Considers the map at the level of individual streets and buildings, revealing particular elements of Rocque's artistic cartography and aspects of Dublin's history.

Publisher Description

Dublin has experienced great—and often astonishing—change in its 1,400 year history. It has been the largest urban center on a deeply contested island since towns first appeared west of the Irish Sea. There have been other contested cities in the European and Mediterranean world, but almost no European capital city, David Dickson maintains, has seen sharper discontinuities and reversals in its history—and these have left their mark on Dublin and its inhabitants. Dublin occupies a unique place in Irish history and the Irish imagination. To chronicle its vast and varied history is to tell the story of Ireland. David Dickson’s magisterial history brings Dublin vividly to life beginning with its medieval incarnation and progressing through the neoclassical eighteenth century, when for some it was the “Naples of the North,” to the Easter Rising that convulsed a war-weary city in 1916, to the bloody civil war that followed the handover of power by Britain, to the urban renewal efforts at the end of the millennium. He illuminates the fate of Dubliners through the centuries—clergymen and officials, merchants and land speculators, publishers and writers, and countless others—who have been shaped by, and who have helped to shape, their city. He reassesses 120 years of Anglo-Irish Union, during which Dublin remained a place where rival creeds and politics struggled for supremacy. A book as rich and diverse as its subject, Dublin reveals the intriguing story behind the making of a capital city.

In exquisitely detailed illustrations and engaging words, Stephen Conlin and Peter Harbison bring alive the story of Dublin - its architecture and streetscapes, its government and its people - from Viking times to the present day.

The astonishing story that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Kidnapped. In 1728, in the wake of his father’s death, the twelve-year-old heir to five aristocratic titles and the scion of Ireland’s mighty house of Annesley was kidnapped by his uncle and shipped to America as an indentured servant. Only after twelve more years did “Jemmy” Annesley at last escape, returning to Ireland to bring his blood rival, the Earl of Anglesea, to justice in one of the most captivating trials of the century. Hundreds of years later, historian A. Roger Ekirch delves into the court transcripts and rarely seen legal depositions that chronicle Jemmy’s attempt to reclaim his birthright, in the process vividly evoking the volatile world of Georgian Ireland—complete with its violence, debauchery, ancient rituals, and tenacious loyalties.

Dublin: A Writer's City takes the reader, area by area, through one of the world's great literary cities.