The Peace Egg Book: an Anglo-Irish chapbook connection discovered - Research article: focus on traditional drama

Manchester and its Irish Population in the Nineteenth Century

Asa Briggs described nineteenth-century Manchester as "the shock city of the Industrial Revolution" (Briggs 1965, 113), a phrase that has been repeated so often that it has become a cliche. As a description of the social and economic changes taking place at the time, however, the phrase represents a valuable shorthand. Nineteenth-century Manchester was the first city in the world in which its economic wealth was derived almost wholly from steam-driven manufacture, mainly of textiles. By the end of the eighteenth century, seventy per cent of the British cotton industry was concentrated in the cotton districts of Lancashire and Cheshire, and by 1835 this had risen to ninety per cent (Kidd 1993, 21). With this manufacture came related merchanting activity associated with the import and export of raw cotton, finished cloth, dyes, steel for machinery, all necessary in this new industry that was, in due course, to become the pre-eminent source of wealth. From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, however, manufacturing predominated, and it was the large cotton mills built to service this new industry in Chorlton-on-Medlock, and especially in the Ancoats districts of Manchester (Williams and Farnie 1992), that attracted visitors from all over the world to see the wonders of the industrial revolution at first hand (Engels 1958; Faucher 1969; Bradshaw 1987; Schinkel 1993).

This new industry led to an almost unbelievably rapid expansion of the population of the city. Manchester was not only the first city to see the formation of an urban working class, but it was also the first city to host a manufacturing and merchanting middle class in the modern sense. It was the growth in the number of cotton operatives and the associated urban unskilled workforce that led to the spectacular population growth in the nineteenth century. In the late 1780s, Manchester had a population of some 40,000 (Briggs 1965, 85), but by the time of the first census in 1801 this figure had nearly doubled to 77,000. It doubled again by the 1820s, increasing to 243,000 by 1841 and, by the mid-century census of 1851, the population of Manchester was 316,000 (Kidd 1993, 22). As Briggs points out, Manchester was "still a small place by later standards, yet it was felt to be one of the 'phenomena of the age'" (Briggs 1965, 85).

The increase in population had been driven by the demands for workers in the new textile industry. Much of this migration was short distance and occurred in inward moving waves (Redford 1976). Workers moved into Manchester from nearby villages and were replaced by men and women from further out, people who in their turn would be attracted towards, or forced into, the ever-expanding mills. Some of the migration, however, was long distance, and the most noticeable element of this inflow was the Irish. There are references to an Irish population in Manchester from the mid-eighteenth century and, by the late 1780s, the numbers were said to be about 5000 (Redford 1976, 134). But from then onwards, the Irish migration expanded rapidly as the growing disparity between the job opportunities presented by the developing industrial areas of Lancashire and the unemployment and poverty of Ireland manifested itself. The Irish population of Manchester in 1841 was some 30,000 or 12.5 per cent of the total. By 1851, this had grown to 53,000 (13.1 per cent) and, if non-Irish-born children of two Irish-born parents are included, that percentage is increased to 17.5 (Busteed 1998, 639-41; 1999, 95). This Irish population was concentrated in three areas: the infamous but short-lived community of Little Ireland by the River Medlock at Cambridge Street (Kay 1969; Busteed 1995), Irish Town by Victoria Station, and Ancoats, which was to become Manchester's largest Irish community (Busteed 1998; 1999).