KELLY, EDWARD (1854-1880), Australian bushranger, was born at Wallan Wallan, Victoria. His father was a transported Belfast convict, and his mother’s family included several thieves. As boys he and his brothers were constantly in trouble for horse-stealing, and “Ned” served three years’ imprisonment for this offence. In April 1878, an attempt was made to arrest his brother Daniel on a similar charge. The whole Kelly family resisted this and Ned wounded one of the constables. Mrs Kelly and some of the others were captured, but Ned and Daniel escaped to the hills, where they were joined by two other desperadoes, Byrne and Hart. For two years, despite a reward of £8000 offered jointly by the governments of Victoria and New South Wales for their arrest, the gang under the leadership of Kelly terrorized the country on the borderland of Victoria and New South Wales, “holding up” towns and plundering banks. Their intimate knowledge of the district, full of convenient hiding-places, and their elaborate system of well-paid spies, ensured the direct pecuniary interest of many persons and contributed to their long immunity from capture. They never ill-treated a woman, nor preyed upon the poor, thus surrounding themselves with an attractive atmosphere of romance. In June 1880, however, they were at last tracked to a wooden shanty at Glenrowan, near Benalla, which the police surrounded, riddled with bullets, and finally set on fire. Kelly himself, who was outside, could, he claimed, easily have escaped had he not refused to desert his companions, all of whom were killed. He was severely wounded, captured and taken to Beechworth, where he was tried, convicted and hanged in October 1880. The total cost of the capture of the Kelly gang was reckoned at £115,000.
See F. A. Hare, The Last of the Bushrangers (London, 1892).
KELLY, SIR FITZROY (1796-1880), English judge, was born in London in October 1796, the son of a captain in the Royal Navy. In 1824 he was called to the bar, where he gained a reputation as a skilled pleader. In 1834 he was made a king’s counsel. A strong Tory, he was returned as member of parliament for Ipswich in 1835, but was unseated on petition. In 1837 however he again became member for that town. In 1843 he sat for Cambridge, and in 1852 was elected member for Harwich, but, a vacancy suddenly occurring in East Suffolk, he preferred to contest that seat and was elected. He was solicitor-general in 1845 (when he was knighted), and again in 1852. In 1858-1859 he was attorney-general in Lord Derby’s second administration. In 1866 he was raised to the bench as chief baron of the exchequer and made a member of the Privy Council. He died at Brighton on the 18th of September 1880.
See E. Foss, Lives of the Judges (1870).
KELLY, HUGH (1739-1777), Irish dramatist and poet, son of a Dublin publican, was born in 1739 at Killarney. He was apprenticed to a staymaker, and in 1760 went to London. Here he worked at his trade for some time, and then became an attorney’s clerk. He contributed to various newspapers, and wrote pamphlets for the booksellers. In 1767 he published Memoirs of a Magdalen, or the History of Louisa Mildmay (2 vols.), a novel which obtained considerable success. In 1766 he published anonymously Thespis; or, A Critical Examination into the Merits of All the Principal Performers belonging to Drury Lane Theatre, a poem in the heroic couplet containing violent attacks on the principal contemporary actors and actresses. The poem opens with a panegyric on David Garrick, however, and bestows foolish praise on friends of the writer. This satire was partly inspired by Churchill’s Rosciad, but its criticism is obviously dictated chiefly by personal prejudice. In 1767 he produced a second part, less scurrilous in tone, dealing with the Covent Garden actors. His first comedy, False Delicacy, written in prose, was produced by Garrick at Drury Lane on the 23rd of January 1768, with the intention of rivalling Oliver Goldsmith’s Good-Natured Man. It is a moral and sentimental comedy, described by Garrick in the prologue as a sermon preached in acts. Although Samuel Johnson described it as “totally void of character,” it was very popular and had a great sale. In French and Portuguese versions it drew crowded houses in Paris and Lisbon. Kelly was a journalist in the pay of Lord North, and therefore hated by the party of John Wilkes, especially as being the editor of the Public Ledger. His Thespis had also made him many enemies; and Mrs Clive refused to act in his pieces. The production of his second comedy, A Word to the Wise (Drury Lane, 3rd of March 1770), occasioned a riot in the theatre, repeated at the second performance, and the piece had to be abandoned. His other plays are: Clementina (Covent Garden, 23rd of February 1771), a blank verse tragedy, given out to be the work of a “young American Clergyman” in order to escape the opposition of the Wilkites; The School for Wives (Drury Lane, 11th of December 1773), a prose comedy given out as the work of Major (afterwards Sir William) Addington; a two-act piece, The Romance of an Hour (Covent Garden, 2nd of December 1774), borrowed from Marmontel’s tale L’Amitié à l’épreuve; and an unsuccessful comedy, The Man of Reason (Covent Garden, 9th of February 1776). He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1774, and determined to give up literature. He failed in his new profession and died in poverty on the 3rd of February 1777.
See The Works of Hugh Kelly, to which is prefixed the Life of the Author (1778); Genest, History of the Stage (v. 163, 263-269, 308, 399, 457, 517). Pamphlets in reply to Thespis are: “Anti-Thespis ...” (1767); “The Kellyad ...” (1767), by Louis Stamma; and “The Rescue or Thespian Scourge ...” (1767), by John Brown-Smith.