Abstract
Webb’s Quaker network and printing business were the springboard from which he became involved in social activism in the greater Dublin area. This activism was then, in turn, the springboard for him to become involved in national elected politics. Social activism can be understood as a broad umbrella term to encompass activity done on a voluntary basis in the public sphere with the intention of building social capital, with particular emphasis on improving the lives of the less fortunate.2 It covers many social, progressive or reformist organisations and it is a vital form of political expression, particularly for those who are excluded from the elective process, most obviously women. In Webb’s case, these activities included the Dublin Statistical Society, the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association, the National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (NARCDA) and the Dublin Exhibition committee. As we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6, although more source material is available on Webb’s Dublin social activism, he continued in the same activities when he became an MP in London. What is detailed in this chapter, then, could be considered Webb’s mid-Victorian liberal and progressive apprenticeship, which ultimately paved the road towards his involvement in much larger imperial concerns.
Webb, Autobiography, p. 48.
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Notes
Mary E. Daly, The Spirit of Earnest Inquiry: The Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 1847–1997 (Dublin, 1997), p. 2.
Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995), p. 5. Luddy is using ‘reform’ and ‘benevolent’ as proposed by Anne M. Boylan, ‘Women in Groups: An Analysis of Women’s Benevolent Organisations in New York and Boston, 1797–1840,’ in Journal of American History, vol. lxxi (1984), pp. 497–523.
For examples of studies of women philanthropists and reformers, see Luddy, Philanthropy; Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980); Margaret H. Preston, Charitable Words;
and F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980).
R. D. Collison Black, ‘History of the Society’ in Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Centenary Volume 1847–1947 (Dublin, 1947), p. 11.
M. J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Hassocks, Sussex, 1975), p. 148.
Alfred Webb, ‘The Progress of the Colony of Victoria,’ in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, vol. i, Part 11 (1856), p. 361.
The speech was delivered on 20 December 1867. Alfred Webb, ‘The Propriety of Conceding the Elective Franchise to Women,’ in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, vol. iv, Part 8 (1868), pp. 455–461.
See Deirdre Raftery, ‘Frances Power Cobbe’ in Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (eds), Women, Power and Consciousness in 19th-Century Ireland: Eight Biographical Studies (Dublin, 1995) pp. 89–124.
Copy of Webb’s speech to Statistical and Social Inquiry Society, 21 December 1880 (NLI, Webb papers, MS 1745); Alfred Webb, ‘Impediments to Savings from Cost and Trouble to the Poor of Proving Wills,’ in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, vol. viii, Part 57 (1880–1881), pp. 182–187.
Copy of Webb’s speech to Statistical and Social Inquiry Society, 15 June 1896, also undated clipping of article in the New Age (NLI, Webb papers, MS 1745). Alfred Webb, ‘Symposium on Crime: The Sherborn Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women,’ in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, vol. x, Part 77 (1896–1897), pp. 326–333.
R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 41–42.
Marie O’Neill, ‘The Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association and Its Successors,’ in Dublin Historical Record, vol. xxxviii, no. 4 (September 1985), p. 126.
J. S. Mill to J. E. Cairnes, 1 September 1867, in Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley (eds), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vols xiv–xvii, The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1849–1873 (32 vols, Toronto and London, 1972 and 1991), vol. xvi, letter 1145, p. 1315.
J. S. Mill to R. D. Webb, 24 February 1868, in Marion Filipiuk, Michael Laine and John M. Robson (eds), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. xxxii, Additional letters of John Stuart Mill (32 vols, Toronto and London, 1991), vol. xxxii, letter 1194A, p. 189.
Berkeley Hill, ‘Statistical Results of the Contagious Diseases Acts,’ in Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. xxii, no. 4 (December 1870), pp. 463–485.
For information on Newman see Quinlan, Genteel Revolutionaries, pp. 37–43 and J. G. Sieveking, Memoir and Letters of F. W. Newman (London, 1909).
See Elizabeth B. Van Heyningen, ‘The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868–1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts,’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. x, no. 2 (April 1984), pp. 170–197.
Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill and London, 1994), discussion of attitudes towards Indian CDAs, pp. 130–140.
Alfred Webb, Congress address (1894), in A. M. Zaidi (ed.), Congress Presidential Addresses, Vol. 1 1885–1900 (5 vols, New Delhi, 1985), pp. 206–207.
Sophie O’Brien (Mrs William O’Brien), My Irish Friends (London and Dublin, 1937), pp. 62–66.
Anne Colman, ‘Far from Silent: Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Writers’, in Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (eds), Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Dublin, 1997), p. 209.
For discussion of these terms see Chris White, ‘General introduction’ in Chris White (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Source-book (London, 1999), pp. 1–8.
For a twentieth-century Irish view, see Anne Owens Weekes, ‘A Trackless Road: Irish Nationalisms and Lesbian Writing’, in Kathryn Kirkpatrick (ed.), Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identity (Tuscaloosa and London, 2000).
Robert Kane, The Industrial Resources of Ireland (Dublin, 1845).
Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography (New York, 1978).
Roy F. Foster, Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family (Hassocks, Sussex, 1976), p. 117.
T. W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981), p. 479.
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© 2009 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre
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Regan-Lefebvre, J. (2009). ‘The labours and responsibilities nearly killed me’: Webb and Social Activism in Victorian Dublin. In: Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244702_3
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