ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. During the years 1840–1841, the prominent London publishing firm of Longman, Orme & Co. issued a ten-volume compilation of the Poetical Works by one of its best-selling authors, the Irishman Thomas Moore. Moore's massive collected edition for Longman, nevertheless, was a monumental hallmark of his immense status in the world of his day. The specifically modern Irish neglect of Thomas Moore in the twentieth century has been nothing short of remarkable – especially in the wake of the Easter Rebellion, the War of Independence, the partition of Ireland into the Irish Free State ('the South') and Northern Ireland ('the North') and the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923. Moore's engagement with his world extended beyond the realms of composition and publication into the concert hall, the aristocratic salon and the bourgeois parlour.
