Photography and Irish emigrants in the 1850s

Photography reached Irish emigrants in the 1850s because the process itself changed twice within the decade: the costly daguerreotype gave way to the cheaper ambrotype, then to the tintype, a plate sturdy enough to survive a post office sack. By the late 1850s, a servant in Boston or a clerk in Dublin could sit for a likeness for a few coins rather than a week’s wages.

That shift mattered to people who had crossed an ocean from their families. A photograph could not replace a face, but it could travel where the person could not, folded into paper and carried in a mail sack across the Atlantic. Anyone tracing photography, Irish emigrants and the 1850s together will find the same three formats behind the shift: the daguerreotype, the ambrotype and the tintype, each one a step down in price and a step up in how easily an image could survive a journey. The history of that possibility runs through chemistry, studio economics and the ordinary habits of letter writing.

Photography Irish emigrants 1850s: three formats, one price fall

At the start of the 1850s, a portrait still meant a daguerreotype: a single image fixed onto a silvered copper plate, housed in a hinged case, and priced well beyond a labourer’s spare change. The Library of Congress’s Liljenquist Family Collection essay on the period notes that the wet collodion process, introduced in the early 1850s, made two new formats possible, the ambrotype and later the tintype, both quicker and far less costly to produce than the daguerreotype had been.

Ambrotypes, images fixed on glass and backed with dark varnish or cloth to make the negative read as a positive, appeared first. According to that same Library of Congress essay, ambrotypes and tintypes together sold across a price range as low as 25 cents and rising to around $2.50, with hand tinting added for a small extra charge. That was a fraction of what a daguerreotype had commanded only a few years earlier, and it put a studio sitting within reach of people who had never expected to own an image of themselves.

Daguerreotype ambrotype 1850s cost: what a likeness actually bought

Prices for the older daguerreotype varied enormously by size, studio and city, and the surviving evidence does not point to one fixed figure. Accounts of the American trade in the early 1850s describe small “picture factory” plates sold for as little as 25 to 50 cents, while a mid-sized studio portrait from an established gallery could run to several dollars, and a large whole-plate image from a leading firm cost more again. What the figures agree on is direction: through the decade, format after format pushed the price of a likeness downward, from a sum that competed with a week’s pay to one that competed with a loaf of bread.

Boston, the city where so many Irish emigrants of the famine and post-famine years landed, had no shortage of places to spend that money. An exhibition drawing on the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library and Historic New England records that the city held 43 daguerreotype studios by 1850, among them the well-known firms of Southworth and Hawes and John A. Whipple. Boston College’s Global Boston project notes that by 1855, 53 percent of the city’s population was foreign born, the majority of them Irish, arriving above all from Cork, Galway, Kerry and Clare and working as labourers, dockhands, hod carriers and domestic servants. The studios and the new arrivals shared the same streets, even if a hod carrier’s budget rarely stretched to a Southworth and Hawes sitting.

Ireland’s own studios and the growth of the trade at home

Photography did not arrive in Ireland after everywhere else. The National Library of Ireland’s photograph collections trace commercial activity back to the 1840s, and its Photographic Society of Ireland Collection, spanning the 1850s through the twentieth century, holds early work by both Irish and English photographers. The Tenison Collection, assembled by Lady Louisa and Edward King-Tenison across the 1850s and 1860s, preserves some of the earliest surviving photographic albums made in Ireland, using processes that were still new when the images were taken.

Commercial studios grew steadily rather than suddenly. The National Library’s own account of the period notes that by 1870 more than 70 studios operated in Dublin and 15 in Belfast, a trade largely built during the two preceding decades. For a family with a son or daughter newly settled in Boston, New York or further afield, a studio visit at home was, by the later 1850s, no longer a novelty confined to gentry households with cameras of their own.

Photographs sent in emigrant letters

Letters were the reliable channel between Ireland and its emigrants, and by the 1850s a photograph was a plausible enclosure rather than an extravagance. The technical case for that habit rests on the tintype. Patented in the United States in February 1856, according to the Ohio History Connection’s account of the format, the tintype fixed a collodion image directly onto a thin sheet of lacquered iron. Unlike a glass ambrotype or a cased daguerreotype, an iron plate could be trimmed small, wrapped in paper and dropped in an envelope without the risk of a cracked pane arriving in pieces. The same museum notes that this durability is precisely why tintypes became closely associated with correspondence in the years that followed, easy to carry and easy to post.

The format that eventually overtook all of these for sheer volume, the paper carte de visite mounted on card, followed a similar logic of thrift and portability. The Royal Collection Trust’s account of the process credits the French photographer André Disdéri with patenting the format in 1854, a method that produced several small prints from a single sitting at a fraction of the cost per image. Its wider popularity built through the second half of the decade and into the 1860s, but the underlying idea, a small, light, mailable paper likeness, was already taking shape in the same years that ambrotypes and early tintypes were spreading.

None of this means every emigrant family had a photograph on the mantel by 1857. It means the obstacles, cost, fragility and access to a studio, were falling away for the first time, and a decade that opened with the daguerreotype as a luxury closed with several cheaper alternatives in ordinary circulation.

How a photograph travelled with a letter

Weight, not just fragility, shaped what could be posted. Under the postal convention that governed United States to United Kingdom mail from 1848 until the end of 1867, postage was charged at 24 cents per half ounce, a rate that applied to Ireland as part of the United Kingdom throughout the years covered here. A single sheet of writing paper cost little to send; a cased daguerreotype in its wooden box did not travel by ordinary letter post at all. A thin ambrotype on a small glass plate, and especially a tintype on sheet iron, sat much closer to the weight of a folded letter, which is one practical reason those formats suited correspondence in a way the daguerreotype never could.

Speed improved across the same years. Competition between the Cunard and Collins steamship lines cut the Liverpool to Boston crossing from 14 days and 8 hours in 1840 to around 12 days by the mid-1850s, according to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum. A photograph handed to a Boston post office in a given week could plausibly reach a family in Ireland within a fortnight, a pace unimaginable for any earlier form of image making.

The cheap likeness and the trade that sold it

Studios competed hard for this new, budget-conscious custom, and their advertising said so plainly. Notices from the period, preserved in collections of Victorian street literature and shopfront advertising, promised a “correct likeness” for a shilling or less, language pitched squarely at customers who had never paid for a portrait before and were not about to overspend on one now. The cheap likeness, as contemporaries sometimes called it, was a distinctly Victorian portrait trade rather than an artistic one. It was a commodity, sized to a coat pocket or an envelope, and sold on speed and price rather than on a studio’s reputation for artistry.

That commercial pitch matters for understanding who could plausibly own a photograph by the end of the 1850s. The people buying the cheapest ambrotypes and tintypes were, by the studios’ own marketing, exactly the labourers, servants and clerks who made up the bulk of Irish emigration in that decade, not only the professional and merchant families who had always been able to afford a portrait.

What historians cannot know

The written record establishes prices, formats, patent dates and studio counts with reasonable confidence. It is far thinner on the specific, human fact of which families actually put a photograph in an envelope bound for Ireland, or received one from America, in any given year of the 1850s. Surviving emigrant letter collections document money, news and instruction in detail; photographs, being physical objects separable from the paper around them, do not always stay bundled with the letters that once carried them, and many simply have not survived intervening generations of house moves, fires and damp.

It is reasonable to say that a photograph became newly affordable and newly postable during this decade, and that Irish emigrant communities in cities such as Boston sat inside a trade built partly on their own custom. It is not possible, from the sources gathered here, to say how common the practice was in any single year, or to reconstruct a typical exchange between a specific family in Ireland and a specific emigrant abroad. The gap is a reminder that the history of ordinary correspondence is written mostly in absence.

Sources and further reading

Library of Congress, Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, essay “Ambrotypes and Tintypes,” Digital Collections.
National Library of Ireland, “Photographs,” collections guide, including the Photographic Society of Ireland Collection and the Tenison Collection.
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Athenaeum, Boston Public Library and Historic New England, exhibition record “A Photographic Portrait of Boston, 1840-1865.”
Global Boston project, Boston College, “Irish” immigration history page.
Ohio History Connection, “What Do You Know About Tintypes?”
Royal Collection Trust, “Carte-de-visite,” photographic technologies collection notes.
Smithsonian National Postal Museum, “Transatlantic Mail,” About Philately: Covers and Letters, Land and Sea, Overseas Mail exhibition.