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Charles Joseph Kickham was born and educated at Mullinahone,
County Tipperary. At thirteen he was involved in a gunpowder accident
which permanently injured his sight and hearing. Soon after he founded
the Young Ireland Confederate Club in Mullinahone. Kickham contributed
articles to James Stephens' The Irish People and later became that
paper's editor in which capacity he was arrested in 1865 for writing
'treasonous' articles. Kickham, nearly blind and almost completely deaf,
was tried and sentenced to fourteen years penal servitude. He was
imprisoned in Portland and Woking prisons where he wrote his first
novel Sally Kavanagh (1869). Kickham was released, due to ill-health,
in 1870 and lived in Blackrock, County Dublin where he continued to
write poetry and novels. His Knocknagow; or The Homes of
Tipperary (1879) was a phenomenal success, making Kickham the
most popular Irish novelist of the 19th century.
Kickham's funeral procession was one of the largest ever witnessed in
Ireland when he died in 1882 with over 150,000 mourners in attendance.
A novel For the Old Land (1886) and Poems of Charles J Kickham
(1931) were published posthumously.