Authors
Huggins, MichaelAffiliation
University of ChesterPublication Date
2013-03-07
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The Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle might be considered a surprising influence on the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s and its most militant leader, John Mitchel. Carlyle has become notorious for his anti-Irish sentiments, expressed most forcefully in his Reminiscences of my Irish journey in 1849. Yet his critique of the Benthamite and liberal Zeitgeist was a significant influence on Mitchel. This article examines what it was in Carlyle’s thought that appealed to Mitchel. Carlyle’s antagonism to liberal conceptions of progress informed Mitchel’s intellectual development and prompted specific political perspectives that can in some measure be viewed as a Carlylean response to Ireland’s crisis in the 1840s. Mitchel made many of the same historic and philosophical assumptions as Carlyle, legitimising the present struggle for Irish nationality via a critique of contemporary laissez-faire doctrine. Thus, Swift’s saeva indignatio was inflected in Mitchel by his encounter with Carlyle’s work, shaping Mitchel’s anger in terms of the spiritual-material polarity at the heart of Carlyle’s Signs of the Times (1829). This ‘sacred wrath’ helps explain why Mitchel is often seen as someone who hated England more than he loved Ireland.Citation
Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, 2 (2012), pp. 329-352Publisher
Firenze University PressAdditional Links
http://www.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-sijisType
ArticleLanguage
enDescription
This is the publisher's pdf version of an article published in Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies by Firenze University Press.EISSN
2239-3978Sponsors
This article was submitted to the RAE2014 for the University of Chester - History.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-12430