‘I never could forget my darling mother’: the language of recollection in a corpus of female Irish emigrant correspondence

Abstract

The post-famine period from the 1850s to the 1920s was a time that saw a significant increase in female migration from Ireland to North America. A small glimpse into the lives of these women – their preoccupations, feelings, perceptions and beliefs – can be found in the letters they wrote home to their families. This article uses a mixed methods approach to analyse the letters of one female Irish emigrant called Julia Lough. First, a close, qualitative reading of the letters is carried out to identify topics and themes within the discourse. Computational methods are then used to examine the language of one of those topics - ‘Recollections’ - to see what linguistic patterns emerge. The essay concludes by discussing how memories of events, people and places contribute to a sense of closeness and attachment between author and recipient.

Key words:

• migration history
• personal correspondence
• corpus linguistics
• digital humanities
• emotions history

Notes

1. Among the Irish relatives the spelling later became ‘Locke’ – very close to the Irish pronunciation of the name – and was written Lowe on some official documents.

2. Professor Kerby Miller, Curators’ Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri: http://history.missouri.edu/people/miller.html.

3. A corpus can be defined as a ‘bod[y] of naturally occurring language data stored on computers’ and corpus techniques of analysis as the ‘computational procedures which manipulate this data in various ways … to uncover linguistic patterns which can enable us to make sense of the ways that language is used’ (Baker, 2006, p. 1).

4. Kilgarriff and Kosem (2012). See also Kilgarriff, Rychly, Smrz, and Tugwell (2004).

5. Rayson (2009). See also Rayson (2008).

6. In the early 1950s, a few of the Lough letters were initially donated by Canice and Eilish O’Mahony of Dundalk, County Louth, to Arnold Schrier, then a graduate student at Northwestern University, now Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, who subsequently employed them, alongside other epistolary documents, in his 1958 book Ireland and the Irish Emigration, 1850–1900 (Schrier, 1958). In 1977–1978 the rest of the Lough letters were donated to Miller by the O’Mahonys and by Edward Dunne and Kate Tynan of Portlaoise, County Laois. Both Miller and Schrier, who thereafter collaborated in researching Irish migration to America, made photocopies and transcriptions of these letters, and Miller returned the original manuscripts to their donors.

7. I am indebted to personal communications with Kerby Miller for the information that follows. See too Miller (2008).

8. This quotation is taken from correspondence between Miller and Mrs Edward McKenna (one of the donors).

9. This family structure (whereby the older siblings emigrated while the youngest sibling remained at home to look after the family) may reflect ultimogeniture practices in rural Ireland. See Ó Gráda (1980).

10. A term coined by the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno in 1985. ‘It refers to the value of the humble and anonymous lives experienced by ordinary men and women in everyday contexts which form the essence of normal social interactions, as opposed to the lives of leaders and famous people that are generally accounted for in canonical histories’ (Amador-Moreno, Corrigan, McCafferty, Moreton, & Waters, In press).

11. Other studies which focus on the writings of the poor include Burnett, Vincent, and Mayall (1984), Fairman (2000) and Yokoyama (2008).

12. Although emigrants came from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds the vast majority were, as Erickson (1972, p. 1), puts it, ‘ordinary working people’.

13. Richards (2006, p. 61) quoting James Scott in Hitchcock, King, and Sharpe (1996, p. 6).

14. In other words, ‘immigrant writers were immersed in cultures which informed their often tentative writing’ (Elliott et al., 2006, p. 7).

15. As argued by Scott (1992), it is not possible to separate language and experience since language constructs identities, ‘position[s] subjects and produce[s] … experiences’ (p. 25). Scott’s view is shared by linguists Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) and Hoey (2005). Whilst what underpins Halliday and Matthiessen’s work on systemic functional grammar is the notion of choice (the lexiogrammatical possibilities that ‘allow [a] speaker to represent the world in a particular way’ (Hunston, 2006, p. 65)), what underpins Hoey’s theory of lexical priming is the idea that individuals are primed to use language in a certain way, therefore raising questions regarding the very notion of choice. Both theories, however, come from the standpoint that language and experience are inherently connected.

16. This worldview, Miller (1985) suggests, dates back to pre-modern times when ‘Gaelic culture’s secular, religious, and linguistic aspects expressed or reinforced a worldview which deemphasized and even condemned individualistic and innovative actions such as emigration’ (p. 556).

17. See, also, O’Farrell (1984, 1987, 1990) for accounts on Irish migrants in Australia and New Zealand, based largely on letters and family memoirs. See also McCarthy’s (2005) study, Irish Migrants in New Zealand, which – ‘in order to facilitate comparative endeavours …’ follows the classification used by the Thematic Index of David Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation. For a detailed account of patterns of Irish migration to other countries including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa see Akenson (1993).

18. Matt (2011) points out that ‘before the seventeenth century, the word nostalgia did not exist, and before the eighteenth century the English word homesickness did not either’. Matt goes on to say that ‘the invention of these terms reflected a new concern about the emotions that were becoming apparent in early modern society’ (pp. 9–10).

19. Here, Richards is referring to Gerber (2006) who argues that ‘emigrant letters, or indeed any type of personal correspondence, is almost always a commentary on the individual psyche of the writer … [letters] are restricted to the way individual writers recreated their own personalities, their emotional conditioning to the experience of emigration, reformulating their relationships and reconstructing their personal identities’ (Richards, 2010, p. 13 summarising Gerber, 2006).

20. See also Brettell and Hollifield (2000, p. vii).

21. See, for example, Reddy (2001) and Matt (2011).

22. Full descriptions of all 24 topics are detailed in Moreton (In press).

23. ‘Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterance … and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance’ (Levinson, 1983, p. 54).

24. The term ‘formulaic language’ is used here to refer to multi-word units that closely resemble phrases found in similar generic points with similar functions in personal letters generally.

25. For a more detailed account of the use of projection structures in the Lough letters see Moreton (2015).