To Victorian visitors, Ireland was a world of extremes – Luxurious country houses to one-room mud cabins (in 1841 40% of Irish housing was the latter). This thorough and engaging social history of Ireland offers new insights into the ways in which ordinary people lived during this dramatic moment in Ireland's history from 1800-1914. It covers wide range of aspects of everyday lives: from work on the many wealthy country estates to grinding poverty in the towns. It covers the transformative effects of the railway development and Ireland's first tourist boom. Workhouse life and the new Poor Law system which incarcerated entire families behind forbidding walls. Religious divisions, educational boycotts, customs and superstitions.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an era of continuity as well as change. Though properly portrayed as the era of 'Protestant Ascendancy' it embraces two phases - the eighteenth century when that ascendancy was at its peak; and the nineteenth century when the Protestant elite sustained a determined rear-guard defence in the face of the emergence of modern Catholic nationalism. Employing a chronology that is not bound by traditional datelines, this volume moves beyond the familiar political narrative to engage with the economy, society, population, emigration, religion, language, state formation, culture, art and architecture, and the Irish abroad. It provides new and original interpretations of a critical phase in the emergence of a modern Ireland that, while focused firmly on the island and its traditions, moves beyond the nationalist narrative of the twentieth century to provide a history of late early modern Ireland for the twenty-first century.

This volume explores the multiple forms and functions of reading and writing in nineteenth-century Ireland. It traces how understandings of literacy and language shaped national and transnational discourses of cultural identity, and the different reading communities produced by questions of language, religion, status, education and audience.

This book provides an in-depth study of translation and translators in nineteenth-century Ireland, using translation history to widen our understanding of cultural exchange in the period. It paints a new picture of a transnational Ireland in contact with Europe, offering fresh perspectives on the historical, political and cultural debates of the era. Employing contemporary translation theories and applying them to Ireland’s socio-historical past, the author offers novel insights on a large range of disciplines relating to the country, such as religion, gender, authorship and nationalism. She maps out new ways of understanding the impact of translation in society and re-examines assumptions about the place of language and Europe in nineteenth-century Ireland. By focusing on a period of significant linguistic and societal change, she questions the creative, conflictual and hegemonic energies unleashed by translations. This book will therefore be of interest to those working in Translation Studies, Irish Studies, History, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.

Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–52 was among the most devastating food crises in modern history. A country of some eight-and-a-half-million people lost one million to hunger and disease and another million to emigration. According to land activist Michael Davitt, the starving made little or no effort to assert "the animal’s right to existence," passively accepting their fate. But the poor did resist. In word and deed, they defied landlords, merchants and agents of the state: they rioted for food, opposed rent and rate collection, challenged the decisions of those controlling relief works, and scorned clergymen who attributed their suffering to the Almighty. The essays collected here examine the full range of resistance in the Great Famine, and illuminate how the crisis itself transformed popular politics. Contributors include distinguished scholars of modern Ireland and emerging historians and critics. This book is essential reading for students of modern Ireland, and the global history of collective action.

This text is a comprehensive study of fiction written by Irish authors during the Victorian age. James Murphy analyses the development of the novel in Ireland and examines the work of authors including William Carleton, Charles Lever, Somerville and Ross, and Bram Stoker in the social and literary contexts of their times.

"For centuries, the Irish have been famed, and often derided, for their attachment to alcohol. Yet in the 1830s and 1840s, Ireland became a temperance stronghold. The man almost singlehandedly responsible for this surprising transformation was Father Theobald Mathew (1790-1856), a popular Franciscan friar. Over a ten-year period, five million Irish men, women, and children took the pledge at his hands, while hundreds of public houses were forced to shut their doors or switch to selling coffee and tea. By the end of the 1840s, however, Mathew's "miracle" was already coming undone. The Great Famine was ravaging Ireland and Mathew's years of nonstop campaigning had left him sick, exhausted, and bankrupt. Undeterred, he traveled to the United States in 1849 to generate support and administer the pledge to as many new immigrants as he could find. Failing health forced him to return to Ireland where he died in 1856, leaving behind a weak and fragmented movement. In the late nineteenth century, several Irish priests revived Mathew, s crusade. In the United States, Irish American bishops supported the Catholic Total Abstinence Union (CTAU) and joined hands with the Women's Christian Temperance Union in their war against liquor. In Ireland, Father James Cullen formed the Pioneers, a total abstinence association for devout Catholics. While the CTAU languished after the United States Congress passed the Prohibition Amendment in 1919, the Pioneers continued to thrive in Ireland into the 1960s. Although the group, s membership has declined in recent years, there are still today a large number of Irish teetotallers."--Publisher's website.