This chapter recounts the manner in which Goldsmith’s pamphlet The Mystery Revealed (1762), uncovering the hoax of the famous Cock Lane Ghost in London, is a sign – as are the many significant references to ghosts in his works – of his rejection of supernatural occurrences and his defence of rational Enlightenment values.

This chapter surveys the relationship between eighteenth-century Irish studies and Queer studies. It gives an important account of key approaches in Queer studies to eighteenth-century Irish literature and culture, as well as providing an overview of the current methodological debates in queer historiography, more broadly. As well as presenting readers with an ingress into queer Irish eighteenth-century studies, this chapter also intervenes in scholarly debates on how to account for queerness in the past. Focusing on three case studies, the chapter examines manifestations of queerness in the Anglophone long eighteenth century across the prose fiction and poetry of the satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the poet Charles Churchill (1731–1764), and the prolific writer and essayist Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). From reading the erotic parameters of Swift’s Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to Churchill’s anti-Irish figure of the fribble which surfaced during the mid-century’s fraught Seven Years’ War debates, and then later, re-examining Edgeworth’s queer depiction of Harriet Freke in Belinda (1801), this chapter brings into sharp relief the fluid, and often contradictory, ways in which eighteenth-century ideas about Ireland and Irishness served to queer emerging norms of British colonial identity and culture.