Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898 Childhood, boyhood, manhood; customs, habits and manners of the Irish people; Erinach and Sassenach; Catholic and protestant; Englishman and Irishman; English religion; Irish plunder; social life and prison life; the Fenian movement; Travels in Ireland, England, Scotland and America

The life of my early manhood is full of my acquaintance with John O’Donovan, the great Irish scholar; and when now--forty years after that acquaintance--I am writing my “recolle...

The last chapter commenced with the arrest of the men of ’48 and ran over the succeeding ten years, up to the arrest of the men of ’58. Those ten years carried me from boyhood i...

After my marriage, my late employer moved into a new house he had built. I rented the house in which I had lived with him the previous four or five years, and I carried on the b...

When I was a little fellow, I got so much into my head about my family, and about what great big people they were in the world before I came among them, that when I grew up to b...

The two letters published in the last chapter, written by James Stephens and Thomas Clark Luby to John O’Mahony, at the start of the Fenian movement, speak for the Irish side of...

Dan Hallahan, John O’Gorman, Willie O’Gorman, William McCarthy, Jerrie O’Donovan, John Hennigan, Jerrie O’Meara and others who had charge of the flags the night of the Polish de...

On the evening of December the 5th, 1858, there was an entertainment at my house in Skibbereen in compliment to Dan McCartie, the brewer, who was leaving town, to accept the pos...

Coming on the year 1860, the men of Skibbereen took up the threads of the organization that were let slip through the arrest of the Phœnix men in ’58. We met James Stephens in B...

Though I spoke of the McManus funeral before, I have now to speak of it again. I find among my papers a letter written by James Stephens to John O’Mahony, the week after the fun...

I must have been at John Cushan’s school about six years. Paying a visit to the school after his death, I looked at the roll-calls, and I could not find my name on them after De...

After the arrest of the Phœnix men in December, 1858, James Stephens went to France. In April, 1859, when I and my companions were in Cork Jail, he wrote this letter to John O’M...

MY FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA.--MY MOTHER, JOHN O’MAHONY, THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER, ROBERT E. KELLY, AND HIS SON HORACE R. KELLY, MICHAEL CORCORAN, P. J. DOWNING, P. J. CONDON, WILLIA...

At the age of seven, I was brought home to my father and mother in Ross, to be sent to school, and prepared for Confirmation and Communion. I had received those sacraments of th...

It may be doubted that I remember things that happened to me when I was at my mother’s breast, or when I was three years old; but I have no doubt on that matter. Prominent in my...

In the spirit of the concluding words of the last chapter, I take _this_ last chapter of the first volume of my “Recollections,” from the recollections of Mr. Crimmins who has l...

This chapter that I have to write now is a very hard chapter to write. I have to say something that will hurt my pride and will make my friends think the less of me. But I’ll sa...

In the summer time of the year 1862 something occurred that brought me face to face with the English landlord garrison of the South of Ireland; something showed me the spirit of...

There were three or four hillocks in the field near the schoolhouse, that grew nothing but bushes and briars, and in these hillocks linnets and goldfinches would build their nes...

Coming on the harvest time of the year 1845, the crops looked splendid. But one fine morning in July there was a cry around that some blight had struck the potato stalks. The le...

In the year 1841, the family of my father’s brother Cornelius, sold out their land and their house, and went to America. In that house the priests used to have their dinner on “...

In the summer of 1847, when Bill-Ned’s decree was executed on our house, and when all the furniture was canted, notice of eviction was served upon my mother. The agent was a cou...

John Mitchel, John Martin, Smith O’Brien, Terence Bellew McManus and other prominent men in the Young Ireland movement of 1848 were transported to Australia, and the movement co...

In the Autumn of 1858, Patrick Mansfield Delaney and Martin Hawe were arrested in Kilkenny, and Denis Riordan was arrested in Macroom. While they were in jail, the Kilkenny men...

The landlords of Ireland are the lords of Ireland. England makes them landlords first, and then, to put the brand of her marauding nobility on them, she makes them English lords...

In these times preceding the Phœnix arrests--from 1852 to 1858--the time of the Sadlier and Keogh Tenant Right movement, the time of the Crimean war, and the time of the Indian...

I did not know what “Repeal of the Union” was when I heard all the grown-up people around me shouting out “Repeal! Repeal!” It is no harm now to let my young readers know what R...

In the Old Abbey field of Ross Carbery, County of Cork, is the old Abbey Church of St. Fachtna. Some twenty yards south of the church is the tomb of Father John Power, around wh...