William Magrath

[Chris]

Thank you so much for all the information.
When you characterize the Foreign Office's "Fenian Brotherhood" series as “impenetrable“, do you mean in their content, or as hard to get access to?

They're not hard to get access to, as they are available on microfilm at the National Archives (and presumably elsewhere). But it wasn't clear (to me) how they were organised and whether it would be feasible to find references to a particular person without weeks of searching.

And there has been NO connection found pertaining to Tumblety so far, I assume... No Irish club in London, or something that they both might have attended...

Not that I'm aware of. We know virtually nothing about Magrath's activities in London, and what we do know is included in the wiki article. The other problem is that I don't know very much about Tumblety, though obviously others such as R. J. Palmer who do are aware of the research on Magrath.

[mariab]

To Chris:
Thank you so much for the information. It's great that the Foreign Office's "Fenian Brotherhood" series are available at the British National Archives. (For a minute I thought that you were referring to the American Foreign office, thus to sources in America.) It sounds like these series are voluminous and no inventory exists, but I'm sure that at some point in the future someone will take the time to go through them.
And another newbie question: Were there any Fenian newspapers circulating in London similar to Der Arbeter Fraint for Jewish socialists/anarchists? And did “Dr. Tumblety“ post any advertisements for his “line of work“ in any London newspapers?
With many-many apologies for keeping firing newbie questions. Thank you.

[Chris]

And another newbie question: Were there any Fenian newspapers circulating in London similar to Der Arbeter Fraint for Jewish socialists/anarchists? And did “Dr. Tumblety“ post any advertisements for his “line of work“ in any London newspapers?

Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask - and perhaps someone can correct me if I'm wrong - but I assume people in London would have read the nationalist newspapers published in Ireland. Some of them are mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the Freeman's Journal, which was the oldest Irish nationalist newspaper (it is included in the British Library's digital collection of 19th-century newspapers as far as 1900):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman's_Journal

Of course, there were also Irish nationalist newspapers published in the USA.

[mariab]

Thank you so much, again, for all the information. I assume that people have checked The Freeman's Journal and other such papers for a possible published letter or mention of Magrath? I wish I could look myself (digitally), if I had the time. (But I'm totally clueless in Fenianism, and I'll be looking for information and sources in Paris, pertaining to Lacassagne's papers, to the Okhrana, and to some other things.)