ABSTRACT
Our understanding of Maginn’s final few years is greatly enriched, but also confused, by his acolyte and first biographer Edward Vaughan Kenealy (1819–1880), a teenage Cork and Trinity College man who turned up in London, under escort of his father, in January 1838 to read for the bar at Gray’s Inn. He was a future Queen’s Counsel, and like Maginn a brilliant classicist who was awarded the LLD. When Kenealy became famous in the 1860s as the lawyer representing the Tichborne Claimant, however, Charles Dodgson realized that his name was an anagram for “Ah! We dread an ugly knave” (Morg. Lib. LHMS Unbound2, MA 6349). Harsh perhaps—but one cannot help but place him in the bin marked brilliant but of dubious mental stability.
