Aet. 48, to George Crosbie, editor of the Cork Examiner. This letter with small textual differences reappeared in the United Irishman (17 March 1900). My notes here are also appended to that letter.
George’s “daily paper” was the London Daily Chronicle (8-9 March 1900).
Queen Victoria previouslyvisited Ireland in 1849, 1853, and 1861. When announcing her forthcoming visit in April 1900, Lord Wolseley issued the Queen’s command that on St. Patrick’s Day all Irish soldiers should wear the Shamrock in the form of a sprig in their caps, “to commemorate the gallantry of her Irish soldiers during the recent battles in South Africa.”
Formation of the Irish Guards was reported in the Daily Chronicle (9 March 1900) and formally announced when the Queen arrived in Dublin in April. Several columns in the Daily Chronicle detailed General Buller’s losses which then exceeded 5,000.
Since the mid-l880s Britain had maintained a large, mostly Indian army on the Northwest frontier. It was continuously threatened by Russia and further troubled by famine.
The English flag shall be the most valuable commercial asset in the world was a paraphrase of imperialist doctrine attributed to Joseph Chamberlain.
The nationalist MP John Redmond pledged “chivalrous hospitality” to the Queen during Commons debate on 8 March 1900, but also vowed the Irish would not be deterred from their national objectives. W. B. Yeats later recalled in Dramatis Personae (1935) that George offered himself to Redmond as a parliamentary candidate at the turn of the century.
“It is not proposed to govern the Transvaal as we govern Ireland, we shall grant it some such measure of self-government as we grant to our Colonies.”
This was a paraphrase of an editorial in the Daily Chronicle (8 March 1900), a newspaper which recently pivoted from pro to anti Boer.
“The man who runs England’s ridiculous empire” in March 1900 was the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain.
“When the Queen landed at the Cove of Cork…” was quoted from the Daily Chronicle (8 March 1900). Named Queenstown in 1849, the place was renamed Cobh in 1922. Kingstown was named after George IV in 1821 and renamed Dún Laoghaire in 1920.
W. B. Yeats reiterated the themes of this letter in his own letter to the Freeman’s Journal (20 March 1900). George’s obscure brother Henry Julian Moore proposed a monument to Queen Victoria in the Freeman’s Journal (10 April 1900).
For context, it’s notable that a review of George Moore’s The Bending of the Bough in the United Irishman (24 February 1900) acknowledged “a not unnatural mistrust of the author’s sympathy with the national ideals and the fear that in writing a political satire he would endeavour to point a moral directly opposite to that which the piece advances.”
It was later reported in the Dublin Daily Express (19 January 1901) that George’s membership in the Irish Literary Society of London was blocked because of his attack (in this letter) on Victoria’s visit to Ireland.
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