A review of 'Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography by Jacinta Prunty' (Pre-published version)

Abstract

This study of the development of the Dublin slums over a period of a century and a quarter investigates the interrelated themes of public health, housing and poverty, as well as the reaction thereto by central and local government, religious denominations and private charities. The study involves in-depth analysis of several issues: early nineteenth-century mortality trends and their impact on contemporary opinion; attempted sanitary improvements from the early nineteenth century onwards; faltering steps into the provision of public authority housing after the enabling legislation of the late 1870s; slum 'clearance' and its social and environ- mental effects; the role of denominational competition in the progressive amelioration of the lot of slum-dwellers; social analysis of both the practitioners and the recipients of private charity; and changing attitudes to the slum question on the part of both central and local government. Considerable attention is paid to the process whereby, on the heels of de-industrialisation from the late seventeenth century onwards, the prosperous classes moved to the growing suburbs, leaving whole reaches of Dublin city to decay into tenement zones. The city's poor and those fleeing rural deprivation moved into in-fill housing in the back gardens and stable lanes attached to former grandee houses or into one-room accommodation in rapidly demoted genteel streets like the appropriately named Fade Street. The in- exorable progress of such conditions through the city over the course of the nineteenth century resulted in 25,000 individuals - 35 per cent of the city's population - living in slum conditions by the eve of the First World War.