Introduction

Among the witnesses who gave evidence to the Whately Poor Inquiry in Dublin city were two policemen: Chief Constables Michael Farrell and Henry Gilbert Goodison. Both were senior and experienced officers, Farrell having served in that position for the previous 26 years, while Goodison had been based in the College Street police division for more than a decade. When asked to provide estimates as to the number of mendicants in Dublin city, however, these two men gave strikingly disparate figures. Farrell divided the beggars into four categories: approximately 100, excluding their children, who resorted to begging from genuine destitution, ‘whose very manner of begging, look and dress bespeak them at once to be objects of real charity, so that he [Farrell] cannot himself refrain from giving them alms in the streets’; 500 regular beggars, including children; 500 who lived on the outskirts of the city and begged in surrounding villages; and 100 who were ‘strangers passing through’. Farrell's figures gave a total of 1,200 mendicants in Dublin city. Goodison's estimate, however, put the figure at closer to 8,000 ‘beggars … using the word in its widest significance, including men, women, their children, and orphans’. The significance here lies in the gap – a sixfold variance – in estimates. We may assume the two senior officers shared an intimate knowledge of the city's streets and a first-hand appreciation of the extent of visible poverty and mendicancy. The disparity in their estimates, therefore, must be explained by these two individuals’ different definitions of what constituted a ‘beggar’, the term used by both men. Farrell drew upon some manner of rudimentary categorisation, while Goodison decided to interpret the word ‘beggar’ in broader terms. This example illuminates an inherent challenge when discussing beggars and begging. As already discussed, definitions of what constituted begging and beggars were never precise, with outright solicitation constituting just one of the ‘pauper professions’ which prevailed in the ‘economy of makeshifts’. The Poor Inquiry commissioners in Macroom, County Cork observed that ‘It is scarcely possible to form anything like an accurate notion of the number of persons who beg. There are some who live entirely by begging, and some beg only at particular seasons’. The difficulty in defining begging and beggars shaped contemporary attempts to measure the extent of the problem, a significant feature of the discourse surrounding poverty and the Poor Laws in pre-Famine Ireland.