Firstly I would like to say that I agree entirely with Simon’s excellent review. However there is one point I would like to raise without, I hope, being accused of nitpicking.
In his paper, The Miner’s Lot: aspects of mining life in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Wales, Simon J.S. Hughes says, “In the early 1840s, following the famine, many Irish came as labourers”. In fact the early 1840s was on the eve of the Great Famine. James Morris wrote in his/her (don’t ask) trilogy Pax Britannica that the crop failed partially in 1845, wholly in 1846 and again in 1848. The generally accepted dates for the famine are 1845-52. Of course life in Ireland prior to the famine wasn’t a bed of roses, but that’s another story.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.