The Urban Environment and Pre-famine Irish Settlements

Abstract

From 1815 onwards, the Irish presence in Britain was increasingly the subject of comment. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Irish in Britain had a bad press. The epithets heaped on their heads usually included ‘dirty’, ‘filthy’, ‘violent’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘ungrateful’. Just as frequently, the character of the Irish, their moral fibre and lifestyle, was subject to critical analysis in column inches of the London and provincial press. The contrast with the comment, or lack of comment, on the Welsh and Scots living in English towns is startling. The modern reader could be forgiven for concluding that between all the Irish poor and the English poor generally there existed a yawning gap in both living conditions and moral fibre. Such a conclusion would be false and the validity or otherwise of the attacks on the Irish character and lifestyle must be judged, in part, on the basis of the urban environment in which a large proportion of the Irish immigrants were forced to live.’ Any immigrants arriving in a new country, devoid of economic resources, are forced into those sectors of the labour market in which there are no barriers to entry and, by definition, these are the lowest paid jobs. However, low pay was not the only factor bearing down on the poor in Victorian Britain; the casual nature of much employment meant that earnings per week were such that millions of people were always on the margin of destitution over the whole of the period under review, and beyond.²