Life
1818-1894 [James Anthony Froude]; ed. Westminster and Oriel College, Oxon.;
fellow; ‘Life of St. Neot’ for Newman’s Lives of the
English Saints (1844); Nemesis of Faith (1849), an unorthodox
work concerning a young man who takes orders and falls into disbelief
and adultery; the text was was publicly burned by William Sewell; Froude
resigned fellowship, met Carlyle, and became chief disciple; issed History
of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish
Armada, 12 vols. (1856-70); ed. Fraser’s Magazine, 1860-74;
rector of St. Andrews, 1868; published ‘A Fortnight in Kerry’,
in Cornhill Magazine (1870); published The English in Ireland
in the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (1872-74), in which he called the
Irish ‘the spendthrift sister of the Arian race’; the first
volume deals with the history of Ireland from the conquest to 1760, featuring
paricularly ‘The Insurrection of 1641’ and ‘Irish Ideas’,
a dark portrait of national crime; the second embraces the the ‘Protestant
rebellion’ of Grattan’s parliament, while the third deals wholly
with the Rebellion of 1798, ending, ‘We cannot govern India; we cannot
govern Ireland’; lectured in America, 1872, and was driven from thence
by Irish-American riots; travelled in South Africa, and argued for confederation;
sole literary executor of Thomas Carlyle, 1881; ed. and published Carlyle’s
Reminiscences (1881) and biographical works; his biography of Carlyle
criticised for frankness, especially in relation to Miss Welsh’s
motives in marrying Carlyle and her subsequent unhappiness; visited Australia,
1884-45; issued Oceania, or England and her Colonies (1886); English
in the West Indies (1888); lectures on Erasmus, 1894; Council of
Trent (1896); Froude began English in Ireland in the 18th Century
(1872-74), at Laraugh; The English in Ireland inspires Lecky to digress
from his History of England in the Eighteenth Century to write corresponding
Irish volumes intended to repute Froude's 'calumnies' against the Anglo-Irish
in styling them a garrison; Froude issued Two Chiefs of Dunboy
(1889), a novel set in Kerry in the 1770s concerning the between Colonel
Goring, a law-abiding and progressive settler, and Morty Sullivan, the
dispossessed chieftain and whiskey-smuggler; remembered as a propagandist
for empire more valued as a prose-writer than a historian. DNB IF NCBE
OCEL ODQ SUTH OCIL FDA
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Works
Fiction, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: or, An Irish romance of the
last century (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1889, 1891), [4],
456pp. [with 16pp. adverts.]; and Do. [abridged edn.], ed. & foreword
by A. L. Rowse (London: Chatto & Windus 1969), 283pp.
Historical works, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1872-74); Do [with new preface] (1881); Do, further edns. in 1882, 1884, 1886, 1874, 1894, 1895, 1901, 1906, &c. [infra]; also Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty years of His Life 1795-1881, 4 vols. (London: Longmans 1882-84), and num. other works. Articles, 'A Fortnight in Kerry', in Cornhill Magazine, 1 (1870), pp.513-31.
Bibliographical
details
The English in Ireland [... &c.]
[rep. edn.] (London: Longmans 1886), Vol. 1: xviii, 704pp.; vol. 2: xii,
568pp.; Vol. £: xiii, 608pp. [incl. index].
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Criticism
‘The Sophistries of Froude Refuted’, in Very Rev. Thomas N.
Burke, OP, Lectures on Faith and Fatherland (Burnes & Oates,
n.d.), pp.117-288
Herbert Paul, The Life of Froude (1905) [var. 1907]
Donal McCartney, ‘James Anthony Froude and Ireland: A Historiographical Controversy of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Irish University Review (Spring 1971).
Lawrence McBride, ed., Reading Irish Histories: Texts, Contexts, and the Creation of National Memory, 1870-1922 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2003).
Oscar Wilde, review of Two Chiefs of Dunboye (1889)
in Pall Mall Gazette (13 April 1889).
C. Litton Falkiner, Studies in Irish History and Biography (Longman & Co [1901]), on Froude and the Irish rebellion of 1642, p. 158
Cardinal Moran, Civilization of Ireland before the Anglo-Norman Invasion [pamphlet] (Dublin: CTS n.d), pp. 10-11.
Michael MacDonagh, ‘The Sunniness of Irish Life’, in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature,(1904), Opening essay, Vol. 8 of Irish Literature, 1904.
Tim Healy, Stolen Waters (1913), p.403,
William Bullen Morris, Ireland and St. Patrick; pp. 171-72.
Chris Corr, ‘English Literary Culture and Irish Literary Revival’, PhD Thesis, UUC 1995, p.68].
L. P. Curtis, ed. & abr. Lecky History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, Chicago 1972.
A. L. Rouse, 'Foreword', Two Chiefs (1969).
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland ((London: Allen Lane 1988), p.103).
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995), p.37
Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Allen Lane 1993), pp.9-10.)
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Notes
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919),
lists History of England (1869); English in Ireland provoked
Lecky and also Father Thomas Burke’s Froude on Ireland; stayed
at Derreen, Kenmare, Co. Kerry, where he began English in Ireland (Vol.
1, 1872); the novel Dunboy [1889] ‘embodies his chief
ideas on Ireland’; O’Sullivan country in SW Cork, 1750-98; Brown
summarises Froude’s thesis: if England had replaced the hopeless
Celt by Anglo-Saxon and Protestant colonists, she would have avoided her
subsequent troubles in Ireland [but see quotations
under 'Failed experiment'].
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations selects [of two]: ‘Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only [animal] to whom torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself,’ from Oceania; also ‘Fear is the parent of cruelty’; ‘Men are made by nature unequal ... vain to treat them as if they were equal.’
Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble (1985, 1996), emphasises his temperamental problems, as early casualty of Oxford Movement; wrote spectacularly bad novel, Nemesis of Faith (1849) out his sexual frustration, causing him to leave the University; his American tour cut short by Irish nationalist agitation; his Reminiscences of Carlyle (1881) and Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1883) distinguished by their shattering frankness; bibl., Herbert Paul, Life of Froude (1907); Waldo Hilary Dunn’s biography (1961-63).
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 , 380-83 reprints Oscar Wilde's review of The Two Chiefs of Dunboye (1889), ‘Mr Froude’s Blue Book on Ireland’ [here 380-83], first printed in [?recte] Pall Mall Gazette, 13 April 1889; Declan Kiberd writes [ed. essay, 375-76]: 'In a review of Froude’s Two Chiefs, [Wilde] ridiculed its theory that Celts only thrive under the rule of Anglo-Saxons. Froude had indicted the Anglo-Irish ascendancy not for its cruelty, but for its inefficiency in enforcing the law. ‘Mr Froude admits the martyrdom ... carried out’ Froude had endorsed Matthew Arnold’s comment on the inability of the Celt to cope with the tyranny of fact, to the great disgust of Wilde, in whose moral lexicon the word fact enjoyed a low estimate. ‘‘The Irish, [Froude] tells us, had disowned the facts of life and the facts of life had proved the strongest.’ Wilde closed his review with a wicked inversion of the author’s original purpose, ‘As a record, however, of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own wishes his book is not without value’, mischievously adding the afterthought that, ‘There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people [. Note, FDA3 remarks that of W. E. H. Lecky that his History of Ireland in the 18th Century effectively exposes the intemperate rancour of the former’s [i.e., Froude's] work [see further under Lecky, Rx.].
‘The Smugglers’, being a section in The English in Ireland, (Vol. I, Book III, Chap. II; 1881 Edn. pp.504-56), deals with circumstances that form the plot of The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889).
Unsigned anniversary account of the 1641 Rebellion, in Fortnight, 299 (Oct. 1992), p.31, alludes the argument between Lecky and Froude which sparked off numerous books including Thomas Fitzpatrick’s Bloody Bridge [1903].
W. E. H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, being last five of his History of England in the Eighteenth Century 1878-1890), were inspired by the aim of refuting Froude’s ‘calumnies on the Irish people’; and note also W. B. Yeats’s phrase, in the second of a series of articles on Samuel Ferguson.
Denis Murphy castigates Froude the historian in Cromwell in Ireland, ‘Mr Froude has been unlucky he did not fall in with this detailed account given by [an eye-witness at Drogheda]. It proves his assertion to be wholly false, that there is no evidence from an eye-witness that women and children were killed otherwise than accidentally.’ (See extract in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, 1904). Note that Froude’s quotes Theobald Wolfe Tone: ‘A country so great a stranger to itself as Ireland, where North and South and East and West meet to wonder at each other, is not yet prepared for the adoption of one political faith ... &c.’ [see further under Tone, Rx.]
Austin Clarke writes of ‘the dogmatism of Froude, attracted and repelled in turn by an alien way of life and thought’. (‘Gaelic Ireland Rediscovered’, in Seán Lucy, Irish Poets in English, Cork: Mercier 1972, p.30.)
Standish James O’Grady cited Two Chiefs of Dunboy with approbation as Mr. Froude’s ‘spirited novel’ in the preface to Ulrick the Ready (1896), p.iv. See also O’Grady’s comments in ‘Introduction’ to Pacata Hibernia Or a History of the Wars in Ireland (London: Downey & Co. 1896): ‘Mr Froude’s picture of the up-right, God-fearing, and civilised Englishman contending against a flood of barbarism, is doubly untrue’ (p.xxx; quoted in David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, Manchester 1988; see further under O'Grady, Rx.)
Terence de Vere White writes in Encyclopaedia of Ireland (Allen Figgis 1967): 'James Anthony Froude’s novel about Kerry, where he used to come for his holidays - The Two Chiefs of Dunboy is due for a revival’ (pp.348-49). Note the Rowse's abridged edition followed two years after.
Oxford Literary Guide to British Isles cites Lauragh in Kerry as the place where he wrote his Irish novel, ‘with only a peat-stack for prospect’.
W. E. Gladstone, rehearsing the themes of J. A. Froude’s famous 1876 lecture, On the Uses of the Landed Gentry, ‘Even the Irish Nationalists may perceive that those marked out by leisure, wealth and station, for attention to public duties, and for the exercise of influence, may become in no small degree, the national and effective, and safe leaders of the people.’ (Quoted Paul Bew, writing on Parnell, in Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1991, p. 19.)
Hyland Catalogue (No. 214) lists Short Studies on Great Subjects (1898), vols. 1-3 [only]; vol. 3 has articles on 'Fortnight in Kerry', and 'Ireland Since the Union'; also Herbert Paul, The Life of Froude (1905)
Stevens Catalogue (1995) lists James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle, A History of the First Forty years of His Life 1795-1881, 4 vols. (London: Longmans 1882-4) [35].
De Burca Catalogue (No. 18) lists Rev. T. N. Burke, Ireland’s Case Stated in reply to Mr. Froude (NY Haverty, 1873), pp. 238..
Belfast Public Library holds The English in Ireland, 3 vols. (1907-1906 sic); Two Chiefs of Dunboy; also, My Relations with Carlyle (1903).
Belfast Linen Hall Library holds The English in Ireland in the 18th century, 3 vols. (1872-74); University of Ulster Library, Morris Collection holds The English in Ireland &c, 3 vols. (1901).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)