On the Sherlocks, Jane Coleman and County Kildare in the Eighteen Forties

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the author acquired about 30,000 letters written mainly in the 1840s. These pertained to estates throughout Ireland managed by the firm of James Robert Stewart and Joseph Kincaid, hereafter denoted SK. Until the letters – called the SK correspondence in what follows – became the author’s property, they had not seen light of day since the 1840s. Addressed mainly to the firm’s office in Dublin, they were written by landlords, tenants, the partners in SK, local agents, etc. After about 200 years in operation as a land agency, the firm in which members of the Stewart family were the principal partners – Messrs J. R. Stewart & Son(s) from the mid- 1880s onwards – ceased operations in the mid-1980s. Since 1994 the author has been researching the SK correspondence of the 1840s. It gives many new insights into economic and social conditions in Ireland during the decade of the great famine, and into the operation of Ireland’s most important land agency during those years. It is intended ultimately to publish details on several of the estates managed by SK in a study more comprehensive than the present article, in book form. The proposed title is Landlords, tenants, famine: business of an Irish land agency in the 1840s, a draft of which has now been completed. A majority of the letters in that study are on themes some of which one might expect - rents, distraint (seizure of assets in lieu of rent); ‘voluntary’ surrender of land in return for ‘compensation’ upon quitting quietly; formal ejectment (a matter of last resort on estates managed by SK); landlordassisted emigration (on a scale much more extensive than most historians of Ireland in the 1840s appear to believe); petitions from tenants; complaints by tenants, both about other tenants and about local agents; landlord-financed and other relief of distress both before and during the great famine; major works of improvement (on almost all of the estates managed by SK which have been investigated in detail in the draft book); applications by SK, on behalf of landlords, for government loans to finance improvements; recommendations of agricultural advisers hired by SK, etc. Thus, most of the SK correspondence is about aspects of estate management. But the firm of SK was not only a manager of land. The correspondence reveals only two estates in Kildare, each of them relatively small, managed by SK in the 1840s. These were the lands of the Sherlocks near Naas and of Jane Coleman in the Kilcullen district. The correspondence on these properties differs substantively from most of those discussed in detail in the draft of Landlords, tenants, famine: first, it is relatively small in quantity, and secondly, it contains relatively little on the core aspects of estate management indicated above. Much of that on the Sherlocks focuses on misfortunes among family members, while the correspondence on Jane Coleman highlights the benevolence of that proprietor.