The Irishman's Harvest | Famine Ireland Through an Englishman's Notebook 1851

Found in a Dublin antique shop, this 1851 Victorian survey of London's poor contains one of the most vivid records of Famine-era Irish immigrants ever written — and it was penned by a Punch magazine co-founder who couldn't quite escape his own bias.Donate a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesMore info at https://vicesandvolumes.comInstagram https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/Henry Mayhew walked into the Irish courts of Rosemary Lane, East London with a notebook and a head full of assumptions. He found thirty pictures of holy men on the walls, beads in a tumbler on the window-ledge, and a community that had built an entire economy out of oranges, eloquence, and each other.This episode covers how the Irish came to dominate London's orange trade, Father Mathew's temperance movement as unlikely competitive advantage, the Limerick man who sold four chickens for three shillings and threepence and walked to Dublin rather than take the ship, and Old Norah's green velvet dress — thirty shillings, earned back, and then lost to a brother with a pension and a talent for other people's savings.Features readings from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (1851), picked up at Needful Things, Dublin.Donate a Coffee https://ko-fi.com/vicesandvolumesMore info at https://vicesandvolumes.comInstagram https://www.instagram.com/vicesandvolumes/