MADDEN, Richard R. The United Irishmen. Their Lives and Times. First, Second and Third Series.

Seven volumes. First & Second Series Published in London by : J. Madden & Co., Leadenhall Street, 1842 / 1843. Third Series Published in Dublin by James Duffy, 10 Wellington Quay, 1846. Publisher’s blind-stamped green cloth, title and volume number in gilt within a garland of shamrocks, crowned by a harp, on spines. Occasional light foxing to plates as usual. Some spines evenly faded. Book label of Sienna Convent, Drogheda on front pastedowns of first four volumes. A near fine set. Scarce.
One day in 1841 the neighbours of a poor old washerwoman, Mrs. Campbell, who was in a stable yard off Saint John’s Lane, Dublin, were surprised to find a well-dressed gentleman desiring to be directed to her. He was writing a book, he explained about the ‘Troubles’ of 1798 and 1803 and he had been told that Mrs. Campbell could tell him something about Robert Emmet. It was not alone the story at first hand of the tragic ending of the Emmet Rising Dr. Richard Robert Madden learned that day, but the heroic story of Anne Devlin. For the crippled washerwoman was no other than the heroine whose fidelity to Robert Emmet had withstood torture and imprisonment, the loss of home and kindred, of worldly goods and health, and whom an ungrateful country a few years later was to let die of hunger and be buried in a pauper’s grave. It was during Dr. Madden’s absence abroad that Anne Devlin Campbell died. He had done all he could both out of his own modest resources, and through an appeal in The Nation, to secure some provision for her. But, except for Father Charles Meehan and a brother of Miles Byrne, there was none to stretch a helping hand to her. When, in 1851 the doctor, on his return to Ireland, traced her to a garret in the Coombe, he found she had died a few days previously of starvation and cold.
This, the first edition of Madden’s The United Irishmen, their Lives and Times ran into seven volumes, covering three series, of which the first appeared 1n 1842, the second in 1843, and the third in 1846. “Four and twenty years have elapsed since the collection of materials for this work was commenced in America where several of the leaders of the United Irishmen were then living. Similar materials were afterwards secured on the Continent and from the surviving friends and relatives abroad and at home came a vast amount of original information and a collection of documents, the most important that have ever been obtained. The materials for the biographies have been placed in the author’s hands, either by their immediate relatives or by friends who had been intimately connected with them in private life or in their political purposes”. Only very modestly and delicately does the writer allude to the great sacrifices demanded of him by this task.

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