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Victorian Studies 45.2 (2003) 382-384



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The Cambridge Union and Ireland, 1815-1914, by Ged Martin; pp. xii + 344. Edinburgh: Ann Barry, 2000, £20.00, $32.00.

If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, one might say that Ireland was lost in the debating clubs of Oxbridge. Ged Martin's Cambridge Union and Ireland, 1815-1914 is a fascinating account of the long career of the Irish question across successive cohorts of Cambridge student debaters, their sometimes worried faculty overseers, and their distinguished visitors from the Victorian and Edwardian political world. Multiple contexts— institutional, generational, political—lend the book a far wider significance than its rather straightforward title may suggest. Whether it was support for Catholic emancipation years before the demand became practical politics, or a belated endorsement of Irish home rule before the First World War, the Cambridge Union's engagement with Ireland intersects in intriguing ways with much more familiar parliamentary and party-political imbroglios such as Robert Peel's by-election defeat at Oxford in 1829 and William Gladstone's dramatic conversion to home rule in 1886.

Martin seeks to move the study of public, especially academic debating from anecdotal history to systematic inquiry. By analyzing the content and results of well over 100 Union debates on Irish affairs during the course of a century, he establishes relatively stable patterns of change and continuity and puts to rest the notion that single debates were catalysts of shifts in opinion. Instead, he shows that debates hold up a mirror to the [End Page 382] existing spectrum of opinion among students and tend to reflect gradual rather than sudden alterations in the views of this youthful sector of the British elite.

The Cambridge Union and Ireland is divided into three parts. Part 1 offers a wide- ranging overview of nineteenth-century Cambridge, the rivalries of the Union and other student societies, the relations among the various colleges and between the junior and senior members of the university, and the anxieties that shaped undergraduate as well as faculty resistance to reforms. Martin's contrast of growing opposition to women's suffrage with gradually rising support for Irish home rule, and his connection of this divergence to the perceived immediacy of the supposed threat of women's advances in higher education, is a good illustration of the dynamics of opinion formation among Cambridge's male undergraduates. Martin also underscores the English and Protestant identities of most undergraduates, for relatively few Scottish and Welsh students attended the university and many Irish students were Protestants and unionists. The Irish and Catholic questions were intertwined, of course, although not always in neat and mutually reinforcing ways. As the old anti-Catholicism waned, however, white Anglo-Saxon racism began to make its presence felt. No less a Progressive darling than C. F. G. Masterman was making racist jokes at the expense of blacks and Irish people as an undergraduate debater in 1897.

Part 2 is devoted to the organization and culture of the Cambridge Union. Its Regency beginnings were turbulent, with the very title "Union" raising suspicions about links to the popular unions of radicals and reformers. Circumventing a university ban on debating until 1821 and then a prohibition of contemporary topics (the "1800" rule) required ingenuity. Paradoxically, the Union went into the doldrums soon after a modified time-limit (the twenty-year rule) was lifted in 1830 and only saw its sails filling again as political controversy and change increased in the 1860s. The Union maintained a reading room and library, and its social networks underpinned factions, secessions, and the clubland rituals of presidential elections and maiden speeches. Major and minor figures in the governing and chattering classes apprenticed as student debaters, and Martin underlines the significance of the Union in their early political formation. Debates involved more than just those who spoke; they ended with a division among all members in attendance and were reported to a still wider audience through the Cambridge Review and Granta. Martin argues, persuasively I think, that the mediocre quality of most speakers and the...

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