In a letter to his family written on April 30, 1916, Thomas MacDonagh recalls “I was astonished to receive by a messenger from P.H. Pearse, Commandant General of the Army of the Irish Republic, an order to surrender unconditionality to the British General. I did not obey the order as it came from a prisoner. I as then in supreme command of the Irish Army, consulted with my second in command and decided to confirm the order. I knew that it would involve my death and the deaths of other leaders. I hoped that it would save many true men among our followers, good lives for Ireland. God grant it has done so and God approve our deed. For my self I have no regret. The one bitterness that death has for me is the separation it brings from my beloved wife Muriel, and my beloved children, Donagh and Barbara. My country will then treat them as wards, I hope. I have devoted myself too much to National work and too little to the making of money to leave them a competence. God help them and support them, and give them a happy and prosperous life. Never was there a better, truer, purer woman than my wife Muriel, or more adorable children than Don and Barbara. It breaks my heart that I shall never see my children again, but I have not wept or murmured. I counted the cost of this and am ready to pay it. Muriel has been sent for here. I do not know if she can come. She may have no one to take the children while she is coming. If she does.”
MacDonagh and Pearse are contemporaries of one another: poets, progressive educators, Gaelic revivalists. They are men who gird for battle “with a revolver in one hand and a copy of Sophocles in the other.” Each man commands a unit of Irish Volunteers during the Easter Rising, which takes place the week of April 24-30,1916. MacDonagh occupies Jacob’s biscuit factory and Pearse the General Post Office (GPO), from which he issues the surrender at the end of the week.
McDonagh and Pearse are signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a document issued by the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army at the beginning of the Easter Rising, proclaiming Ireland’s independence from the United Kingdom. The reading of the proclamation by Pearse outside the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin‘s main thoroughfare, marks the beginning of the Rising.
Pearse’s and MacDonagh’s signatures on the Proclamation are a fatal endorsement for them and for each of the other five men to lend it their signatures. After being court-martialed, both Pearse and MacDonagh, along with Thomas Clarke, are executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin on May 3, 1916, the first of the rebels to be executed.
(Pictured: Thomas McDonagh (left) and Patrick Pearse)
MacCarthy is born in Lower O’Connell Street, Dublin, on May 26, 1817, and educated there and at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He acquires an intimate knowledge of Spanish from a learned priest, who had spent much time in Spain, which he is later to turn to good advantage. In April 1834, before turning seventeen, he contributes his first verses to the Dublin Satirist. He is one of a coterie of writers whose works appear in The Nation, which is started by Charles Gavan Duffy in 1842. Writing under the pseudonym “Desmond,” most of MacCarthy’s patriotic verse appears in this organ.
In 1846, MacCarthy is called to the Irish bar but never practises. In the same year he edits The Poets and Dramatists of Ireland, which he prefaces with an essay on the early history and religion of his countrymen. About this time, he also edits The Book of Irish Ballads (by various authors), with an introductory essay on ballad poetry in general. His Ballads, Poems, and Lyrics appears in 1850, original and translated. His attention is first directed to Pedro Calderón de la Barca by a passage in one of Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s essays, and from then on, the interpretation of the “Spanish Shakespeare” claims the greater part of his attention.
The first volume of MacCarthy’s translations, containing six plays, appears in 1853, and is followed by further instalments in 1861, 1867, 1870, and 1873. His version of Daybreak in Capacabana is completed only a few months before his death.
Until 1864, MacCarthy resides principally on Killiney Hill, overlooking Dublin Bay. The delicate health of some members of his family then renders a change of climate imperative, and he pays a prolonged visit to continental Europe. On his return, he settles in London in 1871, where he publishes – in addition to his translations – Shelley’s Early Life, which contains an account of that poet’s visit to Dublin in 1812.
MacCarthy’s poems are distinguished by a sense of harmony and sympathy with natural beauty. Such poems as “The Bridal of the Year,” “Summer Longings” (alias “Waiting for the May”), and his long narrative poem, “The Voyage of St. Brendan,” are among his most enduring works. The last-mentioned, which paraphrases the “Ave Maria Stella” as the evening song of the sailors, is also marked by the earnest religious feeling which mark its author throughout life. But it is by his version of Calderon that he is considered to have won a permanent place in English letters. His success is sufficiently testified by George Ticknor, who declares in his History of Spanish Literature that MacCarthy “has succeeded in giving a faithful idea of what is grandest and most effective in [Calderon’s] genius… to a degree which I had previously thought impossible. Nothing, I think, in the English language will give us so true an impression of what is most characteristic of the Spanish drama, and of Spanish poetry generally.”
The band is briefly named the Fast, but as there is already a group of that name, they change it to Stiff Little Fingers, taken from the song of the same name that had appeared on Pure Mania, the 1977 album by the Vibrators. Apart from a five-year gap from 1983 to 1987, Stiff Little Fingers has been active since 1977 to the present day and have released ten studio albums.
In 1981, Burns makes his acting debut in an episode of the BBC‘s Play for Today series entitled Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain, written by Belfast-born poet and playwrightStewart Parker, which also features the rest of Stiff Little Fingers effectively playing themselves as “The Band.”
After the breakup of Stiff Little Fingers in 1983, Burns forms Jake Burns and the Big Wheel. The band consists of Burns on vocals and guitar, Steve Grantley on drums, Sean Martin on bass guitar, and Pete Saunders on keyboards. Big Wheel records a total of three singles, “On Fortune Street,” “She Grew Up” and “Breathless.” A compilation album, also called On Fortune Street, is released in 2002 after the band’s demise.
In 1987, Burns disbands Big Wheel, and Stiff Little Fingers reforms, because they are “skint and wanted to make a bit of cash to get back to Ireland for Christmas.”
From about 2001 to 2005, Burns is involved in a side project with Pauline Black of the Selecter, called 3 Men and Black. This involves Black touring with three male artists from the late 1970s and early 1980s doing acoustic versions of songs they are famous for and talking a little about how they came to write the songs. The lineup for the concerts is fairly fluid, and includes such people as Bruce Foxton, Jean-Jacques Burnel, Eric Faulkner and Nick Welsh.
On March 27, 2006, Burns releases a solo album titled Drinkin’ Again.
Burns lives in London for over ten years from 1978 after Stiff Little Fingers relocates there. His first wife lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and after their marriage, he moves to Newcastle, where he lives for 16 years, becoming a supporter of Newcastle United F.C. He is also an avid supporter of the Northern Ireland national football team.
Burns’s second wife, Shirley, is American and they have lived in Chicago since 2004. Burns eventually becomes a U.S. citizen, partially so he can help vote out Donald Trump.
(Pictured: Jake Burns, performing with Stiff Little Fingers in 2019)
Hutchinson is born in Glasgow, Scotland, on February 16, 1927. His father, Harry Hutchinson, a Scottish printer whose own father had left Dublin to find work in Scotland, is Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow and is interned in Frongoch internment camp in 1919–21. His mother, Cathleen Sara, is born in Cowcaddens, Glasgow, of emigrant parents from County Donegal. She is a friend of Constance Markievicz. In response to a letter from Cathleen, Éamon de Valera finds work in Dublin for Harry as a clerk in the Labour Exchange, and later he holds a post in Stationery Office.
Hutchinson is five years old when the family moves to Dublin and is the last to be enrolled in St. Enda’s School before it closes. He then goes to school at Synge Street CBS where he learns Irish and Latin. One of his close friends there is the poet and literary critic John Jordan. In 1948 he attends University College Dublin (UCD) where he spends a year and a half, learning Spanish and Italian.
Having published some poems in The Bell in 1945, Hutchinson’s poetic development is greatly influenced by a 1950 holiday in Spain and Portugal. A short stop en route at Vigo brings him into contact for the first time with the culture of Galicia. Later, in Andalusia, he is entranced by the landscape and by the works of the Spanish poets Federico García Lorca, Emilio Prados and Luis Cernuda.
In 1951 Hutchinson leaves Ireland again, determined to live in Spain. Unable to get work in Madrid, as he had hoped, he travels instead to Geneva, where he gets a job as a translator with the International Labour Organization, which brings him into contact with Catalan exiles, speaking a language then largely suppressed in Spain. An invitation by a Dutch friend leads to a visit to the Netherlands, in preparation for which he teaches himself the Dutch language.
Hutchinson returns to Ireland in 1953 and becomes interested in the Irish language poetry of writers such as Piaras Feiritéar and Aonghus Fionn Ó Dálaigh and publishes a number of poems in Irish in the magazine Comhar in 1954. The same year he travels again to Spain, this time to Barcelona, where he learns the Catalan and Galician languages, and gets to know Catalan poets such as Salvador Espriu and Carles Riba. With the British poet P. J. Kavanagh, he organises a reading of Catalan poetry in the British Institute.
Hutchinson goes home to Ireland in 1957 but returns to Barcelona in 1961 and continues to support Catalan poets. An invitation by the publisher Joan Gili to translate some poems by Josep Carner leads to the publication of his first book, a collection of thirty of Carner’s poems in Catalan and English, in 1962. A project to publish his translation of Espriu’s La Pell de brau (The Bull-skin), falls through some years later. Some of the poems from this project are included in the collection Done into English.
In 1963, Hutchinson’s first collection of original poems in English, Tongue Without Hands, is published by Dolmen Press in Ireland. In 1967, having spent nearly ten years altogether in Spain, he returns to Ireland, making a living as a poet and journalist writing in both Irish and English. In 1968, a collection of poems in Irish, Faoistin Bhacach (A Lame Confession), is published. Expansions, a collection in English, follows in 1969. Friend Songs (1970) is a new collection of translations, this time of medieval poems originally written in Galician-Portuguese. In 1972 Watching the Morning Grow, a new collection of original poems in English, comes out, followed in 1975 by another, The Frost Is All Over.
In October 1971, Hutchinson takes up the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Leeds, on the recommendation of Professor A. Norman Jeffares. There is some controversy around the appointment following accusations, later retracted, that Jeffares had been guilty of bias in the selection because of their joint Irish heritage. He holds tenure at the University for three years, and during that time contributes to the University’s influential poetry magazine Poetry & Audience.
From 1977 to 1978 Hutchinsonn compiles and presents Oró Domhnaigh, a weekly radio programme of Irish poetry, music and folklore for Ireland’s national network, RTÉ. He also contributes a weekly column on the Irish language to the station’s magazine RTÉ Guide for over ten years. A collaboration with Melita Cataldi of Old Irish lyrics into Italian is published in 1981. Another collection in English, Climbing the Light (1985), which also includes translations from Irish, Italian and Galician, is followed in 1989 by his last Irish collection, Le Cead na Gréine (By Leave of the Sun). The Soul that Kissed the Body (1990) is a selection of his Irish poems translated into English. His most recent English collection is Barnsley Main Seam (1995). His Collected Poems is published in 2002 to mark his 75th birthday. This is followed in 2003 by Done into English, a selection of many of the translated works he produced over the years.
A co-editor and founder of the literary journal Cyphers, Hutchinson receives the Butler Award for Irish writing in 1969. He is a member of Aosdána, the state-supported association of artists, from which he receives a cnuas (stipend) to allow him to continue writing. He describes this as “a miracle and a godsend” as he is fifty-four when invited to become a member and is at the end of his tether. A two-day symposium of events is held at Trinity College Dublin, to celebrate his 80th birthday in 2007, with readings from his works by writers including Macdara Woods, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan and Sujata Bhatt. His most recent collection, At Least for a While (2008), is shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award.
Hutchinson lives in Rathgar, Dublin, and dies of pneumonia in Dublin on January 14, 2012. His extensive archive is in the library of Maynooth University. Its opening on May 24, 2015, is accompanied by the inauguration of an annual Pearse Hutchinson seminar and the launch of a collection of unpublished Hutchinson poems, Listening to Bach.
Some critics argue that Hutchinson’s concern with simplicity and Ireland’s place in the comparative history of human oppression too often deteriorates into banality, didacticism, and regurgitation of sentimental revivalist tropes. Even these, however, acknowledge his occasional greatness, while his champions argue that his achievement has not yet been fully recognised and absorbed.
McGurk first joins RTÉ in 1972, as a news reporter, moving on to present Last House and First House on television. In 1972 he wins a Jacob’s Award for his RTÉ Radio documentaries on Ireland’s islands. For 20 years he is the presenter of RTÉ Sport‘s rugby coverage, most notable of the Six Nations Championship and Internationals with the panel of George Hook and Brent Pope. He also spends time in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK, working for BBC Radio 4‘s Start of the Week as a presenter on the regional ITV station for the North West of England, Granada Television. On his return to Ireland, he presents the Sunday Show on RTE Radio 1. He also guest presents Tonight with Vincent Browne, on TV3. He presents a drive-time radio show on 4FM when it launches in 2009.
Until 2019, McGurk is a columnist with The Sunday Business Post. He then writes for The Currency until 2020.
McGurk writes the script for the TV film Dear Sarah based on the letters from Sarah Conlon, campaigning for the release of her husband (Giuseppe Conlon), son (Gerry Conlon) and sister Anne Maguire, caught up in the Guildford Four miscarriage of justice.
Among his poems is “Big Ned” about a farmer from Brockagh, County Tyrone.
While working for 4FM, the Director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, Susan McKay, speaks out against an “uncouth and objectionable” interview McGurk conducts with her. The National Women’s Council has since refrained from giving interviews to 4FM.
From 1983 to 1996 McGurk is married to the broadcaster Miriam O’Callaghan, with whom he has four daughters. In 2003 he marries PR consultant Caroline Kennedy.
On December 5, 2017, the Irish Revenue Commissioners list of tax defaulters reveal that McGurk had made a settlement of €76,000 with the Revenue for the underpayment of income tax.
Liam Redmond, Irish character actor known for his stage, film and television roles, dies in Dublin on October 28, 1989, following a lengthy illness.
Redmond is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on July 27, 1913, one of four children born to cabinet-maker Thomas and Eileen Redmond. Educated at the Christian Brothers schools in Dublin, he later attends University College Dublin (UCD) and initially reads medicine before moving into drama.
While Director of the Dramatic Society, Redmond meets and marries the society’s secretary, Barbara MacDonagh, sister of Donagh MacDonagh and daughter of 1916 Easter Rising leader Thomas MacDonagh and Muriel Gifford. They have four children.
Redmond is invited to join the Abbey Theatre in 1935 as a producer by William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet. Yeats writes his play Death of Cú Chulainn for Redmond to star as Cú Chulainn, hero of one of Ireland’s foundational myths.
Redmond makes his acting debut at the Abbey Theatre in 1935 in Seán O’Casey‘s The Silver Tassie. His first stage appearance is in 1939 in New York City in The White Steed. After returning to Britain at the outbreak of World War II he is a regular on the London stage. He is one of the founders of the Writers’, Artists’, Actors’ and Musicians’ Association (WAAMA), a precursor of the Irish Actors’ Equity Association. His insistence that “part-time professionals” – usually civil servants who act on the side – should be paid a higher rate than professional actors for both rehearsal time and performance, effectively wiping out this class, raising the wages and fees of working actors.
Hyde-Lees is the daughter of militia captain (William) Gilbert Hyde-Lees (1865–1909), of the Manchester Regiment, and Edith “Nelly” Ellen (1868–1942), daughter of barrister and manufacturer Montagu Woodmass, JP. Her father is regarded by her mother’s family as “a most undesirable character, but ‘rolling in money,'” having taken up the life of a “gentleman alcoholic” on resigning his commission after receiving an inheritance from his wealthy uncle Harold Lees, of Pickhill Hall, near Wrexham, then part of Denbighshire. He is “attractive, reckless, witty, and… musical,” and fond of pranks. She has an elder brother, Harold (1890–1963), who becomes a clergyman, with “rigid moral standards” and “a less than joyous existence,” his only indulgence being “a fine collection of drawings and etchings.” When she is only a few years old, her parents’ marriage fails due to her father’s alcoholism. Her father has enough income to support his family, allowing Georgie and her mother to spend “a good deal of their time” travelling in Europe, but his wife is in the awkward social position of being a “married woman without a husband.” The family lives a vaguely bohemian and nomadic lifestyle, travelling frequently to country homes and spending long periods visiting relatives.
Hyde-Lees attends a number of schools in Knightsbridge, London art schools, studies languages and classics, and piano. She becomes a close friend of Dorothy Shakespear, who is fond of Georgie and shares many of her interests despite being six years her senior. After the death of her father in 1909 at the age of 44, her mother marries Dorothy’s uncle, Henry Tucker, Olivia Shakespear‘s brother, and they move to Kensington.
Hyde-Lee’s mother often brings young musicians and artists she has recently met to Olivia Shakespear’s salon, many of whom become well-known modernists, including Ezra Pound, Walter Rummel, and Frederic Manning. She continues to make the rounds of country estates with her mother and Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear. It is in their company in 1910 or 1911, as a seventeen-year-old, that one morning she meets W. B. Yeats at the British Museum and again that afternoon during tea at the Shakespears.
Seven years later, when Hyde-Lees is 25 and Yeats is 52, he asks her to marry him. Only a few weeks earlier, Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud Gonne whom Yeats had loved for many years, had rejected his marriage proposal. She and Yeats marry just three weeks later, on October 20, 1917, in a public register office, witnessed by her mother and Ezra Pound. During the honeymoon, while Yeats is still brooding about Iseult’s rejection, she begins the automatic writing which fascinates him. Yeats writes about her psychography days later in what is to be A Vision (1925), and it holds the marriage together for many years. Within a year of marriage, Yeats declares her name of Georgie to be insufferable, and henceforth calls her George.
Leventhal is born Abraham Jacob Leventhal in Lower Clanbrassil Street, Dublin, on May 9, 1896. His parents are Moses (Maurice) Leventhal and Rosa (née Levenberg). His father is a draper, and his mother is a poet. She is a Zionist, who is a founding member of the Women’s Zionist Society. He lives in the “Little Jerusalem” area of Dublin, the area around the South Circular Road, in his youth. He attends Wesley College, Dublin, and then Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to study modern languages. He edits the TCD student magazine in 1918. It is in TCD that he acquires the nickname “Con,” an allusion to his father’s job as a “Continental” agent. He joins the first Zionist commission and travels to Palestine after World War I and helps to found the newspaper Palestine Weekly. He is then invited to join the Jewish National Fund‘s London office and begins working on the Zionist Review. He returns to Dublin to complete his degree in 1920, and in 1921 travels to Paris where he meets James Joyce.
Leventhal marries Gertrude Zlotover in October 1922. He works with his father-in-law, Joseph Zlotover, at the family furniture business on Mary Street for a time. After, he starts a number of unsuccessful businesses of his own, including the Irish Book Shop on Dawson Street from 1924 to 1925. It is possibly his business failures that inspire the idea of the TCD Students Appointment Association, which would give students pragmatic business skills. TCD accepts this proposal and employes him as the first administrator.
Leventhal completes a PhD in contemporary French literature, and in 1932 is appointed to the staff of the French department at TCD. He replaces his friend Samuel Beckett. During his time in TCD, he is an assistant editor to Hermathena, to which he also contributes his translations of French poetry. He is associated with a number of progressive cultural movements in Dublin of the 1920s and 1930s. He is a regular attendee at meetings held to promote Jewish culture and nationalism and lectures this group on Joyce. Through his interest in Joyce, he becomes an associate of Seumas O’Sullivan, and The Dublin Magazine. When the printers refuse to set his review of Ulysses in 1923 for The Dublin Magazine, he is moved to found his own magazine, The Klaxon, in response to the censorship. The only issue of the magazine publishes a shortened version of the review under the pseudonym “Lawrence K. Emery.” He is also associated with Francis Stuart‘s Tomorrow magazine. He is also interested in drama and is a member of the avant-garde Dublin Drama League, occasionally performing with them. Among his close friends are Daisy Bannard Cogley, Micheál Mac Liammóir, and Lennox Robinson. From 1943 to 1958 his column, “Dramatic commentary”, is published in The Dublin Magazine. He is also published in The Irish Times, The Irish Press, The Listener, Westminster Weekly, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. He is a regular contributor to Radio Éireann and BBC broadcasts.
Leventhal begins a long-term relationship with Ethna MacCarthy, marrying her after the death of his first wife in 1956. She dies in 1959. He retires from TCD in 1963 and moves to Paris, where he becomes Beckett’s literary assistant. He lives on Boulevard du Montparnasse with his partner Marion Leigh.
Leventhal dies of cancer in Paris on October 3, 1979. There are two known portraits of Leventhal, one by John Russell (1920) and a second by Avigdor Arikha. The Leventhal Scholarship at TCD is founded in his memory. TCD and the Harry Ransom Center hold papers relating to Leventhal.
Scriven is born on September 10, 1819, of prosperous parents in Banbridge, County Down. He graduates with a degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1842. His fiancée accidentally drowns in 1843, the night before they are to be married. In 1844, at the age of 25, he leaves his native country and migrates to Canada, settling in Woodstock, Ontario. He leaves his country feeling a spiritual calling to serve the Lord in his Plymouth Brethren faith. He remains in Canada only briefly after becoming ill but returns for good in 1847.
For two or three years Scriven conducts a private school at Brantford. In 1855, while staying with James Sackville in Bewdley, Ontario, north of Port Hope, he receives news from Ireland of his mother being terribly ill. He writes a poem to comfort his mother called “Pray Without Ceasing.” It is later set to music and renamed by Charles Crozat Converse, becoming the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Scriven does not have any intentions nor dream that his poem would be published in the newspaper and later become a favorite hymn among the millions of Christians around the world.
About 1857, Scriven moves near to Port Hope, Ontario. Here he again falls in love and is due to be married, but in August 1860 his fiancée becomes ill with pneumonia and dies. He then devotes the rest of his life to tutoring, preaching and helping others.
In 1869, Scriven publishes a collection of 115 hymns entitled Hymns and other verses which does not include “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
Scriven drowns at age 66 on August 10, 1886. At the time of his death, he is very ill with fever and has been brought to a friend’s home to recover. It is a very hot night, and he goes outside possibly to cool down or to get a drink of cold water from the spring. His friend reports, “We left him about midnight. I withdrew to an adjoining room to watch and pray. You may imagine my surprise and dismay when upon visiting his room I found it empty. All search failed to find a trace of the missing man, until a little after noon his body was discovered in the nearby river, lifeless and cold in death.” To this day, no one knows for certain if his death is an accident or a suicide. He is buried next to his second fiancée in her family cemetery, Pengelley Family Cemetery, at Pengelly Landing, Peterborough County, Ontario, Canada.
A tall obelisk is built upon his grave with the words from the song and the following inscription:
“This monument was erected to the memory of Joseph M. Scriven, B.A., by lovers of his hymn, which is engraved hereon, and is his best memorial. Born at Seapatrick, Co. Down, Ireland, 10 Sept. 1819, emigrated to Canada 1844. Entered into rest at Bewdley, Rice Lake, 10 August 1886, and buried here. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.“
A plaque can be found on the Port Hope-Peterborough Highway with the following inscription:
“Four miles north, in the family Pengelley Cemetery, lies the philanthropist and author of this great masterpiece, written at Port Hope, 1857. The composer of the music, Charles C. Converse, was a well-educated versatile and successful Christian, whose talents ranged from law to professional music. Under the pen name of Karl Reden, he wrote numerous scholarly articles on many subjects. Though he was an excellent musician and composer with many of his works performed by the leading American orchestras and choirs of his day, his life is best remembered for this simple music so well suited to Scriven’s text.“
Lukas Media LLC releases the full-length documentaryFriends in Jesus, The stories and Hymns of Cecil Frances Alexander and Joseph Scriven in 2011. The 45-minute documentary movie details the life of Scriven and his influence on popular hymns.
Edward Maturin, novelist and poet, is born in Dublin on June 18, 1812. He is naturalised as an American and works as a professor of Greek. His fiction and poetry generally deal with historical themes, while his work as a Gothic novelist often has an Irish background.
The Maturin family is descended from a Huguenot clergyman who fled to Ireland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Edward’s father, Reverend Charles Robert Maturin, is curate of St. Peter’s Church, Dublin, and well known as a preacher, as well as a poet and Gothic novelist. Born the second son, Edward enters Trinity College Dublin at the age of fifteen and graduates at twenty. Immediately afterward he emigrates to the United States in 1832 with letters of introduction from the poet Thomas Moore and other Irish writers. Having studied law under Charles O’Conor, he is called to the bar but later becomes professor of Greek at South Carolina College and applies for American naturalisation in 1837. He marries Harriet Lord Gailiard in 1842 and has three children by her. In 1848, he returns to New York, where for upward of thirty years he fills professorships in Greek, Latin and belles-lettres. His mastery of Greek is such that he is selected in 1850 by the American Bible Union as one of their revisers and works on the gospel of St. Mark.
All of Maturin’s work is written in the United States and for the most part concentrates on historical themes or Irish fantasy. His first book contains the interconnected stories of Sejanus and Other Roman Tales (1839) and is dedicated to Washington Irving. They concern incidents during the reigns of the Roman emperors from Tiberius to Nero. Self-consciously literary, the dialogue is written in an imitation of Shakespearean English. This is followed by the two-volume romance, Montezuma, the Last of the Aztecs (1845) and then two works on Spanish themes. The long series of “Spanish Ballads” that originally appears in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review during 1845 are eventually collected with his other poems in Lyrics of Spain and Erin (1850). They are followed by the romance Benjamin, the Jew of Grenada (1847), a story of the fall of the Moslem empire in Spain.
After his move to New York, Maturin’s prose work becomes more Gothic. It includes The Irish Chieftain, or The Isles of Life and Death (1848) which is later to be dismissed as “a wild story without foundation in history … melodramatic, sentimental, extravagant,” and the two-volume Eva, or the Isles of Life and Death (1848). His later Bianca, a tale of Erin and Italy (1852) is set in more modern times but is equally condemned as “an outlandish story, full of murders, characters – mostly illegitimate – with terrible secrets, a duel between brothers, banshees, mysterious lady-prophetesses, fee-faw-fum.” A final offering is his four-act play Viola (1858).
Maturin dies in New York City on May 25, 1881.
(Pictured: “Montezuma: The Last of the Aztecs” by Edward Maturin, Paine & Burgess, New York, 1845)
seamus dubhghaill 