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‘The experimental non-experimental committee’: governing the workhouse in late-eighteenth-century Dublin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2025
Abstract
This article examines the Dublin House of Industry in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Established in 1773, the House of Industry was part of an effort to launch a nationwide system of workhouses and something like a poor law system for Ireland. By the 1790s however, there was a shift from the paternalistic governance of the founders of the house to a new way of managing the relief of the poor within the institution. During this decade, there emerged a new board of governors who adopted a supposed ‘scientific’ approach to philanthropy. Influenced by the ideas of such workhouse reformers as Count Rumford in Munich, the new governors attempted to enact a sweeping series of changes to transform life in the workhouse along ‘oeconomical’ lines. It argues that these transformations reflected broader patterns of social change in the capital, as well as shifts in attitudes to poor relief more generally.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd
References
1 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1797, 190.
2 Minutes of the proceedings of the acting governors of the House of Industry, 1797 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/6, 43–44).
3 Timothy D. Watt, Popular protest and policing in ascendancy Ireland, 1691–1761 (Woodbridge, 2018), 140.
4 Freeman’s Journal, 27 Mar. 1777.
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7 Timothy Murtagh, Irish artisans and radical politics, 1776–1820: apprenticeship to revolution (Liverpool, 2022), 62; David Dickson, The first Irish cities: an eighteenth-century transformation (New Haven, 2021), 262.
8 Commons jn. Ire. (2nd ed.), xvii, 39.
9 For Limerick, see Pauper Limerick: the register of the Limerick House of Industry, 1774–1793, ed. D. A. Fleming and John Logan (IMC, Dublin, 2011). For the Belfast workhouse, see Robert William Magill Strain, Belfast and its Charitable Society: a story of urban social development (Oxford, 1961); The first great charity of this town: Belfast Charitable Society and its role in the developing city, ed. Olwen Purdue (Dublin, 2022).
10 See, for example, the long report in 1778: Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), ix, appendix, dclxxiv–dcxcvii.
11 Padhraig Higgins, ‘The chimney doctor at Channel Row: Benjamin Thompson’s experiments in poor relief in the 1790s’ in Speculative minds in Georgian Ireland: novelty, experiment and widening horizons, ed. Toby Barnard and Alison Fitzgerald (Dublin, 2023), 182–203.
12 Richard Butler, Building the Irish courthouse and prison: a political history, 1750–1850 (Cork, 2020), p. xxvii.
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14 James Kelly, ‘Scarcity and poor relief in eighteenth-century Ireland: the subsistence crisis of 1782–4’, Irish Historical Studies, xxviii (1992), 38–62. Mel Cousins has examined the legislative background of the establishment of houses of industry in the 1770s, but he does not explore how the workhouses operated, while Karen Sonnelitter in her recent study of charity movements only briefly focusses on the Dublin House of Industry: Mel Cousins, ‘The Irish parliament and relief of the poor: the 1772 legislation establishing houses of industry’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, xxviii (2013), 95–115; Karen Sonnelitter, Charity movements in eighteenth-century Ireland: philanthropy and improvement (Woodbridge, 2016), 163–8; Pauper Limerick, ed. Fleming & Logan.
15 For older, but still useful, accounts of the eighteenth-century workhouse, see J. D. H. Widdess, The Richmond, Whitworth and Hardwicke Hospitals: St. Laurences’s, Dublin 1772–1972 (Dublin, 1972), 9–21; Strain, Belfast and its Charitable Society. See recently Katherine Fennelly, ‘The institution and the city’: the impact of hospitals and workhouses on the development of Dublin’s north inner city, c. 1773–1911’, Urban History, xlvii (2020), 671–88; eadem, ‘The Bedford Asylum: building for the ‘industrious child’ in early-nineteenth-century’, Nineteenth-century childhoods in interdisciplinary and international perspectives, ed. Jane Eva Baxter and Meredith A. B. Ellis (Oxford, 2018), 153–65.
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18 Susannah Ottaway, ‘“A very bad presidente in the house”: workhouse masters, care, and discipline in the eighteenth-century workhouse’, Journal of Social History, liv (2021), 1091–1119.
19 Minute book of the corporation instituted for the relief of the poor and for punishing vagabonds and sturdy beggars in the county of the city of Dublin, 1 Jan. 1781 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/4, 151).
20 David Dickson, ‘In search of the old Irish poor law’ in Economy and society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500–1939, ed. Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck (Edinburgh, 1988), 149–59.
21 Irish political writings after 1725: A Modest Proposal and other works, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. David W. Hayton and Adam Rounce (Cambridge, 2018), pp lxix–lxxii; Rowena V. Dudley, ‘Dublin’s parishes 1660–1729: the Church of Ireland parishes and their role in the civic administration of the city’ (2 vols, TCD PhD, 1995).
22 Rowena Dudley, ‘The Dublin parishes and the poor: 1660–1740’, Archiv. Hib., liii (1999), 80–94.
23 Toby Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (New Haven, 2004), 319.
24 David Dickson, Dublin: the making of a capital city (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 121.
25 James Kelly, ‘“Horrid” and “infamous” practices: the kidnapping and stripping of children, c.1730–c.1840’, Irish Historical Studies, xlii (2018), 265–92.
26 Sneddon, ‘State intervention’.
27 Richard Woodward, An argument in support of the right of the poor in the kingdom of Ireland, to a national provision (Dublin, 1772), 11. On Woodward, see James Kelly, ‘Defending the established order: Richard Woodward, bishop of Cloyne (1726–94)’ in People, politics and power: essays on Irish history 1660–1850 in honour of James I. McGuire, ed. James Kelly, John McCafferty and Charles Ivar McGrath (Dublin, 2009), 143–74.
28 Peter Gray, The making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815–43 (Manchester, 2009).
29 Catherine Cox, ‘Health and welfare, 1750–2000’, The Cambridge social history of modern Ireland, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (Cambridge, 2017), 262.
30 Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), xv, appendix, xc.
31 Brendan Twomey, Smithfield and the parish of St Paul, Dublin, 1698–1750 (Dublin, 2005).
32 Dickson, Dublin, 123; Sinéad Gargan, ‘How not to “encourage people to take lotts for building”: the eighteenth-century non-development of Grangegorman by the Monck estate’, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, xviii (2015), 106–29.
33 Diarmuid Ó Gráda, Georgian Dublin: the forces that shaped the city (Cork, 2015), 251, 279
34 An account of the proceedings, and state of the fund of the Corporation instituted for the relief of the poor, and for punishing vagabonds and sturdy beggars in the County of the City of Dublin (Dublin, 1774), 17.
35 Belfast News Letter, 8 Aug. 1806; Gabrielle M. Ashford, ‘Childhood: studies in the history of children in eighteenth-century Ireland’ (DCU, PhD, 2012), 235.
36 On the leasing of adjoining property, see letters from John Hatch to Henry Temple, second viscount Palmerston, 1786–7 (University of Southampton, Broadlands Archives, MS62/BR142/52–58).
37 Saunders’s News-Letter, 19 Dec. 1787.
38 Ibid., 26 Nov. 1787; Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), xvi, appendix, p. cccxcvi.
39 Freeman’s Journal, 30 June 1796.
40 Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), xvii, appendix, p. dxxxii.
41 Thomas McStay Adams, Europe’s welfare traditions since 1500: reform without end (2 vols, London, 2023), ii, 126.
42 Ibid., 170.
43 John Clarke, A concise view of the House of Industry, with respect, principally, to some interesting particulars in the internal state and regulation of it (Dublin, 1791), 13.
44 Henry Kennedy, A few remarks on the affairs of the House of Industry, and on the conduct of some of the present acting governors (Dublin, 1799), 4.
45 George Barnes, Strictures on ‘an account of the proceedings of the acting governors of the House of Industry’ (Dublin, 1798), 28.
46 Kennedy, A few remarks, 3, 8, 11.
47 An account of the proceedings of the governors of the House of Industry in Dublin (Dublin, 1801), 19–20.
48 Mairead Dunleavy, Dress in Ireland (London, 1989), 136–7; Gabrielle M. Ashford, ‘Childhood: studies’, 196–9; Tim Hitchcock, Down and out in eighteenth-century London (London, 2004), 100–02; John Styles, The dress of the people: everyday fashion in eighteenth-century England (New Haven, 2007), 64.
49 An account of the proceedings of the acting governors of the House of Industry for two years (Dublin, 1799), 35.
50 Proceedings (1799), 17. Similar amounts were spent in subsequent years.
51 Minute book of the corporation, 1774 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/2, 267).
52 Ibid., 1773 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/1, 125); Styles, Dress of the people, 261.
53 Ibid., Oct. 1776 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/3, 263).
54 Ibid., Jan. 1776 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/2, 290).
55 Clarke, A concise view, 17.
56 Minutes of the proceedings of the acting governors of the House of Industry, July 1798 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/6, 215).
57 Ibid., July 1798 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/6, 252–3).
58 State of charitable institutions, 77.
59 Thomas Pelham, ‘Extract from a further account of the improvements in the House of Industry in Dublin’, The reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (London, 1799), ii, 154.
60 Thomas Bernard, ‘Extract from an account of the late improvements in the house of industry at Dublin’, Reports, Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, ii, 104.
61 Ibid., 141.
62 Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), ix, appendix, dclxxvii.
63 On the calorific value of English workhouse diets in the eighteenth century, see Tomkins, Experience, 59–60. On Irish workhouse diets before the famine, see L. A. Clarkson and Margaret E. Crawford, Feast and famine: food and nutrition in Ireland, 1500–1920 (Oxford, 2001), 70–75. Clarkson and Crawford mistakenly use London workhouse sources to discuss dietary in the eighteenth-century Dublin workhouse: 62–3.
64 Minute book of the corporation, 1797 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/5, 194–5). This diet was not much different to the general diet of the poor in eighteenth-century Ireland: Juliana Adelman, ‘Food in Ireland since 1740’ in The Cambridge social history, ed. Biagini & Daly, 234. Unlike in English workhouses, no supper was served: minute book of the corporation, Feb. 1774 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/1, 170, 422).
65 Widdess, ‘House of Industry’, 45.
66 Strain, Belfast, 62–3.
67 Minute book of the corporation, Nov. 1773 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/1, 72).
68 Report from the committee on state of charitable institutions (Dublin, 1798), 82.
69 Minute book of the corporation, Mar. 1774 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/1, 222).
70 Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), xvi, appendix, p. dxxxi.
71 Proceedings (1801), 13–15.
72 Pierce Grace, ‘Patronage and health care in eighteenth-century Irish county infirmaries’, Irish Historical Studies, xli (2017), 1–21; Sneddon, ‘State intervention’.
73 Susan Mullaney, ‘“A means of restoring the health and preserving the lives of his majesty’s subjects”: Ireland’s 18th-century national hospital system’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, xxix (2012), 235.
74 Kevin Siena, ‘Contagion, exclusion, and the unique medical world of the eighteenth-century workhouse: London infirmaries in their widest relief’, Medicine and the workhouse, ed. Jonathan Reinarz and Leonard Schwarz (Woodbridge, 2013), 23.
75 Ashford, ‘Childhood’, 218.
76 Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), xv, appendix, xci.
77 For a similar range of ailments on admission to the Limerick workhouse, see Fleming & Logan, Pauper Limerick, pp xxii–xxiv.
78 Minutes of the proceedings of the acting governors of the House of Industry, Feb. 1796 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/7, 62).
79 Minute book of the corporation, Apr. 1778 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/3, 122).
80 Proceedings (1801), 44–5. Of 8,197 inmates admitted to house in 1800, 1,315 died, mostly of fever, according to F. Barker and J. Cheyne, An account of the rise, progress and decline of the fever lately epidemical in Ireland, together with communications from physicians in the provinces, and various official documents (2 vols, Dublin, 1821), ii, 18.
81 Kevin Siena, Rotten bodies: class and contagion in eighteenth-century Britain (New Haven, 2019); Butler, Building the Irish courthouse & prison, 151–2.
82 Proceedings (1801), 40, 38–9.
83 Ibid., 39.
84 Minutes of the proceedings of the acting governors of the House of Industry, Feb. 1796 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/6, 109).
85 Proceedings (1801), 45.
86 A short and impartial statement of facts, relative to the House of Industry (Dublin, 1791), 7, 10, 11.
87 Commons jn. Ire. (3rd ed.), xvii, appendix, dxxxi.
88 Anon, Journal of a tour in Ireland […] performed in August 1804 (www.celt.ucc.ie//published/E800005–004/index.html) (accessed 23 July 2021).
89 Observations on the state and condition of the poor: under the institution, for their relief, in the city of Dublin (Dublin, 1775), 10–11.
90 Minute book of the corporation, Feb. 1796 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/7, 62).
91 Proceedings (1801), 23.
92 State of charitable institutions, 81.
93 Minutes of the proceedings of the acting governors of the House of Industry, Sept. 1798 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/6, 242).
94 Ibid., July 1797 (NAI, PRIV1267/1/6, 43–44).
95 Murtagh, Irish artisans, 78–9.
96 Proceedings (1801), 29–30.
97 Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and police: London charity in the eighteenth century (Princeton, 1989), 139–42.
98 Proceedings (1799), 10.
99 House of Industry-issued halfpenny coin, n.d. [eighteenth century] (British Museum, 1870, 0507.15998).
100 Proceedings (1801), 23, 30.
101 Ibid., 25.
102 Ibid., 30.
103 Proceedings (1799), 32.
104 Proceedings (1801), 34–7.
105 Murtagh, Irish artisans, 62; Dickson, First Irish cities, 212.
106 ‘Report upon vagrancy and mendicity in the city of Dublin’, Appendix to the first report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the Conditions of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, p. 20a, note b, H.C. 1836 [C3 5], xxx, 35.
107 Though, see Henry Joy, ‘Remarks on public charity with an account of the rise, progress and state of charitable foundations in Belfast, 1818’, ed. Jim Smyth, Analecta Hibernica, li (2020), 191–206.
108 Joanna Innes, ‘The state and the poor: eighteenth-century England in European perspective’, Rethinking Leviathan: the eighteenth-century state in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford, 1999), 275.
109 Proceedings (1801), pp 43–4.
110 Report upon certain charitable establishments in Dublin (Dublin, 1809), 39–40.
111 Ibid., 40. McCabe, Begging, 108, 150 provides the best account of the consequences of these changes for Dublin city.
112 Dickson, ‘Old Irish Poor Law’, 156. Further research is required on these institutions and the experience of inmates and patients, but see Fennell, ‘The Bedford Asylum’; Rebecca Sharon Lawlor, ‘Crime in nineteenth-century Ireland: Grangegorman female penitentiary and Richmond male penitentiary, with reference to juveniles and women, 1836–60’ (NUI Maynooth, MA, 2012).
113 See Virginia Crossman, Poverty & the Poor Law in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Liverpool, 2013), 101–38.