Life
1852-1928; b. 2 Oct., Mallow, Co. Cork, ed. Cloyne Diocesan School (though
Catholic) and schol. to Queen’s College, Cork; related to Nagles,
and hence to Edmund Burke, on his mother’s side; f. suffered business
failure, and moved to Cork city, where he died shortly after; an uncle,
James Nagle, acted as family supporter, until he lost his job for participation
in Fenian procession; supported mother, sister and two brothers through
journalism; ed. Queen’s College, Cork; prevented from completing
through financial constraints and ill-health; journalist on Cork Daily
Herald, 1868-76, and Freeman’s Journal, 1876-81; death
of siblings from T.B, 1879-80; death of mother from same, 1882; wrote
‘Christmas in the Galtees’ (Freeman’s Journal, 1877-78);
encountered Parnell at Home Rule meeting in Tralee, 1878; undertook editorship
of United Irishman at Parnell’s request, 1881-90; Secretary
of National League, established at Parnell’s request; arrested with
Parnell and imprisoned in Kilmainham, Oct. 1881; drafted (but did not
sign) ‘No Rent Manifesto’, issued from Kilmainham, 18 Oct.1881,
alienating Archbishop Croke and others; the Manifesto declared illegal,
20 Oct.; released, April 1882; elected MP for Mallow while in prison,
1883; refused to wear prison uniform; later MP for Cork; conducted ‘Plan
of Campaign’ in John Dillon, T. M. Healy, John Harrington, and others,
1886-91; accompanied John Redmond and Michael Davitt to Fenian Convention,
Chicago, securing support for Parnell and IPP, Aug. 1886; arrested with
Dillon, Loughrea, Co. Galway, Dec. 1886; tried and acquitted, Feb. 1887;
MP North Cork, 1887; organised no-rent strike on Kingston estate nr. Mitchelstown;
attempted arrest with John Mandeville, led to Mitchelstown Massacre, 9
Sept.; imprisoned, 2 Nov., 1887, and went naked, refusing to wear prison
clothing; released, 1888; arrested 8 April, 1888; appealed successfully
against 3-month’s hard labour; arrests 24 Jan. 1889; escaped form
courtroom, to England; sentenced in absentia; arrested Manchester, serving
four months in Clonmel and Galway; fnd. Tenant Defence Association, 15
Oct., 1889; Parnell, represented at inaugural meeting by Thomas Sexton,
provides support for the Association, Nov. 1889; O’Brien imprisoned,
Sept.-Dec. 1889; m. 11 June, 1890; issues When We Were Boys (1890),
a romance in the Fenian days of 1860 concerning the involvement of miller’s
son and ex-seminarian Ken Rohan, who stands up to the land agent; written
during two spells in prison - the latter half without sight of the first
manuscript section; Bram Stoker promotes unsuccessful efforts to stage
the novel in London, 1890 [var. 1893]; New Tipperary project, 1890; jumped
bail with John Dillon, Oct. 1890, travelling to America via France; expressed
initial confidence in Parnell by telegram from America, Nov. 1891; repudiated
support after Parnell published his ‘Manifesto to the Irish People’,
19 Nov.; took anti-Parnellite side in Split (6 Dec. 1891); imprisoned
with Dillon on their return; released from Galway jail, 30 July 1892;
re-elected for Cork City, 1892; in response to famine in Mayo (where he
was then living), fnd. United Irish League, with Michael Davitt as President,
a tenant organisation advocating compulsory purchase and hence aiming
to reconcile unionists and nationalists, Westport, 23 Jan. 1898; ran his
own paper, The Irish People, 1899-1908; laid emphasis on ‘conference’
and ‘conciliation’; organised Irish Land Conference, 1902-1903,
leading to Wyndham Land Purchase Act; from 1903; broke with IPP; fnd.-member
of Irish Reform Association, 1904; returned for Cork, 1904; refused Party
pledge, May 1905; unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate with Sinn Féin;
rejoined Irish Parliamentary Party, Jan. 1908; clashed over government
attempts to dilute Land Act, and resigned in ill-health, 1909; Cork MP,
1910; ed. The Cork Accent, and the Cork Free Press, its
an anti-socialist successor; broke with United Irish League and fnd. All-Ireland
League [var. All for Ireland League], 1910, a conciliationist grouping
embodying his preference for negotiations with the Irish Unionists rather
than the British Liberals; voted against 3rd Home Rule Bill, 1914, as
being opposed to partition in any form; spoke in favour of recruitment;
mbr. of Mansion House committee opposing conscription in Ireland, 1918;
did not contest 1918 general elections following popular swing after 1916;
opposed establishment of Irish Free State in view of partition and declined
nomination for Senatorship; works include Irish Ideas (1893); A
Queen of Men (1898); An Olive Branch in Ireland (1910); The
Downfall of Parliamentarianism (1918); Evening Memories (1920);
The Irish Revolution (1921); Edmund Burke as an Irishman ([1924];
2nd edn. 1926); Irish Fireside Hours (1927). d. 25 Feb., London;
bur. Mallow; regarded as dictatorial by many contemporaries such as D.
P. Moran; there is a portrait by Sir William Orpen (Crawford Gallery,
Cork); When we Were Boys is listed among Leopold Bloom’s books
in Ulysses (‘Ithaca’). DNB JMC IF DIW DIB DIH SUTH
FDA OCIL
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Works
When We Were Boys: A Novel (London: Longmans 1890),
viii, 550pp.; The Influence of the Irish language on Irish National
Literature and Character (Cork 1892); Irish Ideas (Lon &
NY: Longmans 1893); A Queen of Men, Grace O’Malley (1898);
The Irish National Question and the Land Acts. Speeches delivered at
Cork [...] 1903 (Dublin: Irish People Office 1903); Recollections
(London: Macmillan 1905); An Olive Branch in Ireland and Its History
(London: Macmillan 1910); The Downfall of Parliamentarianism: A Retrospect
for the Accounting Day (Dublin: Maunsel 1918); Evening Memories,
being a continuation of Recollections (Dublin: Maunsel 1920); The
Responsibility for Partition considered with an Eye to Ireland’s
Future (Maunsel & Roberts 1921); The Irish Revolution and How
It Came About (Dublin: Maunsel & Roberts 1923); Edmund Burke
as an Irishman (Dublin: Gill 1924); The Parnell of Real
Life (London: Fisher Unwin 1926); also introduction to W. P. Ryan,
The Heart of Tipperary (1893). BIBL, Memories contains the ‘Love
Letters and Prison Letters of W. S. O’Brien’. See also Sophie
O’Brien [Mrs. W. O’Brien], Unseen Friends (1st edn. 1912).
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Criticism
Patrick MacDonagh, The Life of William O’Brien (1928).
P. J. Meehan, Life of John Dillon, MP, and William O’Brien, MP, Ireland’s Patriots (NY Law and Trade Printing Co. [n.d.]).
J. V. O’Brien, William O’Brien and the Course of Irish Politics 1881-1918 (Berkeley: California UP 1976).
Sally E. Warwick-Haller, William O’Brien and the Irish Land War (Dublin: IAP 1991).
Patrick Maume, ‘In the Fenians’ Wake: Ireland’s Nineteenth-Century Crises and Their Representation in the Sentimental Rhetoric of William O’Brien MP and Canon Sheehan’, in Bullán, An Irish Studies Journal, 4, 1 (Autumn 1998), pp.59-80.
Brendan Clifford, ed., Reprints from the "Cork Press Press", 1910-16: An Account of Ireland’s Only Democratic Anti-Partition Movement (Belfast & Cork 1984).
James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997), pp.66-67.
W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), p.88.
Benedict Kiely, ‘Ned McKeown’s Two Doors: An Approach to the Novel in Ireland’, A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (Cork UP 1999), p.6.
Stephen Gwynn, Irish Literature and Drama (1936), p. 113.
Frank O’Connor, An Only Son (1961), p. 7.
Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond, p.238.
George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (?1932; and rev. ed. 1972), p. 290
Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Irish Literature and Language, 1845-1921’, in William Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, Vol. VI: 1870-1921, OUP 1996, p.402.)
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Ireland in Fiction, ed. Stephen Brown (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists When We Were Boys [1890]; A Queen of Men [1898], eulogising the first as a very brilliant book, nationalist and Catholic but not blinkered, full of intellect and wit. Justin McCarthy, Irish Lit., gives extract from ‘A Plea for the Study of Irish’; also extract, ‘The Irish in America’, from Irish Ideas. And NOTE, ex NTRY Kickham, O’Brien completed For the Old Land for publication (1886).
British Library holds The Responsibilities of Partition Considered with an Eye to Ireland’s Future (1921) 66pp.; Sinn Fein and its Enemies [Westminster speech, 23 Oct. 1917 [1917], 16pp. See also Sophie O’Brien (his wife; née Raffalovich], Rosette (1907), a novel; Under Croagh Patrick, reminiscences; and Amidst Mayo Bogs.
Belfast Public Library holds When we Were Boys (1880); A Queen of Men (1898); Under Croagh Patrick (1904); Recollections (1905); The Party, who they are and what they have done (1917); Edmund Burke as an Irishman (1924); Evening Memories (1920); Golden Memories (1929); Irish Fireside Stories (1927, 1928); Irish Ideas (1895); An Olive Branch in Ireland (1910); Irish Revolution and How it Came About (1923); The Parnell of Real Life (1926); Around Broom Lane (1931); Also, biog., M[ichael] McDonagh, Life of William O’Brien (1928).
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904), selects ‘A Plea for the study of Irish’ from The Influence of the Irish Language’, a lecture delivered May 13 1902 to Cork National Society, ‘The story of the belief in, and the clinging to, the Gaelic language is in itself a romance pathetic enough for tears. Age after age, while the native tongue was a badge of contempt, a passport to persecution, even a death warrant - the schools suppressed, the printing press unknown, the relics of the national literature scattered in mouldering manuscripts, secreted as damning evidence of superstition or treason - there were always to be found the poet, the scholar, the ecclesiastic, to foster the sacred fire, the outlawed treasure of the Gael, in his bosom - to suffer, and hunger, and die for its sake./ In the days of Elizabeth it was Duald Mac Firbis, dedicating his great Genealogy to his ruined Celtic prince with the pathetic lament that no Irish prince any longer owned enough territory to afford himself a grave. . . Michael O’Clery [...] Keating [...] O’Flaherty [his Ogygia purchased for 20 guineas; ‘the great Burke responsible for saving the priceless Brehon Law Code after its century of wanderings, neglect, and decay in the cabins of Tipperary’; ‘Drimmin don dilis’ purchased for £3.13s.8d.] [...] Petrie, O’Donovan, O’Curry [...] Approached thus with the loving ardour of a nation’s second youth, the tongue of Tara and Kinkora may realise the fond prophecy that ‘the Gaelic will be in high repute yet among the music-loving hosts of Erinn’ and the men who clung to it when it was persecuted, who believed in it when it was scorned, who in the watches of the night hoped on the reward of knowing that they have preserved unto the happier coming time a language which will be the well-spring of a racier national poetry, national music, national painting, and of that richer spiritual life of simplicity, of equality, of good-fellowship, of striving after the higher and holier ideals, with which the Celtic race alone seems to have the promise of brightening the future of a disenchanted world.’ ALSO selects ‘The Irish in America’ from Irish Ideas
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction
(Harlow: Longmans 1988); notes When we Were Boys (1890), set in
Fenian times, incls. some high society London episodes; Ken Rohan, sentence
to life, declares at the end, "Courage, this is not the end!";
records progress of republican American ideas [sic]; his other novels, A Queen of Men (1897), Grace O’Malley had ‘plenty
of mustard, little beef’ according to contemporary. English reviewers.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; extracts The Downfall of Parliamentarianism (1918) [346-53], sometimes bitter, sometimes melancholy and generally perceptive retrospect [Seamus Deane, ed.]; 211; even William O’Brien’s UIL of 1898 could not make the party look particularly inspiring in the centenary year [idem.], 213; Parnell (speech at Listowel, 13 Sept. 1891), ‘Boulogne negotiations [...] the only portions of them Mr. O’Brien begged me not to publish, in case during his imprisonment I found it necessary to publish any of them, were the proposals composed by Mr. O’Brien, with the help of Mr. Dillon, in America, before he left, accepted by Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Sexton when he arrived in France, and actually proposed to me as a solution to the question, and which I found so absurd and ridiculous, and so traitorous to the Liberal allies of these men that they were obliged to admit that they were utterly untenable and unsuitable. Mr. O’Brien can publish these proposals if he chooses, and also the counter-proposals I made afterwards ...’, 311; and 311n, O’Brien, journalist and politician, repeatedly imprisoned for his support of tenant causes, became anti-Parnellite at the split, 315-16n; Land War renewed with the Plan of Campaign (1886-91) by O’Brien, Healy, Dillon, and Harrington, 323n; [compared with Healy in his recognition that the Party lost respectability through the divorce scandal, 329; fund-raising in American with McCarthy and Dillon when the news of Gladstone’s ultimatum arrived; reactions an cables, 333; Irish council Bill, 1907, rejected by Sinn Féin and O’Brien’s United Irish League, as well as John Redmond, 740;. BIOG, 370 [vide supra]. NOTE FDA3, 507, Hobson quotes H. R. Nevinson as reporting that William O’Brien told him Pearse said ‘we are going out to be slaughtered’ (Nevinson, Between the Wars, 1936).
Portraits: William O’Brien by William Orpen [NGI; signed];
see Irish Portraits Exhibition, Ulster Mus. 1965; ALSO portrait group
with Tim Healy, Thomas Sexton, and Justin McCarthy, by Charles Paul Renouard,
presented to NGI by Theobald Matthew, 1934.
Bloom's books: When we Were Boys is part of the library in Leopold Bloom’s home [see Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., p.832].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)