The Cock and Anchor by Sheridan Le Fanu: Contents
Contents page for The Cock and Anchor, Sheridan Le Fanu's first novel, a three-volume tale of early eighteenth-century Dublin published in 1845.
Word count
299 words
Contents page for The Cock and Anchor, Sheridan Le Fanu’s first novel, a three-volume tale of early eighteenth-century Dublin published in 1845.
The novel
The Cock and Anchor, being a Chronicle of Old Dublin City was the first novel by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), the Dublin writer later famous for his tales of mystery and the supernatural, among them Uncle Silas and Carmilla. It was published in three volumes in 1845 by William Curry, Jun. and Company of Dublin, with Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans in London, as the title page reproduced in the first volume records.
The story opens “some time within the first ten years of the last century” (that is, the early 1700s) at the Cock and Anchor, an old inn in the narrow streets near Dublin Castle. It is a historical romance in the tradition of Walter Scott, setting its characters against the society and politics of the city in the reign of Queen Anne. Readers interested in the streets it describes may find D. A. Chart’s Story of Dublin and J. T. Gilbert’s History of the City of Dublin useful companions.
Reading the book
The full text of all three volumes is available on this site:
Le Fanu returned to the Dublin of the eighteenth century in The House by the Churchyard (1863), set in Chapelizod; F. Elrington Ball’s account of the parish of Chapelizod describes the village. His brother William Richard Le Fanu wrote the memoir Seventy Years of Irish Life, one chapter of which includes a sketch of the novelist’s life. The original navigation for the book follows.