HONE, Joseph. The Moores of Moore Hall

With genealogical table and illustrations. London: Jonathan Cape, 1939. Large post octavo. First edition. pp. 287. Green cloth, title in gilt on spine. Previous owner’s blind-stamp on front pastedown. Top edge green. A fine copy. Four generations produced four George Moores. The first built Moore Hall; the last was the famous novelist. George Moore’s ancestors possessed much of the charm, the eccentricity, and the genius of their descendants, and it is no ordinary family whose history Mr. Hone has recorded. George I made a fortune in Spain and came back to Ireland to build, in County Mayo, the typically eighteenth-century mansion of Moore Hall, which was a centre of the family’s life for several generations and which, in 1923, was burned by a gang of Republicans. One of George I’s sons was an idiot: the eldest became a rebel in 1798 and was the first man to be proclaimed president of an Irish republic. George II, an historian whose ‘magnum opus’ never found a publisher, frequented the Holland House set, and was a friend and correspondent of Maria Edgeworth. Her relations with the family are illustrated here by many letters. George III, his son, after a brilliant youth devoted himself to racing and hunting, had a love affair, ran away to the East, and returned to become a Fenian, an M.P., and the father of a great novelist. The childhood and education of George IV and his brothers, Maurice, Julian and Augustus, are described; and the whole family history, the quarrels of the Moores, their behaviour in times of crisis like the famine of the forties, does much to illustrate and explain the many-sided work and character of the writer who was, of all the Moores of Moore Hall, the most bizarre and most brilliant. In a previous copy was the following inscription: “Scarce - most copies destroyed in W War II”.

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