Michael Davitt (1846-1906)

[ The article on Davitt in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009) is by Noel MacLachlin - online. ]

[ top ]

Bibliographical details
Leaves from a Prison Diary; Or, Lectures to a Solitary Audience, facs. rep. of 1885 edn., with an intro. by T. W. Moody (Shannon: IUP 1972), xiv, xv, 251; xi, 256pp. [i.e., 2 vols. in 1. CONTENTS: Pt.1: Criminal life and character; Pt.2: Social evils and suggested remedies; Pt.3: Political Crime: How Ireland is Ruled and Ruined. Political justice: how the Anglo-Irish problem might be solved. ~[COPAC reference - online.]

[ top ]

[ top ]

[ top ]

Commentary

Francis Sheey Skeffington, Michael Davitt, Revolutionary, Agitator, and Labour Leader, intro. Justin M’Carthy [McCarthy] (London: T Fisher Unwin 1908), 291pp., incl. index epigraphs, 1) ‘the land league represented the triumph of what was forgiving obver what was revengeful in my Celtic temperament.’ 2) ‘I would not purchase liberty for Ireland at the price of giving one vote against the liberty of the Republics of South Africa’. 3) ‘Make no mistake about it, my Lord Bishop of Limerick [O’Brien], Democracy is going to rule in these countries.’ Justin McCarthy speaks of his friendship with Davitt, and identifies his policy as ‘the restoration of the Irish people to the right of national self-government as a will partner in the Imperial confederation’ [xix]. Skeffingon quotes Davitt in a letter to The Nationalist, 1 Feb [1905], ‘The corollary of an Irish Ireland, in your sense [eds.] is an English England, a French France, and an American America; all economically secluded from each other’s markets, and living an existence of racial and commercial isolation [the equivalent would be] a family in Dublin resolving to be Murphyist [?sic], determining to grow their own tea, sow and reap their own grain [&c.]. // My idea of an Irish Ireland is an Ireland as politically independent as we can make it; with all her people well educated, in Gaelic and in English, and in as many other languages as they wish to learn; cultivating every available acre of the Irish soil, and exporting millions of what we can spare from our own needs to England … receiving in economic exchange all the useful and needful articles we require … our harbours crowded with ships - English or any other nation’s ships; filled with whatever would tend to make our people and country more prosperous and persevering … &c.’ [Available at Internet Archive - online.]

[ top ]

[ top ]

T. W. Moody, ‘Anna Parnell and the Land League’, Hermathena CXVII, Summer 1974writes, ‘It is true that Davitt, an agrarian revolutionary, was the founder, inspiring genius, and principal organiser of the Land League, but Parnell was its supreme commander and statesman.’ (p.7.)

Desmond Fennell, “Irish Socialist Thought”, in Richard Kearney, ed., The Irish Mind (1985), p.195ff., remarks and quotes: [Davitt] spent seven years in jail for his activities on behalf of the brotherhood [IRB]; released in 1877; by the time he was returned to jail in 1881 - together with Parnell and other leaders of the Land League - he had moved, ideologically, to a socialist position; in Leaves from a Prison Journal, sketched out during his fifteen months imprisonment, Davitt argued for land nationalisation, coperative production, state “regulation and organisation of labour”, and a labour party in the House of Commons; argu[ed] that the real relations between labour and land, and between land monopoly and poverty, could best be discerned in Ireland where there was no abundance of industry to obscure the matter; Land and labour are “absolutely essential to one another”; “land is valueless without labour”; Davitt envisaged taking all land into public ownership and “taxing it, exclusive of improvements, up to its full value”, meaning by improvements “such erections or qualities as can be clearly shown to be the results of the labour of those now in occupation or enjoyment of the land or their predecessors”; this land would be available to “every individual worker would be in a position to command exactly that share of the wealth produced which he had by his labour created; while the community at large would be in possession of that part of the wealth produced of which it was the sole creator”; he argued that “increasing the number of those holding private property in land”, far from being a rememdy “to the evils of land monopoly”, would be “simply landlordism in another form”, and that Peasant proprietorship is “simply landlordism in another form” since “a million proprietors, or petty landlords, would act together as cordially as the present landlord party in the three kingdoms”; to increase that party with public money would be “suicidal” for “popular liberty”; moreover, peasant proprietorship “excludes the (agricultural) labourers from all hope of being able to elevate themselves from their present degraded condition”; industry must be cooperative, on the “basis of joint ownership of capital and absolute contraol on the apart of the worker”; at this period Davitt envisaged Irish self-government on the Canadian dominion model, not the republican model of the IRB, speaking of “as far as practicable, a self-governing community”. Leaves from a Prison Journal provides the only comprehensive statement of Davitt”s socialist beliefs.’

Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848-1918 (Cambridge UP 1973): Michael Davitt, b. Straide, moved to Lancashire with his evicted family at the age of six; found grass roots sentiment far ahead of him when, in 1878, he toured Mayo preaching a straight separatist gospel [71]; The man in the field decisively rejected [Davitt’s] land nationalisation. Davitt’s politically fatuous proposal diverted attention from the more realistic redistribution programme, which might have dramatically altered the pattern of land holding, and condemned him to a career of relative ineffectuality. [88]; The League … pioneered on a mass basis a technique destined to become indispensable in nationalist agitation, the appeal to spurious historic rights. Celtic Ireland had been an intensely hierarchical society, the bulk of the people possessing only a tenuous and ill-defined share in the property for which the leading families contended. The information available to late 19th c. commentators did suggest that something like genuine communal property rights may have existed, and Michael Davitt devoted his preamble to the constitution of the Land League of May to an exposition of the historic rights of the cultivators in Celtic Ireland. But if modernisation of tenurial systems was wrapped in the swaddling clothes of historical reincarnation, Davitt soon found himself out-manoeuvred by more astute historiographical tacticians, and the ‘land for the people’ acquired the distinctly contemporary connotation of individual instead of communal proprietorship. [95].

K. Theodore Hoppen, Ireland Since 1800: Conflict and Conformity (London: Longman 1989): [on the Famine]: Although the original revisionists painted the social, economic and political activities of the landed community in unduly roseate hues, we are still left with a more complex and ambiguous picture than was once the case.’ (p.44.) ‘The Land War and the Land League formally inaugurated in Oct. 1879 by Davitt and Parnell, were, despite their internal contradictions and jealousies phenomena of comparative coherence.’ (Ibid., p.65.) ‘[During the Land War] literacy levels rose everywhere, as did the numbers attending school. And it was this increasingly Anglicised and literate society whcih provided a growing audience for newspapers of all kinds and for a new natioanl literature encompassing both the revolutionary and constitutional traditions.’ (ibid., p.105.) Hoppen also notes the role of land league ladies in smuggling the printers’ plates in their voluminous skirts‘. (idem.)

[ top ]

Quotations
Eviction memories: ‘Almost my first remembered experiences of my own life and of the existence of landlordism was our eviction in 1852, when I was about five years of age. The eviction and the privations of the preceding Famine years, the story of the starving of Mayo, of the deaths from hunger, and the coffinless graves on the roadside - everywhere a hole could be dug for the slaves who died because of “God’s Providence” - all this was the political food seasoned with a mother’s tears over unmerited sorrows and sufferings which had fed my mind in another land, a teaching which lost none of its force or directness for being imparted in the Gaelic tongue, which was always spoken in our Lancashire home.’ (Davitt, Fall of Feudalism, p.106, in Collected Writings 1868-1906, 8 vols, ed. Carla King, Bristol 2001; quoted in Kevin Whelan, ‘Reading the Ruins: The Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape’, in Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms, ed. Howard B. Clarke, et al. (Dublin: Geography Publications 2004, q.p.; see full copy - as attached.]

The Famine: ‘There is probably no chapter in the wide records of human suffering and wrong so full of shame - measureless, unadulterated shame - as that which tells us of a million and a half of people, lying down to die in a land out of which forty-five millions’ worth of food was being exported in one year alone for rent, the product of their own toil, and making no effort, combined or otherwise, to assert even the animal’s right of existence, the right to live by the necessities of its nature. It stands unparalleled in human history, with nothing approaching to it in the complete surrender of all the ordinary attributes of manhood by almost a whole nation in the face of an artificial famine.’ (Quoted [without ref.] by John F. O’Connor, “The Famine to 1876”, in A Course of Lectures on Ireland, ed. Thomas Aloysius McAvoy [Ancient Order of Hibernians] (Worcester, Mass: The Messenger 1915), pp.165; available at Internet Archive - online; accessed 03.05.2024].

Landlord garrison - speech of 1879 Davitt denouncing the ‘landlord garrison established by England in this country, centuries ago’: ‘[It was] as true to the object of its foundation, and as alien to the moral instincts of our people, as when it was first expected to drive the Celtic race “to hell of Connaught”. It is the bastard offspring of force and usury, the Ishmael of the social commonwealth, and every man’s hand should be against what has proved itself to be the scourge of our race since it first made Ireland a land of misery and poverty.’ (Quoted in P. S. O’Hegarty, Ireland Since the Union, p.489; quoted in D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, London 1982; 1991, p.213.)

[ top ]

“What I think of the English” (Birmingham Universal Magazine, July 1900): ‘The English are not a modest race. They preach liberty to the world and practise despotism in India: talk civilisation in their Press and Parliament and shock even the savages of West Africa with their disregard of truth, honesty and the obligations of their written word. Conquest, trade and money make the trinity of England’s materialistic creed [...]’. (Quoted in Noel McLachlan, ‘Michael Davitt and Passive Resistance’ [Commentary], Times Literary Supplement, 12 Feb. 1999, p.14.)

‘[The Celts have] a persistency of purpose and a continuity of racial aim not associated by English or other foreign critics of Celtic character, with the alleged mercurial spirit and disposition of the Irish people.’ (Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, 1904, p.xiii; cited in Chris Morash, ‘Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic’, in Morash, ed., Literature and the Supernatural, Lilliput 1996, pp.95-117; p.103.]

America ties: ‘All my ties except that of birth and my political work … are American. My mother and father were buried in America. My mother’s uncle died high in the service of the United States navy, and my wife is American. My children are now in America, and my only regret is that my two boys are not old enough to fight for Old Glory.’ (To New York Herald, 1898; quoted in McLachlan, op. cit., supra, p.14.)

Dynamite: ‘The dynamite theory is the very abnegation of mind, the surrender of reason to rage, of judgement to blind, unthinking recklessness.’ (1883; idem.)

‘Principles of reform intelligently and fearlessly propagated are far more destructive to unjust and worn-out systems that dynamite bombs, which only kill individuals or knock down buildings but do no injury to oppressive institutions … The dynamite theory is the very abnegation of mind, the surrender of reason to rage, of judgement to blind, unthinking recklessness.’ (Davitt, in Glasgow Herald [?letter], 25 March 1883; quoted in T. W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-82, Oxford: Clarendon 1982, p.552).

Daniel O’Connell: ‘Ireland has never produced a greater man than O’Connell, and Europe very few that can truly be called his equal in the work of uplifting a people from the degrading status of religious and political serfdom to conditions of national life which necessarily created changes and chances of progress that were bound to lead on to the gain of further liberty.’ (Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, London 1904, p.35; quoted in Fergus O’Ferrall, ‘Liberty and Catholic Politics 1790-1990’, in Daniel O’Connell, Political Pioneer, ed. Maurice R O’Connell, 1991, pp.35-56, p.49).

Eviction memories: ‘Almost my first remembered experience of my own life and of the existence of landlordism was our eviction in 1852, when I was about five years of age. The eviction and the privations of the preceding Famine years, the story of the starving of Mayo, of the deaths from hunger and the coffinless graves on the roadside - everywhere a hole could be dug for the slaves who died because of “God’s providence” - all this was the political food seasoned with a mother’s tears over unmerited sorrows and sufferings which had fed my mind in another land, a teaching which lost none of its force or directness by being imparted in the Gaelic tongue, which was always spoken in our Lancashire home.’ (Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or,The Story of the Land League Revolution, London: Harper 1904, p.106; quoted in Kevin Whelan, ‘The Memories of “The Dead”’, in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Johns Hopkins UP Spring 2002, p.60 - available online). Whelan cites ‘[t]wo good modern treatments’ as being T. W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-1882 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981); and Carla King, Michael Davitt (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1999).

[ top ]

References
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904), selects extracts from Leaves from a Prison Diary [‘… all this talk is indulged in really for the sake of concealing the chagrin which England experiences in consequence of the fact revealed in recent years, that the people of Ireland have discovered how to make it more difficult for England to rule Ireland, than to govern all the rest of her vast empire put together’; goes on to distinguish the Extremists fro the Home Rulers or Federalists, ‘No Irish leader can afford to ignore either of these two principle phases of Irish National sentiment’].

[The Davitt Papers including notebooks, letters, autobiographical writings, photograps, &c., are held at TCD (Dublin) - online. ]

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2. selects from The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, ‘The Great Famine and the Young Irelanders’ [198-202], ‘Home Rule and Land Reform’, ‘The New Departure’, and ‘A Future Racial Programme’ [275-80], and ‘Samson Agonistes’ (his account of the Parnell Split in which he blames the IPP for re-electing Parnell, 25 Nov 1890, and Parnell for ignoring Morley’s advice to resign) [320-22]; Some Suggestions for a Final Settlement of the Land Questions [280]. Remarks at 119 [compared with Lalor on opposition to peasant proprietorship, Deane, ed.]; it was Davitt who sustained the alliance between land agitation and political nationalism until the fall of Parnell, linking Lalor’s ideas to the Home Rome question, and giving Lalor a centrality which nationalists later reassigned to Davis [ed.], 120; Davitt, a Lalor convert [ed.], 165; [in Feudalism &c., Davitt follows Mitchel in quoting the Times announcement of the extinction of the Celts], 178n; William Edward Foster, 1818-86, hated by Davitt and others for his coercion measures against Land League, 197; Davitt explains failure of 1848 in terms of the effects of the Famine [ed.], 211; wanted to stimulate in the Irish a sense of the land as a communal possession, 212; [vide Butt (RX supra), 224]; supported by Devoy, 265; 528n.

Emerald Isle Books (1995) lists D. B. Cashman, The Life of Michael Davitt: Founder of the Land League; [and] the Secret History of the Land League by Michael Davitt (Glasgow c.1900), 256pp. [De Burca Books, Catalogue 44 (1997) lists The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or the Story of the Land League Revolution. London, Harper, 1904. Pages, xviii, 750pp. [£135].

[ top ]

Notes
Portrait, Michael Davitt, port., by William Orpen, Municipal Gallery; in FSL Lyons, John Dillon (1968), pp.228 facing; [?]another held in National Gallery noted in Anne Crookshank, Portraits of Great Irish Men and Women, Ulster Mus. 1965 and W B Yeats, A Centenary Exhibition (Nat. Gallery of Ireland 1965).

An Oscar: Davitt was the recipient of letters from Oscar Wilde, following the latter’s letters to the Daily Chronicle demanding reform of the prison system and Davitt’s support in that cause - saying, ‘No one knows better than yourself how terrible life in an English prison is, and what cruelty can result from the stupidity of officialdom’.

‘Passive resistance’, a term coined by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe to describe Isaac’s ‘humour of passive resistance’ in his dungeon, was employed by Davitt with rare sarcasm in 1897 when describing the failure of young men at Coolgrany, Wexford, to prevent the eviction of Widow Darcy, writing that they deserved to be send to prison under the Coercion Act ‘for the splendid “passive resistance” they had shown to the Emergency brigade.’

Ballad hero: ‘One day as I went on my rambles / from Swinford to sweet Ballinalee / I met a young maid on my rambles / And her name was Mary Magee / She sighed for the rights of her country / Michael Davitt her true Irish Boy / Who is now in the Prison in Portland / Far from the lovely green banks of the Moy.’ (Quoted by Kevin Myers, The Irish Times, 25 March 1996.)

Boer War: Michael Davitt condemned the Boer War in Parliament as ‘the meanest and most mercenary of ends and aims which ever prompted conquest or aggression, and it will rank in history as the greatest crime of the 19th century.’ (Quoted in Thomas Kettle, ed., Irish Orators and Oratory; also cited by Stephen Watts in Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater, 1991).

Pamphleteer: purportedly Davitt was the author of the pamphlet attacking John MacBride and his Westport family when the latter offered himself as a candidate in the 1900 Mayo by-election occasioned by Davitt’s resignation of his seat in protest against the Boer War. The pamphlet was produced by Frank Hugh O’Donnell. (See Anthony J. Jordan, The Yeats Gonne MacBride Triangle, Westport 2000, p.145, n.)

Count Tolstoy (1): Davitt made two journeys to Russia, visiting Leo Tolstoy on one occasion; MSS journals in TCD Library; ‘I have come from a journey through the Jewish Pale a convinced believer in the remedy of Zionism’ (TCD MS 9651, pp. 44-45; cited in Library of Trinity College [Handbook; q.d.]).

Count Tolstoy (2): ‘On his first visit to Russia, in 1904, Davitt went to see Tolstoy. Initially their meeting did not go well. When Tolstoy adverted to what he supposed was Davitt’s Englishness he was firmly rebuked - “Oh no I am Irish, not English in any sense”. One of the points of mutual interest was the work of Henry George. Tolstoy had read George’s Progress and Poverty, some ideas from which, on the question of land nationalisation, found their way into Tolstoy’s 1899 novel, Resurrection. They also discussed the plight of political prisoners in Russia and in the UK, with Davitt recording how astonished Tolstoy was to learn that Britain had political prisoners. He also took the opportunity to acquaint Tolstoy with the general outline of Irish history and in particular with the issue of resurgent nationalism. He pleaded with the great writer, whom he said had the ear of the reading world, to “say a word for Ireland’s right to rule herself whenever you can”.’ (Oliver Rafferty, ‘Much more than an Irish nationalist’, review of Laurence Marley, Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur, in The Irish Times, 21 July 2007, Weekend.)

Standish James O’Grady took a side-swipe at Davitt’s nationalisation programme in Ulrick the Ready (1899).

[ top ]

Liam O’Flaherty gives Davitt a brief appearance in Land, where he orates from a platform: ‘To confiscate the land of a subjugated people’, Davitt cried passionately, as he gesticulated with his solitary arm, ‘and bestow it on adventurers is the first act of unrighteous conquest, the preliminary step to the extermination of servitude of an opponent race [sic]. The landlord garrison that England established in this country centuries ago is today as true to the object of its foundation as when it first cursed our soil.’ (Random House ed. 1946, p.175-76). (Quoted in James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room, The Irish Historical Novel, 1983, p.45.]

Denis Ireland, An Ulster Protestant looks At his World (1930), quotes Sheehy Skeffington Michael Davitt), accrediting Davitt with defeating the Anglo-American Alliance [67]

Denis Cashman, the author of the first life of Mitchell (1923), acted as head of the Waterford Fenian ring and was arrested in Jan. 1867 and afterwards convicted of felony treason before being imprisoned in Kilmainham and then transferred to Millbank Prison (London), from whence in Sept. 1867 he was transported to Australia aboard the Hougoumont; pardoned in 1869, he settled in Boston, rejoining his wife and children; died in Boston, 1897; took prominent part in planning the Catalpa expedition to liberate other Irish political convicts in Australia; shared his journey of transportation with John Boyle O’Reilly, John Flood, John Casey, and others; edited The Wild Goose with others; kept a diary of the voyage. (Information supplied by C. W. Sullivan III, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC 27858-4358.)

Michael Davitt Commemorative Conference held at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (DCU), May 2006, with speakers: Joe Lee (‘historical perspective’), Paul Bew (‘agrarian radical tradition’), Brendan Deacy (‘life in images’), Hasai Diner (‘Kishinev & the American Jewish community), John Dunleavy (‘Lancashire apprenticeship’), Anthony Jordan (‘Boer War’), Fintan Lane (‘Irish working-class 1879-1906’), Laurence Marley (‘international radicalism’), W. J. McCormack (‘Irish literary revival’), Laura McNeill (‘[ab]using the memory of a great Irishman’), Andrew Newby (‘loyal opposition in Scotland 1879-1887’), Máirtín Ó Catháin (‘historical memory’), Alan O’Day (‘Butt, Parnell & Davitt’) and Pauric Travers (‘Davitt & education’).

Forgotten Hero: “Michael Davitt and Irish Democracy”, a conference of the Parnell Summer School, Avondale, Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow, 13-18 August 2006, exploring his career as a Fenian, Home Ruler, parliamentarian, social and educational reformer, labour leader, pioneering journalist, inveterate traveller, suffragist and feminist and above all, social democrat. Speakers incl. Brendan Deacy, John Horgan, Carla King, Bill [W. J.] McCormack, Donal Maguire, Martin Mansergh, Alan O’Day, and Trevor Sargent [TD]. (See History Ireland, May/June 2006.)

Casus belli: Michael Newton remarks that it is unclear to historians whether the Land League membership was formed out of self-protection or political motivation. (See Newton, The Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence 1865-1981, Faber 2012, c.p.164.) [Incls. chapter on Ireland, Fenians, Land League and Parnell - 136-97.]

[ top ]