Hugh Dorian was born in poverty in rural Donegal in 1834. He
survived Ireland's Great Famine, only to squander uncommon
opportunities for self-advancement. Having lost his job and clashed
with priests and policemen, he moved to the city of Derry but never
slipped the shadow of trouble. Three of his children died from
disease and his wife fell drunk into the River Foyle and drowned.
Dorian declined into alcohol-numbed poverty and died in an
overcrowded slum in 1914.
A unique document survived the tragedy of Dorian's life. In 1890
he completed a "true historical narrative" of the social and
cultural transformation of his home community. This narrative forms
the most extensive lower-class account of the Great Famine. A
moving account of the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary
circumstances, it invites comparison with the classic slave
narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.
Dorian achieves a degree of totality in his reconstruction of
the world of the pre-Famine poor that is unparalleled in
contemporary memoir or fiction. He describes their working and
living conditions, sports and drinking, religious devotions and
festivals. A sense of loss, closer to bereavement than nostalgia,
is threaded through the text: it is a lament for the might have
been -- the future as imagined before the Famine -- rather than the
actual past.
Dorian's narrative was never published in his own lifetime and
all but forgotten after the author's death. First published in
Ireland in August 2000, The Outer Edge of Ulster includes a
scholarly introduction that traces the troubles that beset the
author and locates the narrative in wider literary contexts.
Appearing for the first time inAmerica, this critically acclaimed
book offers an intimate look at the everyday lives of ordinary
people facing extraordinary challenges.
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