We are now standing close to Trinity College’s Arts Building, and to some of Trinity’s libraries. We are facing Dawson Street, which leads to St. Stephen’s Green.
Connections with this area abound in the Hesburgh Library, and we have selected one very interesting poet to mention, James Clarence Mangan, who worked for a while at the Library of Trinity College, near to where we are standing.
James Clarence Mangan was born in Dublin City around 1803, and by fifteen years of age, while he was working as an apprentice scrivener, he had his first poems published. From then on, his poems and other writings, often clever pieces of wordplay, were published frequently and in many magazines. By the 1830s he was known for his translations from other languages as well as for his own poetry. Working as a copyist for the Ordnance Survey, the scholars he worked with encouraged his poetry based on Irish literature. They also assisted him to find work as a cataloger in the Library of Trinity College where he worked for four years. He suffered from ill-health, depression, alcoholism, and eventually lived in poverty and died in 1849.
What is our connection? A scholar named Rudi Holzapfel worked hard over his lifetime to identify all the publications where Mangan’s writing could be found. We have Rudi Holzapfel’s collection of Mangan – Over 150 books and periodicals as well as files of research.
‘Dark Rosaleen’ by Mangan is based on the Irish ‘Róisín Dubh’ Our ornate gift edition is an indication of the popularity of Mangan’s poem.
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