Richard Twiss

Life
(1747-1821); English travel-writer and author of A Tour in Ireland in 1775 (London 1776; Dublin 1777), emphasising the poverty of the people; widely considered a travesty and made the object of indignant and scornful retorts by Anglo-Irish writers such as Thomas Preston, Leonard McNally and Richard Lewis; a ‘piss-pot’ which was manufactured with his portrait on the inside became the inspiration for comic verses by Lady Clare [Fitzgibbon]; Twiss also wrote on chess games (1787) and marshalled a contemporary exhibition in London of the type of guillotine used to execute Louis XV in 1793.

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Works
Irish interest
  • A Tour of Ireland in 1775 with a Map and a View of the Salmon Leap at Ballyshannon (London: Robson, et al. 1776), 204pp. [see details]
Other works
  • Travels through Portugal and Spain, in 1772 and 1773 . / by Richard Twiss, Esq. F.R.S. (London: printed for the author, and sold by G. Robinson, T. Becket, and J. Robson 1775), [4], iii, [1], 465, [7]pp., ill. [7 lvs. of pls., 3 folded; 1 map, music], 30 cm.; Do. [in French trans.], Voyage en Portugal et en Espagne. ... Orné d’une carte, &c . [Supplément; additions de Mr. Twiss a` son journal ]. as, 2 pts. (Berne 1776).
  • Chess: A Compilation of Anecdotes Relative to the Game, 2 vols. (London: For G. G. J & J. Robinson and T. & J. Egerton 1787-89).
  • A Trip to Paris, in July and August, 1792 (London: printed at the Minerva Press, and sold by William Lane, and by Mrs. Harlow 1793), [6], 131, [1]p., ill [pl.], 22 cm.
  • Execution of the King of France now exhibiting at no. 28, Hay-market. La guillotine; or the beheading machine, from Paris, by which the late King of France suffered. And an exact representation of the execution ([London, 1793], 1 sh. 2mo. [The guillotine at 28 Haymarket was exhibited by Richard Twiss; Nat. Lib. of Scotland, at al.]; Miscellanies, 2 vols. (London: T. Egerton 1805), 8°.

Bibliographical details

A Tour in Ireland in 1775 [with a map, and a view of the Salmon-leap at Ballyshannon] (London: printed or the author; sold by Robson; J. Walter; G. Robinson; and G. Kearsly 1776), [4], 161, 166-204p., p., ill. [front.; fold. map; ) 1 pl.; 21 cm. [Also 2 prelim. pp., 204pp., front. (folded map), 1 pl.]

EDNS: Do., [3rd edn.] (Dublin: Sheppard, Corcoran, &c. 1777), 229pp., 12°; Do . [electronic repro.] (Mich.: Thomson Gale 2003); and Do . [another edn.], in The British Tourist’s Companion [W. F. Mavor] (1809), 12°. Reprint: A Tour in Ireland in 1775 [Dublin 1776], ed. & intro. Rachel Finnegan (UCD Press 2008), 188pp.

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Criticism
Contemporary
  • Richard Lewis, A Defence of Ireland: A Poem in Answer to the Accounts Given of it by Mr. Twiss and Other Writers (Dublin: printed for W. Wilson, No. 6, Dame-Street, M,DCC,LXXVI [1776]), 27pp..
  • “Teresa Pinna y Ruiz” [pseud. of William Preston], An Heroic Epistle from Donna T. Pinna y Ruiz, of Murcia, to R. Twiss [in verse] ... 2ith several explanatory notes, written by himself (Dublin: Printed for W. Wilson 1776), 27pp. [3 edns. in 1776]
  • [by Leonard MacNally,] An Heroic Answer, from Richard Twiss, Esq., F.R.S., at Rotterdam, to Donna Teresa Pinna Ruiz, of Murica (1776).
 
Modern
  • Martyn Powell, Piss-pots, Printers and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-century Dublin: Richard Twiss’s Tour of Ireland [Maynooth Studies in Local History, 85] (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2009), 74pp. [see contents].

Bibliographical details
Martyn Powell, Piss-pots, Printers and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-century Dublin: Richard Twiss’s Tour of Ireland [Maynooth Studies in Local History, 85] (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2009), 72pp. CONTENTS: Chaps. 1. Richard Twiss’s A Tour in Ireland in 1775; 2. Irish Tours and Tourists; 3. Publication and Popular Reaction; 4. Twiss and Irish Cultural Life; 5. Piss-pot Tourist; 6. Twiss and the Formation of Irish Identity; 7. Conclusion. Bibl., pp.64-72.

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Commentary
Richard Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (Oklahoma UP 1962; Newton Abbot: David Charles 1972): ‘[...] Ireland was bewildering to him, for there he experienced what he called “intellectual regress”; that is, the more he heard, the less he understood! He received a strange commemoration, his picture being used to decorate chamber pots manufactured in Dublin. An indecent epigram on the theme was forthwith written by Lady Clare, the Lord Chancellor’s wife.’ (p.7; see further under Sir John Carr, supra.)

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References
Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast), holds signed copy of Tour in Ireland in 1775 [signed copy] (Dublin 1776); note that Do. is given as publ. 1776 in Praeger’s The Way I Went; and cf. COPAC: Tour in Ireland (Dublin: Shepperton et al. 1777), [being] 3rd edn. [no other Irish editions listed].

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