After Sixty Years

Shan F. Bullock

Verlag: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., London, 1931

Beschreibung

Original black cloth with gilt titles on the spine. 214 clean and bright pages, speckled foxing and browning on the first and last few pages and on the edges. Boards slightly rubbed and faded with time consistent with age. Usual toning and age appreciation should be expected. Scarce! Shan Bullock admired and feared his father, and never quite escaped the old man's scorn. He recorded his youth in a memoir, After sixty years (1931) Bullock, Shan Fadh (John William) (1865 1935), author, was born 17 May 1865 at Inisherk, Co. Fermanagh, eldest son among eleven children of Thomas Bullock (1840 1917), estate steward and farmer, and his wife Mary Wheery. Thomas Bullock worked on the Crom Castle demesne of John Crichton, 3rd earl of Erne (1802 85). The great house was glamorous, remote, and distant from the small farmers who paid for it. The estate lay on a sectarian fault line, including both protestant and catholic districts with vivid folk memories of the 1689 battle of Newtownbutler. A private militia of protestant farmers and servants drilled on the castle lawn and the demesne was structured around unspoken distinctions between English house servants, local protestant craftsmen and supervisors, and unskilled catholics in the farther reaches of the grounds. Thomas Bullock combined great physical strength with a fierce desire for independence and a conviction that only farmers were truly men. He brooded darkly over rural depopulation and practised corporal punishment on his sons well into their teens, driving several to emigration. He acquired 200 acres on the Cavan-Fermanagh border and when the estate was sold under the Wyndham land act (1903) he negotiated on behalf of the protestant tenants. Shan Bullock admired and feared his father, and never quite escaped the old man s scorn. He recorded his youth in a memoir, After sixty years (1931), described by Benedict Kiely as the last account of a great estate produced by someone who had seen it before the land war. He was educated at Crom estate primary school, run by the Church of Ireland, and Farra school, Co. Westmeath, a former agricultural college turned school which inspired his novel, The cubs (1906). After failing to qualify for TCD, Bullock spent a year working on his father's holding at Killynick where it became clear he was not suited to farming. He moved to London in 1883, to his father's disgust, to become a civil service clerk in Somerset House, later transferring to the office of the public trustee. Bullock experienced a period of rebellion and instability in London; he abandoned the evangelical protestantism of his childhood and later adopted Matthew Arnold's liberal anglicanism. A streak of sexual guilt, visible in some of his work, may date from this period or from his adolescence at Crom. His life stabilised in 1889 with his marriage to Emma Mitchell; they had a son and a daughter. Bullock took to journalism to supplement his salary and he published his first book of stories, The awkward squads in 1893, partly inspired by the semi-military preparations which accompanied the introduction of Gladstone's second home rule bill (1893). His imaginative focus remained centred on the countryside of his youth; his work centred on catholic and protestant small farmers and labourers, a class below his own. Thomas Bullock served on the board of guardians of Lisnaskea workhouse, where some of his son's characters end up. Bullock's stories revolve around a tension between a rural world dominated by hard physical labour, conflict, and provincial self-assurance, both brutal and admirable in its endurance, and frustrated aspirants to higher things such as adolescent writers, would-be aristocrats, farmers' wives whose parlours subside under muddy boots, figures whose hopes are at once noble, ridiculous and pitiable. Several novels embody this conflict in rival Bullock personae, the unreflective Jan Farmer (Bullock as he might have developed in Fermanagh), and the self-conscious i. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers TSB9028

Bibliografische Details

Titel: After Sixty Years

Verlag: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., London

Erscheinungsdatum: 1931

Einband: Hardcover

Zustand: Very Good

Zustand des Schutzumschlags: No Jacket

Auflage: 1st Edition