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"The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep."
- Alan Patrick Herbert
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ZIN Product Number: 10053943
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| | | |  | | | Product Details
 Format: Paperback, 343 pages
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
ISBN: 0268037116
Release Date: Jan 11, 2001
| |  | | | From The Publisher
Hugh Dorian was a disgrace to the good, the honest and the well-doing. Born in poverty in rural Donegal in 1834, he survived Ireland's Great Famine, only to squander uncommon opportunities for self-advancement. Having drank and brawled himself out of a job and into trouble 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 staggered into alcohol-numbed poverty and died in an overcrowded slum in 1914.
A unique document survived the wreck of Dorian's 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 nostalgia, is threaded through the text: it is a lament for the might have been — the future as imagined before the Famine — rather than the actual past. The final and lasting image is of trauma without recovery: the wise-men who had sat late into the small hours debating politics in the years before the Famine congregated in the after years but sat now in silence "their subjects … lacking words."
Dorian's narrative was never published in his own lifetime and all but forgotten after the author's death. First published in Ireland in August 2000, The Outer Edge of Ulster includes a scholarly introduction that traces the troubles that beset the author and locates the narrative in wider literary contexts. Appearing for the first time in America, this critically acclaimed book offers an intimate look at the everyday lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary time and place.
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| | | | | | Keywords
Donegal (Ireland : County), Social life and customs, Dorian, Hugh,, 1834-1914, Homes and haunts, Biography / Autobiography, Literary, Historical - British, Europe - Ireland, Biography & Autobiography, Ireland, 19th century, History, Social life and customs, Famines, History, Local, Donegal (County), Homes and haunts, Donegal (Ireland : County), Dorian, Hugh,
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