Isaac Butt (1813-79)

b. 6 Sept., Glenfin, Stranorlar, Co. Donegal; ed. Royal School, Raphoe, and TCD; English and Irish bar; trans. Georgics of Virgil (1833) and Fasti of Ovid (1834); co-fnd. Dublin University Magazine, Jan. 1833, calling for ‘a repeal of the literary union’; acted as third editor of the DUM, 1834-38 - and hosted, in association with the Sullivan brothers, a climate of anti-Catholic vitriol; contrib. stories such as “The Bribed Scholar” to Dublni University Magazine, 1834-37, later collected as Chapters of College Romance (1863), and dealing with ‘the romance of truth’; accused Robert Peel of ‘lack of purpose’ in 1835, and responded to the latter’s cancelled subscription with warning that only the Dublin University Magazine could reconcile Irish Tories to his policy; ed. “Gallery of Illustrious Irishmen” from Jan. 1836; succceeded Longfield as Whately Prof. Political Economy, 1836-41, inaugurated with Introductory Lecture delivered before the University of Dublin (Dublin 1837), extending concept of wealth to immaterial goods; called to Irish bar, 1838; delivered Protection to Home Industry (1840; pub. 1846), greeted by John Mitchel as a repeal essay; published a novel, Irish Life in the Castle, the Courts and the Country (1840), centred on the Davis-like character of O’Donnell; fnd. The Protestant Guardian, Dublin;	Portrait in Chalk by J.B. Yeats (NPG)
his political views were altered by the Famine which impressed on him the inablity of England to govern Ireland; much affected by Carleton’s story “La Dhu” (The Fawn of Springvale [...] and Other Tales, 1841); contrib. A Voice for Ireland: Famine on the Land (April 1847), orig. at 40pp.-length in Dublin University Magazine, calling the absence of a proper poor law the ‘moral crime’ of England and warning that current famine administration would cause anti-British coalition in Ireland (‘a little more treating of Ireland as a conquered country … and he would be a bold man who would promise many years continuance of Union’); defended William Smith O’Brien, 1848; wrote a public letter to Lord Roden, April 1849; deeply influenced by William Carleton’s story, “The Black Day”; evolved Federalist solution of the Irish Question; MP for Harwich, 1852; MP for Youghal, 1852-65; Inner Temple and English bar, 1859; reputedly caught in flagrante delicto with Lady Wilde (acc. Yeats); appeared as a barrister against the Wildes in the Travers libel case of Dec. 1864; opposed secular National School system in consideration of the attachment of the majority of Irishmen to their religion, in letter to Gladstone (Liberty of Teaching Vindicated); defended Fenians in the high court, 1865-69; returned to Ireland, 1865; President [chairman] of Amnesty Association, 1869; proposed united Nationalist party in The Nation, Nov. 1869;
held founding meeting of Home Government Association at Bilton’s Hotel, Dublin, attended by with Sir John Barrington, King Harman, Major Knox (Irish Times) A. M. Sullivan, and others, 19 May, 1870; elected MP for Limerick, 1871, and served in that capacity up to his death; launched the Home Rule Confederation [var. League], 8 Jan. 1873, being credited with inventing the phrase ‘‘Home Rule’’; leader of a 56-strong parliamentary Home Rule contingent at Westminster, 1874; proposed that the ‘Irish party will […] exhaust all the forms of the house to attain their just and righteous object’ in answer to the Coercion Bill, but professed disapproval of the ‘obstruction’ tactics of Joseph Biggar and others; lost leadership of Home Rule Confederation to Charles Stewart Parnell, 1877; he was criticised at the Home Rule Conference of 1878 for promoting an alliance with the Conservative Govt.; subjected to further attacks from the Home Rule League, Feb. 1879;
wrote historical tracts and works incl. The History of Italy from the Abdication of Napoleon (2 vols. 1860); Land Tenure in Ireland: A Plea for the Celtic Race (1866) - seeking the extension of Tenant Right by law to all occupiers of land; also issued The Power and the Land (1867) and Irish Federalism (1870); resided in Dublin at 63 Eccles St.; d. 5 May 1879; bur. Stranorlar; Butt, though a life-long Protestant, had a devotion to the Blessed Virgin and the rosary; a railway bridge on the Liffey connecting Pearse St. and Connolly Stations [formerly Westland Row and Amiens St.] bears his name and figures in the “Eumaeus” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. CAB JMC ODNB DIB DIH MKA FDA RAF OCIL

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William Carleton’s dedication to Butt prefix to the 1867 ‘general issue’ of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (London: Tegg 1867) To Isaac Butt, Esq., LL.D., M.R.I.A. Barrister at Law. and one of the Aldermen of the City of Dublin. If there is anything that takes from the satisfactin I feel in dedicating to you this new and general issue of all my works, it is a regret that they are not more worthy of having such a name as yours prefixed to them, - a name even already singularly distinguished in both literature and eloquence - and which promises to shed a lustre upon your profession and your country, unsurpassed by that which emanated from those great and brilliant spirits whose intellect eminence reflets such glory upon iId. With sentiments of the highest esteem and admiration for your genius and principles, Believe me to be, my dear Butt,                Most faithfully and sincerely yours, W. CARLETON. Dublin.

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Bibliographical details
Land Tenure in Ireland: A Plea for the Irish Race , Head (Dublin: John Falconer; London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1 1866), xx, [5-]104pp. [3 edns. in 1866; on extension of Tenant Right; [signed:] Chambers, Henrietta St. 2 July 1866; 2nd edn. pref. signed do., 25 Sept. 1866;. 3rd edn., Pref. [xx] signed do., December 1866; printed by John Falconer, 63 Upr. Sackville-Street, Dublin.] (Available at Google Books - online; see extract - infra.)

See also ensuing publications: 1.] James Hewitt, Viscount Lifford, A Plea for the Irish landlord: A Letter to Isaac Butt, Esq. Q.C. (Dublin: Hodges, Smith & Co. 1867), 20pp. [available at Google Books - online; 2.] A Demurrer to Mr Butt’s Plea, by an Irish Land Agent (Dublin: Hodges, Smith & Co. 1867), 44pp. [Manchester UL; Senate House, Univ. of London]. And see Butt’s response: The Irish People and the Irish Land: A Letter to Lord Lifford with Comments on the Publication of Lord Dufferin and Lord Rosse (Dublin: Falconer 1867), 298pp. [see details].

The Transfer of Land, by means of a judicial assurance: its practicability and advantages considered in a letter to Sir Richard Bethell, M.P., her majesty’s attorney-general for England , Esq., one of her majesty’s counsel, formerly professor of political economy in the University of Dublin (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., 104, Grafton-street; London: James Ridgeway, Piccadilly, 1857). [Reprint from The Dublin University Magazine; broadly supports a the Peelite line of Irish famine as a natural disaster with provision made for the poor, and laments Sir Robert Peel’s loss of office which prevented their continuation.]

Note: The whole is set out in the form of a review which preliminarily cites the following works: Review of The Winter of 1846-47, by A. Shafto Adair FRS (Ridgeway 1847); Robert Murray, Ireland: Its Present Condition and Future prospects (McGlashan 1847)~Speech of the Rt. Hon Lord George Betinck, Commons, 4 Feb. 1847 (Hansard 1847); John Robert Godley, Observations on the Irish Poor-Law (1847); Earl of Rosse, Letters on the State of Ireland (Hatchard and Son 1847); Extracts from Commission of Enquiry into the occupation of Land in Ireland [... &c.], with a prefatory letter from G. Poulett Scrope, MP (Ridgeway 1847); R. Torrens, Esq., FRS, Self-supporting Colonization; Ireland supported without cost to the Imperial Treasury (Ridgeway 1847) [available via HathiTrust - online]

The Irish People and the Irish Land: a letter to Lord Lifford, with comments on the publications of Lord Dufferin and Lord Rosse, formerly professor of political economy in the University of Dublin; and sometime member of Parliament for the Borough of Harwich, in England (Dublin: John Falconer, 1867), 298pp.+9 [chiefly adverts.], 23cm.; available via HathiTrust - online]; Do. [rep.] (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1997.)

[Epigraphs:] Whether an indifferent person who looks into all hands be not a better judge than one who sees only his own? Whether a single hint be sufficient to overcome a prejudice? and whether even obvious truths will not sometimes bear repeating? Bishop Berkeley, [t.p.] Note that he quotes the first again on p.5 to rebutt the suggestion that a nisi prius advocate like himself is least equipt to tell am ‘improving’ proprietor and manager of his own estate the rights and wrongs of the tenant-landlord situation. In an earlier footnote concerning the case of eviction which he has encountered in court he voices his constant belief that such a case ‘would throw more light on the causes which led to the insurrectionary movements which disturbed the South of Ireland in 1822 than is supplied by any one publication to which my memory can refer.’ (p.5n.)

Note: In his Plea for the Irish Landlord (1867), Lord Lifford had characterised Butt’s Land Tenure in Ireland: A Plea for the Celtic Race (1866) as ‘communistic’ and had further written: ‘Irish contempt of law, and of the rights of property, are paramount in the proposal of the Irish lawyer [But], while the principle of fair dealing, and the respect of mutual rights, inherent to every Englishman, supercede the rancour of the Saxon man of business. Consequently Mr. Bright’s scheme is comparatively moderate, and is scouted by a Dublin audience. Mr. Butt’s proposals are subersive of the rights of property, and no doubt are highly popular.’ (Butt, The Irish People and the Irish Land, p.6; quoting Lifford, Plea for the Irish Landlord, q,p.)
 Butt expressly denies any lack of respect for ‘mutual rights" and retorts that he only proposes to ‘make it possible for the Irish tenant to feel ‘respect for mutual rights’ by the indispensable preliminary of securing to him some rights of his own ...] by removing the bitter source of heart-burning hatred and discontent’ occasioned by mass-evictions without reason other than the desire of the proprietor (or even emptor) to institute a ‘clearance’ (p.5n.) of the land (p.7). He adds that he ‘suspect[s] very much that this subject of ‘influence" or personal dominion over the people, lies at the very root of the question we are discussing, and that resistance to tenant right is far oftener a struggle to maintain a system of vassalage than an effort to preserve any right of property in land." (p.7.) [Available via HathiTrust - online.]

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Commentary

Roy Foster, ‘Varieties of Irishness’ [1989], Paddy and Mr. Punch (London: John Lane 1993), questioning supposition that defending the Fenians turned Butt to nationalism, and esp. criticising the supposition in Thornley’s ‘supposedly definitive study’ (1964) that only the subject was a nationalist destined to miss the nationalist boat, well-meaning but stranded by his background: ‘settlement and Irish culture. “Victorian Ireland” could be middleclass, English-speaking and non-separatist in its politics, but no less “Irish” for that. Samuel Ferguson is the figure most often instanced here; but his friend and colleague on the Dublin University Magazine, Isaac Butt, might be taken as another example. Recent research into Butt’s early writings and career 8 has brilliantly queried the idea that defending the Fenians in 1867 somehow converted Butt to his peculiar and (to some of us) sympathetic brand of nationalism. It is, in fact, a presumption that assumes the pure milk of the separatist tradition is the only sustenance that can produce an Irish nationalist worthy of the name. Actually, the preconditions of Butt’s nationalism were set long before, in the “national” preoccupations of the D.U.M. cliques of the 1830s, stimulated by their impatience with the shortcomings and incompetence of the English government, and most of all by the experience of the mismanagement of the Famine (Butt was, after all, also a political economist who swam against the current of the day). [See further under David Thornley, q.v.]

D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London 1982; 1991), p.192: ‘Once Butt came to question the nature of the existing union betwen Great Britain and Ireland it was natural and logical for him to postulate that an Irish Parliament, subordinate in certain respects to the British Government, would provide a workable alternative; he sought “the restoration to Ireland oof that right of domestic legislation, without which Ireland can never enjoy real prosperity or peace.’ (p.193 & seq.)

Tadhg Foley, ‘Praties, Professors, and Political Economy’ (Irish Reporter, Third Quarter 1995), pp.6-7, ‘The only academic economist in Britain or Ireland who opposed orthodoxy was Isaac Butt, a former Whately professor, whose Protection to Home Industry, first delivered as lectures in 1840, was published in 1846; this critique of ‘free trade’ was enthusiastically received by The Nation, was distributed to repeal reading rooms, and was the subject of a eulogistic lecture by Mitchel. (p.7.)

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Joseph Spence, ‘Isaac Butt, Nationality and Irish Toryism, 1833-1852’, in Bullán, 2, 1 (Summer 1995), pp.45-60: (On Irish Life [ … &c.]:) Noting reveals the ambivalence of nationally-minded Tory’s position in Ireland so well as the case of Isaac Butt in 1840: increasingly disillusinoed withthe Union, yet still fearful of throwing off any of the habiliments of Protestant ascendancy; promoting economic nationalism at TCD, while defending the old Corporation as a fortress for the protection of the Union at the bar of the House of Lords. .. Unsprurisingly, the novel, like its author, veered between idealism and pessimism’ (p.53.)

Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English; 1830-1890 [...]’, in Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. Kelleher & Philip O’Leary (Cambridge UP 2006), Vol. 1 [Chap. 11]: Butt is the supposed author of ‘The Past and Present State of Irish Literature’, in Irish Monthly Magazine, 1, 5 (Sept. 1832) - an article in which the case is made that ‘if national literature means the capability of a people to write, and the establishment of a system to publish what is written for the instruction and entertainment of the community [then Ireland’s] very existence as a nation possessing a separate literature of her own, must be denied’ (p.333; here p.451.) [Cont.]

Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing and Drama [...] 1830-1890’ (2006) - cont: cites W. J. McCormack as the origin of the ascription of the said article to Butt However, an article of the same name is shortly afterwards quoted and identified by her with the Dublin University Magazine (March 1837, p.371), with additional remarks in a footnote indicating that its attribution to Butt is the work of McCormack, editor of the relevant section of The Field Day Anthology - viz., ‘The Intellectual Revival, 1830-1850’, ed. McCormack, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Derry/NDU 1991, Vol. 1, pp.1173-1300; p.1200. The possibility of a bibliographical confusion is intensified by the fact that the title of the article is quoted in the body-text on the first occasion and in the notes of Kelleher’s chapter on the second. [Cont.]

Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing and Drama [...] 1830-1890’ (2006) - cont: incls. passing remarks on Butt: ‘[...] The coherence and extent of such a tradition may be overstated [...] yet the Gothic mode with its distinctive anxieties is a significant form in nineteenth-century Irish writing. Other Irish examples of the genre deserve some attention: the DUM, for example, published between 1834 and 1837 an eight-part series entitled Chapters of College Romance which included various sensationalist plots and Faustian themes. Published as the work of one ‘Edward S. O’Brien’, the stories were identified in 1840 as the work of Isaac Butt, editor of the magazine.’ (p.472; see longer full text version in RICORSO Library > “Critical Classics”, via index or direct.)

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Quotations
Address [to] TCD Hist. (1833): The speech is in praise of oratory: ‘I believe, Gentlemen, that there is very little fear that oratory will ever be employed in the maintenance of tyranny. Oratory implies an appeal to the judgement of the many ... oratory implies discussion ..’ [17]. ‘We shall yet send forth a Grattan to represent her [this society] in the senate - a Curran to shed the blaze of eloquence upon her bar - and a Kirwan to redeem her pulpit taste. And I will not - I cannot believe that betters days are not in store for my unhappy, but still loved, my native land. this may not b the place to give utterance to my feelings but I cannot help it. I see good for Ireland. An orator shall yet arise whose voice shall teach her people wisdom, and whose efforts shall procure for him the epithet of the father of his country ... when I think [how] through the instrumentality of this society, my country may be blessed, my soul rises to the grandeur of the vision ... this ennobling contemplation.’ [End.] (Date: end-papers show that Caesar Edward Otway was elected Vice-President for the ensuing year.)

Thistle & shamrock: ‘The Scotsman cultivates his thistle in his garden; the Irishman wears his shamrock till it withers on his bosom, or he drowns it.’ (The Gap of Barnesmore; quoted in R. F. Foster, Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances, 2011; reviewed by Kevin Kiely in Books Ireland (Oct. 2011), p.185.

Land Tenure in Ireland: A Plea for the Irish Race (Dublin: John Falconer; London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1 1866), xx, [5-]104pp. [3 edns. in 1866; on the introduction of ‘fixity of tenure’].

Preface to 3rd Edn.

[...; These facts] are, however, sufficient to establish that the Fenian organisation has, at all events, acquired some considerable strength. [...] I enter on no discussion as to the motices or the criminality of those who have taken part in this confederation. There are obvious reasons why I should not do so. But dealing with the existence of that organization as a fact, I ask of any one who has been compelled to considered it - whether it does not suggest subjects of the gravest reflection. Owing its origina to the individual energy of a young man destitute of all the advantages which might mark him out as a leader of a movement - encountered by influences whose opposition any man would have pronounced fatal - without leaders -without any apparent popular enthusiasm - it has, beyond all question, combined a large number of Irishmen, both here and in America, in a confederation hostile to British power, and important enough to demand preparations of no ordinary character to resist it. The The fact is not altered by all the abuse that can be heaped upon Stephens and his associates. The more you can disparages the agents who have accomplished these results, the [xix] stronger is the evidence of the intensity of the disaffection whcih answers to their appeal.

It is in that intense deep-rooted and fanatical disaffection, and not in any particular organization or leader that the danger consists. Trample out the Fenian conspiracy tomorro, and the disaffection remains - in all probability, made more intense in its nature by the very means employed for its suppression. You can ut down rebellion by force - you can only destroy disaffection by doing justice. If I am wright in tracing that spirit of disaffection to the oppression of our system of land tenure - a system which admits of those accursed clearances which, in one year, desolated 50,000 Irish homes = so long as this system is continued, you have the Irish as enemies both at home and abroad. Even the extermination of the people but increased the danger to English power. The emigrant vessel that carried away the evicted tenant, may have freed the Irish landlord from an incumbrance and a danger. It did not rid English power of a foe. It transferred one to a sphere in which his enmity became more dangerous and more active. Eight millions of the irish people hostile to British power, whether they be in Ireland or America, are a standing menance to England more formidable than fleets or fortresss in sight of her shores. Ireland is her weakness in the eyes of Europe and America - her weakness in the secret councils of her cabinet. Is NO EFFORT TO BE MADE TO REMOVE ALL THIS? If means be not devised to conciliate the Irish race, England will one day or other trace her sorest humiliations to the deep and deadly enmity of that race. If there be any truth in the reasonings contained in this tract, the first, the vital step in that conciliation, must be to enfranchize the Irish serf - to give to the Irish occupier a hold upon his country and his home. Once effect this great measure of wisdom and justice and it will be easy to settle all the other matters which can give occasion for discontent. We would adjust them, not with a hostile population doing battle for their lives, but with a people to whom we would have iven an interest in the soil of their native country, and therefore, in its tranquillity - a people whom we would have reconciled to our institutions and our laws. I cannot help thinking that, even in the narrowest sense of the word, and in reference to Irish questions, he is the true Conservative who would, even at the expense of depriving landlords of an arbitrary power of evition, accomplish this result." (xix-xx.; available at Google Books - online; accessed 10.06.2024.)

Further

‘[I was satisfied that the circumstances of Ireland and of irish landed property more than justified the proposal I made [i.e., fixity of tenure]. I believed that such a measure as I suggested was essential to the preservation, in their own country, of the Irish people.] I felt that it was indispensable, even for the sake of Imperial interests, that some such measure should be passed, if Ireland was not to continue for ever the disgrace and the weakness of the British Crown. I was further satisfied that I proposed nothing inconsistent with any real or true proprietary right. I knew that I was not proposing any control on the absolute dominion of the landlord greater than that which had been already enforced in Ulster, by that custom of tenant right of which that province is justly proud. I suggested in substance, if not literally, that the fixity of tenure which the custom of tenant right gives to the occupier in Downshire should be legalised in the districts where it does exist, and established by law in. the parts of Ireland where it does not. I was satisfied that such a measure would be one in the interest of the landed proprietors themselves — that nothing short of it would give peace to Ireland, or reconcile the consciences of the mass of the people to the settlement of property established by conquest in this island. I saw plainly that while the occupier continued in the state of serfdom in which insecurity of tenure leaves him, it was impossible for any class in Ireland to be prosperous. I saw with equal clearness that the disaffection, nay, the hatred to England, which the present condition of land tenure has caused among the Irish people is creating a danger to the very existence of England’s greatness, which is not the less formidable because the pressure of the present system of land laws is driving the old Celtic race to carry their fortunes and their resentments to far distant lands.’ (Preface to 3rd edn.; available at Google Books - online. Note: Excepting only the sentence in brackets, this passage is quoted in James Godkin, Ireland and her Church, London: Chapman & Hall 1867, p.604; available ant Internet Archive - online.

The Gap of Barnesmore: A Tale of the Irish Highlands and the Revolution of 1688 (1848) - Preface: ‘Not content with the daring step of laying our scene in Ireland, we have gone to the most remote extremity of the island, as if to remove ourselves as far as possible from the effeminacy of fashionable romance [and may hope] our style and sentiments may be as remote from it as our locality.’ Further: ‘The man who knows the North of Ireland in 1847 knows what it was in 1688 [with respect to the unchanging Protestant character; but, on ‘the other side’] ... the wild Irish kern has degenerated into a half civilised boor; the haughty Irish chieftain has settled down into a discontented peasant; and while the characteristics of religious devotion are common enough, the attachment of the Roman Catholic population to the cause of the faith is, perhaps, in Ulster, the only remnant of the chivalry which once belonged to the adherents of James.’ Text: Spenser: ‘You do us English colonists an injustice; we are as warmly attached to Ireland as you.’ Fr. Martin: ‘Enlarge this narrow patriotism into a circle wide enough to embrace all; fling from you your prejudices become of the soil, coalesce with the people, and then see whether you will either be or feel yourselves aliens in your native land.’ [...] Fr. Martin: ‘Let Ireland be a nation, embracing all its people; let Protestants and Roman Catholics have the weight in that nation to which there relative positions entitle them; and I will trust the God of Truth for the success of his Church and his religion.’

College Romance (London 1863), incl. “The Billiard Table”, ‘the billiard tables that infest every city are but, as it were, so many entrances to the hell of infamy’; Edmund Connor; on Historical Society, ‘I had made one or two foolish speeches in the Historical Society of which a favourable account had been carried to the Jephsons [who] immediately set me down as a fellow of College and Lord Chancellor of Ireland’; refers to ‘a fluke’ [idiom]; ‘studying, I have even then formed the habit in which I found amusement - that of studying human nature in every modification of circumstances and character under which I might have the opportunity’. On poor girl attending the dying Thomas Wilson, gambler, ‘her scanty stock of clothing hardly supplied the wants of decency and even with all her care to make the handkerchief meet, its scanty dimensions exposed a bosom of the most delicate whiteness.’ Laetitia marries Sir Henry Disney who abuses her; Edmund becomes a bad tempered lawyer.

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Famine in Ireland: ‘In a country that is called civilised, under the protection of the mightiest monarchy upon earth, and almost within a day’s communication of the capital of the greatest and richest empire in the world, thousands of our fellow-creatures are each day dying of starvation, and the wasted corpses of may left unburied in their miserable hovels, to be devoured by the hungry swine; or to escape this profanation, only to diffuse among the living the malaria of pestilence and death.’ (Dublin University Magazine, XXIX, 172, April 1847, pp.501-540; pp.501-02; quoted in Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, Vol. 1, 1980.)

The Rate in Aid: A Letter to Lord Roden (April 1849), ‘And after all we feel, that let acts of parliament declare what they will, Antrim and Cork ARE parts of the same nation, Mayo and Kent are NOT [... . A]fter half a century’s experience of the Union, we still feel that Ireland is a separate country. Those who have spoken of the English exchequer, and proposed an Irish national rate in aid, have unequivocally proclaimed their conviction that it is so’ (Quoted by Joseph Spence, ‘Isaac Butt, Nationality and Irish Toryism, 1833-1852’, in Bullán, 2, 1, Summer 1995, p.51.)

‘Emigration is the hemiplegia that wastes the vigour of Irish manhood today.’ (Cited in Thomas Kettle’s Introduction to [his own trans. of] Paul Du Bois’s Contemporary Ireland (Maunsel, 1911), p.xi.)

‘Nationality has been his object; and if […] any remarks may appear to bear too severely upon any particular class, body or profession, the Author begs most respectfully to discalim amy feelings of an acrimonious nature’ (Pref., Irish Life in the Castle, the Courts and the Country, 1840, pp.vi-vii; cited in Spence. op. cit., 1995, p.53.)

Occupants of the soil: ‘The present position of the occupancies of the soil of Ireland is at present that of serfs, without any security for their tenure or the fruits of their industry. They are dependent for their very means of existence on the will of their landlord, while the amount of that which is called rent is regulated, not by any economic law, but by the disposition of the landlord to extrot, and their own ability to pay … The only remedy that can be appleid to this lamentable and miserable state of things, is … giving him fixity of tenure […]’ (The Irish Querist, Dublin: Falconer, 1867 [q.p.]; cited in Thomas E. Jordan, ‘The Quality of Life in Victorian Ireland, 1831-1901’, New Hibernian Review/Iris Éireannach Nua, 4, 1 (Spring 2000), p.104.NOTE, Justin McCarthy, History of Our Own Times [1877], ‘it is certain that Butt was not a prudent man ... but it is certain that he was politically honest’.

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References
Dictionary of National Biography cites literary works, Ovid’s Fasti, trans. (Curry, 1833); The Georgics of Virgil, trans. (Curry 1834); Irish Life, In the Castle, the Courts, and the Country (London 1840); The Gap of Barnesmore, A Tale of the Irish Highlands and the Revolution of 1688 (London 1848); Berkeley [Afternoon Lectures on English Literature] (1848); ed. Dublin University Review.

D. J, O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (1919) lists 4 novels: Irish Life in the Castle, The Courts, and the Country (3 vols., London 1840); The Gap of Barnesmore, 3 vols. (London 1848); Chapters of College Romance (London 1863) - containing stories published in Dublin University Magazine from 1834; and, Children of Sorrow - a title described as first fiction in Irish Times obituary but not traced by Brown in BML.

Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives extracts, ‘On Land Tenure,’ and ‘A Scene in the South of Ireland’ from The Irish People and the Irish Land. IF, as supra.

Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, Vol. 2 (1980), bio-bibl. as [as supra]. Note: Rafroidi cannot trace Children of Sorrow, cited by Fr. Stephen Brown (Ireland in Fiction, 1919).

R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), bio-note, p.305: co-fnd. Dublin University Magazine, the organ of Irish Toryism, in 1833; Prof. Pol. Econ., TCD, 1836-40; defended Protestant Dublin Corporation at bar of House of Lords, 1840; leading opponent of O’Connell in Repeal debates in reformed Corporations, 1843; prose fiction and economic tracts expressed depth of national feeling in 1840s, though remaining an Orange Tory in politics; defended Smith O’Brien and T. F. Meagher, 1848, and Fenians, 1865-68; Tory MP for Youghal, 1852-65; Pres. of Amnesty Assoc., 1869; fnd. Home Government Assoc., 1879; Home Rule MP for Limerick, 1871-79. Great and flawed ... a ‘beautiful sinner.’ His death marked the end of constitutional nationalism.

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Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 1: 1297-98, BIOG: son of Protestant rector, ed. TCD and King’s Inns; bar 1838; initially involved in conservative politics; defended nationalist prisoners, 1848; Harwich MP in 1852; English bar, 1859; defended Fenians after 1860, sought amnesty; founded Home Government association in 1870; d. Dundrum, Dublin, 1879; m. Elizabeth Swanzy [also biog., FDA2 305n]; Isaac Butt’s ‘Past and Present State of Literature in Ireland’, an early effort to define Anglo-Irish literature, printed here completely ‘in order to allow Butt’s conservative-radical analysis to emerge intact, with all its hesitations, regrets and recognitions. [FDA1 1220] FDA, COMM [as supra], Selects Past and Present State of Literature in Ireland (1837), conjecturally identified as his, and appearing in Dublin University Magazine; remarks that The Gap of Barnesmore was printed anonymously. FDA2 selects A Voice for Ireland, The Famine in the Land [161-65]; The Parliamentary Policy of Home Rule (speech to electors of Limerick, 23 Sept. 1875) [223-24]; Land Tenure in Ireland; A Plea for the Celtic Race [224-28; Irish Federalism [228-33; and notes, Butt’s conversion from extreme Unionism to the policy of Irish federalism, and thence to Home Rule [caused by Ireland’s treatment in the Famine], 209; (same view attributed to him as in Lecky’s Leaders of Public Opinion, 214); Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, 1904, Chap. VII, ‘Home Rule and Land Reform, Isaac Butt’ [‘ ... the amnesty movement, led by Mr. Butt, for the release of the Fenian prisoners ... in the person of Isaac Butt, a compendium of honest compromise ... the one-time Irish conservative, now a converted nationalist [thought out and projected] a programme which was to seek a solution of the Anglo-Irish question by the means of a Federal Home Rule Parliament in Dublin ... Butt’s programme of the three F’s’ ... a joint evolution of Fenianism and Home Rule’], 276; and the like [277]; refs. in Charles Stewart Parnell’s hostile account of Gladstone’s Guildhall speech, in his own speech at Wexford, 9 Oct. 1881 (& bio-political note) [305]; incidental ref. in T. P. O’Connor’s account of events in Committee Room 15, from Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (1929) [324]; in Frank Hugh O’Donnell, A History of the Irish Parliamentary Party (1910) [335]; in William O’Brien, The Downfall of Parliamentarianism (1918) [349]; cited by Thomas MacDonagh as Anglo-Irish orator, within his sense of the term, in Literature in Ireland (1916) [990]. Note that Michael Davitt claimed that Butt’s Land Tenure in Ireland; A Plea for the Celtic Race (1866), ‘became textbooks for Land League speakers and writers’ [FDA2 224].

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 3: ‘As early as 1847 Isaac Butt, the first professor of political economy at TCD and a fervent supporter of the Union, pointed out the central political flaw in the British response to the crisis [of the famine]. If the Union meant anything at all, it should be able to provide, for any one stricken part of the United Kingdom, the consolidated support of the whole of that kingdom. Yet Ireland was being treated as though it was a separate political entity ... It was this recognition which led Butt finally to sponsor the idea of a federal system as a modification of the Union. His pamphlet of 1847, The Famine in the Land, is one of the first signs of the immense repercussions of the Famine on the ways that Irish people regarded the constitutional relationship between the two islands. later to be founder of the Home Rule League, Butt was taking the first steps towards a conclusion that Parnell and Davitt were to govern [sic]. (p.116.) ‘As Butt pointed out, the cess levied on Irish landlords for the relief schemes should, in all consistency, have been levied on the whole of the United Kingdom.’ (p.117.)

Ulster libraries: University of Ulster Central Library holds Irish People, Irish Land, a letter to Lord Lifford ... comments on the publications of Lords Dufferin and Rosse (1867) [cf. G. T. Dalton, Irish Peers and Irish Peasants, an Answer to Lord Dufferin and the Earl of Rosse]; Irish Federalism, its Meaning, Objects, Hopes ... (1874); David Thornley, Isaac Butt and the Home Rule (1964; rep. 1976); Terence de Vere White, Road to Excess (Dublin [1946]) Belfast Central Public Library holds fictions, Chapters of College Romance; The Gap of Barnesmore (3 vols., 1848). Belfast Linenhall Library holds Irish People and Irish Land, a letter to Lord Lifford [John Hewitt] (1897).

Cathach Books (1996-97) lists Irish People and Irish Land, Letter to Lord Lifford (Dublin 1867) [Cathach Bks. 12]. Protection of Home Industry: Some cases of its advantages considered; the substance of two lectures delivered before the University of dublin in 1840, to which is added an appendix, containing dissertations on some points. [n.d.]; The Rate in Ireland: A Lwetter to the Rt. Hon the Earl of Roden, KP, by Isaac Butt (Dublin: McGlashan 1849), 73pp.

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Notes
William Carleton: Butt was the recipient of the dedication of William Carleton’s new edition of Traits & Stories (2 vols. in 1; c.1853). See also Irish Book Lover, 3, 4, 5. there is a chalk portrait by J B Yeats [NGI].

W. B. Yeats relates that Butt was caught in flagrante delicto with Lady Wilde; see Joseph Spence, ‘“The Great Angelic Sin”: The Faust legend in Irish Literature, 1820-1900’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), ftn.35, p.58.

Land Commission, 1841: Butt quoted the remark of a Land Commissioner in 1841 during a Westminister debate on 29 March 1876: ‘The Repeal of the Irish Act of Settlement by the Parliament of James II [in 1685] gave the Protestant proprietors a fright from which they have not properly recovered even to this day ... They seem to think that they only garrison their estates, and therefore they look upon the occupiers - I cannot call them tenants - as persons ready to eject them on a favourable opportunity.’ (Hansard, H.C. Debates, 3rd ser.., Vol. 228, col. 771; cited in Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1972, p.17.)

Joyce Connection: Note that Butt is alluded to as a standard of Irish eloquence along with others in “Aeolus” episode: ‘Where have you a man now at the bar like those fellows, like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silver-tongued O’Hagan?’ (under heading ‘Clever, Very’, in James Joyce, Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., p.175).

Kith & Kin: Beatrice Mary Butt is the author of Eugénie (1877) and Elizabeth and Other Sketches (1889) - both listed in the catalogue of Richard Beaton [24 Highdown Rd., Lewes, E. Sussex - online; accessed 31.08.2011].

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