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The outcast Irish in the British Victorian city: problems and perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Roger Swift
Roger Swift*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Chester College of Higher Education
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Extract

The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a substantial increase in the pace and scale of Irish emigration to Britain, a process which culminated in the massive Irish pauper influx of 1845-51 in the wake of the Irish famine. During this period the Irish-born population of England, Scotland and Wales rose from 415,000 in 1841 to 727,000 in 1851, reaching 805,000 in 1861, when it comprised 3.5 per cent of the population. Thereafter, the number of Irish-born declined to 653,000 in 1891, reviving only in the twentieth century. These figures do not, however, include the children of Irish immigrants born in Britain; thus the actual size of ethnic Irish communities was undoubtedly much higher than contemporary census returns suggest. Indeed, a survey of the Irish in Britain conducted in 1872 by the Nation, a Dublin weekly newspaper, argued that the number of Irish-born indicated in official statistics should be doubled in order to arrive at a more realistic enumeration of the ethnic Irish community in Britain.

Type
Articles
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 99 , May 1987 , pp. 264 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1987

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2 I am indebted to Dr Alan O’Day for allowing me to use his unpublished paper, based on the Nation survey, ‘A survey of the Irish in England, 1872’, which was prepared for the European Science Foundation project ‘Government and non-dominant ethnic minorities in Europe, 1850-1940’ (Apr. 1986).

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