Lead-Up to Rebellion: 1910–1915

In the second decade of the twentieth century, the push to achieve Irish independence by young nationalists ran parallel to the push for workers’ rights and social equity. Teachers and prolific writers like Padraic Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh joined the Irish Volunteers, which prioritized the goal of nationhood, while Sean O’Casey and James Connolly helped shape the Irish Citizen Army, an armed contingent that protected striking workers. At the same time, republican women formed Cumann na mBan, an organization to support the cause of Irish independence. “Home Rule” for Ireland finally passed in the British Parliament, but its implementation was suspended at the outbreak of World War I. Frustrated with the failure to achieve political autonomy, Pearse used a dramatic graveside speech to lay out his case for more direct action. The time was ripening for open rebellion.

Prospectus of the School Year. St. Edna School, 1910-11.

Padraic Pearse opened a boy’s elementary and secondary school in 1908, hoping to make it “distinctly Irish in complexion, bilingual in method, and of a high modern type generally.” Funding was limited, yet the main objective was “to help the child to be his own true and best self.”  St. Enda’s School thrived, assisted by Pearse’s friend Thomas MacDonagh, members of his own family, and lecturers including W. B. Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Padraic Colum, and Eion MacNeill. St. Enda’s closed after Pearse’s execution in 1916 as leader of the Rising, although his mother later reopened it.

Maud Gonne. Paris, October 7, 1910.

Vintage photograph on a sheet, signed by Gonne in both English and Gaelic with the following words in French: “En combattant et en esperant” (“Fighting and hoping”). One page. Envelope addressed to M. Tournant.

Home Rule and German Invasion. 1910.

Pamphlet.

Four years before the initial approval of home rule in Ireland by the British Parliament and the contemporaneous outbreak of World War I, this extraordinary pamphlet is speculating on the likelihood of a German attack on Britain and the subsequent benefits to Ireland. During World War I, there would indeed be attempts to smuggle arms to Ireland from Germany.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

James Connolly. Labour in Irish History and the Re-Conquest of Ireland. Dublin: Maunsel, 1917.

Second edition, inscribed by Constance Markievicz.

Among the seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation of 1916, James Connolly  initially worked more for the cause of worker’s rights and socialist ideals than for Irish nationhood. “Ireland, as distinct from her people, is nothing to me,” he wrote in this influential book, first printed in 1910. A leader in the 1913 Dublin Lockout, who helped form the Irish Citizen Army, he was also an avowed feminist and mentor to rebel leader Constance Markievicz, who inscribed this book. His execution in May of 1916 following the Easter Rising, tied to a chair because of his wounds suffered during the fighting, turned public sentiment against the British and made martyrs of the rebels.

P. O. Cathasaigh [Sean O’Casey]. The Story of The Irish Citizen Army. Dublin: Maunsel, 1919.

Sean O’Casey played a central role in the formation and leadership of the Irish Citizen Army, created in 1913 to protect workers against both employers and the Dublin Metropolitan Police. In this, O’Casey’s first published book, he writes, “We can only hope that Nationalism, in its new-found strength, will not remain deaf to the claims of Irish Labour....”  Yet O’Casey left the labor group when it became too aligned with the nationalist Irish Volunteers, accounting for his more cynical view of the Rising in his play The Plough and Stars.

Ed. Katherine Tynan. The Wild Harp: A Collection of Irish Poetry. London: Sidgwish & Jackson, 1913.

A poet and writer of more than one hundred novels, Katherine Tynan was also an ardent Irish nationalist, a fighter on behalf of women’s suffrage, and a close friend and colleague of W. B. Yeats. It was Tynan who encouraged him to write The Wanderings of Oisin. The Wild Harp was an influential anthology of short Irish verse.

W. B. Yeats. Poems Written in Discouragement 1912-1913. Dundrum: The Cuala Press, 1913.

Inscribed: “[         ] by W. B. Yeats.” With Lady Gregory’s bookplate.

This slim pamphlet of only five poems contains the core of what would become Yeats’s more politically engaged 1914 volume, Responsibilities. “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing” and “To A Wealthy Man, Who Promised A Second Subscription If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures” reference the failed effort to raise funds for Hugh Lane’s modern art gallery. Perhaps most noteworthy in the theme of failed effort and lost energy is the poem “September, 1913,” with its repeated refrain “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone.” The struggle to bring Ireland into the modern cultural age had seemed stalled at that point in time, despite the successes that had been achieved.

James Joyce. Dubliners. London: Grant Richards, 1914.

Inscribed with the ownership signature of Belfast novelist and critic Forrest Reid.

In 1904 George Russell (AE) published the first three of James Joyce’s now classic stories in his weekly journal, The Irish Homestead. It was the year of Joyce’s departure from Ireland, and against the backdrop of rising nationalism and insularity, Joyce sought to present “a nicely polished looking-glass” to Dublin, ripe with the theme of paralysis.  While in Rome and recalling Ireland’s abiding sense of hospitality, he finished his final, most famous story, “The Dead.” This copy of Dubliners belonged to Forrest Reid, whose novel Following Darkness influenced Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Reid also wrote the first book-length work of criticism on W. B. Yeats.

Padraig Pearse. “Oration of P.H. Pearse over Rossa’s Grave.” Dublin & London: Fergus O’Connor, 1915.

O’Donovan Rossa was a prominent Fenian living in the United States. When he died in 1915, the Irish Republican Brotherhood brought his body to Ireland for a hero’s burial and the opportunity to stir nationalist sentiment. Pearse’s oration over the grave is considered an oratorical masterpiece, his words distributed on the streets of Dublin in the days after the Rossa funeral. “The fools, the fools, the fools. They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

Countess Constance Markievicz. 1915.

Vintage Photograph.

The sister of poet Eva Gore-Booth, Countess Markievicz appears in an Irish Citizen Army uniform, a handgun in her holster, in conversation with rebel Cathal O’Shannon at O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral, an event that helped spark the Easter Rising. An expert marksman, having founded and led a nationalist organization for boys, she served as an active combatant in the Rising and was sentenced to death with other leaders. When the British later commuted her sentence to life imprisonment because they feared the repercussions from executing a woman, she said, “I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.”

Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. Speech from the Dock. Delivered in June 1915, in the Dublin Police Court, where he was tried for speaking against conscription.New York: Skegginton Memorial Committee, 1917.

Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was a journalist whose essay supporting “the full benefits of university life” for women as well as men was published in 1901 with his friend James Joyce’s early essay criticizing the Irish Literary Theatre. Skeffington, who fought for social reform and labor rights, also opposed Irish conscription during World War I, for which he was sentenced to six months in prison. As a pacifist during the Rising, he attempted to stop looting in the streets and was executed without trial by a British captain.

Padraic Pearse. “The Murder Machine.” Dublin: Bodenstown Series No. 3, 1916.

Pearse writes in his introduction that “This pamphlet is not, as its name might seem to import, a penny dreadful, at least in the ordinary sense. It consists of a series of studies of the English education system in Ireland.” The title article was originally published in the Irish Review in February 1913.   Pearse’s general theme is that in the school system imposed by the British “There are no ideas there, no love of beauty, no love of books, no love of knowledge, no heroic inspiration.” In a subsequent essay in the pamphlet he writes, “The English thing that is called education in Ireland is founded on a denial of the Irish nation.”

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Herbert M. Pinn. “How to form Sinn Fein clubs.” Dublin: The Irishman, Sinn Fein Tract No. 3, 1916.

Written in the ferment of 1916, this manual was part of the effort to spread the nationalist organization Sinn Fein across Ireland. The Irishman was a nationalist monthly magazine started by Pim in Belfast. A complicated figure, Pim was a convert to Roman Catholicism, who was described by Arthur Griffith as “my well-meaning but feather-headed friend.…” Pim spent five months in prison following the Easter Rising, tried to take charge of Sinn Fein upon his release, and, following his failure to achieve leadership, swung to the hard right and went to England.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.