On First Looking into Mercier's The Irish Comic Tradition

As I take down my copy of the book from my shelves, I note that, over the decades, it has collected a little section around itself: books by Norman Vance; Writing Ireland by Cairns and Richards; Writing the Irish Famine by Christopher Morash; more recently, The World of Geoffrey Keating by Bernadette Cunningham. But for a long time Vivian Mercier's The Irish Comic Tradition, stood alone—there was nothing like it. And there is still nothing quite like it. If I say that this book is one of the most important books in my life I need first to give some account of the life into which this book nested itself.

My childhood falls into two parts. The first part was spent in Ireland, in North Cork—we owned a small pub-cum-general store (in the Irish style) at the bottom of Main Street, Doneraile. The second part was spent in England, in inner-city Liverpool. In the 1950s we moved to England as a family, when the pub business in Ireland failed. This is not a matter of contrasting an idyllic green rural Irish childhood with a grim smoky English city early adolescence—though that contrast is there, most obviously in childhood lung conditions. The Irish part of my childhood had its own grimness; I think of all the difficulties that led to the decision to move to England.

There were continuities between Doneraile and Liverpool. We become adults, and we must identify and deal with cruelty and stupidity, as we meet them. If you come from an Irish Catholic background, you first meet cruelty and stupidity in your Irish Catholic background. In Doneraile and in Liverpool we were part of educational and belief systems that used what I thought then were astonishing cruelties toward their own members—and, looking back, the banal, the everyday cruelty still seems astonishing and bizarre. From my Irish Christian Brothers school in Doneraile to my Irish Christian Brothers school in Liverpool, the pattern continued. Decades later, when I was planning my series The Irish World Wide, Barry Coldrey, the historian of the Irish Christian Brothers, offered me a chapter on his order's reputation for violence. I commissioned and published that chapter, to give some sort of historical context to my own experiences and the experiences of many others—and to hear what Barry Coldrey had to say.¹

In Liverpool, we—that is, my family—began to explore the English class system, starting from the bottom. My Christian Brothers school in Liverpool was an old style English grammar school—and the English education system, as it then was, offered a route up and out for the clever lad who was good at examinations. The English class system, though interesting, is not as interesting as the English think it is. In my Oxford college, reading the crafted novels of E.M. Forster, I wondered aloud if we were really expected to be all that interested in the opinion of one segment of the English middle class about another segment of the English middle class. And the answer of my tutor, John Bailey, was, Yes, we were supposed to be so interested. A genuinely interesting thing about the English class system is the extent to which it was self-policing (and still is, I think). In our part of Liverpool my decision to go to university was not only not understood; it was often opposed. At one time my mother and I worked in the same grocery store. I was the delivery boy. I overheard my mother talking to Dot, her friend in the shop. My mother asked Dot very reasonable questions, not consciously echoing John Henry Newman: What is a university? What is it for? Dot replied, "I do know this—it is not for the likes of us."

In Liverpool we lived on West Derby Road, by the high wall round Ogden's tobacco factory (see above, childhood lung conditions). It was here that I connected with the English public library system, and I discovered books. I cannot recall there being very many books...