New Hibernia Review

In 1922, during the Irish Civil War, the west wing of the Four Courts building was damaged by fire. The Public Records Office was destroyed and invaluable documents were lost to posterity, among them a set of tables in two folios devised by the Rev. Mr. James Whitelaw, incumbent of the large Dublin parish of St. Catherine's. In five hundred tables, Whitelaw recorded the results of a survey of Dublin streets, houses, and residents that he conducted during five months beginning "early in the month of May, 1798." ¹

The original data consisted of "two folio volumes" whose bulk, he con ceded "renders its publication inexpedient" (EPD 11). Upon completion, the two volumes were expropriated by the lord lieutenant—for the census was, at bottom, a national security precaution, occasioned by revolutionary fervor on the continent—and languished in the archives at the Four Courts building as the property of the state until their destruction by fire more than a century later.

What has survived is Whitelaw's 1805 Essay, in three parts. Its limited set of tables provide a glimpse of the lost folios, and of the inhabitants of Dublin as the eighteenth century came to an end. The few samples of abridged data in the Essay were intended "to show that its claim to perspicuity is not unfounded" (EPD 13). In addition to the core information concerning Dublin's streets and inhabitants, Whitelaw added a commentary about Protestant schools in the nineteen parishes.

James Whitelaw was born in County Leitrim in 1749. In his adolescent years he moved to Dublin and matriculated at Trinity College. Ordained in the Church of Ireland, he became the incumbent of the large, generally impoverished [End Page 136] parish of St. Catherine; it lay south of the Liffey, and to the west. ² Whitelaw's spiritual and secular motives were well suited to the care of the teeming poor of his parish. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the poor of Dublin—Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and occasionally Quaker—lived desperate lives. At the individual level, they eked out a subsistence amid great poverty and appalling hygiene; sickness abounded, and their children died at a high rate.

Exactly how and why Whitelaw planned his survey is not clear, though we know he relied on "Roque's plan of Dublin, on a scale of twenty perches Irish to an inch" (EPD 31) drawn up in 1756, and which he reports, "I generally found minutely exact" (EPD 52). He had recruited a number of assistants, many whom he later evaluated as unsatisfactory. As Whitelaw and his assistants went from house to house gathering data over the course of a hot summer, they encountered little opposition. From his data, Whitelaw sketched what he considered practicable innovations in parochial education; he also described the crowded dwellings he had encountered. "As I was usually out at very early hours on the survey," he wrote, "I have frequently surprised from ten to sixteen persons, of all ages and sexes, in a room not fifteen feet square, stretched out on a wad of filthy straw" (EPD 50). Whitelaw counted 172,091 residents in Dublin's streets; to that number he added 597 Trinity College students, soldiers, and others for a grand total of 182,370 persons.

Dubliners of the day experienced the ripples of the Napoleonic wars, and they lived with the local expression of an expanding nationalism. This movement was viewed with alarm at Dublin Castle. The authorities closely monitored the United Irishmen and, in Dublin, the "Defenders" whose ranks swelled to several thousand. In 1798, the year of Whitelaw's survey, there were uprisings followed by French incursions, which were famously unsuccessful. The aftermath was governmental repression, and anxiety among the people; the unfounded rumor that his work was being undertaken in anticipation of a program of public relief certainly eased Whitelaw's data collection. ³

In the 1805 document, Whitelaw noted his previous fears that his work "had been nearly consigned to oblivion" until "His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant condescended to peruse the manuscript" (EPD, "Advertisement" after...