‘A Local Habitation and a Name’: The Dublin Mechanics’ Institute and the Evolution of Dublin’s Public Sphere,1824–1904

Introduction

The first centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016 saw Dublin transformed into a massive stage for the performance of memory. As exhibitions and lectures across the city explored the history of the rising and its participants, funeral re-enactments at Glasnevin Cemetery, daily flag ceremonies at the General Post Office and newly erected plaques marking the garrison sites of the rising, recurrently called on residents and visitors to engage with the city as a larger-than-life example of Pierre Nora’s ‘memory sites’: objects and spaces invested with symbolic meaning as repositories of the national past. ¹

One important site, however, was missing from this memory map. The Abbey Theatre, the cradle of Ireland’s nationalist revival, was burnt down in 1951. Although it was subsequently re-erected, an important part of Dublin’s urban history was lost along with the old building. The site had lived through a series of reincarnations since the early nineteenth century: in the 1830s it is advertised as one of Dublin’s several Theatres Royal; ² after a patent lawsuit in 1845 and a change of management, in 1847 it became the Princess’s Theatre; ³ the following year it was bought by the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute, a voluntary educational establishment intended to provide technical and scientific instruction to what was termed the ‘operative classes’. When the Mechanics’ Institute went into decline in the 1870s and 1880s, the theatre was again converted into a music hall, ⁴ before being famously sold to Miss Annie Horniman in 1904 to become the Abbey.

Out of this succession of lives, the building’s phase as a mechanics’ institute is perhaps the most eventful, as it coincided with, and helped sustain, a period of rapid evolution in the dynamics of the Irish public sphere. The term ‘public sphere’ was famously codified by Jürgen Habermas as a bourgeois space of debate, first emerging around clubs, societies and coffee houses in the eighteenth century, and gradually evolving into modern structures of social organisation and interaction. ⁵ In between, the nineteenth century saw the European public sphere materialise into thousands of voluntary organisations of every conceivable shape, size and purpose. European countries adopted associational life with a degree of enthusiasm that escalated into an ‘association mania’ after the 1860s. ⁶ Hoffmann evokes,

A picture of sociable societies emerging within the anciens régimes of eighteenth-century continental Europe and spreading in density from west to east as the nineteenth century progressed. By 1914 virtually all of urban society in Europe revolved around associations. ⁷

In the Irish case, Sharon Webb, working on the decades 1780–1830 already notes a proliferation of ‘social, improvement, philanthropic, educational, musical as well as political, radical and debating associations’, ⁸ very frequently organised around taverns, coffee houses and reading rooms. Much of this still applies to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but Webb’s research stops at the pivotal moment of change: the point at which O’Connell’s Catholic Association first extended political agency – or the impression thereof – from the educated, politically conscious middle-class minority, potentially to the Irish population as a whole.

Joep Leerssen in a seminal essay points at Catholic Emancipation as the crucial moment signalling the emergence of an Irish Catholic public sphere, both physically through the occupation of public space, and virtually through the dissemination of Catholic print culture. ⁹ But Leerssen regards the modern public sphere predominantly as a virtual construct, dedicated to the production and dissemination of ideas. This elicits the following comparison between a pre-modern O’Connell and his Young Ireland successors:

The former rooted in the old ways of penal Ireland, with painstakingly built-up networks of ‘rent’-paying rustics, and propaganda conducted by means of ‘extended face-to-face’ mass meetings, involving the physical congregation of all concerned; the latter working through the medium of newspaper, popular press and the cheap anthology in a much more mobile world. ¹⁰

This top-down view, however, overlooks the role of the ‘rent-paying rustics’ themselves in O’Connellite politics. The collection of the Catholic Rent, and later the Repeal Rent, from thousands of individual subscribers, by members of their own communities and the local parish priest, was not a pre-modern political expedient, but the key to the politicisation of the Irish masses. Monster meetings, as Gary Owens has shown, far from consisting simply in bringing a crowd together to hear speeches, were in fact elaborate ceremonies of nationalist self-expression where the central speech was far less important than the attendant ritual. ¹¹ By the same token, Young Ireland’s programme of nationalist education was by no means limited to the publication of printed matter; as a faction within the Repeal Association first, and as the Irish Confederation later, Young Ireland, far more clearly than O’Connell, understood the importance of social interaction in a physical setting.

A key element in Young Ireland’s educational agenda, and the main catalyst in the transformation of the Irish masses from supporters into citizens, was the creation of a network of Repeal reading rooms, the idea, and often the thing, borrowed from Fr Mathew’s Temperance organisation. Reading rooms made books and newspapers available to a growing literate population, but also provided a space for members to bond over the cause, discuss politics, communicate with the leadership, and conduct grass-roots activities on a daily basis. From the Repeal Association to the Gaelic League, throughout the nineteenth century numerous Irish nationalist organisations looked upon the reading room as their most effective instrument to attract members, create national networks and advance their cause. Paul Townend points at the result:

The typical nationalist in post-Famine nineteenth-century Ireland was a reader,…and his reading occurred in reading rooms.…In each [successive organisation], he would have read the same kinds of books and newspapers, engaged in the same kinds of pastimes, listened to similar lectures, and entered into the same kinds of conversation with many of the same people. The history of the reading room imparts an important understanding of how such popular movements,…‘ran into one another’. ¹²

It was not only nationalist organisations that ‘ran into one another’, however; the various causes that dominated Irish public life, from nationalism, to the consumption of Irish manufactures, to trade unionism, to Sunday closing, ¹³ also tended to combine and overlap, along with the physical spaces associated with them. Public houses were particularly versatile, serving as meeting venues for any group willing to pay their rent in drink orders, from trade societies to Fenian circles. What trades and friendly societies gained in convenience and enjoyment, however, they lost in respectability; public-house meetings, it was deplored, resulted in drunkenness, neglect of the society’s business and misuse of its hard-collected funds. ¹⁴ In 1845, the Repeal Association issued an explicit warning that no Repeal room would be sanctioned or funded if operating from a public house. ¹⁵ It was at this moment that reading rooms, nationalist and otherwise, came into their own as the teetotal, rational, respectable counterpart to the public house: at once a social hub and a locus of civic activity. During the middle decades of the century, religious societies of various persuasions, nationalist bodies, trade associations, individual businessmen and commercial companies, all could be found advertising their own reading rooms in the Irish press, ¹⁶ both as places of leisure and meeting venues.

Reading rooms were small dedicated spaces where discourse was constructed horizontally as spontaneous interaction among social peers. But the Irish public sphere also incorporated larger halls such as the Round Room at the Rotunda, or O’Connell’s purpose-built Conciliation Hall, where communication was hierarchical and heavily ritualised: while middle- and upper-class leaders held the platform and directed proceedings according to a pre-established formula – designation of a chairman, introductory speeches, proposing and seconding of resolutions, debate, appointment of a new chairman, vote of thanks to the previous chairman, adjournment – the audience was segregated by gender and ticket price. Both types of settings contributed to the development of Irish civic society in complementary ways: while reading rooms constituted a field for individual political self-expression and social bonding, larger meeting halls were stages for the public performance of citizenship.

The purchase of the Princess’s Theatre by the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute in 1848 marks a milestone, not only in the institution’s own history, but also the evolution of Dublin’s public sphere as a whole. In 1851, the theatre was reinaugurated as the Mechanics’ Institute lecture hall, sharing premises with the Institute’s own classrooms, library and reading room. The building thus became a hybrid space, simultaneously an educational institution, a place of leisure, and the public venue of choice for meetings on topics of interest to the artisan and working classes. At the same time, the principle that mechanics’ institutes ought to be conducted by the workers as well as for the workers, turned the institution’s internal management into a political training ground – sometimes a battlefield – for classes whose role in the public arena was severely limited otherwise.

The hundreds of institutes that mushroomed across the British Isles during the nineteenth century, particularly those in England and Scotland, have received a fair share of scholarly attention since the 1970s. Traditionally debates have revolved around two main issues: the institutes’ effectiveness as educational bodies, and their role as middle-class instruments of social control. Shapin and Barnes laid the groundwork in 1977 by looking into the middle-class discourse behind the foundation of the institutes and its actual translation into a Science curriculum. They concluded that the institutes’ educational agenda was driven by considerations of social control, that the working classes were fully aware of this fact, and that this was the reason for the scheme’s failure. ¹⁷ Michael Collins even more emphatically asserted that middle-class domination ‘was largely responsible for the alienation of those working class members for whose benefit the mechanics’ institutes were originally intended’ and that ‘mechanics’ institutes became little more than societies for middle class philanthropists’. ¹⁸ John Laurent, however, found that workers had actually been able to turn the institutes’ educational agenda to their own ends, particularly to the development of evolutionary socialism. ¹⁹ This view in turn was questioned by Gerry Wright, who saw the Bradford Institute at least as ‘a vehicle for individual social mobility…rather than for the collective emancipation of the working classes’. ²⁰ More recently Martyn Walker has established a distinction between the periods pre- and post-1850: while most pessimistic accounts of mechanics’ institutes focus on the first half of the nineteenth century, Walker contends, it was during the second half that the working classes became cohesive and confident enough to patronise the institutes in substantial enough numbers. Walker finally credits the institutes with facilitating the emergence of an educated working-class elite that would ‘assert itself’ during the twentieth century. ²¹

Many of these debates have found their way into analyses of the Irish context. Enda Leaney evaluates the impact of science lectures at the institutes, and finds them both socially conservative and ineffectual as a means of education. ²² Elizabeth Neswald, in an excellent study of the Galway Mechanics’ Institute agrees that social control was the overriding motivation behind the establishment of this and other institutes in Ireland, although she wonders whether this control was aimed primarily at subduing labour conflict or sectarian tensions. ²³ Still, she moves beyond the usual, somewhat limited range of concerns to look at mechanics’ institutes as a by-product of local interests and allegiances. These and other studies, however, share one common feature: they look at mechanics’ institutes in the abstract as associational bodies, agreements between patrons and members to come together for educational purposes. This article examines the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute more literally as a venue, not in the architectural but the spatial sense. In an interview with Paul Rabinow in 1982, Michel Foucault drew the following connection between architecture and space:

For me, architecture…is only taken as an element of support, to ensure a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations. So it is…especially thought of as a plunge into a field of social relations in which it brings about some specific effects. ²⁴

No study seems to have focused on the physical dimension of mechanics’ institutes, the way in which the existence of four walls with a designated purpose ‘plunged’ members and patrons into particular forms of interaction. These were apt to vary according to geographical location, size, internal configuration, and such apparently mundane factors as heating and lighting facilities. Beyond middle-class agendas and the artisans’ own will to become educated, it was the physical means provided that could make or break an institute.

From a sociological point of view, the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute (henceforth DMI) may be categorised as an early example of what Ella Taylor-Smith and Colin F. Smith term the ‘participation spaces’ of grass-roots democracy, taken as ‘a composite of people, artefacts, and processes, including expectations of behaviour’. ²⁵ Space is here understood, not as a geometrical entity, nor even as a static physical setting for human activity, but as an elaborate social construct. In an illuminating study on the leisure uses of public spaces – including private-as-public spaces like the DMI – Johnson and Glover point out:

Our perceptions of a space enliven, animate, and occupy it, thereby offering complex coded, re-coded, and de-coded versions of social life. Consequently, different experiences of space give rise to radically different spaces.…Public spaces become meaningful through use, not only because of designation. ²⁶

This article will trace the progress of the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute through every change of venue, in order to explore, first, how each successive space affected both the success of the institution and the world of social relations that it contained; and conversely, how members and occasional users appropriated these spaces and invested them with meaning – educational, political, recreational – according to their own needs. Ultimately it intends to explore the connection between the provision and regulation of physical space and the development of civic and political culture.

The First Dublin Mechanics’ Institute, 1824–30

The first Mechanics’ Institute in Dublin was set in motion late in 1824, closely following the trend set by Glasgow and London. According to the prospectus circulated, the promoters aimed at providing the working classes with scientific training in areas related to their respective trades, with a view to helping them improve their own situation. The methods proposed were, in order of priority, the establishment of a scientific library; the delivery of public lectures on relevant disciplines, beginning with Mechanics and Chemistry; the establishment of a School of Arts and Useful Knowledge for the workers’ children; a Museum of Models and Objects of Natural History; and an experimental laboratory and workshop. Members of other classes were not excluded, but the intention of the founders was to limit their presence in the managing committee to one-third at the most. ²⁷ As one anonymous mechanic had written to the newspaper months earlier, ‘Knowledge, to be truly estimated and therefore properly applied, must not be doled out to them as an alms, it must be acquired by themselves as a duty’. ²⁸

On 15 December, subscribers attended a preliminary meeting at the Shakespeare Gallery on Exchequer Street, a two-storey building behind the main row of houses that could be rented by the day for auctions and other public events. ²⁹ Despite the promoters’ declared emphasis on working-class autonomy, not surprisingly the public faces at the meeting were exclusively from the middle classes. The secretary was Rev. Edward Groves, a Protestant clergyman who was closely involved in O’Connellite politics. ³⁰ The chairman was Michael Donovan, probably the renowned chemist, ³¹ while the main speaker, a Mr Kirwan, admitted that he was determined to subscribe even though he was ‘in no way connected with trade, mechanics or manufacture’. ³² After this meeting, another wealthy middle-class patron, George Home, provided the Institute with a provisional office space and a meeting room in his Royal Arcade on College Green. ³³ In the meantime, advertisements were published calling for offers of ‘extensive’ premises at a central location. ³⁴

Shortly afterwards the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute relocated to the ready-made premises of the Dublin Institution, 15 Upper Sackville (present-day O’Connell) Street, which already contained a library with lending facilities, several newsrooms and a lecture hall. ³⁵ But its elitist nature seemed at odds with the DMI’s professed ethos. The Dublin Institution had been founded in 1811 when patrons of the Dublin Library Society found the newsroom too noisy with political debate, and resolved to found a more exclusive and academically-oriented alternative. The initial fund had comprised 300 shares of £50, which made it a joint ownership venture. An annual subscription cost three guineas. ³⁶ By 1820, single-lecture tickets were advertised for 2s 6d, ³⁷ roughly the price of a whole quarterly subscription to the DMI. Although the DMI was intended for mechanics, the physical space provided, and presumably the atmosphere, were decidedly upper middle class.

The DMI’s first anniversary dinner was held in January 1826 at Freemasons’ Tavern, with the usual aristocratic speakers, a superabundance of loyalist toasts to the king (‘three times three’), the nobility and ‘Old Ireland’, and collaborative singing of ‘Rule Britannia’. ³⁸ Despite the festive mood, however, the Institute was struggling. In March, the Lord Mayor was persuaded to preside over the first annual meeting in order to attract some necessary public attention. In the course of a detailed report, Secretary Groves explained the difficulties they had encountered to keep the Institute afloat: they had managed to collect almost £550, but their first course of lectures on Mechanics, although immensely successful, had almost exhausted the budget; a second course on Chemistry was only made possible because both the lecturer and the necessary equipment were obtained free of charge. Meanwhile the library languished under a lack of donations. Mechanics, Groves remonstrated, had done their part by supporting lectures enthusiastically and conducting themselves with perfect propriety; now the directors requested that ‘one hundred individuals of influence and respectability’ should come forward and become life members for £5 each. ³⁹ A few individuals did come forward, but the following December an editorial in the Freeman’s Journal was again lamenting the lack of support received from the higher classes. ⁴⁰ By 1829, the newspaper frankly admitted that they had forgotten entirely that the Institute existed, until a course of lectures was brought to their attention. ⁴¹ The Institute seems to have trudged on in obscurity until its revival in the late 1830s.

Jim Cooke attributed the failure of this first attempt to the combination of a lack of basic education in Ireland until the National Schools System was introduced in 1831, and the general suspicion on the part of employers that mechanics’ institutes would encourage radicalism and demands for higher wages; ⁴² the founding of the Institute did coincide with a period of unrest and the passing of the Combinations Act. Kieran Byrne adds that the heightened political atmosphere, in the middle of O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation, may have made intellectual self-improvement too prosaic an objective. ⁴³

The answer lies probably in a combination of all these factors, with one addition: the DMI was not designed with sociability in mind. Owing to financial constraints, its agenda was centred on only two elements: scientific lectures and the library. Lectures were held irregularly whenever funds and lecturers were available, while the library was intended primarily as a lending library with a strong instructional bent. Secretary Groves told the first annual meeting, ‘that the taste for useful knowledge could only be excited or gratified by allowing the mechanics to take the books to their own apartments, there in the bosom of their families to imbibe and to impart the information’. ⁴⁴ It is unclear whether DMI membership gave mechanics access to the Dublin Institution’s newsrooms, but this was neither on their list of foundational objectives, ⁴⁵ nor too likely to have been availed of, considering the middle-class ambience of the Institution. Ultimately, unless a course of lectures was taking place, there were very few inducements for mechanics to pay their subscriptions and become regular members.

The final explanation was offered by Thomas Cliffe Leslie in 1852: early mechanics’ institutes, he argued, were founded on the erroneous hypothesis that artisans were ready to cooperate with the idealistic plans proposed from above for their intellectual and moral improvement. ⁴⁶ When reality proved otherwise, middle-class reformers could only deplore the public’s obstinate preference for ‘light, amusing and ephemeral publications’ – the newsroom over the library – and urge a stricter adherence to technical education. Leslie, however, took a laissez-faire view of associational life: he understood that the objectives of mechanics’ institutes needed to be adapted to their members’ tastes, rather than the reverse, and that this required providing recreation as well as instruction. ⁴⁷ After all, he argued, ‘it cannot be expected of any man to be a philosopher at all hours; still less can it be expected of a multitude of men’. ⁴⁸ If reformers really wished to lure artisans away from the public house and into the fold of self-improvement schemes, they needed to create an alternative space of sociability where intellectual pursuits were broadened beyond science and technology, and where members could sometimes simply sit down to read the newspapers and converse with friends and acquaintances.

The Second Dublin Mechanics’ Institute, 1837–1919

By the mid-1830s, the DMI had abandoned its borrowed lodgings at the Dublin Institution and faded away entirely from public memory. In a repetition of previous history, at this point Dr Robert Kane of the Royal Dublin Society noticed the institutes operating in England and decided to follow their example in Dublin. With the help of William Torrens McCullagh he canvassed the inhabitants of ‘respectable’ neighbourhoods, without success, only to discover that his projected institute already existed, tucked away in a quiet street, in a dark room where members met with no comforts and only a few books. ⁴⁹ On 9 November 1837, a group of scientists, mechanics and patrons met to relaunch the DMI. ⁵⁰ The founders were determined to avoid any kind of religious or political bias, so they set out to find patronage from a multitude of individuals of all persuasions. These were not forthcoming, however, and Dr Kane finally reflected that it was better to abandon the strategy altogether than to have only a few ‘whose influence might be dangerous’; ⁵¹ the DMI was to be funded primarily by its own members. In order to target as large a body of subscribers as possible, membership was open – no need of introduction by an existing member – and set at 10s, payable by quarterly instalments.

Early in 1838, the new DMI moved from a room at 50 Jervis Street to more spacious and luxurious apartments at the Royal Exchange. For a yearly rent of £90, ⁵² the DMI now had classrooms, a reading room and a gaslit lecture hall that could be sublet two days a week, ‘for any but political or sectarian purposes’. ⁵³ This time the Institute was successful beyond the founders’ expectations. Lectures, now styled ‘popular’, fed into the current fashion and consistently managed to draw large crowds of both sexes, not necessarily of the artisan class alone, who were in it for the entertainment as much as the instruction. ⁵⁴ In 1839, the Institute advertised evening courses in Geometry, Architectural and Mechanical Drawing, and French. ⁵⁵ By 1843, classes had branched out into Latin, vocal music and dancing, with attendance numbers varying between 13 and 210 students, but often exceeding the classrooms’ reported capacity of thirty-five seats. ⁵⁶

These courses, normally held two to three days a week at fixed times, provided opportunities for regular attendance at the Institute, and presumably a more casual form of socialising than public lectures at the hall. But the most telling change was the broadening of the Institute’s customer base to include the members’ wives and female relatives. For a brief period in 1840, the Institute explicitly invited ladies to become members themselves, ‘entitled to the use of the Library, Lectures, &c., with power to introduce a friend to the Lecture Room’. ⁵⁷ Predictably, this new inclusiveness did not extend to the main social space of the reading room, but it encouraged female traffic at the library, and it involved the provision of separate classes for ladies within the premises. ⁵⁸ Women’s interest in becoming members in their own right, however, seems to have been limited; in 1843, figures were reported at a total 1,242 members, including six ladies. ⁵⁹ After this, the Institute was back to considering women as little more than a ticket’s plus-one, and annual reports made no more mentions of female members.

With numbers steadily on the rise nevertheless, as early as 1840 it had become evident that the DMI needed more spacious accommodation. ⁶⁰ On 1 December 1840, a meeting of patrons and members launched a Building Fund in order to provide the DMI with its own dedicated premises. This scheme was significant for two reasons: first, the move from rented to owned premises gave the Institute physical entity and a definite seal of permanency; secondly, the fundraising scheme itself involved the members in the management of the institution to an unprecedented extent. As part of the fundraising effort it was suggested that every person attending classes or making use of the library and reading room should subscribe one penny a week to the fund. ⁶¹ In addition, the directors established monthly meetings to monitor progress, appointed a number of ‘honorary collectors’ and offered ten life memberships in the Institute as a prize to the most successful canvassers. ⁶² By July 1841, the directors reported that, out of the £178 deposited so far, almost £100 corresponded to small sums collected by the mechanics themselves. ⁶³ In June 1841, the secretary attributed the Institute’s success to the fact,

that its constitution was first formed, arranged, and adapted by members of the working classes, to meet their wants; that patronage was not considered essential to its welfare or permanency, but that self-respect and self-reliance should be taught and appreciated; that from its commencement the institution was made to resemble a bee-hive, all its members contributing in various ways to its present prosperity. ⁶⁴

The beehive took their involvement seriously; by the end of the decade, a number of circumstances combined to turn the Institute from a socially conservative scheme of artisan self-improvement and rational recreation, into a political battle ground for the upper echelons of the working classes. At the half-yearly meeting of 10 July 1848, the directors reported that they had agreed to buy the lease of the Princess’s Theatre on Abbey Street for £300, subject to an annual rent of £34 10s. A Mr Shortall – probably the coal merchant listed in the Dublin Almanac for 1847 ⁶⁵ – then intervened to protest that the directors ‘as they generally called themselves’ had made the decision without consulting anyone, insinuated that corruption was involved, and proposed that a committee of rank-and-file members should be appointed to look into the circumstances surrounding the purchase. ⁶⁶ A Mr Lennon seconded the resolution, stressing that they were not against the decision, but against the ‘tyrannical’ manner in which it had been made. The directors insisted that the building was ideally suited to their needs: in a perfect location, close to the main thoroughfare of Sackville Street, and easy to adapt as a lecture hall. After a heated row during which the directors threatened to resign, a committee was appointed to look into the project. ⁶⁷ The following week this committee gave a favourable report, and the building scheme continued as planned. ⁶⁸

By then the purchase was a matter of some urgency for the DMI. Their days at the Royal Exchange became numbered in March 1846 when Dublin Corporation earmarked the building to become the new City Hall. ⁶⁹ The following August a fire erupted on the roof of the Exchange which caused serious damage to the DMI’s lecture room. ⁷⁰ Although the Institute had escaped ‘annihilation’, ⁷¹ classes were disrupted and lectures were temporarily at an end. ⁷² Sometime around November the Royal Exchange trustees served the DMI with a six-month notice to quit, reportedly for safety reasons. ⁷³ After some foot-dragging the Institute was finally forced to relocate, first to no. 6 Abbey Street in September 1847, then to the nearby Anglesea Buildings in December 1848. ⁷⁴ When the Princess’s Theatre offered the prospect of stability, the directors jumped at the chance.

Late in October 1848, James Haughton, a prominent Dublin reformer, then treasurer of the Building Fund, explained that the sum available to purchase the theatre and carry out the necessary renovations amounted to £724 2s 1d. ⁷⁵ The first stage of works included fitting the lecture theatre, and building a library, four classrooms and a reading room. All this could be done for the £400 remaining after purchasing the building. However, it was also intended to add a third storey for the registrar’s apartment, and this required a further £200. ⁷⁶ Haughton made a public appeal for patronage, lauding the advantages that the Institute offered, and urging the necessity of making them permanent by supporting the building project. ⁷⁷ He was disappointed at the number of prospective patrons who chose to ignore his circulars, ⁷⁸ but about sixty others did respond; by late February 1849, Haughton was able to announce that this second fundraising drive was closed. ⁷⁹

Finally in May 1849, the DMI held a public meeting to inaugurate its new premises, which boasted three classrooms in the basement floor, a library and boardroom at street level, a large reading room occupying the whole of the second floor, their projected apartment for the registrar on the third floor and a large enough theatre for the Institute’s reported 2,257 members. ⁸⁰ The following January the directors wrote in exultation:

From the period at which the Institution was originated, in the year 1838, to 1849, we were obliged to submit to the inconvenience of hired apartments in four different localities, where the circumscribed space and insecurity of tenure rendered it impossible to supply those advantages which were so much sought after….

But we are now more happily circumstanced: we have at last ‘a local habitation and a name.’…We have sufficient space to enable us gradually to make those arrangements which are so desirable, in order that the various departments of the Institution may be rendered as effective as possible. ⁸¹

As already pointed out, the new building afforded substance and stability to the DMI itself, but above all, it provided a versatile space where patrons, members and occasional users engaged in various modes of interaction. These ranged from small-scale political manoeuvring at the boardroom to large public meetings at the lecture hall, and from casual socialising at the reading room to structured attendance at evening courses. The fact that all these happened within the same walls, and were specifically targeted to the working and lower middle classes, set the DMI apart from other contemporary organisations and made it one of the main hubs of Dublin’s civic life.

Boardroom Politics

Among the DMI’s various quarters, the boardroom is perhaps the most fully documented, even if this is largely owing to a near-decade of political wrangling between rival factions on the board. Between 1848 when the DMI bought the Abbey Street premises, and 1858 when peace seems to have been restored, the DMI was caught in one controversy after another, endangering its own prospects but giving historians a wealth of newspaper records to make up for the lack of manuscript archives. Conflict ranged from accusations of mismanagement and sectarian bias, to attempts at coup d’état ending in physical assault and appearances before the magistrates. ⁸² But beyond the issues being disputed, it is the ritual surrounding these battles and the social classes involved that highlight the DMI’s role in the development of artisan politics.

The DMI was ruled by an elected board of eighteen directors, a treasurer and three auditors who also had seats on the board, and one paid registrar and librarian. At least half of the board of directors were required to be operatives according to the DMI rules, ⁸³ although this was difficult to achieve in practice. Members of the Institute met at least twice a year: once in January to receive the annual report of the outgoing board, and again in July for the new board’s half-yearly report of progress. For most of the late 1830s and 1840s, these meetings were peaceful affairs, conducted according to a well-established procedure: a prominent member of the board or a patron would take the chair, and offer general remarks about the importance of working-class education or the progress of the Institute; then the secretary would read the report, this would be ‘adopted unanimously’, and after various resolutions of thanks to managers, lecturers and other benefactors, the meeting would be over.

Perhaps not coincidentally, peace ended in July 1848, with Young Ireland threatening revolution and Dublin artisans in a radical mood. That January elections at the DMI had brought a new clique to power, and the displaced faction did not take their new situation lying down. The disputes that greeted the purchase of the Princess’s Theatre were more than a simple disagreement over form; they were the first public expression of internal rivalries culminating in the emergence of a full-fledged ‘opposition party’, set against what they regarded as the tyrannical rule of the ‘board party’. ⁸⁴ In the course of endless battles the opposition party constructed a narrative of themselves as the representatives of the members’ democratic rights against the board’s mismanagement and despotism, ⁸⁵ while the board asserted their authority as officials elected by the majority will of the members, and resisted the opposition’s attempts to bypass them via requisitions for meetings and letters in the public press. ⁸⁶ Tensions came to a head in 1855 when an attempt by the opposition to have the librarian dismissed led to a brief takeover, a contest over legitimacy, and an attempt by the board party to regain possession of the books which the opposition prevented by using hired thugs. ⁸⁷

But there were other dimensions to the conflict than the arguments and tactics used to sustain the claims on each side. Although the lack of manuscript records makes it almost impossible to flesh out the map of social-class dynamics on the board, evidence points at a confrontation between a conservative, deference-oriented board party, and a belligerent, democracy-oriented opposition party led by strong artisans. Perhaps the episode that best illustrates the dichotomy, as well as the dynamics of class and authority at the Institute, is again the recurring disputes over the Abbey Street premises.

Although the building project had been a collective effort by members and patrons, the lease had been drawn up in the names of James Haughton, then one of the auditors, and Richard Allen, Haughton’s fellow reformer and a member of the board. In January 1854, the malcontents began to pressure Haughton to surrender the lease so that it could be transferred to a committee of five elected trustees. ⁸⁸ Haughton refused; again in July the opposition insisted on the inappropriateness, and the danger, of having two private individuals as lessees of what was essentially public property. It was not that they lacked confidence in Haughton personally, they claimed, but there was a far more crucial matter at stake: because the lease was drawn privately, the Institute did not exist in legal terms; it was necessary to create a body of trustees so that the Institute could be formally registered as a public body. ⁸⁹ This contest between the claims of patronage and those of democracy was drowned in a multitude of other disputes at the time, but the building continued to be a bone of contention.

Also at this time, in July 1854 the opposition called a special meeting by requisition to discuss the dangerous state of the building, which had been bought and renovated at a cost of £1,400 only six years before, but already threatened collapse owing to defects in the construction. ⁹⁰ In the course of the debate something unusual happened: an operative bricklayer stood up to speak, and the newspaper report reveals to what extent the Institute really was ‘for the workers, by the workers’:

Mr. McCorry…was received at first with ironical cheers and laughter by one section of the meeting; but very soon the vigorous good sense of his remarks,…secured for him as much of attention as the not numerous, but very noisy, meeting could bestow on any speaker.…He would apologise for the intrusion were it not that he was legitimately a member of that institution, and therefore he felt that where a right existed no apology was necessary (cheers). Owing to the very noisy character of the interruptions,…he would almost think himself at work amidst a number of artisans and labourers, only he saw no hodmen present (hear).

He offered his own explanation – that there was an imbalance in strength between the front and rear walls – and concluded among cheers by saying that ‘the time was fast coming’ when mechanics like himself would be able to take the platform in institutions named after themselves.

As matters stood, the platform evidently belonged to a different class of individuals. Even when speakers identified themselves as operatives, the lack of commentary of the kind reserved for actual bricklayers like John McCorry, suggests that those contending for leadership positions at the Institute were strong artisans rather than labourers. The case of Richard Hennessy is illustrative. Hennessy, a decorative painter by trade, was in the front line of the opposition party from 1853 until his own death in 1855. His first public appearance was in December 1852, when the opposition called a meeting to impeach the board over the presence of ‘immoral’ books in the reading room. ⁹¹ At the next general meeting in January 1853 he spoke up to second a resolution, and by July he was writing his own letter to the press to condemn James Haughton for siding with the board and trying to suppress the dissenters. ⁹² Sometime during the year, not without difficulty he succeeded in joining the board of directors along with other members of the opposition, ⁹³ but the following January he was again struggling to get elected. As a decorative painter, he had registered his name as an operative on the ballot list; the board, however, regarded him as an employer and declared him disqualified. ⁹⁴ Hennessy defended himself, adding his curriculum vitae for good measure:

Rule 3 says – ‘…operative mechanics, tradesmen or artists, are understood to be persons employed by others by the week or day, or to execute work by the piece themselves’. Now, I am principally employed at decoration painting, which I execute myself, from first to last, and for which I am paid by the pieces. Works of this description executed by me at the church of All Hallows was [sic] favourably noticed in the Freeman of November, 1852;…more has gone to the provinces, and some to England. ⁹⁵

The board answered that Hennessy had tendered an offer as a contractor to paint the Mechanics’ Institute only two years before, and reminded him that another ‘respectable painter’ had been removed from the operative list by his own opposition party four years earlier on exactly the same grounds. Hennessy had to spend 1854 out in the cold, but the debate itself, and Hennessy’s own record at the Institute, illustrate both the in-between status of successful artisans – who perhaps employed a small number of assistants – and the opportunities that the DMI afforded those outside the ‘esquire’ category for a political career of sorts.

The Mechanics’ Hall

If the boardroom was the place for the individual exercise of political muscle, the lecture hall was the scenario for collective participation in the construction of public discourse. In this process the venue was as much a part of the message as the speeches themselves; size, configuration and renting fee could affect an organising group’s choice of venue, as well as the atmosphere created at the gathering. But the DMI was a particularly deliberate choice: by calling a meeting, setting up a lecture or conducting business at the DMI hall, speakers were aligning their respective campaigns with the alleged interests of the working classes. This was predictably the case with trade activism, especially by operative associations. Grocers’ assistants, assistant drapers, operative house painters and operative shoemakers, all held separate public meetings at the DMI during the 1850s. ⁹⁶ When the United Trades Association took over in 1863, the DMI continued to be its headquarters until the association was superseded by the Dublin Trades Council in 1880. ⁹⁷ Trade union activity at the DMI began to diminish and finally died down when the Dublin Trades Council inaugurated its own Trades Hall in Capel Street early in 1891. ⁹⁸

Besides trade activism, however, the DMI hall served as a platform for various other causes where the working classes were sometimes the recipients of the message, and crucially sometimes the initiators and agents. Leaving aside regular courses of lectures, public issues discussed at the hall over time ranged from Sharman Crawford’s Tenant Right Bill to Sunday opening of the Glasnevin Botanic Gardens. ⁹⁹ Two causes, however, dominate public activity at the DMI: Temperance and Irish nationalism. The former can be traced to the influence of James Haughton and other patrons, and it translated into a succession of Temperance organisations either being inaugurated, holding public meetings, or operating regularly from the DMI premises. ¹⁰⁰ The latter happened despite frequent disclaimers about the Institute’s strict non-political, non-sectarian character, on the back of a change in policy, from making the theatre available ‘for any but political or sectarian purposes’ in 1839, ¹⁰¹ to a broader ‘all legal and moral purposes’, provided that the board was disassociated from the opinions expressed. ¹⁰² Nationalist agitation at the DMI followed the contemporary course of events from the constitutional movements of the early 1850s, to Fenian activities during the 1860s, the Fenian Amnesty movement that followed the failed 1867 rising, and the emergence of Home Rule during the 1870s. ¹⁰³ Fenian presence at the DMI – possibly under cover, or in combination, with membership in artisan trades – famously made the Institute the organising headquarters for the funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus in 1861, and again for that of Fenian leader John O’Mahony in 1877. ¹⁰⁴ The Fenian Amnesty Association held numerous rallies at the DMI hall and had its own rooms in the building. One report highlights the extent to which pro-Fenian agitation had become an offshoot of trade activism:

A meeting of the Public Demonstration Organising Committee was held in the rooms of the Amnesty Association, Mechanics’ Institute, last evening – Mr. Collins, Regular Carpenters, Gloucester-street, in the chair. Amongst those present were – Messrs. Welstead, Gore, and Mahony, coachmakers; Delany and Heron, sawyers; Dowling, regular carpenters, Leahy, M’Grath, Cuddy, Byrne, Burke, &c.…It was resolved to invite the secretaries of all the Dublin trades to be present at the meeting of the committee on next Tuesday night, at eight o’clock. Mr. Delany having been called to the second chair, the meeting adjourned. ¹⁰⁵

With the emergence of the Irish Parliamentary Party, however, the focus of nationalist politics moved to Westminster, and the hall entered a different phase where popular politics was replaced by entertainment. The mid-1870s found the DMI struggling to cope with a drop in revenue, partly owing to the decline of the scientific lecture and the theatre’s gradual fall into disuse. ¹⁰⁶ In September 1875, the directors decided to lease the hall to J. S. Lofthouse, a theatrical agent, to be inaugurated as the New Princess’s Theatre of Varieties, ¹⁰⁷ although the venture seems to have been short-lived, and no shows were advertised after January 1876. The theatre was more successfully let to a different promoter, the comedian Patrick Langan, ¹⁰⁸ and reopened as the People’s Concert Hall in March 1877. Subsequent directors’ reports rejoiced both at the increased revenue and the theatre’s intellectual and moral tenor. ¹⁰⁹ The hall’s final reopening was in 1886 as the National Theatre of Varieties. ¹¹⁰

The Reading Room

But turning the lecture hall into a popular theatre was not the only concession that the DMI directors had been compelled to make in order to keep up with the times. The reading room, the DMI’s most successful feature since its foundation, now offered only a limited answer to the members’ needs for rational recreation. Early in 1873, the directors established a ‘conversation, smoking, and chessroom’ ¹¹¹ in order to bring the Institute closer to the role demanded by the age: that of a social club. By 1879, amenities also included billiards and a piano. ¹¹² Unfortunately for the DMI, by that time plans were already afoot to establish what became the City of Dublin Workingmen’s Club, intended to offer a similar social space, with one crucial addition: refreshments, including alcohol, would be sold on the premises. The promoters explained:

Mr. Thompson had pointed out the very reason why the Mechanics’ Institute did not succeed; it was surrounded by counter attractions, and in the middle of all those dazzling halls it held out to the working man a room which seemed to be tenanted only by 73 journals (laughter). What they wanted to bring together was all the attractions which in Abbey-street were scattered over a number of institutions. ¹¹³

Other objections to the DMI emerged in the course of these debates. To protests by Thomas Sexton, journalist, future Parnellite MP and a former member of the DMI board, ¹¹⁴ that workers would fail to support the new venture, just as they had failed adequately to support the DMI, an aggravated worker answered:

Mr. Briscoe, a working man,…related his experience of the Mechanics’ Institute of which he was a member. It was not a mechanics’ institute at all. (Hear, hear, from the working men). He found that it was a scene of broils between what might be called a few mechanics and men like Mr. Sexton.…When he saw that the Mechanics’ Institute descended into a low theatre and dancing place, and that no respectable man could go there without jostling against the people who were going into the theatre, he thought it time to sever his connection with it. There was a time when men such as Dr. Cahill and others were employed to lecture in it, but it had no such attraction now. ¹¹⁵

Meanwhile the directors justified their decision to provide for the members’ entertainment, precisely on the grounds that lectures had become obsolete as a means of instruction and had ceased to be a viable offering. Their last attempt, a series on public health sponsored by the United Trades Association in 1872, had been poorly attended and financially disappointing. ¹¹⁶ The DMI faced an impossible dilemma, caught between remaining true to a spirit that had gone out of fashion, or submitting to aggiornamento, and competing with other rational-recreation venues at the expense of the little support it still retained.

But Mr Briscoe’s complaints extended to a different problem that had beset the DMI from its beginnings, and for which the directors had no easy solution: the fact that actual mechanics at the Institute were heavily outnumbered by ‘men like Mr Sexton’, from the upwardly mobile, white-collar lower middle class. This was a recurring pattern in mechanics’ institutes across the British Isles. In February 1852, Thomas Cliffe Leslie, in his two-part lecture for the Dublin Statistical Society, had quoted J. W. Hudson’s seminal History of Adult Education for an explanation:

1st, the diffidence and restraint felt by the operatives in the society of members who are their superiors in wealth and position; 2nd, ‘the time and trouble of suitably attiring themselves to appear in the company of the middle classes’; and 3 rd, ‘the quarterly and annual terms of payment’. ¹¹⁷

Leslie believed that the difficulty lay in the existence of a subscription fee, rather than its format, but he omitted addressing Hudson’s first two points. These, however, were corroborated only a few months later when an anonymous member of the DMI wrote to the Nation to accuse the board of Protestant bias, and of having turned the Institute into ‘a den of bigotry, anti-Catholic, and too aristocratic for the poor operatives of Dublin’. ¹¹⁸ The board published a detailed rebuttal, but one of its members, Edward C. Ferris, added,

That false aristocratic notions prevail in society, there can be no doubt, nor is such a feeling confined to any particular class. The poor operative has his share of that feeling; it is the reason why the reading room, and often the lecture room, is deserted by some of the tradesmen who belong to the Institute, not that their religion is insulted, or their liberality offended, but simply because a false shame prevents them from sitting with men whose avocation and income allows them to dress better. ¹¹⁹

Because no reading-room visitor records seem to have survived, it is difficult to assess the extent of the phenomenon Ferris described. Very little information exists on the type of clientele who actually frequented the reading room, or on the patterns of social relations displayed; still, this absence of information may be an indication of conformity to dominant social norms and standards of respectability. It is likely that reading-room patrons were mostly middle-class professionals, white-collar workers and relatively well-to-do artisans sharing similar codes of dress and behaviour. Operatives in the 1850s were still the social Other, celebrated almost to excess when they defied expectations about their intelligence and respectability, and usually kept in the role of spectators at public meetings; any attempt by an operative to take the floor was normally accompanied by profuse apologies for the intrusion. Their presence in the reading room could not have failed to elicit commentary, whether in praise or censure. As the century progressed, however, and if the reading room continued to replicate existing patterns of social relations, it is not unlikely that these divisions became somewhat relaxed, aided by the arrival of an egalitarian, socially assertive Fenian movement on the scene, ¹²⁰ as well as the broader development of trade unionism during the ensuing decades. ¹²¹ By 1878, when plans for a Workingmen’s Club were brought before Dublin Corporation on the initiative of middle-class philanthropists, operatives like Mr Briscoe were no longer apologising for their boldness in speaking, and one after another insisted that the workingmen themselves should have been consulted first. ¹²²

The Classrooms

The last space of social interaction in the DMI, the classrooms, are even more sparsely documented, but here the complexities of gender are added to those of class. The Institute’s early focus on technical and scientific lectures, as already explained, by the 1840s had broadened to include regular instruction in music and languages, and the provision of separate classes for men and women. This practice continued throughout the next four decades, with its high point during the 1850s and 1860s. A look at the courses offered and their schedules over the years suggests attention to different types of clientele. The evening was for the education of male artisans at the end of their working day. These were offered ‘fundamental’ courses in English, Math and Drawing, along with more expensive ‘supplemental’ courses in subjects ranging from French and German to ‘Dancing and Deportment’. ¹²³ The daytime, often in different days, was reserved for ladies’ classes in subjects such as French, German and Music. ¹²⁴ This latter arrangement had the double effect of excluding working women from the student list, and securing complete gender segregation on the premises. The only exception, perhaps for logistic reasons, was the case of a French class ‘for ladies and gentlemen’ advertised in 1866 as especially useful for ‘parties purposing to visit the forthcoming Parisian Exhibition’ of 1867. ¹²⁵

As this shows, the DMI’s educational agenda during the third quarter of the century was neither exclusively, nor even primarily concerned with providing technical education to artisans; beginning as early as 1844 with a course offering that included conversazione, fencing and gymnastics, ¹²⁶ an additional goal seemed to be to instruct the lower middle classes of both genders in a range of polite accomplishments. But this changed again in the mid-1880s, when a successful Dublin Artisans’ Exhibition revived interest in technical education. Initially negotiations took place between Dublin Corporation and the DMI to establish a public library and a school of Science at the DMI premises, but these failed and in 1887 the Corporation opened its own technical school on Kevin Street. ¹²⁷ Around this time, perhaps looking at the writing on the wall, the DMI curriculum began to combine modern languages and basic Mathematics and Science with specific courses in Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, Magnetism and Electricity, Metallurgy, Photography, and Acoustics, with Shorthand being added by 1889. ¹²⁸

Conclusion

By this time, however, the Kevin Street technical school, the Trades’ Hall and the Dublin Workingmen’s Club, among others, had taken over the DMI’s various roles in Dublin’s public life; the reading room likewise began to lose its appeal when Dublin acquired its first public libraries on Capel Street and Thomas Street in 1884. ¹²⁹ The DMI was falling victim to the wider European trend that Hoffmann describes:

Nineteenth-century associations had effortlessly combined practical advantages and Bildung, amusement and political interests. By the end of the century, however, a multitude of associations emerged that dedicated themselves to the promotion of just one of these purposes. Trade unions and political parties arose out of the associations and rid themselves gradually of the social and moral baggage of the sociable society. They now served only to represent special interests and to mobilize political action.…Mass culture, which was just beginning to be dominated by commercial interests, promoted activities that transcended class, such as sports, for leisure. ¹³⁰

In 1904, the Institute sold off the building to Miss Annie Horniman to be refounded as the Abbey Theatre, and moved to the premises of the Dublin United Trades Council in Capel Street. Its identity thus diluted within that of a more successful organisation, the Institute languished and struggled for a few more years and was finally closed in 1919. ¹³¹

Charting the history of a defunct organisation seems invariably to lead to narratives of decay and death, followed by assessments of its legacy. Jim Cooke thus concludes his own study of the DMI by reflecting that, although inevitably left behind by the pace of scientific and technical progress, the Institute ‘through its classrooms, its library, its reading room, its lecture hall and its theatre, had been a focus for all and a home to working men in revolutionary and peaceful times’. ¹³² Cooke offers this final sentence merely as a postscript in an article which concentrates heavily on the courses and lectures delivered. I argue, however, that it is the Institute’s physical entity as ‘a focus and a home’ to the working and lower middle classes that holds the key to its deeper significance in Irish history. It is difficult to disagree with the prevalent opinion that mechanics’ institutes, the DMI included, were largely ineffectual as instruments of technical education for the working classes; the DMI had abandoned any such aspiration by the 1850s, in practice if not in theory, and it did not feel compelled to revise its educational ethos until the 1880s. At this point, however, it is useful to return to Thomas Cliffe Leslie’s early analysis in 1852:

If certain classes choose to combine their resources, for the purpose of providing at once more useful information and larger means of recreation than their separate efforts could accomplish…the fact of their cooperation cannot be ignored, because some individuals may think it would be better that they should co-operate for scientific and literary purposes exclusively; or that they are departing from the original plan of the Mechanics’ Institute. ¹³³

As an economist, Leslie understood mechanics’ institutes as a commodity, and in his view, ‘the kind of commodity to be provided is one which the public wants’. The history of the DMI suggests that the Dublin working and lower middle classes wanted yet something else besides instruction and entertainment: they wanted to participate in the civic life of the city. The DMI provided both an institutional framework and a permanent physical space to make it possible. Rooms belonging to particular societies and trades were limited in size and scope; rented auditoriums like the Round Room at the Rotunda or the Music Hall on Abbey Street were one-time venues where collective identity was transient and proceedings were usually dominated by the upper- and middle-class leaders of public opinion. The DMI, by contrast, by fashioning itself as an organisation theoretically sustained and managed by the working classes, adopting a broad agenda of working-class self-improvement and procuring stable premises dedicated to the pursuit of this objective, created a space of sociability and self-expression for classes that were gradually becoming enfranchised. In this respect, the DMI’s demise appears not necessarily as a sad history of failure, but simply as a sign that by the end of the nineteenth century, not only technical education, but party politics, trade unionism and other features of modern civic life in Dublin had finally come into their own.