Knocknagow (Hibernia)

Charles Joseph Kickham (1828-82), novelist and Fenian, was born in Co. Tipperary, the son of a prosperous shopkeeper. Despite being permanently deafened and partially blinded by an accident with gunpowder at the age of thirteen, he took an active part in politics, at first as a Young Irelander and, from 1860, as a Fenian. In 1864 he formed, with John O'Leary and T.C.Luby, the three-man Executive which directed the Fenian movement. They were all arrested in 1865. Kickham was sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude, but released after four years because of ill-health. Subsequently he published his best-known novel, Knocknagow, a series of detailed pictures of Tipperary life, in which the Land Question is a major theme. Yeats described Kickham as the 'most rambling and yet withal most vivid, humorous, and most sincere of Irish novelists', and Stephen Brown thought Knocknagow 'one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all Irish novels.'