Introduction: “Tolerably Numerous”: Recovering the London Irish of the Eighteenth Century

In 1708 Charles McLaughlin set out for London accompanied by two friends, William Mulligan and “Patrick D–––d.” After a short time in the capital, they ran out of funds, had “fallen into a state of utter despondency,” and were at a loss as to what the future might hold for them. Mulligan became a soldier and eventually a merchant, amassing a “very considerable fortune”; D–––d resorted to robbery until his career was abruptly halted by a jerk of the executioner’s rope at Tyburn. McLaughlin’s biographer tells us this apocryphal anecdote partly in order to inject some tension into his subject’s “train of vicissitudes and fluctuations of fortune” that McLaughlin was to outline over the remaining pages of his two volumes.1 The tension was artificial, of course, as it was well known to his readers that Charles Macklin—McLaughlin anglicized his name on arrival in London like