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“A Medley Mob of Irish-American Plotters and Irish Dupes”: The British Press and Transatlantic Fenianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Michael de Nie
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Extract

In recent years scholars have paid considerable attention to the problem of British identity and “Britishness.” Britishness and, for that matter, Englishness or Scottishness, are all, of course, impossible to quantify in any exact manner. While regional identities obviously persisted after 1707, this persistence did not preclude the construction of a national identity, a core set of “British” values that most people in Britain could agree represented them and their success as a commercial, industrial, and imperial power. In the press, popular fiction, and political dialogue, “British” was understood to stand for certain qualities, among them earnestness, prosperity, manliness, freedom, character, and civilization. These were the qualities used to contrast, compare, and find Britain superior to almost every nation and people in the world, especially Ireland and the British colonies.

This contrast has been central to scholarship on British identity, most notably Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. Playing on Benedict Anderson's idea of an “imagined community,” Colley portrays Britain as an invented nation brought together primarily by confrontation with the French Catholic Other over the course of a century of near perpetual warfare. Britons came to define themselves as a single people “not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.” While a number of works seeking to modify, challenge, or even refute Colley have followed, most scholars concur that Englishness (or Britishness) was based above all on comparison with others, especially the Catholic French.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , April 2001 , pp. 213 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001

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References

1 Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992)Google Scholar.

2 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London, 1983)Google Scholar. Colley also follows Anderson in the weight she affords to print capitalism.

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5 For example, see Noonan, Kathleen M., “‘The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People’: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda,” Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (1998): 151–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Aside from biographies, the Fenians have received surprisingly little attention from historians. One of the most influential accounts is Comerford's, R. V.The Fenians in Context (Dublin, 1985)Google Scholar, though he is strongly criticized by Newsinger, John in his Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London, 1994)Google Scholar. Also of interest is Broin, Leon Ó, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; and Rafferty, Oliver P., The Church, the State, and the Fenian Threat, 1861–1875 (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

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22 Illustrated London News (23 September 1865).

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35 Rafferty, , The Church, the State, and the Fenian Threat, 1861–1875, p. 103Google Scholar; Newsinger, , Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, p. 65Google Scholar. Another 60,000–70,000 were enrolled in the rest of the country.

36 The Times (5 November and 11 November 1867).

37 Liverpool Mercury (14 March 1867).

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40 Cardiff Times (5 October 1867).

41 Penny Illustrated Paper (23 March and 16 March 1867).

42 News of the World (17 March 1867).

43 Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper (29 December 1867).

44 Lady's Own Paper (21 December 1867).

45 Liverpool Mercury (19 October 1867).

46 The Times (14 December 1867).

47 Penny Illustrated Paper (21 December 1867).

48 Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper (5 January 1868).

49 Liverpool Mercury (19 October 1867).

50 Beehive (19 October 1867).

51 Bristol Times and Mirror (9 October 1867).

52 Sheffield Independent (14 November 1867).

53 Tablet (21 December 1867).

54 Manchester Examiner (16 December and 18 December 1867).

55 Nonconformist (24 December 1867).

56 Illustrated London News (4 January 1868).

57 Spectator (19 March 1870).

58 Spectator (26 March 1870).

59 Birmingham Journal (12 March 1870).

60 Morning Herald (20 December 1867).

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62 Bristol Times and Mirror (20 September 1867).

63 Illustrated London News (26 September 1867).

64 Liverpool Mercury (20 September 1867).

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66 Weekly Dispatch (20 October 1867).

67 Daily Telegraph (16 December 1867). Koss, , The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, p. 168Google Scholar. The paper cut loose from Gladstone and realigned itself as an “Imperial” paper in 1876–78.

68 Daily Telegraph (11 March 1867).

69 Manchester Guardian (21 September 1867).

70 Cardiff Times (3 March 1867).

71 Birmingham Daily Gazette (9 October 1867).

72 Sheffield Independent (5 October 1867).

73 Illustrated London News (1 December 1866).

74 The Irish Church Act of 1869 disestablished the Church of Ireland and made it a voluntary body on par with the other religions in Ireland. It was opposed by only a handful of High Church and Tory newspapers. Gladstone's Land Act of 1870 introduced some measures to protect Irish tenants, including compensation for improvements made on the land if they were evicted. The act outraged most Irish landlords but fell far short of the demands made by tenant right advocates. The Land Act was strongly supported in the Liberal press and for the most part accepted as inevitable by Conservative newspapers.

75 For more on the British press and the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, see my “‘The French Disease’: The British Press and 1798,” Working Papers in Irish Studies 99, no. 3 (June 1999): 1–8Google Scholar.

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77 Ibid., p. 7.

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85 See Arnold's, MatthewOn the Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1867)Google Scholar, and Culture and Anarchy (London, 1868)Google Scholar. See also the special issue on “Victorian Ethnologies” in Victorian Studies 41, no. 3 (1998)Google Scholar, esp. Pecora, Vincent P., “Arnoldian Ethnology,” pp. 355–79Google Scholar; and Herbert, Christopher, “Epilogue: Ethnology and Evolution,” pp. 485–94Google Scholar.

86 Most notably, Gilley, “English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1789–1900”; and Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch. To be fair to Foster, while his defense of Mr. Punch is not entirely convincing, he is right to insist that class and religion must be given equal weight to the idea of race. Other contributors to the debate include Tuathaigh, M. A. G. Ó, “The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration,” in The Irish in the Victorian City, ed. Swift, Roger and Gilley, Sheridan (London, 1985), pp. 13–36Google Scholar; and Paz, D. G., Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, Calif., 1992)Google Scholar. For an interesting, if not entirely convincing, examination of Irish racial identity in the American context, see Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

87 Curtis, , Apes and Angels, p. 110Google Scholar. See also Stepan, , The Idea of Race in Science, p. xviiGoogle Scholar; Lebow, , White Britain and Black Ireland, pp. 35–50Google Scholar; and Gibbons, Luke, “Race against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History,” in his Transformations in Irish Culture (Notre Dame, Ind., 1996), pp. 149–65Google Scholar.

88 Curtis, , Apes and Angels, pp. 18, 26, 37–38, 117–21, 143Google Scholar.

89 Ibid., pp. 94–95, and Anglo-Saxons and Celts, pp. 11–12, 15, 32, 51–64; Lebow, , White Britain and Black Ireland, pp. 35–50Google Scholar, and see also his “British Historians and Irish History,” Éire-Ireland 8, no. 4 (December 1973): 3–38Google Scholar; and Hechter , Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley, 1975)Google Scholar.

90 For more on the British Press and the Famine, see my “The Famine, Irish Identity, and the British Press,” Irish Studies Review 6, no. 1 (April 1998): 27–36Google Scholar, and “Curing the ‘Irish Moral Plague,’” Éire-Ireland 32, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 63–85Google Scholar.

91 Kentish Gazette (1 October 1867).

92 Bristol Times and Mirror (6 September 1867).

93 Bristol Times and Mirror (23 March 1870).

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95 See, e.g., Curtis, , Anglo-Saxons and Celts, pp. 53, 59–64Google Scholar; Lebow, , White Britain and Black Ireland, pp. 43–50Google Scholar; Roger, , “Crime and the Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in The Irish in Britain 1815–1939, ed. Swift, Roger and Gilley, Sheridan (Savage, Md., 1989), pp. 163–82, 163–64, 172Google Scholar; and Tuathaigh, O, “The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” pp. 13–36Google Scholar, esp. pp. 21–22.

96 Cardiff Guardian (9 October 1869).

97 Derby Mercury (1 December 1867).

98 Cardiff Guardian (8 May 1868).

99 Manchester Courier (15 April 1869).

100 Bristol Mercury (19 March 1870).

101 Record (23 December 1867).

102 Standard (8 March 1867).

103 Cardiff Guardian (9 October 1869).

104 Scotsman (21 May 1869).

105 Joyce, Patrick, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), p. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.