Thomas Moore (Dublin 1779 – Sloperton 1852) was born into an affluent middle-class family and, although a Catholic, studied at Trinity College Dublin, which in these Enlightenment-Patriotic years had become accessible to non-Protestants. He also made his literary debut in the Patriotic journal Anthologia Hibernica. In this period (1795-99) radical democrats, inspired by Republican France, were organizing in lodges of “United Irishmen”; Moore was close to this group, which would ally itself with agrarian discontent to launch, in the hope of aid from France, the 1798 Rebellion. College friends of Moore’s were actively involved, such as Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who was killed in 1798 resisting arrest, and Robert Emmet, who was executed for high treason following a failed follow-up rebellion in 1803. Moore would later celebrate their memories in a biography of Fitzgerald (1831) and in verse obliquely honouring Emmet (“Oh breathe not his name”; or the elegy “She is far from the land”, on Emmet’s erstwhile fiancée, Sarah Curran).

In 1799 Moore moved to London to study law. Here he became part of the literary scene of the Regency, where his Anacreontic Odes (1800) found favour, and where he placed himself under the patronage of prominent Whig politicians, becoming part of the Holland House set. Moving between London and Dublin, he began publishing sentimental-patriotic verse set to traditional airs (which had begun to appear in collections by Edward Bunting and others) under the title of Irish melodies. Ten volumes of these appeared between 1807 and 1834, but the peak of their influence was marked by the first five, which appeared between 1807 and 1813. In the first decade, their mixed-feeling invocations of Irish scenery (beautiful), sentiment (sweet), antiquity (sublime) and history (tragic) appealed to all sections of the public, and the charms of their musical settings ensured a wide dissemination. In the process, Moore was the first poet after the 1801 Act of Union to voice an Irish-national political loyalty and to base this loyalty on the riches of Gaelic antiquity and the unresolved conflicts of the recent past. This national historicism was to provide a poetic mode for the entire following century.

For the London literary scene Moore’s fame as a minor regency poet rested on his Anacreontic verse, on the Orientalist verse romance Lalla Rookh (1817) and on his friendship with, and 1830 biography of, Byron. Lalla Rookh was a very considerable international success, with many re-editions, translations, illustrations and musical/operatic adaptations by composers like Spontini (Nurmahal, 1822), Schumann (the oratorio Das Paradies und  die Peri, 1843) and Stanford (The veiled prophet of Khorassan, 1881). Some Irish-national allusions were read into this Orientalist fantasy; but for Irish Romantic Nationalism, Moore’s literary career after the Irish melodies is marked largely by his controversialist and historical prose writings. These appeared in the 1820s, when tensions ran high because of the British government’s continuing reluctance to grant the country’s Catholic majority population full legal standing (a measure which had been promised as part of the 1801 Act of Union). Moore’s Catholic-apologetic Travels of an Irish gentleman in search of a religion (1833) was in fact more political than religious, in aligning Irish Catholicism with cosmopolitan intellectuals rather than with stigmatized peasants; conversely, his earlier satire Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824) had represented the peasant unrest of the mid-1820 as a timeless, ongoing interdependence between “English misrule and Irish misdeeds”, almost like Hegel’s master-slave parable. The life and death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) was one of the first mainstream publications to treat the 1798 Rebellion in unapologetic terms.

Like the prose genre of the National Tale as practised by his rival Lady Morgan, Moore’s Irish Melodies belong to the decades between the Act of Union and Catholic Emancipation (1828). After 1830, his star waned. The History of Ireland, which he took on as a lucrative commission and which appeared between 1835 and 1846, was a burden on him and remained largely ignored; it could hardly be otherwise, since, under the influence of George Petrie, Irish history-writing was at that moment undergoing a hotly contested paradigm shift away from the older, late-18th-century tradition of antiquarianism in which Moore himself was rooted. Moore’s last years were marked by growing senility, and his death occurred almost in obscurity. His posthumous reputation in Ireland continued to rest largely on the Irish Melodies, which have continued to enjoy a tenacious currency. Although a statue in his honour was erected in Dublin in 1857, later nationalists and poets struggled against his influence and against the sentimentalism which lingered longest in his posthumous reputation; his contemporary nationalist engagement, and his importance for transforming Ireland’s Enlightenment Patriotism of the 1790s into Romantic Nationalism, have been rediscovered in recent decades.