In the early 1830s, a 12-year-old black house slave in Baltimore, Maryland, secretly taught himself to read. With 50 cents he got for shining shoes, he bought a school reader he heard about from white boys on the street. There he accidentally encountered a man who was born 250 years ago this week in Dublin, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
In the book, as Frederick Douglass recalled many years later when he had become the first great public hero to emerge from black America, he "met with one of Sheridan's mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation.
" These were choice documents to me. I read them over and again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind and died away for want of utterance. . .what I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery and a powerful vindication of human rights."
If, today, his compatriots recall Sheridan at all, it is as a playwright. A vague image of powdered wigs and Regency furniture might come to mind. His plays, however, don't need any commemoration. Two of them at least, The Rivals and The School for Scandal, remain very much alive, with an impudence and freshness that still delights audiences everywhere. The last production of The Rivals I saw, for example, was in a Presbyterian college in deepest Arkansas. The students still found it pretty wild.
The other Sheridan, the political figure who could fire up the young Frederick Douglass so much by bringing such notions as human rights and emancipation into his field of vision, is, however, almost entirely forgotten here.
The politics of commemoration, as we know from recent events, is still powerfully charged in Ireland. What does it tell us, then, that a man who was one of the founders of international law, one of the fiercest enemies of sectarianism and one of the great adornments of the Irish parliamentary tradition should go unremembered?
These are large, but not exaggerated claims. There are in European history before the emergence of democracy, two great examples of people within the governing system of a colonial power trying to insist on the human rights of faraway colonised peoples.
One is the campaign in the early 16th century of the Dominican friar, Bartolomeo de las Casas, to protect the natives of the new Spanish colonies in South America from exploitation. The other is the impeachment of the governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, by the House of Commons in 1788 for abuses committed against Indians.
The intellectual architect of that impeachment was an Irishman, Edmund Burke. The man who actually achieved it with a speech so brilliantly persuasive that it turned a huge pro-Hastings majority in parliament into a massive vote against him was Sheridan.
And this was no one-off triumph. In a parliamentary career of over 30 years, he declined offers of both high office and a hereditary peerage so that he could continue to campaign for democratic elections, a free press, civil liberties, the abolition of slavery, religious tolerance, Catholic emancipation and the rights of Ireland.
Before Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, he pioneered the use of the Westminster parliament to further Irish causes. He played a key role in defending and extending the legislative independence of the Irish parliament in the 1780s. He opposed fiercely the repression of the 1790s, to the extent of involving himself in a plot to spring the United Irish leader, Arthur O'Connor, from captivity.
With great courage for a man who represented an English constituency, he stood alone in defending the rebels of 1798 at Westminster. He opposed passionately the Act of Union.
He argued with great perspicacity that reform in Ireland would have to start with the rural poor.
He chose as his last words in the House of Commons: "Be just to Ireland as you value your own honour; be just to Ireland as you value your own peace."
Yet it is not at all surprising that the 250th anniversary of his death should go almost unremarked here. There is, to my knowledge, not a single memorial to him anywhere in Ireland. The house where he was born, 12 Dorset Street on the north side of Dublin, has stood derelict for many years and the blue plaque that used to acknowledge him is a long time gone. A nearby block of flats is called Sheridan Court, but there is nothing to say why. Rather oddly, an Imax cinema on Parnell Street was called after him for a while, but it closed last year.
None of this matters to Sheridan, of course. He would have been much more upset that the English establishment chose to bury him at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey rather than with the great politicians in another alcove.
But I think it should matter to us, especially now. The choice of the figures we celebrate from our past hinges on who we think we should be in the present.
That Sheridan never shot anybody perhaps tells against him. That he spent his life trying to make what was then the world's great power accountable for the way it treated its subjects, however far away, should, in these times, count for something.
fotoole@irish-times.ie