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CHILDHOOD : GREECE IRELAND ENGLAND

1850 -1869





LEVKAS, GREECE 1850 - 52



The Ionian island of Levkas where Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850.

Hearn's father, Charles Hearn, was an Irish Surgeon-major in the British army stationed temporarily in Lefkada. His mother, Rosa Tessima Antonia Kassimati came from Kythera. Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn was baptized in the local Orthodox church - indicating that his parents had actually been properly married there, a fact violently denied by the staunchly Irish-Protestant family of Charles Hearn.

When the British occupation of the ionian Islands ended in 1852, Charles Hearn moved his family to Dublin where Hearn's family made life hell for Rosa. A second child was on the way, and to make things worse Charles was moved to the Crimean War.

Apart from Dublin two places claim Lafcadio as their own Levkada and Matsue in Japan. In neither lived he longer than 2 years. Lafcadio had no memory of Greece aside from part of his mother's imagination and temparament. He was thoroughly Irish but with his dark skin an outsider there too.
Photo Panoramio
Biographical detail from Wikipedia



DUBLIN 1852

In 1852, when the British left the Greek Islands, Charles and Rosa Tessima moved to Dublin, where Rosa, because of her dark skin, fierce eyes and temperament was received with great suspicion. In the eyes of the Irish relatives of Charles they weren't even properly married.



Major Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father

Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the battles of Alma and Inkermann, and through the siege of Sevastopol.

After the departure of her husband for the Crimea in 1855, their second child was born: Daniel James. Following his birth Rosa Tessima went through a period of mental depressions, and when in March Charles returnd to Ireland the two parents had several harsh diagreements. In 1856 Charles and Rosa Hearn's luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent.

It is difficult to make out how much little Lafcadio knew of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these years - the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his mother's brain.

When his father with his new wife was sent to India the six year-old Lafcadio was entrusted to the care of Mrs. Justin Brenane - a wealthy widow and distant relative of his father's new wife, who promised to leave him her money, on condition that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith. She lived at 73, Upper Leeson Street in Dublin and later moved to Redhill, Surrey in England, where Lafcadio entered school.

Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on his return journey from India to England, Surgeon- Major Charles Bush Hearn died of Indian fever, on board the English steamship Mula at Suez.

Mrs. Brenane owned a house on Linkfield Place, in Redhill, Surrey, where Lafcadio went to school during the 6 years before she sent him to Ushaw College.
Excerpted from Lefcadio Hearn, by Nina Kennard, 1913.






Lafcadio Hearn at 16.




USHAW, ST. CUTHBERT CATHOLIC SEMINARY 1863-66

Mrs Brenane sent Lefcadio to Ushaw Seminary, because it was a well regarded Catholic College not for training as a priest. He was so wildly independent and contrary that the rector of Ushaw wouldn't have dreamt of training Hearn for the priesthood.

In 1866 while playing a game known as the "Giant's Stride" one of his classmates allowed the knotted end of a rope to slip from his hands. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the inflammation supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly disfigured by the loss of my left eye," he much later tells Mrs. Atkinson, his half-sister from his father's second marriage. He never allowed anyone to take a photo which included his missing eye.

Shortly thereafter he was ejected from Ushaw for not entirely clear reasons, probably he was considered untractable


LONDON 1867-69

After his ejection from Ushaw Lafcadio fled to London to stay with the family of Catherine Delaney, a former maid of Mrs. Brenane.

Nina Kennard writes in her biography: "Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain endeavoured to penetrate."

Hearn's stay in Yvetot near Rouen, 1868-69, supposedly with a relative - his younger brother had been deposited in Paris when the family broke up - is based on hearsay.

Certain is that in 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who had taken control of his life and was told to leave Europe for Cincinnati in America. There he was consigned to the care of a Mr. Cullinane - the brother-in-law of Mrs Brenane's new "husband" Henry Molyneux....

Photo from Elizabeth Bisland, Lefcadio Hearn's Japanese Letters, Vol. XXIII.
Text excerpt from Nina Kennard, 1913.


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