3-028-210 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches from Ireland: interior of a mud cabin at Kildare, 1870. '...in a dwelling which consisted of a single room, eight feet by ten in size, lived a widow, with a grown-up son twenty years of age, another son, of sixteen, and a daughter, of ten years. They had no bedstead or bedding, but slept in their clothes on the bare ground, with a few dirty rags over them. The only furniture was a rickety table and a broken bench, with an iron pot and kettle and two or three cups...Save that it actually has a chimney and a comparatively lofty roof, blackened, however, by a century of smoke, and that it accommodates at night simply a donkey instead of the customary pig, this is about as bad a specimen of an Irish cabin as could be found in any village in the county. There were puddles of water in different places on the mud floor...The widow, although in rags and with bare legs and feet, was a person of some intelligence, who...had taught her children to read...The rent of this hovel of hers, which before the establishment of the Curragh Camp, only a few miles distant, was 4d. per week merely, has since been increased to 10d. This is one of the forty-two families at Kildare, numbering 152 persons, all tenants of the Duke of Leinster'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.