The 15th Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Lecture - transcript

The following is a transcript of the fifteenth Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture by Brendan Twomey at Dublin City Library and Archive on 23 January 2012.

Audio.

Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast.  In this episode, Brendan Twomey author of many books about Dublin, examines the life and works of Sir John T. Gilbert. The 15th Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Lecture, was recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive on 23 January, 2012.

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 correspondents 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, Newenham 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.

 

 

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