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Life
b. Shrone Hill, Co. Tipperary; ed Clongowes; br. of James Sadleir, MP, and son of Dublin solicitor whose practice he at first managed; agent for Irish railways; elected MP for Carlow, 1847, though remaining unionist until 1848; became a member of George Henry Moore’s [q.v.] ‘Irish Brigade’, otherwise known as ‘the Pope’s Brass Band’ because of Sadeir and William Keogh’s [q.v.] obstructionist vociferations in the House of Commons; est. the Telegraph in Dublin, 1851, as organ of the Catholic Defense Association, chaired by Archbishop Cullen [q.v.]; |
supported Charles Gavan Duffy’s [q.v.] Tenant League, but accepted a post as Junior Lord of the Treasury under Gladstone when the new Govt. was formed in 1852 following the collapse of Lord Derby’s shortlived administration (ad interim on fall of Lord Russell’s) having lost the election on the basis of the Irish party’s block vote; elected MP for Sligo, 1853; forged title deeds as collateral for loans on London banks; |
overdrew £200,000 on his own account to purchase votes and maintain the Telegraph; failure of his brother’s Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank (est. 1827), with assets only one-tenth of deposits - the banking losses falling heavily on Tipperary small-holders; committed suicide with prussic acid on Hampstead Heath, 17 Feb. 1856; described in the Nation as ‘a sallow-faced man with multifarious intrigue, cold, callous, cunning’; rumoured to have escaped to America. ODNB DIB DIH FDA OCIL |
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Criticism
John Francis O’Donnell, Sadleir, the Banker; or, The Laceys [Family] of Rathmore (Dublin: The Nation Office 1873) [prev. serialised in Nation, 1872-73]; James O'Shea, Prince of Swindlers: John Sadlier 1813-1856 (Dublin: Geography Publications 1999), 519pp.
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References
Dictionary of National Biography Irish politician and swindler, original of Dicken’s Mr Merdle in Little Dorrit, also appears in Charles Lever's Davenport Dunn and John Needham’s Double. (See Irish Book Lover [q. vol.], ‘life of crime’).
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D. J. Doherty & J. E. Hickey, A Chronology of Irish History Since 1500 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1989) [a widely variant account form DIB, et al.]: leading mbr. of Irish Brigade, and Catholic Defence Association; fnd. Irish Land Company; then fnd. Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank to buy Kingston estate, Co. Cork, on which Land Co. held a mortgage; Chairman of the London and County Joint-Stock Co.; combined with Tenant League to become Independent Irish Party, pledging not to take office; accepted office in Lord Aberdeen’s ministry, 17 Nov. 1852; Lord of the Treasury, 1853; MP for Sligo, 1853; invested in American railways, and embezzled heavily from the Tipperary Bank to the sum of £1,250,000; lost court action against creditor, Jan. 1854; committed suicide, fearing discovery.
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Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, p.254 [ftn. to O’Leary’s Recollections, where he appears as Sadlier (sic)]; 258 [with William Keogh], 277n. [with Keogh].
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Notes
Charles Dickens: Dickens called him that ‘precious rascality’ and made him the model of Merdle (Forster, Life of Dickens).
Hamlet & Co.: Sadleir was called, with William Keogh [q.v.], the ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ of Irish history. (See Malcolm Brown, ‘Besides the Sickbed: Carlyle, Duffy, Dr. Cullen’, in Politics of Irish Literature: From Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats. London: George Allen & Unwin 1972, p.129.)
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