Alexander Mitchell, eighth son of William Mitchell and Jane Ferguson, one of thirteen children, was born in William Street, Dublin, on 13 April 1780. His father was inspector-general of barracks in Ireland, a duty that took him all over the country. When at home he relaxed by playing the violin and the harpsichord and often … Read more
The last few years have seen a sudden resurgence of interest in the history of polar exploration, focused mainly on the major Antarctic expeditions of the early twentieth-century ‘heroic period’. Yet these expeditions represented the end of a long history of polar exploration, and twentieth-century explorers based their methods on the experiences of an earlier … Read more
Russell K. Alspach, in Irish poetry from the English invasion to 1798, wrote of The Harp of Erin (1807), a substantial, posthumously published anthology of Thomas Dermody’s verse, that one could go through it ‘without stumbling on anything that even faintly resembles poetry’. Dermody’s means deter-mined his themes; thus he wrote safe poems to flatter … Read more
During the 1650s, Sir William Petty surveyed Ireland on behalf of Oliver Cromwell’s government, in order to facilitate the dispossession and transplantation of the Catholic Irish after the devastating wars of the 1640s. In later years he settled into the twin roles of landlord and scientist in Ireland, and at some point in the 1680s … Read more