Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism. With Portraits. London: Downey, 1896. First Edition. Two Volumes. Pp (1) xii, 266. (2) vii, 248. Original maroon cloth boards, gilt titles to spines. Light fading to boards, otherwise a nice bright set.

John O’Leary was born in Tipperary Town in 1830. In 1847 he enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin where he met Charles Gavin Duffy, James Fintan Lalor and Thomas Francis Meager. After the failure of the 1848 Rising O’Leary was involved in a plot to rescue the leaders from Clonmel Gaol and was himself imprisoned on September 5th, 1849. When Munster rose on September 16th, 1849 O’Leary escaped from prison. Unable to complete his law studies because of his conviction, O’Leary enrolled at Queen’s College, Cork to study medicine in 1850. He travelled to Paris in 1855 where he lived with Kevin Izod O’Doherty, John Martin and the American painter John MacNeill Whistler.

John O’Leary served as a financial agent for the IRB, traveling internationally to support the movement. He briefly edited The Irish People before being arrested in England in 1865 and sentenced to 20 years for conspiracy, serving nine before exile in Paris. Returning to Ireland in 1885, he lived with his sister Ellen, a poet, and became a central figure in Dublin’s literary scene, inspiring W.B. Yeats’s famous line: “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave.” He also published Young Ireland: The Old and the New (1885) and How Irishmen Should Feel (1886).