In the 1990s I heard a joke that had been told by the English Tory politician Alan Clark at the expense of Michael Heseltine, another Tory politician. Heseltine, who had made a fortune in property and publishing, was, Clark said, ‘the sort of man who bought his own furniture.’

I looked at this joke from various angles. I even turned it upside down. But I could not understand it. Did Clark mean that Heseltine literally went out to various shops and was seen buying furniture? Why would this be funny?

And then, one day as I was walking along the street, it struck me what the joke was. Clark, as the son of Lord Clark, must have inherited furniture, big old heavy pre-IKEA items, and thus viewed those who did not, who had to go out and get their own tables and chairs, as upstarts or unfortunates.

I went home, then, and looked around the house. Not a single stick of furniture was inherited from anybody. And for most people I knew, the idea of inheriting furniture would be unthinkable. The thought of having a bed or a sofa or a table that belonged to grandparents would be absurd. In Ireland, such stuff was thrown out or it fell apart or no one knows what happened to it. 

Thus, if I was writing a novel set in Ireland in the 1920’s, what furniture would I put into an ordinary house? The Census returns of 1901 and 1911, searchable online, do not have information about furniture, but they do tell us about the number of rooms people had and let us know – and sometimes this is surprising – who had servants.

In my novel ‘The Heather Blazing’, I put in the real names of some minor characters, including a woman who lived near Blackwater in Co. Wexford called Mrs. Keating with whom our protagonist played a card-game called solo: ‘Mrs. Keating loved winning. She looked like a big white cat when she won.’ I have no memory of Mrs. Keating ever actually playing cards, but she did live in an old house under the hill in a place called Ballyconnigar Lower, but more usually just called Keatings, since her house, a guest house in the summer, and the barns around it stood out in the landscape.

The house and barns have gone now because of the erosion; even the hill itself has disappeared. Soon, there will be only a few who ever remember this landscape before it changed.

Mrs. Keating appears in the 1911 Census as Margaret Keating, twenty-five years old, married to John Keating, twelve years her senior. Thus, she would have been almost eighty on those summer Sundays when, in a little shop behind the big house, she oversaw a young woman whose job was to divide blocks of ice-cream - rippled, plain or banana-flavoured - into sections – sixpenny or thrupenny – using a long flat piece of shiny metal with teeth to cut into the ice-cream, and then add wafers and sell all this to day trippers.

Like her husband, Mrs. Keating was a Catholic and could read and write. In both 1901 and 1911, her husband signed the census form. In 1901, the family had two farm servants - Patrick Lambert, who was twenty-four, and William FitzGerald, twenty-three. Both could read, but not write. Ten years later, according to the 1911 Census, Patrick Lambert was living not far away, and married with two young children. His wife could read and write, the census form says, but Patrick could still just read.

William FitzGerald, by then, was back living with his mother who could read and write in 1911, but in the 1901 census she could just read. The census information in 1911 is more emphatic about William. He could not read or write, nor could his two siblings Bridget (30) and Martin (36).

As I browse through this online archive when I should be writing a novel or making myself useful in other way, I become fascinated by the names of places in Wexford where people by the name of Lambert lived, names that are new to me, names like: Assagart, Dungulph, Galgystown, Slevoy, Maxboley, Croase, Scar, Kereight, Coolakip, Ballyvoodrane, Ford of Ling, Trimmer.

In his Notebooks, Henry James used to list names of people and places that he might use in future fictions. On May 16 1899 in Rome, for example, he began a list: ‘Steen – Steene – Liege – Bleat – Bleet (place) – Crawforth – Masset – Mulroney – Perrow (or place) – Drydown (or place)’

And then I wonder if there really is a place in South Wexford called Bastardstown. And, sure enough, there were many inhabitants of that precise townland in 1901 and 1911, including Cloneys and Murphys and Rossiters and Furlongs and Cogleys and Bates.

And then I wonder if, had I known all this when I was writing ‘The Heather Blazing’, would I have added one of two of these places, just to spice up a paragraph. Or I might have been tempted to make a stray reference to Patrick Lambert or William FitzGerald.

And then I go to the census and look for my family in Enniscorthy.

In 1911, my grandfather Patrick Tobin wrote his name in English. He could, the census form tells us, read and write and speak Irish and English, as could his two sons, aged seven and eleven. (This was likely more an aspiration than an actual fact.) His wife and his brother could also read and write, but they spoke only English. My auntie Kathleen was just eight months old. My father would be born two years later.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was called Thomas O’Rourke. I could not find him in Enniscorthy in either the 1901 or the 1911 Censuses. And then one day I remembered that older people in the town often referred to my mother’s family as ‘Rourke’ rather than ‘O’Rourke’, ‘O’Rourke’ being somewhat grander and more formal.

And that is how I found him. He was aged fourteen in 1901. His two older brothers worked for the Post Office.

His father John, aged fifty, was a labourer. His mother Anne was forty in 1901. Anne, it says, could read. But John, my great-grandfather, according to the census, could neither read nor write. At the bottom of the form, there is an X mark with a witness signature by the official who then wrote the name John Rourke in his own hand. My great grandfather just wrote the X.

Ten years later, in the 1911 Census, the form says that the same John Rourke could both read and write. He also signed his name. But there is something suspicious about this: the hand-writing is too good. It is possible that John Rourke no longer wished to be known as illiterate, or that his children, now grown-up, did not want to be associated with illiteracy. Perhaps he asked one of them to fill in the form and sign it.

My first novel ‘The South’ dealt, among other things, with the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in the Slaney valley near Enniscorthy. As comic relief, I had an elderly Protestant woman, who had once held land in the valley, remark that a Catholic whose name someone mentioned ‘was the only man in Enniscorthy at the turn of the century who could sign his name.’ She then added: ‘The rest of them just wrote X, my dear, imagine that.’

This was a joke and a way of establishing the distance between the Anglo-Irish and the locals. Many ordinary people in the town were, I knew, literate at the end of the nineteenth century. I was particularly thinking about my grandfather’s family on my father’s side who, although they had no money, owned many books.

In any case, my great-grandfather was, it seems, illiterate in 1901. There are, as far as I know, no photographs in the family of him and his wife. Their two daughters lived in the town all their lives; I remember one of them, Aunt Jo, an old woman in a hat who lived on the Mill Park Road. She gave me a six-penny piece once. She was a dress-maker, rather grand in her way, and the sort of woman who would not tolerate having a father who could not read or write. Her sister, I know, spent time in the Mental Hospital outside Enniscorthy.

I am supposing the eldest son of John Rourke died young; he appeared in 1901 aged nineteen, but I cannot find him ten years later. The youngest son was my grandfather who died in 1936 at the age of forty-eight. I have no idea what happened to his other brother, aged sixteen in 1901.

In the back of my mind there is a story I heard about one of those brothers dying, and leaving a widow and some children in Enniscorthy, and the widow depositing the children in an orphanage in New Ross. and setting out on her own for America. On Sundays, I remember someone saying, my grandparents would set out on bicycles to visit these children in New Ross, but I am not sure how often, or over how many years. I have no idea what happened to the woman who went to America, if she ever wrote to the children, or if they followed her across the Atlantic.

I know the beginnings of her story; that is all. For any novelist, idling through these census forms, with mere lists of names, and information about age, literacy skills, religion, profession and living conditions, a whole world begins. And then the imagination starts to work – a woman in America, a married couple on bicycles between Enniscorthy and New Ross, some children in an orphanage. People lost in history, or at least lost to me.

It is easy to imagine much of this, or let it go, but the question of illiteracy makes me stop. Since my great grandfather was sixty in 1911, then he could have still been alive in, say, 1925. I was born in 1955. This means that there is only thirty years between him and me.

My mother and her two sisters – the grand-daughters of John Rourke – had beautiful handwriting, as did their friends. All of them prided themselves on this. You could tell when a letter arrived which one had written it because the handwriting was also personal and individual.

If John Rourke was indeed illiterate, then it might not have been an aberration. His parents might not have been able to read and write either – there are no extant census forms to prove this one way or the other – and then, going back, could there be many generations leading to my great grandfather, none of whom could read or write?

I start browsing through the census returns in the area around Enniscorthy in 1901 looking for other people who could not read or write. I begin finding them immediately: Patrick Carthy (60), Mary Dunne (62), Elizabeth Somers (62), Martin Connolly (42), Ester Connolly (19), Michael Wickham (52), Anne Doyle (50), Thomas Berry (75), Anne Berry (55), Laurence Wilkinson (63), Margaret Wilkinson (62), William Wilkinson (19), Hannah Lacey (40). And many, many more.

And then there are strange ones: Patrick Leeton (67), agricultural labourer, born in Donegal, living with his family near Enniscorthy in 1901. He can read only, not write, and signs the form with an X. But he can speak Irish and English, or so the form says. His wife and two sons – John (21), James (18) - can read and write, but speak only English.

They are the only Leetons in the entire country in 1901, and they cannot be found in 1911. I wonder if the enumerator who had to fill in the form for them got their name wrong. Leeton was perhaps a bad translation of an Irish name that came from Donegal. We cannot be sure.

Neither could Henry James as he wrote out more and more lists of names, most of them never to be used by anyone, least of all himself. He would have loved census forms. On September 11 1900, he wrote out more names, some preposterous – for example:  Belph, Loveless, Duas, Pester, Cockster, Dresh.

But in the middle of the long list appears the name Stant, and soon comes Bartram and soon Assingham and then Fawns (for a place) and later there is Manningham and then Matcham.

Stant will, within a few years, become Charlotte Stant in ‘The Golden Bowl’ (1904); Bartram will be May Bartram in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903); Assingham will be Fanny Assingham in ‘The Golden Bowl’. Maud Manningam will be a most formidable aunt in ‘The Wings of the Dove’ (1902). Matcham will appear as a great house in both ‘The Wings of the Dove’ and ‘The Golden Bowl’, in which novel Fawns will also be a great house that the Ververs rent.

It looked like Henry James was idling, amusing himself with those lists of names. But it appears that something else was happening. He could hardly have imagined which of these names would come to life for him so richly.

I wonder if it’s true that all you need to begin a novel is a name. But it’s hard to know what name. And, so I go back again, looking through the names of all the people in Ballyconnigar Upper on the Wexford coast in 1901 and 1911: Connors, Sinnott, Murphy, Corrigan, Brien, Carroll, Mangan, Kavanagh, Cullen, Dempsey, Doyle, Carty, Power.

And I could move on to the next townland and see what’s going on there. More names.

Maybe I will start a new novel soon.

Colm Tóibín (November 2023)