Michael Davitt: freelance radical and frondeur Laurence Marley (Four Courts Press, €45) ISBN 9781846820663 Michael Davitt once took the sort of questionnaire that would now be found in a glossy magazine. We learn from it that his heroes were ‘those who minimise suffering’; his favourite food was ‘anything purchased by my own energy’; his favourite … Read more
Travel writings comprise a marvellous if problematic source for Irish scholars—especially for historians of pre-Famine Ireland. Arguably, these accounts can be grouped broadly into at least three categories. First are those, often written by foreign visitors, which focus on Irish poverty and ‘backwardness’, and frequently attribute them to English or landlord oppression. Historians sympathetic to … Read more
The wolf is as rich an image in literature as it is a reality—albeit a persecuted one—in natural history. Invariably featured as a menace in mythology and folklore, the wolf, demon or hero, is a strange and glamorous creature, the enigmatic ancestor of our domestic dog, and still roams Russian Asia, Canada and Alaska.Anyone with … Read more
Biddy Early died on the afternoon of 22 April 1874 in a small, two-roomed mud cottage overlooking Kilbarron Lake in Feakle, Co. Clare. Her life story was first published in 1903, with dark tales of witchcraft continuing to swirl around her memory ever since. In the 1970s an attempt to secure funding for a newly renovated … Read more
With an estimated four million people by the 1770s, Ireland had undergone a population explosion that made Dublin the second-largest city, after London, in the British Empire. Nevertheless, despite this growth, in terms of infrastructure Ireland’s capital city remained a small, densely populated, essentially medieval city, akin to contemporary Paris. Just as would happen in … Read more