Dublin Tenement Life

An Oral History

by Kevin C. Kearns

Gill & Macmillan, 1984, b/w photographic plates, hardcover, dustjacket, ISBN 07172178X

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, small indentation at bottom front edge, otherwise fine

'For nearly one hundred and fifty years, the wretched, squalid tenements of Dublin were widely judged to be the worst slums in all of Europe.  By the 1930s, 6,400 tenements were occupied by almost 112,000 tenants.  Some districts had 800 people to the acre, up to a hundred occupants in one building and twenty family members crammed into a single tiny room.  It was a hard world of hunger, disease, high mortality, unemployment, heavy drinking, prostitution and gang warfare.  But despite their hardships, the tenement poor enjoyed an incredibly close knit community life in which they found great security and, indeed happiness.  
Kevin Kearns has captured their social life, their raw wit, their rousing wakes and their incredible sense of community solidarity.  in their own words, the last of the tenement dwellers bear testimony to the rich human mosaic of a bygone world.  Their accounts are sometimes tragic and emotionally wrenching but equally they are an inspiring chronicle of struggle, survival and triumph of the human spirit.'