The Books That Define Ireland. Tom Garvin

United Irishman he had called for revolution, compelled the government to arrest him and forced it to make a ‘martyr’ of him. Through his arrest, trial and transportation, he had, he hoped, shamed the country out of what O’Connell called the politics of ‘moral force’. There was a chance of his countrymen seeing that the one and only remedy to Ireland’s grievances – to famine, emigration, political and legal corruption – was at ‘the edge of the sword’. He had made sure, ‘for the thing is not going to stop here’, that the breach between the Irish people and the Carthaginian government would be made henceforth wider and deeper than ever. Throughout the Jail Journals Mitchel referred to England as Carthage, a reference no nineteenth-century schoolboy would have missed to Cato’s relentlessly repeated declaration Delenda est Carthago (‘Carthage must be destroyed’).

      He followed an account of his motives with portraits of his fellow would-be revolutionaries. He described William Smith O’Brien as bold and high-minded, but capricious, unaccountable, and intractable; also, he was an aristocrat who could not see that his fellow aristocrats were not Irish, but the irreconcilable enemies of Ireland. On 18 October he learns of the ‘poor extemporised abortion of a rising in Tipperary’ headed by Smith O’Brien on 29 July. On the little information available to him Mitchel considered it to have been ill-judged because it was so badly organised and because it had so little apparent support.

      His captors, the Governor of Spike Island and the officers of The Scourge, the war steamer that conveys him to Bermuda, give him books to read and much of what he writes is triggered by his reading. He thanks God for Shakespeare. He reads Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, ‘a pleasant, rough kind of book, but with something too much hauling of ropes and handing of sails in it’. Dana had shipped himself as a common sailor on board a Boston ship bound to California, on a two-year trading voyage, and subjected himself to short rations and the insolence of a brutal captain; and all because he had heard the sea was good for weak eyes. Mitchel had weak eyes also but pondered the contrast with his own case. He received none of the rough treatment that Dana described but he also considered himself a freer man than Dana who went on to become a successful lawyer in Boston, and therefore, perhaps, more a prisoner, drudge, and slave now than ever. He wishes to experience a thoroughgoing storm but also confesses to not being able to keep his food down during a mild one. He thinks The Scourge a fine ship and finds its officers good-humoured and generous. He is determined not to write another trite travelogue of the kind written by any young lady sailing to India for a husband, by a missionary or by a literary naval officer.

      In a remarkable passage he sets down an inner dialogue between his Ego and a devil’s advocate Doppelganger. Why such a fiery zeal for the French Republic, his Ego is asked, given its indifference to Republicanism or the welfare of the human race in the abstract? Was this vehemence born ‘of pure hatred to England and a diseased longing for blood and carnage?’ Was it a hatred of the millions of honest people who lived in England minding their own business? Would it destroy an economy that kept millions in employment through investment and trade?

      Mitchel’s Ego retorts that the Anglo-Saxon race worships only money and believes that the world was created, is sustained, and governed, and will be saved by the only one true, immutable and Almighty Pound Sterling. France mints the circulating medium of ideals and sets up poorer nations with capital in that stamp. A true friend of the British nation would declare himself the bitterest enemy of its government and institutions but also one of those content with the economic status quo, including those amongst ‘the fed classes’ of Ireland who declared that the country was doing reasonably well when it was instead an exploited part of a bankrupt realm with its ‘hollow credit system’, ‘trading on what it knows to be fictitious capital’, living in terror of a coming crash, held together by ‘yellow chapless skulls of Skibbereen’ and ‘the ghosts of starved Hindoos in dusky millions’:

      Doppelganger. - Surely these sore evils are not incurable - by wise administration, by enlightened legislation: the ghosts and skeletons are not an essential part of the picture; not necessary to the main action of the piece.

      The Ego. - Absolutely necessary - nay, becoming more and more necessary every hour. To uphold the stability of the grand central fraud, British policy must drain the blood and suck the marrow of all the nations it can fasten its desperate claws upon: and by the very nature of a bankrupt concern sustaining itself on false credit, its exertions must grow more desperate, its exactions more ruthless day by day, until the mighty smash come. The great British Thing cannot now do without any one of the usual sources of plunder.

      But was its downfall worth the real horrors of war? Yes, insisted the Ego given the horrors of peaceful and constitutional famine. Because the Irish had been taught peaceful agitation in their slavery, they had been swept by a plague of hunger worse than many years of bloody fighting. The Ego in his dialogue admitted ‘bloody dreams of carnage’, a grisly frame of mind, a ‘high-blazing transcendent fury,’ a vehement thirst for vengeance and prescribed ‘copious blood-letting upon strictly therapeutical principles’: