The Irish in the Victorian City

Roger Swift, Sheridan Gilley, Roger Swift, Sheridan Gilley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781138645295
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317240358
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

First published in 1985, this book explores the social history of the Irish in Britain across a variety of cities, including Bristol, York, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Stockport. With contributions from foremost scholars in the field, it provides a thorough critical study of Irish immigration, in its social, political, cultural and religious dimensions.

This book will be of interested to students of Victorian history, Irish history and the history of minorities.

THE IRISH IN BRISTOL IN 1851: A CENSUS ENUMERATION

David Large

The Irish-born inhabitants of nineteenth-century Bristol have received no attention from historians, and the history of its nineteenth-century Catholicism has yet to be written. Nor did the Irish attract more than passing mention from contemporary observers. Andrew Carrick and John Addington Symonds (father of the well-known Victorian man of letters of the same name), two leading Bristol doctors, who compiled a medical topography of the city in 1833, referred to ‘hordes of Irish adventurers’ living among Bristol’s poor and displaying a supremacy in the art of packing themselves into extremely exiguous accommodation. ‘On one occasion’, they wrote, ‘it happened to us to discover that thirty individuals, on one night, slept in a room the measurements of which did not exceed 20ft. by 16. The people thus congregated were Irish; they chanced to be on their way from London to their native country. At that period cholera was hovering over us. and on the night to which we refer, it swooped down on nine out of the thirty, and seven became corpses in the course of a few hours.’¹ The well-known Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain of 1836 did not deign to mention the Bristol Irish, nor did Sir Henry de la Beche in his report on Bristol to the Health of Towns Commission in 1845.² George Clark, in his much more detailed inquiry of 1850 into the sanitary conditions of the city for the General Board of Health, made just a few casual references to the Irish living in very overcrowded cottages in Cannon’s Court off Lewin’s Mead in the parish of St. James and to the ‘low Irish’ as being particularly numerous in certain insalubrious houses in Marsh Street in the parish of St. Stephen.³ But the Irish received not a mention in the 1,500 manuscript pages which record the proceedings of Bristol’s Local Board of Health (1851–1872)⁴, or in the lengthy Report on the condition of the Bristol poor of 1884 initiated by the Bristol press.⁵

Nonetheless, as Table i shows, the Irish-born were a sizeable minority throughout the nineteenth century:

Table i

Irish-born in Bristol⁶

Census year	Irish born	Total Population	% of Irish born
1841	4,039	122,296	3.3
1851	4,645	137,328	3.4
1861	4,363	154,093	2.8
1871	3,876	182,552	2.1
1881	3,204	206,874	1.5
1891	2,511	221,578	1.1

In the early Victorian age, the Bristol Irish were the largest Irish group throughout the south-west, south Wales and much of the midlands. When the first enumeration of the Irish-born was made in 1841 there were almost as many (4.039) as in Birmingham (4,683) or in the whole of Devon (4,084) and many more than in other ports in south-western and southern England such as Portsmouth (937), Southampton (420), Plymouth (1,000) and Devonport (1,302). Likewise in 1851, Bristol’s 4.645 Irish-born outnumbered those in Newport (2,069), Merthyr Tydvil (3.051) and Swansea (1.333).⁷

The raw figures of Table i indicate that before the great hunger of the late forties in Ireland there was a sizeable Irish-born population in Bristol. Communication between Ireland and Bristol substantially improved in the 1820s: regular steam packet services were instituted between Bristol |nd Cork. Dublin and Waterford in 1821. 1822 and 1826 respectively.⁸ Fares were low, and there was no great travelling obstacle to Irish migration. However the incentive to migrate, so forcibly posed by the Great Famine, which was particulary severe in Co. Cork from which so many of the Bristol Irish hailed, did not swell their numbers significantly. This was not surprising: Bristol’s economy scarcely flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nor did the city exert any great magnetic attraction as a source of employment in the latter half of the century, so that it is not surprising that its Irish-born population gradually declined both absolutely and as a proportion of the growing total population of the city.⁹

Since the Bristol Irish were relatively inconspicuous, it is far from easy to discover them. This essay is a sighting shot, and further investigation is needed if a full picture is to emerge. As the peak in numbers of the Irish-born in the city was recorded in the 1851 census, it seemed best to begin defining their characteristics from the returns of the census enumerators of that year. An attempt has therefore been made to collect the Information in the surviving manuscript enumerator’s books for all individuals whose birthplace was returned as Ireland. In all, information for 4,299 individuals was assembled. This falls a little short of the published figure of 4,645 in the printed volumes of the 1851 census, and one can only speculate why this is so. One possible explanation is that the notes in these volumes on the Bristol registration district refer to 770 persons on board vessels in the Floating Harbour and the river Avon being counted as living in the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Dedication
• Introduction
• The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration
• The Irish in Bristol in 1851: A Census Enumeration
• The Irish in York
• English Working-Class Radicalism and the Irish, 1815-50
• Irish Influence on Parliamentary Elections in London, 1885-1914: A Simple Test
• A Tale of Two Cities: Communal Strife in Glasgow and Liverpool before 1914
• A Comparative View of the Irish in Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century
• The Irish Press in Victorian Britain
• ‘Another Stafford Street Row’: Law, Order and the Irish Presence in mid-Victorian Wolverhampton
• The Stockport Riots of 1852: A Study of Anti-Catholic and Anti-Irish Sentiment
• Irish and Catholic: Myth or Reality? Another Sort of Irish and the Renewal of the Clerical Profession among Catholics in England, 1791-1918
• Vulgar Piety and the Brompton Oratory, 1850-1860
• The Roman Catholic Church and the Irish Poor
• Select Bibliography
• Select Index