Silver in Georgian Dublin: Making, Selling, Consuming is by Dr Alison FitzGerald, a lecturer in history at Ireland’s Maynooth University.
Using eighteenth-century letters, diaries, wills, cookery books and guild records, the book attempts to cast light on the market for luxury goods at a time of considerable expansion and innovation in Dublin, then the British Empire’s second principal city.
Silver in Georgian Dublin illustrates the sort of objects that were most in demand, where and how they were purchased, examining silver’s place in social society and highlighting pioneering advertising tactics used by Irish silversmiths at the time.
Silver's societal context
“My aim in this book was to reconstruct the context in which Irish Georgian silver was valued at the time that it was made,” Dr Fitzgerald said. “What did it mean to be ‘born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth’? Why was a hallmark regarded as such an exceptional form of consumer protection?”
The book is the first major examination of Georgian silver in Ireland since Douglas Bennett's seminal Irish Georgian Silver was first published in 1972.
Silver in Georgian Dublin was launched last week at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square at an event hosted by Ireland’s Company of Goldsmiths.
The hardback book (ISBN 1472427874) is published by Routledge and costs £95 from Hodges Figgis in Dublin or on Amazon.com.
Operating from Dublin Castle, Ireland’s Company of Goldsmiths was set up in 1637. For more information see www.assay.ie.
