Music and dancing at Castletown, County Kildare, 1759-1821 (2011)
Castletown, near Celbridge in Co. Kildare, was the home of the Right Honourable Thomas Conolly and his wife Lady Louisa Augusta (née Lennox). As a well-connected, high-society couple, the Conollys received invitations to the most exclusive social events in Dublin and London and were closely associated with formal social life at Dublin Castle. By the 1780s, their magnificent residence was a centre of fashionable sociability in which music and dancing were significant agents.
Thomas and Louisa Conolly are the first members of their family about whom significant evidence of their social lives, and of the entertainments that they provided at Castletown, can still be found today. That music and dancing were integral to those entertainments is evidenced by a variety of primary source materials currently available across a number of repositories in Ireland and the United Kingdom including: personal and household account books, tradesmen’s receipt books and the voluminous correspondences of the Lennox sisters. This material has allowed for the construction of a narrative of the role played by music and dancing in the lives of the Conollys, both within the house at Castletown and on the estate, in the period from 1759 to 1821. This narrative points to the influences of the Conolly’s social milieu and the entertainments which they experienced at non-domiciliary venues such as assembly rooms and theatres. This is the focus of the first chapter, which contextualizes the occasions for music and dancing which occurred at Castletown in the 1770s and 1780s. These years marked a zenith of music and dancing as aspects of domiciliary sociability and coincided with the period during which the Conollys were more invested than ever in Irish society and in domestic life. Around the same time we find music and dancing functioning at Castletown in the contexts of education and employment: prominent music- and dancing-masters were employed and musical instruments purchased and maintained for members of the extended Conolly family. Thus, the third chapter of this study considers those who facilitated music and dancing at Castletown and in the social lives of the extended Conolly family from the 1780s into the early nineteenth century.
The scholarly examination of music and dancing, as aspects of domiciliary sociability, entertainment and education, provides new perspectives on the form, function and furnishing of a country house in Georgian Ireland. It also provides a useful framework for investigating the social lives of the various people who lived and worked therein.
Published by:
Four Courts Press, Dublin Maynooth Studies in Local History Series. General editor: Raymond Gillespie. (October 2011)
