The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  Like Mitchel, he believed he needed a retreat. In 1879, the O’Reillys had bought a house in Hull, across Boston Harbour. It was in large part seventeenth century, and ultimately he renovated it. (The building is now the Hull Public Library.) From this haven, he would commute by ferry to the Pilot office. His unsettled existence, his concern for the health of his wife and baby Blanid, worsened his chronic and ultimately fatal insomnia.

  Influenced by his group of progressives and above all by the aging giant Wendell Phillips, O’Reilly was by 1880 writing even in the Pilot of the misuse of Christianity for the subjection of the poor. His laments on the subject have a raw, sad authority, a taste both of Whitman and Marx.

  Oh Christ! And Oh Christ! In thy name the law!

  In thy mouth the mandate! In thy loving hand the whip!

  They have taken thee down from thy cross and sent thee to scourge the people;

  They have shod thy feet with spikes and jointed thy dead knees with iron,

  And pushed thee, hiding behind, to trample the poor dumb faces.

  There is no record of what the Archbishop of Boston thought of Christ’s iron-spiked knees as part of the list of proletarian woes.

  Soon the 37-year-old editor had the news, through the Irish census of 1881, that all the plans, all the hopes, captures, imprisonment, destroyed loves, violated secrets, blunted loyalties and ruined youths arising from Irish nationalist protests had not halted ruin. The population of Ireland had declined a further 21 per cent in the past 30 years and was now just over five million. The rest of Europe boomed; Ireland withered. Migration, as Davitt was only too happy to point out, was still the Irish way. Sligo, Mayo, Clare, Galway, Roscommon—counties where land tenure and life were most insecure—were on their way down to a third of their 1841 numbers. O’Reilly absorbed the figures with horror.

  But Gladstone’s Land Act was working to allay some of the defiance of Irish tenants. The act gave legal status throughout Ireland to the Ulster custom, by which farmers would be paid for improvements they had made upon the land. It enabled land purchase—three quarters of the purchase price could be advanced by a land commission to be repaid over thirty-five years at 5 per cent. But less than 1,000 tenants would be rich enough to buy land under this system, and the most important reform for the mass of tenants was the right to take their rents for review to a new Land Court. The Land Court was much used by farmers, who generally ended up with a reduction in rent of up to a quarter. What this first Land Act had not done, however, was to give comfort to those who were already in arrears of rent, who had already been evicted, or who were either starving or under the threat of starvation. It was estimated that 280,000 Irish families, representing 1,500,000 or more people, plus those already evicted, were not helped.

  For these people, nothing was altered. But the Land League had given them coherent stratagems, including the stratagem of the boycott. The method had first been proposed by Parnell at a speech in Ennis in County Clare in 1880. In some versions of the speech the first four instances of the word ‘show’ are rendered as ‘shun.’ ‘When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop-counter, you must show him at the fair and at the market-place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind, as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation … if the population of a county in Ireland carry out this doctrine … there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men within the county.’ The first victim of this device was Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a land agent at Lough Mask in Mayo. Local people refused to deal with him or take his crop in. A work force of fifty Orangemen had to be escorted by 1,000 troops every day to and from Lough Mask to harvest Boycott’s crops. As a result of the Boycott affair in the early 1880s, landlords had now to deal with an Irish tenant class who would no longer speak to them, servants who would not fill their glasses, shopkeepers who turned their shoulders or closed their doors. There were few communities where instances of this moral revolt were not seen. Ordinary people had discovered their power.

  One of the surprising opponents of the Land League was Pat Smyth. Before his death in 1884, he denounced the Land Leaguers as the League of Hell. His problem with it may have arisen from the trouble he had in the management of a small estate he had inherited.

  But the popular force of the League seemed gloriously unstoppable. In October 1881, Parnell attended a rally in Wexford, entering into the city through triumphal arches, and delivered an Irish nationalist speech full of traditional imagery. ‘The Irishman who thinks he can now throw away his arms just as Grattan disbanded the volunteers in 1783, will find to his sorrow and destruction when too late that he has placed himself in the power of the cruel and perfidious English enemy.’ Asked at supper afterwards in a hotel in Wexford whether he expected to be arrested for such a speech, he said, echoing O’Connell long before, that if the government suppressed the Land League, ‘the people will be driven back upon secret organisations as in former times.’

  The day after the Wexford meeting, Gladstone read the speech and authorised Parnell’s arrest. In short order, across the Atlantic, O’Reilly published the details of how Superintendent Mallon arrested Parnell at dawn at Morrison’s Hotel in Dublin. He was taken to Kilmainham Gaol. Davitt, who was touring England, was also arrested and found himself once more in the dreary prison at Portland. ‘England may imprison every public representative in Ireland,’ said an outraged O’Reilly. ‘She may break up every public meeting of the Land League. Very well. Then she drives the people to secret organisations—she plays into the hands of the revolutionists.’

  O’Reilly did not know that from within Kilmainham prison, Parnell was secretly sending mail to his beloved, Kitty O’Shea, still the legal wife of Captain O’Shea. In his cell on the sunny side of Kilmainham, amongst furniture provided by the Ladies’ Land League, Parnell and his fellows, amidst news of authorities striking back and evictions progressing, issued a call for a general strike against rents, a ‘No Rent Manifesto.’ ‘Every tenant farmer in Ireland is today the standard-bearer of the flag unfurled at Irishtown and can bear it to glorious victory … PAY NO RENT UNDER ANY PRETEXT. STAND PASSIVELY, FIRMLY, FEARLESSLY BY while the armies of England may be engaged in their hopeless struggle against a spirit which their weapons cannot touch.’

  The manifesto was signed by Charles Stuart Parnell; Parnell’s friend Andrew Kettle; Micheal Davitt, Honorary Secretary, Portland Jail; Thomas Sexton, Head Organiser, Kilmainham Jail; and Patrick Egan, Treasurer of the IRB, Paris. But Parnell was believed to have put his name to the document reluctantly. And Michael Davitt, in Portland prison in England, had his name attached without his permission, and later denounced the document. On 20 October, the government fulfilled Parnell’s and O’Reilly’s fears, and answered the manifesto by outlawing the Land League itself.

  The No Rent Manifesto was not obeyed by most tenants anyhow, in part because the 1881 Land Act had improved life so greatly for so many middling tenant farmers. Negotiations began secretly between Gladstone and the jailed Parnell to deal with the problems the Manifesto had raised. The two intermediaries on Parnell’s side were his lieutenant Captain Willy O’Shea, formerly of the 18th Hussars and now Home Rule MP for County Clare, and his wife, Katherine O’Shea, who was carrying Parnell’s child. An understanding was reached between Parnell and Gladstone. In return for a law to protect tenants in arrears of rent, and a repeal of the Coercion Act under which Parnell and others had been arrested, Parnell would call off land agitation and co-operate in framing a new Land Act.

  To some the Land League’s successes seemed mere tinkering, and they were planning sterner measures. There had been cheers in the House of Commons in May 1882 when Gladstone announced the name of the new Irish
secretary—Lord Frederick Cavendish, his own nephew by marriage. Within a week of Cavendish’s appointment, he and the Permanent Under-Secretary of Ireland, while strolling over Phoenix Park’s extensive greensward, were hacked to death by twelve inch surgical knives plied by members of the group known as the Invincibles, whose leader was that old Confederate raider, John McCafferty. Hearing of the immolation of Cavendish, Parnell felt so undermined that he thought of giving up politics. It was doubly depressing to hear that the surgical knives had been smuggled from London into Dublin by the wife of the secretary of the Invincibles, Frank Byrne, who had once been president of the Land League.

  In Boston, Patrick O’Collins and John Boyle O’Reilly called a public meeting of outrage on the Phoenix Park murders, and sent a cablegram to Parnell. ‘A reward of $5,000 is hereby offered by the Irishmen of Boston for the apprehension of the murderers, or any of them, of Lord Cavendish and Mr Burke, on Saturday, May 6th.’ At first, John Boyle O’Reilly believed that the killings had been committed by government stooges. It took him some time to realise that the murders had not been a ploy of Dublin Castle.

  There was at that time another challenging face to the demands Ireland made on O’Reilly. Between Speranza’s son, Oscar Wilde, and the solid Boston literary citizen John Boyle O’Reilly lay a gulf both as writers and as human beings. But the 27-year-old literary star and the ten years older O’Reilly were bound together by common nationality and by varying degrees of awe for Speranza, ‘poetess’ of the Nation. Although Lady Wilde had by now, like O’Reilly, disassociated herself from the Fenians, her place in the temple of the Young Ireland movement assured that any son of hers fetching up on a foreign shore came under the patronage and protection of passionate expatriates.

  A measure of protection was necessary from the day Wilde’s steamer, the Arizona, docked in New York harbour early in 1882. Here was a very different Irishman from the wary, vociferous steerage Irish who had filled the city’s air with fiddle music, songs of nostalgia and defiance, snatches of Gaelic, impenetrable accents, and tubercular breath. As the author of a middling book of verse and an unsuccessful play entitled Vera, young, large, florid Oscar was renowned chiefly for his theory of aesthetics and his personal style.

  It was on landing that he was said to have proclaimed to customs: ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius.’ He was probably the only Irishman landing in New York to make such a claim, standing as he was where others had declared chiefly their rude unworldliness, their economic or political desperation. In that sense, Oscar’s arrival was the apogee of all Irish arrivals. Speranza’s son, unmarked by Ireland’s dismal statistics, had many letters of introduction, and got off to a social whirl in New York. His first lecture in that city was a sell out. Wilde came on stage ceremonially, carrying his speech manuscript in a Moroccan leather case which he opened with a flourish. He was wearing knee breeches and silk stockings, the costume of Apollo Lodge, the Freemasons’ lodge at Oxford University. With a cavalier’s cloak over the shoulder, he was again setting himself up to be abominated by the sissy-hating subscribers to the Yankee ethic, and constituted a tough test for the loyalty of hard-handed American Irishdom. He ended his lecture with praise for the lily and the sunflower, ‘in England the most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art.’ In Camden, New Jersey, visiting Walt Whitman in his squalid rooms, he announced that Speranza began reading Whitman to him in childhood. Henry James, who met him in Washington, wrote, ‘ “Osscar” Wilde is a fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad.’ He declared him ‘an unclean beast.’ Old friends even attacked him from England. ‘It is always Judas who writes the biography,’ said Oscar.

  Then it came time to visit John Boyle O’Reilly in Boston, where Wilde saw Whitman’s signature immediately above his own in the O’Reilly autograph book, and wrote beside it, ‘The spirit who living blamelessly but dared to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century.’ In Boston, and in considerable part under O’Reilly’s aegis, Wilde visited Henry Longfellow, had lunch with Wendell Phillips, with Oliver Wendell Holmes, and with Julia Ward Howe, author of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ Such Boston Brahmins were notches in his belt, but he was safest in the Irish fraternity of the playwright Dion Boucicault, and of Boucicault’s friend John Boyle O’Reilly. Both these men had such standing in Boston that they were able to temper the hostility of editors towards the apostle of the lily and the sunflower. It worked to an extent with the Globe, but not so well with Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly. Higginson, who had commanded a coloured regiment in the Civil War, in the one article attacked Walt Whitman for being a Civil War poseur and Oscar for writing prurient poems.

  Wilde’s task with O’Reilly was to arrange the publication of his mother’s poetry by the Pilot. ‘I think my mother’s work should make a great success here, it is so unlike the work of her degenerate artist son,’ he wrote to O’Reilly. With unconscious irony, O’Reilly took him to see Oedipus Tyrannus at the Globe Theatre, and may have been the one to tip him off to the fact that at his lecture in the Boston Music Hall on 31 January, sixty Harvard students intended to dress like him and fill the front seats. Oscar countered by wearing a normal dinner suit. The undergraduates were reduced to applauding wildly every time he drank a sip of water.

  Not that Boucicault and O’Reilly were Oscar’s only supporters in town. The poet Joaquin Miller was also something of a consoler and protector as the barbarians weighed in. The disadvantage of Oscar’s purely Irish approval at such times was that he knew it was in part approval for his mother. In St Paul, Minnesota, Oscar heard himself praised by a priest as the son ‘of one of Ireland’s noblest daughters—of a daughter who in the troublous times of 1848 by the works of her pen and her noble example did much to keep the fire of patriotism burning brightly.’ How Oscar must have flinched at such effulgence! In San Francisco, knowing his audience, he wisely spoke on ‘The Irish Poets of 1848.’ He used the term ‘poet’ to include most revolutionaries. He could remember some of them coming to his house—Smith O’Brien, John Mitchel, James Clarence Mangan, Charles Gavin Duffy. He called Thomas Davis the greatest of them. ‘Of the quality of Speranza’s poems I perhaps should not speak—for criticism is disarmed before love—but I am content to abide by the verdict of the nation.’

  O’Reilly was surely pleased to see this strange young Irishman survive America—not all strange young Irishmen did. Ahead of young Wilde lay both his great works—The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windemere’s Fan—and the disgrace which would evince from him the harrowing De Profundis.

  From treacherous Irish and perverse American politics, O’Reilly found in his muscular late thirties an essentially American solace—canoeing in the wilderness. He made his first long canoe journey in July 1882, down the Merrimac River. The following year, on the Connecticut River, O’Reilly had a collision with a timber raft and capsized. He took on the Delaware, the Susquehanna in Virginia, and, six years after his first excursion, the immensity of the Dismal Swamp.

  There was a particular pathos in O’Reilly’s excitement on his last large excursion to the Dismal Swamp in the autumn of 1888. ‘We still need good whiskey for snakes etc,’ he wrote to Ned Moseley, his regular canoeing companion from Virginia. ‘I shall bring some rare stuff, also rum. I think too it would be well if we had long rubber boots for the swamp grass.’ In canoeing he found a respite from the regimen the demons of his spirit demanded of him. In his last year of life, he enthusiastically published a book on athleticism, Athletics and Manly Sport, in which canoeing, text by O’Reilly, photographs by Moseley, had a large place. He remained passionate about bareknuckle prize fighting, and was ‘one of the guiding spirits’ of the Cribb Club of Boston, named after the famous English boxer, Tom Cribb. But he was also an excellent fencer—for a season he coached the students at Harvard—and was sponsor for an annual O’Reilly Hurling Cup.

  The athlete-poet! For in 1882, in the midst of all the Land League agitation and supp
ort for Parnell, O’Reilly’s next volume of verse—Statues in the Block—emerged and was an indicator of the extent to which the misery of America’s poor had claimed him. The reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly believed that some of the lines gained by their formlessness:

  Insects and vermin, ye, the starving and dangerous myriads,

  List to the murmur that grows and growls! Come from your mines and mills,

  Pale-faced girls and women with ragged and hard-eyed children,

  Pour from your dens of toil and filth, out to the air of heaven …

  The reviewer said that in other passages, however, O’Reilly ‘does not convey through his irregular lines the sense of a long billow-like rhythm which Whitman manages to get into his best fragments.’ His muse was serviceable for lyric rhymes and the felicities of the civic verse, but was capable too of a furious eloquence not utterly dissimilar to that of Whitman. The New York Herald of 3 April 1881 praised this very Whitman-ish quality. ‘Petticoated Boston will, no doubt, set itself to “frown down” this wildness.’

  In between verses and editorials, with a group of friends from the Papyrus Club, O’Reilly wrote as a literary lark a fantastical serial which was later published as a bestselling book, The King’s Men, A Tale of Tomorrow. The novel dealt with a period when America has cut down the wall of protection which surrounds England, and has thus made Britain such a poor country that King Albert of England emigrates to the United States. As the American experience of Boyle O’Reilly and the other authors showed, once monarchy was cut down, demagoguery was the great peril. A complicated plot deals, inevitably, at least in the parts of the book for which O’Reilly was responsible, with Dartmoor Prison. O’Reilly wrote so vividly of a Dartmoor evening that it is clear the salient aspects of his penal experience had never left him.