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Resources for exploring Irish London by century

There's an enormous amount of material published about the history of London, whether as academic texts, popular history books and magazines, television programmes, videos, podcasts, websites and social media posts. But the Irish in London usually get only a short mention in these histories despite being London's oldest and. until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, largest 'foreign' population. 

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After extensive research for this project, I can confirm there is no single source out there which describes the development of Irish London in its many forms over the centuries.  So if you'd like to explore this topic more yourself, I've recommended below some key texts which have helped me to develop the stories of Ireland in London for this website. The footnotes in these texts often provide invaluable signposts to historical sources of the time, from old books, newspapers, paintings and music to the catalogues of archives, museums, and London's local history centres. 

 

Unfortunately many academic texts are not readily accessible outside of academic libraries* so, wherever possible, I've included links to complementary sources which are publicly accessible.

*The related resources page Explore London History provides advice on ways you can access academic publications.   

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You can see all of the sources I've used to develop the blog posts published to date by downloading this Bibliography PDF.  If you know of other useful sources for the history of Irish London during the period of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, please do send me a note via the Contact page or email. 

1600s: Seventeenth century

​​​​​​​Professor Kathleen Noonan's PhD thesis is the most comprehensive account I've found so far of how the migratory patterns of people "out of Ireland" changed from mainly transitory to permanent settlements in London during the seventeenth century.  Unfortunately it only appears to be available in academic libraries.

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  • Kathleen Maurice Noonan, Brethren only to a degree: Irish immigration to London in the mid-seventeenth century, 1640-1660 (PhD Thesis, University of California, 1989).

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M. Dorothy George's classic history of eighteenth-century London was first published in 1925 but is still widely referenced today. It briefly covers the Irish presence in the seventeenth-century city. 

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  • M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Reprint of the 1964 ed. published by Harper & Row, New York. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1984). 

  • Available on Internet Archive (see pp. 120-124, 348).

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Professor Helen Burke's illuminating study of the Irish joke associated with the stage in 1680s London is only available in academic library databases but her two key primary sources are free to view online.

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  • Bogg-witticisms, or, Dear joy's common-places being a compleat collection of the most profound punns, learned bulls, elaborate quibbles, and wise sayings of some of the natives of Teague-Land... (c. 1682). 

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  • Teagueland Jests, or Bogg-Witticisms (1690).  â€‹

    • ​​​Available on Google Books.​​​

1700s: Eighteenth century

​​​​​​​​The Proceedings of the Old Bailey website is a wonderful free resource for exploring the lives of Irish in London who came into contact with the courts, whether as defendants, accusers or witnesses. The nature of the source material means it is the Irish poor who appear most often in these records.

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​​​​​​​London's Irish population, primarily the working poor and destitute, appears throughout M. Dorothy George's classic history of eighteenth-century London and especially in Chapter 3.​

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  • M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Reprint of the 1964 ed. published by Harper & Row, New York. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1984). Available on Internet Archive.

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London historian Jerry White has written a trilogy of London histories from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries which are more recent classics of the genre.  Deeply researched, they're a great read and very affordable. 

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Craig Bailey produced one of the first in-depth studies of the middle-class Irish in eighteenth-century London. Again this is generally available only in academic libraries.

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Ric Berman has recently published a short and very affordable account of the role of the London Irish in the development of Freemasonry. This describes the heterogeneity of the Irish population of eighteenth-century London with an emphasis on 'the aspirational' and 'the affluent' Irish who were active in London Freemasonry.  

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Tim McInerney's study of how the European tradition of "noble blood" influenced the concept of "race" in the eighteenth century includes a chapter on the complications thrown up by the application of the English tradition of nobility to colonial Ireland.  This is another book generally only available in academic libraries.

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  • Tim McInerney, Nobility and the Making of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

    • Extracts are available to read online. â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹

    • ​You can hear Tim discussing the book chapter "Ireland's imposter aristocrats" on The Irish Passport, a podcast he co-hosts with Naomi O'Leary. It's a fascinating listen, not least for its explanation of the dynamics that played out in the Irish peerage between those whose Catholic, Dissenting Protestant and Anglican elite backgrounds originated in Gaelic Ireland, the Old English (Hiberno-Normans like the Butlers of Ormond who feature in this blog post), and the New English settlement of the seventeenth century and afterwards.     â€‹

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1800s: Nineteenth century

As noted above for the eighteenth century, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey website gives us a glimpse of everyday life for those Irish people in London who came before the courts. Adam Crymble has carried out some innovative text mining work with these records to test the use of surnames as a way of identifying Irish people in the absence of corroborating documentation.

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'In the beginning were the Irish'.  So begins the section on the poor of London's "Little Ireland" colonies in  Jerry White's history of nineteenth-century London. As with his volume on eighteenth-century London noted above, this is another richly researched and very affordable book.

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  • Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A human awful wonder of God (London: Vintage Books, 2008).

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Professor Emerita Lynn Hollen Lees' study of Irish Victorian London is another classic text from 1979 which is still frequently referenced today. Lees concentrates on five Irish neighbourhoods: the three oldest and largest Irish colonies of St. Giles, Whitechapel and Southwark and two suburban parishes in Notting Hill and Camberwell. It's another highly readable book and affordable copies can often be found on secondhand book sites.

 

  • Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish migrants in Victorian London (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979).

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An ideal complement to Lees' book is the publication which accompanied a 2005 exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery titled Conquering England: Ireland in Victorian London. This exhibition catalogue includes an essay by Professor Roy Foster which explores the degree to which the middle-class and professional Irish ‘colonised central areas of London metropolitan life…notably journalism, the law, medicine, the arts and, of course, politics’.

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  •   Fintan Cullen and R.F. Foster, Conquering England: Ireland in Victorian London (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2005).    

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This theme is further developed in a recent cultural history of Irish London, from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, by Professor Richard Kirkland. Cheaper than many academic books, it explores just how multifaceted Irish London was in terms of class, religion, politics, and cultural expressions in a city which was both hostile & welcoming.  It provided early inspiration for this project.

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