An exhibition—‘George Catlin: American Indian Portraits’—opened earlier this year in the National Portrait Gallery, London, with the bull buffaloes of British art criticism, Brian Sewell and Andrew Graham-Dixon, locking horns over whether the self-taught Pennsylvanian was any use as a painter. The show has since moved to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It is … Read more
It is now widely accepted that Theobald Wolfe Tone probably took his own life. Why, then, asks Georgina Laragy, was his reputation amongst his peers not damaged by the then criminal and immoral character of his death? Theobald Wolfe Tone’s place in the pantheon of Irish republican heroes has been secure since his death in … Read more
While the heroic, Roman, suicide was a popular literary and historical ‘type’ in the eighteenth century, Tone was equally familiar with another more ‘romantic’ type of suicide. This was epitomised by the publication of the semi-autobiographical The sorrows of young Werther by Johann von Goethe in 1774. A theatrical version of the novel was performed … Read more
Sir,—In ending his review of my book Irish Socialist Republicanism, 1909–36 (HI 21.4, July/Aug. 2013), Padraig Yeates states that I provide ‘many insights into the pursuit of [a workers’ republic] in the 1920s and 1930s that would have been better served by a deeper analysis of the decade before the Treaty’. The review (which, apart … Read more
The Lockout centenary inevitably focuses attention on Dublin’s tenement slums, but urban poverty is nothing new. Amongst the copious holdings of Marsh’s LIbrary are a small collection of papers relating to one of the less salubrious institutions of eighteenth-century Dublin: its workhouse (MS Z.3.1.1, 143-55). … Read more