© National Gallery of Ireland
Trinity Library has 279 personal letters of John D’Alton (1792-1867) and his wife Catherine, spanning forty years of married life. Craig D’Alton, who visited us from Australia, is a descendant. In this guest blog, he writes about the value of the published letters to the research community:
My first encounter with TCD MS 2327 was in 1998, when I made a trip to Ireland to undertake some research into my family history. At the time I was based in Oxford, working on my doctorate in English Reformation history. I spent most of my holiday working on the D’Alton manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, and allowed myself just a single day to explore the TCD D’Alton material, which was described in the catalogue simply as “A collection of letters of John D’Alton and his wife, 1818-1853”. I was expecting a small folder of perhaps ten or twenty letters, and thought that a day would be enough to scan them and transcribe any sections of particular interest. When I called up the manuscript an enormous box of uncatalogued letters – almost three hundred of them, and many of them cross-written – was presented to me. I had a quick look, thanked the librarian, and sent them back. “Retirement project!” I thought.
When in 2014 I finally had a chance to return to Dublin, I thought it would be good to revisit the TCD letters. Logging on to the manuscripts catalogue to check the reference in advance of my trip, I discovered a photo of one of the letters with the intriguing line beneath “Click here for transcript”. What was revealed to me was a full transcript of the first 64 letters under taken by Aisling Lockhart. It is fair to say that I was in shock especially when, having made contact with Aisling, she was kind enough to share her draft transcripts of the remaining letters. All of a sudden a huge archive with incredibly difficult palaeographical issues was unlocked for me. In 2016, the remaining transcripts were published online.
The letters narrate, in remarkable depth and nuance, a loving marital relationship, family tragedies and betrayal, the decline of the rural landlord, the rise of the professional classes, the opportunities – and the limitations – for Irish Catholics of means, personal piety, and the story of a landed legal man trying to make his fame and fortune as an author. There is a temptation in reading them to concentrate on the husband. John became a person of reasonable note in his own lifetime and, whilst he never achieved the enduring fame he might have wished, his memory lives modestly on in the Dictionary of National Biography and in the hearts of Irish genealogists who still mine his books for information on family and local history. The great joy of this correspondence, however, is that both sides are preserved. The letters reveal as much about Catherine and her life as they do about John and his. Indeed, the developing relationship of mutual dependence between this couple is itself worthy of note as each, whilst operating within the gender norms of their day, sought to build a marriage of two equals rather than one based on what we might imagine to have been the standard pattern of wifely obedience.
That this collection should now be accessible through a digital humanities project is an extraordinary boon. The letters are an incredibly rich resource, not just for me, but for any Irish cultural historian of the first half of the nineteenth century. They are now forming the core of a book I am completing on John and Catherine’s life during the Regency period.
Craig D’Alton, Melbourne, Australia.