Outer Edge of Ulster
Cód:
491_9780268037116
Hugh Dorian was born in poverty in rural Donegal in 1834. He survived Irelands Great Famine, only to squander uncommon opportunities for self-advancement. Having lost his job and clashed with priests and policemen, he moved to the city of Derry but never slipped the shadow of trouble. Three of his children died from disease and his wife fell drunk into the River Foyle and drowned. Dorian declined into alcohol-numbed poverty and died in an overcrowded slum in 1914. A unique document survived the tragedy of Dorians life. In 1890 he completed a true historical narrative of the social and cultural transformation of his home community. This narrative forms the most extensive lower-class account of the Great Famine. A moving account of the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, it invites comparison with the classic slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Dorian achieves a degree of totality in his reconstruction of the world of the pre-Famine poor that is unparalleled in contemporary memoir or fiction. He describes their working and living conditions, sports and drinking, religious devotions and festivals. And then he describes the catastrophe that obliterated that world. Horror is remembered vividly but with restraint: in a very short time there was nothing but stillness; a mournful silence in the villages; in the cottages grim poverty and emaciated faces showing all the signs of hardships. The picture of starvation is stark but authentic: the cheek bones became thin and high, the cheeks blue, the bones sharp, and the eyes sunk . . .. the legs and the feet swell and get red and the skin cracks . . .. And at last came the dispersion . . . to places which their fathers never heard of and which they themselves never would have seen, had the times not changed. No one, he writes, can measure the distance of the broad Atlantic speedier and better than a father whose child is there. A sense of loss, closer to bereavement than n
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