Gerald Griffin

Gerald Griffin was an Irish novelist, poet and playwright. His novel The Collegians was the basis of Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawn. Feeling he was "wasting his time" writing fiction, he joined the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious congregation founded by Edmund Ignatius Rice to teach the children of the poor.

Gerald Griffin was born in Limerick in 1803, the youngest son of thirteen children of a substantial Catholic farming family. Patrick Griffin, his father, also made a living through brewing, and he participated as one of Grattan's Irish Volunteers. His mother came from the ancient Irish family of the O'Brien's, and first introduced Gerald to English literature. When he was aged seven, Griffin's family moved to Fairy Lawn, a house near Loghill, Co. Clare, which sat on a hill above the bank of the Shannon estuary, about twenty-seven miles from Limerick. Here Griffin had an idyllic childhood and received a classical education. "When free from his books he was wont to roam through the neighbouring countries, so rich in ruins, which told him of the past glories of his native land. At that time, too he got an insight into the customs of the people and became familiar with the popular legends and folk-tales which he later worked into his stories."

In 1820 the family at Fairy Lawn was broken up. The parents with several of the children emigrated to America and settled in the State of Pennsylvania. Gerald, with one brother and two sisters, was left behind under the care of his elder brother William, a practicing physician in Adare, County Limerick. Griffin met John Banim in Limerick city. Inspired by the successful production of Banim's play Damon and Pythias (1821), Griffin moved to London in 1823; he was nineteen years of age. After an unsuccessful attempt at becoming a playwright, Griffin endured years of poverty in London, managing only to scrape by through writing reviews for periodicals and newspapers. At the end of two years he obtained steady employment in the publishing house as reader and reviser of manuscripts, and in a short time became frequent contributor to some of the leading periodicals and magazines. Griffin's early Literary Gazette pieces vividly described the rural setting of his childhood; recounted Irish folklore; translated the Celtic Irish language for the English readers; and, as Robert Lee Wolff has observed, "waxed richly sardonic about Irishmen who tried to be more English than the English."