Editors’ Notes

EDITORS’ NOTES for over thirty years, beginning in the late 1920s, Sean O’Casey and the American critic George Jean Nathan continued a transatlantic correspondence full of theatrical enthusiasms and philosophical idiosyncracies. O’Casey spent only three months in Nathan’s New York, in 1934, yet the two corresponded as if they were Broadway bon vivants or boulevardiers of the West End—though O’Casey insisted in calling both himself and Nathan “communists”! Patricia Angelin’s distillation of their friendship from the letters derives from service as executrix of the Nathan estate. With Robert G. Lowery, Patricia Angelin has published My Very Dear Sean: George Jean Nathan to Sean O’Casey, Letters and Articles (1985). ❧ perhaps it is the Dickensian esprit of O’Casey’s plays and autobiographies that have led Prof. David Krause back to the sprawling tales of William Carleton. One of Carleton’s least studied novels, Fardorougha the Miser, begun in 1837, oVers a prescient portrayal of pre-Famine Ireland—its folkways , rural social structure, economic exigencies, and Catholic conscience. As Prof. Krause suggests, in Fardorougha the Miser Carleton mixes genres and eVects so generously that his Wction anticipates the abundant variety of voices and themes characteristic of Revival Wction and drama. Our readers will recall both Prof. Krause’s The Profane Book of Irish Comedy and his recent article on “The Conscience of Ireland” in ÉIRE-IRELAND (Summer, 1993). ❧ during the Great Hunger, the Irish Constabulary often had to police evictions and clearances. More often, however, as Prof. W. J. Lowe delineates here, the Constabulary had to protect ordinary commerce and public relief eVorts. Working from public records, Dr. Lowe details incidents at, for example, CoroWn, Ballinlass, Dunfanaghy, and Cranagh that testify not only to the severity of the Famine, but also to the stewardship and disEDITOR ’S NOTES 3 cipline of the new police force. Prof. Lowe’s articles have appeared in many journals—including Hermathena, Saothar, and Irish Historical Studies —and he is author of The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire (1989). ❧ currently composing a biographical study of the Irish naturalist R. L. Praeger, Seán Lysaght is the author of two collections of poems: Noah’s Irish Ark (1989) and Clare Island Survey (1991). A single sequence dedicated to his father, Clare Island Survey records as tokens and emblems of tradition and self the poet’s sightings of Clare birds—bunting, shearwater, pipit, or stonechat. These new poems, including prose poems from the sequence Tagon, hint at autobiography and oVer sightings of Ireland’s human landscape . Seán Lysaght studied at University College, Dublin, and the University of Geneva before spending a few years in Germany. ❧ econometric and demographic statistics of all sorts depict the erratic performance of the Irish economy from the founding of the Free State up to the latest “inter-party” government, but statistics by themselves provide few explanations for the waywardness of economic life in Ireland. Here, Prof. Mary E. Daly, editor of Irish Economic and Social History, shows plainly that the economy of Ireland expresses the cultures of Ireland and especially the entwined ideas and assumptions of rural nationalism and Catholicism, notably Catholic social teaching of the 1930s. Economic liberalism , whether classical capitalism or moderating Keynesian policies remained suspect even through the Fianna Fáil premiership of Seán Lemass and the publication of T. K. Whitaker’s famous white paper, Economic Development (1958). Prof. Daly is the author of, among other titles, A Social and Economic History of Ireland since 1800 and Dublin: The Deposed Capital , 1860–1914. ❧ more peripatetic than most Irish poets, Derek Mahon is known for the elegance of his Wlm scripts and the ironies, both withering and tender, of his poetry—much of it collected in Selected Poems (1991). Now living in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Mahon is a native of Belfast and it is Mahon’s troubled and distant relations with a Belfast recalled from haunts in London or Dublin, that Tim Kendall examines here; but less in terms of the tangible residues of Mahon’s physical Belfast, and more in terms EDITOR’S NOTES 4 of Mahon’s turning and inevitably returning stances toward the shut pubs and the well-known...