Dublin By Dusk | Twilight Talks

Join us for a series of three Twilight Talks, each just fifteen minutes! These talks are are intended to showcase the depth of scholarship, creativity and discovery emerging from registered readers' engagement with the library’s collections. 

Please find a brief abstract of each presentation below. 

Novels, smelling salts, and "Sympathetic Ink for Secret Correspondence": how one circulating library served readers in early nineteenth-century Dublin | Dr Karen Wade  

Before the advent of the public library system, there were the circulating libraries: businesses, large and small, which allowed members of the public to subscribe and borrow books for a fee. While some libraries might have been just a shelf of racy novels at the back of a stationer's shop, others offered a much wider variety of reading material, and might also provide more unusual goods and services to its patrons. In this talk, we take a visit to the Apollo Library. The Apollo prided itself on its extensive collection of books of all kinds. Patrons could also shop for stationery, household items, medication, and makeup, and could even place ads for domestic servants, tutors and real estate. As this talk will demonstrate, the Apollo Library Catalogue opens a window into what life was like for enthusiastic readers in pre-Victorian Dublin, and also shows how library keepers and patrons understood themselves as part of a broader international reading community at the start of the nineteenth century. 

The Paradoxes of a Life: the Eleanor Wicklow Papers at the National Library of Ireland | Olivia Frehill

Eleanor Wicklow was a member of a prominent architectural family who would go on to become the Countess of Wicklow, she came from a position of privilege but worked and advocated for some of the poorest and most marginalised through her charitable projects and work for the Labour party. Deeply guided by her Catholicism, she also, sought to make the moral rearmament movement of the 1950s coalesce with this. In her work as ICA housing advisor, she strove to further the work of the ESB in rural areas but would later act against them in attempting to halt their architectural destruction at Fitzwilliam Street.  This talk wll draw out some of the contradictory elements of her life and explore how they can shed new light on the life of a woman in mid- twentieth century Ireland. 

Masculinity, Subjectivity and Sex in Post-Independence Ireland, c.1920-1942 | Dr Shannon Freegrove

In 1942, James Hickey, a shop assistant living in County Waterford, kept a pocket diary which is held at the NLI. Hickey’s diary, though singular, offers a poignant entry point into a broader exploration of masculinity in post-independent Ireland. Hickey’s diary reveals that the ideals shaping Irish manhood were not universally attainable. Instead, they often functioned as disciplinary norms, defining the boundaries of respectability and measuring men’s social worth.. By outlining contemporary discourses about marriage and sexuality, (including courtship manuals also held at the NLI) and assessing how these messages were internalised, the speaker seeks to recover male emotional subjectivity as a valid and vital historical category. Attending to men’s experiences alongside women’s allows for a more nuanced understanding of Irish patriarchy and the uneven ways power operated within it.