Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on 28 May 1779, the eldest son of John Moore, a modest yet respectable shopkeeper, and Anastasia Codd. His mother's ambition secured him a place at one of Dublin's finest educational establishments, Samuel Whyte's English Grammar School, and by the time he entered Trinity College at the age of fifteen, he had already published several poems in the Anthologia Hibernica magazine. While in Trinity, Moore befriended Robert Emmett, a leading figure of the United Irishmen whose aims for parliamentary reform culmiated in their failed rebellion of 1798. 

In 1799, Moore set off for London to study law at the Middle Temple, a career he soon abandoned in the wake of his social ascent to become a writer. In 1800, he published a translation the odes of Greek poet Anacreon, dedicated to the Prince of Wales, which was well-received. Moore became famous in salons across Europe for his Irish Melodies, his lyrics to a series of tunes adapted by Sir John Stevenson from Edward Bunting's General Collection of Ancient Irish Music. From April 1808, the Irish Melodies were issued in ‘numbers' comprised of twelve or thirteen songs by the Power brothers, two Dublin music-merchants, until the tenth and final issue in 1834. Moore's long Oriental poem, Lalla Rookh, was likewise an instant success, selling all one thousand copies of the first edition on the day of its publication in 1817. His first work of prose, Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824), was partly inspired by a trip to Munster in 1823 and was intended to advance the cause of Catholic emancipation in London. Moore also wrote biographies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and, most notably, of his friend Lord Byron. The first volume of Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of His Life appeared in August 1829, the second following some eighteen months later. In the early 1830s, Moore began work on what would effectively be his final major work, a History of Ireland, which ran to four volumes, ending in the seventeenth century.

Thomas Moore died at his home, Sloperton Cottage, Wiltshire, on 26 February 1852, and was buried at St. Nicholas' Church in nearby Bromham.