|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
of technology by landowners for status and independence. Nevertheless, these public works demonstrate that some landlords, such as the dukes of Devonshire, had a role as “agents of modernisation”.5
“Technological developments which began pre-1914” were briefly cited in Terence Dooley's otherwise comprehensive analysis of the decline of the big house from 1860 to 1960, as making possible a large reduction in the number of servants employed.6 He referred to his condensed treatment of the subject in his introduction by saying that “[t]his author is only too aware that some aspects of big house life are merely touched upon and will in future require much more detailed examination, if not by him then hopefully by others”.7 The importance of the use of technology by big house owners to support their independence and status in Ireland has been largely neglected by historians. It is the intention of the present study to repair this omission.
In the preparation of this book, manuscript sources were consulted in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; The National Archives of Ireland, Dublin; the Birr Castle Archives, Birr, County Offaly; the Tullynally Archive, Castlepollard, County Westmeath; and others as listed in the bibliography. The manuscripts cited were selected and examined for their relevance to technological usage in big houses. Where the material informs general rather than specific aspects of big-house-associated installations, it has been placed in appendices, thus making it more readily accessible from the appropriate chapters of this work.
Secondary sources consulted include unpublished theses, autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. Other works, although published for a wider readership, have proved useful in revealing some of the more arcane—and occasionally frivolous—technology employed by certain rather eccentric big house owners.8 These sources also indicate that the English industrial revolution resulted in much country house technology coming into use there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of these advances, however, were quickly adopted in Ireland due to the often surprising mobility of landlords in an era of sailing ships and horse-powered carriages. Despite the lack of an industrial