A catalogue of the manuscripts and archives of the Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

to critical scrutiny through sampling the criminal and poor-law records of the city. Finally, an assessment is made of the extent to which the Irish were assimilated into the local community. The choice of York for such an extended analysis has not turned out to be particularly fruitful since successive fresh waves of immigrants replaced those who had moved on, and very few Irish remained in the city from one decennial census to the next. Thus it was the transient nature of the Celtic population, rather than the other factors so painstakingly analysed (the herding together of the Irish in slum "ghettoes", their religious and educational isolation, and their dependence on casual labouring or agricultural occupations) which resulted in such minimal assimilation into the York community. The most interesting findings relate to the social behaviour of the Irish. Were they the drunken, violent, brutish individuals depicted by some hostile commentators? In spite of her attempt to revise the antisocial image of the Celtic immigrant, Finnegan's York evidence indicated that their record of criminal offences and their dependence on poor relief were disproportionately heavy for their numbers. Against this, the author emphasizes the social responsibility which led the York Irish to send money back to their less fortunate brethren in post-Famine Ireland. And she argues forcibly that rather than blaming the immigrants for their appalling living conditions, contemporaries should have indicted their landlords for their inhumanity and selfishness. Poverty and prejudice, the title of this book, is more telling than much of its argument. It was the abject poverty in which the Irish lived, rather than their race and religion, which aroused much of the adverse comment from their more affluent contemporaries. Such prejudice did not differentiate the Irish from the English slum-dweller nor, until Rowntree's investigations a generation later, did contemporaries understand the reasons for their poverty. Anne Digby University of York