ABSTRACT
Driving on the main road from Dublin to Cork, one passes through the village of Johnstown (Co. Kilkenny) which contains a small but perfectly-formed octagonal central square. If you glance at a house on the north-west side, you see its name, ‘The Spa House’, writ large on the front wall. Though the town’s historical reputation as a major health-resort has long passed, especially as it was then known as Ballyspellan, the lingering palimpsest of name and function may pique the curious visitor’s interest. In a rare Irish example of an imaginative account of a spa town, Carleton’s comic novella of 1860, The Evil Eye or The Black Spectre, sets part of the story in Ballyspellan. The text describes a town based on the typical British watering-place template but with unique inhabited aspects of its own, where dissipation and disease were equally prominent, a pattern repeated in performances of health across the Irish spas.
