A street seller from Limerick
street seller · Limerick, Ireland · London, England · 19th century
A man who had lived by growing potatoes on an acre of land in Limerick, Ireland. In the potato blight and the Great Famine he gave up his land, crossed to London and took to selling in the streets. His name has not come down.
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c. 1850 · Said to Mayhew by a middle-aged street seller from Limerick in Ireland. He is speaking of the potato blight and the Great Famine of the 1840s. His dialect is written as it sounded.
“It was about an acre, and the taties was well known to be good. But the sore times came, and the taties was afflicted, and the wife and me--I have no childer--hadn’t a bite nor a sup, but wather to live on, and an igg or two. I filt the famine a-comin’.”
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1 · the street-Irish
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