Bard of Erin

RONAN KELLY

Bard of Erin

The Life of Thomas Moore

PENGUIN IRELAND

To Emilie

Contents

Introduction

In August 1835, Ireland welcomed him home like a conquering hero.

He had been living in England for almost all of his adult life, having left, like so many Irish before and since, to try his luck in London. Almost immediately, at the age of twenty-one, fame came his way, and it had only increased in the following three and a half decades. Now, as he arrived into Dublin, people cheered him in the streets; others simply stared. (Could it really be, some wondered, that their hero, their champion, was such a tiny fellow?) The next fortnight was given over to a seemingly unending round of lunches and dinners, fêtes and soirées – all in his honour. At the theatre they called his name from the gods, and the moment he acknowledged the crowd the applause was thunderous; the house leapt to its feet, hats flew in the air, and the unfortunate actors were entirely forgotten.

The welcome was even more magnificent outside the city, nowhere more so than in Wexford, his mother’s county, where his carriage trundled through country lanes at the head of an elaborate cavalcade. A party of horsemen bearing green banners came to meet the parade, the advance guard of further detachments on foot; ladies in their carriages lined the roadside, while labourers in the fields paused in their work and saluted. Nine local girls stepped forward, decked out as the Muses, one of whom crowned him with a myrtle wreath. Then a marching band appeared, leading the way through the lanes, under a series of triumphal arches, at the last of which the master of ceremonies turned to the crowd. His oration was both high-flown and long-winded – even by the garrulous standards of the day – but, eventually, he reached the heart of the matter:

Flags and banners fluttered overheard, emblazoned with phrases like ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘Erin go Bragh’; others were addressed to the guest of honour, in familiar terms, for he was one of their own: ‘Welcome Tom Moore’ and ‘Live for ever Tom Moore’. A little later, a green hot-air balloon was released in celebration. It rose high above the crowd, who could clearly read its legend, another ‘Welcome Tom Moore’. But then suddenly, and far sooner than expected, it became engulfed by its own flame, and plunged to the ground in black tatters.

‘Live for ever Tom Moore’. At the time no one doubted he would, which was neither blarney nor plámás – nor, indeed, hot air, combustible or otherwise. It was a heartfelt article of faith, a genuine belief in the immortality of his lyrics. ‘He will live in his Irish Melodies,’ said Lord Byron, stating the apparently obvious. ‘They will go down to posterity with the music; both will last as long as Ireland, or as music and poetry.’ In the years after his death Moore’s reputation travelled, carried in the baggage of the expanding British Empire as well as, more famously, in the yearning repertoires of the emigrant Irish. In 1879, the centenary of his birth, there were Moore celebrations not only in Ireland, but also in Boston, Brooklyn and San Francisco, in Montreal, Toronto and Quebec, and in Hong Kong, Melbourne and Buenos Aires.

Even as Moore’s reputation was spreading, however, it was also stretching dangerously thin in places, particularly at the root. To several generations in Ireland, Moore was the model of Irish poetry; to some, indeed, he simply was Irish poetry. Such ubiquity was familiar to the likes of Lady Gregory, who had been born within days of his death. ‘If in my childhood I had been asked to give the name of an Irish poem,’ she wrote, ‘I should certainly have said “Let Erin remember the days of old”, or “Rich and rare were the gems she wore”’ – both, of course, songs from Moore’s Irish Melodies. But the price of ubiquity in one era is often a swift sentence to the oubliettes of the next. Even as Gregory acknowledged Moore’s popularity in the past, she and her fellow Revival writers found him wanting. ‘A little later,’ she continued, ‘I came to know other verses, ballads nearer to the tradition of the country than Moore’s faint sentiment.’ From personifying the tradition, Moore was effectively relegated to a place outside it (on the far side of the Irish Sea, it seems). Yeats, likewise, had little room in his pantheon for Moore. The Melodies, ran his elegant dismissal, were ‘but excellent drawing-room songs, pretty with a prettiness which is the contraband of Parnassus’. Centenary celebrations notwithstanding, the coming times would largely acquiesce to the Yeatsian diktat.

Or so, at least, it seemed to me when I began this project.

My first encounter with Moore was at university, in the pages of James Joyce. Until then, I had never knowingly read a word of his verse or heard a note of his music. (I do not believe this is unusual; indeed, I suspect that if Moore lives at all for my generation, it is not in his songs, nor even very much in his own right, but as an aural presence in Joyce – ubiquitous now only in the endnotes to Dubliners and Ulysses, where scholars gloss the musical cues.) But the little I learned about Moore appealed, and I signed up for some serious research – not on his songs, but on his political prose. The contrariness of writing about a poet’s prose was supposed to look like against-the-grain innovation, but in truth it mostly reflected my own ignorance of Moore’s reputation – the sheer reach of his achievement, the influence that those songs had had on Irish culture, arguably even on the Irish psyche.

My standing-start mix of ignorance and perversity seemed to serve me well. By fighting shy of the famous Melodies, my research uncovered a much more complex figure than the faint sentimentalist admired by Joyce and disliked by Yeats. The Moore I discovered was a gifted scholar, a brilliant satirist and a fairly disastrous dramatist; he was a much-loved oriental fabulist and a much-censured coyeroticist; he was a pioneering historian, a struggling journalist and a daring biographer (his lives of Lord Byron, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Edward Fitzgerald are still required reading for modern scholars). I discovered too that his life was no less diverse than his writings: he was a celebrated singer, a sometime rebel, and, by the by, quite the dandy littérateur; he was a duellist (over a bad review) and a sort of accidental tourist (indeed, one of the best-travelled literary men of his day). Politically, he was a committed liberal, particularly in the cause of Catholic Emancipation – but he had his backsliding moments too. For all his popularity, he was never financially secure, and at one point his debts forced him into continental exile (a supposed retrenchment that turned into an impromptu Grand Tour). He was also a son, a brother, a husband and a father – roles and responsibilities that brought much joy, but also, by the cruellest luck, repeated hammer-blows of tragedy.

By the time I finished my degree, I felt that it would take a new biography, rather than a critical study, to do justice to the wide-ranging nature of Moore’s achievements, the best explanation for which always seemed to be his life. In writing this book I have tried to take my method from Moore himself. ‘Biography,’ he once advised, ‘is like dot engraving, made up of little minute points, which must be attended to, or the effect is lost.’

I quickly made up ground on the Melodies, and here was where I discovered the limits of Yeats’s jurisdiction. True, over the course of the twentieth century, Moore had been effectively banished from the highest literary company (‘In the clearing of one hundred years,’ rang The Bell’s anniversary knell in 1952, ‘we know that Moore’s verse is dead, dodo-dead’). But there was a world elsewhere, in which there was life in the old bird yet (‘Bird’, incidentally, was what Moore’s wife called him). He was still current at countless firesides, as the parlour party-piece, and, in the case of competitive fleadhanna, as an opportunity to exhibit the highest levels of proficiency. This, of course, was the world Joyce had tapped into and which, given a pre-war boost by Count John McCormack and the arrival of the wireless, still had its place in twenty-first-century Ireland, albeit largely in my elders’ memories. Talking to people of my parents’ generation, the mention of Moore brought forth stories: many featured mothers doing housework, when the lyrics would be half-sung, or the melody half-hummed; someone else told me her father’s trademark Sunday tune was ‘The Harp that Once’, which would come drifting up the stairs with the smell of a fry. Other memories were not so warm: variations on standing in schoolyards, frozen in short trousers, singing ‘The Minstrel Boy’ for some inspecting Monsignor or other. And some stories were unclassifiable, like the invocation of Moore in one household every time the thunderous plumbing kicked in: ‘Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water…’ More than once I was treated to unstoppable extempore performances (mostly, I think, ‘Oft, in the Stilly Night’). Other avenues again yielded up other gems, including Nina Simone’s version of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and Joe Strummer snarling through ‘The Minstrel Boy’. (There was also Bugs Bunny’s attempt at ‘Believe Me if all Those Endearing Young Charms’ on a booby-trapped piano…) Time and again, I was astonished by Moore’s reach.

And yet, early on, I thought that this book would not be for the people within that reach – actually, I worried it would not be for them – because even having immersed myself in the Melodies, I knew that this would be only part of the story. Again, though, I took my cue from Moore himself, for whom it was not obvious until very late in his career – amazingly, well after the cavalcades and speeches cited above – that the Melodies would outlast his various other writings.

Moreover, while Moore is an important figure in the history of Irish nationalism, that same nationalism seemed to me far less important to his life than received wisdom would suggest. In the one hundred and fifty years of his declining reputation, the shards of commentary that existed were often marred by an obsession with Moore’s nationalism, or lack thereof: either he was the prototypical plastic Paddy, hawking mawkish ditties to his beloved lords and ladies, or he was practically a secret agent, propagandizing for the nation while disguised as a social butterfly. The positions were extreme because certain arguments were still unfinished (indeed, a cultural history of Moore’s afterlife could potentially outweigh even the most detailed account of his life). But in the process Moore was mishandled by both camps, largely because their arguments were anachronistically applied.

‘Irishness’ in Moore’s era was a concept in flux – for which reason, perhaps, in twenty-first-century, post-nationalist Ireland Moore may yet prove to be a more relevant figure than either his critics or his champions imagined.

Be that as it may, in the following pages I have generally tried to respect Moore’s blindness to the future and to eschew, insofar as is practical, the various arguments of posterity. Of course, the songs on which his reputation has come to rest are still at the heart of the book. The title Bard of Erin acknowledges as much. At the same time, though, it also makes the claim that a ‘bard’ can be many things – melodist, minstrel, poet, even prophet – and mythic ‘Erin’, likewise, is both more and less than Ireland.

If the portrait of Moore that emerges in the chapters ahead is a new one, it is because I have tried to go back to the oldest sources – including several hundred unpublished manuscript letters, scattered in libraries and private collections across Ireland, Britain and the United States. Among published materials, the primary source is Lord John Russell’s eight-volume edition of Moore’s Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, dating from the mid-1850s. The ‘memoirs’ contained therein are fragmentary, revisionary, and by no means wholly reliable, but they remain the basis for most of what we know of the first twenty years of Moore’s life. The ‘journal’ and ‘correspondence’ components have meanwhile been superseded by two works of strenuous scholarship, both by Wilfred S. Dowden: The Letters of Thomas Moore, in two volumes, published in 1964, and The Journal of Thomas Moore, in six volumes, which appeared at intervals from 1983 to 1991. The latter work gives contemporary scholars an immediate advantage over their predecessors as it restores for the first time great swathes of Russell’s Victorian-era expurgations.

To some extent, too, the novelty of my portrait is also an accident of history: with the passage of time, even established facts appear in a fresh light. Since his death, Moore has had mixed fortunes at the hands of biographers, but from my perspective two stand out as exemplary: Howard Mumford Jones, author of The Harp That Once (1937), and Hoover H. Jordan, author of Bolt Upright (1975). Theirs were the old facts I have most often turned in the new light. I have also been helped by several illuminative recent studies: first, Thérèse Tessier’s La poésie lyrique de Thomas Moore (1976); and, more particularly, Jeffery W. Vail’s The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore (2001) and Jane Moore’s new edition of The Satires of Thomas Moore (2003). I have not written the words ‘Byron’ or ‘satire’ without referring to the latter works – and neither should any serious student of Moore. In addition, Joep Leerssen’s Remembrance and Imagination (1996) has been a similarly vital touchstone.

As well as this bookish material, published and unpublished, I have also tried to follow where Moore went and to see, insofar as it is still possible, what he would have seen. Dublin and London required a significant imaginative leap, though corners of both are much as they were in Moore’s time, with certain interiors, like Marsh’s Library or the Middle Temple, especially so. But other, out-of-the-way places were more immediately communicative: to visit Moore’s house at Kegworth in Leicestershire, for example, is to appreciate how easy it is to get from there to Donington Hall, Lord Moira’s stately pile; to visit Mayfield Cottage in Derbyshire, on the other hand, is to see exactly what Byron meant by Moore’s ‘sylvan sequestration’. If as much might be guessed from a map, other subtler points could not: such as the direct line of sight from the same cottage to the churchyard where Moore’s infant daughter Olivia is buried. (Soon after her death, indeed, the family moved.) Likewise, the landscape around Sloperton Cottage in Wiltshire all but explains why Moore nearly bankrupted himself to stay there; its proximity to Lord Lansdowne’s magnificent Bowood estate explains the rest. (Parts of that great house were demolished in the mid-1950s, but what survives, including the library, still breathes an enlightened air – as is only proper, for these same rooms saw Joseph Priestley’s discovery of oxygen.) And once, I thought I caught a glimpse of Moore’s world on the cusp of disappearance: his first address in London, 44 (now 85) George Street, was being gutted for renovation when I visited. Most of the street, in fact, was encased in scaffolding. But the site foreman, it turned out, was from Kerry and he had grown up with the Melodies. The exterior, which had a blue plaque – ‘Tom Moore, 1779–1852, Poet, lived here’ – was being preserved, but the old interior was going. With permission, I climbed in through the window of Moore’s second-floor room. It was a dark, inauspicious place for him to set out from, this conqueror in the name of Erin. Perhaps it was just the room’s state of being stripped for restoration, but the epic scale of that journey never seemed so clear.

1

‘A Sort of Show Child’

So he was welcomed home like a conquering hero.

It was 1835, and he was fifty-six years old, an eminent man of letters, beloved by his countrymen as their national poet. The song series that had won him that status, his Irish Melodies, had recently drawn to a close after an extraordinary twenty-six-year, ten-volume run. But in spite of the acclaim, he was not a wealthy man, and the cheering crowds would have been surprised to learn that their bard was still struggling to earn his daily crust, to provide for his wife and children back in England. And so, before the Melodies ended he had already embarked upon a new, even more ambitious project, a multi-volume History of Ireland – a survey on a scale never before attempted, charting the changing fortunes of the Irish people, from the dimly glimpsed era of the island’s earliest inhabitants, sweeping right up to its nineteenth-century status – or condition – as an uncertain cornerstone to the expanding empire.

Or such, at least, was the ambition. By the time of the triumphant homecoming the first volume of the History had already appeared. The fruit of countless hours in the libraries – in marked contrast to the Melodies, which he seemed to pluck from the breeze – the History met a cool reception from the critics. The faltering start was owed to many considerations, not least the burden of great expectation, but in any case it augured ill for the future instalments. Moore had poured himself into the work, and it in turn had drained him dry. In Dublin that summer, then, when he might have been profitably researching the twelve hundred years of Irish history that still lay untouched before him, his time instead was fully taken up with all the laurel-wreathing dinners and speechifying. But even as he was neglecting the grander History, he made time to revisit his own past – as he recorded in his Journal:

The ‘Sir’ was a common mistake – as much a nod to Moore’s stature in the eyes of his admirers as it was a simple confusion with his beheaded near-namesake. The new owner of 12 Aungier Street was a grocer, as had been Moore’s father before him – humble circumstances that the poet was always proud to acknowledge, both to his fellow commoners and among those ennobled friends with whom he spent his days and whose names were written in the Domesday Book. There is a story about Moore’s first presentation to the Prince of Wales in London in about 1800 or 1801, when the royal quizzed the mannerly young poet on his origins, trying to attach him to this or that house of Moore. ‘No, sir,’ he replied, ‘I have not the honour of being descended from any of the distinguished families you have named. I am, sir, the son of one of the honestest tradesmen in Dublin.’ It is probably an apocryphal tale, yet the sentiment rings true. Of course, even within the rank of grocers there were degrees of respectability. ‘When I say that the shop was still a grocer’s,’ Moore would later cavil, ‘I must add, for the honour of old times, that it has a good deal gone down in the world, since then and is of a much inferior grade of grocery to that of my poor father, who, by the way, was himself one of nature’s gentlemen.’

He kept the quibble to himself as the tour continued, first to the small yard at the back, stocked with unfamiliar clutter, then to the little kitchen, where he used to take his bread and milk in the mornings before heading out to school. It was twenty years since he had seen these floors and walls, but the light fell exactly as before, bringing everything back; a correlative of the poeticized light that consistently triggers memories in the Melodies. Upstairs were the old drawing rooms, front and back, the former, contrary to the usual experience, slightly larger than it had been in memory; the latter, as he walked in, instantly recalling to him his mother’s musical evenings of forty-odd years before. In his mind’s eye the room was once again packed to the rafters. He saw and heard them clearly, fellows like Joe Kelly and Wesley Doyle, ‘singing away together so sweetly’. Kelly was a natural talent, never formally trained, barely able to write his own name, but possessed of a beautiful voice and a handsome face, making him as much a star of Dublin’s flourishing theatre world as his brother Michael, a friend of Mozart’s, was in London. Doyle, on the other hand, who played accompaniment on the piano in the corner, had been coached by his father, a professor of music. Amateur and professional mixed freely in this scene, the convivial substratum of small drawing-room performance played out nightly across the city, a social rung or two below, and a few streets back from, similar amusements being enacted in the grander Georgian squares, but no less sophisticated for that. Besides, where talent was the passport, the same figures – artists, actors, or musicians – passed easily back and forth through invisibly observed frontiers.

From the earliest age, Moore was inducted into this culture of performance, the marks of which he bore for the rest of his life. ‘It was my lot,’ he would later recollect, ‘to be made at a very early age, a sort of show child.’ On those exhibition nights in the drawing room above the shop, young Tom would take centre stage, long after his usual bedtime, to recite or to sing voguish ditties. His mother, Anastasia, hostess and doyenne, would be prevailed upon too, usually giving her favourite, the sentimental ‘How Sweet in the Woodlands’, in her clear, soft voice.

Appropriately – or so the story goes – Moore was born amid similar sounds of song and revelry. Late in the evening of 28 May 1779 a barrister who had taken lodgings with the Moores was throwing a party in his room for some friends, and as the night wore on, and the guests grew louder, laughing and shouting, a maid suddenly interrupted to say that Mrs Moore had just been delivered of a son. The bursts of congratulations were stopped short when it was explained that the new mother was now quite ill. Immediately the revellers agreed to move to a nearby tavern, at which one wit of the party quipped, ‘It is right we should adjourn pro re nata’ – the sort of learned pun that would prove at least as appropriate to the newborn as the party he had crashed.

Once she had recovered, Anastasia Jane Moore, née Codd, set about commemorating for posterity the arrival of her first-born child. From the centre of a Spanish silver dollar she had the coat of arms polished smooth, and the following inscribed:

Anastasia kept the medal close by her throughout her life, and some fifty years after having it struck, when she feared they were parting for the last time, she pressed it into her son’s hand, along with her wedding ring.

It was thanks to Anastasia that the family lived on Aungier Street, a fashionable address on the south side of the city. Little is known about Moore’s parents prior to their marriage, and still less of their genealogies. ‘Of my ancestors on the paternal side,’ Moore wrote in 1833, ‘I know little or nothing, having never, so far as I can recollect, heard my father speak of his father and mother, of their station in life, or of anything at all connected with them.’ His father, John Moore, was originally from County Kerry, where the Moore name had been prevalent since the sixteenth century, but John appears to have kept next to no contact with his origins, his son noting that ‘My uncle, Garret Moore, was the only member of my father’s family with whom I was ever personally acquainted.’ Others, in time, were anxious to re-establish the connection: ‘When I came indeed to be somewhat known, there turned up into light a numerous shoal of Kerry cousins… who were eager to advance their claims to relationship with me; and I was from time to time haunted by applications from first and second cousins, each asking in their respective lines for my patronage and influence.’ There is no evidence that Moore ever entertained such claims. Neither, for that matter, did he note the family connection when he toured the region in the 1820s. Even in Georgian Dublin, it seems, it took less than a generation to become a dyed-in-the-wool metropolitan.

Before his marriage, John Moore ran a small vintner’s shop in Johnson’s Court, a narrow lane off Grafton Street. These tributary alleys abounded in the city, hidden between the Wide Streets Commission’s airy new avenues, becoming places where night-vices flourished. Their medieval shadows often earned them darkly suggestive names, such as Cutpurse Row, Cuckold’s Row, Murdering Lane, Rapparee Alley and Cut-throat Lane – all since, of course, municipally renamed. According to J. T. Gilbert’s mid-nineteenth-century History of the City of Dublin, Johnson’s Court ‘figured conspicuously in the scandalous chronicles of Dublin during the first thirty years of the reign of George III’. A wine shop in such a location was primed to do a roaring trade.

In private, John Moore seems to have been a rather modest, unassuming type. Later, when he was described as ‘a homely man’ by the writer S. C. Hall, his daughter-in-law loyally objected. She remembered him as ‘handsome, full of fun, and with good manners’. A portrait attributed to Martin Cregan depicts him as every inch the assured burgher, with his sombre coat, starched necktie, and the glint of a gold watch chain matching the artist’s highlight in his eye. The overall effect chimes with his son’s quoted description of him as ‘one of nature’s gentlemen’ – a typically Moore-ish distinction between birth and bearing – ‘having all the repose & good-breeding of manner by which the true gentleman, in all classes, is distinguished’. He was also a quietly committed patriot: Tom vividly recalled being brought to a celebration dinner for Napper Tandy, where he sat for a few minutes on the famous rebel’s knee. Tom was much struck, too, with the rousing toast: ‘May the breezes of France fan our Irish Oak into verdure.’

For all his apparent seriousness, John Moore also had a dry, puckish sense of humour. Much less religious than his wife, he enjoyed ‘sly sallies’ against the Catholic clergy, and although Anastasia could not help laughing, she always made a point of telling him off. ‘I declare to God, Jack Moore, you ought to be ashamed of yourself’ – thus ran her catchphrase, indirectly intended for the children, and repeated so often that even in late middle age Moore could still hear it clearly. Even on his deathbed John Moore never grew pious, nor lost his quick wit. When the priest offered to hear his confession, he simply turned to Anastasia: ‘You can tell this gentleman all he requires to know…’ A few nights later he was thanking his unmarried daughter for all her care. ‘You are a valuable little girl,’ he said. ‘It’s a pity some good man does not know your value.’ Overhearing this, an apothecary present said with a smile, ‘Oh, Sir, some good man will.’ ‘Not an apothecary, though,’ replied the patient.

Moore always spoke of his father in the highest terms (‘to him and the education which he struggled hard to give me I owe it all’), but throughout his life he was particularly devoted to his mother, and she to him. Anastasia Codd was born in Wexford, daughter of Catherine and Thomas – for whom, presumably, his grandson was named. Unlike her husband, Anastasia maintained strong links with her birthplace, but records of Moore’s ancestors in the area are generally as obscure as those on the Kerry side. As a boy Moore visited Wexford with some family friends, the Redmonds. He never knew his maternal grandmother, Catherine, née Joyce, who had died before he was born, but Tom Codd – ‘my old gouty grandfather’ – featured in several of his earliest memories. The Codd house was in the Cornmarket, which Moore revisited during that nostalgic trip of 1835, afterwards journalizing: ‘Nothing… could be more humble and mean than the little low house which still remains to tell of his whereabouts.’ He was never sure of the nature of old Codd’s work, though he dimly recalled some weaving machinery kept in an upstairs room. Other evidence suggests that Codd turned his hand to whatever promised a return: another cousin, for instance, claimed he ran a slaughterhouse, while Anastasia, with the social climber’s knack for linguistic upgrade, described her father as a ‘Provision Merchant’. The folklorist T. C. Croker meanwhile claimed that he was ‘in the Smuggling line’ – which was not, it must be said, an especially dishonourable business in eighteenth-century Ireland. In any case, as the eldest daughter, Anastasia benefited from her father’s shrewdness, bringing to her marriage a large enough dowry for John Moore to relocate from Johnson’s Court to the much more upmarket Aungier Street.

The couple married in Dublin in late May 1778, the groom a good deal older than his bride: Moore remembered her teasing, ‘You know, Jack, you were an old bachelor when I married you.’ In his understanding, Anastasia was about eighteen – if that – at the time of her marriage, while the information on her gravestone puts her four years younger again. But in fact she was twenty, to John’s thirty-six or thirty-seven. She was by all accounts an extraordinary woman. The artist G. F. Mulvany wrote of her: ‘It was impossible to know Mrs. Moore even slightly, without being pleased with her urbanity, kindness, humour, and with her intelligent conversation; still more did intimate acquaintance lead to the conviction that she was a superior woman: one who, born in a different sphere of society, and under different circumstances, would have been remarkable in her day.’ To Hall she was ‘almost uneducated’, though nonetheless possessed of a ‘higher mind’ than her husband – meaning, it seems, an indulgent, artistic streak, which his pragmatism easily threw into relief. (Perhaps his stolidity was tactical, for when John insisted that one suit a year was enough for any boy, Anastasia simply went out and bought Tom two exactly identical outfits.) She was also an even more ardent patriot than John, and many who frequented her musical evenings would soon find fame as revolutionaries. Moore later intimated that such leanings were inevitable. ‘Born of Catholic parents,’ he wrote, ‘I had come into the world with the slave’s yoke around my neck’. But he made clear that the Moore family patriotism was non-sectarian: most of those Jacobinical friends were Protestants, ‘the Catholics being still too timorous to come forward openly in their own cause’.

Timorousness of any stripe was alien to Anastasia, especially when it came to advancing Tom’s cause. She seized for him every opportunity she herself had missed, encouraging his every effort and cultivating the company of anyone she thought might smooth his path. Mostly, it seems, she kept to the right side of mollycoddling, and their closeness never waned. According to the novelist Lady Morgan, mother and son were more than just temperamentally alike: Anastasia, she wrote, ‘looked like Moore himself in petticoats’. (Alas, Cregan’s portrait does not quite bear this out, nor does it do justice to Anastasia’s famous vivacity, depicting instead a doleful, moon-faced old matron.) Others too observed the mother–son bond. The earliest editor of Moore’s letters noted that throughout his life he rarely missed writing to Anastasia twice every week, the sole significant interruption occurring during his spell in Bermuda and America. The first of these letters dates from August 1793, when Moore was fourteen. He was writing from Aungier Street, quizzing Anastasia on her delay in returning from Wexford:

For God’s sake, will you ever be home? There’s nothing here heard but wishes for your return.

N.B. Excuse my scrap of rhyme; for you know poets will out with it. – Poets! very proud, indeed; but don’t mention it.

Juvenile as they are, these lines presaged much. All his life Moore could be pretentious, but he was far too self-aware to ever come across as precious; likewise, his fondness for highfalutin affectation was invariably undercut with self-deprecating wit. But the letters’ most consistent note, struck time after time in the thousands that followed, was of devoted filial affection. (Incidentally, these youthful lines also attest to Moore’s long-vowel pronunciation of his name – rhyming with ‘poor’ – an Irish intonation which contrasted with his English friends’ insistence on the short ‘o’; Byron, for instance, variously rhymed ‘Moore’ with ‘nor’, ‘shore’ and ‘pour’.)

After Tom Anastasia had eight more children, six of whom died young. The others who survived were Catherine, called Kate, born 1782, and Ellen, born four years later, a weak child who grew into a delicate, suffering woman. Neither enjoyed the opportunities lavished upon their brother – not least, of course, because they were girls. As to the children who died, it is not clear what ages they reached, though some at least were more than infants, and Tom would have been old enough to register the events. But such deaths were relatively common occurrences in the era, to be faced philosophically, and no doubt Tom took his cue from John and Anastasia. ‘My youth was in every respect a most happy one,’ he later wrote in his Memoirs, and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity.

On both sides, then, Moore’s forebears were natives of ‘the hidden Ireland’, to use a compromised if still useful phrase – non-landowning Catholics who lived unremarkably, without leaving many traces, under the Penal Laws, which enshrined the political and economic dominance of the established Church of Ireland. Similarly, the manner in which John and Anastasia rose into respectable – or, better still, recorded – society is to some extent emblematic of the rise of an entire people. Indeed, were it not for the brilliant literary success of their son, the Moores could almost be described as typical, for the means of their ascent was trade.

On 1 February 1779 an advertisement in Saunders’s News Letter announced the latest addition to the commercial life of the city. Headed ‘NEW TEAS’, it proclaimed:

Because of the restrictions of the Penal Laws, it was only through trade that Irish Catholics of the era could participate meaningfully in Irish public life. These laws, which followed the victory of William III over James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, were intended in part to transfer the political power of landowning Catholics into certain Protestant hands. Oaths were introduced to exclude non-Protestants from the professions and political life, and further Acts restricted Catholics’ inheritance and leasing rights. Sundry, severe proscriptions followed through the early 1700s, and by 1729 the right to vote was withdrawn from Catholic freeholders, meaning the country now had a Protestant parliament representing only Protestant opinion. But while the old Catholic nobility were banished or broken (or else became converts to the state faith), their underling coreligionists began to make gains. Careers in law, medicine and the military remained impossible, but the commercial world opened up – both legitimate and contraband – partly, of course, because the ruling caste held trade in disdain. Unsurprisingly, Catholics came to dominate this occupation. A merchant class began to emerge, with the result that by the close of the century some families had amassed considerable fortunes. Neither John Moore nor indeed old Tom Codd ever became particularly wealthy, but they were squarely part of this culture. Even the few traits of John Moore already mentioned – his frugality and lack of ostentation (that pocket watch excepted) – might be seen as characteristic of his entire class.

The teas and groceries sold well enough, and on 27 May – the day before he became a father – John Moore advertised again, puffing his second assortment of ‘FINE TEAS’; he also announced that ‘An Apprentice will be taken’. The apprentice, soon joined by another, would lodge with the family in fairly rudimentary style, for as Moore recollected, ‘our house was far from spacious’. The building itself dated from the early eighteenth century and according to Lady Morgan had once been the home of Oliver Goldsmith’s sister. Living quarters were behind the shop and on the two floors above. Tom’s bedroom was simply a corner of a room portioned off by a wooden screen, on the other side of which two clerks bedded down; for many years he shared this ‘nook’ with his uncle, Richard Joyce Codd.

Today the house has a third floor, but in Moore’s time this was only a small attic room, squeezed beneath an elegant, curving pediment known as a ‘Dutch Billy’ gable, once quite common in Dublin. This ornamentation was a testament to the Protestant fealty of the house’s original inhabitants – but presiding over the shop of a petit bourgeois like John Moore it better symbolized the fluidity of social change in the city. Some two hundred years before Moore was born here, Sir Francis Aungier, Earl of Longford, began developing the area as a new suburb for the Dublin gentry. Stretching due south from the heart of the old city towards the Wicklow hills, Aungier Street was, at seventy feet, the widest in the capital, and it quickly became the address of many of its most powerful individuals, among them the Bishop of Kilmore, the Earl of Donegal and the Countess of Mount Alexander. After 1700 and the death of Sir Francis, a new wave of settlement and displacement began, as the street’s elite moved east to newer, more fashionable developments. Their expansive sites along the street were divided up, the gardens built over, and the detached mansions absorbed into more continuous facades. The new neighbours of the lower-level gentry and minor army officers who could not afford to move were tradesmen and artisans. Wilson’s Dublin Directory records the arrival of coach- and cabinet-makers, tailors, weavers and brass-smiths – to be joined eventually at No. 12 by ‘John Moore, Tea-merchant and grocer’, thereafter a Wilson’s fixture for more than twenty years.

Anastasia promoted and protected Tom in equal measure. She rarely entrusted him to anyone, though an exception was made for a Miss Dodd, an elderly, rather well-to-do spinster who lived in nearby Camden Street. Looking back, Moore candidly admitted that it was his mother’s ambition, ‘with no undue aspirings for herself, to secure for her children an early footing in the better walks of society’ – an ambition to which, he continued, ‘I owe both my taste for good company, and the facility I afterwards found in adapting myself to that sphere’. At Christmas he would spend three whole days with Miss Dodd, fussed over by her and her guests. She too indulged his taste for performing: he well remembered one evening spent hiding beneath the table during one of her tea parties, hugging a small barrel organ in his lap, waiting to surprise the guests with music from – ‘they knew not where!’

Recitation was the first talent Anastasia cultivated in her show-child. The actor-artist J. D. Herbert, another regular at Aungier Street, remembered Tom at three years old, an ‘entertaining little fellow’, prattling away as he clambered upon the visitor’s knee; at five he had already thrown away childish toys, demanding instead passages from Shakespeare; at six he chose a speech from Hamlet to recite before Herbert’s friends (rather bizarrely, it was the prince’s soliloquy on his mother’s marriage: ‘O, most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!’). Sometimes Anastasia taught him the political slogans of day – she fostered his interest in this field too – which he would then declaim with incongruous vehemence. For all his precocious ability, part of the effect was owed to his being so tiny; some even jokingly accused him of being one of ‘the little people’. Even as an adult he remained remarkably diminutive, probably less than five feet tall – an appearance that seemed to concentrate his already considerable charm and to intensify his musical performances.

That musical ability revealed itself slowly, after something of a false start. An old ‘lumbering’ harpsichord had been left with John Moore as part-payment by a bankrupt customer, so Anastasia brought in a piano-tuner’s boy to try Tom with the basics. But the pair spent their lesson-time horseplaying, vaulting over tables and chairs in the drawing room – Tom dreamed of being a harlequin and would practise for hours his hero’s ‘head-foremost leap’ over the end of his bedstead. He barely learned to pick out two or three melodies with his right hand before his young tutor was dismissed. Later, when he was fourteen or so, Catherine began taking lessons, not on the old harpsichord, but on a traded-in pianoforte – a relatively new instrument in the 1790s, certainly rare in such circles, and expensive enough for John Moore to require significant persuasion. This time Anastasia made a better choice for Catherine’s teacher, a young man named William Warren, who later became one of Dublin’s most successful music-masters. Tom listened in on the lessons, afterwards trying out what he had heard, and in this way more or less taught himself to play.

But the key to Anastasia’s ambitions for Tom was his education. She vigilantly monitored his progress, and if she came home late from a party she would wake him to run through his next day’s lessons. Hisfirst school was in Aungier Street, run by a man named Malone. In Moore’s recollection it was a ramshackle place, a sort of urban hedge-school. Malone would arrive in about noon each day, hat wildly askew, and reeking of alcohol. He dozed while ‘ushers’ – probably just older boys – deputized with the lessons; anyone who disturbed his slumber risked a thrashing. But Tom was always spared – partly because he was the youngest boy, partly too thanks to Anastasia’s ploy of heaping master, ushers and fellow pupils alike with ‘all sorts of kindnesses and attentions’. Little else is known of Malone’s school, but it was probably somewhat more formal than Moore let on – as indicated by a silver medal he won in a ‘Publick Examination’ at the age of six.

As soon as he was old enough, Tom was entered at Samuel Whyte’s ‘English Grammar School’ in nearby Grafton Street, literally and figuratively the route to Trinity College. For more than thirty years Whyte’s had been widely regarded as the finest school in the city. ‘At the English Grammar School,’ promised an advertisement, ‘Education in all its most useful and ornamental Branches, speculative and practical, [is] conducted on Academic Principles, to complete the Gentleman and Man of Business, whether his Destination be to the Senate, the Pulpit or the Bar.’ This last destination particularly appealed to Anastasia, who cherished dreams of Tom in a barrister’s gown (penal prohibition notwithstanding). Whyte’s was also one of the city’s most expensive schools, and although the grocery business was flourishing – there is passing reference to a pony kept for Tom – paying the fees represented a serious commitment to Tom’s education. Unusually for the time, Whyte taught girls too, but there was no question of Kate or Ellen being enrolled.

Teaching girls was only one aspect of Whyte’s progressive style. A poet, prosodist, rhetorician, educational theorist and actor manqué, he moulded his pupils in his own high-flown, highbrow image. It was an influence to which Tom willingly surrendered, and thirty years later he wrote: ‘To remember our school-days with gratitude and pleasure is a tribute at once to the zeal and gentleness of our master, which none ever deserved more truly from his pupils than Mr. Whyte.’ These lines appeared in Moore’s biography of another past-pupil, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whom Whyte at the time had unfortunately pronounced ‘a most impenetrable dunce’. Moore credited Whyte with ‘all the instructions in English literature’ he had ever received; certainly his first attempts at poetry bore the impress of Whyte’s own florid verse – the likes of this, from The Shamrock; or, Hibernian Cresses:

And now, when supremely thus blest with your Sight,

I scarce can my Transports restrain;

I wish, and I pant, to repeat the Delight;

And kiss you again, and again…

Poems, On Various Subjects