Lost Property
The Dublin Chronicle, 16-18 May 1771, page 3, carried an advertisement of a list of clothes which had been stolen from a home near Christ Church in Dublin, when a window was left open in the summer of...
View ArticleGossip
On 24 March 1793, Lady Mary Boyle Roche wrote a letter (National Library of Ireland Manuscript 5391). In it, she described Lady Pamela Fitzgerald (pictured above) who had just married Lord Edward...
View ArticlePress Down The Lumps, The Hollows Fill
Jonathan Swift, Irish-born Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, was 67 when he wrote a poem called A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed, about a prostitute taking off her work persona (her...
View ArticleOne Stiff Gown For Sunday
In 1765, Lady Arabella Denny founded the first Magdalen Asylum in Ireland, for Protestant ‘fallen women and penitent prostitutes’ in Lower Leeson Street in Dublin. A year previous to this she had been...
View ArticleTo Drag Free Citizens to the Tenter-fields, and There to Torment Them
Possibly the only portrait of John Rocque – this upperclass man with his ‘way-wiser’ is drawn in his map of Middlesex – source. In 1754, John Rocque came to Dublin. In 1756, he produced the four-sheet...
View ArticleSallied Forth In Your Drawers
In October 1900, when asked his opinion on what ‘national costume’ should be adopted in a soon-to-be-independent Ireland, the Republican Pádraig Pearse had this to say: Frankly I should much prefer to...
View ArticleIf I Paint My Sitter in a Purple Tie
Image. These are the opening lines to the preface of Maurice Craig’s Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City. They hit the point of writing about history so exactly. The historian proper enjoys less...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....