‘A Secret, Melodramatic Sort of Conspiracy’: The Disreputable Legacies of Fenian Violence in Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract

‘A secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy’: The disreputable legacies of Fenian violence in nineteenth-century London. This essay assesses the cultural and historical legacy of the ‘Dynamite war’, a campaign waged predominantly in London by Irish-American Republicans organised under the banners of Clan-na-Gael and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s Skirmishers from 1881 to 1885. The war was, and, to a degree, remains, a contentious event in Irish history principally because its instigators were willing to use extreme violence against civilian targets, and so demonstrated a disposition to transgress codes of martial honour which had previously been regarded as largely sacrosanct. While the history of the campaign, the degree to which it was innovative in its methods as a precursor for urban terrorism, and the manner in which the war has been represented in popular culture and literature have been the subjects of compelling recent research, the extent to which the campaign has been understood within the context of Irish London and its problematic status within narratives of nineteenth-century Irish political insurgency more broadly have been less fully considered. This paper considers these aspects in greater detail, highlighting the disreputable status of the campaign and, subsequently, the manner in which allusions to it are often deeply embedded in Irish literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes with a discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a work which uses fictionalised autobiography to locate the war in the wider history of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. In so doing Joyce acknowledges the ethical complexity of the campaign in a manner which becomes both an intervention in historiography and an experiment in literary aesthetics.

KEYWORDS:

• London
• Fenian
• Dynamite War
• James Joyce
• Thomas Clarke
• Clan na Gael

ORCID

Richard Kirkland http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9336-8087

Note on contributor

Richard Kirkland is Professor of Irish Literature at King’s College London. He is currently working on a monograph titled A Cultural History of Irish London 1880–1925.

Notes

1 Unnamed author, ‘The explosions on the underground railway’, Pall Mall Gazette, 31 October 1883, 3.

2 ‘The explosions on the underground railway’, Standard, 1 November 1883, 3.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 ‘Terrible explosions in london’, North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 31 October, 1883, 3.

6 S. Kenna, ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb: Dynamite and the Fear in Late Victorian Britain’, Postgraduate History Journal: A Collection of Essays Presented at the TCD-UCD Postgraduate History Conference 2009, 1 (2009), 89–100, 92. <https://issuu.com/gearoid.orourke/docs/phcj_2009> [accessed 6 November 2018].

7 For an excellent history of the campaign see: N. Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), for a discussion of its innovative nature see: L. Clutterbuck, ‘Countering Irish Republican Terrorism in Britain: Its Origin as a Police Function’ (Terrorism and Political Violence, 18:1 (2006), 95–118), and for an analysis of the ways in which the campaign is represented in literature see D. Ó'Donghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

8 P. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 166.

9 M. O’Riordan, ‘Marx: The Irish Connection’, The Crane Bag, 7:1 (1983), 164–166, 165.

10 J. Lydon, The Making of Ireland: From Ancient Times to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), 308.

11 L. Clutterbuck, ‘The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans?’, Terrorism and Political Violence,16:1 (2004), 154–181, 159.

12 M. C. Frank, ‘Plots on London: Terrorism in Turn-of-the-Century British Fiction’, in M. C. Frank and E. Grube (ed.), Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 48.

13 Clutterbuck, ‘Progenitors of Terrorism’, 175.

14 J. Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1969), 212.

15 J. McKenna, The Irish-American Dynamite Campaign: A History, 1881–1896 (North Carolina: McFarland, 2012), 96.

16 M. F. Ryan, Fenian Memories (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1945), 136.

17 Although the discovery of a huge IRB arms cache in May 1882 in a stable at 99 St. John’s Road, Clerkenwell suggests the organisation was also prepared for violence on a large scale if necessary. The cache consisted of 70–80,000 rounds of ammunition, 400 rifles with stocks marked with the shamrock, bayonets and sixty revolvers (K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979), 92–93).

18 Unnamed author, The Standard (26 Jan 1885), 5.

19 Unnamed author, ‘The Irish Terror in London’, Funny Folks (31 March 1883), 98.

20 N. Whelehan, ‘Skirmishing, The Irish World, and Empire, 1876–86’, Éire-Ireland, 42:1–2 (2007), 180–200, 185.

21 Short, The Dynamite War, 57.

22 L. H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 233.

23 R. F. Foster, ‘An Irish Power in London: Making it in the Victorian Metropolis’, in R. F. Foster and F. Cullen (eds.), ‘Conquering England’: Ireland in Victorian London, (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005), 12–25, 14.

24 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Irish Dramatic movement, A Lecture Delivered to the Royal Academy of Sweden’, Autobiographies (London, Macmillan, 1980), 559.

25 Yeats, Autobiographies, 210.

26 Ibid, 100.

27 M. Bourke, John O’Leary: A Study in Irish Separatism (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1968), 175.

28 F.A. Fahy and D.J. O’Donoghue, Ireland in London (Dublin: Evening Telegraph, 1889), 7.

29 Ó’Donghaile, Blasted Literature, 3.

30 For more on this phenomenon see C. Herr, For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890–1925 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 9.

31 C. Fitz-Simon, ‘Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment’: Popular Irish plays in the Decade Prior to the Opening of The Abbey Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2011), 115.

32 Fitz-Simon, ‘Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment’, 27.

33 For more on what can be termed ‘Hibernian Wilde’ see J. Killeen, ‘The greening of Oscar Wilde: situating Ireland in the Wilde wars’, Irish Studies Review, 23:4 (2015), 424–50 and S. Kandola, ‘(Re)Hibernicising Wilde? A genetic analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Irish Studies Review, 24:3 (2016), 351–69.

34 J. Joyce, Ulysses H. W. Gabler (ed.), (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 2.423–4.

35 ibid., 2.271.

36 B. Fox, ‘Land of Breach of Promise’: James Joyce and America’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2014), 109. For a full discussion of Fenianism in the work of Joyce see A. Gibson, The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69–91.

37 K. Barry, ed., James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140.

38 Gibson, The Strong Spirit, 90.

39 Joyce, Ulysses, 2.380–1.

40 R. Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 125.

41 Joyce, Ulysses, 3.216–18, 3.239–241.

42 Ibid., 3.250.

43 Ibid., 3:250–1.

44 Ibid., 3:245.

45 Ibid., 3.247–9.

46 The clearest indication of Joyce’s intention here is how the ‘Shattered glass and toppling masonry’ of this image is revisited in ‘Circe’ at the climax of Stephen’s journey of artistic martyrdom: ‘He hits his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry’ (Ulysses, 15.4243–4245). The resonances of this moment are complex but at the least they indicate a deepening of the association of Stephen’s artistic rebellion with his Fenian sympathies.

47 D. M. Earle, ‘“Green Eyes, I See You. Fang, I Feel”: The Symbol of Absinthe in Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly, 40:4 (2003), 691–709, 699.

48 Joyce, Ulysses, 3.228.

49 W. Viney, ‘Reading Flotsam and Jetsam: The Significance of Waste in “Proteus”’, in F. Ruggieri and A. Fogarty (ed.), Polymorphic Joyce: Papers from The Third Joyce Graduate Conference: Dublin 22–23 January 2010 (Rome: Joyce Studies in Italy: 2012), 170.