‘The Irish in Nineteenth Century Britain’ — useful scapegoats for the ills of industrialisation

Roger Swift describes it as “a tragic coincidence” that acute urban problems, emanating from the British ‘Industrial Revolution’, happened to coincide with an influx of Irish immigration.[i] As Graham Davis wrote elsewhere, the seemingly insoluble problems of “overcrowding, epidemic disease, unemployment and disorder” were afforded a convenient, and readily identifiable, scapegoat in the form of the newly arrived “poor Irish”, who — in effect — represented the: “visible Irish”.[ii] ‘The Irish’ featured as a prevalent talking-point in the wider Victorian discourse popularly referred to as ‘the condition of England’.

In respect of employment, the burgeoning ‘Industrial Revolution’ was to the benefit of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. The new arrivals, many of them unskilled, entered a work environment “hungry for human fodder.”[iii] As a consequence, the Irish worker soon became a mainstay in “the coalfields of Scotland and South Wales, in the cotton-mills of the Midlands, in the expanding ports of East London.”[iv] Some have even suggested that, in certain instances, the contribution and presence of Irish workers specifically helped to drive forward and expand the ‘Industrial Revolution’. As Ruth-Ann Harris notes, in the case of Lancashire, “the cradleland of England’s Industrial Revolution”, there existed a number of advantages in the industrialisation process, specifically:

waterpower, fuel, and iron. A fourth advantage was its access to a fluid labor [sic] force on the other side of the Irish Sea.[v]

This notion that, in some cases, there was a necessity for Irish labour is borne out in selected contemporary testimony. Such as that of a Manchester employer who, in 1836, stated: “There are not English enough to supply the demand.”[vi]

It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that this new workforce engendered resentment amongst the native population. The Irish were widely accused of having depressed wages.[vii] One testimony, from an English labourer in 1850, typifies the general attitude towards the Irish worker: “They ruin our trade, and are ruining it more and more; they’ll work for nothing.”[viii] In a similar vein, a popular ballad of the day purported that:

When work grew scarce and bread was dear

and waged lessened too,

the Irish hordes were bidders here

our half-paid work to do.[ix]

Indeed, this reputation of the Irish worker as wage-cutters was not solely the opinion of fellow workers. It gained notable traction amongst elite social reformers and thinkers of the day. Perhaps most famously Friedrich Engels; who wrote that “the wages of English working man should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him.”[x] His opinion was largely built upon the work of Dr. James Kay who had written a pamphlet, in 1832, titled: The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester. In the pamphlet, Dr. Kay presented a case that because the Irish lived on the bare minimum of the necessities of life, this consequently forced the English to do likewise.[xi] Alongside being a ‘wage-cutter’, the other reputation Irish workers repeatedly acquired was that of ‘strike-breaker’. There are several historical cases which would lend to this characterisation, such as the 1853 textile worker strike in Preston.[xii] As Ruth-Ann Harris outlined “From the employers’ view the function of their Irish help was to discipline the English work force.”[xiii]

Unsurprisingly, given these two widely held reputations, and notably during times of hardship or trade dispute, Irish labourers could, on occasion, fall victim to “workplace violence.”[xiv] Although, in some instances, protests against Irish labour remained peaceful, such as the protest of women market-gardeners in Richmond, in other instances it was considerably more confrontational, as particularly recorded with northern miners or Scottish cottars.[xv] It was noted at the time that Scottish workmen emanated the “most vicious hostility” toward Irish labourers, this was evident to such an extent that it became best practice that “Irish navvies never worked alongside the Scots and only rarely with the English.”[xvi] Thus, as Kevin O’Connor summarises, in the eyes of many the Irish were typically seen as “strike-breakers who would gladly work for a lower wage.”[xvii]

Having established the contemporary reputation of the Irish worker in this period, it is necessary to explore whether there was any substance to this reputation. More recent research has generally refuted the notion that Irish worker ‘crowded-out’ native workers. As Kevin O’Connor says: “for all the handed-down myths that the Irish built the railways, rarely did they exceed 30 per cent of the overall navvy force.”[xviii] Jacqueline Turton also notes that the idea that the Irish reduced wage levels, “as many contemporaries believed”, remains “debatable.”[xix] Indeed, as outlined in Jeffrey Williamson’s economic analysis of the period, whilst it is undeniable that immigration lowered the wages of comparatively skilled native-born workers, what is not so clear is whether this had a significant quantitative impact on the real wages in Britain as a whole.[xx] From his detailed analysis Williamson is confident to conclude that, when taken in the round, “The Irish are simply not crucial to the British Standard-of-Living Debate.”[xxi] It is also necessary to note that ‘Irish wage-undercutting’ did not solely effect English workers but also their fellow countrymen. This was articulated by an Irish ticket-porter in Convent Garden, who complained in 1850:

there’s lots ready to work for ½d. instead of 1d. [a turn] in the market, and they’re slinking outside for jobs … It’s my countrymen that’s the ruin of me.[xxii]

The popular reputation of the Irish in Britain as ‘strike-breakers’ relies on a simplistic understanding of the workforce. As Donald MacRaild explains, in most instances the Irish who broke strikes were specifically “shipped in from Ireland for that purpose, and were not drawn from within the established community.” This was perhaps most infamously demonstrated in the case of Lord Londonderry’s strike-breakers during the miners’ strike of 1842.[xxiii] Indeed, the Irish worker in Britain was just as often to be found on the side of the industrial agitators. As one priest testified to Cornewall Lewis’s commission in 1836, the Irish labourer was arguably “more prone to take part in trade unions, combinations and secret societies than the English” and that when they did “they are the talkers and ringleaders”.[xxiv] Donald MacRaild makes specific mention of the famed Irishman John Doherty who helped found the General Union of Spinners (1829).[xxv] Such wider discussion and considerations demonstrate how, often unfairly, ‘the Irish’ were disproportionally blamed for general low wages and the failure of successful industrial action. Certainly, within the workplace, ‘the Irish’ therefore presented a ready, distinguishable, and often convenient scapegoat.

Outside of the workplace, Irish immigrants were also on the receiving-end of considerable hostility; often based upon the perceived effect they had on urban environments and their supposed residential habits. At the time, there was a genuine, widely-held fear that Irish migrants were ‘swamping’ industrialised cities. Irish migration had steadily risen during the first half of the century and reached its climax during the ‘famine years’ of 1845–1852. By 1861, the ‘Irish-born’ in Britain reached its peak of 806,000, declining thereafter gradually.[xxvi] Many of these migrants soon found themselves, far away from home, in “dystopian urban centres that were so vividly captured in the novels and social commentaries of the day”.[xxvii] Many social commentators salaciously wrote about the Irish descending as if they presented something a Biblical plague on the British. Marx recorded that:

Ireland has revenged herself upon England, socially — by bestowing an Irish quarter on every English industrial, maritime or commercial town of any size…[xxviii]

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle expressed a similar view that the growing presence of Ireland’s poor in England was England’s punishment for its mistreatment of Ireland.[xxix] However, as Davis argues, the alarm of the host community had less to do with the scale of immigration and much more to do with the concentration of the Irish when they did settle.[xxx] Due to their general economic station and unskilled employment, the Irish immigrant typically ended up living in the slums of urban cities. As a consequence, “the association between Irish immigrants and slum conditions became established in a crisis atmosphere.”[xxxi] Thomas Carlyle maintained that the Irish “darken all our towns”. As Roger Swift records, Carlyle and others characterised the Irish as occupying “socially immobile and unintegrated ghettos, popularly described as “Little Irelands,” which were isolated in particular streets and courts from the surrounding populations.”[xxxii] Many of the same commentators went so far as to blame the Irish themselves for the condition and nature of such squalid dwellings. Friedrich Engels wrote that, back in Ireland, the Irish typically lived in a one roomed “mud-cabin”, and thus the arriving Irish immigrant saw no need for more than one room. He summarised that; “the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration.”[xxxiii]

Once more, it is necessary critically assess such blanket assertions. Firstly, the scale of Irish immigration numerically leaves a generally false impression. It has been demonstrated that, even during the peak of the ‘famine decade’, immigration — in its entirety — accounted for less than a third of the Britain’s overall population increase. Indeed, according to Davis, before the 1840s and throughout most of the 1850s and 1860s: “the number of immigrants was roughly balanced by Britons who went abroad.”[xxxiv] Also, the widely held idea of Irish ghettoisation in ‘Little Irelands’ has also been challenged by modern social historians.[xxxv] Swift goes so far as to call it “little more than a myth”. In fact, studies of London, York, Liverpool, Blackburn, and Bolton demonstrate that, whilst there might have been areas of concentrated Irish settlement, by no means were the Irish completely isolated and ghettoised from the host community.[xxxvi] As Davis explain, it is relatively understandable that social reformers brought such focus on the residents of ‘Little Ireland’ because the “the Irish who lived quietly in equal numbers and in lower concentrations in predominantly mixed centres of population went unnoticed.”[xxxvii] The gross misnomer that requires particular attention, is the idea that those Irish who did live in dire conditions somehow built and accepted those conditions themselves. As Donald MacRaild explains such new urban centres grew “at a pace beyond previous experience” and consequently brought demands on an already fledgling infrastructure which simply could not be met.[xxxviii] Davis also explains how such ‘slum areas’ were often below river level and thus subject to flooding and how the new industrial phenomena of smoke palls meant that residents had relatively little control or management of their living conditions.[xxxix] Too often those actually responsible for the appalling sanitary conditions in industrial cities — whether it be employers with property interests or local officials — found it “easier to blame the Irish than to face the problems of their own making.”[xl]

Anti-Irish prejudice in nineteenth century Britain certainly played into the notion of ‘the Irish’ having a supposed corrupting influence on the native British population. A key originator of theory that the ‘Irish character’ was in of itself as a social problem was, the previously mentioned, Dr. James Kay. Through his popular writings, Dr Kay argued that not only were the Irish a threat to British living standards (as outlined previously) but also the morality of the native working class.[xli] As Busteed outlines, such was the impact of Kay’s pamphlet that all subsequent analysts “proceeded to make the Irish scapegoats for almost all the ills of industrial urban society, including low wages, street violence and general criminality.”[xlii] Davis outlines how, within a short space of time, sanitary reformers, like Kay, moved from descriptions of insanitary conditions to condemnation of the morality of the dwellers: “What begins with the ‘contagion’ of disease leads inexorably to the ‘contagion’ of Irish immigration.”[xliii] Amongst enlightened opinion, ‘the Irish’ began to be viewed as “a subrace or people with habits antithetically opposed to English norms of thought and behaviour.”[xliv] It became easier for officials and reformers to argue that ‘the Irish’ were not simply the victims of societal problems but rather they were their direct cause.[xlv] The old spectre of anti-Catholicism also contributed to this heady denunciation of the ‘alien’ Irish. As MacRaild suggests, this febrile atmosphere was only worsened by the “vanguard role” which fellow Irish migrants, from the Protestant community, played through their Orange Order branches.[xlvi]

It goes without saying that the basis of this thought-process rested on prejudice. There was no factual basis to support the claims of Kay and others that the ‘Irish character’ was inherently immoral. Although the damage of his claims had already been done, it is worth noting that even contemporaneously “many of Kay’s assumptions were discredited by more sober analysis.”[xlvii] Indeed, once the anti-Irish hysteria simmered, the Irish presence in most cities did manage to become established, albeit with a lingering air of ‘separateness’, broadly accepted.[xlviii] As Kevin O’Connor outlines, the Irish became “the ‘Oirish’ of familiarity” and “part of the fabric of the times.”[xlix] In London, in particular, the Irish even accrued a degree of local respect for their role in the dangerous work of tunnelling.[l] The typified ‘Irish migrant’ — which Kay, Engels and Carlyle wrote of — was largely a construct. Irish migrants to Britain were never a single, homogenous group. Indeed, their ranks contained

both rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, Catholics and Protestants (and unbelievers), Nationalists and Loyalists, and men and women from a variety of distinctive provincial cultures in Ireland.[li]

As has been demonstrated, in almost every facet of life — whether workplace, domestic, or personal — Irish immigrants were deliberately misrepresented and scapegoated out of necessity to account for the negative social outworkings of industrialisation. In the words of Davis “the Irish as a race served as a convenient explanation for urban squalor and depravity”.[lii] A point echoed by MacRaild, who characterises them a “ready-made scapegoat for the disease, overcrowding, immorality, drunkenness and crime of the urban world.”[liii] And Roger Swift who also describes Irish immigrants “convenient scapegoats for environmental deterioration.”[liv] The plethora of urban social problems, from; overcrowding, low wages, lack of job security, crime, and abject poverty, were obviously never the fault or culpability of the Irish immigrant workers. Indeed, as ever, there was a native British class — of factory-owners, landlords, industrialists, and politicians — who could be held far more accountable for such circumstances.

Bibliography

Books

• Curtis Jr, L. P. (1971) Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature Devon: David & Charles Ltd
• Davis, G. (1991) The Irish in Britain 1815–1914 Dublin: Gill and Macmillan
• Engels, F. [Kiernan, V. Ed & Hunt, T. Introduction] (2009) The Condition of the Working Class in England London: Penguin Classics
• Golman, L.I. & Kunina, V.E. Eds. (1972) Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of Writing by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels New York: International Publishers
• Harris, R. M. (1994) The Nearest Place That Wasn’t Ireland: Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Labour Migration Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press
• MacRaild, D. M. (1999) Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan Press Ltd
• Busteed, M. Little Islands of Erin: Irish Settlement and Identity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Manchester
• MacRaild, D. M. Ed. (2000) The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Dublin: Irish Academic Press
• O’Connor, K. (1972) The Irish in Britain London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd
• Swift, R. & Gilley, S. Eds. (1999) The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension Dublin: The Four Courts Press
• Turton, J. The Irish Poor in mid nineteenth-century London

Journals…

• Swift, R. ‘Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, and the Irish in Early Victorian England’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 29, pp. 67–83 (2001)
• Williamson, J. G. ‘The impact of the Irish on British labour markets during the Industrial Revolution’ Journal of Economic History, 46, pp. 693–720 (1986)

[i] Swift, R. ‘Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, and the Irish in Early Victorian England’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 29, pp 67–83. (2001) p. 77

[ii] Davis, G. (1991) The Irish in Britain 1815–1914 Dublin: Gill and Macmillan p. 81

[iii] O’Connor, K. (1972) The Irish in Britain London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd pp. 12–13

[iv] Ibid. p. 20

[v] Harris, R. M. (1994) The Nearest Place That Wasn’t Ireland: Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Labour Migration Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press p. 125

[vi] Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain. H.C. 1836 (40), p. 1 referenced in Harris. (1994) p. 105

[vii] Turton, J. The Irish Poor in mid nineteenth-century London in Swift, R. & Gilley, S. Eds. (1999) The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension Dublin: The Four Courts Press p. 137

[viii] Mayhew, Morning Chronicle Survey, vol. 2, Letter XXIV, 8 Jan. 1850, p. 275 referenced in Turton. in Swift. & Gilley. Eds. (1999) p. 137

[ix] O’Connor. (1972) p. 14

[x] Engels, F. [Kiernan, V. Ed & Hunt, T. Introduction] (2009) The Condition of the Working Class in England London: Penguin Classics p. 125

[xi] Engels. [Kiernan. Ed & Hunt. Intro] (2009) p. 124

[xii] MacRaild, D. M. (1999) Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan Press Ltd p. 167

[xiii] Ibid. p. 153

[xiv] Ibid. p. 165

[xv] Ibid. p. 166

[xvi] O’Connor. (1972) pp. 14–15

[xvii] Ibid. p. 20

[xviii] Ibid. p. 14

[xix] Turton. in Swift. & Gilley. Eds. (1999) p. 138

[xx] Williamson, J. G. “The impact of the Irish on British labour markets during the Industrial Revolution.” Journal of Economic History 46 pp. 693–720 (1986) p. 694

[xxi] Ibid. p. 716

[xxii] Mayhew, Morning Chronicle Survey, vol 6, letter LXXXI, 5 Dec. 1850, p. 228 referenced in Turton. in Swift. & Gilley. Eds. (1999) p. 137

[xxiii] MacRaild. (1999) p. 166

[xxiv] Ibid. p. 129

[xxv] Ibid. 128–129

[xxvi] Davis. (1991) p. 52

[xxvii] MacRaild. (1999) p. 187

[xxviii] Marx, K. ‘Ireland’s Revenge’ Neue Order-Zeitung, No 127. March 16 1855 reproduced in Golman, L.I. & Kunina, V.E. Eds. (1972) Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of Writing by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels New York: International Publishers p. 74

[xxix] Swift. (2001) p. 71

[xxx] Davis. (1991) pp. 55–56

[xxxi] Ibid. p. 51

[xxxii] Swift. (2001) p. 76

[xxxiii] Engels. [Kiernan. Ed & Hunt. Intro] (2009) p. 125

[xxxiv] Davis. (1991) pp. 52–53

[xxxv] MacRaild. (1999) p. 186

[xxxvi] Swift, R. ‘Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, and the Irish in Early Victorian England’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 29, pp 67–83. (2001) p. 76

[xxxvii] Davis. (1991) p. 62

[xxxviii] MacRaild. (1999) p. 187

[xxxix] Davis. (1991) p. 57

[xl] Ibid. p. 59

[xli] MacRaild. (1999) p. 157

[xlii] Busteed, M. Little Islands of Erin: Irish Settlement and Identity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Manchester in MacRaild, D. M. Ed. (2000) The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Dublin: Irish Academic Press pp. 103–104

[xliii] Davis. (1991) p. 57

[xliv] Curtis Jr, L. P. (1971) Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature Devon: David & Charles Ltd p. 21

[xlv] Busteed. in MacRaild. Ed. (2000) p. 103

[xlvi] MacRaild. (1999) p. 187

[xlvii] Davis. (1991) pp. 58–59

[xlviii] O’Connor. (1972) p. 22

[xlix] Ibid. p. 20

[l] Ibid. p. 21

[li] Swift. (2001) p. 76

[lii] Davis. (1991) p. 58

[liii] MacRaild. (1999) p. 156

[liv] Swift. (2001) p. 77