Concerning Patrice Mitchell, Reader of Shakespeare, and the Maintenance of English Among the Irish in Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux

This chapter begins with a personal anecdote about the ex-libris of a book that the author owns, but whose original owner was “P. Mitchell.” Loupès uses the book to introduce the Mitchell family from Dublin, who made their fortune in Bordeaux, and to investigate their attachments to Ireland and the English language, even as they assimilated into French society. He concludes that the Mitchells, like the other Bordeaux Irish families, lived within and between two linguistic and cultural worlds during the eighteenth century, and they seemed to do so with both ease and pleasure.