Romantic Circles

Significance

The Rogueries of Tom Moore is a witty text about a fictional character who is closely connected to the Irish author Henry O’Brien (The Round Towers of Ireland, published 1834). Censorship and common perceptions of the church are challenged and mocked in a very elaborate way. A sharply satirical obituary of Henry O’Brien (1808-1835) follows the story. The young man is depicted peacefully lying on a bed, accompanied only by a book. The window invokes the old belief that the soul should be allowed to depart through such an open aperture. Death is not obvious in the image, and one has to read the accompanying text to know that the young man has died. It can be argued that the unexplained nature of the man's death makes the viewer want to read the text. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that Maclise, early in his career, had already met the antiquary and coin collector Richard Sainthill (1787–1870). According to John Turpin, Sainthill ‘became his most important early patron: he gave Maclise the use of a room as a studio in his house in Nelson Place, and introduced him to antiquarian and Romantic literature’ (J. Turpin, “Maclise Daniel”, ODNB). Consequently, it is difficult to make general assumptions concerning the The Reliques’ readership. The book’s reprint in a new edition in 1870 allows us to believe that it had gained a certain popularity, but neither the preface to the first edition nor the one to the new edition addresses a particular readership. In his book, The English Common Reader, Robert D. Altick points out that the term ‘the reading public’ has always been used ‘elastically,’ and that one should feel obliged to differentiate between a ‘mass’ readership—later called ‘the million’ by the Victorians in general—and a small, ‘intellectually and socially superior audience’ that distinguished itself from the former. The latter, Altick further argues, is the audience for whom authors like Macaulay, the Brontës, or George Eliot most likely intended their own work. Atlick’s ‘common reader’ was usually a member of the working class more interested in newspapers (like the ‘Illustrated Times’) or popular books (like Tristram Shandy or Gil Blas) (Atlick, The Common Reader 7-12). The Reliques seems to have been a book that served both appetites. Its witty compilation of shorter and longer entries on everyday concerns; its scandalous author, Oliver Yorke, who speaks first of Father Prout's death and so immediately references the author's true identity as a former priest (the Reverend Mahony); as well as its many illustrations, could be taken as evidence for a wider, and perhaps mixed, readership. In terms of the gallery’s theme of death—and as many scholars of the English Gothic genre point out—there was a certain hunger for scandal and shock amongst a wider reader- and spectatorship of the early nineteenth century (see Gothic Tales). Consequently, Oliver Yorke starts his preface with the following sentence: ‘It is much to be regretted that our Author should be no longer in the land of the living, to furnish a general Preamble, explanatory of the scope and tendency of his multifarious writings.’ It was probably clear to a nineteenth-century audience that Father Prout was the alter ego of Reverend Mahony, and that the book was a mockery of the church’s false virtues. However, the introduction leaves the reader with a certain uncanny feeling, at least with those who do not immediately recognize Father Prout's identity. In any case, the introduction uses the pervasive fascination with death to create interest in the book, a strategy which is also evident in certain illustrations, such as those depicting the dead Henry O’Brien or young Prout (see the frontispiece of the book's second volume).