Fine houses along with the first signs of the Famine are what struck author William Thackeray when he visited Ireland in 1842, writes Michael Parsons

High rents in south Dublin? No available development land between Dún Laoghaire and the city centre? Houses in the north inner city "which look as if they had seen better days"? Ireland in 2006?

No, these were some of the impressions of an English traveller in Ireland more than 160 years ago.

William Makepeace Thackeray, the English writer best known for the novel Vanity Fair, wrote one of the most famous travel books about Ireland following a four-month tour of the country in 1842.

Thackeray had a fine eye for detail and was keenly interested in the houses - of both rich and poor.

His Irish Sketch Book begins with his arrival by sea. Observing Kingstown (the British name for Dún Laoghaire) he noticed that: "Numerous terraces and pleasure-houses have been built in the place - they stretch row after row along the banks of the sea, and rise one above another on the hill."

The area was fashionable and expensive: "The rents of these houses are said to be very high; the Dublin citizens crowd into them in summer; and a great source of pleasure and comfort must it be to them to have the fresh sea-breezes and prospects so near to the metropolis."

Developers were busy at work (O tempora!): "The better sort of houses are handsome and spacious; but the fashionable quarter is yet in an unfinished state, for enterprising architects are always beginning new roads, rows and terraces: nor are those already built by any means complete."

But Kingstown - even then - was not solely devoted to pleasure. It was also a working town and the author noted that "beside the aristocratic part of the town is a commercial one" where "the houses have a battered, rakish look, and seem going to ruin before their time".

In a place where "seamen of all nations come hither who have made no vow of temperance" he noted the "liquor shops" and "shabby cigar shops".

There being no 46A bus in those days, Thackeray hired a "carman" to take him into Dublin. Unlike today's efficient taxi-drivers, his fellow lacked entrepreneurship: "A carman, who is dawdling in the neighbourhood, with a straw in his mouth, comes leisurely up to ask whether you will go to Dublin? Is it natural indolence, or the effect of despair because of the neighbouring railroad, which renders him so indifferent? He does not even take the straw out of his mouth as he proposes the question - he seems quite careless as to the answer."

Heading towards the city centre, he noticed "the suburbs of pleasure-houses; low, one-storied cottages for the most part: some neat and fresh, some that have passed away from the genteel state altogether, and exhibit downright poverty; some in a state of transition, with broken windows and pretty romantic names upon tumbledown gates."

Thackeray wondered who might live in these houses: "One fancies that the chairs and tables inside are broken, that the teapot on the breakfast-table has no spout, and the table-cloth is ragged and sloppy; that the lady of the house is in dubious curl-papers, and the gentleman, with an imperial to his chin, wears a flaring dressing-gown all ragged at the elbows." (An "imperial", incidentally, was a small beard or tuft of hair under the lower lip - a style popularised by Napoleon III).

Accepting that this was rather fanciful speculation he nevertheless concluded that "these are pleasure-houses for a certain class; and looking at the houses, one can't but fancy the inhabitants resemble them somewhat".

Despite the shabbiness, he acknowledged that "the capabilities of the country, however, are very great, and in many instances have been taken advantage of: for you see, besides the misery, numerous handsome houses and parks along the road, having fine lawns and woods; and the sea is in our view at a quarter of an hour's ride from Dublin".

He was alert to the wealth gap ("it is the continual appearance of this sort of wealth which makes the poverty more striking") and also noticed that all the land between Dún Laoghaire and the city had been developed ("there is no vacant space of fields between Kingstown and Dublin)".

Having passed through the suburbs, he found "the entrance to the capital . . . very handsome" and passed by "numerous rows of neat houses, fronted with gardens and adorned with all sorts of gay-looking creepers".

He was impressed by the Georgian streetscape of the city's southside, noting the "old-fashioned, well-built, airy, stately streets and . . . Fitzwilliam Square, a noble place, the garden of which is full of flowers and foliage".

He wasn't impressed however by "the very dingy abode for the Right Honourable Lord Mayor" in Dawson Street which he described as "a queer old dirty brick-house, with dumpy urns at each extremity, and looking as if a storey of it had been cut off" and had mixed views of College Green.

In "The Bank" he found that "directors now sit" in the old House of Lords; while The House of Commons was used "for the accommodation of clerks and cashiers" but acknowledged that "the interior is light, splendid, airy, well-furnished, and the outside of the building not less so".

Pausing at Carlisle Bridge, (O'Connell Bridge) he looked left "along the quays to the Four Courts" and found "no small resemblance to a view along the quays at Paris" though on closer inspection discovered, "numerous dirty liquor-shops, eating-houses, and marine-stores".

To the right, "the Custom House" where "a considerable number of vessels are moored, and the quays are black and busy with the cargoes discharged from ships. Seamen cheering, herring-women bawling, coal-carts loading."

Moving on, he found Sackville Street (O'Connell Street) "exceedingly broad and handsome; the shops at the commencement, rich and spacious; but in Upper Sackville Street, which closes with the pretty building and gardens of the Rotunda, the appearance of wealth begins to fade somewhat, and the houses look as if they had seen better days". He thought it very quiet and as "vacant and listless as Pall Mall in October".

In the mid-19th century there was considerably less urban sprawl and the countryside was astonishingly close to the heart of the city - "you pass from some of the stately fine Dublin streets straight into the country".

With remarkable precision, Thackeray decided that rural Ireland began "after No. 46 Eccles Street" where "potatoes begin at once".

He was not impressed by Stoneybatter, "a dingy old mysterious district" where he saw "some houses have been allowed to reach an old age, extraordinary in this country of premature ruin, and look as if they had been built some six score years since.

"In these and the neighbouring tenements, not so old but equally ruinous and mouldy, there is a sort of vermin swarm of humanity; dirty faces at all the dirty windows; children on all the broken steps; smutty slipshod women clacking and bustling about, and old men dawdling."

Thackeray's proposed solution was renovation - he suggested that the "Stoneybatterites" whom he found "happy, and sober, and kind-hearted" should clean up their neighbourhood: "only paint and prop the tumbling gates and huts in the suburb" and the result would be "a gay and agreeable picture of human life - of workpeople and their families reposing after their labours".

Rathcoole was even less to his liking; he said it "disappeared from my memory" in the "space of three days" except for his recollection of a "little low building" which provided the living quarters for the Irish constabulary.

He quite liked the village of Johnstown however, "near Lord's Mayo's fine domain, where the houses are of the Gothic sort, with pretty porches, creepers, and railings".

Heading along the Naas Road he noted that "the houses drop off here and there and dwindle woefully in size".

But Thackeray was in for a rude awakening as he undertook his tour of the four provinces. Small houses were the least among the worries of millions of people living in squalor and poverty - and the first rumblings of The Great Hunger.

While he saw numerous pleasant "seats" of "gentlemen" farmers and the great houses of the aristocracy, a pervading sense of gathering crisis pervade the text.

Thackeray observed the crowded tenements in the provincial towns and cities.

In Cork, he shuddered at "quarters . . . swarming with life, but of such a frightful kind as no pen need care to describe: alleys where the odours and rags and darkness are so hideous, that one runs frightened away from them. In some of them, they say, not the policeman, only the priest, can penetrate."

Yet he noticed that in close proximity to the destitution "that the city contains much wealth is evidenced by the number of handsome villas round about it, where the rich merchants dwell".

He was profoundly shocked at the conditions he encountered in rural areas, especially in Munster and Connaught, where much of the populace lived in cabins. Among his many lurid descriptions of these homes this, from Bantry, which he described as "a town of cabins" is especially vivid: "An ordinary pigsty in England is really more comfortable. Most of them were not six feet long or five feet high, built of stones huddled together, a hole being left for the people to creep in at."

He was "haunted by the face of the popular starvation. It is not the exception, it is the condition of the people. In this fairest and richest of countries, men are suffering and starving by millions.

"There are thousands of them at this minute stretched in the sunshine at their cabin doors with no work, scarcely any food, no hope seemingly."

The book was published in 1845 but by then the Famine was underway and the Ireland he had described was about to be swept away by the catastrophe.

The Irish Sketch Book was originally published under the pseudonym, Mr MA Titmarsh, by Chapman and Hall, London, in 1845 and contained wood engravings by Thackeray. Modern editions include that published by the Blackstaff Press in 1985