William Carleton and Orangeism

William Carleton was the youngest of fourteen children born to a peasant family in county Tyrone, Ireland, in 1794. His tales give an accurate depiction of Irish rural life and events during the first half of the nineteenth century. William Butler Yeats was a great admirer, saying, '... the history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields but in what the people say to each other on fair-days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage'. And that is what Carleton recorded for posterity.

William Carleton and Orangeism commences with a narrative of the Williamite period and moves on to the foundation of the Orange Institution around the time of Carleton's birth. Carleton was by no means an admirer of Orangeism as he had experienced it, but his writings provide us with a contemporary perspective of how it functoned in county Tyrone. This study helps to explain Carleton's mindset concerning an important Irish social institution.

Dr Christoper McGimpsey is from Newtownards in county Down. He was educated at Campbell College, Belfast, and later received a B.A. (Hons) from Syracuse University in New York. Thereafter, he was awarded a PhD in Irish history by Edinburgh University. He was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies in Queen's University Belfast and is an acknowledged expert on Orangeism.