This book began in 1994 when my husband, William H. A. Williams, encouraged me to prepare a presentation on illustrations of the Irish Famine. My thanks to him and to my children, Bill and Lavinia Williams, for their ready support and occasional tolerance of this long-term project.
Susan Shaw Sailer and Élaine Ní Cuilléanáin saw and encouraged my first efforts at the American Conference on Irish Studies held in Morgantown, West Virginia in 1994. That paper was published in Representing Ireland, Gender, Class, Nationality (1997) edited by Dr. Sailer. Thanks also to Thomas Redshaw for encouraging me to submit my paper on Punch and Daniel O’Connell. I am grateful to him and to James Rogers for publishing that article in New Hibernia Review (1997). My dear and most hospitable friends Bonnie and Owen Dudley Edwards witnessed the next installment in a paper given in Edinburgh. Owen was especially helpful in expanding my approach as well as my resources. Thanks to Bill Bell and Laura Brake for selecting the paper on Thomas Campbell Foster for publication in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (2000).
Many thanks go to Adrianne Varaday of the University of Cincinnati for the slides on the seminal papers I gave in the beginning of the project. I am deeply grateful to Adrianne and to Janet Reed, Chair of English at University College, University of Cincinnati, who discussed and edited early versions of the manuscript. Dr. Antoinette Larkin of the Department of Humanities, Media & Cultural Studies, University of Cincinnati, also read the manuscript and provided very timely advice and encouragement.
I am grateful to Dr. Terri Sabatos, my fellow Victorianist, for her unfailing enthusiasm, kind hospitality, many cups of tea, and help in research. She was a wonderful font of knowledge and renewal. Special thanks go to Kenneth Haag for hospitality in Bloomington, Indiana.
I want to express my gratitude to the library staffs of the University of Cincinnati Library, especially Sally Long, Virginia Parr and Sally Moffit. The interlibrary loan staff was unfailingly helpful. Tess Midkiff and her staff at Shawnee State University Library must also be given credit for smoothing the path. I am also grateful to the reference staffs at Indiana University and the Scottish National Library.
My thanks to James Donnelly, Jr., who set a tremendous standard in scholarship, and to my colleagues Blasco Sobrinho and Barbara Kunkle who kept me supplied with theory. I am grateful to the Ohio Humanities Council and to James Murphy and the Irish Salon in Cincinnati for giving me opportunities to present aspects of this topic.
I wrote the next-to-last revisions on Dr. Kathryn Jansak’s dining room table in Portsmouth. I also deeply appreciate the support given by my provost at Shawnee State University, Dr. Michael Field.
Finally, I am forever grateful to the memory of Élís Dillon, who made writing seem a possible if not necessarily easy task.
To rely upon the kindness of strangers is far easier than to require the repeated help of good friends. Thanks to all for their steadfastness, and for their enthusiastic applause whenever the fairy gleam seemed to fade. God bless them, every one.
Leslie Williams
Shawnee State University
Portsmouth, Ohio
October 2000