The way we were in 1859 THE YEAR: The newspaper was launched into a market in which half the population over five could not read or write SHANE HEGARTY

IN LATE 1859 an American gentleman steps off a boat at Kingstown, south Dublin. Edward Everett Hale is on a short tour and making notes that he would later turn into a book Ninety Days Worth of Europe. Too many notes, he admits. "The printer warns me that this little book is too long …"

He is giddy, having first visited England, France, Germany and Italy, and in Ireland he marvels at the wooden cottages, the way that Irish miles are a different length to English ones, and how relentlessly chirpy the locals are. By the time the sun sets on just his first day in the country he remarks: "There was nothing of the braggadocio by which the Irishman in America boasts to you that his own country is the finest in the world." And as he leaves Cork three days later, he announces that it is "the most entertaining country to travel in that I ever saw".

Unfortunately for the reader, Hale's isn't the most entertaining book you ever saw. His printer was doing more than saving paper when recommending that he keep it brief. Yet, for a glimpse at the Ireland of 1859, the book holds some fascination, not least in how he describes the countryside in the years after the Famine. Already, cottages have fallen into ruin, largely because they've been stripped of every bit of wood almost immediately: doors, roof, all gone. "But they tell me every thing is thriving here now; and I can well believe it," says Hale. "The solidity of the roads on which I have been travelling, all over Ireland, is one memorial of the good which was educed out of the evil of the famine. The British Government met its responsibilities nobly in that terrible year."

To say that in 1859 Ireland was "thriving" would be overstating it a bit, although in some respects it was improving. The economy, as a whole, was rebounding somewhat from the horrific Famine years; more schools were being built; the railway network was far better than it is today; steamships now chugged in and out of the ports; in the north of the island, the textile industry was flourishing and it was the year in which Harland made Wolff a partner in his Belfast shipyard.

Yet, if you lived in Ireland at the time, you were more than likely to be poor, uneducated and, to an extent, lucky to be alive. When Captain Lawrence Knox launched his newspaper, he sent it into a "market" in which half the population over the age of five years old could not read or write. He sold his paper to a population that was diminishing at a staggering rate. Emigration was not new, but by the 1850s it had become monstrous. Two and a half million people had left the country in the decade after 1845, heading to all corners of the globe, but largely to America. In fact, historians now believe that the figures might be an underestimate because they can't be sure how many settled in Britain. (At least those going abroad no longer included convicts – transportation to Australia had stopped in 1853.)

In 1841, the population of Ireland had been over eight million. By the time a census was taken in 1861, it had dropped below six million. Famine and emigration weren't the only hackers at the population. Disease was rife and the health system patchy. Typhus, smallpox, measles and diarrhoea were among the more common afflictions, although everyone had the right to have a free doctor within a day's walk of them.

The emigrants sent home money, which helped mask the scale of unemployment in a country still largely reliant on agricultural work. Census forms, however, were no longer counting beggars, tinkers or prostitutes as professions. (Prostitution appears to have been widespread, in larger towns at least.) There were workhouses in which poor families entered and lost all individual rights in return for some basic work and a subsistence diet. There were occasional moments of relief for their unfortunate inhabitants, with some getting snuff, tobacco and good meat for Christmas and Easter, and the children even getting toys if they happened to be in a more kindly workhouse.

THE POPULATION was collapsing in a country in which the average married couple was having four children. However, almost one in every 10 infants died in its first year. Many others who had been carried in a malnourished womb during the Famine years would probably have suffered developmentally as a result.

The birth rate would have been higher if it wasn't that people were getting married later and later. This could partly be explained by the development of a system in which the eldest son would inherit the farm, but not until the father was ready to hand it over. Marriages were often arranged, with the help of a matchmaker, and were calculated to keep the land in family hands. This was of benefit to the first-born son and heir, but not so good for other offspring who, as FSL Lyons points out in Ireland Since the Famine, faced a choice between emigrating or staying on and working as farmhands.

It would be another decade before land would begin to move from the hands of landlords into those of the tenants, but there were some changes on the land, with farms being consolidated into larger ones. However, the internal migration towards the urban areas was gathering pace. Depopulation of the countryside halted briefly during the 1850s, but it was only a glitch in a pattern that saw people increasingly abandon their rural cabins for towns.

In rural areas, people were generally healthier and better fed because they still relied on milk and potatoes despite the calamitous failure of the crops during the Famine, and the fact that the crop had failed over a dozen times in the decades leading up to it. Sugar was about to become a much greater part of the diet, so that it was about to become a bad time for Irish teeth. But in 1859 diabetes just wasn't a problem.

At the time, Ireland wasn't much of a beer-drinking nation. It has been estimated that in 1851, the Irish drank 3.5 gallons of beer per head, which wasn't much when compared to the 26 gallons per head being drunk by 1901. Instead, poitín and whiskey stills were the most popular source of alcohol, although they were about go into decline. Murphy's brewery in Cork was founded in 1856. As the railway network improved, the urban breweries began to squeeze out the provincial operations, with Guinness, in particular, thriving. The 1850s marked a period when it truly grew into one of the largest breweries in the world.

Spiritual health was another matter, and here there were some great changes. The Ireland of the 1850s was reeling from the Famine, and as older supernatural beliefs faded, Roman Catholicism, in its more stringent form, gained a firmer grip among the three-quarters of the population that belonged to that religion.

Gradually, there were more priests but fewer parishioners. By 1859, there would have been approximately one priest for every 2,000 parishioners, compared to one for every 3,000 in 1840. As an indication of how quickly the population was dropping – and the priesthood was becoming more of an option for many men – by 1870 there was one priest for every 1,250 parishioners.

Among the island's Protestants, especially its Presbyterians who lived mostly in the north of the island, 1859 was a year that would be remembered for the Great Revival, a period of evangelical fervour to which the firebrand preachers of today still owe a debt. It began among a small prayer group in County Antrim but swept through the province. There were "monster meetings" across Ulster, sometimes attended by tens of thousands of people, some of whom would be "stricken" by the convulsions still familiar at evangelical meetings today.

This, then, was how people lived. The politics that shaped the country they lived in also reached a seminal moment in 1859. The post-Famine years were to see the rise of Fenianism with a more militant, secretive approach. The founding of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, with its military structure and drills, meant the Irish revolutionary movement was reforming with consequences for generations of Irish to come. And it serves as a firm reminder that the Ireland into which Captain Lawrence Knox launched his thrice-weekly newspaper was one that had experienced a catastrophe of great proportions but was now at a decisive turning point.

Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times staff journalist