Victorian Studies

The political history of nineteenth-century Ireland is hardly a neglected topic: hundreds of books and articles treat many aspects of politics and power in Victorian Ireland. A [End Page 521] collection that aims to “provide fresh insights”—as the editors tell us this one does—is thus taking on a difficult task (13). Yet the book succeeds very well in achieving its goal. The editors offer an intriguing selection of articles: some addressing new issues, many tackling familiar ones from new angles or arguing new interpretations. Of the book’s twelve chapters, four are about Ulster, three about nationalism, three about women, and two about government.

The four chapters on Ulster deal mainly with issues surrounding late-nineteenth-century Ulster Unionism. N. C. Fleming studies the continuing significance of landlords as an influential group in Ulster politics even as their power was in steep decline in the south. Gary Peatling takes up the vexed question of the apparent disappearance during the nineteenth century of the radicalism and liberalism that had flowered in Ulster in the late eighteenth century. He focuses on one newspaper, the Londonderry Standard, which presented itself as the “voice of radical Presbyterianism,” and examines how it responded to the changing political landscape occasioned by the rise of the Irish Home Rule cause from the 1870s (158). In doing so he argues that, ironically, the Standard “symptomizes links between the United Irishmen [of the 1790s] and the Paisleyite DUP traditions of plebeian anti-establishment Presbyterian radicalism” of the late twentieth century (164). Jeremy Smith seeks to build upon the revisionist analysis of Edward Carson’s career begun by historians like Alvin Jackson. Smith argues that Carson’s approach to Home Rule was “much more complex and fluid than a straight-forward shift from all-Ireland unionist to Ulster exclusionist” (181). Mark Radford’s chapter on Belfast descends from the lofty heights of political leadership to survey the operations of Ulster Unionism on the streets, particularly in terms of the policing of the sectarian riots that regularly marred city life during the second half of the century. Together these chapters offer a more diverse portrait of late-nineteenth-century Ulster Unionist politics than that which usually appears in Irish and British history textbooks.

The three chapters on nationalism investigate what may at first sight seem to be marginal matters, but which in fact prove to have much broader significance. They deal with John Mitchel and Chartism, Young Ireland and utilitarianism, and Isaac Butt’s writings on political economy. All three, as one of them states, aim to examine alternatives to the “master narrative” of Irish nationalism (96). They treat Mitchel, Young Ireland, and Butt in the context of various political movements and philosophies of the 1840s. Michael Huggins argues persuasively that Chartism was more influential in Ireland during that decade than most authorities have recognised and, indeed, that the politics of the whole decade are more complex than is usually suggested. David Dwan focuses on aspects of Young Ireland’s economic and cultural thinking, particularly its hostility to Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, which it viewed as reflecting an English, as opposed to an Irish, sensibility. Alan O’Day identifies the roots of Butt’s later adoption of the goal of Home Rule in protectionist economic policies he developed during the 1840s in order to address poverty, which he saw as Ireland’s most fundamental problem. These chapters demonstrate that there was much more to Irish politics during the 1840s than Daniel O’Connell’s doomed repeal campaign, the farcical 1848 rebellion, and the tragedy of the Great Famine.

The chapters focused on women are concerned with “high politics” and with the lives of individual elite women. They thus seem a little old-fashioned, since most recent Irish women’s history has tended to deal with movements and groups, many of [End Page 522] them working-class and dissident. This book instead offers us studies of Queen Victoria, two of the marchionesses...