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Irish Gothic Literature
Irish Gothic literature developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the writers were Anglo-Irish. The period from 1691 to 1800 was marked by the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy, Anglo-Irish families of the Church of Ireland who controlled most of the land. The Irish Parliament, which was almost exclusively Protestant in composition, passed the Penal Laws, effectively disenfranchising the Catholic majority both politically and economically. This began to change with the Acts of Union 1800 and the concomitant abolition of the Irish Parliament. Following a vigorous campaign led by Irish lawyer Daniel O'Connell, Westminster passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 removing most of the disabilities imposed upon Catholics. The Anglo-Irish community found itself in a liminal position. No longer able to rely on the British government to protect their interests, many leaned toward Irish nationalism, which itself was somewhat problematic given their minority statu ...
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Anglo-Irish People
Anglo-Irish people () denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until 1871, or to a lesser extent one of the English dissenting churches, such as the Methodist church, though some were Roman Catholics. They often defined themselves as simply "British", and less frequently "Anglo-Irish", "Irish" or "English". Many became eminent as administrators in the British Empire and as senior army and naval officers since Kingdom of England and Great Britain were in a real union with the Kingdom of Ireland until 1800, before politically uniting into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) for over a century. The term is not usually applied to Presbyterians in the province of Ulster, whose ancestry is mostly Lowland Scottish, rather than English or Irish, and who are sometimes id ...
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Melmoth The Wanderer
''Melmoth the Wanderer'' is an 1820 Gothic novel by Irish playwright, novelist and clergyman Charles Maturin. The novel's titular character is a scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 extra years of life, and searches the world for someone who will take over the pact for him, in a manner reminiscent of the Wandering Jew. The novel is composed of a series of nested stories-within-stories, gradually revealing the story of Melmoth's life. The novel offers social commentary on early-19th-century England, and denounces Roman Catholicism in favour of the virtues of Protestantism. Synopsis John Melmoth, a student in Dublin, visits his dying uncle. He finds a portrait of a mysterious ancestor called "Melmoth"; the portrait is dated 1646. At his uncle's funeral, John is told an old family story about a stranger called Stanton, who arrived looking for "Melmoth the Traveller" decades earlier. A manuscript left by Stanton describes his first finding Melmoth laughing at ...
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Henry Irving
Sir Henry Irving (6 February 1838 – 13 October 1905), christened John Henry Brodribb, sometimes known as J. H. Irving, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility (supervision of sets, lighting, direction, casting, as well as playing the leading roles) for season after season at the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theatre. In 1895 he became the first actor to be awarded a knighthood, indicating full acceptance into the higher circles of British society. Life and career Irving was born to a working-class family in Keinton Mandeville in the county of Somerset. W.H. Davies, the celebrated poet, was a cousin. Irving spent his childhood living with his aunt, Mrs Penberthy, at Halsetown in Cornwall. He competed in a recitation contest at a local Methodist chapel where he was beaten by William Curnow, later the editor of ''The Sydn ...
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Dracula
''Dracula'' is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist, but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, hunt Dracula and, in the end, kill him. ''Dracula'' was mostly written in the 1890s. Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes for the novel, drawing extensively from Transylvanian folklore and history. Some scholars have suggested that the character of Dracula was inspired by historical figures like the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler or the countess Elizabeth Báthory, but there is widespread disagreement. Stoker's notes mention neither figure. He found the name ''D ...
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Carmilla
''Carmilla'' is an 1872 Gothic fiction, Gothic novella by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's ''Dracula'' (1897) by 26 years. First published as a Serial (literature), serial in ''The Dark Blue'' (1871–72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). The character is a prototypical example of the lesbian vampire, expressing romantic desires toward the protagonist. The novella notably never acknowledges homosexuality as an antagonistic trait, leaving it subtle and morally ambiguous. The story is often Anthology, anthologised, and has been adapted many times in film and other media. Publication ''Carmilla'', serialised in the literary magazine ''The Dark Blue'' in late 1871 and early 1872, was reprinted in Le Fanu's short-story collection ''In a Glass Darkly'' (1872). Comparing the work ...
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Dublin Evening Mail
The ''Dublin Evening Mail'' (renamed the ''Evening Mail'' in 1928) was between 1823 and 1962 one of Dublin's evening newspapers. Origins Launched in 1823, it proved to be the longest lasting evening paper in Ireland. The paper was an instant success, with first editor Joseph Timothy Haydn from Limerick seeing its readership hit 2,500 in a month, making it at that stage (when few could read, and the only people who bought papers were the gentry and aristocracy) the city's top seller. Its readership ebbed and flowed during the century. From the late 1860s until 1892 it was owned by a Dublin businessman called George Tickell. On Tickell's death it was acquired by James Poole Maunsell, who had edited it in the early 1880s and was the son of a former proprietor, Dr Henry Maunsell. James Poole Maunsell died in 1897 and the paper was acquired by Lord Ardilaun after his death in 1915 it was sold to a Cork businessman called Tivy. During the Land War it took a strongly Conservative an ...
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Great Famine (Ireland)
The Great Famine ( ga, an Gorta Mór ), also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis which subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as , literally translated as "the bad life" (and loosely translated as "the hard times"). The worst year of the period was 1847, which became known as "Black '47".Éamon Ó Cuív – the impact and legacy of the Great Irish Famine During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million Irish diaspora, fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% (in some towns falling as much as 67%) between 1841 and 1871.Carolan, MichaelÉireann's ...
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Bram Stoker
Abraham Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author who is celebrated for his 1897 Gothic horror novel '' Dracula''. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned. In his early years, Stoker worked as a theatre critic for an Irish newspaper, and wrote stories as well as commentaries. He also enjoyed travelling, particularly to Cruden Bay where he set two of his novels. During another visit to the English coastal town of Whitby, Stoker drew inspiration for writing ''Dracula''. He died on 20 April 1912 due to locomotor ataxia and was cremated in north London. Since his death, his magnum opus ''Dracula'' has become one of the most well-known works in English literature, and the novel has been adapted for numerous films, short stories, and plays. Early life Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on the northside of Dubli ...
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Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë (, commonly ; 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She enlisted in school at Roe Head in January 1831, aged 14 years. She left the year after to teach her sisters, Emily and Anne, at home, returning in 1835 as a governess. In 1839, she undertook the role of governess for the Sidgwick family, but left after a few months to return to Haworth, where the sisters opened a school but failed to attract pupils. Instead, they turned to writing and they each first published in 1846 under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although her first novel, '' The Professor'', was rejected by publishers, her second novel, ''Jane Eyre'', was published in 1847. The sisters admitted to their Bell pseudonyms in 1848, and by the following year were celebrated in London literary circles. Charlotte Brontë was the ...
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Uncle Silas
''Uncle Silas'', subtitled "A Tale of Bartram Haugh", is an 1864 Victorian Gothic mystery- thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Despite Le Fanu resisting its classification as such, the novel has also been hailed as a work of sensation fiction by contemporary reviewers and modern critics alike. It is an early example of the locked-room mystery subgenre, rather than a novel of the supernatural (despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the occult and in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic. Like many of Le Fanu's novels, ''Uncle Silas'' grew out of an earlier short story, in this case "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" (1839), which he also published as "The Murdered Cousin" in the collection ''Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery'' (1851). While this earlier story was set in Ireland, the novel's action takes place in Derbyshire; the author Elizabeth Bowen ...
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Tithe War
The Tithe War ( ga, Cogadh na nDeachúna) was a campaign of mainly nonviolent civil disobedience, punctuated by sporadic violent episodes, in Ireland between 1830 and 1836 in reaction to the enforcement of tithes on the Roman Catholic majority for the upkeep of the established state church, the Church of Ireland. Tithes were payable in cash or kind and payment was compulsory, irrespective of an individual's religious adherence. Background Tithe payment was an obligation on those working the land to pay ten per cent of the value of certain types of agricultural produce for the upkeep of the clergy and maintenance of the assets of the church. After the Reformation in Ireland of the 16th century, the assets of the church were allocated by King Henry VIII to the new established church. The majority of the population in Ireland who continued to adhere to Catholicism were then obliged to make tithe payments which were directed away from their own church to the reformed one. This incr ...
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Dean (Christianity)
A dean, in an ecclesiastical context, is a cleric holding certain positions of authority within a religious hierarchy. The title is used mainly in the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, and many Lutheran denominations. A dean's assistant is called a sub-dean. History Latin ''decanus'' in the Roman military was the head of a group of ten soldiers within a '' centuria'', and by the 5th century CE, it was the head of a group of ten monks. It came to refer to various civil functionaries in the later Roman Empire.''Oxford English Dictionary'' s.v.' Based on the monastic use, it came to mean the head of a chapter of canons of a collegiate church or cathedral church. Based on that use, deans in universities now fill various administrative positions. Latin ''decanus'' should not be confused with Greek ''diákonos'' (διάκονος),' from which the word deacon derives, which describes a supportive role. Officials In the Roman Catholic Church, the Dean of the Colleg ...
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