Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger. Or, an Excursion Through Ireland in 1844 & 1845 for the purpose of personally investigating the condition of the poor.
Nicholson, [Asenath]. Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger. Or, An Excursion Through Ireland in 1844 & 1845, for the purpose of personally investigating the condition of the poor. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1847.
8vo.; endpapers and preliminaries foxed; ownership stamp in black ink on the first blank (“Allen Walton”) bled onto the facing page; brown cloth elaborately stamped in gilt and blind; light wear to covers, but gilt on spine still fresh.
First edition of Asenath Nicholson’s account of the humanitarian aid she provided to Irish peasants during the first of several trips she took to Ireland for that purpose.
Nicholson’s journey to Ireland between 1844-1845 coincided with the advent of the Potato Famine, a blight which destroyed the country’s potato crop, causing 750,000 deaths and the flight of two million Irish to Great Britain, Canada and the United States. In her Preface, Nicholson says, “It was my design to go silently through among the poor, and tell the story to my own countrymen; that they might be induced to labor more untiringly and effectually for the destitute portion of this nation, who are daily landing upon their shores.” Later, she adds, “Ireland must be turned inside out; so that all the world might see that, deformed as may be her surface, her vitals show a disease hereditary, obstinate, and still more odious, which opiates or ointments cannot cure.” Her mission was to personally deliver aid, and the word of God, to those in need; she did so, amazingly, on foot, walking through the country and lodging with peasants in their cabins. Throughout 27 chapters, she tells of the towns and counties she walked through, the people she met, and the conditions in which they lived. She says, “…I came to glean after the reapers, to gather up the fragments, to see the poor peasant by wayside and in bog, in the field and by his peat fire, and to read to him the story of Calvary” (Preface, p. iv) She even goes as far as to describe her experience in biblical terms; she says staying in the peasants’ cabins was like “lodging in a manger,” and that there was no room for her “in the inn:” she recounts, “Reader, I would not be an egotist – I would not boast; but I would speak of that Almighty Arm that sustained me, when, on a penny’s worth of bread, I have walked over a mountain and bog for twenty and twenty-three miles, resting upon a wall, by the side of a lake, or upon my basket, reading a chapter in the sweet Word of Life to some listening laborer” (p. v).
Nicholson, born in New England in 1792, is named for the Egyptian bride of the Old Testament prophet Joseph. She lived in New York; was an educator and social reformer, and she also worked as an abolitionist and ran her own vegetarian boarding house. In addition to this book, she penned three others, Nature’s Own Book (1835), Lights and Shades of Ireland – Three Parts (1850), and Annals of Famine in Ireland, in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (1851).
She was spurred to help the Irish after witnessing their struggles with poverty in New York. “It was in the garrets and cellars of New York that I first became acquainted with the Irish peasantry, and it was there that I saw they were a suffering people.” After that, she was determined to travel to Ireland to provide relief and hope to them in their native country, as well as raise awareness of their oppression in the States. Altogether she spent four years in Ireland, during which the Famine raged. She set up a soup kitchen and fund-raising office in Dublin, and was a field agent of the New York Irish Relief Society. She died in 1855.
(#8312)
Print Inquire
