The Reynolds Letters ― An Irish Emigrant Family in Late Victorian Manchester

Personal letters are now recognised 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 selection of forty-nine letters sent from Manchester (1877-1904) chronicles the growing wealth and respectability of Irish emigrants making good in industrial England, as William's dyeing and cleaning prospered. They show that the Irish in Manchester did not always experience the squalor and degradation depicted by Carlyle and Engels. The editor's introduction illuminates aspects of the social history of England as well as Irish emigration.