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Life
1789-1866, antiquarian; b. Dublin, merchant; consul for Greece, sec. to Dublin Chamber of Commerce; director, Bank of Ireland; MRIA 1847; large collection of pamphlets on politics and history of Ireland, but especially of Dublin, 25,000 in number, donated to the RIA by his widow; commissioned to produce a “History of the Port of Dublin” by Ballast Board, 1850, prompting him to write The Scandavian Kingdom of Dublin, edited [‘encrypted’] posthumously by John P. Prendergast (1881); d. 14 Sept., Monkstown, Co. Dublin; there is a burial plaque in Monkstown [Church of Ireland] Church; his Scandanavian Kingdom was a source for James Joyce in A Portrait and Finnegans Wake; RIA exhibition entitled ‘From Cromwell to the Cholera: A History of Ireland from the Pamphlet Collection of Charles Haliday (Feb. 2012)’. DIB DIW
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Works
Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin; With Some Notice of the Author’s Life, ed. by John P[atrick] Prendergast (Dublin: Thom 1881, 1882), cxxiii, 300pp., ill. [pls., fold. maps.]; [2nd edn.] (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Sons 1884), and Do. [rep. of 1884 edn.], intro. by Breandán Ó Riordáin (Shannon: IUP 1969), ix, [1], cxxiii ,300pp,, ill. [6 fold. pls., facs., maps (some col.), plan]
See also ‘Observations Explanatory of a Plan and Estimate for a Citadel at Dublin, 1673’; ‘On the Scandinavian antiquities of Dublin’ [the foregoing both rep. in Scandanavian Kingdom]; The Manuscripts of Charles Haliday of Dublin: Acts of Privy Council in Ireland, 1556-1571 (London HMSO 1897) [Red Council Book; Outlawry of Shane O’Neill; Reduction of Ulster; lists of baronies and persons].
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Commentary
James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge UP 1993), gives an extended account of Haliday’s Scandanavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881), ‘long-accepted as one of James Joyce’s sources for Irish history in general and Dublin history [84] in particular’. Fairhall gives an account of the origin of the book, a ‘production of Haliday’s friend and editor John P. Prendergast, who encrypted six essays by Haliday - a lengthy string and two important short papers - in an exhaustive scholarly apparatus that places the reader at a peculiar distance from Haliday’s voice [...] further concretised by the fact that Haliday had died without publishing his own work [so that t]he book itself is an archaeological dig of the sort that Haliday conducted in his history, an unintended simulation of its own topological problems.’ Fairhall calls this a ‘performative quality [that] mirrors the perpetually excavated “midden mound” of Finnegans Wake.’ (pp.83-84.) [See further remarks, attached.]
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Catalogues
Belfast Public Library holds J[ohn] P. Prendergast, ed., Charles Haliday, Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881); there is an IAP reprint (1972).Emerald Isle Books (Cat. 1995) lists The Manuscripts of Charles Haliday of Dublin: Acts of Privy Council in Ireland, 1556-1571 (HMSO 1897) [£55].
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Notes
Exhibition: An exhibition of his pamphlet collection was held at the RIA in Feb. 2012 (“From Cromwell to the Cholera: A History of Ireland from the Pamphlet Collection of Charles Haliday”.