The Night and Life on the Streets: Disorder in an Irish Town in the 1820s and 1830s

Abstract

It is argued in this essay that the streets of Tralee in south-west Munster in the late 1820s and early 1830s were characterised by a protean, anarchic and often oppositional culture which was both diurnal and very frequently nocturnal in its context of enactment. Indeed, more often than not, darkness framed and enabled expressions of dissidence, resistance and criminality. Technology would, in due course, challenge the imperium of darkness.