The Life and Writings of James Clarence Mangan. Dublin: Gill, 1897. First Edition. Pp xxiv, 250, 15. Publisher’s blue cloth, title in decorative front with shamrock and rose motif in gilt, rose stamped in gilt to centre of upper cover. Covers lightly rubbed, contents age toned with scattered spotting, neat ink stamps to preliminary leaves.

Illustrated with a frontispiece portrait of Mangan & with five plates in text.

W.B. Yeats considered James Clarence Mangan one of the best Irish poets, along with Thomas Davis and Samuel Ferguson, claiming, “To the soul of Clarence Mangan was tied the burning ribbon of Genius.”

James Joyce wrote two essays on Mangan, and also used his name in his works.

James Clarence Mangan was born in Dublin just before Robert Emmet’s failed rebellion in 1803, and died in destitution in 1849, as the Great Famine drew to a close. Accounts of Mangan’s impoverishment, his reclusive behaviour, his addiction to alcohol, combined with the darkness of late poems like ‘The Nameless One,’ have encouraged readers to see Mangan as the epitome of pathos, and a mirror of the degraded colonial condition of nineteenth-century Ireland itself. After the Great Famine Mangan became strongly nationalist, and wrote poems on national themes which are still well-known today, including ‘My Dark Rosaleen’ and ‘A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century.’