What would an environmental history of Dublin look like? Why would we need such a history? Environmental history, which has its roots in the American conservation movement of the 1960s, originally focused its attention on rural landscapes and the frontiers of human settlement. Now that few places on earth could be considered untouched by human activity, a more expansive idea of environmental history has emerged to encompass a wide variety of interactions between the human and non-human worlds. Urban environmental historians have seen cities not as exclusively human places, but spaces in which humans are in constant negotiation with the non-human world. The following pages begin to map some directions for an environmental history of nineteenth-century Dublin. First, I show how we might examine the intersection between environmental factors and socioeconomic change to understand the distribution of people and businesses in the city. Second, I look at animal businesses in detail to see how changes to the use of animals in the city both reflected and shaped larger processes of change in Dublin over the Victorian period.

Urban Landscapes

The nineteenth century was a transitional period for the shape and size of most cities in Europe and America. Industrial cities expanded rapidly in area, population, and infrastructure. Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow are often cited for their dramatic and, to contemporary observers, unnnerving population explosions. The majority of these cities’ new residents were poor, unskilled workers and their arrival coincided with the increasing flight from the city centre of the middle and upper classes who sought the healthier, cleaner environments of the suburbs. Movements of population created rings of differing social and economic status around the city centre, leaving the inner core increasingly impoverished and often polluted. Despite the interest of municipal authorities in controlling nuisances from industries and noxious trades, many factories remained in the city centre throughout the century. Among the trades that produced unpleasant smells and effluvia were a wide variety of animal businesses, including slaughterhouses, dairies, bacon factories, bone boilers, glue manufactories, tanners, skinners, and tallow chandlers. Thus the urban poor and the city's non-human residents were often left to share the same insalubrious space.

Despite Dublin's failure to develop a manufacturing economy, the city shared the socio-economic and geographical transitions that marked many industrializing cities.

Introduction

In 2010, the average Irish adult consumed less than half a pound of potatoes per day: this was a significant drop from an average of just over one pound per day recorded in the late 1940s, but a huge decline from the estimated ten pounds consumed by the pre-Great Famine labourer. Bread, sugar and meat all form a much larger proportion of the diet in Ireland today than in the past. Yet these dramatic changes took place relatively gradually over the period and they are only one aspect of the relationship between Irish society and food. Food is affected by cultural and technological change and the practices of preparing and sharing meals have significance beyond the provision of basic nutrients. Dietary change, especially in the period 1740 to 1900, has been well studied. However, the broader relationship between Irish society and food is only beginning to be explored. This chapter attempts to synthesise a body of existing research on diet with the emerging scholarship on ‘foodways’ to offer some new and old insights into food and diet in Ireland.

For convenience, the chapter is divided into five chronological sections that coincide with events that affected food preparation and consumption. The Great Famine marks the division between the first two sections and the transition from an early modern to a modern diet. The disruptions of the First World War, the Irish Revolution and the Second World War suggest a third division because of their impacts on farming and trade. The end of the Second World War was not an immediate end to rationing (relevant especially to Northern Ireland), but agriculture and trade gradually stabilised and further changes through rural electrification and the establishment of a Department of Health in the Republic mark a new departure. A further all-island nutritional survey in 1999 conveniently marks the division between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The division is imperfect, but offers a working scaffold for existing research.

1740–1845

For the period between 1740 and the Great Famine there is a sizeable literature on food and diet, much of which has focused on the potato. Throughout the eighteenth century, the potato assumed an ever greater importance in Irish diets. The causes and consequences of the potato diet are still debated.

In 1865, the Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden company was founded in Dublin with the aim of building a unique and permanent exhibition space. The first event to be hosted in the palace would be an industrial exhibition and the new company's shareholders hoped that the hall would aid in the cultivation of the natural and mechanical sciences through public lectures, further exhibitions and a library. Among the supporters of the exhibition was the author and satirist William Smyth who penned a celebratory drama with characters such as goddesses of industry and pleasure, ‘Erin’ and Erin's servant, a fairy queen. The fairy queen was tasked with the erection of the palace itself: ‘Here Erin finds a useless green, / And, with a happy, careful thought, / She tells me to transform the scene, / And all this waste expel.’ With a wave of the fairy's wand, she replaced waste land with a monument to industry and progress. The idea that industrialization would simply sweep aside an unproductive agricultural past and replace it with an orderly industrial future was prevalent in nineteenth-century Ireland. Rather than Erin and a fairy queen, science was often the key character in narratives of improvement and industrialization. Museums and exhibitions served as stages for acting out scientific and industrial prowess in visual form. Through the display of scientific and industrial objects, the curators of museums and exhibitions symbolically expelled wastes and replaced them with order, industry and scientific progress.

This chapter examines the museum and the exhibition as locations for science education and popularization in nineteenth-century Ireland. The chapter focuses on the natural history collections of the Queen's Colleges and on a series of privately funded industrial exhibitions in Dublin and Cork.

In 1858 the report of the Royal Commission on the Queen's Colleges proclaimed the agriculture diploma a failure and recommended that it be abolished. The Commissioners’ report called into question the aims of the Queen's Colleges to introduce practical courses into the university. During the course of their investigation the Commissioners had asked Thomas Andrews (professor of chemistry and vice president of the Belfast college) whether he had many students who attended his classes primarily for the purpose of acquiring information applicable to manufacturing and industry. Andrews claimed that such students were very rare and further opined that ‘The demand for mere knowledge, for its own sake is not sufficient to induce a young man to pass through a fixed course of education’. Instead, Andrews told the Commissioners, the allure of the university was the prestige of a degree. Those who wanted practical information simply attended the one or two lectures relevant to their needs rather than matriculating for a full degree.

Despite Robert Kane's hopes that the new institutions would give a ‘practical and industrial character’ to university education, one of its most practical subjects was deemed a failure. The Queen's Colleges were a new type of university. One of their foremost supporters, Kane, saw the colleges as a place to extend and formalize technical education, training professional scientific men alongside lawyers and doctors. If science were to transform Ireland it would do so through the actions of men educated in scientific principles, particularly those sciences most applicable to the development of industry and agriculture. Thus the new colleges were to create a cadre of technocrats through two experimental diploma programmes in agriculture and civil engineering.

The importance of science in Irish popular discourse and public culture during the nineteenth century can hardly be overstated. The promotion of scientific ideas and the application of scientific principles and technologies was the impetus for educational institutions, lectures, voluntary societies, periodicals, museums and exhibitions. Irish nationalists, such as Charles Gavan Duffy, hoped that men of science would assume a role in building an Irish cultural and intellectual milieu. Yet the claim of Duffy that Ireland did not have its own school of scientific thought appears, at least on the surface, to have merit. Irish scientific men often looked to Britain, particularly England, as the centre of the scientific community and many Irish institutions were modelled on British counterparts. However, in scientific terms Ireland was not simply England in miniature. This book examines the middle of the nineteenth century, a crucial period for the development of science in Ireland, and asks what values were placed on science in Irish society and how these values were expressed through institutions, activities and publications.

The interplay between government-controlled institutions and ‘indigenous’ scientific organizations in the period 1840 to 1880 permanently changed the Irish scientific landscape. During the 1840s, science was particularly valued as a discourse which could generate economic and social progress; institutions offering scientific education multiplied. By the 1880s, although many institutions had begun as private initiatives, scientific training was almost exclusively in the hands of the government. Through the Queen's Colleges in particular, the British government embraced the idea that science education could be turned to economic benefit. During the 1850s and 1860s similar sentiments were expressed through popular, and privately funded, industrial exhibitions.

The middle of the nineteenth century saw the unprecedented expansion of science teaching at the highest levels. In the 1840s the Museum of Irish Industry and the Queen's Colleges opened, followed by the Catholic University in 1854. These institutions responded to the perceived need for technical and scientific education in Ireland while also providing new opportunities for the Catholic middle classes in particular. Yet these new developments also drew science into political and religious controversies over the control of education. As one Catholic appointee was later to state, ‘It is not a desirable thing that scientific appointments should be mixed up with the question of religion; but in Ireland, unfortunately, this has long been the rule.’ In Ireland religion was also politics and thus scientific appointments and the philosophy of science education were thoroughly mixed up with political and religious controversy during the nineteenth century.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, scientific societies participated in the movement for educational reform in nineteenth-century Ireland. They offered alternative means of education, both formally through lectures and informally by encouraging self-education. Their members were also frequently advocates for the reform of education on a wider scale and thus many of them were supporters of plans to create new places of higher education in provincial Ireland. Sir Robert Peel's administration introduced the Colleges (Ireland) Act in 1845 in order to meet just such a demand.

Irish Catholics and nationalists practiced and promoted science during the nineteenth century, yet science did not become integral to Irish national identity. This fact was both reflected in and influenced by the role which science played in Irish print culture. The abortive project to issue a history of Irish natural philosophers, mooted by Daniel Owen Madden and intended to form part of the ‘Library of Ireland’, shows how easily science was sidelined from national narratives. The ‘Library of Ireland’ was published by the Catholic publishing house James Duffy and was identified with the nationalist Young Ireland movement. Madden claimed his book would be ‘an attractive, readable, popular, and most useful volume’ which would offer biographies of past philosophers such as Kirwan and Molyneaux, but add modern philosophers such as Robert Kane. The book was never published and the ‘Library of Ireland’, once completed, consisted almost exclusively of history and literature. The exclusion of science from narratives of Irish identity extended beyond a single popular book series as this chapter will demonstrate. One nationalist later recalled that there was no Irish school of scientific thought, despite many outstanding individuals. This chapter tries to understand why, if science was prevalent in Irish life, it was absent from Irish self-definition.

Previous chapters have demonstrated that science was an integral part of efforts to reform Irish education and society. Yet science did not serve a similar function in one of the most pervasive reform movements of the century – that to re-form Ireland as an independent nation. There appears to have been a disconnect between Irish scientific reformers and wider Irish culture. As Madden's failure to have men of science included in the ‘Library of Ireland’ shows, it was difficult to identify an Irish scientific tradition or to link scientific reform with nationalist aims.

In the early twentieth century, the priest and novelist Canon Patrick Sheehan wrote a fictional account of an intellectual society in Cork. Founded through the exertions of a priest, a Catholic doctor and his wife, the society aimed at a mixture of social integration, entertainment and self-education. The participants included a college professor, an English engineer, two single women, the local bank manager and his wife. They had been selected not just for their intellectual attributes, but for their ability to contribute to providing an acceptable social mix. As the doctor's wife remarks, advocating for further Protestant members, ‘I hate this spirit of intolerance amongst Catholics. Really, Protestants are quite as nice, and sometimes much superior.’ Despite such precautions regarding the admission of members, the society's history followed a familiar trajectory from an enthusiastic foundation, through struggles with member fatigue (the ladies crave dancing and music) to dissolution. Each stage was characterized by a tension in aims: the desires to create an intellectual community, to overcome political and religious divides and to provide amusement often clash with one another. Sheehan's The Intellectuals drew on his personal experience as a member of one of Ireland's oldest scientific societies, the Scientific and Literary Society of Cork. His preface claimed that the book would provide a blueprint for the future of Irish society when ‘the barriers of racial and sectarian prejudices may be broken down’ through the development of intellectual pursuits.

Voluntary societies, and particularly scientific societies, are representative of the Victorian urge to combine recreation with higher purposes such as reform and education.

Those who have studied the history of Irish science have generally agreed that scientific activity declined after the turn of the century and was conspicuously absent from the institutions of the Irish Free State. Various explanations have been offered, but they may be summarized as cultural aversion (especially on the part of Catholics and nationalists), lack of economic development and educational disadvantage. Instead of offering credence to any of these theories I want to reject the assumption which I believe underlies the search for such causes. The focus on Irish scientific decline seems to me to imply that Ireland deviated from the expected path. Such narratives can easily become ‘what if ’ stories. Continuing to ask why Ireland failed to develop a scientific culture which was identical to that of her nearest neighbour assumes that it would have been better if she had done so. It is, of course, interesting that Ireland's scientific research tradition during the nineteenth century was dominated by a Protestant Ascendancy and this fact may be explained by some combination of the theories listed above. This book has sought to describe how science actually developed in a variety of sites within Ireland, how science intersected with social, cultural, religious and political communities and to ask what these developments can tell us about the history of science during the nineteenth century. Ireland's relationship with science was and is unique, affected by its specific socio-political context, its relationship with its neighbours (near and far) and international scientific developments.

In reflecting upon what Ireland can tell us about nineteenth-century science, comparisons with Britain are essential. Britain was Ireland's rival and its ruler.