Fanny's First Novel (Edition2024)

Frank Frankfort Moore (1855-1931) was an Irish novelist, playwright, and poet. He was a unionist and a Protestant from Belfast, yet his historical fiction during the Home Rule agitation did not shy away from themes of Irish-Catholic dispossession. Moore was born in Limerick but raised in Belfast, where he recalls seeing dragoons, sabres drawn, rushing sectarian riots in the street below his nursery window as his earliest recollection. Moore's father was a successful clockmaker and goldsmith, and the family was well-educated (French and German were both spoken). The elder Moore, however, as a member of the ultra-puritan Open Brethren group, wanted to limit his children's reading to religious and didactic publications. Michael Paget Baxter, the evangelist who recognized Emperor Napoleon III as the Beast in the Book of Revelation, was a frequent visitor. Moore attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, where he swiftly learned to reject his father's ideas. He remembered the spread of certain slanderous lyrics titled "Mr. Baxter and The Beast," which "proved" that Baxter himself was the Antichrist. Moore praised Irish scientist John Tyndall's statement of scientific materialism at a British Science Association conference in Belfast in 1874, mocking the angry reaction of local Presbyterian ministers.