For today’s Then and Now post, we don’t have a pair of images side by side. Instead, we have a textual description of a part of Chapelizod as it was in the early 1800s, from one of Ireland’s great masters of horror, and to compare against it, a set of photographs which I took around…
Category: then and now
Then and Now: The Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle
This post was suggested by my finding the British Library’s beautiful engraving of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle, on Flickr Commons. This picture dates to 1816, and shows the newly rebuilt Gothic chapel, designed by Francis Johnston, which replaced a 17th-century chapel that had been located on the same site, but which had become…
Then and Now: A Lost Mansion in North Dublin
Today’s post brings us quite literally into my neck of the woods: Santry Demesne Park, which is beautiful, historical, and very conveniently located five minutes away from my house. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Santry Demesne belonged to the Barry family, and contained their stately home and extensive gardens. The house was first built…
Then and Now: Trinity College Gates
This view of the corner of College Green in Dublin comes from The Illustrated Dictionary of Dublin, a guidebook by Strangways and Cosgrave, and dates to around 1895. To the of the picture is the front entrance to Trinity College, and in among the throng of pedestrians and omnibuses you can also see a few…
Then and Now: St. Stephen’s Green and the Shelbourne Hotel
Over the course of our work with the British Library Labs images collection, we’ve found that a significant portion of these digitized works are on travel: both traveller’s accounts of their journeys, and also many guidebooks. Some of these books provide advice that would raise eyebrows nowadays; for example, Dignam’s Dublin Guide enthusiastically recommends Mountjoy…
Then and Now: the delights of Lucan
Browsing the British Library Labs images corpus for works on the subject of Ireland, I came across this familiar-looking image: This is an ad from the 1892 guidebook Visit Ireland, from Irish Tourist Development (an early Bord Failte?) and compiled by F. W. Crossley. (You can see the other images from this work here.) There’s…
The Sea of Books 