Background
John Boyle O'Reilly was born on June 28, 1844, at Castle Dowth, near Drogheda, on the south bank of the Boyne, the son on of William David and Eliza (Boyle) O'Reilly, descended from ancient Irish families. His father kept a school.
(Moondyne is an 1879 novel by John Boyle O'Reilly, which w...)
Moondyne is an 1879 novel by John Boyle O'Reilly, which was made into a film of the same name in 1913. It is very loosely based on the life of the Western Australian convict escapee and bushranger Moondyne Joe. … Moondyne Joe is a convict who escapes after being victimised and mistreated by a cruel penal system. While on the run he is befriended by indigenous Australians who share with him their secret of a huge gold mine. Joe uses his new-found wealth to return to England and become a respected humanitarian under the assumed name Wyville. Recognised as possessing expertise in penal reform, he is ultimately sent back to Western Australia to help reform the colony's penal system. In the course of this he becomes involved in several subplots including the case of a young woman named Alice Walmsley who has been wrongly convicted of murdering her own child. Wyville/Moondyne succeeds in saving Alice from false imprisonment, helps to reform Western Australia's penal system, and achieves a number of other admirable ends before dying in an attempt to save the life of the story's villain, Isaac Bowman. (wikipedia.org)
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(Excerpt from Songs, Legends, and Ballads About the Publi...)
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(Excerpt from The Statues in the Block: And Other Poems ...)
Excerpt from The Statues in the Block: And Other Poems But Silent stood the three who heard, nor smiled Nor looked agreement. Strangers these who stood Within a Roman studio still young. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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John Boyle O'Reilly was born on June 28, 1844, at Castle Dowth, near Drogheda, on the south bank of the Boyne, the son on of William David and Eliza (Boyle) O'Reilly, descended from ancient Irish families. His father kept a school.
John O'Reilly spent four years as an apprentice on the Drogheda Argus and three in England on the Preston Guardian.
O'Reilly returned from England to Ireland in 1863 to enlist in the Tenth Hussars. Like most other young Irishmen he joined the Fenian Order. Almost a third of the English army were Irish. Utterly sincere, young O'Reilly obtained many "recruits, " but his Fenian connection was discovered in 1866. He was tried by court martial, charged with "not giving information" of "an intended mutiny. " Sentence of death as a conspirator to levy war against the Queen was passed on July 9, commuted the same day to life imprisonment, and subsequently to twenty years of penal servitude. After several years of solitary confinement at Millbank and a period of hard labor in the brickyards at Chatham, he was removed to Dartmoor.
O'Reilly was one of the sixty-three political prisoners deported to Australia in the first company sent there since the uprising of 1848. On January 10, 1868, the Hougoumont dropped anchor before Fremantle near Perth. He was "Convict No. 9843. " Sustained by an ever-buoyant spirit, he never gave up the idea of escape. Father Patrick McCabe befriended him. The priest called devoted friends to his aid, and obtained the assistance of an American whaling vessel. The prisoner made his start on February 18, 1869. After weary days of peril and suspense he was rowed out to sea and taken aboard the whaler Gazelle, of New Bedford, Captain David R. Gifford. During the ensuing cruise the courage of the second mate, Henry C. Hathaway, saved O'Reilly from death, and his ingenuity saved the fugitive from capture at Roderique. For many years subsequently in America they were close friends.
Off the Cape of Good Hope he was transferred to the American barque Sapphire, and at Liverpool he became "third mate" of the Bombay which landed him in safety at Philadelphia on November 23, 1869. That same day he took out his first naturalization papers. He knew nobody in the United States. But the story of his escape had preceded him and his personality procured him friends. Already he was called "the poet. " He went on to Boston and obtained employment on the Pilot, the most influential "Irish paper" in America. As "war correspondent" he covered the Fenian raid into Canada from St. Albans. The frank criticisms of that ill-judged foray by such a writer produced a marked impression. Speedily he rose to fame.
In 1876 the Catholic Archbishop of Boston and O'Reilly bought the Pilot. For fifteen years its influence was nationwide. He lectured throughout the country.
O'Reilly's Songs from Southern Seas appeared in 1873; Songs, Legends and Ballads in 1878; The Statues in the Block in 1881; In Bohemia in 1886. He published a novel, Moondyne, in 1879, and a work on athletics, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport, in 1888. With Robert Grant, Frederic J. Stimson, and John T. Wheelwright, he wrote a composite "novel of tomorrow, " The King's Men (1884). O'Reilly was the poet for the O'Connell centenary, for the dedication of the Crispus Attucks monument on Boston Common, and he read a notable poem at the dedication of the Pilgrim Monument at Plymouth in 1889.
O'Reilly died before reaching his full stature as a poet. There are good lines in his poems, the sentiment is kindly, the themes widely varied. He seems most at home in a swinging ballad measure. Widely popular in his time, he is now best remembered by a group of short poems which express his love of the spiritual things in human life. His death at the summer home in Hull was occasioned by overwork and insomnia.
(Excerpt from Songs, Legends, and Ballads About the Publi...)
(Excerpt from The Statues in the Block: And Other Poems ...)
(Moondyne is an 1879 novel by John Boyle O'Reilly, which w...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
John O'Reilly was a devout Catholic but tolerant and magnanimous. His genius for friendship gained him the affection of men of all faiths and all grades of culture.
As a Democrat, John O'Reilly wrote vigorously of politics but refused to seek any office. He became an ardent advocate of Home Rule and the Irish leader in New England, but he always emphasized the duties of American citizenship.
Quotations:
“Be silent and safe — silence never betrays you;
Be true to your word and your work and your friend;
Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,
Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end. ”
John O'Reilly was a member of the Fenian Order.
Quotes from others about the person
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote, "John Boyle O'Reilly was a man of heroic mold and nature; brave, adventurous, patriotic, enthusiastic, with the perfervidum ingenium, which belongs quite as much to the Irish as to the Scotch. We have been proud of him as an adopted citizen, feeling always that his native land could ill spare so noble a son. His poems show what he might have been had he devoted himself to letters. His higher claim is that he was a true and courageous lover of his country and of his fellow, men".
On August 15, 1872, he married Mary Murphy, the daughter of John and Jane (Smiley) Murphy, of Charlestown. They had four daughters.