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

Avril Clinton-Forde

Victorians had opinions about EVERYTHING. Jaw shapes. Correct use of coil horns. Servant's gloves. All treated with the kind of earnest detail usually reserved for matters of real importance. Avril Clinton-Forde selects the delightfully absurd from her collection of Irish and British 1800s books—where privileged people wrote volumes about life's minutiae. Social catastrophes, Irish banshee etiquette, Georgian marriage disasters, bizarre upper-class hobbies, and enjoys wonderfully overcomplicated language of the 19th Century. For history lovers, heritage enthusiasts, and curious insomniacs!

  1. Mayo & Galway 1852 | Lord Lucan's Evictions, Bare Feet & a Very Tinder Horse

    May 26

    Mayo & Galway 1852 | Lord Lucan's Evictions, Bare Feet & a Very Tinder Horse

    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.

    36 min
  2. The Irishman's Harvest | Famine Ireland Through an Englishman's Notebook 1851

    May 12

    The Irishman's Harvest | Famine Ireland Through an Englishman's Notebook 1851

    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. Donate a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesMore info at https://vicesandvolumes.comInstagram https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/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. Donate a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesMore info at https://vicesandvolumes.comInstagram https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/

    39 min

  3. Apr 28

    Atlantic Cable 1857 | Valentia Kerry & the Mechanic of Insufficient Intelligence

    Support the show and buy me a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumes Visit the National Maritime Museum Ireland https://www.mariner.ie/ 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. For additional information and sources please visit https://vicesandvolumes.com/

    35 min

  4. Apr 14

    Georgian Women Told to Hide Their Minds | Conduct Books 1761

    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.

    35 min

  5. Mar 31

    Inside Castletown House | Lady Louisa Conolly's Georgian Letters

    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/ ☕ Support the podcast: ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumes Features interview recorded on-site at Castletown House, Celbridge, Co. Kildare.

    51 min

  6. Mar 17

    Maynooth 1845 | When a Protestant Queen Blushed for Ireland, Co. Kildare

    Help support the show https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumes In 1845, Britain proposed repairs to a seminary it had built in Co. Kildare. Westminster duly lost its mind. A barrister printed his conclusions in capital letters. A Protestant Queen privately noted that the Protestants were 'a disgrace to the nation.' Gladstone resigned from Cabinet over the vote, then voted for it anyway. James Lord's 1855 Digest presents 296 pages of forensic outrage against the Maynooth Grant. Cobbett — Church of England Protestant, unlikely defender of Catholic Ireland — provides three hundred years of inconvenient context. Kildare, it turns out, was fine. The argument was always somewhere else. Features readings from James Lord's Digest of the Maynooth Commission Report (1855) and The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol. II (1908).

    37 min

  7. Mar 3

    Victorian Men Who Wouldn't Stop Talking | Egotists & Bores, 1878

    In 1878, Chambers Edinburgh Journal catalogued the Victorian gentleman at his most tedious—while women were forbidden from mentioning themselves at all. To contribute a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumes to Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/ This week: Lord Erskine, so consumed by self-regard he asked what the great Irish orator Grattan said "of himself"—and received one of history's most withering responses. An American in San Francisco who wouldn't stop interrogating a stranger until the stranger had the last word. Alexandre Dumas tracing his pedigree back to apes to silence a racist. And brilliant writers like Addison and Goldsmith who could fill books with eloquence yet couldn't manage a sentence in company—while mediocrities described tears as "aqueous fluids trickling from visual organs." The men faced mockery. The women faced consequences. Features readings from Chambers Edinburgh Journal (1845 & 1878) and Mrs Beeton's Complete Etiquette for Ladies (1892).

    42 min
  8. County Tyrone Matchmaker 1845 | Mary Murray's Marriage Schemes

    Feb 17

    County Tyrone Matchmaker 1845 | Mary Murray's Marriage Schemes

    In William Carleton's 1845 County Tyrone, Mary Murray arrived at farmhouses in a crimson cloak carrying matrimonial schemes that would shape entire parishes. This professional matchmaker convinced Biddy Sullivan and Paddy M'Cabe they were each dying of love for the other—they married while both believing the other had lied, only discovering their genuine affection at the altar. Carleton's portrait reveals how matchmaking worked in pre-Famine rural Ireland, where marriage was economic survival and women like Mary wielded extraordinary power through social engineering. From her theatrical visits to farming families to her warnings against using a "blackfoot" spokesman in courtship, Mary operated as what Carleton called a "matrimonial incendiary"—setting romantic fires across the Irish countryside. This episode explores the economics of 19th century Irish marriage, the surprising agency women exercised through matchmaking, and the theatrical rituals that brought couples together. The tradition continues today at Lisdoonvarna's annual matchmaking festival. Features readings from "Tales and Sketches, Illustrating the Character, Usages, Traditions, Sports and Pastimes of the Irish Peasantry" by William Carleton (1845).

    34 min
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About

Victorians had opinions about EVERYTHING. Jaw shapes. Correct use of coil horns. Servant's gloves. All treated with the kind of earnest detail usually reserved for matters of real importance. Avril Clinton-Forde selects the delightfully absurd from her collection of Irish and British 1800s books—where privileged people wrote volumes about life's minutiae. Social catastrophes, Irish banshee etiquette, Georgian marriage disasters, bizarre upper-class hobbies, and enjoys wonderfully overcomplicated language of the 19th Century. For history lovers, heritage enthusiasts, and curious insomniacs!

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