**Intact Gift Giving Condition book**

This book explores a very different set of Irish encounters with the metropolis by reconstructing the lives, experiences and activities of middle-class migrants. The familiar story of Irish migration to eighteenth and nineteenth-century London is one of severe poverty, hardship and marginalization. Detailed case studies of law students, lawyers and merchants show that these more prosperous migrants depended on Irish connections to overcome the ordinary challenges of day-to-day life. In contrast to previous scholarly assumptions that middle-class migrants assimilated completely to English cultural and social norms, this book emphasizes the possibilities rather than the limits of Irishness and argues that Irish identity had a unique, operative value of its own, for which there was no substitute.