It has been suggested that Moore's reputation in Belfast for journalistic vitriol "reflected a sense of entrapment among provincial philistines". Moore's 1893 novel, "
I Forbid the Banns": the Story of a Comedy that was Played Seriously, was eventually to sell over half a million copies. The heroine, a young Australian women, scandalises society by operating on the principle that "if marriage is founded upon true affection, the tie will be regarded as sacred by the man and the woman without the necessity of any civil contract". Complications ensue and the experiment proves a failure. The success of the novel gave Moore gave the confidence to launch himself a literary career--in London. He celebrated his departure from Belfast by publishing a collection of anecdotal reminiscences, ''A Journalist's Notebook
(1894) which gave widespread offence to his former colleagues. The ethno-Irish Democratic-Party machine was a demonstration of the corrupt practices that would be a mark an Irish parliament. On these lines Moore wrote satires of Irish Home Rule such as Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister
(1892), The Viceroy of Muldoon
and The Rise and Fall of Larry O’Lannigan JP'' (1893), albeit in "the gentle mould of
Somerville and Ross rather than the turbulent bigotry of [the unionist leaders]
Carson and
Craig". Where Moore's fiction portrays Cromwell's crimes of conquest, the
Lord Protector nonetheless retains the aura of "a
Carlylean Great Man". His
Gaels, by comparison, are "inefficient fantasists". It is suggested that Moore "feared the mass Catholicism of the western peasantry and the Belfast slums as the enemy of individual freedom and economic progress". the Ireland that he describes in his last work,
A Mixed Grill (1930), has been described as "a country best suited to the gentlemanly pursuit of hunting, now departed." ==Death and legacy==