Memoirs of Captain Rock

Memoirs of Captain Rock

Author	Thomas Moore
Language	English
Genre	Satirical novel
Publisher	Longmans
Publication date	1824
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print

The Memoirs of Captain Rock is an 1824 satirical novel by the Irish writer Thomas Moore. It was first published in London by Longmans. It was released the same year as the destruction of his friend Lord Byron's Memoirs which had left Moore £2,000 poorer. The story is inspired by the mythical Captain Rock, leader of a popular agrarian insurgency in Ireland similar to Captain Swing in England. It purports to be the memoirs of his family's career, told to a naïve visitor to the island.

Moore had been long resident in England, and was a noted figure in Regency society in Whig circles, but retained an interest in Irish affairs and supported the Catholic Committee which sought to abolish the penal laws. Moore was inspired by an 1823 trip he made across Ireland with his Anglo-Irish Whig patron the Marquess of Lansdowne, who owned large estates in the West of Ireland. Moore had initially intended travel in the company of his friend Lord John Russell, the future Prime Minister, who had to pull out at the last moment. Moore witnessed the poverty of parts of rural Ireland which, as a Dubliner, he had previously been largely sheltered from, and was intrigued by stories he heard of the mythical Captain Rock who led the rural insurgency. On returning to his Wiltshire home near Bowood, he wrote the piece as a diversion from his work on his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Bibliography

• Kelly, Ronan. Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore. Penguin Books, 2009.
• Swift, Roger & Gilley, Sheridan (ed.) The Irish in Britain, 1815-1939. Rowman & Littlefield, 1989.