Thomas Moore

Did You Know?

• Moore attended Samuel Whyte's co-educational English grammar school in Dublin, where he learned Latin, Greek, French, and Italian.
• By age fourteen, Moore had one of his poems published in the Anthologia Hibernica.
• Moore declined an offer from Dublin Castle to become Ireland's first poet laureate, believing the salaried position would compromise his expression of popular national sentiment.

Travels and family

Moore sailed from London in 1803 to take up a government post as registrar of the Admiralty Prize Court in Bermuda, secured through the favours of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 2nd Earl of Moira. Lord Moira was distinct among his class for having protested against government and loyalist outrages on the eve of the Irish rebellion and for urging conciliation. Finding life on Bermuda dull, after six months Moore appointed a deputy and left for an extended tour of North America. In America he secured high-society introductions but held a low opinion of many hosts, including President Thomas Jefferson, about whom he wrote lines referring to a slave mistress (Sally Hemings). Moore later conceded that, having consorted closely with émigré European aristocrats and Federalist opposition figures, he had developed a somewhat tainted, partisan view of the new republic. United Irish exiles, among them Robert Emmet's brother Thomas Addis Emmet, were in Jefferson's Democratic-Republican camp. After returning to England in 1804, Moore published Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), which included complaints about America and catalogued his real and imagined escapades with American women. Francis Jeffrey denounced the volume in the Edinburgh Review, calling Moore 'the most licentious of modern versifiers'. Moore challenged Jeffrey to a duel, but their confrontation was interrupted by the police; the two then became fast friends.

Political and historical writing

To support his family, Moore entered political squib writing on behalf of his Whig friends and patrons. The Whigs had been split by the divided response of Edmund Burke and Charles Fox to the French Revolution, but found new unity with the antics of the Prince Regent, particularly his efforts to disgrace and divorce Princess Caroline. Moore claimed not to have received 'even the semblance of a favour' from the Whigs as Whigs, and believed there was as much selfishness and low-party spirit among them as among the Tories. However, the Prince Regent's opposition to Catholic admission to parliament may have been reason enough for Moore to turn on his former friend and patron. Moore's Horatian mockery of the Prince in The Morning Chronicle was collected in Intercepted Letters, or the Two-Penny Post-Bag (1813). In works such as Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress (1818), To the Ship in Which Lord Castlereagh Sailed to the Continent (1818), and Fables for the Holy Alliance (1823), Moore lampooned Castlereagh's deference to reactionary continental allies. The verse novel The Fudge Family in Paris (1818) features an upright but disillusioned Irish Catholic tutor, Phelim Connor, whose letters reflect Moore's own views.

On Reform and Repeal

Moore confessed in his journal that he agreed with the Tories in their opinion that the first Parliamentary Reform Act (1832) would give 'an opening and impulse to the revolutionary feeling now abroad', but he embraced this prospect. He argued to Lord Lansdowne that while consequences might be disagreeable for many of their friends, wealth and its advantages were so unequally distributed that 'nothing short of a general routing up can remedy the evil'. Moore predicted that the Tories would prove better equipped to ride out this general routing, agreeing with Benjamin Disraeli that since the Glorious Revolution the Tories had taken 'a more democratic line'. He cited the prime-ministerial careers of George Canning and Robert Peel as evidence that mere commoners by birth could never have attained such high station among the Whigs. In 1832, Moore declined a voter petition from Limerick to stand for the Westminster Parliament as a Repeal candidate. When Daniel O'Connell took this as evidence of Moore's lukewarmness in the cause of Ireland, Moore recalled O'Connell's praise for the 'treasonous truths' of his book on Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Moore suggested these truths did not permit him to pretend that reversing the Acts of Union would amount to less than real and lasting separation from Great Britain. He believed that with a Catholic Parliament in Dublin, the British government would be continually at odds over Church of Ireland and absentee property, trade, foreign treaties, and war.

List of works

Thomas Moore produced a wide range of writings across several decades. His prose works include A Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin from 1810, Memoirs of Captain Rock from 1824, and a two-volume life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan from 1825. He wrote the novel The Epicurean, a Tale in 1827, followed by the two-volume Letters & Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life in 1830 and 1831. Also from 1831 is The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion appeared in two volumes in 1833, and his four-volume The History of Ireland was published between 1835 and 1846. In poetry, he published Odes of Anacreon in 1800, Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. in 1801, Epistles, Odes and Other Poems in 1806, Corruption and Intolerance, Two Poems in 1808, The Sceptic: A Philosophical Satire in 1809, and the oriental romance Lalla Rookh in 1817. His Irish Melodies were issued in multiple volumes starting in April 1808. He also wrote the verse novel The Fudge Family in Paris in 1818 and the comic operas The Gypsy Prince (with Michael Kelly, 1801) and M.P., or The Blue Stocking (with Charles Edward Horn, 1811). Political squibs include Intercepted Letters, or the Two-Penny Post-Bag from 1813. A modern collection, Political and Historical Writings on Irish and British Affairs by Thomas Moore, with an introduction by Brendan Clifford, was published in 1993.