The Prose Writings of James Clarence Mangan. (Centenary Edition). Edited by D.J. O’Donoghue. With an Essay by Lionel Johnson. Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son/T.G. O’Donoghue, 1904. First Edition Thus. Pp, [xv], 329 [8], uncut. Original orange cloth boards, lettered in brown. Covers lightly faded, spotting to endpapers, otherwise a nice bright copy.

Frontispiece portrait of Mangan from a medallion by George Milbourn.

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.