William Carleton

William Carleton (b. 1794–d. 1869), novelist and short-story writer, was born into a rural Catholic family in Prillisk townland, near Clogher, County Tyrone, the youngest child of James Carleton, a tenant farmer, and his wife Mary Kelly, a locally renowned singer. Both parents were Irish speakers and richly versed in the stories and songs of Irish culture. Carleton’s lively childhood in the Clogher Valley proved a vital foundation to his later literary success, centered on his claim to be the first authentic Irish “peasant” novelist in English. Intellectually inclined and educated in hedge schools, Carleton entertained early ambitions for the priesthood but became increasingly disenchanted with the religion. In 1818, inspired by the eponymous hero of Lesage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas, he left home and set out to seek his fortune. Soon after arriving in Dublin later that year, he converted to Protestantism and in 1822 married Jane Anderson. Carleton held various temporary teaching positions until an encounter with the Reverend Caesar Otway, who encouraged him to submit stories to his anti-Catholic journal, The Christian Examiner, sparked a literary career. Carleton’s early fiction—including the very successful collection for which he is still best known, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (two volumes, 1830 and 1833), and Tales of Ireland (1834)—were much criticized for strident anti-Catholicism. Carleton then tried his hand at the novel: Fardorougha the Miser was serialized in the Dublin University Magazine (1837) and published in 1839; in all, he published fourteen novels of varying length and quality. Famously changeable in his politics, Carleton’s acquaintance in the late 1830s with the leaders of the Young Ireland movement, especially Charles Gavan Duffy, prompted him to reconsider the anti-Catholic polemic of his early work and attempt a more nuanced political position in his writing. Consequently, in his most prolific period of the 1840s, he produced a series of novels that addressed issues of the day, of which the best known are Valentine M’Clutchy (1845) and The Black Prophet (1847). Carleton’s turn to publishing in nationalist newspapers in the febrile 1840s seems to have secured him, in 1848, the government pension which he had long been seeking. Nevertheless, Carleton still struggled financially to support his family and, further beset with his own deteriorating health and increasing reliance on alcohol, the quality of his work began to decline. Carleton died of cancer on 30 January 1869, and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery, Dublin.