"An alien & an interloper & despised of his fellow-men..."

I assume the book belonged to my late great grandfather. Several years ago, it caught my eye on the shelf at home on account of its lurid title: The Wild Irishman, published in London in 1905. Its author - one T W H Crosland (left) - is styled on the inside cover "the author of The Unspeakable Scot". Quite why this particular eccentric jeremiad was ever purchased by my relative, I have no idea, but it proved an entertaining accidental diversion. Intrigued by the gratuitously insulting chapter headings, I read on, and was soon chortling at the Crosland's outrageous, ornate, over-ripe - and at times, basically racist, prose.  The author reserves his particular bile for the Scotch, a fondness that finds expression in his chapter in The Wild Irishman on "Dirt", which commences...

"I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out and out the dirtiest people on the earth. But whereas Scotch dirt is a crude and gross affair, Irish dirt has still a pathetic and almost tender grace about it."

Blogging has been quiet on the peaty front, on account of an extended sojourn down to London to see some cronies. As I wandered through those chartered streets, I was soon reminded of Crosland's comparative analysis of both the Irish and the Scotch in London. Crosland particularly despised the swarm of Fleet Street Scottish hacks - a point much enlarged upon on his earlier work The Unspeakable Scot (1902).  Not a fan of the“stern, calculating Scotch peasant has during late years dedicated his son to the practice and service of journalism”, Crosland was at least willing to concede that:

“He [the Scotsman] possesses too certain solid qualities which are undoubtedly desirable in a journalist. For example, he is punctual, cautious, dogged, unoriginal and a born galley-slave.”

 A whole chapter of his 1905 book is committed to "the London Irish". He contends...

"... the London Irish do not shine effulgently. None of them is at the top of things, as it were; none of them has got very far above the middling. The reason no doubt is that the Irish temperament is coy. The Scotchman who comes to London knows that he is an alien and an interloper, and despised of his fellow-men, but he blusters it out. The Irishman, on the other hand, feels his position keenly and refuses to be other than diffident."

Crosland was very keen on provocative epigrams, and both books are full of riling and insulting  jabs at both the Irish and the Scots. Several are eminently quotable, but I'll limit myself to a couple more, from The Unspeakable Scot. Given their relative antiquity, both books are now freely available online, for kindlers and freebie-seekers, seeking comic racist tracts to alleviate the boredom of the commute. Firstly, a classic bit of Crosland, laying into cherished Scotch pieties...

“Your proper child of Caledonia believes in his bones that he is the salt of the earth. Prompted by a glozing pride, not to say by a black and consuming avarice, he has proclaimed his saltiness from the house-tops in and out of season, unblushingly, assiduously, and with results which have no doubt been most satisfactory from his own point of view. There is nothing creditable to the race of men, from filial piety to a pretty taste in claret, which he has not sedulously advertised as a virtue peculiar to himself.”

And secondly, on the Scots tradition of education Alex Salmond is so keen on espousing. I dare say Crosland would not have been an admirer of our First Minister...

“All the same, I concede that the Scotch really do love learning. I gather, too, from unbiased sources that they starve their mothers and make gin-mules of their fathers to get it. And when it is gotten, when a monstrous and unlovely possession it usually turns out to be. For your Scotchman always takes knowledge for wisdom. His learning consists wholly of “facts and figures”, all grouped methodologically round that heaven-send date A. D. 1314, and if you cannot tell him off-hand the salary of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the population of Otaheite and the names of the fixed stars, he votes you a damned ignorant Southron, and goes about telling his friends that he shouldn’t wonder if you never went to 'the schule'.”