Liverpool's social problems, initially the consequence of exponential growth, have always claimed special attention. With characteristic inverted pride, the wretched early-Victorian reputation – ‘the black spot on the Mersey’ – has acquired metaphoric force in historiographical discourse: a damning indictment, it stands as the tidal-mark by which to measure (and applaud) Liverpool's subsequent pioneer role in social reform and its pre-eminence in philanthropy. While prejudice and sectarian tensions disabled political progress, ‘squalid’ Liverpool led the way in social amelioration, empowered by an innovative mixed economy of municipal and voluntary provision. This juxtaposition of backward politics with progressive social policy, a time-worn formulation of Ramsay Muir, requires careful interrogation. No less than party politics, social policy (whether municipal or voluntary) was driven largely by ethnic and sectarian considerations and constructions. Local authority interventionism in health and housing was justified through denigration of the Irish ‘other’ in their midst, legitimising rhetoric which overrode laissez-faire sentiment and rate-payer retrenchment. Innovation in philanthropy, the specialism of the Unitarian liberal elite otherwise denied political influence, was spurred by the need for business acumen, scientific rationality and trained professionalism to curb indiscriminate provision – the deformation of the gift – unduly inflated in Liverpool by sectarian competitive rivalry and Catholic charitable largesse. As this essay shows, Irish and Catholic were rendered synonymous in dispute over charity and social reform, an ethnic identity constructed in a complex process of host labelling and migrant affiliation.

In promoting interventionism, Dr Duncan, Liverpool's pioneering Medical Officer of Health, drew upon the anti-Irish rhetoric and prescriptions of the ‘Condition of England Question’. The (necessary) underclass of early industrialisation, the Irish figured in the social engineering projects of the 1830s and 1840s as the internal ‘other’, a ‘contaminating’ presence within the unreformed and unprotected ‘social body’.