Genealogy of Famine Diary in Ireland and Quebec.Ireland's Famine Migration in Historical Fiction, Historiography, and Memory

Th n l f F n D r n r l nd nd b :r l nd F n r t n n H t r l F t n, H t r r ph ,nd r

Jason King

Éire-Ireland, Volume 47, Issue 1&2, Earrach/Samhradh / Spring/Summer2012, pp. 45-69 (Article)

P bl h d b r h r n lt r l n t t tDOI: 10.1353/eir.2012.0011

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45Éire-Ireland 47: 1 & 2 Spr/Sum 12 The Genealogy of Famine Diary

Jason King The Genealogy of Famine

Diary in Ireland and

Quebec: Ireland’s Famine

Migration in Historical

Fiction, Historiography,

and Memory

When it was published in Ireland in 1991, Gerald Keegan’s Famine Diary, edited by James Mangan, was widely acclaimed as represent-ing “the authentic voice from beyond the grave of an Irish martyr of the Famine” (Jackson 8). Although the narrative had first appeared nine years earlier in Quebec under the title The Voyage of the Napari-ma, it was in Ireland that it proved a publishing sensation. Ostensibly the journal of an Irish schoolteacher who had emigrated to Quebec and perished on Grosse Île in 1847, the Famine Diary provided har-rowing testimony about the calamitous conditions on board the cof-fin ships and seemed to anticipate John Mitchel’s contention that “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine” (Mitchel, Last Conquest 219; also see Mangan 98). Short-ly after its publication in Ireland, the Famine Diary became a national bestseller, was excerpted in the Irish Times, broadcast nationwide in a series of readings on RTE radio, and The Voyage of the Naparima was anthologized in the “The Hidden Holocaust” section of The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada (103–54). The text’s popular reception was attributed by Jackson to its strident denunciation of the British govern-ment and the Anglo-Irish landlords, such as Lord Palmerston, which was perceived to be lacking in the professional scholarship of “anti-nationalist revisionist” historians (8).

Soon after its publication, however, the Famine Diary was exposed as a fraud. In an influential article in The Irish Review, Jim Jackson convincingly demonstrated that the narrative was derived from Rob-

46 Éire-Ireland 47: 1 & 2 Spr/Sum 12 The Genealogy of Famine Diary

ert Sellar’s The Summer of Sorrow (1895), a work of historical fiction by the Scottish born editor of the Huntingdon Gleaner in rural Que-bec, rather than the journal of a genuine famine migrant. Perhaps not surprisingly, professional historians greeted the exposure of Famine Diary as a “cautionary parable” (Akenson 16) and salutary lesson about the credulity to which Irish popular or “received memory [—as] distinct from the recall of contemporary witnesses” (Hirsch 106)—is prone. Its fictitious origins were ascribed to the fallacious tendency of popular memory to form impressions of the past more on the basis of nationalist received wisdom than the procedures of professional historical scholarship. According to Mary Daly, the “runaway suc-cess of the spurious Famine Diary, and its continuing sales despite being revealed as a piece of late nineteenth-century Canadian-Irish fiction—suggest a strong desire to wallow in its emotional horrors, perhaps at the cost of a wider understanding. For some U.S. and Canadian citizens of Irish descent the famine is in danger of becom-ing their answer to the Jewish Holocaust: evidence that the Irish too are a nation of victims, a causal explanation for mass Irish emigra-tion and a symbol of national unity” (71). “This farce might be taken as marking the final collapse of the ‘anti-revisionist’ case,” added D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, “if that case had ever been based on rational argument” (10). For Roy Foster, the reception of Fam-ine Diary was symptomatic of an “idea of self-validation through re-ceived memory” (30), which he associated with a “boom in pop his-tory” (33) and the sesquicentennial commemorations of the famine in general. Similarly, Donald Akenson cautioned that “the lesson” of the Famine Diary was “clear: the hunger for knowledge about certain aspects of the Irish diaspora is so great that one must guard strenu-ously against credulity, especially when the information that comes to hand is evocative, emotionally gripping, and fits with pre-existent stereotypes” (16). More recently, drawing on my own research, Mark McGowan has discussed the Famine Diary controversy in a man-ner that is less dismissive of popular memory, but he too cautions about the need to be “vigilant” in interpreting “the efforts of clerics and nationalists to mould [that] memory for their own purposes” (Historical Memory 15). According to McGowan, “those who imbibed the Keegan diary . . . had embraced a nationalist school of thought and proclaimed Sellar’s fabrication as further evidence that Mitchel


and Young Ireland were correct, and the current school of revisionist historians were dead wrong” (“Famine” 53–54). Most of these histo-rians perceived the Famine Diary to represent the misconceptions of popular memory, defined by anachronistic nationalist ideals, which they sought to refute through their professional scholarship.

My own research suggests, however, that “the lesson” of the Fam-ine Diary is far less clear than these historians imply. First, it needs to be emphasized that their reaction to the text—with the excep-tion of McGowan—was as knee-jerk and uncritical as that of the Irish public that enthusiastically embraced it. As soon as they were revealed to be works of historical fiction, both Famine Diary and The Summer of Sorrow were summarily dismissed as objects of schol-arly inquiry. A less peremptory and more interdisciplinary approach would interpret narratives of historical fiction as significant histori-cal documents in their own right, requiring rigorous analysis if their provenance is to be fully understood. Historians who were dismis-sive of Famine Diary simply cited Jim Jackson’s article and attributed its origins to Summer of Sorrow, yet never displayed any modicum of curiosity about why Robert Sellar, ostensibly “a Scottish-born Ca-nadian Orangeman” (Akenson 16), should be inspired to sing the praises of an Irish Catholic migrant in the first place. Nor did they inquire if Sellar himself had moulded the memory of the famine to suit his own purposes: for whereas Famine Diary excoriates, Sellar exonerates the British government for the calamity of Grosse Île. Finally, no one considered whether Sellar’s work of historical fiction might itself be based on factual sources.

This article examines the genealogy of Famine Diary and the trans-mission of famine memory through its source texts. More specifi-cally, it scrutinizes Robert Sellar’s manuscript records for Summer of Sorrow, which can be found in the same file in Library and Ar-chives Canada (LAC) as his original draft. It is my contention that although Sellar’s text and Famine Diary are works of historical fic-tion, they are actually based on factual sources and eyewitness ac-counts of the famine migration that attest to the shifting relations between Irish Catholics, French Canadians, and Anglo-Protestants in the mid-nineteenth-century Eastern Townships region of Quebec. Both narratives are derived, in particular, from the genuine, first-hand observations of two historical figures who ministered to the famine


migrants: namely, the benevolent Anglo-Irish landlord, Stephen De Vere, and Reverend Bernard O’Reilly, whose testimony can be found in newspaper recollections of the famine migration that provided the source for Sellar’s manuscript. Elsewhere I have argued “persuasive-ly,” according to McGowan, that Sellar’s character Gerald Keegan is a composite figure “based loosely on De Vere” (“Famine” 51), whereas this article further attributes his origins to Reverend Bernard O’Reilly. Like Stephen De Vere, O’Reilly became prominent as a result of his campaign to alleviate the plight of famine emigrants and to estab-lish vulnerable co-religionists in their own colonial settlements. As a French-speaking, Irish-born priest, O’Reilly not only tended to their suffering on Grosse Île in July 1847 but he afterward founded a society for French-Canadian colonization “on an English soil” (“sur une terre anglaise,” Crémazie 15) in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, for which he was celebrated by Quebec’s national poet, Octave Crémaz-ie, as a spiritual forefather of the French-Canadian ideal of “la surviv-ance” (King, “L’historiographie” 21–22).

Implicit in the genealogy of Famine Diary is a legacy of colonial politics in Quebec that binds the construction of famine memory to the struggles between Irish Catholics, French Canadians, and origi-nal British settlers for control of the Eastern Townships from which its sources emanate. The question of who was ultimately responsible for the suffering of Irish emigrants on Grosse Île was answered dif-ferently in each of its source texts, but their conceptions of famine memory were derived as much from the colonial context and po-litical struggles in Quebec as from Ireland itself. As I will argue, Bernard O’Reilly’s instigation of French-Canadian colonization in the region was directly motivated by his experiences on Grosse Île to prevent a similar fate from befalling his French and Irish parish-ioners. More specifically, he encouraged Irish Catholics to support the establishment of these colonial settlements to reciprocate for French-Canadian generosity in adopting famine orphans into their families in 1847. Indeed, O’Reilly was so moved by the hospitality that French-Canadians had displayed in caring for Irish children that it heightened his sense of empathy for his French-speaking parishio-ners. As the victims of catastrophe, the famine orphans provided a blank slate onto which his cultural, national, and religious ideals of redemption and salvation could be projected. They were transformed


into a symbol of French and Irish ethnic cooperation and commu-nity formation in O’Reilly’s oratory and writing, even if the coloniza-tion society he founded proved ephemeral and was forgotten within a generation. Historians who are dismissive of Famine Diary miss the point that it contains genealogical traces of authentic archival records like those of De Vere and O’Reilly.

Only a new approach to migration studies that is genuinely inter-disciplinary and transatlantic in scope can distinguish between the narrative’s layers of fact and fiction in its construction of Famine memory. If there is a “lesson” to be learned from Famine Diary, it is that such a clear distinction between history and memory, factual recall and fictional reconstruction, is less rigidly dichotomous than the text was claimed to exemplify. In reality, its genealogy is comprised of an amalgam of Canadian and Irish, contemporary and secondary, factual and fictional sources that entangle history and memory in each of its successive stages of composition over a period of a century and a half. The recent proliferation of memory studies in Ireland has led to a more nuanced understanding of the interrelation between the historical cir-cumstances of the Famine and its various modes of remembrance in Irish and diasporic locations (Corporaal, Frawley, Kelly) than was evi-dent in the critical reception of Famine Diary; “yet few detailed studies exist of the acts of transfer, historical and continuing, that have contrib-uted to the social memory of the Famine” (Kelleher 270).

The genealogy of Famine Diary provides one such case study of the transmission of Famine memory between Ireland and Quebec. It is not only the text’s genealogical traces but also its generic configu-ration as “a rare, intimate first hand recording of the great Famine” (Pat O’Leary c4) that has made it a vehicle for the popular recollec-tion of the event. In particular, the focalization of the narrative from this “intimate first hand” perspective defines each of its consecutive stages of composition within a continuum of factual and then fic-tional eyewitness representations of the Famine migration between 1847 and 1991: history shades into memory as personal recollection gives way to imaginative reconstruction, but the narrative perspec-tives of Stephen De Vere, Bernard O’Reilly, and then Robert Sel-lar and James Mangan’s protagonist Gerald Keegan remain one and the same. As Ross Poole argues, “what distinguishes memory from its historical analogue is its first-person character” (159): “its role is


to inform the present generation of its responsibilities to the past” (149). It is precisely the intimacy of its tone and stylistic immediacy of Famine Diary that accounts for the extraordinary popularity of its protagonist Gerald Keegan with the Irish public, but his first-person perspective is also mediated and transmitted from contem-porary eyewitness testimonials. As vehicles for the dissemination of famine memory, both Robert Sellar’s Summer of Sorrow and Famine Diary seek to inform readers of their “responsibilities to the past” in a diametrically opposing fashion, but their fictional recollections also obliquely register De Vere and O’Reilly as “first person” source progenitors. More specifically, the moral injunction of an eyewitness to embark on a course of action to ameliorate the suffering or prevent further displacement in memory of famine emigrants is a recurrent feature of each of their texts, whether they are based on personal ob-servation or fictive reconstruction.

The focalization of famine memory in these texts is also defined by the shifting relations between French Canadians, Irish emigrants, and established British settlers that delimit their respective fields of vi-sions. The successive accounts of Bernard O’Reilly, Summer of Sorrow, and Famine Diary lay claim to the memory of the famine migration to support or resist an ideal of French-Canadian and Irish-Catholic colo-nization and resettlement in Quebec. In fact, the exposure of Famine Diary’s fictional origins in 1991 was not the first occasion on which the writing of Robert Sellar had come to the attention of the Irish public. Sellar is best known for his polemical history entitled The Trag-edy of Quebec: The Expulsion of its Protestant Farmers (1907) in which he lamented the colonization of Quebec’s Eastern Townships at the behest of the Catholic Church in order to extend the parish system and separate Catholic schools into an area that had formerly been the domain of American loyalists and Protestant British settlers (Little, Ethno-Cultural Transition 5–15). In particular, Sellar denounced “the ‘peaceable conquest’ by the priests of the Eastern Townships [of] the Protestant stronghold of Quebec” (Tragedy 196), “a conquest without parallel” (198). According to Sellar’s biographer, Robert Hill, The Trag-edy of Quebec was initially conceived in 1893, shortly before he wrote The Summer of Sorrow, “as a way to refute Edmund Blake’s speeches in the British Parliament ‘instancing Quebec as an argument on behalf of giving home rule to Ireland’” (242). Indeed, the very idea that “Home


Rule has been [such] a grand success in Quebec that . . . Ulster need not dread a Dublin parliament” is explicitly repudiated in The Tragedy of Quebec (198).

By 1911 Robert Sellar had entered into correspondence with Sir Edward Carson and his Tragedy had found a readership in Ulster, where it became “a manual in the hands of opponents of Home Rule” (Hill 253). Sellar’s letters to Carson were also published in the Belfast Witness and then reprinted as a pamphlet entitled Ulster and Home Rule: A Canadian Parallel (1912). In this pamphlet, it is not the spec-tacle of the coffin ships but rather that of the Empress of Ireland sailing down the Saint Lawrence River to the 1910 Eucharistic Congress in Montreal, “made gay with streamers, [and] the Papal flag” (14), that Sellar invoked to horrify his Unionist readership. “What Que-bec is today Ireland will become under Home Rule” (5), he warned. Indeed, once “torn from the protecting arms of Great Britain, Irish Protestants may learn their fate in the story of the Protestants of Quebec” (19): for “when Quebec was granted Home Rule, it ceased to be British, it became Papal—give Ireland Home Rule and the like result will follow” (19). The precedent of Quebec made it “the duty of the Unionists in Ireland . . . to risk all, even their lives, rather than bow their necks to Home Rule” (20).

These anxieties of imperial abandonment are implicated in The Summer of Sorrow. As unlikely as it seems that Robert Sellar would create a sympathetic account of an Irish-Catholic famine migrant, let alone one that would inspire the nationalist effusions of Famine Diary, his story of Grosse Île is written in much the same spirit as The Tragedy of Quebec. The fact that Robert Sellar was a British imperial loyalist rather than an ardent Irish nationalist in no way makes The Summer of Sorrow less susceptible to bias than the Famine Diary. On the contrary, although Sellar serialized the narrative in his newspaper the Huntingdon Gleaner to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the famine in 1895, his loyalist sensibility shaped his perception of Grosse Île in a manner that was diametrically opposed to the strident nationalism of Famine Diary. Thus, he provides a highly exculpatory account of British imperial conduct during the famine that impugns only the Ca-nadian colonial authorities, whom Sellar also holds responsible for the abandonment of Protestant farmers in the Eastern Townships, for the neglect of Irish emigrants at Grosse Île. Although the narrative’s pro-


tagonist, Gerald Keegan, does express “indignation at the conduct of the landlords, the ship-agents, and of the quarantine officers” (Gleaner 348), the “most despicable [of] creatures,” he insists, “is the office-hunting Canadian politician” (433). Shortly after landing at Grosse Île, he charges that “the meanness of the Canadian government in dealing with [the emigrants] is shameful” (442). “The Almighty will surely have a reckoning with the rulers of Canada” (446), he adds, for “the callousness of the Canadian government to the suffering of God’s poor on this island” (456). By contrast, the “Imperial authori-ties” defrayed all expenses incurred at Grosse Île “without enquiry,” Sellar maintains, although the Canadian government’s inefficiency meant that little money actually “went to feed the famishing immi-grant” (462–63). “For the tragedy at Grosse isle in 1847, the Canadian government is accountable,” Sellar declared in a postscript to Summer of Sorrow. “There never was a calamity that could have been more easily averted, . . . [but] the British government did its part” (462–63). Ultimately, Sellar’s anti-Canadian sentiments were informed more by his feelings of isolation and neglect as a loyal British Protestant in an increasingly ultramontane rural Quebec than any strong concern he had about the predicament of the famine Irish. He transposed his own anxieties of imperial abandonment into the memory of the famine mi-grants. As fellow victims of colonial neglect, their plight merged in his imagination with that of the Protestant farmers driven out of the East-ern Townships, and the tragedies of Grosse Île and French-Canadian colonization became one and the same.

Thus, if the Famine Diary represents the distillation of nationalist received wisdom about 1847, then surely The Summer of Sorrow ap-pears the opposite extreme. It is in Robert Sellar’s source material for the narrative, however, that genuine eyewitness accounts of Grosse Île can be found. The most significant of these is a lengthy article by James O’Leary, entitled “Grosse Île, 1847,” that was published in the Catholic Record newspaper of London, Ontario, in four install-ments between 9 April and 30 April 1892, which can be found in the same Library and Archives Canada file as Sellar’s manuscript. Unlike James Mangan, the editor of Famine Diary, or Robert Sellar, James O’Leary was a skilled archivist who meticulously assembled contem-porary records and eyewitness testimonials from the quarantine sta-tion at Grosse Île, which he shaped into an authoritative historical


narrative. One of his most significant archival finds was a letter from Grosse Île on 11 July 1847 by Bernard O’Reilly that exclaimed “this is strong language, but the language of a priest and an Irishman . . . who writes on the coffins of the hecatombs slaughtered by legisla-tive neglect, much more than by the hands of sickness” (“Grosse Île, 1847”). Because of the difficulty of communicating from the quaran-tine station, O’Reilly’s letter was only published sixteen days later in the Quebec Mercury on 27 July 1847. In his letter, O’Reilly declared it his “unalterable conviction . . . that no sacrifice should be deemed great by the Government, or the Legislature, which might save to humanity so many lives, to Ireland so many grateful children, to the Empire so many subjects. I am not to be told that the Imperial Gov-ernment would hesitate for a single moment,” he added, “to reim-burse the Province for every shilling expended in a cause so sacred in an emergency unparalleled in the history of nations.” Although O’Reilly’s exhortations were clearly intended to ameliorate condi-

Famine Diary: Journey to a New WorldDublin: 1991, 2003

Voyage of the NaparimaQuebec: 1982

Black 47: A Summer of SorrowGerald Keegan

The Untold Story: The Irish in CanadaToronto: 1988Summer of Sorrow, Robert Sellar

Huntingdon, Quebec: 1895

James O’Leary“Gross Île, 1847”

Catholic Record (London, Ontario)9, 16, 23, 30 April 1892

Stephen De VereLetter to Select Committee, 30 November 1847

British Parliamentary PapersEmigration, v. 5, 45–48

Stephen De VereUnpublished Diary and Letterbook 1847

Trinity College Dublin ManuscriptsMSS 5053, 5061, 5062, 5075, 507a

Bernard O’ReillyLetter from Grosse Île

to Quebec MercuryPublished on 27 July 1847

Bernard O’ReillyLetter from Grosse Île

to Quebec MercuryComposed on 11 July 1847

Genealogy of Famine Diary


tions in quarantine, Robert Sellar strategically misinterpreted them in an exculpatory fashion in Summer of Sorrow as evidence that the British “Imperial Government” did indeed “not hesitate for a single moment” but rather “did its part.” And yet, Bernard O’Reilly had never specified whether the “legislative neglect” of famine emigrants was attributable to either the British imperial or Canadian colonial authorities. Indeed, when the question was put to him directly at a commission of inquiry instituted by Montreal’s Board of Health on 23 July 1847, he answered simply that it was “of very little impor-tance” whether it was “the duty of the Imperial authorities, or . . . the Provincial Government” (O’Gallagher and Dompierre 197) to ameliorate conditions, but that action had to be taken, because, he stated, “many thousands of my fellow-creatures, my fellow country-men, and subjects of this empire, . . . have been sacrificed to neglect and improvidence” (O’Gallagher and Dompierre 194).

From his experience of ministering to the famine migrants, O’Reilly began to perceive their suffering in not just spiritual but also socially redemptive terms. In 1847 he had been stationed as a missionary priest in the Eastern Townships village of Sherbrooke, where he had arrived a year earlier from a much larger urban parish in Quebec City. As a missionary priest, he served a mixed and largely impoverished congregation of French-Canadian and Irish-Catholic parishioners who were scattered over a vast area on much less arable land than the Protestant British settlers, later championed by Robert Sellar, who were the original inhabitants of the region. O’Reilly was summoned from Sherbrooke to serve on Grosse Île from 6 July to 14 July 1847, and then a week later he testified about his experiences, on 23 July, before the commission of inquiry instituted by Montreal’s Board of Health. It was after he left Grosse Île and was traveling en route to Montreal that O’Reilly had a profoundly formative experi-ence: on 18 July in the town of Trois Rivières, he presided over the mass adoption of a party of famine orphans, whom he had escorted from quarantine, into French-Canadian families. As described in a letter by Father Thomas Cook, “Messrs Harper and O’Reilly went through here this morning, in great spirits. Charitable people every-where are arguing over who is to have the orphans whom they have brought from Quebec” (O’Gallagher and Dompierre 106).

The memory of this generosity engendered a heightened sense of


empathy in O’Reilly for his French-Canadian parishioners. In a lec-ture that he delivered in New York in 1852, he specifically paid tribute to the “Bishops, Priests, Nuns, and people of Canada, in 1847,” but most especially:

the French Canadian people: for, . . . so strongly were their sympathies aroused towards the emigrant—that although most parishes already wept for their dead, or feared for their sick Pastor, and that it ap-peared certain death to take an emigrant under one’s roof: still, as each Parish Priest returned from Quarantine, or from Montreal, the parishioners came forward to meet them at the landing places with long trains of carriages, to escort the Priest and his numerous or-phans home. And touching was the meeting of those French mothers with the little children misfortune gave them. (True Witness, Decem-ber 17, 1852)

As a parish priest himself who escorted famine orphans from quar-antine into the arms of the “charitable people” of Quebec, O’Reilly provided one of the first documented Irish expressions of gratitude for French-Canadian generosity in 1847. He recalled “the meeting of those French mothers with the little children misfortune gave them” as a model of femininity in later works such as The Mirror of True Womanhood; A Book of Instruction for Women in the World (96–103); and it became a recurring motif of Irish famine memory in Quebec (see King, “Remembering Famine Orphans”).

More specifically, Bernard O’Reilly perceived the famine orphans to draw the Irish and French-Canadian communities together into a more singular congregation united by their shared calamitous ex-perience. Such French-Canadian devotion to the famine orphans also inspired him, in turn, with a heightened sense of concern that the children of his French parishioners might suffer a similar fate. The mass display of compassion for Irish emigrants that O’Reilly had borne witness to intensified his own feelings of empathy for his French-speaking congregation that was beleaguered, isolated, and increasingly vulnerable in the Protestant Eastern Townships, with very limited access to pastoral care. Although this was a perennial problem for missionary priests in the sparsely inhabited and widely scattered communities of the region, O’Reilly undertook to reshape its patterns of settlement in order to safeguard the faith and future well-being of the children of his parishioners.


Thus, while he was deeply affected by his experience on Grosse Île, it was the plight of the famine orphans that politicized O’Reilly to take action on behalf of not just his Irish but his French-Canadian congregation as well. Less than three months after he returned from the quarantine station, O’Reilly began to advocate for the establish-ment of a society for French-Canadian colonization of the Eastern Townships under the auspices of clerical leadership. As J. I. Little has noted, he wrote frequently to both French and English language “newspapers in Quebec and Montreal [which] published [his] ac-counts of young French-speaking families close to perishing from hunger and cold in the midst of a generally affluent population, and of youths placed in English-speaking families” where they risked los-ing their language and their faith (Ethno-cultural Transition 16; also see Nationalism 81–87). He was particularly sensitive to French-Canadian anxieties of apostasy and assimilation in this predominantly Anglo-Protestant region of Quebec. Hence, O’Reilly wrote three open let-ters to the French-Canadian press that drew significant parallels between the plight of his French parishioners and that of the fam-ine Irish. In each of them, he sought to provide a bulwark against assimilation by encouraging greater French-Canadian colonization of the region “organised around the parish system so that Catholic churches and schools could be supported” (Little, Nationalism 83).

It was in O’Reilly’s second open letter, however, written on 3 No-vember 1847, that the analogy he perceived between French Canadi-ans and the famine Irish became most pronounced. In his view, both groups were highly vulnerable to dispossession because they were not proprietors in their own right but rather dwelled on insecure ten-ancies, with inadequate access to markets or arable soil, that often forced them to emigrate to the United States from their native lands. Thus, he lamented at length:

With all this beautiful land and intellectual glory, moral and physical, under our possession in Canada, thousands of French Canadians are forced into exile in order to earn a living, and thus lose themselves in the ocean of Yankeeism. Or, they settle down close to the border, on British soil where they are almost forced to see their kids grow up before their eyes without schools, without instruction, even forget-ting their language, their origin, their religion. And we are filled with indignation at the sight of this multitude of unfortunate Irish people,


which their inhuman masters, more barbarous than kings and slave merchants from Africa, packed into the holds of ships, sweating in misery and filth; lying under the double embrace of hunger and fever . . . with even worse suffering waiting for them on the American shore. And do we not think that a similar system exists right before our eyes, on our soil?; and that our brothers have to abandon the fertile fields of their childhood to expose themselves to all the temporal and spiri-tual curses that surround them and their offspring, once they settle down amongst a hostile race that is enemy to their language and way of life! (“Lettre II”)1

There is a considerable ambiguity in O’Reilly’s declamation about whether the hostile race he is alluding to is the Anglo-Protestants of Ireland, the United States, or Quebec. In any case, such inhuman masters appear bent on the spiritual and temporal deprivation of the French and Irish Catholics under their thrall. O’Reilly’s rhetoric is highly evocative and imbued with the language of sensibility as it draws on abolitionist imagery to equate the plight of famine emi-grants and French Canadians with that of African slaves on the mid-dle passage, which was a common point of comparison for observers of the Irish exodus (Bigsby 23; Melville 304; Whyte 15). His underly-ing purpose though is to enhance the sense of empathy between his French and Irish parishioners, who are both exposed to the danger of forgetting their language, their origin, and their religion without a more secure claim to their land. The suffering of the famine mi-

1. Translation by Jean-Marc Leduc. In French: “Avec tous les moyens de gran-deur et de gloire intellectuelle, morale et physique sous notre main en Canada, des milliers de Canadiens sont forcés de s’expatrier pour gagner leur vie, et se perdent ensuite dans l’océan du yankeeisme. Ou, se fixant dans le voisinage des frontières et sur le sol britannique, ils sont réduits à voir leurs enfants grandir sous leurs yeux sans écoles, sans instructions, oubliant leur langue, leur origine, leur religion. Et nous sommes remplis d’indignation à la vue de cette multitude d’infortunés irlandais, que leurs maitres inhumains, plus barbares que les rois et marchands négrieres de l’Afrique, entassent pêle-méle à fond de cale, dégoûtants de misère, de malpropreté; gisant sous la double étreinte de la faim et de la fièvre, et les envoient ensuite à la dérive sur le sein des mers, sans souci de leur sort futur, des souffrances plus longues encore qui les attendent aux rivages americains. Et nous ne pensons même pas qu’un système semblable existe sous nos yeux, autre notre propres sol (sic?); et que nos frères se trouvent dans la nécessité de laisser (sic?) tous les jours les champs fertiles de leur enfance, pour s’exposer à tous les malheurs temporels et spirituels qui les entoureront et leurs enfants après eux, une fois qu’ils seront établis au milieu d’une race ennemi de leur foi et qui leur est étrangerè de langue et de moeurs!”


grants will also afflict French Canadians in the Eastern Townships, he warns, unless the continuance of the French language and a Cath-olic way of life can be ensured.

That could best be achieved, in O’Reilly’s view, by mobilizing his French and Irish parishioners on behalf of a common cause. Hence, in his third letter (“Lettre III”), written on 31 January 1848, he insists that the surest way of safeguarding the French language, the Catholic religion, a pious way of life, and the distinct character of the French population is to solidify their alliance with the region’s Irish Catho-lic settlers. His letters to the English press championing the cause of French Canadians were only slightly more circumspect than his correspondence in French. As he wrote to the reformist Pilot (4 May 1848): “The French Canadians are daily insulted for their want of en-ergy—for their apathy to improvement; and when they unanimously respond to the voice of a young obscure stranger, calling on them to unite in town and country, . . . they are taunted . . . and condemned to irremediable degradation, and unavoidable inferiority! . . . The man who sentenced them yesterday,” O’Reilly added, “to be eternally hewers of wood and drawers of water, because of their supposed unwill-ingness to mend their condition, will denounce today both priests and people, for daring to make one step on the road of reform.” The largely Irish Catholic readership of the Pilot was highly susceptible to such entreaties from “a young obscure stranger” who was one of their own, but O’Reilly was also severely denounced in Quebec’s Protestant evangelical and French anticlerical publications such as the Montreal Witness (15 May 1848) and L’Avenir (28 June 1848). Indeed, his pro-posal for French Canadians to settle together in the company of a priest, “who will cut the first tree in each new settlement” from which a cross would be made and “erected on the eve St. Jean Baptiste, the patron saint of French Canadians,” was witheringly reported in the Montreal Witness (17 April 1848); the newspaper also took exception to O’Reilly’s scheme as being intended for the exclusion of Protestants and “extension of the tithe field” into an area of British settlement.

At first, though, his endeavours attracted considerable support from a wide cross-section of French-Canadian clerical and political society, and within months, they had became the basis for govern-ment policy. By March 1848, O’Reilly’s ideas had begun to be put into practice with the launch of the Association for the Establishment of


French-Canadians in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada (Asso-ciation pour l’éstablissement des Canadiens-Français dans les Town-ships du Bas-Canada), which made him highly influential in Quebec, although Little argues that his endeavour was doomed from the start since he tried to placate too broad a spectrum of conservative and radical opinion (“Peaceable Conquest” 107). Montreal’s Bishop Ig-nace Bourget was named official patron of the association, but it also mobilized support from the more militant and increasingly anticleri-cal followers of the ex-revolutionary Louis-Joseph Papineau, recently returned from exile, who actually shared a stage with O’Reilly at a mass rally in Montreal on 5 April 1848 (Little, Nationalism 84–85). Conversely, as J. I. Little also notes, the French-Canadian colonial administration of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, which after a long struggle had only recently been conceded Responsible Government two months beforehand, and the governor general, Lord Elgin, “had little choice but to throw [their] support behind the project” (Ethno-cultural Transition 16) in the hope of co-opting what could become, in Elgins’s phrase, “a potent instrument of agitation” (cited in Lit-tle, Nationalism 86). Such official sanction alienated the association’s more radical French-Canadian followers in turn, who promptly ac-cused O’Reilly in L’Avenir (28 June 1848) of meddling in politics. In response, he wrote a highly ambiguous letter to La Minerve (30 June 1848) that tacitly signaled his support for government policy, but in which he also protested that “being Irish, and knowing the history of my country, and the consequences of discord between brothers, may I no less desire union between you French Canadians?”2

In the face of such pressure from Protestant evangelical and French-Canadian anticlerical quarters, O’Reilly sought to sanctify the association for French-Canadian colonization in the Townships by invoking the memory of the famine orphans. He also went to great lengths to reassure Irish Catholics that the interests of French Cana-dians and their own were one and the same. In an address that he de-livered in Quebec City on 27 March 1848, he insisted both in French and then in English that it was the sacred duty of the Irish to support French-Canadian colonization in recompense for the generosity and

2. Translation by Jean-Marc Leduc. In French: “Irlandais, et connaissant par l’histoire de mon pays, les conséquences de la discorde entre freres, puis-je ne point désirer l’union entre vous Canadiens-français?”


hospitality received by the famine orphans in the preceding months and weeks. The Irish should be especially empathetic to the plight of landless French Canadians, O’Reilly avowed, because they too had experienced dispossession and colonial injustice. “If political motives are to be imputed,” he declared,

because the welfare of one class or one race is especially advocated, it ought to be borne in mind, that it is among that class alone, that lies the deep and inveterate evil I would fain remedy. If, in fine, by claiming for my flock, and for the French Canadian inhabitants of Lower Canada, some reparation for the neglect or the injustice of the Colonial administration during half a century, I am to be impeached with betraying the interests of my own countrymen at large,—I must not submit in silence to the accusation. Were it a crime in the eyes of Irishmen for an Irish priest, to promote the welfare of his flock, I should blush to bear an Irish name. (Quebec Mercury, 30 March 1848)

Thus, in promoting the welfare of his flock, O’Reilly sought to enlist the support of the Irish side of his congregation to help remedy half a century of injustice suffered by his French-Canadian parishioners to resettle them on more arable land. In his view, the Irish had a moral obligation to demand reparations for French-Canadians in espousing their cause, “a duty of memory” to pursue “justice . . . to an other than the self” (Ricouer 89) in a spirit of solidarity.

Hence, O’Reilly dwelt at length on this sense of Irish responsibility to be supportive of French-Canadian colonization in recompense for the mass adoptions of famine orphans. Less than six months after he had returned from Grosse Île, and less than two weeks after Bishop Bourget in Montreal had issued a pastoral letter imploring French Ca-nadians to take in yet more Irish children, O’Reilly adverted to their charity as a sacred bond that united the French and Irish in the prov-ince. To his Irish brethren, he declared that he would not be worthy of his collar

if I attempted to stir up strife between the Irish exile on the banks of the St. Lawrence and his Canadian brother, when I cannot pass a threshold in town or country where I may not see some fatherless, motherless orphan from Ireland, seated at the fire-side, and enjoying the sunshine and warmth of French Canadian sympathy and protec-tion. . . . The noble Canadian Clergymen who descended to an early grave, the victims of their devotedness to my poor stricken country-men, would they not raise their voices from the tomb to accuse me


of unnatural, unparalleled ingratitude? How could I visit Montreal where I saw those heroic nuns attending by night and by day the death bed of the emigrant; and, day after day, laying down their lives in the performance of the work of Charity? It is only a week ago, that I heard the death-knell of another of these angels of earth, who caught the contagion whilst attending upon our poor orphans. . . . How many more of that devoted French Canadian Clergy will be torn from their flocks and their heart-broken parents by the hand of pestilence? And all this for the sake of the Irish emigrant! Could there be a pulse in my heart that would not throb for such a people? No! If I loved them not, praised them not, blessed them not, you would spurn me from you to some other shore where I could no longer see the emigrant’s unhonored grave, and beside it the grave of the Cana-dian priest and the Canadian nun, who cheered the lonely exile’s last hour. . . . But the scenes of Grosse Isle and Montreal would follow me thither; the spectacle I beheld at Three Rivers and in the neighbour-ing parishes, would come back to my mind’s eye;—those Canadian women as I landed on the wharf, with my orphan charge, craving them from me, unappalled by their squalor and the dread sickness that spoke through every wan feature, pressing them to their bosoms with more than maternal fondness and heroism, and bedewing them with tears of sympathy! (Quebec Mercury, 30 March 1848)

If the Irish were the beneficiaries of French-Canadian compassion, then they were beholden to reciprocate in kind. In the midst of con-tinued French-Canadian and Irish suffering, O’Reilly sought to raise the ghosts of the famine dead and to swear on the “emigrant’s grave and . . . the grave of the Canadian priest and the Canadian nun” that it was his sacred duty to honor the sacrifice made by the French-Canadian people to better establish them on their native soil. He conjures a spectacle of reproach from the dead should he “stir up strife between the Irish exile . . . and his Canadian brother” to sunder the bonds of his brethren, their fraternal ties having been sanctified by suffering in the fever sheds and incarnated in famine orphans. Should he break faith with either side of his congregation, they “would come back to [his] mind’s eye” in silent condemnation.

Both in his oratory and his writing, O’Reilly sought to further legitimate his association by invoking the authority of its patron, Bishop Bourget, who also envisioned famine orphan adoptions and French-Canadians colonization to be divinely ordained. On 17 June 1848, Bourget himself issued a pastoral letter which suggested that


a British grant partially earmarked for their association “was a di-rect reward for French-Canadian loyalty” and taking in Irish chil-dren (Little, Nationalism 86–87). In actual fact, the British grant of £20,000 was to reimburse the Canadian colonial authorities for expenditures incurred at Grosse Île and was only paid after several months of dithering and prevarication as well as the province’s threat to default on interest payments (Little, Nationalism 85): notwith-standing Robert Sellar’s subsequent claim, noted above, that it was offered “without enquiry” when the British government did its part. But Bishop Bourget was oblivious to such niceties, proclaiming that O’Reilly’s association would establish French-Canadians on their na-tive soil in reward for their charity (“l’Association qui entreprend de vous établir sur votre sol natal, comme récompense de votre charité,” 5). Like O’Reilly, Bourget hallowed the memory of famine orphan adoptions to help legitimate their association for colonization of the Eastern Townships.

Accordingly, there is an extraordinary historical irony underlying the genealogy of Famine Diary that extends from the letters of Ber-nard O’Reilly, through the ultraloyalist Protestant Robert Sellar’s The Summer of Sorrow and The Tragedy of Quebec, to the unreconstructed nationalism of Famine Diary itself. Implicit in this genealogy is the cultural memory of the famine Irish transmitted, in a highly medi-ated fashion, from authentic archival sources to works of historical fiction that were published during the fiftieth anniversary and before the sesquicentennial of the famine migration. The very founder of the movement for French-Canadian colonization in the Eastern Town-ships that Robert Sellar so lamented in The Tragedy of Quebec was not, in fact, a French but rather an Irish priest: the same Bernard O’Reilly who provided one of Sellar’s most influential, albeit misinterpreted, sources for Summer of Sorrow. Unbeknownst to Robert Sellar, it was Bernard O’Reilly who instigated the “peaceable conquest” of “Que-bec’s Protestant stronghold” (Tragedy 196) in the Townships to safe-guard the future of French-Canadian and Irish children. The very ex-tension of the parish system and Catholic schools into the region that O’Reilly championed as bulwarks against assimilation were regarded by Sellar fifty years later as the underlying cause of Protestant expul-sion. Thus, he identified the plight of Quebec’s Protestant farmers with that of Ulster Unionists similarly threatened by the harbinger of


Home Rule in 1912, whereas O’Reilly had equated the predicament of his landless French-Canadian parishioners with that of the famine Irish he ministered to on Grosse Île in 1847. Such confessional divi-sions in Ireland and Quebec had a profound impact on the shaping and transmission of cultural memory as reflected in each stage of the composition of Famine Diary from both factual and fictional sources.

Ultimately, its genealogy originates in the testimony of eyewit-nesses like Bernard O’Reilly, whose social vision was vested in secur-ing a future for vulnerable French-Canadian children and especially famine orphans. As the offspring of a martyred church, they became the spiritual progeny of both the French and Irish sides of his congre-gation. As highly malleable children in a new world, they provided a cultural tabula rasa on which both religious and nationalist ideals of redemption and salvation could be inscribed. As youthful victims of an unprecedented historical catastrophe, they paradoxically became ex-emplary figures in the French and Irish collective imagination that sig-nified the possibility of cultural and national renewal. Thus, both Bish-op Bourget and Bernard O’Reilly invoked their memory to mobilize French-Canadian and Irish support for their movement for Catholic resettlement in the Townships. The fact that O’Reilly’s social vision in 1847–48 became Robert Sellar’s subsequent nightmare of Protestant expulsion attests to the success of his scheme, even if most historians argue that it only augmented rather than initiated a process of cultural and demographic transition that was already well underway. Be this as it may, O’Reilly himself did not stay in Quebec to observe his ide-als take root but departed in June 1848. As I have argued elsewhere, a generation after the famine, Quebec’s Irish clerical and lay leaders were in open conflict with Bishop Bourget and their French-Canadian brethren, and Bernard O’Reilly himself had been long since forgotten (“L’Historiographie” 24–25). Nevertheless, as he subsequently rose through the ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, O’Reilly remained stead-fast in his commitment to the cause of Irish nationalism and the prin-ciple of land redistribution that he first championed in Quebec. In later years, he became an ardent supporter of the Land League and Home Rule in Ireland that Robert Sellar so disparaged (Cause of Ireland 495–512). O’Reilly’s convictions were born in the fever sheds and lazarettos of Grosse Île, and mediated by the memory of French-Canadian gen-erosity to famine orphans, whose cause he espoused in turn.


In conclusion, the “lesson” of Famine Diary is not that it provides a “cautionary parable” but rather a conduit to the contemporary eyewitness testimony of historical actors such as Bernard O’Reilly. Its genealogy also offers a more discernible trajectory for the dis-semination of famine memory from eyewitness observation to subse-quent recollection than the plethora of monuments that have become the object of increasing critical interest. There is now a growing lit-erature on the artistic and material composition, geographical dis-tribution, and cultural significance of famine monuments in Que-bec (Gautier, McMahon, O’Brien) and elsewhere (Kelleher, Kelly, Mark-Fitzgerald), but still insufficient recognition that these com-memorative markers represent not only the perpetuation but also the potential atrophy of famine memory, the solidification of a fluid sense of historical consciousness into the form of a fixed object (Forty 7).

A case in point is the response of “An Emigrant” at the height of the famine influx in Montreal to the publication of Lord Macaulay’s “Epi-taph on Lord Metcalfe” (1847), the former governor general, who was commemorated “with costly monuments in Asiatic and American cities [/ that] Attest the gratitude of the nations which he ruled” (440). Ac-cording to “An Emigrant,” the subscription raised for any such “costly monument” in Montreal could be better spent on the “thousands of Emigrant orphans thrown friendless and destitute upon our shores” (Gazette, 22 July 1847). He suggests that “whatever funds shall be real-ized, [should] go towards the erection of so noble a Provincial Institu-tion, as ‘an Emigrant Orphan Asylum,’ . . . that . . . shall be associated [with] the name of the good Lord Metcalfe.” The fact that this proposal never came to fruition does not make the absent Metcalfe memorial any less significant a commemorative marker than the stone, granite, and glass monuments that were subsequently erected in Montreal (1859), and on Grosse Île (1909, 1997). On the contrary, their commemora-tive emphases can only be fully understood in relation to the imagined Metcalfe testimonial as artefacts that signify diminishing reminiscences of “Emigrant orphans” whose plight occasioned no such “costly monu-ments”: indeed, expenditure on “costly monuments” appears inversely related to the recollection of those most afflicted by the famine.

Ultimately, it was not the Metcalfe memorial subscribers but rather the Irish boarding house keeper, moneylender, and silver broker Bar-tholomew O’Brien whose will provided “one thousand pounds, for the


building of an Asylum for the Irish Roman Catholic orphan children . . . of this city” in 1849. As a wealthy proprietor, O’Brien had little contact with the famine emigrants, but his decision to endow the or-phanage can be traced to several entries in his diary that record the “Rev. B. O’Reilly” preaching “at Mass . . . for the poor” (23 April 1848; also see 9, 30 April 1848). Thus, it was O’Reilly’s influence no less than O’Brien’s legacy that led to the establishment of Montreal’s St. Pat-rick’s Orphan Asylum in 1851: an institution that became emblematic of Irish communal resilience and self-reliance, with the orphans them-selves transformed into living memorials of the catastrophe they had overcome, although little of their memory now remains. Indeed, after the closure of the orphanage in the late twentieth century, proceeds from its sale were used to create a registered charity, the Montreal St. Patrick’s Foundation, which has recently become embroiled in contro-versy for its attempt to evict vulnerable elderly tenants from a low-rent residential property it owns: a controversy that provides a case study of a community becoming oblivious to its past (see King, “Remem-bering and Forgetting”). Whether it be O’Reilly’s failed association, the absent Metcalfe memorial, or the creation of St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum, these endeavours to safeguard vulnerable children represent forgotten legacies of the famine.

The recovery of these forgotten legacies reveals that the plight of famine orphans not only elicited compassion but also provided the impetus for institutional supports that became obscured and overshad-owed in subsequent commemoration. As a literary artefact, Famine Di-ary appears analogous to public monuments that not only perpetuate but also obfuscate the remembrance of famine migrants. Yet at root, its genealogy can be traced to genuine, eyewitness observations like O’Reilly’s that also corroborate the perceptions of popular memory rather than provide a “cautionary parable” about the nationalist pen-chant for myth making. If there is a “lesson” to be learned from Famine Diary, it is that in each stage of its composition the narrative reflects the distinct cultural and historical moment in which it was shaped, but that it also provides a discernible trajectory to contemporary first-person accounts of the famine migration that are preeminent within a hierarchy of genres. Relearning its lesson requires a new approach to migration studies that combines the interdisciplinary methods of his-torical and literary analysis with archival research on both sides of the


Atlantic. It should examine the cultural exchanges and transmission of memory between Irish and diasporic locations that are encapsulated in artefacts, like works of historical fiction, as legitimate objects of inquiry in their own right. Ultimately, famine memory is not the exclusive pre-serve of historians, creative writers, literary scholars, or the scattered communities from which it emanates: rather, it draws them together in their different endeavors to interpret and make sense of the past. The lesson of Famine Diary is that only rigorous analysis of archival and secondary sources from an interdisciplinary perspective can dis-tinguish fact from fiction in the creation of famine memory.

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Documents

Genealogy of Famine Diary in Ireland and Quebec.Ireland's Famine Migration in Historical Fiction, Historiography, and Memory