James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997)

CONTENTS: Part I: ‘Upper Middle-Class Fiction 1873-1890’; Part II: ‘Intelligentsia Fiction, 1900-1922’, pp.79-87; ‘Guinan and Sheehan: “False Standard of Modern Progress”’, pp.115-26.

Introd.; ‘clues to the prevailing social attitudes and to the mentality of the classes from which the writers emerged’ [1]; repeal of advertisement duty, 1853; of stamp duty, 1855; single-vol. novels, 1894; royalty system; boom in writing and publishing novels in British market periodical role in publishing novels … notably The Irish Monthly; houses, Longmans, Macmillan, Burns & Oates, joined by Chatto & Windus (1876), Hutchinson (1880), T. Fisher Unwin (1882), Edward Arnold (1891), and Grant Richards (1897); [2]

Catholic fiction … to refer to fiction written by people who were Catholics and who thus, in the Irish context, belonged to a clearly distinguishable section of society which, for all its [2] inner diversity, was sufficiently distinct to warrant attention.

Discusses historians’ debate on rise of nationalism; there is agreement that, increasingly throughout the nineteenth century and decisively after the foundation of the Irish Free State, Irish society came to be dominated by a lower middle-class establishment of farmers and shop-keepers. … “Ireland’s nation-forming class” (Emmet Larkin). [Bibl., ‘Church, State and Nation in Modern Ireland’, The American Historical Review, 80 (1975), pp.1244-76.

cottiers [4]

Eugene Hynes relates growing strength of Catholic orthodoxy to rise of lower-middle class [4]; because Irish modernisation in the nineteenth century was agricultural and not industrial, the family, rather than the individual, became central. [5]

Larkin cites culture and especially language rather than economics as the reasons why orthodox Catholicism flourished, insisting on the vigorous adherence to Catholicism … a substitute for the Irish language as a definition characteristic of nationality. [5]

Their republicanism came to be identified with the interests and values of the Irish Catholic framing class, and they never succeeded in creating more than a veneer of Gaelicism in a state whose true psychic centre continued to lie in the heart of provincial Ireland and not on its western seaboard. [6]

[…] a Protestant ascendancy class, which by the 1890s had lost both its political power and, with its recent defeat in the land war, the basis of its economic strength. By means of literature some of its members sought to create a version of Ireland with which they hoped to feel comforted. Through their reworking of ancient Celtic legend they envisioned an Ireland of sensuous pagan peasants, led by a heroic and legendary aristocracy … an attempt ‘to employ literature in a resuscitation of elder Irish values and culture that they hoped would transform the reality of the Ireland they inhabited.’ (Foster, Irish Revival, p.xvi.) [6]

The focus of this book not on the Anglo-Irish world but on Irish Catholic society and on the dynamic interplay of clashes within it as evidenced in Irish Catholic fiction. [6]

The Catholic gentry a very small group … The small Catholic upper middle class thought of itself as the urban ally of the Catholic gentry [and] aimed at success in professions such as law and medicine. [7]

The Catholic intelligentsia was a group that began to make its impact during the second half of the period of this study … often came from a lower middle-class background - supporters of urban modernisation, with its emphasis on individual liberty [7] … This made then opponents of the rural modernisation, with its emphasis on the primacy of the family, which had been achieved in nineteenth-century Ireland. [8]

Until the 1890s Catholic fiction tended to be written by members of the upper middle class and to reflect their outlook and aspirations. Its decline was provoked by the definitive coming to power of the lower middle class. But the advance of this group … was not reflected by a burgeoning of lower middle-class fiction … [8]

contrasts class mentality and individual visions [8]

The Russells and Mulhollands represent a way of being Irish that was subsequently to be ruled out of court in an increasing polarisation between unionism and nationalism. They were proud of their Irishness and Catholicism. But they were also proud if not of a British dimension to their identity then at least of how much they felt Ireland was beginning to achieve within in the context of the United Kingdom. [16]

For Mulholland and her class, though, that nationalism did not include the cultural or political separatism, espoused by other groups in Irish society. / It was on account of this key issue of nationalism that the upper middle class failed to achieve for itself the position of decisive cultural leadership in Ireland for which it longed. [Their] political outlook was too far removed from that of the Catholic lower middle class on the issue, though the two classes shared a similar ethos in many other respects. The result was that the upper middle class was able to exercise very little influence on the ethos of the lower middle class, when the latter came to [16] form the new Irish establishment. Indeed, the opposite happened. The ethos of the upper middle class was largely assimilated to that of the lower middle class. Distinctively upper middle-class values became decidedly mute and were to remain so for a large part of the twentieth century. [17]

Incongruously, however, Lover and Lever were immensely popular with large sections of the Irish reading public, demonstrating an Irish capacity that was to be repeated again and again for coping with critical [17] images of Ireland by absorbing and domesticating them. This is often reflected in the rather patronising term “rollicking”, often used by Catholic reviewers in their assessments of Lover and Lever. They were less tolerant when it came to Lover and Lever’s literary successors, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin.

‘When are we to have what neither Banim nor Carleton nor Lover or Lever has given us - a story describing the real peasant life of Catholic Ireland? it is not so drearily sensational nor so stupidly comic as some of those hard pressed story-tellers would have us believe.’ (Irish Monthly, 7, 1879, 559 [18]

a number of narrative strategies … the most common and perhaps most audacious traced the sources of violence allegations of violence to members of the government or Protestant ascendancy …. [19]

anxious to conform to perceived Victorian standards and this is reflected in a blandness both in the actions of the characters in their novels and also in the sort of novel they wrote. They eschewed anything that made them stand out. It was not a recipe for artistic originality. [25]

describes Lady Ashfield in A Striking Contrast (1895) as ‘radically pragmatic’ [27]

Stories of the moral probity of the peasantry are also prominent in upper middle-class writing. Rosa Mulholland was the acknowledged leader in the field of writing about the moral dilemmas faced by the peasantry .. .with a special expertise in describing the conditions of the poorer class. … Their greatest virtue is that they know their places.’ [31]

On Mulholland’s Story of Chris: ‘In this novel, Mulholland, perhaps inadvertently, opens up a gap between a Victorian, puritan ethic and a Catholic ethic which allows room for forgiveness … Mulholland opts for the puritan ethic precisely because Victorianism [32] could only view Catholic forgiveness as a form of moral looseness, the very thing Mulholland wishes to avoid giving an impression of.’ (p.32).

The members of the upper middle class reserve to themselves the privilege of being the ones best placed to be the interpreters of Irish life. Their fiction was a forum for presenting that interpretation [33]

On women writers, so predominant in this circle: ‘with the exception of such writers as Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O’Brien, the women’s voice in Irish writing was to remain largely silent until the 1960s.’ [34]

Notes that the characterisation of the dictatorial priest has much in common with the Protestant version [50]

Note that Sweetman has a title, ‘Through the Night’ while Attie O’Brien has Through the Dark Night (1899).

The second solution found in upper middle-class novels to the conundrum of rural, Irish discontent was the replacement of the Protestant gentry with a Catholic gentry … almost pathetic hope in the beneficial effects of goodwill. … Not foreseeing the era of tenant ownership, they envisioned an Ireland of peace and harmony in which the Protestant gentry would give way to a re-established Catholic gentry. [44]

Particularly good discussion of Marcella Grace and Priests and People - the latter seen as written from ‘an anti-Irish point of view’ but ‘at least serv[ing] to expose the delusions, or at best, the complacencies, of that version of Ireland in which the Catholic upper middle-class preferred to believe, an Ireland amenable to good will and to the benign effects of a new ruling class.’ (pp.46-47.)

Late nineteenth-century Ireland was awash with contending opinions about Catholicism. [51]

boorishness in action that marks the portrayal of … the Catholic clerical, so central to this version of Catholicism [52]

Some difficulty in that he consistently lists the 3rd edn. of Ailey Moore (1867) without any references to the first edn. of 1856, a copy of which is held in Belfast Central Library, for one place, and so listed also in the BL catalogue.

The enthusiasm of Catholic upper middle-class writers to advance the claims of their class in fiction ran out of steam by the turn of the century. Their Victorian social aspirations ended with the Victorian age. Their political pretensions ends with the ascendancy of the more nationalist, lower middle class. … Their enemy was the Catholic Ireland that lower middle-class farmers, shopkeepers, and priests had formed, a society for whom fiction meant Kickham’s Knocknagow. [73]

Pinpoints upper middle-class reaction to Kickham are reproachable

Notice difficulty of tracing editions used and first editions. E.g., the Anna Livia edn. of Knockagow, which includes the facs. of Russell’s intro. Though that intro first occurs in the 1879 edition, and is facs’d by Robert Lee Wolff in an edition whose intro. Murphy right disparages. [See note p.87.]

Bibl., Knocknagow, or The Homes of Tipperary (1873; Dublin: Duffy 1879), and Do., 3rd. edn.; introduced by ‘M.R.’ [Matthew Russell], (Dublin Duffy 1879; reps. to 1887, &c.), Introduction, pp.vii-xii; Do., intro. Robert Lee Wolff, [1 Vol. facsimile of 1879 edn. with Russell’s introduction] (NY Garland 1979); Do., rep. edn. (Dublin: Anna Livia 1988) [with Russell’s intro. and pagination of 1879 edn.];

Murphy speaks of an ‘interpretative grid’ which enables readers to find in Kickham’s novels a message that he never placed there [81]; cf. infra: ‘the fact that Sheehan became a “a kind of mascot” for Catholic Ireland is a tribute to the latter’s capacity for receiving fiction through an interpretative grid, conducive to its own needs.’ [115]

Members of the intelligentsia were nearly all men. … By contrast [with the upper class Anglo-Irish revivalists] the world of the Catholic intelligentsia was a man’s world. [90]

Catholic Ireland, true Ireland, and new Ireland. [90]

Murphy notes that ‘for all Stephen’s talk of forging “… the conscience of my race”, Joyce’s concerns tilt in favour of the individual. [91]

Cites Roy Foster’s questioning of Yeats’s claim that with the death of Parnell the country was like wax, &c.: ‘While Foster’s analysis is a useful corrective to Yeatsian hyperbole, there is still something to be said for the traditional account.’ [91]

In the end then all [forun] of the principal features of the intelligentsia’s portrait of Catholic Ireland come down to greed. The hunger for the land was [101] no romantic or nationalistic quest for freedom. It was a form of naked materialism. [102]

Squinting Windows: Nan Brennan, who has been deserted by the father of her child, seeks to make him a priest; she is engaged in hostilities with the uncle of the boy and manage to injure his marriage prospects by interfering with his correspondence, with the connivance of the postmistress; he encourages his worthless nephew, Eugene to befriend John and when John kill Eugene it turns out that the dead boy is none other than Nan’s son.

‘the fact that Sheehan became a “a kind of mascot” for Catholic Ireland is a tribute to the latter’s capacity for receiving fiction through an interpretative grid, conducive to its own needs.’ [115]; tensions and conflicts incompatible with a version of him as the serene celebrator of the virtues of Catholic Ireland, though a cursory reading of Guinan’s novels might lead to such a mistaken conclusion …

Soggarth Aroon dated here 1907 against 1905 elsewhere.

Guinan’s novels move through a series of images and aetiologies in order to account for the paradox of people welcoming the exercise of clerical power over their lives, rather than resenting it as the intelligentsia maintained.

*Remarks that The Island Parish complete Guinan’s exploration of the bond between priests and people - without mentioning Kilcloon.

For both O’Donovan and Moore, then, the achievement of freedom by the individual not only enables him or her to survive until the day of general liberation, it is itself another step towards that liberation and towards the creation of a new Ireland. [130]

immured against for inured. [p.131; x2]

For some novelists there was no point in pursuing a positive vision of a new Ireland, so strong was their awareness of the strength of Catholic Ireland. Despairing of attempts to change society, their attention focuses on the individual’s own uncertain bid for freedom. In Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen’s artistic vocation to be a “priest of eternal imagination” is forged in opposition to the demands of family, religion and country. Though his self-proclaimed mission, at the end of the novel, is to forge “the uncreated conscience of my race,”” Stephen’s quest to discover his identity as an artist is not linked with any discernible vision of a new Ireland or with any program of challenge or renewal in the social or political spheres, in spite of his having the opportunity to forge such a link, on several occasions. / While at Belvedere College, he imagines different voices calling to him. There are “the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urgulg him to be a gentteman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things.” Other voices urge him “to be strong, and manly and healthy,” or “to be true to his country and help to raise up her fallen language and tradition,” or to “raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours,” or “to be a decent fellow.” And yet Stephen feels that his own voice will only emerge when he has distanced himself from the others. “He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.”’ / Later, Stephen’s fellow students at the university represent the various Irelands he feels he must reject, rather than embrace, in order to achieve artistic freedom. There is Cranly, his priestlike confessor; Moynihan, the mocker; Temple, the parody of an intellectual; Lynch, the aggressive anti-intellectual; and Davin, the affectionate Gaelic Catholic. Stephen, [132] artist, intellectual and now an aesthetic theorist, finds that part of his defence against the temptation to become like them is his anger against Catholic Ireland. Davin tells him, ‘In you heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful’. For Stephen, however, ‘Ireland is the old sow that ears her farrow. [… &c.] … I shall try to fly by those nets.” [132-33]

The forthright anger of those who find freedom by rejecting Catholic Ireland turns to a helpless bitterness in those who are not only pessimistic about the possibility of creating a new Ireland but are also apathetic about the worth of the individual’s inveighing against it. Seamus O’Kelly’s novels, The Lady of Deerpark (1917) and Wet Clay (1922) are written in a style of bleak realism. They recount the destructive power of the greed of people immersed in the ethos of Catholic Ireland. In the former, one such character exploits the vulnerability of gentry illusions, while, in the latter, a whole community destroys the idealism of a young man who has returned to Ireland with a mission to help save and improve the country. No individual even escapes into freedom in these novels. (p.133.)

Catholic Ireland’s self-understanding was that of a people cruelly treated by a vicious foe over a period of hundreds of years. Throughout that period, the Irish people remained true to its ideal of nationhood and to its Catholic faith. It also revered and loved those rebels and priests who had embodied and sustained its cause. There was thus a double aspect to Catholic Ireland’s historical self-understanding. It was both active and passive. It was long-struggling in assertion of its national right and long-suffering, in defence of its faith. [137].

using the penal days and wild geese tropes, with modified metaphorical meanings, was one way whereby they hoped to normalise the pictures of a new Ireland they portrayed in their novels. - *formidable feat of taxonomy.

She continues to belong to the Catholic church in spite of its failure to be its best self. [140 - soph.] Expects us to remember who Rebecca Kerr is at this point.

For Stephen true Ireland is not to be found amid the tame geese of Catholic Ireland. The real soul of Ireland is expressed in a counterimage: it is “a batlike Soul’ And his artistic vocation bursts on him after his vision of the girl gazing out to see who seems to change ‘into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.’ The old metaphor is displaced by something new.’ [140]

Sweetman Footnote at p.141 repeats substance of quotation at p.59.

Refers to his own essay on the wild geese trope in James Murphy, ‘The Wild Geese, in Irish Review’, 16 (19940, pp.23-28. [142]

Bibl., Murphy, ed., Peter Connolly, No Bland Facility: Selected Writing on Literature, Religion and Censorship (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1991).

Catholic Ireland considered itself as powerful, permanent, and in no need of reform. … Its response to intelligentsia overtures was to withdraw and to consolidate its own position …. Intelligentsia writers came to believe that reasoning and argument had argument had no part to play in such a world. l… In Stephen Hero (1944), Joyce savagely satirises the debased role that the language of the intellect comes to have in such a society. [143]

W. P. Ryan, complained that the clergy, instead of resisting this tendency, had themselves become its promoters. “Many of the Irish Catholic clergy are religious folk-lorists. Theo1ogically, they live and breathe in a folk-lore atmosphere, and much of Catholicism and Church history they have turned into folk lore, pure and simple. Even priests addressing fairly well-educated congregations adopt the folk-lore habit and attitude. (The Pope’s Green Island, London: Nisbet 1912, p.225; here p.144); Murphy compares with this the bishop’s remark to Fergus O’Hare in Ryan’s near-contemporary novel: ‘You want the one thing, intellectuality in the Church and you will not get it. For hundreds of years our religion in Ireland has been emotional and in a measure sentimental.’ (The Plough and the Cross, 1910, p.304; here ftn. 2, p.150-51.

Fr. Bernadine, in O’Donovan’s Vocations (1921), epitomises the sentimental approach to Irish religion. A failed teacher, he is a huge success as a preacher of parish missions because of his beautiful voice and his ability to memorise other people’s sermons. He believes in the emotion of words rather than in their meaning. Fr. Brady caustically refers to him as “ ‘a tailor’s dummy with a gramophone inside him.” (vocations, NY: Boni & Livreright 1922, pp.154-55; here p.144.)

Joyce’s fiction offers the most subtle version of nonintellectual discourse in Catholic Ireland. For him, discourse within Catholic Ireland is a matter, not of the interplay of arguments, but of the exchange of what might be termed theological anecdotes, maxims, and metaphors whose purpose is to secure loyalty and reinforce an emotional identification, rather than to establish a reasonable case. A version of this process is to be found in “Grace,” the penultimate story in Dubliners (1914). In their efforts to persuade Kernan to agree to attend a retreat for businessmen in Gardiner Street Church, Power, Martin Cunningham and M’Coy try to enmesh Kernan in the web of anecdotes, maxims and metaphors on which their own faith is based in the hope that it will reinforce Kernan’s commitment. It turns into a form of anecdotal guerrilla warfare. Cunningham begins with a maxim, “The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope,” and later backs it up with an anecdote, ‘Every other order in the Church had to be reformed at some time or other, but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.”4 / However, M’Coy’s maxim, “The Jesuits cater for the upper classes,” inadvertently allows Kernan to counterattack with a remark about “those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious.” Nor is Cunningham able to retrieve the situation with his complacent, damage-limitation maxim, “The Irish priesthood is honoured all the world over.”5 Kernan presses home his counterattack in the middle section of the persuasion, when the conversation turns to Fr. Tom Burke, the famous preacher. Cunningham repeats rather vague generalisations about him to the effect that “he wasn’t much of a theologian [… &c.]; In the end Cunningham persuades Kernan into going to the retreat with the pièce de résistance of theological anecdotes of religious loyalty and submission, the apocryphal story of Archbishop John MacHale [sic] of Tuam’s submission to the doctrine of papal infallibility in spite of his reservations about it.’ (p.145.)

*Note that, in a footnote, Murphy brilliantly contextualised Browne’s difficulty in understanding why the monks sleep in their coffins at Mount Mellerary in Joyce’s story “The Dead”: ‘that it was a rule, that is all.’ (here p.151)

The corollary to the consolidation of Catholic Ireland was the exclusion of dissenting opinions. For the most part, the intelligentsia viewed itself as the victim of this exclusion. [145]

it is an irony of intelligentsia fiction that characters seeking to change Catholic Ireland by means of reason generally ended up railing against it, the transition from reason to emotion marking Catholic Ireland’s victory against them. In the end they renounce their attachment to Catholicism. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man (1916) deals with the processes that end in extreme rejection of Irish Catholic identity.’ [145

James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997), ‘Intelligentsia Fiction, 1900-1922’ [Pt. II],

[On the Christmas scene in Portrait] The revolt against the Catholic Ireland which the Parnell case provoked uniquely equipped them [the intelligentsia] with a counterrhetoric and a counteranecdotage, albeit of an improvised nature, to that of Catholic Ireland … [146]; emphasises ‘renegade catholics’.

For Simon Dedalus and Casey, their rebellion is a sign of defeat. Stephen, later on, sees rebellion and self-exclusion as necessary steps towards artistic freedom. He willingly adopts Lucifer’s words of rebellion from Fr Arnall’s elaborate theological epic, “non serviam: I will not serve;

If Joyce’s Bildungsroman enacts a decisive break with Catholic Ireland then O’Donovan’s traces a gradual disillusionment with it. The narrative follows Ralph’s own struggle to cope with the positive and negative aspects of his experience of Irish life. It is a process that involves him in testing the adequacy of several different interpretative paradigms for the experience he is undergoing. He is brought up as an implicit believer in traditional Catholic Ireland. As a young adult he changes into a believer in a new liberal Catholic Ireland. Finally, he becomes a pessimistic acceptor of the irreformability of Catholic Ireland. [/…; &c.] (p.147

[CONCLUSION] The period covered by this study was a seminal one for the cultural development of modern Ireland. The Catholic upper middle class aspired to acceptance in Victorian society. The Catholic lower middle class, which dominated Catholic Ireland, cherished the family. The Catholic intelligentsia valued self-realisation and the liberty of the individual. Each of the three principal groups in this study envisioned Ireland in a way that vindicated its values and pushed the experience of others to the sidelines. / The three groups saw the relationship of literature to social reality in different ways. There was something programmatic about upper middle-class fiction. It was written, in part, to make out a case, to answer objections, to stake a claim. Intelligentsia fiction was similarly possessed of a sense of urgency and a note of dogmatism, but they were balanced by an awareness of the strength of opposing forces never admitted in upper middle-class fiction. Intelligentsia fiction was ultimately heuristic in intent. The simulacrum of social reality that the intelligentsia novel created acted as a crucible wherein to test the viability of intelligentsia vision and aspiration. By contrast, the lower middle class ascribed little [149] relevance to literature. At best fiction was allowed the role of sustaining belief in the social order and its durability. / All three groups had their flaws. The upper middle class had a capacity for self-delusion about the leading role it did not play in Irish society. Lower middle-class Catholic Ireland overestimated its own merit and was unable or unwilling to understand how anyone could be dissatisfied with it. The Catholic intelligentsia, because of the weakness of its position in society, was prone to a certain paranoia and to an exaggeration of the wickedness of its opponents. / From the founding of the Irish Free State until the waning of Catholic Ireland in the 1960s, the Irish Catholic intelligentsia played a diminished role, and the experience of intelligentsia writers in the heady days of the first two decades of the twentieth century tended to be forgotten, scholars generally preferring to study the Anglo-Irish literary revival. Nonetheless, vigorous individuals such as Sean O’Faolain (1900-1991) continued to make their mark and the work of outstanding intelligentsia writers such as Joyce survived. / As for the Catholic upper middle class, because it made its peace with Catholic Ireland, the distinctive ethos it possessed until the end of the nineteenth century was almost entirely lost. The upper middle class, however, re-emerged with a new distinctiveness in the 1960s. Once more it vas in pursuit of an international acceptability but now in terms of a modern liberal agenda. In this it found an ally in an intelligentsia strengthened by greater access to third-level education, the women’s movement, and a vastly increased number of journalists, now working in radio and television as well as in the traditional press. / Weakened by these developments and by other factors such as urbanisation, the Catholic Ireland of farmers and shopkeepers gradually began to lose the undisputedly dominant position that it had enjoyed during the first four decades of the new state. Formerly imagined as an Eden, Catholic Ireland is now often derided as an anti-Eden, in terms very similar to those found in the Catholic intelligentsia fiction of the early twentieth century. [END] Note ftn. asserting that Mary Robinson, feminist lawyer, socialist politician and members of an upper-middle class family long-used to serving the Crown, who was elected President of Ireland in 1990, is the perfect embodiment of this new alliance. [152]

Note that Murphy compares Joyce’s ‘exile’ with an episode in Ryan’s The Plough and the Cross in which Geoffrey Mortimer, a Moore-like character, promises to leave Ireland from the North Wall and is told by Fergus O’Hagan: ‘To leave early in the morning by the mail boat from Dun Laoghaire - nick-named Kingstown - would seem more worthy of an artist. There is a radiant view of the receding hills from the deck.’ (pp.21-22.)

sp. humorously [152]

Buchanan’s Father Anthony, here 2nd edn. 1899; BL 1898; and IF, 1903; has ascribed date 1894 to Egerton’s Keynotes, publ. 1893 [DIL etc.]

Miss Erin (London: Methuen & Co. 1898; NY: Benizer 1898); cites the London US edition only though citing Hardy on the Hill (London: Methuen & Co. 1908).

cites Sagart Aroon (Dublin 1907), not 1906.

Is it the Struggles of Dick Massey or The Adventures of Dick Massey [as here]?

Note Candy, Catherine, “Canon Sheehan: The Conflicts of the Priest-Author.” Religion, Conflict and Coexistence in Ireland, Ed, R. V. Comerford, Mary Cullen, Jacqueline Hill, Colm Lennon (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990, pp.252-177. [sic]