John and Michael Banim

John and Michael Banim (respectively, born April 3, 1798, County Kilkenny, Ire.—died Aug. 13, 1842, County Kilkenny; born Aug. 5, 1796, County Kilkenny—died Aug. 30, 1874, Booterstown, near Dublin) were brothers who collaborated in novels and stories of Irish peasant life.

John studied drawing in Dublin and subsequently taught it in Kilkenny. Shortly afterward he went to Dublin, where he earned a living by journalism. In 1821 his blank verse tragedy, Damon and Pythias, was produced at Covent Garden; John married, moved to London, and continued to live by journalism. In 1825 there appeared Tales, by the O’Hara Family, written in collaboration with Michael, who had studied for the bar but had had to take over his father’s business. All three Tales—two by John, The Fetches and John Doe, and one by Michael, Crohoore of the Bill Hook—are remarkable for their melodramatic invention and were immediately successful, John being dubbed “the Scott of Ireland.” He followed them with The Boyne Water (1826), a novel about the Jacobite wars in Ireland, and in 1826 a second series of Tales appeared, containing The Nowlans, a story of passion, guilt, and religious fervour displaying a degree of insight that makes it possibly John’s best novel. The Croppy (1828) is mainly by Michael, then an active supporter of Roman Catholic emancipation.

Despite a painful spinal malady, John continued to produce novels; but ill health eventually led to poverty, and in 1833 subscriptions were opened for him in England and Ireland. He returned to Kilkenny in 1835. Father Connell, the Banims’ happiest book, published the same year, was almost entirely by Michael, who continued to write but in 1873 retired to Booterstown, near Dublin.