David James O'Donoghue


David James O'Donoghue was an Irish biographer and editor. He attended a Catholic school and furthered his own education at the British Museum. He began his journalistic work by writing for the Dublin papers upon subjects relating to Irish music, art, and literature. A founder-member of the Irish Literary Society in London, he was also vice president of the National Literary Society, Dublin, and the compiler of a biographical dictionary, The Poets of Ireland, with entries on 2,000 authors. He published also:
O'Donoghue published an edition of J. F. Lalor's writings and an edition of William Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. He edited the works of Samuel Lover and the prose works and poems of James Clarence Mangan. He wrote biographies on William Carleton , Richard Pockrich, and Robert Emmet.
In 1896 he moved to Dublin. In 1909 he became librarian of University College Dublin. He was co-editor of Catalogue of the Gilbert Library. William Butler Yeats wrote of him in his Autobiographies.

Early Life

David James O'Donoghue was born in 1866 in Chelsea, London, to Irish parents, and grew up in the Hans Town area of Chelsea. He was son of John O'Donoghue, a bricklayer from Kilworth, Co. Cork, and Bridget Griffin, who was from Co. Tipperary. He was the third of nine children, and had four brothers, Thomas, John, James, and Edmund, and four sisters, Mary, Ellen, Katherine, and Agnes. He was first an upholsterer's apprentice from the age of sixteen, before becoming a journalist and author.