This is the first in a series of teaching notes on Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. When complete, they will all be revised, tidied up and turned into a single guide that can be downloaded free by teachers. See this previous post with helpful resources and links, including my own writing on the book, and further links below.

The notes are written in the context of the Irish Leaving Certificate English course, and the novel’s position in the Comparative section: an option for study among many other plays, novels and films. So they are often directed to the modes of comparison there. Although the 2025 rubric covers the modes Theme/Issue, Cultural Context and General Vision and Viewpoint, Literary Genre will also be included here, for future years. Notes on these modes will mainly appear at the end of the teaching notes posts.

I will be giving a free webinar on the book for English teachers on the evening of Tuesday 10th September 2024: register.

Plus: notes on Section 3 (pages 15 to 35); Sections 4 and 5 (pages 37 to 72); Section 6 (pages 73 to 87); Section 7 (page 89 to the end). Also, a post on looking at the story through the lens of George Saunders, and one on the comparative modes.

Pagination is from the Faber and Faber UK paperback edition, 2021.

Teaching Notes 1

Dedication:

There is plenty of material online, in books and in film, on the Magdalene Laundries. A basic outline will be helpful in advance of reading the book. We have to wait until Section 4 before seeing the relevance of this dedication.

Proclamation from the Easter 1916 Rising:

Some will be familiar with Easter 1916 and the Proclamation from History class. If not a simple overview will be useful.
Come back to this later on and discuss ‘cherishing all the children of the nation equally.’
In both cases, central to Cultural Context.

SECTION 1: PAGES 1 to 3

Time: implications of October (then November, on the way to Christmas). This will be a journey to a particular point in time. First sentences of later sections -
Section 3 - ‘Christmas was coming’.
Section 4 - ‘It was a December of crows’.
Section 5 - ‘On Christmas week, snow was forecast’.
Section 7 - ‘On Christmas Eve, Furlong never felt more like not going in.’

Page 1: Suggestive images in the first paragraph: winds, bare trees, the dark River Barrow, rain. The people ‘for the most part, unhappily endured the weather’ (1). General Vision and Viewpoint - does not suggest a positive journey for the story.
1-2: the sense of the close-knit community (a common theme in many comparative texts).
2: First mention of Furlong, a coal and timber merchant who is a provider for the community. But the lorry’s tyres are worn: ‘We could soon be on the rims.’ This concern recurs on page 90 - Mrs Furlong may not get her longed-for windows because of the engine giving out. A continuing idea in the book will be how close life is to the edge.
3: 1980s Ireland: the rare ‘novelty’ of the Polish and Russian boatmen with their fur caps and lack of English. A monoculture very far from Ireland 2024, insular not just in the literal sense.
3: the section ends with the ‘cold’ again, the men ‘facing back out into’ it: this will be a novel about what is faced up to, or not.

SECTION 2: PAGES 5 TO 14

5: Furlong’s path ‘from nothing’, or rather from ‘less than nothing, some might say’ (the vicious ‘some’ who gossip): Mother at 16 ‘falling pregnant’ while a domestic for Mrs Wilson, the Protestant widow: this was her ‘trouble’ in April 1946. Cultural context: the shame and fallen nature of pregnancy, which prefigures the other girl called Sarah later in the novel.
5-6: The supportive environment of Mrs Wilson’s house, compared to outside, where some expect him to turn out to be a ‘fool’ (he is born on April 1st). Some financial stability. Her unusual ‘small library’. First mention of the significant Ned. Lack of tension over religious beliefs: the prayer books are left aside until Sunday: but this suggests an exception to the religious tension and hyper-awareness in the community. Ignoring the influence of the Roman Catholic is not an option for 97% of the community. On page 12 as an adult Furlong is ‘often tense; he could not say why.’
7: The ‘big house’ gives some ‘leeway, and protection’ for Furlong. Once he came back from school with spit on his coat. He develops ‘good, Protestant habits’. Whose attitude is that ‘good’ and what does it show?
8: Mrs Wilson gave a very generous few thousand pounds when Furlong and Eileen married: ‘it was one of her own that had fathered him - sure hadn’t he been christened William, after the kings’. Literary genre: the withholding of information, of who was the father. Furlong does not know, and neither for the moment do we. ‘Unknown’ in the birth certificate: that shame and moral disapproval in 1980s Ireland.
8-9: The Furlongs’ embeddedness in the community: Kathleen helping in the office, Joan in the choir, both in the secondary school. Sheila, Grace and Loretta are yet to attend - see implications later, and on the next note for page 10.
10: Title alert. ‘Sometimes Furlong, seeing the girls going through the small things that needed to be done … felt a deep, private joy that these children were his own.’ The difference to the fates of the children in the laundry. Furlong is hyper-conscious that they are the ‘lucky ones’: he does not take his good fortune for granted. He helps Mick Synnott’s ‘little chap’ as he is pathetically foraging for sticks, and gives him money: Eileen is less sympathetic - the father is a drunk (think of the girl’s father in Foster).
11: Title alert again as Furlong thinks at night ‘going over small things like these’. His agitation, his mind racing, his awareness of life’s fragility (12: ‘it would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew’). He thinks of his girls growing up, and men’s predatory eyes on them (see page 50 and Kathleen).
12: The stray dogs are ‘foraging’ for scraps in the bins, the same word used on 10 for Mick Sinnott’s young son.
12: ‘Some part of his mind was often tense: he could not say why’ - this formulation ‘part of’ recurs regularly throughout the novel: Furlong does not feel whole or complete despite his domestic and professional stability (and see later for the jigsaw motif).
12: the moving statues in Cork and Kerry: credulity in Roman Catholic Ireland in 1985. See the first few minutes of the 1985 ‘Reeling in the Years’. In this section, page 8, also the general belief that Mrs Wilson paid money at Furlong’s engagement because the father was ‘one of her own’ and the thin evidence that he was christened William (a ‘Protestant name’).
12-13: many images of economic hardship in Ireland of the 1980s. 13 - ‘Furlong had seen a young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat’s bowl behind the priest’s house.’ Mick Sinnott’s boy has to forage for sticks and this boy is so desperate he drinks out of a cat’s bowl. See p.104: the black cat eating the crow.
13: current events in 1985 (more explicit references than in Foster, where we just have a brief allusion to the Northern hunger strikes). Closures of businesses - Albatros, the shipyard company, Graves & Co. This is not the Ireland of Microsoft, Google and Pfizer. More images of coldness: the auctioneer says business is ‘stone cold, that he might as well be trying to sell ice to the Eskimos.' (14).
14: So ‘the times were raw’ but Furlong ‘felt all the more determined to carry on.’ As a (fuel) provider, his main duty is to ‘keep providing for his girls’: the vital importance of the school. CK here sets up unobtrusively the later veiled threat by the Mother Superior about the girls’ schooling: two of them are currently at St Margaret’s, the other three are yet to go to ‘the only good school in the town’. What is the attitude behind that word ‘good’ and whose is it?