This slim, attractively produced volume appears in the Cork University Press Irish Narratives series, designed to offer "fresh and exciting sources of personal testimony" on Irish history. The testimony here is in the charming if slight letters from Daniel O'Connell's wife to her son in Clongowes Wood college.
The O'Connell family was close, loving, and warm. It was also utterly conventional, with abiding middle-class concerns about appearance, convention and connection. Mary O'Connell's main concern in London seems to have been that her children acquired "a fine English accent" and that their subsequent sojourns in Kerry would not spoil it. She relied utterly on Clongowes to educate young Danny, not just academically but in the social graces: "I can hardly think that the Jesuits would be behind in the work of civilisation." This is a slight volume: it also suffers from insecure editing (a nice example is when Maurice O'Connell's maiden speech in Westminster is rendered as his "murder speech".) Mrs O'Connell's trendy and expensive whale oil (spermaceti) candles defeat the editors, and perfectly acceptable speech forms ("hooted", "lustily ", "prate") get disapproving modern question marks. This is, however, an eminently readable volume. Not least of its attractions is its shortness - 100 pages - a welcome boon in an age of self-indulgent doorstoppers.