True crime: why the Irish counterfeiting wave of the late 18th century was a myth
The claim that immigrants or minorities are more criminal than the general population is a common trope. From Donald Trump’s claim that Mexicans in the US were ...
Category: Irish London
Were the Irish in 19th century London more criminal, or just easier to catch?
The early nineteenth-century Irish in London are often remembered as poor, semi-criminal slum dwellers, associated with the narrow streets of St. Giles-in-the-F...
Unintentional Migrants to London
This is the slightly-altered text of the paper I delivered at the British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS) conference in Oxford, January 2017. I’d ...
Irish Vagrant ≠ Scottish Vagrant
Scotland and Ireland were both far away from London as far as eighteenth century travellers were concerned. For the Irish, getting to London involved a dangerou...
The Most Catholic Street in England?
If you’ve ever studied the Irish in eighteenth or nineteenth-century London, you’ve probably quickly learned that they were clustered in the Rookery...
Irish Peg: Acceptance through Nicknames
This is ‘Irish Peg in a rage’.[1] As you can see, the Macaroni in the red jacket has carelessly tipped her beer mug and has understandably been conf...