- Email: [email protected]
Exiles of erin: Irish migrants in Victorian London
REVIEWS
211
should now produce a very readable review of alternative communities in nineteenthcentury England. The examples on which he draws derive mainly from the 1830s and 1890s and this evident periodicity of their foundation could prompt speculation as to the relationship between periods of intense activity and the evolving structure of capitalist society. Were there, and are there, specific aspects of the recurring crises of capitalism that prompt alternative visions of the organisation of society? Hardy’s study goes only a little way to seating the communities within wider processes of change, although he recognises that, while small and numerically insignificant and therefore readily contained, the communities which he studies acted as society’s conscience, as a challenge within the general process of historical change. He distinguishes the other-worldly visions of medieval utopias from the humanist views of alternative communities which involved man’s own positive role in changing existing circumstances, but his detachment from the nineteenth-century advocacy leaves him ill-placed to throw penetrating light on the genesis of the communities or on their aims and the political and social circumstances against which they were reactions. What he does do well is to provide descriptions of the communities themselves and of the recurring tale of their short lives, their often eccentric founders and something of the inbuilt tensions implicit in the mode of establishing and running many of them. He populates the map of nineteenth-century England with a surprising number of such initiatives; in addition to the better known like Harmony Hall and the Purleigh Colony, he fills in many details of diverse communities such as O’Connorville, Concordium, The Agapemone, Hodsonian Community, Great Dodford, Clousden Hill and the few urban-based communities such as the Brotherhood Workshop in Leeds. The sites of many of these will no doubt now feature on field trips by geographers and social historians and Hardy’s accounts will provide invaluable detail to flesh out the little evidence which remains on the ground. None can be thought of as typical, but the roots of the diversity stem from distinct movements such as Chartism, the Owenites or, most dramatically, religious sects. Hardy groups his twenty-eight examples into those prompted by utopian socialism, by agrarian socialism, by sectarianism and by the anarchists. In many, the short-term strengths proved long-term weaknesses since, for example, the charisma of a founder could provide a strong initial impetus but lead to unacceptably autocratic rule and the need for financial underpinning could sustain a community only at the cost of compromising its relationship with the wider containing society. The communitarians suffered the penalties of such internal contradictions, and the contemporary thrust of effective political challenge lay elsewhere, in Chartism, in the growth of unionism and in mass political activity. Yet the communities offered a variety of tangible innovations: in education where, for example, Concordium was based on a Pestalozzi school, in farming methods or in technical innovations such as Harmony Hall’s advanced heating and ventilation system and its railway carrying dishes to and from the kitchens. Hardy’s clear and lively writing brings to life many of his thumb-nail sketches of a wide range of alternative communities. Read in conjunction with fuller accounts of the political and ideological background of the movements which gave birth to communities, his book adds a fascinating chapter on the unfolding of political action in industrial society. Manchester University
B. T. ROBSON
LYNN HOLLEN LEES, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London
(Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1979. Pp. 276. El 1.50) This is not only a very good book, but also that rarity, a book which does more than its title suggests. It is a study of Irish migrants in Victorian London; but it is more than that, a study of the London Irish community which included the later generations of London-born Irish as well as the Irish-born who were the migrants proper. Indeed, one
212
REVIEWS
of the themes in the discussion of the urbanization of the London Irish is to gauge the cohesion of the community across time and the seepage as later generations became assimilated. This perspective adds greatly to the importance of the book for social historians, and the scale on which the study of the Irish community is conceived and the range of disciplines brought to bear on its execution, from demography, social anthropology and folklore, make it something of a model monograph which deserves parallels for other towns and other minority communities. It also perhaps makes the book of less immediate interest to historical geographers than its title might imply, since the structure necessarily does not allow room for any detailed work on the origins of first-generation immigrants. Rather more than a hint is drawn from the 1861 census enumerators’ books that the decided majority of immigrants came from south-west Ireland, particularly from County Cork, and it is argued that they migrated less from the pressure of extreme poverty than from a deliberate resolve to better themselves. A more specialised study would undoubtedly have attempted to make more of this material, and to collect comparable data from other censuses and other register sources which occasionally record precise birthplaces. While this book accords with what one would expect to find-that the immigrants included a small number of middle-class, mainly professional, Irish and a slightly larger but still small number of skilled craftsmen, but were largely rural labourers and peasant farmers-a specialized study would also have found room for more extended discussion of the social, economic and demographic context of the immigrants’ home ground. Geographers will find the chapter on the social geography of Irish London useful, particularly the use of printed census data on birthplaces to map the distribution of the Irish-born in 1851 and 1881, and enumerators’ books of 1851 and 1861 for a sample of five Irish neighbourhoods to analyse their distribution and housing conditions at the district and street level. From these sources the interesting point emerges that there were numbers of local pockets of concentrated Irish, but no real Irish ghettos. In other words, the Irish were gregarious, as are all groups of strangers and foreigners in a new and unfamiliar environment, but only up to a point. The Irish quarters were the places with the highest concentrations of Irish, but they were by no means exclusively or even predominantly populated by the Irish; and the Irish, although strangers in the big town, were not so foreign that they did not settle down to living intermixed with the English. Such conclusions, of course, depend on how one defines the unit of a residential neighbourhood, and may result from the accident that the unit of study selected is the parish as a sub-district of the census enumerator’s district. Within the chosen parishes there were some entirely Irish streets and alleys and a different definition of a neighbourhood would have supported the conclusion that the Irish did segregate themselves into ethnic quarters. The book is also in a way narrower than its title suggests. Although it draws on a large range of contemporary printed sources from the early nineteenth century through to Charles Booth, and Mudie-Smith’s religious survey, thus supporting the claim to be concerned with the entire Victorian period, the statistical data are drawn from a one in three sample of Irish households in five parishes from the 1851 and 1861 census enumerators’ books; the Parliamentary Papers used range from 1814-15 to 1873, with the main concentration being between 1835 and 1869; and the newspapers and periodicals have been consulted mainly for the period 1828-58. This is not to suggest that more research ought to have been done; to have exploited the only other accessible set of census manuscripts, for 1871, would have entailed many months more tedious carding and punching, possibly without denting or modifying the demographic and occupational analysis based on 1851 and 1861. It is suggested, however, that the core of the work relates to the Irish in mid-Victorian London. In her technically sophisticated work on the census data there is, moreover, an identification problem to which Professor Lees has perhaps paid insufficient attention. In counting Irish households, those whose heads and other members gave Irish birthplaces are simple enough to identify. But since the author also
REVIEWS
213
wishes to write about the London Irish community, especially in her treatment of sex, marriage, religion, employment and politics, it is important to remember that this community consisted of the Irish-born plus an indeterminate but large fraction of the London- or English-born Irish of the second and third generations. Professor Lees is well aware of this in framing her estimates of the total size of London’s Irish population, in discussing the persistence of active Catholicism among the London Irish, and in examining marriage habits-where she guesses the Irishness of English-born spouses from surnames and maiden names. And it is obvious that contemporaries who thought that the Irish were particularly drunken, poor, promiscuous, idle, superstitious, charming or dirty did not have the Irish-born exclusively in mind. Still, it could have made some difference to have had the birthplace business in mind when drawing conclusions about the Irishness of particular neighbourhoods, since the presence of older settled Irish alongside the first-generation migrants might well swell the size and alter the ethnic mixture of the enclaves. And in concluding that “by 1881 the older Irish communities of the inner ring [St Giles, Whitechapel and Southwark] were fast disappearing” Professor Lees has perforce only been counting the Irish-born of 1881, and has perhaps forgotten that by 1881 such areas might have been too full of native London Irish to have much room for raw migrants. It is immensely difficult, if not completely impossible, to study the process of assimilation from English census data, which concerns itself only with the individual’s birthplace and not with his ethnic origin or religion. A speculatively minded purist might have made the rash attempt to identify the non-Irish born Irish in the manuscript census material from surname evidence, but it probably needs a dash of Irish statistical bravado to do this. Professor Lees, more cautiously, offers an impression of the continuing Irishness of the London Irish drawn from descriptive accounts buttressed by some figures. This suggests that they were not outstandingly good Catholics, only one-third or less of the total London Irish population being active attenders at mass, at the dates when this can be measured in 1837, 1851 and 1902; they did not by any means all send their children to Catholic schools and perhaps not even a majority did so; their family sizes did not differ much from those of the English, and they certainly did not go in for indiscriminate breeding; they married rather later than the English, and probably drank rather more; and they supported a series of strongly nationalist political movements. All in all, while a distinct Irish subculture survived and flourished in London, it looks like a subculture of a minority of the London Irish. The Irish did not wreck London with their rural habits, nor yet did London emasculate the Irish; but the city clearly assimilated many of them, and not the least of this book’s merits is to stimulate questions about that process, and about the factors which made a minority of the migrants’ descendants proof against it. Institute of Historical Research, London
F. M. L. THOMPSON
C.T. SMITH,An Historical Geography of Western Europe before 1800 (London : Longman, revised edition, 1978. Pp. xviii+622. f7.95) About twelve years ago the first edition of C. T. Smith’s An Historical Geography of Western Europe was welcomed by scholars and in the scholarly journals as a valuable addition to the literature of historical geography. It was not that it broke new ground, but that it covered old and familiar material with a new consistency and thoroughness. A feature of the book was its logical organization and its presentation of the changing pattern of Europe’s geography over a longer span of time than has been attempted before or since. The book has a threefold division. The first part reviews the historical geography of prehistoric and classical Europe. The second, concerned essentially with the Middle Ages, deals with rural and urban settlement and agrarian structures, and the third with
211
should now produce a very readable review of alternative communities in nineteenthcentury England. The examples on which he draws derive mainly from the 1830s and 1890s and this evident periodicity of their foundation could prompt speculation as to the relationship between periods of intense activity and the evolving structure of capitalist society. Were there, and are there, specific aspects of the recurring crises of capitalism that prompt alternative visions of the organisation of society? Hardy’s study goes only a little way to seating the communities within wider processes of change, although he recognises that, while small and numerically insignificant and therefore readily contained, the communities which he studies acted as society’s conscience, as a challenge within the general process of historical change. He distinguishes the other-worldly visions of medieval utopias from the humanist views of alternative communities which involved man’s own positive role in changing existing circumstances, but his detachment from the nineteenth-century advocacy leaves him ill-placed to throw penetrating light on the genesis of the communities or on their aims and the political and social circumstances against which they were reactions. What he does do well is to provide descriptions of the communities themselves and of the recurring tale of their short lives, their often eccentric founders and something of the inbuilt tensions implicit in the mode of establishing and running many of them. He populates the map of nineteenth-century England with a surprising number of such initiatives; in addition to the better known like Harmony Hall and the Purleigh Colony, he fills in many details of diverse communities such as O’Connorville, Concordium, The Agapemone, Hodsonian Community, Great Dodford, Clousden Hill and the few urban-based communities such as the Brotherhood Workshop in Leeds. The sites of many of these will no doubt now feature on field trips by geographers and social historians and Hardy’s accounts will provide invaluable detail to flesh out the little evidence which remains on the ground. None can be thought of as typical, but the roots of the diversity stem from distinct movements such as Chartism, the Owenites or, most dramatically, religious sects. Hardy groups his twenty-eight examples into those prompted by utopian socialism, by agrarian socialism, by sectarianism and by the anarchists. In many, the short-term strengths proved long-term weaknesses since, for example, the charisma of a founder could provide a strong initial impetus but lead to unacceptably autocratic rule and the need for financial underpinning could sustain a community only at the cost of compromising its relationship with the wider containing society. The communitarians suffered the penalties of such internal contradictions, and the contemporary thrust of effective political challenge lay elsewhere, in Chartism, in the growth of unionism and in mass political activity. Yet the communities offered a variety of tangible innovations: in education where, for example, Concordium was based on a Pestalozzi school, in farming methods or in technical innovations such as Harmony Hall’s advanced heating and ventilation system and its railway carrying dishes to and from the kitchens. Hardy’s clear and lively writing brings to life many of his thumb-nail sketches of a wide range of alternative communities. Read in conjunction with fuller accounts of the political and ideological background of the movements which gave birth to communities, his book adds a fascinating chapter on the unfolding of political action in industrial society. Manchester University
B. T. ROBSON
LYNN HOLLEN LEES, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London
(Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1979. Pp. 276. El 1.50) This is not only a very good book, but also that rarity, a book which does more than its title suggests. It is a study of Irish migrants in Victorian London; but it is more than that, a study of the London Irish community which included the later generations of London-born Irish as well as the Irish-born who were the migrants proper. Indeed, one
212
REVIEWS
of the themes in the discussion of the urbanization of the London Irish is to gauge the cohesion of the community across time and the seepage as later generations became assimilated. This perspective adds greatly to the importance of the book for social historians, and the scale on which the study of the Irish community is conceived and the range of disciplines brought to bear on its execution, from demography, social anthropology and folklore, make it something of a model monograph which deserves parallels for other towns and other minority communities. It also perhaps makes the book of less immediate interest to historical geographers than its title might imply, since the structure necessarily does not allow room for any detailed work on the origins of first-generation immigrants. Rather more than a hint is drawn from the 1861 census enumerators’ books that the decided majority of immigrants came from south-west Ireland, particularly from County Cork, and it is argued that they migrated less from the pressure of extreme poverty than from a deliberate resolve to better themselves. A more specialised study would undoubtedly have attempted to make more of this material, and to collect comparable data from other censuses and other register sources which occasionally record precise birthplaces. While this book accords with what one would expect to find-that the immigrants included a small number of middle-class, mainly professional, Irish and a slightly larger but still small number of skilled craftsmen, but were largely rural labourers and peasant farmers-a specialized study would also have found room for more extended discussion of the social, economic and demographic context of the immigrants’ home ground. Geographers will find the chapter on the social geography of Irish London useful, particularly the use of printed census data on birthplaces to map the distribution of the Irish-born in 1851 and 1881, and enumerators’ books of 1851 and 1861 for a sample of five Irish neighbourhoods to analyse their distribution and housing conditions at the district and street level. From these sources the interesting point emerges that there were numbers of local pockets of concentrated Irish, but no real Irish ghettos. In other words, the Irish were gregarious, as are all groups of strangers and foreigners in a new and unfamiliar environment, but only up to a point. The Irish quarters were the places with the highest concentrations of Irish, but they were by no means exclusively or even predominantly populated by the Irish; and the Irish, although strangers in the big town, were not so foreign that they did not settle down to living intermixed with the English. Such conclusions, of course, depend on how one defines the unit of a residential neighbourhood, and may result from the accident that the unit of study selected is the parish as a sub-district of the census enumerator’s district. Within the chosen parishes there were some entirely Irish streets and alleys and a different definition of a neighbourhood would have supported the conclusion that the Irish did segregate themselves into ethnic quarters. The book is also in a way narrower than its title suggests. Although it draws on a large range of contemporary printed sources from the early nineteenth century through to Charles Booth, and Mudie-Smith’s religious survey, thus supporting the claim to be concerned with the entire Victorian period, the statistical data are drawn from a one in three sample of Irish households in five parishes from the 1851 and 1861 census enumerators’ books; the Parliamentary Papers used range from 1814-15 to 1873, with the main concentration being between 1835 and 1869; and the newspapers and periodicals have been consulted mainly for the period 1828-58. This is not to suggest that more research ought to have been done; to have exploited the only other accessible set of census manuscripts, for 1871, would have entailed many months more tedious carding and punching, possibly without denting or modifying the demographic and occupational analysis based on 1851 and 1861. It is suggested, however, that the core of the work relates to the Irish in mid-Victorian London. In her technically sophisticated work on the census data there is, moreover, an identification problem to which Professor Lees has perhaps paid insufficient attention. In counting Irish households, those whose heads and other members gave Irish birthplaces are simple enough to identify. But since the author also
REVIEWS
213
wishes to write about the London Irish community, especially in her treatment of sex, marriage, religion, employment and politics, it is important to remember that this community consisted of the Irish-born plus an indeterminate but large fraction of the London- or English-born Irish of the second and third generations. Professor Lees is well aware of this in framing her estimates of the total size of London’s Irish population, in discussing the persistence of active Catholicism among the London Irish, and in examining marriage habits-where she guesses the Irishness of English-born spouses from surnames and maiden names. And it is obvious that contemporaries who thought that the Irish were particularly drunken, poor, promiscuous, idle, superstitious, charming or dirty did not have the Irish-born exclusively in mind. Still, it could have made some difference to have had the birthplace business in mind when drawing conclusions about the Irishness of particular neighbourhoods, since the presence of older settled Irish alongside the first-generation migrants might well swell the size and alter the ethnic mixture of the enclaves. And in concluding that “by 1881 the older Irish communities of the inner ring [St Giles, Whitechapel and Southwark] were fast disappearing” Professor Lees has perforce only been counting the Irish-born of 1881, and has perhaps forgotten that by 1881 such areas might have been too full of native London Irish to have much room for raw migrants. It is immensely difficult, if not completely impossible, to study the process of assimilation from English census data, which concerns itself only with the individual’s birthplace and not with his ethnic origin or religion. A speculatively minded purist might have made the rash attempt to identify the non-Irish born Irish in the manuscript census material from surname evidence, but it probably needs a dash of Irish statistical bravado to do this. Professor Lees, more cautiously, offers an impression of the continuing Irishness of the London Irish drawn from descriptive accounts buttressed by some figures. This suggests that they were not outstandingly good Catholics, only one-third or less of the total London Irish population being active attenders at mass, at the dates when this can be measured in 1837, 1851 and 1902; they did not by any means all send their children to Catholic schools and perhaps not even a majority did so; their family sizes did not differ much from those of the English, and they certainly did not go in for indiscriminate breeding; they married rather later than the English, and probably drank rather more; and they supported a series of strongly nationalist political movements. All in all, while a distinct Irish subculture survived and flourished in London, it looks like a subculture of a minority of the London Irish. The Irish did not wreck London with their rural habits, nor yet did London emasculate the Irish; but the city clearly assimilated many of them, and not the least of this book’s merits is to stimulate questions about that process, and about the factors which made a minority of the migrants’ descendants proof against it. Institute of Historical Research, London
F. M. L. THOMPSON
C.T. SMITH,An Historical Geography of Western Europe before 1800 (London : Longman, revised edition, 1978. Pp. xviii+622. f7.95) About twelve years ago the first edition of C. T. Smith’s An Historical Geography of Western Europe was welcomed by scholars and in the scholarly journals as a valuable addition to the literature of historical geography. It was not that it broke new ground, but that it covered old and familiar material with a new consistency and thoroughness. A feature of the book was its logical organization and its presentation of the changing pattern of Europe’s geography over a longer span of time than has been attempted before or since. The book has a threefold division. The first part reviews the historical geography of prehistoric and classical Europe. The second, concerned essentially with the Middle Ages, deals with rural and urban settlement and agrarian structures, and the third with