Dublin-Printed Elegies of the 1720s

Surprising numbers of small-scale printers were active in Dublin in the 1720s. The period of relative calm that followed the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 enabled trade of all kinds to flourish in Ireland and the number of booksellers active in Dublin increased considerably during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. But so did the number of readers: their wants were supplied partly by books and pamphlets imported from England but also by material printed in Dublin. The range of such material was wide and included not only books and proclamations but large amounts of local verse, much of it printed on single-sided broadsheets. An interesting category of this Dublin-printed material is the verse elegy, over a hundred examples of which survive. This article provides an overview of the existing corpus of Dublin-printed elegies before considering two of them in detail. One is a loyalist elegy for King George I and the other an elegy for the hero of the Irish Jacobites, the Duke of Ormond. The article describes these two very different elegies and the cultures from which they sprang.