Life
1798-1854
[T. Crofton Croker]; b. Buckingham Square, Cork, 15 Jan.; son of a major
in 38th regt. of foot; first employed in merchant business; helped establish
Cork Scientific Society in his teens; became known as a painter, and illustrated
his own works; collected folklore in the countryside, frequently returning
to do so throughout his life; moved to London on the death of his father
in 1818 [var. 1817]; appt. to clerkship at the Admiralty at age of 21
through patronage of J. W. Croker, a friend of his father’s, but
no relation; contributed to Morning Post, and edited at various
times The Keepsake (1824), Fraser’s Magazine and Gentleman’s
Magazine; issued Researches in the South of Ireland (1824),
based on tours of 1812 and 1822, illustrated by Marianne Nicholson, whom
he married in 1830; Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland
[2 pts.] (London: Murray 1825, 1828) correspondence with Grimm brothers,
1826-28, included in second volume of foregoing; co-fnd. Camden Society,
1839; also co-fnd, Percy Society, 1840, editing several eighteenth-century
Irish songs dealing with Thurot’s seizure of Carrickfergus, 21 Feb.,
and subsequent death in battle, 26 Feb. 1760; also co-fnd. Archaeological
Assoc., 1843; member of Hakluyt Soc., for publication of rare and Valuable
Voyages, Travels, and Geog. Records, 1846; reached position of first clerk,
with £800 a year and retired on generous pension of $580, 1850 [aetat.
52]; intimate with Sir Walter Scott, and m. dg. of Francis Nicholson;
d. at home, Old Brompton, 8 Aug.; d. Brompton; bur. Brompton Cem. IF
DNB JMC DIB DIW DIH DIL MKA RAF OCEL OCIL FDA
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Works
Researches in the South of Ireland Illustrative of the Scenery,
Architectural Remains, and the Manners and Superstitions of the Peasantry,
with an appendix containing a private narrative of the Rebellion of 1798
(London: J. Murray 1824), 4to., contains 17 lithograph ills. chiefly by
Marianne Nicholson; Do., Kevin Danaher, intro. [rep. edn.] (IUP
1968); Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland [2
pts.] (London: Murray 1825, 1828),and Do. Facs. rep. (London: Collins
1998), 393pp.; Daniel O’Rourke, or Rhymes of a Pantomime (London:
Ainsworth 1828); Legends of the Lakes, or Sayings and Doings at Killarney
(London: Ebers 1829); Landscape Illustrations of Moore’s ‘Irish
Melodies’ (London: Power 1835); The Tour of the French Traveller
M. de la Boullaye le Gouz in Ireland AD 1644 (London: T. W. Boone
1837); Memoirs of Joseph Holt, General of the Irish Rebels in 1798
[... &c.] (London: Henry Colburn 1838); The Popular
Songs of Ireland (London: Colburn 1839); The Historical Songs of
Ireland (London: T. Richards 1841) [var. G.; DIL], printed for the
Percy Society, Vol. I]; Narratives Illustrative of the Contests
in Ireland in 1641 and 1690 [Camden Society] (London: Bowyer Nichols
1841) [contains Siege of Ballaly Castle and Macariae Excidium];
ed., A Pastoral in Imitation of the First Eclogue of Virgil [encomium
of Fellows of TCD first pub. Dublin 1719] (London: Percy Soc. 1842); A
Kerry Pastoral (London: T. Richards 1843), reprinted for Percy Soc.;
The Keen of the South of Ireland (London: T. Richards 1844), printed
for Percy Soc.; Popular Songs Illustrative of the French Invasions
of Ireland (London: Percy Soc., 1845-47) [Percy Soc. Publ, XXI, Pt.II:
‘The Siege of Carrickfergus’, pp.10-13; ‘Thurot’s
Dream’, pp.17-19; ‘The Capture of Carrickfergus’, pp.20-23];
A Walk from London to Fulham (London: W. Tegg 1860).
(Reprint), Thomas Crofton Croker, intro. by Francesca Diano [Italian translator] Fairy Legends and Traditions in the South of Ireland [facs. of 1825 edn.] (London: Collins Press 1998), 393pp.
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Criticism
Bridget
G. MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker 1798-1854’, in Studies,
32 (1943), pp.529-55.
Russell Alspach, Irish Poetry From the Invasion to 1798 (Phil: Pennsylvania UP 1959).
Robert Welch, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish, 1789-1897 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1988).
Mary Helen Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (1980).
B. G. MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’, in Studies, 32, 1943, pp.539-56.
James Hardiman in Irish Minstrelsy
(1831; IUP rep. edn. 1971), lxxvii, ftn.
Edward Hirsch, ‘"Contention Is Better Than Loneliness": The Poet as Folklorist’, in Ronald Schleifer, ed., The Genres of Irish Literary Revival, Wolfhound 1980, p.17). [Comm, examples under St. Patrick, infra.]
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984), p.326).
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Notes
Dictionary
of National Biography, calls him a friend of Tom Moore to whom he
sent reliques of Irish poetry; founder of Percy Society, 1840, and British
Arch. Assoc., 1843; best known works, Fairly Legends and Traditions
of the South of Ireland (1825), and Popular Songs of Ireland
(1839). QRY Fairy Legends & Traditions From The South of Ireland (London 1826) [LIB HB].
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1912), adds that only one copy of ‘History of Kilmallock’ was printed, and this was given to Thomas Moore (see Moore’s letters to Dublin University Magazine, 1849, Vol. 2, p.213. Also that a son Thomas Francis Dillon Croker (1831-1912) wrote poems for Mirth, Sharpe’s London Magazine, and was known as an antiquarian.
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979), cites Researches &c (1824 [sic]) not admired but not greatly successful; Fairy Legends a popular success, bringing praise from Wilhelm Grimm, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott (who described Croker as ‘little as a dwarf, keen-eyed as a hawk, and of easy, prepossessing manners, something like Tom Moore’). The stories are inhabited by Banshees, Merrows, Phooksas and Cluricaunes, taken from dictation and arranged in effective narrative structures. Yeats remarked that his work ‘caught the very choice of the people, the very pulse of life ... full of harum-scarum gentility, [he] saw everything humorized. His work is touched everywhere with beauty - a gentle Arcadian beauty’ [in Fairy & Folktales of the Irish Peasantry, 1888].
Popular Songs of Ireland, collected by Thomas Crofton Croker [in Morley’s Universal Library, No. 40] (London: Routledge 1886); Introduction by Henry Morley [LLD Prof. of English Univ. College, London], (pp.[5]-8), written commemoratively; relates that T. C. Croker was the son of Major Croker, counting among his friends John Wilson Croker of Galway (not a relative), who for more than twenty years, after 1809 was Sec. to the Admiralty; ‘John Wilson Croker’s Secretaryship of the Admiralty, however solved the material problem of life for his young friend [when] at the age of 21 Thomas Crofton Croker was made a junior clerk at the Admiralty and thenceforth proceeded to work his way up to the position of a first clerk with $800 a year’; retired at the age of 52 on pension of $580 a year [... &c.]; d. Old Brompton; member of Hakluyt Soc., for publication of rare and Valuable Voyages, Travels, and Geog. Records, 1846; incl. songs such as ‘there’s a dear little plant that grows in our isle, / Twas Saint Patrick himself, sure, that set it …’, adjudged by Padraic Colum to rank among ‘the worst verse in the world’ (Colum, A Treasury of Irish Folklore, 1954).
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives 10 extracts (pp. 680-738), incl. "The Confessions of Tom Bourke"; "The Soul Cages"; "The Haunted Cellar"; "Teigue of the Lee"; "Fairies or No Fairies?"; "Florry Cantillon’s funeral"; "The Banshee of the MacCarthys"; "The Brewery of Egg-Shells"; "The Story of the Little Bird" [recorded verbatim from an old woman at a holy well; printed in Amulet, 1827]; and verse, "The Lord of Dunkerron" [‘... O’Sullivan More / Why seeks he at midnight the sea-beaten shore ... loud, loud was the call of his serfs for their chief; / They sought him with accents of wailing and grief: / He heard, and he struggled - a wave to the shore / Exhausted and faint, bears O’Sullivan More!’ [end]. Notes that a poem translated from Irish appeared in The Morning Post, bringing him to the notice of Crabbe; supplied airs to Tom Moore, who acknoweldged same; exhibited in Fine Art Exhibition, Cork 1817; illustrations in The Literary Examiner, shortlived Cork periodical; his sketches of Sunday’s Well illustrated by verses by Father Prout [‘In yonder well there lurks a spell &c.’]; London, 1818; Fairy Legends trans. as Irische Elf-Marchen; Murray advised Croker to return to Ireland to ‘glean the remained of the fairy legends and traditions which he suspected were still to be found lurking among its glens ... making the most of my time hunting up and bagging all the old "gray superstitions" I could fall in with’; President of Soc. of Antiquaries in 1828; his wife wrote some stories appearing under his name (viz ‘Barney Mahoney’, and ‘My Village versus Our Village’) [cited as two very pop. humorous books, n.d., in DIW; ntry bibl., both 1832, and accredited prob. to Mrs Hall]; fnd. member of Camden Society in 1839, and Percy Society in 1840; Historical Songs formed part of third year’s issue by the former; General Holt edited from MS in possession of Sir Wiliam Bentham; contribu. 16 drawings to first Vol. of the Hall’s Ireland; edited an autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick(1848); also a lost play supposed to be by Massinger (1849); retired 1850 with pension; caught the very voice of the people ... &c [copied DIL supra], according to Yeats.
Brian McKenna, Irish Literature, 1800-1875: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978), cites The Adventurers of Barney Mahoney (London 1832), and drama, Harlequin or Eagle, or the Man in the Moon and His Wife (Adelphi 1826); Daniel O’Rourke, or Rhymes of a Pantomime (1828); Recollections of Old Christmas, A Masque (1890); obituary in Gentleman’s Magazine, NS (1854), pp.397-401; ‘Unpublished Letters of T. Crofton Croker,’ ed. Edmund Curtis, Irish Book Lover 28 (1941); also Bridget C. MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker 1798-1854,’ in Studies, 32 (1943) pp.539-56 [casts doubt on his knowledge of Irish]; Neil C Hultin, ‘Mrs Harrington, Mrs Leary, Mr Croker, and the "Irish Howl", Éire-Ireland 20.4 (Winter 1985), pp.43-64.
Cathach Bks. 12 lists Killarney Legends, Arranged as a Guide to the Lakes (London 1831), small. 8to; Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, ‘new and complete edition’ (London: Tegg n.d.) [Cathach 1996-97]. CATL, Memoirs of Joseph Holt, General of the Irish Rebels in 1798; memoirs edited from his original manuscript in the possession of William Betham (Colburn 1938) [1st edn. with details of Holt’s history and the contents of 2 vols.; Emerald Isle Books 95].
Morris Collection (UUC) holds Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland as illustrative of Irish political and domestic history, manners, music and superstitions (Percy Soc., 1844); The Keen of the South of Ireland as illustrative ... &c (1844); Popular Songs of Ireland (1886). BELF CEN holds 15 titles. CATL, Seven Irish Tales (157), ill. Eifriede Abbe; incl. Croker, patrick Kennedy, Letitia Maclintock [ltd. edn. 275]
Belfast Central Public Library holds Familiar Epistles (1805) [by John Wilson Croker].
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T. C. Croker believed that ‘the delusions of Irish folklore among the peasantry retarded the progress of their civilisation’ (Fairy Legends, Vol II, p.vii; cited in Mary Helen Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 1980, p.65.)
Thackeray refers to Crofton Croker’s ‘lake fairy or princess’ at Glengarriff in Irish Sketchbook (1842; Blackstaff, 1985) p. 128. And NOTE, founded Percy Society for publication of old English lyrics and ballads with Dyce and others, 1840. FDA contains one editorial reference only, with Eyre Evans Crowe’s Today in Ireland, Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions in the South of Ireland (both 1825), characteristic specimen of the kind of material that was to be incorporated into the fiction of novelists like Gerald Griffin and John & Michael Banim [Seamus Deane, FDA2 3].
H. Halliday Sparling, ed., Irish Minstrelsy: Being a selection of Irish Songs, Lyrics, and Ballads (London: Walter Scott 1888), Intro., [on Croker:] ‘His knowledge of history was more than equalled by misapplication of its meaning, and Popular Songs of Ireland gave to the world the thought and feeling of a class as that of a nation, and seemed for ever to confirm the slander that Irish songs were "either pure English, or mere gibberish".’ [xvii.]
Sylvester Mahony (‘Father Prout’) cites Croker at the outset of his columns in Fraser’s Magazine: ‘During my short stay at Watergrasshill, a wild and romantic district of which every brake and fell,every bog and quagmire, is well known to Crofton Croker - for it is the very Arcadia of his fictions, I formed an intimacy with this Father Andrew Prout [..., &c.; see continuation under Mahony, Rx; quoted in Benedict Kiely, ‘Irish Potato and Attic Salt’, ‘A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays, Cork UP 1999, pp. 66-78, p.70.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)