A presentation copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper to a woman with impeccable Irish nationalist credentials: “To Mrs. Hartley Withers with the writer’s regards.“
Johnson’s connections with the Withers family must have been through the Irish nationalist cause of which Johnson was by 1897 a fervent supporter. Mrs. Withers came a family background of Protestant Nationalism, and her first marriage was to the wealthy Henry Harrison of Holywood, County Down. Her son from that marriage, also Henry, (a schoolfriend of Withers’ at Westminster School - she was 28 years older than her second husband) became an influential Irish nationalist politician, who rose to fame in his early 20s when he was first arrested for helping oppose an eviction in Gweedore, Co. Donegal. He chose to stand for parliament rather than take his finals (Balliol College) and was elected Member for “Tipperary Mid” later leaving three policemen unconscious when they tried to stop him delivering a speech. A friend and close ally of Parnell, he devoted much of his life to attempting to repair Parnell’s reputation in the face of the divorce scandal and its manufactured evidence. Young Henry’s sister Sarah was a talented artist, who studied at the Slade as he studied at Westminster, and her portrait of her mother (offered for sale in Dublin in 2014) shows an exceptionally strong and handsome woman, still in mourning in 1897. Sarah herself entered politics in later life, becoming the first female councillor in Dublin City Council. Mrs. Withers also appears as the secretary of The People’s Concert Society, the objective of which was to bring high-brow music to the working classes in and around London: she also sang at the concerts.
Mrs. Hartley Withers, also known as Letitia Harrison, deserves to be better known to history. Her second husband Hartley Withers was an influential financial journalist, editor of The Economist from 1916 to 1921 - an interesting time, to be sure, although ODNB rather blandly remarks that “Withers is not rated one of the great editors of The Economist”. His books of economic analysis were readable and popular - Joseph Conrad was apparently fascinated with his analysis of British finance in 1914 in The War and Lombard Street. He was dedicatee of Johnson’s poem “In a Workhouse,“ printed here.
