Background
Patrick Ford was born in Galway, Ireland, the son of Edward and Anne (Ford) Ford. His parents died when he was a child, and in 1842 he was brought to America by friends who settled in Boston.
( The four stories which make up the Mabinogi along with ...)
The four stories which make up the Mabinogi along with three additional tales from the same tradition form this collection and comprise the core of the ancient Welsh mythological cycle. Included are only those stories that have remained unadulterated by the influence of the French Arthurian romances, providing a rare, authentic selection of the finest works in medieval Celtic literature. In this first thoroughly revised edition and translation since Lady Charlotte Guest's famous Mabinogion in 1849, Patrick Ford has presented a scholarly document in readable, modern English, a literary achievement of the highest order.
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Patrick Ford was born in Galway, Ireland, the son of Edward and Anne (Ford) Ford. His parents died when he was a child, and in 1842 he was brought to America by friends who settled in Boston.
In Boston he attended the public schools and the Latin School.
He worked as a youngster in the newspaper office of William Lloyd Garrison, began his active career as a journalist in 1855, and in 1859-60 was editor and publisher of the Boston Sunday Times.
During the Civil War, as a member of the 9th Massachusetts Regiment he took part in the charge at Fredericksburg.
From 1844 to 1846 he lived in Charleston, South Carolina, and edited the Charleston Gazette, but in 1870, returning North, to New York, he founded a paper called the Irish World.
In 1880-81 he organized in the United States 2, 500 branches of the Irish Land League, and raised and dispatched for its support at home over $300, 000—a dole which he eventually doubled.
He advocated complete Irish independence: Home Rule never seemed to him any more than a compromise, Gladstone nothing more than an opportunist. He thought that the peasants should for a while refuse to pay their rents, and that at length they should rise in concerted rebellion.
In support of these ideas he published in 1881 A Criminal History of the British Empire—originally letters addressed to Gladstone in the Irish World, and in 1885, The Irish Question and American Statesmen. He was a sensational antagonist, whose methods could be justified only by the extreme provocation which in his own mind, at least, was too amply existent.
For all his explosiveness, he was in a way effective. He was the means, it is said, of bringing thousands of Democrats in the presidential election of 1884 to desert their party and vote for Blaine, and Gladstone is reported to have said ruefully: “But for the work the Irish World is doing and the money it is sending across the ocean, there would be no agitation in Ireland” (Ford, Criminal History, Preface, ed. 1915).
He continued editing his paper almost till the time of his death. Fie died at his home in Brooklyn.
( The four stories which make up the Mabinogi along with ...)
In 1874 he was one of the founders of the Greenback Labor party.
For the rest of his life his chief interest seems to have been championing the cause of Ireland. He conceived that the plight of that land had been brought about almost entirely by English despotism, and as time went on he hated England more and more inexorably.
He was married in March 1863 to Odele McDonald.