A family of 5 will require—
| Man | 28 lbs. |
| Wife | 21 lbs. |
| 3 children | 42 lbs. |
| 91 lbs. food. |
| s. d. | |||
| Say | 30 lbs. bread—23 lbs. wheatmeal | 3 | 10 |
| 61 lbs. stirabout—20 lbs. oatmeal | 3 | 4 | |
| 91 lbs. | 7 | 2 | |
Thus, when a man had five children to support, and no potatoes, his weekly wages scarcely covered bare food.
Before the Famine and the great fever, the population of our part of Ireland was exceedingly dense; more than 200 to the square mile. There were an enormous number of mud cabins consisting of one room only, run up at every corner of the roadside and generally allowed to sink into miserable squat, sottish-looking hovels with no drainage at all; mud floor; broken thatch, two or three rough boards for a door; and the four panes of the sole window stuffed with rags or an old hat. Just 500,000 of these one-roomed cabins, the Registrar-General, Mr. William Donelly, told me, disappeared between the census before, and the census after the Famine! Nothing was easier than to run them up. Thatch was cheap, and mud abundant, everywhere; and as to the beams (they called them “bames”), I remember a man addressing my father coaxingly, “Ah yer Honour will ye plaze spake to the steward to give me a ‘handful of sprigs?’” “A handful of sprigs? What for?” asked my father; “Why for the roof of me new little house, yer Honour, that I’m building fornenst the ould wan!”
I never saw in an Irish cottage any of the fine old oak settles, dressers and armchairs and coffers to be found usually in Welsh ones. A good unpainted deal dresser and table, a wooden bedstead, a couple of wooden chairs, and two or three straw “bosses” (stools) made like beehives, completed the furniture of a well-to-do cabin, with a range of white or willow-pattern plates on the dresser, and two or three frightfully coloured woodcuts pasted on the walls for adornment. Flowers in the gardens or against the walls were never to be seen. Enormous chimney corners, with wooden stools or straw “bosses” under the projecting walls, were the most noticeable feature. Nothing seems to be more absurd and unhistorical than the common idea that the Celt is a beauty-loving creature, æsthetically far above the Saxon. If he be so, it is surprising that his home, his furniture, his dress, his garden never show the smallest token of his taste! When the young girls from the villages, even from very respectable families, were introduced into our houses, it was a severe tax on the housekeepers’ supervision to prevent them from resorting to the most outrageous shifts and misuse of utensils of all sorts. I can recall, for example, one beautiful young creature with the lovely Irish grey eyes and long lashes, and with features so fine that we privately called her “Madonna.” For about two years she acted as housemaid to my second brother, who, as I have mentioned, had taken a place in Donegal, and whose excellent London cook, carefully trained “Madonna” into what were (outwardly) ways of pleasantness for her master. At last, and when apparently perfectly “domesticated”—as English advertisers describe themselves,—Madonna married the cowman; and my brother took pleasure in setting up the young couple in a particularly neat and rather lonely cottage with new deal furniture. After six months they emigrated; and when my brother visited their deserted house he found it in a state of which it will suffice to record one item. The pig had slept all the time under the bedstead; and no attempt had been made to remove the resulting heap of manure!
My father had as strong a sense as any modern sanitary reformer of the importance of good and healthy cottages; and having found his estate covered with mud and thatched cabins, he (and my brother after him) laboured incessantly, year by year, to replace them by mortared stone and slated cottages, among which were five schoolhouses supported by himself. As it was my frequent duty to draw for him the plans and elevations of these cottages, farmhouses and village shops, with calculations of the cost of each, it may be guessed how truly absurd it seems to me to read exclusively, as I do so often now, of “tenants’ improvements” in Ireland. It is true that my father occasionally let, on long leases and without fines, large farms (of the finest wheat-land in Ireland, within ten miles of Dublin market), at the price of £2 per Irish acre, with the express stipulation that the tenant should undertake the re-building of the house or farm-buildings as the case might be. But these were, of course, perfectly just bargains, made with well-to-do farmers, who made excellent profits. I have already narrated in an earlier chapter, how he sold the best pictures among his heirlooms—one by Hobbema now in Dorchester House and one by Gaspar Poussin,—to rebuild some eighty cottages on his mountains. These cottages had each a small farm attached to it, which was generally held at will, but often continued to the tenants’ family for generations. The rent was, in some cases I think, as low as thirty or forty shillings a year; and the tenants contrived to make a fair living with sheep and potatoes; cutting their own turf on the bog, and very often earning a good deal by storing ice in the winter from the river Dodder, and selling it in Dublin in summer. I remember one of them who had been allowed to fall into arrears of rent to the extent of £3, which he loudly protested he could not pay, coming to my father to ask his help as a magistrate to recover forty pounds, which an ill-conditioned member of his family had stolen from him out of the usual Irish private hiding-place “under the thatch.”
But outside my father’s property, when we passed into the next villages on either side, Swords or Rush or Balisk, the state of things was bad enough. I will give a detailed description of the latter village, some of which was written when the memory of the scene and people was less remote, than now. It is the most complete picture of Irish poverty, fifty years ago, which I can offer.
Balisk was certainly not the “loveliest village of the plain.” Situated partly on the edge of an old common, partly on the skirts of the domain of a nobleman who had not visited his estate for thirty years, it enjoyed all the advantages of freedom from restraint upon the architectual genius of its builders. The result was a long crooked, straggling street, with mud cabins turned to it, and from it, in every possible angle of incidence: some face to face, some back to back, some sideways, some a little retired so as to admit of a larger than ordinary heap of manure between the door and the road. Such is the ground-plan of Balisk. The cabins were all of mud, with mud floors and thatched roofs; some containing one room only, others two, and, perhaps, half-a-dozen, three rooms: all, very literally, on the ground; that is on the bare earth. Furniture, of course, was of the usual Irish description: a bed (sometimes having a bedstead, oftener consisting of a heap of straw on the floor), a table, a griddle, a kettle, a stool or two and a boss of straw, with occasionally a grand adjunct of a settle; a window whose normal condition was being stuffed with an old hat; a door, over and under and around which all the winds and rains of heaven found their way; a population consisting of six small children, a bedridden grandmother, a husband and wife, a cock and three hens, a pig, a dog, and a cat. Lastly, a decoration of coloured prints, including the Virgin with seven swords in her heart, St. Joseph, the story of Dives and Lazarus, and a caricature of a man tossed by a bull, and a fat woman getting over a stile.
Of course as Balisk lies in the lowest ground in the neighbourhood and the drains were originally planned to run at “their own sweet will,” the town (as its inhabitants call it) is subject to the inconvenience of being about two feet under water whenever there are any considerable floods of rain. I have known a case of such a flood entering the door and rising into the bed of a poor woman in childbirth, as in Mr. Macdonald’s charming story of Alec Forbes. The woman, whom I knew, however, did not die, but gave to the world that night a very fine little child, whom I subsequently saw scampering along the roads with true Irish hilarity. At other times, when there were no floods, only the usual rains, Balisk presented the spectacle of a filthy green stream slowly oozing down the central street, now and then draining off under the door of any particularly lowly-placed cabin to form a pool in the floor, and finally terminating in a lake of stagnant abomination under the viaduct of a railway. Yes, reader! a railway ran through Balisk, even while the description I have given of it held true in every respect. The only result it seemed to have effected in the village was the formation of the Stygian pool above-mentioned, where, heretofore, the stream had escaped into a ditch.