The city of Georgian facades and broad-avenued streets that we know as Dublin today was not always so. In Dublin 1660-1860, Maurice Craig explores the city's golden era of architecture and its growth from a relatively unimportant settlement of nine thousand souls to, as Craig puts it himself, 'the Augustan capital of a Gaelic nation'. He offers lively descriptions of many well-known Dublin locales and investigates the lobbying and political efforts involved in this growth process and examines in detail this aspect of the life of the city.
As commentator and writer Mark Girouard observes in his foreword to the book, 'much work has been done since by other historians, and by Maurice Craig himself, on individual aspects of Dublin's buildings and architects, but as a masterly and enthralling general picture, nothing has replaced it'. Overall, the book is a colourful and witty survey that is certain to fund new readers as well as appealing to those who have been calling for some time for the book to be reissued.
About the author: Maurice Craig was born in Belfast in 1919 and educated at Castle Park, Dalkey and Shrewsbury School before going on to Magdalene College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin. He wrote on subjects as diverse as Irish bookbindings, biography, poetry and topography but is best-remembered for his books on architectural subjects.
Dublin 1660-1860 first appeared in 1952 and was followed by further ground-breaking works, including Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size (which was also recently reissued) and The Architecture of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1880. Maurice's interest in and understanding of architecture came through clearly in his photography. Since he took up the camera and pen in the 1940s, Maurice recorded buildings of all types and periods, exploiting to the full his uncanny ability to highlight the key features of a building or neighborhood. Maurice passed away on May 11, 2011.
