How could a young Irish immigrant with only a primary school education and a checkered career as an Australian criminal refugee become a dual force in the intertwined worlds of 19th-century Boston’s high literary circles and secretive fight clubs? A respected voice among immigrant Irish Americans across the secular and religious spheres, the editor, poet, and sportsman John Boyle O’Reilly (b. 1844-1890) defied the odds faced by many first-generation immigrants. Yet he ascended to a position of social respectability and literary prestige thanks to his work with the influential and widely circulated Boston Pilot newspaper, a leading 19th-century Roman Catholic periodical and “workingman’s paper” where he was employed as reporter and editor. At the Boston Pilot, O’Reilly guided a publication that served as the dominant voice for Irish community in America, a newspaper widely recognized as such by Catholic churchmen, Fenian nationalists, and (most important) the Yankee cultural establishment of Cambridge intellectuals and Boston’s Back Bay elites.
This paper examines O’Reilly’s surprising path to literary success, his great popularity among Irish-American and Catholic readers, and – most importantly – his participation in the secret world of upper-class amateur boxing in late 19th century Boston. O’Reilly’s mercurial career thus featured high literary aspiration and genteel poetry writing that brought him friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and other important intellectuals. But he also promoted and participated in a wide range of popular athletics in the United States, with an emphasis on unsanctioned boxing in private Boston men’s clubs. He personally excelled at boxing and also wrote about boxing extensively, publishing his boxing treatise, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (1898), during an era when amateur and professional sports of all kinds were becoming popular avenues toward status and citizenship for Americans of various social backgrounds.
About the presenterJames Emmett Ryan
James Emmett Ryan is Liles Professor of English at Auburn University. He is author of Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950 (2009) and Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in Literary Culture, 1844-1931 (2013). His research on American literature and culture has appeared in many journals, including American Literary History, American Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, Religion & American Culture, Journal of American Studies, Book History, Journal of American Studies, and Leviathan.