Samuel Ferguson’s Maudlin Jumble

The new Irish lyric in English after Thomas Moore gave as many opportunities for Tory fun as it did for radical censure, combining the rude and the refined or the authentic and the counterfeit in a strange synthetic stew. If Erin had a tear and a smile in its eye, the mixing of the modes might also be difficult to pin down: the tear was allied to a subject-matter grounded in political as much as amorous defeat and the smile suggested that amorous or political mischief was never far away. Moore, author of the bestselling Irish Melodies , was not just the friend of Byron, but his biographer and co-conspirator in the destruction of the supposedly scandalous journals. He was also the thinly-veiled ventriloquist behind the Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824) a text rather closer to Irish mischief than its author’s London Whig connections might suggest. One of Moore’s successors, the young barrister and unionist antiquarian Samuel Ferguson, writing for an Irish Tory audience, was more willing to accept that the tear was the true expression of Gaelic poetry and music. He would, however, not shirk translating the strangeness of writing from a Catholic culture which retained more than just a memory of its Gaelic past. Not only was it not wholly vanquished, but after the Emancipation of 1829, it was turning its attentions to the Union of 1801 itself. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.