La Biblioteca a lo largo de la historia

Carleton arrived in Dublin in 1818 with just the last quarter’s payment from his teaching position in the hedge school at Newcastle. He spent his days searching for

employment and his nights in lodging houses across the city. Emancipated from his family and freed from the shackles of living within a rural community under the influence of the Catholic clergy, Carleton claimed in his autobiography to have become a ‘thinking

man’.230 He suggested that he began to form his own view of the world and sought to forge

225 _{Whelan, The Bible War, p. 179.}

226 _{Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, p. 87.} 227 _{Whelan, The Bible War, p. 180.}

228 _{Hempton & Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, p. 88.}

229 _{Hempton & Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, p. 89. The Examiner for instance claimed that more than}

1,340 people had publicly renounced Catholicism in Ireland between October 1826 and April 1827. The

Christian Examiner, iv, no. 23 (1827), p. 397.

a place for himself within it. He reflected, in his autobiography, that upon his first visit to Dublin he began a search for a new religion:

About this time, too, I began to think a good deal upon the subject of religion. I occasionally went, at first out of curiosity, sometimes to one church and

sometimes to another; and I was struck and often deeply impressed by what I had both seen and heard. I did not, however, confine my Sunday visits merely to churches of the Establishment. I often went to the Presbyterian places of worship also, but I did not relish them so well. Even the Methodists did not escape me. In point of fact, I was resolved to look through them all. If I do not examine and compare, thought I, how can I form an opinion as to their relative merits?231

Carleton stated that he had become disillusioned with the doctrines of the Catholic Church, one, that of exclusive salvation, in particular. He explained that ‘I was Protestant at least twelve months before the change was known to a human being.’232 Carleton did not specify a date upon which he converted to Protestantism, it can generally be assumed, however, that he settled upon Protestantism shortly after his arrival in Dublin in 1818.

Carleton soon began to seek out employment in the city. He became a classical tutor to the son of a gentleman, Mr. Fox, of the Combe. Mr. Fox, a Protestant, was the master of one of Erasmus Smith’s English schools.233 _{Carleton moved into the Foxes’ family home}

and through his association with the family he began to make numerous connections with the professional middle-class gentlemen of Dublin society. He secured a second tutorship with the son and daughter of a man named Short. Carleton began to adopt the persona of the middle-class men that he became acquainted with. He secured further tutorships through Mr. Fox and his connections, and in time secured a position as an office clerk in The Sunday School Society for Ireland. During his period of employment with the Foxes, Carleton fell in love with his master’s niece. Carleton married Jane Anderson in 1821.

The Sunday School Society for whom Carleton worked as a clerk was established in 1809. Originally ‘The Hibernian Sunday School Society’, and later ‘The Sunday School

231 _{O’Donoghue, The Life, i, p. 214.} 232 _{O’Donoghue, The Life, i, p. 215.}

233 _{Erasmus Smith (1611-1691), a British Protestant, inherited lands his father had been granted under the}

Settlement of Ireland Act 1652. He founded four grammar schools and one hundred and forty English schools across Ireland from 1669 on. W.J.R. Wallace, Faithful to our Trust: A History of the Erasmus Smith

Society for Ireland’,234 _{the society aimed to encourage and promote Sunday schools in}

Ireland and to provide such schools with requisite resources, including, books for both teachers and pupils, alphabets, spelling books and copies of the Holy Scriptures.235 Founder member, secretariat and later honorary secretariat, James Digges La Touche, a Dublin banker, philanthropist and evangelical Protestant, employed Carleton to work as an office clerk for the society.236 Before and during his employment with the Sunday School Society Carleton entertained notions of entering Trinity College. Ultimately, these

aspirations of higher education were to act against Carleton’s position of employment at the time. Clerks had before Carleton left their positions to enter Trinity College much to the dissatisfaction of the Sunday School Society committee. When Carleton’s intentions became known to Thomas Parnell, one such member of this committee, he took a case against Carleton and insisted he be removed from his position as clerk. Mr. La Touche intervened on Carleton’s behalf but ultimately the clerk was removed from his position when Parnell threatened to withdraw from the society. Mr. Fox, under whom Carleton and his wife boarded was none too pleased with his nephew-in-law’s dismissal. Carleton was evicted and removed to an eating-house while his wife went to reside with her mother. While at her mother’s Jane gave birth to their first daughter, Mary-Anne. Carleton then enjoyed two spells of employment as a school teacher, the first in a Protestant school in Mullingar, the second in Carlow. Neither opportunity amounted to a sustainable career and Carleton and his family returned to Dublin after a short absence.

In his later writings, Carleton conceded that conversion was uncommon, unlikely and unnatural, particularly amongst the lower classes, in Ireland during the pre-famine period, through an anecdote that appeared in his novel Valentine McClutchy: The Irish Agent; or,

Chronicles of the Castle Cumber property (1845). Written by Carleton in 1845,

approximately twenty-five years after his own conversion, the author described two such converts, one formerly a Catholic, the other originally a Protestant. These two characters, Darby O’Drive, baliff to the land agent Valentine McClutchy and convert to the Protestant religion, and Bob Beatty, a convert to the Catholic faith, meet during the course of

Carleton’s narrative. An argument ensues, as both men discuss the virtues of their adopted religions. Bob accuses Darby of changing his religion for personal gain, indicating the

234 _{William Urwick, Biographic Sketches of the late James Digges La Touche, Esq. Banker, Dublin,}

Honourary Secretary to the Sunday School Society for Ireland, during seventeen years from its commencement, (Dublin, 1868), pp. 99-105.

235 _{Urwick, James Digges La Touche, p. 399.} 236 _{O’Donoghue, The Life, i, p. 234.}

connection between Protestantism and privilege or at least greater economic potential in the period, while Darby notes the absurdity of Bob’s conversion given his former infamy as an Orangeman:

“You disgraced your family by turnin’ apostate…”

“Why, you poor turncoat, isn’t the whole country laughin’ at you, and none more than your own friends. The great fightin’ Orangeman and blood-hound turned voteen! – oh, are we alive afther that!”237

Bob had suffered with epilepsy for some time before the Catholic priest, Father McCabe, miraculously cured him of his affliction, and he chose to convert on the basis of this cure. Darby’s reasons for converting to Protestantism were not revealed within the novel, however, one must assume that his association and employment with the Protestant land agent had some bearing on his decision to change his religion.

The significance of the exchange between these two men lies not, however, with either convert or the initial argument between the two but with the reaction of those looking on, both Catholic and Protestant, and the commencement of a violent brawl. Carleton claimed that equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants watched on as Darby and Bob came to blows. The crowd joined the battle and Carleton noted that:

The Catholics, ignorant of the turn which the controversy had taken, supported Bob and Protestantism; whilst the Protestants, owing to a similar mistake, fought like devils for Darby and the Pope.238

Carleton clearly recognised that conversion was an alien concept within pre-famine society. He illustrated as much through this scene as, during the confrontation, the

onlooking Catholics joined the fight for Protestantism while the Protestants battled for the Catholic religion.

It is no surprise that Carleton had left home and moved to Dublin before he changed his religion to Protestantism. It is unlikely that his family, friends and neighbours would had understood or accepted his decision to convert. Had Carleton announced his

conversion before leaving his native Tyrone he would have been susceptible to abuse, and marginalisation and it is highly likely that he would have been regarded as a traitor. The

237 _{Carleton, Valentine McClutchy, p. 244.} 238 _{Carleton, Valentine McClutchy, p. 246.}

position of the convert in pre-famine society was often hopeless. Irene Whelan suggested that converts to Protestantism ‘were frequently attacked by their neighbours, refused goods when they went to purchase them, and often driven out of their homes altogether.’239 While George Ensor noted that Protestants treated the conformists on the Farnham Estate with similar distain:

they despised them as Catholics – they despise them as renegades – they dread them as impostors – and, moreover, they fear them as new competitors for the favours and the lands of the lords of the soil.240

Given this context it is not surprising that there is no evidence to suggest that Carleton publicised the fact that he had changed his religion. And, as we have seen, scepticism about conversion was not confined to the community which a convert left. In Carleton’s case, while he was welcomed by some, such as Digges La Touche, he was dismissed from one job and failed to achieve security in others, very likely, at least in part, because of doubts about his reliability among the community he had joined.