Irish Collections
In 1953, with the acquisition of the James Joyce collection of the Chicago book collector James F. Spoerri, the library began what became one of its major collecting interests, Ireland.
The Spoerri Joyce collection was extremely strong in printed material in both book and periodical form, including all first editions of Joyce's works except five minor items printed for copyright purposes which exist in only one, two or three copies. Particularly uncommon items in the original collection, which has been considerably increased in the years since, were Gas from a Burner, the elusive Cleveland, 1931, edition of Pomes Penyeach, and a copy of the first edition in French of Ulysses, signed by Stuart Gilbert, who oversaw the translation, and inscribed by Joyce to his daughter Lucia on the date of issue.
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33. James Joyce, Gas from a Burner, Flushing, Holland, 1912.
Proof broadside annotated by Joyce: "This pasquinade was written in the railway station waiting room at Flushing, Holland, on the way to Trieste from Dublin after the malicious burning of the 1st edition of Dubliners (1000 copies less one in my possession) by the printers, Messrs John Falconer, Upper Sackville Street, Dublin, in July 1912." The Esher-Randle-Keynes-Spoerri copy.
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In 1955 the University of Kansas Libraries purchased from P.S. O'Hegarty his outstanding collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals of W.B. Yeats. The collection arrived here at KU just a month before O'Hegarty's death in December 1955. Some time later his widow asked if we would be interested in buying the main part of his collection. We were, and on March 26, 1959, there came from the Library loading dock to the desk of the Director of Libraries a message reading "At about 8:20 a.m., 11 tons of books . . ."
The W. B. Yeats collection is a remarkably rich one: all of Yeats' works in first edition except the very scarce Mosada (1886) and The Hour-Glass (1903), with many later and variant editions and printings; books edited or containing contributions by Yeats; several score of books from his personal library (including copies of his own works with his annotations) or having close association in one way or another with the Yeats family; runs of periodicals with which he was associated, such as Samhain, The Arrow, Shanachie, and Dana; many single issues of periodicals in which material by or about Yeats appeared, including particularly elusive journals such as the Kilkenny Monitor and the Irish Home Reading Magazine; and a substantial collection of correspondence between Yeats and his editor, A.H. Bullen, as well as a large number of family letters and the publications of other members of this talented family.
The University's dealings with Mr. O'Hegarty began with a literary subject—the W.B. Yeats collection—and the acquisition of the remainder of his library showed that Yeats was certainly not an isolated literary interest. The collection includes books from Swift, Sheridan and Sterne to Wilde, Yeats, and Sean O'Casey—an author also represented in the Spencer Library by a collection donated by Franklin P. Murphy, former chancellor of the University—and much more from the Irish literary renaissance: many figures other than Yeats, the Abbey Theatre plays, an extensive group of over 160 Abbey Theatre programs ranging from 1904 to 1922, the plays of Synge and Lady Gregory, and the complete output of the Dun Emer and Cuala presses, including the broadsides and other ephemera.
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34. W.B. Yeats, Easter, 1916, New York, 1916. No. 18 of 25 copies privately printed by Clement Shorter for distribution among his friends.
I write it out in a verse—MacDonagh and MacBrideAnd Connolly and PearseNow and in time to be,Wherever green is worn,Are changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.
W.B. Yeats. Sept. 25, 1916
The Rising in Dublin and Proclamation of the Irish Republic took place on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, and between May 3 and 9, Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, John MacBride, Thomas Clarke and other of the leaders were executed. On 11 May, 1916, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory from London, where he was then living: "The Dublin tragedy has been a great sorrow and anxiety . . . I am trying to write a poem on the men executed--'terrible beauty has been born again' . . . I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me--and I am very despondent about the future." The poem is dated 25 September, 1916, but it would appear from the letter to Lady Gregory that Yeats had been working on it for some months.
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35. Poblacht na h Eireann. The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland, [Dublin, 1916]. The Easter 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic. From the P.S. O'Hegarty Collection.
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36. Irish freedom; Saoirse na h-Eireann, no. 41, March, 1914, Dublin. A militant republican newspaper published by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and edited by O'Hegarty at one point; it was suppressed in December 1914. This issue includes no. 31 in a series of lectures on Irish history by O'Hegarty; an article signed "Sarsfield" may also be his. At the top of page one is a retailer's stamp of Thomas J. Clarke, signer of the 1916 proclamation, executed on May 3.
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Often when talking about a major library collection one mentions the collector or donor quickly in passing, perhaps because little is known about him or her, or because there is not enough to say that is relevant to the collection. In the case of P.S. O'Hegarty we know quite a lot about the man himself and we can see that both his life and his intellectual involvement in the building and use of the collection make him an essential part of the story. He may be taken as the type of the collector and the story of the building of his collection as a representation of what lies behind so many of the collections now in our library.
Patrick Sarsfield O'Hegarty was born on the 29th of December, 1879, at Carrignavar, Cork. He entered the British General Post Office service in Cork in 1897 and in 1902 went to the London headquarters office where he served eleven years. During this time he was active in many Irish organizations. In 1913 he returned to Ireland as Postmaster of Cobh, a port of some importance and a British naval station. Four days after the beginning of World War I in 1914, O'Hegarty, a known propagandist and rebel, was removed from this potentially sensitive location and moved to Wales. He was not permitted to return to Ireland for the duration of the war.
In 1918 he refused to take the British Oath of Allegiance and resigned his position, returning to Ireland to take over the Irish Book Shop in Dublin where he established something of an intellectual center. He became widely known in Sinn Fein and Gaelic League circles; he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood for a number of years, and served on the Supreme Council of the IRB at the time of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
In 1922 he was appointed Secretary of the Irish General Post Office, and when the Department of Posts and Telegraphs was formed he became its Secretary, the equivalent of Postmaster General, and retained that position until his retirement in 1944. He was elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1954, and died on December 17, 1955.
O'Hegarty was a life-long book collector. He frequently wrote in his books the date on which he acquired them. The earliest of these dates noted so far is January 1903, written in a copy of John Dillon's biography of John Mitchel. He also added notes on the endpapers of books, pointing out and indexing matters of particular interest, and especially of Irish interest. Very many periodicals, anthologies, and the like have extensive manuscript notes indicating Irish authors and themes.
In addition to collecting books, O'Hegarty was himself a productive author. His first book, in 1917, was a biography of John Mitchel, followed by four other books of political interest and, finally, his major work The history of Ireland under the Union, 1801-1922, published in 1952. He also edited a number of periodicals—An t'Éireannach (The Irishman) for the Gaelic League in 1913, Irish Freedom for the Irish Republican Brotherhood from 1913 until it was suppressed in 1914, and The Separatist under the sponsorship of the IRB Supreme Council in 1922—and maintained a flow of articles in other periodicals and newspapers, and compiled a large number of individual author bibliographies, including those covering the leaders of the 1916 Rebellion.
Although O'Hegarty's collecting interests included many subjects the real strength of the P.S. O'Hegarty library lies in the Irish material and within that in the political history of the 19th century. There are only a very few items in the collection from the 17th century, a period of little printing in Ireland. The 18th century is a different matter however, and the collection has around a thousand examples. The great majority is from Dublin, but there are also examples from Cork, Limerick, Newry, Waterford and Belfast. The eighteenth-century holdings include Dublin editions of English authors, and Dublin piracies of London editions, histories of the theatre in Dublin, very many plays, and a number of poetical miscellanies, as well as the expected preponderance of political material. It is at the very end of the century that the real strength of the collection begins to become obvious with the several editions of Richard Robert Madden's The United Irishmen, their life and times (concerning the revolutionary movement, founded in 1791, which was responsible for the 1798 Rebellion and the subsequent 1803 rising) and transcripts of the trials of Robert Emmet and other rebels of 1803 as well as materials concerning Daniel O'Connell, winner of Catholic emancipation and fighter for Repeal of the Union -- everything from general biographies to copies of funeral orations given in Rome, Dublin and New York.
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37. The Spirit of the Nation. Ballads and Songs by the Writers of "The Nation," with Original and Ancient Music, Arranged for the Voice and Piano-Forte, Dublin: James O'Duffy, 1845. This collection of poetry of the Young Irelanders was signed at Clonmel Prison on 13 November 1848 by Thomas Francis Meagher, Terrence Bellew McManus, Patrick O'Donoghue (who adds "The day on which I was sentenced to be hanged"), and William Smith O'Brien. All four were in fact sentenced to death for their part as ringleaders in the 1848 rising but the sentences were commuted to penal servitude and transportation.
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O'Hegarty collected examples of the posters advertising shipping which brought so many Irish to this country at the time of the great potato blight famine of 1845 to 1849, when a million died and a million and a half emigrated. His collection also includes O'Rourke's history of the famine, a curious pamphlet published in 1847, entitled The potato blight famine: questions and replies between two travellers, on its causes and results which stresses the dangers attending on reliance upon a single crop, and material from yet another poorly organized and quickly aborted rising, that of the Young Irelanders in 1848.
A confidential police report of the activities of Ribbonmen (an agrarian secret society), Orangemen (a Protestant society with a history of sectarian violence), and Fenians (a militant republican organization) in 1864 serves as preface to the 1867 rising, which, as O'Hegarty writes, was "an almost bloodless failure." The collection includes reports of the trials of participants, and material on the Manchester Martyrs, three Fenians executed for the murder of a police sergeant during the jailbreak of the leaders of the rising.
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38. John Mitchel, Jail journal; or, Five years in British prisons, New York: "The Citizen", 1854. Inscribed by Mitchel, 23 September 1874; with a note from P.S. O'Hegarty identifying this as "John Dillon's copy. Signed by Mitchel evidently on his first visit home in 1874, when he stayed some time with Dillon". Dillon was the only non-relative present at Mitchel's deathbed, just six months later, 20 March 1875.
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The first book O'Hegarty wrote was his biography of John Mitchel, and a biography of Mitchel was an early acquisition of his, back in 1903. The collection is strong in Mitchel material: the United Irishman (his newspaper which advocated passive resistance and perhaps stronger methods in agrarian conflict, and which led him to a treason-felony prosecution), the report of his trial, his Jail journal, a classic of prison literature, and his history of Ireland. There is much about Parnell: the Special Commission proceedings, the biography by his widow, attacks from Catholic partisans, cartoons, a measured and anonymous assessment which concludes "that Mr. Parnell's death seems something of a providential character," and the sale catalogue of his library ten years after his death.
O'Hegarty was very close to the events of the new century, although he was virtually deported for the war years. His collection includes works by Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein; John Redmond, the carry-over from Parnell and out of step with prevailing ideas; Erskine Childers, author and patriot, involved in gunrunning into Howth in 1914, and eventually executed by Free State forces during the Civil War in 1922; James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, and signer of the Proclamation of the Republic in 1916; Patrick Pearse, commander-in-chief at the Easter Rising; and surely the most important and exciting piece of paper in modern Irish history, a copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic that was distributed on April 24, 1916.
In spite of O'Hegarty's especial involvement and interest in the political history of Ireland, the scope of his collection extended to everything Irish. There are works on the history of religion, particularly significant in Ireland, the topography and resources of the country, many accounts of individual families, towns and parishes, and a rich representation of periodicals.
Not all of the collection was of Irish interest, for O'Hegarty had a catholic taste in books. He was interested in "penny dreadfuls," the weekly or monthly part-publications popular in Britain during the second half of last century, and notorious for lurid plots and illustrations, in boys' magazines, and in standard boys' fiction of the latter half of last century, such as G.A. Henty (at least 72 titles), R.M. Ballantyne, W.H.G. Kingston, and most of the major authors of this genre.