The lost lives of prisoners in Grangegorman Female Penitentiary

In this article, Brian Crowley gives an insight into the lives of individual women imprisoned in Grangegorman Female Penitentiary, Britain and Ireland’s first female-only prison. Brian Crowley is the Curator of Collections for Kilmainham Gaol and the Pearse Museum and the author of a number of historical articles and ‘Patrick Pearse, A Life in Pictures’.

1 May 2026

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It was with some fanfare that the Inspectors-General of Irish Prisons announced in their 1837 annual report that the ‘Discipline of Female Prisons throughout the Country is likely to receive a Stimulus from the Example of the Grange Gorman Female Penitentiary recently opened in Dublin.’ When it opened the previous year, Grangegorman Female Penitentiary became the first prison in Britain and Ireland to exclusively house women prisoners. This ‘Experiment of an exclusive Female Penitentiary’ placed Ireland at the cutting edge of prison reform at the time, and its establishment was in part due to encouragement and support of the Inspectors-General. Their office had been established in 1822. There were two inspectors and between them, they visited, inspected and reported on every prison in Ireland annually. Although their recommendations to local authorities were not binding, they were quite influential and their annual report was published by the House of Commons. It would seem that they took a particular interest in Grangegorman and were very admiring of the prison’s Head Matron, Marion Rawlins, who had previously worked in Cold Bath Fields Prison in London and was recommended for the post by the well-known English prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry.  In the years following the opening of the prison, the Inspectors-General produced minutely detailed reports of the running of Grangegorman, as they did for all the prisons in Ireland. Their reports remain the main source for understanding the workings of Irish prisons in the mid-nineteenth century.

What is largely absent from the Inspectors-General reports however, is any reference to the lives of individual women imprisoned in Grangegorman. The Inspectors-General treated prisoners as a single homogenous group which they could quantify and analyse in statistical tables to reveal things like the average cost of incarcerating each prisoner, or the financial contribution each prisoner made though their prison work. Their figures were based on the prison account books and registers of prisoners kept by each prison. The Inspectors-General were given full access to these records during their annual visits. The information recorded about prisoners in the prison registers varied slightly depending on the time period and the individual prison, but generally they noted prisoners’ names, their age, crime, sentence, as well as the dates they entered and left the prison. They recorded each prisoner’s physical appearance, including their height, hair colour and complexion. These details would have enabled them to identify escaped prisoners and also aided in recognizing repeat offenders who often provided a false names on rearrest. Levels of literacy were noted as was a prisoner’s trade, if they had one. The Grangegorman registers recorded where prisoners were originally from rather than where they were living at the time of their arrest. The Dublin prison authorities were often anxious to emphasise the fact that the majority of prisoners in their gaols originally came from other counties and that the cost of their incarceration was being borne by the rate-payers of the city rather than the communities from where they came.

While the registers recorded a significant amount of personal information, any expression of individuality by prisoners during their incarceration was ruthlessly suppressed by the authorities. Prisoners were constantly encouraged to abandon their pre-prison lifestyles and become instead law-abiding, constructive members of society. For the prison authorities, prisoners were seen primarily as the subjects of their carefully planned efforts to reform them. As far as they were concerned, the only acceptable response to these efforts was absolute compliance. For most of the prisoners held in Grangegorman, the only surviving archival record of their existence is their entry in prison registers. Outside the prison walls, these prisoners existed on the margins, living in the poorest and most squalid of conditions. It was often only through their acts of anti-social behaviour, such as window breaking, petty crime and disorderly conduct, that their existence reached the notice of wider Irish society. They also became the focus of public attention in the early nineteenth century because of the increasing levels of female criminality, particularly in urban areas. The establishment of Grangegorman as a female-only prison indicated the progressive and modernising spirit of the Irish prison authorities, but it also reflected the particular challenge Irish prisons faced at that time in relation to high levels of female criminality. The relative lack of industrial development in Irish towns and cities in the nineteenth century meant that economic opportunities for women from the lower classes were limited. Domestic service was one of the main sources of employment for women, but a prison record effectively cut them off from this kind of work as employers insisted that domestic servants be women ‘of good character’. In contrast with male prisoners, women who had spent time in prison seem to have found it very difficult to find legal work and the means to support themselves. Having entered the prison system, many found it almost impossible to escape an endless cycle of arrest, imprisonment and re-arrest. While the Inspectors-General expressed their belief in their 1837 report that the new prison in Grangegorman would lead to the reformation of female prisoners, they were concerned that there was no ‘Place of Refuge into which such Persons can be received on being discharged from Confinement.’  Much as they may have wanted to avoid returning to prison, with nowhere to live on their release and no means supporting themselves, many of the women had no alternative other than to return to a life of crime and disorder.

The Inspectors-General were overwhelmingly positive about the new Grangegorman prison and the way it was run in their annual reports. In 1839 they wrote about the

… great value of such an Institution in this populous City; the mode of treatment, and regulations suitable to a Female, being in some degree different from those applicable to a Male person

In 1841 they were happy to report that it maintained ‘the high character it has hitherto so deservedly borne’.  The Inspectors gave Marion Rawlins much of the credit for the smooth running of the prison and in 1842 said her ‘zeal and intelligence on the subject of Prison Discipline cannot be too highly reported upon’. However by 1846, after a decade in operation, it became clear that despite the fact that the Grangegorman was seen by the authorities as one of the best run prisons in the country, a significant number of its inmates almost immediately returned to a life of crime following their release. This was deeply troubling for the advocates of prison reform who had secured significant financial and political support for the building and operation of new prisons on the basis that they would reform prisoners and turn them away from a life of criminality. In addition, prison numbers and arrests were also growing across the country, largely as a result of the catastrophic effects of the Great Famine.

In their 1846 Report, the Inspectors-General of prisons decided to highlight the problem of recidivism by compiling a list of the 45 women who had most frequently been recommitted to Grangegorman Female Penitentiary. Unusually, this table referenced individual prisoners by name. It appears to have been based on those present in the prison on the day of their inspection, 1 October 1822. The table listed the number of misdemeanours and more serious felonies, but excluded arrests for drunkenness.

Return of 45 Female Prisoners taken from the number confined in Grangegorman Penitentiary on the 1st October, 1846, who have frequently been recommitted thereunto, showing how many times committed for felony and for misdemeanours respectively, exclusive of drunkenness.

The prison authorities were anxious to trace reoffending prisoners, and to facilitate this, the entry for returning prisoners in the registers included a reference to their previous prison number, as well as a running total on the number of sentences they had served. Using these numbers it is possible to follow individual prisoners across several decades of prison sentences. The large number of arrests amassed by some of these women prisoners over the years means one can also create a very basic kind of prison biography for them. These accounts are by necessity deeply reductive and present their lives purely in terms of the interaction with the penal and judicial system, a system which was deeply hostile to these women and the way they lived their lives. However, in the absence of any other sources, they represent the only method of reclaiming their stories from complete oblivion. These tables of reoffending prisoners in Grangegorman were produced in the Inspectors-General of Irish Prisons reports of 1846, 1848, 1850 and 1851. This article will attempt to create a prison biography for the leading reoffenders in each of these tables in an attempt to get a better understanding of the shape of these women’s lives.

On 1 October 1846 the prisoner with the highest number of previous convictions was Anne Kelly or Hollywood. Her prison biography starts with her first sentence in Grangegorman on 28 April 1837 when she was convicted of pawning a stolen cloak for which she received a sentence of 14 days.  She was described as being 5’2½ ” in height, with brown hair and a fair complexion (in the years that followed her complexion was mostly  described as being either ‘sallow’ or ‘swarthy’). She was a Catholic and initially her place of birth was given as Rathmines in Dublin. In her initial sentences her occupation was given as ‘plain worker’ which meant she could perform functional sewing and needlework repairs. However on her seventh admission to Grangegorman on 11 June 1838 when she was charged with ‘breach of the peace’, her occupation is listed as ‘none’.  This may reflect the fact that she was no longer supporting herself as a needle worker. In addition, she is recorded as having no education meaning that she was not able to read or write. Among the most common crimes committed listed for the women prisoners in Grangegorman at this time were disturbing or breaching the peace, along with charges for being ‘disorderly’. ‘Disorderly’ persons would have included women whom a police officer believed were soliciting for the purposes of prostitution which may in part explain the multiple convictions under the heading of ‘disorderly’, ‘breach of the peace’ and ‘disturbing the peace’ in the Grangegorman registers. The 1836 Dublin Police Act gave constables very broad powers to

… apprehend all loose, idle, and disorderly persons whom he shall find disturbing the public peace, or whom he shall have just cause to suspect of any evil designs, and all persons whom he shall find between sunset and the hour of eight in the forenoon lying in any highway, yard, or other place, or loitering therein, and not giving a satisfactory account of themselves’

While Anne Hollywood was charged with being a ‘common night walker’ on 20 November 1844 and 18 April 1845,  charges which explicitly reference prostitution are relatively rare in the Grangegorman registers. On 13 February 1838 Anne Hollywood was sentenced to a month for breaking window glass. It is possible that this was part of an attempt to steal goods from a shop, or alternatively it could have been purely an act of vandalism. It seems to have been a relatively common crime in Dublin at the time, particularly among women.

In 1838 Anne Hollywood also had five convictions for drunkenness with sentences of between 24- to 48-hours. However, in 1839 a separate Registry of Drunkards was established for those arrested for drunkenness and vagrancy. These registers only recorded a prisoner’s name and age, and their sentences were usually just for 24 hours. The total number of convictions listed for Anne Hollywood when she was arrested on 16 January 1839 should have been seventeen, but it dropped down to eleven, perhaps reflecting the fact that convictions for drunkenness were no longer included in a prisoner’s conviction total. A woman of the same age who went by the name Anne Hollywood appears in the drunkenness register a number of times that year. For most of her sentences from this period she is listed as Anne Hollywood, though the spelling of Hollywood varied. However on 28 May 1839 she gave her name as Anne McCue, and on 12 October 1839 she used the name Anne Kelly while serving a 14-day sentence for disturbing the peace. The authorities were well aware that she was the same person regardless of the name she gave, and they linked the sentences served under these pseudonyms to her previous convictions under the Hollywood surname.

Generally the sentences served by the women in Grangegorman were relatively short, sometimes just a few days. One of the longest served by Anne Hollywood was for three months between June and August 1841 for stealing a hat.  Unfortunately the registers from 1842-3 and 1846-8 are missing so it impossible to trace what happened to Anne Hollywood during those years. In addition, severe damage to the 1841 register also makes it difficult to identify every one of her prison sentences in that period. Following a gap in the records caused by the loss of the 1842-3 register, Anne Hollywood’s name appears again on 17 January 1844 serving another two months for assault. She was now on her sixtieth conviction. In 1844 her place of origin is given as Wicklow, not Rathmines.  Anne Hollywood’s sentences often followed on from each other quite quickly, with sometimes just a day between her release and subsequent readmission for a different crime. Looking at her sentences for 1844 alone, she spent approximately nine months as a prisoner in Grangegorman as a result of fourteen different prison sentences.

Anne Hollywood’s Prison Sentences in Grangegorman: 1844

In contrast to earlier years, there seems to have been a noticeable increase in more violent and serious crimes, including four convictions for assault in 1844. This might suggest that Anne Hollywood’s lifestyle was becoming significantly dangerous and chaotic. Her interaction with the judicial and penal systems generally did not merit a mention in the press, but on 24 July 1845, the Freeman’s Journal reported that

‘A girl named Anne Hollywood was charged for having attempted to drown herself. The prisoner was observed leaping over the Liffey-wall by constable 19A who was fortunate enough in coming up and rescuing her in time. She was committed for a month.’

The prison registers corroborate this story and record that Anne Hollywood was held in Grangegorman between 23 July and 22 August on charges of attempted suicide.  She made the pages of the Freeman’s Journal again on 11 January 1847, this time in relation to a charge for breaking eight panes of glass in the premises of a Mr. Ryder on Merchant’s Quay. The article notes that this was her 99^th offence in seven years.

Anne Hollywood’s name also appears in the register for Newgate Gaol. The former city gaol was located on Green Street next door to the city court and was used at that time to hold prisoners awaiting trial. In June 1846 Anne Hollywood was held there on charges of stealing a gold watch and chain belonging to a man named John Brennan. As well as her place of origin, the Newgate registers also recorded her current address which she gave as Great Britain (now Parnell) Street. They also noted that she had served 93 previous sentences in Grangegorman. While she was found not guilty on this occasion, she was back in Newgate on 20 June 1848 on charges of vagrancy and breaking the window of a man named Trevor Black. This time her address was given as Church Street. She was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation and sent to the convict depot of Grangegorman. This depot occupied part of the prison building in Grangegorman, but was run directly by the central government to hold female convicts while they awaited the arrival of the ship which would transport them to Australia. The entry for Anne Hollywood in the Grangegorman Convict Depot from 1 July 1848 recorded that to date she had served sentences for two felonies and 117 misdemeanours in Grangegorman.

Anne Hollywood was among the two hundred convicts, forty-five children and thirteen free settlers who embarked aboard the Lord Auckland on the 4 and 5 October 1848. The diary of the Surgeon Superintendent on the voyage, John Moody, does not mention Anne Hollywood so she presumably had no major health issues on the voyage.  Many of the prisoners had intestinal issues, and there were a number of women whose poor health was attributed to the effects of the Famine. The child of one of the convicts had smallpox and had to be quarantined along with her mother. Moody also inoculated of sixteen of the children against the disease as a result. One of the convicts, a 25-year-old woman named Mary Whelan, was admitted to the ship’s hospital on 17 October. She had eaten little on the voyage and had a large suppurating tumour on her right breast. She was also seven months pregnant and went into labour. She died on 28 October and her baby followed her a few days later. Three of the children, including an infant born on the voyage, also died. Moody’s account gives an insight into the debilitating effect Anne Hollywood’s lifestyle would have had on her health when describing another prisoner, Sarah Devine. She was 50, ten years Anne Hollywood’s senior, but their lives had much in common:

This woman’s appearance indicates irregular and ill-spent life; her aspect is sallow and she looks haggard and a good deal emaciated. Was on the town previous to conviction and like many of her class drank as much gin etc. as she could procure

The Lord Auckland docked in Hobart, Tasmania on 26 January 1848. Moody recorded that in

the last portion of the voyage the Prisoners conducted themselves in a satisfactory manner & they had the credit of being the most orderly, healthy and clean set landed in the colony for many years.

The Australian records give a much more detailed account of Anne Hollywood’s appearance. They give her age as 40 and her height as 5’1 ½” (her height in Dublin was generally recorded at between 5’2” and 5’3”). She is described as having dark hair, brown eyebrows, grey eyes, and an oval face with a high forehead, long nose, wide mouth and round chin. It appears she was also a widow and nearly blind in her left eye. Her trade is given as ‘house maid’ and she was sent directly to the Brickfields Depot where female convicts were hired out to private employers. Her various employers between 1852 and 1855 included the New Norfolk Asylum for the Insane. During this period she had numerous run-ins with the law and served several sentences for drunkenness, being out after hours, insolence, and using obscene and violent language to her master. She was also given permission to marry a man named Michael Barry around this period. The Australian prison records do not seem to record anything else about her fate after this time.

A second table listing the women most frequently recommitted to Grangegorman Female Penitentiary appeared in the Inspectors-General of Irish Prisons Report for 1848, although it was actually based on a visit on 13 February 1849. On this occasion the prisoner with the highest number of sentences to her name was named Sarah Nolan.

Table of Recommittals, 1848

Sarah Nolan, or Nowlan, was originally from Delgany in Co. Wicklow and her earliest identifiable conviction was on 21 July 1837 when she was sentenced to 14 days in Grangegorman for breaking property at the age of 24. The register records this as her second conviction. She was 24 years old, 5’3½”,  had dark hair and sallow skin. She could not read or write and her profession was given as ‘bonnet maker’. However, in a similar way to Anne Hollywood, on her tenth conviction when she was charged with drunkenness on 23 April 1838, she was described as having no profession. Her crimes were also similar to those committed by Anne Hollywood with numerous convictions for breaching and disturbing the peace, being disorderly and drunkenness. While it is very possible she was supporting herself by engaging in sex work, there are no explicit references to it in her convictions. She had a number of convictions for theft and from 27 September to 1 October 1847 she was held on remand in Newgate Gaol in Dublin for stealing a handkerchief. Her address at that time was given as Bride Street and the entry in the register notes that she had served 88 sentences in Grangegorman Penitentiary. There are also references to here being in Newgate on two previous occasions in 1839 and 1841. She was released as no bill was produced against her.  She also appears in in the Register of Drunkards on numerous occasions. Her surname is recorded as ‘Nolan’ and ‘Nowlan’ at different times, but she also seems to have used a number of pseudonyms. In February 1838 she used ‘Bridget Nowlane’, in June 1838 and November 1839 she gave ‘Eliza Green’ as her name, in May 1839 she used ‘Eliza Kelly’, in December she was ‘Eliza Ryan, while in three consecutive sentences between 30 July and 23 October 1839 she used ‘Eliza/Elizabeth Nowlan’. Other names used by Sarah Nolan included Catherine Reilly and Mary Hughes. Interestingly, from 4 September 1858 onwards she mostly used the name Mary Burke.  It was under that name that she received her lengthiest sentence when on 1 April 1861 she began a four-year sentence of penal servitude for theft.  This conviction made the papers, the Dublin Daily Express reported that Mary Burke had been sent to trial for pickpocketing 3s 6d from Mr. William White.  According to Tim Carey’s Mountjoy, The Story of A Prison, she served this sentence in the new women’s prison in Mountjoy which had opened in 1858. The now 48-year-old Mary Burke/Sarah Nolan is recorded as being a widow and having served 163 previous sentences.  No record of further prison sentences in Grangegorman appears to exist for her.

Sarah Nolan was also listed on the table of frequently committed prisoners drawn up for the 1850 Inspector-General’s Report. She had amassed 114 sentences at that stage. There were at least seven other women who had previously appeared on either the 1846 or 1848 lists. Anne Carr or Kerr, who had the second highest number of convictions in 1848 and 1850, had also appeared on the 1846 list in which she had the 13^th highest with 70  convictions to her name. The prisoner with the highest number of sentences on the 1850 list was Mary Egan who had been imprisoned 121 times according to the table. She had also been listed in 1846 when she was on her 82^nd sentence.

Return of the undermentioned persons who have been frequently committed to the above prison, showing their ages, and the number of times they were imprisoned, February 22nd, 1851

While the 1846 list was described as being ‘taken from the number confined in Grangegorman Penitentiary on the 1st October, 1846’,  the 1850 list does not seem to have been just drawn from just those prisoners present in the prison on the day the Inspector-General visited on 22 February 1851. Based on the registers, Mary Egan had not been in Grangegorman since 18 November 1850 when she was released having served a month on a charge of being disorderly.  It seems she was not back in Grangegorman again until 25 March 1851 when she served a 24-hour sentence for drunkenness. Based on the information recorded about her, she was a Catholic from Longford, 5’1”, with brown hair and sallow skin. The earliest surviving entry for her in the Grangegorman registers was from 13 August 1841 when she was sentenced to 14 days in prison for disturbing the peace.  This would appear to have been her sixth sentence, but there do not appear to be entries for her earlier offences. Although she is recorded as being 47 years old in the table compiled in 1851, there is some inconsistency in the ages given for her in the registers. When she served a month for breaching the peace on 24 November 1845 her age was given as 33. She was released on 21 December, but was back the following day for a 14-day sentence on a similar charge and her age was recorded as 38 years old.  No explanation was given for this five-year jump in age. Like Anne Hollywood and Sarah Nolan, Mary Egan amassed her high number of prison sentences largely through convictions for breaching and disturbing the peace, as well as charges for being disorderly. The last sentence recorded for her was on 17 November 1851 when she served a month for being disorderly. According to the register, this was her 125^th sentence.  A woman with the same name and age also appeared fairly regularly in the Grangegorman Register of Drunkards during this period, the final instance being on 30 March 1852 when Mary Egan was given a 24-hour sentence and one shilling fine.  After that date, there do not appear to be any further entries for her.

A final list of frequent reoffenders appeared in the 1851 Inspectors-General Report which this time was headed by a 35-year-old woman named Julia Quinn.

Return of the undernamed persons who were in custody on the 15th of January, 1852 and the number of times they have been imprisoned.

Julia Quinn had also appeared in the 1846 list of reoffenders and had served prison sentences for 76 misdemeanours  and one felony. She originally hailed from Baltinglass in Co. Wicklow, and when first imprisoned on 23 February 1838 she gave her name as Julia Wall, a name she never seems to have used again. She was described as a ‘dressmaker’, though from her second sentence onwards she was described as having no trade. She was Catholic, approximately 5’4” tall, with a fair complexion and brown hair. She could read but not write. Her criminal career followed the pattern of the other frequent reoffenders with the usual mix of convictions for being disorderly, breaching the peace and drunkenness. An entry in the Newgate Gaol Register in 1848 reveals that at that time she was resident in Off Lane, now known as Moore Lane. She was tried along with two other women, also resident in Off Lane, for the felony of a gold watch and handkerchief, the property of John Branagan. The other women were Dorah Mathews, a 28-year-old from Tyrellspass in Westmeath and Teresa Carroll, an 18-year-old potter who originally came from Burslem in Staffordshire. The other two women also gave their address as Off Lane. They were found not guilty.  Based on the number sentences she received for breach of the peace, drunkenness and assault it would seem that, like the other women referenced in this article, Julia Quinn’s life may well have been quite chaotic and at times violent. On 13 June 1851 she served two months in Grangegorman for attempted suicide. Her 113th sentence, which placed her at the top of the list of reoffending prisoners in the 1851 report, was for two months which she served between 16 December 1851 and 9 February 1852. She was convicted for the illegal possession of a shirt, dress and boots. It would seem she stole these items with the assistance of two other women: Caroline Massey, a 24-year-old woman originally from Bandon, Co. Cork, and Sophia Henderson, a 27-year-old from Moore Street, Dublin. All three women appeared one after another in the Grangegorman register. The last significant sentence recorded for Julia Quinn was for assault for which she served one month in June 1853. She may also have served a number of 24-hour sentences for drunkenness at this time, the last one being in May 1854, but there appear to be no further entries for her beyond this date.

Like the other women, Julia Quinn simply disappears from the prison record and we have no idea what happened to her after 1854. Her story highlights once again the limitations of the prison archive when it comes to creating any kind of meaningful biography for the women who were imprisoned in Grangegorman Penitentiary in the mid-nineteenth century. At best they give a crude sense of the shape of their lives for a few decades. The 1851 Inspectors-General Report was the last to include a table of the most common reoffenders in Grangegorman. While recidivism remained a major feature of female imprisonment in Ireland in the nineteenth century, as the 1850s progressed, the numbers in Grangegorman began to fall as Ireland recovered from the effects of the Famine and the Irish economy improved. The Famine resulted in a dramatic fall in the Irish population and in particular those from the poorer classes. This decline was further exacerbated by high levels of emigration which continued well into the twentieth century. Other factors, such as the establishment of female refuges and asylums by Catholic religious orders, also had a direct effect of the numbers of women in Irish prisons in the second half of the century. It was this decline in prisoner numbers which ultimately led to the closure of Grangegorman and many other and many other Irish prisons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Image credit: Forty-third Inspectors-General of Irish Prisons Report, 1864.

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