"The Death of a Devotee" by William Carleton

"The Death of a Devotee" by William Carleton (1850, 22 pages)

Irish Short Story Month

March 1 to March 31

William Carleton 1794 to 1869 -Dublin

Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story or related matter and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. 

In 1850 the famine was on the wane in Ireland.  Falmouth Kearney, a maternal great-great-great grandfather  of President Barack Obama emigrated Ireland to New York.   The university of Utah opens in Salt Lake City.    The transportation of British convicts to Western Australia begins.  Slavery is legal in the southern states of the United States.  In an event that will greatly impact Ireland one day Lehman Brothers is founded.  

The most enduring literary works published in 1850 were David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone.    The population of Ireland fell by from about eight million in 1840 to five million in 1850.  

William Carleton is considered one the of best chroniclers of life in Ireland in first fifty years of the 19th century.  

I have previously posted on his important novel The Black Prophet:  A Tale of the Irish Famine and four of his short works of fiction.   If you want to learn about Irish's life in the first half of the 19th century, the work of William Carleton is a great place to start.  (There is some background information on Carleton in my prior posts on him.)

Last year I devoted a week to Irish short stories in which a priest plays a central role and  "The Death of a Devotee"  is a wonderful story centering on a priest's reluctance to give last rtes to a dying man.  Of the five short stories by Carleton I have read, it reads most like a modern short story.  Some of his stories are just fictionalized accounts of like in Ireland and some are really fables and fairy tales.  It is also the most exciting story.  

As the story opens a man pounds on the door of priest and demands that he come to give last rites to his brother.  He does not want just any priest, he wants only one particular one to come.  This priest is very sick and the curate and housekeeper try to get him to take another priest with him.   He demands the sick priest come or he will throw him across his horse and bring him.  The story, it is told by the curate (a curate is a priest's lay assistant, often now called deacons) makes us wonder why he wants only this one priest.  The description of the house where the man lives is wonderful, it brings forth the real poverty and hardship of the people.   There are some things that I did not really derive from reading this story such as why the man wanted only the one priest and why the priest was at first reluctant to preform last rites.  The power in this story is in seeing how important these rites were to the man and his family and how vital the priest was to Irish society.

I read this story in The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories by William Trevor.  I believe if you look you can find it online.