Caroline's Dilemma by Bettina Bradbury

Author:Bettina Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742244662
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

For any widow, raising five young boys through their teenage years on her own would be challenging and costly. Doing so in a foreign country under the watchful eye of trustees and the Court of Chancery was surely more so. Yet Caroline remained, in many ways, a very privileged widow. She was not homeless, and she did not have to pay for accommodation. However, she had to live where her brothers-in-law chose. They had ‘full discretion as to renting, leasing or purchasing’ a cottage or residence for the family. They were to keep it ‘in a proper state of repair’ until the youngest child turned 24 or the family and the trustees decided it made sense to leave it. Then Edward instructed them to sell or dispose of the dwelling, ‘furniture and other effects and the sale monies shall then sink into and form part of the trust fund’.47

They fulfilled this wish, though it is unclear exactly when Caroline left temporary lodgings and settled into a permanent residence. It may just be a coincidence that the very day that Caroline and the boys arrived in London someone placed an advertisement in the Dublin paper the Freeman’s Journal seeking ‘a Modern HOUSE with good garden’, at least four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. The notice specified that the house should be in ‘Landsdowne, Sandymount, or Merrion Road or Clyde or Victoria Terrace’. These locations were all near Sandymount, the residential suburb and seaside resort four kilometres south of Dublin. It was there that at some point Caroline took up residence in a house at 2 Clyde Terrace. This was not far from either the French College or Booterstown, where the two youngest boys went to school. She was definitely living there later in the 1870s.48

Placing Caroline and the children in this middle-class locality, with its villas and terraced genteel housing, respected the spirit of Edward’s directives to give them accommodation suitable to his status. The development of these southern suburbs over the century was fuelled by the ‘gradual flight of wealth’ from the north to the south of the city that left central Dublin grimy, unhealthy and home to the impoverished. Sandymount was far from the rough life and hotels and saloons of Dublin, which Patrick Kearney might have feared would appeal to Caroline. The train line that ran down the coast to Blackrock did not stop there. If she wished to visit the city she would need to take one of the omnibuses that had been serving the routes to the south since the 1840s, or hire a carriage.49 Its seaside location promised a healthy environment for the illness-prone boys.

The houses on Clyde Terrace were a short walk inland from the Sandymount Strand and the beaches of South Dublin Bay. This small terrace of four two-storey houses ran off the north side of St John’s road almost opposite the substantial Irish Anglican Saint John’s Church, Sandymount. Five years before Caroline and the boys arrived, the terrace was described as ‘almost new’, and ‘built by an eminent building firm of Dublin’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.