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Books

Bedding down with the butler in Georgian Ireland

Servants acted as human bed-warmers and in amateur theatricals — but were otherwise ‘just for show’, according to Patricia McCarthy’s history of those eccentric pre-famine days

21 May 2016

9:00 AM

21 May 2016

9:00 AM

Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland Patricia McCarthy

Yale University Press, pp.260, £45, ISBN: 9780300218862

If you had the resources, Georgian Ireland must have been a very agreeable place in which to live. It was certainly more prosperous and peaceful than it would be after the 1848 famine. This idyllic world is captured in Patricia McCarthy’s scholarly and highly entertaining work, which stretches from the start of the building of Castletown House, Co.

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