Patrick Augustine Sheehan (1852-1913)


Life
[Canon Sheehan; ‘the most literary Irish priest since the author of the Prout Papers’, Irish Monthly, 1902] b. 29 New St. [now O’Brien St.], Mallow, Co. Cork, 17 March 1852, third of five children of a shopkeeper (one dying in infancy); initially planned a career in the professions; suffered death of his father (1863) and mother (Feb. 1864); entrusted with three siblings to guardianship of Fr. John McCarthy, a priest and relative who received a ‘modest’ income; ed. Long Room Nat. School, Mallow, Co. Cork - where he shared a classroom with William O’Brien [q.v.] - and afterwards St. Colman’s College (aetat. 14); entered Catholic seminary at Maynooth, 1869 reading modern literature ‘surreptitiously’ on his own; experienced nervous breakdown in face of responsibilities of priesthood; passed a year in convalescence with Fr. Keller who later led the agitation on the Ponsonby estate during the ‘Plan of Campaign’; before ordination, 1872-73; ordained by Bishop Delany, 18 April 1875, and sent by diocese of Cloyne to Plymouth in view of lack of parishes at home; preached to mix religious congregations and instrumental in the conversion of Rev. Robert Hawker, arousing controversy resulting in Sheehan’s transfer to Exeter; served as relief chaplain at Dartmoor Prison and ministered to Fenian prisoners held there; returned to Ireland to become chaplain and curate at poor house in Mallow, Oct. 1877, and estab. a literary society there; transferred to Queenstown Cathedral (Cobh), 1881-89; began writing articles for Ecclesiastical Record and writing childrenֻs stories; suffered health problems and returned to Mallow as senior curate, July 1889;
 
contrib. ‘The Two Civilisations’ to Irish Monthly (Jan. 1890) and numerous poems in that journal thereafter - regarding himself primarily as a poet-turned-novelist; appt. PP in Doneraile, July 1895; Canon of Cloyne, 1903 [RIA; var. Suth. 1906]; wrote largely for Catholic audience in the belief that the faith was endangered by modernisation and socialism - but also as an apologist for Catholicism in face of its enemies; negotiated land-treaties in Doneraile in 1903-07; supported William O’Brien’s All-Ireland League; publ. Geoffrey Austin, Student (1895) anonymously; also The Triumph of Failure (1899) - both ‘sermons in print’ on the importance of Catholic teaching in higher education; greeted by Irish critics as a major religious novel and a ‘trumpet call to our people’; wrote My New Curate (1900), centred on Fr. Letheby, a reforming priest, somewhat based on Fr. T. O’Callaghan, a Land-leaguer who acted as his own curate - at first serialised in The American Ecclesiastical Review; orig. planned as a riposte to anti-Catholic reactions to the burning of Bridget Cleary in Tipperary as a “changeling”;
 

issued Luke Delmege (1901), tracing the path of self-recognition in an intellectual young priest who acquires advanced ideas in England and finally recognises their limitations back in rural Ireland - and in which a young woman offers herself as a sacrifice for the spiritual good of her errant brother by entering an asylum as a patient - a work which won the approval of Leo Tolstoy; contrib. editorials to William O’Brien’s Cork Free Press, 1903; awarded Doctor of Divinity by Leo XIII, Feb. 1902; DLitt of Univ. of St. Albertus Magnus (Wichita, Kansas), 1903; prependary of Kilenemer in the Cathedral Chapter, 26 Dec. 1903; formed constructive friendship with the aristocratic natiissued Lisheen (1907), in which Bob Maxwell learns the philanthropy proper to a landlord after incognito visits to his own tenants; The Blindness of Dr. Gray (1909), in which an old priest learns love from the niece whom he condemns; The Queen’s Fillet (1911), set in revolutionary France; Miriam Lucas (1912), in which the heroine is driven from her inheritance, works with socialists in Dublin and nurses her dying mother - a victim of sectarianism - in New York, before resuming her rightful property; formed constructive friendship with the aristocratic nationalist Lord Castletown of Doneraile, 1903; introduced by Castletown to American Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and corresponded with him; published Glenanaar (1905), based on Doneraile conspiracy trial of 1829 in which Daniel O’Connell played a chief part in exposing perjury of the jurors;

 
awarded Hon. DD by Pius X in 1908 [but see Leo XIII, supra]; offered the see of Lismore in New South Wales on death of Bishop Doyle, June 1909, but unable or unwilling to accept; he endured long illness with cancer as resident at South Infirmary, Cork; d. 5 Oct. 1913; bur. in from of the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin (RC) in Doneraile and honoured with a commemorative statue at the entrance Francis William Doyle Jones (1873-1938), complete with wire spectacles; his last completed novel The Graves of Kilmorna (posthum. 1915), concerns which Halpin and Myles Cogan, the schoolteacher and the miller’s son, who prepare fatalistically for the 1867 Rising in the hope that their deaths will dampen the people’s for the emerging parliamentary politics of Ireland; Tristram Lloyd (1929) was completed by his executor Father M. H. Gaffney; is are held in the National Library of Ireland; his two sisters became nuns; a br. Denis was a shipping clerk. PI JMC DIB DIW DIL SUTH OCIL

[ See Patrick Maume, “Canon Patrick Sheehan”, in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009) - online; see extracts - infra.
Much detail has been added to this notice thanks to James O’Brien in correspondence with RICORSO during June-Aug. 2024. ]

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Works
Novels
  • Geoffrey Austin, Student (Dublin: M. H. Gill [1895]; 1902; 5th edn. 1908); Do. (Dublin: M. H. Gill [1914]), vii, 212pp.
  • The Triumph of Failure (London: Burnes & Oates 1899), and. Do. [4th edn.] (1903); another edn. (Dublin: Phoenix Publ. Co. [1930], vii, 383pp., ill., port.
  • My New Curate: A Story Gathered from the Stray Leaves of an Old Diary (Boston: Marlier, 1900; 1914); Do. (Dublin: Talbot Press [1928]), 340pp.; Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Phoenix Publ. [1930]), viii, 340pp; and Do. [facs. edn.] (Cork: Mercier Press 1989), viii, 340pp. [orig. publ. in  American Ecclesiastical Review].
  • Luke Delmege: A Story (NY & London: Longmans, Green 1901), viii, 580pp., and Do. [new imp.] (1915); Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Phoenix Publ. Co. [1930], and Do., [new edn.] (NY 1955).
  • Glenanaar: A Story of Irish Life (London: Longmans, Green 1905), vi., 321pp., [2]pp.; and Do. [new imp.] (1915).
  • Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise (London: Longmans, Green 1904), Do. [new imp. (1915).
  • Lisheen, or The Test of the Spirits (NY & London: Longmans, Green 1907; 1914), vi, 454pp. [2pp. ads.].
  • The Blindness of Dr. Gray, or The Final Law (London & NY: Longmans, Green 1909), vi, 488; and Do. [new imps.] (1914; 1915, 1922, 1932) [1932 NY imp. available at Internet Archive - online]; Do. [another edn.] (Dubin: Phoenix Publ. co, [1930]), vi, 488pp.
  • The Queen’s Fillet (London & NY: Longmans, Green & Co. 1911), vi, 376pp.; Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Phoenix Publ. Co. [1930]; rep. 1969), vi, 376pp., ill.
  • Miriam Lucas (London: Longmans, Green 1912; 1914), vi, 470pp.; Do. [another edn.] (Duiblin: Phoenix Pubs. [1930]), vi, 470pp.; and Do. (Dublin: Talbot Press 1955), vi, 470pp.
  • The Graves of Kilmorna: A Story of ’67 (London: Longmans, Green 1915), 373pp., Do. [new imp.] (London & NY: Longmans, Green & Co. 1918), 3pp. l., [3]-373pp. [2]; Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Phoenix Publ. [1930]), [4], 373, pl. - see full-text copy of 1918 edn. in RICORSO Library > Irish Classics - as attached].
  • Tristram Lloyd, completed by Rev. Henry Gaffney (Dublin: Talbot 1929); Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Phoenix Publ. Co. [1930]), xlviii, 276pp.
[ Note: The works of Canon Sheehan were printed uniformedly in the Dophin Edition of 1915 and again in the Phoenix Publ. editions of 1930.]
Short Fiction
  • A Spoiled Priest and Other Stories (London: Burnes and Oates 1905; Dublin: Phoenix [1905]), 213pp. [var. Unwin 1904].
  • Canon Sheehan’s Short Stories (London: Burns & Oates 1908), 167pp., 16ç=pp. ; 8 ills. by M. Healy. [see contents] I. Spoiled priest -- II. A thorough gentleman -- III. The monks of Trabolgan -- IV. Rita, the street singer -- V. Remanded.
Poetry
  • Cithara Mea (Boston [Havard]: Marlier, Callanan 1900), 246pp.; and Do. [facs. rep.] (Palala Press 2016), 246pp.
  • Poems (Dublin: Maunsel & Roberts 1921), and Do. (NY: P. J. Kenedy 1922), 68pp.
Prose
  • Under the Cedars and Stars [Catholic Truth Soc.] (Dublin: Browne & Nolan 1903), xii, 379pp.
  • Early Essays and Lectures (London: Longmans, Green 1906) [see contents].
  • Parerga: A Companion Volume to Under the Cedars and the Starts (London: Longmans, Green 1908), viii, 352pp.
  • The Intellectuals: An Experiment in Irish Club Life (London & NY: Longmans, Green 1911), viii, 386pp., 22cm.
  • M. J. Phelan, ed., Sermons of Canon Sheehan (Dublin: Maunsel 1920), viii, 311pp., 22cm.
  • The Literary Life and Other Essays (Dublin: Maunsel & Roberts 1921); and Do. (NY: P. J. Kenedy1922), 203pp.
Miscellaneous
  • ‘Religious Instruction in Intermediate Schools’, in Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Sept. 1881) [pp.528-31].
  • ‘The Two Civilisation’, in Irish Monthly, ed. Fr. Matthew Russell, 18, 199 (Jan. 1890), pp.293, 358 [available at JSTOR - online]
    ‘The German Universities, II ’, in Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Vol. VII (1886) [pp.617-31 [to be continued; see note].
  • ‘Introduction’ to Lizzie Twigg [Elis ni Craoibin], Songs and Poems (Dublin: Sealy Bryers & Walker 1902 1905), xii, 74pp.; Do. [2nd. edn.] (London: Longmans 1905).
  • contrib. to Hermes: An Illustrated University Literary Quarterly, No. 1 (1907).
  • intro. to Cardinal Mercier's Conferences delivered to his Seminarists at Mechlin in 1907, trans. by J. M. O’Kavanagh (London: R. & T. Washbourne 1910), xxiv, 206pp.
  • The Souvenir of Canon Sheehan: being extracts from his writings made by a Sister of the Presentation Convent, Doneraile (London: Burns & Oates 1914), xii, 157pp.

See also ‘Books that influenced Luke Delmege’ in The Irish Monthly, ed. Matthew Russell, SJ. (Dublin: Feb. 1902) pp.109-14.

Correspondence
  • David H. Burton, ed., The Letters of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan (Washington, D.C.: Kennikat 1976), x, 70pp., 23cm.
  • James O’Brien, ed., The Collected Letters of Canon Sheehan of Doneraile, 1883-1913 (Wells [UK]: Smenos 2013), xii, 300pp., ill. .(b&w; ports.),
  • —ed., Correspondence from the Papers of Canon Sheehan of Doneraile 1888-1913, (Wells [UK]: Smenos 2017), xiii, 386pp. 

[ Download: Copies in The Graves of Kimorna or, A Story of ’67 (1913)
are available in RICORSO Library > Irish Classics as .htm, pdf. or .doc. ]

Early Essays and Lectures (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1906), vii, 354pp. [2pp. ads.] - CONTENTS: Essays: Religious Instruction in Intermediate Schools; In a Dublin Art Gallery; Emerson; Free-thought in America; The German Universities; The German and Gallic Muses; Recent Augustinian Literature; The Poetry of Matthew Arnold; Recent Works on St. Augustine; Aubrey de Vere (a study). Lectures: Irish Youth and High Ideals: The Two Civilisations; The Fiftieth Anniversary of O’Connell's Death; Our Personal and Social Responsibilities; The Study of Mental Science; Certain Elements of Character; The Limitations and Possibilities of Catholic Literature.

Canon Sheehan’s Short Stories (London: Burns & Oates 1908), 167, 16pp.; ill. [8 lvs. of pls. by M. Healy]. [see contents] I. Spoiled priest; II. A Thorough Gentleman; III. The Monks of Trabolgan; IV. Rita, the Street Singer; V. Remanded.

The German Universities, II’, in Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Vol. VII (1886): ‘Sheehan’s article on the German universities cited Dr. Pusey’s view that those institutions are given over to rationalism, and remarks on the difference between the early Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason which persuaded many to atheism and the later religious Kant. A footnote on the subject quotes at length from Lord Acton’s article on George Eliot in The Nineteenth Century (March 1885) where he writes: “From Jonathan Edwards to Spinoza she went over at one step. The abrupt transition may be accounted for by the probable action of Kant, who had not then become a buttress of Christianity”. Lord Acton reports that Eliot was “seized with a burst of gratitude” when “she stood before his statue in Berlin”, adding “but she hardly became familiar with her later works.” In an earlier sentence of the passage quoted, Lord Acton writes to Sheehan’s purpose: “One of out ten Englishmen, if there be ten, who read him in 1841, nine got no further than the Critique of pure reason, and knew him as the dreaded assailant of popular evidences.” (Italics Sheehan’s; ftn., p.624.) Sheehan forms the judgement that “German savans, compressing their ideas within the limits of one faculty, grew cramped and illiberal in the pursuit of knowledge” (p.626), and afterwards speaks of an “unconscious against the Protestant doctrine that the Bible was the sole rule of faith [...] losing the spirit of the Divine Word in too critical an examination of the letter.” (p.627.) [Available online; accessed 31.10.2011.]

Index of Publications available at Internet Archive with inks supplied by Clare County Library

The Graves at Kilmorna, A Story of ’67
by Patrick Augustine Sheehan
Published in 1918, Longmans, Green and co. (New York [etc.])
Statement: by the Rev. Canon P. A. Sheehan.
Pagination: 3 p. l., [3]-373pp.
Genre: Fiction; Subject: Fenians — Fiction.
Available at Internet Archive [copy held at UCSB]

The Blindness of Dr. Gray; or, The Final Law
by Patrick Augustine Sheehan
Published in 1909; Longmans, Green & Co. (NY [... &c.]) - new imp. 1932.
Pagination: vi, 488pp.
Available at Internet Archive [copy held at UCLA]

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See RICORSO editions ...
The Graves of Kilmorna: A Story of ’67 (1915; 1918 edn.) - as .htm, pdf. or .doc.

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Criticism
Full-length studies
  • Herman J[oseph] Heuser, DD, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile: The Story of an Irish Priest as told chiefly by himself in books, personal memoirs, and letters (London & NY: Longmans, Green & Co. 1917), xix, 405pp.
  • Arthur Coussens, P. A. Sheehan, zijn leven en zijn werken (Brugge 1923).
  • Francis Boyle, Canon Sheehan, A Sketch of his Life and Works (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son; NY: P J. Kenedy & Sons 1927), viii, 95pp.
  • M. P. Linehan, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile: Priest, Novelist, Man of Letters (1952).
  • Kenneth MacGowan, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile [with a portrait] (Dublin: Catholic Truth Society of Ireland 1963), 20pp.
  • Brendan Clifford, Canon Sheehan: A Turbulent Priest (Millstreet, Co. Cork: Aubane Historical Society 1990, 2008), 27pp..
  • Michael Barry, By Pen and Pulpit: The Life and Times of the Author Canon Sheehan (Fermoy: Saturn Books 1990), 140pp., ill. [ports.].
  • James O’Brien, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile, 1852-1913: Outlines for a Literary Biography (Wells, Somerset, England : Smenos [2013]), x, 214pp., ill. (b&w and col. ports.) [Bibl. refs., pp.205-11; 30 cm.]
Articles, &c.
  • [unsigned], ‘Concerning the Author of Luke Delmege’, in The Irish Monthly [ed. Fr. Matthew Russell, SJ] (Dec. 1902), pp.661-69 [available at JSTOR - online.]
    Published By: Irish Jesuit ProvinceGeorge Moore, ‘Fr. Sheehan’s last masterpiece advocates all Ireland becoming one great monastery Hail and farewell! Salve (London: [q.pub.] 1912), p.121 [infra].
  • W. P. Stockley, ‘Canon Sheehan and His People’, in Essays in Irish Biography (Cork: Cork UP 1933), 191pp. [with other essays on Thomas Moore and Dr. Henebry (1862-1916)].
  • Seán O’Faoláin, The Irish (West Drayton: Penguin 1947), p.97 [see extract].
  • Gladys V. Towers, ‘Canon Sheehan’, in The Irish Monthly [80: 945] (March 1952), pp.112-17.
  • Benedict Kiely, ‘Canon Sheehan: The Reluctant Novelist’, in Irish Writing, 37 (Autumn 1957), pp.35-45 [rep. in A Raid into Dark Corners, Cork UP 1999, pp.181-90 see extract].
  • Francis MacManus, ‘The Fate of Canon Sheehan’, The Bell, 15 (Nov 1947), pp.16-17.
  • Ruth Fleischmann, “Twentieth Century Novels of Rural Ireland” [Ph.D. Diss.] (UCC 1982).
  • Terence Brown, ‘Canon Sheehan and the Catholic Intellectual’, in Literature and the Art of Creation , ed. Robert Welch & Suheil Badi Bushrui (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1985), pp.7-18; Do., rep. in Brown, Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar: Lilliput 1988) [q.p.].
  • D. M. Collie, ‘Nineteenth-Century Novel, A Postscript: The Case for Canon Sheehan’, in Linenhall Review (Winter 1993) [q.p.].
  • John Cronin, ‘Canon Sheehan, Luke Delege’, in The Anglo-Irish Novel: 1900-1940, [Vol II] (Belfast: Appletree 1990), pp.22-29.
  • Catherine Candy, “Popular Irish Literature in the Age of the Anglo-Irish revival: Four Historical Case Studies” [MA Maynooth NUI 1987).
  • Catherine Candy, ‘Canon Sheehan: The Conflicts of the Priest-Author’, in Religion, Conflict and Coexistence in Ireland, ed. R. V. Comerford, M. Cullen, J. R. Hill, and C. Lennon (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990), cp.252.
  • ——, Priestly Fictions: Popular Irish Novelists of the Early 20th Century (Dublin: Wolfhound 1995), 212pp. [studies of Fr. Guinan, Canon Sheehan and Gerald O’Donovan].
  • James H. Murphy, ‘Guinan and Sheehan: “False Standard of Modern Progress”’, in Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997), pp.115-26 [Chap.], espec. 119-22 [infra].
  • Ruth Fleischmann, Catholic Nationalism in the Irish revival: a study of Canon Sheehan, 1852-1913 (1997), 188pp. [Introduction, pp.1-30; Canon Sheehan’s Campaign for a Catholic Culture [31]; The Religious Life in Rural Ireland [49]; The Land, Labour and Social Unrest [112]; The National Question [130]; Canon Sheehan in Perspective [151-69]; Index, &c. [170-88].]
  • Patrick Maume, ‘In the Fenians’ Wake: Ireland’s Nineteenth-Century Crises and Their Representation in the Sentimental Rhetoric of William O’Brien MP and Canon Sheehan’, in Bullán, An Irish Studies Journal, 4, 1 (Autumn 1998), pp.59-80.
  • Joachim Fischer, ‘Canon Sheehan und die deutsche Kultur’, in Deutschlandbild der Iren 1890-1939 (Heidelberg: Winter 2000).
  • Tom Garvin, ‘The Quiet Tragedy of Canon Sheehan’, in Studies, Vol. 98, No. 390 (Dublin: 2009), pp.159-68.
  • John O’Donovan, ‘Daniel Desmond (D.D.) Sheehan (1873-1948) and the rural question in Cork, 1894-1910’, in Defying the Law of the Land: Agrarian radicals in Irish History, with a foreword by Carla King (Dublin: The History Press 2013), q.pp.
  • Bryan Fanning & Tom Garvin, ‘Canon Patrick A. Sheehan, The Graves at Kilmorna (1913)’, in Books That Define Ireland (Sallins: Merrion 2014), Chap. 10.

See also allusion in Terry Eagleton, Crazy Jane and the Bishop (Cork UP 1998), [q.p.]

 
[ See longer bibliography of criticism at Wikipedia - “Patrick Augustine Sheehani8; [by James O’Brien] - onine.; copied as attached on 10.06.2024. ]

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Commentary
Sean O’Faolain
, ‘Even in our day readers of Canon Sheehan’s excellent novel, The Blindness of Doctor Gray, will recognise the familiar priest of the old school, the stern moralist for whom “the Law” was a second god.’ (The Irish, 1947, p.97.)

George Moore, ‘Fr. Sheehan’s last masterpiece advocates all Ireland becoming one great monastery’ (Hail and Farewell! Salve, London: [q.pub.] 1912, p.121).

Benedict Kiely, ‘Canon Sheehan: The Reluctant Novelist’, in A Raid into Dark Corners (Cork UP 1999), pp.181-91: ‘What he meant those two early novels to be was a warning to young men of the dangers to faith of an exclusively secular education. (p.184.). […] If we are to consider Sheehan as a novelist, and there is little point in considering him as anything else, since his work as a parish priest did not differ from the work of other zealous priests and would not in itself call for a critical consideration … then we can see the real triumph of failure in those two novels about Geoffrey Austin. They were a long, hard apprenticeship. When they were ended, he was never again completely blinded by books, neither by their merits nor their moral dangers, and he was better able to look at his people and his scene as a novelists should. […] Yet even in the middle of The Triumph of Failure comes this luminous passage foretelling better things. It is an reflection attributed to the unworthy and absurd Geoffrey: / The high regions of speculative thought are, like Alpine altitudes, too thin for man to breathe in for long periods of time. There is a craving of the heart for human fellowship, as well as a thirst of the mind for knowledge; and what is said of solitude is true of study - that but an angel or a beast can tolerate its continuance. I confess life was taking on new lights and colours since I became interested in the little drama of human feelings and passions; and whilst I thirsted for the unattainable heaven of pure thought, I felt that the very pricks and stings of human passion give life a zest to which my solitary life had as yet been a stranger. I believed now that the best of all existences here below is a compound of action and thought, a steady practical interest in the welfare of the race, and occasional breathing moments of silent conference with the eternal.’ (p.186.) [Cont.]

Benedict Kiely (‘Canon Sheehan: The Reluctant Novelist’, in A Raid into Dark Corners, 1999) - cont.: Kiely quotes the prologue to Luke Delmege: ‘Was it not said of Balzac that he dug and dragged every one of his romances straight from the heart of some woman? “Truth is stranger than [188] fiction”. No! my dear friend, for all fiction is truth - truth torn up by the roots from bleeding human hearts, and carefully bound with fillets of words to be placed there in vases, of green and gold, on your reading-desk, on your breakfast table. Horrid? So it is. Irreverent? Well a little.’ Kiely comments: ‘Well, now we know that he has accepted the horribleness and the irreverence that must be if novels have to be written at all.’ (p.188-89). Further: ‘Paradoxically he was, it might seem, made a novelist in spite of himself, in spite of the Geoffrey Austin in him, by the intervention of the Irish people, including their priests, and by his mystical love for the land of Ireland. … The Fenians, who owed so little to the Irish clergy, had, because of their mystic self-sacrifice, their helpless devotion to an idea that was not material, a faithful champion in the pastor of Doneraile […/] Sheehan was more severe in his denunciations of the people and the country than the harshest of the realists who were to come. The Irish priest then (perhaps still in some places), because of his training and of the way in which the people looked up to him, thundered from the clouds and knew it; whereas the Irish writer who was merely a writer was never allowed to forget that he was nothing more than a man and, in Ireland, no a very desirable type of humanity.’(p.190.)

James H. Murphy, ‘Guinan and Sheehan: “False Standard of Modern Progress”’, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997): ‘The tone is nationalistic but only in as much as nationalism is common as a servant of religion and it is anti-British but only in as much as Anglicisation is common as an instrument of modernisation. It would be incorrect to conclude from this, therefore, that Sheehan was an advocate of Catholic Ireland in terms similar to those of [Joseph] Guinan. Two things, in particular, distinguish his vision from that of Guinan. First, an Irish Catholic nation is of interest to the speaker not because it would insulate Ireland from the outside world, in its own comfortable paradise, but because it might be Of use in a universal struggle. Second, such a Catholic Ireland is not a present reality, it is an ideal state that has yet to be achieved. In fact the novels are highly critical of Catholic Ireland as it actually exists. Its present reality is not that of Guinan’s peasants.’ (p.120.)

Rolf & Magda Loeber, with Anne Mullin Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2006) - Introduction: ‘The Munster author Canon Patrick Sheehan counter-attacked the critics by writing that “we have no Catholic reading public because constructive criticism [our emphasis] is unknown”. Instead, he stated, “we have a good deal of negative criticism ...”’ (Sheehan, Literary Essays and Poems , Dublin, n.d, p.76; Lober, p.lxv.)

Canon Sheehan in Doneraile (anon.)

[...]

His early years in Doneraile coincided with the last stages of the Land War and the introduction of the Land Acts. He played a major part in the negotiations between the tenant farmers and the landlords in the parish. He was the ideal man for this because hi s integrity was never in question and he was respected by all side, even those of different persuasions. He was instrumental in bringing all the negotiations with the landlords to a successful conclusion. The following is an excerpt from a record kept by a J. O’Leary of Carrigeen about the part played by Canon Sheehan in the acquisition of his land.

“In 1904 a few of us (tenants) put our heads together and decided to ask Canon Sheehan to come with us to meet our agent (A.G. Creagh of Mallow) in order to put before him our demands to purchase our farms. [...] I shall never forget that hour, 12 noon of 17th. Sept. 1904 when Canon Sheehan cut the first link of that chain which had bound generations of tenants on the Creagh estate to the chariot of landlordism." He went on to describe the negotiations and the calm dignity of Canon Sheehan in the face of surly and insulting remarks made by the agent's son. On Canon Sheehan's advice the tenants refused to pay rent and after two and a half years the landlord was forced to re-open negotiations and, with a bit of face saving give and take, a deal was concluded and the tenants purchased their farms "at twenty and a half years purchase or 6 shillings and 9d in the pound on the existing rents" All the considerable arrears were wiped out. This agreement was finalised and signed on 14th. July 1907, and the record concludes "The wisdom of his counsel I shall ever treasure and it was ready at all times, any hour night or day. May his saintly spirit ever watch over the parish where his remains lie, is the prayer of J. O’Leary."

Following the satisfactory conclusion of the land purchase, he used his influence in getting as many improvements as possible for Doneraile. he was instrumental in getting an electric plant to provide light for the town and Doneraile Court. The power plant also supplied electricity to pump water to the houses which was an enormous benefit. Lord and Lady Casrletown were very much his supporters in all this.

Lord and Lady Castletown were very friendly with Canon Sheehan and held him in the highest regard. Lady Castletown was formerly Ursula Clare Emily St. Leger of Doneraile Court and Lord Castletown "married in there". Canon Sheehan's success as a writer had turned him into a celebrity, and whenever the Castletowns had a guest of note, they were invariably brought to meet the man of letters. It was through them the Canon met a very famous American for the first time in 1903. He was Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, the great lawyer, and it was a meeting of two intellectual minds. They became firm friends and engaged in a ten year correspondence which only ended on the Canon's death.

—See anon, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile - online [accessed 10.04.2024].

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References
D. J. O’Donoghue
, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912); lists poems, Cithara Mea, poems (Boston 1900), and poems in Irish Monthly; his brother D. B. Sheehan, bank clerk in Cork, wrote for The Nation and United Ireland in the 1880s.

Stephen Brown, ed., Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists Geoffrey Austin, Student (Dublin: Gill 1895; 5th edn.1908); The Triumph of Failure (Burnes & Oates [1899]); My New Curate [1899] (Boston 1914), Do. another edn. (Cork: Mercier 1989); Luke Delmege ([1901] new ed., Longmans 1915); Glenanaar [1905] (London: Longmans 1915); Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise [1904] (London: Longmans 1915); The Spoiled Priest and Other Stories (London: Gill, Burnes & Oates 1905); Lisheen, or The Test of the Spirits ([1907] new ed. London: Longmans 1914); The Blindness of Dr. Gray, or The Final Law [1909] (London: Longmans 1914); Miriam Lucas [1912], new ed. Longmans 1914); The Graves of Kilmorna (London: Longmans 1915). DIL corrects bibliographical details and adds My New Curate (Boston 1900); Under the Cedars and Stars (Browne & Nolan 1903), essays; A Spoiled Priest and Other Stories (Unwin 1905); Early Essays and Lectures (London: Longmans 1906); Parerga (London: Longmans 1908); Sermons, ed. M. J. Phelan (Dublin: Maunsel 1920); The Literary Life and Other Essays (Maunsel & Roberts 1921); Poems (Maunsel & Roberts 1921); Tristram Lloyd, completed by Rev. Henry Gaffney (Talbot 1929);The Literary Life and Other Essays (Dublin 1921).

Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature, ed. (Washington: University of America 1904); gives extract from Luke Delmege.

Patrick Maume, “Patrick Augustin Sheehan [Canon]”, in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009)

Maume gives details of his early contact with Land League figures incl. with William O’Brien [q.v.] at St Colman’s College and a cousin, cousin Fr Daniel Keller (1839-1922) with whom he stayed during convalescence from a bout of mental illness: ‘While studying for the priesthood [at Maynooth] Sheehan experienced what appears to have been a nervous breakdown precipitated by the early deaths of his sisters, and left the seminary for a period in 1872 - to convalesce with his cousin Fr Daniel Keller (1839-192; later a prominent land campaigner). Much of Sheehan’s later work reflects gloomy speculations about what would have become of him had he been unable to proceed to ordination - part of a distinctly morbid streak in his writings. Sheehan’s seminary experience left him with a keen sense of the deficiencies of the current system of theological training in preparing its graduates to address the philosophical challenges of modernity and the problems they would encounter in their pastorate. Much of his spare time was devoted to the study of modern philosophy and literature; he developed a lasting fondness for the German Romantics, while his love of classical studies coexisted with suspicion of the pagan classics as a threat to Christian faith and morals.’

Sheehan was ordained priest on 18 April 1875 for the Cloyne diocese and sent on mission to England, where he served in Plymouth and Exeter. His English experiences gave him a disturbed awe of the power and growing secularisation of England, and a tendency to idealise the unselfconscious catholicism of rural Ireland while sensing its possible fragility.’
[...] Corkery’s story “The Priest” in The stormy hills (1929) is a moving depiction of a lonely priest modelled on Sheehan;  it implicitly equates his efforts to minister to the spiritual needs of struggling mountain-folk with the efforts of the artist to inspire an unappreciative community. [...]  While encouraging elementary and vocational education he thought it cruel to give the poor ambitions above their station; his denunciations of emigrants for seeking higher standards of living is at times astonishingly patronising. The equation made in The graves at Kilmorna between Fenian self-sacrifice before inevitable defeat and the Christian doctrine of redemption through sacrifice was subsequently seen as a prefiguration of the 1916 rising.

Bibl. cites (inter al.): Sophie O’Brien, obituary, Cork Free Press (Oct. 1913); Herman J. Heuser, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile (1917); Brendan Clifford, Canon Sheehan: a Turbulent Priest (1990); David H. Burton, ed., Holmes-Sheehan Correspondence: letters of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan (1993); Maume, ‘Life that is Exile’: Daniel Corkery and the search for Irish Ireland (1993); Catherine Candy, Priestly Fictions (1995); Ruth Fleischmann, Catholic Nationalism in the Irish Revival: A Study of Canon Sheehan, 1852-1913 (1997); James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (1997); Lawrence W. McBride, ‘A Literary Life of a Socially Engaged Priest: Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan (1852-1913)’, Radical Irish Priests, 1660-1970, ed. Gerard Moran (1998), 131-48; Patrick Maume, ‘In the Fenians’ Wake: The Crises of fin de siècle Ireland in the Sentimental Rhetoric of Canon Sheehan and William O’Brien M.P’, Bullán: an Irish Studies Journal, iv, no. 1 (1998), 59-80; Patrick Maume, ‘A Pastoral Vision: Canon Joseph Guinan and the Clerical Social Project in Edwardian Ireland’, New Hibernia Review, ix:4 (2005); Doneraile Parish website [online] (accessed 30 Aug. 2005); Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900 (2006).

(Available online; accessed 10.04.2024.)

Belfast Public Library holds var. edns. of Blindness of Dr. Gray ([?]1970); Glenanaar, a story of Irish Life (1930); Graves of Kilmorna (1930); The Intellectuals, an Experiment in Irish Club-life (1911); Lisheen (1930); Literary Life Essays, poems (1930); Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise (1904); Luke Delmege (1930); My New Curate (1930); Poems (1921); [The] Queen’s Fillet (1930); A Spoiled Priest (1930); Tristram Lloyd (1930); Under the Cedars and the Stars (1905).

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Quotations

Triumph of failure?
Canon P[atrick] S. Sheehan, The Graves of Kilmorna: A Story of ’67 (1915; 1918 Edn.) - Chapter XI

The conversation gave Myles Cogan food for thought. It raised the question to a higher plane. It is no longer the political independence of Ireland that has to be sought; but the very salvation of the people. And this can only be effected by the shedding of blood. What a light it threw on O’Connell’s famous words! How it justified Mitchell! How it sanctioned and adopted Meagher’s Apologue to the Sword! Yes! all the eloquence of Grattan, all the philosophy of Burke, all the fire of Shiel, all the splendour of Plunkett, cannot lift this generation from the slough into which it has fallen. It needs the shedding of blood!
He felt that it would be madness to propound such a fantastic theory to the rank and file of the Fenians. They couldn’t understand it. They were enrolled and sworn to create an Irish Republic; that was their aim. Anything so transcendental as Halpin’s theory would be scouted by them as insanity, or treason. Yes! If Myles Cogan said to them:
“There is no hope; not the ghost of a chance that we shall succeed. That is a dream of madness. But a few of us must die, — it may be ten, it may be a hundred, it may be a thousand, in order that the mob should no longer shout after Castle nominees, or get drunk, or otherwise disrespect themselves,” the probability is that they would depose him, and shoot him as a traitor. [71]
Yes! He would keep the sublime idea locked up in his own mind, and exchange it only with Halpin.

pp.70-71; see full-text copy in RICORSO Library > “Irish Classics” - as .pdf [attached].
 
[Discussing support for the nationalist parliamentary candidate:]
“I suppose ’tis the more prudent course,” said Father James, with unconscious irony. “But what would Halpin say?”
This appeal to the memory of his old comrade seemed to stagger the resolution which Myles had formed. Yes! It was quite true that is not the way Halpin would have acted.
“You remember his great principle,” said the priest; “it was you yourself often mentioned it to me — that he died to lift up the people? It was not for Irish independence he gave his life — that, he knew, was an impossible dream; it was not for Home Rule even — that was not spoken of in his time. It was to purify Irish life; and to keep the Irish from running after idols, like the Israelites of old.”
“Yes!” said Myles, bitterly, “and how far did he succeed?”
“No matter!” said the priest. “As old Longinus used to say, ‘To fail in great attempts is yet a noble failure!’  I like the heroes of lost causes!”
“It seems to be quixotic, impossible, absurd. Perhaps it is old age that is creeping down on my faculties. I was always convinced that if we had three hundred Spartans here in Ireland in the days of Parnell, or even one independent organ in the Press, that awful débâcle would never have taken place.”
“I don’t know,” said Father James, dubiously. “The sentiment of our people is always stronger than their reason. Do you know my own blood boiled within me, when I heard that despairing cry of his: ‘Don’t throw me to the English wolves!’” [330]
“Quite so. I can understand. I will go further and say that his last years were some of the most tragic in all human history; and their events can never be read by Irishmen without shame. All the greater reason why weaklings like myself should shirk the contest.”
pp.329-30; see full-text copy in RICORSO Library > “Irish Classics” - as .pdf [attached].
 
Myles Cogan’s conversation with Father Cyril at Mount Melleray Cistercian Monastery

[...]
“You wish me to speak plainer, Father?” he said. “I will. I say, the commercial immorality that we supposed belonged to clever Yankees or perfidious Englishmen is universal in Ireland today; I say the natural affections are extinguished. Every will is now contested; and the dead, with all their sins upon them, are dragged from their graves to show how legally incapable they were. Instead of the old grave dignity and seriousness of the dear old people, I see nothing but vulgarity everywhere. As to patriotism in the old sense, — the love of Ireland, because she is Ireland, and our motherland, — that is as dead as Julius Caesar. The fact is, to use a slang word that has been flung at me lately, we are up-to-date — that is, we have gone after strange gods!”
[...]
“Well,” said the monk, smiling, “we must establish our premises first.  You heard of Don Quixote?” [338]
 “Yes!” said Myles. “That’s just it. I don’t want to be tilting at windmills.”
 “Then you must be careful, my dear Mr. Cogan,” said the monk, gently, “not to generalise too much. Probably, you have certain ideals before your mind — do you read much?”
 [...]
 “And you haven’t mixed much amongst men?”
 [...].
 “Ah! There is the seat of the malady,” said the monk.
 “But,” said Myles, obstinately, “facts are facts, Father. I tell you the country is turned topsy-turvy. What was right thirty years ago is wrong today; and public life is wholly corrupted. Then, all — everyone,” Myles flung out his arms — “is preaching materialism. The idea of Ireland as a great missionary country is scoffed at; the idea of Ireland as a centre of learning and sanctity, our old heritage, is not even named; the whole mind of the country is directed in one way, to be a little England or America — factories, industries, workshops, our harbours filled with ships, our rivers polluted with slime, the atmosphere reeking with soot—”
 “Look! Mr. Cogan! You have been reading Ruskin?”
 “Yes!” said Myles, ashamed of being caught quoting second hand. “He was the most truthful man of his generation.”
 “But — the windmills?” said the monk. “Is England less materialistic today for all his preaching — for all Carlyle’s scolding?  Are not rivers polluted, skies [339] darkened, children playing on banks of slags and cinders, far more than when he thundered against such things? Where’s the use in useless preaching and prophesying?”
 It seemed the final word to Myles. The two men sauntered on in silence.
 “It is at least a comfort to know,” said Myles at length, “that Saul needn’t be amongst the prophets. My work is done.”
 “Yes, possibly!” said Father Cyril. “Nations follow their destiny. But it may comfort you to know that your country can never live long in the sty of materialism. It is with nations as with individuals. Sometimes, an old man comes up here, just at the end of his life to tell us, or rather tell God, that his whole life has been a huge mistake. He set out, just as you say Ireland is setting out, on the grand race for gold. He would be a successful man, that is, he would die worth sixty thousand pounds. He never lost sight of that, night or day. It haunted him at his meals, at his prayers, at Mass, on his journeys. It was the grand objective of existence. He heard sermons denouncing this evil, but they were not for him. It was the priests’ business to say such things on money from time to time, and that was all right. They were ordained for that. But it was his business to make sixty thousand pounds, and to have the newspapers speak of him as a most wealthy and respectable citizen. That too was all right. It was for that he was created. Then, suddenly, he finds the prize in his grasp; but, like the old fairy legend, the gold is but rusty leaves. He is disgusted with his success. He loathes himself. He remembers something about a camel passing through the eye of a needle; and something about Dives and [340] Lazarus, and a great gulf between. Then he comes up here and resolves to disgorge the whole wretched thing, and turn to better things. Now, that is just what I conjecture, from your statements, will happen in Ireland. The nation will go on from prosperity to prosperity. Moral degeneracy must accompany material progress. The nation will grow swollen and inflated — and then, when the climax is reached, and all the dreams of its patriots are realised, it will grow disgusted with itself, for there is one idea that can never leave it. It has haunted the race from St. Patrick downward; it has gone with them in exile; it was their comfort and anchor of hope in persecution — can you guess what it is?”
 Myles was silent, afraid to guess.
 [...]

pp.337-39; see longer extract - as attached; also full-text copy in RICORSO Library - as .pdf [attached].
 
[ See note on ‘wild justice’ - infra. ]


The Beauty of Summer (Cork: Mercier edn. 1973): ‘Across that bight of sea sleep the three islands that link us with the past, and whose traditions, were we otherwise, would shame us. They are Aran-na-Naomh, Arran of the Saints ... a place for the hermit and the saint; and mark you ... the hermit and the saint must again resume their rightful places in the economy of new orders and systems! You cannot do without them. They symbolise ... comfort without wealth, perfect physical health without passion, love without desire ... clean bodies, keen minds, pure hearts - what better world can the philosopher construct, or the poet dream of?’ (pp.46, 48-49; quoted in Luke Gibbons, ‘Synge, Country and Western: The Myth of the West in Irish and American Culture’, in Transformations in Irish Culture, Field Day/Cork UP 1996, pp.23-35; p.29.)

The Literary Life and Other Essays (Dublin 1921): ‘God be with the good old times, when the hedge-school masters were as plentiful as blackberries in Ireland when the scholars took their sods of turf under their arms for school seats; but every boy knew his Virgil and Horace and Homer as well as the last ballad about some rebel that was hanged ... when the Kerry peasants talked to each other in Latin; and when they came up to the Palatines in Limerick, as harvestmen in the autumn, they could make uncomplimentary remarks and say cuss-words ad libidum before their master’s face, and he couldn’t understand them for they spoke the tongue of Cicero and Livy – the language of the educated world.’ (p.52, quoted in W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition, IAP 1976, pp.27-28.)

Irish Ballad Literature: ‘Yes! There’s the finest touch in all ballad literature. The thought of the old motherland has paralysed them. They remember all — her mountains, her lakes, her valleys, her seas! They recall her long night of suffering, redressed only by her indomitable Constancy. And they remember, how near they were to victory. Oh! If they only had hearkened to the voice of their Bishop and that Franciscan friar who told them to hold out to the last! But it is of no use. They were misled and deceived; and their only hope is now, to flash their sabres tomorrow in the breasts of the Dutchmen! Poor fellows! poor fellows!” (The ‘grave but kind’ Myles Cogan, assistant-teacher, in Graves of Glenmorna, 1918 Edn. p.8 [Chap. 1].)

Free Thought in America: The Sects and the Church’, in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Sept. 1884): ‘The Church must always be in advance of the world. The priest must lead the flock. And his spiritual instructions will carry all the more weight when it is understood that the pastor is a man of culture and refinement, and that his condemnation of new and fanciful theories comes from his belief founded on fair and exhaustive reading, that they are utterly untenable. […] Men will reverence knowledge wherever found, and the natural abilities of the scholar may lead many souls to acknowledge the supernatural mission of the priest.’ ( p.730; cited by Ruth Fleischmann, ‘Knowledge of the World as the Forbidden Fruit: Canon Sheehan and Joyce on the Sacrificium Intellectus’, pp.127-37; in Donald E. Morse, et al., eds,. A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993, p.135.)

A Fenian funeral: On 2 April 1867 Cannon Sheehan witnessed the funeral procession of Peter O’Neill Crowley, who had been shot in Kilclooney Wood near Mitchelstown during the Fenian rising of 5th March. The funeral procession passed from Mitchelstown down to the seashore at Ballymacoda and Sheehan’s account is recorded in his Moonlight of Memory: ‘I remember well the evening on which that remarkable funeral took place. It was computed that at least 5,000 men took part in the procession and shouldered the coffin of the dead patriot over mountain and valley and river until they placed the sacred burden down there near the sea and under the shadow of the church at Ballymacoda. I remember how a group of us young lads shivered on the college terrace at Fermoy and watched the masses of men swaying over the bridge, the yellow coffin conspicuous in their midst. we caught another glimpse of the funeral cortege as it passed the Sergeant’s Lodge, then we turned away with tears of sorrow and anger in our eyes.’ (Pádraig Ó Maidín, ‘Pages from an Irishman’s Diary: This Period Then’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 1, Spring 1971, pp.27-34; p.30.)


P. A. Sheehan, “Books That Influenced Luke Delmege”, in The Irish Monthly (1902)

[...]

I have often in later life asked myself what was the charm that affected me so powerfully in these two writers - what was the note, so peculiar to themselves, that awakened echoes which were silent under the most powerful solicitations of other great writers? And it took many years to discover that the spell was the enchantment and mystery of that idealism, which is common to all great thinkers from Plato downwards; and which approaches so nearly in its discoveries and effects to faith, that in Catholic hands it may yet become the most powerful auxiliary of the latter. Though liable to grave abuse, when misdirected or unsustained by a superior revelation, it is at once the great central problem of all modern philosophy, and to many minds it may be the gateway to the truth. A certain writer has put it thus: -

The grand question of philosophy is whether the material world furnishes only a summation of sensual impressions, or whether it is really and truly a revelation? That is, can we or can we not see through material phenomena into a region which is not appreciable by sense? To put the question in a clear light, we ask: Is the material world a final object, which conveys only sensual impressions - or is the material world a book that affords [113] sensual impression, and which, over and above that sensual impression, conveys an intellectual meaning intended by the Author? A dog looking at a book sees the same that a man sees; but he understands not the intellectual meaning intended to be conveyed to the reader by the aid of the symbols. Is, then, the universe an object final, or a book? This is the great question of philosophy. If we admit it to be a book as St. Paul does (Rom. i. 20), we thereby admit science to be truly a revelation.’ (Theory of Human Progression, Patrick Edward Dove, 1851, p.248.)

It may be said that this was the aspect under which, first Wordsworth, then Tennyson and Carlyle viewed the outer creation.

I rejected Carlyle, then, for the friend introduced by Carlyle, and the steady companion of my maturer years - Jean Paul. I could never understand why Goethe could be considered the first intellect of Germany. His irregular and licentious life, his brutality towards helpless women, and the covert atheism and pagan voluptuousness that pervade his writings, repelled me. On the other hand, the simplicity and pathos, the rich quiet humour, the total absence of uncleanness or vulgarity in dealing with the humblest and homeliest subjects, and the sublimation by poetic instinct of the most ordinary incidents of human life - in a word, the broad humanity of this great writer, Richter, and his perception of the awful sanctity of human life, worked out under the stars, and with all the unseen worlds for witnesses and audience, strike me as the noble characteristics of the best dramatic work that has ever been given to the world. [...]

See full-text copy - as attached.
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Notes
Plot Synopses

Geoffrey Austin: Student (1895), warns of the dangers of college education without religious training, leaving the orphan title-character unfitted for life and careless of eternity. In a sequel, The Triumph of Failure (1899), a sequel which was much better received, Austin encounters Charles Travers who sets about organizing a Catholic revival and dies a failure after being hounded with trumped up charges but whose courage kindles a religious revival in the British Empire. Inspired by him, Austin turns from his classical studies to join a Catholic order sworn to poverty.

Luke Delmege: A Novel (1901), in which an intellectual curate, returning from England, undergoes a painful process of self-recognition. Motivated by reforming zeal, Luke is blind the traditional virtues of rural Ireland and brings misfortune on himself and others. A sentimental sub-plot argues that the best priests are those whose are humility brings salavation to depraved men and fallen women.

Glenanaar: A Novel of Irish Life (1905) is based Daniel O’Connell’s successful defence of men accused of agrarian crimes in Doneraile, Co. Cork. Terence Casey, a grandson of an informer, flees to America but returns to Ireland having made his fortune. He saves a local hurling team and reveals his identity to a conciliatory parish priest. The narrative of mother’s ostracism during the Famine occupies several some chapters. Elsewhere, Casey proposes to a woman who agreed to marry him before he left and who now gives her daughter’s hand to him in marriage. (R. J. Ray dramatised the novel in The Casting out of Martin Whelan (1910); trans. in German as Das Christtagskind.

Note: Glenanaar is based on ‘Doneraile Conspiracy’ of 1829 in which Daniel O’Connell saved four prisoners condemned to death and some 17 others who were tried as a result of determined efforts by the local ascendancy to stamp out agrarian crime, following an attack led by George Bond Low on a landlord called Dr Norcott. Before his trial William Burke rode to Derrynane and convinced O’Connell to appear for the defendants. O’Connell exposed the perjured witnesses in court-room before udges Torrens and Pennefather and the Attorney General John Doherty who summed up. Those charged were acquitted but nevertheless a wider round-up resulted in the condemnation of others, afterwards commuted to transportation. (See Dictionary of Irish History, ed. Hickey and Doherty, 1979).

Lisheen, or The Test of the Spirits (1907), recounts the experiences of Bob Maxwell, a young landlord in Kerry during the 1890s who lodges incognito with his tenants and witnesses their eviction by his own estate-agent. Maxwell marries the daughter of an enlightened English neighbour and learns the importance of improving methods on the part of landlords. The novel ends with a sensational narrative involving an Indian concubine, a fire, rescue and a drowning intended to illustrate the promote and conservative idea of paternalist philanthropy in land relations.

Miriam Lucas (1912): The title-character is robbed of her family estate by an unscrupulous guardian; she takes the side of the workers in his transport company who are induced to strike by an agent provocateur, but when a priest who pleads with them is killed she halts the strike and leaves for America where she works as a journalist in the slums. There she encounters a dying old woman, newly released from prison, who turns out to be her mother, earlier driven from the family estate for converting to Catholicism. Miriam is ultimately restored to her property with the help of kindly Protestants.

The Graves at Kilmorna: A Story of ’67 (1915) centered on Myles Cogan and James Halpin, a miller’s son and a school-teacher and in a midland town, who hold officer rank in the Fenian Army during the 1867 Rising with the intention less of winning a Republic (which they consider impossible) than turning the people away from the corrupt parliamentary party and save the nation from ‘putrefaction’ through their own blood-sacrifice - whether death or imprisonment await them. Halpin is shot in action and Cogan is captured, tried, and sentenced ten years in Dartmoor Prison. Returning to Ireland in Book II of the novel, he debates Irish history with those around him and is killed by a drunkard at an election meeting, to be buried afterward alongside Halpin: Father James, who is a quietly presides over the narrative at every point, says in the concluding sentences: “There they lie; and with them is buried the Ireland of our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions, our love. There is no more to be said. Let us go hence!” By way of romantic plot, Mary Carleton, a friend of Myles’ sister Agnes, betrays him to the police inspector in order to save him from worse in the intended “rising” and informs Halpin that she has done so to avoid his being identified as the betrayer - a fact which Halpin imparts to Cogan in the final phase of their friendship, before Halpin dies in his arms on the field of battle. [BS]

[ Note several longer and shorter allusions to Irish revolutionaries and patriots incl. Charles Kickham, Robert Emmet, Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel (as Mitchell), Thomas Clarke Luby, and James Stephens, et al. See also note on Kilmorna House - infra.]

The above summaries largely based on title-entries in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, ed. Robert Welch (1996).

The Triumph of Failure (1900) - a collection of essays and stories exploring the theme of failure and its significance in human life. Sheehan argues that failure is not something to be feared or avoided, but rather a necessary and valuable experience that can lead to personal growth and development. The book is divided into several sections, each of which focuses on a different aspect of failure. In the first section, Sheehan discusses the nature of failure and its place in human experience. He argues that failure is an inevitable part of life and that it can teach us important lessons about ourselves and the world around us. In the second section, Sheehan explores the different forms that failure can take, including moral failure, intellectual failure, and artistic failure. He examines the causes of these failures and suggests ways in which we can learn from them and move forward. The third section of the book focuses on the role of failure in history and literature. Sheehan examines the lives of famous historical figures who experienced failure, such as Napoleon and Julius Caesar, and explores the ways in which their failures shaped their lives and legacies. He also discusses literary works that deal with the theme of failure, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Dante’s Inferno. Overall, The Triumph of Failure is a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of a topic that is often overlooked or misunderstood. Sheehan’s writing is clear and engaging, and his arguments are backed up by examples from history, literature, and everyday life. The book is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to better understand the nature of failure and its place in human experience. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world’s literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work. (Publisher’s notice at Amazon Books - online; accessed 10.04.2024.)

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Wild justice, viz.— ‘The wild justice of revenge was never a Fenian virtue!’ (The Graves of Kilmorna, 1915; 1918). p.232)

In Graves of Kilmorna, Myles Cogan, released from prison, returns to his home-town in an unnamed county of Southern ireland to find that his fellow-prisoner McDermot is instigating a campaign of agrarian violence in a spirit of historical revenge on the part of the Fenians and the nation. Myles is now determined to uphold the principle of non-criminal patriotism and characterises his own share in the Rising of 1867 as a contribution to the pride and honour of the nation - a repudiation of the “putrefaction’ of jobbery in the electoral system operated by the Irish Parliamentary Party - undertaken without hope or even wish of separation from the English crown. He tells McDermott that Irish people have no reason to repudiate the English crown which provides security for their property but McDermott, from a poor agrarian (peasant) background who has seen his own parents being evicted, has no time for that middle-class view of things. For Myles, it seems that the other has chosen the ignoble option of revenge and his respect for him is shattered.

In discussing the point with Father James, Myles says of his own comrades: ‘They never soiled their flag with crime. The wild justice of revenge was never a Fenian virtue!’ (p.232.) Even Father James paused over this to consider the violence of the men of 1867 which led to the execution of the Manchester Martyrs: ‘That’s all very well, Myles,’ said Father James, after congratulating the writer on his loyalty to his fellows. ‘But what about Clerkenwell? and what about the Phoenix Park?’ To this Myles responds with a disclaimer regarding the idiocy of the ‘two or three fellows’ involved in the bombing and the subsequent killing of a policeman and similarly disowns what the priest calls ‘that supreme crime in the Phoenix Park’ (p.233.): ‘As to the Invincibles, they were no more Fenians than you are’ - citing their youth which disqualifies them from membership of the Fenian Movement, stricto sensu. In this way, Sheehan gives countenance to both the motive of purification and that of revenge in Irish republican separatism - though clearly marking the fact that Myles Cogan and his friend James Halpin had “never entertained’ the idea of separatism. (p.222) - much to McDermot‘s disgust. Clearly, if anything, Sheehan does believe that a form of generational blood-sacrifice is necessary to ‘purify’ the Irish race and nation - the idea which Fr. James quotes from ‘old Longinus’, thus: ‘To fail in great attempts is yet a noble failure!’  I like the heroes of lost causes!” Indeed, this is the concept which affords the title for a very different book in his Triumph of Failure (1900) - from which, indeed, Ruth Dudley Edwards derived the title of her 1977 critical biography of Patrick Pearse.

Like much of the political and moral language circulating in Sheehan’s novel - including strictly contemporary references to Ruskin and Carlyle in respect of the wider British and Irish culture of the 1867 Rising - the phrase ‘wild justice’ must certainly have enjoyed a good deal of contemporary use. it may even have been applied, as Myles suggests, to the agrarian violence of the period and this will bear further examination. In 1930 the Irish Writer - a Protestant clergyman by profession - issued Wild Justice, a fiction study of agrarian crime. Today it is, perhaps, best known as the title of thriller-novels by Wilbur Smith (1992), Philip Margolin (2000) and not less than ten other fiction-authors. It is also a recurrent title for works on the abuse of wild life on the planet - e.g., the highly-praised Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (2009) by Marc Beckoff with Jessica Price and for a work of global politics by Cormac Cullinan entitled Wild Law: A manifest for Earth Justice (2003). Then there is Susan Jacoby’s remarkable study entitled Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (1983) which embraces examples of the theme from Euripedes’ Hecuba onwards. Finally, for our purposes, there is an essay by the philosopher Gerry Wallace entitled simply ‘Wild Justice’ which appeared in Philosophy (July 1995, pp.363-375).

Wallace begins by quoting Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice who makes the case for the identical humanity of Jews and Gentiles but ends rather shockingly with this line: ‘And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ - a line, which, in the context of Israel’s present campaign against Hamas in Gaza must ring a loud peal of cultural and political bells today. Wallace then poses the question raised by the apparent discord between the celebrated plea for some kind of multi-cultural tolerance and the justification of revenge in the concluding line: ‘How can something as barbaric as revenge figure in a humane plea for moral equality?’ He goes on to suggest that ‘[i]n real life revenge seems to be making a moral comeback’ as illustrated not only by cinema - which depicts women settling scores as often as men - but also in numerous actual cases of individuals talking the law into their own hands which he mentions. (p.363.) However this stands today, it is certainly a key question in relation to the history of rebellion in Ireland up to and including the recent Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ where revenge stood out with sectarian hatred as the dominant forces behind the murder of some four thousand people whose lives were taken by ‘freedom fighters and - albeit in lesser numbers - by their opponents between 1972 and 1999. [BS 10.04.2024.]

Kilmorna Hse., Co. Kerry: the family home of the O’Mahonys between Abbeyfeale and Listowel in North Kerry, was the scene of the assassination of Sir Arthur Vickars on 12 April 1921 and the burning of the house by the IRA.  A Tudor-style home of three floors with 20 rooms, a library, chapel and walled gardens, it has been called the Downton Abbey of Ireland. The original owner, Pierce Mahony, was an solicitor and an ally of Daniel O’Connell in the Emancipation campaign. He was elected MP for Kinsale in 1834. On 12 April 1921 the house became the scene of the assassination of Sir Arthur Vickars, a half-brother of the younger Peirce Mahony with whom he shared a mother. Vickars held office in Dublin Castle as official Herald and Genealogist with the title of Ulster King of Arms since 1893 but was desgraced with accusations of stealing of the Crown Jewels from St. Patrick’s Hall in Dublin Castle. The theft was discovered in July 1907. The verdict of a Commission then set up to enquire resulted in his dismissal in January 1908 after he had refused, with his lawyer Tim Healy, to appear before it.

Further: Vickars, who was English born, develped a fascination with Irish historical records and sought for long to gain the post that he so ignominiously lost on that occasion. His copy of the Prerogative Wills of Ireland 1536-1810 later gained enormous interest and value for historians when the originals documents were destroyed wholesale in the Public Record Office at the Four Courts during the Civil War. Vickars was executed at the house by the IRA as a suspected spy during the War of Independence and the house was then burnt. He had settled there shortly after winning a libel case against the Daily Mail in July 1913 after the paper had falsely reported in Nov. 1912 that he had given a copy of the key to a woman who stole the jewels and absconded with them to Paris. No evidence of her existence could be shown and she was admitted by the paper to be an invention.

In its hey-day, Kilmorna House had hosted numerous distinguished visitors including Charles Stewart Parnell, W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and Percy French - as the guest book presented to the Kerry County Museum by Kerry Pocock, a lineal descendant and her daughter Iva in Oct. 2021. Parnell used the house as his base during elections in the county; his last visit was on  September 13, 1891, shortly before his death. (See Donal Nolan, report in Irish Independent - online [re-paragraphed here]; see also Kerry Writers" Museum, online; both accessed 08.04.2024 [incls. photos of Kilmorna Hse and Sir Arthur Vickars.)

Note: Kilmorna is also the name of an area in Listowel town - where a drug-raid was successfully conducted by the Garda in Jan. 2017 [online].

Kilmorna Evictions: Charles Mahony [or O'Mahony] became a Home Rule MP for North Meath in 1886 and the following year he published The truth about Glenbeigh (1867) describing evictions in Kerry which his elder brother George (1842-1912) had carried out on his Kerry estate, Kilmorna. (See Dictionary of Irish Biography, RIA 2009 - "Pierce Charles de Lacy OֻMahony’ - online; accessed 16.06.2024.)

Leo Tolstoy: Tolstoy reputedly called Canon Sheehan "one of the greatest living novelists" and is so quoted by Gladys V. Tower at the outset of her article on him in Irish Monthly (March 1952), pp.112-17; p.12 [JSTOR - online]. Patrick Maume remarks that his praise, especially directed at Gllenanarr which has reformist landlordism at its heart, was probably motivated more by the theme than the art of fiction. (Dict. of Irish Biography, RIA 2009 - online.)

The brother: Canon Sheehan had a brother called D. B. Sheehan who is noticed in D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland (1912) - with remarks: ‘a bank-clerk in Cork and who wrote some good poems about twenty-five years ago for Nation, United Ireland, etc., over the signature of “Dene Bernards.” ’ (Op. cit., p.422.).

W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), contains an erroneous reference in which Rev Canon Sheehan, vicar of SS Peter and Paul Church, in the city of Cork, is said to have been elevated to the episcopacy as Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, but also to have founded the Waterford and South-Eastern Counties Archaeol. Society with an address at the Waterford City Hall, 24th Jan 1894 [159f.].

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Lord Castletown, an improving landlord, befriended Canon Sheehan and introduced him to American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes who was a regular visitor to the Castletowns at Doneraile resulting in a frequent correspondence. See review of G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (OUP ?1993), in The Irish Times (26 April 1994.)

Holmes is where the heart is?: Patrick Maume, writing in the RIA Dictionary entry on Canon Sheehan, remarks that the Doneraile parish priest did not seem to know that Lady Castletown and Holmes were having an affair.

David Alvey, writing on Thomas Davis as ‘the key to peace’ in writes in The Irish Times (10 Aug. 1995), instances Canon Sheehan as the most interesting case of those who understood his legacy: ‘In 1910, he helped to establish a political movement called the All Ireland League, a movement which opposed the advance of sectarianism in the Home Rule Party and worked to establish links with Ulster Protestantism. /.../ The league, which at its height captured eight parliamentary seats and produced a daily newspaper, and which ultimately became swallowed up in the convulsions of the Great War and the 1916 Rising, show what a nationalist movement wholly based on Davis’s vision would be like.’ (p.12.)

Ruth Dudley Edwards: The title of Sheehan’s novel Triumph of Failure (1899) was adopted by Ruth Dudley Edwards for her biography of Patrick Pearse (1977).

Padraig A. Daly wrote “Summers in Doneraile”, a poem on Canon Sheehan (noticed in Dictionary of Irish Literature, ed. Robert Hogan, 1979).

Cahal B. Daly (Bishop of Derry) - former owner of copies of A Spoiled Priest (1905), Intellectuals (1911) andd Tristram Lloyd (Phoenix edn. [1930]) - all held in Library of Queen’s Univ. Belfast [COPAC].

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