The man in the square
Charles Kickham
Charles Joseph Kickham was born on 9 May 1828 in Mullinahone, the son of a draper and general merchant. At thirteen he suffered an accident with gunpowder that left him almost completely deaf and severely damaged his eyesight - he spent the rest of his life reading and writing with difficulty, in failing light. He joined Young Ireland in the 1840s, then the IRB - the Irish Republican Brotherhood - in the 1860s, rising to become a member of its supreme council. In 1865 he was arrested in Dublin, tried for treason-felony, and sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude. He served four years in Pentonville and Woking prisons before being released on grounds of failing health. He came home to Mullinahone and wrote Knocknagow. He died on 22 August 1882 and was buried in St Michael's churchyard, where he remains.
The homes of Tipperary
Knocknagow
Knocknagow, or, The Homes of Tipperary was published serially in 1873 and as a book in 1879. Kickham wrote it while almost blind, dictating passages when his eyes gave out entirely. The story follows a cast of characters in a Tipperary rural parish - clearly modelled on Mullinahone and its surrounds - through the 1840s and 1850s: land agitation, evictions, emigration, and the ordinary texture of life before the Famine finished what it started. Mat the Thrasher, the novel's most famous character, wins a hammer-throwing contest that became iconic enough to be illustrated on stamps and commemorated in statues. The book ran to dozens of editions over the decades that followed, in Ireland, America and wherever the Irish diaspora read. Most rural Irish families had a copy. Many still do.
The politics behind the prose
Young Irelander, Fenian
Kickham's republicanism was not romantic - it was the product of watching his county emptied by Famine and landlordism. He joined the Young Irelanders after 1848 and the IRB after its founding in 1858, and he edited its newspaper, the Irish People, from 1863 until his arrest in 1865. The British authorities found the paper's printing house in Dublin and used the subscription lists and manuscripts to prosecute the editorial staff. Kickham was convicted on evidence that included his own articles and sentenced with three others: James Stephens escaped, O'Leary and Luby were also imprisoned. When Kickham was released in 1869 his health was broken, his hearing and sight were almost gone, but he remained on the IRB supreme council until his death. His politics and his fiction were the same project: the argument that rural Irish life was worth defending, and that the people destroying it had no right to do so.
The grave that was in the novel first
St Michael's churchyard
Kickham is buried in the churchyard of St Michael's Catholic Church in Mullinahone. His grave is a substantial monument - he was given a public funeral in 1882, attended by thousands, with a cortège that processed through Mullinahone before burial. Patrick Pearse and others gave graveside orations in later commemorations. What makes the location quietly strange is that Kickham described churchyard scenes in Mullinahone in Knocknagow years before he was buried there - the place that appears in the fiction and the place that holds his body are the same place. That doesn't happen often.