“Integrated as Outsiders”: Teague’s Blanket and the Irish Immigrant “Problem” in Early Modern Britain

The construction of integration as a two-way process conceals the relations of power in which the discourse of tolerance is grounded. Refugees and immigrants are to be unquestionably integrated and included by those who are invited to be mindful of, understand and recognize those in need of integration, who are thereby always identified as un-integrated. The invitation to be tolerant reinstates and disguises rather than changes those power relations and reconstitutes those to be integrated as outsiders.¹

In the opening act of Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662), the play’s two Cavalier, or Royalist, heroes, Colonel Careless and Colonel Blunt, are on a London street discussing how they might recover their confiscated estates from the Puritans when they are suddenly interrupted by a shrouded figure.² “How now, who art thou?” Careless asks, to which this intruder responds, “A poor Irishman, and Christ save me and save you all. I prithee give me six pence, gad mastero.”³ During the century that followed, this first encounter between the poor Irishman, Teague, and Careless, his future English employer, also became one of those “points” or set pieces that audiences used to assess and compare the skills of those performers who were engaged to perform the Stage Irishman “line of business,”⁴ and virtuoso performances at this dramatic “point,” the evidence suggests, continued to live on in the British collective memory long after the actors who had made them famous had passed away. Speaking in 1844 of John Henry Johnstone (1749?–1828), one of the most famous Teagues of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Mrs. Mathews writes nostalgically: “Who . . . has not a recollection of the incomparable Johnstone (Irish Johnstone) in ‘Teague,’ picturesquely draped in his blanket, pouring forth his exquisite humor and mellifluous brogue in equal measure?”⁵ As this comment reveals, the blanket that Johnstone was wearing also contributed significantly to the pleasure that this lady derived from this dramatic scene, and from the prominence of this blanket in the artistic depictions of some of the century’s other famous Teagues, it is clear that others shared this blanket fixation. Joseph Miller (1684–1738) (see figure 1), John Moody (1727?–1812) (see figure 2), and Edward Anthony Rock (O’Rourke?) (d. 1815) (see figure 3) are all are shown with the outstretched hand or hat of the begging Teague, and all are wrapped in some form of blanket.

In this paper I will argue that Howard’s blanket-clad, beggarly figure acquired its cultural currency because it provided a comforting fiction of immigrant management and control for the expansionist, market-driven nation that came into being in the post-Restoration period, and I will suggest that an understanding of the prehistory and afterlife of this fetishized subject/object also helps to explain the entrenched nature of the resistance that Irish immigrants faced as they sought to advance socially or economically in Britain in the centuries that followed. Recent scholarship on the treatment of the non-Irish immigrant in contemporary Ireland

Figure 1.

Joseph Miller as Teague in The Committee. From a messotint by A. Miller, after C. Stoppelaer. The Theatrical Print Collection, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Figure 2.

John Moody as Teague in The Committee. From Bell’s Edition (London, 1776). The Theatrical Print Collection, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Figure 3.

Edward Anthony Rock as Teague in The Committee. From Bell’s British Theatre, vol. 20 (London, 1797). The Theatrical Print Collection, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

also provides a useful point of entry into this analysis. Present-day Ireland prides itself on having become more cosmopolitan and more multicultural in recent years, a self-congratulatory image that, as Gavin Titley points out, is reflected in advertisements and in the media in “stylised and aestheticised tableaux of difference and diversity.”⁶ This...