A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

But if rent was owing—and it usually was—and if it was not paid in the form of geese, or eggs, or pork, or some other products of low farming and laziness, it remained unpaid; for the landlord had no means of enforcing his claims by any law except the law of the jungle. He might muster his followers and plunder his debtors, and no doubt this system of rent-collecting prevailed for several years after one of the many “settlements” of the country had taken place, yet by intermarriage with the natives, and a general assimilation to their condition of life by the newcomers, these raids for rent became unpopular and impracticable. The consequence was that the landlords—such as remained on their estates—were living from hand to mouth.

But if the fact that the King's writ failed to run in these parts was of disadvantage to the landlords in one respect, it was of no inconsiderable advantage to them in another; for it enabled them with a light heart to contract debts in Dublin and in the chief towns. They knew that the rascally process server, should he have the hardihood to make any attempt to present them with the usual summons, would do so at the risk of his life; and a knowledge of this fact made the “gentry” at once reckless and lawless. The consequence was that Ireland was regarded as no place for a man with any respect for his neighbours or for himself to live in. It became the country of the agent and the squireen.

It was to one of the worst parts of this country that John Gunning brought his wife and four children—the eldest was eight years and the youngest three months—and here he tried to support them off the “estate.” He might possibly have succeeded if his aspirations had been humble and his property unencumbered. It so happened, however, that his father had been the parent of sixteen children, and the estate was still charged with the maintenance of ten of these. Thus hampered, Mr. Gunning and the Honourable Bridget Gunning were compelled to adopt the mode of life of the other gentry who were too poor to live out of Ireland, and they allowed the education of their family to become a minor consideration to that of feeding them.

Mr. Gunning and his wife were undoubtedly the originals of the type of Irish lady and gentleman to be found in so many novels and plays of the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. He was the original “heavy father” who, with the addition of a ridiculous nondescript brogue, was so effectively dealt with by numerous writers until Thackeray took him in hand; and Mrs. Gunning was the first of the tradition of Irish mothers with daughters to dispose of by the aid of grand manners and a great deal of contriving. True to this tradition, which originated with them, the lady was certainly the head of the household—a sorry household it must have been at Castle Coote—during the ten years that elapsed before the migration to England.

Mr. Gunning was a fine figure of a gentleman, a handsome, loquacious person with a great sense of his own dignity and an everlasting consciousness of the necessity to maintain it at something approximate to its proper level, and, like other persons of the same stamp, never particularly successful in the means employed to effect this object. It is doubtful if a loud conversational style, with repeated references to the brilliant past of his family and predictions as to the still more brilliant future that would have been achieved by its representative but for the outrageous fortune that flung him into the bogs of Roscommon, produced a more vivid impression upon his associates in Ireland than it would be likely to do among a more credulous community. In Ireland he resembled the young gentleman who went to educate the French, but was discouraged at the outset when he found that even the children in the streets spoke better French than he did. Mr. Gunning could teach the Irish squireens nothing in the way of boasting; and he soon found that they were capable of giving him some valuable instruction as to the acquiring of creditors and their subsequent evasion. Whatever their educational deficiencies may have been, it must be admitted that they had mastered these arts. Much as he despised his ancestral home, he found, after repeated visits to Dublin, that his heart was, after all, in Castle Coote, and that, for avoiding arrest for debt, there was no place like home.

The Honourable Mrs. Gunning must have become dreadfully tired of this florid person and of the constant worry incidental to the control of such a household as his must have been. Her life must have been spent contriving how the recurrent crises could be averted, and so long as she was content to remain in the seclusion of the Irish village her efforts were successful. We do not hear that the bailiffs ever got so far as the hall door of their ramshackle mansion; there was a bog very handy, and the holes which served as a rudimentary system of natural drainage were both deep and dark. The topography of the district was notoriously puzzling to the officers from the Dublin courts.

But with all her success in this direction one maybe pretty sure that her life must have been very burthensome to the Honourable Mrs. Gunning. She had social ambitions, as befitted a daughter of a noble house, and on this account she never allowed herself to sink to the level of the wives of the squireens around her, who were quite content with the rude jollity of an Irish household—with the “lashings and leavings” to eat, and with the use of tumblers instead of wineglasses at table. She was the daughter of a peer, and she never forgot this fact; and here it must be mentioned that, however culpably she may have neglected the education of her children in some respects, she took care that they avoided the provincial brogue of their Irish neighbours.

Perhaps it was because Walpole knew nothing of the tradition of the English settlers in Ireland that he referred in his letters to various correspondents to the appalling brogue of both the Gunning girls; or perhaps he, as usual, aimed only at making his correspondence more amusing by this device. But every one who knows something of the “settlements” is aware of the fact that the new-comers had such a contempt for the native way of pronouncing English that they were most strenuous in their efforts to hand down to their children the tradition of pronunciation which they brought into the country. They were not always so successful as they wished to be; but within our own times the aspiration after a pure “English accent” is so great that even in the National Schools the teachers, the larger number of whom bear Celtic names, have been most industrious both in getting rid of their native brogue and in compelling their pupils to do the same; and yet it is certain that people have been much more tolerant in this respect in Ireland during the past half-century than they were a hundred years earlier.

Of course, a scientific analysis of the pronunciation of the English language by, say, a native of the wilds of Yorkshire and by a native of the wilds of Connemara would reveal the fact that fewer corruptions of the speech are habitual to the latter than to the former, the “brogue” being far less corrupt than the “burr.” It was not enough for the settlers, however, that their children should speak English in Ireland more correctly than their forefathers did in England; they insisted on the maintenance of the English tradition of pronunciation, erroneous though it might be. So that the suggestion that the daughters of the Gunning family, who had never heard English spoken with the brogue of the native Irish until they were eight or nine years of age, spoke the tongue of the stage Irish peasant would seem quite ridiculous to any one who had given even the smallest amount of study to the conditions of speech prevailing in Ireland even in the present tolerant age, when employment is not denied to any one speaking with the broadest of brogues. Some years ago such an applicant would have had no chance of a “billet”—unless, in a literal sense, to hew, with the alternative of the drawing of water.

The truth, then, is that the Gunning girls had practically neither more nor less of that form of education to be acquired from the study of books or “lessons” than the average young woman of their own day who had been “neglected.” Between the years 1750 and 1800 there were in England hundreds of young ladies who were as highly educated as a junior-grade lady clerk in the Post Office Department is to-day; but there were also thousands who were as illiterate as the Gunnings without any one thinking that it mattered much one way or another.