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The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh
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Extract

Unlike their American cousins, the Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Britain have, until recently, received comparatively little scholarly attention from historians. This is not to say that their presence in Victorian Britain has gone unnoticed; far from it. Throughout the nineteenth century the doings and, much more often, the mis-doings of the immigrant Irish were logged in massive detail by an army of social investigators, philanthropists, clergymen, royal commissions and parliamentary committees. But, with very few exceptions, the scholarly analysis of the data has only begun in earnest during the last two decades, and especially during the past few years. In a growing body of local and regional studies, and in studies of particular aspects of the Irish presence, the literature on the Irish immigrants is becoming not only more plentiful but also conceptually more sophisticated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 31 , December 1981 , pp. 149 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1981

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References

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10 Derived from statistical tables inJackson, , Irish in Britain, p. 11Google Scholar.

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12 Cited as percentages byCollins, Brenda, ’Aspects of Irish Immigration ’(unpublished M.Phil, thesis, Univ. of Edinburgh, 1978), p. 22Google Scholar.

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23 See the excellent paper byHanham, H. J., ’Religion and Nationality in the Mid-Victorian Army ’, War and Society: Essays in Honour and Memory of J. R. Western, ed. Foot, M. R. D. (London, 1973), pp. 162, 176–7Google Scholar.

24 Some of these are noted in passing inParliamentary Papers, 1836 (40), xxxivGoogle Scholar, app. G.

25 It is difficult to quantify this element. They emerge from Denvir's survey of the immigrant Irish (Irish in Britain), and particularly in the study of the political leadership of the immigrant Irish in the studies of Benjamin and Woolaston (see n. 3 above). See alsoRichardson, , ’Irish in Victorian Bradford’, 303–4Google Scholar.

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40 This bald summary does scant justice to Gilley's carefully argued case.

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53 From ÓGráda's revised figures for Irish immigrants to Britain (above, n. 7) and their provenance, it may be inferred that the number of Irish speakers in the immigrant stream to Britain was higher than has been allowed for. This, of course, has implications for literacy, social isolation and religious life among the immigrants.

54 Programme of St. Patrick's Day concert in the Albert Hall, Sheffield, 1890 (Sheffield Central Library: H. J. Wilson Papers).

55 The most thorough attempt to investigate this subject is the work of Gilley, cited n. 3 above.

56 A point noted, self-consciously and defensively, by Gwynn, D., ’The Irish Immigration’, The English Catholics, 1850–1950, ed. Beck, G. A. (London, 1950), pp. 265–90Google Scholar.

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68 In theory, of course, a ’mixed’ marriage was as likely to lead to the ’gain’ of the non-Catholic partner as to the ’loss’ of the Catholic.

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86 The writer hopes to explore some of these aspects of the subject in greater detail in a forthcoming work on British public opinion and Irish Home Rule in the Gladstonian era.

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