Type: Article
Jones, Catherine A. ‘”Our partial Attachments”: Tom Moore and 1798’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 13 (1998), pp 24-43.
This article examines the influence of revolutionary nationalism on the poet Thomas Moore and the writing of his Irish Melodies (1808-34). Jones traces Moore’s beginnings in Ireland prior to his becoming a London literary émigré, from his early years as a student at Trinity College Dublin, which was a ‘hotbed of nationalism’, to his friendship with United Irishmen Edward Hudson and Robert Emmet, whose political enthusiasm and appreciation of Irish music inspired Moore’s Melodies. Jones also discusses the relationship between Moore’s Melodies and two important philosophical works, Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) and David Hume’s Philosophical Essays (1748).