What do you think?
Rate this book
Going To My Father's House
A historian’s personal journey into the complex questions of immigration, home and nation
From Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts?
Patrick Joyce’s parents moved from Ireland in the 1930s and made their home in west London. But they never really left the homeland. And so as he grew up among the streets of Paddington and Notting Hill and when he visited his family in Ireland he felt a tension between the notions of home, nation and belonging. Going to My Father’s House charts the historian’s attempt to make sense of these ties and to see how they manifest in a globalised world. He explores the places - the house, the street, the walls and the graves - that formed his own identity. He ask what place the ideas of history, heritage and nostalgia have in creating a sense of our selves. He concludes with a plea for a history that holds the past to account but also allows for dynamic, inclusive change.
From Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts?
Patrick Joyce’s parents moved from Ireland in the 1930s and made their home in west London. But they never really left the homeland. And so as he grew up among the streets of Paddington and Notting Hill and when he visited his family in Ireland he felt a tension between the notions of home, nation and belonging. Going to My Father’s House charts the historian’s attempt to make sense of these ties and to see how they manifest in a globalised world. He explores the places - the house, the street, the walls and the graves - that formed his own identity. He ask what place the ideas of history, heritage and nostalgia have in creating a sense of our selves. He concludes with a plea for a history that holds the past to account but also allows for dynamic, inclusive change.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published July 27, 2021
5 people are currently reading
192 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 15, 2022
If you love Gaston Bachelard or W G Sebald and are interested in the concepts of selfhood, and home this is the book to read. Brimming with ideas and reflections on these subjects I frequently paused to dwell on how these thoughts applied to my own life. Paused then reread at times, the rereading still a pleasure. This book will live with me for a long time.
May 26, 2024
Lots to take in, by a social historian who blends a memoir of coming of age in postwar London with analyses of the impacts of migration, dispersion, and resistance among his Irish forebears. It roams.
Burnley, North London, Conemara's "Joyce Country," Derry city, and housing estates past and present occupy much of his attention. Neither fully a personal account nor an academic study, Joyce mixes the two foci as he sifts through scholarship, his family's story, and his own travel. Published by Verso Press, so it's firmly on the left. I found this emphasis occluded the forces of mass immigration during the later half of the 20th c. through the present which have unsettled, in more than one fashion, many working-class Britons. Joyce takes the side of his ancestral opposition to empire, but he shuts aside a balanced consideration of how those rooted in England today, given the depressed economy, lack much of a say in how their government fails to regulate current inflow.
You need an interest in Irish culture to navigate with ease these contents. I wish a bit of humor had leavened the approach, but Joyce scrutinizes the scenes he depicts, and enhances with period photos, to support his argument about the costs exacted from the newcomers exceeding those of their hosts, willing or not. He does add that England only begged for the Irish to come to the aid of the Crown due to labor shortages during the Second World War, and he maps out the legacy as in turn, the Irish assimilation by the children such of himself of Englishness grew and perpetuates.
Burnley, North London, Conemara's "Joyce Country," Derry city, and housing estates past and present occupy much of his attention. Neither fully a personal account nor an academic study, Joyce mixes the two foci as he sifts through scholarship, his family's story, and his own travel. Published by Verso Press, so it's firmly on the left. I found this emphasis occluded the forces of mass immigration during the later half of the 20th c. through the present which have unsettled, in more than one fashion, many working-class Britons. Joyce takes the side of his ancestral opposition to empire, but he shuts aside a balanced consideration of how those rooted in England today, given the depressed economy, lack much of a say in how their government fails to regulate current inflow.
You need an interest in Irish culture to navigate with ease these contents. I wish a bit of humor had leavened the approach, but Joyce scrutinizes the scenes he depicts, and enhances with period photos, to support his argument about the costs exacted from the newcomers exceeding those of their hosts, willing or not. He does add that England only begged for the Irish to come to the aid of the Crown due to labor shortages during the Second World War, and he maps out the legacy as in turn, the Irish assimilation by the children such of himself of Englishness grew and perpetuates.
July 23, 2021
My entire review is found here. From it:
Patrick Joyce is a social historian, which quite well puts his finger on the pulse of this book: it’s to do with history, partly his Irish heritage, and partly with how he blends the past and the present. Who doesn’t?
Patrick Joyce is a social historian, which quite well puts his finger on the pulse of this book: it’s to do with history, partly his Irish heritage, and partly with how he blends the past and the present. Who doesn’t?
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews