From Pre-Industrial Crowd to Revolutionary Underground: Dublin’ s Street Politics, 1759–97

Abstract

Dublin’s radical and popular politics represent a special case in the history of the 1790s, and the peculiarities of their development before then merit extended treatment. Despite much exciting and important work on urban riots and crowds in other countries, notably the studies of eighteenth-century Paris and London pioneered by George Rudé,¹ and in contrast with the attention devoted to rural unrest in Ireland, Dublin’s crowd has been largely ignored. The explanation for this may lie in the perception that these urban disorders were episodic and minor. This was indeed the perception of certain contemporaries. In a clear reference to the Gordon riots, Henry Grattan once asked, ‘What are our riots compared to those of London?’ and supplied the answer, ‘nothing’. At the other end of the political spectrum, Castlereagh’s private secretary, Alexander Knox, made a similar point, expressing ‘both surprise and satisfaction that the Dublin mob of 31 March, 1795, fell short so amazingly, both in violence and in outrage, of the London mob of 2 June, 1780’² More concisely, a modern historian of ‘class conflict’ remarks, ‘Dublin was not Paris’ ³ Although Dublin never witnessed events on the scale of the Gordon riots or the Parisian ‘September massacres’ of 1792, its street politics were nonetheless significant. The same historian acknowledges this when he observes that the 1779 riot probably ‘galvanized Lord North into action’, ‘induc[ing]’ the British cabinet to grant ‘Free Trade’.⁴