The historiography of poor-law administration in Ireland ever since Nicholls’s ‘official’ history in the mid-nineteenth century has suffered from a certain selectivity on the part of commentators. As a source of first-hand information Nicholls’s book is of little value. The relatively well-researched account of pre-poor-law relief mechanisms which forms the early part of the book is followed by a disappointing series of extracts from published annual reports, almost devoid of personal comment or reminiscence. The explanation for this lies (if anywhere) in the date of the book’s publication (1856) and the fact that Nicholls had left Ireland under a cloud in 1842. The brief ‘life’ of Nicholls published as an introduction to a later edition of his English poor law is far more revealing.

Studies to date of the Dublin working class have tended to concentrate on the history of trade unionism and labour relations, examining the working class only insofar as this is relevant to the question of labour politics. Although the distinction between skilled and unskilled workers is generally noted, there is little detailed study of distinctions and similarities within the working class except on questions of wages, trade union membership and related issues such as workers’ benefits. The only disaggregation in terms of broader social characteristics occurs in studies relating to Ulster, where the distinctions and similarities between catholic and protestant households have been explored.

This paper analyses the Dublin working class in terms of religion, social background, birthplace, housing conditions and family structure. The major sources employed are the censuses of population, using both published and manuscript material and the registry of marriages. Before examining these however it is essential to sketch the city’s overall economic character.

In the early months of 1882 two of the writers who were to be prominent four years later in opposing Gladstone’s first Irish home-rule bill made similar complaints to correspondents about the state of British public opinion. ‘Less is thought of the Irish question than of the Australian cricketers’, wrote Goldwin Smith; while in characteristic vein, James Fitzjames Stephen waxed choleric about the ‘extravagant idiocy’ of a public obsessed with ‘Jumbo the elephant’, while ignoring ‘one of the most disgusting and brutally dangerous civil wars ever known in these islands’. Each had a particular reason to be preoccupied about Ireland. Smith’s pique was, in part at least, that of the ‘expert’ whose warnings and admonitions had gone unheeded, while Stephen lived part of each year on his small estate in County Louth. However, they also reflected a general concern among politicians and intellectuals which historians have tended to ignore or underestimate — a belief that trends and events in Ireland and the British response to them had serious implications for the future of Britain itself. The recent major study of the home-rule crisis of 1885-6 by Alistair Cooke and John Vincent is remarkable in British historiographical treatment of the Irish question only in the way in which the normal presuppositions are made explicit. Cooke and Vincent argue with admirable clarity, and in remarkable detail, that virtually none of the politicians involved in the crisis were concerned with the ostensible issues of the home-rule policy, each being exclusively concerned instead with exploiting the political crisis which Gladstone’s adoption of the policy (also purely for tactical political reasons) had created. This denial of any importance to ideological differences in political crises is a characteristic of the so-called ‘high politics’ school of historiography, and constitutes perhaps its most serious defect. It is reinforced in the case of the Irish home-rule crisis by the view that, as it was undoubtedly true that few among the political élite cared about Ireland as such, they were equally indifferent to the issues it raised. However, not alone can it be argued that there were important ideological dimensions to most political crises in late nineteenth-century Britain, there is considerable evidence to show that this was particularly true of those involving Irish questions, and of home rule above all.

In 1969 the late Dr Eoin Mac White published a ‘Guide to Russian writing on Irish history, 1917-1963’. Dr Mac White, a professional diplomat who combined with his work a close and scholarly interest in many aspects of Irish-Soviet relations, hoped at some stage to expand his guide into a ‘fuller and more historiographical study’. He doubted, however, if he would be able to find time for such a project, and in the meantime he thought the growing volume of Soviet writing on Irish history ‘should be better known both for its own intrinsic interest as well as an addition to the bibliography of Irish history’. Dr Mac White’s forebodings, unhappily, were borne out; he suffered an untimely death in a motor-car accident in 1972, and to this day the continually expanding Soviet treatment of all aspects of Irish history has remained uncatalogued. This bibliography is intended to repair that omission; it attempts to record all books and journal articles dealing wholly or in substantial part with Irish history published in the U.S.S.R. in Russian or in any other Soviet language between 1917 and 1980. Compared with Dr Mac White’s compilation it lists over sixty additional items (out of a total of 162): an indication, perhaps, of the expansion of Soviet scholarly interest in Ireland over the past decade or so, and in itself some justification for undertaking an exercise of this kind.