Orr, Jennifer (2011) Fostering an Irish writers' circle: a revisionist reading of the life and works of Samuel Thomson, an Ulster poet (1766- 1816). PhD thesis http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2664/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Fostering an Irish Writers’ Circle: a Revisionist Reading of the Life and Works of Samuel Thomson, an Ulster Poet (1766-1816) A thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, December 2010 by Jennifer Orr © Jennifer Orr December 2010 Contents Acknowledgements i. Abstract ii. Abbreviations iii. Introduction 1-7 Chapter 1 The Patrons and the Pundits 8-40 Chapter 2 Revising Robert Burns for Ireland: Thomson and the Scottish Tradition 41-79 Chapter 3 ‘For you, wi’ all the pikes ye claim’: Patriotism, Politics and the Press 80-125 Chapter 4 ‘Here no treason lurks’ – Rehabilitating the Bard in the Wake of Union 1798-1801 126-174 Chapter 5 ‘‘Lowrie Nettle’ – Thomson and Satire 1799-1806 175-211 Chapter 6 Simple Poems? Radical Presbyterianism and Thomson’s final edition 1800-1816 212-251 Chapter 7 The Fraternal Knot – Fostering an Irish Romantic Circle 252-293 Conclusion 294-301 Bibliography 302-315 i Acknowledgements First and foremost, my sincere thanks to Dr. Gerry Carruthers for his wisdom and guidance. It is an honour to be supervised by an academic of such sterling scholarship and good humour. My thanks also to Dr. Rhona Brown for her infectious enthusiasm, friendship and example throughout the course of this thesis. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the intellectual stimulation and camaraderie of several scholars in the fields of Scottish and Irish Literature, who essentially formed an ‘Academy’ of discussion and inspiration: Dr Carol Baraniuk, Dr Frank Ferguson, Professor Colin Walker and Mr John Erskine; four outstanding scholars. It has been a privilege to share lifelong literary interests with Dr Baraniuk, my aunt. My particular thanks to Dr. Ferguson for generously sharing his expertise and support during the year I was based furth of Glasgow. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my family for their encouragement, understanding and support throughout my studies. I gratefully acknowledge their encouragement throughout my academic study and, especially, while I was writing up my thesis. My thanks to my stepfather for dispensing pro bono advice from the ‘University of Life’! Thanks to Steven Wilson for his love and support, for his unwavering interest in my work, and the wider literary and historical projects to which I am dedicated. My thanks also to Dr Kirsteen McCue, Mrs Joyce Dietz, Philip Robinson, Dr Lynn Robson, and Dr Andrew Holmes for their support at different stages during the process. I gratefully acknowledge the support of Patrick Cregg and my colleagues at the Woodland Trust in Northern Ireland, for their flexibility, fun and enthusiasm during the final stages of the project. My thanks also to the staff of the Belfast Central & Newspaper Library for friendly co-operation and helpfulness; Diarmuid Kennedy of Special Collections at Queen’s University, Belfast; staff at the John Hewitt collection in the University of Ulster, Coleraine; the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; and the Manuscripts department at Trinity College, Dublin. I am indebted to many friends for their support, prayers and good wishes and they know who they are. Thanks in particular to those friends who were working also on their own theses at the same time and who offered advice. I would like to acknowledge particularly Steven Wilson, Carol Baraniuk and Jennifer O’Brien for reading my drafts. Thanks to Combibo’s Oxford for caffeine stamina! ii Abstract The Ulster poet Samuel Thomson (1766-1816) experienced a brief period of fame during the 1790s and early 1800s when he published three volumes of verse and became a regular contributor of poetry to Belfast newspapers and journals. Known in popular memory as the ‘Bard of Carngranny’, Thomson had been closely associated with many radical activists who participated in the 1798 Rebellion, although it has never been established if he himself took part in the armed rising. His earlier poems, many of which are written in the vernacular Scots language, celebrate and parody local life in the rural North of Ireland. This study examines Thomson’s significance as a literary artist; an initiator of literary discussion and correspondence; and the father of a Northern school of Irish poets who span the cusp where eighteenth-century Augustanism and first generation Romanticism meet. Through the thorough examination of a range of evidence from published editions, public press and journal contributions, to the poet’s manuscripts, this study investigates Thomson’s work against the political, social, historical, and theological contexts which informed its composition. It attempts the first full reconstruction of Samuel Thomson’s life and career, paying particular attention to his correspondence and his last volume of verse, Simple Poems on a Few Subjects (1806) which has rarely been scrutinised in any detail. It highlights Thomson’s desire to assume a bardic role as an enthusiastic young radical who identified cultural similarities between his corner of Ireland and Robert Burns’s Ayrshire. The thesis also traces his enduring political engagement. While Thomson’s political radicalism may have cooled during the Union period, it was substituted for a radical spiritualism that adopts some of the visionary traits of early Romantic poetry. iv Abbreviations The following abbreviations are frequently employed throughout this thesis: DSL – Dictionary of the Scots Language ECCO – Eighteenth Century Collections Online PRONI – The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland QUB – The Queen’s University of Belfast TCD – Trinity College Dublin 1 Introduction Samuel Thomson (1766-1816), a native of the Presbyterian, Scots- speaking area of Carngranny, Templepatrick, in south Antrim was in his own lifetime a greatly respected poet and instigator of an early Romantic coterie of poets in the the north of Ireland. A hedge schoolmaster by trade, his literary career was in many ways forged in the radical Belfast press which reflected enthusiasm for labouring class poetry, and was restrained by a nuanced national identity which he described as ‘IRISH all without [...] / ev’ry item SCOTCH within’,1 reflecting both his birth and life in the north of Ireland and his Scottish vernacular language and ancestral heritage. His ascent to fame was bound up with the revolutionary fervour generated by the French Revolution and its political reception in Ireland, generating a ready-made audience of United Irish sympathisers and activists. A particularly literary version of vernacular Scots language had been raised to prominence by his celebrated contemporary, Robert Burns, with whom Thomson corresponded during the 1790s. The contemporary success of Burns, as a poet from a similar labouring class background who wrote verses on reformist and radical themes in a familiar tongue, encouraged Thomson to offer the Irish reading public a taste of his own verses and experience. As Irish political circumstance and print culture became less favourable to radical poetry, Thomson adapted his strategy to target different audiences, creating alliances with and seeking advice from fellow radical poets while stylising his verses for a more moderate readership in the Belfast News-Letter. On the other hand, when the Northern Star press was bought up by the firm Doherty and Simms in 1797, Thomson pragmatically decided to publish his New Poems (1799) with this firm, keeping an eye out for opportunities that arose from the demise of radical Belfast. Upon the 1 ‘To Captain McDougall, Castle-Upton, with a copy of the author’s poems’ (1806), ll. 19-20, in Thomson, Simple Poems on a Few Subjects, (Belfast: Smyth & Lyons, 1806; henceforward Simple Poems) pp. 84-86. 2 establishment of a left-of-centre, anti-Union journal, the Microscope and Minute Literary Observer (1799-1800), Thomson was one of the first poets to contribute verses for the eyes of polite, metropolitan Dissenters who looked toward the creation of a liberal education for the deserving in the Belfast Academical Institution. By the time the Reverend Hutchinson McFadden wrote to Samuel Thomson in 1807, he represented one of the more fervent fans of Thomson’s final edition of poetry, Simple Poems on a Few Subjects (1806), and also a changed audience. Thomson’s position in the postcolonial canon has been inevitably affected both by the historical context of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and his own position in relation to the United Irish movement, particularly in comparison with more radical poets of his circle. No evidence has emerged to prove that Thomson was an active rebel during the Battle of Antrim, although his sympathy for the United Irish movement’s aims in its early stages is evident in his poetry, particularly in a piece called ‘The Thoughtful Bard’ (1792) which was seized along with the United Irish and Northern Star documents that came to be catalogued as the Rebellion Papers at Dublin Castle.2 The present author also seeks to remedy the critical embarrassment that surrounds Thomson’s quest for literary patronage by examining Thomson’s motivation in establishing relationships with patrons.