The way back to Erin: Claribel's music and Irish pathos (part 1, likely)
HI. I missed y’all.
It’s been eons, I know, but the last several months have been… hard, for multiple reasons, some of which you can probably surmise from the uhhhhhhhhhhhh state of the USA right now. But I’m determined to send out this email today, because today marks exactly four years since I accidentally stumbled across Claribel and she changed my whole life.
It was difficult for me to regain any sort of stride, let alone in my research, after last November’s everything. I don’t know if I’m truly back in the saddle even now. But here’s one thing that’s helped me: this passage from the writer Maeve Brennan, in a letter to her friend Tillie Olsen. I encountered it around mid-November when I was reading Kate Bolick’s book Spinster, and it came at just the right time to knock my socks off.
I have been trying to think of the word to say to you that would never fail to lift you up when you are too tired or too sad [to] not be downcast. But I can think only of a reminder -- you are all it has. You are all your work has. It has nobody else and never had anybody else. If you deny it hands and a voice, it will continue as it is, alive, but speechless and without hands. You know it has eyes and can see you, and you know how hopefully it watches you. But I am speaking of a soul that is timid but that longs to be known. When you are so sad that you “cannot work” there is always danger fear will enter in and begin withering around. A good way to remain on guard is to go to the window and watch the birds for an hour or two or three. It is very comforting to see their beaks opening and shutting.
(Emphases mine.)
You are all it has. You are all your work has. For better or worse — and it’s still bizarre somehow, after four years hammering away at this project, to realize this anew — I’m the one Claribel has. I’m the one that this story, the unbelievably sprawling story of her life and career and legacy, has. And I can think of few more apt descriptions of her than “a soul that is timid but that longs to be known,” too. Make no mistake, I won’t be walling myself off from the rest of the world to do research over the next several years — I’m going to help combat this absolute festival of horseshit in whatever ways I can — but this truth, Claribel’s truth, is worth telling too.
…alright, philosophizing over, let’s get to some actual scholarly content here. I was hoping to send this installment out in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, but I copied and pasted a lot of this over from another app and there was so much weird extra markdown formatting I had to excise. Whatever. Point being, today we’re going to talk about Claribel’s Irish-music legacy! Because oh boy, does she ever have one, and I’ve realized as I’ve been drafting this that I’ll need at least two newsletter installments to talk about it. (I say this as much for my own accountability as anything else: look for part 2 in your inboxes soon! Ish!)
One of the more remarkable things about Claribel’s story to me — about her cultural staying power, in particular — is how her best-remembered song, “Come Back to Erin,” is in fact best remembered as an Irish ballad. Its origin, namely the fact that it was written by an English woman who likely never set foot in Ireland in her whole life, gets obscured in the process; I’ve seen a nonzero number of sheet music folios from the 1980s or later, as well as a clutch of karaoke videos on YouTube,1 credit the song simply as “Irish Traditional” or something of that ilk. So how on earth was she able to tap into such a strong, enduring vein of emotion here? How did she manage to write such a persistent song?
On one level, I do think Claribel was an incredibly empathetic person and was able to access genuine emotional connections because of that. I can’t be sure how her empathy applied to Irish experiences specifically, though, and as such I’m venturing out on a real conjectural limb with this section. At any rate: the “Great Famine” was happening during Charlotte’s teenage years and young adulthood (1845-1852). I have no solid information regarding how she felt about that. It probably would have been easy enough for this daughter of the gentry to be at an emotional remove from the Famine itself, much like her fellow Lincolnshire native Alfred Tennyson, who on a visit to Ireland in 1848 was absolutely adamant that he should hear nothing of the “Irish distress.”2 I have an as-of-yet-unconfirmed suspicion, though, that she met or at least encountered some number of Irish émigrés during that approximate time period. See, the British railroad system was expanding a lot in the mid-19th century, and in particular there was a whole business group laying tracks and building infrastructure to bring the railway to her hometown of Louth. Her father, Henry Alington Pye (whose, erm, shenanigans I’ve alluded to in other installments), was one of the lawyers/businessmen working on that project. I suspect that’s why a sixteen-year-old Charlotte ended up laying the foundation stone for the Louth railway station in July 1847.
And here's the thing — the laborers actually building these railroads, the “navvies,” included a significant number of Irish workers. Apparently only about 30%,3 but that's nothing to sneeze at, either. So I think there's a fair chance she at least had some exposure to the navvies, even though the class differences might have precluded a lot of actual socialization. Even just hearing them talk or sing amongst themselves could well have had an impression on her. That's one part of my working theory.
The other thing is this: “Come Back to Erin” is actually not the first time Claribel wrote something that plucked at Irish heartstrings. That honor instead goes to “Handful of Earth,” the poem that became a song entitled “Norah's Treasure.”
This poem by Claribel seems to have first been published in a short-lived paper from her main music publisher, Boosey and Co. Plenty of music publishers also owned and published various magazines or papers in this time, and Boosey was no exception. For a while, John Boosey (her main champion at the firm) was the listed publisher of the long-running The Musical World, until around 1862 when the firm sold the paper to another music publisher, Duncan Davison & Co. John Boosey clearly had continued aspirations to be a periodical publisher, because I can name three-and-a-half short-lived titles he put out between 1862 and 1864: The Weekly Vocalist and its counterpart The Monthly Vocalist, The Literary Times (available on the Internet Archive!), and Boosey’s Musical and Dramatic Review.
It's the last of these that's relevant here. Had only twelve weekly issues total, and annoyingly only two survive in the British Library — neither of them being the one where this Claribel poem was originally printed, because of course. However, the first reprint of this poem that I've been able to find, from the Suffolk and Essex Free Press of April 28, 1864, credits it to Boosey's Musical and Dramatic Review. I'd include a picture of the bit in question, but frankly the quality is crap, so a transcript it is:
AN INCIDENT OF THE IRISH EXODUS.
Madame Sainton Dolby has adopted a new ballad written by Claribel, and “married” to an Irish melody by the distinguished vocalist. The words describe a real incident witnessed the other day on the departure of the Galway emigration ship for Australia:-
It's sailin' I am at the dawn of the day,
To my brother that's over the sea,
But it's little I'll care for my life anywhere,
For it's breaking my poor heart will be.
But a treasure I'll take for ould Ireland's sake,
That I'll prize all belonging above,
It's a handful of earth from the land of my birth,
From the heart of the land that I love.And won't the poor lad in his exile be glad
When he sees the brave present I bring,
And won't there be flowers from this treasure of ours,
In the warmth of the beautiful Spring.
Och! Erin Machree! tho' it's partin' we be,
It's a blessin' I'll leave on your shore,
And your mountains and streams I will see in my dreams.
'Till I cross to my country once more.-- Boosey's Musical and Dramatic Review.
Now, is this origin story true? Hell, I have no idea. I'll probably end up cross-referencing ship listings and stuff at some point because I'm me, but that is not today. The important thing is, this poem made it over to the United States. Whether via the Suffolk paper or via Boosey's paper, I don't know yet, but it pops up again in the Louisville Daily Democrat on June 19, 1864. And thus begins the American reprint chain, as more and more papers get ahold of it and decide to share it with their readers:
24 total reprints in American papers from June 1864 to September 1865
2 in 1866, somewhat randomly
3 at the beginning of 1871
and then from 1872 through 1873 (with something of a gap in Jan-June 1873), I've counted EIGHTY total reprints, assuming I didn't accidentally double count something.
I should also mention it did get reprinted in at least three Irish newspapers in its early days, so it seems people in actual Ireland at least didn’t hate it.
So that's a tentative total of 109 American reprints (that I’ve found). That's... kind of wild? And what makes this especially notable is that these were the earliest days of what we'd recognize as modern newspaper syndication.4 At some point, I’ll double-check the newspapers in which the poem appeared and see if they were syndicated in any way. I’m more inclined to suspect, though, that the spread of this poem was much more organic. Which is also kind of incredible.
Ultimately, this poem went all over the damn country, even in its initial spread. It made it to Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin just in 1864. It's usually presented with only a fraction, if any, of its original context; sometimes, especially later, it’s even attributed to “an anonymous signature.” It's also often specifically characterized as Irish, with one version of the reprint saying “Let Irishmen read it,” and another giving it the title “The Irish Emigrant.” It also got slightly... I hate to say bastardized, but certainly retooled into a slightly different song by a guy called Joseph Murphy, who used it in his show “Maum Cre” circa 1872. That version adds a whole turn of the screw about the titular handful of earth being from “our dear mother's grave”… which kinda tips the tone over into maudlin territory, if you ask me, but also who am I to judge the maudlin here.
Themes of loss, alienation, and nostalgia (both sweet and bitter, often at the same time) are already really common across Claribel's lyrics: just look at Dream Land, I Cannot Sing the Old Songs, or even Maggie’s Secret, to say nothing of her non-musical poetry. Whether she tapped into those themes on purpose for both of her Irish songs, I don’t know. But she genuinely hit on something, and I think what she connected with might reasonably described as “cultural homesickness.” Irish people at home were fighting the British — their colonizers, not to put too fine a point on it — about land rights and wrongly imprisoned nationalists and their own damn language.5 Irish people abroad were in this massive diaspora, which of course came with its own potent emotional and sociocultural bouquet that other scholars have already analyzed far more eloquently than I could.6 “Handful of Earth” doesn't pop up in subsequent decades’ newspapers or other publications nearly as often as, for example, “Take Back the Heart” or “Come Back to Erin.” But I did find it in, of all places, a Mexican newspaper from decades later. Witness, the Tampico Tribune of February 1, 1930 discussing the career of boxer John L. Sullivan:
When the match with James J. Corbett was arranged at New Orleans [in 18927] none of the idolizers of the great gladiator realized he was what afterward was known as the “mere hollow shell of his former self.” Neither did Sullivan as he rode to the slaughter in an open faced hack with old Bill McCabe, bellowing with maudlin sentiment a song concerning a “handful of earth from the land of my birth."
Was Sullivan singing Joe Murphy’s version of the song, probably. But at the end of the day, he and Joe Murphy and everyone else who sang any version of that song… they still owe it to Claribel.
Next time, we’ll talk about “Come Back to Erin” — but specifically, how it played a role in the Fenian (Irish nationalist) movement in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
Endnotes
1: Although apparently “Ameritz Karaoke” is mainly to blame for that. See here, here, here, and here.
2: This is a side note, but I’d heard a really damning anecdote about Alfred Tennyson insisting that his carriage curtains always be drawn on this Irish tour, such that he didn’t have to see people suffering. While I’ve found verification of him not wanting to hear about the so-called “Irish Distress” during his stay (notably in the journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson), I haven’t been able to trace the curtains claim further back than this blog post from 2020 that, conveniently, doesn’t cite the curtains claim. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true, but till I can verify, I’ll take that with a grain of salt. And frankly, not wanting to hear about the “Irish distress” on his Ireland vacation already doesn’t paint Tennyson in the best light.
3: And a sizeable number of the songs listed on this page from the UK’s National Railway Museum are at least Irish-flavored: https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/research-and-archive/further-resources#railway-songs
4: Some sources on early newspaper syndication stuff, for anyone else who’s interested!
https://www.britannica.com/topic/newspaper-syndicate
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-syndicated-columns-comics-stories-forever-changed-news-media-180973431/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/newspaper-syndicates
https://www.amazon.com/History-Newspaper-Syndicates-United-1865-1935/dp/1258486237
https://www.britannica.com/topic/newspaper-syndicate
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-syndicated-columns-comics-stories-forever-changed-news-media-180973431/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/newspaper-syndicates
5: Here’s where I wholeheartedly recommend the play Translations by Brian Friel. I read this in undergrad, as part of a course about trauma theory that as a whole had a massive influence on my critical lens. I swear, someday I’ll write the essay that’s been percolating in the back of my head for years involving Translations, What We Do in the Shadows (the movie), and other media that directly makes the audience complicit in its narrative.
6: I suspect any of the sources listed in the bibliography for the relevant Wikipedia article could be a good starting point here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_diaspora
7: So glad this guy was well-known enough that I was able to confirm the year of this incident. Here, read all about it. https://web.archive.org/web/20160506000607/http://www.boxing.com/strong_boythe_life_and_times_of_john_l._sullivan_americas_first_sports_hero.html
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