The family stayed in residence at the school for eleven years.
In 1823 the Reverend Le Fanu became rector of Abingdon in County Limerick, a post he held in absentia until 1826, when he received the deanery of Emly and brought his family to Abingdon to take up residence in the glebe house. The family now found itself in rural Ireland, in a tiny village in the heart of Irish poverty and political ferment. The Reverend Le Fanu had alienated the resident Catholic priest by his three-year absenteeism, and the priest turned the countryside against him. As a result the move, which was promising at first, became financially disastrous. Tithe income dropped to half what it should have been in the first year, and, when in 1831 the Tithe Wars began, the situation became even worse. Catholics refused to pay the required tithes to the established Protestant Church of Ireland, and the family went deeply into debt.
The political situation was, at times, dangerous. As a young man, Le Fanu's younger brother, William, was nearly killed at least once, and Joseph absorbed what his biographer W. J. McCormack calls the "atmosphere of automatic, casual, and yet strangely intimate violence [that] pervaded rural Ireland" along with the acceptance of the supernatural, which was also widespread among Irish peasantry.
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