Vices and Volumes | Navigate Irish and British History's Absurdities from 1800s Books

Richard Maher, author of Sir Charles Wogan: Jacobite Soldier, Royal Agent and Man of Letters, joins Vices & Volumes to tell the extraordinary story of one of Ireland's most overlooked historical figures — a man from Kildare who smuggled a royal princess out of an Austrian palace in a snowstorm, and a researcher who spent eleven years and several trips to Spanish, French, and British archives piecing the story back together.From spiking a courier's drink on an Alpine road to outrunning the British spy network across the Alps, Wogan's 1719 rescue of Clementina Sobieska reads less like history and more like a very well-organised heist. Richard also takes us inside the Archivo General de Simancas — a 16th century castle in León containing 33 million documents — where he found one page written in Wogan's own hand, buried in a year's worth of 18th century military correspondence.We also talk about what it actually feels like to hold a 300-year-old letter written by the person you've spent a decade researching, and Richard's upcoming career break to follow Wogan's trail into a private French archive.Features discussion of Sir Charles Wogan by Richard Maher (2024) and primary sources from the Stuart Papers and Archivo General de Simancas.If you enjoy the show, you can support Vices & Volumes at ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumes — every contribution keeps the books open and the archives visited.

Mayo and Galway, 1852. Five years after the Famine — the roofs are still off, the faces still marked.Sir Francis Bond Head, retired soldier and former Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, arrives in the west of Ireland with a firman from the constabulary, a carpet bag, and a deeply personal grievance against the Irish jaunting car. He wanted to see the real Ireland — not the tourist route, but the west, where the poverty was worst.What follows is one of the most extraordinary pieces of Victorian travel writing about Ireland: funny, warm, and quietly devastating. Bond Head calls unannounced on Lord Lucan — the man who evicted 10,000 from his Mayo estates — sits in lean-tos with evicted women who bless him through the rain, asks a barefoot boy what hurts his feet most ("Snow is cauld, your honour"), and encounters a very tinder little horse who refuses to go east.He also visits workhouses whose populations have fallen from 4,400 to 995, talks to drivers who remember when the potato fed everything, and asks the constabulary at every stop whether there is really as much religious conflict as the English press would have it.Features readings from A Fortnight in Ireland by Sir Francis Bond Head (1852), American edition, Putnam's Library.Content Advisory: Contains historical accounts of the Great Famine, post-Famine evictions, and poverty in the west of Ireland.

Found in a Dublin antique shop, this 1851 Victorian survey of London's poor contains one of the most vivid records of Famine-era Irish immigrants ever written — and it was penned by a Punch magazine co-founder who couldn't quite escape his own bias.Donate a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesMore info at https://vicesandvolumes.comInstagram https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/Henry Mayhew walked into the Irish courts of Rosemary Lane, East London with a notebook and a head full of assumptions. He found thirty pictures of holy men on the walls, beads in a tumbler on the window-ledge, and a community that had built an entire economy out of oranges, eloquence, and each other.This episode covers how the Irish came to dominate London's orange trade, Father Mathew's temperance movement as unlikely competitive advantage, the Limerick man who sold four chickens for three shillings and threepence and walked to Dublin rather than take the ship, and Old Norah's green velvet dress — thirty shillings, earned back, and then lost to a brother with a pension and a talent for other people's savings.Features readings from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (1851), picked up at Needful Things, Dublin.Donate a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesMore info at https://vicesandvolumes.comInstagram https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/

Support the show and buy me a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesVisit the National Maritime Museum Ireland https://www.mariner.ie/In 1857, a copper wire left Valentia Island, Co. Kerry, bound for America. It did not quite arrive.The Atlantic telegraph cable was the most ambitious communications project in history — 2,600 miles of copper wrapped in Malaysian tree sap, coiled in a repurposed warship, aimed at Newfoundland from the very edge of Ireland. This episode follows the story in full: the garden party for the workers at a baronet's estate, the celebratory poem by Queen Victoria's favourite poet, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland posting down to Kerry by carriage, Cyrus Field's speech on the beach at Valentia, and the moment — at 335 nautical miles — when the cable snapped. The official cause, as published in the Illustrated London News: a mechanic of, as they put it, insufficient intelligence.Nine years later, it was recovered from two and a half miles of water by Robert Halpin of Wicklow town — youngest of thirteen, went to sea at eleven, survived shipwrecks, Arctic storms, and the American Civil War before being brought low, ultimately, by a pair of nail scissors. His collection is at the National Maritime Museum, Dún Laoghaire.Features readings from the Illustrated London News, Vol. 31 (July–December 1857). Personal collection of the author.For additional information and sources please visit https://vicesandvolumes.com/

Three Georgian conduct books, one pocket-sized gift from 1827 London. Dr. Gregory's advice to his daughters: keep your intelligence "a profound secret — especially from the men." The perceptive women who read him had a rather different interpretation.Bound together by J.F. Dove in 1827, this dainty little volume contains three enormously influential texts: Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), Dr. John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), and Lady Sarah Pennington's An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters (1761). All three written in the 1760s and 1770s, reprinted continuously for over fifty years, and sold — with considerable commercial success — as gifts.What they were actually giving is the subject of this episode. Gregory diagnoses the problem of female intelligence with striking accuracy, then prescribes a solution that requires no adjustment from the men causing it. Chapone, who publicly outlasted Samuel Johnson in an argument and received explicit praise from Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, tells her niece to mortify her discontent. And Lady Pennington — whose daughters were legally taken from her with no recourse — calls marriage "a hazardous die" and advises "patient submission to an evil which admits not of a remedy." She is not calling it a virtue.With Ann Radcliffe's Emily St. Aubert as a shadow reader, and Rebecca Romney's Jane Austen's Bookshelf as the unexpected catalyst for looking at a book already on the shelf with entirely different eyes.Features readings from Chapone's Improvement of the Mind, Gregory's Legacy and Lady Pennington's Advice, J.F. Dove edition, St. John's Square, London, 1827.

Inside Castletown House, Celbridge, Co. Kildare — one of Ireland's finest Palladian houses — archivist Nicola Kelly opens over a thousand private Georgian letters, and Lady Louisa Conolly turns out to be magnificent company.Married at 15 in 1759, Louisa wrote to her younger sister Lady Sarah Lennox for over sixty years. She documented the renovation of Castletown's dining room and long gallery, complained at length when the unique Murano glass chandeliers arrived the wrong colour, and expressed considerable alarm at the Franchini Brothers' stucco quote ("there will be a fine scold in his honour"). She also had a great deal to say about her sister nearly becoming Queen of England — and even more to say about Princess Charlotte, who got the job instead.The letters cover the 1798 Rebellion in extraordinary first-hand detail, Louisa's close relationship with her executed nephew Lord Edward Fitzgerald, her grief after her husband Tom's death in 1803, and her quietly remarkable philanthropy in Celbridge in her final years.Nicola Kelly, Archivist at OMARC — the OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre — joins Vices & Volumes live from the Castletown archives to bring these letters to life.🏛️ OMARC Website: maynoothuniversity.ie/omarc📸 OMARC on Instagram: @OMARC_archive🏰 Castletown House: castletown.ie📸 Castletown on Instagram: @castletownhouseopw🌿 Heritage Ireland — Castletown: heritageireland.ie/places-to-visit/castletown-house-and-parklands/☕ Support the podcast: ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesFeatures interview recorded on-site at Castletown House, Celbridge, Co. Kildare.

Help support the show https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesIn 1845, Britain proposed repairs to a seminary it had built in Co. Kildare. Westminster duly lost its mind. A barrister printed his conclusions in capital letters. A Protestant Queen privately noted that the Protestants were 'a disgrace to the nation.' Gladstone resigned from Cabinet over the vote, then voted for it anyway.James Lord's 1855 Digest presents 296 pages of forensic outrage against the Maynooth Grant. Cobbett — Church of England Protestant, unlikely defender of Catholic Ireland — provides three hundred years of inconvenient context. Kildare, it turns out, was fine. The argument was always somewhere else.Features readings from James Lord's Digest of the Maynooth Commission Report (1855) and The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol. II (1908).

In 1878, Chambers Edinburgh Journal catalogued the Victorian gentleman at his most tedious—while women were forbidden from mentioning themselves at all.To contribute a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumes to Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/This week: Lord Erskine, so consumed by self-regard he asked what the great Irish orator Grattan said "of himself"—and received one of history's most withering responses. An American in San Francisco who wouldn't stop interrogating a stranger until the stranger had the last word. Alexandre Dumas tracing his pedigree back to apes to silence a racist. And brilliant writers like Addison and Goldsmith who could fill books with eloquence yet couldn't manage a sentence in company—while mediocrities described tears as "aqueous fluids trickling from visual organs."The men faced mockery. The women faced consequences. Features readings from Chambers Edinburgh Journal (1845 & 1878) and Mrs Beeton's Complete Etiquette for Ladies (1892).

In William Carleton's 1845 County Tyrone, Mary Murray arrived at farmhouses in a crimson cloak carrying matrimonial schemes that would shape entire parishes. This professional matchmaker convinced Biddy Sullivan and Paddy M'Cabe they were each dying of love for the other—they married while both believing the other had lied, only discovering their genuine affection at the altar.Carleton's portrait reveals how matchmaking worked in pre-Famine rural Ireland, where marriage was economic survival and women like Mary wielded extraordinary power through social engineering. From her theatrical visits to farming families to her warnings against using a "blackfoot" spokesman in courtship, Mary operated as what Carleton called a "matrimonial incendiary"—setting romantic fires across the Irish countryside.This episode explores the economics of 19th century Irish marriage, the surprising agency women exercised through matchmaking, and the theatrical rituals that brought couples together. The tradition continues today at Lisdoonvarna's annual matchmaking festival.Features readings from "Tales and Sketches, Illustrating the Character, Usages, Traditions, Sports and Pastimes of the Irish Peasantry" by William Carleton (1845).

A Yorkshire manufacturer's 1810 love letter compares himself to "a weeping hermit emerging from a cave" and ends with an advertisement for bridle cutlery. Victorian romance required industrial-scale stationery production, template letters from Mrs. Beeton, and navigating courtship protocols more complex than military campaigns.This episode explores how the 1840 Penny Post revolutionized British communication—letter volume exploded from 76 million to 347 million annually—creating demand for De La Rue's London factory where lace from ladies' bonnets became printing plates through electrotyping. Meanwhile, desperate Victorians paid thirteenpence for "guaranteed" romantic advice that delivered a pamphlet worth "the fractional part of a farthing."Featuring catastrophic courtship correspondence, rejection letter templates, fathers wielding veto power, and the contrast between passionate declarations to ladies versus businesslike proposals to their fathers. One letter promises secrets whispered in quiet spots; another lists prospects and partnership timelines like a loan application.Features readings from Chambers Edinburgh Journal (1846-1851) and Mrs. Beeton's Complete Letter Writer (1894).

In 1884, Irish born Lady Colin Campbell published articles in Cassell's Family Magazine teaching young women how to become "the perfect lady." Two years later, she'd be in court defending herself in the divorce scandal of the century—her intimate life dissected in newspapers across Britain.This episode explores the impossible standards Lady Colin Campbell outlined for Victorian women: white-headed pins must never project from black dresses, collars must be changed daily, sitting with crossed legs was unforgivable, and women must suppress all natural reactions to absurdity. When a page slips and falls surrounded by dinner rolls, or a cake bowls up the room, a perfect lady neither speaks nor smiles. Even at home, exhausted with children clinging to their skirts, women were expected to maintain "freshness and attractiveness" at all times.But who was the woman behind these rigid rules? Gertrude Elizabeth Blood was born in County Clare, Ireland in 1857 and later educated in Dublin. At 23, she met Lord Colin Campbell and became engaged within three days. What seemed like a fairy tale became a nightmare when her husband infected her with syphilis—a disease he'd concealed before their marriage. In 1886, both parties filed for divorce in a trial so explicit that "intercourse" appeared in newspapers and multiscopes became known as "what the butler saw machines" after the butler's keyhole testimony.The episode contrasts Lady Colin Campbell's advice with the even more demanding standards of Isabella Beeton, whose ideal dinner party featured rented hothouse pineapples, out-of-season fruit, and servants in white kid gloves. The gap between these aspirations and reality trapped women in impossible positions—unable to acknowledge their struggles without admitting social failure.Yet Lady Colin Campbell survived. After social ostracism, she became the first female editor of a London newspaper not exclusively for women, succeeding George Bernard Shaw as art editor of The World. She wrote over 200 articles, became an expert in fencing and fly fishing, exhibited landscape paintings, and earned genuine respect from the brilliant minds of her era. Shaw called her wit "lightning" and her journalism unmatched. She famously called Oscar Wilde "the great white slug."From Cassell's Family Magazine (1884), this episode examines what the pursuit of perfection actually cost Victorian women—and the remarkable resilience required to survive it.

In August 1852, Sir Francis Bond Head arrived in post-Famine Dublin and hired a local cabman as his guide. What followed was a tour where historical accuracy took a backseat to the ancient Irish tradition of entertaining visitors—a cultural practice rooted in Brehon Law's requirement to provide travelers with oigidecht: hospitality that included food, shelter, and importantly, entertainment.The cabman's version of history was undeniably creative. Nelson had lost his left arm rather than his right, the statue in College Green depicted "William the Conqueror" rather than William III (six centuries apart), and Dublin's name supposedly derived from "Double-Inn—two houses stuck into one" rather than the Irish Dubh Linn (black pool). Yet his enthusiasm was genuine, his delivery engaging, and his purpose clear: to provide his passenger with an entertaining experience while earning his fare.Head had arrived after a storm-tossed midnight Channel crossing, navigating Morrison's Hotel by single candlelight. By morning, mounted on horseback for observation, he was immediately approached by barefoot boys seeking work—a reminder that Dublin in 1852 was still recovering from the Great Famine. The phrase "I'm wake with the hunger," spoken by an elderly beggar woman, would have carried particular weight just months after the famine's official end.This episode explores Head's observations of Dublin at a transitional moment: the city's exceptional air quality (Phoenix Park's 1,750 acres and Georgian squares provided what Head called "magnificent lungs" compared to coal-choked British industrial cities), the melancholy sight of Daniel O'Connell's empty Merrion Square house still bearing his brass nameplate five years after his death, and the democratic mixing of classes on jaunting cars heading to Donnybrook Fair—soldiers, gentlemen, and working people all sharing the same twopenny ride.Head, a former Royal Engineer who'd fought at Waterloo and served disastrously as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, brought an engineer's eye to Dublin's architecture and infrastructure. His account captures both the Georgian grandeur and the visible poverty, the political monuments and the human stories, the formal Vice-Regal visits and the street-level encounters that revealed a city's character.What he may not have fully understood was that the cabman's performance wasn't ignorance—it was a cultural tradition of hospitality through storytelling, where entertaining the visitor served both social custom and economic necessity.Features readings from A Fortnight in Ireland (1852) by Sir Francis Bond Head, a source frequently cited by historians studying post-Famine Ireland.

Ever wondered how people survived winter before central heating? Spoiler: they didn't always.This episode takes you inside the Georgian and Victorian bedchamber, where staying warm could literally cost you your life. We're talking about warming pans filled with poisonous fumes, feather beds crawling with insects, and bed curtains so tightly drawn you could suffocate before morning. One household manual even suggested testing this theory with a caged bird at your bedside—which, unsurprisingly, nearly died by dawn.But the Victorians weren't just sitting around freezing. They were innovating. We'll explore the remarkable air-pump mattress of 1823—a proto-waterbed with valves, stop-cocks, and convenient tassels you could pull from your pillow to adjust firmness in the night. Imagine Victorian couples arguing at 3 a.m.: "Stop pulling the tassel, you're making it too firm!"Once you survived the night, you had to get dressed. Victorian winter fashion wasn't just about looking elegant—it was thermal engineering wrapped in seal-skin and given exotic names. We're talking about creations like The Diplomatt (with enormous sleeves and seal-skin trim), The Mexican (black cloth with embroidered white silk), and The Semiramis (named after an Assyrian queen because why not?). These weren't just fashion statements; they were survival gear with marketing departments.And then there's food. Winter soup was serious business, and we'll dive into a heated debate from 1880 about charity soup kitchens. Should soup for the poor contain actual meat, or would that spoil them? One writer insisted that if "starving poor" refused meatless pea soup, they should be "improved morally and physically by being kept without meat." His solution? Pig's head soup so greasy it would "quite equal to mock turtle." Delicious.Through readings from rare books—including my own battered, spineless copy of "A New System of Practical Domestic Economy" (1823)—we'll discover the elaborate rituals, surprising innovations, and occasionally questionable attitudes that defined Victorian winter survival.Features readings from:"A New System of Practical Domestic Economy" (1823, anonymous author)"The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine" (1861)Cassell's Family Magazine: "Winter Soups: How to Make Them" by A.G. Payne (1880)Modern life is easy. We complain about winter from heated homes while wearing fleece and microwaving soup. The Victorians had to earn their warmth through constant vigilance, specialized knowledge, and frankly, a shocking amount of work. This episode is a reminder to appreciate your electric blanket, your North Face jacket, and the fact that your mattress doesn't require a pump with decorative tassels.🎧 New episodes every second week | Follow @vicesandvolumes for daily historical discoveriesKeywords: Victorian history, Georgian era, 19th century, 18th century, vintage books, historical books, winter survival, domestic history, social history, rare books, history podcast, Victorian era, British history, Irish history, period history, household management, historical innovation

What if you could never mention yourself or your enemy in conversation? Victorian ladies' tongues required "constant restraint."Matilda Ann Mackarness' 1888 conduct book taught young women that conversation was actually a masterclass in silence. Discover why ladies could only discuss servants and babies after dinner while men debated politics. Learn how "awfully," "stunning," and "checky" threatened the English language in the Great Slang Crisis of the 1880s. Meet the girl so paralyzed by rules she could only say "So you said" when a gentleman spoke to her.The irony: widowed Mackarness violated every rule she prescribed, producing 40+ books to survive near-poverty with seven children. She couldn't afford silence—yet taught women to bind their tongues.

Two hounds clung together all night on a hedge surrounded by freezing floodwater. When the water receded, they were found "closely clasping each other—the friendly warmth that kept both alive." Peter Beckford in crisis reveals his true character.Part 2 explores Georgian veterinary practices: effective mange treatments (sulfur, whale oil, turpentine) versus deadly quicksilver remedies that killed dogs and poisoned staff. Discover the distemper epidemic (50-90% mortality), Beckford's experimental treatments, and the heartbreaking river disaster when his entire pack nearly drowned.The contradiction: a man who knew each hound by name while profiting from Jamaican slave plantations he never visited.

In a Westport, County Mayo bookshop, an American tourist watched Avril read passages about dogs "emptying themselves" from an 1787 hunting manual and said: "You should do a podcast on old books." This is that book.Peter Beckford's "Thoughts on Hunting" (1781) elevated Georgian fox hunting into literary art, blending practical instruction with classical quotations in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French. Discover the rigid hunting hierarchy (Huntsman, Whipper-in, Feeder), the most hilariously terrible character reference ever written ("voiceless, dishonest thief, drunk, notorious liar"), and Letter 13's breathless fictional hunt that transforms kennel management into Georgian poetry.From West Coast Rare Books discovery to 240-year literary masterpiece.

How do you judge if a woman will make a good wife? Georgian radical William Cobbett's 1829 answer: watch her eat a mutton chop. Firm, decisive biting indicates good character. Tentative squeezing indicates disaster.Discover Cobbett's bizarre physical tests: walking speed reveals capacity for love (quick step = good, sauntering = cold-hearted mother), jaw movements predict industriousness, voice quality indicates laziness ("mawmouth women" are disgusting). These reflected Georgian physiognomy—the belief that moral character could be read from physical features.The contradiction: Cobbett demands absolute wifely obedience yet spent nights walking barefoot through Philadelphia throwing stones at dogs so his wife could sleep. Through 37 years of exile, imprisonment, and scandal, Anne Reid stayed.

In 1645 England, Matthew Hopkins declared himself "Witch Finder General" and executed more people in two years than the previous century combined. His secret? Systematic methods for detecting familiar spirits—demonic creatures with names like Pyewacket, Vinegar Tom, and Grizel Greedigut.This second part of our witch trials series moves from legal corruption to examine the supernatural evidence itself: the signs, spirits, and suffering that convinced communities they were surrounded by Satan's servants. Drawing from the 1847 London Journal's extensive investigation, discover how professional witch hunters transformed ordinary life into proof of diabolic conspiracy.Explore the world of familiar spirits—physical demons that required feeding, shelter, and care while leaving evidence on human bodies through "witch marks" (supernatural nipples for nursing demons). Learn how Elizabeth Clarke confessed under torture to five distinct familiars: Holt the white cat (caused illness), Jamara the red spaniel (killed livestock), Vinegar Tom the greyhound (carried messages), Sack and Sugar the black rabbit (spied on enemies), and Newes the polecat (contaminated food supplies).Discover the sophisticated torture techniques: the boots (iron devices that crushed leg bones), thumbscrews, systematic sleep deprivation combined with forced walking, pricking for insensitive marks using retractable needles, swimming tests (float = guilty, sink = innocent but drowned), and prayer tests designed to guarantee failure among the vulnerable. These weren't random cruelties but carefully designed procedures developed by educated professionals who understood exactly how to break human resistance.Plus: flying ointments containing belladonna and mandrake, weather magic accusations against King James VI's voyage, shape-shifting evidence (injured cats = wounded women miles away), healing knowledge that became diabolic conspiracy, and the staggering scale: 157 people burned in Würzburg in just two years (1627-1629), including children as young as nine.Features readings from London Journal (1847), Matthew Hopkins' documented cases, Scottish torture records, and European Inquisition accounts.Part 2 of 2 - Companion to Part 1 on legal corruption and spectral evidence.

From Salem, Massachusetts to Scotland and England, witch trials transformed courtrooms into instruments of systematic prosecution. Part 1 explores how the pursuit of witches corrupted entire legal systems, abandoning every principle of justice to hunt invisible enemies.Witness how spectral evidence made defense impossible—accusers claimed spirits attacked them while the accused's body was miles away. Discover the Malleus Maleficarum's witch-hunting manual that created papal-sanctioned traveling courts, King James VI's personal participation in interrogations, and Richard III's theatrical use of witchcraft accusations for political murder.Through 1847 London Journal accounts, explore gendered prosecution (women comprised 80-90% of victims), shape-shifting accusations, and how these techniques persisted into Victorian Britain when fishermen still sought protection from suspected witches.Part 1 of 2 examining how witch-hunting transformed European and American legal systems.Content Advisory: Contains historical accounts of systematic violence and execution, particularly against women.

How did civilization's greatest achievement—the rule of law—become humanity's most efficient killing machine?In Colonial Salem, 1692, young girls screamed that invisible spirits were attacking them. The accused sat physically present in the courtroom, yet prosecutors claimed her spirit had separated from her body to commit diabolic violence miles away. This was spectral evidence: testimony about crimes committed by invisible forces while the accused was provably elsewhere. Defense became impossible. Alibis became meaningless. And the legal system transformed into an engine of systematic murder.This two-part series explores how European and American courts deliberately abandoned every principle of justice—presumption of innocence, right to confront accusers, credible witnesses—to prosecute supernatural crimes. Drawing from the 1847 London Journal's extensive investigation into witchcraft prosecution, this episode reveals the sophisticated legal machinery designed to eliminate society's most vulnerable members, primarily women (80-90% of victims), through procedures that appeared rational and legitimate.Discover how the 1487 manual "Malleus Maleficarum" created new categories of evidence and redefined burden of proof; how Papal "commissions of fire and sword" created mobile death squads answering only to Rome; how Richard III used witchcraft accusations as political weapons (strawberries to execution in under two hours); how King James VI of Scotland personally supervised torture sessions, taking "conscious delight" in extracting confessions; and how shape-shifting accusations created seemingly objective evidence of supernatural transformation that survived into 1845 Scotland.This isn't primitive superstition—it's the systematic corruption of judicial institutions by learned men who understood exactly what they were creating: a legal framework that could eliminate any targeted population while maintaining the facade of legitimate justice.Features readings from London Journal (1847), "Malleus Maleficarum" legal procedures, King James VI's "Daemonologie" (1597), and Scottish court records through 1845.

A fox screaming at 3 AM outside your window sounds terrifying—but in 18th century Ireland, there was something far more chilling: the Banshee's whale announcing death in your family.When a midnight fox raid on host Avril's henhouse left her wide awake at 3 AM, she picked up an 1847 issue of the London Journal and discovered chapters on Irish supernatural folklore. What followed was a deep dive into the eerie world of the Banshee—the "fairy woman" whose otherworldly cries heralded death in certain Irish families. This episode explores the most spine-tingling Banshee accounts from the 1700s-1800s: Charles McCarthy's exact prophecy of his own death three years in advance, Mrs. Barry's terrifying road encounter with a tall spectral woman in white who physically redirected their horse cart, and Kavanaugh the herdsman's journey from Mallow accompanied by wailing and hand-clapping every step of the way.Discover the Irish keening tradition that may have birthed the Banshee legend, why only certain families (particularly those with O', Mac, or Mc surnames) were "honored" with a Banshee, and why the dying person never heard the warning—only their loved ones did. Plus: European variations including Scotland's phantom horsemen, Wales' Cyhyraeth (a leather-winged hag), Germany's gigantic grave-wrapped woman of the Luenberger Heath, and the White Lady of Brandenburg.These aren't just ghost stories—they're windows into how Irish and European communities processed grief and mortality before modern communication. The Banshee served as a "supernatural telegraph system," connecting families across time and space.Features readings from the London Journal (October 16, 1847), "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland" by Thomas Crofton Croker (1838), Chambers's Edinburgh Journal (1878), and Lady Fanshaw's manuscript accounts.

What do you get when a dishonorably discharged soldier, debtor's prison survivor, and perpetual scandal writes a fishing guide? A Victorian bestseller that went through 17 editions.In 1886, Captain John Joseph Dunn (writing as "Hi Regan") published "How and Where to Fish in Ireland"—ostensibly a practical fishing manual, but actually a hilarious window into Victorian Ireland complete with paraffin-based midge repellent, whiskey-for-your-feet advice, and a strap-on device called a "coil horn" that isn't what you think it is. Host Avril takes you through this moldy treasure (literally—the book arrived covered in actual mold) to uncover the story of a charming rogue who lived on "air and other people's money" while somehow befriending dukes, dodging debt collectors, and writing one of Ireland's most enduring fishing guides.Discover Victorian fishing techniques that involved setting yourself on fire with paraffin mixtures, railway networks instead of roads (pre-1896 cars), counties with different names (Kings and Queens County before 1922), and the delicate art of bribing boatmen with whiskey and "dowsers" (tips). Plus: trout cooked in grease paper over turf embers, landlord permissions for river access during the Famine era, and why County Mayo is "perhaps externally and internally, the wettest county in Ireland."But the real twist? Captain Dunn's daughter Mary Isabelle became "George Egerton," one of the most important feminist authors of the late 1800s. While dad wrote about catching trout, she wrote about women catching their independence.Features readings from "How and Where to Fish in Ireland" by Hi Regan (Captain John Joseph Dunn), 10th edition (1900), originally published 1886.

Ever wondered what happens when someone with dyslexia, an aggressive browsing habit in vintage bookshops, and absolutely no qualifications in English history decides to start a podcast? You're about to find out.Welcome to Vices and Volumes, where host Avril Clinton-Forde reads from her personal collection of books spanning the 1700s through the 1920s—and dives headfirst into the wonderful rabbit holes they create. This introduction episode explains how an impromptu performance for six American tourists in a West Coast Ireland bookshop led to a podcast dedicated to exploring the delightfully complex way the upper classes made simple instructions sound like diplomatic negotiations.What you'll discover in future episodes: Victorian etiquette that makes modern dating apps look simple, Irish folklore and banshees, servant management techniques more insightful than modern leadership books, hunting protocols with existential overtones, and the elaborate way Georgians and Victorians made the English language perform Olympic-level gymnastics just to say something simple.This episode features readings from "Thoughts on Hunting" and "Bear Recital" (18th-19th century), including the immortal wisdom: "A slip of the tongue is no fault of the mind," and why masters who don't understand their servants' duties will find those servants inevitably idle.Whether you're here for history, curiosity, relaxation, or honestly just hoping something will help you fall asleep, Avril has you covered. Episodes include fully researched deep dives and "bare recitals" where the original Victorian and Georgian texts speak for themselves.Perfect for: History lovers, insomniacs, literary curiosity seekers, and anyone who gets genuinely excited about 200-year-old instructions for proper hat storage.