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  • Reading the Lay of the Landscape in William Carleton’s “Ned M’Keown”
  • Thomas B. O’Grady

The initial paragraphs of “Ned M’Keown,” the opening tale of William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830 and 1833, revised 1842–44), act as a doorway into the world—a world both literal and literary—that Carleton has inscribed indelibly in the twenty fictional narratives that constitute his major opus. Benedict Kiely goes so far as to assert that “the Irish novel, in English, begins in Ned McKeown’s cottage at the crossroads of Kilrudden.”1 Kiely hints that the two doors of Ned’s cottage—“one opening into a garden,”2 the other into the roadway—symbolize both the panoramic possibilities of subject matter and the polar extremes of the competing visions of the novel as it would evolve in Ireland over the next century-and-a-half—that is, romantic and pastoral versus realistic and cosmopolitan. In fact, as Thomas Davis recognized in his review in the Nation, Carleton’s work itself embodies both those possibilities and those extremes:

There is nothing in our scenery—from the sunny cornfield and the fierce mountain to the dismal bog and the sequestered glen—from the faction and the party fight to the wedding, the wake, and the funeral—from the land jobber and the usurper and the murderer, to the blooming or heartbroken flower of the parish, the kindly housewife, and withered grand-dam—that he has not put before us. No man, who does not know the things he tells, knows Ireland—no man who knows it ever doubted the perfection of the “Traits and Stories.” We repeat that he has given to all time the inside and the outside of the heart and home and country of the Irish peasant.3 [End Page 133]

By Carleton’s own estimation, proffered in the “Auto-Biographical Introduction” to the revised edition, he indeed produced “a panorama of Irish life among the people” (TS xxiv)—a variation on his claim made in 1830 that “these volumes contain probably a greater number of facts than any other book ever published on Irish life.”4 Yet, as he also admitted in 1830, his “sketches” tend to be “peculiar, in the habits and manners delineated in them, to the Northern Irish.”5 As Kiely demarcates in his book-length study of Carleton, Poor Scholar, the particular locus for Carleton’s stories is a relatively small swatch of Southeast Ulster, a territory comprising contiguous corners of the author’s native County Tyrone and neighboring Monaghan and Armagh:

A line from Omagh on the Strule, which is another name for the upper waters of the Foyle, to Enniskillen on the Erne, would mark approximately the western boundary of that land. On the south it could be enclosed by a line linking Enniskillen with Clones, with Monaghan, with Saint Patrick’s Armagh; always remembering that the Monaghan country opens naturally out to the sea at Dundalk; that between Monaghan and Newry is mountainous country with its own peculiar characteristics and its own influence in the making of any man from South Tyrone or North Monaghan. Then from Armagh the eastern boundary returns to Omagh by way of Dungannon, a town on a great hill where Hugh O’Neill defied Elizabeth, where Grattan’s volunteers came in the eighteenth century to a colourful convention. Further to the east is the flat expanse of Lough Neagh; while north of Omagh there is the cartwheel of mountain ridges centring at Mullagharn, and beyond Mullagharn the Sperrins.6

The countryside that Carleton outlines in “Ned M’Keown” by more localized landmarks—the Valley of the Black Pig, a winding river called the Mullin-burn, the prominent hills of Knock many and Cullimore, Lumford’s Glen and the glen of Althadhawan—forms a scaled-down version of the uneven pentagon mapped out by Kiely’s coordinates.

That countryside—readily identifiable as Carleton’s boyhood environs in the Clogher Valley of County Tyrone—establishes in “Ned M’Keown” some of the crucial ways in which the particular geography of a place can operate as a determining force in the lives of...

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