Harold's Cross

In his latest book, MOUNT JEROME, Dublin’s Victorian Cemetery, Haroldonian, novelist and best-selling Historian, Maurice Curtis, welcomes you to a hidden and often over-looked gem in the heart of Harold’s Cross – MOUNT JEROME.

Many visitors to Dublin describe Mount Jerome as being ‘one of the most interesting 19th-century cemeteries in Europe’ particularly because of its funerary architecture and statuary. It contains some of the finest Victorian memorials, tombs, vaults and crypts in Ireland, commissioned, no less, by the ruling elite in Anglo-Irish society, including the leading (mainly Protestant) professional and merchant class.

With its funerary art, including ornate and shrouded urns, tombs, angels, vaults and crypts, Mount Jerome Cemetery has often been compared to Père Lachaise in Paris and Highgate Cemetery in London. Moreover, the cemetery, with its predominantly neo-Classical tombs, standing out against the dark cedars and cypresses, is considered Dublin’s most Gothic cemetery.

Whereas Glasnevin Cemetery may symbolise Nationalist Ireland, Mount Jerome symbolises Victorian Ireland, having one of the finest collections of Victorian memorials and tombs. Such grandiosity were all expressions of the British Empire’s representatives and minions, ruling from Dublin Castle, with its Anglo-Irish adherents worshipping at the altar of the Protestant Reformation, the Act of Union, and espousing a superiority as expressed in Rule Brittania. Many of these are buried in Mount Jerome, their colonial mind-set embodied in such vaults as those along the Hawthorn and Long Walks in particular.

In this fascinating work, we will discover such luminaries as the Nationalist, Thomas Davis, (and in the 20th century, Republicans), Sheridan Le Fanu, George Russell (AE), Jack B. Yeats, Edward Bunting, George Roe, Arthur Guinness the Second, the Findlaters, the Longfords, J.M. Synge, members of Bram Stoker’s family, as well as Oscar Wilde’s family.

The book is available in ALAN HANNA’S BOOKSHOP in Rathmines or from AMAZON. It retails at 24.95 Euro and is in hardback.