Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852) was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist. Widely regarded in his lifetime as Ireland's "national bard", his fame and reputation rested primarily on the popularity of his Irish Melodies. In these, Moore set to old Irish tunes verses that spoke to a narrative of Irish dispossession, loss, and resistance. In his romantic work Lalla Rookh (1817), in which these same themes are explored in an elaborate orientalist allegory, Moore achieved wider critical recognition and popularity. Translated into several languages, and adapted and arranged for musical performance by, among others, Robert Schumann, the chivalric verse-narrative established Moore as one of the leading exemplars of European romanticism.
In England, Moore moved in aristocratic Whig circles where, in addition to a salon performer, he was appreciated as a squib writer and master of political satire. Chief among his targets, in successive Tory governments, was Lord Castlereagh in whose promises of "emancipation" Moore believed his fellow Catholics in Ireland had been deceived. In the verse novel The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and its sequels, he pillories the Foreign Secretary for employing the same "faithless craft" used to press Ireland into a union with Great Britain to accommodate restoration and reaction in Europe.
Wary in Ireland of an overtly Catholic place-seeking nationalism, Moore refused a nomination to stand with Daniel O'Connell and his Repeal Association for the Westminster parliament. His broader sympathies were expressed in his several prose works, including a biography of the United Irish leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) and the Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824). Complementing Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), the satirical novel is the story, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of Whiteboyism.
Moore continues to be remembered chiefly for his Melodies (typically "The Minstrel Boy" and "The Last Rose of Summer"). He is also recalled, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the destruction of the memoirs of his friend, Lord Byron.
Early life and artistic launch
Thomas Moore was born to Anastasia Codd from Wexford and John Moore from County Kerry over his parents' grocery shop in Aungier Street, Dublin, He had two younger sisters, Kate and Ellen. Moore showed an early interest in music and performance, staging musical plays with his friends and entertaining hope of being an actor. In Dublin he attended Samuel Whyte's co-educational English grammar school, where he was schooled in Latin and Greek and became fluent in French and Italian. By age fourteen he had had one of his poems published in a new literary magazine called the Anthologia Hibernica (“Irish Anthology”).
Samuel Whyte had taught Richard Barnsley Sheridan, Irish playwright and English Whig politician, of whom Moore later was to write a biography.
Trinity College and the United Irishmen
In 1795, Moore was among the first Catholics admitted to Trinity College Dublin, preparing, as his mother had hoped, for a career in law. Through the literary salon of the poet and satirist Henrietta Battier, and his friends Robert Emmet, with him at Trinity, and Edward Hudson, Moore was connected to the popular politics of the capital agitated by the French Revolution and by the prospect of a French invasion. With their encouragement, in 1797, Moore wrote an appeal to his fellow students to resist the proposal, then being canvassed by the English-appointed Dublin Castle administration, to secure Ireland by incorporating the kingdom in a union with Great Britain. At the same time, in what he was later to describe in a preface to his Melodies as his "ardour for the national cause", he had popped "privately into the letterbox" of the United Irish paper, The Press, "a short Fragment in imitation of Ossian". Mirroring the conceit of James Macpherson's Ossian cycle (poems which the Scottish writer claimed to have discovered and translated from Gaelic), it called on the Irish to recall the heroism of their ancestors and strike for freedom.
In April 1798, Moore was interrogated at Trinity by the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, John Fitzgibbon, but acquitted on the charge of being a party, through the Society of United Irishmen, to sedition. He had not joined his friends in taking the United Irish oath, and he was to play no part in the republican rebellion of 1798 (Moore was at home, ill in bed), or in the uprising in Dublin for which Emmet was executed in 1803. Later, in a biography of the United Irish leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831), he made clear his sympathies, not hiding his regret that the French expedition under General Hoche failed in December 1796 to effect a landing. Moore pays homage to Emmet's sacrifice on the gallows, and to the grief of his fiancée Sarah Curran, in the song "O, Breathe Not His Name" (1808).
London society and first success
In 1799, Moore continued his law studies at Middle Temple in London. The impecunious student was assisted by friends in the expatriate Irish community in London, including Barbara, widow of Arthur Chichester, 1st Marquess of Donegall, the landlord and borough-owner of Belfast.
Moore's translations of Anacreon, celebrating wine, women and song, were published in 1800 with a dedication to the Prince of Wales. His introduction to the future prince regent and King, George IV was a high point in Moore's ingratiation with aristocratic and literary circles in London, a success due in great degree to his talents as a singer and songwriter. In the same year he collaborated briefly as a librettist with Michael Kelly in the comic opera, The Gypsy Prince, staged at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket,
In 1801, Moore hazarded a collection of his own verse: Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little Esq.. The pseudonym may have been advised by their juvenile eroticism. Moore's celebration of kisses and embraces skirted contemporary standards of propriety. When these tightened in the Victorian era, they were to put an end to what was a relative publishing success.
Observations of America and duel with critic
In the hope of future advancement, Moore reluctantly sailed from London in 1803 to take up a government post secured through the favours of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 2nd Earl of Moira. Lord Moira was a man distinct in his class for having, on the eve of the rebellion in Ireland, continued to protest against government and loyalist outrages, and to have urged a policy of conciliation. Moore was to be the registrar of the Admiralty Prize Court in Bermuda. Although as late as 1925 still recalled as "the poet laureate" of the island, Moore found life on Bermuda sufficiently dull that after six months he appointed a deputy and left for an extended tour of North America.
As in London, Moore secured high-society introductions. But of many of his hosts he had a low opinion including, with reports of a slave mistress (Sally Hemings), of President Thomas Jefferson: "The weary statesman for repose has fled/ From the halls of council to his negro shed . . . / And dreams of freedom in his slave's embrace!" Moore's reference to the "black Aspasia of the present ********* of the United States", ensured that Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), published after his return to Britain in 1804, was, despite its general catalogue of complaints about America and Americans, immediately reprinted in Philadelphia and was to run into several American editions.
Moore later conceded that, having consorted too closely in the United States with émigré European aristocrats and their friends among the opposition Federalists, he had developed a somewhat "tainted", somewhat partisan, view of the new republic. United Irish exiles, among them Robert Emmet's brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, a prominent abolitionist, were in Jefferson's Democratic-Republican camp.