Poems of James Clarence Mangan. With Biographical Introduction by John Mitchell. New York: P.M. Haverty, 1870. Second American Edition. Pp,, 460. Bound in half green morocco, over marbled boards; spine with raised bands, compartments embellished in gilt with harp & shamrock motifs; all edges in gilt. Light foxing to endpaper, otherwise a fine bright copy, in a handsome binding.

A complete collection of Mangan’s poems including his German & Irish Anthology, Apocrypha & Miscellaneous poems.

James Clarence Mangan was born in Dublin just before Robert Emmet’s failed rebellion in 1803, and died in destitution in 1849, as the Great Famine drew to a close.

Accounts of Mangan’s impoverishment, his reclusive behavior, his addiction to alcohol, combined with the darkness of late poems like ‘The Nameless One,’ have encouraged readers to see Mangan as the epitome of pathos, and a mirror of the degraded colonial condition of nineteenth-century Ireland itself.