Author: Mara, Samuel Delaval
Biography:
MARA, Samuel Delaval (fl 1804)
Mara was “of the Theatre-Royal, Newcastle,” in 1804 when he engaged in a brief pamphlet war with John Mitchell (d 1819), the owner and editor of the recently-founded Tyne Mercury. Besides The Dean-Street Dunciad, Mara wrote four short (one to eight pages) issues of The Mitchelliad in the same year. The name does not appear in anything resembling this form in the genealogical websites, British or Irish: it was most probably an actor’s stage name. The only other published work attributed to him, curiously, is from 1810, a Dublin printing of music from “Brian Boroihme, a National Melodrama.” There is no record of the melodrama appearing in print, but that would not be unusual for such an ephemeral genre. A year later, however, James Sheridan Knowles (q.v.) published Brian Boroihme, or, The Maid of Erin, an adaptation of an earlier melodrama by “Daniel O’Meara.” Either the publisher of the songs by “S. D. Mara” made a mistake in the name or “Daniel O’Meara” was another name, possibly the real name, of the same author. O’Donoghue has nothing on S. D. Mara but includes Daniel O’Meara as the author of a few songs set to music and suggests that he had died “within the last 20 years”—i.e. after 1892, but that is unlikely. He might be the man of that name born in 1782 in Carlow, Ireland, who enlisted in the Essex Regiment of the British Army (44th and 56th Foot) and, having become “nearly Blind,” received an honourable discharge, with a recommendation to the Chelsea Hospital, on 4 June 1804—the year of the Newcastle pamphlet war. He later appears as Paymaster of the 45th Foot in Belfast in 1841, but there the trail goes cold. (findmypast.com 17 Mar. 2023; WorldCat; Richard Welford, Men of Mark ‘twixt Tyne and Tweed [1895], 193-4; O’Donoghue) HJ
Other Names:
- S. D. Mara