Politics, Religion and the Press: Irish Journalism in Mid-Victorian England (review)

The nineteenth-century Irish newspaper press has been largely ignored by historians. This is strange, for two reasons. First, as in Britain, the Victorian era in Ireland witnessed an explosion in the number and variety of local, regional, and national newspapers. Second, the nineteenth century is the most studied and arguably, the most important, era in the history of Anglo-Irish relations—a history in which Irish newspapers played no small part. Historians of physical force and constitutional nationalists in Ireland and the United States have, of course, acknowledged the role of the press in fund raising, political organization, and the spread of national feeling, even if they have not made news-papers their particular object of study. Rather less—or truthfully, almost nothing—has been said of the Irish press in Britain. Although the Irish experience in Victorian Britain has been one of the more vibrant fields of inquiry in the past twenty years, newspapers and the role they played in diasporic Irish nationalism have been largely overlooked.

Anthony McNicholas's Politics, Religion and the Press represents the first of what one hopes will be many forays into this topic. This book is particularly valuable because it not only offers detailed case studies of three London Irish papers, but also skillfully analyzes the political and religious contexts within which they operated and eventually, and sometimes quickly, failed. McNicholas has selected three newspapers active in the 1860s, when, owing to the immigration of the famine years, it became possible to establish a popular Irish press in Britain. The mid century press contained numerous short-lived ventures, but even in a time when publishing was volatile, two of the three papers McNicholas examines were strikingly ephemeral. Only one, the Universal News (1860–1869), lasted more than a year,with the Irish Liberator hanging on for ten months (October, 1863 to July, 1864) and the Irish News managing a mere four issues in the spring of 1867.

After considerable detective work across a range of scattered and incomplete sources, McNicholas has managed to assemble a surprisingly detailed account of the editorship, shareholders, and distribution of these newspapers, as well as the intramural conflicts and funding woes they shared with most fledgling periodicals. But this book offers much more than three institutional histories. McNicholas is concerned above all with the role of these papers in relations between the two most important forces in the mid-century Irish community in Britain, the Catholic church and the Fenians. By the 1860s both groups, for their own reasons, desired to use the popular press to reach the significant number of Irishmen and women living in Britain. The Fenians and such associated organizations as the National Brotherhood of St. Patrick were engaged in a transatlantic effort to rekindle Irish national feeling and secure Ireland's independence through armed revolution. The Catholic church was seeking to maintain contact with, organize, and protect from Protestant proselytizers the recent huge influx of lower-class Irish Catholics, many of them only nominally churched. Owing to the wide dispersal of the immigrant population, the church played a central role in the social organization of Irish life in Britain and exercised considerable influence on the dealers and shops that specialized in Catholic literature and newspapers. Although the distribution networks for these newspapers were organized on confessional lines—nondenominational papers, Catholic papers, and so on—the exact identity of their audience was sometimes contested. The simplest rendering of the question editors faced is, should the readers be addressed as Irish or as Catholic?

In its early years the editors of the Universal News and their clerical allies believed that the readership could be identified as both equally, even if addressing the mas such quickly drove away English Catholic or Protestant readers. But as the secular separatist nationalist movement grew, the relationship between the church and the journalists became increasingly brittle."And it was this relationship," McNicholas argues, "more than the poverty, or lack...