The Viceregal Microbe

By the start of the 20th century many Irish people were living in squalor: the country's infant mortality rate was the highest in Europe and tuberculosis was rampant. The daunting and tireless Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, wife of the British Viceroy to Ireland, devoted herself to social changes that could save lives. But she often faced ridicule because of the contrast between her own high status and her concern for the common man. Arthur Griffith, future president of Ireland, publicly nicknamed her The Viceregal Microbe. This book tells the story of the friction between the struggle for Irish independence and the 'good works' of the Anglo-Irish elite. The mainly Protestant and upper-class women who gathered around Lady Aberdeen through the Women's National Health Association she founded were all fine people with good hearts. But Irish Nationalists treated them with suspicion, and progress in the war against tuberculosis was the casualty. Lady Abderdeen became ever more radical in her campaign for better living conditions for Ireland's poor. The Chief Medical Officer of the Guinness Brewery, John Lumsden, was one of her close allies. By the end of her decades of work (most intensely 1906-1915) in Ireland, Ishbel Aberdeen became as out-spoken as the trade union rebel 'Big Jim' Larkin. She was a strong woman and often alienated people by her relentlessness. She drove herself to exhaustion and her family almost to bankruptcy in her campaign for a better life for Ireland's poor. But in the end she was doomed to be viewed as part of the system of British rule over Ireland. And history belongs to the victor. The contribution of Lady Aberdeen and her volunteers to the welfare of Ireland's poor and sick was largely forgotten in the wake of the country's independence and its nationalist fervour.

A unique and fascinating look at Victorian society through the remarkable lives of an enlightened and philanthropic aristocratic couple, the Marquess and Marchioness of Aberdeen, who tried to change the world for the better but paid a heavy price. This is a true tale of love and loss, fortune and misfortune. In the late 19th century, John and Ishbel Gordon, the Marquess and Marchioness of Aberdeen, were the couple who seemed to have it all: a fortune that ran into the tens of millions, a magnificent stately home in Scotland surrounded by one of Europe’s largest estates, a townhouse in London’s most fashionable square, cattle ranches in Texas and British Columbia, and the governorships of Ireland and Canada where they lived like royalty. Together they won praise for their work as social reformers and pioneers of women’s rights, and enjoyed friendships with many of the most prominent figures of the age, from Britain’s Prime Ministers to Oliver Wendell-Holmes and P.T. Barnum and Queen Victoria herself. Yet by the time they died in the 1930s, this gilded couple’s luck had long since run out: they had faced family tragedies, scandal through their unwitting involvement in one of the “crimes of the century” and, most catastrophically of all, they had lost both their fortune and their lands. This fascinating family quest for the reason for their dramatic downfall is also a moving and colorful exploration of society in Victorian Britain and North America and an inspirational feast for history lovers.

Leading historians explore the multiple dimensions of the Irish lord lieutenancy as an institution - political, social and cultural

This memoir tells the story of the first twenty-one years of my life, growing up and coming of age in the working class Dublin Corporation housing estate of Crumlin. Although humorous when telling my tale, the book also includes stories of abuse, death and loss. The chapters unfold from my unlikely birth – the youngest of fifteen children – to Crumlin life, the death of my brother Paddy in a London road accident and the abuse I suffered through a 'Christian' Brother at school. From a little boy priest in Blackrock College and then as an apprentice projectionist in the Kenilworth Cinema and a year as clapper/loader in Ardmore Studios. The story goes on through my difficult teenage years of alienation from my father and his death at the age of seventy, a month before my 21st birthday and a few months before my marrying my pregnant 18-year-old girlfriend. That marked the end of my life in 147, Leighlin Road and the start of my life as a married man and father-to-be. This book will be of interest to anyone of a Dublin/Irish heritage who will understand my journey. Back in my day emigration, particularly to England, was part of Irish life and that is reflected in my story. I am an experienced storyteller and now I am finally telling my own story of the years that formed the man I am today.

Luke Gibbons, a prominent Irish scholar and Joycean, here offers the first study to make a full and strong argument that Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism. It was common in the first generations of Joycean criticism to attribute Joyce's modernism to European exile, and to portray Ireland as a romantic backwater, the source of the nets from which Joyce was trying to escape. Gibbons argues, by contrast, that the pressures of late colonial Ireland, a country at once inside and outside the world system, provided the ferment that gave rise to Joyce's most distinctive literary experiments. Crucially, Gibbons holds that Ireland features not just as "subject matter" or "content," but as "form." Gibbons further argues that Joyce's major achievement was to pioneer an idiom in which narrative is freighted with voices from both inside and outside a culture. Joyce's use of free indirect discourse opens inner life to other voices and shadowy presences produced by a late colonial culture at odds with its own identity. In this sense, Gibbons shows, Joyce's language is haunted by ghosts, by voices testifying to forces--technology, empire, urbanization--off the page. This book is sure to become a landmark study of this enduring and widely read novelist, and advances our understanding of the connections between modernism and the nation.