Margaret Dixon McDougall’s The Days of a Life (1883): an Irish-Canadian Perspective of the Repetitive Nature of Irish History

In 1881, at the height of the Irish Land War and shortly after the smaller-scale famine of 1879, Belfast-born Canadian journalist and author Margaret Dixon McDougall traveled to Ireland as a special correspondent for the Montreal Witness newspaper. She addressed current social ills at great length in her letters. In 1883, McDougall recast her observations in novelistic form, as The Days of a Life. Alarmed by the condition of the Irish rural tenantry, McDougall felt that the abuses caused by a corrupted system of land ownership should not be allowed to exist under British governance. She supports her criticism with historical weight, showing that the current situation resulted from long-existent social ills. Establishing links between 1879–82 and the Great Irish Famine (1845–52), McDougall assigns Irish history a repetitive streak. In her fiction, recollections of the Famine entail a premediating and radical moral function for Ireland in the 1880s.