pupil to be ‘dilatory and unresponsive to the master’s strap’.2 Griffith believed that only the school system of the Christian Brothers properly recognised Ireland. In schools controlled by government nominees, he wrote: ‘The pupil was not taught as he is in every system elsewhere, to look out upon the world from his own country.’3
By the age of fourteen at the latest, Griffith left school to become apprenticed to a Protestant printer. About that time, his family later said, he wrote a piece that an English magazine (Old and Young) published.4 He also joined the Young Ireland Society. In 1885 its president John O’Leary, the Fenian veteran, presented him with books at the annual prize-giving of this ‘neo-Fenian’ organisation. Another member of the society was W.B. Yeats, with whom O’Leary shared his personal library.5 O’Leary, who was something of a mentor to Griffith and Yeats, once stated that no account of his own life as an ardent nationalist and journalist could be complete without mentioning his devotion to books.6
The Leinster
By the age of eighteen Griffith was also one of the most enthusiastic members of a group that styled itself variously as the Leinster Debating Club/Society or the Leinster Literary Club/Society. Its members met in a room at 87 Marlborough Street, where they kept a small lending library.7 Significantly, the bitter split in Irish politics occasioned by the downfall of Parnell led to the demise of the Leinster in 1892, and Griffith was to be the instrument of its destruction.
Meetings of the Leinster started by reading and discussing papers written by its members, and ended in poetry and sing-songs that included both ‘classical and patriotic’ ballads. Those ‘beautiful little concerts made the evenings enjoyable’, wrote one member.8 At St Patrick’s Day and Christmas there were special celebrations. All this happened in the centre of a city that was dirty and decaying. At Griffith’s suggestion in 1889, members organised long, healthy walks together in the country on Sundays, and reported back on sites of interest visited by them.9 In 1891 James Moran joined the club. He later fondly recalled these young men out together in the Dublin hills. Another acquaintance wrote of Griffith that ‘he was a splendid man to be with on tramps’, for ‘he could go on for hours with a deliberate gait, talking in a rather low voice about people and places. He knew everything about the local history of Dublin and the places adjoining’.10 Even when in London for treaty negotiations in 1921, Griffith led members of his delegation’s staff on rambles through that city.
Some of the young men also cycled together on Saturdays during the 1890s. Griffith got himself an old second-hand bike and named it ‘the humming-bird’, on account of the noise it made before it even came into sight.11 Later, he and some friends peddled 140 kilometers to a Gaelic League festival in Wexford.12 Such outings benefited him in 1916 when he had to ride his bicycle on a long circuitous route by the outskirts of Dublin for a secret meeting across town with Eoin MacNeill.
Minutes of the Leinster society survive for the years 1888–92,13 as does a bound volume of some contributions to the first seven issues of its occasional handwritten journal Eblana. ‘Eblana’ was a name that the Greek geographer Ptolemy once gave to an Irish settlement on or near the site of Dublin.14 Each issue of this journal that survives appears from the minutes to have been read aloud and discussed at meetings. The surviving volume, from 1889, includes an emphatic preface addressed by Eblana’s first editor, Robert Flood, to anyone whose property it might become in the future:
Our society was composed of hard-working young men of humble circumstances who formed a society for their mutual improvement … Therefore, Oh stranger, toss not your head in scorn when you peruse their maiden efforts in literature. Sneer not if colons, semi-colons, and full periods, are less numerous than they would be if our society boasted of M. [A.] and B.A … [It was] written by youths, to fortune and fame unknown.15
As if to underline this point, Flood had to be replaced as editor later in 1889 when he emigrated. He had been its main contributor, with Griffith the other main writer.16 In the fashion of the time contributors adopted pen names, with Griffith already using ‘Shanganagh’, with which he would become closely associated through the pages of the United Irishman. All pen names are identified at the start of the Eblana volume. Out of forty-nine contributions listed for the period of the extant volume, ten were by Flood and nine by Griffith. Shortly before Flood left, he contributed an essay on the ‘Social Condition of the Working Classes’ in which he praised a principle that became Griffith’s political philosophy, writing about ‘that all important factor … the principle of Self Reliance [underlined on the manuscript]’. He reported that his paper had given rise to ‘a most interesting debate’.17 Flood was followed as editor, successively, by Edward Whelan, John Doyle and William Rooney. No issue that any of these three edited appears to have survived.
Griffith spent a night alone in Glasnevin Cemetery, writing for the Eblana about doing so.18 His friend Ed Whelan wrote on ‘Strikes: Their Remedy’. The minutes show that ‘Whelan advocated a system of state socialism or the owning of all sources of trade and industry by the state’, and that his paper was favourably received by Griffith and other members.19
There appear to have been about twenty active members of the club, writing about and discussing a range of literary and other matters from Longfellow and Tennyson, through socialism and religion and on to Irish poetesses. All its members were male, although an explicit late effort by John R. Whelan to have the exclusion of women written into the club’s rules as a requirement, was defeated on the casting vote of the meeting’s chairman, Arthur Griffith.20 Griffith was president of the club from 3 October 1890 until 11 December 1891.
Papers read by Griffith to members included ‘The Irish Writers of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ (‘loudly applauded’), ‘The Elizabethan Poets’, and ‘Thomas Parnell and His Contemporaries’. The latter ‘exhaustive paper’ was unfortunately interrupted from time to time by ‘the uproariousness of a dance club in the room beneath us’.21 During the delivery of his paper on Elizabethans on 5 February 1892, Griffith ‘contended that Marlowe and Massinger have not been accorded the position among the poets of their time which their words entitled them to, and that the abilities of Ben Jonson were much over-rated’. This he delivered to a club of hard-working men like himself who had left school early and who were trying to make a living by day.
There were also formal debates. Griffith argued in the affirmative on a question ‘Is the Church opposed to civilization’, and ‘also spoke in favour of republicanism’ on a heavily defeated motion ‘That monarchial is a better form of government’.22 In a paper on ‘Grattan and Flood’, who were leading lights of the pre-1800 independently minded Protestant Irish parliament, Griffith said of Grattan ‘Had he not played the generous fool prating of Ireland’s trust in English generosity the misery of the last ninety years would have been impossible … Had Henry Flood’s advice been taken by his rival, Ireland, in all human probability would to-day be a free and prosperous nation.’ This paper was read on the evening that his younger friend William Rooney joined the club in 1891.23 Griffith’s contributions to Eblana also included essays on Irish street ballads, James Clarence Mangan, the Gracchi and Sir Richard Steele. The editor commended Griffith for his essay on Irish street ballads, including ‘the simplicity of language and humourous descriptions’, and said of the eighteen-year-old who was already using what became his best-known pen name ‘We expect much from “Shanganagh”.’ In the spirit of the club he also criticised some of Griffith’s other work.24
Griffith’s humourous contributions to Eblana included some lyrical lines devoted to ‘Ye Maide Without a Name’. These resemble in tone verses that he would later dedicate to ‘Mollie’ (Mary/Maud Sheehan) in the 1890s. In this way he responded to the editor’s appeal for a lighter approach than that which he and other earnest young men had taken on ‘very heavy subjects’ when first invited to write for Eblana.25 Griffith also showed his sense of humour in a piece about printers, such as he and his father were. He wrote for Eblana of ‘the unfortunate being’ who misreading the line ‘I kissed her under the kitchen stairs’ rendered it as ‘I kicked her under the kitchen stairs’.26 As MP for the Coombe in a moot parliament held by the club he wittily opposed a bill proposing Home Rule for Ringsend on the paradoxical grounds that he was ‘following the dictates of his own conscience and the instructions of his