INTRODUCTION

Geographical studies of nineteenth-century Irish urban centres have been dominated by concern with morphology and the built fabric, with attempts to reconstruct the social geography of individual towns and cities heavily dependent on property valuation records, health and housing reports (Royle, 1991; Martin 1988; Aalen, 1992; McCullough, 1989). The compilation of topographical information, most notably in the Irish Historic Towns Atlas series, provides a firm foundation on which to build geographical studies, but the lack of census data at the household level prior to 1901, such as is available for most British cities in the form of census enumerators' books, greatly hinders the follow-through stage of effectively ‘peopling the [Irish] past’ (Lawton, 1987). The search for alternate city-wide sources which provide detail on all residents, rather than on the property they occupy, is still in its infancy. In terms of mobility, recent nineteenth-century research has concentrated on Irish overseas migration flows rather than on movements within Ireland, with the exodus precipitated by the famine holocaust (1845–c.1851) understandably dominating the discussion (McKay, 1990; O'Sullivan, 1995). The experience of the overseas Irish in such places as Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and York has also received some very close attention, but such studies cannot be replicated in Ireland in the absence of household census data (Letford and Pooley, 1995; Busteed and Hodgson, 1994; Large, 1985; Finnegan, 1982; Swift and Gilley, 1999). Against this background, a gender perspective on geographical mobility in nineteenth-century Dublin is practically non-existent.