John Kells Ingram

Early life

Ingram was born on 7 July 1823, at the Rectory of Templecarne (Aghnahoo), just south of Pettigo, a village in south-east County Donegal, Ireland into an Ulster Scots family.

Although his ancestry was Scottish Presbyterian, Ingram's grandparents had converted to Anglicanism. His grandfather Captain John Ingram ran a linen mill and had a business as a linen bleacher in Glennane (Lisdrumhure). He was active in the Volunteer Movement and financed in 1782 a volunteer corps in the County Armagh, known as Lisdrumhure Volunteers or Mountnorris Volunteers.

Ingram's father, Rev. William Ingram, a scholar at Trinity College Dublin, rector of the Church of Ireland and curate of Templecarne Parish (Diocese of Clogher), married Elizabeth Cooke in 1817.

Ingram's father died in 1829 and his mother then moved with the family to Newry, to guarantee the best possible education for her five children. Ingram first went to Mr. Lyons' School in Newry from 1829 to 1837.

In 1840, at the age of sixteen, Ingram published sonnets in the Dublin University Magazine.

Academic career

On 13 October 1837, he matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). He graduated with a BA in mathematics in 1842, and was awarded an MA in 1850. His early scholarly publications (1842-1847) were in mathematics. He had a distinguished career at Trinity, spanning over fifty-five years, as a student, fellow and professor, successively of Oratory, English Literature, Jurisprudence and Greek, LL.D, FTCD), subsequently becoming the College Librarian and ultimately its Vice Provost.

During his life, Ingram was President of the Library Association of Great Britain, co-founder of the National Library of Ireland, National Library trustee, Vice-president of the Library Association of Ireland, a member of the Royal Irish Academy, co-founder of the Dublin Statistical Society, honorary member of the American Economic Association, member of the English historical school of economics and co-founder of the Hermathena publication.

The Memory of the Dead

One evening in March 1843 Ingram wrote poem for which he is best remembered, a political ballad called "The Memory of the Dead", (better known as "Who Fears to Speak of '98"; or "Ninety Eight"), in honour of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the United Irishmen. On this evening, he was in company of his like-minded friends John O'Regan, Thomas O'Regan and George Ferdinand Shaw, all fellow Protestant students at TCD. They spent the evening discussing the 1798 Rebellion when briefly Catholics and Protestants (mainly Presbyterians and Methodists) united to try and overturn the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland from which all of them were excluded. They were stirred by the lack of regard shown for the Irish rebels of '98 by the contemporary nationalist movement, led by Daniel O'Connell.

The poem was published anonymously on 1 April 1843 in Thomas Davis's The Nation Newspaper although in fact its authorship was an open secret in Dublin. The Nation was the publication of the radical and bourgeois-radical wing of Ó Conaill's movement for "repeal" of the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain. Despite this poem Ingram showed no nationalist sympathies at any time, maintaining that Ireland was not ready for self-government. "The Memory of the Dead" was my only contribution to the Nation, commented Ingram later. Nevertheless, before he died, Ingram made a manuscript copy of "Ninety Eight", proclaiming that he would always defend brave men who opposed tyranny.

It was set to music for voice and piano in 1845 by John Edward Pigot. Ingram's ballad was translated into Latin by Robert Yelverton Tyrrell and into Irish by Dr. Douglas Hyde. The song became a popular Irish nationalist anthem. It is one of the best-known of Irish Republican songs and often played by the piper at Republican funerals.

Scholarly works

Ingram was one of the writers selected to write "scholars" entries for the ninth edition, the tenth edition and the eleventh editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He wrote the entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Pierre Leroux, Cliffe Leslie, John Ramsay McCulloch, Georg Ludwig von Maurer, William Petty, Francois Quesnay, and Karl Heinrich Rau,.

In his later career Ingram became interested in the nascent disciplines of sociology and economics. He was not a trained economist but rather a sociologist and his early economic writings dealt mainly with the Poor Law. He was a spokesman for historical economics in Britain and influenced many contemporary social and economic thinkers at that time in Great Britain, the United States, and continental Europe. His attack on classical economics encompassed its methodology and its conclusions. Ingram played an important role in the English Methodenstreit (Battle of methods), (closely associated with the Werturteilsstreit). In his 1888 History of Political Economy he used the term "economic man" as a critical description of the human being as conceived by economic theory, and he may have coined the term. From 1891 to 1896 Ingram wrote entries in Palgrave's Dictionary of Economics. He was president of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland between 1878 and 1880 and took over as President of the Royal Irish Academy when William Reeves died in 1892.

He also wrote on labour and trade issues, and connecting these to slavery, including domestic slavery in Europe from ancient times onward. His book, A History of Slavery and Serfdom was extremely successful, being translated into eleven languages and serving as a textbook till the 1920s. He also wrote the entries on sumptuary laws and slavery in the 9th, 10th and 11th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Ingram was active in the fields of mathematics, archaeology, the classics, economics, etymology, law, literature, medieval manuscripts, poetry, religious speculation and Shakespearean criticism. He wrote extensively on Shakespearean syntax. He worked on advancing the science of classical etymology, notably in his Greek and Latin Etymology in England.

He also wrote papers on Mexican antiques and contributed papers to mathematical societies on differential calculus and geometrical analysis.

Literary works

Ingram published several books of poetry and fiction:

Political views

Ingram was an advocate of Home Rule for Ireland, though within the context of a more general devolution within the United Kingdom.

Philosophical views

Ingram was a firm adherent of Auguste Comte and was also a positivist. He was influenced by the German Historical School.

Social engagement

Ingram spoke up for the access of female students to Trinity College. In his function as college librarian, he first opened Trinity College Library so that the general public could see great Irish literary treasures such as the Book of Kells.

Death

Ingram died in 1907 in his house, 38 Upper Mount Street, Dublin, where he had lived since 1884, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Personal life

Ingram married Margaret Johnston Clark on 23 July 1862 at Maghera Church, County Londonderry. They had five children:

Posthumous tributes

Ingram's influence on economics was described by economist Richard Theodore Ely as:

A more humane and genial spirit has taken the place of the old dryness and hardness which once repelled so many of the best minds from the study of Economics and won for it the name of 'the dismal science'. In particular, the problem of the Proletariat, of the condition and future of the working classes- has taken a powerful hold on the feelings, as well as the intellect, of Society, and is studied in a more earnest and sympathetic spirit than at any former time.

Non-fiction works

Correspondence