Lady Gregory's Toothbrush Read Free

Rule to find that every class in Ireland has suffered dire consequences. Later that year she travelled alone to the Aran Islands, staying in a cottage in Inishere “among people speaking scarcely any English”. She wrote to English friends about the trip and her reading of Emily Lawless’s novel Grania , set on the islands, and Jane Barlow’s Irish Idylls , stories of Irish peasant life. (“I look on it as one of my Irish sermon books; it really gives me sympathy with the wants of the people.”) In the meantime, she worked on her husband’s incomplete manuscript for his Autobiography .
    While this work seemed to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt merely a widow’s “pious act”, and had very many dull moments and displays of Sir William’s self-importanceand vanity, it was at the same time a piece of careful repositioning and re-invention which would become the basis not only for Lady Gregory’s life at Coole and her work with Yeats, but also for many of Yeats’s poems about Coole and many of his Anglo-Irish attitudes. It would emphasize, as in her account of Sir William’s funeral, that he was loved by the people, that he and his family were respected as landlords. She would insist upon this all her life. In her own conclusion to the book, she quoted from a letter he had written to her “just before our marriage”: “I always felt the strongest sense of duty towards my tenants, and I have had a great affection for them. They have never in a single instance caused me displeasure, and I know you can and will do everything in your power to make them love and value us.” She continued: “He was glad at the last to think that, having held the estate through the old days of the Famine and the later days of agitation, he had never once evicted a tenant. Now that he has put his harness off I may boast this on his behalf. And, in the upheaval and the changing of the old landmarks, of which we in Ireland have borne the first brunt, I feel it worth boasting that among the first words of sympathy that reached me after his death were messages from the children of the National School at Coole, from the Bishops and priests of the diocese , from the Board of Guardians, the workhouse, the convent, and the townspeople of Gort.” In a letter to afriend of his in London composed while she was working on the manuscript, she wrote: “I attach great importance to the breadth and sincerity of his views on Irish questions being remembered.”
    This note would surface again and again in her letters and diaries. As late as 1920, when she was negotiating the sale of land at Coole, she wrote to Sir Henry Doran of the Congested Districts Board: “May I draw your attention to the fact that through all the troublesome times of the last forty years we have never had to ask compensation from the County or for police protection. We have been, in comparison with many other Estates, a centre of peace and goodwill. This was in part owing to the liberal opinions and just dealing of my husband and my son.”
    In the table of contents for Sir William’s autobiography , Chapter V11 contains a section entitled “The Gregory Clause”. Sir William devoted two and a half pages to the subject, most of it a quotation from an article published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1876 that attempted to justify the Gregory Clause, which was passed by the House of Commons in March 1847.
    Sir William Gregory was one of a large number of Irish landowners and politicians who took the view that the system of land-holding that had been in place in Ireland before the Famine could not continue. They believed that there were too many smallholdings and too many tenants.In 1848, Lord Palmerston, for example, wrote to Lord John Russell: “It is useless to disguise the truth that any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state