Vol. 7: O’Donnell, Ruan and Bob Reece.

Type: Article

O’Donnell, Ruan and Bob Reece. ‘‘A Clean Beast’: Crofton Croker’s Fairy Tale of General Holt’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 7 (1992), Pp 7-42.

This article discusses Thomas Crofton Croker’s Memoirs of Joseph Holt…(1838), edited by Croker from Joseph Holt’s own autobiographical manuscript ‘The Live [sic] and Adventures of Joseph Holt…’. The article provides evidence that Croker substantially changed Holt’s manuscript and that his editing was motivated by his own political and commercial necessity, as well as the need to provide sufficient copy to fill two volumes, as required by his publisher Henry Colburn. The Irish section of Holt’s manuscript on the Wicklow Rebellion of 1798 is compared in detail to Croker’s edited version, to conclude that, “Croker’s extensive, covert and disingenuous adaptation of Holt’s manuscript does not portray the author as he was, or even as he intended himself to be seen; nor does it represent the Rebellion as he perceived it”.