James H. Murphy, Ph.D., D.Litt., F.R.Hist.S., is Professor Emeritus of English at De Paul University of Chicago and Adjunct Professor in the School of English and in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University. His principal research interests are in the political history and the history of fiction of nineteenth-century Ireland. But he has also written on religion, education and gender. He is the editor or co-editor of eleven books, including the nineteenth-century volume of The Oxford History of the Irish Book (2011). He has published six monographs: Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (1997); Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland, during the reign of Queen Victoria (2001); Ireland: A Social, Cultural and Literary History, 1791-1891 (2003); Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age (2011); Ireland’s Czar: Gladstonian Government and the Lord Lieutenancies of the Red Earl Spencer, 1868-86 (2014);  The Politics of Dublin Corporation,1840-1900: From Reform to Expansion (2020).