So began Lady Sarah Cowper's sixteen-year enterprise in self-justification. Between 1670 and 1700 this English gentlewoman had already filled a dozen commonplace books with extracts from poems, sermons, scripture, and essays, consciously searching for an emotional and intellectual outlet. But in July of 1700 with the added impetus of family scandal alongside long-term marital friction and financial instability, Lady Sarah started keeping a diary in which she reacted to her position—initially middle-aged and unhappily married, then elderly and widowed—and to events in her world. When she finally stopped writing because of ill health in September 1716, her daily entries totaled roughly 2,300 pages in seven volumes. This remarkable diary offers a specific link between the ideologies that institutions and authorities were concerned to promulgate and the outlook of the individual.

During the 1790s, political speech in London's public spaces and commercial sites of leisure came under intense governmental surveillance. Fearing revolutionary infection from across the channel in France, the Pitt ministry sent spies into popular organizations such as the London Corresponding Society and turned more attention to other sites as well, including coffeehouses, taverns, debating-club rooms, and the street. Recently, historians too have explored the ways in which radicals manipulated the ludic vocabularies of urban sociability to critique the regime, protest persecution, and argue for reform. In this article I address a site that figured prominently as a place for radical speech in the 1790s: the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Although it was a site whose content was strictly regulated by the state through the office of the Examiner of Plays, the royal theater was, like other eighteenth-century theaters, a place where performances multiplied: viewers watched the play, but in the well-lit and noisy pit, boxes, and galleries, they watched other viewers intently. All were engaged in a complex process of performance, reception, and counterperformance. Indeed, as scholars have shown, theater audiences in late Georgian London were highly skilled at appropriating a theatrical grammar by which to demand their perceived rights as English subjects. Such strategies revealed the potency of theatrical representation in a society where, as Gillian Russell notes, “performance, display and spectatorship were essential components of the social mechanism.”

In August 1865, Liverpool's Catholic Bishop (1856–72), Alexander Goss, needed to find a priest. The bishop knew that Father Hardman of Birchley had grown too old to minister to a mission that was rapidly expanding because of Irish migration into the region. As he considered a replacement for Hardman, Goss made two specifications. First, the bishop sought to replace Hardman with a younger priest who could handle a growing congregation. Second, Goss intended to find an English priest to satisfy the local English Catholic baronet, Sir Robert Gerard. In a letter to Gerard, Goss lamented that “I have had some difficulty in making arrangements to fill his place; for being myself a Lancashireman I can well understand your dislike to have one from a country [Ireland] where nationality seems to override every other feeling.” Despite the region's expanding Irish population, the bishop sought to satisfy Gerard by recruiting an English priest. To Goss's frustration, however, most of the available priests were Irish.

Goss's comments illuminate the nineteenth-century English Catholic's prevalent concern: that Irish nationalism would supersede Catholicism in the hearts and minds of England's Catholic population, which was predominantly composed of working-class Irish migrants. The bishop knew that most Irish Catholics equated their Catholicism with Irish nationalism, while English Catholics like Gerard considered themselves a refined Catholic minority in a vulgar Protestant land. Goss struggled to bridge the ideological differences between English and Irish Catholics in Liverpool. He sought to accommodate working-class Irish migrants while appeasing English Catholic gentry like Gerard who supplied important money and respectability to the Catholic Church.

Of all the immigrants arriving in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century, none attracted as much attention from whites as West Indian men. This was initially explicable by their being the first nonwhites to settle in large numbers. Around ten thousand arrived during the Second World War (more than Britain's entire prewar black population) and, although some two-thirds of them were hurriedly repatriated after 1945, returning ex-servicemen formed the majority of passengers disembarking from the Empire Windrush on 21 June 1948: year zero for mass black immigration. For the following decade, most of the Commonwealth immigrants coming to Britain each year were West Indian, and, of these, men outnumbered women by a ratio of roughly two to one.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, as their womenfolk joined them and as South Asians formed an ever-increasing proportion of new arrivals, it became clear that the prominence of West Indian men was more than merely numerical. It was cultural, stemming from the fascination-cum-revulsion of whites who customarily regarded them as vicious, indolent, violent, licentious, and antifamilial. These qualities were thought to differentiate them from their South Asian counterparts, who overcame an unsavory reputation acquired in the fifties to be viewed as the new Jews, placid and hard-working family men whose strict endogamy nullified their sexual charge. Much the same could be said for West Indian women, who posed less of a threat to white sensibilities on account of being considered less intemperate and sexually predatory than men.