Sir Charles Gavan Duffy(1816–1903)

Charles Gavan Duffy was born at 50 Dublin Street in the market town of Monaghan, on the southern Ulster border, on 12 April 1816, second son of John Duffy, a Catholic shoemaker who ran a Monaghan boot-and-shoe shop, and Anne Gavan. The household was lower-middle-class Catholic Ulster of the pre-Famine generation: the father had been a Catholic Emancipation organiser through the 1820s, the family pew at the Monaghan parish church was three rows from the back, the boy was schooled at the Catholic Latin school at Monaghan from eight to thirteen and then at the Belfast hedge-school of John McCorry on a scholarship his Monaghan parish priest had arranged. He left school at fifteen to take a clerkship at the Dublin printer's office of a Catholic-Emancipation publishing house run by his uncle Patrick Gavan; the move to Dublin in 1831 took him into the printing-and-journalism trade he would work in for the next sixty years.

The seven years between sixteen and twenty-three were the apprenticeship. He worked at the Dublin printing house through 1831 to 1834, moved to Belfast in 1834 to take a sub-editor's post at the *Vindicator*, the Catholic-Emancipation weekly newspaper of north Ulster, edited the *Vindicator* from 1837 (he was twenty-one) to 1841, and was admitted to the Irish bar at King's Inns Dublin in 1845 (the bar reading and the Belfast newspaper work had run in parallel). The *Vindicator* years gave him the Belfast-Ulster Catholic editorial register, the political connections to the Catholic-professional-Emancipation establishment of the Repeal Movement that Daniel O'Connell was running through the same period, and the foundational journalism-and-printing-economics apprenticeship of the Catholic press of the time.

*The Nation*, the weekly Dublin newspaper that became the principal organ of the Young Ireland Movement, was founded by Duffy, Thomas Davis and John Blake Dillon at the small offices at 12 D'Olier Street, Dublin on 15 October 1842. The senior editorial principle of the paper was the foundational one of nineteenth-century Irish cultural-political journalism: the printing of Irish-historical and Irish-literary material (the ballads, the medieval-Irish translations, the modern Irish poetry of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Davis and the early William Butler Yeats) in the same columns as the current political journalism on the Repeal-of-the-Union question, on the Catholic-Emancipation administrative settlement, on the Famine-relief politics of the 1846 onwards period, and on the broader European-revolutionary politics of the 1848 republican wave. The paper had a circulation of about ten thousand at the peak of its mid-1840s readership and was, on every subsequent assessment of the period, the principal vehicle of the Young Ireland Movement's senior cultural-political programme.

He was tried five times on sedition charges between 1844 and 1849 (the treason-felony charge of 1848, after the abortive Tipperary rising of William Smith O'Brien at the Ballingarry working-cabbage-patch action of 29 July 1848, kept him in Newgate prison through to 1849) and was never convicted by an Irish jury, on the principle of Irish-jury practice through the period that no Irish jury would return a guilty verdict on an Irish Catholic-press editor for sedition arising out of pro-Repeal journalism. He emerged from the 1849 trial as the Catholic-press public figure of post-Famine Dublin. He was elected MP for New Ross in the 1852 general election, sat as the leading figure of the Independent Irish Party in Westminster from 1852 to 1855 on the platform of land-reform and tenant-right legislation, and resigned the seat in 1855 on his frustration with the English-parliamentary refusal to bring the tenant-right bills to a vote. He emigrated to the new gold-rush colony of Victoria in the southern Australian colonies in November 1855 at thirty-nine.

The Australian career was the post-Repeal second register of his adult life. He was elected to the Victoria Legislative Assembly for Villiers and Heytesbury in 1856, served as a Minister of Lands in the Heales government 1860-61, as Premier of Victoria from 1871 to 1872 (the Catholic-Irish Premier of any Australian colony to that point, and the first foreign-born Premier of Victoria), and as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly from 1877 to 1880. He was knighted in 1873 (the year after his Victoria premiership ended) and made KCMG in 1873 also, on the Disraeli government's senior recommendation. He retired from active Australian politics in 1880 at sixty-four and moved to the south of France, where he lived at the villa at Nice for the next twenty-three years. He wrote, in retirement, the memoir of the Young Ireland Movement (*Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History*, 1880; *Four Years of Irish History*, 1883; *The League of North and South*, 1886; *My Life in Two Hemispheres*, 1898) that has been the primary source for the historians of the 1840s Irish-nationalist generation since. He died at the Nice villa on 9 February 1903, eighty-six years old, and is buried, on his own bequest, at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin alongside the senior figures of the nineteenth-century Irish-nationalist movement. The Duffy name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic of *Ó Dubhthaigh* (descendant of Dubhthach, the dark one), the foundational Ulster surname of the Monaghan-and-Donegal border counties; Charles Gavan carried it from a Monaghan shoemaker's house through the foundation of *The Nation* and the nineteenth-century Catholic-Irish press, through five sedition trials and an Australian premiership, into the diaspora-and-home Irish-nationalist establishment of the late Victorian period.