Maria Edgeworth: Distinguishing the Irish Anglican Ascendancy from the English

In his 1922 novel Ulysses, James Joyce included a fictionalised depiction of the time he spent living in a Martello Tower in Sandycove, County Dublin, but he turned his real-life roommate –Samuel Chenevix Trench, a member of the Irish Anglican Ascendancy – into the Stage English character Haines. In 1983, when UTV, RTÉ, and Channel Four co-operated in creating the Irish R.M. television series, based on short stories by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, they elected to cast the English actor Peter Bowles as Major Yeates and to change the Major from an upper middle class Irish Anglican to an Englishman.