Overview

The family of playwright J.M. Synge (1871-1909) had a long pedigree in Ireland. Taking the alleged death in 1767 of Mrs John Hatch (nee Synge) as his focal point, Bill McCormack explores the varied strands and stresses of two family histories in the 18th and early 19th centuries. A suicide in 1769, echoed in an early play by Synge, is carefully documented. Among the Hatch family, sometime MP John Hatch (d.1797) emerges as an unlikely ancestor for the playwright, while the behaviour of Francis Synge at the time of the Union come under revealing scrutiny. The religious and educational concerns of John ""Pestalozzi"" Synge (1788-1845) worked as expiation of earlier offences and anxieties, but the Wicklow properties which the Synges inherited from John Hatch could not survive the Famine without grievous loss. Paradoxically, Synge's attachment to local values is traced from that disaster right into composition of ""The Playboy of the Western World"" (1907).

Full Product Details

Author:   Bill McCormack ,  W. J. McCormack ,  Rebecca Mortimer
Publisher:   Manchester University Press
Imprint:   Manchester University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780719062797

ISBN 10:   0719062799
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   31 March 2009
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Introducing - the Synges from Bridgnorth, Shropshire Part 1 - Settings 1. Lands Elsewhere: Wicklow 2. Other people: The Hatches 3. A little learning 4. The Mill at Amino 5. The state of the roads Part 2 - Hatched, matched and despatched 6. An MP and his wife 7. Death in the mountains 8. A battle of wills 9. On debt Part 3 - The Devil's Glen 10. Roundwood and after 11. Her brother's will, 1792 12. The sceond Archdiaconate 13. Rebellion, union and family romance Part 4 - Affairs with the moon 14. How Pestalozzi reached Wicklow 15. Melmoth, the Stay-at-Home 16. In Darby's field Part 5 - Literature at nurse 17. John Hatch, a country doctor 18. Windfalls 19. Work house insurgency Part 6 - Concerning J.M. Synge (1871-1909) 20. Madness and local government 21. Insulting 'The Playboy' 22. A county in romance 23. The wounded dramatist takes his bow -- .

Reviews

'I believe this is a model for a new kind of literary-historical project... It is not biography, literary history or criticism, but it is this awkwardness that is also the work's major strength. McCormack is probably the leading authority on Irish protestant culture in the C18th and C19th.' - Richard Kirkland

Author Information

W. J. McCormack is Professor of Literary History, Goldsmiths College University of London

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