Born to George and Susan Goodfellow (née Nicholson), Goodfellow is raised in a Quaker family. Her father and uncle are builders who construct a row of houses on Morehampton Road, Donnybrook, where she lives for the rest of her life. She is educated at Alexandra College and graduates with an Arts degree from Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
Under the pseudonym Michael Scot, Goodfellow publishes Three Tales of the Times in 1921, a work about life in Ireland under the Black and Tans. She also writes poetry and translates French poetry, notably the works of 15th-century poet François Villon, publishing these translations in The Dublin Magazine between 1924 and 1928.
Goodfellow is independently wealthy, inheriting property in Ireland and England after her mother’s death in 1932. She is a generous patron of the arts, supporting The Dublin Magazine, a literary journal owned by her friend Seumas O’Sullivan, to which she contributes articles, poems, and reviews. She also supports children’s charities and serves on the Board of Governors of the Royal Hospital in Donnybrook.
Her philanthropy extends to securing funding for The Dublin Magazine (1926–1958) and gifting a bird sanctuary, The Grove, in Donnybrook to An Taisce. Despite her influence, she remains modest and private about her contributions, and her own photographic collection is destroyed after her death.
In 1939, Goodfellow falls while getting off a tram and breaks her leg badly, which leaves her with a limp. She dies at the aged of 89 on May 20, 1980, and is buried with her parents in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.
A plaque is erected in memory of Goodfellow’s donation at The Grove, a woodland area at the corner of Morehampton Road and Wellington Place, on October 19, 2022. A plaque commemorating Estella Solomons is placed on the opposite gatepost. Goodfellow’s diaries, poems and literary manuscripts are held in the Trinity College Dublin archives.
Goodfellow’s work and life reflect the intersection of Irish literary culture, nationalist history, and cultural patronage in early-to-mid 20th-century Ireland.
O’Riordan is the youngest child among two sons and three daughters of Daniel O’Connell O’Riordan, a barrister and justice of the peace (JP), and Katharine O’Riordan (née O’Neil), who is her husband’s first cousin. At age of four he witnesses his mother’s death in a carriage accident. His formal education, firstly as a day student at Belvedere College, Dublin (1881–85), and secondly as a boarder at Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare (1887–88), is interrupted by ill health and periods of self-education at home, marked by omnivorous reading in his father’s library.
While engaged in military studies in Bonn, Germany (March–September 1890), preparatory to entering Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in Great Britain, he falls from a horse during riding lessons, suffering a back injury that results in permanent spinal damage, thus precluding a military career.
Left with limited means after his father’s death, O’Riordan moves to London in 1891, where, after attempting suicide, he finds work as a stage actor with the Independent Theatre Society of J. T. Grein and other companies, both in London and touring the provinces, and is noted for his interpretations of Henrik Ibsen. Active in the Irish Literary Society, where he meets W. B. Yeats, he writes fiction under the pseudonym “F. Norreys Connell,” which he also adopts for his stage work.
O’Riordan’s early publications include In the Green Park (1894), a collection of connected short stories, The House of the Strange Woman (1895), a provocative novel of sexual promiscuity in upper-class London bohemia, boycotted by some booksellers as being “morally tainted,” and several books reflecting his deep interest in all things military, most notably The pity of war (1906), a collection of Kiplingesque short stories. Largely abandoning fiction for some years to concentrate on writing for the stage, he returns to Dublin for the first time in fourteen years to direct his controversial one-act play The Piper, which opens at the Abbey Theatre on February 13, 1908. It is jeered as a slander on Irish patriots in disturbances mildly reminiscent of the “Playboy” riots thirteen months previously. The audience on the third night is placated by Yeats, who in a speech from the stage interprets the play – in which a party of rebels in the 1798 rising disdain to set sentries as they argue interminably and discursively, only to be surprised and slaughtered by yeomanry – as a satirical allegory on the fruitless debate that followed the Parnellite split. The work can more usefully be read as a meditation on the propensity of democracy to disintegrate at moments of crisis into ineffectual and dillusory demagoguery. The Piper weathers the controversy to become a frequently performed staple of the Abbey Theatre repertoire during the 1910s.
After the death of John Millington Synge, O’Riordan serves briefly as managing director of the Abbey Theatre from March 25 to July 2, 1909, during which time he produces and directs two of his own one-act plays – Time on April 1, in which he also acts, and An Imaginary Conversation on May 13 – as well as the first revival of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World on May 27. Wearied by the repeated interferences in the theatre’s affairs by its financial backer, Annie Horniman, he resigns abruptly during her fit of pique when the actress Sara Allgood recites poetry at a private gathering of suffragettes.
O’Riordan scores a major triumph on the London stage with Captain Hannibal (1909), his adaptation of a novel by Stanley Weyman, on the proceeds of which he lives for many years. Settling permanently in London, in 1910 he purchases a house at 106 Meadvale Road, Ealing, his home for the rest of his life. Rejected by the British Army at the outset of World War I owing to his disability, after several failed attempts to secure war work he eventually goes to the front in 1918 in charge of YMCA rest huts at Étaples railway junction, where he befriends the doomed soldier poet Wilfred Owen.
O’Riordan achieves his most accomplished writing within a cycle of twelve novels, published under his own name, chronicling the experiences of several inter-connected Irish and English families from the Napoleonic Wars to the 1920s. First of the series to appear was Adam of Dublin (1920), a combined Bildungsroman and roman-à-clef of the literary revival, with vignettes of Dublin slum life, Belvedere College, and the early years of the Abbey Theatre. He follows his protagonist, Adam Quinn, through the sexual turmoil of adolescence, an itinerant acting career, and an unhappy marriage in three sequels: Adam and Caroline (1921), In London (1922), and Married life (1924). These four novels chronologically conclude the narrative of the completed cycle. The narrative commences with the “Soldier” tetralogy – Soldier Born (1927), Soldier of Waterloo (1928), Soldier’s Wife (1935), and Soldier’s End (1938) – a picaresque treatment of the multifarious and farflung experiences of David Quinn, a forebear of Adam, from an Irish childhood and English education, to the Battle of Waterloo, where he suffers horrible facial mutilation, through the Irish famine and the American Civil War, to his death at the hands of Versaillais troops during the suppression of the Paris commune. Judith Quinn (1939) and Judith’s Love (1940), about the disappointments in love and marriage of a late-Victorian Dublin woman, link the narratives of the “Adam” and “Soldier” tetralogies, while The Age of Miracles(1925) and Young Lady Dazincourt (1926) are chronologically contemporaneous with the latter “Adam” novels. Inconsistent in intention, and uneven in execution, the cycle is strongest in its evocative descriptions of Dublin, London, and other cities, with their varied social strata, in different historical periods, in the sharp-edged, witty dialogue, and in the juxtaposition of dazzling comedy and an ironic sense of tragedy.
O’Riordan continues to write successful, if lightweight, stage plays. His 1928 production of Napoleon’s Josephine features a stellar cast including Edith Evans. Among his published plays are Shakespeare’s End, and Other Irish Plays (1912), Rope Enough (1914), His Majesty’s Pleasure (1925), The King’s Wooing (1929), and Captain Falstaff and Other Plays (1935). The historical commentary Napoleon Passes (1933) reflects his abiding interest in the French emperor. President of the Irish Literary Society from 1937 to 1939, he resigns after failing to persuade his colleagues to repudiate Ireland’s wartime neutrality. Despite age, disability, and increasing reclusivity, throughout World War II he serves as an air raid warden from 1940 to 1945. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1945–48), he represents the society on the council of the newly formed National Book League, and is the society’s Tredegar lecturer in 1946. Charming and convivial, a witty and erudite conversationalist, he cultivates numerous literary friendships, and is an inveterate womaniser, enjoying countless intimate relationships, both sexual and platonic.
O’Riordan marries firstly Florence Derby in 1903, a nurse eight years his senior, with whom he has one son. They are estranged by the time of her death in 1923. In 1924, he marries secondly Olga Buckley, his lover since 1920, and secretary to the wife of G. K. Chesterton. They have two sons (both born before the marriage) and one daughter. Despite considerable contemporary celebrity and critical acclaim, his work compared to that of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, he has been ignored by posterity. The best of his writing, especially the “Adam” and “Soldier” novels, merit rediscovery.
O’Riordan dies at his London home on June 18, 1948, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. A special O’Riordan number of the Journal of Irish Literature (September 1985), edited by his daughter Judith, includes a portrait photograph, the text of The Piper, and a detailed chronology.
(From: “O’Riordan, Conal Holmes O’Connell (‘Norreys Connell’)” by Lawrence William White and Aideen Foley, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Walker is born in Dublin, son of Cooper Walker, merchant, and educated by Thomas Ball. He suffers from asthma, which prevents him from attending college. Instead he travels to Italy, where he possibly receives some private tuition in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish. He takes a special interest in Italian literature and Irish antiquities, and on his return to Ireland (where he is employed in the Irish treasury as third clerk in the upper department) resides in an Italianate villa, St. Valerie, on the road from Bray to Enniskerry.
In 1785, Walker is elected one of the original members of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) and on March 17, 1786, is requested to sit on its committee of antiquities. In this capacity he submits several essays to the Academy’s Transactions. However, his best-known work is Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786). His interest in poetry, and in eighteenth-century vernacular survivals of the ancient bardic tradition, suggests important new contemporary and literary dimensions for what had previously been antiquarian and scholarly pursuits. He also breaks new ground by considering modern as well as historical Irish culture, and introduces it to an Anglo-Irish audience by providing English translations of Gaelic songs and poems.
The authorities Walker cites covers the entire range of Irish and Anglo-Irish scholarship on Irish antiquities. He includes excerpts from his correspondence with Charles O’Conor, Charles Vallancey, and Sylvester O’Halloran and carries out an extensive correspondence with Thomas Percy after he becomes Bishop of Dromore in 1782. He focuses on both poetry and music, which according to the popular eighteenth-century view has been the two traditional pursuits of the Irish bards. He presents a historical outline of their progress from the earliest times to the eighteenth century and ends with nine appendices, which are almost as lengthy as the main text. In these, his appreciation of what he considers to be the contemporary survivals of the ancient Irish bardic tradition is apparent in his including an account of Cormac Common, a blind eighteenth-century poet from Mayo, as well as a lengthy biographical notice of Turlough O’Carolan, together with translations of several of his songs. The book brings together many of the literary, scholarly, popular, Celtic, antiquarian, political, and musical dimensions of eighteenth-century Irish culture and prefigures the synthesis of literary modes, cultural theories, and musical styles that would occur in the literary productions of the United Irishmen.
Despite his linguistic skills, Walker has little knowledge of the Irish language, yet he (a member of the Anglo-Irish elite) is consistent in his praise of Gaelic culture, portraying it as sophisticated and literate and, although he highly romanticises his work, he does help to challenge negative appraisals of the Irish character. By the standards of the time it is a work of great erudition. However, today the book is judged to be of limited academic merit as Walker is severely hampered by a shortage of primary documents and by his limited grasp of the Irish language. This is illustrated by his ambiguous use of James Macpherson‘s volumes of Ossianic poems, published in the 1760s, which he quotes as authentic in the text while hinting in the footnotes that they are unreliable.
Charlotte Brooke translates three poems, and in return Walker encourages her to produce her Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). Her work reflects Walker’s influence and she thanks him in the preface for affording her “every assistance which zeal, judgment and extensive knowledge, could give” as well as for prevailing on people to subscribe to her work and for being a subscriber himself. He is part of a literary circle that includes Edward Ledwich, Charles O’Conor, Edward Berwick, John Philpot Curran, and Henry Grattan. He also writes Historical essay on the dress of the ancient and modern Irish (1788), dedicated to his friend James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont, for which he interviews the older generation, consults manuscripts, and even visits tombs to examine the clothing of corpses, and admits he has received copious aid from Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira. The English Review receives it warmly but Richard Gough, the reviewer for TheGentleman’s Magazine, states he is “much disappointed in the perusal of this high priced history.” Other works by Walker include “an historical essay on the Irish stage,” RIA Trans., ii (1788), Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy (1799) and contributions to Vallancey’s Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis (Dublin, 1770–1804). In the 1790s he subscribes to Anthologia Hibernica: a monthly collection of science, belles lettres and history and in December 1794 submits an “Historical essay on the Irish stage” which surveys Irish drama from bardic times through to contemporary folk plays.
Walker dies on April 12, 1810, in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, leaving a fine gallery of pictures, a library containing Irish manuscripts, and a collection of antiquities. He is buried on April 14 in St. Mary’s Churchyard, Dublin. His memoirs of Alessandro Tassoni are published posthumously in London in 1815 (with a lengthy preface by his brother Samuel), as is the second edition of Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (2 vols., Dublin, 1818).
(From: “Walker, Joseph Cooper” by Rosemary Ritchie, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Duhan is one of nine children, one of whom dies before Johnny is born. His parents, John and Christina (née Murphy), raise their family on Wolfe Tone Street, Limerick. He attends the Christian Brothersnational school on Sexton Street but hates it.
Duhan is writing songs from an early age. He leaves school and starts his career as the 15-year-old frontman of the Irish beat group Granny’s Intentions. After success in Limerick and Dublin, where he shares a flat with Phil Lynott and Gary Moore, the band moves to London and is signed to the Deram Records record label. His girlfriend, Maureen, leaves her job as a teacher to travel to London with him. The band releases several singles and one album, Honest Injun, with Duhan composing eight of the band’s eleven songs. Granny’s Intentions melds a bluesy rock sound with a down-home earthiness. Moore joins the band at the age of 17, and Pete Cummins (later of The Fleadh Cowboys) is also a member. The band has their sights set on a further move to Los Angeles, California, but the deal falls through. The band disbands before Duhan is twenty-one. While in London he is offered a job as lead singer with St. James Gate, but that deal falls through as well.
From there, the couple set about a different kind of life, with Duhan growing his own vegetables and embarking on a path as a solo singer-songwriter in earnest. He has a cry in his voice that is plaintive and highly distinctive. An advance from Arista Records allows him and Maureen to put a deposit on their first home in Sandyvale Lawn on Headford Road in Galway. Later they move to Barna, where he enjoys a quiet but very orderly, some might say even regimental life: rising daily before dawn, attending daily Mass, reading vociferously and enjoying his daily swims on his beloved Silver Strand. He climbs Diamond Mountain most Sundays and Carrauntoohil annually.
Just Another Town, To the Light, Flame, and The Voyage are some of Duhan’s work. These align with the first four sections of his poetic autobiography, To The Light. His songs have been performed by Christy Moore, The Dubliners, Mary Black, and other Irish and international singers. Christy Moore states that his song “The Voyage” has been performed at over a million weddings worldwide.
His daughters, Ailbhe and Niamh, describe Duhan as a kind, gentle and selfless soul. He is a true family man. Headstrong in his beliefs, he never follows trends. He spends his life seeking meaning, delving deeply into philosophical and theological works. Mornings are devoted to reading and studying his favourite writers, making meticulous notes on whether he agrees or disagrees with their thoughts, and more importantly why. He teaches all his children to play music, and Niamh is now a music teacher.
Duhan drowns on November 12, 2024, while swimming off Silver Strand in Galway. His funeral Mass takes place at St. Killian’s New Inn Church in County Galway. He is laid to rest at Killaan Cemetery, Woodlawn.
In 1849, O’Donoghue, together with William Smith O’Brien, Terence MacManus, Thomas Francis Meagher and many others, are on board the prisoner transport ship The Swift for a six-month, 14,000-mile journey under difficult conditions on which some fellow prisoners do not survive.
On January 26, 1850, “Using materials he had begged and borrowed” as one account gives it, O’Donoghue starts publishing in Hobart a weekly newspaper named The Irish Exile, aimed mainly at fellow Irish prisoners and deportees and considered to be the first Irish Nationalist paper to be published in Australia.
The paper features Irish ballads and poetry, articles about Irish history, and a regular column by John Martin reporting on the situation of the Repeal Movement, a campaign to repeal the Acts of Union 1800 under which the Irish Parliament had been abolished. There is also local news of the Irish deportee community, then numbering in the thousands, and of Hobart daily life in general.
O’Donoghue uses The Irish Exile to publish excerpts of his journal aboard The Swift, which are reprinted in Australian, British and Irish newspapers. Brisbane‘s The Moreton Bay Courier, reprinted from Dublin’s The Nation, finds that the journal “will show how severely the tyrannical government of England visited the offences of the Ballingarry cabbage-tree heroes. The studies of Messrs. O’Brien, Meagher (afterwards O’), and O’Donoghoe, will amuse the reader”. While in Van Diemen’s Land, The Examiner, the daily newspaper of Launceston, Tasmania, reprints London‘s The Examiner‘s view that “a singularly large amount of mercy has been shown to those grown-up children who made the escapade from Dublin to raise the standard of Irish rebellion at Ballingarry. One of the worthies, Mr. Patrick O’Donoghue, has published an account of his deportation; and certainly a more pleasureable [sic] voyage could not have been under taken at the expanse of government. A roomy cabin, a capital library, a fair dinner, with a couple of glasses of wine, and cigars upon deck, from the dietary and the entertainment of the political exiles.”
Publication of the paper is not in itself illegal, but is highly displeasing to the Governor, Sir William Denison, who finds that the paper can be suppressed by arresting O’Donoghue and charging him with having “left his allocated district.” He is sentenced to one year’s work in a chain gang – a time spent at hard labour, living in a convict station and wearing a convict uniform, mainly in the company of non-political prisoners such as “rapists, muggers and thieves.”
In March 1851, O’Donoghue is released and taken back to Hobart. Undeterred, he immediately restarts his paper, prominently featuring an extensive personal account of his year with the chain gang. The governor reacts by sending him again to a chain gang, at a more distant location this time – the Cascades Penal Station. Three months later the governor orders him released from there and sent to Launceston.
On the way there, O’Donoghue succeeds in escaping from his guards with the help of fellow-prisoners, who manage to smuggle him on board the ship Yarra Yara, on its way to Melbourne. There, he successfully hides from the British authorities and, with further help from Irish sympathisers, manages to get to San Francisco, where some of his fellows such as MacManus and Meagher have also ended up.
O’Donoghue dies in New York City on January 22, 1854, shortly before the arrival of his wife on a ship from Ireland. The time spent in the chain gang may have contributed to undermining his health. The other escaped state prisoners do not attend his funeral, although Michael Doheny and Michael Cavanagh, fellow Young Irelanders who are living in New York City at the time, are in attendance.
The local Sinn Féin branch in Carlow is named after O’Donoghue.
Shackleton is the daughter of Richard Shackleton (1726–92) by his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton (1726–66), and granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke. Her parents are Quakers. She keeps a personal diary for most of her life, beginning at the age of eleven and writing in it almost daily. There 55 extant volumes of her diaries in the National Library of Ireland.
Shackleton is educated, and her literary studies are aided by Aldborough Wrightson, a man who had been educated at Ballitore school and had returned to die there. In 1784, she travels to London with her father and pays several visits to Burke’s town house, where she meets Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. She also goes to Beaconsfield, and on her return writes a poem in praise of the place and its owner, which is acknowledged by Burke on December 13, 1784, in a long letter. On her way home she visits, at Selby, North Yorkshire, some primitive Quakers whom she describes in her journal.
On January 6, 1791, Shackleton marries William Leadbeater, a former pupil of her father and a descendent of the Huguenot Le Batre and Gilliard families. He becomes a prosperous farmer and landowner in Ballitore. She spends many years working in the village post office and also works as a bonnet-maker and a herbal healer for the village. The couple lives in Ballitore and have six children. Their daughter Jane dies at a young age from injuries sustained after an accident with a wax taper. Another daughter, Lydia, is a friend and possible patron of the poet and novelist Gerald Griffin.
On her father’s death in 1792, Leadbeater receives a letter of consolation from Burke. Besides receiving letters from Burke, she corresponds with, among others, Maria Edgeworth, George Crabbe, and Melesina Trench. On May 28, 1797, Burke writes one of his last letters to her.
Leadbeater describes in detail the effects of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 on the lives of her family and neighbours in Ballitore. She is in Carlow on Christmas Day 1796 attending a Quaker meeting when the news arrives that the French fleet has been seen off Bantry. She describes the troops marching out of the town and the ensuing confusion in Carlow and Ballitore.
Leadbeater’s first literary work, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, is published anonymously in 1794 in Dublin. It contains an account of the history of Quakerism and several poems on secular and religious subjects.
In 1808, Leadbeater publishes Poems with a metrical version of her husband’s prose translation of Maffeo Vegio‘s Thirteenth Book of the Æneid. She next publishes in 1811 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, of which four editions, with some alterations and additions, appear by 1813. In 1813, she tries to instruct the rich on a similar plan in The Landlord’s Friend. Intended as a sequel to Cottage Dialogues, in which persons of quality are made to discourse on such topics as beggars, spinning-wheels, and Sunday in the village, Tales for Cottagers, which she brings out in 1814 in conjunction with Elizabeth Shackleton, is a return to the original design. The tales illustrate perseverance, temper, economy, and are followed by a moral play, Honesty is the Best Policy.
In 1822, Leadbeater concludes this series with Cottage Biography, being a Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry. The lives are those of real persons, and contain some interesting passages, especially in the life of James Dunn, a pilgrim to Lough Derg. Many traits of Irish country life appear in these books, and they preserve several of the idioms of the English-speaking inhabitants of the Pale. Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton … compiled by their Daughter is also issued in 1822. Her Biographical Notices of Members of the Society of Friends who were resident in Ireland appears in 1823, and is a summary of their spiritual lives, with a scanty narrative of events. Her last work is The Pedlars, a Tale, published in 1824.
Leadbeater’s best known work, the Annals of Ballitore, is not printed until 1862, when it is brought out with the general title of The Leadbeater Papers (2 vols.) by Richard Davis Webb, a printer who wants to preserve a description on rural Irish life. It tells of the inhabitants and events of Ballitore from 1766 to 1823, and few books give a better idea of the character and feelings of Irish cottagers, of the premonitory signs of the rebellion of 1798, and the Rebellion itself. The second volume includes unpublished letters of Burke and the correspondence with Mrs. Richard Trench and with Crabbe.
Leadbeater dies at Ballitore on June 27, 1826, and is buried in the Quaker burial-ground there.
O’Connor is a well-known intellectual figure in contemporary Irish affairs and expresses strong opinions against censorship and the war on drugs. He contributes a regular poetry column to the Irish daily, the Evening Herald, also writes a column for the Sunday Mirror and a sporting column for TheSunday Times, as well as broadcasting on RTÉ.
O’Connor is also known for the autobiographical The Ulick O’Connor Diaries 1970-1981: A Cavalier Irishman (2001), which details his encounters with well-known Irish and international figures, ranging from political (Jack Lynch and Paddy Devlin) to the artistic (Christy Brown and Peter Sellers). It also documents the progress of the Northern Ireland peace process during the same time, and the progress of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Although he travels extensively, he lives in his parental home in Dublin’s Rathgar. He is a member of Aosdána.
Dowling is born on June 3, 1846, in Clonmel, County Tipperary, the only son of David Jeremiah Dowling, schoolmaster, and Margaret Dowling. His father dies when he is nine years old. He is educated in Clonmel, Waterford, and St. Munchin’s College in Corbally, Limerick, before entering the shipping office of his uncle William Downey in Waterford at the age of eighteen. He distinguishes himself in the Waterford Literary and Debating Society and contributes to local newspapers, including the Waterford Citizen and The Waterford Chronicle. In 1870, he joins the staff of The Nation and moves to Dublin. On the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War, he edits for Alexander Martin Sullivan a war-sheet, The Daily Summary, and subsequently becomes editor and contributor successively to the humorous but short-lived Zozimus and Ireland’s Eye.
Dowling settles in London in 1874, joining the staff of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, and founds Yorick in 1876, a comic paper with cartoons by Harry Furniss which lasts six months. In 1879, he publishes the first and most successful of his many novels, The Mystery of Killard, a strange tale of a deaf-mute fisherman in County Clare, which is hailed as one of the most striking romances of the year. Though his later novels are intensely realistic, exciting, and clever, they never achieve the same high standard. According to Furniss, who thought Dowling would be a great author, he “drifted into the quicksand of Bohemianism…He sank a wreck, with a rich cargo of genius that was never delivered to the world.” Other writers later mention his unfulfilled promise. Among his other novels of Irish interest are Sweet Inisfail (1882) and Old Corcoran’s Money (1892). A dramatisation of Below Bridge (1895) is staged on April 6, 1896, at the Novelty Theatre, London.
Dowling contributes poetry, short stories, and essays to several magazines, including Belgravia, London Society, and Saturday Journal, and is a frequent contributor to Tinsley’s Magazine, writing its leading serials (1880–82), which are later published as the novels Under St. Paul’s (1881) and The Duke’s Sweetheart (1881). His collections of essays include On Babies and Ladders (1873), which some critics believe to be his best work, Ignorant Essays (1887), Indolent Essays (1889), full of wit and original thought, and descriptive essays London Town (1880). He also edits the Poems (1891) of John Francis O’Donnell. He writes both under his own name and under various pseudonyms, including Peter Mendaciorum, Marcus Fall and Emmanuel Kink. A selection of his letters is published as Some Old Letters (Oct. – Nov. 1919) and More Old Letters (Jan. – Feb. 1920).
According to his daughter, Dowling works erratically, often continuously for several days and nights. An invalid during his later years, he composes his works on a sofa, invariably wearing a cap and with a soup-plate full of pipes beside him, which he enjoys in turn. A mild, kind, and gentle personality, he is an effective raconteur and a witty conversationalist. His cousin, Edmund Downey, who publishes many of his works, is introduced to the publishing world by Dowling. He is an applicant to the British charity for authors, the Royal Literary Fund, and leaves his family ill provided for.
Dowling dies on July 28, 1898, at his home at 2 Foulser Road, Tooting, South London, and is buried in Mortlake Cemetery, London. He is married and has three children, although his wife’s name and the date of their marriage are not known.
(From: “Dowling, Richard” by Helen Andrews, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Thomson is born on August 19, 1903, in West Dulwich, London, the eldest of a family of three sons and two daughters born to William Henry Thomson, an accountant, and his wife Minnie (née Clements). Inheriting an interest in Ireland from his maternal grandfather, an Ulsterman of Orange stock, and his mother, he attends Irish language classes run by the Gaelic League in London while a pupil at Dulwich College (1916–22).
Thomson moves back to England in 1934, when he returns to King’s College, Cambridge, to lecture in Greek. He becomes a professor at the University of Birmingham in 1936, the year he joins the Communist Party of Great Britain. He pioneers a Marxist interpretation of Greek drama. His Aeschylus and Athens (1941) and Marxism and Poetry (1945) win him international attention. In the latter book he argues a connection between the work song and poetry, and that pre-industrial songs are connected to ritual.
Thomson befriends and is an important influence on Alfred Sohn-Rethel and his theory of the genesis of occidental thought in Ancient Greece through the invention of coining.
Thomson first visits the Blasket Islands off the west coast of Ireland in 1923. Mac Tomáis, as he quickly becomes known to the islanders, had attended rudimentary Irish classes at a branch of Conradh na Gaeilge in London before he went to Cambridge. When he arrives on the island, he immerses himself in the language. In six weeks of walking around, talking with Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and others, he achieves near complete fluency in the language.
Thomson spends several years with the people of the islands studying their language, history and culture. He maintains a special study of the now extinct community in Ireland, in which he perceives elements of surviving cultural resonances with historical society prior to the development of private property as a means of production. He becomes a champion of the Irish language.
Thomson has a role in the publication of the memoirs of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, Fiche Bliain Ag Fás (Twenty Years Growing) in 1933. The introduction to Ó Súilleabháin’s autobiography by E. M. Forster can also be attributed to Thomson.
When Thomson applies for the new position of lecturer of Greek at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 1931 he, in the words of Richard Roche, “astonished the interview board with a flow of Blasket Irish” and is awarded the post.
In 1951, Thomson is the only member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee to vote against the Party’s programme, The British Road to Socialism, because “the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing.” He also serves on the Party’s Cultural Committee.
The Chinese revolution of 1949 has a profound effect on Thomson and leads to differences with the British Communist Party, from which he eventually drifts. He never loses his political beliefs. He is committed to working class education, including giving lectures to factory workers at Birmingham’s Austin car plant. He also maintains a special affection and support for the Morning Star in his later years.
Thomson authors three popular expositions on Marxism published by the China Policy Study Group in the early 1970s. From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: A study in revolutionary dialectics (1971), Capitalism and After: The rise and fall of commodity production (1973), and The Human Essence: The sources of science and art (1974). He is also the author of Marxism and Poetry (1945).
Godley is the eldest son of Rev. James Godley, rector of Carrigallen, County Leitrim, and Eliza Frances Godley (née La Touche). After attending Tilney Basset’s preparatory school in Dublin, he goes to Harrow College and Balliol College, Oxford, graduating BA in 1878. At Oxford he becomes known for his classical scholarship and wins several prizes, including the Craven scholarship and the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse. In 1879 he is appointed assistant classical master at Bradfield College. He returns to Oxford in 1883 as tutor and fellow of Magdalen College (1883–1912). Serving as deputy public orator of Oxford (1904–06), he is elected public orator in 1910, a post he holds until his death.
Godley also enjoys renown as a writer of satiric verse and prose, beginning his literary career as a contributor to The Oxford Magazine in 1883. In 1890 he becomes its editor, and two years later publishes his first book of poems, Verses to Order (1892). Later publications include Lyra Frivola (1899), Second Strings (1902) and The Casual Ward (1912). His work is very popular and two volumes, Reliquiae (1926) and Fifty Poems (1927), are published posthumously. He also publishes numerous works of serious scholarship including Socrates and Athenian Society in His Day (1896) and Oxford in the Eighteenth Century (1908). Noted as a translator of Herodotus, Tacitus, and Horace, he serves as joint-editor of The Classical Review (1910–20). He also edits and publishes volumes of the poetry of Thomas Moore and Winthrop Mackworth Praed.
Active in political life, Godley serves as an alderman on Oxford City Council. During the Second Boer War (1899–1901) he organises volunteer forces, commanding a battalion of the 4th Oxfordshire Light Infantry (1900–05). He serves in this capacity again during World War I and is lieutenant-colonel of the Oxfordshire Volunteer Corps (1916–19). A staunch unionist, during the Home Rule Crisis, he supports the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and writes some political verse, notably The Arrest, which is popular among unionists. A pioneer in the sport of mountaineering, he is a founding member of the Alpine Club and a committee member (1908–11). He is also a member of the governing body of Harrow School. Towards the end of his career he is awarded honorary doctorates from Princeton (1913) and Oxford (1919).
In 1925 Godley goes on a tour of the Levant and contracts a fever which ultimately leads to his death on June 27, 1925, at his Oxford home, 27 Norham Road. He is buried at Wolvercote Cemetery.
seamus dubhghaill 