Cork Police Office Judy Sullivans, antient dame, indicted for assaulting Miss Juliet Donnelly, tearing her bonnet and dishevelling her auburn dresses. Juliet’s lawyer requested she stand at the end of the table and remove her gloves. Judy (casting a scornful…
Tag: marriage
A Journey
This blogger is away on holiday, so as she packs and runs out the door to the airport, she offers you a letter from Jane Welsh Carlyle to her mother-in-law, discussing her own journey as well as local gossip in…
Couple Beggars in Ireland
Within a context of relatively low levels of interference from Church and State, the urban lower classes often determined their own regulatory mechanisms for marriage that were shaped by their local contexts. In both Dublin and, in most Presbyterian Irish…
Policing Marriage
From the early nineteenth century, newspapers began to report on the operation of the local police and magistrate courts. The reportage of such cases uncovered the daily operations of the local court, as well as providing insight into working-class life…
Some Early Irish Feminism?
Taken from the Freeman’s Journal, 26 February 1841 Dublin Police- Henry Street Office CHARGE OF BIGAMY An interesting-looking young woman, named Anne Kirwan, applied to Mr. Duffy, the presiding magistrate, to have informations taken against John Kirwan, her husband, on…
Marital Advice from Parents to Children
During the early-eighteenth century, the passing of wisdom from parents to children was an expected part of their relationship and vital to the proper socialisation of children. Throughout their lives, parents offered children advice on their behaviour, passing on their…
Irish Farmwives
During the late nineteenth century, women played a substantial role in the Irish farming economy. Farmwork was gendered and women were associated with tending animals, particularly pigs and poultry, dairying, both milking and creating products for market, and tending the…
Seduction: Virtue on Trial
In February 1841 at the Henry Street office of the Dublin police, a girl named Mary Anne Quirk, aged 17, was charged with theft by her father Michael Quirk. It was her second appearance in front of Dr Kelly, the…
Marital Sex in the Eighteenth Century
Uncovering the nature of marital sex in the past is difficult as few people leave a written record of their sexual activity. A study of over one hundred upper-class couples’ letters across a two-hundred year period found no explicit references…