Life
1879-1949 [Robert Wilson Lynd; occas. pseud. ‘Roibeárd Ua
Floinn’ or Ó Floinn]; descended from Charles Lynd, Presbyterian
minister who settled at Rathmullen (though shipbound for Larne); b. 20
April, Brookhill Ave., Cliftonville Rd., Belfast, son of son of Robert
John Lynd, Presbyterian minister [at May St. Presbyterian Church] and
Sarah (née Rentoul); ed. Royal Acad. Inst. (RBAI) and QUB, 1896-97;
meets James Connolly; mother dies running for a train, 1896; grad. in
classics, 1899; reporter in Northern Whig, 1899; reporter on Manchester
Daily Dispatch, 1900; shared studio with Paul Henry while doing freelance
journalism in London, contributing to Today and Black and White;
learns and teaches Irish, Gaelic League, St. Andrew’s Hall (Oxford
St.), teaching Roger Casement, 1902-03; Cloghaneely Summer College with
Casement; there meets Dublin-born poet Sylvia Dryhurst, 1904, whom he
married; contrib. to Hobson’s the republic, 1906; issued The Orangemen
and the Nation (1907); d. of father, 17 Nov. 1907; m. Sylvia Bryhurst,
whom he met at the Gaelic League in London, 21 April, 1909; resides at
14 Downshire Hill, Hampstead; asst. lit. ed. to Daily News (becoming
News Chronicle in 1930), 1908; issues Irish and English (1908);
becomes reader for Mills & Boon; dg. Sigle b. 28 Feb., 1910; dg. Máire
b. 2 March, 1912; issued Rambles in Ireland (1912); lit ed., Daily
News, 1913, columnist in the Nation from 1908 and later for
New Stateman (ed. J. C. Squires), 1913-45; genial and witty essays
signed ‘Y.Y.’; supporter of Gaelic League and - more covertly
- Sinn Féin, writing under the pseud. ‘Riobard Ua Floinn’
in Uladh, 1905, and elsewhere; The Mantle of the Emperor
(1906); parts with Casement over the latter’s IRB membership; rejected
by army, 1914; encouraged Padraic Ó Conaire (see letter of 13 May
1915); writes ‘If the Germans conquered England (1915), printed in
the Irish War News; organises defence of Casement with Alice Stopford
Green, 1916; retires to Sussex during Zeppelin raids; edits works of James Connolly as Labour in Ireland, Labour
in Irish History, and The Reconquest of Ireland (1917); published
collected vols. of his essays and other books such as Home Life in
Ireland (1909), Ireland a Nation (1919), The Art of Letters
(1920), and Dr. Johnson and his Company (1929); Lynd wrote the
literary section in Saorstát Eireann: Irish Free State Official
Handbook (1932), which was edited by Bulmer Hobson; his essays for
New Statesman and Nation were published progressively in
thirty volumes; moved to 5, Keats Grove, London, where the Joyce’s
were guests at the time of their wedding, 1931; visited by Denis Johnston,
1934; moves to Dorking, 1943; writes as ‘John o’ London’
in magazine of that name;
‘YY’ column ends; part-time lit. ed. of New Chronicle;
QUB D.Litt, 1946; retires 20 April; d. 6 Oct.; bur. Belfast City Cemetery;
memorial service, May St., 10 Oct.; Sylvia d., 1952; Lynd’s papers
are held at James Joyce Foundation, Dublin. DNB DIW DIB DIL OCEL KUN
APP DUB OCIL
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Works
Irish and English (London: Francis Griffiths 1908); Home Life
in Ireland (London: Mills & Boon 1908); Rambles in Ireland
(London: Mills & Boon 1912); also US ed. (1912), 25 photos, 5 col.
ill. by Jack B Yeats; The Book of This and That (London: Mills
& Boon 1915); If the German conquereed England (Dub/London:
Maunsel 1917); Ireland a Nation (London: Grant Richards 1919);
The Art of Letters (London: Unwin 1920); The Passion of Labour
(London: G Bell 1920); Books and Authors (London: Richard Dobden-Sanderson
[1922]/London: Jonathan Cape 1929); Solomon in All His Glory (London:
Grant Richards 1922); the sporting Life and Other Trifles (London:
Grant Richards 1922); The Blue Lion, and Other Essays (London:
Methuen 1923); the Peal of Bells (London: Methuen 1924); The
Pleasures of Ignorance (London: Methuen 1924); The Money Box (London:
Methuen 1925); The Little Angel (London: Methuen 1926); The
Orange Tree (London: Methuen 1926); The Goldfish (London: Methuen
1927); The Green Man (London: Methuen 1928); It’s
a Fine World (London: Methuen 1930); Rain, Rain, Go to Spain
(London: Methuen 1933); The Cockleshell (London: Methuen 1933);
Both Sides of the Road (London: Methuen 1934); I Tremble to
Think (London: Dent 1936), ill. Spurrier; Searchlights and
Nightingales (London: Dent 1939); Life’s Little Oddities
(London: Dent 1941), ill.; Things One Hears (London: Dent
1945); Essays on Life and Literature, ed. Desmond MacCarthy [sel.
Sylvia Lynd] (London: Dent/NY: EP Dutton 1951); Books and Writers,
intro. by Richard Church (London: Dent 1952). Also, Galway of the Races,
selected essays, ed. Sean MacMahon (Dublin: Lilliput 1990). See also Eileen
Squire, sel. and intro., "YY": An Anthology of Essays
(1933).
Ireland a Nation (London: Grant Richards MDCCCCXIX 1919), epigram Gen. Smuts; includes successive chapters on under the caption ‘Voices of the New Ireland’, devoted to Dora Sigerson Shorter, Patrick Pearse, Tom Kettle, J. R. Green, and "AE" [George Russell]. The whole takes the view that Irish culture and the Irish mind were repressed by British colonialism, and that only in the late nineteenth century does it begin to emerge again; quotes extensively from Thomas MacDonagh, in Literature in Ireland (1916).
Saorstát Eireann: Irish Free State Official Handbook, ed. Bulmer Hobson (1932), contains contribute by ‘Roibeárd Ua Floinn as ‘The Ethics of Sinn Fein’, with sects.:‘Our Moral Obligations’, ‘The Necessity for Individual Actions’ [Every Irishman who does not speak Irish is against his will a representative of English domination in Ireland, 361], ‘The Policy of Me Fein [each should put into practice ... the Irish nation in miniature, 361], ‘Inter-dependence of State and Individual’; ‘Good Example’ [best method of propagating SF policy], ‘Our Models’ [Emmet, Davis], ‘the difference Between the Average nationalist and the Average Unionist’ [meetings equally noisy], ‘All Depends Upon Determination’ [no honest Irishman is the enemy of Ireland], ‘Brute Force versus Moral Persuasion’, ‘Self Sacrifice’ [quotes St. Paul, “if he had not charity ...”], ‘The Selfish Policy’, ‘The Remedy is in Our Own Hands’ [when every nationalist makes his or her character strong and self-reliant and beautiful, English domination will die for sheer lack of sustenance ... The only way to become a patriotic Irishman is to do your best to become a perfect man, 368 END].
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Criticism
Tony Canavan, ‘Robert Lynd, A Radical for Today?’, in Linenhall
Review 9, 2 (Autumn 1992), pp.4-8.
Dan Finlay, ‘The Man Who Bridged the Northern Gap’, in Books Ireland (April 2000/2001?), pp.97-98.
Irish Book Lover, Vols., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 13.
Robert Greacen, Brief Encounters, Literary Dublin
and Belfast in the 1940s (1991), p. 10.
Robert Greacen, apropos Northern Harvest (1944), ‘I managed to get an introduction out of Robert Lynd, then a notable man-of-letters and essayist in London. / Lynd wrote, ‘No such collection as this of Northern Irish literature could have been made when I was a boy in Belfast ... the omens for the future are good ...’ [
Robert Greacen, reviewing Patricia Craig, Rattle of the North, 1992, in Books Ireland (Oct. 1992).]
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Notes
Margaret Drabble, ed., Oxford Companion to English Literature (OUP
1985), characterises Lynd as a ‘light essayist devoted to Ireland.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 3, makes reference to early commentary on the critical writings of Thomas MacDonagh, Robert Lynd, Ireland A Nation (Grant Richards 1919), pp.164-70 [563n].
Brian Walker et al., eds, Faces of Ireland (Appletree 1992), selects On factory conditions in Ulster, an extract from Home Life in Ireland (Lon 1904), pp.229-30.
Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast) holds Rambles in Ireland (London 1912); The Green Man (London 1930); The Pleasure of Innocence (London 1921); The Peal of Bells (London 1925); Solomon in All His Glory (London 1922); Life’s Little Oddities (London 1941); The Cockle Shell (London 1936); The Money Box (London 1925); Things one Hears (London 1947); I Tremble to Think (London 1936); YY (London 1933); Irish & English (London 1908); Dr Johnson and Company (London N.D.) [2 copies]; The Blue Lion (London 1925); Home Life in Ireland (London 1909)
University of Ulster Central Library, Home Life in Ireland (1909); Ireland a Nation (1919), reflecting strong nationalist sympathies; The Blue Lion (1923); Dr. Johnson and Company (1927), and 31 others (not listed). BML CAT incl. Rambles in Ireland, ill. Jack B. Yeats (1912); Dr. Johnson and Company (1927; Penguin ed. 1946); numerous introductions to selections and anthologies of English poetry, incl. life and letters of Keats; an introduction to James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History (1917 ed.); Ireland a Nation (Grant Richards 1919) [246pp.]; If the Germans Conquered England (Dub&London: Maunsel 1917), p.xiii, 158; and Why Irish should be taught, a reply to Why Should We Teach Irish in the Municipal Technical Institute, by A. B. Wilson (1907), 8vo.
Belfast Central Public Library holds 15 titles including Dr. Johnston and his Company; Home Life in Ireland; Modern Poetry (1939); I Tremble to Think.
Belfast Linenhall Library holds Home Life in Ireland (1908); Irish and English Painters and Impressionists (1908); also Rambles in Ireland (illustrated Jack B. Yeats, n.d.) [cf. Rambles in Eirinn, by William Bulfin].
Pseud.? Lynd is possibly the ‘L’ of prefatory note to
Thomas Kettle, The Ways of War (1917), and possibly ghost-author
of Memoir by Mary Kettle. The Memoir repeats the view expressed by John
Dillon about the executions of 1916. Cf., ‘Mr Lynd, whom I have quoted
so frequently because he understood my husband as it is given to few to
understand another, calls the last lines of his "Reason in Rhyme"
his testament to England as his call to Europeanism is his testament to
Ireland [See "Bond from the toil ... &c., in Kettle, Rx., supra.]
Not psued.: Roibeard Ua Floinn is not among the otherwise exhaustive list of Gaelic pseudonyms listed by Richard Hayes in Clár Litreachta.
P. S. O’Hegarty’s Irish Nation is ded. to Lynd and Hobson. ALSO, P. S. O’Hegarty, ‘Bibliography of Robert Lynd 1879-1949’, in Dublin Magazine, vol. 25, no. 1.
Daniel Corkery instances criticism of Synge by three Northern writers, Robert Lynd, Forrest Reid, and St John Ervine, as ‘the artillery of the Black North’ (Sygne and Anglo-Irish Literature, 1931, p.vii) and later as ‘the Belfast sentimentalists’ (ibid. p.94). See Patrick Walsh (MA Thesis on Corkery, UUC 1993, cp.85]
Another Lynd: Cf. Robert S. Lynd, Knowledge for What: The Place of Social Science in American Culture (1945), from auth. of Middletown and Middletown in Transition.
Pamphlet publication: ‘The Ethics of Sinn Fein’ is cited as a separate title [pamph.] (Dublin ?1919), in D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (Routledge 1982), p.333.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)