Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy

MacGill, Patrick, 1890-1963Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
507K words
Chapters
51

Tags

English Originals General Biography Irish LaborerFate and FortuneDisplacementSocial CritiquePoverty and DignityUnderclass NarrativeDocumentary NarrativeAutobiographyExotic CultureSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy by Patrick MacGillAuthor: MacGill, Patrick, 1890-1963,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Oct 27, 2015

Editor's review

MacGill's autobiographical work recounts, in the first person of an Irish seasonal laborer, the experience of scraping a living at the bottom of society—building roads, digging ditches, working on farms—and holds value both as literature and as social history. The prose is plain but powerful; its details come from firsthand experience, and with little ornament it conveys the real conditions of poverty and migrant labor. It suits readers seeking supplementary material on early twentieth-century Irish and British social history, as well as those studying autobiography or labor narrative. There is no need to read for plot momentum; treat it as a series of continuous sketches of life, attending to scenes of work, dialogue, and the author's attitude toward fate. Since the language is English with regional colloquial color, an annotated or introduced edition is recommended; for first-time readers, reading chapter summaries before the main text helps in grasping relationships and the historical background.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the preface and contents first to understand the seasonal laborers' routes of movement, then proceed chapter by chapter.
  2. Keep pen and paper to note recurring place names, trades, and people, to clarify the narrative threads.
  3. When encountering dialect and colloquial expressions, guess from context first, then check notes; do not stop at every word.
  4. After finishing, compare with early twentieth-century Irish social history sources to understand the background of the work scenes.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51

FAQ

Is this book a novel or an autobiography? Judging by the title and the available information, it is Patrick MacGill's autobiographical narrative based on his experience as an Irish seasonal laborer, with literary treatment, but its core is a record of the author's own life and that of laborers like him; it should not be read as a work of fiction.
Is the English original difficult to read? The language is generally plain but carries Irish and working-class colloquial color; some dialogue and place names may pose obstacles. An annotated or introduced edition is recommended: read chapter summaries first, then close-read key passages.
Is it suitable as historical research material? It can be used as supplementary material, offering individual perspectives and details of life and work scenes, but it is not equivalent to a systematic historical work. Researchers should cross-check with other sources and avoid drawing conclusions from a single autobiography.

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About the author

MacGill, Patrick, 1890-1963 Author

Patrick MacGill (1890–1963) was an Irish writer whose seven works are held in this collection. Public information about him is limited and biographical details are difficult to verify, yet the titles and subtitles of his best-known books show that his writing drew heavily on the working-class labor and wartime experience he knew at first hand. Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy unfolds as the first-person account of an Irish migrant laborer, while The Rat-Pit addresses the hardships of slums and seasonal work in a plain, often critical tone. The First World War occupies an important place in works such as The Red Horizon and The Great Push, where he records trench experience from the perspective of an ordinary soldier with direct language and concrete detail. Books like The Diggers: The Australians in France further reflect his sustained attention to armies and wartime society. His style is realistic and autobiographical, presenting the daily lives of laborers and soldiers through personal observation, in plain prose and with restrained emotion.