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Ireland, Scotland and Samuel Ferguson1

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Ireland, Scotland and Samuel Ferguson1 Estudios Irlandeses , Number 4, 2009, pp. 21-31 __________________________________________________________________________________________ AEDEI Hireling Strangers and the Wandering Throne: Ireland, Scotland and Samuel Ferguson1 Colin Graham NUI Maynooth Copyright (c) 2009 by Colin Graham. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. Abstract. This essay discusses the evolving literary and cultural relationship between Ireland and Scotland in the writings and career of the nineteenth-century Irish poet Samuel Ferguson. By examining the correspondence between Ferguson and his Edinburgh-based publisher, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, it shows the ways in which Ferguson tried to frame his own youthful politics through the Scottish Toryism of Blackwood’s. Ferguson’s temporary interest in the Young Ireland movement and the Protestant Repeal Association in the 1840s is brought to an end in his poem and essay on the death of Thomas Davis. The essay argues that this poem, and the account of Davis which accompanies it, are modelled on the two essays that Ferguson wrote in 1845 on the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Ferguson’s strategy of reading Burns as a respectable poet with a naturally conservative sensibility is replicated in his account of Davis. The essay then suggests that in his later work Ferguson found that Scotland was both an awkward analogy for Ireland’s political situation and less welcoming site of publication for his version of Ireland than had been the case at the beginning of his career. His epic poem Congal (1872) shows the Irish-Scottish relationship under strain, as does his final correspondence with Blackwood’s. Keywords. Samuel Ferguson, Scotland, Congal, Thomas Davis, Robert Burns, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Resumen. Este artículo analiza la evolución de las relaciones literarias y culturales entre Irlanda y Escocia en los escritos y la carrera del poeta irlandés del siglo XIX Samuel Ferguson. Mediante el examen de la correspondencia entre Ferguson y su editorial de Edimburgo, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, se muestra como Ferguson intentó encauzar su política juvenil a través del conservadurismo escocés de Blackwood’s. El interés que Ferguson mostró temporalmente por el movimiento de La Joven Irlanda y por la Asociación protestante para la derogación del Acta de Unión en la década de 1840 finaliza en su poema y ensayo sobre la muerte de Thomas Davis. El artículo sostiene que este poema, y el relato sobre Davis que lo acompaña, se inspiran en los dos ensayos que Ferguson escribió en 1845 sobre el poeta escocés Robert Burns. La estrategia de Ferguson de considerar a Burns como un respetable poeta con una sensibilidad conservadora innata se repite en su apreciación de Davis. El artículo sugiere también que en su obra posterior Ferguson descubrió que Escocia era una torpe analogía de la situación política de Irlanda, así como un lugar menos propicio para la publicación de su versión de Irlanda de lo que había sido al comienzo de su carrera. En el poema épico Congal (1872) se muestra una relación gaélico-escocesa en tensión, así como también en su última correspondencia con Blackwood’s. Palabras clave. Samuel Ferguson, Scotland, Congal, Thomas Davis, Robert Burns, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. ________________________________ 1. Research for this essay was aided by a Leverhulme grant from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University. I am especially grateful to Professor Cairns Craig for his support. _____________ ISSN 1699-311X 22 In Samuel Ferguson’s epic poem Congal, Scotland’s importance moves in and out published in 1872, there are several curious Ferguson’s work, with a Sweeney-like moments of anachronism, where the archaic restlessness – lying beyond the occasionally time of legend slips out of joint, and the poem genetic, historical, and material equivalences gets distracted by its author’s contemporary which Ferguson’s multifarious writings make obsessions. It is no accident that the most between Ireland and Scotland is always the obvious of these chronological fractures in the desire for Ireland itself to be intellectually poem arises from Ferguson’s attempt to settle rooted, “racy of the soil” to use the Young the awkward play of Ireland against Scotland, Ireland phrase, with its own literary and the Gael with and against the Pict. In Congal intellectual culture and its politics left to Scottish troops help with the re-invasion of mature, as Ferguson desired, within the Union. Ireland by Congal, the King of Ulster. This projected ideological future for an Ireland Meanwhile, flitting across the text of Congal, at once British and Irish finds its haunting in and out of its narrative and its scholarly shade in Ferguson’s idealisation of Robert notes, is the figure of mad King Sweeney, that Burns as poet and ploughman, an ideally ancient Irish-Scottish traveller, who later in the organic and local intellectualism which textual life of Irish literature cuts his swathe Ferguson sees Ireland drifting away from after across the pages of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim- the death of Thomas Davis and the famine. Two-Birds and Seamus Heaney’s translation Samuel Ferguson was born in Belfast in Sweeney Astray. As Heaney has it, Sweeney’s 1810 and died in Dublin in 1886. His family is a story of “fits and trips” and “frenzies” were a mixture of small-landed farmers in (Heaney 1984: 3) – in Ferguson’s poem, Antrim and professionals in Belfast. As his Sweeney’s adventures are “Mad-Freaks” poem “Willy Gilliland” (Ferguson 1836) later (Ferguson 1872: 234), and their frantic energy showed, he traced his family origins back to is a danger to the poem’s epic and cultural convenanting Scotland and thus included some coherence. Sweeney is both part of, and more embattled form of Protestantism in his identity. broadly symbolic of, Ferguson’s uncertain In later life, through his work in the judicial Celtic politics, a set of negative analogies system, the Royal Irish Academy, and his which broadly align the various cultures of the marriage, his acceptance into a slightly Celts, which Celticise England, and which different stratum of Irish Protestantism, and continually separate Ireland and Scotland while specifically Anglicanism, in Dublin lead him to talking of them in the same breath. Ferguson’s identify less with the regional affinities of interactions with Scottish culture were many Ulster, and less too with the Presbyterian and various – they range from the opportunism heritage of his family – this in turn was to alter of a young writer finding an outlet for his his perception of Scotland’s importance, an work, through a search for a genuine cultural imperial framework for Ireland and Scotland solidarity, to a potential place for the eventually taking the place of more local confirmation of Tory unionism, and eventually arguments. Ferguson was educated at the a wariness of Scotland’s similarity to Ireland relatively liberal Protestant school, the Royal which was unsurprisingly a defence of Belfast Academical Institution, which not Ireland’s particularity. Ferguson’s continual many years before had been associated with movement towards Scotland was both a fitful the more rarefied echelons of the United reassessment of his Belfast and Antrim roots Irishmen, though post-Union it mirrored the and an increasingly bad-tempered admission of almost uniform transition in the North towards Scotland’s existence as a cultural centre of the Protestant unionism; Ferguson then studied at type that Ferguson assumed Ireland had not Trinity College Dublin, though he never fully become in his lifetime. For Ferguson, actually graduated. He later attended Lincoln’s Scotland offered models for Irish intellectual Inns in London, and it was during this time, in development, for some shared history, and his early twenties, that he began his literary most obviously for a way to assert Celtic connections with Scotland, sending poetry to difference safely within the remit of what Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, having Ferguson, unoriginally, called “the Three- previously published only in the short-lived, Joined-Realm” (Ferguson 1872: 107) of Belfast-based Ulster Magazine. His appearance imperial Britain. in Blackwood’s came as something of a surprise to him, and indeed some of the hubris 23 which Ferguson occasionally revealed of the Protestant Repeal Association (see throughout his long literary career had its Patten 2004: 99-130). His delayed obituary origins at the point at which ‘the Professor’, article and poem on the death of Thomas Christopher North (a pseudonym for John Davis, published in Dublin University Wilson), indulged Ferguson’s poem ‘The Magazine in 1847 (Davis having died in 1845), Forging of the Anchor’ (Ferguson 1832a). For is the point (at least in print) at which he comes some years Blackwood’s and the Dublin closest to a nationalist politics, trying to take University Magazine were Ferguson’s main Davis’s legacy with him as an insurance policy publishing outlets, for both poetry and fiction. for Protestantism. This pivotal moment in (One of the curiosities about Ferguson’s early Ferguson’s cultural trajectory, when he career is that his appearances in Blackwood’s recuperates Davis to suit his own ends, was mirrors the early publication history of W.B. foreshadowed by the articles Ferguson had Yeats, who used his connections with W.E. written two years earlier in Dublin University Henley, and the sometimes not very Scottish Magazine on the poetry and life of Robert Scots Observer, in a similar way). The Dublin Burns (discussed further below). Over the University Magazine, published out of Trinity, succeeding decades Ferguson’s politics gave Ferguson a respectable Irish outlet for his become less clear cut, at least in terms of his poetry and prose, and honed his politic views, views on Repeal as he moved more and more at least early in his life.
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