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Anti-Catholicism, Anti-Irish Stereotyping, and Anti-Celtic Racism in Mid-Victorian Working-Class Periodicals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

D.G. Paz
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Extract

The rapid increase in Irish immigration, it is often argued, was the chief cause for the growth of anti-Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century England. Patrick Joyce and Neville Kirk both believe that ethnic tension and violence in southeast Lancashire and northeast Cheshire increased during and after the late 1840s, that that increase “followed the pattern of the arrival and dispersal” of Irish immigrants, and that the controversy over the creation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 intensified the conflict.

L.P. Curtis, Jr., agrees that the mid-century is important, for it was then, he argues, that the stereotype, based on scientific racism, of the Irish as inferior, was “finally assembled and reproduced for a mass reading public which was by then ready to believe almost anything of a derogatory nature about the Irish people.” The English image of the Irish

was bound up with the idea of race or with that amalgam of ostensibly scientific doctrines, subjective data, and ethnocentric prejudices which was steadily gaining respectability among educated men in Western Europe during the first half of the century. In England the idea of race as the determinant of human history and human behavior held an unassailable position in the minds of most Anglo-Saxonists. …

Curtis admits that the Victorians used the word “race” very loosely, and that working-class anti-Irish “prejudice” had class and religious, as well as racist, bases. But he fails to explore these non-racist elements; his argument rests on the evidence of Victorian anthropological writings; he clearly believes that racism bears explanatory primacy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , Winter 1986 , pp. 601 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1986

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Catholic Record Society (St. Anne's College, Oxford, July 1984) and the Carolinas Symposium on British Studies (Boone, N.C., October 1984). I am grateful to the latter for awarding it a prize. Research for this paper was funded by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

References

1 Joyce, Patrick, Work, Society, and Politics: The culture of the factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980), p. 251 (quoted)Google Scholar; Kirk, Neville, “Ethnicity, Class and Popular Toryism, 1850-1870,” in Lunn, Kenneth, ed., Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society, 1870-1914 (Folkestone, 1980), p. 66Google Scholar.

2 Curtis, L.P. Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, Conn., 1968), pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., p. 19.

4 See Bolt, Christine, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London and Toronto, 1971), pp. ix–xGoogle Scholar.

5 Anglo-Saxons and Celts, pp. 19-20. (“[A] compound of economic insecurity, xenophobia, and the kind of authoritaranism discussed by S.M. Lipset in Political Man, Chapter 4. …” Ibid., p. 125.)

6 Gilley, Sheridan, “English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900,” in Holmes, Colin, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London, 1978), pp. 85–93Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., pp. 85, 92, 97.

8 Ibid., p. 94.

9 Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain (London, 1984)Google Scholar, reviewed by Banton, Michael, “Following the Colour Line,” TLS, 20 July 1984, p. 813Google Scholar.

10 Husband, Charles, ed., “Race” in Britain: Continuity and Change (London, 1982), p. 12Google Scholar.

11 Mountjoy, Peter Roger, “The working-class press and working-class conservatism,” in Boyce, George, Curran, James, and Wingate, Pauline, eds., Newspaper History from the seventeenth century to the present day (London and Beverley Hills, Calif., 1978), p. 267Google Scholar. See Williams, Raymond, “Radical and/or respectable,” in Boston, Richard, ed., The Press We Deserve (London, 1970), pp. 14–15, 21Google Scholar, for some interesting comments on the idea of a “gutter” press.

12 “The Forgotten Woman of the Period: Penny Weekly Family Magazines of the 1840's and 1850's,” in Vicinus, Martha, ed., A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington and London, 1977), pp. 40–51Google Scholar.

13 James, Louis, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830-1850 (London, 1963), pp. 45–46Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., pp. 28-29.

15 Williams, , “Radical and/or respectable,” p. 21Google ScholarPubMed.

16 National circulation figures for periodicals are in Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago, 1957), pp. 351–52, 394Google Scholar. Circulation figures for Manchester are in Protestant Magazine 12 (May 1850): 76Google Scholar; and for Liverpool, , in [Bishop, Francis], Report presented at the fourteenth Annual General Meeting of the Liverpool Domestic Mission Society (London and Liverpool, 1851), pp. 18–19Google Scholar.

17 The largest dealer in cheap periodicals, outside London, in England, and possibly in Britain (James, , Fiction for the Working Man, p. 20Google Scholar).

18 For these, see ibid., pp. 36-38; and Hoggart, P.R., “Edward Lloyd, ‘The Father of the Cheap Press,’“ Dickensian 80 (1984): 33–38Google Scholar.

19 For this, see James, , Fiction for the Working Man, p. 39Google Scholar; and Dalziel, Margaret, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago: An Unexplored Tract of Literary History (London, 1957), pp. 24–33, 37–40Google Scholar.

20 Berridge, Virginia Stewart, “Popular Journalism and Working Class Attitudes, 1854-1886: A Study of Reynolds' Newspaper, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, and the Weekly Times” (Ph.D. thesis, 2 vols., University of London, 1976), 1: 53–54Google Scholar (quoted). See also Berridge, Virginia, “Popular Sunday papers and mid-Victorian society,” in Boyce, , Curran, , and Wingate, , Newspaper History, p. 253Google Scholar; Mitchell, , “Forgotten Woman,” pp. 29–30, 33–34Google Scholar; and James, Louis, “The trouble with Betsy: periodicals and the common reader in mid-nineteenth-century England,” in Shattock, Joanne and Wolff, Michael, eds., The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester and Toronto, 1982), p. 356Google Scholar.

21 See Maidment, Brian, “Essayists and Artizans—The Making of Nineteenth-Century Self-Taught Poets,” Literature and History 9 (1983): 77–8Google Scholar.

22 For anticlericalism and antidenominationalism in these periodicals, see Berridge, , “Popular Journalism,” 1: 353–55Google Scholar; and Dalziel, , Popular Fiction, pp. 25, 159–66Google Scholar.

23 Family Herald 3 (9 Aug. 1845): 216Google Scholar.

24 Ibid. 1 (20 May 1843): 30; ibid. 7 (27 April 1850): 828-29.

25 Ibid. 12 (9 Sept. 1854): 300; Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 267Google Scholar; Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850): 464Google Scholar.

26 Family Herald 1 (1 July 1843): 120–21Google Scholar; ibid. 5 (19 Feb. 1848): 667; ibid. 8 (23 Nov. 1850): 476-77.

27 Ibid. 8 (14 Dec. 1850): 524-25; ibid. (21 Dec. 1850): 540-41; ibid. (4 Jan. 1851): 572-73; ibid. (1 Feb. 1851): 636-37; Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 5 (7 March 1846): 48Google Scholar.

28 Ibid. 8 (17 Aug. 1850): 252-53; cf. Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 2 (1850–1852): 1071Google Scholar.

29 Family Herald 2 (31 Aug. 1844): 270Google Scholar; Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 4 (20 Dec. 1845): 273Google Scholar.

30 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 683–84Google Scholar; Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 5 (18 July 1846): 337Google Scholaret passim ad 6 (24 Oct. 1846): 117; ibid. 7 (11 Sept. 1847): 384; Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 2 (1850–1852): 964Google Scholar.

31 Family Herald 2 (17 Aug. 1844): 238Google Scholar; ibid. 5 (9 Oct 1847): 364; ibid. 8 (7 Dec. 1850): 508-9; Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 5 (1846): 720Google Scholar; Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850), 824Google Scholar.

32 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 2 (1844): 505Google Scholar; ibid. 5 (1846): 733; Family Herald 2 (19 Oct. 1844): 371Google Scholar.

33 Family Herald 14 (9 Aug. 1856): 236–37Google Scholar.

34 Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 2 (1850–1852): 1049Google Scholaret passim ad 1180; Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 3 (7 June 1845): 251Google Scholar; ibid. 5 (20 June 1846): 285; Family Herald 1 (23 Sept. 1843): 317–18Google Scholar; ibid. 13 (5 May 1855): 13-14.

35 E.g., Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850): 46Google Scholar. The story is a fabrication (Roth, Cecil, The Spanish Inquisition [New York, 1964], pp. 256–58)Google Scholar—but what frissons it must have caused!

36 Family Herald Old Series [hereafter cited as O.S.], 1 (24 Dec. 1842)Google ScholarPubMed; Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 2 (1844): 636Google Scholar.

37 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 6 (1846): 75Google Scholar.

38 Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 1 (4 May 1844): 81–84Google Scholar; Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 5 (1846): 595Google Scholar; ibid. 6 (1846): 75.

39 Family Herald O.S. 1 (24 Dec. 1842)Google Scholar.

40 Ibid. 5 (29 April 1848): 825; Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 2 (1850–1852): 692Google Scholar.

41 Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 4 (13 Dec. 1845): 266Google Scholar.

42 For this genre's roots in the Gothic tale, historical novel, and theatrical melodrama, see Dalziel, , Popular Fiction, pp. 14–20, 107–21Google Scholar; and James, , Fiction for the Working Man, pp. 72–113Google Scholar. The use of Roman Catholicism in the Gothic tale is mentioned in Kiely, Robert, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 30–32, 98–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in Tracy, Ann B., The Gothic Novel, 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs (Lexington, Kentucky, 1981)Google Scholar; and in Gose, Elliott B. Jr., Imagination Indulged: The irrational in the nineteenth-century novel (Montreal and London, 1972)Google Scholar. The English working classes, however, were not reading the sorts of things that these literary scholars study.

43 Family Herald 1 (1 July 1843): 113–15Google ScholarPubMed. Dalziel calls this story “superlatively silly” (Popular Fiction, pp. 31-32)—but what frissons that line must have caused!

44 Berridge, , “Popular Journalism,” 1: 291–93, 299–300, 306–8Google Scholar; Berridge, , “Popular Sunday papers,” pp. 256–57Google Scholar; Humpherys, Anne, “G.W.M. Reynolds: Popular Literature and Popular Politics,” Victorian Periodicals Review 16 (1983): 79–89Google Scholar.

45 Family Herald 1 (13 April 1844): 778Google Scholar; ibid. 5 (4 Dec. 1847): 481-84; Lloyds Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 296Google Scholar; ibid. 4 (1845): 369: Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 7 (24 April 1847): 59Google Scholaret passim ad (8 May 1847): 90.

46 Family Herald 1 (2 Sept. 1843): 265Google Scholar; Lloyds Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 244Google Scholar; ibid. 2 (1844): 136.

47 Family Herald 11 (19 Nov. 1853): 465Google Scholaret passim ad (7 Jan. 1854): 585.

48 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 38Google Scholar; cf. “The Sisters of Charity,” a sympathetic account of the French order, in Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850): 295Google Scholar.

49 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 5 (1846): 599Google Scholar.

50 Eliza Cook's Journal 1 (11 Aug. 1849): 229Google Scholar; ibid. 4 (18 Jan. 1851): 177-81; ibid. (1 March 1851): 288.

51 Working Man 's Friend 1 (5 Jan. 1850): 4Google Scholaret passim ad 3 (27 July 1850): 92; ibid. 4 (2 Nov. 1850), 124-28; ibid. 5 (1 Feb. 1851): 126-28.

52 Dalziel comments on this in a paragraph, noting that the same ambiguity appears in Railway novels, which had a middle-class readership (Popular Fiction, pp. 160-61).

53 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 202Google Scholar; ibid. 2 (1844): 531; ibid. 4 (1845): 5.

54 Ibid. 1 (1843): 709.

55 Ibid. pp. 316, 587, 811-13; ibid. 4 (1845): 156; Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 7 (17 July 1847): 252–53Google Scholar.

56 James, , Fiction for the Working Man, pp. 55–56, 129–36Google Scholar, discusses the interest in America and Americans, both black and white.

57 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 216Google Scholar; ibid. 2 (1844): 412.

58 Ibid. 1 (1843); ibid. 3 (1844): 768; ibid. 6 (1846): 48; Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850), 260Google Scholar; ibid. 2 (1850-52): 116.

59 Ibid. 2 (1850-52): 118.

60 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 5 (1846): 297Google Scholar.

61 Ibid. 3 (1844): 369-71, 376-79.

62 The Irish theme is treated in Kelley, Mary Edith, The Irishman in the English Novel of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, and in Bolger, Stephen Garrett, The Irish Character in American Fiction, 1830-1860 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; but once again the English working classes were not reading fiction of the quality discussed by these scholars.

63 Family Herald 2 (25 May 1844): 48Google Scholar; ibid. (5 April 1845): 766; Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850): 615Google Scholar.

64 One short story, lifted from Household Words, describes a “wild Irishman” in a workhouse brawl (Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 2 [1850–1852]: 109Google Scholar).

65 Family Herald 9 (25 Oct. 1851): 416Google Scholar.

66 Ibid. 1 (17 Feb. 1844): 642; ibid. 3 (7 Feb. 1846): 625-27; ibid. 6 (13 May 1848): 23-24; Eliza Cook's Journal 4 (14 Dec. 1850): 106Google Scholaret passim ad (28 Dec. 1850): 143.

67 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 225–28, 273Google Scholaret passim ad 391, 565-66, 641 et passim ad 693, 709-10; Family Herald 2 (11 May 1844): 5Google Scholar; ibid. 3 (21 Feb. 1846): 657-59.

68 Family Herald 10 (18 Sept. 1852): 323–24Google Scholar.

69 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 1 (1843): 394–97Google Scholar.

70 Ibid. p. 88

71 Ibid. pp. 107, 136-37; Family Herald 1 (20 May 1843): 19–20Google Scholar; ibid. (30 Sept. 1843): 331; ibid. 3 (2 Aug. 1845): 193-95; Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 6 (16 Jan. 1847): 312–15Google Scholar; ibid. (13 Mar. 1847): p. 445; Lloyds Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850): 127, 327Google Scholar.

72 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 3 (1844): 91Google Scholar; Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 6 (20 Mar. 1847): 464–66Google Scholar.

73 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 5 (1846): 234–36Google Scholar.

74 Lloyd's Entertaining Journal 1 (11 May 1844): 103Google Scholar.

75 Family Herald 3 (25 Oct. 1845): 400Google Scholar.

76 Ibid. 1 (16 Dec. 1843): 497.

77 Ibid. 5 (19 June 1847): 97-100; Eliza Cook's Journal 4 (8 Mar. 1851): 289-95.

78 Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany 2 (1844): 235-37, 243-45; ibid. 5 (1846): 169.

79 Family Herald 3 (17 May 1845): 22Google Scholar; ibid. (24 May 1845): 35.

80 Working Man's Friend 5 (22 Feb. 1851): 208–9Google Scholar; Eliza Cook's Journal 1 (1 Sept. 1849): 280–81Google Scholar; ibid. 7 (9 Oct. 1852): 369.

81 Not all these tales are trash; they include “Daniel O'Rourke,” a delightful story by the Irish antiquary Croker, Thomas Crofton (Dictionary of National Biography, 5: 132–34)Google Scholar, which has been reprinted in America (Miller, Olive Beaupre, ed., Through Fairy Halls, vol. 6 of My Book House, 12 vols. [Lake Bluff, Ill., 1956], pp. 62–69)Google Scholar. I was struck by the stereotyping when I read the story to my children.

82 Family Herald 9 (18 Oct. 1851): 392–93Google Scholar.

83 Read what purports to be a “letter home”: “Come to swate Ameriky, and come quickly. Here you can buy paraties two shillings a bushel, whisky and coal same price, because we ain't got no turf here, a dollar a day for digging, and no hanging for staling. Och, now, do come” (Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 2 [1850–1852], 1109)Google Scholar.

84 Race: A Study in Superstition, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965), pp. 12–13Google Scholar.

85 Lloyd's Weekly Miscellany 1 (1849–1850): 823Google Scholar.

86 Ibid. 2 (1850-52): 1061-62.

87 Ibid. p. 1087.

88 Family Herald O.S. 1 (7 Jan. 1843)Google Scholar.

89 Working Man's Friend 1 (5 Jan. 1850): 10–12Google Scholar; ibid. (12 Jan. 1850): 39-41.

90 Ibid. Supplement 1 (June 1850): 6-8.

91 (1810-1879), linguist, peace activist, and internationalist (Dictionary of American Biography, 3: 328–30Google Scholar).

92 Working Man's Friend 1 (30 March 1850): 405Google Scholar; also published in Eliza Cook's Journal 4 (29 March 1851): 351Google Scholar.

93 Family Herald O.S. 1 (7 Jan. 1843)Google Scholar.

94 Ibid. 12 (23 Sept. 1854): 332.

95 Eliza Cook's Journal 6 (3 April 1852): 355Google Scholar.

96 Curtis, , Anglo-Saxons and Celts, pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

97 Bolt, Christine points out (Victorian Attitudes to Race, pp. 9–26)Google Scholar that the debate over how to measure and classify “race” was not settled until the very last years of the nineteenth century, when linguistic and cranial measures were finally rejected.