The Damnable Question; A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. [Note: no price on DJ]. Hardcover. xiv, [2], 400 pages. Map of Dublin. Occasional Footnotes. References. Bibliography. Index. Slightly cocked. DJ has some wear, tears, chips and soiling. This is An Atlantic Monthly Book. George Bubb Dangerfield (28 October 1904 in Newbury, Berkshire – 27 December 1986 in Santa Barbara, California) was an English-American journalist, historian, and the literary editor of Vanity Fair from 1933 to 1935. He is known primarily for his book The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), a classic account of how the Liberal Party in Great Britain ruined itself in dealing with the House of Lords, woman suffrage, the Irish question, and labor unions, 1906–1914. His book on early 19th century US history The Era of Good Feelings, won the the 1953 Bancroft Prize and 1953 Pulitzer Prize for History. Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England was not given much attention by academic historians when it first appeared in 1935, but has gained admirers over the years because of its lively style and trenchant analysis. It remains one of the best accounts of the failure of the Liberals to deal effectively with increasingly vehement demands from Irish Unionists and Irish Nationalists, industrial workers, and suffragettes. After serving in the United States Army with the 102nd Infantry Division during World War II, he returned to the study of history. His last book, The Damnable Question: A Study of Anglo-Irish Relations, was a finalist in 1976 for the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction. This work is a humane, masterful exploration of the political and social relations between Ireland and England during the period 1800-1922. Derived from a Kirkus review: Having last looked at the implacable, apparently insoluble Irish question some 40 years ago in his jaunty but dead serious The Strange Death of Liberal England, Dangerfield picks up the web of delusions which comprised England's imperial policies toward Ireland in the years between the Famine and the 1922 Treaty. Dangerfield obviously likes the feisty Irish better than their English overlords; he focuses on the Easter Rebellion which he sees as "a bitter, exact and decisive gloss" on England's most disastrous colonial experiment. Here he parts company with recent revisionists who have tried--in the interests of stanching the current bloodletting in Ulster--to downplay the legacy of that strange, myth-propelled revolution of 1916, a revolution in which the shades Cuchulain marched alongside Connolly and Pearse into the Post Office. After Easter Week, the English infallibly did the wrong thing--first introducing Conscription, then as popular resistance mounted, "coercion." For three years Lloyd George juggled the Nationalists in the south and the Ulster Unionists in "the Micawber-like hope that something would turn up." Unlike Conor Cruise O'Brien who accepts the de facto existence of two states of Ireland, Dangerfield suspects that the Treaty--a "success" in English imperial terms--is doomed to failure. It did not assuage "that existential side of Irish history which is governed by the unappeasable past." Dangerfield has lost none of his elegance and his ability to take the measure of a man or a policy. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: Easter Rising, Famine, Lloyd George, Home Rule, Birrell, Sinn Fein, Conscription, Act of Union, Parnell, de Valera, Markievicz, Asquith, Anglo-Irish War, Edward Carson, James Connolly, Irish Republic, Michael Collins, Fenians, Irish Republican Army
[Book #82929]
Price: $45.00