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Life
| [Edward Darrell Figgis; pseud. “Michael Ireland”] b. 17 Sept. 1882, to Protestant parents, at Palmerston Pk., Rathmines, Dublin, grew up in Calcutta, India, where his father, A. W. Figgis, worked as a tea agent and estab. a tea importing company; returned to Ireland, 1902; EF worked as tea-broker in London and Calcutta, 1898-1910 [var. Ceylon]; publ. poems in A Vision of Life (1909), with a preface by G. K. Chesterton, securing him a position as a reader for Dent, 1910-13, and eventually became an editor at the firm; settled at 42 Asmuns Hill, in Hampstead Gardens, London; wrote fiction incl. Broken Arcs (1911); returned to Ireland, 1913; bought a cottage [var. built] on Achill Island, 1913; established Achill Volunteers; his play, Queen Tara, produced by F. R. Benson at the Abbey, 1913; |
| involved with Bulmer Hobson and others in Howth gun-running, following meeting of 8 May 1914 at the home of A. S. Green and, with Erksine Childers, was instructed to buy arms for the Irish Volunteers (‘Let us buy arms and so at least get into the problem’), travelling to Belgium, then to Germany; prevented by weather from signalling all-clear to Asgard at Lambay Island; imprisoned after the Rising, and held in Reading Gaol, 1916; later wrote of experiences in Castlebar, Stafford and Reading prisons (A Chronicle of Jails, 1917); worked as a free-lance journalist and ed. stories of Carleton (1918); with Austin Stack, elected Hon. Sec. Sinn Féin, 1917-19; arrested and imprisoned, May 1918; |
| issued new novel, Jacob Elthorne (1914); also Children of Earth (1918), about life on Aran; TD, Dáil Éireann, 1918; disliked by Michael Collins; ed. The Republic, Jun-Sept. 1919; Sec. of Commission of Inquiry into the Resources and Industries of Ireland, 1919-22; issued The Historic Case for Irish Independence (1918), followed by The Economic Case for Irish Independence (1920) - basing his arguments heavily upon putative over-taxation; served as Acting Chairman of Free State Constitution Committee; TD, Dublin, 1922; stood as independent candidate in S. Dublin, but abandoned race when 3 Republicans invaded his flat in Dublin and shaved off half his beard (reported in Evening Herald, 13 June 1922); non-political work include novels and studies of George Russell and William Carleton [see infra]; House of Success (1922), about two generations of a middle-class Irish family, and The Return of the Hero (1923), based on the legend of Oisín and Patrick; |
| appears as Ompleby in Eimar O’Duffy’s The Wasted Land (1919); an object of ridicule attacked in the same manner as Figgis; his wife Millie committed suicide by gunshot, 1924 when Figgis was involved with another woman, Rita North, who subsequently died of infection following an illegal abortion 19 Oct. 1925, London; soon afterward killed himself with a gas oven in a London apartment, 27 Oct. 1925; otherwise conjectured that the cause of his suicide arose from a scandal surrounding the Irish Broadcasting [RÉ] committee in which which he was concerned; P. S. O’Hegarty prepared a bibliography in 1938; there is a cartoon port. by Grace Gifford Plunkett and others by Tom Lalor [both NLI]; also a photo-port in the Joly Colelction [NLI]. PI DIB DIW DIH DIL IF1 IF2 OCIL FDA |
| [ There is an entry on Figgis by William Murphy in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (2004) - online. ] |
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Bibliographical details
Shakespeare: A Study (London: J. M. Dent 1911), 345, [1]pp., ill [2 lvs. pls.; 22 cm.] CONTENTS: [Introduction; His life; His stage; His craft; His art; His thought; His personality; Notes; Index of names].Studies and Appreciations (London: J. M. Dent 1912), vii, 258pp. CONTENTS: Contents: Afterthoughts; In Praise of Praise; J. M. Synge; The Art of J. M. Synge; Robert Browning’s Vision; Falstaff’s Nose; The problem of Mr. William Watson; Mr. W. B. Yeats’ Poetry; Mr. William H. Davies; Mr. Herbert Trench; Mr. Robert Bridges; George Meredith: the Philosopher in the Artist; Charles Dickens and the Novel: The Failure of Thackeray; An Aspect of Samuel Butler; The Vitality of Drama.
Carleton’s Stories of Irish Life, ed. & introduced by Darrell Figgis [Every Irishman’s Library] (Dublin: Talbot [1918]), xxxiv, 364pp. CONTENTS: Neal Malone - Phelim O’Toole’s Courtship - The Geography of an Irish Oath - Bob Pentland, or the Gauger Outwitted - The Party Fight and Funeral - The Midnight Mass - The Hedge School - Denis O’Shaughnessy Going to Maynooth.
Bye-ways of Study (Dublin: Talbot; London: Unwin 1918), xii, 108pp. CONTENTS: Charles Stewart Parnell - Francis Thompson - The Letters of George Meredith - “For demand of peace: or else not.”
| The Historic Case for Irish Independence (1920) | |
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| Prelude | |
| Table of Contents [chaps.] | |
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| —See digital edition - as attached. | |
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Criticism
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See also J. W. Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1987), Chap. 13: ‘The Kingdom of Fantasy: The Writer as Fabulist II - George Moore, Padraic Colum, Darrell Figgis, Eimar O’Duffy, Lord Dusany’ (pp.273-99); José Lanters, Unauthorized Versions: Irish Menippean Satire, 1919-1952 (Washington: CUA Press 2000), 287pp. [on The Return of the Hero] |
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Ernest A. Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (Dublin: Maunsel 1916), writes: ‘[Darrell Figgis] latter author had already found a public in England for prose and verse of another tradition, but these first fruits of his return to his native soil indicated that he had found a truer vein of inspiration than was evident in the works of his London apprenticeship. [He] shows himself a disciple of the mystic faith of A.E., to whom The Mount of Transfiguration is fittingly dedicated.’ (p.288.)
Austin Clarke, ‘A Centenary Celebration’, in Robin Skelton & David R. Clark, eds., Irish Renaissance [A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs, and Letters from the Massachusetts Review] (Dublin: Dolmen Press 1965): his account of the Davis meeting of 20 Nov. 1914 refers to a heckler at the back of the hall being ‘tall, red-bearded man, who looked like Darrell Figgis, the poet and critic, [who] jumped to his feet angrily shouting above the others’ at Thomas Kettle. (pp.90-93.)
George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (?1932; and rev. ed. 1972) ‘Bachelor’s Walk’ [chap.], gives account of Figgis’s part in the Howth gun-running, quoting his own narrative beginning with the meeting in Alice Stopford Green’s room in London overlooking the Thames, when Figgis exclaims: ‘Buy the guns, then, if only to be in on it’, and Casement replies, ‘Now that’s talking’, radiant with delight. Figgis organises the purchase of the guns, with Childers, from the Magnus Bros. in Hamburg (including dum-dum bullets off-loaded by the latter) and cleverly circumvents the inspection rulings at the harbour; gives the British steamer the slip in Dublin Bay by circulating a rumour of a landing at Waterford; and, which Hobson, engages the officer of the Scottish Borderers in talk near Howth, while the volunteers slip away with the 1,000 rifles (out of 1,500 purchased) delivered there; Dangerfield comments that, since Hobson and Figgis each sought to represent themselves as central to the event, the necessary casualty was truth.
Malcolm Brown, Politics of Irish Literature: From Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats ( 1972), cites Figgis as an ‘Irish poet’ who demonstrated that, in the comparison between Dublin and Warsaw for the worst slums in Europe, Dublin ‘got the worst of it’ [ftn. The Economic Case for Irish Independence, 1920, pp.2-10]. Brown adds some pages later: ‘afterwards the practical benefits of Irish liberation proved to be less than overwhelming’, though ‘nobody has proposed that independence ought to be called off as a bad job’ (see pp.3; 5-6.)
Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal: The Irish Revolution in Literature from Parnell to the Death of Yeats, 1891-1939 (Gill & Macmillan 1977), pp.98-101; also cites Ernie O’Malley’s vignette of Figgis: ‘Figgis was not popular; it was thought he was too vain. Stories were told about his Christlike beard. His manner, his insistent focus of attention on his words, was the porcupine quill effect of an artist amongst those who thought of nationality alone. He was egotistical; it could be seen in his face and mannerisms; his image was reflected in the half-suppressed smiles of his listeners. He had come from another life; he would find it hard now, I felt. I had read his novels; Children of Earth was the best book I had read about the West of Ireland. He was pleasant when he talked to me of his books; but he had the unfortunate habit of making enemies.’ (On Another Man’s Wounds, 1936, p.77; Costello, p.126.)
Liam Kennedy, ‘The Union of Ireland and Britain, 1801-1921’, in Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (IIS/QUB 1996): ‘The ideas of another of the separatist propagandists, Darrell Figgis, were even less convincing [than Griffith’s]. The absence of protectionism as a cause of Ireland’s industrial decline plays second fiddle to a series of ad hoc explanations, some bordering on the eccentric. He argued, for example, that the Irish railways were built to link military barracks rather than commercial centres, thereby damaging Irish industry. Belfast’s economic progress is attributed to its being a ‘military depot’ at the time the rail network was established. (Economic Case, 1920, p.37). Additionally, he suggests that there had been constant attempts by the Castle administration to stifle promising areas of economic development: among the examples cited were Dunlop’s pneumatic tyre and Galway’s potential as a transatlantic port. (ibid., pp.40-43.)
| William Murphy on the death of Darrell Figgis, in in Dictionary of National Biography (RIA 2004) |
‘On 18 November 1924 Millie – who was admired and liked for her participation in prisoner support activities and her nursing of wounded Volunteers – killed herself, using a revolver given to her by Collins in the aftermath of the 1922 raid on their home. Some implied that she had been in a state of permanent anxiety since that raid and this explained her suicide; however, this was not the only plausible explanation. Around this time Figgis began a relationship with a 21-year-old dancing instructress from Dublin named Rita North: it is unclear whether this relationship began before or immediately after his wife’s death. On 19 October 1925 North died of septicemia at a London hospital. She had become fatally infected following a botched abortion. At her inquest Figgis acknowledged that he was the father, but testified that he was unaware of North’s pregnancy, that she had improvised the abortion in Dublin, and that she had only come to him (5 October) when already ill owing to the abortion. Figgis committed suicide (27 October) by gassing himself in rooms rented at 4 Grenville St., Bloomsbury, London. In the most comprehensive and balanced portrait left by a contemporary, Andrew Malone described Figgis as “fated to provide material for the scoffer and the maker of caricatures”’ (Malone, 15) [End.]. |
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Quotations
Reviewing Corkery: In a review of Daniel Corkery’s Munster Twilight in The Irish School Weekly (26 Dec. 1916), Figgis adverts unfavourably to the open-endedness of the stories, and the refusal to shape the material to the demands of narrative. Includes a discussion of the relation between Anglo-Irish literature and writing in Irish, and offers an undogmatic definition of the former, ‘that is to say the use of the English language in books by Irishmen writing of their own affairs and from their national point of view.’ Figgis regards the stories of the collection other than the first, with its baroque splendour, as ‘mainly sketches glimpses and notes for stories.’ (See Patrick Walsh, UUC Thesis on Corkery and Hewitt, 1993, p.44.)
| The Economic Case for Irish Independence (Dubin: Maunsel & Co. 1920) |
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Whatever the Garrison Parliament did or did not achieve, by the mere fact of its existence it at least annulled the policy of national extinction as directed in the economic interest of England. It brought into being, however faultily, the thought of a separate economic policy for Ireland, and it was prepared to press that separate policy according to its own demands and requirements in open competition with England. Therefore it was expunged, and the older craving for extermination began once more to formulate itself, only now with subtler methods and with new terrors in its grasp. For, where the seventeenth century had looked to the sword, and where the earlier part of the eighteenth century had turned to the open prohibitions and instruments of an alien parliament, the nineteenth century, while not at once discarding the publicity of those instruments, relied rather on the administrative machinery which it busied itself to create, and with which it could more secretly work its will. Its grasp spread through the country to stifle competition [21] wherever that might arise. Moreover, the Jailer Ascendancy, whose minds during the years of legislative independence had been quickened to the thought of a separate economic need, had now in great part removed to London, from which place it sent demands for greater revenues from its estates. As a consequence, while industries in towns and cities were slowly stifled, the whole land of Ireland was racked for rents. So famine and pestilence broke with new horrors over the land, each visitation being, in the formal course of events, severer than the last. Evil upcalled evil. Landlords created destitution, and then, fearing a pauper population in its care, began to clear their estates and consolidate their farms. The English administration, having made the instinct for suppression and extinction the first law of its mind, stifled all hope of rivalry, and the English Parliament, faced by its own acts in human misery, appointed Select Committees of Enquiry. A series of such committees were appointed, who spoke of "misery and suffering which no language can possibly describe " ; but nothing was done. Nothing could be done. The evil was in the fact of conquest, and could not be removed but by the removal of that fact. The law of evil created by the relations of evil between two distinct peoples could only be broken by the sundering of those relations. So famine swept after famine across the land, taking its toll at each visitation, till in 1845, following upon the failure of the potato crop of the previous year, and in the years immediately following, it came with a force that broke the weakened will of the nation. [22] Between 1846 and 1851 a million and a half perished from starvation and its accompanying pestilence. Another half a million, however, fled a countrystricken indeed, but stricken by a relentless policy, relentlessly pursued, not by any mischance. It was pursued even in the camp of death. For where she gave no moneys in relief of need, or only gave with restrictions that made the giving of no avail, England gave grants freely in aid of those who wished to leave Ireland. So began an emigration that continued to drain the nation of the best and richest of its blood. When Irishmen arose with shotguns and in resolute combinations to win their ancient land back to their possession, some of the conditions became relieved that had made Ireland impossible for a thriving population. This was not for some time, and the conditions that England had created, inspired by her economic fear, continued, and have to this hour continued, making it impossible for Ireland, rich though she be in natural resources, to maintain the population she can bring forth on her soil. Moreover, another element was added to the evil. Even the population that remained was not able to maintain itself on its own toil. It required the toil of the citizens of the United States to make Ireland a solvent member of the Empire into which she had by might of arms been forced. [...] (pp.21-23.) |
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References
Dictionary of Irish History uses the word ‘mistress’ for his second alliance, and give no explicit account of the cause of suicide; adds titles, AE, George Russell, A Study of a Man and a Nation (1915); note var. The Economic Case for Irish Independence (1920); The Irish Constitution Explained (1922).
| Dictionary of Irish Biography (Dublin: RIA 2004) - Bibl. of sources for the article by William Murphy lists: WO 35/207, WO 339/2543, CO 904/164, MEPO 3/2578 in National Archives, Kew; BMH, WS 1511 (Eamon O’Duibhir (O’Dwyer)); Darrell Figgis, A chronicle of jails (1917); id., A second chronicle of jails (1919); Joice M. Nankivell and Sydney Loch, Ireland in travail (1922), 90, 294; Ir. Times, Ir. Independent, Times, 28 Oct. 1925; Andrew E. Malone, ‘Darrell Figgis’, Dublin Magazine, i, no. 2 (1926), 15–26; Darrell Figgis, Recollections of the Irish war (1927); P. S. O’Hegarty, ‘Bibliographies of 1916 and the Irish revolution: Darrell Figgis’, Dublin Magazine, xii, no. 3 (1937), 47–54; Robert Brennan, Allegiance (1950); Robert Briscoe, For the life of me (1958), 158; Padraic Colum, Arthur Griffith (1958); F. X. Martin (ed.), The Howth gun running (1964); D. H. Akenson and J. F. Fallin, ‘The Irish civil war and the drafting of the Free State constitution’, éire-Ireland, v (1970), 42–93; Brian Farrell, ‘The drafting of the Irish Free State constitution’, Ir. Jurist, v (1971), 115–40, 343–56; vi (1972), 111–35, 345–59; Calton Younger, Arthur Griffith (1981); John J. Dunn, ‘Darrell Figgis, a man nearly anonymous’, Journal of Irish Literature, xv (1986), 33–42; Walker; J. Anthony Gaughan (ed.), Memoirs of Senator James G. Douglas (1998); Welch; Michael Laffan, The resurrection of Ireland (1999). [Available online; accessed 02.01.2024.] |
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction [Pt. 1] (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), cites Children of the Earth (1918), set in Achill, therein called Maolan; IF2 adds Return of the Hero (1923); The House of Success (1921). BIBL, Shakespeare, A Study (Dent 1911) [Whelan Cat. 32]. DIL characterises his poetry as the work of a talentless AE; Queen Tara is set in Ruritania. IF2, Darrell Figgis is a character in Eimar O’Duffy’s The Wasted Island (1919; 1929).
Internet Archive: A 2pp. candidate statement issued by the Darrel Figgis’ Election Committee Rooms, 15 Lower O’Connell Street, Dublin, 7th June, 1922 is available at Internet Archive - online; accessed 02.01.2024.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), Vol. 2, p.1012: Daniel Corkery writes [in Synge and Anglo-Irish Lit., 1931], ‘What wonder that those of them who most deeply sank themselves in their subject wrote far above their accustomed pitch? Darrel[l] Figgis with his Children of the Earth ...’.
Maunsel Press: publication list attached to St. John Ervine, Mrs Martin’s Man [pop. edn.] (, 1915), incls. notices of The Mount of Transfiguration, new vol. of poems by Darrell Figgis, author of Jacob Elthorn, A Study in Shakespeare, Queen Tara, &c.
| Sinn Fein Catechism: Besides standard works, a Sinn Fein Catechism (Whelan [1918]) is accessible to view in full via the catalogue of the National Library of Ireland - online; a manuscript letter from Darrell Figgis to a Mr Stuart dated 3 April 1912 is held in the National Library of Ireland as MS, with text: Figgis “at the risk of seeming ... an annoying egotist” sends a copy of his Shakespeare study as a thank-you gift for a enjoyable holiday. He states “To come once, I can say, is to return again, and when I return, I think it will chiefly to be to find out certain faces and to shake certain hands”. He adds, in a P.S., “Am I right in calling you Stuart? Or do I stumble?”’ (NLI Cat.; accessed 02.01.2023). |
Cathach Bks (Cat. 12) lists The Irish Constitution (n.d.); The House of Success (Dublin 1921); Bye Ways of Study (Dublin 1918).
Whelan Books (Cat. 32) lists Figgis, Introduction to William Carleton, Stories of Irish Life (Talbot n.d. [1918]).
Hyland Books (Oct. 1995; Cat. 219) lists Maurice Moore, Report on Peat (Dublin Dec. 1921), 110pp., large folding map.
Belfast Public Library holds AE (1916); Bye-ways of Study (1918); Gaelic State Past and Future (1917); Irish Constitution (1922); Mount of Transfiguration (1915); Recollections of the Irish War (1927)
Belfast Linen Hall Library holds Mount of Transfiguration (1915); AE, A Study of a Man and a Nation (1916)
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