Housing

With the redrawing of polities and the shift of power to Westminster following the enactment of the Act of Union in 1801, Dublin's positioning as the second city of the empire was lost by the 1830s.Footnote ²³ Socio-economic decline was accelerated by the movement of elite families from the city centre to London, and the flight to the more healthful suburbs, particularly in the post-Famine era. Even after the extension to the city boundary came into fruition in 1901, the borough comprised 7,911 statute acres. Although a significant increase on the previous 3,733 acres, Dublin remained a small city.Footnote ²⁴ The river Liffey provided the midline boundary between the north and south city wards shown in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1.

Dublin, North and South Wards, Dublin Metropolitan Police stations shown as points, c. 1900. Map based on information derived from the Dublin Metropolitan Police Committee of Inquiry 1883 [C.3576 C.3576-I], p. 25, and Statistical Tables of the Dublin Metropolitan Police for the Year 1901 [Cd. 1166], p. 33, drawn using OSi historic 25-inch basemap © Tailte Éireann/Government of Ireland Copyright Permit No. MP 001023.

Figure 2.

Extract from ‘Map of the city of Dublin and its environs’ (c. 1910) showing North Dock Ward, Mountjoy Ward, railways, tramways and the Royal Canal.

Source: https://collections.library.utoronto.ca/view/mdl:G5784_D7_F7_10_190---191--.

By 1901, NC1E included parts of three district electoral divisions (Inns Quay, Mountjoy and North Dock) and the entire ward was located in the DMP C (Rotunda) Division.Footnote ²⁵ Wards and DMP divisions formed the basis for civil registration and census data collection respectively. From 1864, relatives or institutions were supposed to register births and deaths with the local registrar, who was a dispensary doctor. The ward included two dispensary districts and associated district medical officers of health. The main DMP stations were Summerhill and Store Street, and Mountjoy Prison was adjacent (Figure 1). The ward was intersected by the Royal Canal and the northbound tramlines, while North Wall and Amiens Street railway stations were busy commercial and passenger terminals respectively (Figure 2). Dublin's North Docks dominated the eastern part of NC1E, with its steamship companies, boat maintenance, cattle markets, timber and coal yards, stores and goods sheds. Cranes, lift bridges and turntables were part of the urban fabric of this area and, together with transportation occupations, they increased the level of occupational hazard in predominantly temporary jobs.Footnote ²⁶ O'Casey personified this occupational risk through Irish Nannie's father, whose workplace injuries disabled him. While some locations such as Nottingham Street attracted middle-class merchants and brokers, most inhabitants of NC1E were working class. The western area of NC1E included Mabbot Street, Lower Tyrone Street, Cumberland Street, Birmingham Street and Gloucester Street, notable for their tenements and highly concentrated population.

Employers like Guinness’ Brewery and Jacob's (biscuit) factory provided steady ‘breadwinner’ incomes. But even those employees’ wives kept occasional lodgers to make ends meet until children reached working age.Footnote ²⁷ For families with unsteady incomes, life was precarious and among the inevitable consequences was inferior housing offering rentals at the lowest costs. Cash incomes were spent within a few days, and most households resorted to pawnbrokers on a weekly basis.Footnote ²⁸ Most families pooled their incomes, and child earnings were integral to household survival. Irrespective of the compulsory education age of 14 following the Education (Ireland) Act 1892, the 1902 Commission on Street Trading found 214 boys and 32 girls aged under 14 engaged in paid employment as messengers and in hawking newspapers, fish and fruit.Footnote ²⁹ Girls, predominantly but not exclusively, aged under 14 were undoubtedly tasked with unpaid childcare of younger siblings to enable parents to engage in the workforce.Footnote ³⁰ In the Dublin circuit, education inspectors cited reasons such as poverty and sickness for rates of absenteeism, both of which were enduring features of family life in NC1E.Footnote ³¹

Architecturally, Dublin's northside was dominated by the townhouses of the Gardiner estate, which was constructed in the late eighteenth century and housed some of the city's wealthiest denizens. Jacinta Prunty observes that during the nineteenth century, much of the Gardiner estate was sold to individual bidders on a piecemeal basis.Footnote ³² Unscrupulous landlords, seeking to maximize profits, subdivided these buildings which became overcrowded dwellings for multiple low-status families. The transition from Georgian townhouse to tenement was complete by 1900.

Apart from subdivided townhouses, rows of workers’ cottages were built on NC1E's smaller streets like Oriel and Emerald Street from the 1840s infilling the spaces between arterial roads such as Sherriff Street. By the late 1880s, the ‘semi-philanthropic’ Dublin Artisans' Dwellings Company (DADC) had constructed rows of workers’ cottages in the area around Seville Place,Footnote ³³ but it was not enough to change the overall character of housing. Rental agreements with DADC were generally considered expensive. Appealing to what Murray Fraser described as ‘the elite of the working class’, they were beyond the means of ordinary households.Footnote ³⁴

Exacerbating the sorry state of housing stock was a chronic shortage and relatively high costs: one-room flats in Dublin commanded rent of 3s per week, the same as a three-room house in Belfast.Footnote ³⁵ This gave rise to a range of informal subletting practices. Socially, NC1E contained a highly mobile population of working-class poor who lived predominantly in overcrowded and unsafe tenements. Their mobility was in part prompted by the ad hoc nature of rental agreements, which were predominantly oral. Tenement owners rarely engaged in direct associations with tenants; instead, ‘house farmers’ divided properties into rooms.Footnote ³⁶ For those who could not afford to set up their own households, several lodging and boarding houses of varying standards were in operation.Footnote ³⁷ Single people were often internal migrants and even for those with steady employment, survival was difficult. They rented living space as lodgers or boarders, and if they fell on hard times they could not expect support from non-relatives.

A detailed analysis of death records along with census data suggests a blurred distinction between ‘housekeeper’ and ‘roomkeeper’. Housekeeper can mean women who performed unpaid domestic duties in their own or the homes of others, and roomkeeper indicates women who may have earned a living by keeping lodgers either in their own homes or in sublet rooms. ‘Roomkeeper’ was mentioned repeatedly in the 1878 Public Health Act, but not defined. The act permitted local dictates to assist in its operation, which caused further complications.Footnote ³⁸ According to Dublin Corporation by-laws, a tenement was defined ‘as a house or part of a house…let in lodgings or occupied by members of more than one family’. Roomkeepers, as distinct from ‘lodging house proprietors’, were included in the provisions and defined as people who rented rooms and sublet them for occupational purposes.Footnote ³⁹ Sir Charles Cameron described them as ‘house jobbers’, whom he believed were to blame for rental market fragmentation and price inflation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Under the by-laws, sanitary officers were entitled to inspect housing and roomkeepers were obliged to permit them access.Footnote ⁴¹

Experienced medical officers like Dr Thomas Donnelly, 14 Rutland Square, and Dr John Crinion, 58 Amiens Street, worked together with the local authority sub-sanitary inspectors to try to take dilapidated housing out of usage. Militating against them was the arduous process of getting housing condemned. For example, in the third quarter of 1901 only 25 of 195 houses inspected were condemned and just one building, 19 Gloucester Street Lower. On census night it housed 13 adults.Footnote ⁴² Even after houses were condemned, squatters remained and the destitute poor continued to occupy them.Footnote ⁴³ It was in this ad hoc rental market that commercial sex work proliferated out of public view and evaded prosecution; evidence of this use will be discussed in later sections.

Data and methodology

According to the Annual Reports of the Registrar General (ARRG) for 1901, NC1E contained 28,201 people, living on 674 statute acres, who registered 526 deaths and 694 births that year.Footnote ⁴⁴ By 1911, the population had increased to 29,525 people, but slight decreases are noted in the number of births and deaths (470 and 646, respectively).Footnote ⁴⁵ The nominal index data available on irishgenealogy.ie for deaths occurring in 1901 and 1911 were extracted to enumerate all registered deaths in this ward to examine causal factors. Masters’ level students transcribed the records into an application co-created by the project team.Footnote ⁴⁶ Sorting the final dataset into quarters permitted the inclusion or exclusion of late registrations within their correct calendar year. There was a discrepancy of 10 entries per year for this district when indexed electronic data of the individual level returns were cross-referenced with the ARRG.

Both datasets (General Register Office (GRO)/NC1E/1901, GRO/NC1E/1911) of registered deaths were cleaned prior to analysis. They were sorted by primary cause of death and categorized at a high level in accordance with the prevailing nosology, which prioritized zymotic diseases, diseases of systems and organs and those of various seats.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ontological limitations continue to beleaguer historical epidemiology and whether deaths are ‘of’ or ‘with’ a particular disease is a perennial problem. For example, William Duke, a railway guard, died in 1911 aged 23. The primary cause was exhaustion, but the secondary causes were pneumonia and phthisis.Footnote ⁴⁸ We remained faithful to the record and counted this as exhaustion, but it means underlying conditions may have been under-represented in the aggregated ARRG.

Cause of death data for those who died aged 15–34 in NC1E in 1901 were entered into a spreadsheet with separate fields for names, surnames, house numbers and streets. Street names were standardized; as an extensive programme of renaming occurred post-Independence in 1922, a range of sources were used to match historical street names to their current identities.Footnote ⁴⁹ The geographic co-ordinates of their centre-points were identified using open data from logainm.ie (an Irish government platform) for extant streets. The information was then uploaded to ArcGIS online and place of death data was represented by points. Pop-ups were configured on these points to include further information extracted from death records and links to the 1901 census.

With this approach, it was possible to discern a hierarchy of occupations and associated living conditions. Families occupying the lowest standards of housing were often reliant on supplementary income from boarders. This led to overcrowding and greater risks with respect to contagious diseases. Given the shortage of housing and the tendency towards overcrowding, single women as sole occupant households naturally emerged as unusual.

Cause of death, life stage, occupation and gender

Hyper-localized studies are often criticized as being unrepresentative of the whole. But detailed analyses of areas like Monto can cast light on alterity and how the economy of makeshifts affected life expectancy. Dublin had a comprehensive system of dispensaries and hospital care, and data for Dublin North Superintendent Registrar's District shows that 64 per cent of deaths occurred in a domestic setting.Footnote ⁵⁰ All deaths registered in NC1E in 1901 took place at home, because the nearest workhouses, hospitals and asylums were located elsewhere. Of these registered domestic deaths, 90 per cent were certified by a local physician, 7 per cent were uncertified and 3 per cent related to inquests.

In 1901, the total population of NC1E was 28,201 individuals. This was a young population with limited life expectancy (Figure 3). Figure 4 indicates high infant and child mortality rates in NC1E with over 30 per cent of deaths in 1901 and 1911 relating to infants. The death rate declined significantly after the age of 5, so the number of young adults who died in the study years of 1901 and 1911 is relatively low (62 in 1901; 42 in 1911). In 1901, 5,516 males and 5,563 females aged 15 and under 35 were resident in NC1E (total 11,079); in 1911, similar figures of 5,413 females and 5,641 males (total 11,054) were returned.Footnote ⁵¹

Figure 3.

Population of NC1E by age and sex, 1901

Source: Census of Ireland 1901, Part 1, Vol. 1, Province of Leinster (London, 1901), Table XV, Ages of persons in Poor Law Unions and Dispensary Districts in the city or county borough of Dublin, 31 March 1901, p. 13.

Figure 4.

Age at death as a percentage of total deaths in NC1E, 1901 and 1911.

Source: Analysis of civil registration of death data 1901 and 1911.

Figure 5 breaks down cause of death data for the 15–34 cohort. Pulmonary tuberculosis was rampant, representing 86 per cent of all respiratory deaths (37 people) as compared to 56 per cent of all deaths in NC1E in 1901. This doubling coincides with what was considered a peak in Irish mortality from the disease, but it could equally reflect a more precise cause of death identification. Despite an increase in population, in 1911 a lower number of deaths (42) was reported and 45 per cent were from respiratory diseases. Among the 14 deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis was Cornelius Twohig, a 32-year-old accountant. Born in Cork, and married to a solicitor's daughter, he was a member of the professional classes living in Nottingham Street.Footnote ⁵² Infectious droplet diseases did not differentiate between social class, but mapping data allows patterns to be discerned. Individual deaths from Figure 4 were plotted as point data into a GIS and a heatmap was created for each year (Figures 6 and 7). In 1901, the density of deaths from respiratory diseases focused on three main areas: Sheriff Street and Mayor Street to the south of Figure 6, the Ballybough Road area to the north and a cluster of streets, namely Gloucester, Mabbot and Tyrone Streets, to the west. By 1911, the greatest density of respiratory deaths was focused on Ballybough Road, an area notorious for its poor tenement buildings.

Figure 5.

Cause of death – men and women aged 15–34, NC1E, 1901 and 1911.

Source: Analysis of civil registration of death data 1901 and 1911.

Figure 6.

Heatmap of deaths from respiratory disease, 15–34 age cohort, 1901.

Source: Analysis of civil registration of death data 1901. Map created using OSi historic 25-inch basemap © Tailte Éireann/Government of Ireland Copyright Permit No. MP 001023.

Figure 7.

Heatmap of deaths from respiratory disease, 15–34 age cohort, 1911.

Source: Analysis of civil registration of death data 1911. Map created using OSi historic 25-inch basemap © Tailte Éireann/Government of Ireland Copyright Permit No. MP 001023.

Occupation

Where data from death records can be matched with census returns, the occupational information can provide insights into the socio-economic status of individuals and households. Many of the unskilled workers who lived in the NC1E community were precariously employed. Cross-referencing deaths occurring in 1901 and 1911 with census records from the same years clearly shows the temporary nature of this community's work. Despite the temporal proximity, it can be hard to match addresses in both datasets because people moved around so much. Descriptions of individual employment history often indicate a highly volatile labour market: 17-year-old Patrick Doherty, who died after suffering from phthisis for one year and influenza for three weeks, was unemployed at the time of the census,Footnote ⁵³ but described as a labourer in his death record four months later.Footnote ⁵⁴ Labourer was an umbrella term for the unskilled, and it is unlikely he was working in his final stage of illness. But his family along with the registrar noted his ‘usual’ occupation to articulate respectability in death.

The 1901 census divided occupations into six main classes: professional, domestic, commercial, agricultural, industrial and indefinite/non-productive.Footnote ⁵⁵ Death data for the 15–34 cohort in NC1E in both 1901 and 1911 was extracted and organized into these classes (Table 1). A high proportion of deaths occurred among those of indefinite employment (27 per cent in 1901; 38 per cent in 1911). Most employed people came from the industrial class, both in 1901 (40 per cent) and 1911 (29 per cent), which included lodging house keepers, printworkers, factory girls, shop assistants and general labourers. The next largest category was the commercial class which lay at 27 per cent in 1901 and 19 per cent in 1911. This included office workers and those involved in the lower end of the transportation of goods, such as porters, drivers and sailors.

Table 1.

Breakdown of NC1E death data of 15–34 age cohort by occupational class, 1901 and 1911

Source: Analysis of 1901 and 1911 census of Ireland, occupational tables.

The indefinite/non-productive category allowed enumerators much discretion and this is where the makeshift economy can be found. Married women with no occupation were included in this category, as well as children. All married women who died in NC1E in 1901 were described either in terms of their husband's occupation (‘wife of civil servant’) or as ‘housekeeper’, so were classified under indefinite/non-productive (class VI). Of the 11 married women who died in NC1E in 1911, all but 3 were described as ‘housekeeper’, the others being a ‘roomkeeper’, ‘wife of brushmaker’ and ‘tailoress’. Though sub-categories are included in census reports, the remaining data are still problematic and benefit from further breakdown. For example, keepers of board and lodging houses are categorized as Class V (industrial) but the occupational overlap with roomkeeping is undeniable (we include roomkeeping in Class V). Given its association with wives of men with steady incomes, housekeeping is more appropriately placed into indefinite Class VI. The census enumerators, who were members of the DMP, acted on their own discretion, and even a cursory feminist approach to the data shows it was skewed in favour of the male breadwinner model.Footnote ⁵⁶ Household work, the care and keeping of lodgers (apart from roomkeepers) and part-time work were generally under-represented. Equally, the term ‘launderer/laundress’ is problematic, indicating both the self-employed and women within reform systems like Catherine Boothman and Anne Josephine Dunne who both died at the Magdalen Asylum on Gloucester Road in 1911.Footnote ⁵⁷ Catherine was resident at the same Magdalen Asylum in 1901, aged 22. While she may not have been an inmate for the entire ten-year period, her reliance on that institution has a resonance of being from the ‘unfortunate’ class.Footnote ⁵⁸

In 1901, 120 women aged between 15 and 93 died in NC1E, 14 were described in relation to their husbands’ occupation. Of the remaining 106 women, 48 per cent were described as ‘housekeeper’, 16 per cent as ‘roomkeeper’ and 11 per cent as ‘lady’. Most of the latter group died at St Joseph's, Portland Row, an asylum run by a Catholic religious order of women for ‘aged single females of unblemished character’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In contrast with the 109 women residing in St Joseph's in 1901, 79 were enumerated in the nearby St Mary's Penitent's Retreat on 95 Lower Gloucester Street, as the Magdalen Asylum was then known.Footnote ⁶⁰ Bridget Campion illustrates the fluidity between Monto and St Mary's. She was resident at St Mary's on census night, but a prostitute from 7 Faithful Place according to her GRO death certification in November 1901.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1911, 133 women from NC1E aged between 15 and 92 died; 41 per cent were described as ‘housekeeper’ and 19 per cent as ‘roomkeeper’. The proportion described as ‘lady’ remained stable at 11 per cent, 135 women were resident in St Mary's.Footnote ⁶² Kathleen Walsh who accidentally drowned after falling into the river Liffey was described as a ‘brushmaker's wife’.Footnote ⁶³

Figure 8 shows all deaths within the 15–34 cohorts in NC1E in 1901. In line with the census reports, these are subdivided into five-year segments (15–19, 20–4, 25–9 and 30–4), each represented by a different shaped point. This enables the relationship between life stage, skills, occupational opportunities and progression through the labour market to be traced. Young people were expected to contribute to the household economy through paid and unpaid labour. In 1901, 15-year-old Mary Hennessy moved from Dundalk to live in the Upper Buckingham Street tenements. She had no occupation according to the 1901 census, but because both parents worked (father as a bell fitter and mother as a dressmaker) and had no family nearby, it is likely that Mary cared for her three younger siblings. She was found drowned in the Royal Canal. Although her inquest verdict was open, her father in evidence at the coroner's court stated his belief that it was a suicide case owing to melancholia surrounding her menstrual cycle.Footnote ⁶⁴

Figure 8.

Deaths in NC1E, 1901, by age cohort.

Source: Analysis of civil registration of death data 1901. Map created using OSi historic 25-inch basemap © Tailte Éireann/Government of Ireland Copyright Permit No. MP 001023.

The progression from unpaid to paid employment is reflected in the use of ‘boy’, ‘girl’ and ‘apprentice’ in occupational titles of the 15–19 cohort. As a compositor's apprentice, 16-year-old Walter Carraher, who died from acute pulmonary tuberculosis, was learning typesetting skills in the printworks. In 1901, only one of the six NC1E women who died aged 25–9 years was married, reflecting the countrywide trend of later marriage age. Margaret Mansfield's husband was a civil servant and their household adhered to the middle-class breadwinner model where a wife's role was associated with domestic duties.Footnote ⁶⁵ By contrast, all single women in the 25–9 cohort had an occupation, whether dressmaker, housekeeper, post office assistant, prostitute or shop assistant. In 1901, all but one of the 30–4 cohort were married or widowed. Four were described in relation to their husbands’ work: coach painter, insurance agent, policeman and carpenter. This suggests they did not work full time; their husbands would have been considered skilled and artisanal workers straddling the upper working and lower middle class.

‘Respectable’ single and Dublin-born women usually lived with their families while the linked data for NC1E shows prostitutes were more likely to be living as lodgers or boarders. In her analysis of Nannie's Night Out, José Lanters notes that absence of a ‘paternal or marital surname’ indicated Nannie's loose kinship bonds.Footnote ⁶⁶ Co-residence with family of origin not only made financial sense, it offered young women respectability and a protective structure in accordance with prevailing morals: Anne Martin, a shop assistant, lived with her dairy proprietor father, her mother and three siblings;Footnote ⁶⁷ Christina McDermott lived with her widowed father, sister and aunt; and Alice Gorman, a widowed dressmaker, lived with her widowed mother.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the absence of immediate family, wider kinship bonds were important. Louisa Colhoun, a 29-year-old ‘roomkeeper’, died of pulmonary tuberculosis and a miscarriage at five months at her residence in Ballybough Road in February 1911. By April 1911, her mother, widower and three children had formed a household and were living as boarders in the home of a naturalist and his family, a distant relative of her mother's.Footnote ⁶⁹ Women who resided in St Joseph's or the Magdalen Asylum were invariably without the comfort of relatives. Sex work was well beyond the realms of respectability for the middle classes, but in lower socio-economic groups, where it was very easy to slip down the ranks, judgment was reserved.

Prostitution in NC1E

Police were central to the labelling of women in lower socio-economic groups primarily in life but also in death. Women do not self-identify in the 1901 or the 1911 census as prostitutes, rather they are described as such by DMP officers, who were also instrumental in how they were categorized in the petty courts and the carceral system. DMP surveillance maintained a careful balance of policing by consent and good community relations.Footnote ⁷¹ It is unclear if police played a direct part in the city's commercial sex industry, as there is little evidence of extortion or bribery but complicity is implied as several prostitutes were allowed, as Walkovitz found, ‘to ply their trade as long as they were not public nuisances’.Footnote ⁷² Like the fictionalized ‘Irish Nannie’, those who fell foul of local DMP officers were caught in the arrest and release cycle, as the case of Henrietta Tully illustrates (Table 2).

Table 2.

Henrietta Tully's imprisonment in Grangegorman and Mountjoy

Sources: National Archives of Ireland (NAI)/PRIS/1/9/36, General register, Grangegorman Female Prison (1892), no. 194; NAI/PRIS/1/9/39, General register, Grangegorman Female Prison (1896), no. 3,710 (1897) nos. 160, 672, 1695, 1948, 3363; NAI/PRIS/1/11/33, General register of female prisoners, Mountjoy, Dublin (1899), nos. 861, 2995; NAI/PRIS/1/44/01, General register of female prisoners, Mountjoy, Dublin (1899–1900), nos. 2,400, 3022, 5019, 5,425; NAI/PRIS/1/44/02, General register of female prisoners, Mountjoy, Dublin (1901–02), nos. 1,925, 3061, 5,182, 5438.

Were the manuscript census returns to be taken at face value, then, all but one (Maggie Maynes, the sole occupant and head of a household in County Antrim) of the 211 women returned as prostitutes in 1901, and all 160 returned in 1911, were incarcerated in prisons or asylums on census night.Footnote ⁷³ Maria Luddy offers advice on euphemistic language use and argues that sex workers were betrayed by location.Footnote ⁷⁴ She speculates that Catherine Gordon, listed in the 1901 census as a ‘housekeeper’ and living at 4 Elliot Place with three other housekeepers, was a prostitute.Footnote ⁷⁵ Since the publication of Luddy's book, the manuscript census returns have been digitized and placed online, which allows for greater interrogation and cross-referencing with prison, workhouse and other datasets.

Key identifiers of prostitution in the census are households with female heads or sole occupancy, coupled with street name, age and certain occupations. Data from the census was sorted by relationship to head, sex and marital status in order to identify single women who were household heads. Sole occupants and women living with non-relatives (particularly other single women) were included in the analysis. Figure 9 shows the locations on Purdon Street of 18 households (in eight houses) headed by single women (their sex was omitted from the census, but all names were female). The figure includes women described as housekeepers or descriptors like ‘proprietor’ used to describe Lilly/Lillie O'Connor of 7.4 Purdon Street. Few single-occupancy male households exist in NC1E, suggesting that male prostitutes were located elsewhere in Dublin.

Figure 9.

Households in Purdon Street tenements headed by single women, 1901.

Source: Analysis of 1901 census of Ireland.

When enumerating the census, some DMP officers offered female prostitutes a veneer of respectability by using known occupational euphemisms: Jane Halpin, and her five ‘lodgers’, were all described as ‘unfortunate’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Two of her fellow housemates, Limerick-born Nellie Mitchell and Nellie Maher, are definitely labelled ‘prostitutes’ in the prison registers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Equally implausible was the descriptor of ‘scholar’ for Emily Mack and the five other women aged between 23 and 32 she lodged with at 15 Elliott Place.Footnote ⁷⁸

GRO returns sometimes offer ways of identifying women classified by the DMP as prostitutes, pinpointing their addresses so their networks can be mapped. They can be systematically matched with coronial court, petty session and prison records, which bring into focus the highly subjective way in which the term was employed. There is no mention of prostitute in the GRO/NC1E/1911 dataset but three women were returned as such in GRO/NC1E/1901; Mary Sweeney, Mary Barrett and Bridget Campion, aged 38, 21 and 25 respectively (Figure 10).Footnote ⁷⁹ All three were coroner's cases and their lives were subjected to intense scrutiny.Footnote ⁸⁰ The fact they were not recorded as prostitutes in the census raises the prospect that deaths of both male and female sex workers who died of certified natural causation may have been returned by the local registrar under different categories such as domestic service or room-keeping. Discussed in greater detail by Ciara Breathnach elsewhere, they merit a brief outline here: Barrett's death was accidental; she died at Jervis Street Hospital two days after receiving burns from pouring paraffin oil on a fire at 28 Lower Tyrone Street.Footnote ⁸¹ ‘Cardiac failure syncope’ was Sweeney's registered cause of death at 61 Montgomery Street in February 1901. The full verdict was that she died of ‘cardiac failure due to extensive tuberculosis with disease of the liver’.Footnote ⁸² Echoes of distrust in medico-legal authority permeate the testimony of witnesses: Sweeney had been ‘complaining of her chest’ for 18 months, but refused to see a doctor.

Figure 10.

Location of the three women described as prostitutes in 1901 NC1E death records.

Source: Analysis of civil registration of death data 1901 and 1901 census of Ireland. Map created using OSi historic 25-inch basemap © Tailte Éireann/Government of Ireland Copyright Permit No. MP 001023.

That O'Casey's protagonist, 30-year-old Nannie, died because of excessive consumption of industrial alcohol was based on kernels of truth. Prosecutions for dealing ‘meths’ became a more publicized issue in the 1920s. But deaths arising from the consumption of spirits of unknown alcohol proof was certainly an issue in earlier decades.Footnote ⁸³ Some clues to the consumption of industrial strength alcohol can be found in the coroner's records: for example, Bridget Campion's death due to ‘cardiac failure from excessive drinking’. It is not implausible that her death was caused by what she consumed.

Both Sweeney's and Campion's deaths concern aspects of what may be considered the occupational hazards of the spatial epidemiology of Monto and its heavy drinking culture. For example, in 1901, 247 cases of keeping or selling alcohol without a licence were brought against 49 men and 193 women, 50 of the 150 cases brought against licensed premises were in the DMP C (Rotunda) Division and 1,402 of the 4,829 cases in the ‘other than licensed premises’ category.Footnote ⁸⁴ Finding crimes associated with illicit sale of porter is contingent on a newspaper report of the proceedings of Northern Police Court or a prosecution and imprisonment leading to an entry in the prison registers. Table 2 shows that 6 Faithful Place operated as a shebeen, as well as a brothel. Contradictory evidence was given at Campion's inquest: that she worked at 6 Faithful Place, a house ‘occupied’ by Henrietta Tully. Tully testified that she had been employed as a servant since 26 October and was previously employed in Miss Rice's Laundry, Blackhall Street. Further research shows that 6 Faithful Place was at the time an unoccupied house, and 7 Faithful Place was a private dwelling occupied by Ellen Walsh and her husband Patrick, but 2 Faithful Place was occupied by Henrietta Tully, who was also a prostitute (Table 2). The numbering system used in the census can be at variance with that used in other official records, so it is likely that this is a prostitute testifying for another prostitute. Servanthood in its occupational broadness was often used as a respectability indicator for unmarried women, and gave Tully an opportunity to afford Campion this dignity in death.