ATKINSON, A. Ireland exhibited to England, in a political and moral survey of her population, and in a statistical and scenographic tour of certain districts; comprehending specimens of her colonisation, natural history and antiquities, arts, sciences, and commerce, customs, character, and manners, seats, scenes and sea views.

ENGLISH RULE IN IRELAND WAS AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF CATHOLIC, PROTESTANT AND DISSENTER

Violent inequalities in her political and social system, the true source of her disorders. Plan for softening down those inequalities, and for uniting all classes of the people in one civil association for the improvement of their country. With a letter to the members of His Majesty’s Government on the state of Ireland. Two volumes. London: Baldwin, 1823. First edition. Octavo. pp. (1) [iv], xxxii, 392, (2) vii, 448. Later half calf on marbled boards, some wear to spine and extremities. A very good set of an extremely rare work. €785
Goldsmiths-Kress 23709. Not in Bradshaw.
A. Atkinson, Esq. is a somewhat elusive figure: he was probably born in the 1770s, and most of what is known of him comes from his own writings. He claimed to have been a Dublin native and at various times had addresses in Cuffe Street, New Street, and Bishop Street, although there appears to be no mention of him in contemporary Dublin directories. In 1810-12 he was living somewhere near Athlone, by which time he was already active in his idiosyncratic publishing projects. He had at one stage possessed a small landed property, possibly connected with land that his uncle had owned in County Down, but he eventually lost it. Atkinson was the author of three substantial books The Irish Tourist [1815], Ireland Exhibited to England [1823], and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century [1833] and of at
least three pamphlets, and he was his own publisher and sales representative for at least two of the books. His work was peppered with suggestions for social reform, particularly his Ireland in the Nineteenth Century that was both a travel account and a radical prescription for addressing Irish poverty (making the case for an income tax to support the indigent poor and for the state to underwrite the large-scale settlement of labouring families on waste land); as one enthusiastic reviewer put it, “no cold and unfeeling disciple of Parson Malthus or Miss Martineau could have written such a work, and no Scottish economist will be able to upset it” [Leinster Express, 16 Nov. 1833]. When stepping down from ‘near thirty years of literary labour’ in 1834 he claimed to have produced in total ‘about 8,000 volumes’ [Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 20 Sept. 1834], but the comparative rarity of all but The Irish Tourist would suggest that this may have been an exaggeration.
He was married and had a large family, became a champion of the Dublin poor, was involved with the establishment of the Mendicity Institute in 1817, and became a harsh critic of the official sponsors of charity in the city in 1826. By 1830 he was in the North and involved in charitable fundraising in Belfast, and then in 1834 he was president of a short-lived and radically inclined debating society, the ‘Northern Forum or Belfast School of Improvement’ [Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 20 Oct. 1834]. He was increasingly anti-clerical in his views, making eccentric statements in the press. Back in Dublin he pursued a public squabble with the Society of Friends over money and the long-term care of his sister, who had been admitted to the York Asylum c.1798 [Freeman’s Journal, 21 Nov. 1837]. In 1840 the Freeman’s Journal had to publish an appeal for financial aid to rescue him from destitution, and this attracted quite wide support.
The family background was probably Quaker; he was not a member of the Society but had been a pupil in Ballitore. He may have had Midlands roots but much of his writing drew on his travels in Ulster, both east and west. In the 1840 appeal the Freeman’s Journal suggested that it was the appearance of Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary that put the final nail into his finances, ruining the sales of his self-financed 1833 publication. Opinionated and unpredictable in his judgments, he was a prolific if undisciplined writer, who nevertheless went to places and did things that other travel writers did not. And all his writing was marked by an unusual strength of moral purpose.
In his preface to this work he tells us: “The descriptions of her seats and scenery were taken on the spot, by the Author and other living writers; and the specimens of her natural history, antiquities, manufactures, and commerce, have been collected from the purest sources ... The statesman, the political economist, the lover of Irish scenes and Irish character, naturalist, who studies the history of the earth; the antiquarian, who broods over the monuments of past ages; the merchant, who exclusively regards the progress of commerce, in a country connected with his own; all, it is hoped, will find something in the varied sections of this work.”
Atkinson was genuinely concerned with the condition of the Irish peasantry. He spent much of the previous thirty years travelling in Ireland observing in great detail its people and its economy. This work gives his detailed descriptions of Counties Tipperary, Limerick, Louth, Down and Antrim, visiting most towns and villages commenting on the physical state, the condition of the surrounding countryside and its people. He writes of such matters as tithes, land tenures, mineral waters, meadows, gardens, orchards, timber and woods, bogs, burning and draining, manures, food, fuel, roads, canals, gentlemen’s seats, caves, cairns, cromlechs, agricultural societies, peasantry improvement societies, Ulster dialect, rural inns, linen manufacture and its influence, the then considerable cotton industry, woollen and paper manufacture, trade, mail coaches, etc.
He believed that English rule in Ireland was against the interests of the Irish people, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. He wrote that the Irish Administration: “cannot, in its executive capacity, lay a lasting foundation for the peace of Ireland … or by its terrors, awe it into gloomy silence”.

[CAT 164]