I was fortunate enough to spend a few days
recently researching in the British Library where I came across some papers
which helped me to partially solve a puzzle that has troubled me for some
time. The story of Johanna Macken is a
most unusual one. It was a name I had
heard now and again in my younger days but always, it seemed to me, a name that
seemed to produce a slight frission of disapproval when mentioned by persons of
a certain age. With the instincts of the
Christian Brothers boy, I knew better than to ask my elders too many
questions. I was later to discover that
our town had produced at least one authoress whose fame had travelled far to
other lands but who was perhaps not always as appreciated as she should have
been in her own home town.
The future writer, Johanna Macken, was born
in the late 1850's or early 1860's in the Castledermot area. I have been able to find little information
about her early life which seems in any case to have been fairly uneventful but
she almost certainly attended the Ballitore Quaker School which had formerly
counted Edmund Burke and Napper Tandy among its pupils. It was perhaps this influence that prompted
her to become a Quaker sometime in her early adult life, a move which proved to
be only the first of the quaintly individualist touches that would mark her
personal career from then on. For
Johanna was an unusual and might I say libertarian personality for her day – a
hint of which must have survived to ensure her part in the bawdy rhymes that
innocently echoed around the local school yard almost a century later.
The first time I discovered that Johanna
Macken had a reality outside of our schoolboy chants was many years ago in
Webbs book shop on Aston Quay, home to many a lost literary treasure and a
place which has long since become a casualty of Dublin's ever diminishing book
trade. It was a shop I always enjoyed
visiting, as much for the pleasure of chatting to its elderly guardian Tony
Lamont, a man of abstruse and varied learning as for the opportunity of whiling
away my hours amongst its towers of ancient tomes. On hearing I was from Athy, Tony one day
chuckled mischievously to himself and fished out a greyish pockmarked little
item from one of the rear shelves. It
was a slim book on the history of Castledermot, obviously a product of the
previous century but what caught my attention was the name boldly emblazoned on
the front, that of Johanna Macken. The
title recalled the star of our childhood songs - fiction made flesh and a story
was then related to me which I was finally able to corroborate for myself
almost 30 years later while in the British Library.
The Castledermot book was the first of
Johanna's long and prolific literary career.
It appears she soon thereafter began publishing under a disguised male
name – in the manner of her predecessors Charlotte Bronte and George Elliott –
to escape some of the prejudice against female authors that still survived in
the 19th century. The
Castledermot book was a local affair but my researches have shown that Johanna
Macken was involved in the production of a myriad of literary creations. In the era of the three volume novel – vast
affairs which were the stock and trade of the lending libraries dotted
throughout Britain – Macken quickly made her mark with “Claire”, a five
volume effort which won comparisons with Samuel Richardson's “Pamela” for
its sympathetic account of a working girls passage through life. With the novels she produced over the next
decade or so (at a rate of roughly two a year that would shame many of our
current crop of authors) it seems that Johanna Macken established a solid name
writing under the nom de plume “Mete Lane” as a writer of romance and
adventure stories. These imagined tales
of high society were a world apart from her humble lifestyle which she lived
out, I believe, in a small cottage in the Kilkea area. Nevertheless they were a staple feature of
the diet of the British public at the turn of the century and indeed part of
the forgotten social history of the time.
But Tony Lamont had a more curious story to
tell than that of a now neglected lady novelist. It seems that Johanna Macken under one of her
many pseudonyms was also the author of a series of pornographic novels that were
equally popular in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, but even less
likely to be noted by the compiler of literary histories. Under the name of Jack Makedo, she wrote a
number of what one might call racy page turners for Londons Blackheart Press,
the titles of which are descriptive enough in themselves and need not be
repeated here. It was perhaps at least
one of the reasons why this strange author has become a hidden part of Athy's
past. Lucrative these novels may have
been, but their existence was certainly designed to pass under any official
radar. It was the last of these books, “A
Haunted Heart” which was destined to secure Johanna Macken, alias Jack
Makedo, her own unusual place in literary history. Fifteen years before James Joyce's Ulysses
would create a similar controversy, Macken's last novel was unexpectedly seized
on arrival in the United States by the U.S. Post Office and those involved in
its importation were charged with
attempting to distribute obscene material.
There was no celebrity trial for an author who was – in another of her
many guises – one of Britain's most popular writers of the penny romance.
The ensuing press scandal ensured that many of Macken's remaining titles
were removed from the shelves of the British and Irish book shops.
All that remained in her home town, a place
soon to be consumed by the larger dramas of a World War and a War of
Independence (and in any case not regularly preoccupied by the scandals of the
London literati) was the faint echo of a stained reputation. All that passed down to myself and my pals in
much later years was the fantastical character who starred in many a ribald
rhyme.
Johanna Macken faded into obscurity after the
trial of her New York distributors and to the best of my knowledge never wrote
another book. I have often wondered what
became of her, but I understand she did remain in the South Kildare area and
probably survived to a distinguished age, most likely under another of her many
pseudonyms. Though the photograph
reproduced here shows the lady writer in her heyday – and many of my readers
who may have come across her would have done so when she was at a rather more
advanced age – I would appeal to anyone who could help me to properly conclude
the story of this most unusual woman.
Until then her only surviving epitaph will be
that chanted in a rowdy school yard over fifty years ago.
Johanna
Macken had her pride
Which
was never, ever at her side
For
when she had the sudden urge
She
upped and wrote a dirty dirge.
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