As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series, Professor Martyn Powell will deliver the lecture, "Wolfe Tone and the Hibernian Catch Club: Sociability in Revolutionary Ireland." Lecture Abstract Theobald Wolfe Tone, Irish political radical, best-known of the leaders of the United Irish rebellion of 1798, was a cultural polymath. As Martyn Powell will explain, this is perhaps something that, amidst the memorialising and commemorating that goes on in Irish republicanism, could be a little better understood. Theobald Wolfe Tone was an aspiring novelist; exceptionally accomplished in the genre of diarist and master of the epistolary craft; and even had an early dalliance with amateur theatricals. Less well-known, however, was that he was an accomplished singer, and in 1790 he joined the Dublin musical society, the Hibernian Catch Club. His diary shows that, after a financial windfall, he paid for his membership to the club, but beyond this we are very much in the dark. This lecture will explore his arrival in the club, his network of friends and acquaintances who nominated and supported him, and the tensions that operated in this particular brand of club-life in 1790s Dublin. Political divisions were to be expected, but tense stand-offs also occurred between those who valued a commitment to music-making over sociability. Powell asserts that much more can be said about Tone’s cultural and artistic impulses through a study of Dublin club-life in one of the most fractured periods of Ireland's history. Speaker Biography Martyn J. Powell is professor of history and dean of the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist in Irish political, cultural and social history, and his publications include Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire (2003), The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2005), Piss-Pots, Printers and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (2009), Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2010) (edited with James Kelly), and many articles and essays. He is currently working on a study of violence in Irish society, ‘Houghers and Chalkers: The Knife in Revolutionary Ireland, 1760-1815’, a book on the early club-life of Wolfe Tone, and an edition of the political works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, part of a Leverhulme-funded research project, for Oxford University Press. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

The Glee Club’s annual fall concert features classical and popular music for men’s choirs, ranging from motets of Victoria and songs of Schubert and Mendelssohn to arrangements of hits by The Beach Boys and The Beatles. For tickets, call 574-631-2800 or visit performingarts.nd.edu. Originally published at music.nd.edu.