In early 1843 Whelan left the Register, hoping to start a new Liberal semi-weekly in Halifax. His language was always correct, well chosen, and gracefully delivered.” Writing several years after Whelan’s death, James Hayden Fletcher, himself an accomplished public lecturer, stated that “As a popular orator, we doubt if the Island has ever witnessed his equal.” He had the faculty of seizing at once upon the minds of his hearers, and carrying them along with him. . .
One of Whelan’s later associates wrote that as an orator he was “brilliant, impassioned, exciting. While yet in his teens, he also became known as a speaker at the mechanics’ institute and at the Young Men’s Catholic Institute, an organization established by O’ Brien, a teacher of elocution and a well-known platform orator in his own right. Active in various Irish societies in Halifax, he succeeded O’Brien in directing the Register, an Irish Roman Catholic and Liberal newspaper strongly committed to repeal of the union between Ireland and England. In early 1842, against Howe’s wishes, Whelan left his office, where he had apparently remained during his studies at the seminary, and was ready, at age 18, to become an editor. Both O’Brien and Howe profoundly influenced the precocious youth. Thus Whelan spent his formative years at the intellectual centre of English speaking British North America: the Halifax of Howe, Thomas McCulloch*, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and “The Club.” He eventually attended St Mary’s Seminary, and studied directly under its first superior, Father Richard Baptist O’Brien, a dynamic Irish priest, who commenced classes in January 1840. In the following year he was apprenticed in the printing office of Joseph Howe*, who encouraged him to continue his education through reading, as he himself had done. He appears to have received a rudimentary education in Ballina and in Scotland before immigrating with his mother (who may have been widowed) to Halifax, N.S. In reply to insinuations by political enemies that they had arrived destitute, and that he had had to beg for his bread, Whelan wrote in 1855 that “enjoying in his mother’s right the fruits of no small amount of property, he was never placed in abject condition.” According to the most precise account he has left, the year of their immigration was 1831, and he immediately enrolled in St Mary’s school.
More than that of any other major figure in Prince Edward Island history, the early life of Edward Whelan is shrouded in romantic legend.
WHELAN, EDWARD, journalist and politician b. 1824 at Ballina, County Mayo (Republic of Ireland), son of a soldier in the British infantry d. 10 Dec.
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