Politics, Religion and the Press: Irish Journalism in Mid-Victorian England (review)

"Our Dead Chief:"The Irish Press and the Death of Parnell Michael de Nie Sometimes imperious, always emotionally distant, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) was an enigma even to his closest companions. Nonetheless, with unceasing resolve and supreme self-confidence Parnell bent others to his will and transformed Irish nationalism. But, at the peak of his popularity and influence he suffered a sudden and terrible fall and was subsequently hounded to the grave by the braying British press and sanctimonious Irish Catholic prelates. Or so the story goes. These well-worn narratives of Parnell's rise and fall have deeply influenced both popular memory and academic study of the Irish leader. The meaning of Parnell and Parnellism, however, has always been contested, from the biographies that appeared within weeks of his death up to the present day.1 One of the prime theaters of this contest was the Irish newspaper press—where the majority of the Irish public learned of the leader's death and read the first postmortem meditations on his life and career. The story of the Parnell Split is well known, but it is helpful to begin with a quick overview of the key events and how the Irish newspapers positioned themselves during the controversy. In December 1889, Captain William O'Shea [End Page 106] sued his wife Katherine for divorce, naming Parnell as co-respondent. Parnell and Katherine had been carrying on an affair since late 1880 and he had fathered two of her daughters, yet he was amazingly confident that the messy divorce proceedings would have no impact on his political career. The initial response seemed to justify Parnell's sanguinity, as his political allies rallied to his side and the bishops remained silent. The trial proved extremely embarrassing to Parnell, who offered no defense in order that the divorce be granted so that he might marry Katherine. A decree nisi (that is, a ruling that the divorce could proceed) was delivered on November 17, 1890, but Parnell's supporters reasserted their loyalty at a November 20 meeting in Dublin and then re-elected him chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party on November 25. On that same evening, things began to unravel for Parnell after William Gladstone published a letter in a special edition of the Pall Mall Gazette indicating that he could not continue to work for home rule with the Irish Party if Parnell remained its leader. With his Nonconformist political base scandalized by the conduct revealed at the trial, Gladstone knew that he could not continue the Liberal-Irish alliance unless Parnell stepped aside. The choice was now Parnell or Home Rule, and within a week many of those who had proclaimed the Chief indispensable now called for him to step down. Parnell's position was further undermined over the next two weeks by the publication of his badly received Manifesto and statements from the delegates in America and the Irish Catholic hierarchy. On December 6, a majority of the Irish MPs voted to repudiate the Chief, splitting the party. Over the next ten months what remained of Parnell's support in Ireland steady evaporated as he was attacked across the Irish press and his rump party lost several by-elections. A somewhat pathetic figure by the fall of 1891, Parnell died suddenly on October 6. Generally speaking, the Irish press followed the same trajectory as the Irish Parliamentary Party. The majority of newspapers strongly supported Parnell in the week or so after the divorce decree was issued. Like the Irish MPs, they began to peel away from the leader after Gladstone's letter was published. By the time the party officially split, the majority of Irish newspapers had already come out against Parnell, although with varying degrees of vehemence. Of the thirty-five newspapers examined for this paper, five remained true to Parnell, twelve were anti-Parnellite, eleven were Unionist, and three were nonpolitical newspapers that tried to avoid taking a position. The remaining four newspapers can be regarded as special cases. The weekly United Ireland came out strongly against the Chief in early December but was reclaimed for Parnell after a mob, led by the man himself, famously attacked the...

The West Indian Gazette, edited by Claudia Jones, and on which Donald Hinds was a writer, was one of the most influential pioneers of a genuinely independent black press in Britain. To say that Claudia herself was a communist, feminist and anti-imperialist does not express the dynamism and humanity of her politics, or their innovative nature — including the introduction of the first black carnival in Britain. She, and the Gazette, were immensely important in the creation of the black community in Britain from the late 1950s onwards, as it was beset by an ongoing and crude racism, including the riots of Notting Hill and Nottingham.

Revisiting the Catholic Literary Imagination Douglas Robillard Jr. (bio) Jeana DelRosso. Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives. New York: Palgrave, 2005. x + 203 pp. Farrell O’Gorman. Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2004. ix + 259 pp. Susan Srigley. Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2005. xii + 195 pp. During the last fifteen years we have seen some renewal of interest in the subject of Catholicism and literature. Since the publication of Arnold Sparr's 1990 study, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–60, Joseph Pearce, Ross Labrie, and others have published books on the influence of Catholicism on film, art, and literature.1 Much of the current scholarship examines what Sparr terms the post-World War II "Catholic literary revival" (xi). This development was sparked by European thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and others who brought the theology and aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas into the twentieth century. At the time, there was considerable interest in contemporary Catholic authors such as [End Page 174] Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. In the same period, Allen Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, converted to Catholicism under Maritain's personal influence and actively sought to promote an American Catholic literature. They also acted as mentors for two younger Catholic Southern writers, Flannery O'Connor and a convert, Walker Percy. In time, this literary trend ended. O'Connor died in 1964. Percy continued publishing into the 1980s. However, in many ways, Gene Kellogg's 1970 study, The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period of Convergence both summarized and brought an end to this period. Some of the questions posed during the Catholic literary revival have resurfaced. What is meant by the term, "Catholic literature"? Is there a distinct Catholic literature rooted in a definable aesthetic? What are the features of the Catholic literary imagination? How is the Church itself portrayed in literature? Three recent books examine the influence Catholicism exercises over the literary imagination. In its own way, each attempts to answer the questions posed above. Two studies deal specifically with Flannery O'Connor: Susan Srigley's Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Art and Farrell O'Gorman's Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Srigley locates the origins of O'Connor's aesthetics in Thomism and Catholic doctrine. She takes a deliberately restricted view of her subject, limiting her discussion to only three of O'Connor's works: the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and a single short story, "Revelation." Peculiar Crossroads divides its discussion between O'Connor and Walker Percy and examines biographical as well as literary and theological affinities between the authors. Like Srigley, he identifies Thomist thought as an important influence on O'Connor's aesthetics. In addition, he presents a fascinating account of the literary and theological interactions of O'Connor and Percy with Tate and Gordon. The third book, Jeana DelRosso's Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives, is an investigation of contemporary Catholic women's literature across cultural and ethnic lines, touching only briefly and peripherally on O'Connor. Instead, DelRosso is concerned with the broad question of how women writers of diverse ethnic and national origins "challenge and embrace" the Roman Catholic Church in their fiction and autobiographical narratives (5). Srigley and O'Gorman agree on the importance of Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism to the development of O'Connor's aesthetic. O'Gorman calls the book "the essential starting point in any discussion of O'Connor's and Percy's commitment to realism and an important source for their understanding of art's moral function" [End Page 175] (109–10). Srigley sees O'Connor's theology and art coming together in an "ethic of responsibility" toward others (10). "My concern is to demonstrate how O'Connor's ethics are inextricably linked to her role as a storyteller and how her moral vision is played out in the drama of her fiction" writes...

Catholic literature was a diverse field in early modern England. Manuscript and printed texts were an integral part of confessional identity for English Catholics. It enabled them to establish textual communities, to participate in private meditations, practice their faith, and for women to play an active role in Catholic book and literary culture, with images and mnemonic devices in printed texts offering a way for the illiterate to participate in private meditations. Catholic literature formed part of a Europe-wide movement linked to Catholic Reform and post-Tridentine spirituality, of which English Catholic readers and authors were a part. Print and manuscript circulation of Catholic texts was aided by illicit printing presses set up across England and Europe, which reveals the growing appetite for these texts, and which were also read and responded by Protestant readers, showing the appeal of Catholic religious and spiritual texts across the confessional divide. Once perceived as of interest only to historians of “recusant” post-Reformation Catholics, Catholic writers such as Robert Southwell are now frequently included in cross-confessional general works of literary criticism, and Catholic literary culture is better recognized as an integral part of the study of early modern English literature, literary culture, print and book culture. Setting the parameters for a bibliography on this subject requires a threefold definition. We have taken “early modern” fairly broadly, covering the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, which includes some pre-Reformation as well as post-Reformation material. “Catholic” could be defined in a number of ways which would exclude or include different texts and scholarly works. We have focused on texts of Catholic authorship, generally meaning that the author identified as a member of the Catholic Church at the time of writing; we have also prioritized subject matter, so studies of texts by Catholic authors which are not distinctively Catholic in content may not appear. Finally, “literature”: once implying simply the “literary canon” in which Catholics who wrote after the Reformation rarely appeared, appreciation of the literary elements of all kinds of texts has widened the category. We have included such genres as devotional literature and martyrology, valuable in themselves for understanding early modern religious culture, and also as context for the more “canonical” literary productions of Southwell, Dryden, or Pope. We have included a section on translation, in recognition of the increasing scholarship on literary translators (especially women) and of the importance of continental European texts and spirituality in shaping English Catholicism after the Reformation. The bibliography is set out thematically, with works covering different genres of literature grouped together, but with dedicated sections on selected individual authors. Especially in the latter, the quantity of scholarly work on this field means that this bibliography must, for reasons of space, aim to be representative rather than comprehensive.

In May 2012 New Statesman published a special issue on British-Jewish identity.3 Its editorial opens by recalling Tony Blair’s 2006 address to the Anglo-Jewish population on the 350th anniversary of the Jewish readmission to Britain. In a speech given at Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in London, Blair commended British Jews for retaining a distinct faith-based identity whilst also showing their loyalty and commitment to Britain.4 Blair’s words had obvious implications for other immigrant communities in Britain at the time, especially in view of the tensions that followed the London terrorist attacks of 2005.5 So are British Jews, as Blair suggested, an exemplar of assimilation? As the New Statesman leader rightly points out, the British-Jewish experience is far from that straightforward: ‘the history of Jewish cultural, religious and intellectual life in Britain’, it argues, ‘shows just how complex are such questions of identity and belonging’.6 Writing Jewish explores some of this complexity.

Reviewed by: The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000 by Richard Griffiths Frederick S. Roden (bio) The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000, by Richard Griffiths; pp. xii + 260. London and New York: Continuum, 2010, £19.99, $34.95. In The Pen and the Cross, Richard Griffiths gives us a very effective survey of modern English Catholic literature. This book is a good introduction for the general reader, providing a particular breadth in canonical authors. For the Victorianist, Griffiths offers an overview that locates the nineteenth century as the point of origin for the genre, tracing a trajectory from John Henry Newman to David Lodge. In the process, Griffiths focuses on the strictly literary. As cultural history, while the work pays attention to questions of class, it is primarily concerned with a rather narrow group of writers in its genealogy. Griffiths, coming out of French studies, differentiates the particularities of English versus French Catholic identity. He further limits himself to Roman Catholic literature in England, as opposed to works by Anglo-Catholics (Anglicans). My main objection to this book, a worthwhile guide, is what Griffiths doesn’t talk about rather than what he does. It makes sense to begin a readable study of Roman Catholicism in English literature with the Oxford Movement, and Griffiths stops short of mythologizing or sentimentalizing that historical moment as iconic. Rather than celebrating the return of Romanism to English shores (with the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy), Griffiths delivers a useful discussion of Newman. As he notes in the introduction, his subject is not the Catholic identity of these writers but the “coherent system of imagery” and “specific forms of expression” that define Catholic literature as a genre (3). As social history, Griffiths’s book provides most insight into the peculiar kind of Catholicism found in English literature, generally that of the (middle-class) convert, standing in some relation to the old recusant aristocratic families. Stylistically this phenomenon led to literary concentration on sacramental theology, rather than the [End Page 337] mysticism, miracles, or sentimental piety seen in the Catholic literatures of other countries. Griffiths also argues that English Catholic discourse is marked by its resistance to “centralization and regimentation” and “the triumph of ultramontanism” (16). He suggests an individualistic artistic tradition emerging out of a history of marginalized gentry and the modern bourgeoisie. For example, Griffiths calls Gerard Manley Hopkins “a very modern poet in his form, and also a very modern Christian in much of his content” (41). This question of convert Catholicism reaches its climax with the Decadents at the fin de siècle. Griffiths distinguishes between the “dilettantism” of the attraction to Catholicism exemplified by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which Griffiths blames on Walter Pater’s aesthetic legacy, and the faith of a “number of young poets, including Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Gray, [who] were converted to Catholicism and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity in this” (47, 48). Griffiths opposes the good convert (sincere) to the bad convert (solely drawn to the exotic and beautiful). Acknowledging the debt to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), Griffiths characteristically sacrifices Wilde in a chapter that is ambivalent about whom to praise and whom to blame in this era. Regarding the notoriously eccentric Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, he states that “his idiosyncratic, ornate and mannered style is strangely effective and he stands out as one of the most curious and original figures in the literature of the period” (51). Yet leading to a discussion of Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, and Alice Meynell, Griffiths poses their “revival in serious religious poetry” in “contrast to the aesthetic dilettantism of the circle around Wilde” (52). He values Johnson and John Gray as Catholic poets only after they have rejected Wilde’s influence. No mention is made of Wilde’s deathbed conversion or lifelong writings on Catholicism. Griffiths constructs a heresy trial for art that’s been done many times before, distancing so-called sincere conversion from aesthetic appeal in a manner that is far too simplistic. As he self-stylized with camp awareness in his prose, Wilde...

This article examines the inspection of ‘nuisances’ in England, chiefly in the four decades following 1846–7, when towns were authorized to appoint an inspector of nuisances and provided with a sam...

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

This paper explores how the broadcasts delivered by Winston Churchill on 13 May 1945 and Éamon de Valera on 17 May 1945 were portrayed in the Irish press between May and August of that year. Specifically, it analyses how Irish newspapers justified the policy of neutrality, which was considered morally questionable during the battle against totalitarianism; how they explained the Anglo-Irish relationship in a way that defended Ireland's position in the post-war world; and how they reported on small nations under threat of the USSR to legitimise Ireland's situation. By studying the media coverage of these broadcasts, this paper reveals how Irish newspapers imagined the course of the nation.

Politics, Religion and the Press: Irish Journalism in Mid-Victorian England (review)

Anthony McNicholas, Politics, Religion and the Press: Irish Journalism in Mid-Victorian England. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Franfurt am Main, New York and Wien: Peter Lang, 2007. £42.50. 370 pp

Sociolinguistic patterns of Chinese communities in Britain are a rich and important field which has yet to be systematically explored. Any investigation into the internal structuring and cultural norms and values of these communities must be sensitive to the social and historical background of the people concerned. As a first step towards providing more accurate information, this paper discusses the complexity of the composition of the Chinese population in this country. Findings from a pilot study of language choice within a sub‐group of students are presented. These findings are discussed in the context of wider sociolinguistic issues the Chinese people face as they seek to come to terms with life in Britain.

This article examines the use of the database of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) for England and Wales, which records archaeological finds made by the public (particularly metal detector users). The PAS database is generally considered a valuable resource for archaeological research, but its use as such is rarely critically examined. In this case study, artefacts related to the specific material culture of the historically-attested Jewish community in Britain are examined as a potential source of archaeological information about a specific historical social group. The article highlights several challenges in interpreting records deriving from information received from collectors and hobbyists as a substitute for data recovered by archaeological methods. Several false leads and misinterpretations have been identified, and the lack of contextual information for the artefacts is especially problematic. The PAS records are of limited utility as a standalone source of evidence, and cannot lead to meaningful conclusions about Jewish lives in Britain. The artefacts primarily serve as material illustrations of existing written records rather than independent sources of information.

The psychological health and adjustment to life in Britain of a sample of first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants were measured. It was predicted that problems with the English language, inadequate social support, value differences, and unfulfilled expectations would induce more symptoms of psychological distress and depression in first-generation than in second-generation Chinese immigrants. Overall psychological health, and hence adjustment, was good. There was evidence for language problems and unfulfilled expectations, but not social support and value differences, being linked to mental health in the second generation. Evidence linking mental health to other personal variables was found in both generations.

Whilst the incidence of rickets and osteomalacia amongst the host population is relatively small, its prevalence among the Asian community in Britain is a cause for concern. The primary aim of the Stop Rickets Campaign 1981 is to alert Asian families about vitamin D deficiency and how it can be overcome. The campaign also sets out to educate and inform Asian mothers about the services provided by maternal and child health clinics. The high incidence of rickets and osteomalacia among the Asian population needs to be analysed in the context of the Asian family pattern, how this has been adapted to life in Britain and the communication barrier that exists between the health services and the Asian family.