Marriage in Ireland after the famine: the diffusion of the match

Abstract

Of all the casualties of Irish social life in the decades after the Famine, one of the most significant was marriage of the kind which had become all but universal in peasant families. Many of the characteristics of social and economic life in the two generations before the Famine depended on the readiness with which men and women, in their early twenties or younger, could arrange to marry, giving hardly a thought to their future source of income. The conventional standard of living was low, but few needed to doubt their ability to provide it for a growing family. The marriages that followed engagements so spontaneous were youthful and general. They were the immediate cause of the doubling of population in little more than half a century.