Editing Sheridan Le Fanu (section)

==Early life==
Sheridan Le Fanu was born at 45 Lower [[Dominick Street, Dublin|Dominick Street]], [[Dublin]], into a literary family of [[Huguenot]], Irish and English descent. He had an elder sister, Catherine Frances, and a younger brother, [[William Richard Le Fanu|William Richard]].<ref name=bill>William Richard Le Fanu (1893) [https://archive.org/details/seventyyearsiri00fanugoog ''Seventy Years of Irish Life''], Edward Arnold, London</ref> His parents were [[Thomas Philip Le Fanu]] and Emma Lucretia Dobbin.<ref>{{cite DNB|wstitle=Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan|first=Cæsar Litton|last=Falkiner|volume=32}}</ref> 
Both his grandmother [[Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu]] and his great-uncle [[Richard Brinsley Sheridan]] were playwrights (his niece [[Rhoda Broughton]] would become a successful novelist), and his mother was also a writer, producing a biography of [[Charles Orpen]]. Within a year of his birth, his family moved to the [[Royal Hibernian Military School]] in the [[Phoenix Park]], where his father, a [[Church of Ireland]] clergyman, was appointed to the chaplaincy of the establishment. The Phoenix Park and the adjacent village and parish church of [[Chapelizod]] would appear in Le Fanu's later stories.<ref name=ODNB>McCormack, ''Oxford Dictionary''</ref>

[[File:Sheridan Le Fanu birthplace.jpg|thumb|upright=1.22|The inspiration for ''[[The House by the Churchyard]]'': the childhood home of Sheridan Le Fanu in [[Chapelizod]] in [[Dublin]]]]
In 1826 the family moved to [[Abington, County Limerick|Abington]], County Limerick, where Le Fanu's father Thomas took up his second rectorship in Ireland. Although he had a tutor, who, according to his brother William, taught them nothing and was finally dismissed in disgrace, Le Fanu used his father's library to educate himself.<ref name=bill/> By the age of fifteen, Joseph was writing poetry which he shared with his mother and siblings but never with his father.<ref name=bill/> His father was a stern [[Protestant]] churchman and raised his family in an almost [[Calvinism|Calvinist]] tradition.<ref name=ODNB />

In 1832 the disorders of the [[Tithe War]] (1831–36) affected the region. There were about six thousand Catholics in the parish of Abington and only a few dozen members of the Church of Ireland. (In bad weather the Dean cancelled Sunday services because so few parishioners would attend.) However, the government compelled all farmers, including Catholics, to pay tithes for the upkeep of the Protestant church. The following year the family moved back temporarily to Dublin, to Williamstown Avenue in the southern suburb of Blackrock,<ref>Williamstown Castle, now Blackrock College https://www.youwho.ie/williamstown.html</ref> where Thomas was to work on a Government commission.<ref name=ODNB />