O'Callaghan, John Cornelius

by Paul Rouse and James Quinn

O'Callaghan, John Cornelius (1805–83), historian and journalist, was born in Talbot St, Dublin, one of at least six children of John O'Callaghan, a prosperous catholic attorney, originally from Ulster. O'Callaghan always attributed his literary tastes and interest in history to the influence of his mother, an O'Donovan from Munster. Educated at a school in Blanchardstown, Co. Dublin, and by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare (1816–19), he was called to the bar in 1829. However, he had a severe aversion to practising law, and embarked instead on a literary career. He contributed to a weekly magazine, the Comet, published (1830–33) in Dublin by a club of the same name composed mostly of radical catholic lawyers, including Daniel O'Connell (qv). The Comet campaigned for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, attacked the payment of the tithe, and claimed that anti-tithe violence was the result of injustice. It was suppressed by the government in 1833. O'Callaghan was also a member of another political club, the Irish Brigade, which published the Irish Monthly Magazine of Politics and Literature (May 1832 to September 1834). This denounced the union, promoted Ireland's political and cultural independence, and celebrated Irish history and culture in prose and verse. Little is known of O'Callaghan's activities in the late 1830s, although he appears to have been carrying out research in Paris in 1837. A founder member of the Irish Archaeological Society in 1840, he was an authority on Jacobite military history, and at the behest of the society edited Macariae excidium or The destruction of Cyprus (1846), an allegorical account of events in Ireland (1688–91) by Col. Charles O'Kelly (qv), an officer in the army of James II (qv). O'Callaghan's edition was the product of considerable scholarly research and placed O'Kelly's account within a broad framework of contemporary opinion.

O'Callaghan was particularly anxious to defend Irish Jacobite soldiers from accusations of incompetence or cowardice. This was a central theme of The green book, or gleanings from the writing desk of a literary agitator, a collection of his writings published in 1840, dedicated to the Irish people to defend ‘their natural right to religious freedom and legislative independence’, and to vindicate ‘the national military character from English and Anglo-Irish aggression and calumny’. Much of the work proudly described the heroic deeds of Irish soldiers at home and abroad. The green book was a resounding success and made him one of the most popular nationalist writers of his day. Thomas Davis (qv) persuaded him to write for the Nation and he contributed regularly from October 1842 to April 1843, usually under the pseudonym ‘Gracchus’. Among his more popular pieces was ‘The exterminator's song’, which appeared in the paper's first issue (15 October 1842), and was included in the collection The spirit of the Nation (1843).

After joining the Repeal Association, O'Callaghan played a prominent part in the repeal agitation of 1843, being one of the committee that presented an address to O'Connell at Mullaghmast, Co. Kildare (1 October 1843). He also helped to design membership cards for the association, composed the captions for a series of prints of historic events published by the Nation, and also wrote The Irish in the English army and navy (1843). After Sir Robert Peel (qv) had declared in 1843 his readiness to use force to prevent repeal, O'Callaghan wrote a letter to the association pointing out that a third of the British army were Irishmen and that many of these might be reluctant to take up arms against their countrymen. O'Connell sometimes found his militant rhetoric embarrassing, and after being presented in May 1845 with a warlike song commemorating the battle of Clontarf insisted on restating the peaceable principles of the Repeal Association. According to C. G. Duffy (qv), O'Callaghan ‘had gone through the first Repeal agitation, and had never quite recovered from its disillusions. He was a tall, dark, strong man, who spoke a dialect compounded apparently in equal parts from Johnson and Cobbett, in a voice too loud for social intercourse’ (Duffy, Davis, 108). His habit of talking incessantly about Irish history was a matter of some amusement to other Young Irelanders.

O'Callaghan's work culminated in his magnum opus, the History of the Irish brigades in the service of France, from the revolution in Great Britain and Ireland under James II to the revolution in France under Louis XVI (Glasgow, 8 vols, 1869) (a first volume was published in Dublin in 1854, but the remaining volumes were not published in this edition). Drawing on his earlier works, it was the product of many years research in the French archives, and did much to establish the importance of the Wild Geese in nationalist historiography. In a similar vein he also wrote The Irish at home and abroad, at Limerick and Cremona (1870). O'Callaghan combined exhaustive research and careful scholarship with the picturesque and panoramic historical style of contemporary romantic historians such as Augustin Thierry and Thomas Macaulay. Macaulay admired O'Callaghan's work (despite criticising its nationalist bias) and expressed a wish to meet him on his visit to Dublin in 1849; O'Callaghan, however, was not prepared to wait on him and informed him that he would receive him only in his own home.

During the 1870s O'Callaghan engaged in research on early Irish history. Among his papers was an unfinished work, ‘Fragments of the past on Irish history’ (NLI MS 8120), a collection of articles on Ireland ranging from antiquity to the middle ages. He died 24 April 1883 (apparently unmarried) at 77 Fitzgibbon St, Dublin, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery. A portrait (1874) by Henry O'Neill (qv) is in the NGI.

His brother, Daniel James Callaghan, was surgeon-general in the East India Company. Another brother, Mark O'Callaghan, was a member of the Repeal Association, and read an address to O'Connell during the monster meeting at Mullaghmast in 1843. He also wrote an article ‘Decisive measures! – Repeal crushed?’ for the Nation (17 June 1843) and published a series of historical works to undersell the Nation's Library of Ireland collection. Suspected of being a government informer by some Young Irelanders, he was said to have died in Tasmania c.1859 in the house of the spy John Donnellan Balfe (qv).