Popular History of Ireland, Book 01

Thomas D’Arcy McGee was born in Ireland in 1825 and died in 1868. He was a poet, journalist and orator, who first took part in the nationalist movement in Ireland and then emigrated to North America. In Canada he became a politician and was recognised as one of the Fathers of Confederation, the group of leaders who helped create the Canadian nation in 1867. He was assassinated in Ottawa in 1868.

His A Popular History of Ireland, published in the early 1860s, was written to give general readers an account of the history of the island from the earliest times. It is made up of twelve books, and the first begins with the earliest modern settlement and closes in the eighth century. McGee writes as a patriot and a storyteller, and his sympathies are plain. Modern historians would approach many questions differently, but the book is still valued as an example of how nineteenth-century Irish writers thought about their past.

This recording presents the first book. It has nine sections, beginning with the publisher’s introduction, and lasts a little over two hours. It is read by five LibriVox volunteers. It will be of interest to anyone curious about early Ireland and about the way history was written and read in the nineteenth century, when national stories were often told with passion.

The style is that of a nineteenth-century orator, warm and rhetorical, and it brings the early centuries to life with a sense of drama. Listeners will meet kings and saints, poets and warriors, and gain an impression of how Irish writers of the period understood their own origins. A short, lively beginning to a much longer history.