CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY. – Writer and political figure, b. at Monagham (Ireland) on 12 Apr. 1816, d. at Nice on 9 Feb. 1903. After collaborating in his youth with the Northern Herald and the Morning Register, he became editor of the Vindicator, a Catholic newspaper in Ulster, in 1839. In 1842, together with the two lawyers Thomas Davis and John Dillon, he founded The Nation, a paper that became the most effective advocate of O’Connell’s principles, which Duffy initially shared. Both were imprisoned in 1844 and released together, but they parted ways in 1846 when Duffy joined the Young Ireland movement. Tried for high treason, he escaped conviction and resumed publication of his newspaper in 1849. In 1852 he was elected Member of Parliament for the county of New Ross, but failed to reconcile Catholics and Protestants on the land question and emigrated to Melbourne in 1856. There in 1857 he served as a minister and in 1877 as a reporter to the House of Assembly. Returning to Europe in 1880, he settled in France; Duffy was the first president of the Irish Literary Society (1891).
Works: The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845); Four Years of Irish History (1883); Young Ireland (1884); The League of North and South (1886); Conversation with Carlyle (1892); Memoirs (1898); My Life in Two Hemispheres (1903).