In a children’s story I’m working on, the fictional town of Kilkenny, New Hampshire was settled during the 1800s by Irish Catholics sick of being discriminated against in Boston. One of the adult characters in the story writes a self-published field guide of mythical creatures sighted in and around town, primarily those “brought over” by the Irish residents and some spoken of by native American tribes in the area. This field guide serves as the catylst for the young progtagonist’s modern-day adventures.
However, of the mythical creatures I’ve looked up, a lot of the interesting ones come from Scotland and Wales rather than Ireland. So…would an primarily Irish town in the mid 1800s to early 1900s have been attractive to or repellent to newly arrived Scottish and/or Welsh immigrants? I know that there was no love lost between the Irish and the English, but how well did the Irish get along with the other two groups?
Since this is fiction I know I can do some authotorial hand-waving to explain away things if it’s unlikely and I still decide I need Scottish or Welsh critters in the story, but it would be good to know the historical plausability first.
It’s possible, I suppose, but you’d need a critical mass of Irish in the first wave to establish a viable community. European immigrants to the U.S. tended to settle where there were already many of their kind, in cities along the Eastern seaboard. One man’s ghetto or shantytown was another man’s vibrant ethnic community.
There wouldn’t have been much love lost between the Irish and Scottish at this time either. It was largely Scots that were moved by the Crown into Ulster during the Plantation and in the time period you mention there was a great deal of sectarian conflict between the two groups. Also, many Irish Catholics began emigrating to Scotland around that time and there would have been tensions between the groups there too. So I doubt they’d be in a big hurry to mingle in the New World.
If they were Catholic, then they’d have settled together. Protestants would have been unlikely to join the community. The Gaeilge dialects are also substantially different, so there would have been language issues.
plus, a lot of the Roman Catholic Scots tended to be from the Highlands and isles, so it wouldn’t be a big jump for the story to assume that they would be more likely to speak Gaelic and tell the old stories than Protestant lowlanders.
Actually they’re not that different. It’s entirely possible for speakers of one Gaelic language to converse with speakers of another, even today.
Gaelic was spoken in the lowlands too, and indeed was originally spoken by many Scottish(-derived) Protestants in Ulster, although they hate to admit it now. See Presbyterians and the Irish Language by Roger Blaney.
The Gaelic languages are very different from Welsh on the surface, but there would have been strong cultural similarities right up until the Reformation, and to this day there are many parallels in Celtic folklore. Unfortunately, it sort of takes a trained eye to ferret them out, and the religious culture of Catholic vs. Protestant is a big deal.
If you chose a settlement of Ulster Irish, though, say from Co. Fermanagh or someplace with a heavy Catholic population, you might be able to have the best of both worlds. Ulster Gaelic is a lot closer to Scottish Gaelic than other Irish dialects, and mutual intelligibility would be high. A mixed-religion community, bound together by a common language, might appeal to other Celtic immigrant groups. Probably not historically, but in historical fiction, sure. If you had them immigrate to found the colony in the 1600s, before the plantation system was completely entrenched, it might be possible. Interesting question.
Actually by the mid 1800s/early 1900s the Irish ones would have most likely spoken English anyway (or certainly at least have been capable of speaking English).
The English oppressed America as well remember; I don’t think anyone there would have held the English in particularly high regard at the time, especially not in Boston! The English seem to have had a fair stab at making themselves the common enemy for most of the world.
One of the main themes advanced by Jon Pebbles in his popular history trilogy of the Scottish Highlands, Glencoe, Culloden and The Clearances, is that there was great animosity between the Lowland Scots and the Highland Clans. They hated and feared each other. At the time of the Plantations the Highlands were still a feudal society run by the clan chiefs and pretty well beyond the power of London or Edinburgh to control or influence. By the time of the Elizabethan, Jacobite and Cromwellian plantations into Northern Ireland the primary language south of the Highland Line was Broad Scots, not Gaelic. Broad Scots is what King James spoke and there are reports that his English courtiers could barely understand him. The people who came to Northern Ireland from Scotland were not likely to speak Gaelic in either its Scots or Irish variants as their primary tongue but rather a language incomprehensible to the native Irish and nearly so to English speakers.
In the New World, The Highland Clearances, which started in the mid-1700s, had send the broken clans to Barbados, The Carolinas and Upper Canada where Highland Scots townships had been established for several generations before the rush of Irish immigration in the Great Famine. While there may have been the odd displaced Scot in the shanty towns of Boston in the mid-1800s there could not have been a significant number.
It is worth noting that the primary rap on the Famine Irish was not that they were Catholic, although that didn’t help, it was that they were dirty, diseased, ignorant, illiterate, brawling, drunken, dirt poor and starving.
Well, it depends what you mean by “not likely”. Certainly the majority would not have spoken Gaelic, but as Blaney’s book documents a significant minority of them did, both from the Highlands and from places such as Ayr and Galloway (which had a large Gaelic-speaking population until fairly recently, in historical terms). It was also not uncommon for a lot of them to learn Irish on arrival, particularly those who were missionaries, for obvious reasons.
Of course this is well before the time period in which elfkin477’s story takes place anyway.
Does anyone else have an opinion on a few (also Catholic) Scots from the Highlands settling there too? That’s where the most interesting beasts are from.
Thanks for all the answers - I knew you folks would know
How important is the Irish element? Maybe you could set the whole thing in a Scottish community in Canada? Sorry if that’s totally unhelpful!
I think in many instances Scottish emigration is more similar to English emigration than Irish. Other than people who had to leave the land during the clearances, the impression I get is that to this day Scots tend to go it alone when they settle abroad. Even now there are Irish communities in London in places like Greenford or Stoke Newington, but there are no Scottish communities in London, just as there are no English areas in foreign cities (I know you get ex-pat communities in Spain etc but they’re usually retirees - there aren’t many kids growing up amongst those people).
yes - if you want to switch it to a Canadian setting, I would suggest putting it in Cape Breton, which had a well-established Scots-Gaelic speaking community even into the late 1800s.
The biggest problem you have, which is only obliquely referred to in these posts, is that the Scots mostly migrated before the Irish. My ethnic heritage is more Scottish than anything else, and only one branch arrived after the Revolutionary War. That one branch still goes back to about the Civil War. (I can’t remember if it was before or after.)
If I was writing your story, I’d claim the fun beasties were imported to Northern Ireland when the Scots went there, and then followed with some Irish to your Kilkenny.
