As recorded in newspapers that were published in Dublin [Freeman’s Journal, Dublin Evening Mail] between 1 January 1845 and 31 December 1850 and that are available through the British Newspaper Archive.
Count including ads and family notices
Count excluding ads and family notices
Those charts are a few years old; I must redo them. I suspect that the two terms I’ve used, “famine” and “potato”, don’t capture the full extent of famine reporting: I should perhaps add other terms (eg “distress”).
And be it Enacted, That all potatoes sold in cities, towns corporate and market towns and elsewhere, shall be sold and delivered by weight, and not by measure or in any other way whatsoever, and that such weight shall be according to the avoirdupois pound, fourteen pounds whereof shall make a stone, and eight stone one hundred weight, and that such potatoes shall be weighed, without fee or reward, at the beams and scales of the several places erected and kept pursuant to law;
and if any master or owner of any ship, vessel or boat, coming into any port, harbour or town in Ireland, with potatoes, or any market man, herbman, herbwoman, huckster, or any other person selling potatoes, shall sell the same by measure or otherwise than by weight, and shall be lawfully convicted thereof, every person so offending shall for every such offence forfeit the value of all such potatoes sold otherwise than by weight, and the sum of Sixpence for every stone of such potatoes, and the sum of Sixpence for any quantity under one stone;
and every person who shall demand or take any fee or reward for weighing any such potatoes, shall forfeit the sum of Twenty shillings, provided complaint be made within Three days after any such offence shall be committed.
Bill to consolidate and amend Laws respecting Customs, Tolls and Duties in Markets and Fairs in Ireland HC 183 HMSO 1830
Buckets
If the clause for enforcing the weighing of potatoes shall be passed into a Law and strictly enforced I apprehend it may be productive of much public inconvenience here where the use of Buckets as a measure for sale of potato’s is so general, and I can hardly conceive how such a number of Scales could be got up or attended to as would be necessary to accommodate the population of this City frequenting the Potatoe market.
John Carroll, Secretary to Limerick Chamber of Commerce, to Thomas Spring Rice MP, 2 April 1830, in Letter book 19 January 1826–15 September 1840 [P1/26 p120] [DjVu]
Posted in Ashore, Economic activities, Historical matters, Ireland, Modern matters, People, Politics, Shannon, Sources
Tagged bucket, Chamber of Commerce, John Carroll, Limerick, market, potato, Thomas Spring Rice, tolls, weight
I thought it would be interesting to ask the British Newspaper Archive what people were reading about in newspapers published in Dublin between 1 January 1845 and 31 December 1850. The BNA has scans of two Dublin newspapers for that period, the Freeman’s Journal and the Dublin Evening Mail. I used the archive to search for four different words in those newspapers in that period; I then counted the numbers of results.
On the first round, I included ads and family notices.
Terms in Dublin newspapers (incl ads) 1845–1850
I guessed that the numbers for steam and railway might be exaggerated by their inclusion in ads so, on the second round, I excluded both ads and family notices. The result was as expected.
Terms in Dublin newspapers (excl ads) 1845–1850
I then asked Google’s Ngram machine to count the numbers of occurrences of four pairs of words between 1845 and 1850. I asked it to do a case-insentitive search, but it can’t do that for “compositions” (combinations of words), so it counted:
Ireland+potato
Ireland+steam
Ireland+famine
Ireland+railway.
Here is what it came up with, but whence I know not, other than that it searched the corpus English. The embedding process doesn’t seem to be working, so I’ve left the code here but also cut and pasted the output.
Google Ngram
I suspect that, in recent times, the amount written about steam and railways of the period 1845–1850 in Ireland has been rather less than that about potatoes and the famine.
Posted in Built heritage, Canals, Charles Wye Williams, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, People, Rail, Sea, Shannon, Sources, Steamers, waterways
Tagged boats, bridge, canal, Dublin, famine, Ireland, Killaloe, Limerick, Lough Derg, Operations, potato, railway, Royal Canal, sea, Shannon, steam, steamer, waterways, Waterways Ireland
Irish waterways history 