Alice Milligan is perhaps best remembered, where she is remembered, for her book of verse Hero Lays (1908), for her editing of the Shan Van Vocht, a monthly journal, from 1896 to 1899. Then Griffith and William Rooney launched the new weekly The United Irishman and Alice and Anna Johnston (Ethna Carbery) gracefully withdrew and closed their paper. They were in sympathy with Griffith.
Flann Campbell in The Dissenting Voice (Blackstaff 1991), a fine study of the times, writes that there was sentimentality but not so much on contemporary social issues in it. Yet it reminded people of history that was not fashionable in many northern circles. And they did campaign for Fenian prisoners and published a couple of articles by James Connolly when he was not widely known.
There was a novel, written in the Twenties which seems out of keeping with much of her previous work, in that it carries nineteenth century Oirishness and alarming phonetic dialogue. You think it must be a roman a clef which bore messages to the people of that decade. It is called The Dynamite Drummu and concerns the adventures of an American who arrives in Ireland to sell off a piece of land in Donegal and then, in his rambles, brings us on a guidebook tour of the North and some places nearer Dublin.
We have lost the key. Is, for example, a buffoonish scene of table rapping in the Chamber of Newgrange a dig at Moore's famous account of his visit to the same place with AE?
Less dramatic is the story of his tour of the Giant's Causeway. Maybe this has some relevance to Thackeray's book on his travels in Ireland. Biddy McQuillan dispenses glasses of water at the famous Wishing Well. "Good spring water for sixpence a mug. Drink your fill and no matter what ye wish for, yer sure to get it." Says our American: "A mighty price you're chargin' for this water, ma'am and I wish it was a sup of something stronger." Replies the lady: "Didn't I tell ye ye wouldn't have long to wait till your wish come true" and she drew a pint bottle and a measure from beneath her shawl. And remarked that if the water was sold dear, the whiskey was free, gratis and for nothing ... "unbeknownst to the gaugers, ye understan".
Lots more like that. She wrote it with her brother William. It was published by Martin Lester, Dublin. Bulmer Hobson a director, told her it sold only four hundred copies, according to Sheila Turner Johnston, author of Alice; a Life of Alice Milligan. The US visitor was called Telemachus DuQuesne from Oshkosk, Wisconsin. His father's brother, he tells us, was Barney Kane.