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Richard Robert Madden

Dublin, Ireland, 1798 - 1886, Dublin, Ireland

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n81043471
Madden, Richard Robert (1798–1886), author and colonial administrator, the youngest son of Edward Madden (1739–1830), a silk manufacturer of Dublin, and his second wife, Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of Thaddeus Forde of Corry, co. Leitrim, was born at Wormwood Gate, Dublin, on 22 August 1798. He was educated at a private school in Dublin, and studied medicine in Paris, Naples, and St George's Hospital, London. While in Italy he became acquainted with Lady Blessington and her circle, and acted as correspondent of the Morning Herald. Between 1824 and 1827 he travelled in the Levant, visiting Smyrna, Constantinople, Crete, Egypt, and Syria; he published an account of his travels in 1829. He returned in 1828 to England, where he married Harriet (d. 1888), the daughter of John Elmslie of Jamaica; they had three sons, including Thomas More Madden.

Madden was elected a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1828, and was made an FRCS in 1855. He practised as a surgeon in Curzon Street, Mayfair, until, in 1833, he went to Jamaica as one of the special magistrates appointed to resolve disputes between black apprentices and their white masters in the transitional system which, in 1834, replaced slavery with apprenticeship as a preliminary to full freedom. His energetic support for the apprentices brought him into conflict with the plantation owners, and he resigned in November 1834. He published a two-volume account of his experiences, A twelve-month's residence in the West Indies during the transition from slavery to apprenticeship (1835).

In 1836 Madden was appointed superintendent of the liberated Africans and judge arbitrator in the mixed court of commission in Havana. During his four years in Cuba he published a number of works on slavery, including an Address on Slavery in Cuba, Presented to the General Anti-Slavery Convention (1840). He left Cuba in 1840 to accompany Sir Moses Montefiore on his mission to Egypt to plead for a group of Jews from Damascus accused of ritual murder. Again he wrote an account of his experiences. The following year he was sent to west Africa as a commissioner of inquiry into the administration of British coastal settlements, where he exposed the ‘pawn system’, which was a disguised form of slavery. From November 1843 until August 1846 he acted as the special correspondent at Lisbon of the Morning Chronicle. In 1847 he was appointed colonial secretary of Western Australia, where he strove to protect the few remaining rights of the Aborigines. After returning to Ireland on leave in 1848, he took up the cause of the famine-stricken peasantry, and in 1850 resigned his Australian office in favour of that of secretary to the Loan Fund board at Dublin Castle, which he held until 1880.

Madden's interest in his homeland provided the source of his most enduring work, The United Irishmen, their Lives and Times (7 vols., 1843–6), which was issued in a second edition in 1858; A History of Irish Periodical Literature from the End of the Seventeenth to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (2 vols., 1867); and Literary Remains of the United Irishmen of 1798 (1887), a collection of ballads, songs, and other united Irish literary works. His other work of importance was the three-volume The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington (1855). Madden had been an intimate of the Gore House circle since his meeting with the Blessingtons in Naples in 1821; despite this advantage, and despite his access to the papers, it has been remarked that ‘no one who attempts to use his book can help but deplore the chaotic arrangement, the faults of copying, the digressions and the frequent errors in plain statement of fact which disfigure it’ (Sadleir, 388).

Madden was a member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a corresponding member of the Society of Medical Science. He died at his residence, 3 Vernon Terrace, Booterstown, co. Dublin, on 5 February 1886 and was buried in Donnybrook graveyard there.

J. M. Rigg, rev. Lynn Milne
Sources

Memoirs of Richard Robert Madden, ed. T. M. Madden (1891) · The Times (8 Feb 1886) · M. Sadleir, Blessington–D'Orsay: a masquerade (1933) · Boase, Mod. Eng. biog. · G. J. Heuman, Between black and white: race, politics and the free coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (1981) · N. J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (1994) · CGPLA Ire. (1886)
Archives

Bodl. RH, corresp. and papers · Royal Irish Acad., corresp. and papers · TCD, corresp. and papers relating to United Irishmen · Wellcome L. :: BL, corresp. with John Miley, Add. MS 43684 · BL, letters to Joseph Soul and others

Likenesses

Count D'Orsay, pencil and chalk drawing, 1828, NPG · R. J. Hamerton, lithograph, NPG · J. P. Haverty, oils, NG Ire. · B. R. Haydon, group portrait, oils (The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840), NPG · T. W. Huffam, mezzotint (after daguerreotype by Claudet), NPG · T. W. Huffam, mezzotint (after daguerreotype by Claudet), NG Ire. · T. W. Huffam, mezzotint and line engraving (after drawing), NG Ire. · silhouette, NG Ire.
Wealth at death

£2659 4s.: probate, 15 March 1886, CGPLA Ire.
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J. M. Rigg, ‘Madden, Richard Robert (1798–1886)’, rev. Lynn Milne, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/17753, accessed 20 Oct 2017]

Richard Robert Madden (1798–1886): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/17753

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Last Updated8/7/24

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