William Carleton

by

Sinéad Sturgeon

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0213

Introduction

William Carleton (b. 1794–d. 1869), novelist and short-story writer, was born into a rural Catholic family in Prillisk townland, near Clogher, County Tyrone, the youngest child of James Carleton, a tenant farmer, and his wife Mary Kelly, a locally renowned singer. Both parents were Irish speakers and richly versed in the stories and songs of Irish culture. Carleton’s lively childhood in the Clogher Valley proved a vital foundation to his later literary success, centered on his claim to be the first authentic Irish “peasant” novelist in English. Intellectually inclined and educated in hedge schools, Carleton entertained early ambitions for the priesthood but became increasingly disenchanted with the religion. In 1818, inspired by the eponymous hero of Lesage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas, he left home and set out to seek his fortune. Soon after arriving in Dublin later that year, he converted to Protestantism and in 1822 married Jane Anderson. Carleton held various temporary teaching positions until an encounter with the Reverend Caesar Otway, who encouraged him to submit stories to his anti-Catholic journal, The Christian Examiner, sparked a literary career. Carleton’s early fiction—including the very successful collection for which he is still best known, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (two volumes, 1830 and 1833), and Tales of Ireland (1834)—were much criticized for strident anti-Catholicism. Carleton then tried his hand at the novel: Fardorougha the Miser was serialized in the Dublin University Magazine (1837) and published in 1839; in all, he published fourteen novels of varying length and quality. Famously changeable in his politics, Carleton’s acquaintance in the late 1830s with the leaders of the Young Ireland movement, especially Charles Gavan Duffy, prompted him to reconsider the anti-Catholic polemic of his early work and attempt a more nuanced political position in his writing. Consequently, in his most prolific period of the 1840s, he produced a series of novels that addressed issues of the day, of which the best known are Valentine M’Clutchy (1845) and The Black Prophet (1847). Carleton’s turn to publishing in nationalist newspapers in the febrile 1840s seems to have secured him, in 1848, the government pension which he had long been seeking. Nevertheless, Carleton still struggled financially to support his family and, further beset with his own deteriorating health and increasing reliance on alcohol, the quality of his work began to decline. Carleton died of cancer on 30 January 1869, and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery, Dublin.

General Overviews

With the important exceptions of O’Donoghue 1896 and Kiely 1947, Carleton’s work was largely neglected for almost a century after his death. There are various reasons for this: Carleton’s conversion to Protestantism and the anti-Catholic bias of his early work rendered him a problematic and complex figure for Irish literary history, open to charges of being at best little more than a pen-for-hire and at worst a turncoat propagandist for a deeply inequitable and sectarian state. More pragmatically, Carleton’s prolific and diverse output, much revised and republished even in his own lifetime, was difficult to quantify, and there was in any case little critical interest in the nineteenth century, widely regarded as substantially inferior to the literary achievements of the twentieth. Kiely 1947 and the pioneering critical work of Flanagan 1959 on 19th-century Irish fiction sparked new interest. A small number of monographs on Carleton appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, which share a strongly biographical approach. Boué 1978 makes important revisions to the facts of the biography as established by O’Donoghue 1896, notably regarding Carleton’s anti-Catholicism, insights which are further developed in Wolff 1980. Growing American interest in Carleton was reflected in the journal the Carleton Newsletter (1970–1975), edited by Eileen A. Sullivan, who later published a monograph on the writer (1983). The valuable bibliographical work Hayley 1985 continues to facilitate scholarship on the writer. The 1970s and 1980s still represent the high point of publications on the writer. Thereafter critical interest slowed somewhat: only one further monograph has appeared—Krause 2000 (cited under Studies of the Novels)—although scholarly articles and book chapters continue to appear reasonably frequently, particularly in the form of comparative analyses with 19th-century contemporaries (such as the Banim brothers) or later Ulster writers (notably Benedict Kiely, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney). The annual William Carleton Summer School, founded in 1992 and held in the writer’s native Clogher Valley, continues to play an important role in fostering interest in, and work on, the writer, as exemplified in Brand 2006. In their entries for the writer on biographical databases, Kelly 2007 and Ó Gallchoir 2009 provide excellent overviews of Carleton’s life and succinct summaries of the significance and complexity of his literary legacy.

• Boué, André. William Carleton: Romancier Irlandais. Lille, France: Université de Lille, 1978.

  Boué’s study consists of three sections: a biography, an analysis of the fiction, and a bibliography. Boué demonstrates that Carleton was already moving toward an anti-Catholic position before meeting Otway, based on his discovery of the Peel Memorandum, a letter from Carleton to the British Home Secretary, Robert Peel, offering to provide evidence linking members of the Catholic Association, as well as teachers and priests, to illegal agrarian factions.

• Brand, Gordon, ed. William Carleton: The Authentic Voice. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 2006.

  A valuable collection of contextual documents relating to Carleton’s life and work, including: maps of Clogher; a chronology of first publication of the short fiction and novels; reprints of significant letters (including the Peel Memorandum); a selection of literary perspectives on Carleton. Part 2 contains a selection of lectures on Carleton delivered by leading literary critics at The William Carleton Summer School in the period 1992–2005.

• Flanagan, Thomas. The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.

  Flanagan’s landmark study of 19th-century Irish fiction concludes with a closely contextualized analysis of Carleton’s life and work.

• Hayley, Barbara. A Bibliography of the Works of William Carleton. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1985.

  During the nineteenth century, Carleton’s stories were frequently re-issued by his publishers under different titles and in different collections, making his output difficult to trace. This meticulous and comprehensive bibliography by a noted Carleton scholar lists all the various editions of his work, as well as recording the anthologies and periodicals in which his stories subsequently appear. Hayley thus also offers revealing insight into contemporary publishing practices and tastes.

• Kelly, John. “Carleton, William (1794–1869), writer.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

  Authoritative and concise overview of Carleton’s life and work.

• Kiely, Benedict. Poor Scholar: A Study of the Days and Works of William Carleton. London: Sheed & Ward, 1947.

  The first major study of Carleton, Kiely’s biography is a seminal work that contributed to renewed interest in the writer. Kiely’s evocative, generous, and searching biography of the writer is deeply contextualized in the local history and landscape of the nineteenth century and often reveals Kiely’s own skill as a developing novelist.

• O’Donoghue, D. J., ed. The Life of William Carleton. 2 vols. London: Downey, 1896.

  An indispensable volume for scholars of Carleton. Following an introduction by the novelist Frances Hoey, Volume 1 consists of the writer’s manuscripts, unfinished at the time of his death: The Life of William Carleton, covering the period from 1794 to the mid-1820s. Volume 2 contains D. J. O’Donoghue’s detailed account of Carleton’s subsequent career.

• Ó Gallchoir, Clíona. “William Carleton.” In The Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. 9 vols. Edited by James McGuire and James Quinn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  Excellent summary of Carleton’s life and literary legacy. Online content revised 2010.

• Sullivan, Eileen A. William Carleton. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

  A general and wide-ranging overview of the writer’s life and work, by the editor of the Carleton Newsletter (1970–1975; published by the University of Florida). Sullivan provides summaries and analyses of the early short fiction, as well as a selection of the novels, and the unfinished autobiography.

• Wolff, Robert Lee. William Carleton: Irish Peasant Novelist. New York and London: Garland, 1980.

  Building on the work of Boué 1978, Wolff examines Carleton’s religious beliefs, tracing the changes the writer made to stories after their first publication.