In 2008 the State Library of Victoria was the recipient of a selection of papers, books and other items from the descendents of the former Premier and Chief Justice of Victoria, Sir William Hill Irvine (1858–1943).1 Born at Dromalane, Newry, in Co. Down, William Irvine was educated at Royal School, Armagh, and Trinity College Dublin. Following graduation he entered King's Inn at Henrietta Street Dublin, to further his legal studies. William's father, Hill Irvine, owner of a linen-mill, succumbed to bankruptcy in the late 1870s and died soon after. In 1879, at the instigation of William Irvine's mother Margaret, sister to the Irish political thinker John Mitchel, the Irvine family set out for Melbourne, where they took up residence in Richmond later that year.2 William Irvine, a conservative in politics, loyal supporter of the British Crown, advocate of Federation, and campaigner for conscription during World War One, went on to pursue a legal career in Victoria, achieving notable success in both State and Federal politics, in his later political years being appointed both Lieutenant Governor and Acting Governor of Victoria.3

William Irvine was described by some of his political peers as dignified, upright and statesman-like, a tribute perhaps to his Ulster background; but for others he was reserved and impossible to read. As one journalist noted, ‘he thinks every subject out for himself, studies it, considers it, and comes to a decision quite independently of platforms and programmes’.4 It was this extreme independence of mind, a hint, perhaps, of the northern-Irish Unitarianism from which his family had sprung, that made Irvine vulnerable in Australian party politics. In 1904, Irvine introduced a Strike Suppression Bill, followed immediately with the sending in of strike-breakers to halt the Locomotive Engine-driver's and Firemen's Association strike that was disrupting vital State infrastructure. This unilateral course of action, typical of Irvine's political thinking, caused him immense personal anxiety, and is seen as the incident that hastened his quick exit from the Victorian Premiership.5

Although William Irvine lived a very rich political and legal life, few papers survive from 1894, when he first contested a seat at Lowan for the Victorian Legislative Assembly, until his appointment, in 1919, as Lieutenant Governor of Victoria. A small number of Irvine letters can be found amongst the Alfred Deakin Papers and other political papers held by the National Library of Australia,6 and the present family collection contains a scattering of letters, ephemera, and other items relating to political and judicial appointments. However, the presumption is that the bulk of William Irvine's papers are no long extant. The State Library's collection of Irvine material is, therefore, not a political collection but one that documents key family memories, and events of personal, political, and religious significance. When last used by legal historian J. M. Bennett, in writing his ‘Notes on the Life of Sir William Irvine’, this collation, still in family hands, was referred to as the ‘Irvine Family Papers’.7 Thus one finds some notable family items; a very fine set of correspondence between William Irvine and his future wife, Agnes Sommerville Wanliss of Ballarat,8 eldest daughter of T. D. Wanliss, member of the Legislative Assembly;9 letters to and from Irvine's mother, Margaret Mitchel, a letter from his uncle, William Mitchel, to his sister Henrietta Irvine, in Melbourne; and another from William Irvine's New York resident grandmother, Mrs Mary Mitchel (née Haslett), to his father, Hill Irvine. There is fragmentary correspondence and other items relating to the life of William Irvine's famous uncle, John Mitchel, graduate of Trinity College Dublin, solicitor, historian, journalist, newspaper proprietor, political prisoner and later MP for Tipperary; and a letter from British radical and liberal statesman John Bright, to William Irvine's father, Hill Irvine, discussing Irish political organisation, the envelope, with the stamp of the English Queen, Victoria, deliberately turned on its head.

This collection also contains a sampling of family books: a Bible reputedly used by William Irvine, and inscribed from his aunt, Mary Mitchel, to his elder brother John Mitchel Irvine in 1879; a volume of sermons published in Newry in 1828, written by John Mitchel's father, the Rev. John Mitchel;10 an 1811 Presbyterian hymn book, like the sermons, printed and published locally in Newry11 and inscribed by Irvine's mother Margaret. There is a copy of John Mitchel's most autobiographical work, Jail Journal; or five years in British prisons, also inscribed; plus an album of photographs taken by William Irvine on his return trip to Dublin and Newry in 1904, and holding photos of the family home ‘Dromalane’. This collection also includes some notable political items; a signed photographic calling card of American Confederate General Robert E. Lee, perhaps significant to the Irvine family for several reasons. Firstly, as two of William Irvine's first cousins, William and John C. Mitchel, died fighting for the Confederate Army, William under Lee's command; and secondly, as Irvine's aunt, Mary Mitchel, married Colonel Roger Page of Richmond, Virginia, often referred to as a nephew of General Lee.12 Of particular note in the collection is a complete set of the rare Irish political newspapers, the United Irishman, Irish Felon and Irish Tribune, newspapers edited and published by John Mitchel, John Martin, James Fintan Lalor, Thomas Devin Reilly, and Kevin O'Doherty. Like Mitchel, both O'Doherty and Martin were transported to Van Diemen's Land for their involvement in the Felon; Reilly escaped to America before prosecution for his work on the Tribune, while Lalor, a one time co-editor of the Felon, was imprisoned for five months, reinventing himself in later Irish politics.13

Printed and published weekly from 12 February to the 22 July 1848, each of these newspapers was, in turn, suppressed under the 1848 Treason Felony Act. Stamped postage marks on the copies indicate they were sent from Dublin to the family at Dromalane, Newry. The newspapers were most likely bound by Hill Irvine and are initialled and dated ‘old new year's day 1850’. One copy of the United Irishman, 26 February 1848, has John Mitchel's signature inscribed at the top left hand side of the facing page. While complete copies of the United Irishman and Irish Felon are held by a number of national and university libraries, including Trinity College Dublin and the British Library, complete runs of all three newspapers are scarce.14

It is perhaps appropriate to provide some context here for the Mitchel and Irvine families. Mitchel's pedigree is politically notable; his father, the Rev. John Mitchel, was a dissenting Unitarian Minister who had split from the Ulster Presbyterian Synod in 1829 and was well known, and criticised, as a minister who supported Catholic emancipation and who, in his pastoral work, aided poor Ulster Catholics; the Rev. Mitchel was referred to by some of his parishioners as ‘Papist Mitchel’.15 In the year John Mitchel published his first book – on the seventeenth century Ulster military and political leader, Hugh O'Neill – his uncle William Haslett was elected Lord Mayor of Londonderry, a city dominated by the politics of the loyalist organisation the Apprentice Boys. Mitchel's mother, Mary Haslett, was from a family fully involved in the republican United Irish uprising of 1798. Mitchel would also tell the story of his father, who, as a teenager, had taken the United Irish oath,16 the penalty of which was death or transportation. While true, the circumstances were slightly more complex than his telling, Mitchel always ready to embellish his radical connections. Mitchel's closest friend, fellow transportee and future brother-in-law John Martin, later became MP for Co. Meath; while two of Mitchel's nephews reached high political office, one, John Purroy Mitchel, as Mayor of New York City (1914–1917),17 the other, William Irvine, as Premier of Victoria. John Mitchel himself, in his last years, and to make a political point, stood for the seat of Tipperary on a Home Rule ticket; he won twice but was twice disqualified, still deemed in English law a political exile and therefore ineligible for public office. Mitchel and John Martin died within months of each other, Martin's parliamentary seat being filled by the then political unknown Charles Stewart Parnell, who had the previous year contributed significant financial support to John Mitchel's election campaign for Tipperary.18 In addition, Mitchel's wife, Jenny Verner, a noted activist in her own right, lived on until 1900. Her residence in New York city became a well known centre of Irish political and cultural activity.19

Such political connections would undoubtedly have been talked about in the family and would have impacted upon the life of the young William Irvine. Even in later years Irish politics was not far from the Irvine home. In 1889 Irish activist and former MP, John Dillon, on his fundraising tour of Australia and New Zealand, visited William Irvine's mother and sisters in Melbourne.20 Hill Irvine, William's father, was a solid friend of John Mitchel, and both his mother and father corresponded regularly with his exiled uncle. As a child Irvine would have known his Mitchel cousins who came from France on a number of occasions to stay for extended periods at Dromalane. In 1874, when the sixteen year old William Irvine was in his last year at secondary school in Armagh, John Mitchel returned to Ireland accompanied by his Australian-born daughter Isabel. They stayed in Dublin, dined with Lady Wilde, Irish nationalist writer and mother of Oscar, and travelled north to see Mitchel's sisters in County Down. Early in the following year he returned again, having been persuaded to contest the British Parliamentary seat for Tipperary. His successful election here was major news throughout the country with some of the biggest gatherings ever seen taking place in Tipperary town and Clonmel as thousands came out to see and hear Mitchel who was accompanied on the hustings by his son, the Civil War veteran James Mitchel and his sister Henrietta, William Irvine's aunt and wife of MP John Martin.21

Mitchel, whose health had never been particularly good, took seriously ill and died a little over a month later at the Irvine-Mitchel family home, Dromalane.22 More than ten thousand attended Mitchel's funeral in Newry, with major Irish political figures present; his death was reported widely in the American press with telegrams sent from numerous political organisations and individuals, including the Governor of Virginia and ex-Confederate President Jefferson Davis.23 While there is no firm evidence from the Irvine family papers that Mitchel and William Irvine met, it is highly likely that they did over 1874–75 when Mitchel returned to Ireland. Family evidence certainly suggests that Sir William Irvine was immensely proud of his uncle John Mitchel,24 and when he returned home to Newry in 1904 his speech to the leading citizens of the town, in the Board Room of the Newry Town Hall, paid particular respect to his father, Hill Irvine, his Uncle William Mitchel,25 who had been like a father to him after the sudden death of Hill Irvine, and to his famous uncle, John Mitchel. As the Newry Reporter of 9th July 1904 noted, when reporting the speech;

John Mitchel's connections with Australia date from 1853 when he arrived in Van Diemen's Land with the dubious distinction of being the first Irish nationalist to have ever been sentenced by a piece of British legislation designed specifically for the individual being transported.27 This was the Treason Felon Act (1848). Mitchel was arrested at his home in Dublin on 13 May 1848 and brought before a special Criminal Session sitting in the infamous Green Street Court. Two weeks later, on 26 May, he was convicted and shipped, before dawn, to a prison island in Cove Bay, County Cork. As proprietor of the Dublin newspaper the United Irishman, Mitchel was sentenced for treason, the writing and publishing of seditious articles likely to foment riot or revolutionary behaviour.

Mitchel was held at Cork in isolation for two months before being placed on a transportation ship bound for Barbados in the Caribbean. He spent one year in Barbados, confined to his ship, then months at sea en route to South Africa. Following weeks anchored off the coast of Cape Town, Mitchel was sent on a further sea voyage, eventually landing in Van Diemen's Land on 7 April 1850, two years after his initial arrest.28 Within a short time Mitchel found himself in the company of his political compatriots, including John Martin, William Smith O'Brien, Kevin O'Doherty, Thomas Meagher, and others, in arguably one of the most isolated outposts of the British Empire.29

Mitchel's sojourn in Australia was a brief three years. His escape from his farm near Bothwell, Van Diemen's Land, was largely engineered by Irish political interests in New York and aided by Mitchel's many friends and acquaintances on the Island.30 After careful planning and a number of mishaps, one that saw him miss his ship to Melbourne, Mitchel, with his wife Jenny and family, sailed to Sydney, on to Tahiti and then New York, via an extended stay in San Francisco. After passing Staten Island and landing at No. 3 Pier, North River, New York, on 29 November 1853, Mitchel was fêted as a hero, paraded through the suburbs of Brooklyn accompanied by numerous marching bands and contingents of the New York police, and made guest of honour at a banquet held by the mayor at City Hall.31 In the months after his arrival Mitchel again resumed his work for Irish political self-determination. He established the Irish newspaper the Citizen, its prospectus prominently set out in Irish ethnic newspapers around the world, like the 20 May 1854 issue of the Sydney Freeman's Journal,32 and, over the following year-and-a-half, published his classic nineteenth century prison diary Jail Journal, documenting his enforced exile, a key trope for nineteenth century Irish Diaspora politics.33 In 1855 Mitchel settled in Tennessee, for a number of years farming and editing the Southern Citizen before moving this newspaper to Washington DC in 1858, in order to be closer to the centre of American political activity. However, restlessness, and the possibility of a conflict in Anglo-French relations, saw him decide to move to Paris in 1859 with a view of working for Irish interests from that city.

There are a number of areas in Mitchel's life that are biographically significant and which throw considerable light on some of the contents to be found in this collection. Firstly, the role of family and his extended relations in Ulster; secondly, his work with the Young Ireland group including Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy and the setting-up of his own newspaper the United Irishman; thirdly, his life as political prisoner and Irish exile, memorialised in his most popular work Jail Journal, a work that is also a finely drawn text giving considerable insight into the development of Mitchel's social and political thinking; and finally, Mitchel's significance as historian, newspaper journalist,34 noted scholar and ‘man of letters’,35 author of such influential works as the Jail Journal (1853), Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (1861);36 The History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick (1868); and the Crusade of the Period (1873).

John Mitchel's very public career began in slightly inauspicious circumstances when, as a twenty-one year old, he eloped with the not-yet sixteen year old girl from Newry, Jenny Verner, whom he had been courting for some months. The couple were pursued to England by her outraged father, a military officer and prominent member of the Orange Order. For this escapade Mitchel spent eighteen days in Kilmainham jail, Dublin, pending charges for abduction, which were eventually dropped. The following year Mitchel and Jenny Verner, the love of his life, eloped again, marrying secretly at Drumcree Church, Co. Armagh on 2 February 1837. Destined to be a minister in the Presbyterian Church, Mitchel's politics were radicalised by his short years in legal practice taking on the cases of northern Irish Catholics. After engaging with the inequities of the land tenure system and local politics, and meeting with Charles Gavan Duffy and Daniel O'Connell in Belfast in 1843, he joined the Repeal Association. Mitchel was drawn to Dublin and made the decision in 1845 to accept the position of co-editor of the very influential cultural and political newspaper the Nation, established by Thomas Davis and John Blake Dillon, and operated under the proprietorship of Charles Gavan Duffy. However, Mitchel's increasingly inflammatory articles, prompted by the horrors of the Famine and the mounting death toll, saw him split with Duffy and his moderate politics. Mitchel left in 1848 to found his own newspaper the United Irishman where he further developed the ideas of James Fintan Lalor on agrarian revolution and a national rent strike. It is to the influence of John Mitchel and James Fintan Lalor that Anglo-Irish historian, W. E. H. Lecky, later attributed the political and social chaos that engulfed Ireland from the 1880s.37 Before its suppression in 1848 Lalor wrote a number of key articles for the Irish Tribune that are today considered the forerunners of the socialist republicanism developed by James Connolly and Patrick Pearse in the early twentieth century.

John Mitchel began writing narrative history at the prompting of Charles Gavan Duffy who, building on ideas outlined by Thomas Davis, saw the market for a cheap readable national Irish literature that would inspire and politicise readers.38 In 1845 Mitchel published the first in this series, a life of the Irish seventeenth century figure Hugh O'Neill,39 Irish Chieftain and Earl of Ulster who had militarily resisted Elizabethan annexation of northern Irish territory, and who had later sought political exile in Spain. This was followed by his classic prison narrative Jail Journal, his subsequent volume the History of Ireland (1869), one of the most popular Irish histories to be exported to the Australasian colonies and a text available in many editions until well into the twentieth century. One further volume, and the most enduring in terms of understanding Mitchel's thinking on the political economy of Ireland during the Great Famine, was his 1861 publication Last Conquest of Ireland, a series of extended newspaper articles that first appeared in the Tennessee newspaper Southern Citizen in 1858, and then soon after in book form.

The final facet of Mitchel's life that is of note is his role as the political transportee and the story he made of this in the Jail Journal. Perhaps, most importantly, the Jail Journal documents the beginnings of Mitchel's thoughts on events in Ireland over the 1840s, his analysis of colonialism and British Imperialism, and the evolution of his notion of both cultural accountability and political responsibility. The inevitable conclusion Mitchel reaches in the Jail Journal, and elaborates fully in his articles that became the Last Conquest of Ireland, was the doctrine that the Great Irish Famine, over the years 1846–52, was a deliberate act of ethnic genocide perpetrated by the British Government of Lord John Russell, his administration, and their immediate successors.40 As Patrick Maume has noted, it is a powerful idea that has ghosted modern Irish historiography ever since it was articulated by Mitchel.41 Further, it is a notion that almost immediately became part of the fabric of nineteenth-century Irish political discourse,42 finding instant resonance in the popular imagination, and expression in written history, fiction, and newspaper articles; it spawned the idea of the Irish nation in “enforced exile”,43 while later it was incorporated into twentieth century Irish Republican ideology.

In the William Irvine papers there are a number of documents and other items that reflect the complexity of Mitchel's personal and political life. The most important is the fragmentary sequence of nine letters, seven written over the years 1861–62, to William Irvine's mother Margaret, and his father Hill Irvine, from Choisy-le-Roi near Paris where Mitchel and some of his family were in residence; plus, a related letter from Mitchel's son John, dated 1863. One further letter of 1862, written by John Mitchel's mother in New York to Hill Irvine in Newry, is significant as it throws considerable light on Mitchel's liberal religious views vis-à-vis his daughter Henrietta and her life in Paris at this time. The genesis to the Paris sequence of letters lies in the years immediately following Mitchel's escape from Van Diemen's Land in 1853, his arrival in New York in November of that year and the setting up of the Citizen early in 1854. It was through the columns of the Citizen that Mitchel called for the creation of a radical organisation to progress Irish political aspirations. Two organisations were established over the next two years that coalesced under the control of John O'Mahoney and led to the founding of the Fenian Brotherhood in 1859 with its radical militarist agenda.44 Mitchel was associated with all these groups and by 1866 was acting as financial agent for the Fenians in Paris. However, Mitchel's first sojourn in that city was prompted by his personal desire to further the Irish political cause through his writing. In 1859 he closed the newspaper the Southern Citizen and moved to Paris for six months. He returned to the United States for a short period but was back to France with all his family in 1860 acting as foreign correspondent for a number of Irish and American newspapers including the Charleston Standard,45 the Irish American and the Irishman (Dublin).

This second residence lasted just over two years, the letters in the State Library's William Irvine papers beginning with the family's recent move from inner-city Paris to Choisy-le-Roi, fifteen minutes by train to the city centre.46 Paris was home to a number of Irish exiles and Mitchel, between writing and touring was able to make acquaintance with individuals. These included Miles O'Byrne, a participant in the Irish rebellion of 1798 and whom he had met on his first Paris visit, and John Kenyon, the priest associated with the Young Ireland group of the 1840s and a life-long friend of the Mitchel family. In addition he was on regular occasions visited by family and friends from Ireland. It is almost certain that over this period he also began collecting materials for his History of Ireland.

Mitchel was ever the exile, and such themes dominate these letters. The Paris years of 1861–62 cover a time when he could not return to Ireland for fear of re-arrest and imprisonment,47 but was able to send his two youngest girls Henrietta and Isabel to the Mitchel-Irvine home, Dromalane, to stay for extended periods with their uncle, aunt, nephews and nieces, including the very young William Irvine. These letters are gossipy in tone, revealing a very personal side to Mitchel's life, his concern for the well-being of his family, and the conflicting emotions of a man driven by personal ideals to lead a very itinerant and precarious political life, to the obvious detriment of his wife and children. Issues clearly arose regarding his politics, Mitchel's sister Matilda and her husband Dr John Dickson, at one point refusing to have any more contact with Mitchel and his family, Mitchel regretting the fact of his children being caught in the middle of this family feud.48 The logistics of moving children between County Down and Paris, with escorts, and the difficulties of communication are constantly on Mitchel's mind when writing to his sister Margaret (William Irvine's mother), however his extended network of friends and family aided communication and gave a semblance of normalcy to his otherwise fraught life.

Interspersed with domestic matters are many observations that reflect current politics in Ireland and Mitchel's frustration at not being able to return home. He notes to his brother in law, an avid reader of Mitchel's newspaper columns, that on the advice of John Blake Dillon he had ceased writing for the Dublin newspaper the Irishman. The newspaper was struggling and Mitchel was owed over £60 for copy supplied, plus other incidentals.49 Mitchel's political concerns with this paper, his desire to see a purely secular newspaper free of church influence, information, and reviews of devotional works, is in keeping with the type of newspaper format developed by Davis, Duffy, John Blake Dillon and himself in the Nation of the 1840s, and that Irish Fenians endeavoured to establish during the 1860s:50 ‘I am tired, too, of the “Holy Father,” and of the religious aspect which the Irishman gives itself’.51 Mitchel knew that he could establish a ‘New United Irishman’ newspaper, and make it pay, but he was acutely aware of the political vicissitudes of Irish life and the political and cultural pressures put on such a venture, as he wryly remarks: ‘if there were to be found a decent person in Dublin willing to take the risk of being publisher (registered proprietor) of a New United Irishman, with me for Editor, I could make it pay very well – but where is the man? For the present, I rest on my oars. I don't relish the idea of helping to keep up a miserable rag like the Irishman in its present hands’.52

Mitchel was torn between wanting to ‘do the best’ he could with his ‘particular’ political ‘trade of journalism’,53 and events that were unfolding in America. With the outbreak of the Civil War on 12 April 1861, Mitchel's financial position appeared precarious. The blockade of the Southern State ports necessitated Mitchel sending his newspaper reports, his only financial means of support, to Charleston through a Liverpool firm that was keeping communication with South Carolina open through an Express Company.54 Eventually, however, this doorway was closed and he had no news as to whether his newspaper reports were finding their way back to either South Carolina or New York. In addition, he was worried about his sons John and James, who had enlisted in the Confederate Army, James being at the battle of Manafras and having a very narrow escape in a bayonet charge.55 Any attempt to ship to New York and cross the border to the South he knew would meet with arrest and he pondered his options and that of his family in France. His girls arrived back in Paris from Dromalane at the end of September 1861, along with his sister Mary and youngest brother William, as he wrote to Hill Irvine;

As the Civil War dragged into 1862 the Mitchels became more anxious about their sons. Writing to Hill Irvine in March 1862 Mitchel noted: ‘As to our boys in America the case is very hard. We cannot get the least intelligence of them, & have now only to make up our mind to it. When the war is over somehow, if there be still two boys to the fore we shall think ourselves very fortunate’.57 However, while the need to get back to America for the sake of his sons was a pressing issue, his perception of Irish affairs, the apathy of the able, the Catholic Bishops, and those that refused to engage in political activity to bring about change brought out his ire, as no doubt his brother-in-law was fully aware;

In 1862, under the pressure of both financial and personal circumstances, Mitchel decided on a course of action, namely, to leave his two eldest daughters at the convent of Sacré Coeur in Paris, and with the help of his friend Father Kenyon, to send his wife Jenny and youngest daughter Isabel to Ireland. Mitchel would then proceed with his eighteen year old son William to America, and attempt to enter the Confederate States.59 The journey back was dangerous but Mitchel and his son, after many adventures and several narrow escapes, arrived in Richmond in October 1862. Mitchel's son William immediately joined up, but Mitchel, unable to enlist because of poor eyesight, at age forty-seven joined the ambulance corps, and was later also asked to edit the Richmond Enquirer. Mitchel was present at many unsuccessful Confederate engagements, dealing with the dead and tending to the wounded, before the final surrender of Confederate forces in 1865.

This brief but fine set of correspondence ends on a coda; a letter dated 8 September 1863 from John Mitchel's second eldest son John C. Mitchel, stationed with the Confederate Army at Fort Johnson, North Carolina. Writing home to his aunt, William Irvine's mother, the young Mitchel describes what details he was able to glean of the death of his brother William at the battle of Gettysburg, asking that the news be gently broken to his mother, who was not yet fully appraised of the death.60 In between noting that Charleston is in the first stages of the Union siege, and casually mentioning his escape from the battle at Morris Island with the loss of many of his men, John mentions his having heard of his sister Henrietta's illness and death in Paris, this shortly following her conversion to Catholicism and entry into convent life; plus other family tragedy, the deaths of his mother's brother-in-law Dr Dickson and his Uncle William's wife and child: ‘My Father is still hard at work in Richmond. James is with his Brigade facing the enemy across the Rapidan… We seem to have little other kind of news to exchange. Be kind enough to write to me and tell me how my mother bears this new affliction’.61 Towards the end of 1863 John Mitchel was joined by his wife who, with two of their girls Isabel and Mary (Minnie), had left Ireland on hearing the news of the death of her son, and had run the Union blockade, arriving in South Carolina safely, but with all their belongings, including the bulk of Mitchel's personal papers, destroyed with the firing of their ship.62 A little under a year later, in July 1864, Captain John C. Mitchel was killed in the final Union bombardment on Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

Mitchel's health declined rapidly in the early 1870s, limiting severely his ability to write and support himself and his wife Jenny. In 1874, at the instigation of John Martin, an international Mitchel Testimonial Fund was inaugurated to which significant sums were contributed by the Irish and their supporters in Victoria, New South Wales and New Zealand.63 Letters from John Martin to Joseph Winter, in the State Library's Joseph Winter papers, acknowledge the contribution made by the Australian colonies, and the lasting impact of Mitchel's work. As Martin notes; ‘glad and proud I am that the Irish in Melbourne are sensible of the great and high qualities of John Mitchel and grateful for his life long devotion to the national cause of Ireland’.64 Similar sentiments were expressed in the columns of the Sydney Freeman's Journal, acknowledging Mitchel's essential and lasting service to the cause of the injustices in Ireland in that period when very few people dared to be actively involved in Irish affairs.65

Despite the eulogies John Mitchel also had his dark side. A cantankerous and charismatic figure with devoted followers and passionate enemies, images of Mitchel in Dublin in the mid-1840s with his wife and sisters entertaining guests Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Davis, James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, novelist William Carleton, John Martin, and their constant visitor Charles Gavan Duffy, sit at odds with his later behaviour. Mitchel had the ability to alienate friend and foe alike; his break with Duffy, their mutual animosities and very public sniping in print, lasted for the remainder of their lives.66 In America, Mitchel's extreme dislike of the increasingly industrialised northern States meant he was naturally attracted to a vision of an ordered rural society like the American South, despite the fact that it was based on both class and racial inequality.67 In positioning himself with the South's plantation slave-politics, and supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War, Mitchel alienated many of his ardent followers. When confronted, as he was by many friends, he refused to back down, seemingly able to hold to opinions that were clearly inconsistent with his political writings and stated beliefs.

The Mitchel letters in the State Library's Manuscripts collection provide a rare if brief glimpse into the life of an important nineteenth century political radical. In his own lifetime Mitchel had enormous political presence, the result of his life's work in Ireland, twenty-six years in political exile, and the enduring influence of his seminal publications.68 A very close reading of Jail Journal, History of Ireland, and Last Conquest is still justified for the complexity it reveals of the writer as revolutionary, and for an understanding of the influence these works had on nineteenth-century Irish political thinking. Mitchel's life and work has continued to have an impact on twentieth century Irish political radicalism, and it is perhaps no coincidence that James Quinn's most recent biography of Mitchel was officially launched in Dublin in January 2009 by the President of Sinn Féin Gerry Adams.69 Given that the great bulk of Mitchel papers were destroyed in South Carolina in 1863, while many others used by William Dillon in his 1888 biography are no longer extant, these surviving letters, in the State Library's Sir William Hill Irvine collection, are of considerable importance.70