Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography (review)

Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography, by Jacinta Prunty; pp. xvii + 366. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998, £22.50.

The author of Dublin Slums is both a practising historical geographer and a sister in a religious community, living and working in the Coombe, one of the districts of inner-city Dublin featured in her book. The result is a book that is scholarly and meticulously researched, but also heartfelt, a kind of lamentation for the poverty of both people and policy in nineteenth-century Dublin. Jacinta Prunty first describes in detail the succession of medical and public-health investigations that exposed appalling levels of mortality and disease, and the sanitary and housing reforms proposed to improve the physical and moral environments of the Dublin poor. In later chapters, she focuses on state (Poor Law) and religious, charitable responses to the poverty of the people, especially highlighting the less-than-Christian competition between minority Protestant and majority Catholic church agencies in relieving poverty and converting the poverty-stricken. Finally, she offers a case study of "a classic slum: Dublin North City," including the Gardiner Estate, a middle-class development fallen on hard times, and the narrow lanes and courts characterised by mixed land uses, juxtaposing tenements and slaughterhouses, that lay just west of Sackville (now O'Connell) Street.

The book overflows with every kind of numerical information and social diagnosis, gleaned from nineteenth-century statistical inquiries, government reports, reform tracts, valuations, charity registers, and planning documents. Whatever can be mapped-- typhoid cases, unfit housing, slum clearance schemes, slaughterhouses, ragged schools, asylums for penitent prostitutes, religious adherence, donors and recipients of charity-- Prunty maps. Often, the results are revealing; for example, the widely scattered distributions of indicators of poverty, poor health, and sanitary problems demonstrate the absence of large-scale residential segregation in Victorian Dublin. Occasionally, one longs for more selectivity, reflection, and interpretation. How do these maps inform the definitional debate about what constitutes a "slum," with which the book rightly begins? If the innovation of Victorian reformers was to conceive of "slums" as areas, thereby facilitating area- based "solutions," should we really use the word "slums" to describe the scatter of poor housing and poor people throughout inner-city Dublin? Perhaps this is why church-based initiatives, targeted at poor individuals, continued to be more productive than official programmes of clearance and redevelopment.

Prunty includes passing references to Alan Mayne's important work on slum representations, and demonstrates a general awareness that "slums" are cultural constructions, but she refrains from much critical evaluation of her sources. For example, she notes the sensationalist accounts of slum visitors, but treats them simply as evidence of a lurid reporting style rather than as texts to be analyzed. She is well aware of what all her sources omit--the voice of the slum-dwellers and their everyday experience, of community and recreation as much as hardship. Even the accounts of charity visitors and the implicit evidence of mobility and transiency do not quite recover this experience. But for all her enthusiastic diligence, Prunty neglects sources which have proved valuable elsewhere--newspapers, crime reports, settlement histories, or the material culture uncovered by urban archaeology. Perhaps they were not available in the case of Dublin, but I would have welcomed an evaluation of the possibilities that extended beyond the bald admission that we are too late for oral history.

Prunty faces a dilemma familiar to writers of urban history: how to reconcile the interests of local readers enthusiastic for topographical detail but uninterested in comparative and theoretical perspectives, with those of academic historians, for whom comparisons with other places, contextualization, and methodology are critical. She includes an extensive bibliography recording studies of slums and social housing in London and elsewhere, but the only comparative data she cites come from contemporary reports which tabulated mortality rates or overcrowding in different cities. Yet the scope for comparison is great. As Prunty notes, Dublin was...