Abstract
In 1791 Thomas Butterworth Bayley, Manchester’s most active and observant magistrate, wrote to the Home Secretary of the difficulties of maintaining order in the rapidly expanding cotton capital of England:
The trade of this country is wonderfully prosperous. It produces its attendant evils, amongst these I include a very numerous and foreign population, especially from Ireland, estranged, unconnected and in general in a species of exile. These men are full of money from the high state of wages and are frequently filled with liquor and engaged in desperate affrays.1
Ten years later this, in many ways traditional, complaint about the disorderliness of the ‘low Irish’ had acquired a new and more frightening dimension. The immigrant Irish were now associated with political subversion, a stigma they were to carry through the nineteenth century. Exile and subversion merged and became indistinguishable in the public mind during this revolutionary decade.
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Notes
On the early history of the United Irishmen see R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760–1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) pt III;
T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) iv, ch. 11.
The most detailed recent account of English popular radicalism is A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: the English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Hutchinson, 1979).
For a good introductory text try H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
A very useful collection of LCS records is M. Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
See Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty pp. 424–9; N. J. Curtin, ‘The Transformation of the Society of United Irishmen into a Mass BaSed Revolutionary Organisation’, Irish Historical Studies, xxiv (1985) 463–92.
See Thale, Selections p. 149; J. Binns, Recollections of the Life of John Binns (Philadelphia, 1854).
On this phase of radical activity see especially R. Wells, Insurrection: the British Experience 1795–1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983);
M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982)
and ‘Irish Republicanism in England: The First Phase 1797–99’, in T. Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds), Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History 1690–1800 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979);
J. A. Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1795–1821 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982);
A. Booth, ‘The United Englishmen and Radical Politics in the North-West of England 1795–1803’, International Review of Social History, xxxi(1986) 271–97.
On London’s Irish communities in this period see M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) ch. 3.
For the great increase in Irish immigration at this time see PRO, HO 42/43–4; HO 50/43, 65; HO 100/66, 94, 114. On the early nineteenth century see E. H. Hunt, British Labour History 1815–1914 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) ch. 5;
M. A. G. O’Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (Croom Helm, 1985).
On levels of population growth and urbanisation in general see P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
See PRO, PC 1/41/A139. A copy was also included in the Report of the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons, 15 Mar 1799, appendix 13. The Report appears in S. Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1975) cxxi.
The terrible conditions in these years are well described in R. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1793–1801 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988) ch. 4.
Wells, Insurrection ch. 11; Elliott, ‘The Despard Conspiracy Reconsidered’, Past and Present 75 (1977) 46–61; Hone, For the Cause of Truth pp. 103–4;
H. Legge to Pelham, 20 Sep 1802, PRO, HO 42/66; Balcarres to Pelham, 28 Nov 1802, PC 1/3552; T. B. Howell (ed.), A Complete Collection of State Trials (Hansard, 1820) xxviii, 370.
G. S. Jones, ‘The Language of Chartism’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism 1830–60 (Macmillan, 1982) p. 13.
See especially J. Belchem, ‘English Working-Class Radicalism and the Irish 1815–50’, in Gilley and Swift, The Irish in the Victorian City; J. Belchem, Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);
A. W. Smith, ‘Irish Rebels and English Radicals 1798–1820’, Past and Present, 7 (1955) 78–85.
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© 1991 The Editorial Board, Lumiere (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Booth, A. (1991). Irish Exiles, Revolution and Writing in England in the 1790s. In: Hyland, P., Sammells, N. (eds) Irish Writing. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21755-7_5
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