Alice Stopford Green (1847-1929)

[See portrait - infra]

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Bibliographical details
The Making of Ireland and its Undoing 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1908), xvi, 511pp., and Do. [2nd edn., with add. Appendix] (London: Macmillan [Oct.] 1909; rep. 1913), xxiv, 573pp.; [another edn.] (London: Macmillan 1924), 573pp.; and Do. [rep. of 1st Edn.] (NY: Books for Libraries Press 1972), xvi, 511pp. CONTENTS: Pt. 1: Trade and Industries; Pt. II: Education and Learning.

See also: The making of Ireland and its undoing 1200-1600 / by Alice Stopford Green (Dublin: Maunsel, 1920) [copy at Southampton UL; see COPAC online].

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For comments on Alice Stopford Greene and others connected with the nationalist movement in Ulster, see J. Anthony Gaughan, ed., Memoirs of Senator Joseph Connolly, 1885-1961, A Founder of Modern Ireland (IAP 1996).

Alice Stopford Green

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Commentary
Donal O’Sullivan, in The Irish Free State and Its Senate (London: Faber & Faber 1940): ‘The speech which Mrs. Green had intended to deliver on the occasion of the presentation was also read, in the form of a message to the Senate. There have been many Irish patriots who were also masters of the English tongue; but the lofty ideals for Ireland expressed in this message, and the passionate love of country which inspired them, can seldom have found expression in language at once so moving and so beautiful. As it is not fitting that this message should lie buried in the limbo of forgotten parliamentary records, it shall be reproduced here in full.’ (p.158; as infra.) O’Sullivan quotes the speech at length and adds: ‘By formal resolution, the Senate gratefully accepted the gift of the Casket on the conditions named by the donor; and it further resolved that, in addition to the vellum roll containing the names of the members, the message of Alice Stopford Green which is printed above should also be inscribed on vellum and enclosed within the Casket. The engrossment was executed, with illuminated capitals, by George Atkinson, esq., R.H.A., the head of the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art; and an ornamental silver band of Irish design was made by the same school, wherewith to enclose the vellums. (Senate Debates, III, 1140-45.) / Alice Stopford Green died on the 28th May 1929, and so did not live to see the end of the Senate on which she had set such high hopes.’ (p.159.)

Donal McCartney, in O[wen] Dudley Edwards & Fergus Pyle, eds., 1916: The Easter Rising (1968): ‘Gaelic Ideological Origins of 1916, ‘[...] a representative patriotic history like A. S. Green’s The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908) is worlds away from A. M. Sullivan’s The Story of Ireland (1867) [with its emphasis on Grattan’s Parliament as the high-point]; Mrs Green’s book completely ignores Grattan period but concentrated instead on the Gaelic age when Ireland was a-making, and that with the coming of the English Ireland commenced to be ‘undone’ (p.42); From Alice Stopford Green (who in her turn owed much that wa scholarly in her work to MacNeill), Connolly accepted a glorified picture of early Irish society. He was very impressed by what he described as Gaelic ideas of equality and democracy ... to Connolly’s way of thinking a socialist revolution in Ireland would be in certain respects a return to the early Gaelic system. (p.46).

Francis Byrne characterises Green’s History of the Irish State to 1014 as marred by the anachronistic nationalism of the title (see Irish Kings and Highkings, 1973, Bibliog.).

Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, The Stopford Connection (Gill & Macmillan 1985): ‘The phenomenon of men and women of English stock becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves was repeated many times during the last hundred years ... The Stopfords ... obtained forfeited Ulster and [in 1740s] and added to it by speculation ... Edward Stopford, 18th c. bishop of Meath; his son Edward Adderly, Archdeacon of Meath, supported Gladstone and worked with him at Hawarden [sic]; Alice, b. 1848, called ‘untrained intellectual’ by R. B. McDowell [see Alice Stopford-Green, A Passionate Historian, Dublin 1967]; met John Richard Green in the house of her cousin Stopford Brooke; author of the Short History of England (Macmillan), which ran to 20 eds., Green became a consumptive; she edited his Conquest of England posthumously; he left her with £1800 p.a.; bought house at Kensington Sq.; known as Mrs Johnny Green to Beatrice Potter [Webb], who wrote, “She has the originality which springs from a lonely, unhappy and self-absorbed youth, from the enforced independence of a friendless womanhood. Bred in a remote part of Ireland in a poverty-stricken home, she struggled at self-culture against every imaginable adverse circumstance. A brief married life with a man of talent ... Now she has climbed up the social ladder [on his account] ... She aims at a position to be gained by personal merit.’ [Cont.]

Léon Ó Bróin (Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, 1985) - cont.: Later entries in Webb’s Diary, Vol 1. (ed. MacKenzie, 1982) show her warming in admiration towards Mrs Green. JF Taylor, Alice’s ‘devoted Irish lawyer’ (Webb); in 1879 she met Douglas Hyde; her Irish family address at Bushy park Rd.; brother Jemmett died of typhoid, 1902; his family settled in London; Alice assimilated the idea of ‘an immemorial identity of old Ireland’ [Tierney] from Eoin MacNeill; for her controversy with Robert Dunlop, see Dunlop [supra]. ‘An admirer of Collins, she paid a tribute in print to the efficiency of his intelligence service; her house at St. Stephen’s Green was a salon to Russell, Stephens, Best, George Gavan Duffy, James Douglas, Erskine Childers, Mary Spring-Rice, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Collins, whose tall bicycle was frequently seen in the hall by Mary Comerford while he was still on the run.’ (p.167.) Further: she started Irish Book Shop on Dawson St., with others; suspected by British; pleased with truce; identifies with Treaty; elected Senator; work in the Senate; appeals for reconciliation; has heart attack; holds dinner parties; attitude to women [edged them out of limelight in her social life]; her view of Irish nation [a brotherhood of adoption as well as of blood ... hospitality to men of good-will [who] had become faithful members of the Irish people (phrases from a speech on reception of silver casket in Senate). [See O’Bróin, op. cit. index.]

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Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), ‘... the origins of Gaelic society retained the romantic gloss endowed by zealots like Alice Stopford Green.’ (p. 447; the only reference).

Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Penguin/Allen Lane 1993), prefatorally citing A. S. Green, ‘History is more backward in Ireland than in any other country [...] Here alone there is a public opinion which resents its being freely written, and there is an opinion, public or official, I scarcely know what to call it, which prevents its being freely taught ... Here history has a peculiar doom. It is enslaved in the chains of the Moral Tale - the good man (English) who is prospered, and the bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking end’ The Old Irish World, Dublin & London 1912; Foster, p.1); Foster considers her as a historian who ‘set herself, not to produce a scientific or a poetic history, but simply to reverse the moral of the story; and with the establishment of the Irish Free State ... events seemed gratifyingly to show that the good had come into their kingdom.’ (Foster, p.1). [Cont.]

Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Penguin/Allen Lane 1993) - cont.: See also Foster’s extended discussion of Green, ‘daughter of an archdeacon in County Meath ..’, which ensues on p.14ff., and incl. a passage contrib. to Catholic Bulletin that envisages the average ancient Irish catholic family discussing Thomism and life matters by the cottage fire, p.14ff.) Foster educes a Freudian explanation involving blindness and memory, giving rise to her concept of ‘Irish national memory’, a recurrent phrase in her writings; Mrs Green’s pre-invasion Ireland was a classless egalitarian ‘Commonwealth’, where ‘the earliest and the most passionate conception of “nationality” flourished’, bibl., The making of Ireland and Its Undoing (1908); Irish Nationality (1911); A History of the Irish State to 1014 (1925). See also remarks on the Ordnance Survey team which Alice Stopford Green ‘interpreted [...] team grandiloquently as “a kind of peripatetic university, in the very spirit of the older Irish life”, and believed that their work magically “revealed the soul of Irish Nationality and the might of its repression” and was accordingly suppressed.’ (The Old Irish World, 1912, p.56-61; Foster, op. cit., p.6.)

Angus Mitchell, ‘Ireland, South America, and the Forgotten History of Rubber’, in History Ireland (July/Aug. 2008), pp.41-45: In England a young journalist, E. D. Morel, bgan to speak out against the atrocities [involved in the rubber trade] and was mentored and guided in his efforts by the Irish historian Alice Stopford Green. Green facilitated the necessary introductions that helped to establish Morel as an active coice condemning the destruction and inhumanity. She helped finance several projects, introduced him to her netowrk of radical friends and had his articles placed in journals where she had influence. / In 1904 Morel and Green found a new ally in the British consular official Roger Casement, author of an official report comdemning Leopold’ s rubber-hungry regime. Casement took his crusade to Latin America.’ (p.43; see further under Roger Casement, supra.)

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Quotations
Viking raids: ‘What was the effect of this new peril [and] attack from Europe from the sea? In the first place the highways of the sea, never before closed, were barred by the Scandanavian freebooters. [...] The terrors of the sea journey drove travellers to the land route, and the way across England to the continent became so important that clerics of the tenth century could not imagine that any other way had ever been possible […]. Scholars and Christian monks fled from the heathen barbarians, carrying to Europe their treasures and manuscripts.’ (The Old Irish World, p.77; cited in in George A Little, Dublin Before the Vikings, 1957, p.138.)

Public Announcement (Sinn Féin, Belfast Executive; q.d.): ‘Fellow Gaels! If you are anxious to defeat the English government, / in its policy of preventing the Irish people from learning the true history of our country come to the Lecture on “Ireland, England and the Spanish Armada”, to be delivered by A. Stopford Green / (Author of Idea of a Nation, The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing, Old Irish World, Irish Nationality, &c. &c.), in St. Mary’s Hall, on Thursday, 13 Oct. at 8 o’clock. Admission 3d & 6d. A limited number of reserved seats. Educate that you may be Free.’ [vide Charles Gavan Duffy.]

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Note: The Casket Speech was quoted by Sean O’Faolain, in ‘This is Your Magazine’, The Bell [first editorial], 1940 - as follows: ‘From the beginning, Ireland has been rich in her hospitality to men of goodwill coming within her borders. And at all times there have been incomers who have responded honourably to that generosity and have become faithful members of her people. She has had her rewards among the strangers who, under her wide skies, have felt the wonder of the land, and the quality of its people, and have entered into her commonwealth.’ To this quotation he added the remark: adding: ‘Whatever you are, then O reader, Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House - The Bell is yours’) [See full text of the speech - supra.]

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References
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); gives extract from Mrs. J. R. Green, Town Life in the 15th c. [1894]. See also Irish Book Lover, 4, 7; Also ‘A Castle at Ardglass’ [non-title excerpt from The Old Irish World], in Sophia Hillan King and Sean MacMahon, eds., Hope and History: Eyewitness Accounts of life in Twentieth-Century Ulster (Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press 1996), pp.23-25.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991): selects no part of her works, but cites in a foot-note (Vol. 3, ftn 9, 497) as best-known works, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908), and the pamphlet Ourselves Alone and [sic] Ulster (1918).

Cathach Book. (Cat. 12) lists The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1908), Do., with Appendix to 2nd edn. (1909); [Whelan 32; Hyland 214, 220]; Ourselves Alone in Ulster (1918).

Emerald Isle Books (1997) lists The Making of Ireland [&c.] (London: Macmillan 1908), 511pp. [Commerce, Trade, Learning, the Bards and Brehons, &c.] another edn. (Macmillan 1924), 573pp. [Part I: Trade and Industries, pp.1-203; Pt. II: Education and Learning, pp.235-557]

Belfast Public Library holds no fiction; hist. works incl. Fragments (1920); History of the Irish State to 1014 (1925); Irish Nationality ([1912]; Loyalty and Disloyalty, what it means in Ireland (n.d.); The Old Irish World (1912); Ourselves Alone in Ulster (1918) [var?1915, Cathach Bks. Cat. 12]. MORRIS holds History of the Irish State (1925) 437p.; Irish National Tradition (1917) 24p.; Irish Nationality (1919) 256p.

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Notes
Hill of Uisneach: Green’s Irish Nationality (1912), called a survey of early Irish ‘nationhood’ and bearing a dedication ‘To the Irish Dead’ makes reference to the fourfold division centred at the Hill of Usnech [sic], where ‘all meet in the middle of the island [and where] the Stone of Division still stands.’ She speaks of ‘the unchanging intention - the taking of Irish land’ as the mark of English history in Ireland, and ends with an aspiration towards ‘the natural union [which] approaches the Irish nation’. (q.p.)

Romantic charm: Alice Stopford Green comments on the derogatory view of Irish topography in C. L. Falkiner’s Essays Relating to Ireland, &c. (1909): ‘How was it that these Englishmen left none of their “romantic charm” there? What strange history lies hidden behind this saying?’ (‘The Way of History’, in The Old Irish World, Gill, 1912, p.16; cited in Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Field Day/Cork UP 1996, p.5.)

John Richard Green - b. Oxford, 1837; d. Menton, 1883; Anglican clergyman and librarian at Lambeth palace; while in Lambeth, he spent much of his time writing; his most famous work A Short History of the English People (1874); his books, many with personal bookplates, were donated by his widow to the UCD Library in the 1920s and are held in Special Collections - online.

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