Author Biography
William Cooke Taylor (1800-1849), son of a Youghal manufacturer of Cromwellian descent, was one of the most significant liberal-Unionist commentators of the first half of the nineteenth century. Patrick Maume is a researcher with the Dictionary of Irish Biography, the author of The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891-1918 (Dublin: 1999) and he has edited several titles in the Classics of Irish History series.
Description
Soon after Daniel O'Connell's death, Taylor published (as 'A Munster Farmer') this short account of the Liberator's life, drawing on his personal memories and on articles he had written for the Athenaeum in the 1840s. It includes eyewitness accounts of O'Connell's appearance as he walked through the streets of Dublin. Taylor shows personal sympathy for O'Connell as the leader of oppressed people, but he also sees his talents as distorted by the experience of oppression and by a conservative upbringing, and claims that his abusive and truculent oratory did as much to retard Catholic Emancipation as his tactical leadership did to advance it. This edition also includes a review article by Taylor in the Athenaeum of books including Carleton's Famine novel, The Black Prophet, and a long article on 'Repeal Songs of Munster', considering O'Connellite street-ballads as a study in human folly.
Introduction by Patrick Maume
Reminiscences of Daniel O'Connell
Appendix I, Review of books by William Carleton, the Earl of Rosse and G. L. Smyth (Athenaeum, 13 March 1847)
Appendix II Repeal Songs of Munster (Athenaeum, 30 September and 7 October 1843)
Editor's notes
"Taylor's style is engaging, his controversy may irk but his connection to the times is unique."
Books Ireland
Feb 2005
"University College Dublin Press has now published over thirty ‘Classics of Irish History'. These contemporary accounts by well known personalities of historical events and attitudes have an immediacy that conventional histories do not have. Introductions by modern historians provide additional historical background and, with hindsight, objectivity."
Books Ireland
Nov 2007
"Unsympathetic at best and peppered with factual and interpretive errors, Taylor’s account, in Maume’s words, 'stands as a monument to mutual misunderstanding.' It reflects the fraught relationship between Irish nationalists and the British and Irish Whigs/Liberals who professed sympathy for Ireland but could only countenance their own prescriptions for the neighbouring island’s ills. The tension produced by their different visions of Ireland and their distinct political needs in regard to Irish policy defined Anglo-Irish relations into the next century.
"Taylor’s work offer[s] fascinating partisan portraits of Europe’s first great populist leader. Subsequent generations of nationalists managed to craft and deploy a useful popular memory of the Great Liberator, but th[is] work remind[s] us that O’Connell could be remembered rather differently.
"Scholars of nineteenth-century Irish and Irish-American politics should reacquaint themselves with these classics, part of a long running and immensely useful series from University College Dublin Press.
Patrick Maume has edited and written the introductions for no less than nine of the books in this series, lending them his breadth of knowledge and keen analysis that have made him one of the most learned and intellectually generous young scholars in the field."
Irish Literary Supplement
Fall 2008
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