Victorian Studies

Study of Irish migration has tended until recently to focus narrowly upon certain groups, countries, and periods; in particular, it has focused upon male Catholic rural labourers who immigrated to the United States during the mid- and late-nineteenth century. However, in the last ten or twenty years, a younger generation of Irish historians has begun to offer a more extensive and complex portrait of Irish migration and of the diaspora. This new research has highlighted, for example, female, Protestant, middle-class, and professional emigrants; those who left in large numbers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, long before the Great Famine of the 1840s; as well as the substantial Irish communities established in England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, admittedly slowly, research has begun to take on a comparative dimension: studying the Irish in more than one country and looking at them in terms of other ethnic migrant groups.

Donald M. MacRaild has already made significant contributions to this new literature on Irish migration, especially with regard to England. In 1998 he published a study of the Irish in Cumbria, in the northwest of England—an area not previously associated with Irish immigration during the Victorian period. In 1999 he followed this up with a useful general account of Irish immigration to Britain between 1750 and 1922, and in 2000 he produced an edited collection of papers on the Irish in Britain after the Famine.

The book under review has grown out of this previous work. In his preface, MacRaild explains that he had planned to work on the Orange Order when he began his research on the Irish in Cumbria, but he became frustrated by a lack of source material. The published history of the Orange Order has, so far, been patchy at best, and a lack of primary source material—or rather restricted access to such material—has frequently stymied research in the past. The Orange Order, anticipating hostile accounts of its activities, has often been reluctant to facilitate researchers who are not actual members.

Most Irish historians recognise that the Orange Order, originally established as a Protestant secret society in Ulster in 1795 and soon spreading through Ireland, Britain, and, later, the Empire, has been an extremely influential organisation. It should not therefore, as tends to happen in popular discourse, be dismissed as merely a "sectarian anachronism" (5). Yet we have a number of in-house histories of the organisation, but few scholarly or academic ones. In 1966 Hereward Senior produced a pioneering analysis of the Order's early years in Ireland and Britain up to its banning in 1836. Subsequently, there have been valuable studies of the Order in Scotland, notably by Elaine McFarland and Graham Walker, and in Canada by, among others, C. J. Houston and W. J. Smyth. Currently, David Fitzpatrick is studying the history of Orangeism in Australia.

MacRaild's book is an exploration of the Orange Order's role in the north of England in the period from 1850 to 1920, although his focus is largely on the years before 1900. Since 1990 he has been able to gain access to the minute books and financial records of a handful of local Orange lodges, mainly based in the northeast, but some also in the northwest. He has supplemented these rare sources with more readily available national records of the Order, largely held in Belfast, plus reports of Orange meetings and associated events in the local newspapers of towns such as Jarrow, Wallsend, North [End Page 171] and South Shields, Barrow, Whitehaven, and Carlisle. MacRaild's sources are not exactly copious, but penetrating the secretive world of the Orange Order has never been an easy task for historians. Undaunted, MacRaild proclaims confidently, "scanty material merely impels the historian to be creative with it" (9). MacRaild certainly is creative, and, given the paucity...