Poems by James Clarence Mangan. With Biographical Introduction by John Mitchell. New York: P.M. Haverty, 1859. First Edition. Pp, 460. Publisher’s brown diced cloth boards, in gilt to spine. Ex library copy with stamps and label to front endpapers, stencilled number to tail of spine; title page & contents pages frayed at top hinge & crease marks to lower right corners; otherwise in good condition.

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 behaviour, 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.