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Author: HARKIN, Hugh

Biography:

HARKIN, Hugh (1791-1854: DIB)

No records have been located for his early life but sources give his place of birth as Magilligan (Tamlaghtard), County Derry; the names of his parents are unknown. The family was Catholic. He married and his wife’s name was Margaret (d 1873); although no record of the marriage has been located, they had at least one son, Alexander, and a daughter, Susan Jane. During the 1830s Harkin ran a school in Belfast and worked with Charles Gavan Duffy, an increasingly prominent journalist and politician, on the Belfast Vindicator (1839-42). He supported Catholic emancipation and was known for his inspirational oratory. His contributions to Duffy’s The Nation show that he was in Edinburgh in 1843. He moved from there to Leeds where he edited the Catholic paper, The Lamp. By the time of the 1851 census he, Margaret, and Susan, were living on Blake Street, York, where he ran a school and edited The Bulletin (1852-53). He died of bronchitis in Belfast at the home of his son, Alexander, who was a surgeon. He used several pseudonyms including Henry Picken—the name of a blind man in Belfast whom Harkin allowed to sell the poems as his own (O’Donoghue). He was a friend of Patrick O’Kelly (q.v.) and contributed a comic poem to his The Hippocrene about Michael McCarthy’s plagiarism of O’Kelly’s “Killarney.” Other publications include The Quarterlife; or, the Life and Adventures of Hudy McQuigan (1841), Number 1 of a Proposed Series of Religious Poems (1847), Sacred Songs for the People (1849), and the posthumous Improved Arithmetical Table Book (1861). (DIB 9 Apr. 2021; O’Donoghue; The Lamp 7 [1854] 135; Belfast Newsletter 6 Jan. 1854; ancestry.co.uk 9 Apr. 2021; Kevin MacGrath, “Writers in The Nation 1842-5,” Irish Historical Studies 6 [1949] 189-223)

 

 

Other Names:

  • Henry Picken
 

Books written (1):