Series 1 - Owen Peter Mangan memoir transcript

39pp

Copy of the manuscript provided by Gerald A. Fitzgerald, Washington, D.C. Permission to publish was granted to Kerby A. Miller via telephone call of 9 July 1991 and confirmed via letter of 10 July 1991.

G.A. Fitzgerald's original 1986 transcript of the 1912 memoir of Owen Peter Mangan. Mangan was born in Billy Hill, near Cootehill, County Cavan in 1838. His father was a cattle-driver, small farmer, and illegal whiskey distiller, and his stepfather had multiple, precarious, petty-bourgeois and/or intermediary positions in public bureaucracies or private commercial and industrial concerns. Mangan first emigrated to Preston, England in 1853, moving on to Philadelphia and eventually settling in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1869. He finished his memoir in 1912 and died in 1924 at the age of 88.
Kerby A. Miller writes that 'Mangan's stories of his childhood travails and escapades in Cavan are fascinating and often very amusing,' and that 'Mangan's family represented a kind of decayed rural-industrial proletariat, formerly composed primarily of cottage weavers and spinners, who, after the pre-famine collapse of south Ulster's cottage linen industry, scrambled frantically to survive through wit and expedience in various commercial, industrial, and bureaucratic niches-or fled via emigration, as did very large numbers of young men and women from south Ulster.' Miller also observes that, while other memoirs of the time might not necessarily discuss the Famine, Mangan's 'does situate his own family's economic struggles, including lack of food to eat, in the Famine context', and ultimately, that his memoir is 'interesting for lots of reasons, including: factory work and the apparently porous borders between such labour and various kinds of "upward mobility" into petty-bourgeois niches (shopkeeper, insurance salesman); high rates of geographic mobility among working-class immigrants; workplace and class solidarities among mill-workers; the important role of labour unions-but also of employer paternalism-in achieving economic security and property ownership.'

The reference copy of Mangan's memoir, along with Miller's research on Mangan and the Mangan family in Ireland and the United States, is located in P155/10/2.