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

This important study suggests new ways of exploring the Irish Diaspora by examining the networks, ideologies, and individuals connected with Irish newspaper publishing outside Ireland. Despite the title, the book focuses primarily on three Irish titles produced in London in the 1860s: the Universal News, which ran from 1860 to 1869; The Irish Liberator (October 1863 to July 1864); and the Irish News (which published just four issues in 1867). McNicholas begins with an engaging historiographical overview that demonstrates, first, the paucity of studies of Irish newspapers, and, second, the methodological advances that are necessary to move historians from mining newspapers for material on the Irish Diaspora to studying newspapers as an inherent part of Diaspora culture. The book also frames the emergence of an Irish, particularly Catholic, community in Britain against the backdrop of famine and nativist, Protestant opposition to the renaissance of Catholicism in the 1850s. Although he focuses on London, the epicenter of expatriate Irish print culture in a UK context, McNicholas acknowledges the role and importance of Irish print cultures in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Newcastle. Since the London Irish have generally been poorly served by historical studies and given the richness of the material McNicholas has at his disposal, the metropolitan focus is fully justified.

In many ways, the odds were stacked against newspapers intended for an Irish Catholic readership but wishing for an audience beyond that. Balancing general news with Irish news was a requirement of any title wishing to attract a non-Irish readership or to secure general advertising. A dizzying number of specialist titles rose and fell in Great Britain at this time; competition was fierce; and, for Irish newspapers published in England, Catholic content did not sit easily next to nationalist material. Economic constraints were endemic. The Universal News, despite robust sales, was undercapitalized, with only one-quarter of the initial 20,000 ten-shilling shares taken up (p. 92). Moreover, specific pressures were also applied by the Church; a telling example being the Irish bishops’ successful attempts to persuade the Universal not to publicize the National Brotherhood of St. Patrick. One of McNicholas’s other case-study newspapers, the Irish Liberator, emerged in response to this assertion of clerical pressure.

There is an interesting issue lurking within McNicholas’s study—one of general importance to the Irish in the Atlantic World. McNicholas supports Owen Dudley Edwards and Patricia Storey’s conclusions (Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, eds., The Irish in Victorian Britain, Dublin, 1999) that the Irish press in Britain was “never permitted by Ireland to establish a British identity” (p. 347). More broadly, we might argue, the Act of Union (1801) prevented the Irish in Britain from asserting a British-Irish identity. While the British state pressed nationalist aspirations from one side, the Catholic Church in Ireland exerted control over religious issues from the other. The experience was quite different for Irish Americans, whose hyphenated identity and culture was beyond the strictures of the Irish church and certainly beyond the purview of British governments, although the latter complained bitterly about its results. Comparisons of the Irish press in Britain and the Irish-American press would thus yield interesting results about the differences associated with being Irish in America and Britain.

Readers of this journal will find much of interest in McNicholas’s book: the connections among Irishness, nationalism, and Catholicism are particularly well developed. The author is to be applauded for impressing on his readership the importance of studying cultural expressions, such as newspapers, in their own right, rather than simply foraging in them for evidence concerning events and personalities. In so doing, McNicholas has made a significant contribution to the history of the Irish Diaspora and, more specifically, to newspaper history.