Life
1873-1953; b. Belfast; worked as traveller in ladies’ underwear;
joined Abbey Theatre as an actor; fnd. with Stephen Gwynn and Joseph Maunsel
Hone the publishing company Maunsel, being named after the latter who
invested £2,000 and became its chairman; published Yeats, Synge, Lady
Gregory, George Russell, James Stephens, Hyde, et al.; involved in a prolonged
wrangle with Joyce over the publication of Dubliners in the so-called
Maunsel Edition (1910; ultimately published in 1914), published over five
hundred titles, 1905-1923; received Government compensation for the destruction
of the Maunsel store of - largely unsaleable - books by fire during 1916
Rising; changed the imprint to George Roberts in 1917-20 and to Maunsel
& Roberts in 1920-23; Roberts printed the illuminated Ireland’s
Memorial Record of the Great War, marginally ill. by Harry Clarke;
George Russell [“AE”] included his verse in New Songs
(1904); the Maunsel imprint acquired by Robert West [Catholic Univ. of
America], c.1996.
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Quotations
‘Warm, odorous night, / As a
mother to her breasts ,/ You press the Earth’s sun-wearied face;
/ While a babe in her arms she rests.’ [&c] Also cited from New
Songs, ‘The Prisoner of Love’, ‘Still although I know
our ways / Are divergent through all time/Following love will shed its
rays / On the path you choose to climb[... &c]’ (From A Celtic
Christmas [The Irish Homestead, Christmas Number, Vol. 10;
3 Dec. 1904; p.22; rep. in Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds to Dubliners,
1986, p.131.) ‘By day the Dagda hunts fair / While silent is each
unseen star ... In dreamy rivers flowing past – Sleep / Unveils the
vast mysterious deep’ (Torchiana, op. cit, pp.133-35; with one other.)
References
John Cooke, ed, Dublin Book of Irish Verse 1728-1909 (Dublin:
Hodges, Figgis 1909), selects gives ‘A Lark in the City’; ‘The
Convent Bell’; ‘Your Question’ [‘You ask me sweetheart
to avow/What charm in you I most adore;/But how can I discriminate/From
your innumerable store.’]; with no bio-details.
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Notes
James Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus, ‘What is wrong
with all these Irish writers – what the blazes are they always snivelling
about? Isn’t it funny to read Roberts’ poems about a mother
pressing a baby to her breasts? O blind, snivelling, nose-dropping, calumniated
Christ wherefore were these young men begotten?’ (Richard Ellmann,
ed., Letters of James Joyce, 1966, Vol. II, p.78; cited in Torchiana,
op. cit. [supra], pp.133-35; and note, Torchiana
cites the above as models for the poetic ambitions of a Little Chandler,
giving added force to Joyce’s derision.)
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