Terence Dooley
Autor von Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution
Über den Autor
Terence Dooley teaches in the History Department at Maynooth University, Where he is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates, His latest book is Monghan: the Irish revolution, 1912-23 (Dublin, 2017).
Werke von Terence Dooley
Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution (2022) 39 Exemplare
The Murders at Wildgoose Lodge: Agrarian Crime and Punishment in Pre-Famine Ireland (2007) 19 Exemplare
Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860-1960 (2001) 18 Exemplare
The decline and fall of the dukes of Leinster, 1872-1948 : love, war, debt and madness (2014) 12 Exemplare
Castle Hyde: The changing fortunes of an Irish country house (Maynooth Studies in Local History) (2017) 4 Exemplare
The Historian as Detective. Uncovering Irish Pasts: Essays in honour of Raymond Gillespie (2021) 4 Exemplare
Carton House 2 Exemplare
Country House Collections 1 Exemplar
Zugehörige Werke
Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies: The Journal of the Irish Georgian Society, Vol. XII (2010) — Mitwirkender — 5 Exemplare
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- Dooley, Terence
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- Killanny, Co. Monaghan, Ireland
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- National University of Ireland, Maynooth
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- Maynooth University
Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses & Estates, Maynooth University
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Dooley begins by detailing “big house” life in high Victorian Ireland. Flourishing amidst the economic prosperity of the period, numerous families flaunted their wealth by refurbishing their homes and loading them with art and other acquisitions purchased from the continent, which they often financed through loans and mortgages. Few anticipated that the good times might come to an end, leaving them unprepared when the agricultural economy went into decline in the late 1870s. With indebtedness growing, many landowners sought to maintain their income by raising the rents they charged to tenant farmers. Unable to pay the higher rents the tenants went on strike instead, further crippling landowner finances and exacerbating their financial woes.
In response to the political pressure imposed by the poorer and more numerous tenant farmers, Parliament passed a series of acts designed to facilitate the transfer of the land from the large landowners to the tenant farmers. This initiated a process of land transference that accelerated in the early twentieth century with further increases in the financial incentives for landowners to sell. By then many landowners desperate for money had already curtailed their expenditures and sold off valuable furnishings in the hope of stabilizing their situation or at least delaying their decline.
Instead, their decline accelerated with the outbreak of war in 1914. Dooley describes the blows suffered by many families with the loss of sons and husbands who fell in battle. These individual setbacks were soon compounded by the newly-empowered independence movement, which by 1920 was waging war against the British state. The big houses were prime targets for the Irish Republican Army, both as sources of firearms and as hated symbols of British occupation. Many of the houses themselves were burned down to drive out the pro-Union landowners and to prevent the buildings from becoming barracks for British forces. By the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 the landowning class thus found themselves gutted and friendless, without even a semblance of their former status and power in Irish society.
In many respects the story Dooley tells echoes that of David Cannadine’s seminal work The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Like Cannadine, Dooley explains the various forces squeezing the Irish aristocracy as a class, to which he adds the unique circumstances facing them because of Irish nationalist politics. While their British counterparts suffered from the same economic crisis, they were spared the political assaults of the Land War and the independence movement that delivered the fatal blows that wiped them out for good. It’s an important aspect of Irish history that Dooley recounts well, making his book an important account of the transformations taking place in Irish society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.… (mehr)