Introduction: James clarence mangan: The man in the cloak

In November 1838, James Clarence Mangan published a reinvention of Honoré de Balzac’s novella ‘Melmoth Réconcilié’ (1834), renaming it ‘The Man in the Cloak’. From then on, the phrase became one of the Irish writer’s favourite nom de plumes, augmenting both a lifelong obsession with the veiling of identity and - since to conceal one’s identity is also to complicate and intensify it - the conviction that the self is at once hidden, unstable, and multifarious. Two years later, Mangan signed a letter to a friend (journalist Charles Gavan Duffy) with a deftly drawn pen-and-ink rebus that shows his continuing attachment to the name, as well as a handsome penmanship.