The Fuse is Lit: 1848–1900

Death and disease during the Great Hunger of the 1840s led to massive emigration from Ireland. A growing national urgency for self-identity and autonomy began to re-emerge in Ireland, paralleling similar movements across Europe. Groups like the Fenians in both Ireland and the United States and eventually the Irish Republican Brotherhood fought for complete Irish independence from Britain, while more moderate leaders such as Charles Stewart Parnell tried to achieve a parliamentary solution called Home Rule. At the same time, Standish O’Grady and Douglas Hyde brought out works in the land’s ancient language, Gaelic, which fed the urge for an Irish identity separate from Britain, and a growing number of poets, playwrights, and writers discovered and transcribed into English the ancient myth, folklore, song, and poetry they found by going village to village and door-to-door in the West of Ireland. Their work, initially inspired by tales of an Irish spirit world, was called the Celtic Twilight. It soon broadened into a movement known as the Irish Literary Revival.

Sir Charles Trevelyn. The Irish Crisis: The Great Irish Famine of 1846-7. London: Macmillan and Co., 1880.

In charge of British relief efforts during Ireland’s Great Famine, Sir Charles Trevelyn not only blamed Irish landlords and tenant farmers for the failure of the potato crop but also wrote that the famine was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.”  Between 1846 and 1851, over a million men and women starved, many more people died from disease over time, and the famine prompted emigration of another two million people. Irish identity was almost irretrievably damaged, with the Irish language itself in the western part of the country nearly obliterated.

Standish O’Grady. History of Ireland. London (Printed in Dublin): Sampson Low, 1878, 1880.

Two volumes.

Standish O’Grady’s early, two-volume retelling of heroic Irish mythology was hugely influential to the writers of the Celtic Revival. W.B. Yeats said of O’Grady, “He started us all.”

W. B. Yeats. Mosada. Dublin: Sealy, Bryers, and Walker, 1886.

Inscribed on the verso of the front wrapper: “Mrs Zena Vowell, from her friend, the Author.”

W. B. Yeats published his first stand-alone work at age 21. A play about a Moorish girl who kills herself, Mosada is most noteworthy for its place in Yeats’s bibliography. The frontispiece is a portrait of Yeats by his artist father, J. B. Yeats. A hundred copies were printed, 21 are known to survive, nine of which are signed by Yeats. The recipient has only recently been determined to have been one of the original subscribers of the publication. Years later, after her death, she was said to have appeared at a seance held by a member of Yeats’s circle.

Ed. W. B. Yeats. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. The Camelot Series, No. 32. London: Walter Scott, 1888.

First edition.

Yeats’s first true book was published when he was 23 years old. In this  compilation of tales gathered from various secondary sources as well as his own imagination, Yeats created a fairy world of which he was the master, establishing him as one of the important voices in developing the Celtic mythology that was coming alive in Irish literature. Yeats began work on it in February 1888; it was published in September.

W. B. Yeats. The Wanderings of Oisin. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1889.

Inscribed by Yeats to Maud Gonne.

The first commercial publication in book form by Yeats of his poems, put out only four months after the publication of Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry, Wanderings of Oisin contains some of his earliest verses on themes borrowed from ancient Irish myth.  This copy was presented by Yeats to Maude Gonne, his foremost muse and a leading activist for Irish independence.

Douglas Hyde. Beside the Fire. A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories. London: David Nutt, 1890.

Lady Gregory’s copy, with her bookplate.

Three years after writing Beside the Fire, Douglas Hyde helped establish the Gaelic League, an organization whose mission was devoted to reanimating Irish language and culture. The work of Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats ran parallel to that of Hyde’s, and they drew on his sources of legend and myth. Hyde’s work was often written in Gaelic, while that of Yeats and Gregory was primarily in English. Hyde became one of the leaders of the Revival and his early work inspired Padraic Pearse, Eamon de Valera, and Michael Collins. He became the first president of the Irish Republic in 1938.

W. B. Yeats. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Manuscript. 1890.

First published in The National Observer newspaper in 1890.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, ...”  One of Yeats’s best-known and most beloved poems, its earliest draft dates to December 1888, when Yeats saw a window display in the Strand in Central London that created a flash of memory of his childhood in Sligo, Ireland. The poem was immediately successful upon its publication, establishing Yeats as an important new voice at age twenty-five.

George Moore. Parnell and his Island. London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowery & Col., 1887.

Inscribed by Moore to Evelyn Marshall Field, August 1910.

W. B. Yeats. The Countess Kathleen. Cameo Series. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892.

Inscribed: “W.B. Yeats, 3 December 1892.”

This book, the second of Yeats’s poetry collections, includes the first publication in book form of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” In it he explores the struggles and quests of Celtic mythology as well as of contemporary human emotions. The implicit political undertone to much of the work signaled Yeats’s increased engagement in the debates among the Irish literary circles of the day.

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Douglas Hyde, in The Revival of Irish Literature and Other Addresses by Sir Charles Duffy, Dr. George Sigerson, and Dr. Douglas Hyde. “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.” London (Dublin printed): T. Fisher Unwin, 1894.

“In Anglicising ourselves wholesale,” Hyde writes in this essay, delivered to the Irish National Literary Society in 1892, “we have thrown away the best claim we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality.”

W. B. Yeats. “The Faery Host.” January 14, 1894.

Autograph manuscript. First published in book form in The Celtic Twilight (1893) as “The Host.”

The Celtic Twilight is a compilation of stories, poems, and essays with lore collected by Yeats from the Sligo countryside. It recasts work found in various sources as well as features original creations, furthering Yeats’s effort to use the traditional tales of the Irish countryside to create an Irish literary and cultural identity. This poem became the lead-in to the book’s introduction.

Patrick H. Pearse. Three Lectures on Gaelic Topics. Dublin: Gill, 1898.

A first edition of Pearse’s first independent publication, these lectures were dedicated to the New Ireland Literary Society, of which he was then president. “Gaelic literature, like the Gaelic Race, has long been dying,” he writes here, “but it is ‘fated not to die.’”  Pearse was a scholar and teacher of Gaelic years before becoming a leader of the Easter Rising. James Joyce took his class on Gaelic while at University College Dublin, although he mocked Pearse’s overt nationalism.

Proposal. Signed by Standish O’Grady, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn. “A Celtic Theatre.”  1897.

At Coole in summer 1897, Yeats and Gregory, along with Edward Martyn—a neighboring Catholic nationalist and writer—joined in a conversation in which the two men expressed their regret that there was no established Irish theater, where their plays could be produced. As they all talked, however, “things seemed to grow possible.” Gregory typed an appeal letter, asking guarantors to support a “Celtic Theatre” that would aim to “bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland” and refute the “buffoonery” frequent in existing representations of Irishness. Renamed “The Irish Literary Theatre,” the project ran from 1899 to 1901, laying the foundations for the Abbey Theatre.

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

In The Shamrock. “Robert Emmet; or, True Irish Hearts.” Dublin, October 1, 1898.

An illustrated Irish nationalist newspaper, The Shamrock was published in Dublin each Saturday from 1866 to 1912. Acquired in 1879 by the Irish National Newspaper and Publishing Company, which was owned by Charles Stuart Parnell and the Irish National Party, it was one of many similar publications during this period. The serial of the life of eighteenth-century Irish patriot Robert Emmett, which is shown here, was typical of the fare in the paper, although over its lifetime its contributors included Bram Stoker, Hans Christian Anderson, and Katherine Tynan.

Thomas MacDonagh. “Athens - a Reverie.” 1899.

Autograph manuscript poem.

Thomas MacDonagh’s short career was principally a literary one. He founded The Irish Review Literary Magazine, along with Padraic Colum and James Stephens, and became the first staff member at Padraic Pearse’s St. Enda’s School. As a poet, he wrote several volumes of verse and saw his plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. With Pearse, his cultural nationalism eventually turned political. One of seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, MacDonagh was executed by the British for his leadership in the Rising. This manuscript in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) was published posthumously in The Poetical Works of Thomas MacDonagh (1916).

W. B. Yeats. The Wind Among the Reeds. London: Elkin Mathews, 1899.

Some of Yeats’s most iconic early work appears in this collection of poems of love and magic. This volume has the bookplate and ownership signature of Eve Gore-Booth, the sister of Irish actress and revolutionary Constance Markievicz. Yeats first met the wealthy, elegant sisters at their family’s estate outside of Sligo in 1892, when Constance was twenty-four and Eva was twenty-two. Eva became a suffragette and feminist in England as well as a published poet.

Lecture Ticket. “Subject: Irishmen in the English Army.” Albert Hall, Liverpool, presented by the Liverpool Celtic Literary Society. December 10, 1900.

Maud Gonne was an Irish revolutionary, suffragette, author, and actress, perhaps most remembered today as the poetic inspiration for much of W. B. Yeats’s best poetry and plays, including The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan. Anglo-Irish by birth, Gonne founded The Irish League and the Daughters of Ireland (Inghinidhe na hÉireann), a nationalist women’s organization, and often pushed for direct confrontation against British authority. She lectured widely across Ireland, Great Britain, and the Continent in support of the Irish nationalist cause.  She had an ill-fated marriage to revolutionary John MacBride, a military leader of the Easter Rising, who was executed shortly afterward.

Watercolor by Jack Yeats, signed and dated. The Hard Stuff. 1898.

Provenance: Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The youngest brother of William, Susan, and Elizabeth Yeats, Jack Yeats became one of Ireland’s most esteemed painters. He began his career as an illustrator in journals, then most notably contributed work to his sisters’ Cuala Press. The Hard Stuff, representing a whiskey tent at a racecourse in the West of Ireland, was among Yeats’s earliest watercolors.

Courtesy of Jim Cummins.