Abstract

Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland opens with an account of a paper read by Samuel Ferguson to the Royal Irish Academy in the 1880s, in which he argued that it would be both preferable and possible to construct a railway tunnel under the Liffey, rather than build a bridge over it. Although Ferguson marshalled examples and engineering calculations in support of his proposal, Dublin is still without its tunnel under the river, and for the past century the supports and girders of the Loop Line railway bridge have interposed themselves between a gazer downstream from O'Connell Bridge and the splendours of Gandon's Custom House alongside the lower reaches of the waterway.