David Fitzpatrick:
Oceans of Consolation:
Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia
Review by Patrick O'Sullivan

This is a lovely book. It is well-designed, a pleasure to hold, substantial. More important, it formalises within one volume new standards in the presentation and the reading of nineteenth century Irish migrants' letters. Fitzpatrick has selected and explored, with extraordinary sensitivity, scholarship, and sheer hard work, fourteen 'sequences' totalling 111 letters. A sequence is a group of letters emanating from one extended family. The book falls into three unequal parts: a discursive methodological Introduction; the letters themselves giving the fourteen sequences in four substantial sections; and a last section, 'Themes', six chapters of Fitzpatrick's reflections on his own reading of the letters.

The Introduction begins with a private joke: the example Fitzpatrick gives of the limitations of 'aggregate representations', 'identikit' approaches to the study of migration is from a 1980 essay in Irish Historical Studies by David Fitzpatrick. Then he looks, perhaps too briefly, at earlier uses of migrants' letters by other researchers. I say perhaps too briefly. Fitzpatrick erects adequate signposts, but does not acknowledge that the various collections he mentions come from within different academic disciplines. I can readily imagine an interdisciplinary seminar that gathered together the books mentioned by Fitzpatrick, to develop a critical survey of the use made of letters in the study of migration. The granddaddy of them all is, of course, the 1918-20 Thomas and Znaniecki volume, The Polish Peasant, a classic of sociology, which still has an (indirect, unacknowledged) influence on historians of Irish-America.

In a recent review of books of photography (Irish Studies Review 12) I noted the similar ways that photographs and letters are used in studies of migration, and in histories generally. Broadly, letters (and photographs) are slotted into a pre-existing narrative, a narrative shaped by other sources, a thesis arrived at from first principles (or the indirect influence of Thomas and Znaniecki). These processes inevitably involve selection of letters, abridgement and editing. Thus Kamphoefner and his associates, in their collection of German migrants' letters, excise tedious 'ritualized pious reflections' and lists of persons to whom the letter writer wished to send regards. But these very lists, as Fitzpatrick demonstrates with the letters in Oceans of Consolation, provide the researcher with ways of exploring the letter-writers family and friendship networks. You can, like Fitzpauick, go to the migrant's home region, map those networks and, with a historical geographer's methodology, make visible affection in remembered space.

So, Fitzpatrick presents the letters unedited, with only sufficient addition to make meaning plain and make reference possible. Each sequence is preceded by his own narrative, drawing out the narrative held within the letters, and clarifying the allusions. Here, Fitzpatrick acknowledges, he is using something of the methods of the family historian, walking the ground, listening to stories and drawing on an extraordinary variety of sources. It is only one of the merits of this book that it can be put into the hands of any Irish family historian: it offers, by example, a guide to family history research. By the same token the book offers structures through which family histories can be embraced and enfolded within the parameters of legitimated academic endeavour. Fitzpatrick has gone to extraordinary trouble to clarify the letter-writers' allusions. It is with something of a frisson that the collector of English detective stories comes across a reference to the murder of Glass. (This - for those who do not collect old green Penguins - is the classic real-life case where the detective turned out to be the murderer.)

If pre-existing 'identikit' narratives of migration would simply draw on letters for illustration, are there then things that the letters, and only the letters, can tell us about Irish experiences of migration? In this volume the Doorley letters will most interest scholars of Irish migration to England: a 'sequence' of nine surviving letters, dating from 1877 to 1906, sent out to Maria Doorley in Australia by her mother and sisters in Bolton. The story that emerges of the women's lives in Bolton is a bleak one, of useless men, crippling work, illness, poverty and always the hope of reuniting the family in happier circumstances in Australia. The family could never quite scrape together the passage money - the nearest they came was in 1879, but Kate Doorley's recently-acquired husband found it impossible to save five pounds.

The point is that in every other narrative of mass, 'identikit' Irish migration the Doorleys of Bolton are 'assimilated'. The letters reveal not a dream of Australia, but desperate, unsuccessful plans to escape from misery in Bolton, to get to Australia, the real Australia, described and promised by Maria. Again, Fitzpatrick has walked the ground. He describes the unmarked Doorley graves in Tonge cemetery, Bolton. His footnote (p. 344) thanks the grave-diggers who showed him round. The last section, the chapters on 'Themes', is an extended meditation on the content of the letters, a substantial exercise in discourse analysis, looking at, for example, 'the politics of kinship', money, 'home'. Little or nothing, be it noted, on 'exile'. In these chapters Fitzpatrick the discourse analyst is in tension with Fitzpatrick the statistician, since he has already noted in his Introduction that there can be no defence of this selection of letters as a 'representative sample'. But he is true to his sources, he listens to the letters.

If Fitzpatrick has done so much, can I reasonably wish he had done more? I am intrigued by the processes which turned the able young statistician of that 1980 essay in Irish Historical Studies into the able litterateur and historian of families in Oceans of Consolation: but these are processes, I think, not so much within Fitzpatrick himself as within the academic and non-academic enterprise that is the study of Irish migration. These processes reflect and draw on debates within many academic disciplines, debates at times uncomfortably polarised, on the nature of 'facts', on questions of methodology, on the nature of 'logical positivism'. I wonder how we can place Oceans of Consolation within those debates - for it is a commonplace of those debates that critics of 'identikit' methodologies too often couch their critiques in abstract philosophical forms without adequately demonstrating the kind of methodology they would use and the knowledge they would seek.

I do not, therefore, wish that Fitzpatrick had littered his book with references to Habermas and Foucault - though you can detect the influence of Foucault in that final section. Fitzpatrick has done something quite radical, something that ten years ago might have been ridiculed: he has listened to his sources and he has ably demonstrated the kind of knowledge that is there to find - and would have been lost had he not listened.

Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
England

This review first appeared in Irish Studies Review, No. 14, Spring, 1996, and is reproduced here with the permission of Patrick O'Sullivan.