Memoirs of Captain Rock

THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852) was Ireland's 'national poet' in the century before Yeats. His Irish Melodies (1808-34), composed and performed for an English audience, 'to sweeten Ireland s wrong' secured him worldwide fame. But MEMOIRS OF CAPTAIN ROCK (1824) was a sudden and brilliant variation on 'the-smile-and-the-tear' rhetoric of the Melodies. Its attribution of Irish violence to the British state's support for a rapacious Protestant minority and its savage military and legal repression of a Catholic majority inverted Tory platitudes and helped to make the brutal realities of Irish life a subject of serious public debate. Six editions were printed in London in 1824 alone; other editions appeared in Paris, Berlin, New York and Philadelphia. This annotated edition is the first to be published in Ireland.