ABSTRACT
Much recent historiography concerned with Irish immigrants in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century suggests a widespread perception in the host society that Irish crime constituted a great danger to the safety and security of British citizens. This chapter details how Irish criminality was perceived as a sign of Irish inferiority. It demonstrates that these works portrayed the threat Irish criminality posed to Britain not as a danger to life and property, but rather as the epiphenomenon of a "disease" which would contaminate the morals of the British working class. The chapter argues that the authors of these urban reform documents of the 1830s, developing a rhetorical strategy that differed significantly from earlier works of reform, depicted the anti-domesticity of Irish women as the engine of moral contagion, and thus the basis of the real threat to the social order.
