It is undoubtedly a major event in Irish film studies when one of its most prominent scholars, Kevin Rockett – here writing in collaboration with his wife Emer Rockett – publishes a new book. Readers familiar with The Irish filmography: fiction films 1896–1996 (1996) and Irish film censorship: a cultural journey from silent cinema to internet pornography (2008) are prepared that a new book by Kevin Rockett may be a weighty tome, and so they were likely only mildly surprised when the most recent publication saw the simultaneous arrival of two books, both of them weighty. While writing what would become Film exhibition and distribution in Ireland, 1909–2010 (2011), the authors encountered a substantial gap in the literature occasioned by the almost complete silence of cultural historians on the popular visual culture imported into Ireland during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The authors argue that to neglect such popular forms in favour of the period’s folk culture and/or high art is to miss the ‘more meaningful and complex fluidity that surround all cultural forms’ (p. 11). More than this, it ‘necessarily negatively impacts on how all cultural forms, and indeed all aspects of society, are understood historically’ (p. 11) but especially on an understanding of cinema. Aiming to contribute to a more complete understanding of cinema in Ireland, this is a very welcome study of early popular visual culture that provides innumerable insights into its subject based on both substantial original research and a synthesis of existing work.