Reprint of the original, first published in 1873. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
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.
Since its annexation to the British Crown, Ireland has never ceased in forming the subject of an ardent national debate in Great Britain which resulted in the demonisation of the Celtic race as subaltern and backward. In its effort to forge a national identity, the British Empire adopted several collective identities on the basis of the racial and cultural findings of the 1850s which gave a new impetus to the systematic view of England as a typically Anglo-Saxon culture, staunchly opposed to the alleged Celtic backwardness and the rebellious spirit of the Irish. In view of the rising anti-Irish wave of sentiment in the British imperialist imagination, Irish nationalism was manifest through a series of uprisings, the majority of which sought to link the country to its ancient Celtic heritage. The Celticist movements of Young Ireland and the Irish Revival revealed the need of Irish Nationalists to acquire a new, collective identity, which proved to be a strenuous task, given the complex historical and ethnic background of the Irish. This book investigates the extent to which Irish identity is affected by the racist and nationalist discourses of the nineteenth century which emerged to either defend or oppose the image of Ireland as a cultural construct. The travelogues explored here include some of the most fundamental representations of Ireland by prominent Irish and British travel writers, whose impressions of the island might be linked to the utopian and dystopian dimensions of the country.
There are many books which tackle the political developments in Ireland during the nineteenth century. The aim of this book is to show what life was like during the reign of Queen Victoria for those who lived in the towns and countryside during a period of momentous change. It covers a period of sixty-four years (1837-1901) when the only thing that that connected its divergent decades and generations was the fact that the same head of state presided over them. It is a social history, in so far as politics can be divorced from everyday life in Ireland, examining, changes in law and order, government intervention in education and public health, the revolution in transport and the shattering impact of the Great Famine and subsequent eviction and emigration. The influence of religion was a constant factor during the period with the three major denominations, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian, between them accounting for all but a very small proportion of the Irish population. Schools, hospitals, and other charitable institutions, orphan societies, voluntary organization, hotels, and even public transport and sporting organizations were organized along denominational lines. On a lighter note, popular entertainment, superstitions, and marriage customs are explored through the eyes of the Victorians themselves during the last full century of British rule.
The modern Irish question is defined by many as a case of a great and supposedly liberal nation supposedly mistreating a smaller one. This text embodies a new approach to this issue, analysing key issues from religious discrimination and famine, to the passions of both nationalism and unionism.
A little over a century ago, the Irish in America were the targets of intense xenophobic anxiety. Much of that anxiety centered on their mobility, whether that was traveling across the ocean to the U.S., searching for employment in urban centers, mixing with other ethnic groups, or forming communities of their own. Granshaw argues that American variety theatre, a precursor to vaudeville, was a crucial battleground for these anxieties, as it appealed to both the fears and the fantasies that accompanied the rapid economic and social changes of the Gilded Age.