memoirs, from Julius Caesar’s to Barack Obama’s, Mitchel created himself as he wished others to see him. Near the end he describes how the book was written:
After all, this ‘Journal’ of mine is not, strictly speaking, a Journal at all; though, for convenience, it is occasionally dated. In truth and fact, it is written long after its ostensible dates. All these reflections, inferences, and predictions: I give exactly as I wrote them down at the time. I stand to them all; though I know that many will say subsequent events have belied them.
Seemingly the Jail Journal polished his original notes but did not introduce things he could not have known at the time, either because he was incommunicado or on the other side of the world from the things he was writing about. Because he was a prisoner much of what he wrote about was his own mental states, though the account of his escape reads like a ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure novel.
Page one begins with a striking account of his removal from a Dublin court on 29 May 1848 to a ship that will take him to Spike Island in Cork, the staging post for a journey he knew not where:
I had returned to my cell and taken leave of my wife and two poor boys. A few minutes after they had left me a gaoler came in with a suit of coarse grey clothes in his hand. ‘You are to put on these,’ said he, ‘directly.’ I put them on directly. A voice then shouted from the foot of the stairs, ‘Let him be removed in his own clothes’; so I was ordered to change again, which I did. I asked to what place I was to be removed. ‘Can’t tell,’ said the man. ‘Make haste.’ There was a travelling bag of mine in the cell, containing a change of clothes; and I asked whether I might take it with me. ‘No; make haste.’ ‘I am ready, then’; and I followed him down the stairs.
At Dublin’s North Wall he is escorted to a steam frigate which he learns is to bring him to the Spike Island prison in Cork. Captain Hall, the first of many friendly gaolers, conducts him to his cabin, orders his fetters to be removed and calls for sherry and water. Mitchel asks Hall if he is the author of a book recounting a visit to China which, it turns out, Hall indeed is. Both men discuss two books by another Captain Hall, that both had happened to read. ‘Your mind,’ his companion comments, ‘has been running upon revolutions.’ Mitchel: ‘Yes, very much – almost exclusively.’ The Captain: ‘Ah, sir, dangerous things, these revolutions!’ Mitchel: ‘You may well say that.’
Mitchel then turns on its head the impression of sangfroid that he just conveyed. ‘No doubt he thought me an amazingly cool character, but God knoweth the heart. There was a huge lump in my throat all the time of this bald chat.’ As he converses amicably to Hall he thinks of what might be going on in his desolate house at Charlemont Bridge in Dublin that evening, of his family, his five little children, ‘none of them old enough to understand the cruel blow that has fallen on them this day’ and, above all, his wife. Later in the same chapter, now on Spike Island, Mitchel again reveals the gulf between his outer composure and inner sense of despair. Once alone in his cell he cries for half an hour. Weeks later, in a relatively comfortable cabin in the prison hulk anchored off Bermuda he contemplates suicide but lists the reasons he must live. It would be an admission that he was unable to bear the consequences of his actions, a dying declaration that England’s brute power could not be resisted. It would send his children scandalised to their graves and he hoped to do them some good yet before he died.
Still en route to Spike Island he explains why he did what he did and at such personal cost. In his United Irishman he had called for revolution, compelled the government to arrest him and forced it to make a ‘martyr’ of him. Through his arrest, trial and transportation, he had, he hoped, shamed the country out of what O’Connell called the politics of ‘moral force’. There was a chance of his countrymen seeing that the one and only remedy to Ireland’s grievances – to famine, emigration, political and legal corruption – was at ‘the edge of the sword’. He had made sure, ‘for the thing is not going to stop here’, that the breach between the Irish people and the Carthaginian government would be made henceforth wider and deeper than ever. Throughout the Jail Journals Mitchel referred to England as Carthage, a reference no nineteenth-century schoolboy would have missed to Cato’s relentlessly repeated declaration Delenda est Carthago (‘Carthage must be destroyed’).
He followed an account of his motives with portraits of his fellow would-be revolutionaries. He described William Smith O’Brien as bold and high-minded, but capricious, unaccountable, and intractable; also, he was an aristocrat who could not see that his fellow aristocrats were not Irish, but the irreconcilable enemies of Ireland. On 18 October he learns of the ‘poor extemporised abortion of a rising in Tipperary’ headed by Smith O’Brien on 29 July. On the little information available to him Mitchel considered it to have been ill-judged because it was so badly organised and because it had so little apparent support.
His captors, the Governor of Spike Island and the officers of The Scourge, the war steamer that conveys him to Bermuda, give him books to read and much of what he writes is triggered by his reading. He thanks God for Shakespeare. He reads Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, ‘a pleasant, rough kind of book, but with something too much hauling of ropes and handing of sails in it’. Dana had shipped himself as a common sailor on board a Boston ship bound to California, on a two-year trading voyage, and subjected himself to short rations and the insolence of a brutal captain; and all because he had heard the sea was good for weak eyes. Mitchel had weak eyes also but pondered the contrast with his own case. He received none of the rough treatment that Dana described but he also considered himself a freer man than Dana who went on to become a successful lawyer in Boston, and therefore, perhaps, more a prisoner, drudge, and slave now than ever. He wishes to experience a thoroughgoing storm but also confesses to not being able to keep his food down during a mild one. He thinks The Scourge a fine ship and finds its officers good-humoured and generous. He is determined not to write another trite travelogue of the kind written by any young lady sailing to India for a husband, by a missionary or by a literary naval officer.
In a remarkable passage he sets down an inner dialogue between his Ego and a devil’s advocate Doppelganger. Why such a fiery zeal for the French Republic, his Ego is asked, given its indifference to Republicanism or the welfare of the human race in the abstract? Was this vehemence born ‘of pure hatred to England and a diseased longing for blood and carnage?’ Was it a hatred of the millions of honest people who lived in England minding their own business? Would it destroy an economy that kept millions in employment through investment and trade?
Mitchel’s Ego retorts that the Anglo-Saxon race worships only money and believes that the world was created, is sustained, and governed, and will be saved by the only one true, immutable and Almighty Pound Sterling. France mints the circulating medium of ideals and sets up poorer nations with capital in that stamp. A true friend of the British nation would declare himself the bitterest enemy of its government and institutions but also one of those content with the economic status quo, including those amongst ‘the fed classes’ of Ireland who declared that the country was doing reasonably well when it was instead an exploited part of a bankrupt realm with its ‘hollow credit system’, ‘trading on what it knows to be fictitious capital’, living in terror of a coming crash, held together by ‘yellow chapless skulls of Skibbereen’ and ‘the ghosts of starved Hindoos in dusky millions’:
Doppelganger. - Surely these sore evils are not incurable - by wise administration, by enlightened legislation: the ghosts and skeletons are not an essential part of the picture; not necessary to the main action of the piece.
The Ego. - Absolutely necessary - nay, becoming more and more necessary every hour. To uphold the stability of the grand central fraud, British policy must drain the blood and suck the marrow of all the nations it can fasten its desperate claws upon: and by the very nature of a bankrupt concern sustaining itself on false credit, its exertions must grow more desperate, its exactions more ruthless day by day, until the mighty smash come. The great British Thing
