To Victorian visitors, Ireland was a world of extremes - luxurious country houses to one-room mud cabins (in 1841 40% of Irish housing was the latter). This thorough and engaging social history of Ireland offers new insights into the ways in which ordinary people lived during this dramatic moment in Ireland's history from 1800-1914. It covers a wide range of aspects of everyday lives: from work on the many wealth country estates to grinding poverty in the towns. It covers the transformative effects of the railway development and Ireland's first tourist boom. Workhouse life and the new Poor Law system which incarcerated entire families behind forbidding walls. Religious divisions, educational boycotts, customs and superstitions.

Ian Maxwell writes for family history magazines including Family History Monthly and Ancestry Magazine. He is an expert on Irish Family History and has written a number of guides. He is a former Public Records officer, Northern Ireland.