The Social Topography of Eighteenth-Century Dublin
15 The Multi-Centred Metropolis: The Social Topography of Eighteenth-Century Dublin EDEL SHERIDAN-QUANTZ It is here necessary to remark, that the eastern side of the City, contiguous to the sea, is almost entirely laid out in elegant streets, for the residence of the gentry: and the western side, though more remote from the sea, and consequently not so conveniently situated for the purposes of commerce, is chiefly inhabited by merchants and mechanicks.1 IN A PORT CITY IT SEEMS RATHER ODD INDEED that the ‘merchants and mechanicks’ should dwell in the landward half of the city, leaving the area towards the coast to the ‘gentry’. As the following demonstrates, Dublin’s east–west social gradient as described in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century accounts, of which a typical sample is given above, was not quite as simple as many contemporaries liked to claim. The eastern and western sectors were fragmented and subdivided by the physical barrier of the River Liffey, so that different neighbourhood characters and subcentres of social and economic activity developed, not only in the eastern and western halves of the city but also within these sectors. With the Restoration of the monarchy in England and the consequent re-establishment of the Irish parliament in Dublin, the city began to expand rapidly again. Dublin in the eighteenth century was a capital city, nominally of a semi- autonomous kingdom, de facto of a state with effective colonial status subject to the English throne; nevertheless, the city had all the associated administrative, legal, cul- tural and economic functions of a capital.
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