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Finley Peter Dunne

1867–1936

 

Finley Peter Dunne, the creator of Mr Dooley, one of the most famous Irish characters of all times, was born on 10th July 1867, and reared among the Irish of Chicago.  His parents were Irish immigrants who had come to America as children.  His father's sister was a prominent educator in Chicago, while a cousin was archbishop of San Francisco.

      Dunne was educated at a public school in Chicago.  When he left school in 1884, he went to work as messenger boy at the Chicago Tribune, which was his introduction to the hectic life of the newspapers.  He was promoted to reporter, and by the age of twenty-one, the talented young man was city editor of the Chicago Times.  He was also a staff man on the Chicago Evening Post (1892-97) and editor of the Chicago Journal (1897-1900).

      From 1892 he had been writing short humorous pieces for the Post in the Irish brogue.  It was only when he began writing for the Journal a series featuring the observations of life and current events by a tavern keeper, Mr Martin Dooley, that he achieved fame.  These were published widely, and even in England the Newnes press, and publishers like Routledge and Grant Richards, brought them to the attention of the British and Irish public.

      The first collection was called Mr Dooley in Peace and War (1898) - the war being the controversial Spanish-American War.  It was Martin Dooley's ironic commentary on that imperial enterprise that made Dunne even more famous.  His influence over foreign policy was recognized, and one of his biographers, Elmer Ellis, called him 'the wit and censor of the nation'.

      Dunne was on friendly terms with Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and William C. Whitney, politicians then, as now, being careful to cultivate influential columnists.  Many other collections followed, leading up to Mr Dooley Says (1910).  These widely read and influential books made Dunne world famous as the creator of a truly original character, and a humorist with a sharp eye.

      At the turn of the century he moved to New York City to edit the Morning Telegraph - that was when New York had a wife range of papers.  He married Margaret Abbott of Boston, by whom he had four children.  In New York he rose to become part owner of the American Magazine, and later still editor of Collier's Weekly.  In these journals he wrote nondialect columns which were acute and witty, but did not achieve the same universal fame as the Mr Dooley pieces.

      As is so often the case with creative talents, the money he received (more than a million dollars) snuffed out his talent as a writer.  He retired to Long Island in 1911.  After 1920 he wrote very little, though in 1936 he wrote some autobiographical pieces which his son Philip eventually edited as Mr Dooley Remembers (1963).  He died in New York City on 24th April 1936.

      Aside from his journalism, the only books Dunne published dealt with the musing of his saloon keeper philosopher Mr Dooley.  There were ten books in the series, nine of which appeared before his retirement.

      Philip Dunne saw his father's writings as being in the American rural cracker-barrel tradition of the humour of Poor Richard, Hosea Biglow, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain.  But they had been rural writers, humorists of America's frontier experience.  Dunne was something new, an urban humorist, perhaps the first of a long line of Irish, Jewish, and Italian humorists in the twentieth century.  The dialogues of Mr Dooley are written in what native Irish writers might regard as a stage-Irish idiom, and they derive in part from the popularity of the Irish comic on the contemporary American stage.  But the language was in fact close to that actually spoken on the broadwalks of Chicago and New York.

      Mr Dooley represents not only the few whimsicality of the Irish temperament, but also all the solid common sense of a race underlying it, which had taken on the American ways, and won the fight.

      At an earlier time Mr Dooley would have been rejected.  His popularity derived in large part from the prominent, indeed, essential role which the Irish had begun to play in the life of urban America.  In a sense, Chicago and New York were Irish cities.

      Dunne, too, represented the gift of the Irish through language and storytelling, skills beyond their more taciturn neighbours in the cities, both American and immigrant.  Like JAMES JOYCE [25], Dunne was a bravely experimental writer who realized the full potential of the Irish brogue.

      The city is 'where there is nawthin' to eat but what ye can buy', says Mr Dooley to a friend.  'Where the dust is laid be th' sprinklin' cart, where th' ice-man comes reg'lar an' the roof garden is in bloom an' ye wake not by th' sun but by th' milkman, I says.  I want to be near th' doctor whin I'm sick an' near eatable food whin I'm hungry, an' where I can put me hand out early in th' morning an' hook a newspaper.  Th' city is th' on'y resort fr a man that has iver lived in the city.'

      The Irish had come as emigrants, but by the turn of the century policy was turning against immigration.  Mr Dooley had his comment on this as well.  As his son later pointed out, Dunne's humour 'always had a social purpose.  Mr Dooley was a weapon against hypocrisy and cant, the pompous and the predatory, in politics, business, and society in general'.

      Mr Dooley's 'philosophy' was widely shared by his Irish compatriots, many of whom lamented his later silence.  It coincided with the emergence of a modern Ireland with new notions, where the city was rejected.  Here in part was the emerging difference between Ireland and her exiled American children.