The Siege of Maynooth

I've just been beginning to investigate some of the texts we'll be working on in our project, and came across this fine example from the novel The Siege of Maynooth; or, Romance in Ireland which was published anonymously in 1832:

"Ah ! Cush la ma chree, my Princess of the world," cried Elinor's nurse Alice; " dont be afther spiling the beautiful eyes of ye wid cryin, shure its only thim thierin Spalpeens the Butlers, an there'll be no harm done at all; my Rosy jewel," addressing her daughter, " myself wishes ye'd run an git ready some yerbs an plasthers, for we'll hav a power o' cut heads to cure before mornin."

I haven't had a chance to read it fully yet, but the novel seems to be a sub-Sir Walter Scott affair about the life of the Countess of Desmond, set in Ireland in centuries gone by. In the preface the author raises the issue that actually having the minor characters speak in Irish-accented English is not very realistic as everyone would have been speaking Gaelic:

The Editor has to apologize for the apparent anchronism of the modern patois in the conversation of the subordinate characters—it being impossible to give the original Irish, which few readers would understand; and the present translation is the only method by which the singularity of the ideas and expressions could be preserved.

What I think is interesting here is the clashing claims of truth and fiction. On the one hand, this is a frank admission that the whole text is a complete fabrication. However, the author's own language keeps undercutting this admission: it's only acknowledged to be an 'apparent anachronism' not simply an 'anachronism'; it's a 'translation', which implies that there is a real original; this method of presentation allows the 'singularity' of the original to be 'preserved', again implying that there is something to be preserved.

I'm going to be very interested to see if we find the same kind of conflict between claiming linguistic realism and acknowledging linguistic fiction in other texts from the period. Although, actually, I suppose this is related to the kind of issues that I raised in 'Slumdog Millionaire': at one level, the deployment of different varieties or languages in a work of fiction often seems to signal a commitment to authenticity, but at another level the use of these varieties or languages is often highly artificial.