Abstract
David Dickson focuses on ten Irish ‘cities’. He does not linger over what constitutes a ‘city’, a question which has generated much discussion. Quickly he reveals that it is ‘the top group of urban communities’ that concerns him (p. 2). However, his approach is flexible enough to admit, by way of illustration, towns such as Ennis, Newry, Wexford and Carrick-on-Suir, as well as the small cathedral city of Armagh. Already, his major preoccupation has been announced in the subtitle: ‘an eighteenth-century transformation’.
He vividly conveys the extent of transformation in the opening chapter. Places encircled by walls, bastions and other fortifications in the seventeenth century were subjected to siege, battery, sack and reprisals. Few escaped unaltered either in physical appearance or ownership. Yet, by the later eighteenth century, they had changed in size, look and population, often on a scale that few European counterparts matched at the time. The reasons are one theme in Dickson’s constantly absorbing analysis. No single or simplistic answer suffices. He brings out in full detail, how and why responses differed from place to place. Political, legal and regulatory systems governed what was possible. Moving to how they were peopled and growth was sustained, levels of mortality, fertility, immigration (for betterment and subsistence) and destitution are all investigated. Catholics re-established themselves commercially in Galway, Waterford and Cork, or coexisted with the privileged Protestants in varying degrees of harmony. Nonconforming Protestants sometimes flourished: Quakers in Cork or Scottish Presbyterians in Belfast and Derry. The initiatives in the ten principal locales are traced. In some cases, active landlords and developers are responsible, as with the two Luke Gardiners in Dublin, distant and absent proprietors (Lord Donegall in Belfast), activists within the corporation, or politically and financially ambitious locals, like Edmond Sexton Pery in Limerick or John Beresford in Dublin. Since all of Dickson's chosen examples, except inland Kilkenny, were ports, they relied on marketing and exporting the produce of their hinterlands, and built up a variety of fruitful overseas connections, not only in France and Spain but also with America and the Indies. Yet, as Dickson emphasizes, if some places were advantageously placed geographically to benefit, there were too differences in the energy and ingenuity with which the residents exploited such natural advantages.
Contemporary commentators, mostly visitors and propagandists of modernization, generally approved. These Irish towns were starting to look more like those in England and Western Europe. Moreover, the improvements contrasted tellingly with the surviving ‘Irishtowns’ and huddles of cabins that clustered around the outskirts. They further threw into relief the often unimproved countryside. Yet, it remained the case that few of these Irish conurbations were so large as to be completely distinct from the rural surroundings. Even in central Dublin, the encircling and menacing mountains were visible, as well as the great sweep of the bay. In the largest, too, notably Dublin, but also Cork, Waterford and Belfast, suburban villages were favoured for the residences of the well-to-do, wishing both for easy access to urban amenities and for greater space and more salubrious air.
As Dickson notes, the authorities in urban Ireland lacked the power enjoyed in some continental states to override private and corporate proprietors, so that the most grandiose plans stayed on the drawing board. In a few cases – Pery in Limerick or Donegall in Belfast – individuals owned enough to stamp a distinctive imprint on the place. In later eighteenth-century Dublin, the Wide Street Commissioners were able to impose their vision on parts of the central city. In the main, the results are assumed – silently – to have justified the disruption and destruction. Few lamented the gimcrack which had been swept away. Maybe householders in the new properties accepted the higher rents and charges as the price for more convenient, fashionable and healthy habitations. But not all benefited from the upheavals. Overcrowded and insanitary slums were a less widely advertised result of the emerging cities; tenements, rooming houses and seedy lodgings proliferated.
Enthusiasts for city living expected the urban to be made urbane. Dickson does full justice to the range of goods, services and amusements offered by the largest places, and uniquely by Dublin. The bracing setting could incubate unrest, radicalism and republicanism, as well as crime and poverty. He ponders the reasons for the very different urban responses to the 1798 uprising, with Dublin and Belfast most actively involved. He also reflects on the unique skills and attitudes that the city-dwellers who emigrated in bulk in the nineteenth century may have carried with them. Given the interdependence of eighteenth-century cities on their rural hinterlands, the permeation of new practices and attitudes into the countryside would be worth longer consideration. If The First Irish Cities were no more than a masterly synthesis of the current research and writing, it would be welcome. But, given Dickson’s long immersion in the subject, there are many reflections that will spark further investigations. Coming after Dickson’s remarkable study of Cork and South Munster in the Annales mode, his wide-ranging and searching Dublin (2014), and a lucid textbook on eighteenth-century Ireland, it crowns what must be one of the most fertile of recent Irish historical careers.