Library Forum

I have happened across yet another series of British Parliamentary Papers providing an exhaustive description of various aspects of Irish life in the mid-1800s, complete with statistics and first-hand accounts. This is the link to a volume containing the 1851 and 1852 reports made by the Inspector General to the British House of Commons on every prison, county goal, and regional bridewell in Ireland used for incarceration of Irish residents:

House of Commons papers, Volume 53
by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons

http://tiny.cc/a23b3

There are no lists of named prisoners, although various sections in this volume contain tables of deceased prisoners for which, for Clare residents, the provided prisoners' initials fairly likely are equivalent to Patrick O'Brien in Newgate prison and Catherine McCarthy in the Ennis facility for women.

There are reliable observations that I found enlightening. At Mountjoy prison, located in Dublin, a third of prisoners were Protestant. The Protestant chaplain at Mountjoy reported that the Protestant prisoners there showed very little interest in religion, while the Catholic chaplain reported a high level of observance by the RC prisoners. All chaplains received the same salary, without distinction as to denomination served. Statistics for prisoners during 1851 showed that most prisoners gained weight for the first five months of incarceration, after which the weight gain tapered off. The food served that year at Mountjoy is shown below. At that facility not a single instance of mental illness was found in 1851; the worst health problem was typhus fever, and the most deaths occurred from consumption, with all illnesses painstakingly noted for each facility throughout this annual report. At one facility the medical reporter emphasized that any deaths occurred due to deficiencies in prisoners' diet and health care prior to entering the facility, not due to lack of sustenance while incarcerated. One prisoner died from handling equipment, and several were injured on the same machine. Vocational instruction was widespread throughout the system (a lot of mat weaving and shoemaking), and educational instruction was also provided although many male prisoners already had some ability to read and write.

For me the most interesting observation was a cause assigned to much of the crime. Most male prisoners were laborers, and lack of work was the cause of their committing crimes, mostly stealing. The greatest number of prisoners were aged 16 to 30, and the usual sentence was either 7 years or 10 years. It was well known that the poor were committing crimes in order to be transported to the colonies. Women were committing crimes in greater numbers in the years when prison policy was to transport their children with them; it was acknowledged that being transported with one's family was the most economical way to emigrate. See p. 16.

Focusing on Clare, the below chart shows that Clare was in the top 5 counties providing prisoners in 1851 and that the number from Clare had more than doubled since the years immediately preceding the famine of 1846. The Ennis temporary depot, also called the convict depot, has a description starting on p. 117 (this facility apparently closed in 1855), and the Clare county goal's 1852 description starts on p. 144.

Lots of reading; I hope this posting has provided the overall gist of it. Annual Reports for other years can be located in Google Books by using the key words "Inspector of Government Prisons"

Sharon Carberry

Great posting, Sharon. Thanks very much. The pages you refer to make interesting reading. As usual.

Some time back I read of a case (unfortunately I don't have the reference any more) of a woman (in Cork, I seem to remember) who was convicted of some utterly trivial theft. She told the court she had done it because she had a child and was starving and wanted to be transported. The judge said that because she had deliberately committed the crime in order to be transported he wouldn't have her transported but would send her for incarceration in a brig in the nearby harbour. However, at that time there was a remedy of "petitioning" available to prisoners. They could petition somebody (in Dublin Castle, as I remember), requesting leniency. This woman did this and her sentence was "commuted" to transportation "because she had a child for which she was the sole support".

A quick note for readers who are not familiar with the names of infectious diseases: typhus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhus ) and typhoid ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid ) are two quite different diseases and are often confused because the nomenclature changed during the 19th century in various parts of Europe. It is important to bear this in mind if interpreting epidemiological publications of that era.

Paddy

Thanks, Paddy, for letting me know of your finding this material worthwhile to post. Good point on the distinction between the two types of illness so dreaded by folks back then; not having your medical background I had never even thought about that.

I have a few more comments related to this posting. I have again become aware of how widespread the library collections are that contain publications of the 18th and 19th centuries that appear online (too often in "snippet view" only), which makes sense since Google Books and the Internet Archives are composed of books in such collections, digitized to allow online access. I just finished reading how an article written in the mid-1800s on some arcane court case involving the Massey family of Clare has been in the New York State Law Library's collection for many decades. Many of those old publications have a Library of Congress "OCLC" number, indicating that the books might be on the shelves of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (some I have in fact seen listed as being there). This is similar to my finding earlier this year that a few very old Clare deeds or wills have preserved in a New Jersey academic facility, labeled as an Italian collection. I wonder how many more genealogy resources, not preserved in Ireland or a British archives, are out there somewhere in the world. Digitizing such collections provides the prospect of finding them.

I tried a Google Books search using the key term "summer assizes +Clare" and found a useful list of Clare prisoners whose sentences had been commuted (changed to something less severe or entirely discharged) in 1835 and 1836, shown below along with the title page of the 1836 document. The link is: http://tiny.cc/9ht6x I then compared the men on this list with those on what I call the Leeson List, which is a cataloging of the tenants sent by Wyndham off his Clare property to North America in the 1830s and into the 1840s. There are a few instances of the same names on both lists, so it might be that some commuted prisoners were also Wyndham tenants and left Clare by assisted transportation after leaving prison. That Leeson list is in the archives of the Rootsweb Clare mailing list, where it can be retrieved easily with the search word Leeson. I need to add that the Munmore on the Leeson list has been determined to be Moymore of East Clare, likely tenants of Munmore farm which was Wyndham's property there.

Sharon C.