Editing Thomas Moore (section)

===''The Memoirs of Captain Rock''===
[[File:Maclise, Capt Rock, 1834 (2).jpg|thumb|left|"The Installation of Captain Rock", Daniel Maclise, 1834]]
{{Main|Memoirs of Captain Rock}}

As a partisan squib writer, Moore played a role not dissimilar to that of [[Jonathan Swift]] a century earlier. 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's Travels|Gulliver]] for the sufferings of so many disenfranchised [[Yahoo (Gulliver's Travels)|Yahoos]]".<ref name="Moore 1835">{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Memoirs of Captain Rock |date=1835 |publisher=Baudry's European Library |location=Paris |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eMmqG9-0jiEC&q=Memoirs+of+Captain+Rock&pg=PA146 |access-date=20 August 2020}}</ref><ref>Book the First, Chapter XIII, {{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Political and Historical Writings on Irish and British Affairs by Thomas Moore, Introduced by Brendan Clifford |date=1993 |publisher=Athol Books |location=Belfast |isbn=0-85034-067-5 |pages=49–50}}</ref> ''[[Memoirs of Captain Rock|The Memoirs of Captain Rock]]'' might have been Moore's response to those who questioned whether the son of a Dublin grocer entertaining English audiences from his home in [[Wiltshire]] was himself connected to the great mass of his countrymen – to those whose remitted rents helped sustain the great houses among which he was privileged to move.

''The Memoirs'' relate the history of Ireland as told by a contemporary, the scion of a Catholic family that lost land in successive English settlements. The character, [[Captain Rock]], is folkloric but the history is in earnest.  When it catches up with the narrator in the late [[Penal Laws against Irish Catholics|Penal Law]] era, his family has been reduced to the "class of wretched [[Cotter (farmer)|cottiers]]". Exposed to the voracious demands of spendthrift Anglo-Irish landlords (pilloried by [[Castle Rackrent|Maria Edgeworth]]), both father and son assume captaincies among the "White-boys, Oak-boys, and Hearts-of Steel", the tenant conspiracies that attack tax collectors, terrorise the landlords' agents and violently resist evictions.<ref>from ''Memoirs of Captain Rock'', Book the Second, Chapter I, {{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Political and Historical Writings on Irish and British Affairs by Thomas Moore, Introduced by Brendan Clifford |date=1993 |publisher=Athol Books |location=Belfast |isbn=0-85034-067-5 |pages=53–55}}</ref><ref name="Moore 1835" />

This low-level agrarian warfare continued through, and beyond, the [[Great Irish Famine]] of the 1840s. It was only after this catastrophe, which as Prime Minister Moore's Whig friend, Lord Russell, failed in any practical measure to allay,<ref>{{Cite book |title= The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 |last=Woodham-Smith |first=Cecil |publisher=Penguin |year=1962 |location=London |isbn=978-0-14-014515-1|pages=410–411}}</ref> that British governments began to assume responsibility for agrarian conditions. At the time of ''Captain Rock'''s publication (1824), the commanding issue of the day was not tenant rights or land reform. It was the final instalment of [[Catholic Emancipation]]: Castlereagh's unredeemed promise of Catholic admission to parliament.