-speaking majority. By immersing herself in tinker culture, Elspeth Tandy, Anglicized and Protestant mistress of the Big House, is reconstituted as Ailish Conroy, her authentic and fully Irish self. The representative of the Big House, the Irish naturalizing symbol of sedentarism par excellence, renews her vitality through a temporary immersion in a defanged espace itinerant; at the close of Tandy’s adventure, the sedentary status quo remains unqueried and hierarchies are still in place. Any consciousness that Travellers might possess a native way of life that is not an Irish-language or ‘Gaelic’ one is suppressed in favour of presenting them as a colourful source of cultural renewal for the deracinated. In post-1922 Ireland, attempts were made to strip tinkers of accretions that could render the minority dubiously ‘Gypsy’, foreign, tribal, or pre-Gaelic. Within contemporaneous broadsheet rhetoric, the tinker camp is a shameful spectacle that summons up the humiliations of history and contradicts the post-independence ideology of a classless, self-reliant, and mono-ethnic new state. The tinker figure had been contaminated by a foreignness acquired from its successive constitutions by English rogue pamphlets, Orientalist scholarship, and Gypsylorist writings. Furthermore, in this ultra-nativist period, even certain Irish interventions were considered polluted since native interest in the tinker had always been predominantly an affair of the Anglo-Irish and the British with Irish ties: Marsden and Vallancey were Ascendancy scholars;

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Sampson and Borrow were Victorian Britons partially raised in Ireland; Crofton was a Victorian Briton of Irish planter stock; Synge, Yeats, Starkie, and Macalister were Irish Protestants of British descent. In light of Synge’s and Yeats’s wresting of the tinker from the clutches of British Gypsylorism during the Revival, it is ironic that in the culturally narrowed post-independence period the figure’s Irishness was perceived to have been further compromised by the very attentions of such writers. Seemingly eager to distance themselves from the quasi-colonial Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society tradition, Irish scholars of the period who took an interest in the topic of the ‘tinkers’ tongue’ such as Mícheál MacÉnrí and MacGréine utilized the term Cant (or Ceant in Irish) rather than the Leland-coined Shelta, and published their research in the native and bilingual journal, Béaloideas. An editorial note accompanying a MacGréine article on the topic published in the early 1930s describes Cant as ‘an almost untilled field’: the history of British Gypsylorist ‘Shelta’ scholarship is wholly excised in the post-independence state. In the piece, MacGréine stresses the Irishness and Catholicism of Travellers in pointed contrast to the Protestant Britishness of Romanies: ‘[Tinkers and British Gypsies] do not intermingle or intermarry, they speak different languages [. . . ] and their religions are different.’ 45 Indeed, in 1936 tension erupted between Church of Ireland and Catholic clergymen when it emerged that a Catholic priest was ministering to an Anglican British Romany family wintering with Irish Travellers at a central Dublin camping site. 46 This shift from the late nineteenth-century British intimation of the ‘Gypsyness’ of Irish Travellers to a postindependence rhetoric that stressed their Hibernian credentials appears to have led some to surmise that tinkers’ appearance had ‘whitened’ over the course of a generation, as in the following patently perplexed submission to the mid-century Irish Folklore Commission questionnaire on the minority: In past years [tinkers] were known as ‘gipsies’ [. . . ]. In past years gipsies looked very foreign. The men were swarthy with black straight hair and the women were blond [. . . ]. They were fond of bright coloured clothes and the women 45 Pádraig MacGréine, ‘Irish Tinkers or “Travellers” ’, Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society 3:2 (1932), 170. 46 Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous, 17.

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nearly always wore gay shawls. The modern gipsies or tinkers seem more ordinary in appearance and clothing. 47

However, there is evidence that Travellers themselves exploited this confusion by performing ‘Gypsyness’ when engaging in activities such as fortune-telling. 48 The 1937 Constitution of Ireland stressed that the newly-minted Republic was a predominantly Catholic state, and identity and religion consequently became even more inextricably bound than had previously been the case. Ireland’s Own, a self-consciously Catholic and nativist family magazine founded at the height of the Revival, published an article entitled ‘Our Irish Gypsies, the Tinkers’ in the same year as the revised Constitution was drafted. The periodical’s use of ‘Gypsy’, a loaded word to which overtones of heathenism had adhered since the eighteenth century, betrays anxiety that the minority is less than fully Irish and Catholic. The author of the unsigned piece opens by detailing a stereotypical scene of ‘colourful’ and petty criminal tinker behaviour he witnesses on Wexford Quay: There they were with lean horses, jennets and tethered asses [. . . ] small children snuggled down amidst rags, sacks, bundles and all the ‘mixemgatherem’ of a travelling man’s conveyance. Older children loitered around, keeping a watchful eye on the civil guard on duty. When he approached; they were visibly busy with the youngsters or attending the beasts. Once he turned a corner some of them snatched armfuls of hay from passing farmers’ carts, while the more advanced in the art set up the whine of the mendicant and begged coppers from passers-by with the persistence worthy of a better cause. 49

In a scene that is suspiciously reminiscent of the narrator’s cheating by the tinker in Ó Conaire’s canonical ‘M’Asal Beag Dubh’, the father of the clan then tricks a farmer into paying more for a donkey than the animal is worth. His curiosity piqued, the author continues that sometime after witnessing these events he consulted ‘a book on gipsies’ that apparently proffered the troubling Grellmann-derived paradigm 47 ‘Tinkers’ [1952 Irish Folklore Commission Questionnaire], NFC MS 1255 University College Dublin, 77–78. 48 In preparation for fortune-telling, Irish Traveller Nan Donohoe purchased a mass of cheap bangles, rings and earrings, and tied a silk scarf around her head. Sharon Gmelch, Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman (New York: Norton, 1986), 128. 49 A.S., ‘Our Irish Gipsies—The Tinkers’, Ireland’s Own 17 April 1937: 3–4.

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of nomads’ inherent heathenism: ‘[The Gypsies] seemed to be a dour, pagan, superstitious lot, with few redeeming points and religion was a closed book to them. The Irish tinkers are not mentioned.’ In order to dispel the unease this text arouses within him in reference to the Catholicity of the ‘Irish Gypsies’, the writer proceeds to investigate this topic himself: Picture my surprise to learn from a tinker man who tried to sell me a dog that he and his wife had been married ‘be the priest’, as were all the couples he knew in his travelling [. . . ]. Men and women went to their Duty to the friars. ‘Do your children go to school?’ I asked. ‘Well sir they do sometimes in the winter when we gets an old house to stay in but no school wants them and there’s one good Mistress, God be good to her, that teaches them for Confirmation.’

Thus able to reassure both himself and his readers of the orthodoxy of tinker belief and practice, the author concludes with a liberal humanist affirmation of the Catholic (i.e. Irish) identity of the minority, which even redeems them of their putative propensity for petty crime: It was good to think too, that Catholic Associations, and the Catholic atmosphere of rural Ireland had given these poor, wandering ones, some idea of caring for their souls even in a primitive way. It also set me thinking why should it be considered a most scathing term of abuse to be called ‘a mean tinker’? Every mean man is despicable and the tinkers are not the worst offenders for they are loyal and generous to each other [. . . ]. In their own rude way they provide for their family life and if their methods be not always ‘above board’ they are no less honest than many a pretentious citizen. 50

Just as the suggested collection of folklore pertaining to the ‘religious and social practices of tinkers’ in the Irish Folklore Commission questionnaire received an enormous response, the Irish government’s 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy seems preoccupied by the Catholicity of Travellers. Although members of the community apparently did not regularly attend mass, they ‘see to it that their children receive the Sacraments of Baptism, Penance, Holy Communion and Confirmation’. In diametrical opposition to the fantasy of tinker bigamy and sexual laxity prevalent in late nineteenth-century British accounts and the ubiquity of the trope of the irregular Traveller wedding in Irish literature, the Report found that the institution of marriage in the 50

Ibid. 4.

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community ‘is not any weaker than it is in other Catholic marriages. [. . . ] itinerants have a high standard of sexual morality and there is no evidence of promiscuity’. 51 The damning colonial-era imputation of the sexual immorality of a portion of the Irish Catholic population is finally refuted. In the manner of the anonymous Ireland’s Own contributor, the twentieth-century nationalist commentator commonly expresses gratification that despite the figure’s associations with various kinds of foreignness, the ‘Irish Gypsy’ is in fact a true Gael after all. In the course of his account of a trip around Ireland, Seán Ó Faoláin details that he spoke in Irish in order to discourage a begging Sligo tinker woman, ‘whereat she talked Irish back to me, rich, bawdy Irish, full of life and devilment’. 52 Similarly, a 1939 Irish-language contribution on Cant by MacÉnrí emphasizes the first encounter between the author and the tinker woman who eventually provides him with vocabulary: ‘D’aithnigh mé gur bean de na tinncéirí a bhí ann, agus bheannuigh mé dí i nGaedhilge. D’fhreagra sí mé líomhtha go leor i nGaedhilge’ (‘I recognized that the woman was a tinker, and I greeted her in Irish. She answered me very fluently in the language’). 53 In a similar confirmation of the tinker’s Irish credentials, the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy stresses that few of the ‘itinerants of Ireland are of Romany or Gipsy origin’. 54 An American anthropologist writing on Irish Traveller culture in 1975 differentiates between Gypsies who ‘hail from India’ and Irish Travellers thought to be of ‘strictly Celtic origin’. Disregarding the separate history vociferously claimed by Traveller activists after the 1960s, the author goes on to depict members of the minority as the sainted martyrs of cumulative outrages against the Irish peasantry: ‘Travellers are descendants of the dispossessed of the Famine, of the evictions, or of the vestiges of defeated armies of the Battles of Antrim and of the Boyne.’ 55 Thus, in the anthropological discourse of an era in which 51

Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, 88–90. Seán Ó Faoláin, An Irish Journey, illust. Paul Henry (London: Reader’s Union and Longmans Green, 1941), 195. 53 Mícheál MacÉnrí, ‘ “Ceant” agus Saoghal na dTincéirí’, Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore Society of Ireland 9:2 (1939), 219. 54 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1963), 34. 55 Bettina Barnes, ‘Irish Travelling People’, Gypsies, in Farnham Rehfisch (ed.), Tinkers and Other Travellers (London: Academic, 1975), 232. 52

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the claiming of ethnicity was a strategy of Traveller empowerment, the minority continued to be offered as a symbol of sedentary dispossession. Moreover, the invocation of a divisive symbol of unionist triumphalism such as the Battle of the Boyne suggests that purported Traveller origins were being opportunely exploited in order to link the minority with the Catholics of Northern Ireland. Although the nomad was a necessary Other against which the post-Partition sedentary Self on both parts of the island was constructed, the concluding portion of this chapter outlines the manner in which the Traveller became a pawn between North and South in the period leading up to the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ in the late 1960s.

‘GYPSIES FROM EIRE’: THE TINKER AND POST-PARTITION POL ARIZ ATION As noted earlier, in a German visitor’s account of Ireland published immediately prior to the famine of 1845, a miserable scene of a tinker mending the utensils of an equally poor woman is encountered just prior to entering strikingly prosperous Ulster. The tinker epitomized the disparity between North and South long before Partition, but functioned in the same manner to a much greater degree after 1922. It is arguable that the seed of the post-war focus on the wanderer as emblem of cultural difference on the island was sown as early as Ulster Literary Theatre playwright Gerald MacNamara’s pardoy of Synge, The Mist that Does Be on the Bog (1909). Like Ó Coisdealbha’s later ‘writing back’ to Synge from the Gaeltacht, MacNamara’s comedy replies to the hegemonic Dublin drama scene from a self-consciously regional standpoint. In The Mist that Does Be on the Bog, a ‘tramp’ is revealed to be a methodwriting middle-class Dublin dramatist, and it was quickly established that the playwright-tramp was based on Synge and that MacNamara’s language was a parody of the Dublin playwright’s heightened dialogue. As Mark Phelan notes, the reduction of the tramp in MacNamara’s play in contrast to its valorization in Dublin drama indicates that the vagabond motif was pivotal to the subsequent creation of the opposition of an industrial, plain-speaking North and a heritage-laden but

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impoverished South. 56 In addition, MacNamara’s deflation of the tinker cult counters the Revival-era importation of the discourse of bohémienisme, which facilitated Dublin’s positioning of itself as the opposite of soulless, philistine Belfast. In the post-1922 era, the northern and southern portions of the island of Ireland were at pains to define themselves as diametrically opposed in every way. Interestingly, submitters to the Irish Folklore Commission questionnaire from the northern counties (at least two of whom were Protestant clergymen) were much more likely to state that tinkers had no religion than their southern equivalents; since the tinker had been gradually Gaelicized and Catholicized within Free State discourse, the figure either had to be excised from the imaginative resources available to the Northern Irish Protestant writer or commentator of unionist leanings or else decisively de-Hibernicized. Belfast-born playwright and poet Ruddick Millar, who cultivated an oppositional Ulster identity in many of his works, appropriated the tinker as a representative of regional authenticity in the anti-development comedy, Tappytoosey (1950). Millar’s play centres on a development project that aims to turn the rural idyll of Tappytoosey into a satellite of Belfast. However, in the eyes of older villagers, a stubborn squatter named ‘Tinker’ Thompson functions as a welcome hindrance to the unwanted ‘progress’ emanating from the capital. The unmannerly and shambolic ‘Tinker’ dwells in pre-industrial cultural time, and that is where the villagers wish to be too. In Bryan MacMahon’s 1967 novel The Honey Spike, based on his play of that name, a politically-neutral Traveller who is frustrated that he cannot make a living in Northern Ireland because of antipathy towards his southern origins declares: ‘Up here, everythin’ is cold: the winds, the sea, the islands, and the shore—they all smell like ice. The people here—their eyes are cold. “Be off, you Fenian [Irish nationalist] Papist beggars!”—that’s what they say.’ 57 The tinker’s association with the ‘Southern Irish’ in the post-Partition North is neutralized in Millar’s Tappytoosey by the deployment of the resolutely British surname Thompson for the play’s squatter hero. This name was one, moreover, that was memorably utilized in MacNamara’s extremely popular Thompson in Tír-na-nÓg (1912), an equally oppositional 56 See Mark Phelan, ‘The Enthusiast(s)’, in Hugh Odling-Smee (ed.), ‘Its Own Way of Things’: A Celebration of the Ulster Literary Theatre (Belfast: Lagan, 2004), 9–14. 57 Bryan MacMahon, The Honey Spike (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1995), 27.

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celebration of Northern loyalist incomprehension in the face of Celtic Twilight shenanigans. Millar’s play reflects contemporaneous establishment unionist rhetoric, which either de-Hibernicized the minority by pointedly referring to members as ‘Gypsies’, or seemed troubled by the ‘southern’ associations of the community. The report by the Committee on Gypsies and Like Itinerants to Stormont in 1948, which included the unintentionally comic Ulster Farmers’ Union complaint that rural families were being intimidated by the ‘evil eye’, repeatedly refers to what are almost certainly Irish Travellers as ‘gypsies’. ‘Almost from the inception of the [Northern Irish] state’ with the Partition of Ireland in the 1920s, McVeigh notes, unionist politicians at Stormont, the Northern Irish Parliamentary body, ‘were keen to make political capital out of attacking Travellers.’ 58 Although a number of extended Traveller families ‘have been particularly associated with the north of Ireland since well before the Partition of the island’, 59 in the 15 May 1956 parliamentary debate centred on the minority that occurred in the wake of the recommendations of the Committee on Itinerant Gypsies (1956), even sympathizers appear to have considered Travellers a colourful but implicitly foreign element within the population: representative Cahir Healy’s argument against the proposed legislative response to what the Northern Irish Minister of Home Affairs had referred to in 1954 as ‘the problem of gipsies’ 60 was that ‘these people are the only picturesque features of Northern Ireland [. . . ] and [. . . ] if they disappear the Ulster Tourist Development Association will lack one of its chief assets.’ 61 A 1956 Irish Independent article reported on an Ulster Unionist Council meeting in Belfast, which passed a resolution expressing regret that the government had failed to pass legislation to control the wandering bands of ‘gipsies’ that a councillor claimed crossed the border from the Twenty-Six Counties to avail themselves of the public 58 Robbie McVeigh, ‘ “There’s No Racism Because There’s No Black People Here”: Racism and Anti-racism in Northern Ireland’, in Paul Hainsworth (ed.), Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland (London: Pluto, 1998), 22. For a discussion of the debate surrounding Travellers in the contemporaneous Irish parliament, see Jane Helleiner, ‘ “Menace to the Social Order”: Anti-Traveller Discourse in the Irish Parliamentary Debates 1939–59’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 24:1 (1998), 75–91. 59 McVeigh, ‘Racism and Anti-racism’, 17. 60 ‘Gipsy Nuisance in Ulster’, Belfast News Letter 4 Oct. 1954: 5. 61 Parliamentary Debates: House of Commons (Belfast: HMSO, 1957), 2041.

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assistance. 62 Interestingly, the unionist-leaning Belfast News-Letter’s account of the same meeting noted that one representative described ‘gipsies’ as ‘Eire’s [Ireland’s] chief export’. 63 In like manner, during the 1956 parliamentary debate on the recommendations of the Committee on Itinerant Gypsies, Murtagh Morgan referred to ‘fears in Northern Ireland in regard to invasion from the Republic of Ireland’. 64 If the unionist establishment saw the Travellers as a ‘Twenty-Six Counties’ issue, this was not necessarily the perception in Dáil Éireann: some weeks after the reference to ‘Eire’s chief export’ was made in Belfast, a deputy in the Dublin parliament complained that the subsequent RUC ‘banish[ment]’ of Travellers from the North had ‘unloaded them onto us’. 65 In references that point to the fear of Travellers as nomadic agents who potentially render the boundary between the ideologically opposed states dangerously porous, the Committee on Gypsies and Like Itinerants recommended that ‘a system of registration and reporting to the Barracks in the various Police Districts should be introduced and that an attempt should be made to check the caravans as they cross and recross the border’. The Committee’s Report added that ‘it requires little thought or imagination to realize the contact danger of these people as a source for the spreading of vermin and disease’. 66 Moreover, reference is also made to a pamphlet circulating at that time which recommends, ‘as a “practical solution” for the “tinker classes”, the establishment of a concentration camp for males in which they would have to work to support their families’. 67 Although explicit political hostility towards Travellers in the Northern Irish context tended to emanate from unionist quarters, sedentary consensus concerning the Otherness of the nomad often transcended sectarian division in post-war Northern debate. Indeed, an analysis of the province’s elite nationalist and unionist news media 62 63 64

‘Vagrancy in the North’, Irish Independent 9 Mar. 1956: 2. ‘Control of Gypsies’, Belfast News-Letter 9 Mar. (1956), 10. Parliamentary Debates: House of Commons (Belfast: HMSO, 1957), 2041. 65 Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. 159, cols. 681–2 (11 July 1956), quoted in Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous, 93. 66 Report of Committee on Gypsies and Like Itinerants (1948), quoted in Paul Noonan, ‘Pathologisation and Resistance: Travellers, Nomadism, and the State’, in Paul Hainsworth (ed.), Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland (London: Pluto, 1998), 155. 67 Ibid.

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made by Liz Fawcett during the 1990s suggests that, in contrast to other minority populations such as Chinese and Indian immigrants, who were depicted as ‘outsiders within’ the state, Travellers continued to be depicted as an ‘external threat’ to the region. 68 Contemporary Belfast poet Ciaran Carson’s poem ‘Travellers’ portrays the community as an alternative cultural identity on the island of Ireland that is situated beyond the stifling Catholic/nationalist and Protestant/unionist binary. The poem opens in a chaotic and unanchored Belfast space that has lost its previous designation and its inflexible association with one ‘side’ or the other in the wake of the Travellers’ arrival: ‘On the waste ground that was Market Street and Verner | Street, wandering trouserless | Through his personal map—junked refrigerators, cars and | cookers, anchored | Caravans—the small boy trips.’ 69 Calls for the recognition of the cultural and ethnic separateness of Travellers emerged in the 1960s and 1970s with the politicization of the minority, after which Travellers gradually began to negotiate the bi-vocal and ubiquitous Irish discourses of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ and ‘nationalist’ and ‘loyalist’. This clearing of a space for an alternative Irish identity that refuses the traditional binaries is particularly notable in Traveller Nan Joyce’s My Life on the Road (originally published in 1985 as Traveller), a transcribed memoir of her upbringing in bifurcated post-war Belfast. Travellers’ independence from the sectarian divide is recognized and celebrated throughout My Life on the Road. Though generally based in the capital city, Nan’s family traversed the entire province of Ulster, and the minority’s ability to skirt around the fixed poles of Northern Irish identity and allegiance is physically enacted in journeys that intersect community divisions. Joyce’s description of her physical movements around Belfast in a contribution to a more recent collection of interviews with Northern Irish Travellers makes the neutral stance of this third community explicit and poetically resonant: ‘You [had] to walk across a little bridge with water and you got to the Protestant side and come back across the bridge and you were in the Catholic side. I think 68 Liz Fawcett, ‘Fitting In: Ethnic Minorities and the News Media’, in Paul Hainsworth (ed.), Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland (London: Pluto, 1998), 113. 69 Ciaran Carson, ‘Travellers’, The Ballad of HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems (Meath, Ireland: Gallery, 1999), 33, lines 1–6

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it’s a wildlife park now.’ 70 Ethnic difference is always stressed in My Life on the Road, and despite Traveller commonality with the sedentary poor, a sense of distance from the inter-community conflict figures ‘the Troubles’ as a form of entertaining spectacle to the disinterested minority: When Protestants and Catholics couldn’t get on and they were afeared of living side by side they’d [. . . ] come along to the travellers and say, ‘Can I have a lend of your lorry?’ [. . . ]. At first in the troubles we were very nervous but then we got used to it, we just walked out on the street where people were rioting and we did our shopping and we weren’t afeared. You might stand and look at what’s going on [. . . ]. It’s like seeing a cowboy picture. 71

Moreover, rituals and traditions that were a cause and symptom of intercommunity conflict are described with palpable affection by Nan: ‘One Twelfth of July [. . . ] we were all day watching the Orangemen marching and listening to the music. [. . . ] I’d go skipping along beside them while they were marching. [. . . ] growing up we heard about the Orangemen being bad but they never did anything to us.’ 72 Travellers do not generally identify strongly with either side of the Northern Irish conflict, but sedentarist rhetoric makes it obligatory for the minority to be assigned a label, as Cathal Butler notes: ‘Travellers are at least nominally viewed as “Catholics” and their “brogue” defines them as Irish. It is sometimes said that the “South” should deal with its own problem and not export it “up North”.’ 73 Post-war unionist rhetoric pointedly intimated the foreignness of Travellers by referring to them as ‘Gypsies’, and considered even Northern Ireland-born members of the community to be ‘Southern’, as is suggested by Joyce in her description of her family’s dealings with the auxiliary police force, the B-Specials, during the 1950s: You’d be after lighting this camp fire outside and you know the sticks would be wet, if it was raining it would take you hours to light the fire, and maybe you would have your supper hanging in a pot, boiling, they’d hit it a kick and they 70 Nan Joyce, ‘Nan Joyce’, in John Keenan and David Hines (eds.), In Our Own Way: Tales from Belfast Travellers (Belfast: Belfast Traveller Support Group, 2000), 58–9. 71 Nan Joyce, My Life on the Road, ed. Anna Farmar (Dublin: Farmar, 2000), 76. 72 Ibid. 32. 73 Cathal Butler, Travelling People in Derry and Tyrone (Derry: World Development Group, 1985), 20.

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would spill the water on the fire and everything. And [a B-Special] would say, ‘Get back to your own country,’ you know, and you really were from the North, because your whole family was born in it. And some of the [B-Specials] would say, they would call you ‘dirty gypos’ and things like that. 74

After tensions between the two dominant sedentary factions in Northern Ireland escalated to violence in the late 1960s, Travellers in the region generally ceased visiting areas identified as ‘Protestant’. Nevertheless, while the sectarian factor is present, ‘it is in no way cut and dried. “Unionists” have helped Travellers and some will take the more positive of attitudes [. . . ] while some “Nationalists” are seen to be just as bigoted and biased against Travellers as it is possible to be.’ 75 One Traveller was quoted as saying in a report on ‘itinerant’ settlement published in the early 1970s: ‘The only thing Catholics and Protestants agree on is their hatred of us.’ 76 Indeed, in the recent past, both loyalist and republican paramilitaries have intimidated Travellers in Northern Irish campsites and working class housing estates. 77 A 1986 article on Traveller–sedentary relations in Downpatrick opens: ‘What have loyalists Paramilitaries, Official Unionist, D.U.P. and S.D.L.P. councillors, the R.U.C., [and] self-styled vigilantes from the nationalist community [. . . ] in common? They have all endorsed [. . . ] a campaign of harassment against Travellers.’ 78 The following chapter will trace the Traveller Civil Rights movement that ran almost parallel with the Northern Irish Civil Rights movements in the 1960s, examining the impact such mobilization had on the depiction of Travellers in the work of more politically aware Irish writers and on the public perception of minority ethnicity. The language of identity that emerged during this tumultuous era both in relation to the embattled Catholic population in the North and the Travelling community throughout the island led to the increasing recognition by both sedentary and Traveller authors that members of the minority 74 75 76

Joyce, ‘Nan Joyce’, 61. Butler, Travelling People in Derry and Tyrone, 11–12; 20. Joyce Sholdice, Progress Report on the Settlement of Itinerant Families in Ireland During the Last 5 Years (Dublin: National Council for Travelling People, 1973), 20. 77 Robbie McVeigh, Racism and Travelling People in Northern Ireland: Paper for Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights, 17th Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1992), quoted in McVeigh, ‘Racism and Anti-racism’, 45. 78 Paul Noonan, ‘Travellers Evicted in Downpatrick’, Sphere: A Review of Social Policy and Voluntary Action in Northern Ireland 95 (1986), 6.

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community could claim a separate but nonetheless Irish cultural identity that was neither ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’, ‘Gaelic’ or ‘Gypsy’. Due to this paradigm shift in the politics of identity, a number of dramas that displayed a new sensitivity with regard to the portrayal of sedentary– nomadic relations emerged in the wake of Traveller radicalization. Thus, it might be said that the politicization of Travellers forced a return to a more shaded depiction of the lives of the marginalized. This constituted the coming home to the Irish theatre of the generous and questioning spirit of Synge after decades of one-dimensional and unsympathetic literary depictions of the minority.

5 The End of the ‘Tinker’: Irish Writing after Traveller Politicization Maurice Walsh’s mid-twentieth-century rendering of tinker culture as a colourful and temporary retreat for adventurers from settled society contrasts with fellow Kerry author Bryan MacMahon’s measured portrayal of Travellers in The Honey Spike (1961). MacMahon’s play was produced at the Abbey Theatre at the very outset of the radicalization of Traveller culture that occurred during the 1960s and which led to a sea change in depictions of the country’s largest indigenous minority. The previous chapter suggested that in the narrowed climate of post-independence Ireland, anxiety regarding the ‘Irishness’ of the tinker was contained by an overt stress on the figure’s orthodox Catholicism and Irish language ability. If Synge’s Hibernicization of the tinker may be contextualized within the nativist politics of the Revival, then the sudden alteration in representations of Travellers in the 1960s must be situated within the contexts of that decade’s Romany and Northern Catholic Civil Rights movements. In attempting to represent Traveller difference while avoiding exoticization, The Honey Spike heralded the demise of the onedimensional figure of post-Revival writing; in short, the 1960s was the period in which the ‘tinker’ finally disappeared from the Irish stage and was replaced by the Traveller. In addition, throughout the island of Ireland as a whole after Partition, an unindividuated tinker was invoked on both sides of the border in ideological tussles between establishment unionist and nationalist voices. The previous chapter concluded that post-war unionist rhetoric either de-hibernicized ‘Irish Gypsies’ or seemed troubled by the ‘Southern’ associations of the community, while contemporaneous nationalist discourse south of the border betrayed anxiety that ‘tinkers’ were less than fully Irish. In response to such, MacMahon’s play, with its pointed Northern Irish opening, posits that

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Traveller identity is a separate but nevertheless fully Irish identity that cannot be enfolded within either of the two dominant sedentary factions on the island. The new awareness of Traveller identity proclaimed by MacMahon’s play led to certain more sophisticated depictions of the minority that recognized that members could claim a separate cultural identity without compromising their Irishness. Moreover, The Honey Spike was staged in the period that also saw the emergence of John Arden and Tom Murphy, two radical playwrights who likewise examined the status of the nomadic outsider in dominant society in an even-handed manner. The work of the latter dramatists respond to the explicit confrontation of settled and peripatetic cultures in the 1960s by querying the Grellmann-derived binary of sedentary civility and nomadic barbarism. In particular, Murphy’s plays centred on Travellers and emigrants are an explicit return to the sedition of The Tinker’s Wedding in positing that the huge distance between settled and unsettled is a narrative that sedentary culture must incessantly reiterate in order to maintain its superiority. Eventually, political mobilization opened the floodgates to the emergence of a Traveller writer class, and the chapter concludes with a survey of the self-conscious countering of hundreds of years of majority constructs in the works of Traveller authors Juanita Casey and Rosaleen McDonagh. Ultimately, it is intimated that such writers have transubstantiated the ‘exoticnesss’ that had previously been projected onto Travellers into the more empowering discourse of ethnic and cultural difference. THE SYNGEAN IMPULSE RETURNS TO THE ABBEY: BRYAN MACMAHON’S THE HONEY SPIKE ‘Do you never tire of the road?’ Denny asked. ‘Do you never tire of being fettered?’ the [Traveller] girl flashed. Bryan MacMahon, ‘The Cat and the Cornfield’

Bryan MacMahon’s revolutionary play, The Honey Spike, which opened at the Abbey Theatre on the 22nd of May 1961, acknowledged that the Traveller community constituted a minority to be distinguished from the two dominant monocultures on the island. The Honey Spike

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centres on the travails of a Traveller man, depicted as being caused in equal measure by his marginalized position and his own intrinsically tempestuous nature. The focus is on the daily lives and family relationships and disputes of Travellers, which is set against a backdrop of the mistreatment they endure in their necessary dealings with members of the majority community on both sides of the Irish border. MacMahon’s balanced portrayal of Traveller characters and the members of settled society with whom they interact constituted the return of the generous and questioning spirit of Synge to the National Theatre after many decades of exclusionary drama. Representations of peoples of the road had veered between the poles of trivialization and demonization in post-independence Ireland, and MacMahon’s play was the first notable portrayal of the minority by an important Abbey playwright since The Tinker’s Wedding that was both naturalistic and empathetic. Critic Robert Hogan considered the production to be a respectful and skilful representation of Traveller life: ‘The Honey Spike is impelled by much real observation and intimate knowledge; its realism is lifted by waves of lyricism and emotion and enchantment and song. It is one of the most masterly pieces of theatre that the Abbey has ever produced.’ 1 MacMahon published a novelization of his drama in 1967 under the same title, and it is the text of this novel rather than the playscript that will be considered in the following analysis. In any case, MacMahon’s novel is very precisely based on his Abbey drama: much of the dialogue is lifted from the original piece, while the main characters, basic plotline, and the deployment of flashback, overlapping points of view, and crosscutting remain almost unaltered. The Honey Spike concerns the journey to Antrim of young Kerry Traveller couple, Breda and Martin Claffey, and their race home in their horse and trap from Northern Ireland to get the pregnant Breda to what she believes to be a lucky Kerry hospital, the ‘honey spike’ of the title. The action moves to Puck Fair, a Travellerassociated event held annually in County Kerry, where the couple argue when Martin’s old flame reappears. Martin stays on alone at the fair to flirt with the other woman, or so the overwrought Breda is convinced. At the novel’s tragic conclusion, Breda dies alone in childbirth after she has separated from Martin. 1 Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance (Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1967), 73.

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Bryan MacMahon was born in Kerry in 1909, and continued to work as a schoolmaster and sporadic teacher of both settled and Traveller children in the Kerry town of Listowel throughout his long and successful writing career. MacMahon’s work was widely reviewed, and he is best known for uplifting short stories and novels celebrating the communality of Irish small-town life, which were popular in the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. The author was a visiting lecturer in Irish literature and folklore at the University of Iowa in 1964, and a member of both the Irish Academy of Letters and of Aosdána. MacMahon was on intimate terms with the Travellers of his district, and may be the only recent major Irish writer from a settled background who could speak Cant, which he learnt by travelling with members of the community for a period during the 1960s. This formative experience informs a landmark article he wrote for Natural History in 1971. MacMahon’s novelization of The Honey Spike is very likely the first Irish prose fiction work in which the Cant speech of Traveller characters is reported. The novel strips the dialect of its Gypsylorist construct as an exotic archaism, and presents it for what it is to its speakers: a utilitarian tool of communication. Just as the play of The Honey Spike heralded the replacement of the ‘tinker’ by the Traveller on the Abbey stage, MacMahon’s deployment of the language indicates that ‘Shelta’ was finally to be replaced by Cant. The significance of MacMahon’s familiarity with the idiom to the novel’s empathetic tone was acknowledged by the anonymous Times Literary Supplement review: ‘Perhaps because he speaks the private language of the tinkers he appears warmly sympathetic to their bloody brawls and trickery; there is no detached anthropological observation here.’ 2 An anecdote MacMahon relates in The Master (1992), the first volume of his autobiography, intimates that he considered Cant an equal of the languages of majority literate culture, rather than a creole or pidgin, as has been suggested by certain linguists: 3 on one occasion in a Kerry harnessmaker’s shop, MacMahon spoke in Latin to a priest who entered the premises, conversed in Irish 2 ‘Tinker Stinker’, review of The Honey Spike by Bryan MacMahon, Times Literary Supplement 14 Sept. 1967: 813. 3 See Romani specialist Ian Hancock’s ‘Shelta: A Problem of Classification’, in Ian Hancock and D. De Camp (eds.), Pidgins and Creoles: Current Trends and Prospects, (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1974), 130–7.

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to a schoolteacher who arrived soon after, and later spoke in Cant to ‘an old traveller friend’ who dropped by. When he was finally alone with MacMahon, the harnessmaker, who had remained silent throughout, ‘looked out the window and said dryly, “The priests have Latin, the schoolmasters have Irish, the tinkers have gammon—’tis only ignoramuses like meself speak English now.” ’ 4 In a scene from the novel that typifies the balance MacMahon strikes in The Honey Spike, a liberal priest’s vision of Ireland’s Traveller population is at once unsentimental and deeply sympathetic: [Father Melody] thought of ten thousand people—fathers, mothers, nubile girls (the hands of the children blackberry-stained), old men and women scavenging, drinking, sleeping on roadsides, coughing up blood and phlegm, slatternish tots with their fingers up their noses (‘Do you mind if I take your picture?’ some of the passers-by asked), moving in a wickerwork of movement to and fro in Ireland, their matted hair an undergrowth beneath which they appeared to crouch. Faggot smoke cooked them like slit-open herrings. They were sick with drink slung into hollow bellies. Sweat impregnated their clothing: their babies rolled naked on frostbound roads while above and around them angry farmers swarmed. 5

In addition, although the central family are referred to by the narrator as ‘tinkers’ throughout the novel, the fact that Martin calls himself a ‘traveller’ when speaking to members of his own community suggests MacMahon’s awareness of the difference between the sedentary and literary fantasy of the person of the road (the ‘tinker’) and the reality of actual Travellers’ lives. This assiduousness appears to have made an impact on the Irish Press drama critic, who after praising the play’s ‘fullblooded’ ‘vitality’, was careful to note that it was ‘about tinkers, or, as they prefer to be called, “travelling folk” ’. 6 MacMahon prided himself on his opposition to the dominant discourses of Irish life, and clashed with the educational and clerical establishment in his roles of teacher and writer, relating with amusement of how a mildly anti-clerical article he published caused him to be denounced from ‘at least three pulpits’. 7 The author successfully 4 5 6

Bryan MacMahon, The Master (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1992), 106–7. MacMahon, The Honey Spike, 25. M.M., ‘MacMahon Play is Enthralling’, review of The Honey Spike by Bryan MacMahon, Irish Press 23 May 1961: 7. 7 MacMahon, The Master, 25.

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negotiated the fine line between challenging the orthodoxies of the new state and maintaining his position as a writer acceptable to the Irish establishment and a broad swath of Irish and Irish-American readers. His fellow Listowel writer and former student, John B. Keane, has been described as ‘the most conservative radical and the most radical conservative of the generation which watched the difficult death of traditional Ireland and the hard birth of modernity’. 8 Like Keane, MacMahon was sometimes accused of romanticizing the rural Ireland depicted in his narratives, though the radical implications of his 1961 play cannot be denied. Moreover, the charge that MacMahon’s work idealized Irish life is repeated from one critic to another, generally in short deliberations on the author’s work embedded within broader accounts of mid-century Irish writing. In other words, a comprehensive fulllength study of MacMahon’s work and the centrality of the achievement of The Honey Spike to his oeuvre is overdue, and a proper assessment may well conclude that what is dismissed as the author’s idealization of country life is anything but: early short story collections such as The Lion-Tamer and Other Stories (1948) and The Red Petticoat and Other Stories (1955) contain often tender portraits of a wide spectrum of friends, neighbours, visiting ambulant musicians and circus folk, and the maimed of mind and body. In essence, MacMahon’s depiction of community contradicts the view that the Irish village was inevitably intolerant and homogeneous. The Honey Spike may be MacMahon’s most explicit intervention in the politics of identity, but a subliminal strain of unforced inclusiveness runs through much of his output. In the multifaceted and accepting rural Ireland of the author’s imagining, there is room aplenty for the Traveller. The Honey Spike opens at the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, where the recently married Breda and Martin Claffey have travelled so that the youthful husband can see ‘places no Southern traveller ever seen before’. 9 (In playful one-upmanship of Synge’s theme in The Tinker’s Wedding, MacMahon reveals that the penniless young couple had actually talked an archbishop they accost into marrying them in his cathedral.) MacMahon’s novel was published in the year in which the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association was founded, and the sub-plot 8 Fintan O’Toole, ‘Magic of Pagan Ireland Dies with Playwright’, Irish Times 31 May 2002: 13. 9 MacMahon, The Honey Spike, 29.

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detailing a Republic of Ireland-based IRA brigade’s raid on an RUC base situated north of the border presciently envisages the open conflict of the following decades. Nevertheless, the first piece of extended dialogue attributed to the Travelling man depicts his dismissal of both the province itself and the Republic’s claim on it: ‘ “The North’s a hungry country. [. . . ] If this is the part of Ireland that has been stolen from us, [. . . ] as far as Martin Claffey is concerned the country can stay divided till the crack o’ hell.” ’ 10 Martin’s mother and step-father, Poll-Poll and Mickle, travel in a separate trap alongside the young couple for some of the journey, and Poll-Poll too writes off the province, though for a comically apolitical reason: ‘ “What do yeh think of the North?” Mickle asked. He nudged Poll-Poll with his elbow. [. . . ] Beside him, his wife [. . . ] crooned sleepily to herself. The old woman belched. “The porter’s poor!” she complained.’ 11 While camped at the border on their journey homeward to the hospital of the title, Breda and Martin reluctantly assist Frank Horan, an IRA brigade leader from their home territory of Kerry who has been injured in the night-time attack on the police station. After threats and an attempt to conjure up school memories in common fail to move them, Horan coerces the couple by reminding them of the debts of kindness they owe his family: ‘ “I’m Frank Horan of Farranagark . . . outside Kenmare. We sat together [. . . ]. If you don’t help me across the border I’ll have you crucified in Kerry [. . . ] You often filled your belly at my mother’s table.” ’ 12 The reluctance of Breda and Martin to become involved with Horan’s cause suggests that the couple cannot be presumed to share the aspirations of either sedentary identity on the island of Ireland. Indeed, the Claffeys eventually help Horan only because they remember his mother: in The Honey Spike, Travellers’ loyalty is given to family relationships and to individuals who demonstrate goodwill towards them rather than to abstract concepts of state or religion. When Mickle becomes aware of the identity of the man Breda and Martin have assisted, he immediately thinks of the event in terms of the favours the Horan family now owes his own: ‘ “He’s Master Horan’s son of Farranagark. Martin carried him across the line,” [Breda] said. “I own to God!” Mickle exclaimed. “Shiny Pants Horan will stand me many a glass o’ whiskey for this.” ’ 13 10

Ibid. 13–14.

11

Ibid. 34.

12

Ibid. 96–7.

13

Ibid. 101.

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Though familiar with both North and South, the Travellers refuse to identify with either jurisdiction. When detained for questioning by RUC officers in pursuit of Horan, Breda argues: ‘ “What do we travellers know or care about the goddamn IRAs? [. . . ] Or if this country is broken into two, or two thousand, bits? Isn’t every hand, North an’ South lifted against us?” ’ 14 Nevertheless, out of loyalty to remembered kindness, Breda misleads the officers about Horan’s movements. A second sub-plot of The Honey Spike that outlines the doomed relationship between an RUC officer and a farmer’s daughter from the Republic of Ireland reinforces the theme of the clash of Protestant loyalism and Catholic nationalism. After he has shot one of the IRA raiders who attack his base, the Protestant RUC man, Kenneth Yeoman, thinks of Patsy Hegarty, his Catholic lover south of the border: Yeoman was aware of a seepage of sadness—not for the man who lay prone below him, but for himself. These things could not be hidden from a woman. Blood is between the Papists and my people, he told himself: the senseless blood that is now dribbling on the rubble on the dayroom floor. 15

Soon after, Yeoman resolves to end his relationship with the woman. As with Nan Joyce’s memoir of Traveller life in Belfast, The Honey Spike posits that the two majority sedentary ideologies on the island must be explicitly labelled in order to throw a third into relief. The play of The Honey Spike contains a scene omitted from the novel in which the Claffeys vociferously defend a priest criticized by a Protestant squire for excusing their intrusion into an orchard. After the confrontation, the Traveller family are outraged to the point of violence by the perceived coarseness of the gentleman to the conciliatory Catholic clergyman. 16 In light of growing tensions in Northern Ireland in the period between the initial staging of the play in 1961 and the publication of the novel in 1967, it is significant that the only major scene of the drama to be deleted from the novelization is one that could be interpreted as indicating Travellers’ allegiance to one ‘side’ of the politico-religious divide over the other. MacMahon resists the temptation to utilize Travellers as a metaphor for the subjugated Northern Irish Catholic. Instead, The Honey Spike underlines the divergent 14 16

15 Ibid. 99. Ibid. 89. MacMahon, The Honey Spike (drama), MS 29,341 National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

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loyalties of RUC officer and IRA insurgent in order to emphasize that Travellers do not fully belong to either majority tradition on the island. The novel thus intimates that the language of identity fuelling the clash of the dominant communities should also be recognized as the rightful possession of Ireland’s most numerous indigenous minority. Within twentieth-century Traveller oral history, the border is represented as an apolitical zone of opportunity: an informant recorded in an anthology of Traveller life stories notes that during the Second World War, members of his community economically exploited the boundary between the neutral state to the south and the northern province at war. 17 A contributor to a similar collection remembers that in the inter-war period and despite the hostility of the northern constabulary, prosperous Northern Ireland was ‘a lovely, lovely country’ where a Traveller dealer from south of the border could ‘treble the money’ he ‘would get in the Free State’. 18 As depicted by MacMahon, the Traveller is a liminal figure who can operate across the boundary between the polarized regions of North and South: after all, Martin carries the wounded IRA brigade leader ‘across the line’. Moreover, the symbolism of the description of Breda and Martin’s encampment near the border being ‘suspended between height and depth, between zenith and nadir’ is unambiguous, 19 particularly as it is provided immediately prior to the account of the IRA attack on the RUC station. The ability of the Traveller to traverse the dangerous distance between the dominant poles of identity on the island is symbolically intimated in Martin’s description of his crossing of the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge at the Giant’s Causeway, which spans an 80-foot gully: ‘ “You be damned!” says I, an’ I talkin’ to the bridge. [. . . ] Then I said that no Antrim bridge’d coward a Southern travellin’ man. An’, begod, I crossed.’ 20 According to a glossary of Traveller usage, the community’s definition of the word ‘country’ fundamentally differs from that of majority society: ‘a region characterized by family or cultural unities, not necessarily coinciding with county lines and not necessarily rural.’ 21 Traditionally, 17 Clondalkin Travellers Development Group and Dublin In-Depth Photography, ‘John Ward’s Story’, Travellers: A Way of Life (Dublin: Community Arts, 1993), 45. 18 Artelia Court et al., Puck of the Droms: The Lives and Literature of the Irish Tinkers (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985), 106, 104. 19 MacMahon, The Honey Spike, 87. 20 21 Ibid. 14. Court et al., Puck of the Droms, 255.

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the situating of campsites was ‘dictated by the calendar of annual fairs, births, deaths and marriages’, 22 suggesting that Travellers negotiate a separate identity and sense of place by employing the spatial languages of kinlines, tradelines, and memory lines. A practice called patrin, an alternative mapping reputedly performed by people of the road, involves passing on information to subsequent Traveller callers by leaving sticks in a highly coded arrangement close to friendly households. This communication system that speaks to the Travellers’ alternative negotiation of Irish space is depicted in The Honey Spike: ‘ “Watch out for the grass I’ll throw at the crossroads,” Mickle shouted. “That’ll tell you where we’ve gone. If you see a red rag tied to a bush, skedaddle like the wheels of hell.” ’ 23 The non-literate Martin can ‘read’ sedentary hostility, understanding the fact that ‘well done’ printing on a public poster indicated that it was ‘a Government notice. Together notice and barrier said: Get the hell out of here!’ 24 Travellers effortlessly slide between the opposing identities on the island of Ireland in The Honey Spike: Mickle, a former member of the British forces, regales his stepson with an anecdote in which his loyalty to the Republic is bought with a pint of beer: ‘A fella shook hands with me, an’ I comin’ out of a pub,’ Mickle went on. ‘ “You’re a loyal servant of the Queen,” says he. Me, that turned Republican after I sold me British Army pension! “A true blue,” says he, “so me an’ you will scarify the Pope an’ then we’ll drink the health of King William victor of the Boyne.” God forgive me, I drank with him.’ 25

In the racial melting pot of the Empire, the Traveller in the British Army battalion posted to far-flung regions is equal to his fellow soldiers and enjoys the kind of varied experiences that would have been impossible in an Ireland in which he was a member of a marginalized minority. As Mickle boasts to Poll-Poll: ‘Half the battalion of the Munster fusiliers in hill stations at Gurraticka. The best of buffalo meat instead of cold Irish spuds. Me in a khaki shirt and shorts. Me wearin’ a sun helmet marchin’ to Mass. [. . . ] Me, I say, playin’ a hockey match after sundown in Karachi. Me with my mosquito curtain an’ my fans in the Sudan. Me lyin’ in bed, learnin’ Hindustani. [. . . ] Mohammed Ali Square! 22 24

Barnes, ‘Irish Travelling People’, 236. 25 Ibid. 51. Ibid. 44.

23

MacMahon, The Honey Spike, 45.

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Shepherd’s Hotel! That hand stretchin’ out of a tent at mornin’ to feel the hot sand under the Pyramids. Me now puttin’ out my lousy hand on the mucky edge of an Irish boreen. [. . . ] To hell with Ireland an’ up the blazin’ East!’ 26

The Traveller man’s positive memories of his experiences in the Empire challenges the post-Partition nationalist discourse that considered ‘taking the Queen’s shilling’ to have been a shameful way for a patriotic Irishman to have made a living. For the Traveller man, patriotism is a luxury only those made to feel fully welcome in their native land can avail of in every instance. MacMahon’s awareness of the politics of identity in a novelization published in 1967 is almost certainly inflected by the then emerging Northern Irish Catholic Civil Rights movement. The Honey Spike may be the only mainstream Irish novel ever published with a title in Cant, and the significance of MacMahon’s choice becomes apparent in light of the backdrop of the incipient ‘Troubles’. The use of Cant in conjunction with the depiction of its unarmed speakers being caught in the literal and ideological crossfire between two armed factions demonstrates the maxim that a language is a dialect with an army. The Travellers in The Honey Spike have neither guns nor political clout, so their voice and language are generally unrecognized in the cacophony of the military– paramilitary and republican–loyalist struggles: symbolically, as the Claffeys struggle to support the weight of the heavily injured Horan, the IRA man drops his gun on the pregnant Breda’s instep and hurts her. The gravity of this contemporary context is likely the reason MacMahon’s novel has never been subject to the charge of romanticization often made of his earlier work. As a boy, MacMahon enrolled in Countess Markiewicz’s paramilitaristic Fianna Eireann, an organization that he once referred to as the ‘youthful arm’ of the IRA. The Honey Spike may be a reassessment of such political enthusiasms in the cold light of the worsening polarization of 1960s Ireland and the potential exclusion of other identities generated by that binary. It may also constitute MacMahon’s recognition that his own republican sympathies are not necessarily shared by members of a marginalized community with little stake in the struggle over Irish soil. All in all, The Honey Spike is a distinct departure both from MacMahon’s early work and from the post-independence narratives in which Travellers are merely a quaint subset of majority 26

Ibid. 35–6.

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identity. In The Honey Spike, members of the Travelling community are neither ‘pre-Gaelic’, ‘Gaelic’, republican, nor loyalist, but simply ethnic minority Irish. Like Synge before him, MacMahon wishes to demonstrate that Travellers might be enfolded within a broadened Irishness. If Synge struggled with the narrowing of such definitions and the poisonous rhetoric of the unionist–nationalist divide in his lifetime, then The Honey Spike grapples with the fallout for minority identity when those two dominant sedentary ideologies go to war.

ESPACE ITINÉRANT : THE UNSET TLED DRAMA OF TOM MURPHY AND JOHN ARDEN In early twentieth-century literature, Travellers were invariably depicted as residing or operating in rural settings. Since the 1960s, Travellers have become more visibly urban in base, and certain towns in the Republic of Ireland are at present known for their large Traveller population. Any literature emanating from or set in such locations would presumably reveal the ethnic, social, and linguistic mingling that occurs when majority and minority identities interact. Tuam, a medium-sized town of 6,000 people in County Galway is one such locale. The West of Ireland town made international news in 2003 when it elected Ireland’s first Traveller mayor, and Tuam is also of significance to this investigation for being the vicinity in which a Revival-era travelogue claimed that traces of a pre-Gaelic population were extant. 27 In comparison to an average 0.6 per cent Traveller presence within the population of the Republic of Ireland as a whole, the 2002 Irish census revealed that 7.7 per cent (or 76.5 persons per 1,000 total) of the population of Tuam is Traveller. This percentage constitutes the highest proportion of Travellers in any municipality in the state with a population of 1,500 or more persons in April 2002. 28 Most pertinently, Tuam is the hometown of Tom Murphy, a contemporary dramatist of international reputation who has attempted to engage with the espace itinérant in his work to a much greater degree than any of his Irish-born peers. Murphy emerged 27 Stephen Gwynn, The Fair Hills of Ireland (1906; Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1914), 69. 28 All figures taken from Central Statistics Office [of Ireland], 2002 Census of Population, vol. 8: Irish Traveller Community.

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as a playwright in the early 1960s, and his work is marked by the debates concerning peripatetic culture and identity that circulated in that seminal period. According to Tuam Traveller activist and local representative Mary Moriarty, there has always been an above-average degree of contact between the Traveller and settled communities in her hometown, and such interaction is evident in the number of Cant words found in the very particular dialect spoken in Tuam. 29 In Murphy’s first drama, On the Outside, Joe refers to his friend Frank as ‘sham’ in his first line of dialogue as both penniless young men wait outside a dancehall hoping to get in for free. ‘Sham’ is used in the Tuam idiom to indicate another Tuam person to such a degree that the inhabitants of Murphy’s hometown are often referred to as ‘shams’ by people from the rest of County Galway. However, sham is a Cant word meaning ‘man’ or ‘settled man’, and the commonplace assumption that the word is no more than Tuam dialect indicates the generally unacknowledged influence that Traveller culture has had upon the town’s parlance. Additionally, coonic, used in a variety of Murphy’s plays to refer to a priest, is likewise a Cant word that has percolated from Traveller to general usage in Tuam. In Murphy’s plays, violent navvies and restless emigrants share the predilection of his more overtly ‘tinkerish’ characters for Cant phrases, indicating the playwright’s determined exploitation of the subversive potential of Tuam’s Traveller-influenced dialect. Such words are invariably deployed in Murphy’s drama within standard Hiberno-English speech to underline the speaker’s linguistic and social exclusion. Murphy’s work explores the Cant and Hiberno-English fusion shared by the socially and politically exiled, and seditiously posits that the excluded sedentary emigrants, the broke young settled men, and the marginalized Travellers who utilize such phrases in his work have more in common than dominant discourse generally acknowledges. Critic Anthony Roche notes that Murphy represents on stage those who have no desire to enter a theatre, and denotes their inability to fit the mould with speech syntax that is fractured, hesitant, and incomplete. 30 In The Politics of Magic, his study of Murphy’s drama, Fintan O’Toole posits that Irish antipathy to the playwright in the early portion 29 30

Mary Moriarty, personal interview, 31 Jan. 2001. Anthony Roche, Gill’s Studies in Irish Literature: Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), 130.

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of his career originated in the perception that ‘there were no such people in Ireland and that if there were, to show them was to demean the theatre’. 31 In many of his plays, Murphy’s inarticulate male characters are as liable to suddenly burst into a snatch of sentimental emigrant ballad as they are to speak. The state of existentialist alienation and dispossession that critics perceive in Murphy’s work is more socially embedded than is often allowed for, and speaks particularly of the tension between the espace itinérant of the Traveller and the emigrant and the radiant space of those who stay at home. This is a clash that was rarely acknowledged to be at the heart of Irish identity in songs or literature centred on the ‘unsettled’ character. At best, this was a conflict that was ultimately contained when it was explicitly addressed at all, as in the case of fellow-Galway playwright Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold, in which the peripatetic and ‘foreign’ element within returned emigrant Nora Geraty is literally exorcized. The violently abrupt song snatches of Murphy’s emigrant characters suggest the underlying anger of the consolatory balladry of exile that is generally the only expression of emigrants’ feelings acknowledged by majority society. In light of Murphy’s evocation of sedentary–nomadic tension, the fury of the ostensibly sentimental ballads that continually erupt into speech in his work suddenly becomes apparent. Tom Murphy’s first drama, On the Outside, written in 1959 with Noel O’Donoghue, was transmitted in 1962 by the national broadcaster, Radio Telefís Éireann. On the strength of the 1961 English staging of his first full-length play, A Whistle in the Dark, Murphy retired from his school-teaching job and relocated to England, only returning to Ireland in 1970. Murphy was born in Church View in 1935, the son of a carpenter, and Tuam or its rural hinterland is the setting for a number of the dramatist’s works. Murphy attended the local Christian Brothers School from the age of 7, and later went on to vocational college. The youngest of ten children, Murphy was 9 years old when his father emigrated to England, returning annually only for a few weeks in the summer. The budding playwright first left home when he was 18, but moved in and out of Tuam as he began writing. The Murphy family home was solid and detached, but was surrounded by 31 Fintan O’Toole, The Politics of Magic (Dublin: New Island; London: Hearn, 1994), 19; 12.

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the thatched cottages of the shanty poor and a working-class housing estate, and an awareness of the socially excluded that is almost certainly rooted in this formative experience registers throughout the dramatist’s oeuvre. Prior to the 2001 Murphy season at the Abbey Theatre, the Tuam playwright had not found easy or uniform acceptance in Ireland, despite or perhaps because of the fact that his work forms what O’Toole calls ‘a kind of inner history of Ireland since the momentous changes which were set in motion in 1959’. Although the Abbey had rejected two of Murphy’s plays in the early 1960s, Famine, a 1968 play staged at the Peacock Theatre, was universally hailed. Nevertheless, a number of the dramatist’s subsequent productions were badly received in Ireland, particularly The Sanctuary Lamp (1975), the perceived anti-clericalism of which inspired audience walkouts. Two plays from the 1980s, The Gigli Concert and Bailegangaire were critically acclaimed, and Murphy’s reputation in Ireland was decisively cemented with the 1987 Abbey Theatre revival of A Whistle in the Dark. A Whistle in the Dark, which premièred at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1961, is set in an Irish immigrant enclave in Coventry, and the violent interaction between the characters caused the drama to be simultaneously acclaimed and reviled in the British press. Although critical considerations generally focus on the play’s family power dynamics and post-colonial context, the following analysis will argue that A Whistle in the Dark pivots to a large degree on the status of the Traveller vis-à-vis the Irish emigrant: Murphy explores how the equally ‘unsettled’ emigrant grouping jostles to position itself above the ‘lower’ tinker caste. A Whistle in the Dark’s dissolute Carney clan, consisting of Dada and his five sons, are liable to react with hostility to perceived slights. Only Michael Carney, married to an Englishwoman, has attempted to overcome the influence of the patriarch, who eggs on his sons in their brutality. Due to an inferiority complex reinforced by their class position in their place of origin, the Carneys have internalized the incivility projected onto them by more respectable elements in both their Irish hometown and adopted English city. On some level, however, the more enlightened of the Carney men understand that in their self-hatred they have begun to enact the barbarity they have been unjustly accused of all their lives. A Whistle in the Dark is divided into two parts, the first outlining the build-up to a faction fight the Carney clan is planning to have with a rival all-male Irish immigrant family, while the subsequent

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segment documents the eruption onto the stage of the previously offstage violence. In spite of their recognition of the manner in which the worst has always been expected of them, the Carney men replicate such projection by using the term ‘tinker’ in a pejorative manner and by behaving extremely violently when labelled as such. Near the close of the action, when hanger-on Mush is being pushed out of the Carney circle, he exits the house shouting ‘Tinker! Carneys! Tinkers! Tinkers!’ The stage instructions indicate that in response, Des Carney ‘grabs a whisky bottle and dashes out after MUSH. He is heard breaking the bottle outside’. 32 Moreover, the childhood humiliations that cut the deepest are those in which the Carney family are accused of being less than fully sedentary: Michael recalls his hurt the time a neighbour referred to him as a ‘tinker’ and ordered him back to his ‘tent’, while his brother Harry cannot forget the day their travelling salesman father was called a ‘Jewman’ (itinerant peddler) by their patronizing schoolteacher. 33 Though painfully aware of the social dynamic that keeps them in their allocated place, the Carneys are blind to their own analogous imposition of savage Otherness onto the only social groupings they consider to be beneath themselves. In addition, what many Irish commentators who interpreted the action of Murphy’s play as a racial slur on Irish manhood during its original run failed to notice was that the racial slurs in the dialogue are made only in relation to ‘tinkers’: as it happens, the Carneys speak with grudging admiration about the Muslim men they scuffle with. Those Irish who felt insulted by the action of the play did not examine their underlying sedentarist assumption that the characters’ smears against a nomadic segment of the Irish population were of no import. Despite the fact that the Carneys seem unaware of the ironic nature of their anti-Traveller prejudice, they do understand that their perceived superiority to immigrants of colour within post-colonial English society is a fiction. As Harry notes: ‘And if [the Muslim immigrants] weren’t here, like, our Irish blue blood would turn a shade darker, wouldn’t it?’ 34 Murphy seems to suggest that although emigration to newly multicultural England teaches the Carneys to be ‘white’, the continued 32 Tom Murphy, A Whistle in the Dark, A Whistle in the Dark and Other Plays (London: Methuen, 1989), 80. 33 34 Ibid. 52–3. Ibid. 20.

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resonance of childhood insults indicates that they had internalized quasi-racist beliefs concerning their innate superiority to the Travelling minority before they ever set out to leave Ireland. A Whistle in the Dark underlines the constructed nature of a sedentary–nomadic binary that privileges the ‘settled’ emigrant above the barbaric nomad. Moreover, this binary of civilized house-dweller/uncivil tinker remains in place even when the behaviour of the supposedly superior member of majority society conforms to the very worst stereotype of ‘tinkerish’ behaviour: despite the fact that the rootless, hot-headed, and tribal Carneys brawl, drink heavily, and indulge in criminal activity, they remain resolutely sedentary in identification to the degree that ‘tinker’ is the highest insult that can be thrown at them. A Whistle in the Dark stresses the artificial nature of the abyss between ‘tinker’ and ‘emigrant’ assumed by the raucous Irish family by endowing them with the surname Carney, which immediately recalls the word carny. This is a widely used American slang designation for carnival workers, a peripatetic population with their own dialect and nonsedentary culture somewhat akin to Travellers or Romanies. Interestingly, in Liam O’Flaherty’s short story, ‘The Tent’, an upper-class officer who takes shelter with bigamous tinkers also carries that name, and the following dialogue between the military man and the male tinker draws attention to the potentially porous nature of the boundary between Traveller and settled: ‘ “My name is Carney,” said the stranger to the tinker. “[You are a t]inker, I suppose? [. . . ] Might as well,” [Carney] said. “One thing is as good as another. Look at me. Sergeant-major in the army two months ago. Now I’m tramping the roads.” ’ 35 The binary of settled and unsettled is one that dominant discourse must constantly stress is fixed and intrinsically oppositional in order to maintain the nomad as the Other against which the sedentary and even the emigrant Self is defined. By the closing scene of A Whistle in the Dark, tensions between Michael and his brothers have reached the point of no return. Urged on lustfully by Dada Carney, Des physically attacks Michael, who defends himself by hitting his brother on the head with a bottle and accidentally killing him. What is interesting about this dreadful peaking of the 35 Liam O’Flaherty, ‘The Tent’, The Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories, ed. Benedict Kiely (London: Penguin, 1981), 134–5.

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physical violence that has simmered throughout the play is that it occurs immediately after the verbal violence has also come to a climax: in order to egg Des on to further brutality, Dada had shouted in excitement, ‘Dirt! Muck and trash! Scum! Tinkers! Filth!’ 36 In the frenzy of the blood-letting, the slur that had seared the hearts of the Carney sons throughout their lives is carelessly used by their patriarch in reference to themselves. A moment after Des is killed, the five sons, led by Michael, all wordlessly unite against their father for the first time. As the final curtain of A Whistle in the Dark drops, it is obvious that the vicious pack created by the top dog is about to rip him limb from limb. I would argue that power shifts from patriarch to blooded heir in the instant that Dada Carney throws the word ‘tinker’ at his sons: this is the one insult that cannot be absolved. Although this investigation pays most attention to Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark due to the contemporaneous politics of identity with which it is imbued, it is notable that throughout his career, the Tuam playwright has littered the stage with unsettled and unsettling outsiders intrinsically opposed to the values of landownership and stability: Travellers, circus performers, prostitutes, magicians, and emigrants have continually peopled his dramas. The subversive impulse to wandering and escape inherent in opting to leave one’s birthplace renders the emigrant, in particular, a threat to the values of rootedness and proprietorship exemplified in Irish culture by the Big House. This dynamic is recognized in Murphy’s oeuvre, which underlines the dangerous ‘foreignness’ and ‘tinkerish’ restlessness with which the exile is infected, and which must be exorcized by the majority community upon the emigrant’s return. An examination of Murphy’s more recent plays indicates that he continues to circle around the questions regarding the binary of settled civility/nomadic savagery that fuelled A Whistle in the Dark. The Wake, which premièred at the Abbey Theatre on the 28th of January, 1998, and is set in the present tense, centres on the representatives of the threats to post-independence property-owner interests: a Traveller named Finbar; Henry, a directionless and déclassé Irish Protestant; and the emigrant, Vera O’Toole, who has returned to Ireland after inheriting the family hotel from her mother, much to the distress of her wealthy and more settled siblings. Seemingly impervious to sedentary strictures 36

Murphy, A Whistle in the Dark, 96.

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to maintain property and propriety, the trio of Traveller, insolvent emigrant, and aimless Anglo-Irishman conspire to burn down the building. Henry, who significantly describes the impotent post-1922 Protestant condition as a kind of psychic ‘homelessness’, joins Finbar and Vera in the boarded-up hotel so that the trio can indulge in a carnival of sex and alcohol. The dispossessed descendant of the Big House has ‘run away with the tinkers’ that he now has so much in common with: in a pause between drinking bouts, Henry asks Finbar who his father was. ‘Maybe he was the same man as yours’, is the Traveller’s cryptic reply. 37 In the opinion of her sister, Vera’s utter abandonment of conventional values is epitomized by her sexual relationship with Finbar: ‘Living with the tinkers. [. . . ] With that old thing, that old sponger, that old layabout, Reilly, Finbar Reilly.’ 38 However, the machinations of the establishment O’Toole family to restore a repressive order eventually succeed, and Vera’s bacchanalian plot to destroy the property has been defused by the drama’s close. The symbiotic relationship of emigrant/Traveller and Big House inhabitant is explored in much greater depth in Murphy’s The House, a play with many thematic echoes of A Whistle in the Dark, set in a nominal 1950s that speaks to the acquisitive Celtic Tiger era. In this year 2000 drama, the returned emigrant Christy Cavanagh gains control of the home of the Catholic and minor gentry de Burca family, which consists of the widowed Mrs de Burca and her three daughters, Marie, Susanne, and Louise. Christy’s speech, background, and mode of living are ‘tinkerish’: he studs his conversations with Cant phrases, the unsettled nature of his childhood is hinted at throughout, and a fellow emigrant pointedly asks Christy if he ever worked with ‘diddycois’ in London, a pejorative term for Romanies. In contrast with Christy’s background, The House continually emphasizes the gentility and rootedness of the Anglo-Norman de Burcas. Nevertheless, Christy has taken ownership of the de Burca home by the time the curtain drops, and the espace itinérant and the campsite is seen to have triumphantly erupted into the radiant realm of the gentry home. In placing the patrician dwelling of an ‘old’ family at the centre, Murphy explicitly invokes the Irish literary theme of the Big House, 37 38

Tom Murphy, The Wake, Plays: Five (London: Methuen, 2007), 133. Ibid. 99.

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the home embodying landowner anxieties in the face of smallholder empowerment originated by Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. The play reinforces the resonance of the setting when the de Burca house is described as ‘a veritable, veritable little Ireland’ at one point in the action. 39 However, Murphy’s use of the Big House suggests a symbiotic relationship between the sedentarist symbol par excellence and those its tradition effaces: significantly, the same trope is summoned by a contemporary Irish journalist discussing the social exclusion of Travellers: Irish people have always had x-ray vision when it comes to gauging the exact coordinates within the social galaxy [. . . ]. You either lived in the small professional pocket, the rented private house or, if you were a Prod, a Yank or the local factory-owner, the Big House. The lowest animal on the accepted food chain was the council-house [public housing] dweller. While a grudging mobility between all was allowed, one group remained outside this simplistic little social paradigm. The Travellers. 40

In enacting the seizing of a grand home by the emigrant/Traveller, The House is a kind of Castle Rackrent for real-estate obsessed Celtic Tiger Ireland and a response to Yeats’s Purgatory from the vantage point of the decades after Traveller politicization. In that play, the ‘tinker blood’ of the potential inheritor of the Big House embodies the cataclysmic social and genetic debasement of the Anglo-Irish that must be annihilated. By contrast, in Murphy’s drama the ‘tinkerish’ Christy’s acquisition of the manor home is depicted as the comprehensible revenge of the unsettled emigrant haunted by a fantasy of ‘home’. The Big House of Murphy’s play is the central focus of the hitherto unacknowledged friction between the espace rayonnant and the espace itinérant: as subversively deployed by the Tuam dramatist, the motif intimates that the dominant traditions on the island of Ireland that are imagined to be in contention in point of fact share a sedentarist world view that has historically excluded the landless. In both The House and The Wake, the settled citizen is inconceivable without the unsettled exile against whom those who stay at home unconsciously define their respectability, patriotism, and rootedness. The House subverts the tenant–landlord and Catholic–Protestant binaries that traditionally adhere to invocations of the Big House, and the play’s title is a patent 39 40

Murphy, The House, 81. Daire O’Brien, ‘Counter March’, Agenda. Sunday Business Post 26 Aug. 2001: a2.

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riposte to a motif fixated upon by decades of Irish literary criticism. Such commentary set up an exaggerated opposition of Protestant landowner and Catholic smallholder, whilst ignoring the ideological conflict within post-Partition Ireland of the landed and the landless. Murphy’s very particular use of the Big House trope to indicate sedentary–nomadic rather than smallholder–landlord tensions is made explicit in the emotive nature of Traveller Finbar’s verbal assault on the Anglo-Irish Henry in The Wake: ‘Fuck you. And [your father] the colonel and [your] Mama. And Herr the fuckin’ German living in your Big House now. And just because you can’t lord it over people any more, big words.’ 41 Discussions of the Big House motif in Irish culture tend to circle exclusively upon opposing sedentary traditions on the island of Ireland: Catholic versus Protestant, nationalist versus unionist, republican versus loyalist, or English language versus Irish language. Indeed, a desire to avoid the invocation of this distracting binary underlies Murphy’s decision to make the gentry family at the centre of The House Catholic rather than Protestant, as literary convention and historical patterns might decree. The play’s title and its plotline delineating the usurpation of a native landed family by a drifter draws attention to the role of the Big House as the chief naturalizing symbol of sedentarism and proprietorship in Irish culture. Murphy’s drama intimates that the model of reality promulgated in Big House narratives and their critical apparati omit reference to the non-sedentary in their ostensibly totalizing discussions of the nuances of Irish identity. MacMahon’s conciliatory The Honey Spike posits that the language of identity that had previously been available only to the dominant communities should also be recognized as the Traveller’s rightful possession. By contrast, however, Murphy’s more confrontational drama proposes that the excluded should eventually seize what they have been denied. Christy’s mother was Mrs de Burca’s maid, and Christy himself now serves as handyman to the Big House matriarch when he returns from England to his hometown each summer for a few weeks. Christy covets the fine old home and rootedness of the family with a fierceness that erupts as a drive to sexually possess each and every one of its daughters, and this desire is reciprocated by all three women to greater or lesser 41

Murphy, The Wake, 140.

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degrees. ‘ “I’d like to be this family please” ’, 42 Mrs de Burca recalls the young Christy requesting of her; Christy does not want to simply possess all of the de Burcas, he wants to be one too. Moreover, the sexual desire that circulates between the returned emigrant and the de Burca siblings is somewhat incestuous since it is revealed that Christy was almost fostered by the good-natured Mrs de Burca after his mother died while he was still a young child. Christy’s status within the household he considers his real home is ambiguous, however: to the widowed Mrs de Burca, he is a son and, in his summertime role of handyman, a kind of substitute husband; to Susanne an uppity servant; to the unhappily married Louise, a convenient lover; to Marie, a wished-for husband. Susanne is also an emigrant, though it is stressed that unlike Christy and his peers, who emigrate due to financial necessity, Susanne is prompted to leave home because of personal demons. Nevertheless, although the social and cultural gap between Christy and the de Burcas is a linchpin of the play’s structure, the drifter is, on some level, also a member of the venerable old family, and Susanne is just as rootless as the ‘tinkerish’ man she looks down on as her social inferior. Furthermore the power hierarchy between respectable Anglo-Norman daughter of the Big House and Cant-speaking emigrant is fully upended when it is intimated that Susanne may be working as a prostitute in England. Just as the socially disparate Finbar and Henry in The Wake may share the same biological father, The House seems to imply that the unbreachable distance between settled and unsettled identity is a narrative that sedentary culture must incessantly reiterate in order to maintain the fiction of its superiority and the elision of its necessary Other; due to the large family and patrilineal inheritance patterns of the Irish economy into the mid-twentieth century, emigration functioned as a symbiotic process whereby the many who left were sacrificed so that the few who remained behind could live relatively comfortably—often through remittances. It is significant that the de Burcas are outsiders to the same degree as the town’s emigrants, whose violence and drinking bouts during their annual holidays in the town are dreaded by members of the local establishment. The de Burcas are described as follows by one local ‘Normans! Norman blood sure from way back; it never left them. They 42

Murphy, The House, 1.

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never fitted in here—D’you know what I mean? They’re—different.’ 43 Given that the Irish discourse of Norman ethnic difference dissipated in the face of the Catholic unity required by the Counter-Reformation, Murphy slyly draws attention to the absurd nature of bigotry against indigenous minorities in having a character espouse a belief that sounds ridiculously anachronistic to contemporary ears. In A Whistle in the Dark, the loud attention given to the play’s supposed anti-Irish sentiments left a telling silence around the actual racial insults directed at Travellers in the drama. In like manner, the slur against the twentiethcentury descendants of an Irish population segment that originated in the twelfth century and had fully assimilated by the seventeenth makes the audience conscious of the contingent nature of prejudice and the dangerous fiction of the belief that ‘blood will out’. As such, the message of Murphy’s play runs counter to that of Purgatory in suggesting that it is not ‘tinker blood’ that limits the inheritor of the Big House, merely the effects of the weight of the prejudice against that heritage. The mutual dependence and loathing of Christy and the de Burca women underlines the necessity of the fantasy of the Traveller as a threat to propertied society. It was noted earlier that in the face of evidence to the contrary, the popular belief that Travellers are the descendants of those dispossessed by the 1845 Famine persists in contemporary Ireland. ‘Dispossession’ implies the loss of property, of course, and The House probes the dynamics of the guilt-ridden majority’s nightmare of the desire of the disenfranchised to regain control of what may once have been rightfully theirs. Christy sleeps with Louise de Burca, has sexual designs on Susanne de Burca, and seems vaguely willing to reciprocate the desire of Marie de Burca. In short, Christy’s omnivorous appetites are an eruption of the most dreaded form the fantasy of the tinker’s revenge takes in sedentary and patriarchal imagining: the fear that the subjugated male wishes to sexually possess the higher class female. Murphy’s deployment of the Traveller as the embodiment of the threat to property is not exceptional: as noted, post-independence Irish drama that substantially features a tinker or ‘tinkerish’ character is usually concerned with validating the acquisition of assets. However, in Murphy’s The Wake and The House, the points of view with which theatre-goers are made to empathize are 43

Ibid. 25.

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those of the non-sedentary characters: Vera’s desire to burn down her inheritance is one the audience endorses and Christy’s hunger for the de Burca daughters and everything they represent is pitiful and comprehensible even as it is disturbing. Ultimately, the compulsion of Vera and Christy to acquire or destroy the property of their ‘betters’ indicts the toxic property speculation and acquisitiveness of Celtic Tiger-era Ireland and remakes a literary motif that had functioned for two centuries to unquestioningly reinforce the values of ownership and rootedness. Murphy arrived with a bang on the theatre scene in a period that also saw the emergence of British playwright John Arden, who examines the status of the nomadic outsider in dominant society in a similarly challenging manner. The ideological journey of Arden’s drama will be considered both as a mirror of the development of Irish Traveller politics during the 1960s and 1970s and as a complement to Murphy’s similar emphasis on the ramifications of the privileging of settled above peripatetic. As such, Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark will be intermittently invoked throughout the following discussion of Arden’s contemporaneous Live Like Pigs, and the Irish Traveller Movement’s direct intersection with Arden’s later and more explicitly interventionist street drama is also discussed below. The paradigm shift in depictions of the unsettled notable in the plays of Murphy and Arden reflect the broader politics of the era in which they both came to prominence: the late 1950s and early 1960s was a particularly radical moment in which the conventions of staging and of what constituted ‘suitable’ subjects were being questioned in British drama to a degree not seen since Ibsen and early Shaw, and Arden was one of the many politically subversive playwrights to emerge in the immediate wake of the revolution that was heralded by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). Arden was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in October 1930 and began to write drama while studying architecture at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. Four of his plays were produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London, beginning with The Waters of Babylon in 1957. Arden married Irish actress Margaretta D’Arcy in that same year, and she was later to become his artistic collaborator. Arden’s anti-militarism drama, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), established him as a leading figure among the new playwrights, but this examination will consider the significance

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and contemporary context of the much less discussed Live Like Pigs, produced one year before Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. Live Like Pigs depicts the clash of settled and unsettled values on an English housing estate in an even-handed manner, and the analysis of the play will trace its relationship to Arden and D’Arcy’s more overtly political interventions on the question of Traveller–sedentary tensions in works they created after moving to the west of Ireland in 1967. The couple made the transition in order to contribute to the civil rights and republican movements and to establish improvisational theatre workshops as a vehicle for what D’Arcy has termed anti-repression and anti-imperialist plays, 44 a commitment to radical political stances that frequently drew criticism in both Ireland and Britain. Arden and D’Arcy still live in the west of Ireland, maintaining a base in the County Galway village of Corrandulla and another in Galway city. The latter home is the location in which I interviewed Arden on 11 March 2002, and unless otherwise credited, the following discussion of Live Like Pigs is based on this conversation. Arden’s drama centred on ‘unsettled’ characters evolved from the relatively non-committal neutrality of this early play to politically driven collaborations on a series of improvised responses to contemporary events retrospectively titled Immediate Rough Theatre for Citizens’ Involvement (1974–7). The Rough Theatre events included one ‘intervention’ on Travellers. Entitled No Room at the Inn, the piece was created in reply to the controversy surrounding Traveller settlement and housing in Galway, and both emerged from and contributed to the growing politicization of the city’s Travellers during the period. Given Murphy’s initial success on the London stage and his early rejection by the Abbey and Arden’s second career as an adopted Irishman, neither Murphy nor Arden could be said to fully belong to the dramatic tradition of their countries of birth. It is this doubleness of vision and hybridity of artistic origin that makes their examinations of the politics of non-sedentary existence so empathetic to the outsider point of view. Moreover, sedentary oppression and nomadic resistance have been common to both Ireland and Britain during a variety of historical periods and political dispensations. Thus, as MacMahon’s The Honey Spike and Joyce’s memoir intimate, the bitter divisions of Irish–British 44 Margaretta D’Arcy, Introduction, Arden/D’Arcy Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1994), p. xi.

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relations have arguably been of little relevance to Traveller and Romany populations equally at odds with the uniformly sedentary dispensation of both territories. This sense of the necessity of differentiating Traveller history from majority Irish experience threads through Murphy’s stress on the anti-‘tinker’ sentiment of the post-colonial Irish in A Whistle in the Dark and allows the English-born Arden to directly intervene in the Traveller question during the 1970s in a manner that no Irish-born dramatist attempted. Live Like Pigs, produced at the Royal Court Theatre on 30 September 1958, was based on the Barnsley Chronicle’s report of the local Labourrun council’s eviction of a disruptive family. The drama’s equivocal treatment of the culture clash of the self-consciously ‘respectable’ upperworking class Jackson family and the ‘Travellerish’ tribal grouping of the Sawneys drew criticism from various sectors of the political spectrum: the conservative Barnsley Chronicle considered it a bad reflection on the town, the left-leaning Royal Court circle saw it as an attack on the Welfare State, and a communist theatre-goer publicly berated the playwright for satirizing the working class. The play’s intentionally detached portrayal of sedentary–nomadic tension contrasts with the politicized passion of Arden and D’Arcy’s theatrical interventions on the question in the 1970s, as Arden himself intimates in an introductory note written in 1994: When I wrote [Live Like Pigs] I intended it to be not so much a social document as a study of differing ways of life brought sharply into conflict and both losing their own particular virtues under the stress of intolerance [. . . ] I was more concerned with the ‘poetic’ than the ‘journalistic’ structure of the play. [. . . ] So perhaps I had better declare myself. I approve outright neither of the Sawneys nor of the Jacksons. 45

Nevertheless, the drama’s question as to how the settled and nomadic can ever peaceably coexist in a society that privileges sedentary experience constituted a timely foreshadowing of the violence that erupted after the entwined mobilization of Irish Travellers and British Romanies a few short years later. Sailor, a violent ‘old tyrant’ and former seaman, and his partner, the ‘termagant’ Rachel, head the sprawling Sawney clan, which consists of 45 John Arden, ‘Introductory Note’, Live Like Pigs, John Arden Plays: One (London: Methuen, 2002), 119.

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Rachel’s petty criminal son, Col, Sailor’s daughter, Rosie, and her two children by ‘swarthy feature[d]’ ‘half-gipsy’ Blackmouth, and various visiting nomads and fugitives. Rosie’s children do not attend school, Blackmouth is a mostly absent father, Rachel is a sporadic prostitute, and Col deals in stolen goods. Both family ‘businesses’ are conducted on the self-consciously ‘decent’ council estate, and it is the flaunting of such non-conformist mores that eventually leads to a violent altercation between the Sawneys and the other residents. It should be noted that the town council has obliged the Sawneys to move from a caravan to the housing estate: in other words, the sprawling clan do not actively seek out the confrontation they eventually have with the neighbouring nuclear families, but are obliged to put down roots next to those they have little in common with in line with pro-settlement local government policy. ‘Pigs! Pigs! You’re only pigs!’ Michael’s wife in A Whistle in the Dark cries of his family, and the original audience likely agreed with her complaint. However, the most subversive stroke of imagination of Live Like Pigs is its suggestion that in their mania for settled decency, the Jacksons unleash such grotesque violence upon the Sawneys as to unravel that very respectability in animalistic violence. Towards the close of the action, a large mob drawn from surrounding houses attacks the Sawney home, and a posse of angry neighbourhood women led by the previously benign Mrs Jackson descend on Col Sawney and attempt to castrate him. If Murphy’s Christy enacts the sedentary male fear of the Traveller man’s seizure of both the dwelling house and its female occupants, then Arden’s play might be said to voice a corresponding male Traveller nightmare of the castrating fury of settled women. In an exact echo of Arden’s title, Victorian reformer Smith of Coalville stated in October 1879 that ‘[Gypsies] live like pigs and die like dogs’. 46 Thus, the title appears at first glance to confirm sedentary prejudices concerning the nomadic lifestyle. Ultimately, however, the manner in which events culminate in Live Like Pigs indicates that the bestial humans referred to are not the Sawneys, but their aspirational neighbours. In effect, the implication that the restless might have more to fear from the sedentary than vice versa upends the message of conventional plays centred on 46 Smith in a paper presented to the Social Science Congress at Manchester, quoted in Francis Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1880), 240–2.

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the threat of the anarchic to the propertied such as the Abbey’s recordbreaking The Righteous Are Bold and The Rugged Path. The upwardly-mobile Jacksons of Live Like Pigs are initially relieved to have moved to the new housing estate of the play’s setting from a district of ‘little mucky streets’ ‘down by the Catholic Church’, implying that the family lived in the town’s Irish ghetto. According to Arden, ‘the bottom level of the Irish immigrant class shaded off into beggary.’ This Irish component of the 1950s English underclass serves as the context for reviewers’ unease concerning the violence of A Whistle in the Dark and also underpins the original Royal Court production of Live Like Pigs, in which Irish actresses Anna Manahan and D’Arcy utilized their native accents in the roles of Rachel and Rosie. Though ‘unaware of Irish tinkers’ at the time, Arden has vivid childhood memories of the pathetic indigence of certain Irish immigrants in Barnsley. One particularly disordered family, whom Arden recognizes in retrospect as a source for the Sawneys, did not even own a clock. The sons of another Irish household invariably beat up the local middle-class schoolboys, including Arden himself. The playwright notes that he had little concept of Travellers as a distinct component of the Irish immigrant population in England at the time of writing Live Like Pigs, and was influenced as much by The Tinker’s Wedding as by any real knowledge of the actual population. Nevertheless, the Borrovian stereotype of the ‘wild and unruly’ Irish tinker continued to circulate in post-war Britain, and an unwelcome Irish tinker in implicit contrast to a desirable ‘real’ Romany was utilized by English local authorities campaigning against nomadism throughout the 1960s and was even invoked in a condemnation of ‘foreign Travellers’ made by Enoch Powell in 1970. 47 The Sawneys do not designate themselves as either Irish Travellers or British Gypsies, although Arden remarks that he chose to make the patriarch a sailor because he believes that such figures are as alienated by sedentary norms as any Traveller. Indeed, in line with its detached observation of the effects of perceived difference in the cauldron of a recently constituted housing estate, Live Like Pigs is careful never to confirm that Blackmouth is a Gypsy. The play merely indicates that the perception of this background on the part of the Sawneys and state 47 Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 202–13.

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officials shape reactions to him: just as the rootless Carneys in A Whistle in the Dark are hugely insulted at being designated ‘tinkers’, the underclass Sawneys feel able to look down upon Blackmouth because he is a ‘Romany’. Members of the family deploy the word in moments of anger as one might a derogatory term, and Blackmouth is effectively an outcast among outcasts: Col suggests that ‘they stink like foxes, them Romanies’, and that the males of that community are cowardly brawlers. In addition, Col is also highly offended when one of the gathering mob of disgruntled neighbours refers to the Sawney family as ‘bloody gipsies’. 48 Moreover, the circular logic of stereotype, wherein projected difference functions as confirmation of that Otherness, allows the policeman who harries the Sawneys to believe that the description of Blackmouth as one of ‘general gipsy-like appearance’ proves that he is a Romany. Nevertheless, for Arden, the Sawneys and their various hangers-on are deliberately unlocatable enough to represent the great swathe of any Western population that is alienated from the ‘respectable’ nuclear family values that privilege ‘improvement’ over the instant gratification favoured by the raucous Sawneys. For the playwright, such figures are, he notes, ideological ‘if not necessarily bloodline descendants of the Elizabethan sturdy beggars’ warned against by Awdeley and Harman. Due to chaos of the Sawney household and to its lack of interest in outward displays of ‘neighbourliness’, hostility towards the family builds to such a pitch of hysteria that Mrs Jackson accuses members of eating her missing cat, a charge that seems to be both believed and believable for most of the play. Pointedly, however, the supposedly devoured pet reemerges unharmed from its hiding place at the close of the action. Additionally, and in the manner of Murphy’s trenchant deployment of the resonant surname ‘Carney’, Arden’s choice of ‘Sawney’ and his dangling of the accusation of unclean eating immediately recalls the most infamous carriers of that name in British history, the legendary sixteenthcentury Scottish cannibal clan led by Sawney Bean. The indolent lives beyond civilization of these incestuous devourers of wayfarers confirmed everything the metropolitan centre thought it knew of the workshy and licentious rogues on its periphery. Needless to say, however, the existence of the Sawney Bean group has been discounted by historians. The supposed incivility and animalistic nature of the Sawney clans of 48

Arden, Live Like Pigs, 140; 178; 218.

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sixteenth-century Scottish legend and twentieth-century English drama tell more of the barbarity that is projected by the dominant society onto those on its margins than of the putative barbarians themselves. Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark and Arden’s Live Like Pigs were staged at about the period when British Romanies and Irish Travellers were beginning to mobilize, and both draw attention to the sedentarism that had kept the binary of house-dweller civility and nomadic barbarity in place since the era of the rogue pamphleteer. Murphy had originally submitted A Whistle in the Dark to the Abbey, but was rejected by Ernest Blythe, the National Theatre’s then Managing Director, who was famously overheard loudly disparaging the play when it was subsequently staged at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 13 March 1962. Murphy’s play premièred in England in the same year that MacMahon’s equally ground-breaking but less explicitly confrontational depiction of the interplay of settled and unsettled opened at the Abbey Theatre. The ferocious resistance that greeted Irish Traveller radicalization in the late 1960s and early 1970s was foreshadowed by the Irish artistic establishment’s refusal to countenance the questions Murphy raised. MacMahon’s gentler celebration of Traveller separateness and more distanced depiction of the prejudice suffered by members of that community in The Honey Spike was acceptable to the conservative Abbey Theatre in a way that Murphy’s more belligerent and accusatory drama was not. Indeed, Arden’s depiction of the brutality visited upon the Sawneys when they enact their difference might be said to parallel the violence unleashed upon Travellers after their unapologetic declaration of autonomy in the 1960s, which is examined below. In the post-war period, Travellers were increasingly subject to statesponsored investigations such as the 1952 Irish Folklore Commission questionnaire, whose fact-finding mission was predicated upon the assumption that the minority culture was destined to disappear in the wake of ‘progress’. In addition, and as noted in the introduction, the unconsciously sedentarist policies of the post-independence state gradually forced Travellers into a very visibly oppositional lifestyle. In 1960, and in response both to growing complaints about Traveller nomadism and the failure of Stormont’s 1950 Gypsies Bill, the Irish government set up a Commission on Itinerancy. The authority received submissions from a wide variety of organizations and interested parties, and the resultant Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (1963) was

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the first official document on Travellers created by the post-1922 Irish state. Although it proposed halting sites for those who wished to remain travelling, the Report stressed that the solution to what was deemed the Traveller ‘problem’ was settlement and assimilation. In fact, a census of Travellers taken by Gardaí in preparation for the Commission had found that 78 per cent of the minority wished to put down roots. However, the Traveller definition of ‘settle’ appeared to mean ownership of a house in which to live ‘for a substantial part of the year when not travelling’, 49 suggesting that ‘settlement’ in Traveller usage was not the total abandonment of peripateticism that the Commission wished it to be. Moreover, in a fundamental misunderstanding of the entrenched cultural traditions surrounding travelling that may survive the cessation of nomadism, the Commission assumed that a settled Traveller was one whose cultural allegiance would inexorably transfer to majority values. The Commission’s Report did not explicitly name Traveller cultural difference, though its acknowledgement that the dominant society viewed Travellers as ‘a single homogenous group, tribe or community within the nation’ is practically a definition of ‘ethnic group’. Indeed, it is probable that the deliberations upon the nature of Traveller culture prompted by the Commission’s evidence-gathering may have contributed to the ethnicization of Travellers in the minds of the majority: never before had Travellers received such a degree of serious attention in Irish public discourse. In addition, the Commission implicitly blamed the indigence of the poorest class of Traveller on nomadism, ignoring its own evidence that peripatetism did not necessarily equate with poverty: the wealthiest members of the community tracked in the Report (those who owned expensive vehicles and mobile homes and the greatest number of animals) travelled the widest circuit, while the poorest (those who begged and used tents) journeyed least. Evading evidence of social classes within the minority, the Commission interpreted Traveller separateness as little more than an economic difference from a sedentary society that was implicitly uniform. Anthropologist Artelia Court’s reading of the Report’s aims and analyses suggests that the project was doomed to satisfy neither targeted community nor Commission member: if Travellers ‘were to be distinguished from other impoverished Irish only by superficial characteristics, then their immense 49

Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, 35.

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difficulty in assimilating settled values—the difficulty that had given rise to the Report—seemed inexplicable except as wrongheadedness, ignorance, or mere perversity.’ 50 A nationwide voluntary organization called the Itinerant Settlement Movement was established in the Republic of Ireland in the wake of the 1963 report to assist with Traveller sedentarization. The Northern Irish equivalent, the Belfast Itinerants Settlement Committee, which evolved from Catholic charity organizations, was established in 1969. MacMahon satirizes what he obviously perceives to be the paternalistic and self-serving nature of such organizations in The Honey Spike. In the following scene from the novel, a sceptical Jesuit priest is inveigled by his superior to assist with a proposed ‘Metropolitan Committee on Itinerants’: ‘It’s becoming quite a problem . . . ,’ the Rector said. ‘Who? What?’ ‘The itinerants . . . can’t open a newspaper without . . . By the by, I’ve nominated you to represent us on the Committee.’ [. . . ] ‘The danger is . . . ’ ‘Danger?’ ‘. . . that the Committee will turn out to be a crowd of professional dogooders [. . . ] who’ll recite the rosary once a year in front of a caravan and enter it on twenty forms. And holy women who’ll [. . . ] say: “Repeat a,b,c,d, child,” and “Suffer little children . . . ” and then see that the local reporter hears all about it.’ [. . . ] ‘Father Rector, is [there] an itinerant on it?’ The Rector laughed a tolerant, amused ‘No-o-o!’ 51

In contrast to the earlier rhetoric that perceived Travellers to be ‘hardier’ than the general population, the imagery of bedraggled children that accompanied the campaigns of the late 1960s drew from governmentendorsed sociological thinking that Traveller society was a problematic sub-culture of poverty rather than a distinct community. However, this theory was later retracted by its most prominent academic proponent. 52 50 52

51 Court, Puck of the Droms, 2. MacMahon, The Honey Spike, 23–4. See Patricia McCarthy, ‘Poverty and Itinerancy: A Study in the Subculture of Poverty.’ Unpublished MA thesis, University College Dublin, 1971, and her later retraction, ‘The Sub-culture of Poverty Re-considered’, in May McCann et al. (eds.), Irish Travellers: Culture and Ethnicity (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994), 121–9.

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The threat to identity fostered by the new emphasis on settlement and assimilation impinged heavily on the minority community, as indicated by a comment made in the early 1970s by a Traveller that might be a synopsis of Live Like Pigs: Between the law and the civil people [. . . ] they’re going to get rid of the travelling people as fast as they can. They’re trying to get them off the road. That’s why they’re educating the children, so when they put them in a house, they’ll be able to live with their neighbours. 53

As Bhreatnach notes in a summary of the aims and presumptions of the Commission on Itinerancy: ‘Ultimately, only Travellers were expected to make substantive changes. Travellers were asked to surrender nomadism, family economy, self-employment, flexible work patterns, horses and their own homes for the dubious pleasures of public housing, fulltime school attendance, subsistence on welfare benefits and organized charity.’ 54 In light of the pro-settlement policy of both Church and state and the protests of middle-class residents, local authorities became reluctant to provide reasonably serviced and realistically located halting sites for Travellers who wished to remain on the road. Tensions between Travellers and sedentary society openly heightened as never before, and the vocal claiming of ethnic separateness during this period was a transformation for political ends of the rhetoric of exotic difference that had been forcibly thrust upon the community up to that point. In the immediate wake of the Report, members of the minority mobilized as the Itinerant Action Campaign, a 150-member movement spearheaded by Irish Travellers Tommy O’Doherty and Johnny Connors and the English-born Grattan Puxon, who went on to co-found the Gypsy Council in 1966. 55 The Action Campaign demanded the implementation of the Commission’s recommendations on education, housing, and halting sites for those who wished to remain travelling. 53 54 55

Sharon Bohn Gmelch, Tinkers and Travellers (Dublin: O’Brien, 1975), 134. Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous, 119. Grattan Puxon (1939-), implies that the rise of such activism in both Britain and Ireland was inextricably entwined: ‘Both [Irish Traveller] Tommy O’Doherty (who founded the Society of Travelling People in 1959), and [Irish Traveller] Pop’s Johnny Connors were leading members of the Gypsy Council at the time of the 1st World Romani Congress [in Easter 1971].’ Grattan Puxon, personal correspondence, 25 April 2003.

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The group picketed government offices, confronted Traveller evictors, and opened a camp school at Ballyfermot, Dublin that was quickly torn down by the city corporation. This confrontational and antiassimilationist resistance was a direct response by radicalized Travellers to the perceived paternalism of the Commission on Itinerancy and its allied Christian charitable organizations. The early 1960s are generally considered by historians to be the point at which Ireland had embarked upon a decisive transition from a conservative, rural, and agricultural society to a modern, industrial, and urban one. The mobilization of Travellers might be readily placed within this contemporary Irish framework and within the wider international context of the push for equitable treatment by various historically marginalized constituencies during that period. The minority’s conflict with the Dublin authorities secured a great deal of national and international media attention and garnered the support of liberal and socialist opinion, British Romany evangelical and pressure groups, and Irish legal and student bodies. The consequent transformation in the Irish public perception of Travellers did not quite kill off the ‘tinker’ construct however: during the period in which the drive to forcibly settle Travellers was strongest, the Irish tourism trade promoted excursions in barrel-top ‘Gypsy’ wagons. In the end, the decisive death of the romanticized literary image of the ‘tinker’ might be said to have come with the artistic collaboration of Galway pro-Traveller activists and playwrights Arden and D’Arcy in response to sedentary-nomadic clashes that occurred in the years after the Commission on Itinerancy. During the late 1960s, a startling series of reports appeared in the local and national press of attacks on ‘itinerant’ campsites in Galway county and city involving shotguns and other weapons. Moreover, even when Travellers were willing to settle in line with the recommendations of the Commission on Itinerancy, they were sometimes prevented from doing so by the hostility of potential neighbours: in October 1968, a Galway student march in favour of Travellers was countered by residents opposing the housing of an ‘itinerant’ family in the Claddagh district. A notorious case occurred in Galway city in 1970 involving a Mrs Furey, a Traveller mother of six whose name had been on the Corporation housing list for over ten years and who was at that time squatting with her children in a condemned dwelling. A 300-strong group of residents of the Corporation (public) housing estate in which Mrs Furey had been

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allocated a home vehemently objected to her presence, and threatened bloodshed if she arrived. 56 This was not an isolated incident: similar stand-offs occurred intermittently in Galway throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Such events were the context for the improvised and didactic Arden and D’Arcy Rough Theatre performance No Room at the Inn, which was created in late December 1976 with the Galway Theatre Workshop. This group of University College Galway lecturers and students included the late Pat Sheeran, whose theoretical model of Traveller space has been invoked throughout this study. Arden and D’Arcy pieced together their notes on the event for volume one of their Methuen Plays. The opening sequence of No Room at the Inn, described as demonstrating the ‘alienated social position of the Travelling Community’, represented the conditions in which the poorest Travellers lived and was based on descriptions gleaned from the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy. A suggestion made in 1974 by a Mayo Labour Party councillor that Travellers be sterilized and then shipped to the Aran Islands is explicitly alluded to in No Room at the Inn, in which a portion of item number three on the agenda of the city council meeting reads: ‘[T]hat Itinerants be deported en masse to an uninhabited island off the Atlantic coast.’ 57 With the use of dream sequences involving a genie in the role of guide, No Room at the Inn parallels the contemporary racism of Galway councillors against Travellers to the injustice meted out to the councillors’ ‘native’ Irish ancestors by the Anglo-Norman ruling families of Galway in centuries past: Genie: ‘And where were you? Kept out of the gates by the English colonial bye-laws written over them!’ 58 Just as Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding and Murphy’s The House muddies the boundaries between settled and Traveller/emigrant, No Room at the Inn invokes the historical exclusion suffered by settled Galwegians in order to underline the contemporary segregation of their Traveller 56 For a discussion of these events, see Jane Helleiner, ‘Traveller Settlement in Galway City: Politics, Class and Culture’, in Chris Curtin et al. (eds.), Irish Urban Cultures (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1993), 181–201. 57 See Michael Finlan, ‘Wants Itinerants to be Sterilised’, Irish Times 5 Mar. 1974: 9; Arden and D’Arcy, No Room at the Inn, 402. 58 Ibid. 404.

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neighbours. Moreover, the directness of the performance piece’s message likely made it immediately accessible to amateur performers and local audience members alike. In addition, the title, with its reference to the nativity of Christ, intimates that the sedentary citizens of Galway are less than Christian in their attitude to the minority in their midst, while the voice-over accompanying the waking of the councillors warns that the fate of the Traveller segment of the city is more entwined with that of the dominant population than is admitted: Voice-Over: If there’s injustice toward even a small section of the people in this town and that injustice is not removed, the entire population will in the end suffer for it. 59 The interventionist drama of Arden and D’Arcy is the culmination of the enormous change in the Irish dramatic depiction of people of the road that arrived with that community’s politicization: for one very radical moment, the play centred on the Traveller left the safe and middle-class confines of the theatre and literally took to the streets. In effect, No Room at the Inn collapsed the walls between stage and public space, performance and politics. Such an unabashedly confrontational piece could only have been possible after the early 1960s. At the close of No Room at the Inn, the pressure of political necessity overcomes the councillors’ good intentions towards Galway’s minority population, and once the shock of the dream has worn off, the issue is literally swept under the carpet. Despite this pessimistic ending, however, the gains made by Travellers in the period between the creation of No Room at the Inn in 1976 and its eventual publication in 1994 are reflected in the upbeat tone of the comments appended by Arden and D’Arcy to the notes on the performance, which refer to the current generation of Traveller spokespeople and political representatives. The Itinerant Action Campaign of 1963–4 was short-lived, but it opened the floodgates to Traveller mobilization and to the emergence of an organic intelligentsia who speak publicly on behalf of their community and contest and win local government seats. Equally importantly, the political movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its allied artistic endeavours opened up a cultural space within which the Traveller voice could be truly heard for the first time. 59

Ibid. 405.

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PL AYGIRLS OF THE WESTERN WORLD: SYNGE AND THE TRAVELLER WOMAN WRITER’S CHALLENGE TO THE CANON Even empathetic dominant culture depictions of Travellers sometimes still speak to majority concerns or fulfil a compensatory fantasy of ‘life on the road’. In order for literary representations of the non-sedentary to consistently inhabit espace itinérant, it seems that a decisive intervention from the minority itself is the way forward. Only by attending to the cultural productions of Travellers will it become impossible for settled writers to continue to invoke the community as an apolitical and ahistorical symbol of exoticness or deviance. Such imagery continues to be produced to a certain degree, despite the increasing volubility of Traveller voices and the upending of stereotypes in the work of writers such as MacMahon, Murphy, and Arden. As such, it is fitting that this chapter concludes with a consideration of Juanita Casey and Rosaleen McDonagh, two Traveller authors whose work self-consciously contests the long-established ‘tinker’ construct. In addition, Casey directly addresses Synge’s seminal depictions of marginalized Irish populations, while McDonagh builds upon a concept of the Traveller woman artist arguably first iterated in The Tinker’s Wedding. The era after Traveller politicization is the first time in Irish history in which a body of written material by members of this historically nonliterate culture is readily available, and such texts will inevitably instigate a dialogue with majority culture about the history and meaning of the ‘tinker’ motif. Indeed, this nascent Traveller literary canon might be read as the campsite that is finally beginning to make its presence known in the Big House realm of Irish sedentary culture. The emphatic emergence of Traveller writing counters the weight of the sedentarist canon and forges a shared Traveller identity as an imaginative resource from which members of the contemporary community can draw sustenance. The essentialist rhetoric of a linear Traveller history may echo the Revival-era construct of ‘tinkers’ as a coherent grouping stretching back beyond the historical horizon, but this does not nullify the felt reality and political advantageousness of collective identity, as the details of Casey’s peculiar personal history will attest. The introduction to this study alluded to the fact that until Rhys took the subject position of the madwoman in

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the attic in Wide Sargasso Sea, Bertha’s experiences could not be coherently articulated within dominant culture. Although such ‘writing back’ potentially enfolds a dangerous biological essentialism that ultimately trades in the kind of fictions that constructs minority Otherness to begin with, it is, nevertheless, a necessary first phase. The alter ego of contemporary young Irish Traveller dramatist and performer Rosaleen McDonagh complains in The Baby Doll Project (2003): ‘I always resented it when I read history books that my people were never mentioned or referred to.’ 60 Due to their lifestyle and traditionally non-literature culture, peripatetic groupings have been largely unrecorded by official annals. As Leo Lucassen has argued in reference to the Western European Gypsy, itinerancy has been misleadingly studied within the context of criminality, and the countless other occasions when wanderers passed through communities without incident, obtained what they required, or were simply turned away, have generally gone unregistered. 61 In like manner, Lanters suggests that the perceived ‘exotic and threatening nature of Travellers may in part be the result of the near absence of Traveller self-representations in any of the written or broadcast media’. 62 In the specific case of European Roma, moreover, John Megel has argued that the Holocaust obliged members of that community to situate themselves in a shared and coherent Gypsy past and identity for the first time in their testimonies to ‘the forgotten genocide’. 63 Thus, in response to trauma, silence, misrepresentation, and invisibility, and in a reflection of growing levels of literacy, a highly visible coterie of Traveller and Romany writers have begun to chronicle their experiences in the last few decades. The following consideration of the Irish Traveller author is necessarily brief because it spans a few short decades of writings by members of the minority, as against the centuries of texts about ‘tinkers’ alluded to in previous chapters. Moreover, both Casey and McDonagh have 60 Rosaleen McDonagh, perf, The Baby Doll Project, by Rosaleen McDonagh, dir. Vici Wreford-Sinnott, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 15 Jan. 2003. 61 See Leo Lucassen, ‘A Blind Spot: Migratory and Travelling Groups in Western European Historiography’, International Review of Social History 38 (1993), 209–35. 62 José Lanters, ‘ “We are a Different People”: Life Writing, Representation, and the Travellers’, New Hibernia Review 9: 2 (2005), 25. 63 John Megel, ‘The Holocaust and the American Rom’, in Joanne Grumet (ed.), Papers from the Sixth and Seventh Annual Meetings of the Gyspy Lore Society, North American Chapter (New York: Gypsy Lore Society, 1986), 189.

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experienced a degree of education, public standing, and political activism that is unrepresentative of the average member of their community. Therefore, the problematic status of published and/or literate Travellers as spokespeople for their historically non-literate culture is one that cannot be ignored, although their fittedness is an unexamined assumption that underlines majority culture critical assessments, including this one. Nevertheless, it would be patronizing and inaccurate to assume that the Traveller challenge to sedentary constructs has only recently materialized, or that it inevitably emanates from a Traveller élite: a correspondent who identified him or herself only as an ‘Irish Gypsy’ wrote to The Standard in 1879 to challenge moral crusader Smith of Coalville’s stereotype of the ‘morally degraded’ and ‘criminally inclined’ Romany. 64 In addition, Traveller story-telling, folktales, and balladry rehearse the minority’s beliefs and identity, and constitute an imaginative and shared resistance to the linear modes of sedentary narrative: referring to the marginal, subversive, and fluid quality of oral folklore in contrast to the fixed and canonical nature of the published text, Bairbre Ó Floinn has noted that folk-tales ‘are the Travellers of literature’. 65 Nevertheless, although the ballad tradition of Ireland is arguably a Traveller art form that was also valued by sedentary culture, the contribution of peripatetic peoples to the performance and transmission of such material has not always been fully recognized. Disregard for the sacred cows of official memory permeates Traveller memoir and oral history, often revealing an alternative version of the past of the sort suggested by Traveller indifference to sectarian division in The Honey Spike. In an anecdote dictated by Frank Dunne for an anthology of stories from the road, the almost universally despised ‘Black and Tans’ 66 are remembered with something akin to affection. Members of the auxiliary force, who were generally drawn from 64 Letter to The Standard 16 Aug. 1879, paraphrased in David Mayall, GypsyTravellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 137. 65 Bairbre Ó Floinn, ‘Irish Travellers and the Oral Tradition’, A Heritage Ahead: Cultural Action and Travellers (Dublin: Pavee Point, 1995), 63. 66 The ‘Black and Tans’ is the nickname given to the British personnel enlisted by the Royal Irish Constabulary in their war against the Irish Republican Army in 1920 and 1921. The auxiliary force became notorious for attacks on civilians, and remains anathema to majority Irish recollection.

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the lowest socio-economic stratum of British society, paid for services provided by Travellers and demonstrated a skewed benevolence and class solidarity in such dealings: The British had sent troops to Ireland to try and make peace [. . . ]. They used to hold parties and they would ask my parents to play music for them and they would pay [. . . ]. One day [my mother] went to the shops to get food when one of the troops saw her in the butcher’s shop [. . . ] he came into the shop and pushed the butcher aside, saying, ‘I will pay Mrs Dunne with meat for being such a good musician and a very kind person [. . . ]. It’s on the house.’ The butcher was furious, but he could not say anything [. . . ] sometimes [the troops] would buy clothes for [my mother’s] children but the shopkeeper would not get any money and could say nothing about it because they might shoot him. 67

In addition, Traveller oral tradition appropriates narratives emanating from majority culture, claiming historical figures associated with wandering such as Oliver Goldsmith and St Patrick as erstwhile Travellers. 68 The culture also generates ballads that challenge sedentary ideology: Maher’s memoir reproduces a song entitled ‘The Murder of the Travelling Lad’, which details the tragic outcome of settling on the child of the title. Moreover, in a kind of mirror image of centuries of European narratives concerning child-snatching peoples of the road, Traveller oral culture also expresses fear of the dominant culture’s potential to metaphorically devour its members. 69 The texts of Casey and McDonagh pivot on the question of Traveller ethnicity, and such assertions of separate identity wrestle the discourse of Traveller difference from sedentary literature. Although the earliest written reference to the tinker’s cultural distinctiveness occurred in an official document in 1835, Traveller ethnicity was only acknowledged in law over a century and a half later. In Britain, the status was granted in August 2000, after a group of Irish Travellers refused entry to five north London pubs won a landmark legal case under the 67 Clondalkin Travellers Development Group and Dublin In-Depth Photography, ‘Frank Dunne’s Story’, Travellers: A Way of Life, 33. 68 See Sean Maher, The Road to God Knows Where (Dublin: Talbot, 1972), 103–4; 117. 69 Into the 20th cent., Scottish Traveller oral literature encompassed a ‘gruesome folklore about “burkers” [body-snatchers] who were supposed to be continually on the wait to waylay and murder travelling folk, and sell their bodies to the anatomy schools’. Hamish Henderson, ‘Tinkers’. Man Myth and Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1970), 2854.

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Race Relations Act. In ruling on the case, the court acknowledged that Irish Travellers had a shared history in England going back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century. 70 In the Republic of Ireland, unequivocal legal recognition of equality was awarded in 2000 after twelve years of legislative references to Travellers. 71 Nonetheless, the battle for the acceptance of Traveller ethnicity within popular discourse remains an uphill struggle and the form of separateness claimed by Travellers is sometimes considered to be illegitimate: the title of a Parish of the Travelling People publication, Travellers: Citizens of Ireland (2000), suggests that certain members of the minority suspect that Irish citizenship is queried in their case. Since the 1960s, Traveller women’s self-expression has been channelled through and sometimes published by support organizations. At present, many of the most vocal and interesting texts by Travellers have been created by women from that community; contrary to the invidious media stereotype of the passive and downtrodden Traveller wife and mother, it is the woman’s voice that is emerging most vociferously from the contemporary culture. However, before this figure came to attention in sedentary culture, she had already been conjured up in Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding: as someone who uses subversive song and heightened language to comfort, entertain, and challenge both herself and those around her, Mary Byrne is a prototype of the Traveller woman artist. The language the matriarch uses when addressing the priest in The Tinker’s Wedding is both poetic and subversive in its faux naïveté: she describes him as a ‘single man’ and labels prayer a ‘queer noise’. However, like a true artist, Mary is capable of great empathy when addressing one of her own. Although she will later find Sarah’s desire 70 ‘Irish Travellers Covered by the Race Relations Act’, Commission for Racial Equality, online, 1 May 2006 71 According to one Traveller activist: ‘The first explicit reference to Travellers in modern Irish legislation occurs in section 13 of the Housing Act 1988 [. . . ]. In 1989 and 1993, reference is again made to Travellers in the Incitement to Hatred Act and the Unfair Dismissals Act. [. . . ] In the Housing (Traveller Accommodation), Act 1998, the first piece of legislation to concern itself exclusively with Traveller accommodation, the description contained in section 13 of the 1988 act is relied on as the definition of Travellers. The culmination of the recent legislative reference to Travellers has resulted in a broader legal definition of Travellers in section two of the Equal Status Act 2000 as “the community [. . . ] called Travellers and who are identified [. . . ] as people with a shared history culture and traditions, including historically, a nomadic way of life on the island of Ireland”.’ David Joyce, personal correspondence, 23 May 2003.

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for a wedding puzzling, the older woman nevertheless offers the anxious younger female the comfort of a folktale about ‘great queens making themselves matches [. . . ] and they with shiny silks on them’. Moreover, in order to make amends for her son’s scorning of Sarah’s boast that she is the Beauty of Ballinacree, Mary opens the preview of her promised tale with the rhetorical salutation: ‘you’re a grand handsome woman, the glory of tinkers, the pride of Wicklow, the Beauty of Ballinacree.’ 72 All in all, Synge imagines the performance and creativity of the Traveller woman storyteller decades before such a voice is heard in dominant culture. Juanita Casey is perhaps the most intriguing author to have emerged from the minority culture, and despite the fact that she occasionally resisted the essentialist tag of ‘Traveller writer’ at the height of her fame, her 1971 Dolmen Press novel, The Horse of Selene, is nevertheless a recognizably ‘Traveller’ narrative in playing with established literary constructs and obliquely privileging the oral above the textual and the coded above the legible. Although arguably neglected subsequent to her heyday in the 1970s, Casey has, nevertheless, been the most critically attended to of all writers who currently identify as Traveller, and appears to be gradually being enfolded into the Irish literary canon: the now 82-year-old Casey was the subject of a RTE Lyric FM Radio interview in October 2007, and was name-checked by major contemporary Irish writer Colum McCann at the January 2007 New York launch of his novel of Roma life, Zoli. As such, this analysis of Traveller writing will begin with an examination of Casey’s best-known work, The Horse of Selene. As noted at the outset, it took decades for The Tinker’s Wedding to be staged in the Abbey Theatre, which finally occurred only in 1971. Therefore, it is fitting that Casey, the Irish Traveller woman writer who has achieved the greatest degree of success, should have emerged in the same year that Mary Byrne, Synge’s prototype of the Traveller woman artist, came to public consciousness. The timing of the first National Theatre staging of The Tinker’s Wedding was also significant in other ways: contemporaneous media discourse reveals a continuing awareness of issues pertaining to the Travelling community, even if such attention was predominantly suffused by the rhetoric of ‘resettlement’ and 72

Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 23.

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‘itinerant deprivation’. This debate had of course ultimately emerged from the worldwide mobilization of historically nomadic populations partly instigated by the Irish Itinerant Action Campaign of 1963–4. The Gypsy Council was founded in London in 1966 and the first World Romani Congress was organized in 1971, and Irish Traveller representatives—including Joyce—attended the first and subsequent assemblies and contributed substantially to the movement, a fact that is generally downplayed in accounts of Romany politicization. Given the centrality of Traveller and Romany issues in dominant discourse during the early 1970s, it is not coincidental that Casey, the most successful writer to date from such a background, exploded onto the literary scene in the year of the First World Romani Congress with The Horse of Selene. Casey was born in England in October 1925, and was raised and educated by adoptive parents with ties to the circus industry. She currently resides in Devon, where she breeds ponies and has recently published her autobiography, Azerbaijan! Throughout her life, Casey believed, as she had been told by a member of her adoptive family, that she had been born to an Irish Traveller mother and an English Romany father, and this understanding that she was biologically Traveller and Romany inflected both her writing and its reception: The New York Times called The Horse of Selene ‘a remarkable first novel by a remarkable woman’. 73 It was not until she was in her late seventies and researching her forthcoming autobiography that she discovered otherwise. Casey had closely identified with the minority heritages she considered her own for most of her life: she resided with Romanies in the New Forest in south-east England for a time, during which time she learnt AngloRomani, lived a bohemian life in Ireland with her third husband in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and spent a number of years travelling as a circus animal trainer. In her Lyric FM interview, Casey intimated that because she understood herself to be an Irish Traveller for most of her life, that this is how she continues to conceive of herself: ‘I think everybody sets out either consciously or unconsciously [on] a search that goes right through life to know who they are, what they

73 Desmond Rushe, ‘Dublin: Survival of a Buoyantly Rich Folk Culture’, New York Times 12 July 1971: 22.

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are, and of course they make themselves what they are in the end.’ 74 In light of the fact that Casey has lived and written the felt reality of Traveller identity and that she has always been received and marketed as such, this analysis will unequivocally consider her as a minority writer; if nothing else, the author’s curious life story challenges the reductive essentialism that only a ‘real’ Traveller can portray nomadic culture! Casey noted in a 1972 interview with Gordon Henderson for The Journal of Irish Literature that The Horse of Selene was written in six weeks during the summer of 1964 while she camped in the resonant location of Achill, the former island home of Revival-era artist Paul Henry, of course. The novel was a huge critical success, and John Huston was even seriously interested in directing a film version at one point. MacMahon, whom Casey has described as ‘that lovely man’, 75 sought the author out in the wake of the subsequent publicity, as her ethnicity had been emphasized to an enormous degree in the Irish media. Nevertheless, even while she still understood herself to be biologically ‘of the road’, Casey repudiated the potential essentialism inherent in the identification of the ‘Traveller voice’ by dominant discourse: ‘The only reason why I’ll stress [that I am an Irish Traveller] is because, in a small way, if I get success, then in some way I can pass it on to them—because people say, “Oh fancy that, a Traveler! Well, I never knew they had it in them.” ’ 76 In his consideration of Casey’s novel, Sheeran considers the author’s peripatetic background as pivotal to understanding her place within a female literary counter-tradition that celebrates placelessness and motion, in opposition to the Irish male writer’s fetishizing of place. Moreover, Casey’s poetry collection, Eternity Smith and Other Poems (1985), is similarly conceived of as deconstructing male literary myths. 77 In a paper on Casey delivered at the National American Conference for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, 74 Interview with Juanita Casey, ‘Remembered Words’, Transmitted on RTE (Radio Telefís Éireann (Ireland)), Lyric FM Radio 14 Oct. 2007. 75 Juanita Casey, personal correspondence, 6 Nov. 2007. 76 Gordon Henderson, ‘An Interview with Juanita Casey’, Journal of Irish Literature 1.3 (1972), 51. 77 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Dublin: Attic, 1996), 202–3.

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in 2005, Mary Ann Ryan, like Sheeran, proposes that Casey’s Traveller identity is intrinsic to her writing. Ryan suggests that Casey’s deployment of shifting narrative perspectives in The Horse of Selene ‘elide[s] the reader’s expectations of a consistent, fixed point-of-view’ and privileges a communal storytelling mode over the convention of the single author. Additionally, Casey’s eschewing of any indicators of direct speech endows her text with the ‘performativity of the oral tradition’: readers are constructed as listeners ‘who would pick up a change in voice from [the] storyteller’s dramatic exposition.’ Ultimately, Ryan reads Casey’s ‘tinkering with established modes of literary convention to be venerable intrusions into a settled canon’ that bear witness to the author’s ‘inheritance of multiple heritages’. 78 Casey’s mytho-poetic novel is centred on a Greek woman named Selene, who is referred to as a ‘goddess’ throughout. 79 In her recent Irish radio interview, Casey described The Horse of Selene as ‘a kind of Irish-Greek tragedy . . . almost a myth’. 80 The setting is an Irish island populated by untamed horses and repressed humans, which Selene and her cosmopolitan hippie wanderer friends overrun one bright summer. Casey’s choice of title and subject matter are self-conscious: Travellers have traditionally been involved in the horse trade, and the horse remain a topos pivotal both to the image of the ‘tinker’ in majority culture and to Traveller self-perception. Selene has a Gypsy past and Traveller associations, and this heritage is intimated to be fundamental to her ability to master both the island’s hitherto untameable so-called ‘tinker’ stallion and her islander lover Miceal. A smallholder who must choose between his farming heritage and a life with the nomadic woman, Miceal eventually accedes to the demands of hearth and land and rejects the unconventional Selene. In an inversion of the Bildungsroman tradition, Miceal then becomes the sacrifice necessary to his former lover’s development: he is killed by the ‘tinker’ stallion whilst attempting ‘to dominate it [and] take on Selene’s magic’, according to the author’s 78 Mary Ann Ryan, ‘Shifty Subjects: The Peripatetic Perspective in Juanita Casey’s Fiction’, National ACIS (American Conference for Irish Studies), University of Notre Dame, Indiana, 14–17 April 2005. 79 ‘The horse of Selene (Selene is the Greek Moon goddess), is, [. . . ] a beautiful carving of a horse’s head, from the Parthenon, in the British Museum—it is of one of the spent, exhausted team’s chariot horses sinking back into the ocean; the rising team is badly corroded and hardly recognizable.’ Casey, personal correspondence, 9 Mar. 2001. 80 Interview with Juanita Casey, ‘Remembered Words.’

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exposition of her novel in our correspondence. 81 Sheeran suggests that Casey’s work ‘offers a striking contrast between, on the one hand, the fluidity of young women, wild horses, tinkers and the sea, and on the other the rigidity, not to say petrification of men’. The location of the novel’s setting is called Aranchilla, an unceremonious synthesis of the twin islands of Revival pilgrimage, Aran and Achill, and the first clue that the traditional reverence with which the western island is approached in Irish culture is entirely absent from The Horse of Selene. For Sheeran, Casey’s remapping of the western seaboard is an attempt to ‘amend the near exclusive popular reception of it as literature of place and rootedness rather than, as it often appears, a literature of motion and travel’. 82 Casey’s novel inscribes Aran with the ‘tinker’ female’s fantasy: The Horse of Selene transforms Aran and Achill space from the pastoral and masculine espace rayonnant of the writings of Liam O’Flaherty and Máirtín Ó Direáin, the paintings of Henry, and the Man of Aran of film director Robert Flaherty, into a feminized landscape of desire and espace itinérant. Sheeran posits that the extent to which ‘the culture of the Aran Islands was a travelling/itinerant one has been obscured by an island chronotope developed by cultural nationalists’, who created ‘a vestigal place to house the image of a unified, pre-invasional civilization and a pre-modern self ’. 83 As suggested at the close of Chapter 3, Synge’s sensitive account of Aran struggled to maintain a coherent vision before acknowledging that the reality of the islands could not be contained by the seductive fantasy of an unchanging, archaic space. Given that Synge produced the bestknown twentieth-century text on the subject, Casey’s boisterous Aranchilla may be readily considered as a response to his poignant attempt to construct the western island as a secluded repository of authenticity. The doubt concerning Aran purity that so troubled the sedentary Synge is, by contrast, gleefully celebrated in the espace itinérant and escape feminine of the island imagined by this Playgirl of the Western World. Casey’s irreverent rejoinder to Synge’s Aran construct underlines the earlier suggestion that even empathetic depictions of marginalized Irish 81 82

Casey, personal correspondence, 9 Mar. 2001. Patrick Sheeran, ‘The Road, the House, and the Grave: A Poetics of Galway Space, 1900–1970’, in Gerard Moran (ed.), Galway: History and Society (Dublin: Geography, 1996), 771; 749. 83 Ibid. 752–3; 762.

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groups created by settled writers in the period before Traveller mobilization are transformed by the subsequent ‘writing back’ of minority authors. Moreover, The Horse of Selene attempts to disentangle Travellers from the undifferentiated category of Other that would unproblematically group them with islanders to begin with, an entwined marginalization suggested by the previously cited proposition made in 1974 that sterilized Travellers be shipped to Aran. The islanders so unsentimentally depicted in The Horse of Selene are resolutely post-Revival, and the drollness of Casey’s descriptions of Aranchilla’s grotesque inhabitants anticipate the deflationary styles of both Pat McCabe and Martin McDonagh; when she is finally fully enfolded into the canon, Casey will be recognized as a significant and influential twentieth-century Irish writer. Aranchilla is swamped in summer by a cavalcade of caravans, American tourists, visiting Travellers, and English anglers, which cheerfully confirms what Synge’s text fears: that the western island cannot withstand the forces of modernity. Casey’s islanders inhabit a tourist trap in which ‘heritage’ is a crude marketing tool and Revival-generated images of island simplicity and authenticity are exploited for financial gain. For instance, although she dwells in a comfortable modern home herself, Mrs Geraghty rents out a smaller, meaner house she refers to as a ‘typical island cottage’, while her island neighbour Manny O’Hehir hires out asses with ‘unsuitable mythological titles’ such as Diarmuid and Cuchulainn. Meanwhile, Miceal’s cynical brother Paudi ‘hunt[s]’ Americans to drive around in his horse and car, and a description of his interactions with his clients intimates that the business of selling Aranchilla ‘colour’ degrades both tourist and island entrepreneur alike: Paudi takes the visitors fishing for exorbitant fees, and they swallow ‘his tales of giants and mermaids with audible gulps and Mys. He told them everything they wanted, and they threw the lovely fish money ecstatically every time he barked and clapped his flippers or stood on his storytelling head.’ 84 Casey’s long-lens description of Aranchilla’s men recalls Jack Yeats’s iconic drawing of an Aran fisherman staring off into the distance, but insinuates that the conventional and entwined literary and visual representation of the western islander is one of men by men: 84 Juanita Casey, The Horse of Selene (Dublin: Dolmen; London: Calder and Boyars, 1971), 34; 27; 171.

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Dark clothes, dark faces; the figures of the island men were dark, in a dark landscape. They stood quite still, like statues, in fields, at the sea’s edge, on a headland. The tall dark standing stone would move and become a man. [. . . ] [The men] were like statues placed here and there to watch the centuries stride past the island; their purpose now unknown, their design most ancient. The men stood and had forgotten why. 85

By contrast, the young women of the island are described in the same passage as being ‘in movement’, the ‘bright’ colours of their clothes ‘shout[ing] in the rare sun.’ In Casey’s rendering of Aranchilla, authenticity inheres in ‘nature’ (animals, young women, and Travellers) rather than the male islanders, and the wandering human or untamed animal is valued above the settled or domesticated varieties. The novel opens with a long description of the movements and unnerving habits of the island’s wild horses, and animal ‘character’ is delineated with more care than that of many of the islanders. Casey lovingly details the horses’ comic affronts to sedentary pieties in the following description of their behaviour while grazing in the graveyard: the big black, with the lightning blaze, rocked gently back and forth with his behind digging into the pleasantly sharp edge of a Celtic cross, and the white, raising his tail, sighed, and Mary, beloved wife of Fintan Duffy, received an unexpected tribute which would guarantee a powerful growth of grass around her for a good year. 86

The visiting Doran Traveller clan, who at one point are observed ‘spreading out over the furze like rabbiting dogs’, are associated with the animals that figure so prominently in the novel, and are outside the articulations of dominant discourse. The world of animals, like that of the mute Travellers, coexists with but is often oblivious to the mores of settled island society. In Casey’s description of the Doran family’s preparations for a ferry journey, their utterances mingle with those of their animals to create a symphony that speaks of their status as operators on the borders of literate culture: And the tinkers, on the edges of the island, always on the edges of the lands and the settled society, prepared to move on. The young boys were ordered out of the lake where they had been bathing, their skinny white bodies silvery as 85

Ibid. 21.

86

Ibid. 11.

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sand eels. [. . . ] Hysterical dogs ran under all feet, there were shouts, whinnies, brayings, barks and children’s laughter. 87

Like the unindividuated Dorans, who have no dialogue in the text, the domesticated animals of the islanders are beyond the subjugation of language and naming. As Miceal tells Selene when asked for his pet’s name: ‘The dog has no name. We don’t go in much for naming beasts here.’ 88 The theme and style of Casey’s writing elucidates the ambivalent relationship of the nomadic subject to the practice of reading. The Horse of Selene challenges the ethnocentric assumption that literacy is a necessary and inevitably positive experience for the Traveller, implying that a proud culture of non-literacy is not comparable to ignominious and isolated sedentary instances of illiteracy. Travellers cannot be judged by the yardstick of sedentary values, and the written word is overwhelming and even murderous in Casey’s novel: ‘Newspapers were liable to fight; pages shifted from back to front, and when replaced, some demon managed to whisk them round upside-down. They suddenly grew paper arms and tried to strangle her with the power of the printed word.’ 89 Casey often decorates her works with her own line drawings, and included a number of such illustrations in the published edition of The Horse of Selene and in our correspondence. Altogether, it might be said that in Casey’s writing, whether private or public, the written is not privileged above the oral and the fixed printed line is not favoured over the fluid line of the drawing. In parallel with the traditional reluctance of Travellers to see Cant in print, the dialect is symbolically rather than actually present in The Horse of Selene, with its subversion of dominant discourse and its fluidity with regard to conventions of punctuation. The Dorans do not speak in Casey’s novel, and this refusal to yield to the artifice of representing the Travellers’ language scripturally evades the categorical binary separating oral from written. This binary inscribes Cant as the Other of English and Irish, since it is invariably examined in terms of its derivative relationship to either or both languages. In his memoir of Travelling life, Maher suggests that the Traveller narrative has not been represented in Irish records: ‘Well the road was my home and cradle, as it was for my ancestors. I know it has great 87

Ibid. 41.

88

Ibid. 43.

89

Ibid. 16.

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and ancient history, passed down by word of mouth true and faithfully, completely unknown to the buffer [non-Traveller], and lost or ignored in the annals of Irish history.’ 90 For Casey, on the other hand, the seeming absence of the ‘tinker’ from the text of history is, rather, a submerged and coded script indecipherable to the dominant culture. As David Lloyd writes: If one defines the subaltern not as that which desires the state but as that which is subaltern because it resists or cannot be represented by or in the state formation, its episodic or fragmentary history can be read as a sign of another mode of narrative, rather than an incomplete one, of another principle of organization, rather than one yet to be unified. 91

In Lloyd’s formulation, the bricolage of the hastily erected campsite is a mode of narrative that iterates a different reality to the sturdy permanency of the stone-built house. The ballad, a fluid art form consistently claimed, performed, and interpreted by non-literate culture, exemplifies the manner in which the Traveller cultural production refuses to conform to the sedentary consensus: during the nineteenth century, the ballad was dismissed as ‘ “very defective [. . . ] bombastic, [. . . ] bitter and sectarian [. . . ] Jacobite [. . . ] extravagant and tiresome” ’ by nationalist taste, which judged it to make ‘no pretence to being true to Ireland’. 92 Like Murphy’s intimation that the emigrant challenges the tenets of fixity and origin, the effect of returned emigrant Paudi’s voice in The Horse of Selene evokes the destabilization engendered by the subversion of song: ‘Paudi was a magpie with language; he picked out bright phrases and glitter-laughter, he stole from literary nests. Such a voice naturally charms the ears off women and horses, and can lead a man away [. . . ]. Paudi was an Irish Orpheus, his voice his lute.’ 93 For Casey, music is the utterance that challenges dominant discourse and its claims to coherence, and Miceal’s unthinking patriotism and fixed sedentary identity threaten to disintegrate under the influence of the Gypsy melody played by Selene’s friend: 90 91

Maher, The Road to God Knows Where, 151. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 127. 92 Thomas Davis, ‘The Songs of Ireland’, Prose and Poetry, 255, quoted in Lloyd, Anomalous States, 91–2; Charles Gavan Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, xv, quoted ibid. 92.

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Miceal was bewildered and shaken by the lure and fierceness of the music. It seemed to writhe in the fire, and to lead you into ice and burning so that the hairs crawled on you like a dog’s. He felt a new country of the spirit lying before him as a traveller, yet was afraid to leave the island of himself. 94

Casey’s particular utilization of the word ‘traveller’ in the passage above partakes of the vocabulary of spiritual autobiography, thereby broadening the politicized and capitalized term then being claimed by Traveller activists to encompass all opposition to normative values. Casey self-consciously constructs herself as both an ethnic and a gendered writer. In a description of her method of composition, literary creativity is seen to be a spontaneous by-product of the alchemical processes deployed by the domestic goddess: ‘And I find that, when I do start writing, I release fountains of words, which is awful. I can’t think of anything else, I get obsessed with my writing, and I do it at all the wrong times, you know, when I’m preparing soup, for instance.’ The author concludes that she ‘can’t sort of sit down from like nine to five, steady writing. It has to come in a bang, come in a rush.’ 95 Like Casey, Rosaleen McDonagh is conscious of being a Traveller and a writer, but is equally aware of being a disabled woman and a writer, and her concern that racism against Travellers be recognized emphasizes how Traveller women, in particular, are excluded in Irish society. As she was quoted as stating in a piece about her political career published in the Observer in June 2007: ‘It’s “acceptable” in pubs to tell “knacker” jokes [derogatory slang for a traveller], while, quite rightly, it is regarded as out of bounds to tell racist ones,’ she says. ‘Racism against travellers is still endemic in the Republic. Women in Irish society often complain about a glass ceiling in business and careers. Well, I can tell you that as a female traveller we aren’t even able to look up and see that ceiling. We are locked on the outside looking in.’ 96

Such concerns intersect in McDonagh’s confrontation of the construct of the Traveller woman in her autobiographical one-woman play, The Baby Doll Project (2003). McDonagh’s drama is a response to the writing out of the Traveller and the disabled woman from the narrative of Irish 93 95 96

94 Casey, The Horse of Selene, 20. Ibid. 63. Henderson, ‘An Interview with Juanita Casey’, 45. Henry McDonald, ‘Traveller Attempts to Make History’, Observer 24 June, 2007: 11.

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history, and a subversive reshaping of the stereotypes of the overtly sexual tinker woman and the asexual wheelchair-bound woman. In an attempt to pique the interest of the companion she wishes to marry, Sarah Casey in The Tinker’s Wedding boasts to Michael Byrne of how sedentary males consider her to be a femme fatale: Sarah: Didn’t you ever hear tell of the peelers [policemen] followed me ten miles along the Glen Malure, and they talking love to me in the dark night, or of the children you’ll meet coming from school and they say one to the other, ‘It’s this day we seen Sarah Casey, the Beauty of Ballinacree, a great sight surely.’ Michael: God help the lot of them! 97 Michael’s scornful reaction to this claim suggests that both he and Sarah know that the settled male conception of the dangerously captivating tinker female is little more than fantasy, particularly in the case of a woman who possesses an overwhelming wish to become a ‘respectable’ wife. In short, Synge refuses to engage with what must be the most vigorous and ubiquitous stereotype of the woman of the road; in Irish cultural production, the received image of the tinker is generally, like that of the western islander, the image of the male member of that tradition alone. Other than when demanded by a theme involving sex or sexuality, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers rarely depicted the female tinker, and Synge’s Mary Byrne is atypical for this as well as for other reasons. The literary construct of the fierce and sexually available tinker woman and the contending but equally oppressive contemporary media image of the passive, victimized Traveller female are explored in The Baby Doll Project. Synge’s shaded portrait of tinkers was demonstrated to have foreshadowed the representation of rootless Others in later drama by Abbey playwrights such as MacMahon and Murphy. In like manner, the juxtaposition of images of seductiveness with tropes of squalor in McDonagh’s play might be seen to have built upon Synge’s original puncturing of the sedentary male fantasy of the disturbingly sexual tinker woman. Although the older tinker woman of Revival drama and literature was never sexualized, Synge’s depiction of Sarah Casey was almost certainly singular in its refusal to reduce the youthful woman of 97

Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, CW 4: 11.

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the road to a one-dimensional cliché of the enthralling seductress. Most pointedly, Synge intimates at the opening of the play that Sarah is a mother, a possibility that could not be countenanced within the typical male sedentary fantasy of the unencumbered tinker female. In the Irish ballad tradition and in post-independence texts such as The Righteous Are Bold, the peripatetic and overtly sexual woman threatens to lure the celibate farmer’s son away from the economic and emotional self-sacrifice demanded by the impoverished new state. The hatred and fear of the tinker woman that was so often entwined with the lust inspired by her sexuality is made explicit in O’Flaherty’s aforementioned short story, ‘The Tent’: The other woman was golden-haired, with a very small head and finely developed jaw, that stuck out level with her forehead. She was surpassingly beautiful, in spite of her ragged clothes and the foul condition of her hair, which was piled on her tiny skull in knotted heaps, uncombed. The perfect symmetry and delicacy of her limbs, her bust and her long throat that had tiny freckles in the white skin, made the stranger feel afraid of her, of her beauty and her presence in the tent. ‘Tinkers,’ he said to himself. ‘Awful bloody people.’ 98

Needless to say, the socio-economic actuality of the lives of many women of the road directly addressed by The Baby Doll Project is almost always obscured by such sexualized depictions, which have invariably been produced by male writers. To Leland, the unindividuated ‘Gypsy woman’ of ‘dark blood’ has ‘panther eyes and serpent smile and beauté du diable’, a fantasy that is undercut in Anaïs Nin’s short story, ‘The Gypsy Feeling’, in which an over-excited male poet asks a Romany dancer to tell him about her ‘freedom’. She replies that in her spare time she cooks, sews, and worries about her relative’s whooping cough. 99 McDonagh is of particular interest as a feminist writer from a minority society categorized by anthropologists and sociologists as resolutely patriarchal. Her work examines the intersection of personally resonant concerns with the institutional abuse of Irish children in care, female empowerment, disabled rights, and the politicization of the Traveller 98 99

O’Flaherty, ‘The Tent’, 133. Leland, The Gypsies, 22; Anaïs Nin, ‘The Gypsy Feeling’, Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories (Weston, Conn.: Magic Circle, 1977), 23–7.

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woman. Although more distanced and artful than preceding autobiographical narratives such as Joyce’s My Life on the Road or Maher’s only slightly fictionalized memoir, The Road to God Knows Where, McDonagh’s drama nonetheless takes the form of the Traveller life story. Lanters categorizes this as the first and, when mediated due to the subject’s nonliteracy, often problematic wave of Traveller forays into literature. Such writings generally address the majority population in order to confront negative stereotypes, but the ‘strain of negotiating’ between cultures causes the ‘doubleness’ seen in such narratives, which extol the virtues of life on the road while rarely admitting its hardships. 100 However, The Baby Doll Project knowingly confronts this face-saving evasiveness by juxtaposing the heroine’s vanity and preening with the unglamorous reality of life on a campsite unserviced by toilet facilities. Therefore, McDonagh’s twenty-first century drama may be seen to herald a more judicious style of Traveller autobiography, though it nevertheless builds upon the transcribed memoir of the sort pioneered by Joyce and Nan Donohoe in the mid-1980s. Born into a large Sligo Traveller family in 1967, McDonagh is a performer, an aspiring politician, and a well-known activist on behalf of Traveller and disabled rights. She has a BA in Biblical and Theological Studies and an M.Phil. in Ethnic and Racial Studies from Trinity College, Dublin, making her the first Traveller to gain a postgraduate degree in the history of the Irish state, and likely one of the first openly identified Travellers to earn a BA at Trinity. In 2002 and again in 2007, McDonagh was a Seanad Éireann (Irish Senate) candidate for the Dublin University (Trinity College) constituency and campaigned on both occasions on a platform of minority and women’s rights. As the first Traveller to run for the Seanad, McDonagh received widespread coverage in the Irish and British media. She currently works as Coordinator of the Violence Against Women Project at the Pavee Point Traveller Centre and is also involved in a number of other policy areas as a member of the organization’s senior management team. In particular, McDonagh has lobbied for years on the necessity of allocated parliamentary representation for indigenous minorities in the manner of Central and Eastern European legislatures, in which Roma delegates are apportioned seats. 100

Lanters, ‘ “We are a Different People” ’, 26; 39.

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McDonagh was born with cerebral palsy, and was forcibly taken from her parents as a child and placed in state care because of her condition. Her family was obliged to move from Sligo to Dublin to be closer to the institution in which she was kept. McDonagh received her education up to the age of 13 in a state-run school for the disabled, and did not progress to secondary education until she was 18. This formative experience of institutional care has shaped her defiant sense of her ethnic identity, as she notes in an article published in 2002: As a disabled person, the moment I was sent to residential care I was encouraged not to be a Traveller, not to look like a Traveller and especially, not to think like a Traveller. [. . . ] Being away from home was not just about being away from my family, it was also being away from my culture. This means things that were familiar to me were taken away. My way of talking, my way of dressing, eating and learning were all [discouraged] and as a child I was being prepared to live in a settled identity. [. . . ] Numerous families who were interested in fostering were encouraged to meet me. These fostering attempts never worked out. This was done in order to break any contact with my blood Traveller family. [. . . ] the care workers or nurses in charge went out of their way to ensure Travellers did not play together. [. . . ] I was exposed to settled people’s values twenty four hours a day. Any time issues around Travellers came up on television or the media, I felt alone and unsure about whether or not I was actually a Traveller. 101

Confused by such attempts at assimilation, it was only later contact with prominent Traveller activists such as Catherine Joyce and Martin Collins that enabled McDonagh to understand her experience ‘as a form of racism’. 102 The Baby Doll Project was originally staged at the experimental Dublin arts space, the Project Arts Centre, as a sell-out work-in-progress in November 2002, and was presented to a standing ovation at the inaugural Dis/Cover National Arts and Disability Festival in Dublin in December 2002. On completion, The Baby Doll Project premièred at the Project Arts Centre on 13 January 2003, where it was well received by critics. McDonagh’s play won the 2003 Media and Multicultural Award offered by Metro Éireann, Ireland’s first mass circulation newspaper 101 Rosaleen McDonagh, ‘The Web of Self-Identity: Racism, Sexism and Disablism’, in Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh (eds.), Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland. (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002), 130–1. 102 Rosaleen McDonagh, ‘Like Trying to Bully Me Into Something I Could Never Be’, Irish Times 29 February 2000: 7.

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aimed at the immigrant segment of the population. (Unless otherwise credited, the discussion of The Baby Doll Project is based on an interview I conducted with McDonagh on 22 May 2003 and on my notes from the 15 January 2003 performance I attended.) A reading of McDonagh’s second play, John and Josie, an exploration of the intersection of issues of sexuality, gender roles, and Traveller identity in contemporary Ireland, was presented by the Project Arts Centre during Traveller Focus Week in December 2005. The dramatist’s third work, Stuck, which centres on a Traveller boxer who must choose between his sporting career and a college education, was staged at the same venue in November through December 2007 to coincide with that year’s Traveller Focus Week. Stuck was directed by Jason Byrne, who has worked with the Abbey Theatre on a number of occasions, and The Irish Times drama critic praised it as ‘a refreshingly unsentimental’ portrayal of Traveller cultural and ethnic difference. 103 The ongoing and fruitful relationship of McDonagh and the Project Arts Centre indicates that the most meaningful engagement with Traveller culture in Irish theatre today is occurring outside the mainstream. As such, a watershed to equal the staging of The Honey Spike will definitely have been reached when the National Theatre presents its first work by a Traveller playwright. According to the programme notes for The Baby Doll Project, the monologue explores ‘identities and histories; [. . . ] the impact of the Church; [. . . ] contemporary Ireland, consumerism and poverty; and [. . . ] the personal journeys of thousands of people whose identities are not given equal status’. 104 The title character, Baby Doll, is a fashion and cosmetic-obsessed soi-disant ‘diva’, whose mania for being perceived to be glamorous is a defensive response to the degradations of a childhood in which she was surrounded in the playground while schoolmates shouted ‘smelly knacker’. In addition, the Baby Doll persona is a challenge to the aesthetic norms of a society which finds it inconceivable that a wheelchair-bound woman is capable of feeling and acting on sexual desire, and of being desired in return: ‘I have loved and been loved by men’, the 25-year-old Baby Doll defiantly tells her over-protective mother. Although the huge cultural expectation that the Traveller female marries young potentially alienates the single and 103 Peter Crawley, review of Stuck, by Rosaleen McDonagh, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Irish Times 1 Dec. 2007: 11. 104 Programme notes, The Baby Doll Project.

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well-educated minority woman such as McDonagh, the play suggests that the disabled woman in any society is desexualized, degendered, and, ultimately, disembodied. Nonetheless, according to the Irish Times review: McDonagh defies you to see her as a victim. The pitiful details of her early life in and out of institutions [. . . ] are not presented tear-jerkingly but as a necessary prelude to her inevitable politicization. [. . . ] As a child she knew she was being disrespected and patronized, and a streak of stubbornness hardened: at speech classes she refused to talk because she sensed the teachers wanted to eliminate her traveller accent. 105

Baby Doll’s revenge on this imposed silence is a skilfully constructed monologue that lasts almost one hour and a half in production. McDonagh’s piece is profoundly aware of the disadvantages many contemporary Traveller women suffer: Baby Doll feels guilty when she remembers that many of these women still do not have bathrooms, while she wallows in cosmetic luxuries bought from expensive department stores. The coy, kittenish Baby Doll is a wonderfully comic creation, drawing nervous laughter by revealing to the audience their preconceptions about the disabled woman’s relationship with her body, and the Traveller woman’s hygiene standards and idiosyncratic sartorial sense. Baby Doll states that a frothy pink confection of a dress given to her in childhood by an aunt was beautiful in what she refers to as a ‘Travellerish’ way, but the garment is ultimately taken from her by the nuns in charge of the institution and given to another inmate, because, they admonish Baby Doll, ‘it must have been stolen’. In our interview, the dramatist stressed that she aims to ‘reinvent’ the Traveller woman by celebrating and politicizing what she terms ‘the Traveller woman’s aesthetic’, which appears to be a defiant embrace of all that is considered vulgar by élite, urban Celtic Tiger taste. Indeed, in the DruidSynge The Tinker’s Wedding, the 2005 Galway Druid Theatre company’s mammoth eight-and-a-half-hour production of all of the dramatist’s work, Sarah Casey’s skimpy clothes and garish jewellery and make-up were provocatively ‘tasteless’. The outset of this study noted that the concept of the Irish tinker as an exotic of some kind or other has been the one constant in depictions from the early nineteenth-century 105 Stephen Dixon, review of The Baby Doll Project, by Rosaleen McDonagh, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Irish Times 15 Jan. 2003: 12.

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right into the twentieth century, and The Baby Doll Project seizes that outlandishness and transforms it into Traveller style. The country and western songs of American stars Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton that the heroine and her sisters so unfashionably champion as children provide the soundtrack between sequences in The Baby Doll Project. The highly melodramatic music and glitzy image of such singers indicate that the alternative ideal of beauty that McDonagh hopes to forge is imbricated by the proudly dissident aesthetic of the rural American ‘white trash’ idiom, which will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter in relation to the Traveller-centred film This is My Father. Baby Doll mourns the loss of what is referred to in the play as her ‘Traveller-style’ long hair, forcibly cut by the nuns. For McDonagh, this claim to a Traveller woman’s definition of loveliness is an attempt to appropriate as glamorous an aesthetic that dominant culture dismisses as tawdry. Moreover, McDonagh is not the only Traveller woman writer to focus on the potential challenge to sedentary beauty norms of the distinctive Traveller style: Joyce claims to possess a strikingly similar memory of a nun forcibly cutting her hair short when she attended school, and likewise refers to very long hair as a fashion peculiar to Travelling girls. 106 McDonagh’s ingenuity lies in drawing humour from a bleak narrative by juxtaposing the self-assured Baby Doll’s frivolous pronouncements on fashion and beauty with the eerily-lit moments when a younger and more vulnerable persona who is not yet Baby Doll emerges to recount the horrors of institutional life and institutionalized racism and disablism: while she is using the communal toilets at her state-run school for the disabled, Baby Doll witnesses another pupil having excrement smeared on her face by angry carers as a punishment for having soiled her clothes: ‘They rubbed her nose in it. Isn’t that what they do to train animals?’ Baby Doll queries in a faux naïf voice. The excessive and kitsch decor of Baby Doll’s bathroom is a proclamation that those dismissed as being surplus to sedentary requirements can appropriate and celebrate their ‘trashiness’. To Baby Doll herself, the bathroom she escapes to is a sacred, private, female space for the Traveller girl reared on campsites without toilet facilities, and the wheelchair-bound 106 Nan Joyce, ‘Nan Joyce’, in John Keenan and David Hines (eds.), In Our Own Way: Tales from Belfast Travellers (Belfast: Belfast Traveller Support Group, 2000), 63.

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child used to the forced communality of educational institutions for the disabled. Nevertheless, Baby Doll remarks that ‘the day has yet to dawn when Hello magazine does a colour spread on Travellers’ bathrooms’, acknowledging the facts that Traveller categories of beauty will never be defined as such by aspirational settled tastes and that the conditions in which many Travellers live remain primitive. McDonagh is a strident and interesting new voice in Traveller culture, and she is one of a number of minority writers, performers, and intellectuals who have in recent decades both challenged the canonical dramatic construct of the ‘tinker’ and appropriated the more empathetic sedentary depictions of Travellers: MacMahon’s The Honey Spike was revived in 1993 using actors from the minority community, and Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding has been staged a number of times since the 1970s with Traveller actors in the lead roles. The writings generated by Casey and McDonagh do not self-consciously emerge from or make reference to texts by other Irish minority writers; as yet, there is no agreedupon written Traveller canon. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, such testaments and reinterpretations create and reiterate Traveller cultural distinctiveness, and simultaneously begin to dismantle the monumental ‘tinker’ construct painstakingly erected by centuries of sedentary writing. I will conclude my consideration of McDonagh by noting that the Irish government’s 2002 Census of Population included separate volumes on both Travellers and disability. This constituted the first ever effort to collate information on the disabled constituency in Ireland, and the only government attempt to systematically gather thorough statistical information on Travellers since the era of the Commission on Itinerancy. Thus, the emergence into public prominence of Traveller writers and disabled Traveller writers such as McDonagh bears witness both to the mobilization of the community itself since the 1960s and the beginning of an understanding that the minority is as diverse as the settled majority. Such developments may herald the commencement of a new era in sedentary–Traveller relations in the coming decades, despite the gloomy picture presented in analyses of dominant culture attitudes. McDonagh, a dramatist, activist, and spokesperson with a unique awareness of the interface of real-life Traveller issues and the weight of the received literary image of the ‘tinker’, will almost certainly be at the forefront of the revolution.

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This chapter has suggested that by the latter half of the twentieth century, politically radical writers are increasingly sensitive to issues of cultural difference and the weight of inherited sedentarist stereotypes in approaching the topic of the Traveller. Moreover, contemporary Traveller writers have themselves begun to negotiate and challenge dominant ideology. Therefore, does this analysis ultimately imply that we have come to the end of history in terms of the depiction of Irish Travellers by creative artists from majority society? The following and final chapter will argue to the contrary by turning its attention to screen portrayals of the Traveller minority in Britain and Ireland, which will be considered alongside contemporary American film and television depictions of the descendants of nineteenth-century Irish Traveller immigrants to the United States. It will be argued that in an Atlantic Anglophone culture that increasingly engages with visual rather than print media in seeking entertainment and enlightenment, screen representations of the Traveller both reinforce and reshape the tinker figure that has emerged from ‘Old World’ writing over the last 500 years. Indeed, if we return briefly to two of the paradigm-shifting texts considered earlier in the chapter, MacMahon’s The Honey Spike and Arden’s Live Like Pigs, the interconnected nature of the visual and the textual in any consideration of the history of the tinker trope becomes apparent. As noted, MacMahon’s decentred narrative deploys flashbacks, overlapping points of view, and crosscutting to build to its tragic close, and the cinematic nature of the techniques utilized suggest that the writer may well have been influenced by a film on a similar theme that was an enormous success in the Irish market during the 1950s: the plot and tone of The Honey Spike immediately recalls Ian Niall’s novel of Scottish Travelling life, No Resting Place (1948), or more precisely, documentary maker Paul Rotha’s 1951 film of the novel. As already noted, in the film of No Resting Place the action remains unchanged but the setting switches to Ireland, and the Scottish tinklers of the novel become Irish tinkers. Appropriately, No Resting Place was filmed in the Wicklow districts of Synge’s tramping with a cast that included many Abbey players. MacMahon did not name-check the film when promoting The Honey Spike, but the disinterested portrayal of the Kyle tinker clan and those with whom they interact may well have influenced the Kerry author’s unsentimental portrayal of Travellers’ negotiation of majority society. As it happens, Arden admitted in our interview that

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Rotha’s adaptation shaped his even-handed portrayal of the clash of the Sawneys and their settled neighbours in Live Like Pigs. In addition, the Niall/Rotha and MacMahon plotlines are strikingly similar: both centre on the tribulations suffered by a Traveller man due to a combination of personal failings and structural prejudice, and both culminate in the catastrophic death of the male protagonist’s wife. Chapter three concluded that Synge himself contributed to the visual image of Aran that currently adheres to his influential text on the subject, as Casey acknowledges in invoking both The Aran Islands and Yeats’s drawings of islanders in The Horse of Selene. In like manner, the multi-media contexts of The Honey Spike and Live Like Pigs reinforce the following chapter’s surmise that by the latter part of the twentieth century, the symbiotic nature of visual and textual representations of Travellers is increasingly apparent.

6 Screening the Travel(l)er The tinkers are no great problem to the authorities now, excepting perhaps to the collectors of taxes! All the same, there should be a film or two in these picturesque wanderers, who deserve to be ‘documented’ before they disappear. There is nothing quite like them outside of Ireland. Charles Duff, Ireland and the Irish (1952) [The current US television drama series The Riches] is about a family of American Irish Travelers, a generally nomadic clan somewhat akin to gypsies, some members of which are renowned grifters and scam artists. ‘I knew that Travelers existed in Ireland,’ [male lead Eddie] Izzard said. ‘I didn’t know that they were [in the US] in such numbers, and nobody knows how many there are.’ The mostly mysterious Travelers are a vehicle ripe for drama, in other words. Dave Walker, ‘Fellow Travelers’ Living, Times-Picayune 26 Mar. 2006: 1

Previous chapters considered the deep-rooted text-based traditions that imbricate the contemporary literary and print media image of the Irish Traveller. However, the current construct is constituted as much by recent screen representations as by the enormous number of books and documents through which fantasies of the tinker have circulated for centuries. In acknowledgment of this, the final chapter will focus on the depiction of the descendants of nineteenth-century Traveller immigrants to the US in contemporary American film and television, though it will open with an outline of recent cinematic portrayals of the Irish Traveller. From the sixteenth century to the opening of the twentieth, ‘paper imprinted with words or pictures was the only medium by which

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complex texts, and therefore complex ideas, could be carried in quantity across time and space’. 1 With the arrival of mass film and television in the twentieth century, however, print lost its uniqueness, and small and large screens became the media through which conceits that had previously circulated in printed texts continued to be disseminated: as noted, the play The Honey Spike was probably influenced by Paul Rotha’s Hibernicized film version of No Resting Place rather than the novel itself. American products govern the television schedules as well as the cinema programmes of other predominantly Anglophone territories such as Ireland and Britain, so it is appropriate that this investigation of the long literary history of the tinker in the British Isles should close with a consideration of how that trope crosses over onto the American screen. In fact, the US film industry has repackaged ‘Old World’ textual traditions for visual consumption from its earliest period: the self-explanatory The Gypsies in Ireland (1912) was a variant title of the representation chosen for the Irish-American home audience by the Kalem Company, the first filmmakers to shoot on location in Ireland. 2 From its inception, therefore, the new visual medium engaged with and modified an Irish tinker figure constituted by centuries of literature. This final chapter opens by noting that the pre-industrial Traveller figure of recent Irish cinema such as Into the West and Trojan Eddie is informed by the literary tradition of the tinker as dweller in an archaic chronotope and the news media stereotype of the atavistic male tinker. Such representations, moreover, implicitly disbar the minority from participation in the ordered culture and prosperous economy of ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. By contrast, it will be argued that the Irish-Canadian coproduction, This Is My Father, in which the Traveller owners of a family business are portrayed as having held onto their identity even as they take advantage of economic opportunity, suggests that the community is capable of adapting to new conditions while maintaining cultural distinctiveness. In a similar manner, the literary constructs from which the pre-modern Traveller of Irish cinema emerges are sent-up in Guy Ritchie’s British comedy Snatch, in which an ‘Irish Gypsy’ outfoxes other 1 William St Clair, ‘But What Did We Actually Read?’ Times Literary Supplement 12 May 2006: 13. 2 The Gypsies in Ireland and Gipsies of Old Ireland were variant titles of The Vagabonds, a love story featuring a flirtatious ‘Irish Gypsy’ maiden and an ‘Irish Gypsy’ fiddler.

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members of a crime network by playing upon their presumption that his culture is an anachronism. In order to segue from an analysis of the Traveller figure in Irish and UK cinema to its US equivalent, the discussion evaluates Trojan Eddie alongside the near-contemporaneous depiction of the Irish-American minority in the US film, Traveller. The comparison concludes that the American Traveler figure is constituted within an idiom of what will be termed exotic Sameness in contrast with the Othering of its Irish equivalent. The Traveler delineated in US film is informed by particularly American discourses, rendering it a related but nevertheless different phenomenon to that of the screen representation of its transatlantic ‘cousin’. If Irish culture’s portrayal of the tinker has often been a conversation with itself regarding identity and conformity, then this investigation suggests that the Traveler of US imagining emerges from a debate centred on assimilation and race. The image of the Irish-American Traveler will be demonstrated to be informed by three centuries of Irish identity in the New World, encompassing eighteenth-century Ulster Presbyterian and nineteenth-century Catholic Irish immigrants. Though initially perceived to be scoundrels, the eighteenth-century Ulster Irish were eventually integrated into an unethnicized Americanness, and the Traveler’s charm in contemporary American popular culture will be demonstrated to be rooted in its possession of a combination of modish postFamine Irish-American ‘ethnic whiteness’ and furtively appealing ScotsIrish roguishness. For these reasons, US Travelers are demonstrated to be much less Othered on the American screen in contrast to the shameful humiliations of history evoked by the Traveller figure in Irish cinematic depiction. In addition, the Traveler of American representation recalls the heroically unruly past celebrated by genres such as the western, the road movie, and the mafia film, and as such, the Irish-American figure easily slots into the ready-made cinematic tradition of the romanticized outlaw. THE TRAVELLER IN RECENT IRISH AND BRITISH CINEMA The contemporary contexts of recent cinematic images of the Irish Traveller have received much more critical attention than the long literary

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hinterland from which such representation ultimately emerges. Therefore, it is to be hoped that this study will open up a debate on the long lineage of the tinker trope that will eventually allow for more informed analyses of the cultural accretions that adhere to visual depictions of the Travel(l)er. Due to the scarcity of scholarship on US Travelers, considerations of their image are commonly created within a vacuum of knowledge concerning the community’s specific history and traditional representation, and therefore often misinterpret key issues or presume the culture to be interchangeable with that of any other marginalized minority. For instance, although Maeve Connolly’s recent reflection on the Travel(l)er onscreen, ‘ “A Bit of Traveller in Everybody” ’, has much to recommend it, she misreads a scene in Traveller in which lead character Bokky watches the World Series on television with friends and family as an attempt to ‘Americanize’ the community. However, the few anthropological accounts of Irish-American Traveler culture that have been published suggest that gathering to watch that particular sporting event was also a specifically Irish-American Traveler custom throughout the twentieth century. For a non-literate community, the occasion was utilized as an easily-remembered annual date by which the seasonally itinerant males knew it was time to come home to their permanent settlement from their summer work. ‘ “A Bit of Traveller in Everybody” ’ discusses recent explorations of history in films consumed by a largely Irish audience in which images of Travellers recur such as Into the West (1992) and This Is My Father (1998). Connolly suggests that in these Irish productions, Travellers ‘form a key element of the historical mise-en-scène, often providing a figurative or literal link to the past’, and that they are also understood to embody an ‘antidote’ to ‘a range of contemporary ailments, from postmodern alienation to crises over family values’. 3 Building upon Connolly’s argument, I would suggest that the film that has received most critical attention, Mike Newell’s Into the West, returns members of the minority to an Irish literary past in which the tinker figure shone briefly as a symbol of native exoticness, and that this reinstatement is a reactionary gesture. In Into the West, the Reilly Traveller family moves from being a discriminated-against settled minority in contemporary 3 Maeve Connolly, ‘ “A Bit of Traveller in Everybody”: Traveller Identities in Irish and American Culture’, in Diane Negra (ed.), The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 285.

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Dublin to a de-ethnicized and picturesque wandering rural band, at one with the natural world and other creatures of nature. In Travellers and Ireland: Whose Country, Whose History? (1995), Jim MacLaughlin discusses the flight of certain Travellers from settled urban life in recent decades: Ever since the Seventies, discrimination against Travellers has been systematic [. . .] [and] attacks by anti-Traveller vigilante groups have also been on the increase. By the late Eighties it was widely recognised that feelings of alienation among the Travellers [. . .] could only lead to anti-social behaviour [. . .]. This is causing some Travellers to take to the travelling life once again because, they argue, it is healthier and preferable to life on the dole in urban Traveller ghettos. 4

MacLaughlin suggests that for unhappily settled Travellers, a return to the road is a potential way out of the contemporary morass. However, the journey westward depicted in Into the West is not an adaptation of traditional Traveller values to a contemporary world but a flight into the past. The voyage of the Reillys is a pilgrimage towards the Revival world of ennobled tinkers, the myth of which has been kept alive by their story-telling grandfather, who has held onto what is presented as being the authentic pre-modern Traveller lifestyle. In fact, in an indication of the kind of adaptation within the minority culture that the film denies, the colourful barrel-top wagons displayed so prominently in Into the West as a paean to nomadic tradition were actually introduced to Travellers by British Romanies in the inter-war period, 5 and were soon superseded by caravans and trailers. Into the West reprises the Revival idealization of the tinker in its enactment of a Traveller family’s transformation from members of a marginalized minority to the (re-)embodiment of indigenous values once the journey backwards to the pre-industrial West has been made. However, what was potentially subversive on first iteration by Synge is far from being so when repeated at the close of the twentieth century, decades after the emergence of a Traveller activism that seeks to find accommodation between the preservation of a distinct culture and economic security for members of that community. 4 Jim MacLaughlin, Travellers and Ireland: Whose Country, Whose History? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 51. 5 Sherley McErgill, ‘The Tinker and the Caravan’, Irish Press 3 Mar. 1934: 8.

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At the opening of the film, the drunkard Papa Reilly (Gabriel Byrne) and his motherless sons, Tito (Rúaidhrí Conroy) and Ossie (Ciarán Fitzgerald), are living in squalor in the high-rise Ballymun Flats, Irish modernity’s greatest failure in social housing. It is only by journeying towards the region offered as the reservoir of the authentic during the Revival that the Travellers can regain their real ‘tinker’ selves and shake off what are implied as being the destructive late capitalist accretions of urbanization, material and spiritual impoverishment, and ethnicization: in the final scene, Papa Reilly’s response to his son’s query as to whether Travellers should identify with cowboys or Indians is to state that there’s ‘a bit of Traveller in everybody, Tito. Very few of us know where we are going.’ As in the Revival period, the Traveller functions as a romanticized representation of the deliverance from the evils of modernity available in the West. As a film made at the outset of the economic boom of the 1990s, Into the West suggests that there is neither physical nor psychic space for Travellers in contemporary urban Ireland. Travellers in Into the West belong to the pre-modern landscape, and are destined to be banished to the constituency of Revival fantasy. The ‘tinker’ fantasy is a balm to a frenetic Ireland in search of quick spiritual fixes, but the actual Traveller is an anachronism destined to be excluded from the new prosperity. Although I have broadly concurred with Connolly’s reading of Into the West, her contestation that Irish-Canadian co-production This is My Father (1998) similarly deploys Travellers as an ‘antidote’ to contemporary ailments does not do justice to its complexity. Rather, Paul Quinn’s film presents the minority culture as dynamic and capable of evolution in a manner denied by more typical cinematic representations. This is My Father concerns the 1930s romance of middle-class convent girl Fiona (Moya Farrelly) and an impoverished and uneducated young farmer named Kieran (Aidan Quinn). Their affair is doomed by what is depicted as having been the inflexible class structure of the socially and culturally narrow Ireland of the period. These events, narrated by an elderly woman whose identity is revealed later in the film, frame the present-day quest of the couple’s now middle-aged son to probe his parents’ secrets. Kieran Jnr. (James Caan) was born in Chicago after the pregnant Fiona fled to America in the wake of her lover’s suicide, a tragedy prompted by the pressure brought to bear upon the pair by their judgemental community. This Is My Father depicts, with a rather

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affectionate gaze, the tackiness of a contemporary rural Ireland in which people dwell in gaudily-painted bungalows and the presence of factory stacks are noticeable on the horizon. This industrially developed and architecturally bastardized countryside stands in explicit contrast to the tasteful vernacular architecture of traditional farmhouses depicted in the scenes set in the socially rigid and underdeveloped past in which the romance of Fiona and Kieran Snr. unfolds. A further contrast is implied by the film’s paralleling of the ‘dry’ dancehall policed by the local priest depicted in a flashback to the 1930s and the carnivalesque teenage disco shown in a scene set in contemporary Ireland. The American idiom of ‘white trash’, the origins of which will be discussed in relation to Irish-Americanness below, associates the poor rural white or ‘cracker’ lifestyle with tastelessness, deviance, semi-literacy, lawlessness, and cultural degeneracy. The visual hallmarks of ‘white trashness’ are evoked by the bed and breakfast establishment in which Kieran Jnr. stays on his fact-finding trip to Ireland: the space is decorated by a loud and incongruous mural of Hawaii, and ashtrays and cigarettelighters are strewn throughout. In addition, hens peck in the backyard and the camera lingers on the congealed, artery-clogging sustenance that guests are offered for breakfast. It is no coincidence that the gaudy dining area of the B&B recalls the kitsch décor of Baby Doll’s bathroom in McDonagh’s play: the business belongs to a settled Traveller named Seamus Kearny (Colm Meaney). In invoking the visual associations of what is increasingly argued to be the proudly dissident culture of the American rural white working class, Quinn simultaneously summons up the ‘Traveller aesthetic’ dismissed as mere tastelessness by a Celtic Tiger élite; it is notable that many contemporary popular accounts of Traveller culture circle upon the ostentatious designer clothing typically worn by wealthy Traveller women on special occasions. 6 The implication of such stress is that the clothing concerned is vulgar: in other words, the defiant Traveller aesthetic, like its American ‘white trash’ equivalent, ‘privileges prints over solids, animal over vegetable, full over empty’. 7 6 7

See Hannah Borno, ‘Caravan of Love’, (British) Marie Claire (Aug. 2000), 75–6. Gael Sweeney, ‘The King of White Trash Culture: Elvis Presley and the Aesthetics of Excess’,. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (eds), White Trash: Race and Class in America, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 250. The essays in this collection present the lifestyle of American ‘po’ white folks’ as the expression of a distinct culture, albeit one that is denigrated by élite discourse as merely the tasteless trappings of the ignorant and uneducated.

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The narrator of This Is My Father referred to above is Mrs Kearny (Moira Deady), the B&B owner’s mother. Mrs Kearny is old enough to have known Kieran Junior’s parents during the period of their affair, and it is her words that link past and present throughout, a device that likely prompted Connolly’s reading of the film as situating Travellers in bygone time. However, in contrast to the reactionary Into the West, in which Travellers are indeed portrayed as being out of place in prosperous Ireland, in This Is My Father Traveller culture is depicted as having evolved alongside sedentary culture, albeit on its own trajectory. Although Seamus and his mother have moved into a house and opened a business, it is a dwelling that is pointedly marked by ‘outsider’ taste. In addition, the Kearnys have resolutely held onto their minority identity even as they have settled, directly contradicting the 1960s government rhetoric that assumed that a house-dwelling Traveller was one whose cultural allegiance would inexorably transfer to majority values. Moreover, the Kearnys maintain that cultural difference while taking advantage of the economic opportunities available in this wealthier Ireland: when Mrs Kearny responds to Kieran Junior’s request to have his fortune told with a formulaic ‘let silver cross my palm’, implying that the fee will be small enough to be paid with a coin, the entrepreneurial Seamus comically interjects that ‘£10 is customary’. In addition, the conclusion of the film deflates the stereotype of the ‘wise Traveller woman’ in possession of uncanny insight. Early scenes intimate that the Traveller narrator somehow knew that Kieran’s mother was pregnant on the day she fled to America. The long cultural tradition of the woman of the road as prophet/witch is punctured at the close of the film, however, when Kieran is informed that Mrs Kearny knew this secret simply because Fiona confided in her. Moreover, a curse is cast in the film that appears to blight the life of Fiona’s intolerant mother, but it is a malediction spoken by a settled rather than a Travelling woman, as would almost certainly have been the case in a film more reliant on the association of the wanderer with the uncanny. By contrast, Into the West, with its intimation that the mysterious horse central to the narrative embodies the spirit of the Reilly boys’ dead mother, doubtlessly subscribes to this stereotype. Unlike many North American films in which a homogeneous and visually pleasing Irish landscape is celebrated regardless of the actual time period of the setting, the affectionate lingering upon the

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architectural vulgarity of contemporary Ireland in This Is My Father points to that tackiness as emerging out of a much-needed new hybridity that encompasses Irishness and Americaness, settled and Traveller, élite and marginalized. This sense of peaceful coexistence is underlined by the resolution Kieran Jnr. comes to in having fully uncovered the circumstances of his conception and birth by the film’s close. In This Is My Father, secular, vital, and culturally-hybrid contemporary rural Ireland is presented as a welcome contrast to a past in which no mingling between classes or cultural identities was tolerated: the scenes set in the 1930s pointedly include one in which a shopkeeper openly refuses to serve the young Mrs Kearny and her children as they traverse the countryside in a colourful wagon. In short, although Mrs Kearny functions aurally as the link between past and present, her nomadic life in the period in which she knew Kieran’s parents is explicitly contrasted to her settled life in contemporary Ireland. This Is My Father optimistically suggests that Traveller culture is dynamic and capable of alteration, even as it holds onto certain aspects that mark its difference from dominant society. In Into the West, travelling by barrel-top wagon is a paean to lost ‘tinker’ authenticity, but in Quinn’s film it is merely one stage through which the highly adaptive Kearny family passes. All in all, in its celebration of Traveller kitsch, bad architecture, and tasteless home decoration, and in its focus on the return of the illegitimate Irish-American son to a culture vastly altered from the days in which it made his parents outcasts for daring to cross class lines, This Is My Father revels in all that is the bastard of official discourse and élite taste. José Lanters has noted that Irish Travellers ‘are never represented as just themselves, but always as Other to the norm of the settled population’. 8 This chapter will posit that it is possible to give a more nuanced reading of the Traveler on the American screen, but that Lanters’s claim holds true for much Irish cinematic representation, which tends to construct the minority in a manner analogous to the most negative literary depictions. This will be demonstrated in the following brief comparison of the 1997 American film Traveller (which will be returned to in detail later), and Gillies MacKinnon’s near-contemporaneous Irish production, Trojan Eddie (1996). The films share superficially similar 8 José Lanters, ‘ “We Are a Different People”: Life Writing, Representation, and the Travellers’, New Hibernia Review 9:2 (2005), 25.

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plotlines and thematic concerns: in both, a Traveller man working in an itinerant and semi-legal trade alongside a rebellious younger male partner begins to hope that he can eventually break away from his culture. He also attempts to shield his partner from the wrath of the Traveller patriarch, which has been prompted by the younger man’s closeness to a girl associated with the community leader. However, the comparable narrative trajectories only underline the dissimilarity of Traveller and Trojan Eddie in their respective constructs of the Travel(l)er male. The business partners of Traveller are attractive, charming, loyal, and loving towards their own, and the audience is primed to be sympathetic when the Travelers’ non-violent scams threaten to be their undoing; needless to say, this construct partakes of the well-established American cinematic tradition of framing the outlaw as hero. Although the comparable Irish film admirably attempts to avoid the romanticization of Traveling culture flirted with by its American equivalent, the scamming team of the eponymous Trojan Eddie (Stephen Rea) and his side-kick Dermot (Stuart Townsend) are resolutely unsympathetic to the point where negative print-media stereotypes of the barbarian and irresponsible Irish Traveller male are explicitly invoked. Dermot seduces teenage Traveller Kathleen (Aislín McGuickin), which immediately endangers her because she is affianced to violent Traveller patriarch John Power (Richard Harris). In addition, Dermot runs away with the girl within hours of her marriage to Power, but later abandons her when the substantial amount of wedding gift money she has absconded with is reclaimed by Power’s henchmen. Furthermore, Trojan Eddie continually lies to his girlfriend and brutally beats his estranged wife. Only in the closing shot, which indicates that he has broken away from Traveller culture and the makeshift spaces he had originally operated from and has opened a legitimate business in a permanent premises, is the audience invited to fully sympathize with the title character. This ending reinforces the negative depiction of the minority culture: Eddie has less than the viewer’s full approval until his lifestyle decisively reflects the sedentary value of rootedness. In short, Trojan Eddie suggests that members of the Traveller minority will be disbarred from participation in the prosperous ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy and in dominant culture civility until they embrace stability and permanency.

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Although there is some attempt to depict the rough-and-tumble of Traveller life that pays tribute to difference without automatically transforming it into Otherness, Trojan Eddie is flawed on a number of levels. The storyline is often incoherent and most of the male Travellers depicted are capable of mob violence, wife-beating, and in one instance, the unprovoked murder of a fellow man of the road. Irish film critic Ruth Barton suggests that the film’s meandering plot may be an attempt to indicate the manner in which the nomadic narrative is uncontainable within the parameters of dominant culture storytelling. 9 However, if this is indeed the case, Trojan Eddie fails to convincingly pull off this admirable aim. In addition, the characterization of Traveller women is outrageously one-dimensional, and by depicting wives and girlfriends continually baiting their easily angered partners, the film implies that male Traveller violence against women is deserved. The portrayal of such behaviour is particularly invidious because no attempt is made to depict the social marginalization that may lead to high abuse rates within a disadvantaged community. Conjugal violence is unleashed within a contextual void, and a disturbing intimation arises that it is being presented as titillation to an implied male sedentary viewer. In discussing Irish racism, McVeigh notes the manner in which dominant Irish society depathologizes itself by projecting its problems onto various ‘out-groups’: ‘people inside the community are not sexually active, Black people are; people inside the community do not exploit their fellows, Jewish people do.’ Most significantly, ‘men inside the community are not violent to their partners, Travelling men are.’ 10 As a film for which the screenplay was written by critically acclaimed Irish playwright Billy Roche, and one in which actual Travellers appeared as extras, Trojan Eddie is all the more disappointing. On the contemporary Irish screen at least, the alluring Playboy of the Eastern World of the Revival has been replaced by the unassimilable Traveller male of current media representation, a passing embodied by the poignantly ruined beauty of Richard Harris. The idealization of the Revival period is no longer an option, of course, but does the refutation of the romanticized ‘tinker’ promulgated by Into the West mean that a contemporary filmmaker’s only recourse is to one-dimensional 9 10

Ruth Barton, Irish National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), 185–6. McVeigh, ‘The Specificity of Irish Racism’, Race & Class 33:4 (1992), 45.

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stereotypes in the manner of Trojan Eddie? British director Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000), a mischievous film that invokes but ultimately subverts the cliché of the Traveller as carrier of abandoned historical traces, will be considered as offering a viable approach for the filmmaker hoping to undermine both poles. In Snatch, Brad Pitt portrays a London-based ‘Irish Gypsy’ and unlicensed boxer-for-hire named Mickey, one of the central characters in a large cast. The pugilist’s first name, which instantly conjures up ‘mick’, a derogatory designation for an Irishman, is the first red flag that indicates that this is a narrative in which outrageous stereotype will be cheerfully invoked. In an indication of the manner in which racial cliché is ultimately punctured in the film, however, the seemingly unworldly Traveller outmanoeuvres other London underworld figures in the closing scenes, having manipulated their presumption that he is an easily exploited denizen of a pre-industrial order. Pitt’s Traveller character is a variant on the well-established theme of the wily Irishman who finds success in England by taking advantage of the metropolitan centre’s underestimation of the colonial subject’s abilities, stealth, and ambition. In this particular telling, the minority boxer exploits the English sedentary order’s underestimation of the resourcefulness of the subtly hostile Irish nomad: we learn at the close of Snatch that Mickey decides to double-cross his criminal associates only after they have caused the death of his beloved mother. Moreover, in its own self-consciously crude and ‘laddish’ style, Snatch acknowledges that the Gypsy or the Traveller identity is one that transcends dominant culture categories. When Mickey first appears the narrator advises the audience: ‘It’s not Irish. It’s not English. It’s just pikey [Romany/Traveller].’ Ritchie draws upon the centuries of literary stereotypes that adhere to the current image of the Irish Traveller in creating Pitt’s character. Mickey is a patent pastiche of previous literary and visual representations of the ‘Irish Gypsy’: the very category is a Victorian fiction that was cemented by British Gypsylorism and a construct, if one recalls the variant title of the first film shot in Ireland, which invokes the earliest screen fantasy of exotic Irishness. The handsome 1990s leading man is transformed into a grubby and broad-nosed ‘ethnic’ boxer with the aid of prosthetics and the darkening of his hair and skin, a make-over that summons up both the pugilistic Borrovian Gypsy and the ‘blackedup’ counterfeit Egyptian of rogue literature. Additionally, Ritchie’s ‘Irish

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Gypsy’ underlines the ultimately self-serving performance to sedentary expectations that such hoodwinking entails: in the manner of the consumer of rogue pamphlets who vicariously enjoys reading of the cozening of respectable citizens by canting ‘Egyptians’ and ‘tinkards’, viewers recognize that Mickey’s rapid-fire mumbling is being deployed to deceive his would-be exploiters, who take it as evidence of his apparent imbecility. Also, and without a doubt, the casting of the biggest male film star of the 1990s as the seemingly down-trodden Mickey immediately alerts the audience to the fact that the ‘Irish Gypsy’ will inevitably triumph. The plot of Snatch, which involves the entwinement of the global diamond business and an international trade in stolen jewels with the unlicensed boxing underworld, is convoluted to the point of incomprehensibility. Ultimately, it devolves into a pastiche of the kind of fastpaced gangster film aimed at young male audiences in which moral or emotional complexity and depth of character is secondary to speedy action and cruelly effective one-liners. Most interestingly, Snatch points to the literal performance of ethnic identity in its opening sequence, in which diamond thieves disguise themselves as bearded and blackclad orthodox Jews in order to infiltrate a Jewish-owned diamond business. The ersatz Jews convince the gentile security guards of their credentials by loudly and incongruously discussing Scripture as they enter the premises. In the cases of both Mickey and the jewel thieves, the ostensible confirmation of ethnic stereotypes is a wily method of outfoxing one’s adversaries. This ploy is likewise utilized by an East End diamond trader in the film, who finds that pretending to be Jewish is a shrewd career move in a business seemingly dominated by dealers from that tradition. Certain of the film’s other characters involved in the trade appear not to believe his pose, but all play along with his performance for the sake of profit. Of course, this paralleling of the performativity of Gypsy and Jewish ethnicities simultaneously invokes and refutes the nineteenth-century rhetoric that presented the two historically peripatetic populations as linked ‘Oriental races’. Snatch is an intertextual bricolage that self-consciously revels in the visual short-hand of touristic cliché, product placement, and hackneyed film scenes: a jewel thief visiting London goes to Saville Row to be fitted for a suit; a New York-based diamond trader’s desk mug, inscribed with the kitsch legend ‘I ♥ NY’, faces the camera in the manner of the

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most blatant style of product placement; Mickey’s mother, a beloved ‘Ma’ in the style of classic Hollywood depictions of Irish gangsters, is greeted with the old Hollywood ‘Oirish’ salutation, ‘top o’ the mornin”; the film’s one Russian character is, predictably, an ex-KGB agent. In Snatch’s cartoonish style, Mickey is demonstrated to be a ‘Gypsy’ boxer because he wears a ‘Gypsyish’ hat and smokes while in the ring. In addition, the film descends without warning into children’s caper when a preternaturally intelligent dog, apparently loyal to the Traveller camp from which he originated, intervenes in the action by snatching a diamond coveted by Mickey’s would-be exploiters. If Ritchie sends up stereotype by invoking it to the point of ludicrousness throughout the film, then the constant repetition by most of the male leads of the racist sentiment, ‘I fucking hate pikeys’, eventually effects the same reaction. By the time a fourth or even fifth character has voiced this exact phrase to no one in particular, what appeared on first utterance to be an offensive but personal opinion is eventually shown up to be the mindless echoing of the bias of others; racial prejudice, like much else in Snatch, is demonstrated to be the self-conscious borrowing of a trite idea. When a devious boxing promoter assures a policeman in a mock-earnest tone that Gypsies are ‘not to be trusted’, the implication is that the nomadic characters are no more or no less scheming than anyone else in the film. Just as The Tinker’s Wedding attempts to lessen the social distance between ‘respectable’ priest and raucous tinkers by depicting them to be equally dissolute, Snatch suggests that prejudice allows treachery to be projected onto the Traveller boxer alone by his more unsavoury associates. Ritchie’s film points to the folly of the myth of the nomad who exists in earlier cultural time, a construct that continues to circulate within Irish and British culture, though with less and less conviction. Once the fantasy of the pre-industrial Romany idyll became less viable, interest shifted towards American Gypsies, whose lifestyle could be readily situated within the potent myths of the hobo and the open road: ‘After Europe had become industrialized in the nineteenth century and so crowded that there was hardly room for the Gypsy [. . .], America [. . .] became [. . .] the land of free, untrammelled wandering.’ 11 In like manner, the then Honorary Secretary of the Gypsy Lore Society wrote 11

Walter Starkie, Don Gypsy (London: Murray, 1936), 90.

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Leland’s biographer in July 1910: ‘America is a far better place to study [Gypsies] than old England. To judge from reports I get [. . .] you can meet every type and hear every dialect of all Europe in one field.’ 12 Although the tinker fantasy shifted many copies of Walsh’s adventure novels in mid-century America, there has been a noticeable recent trend in US popular fiction towards sensationalist narratives about IrishAmerican Travelers, 13 works that parallel the spate of contemporaneous screen depictions of the minority discussed below. Although this fascination partakes of the ubiquitous American myth of the freedom of the road, it will be demonstrated to also be informed by the postCivil Rights appropriation of mainstream Irish-American identity as a politically acceptable white ethnicity. Even if the handful of visual representations considered does not constitute an enormous volume of material, it nevertheless points to the disproportionately large amount of cultural attention that a minority unofficially estimated at 30,000 people receives. 14 The analysis will open with a short sketch of the history of Travelers in the US as currently understood by the few anthropologists, contemporary folklorists, and American educators who have had contact with the community. However, given the dearth of scholarship on the subject, this synopsis of available material is doubtlessly inflected by the very discourses that shape more overtly sensational constructs of the Traveler. 15 12 R. A. Scott MacFie to Pennell, 19 July 1910, quoted in William G. Lockwood and Sheila Salo’s Gypsies and Travelers in North America: An Annotated Bibliography (Cheverly, Md.: Gypsy Lore Society, 1994), 1. 13 See Nancy Means Wright, Mad Cow Nightmare: A Mystery Featuring Ruth Willmarch (New York: Thomas Dunne for St Martin’s Minotaur, 2005); Dennis Hamill, Fork in the Road (London: Scribner, 2001); Kim Ablon Whitney, See You Down the Road (New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2004). 14 Ian Hancock, personal correspondence to Thomas McDonagh and McVeigh, quoted in McDonagh and McVeigh, Minceir Neeja in the Thome Munkra: Irish Travellers in the USA (Belfast: Belfast Travellers’ Education and Development Group, 1996), 23. Hancock is an expert in Romany culture based at the University of Texas at Austin. 15 The basic facts of Irish-American Traveler history and culture provided above have been drawn from the following overlapping sources, and the shortness of the list indicates the dearth of available information on the subject: Mary E. Andereck, Ethnic Awareness and the School: An Ethnographic Study, Sage Series on Race and Ethnic Relations, 5 (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992); Pat Bond, ‘The Irish Travellers in the United States’, Sinsear: The Folklore Journal 5 (1988), 45–58; McDonagh and McVeigh, Minceir Neeja in the Thome Munkra; Rita Kinch, ‘Travellers, Irish: A Unique Community’, in Michael Glazier (ed.), Encyclopedia of Irish America, (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 909–11.

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‘ WHAT IS AN IRISH TRAVELER?’ TRAVELERS AND THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION ‘Now you were alluding to the fact that you are an Irish Traveler [. . .] Can you explain, first of all: What is an Irish Traveler? This is an important point to tell our viewers.’ Gary Tuchman, ‘Mom: “No Excuse” for Striking Child’, CNN Access, 23 Sept. 2002

Irish-American Travelers constitute a small population of scattered groups that has resided in America since emigrating from Ireland sometime between 1840 and 1865. Accounts suggest that a handful of minority families initially spread throughout the urban Northeast, where they practised their ancestral occupations. Prior to the Civil War, Travelers had begun to winter in the southern states, where they traded mules and horses, and when demand for these animals decreased in the North in the late 1800s, members of the community took up permanent bases throughout the South. Traveler oral traditions concerning these movements are bolstered by nineteenth-century Southern Catholic church registries that record parishioners with common Irish Traveller surnames who are identified as ‘Irish Tinkers’, ‘Gypsies’, and ‘Irish Horse Traders’. 16 After the Depression and the decline of the horse trade, Traveler males concentrated on providing linoleum peddling, spray-painting, tarmacadaming, and related services to farming communities, occupations that continue to this day. Since the 1960s, Travelers have abandoned the tents and trucks of previous generations for villages of luxury mobile homes and houses. However, despite these adaptations to sedentary norms, business transactions continue to be cash-based, and bartering is still used in business dealings. Moreover, contemporary Travelers appear to have remained more seasonally nomadic than their Irish counterparts. Although this has yet to be acknowledged in US law, anthropologists describe the community as an ethnic minority: American Travelers share common descent and appear to have held onto certain of the cultural, linguistic, and religious practices found in the related Irish community. Nevertheless, they are generally markedly wealthier and better educated than their Irish counterparts, which 16

Kinch, ‘Travellers, Irish: A Unique Community’, 910.

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means that negative stereotypes have arguably less impact on their lives. Interestingly, the valuable skill with horses possessed by the Travellers who first settled in America allowed them to differentiate themselves from the great mass of unskilled Irish and likely formed the basis of the community’s current economic and cultural independence from mainstream Irish-American society. 17 In addition, the US minority has not organized or allied itself with Roma networks, and this lack of visibility makes Travelers less liable to public scrutiny, for the most part. Although Leland documented his conversation with an Irish tinker in Philadelphia in 1879, 18 Frederick Arnold initiated a short-lived flurry of scholarly interest in what he termed members of a culturally and linguistically distinct New York state ‘caste’ when he read a paper on the topic at Harvard University in 1899. The American folklorist concluded that the ‘race of hereditary vagrants’ depicted in English rogue literature were these selfsame Irish tinkers. As distinct from the contemporaneous Gypsylorist emphasis on the superiority of the ‘fullblooded’ Romany over the ‘half-caste’ Irish tinker, Arnold depicts the tinker as a racially pure lineal descendant of the early modern rogue who is in implicit contrast to the deracinated English Gypsy. Following Arnold’s paper, Travelers sporadically came to attention during the midtwentieth century as a manifestation of Southern colour in popular folklore and trade publications, Catholic periodicals, and regional tourist guides. Nevertheless, they remained largely undocumented by serious commentators in the US until the early 1970s: the articles of American anthropologists Charles Hudson and Jared Vincent Harper on the topic of Traveler Cant during that period constituted the first research of its kind. Overall, moreover, studies remain scant due to the reticence of the community to co-operate with sedentary scholars. 19 Furthermore, because the US Census does not recognize Travelers as an ethnic group, official population figures are unavailable. The existence of Travelers is generally of little interest to the dominant Irish population, which contrasts hugely with Ireland’s intense fascination with majority Irish-America; amazingly, the first television documentary on the Irish-American minority was broadcast in Ireland 17 18 19

Bond, ‘The Irish Travellers in the United States’, 46. Charles Godfrey Leland The Gypsies, (London: Trübner, 1882), 362. See Linda L. Kent, ‘Fieldwork That Failed’, in Philip R. DeVita (ed.), The Naked Anthropologist (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992), 17–25.

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as late as 1995. 20 The 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy made no mention of American Travelers, perhaps because the relatively wealthy, educated, and cohesive US community challenged the stereotype of inherent Traveller indigence upon which the Report’s settlement policy was predicated. The first five chapters of this study called attention to the lacuna within Irish culture and history when it comes to full recognition of the Traveller, and what little is known of the related US minority suggests that the examination of American history, culture, and identity requires a similar broadening of emphasis to include varieties of Irish-Americanness that are currently overlooked; Travelers are not even briefly mentioned in any of the many studies concerning Irish emigrant experience in America that I consulted in researching this chapter. In effect, the minority functions as a blank canvas onto which all kinds of intersecting fantasies concerning Irishness, ‘whiteness’, Gypsyness, and roguishness may be projected. In the introduction to their 2004 essay collection, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, editors Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz consider the significance to the understanding of the early modern English rogue of the contemporary American outlaw hero construct: ‘the myth of the rogue is as real today in the United States as it was in early modern England, as images of rogues and their legendary tricks are part of the unspoken background of contemporary urban culture, and may continue to be a metaphor for self-invention generally.’ 21 Dionne and Mentz go on to consider US films that depict urban swindlers, implying that the ‘images of rogues and their legendary tricks’ that suffuse contemporary culture are accessed by the vast majority of Americans through the cinema and television screen. Similarly, the resemblance between representations of early modern English organized crime and those of an ethnic American mafia glamorized by late twentieth-century cinema is the starting point of Becoming Criminal, Bryan Reynolds’s study of popular iterations of the English rogue. Although these critics merely connect the fantasy of the sixteenth-century rogue with that of the contemporary scoundrel, certain members of today’s Irish Traveller élite make explicit links between contemporary Travellers and the ‘tinkards’ targeted by the statutes created in response to the rogue 20 Radharc: Stories from Irish America, ‘Travellers of Murphy Village’, transmitted on RTE (Ireland), 23 April 1995. 21 Dionne and Mentz, Introduction, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, 3.

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panic. Moreover, as noted earlier, a conflation of actual early modern rogues and actual immigrant tinkers was made by Arnold in the late nineteenth-century. Surprisingly, however, this same identification was recently proposed by Renaissance scholar Arthur F. Kinney in an ‘Afterword’ to Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, which will be quoted from at length below. Although Travelers are generally less liable to scrutiny than their Irish counterparts, their very obscurity leads to an enormous degree of curiosity when members of the minority unexpectedly come under the spotlight. Kinney references the case of Madelyne Gorman Toogood, an Irish-American Traveler captured beating her four-year-old daughter on a surveillance video in Mishawaka, Indiana, in September 2002. The subsequent media fallout demonstrated the depth of the longstanding image of the deviance of peripatetic culture, with the case leading to a mainstream debate on the ‘hidden’ and ‘criminal’ nature of Toogood’s community. The tape was repeatedly played on primetime news broadcasts, and the accompanying voice-over noted that Toogood and her husband had been living under multiple identities in several states. Kinney’s analysis situates the incident within the context of the early modern English underworld, which is presented as historical reality rather than sedentary projection onto its peripatetic Others: For a brief moment she had exposed their community of gypsies, which depends on anonymity and secrecy, fostered by a tradition in the United States that is at least 150 years old. [. . .] Travelers, self-employed as tinkers, originally came to America to escape the Irish potato famine. [. . .] Not unlike their Tudor predecessors, they roam the nation for six months of the year painting houses and return to their autonomous universe in South Carolina for the winter months. Like the vagabonds described by Thomas Harman or Robert Greene, the Irish Travelers are known by their nicknames [. . .] arrange their children’s marriages, speak their own ‘canting tongue,’ a strange Gaelic-English dialect in which Misli shayjo means ‘Go away, the police are here!’ and are accused by outsiders as con artists [. . .] [A]s Harman and Greene note of [Irish-American Travelers’] ancestors, they patrol their own bands, establish their own rules, and punish those who break them. [. . .] The lives of America’s Irish Travelers have their resonances in the practices of Tudor and early Stuart vagabonds [. . .] [whose] rules, like the practices of the Irish Travelers, are designed to keep them together, [. . .] independent of those constituting the larger society. Membership in the Irish Traveler communities, as in [certain rogue literature

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authors’] fraternities of vagabonds, is clearly delineated [. . .] and confirmed by social and linguistic practices. And, like the Travelers of today, the identification and numbers of their Tudor predecessors were largely unknown, even when the government set out to learn about them. 22

Kinney’s only contemporary reference for this passage is a one-page Time magazine article on the minority published in the immediate wake of the Toogood case, and from which much of his information about Travelers appears to have been culled. The fault with Kinney’s discussion is that cultural accretions are taken for historical evidence: he fills the vacuum of scholarship surrounding the American Traveler with unexamined sedentary fantasy. Moreover, although such Old World accretions are doubtlessly still carried by Travelers to a degree (though hardly in the biological sense potentially implied by Kinney’s use of the word ‘ancestor’), the following analysis will argue that the Traveler construct has not gone unmarked by 150 years in America or by that country’s discourse of race. Ignoring the social and cultural contexts in which Travelers have existed in recent decades, Kinney implies that we may glean all we need to know of the reality of a twenty-first-century US minority by referring to English early modern sources and a onepage popular news journal article. Finally, as troubling as is this conflation of the rogue pamphlet ‘tinkard’ and the contemporary Traveler, it is no less problematic than the assumption that Travelers may be readily contextualized within majority Irish history: Kinney suggests that Travelers came to the US to escape the Famine of 1845, though the community’s oral history provides no support for this statement. Moreover, since there are no known written records of the earliest period of Traveler presence in the US, it is not apparent where this fact was sourced. The following analysis of the depiction of the Traveler in popular culture suggests that Old World categories are of limited use in understanding the received image of the minority in America, which must be understood within the altogether different racial and cultural contexts of that society. The invocation of categories that draw from an Irish or British historical or literary context are common in discussions of the Traveler, and commentators likewise habitually fuse Irish Travellers 22 Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Afterword: (Re)presenting the Early Modern Rogue’, in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, 361–2.

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and the related Irish-American population when the US minority is discussed. Such conflations both fill gaps in historical knowledge with fantasies promulgated by literature and intimate that Traveler culture has not altered after 150 years on another continent. Most importantly, such assumptions place no emphasis on the significance of Travelers’ IrishAmericanness and perceived racial status, which, it will be argued, is pivotal to understanding the contemporary image of the Irish-American community.

WHITENING OFF-WHITE TRASH: COLONIAL-ERA IRISHNESS AND THE SCREENING OF AMERICAN TRAVELERS Much scholarly consideration has been given to the discourse of degeneration due to miscegenation that was current in the US during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the contemporaneous American rhetoric of criminality and deviance amongst racially undiluted ‘feeble-minded white hill folk’ has been critically neglected. The latter discourse emerged from Eugenic Family Studies, investigations of rural extended family units conducted by researchers affiliated with the US Eugenics Record Office that created a pseudo-scientific discourse of ‘white trashness’. 23 The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (1877), the foundational text in this field, will be discussed in reference to the eighteenth-century Ulster-Irish and Irish Travelers; such studies have been popularly invoked in the contemporary period to explicate purported US Traveler deviance and they often centred on the implicit descendants of those who came to be known as the ‘ScotchIrish’ (or ‘Scots-Irish’ in contemporary usage). Ulster Presbyterians of predominantly Scottish descent, or those later identified as such, 24 the so-called Scotch-Irish left Ireland for the mar23 24

Wray and Newitz (eds.), Introduction, White Trash, 2. Some 18th-cent. Irish immigrants later identified as Presbyterian may well have originally been Anglicans or Catholics who converted to Presbyterianism in the New World for a complex variety of reasons. David N. Doyle, quoted in Kerby A. Miller, ‘ “Scotch-Irish”, “Black Irish” and “Real Irish”: Emigrants and Identities in the Old South’, in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (Harlow, England; New York: Longman, 2000), 139.

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ginal rural zones of Pennsylvania, the Appalachians, and the Carolinas in the eighteenth century. As in the case of Irish-American Travelers, the ‘Irishness’ of the Ulster immigrants becomes hard to detect after a few generations in the New World, and neither group quite fits within the parameters of what is now popularly understood to be IrishAmericanness, which is implicitly Catholic, urban, and Famine-era in origin. Although Donald Akenson has estimated that as many as 58.6 per cent of those who currently identify as Irish-American are Protestant, 25 the Scotch-Irish were subsumed by Anglo-American identity some time after their arrival in the New World, and became unhyphenated Americans. Likewise, for the most part, Travelers were popularly labelled as either members of an ethnically unmarked ‘grifter’ subculture or as undifferentiated ‘Irish mule traders’ throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, well-heeled contemporary Catholic IrishAmerica has no desire to claim kinship to either of the aforementioned Irish groupings: in an interview in the immediate wake of the Toogood case with political scientist and lawyer Larry Otway, a representative of the Lawyers Committee for Roma Rights and Recognition group, conservative Irish-American television journalist Bill O’Reilly protested loudly against Otway’s insistence on the Irish origin of Travelers. In like manner, although known in the area as an Irish community, the large South Carolina Traveler enclave has never been included in the St Patrick’s Day celebrations by the local Irish Historical Society. 26 Many of the networks discussing the Toogood case had to initially attempt to answer the basic question, ‘Who are the Travelers?’ Although their Irishness is currently sometimes evoked, Travelers are also subject to an ethnically unmarked construct of white trashness that America has consciously forgotten was created in response to the perceived incivility of the eighteenth-century Irish. In discussing these two Irish immigrant groups side by side, I hope to tease out the history and connotations of the term ‘white trash’ as applied to descendants of both, even if the probable Scotch-Irish origin of many of those so labelled is currently elided. With the rise of Irishness as what cultural critic Diane Negra calls the white ethnicity of choice in the American identity 25 Donald Akenson, ‘Irish Migration to North America 1800–1920’, in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (Harlow, England; New York: Longman, 2000), 113. 26 Bond, ‘The Irish Travellers in the United States’, 57.

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marketplace since the 1990s, 27 American Traveler culture currently occupies a complex position in which it is perceived to carry both an explicit Famine-era Irishness as well as an implicit colonial-era Irish white trashness. Of course, in order to be white trash, the Traveler had first to become white: early twentieth-century American commentators repeatedly placed Travelers’ ‘Gypsyness’ above their ‘Irishness’ when their nomadism was under consideration. 28 However, in contemporary popular representation, Travelers’ Christian Irishness is underlined when the minority is depicted alongside American Romanies in order to contrast Traveler ‘whiteness’ with implicitly ‘heathen’ Gypsy darkness, as will be demonstrated in the discussion of the film Traveller. Americans who define themselves as being of post-Famine Irish immigrant descent possess what Negra sees as the only currently nameable white ethnicity, while Scotch-Irishness has long been subsumed under a foundational Americanness. Although the transformation of post-Famine Catholic Irish-America from outsider status to bastion of white establishment has been well documented, 29 the fact that the Scotch-Irish underwent a similar process only a century earlier is critically neglected. A sharp distinction between Irish and ScotchIrish developed after the influx of the predominantly Catholic Famine poor, and by the late nineteenth century, a self-consciously Anglo and Protestant Scotch-Irish identity had emerged alongside a Catholic IrishAmericanness that was increasingly intent on seizing the whiteness that was by then indisputably possessed by the Scotch-Irish. By 1902, American commentator Charles Hanna was insisting that those who identified as Scotch-Irish were of ‘unmixed Scottish blood’, which was the reason, his argument implied, that the Ulster Irish were more assimilated than their Catholic counterparts. However, in an attempt to share in the respectability and mainstream Americanness that Scotch-Irishness had 27 Negra, ‘The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture’, The Irish in Us, 11. 28 Although the following articles refer to Gypsies or Romanies in their titles, they actually discussed Travelers either in part or full: ‘Strange Southern Landlords Live as a Gypsy Tribe’, New York Herald Magazine 13 July 1913: 6; Konrad Bercovici, ‘The American Gipsy’, Century Magazine 103:4 (1922), 507–19; Eileen Irish, ‘Romany’s Wandering Children’, New York Sun Magazine 26 May 1929: 20; Don Boles, ‘Some Gypsy Occupations in America’, JGLS, 3rd series, 37:3–4 (1958), 103–11. 29 See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

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by then attained, an emergent Irish-American Catholic middle class began to vehemently claim Scotch-Irishness for Ireland. In October 1896, three months before Harvard University founded a chair of Celtic Studies and began offering courses in the Irish language, Charles W. Eliot, the President of the university, eulogized the contributions made to ‘American Civilization’ by various European immigrant groupings in an article for The Atlantic Monthly. The eighteenth-century Irish were not included, which prompted a public condemnation by prominent Irish-American J. D. O’Connell, who admonished Eliot for subsuming the Scotch-Irish under the labels of ‘the English race’ and ‘the Scotch’. 30 In an indication of the growing clout of a nascent Catholic Irish-American establishment, O’Connell subsequently extracted an apology both from Eliot and from the Episcopal bishop of Washington DC, who had utilized the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in referring to all Anglophone peoples. The Irishness or otherwise of the Scotch-Irish was a hot debate in 1902: the Irish-American John C. Linehan was the author of an attempt to Hibernicize the grouping published soon after Hanna’s volume, which argued that the belief that the Scots and the Irish did not share blood was a fallacy rooted in anti-Catholic prejudice. 31 Obviously aware of the original reputation for incivility of the eighteenth-century Ulster settlers with whom he is at pains to stress kinship, however, Linehan emphasizes that ‘neither socialists nor anarchists, degeneration nor decay, physically or mentally’ arose from ‘Irish stock’. 32 Needless to say, the early history of the Ulster Irish in the New World is documented to a much greater degree than that of the Travellers. The following outline emphasizes the initial negative impression made by the population and their consequent contribution to nascent discourses of whiteness and white trashness due to their perceived ‘non-white’ capacity for barbarity. This is an aspect of early Scotch-Irish history that I will demonstrate is pivotal to understanding the contradictory contemporary figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as simultaneously ‘white’ and imperfectly tamed. In response to internal strife within Irish Presbyterianism, fluctuations in the market for Ulster-produced linen, 30 Jeremiah D. O’Connell, The ‘Scotch-Irish’ Delusion in America (Washington, DC: American-Irish Publication, 1897), 5. 31 John C. Linehan, The Irish Scots and the ‘Scotch-Irish’ (Concord, NH: AmericanIrish Historical Society, 1902), 6; 7. 32 Ibid. 60.

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and the religious intolerance of the Anglican Church in Ireland, more than 100,000 predominantly Presbyterian men and women of Scottish planter stock emigrated to the American colonies between 1718 and 1775 from the northern Irish province of Ulster, where they had been uneasily settled for a century. The political marginalization of Presbyterians by the Established Church in Ireland, and their deployment there as a kind of bulwark between the British ruling class and the native Irish was replicated in the New World: as occupants of unauthorized tracts taken from Native Americans without payment, the Irish functioned as a buffer zone between European and native, legitimacy and illegitimacy, and civilized and uncivilized. To their eighteenth-century contemporaries, the Ulster settlers constituted a problematic population segment, as New York state landowner and author Hector St John de Crèvecoeur noted at that time: The Irish do not prosper so well; they love to drink and to quarrel; they are litigious and soon take to the gun, which is the ruin of everything; they seem beside to labour under a greater degree of ignorance in husbandry than the others, perhaps it is that their industry had less scope, and was less exercised at home. 33

In 1729, Benjamin Franklin referred to Irish ‘Impeniten[ts]’ in the Pennsylvania Gazette as a spreading ‘Small Pox’, 34 and as described by historian Patrick Griffin, the lifestyles of these immigrants became the very definition of rural white indigence into the present period: ‘Poor and mobile, they scratched a precarious existence out of the woods beyond the reach of the law and polite society.’ 35 Popular depictions in the Pennsylvania press painted the Ulster settlers as squatting, drunken, boisterous, dishonest, lazy, and comic. Most significantly, in light of rhetoric of problematic whiteness that eventually leads to the poisonous white trash construct, the Irish settlers were referred to as ‘idle trash’ in a 1734 letter to Thomas Penn, 36 making them the implicit ancestors of 33 Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (London: Printed for Thomas Davies, 1783), 78–9. 34 Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania Gazette, 17 Nov. 1729, quoted in Patrick Griffin, The People With No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 102. 35 Griffin, The People With No Name, 3. 36 Samuel Blunston to Thomas Penn, 13 August, 1734, quoted in Griffin, The People With No Name, 105.

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the ‘po’ white folks’ who are generally subject to the label of ‘trash’ in the contemporary period. The first wave of emigration from Ulster occurred from 1718 onward, and was made up of those who could raise the cost of their passage. However, the second wave, beginning in 1740, consisted of penniless indentured servants. One estimate suggests that ‘not less than half, nor more than two-thirds of all white immigrants to the colonies were indentured servants or redemptioners or convicts’, and that beginning in 1728, ‘by far the greatest number of servants and redemptioners’ came from Ireland. 37 It can therefore be stated that the image of the lowest white on the social scale in eighteenth-century America was almost certainly associated with the settler from Ireland. The penury and subsequent ‘savage’ behaviour of these Irish caused them to be perceived to be ‘unworthy’ of their whiteness: Franklin denigrated the Paxton Boys, the Irish perpetrators of an indiscriminate massacre of Indians in Lancaster in 1763 as ‘christian white savages’ whose brutality made them more barbarian than any Indian or ‘poor unenlightened African Negroe’. 38 Franklin’s yoking together of categories that are ‘naturally’ contradictory in the phrase ‘christian white savages’ suggests the threat to the entwined concepts of ‘whiteness’ and ‘civility’ that the Paxtons’ actions posed. Many immigrants of the second wave subsequently made their way along the eastern slope of the Appalachians to the back parts of Virginia, where the charge of being the ‘Refuse of Mankind’ was again levelled against them, 39 and it almost goes without saying that the areas settled by the eighteenth-century Irish are today popularly perceived to be the epicentre of white trash culture. It was the phenomenon of white indentured servants that is generally held to have led to the coining of the contemptuous term ‘white trash’ by AfricanAmerican slaves in about the early nineteenth century. However, I posit that the 1734 reference to Ulster ‘idle trash’ referred to above suggests 37 Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 336, quoted in James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 176. 38 Benjamin Franklin, A Narrative of the Late Massacre in Lancaster County (Philadelphia, 1764), quoted in Griffin, The People With No Name, 170. 39 Richard Hooker (ed.), The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., 1953), 60; 52.

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that the word ‘trash’ had earlier attached itself specifically to the Irish, and that their subsequent behaviour cemented this perception of their flawed whiteness. Anthropologist Jacqueline Zara Wilson’s examination of the construct of white trashness in the New World implies that it still carries traces of the immigrants to whom it was originally applied: ‘in an area with a diverse mix of European backgrounds, which is to say various forms of “Whiteness”, the person so dubbed is not merely White, but a particular type of White: he/she is almost certainly of “Anglo” or, especially, Celtic descent.’ 40 I might note at this juncture that the 1962 dismissal of Murphy’s dramatic treatment of Irish emigrant culture as ‘rubbish’ takes on a greater significance in light of the long history of the use of this and related terms to refer to impoverished Irish population groups. Negra argues that in a post-Civil Rights America, ‘Irishness’ and ‘whiteness’ currently function as interchangeable categories, 41 and that in celebrating their Irishness, contemporary Irish-Americans also triumphantly point to their whiteness. Irish-American Travelers were enfolded within the Old World label of ‘Gypsy’ by early American commentators, and post-Famine Irish-American identity has moved from the periphery to the mainstream in recent decades, becoming ‘whiter’ in the process. Consequently, the ‘Gypsyness’ of the allied Irish-American Traveler culture has begun to whiten alongside that of majority Irishness and thus to be perceived to be less threatening. In order to demonstrate how a complex combination of both Traveler whiteness and Traveler white trashness is iterated in contemporary American culture, I will now turn to an episode of the popular detective series Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Entitled ‘Graansha’, it was originally broadcast in 2003 and centres on the murder of a female probation officer of Traveler origin named Ann Devlin. Extraordinarily, the foundational Eugenic Family Studies text, Dugdale’s The Jukes, is directly invoked in the episode concerned. The attention of lead character Detective Goren turns to the extended Devlin clan when it transpires that Ann had been opposed to their scamming lifestyle, and had attempted to rescue her 12-year-old 40 Jacqueline Zara Wilson, ‘Invisible Racism: The Language and Ontology of “White Trash” ’, Critique of Anthropology 22:4 (2002), 388. 41 Diane Negra, ‘The Irish-American Male Body in the Aftermath of 9/11’, The Irish Seminar 2003, Keough-Notre Dame Centre, Dublin, 30 June–25 July 2003.

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niece from the enclave. This child’s engagement party features in the rather sensational plot, as does a subplot involving stolen vehicles. Law and Order tends to use extremely topical issues as the starting point of scripts, and in light of the fact that ‘Graansha’ was broadcast only eight months after the Toogood controversy, the repeated references to Indiana Travelers is doubtlessly a direct nod to that case. At the episode’s conclusion, Detective Goren confronts Ann’s murderer, the family patriarch, at a clan gathering. Presented with compelling evidence, the previously secretive and uncooperative Devlins angrily turn their leader in. It seems that the patriarch killed Ann because she had been revealing the secrets of Traveler petty crime to her boyfriend, a senior professor of anthropology. The debate as to whether deviancy was learned or hereditary was central to The Jukes, a copy of which Detective Goren picks up and presents to camera when interviewing the anthropology professor in his office. The subsequent discussion centring on the backwoods and criminally inclined Juke family by Goren and the academic is explicitly presented as the context within which Traveler behaviour may be understood. Utilizing the discourse of Dugdale’s research, Detective Goren describes the Irish-American minority during this exchange as a ‘tribe’ of ‘paupers, harlots, misfits, and petty thieves’, and what initially appears to be the clan’s inherited criminality is contrasted to a one-off misdemeanour carried out by the professor’s momentarily wayward teenage son. Dugdale had become intrigued by what he perceived to be the high incidence of kinship among New York state inmates while acting as a prison inspector in 1874, and initiated an investigation of one large kin group living in Ulster County, New York. This place-name is of huge significance to the cementing of the link between white trashness and Scotch-Irishness, suggesting at first glance that the Jukes lived in a constituency with a tradition of eighteenth-century Irish settlement. 42 The kin group’s lineage dated back to the earliest European communities in America, and purportedly exhibited a high degree of what was labelled hereditary pauperism, feeble-mindedness, immorality, degeneration, and criminality. In addition, although the extended 42 In fact, the county ‘is presumed to have been named in honour of the Duke of York, James Stuart, who held the Irish title of Earl of Ulster’. See Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y. (Marbletown, NY: Ulster County Historical County, 1975), 183.

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family under investigation was in possession of a number of surnames, Dugdale bestowed the fictional name of ‘Juke’ upon members in his report, and in the twentieth century, the actual surnames of his subjects were revealed to be the following: Miller, Sloughter, Plough, Clearwater, Bank, DuBois, and Bush. 43 Significantly, the primary entry for these names in the Dictionary of American Family Names suggests that most are likely to have been carried by people of British Isles descent. This does not prove the Ulster origin of the Jukes, of course, but suggests, in light of the name of the county the family inhabited, that this heritage might have been perceived to have been likely by those familiar with the raw data. In contrast to the fixed Gypsy nature posited by Enlightenment commentators, Smith of Coalville’s late Victorian crusade to ‘reform’ future generations of British Romanies by forcibly separating children from parents was predicated upon the assumption that Gypsy ‘deviance’ inhered in nurture. In like manner, Dugdale’s near contemporaneous work explored the woes of the Juke family by speculating on the relationship between biology and environment. The Jukes went through several editions after its initial publication in 1877, and exerted an influence at odds with its author’s intentions: despite Dugdale’s refusal to rely on simplistic assumptions regarding the inherited nature of criminality, his study was ‘used for decades as a textbook example of how heredity shaped human behaviour and helped lead to calls for compulsory sterilization, segregation, lobotomies and even euthanasia against the “unfit” ’. 44 Furthermore, The Jukes inspired the rash of Eugenic Family Studies that were produced into the first two decades of the twentieth century, 45 and the anthropology professor depicted in ‘Graansha’, whose field is ‘tribes, clans, extended family groups’, is Dugdale’s direct intellectual descendant. To late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, the Jukes came to represent the fecklessness of backwoods colonial culture, and a litany of their behaviour brings to mind many of the charges made against Irish immigrants in the eighteenth-century period and Travelers in contemporary popular representation: the Jukes demonstrated 43 44 45

Scott Christianson, ‘Bad Seed or Bad Science?’ New York Times 8 Feb. 2003: B11. Ibid. B9. See Nicole Hahn Rafter’s edited collection of nine such studies, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

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a predilection for consanguineous marriages, squatting, fecklessness, impetuosity, restlessness, petty crime, sporadic employment, and pauperism. Most interestingly, in light of the explicit invocation of The Jukes in ‘Graansha’, Dugdale suggested that the eponymous family subsisted ‘much as gypsies’. 46 In like manner, a 1929 JGLS article by prominent American folklorist Henry W. Shoemaker conflates the colonial Irish and nineteenth-century Irish Traveller emigrants in stating that socalled ‘Irish Gypsies’ settled Pennsylvania in circa 1775. However, all but one of the six local ‘Irish Gypsy’ surnames provided by the author originate in Ulster and not one is a common Irish Traveller name, 47 which strongly suggests that the settlers concerned were actually ScotchIrish. Significantly too, this supposed ‘Irish Gypsy’ cohort seemingly melted into unethnicized Americanness in the manner of the Ulster Irish: ‘most of them married into prosperous “gentile” farmer families and left the road.’ 48 For Shoemaker as for other Americans, the image of the Scotch-Irish and that of the ‘Irish Gypsy’ are too entwined to be disentangled. The behaviour of the Jukes precisely conforms to what Wilson defines as the stereotype of backwoods ‘po’ white’ conduct: the term [‘white trash’] carries a special implication of congenital indigence— poverty of the sort that is passed down from generation to generation, and embodies not only a lack of material resources, but an aggressively maintained disbelief in the notion of upward mobility via socially sanctioned, workoriented, avenues. 49

Today those labelled ‘white trash’ are ethnically unmarked precisely because of the term’s origins in reference to the white Northern European immigrant groupings that became, simply, unhyphenated Americans. On urbandictionary.com, an uncensored website to which contributors post anonymous and provocative glosses for slang terms, the lack of reference to specific white identities in categorizing those defined as ‘trash’ is striking. Indeed, the most offensive gloss provided demonstrates 46 Richard Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (1877; New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1970), 14. 47 ‘Yeoh, McCloskey, McCurry, McGuire, Lindsay and Marshall [. . . ].’ Henry W. Shoemaker, ‘Origins of the Pennsylvanian German Gypsies’, JGLS 3rd series. 8: 4 (1929), 182. 48 49 Ibid. 183. Wilson, ‘Invisible Racism’, 388.

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the verbal violence unleashed by the subversion of the belief in the ‘naturalness’ of both non-white barbarity and white civility upon which the ‘incongruousness’ of the term ‘white trash’ rests: ‘The equivalent to a nigger except only white.’ 50 Hence, the very category of white trash threatens but ultimately confirms the unspeakable but pervasive binary encoded within the DNA of American identity: that of white and nonwhite. Albert Winship’s Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity (1900), a comparison of the family environments of the Jukes and that of Yale-educated theologian Jonathan Edwards, was primarily concerned with the possibility of ‘making regenerates out of degenerates’ in the New World. Winship suggested that Juke degeneracy might be traced to the fact that family members ‘did not make good homes, did not provide themselves with comforts, did not work steadily’, positing that with education, effort, and Christian instruction, the Jukes could become productive citizens. 51 Most significantly, the study concluded that the Jukes had ‘rarely married foreign-born men or women, so that it may be styled a distinctively American family.’ 52 Thus, Winship implied, the Jukes had not acquired their bad habits as a result of an infusion of new immigrant ‘blood’, as might have been suggested in a contemporaneous work trafficking in the more commonplace rhetoric of degeneration due to miscegenation. Instead, their conduct is explained as the result of bad environment, and the kin group’s impeccable whiteness ensures that such degeneracy is considered eminently reversible by both Dugdale and Winship. Indeed, the Jukes were what was understood to be the very definition of ‘American’ by the time Hanna decisively de-Hibernicizes the Scotch-Irish in 1902: white, Protestant, and of northern European, predominantly British heritage. According to an analysis of Dugdale’s tables made in 1915, within the Juke lineage could be counted 140 offenders, 60 thieves, 7 victims of murder, 50 prostitutes, 40 venereally diseased women, and 30 prosecutions in bastardy. For a period of seventy-five years beginning in 1800, the family and their victims reputedly cost the State of New York close 50 ‘White trash’ entry, urbandictionary, online, 3 Nov. 2006 . 51 Albert Winship, Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity (Harrisburg, Pa.: Myers, 1900), v; 9. 52 Ibid. 11.

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to $1.4 million dollars to incarcerate, relieve, treat, and prosecute. 53 But despite this, the Jukes were as American as apple pie. A throwback to an earlier and wilder era, the Jukes spoke to the late nineteenthcentury United States of how far it had come and the degree to which a moral environment could work to assimilate temporarily degenerated whites. In a piece published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1881, Dugdale notes that in matters of crime, ‘the public mind largely ignores the part which civilization plays as a perpetual persuasion, in slowly moulding the most diverse and obdurate elements of self interest’. 54 Dugdale was a social reformer who believed in the importance of environment to the perpetuation of criminality and The Jukes was not a eugenicist tract, although most of those who subsequently utilized his work subscribed to such beliefs. Nevertheless, The Jukes was also occasionally deployed to argue against the notion of a genetically inherited criminal nature, as Winship’s study indicates. In its representation of a tightknit, criminally inclined Traveler clan, the Law and Order episode begins with the intimation that Traveler criminality inheres in nature, but concludes that it inheres in nurture and is, therefore, capable of reformation. The final scenes of ‘Graansha’ depict Travelers co-operating with Detective Goren once the bullying and overly influential patriarch is shown to be the murderer, suggesting that the community’s delinquency is environmental rather than genetic in origin. Moreover, that misbehaviour does not run deep: Goren notes at one point that Travelers are ‘not known for violence’, and the mother of the engaged girl convincingly argues that the mores of her culture ensure that ‘nothing indecent’ will be allowed to occur between the young affianced couple. Significantly, Goren appears to intuitively understand Travelers: it is noticeable throughout the episode concerned that although his AfricanAmerican colleague has never heard of the minority community, the Jewish Goren appears to be very familiar with Traveler culture. No reason is given for this deep knowledge of what remains an obscure grouping, the Toogod case notwithstanding. At one point Goren refers 53 Arthur H. Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915 (Washington: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), 1. 54 Richard Dugdale, ‘Origin of Crime in Society’, The Atlantic Monthly 48.290 (1881), 735.

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to Travelers as the ‘last free living tribe of nomads in America’, and wistfully muses at the close on ‘all that Ann gave up [in leaving her Traveler family]. It must have been hard for her.’ As noted, the script of ‘Graansha’ explicitly references nineteenth-century Eugenic Family Studies discourse in constructing Travelers, so it may be readily surmised that the mystical link between Jewish and other peripatetic ‘races’ likewise promulgated in that era is being invoked through the detective’s empathy for the nomads. Ultimately, however, Goren’s nostalgia is for the tribal culture his own immigrant ancestors necessarily abandoned: the final scene depicts a Devlin clan on the brink of forsaking nomadic and overtly ‘ethnic’ Old World culture for law-abiding, nuclear-family oriented New World norms, a journey that has implicitly already been made by Goren’s ‘off-white’ ancestors. The professionally successful and socially integrated detective offers a lesson as to how the future of Travelers will look should they quit their non-conformist wandering and outmoded family formation and arrive at the final desirable destination of all ‘off-white’ immigrant groupings: unambiguous whiteness. The tagline of the 1997 American film Traveller runs as follows: ‘Swindlers. Scammers. Con-men. As American as apple-pie’, and in the manner of ‘Graansha’, the arc of the action moves from Traveler deviancy towards Traveler reformation. The film concerns the visit of Pat (Mark Wahlberg) to the extended Irish-American Traveler family from whom he is descended. Rejected at first by the community patriarch, whose daughter he later romances, Pat is eventually ‘apprenticed’ to his conman cousin, Bokky (Bill Paxton). However, Bokky soon falls in love with a waitress from majority society (Julianna Margulies) and begins to desire a more settled and conventional life. The trailer of Traveller constructs the minority as carrying the markers of both postFamine and colonial-era Irish-Americanness: visually, it is figured as an indigenous backwoods white trash subculture of the sort associated with the eighteenth-century Irish, while aurally it is presented as a pristine Gaelic society, since the narration is spoken over Irish folk music. Traveller is patently on the side of its lovable rogue lead characters: the film opens to a shot of the physically attractive Bokky driving a car and trailer to a background track of the classic pro-hobo anthem, ‘King of the Road’. In addition, the terms ‘grifter’ and ‘drifter’ are utilized in various reviews of Traveller, words that likewise evoke indigenous American categories of furtively appealing nomadism. When Bokky, the

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conman with a heart of gold, falls for the explicitly ‘cracker’ waitress and single mother, he begins to come to some sort of moral awakening. Indeed, the final heist of his swindling career is executed only in order to raise cash for an operation required by his new girlfriend’s daughter. Moreover, the conmen portrayed so sympathetically in Traveller are undifferentiated from white majority culture in appearance and accent. Nevertheless, although referred to at one point by Bokky as being of Irish, English, or Scottish origin, the specific Travelers depicted in the film are subtly intimated to be of Irish descent. In much current American representation, uncouth but ultimately redeemable Traveler culture evokes nostalgia for the perceived hidden root of contemporary, urban, and law-abiding white America. While Travellers in Ireland have intermittently been represented as Other, the perceived whiteness and Irishness of the related American community allows them and their supposed backwoods subculture—so similar to that of the earliest Irish settlers—to occupy a position of what might be termed unreformed but reformable Sameness within dominant American discourse. Traveler whiteness is reinforced in the penultimate scene of Traveller, in which Pat and Bokky are pitched against Romanies they have double-crossed in their final scam. In contrast to the film’s sympathetic figuring of Travelers, members of the other historically nomadic grouping depicted are constructed as stereotypically dark-skinned, murderous, and ‘Oriental’ Gypsies and are referred to throughout as ‘Turks’. Indeed, in a scene in which the hitherto selfconsciously charming Traveller suddenly becomes graphically violent, Bokky invokes the rhetoric of inherited degeneracy against the Gypsies in a stream of particularly offensive and racist insults, while Pat and Bokky are unmistakably Hibernicized when one of the Romanies refers to them as ‘micks’. Significantly, this penultimate scene is the first point in the film at which the Travelers’ Irishness is explicitly referred to: as noted, Bokky suggests early on that Travelers may be of Irish, Scottish, or English descent, but viewers are nudged throughout towards an understanding that this is a culture of Irish heritage through visual cues, rather than being unequivocally and verbally advised of this fact. In effect, white Irishness becomes nameable when placed alongside a contrasting dark-skinned Otherness. If Snatch utilizes the slang word ‘mick’ as one more stereotype that it will celebrate before puncturing, the summoning of the term in Traveller is a more straightforward

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celebration of whiteness: the contemporary American invocation encodes the triumphalist message that although the Irish may once have been subject to racialized epitaphs, the whiteness they have since acquired has emptied the term of its original negative overtones. In its contrasting of a heavily accented, unsympathetic, and implicitly nonChristian Gypsy Other and a white Traveler Same, the penultimate scene of Traveller suggests that mainstream American whiteness is the ‘natural’ possession of a grouping of Irish and Christian heritage. Ironically, the Othering of the Irish Traveller that occurs in Irish films such as Into the West and Trojan Eddie is avoided in this American depiction of the related US community through the projection of negative stereotype onto ‘non-white’ nomads: in short, Otherness is avoided by the Traveler at the expense of the Romany. In ‘Graansha’ and Traveller, the minority Irish-American criminal eventually begins to repent of his wayward behaviour or is turned in by community consensus. This plotline of inevitable redemption is a narrative that America incessantly repeats in convincing itself that white deviance is always temporary: this story arc also fuels the 2007 F/X cable channel series The Riches. British comedian Eddie Izzard plays the lead character, Wayne Malloy, a Traveler who has swindled his way across the United States with the aid of his apprentice conmen children. After Wayne and his wife Dahlia (Minnie Driver) inherit the grand home and identities of a recently deceased family called the Riches, the Malloys appear to repent of their scamming and itinerant ways and settle down to a law-abiding existence in Louisiana. Wayne utilizes his native wit to pass as Doug Rich, who had been a successful corporate lawyer, while Dahlia performs the role of pampered housewife with ambitions to get her children into the best local private school. ‘Graansha”s complex interplay between Jewish and minority Irish-American identity and the inevitability of ‘off-white’ progress to whiteness reappears in The Riches: the eponymous dead family whose assimilated upper-middleclass identity the Malloys appropriate are later revealed to have been Jewish. All is not as it seems, however. Wayne boasts in reference to the ‘American dream’ of wealthy suburban life: ‘we’re gonna steal it!’ Although the Malloys merely simulate conformity in the earliest episodes of the series, the cumulative story arc suggests that the family will eventually internalize dominant values. The longer the Malloys

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are away from their originary culture, the less ‘cracker’ their behaviour becomes. When Dale (Todd Stashwick), a member of their old community comes to stay with the Malloys in Louisiana, he is presented as comically white trash/Traveler in contrast to his increasingly integrated host family: Dale speaks incoherently in a stereotypical Southern accent, has bad teeth, eats crisps instead of solid meals, and watches television in an incessant and indiscriminate manner. In a further invocation of commonplace American clichés of white trash irresponsibility and amorality, Dale’s unmarried and heavily pregnant sister Ginny (Nichole Hiltz) is pointedly depicted swilling beer and smoking cigarettes. Furthermore, The Riches intimates that the moral distance between the Travelers and their new sedentary associates in Louisiana is not as great as first appears: the Malloys are a close-knit and tolerant household for all their swindling ways, while their putatively upright neighbours harbour secret addictions, family dysfunction, and crooked business practices. Indeed, The Riches suggests that assimilated and educated Americans are just as white trash as the Malloys: at one point in episode five of the first series, ‘Doug’/Wayne dismisses two corrupt lawyers as ‘crackers’. All in all, the Malloy family’s effortless imitation of uppermiddle class mores uncovers the colonial-era ‘trashness’ that is the secret root-spring of white, advanced capitalist American respectability. Far from being a racial or social outsider, in The Riches, as in Traveller and ‘Graansha’, the scamming Traveler is the quintessential mainstream American. Dmitry Lipkin, the playwright who co-wrote the script of The Riches, notes that his attention was initially drawn to the minority by the Toogood case, which has emerged as the media event at the heart of the contemporary American fantasy of the roguish but implicitly reformable Traveler: ‘ “They are outlaws [. . . ] I like to write characters that are rebellious, who take crazy risks and are reckless. To me, that’s sympathetic.” ’ 55 The casting of a member of Elvis Presley’s so-called Memphis Mafia, Red West, as a Traveler elder in The Riches explicitly links Travelers to a major cracker icon: the Vegas-era Elvis, with his defiantly tasteless costumes and excessive appetites, has been referred to as the twentieth-century ‘White Trash King’. 56 Travelers are a throwback to 55 56

Dave Walker, ‘Fellow Travelers’, Living, Times-Picayune 26 Mar. 2006: 1. Wilson, ‘Invisible Racism’, 393.

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an initially untamed but eventually integrated subculture, echoing the latent American image of the ultimately civilized colonial-era Irish. The repeated narrative of the inexorable reformation of degraded whiteness in Travelers’ movement from rural backwoods incivility to normative values in the screenings discussed is invisibly inscribed by this upward trajectory of the eighteenth-century Ulster Irish. In short, Travelers embody the journey made by white American society itself from the earliest days of European settlement. Traveler culture is threatening but redeemable, a reminder of unethnicized America’s initially uncivil but subsequently civilized origins. Advanced capitalist America has long moved beyond its originary wild Irish beginning but continues to project this moment onto the least understood and least assimilated of its current Irish groupings. Travelers are the contemporary embodiment of an uncouth colonial past furtively celebrated as a justification for the ‘civilized’ present. With its swindling but lucrative business practices, and its intimidating secrecy, the fantasy of Traveler culture nostalgically recalls the raw enterprise and incestuous clannishness of early America epitomized by the eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish. The hegemonic nature of the US film and television industry ensures that it often repackages a community’s image and sells it back to itself, both in terms of cinema tickets and in the depicted culture’s autoexoticizing adoption of its (re)presentation. Unimpeded by the unappealing additions of subtitles or dubbing, American television products take up a substantial chunk of the primetime schedule in Anglophone countries. Indeed, Law and Order: Criminal Intent has been screened on an Irish television channel in recent years, suggesting that Irish viewers who were unaware of the existence of an American Traveler population may have been made cognizant of this fact by watching the sensationalist ‘Graansha’ episode! In light of the late capitalist process whereby the US sells its construct of Ireland back to the Irish, it is likely that the recent American interest in the Traveler will begin to inform Irish cinematic and even literary depictions of the related Irish community: already, the American white trash idiom is seen to have inflected the spectacle of the Kearny family’s defiant Traveller taste in interior decoration in the Irish co-production, This Is My Father.

Conclusion About one year into exploring this topic, I happened to speak with an established Irish poet at a literary event. My research was already beginning to take shape, and on enquiry, I offered him a broad outline of my goal to uncover the development of the ‘tinker’ construct and outline what I was already suspecting would turn out to be its limiting of actual Traveller lives. His response to this was as follows: ‘Travellers? A wonderful people! Inspirational! I think that I’ll go and live with them for a few weeks sometime.’ I did not know quite how to respond to this statement. Although I was only beginning to be familiar with the history of majority society’s representations of Travellers, I had begun to understand enough to be disturbed by his casual assumption that the marginalized minority culture existed as a kind of cultural spa for artists in need of stimulation. Did he not imagine for a moment that Travellers themselves might not be entirely comfortable with his presence? Did he not suspect that members of that community might be wary of the motives and preconceptions of outsiders who wished to depict them, however ostensibly benign? Did it ever occur to him that the culture might have been exoticized and romanticized enough already? It struck me at that moment that I had been still unconsciously holding on to a rather naïve conviction that poets were those who queried the blinkers with which we willingly limit our comprehension of Others, and it was a shock to realize that a contemporary creative writer might serve to reinforce hackneyed beliefs. Since then, I have slowly come to realize that what this study dubbed ‘tinkerlorism’ functions in the manner of the Orientalism described by Edward Said: those who wish to write of the culture concerned decide long in advance of contact what it is that the tradition ‘symbolizes’, and will iterate this vision regardless of any contradiction presented by actual association. The contemporary poet comes ready armed with the ‘tinker’ motif of centuries and imagines

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that he sees the Traveller, but all he really observes is his own inverted image. The early chapters of this study demonstrated that the cultural politics of the Revival era necessitated Synge’s depiction of the tinker as an exotic aboriginal, even as his work queried common assumptions regarding the community concerned. However, in light of the many testaments to Traveller experience that have emerged from the culture since its politicization in the 1960s, it seems that it should no longer be possible for the hollowness of the ‘tinker’ trope to be ignored or for sedentary writers or filmmakers to deploy a construct identified with an actual contemporary minority as an apolitical and ahistorical symbol of menace or exoticness. Nevertheless, as noted, the tinker figure continues to appeal to those seeking a motif of insurrection or an exotic source of cultural renewal in a manner that would currently be almost unthinkable in any other First World country with a comparable indigenous minority. That Travellers still function in this manner in the Irish imagination decades after politically radical majority writers and Traveller authors themselves began to challenge the tinker trope illustrates how culturally and politically uncontroversial such an identification remains in Ireland to this day. Although the querying of sedentary values initiated by Synge in the early twentieth century is acknowledged to have been continued by politically-aware writers after the 1960s, it is still surprisingly common for Irish creative artists to reinforce the tinker stereotype. The overall thrust of this study suggests that it is time for a greater number of majority culture writers and filmmakers to become somewhat more selfconscious in deploying a figure that, with so few exceptions, has invariably served as a piece of colourful background minstrelsy or a narcissistic symbol with which sedentary society converses with itself. Moreover, it is time for critics who would consider the depiction of Traveller culture to become aware of the specific history of the tinker motif, rather than relying on theoretical models imported from altogether different contexts. What is more, the confidence with which still all-too-rare analyses of the contemporary representation of Travellers are made is often entirely out of keeping with the awareness of the depth, length, origins, and implications of the construct concerned. Finally, it is time for literary critics and creative writers who would consider the depiction of Travellers to realize that the minority is finding its own voice and

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that this is one which must be listened to as a long-overdue counter to the deafening loudness of sedentary definitions. In short, the onanistic narcissism of speaking only to inherited belief is no longer adequate. The living voices of Traveller writers and spokespeople must be attended to, and members of majority culture must cease representing the living language of a contemporary minority as though it were a dead language that no one has ever heard spoken. My aim in writing this study has been to initiate a debate concerning the very long tradition of the figuring of the tinker and the relatively recent practice of ‘writing back’ to that construct, so that even if creative artists continue to deploy members of the Travelling community as shorthand for subversion, menace, or local colour, a chink of doubt might begin to infiltrate the certainties that fuel such depictions. Moreover, it is not simply that a new kind of Traveller narrative must become the dominant mode of representation. In addition, canonical literature and motifs must also be opened up in the manner of Murphy’s undermining of the Big House trope’s validation of sedentarism in The House. For instance, Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun’s 2007 rewriting of Synge’s Playboy as a fable of a Nigerian refugee’s impact on a contemporary working-class Dublin household is a model of the manner in which established works can be made to speak more directly to current sedentary–nomadic issues. Furthermore, inspired casting as well as radical rewriting may also unpack a seemingly closed text: out of the vast number of ‘tinker’ plays written and produced in Ireland throughout the twentieth century, The Tinker’s Wedding is the only one to have been staged a number of times in recent decades by Traveller dramatic groups. This continual revisiting indicates that when performed by actors from the community depicted, Synge’s work yields readings that are not apparent when the tinker parts are taken by players from the dominant culture. This study is the first full-length work to address the topic of the long evolution of the tinker as a created figure in literature and popular culture, and it raises many questions that will, I hope, be taken up by subsequent research. It demonstrates the striking ubiquity of and dependence on an exotic or threatening tinker figure in many texts concerned with Ireland or Irishness. Although it was stated at the outset that this work was less an analysis of the history of Travellers than a critical investigation of the cultural image of the community, the

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examination nevertheless suggests the manner in which the pervasive construct of an uncivil or romantic tinker impinges upon the lives of actual Travellers and shapes the sedentarist bias encoded in state apparati. Ultimately, the volume concludes that the fantasy of the Traveller constitutes an unacknowledged and important discourse of the Other against which the two dominant sedentary factions on the island of Ireland have unconsciously defined themselves. As such, this research posits a framework within which disparate cultural artifacts may be seen to coalesce as a shadow narrative of majority history. The consideration given in recent years by historians, folklorists, linguists, and literary critics to the language patterns, history, and creative output of the Irish Jewish and Ulster-Scots traditions within the island of Ireland can only draw further attention to the scholarly neglect of the country’s most marginalized minority. In like manner, the final chapter notes that the culturally significant US Traveler community has thus far been excluded from studies of Irish-American history, identity, and assimilation. Lloyd notes the following in his analysis of the operation of racism, which I have read as being equally applicable to the entangled discourse of sedentarism: culture itself constitutes the formal principles of racist discourse [. . . ]. For the demand for representation within existent institutions will be self-defeating so long as it is not accompanied by the demand for the transformation of those institutions, since every partial instance of representation of difference succumbs to the larger narrative of representation which absorbs it. 1

Ultimately, the respecting of Traveller difference is only the first step in the necessary transformation of settled society. Sedentary representations of people of the road have shaped the legal, cultural, and social frameworks that members of that community are forced to negotiate in their contacts with dominant society. Therefore, this investigation of the manner in which cultural and spatial exclusion has forced Travellers into an oppositional stance implicitly suggests that the recognition of the nomadic voice must be part of a wider querying of the apparati through which sedentarism is naturalized. In addition, the lack of interest shown in the minority by most contemporary Irish academics will only be 1 David Lloyd, ‘Race Under Representation’, The Oxford Literary Review 13: 1–2 (1991), 86.

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fully revealed when scholars of Traveller heritage emerge in substantial numbers. Of course, such will only occur when the current structural impediments to full Traveller participation in Irish society begin to be dismantled. As an Irish researcher of wholly settled descent who took years to slowly nudge towards a basic understanding of the implications of the ‘tinker’ construct to the Irish literary and cinematic canon, my hope is that in the not-too-distant future, commentators of Traveller heritage will themselves tackle such issues from an insider perspective that is capable of uncovering what cannot be perceived by one raised in the dominant culture. The voice of the Traveller will be seen to be truly recognized when the choice of a minority lifestyle is not a guarantee of marginalization or perceived to be in inherent opposition to majority values, as is presently the case. Just as producers of cultural artefacts who recognize the manner in which Traveller Otherness is iterated must transform modes of representation that at present merely reproduce the binary of sedentary Same and nomadic Other, the contending spheres of espace rayonnant and espace itinérant must ultimately yield to a realm that is neither. It is time for a dialogue between settled and nomadic to emerge, so that an unexamined sedentary consensus that has perpetuated its privileges for far too long against a minority that it rarely even acknowledges to be its Other might finally become visible. In short, the illicit Traveller campsite has always existed on the grounds of the Big House, but its presence has yet to be acknowledged or fully accepted. Such querying will ultimately allow for the imagining of a space that does not at present exist, and will permit the creation of an Irishness that unequivocally encompasses diverse identities. Indeed, Irishness itself will necessarily be transformed by such inclusiveness. Finally, and in order to suggest the manner in which the Traveller is beginning to be represented without recourse to either positive or negative stereotype, this conclusion will close with a brief look at a recent film that depicts the culture in a ground-breaking manner. This particular work points to the possibility that the inevitable transformation of modes of portraying Travellers may have already begun. It is fitting too, in light of this study’s repeated deployment of the illicit campsite as a symbol of the manner in which the Travelling minority is at once central to and invisible within the Irish (cultural) landscape, that the film’s setting is a shambolic temporary settlement.

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The seventh gloss of the OED definition of the verb ‘screen’ is as follows: ‘to show (a picture) on a screen; to project on to a screen as with a magic lantern or film projector; to exhibit as a production for the cinema or television.’ However, the following is the second and, therefore, the much more utilized definition: ‘To hide from view as with a screen; to shelter from observation or recognition.’ The concluding chapter’s consideration of film and television representations of the Travel(l)er indicates that in terms of screen depictions of nomadic minorities, the more common definition of the verb is apposite. Such figuring functions much in the manner of conventional literary representation in its obscuring of the reality of marginalized lives in favour of a sedentary image of the espace itinérant. Although it was argued that the US Traveler is much less Othered on the American screen in comparison to the related minority’s depiction in recent Irish cinema, ultimately, US portrayals are still preoccupied with sedentary anxieties regarding race, assimilation, and settlement. This may imply that in relation to the representation of the marginalized, cinema is an inherently conservative medium destined to repeat the truisms of dominant belief. However, Pavee Lackeen (2005), the title of which translates from Cant as ‘Traveller girl’, is a multi-award-winning Irish film about Travellers by a settled director that points a way out of the morass for creative artists wishing to engage with the minority community in a manner that honours difference without resorting to fetishization. This study has demonstrated that the concept of the tinker as an exotic of some variety or other has been the one constant in depictions of the Travelling minority from the early nineteenth century right into the present period. However, Pavee Lackeen opens a vista within which it is possible to imagine a new way of representing Traveller culture that dispenses with such accretions. The director and script co-writer of Pavee Lackeen is Perry Ogden, an English fashion photographer who has resided in Ireland for a number of years. Ogden’s film examines the daily life of 10-year-old Traveller Winnie Maughan, who lives in an unserviced caravan site adjacent to a noisy motorway on the barren outskirts of Dublin. Winnie Maughan is played by a young Traveller girl of that name, and all the parts of her onscreen family are portrayed by her real-life mother, sisters, and brothers. As might also be noted in relation to the staging of The Tinker’s Wedding by Traveller dramatic groups, Ogden’s decision to cast actual members of the minority com-

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munity as the Traveller characters closes off the potential for inadvertent parody that occurs when a performer from majority society portrays a vulnerable Other. The naturalistic and improvisational style of the film takes its inspiration from documentary: pointedly, Pavee Lackeen boasts of no plot or backstory in the traditional sense, and deploys minimal exposition. In fact, the viewer is simply offered a series of loose and obliquely related episodes: Winnie is suspended from school for fighting with children who make derogatory remarks about her, visits the doctor, washes her hair at the outdoor tap that is the family’s only water source, gets reprimanded for petty thieving, sniffs petrol fumes with other children, and gets dressed up for a night out that it transpires consists only of walking to a nearby chip-van to buy supper. Interspersed with these almost random events are scenes in which Winnie’s mother deals with various state officials who intervene in her family’s life: social workers, city council representatives, a doctor, a teacher, and an assimilated Traveller activist all meander in and out of shot, although Ogden avoids any predictable depiction of an overt clash of Traveller and house-dweller. Interestingly, Winnie’s most neutral interactions with settled people are her conversations with immigrant shop assistants. In addition, the traditional Irish music that tends to be utilized in screen depictions of Travellers is noticeable by its absence. Indeed, in the manner of Travellers’ championing of over-the-top country singers in The Baby Doll Project, Winnie performs the kitsch disco anthem ‘I Will Survive’ when called upon to sing, rather than the doleful ballad a more typical representation might offer. In fact, the only discernible ‘soundtrack’ to the action occurs when motorway traffic can be heard during a scene in which Winnie’s older sister retouches her make-up inside the caravan. In its deliberate lack of structuring and its refusal to fill in the narrative gaps or explicate the exact nature of Winnie’s relationships with the various characters who wander through the scenes, this politically alert but never polemical film avoids objectifying the Traveller subject of the camera’s gaze. Pavee Lackeen leaves viewers to weave their own meanings from the scenes depicted and to deal solely with the immediate action. Moreover, it is this ‘take it or leave it’ spirit that allows Ogden to endow the production with a title in Cant. His minimal directorial mediation and refusal to rely on goal-oriented

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plot or the security of recognizable genre demonstrates the sensitivity required in considering a minority whose depiction has generally been refracted through the lens of accumulated stereotypes. Furthermore, Ogden underlines the sense that the received image of the Traveller is a narrative enforced by sedentary society by making Mrs Maughan’s interactions with state officials the film’s only real plot points. Pavee Lackeen’s radical departure from the traditional representation of the Traveller as either exotic or threatening proposes a way forward out of the stultifying tinker construct for those who wish to creatively engage with Traveller culture. Prior to Ogden’s film, the best the Traveller who wished to see him or herself onscreen could wish for was a colourful cameo in a production that might or might not be respectful towards the minority culture. However, the success of Pavee Lackeen with a cast of Traveller actors in the lead roles posits that the next step in the process of countering the tinker stereotype is the emergence of Traveller filmmakers and screenwriters, since even well-intentioned sedentary interpreters often ventriloquize minority voices. Such has already begun to occur in literature, since the growing volubility of Traveller writers will inevitably lead to a point at which the conjuring up of the centuries-old tinker construct will no longer be credible in the Irish text. The logic of the progression of Traveller culture from one that used to passively inspire sedentary authors to one whose own writers now actively engage with or counter tinker stereotypes suggests the inevitability of the emergence of Traveller filmmakers. Irish culture currently possesses a great number of literary texts and memoirs about Travellers that have been created by Travellers themselves, even if the full significance and implications of this nascent contending canon has yet to be recognized in dominant society. Accordingly, when Traveller directors and producers finally begin to make their presence felt, members of that community will at last become the creators of visual images of Travellers by Travellers. Of course, in the end, progress will really be seen to have been made when filmmakers or writers who identify as Traveller no longer feel obliged to treat of that culture in their creative works. In conclusion, I will predict that the challenge to the ‘tinker’ already initiated by Traveller authors and informed majority culture writers and filmmakers will eventually effect the complete overturning of the longest-lived and most deeply rooted construct of Irish Otherness.

Appendix: Biographical Notes The following biographical notes detailing the more obscure figures considered, as well as the unexamined interest in the tinker of certain better-known individuals, are offered in acknowledgment of the diverse range of writers and commentators mentioned in this study. Arden, John (1930–), major post-war British playwright. Live Like Pigs (1958), an early play produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre, deals with the tension that erupts between a forcibly-settled nomadic family and their neighbours. Arden moved to Galway in the late 1960s with his Irish wife and collaborator, Margaretta D’Arcy, and the couple turned their attention to local issues. They produced a series of collaborative street dramas during the 1970s, one of which, No Room at the Inn, considered Traveller-sedentary clashes. Borrow, George (1803–81), author, Gypsy expert, and linguist. The Victorian literary fad for romanticized Gypsies was initiated by Borrow’s imprecisely located picaresques, which consisted of semi-autobiographical narratives of his escapades with Romanies, tramps, and tinkers such as The Zincali (1841), a huge seller in Britain and overseas, and The Bible in Spain (1843). Bulfin, William (1862–1910), Offaly-born author of the travel book, Rambles in Eirinn (1907). Bulfin emigrated to Argentina in his teens and returned to Ireland in 1902. A vigorous defender of Catholic rights and a friend of Arthur Griffith, Bulfin’s antipathy to the Anglo-Irish Abbey Theatre playwrights and their perceived appropriation of the tinker is much on display in his travel narrative. Campbell, Joseph (1879–1944), Belfast poet associated with the Ulster Literary Theatre. Carney, John Francis (Frank) (1904–77), a dramatist born in County Galway and educated in St Jartlath’s Tuam and at the National University, Carney was a civil servant in the Old Age Pensions Department of the Free State government. The Abbey produced three of his plays: They Went by Bus (1939), Peeping Tom (1940), and The Righteous Are Bold (1946). The third of his National Theatre productions concerns the possession of an Irish woman by the violent two-hundred-year-old spirit of a Spanish Gypsy. The play was a considerable success, and continues to enjoy amateur productions in Ireland and the United States.

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Casey, Juanita (1925–), novelist and poet. Casey was born in England and raised by an adoptive family with ties to the Mills-Fossett Circus, from whom she received a boarding-school education. She later spent many years travelling as a circus animal trainer. Until she was in her seventies and discovered otherwise, she believed her biological parents to have been an Irish Traveller mother and an English Romany father. Casey emerged onto the literary scene in 1971 with the novel The Horse of Selene, and has published two novels, two poetry collections, and one book of short stories. She currently resides in Devon, where she has been breeding horses. Colum, Pádraic (1881–1972), the son of a workhouse master, Colum selfconsciously cultivated a ‘tramp’ persona in his autobiographical writing. His play, The Fidder’s House (1907), and his much-anthologized poem, ‘An Old Woman of the Roads’ (1905), valorized peoples of the road. Coffey, Charles (1700?–1745), Dublin-born dramatist and author of The Beggar’s Wedding (1729), a version of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera set in his home city which made comic use of the motif of inverted beggar ritual. Crofton, Henry Thomas (b.1848), Manchester-based Gypsylorist and author of seminal papers on Shelta. Crofton was a member of an extensive family descended from John Crofton of Ballymurry, Co. Roscommon, Queen Elizabeth’s Escheator-General of Ireland. He consolidated Romani as a subject of scholarly interest with Dialect of the English Gypsies (1875), which he coauthored with Bath Charles Smart. Crofton served as president of the Gypsy Lore Society from 1908 to 1909. D’Arcy, Margaretta (1934–), Irish actress and wife and sometime collaborator of British playwright John Arden. Dugdale, Richard (1842–83), prison reformer and author of The Jukes (1877), a foundational text of Eugenic Family Studies, a slew of investigations of the perpetuation of deviance within white rural families produced by researchers affiliated with the US Eugenics Record Office. Dugdale was born in Paris to English parents who later moved to New York. At the age of 27, he became a member of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York, and formulated his study while acting as a prison inspector during 1874. Gmelch, George, a contemporary American anthropologist who, with collaborator Sharon Bohn Gmelch, produced an enormous body of work on Travellers throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, at a time when the minority was of little interest to Irish academics. Their theories that Traveller culture

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is primarily rural and that a Traveller population of archaic origin absorbed dropouts from sedentary culture were extremely influential. Gmelch, Sharon Bohn, see George Gmelch. Grellmann, Heinrich (1753–1804), ethnographer and historian based at Göttingen University. Grellmann collated Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner/Dissertation on the Gipsies (1783), a study that purported to expose the Indian origins of European Gypsies through linguistic detective work. The earliest ‘standard work’ on Gypsies, its significance lies in its crystallization of dispersed stereotypes gleaned from earlier commentaries. Gypsy studies in the following centuries often unashamedly paraphrased it. Gwynn, Stephen (1864–1950), Donegal-raised nationalist, soldier, and man of letters. Gwynn’s The Fair Hills of Ireland (1906) drew upon Irish mythohistoric and folk traditions centred on the putative contemporary survivals of pre-Celtic peoples, population traces that were more explicitly named as modern Travellers by Eóin MacNeill. Hackett, William, a mid-nineteenth-century amateur antiquarian and Irish language enthusiast from Midleton, Co. Cork, and a member of the Ossianic Society from its foundation. His portrait of the Irish tramp as a member of a highly-organized secret brotherhood in an early 1860s article for the Ulster Journal of Archeology obviously draws upon English rogue literature precedents. Hanna, Charles A., American author of The Scotch-Irish (1902), a refutation of contemporaneous attempts to reclaim the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots) for a broad Irish-American identity. Henry, Paul (1876–1958), Belfast-born artist. Inspired by Synge’s writings on Aran, Henry lived on the Mayo island of Achill for seven years, beginning in 1912. Hoyland, John, Quaker activist and author of the influential and Grellmanninspired Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, and Present State of the Gypsies (1816), which was based on the results of a questionnaire on Gypsies and tinklers circulated to the Sheriff of every county of Scotland. John, Augustus (1878–1961), Welsh artist and leading light of the British bohemian scene. John was avidly interested in the subjects of Gypsies and tinkers, and was elected Gypsy Lore Society President in 1936. Joyce, Nan (1940–), Travellers’ rights representative and memoirist of Traveller life. Joyce was born in Tipperary, but moved to Belfast as a 3-year-old. She

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became extremely well known for her activism during the 1970s and 1980s, and eventually stood as a candidate in national elections. Keating, Geoffrey (Seathrún Céitinn) (c .1580–c .1644), Hiberno-Norman poet and the last significant pseudo-historian writing in Irish, Keating was ordained as a priest in Ireland in 1603 before receiving his education in France. Foras Feasa air Éirinn / History of Ireland (1634), a composite of antiquarianism and Gaelic mytho-historiography, underlined Ireland’s Oriental links. Lawless, Emily (1845–1913), Irish novelist. Her sentimental Grania: The Story of an Island (1892) is set on Inishmaan and takes the side of the tough island heroine against the males of Aran. Leland, Charles Godfrey (1824–1903), Philadelphia-born translator, scholar of Gypsy culture, and author. Leland claimed to have ‘discovered’ Shelta, the Irish ‘tinkers’ language’, in Bath in 1880, when he was already a wellknown scholar of Romany culture. A graduate of Princeton, Leland lived and studied in continental Europe during the 1840s. Today his extensive work on Romany culture and language is largely forgotten, although his reputation as the author of ‘Hans Breitmann’s Ballads’, humorous verses centred on European immigrants, survives in the United States. Linehan, John. C., Irish-American author of The Irish Scots and the ‘ScotchIrish’, (1902), an explicit attempt to re-Hibernicize the Scots-Irish. Liszt, Franz (1811–86), experimental Hungarian composer of the Romantic period. He described his lengthy delineation of the Gypsy influence in Hungarian music, Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie (1859), translated as The Gipsy in Music in 1926, as an ‘overgrown preface’, whose aim was to elucidate the Rhapsodies Hongroise. Lynd, Robert (1879–1949), Irish journalist, travel writer, and nationalist. Lynd was the son of a Belfast Presbyterian minister and a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Home Life in Ireland (1909) and the tramping narrative, Rambles in Ireland (1912). Macalister, R. Alexander Stewart (1870–1950), first Professor of Celtic Archaeology at UCD (1909–43), member of the Gypsy Lore Society, and erstwhile President of both the Royal Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Irish Academy. His archaeological research interests included Israel, Palestine, and Ireland, on which he published a number of studies, but he is equally remembered for his 1937 study of Traveller Cant, The Secret Languages of Ireland. The text was based on John Sampson’s unpublished research, and remains the only full-length Irish publication on the subject.

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McDonagh, Rosaleen (b. 1967), Sligo-born contemporary human rights activist and playwright of Irish Traveller heritage. McDonagh was a 2002 Seanad Éireann (Irish Senate) candidate. Her critically acclaimed and awardwinning one-woman play, The Baby Doll Project (2002), explores the realities of Traveller and disabled women’s lives. Her most recent play, Stuck, also on the Traveller theme, was staged in Dublin in late 2007. McDonagh, Michael, contemporary Irish Traveller activist and spokesperson. McGinley, Peter Toner (a.k.a. Peadar MacFhionnghaile or MacFhionnlaoich, 1857–1940), a Donegal civil servant, erstwhile Gaelic League President, and dramatist. His play, Eilís agus an Bhean Déirce (first performance 1901; translated as Lizzie and the Tinker in 1970), is most likely the earliest utilization of the tinker figure in twentieth-century Irish-language theatre. MacFirbis, Duald (Dubhaltach Mac Fhir Bhisigh) (?1600–1671), compiler of Gaelic mytho-history, Sir James Ware’s amanuensis, and the last of the line of the learned Mac Fhir Bhisigh family. His Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions), a compilation of medieval narratives recounting Gaelic mytho-history from Creation onward, chronicles the pre-Milesian (pre-Celtic) inhabitants of Ireland of whom Travellers were later posited as survivals. MacGréine, Pádraig (a.k.a. Patrick Greene and Master Greene, 1900– 2007), Longford schoolteacher, folklorist, and author of seminal articles on Traveller Cant for the bilingual journal Béaloideas during the 1930s, a period during which the minority’s culture was of little interest to most Irish scholars. MacGréine remained interested in the topic throughout his life, and was still teaching Cant to Irish Traveller adolescents one evening a week at the age of 104. MacNamara, Gerald (pseudonym of Harry C. Morrow, 1865–1938), a dramatist of the Ulster Literary Theatre in Belfast. The Mist That Does Be on The Bog, MacNamara’s satire targeting Synge’s perceived fetishization of the tramp, played to a full house at the Abbey Theatre in 1909. MacNeill, Eóin (1867–1945), born in county Antrim, studied at St Malachy’s College, Belfast, and the Royal University. MacNeill was first Professor of Early Irish History at University College Dublin, a founder of the Gaelic League, and served as Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers, a paramilitary organization founded by nationalists in 1913 to implement the imminent Home Rule Act. MacNeill also served as Minister for Education in the first Irish Free State government. In Phases of Irish History (1919), MacNeill’s study of the peoples inhabiting Ireland from the prehistoric to the post-Norman period, he deduces

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a genetic connection between contemporary Travellers and the settlers of preCeltic Ireland. MacRitchie, David (1861–1925), Edinburgh University-educated accountant and son of a surgeon in the East India Company. MacRitchie founded the Gypsy Lore Society in 1889, and published extensively on British ancient history and on the pre-historic peoples of Scotland. Maher, Sean (1932–), Traveller memoirist. Maher was born in the County Home (workhouse) in Tullamore, and ran away from his parents and life on the road at the age of twelve, subsequently receiving a formal education. Maher’s The Road to God Knows Where (1972), a record of his early years, is a foundational narrative of the Traveller memoir genre. Marsden, William (1754–1836), an Orientalist and numismatist. Born in County Wicklow to a wealthy banker and ship-owner, Marsden joined the East India Company in 1771, and subsequently published a History of Sumatra (1783), A Dictionary and Grammar of the Malayan Language (1812), and Numismata Orientalia (1823–5). A fellow of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, 1784, and an original member of the Royal Irish Academy, Marsden proposed a ‘Hindostanic’ link to the Gypsy language that appeared almost simultaneously with Heinrich Grellmann’s better-known thesis on the same topic. Mayne, Rutherford (1878–1967), pseudonym of Samuel Waddell, actor and playwright of the Ulster Literary Theatre. Mayne’s The Turn of the Road (1906) centres on the struggle between sedentary and nomadic values that ensues when a musically gifted farmer’s son becomes fascinated by an erudite and culturally sophisticated tramping fiddler. Meyer, Kuno (1858–1919), celebrated German scholar of Irish who took an interest in Shelta on the basis of its perceived link to Old Irish. Meyer published articles on the subject in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. Millar, Ruddick (1907–52), Belfast-born playwright and poet. Millar appropriated the Irish tinker as a figure of rural Ulster authenticity in the antidevelopment comedy, Tappytoosey (1950). Murphy, Tom (1935–), major Tuam-born playwright. Murphy’s dramas often deploy the Traveller Cant-derived slang of his hometown dialect to explore the social exile of those excluded by normative values. O’Donovan, John (1806–61), renowned Irish-language scholar and Ordnance Survey topographer. The aristocratic origin of a tinker called Mac Swyne Na Doe was described by O’Donovan in a letter from Donegal written in 1835.

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Ó Coisdealbha, Seán (1930–2006), Irish-language dramatist and poet. Born in Indreabhán, Connemara, his poems have passed into oral tradition in the Gaeltacht, and have been included in French and English language collections of twentieth-century Irish-language poetry in translation. Ó Coisdealbha’s comic Irish-language drama, An Tincéara Buí /The Sallow-Skinned Tinker, was first performed in Dublin in 1957 at the Drama Festival Championship. Ó Coisdealbha was a member of Aosdána, the prestigious Irish association of creative artists. O’Flaherty, Liam (1896–1984), short story writer and author. As a selfconscious exile from mainstream sedentary and Anglophone culture due to his islander and Irish-language heritage, O’Flaherty’s work often depicts peripatetic peoples and the wandering lifestyle. O’Kelly, Seamus (1878–1918), Revival-era playwright and journalist. One of seven children born to a Loughrea, Co. Galway family of modest means, O’Kelly had little formal education. The Shuiler’s Child (1909), a tragedy centred on the fostering of a child of a woman of the roads, was less sympathetic to the peripatetic subculture than many contemporaneous Abbey plays. Pococke, Richard (1704–65), extensive English traveller and Anglican bishop in Ireland. Appointed Archdeacon of Dublin in 1745, and Bishop of Ossory in 1756, he was translated to the bishopric of Meath in 1765. In his influential travel narrative, A Description of the East (1743–45), Pococke suggested that the nomadic Chingani of Syria were ‘relations’ of the ‘gypsies in England’, thereby laying the imaginative groundwork for the later theory of the ‘Oriental’ links of Europe’s Gypsies. Pococke’s other works include the Tour in Ireland in 1752. Richepin, Jean (1849–1926), born in Médéa, Algeria, was a prolific poet, novelist, and dramatist. Richepin’s utilization of a heightened form of naturalistic language in his first book of poems, La Chanson des Gueux (The Song of the Outcasts, 1876), in which he employed underworld cant, led to the author’s imprisonment for its ‘immoral’ language. Richepin’s Le Chemineau (The Vagabond ) was first produced at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, Paris, on 16 February 1897, where it was possibly seen by J. M. Synge. Sampson, John (1862–1931), Cork-born commentator on Gypsy and tinker culture. The Sampson family moved to Liverpool when John was 9 years old, but quickly fell into poverty following the death of his father. The selftaught Sampson, a founding member of the Gypsy Lore Society, was appointed to the newly established Liverpool University in 1892, where he befriended Kuno Meyer, the German scholar of Irish, and Gypsylorist and artist Augustus John.

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Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), the canonical Scottish novelist demonstrated a marked interest in the Gypsies and Hiberno-Scottish tinklers of his country, notably in the novel Guy Mannering and in a series of articles co-authored with Thomas Pringle that were published by Blackwood’s Magazine during 1817. Scott also encouraged Walter Simson’s massive survey of Scottish Gypsies, A History of the Gipsies. Shiels, George (1886–1949), successful Abbey playwright of the 1930s and 1940s. His 1940 pro-sedentary drama, The Rugged Path, which centres on the collision of a respectable farming family and an anarchic clan with peripatetic allies, created a record for the Abbey when it ran for eight weeks and was seen by 25,000 people. Sigerson, George (1836–1925), Revival-era author, nationalist, and neurologist. Dr Sigerson claimed that the pre-Celtic settlers of Ireland had arrived on Irish shores fully evolved. Simson, Walter, Scottish author and amateur historian. Although it was only published in 1865, Simson’s influential 575-page History of the Gipsies was collated decades earlier during the lifetime of his acquaintance and correspondent, Walter Scott. The work was edited and extensively annotated by Simson’s New York-based son, James Simson. Walter Simson’s enormous volume is of interest as a collation of some hundreds of years of Scottish writings and traditions about Gypsies and tinklers. Speakman, Harold (1888–1928), American artist and author of the combination travel book and literary guide, Here’s Ireland (1925), an elegant and witty account of a Borrovian ‘tinker-style’ journey through Ireland by ass-cart in 1924. The spectacle caused a minor sensation, bringing Speakman to the attention of the major writers of the day. Starkie, Walter (1894–1976), the most prolific and best-known twentiethcentury Irish Gypsylorist. A scholar of George Borrow’s work and a lecturer in Romance Languages at Trinity College Dublin, Starkie published a number of picaresque narratives of his travels amongst Spanish Gypsies. A member of the Abbey Board from 1927 to 1942, Starkie was elected President of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1965. Twiss, Richard (1747–1821), the wealthy elder son of an Anglo-Dutch merchant family descended from the family of Twiss resident about 1660 at Killintierna, Co. Kerry. Author of Travels Through Portugal and Spain, in 1772 and 1773 (1775), which contains one of the earliest discussions of Spanish Gypsies in English-language travel writing. Twiss also wrote the badly received Tour in Ireland in 1775 (1776).

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Vallancey, General Charles (1721–1812), an English-born military surveyor and engineer of Huguenot descent who became fixated upon Irish antiquities when posted to Ireland in 1762. Founder-member of the RIA in 1782, and founder of Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis, an important journal devoted to Irish culture. A prolific author on various subjects other than Irish antiquities, Vallancey is remembered for his theories of the ‘Eastern’ origins of the ancient Irish people and language. His explicit response to Heinrich Grellmann, which suggested a proto-Gypsy component in the ancient ‘Oriental’ Irish population, was published in 1804. Walsh, Maurice (1879–1964), best-selling Irish writer. Born into a farming family near Listowel, Co. Kerry, Walsh is best known for his short story, ‘The Quiet Man’, which was made into a hugely-successful film starring John Wayne. Claimed equally by Scottish and Irish literature, Walsh began writing while working in Scotland, and his adventure novels and stories generally deployed Irish or Scottish rural settings and roving characters. Yeats, Jack B. (1871–1957), artist and brother of poet W. B. Yeats. Yeats’s childhood in rural Ireland awakened his interest in the peoples of the road, who were common subjects of his paintings and drawings. Yeats provided the line drawings for the first edition of Synge’s The Aran Islands.

Glossary Bacach: tramp (Irish). Cant: a term used to denote the secret vocabularies of rogues, particularly in early modern England, and also the designation for the language of Irish Travellers utilised by most scholars since the late twentieth century and by many Travellers themselves. Cryptolect: a secret language or dialect utilized by members of a minority, often in the presence of members of majority society. Sometimes used by linguists in reference to the languages and vocabularies deployed by Travellers and Romanies. Espace itinérant/espace rayonnant (travelling space/radial space): theoretical terms coined by Irish literary critic Pat Sheeran to distinguish between the sedentarist mindset and its cultural products and the contending sphere of the nomadic culture and lifestyle. Egyptian, counterfeit Egyptian: designations given to British nomads during the Elizabethan period, who were sometimes accused of counterfeiting foreign appearance in the expectation of financial benefit. Gypsy is generally understood to be an abbreviation of the earlier term. Exotic Sameness: a term coined by the present author to describe the positive depiction of Irish-American Traveler cultural and ethnic difference in contemporary America. Firbolg, fir-Bolg: in the myth-histories of Ireland, post-diluvian inhabitants of the island enslaved by other settler groups. According to medieval Irish annalists, the Fir-Bolg originated from the Eastern Empire (‘Greece’). Folkloric belief suggested that the Fir-Bolg fled to the Aran Islands after being vanquished by the Tuatha Dé Danann. Gaeltacht: the name given in Irish and Hiberno-English to the culturally distinct districts of Ireland in which Irish is still the first language. Gypsy Lore Society: see Gypsylorist.

Glossary

289

Gypsying: the verb Victorian Gypsylorists and British bohemians sometimes used to describe their aping of the Romany lifestyle. Gypsylorist: a term applied to writers and adventurers associated with the Gypsy Lore Society and its journal, an organization established in the late nineteenth century for the investigation of Gypsy culture and language. Gypsylorists also occasionally took an interest in the Irish tinker. Scholars, artists, and writers associated with the society concerned themselves with and even appropriated British Romany culture. The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society was first issued in 1888 and revived again in 1907. Milesians: in the myth-histories of Ireland, usurpers of the Tuatha Dé Danann and the final settlers of prehistoric Ireland. Known as ‘Gaels’ or ‘Scots’ to later commentators. According to certain Irish annalists, the Milesians came from Scythia, and from that country to Egypt, from Egypt to Spain and from Spain to Ireland. The arrival of the Milesians was constructed as the culmination of the ancient plantations, since they were the population group with which the chroniclers of the medieval period identified. Patriarco/patrico: a counterfeit or vagabond priest catalogued in rogue pamphlets. Rogue literature/rogue pamphlets: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English texts that classified the secret customs and lifestyles of various purportedly underworld rogue types. Romany Rye/Rai: ‘a Gypsy gentleman’ (Romani). First used by and of George Borrow, the term subsequently became a popular self-designation amongst British and American male adventurers who immersed themselves in Gypsy culture. Scots-Irish/Scotch-Irish: the designation given in America to eighteenthcentury Presbyterian immigrants from Ulster (or those identified as such) and to their descendants. Sedentarism: a term coined by race theorist Robbie McVeigh to describe practices that perpetuate and normalize a settled lifestyle and pathologize and inhibit a nomadic lifestyle. Shelta: a term for the ‘Irish tinkers’ tongue’ utilized mainly by scholars. Coined by American Gypsylorist Charles Godfrey Leland in the 1880s.

290

Glossary

Shuiler: obsolete Hiberno-English designation for peoples of the road. From the Irish siúlóir/siubhlóir, ‘walkers’. Tinkerlorist: a phrase coined by the present author as an Irish Revival-era corollary of the relatively better-known and inextricably intertwined late Victorian phenomenon of Gypsylorism. Tinkler: a variant of tinker used mostly in Scotland. Travelers: present-day American descendants of Travellers who emigrated from Ireland sometime between 1840 and 1865. Tuatha Dé Danann: in the myth-histories of Ireland, usurpers of the FirBolg who were, in turn, conquered by the Milesians. Folkloric belief suggested that, having been defeated by the Gaels, the Tuatha Dé Danann descended underground and became those afterwards referred to as fairies.

Bibliography ARCHIVES Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. Irish Film Archive, Irish Film Institute, Dublin. Irish Travelling People Collection, University of Ulster at Jordanstown, Belfast. National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin. Newspaper Library, Belfast Central Library. The Gypsy Collections (Gypsy Lore Society and R. A. Scott MacFie Gypsy Collections), Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool University. Manuscripts Department, Old Library, Trinity College Dublin. PERSONAL INTERVIEWS AND PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE Arden, John. Personal interview. 11 Mar. 2002. Casey, Juanita. Personal correspondence. 9 Mar. 2001; 6 Nov. 2007. Diner, Hasia. Personal correspondence. 19 Mar. 2005. Joyce, David. Personal correspondence. 23 May 2003. Maher, Sean. Personal interview. 11 Feb. 2000. McDonagh, Michael. Personal interview. 28 April 2001. McDonagh, Rosaleen. Personal interview. 22 May 2003. Moriarty, Mary. Personal interview. 31 Jan. 2001. Ó Coisdealbha, Seán. Personal interview. 11 June 2006. Puxon, Grattan. Personal correspondence. 25 April 2003. FILM, TELEVISION, AND RADIO ‘Graansha’. Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Transmitted on NBC (USA), May 11, 2003. The Gypsies in Ireland. Dir. Sidney Olcott. Kalem (USA) 1912. Interview with Larry Otway. The O’Reilly Factor. Conducted by Bill O’Reilly. Transmitted on Fox Network (USA) 23 Sept. 2002. Into the West. Dir. Mike Newel. Channel Four Films (Ireland/UK) 1992. Man of Aran. Dir. Robert Flaherty. Gainsborough Pictures / Gaumont British Picture Corp. (UK) 1934.

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Index Note: Where practical, pre-1960 cultural representations of Travellers have been indexed under ‘tinker(s)’ while post-1960 representations and references to the actual community have been indexed under ‘Traveller(s)’. References to ‘Gypsies’ have mostly been subsumed under ‘Romanies’. bohemianization of islanders in 100, Abbey Theatre 11, 15, 18, 41, 59, 99, 105 106, 135, 137–9, 143–5, 148, Borrow and 81 173–5, 187, 190, 197, 200, 202, Catholicism in 127–8 214, 228 evolutionary theory and 14, 118–20 ‘Abbey tinker’ 14, 126, 135, 136–8, 145, Fir-Bolg and 111, 113, 127 148, 173, 176 modernity in 86, 97, 128–31 Achill Island 131, 132, 216, 218 Orientalism in 96–7, 105–6, 113 Acton, Thomas 200 Synge’s identification with islanders actors, Traveller 231, 273, 276–7, 278 in 130–1 Adigun, Bisi 273 tinkers and 96–7, 111–14, 118, 120, aesthetic norms, Traveller 229–30, 240 124–5, 132 African-Americans 265 Arbois de Jubainville, Henri d’ 99, 100 agricultural labourers 4 Arden, John 14, 208, 279 Akenson, Donald 255 Immediate Rough Theatre for Citizens’ Allgood, Molly 106–7 Involvement 197, 207 American Travelers, see Irish-American Live Like Pigs 196–202, 205, 232, 233 Travelers Murphy and 196, 198, 202, 207 Andereck, Mary E. 248 No Room at the Inn 197, 207–8 Anderson, Benedict 156 Romanies in 174 Anglo-Irish 14, 22, 89, 99, 106, 125, Synge and 200, 207 126, 134, 143, 160–1, 190–3, 194 Traveller politicization and 196–8, Anglo-Irish antiquarianism 22, 23–4, 202, 205–8 32–4, 83, 111, 123, 160, 284, 287 Arnold, Frederick 250, 252 Annals of the Four Masters 23 Art of Juggling, The (Rid) 37 anti-English feeling 22, 97, 150, 151 Atlantic Monthly (magazine) 257, 265 anti-hero, tinker as, see also drama, Autobiographies (Yeats) 116 post-Revival 134–52, 156, 175, ‘Autobiography’ (Synge) 114, 116 242–5 Awdeley, John 37, 82, 201 anti-vagrancy laws 37, 38, 40, 90, 202, Azerbaijan! (Casey) 215 251–2 antiquarianism, see Anglo-Irish B-Specials 170–1 antiquarianism Baby Doll Project, The (McDonagh) 210, Aran Islands 57, 86, 111, 123–4, 132–3, 223–31, 277 207, 218, 288 bacach (tramp) 36, 61, 288 Aran Islands, The (Synge) ballads, see also music 48, 64, 70, 90, Aran as pre-lapsarian in 116–17, 119, 106, 154, 186, 211, 212, 222, 225, 123, 128 Aran as virgin territory in 123–4, 277 126–8 bards 88, 91

314

Index

barrel-top wagons, see wagons Banim, Mary 124 Barnes, Bettina 164, 182 Barton, Ruth 244 Battaglia, Rosemary A. 67 Bax, Arnold 36 Béaloideas (journal) 161 Bean, Sawney 201–2 Becoming Criminal (Reynolds) 251 Berlagar na Saer (Munster masons’ dialect) 92 Beckett, Samuel 145 Becoming Conspicuous (Bhreatnach) 7, 8, 158, 205 beggarliness as Irish trait 82–3, 88, 200 beggars 3, 8, 26, 34, 38, 43, 60, 82–3, 84, 88, 104, 121, 126, 201, 203 Beggar’s Wedding, The (Coffey) 60 Belfast Itinerant Settlement Movement 204 Belfast News-Letter 34, 40, 168 Bhreatnach, Aoife 7, 8, 158, 205 Big House (literary tradition) 5, 9, 73–4, 159, 160, 190–5, 209, 273, 275 Binchy, Alice 154 Blackcock’s Feather (Walsh) 157 Blackwood’s Magazine 46, 50, 53, 84, 87 Blasket Islands 119, 124 Blumenbach, Johann 32 Blythe, Ernest 202 bohemianism 10, 13, 87, 97–8, 100–7, 137 Book of Invasions, The 23, 25, 29, 100, 117 Borrow, George 87, 148, 149, 245, 279 Lavengro 80 Romanies and 79–80, 81, 87 Romany Rye 79, 149 Synge and 80–1, 161 tinkers and 81–2, 161, 200, 245 Wild Wales 35, 81 Zincaldi, The 80 Botheroyd, Paul F. 60 Bourgeois, Maurice 63–4, 65, 67, 78, 85, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 112, 113, 124, 126, 127 boxing 80, 157, 228, 245–7 Brand (Ibsen) 103 Brennan, M. M. 136

Britain, Travellers and, see also English literature, tinkers and; Gypsy Lore Society, tinkers and; Scottish literature, tinkers and; tinklers, as Hiberno-Scottish 2 British Army, Travellers and 180–3, 189, 211–12 British Gypsies, see Romanies Broken Soil (Colum) 108 Bronté, Charlotte 9, 85 Brown, Irving 153 Brown, Marilyn R. 101 Brown, Terence 8, 155 Brown, Vanbeest 51 Bulfin, William 29, 89, 101, 125, 279 Bull, Philip 156 Bunreacht na hÉireann, see Constitution, Irish Bunyan, John 45 Burden, The (Worthington) 108 Burke, Seamus 136 Burns, Robert 48, 64 ‘Jolly Beggars, The’ 48 Butler, Cathal 170 Byrne, Gabriel 239 Byrne, Jason 228 Campbell, Joseph (Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil) 41, 88, 107, 279 campsites 7, 9, 72, 120, 206, 209, 275 ‘Can We Go Back Into Our Mother’s Womb?’ (Synge) 114 cant (early modern underworld language) 32, 38, 39, 42, 92, 288 Cant (Irish Traveller language), see Shelta caravanning 8, 79–80, 89, 206 Carleton, William 41 Carney, Frank 14, 135, 144–52, 186, 279 carnies (carnival workers) 189 Carson, Ciaran 169 Carthaginian language 22 Casey, Juanita 6, 280 Eternity Smith and Other Poems 216 The Horse of Selene 214, 215, 216–23, 233 literary canon and 209, 214, 217, 219, 231 Shelta and 221–2 Synge and 209, 218–19 as Traveller 214–16, 223

Index Castle Rackrent 192 ‘Cat and the Cornfield, The’ (MacMahon) 174 Catholic-Protestant tensions, Travellers and, see religion Catholicism, see religion Caveat or Warning for Commen Cursetors Vulgarly Called Vagabones, A (Harman) 37, 82 ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland 3, 191, 192, 196, 229, 235, 239, 240, 243 Celts, tinkers and, see also tinkers, as pre-Celtic survivals 20, 26, 35, 45, 57, 91, 164 Chambers’s Encyclopedia 91 chemineau, Le (Richepin) 102–3 Civil Rights Movement (Northern Ireland) 171, 178, 183, 197 Civil Rights Movement (Traveller) 171 Clarke, Edward Daniel 34 class, see also poverty, of tinkers: variation of, amongst Travellers 3, 74, 203, 241, 249, 251 in The Tinker’s Wedding (Synge) 74 Cobbett, William 83 Cock-A-Doodle-Dandy (O’Casey) 145 Coffey, Charles 60, 280 Collins, Martin 227 colonialism, Travellers and 27–8 Colum, Pádraic 78, 108, 280 Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes 43 Committee on Itinerant Gypsies 167 Committee on Gypsies and Like Itinerants 167, 168 Connolly, Maeve 237, 239 Connors, Johnny 205 Constitution, Irish (Bunreacht na hÉireann) 144, 156, 162 Corkery, Daniel 64, 120 Court, Artelia 26, 181, 203 Cousins, James H. 36 Cowper, William 34 Cré na Cille (Graveyard Soil) (Ó Cadhain) 140 criminality 11, 32, 37, 39, 48–9, 77, 83, 90, 143, 162, 163, 210, 211, 243–5, 252–3, 260–1, 265–8, 273 Crofton, Henry Thomas 33–4, 99, 161, 280

315

cultural practices, Traveller 2–3, 77, 217, 225, 238 Daiken, Leslie 137, 139, 148 Dáil Éireann 168 Dana (journal) 89–90, 118 D’Arcy, Margaretta 196, 197, 200, 206, 208, 280 Darwin, Charles 113, 114, 115, 118, 121, 122 Davies, John 82 Deane, Paul 131 de Crèvecoeur, Hector St John 258 Delaney, Paul 61 demonization, of tinkers, see drama, post-Revival Denvir, Gearóid 139 Descent of Man, The (Darwin) 114 Diner, Hasia 43 Dinneen, Patrick 41 Dionne, Craig 251 disability 223, 225–9 Dissertation on the Gypsies (Grellmann) 30–1, 33, 40, 55 domicentrism 6 Donohoe, Nan 226 Dorian, Hugh 83 drama, tinkers and amateur 136, 137, 145, 231 eighteenth-century 60, 280 improvisational 207–8 Northern Irish 165, 166–7 post-1960 173–5, 184–208, 210, 223–31 post-Revival 134–65, 195 Revival 41, 57–78, 93–5, 103, 106–8, 110, 138, 213 Driver, Minnie 268 DruidSynge 229 Druid Theatre 229 ‘Duality of Literature, The’ (Synge) 110 Duff, Charles 234 Duffy, Bernard 136 Dugdale, Richard 260, 261–5, 280 early modern continental Europe, tinkers and 13, 37–40 early modern England, tinkers and 13, 38–9, 45 Edgeworth, Maria 192

316

Index

education, Travellers and 6, 7, 154, 163, 205, 211, 226 Edwards, Jonathan 264–84, 91, 92, 93, 263 Egypt 37 Éire-Ireland (journal) 22 Eliot, Charles W. 257 emigrants Irish 16, 142, 144–52, 151, 174, 186–96, 200, 236, 249, 250, 254–60, 263 relations with Travellers of, in Murphy 186–96 tinkers and 142, 144, 145–52, 185–96 Traveller, see Irish-American Travelers English literature, tinkers and, see also Scottish literature 10, 13, 37–9, 45, 54, 63, 81–2, 160–1, 200, 245–6, 250, 251–3 Enlightenment 21, 22, 31, 34, 50 Enlightenment racial discourse 30–2 espace itinérant 5, 6, 73, 135, 184, 186, 275, 276 espace rayonnant 5, 6, 73, 192, 218, 275 Estabrook, Arthur H. 265 Eternity Smith and Other Poems (Casey) 216 ethnicity, of Travellers, 2, 4, 10, 15, 27–9, 42–4, 138, 152, 158, 160, 164–5, 170, 174, 184, 203–5, 209, 212–13, 227, 239, 246, 249–50 Étude Morbide (Synge) 109–10 Eugenic Family Studies 254, 260, 262, 266 evangelicalism 55, 81, 116, 117 evolutionary theory: social Darwinism 118 Synge and 14, 86, 97, 113, 114–22, 129, 130 tinkers and 113–14, 118 exoticization, of tinkers, see Orientalism fairies, tinkers and 106, 110–11 fairs 1, 13, 74, 85, 150, 158, 175 famine, see Great Famine Fanning, Brian 3 Fawcett, Liz 169 fiction Aran Islands in 124 Irish-American Travelers in 248

Roma in 214 Romanies in 79–80, 85 tinkers in 35, 157, 158–59, 217–18, 220–3, 225 tinklers in 159 Travellers in 175–84, 214 Fiddler’s House, The (Colum) 108 field clubs 13, 84–7 film Irish-American Travelers in 15, 234–5, 236, 237, 242–3, 266–8 Romanies in 267–8 Travellers in 15, 232, 234, 235, 236–47, 276–8 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 94fn Fir-Bolg 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 111, 113, 127, 288 Fitzmaurice, George 138 Flaherty, Robert 218 Flood, Jeanne A. 67, 69 folklore (Irish), tinkers in 19, 20–1, 41, 61–2, 111, 138, 154, 159, 161, 163, 166 Foras Feasa air Éirinn (History of Ireland) (Keating) 23, 27, 29, 85, 117, 122, 282 fortune-telling 34, 37, 69, 102, 136, 149, 162, 241 Foster, John Wilson 86 Foster, Roy 98–9 Franklin, Benjamin 258, 259 Fraternitye of Vacabondes, The (Awdeley) 37, 82 freedom, of tinkers 67, 68, 106, 141 Gaelic League 25, 88, 114, 130 Gaelic Society of Dublin 92 Gaelic mytho-history 23–4, 29, 33, 35, 100, 111, 112, 122 Gaels, see Celts Gaelo-Phoenicianism 22–3 Gaeltacht 139, 141, 165 Gammon, see Shelta Garner, Steve 3, 7 genetic origins of Travellers, research into 28 Gipsy in Music, The (Liszt) 109 Gitanos, see Spanish Gypsies Gmelch, George 19, 27, 28, 280 Gmelch, Sharon Bohn 43, 205, 280

Index Goldsmith, Oliver 212 Gordon, Jean 52–3 Grania: The Story of an Island (Lawless) 124, 282 Greene, David H. 64 Gregory, Lady Augusta 21, 28, 62, 81, 94, 110, 124–5 Great Exhibition of 1878 101 Great Famine 4, 20, 164, 195, 252, 253, 256 Grellmann, Heinrich 30–2, 33, 34, 39, 40, 46, 50, 55, 67, 80, 109, 174, 281 Grene, Nicholas 66 Grierson, George Abraham 153 Griffin, Patrick 258 Griffith, Arthur 103 Groome, Francis Hindes 148, 199 Guy Mannering (Scott) 51–3 Gwynn, Stephen 89, 184, 281 Gypsies, see Romanies Gypsies Bill 202 Gypsy Council 205, 215 Gypsy Holocaust 143, 210 ‘Gypsying’ 79–80, 84, 89, 92, 206 Gypsy Lore Society 288 Irish-American Travelers and 263 Romanies and 56, 80, 84, 94–5, 148, 247–8 Shelta and 91, 92, 94, 95, 152 Tinker’s Wedding, The (Synge) and 78–9 tinkers and 40, 46, 56, 78–9, 91–5, 148, 152, 160–1, 176, 245 Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (Leland) 93 ‘Gypsylorism’, see Gypsy Lore Society Gypsies in Ireland, The (film) 235, 245 Hackett, William 36, 60, 281 Haddon, Alfred Court 120 halting sites 203, 205 Hancock, Ian 248 Hanna, Charles A. 256, 257, 264, 281 Harman, Thomas 37, 54, 82, 201, 252 Harper, Jared Vincent 250 Harris, Richard 243, 244 Harvard University 250, 257 Haverty, Martin 123 Healy, Cahir 167

317

health, of Travellers, see also social Darwinism 6, 118 Helleiner, Jane 26 Henderson, Gordon 216 Henry, Paul 131, 216, 281 Hepenstall, William D. 137 ‘Hibernicization’, of tinkers 12, 14, 21, 44–5, 57, 78–9, 84, 87–8, 91–2, 160–2, 164, 173 Highlanders 21, 45, 48–9, 52, 64 history, of Travellers, see Irish-American Travelers; Irish government reports, Travellers in; Irish state, Travellers and; tinkers, earliest official reference to; tinklers, as Hiberno-Scottish; Traveller(s), origin theories of; Traveller(s), politicization of; Traveller(s), settlement, of Here’s Ireland (Speakman) 89, 125 Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner (Grellmann), see Dissertation on the Gypsies Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, and Present State of the Gypsies (Hoyland) 46–7, 55 History of the Gipsies, A (Simson) 46, 49, 53, 84 History of Ireland (Keating), see Foras Feasa air Éirinn hoboes 266 Hogan, Edmund 93 Hogan, Robert 175 Honey Spike, The (MacMahon) 166, 173–84, 193, 197, 202, 204, 231, 232 Horse of Selene, The (Casey) 214, 215, 216–23, 233 horses 13, 85, 217, 220, 241, 249, 250 House, The (Murphy) 9, 74, 191–5, 207 Howe, P. P. 80 Hoyland, John 46–7, 54, 55, 67, 281 Hudson, Charles 250 Huston, John 216 Huxley T. H. 86, 115 Hyde, Douglas 25, 106, 110, 125 Ibsen, Henrik 103, 196 idealization, of tinkers, see drama, Revival Ignatiev, Noel 256

318

Index

Immediate Rough Theatre for Citizens’ Involvement (Arden) 197 indentured servants 259 India see Orientalism, and Romanies Into the West (film) 235, 237–9, 241, 268 ‘In West Kerry’ (Synge) 64, 87, 117, 119 IRA (Irish Republican Army), Travellers and 136, 179–81, 183 Ireland’s Own (magazine) 162, 164 Irish drama, see drama Irish-American Traveler(s) 15, 16, 289 African-Americans and 265 on American television 249, 252, 255, 260–1, 265–6, 268–9 as criminal 252–3, 260–1, 265–8 definition of 249–50, 290 as ethnic group 249, 250 Eugenic Family Studies and 254, 260–5, 266 in fiction 248 in film 15, 234–5, 236, 237, 242–3, 266–8 Great Famine and 252, 253, 256 history of 248, 249, 250 invisibility of 237, 249, 250–3, 270, 274 as ‘lovable rogues’ 236, 243, 266, 269 ‘open road’ myth and 236, 247 oral traditions of 249 as reformable 15, 265–6, 267, 270 rogue literature and 250, 252–3 Romanies and 152–3, 267 Scots-Irish and 15, 236, 254–7, 263 South Carolina enclave 255 Travellers (Irish) vs. 16, 236, 242–3, 253–4 ‘whiteness’ and 15, 236, 248, 251, 253, 256, 257, 260, 263–270 ‘white trash’ culture and 15, 230, 255–6, 266–9 Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann/Constitution of Ireland) 144, 162 Irish Folklore Commission 41, 154, 159, 161, 166, 202 Irish government reports, Travellers in, see also Irish state, Travellers and; settlement, of Travellers 27, 43, 163–4, 202–4, 206, 207, 231, 251

‘Irish Gypsies’ (tinkers) 35, 36, 41, 136, 161–2, 164, 167, 173, 211, 235, 245, 263 Irish(-)language abilities of tinkers in 14, 134, 135, 156, 159, 160, 164 vs. English-language depictions of tinkers 139 and sedentary concensus 156 terms for tinkers in 10, 40, 41 writing, tinkers in 28, 41, 135, 138–42, 159, 161, 162, 164 ‘writing back’ to Synge in 141 Irish literature, tinkers and, see Irish writing, tinkers and Irish Literary Revival, see drama, Revival Irish nationalism 4, 22, 30, 58, 83, 101, 112, 126 Irish state, Travellers and, see also Irish government reports, Travellers in; Travellers, settlement of 2, 4, 7–8, 143, 144, 156, 166, 168, 181, 202–7, 213 Irish tinkers, see tinkers Irish Traveller Movement 196 Irish Travellers, see Travellers Irish writing, tinkers and, see also Anglo-Irish antiquarianism; Belfast News-Letter; drama, tinkers and; fiction, tinkers in; folklore (Irish), tinkers in; Gaelic mytho-history; Irish government reports, Travellers in; Irish(-)language writing, tinkers in; memoir, Traveller; Northern Irish government reports, Travellers in; poetry; travel literature; writers, Traveller eighteenth-century 22, 23, 32–4, 40, 41, 60 medieval 23–5, 29, 33, 35, 100, 111, 112, 122 pre-Famine 26, 41, 43–4 post-Famine 36 Revival-era 41, 58–133 post-Revival 31, 134–72 post-1960 173–233 Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (The Gaelic Journal) 92 Itinerant Action Campaign 205, 208, 215

Index Itinerant Settlement Movement 204 itinerant entertainers 3, 107, 108, 178 itinerant traders 3, 8, 141, 188 Izzard, Eddie 234, 268 Jacobite Gypsies 51, 52, 54 Jane Eyre (Bronté) 9, 85 Jewish peddlers 43, 188 Jews: Irish-American Travelers and 266, 268 Romanies and 109, 246 tinkers and 20–1, 154, 188 Travellers and 43, 244, 274 John, Augustus 79, 131, 132, 281 John and Josie (McDonagh) 228 ‘Jolly Beggars, The’ (Burns) 48 Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (journal), see Gypsy Lore Society Joyce, Catherine 227 Joyce, David 40, 213 Joyce, James 24, 94 Joyce, Nan 169–70, 180, 197–8, 215, 226, 230, 281–2 Jukes, The: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (Dugdale) 254, 260–3, 265 Jukes-Edwards, The: A Study in Education and Heredity (Winship) 264–5 ‘jumping the budget’, see also sham weddings 61 Keane, John B. 178 Keating, Geoffrey 23, 27, 29, 85, 99, 114, 117, 122, 282 Kenny, Mairín 27 Key Above the Door, The (Walsh) 156–7 Kiberd, Declan 130 Kiely, David M. 68, 77 ‘King of the Beggars’ 60 ‘King of the Tinkers’ 110 King, Mary C. 66, 73 Kinney, Arthur F. 252, 253 ‘knacker’ (pejorative) 223 Land League 156 land ownership, see also nomadism vs. sedentarism; proprietorship vs. nomadism; sedentarism; settled community vs. Travellers centrality of, to Irish identity 5, 155–6

319

vs. nomadism 5–7, 27, 63, 106–8, 125, 137–9, 143, 144, 155–6, 171, 174, 177, 190, 203, 217, 225 Lands Wars 4 language, Traveller see Shelta Lanters, José 210, 226, 242 ‘Last Fortress of the Celt, The’ (Synge) 111, 113 Lavengro (Borrow) 80 Law and Order: Criminal Intent (television show) 260–1, 262, 263, 265, 266, 268, 270 Lawless, Emily 124, 282 Lebor Gabála Érenn, see Book of Invasions, The legal recognition (Ireland and UK), of Travellers 4, 212–13 Leland, Charles Godfrey 84, 91, 93, 97, 152, 248, 250, 282 Lennon, Joseph 24 Liber Vagatorum (The Book of Vagabonds) 38–9, 106 Linehan, John C. 257, 282 Lipkin, Dmitry 269 Lion-Tamer and Other Stories, The (MacMahon) 178 Liszt, Franz 109, 110, 282 literacy, Travellers and 85, 182, 209, 221 literary canon, Travellers and 209, 214, 217, 219, 231 literature, Travel(l)ers in, see English literature, tinkers and; Irish-American Travelers, in fiction; Irish writing, tinkers and; Scottish literature, tinkers and Live Like Pigs (Arden) 196, 197, 198–202, 205, 232, 233 Lizzie and the Tinker (McGinley) 138 Lloyd, David 222, 274 Look Back in Anger (Osborne) 196 ‘Lough Derg Pilgrim, The’ (Carleton) 41 Lowndes, George R. 89 Luasnad, Capa and Laine (Synge) 122 Lucassen, Leo 210 Luther, Martin 38–9 Lynd, Robert 88, 107, 282 Macalister, R. Alexander Stewart 25, 35, 94, 148, 153, 154, 161, 282 McCabe, Pat 219

320

Index

McCann, Colum 214 McCarthy, J. Bernard 136 McCormack, W. J. 114 McDonagh, Martin 219 McDonagh, Michael 28–30, 283 McDonagh, Rosaleen 283 The Baby Doll Project 210, 223–4, 225–31, 277 disability issues and 223–4, 229, 231 John and Josie 228 literary canon and 209, 231 political career of 211, 226 Stuck 228 Synge and 209, 224 as Traveller writer 212, 223–7 McDonough’s Wife (Gregory) 110 MacÉnrí, Mícheál 114, 164 McErgill, Sherley 92 MacFirbis, Duald 23, 24, 25, 111, 283 McGinley, Peter Toner 138, 283 MacGréine, Pádraig 159, 161, 283 McKenna, Stephen 101 MacKinnon, Gillies 242 MacLaughlin, Jim 155, 238 MacMahon, Bryan 14, 155, 158, 176–7, 183, 216 ‘The Cat and the Cornfield’ 174 critical neglect of 178 empathetic depiction of Travellers in 173–8, 231 The Honey Spike 173, 174–84, 193, 197, 193, 202, 204, 231 The Lion-Tamer and Other Stories 178 The Master 176 Murphy and 202 The Red Petticoat and Other Stories 178 Shelta in 176–77 Synge and 174–75, 178, 184, 231 Walsh and 158 MacNamara, Gerald 165–7, 283 MacNeill, Eóin 25–6, 29, 112, 283–4 McNeillie, John, see Niall, Ian McNulty, Edward 136 MacPherson, James 46 ‘McPherson’s Rant’ (ballad) 48 MacRitchie, David 40, 46, 148, 284 Mac Swyne Na Doe 26 McVeigh, Robbie 5–6, 140, 167, 244 Maher, Sean 20–1, 28, 154, 212, 221–2, 226, 284

Manahan, Anna 200 Man of Aran (film) 218 Marian, Noel 136 Margulies, Julianna 266 marriage ceremonies, sham 60–1, 73 and tinkers 60–3, 67, 158 in The Tinker’s Wedding (Synge) 62–3, 67–8, 73, 74, 214 Marsden, William 32–3, 34, 48, 160, 284 M’Asal Beag Dubh (Ó Conaire) 138–9, 162 Master, The (MacMahon) 176 Maughan, Winnie 276–7 Mayall, David 55 Mayne, Rutherford 107, 108, 137, 284 media, representations of Travel(l)ers in the, see print media; television medieval Irish writing, see Gaelic mytho-history memoir, Traveller, see also oral culture, Traveller; writers, Traveller 20, 28, 169–70, 154, 180, 212, 226 Mercier, Vivian 66, 120–1 Meyer, Kuno 92, 93, 94, 152, 284 Milesians 23 Millar, Ruddick 166–7, 284 Miller, Kerby A. 262 Mist that Does Be on the Dog, The (MacNamara) 165–6 modernity 14, 85, 97, 128–31, 202, 206, 235, 238–42 Moore, George 101, 125 Moriarty, Mary 185 Mortimer, Mark 99 Moryson, Fynes 82 Murphy, Tom 14, 186–7, 260, 284 the Anglo-Irish and tinkers in 190–4 Arden and 196, 198, 202, 207 Big House tradition and 5, 9, 190–5, 273 challenge to tinker stereotypes in 174, 189, 207 emigrant-Traveller relations in 186–96 The House 9, 74, 191–5, 207, 275 MacMahon and 202 On the Outside 185, 186 response to Yeats’s Purgatory of 192 Shelta in 185, 191, 194

Index Synge and 207 Tinker’s Wedding, The (Synge) and 207 Traveller politicization and 202 Tuam (County Galway) dialect in 185 The Wake 190–1, 192, 193, 194, 195 Whistle in the Dark, A 186–90, 191, 195, 196, 199, 201, 202 music ballads 48, 64, 70, 90, 106, 154, 186, 211, 212, 222, 225, 277 Synge and 104, 107, 109–10 Romantic 109 tinkers and 104–5, 106, 107–11, 140, 148, 211, 213, 230, 277 Romanies and 101, 109, 222 Muslims 188 My Life on the Road (Joyce) 169–70, 197, 226 mytho-history, see Gaelic mytho-history nationalism, see Irish nationalism nationality, of tinkers, see ‘Hibernicization’, of tinkers; tinkers, as foreign Negra, Diane 255, 256, 260 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala 28 Ní Fhaircheallaigh, Úna 124 Ní Shuinéar, Sinéad 40, 41, 42, 43 Niall, Ian 159, 232 Nic Shiubhlaigh, Máire 103, 108 ‘Night That Larry Was Stretched, The’ (ballad) 70 Nin, Anaïs 225 nomadism vs. sedentarism, see also land ownership; proprietorship vs. nomadism; sedentarism; settled community vs. Travellers 5–7, 27, 106, 108, 156, 186, 188, 192, 198–202, 203, 206, 217, 220 No Resting Place (film) 159, 232, 235 No Resting Place (Niall) 232 No Room at the Inn (Arden) 197, 207–8 North-South tensions, Travellers and, see also post-Partition polarization, tinkers and 107, 135–6, 165–8, 179–84 Northern Irish government reports, Travellers in 167, 168

321

Northern Irish literature 165–6 Northern Irish state, Travellers and 2, 107, 165–71, 180–1, 202 O’Brien, Edna 109 Ó Cadhain, Máirtín 140 O’Casey, Sean 145 Ó Coisdealbha, Seán 135, 139–41, 165, 285 Ó Conaire, Pádraic 138–9, 162 O’Connell, Jeremiah D. 257 O’Doherty, Tommy 205 O’Donovan, John 26, 43, 284 Ó Faoláin, Seán 164 O’Flaherty, Liam 189, 218, 285 Ogden, Perry 276–8 O’Kelly, Seamus 41, 103, 106, 285 Okely, Judith 30 ‘Old and New in Ireland, The’ (Synge) 127 Old Irish 92 ‘Old Woman of the Road, The’ (Colum) 78 O Luingsigh, Donnchadh 92 Olympia Theatre 202 ‘On the Origin and Language of the Gypsies’ (Vallancey) 33 On the Outside (Murphy) 185, 186 ‘Oppression of the Hills, The’ (Synge) 44, 77 oral culture, Traveller, see also memoir, Traveller; writers, Traveller 15, 20, 181, 211–12, 214, 217 Ordnance Survey 26, 83, 111, 123 O’Reilly, Bill 255 Ó’Rian, Gearóid 27 Orientalism in The Aran Islands (Synge) 96–7, 105–6, 113 and Romanies 10, 13, 21, 30–3, 37, 39, 45, 49, 50–1, 56, 109, 153, 164 and tinkers 10, 13, 25, 36, 58, 59, 91, 96–7, 113 271 and tinkers in Synge 9, 13, 58, 59, 96, 97, 113 and tinklers 12, 21, 44–57 origin theories of Romanies 30–9, 50–1, 57 of Travellers 4, 20–1, 22, 25–30, 42, 164, 195

322

Index

Osborne, John 196 otherness 5–6, 15, 90, 135, 140, 156, 165, 168, 188, 210, 242, 275 O’Toole, Fintan 185–6, 187 Otway, Larry 255 Overbury, Sir Thomas 39 Paris 97, 98, 99–103, 104, 105 Partition see also post-Partition polarization, tinkers and 4, 7–8, 14, 156, 167, 173 Parton, Dolly 230 St Patrick 20, 21, 28, 146, 151, 212 pavee, see pavvy Pavee Lackeen (film) 276–8 Pavee Point 226 pavvy 28 Paxton, Bill 266 Paxton Boys 259 peddlers 37, 40fn, 43, 188 Penn, Thomas 258 ‘People and Places’ (Synge) 80, 83, 87, 120 Phases of Irish History (MacNeill) 25–6, 29, 112 Phelan, Mark 165 Phoenician language 22 Phoenicians 22, 24, 26 ‘pikey’ (pejorative) 247, 245 Pitt, Brad 245 Playboy of the Western World, The (Adigun and Doyle) 273 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge) 9, 11, 75, 117, 122–3, 132, 140 Pococke, Richard 33, 34, 47, 123, 285 poetry 125–6, 169, 216 politicization, of Travellers 11, 14, 135, 152, 173–4, 184, 192, 196–8, 202, 205–8, 215, 238 Politics of Magic, The (O’Toole) 185 population figures Travellers 2, 56, 184 Irish-American Travelers 248, 250 Pohle, Robert 22 post-Independence Ireland 10–11, 134–9, 151 post-Partition polarization, tinkers and, see also North-South tensions,

Travellers and 8, 133, 155, 165–72, 183 poverty, of tinkers, see also class 4, 34, 43,44, 74, 81–2, 203, 204 Powell, Enoch 200 prejudice, against Travellers 6, 187–90, 195, 207, 223, 242, 247 Presley, Elvis 269 print media: Irish-American Travelers in 234, 250, 253 Travellers in 1, 8, 56, 158, 168–9, 192, 204, 206, 210, 214, 216, 224, 226, 227, 235, 243, 244 promiscuity, of tinkers, see sexual freedom, of tinkers proprietorship vs. nomadism, see also nomadism vs. sedentarism; sedentarism; settled community vs. Travellers 135, 156, 190–6 Pringle, Thomas 50, 52 Project Arts Centre 227–8 Puck Fair 175 pugilism, see boxing Purgatory (Yeats) 143–4, 145, 192, 195 Puxon, Grattan 205 Quakers 55 ‘Quiet Man, The’ (Walsh) 157 Quinn, Hugh 136 Quinn, Paul 239 race, see also ‘white trash’ culture racialization 17, 33, 36, 39, 56, 140, 236, 250, 253 tinkers, racial inferiority to Romanies of 56, 85, 118, 153, 189, 200, 250 ‘whiteness’, Irish-American Travelers and 15, 236, 248, 251, 253, 256, 257, 260, 263–70 ‘whiteness’, Travellers and 140, 161, 188, 245 radio 186, 214 Rambles in Eirinn (Bulfin) 125 Rea, Stephen 243 Red Petticoat and Other Stories, The (MacMahon) 178 religion(s), see also Romanies, heathenism of; tinkers, ‘Catholicization’ of; tinkers, impiety of; Tinker’s Wedding,

Index The (Synge), priest in 2, 14, 81, 125, 127–8, 134, 145–52, 161–4, 166, 177, 205, 255, 257 Travellers and 2, 161–4 tensions between Catholic and Protestant, Travellers and, 4, 9, 25, 125–6, 14, 161, 169–71, 179–84, 192, 193 Romanies and 30, 32, 39, 54–5, 59, 134, 162–3 tinkers and 14, 61, 63, 67, 70–1, 134, 150, 161–3, 166 Report of the Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes 43 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy 27, 43, 163–4, 202–4, 206, 207, 231, 251 Report of the Committee on Gypsies and Like Itinerants 167, 168 Revival, see drama, Revival Rhys, Jean 9, 209 Richepin, Jean 102–3, 285 Riches, The (television series) 234, 268–9 Rid, Samuel 37 Riders to the Sea (Synge) 18, 65, 93, 121 Righteous Are Bold, The (Carney) 14, 134, 135, 144, 145–52, 186, 200, 225 Rising of the Moon, The (Gregory) 106 Ritchie, Guy 235–6, 245 Road to God Knows Where, The (Maher) 20–1, 226 Road to Nowhere, The (Walsh) 154, 157, 158–9 Robinson, Lennox 136 Roche, Anthony 185 Roche, Billy 244 rogue literature 289 cant in 32, 38, 39, 42 European 38–9 Irish rogues in 82, 251–2 Romani in 32, 38, 92 Romanies and 37, 85, 201 tinkers and 37–9, 43, 45, 54, 63, 160, 245–6, 250, 251–3 Travellers and 39–40, 251–2 Roma 3, 144, 210, 214, 226, 250, 255 Romani (Romany language) 32, 33, 38, 40, 80, 92 153 Romanies 3, 17, 79

323

Anglo-Irish antiquarians and 32–4 as antithetical to Europeans 32, 39 as artistic 13, 97, 101 as ‘counterfeit’ foreigners 37, 51, 245 as demonic 144, 147–50 in drama 103 as criminal 32, 37, 39, 48–9, 210, 211 as Egyptian 37 as emblem of British rurality 13, 79–81, 84–5, 87, 89 Enlightenment racial discourse and 30–2 field clubs and 13, 84, 87 Gypsies vs. 17 heathenism of 30, 32, 39, 59, 134, 162–3 Highlanders and 21, 49, 64 in Ireland 3, 34–5, 161, 164 Irish-American Travelers and 267 Jacobite 51, 52, 54 Orientalism and 10, 13, 21, 30–3, 37, 39, 45, 49, 50–1, 56, 109, 153, 164 origins of 30–9, 50–1, 57 politicization of 173, 215 in prose, see Borrow, George as racially superior to tinkers 56, 85, 118, 153, 189, 200, 250 ‘reformation’ of 54–5 romanticization of 84–5 as secret guild 38–9 tinkers and 30–40, 56, 85, 118, 153, 189, 200, 250 tinkers as closeted 45 as trans-European 31, 32, 47 Travellers vs. 3 Travellers and 3, 197–8, 202, 206, 215, 238 romanticization, of tinkers, see drama, Revival Romany Rye (Borrow) 79 ‘Romany Rye’ (designation) 79–80, 149, 289 Ross, Martin 124, 131 Rotha, Paul 232–3, 235 roving entertainers, see itinerant entertainers Rugged Path, The (Shiels) 143, 145, 200 ‘running away with the tinkers’ 135, 154, 157, 159, 160, 173, 191, 225, 271

324

Index

rurality Romanies and 13, 79–81, 84–5, 87, 89 tinkers and 13, 78, 81, 84–5, 86–9, 167 Russell, George 98 Ryan, Mary Ann 217 Said, Edward W. 271 Sallow-Skinned Tinker, The (Ó Coisdealbha) 136–41 Sampson, John 58, 61, 91, 93, 148, 153, 161, 285 satire 39 Scots-Irish (Ulster Scots) 15, 236, 254–60, 262, 263, 264 Irish-American Travelers and 15, 236, 254–7, 263 Scott, Sir Walter 12, 21, 157, 286 Guy Mannering 51–3 Jacobite Romanies in 51, 52, 54 Orientalization of Romanies by 50–1 Scottish Romanies in 45, 50, 54, 157 and Simson 46 Orientalization of tinklers by 47 tinklers and 46 Waverley 48, 55 Scottish Romanies 44–54, 153, 157 Scottish literature, tinkers and 44–54, 64, 157, 232 Scottish scholarship, tinkers and, see tinklers, as Hiberno-Scottish Scottish tinkers, see tinklers Scottish Travellers, see tinklers Secret Languages of Ireland, The (Macalister) 94, 153 ‘Secret Languages of Ireland, The’ (Meyer) 92 sedentarism, see also land ownership; nomadism vs. sedentarism; proprietorship vs. nomadism; settled community vs. Travellers 5–6, 289 Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (Arden) 19 Seton Hall University 145 settled community vs. Travellers, see also land ownership; nomadism vs. sedentarism; proprietorship vs. nomadism; sedentarism 8, 27, 67–76, 106, 125, 155, 171, 177, 187–94, 197, 205–8

settlement, of Travellers, see also Irish state, Travellers; Irish government reports, Travellers in 202–5, 212, 214, 238, 241 sexual freedom, of tinkers 60–3, 67, 77–8, 140, 149, 163–4, 191, 195, 224–5 Shadow of the Glen, The (Synge) 18, 65, 76, 77, 101, 108, 121, 142 sham weddings 60–1, 73 Sheeran, Pat 6, 207, 216–18 Shelta (Irish Traveller language) 2–3, 277, 289 in America 250 as artificial language 153 Berlagar na Saer (masons’ dialect) and 92 cant (early modern underworld language) and 32, 38, 42, 252 cant vs. 38, 42 Cant (Irish Traveller language) vs. 17, 161, 176 in Casey 221–2 as Celtic language 91 discovery of 17, 91–2, 152 in Finnegans Wake 94fn Gypsy Lore Society and 91, 92, 94, 95, 152 Hiberno-English and 13, 93, 95, 185 invisibility of 135, 152–6, 183, 185 Irish language and 159, 221, 252 in Irish literature 176–7, 183, 185, 191, 194, 221–2 in MacMahon 176–7, 183 in Murphy 185, 191, 194 Old Irish and 92 as pidgin 153, 154 Revival and 91–5 rogue literature and 38, 42, 92 Romani and 92, 152–3 as secret language 91, 153, 155 settled society in 68, 93, 181, 203 Synge and 93, 95 Traveller ethnicity and 152 Tuam (County Galway) dialect and 185 as unpatriotic 160 Shiels, George 136, 143, 286 Shoemaker, Henry W. 263

Index shuiler (tramp; obsolete Hiberno-English) 40–1, 290 Shuiler’s Child, The (O’Kelly) 41, 103, 106 Sigerson, George 113–14, 119, 286 Simson, James 40, 46 Simson, Walter 35–6, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 56, 84, 125, 286 singing, see music Smith, Adam 52 Smith, George 55, 199, 211 Snatch (film) 245–7 social Darwinism, see evolutionary theory Somerville, Edith 124, 131 song, see music Speakman, Harold 89, 98, 124, 286 Spencer, Herbert 115 Stage Irishman 35–6, 125, 136 Spanish Gypsies 33, 79–80, 144, 147–50 Starkie, Walter 148–9, 161, 286 Stephens, Edward 19, 86, 93, 104 Stephens, Laura 89–90, 118 stereotypes: of Romanies 30, 32, 41, 74, 80, 104, 149, 150, 199, 201 of tinkers 19, 35, 66–77, 104–5, 136, 137, 139, 189, 235, 241, 243, 244, 275 of Travellers 212, 213, 235, 243, 244, 246, 267, 275 Stormont 167, 202 Stuck (McDonagh) 228 superstitions, concerning tinkers 73, 150, 167, 241 Symons, Arthur 84, 95, 124, 126 Synge, Alexander 127, 128 Synge, John Millington 9–12, see also Tinker’s Wedding, The (Synge) and Aran Islands, The (Synge) anti-Englishness of 97 Arbois de Jubainville and 99 Arden and 200, 207 ‘Autobiography’ 114 ‘Ballad of a Pauper’ 90 Borrow and 80–1, 161 British literature and 99 ‘Can We Go Back Into Our Mother’s Womb?’ 114 ‘Duality of Literature, The’ 110 Étude Morbide 109–10

325 evolutionary theory and 14, 86, 97, 113, 114–22, 129, 130 field clubs and 85–6 French culture and 13, 97–102, 104, 108, 126, 88–9 Gaelic mytho-history and 100, 106, 111–14, 116–17, 120, 123 ‘Hibernicization’ of tinkers by 78–9, 84, 87–8, 173 identification with tinkers of 11, 19, 89, 90–1, 103–4, 107, 126, 165 ‘In West Kerry’ 64, 117, 119 Irish language and 99–100, 127, 140–1 ‘Last Fortress of the Celt, The’ 111, 113 Luasnad, Capa and Laine 122 MacMahon and 174–5, 178, 184, 231 in McNamara 165 Murphy and 207 ‘Old and New in Ireland, The’ 127 ‘Oppression of the Hills, The’ 44, 77 Orientalization of tinkers by 13, 58, 59, 96, 97, 113 Paris period of 13, 97, 99–103, 104, 105 ‘People and Places’ (Synge) 80, 83, 87, 120 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge) 9, 75–6, 101, 102, 117, 122–3, 132, 140 Richepin and 102–3 Riders to the Sea 18, 65, 93, 121 rogue literature and 63 Shadow of the Glen, The 18, 65, 76, 77, 93, 102, 121, 142 Shelta and 93, 58 Symons and 84, 95, 124, 126 tinkers vs. tramps in 44 tinkers as emblem of Irish rurality in 13, 78, 81, 84–5, 86–8 Traveller women writers and 209, 213–14, 218–19, 224 ‘Vagrants of Wicklow, The’ 20, 44, 75 Well of the Saints, The 60, 75, 121 When the Moon Has Set 102 Yeats, Jack and 219 Yeats, W. B. and 81, 109, 131, 161

326

Index

Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Corkery) 64 Synge and the Irish Theatre (Bourgeois) 63–4, 65, 67, 78, 85 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 112, 113, 124, 126, 127 Tappytoosey (Millar) 166–7 Task, The (Cowper) 34 television (US), Irish-American Travelers on 249, 252, 255, 260–1, 265–6, 268–9 ‘Tent, The’ (O’Flaherty) 189, 225 Terrible Baisht, The (Fitzmaurice) 138 This is My Father (film) 230, 235, 237, 239–42, 270 Theatre of Ireland 103, 108 Thompson in Tír-na-nÓg (MacNamara) 166 Thornton, Weldon 67–8 Time (magazine) 253 Tincéara Buí, An (Ó Coisdealbha) 135, 138, 139–42, 151 Tinker and the Fairy, The (Hyde) 106, 110 ‘tinker’ (pejorative) 16, 188, 190, 195, 201 ‘tinke’, origins of the word 10, 34–6, 40–2 tinker(s), see also Travellers; drama, tinkers and; Irish writing, tinkers and: as aboriginal exotics 13, 21, 45, 78, 83, 91, 97 the Anglo-Irish and, 89, 106, 125, 126, 134, 143, 160–1, 190–1, 192, 194 as artistic 13, 22, 88, 91, 97, 102, 104, 105 as anti-hero 134–52, 156, 175, 242–5 beggars vs. 43, 75, 203 as British cultural category 13, 37–43, 45, 200 ‘Catholicization’ of 14, 134, 161–3, 166 as Celts 20, 26, 35, 45, 57, 91, 164 as closeted Gypsies 45 as continental European category 13, 38–9 as criminal 11, 37, 77, 83, 90, 143, 162, 163, 210, 243–4, 245, 273 as cultural construct of Traveller 16

as disseminator of disease 14, 90, 168 as ‘drop-outs’ from majority society 29 earliest official reference to 43 as emblem of Irish rurality 13, 78, 81, 84–5, 86–9, 167 English-Irish tensions and 144, 150, 151 as fake Romanies 56 as Fir-Bolg 26, 27, 29, 127 as foreign 14, 29, 134, 136, 144, 160, 169, 200 freedom of 67, 68, 106, 141 ‘Hibernicization’ of 12, 14, 21, 44–5, 57, 78–9, 84, 87–8, 91–2, 160–2, 164, 173 impiety of, 162, 166 as ‘Irish Gypsies’ 35, 36, 41, 136, 161–2, 164, 167, 173, 211, 235, 245, 263 Irish language abilities of 14, 134, 135, 156, 159, 160, 164 Irish-language terms for 10, 40, 41 in Irish-language writing 28, 41, 135, 138–42, 159, 161, 162, 164 marriage and 60–3, 67, 158 North-South tensions and 107, 135–6, 165–8, 179–84 in Ordnance Survey 26 Orientalism and 10, 13, 25, 36, 58, 59, 91, 96–7, 113 origins of word 10, 34–6, 40–2 as parasitic 83, 90 as pre-Celtic survivals 10, 13, 22–9, 35, 45, 57, 91, 87, 111–12, 127 as pre-lapsarian 120–21 as racially inferior to Romanies 56, 85, 118, 153, 189, 200, 250 Romanies and 30–40, 56, 85, 118, 153, 189, 200, 250 ‘running away with the’ 135, 154, 157, 159, 160, 173, 191, 225, 271 satire of 39 as secret guild 38–9 sexual freedom of 60–3, 67, 77–8, 140, 149, 163–4, 191, 195, 224–5 social Darwinism and 118 Synge and, see Synge, John Millington; Tinker’s Wedding, The (Synge) tinklers vs. 2 tramps vs. 44, 74

Index Travellers vs. 16, 143, 173, 176, 177, 209–11, 239, 271–5 as undifferentiated Irish poor 4, 34, 44, 74, 81–2, 203, 204 urban vs. regional/rural and 7, 45, 81, 85, 125, 138, 141, 142, 165, 184, 240 Tinker’s Wedding, The (Synge): at Abbey Theatre 11, 18, 59, 214 as anti-clerical 65, 69 British literature and 10, 13, 64 challenge to stereotypes of 66–76, 112, 207 critical neglect of 11, 12, 19, 59, 64–5, 66 criticism of 63–9, 73, 74, 137 Druid Theatre production of 229 as exemplary text about tinkers 9–10 European literature and 10, 12, 13, 19, 20, 63, 66, 98, 102–3 first production of 65 Ibsen and 103 marriage in 62–3, 67–8, 73, 74, 214 Murphy and 207 as naturalistic representation 12, 19, 59, 65–6 priest in 59, 65, 68–73, 74, 75, 76, 102, 151, 231 Shelta in 93 rogue literature and 59, 60, 63, 70, 73 settled community vs. tinkers in 67–76 source material of 18–19 tinkers vs. tramps in 44 Traveller politicization and 11, 214 Traveller productions of 231, 273, 276 Traveller woman artist in 213–14 wealthy Travellers in 74 writing of 18 tinklers 232, 290 as Hiberno-Scottish 12, 35–6, 46, 47, 48, 50, 90 Jacobitism and 51, 52, 54 Orientalization of 12, 21, 44–57 perceived displacement of by Romanies 12, 46, 57 in Robbie Burns 48 in Scott 46 tinkers and 2, 90, 159, 235 ‘Tinkler’s Waddin, The’ (Watt) 64 tinsmithing 37, 39, 42, 45, 252

327

Toogood, Madelyne 252–3, 255, 261, 265 Tour in Ireland (Pococke) 123 tourism 132, 167, 206, 218–19 ‘Tramp, The’ (Stephens) 89 tramps 4, 36, 41, 57, 60, 74, 77–81, 87–90, 102, 112, 137, 142, 143 tramping 88–9, 160, 189, 232 travel literature 41, 89, 107, 164, 234 Traveller (film) 236, 237, 242–3, 266–8 Traveller Cant, see Shelta ‘Traveller’, origins of the word 43 Traveller(s), see also tinkers actors 231, 273, 276–7, 278 aesthetic norms of 229–30, 240 in America, see Irish-American Travelers in Britain 2, 4, 81, 245 campsites of 7, 9, 120, 275 Catholicism and, see also religion(s) 2, 161–4 class variation amongst 3, 74, 203, 241, 249, 251 as clothes-dealers 89, 141 colonialism and 27–8 cultural practices of 2–3, 77, 217, 225, 238 definition of 2 ethnicity and 2, 4, 10, 15, 27–9, 42–4, 138, 152, 158, 160, 164–5, 170, 174, 184, 203–5, 209, 212–13, 227, 239, 246 in film 15, 232, 234, 235, 236–47, 276–8 genetic origins of, research into 28 Great Famine and 4, 20, 29, 164, 195, 253 intelligentsia 208, 211 invisibility of 1, 5, 34–5, 183, 210, 221–2 legal recognition of 4, 212–13 living conditions of 7, 229, 277 literary canon and 209, 214, 217, 219, 231 modernity and 202, 235, 238–42 as non-literate 85, 182, 209, 221 oral culture of 15, 20, 181, 211–12, 214, 217 origin theories of 4, 20–1, 22, 25–30, 42, 164, 195

328

Index

Traveller(s), see also tinkers (Cont.) origins of word 43 politicization of 11, 14, 135, 152, 173–4, 184, 192, 196, 198, 202, 205–8, 215, 238 prejudice against 6, 187–90, 195, 207, 223, 242, 247 rogue literature and 39–40, 251–2 Roma vs. 3 Romanies and 3, 197–8, 202, 206, 215, 238, 245 Romanies vs. 3, 161 settled community vs. 8, 27, 67–76, 106, 125, 155, 171, 177, 187–94, 197, 205–8 settlement of 202–5, 212, 214, 238, 241 Tinker’s Wedding, The (Synge), and 11, 231, 273 tinkers vs. 16, 143, 173, 176, 177, 209–11, 239, 271–5 ‘Troubles’ and 165, 170, 171, 179, 183 violence and 206, 238, 243, 244 women writers 174, 209–31 ‘writing back’ of 209–31, 273 ‘Travellers’ (Carson) 169 Travelling Man, The (Gregory) 106 Trojan Eddie (film) 242–5, 268 ‘Troubles’, Travellers and 165, 170, 171, 179, 183 Tuam, County Galway 184–5 Tuatha Dé Danann 23, 25, 111, 290 Turn of the Road, The (Mayne) 107–8, 137 Tuchman, Gary 249 Two on a String (Hepenstall) 137 Twiss, Richard 33, 34, 286 Tyndall, John 115, 123 Ulster County, New York 261 Ulster Literary Theatre 165 Ulster Scots, see Scots-Irish Ulster Unionism, see also post-Partition polarization, tinkers and 4, 136, urban vs. regional/rural, tinkers and 7, 45, 81, 85, 125, 138, 141, 142, 165, 184, 240 urban poor 7, 8 urbandictionary.com 263–4

‘Vagrants of Wicklow, The’ (Synge) 20, 44, 75 Vallancey, Charles 23–4, 33, 160, 287 Victorian Britain, tinkers and, see Gypsy Lore Society, tinkers and violence, Travellers and 206, 238, 243, 244 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 145 wagons 136, 238, 242 Wahlberg, Mark 266 Wake, The (Murphy) 190, 192, 193, 194 Walsh, Maurice 14, 77, 155, 248, 287 Blackcock’s Feather 157 The Key Above the Door 156–7 MacMahon and 158 ‘The Quiet Man’ 157 Road to Nowhere, The 154–5, 157, 158–9 Wandering Jew 20 ‘Wandering Tribe, The’ (Gregory) 21 Ware, Sir James 23 Waters of Babylon, The (Arden) 196 Watt, William 64 Waverley (Scott) 48, 55 Weldon, Helen 94 West, Red 269 Well of the Saints, The (Synge) 60, 75, 121 Whelan, Kevin 83 When the Moon Has Set (Synge) 102 Where There is Nothing (Yeats) 60, 94, 95, 106, 125, 143, 152 Whistle in the Dark, A(Murphy) 186, 187–90, 191, 195, 196, 199, 201, 202 ‘white trash’ culture, see also race 230, 254–66, 269 Irish-American Travelers and 15, 230, 255–6, 266–9 Travellers and 229–30, 240 Wild Wales (Borrow) 35, 81 Wide, Sir William 111 Wide Sargasso Sea 210 Williamite Wars 82 William of Orange 4 Wilson, Jaqueline Zara 260, 263 Winship, Albert 264–5 Woodbridge, Linda 38

Index

329

World Romani Congress 215 Worthington, E. K. 108 Works of Ossian (MacPherson) 46 writers, Traveller, see also oral culture, Traveller; memoir, Traveller 20–1, 28, 154, 169–70, 180, 197–8, 174, 209–31, 281–2, 284 ‘writing back’ to Synge by 209–31, 273 ‘writing back’ to Synge 141, 209–31, 273 Wynette, Tammy 205, 230

Yeats, Jack B. 131, 132, 219, 287 Yeats, W. B. Autobiographies 116 Gypsy Lore Society and Purgatory 143–4, 145, 192, 195 rev. of Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (Leland) 93 Synge and 81, 109, 131, 161 tinkers and 58, 60, 125, 161 Where There is Nothing 60, 94, 95, 106, 125, 143, 152

‘Years of the Travellers, The’ (Botheroyd) 60

Zincaldi, The (Borrow) 80, 149 Zoli (McCann) 214