Gentlemen1
You have lately attained an unenviable notoriety. The wide world of newspaper readers is aware of your physical entity. Scraps from the Sligo Champion transferred to the columns of Jerrold2 and the Times3 have carried your fame further than many of your mothers ever anticipated! Thus have I made your acquaintance.
I have not been in Ireland many days, still have I seen sufficient to sadden my heart4 and relax the fastening of my breeches pockets. Inconvenient stirrings of humanity, unworthy perhaps of your participation! You are no ordinary men. Any fellow with an average impregnation of the Devil might by an effort button up his sympathies against the pleadings of Woe everywhere existent. By a stern act of volition I might do the same myself. But you, Sligo officials, stop not here. You push your heroic principles beyond the boundaries of passive indifference. Joyfully death-defiant you stand forth a rollicking antithesis to the scenes which surround you. Ireland's year of mourning is your year of jubilee! Gallant souls! Jolly sparks from that primeval spirit which sung tenor to Nero’s cat-gut when he fiddled over burning Rome!5
Sligo Officials, there are two laws to which I may appeal – The first and holiest is God's law written in the hearts of all though oft illegible through the disfigurements of selfishness, snobbism and folly – that law which binds your sympathies with humanity and claims soft pity for the wretched. This to your own consciences Gentlemen. If you heed it not then I tell you there is a law to control perforce your Baccanalian exhibitions. Potent as your gastronomic coterie may deem itself, it is less than a maggot beneath the heel of Public Opinion. Provoke this agency and
‘The joys and the wishes
The loaves and the fishes6
On which you so wantonly revel
Will go – and quite right –
To the people's delight
Most exceedingly quick to the Devil!’7
Wat Ripton8 | Ex. Gov. official
RI MS JT/2/13a/185
JT Journal Transcript Only
Gentlemen: Tyndall’s journal entry for 11 March 1847, in which this letter was copied, recorded that Tyndall wrote this letter ‘to the Editor of the Sligo Champion concerning the Government officials’ (RI MS JT/2/13a/185). The Sligo Champion was an Irish newspaper founded in 1836. Tyndall appears to be responding to recent accusations that government officials in Ireland’s County Sligo were profiting from the Great Famine by accepting government aid and not passing the funds or food to the neediest citizens in their county. An untitled editorial for the Times of London on 25 February 1847, for example, mentioned that “a Sligo paper … distinctly charges the gentry and magistracy of the county with trafficking in the people’s misfortune for their own lucre” (Times, 25 February 1847, p. 4).
columns of Jerrold: probably either Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, which flourished in the mid-1840s, or Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, which lasted from 1846 until 1848. M. Fryckstedt, ‘Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 19:1 (Spring 1986), pp. 2-27, on p. 2.
the Times: a widely read daily British newspaper published in London.
still have I seen sufficient to sadden my heart: probably a reference to the Great Famine in Ireland.
Nero’s cat-gut when he fiddled over burning Rome: Roman Emperor Nero allegedly fiddled while the Great Fire of Rome burnt his city in 64 AD. Cat-gut was occasionally used to string violins and fiddles.
The loaves and the fishes: a reference to two Biblical miracles, in each of which Jesus was able to feed thousands of people using just a few loaves of bread and fish.
‘The joys and wishes … to the Devil!’ : unidentified poem, possibly written by Tyndall himself.
Wat Ripton: one of Tyndall’s most frequent pseudonyms.
Please cite as “Tyndall0328,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0328