Matt the thresher

disco biscuit

Has anybody ever heard of Matt the thresher. I cannot find anything about him in google search. I think he was from Tipperary and might have been famous for threshing corn.

HeidiHeidi

Nice pubs in Dublin and Tipp named after him!

zoe 3619

disco biscuit wrote: »

Has anybody ever heard of Matt the thresher. I cannot find anything about him in google search. I think he was from Tipperary and might have been famous for threshing corn.

Not sure,but there's a pub of that name in Birdhill,co.Tipp.

dudara

Not a Help Desk topic. Let’s try moving this to the Tipperary forum

dudara

Xenophile

Editor’s Choice: Knocknagow - Case history of an Irish Best-seller by Seán Ó Faolain
From the archive: in a story first published in 1941 Seán Ó Faolain takes a close look at why Knocknagow (1879), the novel by Charles Kickham, became such a hit with Irish readers
Mon, Oct 7, 2013, 11:20 Updated: Mon, Oct 7, 2013, 11:21

Sean O'Faolain. Photograph: Eddie Kelly

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First published: Saturday, May 10th, 1941
Charles Kickham (May 9th, 1828-August 22nd, 1882) was born in the village of Mullinahone, County Tipperary. The village is about half-way between Kilkenny and Clonmel, if you take the road through Fethard. Slievenamon is due south of it and the Slieveardagh Hills – now coming into prominence because of their coal desposits – are to the north. (They gave its name to the village of New Birmingham at their feet.)
In the year 1879, when he was fifty-one, Kickham published a novel, “Knocknagow, or the Homes of Tipperary.” It is the best-seller that any Irish novelist ever produced. (It is now in its twenty-seventh edition incorrectly marked Twenty-sixth Edition). No record exists of the size of the early editions, and most of them are undated – a bad habit with Irish publishers , which for some unknown reason they follow to this day – but we can make an adequate guess at their size, and, perhaps, be satisfied as to the minimum number of copies printed.

1,000 Copies a Year
Browne and Nolan’s informed me that they printed for the publisher (James Duffy) an edition of 5,000 copies in 1931, and another of 5,000 in 1935. The publisher tells me that the present edition is also one of 5,000 copies. That makes an average sale of 1,000 copies a year at present, and the publishers assure me that the sales are, by comparison with earlier times, on a downward graph – though obviously still very satisfactory, considering how old the book is.
To go back to the earlier time, there were seven editions between 1879 and 1887, or an edition every year almost. As I say, we do not know the size of these editions. We have to balance the fact that the modern editions run to 5,000 against the present annual sale of 1,000; bear in mind that we are told that sales are not what they were, and that the great hey-day of the novel is over, and simply hazard that all editions average out at around 3,000 copies. That would mean a sale – surely we may say a minimum sale – of over 70,000: probably far more. It is a pity we cannot be more precise.
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Translations
But we must go-further. “Knocknagow” has been translated into several languages. It has been sold and published in the colonies. I doubt if there can be a living Irishman who has not at least heard of it. Sales, moreover, underestimate readers.
From what we know of the indestructibility of matter in the countryside – where a hat will last anything up to twelve years and a stick may last a generation – every cherished copy of “Knocknagow” has probably passed from grandfather to grandson.
I bought the seventh edition of the novel on a bookstall a while ago, dated 1887, and at the end of certain chapters one reader had marked over the years the date at which he had arrived at that point in his reading – much as a man might notch his doorpost for the growth of his children, or, like Crusoe, commemorate the passing of his life. In short, the actual number of readers of “Knocknagow” is incalculable.
Why, one asks, has this one book by this novelist who wrote two other novels and some well-known verse, such as “She Lived Beside the Anner,” had this unique success?
To say that “Knocknagow” succeeded on its merits is not enough. Better books have not sold as well. Kickham’s own “Sally Cavanagh” is not much inferior, if inferior at all, and it has had no such reclame. There are other novelists, like Griffin and Sheehan, who wrote of the life of the people with as much sympathy and even more incisiveness, but it will be a long day before their most popular books-such as “Glenanaar,” or “The Graves of Kilmorna” approach Kickham’s total.
* * *

Commercial Success
One may agree that a book has a commercial success like this for two main reasons – because people buy it to possess it, and because people buy it to read it. There are many books which people buy but do not read, such as sets of Dickens “for the children.” and of all the people who purchased “Finnegans Wake,” how many have read it?
There can be no such doubt about “Knocknagow.” It is remembered by its characters and its incidents – Mat Donovan (the Thrasher), Grace Kiely, Norah Lahy, whom Kickham, against the appeals of her admirers “had to let die” – a figure as appealing to readers of Kickham as Little Nell to readers of Dickens; or Phil Lahy, who was so devoted to the prophecies of Colmcille; Billy Heffernan, the flute-player; the droll figure of Wattletoes, Father Matt, the priest with the proud head.
“Everybody” knows the famous contest between Matt and the Captain, where Matt hesitates to defeat the Captain at throwing the hammer – for he is “a decent man,” and if Matt could without dishonour let him have the victory he would like to do it; and we remember with emotion how Matt’s eyes fall on the white-washed cabins of the village across the hill, and a surge of deeper joyalty breaks through him and whispering “For the honour of the old home” he breaks all records amid the frenzied shouts of the crowds.
* * *

Jokes and Phrases
The very phrases of the book have gone into popular speech, and Kickham either invented these or publicised them: such as “Straight as a split on a peeler’s poll”; “That fellow is blue for want of a batin”: “The world is only a blue-rag, knock a squeeze out of it if you can.”
They are on every page. The jokes become traditional. “Matrimony is a place or state of punishment where some souls suffer for a time before they go to Heaven.” The angry man who has just made his Confession and is in the state of grace and cannot vent his anger. “I’m in the state of grace now, but, please God, I won’t always be in the state of grace! And if I meet you then, by so-and- so and this-and-that ….”

The book has been so carefull

Odelay

^ what is all that about????

akelly02

One of the best footballers to lace a pair of boots from offaly

finbarrk

A good pub.

Charles J kickham from Mullinahone wrote Knocknagow, or the homes of Tipperary was pub (partially) in serial form 1870, as book 1873. It is a drama about the land question. Love story set against backdrop of evictions, absentee landlords and their vicious land-agents. Set in the fictional place of Knocknagow, Co.Tipperary. The hero is his most famous character, Mat "the Thrasher" O'Donovan. It was perhaps the most popular Irish novel of the late 19th - early 20th century......