Victorian Period
During the 19th century, because Ireland was a constituent part of the United Kingdom, British architecture continued to influence building styles in Ireland. Many prominent Irish buildings were designed and built in Ireland during this period (1837–1901) including Findlater's Church on Parnell Square, the Royal City of Dublin Hospital, Olympia Theatre, the Central Markets in Cork, the National Museum of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, the Natural History Museum, and the National Gallery of Ireland. Many of these new buildings were located in the Southside of Dublin in places like Kildare Street and Baggot Street and in the centre of Cork. However, few buildings were built outside the major cities other than a few railway stations in the provincial towns.
During the Victorian period, many new statues were erected in Ireland, particularly in Dublin. These included several rather elegant statues of figures such as Queen Victoria, Daniel O'Connell and Henry Grattan.
One of Ireland's finest Victorian buildings is the cathedral dedicated to St Mary at Killarney; built in a neo-gothic style known as 'Lancet arched Gothic', so called because the cathedral has many long, slender lancet shaped windows with acutely pointed arches. The architect was August Pugin one of the greatest of Victorian architects. The cathedral begun in 1842, funded by public subscription, and interrupted by the horrors of famine, was finally dedicated in 1855. The design is typical of Irish gothic, and a blend of Corinthian and Doric, decorated with Sicilian marble and Caen stone. The cathedral is crowned by a spire of 280 ft. Pugin's work was eminently suited to Ireland, a convert to Roman catholicism, be believed gothic architecture to be the only style suitable for religious worship, he attacked the earlier neoclassical architecture as pagan and almost blasphemous. This philosophy embraced by the church in Ireland at the time helped to popularise the gothic style in Victorian Ireland.
Read more about this topic: Architecture Of Ireland
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“Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another age ... when so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in Richard Chevenix Trench, On the Study of Words, lecture 1 (1858)