Author Biography
JOSEPH KEATING (1871-1934) was the son of Irish migrants to south Wales. He received a rudimentary schooling before starting his working life labouring in the coalmines. Subsequently, he educated himself sufficiently to embark on a career in journalism. He wrote short stories and popular novels, and some of his work achieved a degree of acclaim during the decade before the First World War. PAUL O'LEARY is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. He is author of Immigration and Integration: the Irish in Wales, 1798-1922 (2000) and editor of Irish Migrants in Modern Wales (2004).
Description
This eloquent memoir provides an unrivalled insight into the life of a child reared in a working-class Irish Catholic community in late nineteenth-century Britain. No other author succeeds in depicting so vividly the texture of a life delimited by manual work, home and community ties as experienced by Irish migrants of the period. At the same time, it charts the tortuous route by which a young man struggled to free himself from a life of manual labour by using his literary talents to become a journalist and a popular novelist. Published in 1916, it reflects the world and assumptions of an emigre community between the failure of the Fenian movement and the Easter Rising, and it includes a telling vignette of the aged Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. An insightful picture of the world of those Home Rule supporters who lived outside Ireland emerges from this book.
Introduction by Paul O'Leary
My birth
My beginnings at school
My burning sixpence
- I yearn to be a navvy
I go down a coal-pit
Danger
- I hear of Dickens and Byron
My troubles begin
Real overwork
My struggle for the sun
Deadliness of an easy job
Despair makes me think of enlisting
The Post Office
Reporting
I seek refuge in Cardiff
Good-fortune comes my way
An unexpected desire
- I discover my true love
My novel seeks without finding
London, the university of universities
My disapproval of London
Paddington Station
A new influence
- I lecture at Cambridge
My mysterious visitor
Youth grown old
Lunch at 'The Fountain'
I am a city clerk
Index.
"The reprint of this book and similar ones is of great importance in terms of Irish historiography."
Books Ireland
Sept 2005
"This is a fascinating record of the son of poor Irish immigrants struggling to raise himself out of poverty and the South Wales pits to become a socialist and well-known writer. An essential piece of social history."
Irish Democrat
2006
"University College Dublin Press has now published over thirty ‘Classics of Irish History'. These contemporary accounts by well known personalities of historical events and attitudes have an immediacy that conventional histories do not have. Introductions by modern historians provide additional historical background and, with hindsight, objectivity."
Books Ireland
Nov 2007
"Scholars of nineteenth-century Irish and Irish-American politics should reacquaint themselves with these classics, part of a long running and immensely useful series from University College Dublin Press."
Irish Literary Supplement
Fall 2008