Irish Identities in Victorian Britain by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (review)

This book of essays provides a valuable view not only of the subject of the Irish and their varied identities in Victorian Britain, but also of the state of current research on the Irish in Britain. Recent decades have seen a burgeoning of research in the Irish diaspora, and this volume tells us much about new and important work. It is worth remembering that during the nineteenth century the Irish were the largest group of immigrants in Britain. In the middle of the century the Irish-born numbered just over six hundred thousand. In their brief introduction, the two editors, Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, emphasise the diversity of Irish identities, which reflected differences in where people came from and where they settled, as well as religious, social, and political differences. The impressive range of essays reflects well this great diversity.

In his opening chapter, Swift provides a useful survey of recent trends in historiography of the Irish in Britain. Looking over the last decade, he refers to more than fifty published works and a number of theses while drawing attention to some of the new areas which have attracted researchers. A number of important local and regional studies have illuminated ways in which experiences of the Irish differed from area to area. Another field of enquiry focuses on the position of Protestants among these migrants. The presence of this substantial group of people has often been ignored in the writing on the Irish in Victorian Britain, but recently there have been efforts to address this gap in our knowledge. The role of women in this migrant group has also received special attention over the last decade. Several important general works on the Irish in Britain have arisen from this research.

A chapter by Malcolm Smith and Donald MacRaild seeks to analyse the particular regional and provincial provenance of those who settled in Britain. Some general trends are widely known, such as the migration between Ulster and Scotland, and that between Connacht and central and east-central Ireland through Dublin to Liverpool. The census returns usually record as the place of origin only Ireland rather than a specific location; as a result, our knowledge of where people originally came from is scanty. To obtain more information the two authors have devised a special method called “Random Isonymy” which compares surname distribution of the Irish in particular areas in Britain to surname distribution in Ireland (28).

The Irish in Manchester are the subject of a study by Mervyn Busteed. By the beginning of the Victorian period there was already an established Irish community in Manchester, and by 1861 it peaked at 52,000, or some fifteen percent of the population. Busteed studies social mobility within this group and emphasises its involvement in local institutions. He is especially concerned to show the ways in which the Catholic church and organisations such as the Irish National Foresters helped to retain a separate identity for the Catholic Irish community. Gilley also looks at the Catholic church and points out that by the twentieth century a large majority of the members of the English and Scottish Catholic churches were of Irish birth or descent. Yet, during the nineteenth century the Catholic church in Britain was served by a predominantly English priesthood and episcopacy. Gilley argues that although the structure of the English church encouraged assimilation, Irish Catholics understood their Catholicism as part of their separate identity.

Ian Meredith draws attention to the often overlooked members of the Church of Ireland who emigrated to Scotland. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the membership of the Episcopal church in the west of Scotland was very small, but by 1923 there were almost one hundred ten thousand Episcopalians living in the diocese of Glasgow and Galloway, especially in Glasgow. Much of this growth was due to the immigration of members of the Church of Ireland. These new arrivals provided a great challenge...