A. M. Sullivan (1830-84)

[ See entry on A. M. Sullivan by Patrick Maume in Dictionary of irish Biography (RIA 2009) - available online. ]

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Bibliographical details

The Story of Ireland [.... &c.] - EDITIONS

The Story of Ireland; or, A Narrative of Irish History, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, Written for the Youth of Ireland (Dublin: A. . D. Sullivan 1867), 588pp. [2], ill., 19cm. [Pref. signed: 15th August 1867.]

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Do. [...] from the Earliest Ages to the Insurrection of 1867, ... Continued to the present time by J. Luby, illustrated with numerous engravings (Providence; H. McElroy 1883; 1885), 643pp., [1], ill. [18 pls. & front. ports.], 8° Do., [...] from the earliest times to the Fenian Insurrection of 1867, by Alexander M. Sullivan; continued to the present time by P; D. Nunan (Boston: Murphy & McCarthy 1885), 661pp, ill. [12 unnum. pls., ills. & ports.; The Story of Ireland; a narrative of Irish history, from the earliest ages to the insurrection of 1867 ... Continued to the present time by J. Luby, etc. 25th Edition. (Dublin 1887), 17cm. The Story of Ireland [...] brought up to recent times by a well-known author. [new. edn.] (M. H. Gill & Son [1894]), [Copy of Tessa Hurston, Library of QUB at Armagh]. The Story of Ireland from the Earliest Ages to the Insurrection of 1867, continued to the present time by James Luby, illustrated with numerous engravings (NY: P. J. Kenedy Excelsior Catholic Publishing House 1892 [copyright], 1898), ix, 649pp., [8], ill. [18 lvs. of pls. [see details]. The Story of Ireland. New Edition. (Dublin: M. H. Gill; London: Burns & Oates, Ltd.: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 1894), 582pp., ill. [18 pls.] + Valedictory - [ending:] God Save Ireland! [1p.], Contents [3pp.]; Illustrations [1p.; available avia HathiTrust - online]. Do., [...] New Edition, brought up to date by a well-known author (Dublin: M. H. Gill 1907, 1907), 19cm.

Digital editions

The Story of Ireland is available at LibraryIreland.com - online [accessed 20.10.2010; still current at 17.09.2024.];

The Story of Ireland from the Earliest Ages to the Insurrection of 1867, continued to the present time by James Luby, illustrated with numerous engravings (NY: P. J. Kenedy Excelsior Catholic Publishing House 1892 [copyright], 1898), ix, 649pp., [8], ill. [18 lvs. of pls. [epigraph:] “She’s not a dull or cold land; / No! she’s a warm and bold land! Oh! she’s a true and old land, - This native land of mine.” (Davis). [Ded.:] To My Fellow Countrymen / at home and in exile / on the college and the mansion / amidst the green fields or the crowded cities /soon to be /the men of Ireland / I dedicate this little book, which contains / the story of our Country /and subscribe myself / friend the Author. List of Illustrations; Sketch of the Life of Alexander Martin Sullivan [pp.[v]-ix; signed. T.P.G.] Publisher’s Notice [pp.1-2]; Preface to the American Edition [signed. J. L[uby [3-4]; Author’s Preface, pp.[5]-7. [Available at Internet Archive - online; access 17.09.2024.]

Illustrations [listed at front]: The Milesians sighting the “Promised Isle” [11]; Queen Scots unfurls the “Sacred Banner” [17]; Recital of the Bardic Tales in Ancient Erinn [26]; The death of King Dahi [49]; St. Columba led blindfolded into the Convention [56]; The murder of King Mahon [78]; Brian on the morning of Clontarf [96]; The Norman landing [112]; The meeting of Eva and Strongbow [119]; The Death-bed of King Henry the Second [132]; Godfrey of Tyrconnell borne into battle [146]; Edward Bruce crowned king of Ireland [161]; Mao Murrough warned of the plot by his Bard [169]; Silken Thomas flings up the Sword of State [201]; The “Reformers” at their work [207]; Stealing away the Tyrconnell princes [238]; Red Hugh O'Donnell’s welcome home [249]; The Conflict before Armagh [257]; Dunboy besieged [295]; The last struggle of Mac Geoghegan [303]; “The Flight of the Earls” [327]; The Princes received by the Pope [337]; Mac Mahon before the Lords Justices [363]; Authentic portrait of Owen Roe O'Neill [363]; Depositing the captured English Standards in Limerick Cathedral [370]; Seizing the Irish children for Slave-gangs [391]; Battle of the Boyne [410]; Sarsfield captures the Siege Train [433]; How they kept the bridge at Athlone [447]; The Dog of Aughrim [451]; Mass on the Mountain in the Penal times [477]; The capture of Lord Edward Fitzgerald [613]; A scene from the Irish exodus [561].
CONTENTS [i.e., chapter-headings - listed at end of book only]:
Author’s Preface [3] Preface to American Edition [7] Introductory - How we learn the facts of early history [9] 1.] How the Milesians sought and found “the Promised Isle” - and conquered it [11] 2.] How Ireland fared under the Milesian dynasty [19] 3.] How the Unfree Clans tried a revolution; and what came of it. How the Romans thought it vain to attempt a conquest of Ireland [23] 4.] Bardic Tales of Ancient Erinn. “The Sorrowful Fate of the Children of Usna” [26] 6.] The death of King Conor Mac Nessa [35] 6.] The “Golden Age” of Pre-Christian Erinn [38] 7.] How Ireland received the Christian Faith [45] 8.] A retrospective glance at pagan Ireland [51] 9.] Christian Ireland.] The Story of Columba, the “Dove of the Cell” [55] 10.] The Danes in Ireland [74] 11.] How “Brian of the Tribute” became a High King of Erinn [78] 12.] How a dark thunder-cloud gathered over Ireland [85] 13.] The glorious day of Clontarf [89]		[...] 55.] Something about the conflicting elements of the civil war in [1642-9. How the Confederate Catholics made good their position, and established a national government in Ireland [360] 56.] How King Charles opened negotiations with the Confederate Council. How the Anglo-Irish party would have ” peace at any price” and the “native Irish” party stood.out for peace with honor.] How Pope Innocent the Tenth sent an envoy - “not empty-handed” - to aid the Irish cause [364] 57.] How the nuncio freed and armed the hand of Owen Roe, and bade him strike at least one worthy blow for God and Ireland.] How gloriously Owen struck that blow at Benburb [370] 58.] How the king disavowed the treaty and the Irish repudiated it. How the council by a worse blunder clasped hands with a sacrilegious murderer, and incurred excommunication.] How at length the royalists and the Confederates concluded an honorable peace. . [377] 59.] How Cromwell led the Puritan rebels into Ireland. How Ireland by a lesson too terrible to be forgotten was taught the danger of too much loyalty to an English sovereign [381]
[...]		[...]
See ...   Table of Chapters - as attached. Author’s Preface - as infra.

New Ireland: Political Sketches and Personal Reminiscences of Thirty Years of Irish Public Life, by A. M. Sullivan (London, Glasgow, Manchester & Birmingham: Burns Oates & Washbourne n.d. [1878]), 463pp. [Cameron & Ferguson Edn.] Preface, sign. London Sept. 24, 1877 [i]. CONTENTS incl. Looking Back; The Schoolmaster Abroad; O’Connell and Repeal; The Ribbon Confederacy; Father Mathew; The Black Forty-seven; Young Ireland; After-scenes; The Crimson Stain; ‘Lochaber no More!’; The Encumbered Estates Act; The Tenant League; ‘The Brass Band’; The Suicide Banker [Sadleir]; The Artbuthnot Abduction; The Phoenix Conspiracy; Papal Ireland; The Fate of Glenveih [Glenveigh]; The Fenian Movement; A Troubled Time; The Richmond Escape; Insurrection!; The Scafford and the Cell; ‘Delenda est Carthago!’; Disestablishment; Longford; “Home Rule”; The Kerry Election; Ballycohey; The Disestablished Church; Ireland at Westminster; Loss and Gain. Sequel: Gathering Clouds; ‘Obstruction!’; The Land League; Agrarian Revolution. [Wrapper, 2/6; Cloth 4/-; note Lowe, Marston, Searle & Rivington edn. of 1877.]

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Commentary
T. A. Jackson, Ireland Her Own (Cobbett Press 1949; rep. Lawrence & Wishart 1970) [epilogue Desmond Greaves], containing remarks on Stephen’s naming Sullivan a ‘felon-setter’ following arrest of Phoenix Club members in late 1857 [var. 1858], an event instigated by Sullivan’s securing William Smith O’Brien to write an article in The Nation advocating ‘moral force’, to which he then appended an editorial specifically addressed to Fenians in Kerry, supposedly resulting in the arrest of the Phoenix Club members; Jackson characterises Sullivan’s style as ‘sentimentally and hysterically pacifist’.

D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London: Routledge 1982; 1991), p.247-49: ‘[…] Sullivan, like most writers in the Davisite tradition, disagreed with the Gaelic leaguers in that he admired the Protestant patriots of the eighteenth century, who at last opened their eyes to the reality of English oppressions, only to be again betrayed. England once more broke faith with Ireland; Ireland was provoked into revolt; and Wexford rose, led by Father Murphy and other priests whose names “should ever be remembered by Irishmen when tempters whisper that the voice of the Catholic pastor, raised in worry or restraint is the utterance of one who cannot feel for, who would not die for, the flock he desires to serve.” After the ’98 rebellion the parliament of Ireland was extinguished and an independent country degraded into a province: “Ireland as a nation was extinguished”. With the great famine, the Irish as a race nearly went the same way, as the English press gloated over the “anticipated extirpation of the Irish race”. But Ireland was fated not to die; and although Sullivan could not approve of the “insensate” attempt at a rising in 1867, he praised the virtue, patriotism, and Christianity of some of the Fenian leaders: “Their last words were of God and Ireland”. And when Sullivan took his story of Ireland up to recent times, the land acts, the home rule bills, all provided proof of his contention that “there is a god in Israel”.’ [Cont.]

D. George Boyce (Nationalism in Ireland, 1991) - cont.: ‘Sullivan’s mixture of historical fact and fiction, of poetry and prose culled from writers like Moore, Davis and Gavan Duffy, his conviction that the Irish would triumph over all adversity, and move on to their “great purpose” was the kind of literature that his, and succeeding generation of Irish nationalists were reared on; Eamon de Valera was perhaps its most celebrated exponent. / The histories written by Abbe MacGeoghan, Mitchel and D’Arcy McGee were of exactly similar kind, even down to the detailed refutation of the massacres of 1641; and McGee’s publisher remarked that “A nation with such a strange history must have some great work yet to do in the world. Except the Jews, no people has so suffered without dying”. This was the stuff of the home rule movement and of the nationalist movement that succeeded home rule. It was embodied in almost every speech, pamphlet, newspaper editorial and poem. [… &c., p.249; includes page refs. with all quotations from The Story of Ireland, 1867.] Note also R. F. Foster remarks in Paddy and Mr Punch (1993) on G. D. Boyce’s ‘acute analysis of The Story of Ireland (1867)’, in Nationalism in Ireland [1982].[ top ]

Roy Foster, ‘The Magic of Its Lovely Dawn, Reading Irish history as Story’ [Carroll Inaugural Lecture] (Times Literary Supplement, 16 Dec. 1994), rems. on The Story of Ireland (1867 and eds.), one of the great best-sellers of all (Irish) time, rapidly shifting 50,000 copies and going into dozens of editions [25th in 1888]; based on ‘chief events’, ‘easily comprehended and remembered’, with minor incidents dropped as being likely to ‘confuse and bewilder’; addressed to ‘Irish Nation of the Future’, and told ‘after the manner of simple storytellers’; Ireland as Island of Destiny, invaded by Spanish Milesians [Catholic connection]; archaeology used to buttress claims of rule by accomplished sovereigns from 1500 b.c.; ‘liberal patrons of art, science and commerce’; ‘regularly convened parliaments’; Home Rule avant la lettre; St Patrick’s prayers ‘express such doctrines as are taught today in the unchanged and unchanging Catholic church’; ‘national unity’ as object of the quest-tale; Ulster plantation swept aside ‘lie the baseless fabric of a vision’; Stuart’s condemn Irish to suffer in the eighteenth century ‘an agony the most awful, the most prolonged, of any recorded on the blotted page of human suffering ... in cruelties of oppression endured, Ireland is like no other country in the world’; supplied the canon for Irish history as taught for generations by orders like the Christian brothers ... All conformed ... determinism was explicit. The formula brilliantly poularised by Sullivan in 1867 created the terms learned by successive generations.’; also cites oft-reprinted Speeches from the Dock.

See also Foster, The Story of Ireland [Inaugural lecture ... Univ. of Oxford, 1 Dec. 1994] (Clarendon Press 1995): ‘The point of the Story of Ireland as retailed in classic form was, in fact, that though all the elements were there (villains, heroes, helpers, donors) it had not reached its ending yet. But through omission of elements that did not suit the fairytale, and adherence to established narrative forms, the right ending could be inferred. This might be illustrated by looking at the most famous book written under the title The Story of Ireland, first published by A. M. Sullivan in 1867. [...] Sullivan, a journalist and politician from Cork, helped create the popular Irish [8] concept of nationalism through his newspaper The Nation and his oft-reprinted Speeches from the Dock. In The Story of Ireland, written (he said) “hand to mouth ... with printers like wolves at my heels for copy”, he produced one of the great bestsellers of all (Irish) time, rapidly shifting 50,000 copies and going into dozens of editions. It is worth dwelling on this text, not only because of its huge influence, but because it best encapsulates the formalities, motifs, elisions, parallelism, and - of course - gaps that characterize the story. Sullivan defended his decision to present a narrative based on “chief events”, “easily comprehended and remembered”; minor incidents or qualifications which might “confuse and bewilder” were dropped. He addressed himself to the young, the “Irish Nation of the Future”, telling them Ireland’s story “after the manner of simple storytellers”. But the sequence and emphasis were really aimed at a far wider target. The theme was established from the beginning: Ireland as the Isle of Destiny, invaded from Spain by Milesians (and thus implicitly linked from its origins to Catholic Europe). Archaeology was used to buttress claims of. rule by accomplished sovereigns from about 1500 BC, “liberal patrons of art, science and commerce”, instituting orders of chivalry and “regularly convened parliaments”. The themes are legitimate independence, equal status with other European nations, the capacity for self-government: Home Rule three thousand years avant to lettre. This mercilessly present-minded preoccupation drives on through Christianity, accomplished peacefully in Ireland alone: St Patrick’s prayers and litanies “express such doctrines as are taught in our own day in the unchanged and unchanging Catholic Church”. Columba, the wandering saint, is presented as the first involuntary emigrant [...] in fact, he goes off to Scotland and [9] brings about “the independence of the young Caledonian nation” - Home Rule all round. [...; 10]; There is, however, an end in sight and it uses the language of another story: nation becomes religion [...] But if the message is the right to revolt, Sullivan’s own politics were those of a moderate Home Ruler; Ireland would thus, in the end, export virue back to England, where family life, Sullivan airily remarked, was “one black catalogue of murdering, wife-beating and infant-choking”. Most importantly, the Story of Ireland must not be absorbed into England’s corrupt narrative, substituting “her history of falsehood, rapine and cruelty for ours of faithfulness, noble endurance and morality - giving us the [11] bloodstained memoirs of her land and sea robbers in place of the glorious biographies of our patriots and our saints.”’ (Foster, pp.8-12.) [Bibl. citations incl. R. Moran, ‘Alexander Martin Sullivan (1829-1884) and Irish Cultural Nationalism’, unpub. thesis, Univ. of Cork [NUI], 1993.]

Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork UP 1996), p.15, contesting Foster’s view of A. M. Sullivan’s history as determining without exceptions the form of Irish school historiography and tradition in view of the Sullivan’s ‘conservative project’ and in particular his ‘sustained opposition’ to Fenianism. Further, ‘[T]heir orderly stories can be seen as an attempt to co-opt and control the more unruly a refractory narratives of vernacular history, in which the past was embossed in material form on the landscape and worked in the very texture of social experience’.

Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP/Field Day 1996) - writing of The Nation’s ‘programme of historical-consciousness raising’: ‘A. S. Sullivan’s career is exemplary in this regard. Radicalized by the famine, assistant editor of The Nation in 1955 and editor form 1858 to 1876, Sullivan [...] clashed bitterly withthe Fenians; but he gained much popularity over the fact that he was imprisoned on account of an article he had written on the Manchester Martyrs [...] This remarkable man brought Davis’s ideals into practice, especially in his massively influential history book for young people, The Story of Ireland [... &c.] (Dublin 1867). Not only does the format of the story transcend the division, deplored by Davis, between imaginative literature and factual history, the illustrations appear almost like a response to Davis’s request for a gallery of “Irish historical paintings”. The first of the meaning illustrations in the Story deals with the theme which Davis, too, [151] had mentioned as the starting point, “The Milesians sighting the ‘Promised Isle.” [Davis, "Hints for Historical Paintings" - attached]. The final illustration provides a poignant counter-point, and shows the leave-taking of emigrants; the Milesians are forced out of their promised isle (‘A scene from the Irish exodus’, 561). Sullivans Story, then, in presenting an emotive, gripping, pictorial and literary version of “exciting history” [....T]hat the attempt to set the historical record straight involves a continuing acceptance, in the teeth of factual falsification, of Ireland’s legendary origins as exemplified in the Lebor Gabala and Keating. Sullivan’s book situates itself, like many other late-nineteenth-century histories which reach from the Fianna to the Fenians, between myth and history and dovetails one with the other. In subsequent decades, such popular Stories and Tales merged into a popular amalgam of indiscriminate Irish-interest reading material, which did much to motivate its audience, and which played an important role in the development of nationalist enthusiasm. (pp.151-52.)

Note: Leerssen goes on to propose ‘added connotations’ to R. F. Foster’s analysis of the way in which the Irish nationalist historians sought to impose a sense of ‘discursive organity [, ...] order and closure’ on the facts which Irish history in itself failed to supply. (Ibid; ref. to Foster, The Story of Ireland: An Inaugural Lecture [...] Oxford, 1 Dec. 1994; Clarendone Press 1955.)

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Quotations
New Ireland: Political Sketches and Personal Reminiscences of Thirty Years of Irish Public Life (1878): ‘It may be that, even if the tempting idea of “colonisation” had never affected their minds, a certain section of the Irish landlords would have had to pursue, in a greater or less degree, the course that followed. What were they to do? Penniless landlords, it seemed a miserable necessity that they should sacrifice the latter [viz., the tenants]; as one drowning man drives another from a plank insufficient to support them both. Be this as it may, in the track of the Irish Famine came such wholesale “clearances” as never had been known in the history of land-tenure.’ (p.114.)

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References
D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912); b. Castletownberehaven [sic], 1830; journalist and ed. of The Nation, 1855; afterward proprietor; contrib. poetry to The Nation, 1856-70; included in Irish Penny Readings (4 vols., 1879-85); MP Louth, 1874; later MP Meath; bar, 1876; Story of Ireland [n.d]; New Ireland [n.d.]. d. 17 Oct.; bur. Glasnevin.

See also Irish Book Lover, 3.

Brian Cleeve & Anne Brady, A Dictionary of Irish Writers (Dublin: Lilliput 1985); b. Bantry, joined The Nation in 1855 and succeeded C G Duffy as editor and proprietor of The Nation, 1855 [var. 1858 DIB] to 1876 when he handed over to his brother TD Sullivan; insistent but moderate nationalist strongly opposed Fenians militancy; served six months sentence for article protesting the execution of the Manchester Martyrs, 1867-68, and erected statue to Grattan with the proceeds on a collection on his behalf; Nationalist MP for Louth (1874) and Meath (1880), he also practised law in London after 1877. he wrote a popular Story of Ireland, 1870; also New Ireland, 2 vols. (1877). [ERR, Author of the ballad ‘God Save Ireland’].

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; selects from New Ireland (1877); A M Sullivan, proprietor of The Nation from 1855 to 1876; renowned for hostility to Young Ireland, counterbalance to [Mitchel’s] genocidal view of famine, [192]; as sole proprietor of The Nation he was v. influential, but renowned for hostility to left-wing element in Young Ireland and the genocidal view of the Famine, to which he attributes ‘painful misunderstanding and bitter recrimination’; he considers the condemnation generally heaped on the landlords ‘too sweeping ... the bulk of the resident landlords manfully did their best in that dread hour’; his writings characterised by fulsome sentiment and political mildness [Deane, ed.; 192-98]; 248 [no notes]; A. M. Sullivan, although corrected in a public letter by the principal actor in restoring the captive [James Stephens] to freedom, says, even in the last edition of his New Ireland, that Stephens made his exit through the front door of the prison’ (John Devoy, Recollections, 1929), 268; [confusion with A. M. Sullivan (his son) defending Casement in 1916, 295]; English speaking (Frederick Ryan) 999, and biog. ftn; Uncle of Tim Healy; journalist in Liverpool and Dublin and in 1855 proprietor of The Nation; called by James Stephens ‘a felon-setter’ in The Irishman; founder member of IPP, imprisoned for supporting Manchester Martyrs; passed The Nation to his brother in 1876; d. Beckenham, Kent; BIOG, 207-08. FDA3, A. M. Sullivan, The Story of Ireland (1867), perhaps the most influential nationalist history [FDA3 583]; joined The Nation in 1855; opposed to Fenianism; Story of Ireland (1870) the bible of popular nationalism [FDA3 999].

Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); 1830-1884, b. Bantry; Story of Ireland (1870); sided with Healy against Parnell (the Bantry Gang); arrested in 1868 for his article on the execution of the Manchester Martyrs, he used the public subscription of £400 to erect the statue of Henry Grattan facing TCD. Formed the Home Rule Party with Isaac Butt but turned to Parnell in 1877. The anthology selects 16 poems incl. ‘The Wearing of The Green’, ‘On the Colleen Bawn’, ‘The Native Irishman’, et. al.

Ulster Libraries: BELFAST LINENHALL LIBRARY holds New Ireland, 2 vols. (1877). BELFAST PUBLIC LIBRARY holds Modern Irish History (n.d.); New Ireland (n.d.); Speeches and Addresses 1859-1881 (1882); Story of Ireland (1887). UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER CENTRAL LIBRARY [Morris Collection], holds New Ireland, Political Sketches and Personal Reminiscences, 2 vols. (1878); The Story of Ireland, a narrative of Irish History from the earliest ages to the present times (1889).

Hyland Books (Cat. 219; 1995) lists The Story of Ireland (1894 edn.), ills; also Sullivan Bros., Irish Penny Readings, 2 vols. (1st edn. 1879), both 319pp.; Speeches from the Dock, or Protests of Patriotism (Boston n.d.), 236+91+84pp.

Namesake: An A. M. Sullivan, described as a poet and student of Irish history, reviewed Anthony Burgess, Re Joyce (Norton 1965), in Sewanee Review (25 Dec. 1995), p.34.

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Notes
Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Ireland (Cambridge 1973), writes: ‘A. M. Sullivan, leader of the moderate constitutional nationalists whose ambition to claim the coffin for themselves [at Terence Bellew McManus’s Fenian funeral, 10 Nov. 1861] Stephens thwarted, concluded that the funeral ‘gave the Fenian chiefs a command of Ireland which they had not been able to command before’ (p.55).

Edith Somerville, in Irish Memories [copying Martin Ross’s memoir of her brother and her father’s house at Ross], makes reference to A. M. Sullivan’s view that ‘No adequate tribute has ever been paid to those Irish landlords - and they were men of every party and creed - who perished, martyrs to duty, in that awful time; who did not fly the plague-reeking workhouse, or fever-tainted court.’ (Irish Memories, p.17.) Note poss. family connection between A M[artin] Sullivan and the Martins of Ross.

Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock includes a comic allusion to The Story of Ireland by A. M. Sullivan, here confused with J. L. Sullivan, the singer (Pan Edn., 1980, p.33.)

Liam O’Flaherty: A.M. Sullivan’s The Story of Ireland and the Gaelic version of Fairies at Work by William P. Ryan are the only books we hear of in the O’Flaherty household. (see Patrick Sheeran, The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism, UCG 1972, p.55.)

Story of Ireland (USA): A publisher’s notice prefixed to The Story of Ireland in the American edition (P. J. Kenedy 1892) records that a letter to A. M. Sullivan was answered by his brother T. D. Sullivan with the words: ‘My brother, Mr. A. M. Sullivan, M P., has sent me a note which he recently received from you relative to the reprinting of “The Story of Ireland,” by you in America. He has done so because the copyright of that work passed from him to me on my purchase of this concern from him three years ago. .... In writing to me, he said he regarded your offer as an honorable one, and felt confident that you would act up to it, and he advised me, as the owner of the copyright, to accord you the permission you desired. I have much pleasure in doing so, on the conditions mentioned by you, and I hope your publication of the work will be in every way successful.’ (Op. cit., p.1.)

Note: the publisher mentions that all the illustrations in the original have been reproduced with ‘many portraits added [to] give the volume an additional interest’. On the question of orthography, Kenedy writes: ‘In this edition too, the author’s plan of spelling the old Irish names, for the most part, as they are pronounced has been followed, as it is considered that the principal aim, in a popular work such as this, should be to contribute, in all possible respects, to the convenience of the reader.’

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