Table Of ContentPEARGUS 0»CONNOR; IRISHMAN AND CHARTIST
A Study of his Life and Work.
Eric Glasgow.
45 York Road,
Birkdale,
Southport,
Lancs.
1950.
ProQuest Number: 27529426
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
uest
ProQuest 27529426
Published by ProQuest LLO (2019). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author.
All rights reserved.
This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO.
ProQuest LLO.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.Q. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346
.'- )! ï'.-Iwc.i.'. oA
-'.ïr
vTî-b^: ii:'-
. ' £ V "Jna: =
#%
ii^' ÇSÜ *" .iS ."-TC'^ A. .
.•tod fij i->, f-nil-'F ai-i~‘
. . . vale^fertT S:r J..: *y :• :1l> TÏY ”
.poiq'i -:i''- Ir'îPHfIC enT J i IV
.£.^n30'À :- r^S t. il.'3 : . ..
1*
P fer:9.Z idf “-o '^'i.: ri':@ci- e#T
.'>j •>£io*> LruJ ara "l'o brg ariï
ri'-; JoX 'SO: . . 11/ '• s/i
.'I5':3SJ o'- : .I -n V5jralô‘iï Ü i IX
. ,'iSf y i'BFïJ W " "
,' c 'ievlop'ro V-: , '»
ISTii’OL- &/•:•■•■ T Xlta-z><]çJ;
' - vo feTljn^*ïO'" ) I
,Y^:!qeTjnj I ' ..
JOHNK
üNIVERbi»
LIBRARY
CONTENTS
Summary of results of research.
Acknowledgments.
To the reader.
pter I - Introduction.
M II - The Family Background.
It III - The Early Years,
M IV - Reform and Repeal in County Cork.
It V - M.P. for County Cork.
It VI - The Radical Agitator,
II VII - Chartism Frustrated,
II VIII - The Chartist Champion.
It IX - Behind the Scenes,
It X - The Beginning of the Land Scheme,
It XI - The End of the Land Scheme,
It XII - M.P. for Nottingham,
It XIII - Ireland’s Lost Leader,
It XIV - The Last Years,
tt XV - Conclusion,
>endlx I - The Conner Family,
It II — Some Portraits of Feargus O’Connor
Bibliography.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS OF RESEARCH P.II.
The main aspects of the subject on which I claim to be able to
throw a distinctly new light as a result of research are the following
1, O’Connor’s ancestry and family background - papers preserved
at Manch House, County Cork, and secondary accounts by
W.J.O’Neill Daunt and Sir Bernard Burke, the genealogist,
2, His activities in County Cork and particularly the events
^ leading up to his election in 1832 - local newspapers and
material, printed and manuscript, left by W.J.O’Neill Daunt,
3, His early attempts at organising English Radicalism, before
the advent of Chartism - newspapers and journals of
London, Leeds and Manchester,
4, His influence on Chartism seen from the ”Northem Star”,
5, The land scheme, on which there is room for an intensive
study - newspapers and pamphlets; local knowledge,
6, The last stage of Chartism after 1848, unduly neglected by
previous historians,
7, The public attitude towards O’Connor at the time of his
death.
There still remain topics which might be developed further,
notably the land scheme and O’Connor’s relations with his constituents
at Nottingham, I hope ultimately to deal with these in greater detail
than has been possible in the present study.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS P.Ill,
I am greatly indebted to the following for information or
permission to consult papers in their care
H.L,Conner Esq,, B.L,, D.J,, Manch House, Ballineen,
County Cork;
Miss D.O’Neill Daunt, Kilcascan, Ballineen, County Cork;
Dr, Richard Hayes, the National Library, Dublin;
\ Dr, Edward MacLysaght, Genealogical Officer, Dublin Castle;
T.U.Sadleir Esq,, M.A., M.R.I.A., Librarian of the King’s
Inns, Dublin;
J.H.Scholes Esq,, Curator, the Kirk Collection at the
Castle Museum, York;
V Norman Harding Esq,, for information about his forthcoming
work on Thomas Allsop;
Professor David Williams, for notifying me of the Chartist
material at Birmingham;
Mrs, I,Davidson, for information about the land settlement
at Heronsgate, Rickmansworth,
Herts;
Arthur J.Hawkes Esq,, P.S.A,, late Borough Librarian of
Wigan;
and to not a few others for dealing patiently and helpfully with an
indefatigable correspondent.
TO THE READER P.IV.
Before you turn these pages, before you enter the strife and
suffering of a distant age, remember that there is no perfection in
human things, and that to judge men, even when embalmed by time, as if
they should have possessed complete wisdom and complete foresight is
to disinherit the work they tried to do. The noble calling of an
historian does not demand that he should forget that merit is harder
to attain in the stress of life than in the cool detachment of a
study, fortified by the passage of years. In the inscrutable depths
of human nature much is written that even he cannot read, and that is
best passed on to some higher authority. His task is surely to
understand without condoning, to interpret without losing sight of
the ultimate standards, and to err, if err he must, on the side of too
much generosity in the ascription of motive. To God alone is it given
to be infallible and to recognise all the engines of human conduct in
a period of peculiar difficulty. The historian must move with less ^
certainty when he deals with the blunders and triumphs, the ugliness
and beauty, of human enterprise in a complicated and afflicted world.
Hardly less alive to the inner mystery of life must be the reader,
can see little more than the pattern of the ripples stirred by the
eddying wind. The most he can hope for is to widen his experience of
the ardours and perplexities of the human soul, embedded in the hard
framework of political and social controversy. In the varied and
active career of Feargus O’Connor he may not be deprived of a
message worth receiving.
CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION P.l.
The occurrence in our own time of what may he regarded as the
final stage in the conflict between capital and labour has drawn
attention to the Chartist movement which, occupying roughly the
decade between 1838 and 1848, represents the first expression, on a
large scale, of self-conscious solidarity and systematic unrest
among the working-classes in England, Recent experiences in social
problems, both in this country and abroad, have emphasised the value
of going back to the troubles of an earlier period, when working-men,
engulfed in the first consuming onslaught of the Industrial Revolution,
sought relief from their sufferings in the acquisition of political
rights as a means of securing a more equitable distribution of social
benefits. However painful it may sometimes be to study the internal
struggles of a single society, the rise and fall of hopes in the
Chartist agitation does reveal an age at least as bewildered and as
afflicted as the present one, which managed nevertheless to avoid
serious disorder, and finally to effect the necessary adjustments of
old political apparatus to suit drastically changed social conditions.
An acquaintance with the protracted anguish of the factory towns, the
hunger, both spiritual and material, of the agglomerated multitudes,
hidden in the smoke and noise of competitive industrialism, deepens
our understanding of the combination of human and economic factors
which underlies all historical change, and enlarges our sympathies to
include the nameless, grey masses who, however inarticulate, provide
the basis of the historical process. We see new forces emerge, and
new types of leaders - the widening of political influence from the
few to the many, and the appearance of the demagogue who leads
because he submits to the prejudices and defects of the popular
outlook. In the light of current knowledge of class-warfare and social
upheaval our diagnosis of the strains and rifts within Chartism
becomes more definite and certain.
What especially benefits is the more elemental and ruthless
aspect of Chartism represented by Feargus O’Connor, Historians have
hitherto been too ready to dismiss O’Connor as an insincere adventurer
who brought to grief the constructive work which might have been done
by Lovett and his school. As G,D,H,Cole has pointed outj it is
scarcely possible to read about O’Connor without finding him uniformly
condemned and the whole burden of his career deplored. The reason for
this is partly too much confidence in the practical acumen of Lovett,
and partly the unfair assumption that O’Connor was a devotee of
"physical force," In fact the real revolutionists in Chartism were
few and relatively obscure; O’Connor was not necessarily evading the
logic of his own teaching when he took up a middle position, content
to use threats to sharpen the point of his demands. In justice to the
past it is necessary to move the centre for the interpretation of
Chartism from Lovett to O’Connor, who was far more influential and
virtually had the movement in his pocket throughout the later stages.
The great agitator has told us himself, with not very attractive
egotism,
"It is my boast that neither the living denouncer nor the
unborn historian can ever write of Chartism, leaving out the
name of Feargus O’Connor,"i
This has never been more true than it is now, and the object of the
pages which follow is to unravel the threads of O’Connor’s activities
from the tangled Chartist skein.
Chartism is not, however, the only movement involved, for
O’Connor was first and foremost an Irish orator, winning his most
authentic triumphs among the green hills and responsive peasants of
County Cork, where he rose from comparative obscurity to be the local
champion of Ireland’s collection of grievances, religious, political
and economic. To assess his life on his Chartist work alone is to view
it in quite a false perspective and to make its dominant traits really
incomprehensible. What happened to him in England is to be regarded as
1, "Chartist Portraits," 1941, p,300,
2, "The Labourer," 1847, Vol,I, p,176.
1
INTRODUCTION (CONTINUED) P.2.
a continuation, in variant form, of his first excursion into politics
in County Cork, concluded in 1835 owing to his quarrel with O’Connell,
The story we have to tell is, therefore, a full and interesting one,
ranging widely between Ireland and England, and disclosing not a few
unfamiliar facets. It contains plenty of tragedy and failure, incessant
conflict and acrimonious argument, but one scrutineer at any rate has
found in it a concealed element of nobility which mitigates its sordid
features, a poignancy of confused spiritual aspirations which redeems
it from a mere drive for power. Success is not the only, or even the
best, standard by which to judge merit and motive, nor does the
Icollapse of hopes imply futility in the ultimate sense. Lacking in
originality, consistency and sweet reasonableness as O’Connor
undoubtedly was, he nevertheless left an enduring impression upon the
course of Radical movements in England and Ireland alike. At least he
won for them attention when they were liable to be ignored, and made
the need for reform evident to all save the most obdurate. His
contribution, therefore, to the making of the modern world has been
considerable, and the ensuing study is not wholly irrelevant to the
issues facing us to-day.
CHAPTER II - THE FAMILY BACKGROUND P.5.
As soon as we begin to consider the career of Feargus O’Connor we
are faced with the problem of discovering in it a permanent and
consistent aim. Not only have the earlier Irish activities to be
reconciled with the long and diverse championship of Radicalism in
England, but the conflicting elements in O’Connor’s outlook have to be
explained, and if possible fitted into a coherent mental pattern. Some
sort of order has to be sought among the twists and turns, the vagaries
and incongruities, which confront even the most cursory observer. We
have to try to understand how it was that O’Connor managed to combine
extreme democratic sentiments with undisguised aristocratic pretensions,
a passion for equality and the liberation of the labouring masses with
pride in his own ancestry and exuberant hereditary claims. So the enemy
of privilege and tradition, the caustic assailant of the old order of
society, far from brandishing a humble origin before his vast and
delighted audiences, went out of his way to assure them that the royal
blood of Ireland flowed in his veins and that his quarrel with the
established nobility, more especially in Ireland, was that they were
comparative newcomers and not sufficiently exalted in birth. Stranger
still is the fact that, thanks to O'Connor’s unrivalled skill as a
demagogue, his proletarian followers detected nothing incompatible in
the conjunction of this lavish reliance upon descent with popular rights
and self-government. Superior critics might be either amused or
indignant at this blazon attempt to get the best of two opposed worlds,
but this did not destroy its emotional appeal to simple and unthinking
men. There was also O’Connor’s perpetual oscillation between physical
and moral force, his proneness to use the language of the first and the
policy of the second, his tendency to draw back when the crisis came and
repudiate the impression w ich his strong words were liable to convey.
It was easy, on outward evidence at least, to sustain a charge of
cowardice against O’Connor, but much of it depended upon failure to
understand the ideas, miscellaneous and barely assimilated as they were,
which lay behind his puzzling mental processes. His conduct might be
rather erratic, but a family likeness knit it together. Then came the
Land Scheme into which he diverted the later stages of Chartism, an
alien importation if ever there was one and carried out against loud
and widespread opposition. To many this excursion into agrarian
enterprise must have been startling, so reactionary and uncongenial was
it in a country whose economic future was obviously industrial, and
where O’Connor’s enthusiasm seemed quite out of place. In fact it was
drawn from very different surroundings and scarcely related to English
conditions, but why it happened need not be at all mysterious.
Much in O’Connor’s life seems inexplicable until it is related to
his Irish antecedents, when enduring motives and influences can be
discerned. The defect of the usual interpretation of his career is that
it is viewed mainly, if not entirely, from the English angle, so that
the perspective is wrong and the vitally important formative years are
left in almost unmitigated darkness. When more attention is given both
to the region in County Cork from which he came and to the family
background which he inherited, a more correct balance will be attained
and his life seen in its unity and basic continuity. Geographical
factors must have had a largely unconscious effect on his outlook. The
Bandon valley, the cradle of his early years, is still rather isolated
and unspoilt, and no doubt it was even more so when O’Connor knew it.
The wild uplands, the wooded hill-slopes, the primitive roads running
uneasily between the villages and scattered dwellings, must have helped
to kindle a passion for freedom and a hatred of restraint, a gusto for
life which was boisterous, untamed and spontaneous. Long hours in the
open air, with the horizon limited only by the inscrutable undulations
of the earth and the remote canopy of the sky, bred undisciplined
ardour and no tenderness towards what was artificial, external and
circumscribing. Turbulence could hardly have found a more promising
field of operations, for peasant oppression and religious jealousy
provided ample explosive material and communications were so bad that
the hand of authority was necessarily slow in action and patchy in
distribution, G,M,Trevelyan has said that the difficulty of getting
about did more for liberty in the Middle Ages than Magna Carta, and in
this respect conditions in County Cork were largely medieval even in
the nineteenth century. Far away from Dublin, and insulated by
