Life
1834-1908; b. Dublin; ed. Quaker day school and in later Manchester; apprentice
to father’s printing business; visited Australia for health, 1854;
returned to Dublin, 1855; deck-hand on sailing ship; mgr. and owner of
the printing firm; compiled Compendium of Irish Biography (1878);
early supporter of Home Rule movement; Anti-Parnellite MP for West Waterford,
1890-1895; Dublin Corporation and Port and Docks Board; extensive travels,
India and USA, where he spoke against slavery; elected President of Indian
National Congress, 1898; contrib. travel articles to Freeman’s
Journal, Irish Monthly, New York Nation; also Opinions
of some Protestants Regarding their Irish Catholic Fellow-Countrymen
(1886), and The Alleged Massacre of 1641 (1887); d. Shetland Islands,
on holiday; buried in the Blackrock Quaker burial ground; the Webb Collection
of books was acquired by the National Library of Ireland. DIB DIW DIH
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Works
Alfred Webb, Compendium of Irish Biography (Dublin Gill
1878; rep. facs. 1970); also The Opinions of Some Protestants
regarding their Irish Catholic Fellow-Countrymen [2nd enl. edn.] (Dublin
1886); Marie-Louise Legg, ed., Alfred Webb: The Autobiography
of a Quaker Nationalist (Cork UP 1999), 106pp.
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Notes
R. F. Foster, ‘Remembering 1798’, in The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Penguin 2001): ‘Remembering 1798’: In September 1898 the Irish Quaker Alfred Webb, nationalist, printer, ex-secretary of the Land League and currently treasurer of the Evicted Tenants’ Fund, wrote to a colleague: “The country appears memorial mad.” He complained of “no less than 4” monuments to the United Irishmen in County Wexford and remarked caustically that this expenditure was “absorbing funds that shold go to supporting a Home Rule fight and towards relieving the evicted … What is going on is talk about the past, and inaction in the present.”’ (Alfred Webb to J. F. X. O’Brien, 21 Setp. 1898, and 21 July 1898, NLI, MS 13, 431(5); here p.219.)
D. J. O’Donoghue claims in Irish Ability (1906),
preface, [sel.] ‘Even Webb’s Compendium &c does not
contain one-third of the men and women named in this book’. [v.]
Douglas Hyde: Alfred Webb, Compendium of Irish Biography (Dublin 1878) & The Opinions of Some Protestants regarding their Irish Catholic Fellow-Countrymen [2nd edn.] (Dublin 1886), were both held in the library of Douglas Hyde (see Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974, n., p.205).
Gulliver’s Travels (1726): The title page of a first-edition volume was acquired by the National Library of Ireland with the Alfred Webb Collection in 1908 (displayed on Front Page of NLI website at 25 Sept. 2002.)
Source list: An Appendix to Webb’s Compendium lists 350 sources of Irish biography.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco): 2002