O'Casey -v- Dickens

Why did my friend, who grew up in O'Casey's world, prefer Dickens' novels to the Dublin plays?

Last week I saw Sean O’Casey’s ‘Dublin Trilogy’ in a brilliant new production by the Druid theatre company. Although set in the revolutionary period 1915-1922, the plays, The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, combine melodrama, farce and tragedy making them perennially popular.

The River Liffey in Dublin (Photo by NIR HIMI on Unsplash))

Famously, the male characters, who have the best comic lines, are weak, indolent braggarts, while the women are brave, resilient stoics. The most striking effect of watching the three plays in such close succession was to hear their idiomatic range. Each character has her or his own register, with the result that, for all their loquacity, the characters don’t actually speak, much less listen, to one another.

Poverty and laziness lead the men to project themselves beyond the four walls of their tenements, the Covey clinging Marxism and “Janerski’s thesis”, Davoren casting himself as a latter day Shelley and Captain Boyle reminiscing about his putative voyage to the “Antanartic Ocean”. Their nationalism is another dream, potent and fatal, expressed in the chilling blood rhetoric of revolutionary leader, Padraig Pearse. The women, meanwhile, focus on improving their present lives, Nora Clitheroe, Jenny Gogan, Rosie Redmond, Minnie Powell, Juno and Mary Boyle all have jobs and spend their money on their homes and clothes. Only for the brief time that the Boyles believe they have come into the money are the ‘Captain’ and Juno in harmony.

  The would-be camaraderie of the revolutionary movement is fractured by the solipsism of these individual needs. Even the women, who pull together in times of trouble, bitch about one another behind hands, Jenny Gogan sniping at Nora Clitheroe’s notions of “upperosity”, Mrs. Grigson criticising pretty Minnie Powell and Juno challenging her daughter’s strike action and because a principle won’t put bread on the table. Nevertheless it is Jenny who brings the broken Nora into her home, and Juno takes her pregnant daughter away with the famous line that the baby will be better off with two mothers than with a mother and father. That is the real revolution presented here. This woman who has tolerated her husband’s tyranny and fecklessness now defies convention and religious taboo to save her daughter and raise her grandchild. This Civil War baby is the symbolic culmination of the arc traced through the plays from Nora Clitheroe’s miscarried child of the Rising in 1916.

As I watched the plays the voice of another, real, woman was playing in my head. One who suffered even more than Juno at the hands of a drunken, violent and unfaithful husband, who yet forgave all, and retained a spry intelligence and sense of humour to the end of her long life. The lady’s name was Lizzie Boylan and I was lucky enough to have been half-raised by her.

Several of my friends who knew and loved her urged me to write her story. Late in Lizzie’s life I asked her permission to do this and to record her reminiscences. She agreed saying “I think it would be a very good book”. Thus began a series of afternoons in Lizzie’s corporation flat in the centre of Dublin, behind the Guinness brewery, where she sat with the late afternoon sun dancing around her white head recalling her difficult life. Her memory was so clear and sharp, her words so rich with colour and humour that she transported me to the world she had inhabited, and which provides the setting for O’Casey’s most popular plays.

Lizzie was born in 1906 and so had witnessed rebellion and civil war, “One evening my father and the other men were lined up on the path. The British soldiers did this regularly. They shot three men in the row near the hall door at Parnell Street.” She particularly recalled the brutality of the Black and Tans who feature in O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman. 

“The Black and Tans were villains and murderers and robbers and rapists and destroyers of our world. They would shoot you through like a dog. There was a curfew. Men caught out after it were shot. Women were taken into vans, raped and thrown out again. My mother couldn’t go out to the shops during daytime curfews. Someone would go out to the shops and bring supplies around to the houses. Outside there were sandbags, soldiers, fixed bayonets, hall doors locked, windows blacked out.” [Lizzie’s words as spoken to me]

But Lizzie was not impressed with O’Casey. She walked out of The Plough and the Stars saying she’d hear more wit at home. Instead, she loved Dickens. The first copy of David Copperfield that I ever possessed was an old edition that Lizzie bought for me from a book barrow. She saw the films of David Copperfield and Great Expectations in the Roxie (later the Ambassador cinema). Once she said to me when describing her early life, “That’s why you can call me Lizzie Dickens”. 

A leaf out of Dickens (Photo by Taha on Unsplash)

   

“We were brought up roughly. Oliver Twist puts me in mind of it. There was a man who trained children to steal. My mother used to keep us apart and say ‘You’re not to go out with them’. We’d see them coming home with little bags of things. Children went barefoot and with no seat in their pants.” [Lizzie’s words]

What was it about Dickens’ novels of Victorian England that was more real to Lizzie than O’Casey’s plays of revolutionary Dublin? Both writers sought in their work to expose the injustices of their respective societies, both were sentimental and generally endowed their female characters with more nobility than their male counterparts. Both also mixed caricature and broad comedy with deep suffering. Both give their characters a heightened and rhythmic idiom and coined phrases which survive today in common speech, e.g. Mr. Micawber’s “Something will turn up” and Captain Boyle’s “The whole worl’s in a state of chassis”.

   Allowing for the conventions of the different forms in which they wrote, serialised fiction and drama, however, there is a lack of development in O’Casey’s characters which is apparent in Dickens’ protagonists. Perhaps the greatest gap between them, from Lizzie’s point of view, is children. Apart from the consumptive Molly Gogan in The Plough and the Stars, children do not feature in O’Casey’s plays whereas Dickens’ novels are full of them. The three that Lizzie mentioned to me narrate the lives of their protagonists from birth to maturity.

Her own memories are filled with children – large families being a feature of life in the tenements. She was one of sixteen and she gave birth to sixteen, only six of whom survived into adulthood. “Sometimes you only got to look at the child before it died.” There were no Coveys, Davorens or Benthams in Lizzie’s world. Life was a struggle for survival and those who could escaped, mostly to England, some to America or Australia.

Those of O’Casey’s characters who survive remain trapped, much like Joyce’s Dubliners. By contrast, Dickens’ boys come of age and shed their delusions. Maybe they offered a picture of hope to Lizzie who, surveying her world at the end of her ninety-four years, said, “It’s as if the globe had moved and we are in a different period of time.” We are and the globe is changing yet O’Casey and Dickens continue to entertain and speak to us.

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I haven’t yet written the book of Lizzie’s life but I did write some radio essays about her which will feature in ‘Three for Friday’, so stay tuned for more!