Post by Waverley on Dec 28, 2008 1:00:12 GMT 1
In this article, Sheridan Gilley looks at the rich history surrounding Irish immigration abroad.
The crowds which packed the exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite painting in the Tate Gallery last year saw Walter Howell Deverell's picture of 1853-4, 'The Irish Vagrants ', showing a pauper family beside an English road. One man is asleep, a second is sunk in dejection, a sleeping infant clasps a woman impressive and impassive in despair, while two half-naked children stand, one of them pleading for alms from an unheeding lady riding by. The painting is a Christian Socialist comment on a great natural calamity, the Irish pauper influx into Britain in 1845-51 in the wake of the Irish Famine. Yet that fight from starvation only hastened an existing trend: Irish immigration was a trickle in 1790s, a stream in the 1820s, a river in the 1840s, and a flood from the late 1840s as the Irish-born population of England and Wales rose from 291,000 in 1841 to 520,000 in 1851, reached its peak of 602,000 in 1861, at about 3 per cent of the total population, and fell to 427,000 at the end of the century.
These figures do not, however, include the children of immigrants born in Britain, while as a proportion of the total population, the statistics for the Irish-born in Scotland are still more striking: 128,000 in 1841 and 207,000 in 1851, or 7 per cent of the Scottish population, remaining roughly at this level for fifty years: the figure in l901 was 205,000. Most of these immigrants settled in the industrial towns of Lancashire and Western Scotland, especially in Liverpool and Glasgow, and in London, with smaller concentrations in the midlands, the north and Yorkshire. In London, the largest Irish settlement in absolute numbers, the Irish were about 5 per cent of the population in 1861, though this rose to nearly a quarter in Liverpool, and 18 per cent in Dundee. Through this concentration in towns and cities, they stood out from the host population by their poverty, nationality, race and religion.
Certainly the Irish Catholic immigrants look like the outcasts of Victorian society, outcast from British capitalism as the poorest of the poor, from mainstream British politics as separatist nationalists and republicans, from the 'Anglo-Saxon' race as 'Celts', and as Catholics from the dominant forms of British Protestantism. The Irish were, therefore, the outcasts of Victorian Britain, with an accumulated body of disadvantages possessed by no other group of similar size until the Jewish immigration; they were the largest unassimilated section of their society, as a people' set apart and everywhere rejected and despised.
Poverty was the most unambiguous of these disadvantages. It was the driving force of emigration into Britain which, at least at first, received the immigrants least able to move on to North America or Australasia. A majority of the new-arrivals in Britain crowded into slum tenements, 'rookeries', lodging houses and cellar dwellings in the long-established and already over-populated districts of Irish settlement in Lancashire and London, and even in smaller centres, theirs tended to be the filthiest and foulest of neighbourhoods. Though the early emigrants often came as harvesters, they had no capital to became other than casual workers on the land; even the York field labourers lived in the city slum, tramping long distances to work every day in the surrounding countryside. So like more recent refugees from pauper rural economies, the great majority entered the lowliest and least healthy of urban occupations, unless they enlisted in the army, which was over 30 per cent Irish in the mid-Victorian era, though this proportion had fallen heavily by the end of the century. Indeed among the country immigrants to British towns, the Irish were the least well-prepared to succeed in their new environment, the minority of skilled workmen entering sweated industries like cobbling and tailoring, the great majority with no skills being concentrated in unskilled occupations, casual labour at the docks and street-selling. These were occupations for which a highly sophisticated economy like London, with a highly specialised labour force, had very few rewards. The Irish could only get into the metropolitan economy with difficulty, and so figure dramatically in Henry Mayhew's portraits of the more marginal and picturesque of the city's proletarians in mid-century.
The Famine influx often made matters dramatically worse, sometimes resulting in or reinforcing a socially immobile and unintegrated ghetto, isolated in particular streets and courts from the surrounding area and contributing to the crime rate in disproportionate numbers in the categories for petty theft and casual violence. Thus the old city of York contained a classic Irish slum, with a high turnover of population and a reputation for dirt and disorder which lasted until the clearance programmes in the 1920s and 30s. Yet the high Irish crime rate fell in the decades from 1860, while remaining disproportionate to Irish numbers, and must be understood against the background of an insecure new police force with a military background, exercising a new rigour in policing illegal drinking and overcrowded lodging houses, which brought them into conflict with the local working-class population, especially the Irish, even though some of these policemen were Irish themselves. Here the Irish were the victims of the development of a more regimented and orderly society, of which they were to become a part.
The Famine also cast a long shadow in Liverpool, where work opportunities, housing and sanitation were overwhelmed by the 1840s immigration. The city was a trading and a commercial rather than an industrial centre, and the employment available was largely in unskilled occupations for which Catholics and Protestants were in active competition. There is, however, a range to even this experience which suggests a complex answer to the controversial and much debated question, as to whether Irish immigrants lowered English wages. In Glasgow, the Irish found jobs in mills and mines, though excluded from engineering, the shipyards dominated by the Orange Order, and skilled trades controlled by craft unions. There is another contrast with the Irish settlement in Edinburgh, the home of a rentier class and of legal, literary and ecclesiastical establishments, in which the Irish poor were confined to such dependent menial occupations as general labouring in building, domestic service, portering, street-cleaning and street-lighting. The more positive side of this poverty was a lively communal generosity and self-help, extending to sending money to members of the family still in Ireland and, even after 1860 and the relaxation of the settlement provisions of the Poor Law, the Irish made a smaller call on public and private charity than their poverty and English prejudice might lead one to suppose.
A second mark of Irish apartness was Irish nationalism. Here, again, there were grounds for British conservative prejudice, in the tradition of Irish agrarian outrage and of the 'physical force' resort to street violence and armed rebellion, or more impressively, the resort to passive mass defiance. This defiance was an attraction to English political radicals, drawn to the oratory of such distinctively Irish gifts to English Chartism as Feargus O'Connor and Bronterre O'Brien. Yet the Irish provided more than these well-known Chartist leaders and, despite Daniel O'Connell's opposition to the movement, ordinary Irish Catholics were sometimes a well-integrated part of a popular British proletarian culture, in which English radicals actively championed the Irish cause and sought, and gained, Irish Catholic support. So the Irish made a distinctive contribution to the last phase of Chartism in 1848, and its failure may have had a decided effect on the increasing social and political isolation of the Irish in Britain in mid-century. There was, therefore, an Irish Chartist echo in England to the rising of the Young Irelanders of 1848, and in the 1860s the revolutionary tradition returned to England with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and most spectacularly, with the Clerkenwell prison explosion in 1867. Indeed, after the abortive Fenian rising of the same year, every young Irishman of spirit was a sentimental Fenian. The agrarian violence
Yet the idea of the Irish as an 'outcast' alternative in British radical politics needs the most sensitive statement. The Irish nationalist MPs after 1829 formed an often disruptive element in English politics, and different aspects of the Irish question helped destroy a Tory administration in 1846 and the Liberal party in 1886. Again, the Irish campaigns for the Repeal of the Union in the 1840s and for Home Rule after 1880 did seem to many Englishmen to threaten the destruction of the Empire at its very heart. But the actual Irish threat to the Empire can be much exaggerated. The Irish element in Chartism lent itself to the conservative exploitation which was one cause of its defeat. The very strength of Irish Catholic nationalism in Liverpool gave a populist Orange Toryism a century of almost uninterrupted ascendancy in local politics. There were largely apolitical communities in York and Edinburgh, though the last was the nursery of the revolutionary James Connolly: this apoliticism was doubtless a reflection of the marginal position of the Irish in the economies of these cities, and in Edinburgh the leadership of a conservative Scottish Catholic Church.
The greatest successes of Irish political activity came only in the 1880s, when the Irish parliamentary party created a mass organisation harnessed to constitutional nationalism, which gained a measure of respectability through Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule. Though the pauper Irish were difficult to register as voters, and were only numerous enough to return a nationalist MP, T.P. O'Connor, in one British constituency, in Liverpool, the late Victorian Irish MPs v ere a well-integrated element in British political democracy, the symbols of a degree of acquiescence in British rule which post-1916 perspectives have obscured. The Irish alliance with the Liberals lasted until 1916, despite the difficulties created by Liberal attacks on Catholic education and the Liberal inability to deliver on Home Rule. There was, then, a considerable complexity to Irish political experience, a complexity masked by the revolutionary activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Most Irish Catholics tacitly accepted the Empire, and their attitudes were made clear from '1914, when half a million men of Irish descent volunteered to fight in the British and dominion armies. The great majority were not revolutionaries but became loyal if not enthusiastic subjects of the Crown, in England and Scotland, as in Canada, Australasia and in Ireland itself.
The whole history of this pattern of increasing Irish political integration is as yet a subject largely unexplored, especially for mainland Britain. Yet it is highly relevant to a third criterion of apartness, the hostility towards the Irish as a separate 'race', through the pseudo-scientific mid-Victorian rationalisation of an older English national prejudice. The difficulty with anti-Irish racism is partly one of terminology, partly a matter again of defining the position from which the Irish were 'cast out'. The Irish were defined as a separate racial group as 'Celts' to be distinguished from the English 'Anglo-Saxons'; and Anglo-Saxons were alleged to be at least racially superior as rulers or governors to the racially anarchic Celts. Victorian racial theory, however, was in the form of the claim that the English were racially superior as a 'mixed race', not as a pure one, as a product of mingling of the British 'Celts' with the Norse and Danish invaders, as well as with the Anglo-Saxons. Thus the mongrel English had the good 'Celtic' qualities as well as the good Anglo-Saxon ones. It is as if a member of the National Front were to claim superiority based on his double descent from a Norman and a black Jamaican. Much of the evidence for anti-Celtic racism comes in Punch cartoons depicting the Celt as a gorilla, as if he stood on a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. Yet the Irish so depicted are also under attack on political or religious grounds, while loyal Celts, no less Celtic for their loyalism, are depicted with a Grecian purity of feature like the figure of Hibernia herself.
In any case, Anglo-Saxon racism was not identical to hatred of the Irish, and some of the exponents of Celtic racial theory also supported Home Rule. The anti-Celtic stereotype was a complex one, as Celts were generally acknowledged, in the manner of Matthew Arnold, to be as superior as poets to the Saxon Philistine as they were inferior as politicians, and to be as chaste, hospitable, witty, kindly and generous as they were feckless, stupid, violent, unreliable and drunken. Indeed this view of the Irish is arguably partly of Irish origin, its most complete expression being the analysis of the Irish character by an Irish Catholic bishop, with which Dr S.J. Connolly opens his recent study of the Church in pre-Famine Ireland, though some parts of it are also to be found in the street ballads sung by the Irish themselves. There is a further paradox about the Anglo-Saxon attitude which treats the Irish character as racially Celtic. As a highly sophisticated intellectual prejudice developed by ethnologists, historians and poets, Anglo-Saxonism was restricted by its very nature to literate members of the Victorian middle class, and cannot therefore be invoked to explain the attitudes of people ignorant of the intricacies of ethnological theory. On the other hand, as a middle-class prejudice, anti-Celticism seems to have been wholly inoperative against the advancement of the small Irish Catholic middle class, suggesting that the prejudice was one essentially against Irish paupers, as a parallel with the more negative attitudes to the English poor. The Irish Catholic London journalist Justin McCarthy could claim that his career had never been impeded by his Irishness.
Yet the negative aspects of the Irish stereotype tended to be dominant in the 1850s and 1860s, as in the Punch cartoons. Indeed those guilty of this prejudice include Marx and Engels, and an 'anti-Celticism' did exist, but most frequently in mongrel form, in association with national and religious prejudice, It is, therefore, difficult to isolate it from other aspects of anti-Irishness and anti-Catholicism, as a phenomenon standing on its own.
Finally, there is the claim that the Irish were outcast because they were Catholics. The English, Scots and Welsh were overwhelmingly Protestant by tradition, and after 1790, the strength of popular Protestantism was vastly reinforced by the Evangelical Revival. Protestant 'No Popery' also gained an increasing ascendancy over the Established Church of Ireland and the once-liberal Ulster Presbyterians, and Ulster immigrant members of the Orange Order introduced their fratricidal strife with Irish Catholics into a number of British towns, chiefly Liverpool, where sectarian competition for jobs in a weakly unionised economy polarised politics between the Orange and the Green, the followers of a dead. Dutchman and a live Italian. The endemic street warfare and sectarian conflict of Liverpool contrast with the comparative calm of Iiberal-controlled Glasgow, though in Glasgow also there was a great gulf between Irish Catholic mores and the respectable Scottish Presbyterian values which made it impossible for Irish Catholics to become Scots. Yet there was a rationalism and egalitarianism in Scottish Liberal Presbyterianism lacking in bigoted Tory Liverpudlian Orange Anglicanism, despite the Scottish 'No Popery' excitements of the 1850s and John Cormack's anti-Irish Protestant Action Party in Edinburgh in the 1930s. These two periods of Scottish Catholicism have, however, opposing explanations: mid-Victorian 'No Popery' reflected Scottish self-confidence, while the 1930s outbreak arose from an anxiety that Scottish values were in decline and under threat from a growing Catholic population.
One manifestation of the new sectarian violence of the 1850s was the Stockport riots of 1852, which arose in part from the underlying antagonism between the masses of new immigrants and hard-pressed English cotton workers who resented the incursion of cheap Irish labour into the mills. This antagonism, however, was insufficient to cause the riots by itself, the actual occasion being the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy of bishops in 1850, fanned to flame by the 'respectable' anti-Catholicism of local Anglican clergymen and electorally vulnerable Tory politicians playing the Irish card in a bid for power. The anti-Catholic disturbances of the '1850s and 1860s, in Liverpool, London, Birkenhead and Birmingham, in which Irish Catholics stood firm against the advent of sensationalist anti-Catholic lecturers, like the former shoe-salesman, William Murphy and the so-called 'Dominican' Baron de Camin, may reflect a new self-confidence in the Irish Catholic community, which evoked a new and bitter Protestant response.
Yet whatever its place in popular prejudice', the 'No Popery' influence was partly a reaction to the Anglo-Catholic Revival, which by introducing Popery into the very heart of the Establishment, did far more than the lrish to inflame the passions of Victorian anti-Catholicism. Its irony was that when some of these Anglo-Catholics apostatised to Rome, they found themselves, like John Henry Newman, given over to 'hearing the general confessions of dirty Paddies'. It was a former High Church archdeacon, Henry Edward Manning, the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, resolver of the Dock Strike of 1889, who described his life as it neared its end as one of labour for the Irish immigration in England. Not all the English converts liked the Irish, but the very soul of Anglicanism gave the Irish Catholic mission a number of its most devoted pastors, with those native English Catholic priests who died while ministering to the Irish victims of cholera. Again, there is a balance to be drawn, as not all Catholic-born English priests wanted to minister to the Irish, who in any case could not always feel completely at home in a Church which was governed by an English clergy.
Were then, the Irish 'outcast' as Catholics? They were not more 'outcast' as Catholics than English or foreign Catholics on the ground of their Catholicism alone. Catholicism was unpopular as a living ideological force, being regarded with the same suspicion as modern Communism. Indeed conversion to Catholicism was, as W.H. Auden puts it, a disaster that could happen in the best of families. There can hardly have been a wealthy Victorian household which was not divided by at least one conversion to Rome, and the full force of anti-Catholic prejudice in such cases did not fall on the Irish. Some Protestant polemicists regarded Irish immigrants with more indulgence than either converts or nuns, as the Irish were, at least in possibility, converts to Protestantism. It is true that English observers sometimes distinguished between the 'gentlemanly' English Catholic middle class and the superstitious Irish peasantry, who were as bad as the Italians but Victorian 'No Popery' was much more than anti-Irishness. Catholicism was regarded even by good Victorian liberals as foreign, exotic, dangerous, the religion of England's traditional enemies, France and Spain, the ally of reactionary governments and the creed of superstitious peasants everywhere. The more Protestant-minded hated Rome as unscriptural and anti-Christian. But though the Irish were disliked as Catholics, so was the Duke of Norfolk, the head of the English peerage, the Queen of Spain and the local Italian ringangrinder; and the roots of the outcastness of the Irish are also to be found in other things than Catholicism.
Thus the Irish were 'outcasts' by reasons of their poverty, their political nationality, their 'race' and their religion. But these antagonisms were not simple, they were ambiguous. An English radical or Liberal repelled by an Irishman's Catholicism might well rejoice in his radicalism or Liberalism; a High Churchman repelled by an Irishman's Liberalism might well respect his Catholicism. It is perhaps no accident that the greatest of nineteenth-century Englishmen, the English politician most wounded by the wrongs of Ireland, was both a Liberal and a High Churchman, William Ewart Gladstone.
Yet here again, there is another side. These various aspects of the apartness of the pauper Irish Catholic Celt tended to reinforce one another. Despite the anticlericalism of some of the Fenians, the loyalty of Fatherland generally strengthened the loyalty to the Faith. Again, the church-related culture may have worsened Irish poverty, and inhibited the development of closer personal contacts with, and therefore wider economic opportunity in, the English Protestant-owned and run economy. A different argument stresses the role of Catholic education and charity, in encouraging social mobility by providing schooling and communal self-help in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, but the full measure of this revolution only occurred in this century. There is a most impressive record of social work by priests and sisters, though it took years to catch up with the much more considerable achievements by Protestants and then the state. Even humane Catholic ecclesiastics often opposed the work of non-Catholic philanthropists like Dr Barnado as proselytising in aim, as it often was.
The survival of the loyalties to Faith and Fatherland is also still a matter for academic enquiry. At least half the pre-Famine and Famine emigrants from Ireland were not regular churchgoers in their homeland, which unsettles the simple identification of 'Irish' with 'Catholic'. Immigration into England was largely from eastern Ireland, where formal religious practice was higher before 1850 than in the west, yet London, with its immigrants first from Leister and then Munster, never had rates of churchgoing much above 30 per cent of its nominally Catholic Irish population. The immigrants in northern England came from Ulster and then Leinster, but again, only a third of the Catholic population was given to regular religious practice before 1840, though through missionary effort this may have risen as high as 60 per cent by 1860. Thus Irish Catholic rates of Sunday church attendance were often below those of English Protestants, if higher than those for the English working class. Certainly Irish Catholics were less inclined to formal worship than English Catholics, and could be regarded as an embarrassment to the English Catholic Mission rather than a reinforcement of it. Yet there remained a non-churchgoing Irish Catholicism which was outside clerical influence and which was rooted in a pre-Tridentine Gaelic-speaking popular peasant culture of the home and pilgrimage, rather than in Mass-going in a new shrine church. Even here, however, the traditional sources of priestly authority were reinforced by the Rome-inspired Ultramontane revival, which introduced warmer, more colourful Baroque and romantic devotions to the Blessed Sacrament, the. Virgin and Saints. These devotions recalled many Irishmen to the practice of their religion, and reinvigorated the special relationship between the Catholic priest and the Irish people.
Indeed insofar as it was successful, the creation of this church-related culture was also the creation of a low profile community founded in family relationships and in many ways invisible to outsiders, occasionally resulting in an hereditary Irish closed-shop, as in the case of the Greenock sugar workers and the stevedores union in the East End, and often, as when in the 1920s the Irish moved from their traditional Liberal allegiance to Labour, exercising a pervasive Christian Socialist influence in the Labour Party, on local councils and the local MP, as in the excellent relations between the Catholics of Poplar and their Christian Socialist MP George Lansbury. The fact that the clergy were often the only professional people resident in working-class areas also gave them a political role, which not a few of them were very willing to play, especially on the education issue. But even in matters like housing, London East End parish priests like Canon Ring and Fr. Beckley were formidable political allies or enemies. The. and result was a curious combination of achieved Irish integration and acceptance with a surviving Irish apartness. The Catholics of Irish ancestry couli4 maintain a separate culture and identity in their own 'Little Ireland', yet move easily among the surrounding population, with no obvious sense of difference from them, while yet still retaining their own traditional hidden life.
For the Irish that was a kind of success: not the individualistic success of the self-made man, though there were Irish Catholics of that kind, fewer in Britain than in America. Rather, granted their generally low economic possibilities and aspirations, the Irish in the long term had the kind of success possible only to people who know who and what they are. Nor was this merely a local communal loyalty to the Catholic Church and nationalist society, but to these entities in their widest manifestations. Religious, national and ethnic identity came together in the international consciousness of the Irish Catholic emigrant, who was aware through his newspapers, parochial organisations and political parties of what was happening in Ireland and throughout the Irish diaspora, and was therefore part of an international community pervaded by the nationalist movements and. by the Roman Catholic Church. For that double success, by priests and politicians, in the creation of Irish Catholic communities, one is tempted to search for social explanations. One explanation however, goes, beyond social history, to a perennial fact about mankind. Whatever the Irish Catholics' faults, theirs was not a poverty of the spirit, for their pride in their religion, nationality and race, the differences which sharpened their sense of separation, also gave them the assurance that even in their poverty they stood higher in the providence of God and in the light of history than the prosperous heretical Anglo-Saxon stranger. Moreover underpinning this pride was even a pride in poverty itself, in that holy poverty in which they were one with Christ and with His saints before them. The Irish created in their nationalist organisations and in the Roman Catholic Church a spiritual empire both in Ireland and across the seas. In one sense, their empire was an answer to that British empire whose existence had made their empire possible. For there is always a spiritual dignity possible to those who do not achieve in the eyes of the world the best things which the world thinks that it has to offer them, the dignity which a beaten nation, be it Poland or Ireland, ran sometimes achieve upon its knees. Some possibly consider such a spirit a sure sign of false consciousness. To the Irish, however, it was a source of dignity and strength, offering them hope in this world and for another. In this they did no more than draw on the innermost resources of their nationality and religion, for the Catholic Christian sees mankind as outcast, and all in need of a dignity and strength, which the spirit gives, and which the world can never know. There was tragedy here but al so pride. The Irish may have been exiles in spirit in Britain, but they were not exiles from their Faith, their Fatherland and their God.
This study draws on the contributors to the forthcoming Croom Helm volume on The Irish in the Victorian City, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Roger Swift. For Further Reading:
J.A. Jackson, The Irish in Britain (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963);
J.E. Handley, The Irish in Scotland (Cork University Press, '1943) and The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork University Press, 1947);
Lynn H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester University Press, 1979);
Alan O'Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism: Parnellite Involvement in British Politics 1880-86 (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1.977);
M A.G. O'Tuithaigh, 'The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Problems of Integration', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 5th. Series, vol. 31 (1981).
• Colin Holmes is Reader in economic and social history at the University of Sheffield and the author of the forthcoming John Bull's Island. Immigrants and Refugees in Britain 1870-1982 for Macmillan.
The crowds which packed the exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite painting in the Tate Gallery last year saw Walter Howell Deverell's picture of 1853-4, 'The Irish Vagrants ', showing a pauper family beside an English road. One man is asleep, a second is sunk in dejection, a sleeping infant clasps a woman impressive and impassive in despair, while two half-naked children stand, one of them pleading for alms from an unheeding lady riding by. The painting is a Christian Socialist comment on a great natural calamity, the Irish pauper influx into Britain in 1845-51 in the wake of the Irish Famine. Yet that fight from starvation only hastened an existing trend: Irish immigration was a trickle in 1790s, a stream in the 1820s, a river in the 1840s, and a flood from the late 1840s as the Irish-born population of England and Wales rose from 291,000 in 1841 to 520,000 in 1851, reached its peak of 602,000 in 1861, at about 3 per cent of the total population, and fell to 427,000 at the end of the century.
These figures do not, however, include the children of immigrants born in Britain, while as a proportion of the total population, the statistics for the Irish-born in Scotland are still more striking: 128,000 in 1841 and 207,000 in 1851, or 7 per cent of the Scottish population, remaining roughly at this level for fifty years: the figure in l901 was 205,000. Most of these immigrants settled in the industrial towns of Lancashire and Western Scotland, especially in Liverpool and Glasgow, and in London, with smaller concentrations in the midlands, the north and Yorkshire. In London, the largest Irish settlement in absolute numbers, the Irish were about 5 per cent of the population in 1861, though this rose to nearly a quarter in Liverpool, and 18 per cent in Dundee. Through this concentration in towns and cities, they stood out from the host population by their poverty, nationality, race and religion.
Certainly the Irish Catholic immigrants look like the outcasts of Victorian society, outcast from British capitalism as the poorest of the poor, from mainstream British politics as separatist nationalists and republicans, from the 'Anglo-Saxon' race as 'Celts', and as Catholics from the dominant forms of British Protestantism. The Irish were, therefore, the outcasts of Victorian Britain, with an accumulated body of disadvantages possessed by no other group of similar size until the Jewish immigration; they were the largest unassimilated section of their society, as a people' set apart and everywhere rejected and despised.
Poverty was the most unambiguous of these disadvantages. It was the driving force of emigration into Britain which, at least at first, received the immigrants least able to move on to North America or Australasia. A majority of the new-arrivals in Britain crowded into slum tenements, 'rookeries', lodging houses and cellar dwellings in the long-established and already over-populated districts of Irish settlement in Lancashire and London, and even in smaller centres, theirs tended to be the filthiest and foulest of neighbourhoods. Though the early emigrants often came as harvesters, they had no capital to became other than casual workers on the land; even the York field labourers lived in the city slum, tramping long distances to work every day in the surrounding countryside. So like more recent refugees from pauper rural economies, the great majority entered the lowliest and least healthy of urban occupations, unless they enlisted in the army, which was over 30 per cent Irish in the mid-Victorian era, though this proportion had fallen heavily by the end of the century. Indeed among the country immigrants to British towns, the Irish were the least well-prepared to succeed in their new environment, the minority of skilled workmen entering sweated industries like cobbling and tailoring, the great majority with no skills being concentrated in unskilled occupations, casual labour at the docks and street-selling. These were occupations for which a highly sophisticated economy like London, with a highly specialised labour force, had very few rewards. The Irish could only get into the metropolitan economy with difficulty, and so figure dramatically in Henry Mayhew's portraits of the more marginal and picturesque of the city's proletarians in mid-century.
The Famine influx often made matters dramatically worse, sometimes resulting in or reinforcing a socially immobile and unintegrated ghetto, isolated in particular streets and courts from the surrounding area and contributing to the crime rate in disproportionate numbers in the categories for petty theft and casual violence. Thus the old city of York contained a classic Irish slum, with a high turnover of population and a reputation for dirt and disorder which lasted until the clearance programmes in the 1920s and 30s. Yet the high Irish crime rate fell in the decades from 1860, while remaining disproportionate to Irish numbers, and must be understood against the background of an insecure new police force with a military background, exercising a new rigour in policing illegal drinking and overcrowded lodging houses, which brought them into conflict with the local working-class population, especially the Irish, even though some of these policemen were Irish themselves. Here the Irish were the victims of the development of a more regimented and orderly society, of which they were to become a part.
The Famine also cast a long shadow in Liverpool, where work opportunities, housing and sanitation were overwhelmed by the 1840s immigration. The city was a trading and a commercial rather than an industrial centre, and the employment available was largely in unskilled occupations for which Catholics and Protestants were in active competition. There is, however, a range to even this experience which suggests a complex answer to the controversial and much debated question, as to whether Irish immigrants lowered English wages. In Glasgow, the Irish found jobs in mills and mines, though excluded from engineering, the shipyards dominated by the Orange Order, and skilled trades controlled by craft unions. There is another contrast with the Irish settlement in Edinburgh, the home of a rentier class and of legal, literary and ecclesiastical establishments, in which the Irish poor were confined to such dependent menial occupations as general labouring in building, domestic service, portering, street-cleaning and street-lighting. The more positive side of this poverty was a lively communal generosity and self-help, extending to sending money to members of the family still in Ireland and, even after 1860 and the relaxation of the settlement provisions of the Poor Law, the Irish made a smaller call on public and private charity than their poverty and English prejudice might lead one to suppose.
A second mark of Irish apartness was Irish nationalism. Here, again, there were grounds for British conservative prejudice, in the tradition of Irish agrarian outrage and of the 'physical force' resort to street violence and armed rebellion, or more impressively, the resort to passive mass defiance. This defiance was an attraction to English political radicals, drawn to the oratory of such distinctively Irish gifts to English Chartism as Feargus O'Connor and Bronterre O'Brien. Yet the Irish provided more than these well-known Chartist leaders and, despite Daniel O'Connell's opposition to the movement, ordinary Irish Catholics were sometimes a well-integrated part of a popular British proletarian culture, in which English radicals actively championed the Irish cause and sought, and gained, Irish Catholic support. So the Irish made a distinctive contribution to the last phase of Chartism in 1848, and its failure may have had a decided effect on the increasing social and political isolation of the Irish in Britain in mid-century. There was, therefore, an Irish Chartist echo in England to the rising of the Young Irelanders of 1848, and in the 1860s the revolutionary tradition returned to England with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and most spectacularly, with the Clerkenwell prison explosion in 1867. Indeed, after the abortive Fenian rising of the same year, every young Irishman of spirit was a sentimental Fenian. The agrarian violence
Yet the idea of the Irish as an 'outcast' alternative in British radical politics needs the most sensitive statement. The Irish nationalist MPs after 1829 formed an often disruptive element in English politics, and different aspects of the Irish question helped destroy a Tory administration in 1846 and the Liberal party in 1886. Again, the Irish campaigns for the Repeal of the Union in the 1840s and for Home Rule after 1880 did seem to many Englishmen to threaten the destruction of the Empire at its very heart. But the actual Irish threat to the Empire can be much exaggerated. The Irish element in Chartism lent itself to the conservative exploitation which was one cause of its defeat. The very strength of Irish Catholic nationalism in Liverpool gave a populist Orange Toryism a century of almost uninterrupted ascendancy in local politics. There were largely apolitical communities in York and Edinburgh, though the last was the nursery of the revolutionary James Connolly: this apoliticism was doubtless a reflection of the marginal position of the Irish in the economies of these cities, and in Edinburgh the leadership of a conservative Scottish Catholic Church.
The greatest successes of Irish political activity came only in the 1880s, when the Irish parliamentary party created a mass organisation harnessed to constitutional nationalism, which gained a measure of respectability through Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule. Though the pauper Irish were difficult to register as voters, and were only numerous enough to return a nationalist MP, T.P. O'Connor, in one British constituency, in Liverpool, the late Victorian Irish MPs v ere a well-integrated element in British political democracy, the symbols of a degree of acquiescence in British rule which post-1916 perspectives have obscured. The Irish alliance with the Liberals lasted until 1916, despite the difficulties created by Liberal attacks on Catholic education and the Liberal inability to deliver on Home Rule. There was, then, a considerable complexity to Irish political experience, a complexity masked by the revolutionary activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Most Irish Catholics tacitly accepted the Empire, and their attitudes were made clear from '1914, when half a million men of Irish descent volunteered to fight in the British and dominion armies. The great majority were not revolutionaries but became loyal if not enthusiastic subjects of the Crown, in England and Scotland, as in Canada, Australasia and in Ireland itself.
The whole history of this pattern of increasing Irish political integration is as yet a subject largely unexplored, especially for mainland Britain. Yet it is highly relevant to a third criterion of apartness, the hostility towards the Irish as a separate 'race', through the pseudo-scientific mid-Victorian rationalisation of an older English national prejudice. The difficulty with anti-Irish racism is partly one of terminology, partly a matter again of defining the position from which the Irish were 'cast out'. The Irish were defined as a separate racial group as 'Celts' to be distinguished from the English 'Anglo-Saxons'; and Anglo-Saxons were alleged to be at least racially superior as rulers or governors to the racially anarchic Celts. Victorian racial theory, however, was in the form of the claim that the English were racially superior as a 'mixed race', not as a pure one, as a product of mingling of the British 'Celts' with the Norse and Danish invaders, as well as with the Anglo-Saxons. Thus the mongrel English had the good 'Celtic' qualities as well as the good Anglo-Saxon ones. It is as if a member of the National Front were to claim superiority based on his double descent from a Norman and a black Jamaican. Much of the evidence for anti-Celtic racism comes in Punch cartoons depicting the Celt as a gorilla, as if he stood on a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. Yet the Irish so depicted are also under attack on political or religious grounds, while loyal Celts, no less Celtic for their loyalism, are depicted with a Grecian purity of feature like the figure of Hibernia herself.
In any case, Anglo-Saxon racism was not identical to hatred of the Irish, and some of the exponents of Celtic racial theory also supported Home Rule. The anti-Celtic stereotype was a complex one, as Celts were generally acknowledged, in the manner of Matthew Arnold, to be as superior as poets to the Saxon Philistine as they were inferior as politicians, and to be as chaste, hospitable, witty, kindly and generous as they were feckless, stupid, violent, unreliable and drunken. Indeed this view of the Irish is arguably partly of Irish origin, its most complete expression being the analysis of the Irish character by an Irish Catholic bishop, with which Dr S.J. Connolly opens his recent study of the Church in pre-Famine Ireland, though some parts of it are also to be found in the street ballads sung by the Irish themselves. There is a further paradox about the Anglo-Saxon attitude which treats the Irish character as racially Celtic. As a highly sophisticated intellectual prejudice developed by ethnologists, historians and poets, Anglo-Saxonism was restricted by its very nature to literate members of the Victorian middle class, and cannot therefore be invoked to explain the attitudes of people ignorant of the intricacies of ethnological theory. On the other hand, as a middle-class prejudice, anti-Celticism seems to have been wholly inoperative against the advancement of the small Irish Catholic middle class, suggesting that the prejudice was one essentially against Irish paupers, as a parallel with the more negative attitudes to the English poor. The Irish Catholic London journalist Justin McCarthy could claim that his career had never been impeded by his Irishness.
Yet the negative aspects of the Irish stereotype tended to be dominant in the 1850s and 1860s, as in the Punch cartoons. Indeed those guilty of this prejudice include Marx and Engels, and an 'anti-Celticism' did exist, but most frequently in mongrel form, in association with national and religious prejudice, It is, therefore, difficult to isolate it from other aspects of anti-Irishness and anti-Catholicism, as a phenomenon standing on its own.
Finally, there is the claim that the Irish were outcast because they were Catholics. The English, Scots and Welsh were overwhelmingly Protestant by tradition, and after 1790, the strength of popular Protestantism was vastly reinforced by the Evangelical Revival. Protestant 'No Popery' also gained an increasing ascendancy over the Established Church of Ireland and the once-liberal Ulster Presbyterians, and Ulster immigrant members of the Orange Order introduced their fratricidal strife with Irish Catholics into a number of British towns, chiefly Liverpool, where sectarian competition for jobs in a weakly unionised economy polarised politics between the Orange and the Green, the followers of a dead. Dutchman and a live Italian. The endemic street warfare and sectarian conflict of Liverpool contrast with the comparative calm of Iiberal-controlled Glasgow, though in Glasgow also there was a great gulf between Irish Catholic mores and the respectable Scottish Presbyterian values which made it impossible for Irish Catholics to become Scots. Yet there was a rationalism and egalitarianism in Scottish Liberal Presbyterianism lacking in bigoted Tory Liverpudlian Orange Anglicanism, despite the Scottish 'No Popery' excitements of the 1850s and John Cormack's anti-Irish Protestant Action Party in Edinburgh in the 1930s. These two periods of Scottish Catholicism have, however, opposing explanations: mid-Victorian 'No Popery' reflected Scottish self-confidence, while the 1930s outbreak arose from an anxiety that Scottish values were in decline and under threat from a growing Catholic population.
One manifestation of the new sectarian violence of the 1850s was the Stockport riots of 1852, which arose in part from the underlying antagonism between the masses of new immigrants and hard-pressed English cotton workers who resented the incursion of cheap Irish labour into the mills. This antagonism, however, was insufficient to cause the riots by itself, the actual occasion being the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy of bishops in 1850, fanned to flame by the 'respectable' anti-Catholicism of local Anglican clergymen and electorally vulnerable Tory politicians playing the Irish card in a bid for power. The anti-Catholic disturbances of the '1850s and 1860s, in Liverpool, London, Birkenhead and Birmingham, in which Irish Catholics stood firm against the advent of sensationalist anti-Catholic lecturers, like the former shoe-salesman, William Murphy and the so-called 'Dominican' Baron de Camin, may reflect a new self-confidence in the Irish Catholic community, which evoked a new and bitter Protestant response.
Yet whatever its place in popular prejudice', the 'No Popery' influence was partly a reaction to the Anglo-Catholic Revival, which by introducing Popery into the very heart of the Establishment, did far more than the lrish to inflame the passions of Victorian anti-Catholicism. Its irony was that when some of these Anglo-Catholics apostatised to Rome, they found themselves, like John Henry Newman, given over to 'hearing the general confessions of dirty Paddies'. It was a former High Church archdeacon, Henry Edward Manning, the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, resolver of the Dock Strike of 1889, who described his life as it neared its end as one of labour for the Irish immigration in England. Not all the English converts liked the Irish, but the very soul of Anglicanism gave the Irish Catholic mission a number of its most devoted pastors, with those native English Catholic priests who died while ministering to the Irish victims of cholera. Again, there is a balance to be drawn, as not all Catholic-born English priests wanted to minister to the Irish, who in any case could not always feel completely at home in a Church which was governed by an English clergy.
Were then, the Irish 'outcast' as Catholics? They were not more 'outcast' as Catholics than English or foreign Catholics on the ground of their Catholicism alone. Catholicism was unpopular as a living ideological force, being regarded with the same suspicion as modern Communism. Indeed conversion to Catholicism was, as W.H. Auden puts it, a disaster that could happen in the best of families. There can hardly have been a wealthy Victorian household which was not divided by at least one conversion to Rome, and the full force of anti-Catholic prejudice in such cases did not fall on the Irish. Some Protestant polemicists regarded Irish immigrants with more indulgence than either converts or nuns, as the Irish were, at least in possibility, converts to Protestantism. It is true that English observers sometimes distinguished between the 'gentlemanly' English Catholic middle class and the superstitious Irish peasantry, who were as bad as the Italians but Victorian 'No Popery' was much more than anti-Irishness. Catholicism was regarded even by good Victorian liberals as foreign, exotic, dangerous, the religion of England's traditional enemies, France and Spain, the ally of reactionary governments and the creed of superstitious peasants everywhere. The more Protestant-minded hated Rome as unscriptural and anti-Christian. But though the Irish were disliked as Catholics, so was the Duke of Norfolk, the head of the English peerage, the Queen of Spain and the local Italian ringangrinder; and the roots of the outcastness of the Irish are also to be found in other things than Catholicism.
Thus the Irish were 'outcasts' by reasons of their poverty, their political nationality, their 'race' and their religion. But these antagonisms were not simple, they were ambiguous. An English radical or Liberal repelled by an Irishman's Catholicism might well rejoice in his radicalism or Liberalism; a High Churchman repelled by an Irishman's Liberalism might well respect his Catholicism. It is perhaps no accident that the greatest of nineteenth-century Englishmen, the English politician most wounded by the wrongs of Ireland, was both a Liberal and a High Churchman, William Ewart Gladstone.
Yet here again, there is another side. These various aspects of the apartness of the pauper Irish Catholic Celt tended to reinforce one another. Despite the anticlericalism of some of the Fenians, the loyalty of Fatherland generally strengthened the loyalty to the Faith. Again, the church-related culture may have worsened Irish poverty, and inhibited the development of closer personal contacts with, and therefore wider economic opportunity in, the English Protestant-owned and run economy. A different argument stresses the role of Catholic education and charity, in encouraging social mobility by providing schooling and communal self-help in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, but the full measure of this revolution only occurred in this century. There is a most impressive record of social work by priests and sisters, though it took years to catch up with the much more considerable achievements by Protestants and then the state. Even humane Catholic ecclesiastics often opposed the work of non-Catholic philanthropists like Dr Barnado as proselytising in aim, as it often was.
The survival of the loyalties to Faith and Fatherland is also still a matter for academic enquiry. At least half the pre-Famine and Famine emigrants from Ireland were not regular churchgoers in their homeland, which unsettles the simple identification of 'Irish' with 'Catholic'. Immigration into England was largely from eastern Ireland, where formal religious practice was higher before 1850 than in the west, yet London, with its immigrants first from Leister and then Munster, never had rates of churchgoing much above 30 per cent of its nominally Catholic Irish population. The immigrants in northern England came from Ulster and then Leinster, but again, only a third of the Catholic population was given to regular religious practice before 1840, though through missionary effort this may have risen as high as 60 per cent by 1860. Thus Irish Catholic rates of Sunday church attendance were often below those of English Protestants, if higher than those for the English working class. Certainly Irish Catholics were less inclined to formal worship than English Catholics, and could be regarded as an embarrassment to the English Catholic Mission rather than a reinforcement of it. Yet there remained a non-churchgoing Irish Catholicism which was outside clerical influence and which was rooted in a pre-Tridentine Gaelic-speaking popular peasant culture of the home and pilgrimage, rather than in Mass-going in a new shrine church. Even here, however, the traditional sources of priestly authority were reinforced by the Rome-inspired Ultramontane revival, which introduced warmer, more colourful Baroque and romantic devotions to the Blessed Sacrament, the. Virgin and Saints. These devotions recalled many Irishmen to the practice of their religion, and reinvigorated the special relationship between the Catholic priest and the Irish people.
Indeed insofar as it was successful, the creation of this church-related culture was also the creation of a low profile community founded in family relationships and in many ways invisible to outsiders, occasionally resulting in an hereditary Irish closed-shop, as in the case of the Greenock sugar workers and the stevedores union in the East End, and often, as when in the 1920s the Irish moved from their traditional Liberal allegiance to Labour, exercising a pervasive Christian Socialist influence in the Labour Party, on local councils and the local MP, as in the excellent relations between the Catholics of Poplar and their Christian Socialist MP George Lansbury. The fact that the clergy were often the only professional people resident in working-class areas also gave them a political role, which not a few of them were very willing to play, especially on the education issue. But even in matters like housing, London East End parish priests like Canon Ring and Fr. Beckley were formidable political allies or enemies. The. and result was a curious combination of achieved Irish integration and acceptance with a surviving Irish apartness. The Catholics of Irish ancestry couli4 maintain a separate culture and identity in their own 'Little Ireland', yet move easily among the surrounding population, with no obvious sense of difference from them, while yet still retaining their own traditional hidden life.
For the Irish that was a kind of success: not the individualistic success of the self-made man, though there were Irish Catholics of that kind, fewer in Britain than in America. Rather, granted their generally low economic possibilities and aspirations, the Irish in the long term had the kind of success possible only to people who know who and what they are. Nor was this merely a local communal loyalty to the Catholic Church and nationalist society, but to these entities in their widest manifestations. Religious, national and ethnic identity came together in the international consciousness of the Irish Catholic emigrant, who was aware through his newspapers, parochial organisations and political parties of what was happening in Ireland and throughout the Irish diaspora, and was therefore part of an international community pervaded by the nationalist movements and. by the Roman Catholic Church. For that double success, by priests and politicians, in the creation of Irish Catholic communities, one is tempted to search for social explanations. One explanation however, goes, beyond social history, to a perennial fact about mankind. Whatever the Irish Catholics' faults, theirs was not a poverty of the spirit, for their pride in their religion, nationality and race, the differences which sharpened their sense of separation, also gave them the assurance that even in their poverty they stood higher in the providence of God and in the light of history than the prosperous heretical Anglo-Saxon stranger. Moreover underpinning this pride was even a pride in poverty itself, in that holy poverty in which they were one with Christ and with His saints before them. The Irish created in their nationalist organisations and in the Roman Catholic Church a spiritual empire both in Ireland and across the seas. In one sense, their empire was an answer to that British empire whose existence had made their empire possible. For there is always a spiritual dignity possible to those who do not achieve in the eyes of the world the best things which the world thinks that it has to offer them, the dignity which a beaten nation, be it Poland or Ireland, ran sometimes achieve upon its knees. Some possibly consider such a spirit a sure sign of false consciousness. To the Irish, however, it was a source of dignity and strength, offering them hope in this world and for another. In this they did no more than draw on the innermost resources of their nationality and religion, for the Catholic Christian sees mankind as outcast, and all in need of a dignity and strength, which the spirit gives, and which the world can never know. There was tragedy here but al so pride. The Irish may have been exiles in spirit in Britain, but they were not exiles from their Faith, their Fatherland and their God.
This study draws on the contributors to the forthcoming Croom Helm volume on The Irish in the Victorian City, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Roger Swift. For Further Reading:
J.A. Jackson, The Irish in Britain (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963);
J.E. Handley, The Irish in Scotland (Cork University Press, '1943) and The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork University Press, 1947);
Lynn H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester University Press, 1979);
Alan O'Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism: Parnellite Involvement in British Politics 1880-86 (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1.977);
M A.G. O'Tuithaigh, 'The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Problems of Integration', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 5th. Series, vol. 31 (1981).
• Colin Holmes is Reader in economic and social history at the University of Sheffield and the author of the forthcoming John Bull's Island. Immigrants and Refugees in Britain 1870-1982 for Macmillan.