Beschreibung:

Lot 1194/0217 THE PAPERS OF LORD MONTEAGLE OF BRANDON The Spring Rice family played an important role in Irish history through the 19th and into the early 20th century. The head of the family, created Lord Monteagle of Brandon in 1839, was the owner of a considerable landed estate in Cos. Limerick and Kerry, based on the family seat at Mount Trenchard near Foynes. In 1883 this comprised nearly nine thousand acres and was worth over £6000 a year. The Spring Rices were conscientious landlords, with a particularly fine humanitarian record during the Great Famine. The first Lord was active in Irish and British politics and was Chancellor of the Exchequer during the 1830s. The second Lord was a founder of the co-operative movement and an able assistant to Sir Horace Plunkett. His daughter Mary Spring Rice was an ardent nationalist and crewed on Erskine Childers’s yacht the Asgard that smuggled guns into Howth for the Irish Volunteers in 1914. The Spring Rices were also connected by marriage to a number of prominent families whose documents feature in this collection. In particular, Mary Spring Rice (sister of the first Lord Monteagle) married the son of William Smith O’Brien the nationalist leader and was mother of the artist Dermod O’Brien; Theodosia, another sister, married the gifted writer and public servant Sir Henry Taylor; and the second Lord Monteagle married Elizabeth Butcher, daughter of the Bishop of Meath and sister of the Unionist politician Lord Danesfort. Above all, there were no fewer than five intermarriages between the Spring Rices and the Marshall family of Leeds, who made a fortune from their flax mills and built a number of fine houses in the Lake District. Here they were visited by some important literary figures, notably Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”) and Tennyson in 1857. The papers in this collection fall into three sections – letters, legal papers, and the contents of a deed-box. There are no fewer than 856 letters , all of a personal nature and mostly written in the 1860s and 1870s to Alice Spring Rice by her siblings and cousins. Their importance lies in the wealth of intimate material they provide on the daily lives of the correspondents, particularly the ladies. The children of Victorian upper-class families were isolated from the communities in which they lived and developed an intimacy with each other which involved the use of private nicknames and allusions which they alone understood. This often continued into adulthood, when careers (for the boys) and marriage or spinsterhood (for the girls) drove them apart – hence the abundance of letters between them, full of news, humour, teasings, and secret allusions. The collection of Spring Rice letters is unusually large and provides a special opportunity to look into the private lives and relationships of one closely interknit family group. In particular, about one-third of the letters were written by Julia Marshall, with a few by her brothers Victor and James, from their homes at Headingley in Leeds and Monk Coniston in the Lake District. Monk Coniston was the home created by their father James Garth Marshall, and the surrounding landscape – saved for the National Trust by Beatrix Potter – is today one of the most important of the Trust’s properties in the north of England. The legal and administrative papers comprise marriage settlements, wills, and associated papers of the successive Lords Monteagle and of the poet Sir Henry Taylor and the politician Lord Danesfort. The deed-box contains a large number of legal papers, some letters, and a few miscellaneous items from the time of Stephen Edward Rice (d. 1831) and his son Thomas the first Lord Monteagle. The more significant items are: · Genealogical notes on the Rice family of co. Kerry. · 24 letters on estate matters to Rice from his agent in co. Limerick, 1802-1803. · Valuation of the contents of S.E. Rice’s house in Dublin, 1804. · 150 letters on political matters from Monteagle to Matt