Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism before 1850

Abstract

HISTORIANS of English radicalism and Chartism differ on the place which Irish questions played in the various movements, and on the importance of the part played in English radical movements by Irish men and women. The years during which the Chartist Movement dominated English radicalism were also the years of Daniel O’Connell’s domination of Irish popular politics. The earlier historians of Chartism tended to see the O’Connellite repeal movement as entirely separate from Chartism, but to allow for a considerable Irish influence in Chartism nevertheless. For many of them, this influence was unfortunate. Mark Hovell, Chartism’s first historian, saw O’Connor as an Irish outsider who battened on to English politics after having failed in Irish politics and quarrelled with O’Connell, and who thereby encouraged all that was worst in English popular politics — violence, brutality, and a mindless harking back to an idealised peasant past. Hovell had no time for the Irish in any form. He regarded Feargus O’Connor as the ruin of Chartism, but interestingly, although he found it difficult to find language base enough to describe Feargus, he nevertheless saw him as ‘the best of a rather second-rate lot’ when he entered Parliament as one of the Irish members in 1833. The Irish immigrants in Hovell’s picture always ‘swarm’, and serve mainly as shock troops for that turbulent side of the movement for which Hovell had no sympathy or understanding.²

Before I reached my nineteenth year (1843) my spare time was divided between three public movements — the temperance movement under Father Matthew, the repeal movement under Daniel O’Connell, and the Chartist or English movement under Feargus O’Connor. In the bewildering whirl of excitement in which I lived during those years I seemed almost wholly to forget myself. Night brought with it long journeys to meetings and late hours, though the day brought back the monotony of the sweater’s den …

(Robert Crowe, The Reminiscences of a Chartist Tailor)

I am indebted to a number of colleagues and students for illustrations to this paper from their local research. In particular, Nick Cotton, James Epstein, Sieglinde Juxhorn, John Sanders, Jonathan Smith and Robert Sykes.