Time: the forties, in Ballyquin, Co. Galway. It is a kind of appeal in story form to the Irish landlords to stay at home and “right Ireland’s wrongs.” The good points in the Irish character are well brought out, the brogue is well reproduced, and there is much humour. There are some glimpses of Dublin society. The bias is somewhat Protestant.
“MACEIRE, Fergus.”
⸺ THE SONS OF EIRE. Three vols. (Lond.: Newby). 1872.
Author styles himself “The last of the Sons of Eire,” an old broken-down Irish family living in Hampshire (Vol. II. brings them back to Ireland). A long autobiography, with a multitude of rather trifling incidents, much conversation, and a good deal of moralising. The portrait of the writer’s mother is interesting and curious. The Author seems Catholic and Irish in sympathies. In the end the teller marries the betrothed of his brother Brian, the real hero, who has been killed in a skating accident.
MACGILL, Patrick. “The Navvy Poet.” B. Glenties, Co. Donegal, 1891. Ed. at National school until he was twelve. At fourteen began to write verse for the Derry Journal. Soon after set out for Greenock with 10s. in his pocket. “Since then I have done all sorts of things, digging, draining, farming, and navvying.” In 1912 was a plate-layer on the Caledonian Railway.—(I.B.L., III., p. 71). His poems are Songs of a Navvy, Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrap Book, and Songs of the Dead End. Is now a soldier in the London Irish Rifles, and has written a good account of military life in The Amateur Army. A series of sketches from the firing line, entitled The Red Horizon, is in preparation.
⸺ CHILDREN OF THE DEAD END. Pp. 305. (Herbert Jenkins). 6s. 1914.
“Most of my story is autobiographical.”—(Foreword). It opens in the Glenties with a faithful picture of the people and their hard life. The scene then shifts to Scotland and depicts the toils and temptations that beset the men, and especially the girls, in their sordid and insanitary surroundings. The hero goes on tramp with “Moleskin Joe,” a philosophic vagabond, finely described; and the shifts they are put to and the scenes they come through all bear the mark of truth, as does the wild life led by the navvies at Kinlochleven. The description of these scenes in a London newspaper led to his employment on the press. The hero’s love for Norah Ryan is purely and touchingly delineated, and, save for one unhappy gibe at the P.P., the book is unobjectionable.
⸺ THE RAT PIT. Pp. 308. (Jenkins). 1915.
The story of Norah Ryan, the heroine of The Children of the Dead End, from her childhood in Western Donegal to her death, a woman of the streets, in a Glasgow slum. A heartrending story from start to finish, with scarcely a gleam of cheer. The Author has exceptional powers of observation and gifts of description, and the book is extraordinarily realistic. But the realism and the sombreness being exclusive, the effect is exaggerated even to falseness. Farley McKeown is impossibly villainous, the picture of the wake revolting because undiscerning, Norah’s innocence overdrawn. Yet on the whole the Author’s claim that it is a transcript from life, life seen and lived by him, is doubtless well sustained. There are several needless sneers at the priests, e.g., p. 286, which is wantonly unpleasant. The Author is not prurient, but he describes plainly and vividly scenes in Glasgow brothels. Good picture of the conditions of life of the Irish migratory labourers.