“Dublin 1911” - A Year in the Life of Dublin from newspapers, ads and photos - GALLERY

Royal Irish Academy book illustrates Ireland’s capital’s life in a single year

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The cover of "Dublin 1911" book

Photo by Royal Irish Academy

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PHOTOS - Life in "Dublin 1911" spelt out in photographs, advertisements and documents - slideshow

The National Archives has digitized both the 1911 and 1901 censuses and while making these records available on its website was a complex  process, involving over nine million entries, the rewards have been significant.
 
“I’m personally delighted with the way that Irish people have taken the 1911 and 1901 censuses to their hearts,” says Ms. Crowe. “I’m a great advocate of history for the people. I love history to be de-mystified, made simple. For me, the greatest success of this is that primary source material and census returns are now completely understandable by any ordinary person who has the use of a computer.”
 
Ms Crowe hopes that Dublin 1911 will complement the census website by encouraging readers to go online and research their own families and communities. An upshot of publishing the census data is that it has helped remove the historical stigma of poverty.
 
“One of the interesting side effects is that people may have stopped feeling ashamed of having poor ancestry,” says Ms. Crowe. “Most of us in Ireland come from poor backgrounds, originally, but there was often great shame in discussing coming from the tenements or from a small rural dwelling and I think the census has done something to alleviate that. It has inspired people to look with a different eye at their ancestors who were heroically rearing large families in very difficult times.”
 
While the prevalence of issues like emigration, unemployment and economic mismanagement in the Dublin of 1911 ring with a strong contemporary resonance, smaller details dramatise a world unrecognisable from today’s city: most women had their clothes made for them and were catered for by over 3,000 dressmakers and 600 milliners, over one third of married women had seven or more children, most suburban Dubliners had at least one servant and Dublin’s traffic was dominated by bicycles, trams and the horse and cart.
 
Included in this stylish production – which is framed by arresting replicate census returns – is a letter published in the Irish Times of April 4 1911 skeptical about the need for a census. The writer suggests “it is open to the enquiring mind to ask what it has all been for?”. If nothing else, it supplied Dublin 1911 with a fertile canvas for this intimate portrait of Ireland’s capital city at the start of the last century and on the eve of radical change.
 
‘Dublin 1911’ is available from Amazon.

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