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When asked what he had missed most during four years' imprisonment, Charles Kickham replied: "Children and women and fires." This gentle Fenian was released from Woking jail in March 1869, broken in health.

On returning to Mullinahone, Co Tipperary, his hearing and eyesight - damaged since youth - continued to deteriorate. None the less, he completed his blockbuster, Knocknagow, which he dedicated to his nieces, Annie and Josie Cleary. According to Kickham's biographer, Prof Vincent Comerford, the two girls entered "intimately into the making of Knocknagow". But they were soon condemned to the emigrant ship. "Good Lord," Kickham wrote to Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, "how horribly dark and dumb the world will be when my two interpreters are gone."