The Reynolds Letters: An Irish Emigrant Family in Late Victorian Manchester (Irish Narrative Series)

ISBN: 1859182003

Author: McBride, Lawrence

Condition: New

Personal letters are now recognized as the richest source for understanding the process and experience of migration. After the death of her husband, a victim of the Great Famine in Mohill, Co. Leitrim, Mary Reynolds settled her young family in Lancashire. Those who stayed there maintained an affectionate and informative correspondence with Laurence Reynolds and his family, who went on to Chicago.This collection of forty-nine letters sent from Manchester (1877-1904), chronicles the growing wealth and respectability of Irish emigrants making good in industrial England, offering an interesting counterpoint to more familiar stories of poverty. They show that the Irish in England did not always experience the squalor and degradation depicted by Carlyle and Engels.The editors introduction illuminates the social history of England as well as Irish emigration.