Assignment Overview:

Write a short essay (c.2,000 words) on one of the following topics

1. How reliable is the census of 1841?

Report of 1841 census, P.P. 1843 XXIV, viii-x

Joseph Lee, ‘On the accuracy of the pre-famine censuses’ in J.M. Goldstrom and L.A. Clarkson (eds), Irish Population, Economy and Society (1982), 37-56

M. Austin Bourke, ‘The Agricultural Statistics of the 1841 Census of Ireland – a critical review’ Economic History Review 18 (1965)

G.S.L. Tucker, ‘Irish Fertility Ratios before the Famine’, Economic History Review 23 (1970), p.267-71 only.

E. Margaret Crawford, Counting the people: a guide to the censuses of Ireland, 1813-1911 (2002)

2. Was Ireland a disorderly society in the early nineteenth century?

For an early and influential statement, see the short introduction to George Cornewall Lewis, Local Disturbances in Ireland (1836), p.1-2, p.94-99 (This is available online on Google books or in the database The Making of the Modern World)

Stanley Palmer, Police, and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850 (1988), 45-54[see also the review of this book by Sean Connolly in Irish Historical Studies 26 (1989), 307-309]

Samuel Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (1979), 65-86

Richard McMahon, Homicide in pre-Famine and Famine Ireland (2013), 12-22

3. Why did the state establish a national system of primary education in 1831?

First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry 1825 XII, p.89-92

D.H. Akenson, ‘Pre-University education’ in W.E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland vol.V(1989), 523-531

Gillian O’Brien, ‘The 1825 Commissioners of Irish Education reports’ in Garrett Fitzgerald, Irish Primary Education in the Early Nineteenth Century (2013), 1-30 only.

Antonia McManus, The Irish Hedge School and its Books (2002), p.41-53

Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), 27-9, 72-6