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Frank Frankfort Moore (1855–1931) was an Irish journalist, novelist, dramatist, and poet. He was a Belfast Protestant and a unionist, but his historical fiction during the years of Home Rule agitation did not shy from themes of Irish-Catholic dispossession.

Belfast years

Moore was born in Limerick, but was raised in Belfast where he records as his earliest memory was witnessing dragoons, sabres drawn, rushing sectarian rioters in the street below his nursery window.

Moore's father was a successful clockmaker and jeweller, and the home was relatively cultured (both French and German were spoken). However, as a member of the ultra-puritan Open Brethren sect the elder Moore sought to restrict his children's reading to religious and didactic titles. The evangelist Michael Paget Baxter, who identified the Emperor Napoleon III as the Beast of the Book of Revelation, was a regular visitor.

Moore was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution where he quickly learned to distance himself from his father's beliefs. He recalled the circulation of some scurrilous verses entitled "Mr. Baxter and The Beast", "proving" that Baxter himself was the Antichrist. He was to write that "if ever a mortal heard the voice of God, it would be in the garden at the cool of the day". He later took Anglican communion in the Church of Ireland.

From 1875 Moore worked for local, conservative and unionist, paper, The News Letter, but secured international assignments for a wider range of publications, including London titles. In 1878 he reported on the Berlin Congress which reconfigured the Balkans, and in 1879 (with an enthusiasm for empire) wrote despatches from South Africa on the Zulu War. He went on to travel and report from India, Burma and South America.

Moore's 1893 novel, "I Forbid the Banns": the Story of a Comedy that was Played Seriously, was eventually to sell over half a million copies. The heroine, a young Australian women, scandalises society by operating on the principle that "if marriage is founded upon true affection, the tie will be regarded as sacred by the man and the woman without the necessity of any civil contract". Complications ensue and the experiment proves a failure.

The success of the novel gave Moore gave the confidence to launch himself a literary career--in London. He celebrated his departure from Belfast by publishing a collection of anecdotal reminiscences, A Journalist's Notebook (1894) which gave widespread offence to his former colleagues. The ethno-Irish Democratic-Party machine was a demonstration of the corrupt practices that would be a mark an Irish parliament. On these lines Moore wrote satires of Irish Home Rule such as Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister (1892), The Viceroy of Muldoon and The Rise and Fall of Larry O’Lannigan JP (1893), albeit in "the gentle mould of Somerville and Ross rather than the turbulent bigotry of [the unionist leaders] Carson and Craig".

Where Moore's fiction portrays Cromwell's crimes of conquest, the Lord Protector nonetheless retains the aura of "a Carlylean Great Man". His Gaels, by comparison, are "inefficient fantasists". It is suggested that Moore "feared the mass Catholicism of the western peasantry and the Belfast slums as the enemy of individual freedom and economic progress". the Ireland that he describes in his last work, A Mixed Grill (1930), has been described as "a country best suited to the gentlemanly pursuit of hunting, now departed."

  • Love Alone is Lord (1905)
  • The Artful Miss Dill (1906)
  • The Love that Prevailed (1907)
  • Captain Latymer (1908)
  • Fanny's First Novel (1913)
  • The Ulsterman (1914)
  • The Lady of the Reef (1915)
  • Courtship of Prince Charming (1920)
  • A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude (1920)
  • The Hand and Dagger (1928)

Plays

  • A March Hare (1877)
  • Moth and Flame (1878)
  • The Mayflower (1892)
  • Kitty Clive, Actress (1895)

Satire

  • Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister (1892)
  • The Viceroy of Muldoon (1893)
  • The Rise and Fall of Larry O’Lannigan JP (1893)
  • The Lighter Side of English Life (1914)
  • A Mixed Grill (1914)

Biography

  • The Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1910)

History

  • A Georgian Pageant (1908)

Travelogues and commentary

  • The truth about Ulster (London : E. Nash, 1914)
  • Belfast by the Sea (originally appeared as a series of 61 articles in the Belfast Telegraph, 1923-4) (1928).

Notable Quotations

"He knew that to offer a man friendship when love is in his heart is like giving a loaf of bread to one who is dying of thirst." The Jessamy Bride

"I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God, it would be in a garden at the cool of the day." A Garden of Peace

References

  • Read Moore's biography of Oliver Goldsmith at the Internet Archive
  • From Limerick City Library/Local Studies/Books & Journals/Worthies of Thomond, a collection of biographical notices of notable people of Co. Limerick & Clare by Robert Herbert

: August 2019, there are no LC catalogue records as Phineas O’Flannagan, LCCN nr2007005432, or Bernard O'Hea, LCCN nr2007005431.