James Stephens (Fenian) - Early Life

Early Life

References to his early life, according to one of his biographers, Desmond Ryan, are obscure and limited to Stephens' own vague autobiographical recollections. James Stephens was born and spent his childhood at Lilac Cottage, Blackmill Street, Kilkenny, on 26 January 1825. No birth records have ever been located, but a baptismal record from St. Mary’s Parish is dated 29 July 1825. According to Marta Ramón, there is reason to believe that he was born out of wedlock in late July 1825; however, according to Stephens his exact date of birth was 26 January.

The son of John and Anne Stephens (née Casey), he had five brothers and sisters: Walter, John, Francis, who died when James was ten, Harriet, who had died by July 1848, and Anne, who died just after his flight into exile, as did his father. By 1856 Stephens’s remaining family vanish without a trace, according to Ramón.

For many years, his father had been a clerk to auctioneer and bookseller William Jackson Douglas whose offices and warehouses were on High Street, Kilkenny. Ryan has the order of the name as William Douglas Jackson, of Rose Inn Street, in his Stephens' biography Fenian Chief. John Stephens, as well as his earnings as a clerk, also had some small property in Kilkenny; records show him as occupier of 13 Evan’s Lane, St. Mary’s Parish and 22 Chapel Lane, St. Canice’s Parish, his residence at the time of the rising.

Little is known of Stephens’s mother and according to Ryan, it is possible he had no memory of her. Only briefly does Stephens mention her in his writings, although her name appears on Stephens' marriage certificate in 1863. His mother’s people, the Caseys, were shopkeepers; one account says they ran a small hardware business. In April 1846 James and his sister, Anne, became sponsors to their cousin, Joseph Casey, at his baptism in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Kilkenny. Joseph Casey would later be acquitted of charges of suspected Fenian activities in England in 1867. During Stephens' second exile in Paris, he would spend much time with the Caseys, who emigrated to France after the trial of Joseph. Stephens would be expelled from France on 12 March 1885 because of a series of press interviews given by Patrick Casey advocating the "dynamite war," which Stephens had repudiated consistently.

Because his father was intent on giving his son the best education his means would allow, Stephens was registered as a day pupil at St. Kieran’s college for at lest one quarter in 1838. Prior to this, he had attended St. Kieran’s school beside his home, before the school moved to College Road.

An omnivorous reader, Stephens, according to Ryan, was a silent and aloof student with a thirst for knowledge, a characteristic throughout his life. Aged 20, Stephens was apprenticed to a civil engineer and obtained a post in a Kilkenny office for work then in progress on the Limerick and Waterford Railway in 1844.

Stephens was in a romantic relationship with a young lady, Miss Hilton, at this time, although she did not share his nationalist sentiments. This relationship ended shortly after the rising.

According to Ryan, for an unexplained reason, Stephens had already become a “revolutionary in spirit” by his mid twenties. The one influence he mentions in this period was that of Dr. Robert Cane a former Mayor of Kilkenny, a cultural propagandist, and a moderate Young Irelander.

As a young man, Stephens had declined to affiliate with any political organisation. He distrusted the conciliatory Repealers of the O’Connell school, describing the Repeal agitator as “a wind-bag”; the Young Ireland Confederation, however, was of “sterner stuff,” and he was better inclined towards them. His father also was a strong sympathiser and was moderately active in local politics. The Kilkenny Irish Confederation club would later lend some economic assistance to Stephens during his Paris exile.

Ireland in the 1840s was devastated by the Great Famine; the Repeal movement was in decline, and the country moved towards insurrection, aided by the incitements of John Mitchel and James Fintan Lalor. Stephens sympathies lay more with the Mitchel and Lalor brand of republicanism, than with Charles Gavan Duffy’s and William Smith O'Brien’s mild constitutionalism. This would come to a head with the revolutions sweeping Europe from the Paris barricades of February 1848. According to Ryan, Stephens was caught up in these impulses and added secret drilling to his work of railway construction.