Earl Grey’s Irish Famine orphans (95): early draft?

I’ve come across a few typed pages of stuff i seem to have written around the time of the first volume of Barefoot…? That is, the late 1980s or early 1990s. This particular one was on the back of a list of medicines. I’m intrigued. I cannot remember it. When did i write it? Is it an early draft of the Preface and Introduction to Barefoot 1? or was I preparing a lecture, a conference paper, or even an article for an Irish history journal? Readers will recognise some sentences. Some claims and issues are dated by now. (Pace my comments about twentieth century historians). I’ll keep searching for more pages. Or should I not? Maybe they will be of interest…i hope.

Here’s my first discovery. Historiographical? Was i trying to put the immigration of Irish females into some kind of context? I’ll suppress the temptation to revise it.

“They were condemned out of hand as prostitutes, ill-suited for work in the colonies, and undisciplined and promiscuous during the voyage here. Even more surprising is the fact that the criticisms of contemporaries should be so readily and uncritically adopted by twentieth-century historians. Fortunately, the good sense and meticulous scholarship of some, A. J. Hammerton for example, has shown how ill-founded condemnation of these young women was. Too often the exceptional case has been taken as typical, an isolated complaint “representative of every woman on every ship” (my italics). All of them were tarred with the same brush.

As far as the Irish foundlings were concerned, not one of the boats carrying young women from charitable institutions in Dublin and Cork was reported on unfavorably at the time of their arrival. (Check) Yet recently an Irish historian could still write, “…on the long voyage to Australia the sailors and girls consorted promiscuously. When they reached Sydney, they became prostitutes…”. Such blanket condemnation and blind following of the undiscriminating opinions of contemporaries has too often been characteristic of historical writing on the subject.

The weaknesses of historians aside, it remains true that single female migrants were generally looked down upon by religious leaders, and members of of the upper and middle-class public in Britain and Australia for most of the nineteenth century. It was as if the language learnt from Masters and Surgeons, uncomfortable if not openly hostile to the women convicts and female paupers in their charge became the only acceptable way of saying things. Such language was repeated unquestionly by a succession of commentators as a means of attracting attention, and gaining publicity for themselves. The hostility of the early days was to forge images and condition attitudes towards later female migrants, not least the female orphans from Irish workhouses in…”

And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and fallen griefs of weeping willow.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

Postscript

I hesitated ever so briefly about adding this bit. But it is too important not to. It’s a brief and simple explanation of why i am writing “YES” in the upcoming referendum. It’s from my FB page.

‘I suppose i have to ask myself why? Where did that come from? EQ. Emotional intelligence. I know deep down it is the right thing to do. From…? Life experience, not all of it in Australia. My training as a would-be historian, try to know and understand, try putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. Use empathy. I’d hope descendants of the Irish orphan ‘girls’ would have that.‘