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Thank-you very much. So again as you’ve been told tonight is the 15th Gilbert lecture,
and Gilbert is primarily remembered today - to use the sub-title of a book published
about him about ten years ago or so with an association of people in this room - as a
Historian, Archivist and Librarian. But to his contemporaries and he described himself,
he was known as the Historian of Dublin.
John Gilbert, and don’t forget he was only Sir John for the last year of his life so
I will refer to him primarily as John Gilbert, was a Dubliner. He was born on 23 January
1829 again as we have been told exactly one hundred and eighty three years ago.
Following his death in a far-sighted move, Dublin Corporation purchased his library of
about 10,000 items as we’ve been told for £2,500. Not an inconsiderable sum in those
days and it has been housed in this building since this building opened over 100 years
ago. For that hundred years the Gilbert collection here has provided historians of Dublin, historians
of the eighteenth century and historians of history writing with plenty of material.
Now my history professors taught me that one should start a biographically based lecture
with an apposite quote from the dedicatee. Preferably a short pithy one that captures
something of the essence of the person. Unfortunately John T. Gilbert did not do short pithy sentences
so you will have to make do with a quotation which does capture him from his 1864 book
On the history, position and treatment of the public records of Ireland. Where he used
the ‘non de plume’ or perhaps we should say the ‘nom du guerre’ of ‘An Irish
Archivist’. And he says:
‘a solid and permanent public good would result from the publication, in their integrity,
of the original documents, in the presence of which should rapidly fade away those romances,
styled ‘Irish Histories,’ by which Ireland has been, and must continue to be, historically
mis-taught and deluded, until confronted by the facts’
Not exactly short but it does express very much a theme that I’ll come back to again
and again throughout the session.
Reading to prepare for tonight I was looking up what modern writers say about this type
of subject. Anthony Marwick for example, in 2001, The New Nature of History arrives at
roughly the same conclusion, where he says ‘as long as countries go on teaching their
biased versions of history, so long will conflicts and tensions exist between different countries.
Accurate, professional history is a necessity if tensions and suspicions are ever to be
removed.’ So really the same sentiment nearly 100 years later. And of course it goes without
saying that in Peace Process Ireland and when we are about to enter a decade of commemoration
that maybe we should remember those thoughts – John Gilbert’s thoughts going forward.
And again I see the exhibition outside you can see some of those thoughts displayed in
terms of his work.
Who was this John Gilbert of whom we speak? Well first of all he isn’t John Gilbert,
the painter and he isn’t John Gilbert the movie star from the 1920s, he is John Thomas
Gilbert, of Dublin. And in the principle of lecturing of tell them what you are going
to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you have told them I’m going to cover
my three topics, in other words a brief biographical sketch with some comments on the man, a brief
review of his works again I can only cover some of them because they are so extensive,
and an overview of the context within which he was operating – what was he trying to
do and how did it fit in?
So to set off - John Gilbert was born in Jervis Street, 23 Jervis Street in 1829 in the then
fashionable north side of Dublin. He was the youngest of the five children and the second
son of John Gilbert and Marianne Costello. The original house is long demolished and
Penny’s store is now on the site and there is a plaque on the side of the building erected
with the good offices of some people in this room commemorating Sir John Gilbert.
His father, also called John, died in 1833 leaving Marianne a widow with five children.
Both of his parents came from wealthy middle-class merchant families – or should we say very
much trade and very much not land or the professions, which of course is an interesting image in
itself. There are some examples of the firm. They were in the wine and cider importing
business. And his father was the consul in Dublin for Portugal. His mother’s family
were coachbuilders and operated out of the neighbouring building in Jervis Street. So
as I said from trade.
In 1905, seven years after the death of Gilbert in 1898, his widow the novelist and children’s
writer Rosa Mulholland published a biography of Gilbert, which she styled a memoir. Now
while at times her text borders on the hagiographical, and border I think is being kind, she was
a novelist after all. It does contain some important observations and some important
insights into late Victorian Ireland.
Likewise in a somewhat ironic twist, given Gilbert’s dedication to the publication
of primary sources, some of the letters are now lost so the letters contained in her book
are now the primary source from which we can make those assumptions. I think Gilbert would
have appreciated that irony.
In the first line of the book she reminds us that John was the son of an English Protestant
and Irish Catholic, literally the first line. Now strictly speaking that’s not quite true
because his father was actually born in Dublin, albeit of an English father but Protestant
he certainly was.
Gilbert’s parents were married in 1821 and Rosa notes that ‘the marriage was a very
happy one, and such a state of things was more remarkable in the earlier part of the
nineteenth century than it would be at the present time.’ Now she always expresses
sentiments like this anytime sectarianism comes up and I think she would be disappointed,
shall we say in what has happened in the 100 years since.
The five children of the marriage were reared in the Roman Catholic faith. I’m being slightly
pedantic here but I will always refer to it as Roman Catholic faith because that’s what
Gilbert did in all his publications to make absolutely clear what he was talking about.
She tells a colourful anecdote of how John senior wished for John junior to be brought
up a Protestant. His mother refused, ‘You think, that you are providing better things
for him in a future existence; but believe me, you are doing your son a grievous wrong,
where this world in concerned’ . I wonder about that story but it still makes for a
good story.
The chronology of his life and this is not a major biographical piece so I’m not going
to dwell too long, but the chronology of his life was that he was educated at St. Vincent’s
Seminary in Usher’s Quay which then morphed into Castleknock College and then at Prior
Park College (near Bath) a high-class school for the children of what Mullholland refers
to as the ‘old faith’ from both England and Ireland. He did not go to Trinity. Again
to quote Rosa because ‘Irish Catholic parents, jealous guardians of the dearly bought and
hardly preserved faith of their children cherished even more than the present dread of the spirit
of Trinity College’ So not one to mince her words when she wanted to.
For pretty well all of his life Gilbert lived with his mother, sisters and actually some
cousins as well. In the 1850s they moved to a very fine house out in Blackrock, which
called Villa Nova where Gilbert spent more than the half of his life probably two thirds
of his life. We have a few pictures of Villa Nova. It’s now an apartment block like a
lot of these things.
Gilbert worked in the family wine and cider business from a young man of nineteen and
he sold his interest in the 1860s when he took up his position as Secretary of the Public
Records Office. His income then mainly came from the family business but he did have some
paid positions both as Secretary of the Public Record Office and as representative for the
Historic Manuscripts Commission and he was paid for the compilation of the Ancient Records
of the City Dublin. We’ll talk about that later.
In the mid-1880s Gilbert invested a significant proportion of his wealth, and there’s a
resonance on this one, in the Munster Bank which then failed spectacularly because of
the shall we say illegal activities of some of the leading officers of the bank. And again
Mulholland refers colourfully to a story where Gilbert was reputed to say: ‘Is it not a
strange experience for a man who awakes in the morning, believing himself secure in the
possession of a fair share of the needful goods of this world, to go down to breakfast
and read his ruin in the newspapers.’ We do it via Morning Ireland but he did it in
The Irish Times.
The financial pressure on Gilbert at the time to clear off these debts (a nineteenth century
version of burning the bondholders) was such that he was actually forced to consider selling
Villa Nova and indeed his collection. Thankfully he didn’t have to do so.
He had a couple of crises in his life and again I’m not going to dwell. This is not
going to be a Gilbert bashing session, far from it. But he had a couple of crises in
his life and let’s put it this way he had to take time out a couple of times to just
get himself back together again. But he did get back together again and resumed his career
and publishing after both of those incidents.
As a young man I think you could certainly characterise him as man in a hurry. At the
age of nineteen he was already on the council of the Irish Archaeological Society. Now I
often suspect when you look at young people like this there’s a little bit of ah well
he’s volunteering to do this so we’ll let him off, but he was mixing in doing so,
and again sorry about the print there – you can probably see them. Have a look at the
names there, you’ll recognise a lot of them. Now this is a few years later when it’s
the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society. But they were both in the same business the
publication of original material. They were quite successful at that. Gilbert gave, at
the end of the 1850s, wrote about a 40-page article where he went through each of the
14 volumes that they had published up to that point. So these were important publications
in the 1850s. Again if you look at the list of names there they include at various times
- Isaac Butt, William Smith O’Brien, Charles Gavan Duffy, Samuel Ferguson, John Mitchel
and William Wilde, you know a not inconsiderable bunch of people.
The objectives of the Celtic Society, just using the quote from them but the others were
the same, were ‘to publish original documents illustrative of the history, literature and
antiquities of Ireland, edited with introductory essays, English translations and notes.’
That was their aim. And this was part of a whole series of similar societies set up in
the mid century. I’m involved in the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and it was
set up in 1849 in Kilkenny – similar type of objectives not so much the publishing but
more about research and preservation and I have some very interesting late 19th century
photographs from our collection to illustrate some points at the end.
Undoubtedly Gilbert’s great love at an institutional point of view is the Royal Irish Academy.
He was associated with the Academy for pretty well all of his adult life, for forty-six
years. The story of his abortive attempt to become a member of the Society in 1852 has
been told by others. His proposers were John O’Donovan, George Petrie, Charles Graves,
Sir Robert Kane, Rev. Drummond, Samuel Ferguson, W. E. Hudson and John Pigot. That was pretty
well as good as you can get and they still said no. Now there are two versions of the
story one is that it was basically, shall we say a foul up at the administrative end
and that just people didn’t vote and no body turned up and all that sort of thing.
Rosa recounts, that she felt that the ‘black beans’ as Gilbert called them carried the
day was ‘due to a spirit of sectarian prejudice’. Not so sure I think there could have been
a little bit of class and a little bit of “is this guy too young?” he was only 23
at the time. So there could have been a little bit of other issues going on. But certainly
refused he was. But not a second time only three years later, when with the support of
people like William Wilde he was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy, as I said
which he served for the rest of his life. In fact within a year he was on the council
of the Royal Irish Academy. And he was pretty well on the council and held various offices
in the Academy from then until the end of his life. For example he was Honorary Librarian
for 35 of those 40 something years. He was on various committees. He was vice president
in the 1890s before his death and actually turned down an offer of being President of
the Academy.
In 1862 he was awarded the Cunningham medal, which is the Academy’s highest award. Previous
winners around that time were Rowan Hamilton, William Wilde, George Petrie, John O’Donovan,
so again illustrious company. And in recent times Seamus Heaney and Maurice Craig for
example have been awarded the Cunningham Medal. So this was a very illustrious award. And
the reason he got it was for his Streets of Dublin book, which I’ll come onto in a few
minutes.
As I said earlier he worked then for the Public Records Office in 1867. He was appointed as
secretary. Effectively number 3 in the office. There’s a long story as to why he ended
up as number 3, which I’ll come back to in a moment. It wasn’t the happiest of positions.
Samuel Ferguson was made the deputy keeper and he only got the number 3 position which
in a round of shall we call it downsizing or cost cutting, 7 or 8 years later was abolished.
So it was not the happiest of experiences for him.
But he got some compensation in 1869 when he was appointed the representative in Ireland
for the Historic Manuscript Commission. And one of the first thing he did was he said,
look at all the folks I can talk to, he said I have looked at all these records and there
are vast quantities of material there and I can get you the detail on this, and he did.
So through the 1870s vast amounts of this, the detail from these private archives, hitherto
private archives were made public through the deputy keeper’s reports and they are
still obviously major sources today and well looked up and well used and by many, many
historians.
One of the people he got involved in at that time you can see there is the Ormonds of Kilkenny.
And he did have a way of getting on with the grandees, shall we say for example the Marquis
of Ormonde ‘I desire that Mr. J. T. Gilbert, F.S.A., should take charge of my documents
now at the Public Record Office, Dublin, and arrange all the further matter in connection
with them and their return to Kilkenny Castle.’ He’s the only one I trust in other words,
type of comment. And Gilbert, never one to miss a trick in that situation used those
avenues to make sure that he was the one who had effectively privileged access to these
sources.
Having said that he spent a lot of time there in Kilkenny. He started the editing of the
Ormond papers. They were so vast, actually I didn’t even make a note of how many, it’s
about fourteen or fifteen or something, he only got through a number of them. It was
taken over by a chap called Falconer afterwards. And actually had to be finished by Francis
Elrington Ball, another great historian of Dublin and that didn’t get finished until
well into the 20th century. So it was an enormous project and again a very widely used resource.
Now, so Gilbert the man. What about Gilbert the man? Rosa describes him as having a ‘large,
well-developed figure …. Who looked older than his years.’ I’m not so sure I agree
with that. That said there are only two pictures that we show regularly - this as a young man
and then the other one as an older man, which we’ll come back to in a moment. But there
is no doubt that he was a convivial and social person. His range of distinguished corespondents
both from the historical community and indeed from aspects of the political and cultural
community and his friendship, for example with Florence McCarthy and the Wildes. He
was really, really friendly with the Wildes and spent a lot of time in No 1 Merrion Square.
It maybe slightly anachronistic to suggest but he was fond of and very friendly with
Oscar and you know he may have had some influence on the young Oscar because Gilbert was very
fond of puns. He might have been fond of it but he wasn’t actually that good at it.
He certainly was no Swift with mock Latin and all the rest of it. I’ll just give you
one quote and it’s really not great but it does illustrate the point. He was writing
to a Dr. Lyons, who was interested in music and the preservation of historical, Irish
historical music, ‘But isn’t it useless to continue thus harping on, stringing words
together merely to make them instrumental to our purposes’ and so on. So not exactly
Swiftian in its language but he was just having fun.
Again as I hinted – I’m not going to go into them but he was involved in a number
of scrapes, shall we say throughout his career, both public ones and behind the scenes ones
to do with the Cunningham medal, the allocation of the Cunningham medal, to do with the Todd
memorial fund, to do with the editorship of various publications before, during and after
the various time he was not in office etc. So I think the conclusion is he was not an
easy man to get on with. I think he was a solo runner not so good a team player might
be another way of putting it. But as I said he was a charming man and everyone enjoyed
his company. He was well used to managing the old boys network his friend Ribton Garstin
many years later talks about 13 RIA members meeting before committee members, meeting
in Macken's Hotel in Dawson St, and he says, 'Gilbert was the life and soul of these parties
always ready with repartee. His jokes were always enunciated with a dry humour and twinkle
in the eyes’ And then we went on, ' One thing we always strove for together, namely
to maintain for the Academy Council its reputation as a public body where no consideration of
religion or politics should be allowed to interfere with the management or the men.’
So I think that is a sense of Gilbert the man. I think just two final stories and then
we’ll move on. One is he like flattery as much as anybody else and John O’Donovan
suggested in a letter to him one time, somebody asked me for your address and I said, it’s
very simple just Mr J. T. Gilbert, Dublin would do. And he would have appreciated that
kind of comment.
Towards the end of his life he was showered with honours as often happens. He was made
the Director of the National Gallery, trustee of the National Library, he got an honorary
Doctor of Laws from Trinity, of all places in 1892 and he was made Sir John T Gilbert
in the New Year’s Honours List in 1897, just 15 months before he died. So that’s
Gilbert the man.
We know a lot of this from the work of his wife Rosa Mulholland. He married Rosa in 1891.
Rosa is an interesting character in her own right, an extremely interesting character.
She was a novelist and children’s storywriter. Yeats anthologised some of her work in his
canon forming publications in the 1880s and 1890s. She was quite radical in her views
on many issues. Today she’s mainly known for a novel called Marcella Grace, where in
a sort of didactic novel she tries to say, well how are we going to get out of this landlord
problem. This is in the 1880s and even after the Land War she was still kind of proposing
a sort of, her analysis was that we had these lazy Protestant landlords and if we replaced
them with by Gaelic Catholic landlords we could make things work better which was really
already 30 years out of date and so on, so you know it’s interesting. But she is an
interesting character in her own right and she wrote this rather voluminous biography.
And I suppose the last point I want to make about Gilbert the man is his book collection
which was mentioned here earlier. One of the first things that the Corporation did after
purchasing was to organise for Douglas Hyde and for D. J. O’Donoghue to do a catalogue
of it. For some reason it took quite a while and was only published in 1918. He collected
books all his life. It was a working library. When you look at, there is a list of his early
books, 315 early books and there is quite a lot of poetry interestingly when you look
at that. But his later library, which was 9,000 or 10,000 items is definitely a working
library, not many novels but lots of historical stuff.
Not surprisingly Mullholland notes that in Villa Nova in Blackrock, she says, “'as
for books they were everywhere”. Bit like my house but we won’t go into that.
In 1855 O’Donovan signed off a letter to Gilbert ‘I remain with great veneration
for your family (I mean the books), yours,’
He was also a lender of books. William Wilde returned one to him in 1874 saying oops sorry
I’ve had this for the last five years. There it goes.
But he was a serious collector. Following his death Rosa offered the collection to Dublin
Corporation. The collection was reviewed by T. W. Lyster and the same D. J. O’Donoghue
and the asking price of £2,500 was agreed to. They got it valued, I was reading this
only last week, they got it valued and the valuation came in at about £3,500, £3,250
and they said well I think that valuation is a bit high make an offer of £2,500 that’s
been asked for, so that’s what was done.
It is full of wonderful stuff and again I have some examples here - I’m not going
to dwell on these, but just to illustrate. First of all there’s his signature, which
is on many of the books. They are full of wonderful bindings from various collections,
Newhenham Pamphlets for example. They are full of both Dublin and Irish printing, but
a lot of expatriate Irish works; Latin and English works published by Irish authors or
in connection with Ireland on the continent. And again if you are doing any work on the
English Short Title Catalogue it’s not too infrequent that you will see the only holding
is the Gilbert, is the Gilbert Library holding of a book. They are also full of bookplates
from the Putlands, also a very interesting Dublin family, again some of them buried in
St Michan’s in Church Street. There’s another one from George Putland. And they
are the Putlands of Bray where there are Putland Streets and so on.
He has O’Connell books. He was a great attender or sending an agent to book auctions and so
on. One thing and I will make the point in a few minutes he’s not just a historian
of high politics. Gilbert is one of the first historians to have a great awareness of social
history, economic history and the need to blend the whole story of a city and he does
that brilliantly in The City of Dublin books. Plenty of dedications: this one is The Closing
Years of Dean Swift’s Life by William Wilde, dedication to Gilbert. Interesting book because
Wilde actually was the first person to establish that Swift actually had a medical condition
and not just dementia in his later years, Méniere’s disease. Eugene O’Curry’s
signature - lots of signatures. And again handbills and so on again. One of the things
I’ve used is some of the early newspapers; again some of them are the only examples from
some of the very early Dublin single sheet newspapers. And there’s one outside which
is really interesting which diary of the weather in Dublin in the first 40 years approximately
of the 18th century and I’ve used that. And actually for your local history in Donnybrook
and so on there is a great description of the Dodder flooding after excessive rainfall,
Hurricane Charlie here we come and recently here we come; marvellous description of that
in it. And lastly bindings – some wonderful binding and Gilbert’s own bookplates.
Again I’m a great believer in indexes, so just a review of entries under the letter
P in the catalogue shows Thomas Paine is there, there are eighteen volumes on St Patrick,
eight works by George Petrie, twelve volumes of Sir William Petty’s works, as well as
Laetitia Pilkington and very interestingly sixteen volumes where the title is – because
they are anonymous, the title is popery, which is another interesting view. Cervantes is
present, lots of Swift, but only one collection of Shakespeare, not too much Macauley. No
Mulholland which I thought was strange and likewise no Caeser Otway which I thought was
a bit strange given he was writing on a similar type of scene just before Gilbert’s time.
I’m not going to go into Rosa Mulholland’s description of his death it is very purple
prose. But huge number of obituaries – one of the more interesting ones I came across
is from the New York Times. And it’s literally May 24th, only 24 hours later - the telegraph
was well in action by then obviously. They had this obituary out literally a day later.
So much for the life, what about the works?
Well they are too numerous to go in to in great detail so I’m just going to pick and
choose and the first one I’m going to look at very briefly is The History of Dublin,
which really made his name. These were published as a set of essays in The Irish Quarterly
Review in the early 1850s but then he revised and expanded and published in book form – three
volumes in 1854 and then 1859. It was the publication of this that led to him receiving
the Cunningham medal in 1862. It is a great read, I would recommend it to people. It is
a great read and it deals with the individual streets in the city centre, none of your new
fangled stuff like Pearse Street or Townsend Street, I mean this is Swan Alley and right
into the city centre. And just to illustrate as I said, just almost at random but partly
because I had an interest in one point, just pages 11 and 13 in volume ii for example when
dealing with Swan Alley has serious material dealing with the high church Tory coterie
called the Swan Tripe Club which used to meet in the Swan Tavern. But then he follows that
up with a reference to George Hendrick aka Crazy Crow Hendrick he describes him as follows,
he says ‘In Swan Alley were several gambling houses frequented by sharpers and gamblers.
George Hendrick alias Crazy Crow, porter to several of the banks of musicians in town
(as you can see) was one of the most eccentric and notorious Dublin low-life characters of
his day. He dropped dead in the Alley in 1762. He had been fined and imprisoned in 1742 for
having stolen corpses from St. Andrew’s churchyard. A large and spirited full-length
etching representing him laden with musical instruments appeared in 1754 and was sold
through the town by himself with the following inscription, I’ll read it - it’s not great
but we’ll read it anyway:
With look ferocious and with beer replete See Crazy Crow beneath his minstrel weight
His voice as frightful, as great as Etna’s roar
Which spreads its horrors to the distant shore Equally hideous with his well-known face
Murders each year till whiskey makes it cease. So, yeah not great poetry. But I really would
recommend it; it really is a very good read.
The second thing to just refer to in his work and perhaps his most important non-historical
work, as in content were his three pamphlets published in the guide to the Irish Archivist.
Now this was a full-blown pamphlet war. The whole nature of publication of historical
records was undergoing change in the mid 19th century and Ireland was well behind. There
had been work and it’s referred to outside by The Irish Records Commission three decades
earlier between 1810 and 1830, but they had published very little. In Britain the Public
Record Office had been set up in 1838 and that was beginning to give a model as how
this should be done. And nothing was happening in Ireland. So the Irish Legal Repository
and a chap called Morrin, James Morrin set to and published two volumes of Irish chancery
records in the period from Henry VIII to the eighteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign, being
the first volume and the second volume followed shortly afterwards. You know even Gilbert
thought the first one…he was reasonably complimentary in a letter to Morrin about
it. But having reviewed it in more detail and having assessed some of the issues he
issued a set of pamphlets that were extremely critical of Morrin’s work both at a technical
level, in terms of he accused him of plagiarism and at the risk of telling a joke badly, you
know the one about stealing one person’s work is plagiarism but stealing lots of people’s
ideas is research. Well apparently the preface was very well researched let’s put it that
way and unacknowledged which was really the sin that he was on about. Questions in the
House, an inquiry the whole works. This went on and on for several years. And you know
Gilbert was correct at one level, Ireland was behind, the records were not being published,
access to the records was patchy. Again where have we seen that before – in terms of something
like The Land Commission, but let’s not go there. There was also a debate over the
standards to be applied. Do you put calendars out or do you reproduce them? Do you photograph
them, literally photograph them and reissue them and all these debates were going on.
And Gilbert waded into the middle of it all. At one level he was successful The Public
Record Office in Ireland gets set up in 1867 but as I hinted at early Gilbert had made
too many enemies. So he doesn’t get the top job, he doesn’t even get the second
job, which is what he was hoping for, that he’d get the second job but be able to effectively
run the show. He gets the third job and he’s not really able to influence it as much as
he would have liked. Back to this point of team player versus loner is the point.
The language of the time could be quite, quite emotive, and this is a point I want to come
to just in the second half of the talk. In a letter to Gilbert in March 1855 O’Donovan,
for example, he says, ‘I have no belief in any justice for Ireland, or for any other
country, unless Ireland and such other countries, are able to demand justice with the tongue,
or fist, or sword. Ireland has lost all those instruments recently, and she must therefore
rest content with having injustice copiously dealt out to her.’ Now he’s talking about
record keeping here. Right, this is not talking about landholding or export policy or anything.
But he was encouraged by his friends Reverend Graves wrote to him in 1865 after one of the
pamphlets was published and he says, “As in the former Pamphlets, keen wit and biting
sarcasm flash like the blue glint of the polished rapier in the hand of a practised fencer”.
So he was getting encouragement from people. Likewise The Irish Times, I mean one of the
surprises I found when reading this is the anti-English tone of a lot of Irish Times
articles at this time. For example one of the enquiries was carried out by two leading
English archivists Brewer and Hardy and The Irish Times says well why were English antiquarians
employed to decide on the quality of Irish material. You know – it may or may not be
a fair point.
Gilbert kept up the pressure with public appeals via The Irish Times etc. but as I said it
didn’t work out to well for him too well in the end. Having said that he forced the
pace Public Records Office was set up in 1867. One of the things it did of course was to
start to centralise records and we won’t say where that ended up in another 60 years
but that’s another story.
In the meanwhile he continued to publish. In the publication of Dublin, Speranza Wilde
which is William Wilde’s wife had written to Gilbert, saying that you know I have only
one complaint, she says ‘In the History of the Philosophical Society you scarcely
appreciated my husband’s labours. From the passage one might think he had only compiled
a catalogue whereas he first was the one who wrote the history and told the world all that
is known on the subject.’ And in fact all that is known on this subject has expanded
very considerably since the Irish Manuscript Commission have published volumes that are
that thick on the Dublin Philosophical Society. But she continues, she says ‘in 10 or 20
years will certainly think W.R. Wilde was a poor wretch of a clerk who copied catalogues
for a livelihood.’ ‘when vapid commonplaces are thought worthy of immortality in Mr. Gilbert’s
‘History of Dublin’. That’s a little over the top. But then she says actually I’m
really only teasing you, ‘you can bear a little censure, can you not, at least from
me? You know none hold your talents in higher estimation.’ So and that’s William Wilde
there.
So he continued his own works. The next work he published was The Viceroys of Ireland which
is one of these again source and description type books where using new material he is
giving short biographies of all the viceroys of Ireland. It was published to rave reviews
at the time. Again just to quote from one of them ‘As a contribution to our knowledge
of Irish history it is of unquestionable value.’ This is from the London Review. However the
reviewer then goes on to say, ‘But here we fear that our praise must stop. Mr. Gilbert
is rather an archaeologist or a chronicler than an historian. His narrative is dry, hard,
and un-picturesque. His facts are a mere succession items, and do not fall in with, or suggest
any general view.’ And I suppose it would be a point you could make about him in that
it is you know a list of things rather than a grand narrative. But I have some quotes
later about how Gilbert felt about grand narratives. He would have been delighted by anybody saying
that he was putting the facts in front of people.
The next piece was he published several volumes, some at his own expense on the Confederate
wars and the 1640s and 1650s. And I’m not going to dwell on it in any great depth except
to say that he put a huge amount of personal effort into it. I think he felt that this
was his contribution to Irish history that this was what he was going to bring to the
table. In particular he published Sir Richard Belling’s account and a piece called the
Aphoristic… a big long title, an account of the 1640s from the North of the country.
They both have been, as one recent scholar put it, they don’t get used that often,
have been underused by historians in the last century. But they are actually important pieces
and are still used and perhaps should be used a bit more. He put enormous effort into that
and as I said published some of these at his own expense as late as the 1690s.
The other thing that he is remembered for is the Calendar of the Ancient Records of
Dublin he was involved with 7 volumes out of the 19 volumes that were produced. His
deal was that he would be paid 10s 6d per page and as each volume was roughly 5 hundred
and something pages that was roughly £300 per volume. Which was not bad in those times
and he did 7 volumes. After he died his wife Rosa continued the process. However, and wait
for it, her rate was reduced to 7s a page. The rationale was that as most of the translation
work had been, and as most of the deciphering of the Middle English and the hard handwriting
had been done that it didn’t need such specialist knowledge to complete the project. But that
was the argument and she saw it through to volume 18 with some assistance from a colleague.
She actually died before the last volume was produced which was only produced as late as
1944. So it started from 1887 to 1944, 19 volumes. A magnificent piece of work; an absolutely
fantastic piece of work. It pulls together records from an extremely wide variety of
sources and of course Murphy’s Law is I’ve got all of these all mixed up in my own handout
sheets here so I won’t know which is which. These are just examples of the sources which
have been used to compile it. This is the Chain Book of Laws of the City from 1316,
one of the treasures. This one, complete with little drawings of… what’s his name, wherever
he’s gone…Walter the steersman, again lovely picture of him there. This is the cover
of the Chain Book, oh no the White Book. This is the Grant of land to William Russell in
1236. And all of these have been deciphered and worked through and printed in various
parts, appendices etc to the volume. This is the Franchise Roll, again I don’t have
the date on this one, but it’s obviously an early one. This one is Thomas La Harper,
again same like the previous one there, the image of the harp to describe them. And lastly
another roll from it. So these are beautiful objects in themselves. He worked with them
for many, many years; he had a familiarity with these. His first piece of work for Dublin
Corporation was 1866 so he had a long association with the city and its muniments as he would
have called them…and a last one from them.
Just as a piece of illustration this is piece from my own piece on Dublin in 1707 and if
you look at the 3rd column you can kind of see what my main source is because when you
are quoting the Calendar of Ancient Records it’s shortened to CARD. So literally almost
the entire story of what I was telling was coming straight out of the Calendar of Ancient
Records.
And this comes to the point where we talk about bin collections because in reading the
Calendar for the first 20 years of the 18th century which is what I was interested in
at this time the strategy on cleaning the streets and bin collections literally varied
every 2-3 years. They would privatise it, set up their own institution, give it out
as a contract, charge, privatise, give it out as a contract, set up their own institution.
It just would turn and turn and turn. It makes for a wonderful story.
And the other story that again…and this is where CARD is absolutely wonderful, you
can get these magnificent stories of what goes on in the city. Again one is the prison,
again prisons were privatised in those periods and there is a wonderful story which you can
see in CARD about Richard Blondville who was granted the concession to open the new Marshalsea
prison but in 1705 he basically says I’m not being paid by the prisoners, and you owe
me money. And the prisoners put in a counter petition saying that he was denying them food
etc. etc. So you get a whole sense of a whole story, of a whole incident. You get about
50 names that we would never otherwise hear or see. We can see the dynamics of the Corporation;
you can see the dynamics of the way the prison worked. They are, you think these things are
dry but they are not. You can really read and work at them. The Corporation has continued
and now Dublin City Council the honourable tradition of publishing works on the history
of this city. Just to name 4 or 5 from recent times, there’s been a book on water and
drainage, one on city managers, one on town clerks, I see outside actually a Dictionary
on Dublin in 1738 compiled from CARD and other similar sources Georgian squares, Dublin City
Walls, I could go on. So the City has continued a wonderful tradition of this.
Now I am going to wrap up shortly, I just want to make one last point about his own…his
works and then something about context. Firstly he was an author within the Dictionary of
National Biography being published in London at this time. Máire [Kennedy] has estimated,
actually not estimated, counted 104 entries varying from Middle Ages through to his friends
actually, because in some of them he knew these people, one of the Graves for example
is there. I’ve looked at a few of them - they stand up very well. I looked at people he
would like and people he wouldn’t like and then looked at the current entry in the recent
Royal Irish Academy Dictionary of Irish Biography and they stand up well, he makes a few points
but they stand up well. The only he really criticises is Walter Harris, because Walter
Harris had published on Dublin. He thinks it’s very inaccurate and of course the big
sin, Harris then gets reproduced and reproduced and reproduced by other people without the
people going back to check the original source and for Gilbert this is a great sin and Harris
was the font for many of those errors so he’s very critical of Harris. But his DNB entries
are well worth, are well worth reading.
So my last theme which is context…very briefly three short contexts. First off: historic
practice. Now who is this? This is Leopold Von Ranke. Now Ranke is the great historian
of the mid 19th century who pushed forward the agenda of how history should be written
with his wonderful phrase ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ history should be written as it
really is. Of course that cannot be done but he was saying and Gilbert would totally, Gilbert
would be a card-carrying Rankean as far as this sort of philosophy would be concerned.
Ranke would have other wonderful quotes to talk about. He says the historian must ‘extinguish
their own personality’, not let it get in the way and so on.
Unlike Macauley and Froude and many others Ranke did not use the past in order to seek
to justify the current situation he used the past to understand the current situation.
And again Gilbert would have strongly agreed with that. Not everyone agreed one of his
colleagues in Berlin called it ‘the objectivity of a eunuch’ which is rather a tough way
of saying it. But I think again a recent historian Eric Hobsbawm put it right, he says, ‘historians
are professionally obliged not to get it wrong – or at least make an effort not to.’
And I think Gilbert would have been, would have been very much in that space.
As already noted he was not a literary stylist himself and he kind of knew that, so he said
let the documents speak for themselves. And I want to just give you a couple of quotes
that will try and illustrate where he was coming from that…if I can just put my finger
on them. Likewise Gilbert was one of the first people to introduce footnotes, proper footnotes
that you can actually go and repeat the exercise yourself, as opposed to some vague footnote
that you would have to spend an awful long time finding the source. I’ll come to those
quotes from Gilbert in a moment.
Historical practice is moving toward ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ trying to describe
it as it really was and Gilbert would agree with that. But we are also in mid nineteenth
and late nineteenth century Ireland and of course Ireland is part of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland at this time. This are just a couple of photographs from
the 1880s the RSAI collection, but the first two are just interesting curiosities, but
then you have got to remember another aspect of Ireland at this time, the whole British
presence issue and this is my favourite one, the jubilee celebrations for Queen Victoria
in 1897. So you know this is the context within which Gilbert is working, right it’s an
imperial context. He might be Nationalist-leaning, her might have Nationalist views, but it’s
not Nationalism in a separatist sort of way. He would even find Parnell too far I would
have thought. Separatism is not the objective. The objective is some sort of accommodation
within the imperial and don’t forget they are not even talking British, they would use
the phrase imperial settlement. But as you know times were moving on. Now it’s not
that he was naïve. His correspondence does refer to, not surprisingly, all the current
incidents of the time, the Famine, the Phoenix Park murders etc. they all get…not huge
but they get brief mentions, so it’s not the case that he’s operating in a political
vacuum and doesn’t know what’s going on in the world. Likewise, for example his comment
on Lord Charlemont’s writings…he was looking to publish them, “should have a great interest
for people interested in the Home Rule question, but I fear that the majority of our politicians
are very shallow in their knowledge of real Irish history and they are frequently falling
into very ridiculous errors by relying on obsolete and inaccurate publications.’ And
that’s just one example, there are literally dozens of them, where what John Gilbert is
trying to do is to set the record straight by publishing the record and saying read it
for yourself and make your own mind up.
So just to conclude: biography is an ever-changing genre and I haven’t tried to do a revised
biography of Gilbert but I have tried to say look you know who was he? What did he do?
Where did he fit in? and what is his enduring legacy? Well his enduring legacy firstly is
his works – or at least some of them - while many are not now some widely consulted others
such as the Calendar of the Ancient Records of Dublin and City of Dublin are absolute
classics and are still widely used all the time.
The second influence he still has today is his library that we’ve referred to several
times. I mean it is a wonderful source for historians of both Dublin and of 17th and
18th century Ireland in particular.
And I think his third legacy is the way he pushed the historical agenda forward in the
mid 19th century through the establishment of the Public Records Office and so on. Again
one of the later, later legacies is the Irish Historic Manuscript Commission then gets set
up in 1929 very much on Gilbertian lines in terms of the way it works and the way it publishes
and what it publishes and how it publishes them. And you should not underestimate the
criticism it had to put up with. In 1941 it published the letters of Lady Emily Fitzgerald
from Carton House, three volumes and it got phenomenal criticism for why are we publishing
this English imperialist? … you can imagine the sort of questions in the Dáil that got
asked for that sort of thing. And Gilbert would have had none of that. He was quite…while
he was a Nationalist, the Calendar of the Ancient Records of Dublin, you know five out
of the six centuries that he deals with are populated by Englishmen effectively and he
had no problem with that, that’s my city, that’s how it works so we will publish how
it works. And source publication continues to this day.
So I think in conclusion his own self-assessment, again quoted by his wife, was that he possessed
an ‘originality of conception and unlimited tenacity and perseverance in pursuing the
objects which I decided on as deserving.’ And I think that’s probably pretty true.
He published circa forty books in his time, almost all of them are records that were not
available before he published them. They are part now of our historical heritage and they
cannot be taken out of our historical heritage because of that. And again I know we shouldn’t
finish in German but I think we will just go back to he did try to live up to ‘wie
es eigentlich gewesen’. Thank-you