Speculative Minds in Georgian Ireland
Novelty, Experiment and Widening Horizons
- 269 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Speculative Minds in Georgian Ireland
Novelty, Experiment and Widening Horizons
About this book
Between 1750 and 1837 Ireland encountered new ideas, commodities and experiences. While political upheavals and international warfare have been thoroughly explored, the novelties in the domestic sphere and daily life remain hazy. This collection investigates a wide and varied range of the innovations. Changes in how homes were furnished and decorated, what shops stocked, what was available to plant in gardens, what the newspapers published, how the poor might be fed economically and employed usefully are all investigated. Through commodities like sugar and through personal experiences many in Ireland confronted the unfamiliar and exotic. ' Novelty' – in individuals' lives and of goods – was at a premium. Those from Ireland gazed at the heavens, travelled to the Caribbean, devised manufactures to improve daily life, or speculated about how to release the untapped potential of the island. The results, whether inspired by curiosity, a zest for experimentation, fashion, profiteering, patriotism or civic conscience, permeated modest homes, small workshops and larger manufactories. Professionals, the middling sorts and the obscure, not just landed grandees, emerge as the vital innovators, inventors and patrons. Individually and collectively, the essays reveal numerous unexpected worlds within and beyond Ireland.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Daily life and scientific enquiry by Leonie Hannan
- Dublin's sugar landscapes in the eighteenth century: some French parallels and connections by Finola O'Kane
- 'Not to be had elsewhere in this kingdom': buying and selling exotic plants in Ireland, 1740-1820 by David A. Fleming
- A political turn of the Irish newspaper, 1760-70 by Joel Herman
- A taste for pastes: Dr Henry Quin, James Tassie and the empress of Russia by Toby Barnard
- Classicism and commerce: Josiah Wedgwoof and his 'seed[s] of consequence' by Alison FitzGerald
- William Allen and the emergence of single-sheet graphic satire publication in Ireland, 1778-95 by James Kelly
- The chimney doctor at Channel Row: Benjamin Thompson's experiments in poor relief in the 1790s by Padhraig Higgins
- A brittle business: Charles Mulvany and the Dublin glass industry, c. 1780- c.1840 by Anna Moran
- Frustrated ambition in the eighteenth-century Atlantic: Robert Tennet in Jamaica, c.1784-95
- Index