This chapter explores how three major nineteenth-century English literary figures lived, perceived and wrote about the troubled relationship between England and Ireland. Describing their collective belief in the Union, the chapter seeks to place the writers politically in terms of their ideas about Ireland as expressed in their fiction, their journalism and their private correspondence. They are shown to have flirted with the liberal agenda for Ireland but essentially, following Edmund Burke, can be seen to have adopted increasingly conservative (and anti-Gladstonian) positions - favouring coercion before concession - as they grew older and as the spectre of Home Rule became more real in the closing decades of the century.