[Gulliver] afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my friends; but although they were told, “that I was a great traveller, and had seen all the world”, they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question (Swift 2005: III, 10).

A population that is impassive, reluctant to communicate, and a traveller who does not arouse curiosity in the locals – these are further similarities with Banks’s Irish dwellers of the shanties, on one hand, and on the other with the visitor John Brown and his group, whom these dwellers hardly notice when passing by. Swift’s devastating judgment of the Struldbrugs is thus, in Gulliver’s words:

They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the men.  Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described (Swift 2005: III, 10).

As the group of the Underground Railroad make their way along the muddy track, the shanties of “the poor, sullen souls” are now being erased from their sight one by one, when they see ahead of them “situated on a pleasant rise of land, a proper house with a porch and an attached barn, the home of the supervisor of the mines, Mr. Jonas Wilkinson”. There is a sharp contrast between the abode of the Irish miners and the home of their American supervisor. Furthermore the difference between the way Wilkinson sees his Irish workers versus the way the Browns see the slaves they are helping is striking:

Mr. Wilkinson told us, “They run off to a surprising degree, the Irish. Though they’ve got nothing to run to, except back to the wharfs of Boston or New York. A lot of them are sickly by the time they get here and end up buried in the field yonder. They’re a sad lot.” Mr. Wilkinson was a round, blotch-faced man with thinning black hair and a porous-looking red nose that suggested a long-indulged affection for alcohol. “Ignorant and quarrelsome and addicted to drink”, he said. “The females as much as the men. And you can’t do much to improve them. Although my wife and I have certainly given it a try, she by schooling the little ones and me preaching every Sunday to them that will listen. But they breed faster than you can teach them, and when it comes to proper religions, Mister Brown, they’re practically pagans. Superstitious papists without a priest is what they are. I’ve about given up on ’em and just try now to get as much work out of ‘em with as little expense as possible before they run off, or die.
“Sorry for sounding so harsh”, he said to Father, who sat on a straight chair and grimly regarded the floor. “But what you’ve got with these Irish is the dead ends of European peasantry. There’s little for them in this country. Little enough for them back there in their own country, I suppose”, he added, pulling on his chin. “Which, of course, is why they come over in the first place. For them, poor souls, I suppose it’s an improvement. They get to start their lives over” (Banks 1999: II.7, 213).

Almost every single negative stereotype about the “sad lot” of the Irish is touched upon here: “ignorant and quarrelsome and addicted to drink,” poor, pagans or “superstitious papists”, and lazy. This mirrors Swift’s description of the Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), as well as the perplexing depiction of the Irish from the perspective of the proposer – projector – narrator in Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). Most academic studies have shown that Swift’s rhetorical strategies are extremely nuanced and complex, and traditionally agree that “the author’s meaning diverges from the narrator’s” (Phiddian 1996: 606). Instead of aiming at exposing the Irish in their poverty and overpopulation, Swift protested “against the unqualified maxim that people are the riches of a nation” (Landa 1942: 165), and “what Swift wanted for Ireland was not fewer people but more opportunities – opportunities that would present themselves if England adopted a less restrictive policy” (Landa 1942: 170). However, more recently it has been suggested that Swift’s intention was less benevolent than thought at first:

Contrary to traditional misapprehensions, A Modest Proposal is neither a Dickensian protest at the conditions of the poor, nor a diatribe against English exploitation of Ireland, but an “economic” tract by a profiteering do-gooder who thinks the economy might be improved by exploiting the anthropophagous proclivities of the Irish natives. Swift is not friendly to these natives. He portrays them as a beggarly, thieving, adulterous riff-raff, who, if they could be taught that their bastard offspring were a cashable asset, might take better care to preserve and nourish them in infancy, and also refrain from beating their wives when they are pregnant for fear of a miscarriage (Rawson 2012: 5).

Rawson has adopted the questionable assumption that Swift’s perspective and the proposer’s are identical. In the same way in which Swift – according to Rawson – (or, as generally agreed upon: the proposer) may be considered “not friendly to these natives”, so is Mr. Wilkinson not friendly to their offspring, who have crossed the Atlantic and become immigrants. For sure, in Cloudsplitter this attitude is neither shared by the narrator, Owen, nor by the author, Banks. The latter seems to make a clear statement: the treatment of the Irish immigrants is regarded as appalling, which is why John Brown cuts his ties with Wilkinson. However, Wilkinson certainly has a point inasmuch as there is “little enough for them back there in their own country”, and that they have come over to seek improvement.

The visitor Mister Brown, impressed by his host’s viewpoint, addresses him thus: “I am curious, though, as to your reasons for agreeing to aid us in our efforts to carry Negro slaves off to Canada, when you appear to have so little fellow-feeling for the poor indentured men and women in your charge here”. This is his host’s opportunity to justify himself, albeit with an overtly mercantilist rather than humane reasoning, similar to Swift’s Proposer:

“Ah!” Mr. Wilkinson said brightly – he’d heard this argument before and was prepared, even eager to answer it. “Slavery is evil! That alone is reason enough for a Christian man to want to aid and abet you. But beyond that, slavery provides the Southerners with an unfair advantage in the labor market. No, sir, for the economic health of our nation, we all must do what we can to bring about the end of slave labor. And this is simply my small part, aiding you and your son and your Negro friend here, and your friend the famous Mister Douglass” (Banks 1999: II.7, 213).

Irritated at this lack of sympathy for their actual cause, John Brown would “cut their link from the chain”, arguing that “these Wilkinsons have it all wrong. They can’t be trusted” (Banks 1999: II.7, 215). When the group is about to depart, for a last time the reader gets a glimpse of the Irish miners, these alien-like creatures, their dullness increased by the gloomy atmosphere Banks has created to depict them as “dead souls” rather than as living human beings:

Hidden by the darkness, as we passed among the thick white trunks of the birch trees, we saw the miners. They were illuminated by the flickering light of the whale oil lanterns they carried – shadowy, slumped figures moving silently uphill. It was like a march of dead souls that we observed, and the image troubled me, and I found myself lingering behind the others, hanging back, fighting a strange impulse to leave the darkness and join them, to fall into line with the returning miners and merge my life with theirs.
Father grabbed at my sleeve. “Come, Owen” he said. “I know what you feel, son. Come away. We cannot help them”, he said, and I turned reluctantly from them and followed my father and the four Negroes into the forest (Banks 1999: II.7, 213).

Readers might ask themselves whether the emotion aroused by the dwellers is one of “fellow-feeling” and compassion, or rather disgust and contempt. While Banks deploys Owen to illuminate the first, his father seems to illustrate rather the second. Whereas John Brown the abolitionist goes out of his way to assist those of African descent, the Negroes, to whom he devotes his whole life, he seems to have given up on the Irish immigrants. More than helpless, he seems to consider them not to be helped. Or could he be suggesting, when he says “we cannot help them”, that he has his hands full with helping slaves and that he cannot save everyone who is treated like a slave in America? The issue is that even though the Irish miners live and work in terrible conditions and suffer much prejudice, they are neither technically nor legally slaves, but wage labourers. So saving or freeing them is not urgent, not even a necessity. On the other hand, without aiming to plunge into the depths of the religious dimension, Banks is perhaps too generous in his imaginative account of how a low church hard-line Protestant such as John Brown might respond to any frontier Irish Catholic populations he encountered. Altogether, Banks might be using the Irish plight to show the complexity of racial and social prejudice in America and to indicate that slaves are the most, but not the only, exploited group in the country.

3.  The “shabby Irish laddies” on the Boston Common
A third and last passage featuring persons of Irish descent in Cloudsplitter appears towards the middle of the book. The narrator, Owen, and his father John Brown are in Boston, hosted by the Howes, an abolitionist family, while awaiting a ship to carry them to England. John Brown has decided to make a killing, selling wool across the Atlantic – an initiative that will turn out a complete failure. Owen seizes the opportunity to attend a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in which Mr. William Lloyd Garrison9 is to deliver a speech. He thus describes his way there:

I headed out, by way of Beacon Street, to the Park Street Church, which was located from Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Beacon Street ran alongside the wide expanse of the famed Common, with a facing row opposite, I kept to that side of the street, close by the tall, elegant houses and as far from the darkened Common as possible, for there – lurking among the shrubs and trees and appearing suddenly out of the darkness to glare and howl at the decorous, well-dressed men and women walking peacefully towards the church – was the enemy (Banks 1999: III.10, 321).

This thrilling description of the threat posed by some unknown beings hidden in the dark evokes Gulliver’s first approaching the Yahoos: “I walked very circumspectly, for fear of being surprised, or suddenly shot with an arrow from behind, or on either side” (Swift 2005: IV,1). Banks then goes on to describe these beings:

They were boys, mostly, and young men, idlers and drunkards, brawlers, louts, whoremongers, and common thieves; there were numerous females among them, too, maps and doxies as wild and brutal looking as their brothers. It was not so much their unwashed physiognomies that made them appear brutal and coarse, as their rage. No matter how noble the human face in repose, how symmetrical, fresh, and clear it may appear, when the brow is bent and glowered down, the mouth misshapen by an obscene word, the nostrils flared in revulsion and the lips sneering, and when the fist gets doubled and held out like a weapon, one recoils as if from a sub-species, as if from a demonic, bestial version of one’s self. How can we all be humans alike, when one of us has turned suddenly so ugly? And when a whole crowd turns itself into a mob, what species is it then? (Banks 1999: III.10, 321-2).

“Brutal and coarse”, full of rage, “a sub-species”, “a demonic, bestial version of one’s self” from which one recoils…: this comes as close as possible to Swift’s human animals or animalized humans depicted as Yahoos in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels. Furthermore, the hint at “a whole crowd (that) turns itself into a mob” and the doubts as to the “species” will remind the initiated reader of Jonathan Swift’s famous letter to Alexander Pope, in which he makes a clear distinction between the individual and the “tribe” to which the former belongs. Moreover here Swift explicitly equates “animal” with “man” (“that animal called man”), which he hates, while disputing the definition of “animal rationale” attributed to it by biologists:

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians – I will not speak of my own trade – soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax (Swift: 1999).10

Owen continues with his account:

I could fairly smell the brandy and beer on the breath of the youths who stuck their whiskered faces out at me and brayed their Negro-hating sentiments at me and the other men and women who were silently, peacefully walking the sidewalk alongside me. The gang cackled and screeched and sometimes even tossed a rock and then ducked back into the bushes out of sight, to be replaced a few rods further on by another gang, whose drunken members would pick up the chant.  “Nigger-lovers!” they hollered. “Yer nigger-lovers! “Yer niggers yerself! Ugly black niggers! Ugly black niggers!” And so on, stupidly, even idiotically they ranted – until we were walking a kind of gauntlet, it seemed, or proceeding through a maddened, howling mob to our own public hanging, headed not to a place of worship but to a scaffold (Banks 1999: III.10, 322).

The description of himself and the others “who were silently, peacefully walking the sidewalk alongside me” is distinctly reminiscent of Gulliver’s first impression of the Houyhnhnms: “I saw a horse walking softly in the field; (…) looking with a very mild aspect, never offering the least violence” (Swift 2005: IV,1). On the other hand (and on the other side of the street), the sounds uttered and movements made by “the gang”, or this “maddened, howling mob” are those of enraged animals (or hooligans, at least), which bear an analogy with the Yahoos: braying, cackling, screeching, chanting, hollowing, ranting, tossing a rock and then ducking back. The contrast between the peaceful citizens and the ranting gang is as wide as the gap between Swift’s Yahoos and Houyhnhnms.

Once inside the sanctuary of the church, Owen “breathed a great sigh of relief” after having been tormented by those “people with murder in their eyes” (Banks 1999: III.10, 322). Yet he is also tormented by himself and the overarching force of his father’s rightness and moral correction. For no proper reason he suddenly leaves the congregation to wander around boulders and bushes, among the ghostly figures that step forward and then silently withdraw, some of whom hiss to him or beckon for him to follow. He reflects on these outcasts:

Were these shadowy figures, these frail, gray wraiths and dark spirits, the same demonic figures I had seen earlier howling at the good Quaker abolitionists on their way to meeting? These people hardly seemed capable of raising their voices, much less shrieking obscenities and tossing rocks and other missiles (Banks 1999: III.10, 327).

Suddenly a change of scenario occurs with another group approaching:

But then I saw a band of ruffians, seven or eight of them, boldly approaching me, swigging from a shared bottle and laughing boisterously. They marched straight towards me, as if we were on a path and their intent was to force me out of it. They were boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, amusing themselves by banding together and playing the bully to solitaries like me. As they neared me, one of them hollered, “Out of our way, ye damned bunter, or we’ll slice of y’prick and make y’eat it!” and the others laughed.
Shabby Irish laddies they were, all puffed up with alcohol and the rough pleasure of each other’s company, and I knew what they thought I was, out here in the night alone – a catamite, a molly-coddle, in search of another. Possibly, in a strange sense, they were right about who I was and what I was doing there, at least for this one night in my life. They had no way of knowing for sure, however, and neither did I. But regardless, I was not about to play the girl for them, or the nigger, and step aside so they could march past unimpeded. Instead, I waded straight into them, as if they were a low wave at a beach” (Banks 1999: III.10, 327).

At the thrilling height of that first account of the “band of ruffians” marching threateningly straight towards Owen, these brutes are identified as Irish (“Shabby Irish laddies they were”). Their way of boldly and boisterously approaching the stranger and hollering at him (“They marched straight towards me, as if we were on a path and their intent was to force me out of it”), bears a noteworthy resemblance to the Yahoos and their attitude towards the stranger Gulliver in their first encounter (“I had not got far, when I met one of these creatures full in my way, and coming up directly to me.”). This seems even more striking when taking into consideration the interpretations according to which the Yahoos are said to represent the Irish, as discussed by some scholars, such as Sir Charles Firth, Arthur Case, and Donald T. Torchiana. The latter argues that:

The evidence for Ireland in Book IV [of Gulliver’s Travels] may have become even more apparent in the last thirty years. … a mere glance at Houyhnhnmland suggests how closely it approximates the Ireland familiar to Swift on maps from his boyhood on (Torchiana 1975: 195).

Along this same line, Claude Rawson’s more recent assertions push this point to an extreme:

Humanity’s despised subgroups, Indians, Irish, women, beggars, are correctly seen for what they are by people who, when the truth is known, are precisely as despicable for the same reasons. It is thus that the Yahoos, that stereotype of “all savage Nations” (Gulliver’s Travels Vol. 4, ii), embodying generic features of outlandish “Indians”, and widely understood to refer specifically to the Irish “natives”, are revealed to be biologically identical with the rest of us, ostensibly rather worse than we are, though, as is sometimes hinted, actually not quite so bad (Rawson 2012: 5).

To illustrate this, it is worth to look in more detail at Gulliver’s account of his first encounter with these creatures, the ugly monsters who, indeed, in an utterly sarcastic twist, turn out to be of his kind:

At last I beheld several animals in a field, … and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees. Their shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind a thicket to observe them better. Some of them coming forward near the place where I lay, gave me an opportunity of distinctly marking their form. …Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy. … I had not got far, when I met one of these creatures full in my way, and coming up directly to me. The ugly monster, when he saw me, distorted several ways, every feature of his visage, and stared, as at an object he had never seen before; then approaching nearer, lifted up his fore-paw, whether out of curiosity or mischief I could not tell; but I drew my hanger, and gave him a good blow with the flat side of it, for I durst not strike with the edge, fearing the inhabitants might be provoked against me, if they should come to know that I had killed or maimed any of their cattle. When the beast felt the smart, he drew back, and roared so loud, that a herd of at least forty came flocking about me from the next field, howling and making odious faces; but I ran to the body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off by waving my hanger. Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth, which fell about me on every side (Swift 2005: IV,1).

Contrary to reason, and unlike Gulliver, Owen neither thoroughly observes the despicable aliens who come his way, nor does he manage to escape “pretty well.” He recognizes placing himself in a situation “which has as its outcome only two logical conclusions – a miraculous triumph over one’s enemies, or one’s own death – so that the line between suicide and martyrdom is drawn so fine as not to exist”. Owen goes into the fray intentionally like a suicidal act and at the same time comes close to martyrdom. What ensues is a brutal beating that goes on for many minutes:

It was a contrivance of my own making, but I did not know it yet, when the first of the lads reached forward as if to grasp me by my placket, and I tore his hand away with my right hand and clubbed him in his grinning face with my left, sending him sprawling.

That was as close to miraculous triumph as I came, however. At once the rest of the gang was upon me like a pack of wolves taking down an elk in deep snow. In pairs and from all sides, they darted in on me and struck me in the face and belly and groin, kicked at my knees, and although I did some damage to them, they soon had me crouched over, and in seconds, with several hard, well-placed kicks to my ankles, they had me on the ground face-down, curling in on myself to protect my head and nether parts from their continuing barrage of kicks and blows. They said not a word to me or to each other, and now that they had me down, businesslike, went straight to work, pounding at me as if they wished to murder me. The beating went on for many minutes, until I was beyond pain, or so encased by it that I could no longer distinguish the individual blows. Their boots and fists smacked loudly against my spine and ribs and back of my head and the meat of my arms and legs, pitching my limp body this way and that, until finally the force of the blows tumbled me off the path into a shallow gully beside it, where there was enough bilge and foul-smelling trash that they did not want to pursue me there.
I lay still and kept my eyes shut and heard them spit at me but did not feel it. I heard them laugh and call me names that I did not understand, and then at last they either grew bored with the game or thought me unconscious or dead, for the spitting and derision ceased, and I heard their boots against the gravel as they strode off. And then silence (Banks 1999: III.10, 327-8).

Thus ends the third – and last – passage in Cloudsplitter in which people of Irish descent play a role, a stunningly savage one in this case. Even in the context of the novel, which features a cornucopia of scenes including harsh violence, the depiction of this beating is particularly brutal. Owen has no chance whatsoever to respond to it. Eventually he is found, carried to the home of the Howes who are hosting the two Browns, and nursed by his father. In the process of his recovery Owen is seized by hallucinations and remorse, and the unfortunate encounter leaves a strong imprint on him.

Conclusion
The three instances in which members of the Irish immigrant community play a role in Cloudsplitter, and the way these characters and their circumstances are portrayed, with dramatic intensity, brilliant narrative skills, and psychological depth, suggest distinct resonances with Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the Irish (through the proposer) in A Modest Proposal, and the Struldbrugs and Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels. Like Gulliver, who ends up in progressively stranger countries and crueller circumstances on each of his four travels (from accidentally stranded in Lilliput to being left marooned in the country of the Houyhnhnms), in Cloudsplitter, in each of the three scenes, as if they were arranged in crescendo, the Irish suffer a progressive dehumanization and degradation of their characters and their attitudes. The first scene depicts an extremely young and thin Irish prostitute who appears as a victim (of Owen – and of her circumstances) and who evokes sympathy and compassion. The second displays a group of Irish miners dwelling in shanties, a “sad lot”, who are so brutalized that they appear unable to take notice of anyone or anything surrounding them. They also arouse compassion in the readers, yet are considered beyond help – even by John Brown, who, on the other hand, has declared it the goal of his life to free another disadvantaged community, the slaves. Finally, the culmination of human debasement is achieved with the third group, the Boston gang of “shabby Irish laddies” who brutally beat up the narrator, Owen, and abandon him for dead.

Altogether this essay illustrates how Banks might well have been harkening back to Swift in his depiction of the degradation, despair, and violence of the Irish immigrant community in Cloudsplitter. Moreover by including these three significant passages on the Irish, Banks achieves to further enhance the role of the less favoured communities in Cloudsplitter. Thus these representations contribute to the reflection about race, class, and prejudice in nineteenth century America, while evoking links to the social struggles of eighteenth century Britain and Ireland.