Vices and Volumes | Navigate Irish and British History's Absurdities from 1800s Books

Mayo and Galway, 1852. Five years after the Famine — the roofs are still off, the faces still marked.Sir Francis Bond Head, retired soldier and former Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, arrives in the west of Ireland with a firman from the constabulary, a carpet bag, and a deeply personal grievance against the Irish jaunting car. He wanted to see the real Ireland — not the tourist route, but the west, where the poverty was worst.What follows is one of the most extraordinary pieces of Victorian travel writing about Ireland: funny, warm, and quietly devastating. Bond Head calls unannounced on Lord Lucan — the man who evicted 10,000 from his Mayo estates — sits in lean-tos with evicted women who bless him through the rain, asks a barefoot boy what hurts his feet most ("Snow is cauld, your honour"), and encounters a very tinder little horse who refuses to go east.He also visits workhouses whose populations have fallen from 4,400 to 995, talks to drivers who remember when the potato fed everything, and asks the constabulary at every stop whether there is really as much religious conflict as the English press would have it.Features readings from A Fortnight in Ireland by Sir Francis Bond Head (1852), American edition, Putnam's Library.Content Advisory: Contains historical accounts of the Great Famine, post-Famine evictions, and poverty in the west of Ireland.

Found in a Dublin antique shop, this 1851 Victorian survey of London's poor contains one of the most vivid records of Famine-era Irish immigrants ever written — and it was penned by a Punch magazine co-founder who couldn't quite escape his own bias.
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Henry Mayhew walked into the Irish courts of Rosemary Lane, East London with a notebook and a head full of assumptions. He found thirty pictures of holy men on the walls, beads in a tumbler on the window-ledge, and a community that had built an entire economy out of oranges, eloquence, and each other.
This episode covers how the Irish came to dominate London's orange trade, Father Mathew's temperance movement as unlikely competitive advantage, the Limerick man who sold four chickens for three shillings and threepence and walked to Dublin rather than take the ship, and Old Norah's green velvet dress — thirty shillings, earned back, and then lost to a brother with a pension and a talent for other people's savings.
Features readings from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (1851), picked up at Needful Things, Dublin.
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In 1857, a copper wire left Valentia Island, Co. Kerry, bound for America. It did not quite arrive.
The Atlantic telegraph cable was the most ambitious communications project in history — 2,600 miles of copper wrapped in Malaysian tree sap, coiled in a repurposed warship, aimed at Newfoundland from the very edge of Ireland. This episode follows the story in full: the garden party for the workers at a baronet's estate, the celebratory poem by Queen Victoria's favourite poet, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland posting down to Kerry by carriage, Cyrus Field's speech on the beach at Valentia, and the moment — at 335 nautical miles — when the cable snapped. The official cause, as published in the Illustrated London News: a mechanic of, as they put it, insufficient intelligence.
Nine years later, it was recovered from two and a half miles of water by Robert Halpin of Wicklow town — youngest of thirteen, went to sea at eleven, survived shipwrecks, Arctic storms, and the American Civil War before being brought low, ultimately, by a pair of nail scissors. His collection is at the National Maritime Museum, Dún Laoghaire.
Features readings from the Illustrated London News, Vol. 31 (July–December 1857). Personal collection of the author.
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Three Georgian conduct books, one pocket-sized gift from 1827 London. Dr. Gregory's advice to his daughters: keep your intelligence "a profound secret — especially from the men." The perceptive women who read him had a rather different interpretation.
Bound together by J.F. Dove in 1827, this dainty little volume contains three enormously influential texts: Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), Dr. John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), and Lady Sarah Pennington's An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters (1761). All three written in the 1760s and 1770s, reprinted continuously for over fifty years, and sold — with considerable commercial success — as gifts.
What they were actually giving is the subject of this episode. Gregory diagnoses the problem of female intelligence with striking accuracy, then prescribes a solution that requires no adjustment from the men causing it. Chapone, who publicly outlasted Samuel Johnson in an argument and received explicit praise from Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, tells her niece to mortify her discontent. And Lady Pennington — whose daughters were legally taken from her with no recourse — calls marriage "a hazardous die" and advises "patient submission to an evil which admits not of a remedy." She is not calling it a virtue.
With Ann Radcliffe's Emily St. Aubert as a shadow reader, and Rebecca Romney's Jane Austen's Bookshelf as the unexpected catalyst for looking at a book already on the shelf with entirely different eyes.
Features readings from Chapone's Improvement of the Mind, Gregory's Legacy and Lady Pennington's Advice, J.F. Dove edition, St. John's Square, London, 1827.

Inside Castletown House, Celbridge, Co. Kildare — one of Ireland's finest Palladian houses — archivist Nicola Kelly opens over a thousand private Georgian letters, and Lady Louisa Conolly turns out to be magnificent company.
Married at 15 in 1759, Louisa wrote to her younger sister Lady Sarah Lennox for over sixty years. She documented the renovation of Castletown's dining room and long gallery, complained at length when the unique Murano glass chandeliers arrived the wrong colour, and expressed considerable alarm at the Franchini Brothers' stucco quote ("there will be a fine scold in his honour"). She also had a great deal to say about her sister nearly becoming Queen of England — and even more to say about Princess Charlotte, who got the job instead.
The letters cover the 1798 Rebellion in extraordinary first-hand detail, Louisa's close relationship with her executed nephew Lord Edward Fitzgerald, her grief after her husband Tom's death in 1803, and her quietly remarkable philanthropy in Celbridge in her final years.
Nicola Kelly, Archivist at OMARC — the OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre — joins Vices & Volumes live from the Castletown archives to bring these letters to life.
🏛️ OMARC Website: maynoothuniversity.ie/omarc📸 OMARC on Instagram: @OMARC_archive🏰 Castletown House: castletown.ie📸 Castletown on Instagram: @castletownhouseopw🌿 Heritage Ireland — Castletown: heritageireland.ie/places-to-visit/castletown-house-and-parklands/
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Features interview recorded on-site at Castletown House, Celbridge, Co. Kildare.