`A very singular person, of whom the world tells a thousand and one tales, you know, but of whom I shall speak as I find him, because the utmost kindness and warm-heartedness have characterised his whole bearing towards us . . . "
Not everyone would have spoken so gently of Francis Sylvester Mahony as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a letter to her sister in 1848. And indeed, this irascible, scholarly, witty and lonely man became something of a burden to her in Florence, visiting a little too often, smoking a little too heavily, keeping her beloved Robert in conversation too long, calling her "Ba" with a little too much familiarity. And yet, she admits, "one likes the human nature of the man".
Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804-66) was a master of literary disguise and it is as his literary alter ego, Father Prout, that he is now, if at all, remembered. His grave is in the churchyard of St Ann's Shandon in Cork on the north side of the city. Here he lies among family bones, the faint lettering on the tomb offering only a succession of "Mahony" names.
Born into a Cork woollen milling family, he was educated by the Jesuits in Ireland and in Amiens and became a seminarian at their house in Paris. A spell as master of rhetoric at Clongowes Wood College ended not long after he led a group of students on a drunken late-night spree. Dismissed by the Jesuits, he travelled Europe, finally being ordained for the Cork diocese.
Here his insistence that the city should have a chapel of ease associated with its cathedral, usually known as the North Cathedral or even, so unassuming were the natives, as the North Chapel, led to such defiance of his bishop as to finally drive him from both the city and the Catholic Church. He never practised as a priest again, although he said his office daily to the end of his life. He remained, according to his biographer, Blanchold Jerrold, "a half-pay soldier of the Church - minus the half-pay".
In 1834 he joined William Maginn at Fraser's Magazine in London and established himself not only as a journalist but as a member of high artistic society in London, Paris, Florence and Rome; it was Mahony who found the house in Paris in which Thackeray and his bride Isabella Creagh Shawe began their married life.
When Mahony began his career in journalism he chose as his pseudonym that of a lately deceased Fr Prout, parish priest of Watergrasshill near Cork. Jonathan Swift and Stella, he claimed, were the literary Fr Prout's parents. Under this byline he wrote speeches and poems in which he challenged, with humour, scholarship and, at times, unyielding savagery, the publications, personalities, controversies and politics of the times. The claim that Thomas Moore was a plagarist was a running theme.
He moved from Fraser's to the Bentley Miscellany when that magazine was edited by Charles Dickens; later he wrote from Rome for the Daily News, inventing the persona of the Benedictine Don Jeremy Savaronola. His antipathies were absolute, his contempt for Daniel O'Connell a life-long conviction. But Mahony was also a loyal friend, and was steadfast, for example, to Fr Theobald Mathew, "the Apostle of Temperance", campaigning - perhaps too vigorously - for his appointment as Bishop of Cork. Father Prout wrote on religion, literature, art, music (even in Italy poor Tom Moore could not escape, becoming Tomaso il Moro). In Paris he became a correspondent for The Globe until his death at his apartment near the Palais Royal.
In Cork his vast funeral was brightened by ironies: his body was received by Bishop Delany, whose appointment Mahony had wanted for Fr Mathew, while the Requiem Mass was said at St Patrick's Church, the very chapel of ease for which he had campaigned so aggressively all those years ago. But it is for his ballad "The Bells of Shandon" that he is mainly remembered, a ditty so light and sentimental that it could never have seemed to him to merit the longevity which eluded all his other work.
Mary Leland is the author of The Lie of the Land: Journeys through Literary Cork. (Cork University Press, 1999)