Introduction

Abstract

This book is concerned with certain events which took place in Britain during one year, 1847. They were an integral part of the Irish Famine tragedy of the eighteen forties, a calamity that has scarred the Irish national psyche through to the present day. Tens of thousands of destitute Irish, men, women and children, poured into British cities and towns, hoping to escape the nightmare being lived by a significant proportion of the population of Ireland. This influx of refugees took place at a time when the urban squalor in Britain was assuming crisis proportions. Far from Britain proving a haven, for many Irish, the experience of the British slums was a continuation of the horrors being endured in Ireland. In the Registrar General’s report for 1847, Liverpool was described as ‘the cemetery of Ireland’. It is the story of these famine refugees which forms the substantive content of this study.