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John Boyle O'Reilly

1844–1890

 

When many Americans think of Irish poetry it is not always Yeats or Seamus Heaney that comes to mind, but the Bostonian John Boyle O'Reilly.  His poetry was quoted by John F. Kennedy when he spoke in 1963 to the Irish national assembly because it had been the poetry which had made Ireland come alive for many of the president's family in the nineteenth century.

      The Fenian poet and editor was born the child of William and Eliza (Boyle) O'Reilly at Dowth Castle, on the south bank of the Boyne, near Drogheda, on 28th June 1844.  His father was the master of the national school which had been established there by Lord Netterville as part of the Netterville Institute.

      A clever boy, at the age of fourteen John Boyle O'Reilly was apprenticed as a printer to the Drogheda Argus.  Local newspapers played an important part of the life of rural Ireland, and by this time many were becoming strongly nationalist in political tone.

      He later moved to England, working on the Guardian in Preston.  The north of England had drawn many Irish people to work in the thriving industries there when no work could be found at home.  It was in Preston that he joined the Fenians, or Irish Republican Brotherhood.  He was sent to Dublin in 1863 to enlist in the 10th Hussars as part of a Fenian scheme to subvert the empire by secretly recruiting Irishmen from the British Army into the ranks of the republican movement.  However, he was informed on in 1866, arrested and sentenced to death for failing to give information on an intended mutiny and conspiring to levy war against the queen.  His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he passed a year in solitary confinement in the notorious Millbank Gaol in London, where hard labour meant climbing the treadmill for long hours every day.  He also passed a period of hard labour in the brickyards at Chatham.  He was then sent to the remote prison on Dartmoor, from which he managed to escape.  Recaptured, he was sentenced to twenty years in the penal colony in western Australia.

      O'Reilly was one of sixty-three political prisoners deported in 1867 to Australia - the first to be sent there since 1848.  As convict No. 9843, he landed at Fremantle on 1st January 1868, and was sent to a convict settlement nearby.  With the help of Fr Patrick McCabe, a local Catholic priest, he escaped on a New Bedford whaler to America.  At sea he was transferred from the whaler to an American barque, and at Liverpool was transformed into the third mate of the Bombay, landing in Philadelphia in November 1869.  The day he landed he applied for naturalization.

      Though he knew nobody in Boston, his fame as a poet and patriot had gone before him.  He settled down in Boston, where he joined the staff of the Boston Pilot, a long established Irish-American newspaper of Catholic interest, edited by Patrick Donahoe.  He frankly reported on the mismanagement of the Fenian invasion of Canada from St Albans, and within a few months of joining the paper he was appointed editor.  He married an Irish girl, Mary Murphy, in August 1872; they had two daughters.

      He quickly made a name as a writer and lecturer.  His Legends and Ballads went into eight large editions.  In 1876, along with Archbishop John Joseph Williams of Boston, he became part owner of the Pilot (which had a circulation of over one hundred thousand), and he remained its editor until his death.  For the next two decades the paper played an important role in the assimilation of Irish Catholics into American society, through O'Reilly's additional advice.  Slowly, his youthful revolutionary ideals matured into a more conservative outlook.

      Influenced by such men as Patrick Donahoe and Patrick Collins, his was a conservative, constructive, but still anti-British programme of Irish-American acculturation.  The paper supported Democratic candidates, and his own comments on the developing industrial nature of the United States placed him among the leading social reformers.  When members of the Catholic community faced financial ruin in Boston following the fire and panic of 1872 to 1873, he began with Archbishop Williams a scheme to help local businessmen.

      His novel Moondyne (1879), about his Australian experiences, was also a success.  His volume of poems, Statues in the Block (1881), was also popular.  Under his charge the Pilot became famous for its noted contributors, which included WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8] and other writers and poets of the new generation in Ireland.

      He was refused permission to enter Canada in 1885 by the government.  Liberal in his views, John Boyle O'Reilly opposed the anti-Semitic and anti-black prejudices of so many Irish Americans all his life.  He was also interested in sports, being an excellent athlete and an enthusiastic canoer.  He even wrote about sports: Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sports appeared in 1888.  He was also deeply involved in Catholic activities in Boston, in the Irish-Catholic Colonization Association, and in promoting Catholic education to the highest levels.

      Overworked and suffering from insomnia, he died from an accidental overdose of his sleeping potion at his summer home in Hull, on Boston harbour, in August 1890.  There is a memorial in Boston, which his many admirers paid for through subscription, as well as a bust in the city's Public Library.  He left a popular legacy of verse among the Irish at home and in America.

      He was a favourite poet for the special occasion, such as the O'Connell Centenary, or the dedication of the Crispus Attucks monument on Boston Common.  He had not fully developed as a poet when he died.  Like many of the Irish poets he admired, such ass Thomas Davis and D'Arcy Magee, his best work is in ballads.  Over the years many of these have perhaps faded from the collective memory and modern critics prefer the shorter poems reflecting his interest in things spiritual.

      Though his name as a poet has declined in Ireland, when he was quoted by that other famous son of Boston, President John F. Kennedy, on his visit to Ireland in 1963, it led to a revival of interest in him in both America, Ireland, and Australia, as the significant figures of the nineteenth century are reappraised.

      As editor of the Pilot or patriotic poet, John Boyle O'Reilly was one of the most influential Irish Americans of his day, reflecting their policies and piety in the editorials and poems he wrote, but never confusing the two.  He was an advocate of Ireland's right to home rule, and he provided leadership to the Irish-American community on the issue, but he also saw that they were making their lives in a new country and laid equal emphasis on the duties of the Irish as American citizens.