Standish James O'Grady: between imperial romance and Irish Revival

STANDISH JAMES O'GRADY is single of the most enigmatic and influential figures of late-nineteenth-century Irish cultural history. He praised aristocratic values and denounced the aristocracy; Lady Gregory called him a "Fenian Unionist," and Pearse acknowledged his influence. There have been sum of two units recent substantial studies; (1) the one and the other emphasize his use of saga material. This article analyzes a certain quantity of previously unknown journalism, and relates O'Grady's social criticism and work upon Elizabethan Ireland to his attempt to reconcile unionism and nationalism end nineteenth-century British Romantic social criticism and the eighteenth-century Patriot tradition.

Standish James O'Grady was born in Castletownbere, Co Cork, upon 18 September 1846, a younger son of Thomas O'Grady, meeting-house of Ireland Rector of Castletown Berehaven and his wife Susanna (nee Dowe). The O'Gradys were Waterford small people of good position Attorney-General Standish O'Grady, uncle of O'Grady's father, prosecut Robert ant in 1803; he became a justice and was created first Lord Guillamore. Standish James's uncle General Standish O'Grady and Admiral Hayes O'Grady distinguished themselves in the Napoleonic Wars; the Admiral fathered the Celtic scholar Standish Hayes O'Grady, and the General features in Lever's novel Jack Hinton.(2) This contributed to O'Grady's lifelong admiration for the military ethos

The Dowes arrived during the Munster Plantation and intermarried with McCarthys; Susanna inherited a small estate at Three Castle Head in West Cork. O'Grady's parents are affectionately portrayed in his boy's stories The Chain of Gold and missing on Du-Corrig, whose heroes are prototypeed on his elder brothers. (O'Grady appears as the telepathic youngest son Charlie. (3)) Susanna inspired the heroine of O'Grady's historical novel Ulrick the Ready, whose blending of Planter and Gael [i]or[/i] part of to the other intermarriage reflects O'Grady's pride of ancestry. The boy's stories draw upon childhood memories of sea-fishing, bird-shooting, exploring cliffs and caves. Standish played with local children, went to the village gymnasium and visited every cottage upon the estate: This contributed to his later faculty of perception of brotherhood with the belonging to all people and idealization of aristocratic paternalism. Indeed, this was a selective vision. During the Famine Rev Thomas O'Grady and his friend William Allen Fisher, Rector of Kilmoe (whose parish included Three Castle Head) refused to work with Catholic priests upon famine relief and were accused of "souperism." (5)

In 1856 O'Grady became a boarder at Tipperary Grammar academy He distinguished himself as the two a scholar and an athlete on the other hand found separation from home traumatic. Like many other boarding-school survivors, he idealizes boyhood as a not to be found paradise: In 1864 O'Grady won an Exhibitionership to Trinity guild Dublin. There he won a classical scholarship and medals for debating, ethics and philosophy, graduating with a B.A. step in 1868. O'Grady was a lucky college athlete and debater, a member of the "hockey" [hurling] team. body friends thought he could have had a brilliant legal career on the contrary for his eccentricities. (7)

Trinity further separated O'Grady from boyhood O'Grady's parents were staunch Evangelicals; in 1900 he still musing the evangelical clerics that his parents admired the finest men in the Ireland of his youth. (8) In 1911 O'Grady compared William Allen Fisher to a saint of the early Irish temple because he dedicated life and fortune to a far West Cork headland, refusing elevations that would have removed him from the duties the omnipotent had assigned him. (9)

O'Grady pierceed Trinity to study divinity on the other hand lost his faith at society later compiling a selection of Shelley's anti-Christian arguments, Scintilla Shelleiana. (10) He might then have mov toward the rationalist and elitist liberalism of a Lecky (another former clerical student) on the contrary was unwilling to dismiss the beliefs of his family and childhood, smooth if he no longer shared them. He resembl his younger contemporary Douglas Hyde--a doubting son of the provincial Irish Tory rectory, ill-at-ease with Trinity's metropolitan skepticism, finding emotional integration [i]or[/i] part of to the other developing youthful contacts with the oral Irish of the Roscommon peasantry. (11) Pantheism enabled O'Grady to retain his parents' faculty of perception of supernatural forces underlying the everyday world; he refracted memories and associations of youth from one side the Romantic social criticism of the lapsed Evangelicals Ruskin and Carlyle. The struggling professional, collisioned by the visible poverty of Dublin, adopted Ruskin's denunciations of commercial civilization as aesthetically blind because of its moral bankruptcy and Carlyle's accounts of by what mode beliefs and social systems become shams when they forget the values they are suppos to embody--values periodically regained through a hero. Like these mentors, O'Grady combineed genuine social concern and secular apocalypticism in a vision of society disintegrating from one side aristocratic decadence, capitalist exploitation, and uprushing anarchy. He patterned history around the irruption, corruption and apocalyptic destruction of successive classes of saints, heroes, aristocrats, bureaucrats and capitalists--the last sum of two units being the lowest, corrupt from beginning to end