countdown-to-zero — 9 years ago(July 20, 2016 01:01 PM)

What is today incredibly bizarre is the actual historical record of the deranged 'character' ("
Georgian Britain's Worst Husband
") Redmond Barry Lyndon (a fictional persona loosely adapted from the actual historical figure of Andrew Robinson Stoney-Bowes) from whom Thackeray adapted his picaresque novel, and from which in turn Kubrick radically reconfigured the persona in the light of his frustrated Napoleon project in order to incorporate much of his accumulated research and visual material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Robinson_Stoney
Seemingly, the historical figure that Thackeray (who himself was the polar opposite to Redmond Barry: an Englishman, he married an Irish woman from Cork but later went bankrupt from his gambling despite his literary successes) adapted transpires to be a really nasty and brutal psychopath.
At that time in the late-1780s, the story about Stoney was headline news in the British media, as also recounted in these subsequent examinations and and more recently published books detailing the events (while Thackeray based his novel on direct information he acquired from John Bowes, the grandson of "Lady Lyndon" (Countess Bowes):
Wendy Moore: "Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met his Match" (2009).
Derek Parker, "The Trampled Wife" (2006).
Ralph Arnold, "The Unhappy Countess" (1957).
Jesse Foot, "The Lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq., and the Countess of Strathmore, written from thirty-three years professional attendance, from Letters and other well authenticated documents" (1810).
In all these accounts, Barry wasn't Irish at all, but a part of the invading Anglo-Irish colonialist Protestant Ascendency in Ireland, which is why he later became an MP, a member of the British Parliament, and also the High Sheriff of Durham, later moving on to become a murderer, child abductor, wife basher, and multiple rapist, the most brutally horrendous 'husband' in 18th century Britain, or at least the most notorious.