Books for Children

~endix I Books for children IRISH books specifically written for children begin with Maria Edgeworth's well-known moral, educational stories which still appeal to children fortunate enough to have them read aloud to them. There is, however, more fantasy in the fairy stories of Granny s Wonderful Chair and the Stories It Told (1857) by Frances Brown (1816-79) the blind Donegal poet and novelist. Following Standish O'Grady's Irish stories came those of Ella Young (1865-1951). Born in County Antrim, she became an active Republican, learned Irish, and wrote The Coming of Lugh (1909) and Celtic Wonder-Tales (1910). Her later work The Wonder Smith and His Son (1927) and The Unicorn with Silver Shoes (1932) have a touch of pleasing fantasy about them. Another woman writer who produced stories for children was Winifred Letts (b. 1882), whose poems, in Songs from Leinster (1913) and More Songs from Leinster (1926), and an autobiography, Knockmaroon (1933), are worth reading. In more recent times Patricia Lynch (1900-72) wrote many very popular books for children, particularly her Turf-Cutter's Donkey Series which began in 1935, and the books about Brogeen the leprechaun, which began in 1947. Her writings, warmhearted and skilful, have been widely translated. A Storytellers Childhood (1947) is a masterly rendering of her own youth, to be compared, perhaps, with an earlier masterpiece, Hannah Lynch's Auto biography of a Child (1899). The Singing Cave (1959) by Eilis Dillon (b. 1920) is the best of this writer's work for children. She has also written a lively historical novel Across the Bitter Sea (1973) with a sequel Blood Relations (1977). ~endix2 Criticism and scholarship A physician and pamphleteer, an eccentric, epigrammatic versifier, but, above all, a magnificent wandering scholar, James Henry (1798-1876) gave up medicine and applied himself to the study of Virgilian manuscripts in European libraries: the resulting five volumes of his Aeneidea were marked by vast learning and original comment. There were several other nineteenth-century scholars who enhanced the reputation of Trinity College. They include Sir John Pentland Mahaffy (1839-1919), who was born of Irish parents in Switzerland, educated at home in Donegal, and then went on to a distinguished career in Trinity College, Dublin, of which he became Provost in 1914. The Principles of The Art of Conversation (1887) may give some idea of his own formidable powers as a talker. But Mahaffy was equally formidable as an author, with more than thirty books on classical, historical and philosophical subjects to his credit. The portrait by Sir William Orpen (1878-1931) shows a touch of arrogance but hardly conveys the selective kindness and trenchancy of the man who became a legend in his life time : the divergent opinions of his character can be under stood by reading Mahaffy: a biography ofan Anglo-Irishman (1971) , by W. B. Stanford and R. B. McDowell. A non-academic historian, William Hartpole Lecky (1838 1903) was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, travelled abroad and settled in London in 1871; he represented Dublin University at Westminster from 1895-1903, and was a liberal Unionist who opposed Home Rule. Five of the twelve volumes of his great History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1892) are devoted to Ireland because he wanted to refute Froude's calumnies against the Irish people. His first book was the anonymous Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland (1861) , followed by his History of the Rise and Influence of CRITICISM AND SCHOLARSHIP 291 Rationalism in Europe (2 vols, 1865) which established his reputation, and History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (2 vols, 1869). He has been characterised by James Auchmuty in his Lecky (1945) as 'almost the last in the great line ofnon-academic historians', and while Auchmuty points out that Lecky failed to understand the reality of nationalist emotions he rightly praises his principles of sanity and moderation, his love ofjustice and morality. Two other classical scholars who wrote elegantly were Robert Yelverton Tyrrell and John Bagenal Bury. Tyrrell (1844-1914), born in Tipperary, became one of the greatest classical scholars of his day, holding the chairs ofLatin (1870), Greek (1880) and Ancient History (1900) at Trinity College. His editions of classical authors include the massive Cicero's Correspondence; he was a wit as well as a scholar; he edited Kottabos (a journal publishing translations, parodies, lyrics and light verse, provided they were erudite and frivolous) and was a founder of the more solemn academic journal Hermathena in 1874. It still appears regularly. Bury (1861 1927), born in Monaghan, was educated at Foyle College, Londonderry and Trinity College, Dublin, where he held the chair of Modem History from 1893, and the chair of Greek from 1898; he then went to the chair of Modem History at Cambridge in 1902. Early in his life the History ofthe Later Roman Empire (1889) established his fame; he followed it with several other excellent books on Greek and Roman History. In Irish scholarship P[atrick] W[eston] Joyce (1827 1914) combined a capacity for translation, for expertise in Irish place names and for writing general histories of Ireland that survived in schools until recently and provided a concise view of events. He wrote English as we speak it in Ireland (1910), to be compared with J. J. Hogan's The English Language in Ireland (1927). More specialised in his interests was William]. Fitzpatrick (1830-95) who published much of the secret history of Ireland in books such as The Sham Squire (1866) and Ireland before the Union (1867). It is hard to classify Joseph Holloway (1861-1944), an architect with a passion for the theatre whose vast diary records his daily life and gives details of performances in 292 ANGLO-IRISH UTERATURE Dublin theatres which he attended so assiduously. Four volumes selected from the 25 million words of the diary have been published by Robert Hogan and M.J. O'Neill (in 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970) and are a valuable source of infor mation. Like Holloway, W. J. Lawrence (1962-1940) came to dislike Yeats, and, particularly, Synge's Playboy; though his books deal with the Elizabethan stage, about which he had a deep and detailed knowledge, he wrote intelligent if often destructive cricitism of Irish drama for The Stage. It is a relief to move among the less puritanical pages of Stephen Gwynn (1864-1950) who conveyed his enjoyment of Irish literature with an elegant ease, based upon knowledge and sound critical judgement. His Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language (1936), long a pioneering guide to the subject, may now seem simple, even superficial, but his books on Swift and Goldsmith are still eminently worth reading. Gwynn's public life as MP for Galway from 1906 to 1918 did not hinder his having a very large and varied output of writing, which is all pleasurable, be it autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, poetry, books on fishing or guide books. He is a good guide, sharing his pleasures (and he had admirable taste) with his readers in an admirable way. Another writer effective in communicating with his readers was the librarian and distinguished scientist Robert lloyd Praeger (1865-1939) who in addition to The Botanist in Ireland (1934) and a very readable Natural History ofIreland (1950) wrote, in The Way that I Went , a lively account of his extensive travelling in Ireland. John Eglinton (William Kirkpatrick Magee, 1868-1961) went to the High School, Dublin, where he was a contemporary of Yeats, who later thought him 'our one Irish critic'. Yeats selected Some Essays and Passages by John Eglinton for the Dun Emer Press, run by his sisters, to publish in 1905. A Theosophist, Eglinton became friendly with AE, and wrote transcendental essays under the influence of Emerson and Thoreau. His Anglo-Irish Essays appeared in 1917, and A Memoir of AE in 1937. Though he edited, with Fred Ryan, the twelve issues of Dana which contained work by many leading writers of the time during its brief run (between 1904-5), he was not regarded as sympathetic to the literary revival; his classical education led him to insist on literature CRlTICISM AND SCHOLARSInP 293 having larger than national horizons. Inclusive in his taste, Robert Lynd (1879-1949), educated at Queen's College, Belfast, was a journalist who wrote graceful essays, very much part of the Edwardian period, which conveyed his appreciation of literature in a middle-brow manner. With Joseph M[aunsel] Hone (1882-59) Irish biography came of age. A learned publisher, with a philosophical cast of mind, he wrote admirable lives of Bishop Berkeley and George Moore, and many subsequent writers have found his full, pioneering and shrewd life of W. B. Yeats (1942) a good starting point for their own work. Historical background for general readers is provided in Constantia Maxwell's (1886 1962) Dublin under the Georges (1936) and Irish Town and Country under the Georges (1940). The Irish Literary Renaissance had its first historian in Ernest A. Boyd (1887-1946) who worked in the British Consular service and settled in New York in 1920. He began his account with Mangan arid Ferguson, and blended history and trenchant criticism effectively throughout Ireland's Literary Renaissance (1920). Though this book gives the impression of having been written for readers with a know ledge of the literature rather than being designed as a text book for those with no knowledge of the background it still has much in it worth pondering; it was reissued in 1922. Another account also worth looking at is The Irish Drama (1929) by Andrew E.

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