The “Tinker” Figure in the Children’s Fiction of Patricia Lynch
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v7i1.184269Keywords:
Patricia Lynch, Tinkers, Children's bookAbstract
This article explores the representation of Travellers or “tinkers” in some of Patricia Lynch’s children’s books from the first half of the twentieth century. One of the first children’s writers to create a world directly recognizable to her young readers, in which she used to shape a concept of “Irishness,” Lynch establishes the “tinker” as a bridging figure between the realism of rural Ireland and the magical “other world” of the supernatural, but belonging properly to neither. Tinkers are tools through which the child is taught, by negative example, to value the domestic realm and to be a good citizen. Relief from the domestic routine should be found in fairy tales, and not in the actual world of the tinkers. Excluded from both the real world and its acceptable alternative, Travellers are denied a legitimate status within an Irish context. Lynch suggests that the only way for a Traveller to become legitimate is to cease being a Traveller.
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Copyright (c) 2005 José Lanters
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