TOWNSEND, Rev. Horatio. Statistical Survey of the County of Cork, with Observations on the Means of Improvment; drawn up for the consideration, and by direction of the Royal Dublin Society. With large coloured folding map of the county.

Dublin: Printed by Graisberry and Campbell, 1810. Octavo. First edition. pp. xx, [1], 749, [1], 78, [16], 79-104 (addenda and appendix). Contemporary half calf on marbled boards, title in gilt on red morocco label on spine. A very good copy. Very scarce

Goldsmiths’-Kress 19999.
Rev. Horatio Townsend (1750-1837), historian, son of Philip Townshend of Rosscarbery, County Cork, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated B.A. in 1770, and M.A. in 1776. He was incorporated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1776 and took orders, and was given the living of Rosscarbery, where he resided for the rest of his life.
His most important work is this Statistical Survey of his native county which was first published in one volume in Dublin in 1810. A second edition of the work, in two volumes, was published in Cork in 1815. Another work by Townshend was A Tour through Ireland and the Northern Parts of Great Britain, octavo, London, 1821. He also wrote a good deal of local and ephemeral verse, a specimen of which may be found in The Hippocrene (1831) by Patrick O’Kelly. He wrote occasional articles for Blackwood’s Magazine under the signature of ‘Senex,’ and to Bolster’s Cork Magazine.
His most famous publication was A Statistical Survey of the County of Cork, with Observations on the Means for Improvement (1810) was drawn up under the auspices of the Dublin Society. It was not a quantitative survey, but a prose description of the county. Townsend systematically described the geology, physical geography, inhabitants, antiquities, and the state of the church and agriculture in the first part of the book, following it with a topographical description barony by barony. Finally came addenda which were lists of miscellaneous items such as observations on bees and eggs.
Townsend in his Survey proved a systematic and industrious compiler and could show sympathy towards those whom he observed. He found the local people engaging in some respects and could describe them wittily, comparing for example Englishmen in an Inn who would barely exchange one word over their drink with a similar gathering of Irishmen where “the difficulty is to find a listener” (p. 75). He also wrote sympathetically about the alleged thievish tendencies of the Irish, ascribing these largely to poverty. He perceptively observed that underemployment stemmed from overpopulation in Irish rural districts, and identified the ease with which potatoes could provide for a family as the key to early marriage and further population growth in such districts.
Townsend’s Survey did, however, show the conventional prejudices of his class and time. In comparing English and Irish peasantry, he proclaimed “the superiority of the English in cleanliness, decorum, the order and decencies of life” (p. 74). He described the violent attacks among Irish peasants and attributed them to the persistence of their ancient tribal quarrels. His remarks, particularly criticisms of the clergy’s role in education, led to a bitter and protracted correspondence with the Dublin Society and in the Cork press. Townsend’s anti-Catholicism became manifest also in his Observations on the Catholic Claims (1812), in which he argued against Catholic emancipation chiefly on the grounds that Roman Catholics were claiming a right to freedom of conscience which they denied their own members. While such arguments dominated the immediate and local reception of his work, later readers have valued his detailed and often perceptive descriptions of the county, not least because his was one of the earliest such surveys in Ireland. In 1810 or after Townsend and his second brother, Thomas (b. 1737), bought the family property at Derry from his eldest brother, Richard (1733-1817), where he built a new house. His sight was impaired in later life following an accidental explosion. Townsend died on 26 March 1837 and was buried in St Fachtna’s Church, Ross Carbery, where he is commemorated by a memorial in the form of a relief of the Good Samaritan by the noted sculptor Thomas Kirk. An important work on the county’s agricultural economy. With chapters on: geography, inhabitants, antiquities, ecclesiastical places, agriculture, and the various baronies.

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