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Protestant London, No-Popery and the Irish Poor, 1830–60

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Sheridan Gilley
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Extract

“What though the western breezes

Blow soft o'er Erin's Isle,

Though every prospect pleases,

And only Rome is vile;

In vain with lavish kindness,

The gifts of God are strewn,

The Celt in abject blindness,

Bows down to wood and stone!”2

Rev. Jos. Rogerson Cotter (1852)

The social historian in quest of Victorian commentary on the Irish in London finds a surprising dearth of materials. There were Irish beggars everywhere in the city, and their tenements lay within a few yards of the most fashionable thoroughfares, but neither their revolutionary potentialities nor predilection for violence nor deplorable religion made much impact upon the Victorian imagination. As they hardly figured in the national life, so they have left few traces in the memoirs of their betters, and hardly appear in Victorian literature, even in the novels of Dickens, who also ignored them in his hearthside journals, though he was always exploring their rookeries. They make fleeting appearances in the romances of Kingsley, Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell; and Carlyle and Bulwer Lytton thought them a nuisance, and said so. But these few Celtic birds of passage do not greatly enlarge one’s understanding of the Irish in London, and hardly make an English literary summer.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , January 1970 , pp. 210 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1970

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References

1. Part II, 1850-1860, is to follow in a later issue. There are a number of references in these notes to this second article.

2. “The Author retains this verse nearly unaltered, to show the identity of Romish with the heathen idolatry set forth by Bishop Heber.” The Sacred Harp of Ireland. Original Hymns … Sold for the benefit of the Donoghmore Mission, County Cork (London, 1852) p. 3.Google Scholar

3. Household Words and All the Year Round. There are a few Irish references of no great liveliness or value in Stone, Harry: The Uncollected Writings of Charles Dickens: Household Words (London, 1969) Vol. 1 pp. 232, 429-30.Google Scholar

4. A half-comic, half-tragic portrait of one Mike Kelly, a sweated Irish tailor, in bondage in St. Giles's, see Alton Locke, Chapter 21 (London, 1848); in edition of 1885, pp. 221-2; and, for a meaningful aside, on the need for “a drop of the warm enthusiastic Celtic blood” in “the old frozen South Saxon veins”, as part of his thesis of the need for racial mingling, see Yeast (London, 1851) Chapter 13, in edition of 1869, p. 227.Google ScholarPubMed

5. Who has Sybil rescued by a kindly Irish co-religionist at the door of a Westminster brothel. Disraeli, B.: Sybil, or the Two Nations (London, 1913) p. 336.Google Scholar He also describes a Fenian meeting in a London Catholic schoolroom, addressed by an unfrocked priest, in Lothair (London, 1870), Chapter 27; in Nelson edition, pp. 116-20.

6. “She was aware of them as a group and as part of the complex social problem. In Ruth (London, 1853) she correctly traces the origins of the cholera epidemic to 'the low Irish lodging houses' and acknowledges their priests as the first to give warning, while Thornton in North and South (London, 1855) imports Irish labour as strike breakers.” Wright, Edgar: Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment (London, 1965), p. 94.Google Scholar Wright considers this little enough, and ascribes Mrs. Gaskell's neglect of so important a subject to her anti-Catholicism, but she had a good deal more to say about the Irish than most of her compeers—rather more than Dickens, with whom he adversely compares her.

7. Carlyle, T.: Chartism (first published 1843; London, 1858), pp. 16–21.Google Scholar Bulwer, Edward Lytton: England and the English (London, 1833), Vol. 1, pp. 237–8. Cf.Google Scholar The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton (London, 1913) p. 460.Google Scholar

8. For studies of the Irish in Britain heavily based upon parliamentary reports and the more accessible printed sources, see George, Dorothy: London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1965) esp. pp. 120–31;Google Scholar Redford, Arthur: Labour Migration in Britain (London, 1926) pp. 134–64;Google Scholar Clapham, Sir John: An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1926-38) Vol. 1 pp. 59–63,Google Scholar 72, 277, 405, 407, 410; Vol. 2 pp. 445, 494; Vol. 3 p. 449; Fay, C. R.: Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1920) pp. 104,Google Scholar 171-2, 217-8, 220-1; Strauss, E.: Irish Nationalism and English Democracy (London, 1951) pp. 118–37;Google Scholar and Jackson, J. A.: The Irish in Britain (London, 1963).Google Scholar

9. Strauss, op. cit. p. 132; Thompson, E. P.: The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963) p. 315.Google Scholar

10. Ribton-Turner, C. J.: A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (London, 1887) pp. 226–7;Google Scholar Owen, David: English Philanthropy 1660-1860 (London, 1965) pp. 109,Google Scholar 112; Kerr, B. M.: “Irish Seasonal Migration to Great Britain, 1800-1838”, Irish Historical Studies, September 1942, Vol. 3 p. 347,Google Scholar

11. For a cross section of Victorian opinion, see Flinn, W. (ed.): Edwin Chad-wick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (first published 1842: Edinburgh, 1965) pp. 16,Google Scholar 64-5, 199, 338. On a particular Irish scheme in London, Jenning's Buildings, Kensington, see Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England 1848-9 (London, 1852) p. 166,Google Scholar Kensington Public Library; and on the long-drawn-out battle over Celtic “nuisances” and want of sanitation, between the landlord of Jenning's Buildings and the Kensington Vestry and its medical officer, Sewers Committee Minutes April-August 1856, January 1857; January 1858; June-July 1864; April 1865; and Godrich, Francis: Report of the Sanitary Condition of the Parish of St. Mary Abbot's Kensington … for … 1856 (London, 1857) pp. 14–17,Google Scholar Kensington Public Library.

12. Reports from the Select Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders in the Metropolis P.P. 1816 Vol. 4 p. 5;Google Scholar P.P. 1818 Vol. 15 pp. 252-3, 258-9, 262-3; on Catholic difficulty in the matter, see Fr. J. G. Wenham in the Tablet, 30/8/1854.

13. Especially in evidence in the application of the Removals Acts, on which see Part II of this article.

14. See Hansard, 1/6/1849, Voi. 105, col. 1030.

15. See Roberts, Henry: “On the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Classes”, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science 1861 (1862) pp. 751–3Google Scholar; Greg, Percy: “Homes of the London Workmen”, Macmillans Magazine May 1862, Vol. 6 pp. 66–7.Google Scholar

16. Anti-Irish prejudice in England is most fully surveyed by Curtis, L. P. in Anglo-Saxons and Celts (New York, 1968),Google Scholar which ignores the complexity of English attitudes to the Irish in favour of an unproven thesis that most Englishmen believed in Celtic racial inferiority.

17. Thompson, op. cit. pp. 432-5; Strauss, op. cit. pp. 121-3; Redford, op. cit. p. 162; cf. Tuke, James H.: A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847 (London, 1848) p. 45;Google Scholar and for Catholic attitudes, see my forthcoming article, in July 1971, in the Downside Review.

18. Engels, F.: “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Britain (first published London, 1844; in edition of Moscow, 1963) p. 63.Google Scholar

19. Cf. the reports on the working classes of Westminster, Church Lane St. Giles's and St. George's-in-the-East, J.S.S.L. 1840, Vol. 3 pp. 14–24;Google Scholar Vol 2 pp. 1-18, 193-249. For a more specifically religious interest in Irish head-counting, see Lumley, W. G.; “The Statistics of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales”, J.S.S.L. 1864, Vol. 27 pp. 303–23.Google Scholar

20. See Roberts, loc. cit.; McCormack, Henry: “A Few Particulars relative to our Town-poor, especially the Irish Town-poor”: T.N.A.P.S.S. 1861 (1862) pp. 613–8;Google Scholar Pollard-Urquhart, W.: “Conditions of the Irish Labourers in She East of London”, ibid. pp. 744–9;Google Scholar on the Association, Finer, S. E.: The Li je and Times of Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952) pp. 488–9.Google Scholar

21. For this, and for the portrait of Denny, the Irish court barber, see Smith, C. M.: The Little World of London (London, 1857) pp. 221–2,Google Scholar and for a comparable picture of Irish fruitsellers, Sims, George: Glances Back (London, 1917) p. 187.Google Scholar

22. And so Irish immigrants figure in the pages of well-meaning clerics and journalists like Montagu Gore, Thomas Beames, Henry Roberts, John Hollingshead, W. Weir, Mary Bayly, Thomas Archer, Charles Bosanquet, James Greenwood, John Garwood, Ellen Barlee, and of course Henry Mayhew. See Gore's On the Dwellings of the Poor and the Means of Improving them … (London, 1851) pp. xii–xv,Google Scholar 4, 7-8. Gore was also the author of Suggestions for the Authorization of the Present Condition of Ireland; a long letter on the degradation of the Irish in St. Giles's was contributed to the introduction to the Dwellings of the Poor by Thomas Beames, a London clergyman with a social interest declared in The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective … (London, 1850),Google Scholar a study of slums in St. Giles's, Saffron Hill and Bermondsey. On the Irish in these and similar districts, see Hollingshead's Ragged London in 1861 (London, 1861) pp. 59,Google Scholar 107, 147, 170; Weir's “St. Giles's, Past and Present”, in Charles Knight's London (London, 1851), Vol. 3 pp. 165–72.Google Scholar Possibly the best single study is the Rev. John, Garwood's in The Million-peopled City (London, 1853), pp. 178–315.Google Scholar Garwood, Secretary to the London City Mission, based his account on the reports of his Scripture Readers, on whom see below. For other evidence of Evangelical concern with the Irish, see Bayly, Mary: Ragged Homes and How to Mend Them (London, 1859), pp. 63,Google Scholar 145; Barlee, Ellen: The Lord's Jewels: or, Sketches of Unknown Disciples (London, 1853), pp. 106–7.Google Scholar A more directly social interest appears in Thomas Archer's The Pauper, the Thief and the Convict (London, 1865), pp. 63,Google Scholar 66, 94-5, 121-2, 132-4; Charles, Bosanquets London (London, 1868), pp. 134,Google Scholar 163, 177; James, Greenwood's The Wilds of London (London, 1874), pp. 196–202.Google Scholar For Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1861), and, with John Binny, for The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London, 1862), and for Catholic attitudes to the Irish, see my article in the July 1969 issue of this journal. For a foreign viewpoint on the Irish costers and hop-pickers, based in part on observations and partly on May-hew, see Esquiros, Alphonse: The English at Home (London, 1861), Vol 1 p. 225;Google Scholar Vol. 2 pp. 30-2. The local Irish rookeries in wealthy areas sometimes have their place in local histories. Cf. Loftie, W. J.: Kensington, Picturesque and Historical (London, 1888) p. 124,Google Scholar and Hunt, Leigh: The Old Court and Suburb (London, 1902) pp. 86–7,Google Scholar on Jenning's Buildings, Kensington.

23. Thus there is no special Irish interest in the writings of Octavia Hill, Douglas Jerrold, Canon Barnett, Thomas Wright, Andrew Mearns, Arnold White or Mary Anne Barber.

24. Pasquet, D.: Londres et les Ouvriers de Londres (Paris, 1913).Google Scholar

25. Cf. Booth, Charles: Condition and Occupations of the People of the Tower Hamlets (London, 1887)Google Scholar and Mess, Henry Adolphus: Casual Labour of the Docks (London, 1916).Google Scholar The little evidence there is has been gathered and variously interpreted by Stern, Walter: The Porters of London (London, 1960), pp. 151,Google Scholar 159-160, 173; Hobsbawn, Labouring Men (London, 1964) pp. 232,Google Scholar 322, and, on the obscurity of early Irish docking organization, p. 214; Lovell, J. C.: Trade Unionism in the Port of London, 1860-1914 (Ph.D. London, 1966) pp. 98–9,Google Scholar 113, 119; and George, M.D.: “The London Coal Heavers: Attempts to regulate Waterside Labour in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Economic History Supplement to Economic Journal, May 1927, Vol. 1, pp. 229–48.Google Scholar

26. Booth, Charles: Life and Labour of the People in London (London, 1903).Google Scholar First series Vol. 4, p. 22; Second Series Vol. 3, p. 404; and on Irish pauper case histories for Stepney, Vol. 4, pp. 311, 317-22, 355, 357, 365, 375.

27. Third Series. Vol. 1 pp. 17, 46-9, 53, 69, 88; Vol. 2 pp. 37-42, 141-5, 187, 204; Vol. 3 pp. 32, 84-5, 101, 141-2, 185-6; Vol. 4 pp. 13-14, 126-7, 138, 143-4, 163-4, 175-6; Vol. 5 pp. 91-2, 110, 116, 150, 153-4, 157, 209-10; Vol. 6 pp. 16-19, 32-4, 88, 105-6; Vol. 7 pp. 241-68. Much of this is social information embedded in religious material and greatly exceeds in bulk the Irish entries in the purely social first two series: a fact which may explain the extraordinary judgment that “they are scarcely mentioned by Booth”. (Jackson, op. cit. p. 94.)

28. There was some passing popular revulsion from the few riots among Irish navvies, none of them near London (Terry, Coleman: The Railway Navvies (London, 1965), pp. 93,Google Scholar 95, 97, 173), and the warfare between the Clerken-well Irish community and Italian anti-clerical refugees was noted by The Times (18/7/1853). But if Irishmen took part in the Sunday trading riots of 1855 or the East End bread riots of January 1861, most observers failed to note them; they were lost in the city mob. Nor is there much evidence of official or public concern about Irish Cockney disloyalty, despite the Brotherhood of St. Patrick in the ’60’s, and despite popular disquiet about an Irish nationalist uprising in the city, at the time of the Clerkenwell prison outrage (1868), and during the French invasion scares.

29. See Garratt, Rev. S.: “The Irish in London”, in Motives for Missions: a series of six lectures delivered before the Church of England Young Men's Society in the Autumn of 1852 (London, 1852) p. 191.Google Scholar

30. Cf. Coleman, B. I.: Anglican Church Extension and Related Movements in London, c. 1800-1860: with special reference to London. Ph.D. Cambridge, 1969, p. 362;Google Scholar Kitson Clark, G. S. R.: The Making of Victorian England (London, 1962), p. 21;Google Scholar Best, G. F. A.: “Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain”, in Robson, R.: (ed.) Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967), p. 142.Google Scholar

31. Arnstein, W. L.: “Victorian Prejudice Re-Examined”, Victorian Studies June 1969, Vol. 12 p. 455.Google Scholar

32. Norman, E. R.: Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London, 1968).Google Scholar

33. A survey of The Times from August 1850 to August 1852, the period of the Papal Aggression, yielded barely a significant reference to the Irish in London, police reports excepted. Punch drew much of its humour from London life and fashion; it exploited the Papal aggression to the full, making the Roman Church the principal object of its satire from October 1850 until the end of 1851, thereby substantially increasing its circulation. Yet between January 1850 and December 1852, there are but two references to the Irish in London: one indirect, to Wiseman's mission to “Kell Meli (Calmel) Buildings”, Vol. 21, 1851, p. 94; the other in connection with Archbishop MacHale's visit to London in 1852, Vol 23 p. 163.

34. Mayhew, op. cit. Vol. 1 pp. 221, 225, 226-8, 236-47; cf. Thompson, op. cit. p. 440.

35. Of representative English opinion, Lord John Russell thought that the real danger was Puseyism: a sentiment he shared with the Queen. Chadwick, W. O.: The Victorian Church Part 1 (London, 1966), pp. 296–7.Google Scholar

36. Handley, James Edmund: The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork, 1947), pp. 93–121.Google Scholar

37. Cahill, Gilbert A.: “Irish Catholicism and English Toryism”, Review of Politics, January 1957, Vol. 19 pp. 62–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. Thus the use of the Bulwark, the organ of the Scottish Reformation Society and Blackwoods below.

39. See Wylie, Rev. J. A., Professor of the Protestant Institute of Scotland: “Rome's Grand Missionary Institute”, or her use of the Irish for swamping England, in Rome and Civil Liberty … (London, 1964), pp. 164–70;Google Scholar see also below, or, in article II, Catherine Sinclair, Arthur Kinnaird, John Cumming; cf. Handley, op. cit., p. 249.

40. For a silly underestimate of Catholic numbers, see The Times, 11/8/1851, 15/8/1851; but see Bishop Stanley of Norwich's moderate statement of the true position: Record, 23/12/1850.

41. “We are unable to complete these alarming statistics (of institutional advance) by a numerical statement of the increase of the Roman Catholic population; yet can we affirm that it is commensurate with the expectation which the preceding facts would lead us to entertain; and that of this augmentation, a large proportion is composed of proselytes. The additions from the influx of Irish Papists, and from the natural progress of population, fall very far short of the total increase …”; Woodward, George Henry: Claims of the Protestant Association on Public Support (London, 1840), p. 6.Google Scholar

42. Cumming, Revd. John: A pocalyptic Sketches: or Lectures on the Book of Revelation: delivered in … Exeter Hall in 1847-48 (London, 1848), p. 403.Google Scholar

43. D.N.B.

44. See Best, G. F. A.: “The Protestant Constitution and its Supporters, 18001829”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society October 1958, Vol. 13 pp. 105–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. See the attempt at definition by Reynolds, J. S.: The Evangelicals at Oxford 1735-1871 (Oxford, 1953), pp. 1–4.Google Scholar

46. Conybeare, Rev. William: Church Parties: an Essay … (London, 1854), pp. 5–6;Google Scholar and, for his definition of Recordite, pp. 16-40.

47. Robert Bickersteth (see article II), to the Protestant Alliance, Record, 18/5/1853.

48. The barrister Alexander Haldane: Balleine, G. R.: A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (London, 1951), pp. 162–3.Google Scholar

49. Which claimed by 1846 to have converted “thousands” of Roman Catholics; to have distributed 150,000 Bibles and Testaments in Irish, and to have taught a quarter of a million Irish, “chiefly adults”, to read them. Record, 14/9/1846.

50. See their histories in their various Appeals in the Record, 24/1 /1853, 3/3/1853, 5/5/1853, 16/5/1853; Nangle, Rev. Edward: The Achill Mission, and the Present State of Protestantism in Ireland … (London, 1839).

51. See Birks, Thomas Rawson: Memoir of the Rev. Edward Bickersteth (London, 1852), Vol. 2 p. 371;Google Scholar McGrath, Fergal, S. J.: Newman's University: Idea and Reality (London, 1951), pp. 17–8, 21.Google Scholar

52. See their Appeals, Record, 24/1/1853, 31/1/1853; also McDowell, R. B.: Public Opinion and Government Policy in Ireland, 1801-46, (London, 1952), pp. 30-3; Chadwick, op. cit., p. 49; Hexter, J. H.: “The Protestant Revival and the Catholic Question in England, 1778-1829”, The Journal of Modern History, September 1936, Vol. 8 pp. 314–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. For its early history, see the Appeal in the Record, 30/5/1856.

54. For this network of patronage when it becomes important for my purpose, in the '40's, see Article II.

55. See Senior, H.: Orangeism in Ireland and Britain 1795-1836 (London, 1966).Google Scholar

56. Cf. the statements of aims and income, Record, 24/8/1854: the Evangelical Alliance, with £700 a year, “sanctioned the mission of 100 ministers in Ireland” and was primarily interested in assisting persecuted ex-Papists on the continent, the Protestant Association (£842) and Protestant Alliance (£936) were chiefly concerned with preventing parliamentary concessions to Catholics at home.

57. There is only one detailed study of one minor incident in the whole history of Protestant electoral pressure: Vincent, Allan McClelland's “The Protestant Alliance and Roman Catholic Schools”, Victorian Studies, December 1964, Vol. 8 pp. 173–82.Google Scholar

58. The Protestant Alliance, the Protestant Association and the Protestant Reformation Society, for which see below.

59. Bickersteth, Rev. Robert: The Designed End of Affliction: a sermon preached at St. John's Church, Clapham … March 24, 1847 (London, 1847), p. 18.Google Scholar

60. Eg. the denunciation of … the extenuating views of the Roman Catholic religion which the spirit of modern liberality has rendered but too popular among multitudes of the influential classes of Society ... By many Protestants, it is held to be a species of aggravated calumny, to charge the Church of Rome with the very doctrines which her ecclesiastics are sworn to teach …” Third Annual Report 1830 P.R.S.

61. Best, “Popular Protestantism”, op. cit., p. 138.

62. First Annual Report of the Islington Protestant Institute (November, 1847), p. 13.

63. See the Record's denunciation of “the semi-Infidel or Liberal, the Papist and the Tractarian. There is a very complete 'alliance' among all these parties, for both defensive and offensive purposes …” 14/9/1846. Also its attack on “the followers of Cardinal Wiseman and Jeremy Bentham …” 3/1/1853; and the aims of the Protestant Association: to “unite those who deny the doctrines of Popery, of Voluntaryism, of Liberalism- who admit the truth of the Bible, the authority of the Bible, the duty of the State to obey the Bible;—” Colquhoun, J. C, M.P.: On the Object and Uses of Protestant Associations (London, 1839), p. II.Google Scholar

64. Dated 4/11/1850; in Gilbert, James: The Roman Catholic Question: a copious series of important documents … on the re-establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy . . . (London, 1851).Google Scholar

65. E.g., the Record, 7/11/1850: “Men, indeed, more perfectly imbued than his Lordship with the principles of the Reformation would, under no circumstances, wilfully expose any part of the population to the idolatrous teaching of the apostate Church … Still making allowances for such discrepancies, the letter is a noble document ...”: a mild enough comment, under the circumstances.

66. Privy Council grants to English Catholic poor schools began in 1848, and reached the quarter of a million pound mark by 1865, while by 1857, the three English Catholic reformatories for juvenile delinquents from the Irish slums were all in receipt of state assistance under the Act of 1854, though all three were conducted by foreign male religious orders, in 1854, Palmers-ton commissioned the first Catholic chaplains for the army and navy, and in 1858, they were placed on the same footing as their Protestant colleagues. In 1854, Palmcrston sought Parliamentary authority to appoint Catholic chaplains to the seven penal prisons; his measure was defeated then, but was passed in 1862. In 1863, an Act of Parliament permitted the payment of Catholic chaplains to the town gaols at the discretion of the local magistrates. By the Act 25 and 28 Victoria, cap. 43 (July 17, 1862, Section I), Poor Law Guardians were empowered to transfer workhouse children to outside Catholic poor-schools, and to pay their expenses. Another Act, 29 and 30 Victoria, cap. 113 (August 10, 1861, Section 14) strengthened this provision, which was made conditional on the request of parent or guardian, and a third Act, 31 and 32 Victoria, cap. 122 (July 31, 1868, Sections 16-22), enforced the sacerdotal privilege of visitation and pauper rights to refuse Protestant religious attentions, and required the compilation of a creed register which was open to the priest, and classified children according to their parents' religion. The Act also established the Poor Law Board's authority to make the Guardians obey the law. See Catholic Directory 1873, pp. 28-30.

67. See the Bulwark, 1853-4, Vol. 3 pp. 141, 252; Monthly Letters 1/4/1854, item no. 240, 1/8/1854, P.A. For parliamentary voting alignments, showing a clear Tory opposition to Catholic relief, and a clear Liberal tenderness for it, see Ewald, A. C: The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beacons-field (London, 1882), Vol. 2, pp. 523–5.Google Scholar

68. It was, wrote the Record, “much the same as if a medical board should provide poisons instead of medicines for their bodies, giving drink to the drunkard and opium to the opium eater, pandering to every depraved taste, and making the rule of their prescription to be not what men want, but what they wish …” 30/10/1854.

69. For the Catholic campaign, see Ryley, E. A.: Letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord Brougham (London, 1862);Google Scholar Lucas, Edward: The Life of Frederick Lucas, M.P. (London, 1886), Vol. 2 pp. 405–41Google Scholar, and Pollen, John Hungerford, S.J.: The Life and Letters of Father John Morris of the Society of Jesus (London, 1896), pp. 143–9.Google Scholar The volume of Catholic protest on the subject is vast: cf. Gallwey, P., S.J.: How Some of the Poor are Wisely oppressed in Workhouses (London, 1861);Google Scholar “A Lover of Celt and Saxon”, The Month, January 1868, Vol. 8 pp. 28–32.Google Scholar

70. See Ryley, op. cit., pp. 5-6. There was a notorious meeting of Poor Law Guardians from all over England in London in February 1860, to defy the pro-Catholic inclinations of the Poor Law Board: Bulwark, 2/4/1860; Marylebone Mercury cited in Tablet, 1/9/1860; Tablet, 28/4/1860. Even more notorious was the overwhelming vote by the Middlesex magistrates not to admit Catholic chaplains into London gaols, as required by the Bill of 1864: an act of defiance in which the celebrated barrister, Ragged School Union promoter and arch-Evangelical Joseph Payne (see below) took a leading part, provoking The Times to wonder “what horrible schemes, what new Guy Fawkes plots for the blowing up of the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr. Newdegate, might not be hatched if two such persons as Mr. Newman and an Irish convict got together in a prison cell?” Tablet, 23/4/1864.

71. St. John, Canon Edward, Mannings Work for Children: a Second Chapter in Catholic Emancipation (London, 1929), pp. 110–1;Google Scholar Wood, Albert: A Brief History of the Catholic Church in Plumstead (Bristol, 1948), pp. 214–23.Google Scholar

72. See Admiral Vernon Harcourt's letter to Captain J. E. Gordon, who left the Reformation Society “because it refused to unite a political work with its spiritual work, and formed the Protestant Association … which however politically useful, I believe has done little or nothing in the way of converting Roman Catholics …” Record, 23/6/1853.

73. My own speculation on the fact that it had only one branch (Warrington) in Lancashire, where the other Protestant organizations were strong.

74. See Appendix I.

75. First Annual Report 1828, p. 23, P.R.S.

76. Second Annual Report 1829, pp. 23-4, P.R.S.

77. Ibid.

78. For the history of the schools, see Appeal, Record, 26/2/1856.

79. Robert Jocelyn, third Earl of Roden, (1788-1870): M.P. for Louth, 1806-7, 1810-20; succeeded to Earldom, 1820; Grand Master of the Orange Lodge; “superseded as custos rotulorum of co. Louth and as magistrate for that county and co. Down (in) 1849 for his conduct in an affray between the Orange society and the Roman Catholics”; a patron of the St. Giles's Free Schools, of the Reformed Romanist Priest Society and of the English Church Missions to Roman Catholics, on which see article II; Record, 24/3/1853; Boase, Vol. 3, col. 245.

80. First Annual Report 1828, pp. 23-5, P.R.S.

81. Fourth Annual Report 1831, p. 21, P.R.S.

82. Author of Romanism and Tractarianism Refuted (London, 1853); Who is Anti-Christ? (London, 1854); cf. Boase, Vol. 1, col. 207.

83. Beamish, Rev. H. H.: A Sermon for the Irish Society preached at St. Peter's Church, Cork, Sunday, October 31, 1830 (London, 1831).Google Scholar

84. Fourth Annual Report 1831, pp. 20-1, P.R.S.

85. Sixth Annual Report 1833, p. 14; Seventh Annual Report 1834, p. 35, P.R.S.

86. E.g., in 1838, into the notorious regions of Drury Lane: Twelfth Annual Report 1839, p. 18, P.R.S. There was also a Protestant Scripture Reader at work in St. Giles's in 1847: see the report of annual meeting of the Society, Record, 17/5/1847, and for his journal, the British Protestant, 1847, Vol. 3; 1848, Vol. 4. In September 1848 he was joined by a Scripture Reader to Drury Lane.

87. At Chelsea and Westminster, Fourteenth Annual Report 1841, p. 11, P.R.S.; at Islington, Poplar, St. John's Wood and Southwark, Fifteenth Annual Report 1842, p. 10; in Bermondsey and Woolwich, Seventeenth Annual Report 1844, pp. 17-9; in Greenwich, Lambeth and Somers Town, Eighteenth Annual Report 1845, pp. 17-9; in Deptford and Hammersmith, Nineteenth Annual Report 1846, pp. 11-2, P.R.S.

88. In Finsbury, Lambeth, the City of London, Marylebone, Southwark and Tower Hamlets; there were fifteen others elsewhere in England. Fifth Annual Report of the Protestant Association (London, 1841), pp. vii–viii.Google Scholar

89. Cf. the report of the Southwark Operatives' Protestant Association Meeting, Record, 10/9/1846. One does, however, find the Tower Hamlets Operatives’ Association expressing its mortal fear of “three thousand Repealers”, local labourers enrolled as members of the Catholic Institute by an East End parish priest, Tablet, 10/6/1843; Penny Protestant Operative 1846, Vol. 7 p. 22.Google Scholar

90. Nineteenth Annual Report, P.R.S. loc. cit.; see the British Protestant, January 1845, Vol. 1 pp. 22–3;Google Scholar April, pp. 114-8; June, pp. 137-43; August, pp. 183-5; December, pp. 286-8. The next best documented auxiliary was in Westminster.

91. See Appendix II.

92. See Quarterly Extracts, October 1831, pp. 9-10: Twentieth Annual Report, 1847, pp. 15 -7, P.R.S.

93. Weylland, John. Matthias: Round the Tower: or, the Story of the London City Mission (London, 1875), p. 155.Google Scholar

94. John Plumptre, M.P., a patron of the City Mission and sometime champion of the Protestant Association; Captain Henry Trotter, Boase, Vol. 3, cols. 1022-3; Captain Francis Maude, Boase, Vol. 2, col. 800; John Cumming, on whom see above, Joseph Payne and Captain Vernon Harcourt, on whom see below; the Bickersteths, Lord Ashley, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and the Hon. Arthur Kinnaird, who make their appearance in Part II.

95. See the Record, February, 1839.

96. Oppenheimer, Joseph M.: London City Missioner's Diary, September, October 1861, January, February and May 1862, in the Vestry, St. Giles in the Fields.

97. M.M., L.C.M. 1/9/1851, Vol. 6 p. 320. Cf. the Missions condition in 1868, when it claimed to have made nearly two million visits to the poor, to have distributed two and a half million tracts, to have conducted indoor services and Bible-classes for 36,000 people, to have taught 8,297 children in Ragged Schools and persuaded 141 shops to close on the Sabbath. M'Cree, George Wilson: The Moral Condition of London: a Discourse (London, 1868), p. 13.Google Scholar

98. “It is principally owing to the city missionaries that the other portions of society have known what they now do of the practices and habits of the poor …” Mayhew, op. cit., Vol. 1 p. 318; “Many of the new metropolitan philanthropic groups that sprouted in the 1840s and 1850s seem to have had at least part of their origin in the L.C.M.; and to it Ashley was largely indebted for his introduction to the London slums”. Best, G. F. A.: Shaftesbury (London, 1964), p. 57.Google Scholar

99. M.M., L.C.M., 9/3/1836, 13/4/1836, 22/6/1836, 3/8/1846, Vol. 1 pp. 169, 199-200, 252-3, 269.

100. E.g., the case of James Donovan, M.M., L.C.M., 6/9/1836, Vol. 1 p. 286; cf. the case of Thomas Duffy, M.M., 13/1/1851, 29/1/1851, Vol. 6 pp. 199, 205.

101. L.C.M.M., July 1839, Vol. 4, pp. 126-7.

102. Weylland, loc. cit.; cf. L.C.M.M., December 1855, Vol. 20, p. 286.

103. The phrase is Joseph Payne's, the anti-Catholic Westminster magistrate and pillar of both the City Mission and the Ragged School Union; it appears in the Ragged School Union Magazine, June 1855, Vol. 7 p. 119; on Payne, see Boase, Vol. 2, col. 1405.

104. Weylland, J. M.: These Fifty Years: being the Jubilee Volume of the London City Mission (London, 1884), pp. 319–20; cf.Google Scholar the account of a Scripture Reader's labours on Saffron Hill, Record, 13/9/1854.

105. L.C.M.M., May 1841, Vol. 6 p 69; their first reported conversion was in 1842: Seventh Annual Report 1842, p. 22.

106. M.M., L.C.M., 31/7/1843, Vol. 3 p. 416.

107. Ibid, 17/12/1846, 14/12/1846, Vol. 4 pp. 555-6, 560-1.

108. Harcourt, Francis Vernon (1801-1880), son of Archbishop Harcourt of York; an army captain from 1834 to 1840, a colonel for half-pay in 1846, M.P. for the Isle of Wight, 1852-7; Boase, Vol. 1, col. 1323.

109. M.M., L.C.M., loc. cit.

110. Ibid, 22/2/1847, Vol. 5 pp. 18-9.

111. Ibid, 22/5/1848, 28/5/1848, Vol. 5 pp. 225, 229-30.

112. To St. George's-in-the-East: L.C.M.M., February 1850, Vol. 15 p. 45.

113. “An Exact Copy of the First Month's Journal of the Irish Missionary”, L.C.M.M., March 1849, Vol. 14 p. 54; cf. “The Irish of London”, L.C.M.M., July 1848, Vol. 13 pp. 167-8.

114. Garwood, op. cit., p. 245.

115. To policemen, cab-drivers, Italians, French, Jews, Welsh, prisoners, thieves and Greenwich Pensioners, L.C.M.M., January 1850, Vol. 15 p. 2; June, p. 135.

116. Oppenheimer, op. cit., p. 123.

117. See the Annual Reports of the St. Giles and St. George, Bloomsbury, Ragged and Industriai Schools and Refuge for Destitute Children … 1846, p. 8;Google Scholar 1847, pp. 15-7; 1853, pp. 23-4.

118. Dallas, A. B.: Incidents in the Life and Ministry of the Rev. Alexander R. C. Dallas (London, 1871), pp. 450–1.Google Scholar

119. These Fifty Years, pp. 265-8.

120. Oppenheimer, op. cit., p. 46: cf. L.C.M. Eighth Annual Report 1843, p. 10, on a girl reclaimed by a city missionary and despatched to a Catholic institution through a Catholic priest; L.C.M.M., March 1849, Vol. 14 pp. 56-7, 63; also February 1853, Vol. 18 pp. 30-4.

121. Bayly, Mary, loc. cit.

122. Richardson, Anna: Forty Years’ Ministry in East London: Memoir of tiie Rev. Thomas Richardson, late Vicar of St. Benet's, Mile End (London, 1903), pp. xi, 13-4, 85-6, 210.Google Scholar

123. George Wilson M'Cree: His Life and Work (London, 1893), pp. 29–32, 41-2, 54-6.Google Scholar

124. St. Giles's Christian Mission: a River of Mercy and its first Spring: Fourteen Years’ Labour among the Criminal Classes (London, 1891).Google Scholar

125. Pike, G. Holden: Pity for the Perishing: the Power of the Bible in London (London, 1884), p. 196.Google Scholar A not uncommon Protestant charge: cf. L.C.M.M., August 1845, Vol. 10 p. 179.

126. Pike, G. Holden: Saving to the Uttermost: Twenty-five Years’ Labour in St. Giles's (London, 1885), pp. 36–7.Google Scholar