Introduction: “Tolerably Numerous”: Recovering the London Irish of the Eighteenth Century

“London!,” exclaimed Miss Counihan. “The Mecca of every young aspirant to fiscal distinction.”

—Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1939)

In 1708 Charles McLaughlin set out for London accompanied by two friends, William Mulligan and “Patrick D–––d.” After a short time in the capital, they ran out of funds, had “fallen into a state of utter despondency,” and were at a loss as to what the future might hold for them. Mulligan became a soldier and eventually a merchant, amassing a “very considerable fortune”; D–––d resorted to robbery until his career was abruptly halted by a jerk of the executioner’s rope at Tyburn. McLaughlin’s biographer tells us this apocryphal anecdote partly in order to inject some tension into his subject’s “train of vicissitudes and fluctuations of fortune” that McLaughlin was to outline over the remaining pages of his two volumes.¹ The tension was artificial, of course, as it was well known to his readers that Charles Macklin—McLaughlin anglicized his name on arrival in London like many Irish before and after him—went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the eighteenth-century London stage. Yet the opposing fates of Mulligan and D–––d exemplify the spectrum of possibilities that awaited Irish arrivals in London in the eighteenth century.

We might begin by considering why an essay collection on the activities of the eighteenth-century London Irish might be appropriate at this time. Up until quite recently, if one was looking for information on this ethnic grouping, one might be directed toward John Denvir’s The Irish in Britain (1892), John Archer Jackson’s The Irish In Britain (1963), and, more recently, Donald M. MacRaild’s The Irish Diaspora in Britain, 1750–1939 (1999, 2011).² However, there are notable shortcomings with each of these books, at least insofar as the eighteenth century is concerned. Denvir’s book identifies this period as the time when the Irish in London first became “tolerably numerous” and provides rich anecdotes, but the historiography and referencing is, naturally enough, inadequate for the purposes of modern scholarship. Jackson’s survey is largely concerned with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but gives only the most cursory attention to the pre-1800 era. This is a problem that is shared with MacRaild’s book, which, despite the very fine scholarship it boasts, simply does not cover the period it claims to cover: the most substantive discussion McRaild gives of the eighteenth century is a brief overview of the relationship between the United Irishmen and English radicals.

In terms of scholarship of the Irish diaspora, the relative lack of attention to the eighteenth century is perhaps understandable. The nineteenth century has proved a siren call to historians and sociologists. This, after all, was the century that saw the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the spread of the various famines that ravaged Ireland, events that prompted mass Irish immigration to Britain and elsewhere. The influx of Irish immigrants in the wake of 1815, and the concomitant anxieties it fueled, led to the formation of a Select Committee on Disturbances in Ireland in 1825, the Select Committee on Emigration in 1827, and, eventually, the commissioning of George Cornewall Lewis’s Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain (1836). Moreover, if we also remember that the first census in Britain to record the country of birth of residents took place in 1841, we must acknowledge that there is vastly more hard data available on the Irish in Britain during this century. Donald Akenson’s paradox is particularly true of the eighteenth century: “Given that Great Britain numerically has been the second most important reception area for Irish migrants, nevertheless it is the place for which we have the least and lowest quality of information on the migrants, particularly systematic data.”³ In addition, there is the issue of language: the evidence suggests that a small proportion of Irish migrants to London could speak English. Peter King, for instance, has shown...