The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882 (review)

Michael De Nie presents the "The Eternal Paddy" as Britain's "Eternal Other," whose differences were cemented by race, religion, and class. Paddy was, as de Nie reminds us, a Celt, a Catholic and a peasant, the only "Other" actually within the boundaries of the United Kingdom. In the reverse mirror of Irishness, the negative became positive, and the traits of Britishness emerged with reassuring clarity. With Irish squalor, improvidence, and violence available to provide a foil to British dedication to hard work, foresightedness, and "justice," the nature of the Irish stereotype underwent little serious change in the nineteenth century. Yet, for a time, those on the larger island entertained the hope that Paddy could step through the looking-glass, shed his Irishness, and become British himself.

The structure that de Nie has chosen for his study generally has served him well. By confining his focus to four relatively brief, but concentrated, moments in Anglo-Irish history, he has been able to investigate British press opinion to a depth that might not otherwise have been possible. De Nie creates a nuanced complex picture of what he calls Britain's "constant dialogue of sympathy and hostility for Ireland. . . ."

De Nie finds this dialogue carried over into political cartoons, which ran from sympathetic concern for Irish grievances to examples of the simianized Paddy, the most degrading form of racial stereotyping applied to the Irish. De Nie builds on Perry Curtis's Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, the most influential account of scientific racism's influenve on British attitudes towards the Irish as represented in the cartoons, yet—while he accepts much of Curtis's argument—de Nie also looks beyond issues of race. For example, he interprets the dehumanized Irish ape-man as exemplifying "the competition over masculinity implicit in the formation of British and Irish national identities." The British ideal of manliness was based on self control, independence of mind, and a supposed dedication to "a fair fight"—qualities declared missing in those Irish given to mob violence and assassination. On the other hand, De Nie sees the frequent images of lovely Erin, sometimes shrinking from, sometimes standing up to, this unmanly monster, as representing the British hope for the majority of Irish people who might yet be led from Hibernian darkness into the Anglicized light.

Tracing the fate of this hope is one of de Nie's major themes. He sees the Act of Union, adopted in the wake of revolutionary violence, as representing British optimism that the Irish could be Anglicized and, ultimately, integrated within the United Kingdom. Continued nationalist agitation, agrarian violence, and massive poverty, all culminating in the crisis of the Famine, caused the British to decide that the Irish could not survive, much less prosper, on their own. British know-how and control were needed. Under the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, new landlords from England and Scotland were to lead Ireland toward some sort of redemption. It did not quite work out that way, of course. The later violence of the Fenian movement followed by Land League agitation shook British confidence that the Irish could ever be remade in the British image. De Nie interprets Liberal reticence toward continued coercion acts in the 1880 s, the passage of the Land Acts, and even the party's eventual embrace of Home Rule as representing the abandonment of that hope. Thus, what some might see as examples of enlightened rethinking of the Union and of Irish grievances, The Eternal Paddy views as representing a disgruntled, pessimistic abandonment of an eighty-year experiment begun in 1800. "The Irish were the mirror opposite of the British, but they were still a reflection. The evaporation of popular belief in Britain that Irishness could be overcome, and the Irish anglicized, shattered this mirror and ultimately set Anglo-Irish relations on a path leading to Irish independence. . . ."