Skeffington Gibbon

The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon (ed. by Scott Lyall), 2015

This article focuses on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s staging of multiple personae both in his life and in his oeuvre. It deals with what is termed is here as a ‘heterodixical stance’ – a shifting perspective and a fragmentary method that chime with modernist techniques. It discusses a wide range of works, both fictional and non-fictional, canonical and less explored. Through such a radical re-reading the article also attempts to reframe Gibbon’s nationalism as ‘cosmopolitan’ and fluid.

Ɖ ire-Ireland, 2004

S J O'G is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures of late-nineteenth-century Irish cultural history. He praised aristocratic values and denounced the aristocracy; Lady Gregory called him a "Fenian Unionist," and Pearse acknowledged his influence. There have been two recent substantial studies;¹ both emphasize his use of saga material. This article analyzes some previously unknown journalism, and relates O'Grady's social criticism and work on Elizabethan Ireland to his attempt to reconcile unionism and nationalism through nineteenth-century British Romantic social criticism and the eighteenth-century Patriot tradition.

County Roscommon Historical and Archaeological Society Journal, 2024

John Keogh, antiquarian, scholar and anglican priest, was born in Co. Limerick about 1653, the son of Denis Keogh or MacKeogh of Castletroy. The Keoghs were a Catholic family who had been dispossessed of their plentiful estate "which they had enjoyed for above 1,700 years", as a consequence of the wars of the 1640s. Denis married a Protestant clergyman's widow, and John was raised in that religion, matriculating at Trinity College Dublin in July 1670, aged 17. He continued there for eight or nine years, according to his son, gaining "great credit and reputation for his strict morality, great abilities, and knowledge, especially in the mathematical sciences". The dates of his B.A. degree and ordination are not recorded, but he graduated M.A. in 1678. Having failed to win a college fellowship due to lack of patrons, he took the opportunity offered by Bishop Hodson of Elphin to be ordained for that diocese. According to one source, he was appointed vicar of Creeve parish in 1674, and in 1678 was presented to the living of Bumlin, Kilglass and Kilcola, and the prebend of Termonbarry. Residing thenceforth at Strokestown, he married in 1679 Avis Clopton, an English lady, with whom he had, it was said, at least 21 children. 1 Of the six who survived him, his second son, also named John (1681-1754), became chaplain to Lord Kingston at Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, and incumbent of that parish. He was the author of the Botanologia Universalis Hibernica (Cork, 1735), a catalogue of Irish plants and their virtues, Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica (1739) and A Vindication of the Antiquities of Ireland, and a defence thereof against all the calumnies and aspersions cast on it by foreigners (1748), which included an account of his father and the family. He spelled his surname K'eogh, perhaps a reference to its derivation from the Irish Mac Eochaidh. At Strokestown John Keogh the elder devoted himself to his studies, and "had not leisure to look into the world, and pursue the riches, honours and profits of it". He kept a school, where over the years "he had near two hundred scholars, a great number of which he fitted for the college of Dublin" 2. 1 The principal sources for his biography are: his son John Keogh's Vindication of the Antiquities of Ireland (1748); Alumni Dublinenses (1924); Clergy of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh (2008); Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society (ed. K. Theodore Hoppen, 2008). O'Donovan noted a local tradition that he had lived at Cloonslanor near Strokestown; also that Keogh consulted the planets when his first son was to be born, found their aspect inauspicious, and wanted the midwife to delay the birth to a more favourable conjunction, but to no avail, and the boy popped out. "All is wrong, says the father; he will be a rake! and so he was! and squandered all the little estate." OSL 117. The eldest son Michael Keogh (1680-1734) in fact became a minister of the established church, and served in his father's parish, though he may have been a rake as well. 2 The records of Trinity College show that Mr Keogh or Cugh of Strokestown had tutored for entry to the college in 1697 John Goldsmith of Ballyoughter, Leonard Hodson, John and Oliver King of Charlestown, all of Co. Roscommon, and William Piers of Tristernagh, Co. Westmeath. Thereafter, the Roscommon gentry favoured the new diocesan grammar school at Elphin, and the only mention of him subsequently was as tutor to Roger West in 1715, and to his own sons John and Michael Keogh, both of whom matriculated in 1705 at the mature ages of 23 and 24. (Alumni Dublinenses, 1924) 8 "Kinel Dofa, called in later ages Doohy-Hanly, extended along the Shannon from Cara na dTuath (Carranadoe Bridge) to Drumdaff in the southern extremity of the parish of Kilgefin (where Mr Digby lives)….[It] comprised all the parish of Kilglass, all Termonbarry, only one townland of Bumlin called North Yard, the east half of Lissonuffy… all the parish of of Cloontooskert, and all Kilgefin." OSL 115,116 9 "At the year 1398, Aughrim Mac Naodha, now Aughrim, is mentioned as lying in the territory Tir Briuin na Sionna… The probability is that Tir Briuin comprehended the parishes of Aughrim, Kilmore and Cloonaff…" OSL 83

Emer Purcell, Paul MacCotter, Julianne Nyhan & John Feehan (eds), Clerics, Kings & Vikings. Essays on Medieval Ireland in honour of Donnchadh Ó Corráin, 217-36, 2015

A study of the very first copy of Alice Stopford Green's book, The Old-Irish World & its connection with the Belfast antiquary, F.C. Biggar

Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society, 1987

... transcribed, by Donncha Mac Oireachtaigh, ... When Dundalk man Matthew Graham, of whom we shall hear more, published The Giantess, from the Irish of Oisin in 1833, there were two Samuel Coulters among the subscribers, one of them a medical doctor,25 and Robert Coulter ...

The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon, ed. Karen O'Brien & Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2018

TIM STUART-BUTTLE Gibbon and Enlightenment History in Eighteenth-Century Britain **Pre-publication version, for K. O'Brien & B. Young (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Gibbon (Cambridge University Press, 2018)** The Decline and Fall is astonishing in its erudition, ambition, and scope. It poses formidable challenges to the intellectual historian, who endeavours to identify those 'intellectual contexts and frameworks of discourse' which might shed light on what Gibbon was 'doing in writing' the work. 1 In recent decades, scholars have greatly advanced our understanding of the manner in which Gibbon both engaged with and departed from those 'frameworks of discourse' which were prevalent in his native country. The necessarily selective overview of the British intellectual context offered in this chapter serves to illuminate aspects of Gibbon's thinking; but it also reminds us that in a number of respects The Decline and Fall was an enlightened history unlike any other. (i) British Enlightened History 'I believe', David Hume famously declared in 1770 to his publisher William Strahan, 'this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation'. Hume could name 'no less than eight Histories upon the Stocks in this Country'. 2 Here Hume referred to Scotland; but the initiatives of ambitious Scottish authors and publishers were motivated by the prospect of success in the larger and more profitable English, and indeed wider European and North American markets. 3 They worked together successfully to broaden and diversify their audience. The marketability of historyand the success of Scottish authors in cultivating (and profiting from) this public

British Assocation for Modernist Studies conference, London, June 2019.

Despite the field arguably being his most natural home, Lewis Grassic Gibbon is relatively little known within modernist studies, relegated instead to the implicitly devalued sub-categories of “working-class” or “socialist” writing (themselves often erroneously reduced to simple sub-categories of realism). The result, as Douglas McNeill explains, is that Gibbon remains ‘under-read, under-discussed, under-theorised’. Simultaneously, however, Gibbon also unsettles traditional categorisation within working-class literature: a crofter’s son from rural Scotland, he falls outside orthodox Marxist definitions of ‘proletarian’, resulting in his incorrect classification by some contemporaries as a ‘bourgeois intellectual’. Moreover, though a self-described ‘revolutionary writer’, Gibbon nonetheless decried the prescriptive anti-modernism of other socialist writers and intellectuals as ‘bolshevik blah’. Indeed, his most comprehensive critique of such ‘blah’ can arguably be read in the overt modernism of his trilogy, A Scots Quair (1932-34), wherein the aesthetic principles of early twentieth-century avant-gardists are fused with the political ambitions of the Marxist historical novel as his characters move from Scotland’s declining semi-feudal croft economy to the metropolitan centre commonly associated with both archetypal modernist and proletarian subjects. Gibbon’s aesthetic practice is thus fundamentally intertwined with his heterodox revolutionary outlook; in combining the two, he confirms his status as both a troublesome modernist and a troublesome proletarian, differentiating himself from the vast majority within the left-wing and avant-garde literary milieus to produce a text whose modernism centres working-class subjectivity and locates collective agency not in the orthodoxies of any single ideology or organisation but rather as a capacity latent within the class itself.