The infamous Mrs Mack, who appears in the ‘Nighttown’ episode of Ulysses, kept a brothel at 85 Lower Tyrone Street in the heart of the red-light (Monto) district of Dublin. She was so well known that the area was often referred to as ‘Macktown’. The 1901 census records that Mack had five ‘lodgers’, ranging in … Read more
As the nineteenth century progressed, prostitution in Dublin became more geographically confined. After the 1870s women began to move into cheaper accommodations available in the Lower Mecklenburgh Street area. The evidence of the Revd Robert Conlan to a commission on housing in 1885 revealed that brothels were extending into the district. He observed that some … Read more
Thousands of women working as prostitutes roamed the streets of the towns and cities of Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there was a common belief that prostitution was an inevitable feature of life, especially where military garrisons existed, as long as prostitutes remained out of the public eye they were tolerated. … Read more
Sir,—The presence of ethnic minorities in eighteenth-century Ireland was seldom commented on, but they existed even in ‘less predictable locations … such as … Carrickmacross’, as Philip McEvansoneya pointed out (HI 20.2, March/April 2012, pp 26–8). The Carrickmacross individual steps out of the shadows a little, for she is mentioned in Denis Carolan Rushe’s History … Read more
Dublin in the 1740s was a Protestant city, and one that was alive to the hair-splitting controversies that stirred up the non-conformist world. Arminians, Baptists, Bradilonians, Muggletonians, Quakers, Socinians and Unitarians all found a ready audience. Into this cacophony came John Cennick, a young evangelical preacher of magnetic power, who brought with him the practices of … Read more