Lewis Darwen – författare

The Great Irish Famine claimed the lives of one million people, mainly from the lower classes. More than a million others fled the stricken land between 1845 and 1851. In recent decades, its history has become the focus of considerable scholarly and popular attention, but much remains to be retrieved and reconstructed, particularly at the level of the rural poor. This book fills that gap. It is based on a large volume of reports on social conditions in the Irish localities, emanating from within those localities, that has never been used systematically by historians. It bears the compelling title of the ‘Death Census’. Most historians are simply unaware of its existence. The outstanding feature of the Death Census is that it was authored by local clergymen who lived among the people they served and were intimately involved with their lives. This book brings the Death Census together in composite form for the first time and provides a detailed examination of its contents. The result is new understanding of the Great Famine as it was experienced on the ground.

During the nineteenth century, local officials sought to deal with their Irish pauper ‘problem’ by removing these poor migrants back to Ireland under the laws of settlement and removal. Over the course of the century, hundreds of thousands of Irish paupers were forcibly repatriated in this way. Even though the settlement rights of Irish immigrants gradually improved over time, removals were still taking place into the twentieth century.The system was widely recognised as being cruel and unfair, especially in Ireland where the removal of Irish paupers from Britain garnered considerable political and press attention. Much was made of the illegality of some removals, and of harsh removals involving widowed women, children and the elderly.This book, which is the first sustained study of repatriation from Britain, demonstrates a persistent theme: the marginal nature of Irish life on the larger island. Drawing on extensive research from newspaper sources and parliamentary papers, it presents an original and richly detailed perspective on Irish immigration, poverty and pauperism in nineteenth-century Britain.