Hugh Heinrick:
A Survey of the Irish in England (1872)
Edited by Alan O'Day
(London, The Hambledon Press, 1990, xxxvi + 138 pp)

Book Review by Roger Swift

Between July and November 1872 The Nation, an Irish nationalist newspaper printed in Dublin, published a series of articles written by Hugh Heinrick, a Wexford-born schoolteacher in Birmingham, on the Irish in England. This series, which The Nation claimed to be the first comprehensive investigation of the Irish community in England, has been largely ignored by historians of the Irish in Britain and Dr. O'Day is to be congratulated for making this unique source available to a wider public.

As Dr. O'Day observes in his excellent introduction to the survey, the motivation for the series lay in the developing consciousness of the Irish in Britain in the context of Irish nationalist politics during the 1860s. Moreover, the extension of the franchise in consequence of the 1867 Reform Act gave the Irish in Britain - many of whom were newly-enfranchised - added significance since they were potentially able to exert an Irish influence in urban parliamentary elections. Thus it was in the interests of the developing Home Rule movement in Ireland to investigate the political organisation and potential of Irish communities in Britain and this was the essential aim of Heinrick's survey.

The survey has some obvious weaknesses. It was limited to England and The Nation did not commission a further series on the Irish in either Wales or Scotland. In geographical terms the coverage is patchy, for Heinrick did not visit all of the places described in the text, hence the most valuable sections are the largely first-hand accounts of the Irish in Leicester, Birmingham, the Black Country, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the North-East. Moreover, Heinrick was hardly an impartial observer. His sources were limited and his method was unsystematic. Indeed, much of the content is superficial, repetitive and simplistic.

This said, the survey provides some invaluable perspectives on immigrant demography, social characteristics, occupational patterns, religious participation and political potential. Heinrick sought to identify the Irish community in its full sense, including the descendents of the Irish-born as well as the immigrants themselves, concluding that the actual size of the ethnic community was 2,500,000. This figure contasted sharply with the 566,540 Irish-born enumerated in the 1871 census, which certainly under-estimated Irish numbers. As O'Day points out, Heinrick's calculations were exaggerated but serve to remind us of the difficulty of accurately enumerating the Irish in England and, indeed, of ascertaining who the Irish were. The survey also indicated, much to Heinrick's dismay, the extent to which the Irish had been assimilated into English society, a process facilitated by intermarriage and upward mobility which sapped the strength of Irish communities. For Heinrick, the only salvation of the Irish as a distinct people lay in isolation, hence the function of nationalist politics was to separate them from the baneful influences of English society. Thus, whilst claiming that 'everything good which the Irish in England have preserved is their own; their vices in nine cases out of ten are acquired', Heinrick argued that 'while the Irishmen in England are true to Faith and Fatherland, there is no power in England, whether political or social, that can divert their destiny or check their progress'. Yet the occupational profile of the Irish presented in the survey illustrates just how difficult it was for the Irish to preserve a separate identity in the long-term. Although the Irish were located disproportionately among the labouring poor, Heinrick denoted a degree of upward moblity within the labour market, demonstrating differences in Irish employment patterns over space and generations and placing occupational profiles and differential wage-rates in their local and regional context. Thus the survey pointed to the emergence of a substantial Irish middle-class in London, to the presence of skilled workers in the Midlands, and to the variable experience of the Irish in South Lancashire, where an Irish middle-class had emerged in both Liverpool and Manchester whilst in neighbouring Wigan and St. Helen's the Irish were almost wholly labourers of one sort or another. In short, the survey suggests that Irish employment was determined less by the numbers of Irish in a given district than by the economic infrastructure of the place where they settled. However, as O'Day notes, the survey sheds little light on why the Irish selected particular destinations for settlement in England or on the extent of internal migration thereafter.

Inevitably, the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church in England to address the spiritual and temporal needs of Irish communities receive wide and glowing coverage in the survey, but the analysis is essentially deferential, superficial and uncritical, adding little to our knowledge of the subject. In contrast, Heinrick's assessment of the political potential of the Irish in England suggests that almost everywhere the power of the Irish to influence the outcome of elections was weak. Heinrick attributed this weakness to an absence of political organisation among the Irish themselves rather than to institutional or social barriers within the host community, noting that in many towns the root of the problem lay in the inability of an insufficient Irish middle-class to provide political leadership within Irish communities which were already on the verge of disintegration.

A Survey of the Irish in England (1872) is an important book, despite its flaws. First, it provides a contemporary Irish perspective on the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain, thereby offering a slight counterweight to the profusion of non-Irish sources on which historians of the Irish in Britain have been largely dependent. In this context the Survey deserves to stand alongside John Denvir's more impressive The Irish in Britain (1892) as a seminal source for the study of the subject. Second, the timing of the survey is important, falling as it does between the large-scale migration of Irish people during the Famine period and the later wave of Irish emigration during the late-Victorian agrarian depression. In this context the survey illuminates our understanding of the degree of stabilisation achieved by Irish communities in Britain by 1872 and of the various processes through which Irish migrants were becoming increasingly assimilated into British society.

Roger Swift
University College Chester
Chester
England

This review originally appeared in Immigrants and Minorities, 10, 3 (1991), 112-114, and appears here with the permission of Roger Swift.