The Middle Class of Callan, Co. Kilkenny 1825-45

This book examines the changing lives of the middle class in one small Irish town in the early 19th-century. In the years before the Famine, the mail coach traveling between Dublin and Cork passed through Callan in County Kilkenny, and many of its passengers commented disparagingly about the town and its streets. However, what they saw was an incomplete picture of Callan, where 40% of the population were middle class, with reasonably good incomes and life styles. This group comprised business people, the clergy, professionals, government officials, and farmers. Their private lives, as described in the remarkable diaries of Callan resident Amhlaoibh O Suilleabhain, were taken up with the universal concerns of birth, marriage, and death, as well as health, diet, language, and leisure. Their public interests reflected the national scene, with religion dividing them into Catholic and Protestant factions. In 1825, the small Protestant group, despite being only 3% of the population, controlled all the levers of local power, but, by 1845, the increasingly educated Catholic middle class were beginning to have a say in the new local government institutions, such as town commissioners and poor law guardians, which were established by the Whig administrations of the 1830s. Only in the face of the cholera epidemic of 1832 did the two communities put aside their religious differences for the protection of all.