O’BRIEN, Henry. The Round Towers of Ireland or The History of the Tuath-De-Danaans for the time unveiled.

Illustrated. London: Parbury, Allen, and Co.; Dublin: J. Cumming: 1834. Second edition. Octavo. pp. xxxii, 524, [4]. Half green morocco on marbled boards, title in gilt on brown morocco label on gilt decorated spine. Ex libris John O’Hagen with his armorial bookplate. A very good copy.

In 1832, on very short notice, O’Brien enthusiastically wrote a dissertation on the round towers of Ireland in an attempt to win the RIA’s Cunningham gold medal and a £50 prize offered by the Academy to the person whose work would finally explain the origin of what were then regarded as enigmatic structures. Other competitors included Marcus Keane and the eventual recipient of the 1833 medal, George Petrie. O’Brien was awarded £20 as consolation, but he had been so passionately convinced of the importance and accuracy of his explanations and hypotheses that he accused the Academy of unfair adjudication, and unsuccessfully demanded that it should reconsider and award him the prize. Not surprisingly, the Academy refused to publish his essay, which he had hoped would appear in its Transactions.

“The object of this present work (an expanded version of his prize essay) was to show that the round towers were Buddhistic remains. The book was condemned as wild and extravagant in the Gentleman’s Magazine and by George Petrie, a fellow Irish antiquary. Thomas Moore wrote a hostile review in the Edinburgh Review, and, in response O’Brien accused Moore of appropriating his discoveries in his History of Ireland. F. S. Mahony, known as Father Prout, a warm friend and admirer of O’Brien’s, came to his defence in The Reliques of Father Prout (1836)”. ODNB.

[CAT 163]