50 Facts About Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore, was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist who was widely regarded in the late Georgian era as Ireland's "national bard".

In England, Thomas Moore moved in aristocratic Whig circles where, in addition to a salon performer, he was appreciated as a squib writer and master of political satire.

Chief among his targets, in successive Tory governments, was Lord Castlereagh in whose promises of "emancipation" Thomas Moore believed his fellow Catholics in Ireland had been deceived.

Wary in Ireland of an overtly Catholic place-seeking nationalism, Thomas Moore refused a nomination to stand with Daniel O'Connell and his Repeal Association for the Westminster parliament.

Thomas Moore continues to be remembered chiefly for his Melodies.

Thomas Moore is recalled, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the destruction of the memoirs of his friend, Lord Byron.

Thomas Moore was born to Anastasia Codd from Wexford and John Moore from County Kerry over his parents' grocery shop in Aungier Street, Dublin, He had two younger sisters, Kate and Ellen.

Thomas Moore showed an early interest in music and performance, staging musical plays with his friends and entertaining hope of being an actor.

Samuel Whyte had taught Richard Barnsley Sheridan, Irish playwright and English Whig politician, of whom Thomas Moore later was to write a biography.

In 1795, Thomas Moore was among the first Catholics admitted to Trinity College Dublin, preparing, as his mother had hoped, for a career in law.

In 1799, Thomas Moore continued his law studies at Middle Temple in London.

Thomas Moore's introduction to the future prince regent and King, George IV was a high point in Moore's ingratiation with aristocratic and literary circles in London, a success due in great degree to his talents as a singer and songwriter.

Thomas Moore was to be the registrar of the Admiralty Prize Court in Bermuda.

Thomas Moore, nonetheless, was dogged by the report that the police had found that the pistol given to Jeffrey was unloaded.

In 1809, Thomas Moore was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Between 1808 and 1810, Thomas Moore appeared each year in Kilkenny, Ireland, with a charitable mixed repertory of professional players and high-society amateurs.

Thomas Moore favoured comic roles in plays like Sheridan's The Rivals and O'Keeffe's The Castle of Andalusia.

Thomas Moore was dying of tuberculosis that riddled the family when, according to Foreign Legion records, he was killed in action on 6 February 1846.

In 1818, it was discovered that the man Thomas Moore had appointed his deputy in Bermuda had embezzled 6,000 pounds sterling, a large sum for which Thomas Moore was liable.

Byron entrusted him with a manuscript for his memoirs, which, as his literary executor, Thomas Moore promised to have published after Byron's death.

In Paris, Thomas Moore was joined by Bessy and the children.

In 1821, several emigres, prominent among them Myles Byrne refused to attend a St Patrick's day dinner Thomas Moore had organised in Paris because of the presiding presence of Wellesley Pole Long, a nephew of the Duke of Wellington.

Once Thomas Moore learned the Bermuda debt had been partly cleared with the help of Lord Lansdowne, the family, after more than a year, returned to Sloperton Cottage.

Widely read, so that Thomas Moore eventually produced a sequel, was the verse novel The Fudge Family in Paris.

Thomas Moore greatly admired Swift as a satirist, but charged him with caring no more for the "misery" of his Roman Catholic countrymen "than his own Gulliver for the sufferings of so many disenfranchised Yahoos".

Thomas Moore rallied to the "liberal compromise" proposed by Henry Grattan, who had moved the enfranchisement of Catholics in the old Irish parliament.

Such argument made little headway against the man Thomas Moore decried as a demagogue, but who, as a result of his uncompromising stand, was to emerge as the undisputed leader of the Catholic interest in Ireland, Daniel O'Connell.

Thomas Moore lived to see the exceptional papal discretion thus confirmed reshaping the Irish hierarchy culminating in 1850 with the appointment of the Rector of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, Paul Cullen, as Primate Archbishop of Armagh.

Thomas Moore is, as Moore had been, a Catholic student at Trinity College.

In 1816, Thomas Moore had published a A Series of Sacred Songs, Duets and Trios of which the first, "Thou art, O God", became a popular hymn.

Thomas Moore acknowledged scholarly failings, some of which stemmed from his inability to read documentary sources in Irish.

For Thomas Moore this was evidenced by the prime-ministerial careers of George Canning and Robert Peel: "mere commoners by birth could never have attained the same high station among the Whig party".

In 1832, Thomas Moore declined a voter petition from Limerick to stand for the Westminster Parliament as a Repeal candidate.

The difficulty, Thomas Moore suggested, was that these "truths" did not permit him to pretend with O'Connell that reversing the Acts of Union would amount to something less than real and lasting separation from Great Britain.

From 1806 to 1807, Thomas Moore dramatically changed his style of writing and focus.

The principal source for the tunes was Edward Bunting's A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music to which Thomas Moore had been introduced at Trinity by Edward Hudson.

Thomas Moore believed that to occupy the salaried position he would have to tone down his political views.

Thomas Moore was providing texts to what he described as "our national music", and his lyrics did often "reflect an unmistakable intimation of dispossession and loss in the music itself".

Eoin MacWhite and Kathleen O'Donnell have found that the political undertone of the Melodies and of other of Thomas Moore's works was readily appreciated by dissidents in the imperial realms of eastern Europe.

Thomas Moore was much criticised by contemporaries for allowing himself to be persuaded, on the grounds of their indelicacy, to destroy Byron's Memoirs.

In 1821, with Byron's blessing, Thomas Moore sold the manuscript, with which Byron had entrusted him three years before, to the publisher John Murray.

Thomas Moore stands in the centre of a calotype dated April 1844.

Thomas Moore is pictured with members of the household of William Henry Fox Talbot, the photographer.

Thomas Moore was reduced ultimately to senility, which came suddenly in December 1849.

Thomas Moore died on 25 February 1852, in his seventy-third year, having outlived his wife, his five children and most of his friends and companions.

Thomas Moore was buried in Bromham churchyard within view of his cottage home, and beside his daughter Anastasia, near Devizes in Wiltshire.

Thomas Moore had appointed as his literary executor, Lord John Russell, the Whig leader who, just four days before Thomas Moore's death, had ended his first term as Prime Minister.

The Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore appeared in eight volumes, published between 1853 and 1856.

Not only did the bathos and nostalgia of Thomas Moore's verse appear suspect, as a form of home and public entertainment its reading and recitation did not survive the developments in mass media: cheap print, the recorded voice, the moving image.

Thomas Moore is commemorated in several places: by a plaque on the house where he was born, by busts at The Meetings and Central Park, New York, and by a bronze statue near Trinity College Dublin.