The following letter, originally published in The Times of London and reprinted in the Limerick Chronicle on 5 November 1845, provides a valuable contemporary account of Limerick city. Written by a correspondent for The Times, the piece offers observations on the city’s industrial development, commercial activity, and urban infrastructure, as well as social commentary of pre-Famine Ireland and the prevailing attitudes of an English observer encountering provincial life in the west of Ireland.
(FROM “THE TIMES” COMMISSIONER.) Limerick, Oct. 23.
Without entering into any lengthened description of the city of Limerick, it will be enough, perhaps, to state that it is a large, well built, and evidently a thriving town.
It possesses wide and straight streets—the first instance I have yet met with of this being the character of any town in the west of Ireland—many handsome public buildings, some manufactories of lace, gloves and brushes, most extensive flour mills, and a very large “pig factory,” as it is called, at which about 1,000,000 pigs a-year are slaughtered.
The Shannon, which is here a magnificent river, passes through the town, which is built on either side of its banks. A handsome bridge, designed by Nimmo, and other bridges, connect each portion of the town. A good deal of shipping and other small craft find sufficient commerce for employment, and the one dock which exists is very inadequate for the trade. A number of men are seen idling about the streets, who might, it is said, obtain work at 1s. a-day, which they refuse; still, however, an air of commercial activity and prosperity pervades the place.
The brush factory of Mr. Egan employs about 300 men, who receive from £1 to 30s. a-week wages, and many of the brushes are sent to London. When it is considered that 14lb. of potatoes may be purchased for 2d. or 3d., according to the market, and that this is the chief food, this rate of wages is high, as compared with that in most English towns.
The Lace factories give employment to about 1,000 girls; the most extensive of these factories, that carried on by Mr. I. Greaves, employs 240 girls, who receive on an average 3s. 6d. a-week, and is now enlarging for the reception of 100 more lace girls. Very beautiful lace is made at this factory, on an invention of the proprietor, for which he obtained a prize of a silver medal, at the exhibition of Irish manufacture in 1844; it is similar in appearance to the finest Brussels lace, and her Majesty is said to have obtained several specimens of it.
The “pig factory” of Mr. J. Russell, and the extensive flour mills of J. N. Russell, give a great amount of employment and encouragement to trade. The glove manufacture is falling off. The town and county of Limerick have also obtained much celebrity for their pretty women. I had the opportunity yesterday of being present at a charitable orphan bazaar held in the town, and certainly the number of handsome women and the female beauty assembled there, maintained this character, and fully equalled in these respects any similar assemblage which I have seen in any part of England.
This affords me an opportunity, though it is scarcely worthwhile, to answer any slander which has been industriously propagated on every possible occasion by “the Liberator,” as he is fantastically termed by his party, to get up a prejudice against me, by asserting that I had accused the women of Ireland of being “ugly.”
There are those with whom such an assertion may have a certain influence, and therefore it was made. The man, however, who unblushingly dared to slander the women of England en masse by accusing them of being unchaste, was the last man, one would have thought, to forget his own glass windows when he threw this stone, even had I made the assertion that “the women of Ireland were ugly,” which I need not tell you I never did.