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Life
1724-1769 [var. Derricke]; b. Dublin, d. Tunbridge Wells; apprent. linen-maker, joined travelling actors [‘mummers’], moved to London and met Goldsmith and Johnson; succeeded Beau Nash as Master of Ceremonies at Bath; pop. plays include Sylla (1753), based on another by Frederick of Prussia; A Voyage to the Moon (also 1753); Ossianic poem, The Battle of Lora (1972). RR DIW
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Criticism
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, p.87; also brief notice in Russell Alspach, Irish Poetry from the English Invasion to 1798 (Pennsylvania UP 1959), p.34f., remarking that The Image is treated as a part of Irish Literature in Samuel Ferguson., ‘Mere Irish: Curiosities of Irish Literature’, Dublin University Magazine, IX (1837).
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Commentary
Russell K. Alspach, Irish Poetry (Penn. UP 1959): cites lines addressed to St. Patrick enquiring why he troubled to kill snakes ‘When as thou left’st more spiteful beasts/Within this fertile land’, signifying Irishmen. (Alspach, p.35.)
Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael (1986), writes: Samuel Derrick, Irish born successor to Beau Nash as master of Ceremonies at Bath, published a description of various places in Ireland in 1767 [...] incl. Killarney, ‘one of the most beautiful and romantic spots in this kingdom.’ Letters written from Leverpoole, Chester, Corke, the lake of Killarney, 2 vols. (Dublin 1767). [p.76].
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Quotations
Of the Irish (1): ‘For in verie trothe my harte abhorreth their dealynges and my soul dooeth deteste their wild shamrocke manners.’ (from Image; cited in Alannah Hopkins, Living Legend of St. Patrick, 1989, p.112.)
Of the Irish (2): ‘Yet do thei loke to shaking Boggs, / such vertue hat that grounde: / that they are wurse than widlest Karne, / And more in Sin Abound’. (Quoted in John Wilson Foster, ‘Encountering Traditions’, in Foster and Helena C. G. Chesney, ed., Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Dublin: Lilliput 1997), p.27.
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