W.J.Lowe:
The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire
The Shaping of a Working Class Community
(Peter Lang, New York, 1989, 227 pp.)

Book Review by Roger Swift

The largest concentration of Irish immigrants in mid-Victorian England lay in the industrial towns of Lancashire. These towns had provided a focus for Irish settlement during the early nineteenth century, but the late 1840s and early 1850s witnessed a sharp and rapid increase in the numbers of Irish-born in Lancashire in the wake of the Irish Famine. Yet, although a number of local studies have recently shed light on aspects of the Irish immigrant experience in specific towns within this heavily urbanized and industrialized district, historians of the Irish in Britain have long acknowledged the need for a definitive regional history of the Irish in mid-Victorian Lancashire. In this context, Dr. Lowe is to be congratulated on this pioneering study which is not only based on a wide range of hitherto-unused primary sources but also provides an effective synthesis of recent studies of the Lancashire Irish.

The central thrust of this study concerns the process of community formation among the Lancashire Irish between 1845 and 1870. This was a critical period for the Irish in Britain, given the scale of Irish immigration and the range and intensity of the social and economic problems which faced Irish migrants, including the ingrained prejudices and hostility of the host society. With specific reference to Irish settlement in Liverpool, Manchester, Oldham, Preston, St. Helens, Salford and Widnes - towns of varying sizes which represent the diversity of nineteenth-century Lancashire's industrial environments and townscapes - Dr. Lowe shows that the mid-Victorian period witnessed the development of conscious group consolidation among the Lancashire Irish, who became more aware of themselves as a community with common needs and interests and used their Irish experience and heritage to form themselves into a coherent and identifiable working-class group.

The profile which emerges is dynamic rather than static. For the Lancashire Irish, the mid-Victorian period was one of adjustment and change. Whilst accepting that the Irish of the Famine crisis were very much the demographic and social problem contemporaries thought they were, Dr. Lowe notes a modest improvement in the occupational profile of the younger members of the Lancashire Irish community. He points to the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the establishment of a strong community life among the Lancashire Irish that was the obverse of their largely-unskilled occupational status and the physical conditions in which they often lived. He shows how communal attachment to the Catholic Church also formed the basis for involvement in nationalist politics in the 1860s and beyond, as seen in the activities of the Lancashire Irish Republican Brotherhood and the later support for the land and Home Rule movements. Moreover, in developing his arguments, Dr. Lowe fruitfully employs his wide knowledge of the Irish in North America in order to compare and contrast the experiences of the Irish in Lancashire and their American counterparts.

Yet Dr. Lowe also shows that by 1870 the second-generation Lancashire Irish, an increasing number of whom were English-born, were beginning to lose their ethnic and communal distinctiveness, behaving more like the population in general and becoming more recognizably a part of the mainstream of working-class life, although many of them retained a residual awareness of their Irish heritage. Indeed, Lowe argues that it was the very level of community confidence and accomplishment achieved by the Irish in mid-Victorian Lancashire which enabled them to move on, to use their community life and institutions as a bridge to modern industrial culture. He acknowledges that the extent to which this process continued after 1870 remains a matter for further study, although Frank Neal's Sectarian Violence : The Liverpool Experience 1819-1914 (Manchester, 1988) and the collection of essays edited by myself and Sheridan Gilley as The Irish in Britain 1815-1939 (London, 1989) - which were published after Dr. Lowe's book had gone to press - do shed some light on this broader issue. Indeed, the focus of the scholarly study of the Irish in Britain is at last shifting away from the mid-Victorian period, which is relatively well-researched, towards the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Closely-argued and well-written, this is undoubtedly an important book which not only adds substantially to our understanding of the development of Irish communities in mid-Victorian Britain but also illustrates the merits of a regional approach to the historical study of Irish migration and settlement during the period.

Roger Swift
University College Chester
Chester
England

This review originally appeared in Irish Historical Studies, XXVII, 108 (November 1991), 379-380, and appears here with the permission of Roger Swift.