Protestant London, No-Popery and the Irish Poor, 1830–60

Abstract

“What though the western breezes Blow soft o'er Erin's Isle, Though every prospect pleases, And only Rome is vile; In vain with lavish kindness, The gifts of God are strewn, The Celt in abject blindness, Bows down to wood and stone!”2 Rev. Jos. Rogerson Cotter (1852) The social historian in quest of Victorian commentary on the Irish in London finds a surprising dearth of materials. There were Irish beggars everywhere in the city, and their tenements lay within a few yards of the most fashionable thoroughfares, but neither their revolutionary potentialities nor predilection for violence nor deplorable religion made much impact upon the Victorian imagination. As they hardly figured in the national life, so they have left few traces in the memoirs of their betters, and hardly appear in Victorian literature, even in the novels of Dickens, who also ignored them in his hearthside journals, though he was always exploring their rookeries. They make fleeting appearances in the romances of Kingsley, Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell; and Carlyle and Bulwer Lytton thought them a nuisance, and said so. But these few Celtic birds of passage do not greatly enlarge one’s understanding of the Irish in London, and hardly make an English literary summer.

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