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

Abstract

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.

Birmingham's Irish Community and the Murphy Riots of 1867

“…By 1901 this percentage had declined to 7 per cent, but this reduction reflected the decrease in the number of Irish-born in Britain rather than a reduction in their over-representation in prison. 47 The Irish were generally less homicidal than the English and Welsh 48 and Swift describes how Irish people in England were prosecuted and jailed for a limited range of petty crime, including drunkenness, disorderly behaviour, assault, petty theft and vagrancy. These offences were mostly tried before local magistrates.…”