MAPPING IRISH ADMISSIONS

JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN was a sensitive soul. When he admitted these thoughts to his friend Henry Weston of Cork in 1773, he was a twentythree year old in London about to start his first term as a law student. Curran's painful dislocation becomes almost tangible as he contrasts the security of Ireland with an uncertain future in London, an unknown and foreign place, a ‘land of strangers’. Wrapped up in this migration was another journey, the difficult transition from youth to the ambiguous responsibilities of adulthood. Curran mulled over the costs and benefits of this new found independence in the solitude of his lodging house as the bells of nearby St Martin's in the Fields thundered in his ears, drowning out the noisy traffic in the Strand and Charing Cross. Set adrift in the city's relentless ‘hurry of business’, Curran would have been able to relate to the young Irish medical student, Robert Wigram, who received the following greeting from the Irish physician he came to study with in London, ‘If you fall here young man, no one will stop to pick you up.’

Given Curran's heartfelt pining, one might be forgiven for thinking that his separation from home was permanent, but that was never his intention. Curran, like many other Irish students in London, returned to Ireland to practice law.