One of the main social functions of picture postcards was to facilitate communication, a sort of Edwardian Facebook or Twitter. We tend to think of postcards now as mainly sent by holidaymakers, but in the early twentieth century they were also used to send birthday, congratulatory, Christmas and other greetings. The importance of postcards as … Read more
Between 1895 and 1920 the purchasing, sending and collecting of picture postcards became a craze, in Ireland as elsewhere. About 200–300 billion of them are thought to have circulated worldwide during this period, and postcard production became a big international business that appealed to entrepreneurs everywhere, employing huge numbers of people. The first plain postcard … Read more
The state reformatory was one of three institutions provided for by the 1898 act and the only one to be managed by the prison system. Certified reformatories were established and operated privately, perhaps by a local authority or religious order. Inmates could be detained there by the courts and those deemed to be progressing well … Read more
Vaughan correctly pointed to the importance of the fact that John George’s father, George Adair, had married into the powerful and influential Trench family. In particular, his interaction with the ruthless land agent William Steuart Trench is thought to have influenced Adair’s outlook on how to deal with recalcitrant tenants. No attention, however, has been … Read more
While Rutty dates the introduction of granite for construction work in Dublin to the early 1740s, evidence suggests that it was used at least 40 years earlier for some purposes. Clues to its earlier use lie in Rutty’s reference to the use of granite for paving and to its being ‘vulgarly called firestone’. Firestone remained … Read more