As for life and circumstances in general, towards the end of the 18th century, they were indeed ‘wild, wonderful, and savage,’ to use a critic’s words of Maturin’s Women in its quality of an Irish story. Reality abounded in startling and extraordinary incidents, not seldom outdoing even the confessedly fertile imagination of the poets of Erin. The picture which Miss Edgeworth drew, in her immortal Castle Rackrent (1800) of a typical Irish estate, other writers confirmed to be eminently faithful; life in the country, all around, was feudal, wild and reckless; elopements occurred frequently, and duels were daily bread among the gentry. The disposition of the lower classes was likewise all for the adventurous, so much so that the autobiography of a famous highwayman became one of the most popular schoolbooks, effects of which reading by no means failed to make an appearance.[13] In the capital the social contrasts presented themselves at their sharpest. Beside the refined, gay and brilliant Dublin there was another, where the sullen murmur of discontent was never hushed, and which was constantly hovering on the brink of rebellion. ‘There existed,’ says Carleton,[14] ‘in Dublin two distinct worlds, each as ignorant of the other—at least, in a particular point of view, and during certain portions of the day—as if they did not inhabit the same country.’ Fierce street-frays occasionally raged for whole days in public thoroughfares, and the students of Trinity College were said to be particularly prone to take part in these and other such-like amusements.—
What other records there are left of the youthful years of Maturin are centred in the story of a courtship which ended in marriage at an early age. The object of his attachment was Miss Henrietta Kingsbury, like himself of an old and respected Protestant family. According to a tradition it was Miss Kingbury’s grandfather to whom Swift is supposed to have uttered his last words before the light of his powerful mind was darkened for ever. A brother of hers was archdeacon of Killala. Now biographers[15] generally maintain that Maturin married while still going through his college course, and decided in favour of the clerical profession after his marriage, in hopes of being promoted through the interest of his wife’s relations; but this, at least partly, seems to be wrong. Maturin was not exactly a child at the time of his marriage—he was 23 years old—; he had most probably finished his college course and had certainly taken holy orders, being already in enjoyment of the title Reverend, as may be seen from his marriage license at the Public Record Office in Dublin[16].
The union proved happy. Though the maintenance of a growing family early compelled Maturin to strenuous work, his literary occupations being thus influenced by pecuniary considerations, it at the same time gave him full compensation for his labours. His wife was a woman of beauty and talents—she was one of the best singers in Dublin, a pupil of Madame Catalani—and the conjugal harmony is said never to have been broken. In many of his works Maturin speaks of a happy home with nothing short of devotion, and in one of his sermons he calls domestic felicity ‘the best, the only that deserves the name, the sole flower that has been borne unwithered from paradise.’ Yet it was, no doubt, well for the domestic felicity that Mrs Maturin was a woman of elegance and possessed talents admired in society; for her husband was not always content with a quiet home-life but would, from time to time, emerge from it to be a lion of reception-rooms and to play the part of a dandy and a grand seigneur. His was a complicated nature, and there was—though certainly much exaggerated by tradition—another side of his character, vain, pleasure-loving and extravagant, which broke out, as will be seen, with singular force after his only great success in life.—As for Maturin’s choice of profession, it must be considered a failure. Not that he lacked qualifications for his calling: he was naturally religious, and distinguished himself as a very eloquent preacher, nor was he ever accused of neglect in the discharge of his duties; but the ‘worldly’ side of his character was too strong not to bring about conflicts. The union of clergyman and author was, after the classical examples of Swift and Sterne, probably not in itself an abomination in the eyes of the British public. Yet the apparent incompatibility of the two in Maturin’s case was continually emphasized by hostile critics, and his eccentric habits, his connection with the theatre and his excessive fondness for dancing was more than the average mind could ever understand in one of his profession; to judge from certain utterances[17] Maturin was, at least in the most rigorous-minded circles, actually considered more or less insane.—
What induced Maturin to choose a profession in the earliest years of the century was, besides his intention of marrying, the declining state of his father’s affairs. About the time of the Union the work of the postal establishment appears to have fallen into a decay, which sadly affected the Clerks of the Roads, who were paid in proportion to the frequency and quantity of their sendings. As early as 1802 Mr. William Maturin is found writing[18] to the secretary of the Irish Post Office to complain of the distressing diminution of his income. After drawing a comparison with the extent of his sendings in previous years, he continues:
Under these embarrassing Circumstances, already deprived of the principal part of my subsistence, and with the melancholy prospect of the rapid failure of the residue, I earnestly supplicate you, Sir, to lay this application before the Post Masters General, whose humanity I trust will not permit an old and faithful servant, to be reduced, without any fault on his part, from a state of humble competence, to wear out the short remains of his Life in penury and distress.
Yet this must be the case, if Government do not graciously interpose, by granting not only some Compensation for past losses, but some provision against those exigencies which are encreasing every hour, and threaten the total extinction of the emoluments of a Clerc of the Road-Emoluments, which after a service of 40 years, are almost all the provision left us.
This application was forwarded with the secretary’s recommendations, but whether it had any effect is uncertain. At all events it is clear that the family was not quite abruptly plunged from affluence into poverty at the final dismissal of Maturin senior from his situation—of which more later on—and that his son had long before been obliged to work hard both as a curate and an author. His first appointment was the curacy of Loughrea, to which he attended some time between 1804 and 1806.[19] The sojourn of Maturin in Loughrea was, upon the whole, felt as a kind of exile; wretched place as a small Irish country-town at that time must have appeared to all, it was intolerable to a man of literary interests and social habits. His dreariness was, however, pleasantly interrupted by his sojourn as a guest at Cloghan Castle, the seat of the family of O’Moore, who were supposed to be the lineal descendants of the old kings of Leix. In a note to Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin says that he was an inmate of the castle for many months, and to his friends he used to speak with delight of ‘that ancient structure, and the Irish hospitality he there enjoyed and witnessed.’[20] For Maturin’s literary conceptions this visit was of importance. He saw now, for the first and only time in his life, a glimpse of the wild nature of Western Ireland; he actually inhabited, himself, one of those old castles the occurrence of which in the romantic productions of the period was a conditio sine qua non; and he came into contact with genuine types of Irish peasantry, such as he was afterwards to describe with an impartiality and a graphic realism unequalled in earlier Irish fiction.
Through some exertion on the part of his relations, Maturin was before long removed to the curacy of St. Peter’s in Dublin, where he remained to the hour of his death. The parish was one of the most extensive in the town, and was said to contain ‘most of the wealth, rank, and talent of the metropolis.’[21] The salary of the curate, however, did not amount to more than 80-90 pounds per annum, and Maturin was, consequently, forced to eke out this slender income by other means. Alaric Watts says in his article that Maturin resided in his father’s house until the final economic ruin of that gentleman; according to other writers he established himself, immediately on his return to Dublin, in York Street,[22] where he set up a kind of boarding school and prepared young men for College. The task was rather congenial to him; he was always fond of the company of very young people, and at his well-known house, alternately the scene of luxury and poverty, he was wont to arrange private theatricals and other amusements with his pupils. York Street was then very different from what it is now, belonging to the fashionable Dublin, round Stephen’s Green.
By this time, also, Maturin’s first romance was composed. He wrote for money, it is true; but he turned to this mode of gaining—or trying to gain—money, because literature represented his greatest interest in life. Few authors, in fact—whatever Maturin himself may say in the prefaces to his books—have felt themselves to be literary men so intensely as Maturin. If he had been a rich man, he would certainly have been an author all the same, as were Beckford and Lewis. As for his first book, it was conceived from his own innermost inclinations. The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio was written in the Radcliffe style, not because Maturin believed it to be the style best relished by the general public, but because he, at the time in question, relished it best himself.