Michael Davitt after the Land League 1882–1906, Carla King (Dublin: UCD Press, 2016), 728 pages. This is a whale of a book, a real doorstop. Carla King’s new work on Michael Davitt is a welcome treasury of facts about an important Irishman. It has been warmly received, not least because its author is recognised as a dedicated scholar. Many readers will recall learning about Michael Davitt (1846–1906) at school, and may associate him only with the Land League. King’s main purpose is to show that his achievements extended well beyond that movement. He is one of the heroes of Irish history. He stood up for the poor Irish and – as readers by chance may also know – for the assailed Jews of Limerick. He is celebrated, with Parnell and Croke, as a founding patron of the GAA. He might have achieved even more, had a dental procedure not led to blood poisoning that struck him down aged sixty. That Davitt was a borderline socialist, a sometimes anti-Semite and a practising Catholic, who led the charge against Parnell when the O’Shea scandal broke in 1890, may come as a surprise. His immediate biographer in 1908, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, was rightly concerned lest Davitt’s radicalism be ignored and his character oversimplified. Davitt’s parliamentary career is not well known, and the fact that he was recognised internationally as an accomplished journalist is perhaps even less appreciated. He happily wrote from Europe and Africa for William Randolph Hearst’sAmerican newspapers, the papers in respect of which contemporaries coined the derogatory term ‘yellow journalism’. Greatly inspired by the writings of James Fintan Lalor, like Arthur Griffith, James Connolly and Jim Larkin after him, Davitt was a central participant in the foundation of the Land League in his birth-county of Mayo in 1879. However, within three years that organisation was a spent force and it benefited Parnell politically more than it did Davitt. In 1880 its agitation ensured a victory for the Parnellites at the general election and in May 1882 its implicit threat of violence underpinned the Kilmainham Treaty – a compromise achievement associated with Parnell. Meanwhile, Davitt himself had been sent back to jail in England, and his own election to parliament for Meath in 1882 was overturned because he was then a convict. When he subsequently campaigned to save the Land League, Parnell outmanoeuvred him by using Davitt’s social radicalism against him, who 254 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 Summer 2017: Book Reviews came to espouse land nationalisation. Parnell likewise dashed Davitt’s hopes of becoming editor of the Freeman’s Journal, advocating to its board a more moderate choice. This casts in a certain light Davitt’s subsequent haste in urging Parnell to quit as leader, when the latter’s relationship with Katherine O’Shea came to light. That Davitt is so often associated solely with the Land League is a convention of the standard narrative of the fight for Irish freedom, into which the League’s activities are slotted as a step along the way. John Devoy’s biographical sketches of Davitt following the latter’s death referred only to his subject’s activities up to the foundation of the Land League. Davitt’s popular profile also owes something to the fact that the standard modern biography, TW Moody’s Davitt and the Irish Revolution, 1846 to 1882 (Oxford, 1981), concentrated on Davitt’s life for his first thirty-six years, until the Land League was suppressed. Moody’s bulky volume (674 pages) has now been complemented by this even bulkier one from Carla King, dealing with the hero’s last twenty-four years, entitled Michael Davitt After the Land League, 1882–1906. In the interim came Laurence Marley’s readable Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur (‘malcontent’), published by the Four Courts Press, a mere 314 pages. Earnestness can be irritating rather than endearing, but in Davitt’s case it is difficult not to admire this ‘man of the people’. Like Arthur Griffith, another national icon who has been too often diminished by association with just one moment in history – in Davitt’s case the creation of the Land League, in Griffith...
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Nov 1, 2018
Karina Holton 
Open Access