Source: https://www.catholicireland.net/like-sun-gone-down/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 12:31:21+00:00

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John Canon O’Hanlon (1821-1905) was a priest literateur of the 19th century so well-known that Joyce has immortalised him as a charcter in “Ulysses”. He wrote on many topics including folklore, the lives of Irish saints, the Irish language, church buildings, politics, art and poetry. Pádraig Ó Macháin and Tony Delaney put together a selection of his writings to commemorate the centenary of his death.
291.pp. Price €15. Published by Galmoy Press, Ráth Oisín, Crosspatrick, Co. Kilkenny.
056-8831347. To order this book email: [email protected].
John Canon O’Hanlon (1821-1905) is one of a number of 19th century priest writers (usually of local history and antiquities) who felt that the educational opportunity afforded by their family background gave them a duty and privilege not just of the priestly ministry but also of scholarly publication of the history of their dioceses, counties and country which had been de facto proscribed in the 18th century.
The title Like sun going down reflects his interest in preserving past memories for future generations. This work makes a selection of reminiscences of his childhood, and articles written during his eleven years in St Louis, Missouri, USA and fifty two as a priest in Dublin. It also includes a selection of poems he wrote under the pen-name Lageniensis (‘Leinsterman’).
Every credit to the editors Pádraig Ó Macháin and Tony Delaney who put together this compendium of O’Hanlon’s enormous output to honour the centenary of his death and wrote the Introduction.
In the illuminated address that they presented to John Canon O’Hanlon on the occasion of his Golden Jubilee, 29 May 1897, his parishioners and fellow priests laid emphasis on three aspects of his career in which he had distinguished himself. The first was his work as a priest: his care for the welfare of his parishioners, and his renovations to the two churches in his parish, St Mary’s, Star of the Sea, in Irishtown, and St Patrick’s in Ringsend. The second was his patriotism, as an advocate of ‘the national interests of our long suffering country… in endeavouring to realise the highest aspirations of our race’. The third was his work as an author, and in particular as a hagiologist or hagiographer, a chronicler of saints’ lives. (1) While it is John O’Hanlon the writer who is in evidence in the following selections, it will be apparent that the three aspects of his life that were emphasised by his admirers in 1897 are interconnected, and form part of a continuity of learning and intellectual activity discrenib1e throughout his life.
Against a background of personal experience as an emigrant and as a young priest, the coincidental developments of pastoral care and literary activity combined in a practical way in O’Hanlon’s production, in 1851, of a handbook for the Irish emigrant to America. Even at a distance of over one hundred and fifty years, there is a freshness and immediacy in his account of the modalities and the pitfalls of travel to America from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century that must have been all the more striking to contemporary readers. His concern for the Irish emigrant was to outlast the ten years he spent in Missouri. Forty years later, he produced a revised and updated edition of The Irish emigrant’s guide in 1890; and this was followed in 1903 by his Irish-American history of the United States. The aim of the latter book was two-fold, historical and educational: to record the achievements of Irish-Americans from early colonial times to the time of writing; and to furnish for an Irish readership a general history of the United States. (5) Whatever its merits today, this book displays all the characteristics that distinguish O’Hanlon’s scholarly work, in that it replicates in style and methodology the author’s comprehensive mastery of an array of source material, and his ability to convey the essence of those sources while avoiding partisanship of any kind. In his account of the American Civil War, for example, he treats equally of the exploits of Clebourne and Meagher – Corkman and Waterfordman, Confederate and Federal respectively – and avoids exaggerating their part in the complex events of the time.
His American experience also seems to have cultivated in John O’Hanlon a taste and a remarkable energy for travel, and the spirit of enquiry that goes with it. In subsequent years, in the course of his hagiographical research, he would make many trips to continental Europe, undaunted by difficulties of travel or accommodation. At the age of seventy, on his return to America in the autumn and winter of 1891, he would cover thousands of miles as he travelled to numerous locations throughout the United States and Canada in less than three months. (6) To someone, who as a young priest had ridden on horseback to distant missionary outposts along the banks of the Missouri river, such travel may well have seemed relaxing and a luxury.
It is small wonder, then, that in recording some of his early journeys, O’Hanlon can be viewed not just as a scholar, but as a travel writer in his own right. His Life and scenery in Missouri, published in book format in 1890, is undoubtedly the best example of his talent in this regard, but the combination of historical writing and travel writing was one that had been long established in his work. It emerges particularly in the closing chapters of his Life of St. Dympna in 1863. His anxiety to give the reader practical information on how to travel to the destinations mentioned in this book is a feature of his narrative; so too is his delight in description and observation, and his scientific curiosity in anything connected with the care of the poor and the infirm. In his record of his trip to Gheel, for example, he pays particular attention to the hospital for the insane, erected in that city a year earlier, a record that we have reproduced below.
John O’Hanlon was a bibliophile, and a minor litterateur of nineteenth-century Dublin. (7) His friends and correspondents included scholars such as Eugene O’Curry and R. R. Madden, and poets and writers such as Denis Florence MacCarthy, (8) John F. O’Donnell, (9) and John McCall and his son P. J. (10) In an age when expression in verse was not unusual, and where poetry in English was seen as important to the national cause (11) O’Hanlon himself had more than a passing interest in making poems, both formal and occasional, including versified versions of legends that he had elsewhere expressed in prose.
He was also very much part of the nineteenth-century culture of the antiquary-folklorist. (15) Mixing scholarly discipline with respect for the tradition-bearer, he connected both with the father of Irish folklore studies, Charles Vallancey (whom he quotes liberally in his writing), and with the literary tradition of writers such as Carleton and O’Hanlon’s fellow Queen’s County man, John Keegan, in whom he had a lifelong interest.
Few things are so evanescent in their nature as folk lore remembrances and theories; but their generic peculiarities have been fairly preserved in our ancient and modern literature. Of this source for information the writer has availed himself. Thousands of interesting legends have been totally forgotten, however, because unrecorded; and yet many of these were essentially important for a perfect solution to historic problems, while they characteristically illustrate a people’s moral and intellectual organization or culture, and speculative opinions.
If unnoticed in some form, such as that now presented, it is probable those legends and traditions must have been consigned altogether to oblivion.
The inspiration for many of these writers was the work of John Lanigan, (17) and it is no coincidence that O’Hanlon’s first involvement in monumental commemoration was his collaboration with Petrie and O’Curry in the creation of a Celtic Cross for Lanigan’s grave in Finglas. (18) In the writings of all these clerical scholars, there is a sense of purpose, as though the educational opportunities afforded them by their family backgrounds, and by Emancipation, placed upon them not just a duty of priestly ministry, but a duty also of scholarly publication of the history of their dioceses, counties and country, which had been concealed and proscribed de facto in the eighteenth century. This sense of purpose is most evident in O’Hanlon’s core writings, where he pursues his project of chronicling the lives of the Irish saints, organised by feast-day, from 1 January to 31 December.
To a large extent, this method of repetition and re-cycling was to be his working template throughout his career. Saints’ lives would appear initially in articles or monographs, and would again be published as part of the great work. The template held true also for other areas of his writings. His series on the ‘Old churches of Leix’, for example, published in the Irish Builder in the 1880s, had the dual function of preparing material to be included as background in the Lives of the Irish saints, and verbatim in his History of the Queen’s County. Nor did he cavil at simultaneous publication in cases where, one deduces, he held that some of the matter published in book format could benefit from an independent existence as an article. For this purpose, the pages of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record were always at his disposal, it would appear, and a case in point was the parallel publication in that journal of the historical portion of his introduction to Mason’s Essay on the antiquity and constitution of parliaments in Ireland in February of 1891, at the very time that it was being published in his new edition of that book.
In addition to his objectivity, the ‘many learned authorities consulted and cited’ are also a feature of his work that remains relevant today. O’Hanlon can never be accused of fancy or fabrication in his writing. Every proposition, deduction and conclusion is painstakingly annotated and referenced, so that while one may at times demur at a style that verges on prolix – but that was, after all, very much of its time – one can still admire his scholarly methodology and his all-pervasive concern to be both precise and exhaustive. That desire for exhaustive annotation led O’Hanlon to the examination of sources that had been neglected or little used up to then, a case in point being the use made by him of the records of the Ordnance Survey.
O’Hanlon’s repeated advocacy of the publication of the records of the Ordnance Survey in the form of parish memoirs and county histories (25) amounted to more than just his usual predilection for the ‘grand scheme’ of his own devising. He saw in these records one of the foundations for the study of the history of local places, and he saw also their value as aids to preserving, for all time, information on structural antiquities then extant but which in future might well be destroyed. This perception confirmed him in his conviction of the importance of the role of the artist in antiquarian and historical studies.
Viewed in this context, the multitude of mostly contemporary sketches included by O’Hanlon in Lives of the Irish saints has more purpose than that of merely offering relief to the reader from the highly detailed prose. They also serve to highlight a neglected aspect of John O’Hanlon, that of the competent amateur artist.
O’Hanlon was scarcely returned from the United States in 1853 when he was engaged in making a sketch of Coolbanagher, in his native Queen’s County. This work of travelling throughout Ireland and sketching antiquities was to continue for the next half-century, with the dual purpose of illustrating his writings and of preserving in art a fragile part of his country’s heritage. Of the 596 drawings engraved in the ten volumes of Lives of the Irish saints, John O’Hanlon is responsible for 128: just over one fifth. His drawings range in date from December 1853 (27) to June 1901, (28) three years before his death. An original sketch by O’Hanlon is published for the first time below, p. 173, and in Appendix 5 we catalogue the engravings in Lives of the Irish saints.
John O’Hanlon’s childhood was a time of social and political unrest in the Queen’s County. Emancipation apart, the agitation against tithes and other injustices engaged the efforts, on the side of ‘moral force’, of people such as Pat Lalor of Tinnakill, Peter Gale of Arless, and John Dunn of Ballinakill; while on the side of ‘physical force’ were a range of secret organisations such as the Rockites and the Whitefeet. O’Hanlon recorded the impression left on him by the Ballykilcavan evictions of 1828, and it is possible that the seeds of his advocacy of constitutional politics and of Home Rule may have been sown by his attendance in his fifteenth year at O’Connell’s meeting on the Great Heath in January 1836. (31) It is likely that those early influences – in combination with his pastoral desire to better the lot of the despairing poor that he had encountered firstly in St Louis, then in the poorhouse in James’s Street, (32) and subsequently throughout his career as a priest in central Dublin and in Sandymount generated in him the vision that emerges in his writings in later life. By no means a radical priest, and always submissive to the authority of his archbishop, (33) he nevertheless had a political conscience, which surfaces in his attitude to the land question in 1881 (see pp. 126-30), and in two publications by him in 1891-2 in the context of the Home Rule debate of that time.
There seems no doubt that these works were produced as a deliberate contribution to that debate. Both were new editions by O’Hanlon of works by earlier authors: William Molyneux and Henry Joseph Monck Mason. In the edition of Molyneux, whose work on its first issue in 1698 had been publicly burned, O’Hanlon, writing in September 1891, says that he attempted ‘to make it suitable for popular reading, at a period also when a study of Ireland’s former struggles for parliamentary independence ought naturally aid in shaping and directing the future life of a nation, that demands the permanent establishment of Home Rule, and the inalienable rights of constitutional self-government’. (34) In his introduction to Mason’s work – a book he dedicated to Gladstone in March of the same year, he allowed himself a lengthy polemic on the subject, an extract from which we have reproduced below.
It is tempting to view his efforts in the cause of the memory of Daniel O’Connell as another aspect of his hagiographical endeavours. To take this view, however, would be to deny O’Hanlon his right to be viewed as a conscientious historian. His ‘Life of William Molyneux’ is a fine piece of biographical writing, (39) and, from the evidence of proofs that survive of the abandoned work, (40) there is no reason to believe that his biography of Daniel O’Connell would have been anything other than that also.
2. See Appendix 1, under the year 1842.
4. The life of Saint Malachy O’Morgair, vi.
6. Appendix 2 § 8.
7. On 24 September 1902, O’Hanlon sent his friend Cardinal Moran ‘a collection of Autograph Letters of celebrated Irish writers torn out of the books in which I had them bound, as material for your Museum’ (Archives of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney: Cardinal Moran Archive, Box U 2419).
8. ‘I had purposed on Monday evening next to attend the [Royal Irish] Academy for the purpose of electing him as a member of the Council. Alas! that instead of doing him this honour, I can only hope to manifest my deep regret and respect by attending his funeral on Tuesday’ (NLI Denis Florence MacCarthy Papers, Accession 1550Box 1, Folder 1: O’Hanlon to John MacCarthy, 8 April 1882). See Appendix 1, under the year 1882.
9. … my dear and delightful former friend John Francis O’Donnell’ (UCD Department of Archives LA 15/1288).
of condolence to P. J. McCall (20 January, 18 February 1902) in NLI MS 13875.
11.Cf. John Keegan Casey’s ‘Lecture on the influence of national poetry’ in Roe, Reliques of John K. Casey, 221-8.
12. O’Hanlon administered the Last Rights to O’Daly, 20 April 1878 (Calm, ‘John ODaly’). O’Hanlon had the good fortune to be able to call on the scholarly and literary talents of his parishioners in the two Dublin parishes in which he served. In Írishtown, for instance, two of his parishioners were John Gerald McSweeny (editor of the Weekly Freeman, and signatory to the 1897 address), and the geologist Joseph P. O’Reilly (DDA Walsh Papers 1890, Secular Clergy: O’Hanlon to Walsh, 18 November 1890).
l3. See Appendix 1, under the year 1877. The council adjourned its meeting of 16 May 1905 as a mark of respect to O’Hanlon (Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language report for 1905,69-70).
14. United Irishman 20 May 1905. See Appendix 1, under the year 1900. For more on his engagement with the Irish language, see Breatnach agus NI Mhurchti, Beathaisnéis, 106-7.
15. For the development of folklore studies in Ireland during this period see Ó Giolláin, Locating Irishfolklore.16. ‘Father Meehan met a woman who sought alms. He counted his treasury; it amounted to a shilling, and he gave her sixpence. He was rather sceptical about her bona fides, and after some consideration followed her round the corner to see if his doubts were justified. She went into a public house, and before Father Meehan could intervene, had demolished a glass of whiskey. As he came out he was caught by Father O’Hanlon; and the two regained the presbytery in silence, when the latter simply shook his comrade by the hand, more is sorrow than in anger’ (Irish Times 16 May 1905).
17. On Lanigan’s influence on the study of Irish antiquity in the nineteenth century see Collins, Catholic churchmen, 64-7.
18. See Appendix 1, under the year 1861.
19. The Life of SaintMalachy O’Morgair, Prospectus [following p.222] p.iii.
20. McCartney, ‘Canon O’Hanlon: historian of the Queen’s County’, 594.
21. Lives of the Irish saints X, numbers 100 and 101 (Dublin City Library and Archive).
22. Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society New Series, 1(1856-7)153-4 and 192-4.
Survey Library…’ (Lives of the Irish saints I, lxvii n. 33). O’Donovan was the ‘gentle ollamh‘ of O’Hanlon’s verse in ‘The Land of Leix’ (Poetical works of Lageniensis, 92). For O’Hanlon’s grief at the death of O’Curry, see Appendix 2 § 3.
24. The life of Saint Laurence O’Toole, Prospectus [following p. 186], p. [iii].
25. E.g. Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society New Series, 1 (1856-7) 297, 322, 324; 4 (1862-3) 238-40.
26. Ibid., New Series 2 (1858-9) 48.
27. Lives of the Irish saints VIII, 329-30.
29. The life of Saint Laurence O’Toole, vi.
the year 1836. Q’Hanlon’s political outlook is analysed in McCartney, ‘Canon Q’Hanlon: historian of the Queen’s County’.
32. Appendix 2 § 2.
33. Appendix 2 § 4.
34. The case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament, viii.
35. ‘I have to state that I am going to the House of Commons this evening, where I hope to meet my friend Mr. Alfred Webb, or some of the Irish members I happen to meet, to get me an order for admission to hear something about Home Rule and its prospects’ (UCD Dept of Archives LA15/1297: O’Hanlon to D. J. Q’Donoghue, 13 June 1893). Webb was MP for West Waterford, 1890-95.
36. The poetical works of Lageniensis, viii.
37. Notes to Appendix 2 § 9.
38. O’Hanlon stated in 1902 that the History had ‘engaged my time and researches for more than thirty past years of my life’ (letter to Leinster Express 26 April 1902).
39. The case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament, xi-xlv.
40. Appendix 3 § 2.
42. Carey, ‘O’Hanlon of “the Irish Saints” ” 159.
43. DDA Walsh Papers 1897, Secular Clergy: O’Hanlon to Archbishop William J. Walsh, 1 November 1897.
44. See Appendix 3 § 1.
45. See Appendix 1, under the years 1907 and 1914. Despite the fact that he had been preparing the work since 1883 with his series ‘Old churches of Leix’, followed, in 1888, by his series ‘Historic memorials of Leix’, volume I of the History, which he had seen in proof, still bore the signs of hurried preparation, and, though generally well received, was not without its critics: ‘We cannot commend the chapters dealing with the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, inasmuch as the numerous documents of the State Papers, the Song of Dermot, the Plea Rolls, etc., do not appear to have been consulted’ (W. H. Grattan Flood in New Ireland Review 28 (1907-8) 317).
46. O’Hanlon, ‘The Catholic Church in the United States’ (1892) 496-7.

References: § 8
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