FOR MUCH OF the nineteenth century, the people living in Dublin’s tenements remain invisible to the historian.
But for the men and women who actually lived in these tenements, they were simply ‘home’. To the working class, arguments about the social or political causes of Dublin’s housing problems must have seemed rather abstract.
‘Every shape of disease germ’ This journalist went on to describe the rooms on the top floor of a tenement building: ‘that is where every shape of disease germ, both physical and mental, is being bred at hot-house speed. That top back room of the Dublin tenement house is the devil’s incubator. Its inmates can remain neither healthy nor clean, nor moral.’
When No. 14 was converted to tenements nineteen separate flats across its five levels were created, one flat in each of the house’s eighteenth-century rooms. Looking at the ground floor, we see that the large room at the front of the house called the front or street parlour) was subdivided to form a three-room apartment, with the large two-bay rear room subdivided to form a four-room flat.
They offer information on the number of official tenants per flat and the rent they paid. In many entries, including that for No. 14 Henrietta Street, the agents and lessor are also identified. ‘Class A tenement’ The 1912 valuation notes that while No. 14 had been a ‘Class A’ tenement, it had been recently downgraded to a ‘Class B’, with its valuation lowered from £62 toHowever, despite this downgrade, evidence indicates that Henrietta Street was still not the ‘worst of the worst’ of Dublin’s tenements. In 1914, a survey of tenement families reported that the average weekly rent for a tenement apartment was 3s.
The inhabitants of Dublin’s tenements were highly mobile, frequently moving from one building to another, indicating the economic precariousness of their existence and the lack of security provided by leases and rental agreements. Advertisement After rent, the greatest expenditure was food. For those living in the tenements, ‘diet’ was not a matter of taste or preference so much as it was about the weekly struggle for survival against poverty and illness. For many, their diet was both meagre and monotonous. The most common item in the typical diet was bread, with the two-pound white baker’s loaf being the most popular variety in Dublin.
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