SEARC'S WEB GUIDE - Michael Davitt (1846-1906)

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< Searc's Web Guide to 19th Century Ireland - Michael Davitt (1846-1906)

Michael Davitt was born in County Mayo where his family were evicted from their farm in 1852. The family emigrated to Lancashire where Davitt was employed as a child labourer and lost an arm in a factory accident at the age of nine. He later worked in a post-office and printing works. In 1865 Davitt joined the Fenian movement and, in 1868, he became Secretary of the IRB and an armaments agent in England. In 1870 Davitt was arrested for smuggling guns to Ireland and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment on the uncorroborated evidence of John Joseph Corydon, a spy.
On his release in 1878 Davitt gave lecture tours in England, Ireland and in America. In 1879 he founded the National Land League with Charles Stewart Parnell.
In 1881 Davitt was imprisoned in Portland Prison and was elected an MP for County Meath but his election was declared void because of his imprisonment. He was released in 1882 and published The Prison Life of Michael Davitt from which the extract below is taken.
Davitt was elected MP for South Mayo in 1895 and in 1898 he, together with William O'Brien, founded the United Ireland League. In 1899 Davitt resigned his parliamentary seat over the Boer War. In 1903 he visited Russia and in 1904 he published The Fall of Feudalism. Davitt helped found the English Labour Party with Kerr Hardie in 1905.©

Michael Davitt (1846-1906)

Liberty! Who that has not himself been once imprisoned can appreciate what this means? Who that has not had to look forward with aching heart and longing soul for days, months, years, to the time when he would once again find himself unfettered, free to talk with his fellow-man - at liberty to exercise the rights of his nature's manhood, undeterred by prison rules or the threat of the warder's reports, can realise what that heaven-born word implies! I was liberated once - unexpectedly set free, after seven and a half years of close imprisonment, and I am almost inclined to say, that the punishment involved in a penal servitude of that duration would be worth enduring again to enjoy the wild, ecstatic, soul-filling happiness of the first day of freedom. It is a sensation of delight akin to that which Adam must have experienced upon waking to life and consciousness in the Garden of Eden; only Adam's memory could recall neither pain nor sorrow as a contrast to the living pleasure of Paradise; while everything which meets the gaze of the liberated prisoner, every thought of the present and the future assumes a brighter hue and wears a more blissful meaning from the terrible recollection of the felon degradation, the narrow cell, the stinted sunlight, the loathesome daily task, the brutal warder, and the weary, heart-longing expectancy for the hour of deliverance...
It was a lovely morning in the autumn of 1881, and the infirmary garden in Portland Prison was aglow with the bloom of the late summer flowers which the Governor had kindly permitted me to sow in the early portion of the year. The English Channel, which often lulls the weary Portland prisoner to sleep by the storm-chorus of its waves as they dash against the rocks underneath the walls, lay in unruffled calm.
From the headland upon which the great convict establishment stands could be seen the picturesque shadows which the Dorsetshire cliffs flung out upon the bosom of the sea. Away beyond the coast-line appeared harvest-fields and homesteads, melting into the distance, and so sadly suggestive of what imprisonment was not - liberty, home, and friends - conjuring up that contrast between the manacled and the free which constitutes the keenest mental pain in the punishment of penal servitude.
It was a day which would fill one's whole being with a yearning to be liberated - a day of sunshine and warmth and beauty, and the moment had arrived when my resolution to give freedom to my little feathered 'chum' could no longer be selfishly postponed. [Davitt kept a Blackbird in his prison cell]. I opened his door with a trembling hand, when quick as a flash of lightning he rushed from the cage with a wild scream of delight, and in a moment was beyond the walls of the prison! The instinct of freedom was too powerful to be resisted, though I had indulged the fond hope that he would have remained with me. But he taught me the lesson, which can never be unlearned by either country, prisoner or bird, that Nature will not be denied, and that liberty is more to be desired than fetters of gold. © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008

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