Everyday Life in 19th Century Ireland

To Victorian visitors, Ireland was a world of extremes—luxurious country houses to one-room mud cabins (in 1841, forty percent of Irish housing was the latter). This thorough and engaging social history of Ireland offers new insights into the ways in which ordinary people lived during this dramatic moment in Ireland's history from 1800-1914. It covers wide range of aspects of everyday lives: from work on the many wealthy country estates to grinding poverty in the towns. It covers the transformative effects of the railway development and Ireland's first tourist boom, workhouse life and the new Poor Law system which incarcerated entire families behind forbidding walls, as well as religious divisions, educational boycotts, customs, and superstitions.