Thomas Crofton Croker (Cork 1798 –  London 1854) son of an army officer, moved to London after obtaining a clerkship in the Admiralty, and lived there for the rest of his life; he was among the founding members of the Percy Society.  In his early years, he had developed a keen interest in Irish rural  life. That interest, which notably  manifested itself in his Researches in the south of Ireland, illustrative of the scenery, architectural remains and the manners and superstitions of the peasantry (1824), marks the shift of the tradition of antiquarian scholarship into (in this case) folklore studies. That the turn to peasant superstition reflected a need to sanitize and render innocuous an underclass which had recently risen in open revolt against British rule and colonial land ownership (in the 1798 Rebellion, and in ongoing agricultural unrest in the 1820s) is indicated by the fact that appended to the Researches was a “private narrative of the rebellion”.  In his editions for the Percy Society and the Camden Society Croker would edit other private narratives of witnesses of peasant revolts in  1798 and 1641. For the Percy Society he also published numerous descriptions of Irish legends and folk customs such as the “keen” (a plaintive funeral wail with impromptu lines of verse, which was widely seen as a sign of the archaic and spontaneously-poetical nature of Gaelic folk culture).

Croker thus became the first folklorist of Ireland, and while in his more scholarly publications he was aware of the extent to which oral literature reflected the political disaffection of the peasant population, in his most popular book he used folklore to de-politicize the image of the Irish peasantry. Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland (1825) was widely noticed around Europe and even translated into German by the Grimm brothers. This volume of descriptions of superstitions and supernatural folk beliefs was aimed, not at a scholarly audience, but at the general reading public, with illustrations by Daniel Maclise and fresh volumes following in 1827 and 1834. Giving readers a “light”, unpolitical Irish local colour, his tales, involving fairies, banshees, leprechauns and other supernatural creatures, became widely popular and provided later versifiers and playwrights with the stock-in-trade of a romantic-patronizing imagination of the superstitious Irish peasantry. These fairies, banshees and leprechauns accordingly remained a noticeable presence in popular culture, especially in the Irish diaspora in America and in the tourist trade, but were much resented by later folklore fieldworkers such as Douglas Hyde, who also suspected that Croker had invented some of the creatures in this menagerie, and W.B. Yeats, who attempted to replace them with loftier legendary beings linked to ancient Gaelic myths.