Quality of life, hegemony, and social change in rural Ireland: W. Bence Jones, 'A landlord who tried to do his duty'

Numerical indexes of quality of life provide a date-specific representation of society, and a time series extends our grasp of events. However, the so cial processes undergirding date-specific indexes and the related intervals in time fail to convey the realities of the human experience. Indices abst ract meaning from events and the people who participate in them. Quality of life can rise and fall, and may move in both directions in a lif etime. Within those processes some people are agents of change, a status de rived from social position and wealth. The retrospective appraisal of his e xperiences as a resident landlord is used as a schema for an appraisal of W illiam Bence Jones' role in the evolving quality of life in Victorian Irela nd.