VICTORIAN THREATENING LETTERS.

Victorian Ireland was global champion of threatening letters. This book reveals the murky world where tens of thousands of these letters and notices were nailed to barn doors or sent by penny post, intimidating, giving ‘fair warning’ and terrorising the recipients. These victims were sometimes landlords, land agents and land grabbers. Equally, they could be small farmers disputing land occupancy with neighbours. 
This book examines the nature, extent and context of this unusual trend. It investigates who sent threatening letters and why they sent them. It also delves into who received such unwelcome correspondence and what action they took, giving new insights particularly into 19th-century rural Ireland. 

Author 

Donal McCracken has been an academic for over 30 years.  As a faculty dean for 15 years after 1994, he did much to advance the transformation and black advancement in the humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, where he is now an emeritus professor. He has published extensively on Irish history (including on the southern African Irish diaspora), on media history and on botanical and environmental history