Book Review: An Irishman's Life on the Caribbean Island of St Vincent, 1787–90: The Letter Book of Attorney General Michael Keane by Mark S. Quintanilla (ed)

Abstract

as the Irish Party tightened its grip and forced the Corporation into a nationalist echo chamber. At the end of the century, Dublin was known for its appalling public health record, and hadn’t even begun to address the problem of overcrowded tenement housing. No systematic analysis of the social makeup of the membership of the Corporation is offered by Murphy, but it is clear that as the century progressed, big businessmen and merchants were gradually replaced by small retailers and publicans. This was partly because of the flight of Protestants to the townships, where they managed their own localities, leaving the city centre struggling financially. The interplay between the Corporation and the townships and other important urban institutions such as the ballast board and the Chamber of Commerce deserves a more in-depth analysis. The book would also have benefited from a more robust discussion of the relationship between different urban social classes. While Murphy feels that Corporation politics offered a window onto ‘a myriad of social and economic issues’, many of these wider issues receive only limited attention in this book (p. 12). The suppression of a nascent working class politics by a nationalist agenda and the fact that nineteenth-century Dublin lacked a civic vision and pride, in stark contrast to the progressive and far-sighted Belfast Corporation, are among the themes that Murphy touches on but does not develop. Thus arguments can feel tentative, not helped by the fact that the book lacks a conclusion that would have helped to draw some of these issues out. However, the book succeeds on its own terms and provides a fascinating insight into a group and their preoccupations which, as Murphy ably outlines, was a microcosm of the political issues that exercised nineteenth-century Ireland. Overall, it is a welcome addition to Irish urban historiography.