In March 1797 Tone recorded a conversation with Thomas Paine in Paris where he described the shattered state of Edmund Burke’s mind following the death of his son Richard. Paine retorted that it was the Rights of Man that had broken Burke’s heart and that the death of his son gave him an excuse to develop the chagrin which had preyed upon him since. Tone recorded that he was sure that The Rights of Man had tormented Burke exceedingly, but that he had seen himself the workings of a father’s grief on his own spirit and that Paine had no children. Two of Tone’s three children were to die of illness in France. Tone’s Autobiography is very much the story of his family by his family. All three memoirs, his own and equally well-crafted ones by his son William and his wife Martha, capture a life that cannot be reduced to any single political end.
BF
Notes
1William Theobald Wolfe Tone (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (Washington: Gales & Seaton, 1826).
2Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998).
7
John Mitchel, The Jail Journal (1861)
John Mitchel (1815–1875) wrote two hugely influential books. The focus here is upon the better-known Jail Journal, described by Patrick Pearse as the final gospel of the new testament of Irish nationalism.1 It opens dramatically on 27 May 1848 with his imprisonment and sentencing to fourteen-years’ transportation. His readers learn why he is being transported, through a series of flashbacks and asides, meditations on books Mitchel reads as he is shipped first to Barbados, then to Cape Town and on to Van Diemen’s Land and also through the observations he records of his journey. The Jail Diaries document a dramatic escape to New York in 1853. There he set up The Citizen, an anti-British and pro-slavery periodical in which he first serialised his Jail Journal between January and August 1854. Irishmen in America, he wrote in the first issue of The Citizen, could not endure the thought of accepting the defeat which had driven them from the land of their fathers and which had made Ireland an object of pity and contempt to the world. The Jail Journal first emerged alongside polemics against the British Empire, the economic and social ideas that Mitchel believed were integral to its success and caused the devastation of Ireland and alongside strident defence of the Southern slave-owning social order that he believed was the only hold-out against the triumph of such ideas in America.
Mitchel’s other influential book The Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps) also began life in serial form, this time in The Southern Citizen which was established in 1857 after he left New York in disgust for Knoxville, Tennessee. The Last Conquest depicted the Famine as the culmination of a process of colonisation whereby Ireland would in future be dominated by the liberal political economy and liberal ideologies that had built the British Empire.2 It offered a powerful polemic that in many respects resembled Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class. Both were very influenced by the anti-laissez-faire writings of Thomas Carlyle. Whereas Engels described the lives of the Irish poor in urban slums, Mitchel depicted their deaths as due to malign neglect, justified by laissez-faire doctrines at home. Mitchel influentially undermined the reputation of Daniel O’Connell as Liberator, blaming him for this liberal tyranny insofar as O’Connell was the only Irish leader able to do anything about it. Pro-slavery Mitchel attacked O’Connell’s preoccupation with Abolitionism, seeing it as a manifestation of the sham philanthropy of a British model of liberalism that had killed hundreds of thousands through famine in Ireland. Mitchel had little political influence during his life but his analysis of the Famine and his anti-liberal anti-colonialism became standard interpretations among the early twentieth-century nationalists who rejected Home Rule. Pearse was drawn instinctively to his revolutionary spirit. Griffith admired Mitchel’s contrariness, insisting in his 1913 foreword to a reprint of the Jail Journal that no excuses were needed for an Irish nationalist declining to hold the Negro his peer in right. James Connolly admired his critique of British colonialism but quietly sidestepped Mitchel’s intense antipathy towards any form of socialism.
The Jail Journal was Mitchel’s best and best-known book. It is much more than a polemic. He emphasises the decency and kindness of the prison wardens and governors, navy officers and marines he encounters. He never appears to exaggerate any hardships he experienced. Ideas and arguments that are stridently emphasised in his journalism and in his later book The Last Conquest, crop up as shifts in register. Mitchel the journalist and Mitchel the author of The Last Conquest wrote like a man possessed by great passions and greater hatreds. The Mitchel revealed in the Jail Journal was self-possessed. The reader learns of his beliefs and opinions but is invited to judge these against his character. Like all great political memoirs, from Julius Caesar’s to Barack Obama’s, Mitchel created himself as he wished others to see him. Near the end he describes how the book was written:
After all, this ‘Journal’ of mine is not, strictly speaking, a Journal at all; though, for convenience, it is occasionally dated. In truth and fact, it is written long after its ostensible dates. All these reflections, inferences, and predictions: I give exactly as I wrote them down at the time. I stand to them all; though I know that many will say subsequent events have belied them.
Seemingly the Jail Journal polished his original notes but did not introduce things he could not have known at the time, either because he was incommunicado or on the other side of the world from the things he was writing about. Because he was a prisoner much of what he wrote about was his own mental states, though the account of his escape reads like a ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure novel.
Page one begins with a striking account of his removal from a Dublin court on 29 May 1848 to a ship that will take him to Spike Island in Cork, the staging post for a journey he knew not where:
I had returned to my cell and taken leave of my wife and two poor boys. A few minutes after they had left me a gaoler came in with a suit of coarse grey clothes in his hand. ‘You are to put on these,’ said he, ‘directly.’ I put them on directly. A voice then shouted from the foot of the stairs, ‘Let him be removed in his own clothes’; so I was ordered to change again, which I did. I asked to what place I was to be removed. ‘Can’t tell,’ said the man. ‘Make haste.’ There was a travelling bag of mine in the cell, containing a change of clothes; and I asked whether I might take it with me. ‘No; make haste.’ ‘I am ready, then’; and I followed him down the stairs.
At Dublin’s North Wall he is escorted to a steam frigate which he learns is to bring him to the Spike Island prison in Cork. Captain Hall, the first of many friendly gaolers, conducts him to his cabin, orders his fetters to be removed and calls for sherry and water. Mitchel asks Hall if he is the author of a book recounting a visit to China which, it turns out, Hall indeed is. Both men discuss two books by another Captain Hall, that both had happened to read. ‘Your mind,’ his companion comments, ‘has been running upon revolutions.’ Mitchel: ‘Yes, very much – almost exclusively.’ The Captain: ‘Ah, sir, dangerous things, these revolutions!’ Mitchel: ‘You may well say that.’
Mitchel then turns on its head the impression of sangfroid that he just conveyed. ‘No doubt he thought me an amazingly cool character, but God knoweth the heart. There was a huge lump in my throat all the time of this bald chat.’ As he converses amicably to Hall he thinks of what might be going on in his desolate house at Charlemont Bridge in Dublin that evening, of his family, his five little children, ‘none of them old enough to understand the cruel blow that has fallen on them this day’ and, above all, his wife. Later in the same chapter, now on Spike Island, Mitchel again reveals the gulf between his outer composure and inner sense of despair. Once alone in his cell he cries for half an hour. Weeks later, in a relatively comfortable cabin in the prison hulk anchored off Bermuda he contemplates suicide but lists the reasons he must live. It would be an admission that he