2-888-783 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Dancing between Decks, 1850. Emigrants leaving for the colonies: United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. The average annual emigration from the United Kingdom between 1825 and 1850 was 91,407. Depiction of '... emigrants, male and female, dancing between decks - to the music of the violin - played for their amusement, by some of their fellow-passengers...Though many of the Irish emigrants are, doubtless, persons of small means, who have been hoarding and saving for years, and living in rags and squalor, in order to amass sufficient money to carry themselves and families across the Atlantic, and to beg their way to the western states, where they may "squat" or purchase cheap lands, the great bulk appear to be people of the most destitute class, who go to join their friends and relatives, previously established in America'. From "Illustrated London News", 1850.