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Life
1802-1845; b. Cork; employed at Beamish’s in Cork, and present during the visit of Tom Moore in 1823; contrib. to The Merchantile Reporter and Bolster’s Quarterly Magazine, where he published a version of the Deirdre story; emig. to the US in 1827; edited a newspaper; d. NY; [?father of J. A. O’Shea, q.v.]. RAF
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Works
Rudekki: A Tale of the Seventh Century (Longmans 1826), 160pp.; The Lament of Hellas and Other Poems (1826); Adolph, and Other Poems (NY 1831); Parnassian Wild Flowers (Georgetown 1836); Clontarf; or, the Field of the Green Banner: An Historical Romance, and Other Poems (NY: D. Appleton & Co 1843), 156pp., ill. [1 pl.], incls. ‘Notes on Clontarf’, pp.131-38; Poems by the late John Augustus Shea, collected by his son (NY 1846), 12°; “Deardra” by J. A. Shea, published in Bolster Magazine, II, No. 7 (July 1827), pp.256 et seq.
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Commentary
J. S. Redfield, Notes from Moore’s Letters to his Musical Publisher, James Power (NY: Redfield [1854]: Shea crops up in John O’Driscol’s account of Moore’s visit to Beamish and Crawford’s brewery in Cork, added in a footnote to this text (pp.103-04.) Shea, who was then ‘a poetic clerk in the establishment’, and afterwards the editor of a newspaper in America, ‘quaffed a brimming draft from the same goblet’ that Moore had used to drink his complimentary glass of Beamish, prefaced no doubt by a corresponding sentimental speech, dispatched the relic to a glass cutter in Hanover Street, to have the name MOORE engraved on it as a precious memento of the visit of Erin’s Minstrel to the Cork Porter Brewery.‘ (pp.103-04.) (For Notes [... &c.], see further under Moore, Works - as supra.)
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References
Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, 1789-1850 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol. I, p.172.
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