DUBLIN

At the end of the eighteenth century, Dublin was the second largest city in the British Isles and the tenth largest in Europe, with a population of 182,000. An era of rapid expansion was coming to an end; indeed, the population of Dublin city and county combined fell between 1821 and 1831. The city's population reached 258,000 in 1851, falling to 245,000 by 1891. Suburban growth more than compensated for the decline in the city, although after a brisk expansion in midcentury, it tailed off during the 1880s. City and suburbs entered another phase of expansion during the 1890s, which continued up to the eve of World War I. In 1911 Dublin and its suburbs had a population of 400,000, but Belfast, with a population of only 20,000 in 1800, was Ireland's largest city.

population

A commercial and administrative city, offering limited industrial employment, Dublin failed to attract significant immigrants from rural Ireland; in 1841 just over one-quarter of the population was born outside Dublin city and county; by 1911 the comparable figure (in an enlarged city) was under 30 percent. Non-Dubliners were best represented among the professional and middle classes and domestic servants; general laborers were overwhelmingly Dublin born. Many skilled and unskilled Dublin workers migrated to Britain, some settling permanently. Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe began arriving in Dublin in the 1880s; the only other significant non-Irish group in the city were the garrisons of British soldiers.

Epidemics of fever, smallpox, and cholera were a regular feature of Dublin life until the 1870s, but despite their disappearance, Dublin's death rate declined at a much slower pace than other cities in the United Kingdom; until the 1880s, deaths regularly exceeded births. Infant mortality, which was below the average for U.K. cities until 1890, was 20 percent above that average by 1914. The death rate among adults was significantly higher than in British cities, with tuberculosis and respiratory disease the major killers. Tuberculosis peaked in Dublin several decades later than in Belfast or in British cities; poverty, overcrowding, and poor hygiene were significant factors. By 1911 completed family size in Dublin was slightly below the Irish average, and there is evidence that some Protestant families were controlling fertility.

industry

Many of the industries found in late-eighteenth-century Dublin had catered to the landed gentry; during the nineteenth century, these trades tended to stagnate or disappear because landed incomes were less buoyant, and the Act of Union of 1800 (which abolished the Irish parliament) lessened the attractions of the Dublin Season. Guinness's Brewery, which claimed to be the largest brewery in the world by the 1880s, employed fewer than two thousand workers; the distillation of Irish whiskey employed less than five hundred. General laborers, many in casual employment, accounted for between 20 and 25 percent of the workforce. Most women were engaged in laundry work, dressmaking, and domestic service; there were few openings for young boys or girls. The coming of the railways resulted in a major expansion in Dublin port. By 1875 Dublin was Ireland's largest port and the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, but the growth in port activity tailed off sharply during the 1880s, as did investment in the port. By 1907 Dublin ranked twelfth among U.K. ports; Belfast was ninth.

Because of a surplus of general laborers, the gap between skilled and unskilled wages was higher than in British cities, and casual employment was common. In 1908 James Larkin (1876–1947), a fiery and charismatic labor leader who had previously worked as a union organizer in Liverpool and Belfast, began to enroll Dublin laborers and dock workers in his Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. Larkin's militant tactics initially achieved some gains for the workers, but in 1913 Dublin employers decided to face Larkin down by dismissing all workers who failed to sign an undertaking not to join the union; the 1913 Lock-Out lasted for several months and ended in defeat for the workers.

social geography

By the close of the eighteenth century, the Wide Streets Commissioners had laid out the modern Dublin streetscape. The opening of the magnificent Custom House (1791) and Carlisle Bridge (1791–1794) by the architect James Gandon (1742–1823) shifted the axis of the city to the east, away from its Viking and medieval roots. Port development migrated to the north banks of the river Liffey, and this together with the growing trade in live cattle (who walked to the port) spelled doom for the formerly fashionable north city streets and squares. They were converted into tenement housing for dock laborers, casual workers, and prostitutes—their habitués have been well captured in the plays of Sean O'Casey (1880–1964), and the "Night-town" scene in Ulysses by James Joyce (1882–1941). Fashionable Dublin retreated to the southeast of the city and the adjoining suburban townships of Pembroke and Rathmines. Suburbia offered an escape from disease and poverty, from higher local taxes, and from a city that was increasingly being taken over by Catholics and nationalists.

city politics

In 1840 Dublin Corporation was transformed from a closed corporation, dominated by a small and largely self-perpetuating body of freemen, to one elected by property owners. Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847), member of parliament (MP), became the first Catholic lord mayor since the Protestant Reformation and immediately used the office to launch a campaign to restore the Irish parliament. O'Connell went to some effort to retain a Protestant presence in Dublin Corporation—inaugurating an informal arrangement where the office of lord mayor was held alternatively by a Catholic/liberal and a Protestant/conservative, but this pact broke down during the 1860s as tensions rose over Italian unification, disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the refusal of a government charter to Dublin's Catholic university. The city's Protestant population fell by ten thousand (19 percent) between 1861 and 1871. During the 1880s, the triumphant Home Rule party further eroded Protestant/unionist representation in city politics through a strong campaign for voter registration and militant tactics, such as refusing an address of welcome to the visiting Prince of Wales. The 1898 Local Government Act (Ireland's equivalent to Britain's 1888 Act) increased the electorate from eight thousand to thirty-eight thousand, resulting in a modest labor representation. However, Dublin Corporation continued to be dominated by supporters of the Irish Nationalist Party; labor and the newly emerging Sinn Féin Party failed to establish a significant presence.

The post-1840 Dublin Corporation was frequently accused of corruption. However, some of the criticism reflects Protestant resentment at losing power. Between the 1840s and the 1860s, the membership of Dublin Corporation included a significant number of the city's business elite—brewers, distillers, railway directors, and prominent merchants—but by the 1880s it was increasingly dominated by the city's publicans, many of them also tenement landlords. During the 1860s, Dublin Corporation successfully carried out a major water scheme, but a main drainage scheme was not completed until 1906, and for many years the river Liffey acted as the city's main sewer. The delay was mainly due to financial difficulties—the city's income was substantially reduced in 1854 and did not return to the 1850 level until the mid-1880s. Dublin Corporation attempted to revolve this problem by extending city boundaries to include the adjoining suburban townships, but the latter proved adept at resisting their efforts. In 1900 the city absorbed the poorer suburbs to the north and west, but the prosperous southside townships of Rathmines and Pembroke remained independent until 1930, largely thanks to the support of the Irish Unionist MP Baron Edward Henry Carson (1854–1935), whose father had been a property developer in both townships.

By 1914 Dublin Corporation had provided housing for 7,500 persons, 2.5 percent of the population, a proportion that they claimed was greater than in any other city in the United Kingdom; local authority and philanthropic housing combined accounted for almost 20 percent of the city's housing stock, yet in that year twenty thousand people were living in one-room tenements, and an official inquiry estimated that fourteen thousand new houses were urgently needed. The relocation of working class families in the suburbs did not begin until the 1920s.

culture

Dublin's National Library, National Gallery, and National Museum are nineteenth-century foundations. In 1815 the Royal Dublin Society (RDS, founded in 1731) purchased Leinster House, the former townhouse of the Duke of Leinster, which became the society's library and museum. In 1853 the RDS organized the Dublin Industrial Exhibition with the financial assistance of railway magnate William Dargan (1799–1867). In 1857 the society erected a Natural History Museum on its grounds with government assistance; thirty thousand books from the RDS's library formed the nucleus of the National Library that opened in 1890.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Ireland's leading learned society, the Royal Irish Academy (founded 1785) accumulated an impressive collection of Irish antiquities and manuscripts, and in 1852 they moved to new premises in Dawson Street that included a dedicated museum and library. When the Science and Art Department at South Kensington opened a museum in Dublin in 1890, the Royal Irish Academy's collection became the nucleus of the antiquities collection. The museum was renamed the National Museum in 1908.

Theater and music formed part of Dublin's cultural fabric, but they were not represented in any buildings of significance; the Abbey Theatre, founded in 1904 in Dublin's down-at-the-heels north city, achieved its reputation for pioneering contemporary Irish drama despite precarious finances and modest premises.

In 1800 Dublin had one university, Dublin University, founded in the sixteenth century, and its single college, Trinity College. During the nineteenth century, Dublin University followed a pattern similar to many other universities, opening professional schools in law and medicine and expanding its curriculum to include natural sciences, history, and economics. Catholics were admitted in 1793, but they were precluded from becoming scholars or fellows for many decades. In 1854 John Henry Newman (1801–1890) opened the Catholic University in the hope that it would become "A Catholic Oxford in Ireland," but although the foundation stone for university buildings was laid in the northern suburb of Drumcondra in 1861, lack of funds meant that it was not constructed. The Catholic University, renamed University College Dublin, survived as a small college with a liberal arts program and a medical school until 1908, when it became a constituent college of the new National University of Ireland.

religious institutions

Catholics constituted a majority of Dublin's population from the early eighteenth century, but the penal laws meant that all prominent religious buildings were the property of the established church. The two Church of Ireland cathedrals, Christ Church and St. Patrick's, date from medieval times and were extensively renovated and partly remodeled in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Catholic pro-cathedral (1816) reflected the pre-Catholic Emancipation era: it was erected on a minor street in the north city. Most of the early Catholic churches were erected in poorer quarters; later constructions were more ostentatious befitting a growing Catholic assertiveness. John Henry Newman remarked that the (unfashionable) north side was "the specially Catholic side of Dublin"; the northern suburb of Drumcondra became the home to Catholic seminaries and the residence of the archbishop. Religious institutions catering to all denominations flourished during this period: schools, universities, hospitals, orphanages, and charities were all denominationally based, as was recruitment by many private employers. One Dubliner recalled that "From childhood I was aware that there were two separate and immiscible kinds of citizens: the Catholics of whom I was one, and the Protestants who were as remote and different from us as if they had been blacks and we whites" (Andrews, p. 9).

By 1914 Dublin was anticipating the return of devolved government with the establishment of a Home Rule parliament, but these plans were over taken by World War I and the 1916 Easter Rising. Between 1916 and 1923, large areas of central Dublin were destroyed by rebellion and civil war. The new state inherited a capital city that was very different from the city of the Irish parliament of the late eighteenth century: more Catholic, more nationalist, somewhat down-at-the-heels—a city that is best captured by Joyce's Dubliners or Ulysses.

See alsoCities and Towns; Great Britain; Ireland; London.

bibliography

Andrews, C. S. Dublin Made Me: An Autobiography. Dublin, 1979.

Craig, Maurice. Dublin 1660–1860. London, 1992.

Daly, Mary E. Dublin: The Deposed Capital, 1860–1914. Cork, 1985.

Hill, Jacqueline. From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840. Oxford, U.K., 1997.

McParland, Edward. "Strategy in the Planning of Dublin 1750–1800." In Cities and Merchants: French and Irish Perspectives on Urban Development, 1500–1900. Edited by Pierre Butel and L. M. Cullen, 97–108. Dublin, 1986.

Vaughan, W. J. Ireland under the Union, I: 1801–1870. Vol. 5 of A New History of Ireland. Oxford, U.K., 1989.

——. Ireland under the Union, II: 1870–1921. Vol. 6 of A New History of Ireland. Oxford, U.K., 1996.

Whelan, Yvonne. Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, 1900–1966. Dublin, 1999.

Mary E. Daly