Signed, A Paddy: An Irish Immigrant Story (Paddy series)
County Cork, 1848. Rosaleen, aged 15 and the last of her family, hurriedly buries her mother’s corpse in unconsecrated ground. The potato blight compels her to emigrate; it is only a question of the Antipodes or America. Rendered older than her years by circumstances, Rosaleen goes first to Boston and then to Lowell, where she works in a cotton mill and encounters anti-Irish prejudice from her fellow workers for the familiar economic reason that the last-arrived and most desperate will accept working for less; she is also sneered at as ‘a Bridget.’
In Boyle’s impressively researched first novel, Rosaleen gets involved in the Abolitionist movement and, in the wake of a terrible accident in the mill, becomes an activist for better working conditions and falls in love. Boyle gets across very effectively the shock of arriving in a city to someone whose horizons until then have always been rural. Supporting characters are compelling, especially Marie, her Black colleague in Boston, Nancy in the Lowell boarding house, and the sinisterly entitled Oliver Cole (plot-wise, I thought more might have been made of him).
Whilst Boyle correctly points out that her heroine would probably have spoken Irish, her English betrays no difference from that spoken in Massachusetts, and terms like ‘dumb worm,’ ‘pooped’, ‘to date’ (as a verb) and ‘wow’ have a jarring modernity. A reference to a ‘crematory’ at a Cork workhouse is misplaced; this would have been a burial pit. By contrast, the anonymous letters, signed ‘A Paddy’ of the title, were so completely in ‘voice’ that I googled their contents thinking the author must have used original sources.
