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Introduction
- Southern Illinois University Press
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INTRODUCTION IN EVERY WAY BUT O~'"E, Joseph Holloway of Dublin was a thoroughly unremarkable man, but in that one way he was, without exaggeration, astounding. For most of his almost eighty-four years, he was a man as completely dedicated to art as his country had ever seen. His interest embraced music, painting, and, above all, the theatre. People who knew him toward the end of his life, in the 1930's and early 1940'S when he had achieved a mild local notoriety as a Dublin character, would have seen him at every art exhibition, every concert, every lecture, and every theatrical first night. In appearance he was then a short, slightly portly old gentleman with a bowler hat set squarely upon his head, with a mane of thick gray hair, a straggling moustache, drooping jowls, bright and inquisitive blue eyes, and a kindly and benevolent manner. If one knew him slightly better, one might have thonght him a trifle eccentric. The basis for this unjust judgment was that he was knovv'11 to be an indefatigable collector who for over fifty years had :filled his house to bursting with everything even remotely connected with the theatre: books, playscripts, prompt copies, playbills, scrapbooks filled with clippings, letters from actors and playwrights-a vast pile of theatrical refuse garnered from a half-century of devoted playgoing. He covered the walls of his house from floor to ceiling with paintings, sketches, .and drawings that he had commissioned young artists to make of Irish theatrical and literary figures. Ultimately, xii INTRODUCTION the walls became so completely covered that many of the pictures had to be merely stacked in heaps against the baseboards. In his later years, his study became so cluttered with his books and journals that one could only move through it along two or three narrow pathways. Once his study table collapsed under the weight of material upon it, and, rather than disturb the orderly disorder of the room, it was more convenient to let it lie undisturbed for a couple of years than to extricate it. When, toward the end of his Hfe, he contributed most of his books and pictures to the Municipal Gallery and the National Library, lorryload after lorryload was hauled away before making a significant dent in the trove. The size of the collection may have been a bit overwhelming , but the collection itself was scarcely foolish. Holloway was prompted by a purposeful and methodical devotion rather than by a whimsical eccentricity, and for the historian the material is a gold mine of information, much of which would almost certainly have been lost had not Holloway preserved it. The most remarkable memorial that Holloway left was not, however, his collection, but an immense manuscript journal called "Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer," which covers in minute detail practically everything that he saw and did for a period of over fifty years. TIlis journal is composed of 221 bulky manuscript volumes housed in the National Library of Ireland. The volumes contain over 100,000 pages upon which are semilegibly written approximately 25 million words. This vast journal was the great work of Holloway's life. In style and in artistry it is probably one of the worst books ever written, but in scope and in content it is. one of the most valuable and fascinating documents to emerge from the greatest period of Irish letters. Hanaway was born on March 21, 1861, at 71 Lower Camden Street, where his father operated a bakery shop. While Holloway was attending St. Vincent's College, [54.225.1.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:04 GMT) Introduction xiii Castleknock,. his father, who had already retired, died in January, 1874. For the next few years, Holloway went to various schools and lived with sundry relatives until finally moving with his mother and sister to 21 Northumberland Road where he lived for the rest of his life. He attended the School of Art in Kildare Street for several years, and when he was nineteen entered the office of J. J. O'Callaghan, an architect. There Holloway remained until he set up for himself as a practicing architect in 1896. Architecture did not, however, occupy a great deal of his time and attention, and he found himself increasingly attracted by the many flourishing cultural societies and clubs in Dublin and increasingly attracted by, although not to, the theatre. He was a member of the National Literary Society, the Association of Elocutionists...