Moveable Households? The Materiality of Early Irish Immigration

In November 1785, the barrister John Ennis signed a life-long lease for a property in Dublin County, Ireland.  This contract not only stipulated the times and amounts of the Irishman’s rental payments.  It also inventoried the household furnishings left in his care.  Surprisingly, this list included both large furniture items and smaller decorative pieces, like “4 Ornamental China Birds.”  Eighteenth-century historians have suggested that tables, chairs and other large furnishings traditionally were bought with particular households in mind; but they still study smaller decorative items as things attached to people rather than places.  The example of John Ennis, which was common in Georgian Ireland, contests this scholastic habit.  It instead reveals that individuals did not always intend to take their possessions---even their smallest possessions---with them when they changed households.  It also suggests that Irish consumers often operated with a very different perception of the link between person, place, and thing than historians traditionally have granted. 

My paper uses correspondence and lease agreements to reexamine perceptions of property ownership and material spaces in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Irish households.  It especially focuses on socially middling groups.  These included the merchants and professionals most likely to benefit from increased transatlantic trade and its consumer revolutions.  They also involved those persons most likely to move through this non-local world as immigrants.  As such, my paper contends that a revised imagining of the Irish household necessarily impacts narratives examining early Irish emigration.  It explores immigration as a material phenomenon and asks, if Irish consumers attached possessions to spaces (not persons), did material dislocation occurred in relocation?  By comparing homeland material expectations to those of Irish settlers in contemporary New Orleans, my paper ultimately argues that households served as important centers of cultural continuity and transition for a socially advancing, mobile Irish population.