The poet and novelist Dominick Kelly all but disappeared from literary history after his death in 1806, though a number of his works survived him, being reprinted, sometimes more than once, under the names of quite different writers. A native of the west of Ireland, the Roman Catholic Kelly studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh in the 1750s and, most likely, continued his studies at a continental university at the beginning of the 1760s. It was during his student days that he published his first poem, “
MissPolly Roe,
of Galway”, in
The Edinburgh Magazine(1758). When the London newspaper,
Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle, published a poem Kelly thought a “piratical imitation” of his own “justly admired song”, he wrote a letter of protest, leading the
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Citation: Ross, Ian Campbell. "Dominick Kelly". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 December 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=14493, accessed 19 April 2024.]
