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The Captain and the King: William O'Shea, Parnell and Late Victorian Ireland, by Myles Dungan; pp. xxiv + 439. Dublin: New Island, 2009, £26.99, $47.95.
The sensational divorce case brought in November 1890 by Captain William O'Shea wrecked both the political future of the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell and the movement for Home Rule. In his justification for writing a biography of the MP whom Parnell cuckolded over a period of years, Myles Dungan argues that O'Shea was "far more than the mere catalyst in a national tragedy" (xvi). Dungan's aim is not to contest the ways in which O'Shea has been portrayed-whether in political memoirs by contemporaries or in twentieth- and twenty-first-century reassessments of both Parnell and Katharine O'Shea-as "a self-deluded mari complaisant" and a "place seeker par excellence" (xv, 105). Rather, it is his case that since Katharine's role in the affair (in particular, her lesser-known role as Parnell's intermediary with William Gladstone) has been revised so extensively (even "re-invented" [xv]), a reassessment of O'Shea is overdue. It's a valid position, and Dungan's focus upon O'Shea does indeed bring out neglected aspects of the political scene at the time, in particular the extent to which Irish Whigs like O'Shea, or "West Britons" as they were derisively known, served as a counterpoint to nationalist politics and to the Home Rule movement specifically (54). Dungan is particularly good at explaining the significance of the 1884 Reform Act, which more than trebled the number of Irish voters and necessarily strengthened the nationalist cause. No wonder that his Clare constituents ousted O'Shea before...