History:The words of Lord Acton in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge have an especially appropriate application to Davitt.
"Never debase the moral currency or . . . lower the standard of rectitude . . . At every step we are met by arguments which go to palliate to confound right and wrong". Davitt had a passionate sense of the difference between right and wrong in public affairs and political economy, and his whole public life was a crusade in the cause of truth to expose and undo the effects of injustice in society.
Laurence Marley rightly emphasises that Davitt must not be seen in insular terms as an Irish nationalist. His legacy is much wider and he was as much as anything a seminal figure in labour history and an international human rights advocate. Equally, his passion for the underdog was a result of his own and his family's experience. Born in the west of Ireland during the Famine, Davitt's parents were evicted. They were among the lucky ones who managed to migrate to England. Yet the young Davitt's life was marked by hardship and tragedy. Forced into work at an early age he lost his right arm as a result of an accident in a mill in his parents' adoptive town of Haslingden, Lancashire.
Davitt's subsequent career would take him into the IRB at the age of 19, with his parents' approval, and for his revolutionary activities he was sentenced to prison in 1870 for 15 years. The conditions he endured became something of a cause célèbre and by the time of his release under licence in 1877 he weighed only eight stone 10lb. Despite continued involvement with the Fenians - he was a member of the IRB Supreme Council - he began to develop ideas other than those of physical-force republicanism.
His Land League work brought him into contact with Parnell, whose essential conservatism he subsequently came to despise. Davitt also condemned the cult of Parnellism, which he saw as a substitute for nationalism, and used his short-lived newspaper, the Labour World, as a platform to open the first salvo in the campaign to bring Parnell's leadership of Irish nationalism to an end. But Davitt too would surrender something of his earlier radicalism and his election to Westminster would seem to indicate a final abandonment of Fenian methods. He resigned, however, in protest against the Boer War and declared that justice could never be had from the Imperial Parliament except under threat of force. Marley does remark that Davitt's resignation speech has about it something of an "appeal to the hillside men".
Any historian writing on Davitt does so in the shadow of Theodore Moody's Davitt and Irish Revolution. That work leaves the story in 1882 and so in principle there is quite a scope for a complete biography of Davitt. Marley's book is based on an impressive, but not exhaustive, range of primary and secondary material. He has studied the sources well but is less accomplished, perhaps, in weaving them together into a coherent narrative. It is therefore a difficult book to read, but nevertheless worth persevering with for the overall picture that emerges of Davitt's social and political philosophy.
The strength of the work is without doubt the author's skill in relating and locating Davitt's views within the general economic and political theories and movements of his day, and in demonstrating the influences on him, especially that of the American labourite Henry George. Equally, Davitt's contacts were wide-ranging and complex and included American presidents, emerging British Labour politicians, fellow journalists, and even the Russian novelist Tolstoy.
On his first visit to Russia, in 1904, Davitt went to see Tolstoy. Initially their meeting did not go well. When Tolstoy adverted to what he supposed was Davitt's Englishness he was firmly rebuked - "Oh no I am Irish, not English in any sense". One of the points of mutual interest was the work of Henry George. Tolstoy had read George's Progress and Poverty, some ideas from which, on the question of land nationalisation, found their way into Tolstoy's 1899 novel, Resurrection. They also discussed the plight of political prisoners in Russia and in the UK, with Davitt recording how astonished Tolstoy was to learn that Britain had political prisoners. He also took the opportunity to acquaint Tolstoy with the general outline of Irish history and in particular with the issue of resurgent nationalism. He pleaded with the great writer, whom he said had the ear of the reading world, to "say a word for Ireland's right to rule herself whenever you can".
The work is more of an intellectual biography, and there is less said of Davitt the man, especially his relationship with his wife and children. Equally, not much information is given as to the reasons for Davitt's transformation from physical-force nationalism to constitutionalism, or for that matter the circumstances leading to Davitt's election as a local government representative or indeed as an MP.
Marley's work is an important contribution to the history of the development of labour politics in these islands and in that context is both stimulating and informative. It reads like a sizeable piece of Irish social history for the years of Davitt's life and is especially illuminating on the issue of the Land Conference of 1902, Davitt's important reply to this, and the subsequent fragmentation of nationalist opinion in the face of Wyndham's land act.
Oliver Rafferty SJ is a historian and a visiting professor at Loyola University, Chicago. His work includes The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat. His next book, The Catholic Church and the Protestant State: Nineteenth-century Irish Realities, will be published early next year
Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur By Laurence Marley Four Courts Press, 314pp. €45