Irish Recollections

'To be sure I hated Ireland most cordially; I had never seen it, and as a matter of choice would have preferred New South Wales, so completely was I influenced by the prevailing prejudice against that land of barbarism!' Thus Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna recalled in her memoirs her view of Ireland as she had set off for that country in 1818. But she came to love Ireland, so much so that after her death her grave was planted with shamrocks. In this abridged version of the second edition of Personal Recollections (1847), Tonna gives a vivid account of her time in Ireland, of the violent activities of the Rockite movement in the mid-1820s in Kilkenny-Tipperary, and of the apocalyptic ultra-Evangelical 'siege mentality' during the Tithe War and the run-up to Catholic Emancipation. It is also a valuable memoir of her religious and literary development,