Frank Frankfort Moore

Frank Frankfort Moore (1855–1931) was an Irish journalist, novelist, dramatist, and poet. He was a Belfast Protestant and a unionist, but his historical fiction during the years of Home Rule agitation did not shy from themes of Irish-Catholic dispossession.

Belfast years

Moore was born in Limerick, but was raised in Belfast where he records as his earliest memory was witnessing dragoons, sabres drawn, rushing sectarian rioters in the street below his nursery window.

Moore's father was a successful clockmaker and jeweller, and the home was relatively cultured (both French and German were spoken). However, as a member of the ultra-puritan Open Brethren sect the elder Moore sought to restrict his children's reading to religious and didactic titles. The evangelist Michael Paget Baxter, who identified the Emperor Napoleon III as the Beast of the Book of Revelation, was a regular visitor.

Moore was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution where he quickly learned to distance himself from his father's beliefs. He recalled the circulation of some scurrilous verses entitled "Mr. Baxter and The Beast", "proving" that Baxter himself was the Antichrist.

In 1874 Moore hailed the declaration of scientific materialism by the Irish physicist John Tyndall at a conference of the British Science Association in Belfast and mocked the outraged reaction of local Presbyterian ministers. Moore did not disguise his disdain for the fevered evangelism of the Ulster Revival. He was to write that "if ever a mortal heard the voice of God, it would be in the garden at the cool of the day". He later took Anglican communion in the Church of Ireland.