The Irish weren’t the only people who thought that the grandee landlords were a bit too absent. Apparently, when Lord Galway sought election in York he was opposed on just such grounds, together with his obvious self-interest as to a juicy posting in the British foreign service. While looking for details of works on Irish family history I was mistakenly directed by the COPAC database to this curious document - a polling pamphlet of 1784:

To the freemen of York: Permit me, my Brother Freemen, to ask you a few Questions before you give your Votes? Hath not our worthy old Member Lord John Cavendish always behaved to us in the most Honourable Manner? Did not Lord Gallway act most shabbily by us at the last election. Were not our Names then ordered in by his Committee under the denomination of Poor Indigent Objects of Charity? Were not a great number of our names struck out, because we provided decently for our Families? Did not this Irish Lord give up his Seat in Parliament for Pomfret and leave his Constituents on the bare promise of an Embassy? Is it not likely that he will also desert us as soon as he can get a Place? Will it not be a reflection upon us to have our names appear in a Poll-Book, that we voted for such a Man, whose duty if he did it, is to attend the Irish House of Lords? Sir William Milner’s Family served us faithfully, and he and Lord John Cavendish have all the Interest of the late Sir Charles Turner. A Cobler / [by Cobler]. 1784]

... which reminds me of a foolishness of my own when yonks ago I was an underling in Hodges & Figgis’s on Nassau Street. Casting a quick eye over a cheque paid for some of Neville Figgis’s antiquarian books, it struck me that the tall gent who had just written it had omitted to sign his name, rather oddly supplying his address in its place- and that in the broadest terms: “Galway”. I hastened into the street to catch him up and posed my question, to which the answer came back promptly, ‘I am Galway’. Well, Galway, look at this! Not that a man is responsible for his anscestors, for isn’t the current Lord Leitrim and very amiable man?

Sir Garnet Wolseley [infra] was the Irish-born generalissimo of Victorian England whose organisational abilities made his name synonymous with tight-shippery of every kind (‘all Sir Garnet’). Long before the summit of his career. The lucky bugger died in 1913 before the world he knew in was thrown into disarray by World War I. For James Froude, a rather nasty piece of racist work, he was ’most distinguished living representative of the ’ in Ireland’ in the dedication to The in Ireland (1872), as he called him in a book which nettled W. E. H. Lecky into writing his volumes on eighteenth-century Ireland, intending to refute the charge that Anglo-Ireland was just a colonial garrison.

Now, suddenly, Wolseley crops up in Colm Toibin’s novel The Master where he features in an early chapter as Henry James’s host in Dublin during the soldier’s terms his period of tenure as Commander-in-chief in Ireland. Dervla Murphy and Angus Mitchell have had interesting things to say about Wolseley - see our RICORSO record, infra - a hugely sanguine battler, and his brother Frederick, a leading figure in the rubber trade. As a final irony - if it is such, Wolseley’s birthplace was Golden Bridge, the venue of the recent orphanage scandals in Catholic, post-independence Ireland.

If Wolseley is a relative obscure - at least, uncelebrated - Irish avatar, Oscar Wilde is no such thing, and Toibin’s treatment of the coincidence that Wilde’s Earnest succeeded when James Domville failed is one of the most scintillating things in an astonishingly bright novel. By bright I mean that Toibin has now manifestly demonstrated both the the subtly of her sense of the artistic life, keenness of his imagination, and the astonishing range of his resources as a reader and a writer.

Thanks to Inter-library Loan and the collection at Aberdeen UL, I recently got sight of Sr. Una Agnew’s Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh (1998), a work which states the argument in question in the fullest possible way. Agnew draws on previous versions of the same disputation in Tom Stack’s Harvard dissertation of 1986 (“Ordinary Plenty: Patrick Kavanagh and the Catholic Imagination”) and a slightly later version in Michael Howlett’s dissertion on “The Human Condition in the Writings of Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967): A Theological Exploration”, submitted at the Gregorian University, Rome, in October, 1990.

Both are mentioned in her valuable bibliography, sections of which have been added to the Kavanagh pages of this website [see under Patrick Kavanagh]. Aside form the ground-breaking biographical research which turned up the story of Kavanagh’s errant grandfather (Peter Kevany, rightly-named), her interpretation suggests Kavanagh was a believer in the spirit of Vatican II avant le mot - an Irish mystic sine hell-fire and attendant sexual guilt.

This is an attractive view of Kavanagh, and one that confers new relevance on him, no only for the religious but for all those who hope to trace the origins and growth of a new spirituality in Ireland. That said, Seán MacReamoinn, the epitome of liberal gaelgóir-Catholicism himself - is imperfectly convinced by the thesis of a ‘mystical Kavanagh’, in part because Kavanagh was so unconvincing in the role of saint in his day-to-day existence (cadger, curmudgeon, drunk).

Agnew is unambiguous about her own religious faith, which has both a traditional and a modern side to it, if little sign of philosophical sophistication. It is in the spirit of the traditional Irish cleric that she concludes, pleasantly enought, that Kavanagh ‘undoubtedly’ rests in Heaven in keeping with the superficial sense of one of his best-known poems (though I doubt his eschatology on that or any other occasion stands up to close examination). All being said and done, it might be best to corrale him with the other ‘secular mystics’ of modern Irish poetry, among whom Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney can be numbered in the first rank.

It is one of the lesser ironies of Irish history that the man who ‘shopped’ Peter Kevany, the errant grandfather of Patrick Kavanagh, for cohabitation with Nancy Callan was W. Steuart Trench , a land-agent to the Shirley estates in Monaghan where Kevany’s national school was situated. Trench is the author of Realities of Irish Life, the book so often held up as a prime example of the Malthusian perspective on Irish famine which is accredited with aggravated a tragic situation. When the book was reprinted in 1966, Kavanagh wrote the foreword - though with making any allusion to his school-teacher grandpa’s troubles. (Agnew calls the author Stuart Trench.)