ABSTRACT
Davitt’s life as a land reform activist and journalist was quite lonely. Although he mixed with a lot of people, he was constantly on the move and had not had a settled home since he left his parents’ house in Haslingen in the late 1860s. Most of the time when he was in Ireland he stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Dublin, William O’Brien relates an 1885 conversation where Davitt declares that he will find a home of his own before the following year. Davitt’s declaration was not quite fulfilled, but he was married on the last day of 1886. His wife was Mary Yore, an Irish-American, who having lost her mother in an accident in which she too was almost killed, and was brought up by an aunt, Mary Canning, in Oakland, California. On the couple’s return to Ireland, they still had no home, and stayed for a while in the Imperial Hotel in Dublin.
