Francis Sylvester Mahony: Life

1804-1866 [pseuds. ‘Fr. Prout, P.P. of Watergrasshill’; Don Jeremy Savonarola, Benedictine Monk’; occas. err. Mahoney]; b. Cork, into a woollen milling family; ed. by Jesuits in Ireland and afterwards at St. Acheul, a Jesuit college in Amiens, from age of twelve; studies inseminarian in Paris and Rome; commenced teaching at Jesuit school of Clongowes as master of rhetoric, 1830, with Canon Sheehan among his pupils; dismissed by Jesuits for leading boys on drunken outing at Celbridge, remaining thereafter a ‘half-pay soldier of the Church, without the half-pay’ (acc. Jerrold); ordained an Ignatian at Lucca; commended by Fr. Mathew for assisting fever victims in Cork epidemic of 1832 and remained his loyal friend, assisting him in unsuccessful attempt to gain bishopric of Cork; struggled to gain a chapel of ease for Cork, resulting in disagreement with the bishop and his dismissal from the diocese; moved to London; encouraged by William Maginn; wrote for satirical sketches Fraser’s Magazine, 1834-36, in company with Coleridge, Thackeray, Southey, Lockhart, Maginn, Maclise and Count D’Orsay; constructed Cresswell pseud. in order to introduce Fr. Prout of Watergrasshill, a French-educated parish priest who claims to be the son of Dean Swift and Stella (‘Dean Swift’s Madness: A Tale of a Churn’); contrib. ‘The Apology for Lent’ (April 1834), , in scholarly praise of fish; contrib. ‘Songs of Horace’ (December 1836); practised art of what he called ‘upsetting’ poems, and thereby noted for mock translations of Moore and others into classical languages, imputing plagiarism or those ‘originals’ by same (‘The Rogueries of Tom Moore’); also contrib. [‘Women and Plea for Pilgrimages’, addressed to Walter Scott, come to kiss the Blarney Stone, mocking his relations with Maria Edgeworth; ‘Wooden Shoes’; and ‘Frogs and Free Trade’, &c., as well as studies of Erasmus, James Barry and five articles on Horace and ‘Father Prout’s Self-Examination’; repeatedly satirised Milliken’s ‘Groves of Blarney’, providing ‘originals’; in Latin, Greek, and Norman rench, as well as an Italian version as ‘I Boschi di Blarnea’, which he contends was sung by Garibaldi in the woods above Lake Como’; made O’Connell his bête noir (‘vile Dan’, and the ‘bog-trotter of Derrynane’, also appearing allegorised as ‘Dandelone’ in his Sardinian essays); assailed Lady Morgan, comparing her to the worst invaders of Italy and disparaging her linguistic pretensions with the assertion that she knew no more of the language that peppers her writing than she does that of the Celestial Empire (ie., China); later contrib. poems to Bentley’s Magazine, issued in Bentley’s Miscellany (1937); his ability to write much effected by drinking; persuaded by Dickens to act as Rome correspondent for The Daily News, 1849 [var. 1846 DNB], writing under his second pseudonym; visited Genoa; acted as Globe correspondent in Paris, 1858-66; also travelled via the Balkans to Asia Minor and Egypt; d. Paris; bur. St. Ann’s, Shandon, among family graves; large funeral in Cork; his body received in Cork by Bishop Delaney, whose post he had wanted for Fr. Mathew; requiem mass said in chapel of ease for which he had aggressively campaigned; works issued as Reliques of Fr. Prout (2 vols., 1836), ed. by Oliver Yorke [pseud.], ill. Daniel Maclise; and The Last Reliques of Fr. Prout, (1876), with a memoir by the editor Blanche Jerrold; later collected as The Works of Father Prout (London: Routledge & Sons 1881), edited by Charles Kent, BL. DNB JMC DBIV ODQ MKA RAF OCEL DIB DIH FDA OCIL

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Works

Reliques of Father Prout late P.P. of Watergrasshill in the County of Cork, Ireland, collected ... by Oliver Yorke [pseud. for Mahoney], 2 vols. (London: James Fraser 1836) [var. 1837], ill. by Alfred Croquis [i.e., Daniel Maclise]; Do., [rev. and enl. edn.; Bohn’s Library] (London: Bell & Daddy 1866), ill. Maclise; T. Crofton Croker, ed., The Tour of the French Traveller M. De La Bourllaye de Gouz in Ireland a.d. 1844, with notes and ill. extracts contrib. by James Roche, Rev. F. Mahoney, T. Wright and Croker (London 1837); Facts and Figures from Italy, by Don Jeremy Savonarola, Benedictine Monk [pseud. Mahoney] addressed ... to Charles Dickens (1847) [var. as Roman Letters by Don Jeremy Savonarola]; coll. and ed., B[lanchard] Jerrold, The Final Reliques of Father Prout [The Rev. Francis Mahoney] (London: Chatto & Windus 1876); also Charles Kent, ed. & intro., The Works of Father Prout (London: George Routledge & Sons 1881), 499pp.

Note var. The Relics [sic] of Fr. Prout (London: George Bell 1881), cited in Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds for Dubliners (1986).

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Criticism

C. Clemen, ‘A Neglected Humorist, Father Prout’, in Catholic World, CXXXVII (1933), pp.706-10.

Benedict Kiely, ‘Irish Potato and Attic Salt’, The Irish Bookman (November 1946), rep. in ‘A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (Cork UP 1999), pp. 66-78.

E[thel] Mannin, Two Studies in Integrity (London: Jerrolds, 1954).

Davis and Mary Coakley, Wit and Wine ([London:] Volturna Press 1975).

Terry Eagleton, ‘Cork and the Carnivalesque: Frances Sylvester Mahony (Fr. Prout)’, in Irish Studies Review (Autumn 1996), pp.2-7.

Fergal Gaynor, ‘An Irish Potatoe Seasoned with Attic Salt’: The Reliques of Fr. Prout and Identity before The Nation’, Irish Studies Review, 7, 3 (Dec. 1999), pp.313-24.

‘M’ [unknown pseud.], writes in ‘Irish Politics and Irish Priests’, in Cornhill Magazine, Vol. I (1870).

William J. Maguire, Irish Literary Figures (Dublin: Metropolitan Publishing Co. 1945), ., p.119ff.

W. R. Le Fanu [br. of J. S. Le Fanu], Seventy Years of Irish Life (1894), p.180.

Robert Farren, The Course of Irish Verse (NY: Sheed & Ward 1947; London 1948), pp. 11,16.

Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 1789-1850 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol 1, pp.19ff.

W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984), p. 175.

Peter Costello, Clongowes Wood (1991), p. 83f..

Mary Leland, ‘A half-pay soldier of the Church - minus the half-pay’, Literary Landmarks [column], in The Irish Times (1 July 2000).

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Notes

Dictionary of National Biography lists author as Mahony [sic]; do., and Harry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography (1988).

Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives "Rogueries of Tom Moore" from Reliques, and "Bells of Shandon". Oxford Dict. Quotations selects ‘Bells of Shandon’ only.

Arthur Quiller Couch, ed., Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918 (new edn. 1929), 684. SEE also under Milliken, for relationship with "The Groves of Blarney".

Frank O’Connor, ed., Book of Ireland (Collins 1969 Edn.) selects "The Bells of Shandon" [‘With deep affection / And recollection, / I often think of / Those Shandon bells, / Whose sound so wild would, / In days of childhoo’ / Fling around my cradle / Their magic spells. ... thy bells of Shandon / That sound so grand on / The pleasant waters of the River Lee.’]. Also incls. jejune rhymes such as ‘Moscow’ and ‘Kiosk, O’.

Brian McKenna, Irish Literature, 1800-1875: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978), bibl. incls. Ethel Mannin, ‘Rev Francis Mahoney’, in Two Studies in Integrity (NY 1954), a definitive biography that unravels the confused web spun by prev. biographers; Benedict Kiely, Irish Bookman (1946) [see supra], writing of his work as ‘[...] multicoloured as shot silk’; also L.A.G. Strong (Irish Writing, 1950); James Hannay [George Birmingham], ‘Recent Humorists, Aytoun, Peacock, Prout’, in North British Review, 45 ([?1896]), pp.75-104, in which the author remarks that Prout’s humour is thoroughly Irish ‘in its brilliance, its extravagance, and its waywardness of fanciful epigram - a kind of practical joking in literature.’

Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature (OUP 1986), calls him a Jesuit who admitted he had mistaken his vocation; mentions among contribs. to Fraser’s Magazine ‘mystifications in the form of invented originals in French, Latin and Greek for well known poems by Thomas Moore, Charles Wolfe, and others’; his contributions collected as Reliques, 1836. Globe correspondent in Paris, 1858-66.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2, selects from The Reliques of Father Prout ‘The Bells of Shandon’, ‘The Attractions of a Fashionable Irish Watering-Place’ [38-40]; among those remembered for one lyric [Deane, ed.], 3; contrib. prolificly to Blackwood’s Magazine, co-founded by William Maginn, supplying folk-custom miraculously preserved in the amber of poverty and illiteracy, a historicised version of stage-Irishman [ed.], 4; playful drollery anticipated by John O’Keeffe (of ‘Amo, Amas’), 9; [?28]; Corkery instances Prout under expatriation, and Luke Gibbon ed., notes, the pen name of FSM, a defrocked priest whose remarkable satirical essays on Irish literature and other themes were collected in The Reliques of Father Prout (1836), 1008; with Lever & Lover synonymous with popularising the stage Irishman, 1011; BIOG & WORKS, 112 [as supra].

"The Night that Larry was Stretched", reputedly by Rev. Robert Burrowes of St. Finbarr’s Cathedral, Cork, was rendered by Mahony as "La Mort de Socrates", par L’Abbé de Prout, Curé du Mont aux Cresson, prés de Cork, as folllows: ‘A la veille d’etre pendu / [?] Lavent reçut dans son gîte / Honneur qui lui etait bien dû / de nombreux amis la visite […. &c.]’ (See Charles Kent, ed., Works of Fr. Prout, 1888, Routledge & Sons, p.179f.) See also "[James] Barry in the Vatican", in Fraser’s Magazine, April 1835 (given in Kent, op. cit., pp.249-67.)

Swift & O’Connell: Mahony compared Daniel O'Connell disadvantageously with Jonathan Swift in writing of a time when ‘the debt to the only true disinterested champion of her people will then be paid - the long deferred apotheosis of the patriot-divine will then take place - the shamefully-forgotten debt of glory which the lustre of his genius shed around his semi-barbarous countrymen will be deeply and feelingly remembered […] the prophetic seer of coming things.’ (Fraser’s Magazine; cited in Robert Mahony, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity, 1996).

Murphy (1938), by Samuel Beckett, makes reference to ‘the grave of Fr. Prout (F. S. Mahony) in Shandon Churchyard’ as being ‘the one place in Cork she [Miss Counihan] knew of where fresh air, privacy and immunity from assault were reconciled’. (Calder Edn. Calder & Boyars Edn. 1963, p.38).

British Library holds [under Father Prout] The Reliques of Father Prout, late P. P. of Watergrasshill in the County of Cork [...] Collected and arranged by Oliver Yorke, Esq. Illustrated by Alfred Croquis, Esq. [i.e. Daniel Maclise.]. 2 vol. London 1836. 8o. [No listings under Francis Sylvester Mahony.]

Hyland Books (Cat. 214) lists Reliques of Father Prout [2 vols.] (1836), ill. Daniel Maclise, good condition [£95]; also Reliques of Father Prout [rev. and augmented] (1886) [Hyland 220; 1996]

Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)