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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2010
This paper investigates the way in which the ‘problem of poverty’ in Ireland was encountered, constructed and debated by members of the Irish intellectual and political elite in the decades between the Great Famine and the outbreak of the land war in the late 1870s. This period witnessed acute social upheavals in Ireland, from the catastrophic nadir of the Famine, through the much-vaunted economic recovery of the 1850s–1860s, to the near-famine panic of the late 1870s (itself prefigured by a lesser agricultural crisis in 1859–63). The paper focuses on how a particular elite group – the ‘Dublin School’ of political economists and their circle, and most prominently William Neilson Hancock and John Kells Ingram – sought to define and investigate the changing ‘problem’, shape public attitudes towards the legitimacy of welfare interventions and lobby state officials in the making of poor law policy in this period. It suggests that the crisis of 1859–63 played a disproportionate role in the reevaluation of Irish poor relief and in promoting a campaign for an ‘anglicisation’ of poor law measures and practice in Ireland.
1 Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (1992), 1–5.
2 Boylan, T. and Foley, T., ‘From Hedge Schools to Hegemony: Intellectuals, Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’, in On Intellectuals and Intellectual Life in Ireland, ed. O'Dowd, L. (Belfast, 1996), 98Google Scholar.
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9 Tenth Report on Poor Laws (Ireland), 48–75.
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15 Boylan and Foley, ‘From Hedge Schools to Hegemony’, 98–9, 108–9.
16 Gray, ‘Making of Mid-Victorian Ireland?’.
17 National Library of Ireland, Larcom Papers (hereafter Larcom Papers), Hancock to Larcom, 17 Aug. 1863, MS 7606/4.
18 Gray, ‘Making of mid-Victorian Ireland?’.
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27 Letter, Dublin Evening Mail, 23 Nov. 1863.
28 Express, 19 Nov. 1863. The Irish Times (19 Nov. 1863) took a more hostile line towards Ingram.
29 Dublin Evening Mail, 19, 21, 23 Nov. 1863.
30 Nation, 21 Nov. 1863; Irishman, 28 Nov. 1863.
31 Dublin Evening Post, 24 Nov. 1863, 11 Feb. 1864; Times, 4 Dec. 1863.
32 Phelan letter in Freeman's Journal, 4 Mar. 1864. For his 1859 initiative, see Virginia Crossman's article in this volume.
33 Larcom Papers, T. H. Burke to Larcom, 7 Mar. 1864, MS 7607/1; University College London Archives, Chadwick Papers, Power to Chadwick, 3 Oct. 1863, 1605/40.
34 Larcom Papers, Power to Larcom, 7 Jan. 1865, MS 7781/6.
35 Hancock, W. Neilson, The Law of Poor Removals and Chargeability in England, Scotland and Ireland; with Suggestions for Assimilation and Amendment (Dublin, 1871)Google Scholar. A similar argument, focusing on the consequences of the harsh removal clauses in Scotland for the health of Irish migrants there, is made in Hancock, W. Neilson, ‘Some Statistics and Researches on the Poor Removal Question, with Special Reference to the Removal of Persons of Irish Birth from Scotland’, JSSISI, 6 (1878), 356–61Google Scholar.
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39 Alan Kidd, State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (1999), 45–6.
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43 Hancock, ‘Some Statistics and Researches on the Poor Removal Question’, 360.
44 Boylan and Foley, ‘From Hedge School to Hegemony’, 105, 110–11.
45 Gray, The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 336–8.
46 Alfred Power, A Paper on Out-Door Relief in Ireland: Prepared at Earl Spencer's Request (1875).
47 Crossman, Virginia, ‘Cribbed, Contained and Confined? The Care of Children under the Irish Poor Law, 1850–1920’, Éire-Ireland, 44 (2009), 37–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 National Library of Ireland, Mayo Papers, W. Neilson Hancock, Reports on the leading indications of the state of Ireland in August 1867, 4 Oct. 1867, MS 11,221.
49 See numerous memos by Hancock in British Library, London, Gladstone Papers, Add. Mss 44,610 and 44,613.
50 Gladstone Papers, Lambert to Gladstone, 5 Jan. 1869, Add. MS 44,235, fo. 33; Lambert memo, 8 Feb. 1869, ibid., Add. MS 44,609, fos 27–40, Lambert memo, 6 May 1869, ibid., Add. MS 44,610, fos 38–44.
51 Hancock memo, 16 July 1869, ibid., fos 190–5.
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