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Michael Cavanagh – His Life and Selected Works
by The Michael Cavanagh Society
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 1st December 2010
ISBN: 978-1-907179-98-3
Price: €20.00
Michael Cavanagh (1822-1900) of Cappoquin, Co. Waterford was a Young Irelander, Fenian and writer of considerable importance. Having lived through the Great Famine, Cavanagh was involved in one of the last Young Ireland actions in Ireland, the attack on the constabulary barracks at Cappoquin. After that, Cavanagh and other rebels, including his great friend Hugh Collender, went to the USA. In America, Cavanagh’s literary talents were given the opportunity to blossom and he had a career spanning over half a century as a writer, poet and journalist in New York and Washington.
Cavanagh continued his lifelong involvement with Irish nationalism in the USA and was a prominent Fenian all his life there. He was one of those nominated to accompany the body of Terence Bellew MacManus back to Ireland in the early 1860s, a major event in the rise of Fenianism. As a writer, he is most famous as the biographer of his great friend and colleague, Thomas Francis Meagher. He was, however, a writer of great diversity and was equally adept in storytelling as he was in history, and as a poet in English or Irish. He also translated many poetic works, including many by Douglas Hyde.
This collection of Cavanagh’s selected writings tries to provide the reader with as wide a range of his works as possible. There is a large selection of his poetry, including some translations, folklore pieces, accounts of life in 19th century Ireland and several historical pieces about Irish and Irish American events and personalities. Many are tinged with the nostalgia and anger of the forced emigrant and are, in fact, historical documents of the Irish diaspora, both social and political, as it evolved after the Great Famine. For those seeking to understand the anguish and pain of the post-Famine generations, and learn something of the folklore and society of rural Ireland in the mid 19th century, the writings of Michael Cavanagh are essential research material.
