[Trevor, Edward / Kilmainhaim Gaol (Jail)] / [Anonymous (attributed to Sanders, Robert)].

The Roman History, In a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son. [Personal copy of Edward Trevor, with the signed autographed name and original bookplate / Exlibris of this infamous medical inspector of convicts in Kilmainham Jail and later in Cork supervisor of Convict – departure to Australia].

First Irish Edition. Two Volumes (complete set). Dublin, Printed for J.Williams, 1775. Small-Octavo (11,5 cm x 17 cm). IV, 300, 262 pages. Original Hardcover with original spine-labels. In protective Mylar. New endpaper to Volume I. Minor wormhole-damage to pastedown and a few pages only. Binding slightly rubbed but firm and strong. Very good condition with only minor signs of wear. This set, with the exceptionally interesting provenance, does not only contain Trevor’s signature but also his bookplate and some doodling of a portrait of an 18th or 19th century figurehead.

Trevor, Edward (c.1765–1837), doctor, controller of Kilmainham jail, and medical inspector of convicts, was probably born in Co. Down; details of his early life are sparse, and nothing is known of his parents. Hostile references to low birth and military service in the ranks, according to pamphlets published (1807–10) by barrister and former state prisoner St John Mason (qv), suggest he was a self-made man, an opportunist who prospered in a Georgian demi-monde of professional ambiguity. Trevor’s medical career, variously given as apothecary, physician, surgeon and inspector, appears to have evolved without formal qualifications. The Dublin Directory for 1788–1837 sketches his progress. In 1788 ‘A. Trevor’ was listed as apothecary to the Infirmary, Arbour Hill, subsequently to the Royal Military Infirmary (latterly occupied by the Department of Defence), the hospital newly designed by James Gandon (qv) beside the Phoenix Park. There he served until at least 1802, by which time he was ‘Edward Trevor’. He also served from 1802 to c.1828 as surgeon to the Hibernian Society’s school within the park for children and orphans of the army in Ireland. His identity as a medical doctor, both surgeon and physician, is intermittent and interchangeable, as with much of his professional career.

Trevor is named in 1797 as a physician with an address at the Phoenix Park and in 1798 as a surgeon, his address Montpelier Hill, adjacent to the Royal (latterly Collins) Barracks and Arbour Hill. In 1800 he was ‘assistant surgeon’ at the Phoenix Park. A graduate of neither the RCPI nor the RCSI, he might, like some so-called surgeons of the time, have acquired his expertise in the shadow of a barber’s pole or, as a soldier, through talent displayed in the field. Trevor’s pharmaceutical credentials may have been less uncertain: St John Mason mentions his apprenticeship to an apothecary in Bridge St., for a promised fee rather than any innate ability. Trevor is listed in the first volume of Peterkin & Johnson, Medical officers in the British army (1968), as ‘apothecary to her majesty’s infirmaries in Dublin, 12 July 1800’.

Between 1810 and 1837 Trevor’s Directory status as a practising physician remained unbroken, with an address at 6 Fitzgibbon St., Dublin, which he shared with his wife and children. However, ‘Doctor Trevor’ had a parallel reputation, preserved in subsequent nationalist mythology, as a monster of rare iniquity who enjoyed excessive freedom of authority in conditions so bizarre as to seem fictional. He was appointed medical supervisor in 1797 of the new Dublin county jail at Kilmainham. His ostensibly pastoral role as carer of inmates appears to have descended unchecked into despotism. The disturbed political condition of Ireland in 1797–1803 enabled him to take virtual control of the jail. He subverted the official authority of George Dunn the jailer, who became a henchman with whom he reputedly ‘shared’ a wife. Trevor was accused in petitions by articulate state prisoners of degrading treatment and deliberate humiliation of inmates, including the mixing of political prisoners with regular criminals. He even established himself, for personal profit, as the official baker to Kilmainham jail. He allegedly sought business partners about 1802, who later claimed he had threatened to flog menial staff at the garrison bakery located in Barrack St.

St John Mason, lawyer and cousin of Robert Emmet (qv), was in Trevor’s custody as a state prisoner following Emmet’s rebellion in July 1803. He subsequently pilloried him in his polemic Pedro Zendono, inquisitor of Kilmainham (1807). Official witness statements by former state prisoners, compiled by Mason in 1808, provide the chief record of Trevor’s alleged cruelties, vividly told in Pedro redivivus: prison abuses in Ireland (1810). He dedicated the volume to Richard Brinsley Sheridan (qv), MP, whose parliamentary statement of 2 July 1808 exposed Trevor’s torment of state prisoners at Kilmainham during 1803–5. His victims (and subsequent accusers), whom he had wanted to turn informer, included James Tandy (qv) and Anne Devlin (qv), imprisoned with her family, of whom a young brother, James, died of fever. Such public knowledge may have thwarted Trevor’s attempt in 1808 to be appointed inspector general of prisons.

While exercising a regime of psychological control and physical terror within Kilmainham jail, Trevor would temporarily send wilful inmates such as Anne Devlin to the dilapidated old jail nearby to break their spirit. A servant and follower of Robert Emmet, Devlin refused throughout her long and inhumane confinement by Trevor even to acknowledge Emmet, for fear of betraying him. In frustration, Trevor cursed her as a ‘rebelly bitch’. Ingratiating himself instead with the credulous Emmet on the eve of his execution, 19–20 September 1803, Trevor persuaded Emmet to entrust him with his last letters which, predictably, went to Dublin Castle. In July 1804 a three-day judges’ investigation of Trevor’s alleged conduct at Kilmainham resulted in acknowledgement of his unpopularity but recommended no more than improvements in conditions at the jail. The failure of official complaints in 1808 prompted accusations of collusion and friendship between Trevor and members of the investigating commission. Trevor dismissed the opinion of detractors and maintained he was following orders. Having already served in Kilmainham as medical inspector of convicts, he moved from there to Cork in 1817 as supervisor of convicts bound for Australia, but retained enough influence at Kilmainham to be accused in 1832 of fixing commercial contracts there. Although occasional allusions to compassion for the plight of ordinary criminals peppered his otherwise unfavourable record, the living conditions of convicts had become so foul by 1836 that the reformist under-secretary for Ireland, Thomas Drummond (qv), closed the notorious prison hulks as partial remedy for a system of neglect.

Trevor accumulated sufficient personal income to make his family comfortable and possibly more respectable than he himself had been. He died 19 February 1837, his estate amounting to £36,000. His widow, Mary (maiden name unknown), died on 13 March 1842. His eldest son, Edward, became a major-general and died in Plymouth in 1878; a younger son, Arthur Hill Trevor, was a major. He was buried in the Trevor vault beneath St Paul’s church, North King St., Dublin. The vault was forensically examined in 1903 to determine if a headless cadaver there might be that of Robert Emmet, concealed after his execution. Its subsequent disappearance perpetuated the fascination surrounding both Edward Trevor and Robert Emmet.
Sources

Dublin Directory, 1788–1837; ‘Vindex’ (St John Mason), Pedro Zendono, inquisitor of Kilmainham (2nd ed., 1807); St John Mason, Pedro redivivus: prison abuses in Ireland (1810); NAI, OP 934, memorandum of Trevor’s services, c.1828; RIA, MS 23.k.62/A(i), item 14, ‘Robert Emmet’s burial place’; J. J. Reynolds, ‘The mystery of Emmet’s grave’, Banba, app. 1922; R. B. McDowell, The Irish administration, 1801–1914 (1964); John J. Finegan (ed.), The Anne Devlin jail journal (1968); Alfred Peterkin and William Johnston, Medical officers in the British army, 1660–1898 (1968), i, 132; Rupert J. Coughlan, Napper Tandy (1976), 137, 174–6; Joseph Robins, Fools & mad: a history of the insane in Ireland (1986), 31–2; Freida Kelly, A history of Kilmainham Gaol: the dismal house of little ease (1988); Patrick M. Geoghegan, Robert Emmet: a life (2002); James Quinn, Soul on fire: a life of Thomas Russell (2002); Evening Herald, 18 Jan. 2003; Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: the making of a legend (2003); Ruán O’Donnell, Robert Emmet and the rising of 1803 (2003); Niamh O’Sullivan, Every dark hour: a history of Kilmainham Jail (2007) (Source: Dictionary of Irish Biography – DIB).

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SANDERS, ROBERT (1727–1783), compiler, the son of Thomas Sanders, who occupied a humble station in life, was born at Breadalbane in 1727. He was apprenticed to a comb-maker, but, having an ardent passion for reading and a ‘prodigious memory,’ he acquired, without any master, a fair knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He appears to have served as usher in various schools in the north of England previously to coming, about 1760, to London, where ‘he followed the profession of a hackney writer.’ In 1764 he compiled ‘The Newgate Calendar, or Malefactor’s Bloody Register,’ which came out in numbers, and was republished in five volumes. In 1769 he was employed by George William, first baron Lyttelton [q. v.], to correct for the press the third edition of his ‘History of the Life of Henry II;’ a nineteen-page list of errata was appended. In 1771, partly from his own survey, but chiefly from Ray, De Foe, Pennant, and similar sources, Sanders compiled a serviceable itinerary, which was published in weekly numbers under the title of ‘The Complete English Traveller, or a New Survey and Description of England and Wales, containing a full account of what is curious and entertaining in the several counties, the isles of Man, Jersey, and Guernsey … and a description of Scotland’ (reissued London, 1771, fol., under the pseudonym of Nathaniel Spencer). To the topographical descriptions of each county are added brief memoirs of eminent natives. Sanders’s knowledge of Hebrew proved useful in his next work, an edition of the Bible, with learned annotations, which first appeared in numbers, but was reissued as ‘The Christian’s Divine Library, illustrated with Notes,’ in two volumes folio, 1774. The work appeared as by Henry Southwell, LL.D., rector of Asterby, Lincolnshire, but this divine merely lent his name for a fee of a hundred guineas. Sanders was paid twenty-five shillings a sheet. In the same year he issued anonymously ‘The Lucubrations of Gaffer Graybeard, containing many curious particulars relating to the Manners of the People in England during the Present Age; including the Present State of Religion particularly among the Protestant Dissenters,’ 1774, 4 vols. 12mo. This was a satire upon the leading dissenting divines of the metropolis, Dr. Gill being portrayed as Dr. Half-pint, and Dr. Gibbons and others in equally transparent nicknames. Obscure as Sanders was his gibes seem to have been resented. A manuscript note in the British Museum copy of the satire explains that Sanders was once a student at an independent academy (in Hackney), from which he was ignominiously expelled; but this explanation does not seem to accord with the ascertained facts of Sanders’s career. Towards the end of his life he projected a general chronology of all nations, and had already printed off some sheets of the work under the patronage of Lord Hawke, when he died of a pulmonary disorder on 24 March 1783. Sanders was a self-created LL.D.; his headquarters in London were the New England, St. Paul’s, and New Slaughter’s coffee-houses. His sharp and querulous temper kept him in a state of warfare with booksellers and patrons. In a begging letter which has been preserved, dated 1768, he makes allusion to a wife and five young children.
[Gent. Mag. 1783, i. 311, 400, 482; Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes; Cushing’s Pseudonyms, p. 542; Timperley’s Hist. of Printing, 1842, p. 729; Chalmers’s Biogr. Dict.; Allibone’s Dict. of English Literature; Granger’s New Wonderful Museum; Smeeton’s Biographia Curiosa, 1822; James Lackington’s Memoirs, 1760–90.] (Source: Dictionary of National Biography)

• Keywords: Catalogue Irish History Two – Origins of Irish Identity · Irish History – Rare · Irish History in the 18th century · Irish History in the 19th century · Irish Prison History · Kilmainham Jail · New Arrivals · Prison · Prisoners · Roman History – Rare · Scottish Enlightenment · Scottish History Rare · Scottish Writers
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 31237AB

EUR 1.480,--