The Martins of Cro' Martin

London: Chapman and Hall, 1856. First Edition in book form. Very Good. Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. 8vo, 8 3/8 x 5 1/4 (212 x 132 mm); xiv, 625 pp. Forty plates, including frontispiece and vignette title, by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). Half leather binding in tan polished calf with blind-stamped blue canvas; raised bands and elegant gilt decorations; gilt title on red calf label; edges stained red; hinges partly cracked but binding square and tight; dampstains on some pages and generally evenly toned pages.

[Sadleir 1410]. The Martins of Cro' Martin is novel about the exploits of a young man named Paul Goslett, who comes to the small Irish village of Cro' Martin and falls in love with the daughter of a local politician. It depicts the fall of a Connemara estate in the period between Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the Great Famine (1845-1849). Even as he asserts that the fall of the landed gentry brings disastrous upheaval to a traditional society, Lever insists on the inevitability of such collapse. Lever's reforming Anglo-Irish heroine Mary Martin is doomed to defeat and early death, unable to stem the costs of her absentee family's arrogant isolation from their tenants and neglect of their responsibilities as landlords.
Charles James Lever (1806 - 1872) was an Irish novelist and raconteur, a medical doctor who traveled to Canada, was posted in Brussels, and later traveled widely in Europe and settled in Italy.