THOMAS CARLYLE, CHARTISM, AND THE IRISH IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Abstract

Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns.

—Chartism

THUS WROTE THOMAS CARLYLE in his famous long pamphlet Chartism, published in December 1839. But what moved Carlyle, the intellectual hero of the age, to direct attention in Chartism to the Irish presence in the early Victorian city? Why did he present the Irish in England in such negative terms? Was his analysis correct? And what was the wider significance of his interpretation? These, as Carlyle might have said, are measurable questions and they form the essential framework of this paper. Yet it is impossible to respond to these questions without first examining the contemporary social, economic, and political contexts within which Chartism was written; Carlyle’s development as an historian in the early 1830s; and the purpose of Chartism, including the chapter on the Irish entitled “The Finest Peasantry in the World.”