Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer 1711-1790

Parental profligacy and the dishonesty of his guardian meant that when Edmund Spencer came of age in 1732 he inherited only a fragment of the estates that his great-great-grandfather, the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, had amassed in Ireland. To keep himself and his family in a manner appropriate to their status Spencer had to find an income.