“The Agitator’s Wife” (1894): the story behind James Connolly’s lost play?

ABSTRACT

The centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016 and the 150th anniversary of James Connolly’s birth in 2018 afford an ideal opportunity to reappraise this unique figure. Rightly renowned for his polemical journalism and political theory, Connolly is less celebrated for his creative writing. His 1916 play, Under Which Flag?, long considered lost, resurfaced fifty years ago without causing significant ripples in Irish literary circles, but interest in Connolly’s role in the struggle for Irish independence continues to grow, and critics are becoming increasingly aware of the fusion of feminist and socialist thought that shaped his particular anti-imperialist agenda. In this context his creative writing takes on new significance. A second lost play of Connolly’s, The Agitator’s Wife, has never been found, but its discovery would surely deepen our understanding of this gifted radical thinker. In this essay we suggest that an anonymous short story bearing that very title, published in a short-lived Christian socialist journal of the 1890s, may be a crucial missing piece in solving the puzzle of Connolly’s forgotten drama.

KEYWORDS:

• James Connolly
• lost works
• The Agitator’s Wife
• Irish theatre
• industrial action: Under Which Flag?

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Carole Jones and Martin Sanders at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick Library for the scan of the story. This transcription by Dini Power, 6 July 2018. The authors are grateful to the anonymous readers for Irish Studies Review for their excellent insights and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Lusk and Maley (eds.), Commemorating Connolly; and Lusk and Maley (eds.), Scotland and the Easter Rising.

2. See Dick, “The Behans: Rebels of a Century”; Lusk, “Short Skirts, Strong Boots and a Revolver”; and Skinnider, Doing My Bit For Ireland. See also McCoole, No Ordinary Women. There were clearly agitators’ husbands, brothers, sons and fathers in the period.

3. According to Peter Berresford Ellis “He wrote at least one short story which was published in the first issue of his Workers’ Republic, 13 August 1898”. Ellis, James Connolly: Selected Writings, 49. We looked in vain for this 1898 story, but it put us on the lookout for early fiction as another creative pursuit to add to the poems, play and songs we knew about. False leads can prove fruitful.

4. Maitland Sara Hallinan collection [Papers of Henry Sara (1886–1953), Trotskyist; and Frank Maitland (1909–2001), friend and executor of Sara], http://mrc-catalogue.warwick.ac.uk/records/MSH/1/153/1, [accessed December 15 2017].

5. Ellis, James Connolly: Selected Writings, 49.

6. Citing Yeats’s much-quoted claim that his play “sent out certain men the English shot”, Alvin Jackson remarks: “Seán Connolly, one of the Abbey Theatre actors, and an officer in the Irish Citizen Army, was killed on Easter Monday 1916 at Dublin City Hall. Connolly’s last performance at the Abbey was in Yeats’s ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’, and his final appearance on stage was at Liberty Hall in a patriotic melodrama, ‘Under which Flag?’”. Alvin Jackson, “Mrs Foster and the Rebels”, 159. Jackson doesn’t mention the author of this “patriotic melodrama”, or link Yeats with James Connolly, about whom he has some sharp things to say elsewhere in his essay.

7. Lusk, “‘Did that play of mine…?’”, 420, citing Moran, Four Irish Rebel Plays, 276.

8. See Skeffington, “Under Which Flag?: James Connolly’s Patriotic Play”, 6. It’s been argued that Connolly’s anti-enlistment drama was informed by Shaw’s pro-recruitment play, O’Flaherty VC (1915). See Ritschel, “Shaw, Connolly, and the Irish Citizen Army”, 131–2, n. 34. Recruitment was a major theme of the drama of the period. As Ritschel observes, in November 1915 Molony had staged a revival of George Farquhar’s comedy, The Recruiting Officer (1706), “as an accompaniment to James Connolly’s anti-recruitment efforts”. Ritschel, “Helena Molony and Revolutionary Theatre”. Under Which Flag? is an anti-recruitment play that calls for the Irish people to serve the cause of Ireland and Labour rather than Britain and Empire. In this it follows Cathleen Ni Houlihan. “The Agitator’s Wife” is a recruitment narrative of the same subversive kind, calling up recruits to the cause of the workers.

9. Moran, Four Irish Rebel Plays, 276.

10. Ibid., 277.

11. Ibid.

12. Foster, Vivid Faces, 112. Even full-time historians get their dates wrong.

13. Richards, “‘Did That Play of Mine …?’”, 306.

14. Laurence Cox has argued that Yeats and Connolly had very different conceptions of day-to-day politics. According to Cox, “there is no evidence that Connolly ‘made a stone of his heart’, nor did he need to […] he was a highly successful union organiser in three countries, constantly immersed in action. […] Nor, despite occasional crotchetiness in internal communication, does he seem to have seen himself as having made ‘too long a sacrifice’”. Cox’s literal reading underplays the extent to which for both men the power of a transformative tale was crucial in the dramatic depiction of political struggle. Cox, “‘Hearts with One Purpose Alone’”, 57.

15. Moran, Four Irish Rebel Plays, 118–19. Moran’s somewhat dismissive remark about “the apparent absurdity of humdrum men donning military uniform” fails to address the fact that humdrum men were being recruited in their thousands to die for the British Empire (24).

16. Moran, Four Irish Rebel Plays, 129.

17. Women volunteers had to fight on two fronts, and did not secure service pensions until 1934. See Coleman, “Military Service Pensions and the Recognition and Reintegration of Guerrilla Fighters after the Irish Revolution”, 556.

18. Coleman, “Compensating Irish Female Revolutionaries, 1916–1923”, 916.

19. Ritschel, “Helena Molony and Revolutionary Theatre”.

20. Under Which Flag? was first published in Moran, Four Irish Rebel Plays, 105–132. It was reprinted as part of a special issue of Interventions edited by Morris and Thompson – “Under Which Flag? Revisiting James Connolly”, 26–47. For some critical responses see Ritschel, “James Connolly’s Under Which Flag, 1916”; and Thompson, “Indigenous Theory: James Connolly and the Theatre of Decolonization.”

21. Ellis, “New Connolly Collection”, 8.

22. Wills, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO. See Maley, “Shakespeare, Easter 1916”, 191–2.

23. D’Arcy and Arden, “A Socialist Hero on the Stage,” 172. As well as being a dramatist in his own right, Connolly has inspired others to stage his life. For a discussion of three such “bioplays” – D’Arcy and Arden’s The Non-stop Connolly Show (1977), Kirwan’s Blood (1993), and Eagleton’s The White, the Gold and the Gangrene (1997) – see Kao, “James Connolly on Stage”.

24. Krause, “Connolly and Pearse: The Triumph of Failure?” 67.

25. See McCoole, Easter Widows, chapter 3, “Lillie and James”, 79.

26. McCoole, Easter Widows, 75.

27. O’Brien, James Connolly: Portrait of a Rebel Father, 96–7. Drama was in the family. Nora herself later “took part in a Volunteer play called ‘Ireland First’” in Belfast. Connolly, The Unbroken Tradition, 82.

28. Collins, 16 Lives: James Connolly, 102–3.

29. Ibid., 69–70. Lynd wrote the introduction to the reprint of Connolly’s Labour in Ireland.

30. Metscher refers to The Agitator’s Wife as “unfortunately lost”. Metscher, “Connolly’s Mature Concept of an Irish Socialist Republic,” 219.

31. Ellis, James Connolly: Selected Writings, 49.

32. Levenson, James Connolly: A Biography, 290.

33. Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, 400.

34. Morgan, James Connolly: A Political Biography, 33; 209, n. 53.

35. Wilmer, “Travesties,” 36.

36. Nevin, James Connolly: A Full Life.

37. Morris, “A Contested Life,” 114, n. 5. It is not clear how Morris inferred the date of 1907 for “The Agitator’s Wife” as no source is offered for this information and it does not appear in other literature regarding the play.

38. Ibid., 114, n. 5.

39. Lusk, “‘Did that play of mine…?’”, 419.

40. Ellis, James Connolly: Selected Writings, 189.

41. Ibid.,191.

42. Dobbins, “Whenever Green Is Red”, 620.

43. Ward, “‘Suffrage First, Above All Else!’”, 34.

44. O’Casey, Complete Plays, 189.

45. Ellis, James Connolly: Selected Writings, 124.

46. Anon, “The Agitator’s Wife”. In the last years of the nineteenth-century, when the Labour Church with its Christian Socialist fusion was gathering momentum, The Labour Prophet, with its byline of “Let labour be the basis for civil society”, was “the movement’s magazine”. See Bevir, “The Labour Church Movement, 1891–1902,” 220. It ran from 1892 to 1901, first as a penny monthly then as a free quarterly. See Sumpter, “Labour Prophet (1892–1901)”, 339. Edited by John Trevor, subtitled “The Organ of the Labour Church”, and later “And Labour Church Record”, it was published in Manchester and London. According to Jacqueline Brophy: “Declared purpose was to represent the religious life which inspires the labor movement; aimed at furthering formation of a national organization of Labor Churches; included Cinderella supplement for children”. Brophy, “Bibliography of British Labor and Radical Journals 1880–1914”, 114.

47. See Newsinger, “‘As Catholic as the Pope’”. Connolly, who opposed dogmatism in all shapes and forms, including militant atheism, published two key essays on the topic of radicalism and religion, “The New Evangel”, in Workers’ Republic (17 June 1899), https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1901/evangel/socrel.htm, [accessed September 30 2018], and “Roman Catholicism and Socialism” in The Harp (September 1908), https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1908/09/cathsoc.htm, [accessed September 30 2018].

48. One scholar has discussed the story “by an unidentified author” in the context of a study of working-class women, but without making the Connolly connection. See Hill, “Women, Work, and God,” 176.

49. Morris, “A Contested Life”, 103.

50. Connolly, “Party Politicians”, 359.

51. Connolly, The Re-Conquest of Ireland, in Ellis, James Connolly: Selected Writings, 195.

52. See Connolly, “The Legacy”.

53. Allen, “A Revolutionary Cooperation”, 64.

54. Whelan, “1916 in Ireland”, 97.

55. Ibid.

56. Wilson, Victims and Poached, 15. See Levitas, “Plumbing the Depths”, 141–2.

57. Wilson, Victims and Poached, 13.

58. Ibid.

59. Moran, “Conflicting Counter-Hegemonies”, 524.

60. Howell, A Lost Left, 19.

61. Young, “John Maclean, Socialism and the Easter Rising”, 24.

62. Ó Cathasaigh, The Lost Writings, 117.

63. One of our anonymous readers for this essay made the astute observation that the phrase “he was man enough to keep it under” chimes with Connolly’s appeal to his wife on the eve of his execution, “Don’t cry, Lillie, you’ll unman me”, quoted by his daughter in her memoir The Unbroken Tradition, 184.

64. It certainly published other short stories – the next piece in the issue in which “The Agitator’s Wife” appears is “Stumpy Tail. By a Boy of Eight”. It is indeed a very stumpy tail, a paragraph in length. The same page also advertises a penny pamphlet by the editor entitled Theology and the Slums. The Labour Prophet 3, no. 26 (February 1894): 28.

65. Again, we are grateful to the anonymous reader for urging us to be clearer as to our motives.