Speaker: Marie Riley
In 1846, mounting public concern about the vast numbers of Irish poor arriving in Liverpool led stipendiary magistrate Edward Rushton to request that police be dispatched to the dockside in order to establish the scale of the problem. In the first eleven months of 1847, 296,000 people were counted disembarking from Irish vessels at Liverpool’s Clarence Dock. In a crude measure of their likely intentions, those with luggage were deemed to be en route elsewhere, perhaps intending to board ships to Canada or North America. But the 116,000 described as ‘half naked and starving’ posed an immediate challenge for the authorities and provoked hostile responses from many quarters.
Our speaker: Marie Riley, has had a varied career in the voluntary sector and in adult education. Her original academic focus and the subject of her PhD was on mid-nineteenth-century women’s literature. Her current research interest however is on Victorian Liverpool, particularly the Liverpool Workhouse. She has delivered numerous talks and in 2026 published articles in the Liverpool History Society Journal, the Journal of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society and the Journal of the Irish Federation of Local History Societies.
