Wesley Guard Lyttle (real name Wesley Greenhill Lyttle, pseudonym Robin, 15 April 1844 - 30 October 1896) was an
Irish newspaper publisher, writer and editor.
Life
He was born in
Newtownards
Newtownards is a town in County Down, Northern Ireland. It lies at the most northern tip of Strangford Lough, 10 miles (16 km) east of Belfast, on the Ards Peninsula. It is in the Civil parishes in Ireland, civil parish of Newtownard ...
,
County Down
County Down () is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. It covers an area of and has a population of 531,665. It borders County Antrim to the ...
. He worked as a junior reporter, schoolteacher, and editor, among other occupations. He was well known as an entertainer, often in the guise of his alter-ego "Robin", a jovial country farmer who regaled his audiences in Ulster-Scots dialect. For most of the 1870s Lyttle lived in Belfast where he began to write and perform his humorous monologues. From 1880 he owned and edited the ''North Down Herald''. Lyttle moved the newspaper to Bangor in 1883 where it became the ''North Down Herald and Bangor Gazette'', a strong Liberal and
Home Rule paper.
[ Stephen Brown: A Reader’s Guide to Irish Fiction (1910)] He published his humorous monologues as ''Robin’s Readings'' and continued to give public performances.
Lyttle is probably best remembered today for his novel ''Betsy Gray, or, The Hearts of Down''. It first appeared in serial form in the ''Herald'', beginning on 7 November 1885. It is a semi-historical account of
Betsy Gray, a Presbyterian peasant girl who became a leader of the pikemen in the front ranks at the
Battle of Ballynahinch, during the
Irish rebellion of 1798. Lyttle provides a vivid, if not entirely historically accurate, account of the Rebellion in County Down, and the events immediately leading up to the insurrection.
Betsy Gray at Lisburn.com
/ref>
His name is usually given as Wesley Guard Lyttle, due to an error in his obituary in the Belfast News-Letter, 2 November 1896.
Select works
*'' Robin's Readings'', Eight Vols.
*''Sons of the Sod: A Tale of County Down'', 1886.
*''Betsy Gray'', 1888
*''The Smugglers of Strangford Lough''.
*''Daft Eddie'', 1889.
*''Two Irish Arthurian Romances'', published 1908.
References
External links
Lyttle at The Ulster-Scots Language Society
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lyttle, Wesley Guard
1844 births
1896 deaths
Irish journalists
Irish newspaper editors
Irish newspaper publishers (people)
Irish schoolteachers
Irish writers
People from Newtownards
19th-century journalists
Male journalists
19th-century male writers
19th-century Irish businesspeople