[The Rare Volume One] – O’Brien, Fitz-James.

The Diamond Lens [14 pages in: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume I – January, 1858 – No. III] – Here on Offer is a the original bound inaugural Volume I of “The Atlantic Monthly”, signed and inscribed, possibly by a distant family-member of Fitz-James O’Brien: “D.D.O’Brien, Mallow” – “Presented by D.D.O’Brien to L. O’Kelly”. A later, 19th century ownership-signature is: “John L. Williams”. The entire Volume includes the following numbers: Volume I – November 1857 – No.I. / Volume I – December 1857 – No. II. / Volume I – January 1858 – No. III. / Volume I – February 1858 – No. IV. / Volume I – March 1858 – No. V. / Volume I – April 1858 – No. VI //

Boston, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1858. Octavo. IV, 768 pages. Hardcover / Original Half-leather with gilt lettering on spine. Binding in poor but still good + condition with some stronger signs of wear, spine starting, mild foxing throughout and some faded damp-staining to the outer paper-margins inside only. Endpaper, Half-title and titlepage slightly detached. This is the very rare inaugural Atlantic Volume with a wonderful irish provenance, possibly even a relation to Fitz-James O’Brien.

The Atlantic is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.

It was founded in 1857 in Boston as The Atlantic Monthly, a literary and cultural magazine that published leading writers’ commentary on education, the abolition of slavery, and other major political issues of that time. Its founders included Francis H. Underwood and prominent writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. James Russell Lowell was its first editor. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the magazine also published the annual The Atlantic Monthly Almanac. (Wikipedia)


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O’Brien, Fitz-James (1828–62), writer, was born Michael Fitzjames O’Brien in Cork, the only child of James O’Brien (1780–1839), county coroner, and his wife Eliza, daughter of Michael O’Driscoll of Baltimore, Co. Cork. They were well off and lived at 58 South Mall, Cork city. Eliza’s father was a wealthy landowner from an old, well established family, and was known locally as ‘The O’Driscoll’. His grandson, always called ‘Fitzjames’ (which he later wrote as ‘Fitz-James’) was his sole heir. After James O’Brien’s death (c.1839), his widow, a noted beauty, married a wealthy Corkman, De Courcy O’Grady. They settled in Castleconnell, Co. Limerick, and Fitzjames was educated privately and enjoyed an active, sporting life. His first published poem was inspired by the famine and advocated escaping English tyranny by flight to America. Charles Gavan Duffy (qv) published it in The Nation (15 March 1845) under the caustic introduction: ‘This might be called The Coward’s Resource’. Undeterred, O’Brien continued to send in verse under pseudonyms such as ‘Heremon’ and ‘Fineen Dhuv’. His most celebrated poem was the romantic ‘I know a lake’, which appeared on 26 July 1845. Its (unattributed) inclusion in Edward Hayes’s popular The ballads of Ireland (1855) ensured it lasting fame. From July 1848 he also contributed to the Cork Magazine and sent patriotic verse to the Irishman.

O’Brien always claimed (falsely) to have attended TCD. He probably spent some time in France, as he was fluent in the language. On his twenty-first birthday in 1849 he came into his inheritance of around £8,000 and left for London. There he ran through his money in two years of luxurious living. He had work published in the Metropolitan and the Parlour magazines but later complained of the difficulty of breaking into literary London. His first story, ‘The phantom light’, made good use of Irish peasant superstition and appeared in the Home Companion. Afterwards he seldom used Irish settings in his stories and turned his back on his earlier patriotism. American friends noted that he seemed ashamed of his nationality and was delighted when mistaken for an Englishman. After an unhappy love affair with the wife of an officer, he left London penniless at the end of 1851 for New York. He never returned, never again lived within his means, and never again fell in love, although he had numerous affairs.

O’Brien’s entrée into New York’s literary scene was swift and successful. He first contributed to the Lantern, a comic magazine established by a fellow Irishman, the actor John Brougham (qv). For this he provided an autobiographical sketch of himself as ‘The sentimental poet’: ‘of medium height, with large eyes, large nose, and a head shaped like an isoceles triangle’ (Wolle, 37). This was a reference to his tiny chin, caricatured by contemporary artists. Within months he was drama critic of the Saturday Press, and by the end of the year was on the staff of the New York Daily Times, to which he contributed stories, poems, literary reviews, and essays. Other publications with which he was sporadically associated included Young Americans, the Saturday Whig Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. His play ‘A gentleman of Ireland’ – a picaresque tale of an Irishman in London – opened Christmas 1854 and was a resounding success. The role of Gabriel Fitzmaurice was one of Brougham’s favourites and he revived it frequently. At one such revival, O’Brien reviewed his own play as ‘a wonderfully crude production . . . the dialogue is sometimes smart but never witty . . . There is no characterisation, everybody talks like everybody else’ (Saturday Press, 13 Nov. 1858).

His most important connection was to the Harper brothers, owners of Harpers’ Monthly and Harpers’ Weekly. To this he contributed his ‘Man about town’ column from January to September 1857. A gossipy, exuberant account of his adventures, in which he amusingly satirises his poverty, it made him famous; his biographer, Francis Wolle, credits him with ‘initiating the column of personal comment . . . America’s first columnist in the modern sense’ (Wolle, 133). However, he was unable to sustain it for longer than nine months; though brilliant, he was erratic and undisciplined. His friend the journalist R. H. Stoddard wrote: ‘No American writer ever had such chances of success as Fitzjames O’Brien, and but one American writer [Poe] ever threw such chances away so recklessly’ (New York Tribune, 6 Mar. 1881). O’Brien was among the most colourful characters in the circle centred on Pfaff’s Cellar tavern at 653 Broadway, where a table seating thirty was permanently reserved for ‘bohemians’ including Henry Clapp, Ada Clare, and Walt Whitman, who referred to O’Brien as very bright and the talk as very good. O’Brien, always well dressed and generally well mannered, got into brawls when drunk. He appeared, thinly disguised, in two novels of the period, William North’s The slave of the lamp (1855) and Bayard Taylor’s John Godfrey’s fortunes (1864).

The three stories on which O’Brien’s fame rests were written in 1858 and 1859. ‘The diamond lens’ deals with a man who commits murder to obtain the perfect lens. This enables him to see a sylph in a drop of water; when the water evaporates, he goes mad. ‘What was it?’ concerns an encounter with an invisible monster, while ‘The wondersmith’ is about diabolic toys, which eventually attack their creator. Cleverly blending scientific rationalism with gothic horror, they electrified readers and are still anthologised. O’Brien was named ‘the Celtic Poe’. Hoffmann, Dickens, and Sheridan Le Fanu (qv) were other discernible influences, while he foreshadowed de Maupassant and H. G. Wells.

On the outbreak of civil war in 1861, he enlisted in the 7th Regiment of the New York National Guard. Anxious for active service, in June he began recruiting for a New York volunteer regiment, to be called the McClellan Rifles. Numbers failed to reach the minimum regimental requirement, but in January 1862 he was taken on to the staff of Gen. Frederick W. Lander, and departed for Western Virginia. His high spirits, athleticism, and ability to turn out marching songs made him a great favourite. He received honourable mention for his bravery at the battle of Bloomery Gap (13 February 1862), and three days later his audacious behaviour during a skirmish led to a shoulder wound. This was improperly treated and he died of tetanus in camp on 6 April 1862 . His body was brought back to New York and held in the vault of Greenwood cemetery until it was finally interred on 27 November 1874.

A compilation with biographical sketch by his friend William Winter was published in 1881 and brought him back to public notice. Since then his stories have survived in anthologies of the supernatural. His poetry has been largely dismissed as facile and derivative. His 1940s Dictionary of American Biography entry characterises him as minor and more significant as a personality than a writer, and he is not included in American National Biography (1999); but his work has proved stubbornly popular with niche audiences. He has been translated into French, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian, and a new American edition of his stories appeared in two volumes in 1988. His literary criticism was recently compiled in Fitz-James O’Brien: selected literary journalism, 1852–1860, edited by Wayne R. Kime (2003). (Source: Bridget Hourican for THE DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY)

• Keywords: American Civil War · Fitz-James O’Brien · Horror · Irish Literature – 19th Century · Irish Literature – Rare · O’Driscoll Family History · West Cork
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 31942AB

EUR 1.800,--