AN unearthly and ghostly figure, in a brown garment the same garment (to all appearance) which lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally unkempt, the corpse like features still as marble a large book was in his arms and all his soul was in the book."
Thus John Mitchel recalled his first sight of Mangan the poet was working in Trinity College Library at the time in the lowly position of Library Clerk. Four years later he was dead his body, weakened by alcohol and malnutrition, was unable to recover from an attack of cholera in the epidemic of 1849. He was 46.
Ellen Shannon Mangan's biography of the poet brings together all that has been discovered since D.J. O'Donoghue's The Life and Writings of James Clarence Mangan (1897), and tries to penetrate the veils of Victorian politeness with which the poet, and his friends, concealed what our more outspoken age would like to know. Much still remains dark or inexact the separation of fact from fiction is particularly hard where Mangan is concerned.
Mangan was apprenticed as a scrivener in Dublin, his birthplace, and he worked at copying for 20 years. He hated the long hours and unhealthy working conditions, but he was supporting his parents, his two brothers and his sister.
When he was working he may well have had an 18 hour day and he was often subject to debilitating illnesses. Like many other poets of the period, he has been classified as manic depressive, and the partial blindness which afflicted him between the ages of five and 15 was probably psychosomatic in origin. It is not surprising that he found relief in alcohol and that his dependency on it increased with age.
When he was 35 he got a more congenial job as copyist for the Ordnance Survey Office. His wages were the same as before, he only had to work a seven hour day and he enjoyed the company of his fellow workers, especially in the tavern.
Nevertheless he had difficulty in turning up regularly or on time. A contemporary account gives a startling picture of a man much older than his years. "His hair had gone, and given place to a very common looking flax coloured wig his teeth were a false and ill fitting set . . . Such was the appearance of Mangan before his later self abandonment.
Despite his neglect of his person his weird clothes and his reclusive nature, his company was valued and he was considered to be a genius although he had yet to write those poems on which his reputation chiefly rests, Dark Rosaleen, O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire, Siberia, The Nameless One, Gone in the Wind etc.
It was probably his friendship with Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel that inspired him to produce a series of fine poems for their paper, The Nation, poems such as Dark Rosaleen in which Mangan wed a newly discovered patriotic fervour to a Gaelic folk song translated by another hand.
Mangan knew no Irish so he had to rely on translations, but his versions of Irish poems are every bit as skilled as the many translations from German, a language he did know and seems to have taught himself, which he contributed to the Dublin University Magazine for 11 years.
The closure of the Ordnance Survey in 1841 was a blow to Mangan. He got the job in TCD, but from then on his life became more and more grim. The deaths of his parents, though removing a burden, affected him adversely.
In 1846 he lost the job in TCD. Unemployed and unemployable, he became a homeless wanderer, scraping a few coins here and there and writing pathetic begging letters, yet it was at this time he wrote his best known poems. The biographer thinks that had it not been for the stimulus of alcohol this would not have been possible. Whether the poet consumed more than a strictly medical amount of opium or laudanum remains an open question.
The phrase "almost certainly" occurs noticeably often in this biography, which indicates the difficulty about being certain of many of the details of Mangan's life, especially where the evidence is conflicting.
Ellen Shannon Mangan is careful to present the various assumptions that have been made and allow the readers to come to their own conclusions. Her own bias is naturally in the poet's favour, but in spite of her sympathy his story is still that of "a life but darkly understood", as Mangan wrote in his My Adieu to the Muse 20 years before his death.
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