Chicago Trek: Day Two

• The promised thunderstorms did not materialize.  Hooray!
• Needless to say, the book I most wanted to read has vanished into the ether, or at least into the murky, unfathomable depths of the Regenstein stacks.  (Insert various unprintable words here.)
• Nevertheless, I did read two Irish novels, George Brittaine's Irishmen and Irishwomen (2nd ed., 1831) and Cecilia Mary Caddell's Nellie Netterville (1867). Caddell's novel has the least manifest theological content of any novel I've read so far, even though the subject--the Cromwellian Settlement and the transplantation of landowners--involves considerable sectarian violence.  The novel proves conciliatory to Protestants: while it links Puritanism with the worst form of fanaticism, particularly in a long set-piece featuring Puritan soldiers torching a secret church with the congregation still inside, it also features virtuous and heroic Protestants who renounce extremism.  Nor does Caddell give any sign that these Protestants need to convert in order to be redeemed.  While the novel clearly links the settlement to contemporary Irish unrest, it also implies that Protestants and Catholics might be able to achieve some sort of harmony...at a future date.  Brittaine's novel addresses the Rockite rebellion (negatively), "New Light" Presbyterianism (positively),  the implosion of Protestant-Catholic relations (confusedly), Protestant Sunday Schools (positively again), and conversion to Protestantism (very positively).  This was all a bit too much for one 200+ page novel, especially because Brittaine pushes a strong anti-Catholic line while almost grudgingly admitting that Protestants and Catholics had been co-existing perfectly well before the "New Light" movement got going.  (Eyre Evans Crowe's novella Old Light and New Light harshly indicts the New Light movement for sparking sectarian conflict.)  That being said, I can't think of any other novel in which the evangelical heroine escapes assassination because some teenage scamp dumps a bucket of mud over her.
• I also came across this novel (first published in the 1850s) and its sequel.  They both look delightfully awful.
• There's another take on the Mystery of Edwin Drood just out?