McDonnell, Hector (Illustrator).

The Night Before Larry was Stretched [with signed etching]. With an introduction by Terence de Vere White.

Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 1984. 20.5 cm x 13 cm. IX, 96 pages. Original Hardcover in original slipcase. Number 48 out of a limited edition of 500 copies / Excellent, close to new condition. Includes orignial, signed etching.

“The Night Before Larry Was Stretched” is an Irish execution ballad written in the Newgate cant.
The song is in The Festival of Anacreon, with tune direction “To the hundreds of Drury I write.” It is also listed in Colm Ó Lochlainn’s Irish Street Ballads and Frank Harte’s Songs of Dublin.
Donagh MacDonagh gives the following sleeve note ‘One of a group of Execution Songs written in Newgate Cant or Slang Style in the 1780s, others being The Kilmainham Minuet, Luke Caffrey’s Ghost and Larry’s Ghost in which, as promised in the seventh stanza of the present ballad, Larry comes “in a sheet to sweet Molly”!’ The Newgate Cant or Slang Style is not unique to Dublin and all the cant and slang is to be found in Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937). Nubbing cheat or Nubbin chit is cant for the gallows, while Darkmans is cant for night. Joyce, working out of Thomas Dekker’s The Gul’s Hornbook and The Belman of London (1608), wrote:

White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is.
Couch a hogshead with me then.
In the Darkmans clip and kiss.

The ballad is estimated to have been written around 1816. Will (Hurlfoot) Maher, a shoemaker from Waterford, wrote the song; Dr Robert Burrowes, the Dean of Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork, to whom it has been so often attributed, certainly did not. In Ballads from the Pubs of Ireland, p. 29, James N Healy attributes the song to a William Maher, (Hurlfoot Bill), but doesn’t note when Maher lived. However, the song is attributed to a ‘Curren’ in The Universal Songster, 1828, this possibly being the witty barrister John Philpot Curran or JW Curren.
The Newgate cant in which the song was written was a colloquial slang of 18th-century Dublin, similar to the thieves’ cant still used in London (an example of the London use is seen in the 1998 film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). This is only one of a group of execution songs written in Newgate Cant or slang style somewhere around 1780, others being The Kilmainham Minuet, Luke Caffrey’s Ghost and Larry’s Ghost, which, as promised in the seventh verse, “comes in a sheet to sweet Molly”.
A French translation of the song called La mort de Socrate was written by Francis Sylvester Mahony, better known as “Father Prout” for Fraser’s Magazine, and is also collected in Musa Pedestris, Three Centuries of Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes, collected and annotated by John S Farmer. (Wikipedia).

The Illustrator:

Hector McDonnell was born in West Belfast in March 1947.
He studied at the Art Academy in Munich and later moved to Vienna where he spent a year working in a studio of the sculptor and architect Fritz Wotruba. Following the continental experience, about 1967 McDonnell entered Christ Church, Oxford College to study history. On graduating from Oxford, he began to exhibit his paintings regularly in London.
Self-confessedly, Hector McDonnell is a loner, a maverick, an unbranded steer. As a completely figurative painter in the early 1970s he was out on a limb. The fashionable contemporary art at that time was abstract, pop or conceptual. His output is prolific. He produces a large quantity of oil paintings, both very large and very small, using dashing thick square brushstrokes, and presumably painted very quickly. His speciality is interiors, usually with a lot of floor in the foreground. These are often pub and cafe interiors, but more particularly shops, especially butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers. He also regularly produces small sets of etchings on the same subject.
McDonnell allows himself to be seduced by what he sees: events startle him into perceiving what he calls the ‘magical’ in everyday situations. In his painting each object is imagined with the stout atmospheric density he needs to give form to his feelings. It might almost be possible to describe this as ‘folkloristic’, if by that one meant the creative fluency with language that turns the simplest Irishman into a poet – where the word is an integral part of man’s being poetry and naturalism lie side by side.
McDonnell now spends much of the year in New York City, where he has a young family. (jameswray.ie).

• Keywords: Catalogue No.10 – International Literature · Illustrated Books · Irish Literature – Rare · Limited Edition · Signed
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0856403202
• Inventory Number: 43022AB

EUR 150,--