Foreword
by
Benedict Kiely
In the
autumn of 1868, laden with accolades, but melancholic, written-out, and
riddled with the cancer that would shortly kill him, the novelist William
Carleton turned to a subject as rich and difficult as any he had yet undertaken:
himself.
The
result was this fine - and alas unfinished - autobiography, a fresh, vivid,
vigorous work which covers the first twenty-eight years or so of his life.
It takes him from a near idyllic childhood in the Clogher valley to a bed
of rags and straw shakedowns in Dirty Lane, Dublin, from which, equipped
only with his genius and a powerful sense of destiny, the young Carleton
went out upon the world.
