Good social history sees people’s lives ‘from the inside out’, in Henry Glassie’s words,¹ evaluating their working lives and social and personal relationships from their standpoint. People do not go about in a permanent state of consciousness of the wider historical trends in which they are playing a part. As well-informed a man as Dr Charles Cameron, leading public health exponent, could scoff, in 1874, at the idea that the Irish population count was falling: ‘It is absurd to believe that the births of Dublin, or any part of Ireland, but slightly exceed the deaths . . . The prolificness...

As far as major trends and changes in Irish agriculture after 1850 are concerned, the bog (so to speak) has been so skilfully, ably and comprehensively stripped that it would be an insult to the hardworking historians who performed this back-breaking task to clamp their sods of evidence in different patterns to make them look somehow new. What follows is a brief summary of their findings, but the bulk of the chapter is a discussion of change and continuity in everyday farm-work in Ireland between 1850 and 1922 for men, women and farm labourers.

The most obvious change in Irish...

There was some development of non-agricultural employment in Ireland between 1851 and 1922, but this does not mean that there was work for everyone. Emigration masked the true extent of unemployment, millions of people moving from the country and sending home money to those who could not survive on the wages paid for the work they described themselves as doing to the census. Any discussion of ‘gains’ must bear this firmly in mind.

There was, however, an increase in thenumbersof people employed in professional and white-collar work, in local government and civil service work, in commercial and distributive...

The French wordéducationrefers to all aspects of a person’s upbringing, including the formal acquisition of knowledge. The world of schooling in the nineteenth century cannot be understood without appreciating that going to school made up only part of children’ s ‘education’, and whether this was a small or a large part (or no part at all) depended largely on family priorities. Almost all children (except those in rich families) were trained to help around the house, business, workshop or farm as soon as they could walk and stand still, bringing buckets of water from the well, holding out...

The alarming figures have been so often repeated that we are in danger of taking them for granted: in 1890 there were 3 million Irish people living outside of Ireland and 40 per cent of all Irish-by-birth people in the world were living outside it. Emigration of Irish people had been going on in one form or another since the seventeenth century, but it began to accelerate in the nineteenth. About a million people emigrated from Ireland between 1815 and 1845, 2.5 million between 1846 and 1855, and another 4 million between 1856 and 1914. Because of the difficulty of...

We are certain of three things about marriage and family in Ireland in the years 1850–1922. The first is that Irish people in general married at a lower rate than the European norm; the second is that they married comparatively late: the average age of brides in 1911 was 29, that of bridegrooms 33. The third is that, once married, Irish people had what were, by European standards, large families. Over the past fifty years or so, historians have developed, on the basis of these three facts, a negative view of post-Famine Irish marriage. Marriage became, we are told,...

On 27 February 1873, William Corcoran, a baker in Tuam, Co. Galway, summoned the doctor to look at his 22–year-old assistant William Burke. The doctor took one look, diagnosed smallpox and ordered young William to the local workhouse hospital. Instead, however, Corcoran brought him to the railway station and settled him on the train home to Athenry. By the time William Burke died, some days later, a full-scale public health alert was in place. Kineen’s hotel in Athenry was closed by public health order; Loughrea workhouse infirmary van was burned maliciously to make sure it could not be used...

Nineteenth-century institutions lasted a long time in Ireland. Reformatories and industrial schools still operated in the 1970s. Psychiatric hospitals began to experiment with ‘care in the community’ in the 1960s and 1970s, but many of the features of the old lunatic asylum remained until much later. Magdalen asylums lasted until the 1980s. The hated workhouses were more or less abolished after independence, though the more benign county homes which replaced them continued to house some homeless people until long after that.¹ And in Ireland, as elsewhere, the founding principles of the nineteenth-century prison still inform judicial punishment in the early...

Vagrants and prostitutes were among those who would have been described as ‘poor’ by everyone, including labourers and casual workers. As targets of repression and recipients of relief, they were in regular contact with government and voluntary agencies of the time. Vagrancy or wandering homelessness in Ireland and in Britain was seen as such an ongoing social problem that it prompted a special government commission in 1906; social panic about prostitution happened a little earlier, in the 1860s and 1870s, flaring and fading at intervals for the remainder of the period.

For being drunk and wandering about in suspicious circumstances...

A combination of legislation, town planning and cultural change led to the gradual disappearance of houses like those noted by Henry Coulter in Scariff, Co. Clare, in 1861 – ‘wretched-looking hovels with fermented manure heaps outside’ – and complained about by health authorities in several parts of the country in 1873 as a ‘fertile source of zymotic disease’.² But the thatched house (with walls sometimes of mud but, from the 1850s, more often of stone) could be roomy, comfortable and snug, its cleanliness or otherwise depending on the household’s level of income and means of disposing of waste. Thatch was reputedly warm...

In 1910–14 an American film company, in Ireland to make a film about the Colleen Bawn,² went to Dingle to make a documentary on emigration. There they staged a mock farewell scene at Dingle railway station, observed by an interested crowd.³

To people who grew up and came of age between the Famine and Independence/Partition, the past was always present. Later marriage, where it happened, meant generational stretching – ‘my father’s time’ and ‘my time’ could encompass a century. And seventy-two years is a very short time: someone born in the 1850s could be entering the grandparent generation when the...