Abstract
It is argued in this essay that the streets of Tralee in south-west Munster in the late 1820s and early 1830s were characterised by a protean, anarchic and often oppositional culture which was both diurnal and very frequently nocturnal in its context of enactment. Indeed, more often than not, darkness framed and enabled expressions of dissidence, resistance and criminality. Technology would, in due course, challenge the imperium of darkness.
A scene evocative of an M.R. James ghost story was sketched in a Tralee newspaper on 7 March 1829. It was reported that ‘much conjecture and some confusion was occasioned in our streets yesterday evening by finding a human hand (which appeared to have been for some time severed from the body), in one of the back lanes in this town. It also had the appearance of having being gnawed, and scarcely any of the flesh remained; the bones of the fingers and even the nails were complete, and part of one of the bones of the lower arm were attached to it’. 1 This grisly nocturnal anatomical discovery was admittedly an exceptional occurrence in terms of the town's rabelaisian sub-culture which thrived under the liberating cover of darkness. Yet this episode is suggestive of a nocturnal sphere beyond the reach of authority. Later in the same month, an Italian teacher of foreign languages resident in Tralee, Ludovico Adamo, encountered two prostitutes at night. Significantly, a complaint of purported assault made to the court of petty sessions was lodged by these unnamed women and not by Adamo. According to the newspaper account of the incident, two prostitutes having supposedly physically assaulted Adamo and knocked off his hat ‘had the impudence to put a summons served upon him to attend the petty sessions for an alleged assault’. 2
However, neither woman was in attendance at the hearing and apparently Adamo ‘expressed himself in warm terms of indignation at the unprovoked insult he had received’. In the absence of extant testimony from the women, the exact nature of their nocturnal engagement with Adamo remains elusive and ambiguous. The description of the women was dismissive and generic: they were depicted as part of an amorphous cohort of ‘vagabonds, male and female, who frequently infest our streets at night’. In particular, they were identified with ‘a set of shameless and unfortunate prostitutes, who generally infest the streets of this town at night’. 3 The street context of the Italian flâneur is illustrative of a communal urban milieu that was vibrant and anarchic and usually nocturnal. Different social classes frequented the streets day and night. 4 This article delineates an early nineteenth-century urban nocturnal sphere shared and contested simultaneously by rich and poor. 5 Tralee's streets at night were a locus of popular cultural and social dissidence which also enabled an assertion of communal identity by a socially disenfranchised urban cohort. With the advent of a municipal network of gas lights and enhanced emphasis on social regulation in the aftermath of the Great Famine, nocturnal expressions of resistance and opposition were increasingly excluded from an elite urban sphere. 6
In a letter to the Kerry Evening Post published in 1852, its anonymous author defined the utility of Tralee's network of street gas lights in terms of extending the working day and protecting people and property during the night. 7 In early modern Europe, crime and its dangers were specifically associated with the urban night. Indeed, scholars have demonstrated that cities were especially confronted by nocturnal crime in contrast to a marked inclination to criminality during the day in rural areas. In effect, the social life of the early modern urban milieu extended well beyond sunset. 8 Craig Koslofsky has argued that early modern Europe experienced a process of nocturnalisation that entailed an ongoing ‘expansion of the legitimate and symbolic uses of the night’. 9 In this respect, regular public street lighting was a key element of urban nocturnalisation. Moreover, Koslofsky has deployed the metaphor of colonisation to situate those who resisted or were impacted by the process of nocturnalisation. Nonetheless, the night remained an optimal time to resist authority. Despite new lighting, resistance to nocturnalisation continued along what Koslofsky defined as traditional, criminal and political lines. 10 The spread of public street lighting in major European cities was remarkable. In 1660, no European city had a permanent infrastructure of public lighting. However, by 1700 reliable systems of public lighting had been established in cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, Turin, Hamburg and Vienna. 11 Unlike Ennis, a Munster town not dissimilar to Tralee in terms of population, where provision for public street lamps was made in the 1820s, Tralee appears to have had no public lights in place prior to 1848. 12 In effect, the culture of an early modern nightlife lingered in Tralee down to the end of 1840s.
The introduction of street lights constituted something more than a purely technological innovation. In a comparative study of street lighting in Brussels and Montreal, Nicolas Kenny argued that proliferating street lights resulted in a range of emotional responses in these cities. In this respect, Kenny contended that street lights generated varied emotional responses centred on the politics of access to light, the nature of urban self-presentation and senses of belonging on the part of urban dwellers. Accordingly, Kenny argued that emotions, as much as public lights themselves, determined the perception of the nocturnal ambience. More specifically, he proposed that the political and cultural implications of street lighting were illustrative of ‘the emotional outlooks on the frenetic, enjoyable, or threatening city’. Illuminated streets and boulevards enabled an ‘affective connection’ to the urban milieu while dark and shadowy zones elicited fear and suspicion. 13 Moreover, gas lights could be literally dazzling. Shortly before 10 at night in late December 1857, a West Kerry farmer called Eugene McCarthy who had attended the Blennerville fair walked from the port village into Tralee. Apparently inebriated, McCarthy on reaching the basin of Tralee ship canal was so ‘dazzled by the gas lights and the mist of the night’ that he ‘mistook the water for the road’ and as a result drowned. A group of sailors retrieved the body of McCarthy and removed it to a local police barracks to await an inquest. 14 Ironically, seven gas lamps had been erected around the canal basin a number of years previously in response to complaints about the danger posed to ship passengers during the night in the vicinity of the waterway. 15 It seems that McCarthy's experience of public lights in an urban environment was sufficiently alien to result in his fatal disorientation.
Early Nineteenth-Century Tralee
In a journal of a trip from Kent to Ireland written in 1788, its unidentified male English author described the south-western town of Tralee as both a locus of improvement and squalor. He noted that the town seemed well populated but that its inhabitants were ‘perfectly idle and dirty’. Moreover, the county capital of Kerry which was ‘by far the most considerable town in the county’ was spoken of ‘as the wickedest town in Ireland for everything that is bad and obscene’. By way of mitigation of this damning verdict, the English traveller considered Tralee an attractive town notwithstanding its remote location and he noted that it was now ‘undergoing great improvements, both in buildings, and paving the streets’. 16 Another visitor in 1788, Daniel Beaufort, an Anglican clergyman, also referred to a town in a process of reconfiguration with ‘many houses building so that half the streets are in rubbish’. 17 A sense of ambiguity is discernible in an account of the town composed some 25 years later. James Hall, a clergyman born in Scotland, in a work titled Tour through Ireland published in 1813 was not impressed by a town whose streets were ‘irregular and narrow; and, owing to their being paved with limestone, are extremely dirty’. More ominously, Hall wrote that ‘seemingly two-thirds, of the inhabitants of Tralee, appear to be in a state of beggary’. Yet the town was not without manifestations of civility in that its inhabitants supported two newspapers, a circulating library and a playhouse which featured ‘a regular set of players who stroll to Cork, Limerick, and other places, and do tolerably well’. 18 In the late 1820s, customers with an interest in books, music and prints frequented Miss Walsh's Library on the Mall while the reading room at Tralee Club catered for those of its members avid for news of current affairs. 19
Notwithstanding a sustained economic depression in Britain and Ireland after 1815 in the wake of the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars, the volume of Irish agricultural exports increased throughout the 1820s and 1830s. 20 The same period witnessed a marked expansion of Tralee's commercial activity. 21 The population expanded from 7,547 in 1821 to 9,568 in 1831. 22 Initially, the export of beef and butter to Britain played an important role in the town's burgeoning commercial profile. 23 Not surprisingly given the central economic importance of dairying in Kerry at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the allied sale of butter to Cork and Limerick merchants for export, the trade in butter was critical to the town's financial invigoration. 24 By 1824, Tralee's economic fortunes had been considerably augmented by a local trade in butter. Where previously butter had been sent to Cork for sale, it was now purchased in Tralee for export. 25 In a context where butter producers from the Iveragh peninsula might spend up to three or four days making the round trip to Cork to sell their produce, the market in Tralee was more convenient in terms of proximity. 26 Moreover, an export business in oats and other grains had also been established. 27 Indeed, the export of 100,000 barrels of corn from Tralee Harbour in 1823 is suggestive of the increasing importance of this cereal in the town's export business. 28 The total value of exports from Tralee for 1823 was estimated at £50,000. 29 Such was the increase in shipping traffic at Blennerville Quay that no fewer than eighteen ships arrived in Tralee Bay within the space of a given week in 1825. 30 In the same year, a group of emigrants left Tralee for St. Mary's in Newfoundland with the intention of settling in Canada. The ship on which they voyaged had first crossed the Atlantic with a cargo of timber for the Tralee merchant John Donovan. 31 Such was the lucrative nature of the business in emigrants that another Tralee timber importer, Hicksons of the Canal, soon entered the market for the passage to Canada. 32 The establishment of Tralee Savings Bank in 1823 reflected a more vibrant mercantile environment. 33 By the late 1820s, the town hosted a busy linen market and in 1829 a linen hall was constructed. 34 An act of parliament in 1828 made provision for the construction of the Tralee Ship Canal which when it was finally completed in 1846 enabled vessels to unload and take on cargo at the basin close to the town centre. 35 By the early 1830s, the town's export trade was dominated by corn while the export of butter was in decline. 36 By 1835, it was calculated that around 10,000 tons of corn were exported annually from Tralee to British ports. In the same year, the construction of the town's largest ever corn store in Strand Street by Nicholas Reardon was remarkable in so far as ‘thirty years ago there was not a corn store in Tralee, nor corn enough in Kerry (beyond its own consumption) to fill one’. 37
As trade expanded, the extent and material fabric of the town were also enhanced. For instance, a case was made in 1816 for the reconstruction of the belfry of the Protestant parish church of St. John on the basis that the ‘bell cannot in consequence of the great increase of buildings in the town be heard by those families living within a short distance of the church’. 38 William Wilson (d.1839), a local solicitor and a key figure in the town's architectural improvement, was credited with being instrumental in the development of the town from ‘the condition of an inconsiderable village of mean structure, to its present handsome appearance’. 39 The death in Worcester in 1831 of Tralee's last resident proprietor, Sir Edward Denny, and the previous demolition of Tralee Castle in 1826, progressively diminished the immediate influence of the town's seigneurial family. 40 Elite sociability was enabled through events such as the long-established Tralee Races which in 1825, for instance, were complemented by a grand masquerade and fancy ball at the Assembly Rooms. 41 Moreover, the town's two masonic lodges provided a vibrant homosocial milieu for affluent men. 42
At the bottom of the urban social hierarchy, many depended on occasional employment and eked out a precarious existence. With poor families facing starvation in 1822, labourers in the town collectively protested their dire material circumstances. 43 Again in 1835, tradesmen and labourers faced famine at a time of high potato prices and widespread unemployment. 44 Additionally, individuals and families from impoverished parts of county Kerry migrated to Tralee where some became street beggars. 45 Many of these individuals were Irish-speakers and the survival of a Gaelic manuscript compiled by the Tralee stone mason and poet Uilliam Ó Cathasaigh in 1817 hints at a vibrant urban milieu of Irish literature and scholarship. 46 Another Gaelic poet, Tomás de Stac, was a schoolmaster in the town in the 1820s. 47 The employment of an Irish-language interpreter at the Tralee courts likewise cautions against an assumption of a wholly anglophone urban milieu. 48
Social Tensions and Crime in Nocturnal Tralee
On the morning of 24 November 1829, a gruesome discovery was made at a river meadow adjoining the town. A leather dresser called James Connor and his brother who had gone to the river to wash sheep skins found a woman's unclothed body lying face down in the water. The deceased was called McCarthy, a native of Cork apparently abandoned by a soldier she had followed to Tralee where allegedly she ‘continued in those disorderly courses, which terminated in her destruction’. 49 It was recounted elsewhere that she was married to a soldier whose regiment was transferred to Tralee and that she followed him without the permission of his commanding officer. Lacking friends in the town, it seems that ‘she then commenced to live an unfortunate life’. 50 Two other prostitutes, euphemistically depicted as ‘wretched cyprians’, named Walsh and Glynn, had been confined to the county jail by the town's provost for questioning in the matter of Ellen McCarthy's violent death. 51 In 1829, Glynn was aged around 25 years old while Walsh was about 20 years old. Both women were illiterate. 52 In fact, this was not Glynn's first sojourn in the county jail. She had been committed to the same institution previously in December 1828 when she was charged with stealing 2s 6d from David Alman of Tralee. 53 A coffin was procured and the body of the deceased was removed to the court house for medical investigation. A jury was sworn by the coroner with a view to convening an inquest in relation to the demise of McCarthy. 54 A series of witness statements were made during the course of the inquest which shed light not just on the immediate context in which the deceased met her death but which also reveal a vibrant nocturnal urban sphere populated by diverse socio-economic cohorts.
The county coroner of Kerry, James McGillycuddy, assisted by Caleb Chute, provost of Tralee, presided over the inquest in a courtroom that was ‘crowded to excess’. 55 The proceedings were covered in varying levels of detail by two newspapers: the conservative Protestant Kerry Evening Post owned and edited by brothers John and Charles Eagar and the Catholic nationally minded Tralee Mercury published by John Flynn. 56 Tralee's third newspaper The Western Herald was owned by Thomas Day and it simply noted the murder and the outcome of the inquest. 57 Notwithstanding a tendency to sensationalism, for unintentionally complementary reasons of moral outrage and commercial success, these newspaper accounts can be compared and contrasted to enable a reasonably full reconstruction of events. 58 The opening witness, James Connor, explained how he and his brother had discovered the ‘deceased in a state of total nudity, prostrate on her face, with her head and part of her arms under water’. 59 Another witness, Catherine Godfrey, who recounted on oath that she was ‘the comrade of the deceased’ and that during the early evening of Monday 23 November, they had decided to walk along opposite sides of an open stretch of river in the town known as the canal. 60 However, Godfrey was assaulted by two other prostitutes named Judith Walsh and Peggy Glynn who were in search of McCarthy or ‘Corky’ as they colloquially termed her. Both women had for some time apparently bitterly resented McCarthy's greater success in attracting clients. 61 Godfrey went in search of her companion and found McCarthy in the town's central Square ‘accompanied by a well dressed young man’ who gave her a shilling, nine pence of which she presented to Godfrey and ‘advised her to go home as the night was cold and witness bare-foot’. Ellen Godfrey never saw her friend alive again. A night watchman on a property on Denny Street (then still partly under construction following the demolition of Tralee Castle) called Mathew Sheehan gave evidence that he had met the deceased between 10 and 11 o’clock that night. 62 Moreover, Ellen McCarthy had frequently resorted to him seeking protection from Walsh and Glynn and had often left her cloak with him for safekeeping, although not on this final occasion. Sheehan last had sight of McCarthy as she headed in the direction of the Boherbee neighbourhood of the town not far from where she was to be found dead the following morning. 63
The testimony of other witnesses shed further light on the precarious existence of McCarthy and Godfrey. John Scanlan, a tailor who lived at Rock Street, testified that both Glynn and Walsh had spent the night of 23 November at his house and as far he was aware, they had not left the premises at any point. Another lodger in Scanlan's house, Margaret Fitzgerald, gave evidence to the same effect. 64 However, little emphasis was placed on either testimony as they were not considered entirely reliable witnesses. 65 An individual named Denis White testified that Godfrey had slept in his house on the night of 23 November and that McCarthy had also slept in his one-room cabin for a number of nights previously. A man called Nowlan was obliged to give evidence having been accused by Godfrey ‘with acting a bully at night in the streets, and with beating and extorting money from unfortunate girls’. However, Nowlan was able to prove that he was indoors on the night of McCarthy's demise. The jury concluded its deliberations and announced that the victim's death was the result of violence ‘inflicted by some person or persons unknown to us’. 66 Curiously, although Walsh and Glynn had been taken into custody, they were not required to testify. 67 By way of the final manifestation of Ellen McCarthy's marginal social status, the churchwardens initially refused to bury her body. However, their stance elicited furious condemnation in the crowded courtroom. When the inquest resumed on 27 November, it was announced that McCarthy had been interred overnight. 68
Of course, the murder of Ellen McCarthy constituted a personal tragedy framed by the experience of poverty and truncated agency for a woman consigned by force of circumstance and gendered disadvantage to society's outer fringes. In attempting to construct a narrative of her final hours, inevitably partial in nature, questions also arise as to the significance of space and social status in a specific nocturnal urban context. The socio-economic ordering of an urban sphere was most readily discernible in the contrasting locations of the quarter where McCarthy and Godfrey lodged and the commercial and residential streets where they sought to make a living through prostitution. In her testimony at the inquest, Godfrey stated that she and McCarthy lodged near the Quarry. Denis White, described as a labourer, confirmed that they stayed at his house. 69 However, White further elaborated on the extent of what was termed a cabin when he described it as consisting of one room only. 70
The Quarry district was effectively an encampment of squatters to the south of Strand Street. In 1845, the Quarry area was referred to as the St. Giles of Tralee by way of allusion to a notorious contemporary slum quarter of the same name in central London which was dominated by impoverished Irish migrants. 71 In 1846, the district consisted of ‘different rows of hovels that crowd that spot’ which were ‘the haunt and hotbed of all the low profligacy of the town’. Moreover, the majority of these rudimentary and unsanitary structures were inhabited by two and often three families. 72 An account from 1830 of how a poor family's cabin at Strand Road suddenly collapsed narrowly averting the death of five persons is suggestive of the flimsy construction of such houses. 73 In a report on patients admitted into the town's fever hospital and their streets of origin for the year 1845, it was noted that thirty-two people were inhabitants of the Quarry while in contrast only three persons were admitted from the town's premier residential and commercial quarter of Denny Street. In fact, these three individuals were members of one family living in a stable lane at the rear of Denny Street. It is quite probable that admittance to the fever hospital was a last resort for those with no other option in terms of treatment while the relative affluence of Denny Street residents ensured they received medical attention in their own homes. Indeed, during the cholera pandemic of 1832, a marked level of popular resistance to treatment in Tralee's fever hospital was noted. 74
In contrast, the nocturnal locales frequented by McCarthy and Godfrey on 23 November 1829 constituted the residential nexus of the town's elite. For example, Catherine Godfrey walked along the Day Place side of the river canal while her companion proceeded by way of Stoughton's Row. The construction of the fashionable town houses which constituted the range known as Day Place dated to the early nineteenth century. This elegant terrace was one of a number of local improvements inaugurated by the politician and judge Robert Day (1746–1841) who was widely acknowledged for his civic benevolence. 75 The spatial implications of the public proclamation in Tralee of the accession to the throne of William IV reveal a firmly hierarchical ordering of the urban landscape at least during the daytime. On Saturday 3 July 1830, Francis Chute McGillycuddy, under-sheriff for county Kerry, accompanied by the town provost, Caleb Chute, in tandem with a military party, paraded to select locations to read the proclamation in public. As the ceremony of proclamation unfolded in Day Place, Nelson Street (now Ashe Street) and Denny Street, it embodied not just a communication of regal dignity and gravitas, it simultaneously underpinned a local elite's aspirational sense of status and authority. This act of street theatre culminated when the military party lined up at Day Place and fired a feu de joie in honour of the accession and an army band rendered ‘God save the king’. 76 Of course, popular endorsement of the spectacle through passive participation was key to the validation of the message of continuity and stability engendered by such manifestations of authority. The town's ‘inhabitants joined the procession, accompanied it through the principal streets’ while the ‘people testified their loyalty by repeated cheering’. 77 If the emotions of the moment were for the most part transient, the streetscape of power endured, if only during the day.
Details of an auction of household effects at number 4 Day Place in 1834 are illustrative of the considerable luxury enjoyed by residents of these spacious dwellings. In addition to standard items of furniture, the late Mrs. McGillycuddy owned an extensive selection of decorative and functional items such as carpets and rugs; pier, chimney and dressing glasses; drawing room, parlour and bedroom window curtains; and an eight-day clock. 78 Yet, it seems the affluence and material comforts enjoyed by the residents of Day Place elicited a degree of resentment on the part of the excluded. Previously during the late summer of 1829, some silver spoons were presented to a pawnbroker in the town who became suspicious as to their provenance. On further investigation, it was discovered that they had been stolen from Sophia McGillycuddy's house at Day Place. As the daughter of Sir Barry Denny of Tralee Castle and by virtue of marriage to a scion of an old Gaelic aristocratic family, Mrs. McGillycuddy's position in the front rank of local society was assured. 79
Random acts of nocturnal vandalism are suggestive of a broader antipathy to the elite residents of the terrace. In 1832, trees planted by the Rev. Arthur Herbert at his Day Place residence were maliciously cut down during the night. 80 While in early October 1834, the glass in one of Miss Hussey's drawing room windows at Day Place was smashed by unknown assailants who launched their lapidary onslaught under the cover of darkness at midnight. Indeed, this was not the first occasion on which Miss Hussey's windows had been damaged. 81 On the same Thursday night in October on which her window glass was broken for the second time, a street affray had already occurred around 8 pm. In the aftermath of a fair in the town that day, two drunken individuals named Griffin and Moriarty began shouting in the streets and when they were approached by two police constables, a hostile crowd gathered. The constables resisted the mob's attempt to seize their firearms and in the ensuing tussle, Moriarty was wounded by a police bayonet. Fortunately, the two hapless policemen ‘were at length rescued from the violence of the rabble, but not until they were wounded and severely beaten’. 82 The residents of Day Place continued to endure malicious vandalism at night time. In February 1835, under the cover of darkness, thieves stole a large box containing a myrtle tree from outside the parlour window of Captain Fairfield's house at Day Place. They also damaged his front door when they used a chisel to remove its rapper. 83 In May 1835, ornamental trees planted along the riverside against a parapet wall were uprooted during the night. Apparently, the identities of the miscreants were known to one individual who was too fearful of retribution to initiate a prosecution. 84
In the absence of public lighting in the streets, the cover of darkness was perceived as hosting an ambience of criminality and dissidence. In a case heard at the town's petty sessions’ court in August 1829, a prostitute complained that she had been assaulted by a man at night who stole 7s 6d from her. When asked by one of the magistrates why she was out in the streets late at night, she replied succinctly that ‘my business keeps me in the street mostly at all hours of the night’. 85 In December of the same year, Nancy Walsh, who was ‘lately suspected of being concerned in the atrocious murder of the unfortunate Nelly M’Carthy’, was attacked by two men at midnight. Previously known as Judith, now called Nancy and later referred to as Anne, Walsh's protean forename indicates her liminal status. Moreover, such fluidity of nomenclature is suggestive of the invisibility of such women to the social establishment. On this occasion, two journeymen shoemakers, John Foley and Thomas Mahoney, assaulted and robbed Walsh of 5s 6d in cash. Walsh's accusation against the men was corroborated by the testimony of an unnamed witness who was described as a ‘highly respectable gentleman, who was then proceeding through the street on professional business’. 86 Although Walsh may have embodied those women who were deemed a ‘public nuisance’ in Tralee, she was, nonetheless, sufficiently self-assured and well-informed to initiate the prosecution of her assailants through the mechanism for redress offered by the court of petty sessions. Although the Kerry Evening Post was predictable in its condemnation of ‘abandoned females’, it reserved particular contempt for those men ‘who prowl in darkness for the base purpose of tyranising over these wretched outcasts of society, and plundering them of the wages of sin and shame’. 87 Once again, the cover of darkness provided a mise-en-scène for dissidence and supposed moral turpitude.
Streets of Night and Day
In addition to enabling crime, darkness also provided a backdrop for indulgence in popular revelry. One contemporary ritual of street culture, also often complemented by print, and much disdained by the establishment, was that of the Skellig Lists. These lists in the form of songs that were sung or published around Shrove Tuesday paired off individuals who remained unmarried before Lent. The tradition was common to Cork and Kerry. 88 On 16 February 1831, Tralee was besieged at night by disorderly gangs ‘driving people to the Skelligs, who neglect to get married before Lent’. These boisterous groups roamed the streets ‘drumming and yelling’ until midnight during which time they maintained a ‘most discordant clamour’. Reflecting the evolving nature of urban popular culture, it was claimed that the practice of the Skellig Lists was ‘under the pretext of a custom, a few years since introduced here’. 89 During the height of uproar, the horses of an incoming mail coach took fright and the careening vehicle accidentally ran over a man and a woman in the crowd severely injuring the latter. Moreover, it was noted glumly that ‘assemblages of this kind seldom disperse without mischief’. In this instance, the environs of Day Place provided the target for the expression of some revellers’ hostility when they smashed panes of glass in windows of the grand terrace's residences including those of Mr. Busteed who presided over the town's post office at that location. 90 The following year, on 7 March 1832, the Kerry Evening Post lamented that ‘an immense mob of the lowest rabble of this town’ had raucously paraded the streets the previous night with the intention of ‘routing to the Skelligs all persons who remain unmarried on the eve of Ash-Wednesday’. Again, it was emphasised that this ‘ridiculous custom’ had been recently introduced to Tralee. Although it was grudgingly conceded that no violence had been perpetrated, nonetheless, it was proposed that ‘any assemblage of mobs, by the beat of drum, particularly at night, should not be allowed’. 91 Clearly, while expressions of popular cultural vitality were generally distrusted, they were feared when enacted under the cover of darkness when anarchy might be unleashed. Moreover, while the nocturnal rituals of the Skellig Lists may appear largely disruptive at first glance, such revelry possibly also functioned to strengthen popular communal identity. 92 By 1851, a printer in Tralee, F.C. Panormo, felt obliged to disassociate himself publicly from the Skellig Lists such was the level of opprobrium attached to these rituals. 93 It seems a rumour had circulated that he had printed one such list and Panormo avowed in a newspaper notice that he was in no way responsible for this ‘obnoxious publication’ when he announced that ‘I think it only due to my many friends, and the public in general, to declare, that such a report is totally unfounded, as such paper, was not, nor would be, under any circumstances, nor for any consideration, be allowed to issue from my establishment’. 94 Evidently, bourgeois respectability and popular urban culture were now mutually exclusive.
Of course, an oppositional culture was also manifested to some extent during the day on the streets
Concerns about supposed nocturnal mayhem were set against a narrative of ongoing improvement. In August 1831, the Kerry Evening Post was acerbic in its commentary on lawlessness in the streets at night while also celebrating the town's advancement. For example, the planned new court house was expected to be ‘a splendid edifice, and a great ornament to our quickly improving town’. Already a large number of stone-cutters were employed on the project and the editorial remarked to its readers that ‘we never remember to see in this town or county so large a quantity of beautiful hewn-stone prepared for any building, either public or private’. In preparation of the chosen site for the court house, labourers were clearing the foundations of the old jail at Nelson Street. Within a few days, stone masons were expected to embark on the building's construction. 100
Places of improvement during the day might become places of crime at night. For example, in Nelson Street, an audacious, if somewhat unsuccessful, gang of thieves had wreaked havoc in the town on the night of 16 August 1831. Having failed to wrench open the external window shutters of a shop in Nelson Street owned by a cloth merchant called John Casey, they proceeded in search of a new target. In smashing a pane of glass in the window of a publican's establishment in the Square owned by an individual called Flaherty, the burglars unwittingly alerted residents in the building and once again, they fled empty-handed. Proceeding to the adjacent Pie Lane (now Dominick Street), the gang members removed a pane of glass from the shop window of a nailer called Foley and managed to steal eighteen pence worth of bread. The chaos of the night prompted the newpaper to complain about ‘groups of idle and dissolute ruffians and prostitutes, who infest our streets at all hours of the night’. Worse again from the evangelical Protestant perspective of the owner editors of the Kerry Evening Post, revellers routinely defiled the solemnity of the sabbath. Displaying a ‘daring defiance of all law’, it was claimed that ‘the dawn of Sunday morning is always ushered in by mobs of miscreants, male and female, parading our streets with discordant yells’. On the previous Sunday, unruly gangs reappeared on the streets after sunset and Tralee resembled a ‘Cherokee station, surprised by a neighbouring tribe of Indian savages, than a town inhabited by civilised Christians’. 101 The implied conflictual contrast between the savage and the civilised, night and day, was emphatic.
Nocturnal crime sprees inspired a demand for effective forms of prevention and protection. The editorial focus of the Kerry Evening Post returned to the issue of nocturnal street criminality on 20 August 1831 when it claimed that the ‘banditti, who infest our streets at night, appear disposed to keep themselves in practice’. On the night of the previous Thursday, panes of glass in the shop window of Thomas O’Reilly on the Mall were shattered and thieves made off with about five shillings worth of bread. Warming to its theme, the editorial elaborated on what it depicted as an expansive criminal cohort in the town which demanded an appropriate response. Starting out as ‘turf and potatoe snatchers’, these men expanded their sphere of activity by attaching themselves to prostitutes. Called ‘botheen boys’, such individuals ‘for a stated share of wages of infamy and of the joint profits of plunder are bound to aid and protect their female companions’. Moreover, with the imminent prospect of long winter nights, the ‘industrious and respectable inhabitants of this town’ were advised to consider ‘adopting some precautionary measures for the protection of life and property’. Adducing a pressing need for public lighting, especially in the context of dark winter nights, the editorial advocated that existing legislation be deployed to this effect. It proposed that a meeting be convened locally to draft a petition to the lord lieutenant in order ‘to cause an equitable assessment to be struck…for the purpose of paving, lighting, removing nuisances’. Additionally, the editorial recommended the appointment of six nightwatchmen who would be paid ‘by subscription’ and two of whom would patrol the streets by night. In the absence of a borough fire engine, such an arrangement would also prove a ‘safeguard against the dreadful ravages of fire’. In a final appeal to civic pride, the paper noted that neighbouring Killarney enjoyed the benefits of a night watch. Elsewhere in the same edition of the newspaper, it was stated that Tralee had a complement of six policemen who could not be expected to undertake night patrols. 102 The idea of a dedicated night guard was part of a broader programme of improvement informed by notions of respectability and civility in an urban environment subject to enhanced surveillance and control. 103
However, the enveloping veil of darkness continued to serve as the backdrop for criminality. In late July 1833, a married woman called Catherine Connor arrived in Tralee from Killarney. Alone in the town, at a ‘late hour that night’ she was apparently forced by two or three men into a smith's forge where she was sexually assaulted. 104 Two of these men, Philip Reidy and Daniel Sullivan, were apprentices to the smith and imprisoned Connor in the forge where she was ‘detained till morning, and her person violated’. An army corporal lodging in an adjacent house heard her cries for help and when he went to investigate he was ‘beaten off by these depraved fellows’. However, both Reidy and Sullivan were implicated in the crime and were taken into custody. A third individual apparently involved in the assault managed to escape. 105 Another version of this incident provides some interesting ancillary details in relation to the circumstances of the supposed crime. In this account, Catherine Connor was ‘forced into a forge in a back lane in this town’ about 10 pm. The police ‘on hearing the first intimation of the outrage’ managed to locate Connor in ‘her obscure lodgings’. Assured of her safety, she agreed to make a complaint before the town's provost and ‘two of the fellows were completely identified by her and lodged in the police barrack’. It seems that Reidy and Sullivan ‘kept the unfortunate victim of their cruelty in the forge from ten o’clock at night till three o’clock in the morning’. However, the woman's screams attracted the attention of a ‘corporal of a recruiting party in this town’ who attempted to rescue her but was driven back by her assailants. It was the latter individual who alerted Sergeant Nason of the Tralee police to the incident. 106 Both Reidy and Sullivan were charged with rape, although it is not clear if they were actually convicted of this crime. 107
By way of conclusion, it is appropriate to return to the story of Margaret Glynn and Anne Walsh whose experience of nocturnal street life was so graphically recorded contemporaneously. Both women remained within the purview of authority which largely exercised unchallenged sovereignty during daylight hours. Charged with vagrancy (possibly a euphemism for prostitution) at the Tralee spring assizes in 1831, they received a sentence of transportation if security on their behalf were not lodged within six months. 108 The women reappeared in the historical record two years later in February 1833 when James Murphy, governor of the county gaol at Tralee, prepared to accompany to the convict hulk at the Cove of Cork eleven male and five female prisoners who had been sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the Australian penal colonies. For obvious reasons of security, Murphy was supported by a small military escort from the town garrison. 109 Seven of the men in the convict party had been convicted of larceny, three men had been found guilty of sheep stealing and John Downey had been convicted of rape while Glynn, Walsh and Elizabeth Hawkins had been convicted of vagrancy. 110 Two other women, Catherine Sullivan and Honora Buckley, had been convicted of larceny. All travelled to Cork on the mail coach. 111 The last appearance of Glynn and Walsh, adept denizens of the night, within a daytime urban context in Tralee was framed by criminality, constraint and imminent exile.
Transportation was an emotive affair entailing as it invariably did a complete rupture of family ties and a profound dislocation of social and cultural experience. 112 It is instructive to reflect on how the inaugural stage in the process of transportation as enacted on the streets of Tralee represented a daytime manifestation of authority that was counterpointed by nocturnal agency on the part of the marginalised. Embarkation on the long journey of transportation constituted the first act in a communal morality play. What was effectively an exposition of public theatre unfolded on the morning of 7 October 1829 when a crowd gathered outside Devine's hotel in Tralee as the mail coach prepared to leave for Cork with a group of convicts sentenced to transportation to New South Wales. The convict party consisted of James Daly found guilty of the violation of Mary Cronin; William Flynn who was convicted of the theft of sixty pounds in a Killarney hotel; Thomas Pyne, Jeremiah Regan and Patrick Regan who had been convicted of horse stealing. Although the darkness of the night accommodated expressions of dissidence and criminality, daylight hours hosted performative rituals of official authority and in turn, enabled public admissions of acquiescence in their hegemony or in this specific example an appeal to overturn a supposed injustice. In what was effectively a display of street drama, James Daly seized the moment to protest his innocence to a large crowd that surrounded the mail coach when he ‘in the most solemn and impressive manner protested his innocence of the crime for which he has been convicted’. 113 Furthermore, Daly asserted his innocence before God and ‘appealed to a crucified redeemer for the truth of his assertions’ and giving ‘utterance to the most awful imprecations, if he was guilty, he bade adieu to his weeping friends in a manner truly affecting’. 114 On the other hand, transportation may have signalled the promise of a new life for some. Mary Brosnahan, aged about 18 years and charged with the theft of clothing in 1830, rejoiced on hearing her sentence at the District Quarter Sessions in Tralee. Indeed, Brosnahan on learning of her sentence of transportation proclaimed ‘that was her sole object and used several most indelicate expressions, unfit to be reported’. 115 The abject desolation of Daly and the supposed glee of Brosnahan give some indication of the range of emotions generated by a sentence of transportation. In both instances, they took advantage of daytime manifestations of official dominion, the point of embarkation for the journey of transportation and the courtroom, to articulate their own perspective in relation to their individual predicament in a self-generated dialogue with authority. It is only possible to speculate as to the state of mind of Glynn and Walsh as they travelled on the mail coach from Tralee to Cork. What is certain, however, is that they can scarcely have envisaged the new world that awaited them in distant Australia. They had exchanged the familiar streets and lanes of Tralee for those of Sydney, the burgeoning capital of New South Wales. However, rather than representing a fresh start, it appears from the record of both women's occasional imprisonment in Sydney's Darlinghurst prison that their lives continued along a trajectory first launched in their home country. 116
This essay has argued that the streets of Tralee in the late 1820s and early 1830s were characterised by a protean, anarchic and often oppositional culture which was diurnal and more frequently nocturnal in its context of enactment. Indeed, more often than not, darkness framed and enabled expressions of dissidence, resistance and criminality. Technology would, in due course, challenge the imperium of darkness. On the night of 21 July 1848, curious crowds gathered around four gas lamps in Day Place and two lamps in the Square which were lighted on a trial basis prior to the extension of gas lighting across the town. In terms of changing attitudes to what was deemed to be culturally and socially normative, an event in town on the same night was emblematic of a new era of putative respectability. The Assizes’ Ball was held at Benner's Hotel and it was attended by a ‘large number of fashionables, comprising the leading families of Tralee and its vicinity’. Indeed, the assemblage was considered to be ‘unusually brilliant’ with polkas, waltzes and quadrilles following in succession in a ballroom which was ‘most tastefully decorated, and remarkably well lighted’. 117 Effectively functioning as an avatar of an era of control and regulation, the town's gas lighting network expanded exponentially with the erection of ninety gas lamps by late September 1848. 118 The night in Tralee was now transformed as ‘the light was very brilliant’ while the ornamental double lamps at Day Place produced ‘a very pleasing effect’. 119 Towards the end of October of the same year, it was reported that ‘gas light is being generally taken into the shops of respectability in this town’. Indeed, it was a matter of general complaint that the street lamps were extinguished too early in the night. 120 A critical shift in perceptions of nocturnal urban regulation was underway. In effect, Tralee's early modern culture of the night which had endured down to the late 1840s was increasingly supplanted by a nocturnal regime of light and control. Of course, this new dispensation faced occasional resistance in the form of the destruction of gas lights. 121 However, such was the dependency of the town's populace on the convenience afforded by public lighting that its unanticipated withdrawal on a January night in 1854 elicited panic. An anonymous letter to the Kerry Evening Post described how Tralee was reduced to a ‘state of total darkness’ with people ‘groping with sticks and feeling their way in the dark, while others were speaking aloud, to prevent a collision in the streets’. 122 Moreover, a sense of civic enhancement was central to the predication of a post-famine identity for Tralee. In the first number of a new serial publication The Kerry Magazine in 1854, the town was presented as a locus of modernity and innovation. The periodical's editor, an Anglican clergyman and antiquarian, Arthur Blennerhasset Rowan (1800–1861), was emphatic as to the reconstructed nature of the town when he declared that ‘Tralee is decidedly a new town – in all its essentials’. Citing among other developments ‘new light (gas-light we mean) over head’, a new court house, a new gaol, a new barracks, a new canal and an expected new railway station, Rowan advised his readers to embrace Tralee's vibrancy as a ‘bustling, thriving, mercantile town’. 123 Henceforth, nocturnal dissidence and non-conformity were to be progressively excluded from the public sphere to the spatial and social margins of the town.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
