Thomas Crofton Croker

Thomas Crofton Croker (15 January 1798 – 8 August 1854) was an Irish antiquary, best known for his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–1828), and who also showed considerable interest in Irish song and music.

Although Fairy Legends purported to be an anthology of tales Croker had collected on his field trips, he had lost his manuscript notes and the work had to be reconstructed with the help of friends. He did not acknowledge his debt satisfactorily in the estimation of Thomas Keightley, who voiced his complaint publicly, and soon published his own rival work. The other collaborators generally allowed Croker to take credit, notably William Maginn, though after his death his kinsmen insisted Maginn had written four or more of the tales. Croker retracted ten tales in his third edition of (1834), and after his death, a fourth edition (1859) appeared which was prefaced with a memoir written by his son.

William Butler Yeats, who appropriated a number of tales for his anthology, characterised Croker as belonging to the class of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, and criticised him for comic distortions of the Irish tradition, an assessment echoed by other Irish critics. Bridget G. MacCarthy wrote a biographical paper that scrutinises Croker's habit of publishing writings by others under his own name. Defenders of Croker include Justin McCarthy and Neil C. Hultin.

Croker was born in the city of Cork, the only son of Major Thomas Croker and his wife, the former Miss Dillon, daughter of Croker Dillon and widow of a Mr Fitton. At age 15, he apprenticed in business. During the years 1812 to 1815, he travelled the south of Ireland and began collecting legends and songs. Croker took one Irish coronach (keening) that he collected in Cork in 1813, and translated it into English prose, which was published in the Morning Post in 1815 and caught the attention of the poet George Crabbe in 1817, through the intermediary of the antiquary Richard Sainthill [la].

Croker also showed talent as an artist, and his works were exhibited at Cork in 1817 ("pen-sketches of pilot-boats"), but he abandoned art in favour of literary pursuit.

Around 1818, he sent to the poet Thomas Moore a set of about forty ancient Irish air or songs, and some collected poetry, and Moore used the material in editions of his Irish Melodies.

After his father's death on 22 March 1818, the estate was managed by his distant relative (or of no relation), John Wilson Croker who was then Secretary of the Admiralty, and who procured him a position as a clerk there, a position he would retain for thirty years until his retirement in 1850.

He was a man of short stature, measuring 4 feet 10½ inches tall, and described by Sir Walter Scott as "Little as a dwarf, keen-eyed as a hawk and of very prepossessing manners—something like Tom Moore".