I

Richard Butler has recently observed that, along with courthouses, prisons and asylums, workhouses were one of the four types of public buildings that transformed Irish cities and towns between 1750 and 1850.Footnote ¹² The houses of industry in particular remain under-studied as part of the landscape of poor relief and institutional state-funded responses to sickness and disease.Footnote ¹³ While studies have shown the ‘efficacy’ of the Dublin house of industry during moments of distress (such as the subsistence crisis of 1783–4), there has been only cursory attention to the day-to-day operation of this institution.Footnote ¹⁴ There has been surprisingly little analysis of the massive complex of hospitals and asylums that dominated the north-west fringe of Dublin city until recently, especially the early decades of its operation.Footnote ¹⁵ Too often, the house has been seen as a barometer of the Dublin economy in general rather than examined in its own right.

As an overview of early European workhouses notes, these institutions have traditionally been depicted as either ‘disorganised and physically punitive or regimented and psychologically harsh’. Recent historiography cautiously emphasises the benefits of workhouses as sources of refuge and comfort.Footnote ¹⁶ If the nineteenth-century workhouse was intended to deter paupers through a harsh disciplinary regime and the workhouse test, the eighteenth-century workhouse, it is argued, was less intimidating. Such institutions were established for a variety of purposes: to control vagrancy and begging; to reform the morals of the poor; to instil work discipline; or to exert social control.Footnote ¹⁷ Like their counterparts in Europe and the Atlantic world, eighteenth-century Irish workhouses were complex and hybrid institutions.Footnote ¹⁸ The Dublin House of Industry was established as ‘an institution of police as well as charity’, providing relief for all the destitute and ‘deserving poor’ wishing to enter the house, while also taking up vagabonds and sturdy beggars, the ‘undeserving poor’.Footnote ¹⁹ This charge created a tension between severe discipline and the provision of a range of services for the many elderly and sick among the inmate population.

The workhouse was not the only source of support for the Dublin poor. While no national system of poor relief had been established in eighteenth-century Ireland, a patchwork of different forms of relief existed in the capital. Dublin Corporation experimented with various forms of relief for the deserving poor and correction for adult vagrants and beggars.Footnote ²⁰ In 1703, it established a workhouse on James’ Street to promote religious diligence and social subservience among the deserving poor, and to introduce a work ethic in the undeserving.Footnote ²¹ The workhouse provided limited relief for several decades before becoming, by the 1730s, a de facto foundling hospital. At the local level, Church of Ireland parishes provided for the upkeep of the parish poor, with even Catholic residents receiving aid in some parishes.Footnote ²² Several Dublin parishes established small poorhouses and almshouses from the 1670s onwards to accommodate unfortunate parishioners, principally worthy Protestant widows.Footnote ²³ Badging schemes for parish beggars were introduced periodically, while parochial schools were also created, though these were often limited and exclusively Protestant institutions. By the mid eighteenth century, an increase in the pauper population put these structures under strain. The period witnessed a flourishing of voluntary charitable associations, including several hospitals providing medical care for the sick poor. This was, as David Dickson observes, partly a response to the failure of public institutions to cope with the throngs of sick and vagrant poor that arrived in the city during moments of crisis, such as the 1740–41 famine.Footnote ²⁴

The establishment of the Dublin House of Industry and the criminalisation of begging and vagrancy was part of a flurry of legislative activity and urban reform efforts from the 1770s onwards that sought to discipline the culture of the urban poor and to bring order to the streets of the capital. Through the employment of such instruments as the black cart, a vehicle used by the beadles to round up and incarcerate suspected vagrants, there was an emphasis on ‘police’ and on improving the urban landscape to create a more polite environment.Footnote ²⁵ By the same period, as Andrew Sneddon notes, the Protestant middle class and gentry also had begun to express a renewed concern with poverty in Ireland.Footnote ²⁶ In his proposals for a national workhouse system, Richard Woodward, bishop of Cloyne, outlined a hierarchical, paternalistic vision of society, arguing for what he described as the ‘rights of the poor’ to subsistence and the duties of the propertied to provide for them. This was, however, a limited vision of poor relief. Woodward emphasised that these ‘rights’ applied only to those who laboured and not to ‘idle vagrants’.Footnote ²⁷ Debate over the provision of relief to the deserving poor indicated widespread opposition to a model based on the expensive English parish system and a preference for more ad hoc and economical measures.Footnote ²⁸ The enabling legislation passed by parliament in 1772 did not require local grand juries to establish workhouses, meaning that their subsequent construction relied on local enterprise and resources.Footnote ²⁹ It was in this context that local elites in several towns and cities established houses of industry. Initially planned to be self-supporting through a combination of subscriptions, benefactions, parochial collections and inmates’ labour, by 1778, the Dublin House of Industry was already heavily reliant on the annual parliamentary grants that eventually would provide the bulk of its funding.Footnote ³⁰

II

The House of Industry opened its doors in November 1773 in a converted malthouse on Channel Row, a part of the city that already accommodated several other charitable institutions, including the Blue Coat School and an almshouse for widows on Oxmantown Green to the west.Footnote ³¹ There was also a Dominican convent in Channel Row, along with a school popular for the education of the daughters of the Catholic nobility. The structure that dominated the area, however, was the Royal Barracks, which could house up to 4,000 men and 1,000 horses. The presence of the barracks ‘created a new micro-economy in the surrounding district’ enhancing the role of Smithfield, directly south of Channel Row, as a large cattle and hay market.Footnote ³² Efforts in the early eighteenth century to build a fashionable area around Smithfield had foundered, and the area stubbornly resisted gentrification. It was not uncommon for workhouses to be sequestered in morally dubious quarters or in areas that housed other marginal inhabitants. The proximity of the barracks and the markets ensured this area became densely packed with taverns and whiskey shops, while it also came to be associated with prostitution and crime. For example, Diarmuid Ó Gráda notes the large number of taverns around the barracks and characterises Barrack Street as the ‘bargain basement of the sex market’.Footnote ³³

The population of Dublin’s workhouse reflected demographic shifts and economic fluctuations, during a time when a significant influx of migrants from rural areas seeking work in domestic service or construction swelled a local population teetering on the edge of subsistence due to periodic downturns and industrial disputes. By 1776, the number of inmates in the house averaged 516, comprised of a mix of paupers seeking relief and vagrants confined against their will. Seasonal patterns of residency emerged, especially during harsh weather conditions. Initially, the workhouse primarily housed compelled vagrants and beggars, but by the 1780s, there was a shift towards more voluntary admissions, indicating a growing reliance on the institution for short-term relief among the working poor. Special accommodations were made for the elderly poor, who made up one-fifth of the inmates.Footnote ³⁴ Religion also played a significant role, with Catholics outnumbering Protestants three to one, reflecting the city’s changing demographics and the Catholic population’s greater poverty. Women, particularly the elderly and those with children, formed the majority of inmates. By the end of the century, there was also a growing emphasis on specialised care for the rising number of children within the workhouse.Footnote ³⁵

As the population grew and requirements changed, the original malthouse was repurposed in an ad hoc manner to meet the needs of the corporation with space reorganised over time. Governors acquired neighbouring buildings and a complex of structures emerged haphazardly.Footnote ³⁶ By 1787, these facilities were deemed unfit for purpose and proposals were sought for an up-to-date house.Footnote ³⁷ There was a further sense of urgency to minimise the spread of contagious disease in 1788, when ‘gaol fever’ swept through the house resulting in as many as thirty excess deaths per week. By that year, the average population of the house had swelled to 1,540 inmates. The new house was to be a utilitarian structure. Those submitting proposals were to inform the corporation how their estimates could be reduced by ‘dispensing with the ornamental parts of their plans’. There is no evidence of who designed the winning entry, though Richard Johnston, the brother of architect Francis Johnston, was heavily involved in the building of the new workhouse.Footnote ³⁸

In 1791, work began on a purpose-built workhouse, just north of the original buildings, with the goal of establishing a healthier environment, as well as greater discipline, segregation and surveillance of the different classes of inmates. By the time it was completed in 1794, it was much more extensive than the original building, including a dining hall, washhouse, porter’s lodge, officers’ house, work-sheds, stores and rooms for meetings of the corporation. Designed to accommodate 1,600 paupers, numbers in the house quickly outpaced this plan. The old workhouse had offered limited dedicated spaces for the elderly or children; the new structure not only separated the sexes, but provided room for children, as well providing apartments for the elderly detached from the vagrant poor.Footnote ³⁹ In the wake of Rumford’s visit in 1794, further renovations took place, with three large feeding halls constructed in the central courtyard, one specifically reserved for a special ‘class of merit’. The food halls were fitted out with galleries for surveillance so that visitors could ‘inspect the distribution of food and see that order is preserved’.Footnote ⁴⁰

III

As the visit to the house by Rumford suggests, poor relief reformers in Ireland were inspired by the wider current of European philanthropic ideas. In promoting a revived system of workhouses in Ireland during the 1760s and 1770s, Woodward cited English, Dutch and Swiss precedent. His ideas were not dissimilar to ‘older municipal paternalism’ that was expounded by patriots in cities such as Hamburg and Amsterdam during these decades.Footnote ⁴¹ At the same time, reformers such as Rumford were also beginning to critique the paternalist approach and argue that a more scientific approach was key to determining the best modes of poor relief within workhouses.Footnote ⁴² By 1790, the governors of the House of Industry faced similar censure. Commentators denounced the institution’s supposed financial profligacy and its failure to fundamentally alter the degree of begging and vagrancy across the city.

Such criticisms were particularly directed by a faction attending board meetings in the house. In 1791, the formally sedate world of the governor’s board room had become the site of increasing conflict and dispute. John Clarke, a member of the corporation, published a damning account of the ‘incorrigible management’ of the house. A faction within the corporation of the poor, he asserted, had staged a coup and taken control of key committees, eventually establishing a seven-man acting board of governors. In 1796, Thomas Pelham, as MP for Clogher, presented a bill ‘for the better governing and managing the house of industry for the relief of the poor in Dublin’ that essentially formalised this new power structure, creating an elected board of seven acting governors.Footnote ⁴³ During the 1790s, this new guard, in their own publicity material, depicted themselves as reformers interested in improving the house along scientific principles. However, the changes proposed by the governors encountered considerable opposition, and their motives were frequently impugned. Wedded to more traditional modes of philanthropy and implicated by the condemnation of the previous governors of house, those styled the ‘friends of the institution’ were highly disparaging of the new men, dismissing them as ‘jobbers’ intent on controlling the house for their own selfish ends.Footnote ⁴⁴

George Barnes, a barrister and member of the corporation, claimed this group, who he described as ‘the oeconomists’, had attempted to usurp the authority of the traditional leaders of the house such as Woodward and the Presbyterian minister Benjamin McDowell. According to Barnes, this crusading faction had even waited until Woodward was out of the city to hold votes and install their supporters in prominent positions. By this means, they had also taken control of a committee that provided them with de facto control. When the governors established an ‘experimental committee’ in November 1791 to examine ways of reforming the house, Barnes claimed the committee had failed to submit a single report and nicknamed it derisively as ‘the experimental non-experimental committee’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Henry Kennedy, a former member of the board, was equally dismissive of this faction, noting ‘their pretensions to oeconomy, capacity and activity’. Kennedy also implied various degrees of corruption among the governors, suggesting that the surgeons in particular ‘derive emoluments’ and other benefits from their work in the house that should disqualify them from the board.Footnote ⁴⁶

Although dismissed as ‘middle men’, the acting governors were hardly as obscure as critics suggested. Among them were two medical men who had previously been charged with caring for the bodies of the house residents. James Henthorn was a long-time surgeon to the house and secretary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. Francis L’Estrange was president of the same body as well as a surgeon at Mercer’s Hospital. Three of the governors were members of the clergy. Rev. James Horner was chaplain for the debtor’s prison and clergyman at Mary’s Abbey Presbyterian church. William O’Connor was curate’s assistant at St Audeon’s parish church, and Thomas Gamble served as chaplain at Newgate and curate at St Michan’s. There were also two lawyers: Edward Houghton and Henry Talbot Worthington, both commissioners of bankruptcy and sons of men prominent in Dublin business and politics. Benjamin Houghton was a silk manufacturer and central to the running of the House of Industry in the 1770s and 1780s, organising manufacturers in the house and becoming the target of attacks from the mob for his diligence in taking up beggars from the street. William Worthington was a merchant and alderman, and lord mayor of Dublin in 1795–6. Embracing the characterisation of their detractors, these men claimed that previous governors, upon finding that ‘their well-meaning measures produce no correspondent good effects’, had left ‘the business of practical improvement to those middle men who are in immediate contact with the poor’.Footnote ⁴⁷ While all had to varying degrees previously participated in the philanthropic culture of the city, none are known to have committed their ideas on poor relief reform to print. But now, in their committee reports, they set about outlining a scientific vision of philanthropy, critical of traditional modes of philanthropy that relied on the benevolence and munificence of the elite. After seizing power in the house, they attempted to put these ideas into practice.

IV

The new governors instituted a variety of changes, but for the inmates transformations in the provision of clothing and food, along with novel approaches to the organisation of work and space, were the most consequential. On entering the house, the poor could gain access to clean clothing, especially clean linens. A lack of clean linen and the ‘raggedness’ of clothing were regarded as key distinguishing marks of real poverty.Footnote ⁴⁸ Cleanliness in the complex array of linen undergarments worn by ordinary men and women in the eighteenth century was a mark of respectability. The homeless poor, described as ‘those squalid and ragged beings’, clearly could not maintain such appearances.Footnote ⁴⁹ Many sold or pawned items of clothing in times of need. In 1774, according to the governors, of those requesting entry to the house, ‘by far the greater part of them were destitute of necessary cloathing, and all, without exception, dirty and offensive’. However, since admittance, these ‘objects who were taken in being almost naked’ had received sufficient clothing, with £265 18s. 9d. spent on clothes that year.Footnote ⁵⁰ A committee was established to examine the clothing needs of the institution. Their first report emphasised the poor clothing and raggedness of many entering the house, concluding that clothing should be given to those ‘as are able to labor but now confined to their beds for want of cloathing’.Footnote ⁵¹ The inmates’ clothing was hardly extravagant, consisting of ‘coarse brown linen’ which was cheap, plain and unbleached, unlike the white linen that was a sign of cleanliness.Footnote ⁵² In October 1776, the house invested in 1,500 yards of linen cloth, ‘so that each person should have a clean shift or shirt each week’.Footnote ⁵³ Inmates ‘who are in real want of them’ were also supplied with stockings and shoes, essential items for demanding forms of labour.Footnote ⁵⁴

Despite the rudimentary quality of the clothing, the governors complained there was ‘a traffic for cloaths’ outside and within the institution. One observer claimed that ‘shoes were no sooner received than sold in the house’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Clothing was increasingly stolen and smuggled out by both inmates and staff.Footnote ⁵⁶ This occurred so frequently that the governors were required to issue an address to the pawnbrokers of the city noting inmates had been ‘repeatedly detected pledging articles of dress and furniture belonging to the institution’. Anyone offering articles of clothing ‘marked with the brand of the house’, they advised, should be taken into custody and handed over to the beadles.Footnote ⁵⁷ The same year, the governors observed that ‘giving cloaths indiscriminately to the poor, relaxed their industry … such cloaths not being their own property, were neither valued nor preserved but generally commuted for spiritous liquors’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In response to such issues, the governors became noticeably more frugal in the provision of clothing to inmates, linking the provision of clothing to the performance of labour. Thomas Pelham, during a visit to the house in 1797, observed that ‘the adult poor have no clothing, but such as they procure by their industry’.Footnote ⁵⁹ This not only encouraged labour but would also deter inmates who ‘often made away with part of their clothes’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In part, this change was based on concerns about the theft and sale of clothing and the rising costs of running the house, as the number of inmates continued to grow. It was also driven by a conviction among the governors that inmates could learn habits of industry and ‘a taste for the comforts of life’ by making or earning their own clothing.Footnote ⁶¹

The provision of food was also central to inmates’ daily routine. Like clean clothing, nourishing food was initially seen as an important draw to paupers entering the house. It was by far the greatest expenditure of the institution and was fundamental to the delivery of adequate care. On the opening of the house, the governors claimed they offered a more than adequate diet ‘in order to tempt the real objects of charity to enter into the house’.Footnote ⁶² The diet was monotonous if, on the face of things, relatively nutritious.Footnote ⁶³ Inmates were provided with breakfast and dinner each day. ‘Industrious’ adults received a daily breakfast of one quart of ‘thick oatmeal pottage’ and a pint of buttermilk. Dinner in general offered more variety, including twelve ounces of bread and a pint of beer most days, with potatoes, herrings, oatmeal with leeks, pea soup with ginger, and broth served on other days. Beef (‘one pound in weight when raw, without the bone’) was prepared on Sundays, while there were often seasonal variations. Similar meals were provided to the other classes within the house, including the elderly, the infirm and children, though in less generous quantities, while inmates engaged in more strenuous forms of labour received more substantial meals.Footnote ⁶⁴

Beyond the official house dietary, other sources of sustenance were periodically available. Small indulgences were allowed that made life in the institution more tolerable. Christmas dinner included an extra pint of ale. Benefactions were offered in the form of mutton and beer, while corporate bodies such as the paving committee donated fruit, herrings and other food seized from rogue street vendors.Footnote ⁶⁵ As in the Belfast workhouse, where it was thought to promote the spread of ‘luxury and idleness’, tea drinking was common among inmates. ^{Footnote 66} The ‘working poor’ and those in the ‘lunatic’ cells received tobacco and snuff from time to time.Footnote ⁶⁷ The diet in the infirmary also differed from the rest of the house. Along with better quality meat, the sick received stronger drink, with physicians prescribing spirits and wine for medicinal purposes.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, inmates were not merely involuntary consumers of house fare. Provided they engaged in labour, inmates had some choice in what they ate and drank. Inmates who obeyed the rules of the house and engaged in labour were permitted leave from the house to use their weekly premium to purchase food and drink from nearby taverns, markets and street vendors.Footnote ⁶⁹

With the election of the new governors, the ideas of Count Rumford and other proponents of a scientific and economical approach to poverty came to dominate in the dietary of the house. These ideas were laid out in annual reports, where statistics and data were marshalled to demonstrate the economy of the diet. Previously, the governors contended that the poor had entered the house to receive ‘gratuitous support’ and ‘profuseness of diet’ superior to that enjoyed by common labourers. Such a diet, it was now claimed, along with waste and corruption among the officers of the house, had driven up the share of the house budget devoted to food. The governors, however, had initiated a complete transformation in such spending.Footnote ⁷⁰ The indulgent diet of the early years was abandoned and the food provided became cheaper, more monotonous and probably less nutritious. Dinner involved a rotation of meals including oatmeal, buttermilk, potatoes and the occasional serving of colcannon. During Rumford’s visit, he prepared his soup for inmates to demonstrate that it was both economical and nourishing. The governors implemented a reformed dietary for inmates with this soup as its centrepiece. They sought to provide nourishment at the lowest cost per inmate, providing detailed analysis of the cost of ingredients, fuel and labour required for each meal. Bread rations were restricted, added to the soup to deter trading them for whiskey. As the riot in 1797 suggests, this change met considerable resistance. Attempts to bake cheaper, mixed bread in-house also failed, as it was deemed unappetising by inmates, who preferred white flour bread. By the end of 1797, these reforms had at least led to a significant reduction in the cost of feeding inmates.Footnote ⁷¹

As well as the provision of clothing and food, the house also served as a place for the sick to convalesce and receive medical attention. At first glance, it might appear that the sick poor in the capital, compared to those outside the city, were particularly well provided for, since Dublin had several voluntary hospitals and infirmaries. However, these were either highly specialised, focusing on particular aliments, or exclusive, with admission into the infirmaries tightly controlled by governors.Footnote ⁷² Most voluntary hospitals and infirmaries in Dublin also practiced forms of ‘diagnostic exclusion’ for fear of contagion, refusing admission to those suspected of such conditions as venereal disease, ‘the itch’, smallpox and fevers.Footnote ⁷³ Consequently, the house became increasingly important in the provision of medical care for the Dublin poor. Indeed, what historians have described as the medicalisation of the English workhouse also took place in the House of Industry, with the treatment of the elderly sick, infants, and others requiring medical attention becoming central to its duties by the end of the century.Footnote ⁷⁴

In 1774, wards were established for medical and surgical patients under the care of two physicians, two surgeons and several nurses. A separate infirmary was opened for children in 1785.Footnote ⁷⁵ Medical expenses rose incrementally over the first decades of operation. By 1791, the cost of the infirmary was £600 per annum, the second largest expense after food.Footnote ⁷⁶ On admission, inmates were treated for a range of diseases and infirmities, including scurvy, scald head and a range of respiratory and digestive diseases.Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1796, a report on the health of children in the house found them suffering from smallpox, measles, ‘scrofulous affections’ and consumption.Footnote ⁷⁸ Venereal disease was common among patients in the infirmary, particularly among the women taken up as prostitutes. Such women were treated in a separate venereal ward or, from 1792, sent to the Westmoreland Lock Hospital.Footnote ⁷⁹ The governors claimed the quality of care was relatively high, emphasising efforts to separate the sick to prevent contagion. Nonetheless, between 1780 and 1786, 15 per cent of inmates admitted died in the house. According to the governors, this was ‘a mortality rate not excessive’ given that many inmates entered the workhouse ‘in the last stage of disease’.Footnote ⁸⁰

As Kevin Siena has argued, medical men in the eighteenth century regarded the bodies of the poor as predisposed to fever and as the cause of contagion in crowded sites, such as prisons and workhouses. This led to a preoccupation with ventilation and the circulation of fresh air in institutional settings to prevent contagion from such ‘rotten bodies’.Footnote ⁸¹ Fear of contagion was constant, with the governors reporting that ‘medical attendance on the infirmary must be constant, laborious, and full of danger’.Footnote ⁸² To avoid contagion, ‘the necessaries’, previously contiguous to the dormitories, were moved some distance away.Footnote ⁸³ In the early days of the house, while different classes of inmates were segregated to some degree, there was a growing concern that intermingling of the sexes and of the deserving poor with vagrants and prostitutes endangered the morals of the more virtuous inmates. The remodelled house emphasised the separation of inmates based on fears of physical contagion. Yet, an examination of the wards in 1796 still found the sick and healthy ‘promiscuously heaped together’ in the same beds and recommended a stricter division of the inmates.Footnote ⁸⁴ In order to separate different classes of patients, four wards were built away from the healthy inmates with a garden for air and exercise. Two fever wards were established due to the ‘great encrease of contagious disease’.Footnote ⁸⁵

The governors were not only concerned with the spread of disease. There was also growing unease about moral corruption in the house. In 1791, a critic decried the ‘indiscriminate mixture of paupers of every description’ which would lead to ‘the utter subversion of all morals or industrious habits’. Beggars, vagrants, prostitutes, as well as workshy inmates, it was feared, would morally compromise the impressionable youth who might acquire ‘vicious habits’. The vagrant class, the critic argued, should be completely separated from the rest of the inmates, dressed in ‘coarse raiment’, and set to hard labour.Footnote ⁸⁶ A report by the governors in 1798 complained that ‘the indiscriminate association of the poor must necessarily have been destructive to industry, order and decency’. It was the object of the governors to ‘form them into separate classes according to their ages, qualities, conduct and abilities’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Despite such aspirations of improvement, a visitor to the house in 1804 noted the absence of segregation in the courtyard between children and other inmates during daylight hours. Such mixing, he concluded, made the house ‘a great seminary of prostitutes, thieves, plunderers and rebels’.Footnote ⁸⁸

From the opening of the house, those who were in good health and able-bodied were required to work; and labour was central to its ideology and day-to-day routine. Unlike some workhouses, governors made a serious effort to compel able-bodied inmates to work. For Woodward, labour served as an end in itself, ‘not so much for the sake of what they can earn, as with a view to subject them to discipline; and habituate them to good order and decency’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Work might also teach skills that would be beneficial outside the house. This was especially true of children, who were taught a range of ‘useful’ skills and apprenticed out to men and women throughout the city. The governors also believed inmate labour would raise a substantial amount of the necessary revenue for the house. Finally, supervised by staff, inmates performed much of the everyday manual labour required for the efficient running of the institution.

A wide range of manufacturing took place in the house. In the early years, much of the work was the arduous labour traditionally associated with houses of correction and workhouses. Logwood was ‘chipped and rasped’ by male inmates to produce a dye for clothing. Others were occupied in ‘making junk’ and ‘turning the cutler’s wheel’. Beating hemp, a type of gruelling labour long carried out in workhouses, supplied material for making ropes and coarse cloth. Picking oakum, the untwisting and picking of old rope and mixing it with tar for caulking seams on ships, was a task assigned to the infirm. A quarter of all inmates engaged in labour were usually employed at this task. It was considered demeaning, tedious and unproductive labour; nevertheless, cards were printed and handed out to ship masters advertising the availability of the finished products.Footnote ⁹⁰ Many inmates were employed in menial offices. By 1798, there were nearly 100 male and female inmates engaged as noggin gatherers, porters, necessary washers and kitchen workers. Four women were paid 2d. per week for washing for the house. There were two full-time bread-cutters, paid 6 ½d. per week each. Most of these ‘inferior servants’ were selected from the order of merit, a system of rewards based on good behaviour, so this work was likely regarded as less onerous than labour in the workshops of the house.Footnote ⁹¹

Women were engaged in spinning flax, cotton and worsted wool, as well as carding and combing. A workshop was built with eight looms and forty flax wheels, capable of providing labour for 200 adults.Footnote ⁹² The governors were also interested in bringing innovative technology to the house, acquiring labour-saving devices such as spinning jennies. Four stocking frames were purchased from Scotland, while two looms were fitted up for weaving calicoes.Footnote ⁹³ In the early years, manufacturers sent materials to the house to be worked up by the inmates, who received a weekly stipend for their efforts. A master of works was employed and required to present a list to the board each Monday detailing the productivity of each inmate, and those failing to reach the weekly quota were placed on short allowance. Those who refused to work, or who performed their tasks inadequately, could be punished through whipping or expulsion from the house.Footnote ⁹⁴

Governors made efforts to train women and girls in trades they had been traditionally excluded from, particularly shoe-making, glove-making and stay-making, trades they felt women might be more suited for. This met with substantial resistance, reflecting broader conflict in the city between journeymen and masters over the employment of women and children in workshops. To maintain their ability to negotiate rates for piece work and wages, combinations of journeymen in the city had a reputation for excluding women and children from many of the more skilled and better paid areas of the textile trade.Footnote ⁹⁵ Such exclusionary practices were also based around gendered concepts of work and artisan identity, with journeymen promoting a masculine vision of skill and labour in many trades that excluded women. The governors discovered that efforts to train women in the ‘frame hosiery’ met with much opposition from ‘the working men of the metropolis’ who used a range of ‘menaces and seductions’. Broadsides were published by Dublin hosiers targeting masters who employed anyone trained up in the house. Eventually, after threatening to bring in the militia, the governors were able to overcome journeymen opposition and employ women in a range of different trades.Footnote ⁹⁶

The governors also embraced novel ideas regarding the psychology of labour. In this, they were influenced by changing ideas among philanthropists in England and elsewhere. Traditional English paternalists, such as Jonas Hanway, saw labour as an unpleasant activity enforced by necessity and fear of want. However, a novel theory emerged among the so-called political economists who stressed the human passion for self-betterment rather than necessity as driving men and women to labour.Footnote ⁹⁷ Acknowledging the influence of such projects based on encouraging self-betterment among the poor (and also Rumford’s experiments in Munich), the governors noted they had instituted a series of reforms intended to ‘excite industry by emulation’.Footnote ⁹⁸ A system of rewards and punishment was introduced for labour. In 1796, a small retail shop was opened where inmates awarded the ‘order of merit’ for their work were entitled to spend tokens on clothes and provisions. This premium for labour was to be paid in a token depicting a spinning wheel on one side with the legend ‘by labour only we prosper’.Footnote ⁹⁹ This system was intended, according to the governors, to ‘prevent idleness and ebriety, which formerly prevailed, when leave of absence from the house was granted to procure those articles’. Inmates could purchase provisions without leaving the house and prepare them on ‘a small culinary apparatus’ designed for that purpose by Rumford during his visit.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

A ‘class of demerit’ was reserved for certain women who, it was claimed, ‘maintain eternal war against industry, order and decorum’. These inmates resisted efforts to make them labour, ‘damaging the materials they are entrusted with for instruction’ while ‘little regarding the comfort or decency of cloathing’. As punishment, the women were distinguished from other inmates by ‘a peculiar mode of dress, food and employment’, received reduced rations, and occasionally suffered solitary confinement.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Aside from premiums, other inducements were provided to promote labour and discipline. A special ‘pattern coat’ was awarded to women in the hosier’s room ‘for industry and good conduct’, while a ‘linsey woolsey’ coat was given to women ‘for idleness and bad conduct’.Footnote ¹⁰²

There was also renewed attention in the 1790s to the education and moral well-being of children in the house. Governors were concerned with promoting ‘habits of industry’ among young inmates so that they might contribute to national prosperity. On Sundays, the governors examined the children on religious principles, as well as spelling, reading and arithmetic, with premiums awarded based on merit. It was claimed that the instruction provided was equal to that of parochial schools while also providing a practical training in a trade.Footnote ¹⁰³ Yet, in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion, the governors began to rethink the role of education for children in the house. The education of poor children might lead to interest in ‘the political readings of the day’ rather than in moral instruction. The governors now suggested that literacy promoted ‘a tendency to encourage a premature and ardent pursuit after objects, and to open the mind’s eye to many wants, not essential to the happiness, nor connected with the condition of the lower classes’. Labour, rather than education, would promote real morality among children. Indeed, unlike the ‘unreal things’ presented in books, ‘the substantial materials of labour are not evanescent’ and moral teachings might be more effectively ‘embodied’ in the artifacts of children’s work.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

V

From the mid 1780s, there had been an increasing concern with ‘police’ and urban improvement in the capital. A Dublin police force was established in 1786 concerned with, among other things, the regulation of journeymen disputes and the control of drinking establishments in the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Attitudes to the vagrant poor and those confined in residential institutions were not immune to these forces. A report that formed part of the 1833–6 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, reflecting on the history of the House of Inductry, noted that under the new governors it had undergone ‘a complete revolution’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Certainly, in the wake of Rumford’s visit to Dublin, there was a comprehensive effort by the governors to implement a programme of improvement based largely on his vision of improvement. But, the transformation of the house had begun earlier and was wide-ranging, coinciding with the growing influence of a group of ‘oeconomist reformers’ on the board. Were the Dublin governors unique in this regard in an Irish context? Further research is required on other eighteenth-century workhouses, such as the House of Industry in Limerick or the Belfast Charitable Society.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The governors did not challenge the need for the workhouse itself. In this, they were swimming against the tides of philanthropic opinion. This was part of a broader European shift in attitudes towards poor relief and the control of vagrancy, with a ‘waning of faith in residential institutions’ for relieving and disciplining the poor and a growing emphasis on short-term, outpatient relief.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Like the leading advocates of philanthropy in the 1790s, the governors recognised that outdoor relief of the poor in their own homes was preferable to ‘any association of them in extensive public establishments’. Yet, the contagion and ‘offensive effluvia’ of the habitations of the Dublin poor, they argued, made this solution impractical and necessitated the maintenance of a site for the relief of the poor relatively free from contagious disease.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ At the same time, the political turmoil and economic dislocation of the 1790s no doubt infringed upon the outlook of the governors. The rebellion in the city certainly shook their confidence in the utility of the house and perhaps confirmed their view of the incorrigibility of the working poor.

By the turn of the century, the purpose of the House of Industry was to change dramatically. The vision of the workhouse as a site of social engineering popularised by Rumford had given way to the idea of the institution as primarily a deterrent against idleness and vagrancy. The policy of indiscriminate admission was discontinued, and the governors were given greater power to determine who was worthy of admission. Efforts were made to ensure only paupers from the city and county of Dublin were admitted. Recognising the failure of the house in this regard, a report in 1809 recommended it should no longer be responsible for the suppression of street begging and the confinement of vagrants, which should instead be matters for the newly formed Dublin police.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This proposal to rid the house of these ‘notoriously vicious and profligate’ inmates was later taken up by the chief secretary, Robert Peel.Footnote ¹¹¹ In Ireland, as elsewhere, mendicity societies were established to address the impact of the post-war economic recession, providing food and work for paupers during the day. In the two decades after the Act of Union, the House of Industry was increasingly focused on a range of ‘narrower medical functions’ with the establishment of a number of more specialised institutions — a fever hospital, an asylum for children, a surgical hospital, a mental asylum, a hospital for incurables, along with a penitentiary — on the expanding Grangegorman site.Footnote ¹¹² In 1838, the workhouse would be revived and enlarged under the new Poor Law as the North Dublin Union, part of a new, more foreboding, disciplinary regime.Footnote ¹¹³