Life
1873-1953; b. Belfast; worked as traveller in ladies’ underwear;
joined Abbey Theatre as an actor; fnd. with Stephen Gwynn and Joseph Maunsel
Hone the publishing company Maunsel, being named after the latter who
invested £2000 and became its chairman; published Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory,
George Russell, James Stephens, Hyde, et al.; involved in a prolonged
wrangle with Joyce over the publication of Dubliners in the so-called
Maunsel Edition (1910), published over five hundred titles, 1905-1923;
received compensation for the destruction of the Maunsel store of - largely
unsellable - books by fire during 1916 Rising; the imprint name changes
to George Roberts in 1917-20, and to Maunsel & Roberts, 1920-23; certainly
concerned in the fiasco of Joyce’s Dubliners (1916); Roberts
printed the illuminated Ireland’s Memorial Record of the Great
War, marginally ill. by Harry Clarke; George Russell [“AE”]
included his verse in New Songs (1904); Maunsel acquired by Robert
West, c.1996.
[ top ]
Quotations
‘Warm, odorous night,/As a mother
to her breasts,/You press the Earth’s sun-wearied face;/While a babe
in her arms she rests.’ [&c] Also cited from New Songs,
‘The Prisoner of Love’, ‘Still although I know our ways/Are
divergent through all time/Following love will shed its rays/On the path
you choose to climb[... &c]’ (From A Celtic Christmas
[The Irish Homestead, Christmas Number, Vol. 10; 3 Dec. 1904; p.22;
rep. in Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds to Dubliners, 1986, p.131.)
‘By day the Dagda hunts fair / While silent is each unseen star ...
In dreamy rivers flowing past – Sleep / Unveils the vast mysterious
deep’ (Torchiana, op. cit, pp.133-35; with one other.)
References
John Cooke, ed, Dublin Book of Irish Verse 1728-1909 (Dublin:
Hodges, Figgis 1909), selects gives ‘A Lark in the City’; ‘The
Convent Bell’; ‘Your Question’ [‘You ask me sweetheart
to avow/What charm in you I most adore;/But how can I discriminate/From
your innumerable store.’]; with no bio-details.
[ top ]
Notes
James Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus, ‘What is wrong
with all these Irish writers – what the blazes are they always snivelling
about? Isn’t it funny to read Roberts’ poems about a mother
pressing a baby to her breasts? O blind, snivelling, nose-dropping, calumniated
Christ wherefore were these young men begotten?’ (Richard Ellmann,
ed., Letters of James Joyce, 1966, Vol. II, p.78; cited in Torchiana,
op. cit. [supra], pp.133-35; and note, Torchiana
cites the above as models for the poetic ambitions of a Little Chandler,
giving added force to Joyce’s derision.)
[ top ]