Neil Hegarty

“consciousness. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and many other such literary portrayals appeared in these years to testify to this growing attention. A novel might have been written about the travails of Davitt’s life too. As a child he was employed in the cotton industry, working in the local mills that resounded to the din of vast and deafening spinning machines that regularly nipped off workers’ limbs and scalps; in 1857, Davitt himself lost an arm to one of these machines and was dismissed from the works without compensation. In his teens, he managed to acquire an education”
― Neil Hegarty, The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People

“So long as John remained on the throne, this delicately poised status quo remained in place: with his death, however, it broke down, and new policies began instead to highlight the chasm between native Irish and colonists. Almost immediately, for example, the new statutes of Magna Carta came into effect: the rights of landowners and nobles in the lands settled by the Anglo-Normans were thus guaranteed – but the charter did not extend to the Irish themselves.”
― Neil Hegarty, The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People