Courtney McGrailThomas Fitzpatrick and The Lepracaun Cartoon Monthly, 1905–1915
by James Curry and Ciarán Wallace
(Dublin City Council/Fours Courts Press, €19.95m)
Felix M. Larkin
There is a rich tradition of cartooning in Ireland, shaped by our natural tendency towards irreverence. A “born sneerer”, James Joyce’s description of himself in A Portrait of the Artist, could be applied to very many of us.
In the late 18th Century, the wonderfully vivid and colourful cartoons published as supplements by the Freeman’s Journal and other organs of nationalist opinion in Dublin were immensely popular – and they are still often reproduced. They were a uniquely Irish phenomenon, with no exact equivalent in Britain.
Leprecaun
Two of the artists responsible for them were Thomas Fitzpatrick and John Fergus O’Hea, and they later collaborated on the monthly magazine, The Lepracaun, which is the subject of this wonderful new book.
It is a valuable addition to the growing scholarly literature on Irish cartoons, which includes John Killen’s The Unkindest Cut (focused on Ulster), Perry Curtis’s Images of Erin, my own work on the “Shemus” cartoons in the Freeman’s Journal in the 1920s and on Dublin Opinion, Pól Ó Duibhir’s work on Gordon Brewster’s cartoons in the Independent group of newspapers, and James Curry’s Artist of the Revolution (about Ernest Kavanagh, of the Irish Worker).
The Lepracaun was published continuously from 1905 to 1915. Fitzpatrick was its proprietor and editor until his death in 1912, after which the journal struggled on under his daughter, Mary, until its sudden and unheralded demise.
Cartoons
Each issue was a miscellany of illustrations and satirical features, with Fitzpatrick providing the bulk of the cartoons. Other cartoons were supplied chiefly by O’Hea (under the nom de plume ‘Spex’) and by another artist who signed his work as ‘S.H.Y.’ and is identified in this volume as the London-born artist Frank Reynolds.
James Curry contributes a biographical sketch of Fitzpatrick to the volume, while Ciarán Wallace reviews the contents of The Lepracaun over the span of its 122 issues. These essays are followed by a selection of 79 cartoons, each placed on a single page and with a helpful commentary on each by Wallace. There is an introduction by the contemporary artist, Jim Fitzpatrick, who is a grandson of Thomas.
While The Lepracaun aspired to a national readership, it focus was on Dublin. Wallace characterises it as having “a wry, urban sense of humour”. Politics was the most regular subject matter of its cartoons – Dublin municipal politics, as well as national politics – but other aspects of life in Dublin also featured strongly, and the magazine evinced a particular sympathy with the urban poor.
According to Wallace, however, it was somewhat hostile towards both the labour movement and the cause of women’s suffrage.
The cartoons were skilfully drawn and they certainly had the capacity to pack a punch, but they seem to me often more propagandistic than humorous and their style is somewhat old-fashioned even by the standard of their time.
Change
A more subtle and crisper kind of cartoon had already begun to appear in London newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror – part of the so-called ‘Northcliffe revolution’ which transformed newspapers into mass-circulation, populist organs.
This change in cartooning practice came late to Ireland, long after The Lepracaun had ceased publication.
Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in The Lepracaun cartoons. They provide a fascinating insight into politics and society in Ireland in the years before the 1916 Rising, and they are well presented in this splendidly designed volume published by Dublin City Council as part of its Decade of Commemorations programme.