CARLETON, William, Irish novelist and short-story writer: b. Prillisk, County Tyrone, 20 Feb. 1794; d. Sandford, 30 Jan. 1869. His father was a farmer on a small scale. The son, intended for the priesthood from a tender age, spent his boyhood in pursuit of an education, and managed, in spite of difficulties, to acquire a fairly creditable one. With no other equip ment, and without a penny in his pocket, he set out on foot from his native county, at about the age of 24, to seek his fortune, for he had long abandoned all ambition for the sacerdotal dignity. Arrived in Dublin, he decided to change his religion, and he became a member of the Established Irish Protestant Church. He subsisted for a time on some tuitions, and when he obtained a clerkship, with a salary of i60 a year, in the Sunday School Society, he thought that he was provided for for life. On the strength of this clerkship and the income de rived from some evening tuitions, he married Jane Anderson, his faithful and loyal com panion for the remainder of his life; but before his first child was born he was ousted from his position in the Society. A period of school mastering, first at Mullingar and afterward at Carlow, followed; but he eventually gravitated back to Dublin. At that time (1828), the United Kingdom was rocked to its base by the climax of the agitation for Catholic Emancipa tion. The Evangelicals, an aggressive party which had taken the Church of Ireland under its special protection, were then powerful in Dublin. For the propagation of their views they had a monthly publication, The Christian Examiner, and to this magazine Carleton was invited to contribute stories and sketches based on the superstitions of the Catholic Irish peasantry, a subject with which he was thor oughly acquainted. He made his first ap pearance in its pages in April 1828 with the first part of and 'Tubber Derg,> two of the finest things he ever wrote. For some years Carleton contented himself with producing short stories and sketches, so that it became a by-word among his friends that a long novel, with an intricate and sustained plot, was be yond his range. 'Jane Sinclair' (1836) did not do much to dissipate this belief, but when the Miser' carne out in 1837-38, it became evident that a new star had risen above the literary horizon. This pathetic novel excels in the portraiture of the vice of avarice: Fardorougha has been compared, and not un favorably, with Moliere's Harpagon in and with Balzac's Pere Grandet in (Eugenie Grandet.' In Honor O'Donovan Carleton has presented to us one of those heroines in humble life in whose delineation he admittedly excels.
The success of the Nation newspaper, founded in Dublin in 1842, gave a new direction to Carleton's thoughts. Hitherto his attitude had been, on the whole, one of satirical censure on the religion of the great majority of his fellow-countrymen and of more or less open hostility to Irish national aspirations. He now saw that, if he wished to be popular, he must espouse the popular side. Accordingly, in 'Valentine McClutchy> (1845), he made a regu lar right-about-face, and let himself go, almost without restraint, in attacking Orangeism, the Grand Jury system, the methods by which the Union was carried, the Charter Schools, absentee landlords with their conscienceless agents, the corruptions of Irish Protestantism, and even the practices and pursuits of the Evangelical party.
most prolific period. In rapid succession work after work flowed from his pen:
Carleton made some incursions into middle class life, and even into the domains of higher society, but it is with ordinary people, and es pecially with the peasantry, that he is in his element and entirely at home. No one ever understood or described the Irish peasant of 75 or 100 years ago as he did. The faction fight, the party fight, the courtship, the wed ding, the christening, the death-bed, the wake, the funeral, the hedge school, the secret so ciety, the workings of landlordism, the practices of the unjust and rapacious land agent, the eviction, the revenge, the piety, superstitions, customs, peculiar expressions, modes of thought and outlook on life of the people— he brings them all before us clearly, vividly, un mistakably. Consult O'Donoghue, D. J.,
of Carleton' (1896).