On May 9, 1830, fourteen year-old Daniel O'Connell Jr., son of the Liberator, left his comfortable home in Dublin to attend the Jesuit college at Clongowes Wood in County Kildare. Thus began a three-year correspondence between Danny Jr. and his mother, Mary O'Connell. Bursting with love and affection, illness and death, politics and scandal, these letters allow a brief glimpse at the relationship between mother and son in nineteenth-century Ireland...