Small Things Like These Characters

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

A small cast carries this novella, which suits comparative essays well: you can know every character in real depth and still have room to compare them against a second text.

Bill Furlong

Furlong is a coal and timber merchant, father of five daughters, and the son of an unmarried teenage servant who was never turned out by her employer. That single fact shapes almost everything he does. He is not naturally rebellious, he absorbs warning after warning about minding his own business, but he cannot make himself stop seeing what he has seen.

They’ve only as much power as we give them, I thought.Bill Furlong, Scene 138, Kehoe’s pub storage room

Use Furlong for any question on moral courage, conscience, or the cost of doing the right thing. Track him from quiet unease at home, through repeated warnings from Eileen and Mrs Kehoe, to the two-word decision that closes the novel.

Furlong’s dignity also matters, separate from his courage. When Sister Mary needles him about his own illegitimate birth, he does not flinch or apologise for his mother.

I have my mother’s name and no harm came from that.Bill Furlong, Scene 107, Sr. Mary’s office

That reply is worth having ready for questions on identity or class. Furlong defends his origins in the same office where the convent is trying to buy his silence, which links his personal dignity directly to his refusal to be bought.

Eileen Furlong

Eileen is Furlong’s wife, practical, protective of their five daughters, and proud of the respectability the couple has built. She is not written as a villain. Her instinct to look away from the convent’s cruelty comes from real fear for her own family’s security, not from indifference to suffering.

If you want to get on in life – there are things you have to ignore.Eileen Furlong, Scene 82, Furlong and Eileen’s bedroom

Use Eileen wherever an essay needs self-interest argued honestly rather than caricatured. Her case against Furlong’s interference is rational and loving, which is exactly what makes his refusal to take her advice so costly.

Eileen is also allowed real warmth earlier in the novel, before the convent forces the couple apart. Looking at their own contented household, she credits Furlong’s steadiness rather than luck.

Isn’t it great to see them not asking for the sun and the stars? We must be doing something right.Eileen Furlong, Scene 50, Furlong’s living room

Pair this early domestic contentment with her later hardness in an essay on marriage under pressure. The same values that make her proud of their family, respectability, security, stability, are exactly what make her afraid of what Furlong is about to risk.

Mrs Wilson

Mrs Wilson is the wealthy widow who employed Furlong’s mother as a domestic servant and, when the girl became pregnant and unmarried, did not send her away. She takes mother and son into the Big House itself, an act of decency the novel treats as the origin of everything good in Furlong.

You’ll be sleeping in this house now William. I’ve had a room made up for you.Mrs. Wilson, Scene 83, the Big House drawing room, after the funeral

Use Mrs Wilson as the novel’s proof that one person’s ordinary kindness can outweigh what an entire system expects, and as the direct model for Furlong’s own act of rescue at the end of the story.

Mrs Wilson is dead by the time the main story takes place, remembered rather than seen, which is itself worth noting in an essay on structure. Her old farmhand, Ned, confirms that her kindness to Furlong’s mother was never resented or held over her.

She never once regretted takin’ your mother in. Never took advantage of her.Ned, Scene 134, the Big House kitchen

That distinction, kindness given without leverage, is exactly what separates Mrs Wilson from Sister Mary, who never offers anything without expecting silence in return.

Sister Mary

Sister Mary is the convent’s Mother Superior, the figure of institutional power the novel sets directly against Furlong’s conscience. She is warm in company, needling in private, and entirely willing to buy silence with a bribe disguised as a Christmas gift.

Sure the whole world looks pretty under snow.Sr. Mary, Scene 107, Sr. Mary’s office

Use Sister Mary for questions on hypocrisy or concealment. Her line about snow is the novel’s clearest image of appearance covering what lies beneath it, the very thing her convent depends on the town agreeing to.

Her power also works through smaller, more personal cruelty. In the same meeting, she needles Furlong about having no son to inherit his business, a jab dressed up as sympathy.

To not have a boy to carry on your name, ya know?Sr. Mary, Scene 107, Sr. Mary’s office

Use this alongside the bribe itself for an essay on how the convent’s authority operates: not only through what it controls institutionally, but through exactly where it knows to press an individual man.

Sarah

Sarah is the girl Furlong finds locked in the coal shed on Christmas Eve, pregnant, disoriented after a night in the cold, and told her child will be given away to what the nuns call a good home.

Is it the day or night, Mister?Sarah Redmond, Scene 103B, the convent coal shed

Use Sarah as the concrete, individual evidence behind the novel’s abstract institutional cruelty. She is not a symbol first and a person second: her disorientation, her fear for her baby, and her disbelief that anyone would help her all ground the Magdalene laundries theme in one specific girl.

Sarah’s own account of how she came to be in the convent matters just as much as her treatment inside it. Her family, not only the Church, put her there.

Ardboe, Sir. Daddy didn’t want me home.Sarah Redmond, Scene 103B, the convent coal shed

Use this line for essays on complicity beyond the institution itself. The novel is careful to show that the convent could not hold girls like Sarah without a wider society, families included, willing to send them there in the first place.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: build your strongest paragraphs around Furlong and Eileen, since their disagreement drives the moral argument of the novel, then use Mrs Wilson, Sister Mary and Sarah as the evidence either side of that argument rests on. Mrs Wilson and Sister Mary make the sharpest comparative pair: two women in positions of power over a vulnerable young person, making opposite choices.