Irish Identities in Victorian Britain

Roger Swift, Sheridan Gilley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415582865
• eBook ISBN: 9781317965565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Géographie historique

Recent studies of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain have emphasized the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich and diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities co-existed and sometimes competed.

In contributing to this burgeoning historiography, this book explores and analyses the complexities surrounding the self-identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain, which differed not only from place to place and from one generation to another but which were also variously shaped by issues of class and gender, and politics and religion. Moreover, and given the tendency for Irish ethnicity to mutate, through a comparative study of the Irish in Britain and the United States, the book suggests that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish often had to change it.

Written by some of the foremost scholars in the field, these original essays not only shed new light on the history of the Irish in Britain but are also integral to the broader study of the Irish Diaspora and of immigrants and minorities in multicultural societies.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

Introduction

Irish Identities in Victorian Britain

The question of identity lies at the heart of modern Irish history, and for most Irish people in the Victorian period and beyond, this issue was resolved in one of two ways, as religious and political allegiances reinforced each other. On the one hand, to be a Roman Catholic was to be an Irish nationalist, and a rebel or Home Ruler; on the other, to be a Protestant was to be a supporter of British rule in Ireland and of the British Empire. In the same way, the great majority of Britons as Protestants took the Irish Unionist view of Ireland. In practice, however, for significant minorities, these combinations might be exchanged, or simply varied in many and subtle ways, especially among the Irish in Britain, as a consequence of the domestic pressures operating upon them and their own influence upon the wider population. To take but one example, recent studies have suggested that in Wales, the influence of Liberalism and a sense of Welshness moved public perceptions of the Irish question away from one of simple identification with Irish Protestants in I860 towards a stronger sympathy with Irish nationalism by 1914, as another ‘Celtic’ nationality with its own legitimate demands.

The outcome was a complexity about the self-identity of the Irish in Britain and about the manner in which their host communities regarded them, which differed from place to place and from one generation to another. This forms the central theme of this collection of essays, penned by established scholars, which seeks to complement the trilogy previously co-edited by ourselves, namely The Irish in the Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1985), The Irish in Britain, 1815-1939 (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989) and The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999).

The collection opens with Roger Swift’s historiographical essay, which shows how the recent historiography of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain has revised substantially earlier, monochrome studies of the Irish, which presented them as the outcasts of Victorian society, by emphasising the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich yet diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities coexisted and sometimes competed.

Of course, one of the reasons why the Irish tend to be lumped together as an undifferentiated mass is the lack of systematic analyses of the particular regional and provincial provenance of those who made homes in England, Wales and Scotland. Historians speculate about origins; but few have interrogated the census to provide robust assertions about where in Ireland particular migrants came from. As such, complexity and subtlety are absent. The failure of the census systematically to capture specific birthplace data offers one explanation of why this is so. The sheer difficulty of abstracting data on birthplace to arrive at meaningful quantitative perspectives provides another. Yet, as Malcolm Smith and Donald MacRaild illustrate, in an innovative and stimulating analysis of the origins of Irish migrants in northern England, the use of a technique from biological anthropology called Random Isonymy enables the substitution of surname data for birthplace data in order to establish the major interregional interconnections between the two islands which are evinced in Irish migration pathways. They show that the close association between name and place in Irish culture enables robust conclusions about the provenance of migrants to be derived from surname data drawn from the digitized 1881 census. Moreover, their work suggests that names may underpin cultural transfer, and thus could help explain why particular types of Irish culture emerged in one town or region but not in another.

Indeed, the theme of Irish cultural diversity is explored further by Mervyn Busteed, who demonstrates, with particular reference to Irish migrant politics in Victorian Manchester, the ways in which Irish Catholic nationalist self-expression was moulded and conditioned by new general expectations of what constituted acceptable political behaviour in public spaces, through demonstrations and processions, with distinctive disciplines, dress codes and speeches. These exerted their own influence upon the nature of the demands of the demonstrators themselves. There is a similar theme of change in time in Elaine McFarland’s account of the part played by John Ferguson as the leader of the predominantly Catholic Irish nationalist political movement in Scotland. As an Ulster Protestant yet a progressive radical, closely connected with the whole left-wing dimension of Scottish life, Ferguson made Irish nationalism part of the mainstream of Scottish radicalism, giving it a British role and character beyond the confines of ghetto politics. In different ways, both Busteed and McFarland show how Irish identity in Britain in this era makes sense within a British context and not just an Irish one, varying across the three nations in Britain itself. The varieties of Irish nationalism also appear in Philip Bull’s essay on William O’Brien. A Catholic educated in Protestant institutions with a reputation for anticlericalism yet an ally of Tim Healy, a successful agitator for land reform who nonetheless advocated reconciliation with Irish landlords, a nationalist but an international sophisticate married to a Frenchwoman, a nationalist Member of Parliament (MP) in the imperial parliament, O’Brien embodied some of the paradoxes of Irish Catholic nationalism which was not simply of one complexion, but was divided within itself.

Moreover, Sheridan Gilley explores another form of isolation, between Irish and English and Scottish Catholics. He explains this in terms of the failure of Irish Catholic ecclesiastics to take over the Catholic Church in England and Scotland as elsewhere, although most Catholics in England and Scotland were of Irish origin, and of the very different British and Irish Catholic identities, in part a matter of largely dissimilar social backgrounds and political traditions. On the other hand, he shows that despite tensions, relations between the Irish and the English within the Church during the Victorian period and beyond were generally marked by peaceful coexistence, Catholicism in Britain offering as much a form of integration into the host community as a kind of separation from it.

By contrast, in the Durham University doctoral research from which his chapter here is derived, Ian Meredith has shown by a detailed scrutiny of church registers how working-class members of the Church of Ireland (as opposed to Presbyterians, more commonly associated with the Irish Protestant immigration into Britain), made a substantial contribution to the considerable nineteenth-century expansion of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the west of Scotland, a theme which is largely ignored in Scottish Episcopal historiography as well as in working-class history. In this matter, Dr Meredith has thrown light upon another neglected area of working-class life. Here, however, in his essay in this volume, he delineates the obstacles to the success of the Episcopalian mission to these Irish migrants, partly to do with the weaknesses in their own church commitment and the shortcomings of the Scottish Episcopal Church itself, and partly to do with the Church’s own increasingly High Church character, which was repugnant to the fundamental Protestantism of the Church of Ireland immigration.

One of the failures of the historiography of the Irish in Britain has been the provision of anything like an adequate account of the experiences of Irish women, a theme addressed in Bronwen Walter’s groundbreaking analysis and assessment of Irish female domestic servants in late Victorian London. By reference to both quantitative data drawn from the 1881 census and contemporary qualitative evidence, Walter shows that Irish-born servants formed an integral part of the domestic arrangements in the very sort of Home Counties well-to-do Protestant households with cultures remotest from their own. Moreover, she argues not only that their presence – as strangers on the inside, at the very heart of the English ‘establishment’ – contributed to social constructions of Englishness but also that Irish women’s identities were recognized as culturally distinct.

The concept of the Irish ‘Other’ is explored further by Veronica Summers, who, by drawing upon hitherto little-used records from petty sessions, priests and police in Glamorgan, exposes the limitations of the stereotype of ‘the criminal Irish’ by exploring perceptions and realities surrounding the Irish threat to property, persons and the community in Victorian South Wales. By examining contemporary attitudes through each stage of the legal process, her essay not only highlights the significance of deploying an additional identifying label in the study of the relationship between overwhelmingly poor Irish migrants and crime, that of the Roman Catholic criminal, but also offers a specifically Welsh perspective on the subject.

Yet it is important to acknowledge that the question of Irish identity had an international as well as a British resonance and, in the final essay, Alan O’Day draws especially upon the comparison between the experience of the Irish in Britain and the United States to stress the instability of the content of Irish ethnicity, its increasing looseness of association with Ireland and its tendency to ‘mutate’ in content over space and time, perhaps most strikingly according to the various political and social benefits which favoured its preservation from one locale to another. Thus, by reference to case studies of the Irish in Stafford and Butte, Dundee and San Francisco, Liverpool and Boston, and Manchester and Philadelphia, O’Day argues that ‘mutative ethnicity’ and ‘adaptative ethnicity’ become the terms best explaining the history of the Irish diaspora and casting light on Irish belief and behaviour.

In this context, Dr O’Day sums up the paradox of this volume, that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish also had to change it. The essayists have striven to show that such changes, made partly in order to harmonise better with the varied local character and setting of the English, Welsh and Scots populations, and made in part to seek their approval, were aspects of a complicated process of remaining faithful in a range of ways to the tradition. The identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain is, like Irish identity elsewhere, a somewhat complicated and shifting concept, moving and developing throughout the period in a jostling for cultural, social and political space in which the British and Irish changed one another.

Roger Swift

Emeritus Professor of Victorian Studies, University of Chester

Sheridan Gilley

Emeritus Reader in Theology, University of Durham

Identifying the Irish in Victorian Britain: Recent Trends in Historiography

Roger Swift

University of Chester, Chester, UK

By reference to over 50 published works (including monographs, contributions to edited collections and journal articles) and several unpublished theses, this essay explores the ways in which the recent historiography of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain has revised substantially earlier, monochrome studies of the Irish, which presented them as the outcasts of Victorian society. Whilst acknowledging that this research forms but a small part of the vast body of recent scholarship on the Irish Diaspora of the same period, it shows that recent studies have not only addressed some of the long-standing omissions in the historiography of the subject but have also charted new territories for exploration by emphasising the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich yet diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities coexisted and sometimes competed.

Several years ago, in a contribution to a collection of essays edited by Donald MacRaild, I reviewed the historiography of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain during the previous decade,¹ noting that the 1990s had witnessed not only a substantial increase in the pace and scale of research and an extension of the parameters of scholarly study, but also the deployment of more sophisticated approaches and methodologies. In particular, it was evident that in their examination of the experiences of Irish migrants, historians were placing greater emphasis on the interrelated issues of identity, diversity and accommodation, with the result that, as the reductionism of some earlier studies had been challenged,² the historical debate had become more refined and complex. There was, for example, a greater awareness among historians that Irish migration and settlement was ‘a multigenerational phenomenon’; hence the experiences and perceptions of the Irish-born and their descendants, as well as their relationships with the host society in Britain and beyond, varied in both time and place.

Yet it was also evident that a considerable body of research was required before the definitive history of the Irish in Britain during the period could be written, and I identified a number of gaps in the historiography of the subject. These included the need for further work on patterns of Irish settlement and demography; social and cultural experiences; the experiences of Irish women, the Irish middle class and Irish Protestants; the contributions of the Irish within the labour movement; and Irish nationalist activity, particularly in regard to Fenianism. I also suggested that the time was perhaps ripe for the production of definitive histories of the Irish migrant experience in specific British cities, most notably Liverpool, London and Glasgow. Nevertheless, my essential conclusion was an optimistic one, for it seemed to me that the pioneering works of Patrick O’Sullivan, Donald Akenson and others, with their emphasis on the themes of time and place, of similarity and difference, of change and continuity, and of connections, in Irish migration studies, clearly offered new opportunities to historians of the Irish in Britain, most notably in regard to comparative studies, whereby the Irish migrant experience might be examined more fully in the wider context of the experiences of other migrant groups during the same period and in terms of the interaction between the Irish and other minorities.

In this context, this essay seeks merely to provide an update on the historiography of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain by taking stock of what has been achieved in recent years, although it is impossible to do full justice to a considerable body of scholarship in a relatively short study. Moreover, it should be acknowledged that research on the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain forms but a small part of the vast body of recent scholarship on the Irish Diaspora of the same period which, as Professor Joe Lee has recently illustrated in a magisterial survey, is a complex and problematic subject.³ Nevertheless, it is perhaps worth emphasising from the outset that in many respects the pace and scale of research appears undiminished, with nearly 50 works published (including monographs, contributions to edited collections and journal articles) and 17 completed theses. Moreover, the focus of many of these studies has done much not only to address some of the long-standing omissions in the historiography of the subject but also to chart new territories for exploration.

There have, for example, been some significant developments in regard to the study of Irish migrants in their national and regional contexts. Donald MacRaild’s monograph, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922 (1999)⁴ provides a lucid and concise analysis of the subject and constitutes a worthy successor to Graham Davis’s The Irish in Britain, 1815-1914 (1991),⁵ the first major synthesis of research on the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. MacRaild examines a variety of themes, including the influences in Ireland on migration to Britain, the development of Irish settlements, the importance of the spiritual and social bonds engendered by Irish Catholic culture, the contribution of the Irish in Britain to radical and labour politics, and the adverse – and sometimes violent – reactions of the native population to Irish migrants, but his study of the Protestant Irish and their associational culture provides a particularly welcome a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Abstracts
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Identifying the Irish in Victorian Britain: Recent Trends in Historiography
• 3. The Origins of the Irish in Northern England: An Isonymic Analysis of Data from the 1881 Census
• 4. Resistance and Respectability: Dilemmas of Irish Migrant Politics in Victorian Britain
• 5. The Making of an Irishman: John Ferguson (1836 – 1906) and the Politics of Identity in Victorian Glasgow
• 6. William O’Brien, MP: The Metropolitan and International Dimensions of Irish Nationalism
• 7. English Catholic Attitudes to Irish Catholics
• 8. Irish Episcopalians in the Scottish Episcopal Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway during the Nineteenth Century
• 9. Strangers on the Inside: Irish Women Servants in England, 1881
• 10. ‘A Source of Sad Annoyance’: The Irish and Crime in South Wales, 1841 – 81
• 11. A Conundrum of Irish Diasporic Identity: Mutative Ethnicity
• Index