Analysis: There's a disconnect between Theobald who died in 1798 and 'Wolfe Tone’ the Irish republican rebel icon
By Sylvie Kleinman, TCD
Joseph Mary Plunkett had referred to ‘Wolfe Tone’s Autobiography’ as his ‘bible’, but it was another form of literary companionship, all together. He owned the immensely popular R. Barry O’Brien edition (1893). When it was republished in 1912, suffragist and republican Rosamond Jacob defended Tone (as she rightly called him, by his actual surname, as he was called in his lifetime) against accusations of ‘aggressive irreligion’. A close reader, she just 'got' his Enlightenment secularism. One of many big conversations needed to relocate Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98) in the context of his own times. But today we’ll start with projecting the self, and his literary genius.
Yes, Pearse proclaimed it the ‘first gospel of the New Testament of Irish nationality’, but he also praised Tone’s ‘noble spirit’, which ‘laughed and sang with the gladness of a boy’. Pearse was another close reader, and typifies that sense of proximity to Tone which merits an explainer.
For decades Tone’s posthumous reputation rested on the simple reality that he left future generations with more writings (political and personal) than all the United Irishmen combined. There was motive: in his autobiography, Tone wrote of his ‘ambition’ to perhaps one day achieve ‘literary fame’. His writing ‘talents’ had been the pathway to becoming a ‘sort of political character’, even ‘pretty notorious’. He embedded ‘my own history’ into the history of ‘my own times’, and later even conservatives read him as a credible source on Irish separatism. On his 33rd birthday in Paris, Tone projected into the hereafter (diary): ‘If I succeed here, I may make some noise in the world yet...’ That’s one gamble he certainly won.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The History Show, Historian Georgina Laragy discusses Theobald Wolfe Tone's death
His skills as a political influencer hit the Dublin Castle radar: Leonard MacNally (himself a writer) warned that he wrote ‘with perspicuity and elegance’. Tone’s secret mission to France (1796) is a factual form of romantic adventure and hero quest, minutely detailed in his extraordinary diary, most of it verifiable. In exile, his private emotional lockdown was lifted by his public lobbying mission as a ‘minister plenipotentiary planning’ the first genuine Irish revolution, the epic challenge of his life. He experienced a seven-month blackout of news from ‘Matty & the Daffs’, his wife and kids in America: ‘I am in a frenzy...how is my dearest life and soul, and our darling little babies...that I doat upon?’ Readers became complicit in his daily debriefings to himself.
Like any blog today, communicating was therapeutic: ‘when I am writing these ingenious memorandums, I feel as if I were chatting with my dearest Love.’ He typifies Enlightenment writing ‘at the moment’, capturing his experiences with sharp eloquence, and immediately, ‘as things strike me’. Poet, journalist and Young Irelander Thomas Davis imagined himself in Tone’s lodgings in Paris, watching him write. Today, we can relate to his mindfulness. The Decade of Centenaries may have discovered the (20th century) history of emotion, but there was an emblematic blueprint.
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From RTÉ Archives, President Éamon de Valera unveils Wolfe Tone statue in 1967
In emerging nations in the 19th century, or political regenerations, a logical quest for ideological leadership elevated visionaries into monomyths, traditions and rituals were created, but this one also had immense human appeal. Published by his son William as Life in 1826, as internationally innumerable memoirs from the revolutionary decades came out, Tone's written legacy amounted to ca. 1000 pages. Chunked editions followed swiftly, dumping all the political stuff, and mostly reprinting the very compelling autobiography (hence the title) and the diary.
Publishers knew that portrayals of illustrious characters written by themselves sold well, and this scoundrel had paid the ultimate price. Tone forcefully projected his character, and ambition to achieve ‘an honourable reputation’ in the hereafter, later exposing him to accusations of creating his ‘own myth for posterity’ (Marianne Elliott, 1989). His biography came out as the mist of Irish negativity was only slowly lifting. Conventional historical narrative has not sufficiently linked Tone’s Enlightenment sentimentalism, and belief in man’s capacity for action, to his political energies.
Bodenstown in Co Kildare made an ideal place of pilgrimage, but C. J. Woods has convincingly demonstrated how over time the speechifying had less and less, if anything, to do with Tone. Every year, they ‘buried him deeper and deeper’, as one reporter put it. When Tonehenge went up, the 1967 statue of Tone by sculptor Eddie Delaney, one deflecting reaction was that his ‘autobiography’ was his greatest monument.
There’s a disconnect between Theobald who died in 1798 and ‘Wolfe Tone’ the Irish republican rebel icon of popular culture. Tim Murtagh recently pointed to the anachronism of musing about Tone’s socialism: it’s ‘like asking whether Galileo was a quantum physicist’. Explore Brainstorms about halo effects, and ‘later generations retrospectively tagging stuff on' to ‘Mick’ (as Kathleen Lynn referred to Collins in her diary).
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From RTÉ Archives, Theobald Wolfe Tone commemoration in Bodenstown in 1972
Oddly but aptly pertinent is Niamh Wycherley’s appeal for the real St. Brigid to stand up, and not only because Tone would have found his hagiography quite hilarious. In his pre-Castle days, Augustine Birrell reviewed the O’Brien Autobiography: Tone was ‘a true humourist’, free from ‘illusion, delusion, and humbug.’ Early in Tone’s French mission, a few lines up in the diary from his iconic ‘men of no property’ (endlessly plucked out of context), he contemplated his likely and ignominious death as a traitor in Ireland. Borrowing from Scottish novelist Tobias Smollet’s picaresque Humphrey Clinker, Tone blurted out: ‘Please God, the dogs shall not have my poor bones to lick.’ On the Swiss border into Germany in 1915, after a shaky moment, Plunkett had found solace in Tone’s rollicking humour and humanity.
So it’s actually a no brainer, folks. Tone’s autobiography and diary were avidly read for decades, not only by ardent Irish nationalists, and for a time after 1922 even in Irish schoolrooms. And it’s from these two self-defining first-person texts that his powerful, chatty, eloquent, meandering, focused, despondent, historicising, meditative but eternally optimistic interior voice entered the public consciousness. His enthusiasm jumps off the page.
If you spot ‘Nil Desperandum!‘ in post 1916 prison jottings, remember it peppers both his self-writings. That essential key to understanding what we’ve inherited from past generations is a bit lost on many today. When the first Home Rule Bill challenged everyone to read up on Irish history, the Liberal MP George Otto Trevelyan, son of Sir Charles, ticked a list of the best hundred Irish books: Tone’s ‘Autobiography ‘ was among the ‘very choicest reading’. Assertively formulating his vision for a sovereign and democratic Ireland, Tone had created a compelling and immersive reader experience.
Dr. Sylvie Kleinman, M.Phil., Ph.D. is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Dept of History at Trinity College Dublin.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
