Harold Frederic, the Irish, and The Damnation of Theron Ware

Abstract

The year 1896 saw the publication of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, one of the most impressive American novels of the nineteenth century. Though it garners little attention today, the book was critically acclaimed upon its release—more acclaimed in England in fact than had been Henry James’s work (Earnest 220). Frederic’s novel offers a unique portrait of Irish Catholic life in the 1870s as the Irish settled into the American cultural and geographical landscape, and as well a vivid profile of anti-Irishness offered by an erstwhile member of a nineteenth-century Protestant American community. The community involved is a Methodist one, and the geographical context is the Mohawk Valley, the Leatherstocking region of north central New York state. Despite its German and Dutch settlements, the region had a New England flavor, being an area into which, by the nineteenth century, New England culture and religion had branched out, and into which considerable Irish settlement came around mid-century. Theron Ware has not been extensively analyzed over all, nor satisfactorily introduced into the context of Irish American studies given the fact that it is the most Irish of American novels outside the field of Irish American authorship per se. In this gilded age classic, a similar sense of native Protestant decline in the Northeast prevails to that discussed in chapter one, along with a narrative of Irish immigrant fortunes on the rise.