Frank Frankfort Moore

Moore was born in Limerick, but was raised in Belfast where he records as his earliest memory was witnessing dragoons, sabres drawn, rushing sectarian rioters in the street below his nursery window.

[2] In 1874 Moore hailed the declaration of scientific materialism by the Irish physicist John Tyndall at a conference of the British Science Association in Belfast and mocked the outraged reaction of local Presbyterian ministers.

[5] From 1875 Moore worked for local, conservative and unionist, paper, The News Letter, but secured international assignments for a wider range of publications, including London titles.

[2] As a schoolboy he had shown an early aptitude for poetry, publishing a volume of verse in 1872 which drew a letter of encouragement from the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The first of these is an imaginary travelogue whose scope is the span of the British empire, the globe "charted by a vision tragic and romantic, much in the style of Tennyson or Wordsworth but in the rhythm of the Victorian hymnal".

The heroine, a young Australian women, scandalises society by operating on the principle that "if marriage is founded upon true affection, the tie will be regarded as sacred by the man and the woman without the necessity of any civil contract".

The Jessamy Bride (1897), a sentimental tale of romance between Mary Horneck and Oliver Goldsmith and involving, among other historical characters, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, was a major success.

[3] Yet in The Truth about Ulster (1914) Moore allowed that the Protestants, in important respects, remained a planted "colony" and he expressed understanding but little sympathy for their sectarian passions.

In The Lady of the Reef (1915) an English artist living in Paris travels to County Down to claim an inheritance and is baffled by the strength of local anti-Catholic feeling.

[10] Where Moore's fiction portrays Cromwell's crimes of conquest, the Lord Protector nonetheless retains the aura of "a Carlylean Great Man".

It is suggested that Moore "feared the mass Catholicism of the western peasantry and the Belfast slums as the enemy of individual freedom and economic progress".