DAVID DICKSON
Yale University Press
€22
ISBN 9780300229462
Reviewed by John Cunningham
‘Many of the best streets are entirely occupied by shops; these have all large windows, in which the articles are exhibited to attract purchasers. They also have over the doors a plank painted black, on which is inscribed, in gold letters, the name and profession of the owner. These shops are at night brilliantly lighted up, and have a handsome effect. In them is to be found whatever is curious or valuable in the world’ (p. 113).
Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was an Indian visitor to several Irish cities in 1799, and from his outsider’s perspective he conveys something of the sense of what a late eighteenth-century Irish city might have looked and felt like. The quotation underlines the expansive and innovative character of high-end retailing at a time when all social classes were still depending on markets for the bulk of their purchases. It is a description that best fits Dublin, which earlier in the same decade had 58 booksellers (Cork had three and Limerick four), 33 jewellers (Cork had two and Limerick one) and 30 perfumers (Cork had eight and Limerick none). The distribution reflected Dublin’s dominant position in urban Ireland—its population in 1821 was approximately equal to the combined total of the next eight cities—but also its position as the former location of a legislature, which met much more frequently than formerly in the era of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’. If Dublin looms large in the volume, nine other cities are considered: Belfast, Derry, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny and Drogheda. Dealing with such a large number of places was undoubtedly a challenging task, but it is one that is addressed successfully by David Dickson in eleven thematic chapters. As well as conveying the singularity of individual places, including their engagements with the wider world, the approach provides a broad and comparative perspective on Irish urban development which, while drawing on prior studies of particular places and specific areas of endeavour, also yields fresh insights.
In many respects, the long eighteenth century (c. 1660–1820) covered here was a golden age of Irish urban development, and Dickson is the leading authority on the topic, as established by such previous publications as Dublin: the making of a capital city (2014) and Old World colony: Cork and south Munster, 1630–1830 (2005). For this latest work, both author and publisher deserve congratulations for producing a handsome volume, well designed and illustrated to an unusually lavish extent by maps, tables, engravings and no fewer than 24 pages of colour plates. For a substantial hardback, moreover, it is attractively priced.
With notable exceptions such as the Royal Irish Academy’s Irish Historic Town Atlas series, urban history has been relatively neglected by historians of Ireland, with Dickson pointing out in his Introduction that such research as has been undertaken on the period covered here has been uneven and generally non-theoretical. Architectural history, print, theatre, music, science, high culture, high politics and urban morphology he acknowledges to have been thoroughly investigated, while social relations, economies and material life have not. The point is borne out in the arrangement of the book, the shortest of the eleven chapters being the one treating ‘Order and Disorder’, which ranges confidently but briefly over the expansion of the military establishment, the policing of Dublin, the moral economy of food protests, labour militancy among artisans and sectarian faction fighting. Readers with an interest in urban ‘order and disorder’ will find more in James Kelly’s Food rioting in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (2017).
The scene-setting first chapter sets out the prior development of the cities in an imaginative fashion, by tracing the histories of their walls. Walls were of diminishing strategic importance through the eighteenth century and were in the process of being removed in most places. The importance of historic fortifications varied from one place to another—Sligo was never walled, while the walls of Derry retain their symbolic significance into the 21st century. With the growth of the extra-mural population in most places, walls were becoming redundant: Galway’s were left to decay from the 1760s, and the same decade saw the piecemeal removal of Limerick’s. Chapter 7, the longest in the book, takes up the story of infrastructural development through the century—a complex story in Dublin, involving many individuals, estates and public agencies, but less complex in southern ports, including Limerick, where the driving force behind the extra-mural ‘new town’ was Edmund Sexton Pery (1712–1806).
Trade and commerce, being the lifeblood of cities, are given due attention. In this regard the key importance of trading partnerships is underlined, partnerships straddling the Atlantic in some instances. The long relationship of Belfast-based Thomas Gregg and Belfast-born but New York-based Waddell Cunningham is a case in point. Their resources and connections would be significant in respect of the rapid growth of the Belfast textile industry in the closing decades of the century, but their interests also extended into landed property and the slave trade. On the evidence presented, a number of efforts by Limerick merchants to profit from the slave trade were less successful.
Of particular interest is the substantial chapter dealing with the religious denominations, including their role in education. The chapter traces the remarkable recovery of the Catholic Church, whose places of worship had been closed or destroyed in the 1690s. Though starved of resources and subject to penal legislation, it continued to operate, though varying in the extent of its influence from one place to the next. The reinvigoration was facilitated by a steady incoming stream of parish clergy and members of religious orders trained in the Irish Colleges on the Continent. If there was a disposition among the Catholic laity to assist these priests financially, outside their ranks there was concern about their impact on ‘unthinking weak’ Protestants, who, according to the mayor of Cork in 1731, were ‘frequently perverted by their persuasions’ and who brought ruin to their families by falling into the ‘clandestine marriages celebrated by them’ (p. 129).
By the second decade of the eighteenth century chapels were opening discreetly in secular-seeming buildings, often outside the historic walls, even if they could not cater for all those wishing to attend services. With the Established Church having control of urban cemeteries there were, however, limitations on the involvement of Catholic priests in funerals, as there were also in other rite-of-passage rituals. Exceptions to the general pattern of expanding Catholicism were the predominantly Protestant cities of Belfast and Derry, where Catholic places of worship did not appear until late in the century. Elsewhere, at moments of alarm about a Jacobite threat, there were occasional acts of repression against Catholics, including arrests of clergy. Everywhere, until late in the century, discretion required that there be no public displays of Catholicism, such as processions, and that priests did not appear publicly in clerical attire.
The chapter shows that the infrastructure of ascendant Anglicanism was considerably extended in Dublin, but only modestly elsewhere. As the established church, its parish vestries had responsibilities for certain public functions, the fulfilment of which was largely confined to urban areas, and patchily so in those. These functions included the care of foundlings, the support of needy parishioners, the badging of beggars and the burial of paupers, and were extended in some places during the century to cover public lighting and policing. Vestry cess paid for all of this, and also for the upkeep of the church infrastructure, and it was an unpopular tax among non-Anglicans.
Of the dissenting bodies, Presbyterianism had a presence in all ten of the towns at the beginning of the century, but it was weakening in most. With fissiparous tendencies and links to Scotland, the key development was the shifting of its centre of gravity from Dublin to Belfast. Emergent Methodism made some inroads, especially among the Dublin artisan class, while Quakers were a distinctive and generally endogamous body, with an influence in business greatly exceeding their demographic weight. Prominent in the textile sector, Huguenots were evidently also involved in the book trade, through which they disseminated writings of the French enlightenment.
There was a considerable variation in literacy levels between towns, Dublin and Galway being the outliers. Only 33% of Dublin girls of school-going age in the 1790s remained illiterate, while the figure was 70% for their peers in Galway. The figures for males were 18% and 45% respectively. Other places fell somewhere in between, except for Belfast, where the ability to read was even more widespread than in Dublin, though not the ability to write. The emphasis on reading there reflected the importance of the capacity to personally engage with Scripture in the Presbyterian tradition. Dublin’s high levels of literacy reflected the provision of free schools by Church of Ireland parishes, in addition to a number of charity schools and Charter schools. These were all legal and Protestant, but throughout the century Catholic teachers, lay and clerical, operated fee-paying ‘garret’ schools. The lifting of penal restrictions on Catholic education towards the end of the century changed the educational landscape, enabling new religious orders to extend their influence. Even before the formal legal changes, groundwork had been done, such as in Cork, where Nano Nagle, founder of the Presentation Order in 1775, was already operating a charity school in 1755, modelled on the petites écoles that she had encountered in Paris.
A late chapter looks at the political fervour of the 1790s. Culminating in the enormously consequential rural revolt of 1798, it was largely fomented by city-based radicals, whose printed propaganda would reach far into the countryside. With American democratic thought already disseminated through the Volunteers, engagement with revolutionary French ideas was heralded by spectacles of 1789 such as Gallic Freedom and Bastille: The Triumph of Liberty, staged in Dublin. It was not, however, all a one-way street, one learns, for the anti-revolutionary sentiment of Democratic Rage, or, Louis the Unfortunate also attracted audiences to theatres in Dublin, Cork and Galway. Spectacle moved outdoors in Belfast in 14 July 1791, when Volunteer companies mustered to celebrate the fall of the Bastille, an anniversary that would also be marked in subsequent years. Comparisons between the religious and social composition of the United Irishmen in Dublin and Belfast are well drawn, as are the contacts of both with the rising movement for Catholic rights. Owing to historic contacts, economic and religious, between the Catholic middle class of other cities and ancien régime France, there was considerable hostility towards revolutionary ideas. From Galway, for example, the predominantly Catholic yeomanry marched towards Castlebar to repel the French force under Humbert, while the Catholic clergy took charge of defending the city against any threat that might be presented by local rebels.
In such a wide-ranging work not all topics can be addressed by a reviewer—one may point to the treatment of the book trade, of theatre and of charities. The first Irish cities is whole-heartedly recommended as an authoritative survey, accessible, generally engaging and crammed with insight. It will be an indispensable resource for researchers in Irish urban history, and it will be greatly appreciated by anyone with an interest in eighteenth-century Ireland.
John Cunningham lectures in the School of History and Philosophy, NUI Galway.