Estudios Irlandeses (Mar 2022)
Patrick MacGill: A Path to Socialism Shared with Jack London
Abstract
Until relatively recently the works of the early twentieth-century Irish novelist Patrick MacGill have been neglected by literary commentators. MacGill made his reputation, initially, through his poetry that was centred on the hard lives and conditions of the ‘Navvy’ – the itinerant labourers of the British industrial world. He subsequently published two novels that record the conditions of the Irish migrant agricultural and industrial labourers in Scotland, namely The Children of the Dead End and The Rat-Pit, establishing his reputation as a social commentator of the lower reaches of the working class. Several literary commentators such as Jack Mitchell (1982), Seamus Deane (1985), Owen Dudley Edwards (1986), and Terry Phillips (2010), have considered these early works to have a socialist view while others, Lochlinn McGlynn (1944), and Joe Mulholland (1972) have admired the descriptive skills and the realism in his writings. This article considers their points and places in context MacGill’s education in socialism in Greenock and Glasgow around 1909 and highlights examples where his socialist views are manifestly visible outside his novels. Patrick MacGill and Jack London were writers whose early literary works are formed of their experiences in the lower layers of the working class. In this article, the similarities in the formative years of MacGill and those of Jack London are exposed showing a striking commonality in their experiences that leads them both to socialism and to record those experiences in literature.
