Tom Barclay, Memoirs and Medleys: The Autobiography of a Bottle-Washer

Abstract

Tom Barclay (1852–1933) was born in a Leicester slum to parents who fled famine-ridden Ireland in the late 1840s. Apart from brief spells in London and Ireland, he spent his entire working life as an unskilled labourer in various Leicester factories, while assiduously pursuing his personal goal of intellectual independence through self-education. His autobiography, which was written in the 1920s and edited for publication after his death, is the self-portrait of a politicised working-class autodidact, the central stand of which charts Barclay’s ideological journey from pious young Catholic to freethinking secularist and socialist activist, who came to believe in ‘Heaven on Earth as fervently as ever the Religionist believes in a Blessed State of Immortality’. Throughout the text Barclay promotes his particular brand of radical socialism with polemical brio, chiding rapacious capitalist and apathetic worker alike, while eulogising his hero George Bernard Shaw, with whom he occasionally corresponded. The breezy conversational intimacy of Barclay’s prose style belies his sharp understanding of autobiography as calculated self-portraiture and his alertness to the transformative power of memory, as the following extract reveals. In addition to being a compelling record of proletarian activism during the Victorian socialist revival, Memoirs and Medleys is also a key historical source for the study of the second-generation Irish experience in nineteenth-century England. In particular, Barclay’s graphic account of the forces that shaped his attitudes towards his Irish cultural heritage during his formative years has been used by scholars both to substantiate and to refute the thesis of second-generation assimilation.¹

Edited by James K. Kelly, with a foreword by Sydney A. Gimson (Leicester: Edgar Backus, 1934). xi, 142pp.; pp. 3–9; 22–4.