Irish Avatar is an 1821 pamphlet by George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, known as Lord Byron.
Irish Avatar is an 1821 pamphlet by George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, known as Lord Byron.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the so-called "Irish Question", regarding the response of the British government to rising nationalistic sentiments in Ireland, began to once again emerge into the public consciousness. The "question" had been exacerbated by the ultimately unsuccessful uprising by the United Irishmen in 1798, inspired by the French Revolution.[ citation needed ]
As a result of pressure from the opposition as well as Ireland, the incumbent government administration was forced to repeal portions of the Penal laws and grant increased authority to the Irish parliament. However, on January 1, 1801, under the Acts of Union, the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland were merged into the United Kingdom; the Irish parliament was abolished, and Irish representatives received seats in the British parliament. The act increased Irish support for home rule in Ireland.[ citation needed ]
Lord Byron was impressed by Lines on the Entry of the Austrians into Naples, which was written by Irish writer Thomas Moore in 1821. Therefore, he conceived the Irish Avatar as a work in the same vein, attacking the "servile Irish" as Moore had attacked the capitulating Neapolitan soldiers. [1]
Byron wrote the pamphlet Irish Avatar after the royal visit by King George IV to Ireland. Byron criticised the attitudes displayed by the Irish people towards the Crown, an institution he perceived as oppressing them, and was dismayed by the positive reception George IV received during his visit. In the satirical pamphlet, Byron lambasted Irish unionists and voiced muted support towards Irish nationalism. [2]
Thomas Moore expressed positive criticism for the Irish Avatar, and had written in his journal that he had "Received Lord Byron's tremendous verses against the King & the Irish for their late exhibition in Dublin – richly deserved by my servile & hollow-hearted countrymen". [3]
Byron had expressed concerns over the "Irish Question" in letters which dated back to the years he was a student at Cambridge University. In his second speech to the House of Lords, which he delivered on 21 April 1812, Byron spoke in defense of the civil rights of Irish Catholics. The formal reason for the speech was a proposal to set up a committee to investigate the complaints of Irish Catholics. However, from the outset, Byron made it clear that he perceived their complaints to be part of a larger nationalist movement. In the speech, Byron warned of the danger of favoring Irish Protestants over Catholics, warning that this would only increase the sectarian divide in the country. Byron also castigated several British politicians for their indifference to Irish affairs in the speech. [4]
George IV was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from 29 January 1820 until his death in 1830. At the time of his accession to the throne, he was acting as prince regent for his father, George III, having done so since 5 February 1811 during his father's final mental illness.
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, was a British Conservative statesman who served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, simultaneously serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1834–1835), and twice as Home Secretary. He is regarded as the father of modern British policing, owing to his founding of the Metropolitan Police Service. Peel was one of the founders of the modern Conservative Party.
Henry Grattan was an Irish politician and lawyer who campaigned for legislative freedom for the Irish Parliament in the late 18th century from Britain. He was a Member of the Irish Parliament (MP) from 1775 to 1801 and a Member of Parliament (MP) in Westminster from 1805 to 1820. He has been described as a superb orator and a romantic. With generous enthusiasm he demanded that Ireland should be granted its rightful status, that of an independent nation, though he always insisted that Ireland would remain linked to Great Britain by a common crown and by sharing a common political tradition.
Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry,, usually known as Lord Castlereagh, derived from the courtesy title Viscount Castlereagh by which he was styled from 1796 to 1821, was an Anglo-Irish statesman and politician. As secretary to the Viceroy of Ireland, he worked to suppress the Rebellion of 1798 and to secure passage in 1800 of the Irish Act of Union. As the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 1812, he was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon, and was British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. In the post-war government of Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh was seen to support harsh measures against agitation for reform. He killed himself while in office in 1822.
Thomas Moore was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. Their setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.
James Henry Leigh Hunt, best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet.
John Wilson Croker was an Anglo-Irish statesman and author.
Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine, was a British Whig lawyer and politician. He served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain between 1806 and 1807 in the Ministry of All the Talents.
Edward Dowden was an Irish critic, professor, and poet.
John Cam Hobhouse, 1st Baron Broughton,, known as Sir John Hobhouse, Bt, from 1831 to 1851, was an English politician and diarist.
John Philpot Curran was an Irish orator, politician, wit, and lawyer renowned for employing his skills in defence of civil and political liberty. He first won popular acclaim in 1780, as the only lawyer in his circuit willing to represent a Catholic priest horsewhipped by an Anglo-Irish lord. In the 1790s he was celebrated as a champion of Catholic emancipation and reform in the Irish Parliament and as defence counsel in court for United Irishmen facing charges of sedition and treason. He was vocal in his opposition to Britain’s incorporation of Ireland in a United Kingdom.
General Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton PC was an Anglo-Irish politician and soldier, who both in public and private life attracted scandal. He was spurned by colleagues in the British House of Commons who believed that in the election of 1769 he had played an underhand role in denying his seat to the popular choice, the reformer John Wilkes. In 1788 he was publicly accused in Dublin of raping a twelve-year-old girl. Ten years later, his command in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798 was criticised by fellow officers for its savagery, and not least against women. His last years in Parliament were marked by his opposition to Catholic Emancipation, and to parliamentary reform.
The ordinance of no quarter to the Irish was a decree of the English Long Parliament passed on 24 October 1644 in response to the Irish Confederation of Kilkenny threat to send troops from Ireland to support King Charles I during the English Civil War. The decree ordered Parliamentary officers to give no quarter to Irish soldiers fighting in England and Wales, and Irish Confederate sailors at sea who surrendered.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
Stephen Lushington, generally known as Dr Lushington, was a British judge, Member of Parliament and a radical for the abolition of slavery and capital punishment. He served as Judge of the High Court of Admiralty from 1838 to 1867.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
Thomas Medwin was an early 19th-century English writer, poet and translator. He is known chiefly for his biography of his cousin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and for published recollections of his friend, Lord Byron.
Effingham William Wilson was a 19th-century English radical publisher and bookseller. His main interests were in economics and politics, but he also published poetry.
The letters of Lord Byron, of which about 3,000 are known, range in date from 1798, when Byron was 10 years old, to 9 April 1824, a few days before he died. They have long received extraordinary critical praise for their wit, spontaneity and sincerity. Many rate Byron as the greatest letter-writer in English literature, and consider his letters comparable or superior to his poems as literary achievements. They have also been called "one of the three great informal autobiographies in English", alongside the diaries of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell. Their literary value is reflected in the huge prices collectors will pay for them; in 2009 a sequence of 15 letters to his friend Francis Hodgson was sold at auction for almost £280,000.
Byron's Memoirs, written between 1818 and 1821 but never published and destroyed soon after his death, recounted at full-length his life, loves and opinions. He gave the manuscript to the poet Thomas Moore, who in turn sold it to John Murray with the intention that it should eventually be published. On Lord Byron's death in 1824, Moore, Murray, John Cam Hobhouse, and other friends who were concerned for his reputation gathered together and burned the original manuscript and the only known copy of it, in what has been called the greatest literary crime in history.
Works related to Irish Avatar at Wikisource
