Matt[hew] Talbot (1856-1925)


Life
self-styled ‘servant of God’; ed. O’Connell CBS; an alcoholic, he left his employment at the Board of Ports and Docks in disgrace; took a pledge of total abstinence, 1884 and gave up tobacco; engaged in ascetic practices; had a room in Gloucester St.; sought spiritual guidance from Dr. Hickey of Clonliffe; worked in Martin’s timberyard; read socialist literature and adhered to union rules in the 1913 Lockout Strike but remained inactive; received a disability benefit of 37.5p. p.w.;
 
collapsed and died in Granby row, on Sunday, 7 June 1925, and was discovered to be wearing chains on waist, arm, and leg; co-opted as working-class saint and national religious icon, notably in Irish Ways (1933); declared ‘Venerable’ by Vatican, 1976; a plaque was erected at Rutland Buildings (adjac. Parnell Sq.) and the new Liffey Bridge east of the Customs House was later named after him; he is the subject of play by Thomas Kilroy. DIB FDA OCIL

[ top ]

Criticism
Joseph Aloysius Glynn, A Life of Matt Talbot (1926) [var. 1928: DIW]; M. G. Carroll, The Story of Matt Talbot (Cork 1948); Mary Purcell, Matt Talbot and His Times, with foreword by John Charles McQuaid, Archb. of Dublin (Dublin: Gill & Son 1954), 278pp.

The Irish Way - 432-1932 (London [Paternoster Row]: Sheed & Ward 1932), a collection of brief essays, [with] eighteen portraits of Irish saints and other exemplary Catholics coinciding with the Eucharist Congress in Dublin; it explicitly connects Catholicism and nationalism; incls. as its final biographical vignette an account of Matt Talbot; a foreword by F. J. Sheed argues that the portraits represent the Irish “nation personified”: “The aim of this book is to show what Catholicism is in the Irish, and the method has been to take a number of great Catholics who were typically Irish and show what manner of people they were” (p.v; see Wim Van Mierlo & Ingeborg Landuyt, ‘Catholicism, Nationalism, and Exile: Sheed and Ward’s Irish Way in [FW Notebook] VI.B.34’, in Genetic Joyce Studies (Spring 2002) - online; accessed 26.06.2011.

[ top ]

References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3: remarks at pp.1141, 1307.

[ top ]