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Outer Edge of Ulster - A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal (Paperback, New)
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Outer Edge of Ulster - A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal (Paperback, New)
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Total price: R676
Discovery Miles: 6 760
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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. And then he describes the catastrophe that
obliterated that world. Horror is remembered vividly but with
restraint: “in a very short time there was nothing but stillness;
a mournful silence in the villages; in the cottages grim poverty
and emaciated faces showing all the signs of hardships.” The
picture of starvation is stark but authentic: “the cheek bones
became thin and high, the cheeks blue, the bones sharp, and the
eyes sunk . . .. the legs and the feet swell and get red and the
skin cracks . . .”. And at last came “the dispersion . . . to
places which their fathers never heard of and which they themselves
never would have seen, had the times not changed.” No one," he
writes, “can measure the distance of the broad Atlantic speedier
and better than a father whose child is there.” 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. The final and
lasting image is of trauma without recovery: the wise-men who had
sat late into the small hours debating politics in the years before
the Famine congregated in the after years but sat now in silence
“their subjects . . . lacking words.” 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 in America,
this critically acclaimed book offers an intimate look at the
everyday lives of ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges.
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